Check Book: Globes

Congrats to everyone who bet on Polymarket that Griffin Newman would make a voice cameo!

IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

I ended last week’s BPR by promising a recap of the NYFCC dinner, but that was before I realized that Griffin, Richard, and Alison would be recapping the event on the most recent episode of Critical Darlings! I have nothing to add to what they said, really, except that here’s a photo posted by presenter Lupita Nyong’o that features Ben and David in the background:

In more recent news, the Golden Globes were last night. On a scale of prestige that has the Oscars at one end, and the Astra Awards (??) honoring a dog (???!?!??!!) on the other, the Golden Globes would like to land somewhere closer to the Oscar side, and their awardees this year felt tasteful and considered. Plus, Nikki Glaser’s sophomore effort as host provided the proper amount of glamour with some fresh twists. Turning a tired bit about Leo dating 25-year-olds into a much smarter observation about how we don’t actually know anything about the man? Brilliant. However, in a telecast that involved a bit about skipping ad reads, there was much I wanted to +15seconds for.

THE BEST

• OBVIOUSLY, the highlight of the telecast was the Griffin Newman cameo. Bombas socks have never sounded better. Fun behind-the-scenes tidbits - this came together last week, Griffin recorded the bit in our studio, and of course was asked to do this by Podcast the Ride’s Scott Gairdner, who directed the segment.

• For the most part, the speeches were great. Teyana Taylor showing off a bejeweled g-string before delivering a genuinely emotional moment? Loved it. PTA thanking Mike DeLuca and the late Adam Somner for their career-long support? Beautiful. Bobby Cannavale missing Rose Byrne’s win because he was purchasing a bearded dragon at a reptile expo in New Jersey? Iconic. Every winning moment felt like a great dress rehearsal for the Oscars. Nary an Adrien Brody to be seen.

• I gave kudos to Nikki Glaser up front, but some more great bits - the See BS news moment felt pretty cathartic and I wish there had been even more of that acidic energy throughout the night. I also loved the joke about The Rock being safe because he wasn’t competing against The Paper…so fucking stupid. Sean Penn leather handbag also very memorable!

• LOVED Wanda Sykes shitting on Bill Maher and Ricky Gervais. Fuck those guys.

• Julia Roberts giving kudos to Eva Victor and Sorry, Baby was movie star magic. Clooney and Cheadle presenting afterwards also crushed. Why are we rebooting Oceans?? Let’s just bring these guys back!!!

THE WORST

• The sponsored Polymarket stats were TERRIBLE. Firstly, they ruined the suspense of upcoming categories. Secondly, these weird betting markets are tacky as fuck and make me ashamed to be alive right now.

• ET’s Kevin Frazier and Variety’s Marc Malkin giving running commentary throughout the ceremony almost sunk the entire telecast. Why are we listening to these bozos, who are neither well-informed nor funny? As someone who loves doing awards-announcer voice, I also think these guys don’t even have pleasant voices! Why did we do this?? Malkin especially, after a year of red carpet gaffe after gaffe being given such a big platform?? WHY!!!

• Also, why was everyone seated so far from the stage? Why did it feel like it took at least 60 seconds for most winners to get from point A to point B? Why was a Bar Mitzvah DJ soundtracking these long ass walks with the most irrelevant hits of 2013??

• Judd Apatow doing microaggressions and vamping on stage about how he doesn’t know how to move the camera. Okay. I like that the telecast cut to Spielberg’s bemused reaction after that.

• The weird shoehorning in of Paramount+’s UFC deal into the Heated Rivalry moment. Those audiences do NOT overlap.

• Shit like the super long Apatow moment and the pointless UFC promo really rubbed salt in the wound re not televising the Best Score award, which ended up being the only meaningful recognition of Sinners. The “Box Office and Cinematic Achievement” award still feels like a backhanded compliment to me.

LOOKING AHEAD

• Hamnet winning Best Drama over Sinners means that it is BACK IN THE RACE. Having producer Steven Spielberg accept first felt like a campaign move.

• I think Timothée has Best Actor locked up at this point, I just hope he doesn’t wear Chrome Hearts to the Oscars.

• Are Benicio and Sean splitting the Supporting Actor vote? Stellan winning does feel like a nice choice - those guys already have Oscars, and it would be a nice way to recognize Sentimental Value.

• Important to keep in mind that Anora won ZERO Golden Globes last year, although that season was a bit more chaotic.

• The Secret Agent is looking more and more like the International Feature to beat. Brazilian stans scare me.

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE OLD DOSSIERS

This week on the show, Marie, Ben, and the Two Friends discussed Park Chan-wook’s new film No Other Choice. Or, well, at least that’s what I assume they did, because I have not listened to this episode yet: No Other Choice doesn’t arrive in Madison, Wisconsin, until this upcoming Friday—and even then, it’s only going to the AMC that not too long ago had to close its doors amidst a flurry of health code violations. (If any rich Wisconsinites are reading this, please open an art cinema in Madison ASAP.)

HOWEVER, in celebration of a director that I campaigned so hardly (and hopefully not too annoyingly) for during Blank Check March Madness/World Cup 2023, I’m using this week’s newsletter to detail Park’s origins and chart where he might go next.

The Universal Language

I’m not exactly going out on a limb here when I say that Park Chan-wook is one of contemporary cinema’s greatest image-makers: every new Park film comes with an assortment of frames and transitions I’ve never seen before. While researching Park’s early years, I found a couple of potential wellsprings for Park’s unparalleled eye. As Park told BOMB Magazine in 2006, “A visual sensibility runs in my family.”¹ His father was a professor of architecture who specialized in color, his mother taught political science but wrote poetry on the side, and his younger brother—Park Chan-kyong—is a multi-media artist who has worked in painting, photography, sculpture, installation art, and film.² (In the early 2010s, the two Parks collaborated on the short films Night Fishing and DAY TRIP.)

But before Park (Chan-wook) began working as a filmmaker, he worked as a film critic, a move he said was partially inspired by the realization that he had less obvious skill for image-making than his younger brother: “As a child I would often go to galleries with my dad, and when I was young I vaguely thought that I would be a painter. But compared to my brother, I didn’t have much talent with my hands or in drawing. When I realized that, but still knew I had an eye for beauty, I wanted to become an art critic. If I couldn’t create myself, I wanted to discover talented artists and show their work to the world.”³

Among the Park family’s art world interests was cinema, though the Parks rarely ventured to the movie theater. Instead, as Park told Critical Darlings host Alison Willmore in 2022, “every weekend, the newspaper would say which movie would be playing on television and I’d wait with an excited heart with my parents for that.” The majority of these films originated outside of Korea: according to Park, his childhood movie diet consisted of “mostly older French films or classic Hollywood movies.”⁴ Many of these foreign films were broadcast on the American Forces Korea Network, which typically did not include subtitles—and, even if they did, the subtitles would often be in English. But that didn’t matter much to a young Park: “I still understood them. When I finally watched some of them again, with subtitles, I knew I had understood the faces, the things they did.”⁵ Judging by the films he would later make, boy did he.

The (Maybe) Fallen Ones

No Other Choice is an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, which had been previously adapted into a film by the Greek director Costas-Gavras in 2005. Park first announced his intentions to re-adapt Westlake’s novel in 2009 while promoting his film Thirst, and over the next decade-plus, the project was never far from Park’s mind. In fact, in 2019, Park told Variety that “I have had a lifetime project to make a film titled ‘The Ax.’ I’ve not yet started filming, but I wish to make this film as my masterpiece.”⁶

But while No Other Choice finally came to fruition this past year, many other potential Park projects fell by the wayside, especially in the period between Park’s 2013 English-language debut Stoker and his triumphant return to his natural language in 2016’s The Handmaiden. Stoker had its origins as a script on Franklin Leonard’s Black List—not to be confused with the former (and now disgraced) South Korean president Park Geun-hye’s blacklist—and shortly before that Stoker’s release, Park was attached to another Black List script: The Brigands of Rattleborge, an S. Craig Zahler-scripted Western that topped the Black List in 2006 but struggled to gain traction—first at Warner Bros., then with producer Brad Fischer—thanks to its extreme violence.⁷ As recently as a few days ago, though, Park has claimed that he still wants to make the film—and with backing from a US studio.⁸

Also in 2012, Park was linked to yet another Black List script, the crime story Corsica 72, written by the Bond franchise’s Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. The script appeared on the 2009 iteration of the Black List and placed second on its across-the-pond cousin the Brit List that same year.⁹ It had previously been attached to Luca Guadignino.¹⁰ Two years later, Park signed on to direct the science-fiction thriller Second Born, the first and only screenplay attached to the screenwriter David Jagernauth, which Park described as Philip K. Dick-esque.¹¹ Neither project has surfaced much in the time since their initial announcements.

Following the release of The Handmaiden, Park circled a different science-fiction project: Genocidal Organ, an adaptation of the Japanese writer Project Itoh’s 2007 novel of the same name. Much like Brigands, Park also still harbors ambitions to make this project in the English language.¹² And hey, if it could happen for The Ax, maybe it could happen for ::checks notes:: Genocidal Organ.

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

Griffin Newman, Host: (a note from Marie) Griffin texted us all this weekend trying to get us to attend Disney on Ice, which was kind of weird.

AJ McKeon, Editor: “This is probably a terrible recommendation for a movie podcast newsletter but since we have been avoiding screens with Hayes’ concussion (from falling off a golf cart!) it has improved all our moods. We’ve been listening to a lot of books and building a lot of lego. So I guess I’m recommending reduced screen time!

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I got a Steam Deck recently, and all I want to do is play video games now. I will now recommend some games I’ve been enjoying which everyone else played 1-3 years ago: Strange Jigsaws (strange, funny, meta puzzle game), The Drifter (a point-and-click THRILLER??? Why did no one think of this before??), Q-Up (an extremely well-made game that is essentially a parody of e-sports and is absolutely no less addictive because it’s basically a joke). “

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “My brain has been running on empty the past week and so I have spent an unconscionable number of hours playing Octopath Traveler 0. Still no better combat system in contemporary RPGs imo.”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “Traitors is back on Peacock and I am spending all of my time and energy hating Michael Rapaport. But I also do love this gorgeous Irish woman from Love Island who brought a bunch of fabulous wigs and hairpieces to the castle. Her name is Maura. I hope she wins.”

Griffin Newman, Host: “My resolution is to spend more time reading and writing in 2026! (Fuck arithmetic.) Two things I used to enjoy doing often before my entire life got consumed by mispronouncing words on microphones and listening to other people’s podcasts. Speaking of, thank you all for another year of supporting Blank Check!!!”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

Join Pulp Men (and Woman) of the Year Griffin, David, Ben, and Marie as they discuss Park Chan Wook’s latest offering, the silly and sublime No Other Choice.

MEANWHILE ON PATREON…..

We’re gonna ease on down, ease on down the road!! As we continue our trek toward… New York!!! The Emerald City of the U.S.??? with one of Griffin’s favorites, Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz (or The Wizzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!!!!).

AND ON CRITICAL DARLINGS:
Richard Lawson and Alison Willmore discuss the precursor circuit as well as Marty Supreme! Featuring recent Golden Globe’s voice performer Griffin Newman!

COMING SOON:

FORMAL GRAPHIC TO COME, BUT HERE’S OUR MAIN FEED SCHEDULE THROUGH FEB 2026:
JAN 11 - No Other Choice with Marie Bardi
JAN 18 - Ratcatcher
JAN 25 - Morvern Callar
FEB 01 - We Need to Talk About Kevin
FEB 08 - You Were Never Really Here
FEB 15 - Die, My Love
FEB 22 - Send Help (new Sam Raimi)

1. Bomb Magazine, July 1, 2006.

2. Independent, October 22, 2022.

3. Bomb Magazine, July 1, 2006

4. Vulture, December 13, 2022.

5. New York Times, October 16, 2017.

6. Variety, October 6, 2019.

7. Variety, August 29, 2012.

8. The Guardian, January 9, 2026

9. Variety, September 17, 2012.

10. Screen Daily, December 2, 2010.

11. Variety, November 13, 2014,

12. The Guardian, January 9, 2026.