Class is in session on this episode of Movie Mike's Movie Podcast! Get ready to relive your school days with a double dose of cinematic nostalgia as Mike shares his Top 10 movies that he thinks embody the high school and college experience. Whether you're reminiscing about the awkwardness of adolescence or the wild adventures of college life, we've got your ultimate movie playlist covered. Mike gives his spoiler free movie review of DC’s Blue Beetle. Movie Mike breaks down the latest thrilling installment from the DC universe, how Blue Beetles sizes up as their first Latino superhero and whether it was a hit or miss for DC. In the Trailer Park we're hitching a ride to Vacation Friends 2 starring John Cena and why 20th Century Studios may be single handedly saving comedy in movies.
Episode Highlights:
- Top 10 High School and College Movies of All-Time
- Movie Review: "Blue Beetle"
- Trailer Park: "Vacation Friends 2"
- Laughs, Drama, and Nostalgia Galore!
Subscribe now and join us for a movie-filled adventure that will make you want to relive your school days again and again!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome back to Movie Mike's Movie Podcast. We
are going back to school on this episode and celebration
of all the kids and college students going back to school,
I have for you my top ten high school and
college movies of all time. In the movie review, I'll
be talking about DC's Blue Beetle, a movie that warned
my little Mexican heart. And in the trailer Park, we'll
(00:23):
be talking about a sequel to an unexpected comedy hit,
Vacation Friends Too, coming to you soon on Hulu. Thank
you for being subscribed, thank you for listening to the podcast.
And now, movie Crew, let's talk movies.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
In a world where everyone and their mother has a podcast,
one man stands to infiltrate the ears of listeners like
never before in a movie podcast. A man with so
much movie knowledge, he's basically like a walking IMTB with glasses.
From the Nashville Podcast Network.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
This is Movie Mike's Movie Podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
The summer is winding down, Kids are going back to school,
college kids are filling up targets so I can't get
my almond milk, and I want to share with you
my top ten high school and college movies of all time.
That's right. It is time to go.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Back to a school.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Back to a school. So let's break down the rules
for this list. Similar to an episode I did last
week about the top summer movies of all time, these
movies completely have to embody the high school and or
college experience. I almost day a top five college, I
almost date a top five high school. But I realized,
in the spirit of back to school, let's combine them
(01:38):
all together to give you the ultimate experience to relive
your high school or college days. First of all, they
have to take place in high school or college, and
as I go through this list, I will relate different
movies to my life. And I'm also throwing out the
rule no sports movies. I feel like those are in
a completely different genre, So you won't find any sports
(01:58):
movies on my list superhero movies. So let's kick it
off at number ten. I have a movie from twenty
twelve call Project X. Even though I was out of
high school in the twenty tens, I feel like this
movie is a complete representation of what was going on
at that time. The movie is about three friends who
are basically nobody's in high school. They are seniors, and
(02:20):
they are trying to make their mark on the legacy
of their high school career. So what do they do.
They throw the ultimate party of all time, completely shutting
down their entire neighborhood. At one point there's police and helicopters.
It's a very extreme case of a party. But growing
up and going to parties in high school that I
(02:41):
was not invited to, I very much felt like what
these three kids felt like in this movie, a complete nobody,
an outcast, and somebody who just wanted to do one
thing to leave an impression on your entire class. And
the movie starts out innocent enough, and then it just
keeps escalating and escalating until pretty much this party is
going to ruin not only their college life, but probably
(03:03):
their life after this. And I think this movie is
a great representation of the twenty tens, where it seemed
like everybody was just partying. If you turn on the radio,
everything was like, let's live life like it's gonna and
to nine, let's go to the club. Everything was so
dance centric and just let's live in the moment and
everything is gonna be fine. And now a decade later,
(03:23):
I'm looking at myself and thinking everything was not fine,
Pitt Bull. We are struggling now, and it's all because
you told me to party in the twenty tens, like
there was no tomorrow, but now there are repercussions. But
there's one song on this soundtrack that just I feel
like couldn't spark anybody who grew up or went to
college or high school in the twenty tens, and it
is the Steve Aoki remix of Kid Cut He's Pursuit
(03:44):
of Happiness. Like that's all I need to hear to
invoke the emotions of the twenty tens, just those few notes.
So this is such a fun movie, maybe one you
miss because it was one that just kind of came
out in a mix of all these outlandish comedies in
the twenty tens, kind of writing the cote tails of
(04:05):
everybody wanting another hangover. But I love this movie so much,
so at number ten, I have Project X. At number nine,
I'm going back to two thousand and four, and it
is Napoleon Dynamite, which I feel greatly in capsules the
awkwardness of high school, and that is how I described
my high school experience. I was the elite level of
(04:26):
awkward in high school because I didn't speak much, and
when you don't speak much in high school, you very
much become an outsider. I was very much in this
weird position, kind of like Napoleon Dynamite in this movie.
But unlike Napoleon Dynamite. I think like my bullying kind
of weird off in high school, and I was just
weird for the sake of being weird. But I think
it was because the fact that I didn't really say
(04:47):
a whole lot that I didn't really have a whole
lot of people just go out of their way to
ridicule me like they do Napoleon Dynamite. But I was
just so far in the background that I kind of
just evaporated into nothingness. I almost didn't exist in high
school because I was so awkward. I didn't say enough
things for people to have an opinion on me. I
just kind of existed and went through everyday feeling kind
(05:09):
of invisible. There were a lot of lunches alone and
a lot of time I just spent inside my head.
So I feel like when Napoleon Dynamite came out, I
felt like, man, there is a character who is kind
of like me. If I was a little bit more
outgoing and ridiculous. With my awkwardness that was all hiding
inside of me, I would very much be a Napoleon Dynamite.
And what I love about Napoleon Dynamite and the way
(05:31):
it represents high school is it's so quirky, it's so
off the wall. And also when this movie came out,
it became such a cultural impact that we were quoting
every single line from this movie, like this one your
moone goes to college. And for some reason there were
all these quotes that became so big that at the
time I didn't even fully get it, Like why is
(05:51):
this quote so memorable your moone goes to college? I
don't know, but I hear that and it immediately puts
me back into watching Napoleon Dynamite. And why I feel
this movie embodies the high school experience is because it's
all about those awkward years. It's about being weird. It's
about doing something ridiculous like running for president when you
have no chance of winning. It's also about having crushes
(06:12):
on people out of your league, very much identified with
Pedro in this movie, trying to go for the most
popular girl in school and failing completely. Also because there
was a language barrier, which I also feel on another level.
So at number nine, I have the quirkiest high school
movie of all time, Napoleon Dynamite. At number eight, we're
going back to the eighties, a decade that was just
(06:33):
filled with so many high school and college movies, I
think because they were relatively cheap to make, and also
at that time, we're just speaking so much to people
going to watching movies. So it was very much a
representation of that generation, which every good high school and
college movie should be, but one that I feel is
a little bit off the wall and almost doesn't even
(06:54):
fit in with the category of all the movies of
the eighties that were four teenagers at that time. It's
nineteen eighty six Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield. He
plays this self made millionaire and he has this successful
chain of plus sized clothing stores, which is such a
bizarre plot, but you think of Rodney Dangerfield, one of
the greatest comedians of all time, and that is a
(07:16):
role that only he could do. And he is trying
to help his son who is going through college not
having a good time. Rodney Dangerfield's character is going through
a lot personally as well, so he decides to go
back to school with the Sun, and he enters college
as a student himself. So it's almost like the reverse
of Billy Madison. And to me, this represents college in
(07:37):
the eighties and very much a snapshot into what you
could get away with in the eighties. But I feel
like Rodney Dangerfield's comedy, even though maybe at today's standards,
isn't always politically correct, it always had a very wholesome
attitude to it and you could very much get the
idea of that in the trailer for this movie back
in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Well, I should dream I'm going to college.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
This is the way I always pitched, Clint, When did.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
You dream going to college?
Speaker 3 (08:00):
When I used to fast for the high school man?
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Lot of woman. She is the teacher.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
I know, I like teaching. Do something Ruin and I
could do it over again. What do you say you
and I have done it tonight?
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Nactually I'd like to join you, but I have class tonight.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Why don't you call me some time when you have
no class?
Speaker 1 (08:17):
So, if you're just a fan of classic comedian humor,
this is such a fun movie to watch, and I
feel still holds up pretty well. So at number eight.
I have Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield at number seven.
Another movie from the eighties, I have Stand in Deliver.
I wanted to put a little bit more of a
serious high school movie and one that greatly represents the
(08:38):
struggles that Mexican Americans like myself have in high school.
The reason I feel this movie is a great representation
of high school from the perspective of somebody who either
has parents that come here from another country or you
yourself have come here from another country and are trying
to assimilate to American culture in a system that isn't
(09:00):
really geared towards you or your success. And that is
what you see in Stand and Deliver. You have Edward
James Almost's character, who plays the East LA math teacher
trying to motivate this group of students living in LA
to take their AP calculus very serious, to try and
get them to go from not caring about school to
(09:22):
testing highly an AP calculus in their senior year. So
you have all these students that do want a better life,
but they just never had a teacher tell them that
they had it in them. I feel like growing up
I saw kids make really bad decisions and ended up
in jail or in prison, and I realized that I
didn't really want that for myself, and growing up, I
(09:43):
didn't really have a whole lot of examples to teach
me how to do things correctly. My sister was the
first female and the first person ever on any sides
of my family, my mom's side or my dad's side.
She was the first one to go to college and
to graduate college, and I ended up becoming the first male.
And we didn't really have any kind of roadmap to
go on because my parents came here when they were teenagers.
(10:07):
They didn't make it out of elementary school, so they
didn't go to high school, much less college. So really
what I relied on was having teachers tell me that
there was something more out there for me. I think
the first time I ever had that was in elementary school.
I had a teacher named Miss Jeter, who was the
first one to speak to me in a way that,
even in the third grade, felt like I wasn't just
a kid. And she recognized my background and my culture
(10:31):
and didn't really try to change that but rather make
that the thing that made me special, and was the
first one to see potential in me, and I think
that was the first example for me that somebody actually
cared about me, much like Hymen Escalanta did and Stand
and Deliver, and that's probably why Edward James almost received
an Oscar nomination for this role. So one of my
(10:52):
favorite movies and a great depiction of high school life
for Latinos. That's why number seven my pick is Stand
and Deliver. At number six, I Have Never Been Kissed.
It's about Drew Barrymore's character who plays a reporter named
Josie who goes back to high school to do an
investigative piece and discover the real life of teenagers in
(11:13):
high school in the nineties, and through this assignment, she
is able to relive high school, but instead of being
the most unpopular person in high school, she's able to
turn the tables now that she is an adult and
tries to become the most popular person in high school.
The crazy thing about this movie is, first of all,
growing up, this was the high school experience I wanted.
(11:34):
I was eight years old when I first saw this movie,
and I thought, I want to be a teenager. I
want to go to high school because everything is going
to be cool. And by the time I got to
high school, I realized that it's not as cool as
it's made out to see. The other crazy thing to
me looking back on this movie now is at the time,
this was such a ridiculous thing and unheard of. But
(11:54):
now it seems like every few months I see a
story about this happening. In real life, there is a
twenty five or thirty year old going back to high
school and posing as a student. And at the time
when this movie came out, the plot seems so believable.
To me, you rooted for her to be able to
get that final kiss at the baseball game. Looking back
(12:15):
on it now, this would never happened in real life.
She would be in jail. It would be all over
TikTok with all these theories, and in no multiverse would
that final scene happen. But since it's a movie and
you can throw out all the real world stuff, it's
a great one. So at number six, I have never
been kissed. At number five, we're going back to the seventies,
(12:37):
and it's one of the most classic college movies of
all time. I have nineteen seventy eight's Animal House from
National Lampoon. It's a movie about two fraternities going head
to head. One is the group of misfits and the
other is a group of handsome young men who want
to take them down. You learn a lot about life
in Animal House. You learn about fraternity sorority life politics,
(13:01):
and a lot of party culture, which the first time
I watched this movie, I thought this is exactly what
college was going to be. Partying non stop and then
every now and then going to class. But I thought
college was going to be a non stop or ride
like this, and it turns out it's really not that.
And I think it's because I didn't really have the
(13:22):
traditional college experience. When I graduated high school in two
thousand and nine, I first went to community college. I
knew I wanted to get out of Waxahatchie, Texas, my hometown,
because for me, I just needed to see the world
a little bit more. I needed to go be on
my own to fully experience life and find my own way.
And I knew staying there I would get too comfortable,
(13:45):
I would never pursue the things I wanted to pursue
in life. And that's fine for some people, but for me,
I knew I needed to get out of there. If
I ever wanted a chance of pursuing what I want
to do now. So I left Waxahatchie and I moved
to Austin, Texas. And you think, oh, you probably went
to the University of Texas first, or maybe even Texas State,
But that's not what I did. I went to community
(14:06):
college first. I went to Austin Community College shout out
to the river Bats, because I really needed to figure
out what I wanted to do. I think that time
in your life is so crazy. You're seventeen, eighteen years
old and you have to decide what you want to
do for the rest of your life. What do you
want to go study? That was so overwhelming to me
that I realized I just needed to go to community college,
(14:28):
knock out my basics, and after a couple of years
reassess and figured out exactly what I wanted to pursue.
And even then I was still like, I still have
no idea what to do. I took so many different
classes and so many different majors that I just ended
up getting all over the place. So I think for
that reason, since I didn't live in a dorm, not
only in those first two years, but ever, I never
(14:49):
had this party experience like an Animal House or in
like all those classic college movies where you're just meeting
people and partying and it's all just one fun wild ride.
I never really had that at community college. I transferred
to Texas State, and even then I was working. I
was interning, so the time I was on college campus,
I was just there to go to class, do my homework,
(15:12):
and go back and do it all over again. So
I never really fully experienced that college life. Not to
say I didn't party a little bit, but it wasn't
the fun partying like you see an Animal House. It
was really just hanging out with my friends and boweling
off steam on the weekends. So I feel like if
there's one thing I regretted for my college years, was
not going to live on campus at least for a
(15:34):
year or two. Correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe I
feel like I'm missing something because I just thought that
college was supposed to be like Animal House, so therefore
I thought I failed. An Animal House has one of
my favorite comedic scenes of all time, Whenever the krusty,
bitter old dean is reading their midterm grades and they
are all terrible.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Mister mister Bluetowsky zero point zero. You're out finished at
Faber expelled. I want you off this campus at nine
o'clock Monday morning. And I'm sure you'll be happy to
know that I have notified your local draft boards and
told them that you are now all all eligible for
(16:17):
military service.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
So that is why I have Animal House from nineteen
seventy eight at number five. At number four, I have
Super Bad. The choke hold this movie had when it
came out in two thousand and seven on everybody. I
feel like it was the last raunchy comedy of this era.
It was the most successful comedy of two thousand and seven.
(16:39):
Back when multiple comedies were coming out a year, I
feel like at least every few weeks you would get
a new comedy in theaters. It's just not like that anymore.
The reason this movie was so successful was because of
the cast. You had Jonah Hill, you had Michael Sarah,
You have Christopher Mints plus as mclovin. You have Judd
Apatow producing the movie. You have seth Rogan and Bill Hayter.
(17:02):
It is an amazing comedic cast. It's like the Avengers
of comedy. And the premise really wasn't anything different from
the raunchy teen comedies that came before it. It's a
bunch of high school kids trying to lose their V card,
much like nineteen ninety nine's American Pie. I think what
made this movie so great was all of the memorable
lines and quotes, which I feel like ran rampant in
(17:24):
the two thousands. Every single comedy that came out was
just the banger with a quote that could easily be
slapped onto a T shirt, thrown onto a bumper sticker,
but most importantly be repeated by every single high school
after they saw a movie like super Bad. This movie
was so over the top. I love that it takes
place entirely in one day, but I feel like the
(17:47):
character that really stole the show in this movie was
the one and only.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Although I do feel a little bit like this movie
suffered from being overhyped, so I very much feel like
it was right time, right place for this movie to
come out in two thousand and seven, which is overall
one of my favorite years of film of all time,
if not my favorite year. I always kind of go
back and forth between two thousand and seven, twenty nineteen,
(18:16):
or nineteen ninety four, but this year was just so
formative on my taste that it will always be a
classic for me. It taught me about partying, It taught
me about underage drinking. In the end, it taught me
a lot about being myself. So at number four, I
have Super Bad getting into the top three. Now at
number three, I have two thousand and fours Mean Girls.
(18:38):
This movie is great from beginning to end. I can
hop into this movie at any point, whether it be
thirty minutes in in the last ten minutes, and I
sit down and watch the rest of this movie. It
has a great cast with Tina Fay, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams.
It has the memorable lines.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
She doesn't even go here.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
And what I love about Mean Girls, and the reason
I feel it really encap sure is that high school experience.
Is it so much speaks to the clicks that you
have in high school, and not just that, but how
important it was to fit in and be accepted by everybody.
And that's what Lindsay Lohan's character goes through in this movie.
And at first she doesn't fit in with the popular crowd,
(19:18):
the plastics, and she starts hanging out with who would
end up being her truest friends, and she just didn't
really realize it at the time. And together they get
the idea to infiltrate the plastics and bring their reign
of terror down, but during that process, she ends up
becoming a plastic herself, forgets about the plan, and ends
up letting down her first friends down in the process.
(19:41):
And I think, what this movie taught me about high school?
Is it so important just to be yourself and not
caring about what other people think. My biggest regret I
told you in college, Well, it's not partying enough, not
partying in the traditional college sense. But my biggest regret
in high school was caring so much about what people
(20:02):
thought about me. I think I actually would have had
more friends in high school, or any friends in high school,
if I just wouldn't have cared about what the people
I was trying to impress thought about me. I wanted
to be cool, even though I wasn't cool. I should
have just accepted the fact that I was kind of
a weirdo, kind of a loser into music that nobody
(20:22):
else liked. I dressed in all black, so people thought
I was some emo goth kid. I should have just
owned that and been friends with the other people like
me and stop trying to impress these people that I
was never going to win over. And I think what
I learned in Mean Girls is that small group of
friends you have that maybe aren't the coolest to everybody,
(20:44):
but they are so loyal and they know you better
than anybody. Be friends with those people, hang out with
those people, and don't care what anybody else thinks, because
in the end, those are going to be the people
who will always have your back. And high school is
so fleeting that I'm not friends with anybody I was
friends with still in high school. I hardly even talk
(21:05):
to them. The only time I really see those people
now is on Facebook. But I think I would have
had a much better time if I would have just
allowed myself to accept who I was and be friends
with who I wanted to be friends with. And I
probably would have had a better time in high school
and probably even had a girlfriend in high school, which
I never did. So Mean Girls taught us about clicks,
It taught us about being cool, but most important about
(21:26):
finding your true friends. And that is why I have
it at number three. At number two from two thousand
and three. I have old school talk about a movie
with an amazing cast, Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn,
directed by Todd Phillips, who would go on to direct
movies like The Hangover, Joker, War Dogs. He also makes
(21:47):
cameos in a lot of his movies, but he had
a really tight grip on the comedy genre. And to me,
this is the best college movie of all time because
it's about these guys who are all friends in college
and going back and reliving those days now in their
late thirties and forties. And it's a story about underdogs.
They go and recruit these non traditional students we're at
(22:10):
risk of getting evicted from their house. It has the
classic crusty, bitter old dean played by Jeremy Piven. And
what you learn in this movie about life. It's all
about the ups and downs of post college life, accepting
your fate as an adult. It also teaches you more
about fraternity and sorority life, college politics, and party culture. Also,
so many memorable lines in this movie. I think the
(22:32):
scene everybody thinks of is Will Ferrell going streaking. We're
going streaking, Snoop, snoop a loop, But My favorite line
in any comedy really is always the most obscure line
that I end up quoting time and time again. And
it's always something that's not even meant as a joke,
but for some reason I just pick up on it
and then use it later in my life. And my
(22:53):
favorite line and the entire movie of Old School is
whenever they are taking their test trying to prove the
Dean wrong, and they are taking the actual, like written,
standardized test, and it's a scene where they're all sitting
in the classroom and they're all cheating on this test,
and it's very obvious because they all have an ear piece,
and anytime the person down the line, which I think
in the movie is already laying as one of the
(23:14):
guys feeding them the answers, they go and put their
fingers up to their ear like they clearly have an
earpiece and are listening to somebody give them the answers.
But still, somehow Jeremy Piven doesn't pick up on it.
And there's a moment that Vince Vaughn just says this
very sly quiet line where he is essentially patronizing the
Dean and commending him on giving them such a great test,
(23:37):
good test. That's what I say, good test, good test.
You probably can't even hear in that clip, but he
whispers good test, good test. So I guess I've been
talking about how I want to go back and redo
my college experience. Maybe I'm just ten years away from
recreating old school. But at number one, it's not a
(23:57):
college movie. It is a high school movie. It is
from nineteen eighty five. It is The Breakfast Club. And
the reason I picked and put The Breakfast Club at
number one is because if this movie didn't exist, a
lot of these other movies I've been talking about would
not exist. It essentially became the blueprint of a teenage
(24:18):
drama slash comedy, and it's the movie that really created
and gave that voice to that generation in the eighties.
It's also because the movie represents every single stereotype in
high school. You have the bad boy, you have the
rich sorority girl, you have the jock, you have the nerd,
and you have the weirdo slash basket case. And it's
(24:39):
about all those stereotypes coming together and realizing that they
are not much different than each other. And I'm glad
by the time I went to high school, this old
school mentality started to change. There were still clicks, but
it didn't really feel like a jock couldn't be friends
with a weirdo, where a rich kid couldn't be friend
with a poor kid. I think later in the two thousands,
(25:01):
we all became a little bit more accepting of each
other and is probably an entirely different game right now
in high school, where none of the stuff that happened
in movies from back in the day even exists anymore.
So I feel like we have very much advanced in
a society. But I feel like this movie was so
important in the eighties to show we're not really that different.
We don't need to hate each other just because of
(25:23):
the stereotype we belonged to. But it did. After you
watch it, you think to yourself, who are you in
this movie? I would have been the weirdo his hands down,
I would have been that one. I just would have
been the quiet weirdo. But it has a lot of
great comedy throughout this movie. Probably my favorite scene is
Bender facing off with the principal. Eat my shorts.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
You just bought yourself another Saturday Misty, Oh crushed, You
just bought one more.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Right there, well on free the Saturday after that. Beyond that,
I'm gonna have to check my calendar.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Good, are you through?
Speaker 1 (25:58):
No, I'm doing society a favor.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
So that's another one. Right now.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
I've got you for the rest of your natural foreign life.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
If you don't watch your step, you want another one?
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Yes, you got it. You got another one right there.
That's another one, pal, And not only that, you have
one of the best uses of a song in a
movie with the fizz bump and the closing credits to match.
So at number one, the best high school and or
college movie of all time, it is nineteen eighty five's
(26:30):
The Breakfast Club. There were so many honorable mentions I
didn't get to. Nineteen ninety eight Can't Hardly Wait is
also one of my favorites because I feel like, unlike
all the other teen movies of the nineties, this one
feels the least mean spirited to me. It also has
Jennifer Love Hewitt, who I feel like was the heart
throb of the nineties and my crush growing up. I
(26:52):
also wanted to throw in BookSmart from twenty nineteen because
I feel like it is the modern version of Super Bad.
From the female perspective. I also just love movies that
take place entirely in one day. You also have two
thousand and eight's The House Bunny, Legally Blonde from two
thousand and one, The Edge of Seventeen, which is a
really good high school movie with Hailey Steinfeld. On the
(27:13):
college side, you have Goodwill hunting the Social Network, and
another great woman from the two thousands, Accepted, which is
pretty dumb when you think about it, but it has
a lot of charm to it. So that is my list.
I'll come back and give my spoiler free movie review
a Blue Beetle, and then we'll talk about Vacation Friends too.
(27:34):
Let's get into it now, a spoiler free movie review.
I want to talk about DC's Blue Beetle, and before
I even get into this review, I have to issue
a Mexican bias alert because I know, as a Mexican
American going into this movie, I was going to enjoy
it more than the average person. Because you have your
first Latino star in a DC superhero movie, Jim Reyes
(27:57):
played by Zola Marithuena. You have a Latino right director
and primarily Latino cast, so I feel like for me,
this is the first time I'm really seeing my people
represented on the big screen in my favorite genre. Why
is it taken so long? So there were a lot
of things in this movie that just hit with me,
that made me realize they made this movie exactly for
(28:18):
people like me. All of the references, even the music
and the character names. I just knew that they had me.
Even when I walked into the theater. Our entire row
was taken out by a Mexican family, and that just
warmed my heart as well. You had a mom, dad, brother, cousin,
and a baby. I'm not the biggest fan of always
bringing babies into PG thirteen rated movies, but I asked
the kid what his name was and he said Porfino Mondragon.
(28:40):
So I'm like, all right, let him in. So what
this movie is about. Our main character is named Jim
Rees and his life is changed forever after this alien
relic chooses him as a symbiotic host and he becomes
the Blue Beetle. If you had to compare this movie
to a Marvel movie, it's probably a lot like Ant Man.
So I feel like if anybody has a reason and
they're not gonna like this movie, it's because maybe you
(29:02):
didn't like ant Man. Maybe there's just something about making
a superhero movie about an insect that people get turned
off by, unless you're Spider Man. But the comic book
elitist will say that Blue Beetle came out before ant Man,
But I always look at it from a film perspective,
and whenever they first debuted on the big screen. What
I did enjoy about Blue Beetle is it was a
very good representation of what a kid like Hymen would
(29:23):
go through having this thing take over his body and
transforming him into a superhero and navigating how to use
these powers. I feel like there were a lot of
moments in this movie that represented what I would do
in the situation of figuring out how to fight, not
wanting to kill other people, and overall just being overwhelmed
by the process, which is something I feel like is
it really represented in movies. Throughout this entire movie, you
(29:45):
see Hymen really struggle with it and have to come
to his own to be able to harness the powers
of the Blue Beetle and therefore become the Blue Beetle.
So I felt like there was a lot of growth
in his character, and that was just one of the
ways I related to his character in the movie. He
is the first in his family to go and graduate college.
That is where we find him at the start of
this movie. He just gets home from college and then
(30:06):
his parents deliver some pretty bad news that they're going
through a lot of financial struggles. His dad is having
some health issues, so his world kind of comes crumbling
down as he's trying to start his new life. He
feels like he has now let his parents down and
is trying to find a way to support his family.
And this is where I'm going to get into the
biased stuff, because I felt like him and his family
(30:27):
was such a great representation of the Mexican American family
that I've not seen portrayed at this level on the
big screen in a big Hollywood production. I always feel
like Mexican American characters are minimized, and sometimes we are
caricatures or just bad versions of what Mexican life is
really like. But there were so many things in this
(30:48):
movie that felt authentic to me that I could tell
that there were Latino actors trying to really portray things
and put things in this movie that Mexicans actually do,
that Mexicans actually listen to. That Mexicans actually even trucks
that Mexicans actually drive. This was all represented in this movie.
I feel like George Lopez's character was a great representation
(31:08):
of that. His name is Rudy. I have a brother
named Rudy, So right off the bat, I was like,
that could be my brother right there. And from the
very first time he was on screen, he pulled up
in his trug listening to Lostocanas that Tijuana and I
was like, that would be the equivalent if you grew
up listening to country music and it never heard an
Alan Jackson song in a movie and that was the
first time you heard it. That is how it felt
(31:29):
to me. And then when it comes to the language,
which is a big part of this movie, I love
that Blue Beetle committed to using Spanish throughout the movie
and at times the Spanish wasn't even subtitles, and that
felt more authentic to me because a lot of the
stuff sometimes doesn't translate. I think if you grow up
speaking Spanish, there are just some phrases we use that
if you tried to translate it to English, it just
(31:51):
wouldn't really make sense. But it makes sense to us.
It's a pretty big risk. Using that much Spanish in
a movie, you could turn a lot of people off,
but I love the commitment to it. They also balanced
it pretty well with using Spanglish, going back and forth
between English and Spanish, which is something that Mexican American
families are just accustomed to. When your parents are from Mexico,
your grandparents are from Mexico, you grow up in America.
(32:14):
Primarily you start learning English because you go to school here,
but your parents still speak Spanish, and then through them
going to work and living in this country for an
extended period of time, they start to learn English. And
the way we just communicate is mixing it all together. Oftentimes,
when I call my mom, sometimes I'll speak to her
in English, She'll speak back to me in Spanish. When
I talk to my dad, kind of the same, or
(32:36):
sometimes we just go back and forth a lot. You
could have an entire sentence where every other word is
in a different language, and for some reason we just
get it. It works for us, and that is what
was shown a lot in Blue Beetle. And it never
felt forced or cheesy to me, which always turns me
off in a movie when they have to overemphasize words
like Dorothia Thaco and stuff like that, I just rather
(32:58):
than not use it at all. But in this case,
I loved every instance of it. Everything from the way
that their house looked they had the Vidhican that Juada
Lupe on the wall, from the TV shows they were watching,
from the music they were listening to. Like I mentioned before,
everything about it just felt so authentic. And then it
comes to the characters, which I did really a little
bit with himaed like I said earlier, being the only
(33:19):
male in my family to go and graduate college. But
he's also just like really good looking, so there was
other things about his personality that wasn't exactly me. But
the character that just kind of struck with me so
much was the dad. If my dad was taken out
of the real world and put onto the big screen,
it would be Heima's dad, and I felt like his
(33:40):
character was so important for me just feeling this emotional
connection to this film. Without the Dad, I probably wouldn't
have felt this movie as much in my heart. But
just the way he acted, the way he cared about
his family, even just the way he spoke and the
way he looked that real just blue collar, working hard
to provide for his family mentality that is my dad.
(34:04):
The character here is probably a little bit more positive
than my dad. My dad curses a lot more and
isn't as poignant with his feelings, but deep down, that
is exactly my dad. Especially the scene where he was
having a heart to heart with his son and he
was drinking a beer and telling him not to tell
his mom. I've had many instances of that with my dad.
And that's all I'll say about his dad. I do
want to give a spoiler version of this review getting
(34:27):
all the topics, and I'll talk more about his dad
as I'm going to start get emotional thinking about this
movie again, which is something I really wasn't expecting for
this movie to do. But I will share the line
about coming to this country and he said that crossing
the border is hard, but you know what's harder than
twenty years after, and that was so true. I thought
of my dad, who came here as a teenager. He
(34:49):
worked all these various jobs, from cleaning escalators to doing maintenance,
to being a mechanic doing yard work, and finally found
his way being a truck driver and has now done
that for over thirty years. So yes, coming to this
country is hard, but what's even harder is building a
life here and doing all the things to achieve that
(35:09):
American dream. So that line is one of my favorite
lines in any DC movie, and also just the fact
that we finally have our own superhero. Now the hard
part comes in is I don't know what's going to
happen to Blue Beetle after this is not really connected
with the DCEU. We have Aquaman coming later this year,
and it seems like James Gunn is just gonna scrap
(35:30):
everything and start new with Superman and building all these characters.
So I don't know what's going to happen with Blue Beetle.
Will we get another movie? Probably not, And it hurts
even more that it didn't really make much at the
box office, which it wasn't really expected to. They didn't
really spend that much on marketing or promotion. The budget
was one hundred and four million and it opened to
(35:53):
forty three million dollars worldwide, which isn't great, and out
of all the DCEU domestic opening weekends, it is at
the bottom. It is behind the Flash, it is behind
Shazam two. Blue Beetle only opened to twenty four point
five million dollars in the United States. But when I
look at all these DCEU movies, everything from Man of
(36:13):
Steel to Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Justice League, Aquaman, the
First Zam, Birds of Prey, the only thing I would
rank higher than this movie is the Suicide Squad. That's
the only one. Maybe Man of Steel given the day.
Maybe it's because I just watched Blue Beetle and I
have recency bias, but it was just so good that
(36:35):
I feel like the money that it's made doesn't really
represent the film. And then it's a rare case and
I come on here and often I try not to
just all out bash DC. I always give them the
benefit of the doubt because they have such great characters.
And this is the case where I don't even feel
that it's getting that much hate. It just didn't really
do that well because people weren't hyped about it, and
(36:56):
you also have the strike going on, they couldn't really
promote it as much. The summer blockbuster season is also
dwindling down right now that I feel like maybe it
wasn't the right time for it to come out. But
also it's hard to sell a brand new character, and
it's also speaking to a very niche audience if you
are focusing on the Mexican demographic. But I feel like
this is a movie everybody should get a shot too,
(37:18):
because I want to see more characters like this on
the big screen. Doesn't always have to be a superhero movie,
but I just love big blockbusters with Mexican faces and
it it just makes me happy. So now it comes
down to what I will rate Blue Beetle. Let me
remind you of my Mexican bias. I would honestly say
(37:40):
if I was a Mexican and if I hadn't related
with all of these characters, it would probably on its
own be a three or a three point five at best.
But the fact that this movie really got me emotionally,
and I was so invested in all these characters and
it felt so familiar to me, and it brought so
(38:00):
much joy to see things that I've never seen in
a movie from my background, from my culture. I saw
me in this movie, I saw my dad in this movie,
and I left the theater just completely riding a high
that I had never really felt before. So again, probably
a three to you if you're not Mexican, maybe a
three point five if you just love DC. But I'm
(38:22):
gonna give a Blue Beetle a four point five out
of five Scaubs. And I will say at times the
acting is a little bit cheesy. That is probably what
kept me a little bit out of it in the beginning.
I'd say in that first ten to fifteen minutes, it
felt a little bit like a cheesy action movie to me,
Like there's a big, dark villain and then you have
(38:42):
this nice kid and then they're all going to clash together.
And I was worried about that. But once the action
got going at the end of that first act, I
felt like that cheesiness kind of went away. It creeps
back every now and then, and this movie doesn't really
go way beyond the superhero formula. It stays pretty close
to it. So again, this is with the Mexican bias,
also with it hitting me more emotionally, which I will
(39:05):
explain more in the spoiler review. So probably on a
normal day I would have given it a four, but
because of the impact it had on me, I'm sticking
with that four point five out of five scaubs. It's
time to head down to movie. Mike treylar par Vacation Friends,
(39:26):
who is coming out soon on Hulu. Depending on when
you're listening to this on August twenty fifth, it could
be coming out this Friday, or it could already be out.
And this is a sequel. I was not expecting to
be as excited as I am. It's a very rare category,
where the first one. I don't want to say it's
(39:46):
a great comedy because it's so ridiculous. And if it
was a movie I would recommend to you and say
this is a funny movie, you would probably watch it
and think, Mike, what in your right mind are you thinking?
Because it's so cheesy. It's so over the top at
times cringeworthy. But for some reason, I just kept thinking
about Vacation Friends, and after watching it, I thought that
(40:08):
was a good time. It didn't really test anything as
far as the levels of comedy or push the envelope
on cinema, but sometimes you just want a movie so
ridiculous that you can turn your brain off, not think
about anything except every ridiculous action that is happening, and thinking,
you know what, that was a fun time. It accomplished
what it needed to do. I didn't go to the
(40:30):
theater to see it, so no harm done. And then
watching the trailer for Vacation Friends Too, I thought they
might actually have something here, and I'll explain more why
that could be the case. But the premise of this
movie in the first one is it's just this couple
who goes on vacation and ends up making friends with
this other couple who are a lot of fun on vacation,
(40:51):
even though they get into some pretty sticky situations. But
then the vacation ends and they end up wanting to
be friends in real life. So it's you are all
right vacation, but I don't really want to be friends
with you in my real adult life. So the plot
of Vacation Friends Too is them reuniting again on the
vacation and going on another ridiculous adventure. This will looks
(41:12):
a little bit more action packed. The fact that the
first one was I guess a moderate success that they
could make a sequel. They got a little bit more
money to play around with in the budget, and it
almost looks more like a comedy action movie now. So
here is just a little bit of Vacation Friends Too.
Look at us all together again.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
We just wanted to give you, guys a Real heardy Moon?
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Just sound this crawling under a table? He's Clingy's the
reason I've never seen that much water come up a
person before. Did I throw up a lot? But hole
threw up bud? So who would have thought that Lil
(41:54):
Real and John Cena would be a great on screen
comedy duo and be a pair that I would want
to see in another installment of a movie that is
utterly ridiculous. And I have no shame in saying that
this is a comedy I enjoy, even though I know
on paper it isn't a great comedy. How I would
compare this if you went to a restaurant and ordered
(42:16):
dessert and they gave you a little Debbie snack, you
would say, this is not what I was expecting. I
was expecting some gourmet dessert created by a chef. But
if you ate that little Debbie snack, whether it be
a honey bun or a brownie or a Swiss cake roll,
you would eat it and think, you know, that's actually
pretty good. It's just not what I was expecting in
this moment, but it gets the job done, and little
(42:36):
Debbie snacks are really nobody's favorite dessert. But if you're
at a gas station, you have nothing else to eat.
You eat it and enjoy it. It reminds you of
your childhood vacation. Friends Too is the little Debbie Snacks
of comedy. Probably has a little bit too much sugar.
You're not really a fan of all the ingredients because
what they do to your body, so overall it's probably
not the best for you. But there's just something about
(42:58):
the way it goes down that really hits that spot.
I almost feel like it is the new Hangover getting
a sequel now. I feel like it has the potential
to be a new franchise Like that, it will never
reach the level of popularity or cultural impact that a
Hangover has because it has less star power. It also
has less eyes on it. Being a twentieth century Studios
(43:19):
film debuting exclusively on Hulu, I just feel like no
comedy is ever going to have that big of an
impact anymore as it did in the two thousands. But
I really got to give it to twentieth century studios
of really knowing their lane when it comes to comedies.
They're not really putting out anything completely groundbreaking, But I
feel like anybody who just needs that it scratched of
(43:40):
having a new comedy. They're very much feeding that audience,
so they kind of found their niche here and really
just going after that dynamic of comedy, and it can
be all types of comedies, whether it be just wacky,
over the top comedies like this, stark comedies, more sophisticated comedies.
They're very much just owning that genre right now. I
(44:00):
feel like that is why Hulu has creeped up into
one of my favorite streaming services, because they are taking
chances on movies like this, and this has been one
of the first cases of me seeing a sequel to
one of their comedies. So it's coming out on Hulu
on August twenty fifth. It takes place just months after
the original Vacation Friends, so if you haven't seen that
one yet, I would say start with that one and
(44:22):
if you're completely turned off by it in the first
thirty minutes, you're probably not going to like the rest
of it. But if you end up enjoying it, then
I think you'll be like me and be excited oddly
for Vacation Friends too. They're also throwing Steve Buscemi in
the cast now, so either they're doing something right or
all these actors are just doing these movies to get
a paycheck. At that for this week's edition of Movie Lin,
(44:46):
Frame or Bar and that's gonna do it for another
episode here of the podcast. But before I go, I
gotta give my listeners shout out of the week. This
week we are going over to Twitter because I posted
the question what is your favorite high school or college
movie of time to get an idea of what you
had to say? And this week's listener shout out is
to Gina Blade, who replied with her top three that
(45:06):
include The Breakfast Club, sixteen Candles, and Fast Times at
Ridgemont High. Like I said, the eighties were a great
time for high school movies. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
probably should have made my honorable mentions. My favorite thing
about that movie is Sean Penn started a trend with
the slip on checkered vands after his character wore them
in that movie. It was on the poster, everybody started
(45:28):
wearing the checkered vans, and look, forty years later, they're
still popular. So thank you Gino for sharing your top three,
Thank you for listening, and until next time, go out
and watch good movies. And I will talk to you later.
Hello, and welcome back to Movie Mike's Movie Podcast. We
are going back to school on this episode and celebration
of all the kids and college students going back to school,
I have for you my top ten high school and
college movies of all time. In the movie review, I'll
be talking about DC's Blue Beetle, a movie that warned
my little Mexican heart. And in the trailer Park, we'll
(00:23):
be talking about a sequel to an unexpected comedy hit,
Vacation Friends Too, coming to you soon on Hulu. Thank
you for being subscribed, thank you for listening to the podcast.
And now, movie Crew, let's talk movies.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
In a world where everyone and their mother has a podcast,
one man stands to infiltrate the ears of listeners like
never before in a movie podcast. A man with so
much movie knowledge, he's basically like a walking IMTB with glasses.
From the Nashville Podcast Network.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
This is Movie Mike's Movie Podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
The summer is winding down, Kids are going back to school,
college kids are filling up targets so I can't get
my almond milk, and I want to share with you
my top ten high school and college movies of all time.
That's right. It is time to go.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Back to a school.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Back to a school. So let's break down the rules
for this list. Similar to an episode I did last
week about the top summer movies of all time, these
movies completely have to embody the high school and or
college experience. I almost day a top five college, I
almost date a top five high school. But I realized,
in the spirit of back to school, let's combine them
(01:38):
all together to give you the ultimate experience to relive
your high school or college days. First of all, they
have to take place in high school or college, and
as I go through this list, I will relate different
movies to my life. And I'm also throwing out the
rule no sports movies. I feel like those are in
a completely different genre, So you won't find any sports
(01:58):
movies on my list superhero movies. So let's kick it
off at number ten. I have a movie from twenty
twelve call Project X. Even though I was out of
high school in the twenty tens, I feel like this
movie is a complete representation of what was going on
at that time. The movie is about three friends who
are basically nobody's in high school. They are seniors, and
(02:20):
they are trying to make their mark on the legacy
of their high school career. So what do they do.
They throw the ultimate party of all time, completely shutting
down their entire neighborhood. At one point there's police and helicopters.
It's a very extreme case of a party. But growing
up and going to parties in high school that I
(02:41):
was not invited to, I very much felt like what
these three kids felt like in this movie, a complete nobody,
an outcast, and somebody who just wanted to do one
thing to leave an impression on your entire class. And
the movie starts out innocent enough, and then it just
keeps escalating and escalating until pretty much this party is
going to ruin not only their college life, but probably
(03:03):
their life after this. And I think this movie is
a great representation of the twenty tens, where it seemed
like everybody was just partying. If you turn on the radio,
everything was like, let's live life like it's gonna and
to nine, let's go to the club. Everything was so
dance centric and just let's live in the moment and
everything is gonna be fine. And now a decade later,
(03:23):
I'm looking at myself and thinking everything was not fine,
Pitt Bull. We are struggling now, and it's all because
you told me to party in the twenty tens, like
there was no tomorrow, but now there are repercussions. But
there's one song on this soundtrack that just I feel
like couldn't spark anybody who grew up or went to
college or high school in the twenty tens, and it
is the Steve Aoki remix of Kid Cut He's Pursuit
(03:44):
of Happiness. Like that's all I need to hear to
invoke the emotions of the twenty tens, just those few notes.
So this is such a fun movie, maybe one you
miss because it was one that just kind of came
out in a mix of all these outlandish comedies in
the twenty tens, kind of writing the cote tails of
(04:05):
everybody wanting another hangover. But I love this movie so much,
so at number ten, I have Project X. At number nine,
I'm going back to two thousand and four, and it
is Napoleon Dynamite, which I feel greatly in capsules the
awkwardness of high school, and that is how I described
my high school experience. I was the elite level of
(04:26):
awkward in high school because I didn't speak much, and
when you don't speak much in high school, you very
much become an outsider. I was very much in this
weird position, kind of like Napoleon Dynamite in this movie.
But unlike Napoleon Dynamite. I think like my bullying kind
of weird off in high school, and I was just
weird for the sake of being weird. But I think
it was because the fact that I didn't really say
(04:47):
a whole lot that I didn't really have a whole
lot of people just go out of their way to
ridicule me like they do Napoleon Dynamite. But I was
just so far in the background that I kind of
just evaporated into nothingness. I almost didn't exist in high
school because I was so awkward. I didn't say enough
things for people to have an opinion on me. I
just kind of existed and went through everyday feeling kind
(05:09):
of invisible. There were a lot of lunches alone and
a lot of time I just spent inside my head.
So I feel like when Napoleon Dynamite came out, I
felt like, man, there is a character who is kind
of like me. If I was a little bit more
outgoing and ridiculous. With my awkwardness that was all hiding
inside of me, I would very much be a Napoleon Dynamite.
And what I love about Napoleon Dynamite and the way
(05:31):
it represents high school is it's so quirky, it's so
off the wall. And also when this movie came out,
it became such a cultural impact that we were quoting
every single line from this movie, like this one your
moone goes to college. And for some reason there were
all these quotes that became so big that at the
time I didn't even fully get it, Like why is
(05:51):
this quote so memorable your moone goes to college? I
don't know, but I hear that and it immediately puts
me back into watching Napoleon Dynamite. And why I feel
this movie embodies the high school experience is because it's
all about those awkward years. It's about being weird. It's
about doing something ridiculous like running for president when you
have no chance of winning. It's also about having crushes
(06:12):
on people out of your league, very much identified with
Pedro in this movie, trying to go for the most
popular girl in school and failing completely. Also because there
was a language barrier, which I also feel on another level.
So at number nine, I have the quirkiest high school
movie of all time, Napoleon Dynamite. At number eight, we're
going back to the eighties, a decade that was just
(06:33):
filled with so many high school and college movies, I
think because they were relatively cheap to make, and also
at that time, we're just speaking so much to people
going to watching movies. So it was very much a
representation of that generation, which every good high school and
college movie should be, but one that I feel is
a little bit off the wall and almost doesn't even
(06:54):
fit in with the category of all the movies of
the eighties that were four teenagers at that time. It's
nineteen eighty six Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield. He
plays this self made millionaire and he has this successful
chain of plus sized clothing stores, which is such a
bizarre plot, but you think of Rodney Dangerfield, one of
the greatest comedians of all time, and that is a
(07:16):
role that only he could do. And he is trying
to help his son who is going through college not
having a good time. Rodney Dangerfield's character is going through
a lot personally as well, so he decides to go
back to school with the Sun, and he enters college
as a student himself. So it's almost like the reverse
of Billy Madison. And to me, this represents college in
(07:37):
the eighties and very much a snapshot into what you
could get away with in the eighties. But I feel
like Rodney Dangerfield's comedy, even though maybe at today's standards,
isn't always politically correct, it always had a very wholesome
attitude to it and you could very much get the
idea of that in the trailer for this movie back
in nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Well, I should dream I'm going to college.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
This is the way I always pitched, Clint, When did.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
You dream going to college?
Speaker 3 (08:00):
When I used to fast for the high school man?
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Lot of woman. She is the teacher.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
I know, I like teaching. Do something Ruin and I
could do it over again. What do you say you
and I have done it tonight?
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Nactually I'd like to join you, but I have class tonight.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Why don't you call me some time when you have
no class?
Speaker 1 (08:17):
So, if you're just a fan of classic comedian humor,
this is such a fun movie to watch, and I
feel still holds up pretty well. So at number eight.
I have Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield at number seven.
Another movie from the eighties, I have Stand in Deliver.
I wanted to put a little bit more of a
serious high school movie and one that greatly represents the
(08:38):
struggles that Mexican Americans like myself have in high school.
The reason I feel this movie is a great representation
of high school from the perspective of somebody who either
has parents that come here from another country or you
yourself have come here from another country and are trying
to assimilate to American culture in a system that isn't
(09:00):
really geared towards you or your success. And that is
what you see in Stand and Deliver. You have Edward
James Almost's character, who plays the East LA math teacher
trying to motivate this group of students living in LA
to take their AP calculus very serious, to try and
get them to go from not caring about school to
(09:22):
testing highly an AP calculus in their senior year. So
you have all these students that do want a better life,
but they just never had a teacher tell them that
they had it in them. I feel like growing up
I saw kids make really bad decisions and ended up
in jail or in prison, and I realized that I
didn't really want that for myself, and growing up, I
(09:43):
didn't really have a whole lot of examples to teach
me how to do things correctly. My sister was the
first female and the first person ever on any sides
of my family, my mom's side or my dad's side.
She was the first one to go to college and
to graduate college, and I ended up becoming the first male.
And we didn't really have any kind of roadmap to
go on because my parents came here when they were teenagers.
(10:07):
They didn't make it out of elementary school, so they
didn't go to high school, much less college. So really
what I relied on was having teachers tell me that
there was something more out there for me. I think
the first time I ever had that was in elementary school.
I had a teacher named Miss Jeter, who was the
first one to speak to me in a way that,
even in the third grade, felt like I wasn't just
a kid. And she recognized my background and my culture
(10:31):
and didn't really try to change that but rather make
that the thing that made me special, and was the
first one to see potential in me, and I think
that was the first example for me that somebody actually
cared about me, much like Hymen Escalanta did and Stand
and Deliver, and that's probably why Edward James almost received
an Oscar nomination for this role. So one of my
(10:52):
favorite movies and a great depiction of high school life
for Latinos. That's why number seven my pick is Stand
and Deliver. At number six, I Have Never Been Kissed.
It's about Drew Barrymore's character who plays a reporter named
Josie who goes back to high school to do an
investigative piece and discover the real life of teenagers in
(11:13):
high school in the nineties, and through this assignment, she
is able to relive high school, but instead of being
the most unpopular person in high school, she's able to
turn the tables now that she is an adult and
tries to become the most popular person in high school.
The crazy thing about this movie is, first of all,
growing up, this was the high school experience I wanted.
(11:34):
I was eight years old when I first saw this movie,
and I thought, I want to be a teenager. I
want to go to high school because everything is going
to be cool. And by the time I got to
high school, I realized that it's not as cool as
it's made out to see. The other crazy thing to
me looking back on this movie now is at the time,
this was such a ridiculous thing and unheard of. But
(11:54):
now it seems like every few months I see a
story about this happening. In real life, there is a
twenty five or thirty year old going back to high
school and posing as a student. And at the time
when this movie came out, the plot seems so believable.
To me, you rooted for her to be able to
get that final kiss at the baseball game. Looking back
(12:15):
on it now, this would never happened in real life.
She would be in jail. It would be all over
TikTok with all these theories, and in no multiverse would
that final scene happen. But since it's a movie and
you can throw out all the real world stuff, it's
a great one. So at number six, I have never
been kissed. At number five, we're going back to the seventies,
(12:37):
and it's one of the most classic college movies of
all time. I have nineteen seventy eight's Animal House from
National Lampoon. It's a movie about two fraternities going head
to head. One is the group of misfits and the
other is a group of handsome young men who want
to take them down. You learn a lot about life
in Animal House. You learn about fraternity sorority life politics,
(13:01):
and a lot of party culture, which the first time
I watched this movie, I thought this is exactly what
college was going to be. Partying non stop and then
every now and then going to class. But I thought
college was going to be a non stop or ride
like this, and it turns out it's really not that.
And I think it's because I didn't really have the
(13:22):
traditional college experience. When I graduated high school in two
thousand and nine, I first went to community college. I
knew I wanted to get out of Waxahatchie, Texas, my hometown,
because for me, I just needed to see the world
a little bit more. I needed to go be on
my own to fully experience life and find my own way.
And I knew staying there I would get too comfortable,
(13:45):
I would never pursue the things I wanted to pursue
in life. And that's fine for some people, but for me,
I knew I needed to get out of there. If
I ever wanted a chance of pursuing what I want
to do now. So I left Waxahatchie and I moved
to Austin, Texas. And you think, oh, you probably went
to the University of Texas first, or maybe even Texas State,
But that's not what I did. I went to community
(14:06):
college first. I went to Austin Community College shout out
to the river Bats, because I really needed to figure
out what I wanted to do. I think that time
in your life is so crazy. You're seventeen, eighteen years
old and you have to decide what you want to
do for the rest of your life. What do you
want to go study? That was so overwhelming to me
that I realized I just needed to go to community college,
(14:28):
knock out my basics, and after a couple of years
reassess and figured out exactly what I wanted to pursue.
And even then I was still like, I still have
no idea what to do. I took so many different
classes and so many different majors that I just ended
up getting all over the place. So I think for
that reason, since I didn't live in a dorm, not
only in those first two years, but ever, I never
(14:49):
had this party experience like an Animal House or in
like all those classic college movies where you're just meeting
people and partying and it's all just one fun wild ride.
I never really had that at community college. I transferred
to Texas State, and even then I was working. I
was interning, so the time I was on college campus,
I was just there to go to class, do my homework,
(15:12):
and go back and do it all over again. So
I never really fully experienced that college life. Not to
say I didn't party a little bit, but it wasn't
the fun partying like you see an Animal House. It
was really just hanging out with my friends and boweling
off steam on the weekends. So I feel like if
there's one thing I regretted for my college years, was
not going to live on campus at least for a
(15:34):
year or two. Correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe I
feel like I'm missing something because I just thought that
college was supposed to be like Animal House, so therefore
I thought I failed. An Animal House has one of
my favorite comedic scenes of all time, Whenever the krusty,
bitter old dean is reading their midterm grades and they
are all terrible.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Mister mister Bluetowsky zero point zero. You're out finished at
Faber expelled. I want you off this campus at nine
o'clock Monday morning. And I'm sure you'll be happy to
know that I have notified your local draft boards and
told them that you are now all all eligible for
(16:17):
military service.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
So that is why I have Animal House from nineteen
seventy eight at number five. At number four, I have
Super Bad. The choke hold this movie had when it
came out in two thousand and seven on everybody. I
feel like it was the last raunchy comedy of this era.
It was the most successful comedy of two thousand and seven.
(16:39):
Back when multiple comedies were coming out a year, I
feel like at least every few weeks you would get
a new comedy in theaters. It's just not like that anymore.
The reason this movie was so successful was because of
the cast. You had Jonah Hill, you had Michael Sarah,
You have Christopher Mints plus as mclovin. You have Judd
Apatow producing the movie. You have seth Rogan and Bill Hayter.
(17:02):
It is an amazing comedic cast. It's like the Avengers
of comedy. And the premise really wasn't anything different from
the raunchy teen comedies that came before it. It's a
bunch of high school kids trying to lose their V card,
much like nineteen ninety nine's American Pie. I think what
made this movie so great was all of the memorable
lines and quotes, which I feel like ran rampant in
(17:24):
the two thousands. Every single comedy that came out was
just the banger with a quote that could easily be
slapped onto a T shirt, thrown onto a bumper sticker,
but most importantly be repeated by every single high school
after they saw a movie like super Bad. This movie
was so over the top. I love that it takes
place entirely in one day, but I feel like the
(17:47):
character that really stole the show in this movie was
the one and only.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Although I do feel a little bit like this movie
suffered from being overhyped, so I very much feel like
it was right time, right place for this movie to
come out in two thousand and seven, which is overall
one of my favorite years of film of all time,
if not my favorite year. I always kind of go
back and forth between two thousand and seven, twenty nineteen,
(18:16):
or nineteen ninety four, but this year was just so
formative on my taste that it will always be a
classic for me. It taught me about partying, It taught
me about underage drinking. In the end, it taught me
a lot about being myself. So at number four, I
have Super Bad getting into the top three. Now at
number three, I have two thousand and fours Mean Girls.
(18:38):
This movie is great from beginning to end. I can
hop into this movie at any point, whether it be
thirty minutes in in the last ten minutes, and I
sit down and watch the rest of this movie. It
has a great cast with Tina Fay, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams.
It has the memorable lines.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
She doesn't even go here.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
And what I love about Mean Girls, and the reason
I feel it really encap sure is that high school experience.
Is it so much speaks to the clicks that you
have in high school, and not just that, but how
important it was to fit in and be accepted by everybody.
And that's what Lindsay Lohan's character goes through in this movie.
And at first she doesn't fit in with the popular crowd,
(19:18):
the plastics, and she starts hanging out with who would
end up being her truest friends, and she just didn't
really realize it at the time. And together they get
the idea to infiltrate the plastics and bring their reign
of terror down, but during that process, she ends up
becoming a plastic herself, forgets about the plan, and ends
up letting down her first friends down in the process.
(19:41):
And I think, what this movie taught me about high school?
Is it so important just to be yourself and not
caring about what other people think. My biggest regret I
told you in college, Well, it's not partying enough, not
partying in the traditional college sense. But my biggest regret
in high school was caring so much about what people
(20:02):
thought about me. I think I actually would have had
more friends in high school, or any friends in high school,
if I just wouldn't have cared about what the people
I was trying to impress thought about me. I wanted
to be cool, even though I wasn't cool. I should
have just accepted the fact that I was kind of
a weirdo, kind of a loser into music that nobody
(20:22):
else liked. I dressed in all black, so people thought
I was some emo goth kid. I should have just
owned that and been friends with the other people like
me and stop trying to impress these people that I
was never going to win over. And I think what
I learned in Mean Girls is that small group of
friends you have that maybe aren't the coolest to everybody,
(20:44):
but they are so loyal and they know you better
than anybody. Be friends with those people, hang out with
those people, and don't care what anybody else thinks, because
in the end, those are going to be the people
who will always have your back. And high school is
so fleeting that I'm not friends with anybody I was
friends with still in high school. I hardly even talk
(21:05):
to them. The only time I really see those people
now is on Facebook. But I think I would have
had a much better time if I would have just
allowed myself to accept who I was and be friends
with who I wanted to be friends with. And I
probably would have had a better time in high school
and probably even had a girlfriend in high school, which
I never did. So Mean Girls taught us about clicks,
It taught us about being cool, but most important about
(21:26):
finding your true friends. And that is why I have
it at number three. At number two from two thousand
and three. I have old school talk about a movie
with an amazing cast, Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn,
directed by Todd Phillips, who would go on to direct
movies like The Hangover, Joker, War Dogs. He also makes
(21:47):
cameos in a lot of his movies, but he had
a really tight grip on the comedy genre. And to me,
this is the best college movie of all time because
it's about these guys who are all friends in college
and going back and reliving those days now in their
late thirties and forties. And it's a story about underdogs.
They go and recruit these non traditional students we're at
(22:10):
risk of getting evicted from their house. It has the
classic crusty, bitter old dean played by Jeremy Piven. And
what you learn in this movie about life. It's all
about the ups and downs of post college life, accepting
your fate as an adult. It also teaches you more
about fraternity and sorority life, college politics, and party culture. Also,
so many memorable lines in this movie. I think the
(22:32):
scene everybody thinks of is Will Ferrell going streaking. We're
going streaking, Snoop, snoop a loop, But My favorite line
in any comedy really is always the most obscure line
that I end up quoting time and time again. And
it's always something that's not even meant as a joke,
but for some reason I just pick up on it
and then use it later in my life. And my
(22:53):
favorite line and the entire movie of Old School is
whenever they are taking their test trying to prove the
Dean wrong, and they are taking the actual, like written,
standardized test, and it's a scene where they're all sitting
in the classroom and they're all cheating on this test,
and it's very obvious because they all have an ear piece,
and anytime the person down the line, which I think
in the movie is already laying as one of the
(23:14):
guys feeding them the answers, they go and put their
fingers up to their ear like they clearly have an
earpiece and are listening to somebody give them the answers.
But still, somehow Jeremy Piven doesn't pick up on it.
And there's a moment that Vince Vaughn just says this
very sly quiet line where he is essentially patronizing the
Dean and commending him on giving them such a great test,
(23:37):
good test. That's what I say, good test, good test.
You probably can't even hear in that clip, but he
whispers good test, good test. So I guess I've been
talking about how I want to go back and redo
my college experience. Maybe I'm just ten years away from
recreating old school. But at number one, it's not a
(23:57):
college movie. It is a high school movie. It is
from nineteen eighty five. It is The Breakfast Club. And
the reason I picked and put The Breakfast Club at
number one is because if this movie didn't exist, a
lot of these other movies I've been talking about would
not exist. It essentially became the blueprint of a teenage
(24:18):
drama slash comedy, and it's the movie that really created
and gave that voice to that generation in the eighties.
It's also because the movie represents every single stereotype in
high school. You have the bad boy, you have the
rich sorority girl, you have the jock, you have the nerd,
and you have the weirdo slash basket case. And it's
(24:39):
about all those stereotypes coming together and realizing that they
are not much different than each other. And I'm glad
by the time I went to high school, this old
school mentality started to change. There were still clicks, but
it didn't really feel like a jock couldn't be friends
with a weirdo, where a rich kid couldn't be friend
with a poor kid. I think later in the two thousands,
(25:01):
we all became a little bit more accepting of each
other and is probably an entirely different game right now
in high school, where none of the stuff that happened
in movies from back in the day even exists anymore.
So I feel like we have very much advanced in
a society. But I feel like this movie was so
important in the eighties to show we're not really that different.
We don't need to hate each other just because of
(25:23):
the stereotype we belonged to. But it did. After you
watch it, you think to yourself, who are you in
this movie? I would have been the weirdo his hands down,
I would have been that one. I just would have
been the quiet weirdo. But it has a lot of
great comedy throughout this movie. Probably my favorite scene is
Bender facing off with the principal. Eat my shorts.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
You just bought yourself another Saturday Misty, Oh crushed, You
just bought one more.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Right there, well on free the Saturday after that. Beyond that,
I'm gonna have to check my calendar.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Good, are you through?
Speaker 1 (25:58):
No, I'm doing society a favor.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
So that's another one. Right now.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
I've got you for the rest of your natural foreign life.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
If you don't watch your step, you want another one?
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Yes, you got it. You got another one right there.
That's another one, pal, And not only that, you have
one of the best uses of a song in a
movie with the fizz bump and the closing credits to match.
So at number one, the best high school and or
college movie of all time, it is nineteen eighty five's
(26:30):
The Breakfast Club. There were so many honorable mentions I
didn't get to. Nineteen ninety eight Can't Hardly Wait is
also one of my favorites because I feel like, unlike
all the other teen movies of the nineties, this one
feels the least mean spirited to me. It also has
Jennifer Love Hewitt, who I feel like was the heart
throb of the nineties and my crush growing up. I
(26:52):
also wanted to throw in BookSmart from twenty nineteen because
I feel like it is the modern version of Super Bad.
From the female perspective. I also just love movies that
take place entirely in one day. You also have two
thousand and eight's The House Bunny, Legally Blonde from two
thousand and one, The Edge of Seventeen, which is a
really good high school movie with Hailey Steinfeld. On the
(27:13):
college side, you have Goodwill hunting the Social Network, and
another great woman from the two thousands, Accepted, which is
pretty dumb when you think about it, but it has
a lot of charm to it. So that is my list.
I'll come back and give my spoiler free movie review
a Blue Beetle, and then we'll talk about Vacation Friends too.
(27:34):
Let's get into it now, a spoiler free movie review.
I want to talk about DC's Blue Beetle, and before
I even get into this review, I have to issue
a Mexican bias alert because I know, as a Mexican
American going into this movie, I was going to enjoy
it more than the average person. Because you have your
first Latino star in a DC superhero movie, Jim Reyes
(27:57):
played by Zola Marithuena. You have a Latino right director
and primarily Latino cast, so I feel like for me,
this is the first time I'm really seeing my people
represented on the big screen in my favorite genre. Why
is it taken so long? So there were a lot
of things in this movie that just hit with me,
that made me realize they made this movie exactly for
(28:18):
people like me. All of the references, even the music
and the character names. I just knew that they had me.
Even when I walked into the theater. Our entire row
was taken out by a Mexican family, and that just
warmed my heart as well. You had a mom, dad, brother, cousin,
and a baby. I'm not the biggest fan of always
bringing babies into PG thirteen rated movies, but I asked
the kid what his name was and he said Porfino Mondragon.
(28:40):
So I'm like, all right, let him in. So what
this movie is about. Our main character is named Jim
Rees and his life is changed forever after this alien
relic chooses him as a symbiotic host and he becomes
the Blue Beetle. If you had to compare this movie
to a Marvel movie, it's probably a lot like Ant Man.
So I feel like if anybody has a reason and
they're not gonna like this movie, it's because maybe you
(29:02):
didn't like ant Man. Maybe there's just something about making
a superhero movie about an insect that people get turned
off by, unless you're Spider Man. But the comic book
elitist will say that Blue Beetle came out before ant Man,
But I always look at it from a film perspective,
and whenever they first debuted on the big screen. What
I did enjoy about Blue Beetle is it was a
very good representation of what a kid like Hymen would
(29:23):
go through having this thing take over his body and
transforming him into a superhero and navigating how to use
these powers. I feel like there were a lot of
moments in this movie that represented what I would do
in the situation of figuring out how to fight, not
wanting to kill other people, and overall just being overwhelmed
by the process, which is something I feel like is
it really represented in movies. Throughout this entire movie, you
(29:45):
see Hymen really struggle with it and have to come
to his own to be able to harness the powers
of the Blue Beetle and therefore become the Blue Beetle.
So I felt like there was a lot of growth
in his character, and that was just one of the
ways I related to his character in the movie. He
is the first in his family to go and graduate college.
That is where we find him at the start of
this movie. He just gets home from college and then
(30:06):
his parents deliver some pretty bad news that they're going
through a lot of financial struggles. His dad is having
some health issues, so his world kind of comes crumbling
down as he's trying to start his new life. He
feels like he has now let his parents down and
is trying to find a way to support his family.
And this is where I'm going to get into the
biased stuff, because I felt like him and his family
(30:27):
was such a great representation of the Mexican American family
that I've not seen portrayed at this level on the
big screen in a big Hollywood production. I always feel
like Mexican American characters are minimized, and sometimes we are
caricatures or just bad versions of what Mexican life is
really like. But there were so many things in this
(30:48):
movie that felt authentic to me that I could tell
that there were Latino actors trying to really portray things
and put things in this movie that Mexicans actually do,
that Mexicans actually listen to. That Mexicans actually even trucks
that Mexicans actually drive. This was all represented in this movie.
I feel like George Lopez's character was a great representation
(31:08):
of that. His name is Rudy. I have a brother
named Rudy, So right off the bat, I was like,
that could be my brother right there. And from the
very first time he was on screen, he pulled up
in his trug listening to Lostocanas that Tijuana and I
was like, that would be the equivalent if you grew
up listening to country music and it never heard an
Alan Jackson song in a movie and that was the
first time you heard it. That is how it felt
(31:29):
to me. And then when it comes to the language,
which is a big part of this movie, I love
that Blue Beetle committed to using Spanish throughout the movie
and at times the Spanish wasn't even subtitles, and that
felt more authentic to me because a lot of the
stuff sometimes doesn't translate. I think if you grow up
speaking Spanish, there are just some phrases we use that
if you tried to translate it to English, it just
(31:51):
wouldn't really make sense. But it makes sense to us.
It's a pretty big risk. Using that much Spanish in
a movie, you could turn a lot of people off,
but I love the commitment to it. They also balanced
it pretty well with using Spanglish, going back and forth
between English and Spanish, which is something that Mexican American
families are just accustomed to. When your parents are from Mexico,
your grandparents are from Mexico, you grow up in America.
(32:14):
Primarily you start learning English because you go to school here,
but your parents still speak Spanish, and then through them
going to work and living in this country for an
extended period of time, they start to learn English. And
the way we just communicate is mixing it all together. Oftentimes,
when I call my mom, sometimes I'll speak to her
in English, She'll speak back to me in Spanish. When
I talk to my dad, kind of the same, or
(32:36):
sometimes we just go back and forth a lot. You
could have an entire sentence where every other word is
in a different language, and for some reason we just
get it. It works for us, and that is what
was shown a lot in Blue Beetle. And it never
felt forced or cheesy to me, which always turns me
off in a movie when they have to overemphasize words
like Dorothia Thaco and stuff like that, I just rather
(32:58):
than not use it at all. But in this case,
I loved every instance of it. Everything from the way
that their house looked they had the Vidhican that Juada
Lupe on the wall, from the TV shows they were watching,
from the music they were listening to. Like I mentioned before,
everything about it just felt so authentic. And then it
comes to the characters, which I did really a little
bit with himaed like I said earlier, being the only
(33:19):
male in my family to go and graduate college. But
he's also just like really good looking, so there was
other things about his personality that wasn't exactly me. But
the character that just kind of struck with me so
much was the dad. If my dad was taken out
of the real world and put onto the big screen,
it would be Heima's dad, and I felt like his
(33:40):
character was so important for me just feeling this emotional
connection to this film. Without the Dad, I probably wouldn't
have felt this movie as much in my heart. But
just the way he acted, the way he cared about
his family, even just the way he spoke and the
way he looked that real just blue collar, working hard
to provide for his family mentality that is my dad.
(34:04):
The character here is probably a little bit more positive
than my dad. My dad curses a lot more and
isn't as poignant with his feelings, but deep down, that
is exactly my dad. Especially the scene where he was
having a heart to heart with his son and he
was drinking a beer and telling him not to tell
his mom. I've had many instances of that with my dad.
And that's all I'll say about his dad. I do
want to give a spoiler version of this review getting
(34:27):
all the topics, and I'll talk more about his dad
as I'm going to start get emotional thinking about this
movie again, which is something I really wasn't expecting for
this movie to do. But I will share the line
about coming to this country and he said that crossing
the border is hard, but you know what's harder than
twenty years after, and that was so true. I thought
of my dad, who came here as a teenager. He
(34:49):
worked all these various jobs, from cleaning escalators to doing maintenance,
to being a mechanic doing yard work, and finally found
his way being a truck driver and has now done
that for over thirty years. So yes, coming to this
country is hard, but what's even harder is building a
life here and doing all the things to achieve that
(35:09):
American dream. So that line is one of my favorite
lines in any DC movie, and also just the fact
that we finally have our own superhero. Now the hard
part comes in is I don't know what's going to
happen to Blue Beetle after this is not really connected
with the DCEU. We have Aquaman coming later this year,
and it seems like James Gunn is just gonna scrap
(35:30):
everything and start new with Superman and building all these characters.
So I don't know what's going to happen with Blue Beetle.
Will we get another movie? Probably not, And it hurts
even more that it didn't really make much at the
box office, which it wasn't really expected to. They didn't
really spend that much on marketing or promotion. The budget
was one hundred and four million and it opened to
(35:53):
forty three million dollars worldwide, which isn't great, and out
of all the DCEU domestic opening weekends, it is at
the bottom. It is behind the Flash, it is behind
Shazam two. Blue Beetle only opened to twenty four point
five million dollars in the United States. But when I
look at all these DCEU movies, everything from Man of
(36:13):
Steel to Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Justice League, Aquaman, the
First Zam, Birds of Prey, the only thing I would
rank higher than this movie is the Suicide Squad. That's
the only one. Maybe Man of Steel given the day.
Maybe it's because I just watched Blue Beetle and I
have recency bias, but it was just so good that
(36:35):
I feel like the money that it's made doesn't really
represent the film. And then it's a rare case and
I come on here and often I try not to
just all out bash DC. I always give them the
benefit of the doubt because they have such great characters.
And this is the case where I don't even feel
that it's getting that much hate. It just didn't really
do that well because people weren't hyped about it, and
(36:56):
you also have the strike going on, they couldn't really
promote it as much. The summer blockbuster season is also
dwindling down right now that I feel like maybe it
wasn't the right time for it to come out. But
also it's hard to sell a brand new character, and
it's also speaking to a very niche audience if you
are focusing on the Mexican demographic. But I feel like
this is a movie everybody should get a shot too,
(37:18):
because I want to see more characters like this on
the big screen. Doesn't always have to be a superhero movie,
but I just love big blockbusters with Mexican faces and
it it just makes me happy. So now it comes
down to what I will rate Blue Beetle. Let me
remind you of my Mexican bias. I would honestly say
(37:40):
if I was a Mexican and if I hadn't related
with all of these characters, it would probably on its
own be a three or a three point five at best.
But the fact that this movie really got me emotionally,
and I was so invested in all these characters and
it felt so familiar to me, and it brought so
(38:00):
much joy to see things that I've never seen in
a movie from my background, from my culture. I saw
me in this movie, I saw my dad in this movie,
and I left the theater just completely riding a high
that I had never really felt before. So again, probably
a three to you if you're not Mexican, maybe a
three point five if you just love DC. But I'm
(38:22):
gonna give a Blue Beetle a four point five out
of five Scaubs. And I will say at times the
acting is a little bit cheesy. That is probably what
kept me a little bit out of it in the beginning.
I'd say in that first ten to fifteen minutes, it
felt a little bit like a cheesy action movie to me,
Like there's a big, dark villain and then you have
(38:42):
this nice kid and then they're all going to clash together.
And I was worried about that. But once the action
got going at the end of that first act, I
felt like that cheesiness kind of went away. It creeps
back every now and then, and this movie doesn't really
go way beyond the superhero formula. It stays pretty close
to it. So again, this is with the Mexican bias,
also with it hitting me more emotionally, which I will
(39:05):
explain more in the spoiler review. So probably on a
normal day I would have given it a four, but
because of the impact it had on me, I'm sticking
with that four point five out of five scaubs. It's
time to head down to movie. Mike treylar par Vacation Friends,
(39:26):
who is coming out soon on Hulu. Depending on when
you're listening to this on August twenty fifth, it could
be coming out this Friday, or it could already be out.
And this is a sequel. I was not expecting to
be as excited as I am. It's a very rare category,
where the first one. I don't want to say it's
(39:46):
a great comedy because it's so ridiculous. And if it
was a movie I would recommend to you and say
this is a funny movie, you would probably watch it
and think, Mike, what in your right mind are you thinking?
Because it's so cheesy. It's so over the top at
times cringeworthy. But for some reason, I just kept thinking
about Vacation Friends, and after watching it, I thought that
(40:08):
was a good time. It didn't really test anything as
far as the levels of comedy or push the envelope
on cinema, but sometimes you just want a movie so
ridiculous that you can turn your brain off, not think
about anything except every ridiculous action that is happening, and thinking,
you know what, that was a fun time. It accomplished
what it needed to do. I didn't go to the
(40:30):
theater to see it, so no harm done. And then
watching the trailer for Vacation Friends Too, I thought they
might actually have something here, and I'll explain more why
that could be the case. But the premise of this
movie in the first one is it's just this couple
who goes on vacation and ends up making friends with
this other couple who are a lot of fun on vacation,
(40:51):
even though they get into some pretty sticky situations. But
then the vacation ends and they end up wanting to
be friends in real life. So it's you are all
right vacation, but I don't really want to be friends
with you in my real adult life. So the plot
of Vacation Friends Too is them reuniting again on the
vacation and going on another ridiculous adventure. This will looks
(41:12):
a little bit more action packed. The fact that the
first one was I guess a moderate success that they
could make a sequel. They got a little bit more
money to play around with in the budget, and it
almost looks more like a comedy action movie now. So
here is just a little bit of Vacation Friends Too.
Look at us all together again.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
We just wanted to give you, guys a Real heardy Moon?
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Just sound this crawling under a table? He's Clingy's the
reason I've never seen that much water come up a
person before. Did I throw up a lot? But hole
threw up bud? So who would have thought that Lil
(41:54):
Real and John Cena would be a great on screen
comedy duo and be a pair that I would want
to see in another installment of a movie that is
utterly ridiculous. And I have no shame in saying that
this is a comedy I enjoy, even though I know
on paper it isn't a great comedy. How I would
compare this if you went to a restaurant and ordered
(42:16):
dessert and they gave you a little Debbie snack, you
would say, this is not what I was expecting. I
was expecting some gourmet dessert created by a chef. But
if you ate that little Debbie snack, whether it be
a honey bun or a brownie or a Swiss cake roll,
you would eat it and think, you know, that's actually
pretty good. It's just not what I was expecting in
this moment, but it gets the job done, and little
(42:36):
Debbie snacks are really nobody's favorite dessert. But if you're
at a gas station, you have nothing else to eat.
You eat it and enjoy it. It reminds you of
your childhood vacation. Friends Too is the little Debbie Snacks
of comedy. Probably has a little bit too much sugar.
You're not really a fan of all the ingredients because
what they do to your body, so overall it's probably
not the best for you. But there's just something about
(42:58):
the way it goes down that really hits that spot.
I almost feel like it is the new Hangover getting
a sequel now. I feel like it has the potential
to be a new franchise Like that, it will never
reach the level of popularity or cultural impact that a
Hangover has because it has less star power. It also
has less eyes on it. Being a twentieth century Studios
(43:19):
film debuting exclusively on Hulu, I just feel like no
comedy is ever going to have that big of an
impact anymore as it did in the two thousands. But
I really got to give it to twentieth century studios
of really knowing their lane when it comes to comedies.
They're not really putting out anything completely groundbreaking, But I
feel like anybody who just needs that it scratched of
(43:40):
having a new comedy. They're very much feeding that audience,
so they kind of found their niche here and really
just going after that dynamic of comedy, and it can
be all types of comedies, whether it be just wacky,
over the top comedies like this, stark comedies, more sophisticated comedies.
They're very much just owning that genre right now. I
(44:00):
feel like that is why Hulu has creeped up into
one of my favorite streaming services, because they are taking
chances on movies like this, and this has been one
of the first cases of me seeing a sequel to
one of their comedies. So it's coming out on Hulu
on August twenty fifth. It takes place just months after
the original Vacation Friends, so if you haven't seen that
one yet, I would say start with that one and
(44:22):
if you're completely turned off by it in the first
thirty minutes, you're probably not going to like the rest
of it. But if you end up enjoying it, then
I think you'll be like me and be excited oddly
for Vacation Friends too. They're also throwing Steve Buscemi in
the cast now, so either they're doing something right or
all these actors are just doing these movies to get
a paycheck. At that for this week's edition of Movie Lin,
(44:46):
Frame or Bar and that's gonna do it for another
episode here of the podcast. But before I go, I
gotta give my listeners shout out of the week. This
week we are going over to Twitter because I posted
the question what is your favorite high school or college
movie of time to get an idea of what you
had to say? And this week's listener shout out is
to Gina Blade, who replied with her top three that
(45:06):
include The Breakfast Club, sixteen Candles, and Fast Times at
Ridgemont High. Like I said, the eighties were a great
time for high school movies. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
probably should have made my honorable mentions. My favorite thing
about that movie is Sean Penn started a trend with
the slip on checkered vands after his character wore them
in that movie. It was on the poster, everybody started
(45:28):
wearing the checkered vans, and look, forty years later, they're
still popular. So thank you Gino for sharing your top three,
Thank you for listening, and until next time, go out
and watch good movies. And I will talk to you later.
Host
Mike D
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