Films for All Seasons (Interview w/ Abby Olcese)

Eli (00:01.474)
Hello and welcome to the establishing shot a podcast where we do deep dives into directors and their filmography's I am your host Eli price and we are here on episode 87 or 86 I'm just gonna cover my bases with my release schedule so that You just whichever one it is. That's you you know because now it's but I've been like playing around with my release schedule, so I don't

actually know if it's 86 or 87 yet, but we'll see. And yeah, speaking into the future here. But I have a guest from a couple of weeks ago who talked about Catch Me If You Can with me for that episode. She is joining me again, Abby L. Chessy. It is great to have you back on the show. It's almost like we just finished recording that.

last episode moments earlier. I know. But yeah, it's great to have you back on. But yeah, I really wanted to bring you on to talk about your book, which I'm sure when you write a book, it's like I would like to talk about my book. So I know that's how I would feel if I ever wrote a book.

Abby Olcese (01:00.055)
I know. Yeah. Yeah. It's like no time has passed at all.

Abby Olcese (01:27.046)
you

Eli (01:27.95)
I'm very happy to let you talk about your book. It is called Films for All Seasons Experiencing the Church Year at the Movies. So I have my copy right here. If you're watching the podcast, this is what it looks like so that when you go to buy it, which you're going to do, I can only assume, that's what it looks like so that you don't buy the wrong book, which I don't

Abby Olcese (01:50.936)
I have my copy here too.

I don't yeah, that's there aren't a lot of books with this title

Eli (01:57.57)
think you could because I don't think there's other books called this. But yeah, I haven't read the whole thing because I haven't gone through a whole year yet, but I have read some of the chapters and have enjoyed them. So before we jump into the book, let's go back to the beginning for you. anyone that

Abby Olcese (02:10.811)
Yeah.

Eli (02:25.814)
writes about film that I've had on here. I always love to hear how they got into writing about film. So where did it all start for you?

Abby Olcese (02:32.444)
Yeah. Oh gosh. I think it all started for me as like, I was at a very early age. spent my, yeah, my elementary school years in Chicago. And this was when the Chicago Tribune had like a whole staff of film critics. like Gene Siskel was one of them. Michael Williamson was another one. And so the,

Eli (02:43.704)
Cool.

Eli (02:52.705)
Yeah.

Eli (02:56.248)
Yeah.

Abby Olcese (03:01.678)
every Friday we would get the weekend preview section in the Chicago Tribune, which included the film reviews. I would always, like it was right after the comics, that was the thing that I turned to. It was like the pullout section. And so I would just sit there in bed with my parents and like read out the reviews. And most of them obviously were from movies that I couldn't watch yet because I was like, you know, barely able to read. And so like, I wasn't really necessarily ready to watch, say, Sling Blade. That's not a movie that a seven-year-old can watch. But...

Eli (03:12.258)
Very cool.

Eli (03:26.862)
No.

Abby Olcese (03:29.628)
Yeah, but reading about it was really interesting because I liked being able to find out what the movies were about to get like that little snippet of a story. And like my family and I watched movies together every Friday. Usually I would watch something like, you know, kid friendly by myself. And then after I'd gone to bed, my parents would watch, you know, movies that they wanted to watch. And they always ended up talking about them the next day. like,

Eli (03:36.738)
Yeah.

Eli (03:49.102)
Sling blade.

Abby Olcese (03:52.676)
I remember my parents watching Waiting for Guffman and then like basically reciting the entire film like the next morning over breakfast because they loved it so much. yeah, and like stories like finding out like the plot of Peter Weir's picnic at Hanging Rock over like a dinner party because somebody brought it up and my mom was like, that's a good movie. And I was like, what's it about? And then she tells me like, well, you know, these girls.

Eli (04:00.364)
Yeah, that's cool.

Abby Olcese (04:15.26)
at a girls school, they go on a picnic out in the wilderness and then they go and climb some rocks and a mountain and they never come back. And I was like, they never come back. So just, you know, stuff like that. And also kind of being introduced to film, like to writing about movies as a job you could have, like as a kid, like you can think of nothing better. So.

Eli (04:21.282)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (04:35.958)
Yeah. Yeah.

Abby Olcese (04:39.418)
Yeah, I decided at a very early age that that would be a really cool job that it was one I wanted to have. It was like between that and becoming a famous novelist. I went and picked careers that were like 100 % success rate, very easy to do. And my parents were like, maybe you should have a backup career. And I was like, no, never. Yeah, the journalism industry is gonna be like, it'll be there when I get out of college, I'll get a job, it'll be great, I'll work for NPR, it'll be perfect.

Eli (04:53.582)
yeah, totally. As everyone knows.

Ha ha ha.

Eli (05:07.202)
Yeah. huh.

Abby Olcese (05:09.306)
Sure, sure kid. So anyway, that's kind of where it started and it never really went away. I've been trying to get people to pay me to write about movies. Yeah, in some form ever since I was able to do it really.

Eli (05:16.782)
That's awesome,

Eli (05:22.146)
Yeah. So did you like, when you hit like your teenage years and you started like watching more of these movies, did you, were you like writing for, did you do any like school paper writing or anything like that for movies or, or was it just like still personal at that point?

Abby Olcese (05:35.244)
Yeah, I tried. didn't... It was still personal at that point. I didn't really start doing it, like, for in print until, until college. Like, I, as soon as somebody would let me do it, I was like, can I do this? And they were like, sure. Yeah, so that was, that was kind of my, my early intro into it. But watching a lot of stuff up to that point.

Eli (05:44.758)
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (05:52.77)
Yeah, very cool. Yes, yes. And so, so your book, this is your first book, if I'm not mistaken, right? Okay. So there, this book is, obviously like, kind of an exercise in writing about films. Obviously it's, you, you kind of take an approach of looking at the different seasons, but like each chapter is about a particular movie.

Abby Olcese (06:01.83)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Abby Olcese (06:13.232)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (06:22.788)
so it's a little bit more long form than just like a movie review because you're looking at it through a specific lens. but yeah, it's what, what was the transition like of like taking like just writing about films and reviewing films and taking that into like, okay, I have an idea for a book. what, what did that whole like process look like? And you know, how did it, I guess, like, how did it come about?

Abby Olcese (06:45.232)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (06:50.288)
Yeah. Yeah. So I, one of the sites that I write for is a website called Think Christian. And Josh Larson, who's the cohost of film spotting is the editor of that site. He's a wonderful editor, one of the best I've ever worked for. And he, during the pandemic commissioned me to write a series of articles that were just like lists of recommendations for movies that people could watch during the church year. was basically, it was this, shorter.

Eli (06:58.306)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (07:04.206)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (07:19.192)
Sure.

Abby Olcese (07:19.504)
just because churches were closed and people couldn't worship together in person. And so we thought this might be a good alternative for people to do when they were stuck at home. Like you're gonna watch a lot of movies anyway. We can theme them and you can have conversations with your friends and family about it. And those articles proved to be pretty popular. And so they just kind of kept coming. And after I'd been doing that for about a year, like the hardest thing to do when you're coming up with a book proposal is the outline. And I realized that the outline had basically written itself.

Eli (07:24.835)
Yeah.

Eli (07:29.944)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (07:37.612)
Yeah.

Eli (07:46.723)
Yeah.

Abby Olcese (07:47.598)
So yeah, all it took was just a couple of emails to make sure that it was okay that I did it. And then kind of figuring out how I was going to expand it and come up with kind of a selling proposition for it. So it came together kind of uniquely fast, I think, for the way that most book proposals come together from what I understand.

Eli (08:03.96)
Yeah.

Eli (08:07.596)
Yes, because you had basically been writing your book proposal in sections over a whole year, so...

Abby Olcese (08:13.562)
Yeah, basically, like I had a few ones that I wanted to swap out and a few things that I wanted to expand on. And this kind of allowed a fun opportunity for me to just kind of let myself off the leash and do more of what I had been enjoying doing basically for the last couple of years.

Eli (08:20.418)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (08:28.972)
Yes. Yes. And so, yeah, so this for, you know, we have, I'm sure people that listen that are religious and ones that aren't. but this book is particularly focused on the church calendar. So, you know, most people are aware of like Easter and Christmas, but there's other parts of the church calendar as well. There's, there's actually like parts of the church calendar that lead up to Easter and lead up to Christmas Lent and Advent.

Abby Olcese (08:43.835)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (08:58.574)
And you know, there's there's other there's Epiphany after Christmas. There's you know There's there's other things on the church calendar

Abby Olcese (09:08.132)
Yeah, there's, yeah, there's, there's, there's Pentecost, which was a word that I knew existed, but didn't really dig into until Josh asked me to write a list of five movies to check out for Pentecost. And my first reaction was, dude, for real, like, who's going to watch a movie for Pentecost? And then once I looked into like what the actual themes of it are, which is, thematically, it's very much about like,

Eli (09:27.907)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (09:32.718)
celebrating the diverse family of the church, looking at it's, in the Bible, it's considered like the birth of the church and like kind of the beginning of the early Christian movement. And so you're looking at basically how has the church grown since then? What does it look like to be like a...

Eli (09:40.866)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (09:54.084)
a belief system that spans the world. And also within our own communities, there's a lot of diversity and a lot of need to recognize that people have different needs and they're coming from different backgrounds. Like what does it mean to be a church community? Which is something that a lot of churches don't really discuss on Pentecost, but makes really great inroads for movies because there are a lot of movies that talk about like kind of putting together a team, like a ragtag group of folks who wouldn't normally work together and then kind of form a found family.

Eli (10:06.05)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (10:22.96)
which is why Fast and Furious 6 is my number one choice for Pentecost. Because it's a, know, the whole series of films has always been really highly praised for its inclusion of diverse perspectives and giving those characters a lot of agency. And the sixth movie in the series is one that kind of challenges those ideas of found family and builds on them really well. So it allows you to kind of experiment and go to some really fun places.

Eli (10:38.829)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (10:45.688)
Yeah.

Eli (10:50.05)
Yeah, yeah, and movies are like built to help you like see diverse opinions and see diverse, I mean, it's a form of art and that's something that artists always done throughout history is like give you show you different perspectives, change your, you know, give you a different view of things. And yeah, so very cool. Yeah, so it's built around the church calendar, you have movies for kind of like

Abby Olcese (11:03.461)
Yeah. Yeah.

Abby Olcese (11:13.137)
Yeah.

Eli (11:19.402)
each major piece of the church calendar. And so like, this is a like spiritual endeavor in a sense. And in the introduction of the book, you actually talk about how watching you talk about watching films as a spiritual practice. And I'd love for you to explain to the listeners what exactly that means for you for the for this exercise, at least.

Abby Olcese (11:38.62)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (11:46.47)
Yeah.

Yeah, so like you mentioned, there are all of these different seasons within the church calendar. I think as somebody who engages with the world primarily through narrative, like that's kind of the way I've always seen the world is through stories. I engage with those parts of the year. Like my favorites are like Advent and Lent because they are so.

Eli (12:03.64)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (12:11.694)
intensely dramatic. And like those are those are the things that really engage with the narrative of the Gospels very, very deeply. And they engage with really relatable emotions very, very deeply. So like ideas of like hope and fear and betrayal and loss and grief, but also like kind of the wonderful capacity for surprise that comes with so much of the Bible stories.

Eli (12:13.646)
Sure, yeah.

Eli (12:24.812)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (12:41.5)
And so I kind of refer to it a little bit in interviews sometimes as a synesthesia, kind of, where I recognize that feeling when I'm at a church service during certain times of the year. And then I recognize other times that I have felt that. And it's almost always with movies. I can tell you certain kinds of stories that make me feel the same way. Which I think for me, it kind of taps into sort of the Joseph Campbell-esque.

Eli (12:55.288)
Sure.

Eli (13:01.165)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (13:11.022)
idea that a lot of stories come from the same sources. Like we're all interested in the same feelings and themes and we're trying to answer the same questions basically. Whether or not you're coming at it from a religious perspective or just a secular perspective, like somebody trying to figure out how the world works. For me, all of those ideas come from like a single spiritual source. Like I find them powerful because they all come from a desire to find some form of God. So whether or not

Eli (13:28.685)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (13:40.806)
filmmakers realize it. think they're these movies that I love are tapping into something similar. And so it's really cool to be able to kind of bring people to these stories that I love and say, this story reminds me of this story in these ways that what that's what makes them both resonant, not necessarily because one is influenced directly by the other, but because they are in conversation with each other, whether or not they realize it. So that's that's kind of the fun.

Eli (13:53.933)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (14:06.65)
spiritual practice of it for me is like trying to figure out where an artist is coming from, what interests them, what questions they're trying to answer, and how that for me reflects the journey that I and like other people in my religious community and like circle of family and friends, how we're trying to figure out how the world works in those same ways basically.

Eli (14:08.6)
Yeah.

Eli (14:27.852)
Yeah. I, you know, just kind of like humans have always naturally, seems like just when you just look back on history and humans just tried to tell stories to make sense of things. And that's, yeah. And that's, there's a sense in which the church calendar is doing that in a kind of, a very different way. But the, the, when you go through all of the

Abby Olcese (14:41.87)
Exactly. Forever. Yeah.

Eli (14:56.462)
parts of the church calendar, kind of like tells one big story. you, you know, each part is tied to like a different feeling within that story and different kind of characters even within that story. know, Advent is very like, is very, a very like waiting, longing feeling that is supposed to be like explored during that season.

Abby Olcese (15:00.932)
Yeah. Yeah.

Abby Olcese (15:11.994)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (15:24.91)
And there's movies that like very much explore those feelings of like

Abby Olcese (15:29.422)
Mm-hmm. And ones that aren't even necessarily Christmas movies. Like, I think that, yeah, that sense just, it exists in so many things. And one of the things that I like about the Church Calendar is that it points to all of these different parts of the Bible and it tells you how they are influenced by the other parts. Like, how they kind of come together, how this is informed by what comes before. Like, when we talk about Advent.

Eli (15:36.792)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Eli (15:49.016)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (15:54.682)
Yes, we are talking about kind of the movement towards like the nativity scene that we're all familiar with, but we're also in large part talking about like the prophet Isaiah and how he talked about the arrival of the Messiah generations before it actually happened and like what was going on in Israel that necessitated that. And so like that's as a theology nerd, that's a thing that really kind of gets me going is like being able to point at how all of that stuff connects, which is also a thing that I really love doing about film criticism is being able to.

Eli (15:59.863)
Right.

Eli (16:05.664)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Abby Olcese (16:22.598)
point at like how this director's work is influenced by this director's work, how this might be influenced by this part of their life. Like we just talked about Catch Me If You Can and Steven Spielberg and how that movie, even though it's, you know, not autobiographical at all, really has a lot to say about certain parts of his life and like how he grew up and what his relationship to his parents were. Like I just think it's really cool that artists are able to find pieces of themselves in stories that aren't even directly about them.

Eli (16:50.518)
yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it also makes me think, I wish I had thought to write down the quote, but there's this quote from George Miller that I've used before, who's a very popular director of movies like, know, Mad Max and also Happy Feet, you know. But he has this quote where he's...

Abby Olcese (17:07.856)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (17:12.538)
Yeah, yeah, that's that's my guy. I love George Miller.

Eli (17:19.49)
basically says like the cinema is like the new cathedral. It's a place where people come together from whatever background they're coming from to watch a story and kind of figure out who they are and what their place in the world is. And that's kind of like, I guess how he sees like going to the movies. it's cool because like

Abby Olcese (17:24.869)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (17:49.024)
I hadn't even thought about that until I was listening to you talk and I was like, this is reminding me of that George Miller quote that I wish I would have thought to write down.

Abby Olcese (17:55.184)
Yeah, it's yeah, and I know, like, I think I quote this in the book, too. But I think about it a lot that Roger Ebert talked about movies as being the great empathy generating machine. And that like, they allow us to see into the lives of people that aren't like us. Which is a thing that I wish the church was better at doing on a large scale. There's I mean, a lot of very necessary conversations about how that needs to happen.

Eli (18:05.122)
Yes.

Eli (18:11.341)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (18:14.72)
Yeah.

Abby Olcese (18:23.162)
and that often the public image of the church that we get is, I mean, it's definitely not consistent with what I grew up with and what I experience now. But I fully understand why certain people in my own life, even some who grew up going to church and no longer do, why they have chosen not to. Because the religion that they were raised around is...

Eli (18:30.478)
Sure.

Eli (18:42.188)
Yeah. No, yeah.

Abby Olcese (18:46.426)
wasn't good. It wasn't inclusive. It wasn't, I think in some cases, accurate representation of what I know the gospel to be. I think Jimmy Carter just passed and Scott Derrickson, the director, posted a quote of his that I really liked, which was that Christianity has been basically taken over by people who would turn away Jesus if he showed up at their door, which like I, yeah, right on. So that's also kind of where I stand on that.

Eli (18:48.461)
Right.

Eli (18:59.576)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (19:07.99)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (19:16.268)
Yeah, yeah, if only we had more like people creating things like Habitat for Humanity, you know, instead of getting into politics.

Abby Olcese (19:24.174)
Right, exactly. feel like in some small way, kind of hope that the book is sort of an introduction into that kind of expansive viewing for people who otherwise might not do it. I don't know if that's like, that would be like one of the great hope of mine is to have people engage with that and be like, I would never have watched that movie if you didn't tell me to and be like, all right, did my job.

Eli (19:44.419)
Yeah.

Eli (19:48.994)
Yeah. Yeah. That's a win. So yeah, so there might be listeners listening that, you know, and very likely will be listeners that hear this episode that are not Christians or maybe even like religious or spiritual at all. How, first of all, like, can reading this book and watching these films in this way be beneficial for those people? And how would you think

Abby Olcese (19:53.062)
Yeah.

Abby Olcese (20:05.146)
Yeah.

Eli (20:19.054)
If yes, then how would you think that would be beneficial for them?

Abby Olcese (20:23.226)
Yeah, and I don't mean any of this to sound like I'm trying to like get you to commit your life to Christ. That is it like I grew up around that. It's very squidgy for me. I don't love it. basically, so like one of the movies that I include here is The Night of the Hunter, which is like my favorite of all time. And it's it's beautiful and

Eli (20:29.518)
Sure, yeah

Eli (20:36.076)
Yes, I understand that.

Eli (20:45.748)
Love that movie.

Abby Olcese (20:49.432)
One of the, like, the thing that I like about it so much is that it was made by a gay man, Charles Lawton, who had been living most of his life in the closet because he, the church had, like, he lived in England, which was mainly, you know, Church of England going culture, and he did not feel safe being able to express who he really was. And he...

Eli (20:56.397)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Abby Olcese (21:13.946)
was into like he was drawn to that project because it has so many themes in it of religious hypocrisy. And he would have been completely within his rights to make a movie that was like staunchly anti Christian, very angry, very bitter. But that's not the movie that he chose to make. He made a movie that has these two examples of Christianity. One that is very, very close to like the kind of Christian nationalism that rears its ugly head very frequently now. And

Eli (21:25.677)
Yes.

Eli (21:42.892)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (21:43.734)
version of Christianity that I am much more familiar with, which is like selfless and kind and lovely and open and accepting. And so it's an example of what we often see and what is true and what can be. And so what I hope is possible for like non-religious folks who read this book is that they can see that religion doesn't have to look a certain way that

Eli (21:56.542)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Eli (22:11.214)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (22:11.672)
it may be frequently portrayed and expressed as one thing, but it is in fact much freer and more diverse and more personal and much more complex than that. And even if you're just willing to engage with it as like a set of ideas, there's all kinds of interesting stuff to engage with. And that those themes are like very narratively and emotionally powerful.

Eli (22:31.97)
Yes.

Abby Olcese (22:40.494)
and that they kind of carry over into our mainstream life, whether or not people realize they're there, which is one of the things I think makes it so interesting. So there's that. I think if you're interested in just like seeing how a person of faith watches mainstream movies in a way that is like not prescriptive and judgmental, you can.

Eli (22:40.781)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (23:05.474)
Yeah. Yeah, no.

Abby Olcese (23:06.106)
get something out of that too. That's like specifically why I wanted to write this book. I was raised around a lot of that, just kind of culturally. And I know a lot of other people were too. Joe George, who you've had on the podcast can tell you very similar stories. Zachary Lee too, and Sarah Welch Larson too, like just all of us. And this is kind of a break from that. It's maybe something that shows you what.

Eli (23:11.875)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (23:19.886)
Sure, yeah.

Eli (23:25.539)
Yeah.

Abby Olcese (23:33.402)
Yeah, like what is true and what can be when it works, hopefully.

Eli (23:36.62)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're not, if you're not religious and even like, if you don't like religion, maybe reading this book can be like, there's people that are religious that I can like get on board with. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We promise we don't all suck. Some of us do. And I guess to a degree we all do a little bit, but some

Abby Olcese (23:45.382)
you

Abby Olcese (23:51.3)
I hope, yeah, yeah, yeah, we don't all suck, I promise.

Yeah, my, exactly, yeah, that's why I go to church. It's because I suck sometimes. But yeah, my friend Brock tells me that this this book is, let me explain myself to you, the book, which is more or less right.

Eli (24:05.934)
Yeah.

Eli (24:15.112)
Mmm. Yeah, but that's cool. It should be personal, you know Yeah, yeah Well, I guess I love that answer Love that. I hope everyone will check out this book when this releases as we close will be in the Lent season so smack dab in the middle of it all the fasting all of that so

Abby Olcese (24:20.538)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Abby Olcese (24:37.649)
Yeah.

Eli (24:44.246)
Mardi Gras big here in South Louisiana where I am. So we'll just be coming out of that. So Fat Tuesday, it can get wild. So, but we'll be past that and in the fasting season fish on Friday season down here. But on that note, since we'll be kind of in the middle of Lent, what is like if you had to pick one

Abby Olcese (24:47.367)
sure, of course.

Abby Olcese (25:03.643)
Yeah.

Abby Olcese (25:10.768)
Yeah.

Eli (25:14.776)
film in the book for the Lent season, what would it be? No pressure.

Abby Olcese (25:16.616)
gosh. Okay. Yeah, no pressure. I feel like, I love all of the books in my section, or not, sorry. I love all of the movies in my section on Lent. Of them, I think the one that is probably the most like capital L Lent is The Dark Knight, the Christopher Nolan, the second.

Eli (25:44.172)
Sure.

Abby Olcese (25:46.126)
in the kind of his Batman trilogy. Just because it's a really good example of like, nobody, like the idea of there are no white knights basically, of just like all of us are fallible. Putting your faith in, putting your faith in earthly things and in imperfect humans will like always.

Eli (25:48.078)
Mm-hmm.

Eli (25:58.382)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (26:14.756)
at some, in some way, or form will always let you down basically. But that doesn't mean that we don't have a duty to keep trying to make things better basically. And when we come up against kind of joker like forces of chaos that tell us that there is no meaning and that chaos is really the only way to make sense of everything, I think it's very tempting to give into that. But we still have to come up against that.

by knowing that while our efforts are flawed and while we are fallible people and we will often fail ourselves and each other, that we still have to try. So that's kind of my big takeaway from that movie and that it's not always going to end well. Like sometimes it's gonna end really messily, but that it's also not the end of the story. Like there's still another entry to go. And some people will say that entry is not very good, but.

Eli (27:04.44)
Yeah. Yes.

Eli (27:10.275)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Olcese (27:14.428)
Other people think it's fine and that is great. But yeah, but there are plenty of other movies in here too. Like I would highly recommend that people check out Bad Times at Bel-Royale, which is a movie that I love that when it came out, it's great. And it didn't get a ton of love when it first came out, but it's I think a really interesting movie all on its own that has some interesting things to say about the people we are, the people the world tells us that we are and the people we would like to be.

Eli (27:14.478)
I think it's good, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Eli (27:26.518)
Yes, I've been meaning to check that one out since it came out. Yeah.

Eli (27:44.268)
Yes, yeah, very cool. Yeah, I love that. That is, you heard it here first during this Lent season. It is your excuse to rewatch the Nolan Batman trilogy with a special emphasis on the Dark Knight. So you heard it. You heard it here first. If you needed an excuse. Yeah, yeah, go back and watch the movie, then go back and listen to that episode on the podcast.

Abby Olcese (28:00.006)
There you go, yeah. Yeah, with podcast episodes to accompany, right? So.

Eli (28:12.526)
And yeah, enjoy enjoy that But thank you so much Abby for coming on and talking about your book I look forward to digging into the rest of it as the seasons come So excited about that and I hope everyone here it is again in case you needed to be reminded Go get go get this book. I'll make sure there's links in the episode description To where you can find it. Is there is there like?

a good place for people to just follow you to see what you're up to and what you're writing about.

Abby Olcese (28:45.54)
Yeah, yeah, I'm on Blue Sky most of the time now. I'm ABBYOLCESE, Abbeal Chessy at Blue Sky. I'm still on Twitter occasionally under the same handle too, so you can find some of my stuff there as well. I guess X, it'll always be Twitter to me. Yeah.

Eli (28:49.571)
Okay.

Eli (28:58.734)
Okay. Yeah, great. And I'll make sure, X, Twitter, you know, whatever. Yeah, I'll make sure to link those as well so people can just click on those and hit the follow so you can keep up with what Abby's doing. So yeah, thank you so much for coming on. Yes, but next week, I actually don't know. I'm not even gonna try to figure out my calendar.

Abby Olcese (29:14.268)
Yeah.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Abby Olcese (29:24.7)
you

Eli (29:25.386)
You'll find out what we're doing next week when it comes. But that's it for today. I've been Eli Price for Abbey Ochesi. You've been listening to The Establishing Shop. We will see you next time.