Episode #385 - Amsterdam

[0:00] On this episode, we discuss Amsterdam.

[0:04] It's an epic multiverse crossover.

[0:06] The movie that finally brings together Batman, Harley Quinn, Gamora,

[0:10] Ileana Rasputin, General Zod, Black Klansman, Austin Powers,

[0:14] Marty the Zebra, Raylan Givens, Freddie Mercury, Dr. Victor Ehrlich,

[0:18] Travis Bickle, and Bombalurina.

[0:20] Though none of them are playing those characters.

[0:22] Man, what a movie that would have been.

[0:24] Not this one.

[0:25] Hey, everyone, and welcome to The Flophouse.

[0:49] I'm Dan McCloy.

[0:50] Oh, boy.

[0:51] It's me, Stuart Wellington.

[0:52] And I'm Elliot Kalin, and I have a little bit of a cold,

[0:55] so Stuart may need to take over the summary of the movie from me some way through.

[0:59] That's Elliot, because I was like, who's that sexy boy?

[1:02] Yeah, ooh, crackly.

[1:04] When I have a cold, I do sound like a sexy boy.

[1:07] Causes a lot of trouble.

[1:10] Why is the crackly voice sexy, Stuart?

[1:14] Yeah, it's because it sounds like you're not long for this world,

[1:20] The inheritance will come to you faster.

[1:23] Exactly.

[1:24] Yeah, yeah.

[1:25] And all beauty comes from its fleeting impression on the mind in this temporal space.

[1:30] Wait, let me find out.

[1:31] I'll text my friend Anna Nicole Smith real quick.

[1:34] It gives me more of a Kathleen Turner feel, I feel like.

[1:38] Yes, that's what I was thinking when you said that.

[1:41] I'm like, if I close my eyes, is he Jessica Rabbit?

[1:44] Yeah, it's like there's a crackling fire inside your mouth.

[1:49] Just like in those, what gum commercial was it where they would say,

[1:53] The inside of your mouth is a blistering 98.6 degrees.

[1:57] As if that was not the normal human temperature.

[2:00] And it's like footage of people sweating their asses off.

[2:04] It's like, get out of that dude's mouth, idiot.

[2:07] As if people are walking around going like, ah, ah, ah, my own tongue.

[2:11] Ah, it's suffering.

[2:14] Well, as you've surely guessed by now,

[2:16] this is a podcast where we watch a movie that was a critical or commercial or both flop.

[2:21] And then we talk about it.

[2:22] We discuss what we thought of it, usually making some jokes and japes along the way.

[2:28] It's called The Flop House.

[2:29] It's been going on for 15 years.

[2:32] Put it in your ears.

[2:33] You're doing it right now.

[2:34] You're soaking in The Flop House.

[2:36] Wow.

[2:37] That's the first take on that shit.

[2:40] It feels like you're stalling until a sniper can take one of us out.

[2:44] Keep going.

[2:45] If you line up perfectly, the hitman will get that achievement or whatever the fuck.

[2:50] And this is our second David O. Russell picture,

[2:53] although the first one he took his name off of, male slash accidental love.

[2:59] Cool, cool, cool, cool.

[3:00] This time we do not have the screenwriter with us because the screenwriter this time was David O. Russell.

[3:04] Interesting.

[3:05] Who, by all accounts, is a genuinely unpleasant person to be around.

[3:08] So he asked to be on the show and we said yes.

[3:11] I've only heard negative things except from a mutual friend of ours, Elliot,

[3:15] who I will not name for their own safety, who was like, no, he's a nice guy.

[3:19] But he seems unreliable.

[3:22] I imagine he is one of those people who is a nice guy to some people and a real nightmare to other people.

[3:28] Exactly.

[3:29] Maybe he just doesn't handle stress well.

[3:31] You are bad.

[3:32] I just know that anyone who shouts that Lily Tomlin is instantly on my shit list,

[3:36] there's no reason to do that ever.

[3:38] Yeah, indeed.

[3:39] Although that video, if you've ever seen it,

[3:41] there is the funny moment where he leaves the room and then walks back in again.

[3:45] Yeah.

[3:46] But anyway.

[3:47] It is much like a scene from the film that he is directing, actually.

[3:51] It feels like it.

[3:52] Yeah.

[3:53] So this was David O. Russell's first film as a director since Joy,

[3:57] a movie that I genuinely did not understand the purpose of and found baffling.

[4:02] That's another David O. Russell movie, spoiler alert,

[4:04] that I liked a little bit better than the populist scene, too.

[4:08] That's totally cool.

[4:09] It is absolutely a mess, but I kind of was charmed by some of it.

[4:12] What did he do before that?

[4:14] American Hustle, I think, was before that.

[4:16] Oh, what a stinker.

[4:17] Which I also did not care for.

[4:18] That one I don't like.

[4:19] Yeah, it's a stinker.

[4:20] Before that was Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter, both of which I really like.

[4:23] I think those are both really good movies.

[4:24] Yeah.

[4:25] I think The Fighter, it loses a lot of steam when he decides to shoot the climactic fight

[4:29] as if you are watching it on HBO.

[4:31] Which is an interesting creative choice to put you at – it's almost Brechtian,

[4:35] the distance that he is putting between you and the characters at that point.

[4:39] But he's a hit-and-miss director, by which I mean I wouldn't be surprised

[4:42] if he hit a miss at some point.

[4:44] He seems like a difficult man.

[4:46] No, he is definitely, from all reports, not a nice man who may have also done

[4:52] some weird stuff.

[4:53] We won't get into that.

[4:55] He came to blows with George Clooney on the set of Three Kings.

[5:00] My favorite David O. Russell movie.

[5:02] Yeah, hey, that's fine.

[5:03] That's a totally good choice right there.

[5:05] Yeah.

[5:06] So we won't spend a lot of this episode on the merits or demerits of David O. Russell

[5:12] just because we're here just talking about the movie.

[5:13] And I think we're going to have an interesting debate and discussion about this film possibly

[5:17] because we'll see.

[5:20] This was a very divisive movie in a critical community.

[5:22] I know The New Yorker put it as one of its ten best movies of the year.

[5:25] What?

[5:26] And I would not do that.

[5:28] I mean, let's not –

[5:30] Did they only see nine movies?

[5:32] I think it's going to be clear pretty early on that I will be the defender of the movie

[5:39] more than the others.

[5:40] I basically enjoyed it even though I think there's a lot that's a mess.

[5:44] But I would not put it on a ten best list for sure.

[5:47] I was amazed.

[5:48] I had to look up Richard Brody's review.

[5:50] And Richard Brody, much like the other New Yorker film reviewer, Anthony Lane,

[5:55] is a very idiosyncratic individual.

[5:57] Reading his review, everything in this movie that didn't work for me worked for him like gangbusters.

[6:02] He just could not get enough of it.

[6:03] So let's talk about this movie, shall we?

[6:05] This kind of screwball, madcap, relatively jokeless, relatively thrillless spy comedy thriller.

[6:12] About American fascism.

[6:14] About American fascism.

[6:16] And that amazingly keeps hinting at the subject of race and then running away from it as quickly as possible.

[6:22] True, true.

[6:24] It starts with a text on screen that says a lot of this really happened.

[6:27] Which is such a fucking common piece of shit thing to do.

[6:31] Like every fucking movie these days.

[6:34] These days.

[6:35] But it's such a fucking common thing, trend, is to be like parts of this happened but parts didn't happen.

[6:43] It's like fuck.

[6:44] Okay, dog.

[6:45] Just leave this part out then.

[6:47] I would say that in a movie that is more based on reality than this film, I actually appreciate that it's gone that direction.

[6:55] Because it's like, look, it's admitting up top.

[6:58] Look, this is a movie.

[6:59] Some of this is bullshit.

[7:00] But it's inspired by true events.

[7:02] As much as I don't love the big short, that they do keep toeing that line where they're going some of this is true, some of this is not.

[7:09] But this –

[7:11] This movie is 95% just totally made up.

[7:16] It's so loosely inspired by something.

[7:18] Is it just to protect themselves from those people who went to see Tar and were mad that that person doesn't actually exist?

[7:25] I think it is to make it sound more important than it is.

[7:28] Because this movie is kind of like reaching for important, but it's reach exceeds its grasp.

[7:34] As all mankind should, I guess.

[7:37] So we start out in New York.

[7:38] It's New York in 1933, and we're introduced to our most of the time narrator but not all the time.

[7:45] This is Bert Berenson, played by Christian Bale, and he is a World War I veteran who focuses on making facial prosthetics for disfigured World War I veterans like himself.

[7:56] He has a missing eye with a glass eye in.

[7:59] He wears a back brace, and he's always getting in trouble for making experimental drugs and testing them on himself.

[8:05] A character quirk which never quite becomes a plot point or a real character trait.

[8:09] Like it just kind of pops up every now and then.

[8:11] I mean it does justify how long the monologue at the end of the movie is because it is the ravings of a stoned man.

[8:18] That's true.

[8:19] And I feel like –

[8:21] You see a movie like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where you're like this movie feels like it is about characters who are high all the time.

[8:27] And the movie is making me feel like that, whereas this kind of doesn't get across.

[8:31] But my main problem with Bert Berenson – I don't know if you guys had this issue.

[8:34] His voice and his mannerisms are like – they are so stiffly attempting to be Jewish, New York Jewish, that it edges into anti-Semitism.

[8:45] And I was like, is this what Christian Bale thinks Jewish people look and sound like?

[8:49] Like it's ridiculous.

[8:50] And he keeps talking about how he's half Catholic, half Jewish, and I'm like, well, maybe that's why he's such an unconvincing Jewish person.

[8:56] I don't know.

[8:57] Your thoughts as Gentiles.

[8:58] As a Gentile, I mean I guess I wasn't attuned to that.

[9:02] This was the first thing I was going to ask you about.

[9:04] I mean Audrey said, oh, he's like – it's like Christian Bale Kramer and that's kind of what it is.

[9:13] He's doing his own like Midge Maisel thing, right?

[9:15] Yeah.

[9:16] Yeah.

[9:17] I saw it written somewhere, described as Columbo by way of Pacino.

[9:21] Oh, okay.

[9:22] Which is like, yeah, I could see that.

[9:25] That makes sense.

[9:26] But it does feel like he is.

[9:28] He's going for New York Jewish and he's not quite hitting it, but he is – it does feel like he's trying for it.

[9:33] So he's best friends with a lawyer named Harold Woodman played by John David Washington.

[9:38] This is his war buddy.

[9:39] They met – they fought together in World War I, and Harold comes to him and says, hey, I need you to perform an autopsy on a man who means a lot to us.

[9:47] General Bill Meekins, the man who is our commanding officer in World War I who will go on to be played by Ed Begley Jr.

[9:54] Now, John David Washington, very handsome, very charismatic and talented, seems to have –

[10:00] drawn the short straw for quirky characters in this movie.

[10:03] Yeah, he is sedate where everyone else is frantic.

[10:07] Well, most other people are frantic.

[10:08] There are a couple, Zoe Saldana is pretty sedate.

[10:11] Margot Robbie is kind of just left adrift by her character.

[10:16] We'll talk about that when she comes up.

[10:18] Well, I think it's this movie,

[10:20] and I don't want to keep accusing this movie

[10:22] of things that are unfair,

[10:23] but this movie at times feels like an episode of Seinfeld

[10:25] where all the white people get to be wacky doodle crazies

[10:29] and all the black people,

[10:30] their job is to roll their eyes

[10:31] at these wacky doodle crazy white people,

[10:33] and the black people don't get to have fun.

[10:34] It's a little bit like that.

[10:35] So, Liz Meekins, the General's daughter,

[10:40] played by Taylor Swift in, I have to say,

[10:43] probably my favorite performance in the film, to be honest,

[10:45] because it felt the most like a real person.

[10:46] I was like, you know, shortly before she left the film

[10:50] under shocking circumstances.

[10:51] She certainly gets run over by a truck.

[10:53] Shock like a real person.

[10:55] But I, yes, right before that happened,

[10:58] I turned to Audrey, I'm like, really?

[11:00] Goodness.

[11:01] And I was just thinking of that.

[11:03] And the thing is, I mean, you know,

[11:05] we're both fans of her music,

[11:08] particularly the last few albums for me, Audrey.

[11:11] You mean you and Audrey, not you and me.

[11:13] Yes.

[11:14] I don't like or dislike.

[11:15] She's not my type of guy.

[11:15] I think she's very good, and I, you know,

[11:18] Bumble Lorena was no chance to judge her acting ability.

[11:22] So I was glad to see that I thought

[11:24] she put in a good job here.

[11:26] She comes out the best of it.

[11:28] So Liz Meekins, she suspects her father's death

[11:31] of being foul play.

[11:33] She wants them to perform a secret autopsy.

[11:34] They have two hours to do it.

[11:36] So they got to rush that corpse

[11:38] out of that funeral home real fast.

[11:40] And then Chris Rock shows up as Milton,

[11:44] and he's like a friend of theirs

[11:46] who I guess works for Harold and was also in World War I.

[11:48] And there's never a real reason why Chris Rock

[11:50] is particularly in this movie,

[11:51] except to like show up and tell a joke every now and then.

[11:54] And then to help say the moral at the end.

[11:58] And so they rush it out.

[12:00] Bert is like, I don't want to do this.

[12:01] I hate doing autopsies.

[12:02] It's fine, because most of the autopsy work

[12:04] is done by Irma St. Clair, played by Zoe Saldana.

[12:08] And if it's always already, usually it's Zoe Saldana,

[12:10] but she started being credited with a tilde over there.

[12:14] So I think that's her family name is,

[12:16] her father's last name was Saldana, I think.

[12:18] So I think she's trying to reclaim her actual family name.

[12:20] Thank you for explaining,

[12:21] because I just thought you put some English on it.

[12:24] Actually, some Spanish is what I put on it.

[12:28] But I don't know how she pronounces it.

[12:30] But for a long time, she's been Zoe Saldana,

[12:32] but she's credited here as Zoe Saldana.

[12:34] But so she does most of the work.

[12:37] She's a nurse.

[12:38] They kind of just need Bert's signature on it,

[12:40] because he's a doctor,

[12:41] but it's implied that his medical license

[12:43] is either on probation or has been suspended.

[12:46] So I don't know why his signature

[12:47] would be so good on an autopsy.

[12:48] Anyway.

[12:49] He's mostly at this point a legal drug dealer

[12:51] for veterans in pain at this point.

[12:55] Yes.

[12:56] And they've both been unlucky in love.

[12:58] Harold is clearly trying to set Bert and Burma up.

[13:00] Which is like the kind of like to a drug dealer,

[13:03] like the way that like a serial killer

[13:05] who only kills other serial killers is, right?

[13:08] Where it's like, oh, it's okay that he does this,

[13:10] because he's doing it for good, you know?

[13:14] Wait, hold on.

[13:14] He's doing it for good.

[13:15] It would be okay even if he wasn't a veteran

[13:17] who needed medication.

[13:18] Oh, that part.

[13:18] I was like, I thought you were arguing in favor

[13:21] of the moral appropriateness of setting him up

[13:23] with Zoe Saldana.

[13:25] And I'm like, no, that seems fine.

[13:27] I don't understand why we have to justify that with veterans.

[13:29] No, that's totally fine.

[13:30] They clearly have some chemistry,

[13:32] but he can't act on it because he's married

[13:34] and still hung up on his wife, right?

[13:37] Yes.

[13:37] And a phrase that comes up a lot in the movie

[13:41] is the idea that Christian Bale

[13:42] followed the wrong God home.

[13:44] And there's a lot of very pretentious language

[13:47] like that in the movie.

[13:47] It's a movie that,

[13:48] I'm just gonna say it right now early on.

[13:50] Watching this movie, I was like,

[13:52] is this what it feels like

[13:53] when people who don't like Wes Anderson

[13:55] watch a Wes Anderson movie?

[13:57] Where people talk in like an artificial tone of voice

[13:59] and it's very kind of either wacky or mannered.

[14:02] And there's that separation between reality and this.

[14:04] And there's a lot of like pretty costumes from the past

[14:07] and stuff like that.

[14:08] Except David O. Russell's movies are by choice,

[14:11] chaotic messes.

[14:12] That's what he prefers to make.

[14:14] Whereas Wes Anderson's are very controlled.

[14:15] So I feel like Wes Anderson for me really works

[14:17] because I'm like, I'm never supposed to be in reality.

[14:20] I'm in his reality.

[14:21] And he gets to an emotional truth through it.

[14:22] Whereas with this movie,

[14:23] it feels like David O. Russell

[14:24] is trying to get to an emotional truth

[14:26] without making a choice of being real or unreal,

[14:29] if that makes any sense.

[14:32] I see why you feel that way.

[14:33] I thought about this too.

[14:35] It's also kind of reminiscent of,

[14:37] a lot of people invoke the Coen brothers,

[14:38] like this sort of sprawling,

[14:40] like capery thing with a bunch of wacky characters.

[14:42] And they also have their characters speak

[14:46] in heightened dialects all the time

[14:47] to sort of clue you into the fact

[14:50] that perhaps you don't need to take this

[14:51] as existing in our reality.

[14:54] As literal reality, yeah.

[14:55] Yeah, and I didn't,

[14:57] I think that I imagine that a lot of the people

[14:59] who watch this who liked it less than I did,

[15:02] i.e. you, Elliot.

[15:03] And me.

[15:04] Maybe, yeah.

[15:05] Don't forget Stu.

[15:06] I know, but we're talking to Elliot right now.

[15:08] We'll get you used to it.

[15:09] Oh, shit.

[15:10] You're gonna take your licks.

[15:11] No, no, no.

[15:12] A lot of people who didn't like it,

[15:13] whether it be the two of you or others,

[15:15] I think had this problem where it's like,

[15:18] it didn't clue enough into maybe

[15:21] that this reality is not a thing

[15:23] that you need to be taking seriously.

[15:24] So the things that are said just seem unreal.

[15:28] You know, like they seem like,

[15:29] well, no one would be like this.

[15:32] But I didn't have that issue.

[15:33] So I don't know.

[15:34] It's just personal.

[15:35] And I think, I mean,

[15:36] it's one of those things also where I think you're right.

[15:38] I think there is part of that,

[15:39] that if the movie had chosen to be more artificial

[15:41] or less artificial, it might've worked more for me,

[15:43] but the sensibility is not clear.

[15:46] But also, if it was funny, I wouldn't have cared as much.

[15:49] If it was exciting, I wouldn't have cared as much.

[15:51] The difference between Wes Anderson movies and this is,

[15:53] Wes Anderson movies are really funny.

[15:55] Coen Brothers movies are really funny and they're exciting.

[15:57] Because the Coen Brothers are maybe the greatest

[15:59] living filmmakers, I would say, at least in America.

[16:01] Wes Anderson, his movies can be hit and miss,

[16:04] but I love him overall.

[16:04] And I do think he's super talented.

[16:06] Whereas, what's weird for David O. Russell

[16:08] is that like, for someone who's made so many movies,

[16:10] I feel like every time he kind of forgets how a movie works

[16:13] and how to show things visually.

[16:15] He likes to slop it up.

[16:16] He puts water on those sticks.

[16:20] A lot of scenes feel like acting exercises.

[16:23] That they're just like, yeah, let's run with it.

[16:25] We'll fix it in post.

[16:26] And I think it totally-

[16:28] Sorry, I think it just totally has to do

[16:30] with whether or not you like find the characters

[16:33] like fun to hang out.

[16:34] Like that was like where I'm just like,

[16:35] this is sloppy and that's part of what I enjoy about it.

[16:39] Like, I just don't mind hanging out with the characters,

[16:43] even though some of them are more boring than others.

[16:45] But I can also totally get why it doesn't work for people.

[16:49] Yeah, I think that makes sense.

[16:50] I mean, my issue with American Hustle was partly that like,

[16:53] the movie just kind of would forget

[16:54] it was a story for a long time.

[16:56] And you just watch the characters yelling at each other.

[16:58] And it was like,

[16:59] I feel like I'm watching a bad improv show right now

[17:01] where everyone's just yelling at each other with accents on.

[17:04] And in this one, I think it makes sense, Dan,

[17:06] that it's sloppy,

[17:07] but you enjoyed spending time with these characters.

[17:08] I felt it was sloppy and I did not like these characters

[17:10] and didn't want to spend time with them.

[17:12] And also, and the worst thing as we'll get to it,

[17:14] when you're watching characters

[17:15] having a beautiful, great time

[17:17] and you're not keyed into it,

[17:19] it becomes offensive to you.

[17:21] It's like, there are scenes in this movie,

[17:23] we're getting up to a secret.

[17:25] Well, it feels like when you watch the end of SNL

[17:27] and everyone's hugging as if they had

[17:29] a transcendent experience and you're like,

[17:30] that was a fucking shitty show.

[17:32] Like, this makes me madder that you guys are acting

[17:34] like you just pulled off a Tom Stoppard play.

[17:37] You know, there's something like that.

[17:39] Yeah, like a three pointer at the buzzer

[17:42] and the whole team won.

[17:44] Yeah, exactly.

[17:45] So they find evidence of foul play

[17:49] that he may have been poisoned.

[17:51] Liz Meekins, she doesn't show up

[17:53] where they're supposed to meet up,

[17:53] but she kind of, they find her.

[17:55] She's scared of being caught.

[17:56] She says her dad saw and knew something

[17:58] that got him in trouble.

[17:59] But before she can say what it is,

[18:01] a guy just runs up and pushes her in front of a truck

[18:03] and she gets hit by a truck and killed, gets run over.

[18:06] And then the guy-

[18:07] It's pretty funny.

[18:08] It's genuinely shocking to see-

[18:09] It's pretty funny, yeah.

[18:10] Taylor Swift just being pushed into the street

[18:13] and a truck ran over her.

[18:15] And that was a moment that worked for me

[18:16] because I genuinely was not expecting it to happen so fast.

[18:20] And this is Timothy Oliphant, right?

[18:21] With the very heavy makeup.

[18:23] Yeah, yeah, he's-

[18:23] Which I did not know until the end credits

[18:25] because he's gross.

[18:26] Yeah, I didn't recognize him at all.

[18:27] They gross him up.

[18:28] He's a handsome man and he looks-

[18:29] They really buried those diamond cutting cheekbones

[18:32] under heavy putty.

[18:33] And he pushes her in front of a truck

[18:35] and then just points at them and goes,

[18:37] hey, they did it.

[18:38] And everyone immediately believes it.

[18:39] There is a line later on

[18:40] when they're being questioned by the police

[18:42] where they're like, yeah,

[18:44] he was able to do it because he's good at being a criminal.

[18:47] And I'm like, yeah, I guess that's true.

[18:50] Yeah.

[18:51] He convinced the crowd.

[18:51] I mean, he controlled the narrative.

[18:53] He was the first one to say anything.

[18:55] He said it.

[18:56] He's pointing at, in the past,

[18:58] I mean, well, I mean,

[19:00] we don't even have to qualify it, unfortunately.

[19:02] He's pointing at a black man

[19:04] and a crazy looking drug addict.

[19:08] I mean, Christian Bale throughout

[19:10] does look like a maniac, you know?

[19:12] Yeah, so it's an easy crime to pull off,

[19:15] perhaps giving the lie that he's good at crime.

[19:17] Whose eyeball keeps falling out?

[19:19] How much money do you think was put

[19:21] into those eyeball effects?

[19:22] I think a lot.

[19:22] A lot, I think so.

[19:24] And within moments,

[19:25] they are defending themselves to the crowd

[19:27] and then suddenly running

[19:28] as a police officer shoots at them.

[19:31] And then this is when, uh-oh, they're on the run.

[19:35] They might get caught for a murder they didn't commit.

[19:37] Hey guys, weren't you wondering how they became friends?

[19:41] Let's jump back to 1918.

[19:43] Cause you know what?

[19:44] I wasn't wondering.

[19:45] I could just take it for granted

[19:46] that they were old war buddies.

[19:48] But we have to be introduced-

[19:49] Slow the narrative down a little bit, why not?

[19:50] But we have to be introduced to the third member

[19:52] of their triumvirate that we don't know about.

[19:54] So, Burt's in-laws convince him to enlist in the war

[19:57] and suddenly we're in France.

[19:59] General Meekins-

[20:00] It's Burt in charge of a group of black soldiers

[20:03] who are being, because the white soldiers

[20:06] being racist to them.

[20:07] This is also loosely based on truth

[20:09] that there was a unit of American black soldiers

[20:13] who are treated as part of the French army

[20:17] because the white soldiers from America

[20:18] would not work with them.

[20:20] And so the idea, and they keep saying it's a dishonor,

[20:22] you have to wear the French uniform.

[20:23] In real life, they wore an American uniform

[20:25] with a French helmet and some other French stuff.

[20:27] But anyway, it doesn't matter.

[20:28] At the point, this is more true

[20:29] than some of the other stuff in it.

[20:31] So you only give it one Pinocchio.

[20:32] Yeah, half a Pinocchio.

[20:35] I just give it half Pinocchio's nose.

[20:37] Yeah, it just looks like it's a slightly longer

[20:39] than normal nose.

[20:40] Yeah, a Cyrano nose.

[20:42] It's the kind of nose that you probably

[20:44] shouldn't be contouring, because it's already noticeable.

[20:47] Yeah.

[20:48] But embrace it.

[20:49] Yeah, embrace it.

[20:50] Let's call it ultra aqua line.

[20:52] Now, not ultra aqua lung, which would be a combination

[20:56] of the movie Ultraviolet and the Jethro Tull album Aqua Lung.

[20:59] I think we're going a little something like this.

[21:00] I bet they sync up.

[21:02] Let's watch the podcast and see if they sync up.

[21:05] Try to sync it up and see if, is that Shirley?

[21:07] Shirley's Theron in Ultraviolet, or am I thinking?

[21:09] I think so.

[21:12] Or is it?

[21:13] Wait, is that Christian Bale as well, Ultraviolet?

[21:15] No, that's Equilibrium, I think.

[21:16] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[21:17] Yeah, yeah.

[21:18] See if it, see if it, anyway, see if it.

[21:19] Are you thinking it might be Mia Jovovich?

[21:20] Mia is Mia.

[21:22] Because Mia Jovovich is, is she Resident Evil

[21:24] or is she Ultraviolet?

[21:25] I think she's both.

[21:26] I can't remember.

[21:26] Oh, no, Shirley's Theron is Aeon Flux, that's right.

[21:29] So, so who's in Ultraviolet?

[21:30] Is it Mia Jovovich?

[21:31] It is Mia Jovovich.

[21:32] It's Mia, it's Mia, whoops.

[21:34] We got, we just earned us a Pinocchio.

[21:36] Yeah, if you do that.

[21:37] Yeah, so see if you, see.

[21:38] Send us a YouTube link to your mixed mashup.

[21:41] Send us a YouTube link of Mia Jovovich

[21:43] shooting people to locomotive breath

[21:44] and we'll see, we'll see how it syncs up.

[21:47] So the, he puts Bert in charge of these soldiers

[21:51] and Harold is one of them.

[21:52] He makes, and so is Chris Rock, his character Milton.

[21:55] And Harold makes a deal.

[21:56] We'll keep you safe if you keep us safe,

[21:57] which is kind of, it feels like that should be the deal

[21:59] between a commanding officer and the soldiers.

[22:02] Sort of army thing.

[22:03] Anyway, they do, they must do a bad job

[22:05] because they all get shot up and sent to a hospital

[22:08] where Margot Robbie is a nurse working there or a medic.

[22:11] She's patching them up.

[22:13] She gets in trouble because she's taking the metal

[22:15] she removes from their body so that she,

[22:17] for reasons she hasn't explained yet, she's collecting it.

[22:20] And Harold defends her in French

[22:21] and it turns into a mini uprising

[22:23] in the room of all the American soldiers defending her.

[22:25] And she reveals she's not actually French.

[22:27] She's Valerie Vandenberg,

[22:29] an American socialite working in France.

[22:32] And suddenly she's VO-ing about the instant connection

[22:35] she felt with Harold and with Bert.

[22:37] And it gets very, it's like two people in love

[22:40] is a beautiful thing,

[22:40] but when you are standing outside of that love,

[22:43] it is sickening.

[22:45] Well, also I will say-

[22:46] Yeah, that's why you're always complaining about polycules.

[22:50] Unless it-

[22:51] I mean, if this had become a polycule,

[22:54] I would have found it more interesting

[22:55] than it just being Harold and Val and their friend Bert

[22:59] who hangs around and shares a room with them.

[23:00] So I guess it's just closing his ears while they have sex.

[23:03] Like if there's no, anyway, it's not interesting.

[23:06] It never goes full, yeah.

[23:08] Love triangle.

[23:09] Or threesome, like just, yeah.

[23:12] Happy threesome.

[23:13] But Margot Robbie here,

[23:18] well, first let's talk about them being in love

[23:20] because I'm, unless two actors have like-

[23:24] They're both very attractive.

[23:25] They're both very attractive,

[23:26] but unless two actors have like

[23:27] really strong chemistry together,

[23:30] I tend not to think about it that much.

[23:33] I just accept in most movies,

[23:35] like they'll tell you like, oh, they're in love.

[23:37] And I'm like, sure, fine.

[23:39] Because like, I don't know,

[23:40] in life when I see my friends who are in love,

[23:42] they're not like, I'm not like,

[23:43] it's electric at every moment between them.

[23:45] I'm just like, yeah, they love each other.

[23:46] But this movie, maybe I'm wrong.

[23:48] I felt like it had not that much chemistry

[23:51] between these two very attractive people.

[23:53] I agree.

[23:54] And the movie is trying very hard to present this

[23:56] as a love for the ages, a transcendental love.

[23:58] And I felt like they did not have much chemistry.

[24:01] So the movie is trying very hard

[24:02] to convince you of something that it's not showing.

[24:05] And I feel like one of the great things about movies,

[24:07] one of the most powerful things about movies

[24:09] is when they take an emotion,

[24:11] a character you're watching who's not real is feeling,

[24:14] or real if it's documentary, and they make you feel it.

[24:17] And the best movies about love,

[24:18] they do make you feel,

[24:20] not just that these characters are in love,

[24:21] but you become affected by the penumbra of that love,

[24:24] to use Supreme Court talk that has since been overruled

[24:27] in the Dobbs decision, I guess.

[24:29] But they make you feel the glow of that love.

[24:33] And the movie is trying so hard,

[24:35] and Burt keeps talking about how he feels it,

[24:36] but as a viewer, I know, I did not feel it.

[24:39] And so it just felt cloying and kind of like.

[24:41] Yeah.

[24:43] It's like that scene in Garden State

[24:45] where she puts that headphones on

[24:46] and he listens to that song.

[24:47] And it's like, if you're not keyed

[24:49] into that feeling of that song,

[24:51] then that moment is stomach churn.

[24:53] Are you telling me that there's a flaw

[24:56] in the movie Garden State, Dan's favorite movie?

[25:00] Just the one flaw.

[25:01] I do think also one of the problems with their romance

[25:04] is that of the three leads,

[25:06] like a lot of energy gets put

[25:08] into characterizing Christian Bale

[25:10] and not so much into these other characters.

[25:13] John David Washington doesn't get a lot.

[25:15] I think Margot Robbie gets the worst of it.

[25:16] I think that she's a tremendous performer,

[25:19] obviously movie star, beautiful and charismatic,

[25:22] but also game for-

[25:24] Very talented.

[25:25] Very talented.

[25:25] Yeah.

[25:26] She's Barbie, for fucking God's sake.

[25:28] Yeah, well, it's amazing how much this movie does,

[25:32] even though I liked it,

[25:32] it does really dampen her spark in particular, I feel like.

[25:36] Yeah.

[25:37] Well, she's not playing a character.

[25:39] She's playing, I mean, to use an overused phrase,

[25:43] credit to Nathan Rabin, friend of the show,

[25:46] she's playing a manic pixie dream girl.

[25:48] Like she is the manic pixie dream girl

[25:50] who is also the, later on as we'll see,

[25:54] the like girl with a medical problem,

[25:56] which makes her fragile and therefore more beautiful.

[25:58] Yeah.

[25:59] Gives her more zest for life or whatever.

[26:01] And so when you meet-

[26:02] Her one characteristic is she is taking

[26:06] these shrapnel pieces for her bizarre artworks

[26:09] that is the only thing she's given.

[26:13] Let me go take you through this whole scene

[26:14] because this is the scene,

[26:15] I feel like if this scene didn't exist in the movie,

[26:17] I might've liked the whole movie better,

[26:18] is she goes, okay, I'll tell you two

[26:21] what I use the metal for

[26:22] in exchange for something beautiful.

[26:24] So Bert leads them through making up

[26:26] a nonsense song in French made out of nonsense phrases,

[26:30] which they all sing together.

[26:31] And it's so beautiful to her that she shows,

[26:33] she's making kind of art pieces and toys with the shrapnel.

[26:37] And as I wrote my notes, who boy is it twee?

[26:39] And we get just a montage of her

[26:42] showing off different things where she's like,

[26:44] it's just very cutesy and precious.

[26:47] And it's like-

[26:48] Is this the scene that like culminates

[26:50] in like head-on character shots of them

[26:53] and they just say Amsterdam over and over?

[26:56] No, that's the end.

[26:57] That's the end of the sequence.

[26:57] Well, that happens at the,

[26:59] yeah, that's kind of the end of the answer sequence.

[27:01] But yeah, it's very precious

[27:02] and not based on the novel pushed by Sapphire.

[27:04] Yeah.

[27:05] Like it's precious in a cloying way,

[27:07] in a Hummel figure.

[27:09] This is my least favorite part of the movie.

[27:13] Just slightly below the long explanatory ending,

[27:18] which we'll eventually talk about.

[27:19] Boy, when they go overboard explaining

[27:21] the most obvious twist in the history of movies.

[27:24] Like not since death on the Nile

[27:26] has there been a more obvious villain reveal.

[27:28] Like, wait a minute.

[27:29] All the characters we don't like are bad guys

[27:32] and in on the conspiracy.

[27:33] Okay, cool.

[27:34] And all the ones we've seen are pretty nice or good.

[27:36] All nice and good, yeah.

[27:38] So they sneak off to Amsterdam together.

[27:41] And this is when it starts,

[27:43] this sequence starts off with them meeting up

[27:44] with two of her friends who are clearly spies,

[27:47] Mike Myers and Michael Shannon

[27:49] in the role of Paul Canterbury, an English guy

[27:51] and Henry Norcos, an American spy.

[27:53] Hold on, Stuart.

[27:54] Yeah, yeah, my neighbor, Michael Shannon.

[27:56] Yeah.

[27:57] Surely you found something to enjoy

[28:00] in the double act of Mike Myers and Michael Shannon

[28:04] birdwatching spies.

[28:05] I mean, I could have,

[28:08] give me more of that, please.

[28:10] Yeah, I mean, the two of them,

[28:12] it gets annoying by the end of it,

[28:14] but I like when they first show up,

[28:15] the same way that when Michael Myers

[28:16] shows up in Inglourious Bastards,

[28:18] I was like, yeah, I like it when he shows up.

[28:22] When Mike Myers shows up, sorry.

[28:25] That would actually be really, really wild

[28:28] if you think about it.

[28:30] If Brad Pitt's like, I want 50 German scalps

[28:32] from each of you and Michael Myers is just like,

[28:34] eh, not a problem.

[28:36] And you're like, he talks now?

[28:39] I just really,

[28:40] one of the things I enjoyed about this character

[28:42] is I felt like there was a certain bizarre realism

[28:45] in the way that they were portrayed as company men

[28:49] where it's like, they're clearly spies,

[28:51] but they're like, no, no, no, no, no, we're not spies.

[28:54] We run, we make glass eyes and we're birdwatchers

[28:58] and everyone in the room knows that they actually are spies.

[29:02] And this is a transparent lie,

[29:04] and luckily the movie assumes we're fucking babies

[29:07] because it actually puts their actual titles

[29:10] in like a little title card underneath them.

[29:12] And I'm like, I fucking knew that shit, dude.

[29:14] You didn't have to show it to me.

[29:15] It's amazing how much this movie,

[29:17] and I have to assume these are things

[29:19] that were put in afterwards

[29:20] because maybe test audiences were confused

[29:22] because the movie was moving too fast.

[29:23] It's amazing how often the movie underlines

[29:25] incredibly obvious information

[29:28] or just doesn't trust the audience.

[29:30] So they go on about birds.

[29:32] They have a bunch of taxidermied birds,

[29:34] they're birdwatchers.

[29:35] And they're like, hey, we're gonna give,

[29:37] Christian Bale, we're gonna give you

[29:38] a lifetime supply of glass eyes.

[29:40] And in return, you're gonna owe us a spy favor

[29:43] at some point because we'll have to go to Oregon

[29:45] because as Margot Robbie says, the dream repeats itself

[29:48] because it forgets itself.

[29:49] But this is the good part.

[29:51] Because we assume automatically that you

[29:54] will be involved in some sort of thing

[29:57] that will need your help.

[29:58] That's the funny part to me.

[30:00] They can't know that later on it's going to be embroiled in this conspiracy.

[30:03] Well, it's like, hey, you're a one-eyed doctor and you're a lawyer.

[30:07] I'm going to need your help at some point in the future to keep America safe for democracy.

[30:11] For a joke I'm writing about you walking into a bar.

[30:17] Can I mine your life rights for that?

[30:21] So now there's a long sequence of them just dancing and partying in Amsterdam.

[30:25] This joyous time in Amsterdam is basically just them in a one-room apartment dancing

[30:29] all the time.

[30:30] Mike Myers does a sand dance.

[30:31] I've seen the dreamers before.

[30:32] I know what it's like, right?

[30:34] I mean, said at a different time, but yeah, pretty much the same thing.

[30:38] Except the dreamers had the guts to have them all have sex with each other.

[30:41] So you know.

[30:42] I want to make it clear that in case listeners heard it too fast, Mike Myers did a sand dance

[30:49] and not a fan dance like Uhura and Star Trek 5.

[30:54] He just dances around on some sand.

[30:57] He dances around on some sand while dressed as the guy in You Can't Take It With You who

[31:02] is posing for a pic for a drawing where he's like where he's like wearing kind of Roman

[31:06] clothes but also right old right modern shoes.

[31:09] But anyway, yeah, Valerie joins Harold and Bert's friend pact.

[31:14] Harold and Valerie in love, blah, blah, blah.

[31:16] This goes on for a while.

[31:17] It's very repetitive.

[31:18] Bert says, I have to go back to New York to be with my wife.

[31:21] And they're like, don't go.

[31:23] Don't go.

[31:24] It's life is perfect here.

[31:25] And he has to go.

[31:26] His father-in-law blacklifts from the hospital he works at immediately for working with veterans,

[31:31] which is weird.

[31:32] Yeah.

[31:33] Which is it's like I could see that maybe happening after like Vietnam.

[31:36] Yeah.

[31:38] But after World War One, I mean, maybe that happened.

[31:40] Veterans were so hated after World War One.

[31:43] We missed or I don't remember us talking about it like a very quick scene in the flashback

[31:49] earlier where Bert is being sent off to war by, you know, his in-laws.

[31:57] It seems sort of clear that maybe they'd be happy if he didn't come back like, yeah, they're

[32:01] portraying it as like, this will make your name.

[32:03] You'll get respect on Park Avenue or whatever, but they kind of don't want him to come back.

[32:07] That's true.

[32:08] So what?

[32:09] Harold, he has to practice medicine in an alleyway.

[32:11] He gets a morphine addiction.

[32:12] He goes to jail.

[32:14] Harold wants Valerie because they know she's rich to use her connections to help Bert.

[32:18] She doesn't want her family to know where she is.

[32:19] And she agrees to help.

[32:20] But then she disappears.

[32:21] And they don't and they never see her again.

[32:24] Or will they?

[32:25] It's a movie.

[32:26] Yeah, we'll find out.

[32:27] Now, back to 1933, they're on the run.

[32:28] They go to Bert's wife's apartment.

[32:29] And at first, she's very cold to them.

[32:31] But then she checks his back, which is all scarred.

[32:33] She talks about how ugly and grotesque it is.

[32:35] But it's implied that she's turned on by his wounds and that he's not comfortable.

[32:40] This is never touched on again.

[32:41] No, they have a very strange relationship, which kind of makes it feel weird, like real

[32:46] to me.

[32:47] But also, I'm not quite sure what it is where, yeah, she seems to be sort of turned on by

[32:53] the fact that he's so broken and injured seeming and he doesn't want to be that.

[33:00] But also, like she sort of hates him, but also seems to have like genuine love for him.

[33:08] Just not in a way that allows her to behave in a way that he would be happy with.

[33:13] I feel like this.

[33:14] I feel like she is.

[33:15] She's not given.

[33:17] I mean, this is this is Beatrice.

[33:18] This is Beatrice played by Adrian rise, Andrea Riseborough.

[33:21] Maybe she's bringing some of the feel of possessor with her to this character, because this character

[33:26] is definitely more complicated and weirder in a in a kind of not weird in a like, oh,

[33:32] I'm so kooky.

[33:33] I make art out of shrapnel, but weird in a like it's hard to gauge exactly what's happening

[33:37] within her emotionally at any given point.

[33:39] And I feel like she's succeeding the way a lot of the other actors are not in giving

[33:43] depth to an underwritten character.

[33:44] But it doesn't really fit with the movie.

[33:46] Because we're we're introduced to this.

[33:49] We're introduced to this character by other people talking about her.

[33:51] And we're so the impression we have is that she is maybe a shrew or shrill and she is

[33:57] not going to let him be himself and that she wants nothing to do with him.

[34:02] But then when we're introduced to her, we're like, who is this weirdo?

[34:05] Yeah.

[34:06] And plus, ultimately, she is very helpful to him, even if she's wrong for him.

[34:11] Yes.

[34:12] Like, so, you know, I forgot that was her and Mandy, too, as Mandy.

[34:15] She's really good.

[34:17] She's good.

[34:18] Yeah.

[34:19] She's really good.

[34:20] Anyway.

[34:21] So the.

[34:22] Yeah.

[34:23] I mean, the quality of talent is not the problem of this movie.

[34:25] Yeah.

[34:27] It's an amazing cast.

[34:28] It's an amazing cast.

[34:30] So that's that's a good point.

[34:31] So she's like she they want her to help.

[34:35] It's weird.

[34:36] They kind of assume in this movie that every person who's connected to rich people had

[34:39] just has what they like strings to pull, which I guess is probably true.

[34:42] But she tells she helps them identify that that before Taylor Swift got killed, they

[34:48] thought she said Mr. Rose and she goes, you mean Mr. Vose, Mr. Vose, Tim Vose.

[34:53] He's a he's a rich person.

[34:55] I know him.

[34:56] And that's when the cops barge in.

[34:58] But it's cops.

[34:59] One of them, Bert knows and is a regular patient of Bert's.

[35:02] He's also a World War one veteran.

[35:03] Yeah.

[35:04] Played by played by Matias Schoenaerts from A Bigger Splash and The Old Guard.

[35:08] Yeah.

[35:09] Yeah.

[35:10] And the other is what, Dickie Moltisanti from Many Saints in Newark.

[35:14] Yeah.

[35:15] Alessandro Navola.

[35:16] He's really good, too, as like the doofusy cop.

[35:20] I mean, they're both good, but yeah, they're both good.

[35:22] Very defensive also because he didn't serve and he's very defensive about it.

[35:25] They're both good.

[35:26] But it also feels like, do we need this much?

[35:30] Do we need this guy to, like, pick up random shit and break it on accident?

[35:34] I loved it.

[35:35] And I loved that.

[35:37] I loved her reaction when he broke.

[35:40] I mean, it's funny.

[35:41] I was like, well, come on, movie.

[35:44] Well, I did like I did like that that character, the way he's portrayed, you don't know if

[35:49] he's being threatening or clumsy.

[35:51] It's a little bit of both, but also that these characters, I found them genuinely more funny

[35:55] than some of the others.

[35:56] But I think you're right, Stuart.

[35:57] Does the movie need these characters to have as much going on with them when they just

[36:01] need to be too threatening cops that keep coming up and bothering the main characters,

[36:05] especially because you're saying they still focus too much?

[36:08] They still focus while never really doing much of anything because they're never a genuine

[36:12] threat.

[36:13] They always let the heroes go away.

[36:14] If this was a role playing game, I would be like the Dungeon Master is putting way too

[36:17] much fucking time into these NPCs.

[36:21] It's a dungeon.

[36:22] And and the Dungeon Master has put all of his prep into the two guards at the entrance

[36:26] gates.

[36:27] You have a hilarious routine with two of them.

[36:28] And then you walk into the dungeon and the monsters are like, then there's, I guess,

[36:31] like a dragon.

[36:33] Blah, blah, dragon.

[36:34] And you're like, shouldn't you focus more on this?

[36:35] Yeah, I will say apropos to that, like, we'll get to the ending, but I know that movies

[36:40] are not shot in sequence at all.

[36:42] But this movie has this uncanny feeling.

[36:46] This movie has the uncanny feeling of a film that they put a lot of energy into at the

[36:51] beginning and then just like ran out of energy as it like went along.

[36:56] And then, you know, like the John Mulaney joke about writing Happy Birthday, like they're

[37:00] like cramming as much as they can into the last 20 minutes.

[37:03] So I got really distracted.

[37:05] I had a friend showing a video that's a Christmas special where the guys in Ninja Turtles costumes

[37:09] just showed up with Alan Thicke and he's like performing a song and they're dancing around

[37:13] him.

[37:14] It's wild.

[37:15] I wish I was showing a video.

[37:17] I had a stream on that a friend was doing an old Disney holiday.

[37:24] It is unprofessional for you to be running a video arts gallery while you're supposed

[37:28] to be podcasting.

[37:29] I don't know about that.

[37:32] I think that's being extra professional.

[37:34] I know.

[37:35] I know that it's part of part of the Nam June Paik exhibit that you're putting up is he

[37:39] requested that it only be up while you're podcasting.

[37:42] But still, I know one would have known if Stuart had spilled the beans, but clearly

[37:49] he was distracted by it.

[37:50] So, no, I should have known that he's like the dog and would not have been able to avoid

[37:57] the fire and all the Ninja Turtles dancing.

[38:00] And Alan Thicke.

[38:01] Yes.

[38:02] Sorry.

[38:03] I don't know what I do if I caught him, you know.

[38:05] So anyway, the cops are like, you you killed Liz and they're like, give us some more time

[38:09] to clear our name.

[38:10] And the cops say, OK, and this and the next is a moment that I feel talks about the lack

[38:16] of threat and lack of stakes in the movie is they go outside and Timothy Oliphant just

[38:20] drives by and yells, hey, don't tell anybody anything.

[38:23] Committee of five and then drives off.

[38:25] And Bert is like, Bert's like, why didn't they just kill us?

[38:27] And it's like, yeah, movie, why didn't he just kill you?

[38:30] And why did he yell the name of the bad guys who are secret?

[38:34] The movie does never adequately answer those questions.

[38:37] Oh, hey, he might as well say, I'm doing this for a secret committee that's trying to pull

[38:42] off a coup.

[38:43] Don't tell nobody scouts on or now.

[38:46] I mean, yeah, I think that the idea, I guess, is that killing him was Taylor Swift in front

[38:52] of a truck.

[38:53] I don't kill the morphine addict and the black guy.

[38:55] No one's going to care.

[38:56] It's the 30s.

[38:57] I guess I know.

[38:58] I'm just saying that if there's any rationale I can think of, it is that killing them draws

[39:02] more attention to the conspiracy.

[39:03] But if that's so, just let them go.

[39:05] Let them go and like rave around and take their luck with the police, you know.

[39:10] So anyway, they go to see Mr. Vose.

[39:12] They go to his estate.

[39:13] They pretend to be charity collectors for an Episcopalian charity.

[39:17] Mr. Vose apparently isn't in, but his wife, played by Libby, played by Anya Taylor Joy,

[39:22] is there.

[39:23] And I liked Anya Taylor Joy in this movie, too, to be honest.

[39:24] I feel like I haven't seen too many movies where she gets to not have a mystical side

[39:28] or a strange side, but just gets to be kind of like a jerk, you know.

[39:33] We don't get, I feel like I don't get to see too many performances by her where she gets

[39:36] to just be a flat out jerk person, you know.

[39:39] Yeah, no, I think that this movie uses her kind of alien quality well, where it's like,

[39:45] what is this person's deal?

[39:48] Like they seem to be.

[39:50] And by the very end, we'll get there.

[39:51] There's one moment where she's talking about real energy and talking to beings from another

[39:55] planet.

[39:56] Yes, yes.

[39:57] That only comes up for a second.

[39:58] That's when, uh-oh.

[40:00] Valerie walks in and they all recognize each other because, of course, why wouldn't they

[40:03] recognize each other?

[40:04] It was the most important moment of their lives.

[40:06] And Valerie tells them she told Liz to hire them to investigate her father's murder.

[40:13] And she's actually not Valerie Vandenberg, she's Valerie Vose of New Jersey.

[40:18] And Harold is offended that she's been in America for years and never got in touch with

[40:22] them.

[40:23] And she tells them that they learned from Anya Taylor-Dwever that she has a nerve disorder

[40:26] now somehow.

[40:28] She's behaving strangely at this point.

[40:30] She's not behaving like she was back in Amsterdam.

[40:33] She's lost her joie de vivre and she's got nausea and vertigo and weakness.

[40:38] And so they say she has a nerve disorder.

[40:40] And Libby, Anya Taylor-Dwever, is her sister-in-law.

[40:43] And she sends a big thug to beat them up.

[40:47] And he punches Bert out.

[40:48] Then Harold punches the thug out.

[40:50] Bert wakes up to meet the guy they came to see, Tom Vose, played by Rami Malek.

[40:55] You know instantly he's the villain.

[40:57] You know instantly he's the bad guy.

[40:58] If Rami Malek doesn't have big Freddie Mercury horse teeth in his mouth, you know he's the

[41:02] bad guy.

[41:03] That's the thing.

[41:04] You don't cast him in a supporting role to not be the bad guy.

[41:07] If he's the lead, maybe he's a lovable weirdo of some kind.

[41:13] But as a side character, he is the villain.

[41:16] He's like a Max von Sydow type.

[41:19] Exactly.

[41:20] Like latter-day Max von Sydow or latter-day Ed Harris, he radiates, I'm the villain in

[41:25] this movie.

[41:26] You know.

[41:27] And I'm sure he's a very nice man in real life.

[41:31] We're friendly with people who aren't friends with him.

[41:32] I've never met him.

[41:33] And he apparently is a very nice person.

[41:34] But anyway.

[41:35] So Valerie argues with her sister-in-law.

[41:38] Everyone's arguing.

[41:40] And this is when Christian Bale is at his most fake Jewishness with the way he's gesturing

[41:45] so stiffly.

[41:46] Anyway.

[41:47] Anya starts blaming Valerie for Liz's death for getting these guys involved.

[41:52] Anyway.

[41:53] Tom says, I'd love to help you.

[41:54] I can't get personally involved.

[41:55] I am just a bird watcher.

[41:57] That's what I specialize in.

[41:58] I don't like to get involved in this stuff.

[42:00] But you know who you can talk to?

[42:01] The most decorated Marine of World War I, General Gil Dillenbeck.

[42:07] It's one of those things where it's like, I know plot-wise why Tom is sending them to

[42:11] go talk to Gil Dillenbeck.

[42:13] It's part of the evil plan.

[42:14] But movie logic wise, I don't know why in that moment that character, I don't know why

[42:18] Harold and Bert are like, yeah, that makes sense.

[42:21] We'll talk to this other general.

[42:23] No, the conspiracy doesn't make any sense, no matter how much time they try at the end

[42:29] to put into explaining it, because I will talk about when we get there, but there's

[42:34] a point in which the movie switches over from like, OK, our heroes are in danger from the

[42:41] bad guys, too.

[42:42] For some reason, the heroes and the bad guys want the heroes to be at the place where they're

[42:47] doing their evil scheme.

[42:49] And it never quite makes any sense to me.

[42:53] It turns into a trap.

[42:54] The bad guy.

[42:55] It's I mean, everyone in this movie, much like the real life conspiracy that it's based

[42:59] on, everybody is kind of flat footedly running around, stumbling over their own feet.

[43:03] And I feel like even though it's not based on this story, I feel like Burn After Reading

[43:07] gives such a better sense of like people who are think that they are spies or think

[43:12] that they're in a conspiracy and are just bumbling into each other because they don't

[43:16] know what they're doing, which is how much of actual history works.

[43:19] Anyway, they go General Dillon back.

[43:21] He was oh, this is why he was he was with Meekins at one point in his travels.

[43:24] Maybe he can tell you why he's poisoned.

[43:26] And they watch a newsreel that is just to show us who Dillon Beck is privately owned

[43:31] newsreel.

[43:32] That's right.

[43:33] Yes.

[43:34] You know who he is.

[43:35] He has that Libby has such a crush on General Dillon Beck that they watch this newsreel

[43:39] and Dillon Beck is played by Robert De Niro, who is an old man who is.

[43:45] And it's it's similar to the Irishman where it was like, here's him in World War Two.

[43:49] We deaged him.

[43:50] So it only looks like he's in his 50s when he was fighting in World War Two.

[43:53] Like General, we're supposed to believe that he was fighting in World War One 15 years

[43:56] ago, I guess, as a general.

[43:57] So maybe.

[43:58] But he was already an old man.

[43:59] So anyway, the whole point of the newsreel is to show is to introduce the audience kind

[44:04] of poorly, if you're not familiar with it, to the Bonus Army March of of the 1920s, when

[44:11] the or I guess it was the late early 30s, maybe I can't remember exactly what it was,

[44:14] but there was a period where World War One veterans, they were owed a bonus by the government

[44:19] or at least they wanted a bonus by the government because so many of them were living in poverty

[44:23] and they marched on Washington and encamped in Washington.

[44:26] And eventually the U.S. Army, led by Douglas MacArthur, and I think Patton was involved

[44:30] in World War Two, just came out and forced them out and attacked them.

[44:34] And so the idea is that Dylan Beck was the leader of the Bonus Army March, a real thing

[44:37] that actually happened.

[44:39] And the newsreel melts partway through and they talk about how they have to get another

[44:42] one.

[44:43] And Howard Howard, because of because of gremlins, one's cause that it melted because we got

[44:49] all the information.

[44:50] Yeah, basically.

[44:51] Move it along.

[44:52] Movie.

[44:53] I mean, that is a film.

[44:54] So it's a good way to to do.

[44:57] So this was in.

[44:58] Sorry.

[44:59] It was in 1932.

[45:00] It was right after it was during the Depression.

[45:01] Right for that.

[45:02] Anyway, they were they were marchers who were demanding more money for their service and

[45:06] did not get it.

[45:08] So they Harold and Valerie, they have a moment together, but they're like, oh, our love is

[45:12] impossible here, dah, dah, dah, dah.

[45:14] And Tom talks to Bert.

[45:15] And at this point, I was kind of wondering, like, why is this scene still going on?

[45:20] Why aren't they?

[45:21] Why haven't they left?

[45:22] Tom tells Bert, though, there's there's this unscrupulous British birdwatcher who steals

[45:26] eggs and that's the kind of person who probably killed making making.

[45:30] And it's like we know he's talking about Mike Myers character, but he doesn't come out and

[45:33] say it.

[45:34] And it never really builds into anything.

[45:36] If he's trying to create suspicion in their minds of his enemies, the the other spies,

[45:41] it never really leads to much.

[45:43] Anyway, Valerie is like, take me with you on your detective mission.

[45:46] But they leave the house without her.

[45:48] And it seems pretty clear.

[45:49] And as the doctor shows up and it seems very obvious already that the medical treatments

[45:53] she's getting for her disorder are what's actually causing her symptoms.

[45:57] This is incredibly obvious.

[45:59] Was it as obvious to you guys as it was to me when a doctor comes in and goes, oh, yeah,

[46:03] yeah.

[46:04] She has this disorder.

[46:05] And they're like, she never used to have it.

[46:06] He's like, well, she has it now.

[46:07] Anyway, I got an injector with some stuff that makes her feel bad.

[46:09] Yeah.

[46:10] Yeah.

[46:11] It's like the like.

[46:12] Yeah.

[46:13] I mean, it does make you respect the characters all a lot less that none of them seem to realize

[46:17] this until the end.

[46:18] Yeah.

[46:19] Because it's not even like the movie is giving you red herrings.

[46:21] It's just hand you herrings and saying this isn't a fish.

[46:24] And you're like, I can tell it's a fish.

[46:25] It's a herring.

[46:27] It's a regular herring.

[46:28] So anyway, they try to get in touch with Dylan back over, I guess, the phone or the mail.

[46:34] But he turns down Burt's request.

[46:37] Harold goes back to see Valerie and they gavort.

[46:39] They have a little date.

[46:40] Yeah.

[46:41] They have a little date.

[46:42] Yeah.

[46:43] And this is when they say Amsterdam at the camera a bunch of times again.

[46:45] The police show up to Burt's office and Burt gives the one that gets medicine medicine.

[46:49] The cops threaten him with closing his office, but this doesn't lead to much.

[46:52] Then he locks himself in his office to meet with Irma.

[46:56] Yes.

[46:57] While they hide outside and listen in.

[46:59] That's all very.

[47:00] I mean, like, I enjoy I enjoy their double act again where they're like, what's he doing?

[47:05] Just listen to music.

[47:06] He likes music.

[47:07] Yeah.

[47:08] Yeah.

[47:09] Like they're talking back and forth about the music.

[47:10] It's kind of amusing how deadpan it is.

[47:13] But I'm as much as, you know, whatever.

[47:17] Find happiness with Zoe Saldana.

[47:19] But like, why aren't you immediately dealing with the fact like you have not the proof,

[47:25] but she says like, oh, I was I was attacked by someone.

[47:29] They took the.

[47:30] They stole the autopsy notes, which my arm is broken.

[47:33] It's obvious that I have been in a fight.

[47:35] Like, why don't I just tell the police that immediately?

[47:38] It makes me nervous.

[47:39] Look, I know that they want to have a romantic moment.

[47:42] And it's a it's a movie where the characters seem to feel no urgency, no stakes or urgency.

[47:49] Thank you.

[47:50] Urgency.

[47:51] And there are movies where there's an urgent problem.

[47:52] Like The Big Lebowski is a movie where the joke of the character is how little urgency

[47:57] he feels at times that he has a mystery on his hand.

[47:59] So he goes home and takes a bath and lights a bunch of candles or like in Haruki Murakami

[48:04] novels.

[48:05] Someone will be searching for a missing person and will go home and make pasta for dinner

[48:07] and fold their laundry and drink a beer and always drink a beer.

[48:13] That is the quirky thing about it.

[48:14] But here it's like Christian Bale's like, we got to meet this doctor.

[48:17] He can clear our name.

[48:18] But first, I'm going to go to work and I'm going to have a regular day at work.

[48:23] And when Irma shows up and is like, they broke my wrist and they stole my papers.

[48:27] He's going to turn on the radio so they can kiss for a moment.

[48:29] And it's like it's a the weirdest thing then is that his wife shows up all of a sudden

[48:34] just to interrupt the scene.

[48:36] And then she leaves again like it doesn't make any sense to me.

[48:40] Just to like remind him that he should slap him as if she knew that so that that Irma

[48:46] was there.

[48:47] Well, she does.

[48:48] And the secretary called because I forgot about that.

[48:53] Yeah.

[48:54] But it is weird that she's then like she's just there to like dangle the possibility of

[48:59] change in front of his face and then leave.

[49:01] It's so funny because it's like the police show up and then he leaves them so that Irma

[49:05] can show up.

[49:06] And then he leaves that conversation because Beatrice shows up and now Irma is waiting

[49:10] for Beatrice to finish and the police are waiting for both of them to finish.

[49:12] And this could be a really funny moment if there was any sense of like farcical, you

[49:16] know, urgency.

[49:18] You're talking about urgency and stakes.

[49:19] And early on the movie, it comes up with like an immediate problem where they're like, we

[49:24] need to have this autopsy done in two hours.

[49:27] That didn't matter at all at that point.

[49:29] And for me, that should have been a clue that the rest of the movie is not going to matter.

[49:33] Yeah.

[49:34] Yeah.

[49:35] Because if you introduce a timeline that you multiple times mentioned, this has to be done

[49:39] quickly.

[49:40] There's no effort to make it seem like they're moving quickly or that it even matters at

[49:44] all.

[49:45] Yeah, I agree.

[49:46] So the veteran, he says, I'll do you, I'll, okay, I'll, I'll, I'll let you keep going,

[49:50] but you got to get me the contract that Harold signed with Liz Meekins since we wanted the

[49:54] autopsy results and those are missing.

[49:56] And then Bert falls down, I guess, because he takes one of his experimental drugs for

[50:00] Irma and Bert leave the office, they're briefly stopped by two old men who sing a song to

[50:06] them because they're rehearsing for this big veterans reunion gala that Bert is organizing

[50:10] with Harold.

[50:12] Bert goes to Harold's office and Val is there, and apparently they had some misadventure

[50:16] that had violence in it, but we don't get to hear about it for a little bit.

[50:19] Again, there's no urgency because Bert's like, we gotta go see Meekins, and they're like,

[50:24] we're on it.

[50:25] And they drive to the Waldorf Astoria to see Paul Canterbury, Mike Myers, and Bert's like,

[50:29] we gotta go see Meekins, and I'm like, movie, just fucking figure out what you're doing.

[50:35] And Paul gives Bert a new box of glass eyes, and a man throws a drink at Bert because his

[50:41] status in the birding community is so low.

[50:43] Well, he besmirched the name of what was the bird.

[50:47] There was a bird that they're mad at that he besmirched the name of it because he's

[50:52] proved that it's a parasitical bird that will steal other birds' nests.

[50:57] The cuckoo, right?

[50:59] And this scene, I don't know about you guys, was so fucking funny, I just lost my shit.

[51:04] I had to pause the movie, I started slapping my knees so hard I had to call the doctor.

[51:08] My enjoyment of the movie is only growing by how much it has angered me.

[51:14] So anyway, Paul takes them to an office where Michael Shannon is, they both talk cryptically

[51:19] about threats in the world and to England or whatever, and Bert doesn't trust them because

[51:24] Tom Vose told them this story about this evil British bird watcher, but that dissipates

[51:28] pretty quickly.

[51:29] And that's when they give their speech about how the cuckoo is a destructive parasitic

[51:32] bird that steals other birds' nests and then destroys the nest, and this is supposed

[51:36] to be a metaphor for fascism, basically.

[51:39] And Val says she and Harold, now they finally tell their story, that they were at her house

[51:44] and they saw that Timothy Oliphant, the man who pushed Liz Meekins in her car, was outside

[51:48] their house, then left, and they decided to follow him.

[51:52] And it's such a ridiculous, it's like, so I guess he was there watching them, right?

[51:57] So why did he leave?

[51:59] They left and they followed him to an anonymous building that had a medical clinic in it,

[52:04] where they are doing forced sterilizations on black people.

[52:08] This barely ever comes up again.

[52:10] And the medicine all has this vaguely swastika-ish symbol on the bottles, and there are signs

[52:15] that say like the Great Nation Society and stuff like that, they have a brief fistfight,

[52:18] there's a brief gunfight, they run away, and Harold is like, I saw a clinic like that

[52:22] in Texas, too.

[52:23] And it's like, oh, and you never brought it up until now?

[52:27] There's two things that I find galling about this.

[52:30] One is that the forced sterilization of black people is by far the worst thing that is happening

[52:35] in this movie, and it barely gets mentioned again.

[52:37] Two, this is a thing that states were doing at this time.

[52:41] So the idea that a secret committee is doing this terrible thing, when this is a thing

[52:45] that was happening officially, it's like the movie is both trying to, it's like the movie

[52:50] doesn't, it's so, just that the movie is so muddled-headed in the way it's presenting

[52:53] these things, you know, which only continues.

[52:56] But anyway.

[52:57] And I just want to say that forced sterilization of anybody is bad.

[53:01] Is bad.

[53:02] Yeah, I think we can, let's just go, yeah, in case we need to, let's go on the record

[53:05] that that's bad.

[53:06] Flop us against it.

[53:07] It was bad.

[53:09] Elon Musk.

[53:10] Oh, right.

[53:11] Well.

[53:12] Dan, I hate to tell you, it's too late.

[53:14] He's already got, there's already a lot of little Musks.

[53:16] I know.

[53:17] But it's also that this, that we got to see so much goofy stuff happening in real time,

[53:24] but this moment happened in a flashback is a strange thing.

[53:27] And I wonder, it's just a very weird way to structure your movie.

[53:30] Anyway, Paul and Henry explained there's a cabal in America that's in league with a German

[53:34] cabal.

[53:35] Now this is 1933.

[53:36] It should just be able to say Nazis, especially because Nazis show up later.

[53:41] But they say it's a committee called Der Funf and our heroes go, committee of the five,

[53:45] committee of the five.

[53:46] They repeat the words committee of the five as if it's got a secret meaning so many times

[53:51] in this movie.

[53:52] And each time it's just like committee of the five, committee of the five.

[53:55] And it's like, I, yeah, man, we got it.

[53:58] Anyway, it just, this makes me so mad.

[54:00] But anyway, Dylan Beck, apparently to say, has also been investigating this committee

[54:03] of the five.

[54:04] He, they keep trying to get him to join them and he keeps leading them on trying to figure

[54:08] out who they are.

[54:09] They got to get Dylan Beck to speak at their veterans reunion gala.

[54:12] And that will draw out the members of the committee of the five.

[54:16] Why?

[54:18] But that's the plot.

[54:19] That's how it works.

[54:20] And Valerie is like, I've been having these dizzy spells.

[54:22] I've diagnosed with epilepsy despite not having seizures before they started giving the medicine.

[54:28] And the medicine makes me worse.

[54:29] And they go to Dylan Beck's.

[54:31] Valerie's feeling very weak.

[54:33] Dylan Beck's wife, played by Beth Grant, in a very short scene, I wish she had more time.

[54:37] She won't let them in.

[54:38] They kind of barely try to convince her.

[54:40] And then our three heroes argue.

[54:41] And then Mrs. Dylan Beck is like, oh, the general says you can meet him.

[54:45] And it's like, well, then what was the point of all that charade?

[54:47] You know, if they were barely going to have to try.

[54:50] But anyway, they go in and there's a guy named McGuire who has a bag of money, who shows

[54:55] up once a month to offer Dylan Beck the money to help his committee, which is called the

[55:00] Committee on the Sound Dollar.

[55:01] But he flubs and says Committee of the Five.

[55:03] He just they don't even have to search for clues.

[55:05] He just says, yeah, my group, the Committee of the Five, I mean, Committee of the Sound

[55:09] Dollar.

[55:10] He immediately shows up while they're, you know, stacked on the staircase.

[55:14] Yeah.

[55:15] And so Dylan Beck, Robert De Niro, he says, prove, prove your identity.

[55:18] I met you once and you sang a song for me.

[55:20] Can you sing it again?

[55:21] And they sing it.

[55:22] It turns out to be their French nonsense song.

[55:24] And he tells them that their friend, Bill Meekins, was killed because he saw something

[55:29] monstrous.

[55:31] And he says that the man downstairs is offering him money to make a speech for these secret

[55:35] conspiracy masters.

[55:37] And Bert says, you come to our gala and we'll lure out the bad guys.

[55:40] And the general is so instantly on their side and says to McGuire, do you want me to be

[55:45] your dictator?

[55:46] Is that it?

[55:47] And it's one of those things where it's like it's a secret plot that he already seems to

[55:50] have figured out exactly what it is.

[55:51] And he just goes and says it.

[55:53] And it's a movie.

[55:54] Everyone's always like, we've got to be careful what we say.

[55:56] The Committee of Five is everywhere.

[55:57] And it seems to turn out the Committee of Five is almost non-existent.

[56:00] And they can they just spout about what they're doing all the time.

[56:03] Like it's as if in three days, the Condor, Robert Refford, kept going up to people and

[56:06] being like, hey, I work for the CIA.

[56:08] Someone tried to kill me.

[56:09] Can you help me?

[56:10] Thank you.

[56:11] Appreciate it.

[56:12] Calls up the CIA.

[56:13] Hey, did you were you the guys who tried to kill me?

[56:15] Because here's where I am.

[56:16] Let me give you the address.

[56:17] You can show up and explain it to me.

[56:18] Again, it's like a fucking role playing game where an NPC shows up and he's like, hey,

[56:23] players, I need to do this.

[56:24] And then the players are like, yeah, yeah.

[56:26] And talk shit and say something obviously wrong.

[56:29] Like Robert De Niro being like, oh, I clearly suspect you guys are bad.

[56:32] And he's like, ha, ha, ha, whatever.

[56:34] That's what it's like.

[56:35] It's like we got to move this movie along.

[56:38] My character normally would be suspicious of your behavior.

[56:40] But I don't have time for this.

[56:41] We need to we need the plot to happen.

[56:44] This movie's got to fit into its tight two hour and 14 minute running time.

[56:48] So the so they set it up.

[56:51] Dillon Beck's going to give this.

[56:52] He says, I'll give your speech.

[56:53] I'll do it at this veterans reunion.

[56:55] And Dillon and McGuire says, yeah, yeah, you can meet the committee of the five privately

[56:58] there.

[56:59] OK.

[57:00] And they go to Tom Vose's office where he's got some pictures on the wall that are covered

[57:03] with little napkins or drapes or something.

[57:06] They all find that very suspicious.

[57:07] At no point do they get up and go over and lift those curtains to see what the pictures

[57:11] are.

[57:12] Why would they?

[57:13] It's fan art of fucking Shrek and Sonic having a baby.

[57:17] It's yeah, it's all it's all pictures of Dr.

[57:20] Phil as an M&M marrying Shrek on the set of Supernatural.

[57:24] Yeah, horrific.

[57:25] We have to stop this.

[57:27] So Vose shows up with his wife.

[57:29] She is starstruck by the general.

[57:31] And Tom says, hey, why don't we have the reunion be broadcast over the radio so everyone can

[57:35] hear your speech?

[57:36] Mr. General Dillon Beck, speak from the heart.

[57:38] Speak about Bill Meekins.

[57:40] And Bert explains their plan and voiceover as if we didn't already know what it was.

[57:44] He's like, so we're going to set it up.

[57:45] So he's going to talk at the reunion.

[57:47] And when the committee of five show up, we're going to reveal who they are.

[57:50] And it's like, no shit, dude, like I've been watching a movie like and then the police

[57:54] show up and they're like, we're going to help you to the same.

[57:57] Yeah, please.

[57:58] Officers will be.

[57:59] This is the point in the movie where I like, look, I'll be frank.

[58:02] I've been struggling with.

[58:03] Hey, Frank.

[58:04] Nice to meet you.

[58:05] I knew you as Dan.

[58:06] But yeah, you know.

[58:07] But you're right now.

[58:08] That's OK.

[58:09] Frank, for the purposes of the next few minutes, no, I've been dealing with.

[58:14] That's why you're that's why your solo album is called Temporarily Frank Temporarily Frank.

[58:18] I've had a Jim Woodring's temporary fake lately.

[58:21] I've had some really Frank Woodring.

[58:23] That must be amazing to see the world through his eyes for a couple hours.

[58:26] Wow.

[58:27] Anyway, let me be honest instead and say, Jim Woodring, right?

[58:32] Anyway, yeah, that.

[58:33] Yeah, I've I've had some dental work recently.

[58:36] I've been having some like lingering pain.

[58:40] This was the point in the movie that I sort of got up to try and deal with that pain issue

[58:45] and was afraid that I'd miss something.

[58:47] But I hadn't really.

[58:49] And the reason I bad that you were seeing it in a theater and you couldn't pause it.

[58:53] Yeah.

[58:54] Yeah.

[58:55] I still in the room.

[58:56] I'm just saying I was paying like a little less attention, but just marginally less.

[59:00] But the thing was also the moral of the story is I hadn't missed anything.

[59:04] The movie just stops making sense for whatever degree it was in the past.

[59:09] At this point, where it's like everyone's wearing giant ass suits and everyone's wearing

[59:12] giant ass suits.

[59:13] I was going to say from Dan, a movie stop making sense is the highest compliment dancing

[59:17] with.

[59:18] Yeah.

[59:19] It's amazing.

[59:20] Yeah.

[59:21] But this must be the place if you want.

[59:22] If you want to say goodbye, you'd be saying bad bye.

[59:24] But it's suddenly suddenly the movie's like, OK, hey, wait, let me get my point out, please.

[59:30] Please.

[59:31] And it's like, OK, the bad guys are like, yeah, let's get the good guys into our room

[59:38] at the same time.

[59:39] We're doing our like kind of seat of our pants scheme that may or may not work.

[59:47] Like it's all cool that that's happening now.

[59:49] And the police are immediately back on the side of the good guys to be like, yeah, we're

[59:54] also going to help in this sting that you're planning.

[59:58] Like, you know.

[1:00:00] obviously like I said I like this movie more than the rest of you but like this

[1:00:04] is the part where I'm like it's just really hand-waving so much away for the

[1:00:08] purposes of getting everyone in place for the climax yeah we're at the gala

[1:00:12] and everybody shows up right like every character that's ever been alive is

[1:00:16] there yes everyone who's ever existed there's like there's like the ghost of

[1:00:21] Ed Beegley jr. Taylor Swift they're all there the Raptors the ghosts are there

[1:00:26] yeah I think a better version a better version of this would have been like

[1:00:31] okay we are really dance we're on a tightrope right here who's using who and

[1:00:35] who's gonna come out from it is a dangerous situation for both sides yes

[1:00:39] who's gonna whose risk is gonna pay off but there's no there's no urgency or

[1:00:42] stakes so it doesn't matter and we spend so much time at the reunion gala just

[1:00:46] watching them dance and listening to music so and the spies are just

[1:00:50] backstage just hanging around and at the gala Dylan Beck asked Canterbury

[1:00:55] Norcross whose side are you on and they go well you're on we're on your side

[1:00:58] which is the most suspicious thing a spy can tell you like that there's no well

[1:01:03] of course I'm on your side oh sure sure and the spies are very nervous about

[1:01:06] everything there's lots of jazz dancing the veterans sing a song about peanuts

[1:01:09] with Burt they love this peanut song we've heard them sing it a few times

[1:01:14] Is this when they take the hallucinogenic eye drops and Anna Taylor Joy talks about like

[1:01:21] Cthulhu shit visitors from beyond the stars that's shortly so Burt's in-laws

[1:01:27] show up they're like we're proud of you we're gonna help you get your medical

[1:01:29] license back this is so great everyone's kind of milling around for a while Tom's

[1:01:34] wife doesn't like that Valerie and Harold are recording things in it with

[1:01:37] a film camera and Burt is appalled when Beatrice is just like a social climber

[1:01:42] and and he's like you know what I don't want to move back in anymore because

[1:01:45] I've waited too long for the wrong thing and Beatrice goes I think terrible

[1:01:49] things might happen to you and then goes off to help her mom meet rich

[1:01:54] people there's a Fado singer singing in Portuguese for some reason I

[1:01:58] don't know why and then Tom Vose he takes Dylan Beck to see the committee of

[1:02:03] course our heroes are all allowed to go with him because who has this secret

[1:02:08] conspiracy sure Dylan Beck has a plus three to come meet them in a secret back

[1:02:12] room and the three evil businessmen being like hello we're evil business

[1:02:19] being evil one is played by great director Leland Orser noted shithead

[1:02:26] Chris Noth yeah that's right I didn't even recognize Chris Noth yeah yeah

[1:02:32] because you assume that he like his character had an accident on a peloton

[1:02:36] yeah yeah I thought he just vaporized in that moment yeah that went when his

[1:02:40] character died on the show he disappeared from reality like a double

[1:02:43] dragon bad guy that you've just beaten up and he just goes boop boop boop and

[1:02:47] blinks out and becomes food anyway so uh there's a chemical magnate a

[1:02:51] communications magnate and a telecommunications magnate and a

[1:02:54] newspaper magnate and they keep calling the general Gill even though he says

[1:02:57] call me the general and they're like Meekins I don't know what it is my

[1:03:01] friend general Meekins sir there's only one general that I respect and he hangs

[1:03:05] out with Shaq a lot he's very short so and they talk about how they've had

[1:03:14] business good business in Germany under strong leadership in Germany good

[1:03:18] business and it's this weird thing where the movie is kind of operating under the

[1:03:22] understanding that nobody in America knows who Hitler is which is bonkers

[1:03:27] it's but that he's kind of like a secret guy that that is that is operating under

[1:03:33] even though at this point he's already the Chancellor of Germany like it's you

[1:03:38] know it's it's very weird how they're anyway so they're like Germany wink wink

[1:03:42] nudge nudge say no more say no more when it's also the fact that like many

[1:03:46] American businesses were still doing business with Germany at this point the

[1:03:49] movie studios were still doing business with Germany so like the idea that they

[1:03:53] must be evil they're doing business with Germany like that was a generally and

[1:03:58] cement and to cement our hero like our heroes part in this they are hiding in

[1:04:03] the back recording it all on a video camera which I don't film film camera

[1:04:08] which I don't yeah they're recording on their iPhone but Harold is holding up

[1:04:15] his phone but he's holding it sideways so it's like don't do that no but he's

[1:04:19] recording it but but in a way like I made the you know I spoke wrong but the

[1:04:24] way it's being recorded it's just a it's just film of these of these men standing

[1:04:29] around they don't get it's not like they're getting the audio like there's

[1:04:32] no no they're not actually capturing any damning evidence other than people

[1:04:36] standing in a circle well I guess they can prove that these three guys met with

[1:04:40] General Dillon back but that's not much that's pretty weak weak tea yeah weak

[1:04:45] sauce evidence yeah and as if we so in case we didn't get it Harold mimes that

[1:04:50] symbol that we saw on the medicine jars earlier to Bert as if we're morons and

[1:04:55] like and the magnates are like hey the general would you like some expensive

[1:04:59] real estate wouldn't that be nice and it's it's so happy it's like a bunch of

[1:05:03] children and his reactions are always negative he is giving them no ground he

[1:05:08] is like I don't like you you guys are idiots

[1:05:11] call me the general this plans going off perfect it's like and that they're like

[1:05:16] they're like how about this and he's just like you're a bunch of evil people

[1:05:20] I don't like you so there's this is going great ever a question that he is

[1:05:23] going to like do what they want yes so that's when they take the German

[1:05:28] eyedrop drugs and Anya very briefly talks about how it they use it at the

[1:05:32] real society to talk to advanced alien races and like that's kind of that's

[1:05:37] based slightly in historical fact to of people thinking they could do that but

[1:05:40] it's just very it's very funny that that just suddenly comes up out of nowhere

[1:05:43] and Libby who up to this point has all been about been all about keeping up

[1:05:46] appearances is now like oh yeah by the way by the way I'm a I'm a I'm like a

[1:05:50] Nazi supernaturalist a Nazi occultist should I mention that we I use drugs so

[1:05:55] and Tom and Libby they tell the general don't go off script I'm gonna give you

[1:06:00] some more money and a walrus skin bag I what a threat to like this weird hidden

[1:06:06] threat based on it was it a bag or a book it looked like maybe it's a folder

[1:06:10] it's like an attache case you know and he goes he goes listen if you don't give

[1:06:15] that speech your reputation might get destroyed people might kill you and as

[1:06:21] if we're and it's like at this point I was like it's been so obvious Tom was a

[1:06:24] bad guy are we supposed to know it yet or no is this are we as the audience

[1:06:28] supposed to think this is a sincere warning or is this one we're supposed to

[1:06:31] be like oh so Tom the evil guy is also in on the evil hmm anyway they say say

[1:06:39] don't make this mistake like Bill Meekins he goes out but he makes his

[1:06:42] speech as a Burt goes out and introduces the general and then the deal that comes

[1:06:46] out and he gives his speech all about how Meekins was great and he was killed

[1:06:51] because there's a conspiracy and blah blah somehow even though this in any

[1:06:55] previous shots unless I forgot it there is a group of members of the German

[1:06:59] American Bund which was an American group that sympathized with Germany and

[1:07:03] dressed like Nazis and held a rally later in history at Madison Square

[1:07:07] Garden in support of the Nazi government like they're there in full uniform

[1:07:11] somehow they've been hidden in a corner up to this moment and they're shouting

[1:07:14] German at him and it's like hold on movie like the movie has been dancing

[1:07:18] around it's like the movie just got tired and was like whatever Nazis

[1:07:21] Germany here we go okay but Dan what were you gonna well I also think it's

[1:07:24] funny that De Niro's speech at this point is a weird combination of being

[1:07:28] like very blunt and being like hey people want to to bribe me so I can

[1:07:35] become like this puppet president but also like talking around everything in a

[1:07:42] way that like I don't know that all the speech would make sense to anyone who

[1:07:45] hadn't been watching the movie up until that point like the people in the hall

[1:07:48] fair anyway it doesn't the whole thing is that many does Minkins was killed

[1:07:53] because he witnessed like Mussolini's car run over a person or something right

[1:07:58] yeah which doesn't seem like I don't know he was but he was in a car with

[1:08:03] Mussolini and Mussolini's car hit a kid and kept going and that Mussolini

[1:08:07] didn't feel any guilt about it and that were remorse and that was apparently the

[1:08:11] heart like it's not even that his plane flew over an island where they were

[1:08:14] making a fake alien that was gonna end World War three so of course Minkins had

[1:08:18] to be taken out yeah like it's that it's it's pretty weak again pretty weak

[1:08:22] sauce again this is the fascists by this point I think they'd already been

[1:08:26] slaughtering people in Ethiopia you know the Italian army and so it's like it's

[1:08:30] one of these things where it's like this seems like not I thought it was gonna be

[1:08:33] like oh he that that he saw the plans that Hitler was gonna invade Poland or

[1:08:38] something like that you know where he saw the plans for the Holocaust or a

[1:08:41] nuclear weapon but instead it's just that like Mussolini who it that hit

[1:08:45] someone with his car yeah it's pretty bad it's pretty bad it's not it's

[1:08:49] terrible it's not the worst thing Mussolini did but I would be I would not

[1:08:53] imagine that an American military man saying oh I saw Mussolini a fascist

[1:08:59] dictator hit a child with a car and then just go on like I don't these this is

[1:09:05] not the explosive piece of information that's gonna I don't know what it is

[1:09:09] expected that this will do no that they're all these people who are like

[1:09:13] you know what maybe our country does need strong leadership like Italy and

[1:09:16] Germany maybe it's time to round up those undesirables and get them out and

[1:09:19] me can be like uh he committed a hit-and-run that they would be like well

[1:09:23] I am appalled forget what I said now I now I realize that that the end of

[1:09:32] freedom of speech and the rounding up of dissidents and minorities to be

[1:09:35] slaughtered is a bad thing because a man who was involved in a hit-and-run

[1:09:39] accident certainly certainly I can't trust anything he would do you know so

[1:09:43] anyway again this is a country where Ted Kennedy essentially killed a woman with

[1:09:47] a car and went on to be a senator for like 30 more years yeah so and that was

[1:09:52] later anyway but the generals like the rich are trying to control the country

[1:09:57] and Timothy oh my god they saw

[1:10:00] from happening.

[1:10:01] Yep.

[1:10:02] This movie, this movie was the stopgap, the yeah.

[1:10:07] And Timothy Oliphant, he's up in the rafters and he tries to shoot Dylan Beck.

[1:10:11] And Dylan Beck very bravely just keeps giving his speech as bullets are flying around.

[1:10:15] Yeah.

[1:10:16] He is.

[1:10:17] He's going to shout those.

[1:10:18] He's got that regular Robert De Niro in an interview on a late night show energy of not

[1:10:23] being faced.

[1:10:24] He's just like, stop that.

[1:10:26] Stop it.

[1:10:27] Yeah.

[1:10:29] Like he's talking to a dog that is that is that is like not hasn't started peeing on

[1:10:33] the road yet, but it looks like it's about to.

[1:10:36] And Val and how Harold go up and fight him.

[1:10:39] Bert actually gets shot in the side, I think, or the leg on the side.

[1:10:42] And the thug yells about the thug is like, Tom Vose is a great man.

[1:10:46] Six Emperor Taranis.

[1:10:47] Tom Vose is a great man.

[1:10:48] It's like if you're going to hire a conspiratorial sniper, don't have him shout your name in

[1:10:52] the middle of his attack.

[1:10:53] I do.

[1:10:54] Kind of like that's just that's just conspiracy one on one guy writing to.

[1:10:58] That was probably a bad idea.

[1:10:59] I did kind of like the bit where he was like he was like up in the rafters and they're

[1:11:02] like fighting with him and knock the gun loose.

[1:11:04] And then they toss him off the other like the platform he's on.

[1:11:09] And he just lands on the ground next to the gun.

[1:11:12] Oh, yeah.

[1:11:13] Well, you just threw him to his gun.

[1:11:15] Yeah.

[1:11:16] And the the blunt members start shouting.

[1:11:19] So the veterans start singing my country tis of the anthem.

[1:11:22] Hey, Dan, wasn't it just like the scene in Casablanca where the horse Wessel song and

[1:11:27] the Marseille Marseille?

[1:11:28] Yes.

[1:11:29] It was like that if it was directed by what's his face from City of Lost Children and sort

[1:11:35] of sped up at twice speed.

[1:11:38] Yeah, it's it just does.

[1:11:39] And it's also one of the things where and this is again, like the the German-American

[1:11:44] Bund members were not saying we should be Germany.

[1:11:46] They were saying Germany and America should be should be in alliance together like they

[1:11:50] consider themselves Americans as much as Germans.

[1:11:52] So like there's a it's letting those be it's letting America off the hook, I feel like

[1:11:56] for for the movie to just be like, they're Germans, they're German spies, whereas there's

[1:12:00] a big step.

[1:12:01] There's a big picture of George Washington behind on the stage.

[1:12:04] Yeah.

[1:12:05] And the reason for that is because at the German Bund rally, there was a huge picture

[1:12:07] of George Washington on the stage like they anyway, it's not like I definitely saw a critique

[1:12:12] of that when I was reading reviews for the like, there's no need as long as you're making

[1:12:17] up history.

[1:12:18] There's no need to be like there were like literal Nazis here.

[1:12:21] Like there was a yeah, American fascist movement that could have just been what this was about.

[1:12:27] But well, it's it's because, you know, this is a movie that's trying to I think it's it

[1:12:32] has a message in it about freedom and kindness or whatever.

[1:12:35] But it's a really black and white movie on a not black and white topic that everyone

[1:12:39] in the movie, like you were saying earlier, everyone who's nice and who we like is a good

[1:12:43] guy and everyone who's mean is a bad guy.

[1:12:46] And there's no there's no getting into the fact that like there were a lot of American

[1:12:50] Americans who felt like patriots, who were just I want to take over the country.

[1:12:55] But we're like, yeah, I want someone like Hitler in charge that that American history

[1:12:58] is much messier than that.

[1:12:59] And I feel like it's the kind of thing you get away with in a movie in the 40s, where

[1:13:03] you're trying to rally people against fascism to be like, hey, if you're an American, you

[1:13:07] don't like fascism.

[1:13:08] But if you're making a movie now about that time, why do it so cut and dry, especially

[1:13:12] if the whole point of your movie is kind of sloppy chaos?

[1:13:15] Well, also, especially if the whole point of the movie is the fact that there is again

[1:13:20] a rising American fascist movement.

[1:13:22] And so like that's obviously why he felt like he needed to make this movie at this time.

[1:13:27] So why cut the strength of it?

[1:13:29] Yes, exactly.

[1:13:30] Why make it less relevant in that way?

[1:13:32] Anyway, at this point, Bert is tripping pretty hard from those eye drops.

[1:13:37] And Tom is like, yes, I was behind it.

[1:13:41] And the spies are like and Tom's been messing with Valerie's medication to control her recklessness.

[1:13:46] And Tom's like, look, I'm a racist.

[1:13:48] And that's when there's a and that's when it's like, yeah, Bert.

[1:13:53] And it's like and Burton voiceovers like, you know, whose pictures he had in his office.

[1:13:58] Pictures of Adolf Hitler and Goebbels.

[1:13:59] And he has this line, which bugged me, so just most people didn't even know who that

[1:14:02] was yet, which is bonkers.

[1:14:04] The idea that like Tom was an early adopter of Hitler in 1933 and that most Americans

[1:14:10] Hitler was still like an underground figure that they weren't familiar with.

[1:14:12] When again, he was the chancellor of Germany.

[1:14:14] He'd been in the news for years at that point.

[1:14:17] You know, he was the author of a bestselling book.

[1:14:20] Yes.

[1:14:21] At this point in the movie, we are into Christian Bale, of course, tripping balls off those

[1:14:28] eye drops, goes on an extended voiceover explaining everything about the movie that we've already

[1:14:35] seen, including like my favorite and some things that we didn't see.

[1:14:39] My favorite part in it was like, you know, honestly, because I understand why this is

[1:14:44] in there, because I was like, why are the bad guys wanting these people to come to their

[1:14:50] rally?

[1:14:51] Like, that seems weird since they were just framing them moments before.

[1:14:55] Like there's a part where like they show Rami Malek and be like, and he wanted us, Tom wanted

[1:15:00] us there because we were his route to Robert De Niro, who he wanted.

[1:15:04] And then like Robert De Niro literally like says the same thing over again.

[1:15:09] It's like, you wanted me here.

[1:15:12] Why did you double up on that movie?

[1:15:15] I didn't understand it, but you saying it twice doesn't make it make any more sense.

[1:15:18] It still doesn't track.

[1:15:21] And Burt's VO is both telling us things that we have already heard or about here and then

[1:15:25] telling us things that I don't know how Burt knew, because Burt's like, turns out Tom had

[1:15:30] been paying people to put positive articles about the Nazis in newspapers, and he even

[1:15:34] cut the shrubs in his garden to look like swastikas.

[1:15:37] You got to really be crazy to do that.

[1:15:39] It's like, when did this happen?

[1:15:41] Where are you getting this from?

[1:15:42] I assume that after the fact it came out and this is like him talking from the future.

[1:15:46] Yeah, they were taking a helicopter ride later and saw it.

[1:15:50] Yeah, I guess so.

[1:15:52] It's so funny to me for him to be like, and here's some supporting evidence that the movie

[1:15:56] didn't have time to introduce him in an organic manner.

[1:15:58] If you weren't sure whether Tom was a Nazi or not, how about this, swastika shrubs?

[1:16:03] Let me point you to Appendix C in which we look at the swastika shrubs.

[1:16:08] And also he goes, you could only see it was a swastika from above, but the shrub we see

[1:16:12] is pretty clearly a swastika.

[1:16:13] You don't have to be that far above.

[1:16:14] You can see it from the upstairs windows.

[1:16:16] They clearly had this footage of the swastika shrub, and I feel like that's even a shrub

[1:16:20] that they walk past earlier in the movie.

[1:16:24] They made no real effort to hide Tom being a creepo.

[1:16:27] Why not reveal that when they left the house the first time, so that at least you're like,

[1:16:32] you know that the stakes are high.

[1:16:35] You know what I mean?

[1:16:37] At least know that like, oh, the bad guys are fucking like clearly Nazis.

[1:16:41] Well, especially when, you know, it's so clear so early.

[1:16:44] I mean, I guess that they thought it wasn't going to be clear that early.

[1:16:47] But it's like one of the things I love in the movie, The 39 Steps, is when Robert Donnett,

[1:16:51] he goes to the guy who's supposed to be his contact.

[1:16:53] That's the 39 Steps to the Dreamlands, right?

[1:16:56] Not exactly.

[1:16:59] But that he goes, he goes to the guy, he goes, hey, I need your help.

[1:17:02] The guy that I'm supposed to look out for, he's evil.

[1:17:04] He's missing a joint on his little finger.

[1:17:05] And the guy goes, oh, like this?

[1:17:07] And he shows his hand and he's like, yeah, I'm the bad guy.

[1:17:09] I love that that movie does not waste any time with you.

[1:17:13] It doesn't then have you running around and reveal it at the end.

[1:17:17] The movie isn't like, why is this character always wearing gloves?

[1:17:22] And with gloves is one little flop finger.

[1:17:26] But I think it would have, if they had walked by it and you saw that it was a swastika shrub,

[1:17:29] but they missed that somehow, like, characters always seem like dummies.

[1:17:33] Yeah, it would fit their characters and it would make them, it would make the audience

[1:17:36] be like, fuck, they're actually in super real danger now.

[1:17:40] Yes, and the other thing is that, and this is something again that I think maybe only

[1:17:43] picked up as a Jewish person.

[1:17:46] Christian Bale's character is supposed to be half Jewish.

[1:17:48] He talks about it a lot.

[1:17:50] As soon as he finds out Nazis are involved, he doesn't seem to feel any more different

[1:17:54] than if they had been just rich bad guys.

[1:17:57] When it's like, Christian Bale, these people are a genuine threat to you.

[1:18:02] Specifically and your family.

[1:18:03] Like, I don't know a Jewish person in the 1930s who didn't have an opinion on Nazis

[1:18:08] that was different because they were then regular Gentiles and just because they were

[1:18:12] a real and a clear and present threat to them.

[1:18:14] So the idea that he's like, and get this, they was not pretty bad.

[1:18:20] It's like, yeah, more than pretty bad, dude.

[1:18:22] Like, anyway, it just, it was, it felt like a, it felt like a modern day, modern day opinion.

[1:18:28] But it's the 30s.

[1:18:30] This is live history for them.

[1:18:31] So anyway, he doesn't know that World War II is going to end the right way.

[1:18:35] For all he knows, Hitler is going to run Germany for a thousand years like he's been promising

[1:18:39] using that real energy that Anya Taylor-Joy is so hopped up about.

[1:18:42] But anyway, flash forward.

[1:18:44] It's just the same, again, the general lack of the characters giving a shit about what

[1:18:48] happens in their own movie.

[1:18:50] But we flash forward briefly to the general testifying before Congress about this.

[1:18:54] Then we go back to Tom and his wife laughing.

[1:18:56] And then this is a moment that I found so baffling as to why it happens now.

[1:19:00] Valerie shoots them both in the face with one bullet.

[1:19:03] They're not killed.

[1:19:04] And they go, ow, that really hurt.

[1:19:05] Why'd you do that?

[1:19:06] And then an instant later, it turns out that was a fantasy she was having.

[1:19:09] She didn't really do it.

[1:19:10] And she goes, I was just thinking about shooting you in the face.

[1:19:11] And it's like, why now?

[1:19:13] That could be a funny joke at another point in the movie.

[1:19:15] But why now when the movie has to wrap it the fuck up?

[1:19:17] I loved that this happened.

[1:19:19] I love that this happened because at that point, well, at that point of the movie, look,

[1:19:23] it was the movie's own fault that it had engaged this long monologue.

[1:19:27] It could have just fixed having this long monologue.

[1:19:30] But I did feel like that was an acknowledgement by the movie that like, look, we realize that

[1:19:34] Christian Bale has been explaining the plot of the movie to you for the past 10 minutes.

[1:19:39] Here, we're going to have this brief, weird joke where there's a fantasy sequence where

[1:19:45] she shoots these two bad guys.

[1:19:48] Margot Robbie shoots the bad guys.

[1:19:50] And everyone yells at her being like, we had them.

[1:19:53] Like, you ruined it.

[1:19:54] You're going to be in trouble now.

[1:19:56] And then like, it's revealed immediately as a fantasy.

[1:20:00] And it's such a weird fantasy where she shoots them.

[1:20:03] It happened so fast that I had to rewind

[1:20:05] to make sure I had understood what had happened.

[1:20:07] It's like a Han shooting Greedo level of like,

[1:20:12] like it comes out of nowhere.

[1:20:13] Actually, I guess they set that up.

[1:20:15] Han has his gun under the table and everything.

[1:20:16] But it's more like Greedo shooting first,

[1:20:18] where it's like, it comes out of nowhere

[1:20:20] and you're not quite sure what happened.

[1:20:21] And the two of them are like, ow, why did you do that?

[1:20:23] And the spies are like, we had all the evidence.

[1:20:25] Now we have nothing, which doesn't make sense.

[1:20:27] Someone doesn't stop being a criminal

[1:20:29] because they got shot in the face.

[1:20:30] Like, they're gonna go to the trial

[1:20:31] and the judge is gonna be like,

[1:20:33] well, you did kill someone

[1:20:34] and try to overthrow the government.

[1:20:35] But in light of the facts

[1:20:39] that you got shot in the face afterwards,

[1:20:41] you're free to go.

[1:20:42] You've, you know, we can't find you guilty.

[1:20:44] I mean, it's such a weird fantasy.

[1:20:46] Cast a little doubt on the proceedings,

[1:20:48] whether it was a, you know,

[1:20:51] everything was done on the up and up.

[1:20:52] Okay, so let's do a mock trial.

[1:20:54] Let's do a mock trial.

[1:20:55] I mean, Jeb Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald

[1:20:56] doesn't change that he's not the president.

[1:20:57] That what?

[1:20:59] Let's do a mock trial.

[1:21:00] Dan is defendant.

[1:21:00] Okay, let's do it.

[1:21:01] Okay, Dan, you're the defendant.

[1:21:03] I'm the prosecutor.

[1:21:04] Stuart, you're the judge.

[1:21:05] Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

[1:21:07] Now I have here two people who yes,

[1:21:09] got shot in the face with one bullet.

[1:21:12] It's amazing that it happened that way,

[1:21:13] but still let us not forget the mountains of evidence

[1:21:17] that they killed Taylor Swift.

[1:21:19] Ow, I hurt so much because I got shot in the face.

[1:21:22] Ow.

[1:21:23] Well, I mean.

[1:21:24] Oh, so you're the,

[1:21:25] I thought you were gonna be the lawyer for the defense.

[1:21:26] You're the actual defendant.

[1:21:27] You said I was the defendant, I thought.

[1:21:29] You're right.

[1:21:30] I shouldn't have said defendant.

[1:21:30] I should have said defense.

[1:21:31] Ow, my face.

[1:21:33] Stuart, declare a mistrial.

[1:21:34] They don't have a defense lawyer.

[1:21:35] They have to have representation.

[1:21:37] Well, I do declare a mistrial on the proceeding.

[1:21:41] We'll see, see.

[1:21:42] Ah, God dang it.

[1:21:45] Anyway.

[1:21:46] Jury, you're free to go.

[1:21:46] I'm one of those judges that wears a weird wig

[1:21:50] for some reason.

[1:21:51] Oh, so they're being tried in British courts

[1:21:53] because Paul Canterbury arrested them.

[1:21:55] Okay.

[1:21:56] Yes, that's why.

[1:21:57] Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,

[1:22:00] it's so exciting to be here in old Britannia,

[1:22:03] in the mother country, trying this trial.

[1:22:07] I say my face hurts something terrible.

[1:22:10] Now, now, let me remind the jury

[1:22:13] that the defendants are not actually British.

[1:22:16] They seem to be affecting a British accent

[1:22:18] to sway the jury into finding in their favor.

[1:22:21] Well, I never,

[1:22:23] I've never heard such ridiculousness in my life.

[1:22:27] Now, okay, I didn't think we'd have to do this,

[1:22:30] but I'm going to submit to the jury exhibit negative A

[1:22:32] that the defendants are the Vose couple from New Jersey,

[1:22:37] not old Jersey, in which case perhaps

[1:22:39] they would have that English accent.

[1:22:40] Forget about it, ah.

[1:22:42] Okay, now they're affecting a New Jersey accent.

[1:22:44] I'm not quite sure why.

[1:22:46] There are people in New Jersey

[1:22:47] who don't sound quite like that,

[1:22:48] but yes, it's not helping nor hindering their case.

[1:22:51] It's just a weird thing for them to do

[1:22:53] in this set of circumstances.

[1:22:57] The great thing about this trial scene

[1:22:58] that we're playing out is that it has the same level

[1:23:01] of urgency as the movie we're talking about.

[1:23:04] Yeah, we're showing instead of telling.

[1:23:06] Okay, anyway, instead of shooting them,

[1:23:08] Valerie declares her love of Harold and she kisses him.

[1:23:10] And now Bert launches into another lengthy voiceover

[1:23:13] about how you need love in your life.

[1:23:15] And he goes through thinking about all the people he loves

[1:23:17] and he just moralizes at length

[1:23:18] about being kind and loving people,

[1:23:21] which again is rich coming from David O. Russell,

[1:23:24] a man who by most public accounts is a very mean man

[1:23:28] and is not kind to people.

[1:23:30] And we find out that his back brace stopped the bullet.

[1:23:33] That's why he isn't dead now.

[1:23:34] And they did succeed in stopping the plot.

[1:23:35] Yeah, that's what I fucking guessed, dude.

[1:23:38] Yeah, nobody goes to jail.

[1:23:40] The general's reputation does get smeared,

[1:23:42] but that's just kind of like a hanging loose thread.

[1:23:44] And for some reason he's like,

[1:23:46] of course Valerie and Harold

[1:23:47] had to flee the United States that night.

[1:23:49] I don't understand why they had to do that.

[1:23:51] Because of the Gestapo, of course, like the movie said.

[1:23:56] That doesn't make any sense.

[1:23:57] And they want to go to, well, they want to go to Amsterdam

[1:24:01] and they go, don't go to Amsterdam

[1:24:04] or the Gestapo will knock down your door.

[1:24:06] And they're like, what's a Gestapo?

[1:24:07] And he's like, you'll find out.

[1:24:09] Again, they would have, this stuff was in the newspapers.

[1:24:11] Like they would have known about this stuff.

[1:24:13] Germany was not like a secret, you know?

[1:24:15] Anyway.

[1:24:17] They get sent to an undisclosed location.

[1:24:20] Yeah, and Bert decides he's going to stay.

[1:24:23] He's going to stay here and fight.

[1:24:25] He kind of doesn't, I mean, the reason he's staying

[1:24:27] is clearly because he wants to have sex with Irma,

[1:24:29] but he doesn't say that.

[1:24:30] He's just like, I got to stay here

[1:24:32] and look out for the people I love.

[1:24:34] Let's be kind to everybody, kindness.

[1:24:36] Kindness, kindness, that's what I'm talking, kindness.

[1:24:38] Let's just be kind, kindness.

[1:24:40] And the movie just kind of peters out.

[1:24:41] And then during the credits,

[1:24:43] we see Robert De Niro giving the same speech

[1:24:46] that the one real character in this movie made.

[1:24:50] That the real general he's based on gave to Congress.

[1:24:53] To bolster the idea that this actually happened.

[1:24:56] I fucking hate this shit.

[1:24:58] And the real story behind it is that this general was like,

[1:25:01] a bunch of rich people came to me and they gave me money

[1:25:03] so I'd become a dictator and nobody was ever arrested.

[1:25:06] And people to this day debate on how serious that plot was

[1:25:09] or how far, I mean, I guess maybe it was serious

[1:25:11] or how far along it went.

[1:25:14] But this movie is like, I don't know.

[1:25:16] Let's go into final judgments, I guess.

[1:25:17] I guess I've made it pretty clear

[1:25:18] how I feel about the movie.

[1:25:19] But Dan, should we do final judgments?

[1:25:21] Yeah, let's do final judgments.

[1:25:22] Real quick before we do final judgments,

[1:25:24] a little round of applause from our listeners.

[1:25:26] Oh yeah, yeah.

[1:25:27] Making it through this fucking thing.

[1:25:29] You did it, dude.

[1:25:31] That shit was stuffed full of garbage and you said it all.

[1:25:34] It's a very convoluted movie.

[1:25:36] Appreciate it.

[1:25:37] A lot of plot, a lot of incident.

[1:25:39] You got through it.

[1:25:40] With a cold, with a cold.

[1:25:41] Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying.

[1:25:42] You got through the whole thing with a cold.

[1:25:44] I had, you know, I was ready to tag in at any point.

[1:25:47] Didn't need to.

[1:25:48] I'm still hanging out by the ropes.

[1:25:50] I appreciate that, Stuart.

[1:25:51] I appreciate it.

[1:25:51] And for the listeners who missed some of the details

[1:25:53] because they were orgasming because of my sexy voice,

[1:25:55] just listen to it again.

[1:25:56] It's a podcast.

[1:25:57] That's fine.

[1:25:58] If you listen to it a bunch of times,

[1:25:59] eventually you'll become less sensitive to it

[1:26:01] and you'll be able to listen to it without just true,

[1:26:04] just true sexual benefit.

[1:26:05] Yeah, but then the problem is you'll get to a place

[1:26:07] where you're like, you're so desensitized

[1:26:09] that you just can't, you can't reach a climax without it.

[1:26:12] Yeah, and then you need, you need even rougher stuff,

[1:26:14] which is me being strangled while talking.

[1:26:17] To get my voice to be even rougher and less awkward.

[1:26:19] So let's go on to the final judgments.

[1:26:22] Look, I mean, I knew that it was somewhat of a mess.

[1:26:26] I like talking to you guys has only reinforced

[1:26:29] like the silliness of a lot of it.

[1:26:31] But I think that the, like,

[1:26:36] this movie has a lot of like what I like in a movie

[1:26:39] and so even a bad version of it, I enjoy.

[1:26:42] Cause I like this kind of sprawling,

[1:26:46] serial comic kind of like a goofy capery,

[1:26:50] but also not thing.

[1:26:53] I mean, like this is not the best example of it obviously,

[1:26:56] but I like it enough as a thing that I enjoyed it.

[1:26:59] And I like all the performers.

[1:27:00] And also I have a certain fondness

[1:27:04] for ramshackle broken things.

[1:27:06] Much as you might think the cutest dog

[1:27:09] at the pound is the one that's all like slobbery

[1:27:11] and scruffy, you know, I often.

[1:27:15] Dan goes to the pound and he's like,

[1:27:16] get, show me your fucked up dog.

[1:27:18] Show me your real, give me your dog's real screwed up.

[1:27:22] Is the fucked up pound dog of movies.

[1:27:24] And I enjoy it for that.

[1:27:25] I also want to ask you a question before, I mean,

[1:27:27] like you can give your own assessments obviously too,

[1:27:30] but I want to ask you this question.

[1:27:31] How much more would you have liked this movie

[1:27:33] if it did not claim at all to be based on true events?

[1:27:37] If it was just presented as historical fiction,

[1:27:39] because I think that that might've helped it.

[1:27:41] I think, I think to be honest,

[1:27:43] I think it would have helped it a little bit,

[1:27:45] but at the same time,

[1:27:46] it still takes place in a world that existed.

[1:27:49] So there's the thing,

[1:27:51] I think the bigger problems I had with it were less

[1:27:53] the things that it did to change history

[1:27:55] and more the things that it ignored

[1:27:57] about the world at that time.

[1:27:58] Like it's a movie where a white man

[1:28:00] and a black man are best friends in 1933.

[1:28:03] And it just kind of keeps hinting at racism

[1:28:06] without really showing us how overwhelming

[1:28:09] that racism was for most people,

[1:28:13] not that they all felt it,

[1:28:14] that everyone's life was affected by it.

[1:28:16] And it kind of like, it kind of like dances around it.

[1:28:19] People are kind of, people are more miffed

[1:28:21] at interracial relationships

[1:28:23] than they are offended or disgusted by it.

[1:28:25] And at the time that was a very real,

[1:28:26] I mean, it was illegal in much of the country for that.

[1:28:28] So like, it's a movie that feels like it is,

[1:28:31] I think if it was more, if it was more artificial,

[1:28:35] I could buy that fake past world a little more.

[1:28:38] The same way that like, The Great is a show I enjoy

[1:28:41] and it has almost no connection with real history,

[1:28:43] but it exists in a kind of fantasy world

[1:28:45] of 18th century Russia, you know?

[1:28:47] So it's not laying claim to any sort of reality.

[1:28:53] It seems like a lot of movies have two speeds.

[1:28:56] They can either be like, they can treat racism

[1:29:00] in the like, black people can only exist

[1:29:05] through trauma stories, or it's like ignored entirely

[1:29:09] and just imagined it doesn't happen.

[1:29:12] And I feel like neither one does a good service.

[1:29:16] Yeah.

[1:29:17] Yeah, I mean, it's something that a lot of movies struggle.

[1:29:19] I feel like I've seen more movies

[1:29:21] that have failed with that challenge than have succeeded,

[1:29:23] but like, but I think you're right, Dan,

[1:29:26] that if it was just, if it didn't pretend

[1:29:27] to be historical truth at all,

[1:29:31] I think I might've enjoyed it slightly more,

[1:29:33] but I would still call it a bad, bad movie

[1:29:35] because it's just like,

[1:29:36] it tries to be funny and it's not funny.

[1:29:38] It tries to be beautiful and it's not beautiful.

[1:29:40] It tries to be exciting and it's not exciting.

[1:29:42] And so it entered that kind of uncanny valley place

[1:29:47] for me with a movie where it's like,

[1:29:49] this movie is telling me

[1:29:50] that this is a delightful madcap romantic romp,

[1:29:53] but it's not.

[1:29:54] And it's only highlighting for me how much it's not,

[1:29:56] you know?

[1:29:57] So maybe if the movie was trying to,

[1:29:59] it feels

[1:30:00] It's a little bit like the movie version of

[1:30:02] you're sitting next to a drunk guy at the bar

[1:30:04] who told you a joke and you don't think that's funny

[1:30:06] and he just keeps shoving you and going,

[1:30:08] how funny, right?

[1:30:09] Isn't it funny?

[1:30:10] It's funny, right?

[1:30:10] And the more he does that, the less funny it gets.

[1:30:13] So anyway, it just didn't work for me.

[1:30:15] But Dan, if it worked for you, more power to you.

[1:30:17] Any joy you can find in this veil of tears that we live in,

[1:30:20] go for it.

[1:30:21] I'm not judging you,

[1:30:21] nor am I judging any fans that like this.

[1:30:23] I am judging Dana Russell.

[1:30:25] I'm gonna say this is gonna be a bad, bad movie

[1:30:28] for old Stu Balls here.

[1:30:31] I feel like-

[1:30:32] You seem to be the most actively frustrated by it.

[1:30:33] Yeah, I mean, there's a movie where

[1:30:38] it is so overly scripted at times.

[1:30:40] There's so many voiceovers.

[1:30:43] There's this like,

[1:30:45] it feels like the movie is treating me like a baby,

[1:30:48] even to the point that like,

[1:30:50] it has to force this like love of these characters on me,

[1:30:55] which is not earned.

[1:30:56] They don't do anything that would make me endeared to them

[1:31:00] or them endeared to me.

[1:31:01] And yeah, and like the movie is constantly telling

[1:31:04] rather than showing.

[1:31:05] And then when it's showing, it is doing too much.

[1:31:08] Like it just, it's too much.

[1:31:10] Doesn't know what it's doing.

[1:31:11] It's too sappy, doesn't earn anything.

[1:31:14] And it's not funny or exciting.

[1:31:18] Yep, that's me.

[1:31:19] That's a bad, bad.

[1:31:20] That's a definition of a bad, bad.

[1:31:22] I'm Jordan Cruciola, the host of Feeling Seen,

[1:31:25] where we talk about the movie characters

[1:31:26] that make us feel seen.

[1:31:28] And I'm the show's producer, Marissa.

[1:31:30] Jordan, you've interviewed so many directors,

[1:31:32] actors, writers, film critics.

[1:31:34] And I like to play this little game

[1:31:35] where I take a sip of coffee every time someone says,

[1:31:38] that's such a great question.

[1:31:40] That's such a fabulous question.

[1:31:42] Or they tell you how smart you are.

[1:31:43] I think that you are rather brilliant.

[1:31:45] And of course the big one is,

[1:31:47] how smart are you?

[1:31:48] How smart are you?

[1:31:51] And of course the big one is,

[1:31:53] when they cry unexpectedly.

[1:31:54] Unexpectedly, yes, yes.

[1:31:55] Jordan, I don't want to cry on your podcast.

[1:31:57] I wasn't expecting to cry.

[1:31:59] I mean, it makes me kind of want to cry.

[1:32:01] Feeling Seen comes out every Thursday

[1:32:03] on MaximumFun.org.

[1:32:05] Listen already.

[1:32:06] What are you waiting for?

[1:32:07] Jordan, that's such a great question.

[1:32:11] Al Laughlin here with breaking news

[1:32:13] on a revolutionary form of entertainment,

[1:32:15] professional wrestling.

[1:32:18] For more, we go to our correspondent, Danielle Radford.

[1:32:21] Professional wrestling is the craze

[1:32:23] that's sweeping the nation,

[1:32:24] featuring fisticuffs and colorful costumes.

[1:32:28] But who can help us make sense

[1:32:29] of this world of body slams?

[1:32:31] Lindsay Kelk has the answer.

[1:32:33] Sources tell us of an amazing podcast

[1:32:35] called Tights and Fights,

[1:32:36] filled with discussions of the absurdity

[1:32:38] of professional wrestling,

[1:32:39] plus all the sincerity and hilarity

[1:32:42] that you could shake a stick at.

[1:32:45] Listen to the Tights and Fights podcast every week.

[1:32:48] Find it on Maximum Fun

[1:32:49] or wherever you get your podcasts.

[1:32:51] And your old-timey radio.

[1:32:55] Hey, I want to tell you guys something.

[1:32:56] The one's listening, the one's in this room,

[1:32:58] and that's, and Elliot, he's not in this room,

[1:33:00] but he's in this room in the sense

[1:33:02] that he's on my Zoom screen.

[1:33:02] I am listening.

[1:33:04] True, true, true.

[1:33:06] We have sponsors.

[1:33:08] For the most part, The Flop House is made possible

[1:33:11] by listeners like you who become members

[1:33:13] over at MaximumFun.org.

[1:33:15] But we have a few other brief words

[1:33:20] from our sponsors.

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[1:34:30] Elliot, I think you have a jumbotron to read.

[1:34:32] I do, I have a jumbotron to read.

[1:34:34] Dan very cleverly gave it to me

[1:34:36] when I was losing my voice,

[1:34:37] but let's see if I can still do it.

[1:34:39] This is now a sexy jumbotron, as we've established.

[1:34:41] Okay, this message is for Graham

[1:34:44] and the message is from Tyler.

[1:34:46] And it says, dear Graham, congratulations on being born.

[1:34:49] It was so cool to finally get to meet you,

[1:34:51] even if you were pretty low energy about the whole thing.

[1:34:53] I can't wait to see what kind of hilarious,

[1:34:55] sarcastic kid you'll grow up to be,

[1:34:57] considering who your mom is.

[1:34:58] I think it's just a matter of time.

[1:35:00] Love, your Uncle Tyler.

[1:35:01] What a sweet jumbotron, I really love that.

[1:35:04] Someday, Graham will grow up and listen to that.

[1:35:08] Hopefully not for a while,

[1:35:09] because this was a pretty, I apologize,

[1:35:11] a pretty not safe for kids podcast

[1:35:13] with all my swearing and my incredibly sexy voice.

[1:35:16] But Graham, when you listen to this 18 years from now or so,

[1:35:21] happy being born day.

[1:35:22] Happy being born day, indeed.

[1:35:25] Do either of you have any other things

[1:35:28] to mention before we move on?

[1:35:30] I'd like to, oh.

[1:35:34] I would like to, as always, I'm gonna, oh.

[1:35:37] Alex, just delete Elliot's entire audio file.

[1:35:40] No audio from Elliot this whole episode, great.

[1:35:43] So, I am gonna recommend going to the bars I own.

[1:35:49] Be a very short episode.

[1:35:51] I mean, our audio track is gonna stay the same.

[1:35:55] Yeah. That's fair, fair.

[1:35:57] Just be long periods of silence.

[1:35:59] It'll be the jazz of Flophouse.

[1:36:01] Yeah, yeah, it's a vibe.

[1:36:04] So, yeah, go to my bars, Hinterland's Bar, Minnie's Bar.

[1:36:07] I might be there, I might not.

[1:36:08] If I'm not there when you go by, I am sorry.

[1:36:11] I can't always be there, but yeah,

[1:36:14] it's always nice to see folks.

[1:36:15] You've got miniatures to paint.

[1:36:17] I got miniatures to paint.

[1:36:18] I gotta go out to fancy dinners with Dan,

[1:36:20] like we did this week, where we ate sushi.

[1:36:22] What?

[1:36:23] It was so nice, what a date.

[1:36:26] Just a couple of dudes and some raw fish.

[1:36:29] What was your favorite bite, Dan?

[1:36:33] I like the fishy pieces.

[1:36:34] Oh, those are good pieces.

[1:36:36] Something fishy and oily for me, thanks.

[1:36:38] I like that cheek, give me that, the fatty tuna cheek.

[1:36:42] The fatty cheek.

[1:36:43] I like the fatty cheek, as long-time listeners know.

[1:36:46] Hey, Elliot, what do you want to say?

[1:36:49] Graham, you'll get that joke when you're older.

[1:36:51] So this is a, I wanted to say,

[1:36:54] I've been talking a lot on this podcast

[1:36:55] about Maniac of New York, Don't Call It Comeback,

[1:36:58] my new series from Aftershock.

[1:37:00] It was originally scheduled for December 7th.

[1:37:02] Unfortunately, it has been delayed.

[1:37:03] I don't know when it's coming out yet, possibly in January,

[1:37:07] but keep your eyes peeled.

[1:37:08] I will, of course, announce the release date when I know it,

[1:37:11] but that book is still going to come out,

[1:37:13] and I hope you can enjoy it.

[1:37:15] I'm very excited about it.

[1:37:16] So that's Maniac of New York, Don't Call It Comeback.

[1:37:18] Just kind of be ready for it.

[1:37:20] Just kind of be ready at any moment

[1:37:21] to go run out and get it.

[1:37:23] Just be ready for it.

[1:37:24] That's what Elliot recommends in life.

[1:37:28] Letters from listeners like you.

[1:37:31] Here they come, walking down the street.

[1:37:35] Get the funniest letters from.

[1:37:37] Letters from.

[1:37:38] All the listeners we meet or don't meet.

[1:37:41] Hey, hey, it's the Flophouse.

[1:37:42] See, what a twist.

[1:37:44] I sang that one.

[1:37:45] Okay.

[1:37:46] I love it.

[1:37:47] Wait, that was you singing?

[1:37:48] I thought that was Elliot singing.

[1:37:49] I know.

[1:37:50] We've trained you well.

[1:37:51] This is.

[1:37:52] And I thought it was Mickey Dolenz.

[1:37:53] From Joan, last name withheld.

[1:37:55] Who writes.

[1:37:57] Dan describing Moonfall in 4DX got me fondly reminiscing

[1:38:01] about the time my favorite movie ever, Gremlins,

[1:38:04] was briefly re-released into 4DX cinemas.

[1:38:08] Joe Dante's zany creature feature classic

[1:38:11] turned out to be a perfect fit for the gimmick-laden format.

[1:38:15] I recoiled in solidarity with Gizmo

[1:38:18] as we were both splashed with water

[1:38:19] we knew we shouldn't be touching.

[1:38:22] I held on for dear life as I was violently thrust about

[1:38:27] by my erratic mechanical chair,

[1:38:30] just as Mrs. Deagle did in her final moments.

[1:38:34] And I now have firsthand knowledge

[1:38:35] of what a Gremlin attack really feels like,

[1:38:37] assuming it feels like getting mildly poked in the back.

[1:38:41] Of course, the highlight of the evening

[1:38:42] was the Snow White scene

[1:38:43] when my gyrating seat gave me no choice

[1:38:45] but to bounce up and down in rhythm

[1:38:47] with the Gremlins' rowdy movie theater antics.

[1:38:50] It felt like the perfect 4DX moment,

[1:38:52] one where the action on screen

[1:38:53] was actually bleeding out into the audience

[1:38:55] in those few brief minutes.

[1:38:57] We were all of us Gremlins.

[1:39:00] My question for you guys is this.

[1:39:01] Are there any favorite movies of yours

[1:39:03] that you'd like to see given the 4DX treatment?

[1:39:06] And if so, how would you want to see

[1:39:08] those in-theater effects applied?

[1:39:10] Elliot, would you ever want to feel

[1:39:12] like you were rumbling down the tracks

[1:39:14] of the hijacked Pelham 123?

[1:39:17] Dan, could the sense of salmon and honey

[1:39:19] wafting by your nose make you love

[1:39:21] the country bears even more?

[1:39:23] Yep.

[1:39:24] Stu, where's this going?

[1:39:25] I'm not sure you could ever safely replicate

[1:39:27] the sensation of getting your ding-dong ripped off,

[1:39:30] but there must be other fun ways

[1:39:32] to enhance the castle freak experience.

[1:39:35] Maybe just pull out some pubes.

[1:39:37] That could do it.

[1:39:37] Yeah.

[1:39:38] Your dream to finally-

[1:39:39] I call them stoobs.

[1:39:40] That's Stu's version of boar.

[1:39:43] I can never truly know what it is

[1:39:45] to have my ding-dong ripped off.

[1:39:47] Anyway, excited to hear all the awesome ideas

[1:39:50] you flop-magineers come up with.

[1:39:53] See you in the fourth dimension, says Joan.

[1:39:56] So just to pull back the curtain,

[1:39:58] Dan just sent us the question.

[1:40:00] rather than the entire, uh, letter.

[1:40:02] Um, you don't have to apologize, but it's funny because the first thing that

[1:40:06] came to my head was gremlins too.

[1:40:08] No question.

[1:40:09] Gremlins who would be great.

[1:40:10] Uh, but other than that, I don't know.

[1:40:12] Tango and cash would be really great.

[1:40:14] You'd get water sprayed in your face, money thrown all over you.

[1:40:17] Cocaine.

[1:40:18] Yeah.

[1:40:19] Okay.

[1:40:19] Sprayed out of you.

[1:40:20] Yeah, sure.

[1:40:21] Why not?

[1:40:21] Check balance, et cetera.

[1:40:23] I mean, I think that that captures the truth about it is that there

[1:40:26] has to be a certain goofiness.

[1:40:29] Like Jurassic park would be amazing.

[1:40:32] I could see Jurassic park being fun with it, but yeah, you're not

[1:40:34] going to want to watch like, um, uh, you're not going to want to watch

[1:40:39] like Kramer versus Kramer in four DX.

[1:40:42] You know, I was thinking of something for me, like Terminator two, a movie

[1:40:45] that like, you know, a thrill park ride, but one that I have seen so many

[1:40:51] times that I guess I'm looking at 40 X as a chance for me to feel it.

[1:40:56] I knew, you know, in a different way.

[1:40:59] Yeah.

[1:40:59] Maybe have some hot water sprayed on me when it sinks into the lava.

[1:41:04] Like, I feel like, like I might pick a movie.

[1:41:07] That's one of my favorites that I've seen so many times.

[1:41:09] Like big trouble in old China.

[1:41:11] I feel like it's a big goofy, fun movie.

[1:41:14] That'd be great for that.

[1:41:15] A goofy movie.

[1:41:16] This is going to be an unpopular.

[1:41:17] You just, did you recently watch the goofy movie?

[1:41:19] I did actually recently watch.

[1:41:21] I asked cause Dan was walking around clearly pitching a tent.

[1:41:25] Yeah.

[1:41:29] Uh, no truth though.

[1:41:31] There are some uncomfortably sexy, like background characters in a goofy movie.

[1:41:36] Like I, it was in that like period where it's just like, okay.

[1:41:39] Every supporting character is going to have like weird, like bouncy cartoon.

[1:41:47] Anyway, uh, just having a good time, you know?

[1:41:52] Yeah.

[1:41:53] Yeah, sure.

[1:41:53] This is going to be an unpopular answer to this question.

[1:41:55] I'm going to say no.

[1:41:57] There are no favorite movies of mine that I'd like to see in 40 X.

[1:42:00] It's what you guys described.

[1:42:02] Sounds like it'd be super fun.

[1:42:03] It's like the movie turns into a theme park ride.

[1:42:05] That's not my preferred way to experience movies.

[1:42:09] So I'm going to say, considering the closest, I think I've come to it since I've

[1:42:13] never seen 40 X is going on the guardians of the galaxy breakout ride in a, at

[1:42:18] Disneyland, where there is a kind of a gardens, the guardians, the galaxy

[1:42:22] adventure going on in front of you as you are repeatedly lifted into the air

[1:42:25] and dropped again.

[1:42:26] Cause it's just the old tower that they've turned guardians.

[1:42:29] And what's happening in the guardians of the galaxy movie is almost

[1:42:31] incomprehensible.

[1:42:32] Like you really can't pay attention to it.

[1:42:34] And so that's an extreme example.

[1:42:35] I know it's minimal content and maximum being thrown around, but I like to just

[1:42:39] sit back and get absorbed into a movie, you know, as much as it would be.

[1:42:42] I just texted my, my buddy, Jim Cameron and told him that you aren't into movies

[1:42:47] being turned into theme park rides.

[1:42:48] And he said, he's driving over to your house to beat your ass.

[1:42:52] Oh no.

[1:42:53] I was at the tower of terror in a Disney world in Florida this year.

[1:42:58] And, uh, I.

[1:43:00] It's still tower of terror there.

[1:43:01] It has not had the, the guardian skin put on it.

[1:43:03] And, um, I, it was my least favorite, but you showed up dressed up as

[1:43:08] tracks, which was kind of awkward.

[1:43:11] I, I was like, oh, I'm too old for the tower of terror now, because I feel like

[1:43:15] I'm going to blackout when it drops.

[1:43:17] Oh, that's not good.

[1:43:18] Yeah.

[1:43:18] That's not good.

[1:43:20] I still enjoy the, I enjoy the being dropped part of the ride.

[1:43:22] Cause it reminds me of when I was a baby.

[1:43:23] I just, I just recently went to universal studios with flop house

[1:43:27] friend, Jordan Morris, what, what?

[1:43:29] And we went to, what'd we do?

[1:43:31] Let me give you the full rundown.

[1:43:32] Jurassic world Dominion ride.

[1:43:33] That was super fun.

[1:43:34] Got splashed, went to the minions ride.

[1:43:37] That fucking sucked.

[1:43:38] Not a fan.

[1:43:39] Went to the water worlds, uh, water world stunt show.

[1:43:42] That fucking rocked.

[1:43:43] Went to the, I've heard that's a great stunt show.

[1:43:45] Went to the mummy, uh, the mummy ride.

[1:43:48] And you know, that's the thing with universal.

[1:43:51] There's no splashing.

[1:43:52] Although I got splashed with sand.

[1:43:53] The thing about universal, I know you're saying, I know you, I know you said the

[1:43:56] mummy and then we're restarting and say the mummy, but I wish the name of the

[1:43:59] ride was the mummy colon, the mummy.

[1:44:01] I think that'd be amazing.

[1:44:02] I went on the, the mummy, the mummy ride.

[1:44:04] I feel like the rule of thumb there is the older, like least relevant.

[1:44:09] The property, the cooler, the ride has got to be like, it's

[1:44:12] got to survive this long.

[1:44:14] Yeah.

[1:44:14] Like for them to still have a water world stunt show, it must be fantastic.

[1:44:19] And speaking of James Cameron, the avatar ride at Disney like animal kingdom or

[1:44:23] whatever the hell it's called was astounding.

[1:44:26] Like a movie that, you know, uh, I am not going to be one of those people

[1:44:30] arguing and had no footprint.

[1:44:31] Cause I think that's absurd.

[1:44:33] And I think it had a different kind of footprint than some movies.

[1:44:38] Don't bet against Jim Cameron.

[1:44:40] I don't think you should bet against Jim Cameron, but like the

[1:44:43] avatar ride is astounding.

[1:44:46] Uh, anyway.

[1:44:47] I think, I think Richard kind of swear by his eyes lit up as soon

[1:44:53] as the avatar ride was brought up.

[1:44:54] Uh, I'm actually, I'm actually going to universal studios

[1:44:57] soon for my older son's birthday.

[1:44:58] What was it about the minions ride?

[1:45:00] That was not fun.

[1:45:00] Stuart, since I'm almost certainly going to have to go, though, the weight is

[1:45:04] super long cause everybody wants to go on it and then it is one of those rides

[1:45:07] where a lot of it was sitting in like a movie theater seat and then you just

[1:45:11] kind of move up and down and watch a movie, uh, which wasn't great.

[1:45:15] Perfect for my kids.

[1:45:17] A hundred percent.

[1:45:17] If you go, definitely go in the studio tour because they have a section of

[1:45:21] the, uh, the scenery from Nope, the like Jupiter's claim stuff.

[1:45:26] And it's, it's incredible.

[1:45:27] It was so great.

[1:45:28] When my kids are going to love that.

[1:45:31] They love nope.

[1:45:32] I mean, there's a fast and furious thing for them.

[1:45:34] Cause they love that shit.

[1:45:35] Right.

[1:45:35] Cause they like being part of the family.

[1:45:37] It's about family.

[1:45:38] Yeah.

[1:45:38] They love family.

[1:45:39] Uh, we got one more letter.

[1:45:41] It's from Kelly.

[1:45:42] This, this, this shows you, wait, this shows you how I've indoctrinated.

[1:45:45] My kids is we're going to universal studios.

[1:45:46] My younger son is four.

[1:45:48] He's like, are the universal monsters going to be there?

[1:45:50] And I'm like, I know they do stuff around Halloween, but I don't know if these

[1:45:54] almost a hundred year old properties are still like big in the parks, but that's

[1:45:58] all he wants to see the minions and, uh, the creature from the black lagoon doesn't

[1:46:01] want to see the psycho house.

[1:46:03] They don't know what psycho is.

[1:46:04] Okay.

[1:46:04] This I was telling the story this morning about when I was a kid, we went to the

[1:46:08] universal studios in Florida where they still have a studio tour, but it's

[1:46:11] obviously fake.

[1:46:12] And they're like, there's the psycho house.

[1:46:14] And it's like, no, it's not.

[1:46:15] They didn't shoot psycho in Florida.

[1:46:16] Like this is the whole point is to see the real house.

[1:46:18] This is a fake psycho house.

[1:46:20] Yeah.

[1:46:21] Kelly last name withheld rights.

[1:46:22] Hello.

[1:46:23] Peaches.

[1:46:24] Kelly Kapowski fictional character.

[1:46:25] I wanted to tell you about a real freak I met years ago in a college cell biology

[1:46:30] class.

[1:46:31] Now, one of my best friends, the first day of class, look, this better be connected

[1:46:36] to Topeka, Kansas, right?

[1:46:37] I don't know why it involves our podcast.

[1:46:39] Well, we'll see.

[1:46:41] We'll see.

[1:46:42] Now, one of my best friends, the first day of class, this guy pulled out a line

[1:46:46] from his messenger bag, peeled it and started eating it in class.

[1:46:51] Oh, that's a lime.

[1:46:52] A lime.

[1:46:52] I misheard you.

[1:46:53] I misheard you.

[1:46:54] I thought you said line.

[1:46:54] And I'm like of Coke right in the class.

[1:46:57] No, a lime.

[1:46:58] Uh, the professor stopped mid-sentence and said, excuse me, is that a lime?

[1:47:04] It was.

[1:47:05] We all gasped.

[1:47:06] He ate a whole lime every day.

[1:47:09] By the end of the year, I think we'd all tried at least a slice

[1:47:12] of raw, unaccompanied lime.

[1:47:14] The professor did as well.

[1:47:15] Those tart little bastards really brought us together in such a beautiful way.

[1:47:20] Thanks.

[1:47:21] Thanks for keeping me company during my graduate degree.

[1:47:24] You three are very cool.

[1:47:25] Kelly name withheld.

[1:47:27] Okay.

[1:47:27] So the relationship to our podcast, is it like a third man, Harry lime type thing?

[1:47:34] She thought we all had scurvy and needed.

[1:47:36] Oh yeah.

[1:47:38] Oh, is it because I did think I had it once, but I didn't check that.

[1:47:42] I didn't.

[1:47:42] I think that this probably getting middle end on that one.

[1:47:45] I'm guessing this related to the fruit brutes episode or whatever.

[1:47:49] Oh, right, right, right.

[1:47:50] The flop has fruit group.

[1:47:51] Yeah.

[1:47:52] Our spinoff podcast.

[1:47:53] And we may be, maybe we talked about whether or not someone had ever.

[1:47:57] Eating the lime.

[1:47:58] Although I kind of enjoyed the letter most void of any context.

[1:48:01] Yeah.

[1:48:04] Um, so that was about this fucking thing.

[1:48:07] And, uh, of course, having talked about limes, we.

[1:48:11] Traditionally now go on to the final segment, which is called Dan pulls up

[1:48:15] letterbox and remembers what he watched.

[1:48:17] Yeah.

[1:48:17] What did I see?

[1:48:18] What can I possibly recommend?

[1:48:21] Honestly, I've seen a lot of stuff lately that I was more mixed on.

[1:48:24] This is recommendations by the way.

[1:48:26] But, uh, I did watch and enjoy rolling thunder from 1977 movie.

[1:48:30] I'd never seen before starring, uh, William Devane, uh, and, uh, very young.

[1:48:37] You're so divvying Tommy Lee.

[1:48:39] Joe, I think you start in rolling thunder.

[1:48:42] You're so divvying from what, what are they?

[1:48:46] Reverse mortgage commercials, Fox news.

[1:48:49] And it goes, you were also in Phenom, Phenom, the ABC sitcom

[1:48:54] Phenom with Judith light.

[1:48:56] He's still trying fucked up.

[1:48:58] And he's still trying to 24.

[1:49:00] I think he was one of the presidents.

[1:49:02] I'm 20.

[1:49:02] He's been tons of stuff.

[1:49:03] Yeah.

[1:49:04] Um, well, I'm trying to say where Stuart might think of him.

[1:49:07] Um, I don't know.

[1:49:09] I don't know whether Stuart even watched 24.

[1:49:10] I'm just making guesses.

[1:49:11] He's 24 hours.

[1:49:13] The show.

[1:49:13] Yeah.

[1:49:15] Yeah.

[1:49:15] The show about a man with a no bladder.

[1:49:17] Um, it's, it's rolling thunder.

[1:49:21] The thing about rolling thunder is it's a, it's a revenge movie where, you

[1:49:27] know, someone's family is killed, but it's not the traditional sort of like

[1:49:31] we're fridging these characters.

[1:49:33] Killing is a much sadder movie.

[1:49:35] The script was by Paul Schrader.

[1:49:38] It takes the time director of heartbeats.

[1:49:40] Yeah.

[1:49:41] It's a, it's a movie that takes the main character is a, uh, is a

[1:49:46] prisoner of war who's been returned.

[1:49:48] His family has moved on without him.

[1:49:50] So there's like already the sadness and then he loses his family and it's less

[1:49:55] of sort of the shallow motivation that a lot of revenge movies have.

[1:50:00] that this was the one thread connecting him to sanity that has been severed and

[1:50:05] he takes revenge and it's just interesting to see a 1970s action

[1:50:10] revenge thriller that is mostly about sadness about like the revenge is not a

[1:50:17] cathartic you know like triumph it is just you know him spinning further in

[1:50:22] away from society and warmth so yeah you know they say about revenge first you

[1:50:29] got to dig two graves it makes an ass out of rev cuz the first one's probably

[1:50:34] gonna suck so you gotta dig two of them so the second one's good yeah cuz you've

[1:50:38] never dug a grave before like the first like the first pancake yeah I'm gonna

[1:50:48] recommend a French erotic thriller called double lover that's right double

[1:50:53] lover watch it it's a movie about a young woman who starts seeing her

[1:50:59] therapist and then she starts dating her therapist which I don't think is

[1:51:02] allowed and then she realizes that her her new boyfriend might just have a twin

[1:51:09] brother and he's also a therapist but he's got a very different style of

[1:51:16] therapy if you know what I mean and it gets weird from there folks I don't know

[1:51:20] what you mean well soon you will if you watch yeah

[1:51:23] soon you will if you watch a double lover I gotta find out it's guys guys

[1:51:30] it's a weird one speaking of weird ones you know what it's almost the end of the

[1:51:34] year that means I gotta hurry to get in another check new wave and my

[1:51:37] recommendations before we go to 2023 gotta check them off your list it's

[1:51:43] Elliott's checklist right Elliot's checklist is that's what it's called

[1:51:47] Elliot's new wave checklist yep so put this on the checklist I want to

[1:51:51] recommend fruit of paradise this is directed by Vera Chytilova who also of

[1:51:55] course did daisies is that fruit a lime it is not a lime I hate to tell you

[1:52:00] otherwise that would have provided some reason for that letter to have existed

[1:52:04] and then be read on the show but no there's still no reason which is the

[1:52:07] beauty of the thing it's a real comic strip Nancy type of surreal non sequitur

[1:52:12] so anyway Joseph and Eva are a married couple who go on a vacation there and

[1:52:18] they've kind of lost the spark in their relationship Eva becomes more and more

[1:52:22] intrigued by Robert a man who as it turns out is probably a serial murderer

[1:52:27] and may be intending to murder her as well but there's larger implications to

[1:52:32] that the whole thing is more than anything else a kind of retelling of the

[1:52:35] Adam and Eve story in a very kind of semi abstract way there's a lot of

[1:52:40] strange moments in it there's a lot of weird things it's a more straightforward

[1:52:43] plot than daisies Chytilova's I think previous movie but it's still very

[1:52:49] strange but I find I found it very beautiful and very affecting the it's

[1:52:55] worth it at the very least just seeing the first seven or eight minutes which

[1:52:59] are a kind of artsy telling of the real Adam and Eve story the original one and

[1:53:03] the imagery of it where they're kind of positing Adam and Eve as being a part of

[1:53:08] nature by literally flooding their images with psychedelic colors in a way

[1:53:12] that I had not really seen in a film before it's very artsy like I said it

[1:53:16] takes a while for the story to kick in but if you see nothing it's worth seeing

[1:53:19] that very opening just for kind of the beauty of it you know just the visual

[1:53:23] spectacle maybe crush like an edible and watch that shit yeah I'm sure and then

[1:53:27] stick around for the rest of the movie too I don't know Ali I only watch fartsy

[1:53:31] things actually kind of true nothing artsy yeah this is just artsy there's

[1:53:36] nothing fartsy in it and I guess how much fartsy this is what's the FQ the

[1:53:42] parts in this yeah I think that I'm also just Randy Blake show up he doesn't I

[1:53:47] guess is my alternate recommendation it'll guess it'll be Howard Stern's butt

[1:53:51] bongo pay-per-view special I guess maybe that'll get into the fartsy stuff you're

[1:53:55] looking for yeah huh well guys we did it we did another episode of the Flophouse

[1:53:59] that's the podcast you just put in your ears for a couple hours take it out in a

[1:54:05] second yeah you take it out in a second but not before learning that we're part

[1:54:09] of the maximum fun podcasting network go to maximum fun org if you want to check

[1:54:14] out the other great shows they have there there's a lot that are funny and

[1:54:19] there's some that actually tell you something unlike usually us also thank

[1:54:24] you to Alex Smith he is at how old are you on Twitter he is our producer he

[1:54:31] does magic for us he also did the sexy xenomorph song that contest is still

[1:54:38] ongoing if you poke around on our website Flophouse podcast calm you can

[1:54:43] find out all about that or check the show notes for old episode and thank you

[1:54:47] to everybody who tuned in to our live Flophouse holiday special where Stuart

[1:54:52] and Dan and others and we're gonna have some fun

[1:55:01] in Dan's kitchen if you missed it and would like to watch it go over to my

[1:55:05] twitch channel and hopefully it will have been archived but that's Stuart

[1:55:10] Wellington that's my twitch so thanks for listening we'll see you next time

[1:55:14] for the Flophouse I've been Dan McCoy I'm Stuart Wellington and I'll probably

[1:55:19] be Elliot Kalin unless I have to fake my own death and change my identity for

[1:55:25] unnamed trouble reasons stay tuned let's find out and if the next episode is

[1:55:29] being co-hosted by Sergio Abrogoso then you'll know that that's exactly what

[1:55:34] happens

[1:55:39] on this episode we discuss Amsterdam the true story of the shooting of the movie

[1:55:46] deuce bigelow European gigolo that's one too that's better than my other one I

[1:55:53] want to hear that shit okay here it is let's wait I was gonna talk yeah last

[1:55:58] two at the end all right on this episode we discuss Amsterdam the movie that begs

[1:56:04] the question on set did Ed Begley jr. keep asking John David Washington why

[1:56:08] his dad Denzel hasn't called him since they'd elsewhere ended it's a good one

[1:56:14] I love it okay it's a good yeah any Alex any you don't use throw him at the end

[1:56:18] yeah use every part of the Buffalo and now we move along to what we call the

[1:56:25] taping of the show I guess we do yeah we technically I mean yeah yeah maximum fun

[1:56:34] org comedy and culture artists owned audience supported

Episode #385 - Amsterdam

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