NWWITA – Episode 26 – A Good Boy or A Good Son

Talking Good Boy (2025) and The Good Son (1993)

This week I talk about Good Boy (2025) and The Good Son (1993)!

Good Boy was a movie I was highly anticipating this year and I am glad I was able to catch it in theaters before it was over taken by other more known movies! It kind of gave me the vibe of Courage The Cowardly Dog but live action so I was really interested in it for that reason and of course I needed to know if the dog survives or not and thankfully the creators let us know that he does indeed survive!

Here’s the synopsis taken from IMDb:

“A loyal dog moves to a rural family home with his owner, only to discover supernatural forces lurking in the shadows. As dark entities threaten his human companion, the brave pup must fight to protect the one he loves most.”

Directed by: Ben Leonberg

Writers: Alex Cannon, Ben Leonberg

Because I follow Shudder (one of the distributors) on socials I was seeing a lot of different interviews of the Director and Producer Kari Fischer talking about working with Indy (which that is both his actual name and in film name lol) and how they truly love their dog but he’s super energetic so just the challenges of trying to film around the dog’s energy and personality. But also it was super super cute seeing the red carpet dog event like omg that should happen more often!

Indy with his dad/ director Ben Leonberg

Check out the trailer down below:

As I’ve said in my podcast a few times I’ve been taking film making classes and a concept we went over this semester while discussing film language was the Kuleslov Effect which is this concept with film making that one image that is then succeeded by another will cause the viewer to perceive an emotion even if the image of the person is blank.

Here is the original film montage experiment that explores this effect:

Now Hitchcock went a step further and added a third frame which is the reaction shot so think

1) a frame of a person

2) what that person is looking at

and

3) the person’s reaction to what they’re looking at

He called this pure cinema and here’s a video of him explaining as well as using himself to create the examples:

So with this concept freshly in my mind as I watched this movie I instantly realized that Leonberg was utilizing this effect in order to have us as the audience feel that Indy was in danger or scared or a multitude of emotions that weren’t actually there.

And then of course the after credits of this film was Leonberg confirming that that is in fact what he was doing lol.

The other movie I talk about this week is The Good Son (1993)! It was a movie I watched on VHS when I was younger and is honestly the main movie I think of when I think of a young Macaulay Culkin and Elijah Wood!

Here’s the synopsis taken from IMDb:

“A young boy stays with his aunt and uncle and becomes friends with his cousin, a boy of the same age who shows increasing signs of violent and psychopathic behavior.”

Director: Joseph Ruben – also worked on The Stepfather (1987) of course lol

Writer: Ian McEwan

While looking more into this (honestly mostly just the Wiki lol) I was surprised to find out that apparently Home Alone 2 wouldn’t have happened if Culkin wasn’t given the opportunity to play the role of this scary child lololol.

I found this Cracked article that quotes a New York Times article from 1991 but because I don’t have a New York Times subscription I can’t read the full thing but here’s a quote from the Cracked article:

At the time, 20th Century Fox were really keen on getting him to do a Home Alone sequel (Home Alone had been ridiculously successful, for a while the third-highest-grossing film of all time). His father and manager Kit said that if they wanted him, they also had to give him the role of the evil kid in their upcoming R-rated thriller The Good Son.

The studio already had an actor lined up, but they agreed and replaced him. And though they publicly denied the decision was anything other than just hiring the most bankable star, sources privately revealed how Culkins’ people had kinda extorted the part out of them. Kit further influenced the studio into casting his daughter Quinn and even casting a third Culkin, Rory, as a character who only appears as a photo.