Long Road to Ruin: The 28 Days Later Film Series

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
The following may contain offensive language, adult humor, and or
content that some viewers may find offensive. The views and
opinions expressed by anyone speaker does not explicitly or necessarily
reflect or represent those of Mark Ratleage or W two
M Network. Please listen with caution, or don't listen at all.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
He can't with sequels in his bag. Repoossives of Bob
cult say, show we.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
Actorize the former share.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
Series forgethern.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
He survives? Is that the first time you've heard that?

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Uh? No? I heard it when you, Yeah, because you
played that. I think you debuted it when you and
Sean did the Naked Gun trilogy and I listened to
that one.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
So cool. What do you think in terms of AI
generated slop cover of the Food Fighters.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
I've heard much worse.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
That's always the nicest thing you're ever going to say
to me.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
No, it's about the nicest thing I say generally about
AI generated music and art.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
That's fair, mostly.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Because, like I should phrase this carefully because I'm not
anti generative creativity. I just think that if that's all
you do, if you don't go through like the editing
process and refining, and if there's no part of you
in it, other than like, oh I know owing how
to prompt it. Well, that's not quite the same thing
as using it as a force multiplier for ability that

(02:24):
you've gained on your own. And there are two different things.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
And I would say that was the second that was
part of you know, because Suno does two songs for
you at the same time. And I think that was
the second iteration. There's I very rarely like the first draft.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
It's almost never very good.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Yeah. Well, also I always don't always know what I want,
so like I kind of use the the ai generative process,
both in chat EPT with the writing or in sunodai
with the music, or back the chat GPT with art.
I very rarely like the first thing I get, I know,

(03:02):
but it gives me a direction that I give me.
It refines and configures for me in a way that
would be difficult to do without the use of generative technology.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
I consider it to be very useful, especially if if
you want to hire, and you should for a lot
of this stuff. Mind you, you're gonna hire a real artist,
but you need to give them some direction. I tend
to find that having some stuff that is like generally
what you would want. Yeah, as an example, as a

(03:37):
reference is more helpful than trying. It makes the connection
between your brain and their brain easier otherwise.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
It's the example I always use is. I don't know
if you've ever watched Mad About You, but there's a
scene where Yoko Ono is saying to Paul Reiser, I
want you to film the wind, and he's and he's like, okay,
like the wind blowing through trees. No, the wind, And
Paul rises like, I'm a documentary filmmaker, this is a
visual medium. How the fuck do you want me to
film wind? And he's trying and trying. The funny part

(04:09):
of the episodes, he's trying and trying and trying, and
finally he just begs and tell us like, I can't
do it, Yoko, I can't. I'm sorry because he really
wanted to work with her, and you know, and he
wanted to He wanted to satisfy this woman. You know,
he wanted to please her, and she was like, it's
no biggy, Paul whatever. Anyway, welcome to the Long Road

(04:30):
to Ruin. That is not Sean. That is, in fact,
my co host on Damn You Hollywood, Robert Winfrey, say hello,
Robert Winfrey.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Hello, Robert Winfree.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Very good. So this is kind of a damn you, Hollywood,
because we should have done twenty eight years later when
it came out, But we are slaves to consistency and history,
so we did Ilio instead. Well, the rest of the
world was talking about twenty eight years later. Damn you, Hollywood.
Always on the always our finger on the throat of culture.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
You don't want us to be the ones taking your pulse.
We are that joke from The Simpsons where mister Burns
was taken to a hospital where he's pronounced dead. He
was then take into a better hospital where his condition
was upgraded to alive.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
That's kind of us a little bit. But this was
other than the fact that I knew I was gonna
do Ilio and not twenty eight years later.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
It.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
I was telling my my son this one because we watched.
We watched twenty eight days later together the three of us,
my son and my daughter and I.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
That's easily the best of the.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
It's my favorite of the three. I can tell you
that right now. Oh yeahspoiler alert, it's the best made
of the three. Then we watched twenty eight weeks later
and my son looked at me and he says, father.
He calls me father. He said, Father, why are you
doing this to yourself? I know you don't like this.
And I said, well, I like the first movie. I've
never seen the second, and you know, i'll watch the
third on Thursday and that'll be the first time I've

(06:00):
seen it since it came out in June. And he
was like the father. He called me father. He says,
but why why do you do this? And I said, sometimes, Son,
you do it because you enjoy it, and sometimes you
do it for the content. But also I saw your
comment in the chat and I think it was it's
worth kind of sharing with the world. Very rarely do

(06:22):
I pick something that Robert actually wants to do and
enjoys doing, and that you know he's kind of he
also was going to hear too, because he's a slave
to loyalty and consistency. But on the occasion we will
come across something that he genuinely enjoys and wants to
talk about. It was twenty eight years later. I thought, okay, well,
this gives me a chance to watch the entire series

(06:42):
and do a long road to Ruin, and then I
can get past all of this and we'll then we'll
be up for the bone Thugs and Harmony or whatever the.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Hell the movie is called Bone Temple.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah, and that'll just be a regular damn you, Hollywood.
So just give me like a minute or two on
not what you think think of the films necessarily, but
like why you wanted to talk about this, why you
were glad that I delayed a month or two but
put it on the schedule regardless, Like I said, just
a minute or two.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
Some of this has to some of this gets into
a little bit of like the backstory of the first movie,
and so if you don't mind me speaking a little
bit too, some of the history of that and a
few other things as to why this whole series kind
of is stuck with me for a while, We got
to talk zombies as a genre for a second or

(07:35):
two here, if you'll all bear with me. There's a
handful of inflection points in these zombie subgenre of film,
because the original zombie movies are all based a little
bit more around like hypnosis, voodoo, that kind of stuff.
Stuff like White Zombie starring Bell Lugozi, or I Walked
with a Zombie, things of that nature.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
I walked with a zombie, the story of Marx's Data,
I got my soap.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
I was going to give you the opportunity to find
something to say with that one. Actually that worked with
the zombie. Some really good cinematography, some real, real nice
imagery that plays in it. But anyway, there's a lot
of that initially in the zombie sub genre, because that's
where the term comes from. It's from Haitian voodoo sort of.
That's longer and more complicated. But then we get the

(08:27):
next major inflection point comes with George Romero and with
Night of the Living Dead and that and his sort
of spin offs from that one, and then there's the
he and the co writer for Night of the Living
Dead had a split, amicable but a creative difference over

(08:47):
what they might want to do next. It's why the
rest of the George A. Romero ones don't say don't
have living Dead in the title. It's just Day of
the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Land of the Dead,
whatever it happens to be. The other ones from the
Other Gentlemen have living Dead in the title. So that's
where you get returned to the living dead from the eighties,

(09:08):
which I don't know, if you, I imagine you've seen
that one mark even it's the one with the tar
Man is kind of what it's referred to as.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
Maybe I know I've seen I know, I've seen Eight
of the Living Dead.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, So point being like, there's that split and that
kind of ushers in the makeup driven effect, that the
practical effects heavy version of zombies that we get for
against some from Romero where there's sometimes there's science behind it,
sometimes there's other stuff, And that's kind of the predominant

(09:41):
motif for zombies for a while, and the genre falls
out of favor pretty quickly into the eighties. Genres come
and go like that, they all it's never there's never
like no zombie movies being made, but you know, everything fluctuates.
So the eighties we get more like the rebirth of
the Slashers, and then in the nineties vampires actually come
back into the four it's even with a lot of

(10:05):
some Dracula remakes. Blade comes out comes around and makes
vampires a thing again in a lot of respects. But
really what we get like out of the nineties into
the early two thousands, this kind of the time people
we're gonna be talking about you get a lot of
the like self aware stuff, you get scream I know
what you did last summer, sort of the rebirth of

(10:27):
the weird teen. Not full on slasher, but pseudo slasher stuff.
That's kind of what's churning around late nineties, early two thousands.
There's not a lot of monster movies. Vampires have been
infected by Twilight. I say that with no major moral judgments.
I'm just saying that's what happened, and it does kind

(10:51):
of leave the field open for another subgenre of the
horror of horror to kind of come to the four.
The problem is, we've all seen zombies by this point,
We've seen the Romero stuff. Georgia Romero is still making
zombie movies at this point on occasion. But twenty eight
days Later is the other major inflection point in the

(11:14):
zombie subgenre. Again, there's a few of them. There's the
early ones. Then Romero changes the game, and the game
remains the same until Danny Boyle changes it pretty dramatically
with twenty eight days Later. This is where we get
fast zombies. Those weren't really a thing before this that
you had all the slow moving shambling. Let's show off

(11:36):
the makeup departments work. That was kind of the one
of the things there in this one. They are expressly
biological in a way that had not really been done
a whole lot before. There'd been occasional like bio weaponry components,
but nothing more or less as grounded as this one.

(11:56):
So we've got a slightly different take on where zombies
come from. We've got an entirely new kind of zombie.
Because slow zombies are scary in their own way, fast
zombies are definitely terrifying in their own way, and people
still argue to this day about which is better. It's
largely done to personal preference. Both can be done well,
both can be done poorly. But it's not a mistake

(12:20):
that after twenty eight days later, with Zack Snyder's remake
of A Day of the or Dawn of the Dead,
rather excuse me, he has fast zombies. For the most part.
It's not a mistake that Robert Kirkman chose to have
Rick Grimes wake up in a hospital bed after the

(12:41):
world fell apart while he was unconscious. These are not accidents.
That's the impact that this movie had on the zombie subgenre.
And I was of the appropriate age to be like,
you know what, I've kind of had enough vampires when
this comes around, I've kind of had enough. No one
was making good monster movies at this point in time

(13:02):
as a general rule, so those were kind of fallen
by the wayside. I'm glad they came back to the fore.
That's kind of what replaced zombies once. The Zombie Pie
kind of ran its course hand full of years ago,
but it is one of the major inflection points for
the sub genre, and it helps that it's just an
exceptional film, So that's kind of why it's stuck with me.

(13:23):
And it's one of those franchises that the where the
first movie is so good and hit me just right
that I will follow this thing through ups and downs,
And there's both in the next two movies to talk about.
So so.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
Let's get into it. We are talking obviously twenty eight
days later, twenty eight weeks later, and twenty eight years later,
which just came out this last June. What does a
zombie movie look like when it's not really about zombies?
In twenty two. Twenty eight days later marked a hard
reset Fahara, as Robert mentioned, directed by Danny Boyle and
written by Alex Garland of Civil War fame. It wasn't

(14:01):
about slow walking corpses, as Robert pointed out, it was
about rage, breakdown and the monstrous potential inside ordinary people.
Shot on grainy digital video with handheld cameras and natural light,
it felt urgent, real, and deeply psychological. Boyle's Britain wasn't
just overrun by infection, and it collapsed inward, exposing militarism, patriarchy,

(14:25):
and the thin membrane holding society together. Five years later,
twenty eight weeks later took a different path, with Boyle
and Garland stepping back. Director Juan Carlos Fresnodillo delivered a
more conventional sequel, slicker, louder, bloodier. The sole critique was
still there, in the form of American military intervention and

(14:46):
government failure, but it was buried under spectacle. Gone was
the diy panic of Boyle's lens and its place drones, firebombs,
and the Hollywood grade body count. Now nearly two decades later,
twenty eight years later brings Boiling Garland back, and it
asks a different question what happens when the apocalypse becomes history?

(15:06):
In this world, Britain remains quarantined haunted by infection, but
the rest of the world has moved on. The fear
isn't just the virus, its isolation, abandonment, and the political
uses of containment. The film is slower, more abstract, and,
according to early critics, less emotionally immediate, but it completes
the arc from trauma to militarization to forgetting. So here's

(15:31):
why we're talking about this tonight. Besides the obvious things
we mentioned earlier, these films aren't just horror movies. There's
cinematic documents of how our culture processes catastrophe, from nine
to eleven in Iraq to the pandemic, lockdowns and biosurveillance.
Each entry captures the emotional logic of its era, whether
you love or hate them individually. As a trilogy, they

(15:53):
chart something bigger. So tonight, on the Long Road to Ruin,
we're not just reviewing three movies. We're dissecting a twenty
two year conversation about fear collapse, which is all the
raids these days and what survives us when society dies,
and pay close attention to it because it's happening as
we speak. But enough about the end of the world.
Let's talk movies. Robert twenty eight days Later, Let's get

(16:14):
into it. I love this movie, I really do. I'm
got to be favorite for anything. But it's an exceptional movie.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
It's great. It's one of the first movies that was
shot almost entirely digitally for budgetary reasons. Uh. Fun fact
about that one. Actually there is one sequence in twenty
eight Days Later that is shot on conventional film. It
is the ending. That's why it looks brighter, more optimistic,
and happier. That's part of the reason it's straight up

(16:43):
on film, whereas the others are shot digitally, and for
a long time, I think that's part of the reason
you couldn't find this movie anywhere. They had not printed
new DVDs or Blu rays. It didn't stream anywhere. I
think part of that was, like the digital quality was
poor enough that when put on a modern streaming service,

(17:04):
it looks it just there's a quality to it that
was very difficult to me.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
From a principal photography cinematography point of view, the Blair
Witch project is clearer like this is this was intentionally
greeny it is.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
But it's also a product of digital technology at the
time this was shot, not really going above like three sixty,
so there's a lot of and then when it's broadcast
in digital only, it just looked. It just winds up
looking weird because it's hard to upscale it. So there's
a little bit of a problem. So I think that's
part of the problem. But thankfully with the release of

(17:47):
twenty eight years later, this did get back into the
digital to the digital marketplace, so you can buy it
on Amazon now, whereas for a long time you couldn't. Again,
you couldn't even buy it. There was a period of
like three years where you legitimately could not stream or
buy twenty eight days later digitally anywhere.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
So this is one of those where I really had
to like do an easter a hunt to find these movies.
Twenty eight days later, I watched on Pluto, twenty eight
weeks later, I watched on Hulu twenty eight years later.
Is currently PVOD and I might the place of choice
that I choose to rent my movies from is Amazon
because it's just it's just their interface is the easiest

(18:28):
to work with. Yeah, So a couple of notes about
this movie. One, I love the cinematography of this It
is definitely a masterclass and your cinematography does not have
to look a Lord of the Rings pretty No, what
it has to do is have a perspective, have an aesthetic,
be consistent in that aesthetic, and that this does. I

(18:54):
like the fact that it feels like you are part
of the campaign, you were part of the adventure, because
it has that documentary feel to it. But it's not perfect.
And while Cilly and Murphy and the other actor in Bruges,

(19:16):
Brendan Gleeson, are phenomenal in this, Naomi Harris the actress
is fine. And I'm curious to get your take on
this because we don't always agree, and that's why that's
why we do this to do to do our weekly
banging of the head session, not that kind of head banging.

(19:37):
Naomi Harris, I think is a perfectly serviable, serviceable actress.
But I don't like is the character writing, which is
what I mean when I say like, this is not
a perfect movie. Upon rewatch the other night, you know,
both Jonas and I are sitting there watching this. Lily
was there too, but she had a different take. I
find Naomi Harris's character to be grating, Like it's less

(19:57):
than a month since the zombie outbreak and she has
she has the hardened exterior of like a lifelong combat veteran,
except that this was twenty eight days ago. How are you?
How are you this hardened? This solace? And it feels

(20:18):
like it was done that way just to give her
the arc to where she finds her humanity towards the end,
and you know, her and Silly and Murphy kind of
swap because he's the sensitive soul at the beginning, and
you know, the babe in the wilderness, the POV character,
and by the end of it, he's, you know, he
has leaned into his lack of inanity, of lack of humanity,

(20:43):
whereas she softens a bit. But I don't understand how
she got there in the first place. They treat her
as if she's one of the Marines from Aliens, and
I felt like it was a bit pitchy, that it
didn't really match, Like this is the sort of thing
where if we catch up to her in twenty eight

(21:04):
weeks later, I can kind of see it. But this
soon to be to the extinction event, and I'm like,
why are you this mad? So I'm curious to get
your take on that. I mean, if you think I'm
completely off base, which is fine. It's a matter of.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
I don't think you're I don't think you're completely off base.
This is one of those instances where you run into
some of the shortcomings on Garland's writing.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
Yeah, he tends to like rely entirely too much on
troops and she's way tropy.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
Garland is a theme over substance writer.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
Uh huh, which I know you love.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
I can take it or leave it.

Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah, I know.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
So her character is there to serve the thematic purposes.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
And.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
He's just not. He's confident enough. Whether you think he
should be or not is entirely another matter. But he's
confident enough the overall emotional logic of what's going on
in the journey that we're going to go on with
these characters, that he doesn't want to get too bogged
down in the weeds, and he'd rather have a character
that maybe some of those questions might linger if you

(22:14):
think about it. But in the course of the movie,
is there to service the goal of the end, the
thematic goal in the end, And it's a choice not
what I always agree with. I could have done with
a little bit of her backstory here. I'm kind of
with you on that.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
But.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
The fact that this movie was also shot for like.

Speaker 1 (22:38):
Pocket change, Yeah, hat Penny.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
So there's a lot of there's a lot of ground
that has to be seeded to the logistical realities of
this that maybe there was an idea of having us
get more of her story, but it would have cost
too much, extended everything too much. You know, maybe it
wound up disrupt Maybe they shot it and wound a
disrupting too much of the flow of the film, and
then you had to kill your baby. As we're also

(23:03):
inclined to say mm hm.

Speaker 1 (23:06):
So I agree with you.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
I think it's a little bit of a weakness that said.
I think you do need that character. You need that
kind of character here to complete the emotional arc by
the end of it, because absent that this is it's
it's one of the weaker elements of the movie. But
I think without it, the movie overall becomes a lot weaker.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
So this isn't a crowd pleasing movie. I think it's
intelligently written in the sense of I definitely think it's
a thoughtful movie. It's it's one that makes you think.
But if you're looking for kind of a crowd pleasing
zombie movie. First of all, that's the next one. But
but this one, once you get past the initial set

(23:54):
pieces and then you get to the very end where
Cillian Murphy goes fucking you know, Rambo First Blood, a
little on the soldiers. Not a lot of zombie in
the zombie movie, which as an intellectual and a film
critic I'm fine with. As a popcorn movie watcher who
went to watch the zombie you know, the zombies eat

(24:15):
the meat sacks, I'm sorely disappointed.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
Yeah, I get it. It's again, it's a budgetary constraint thing.
I think, to the credit of all the filmmakers, they
stuck the budget where they needed it.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
Yeah. So my girlfriend's line here the opening scene disturb
me so much I left. Yes, she struggled with she
struggled with you make fun of me. She struggled with
the gore of the first few minutes of this movie.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
Uh yeah, when the chimps attack, and yeah, that's the
whole thing.

Speaker 1 (24:48):
Yeah, it's a very intense, claustrophobic scene. Like even if
you're like fine with gore. That's one of those that's
one of those that really relies on its ability to
overstimulate the audience.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
Yeah, especially with the number of people that have just
a base, knee jerk emotional reaction to Oh, look at
that poor monkey with ape with electrodes in its brain.
It's a whole thing. But yeah, this movie. One of

(25:27):
the other great things about this movie is the editing choices.
There's a way to use rapid fire editing to build
tension and to create the right kind of chaos. But
one of the great things about this one and I
it's similar to like Mad Max Fury Road, where there's
a lot of cuts, but everything is done in such

(25:49):
a way that you the viewer, don't lose track of
the action and.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
Also creates an urgency. Yeah, embedded in the film like you.
You know, it's funny how film can play tricks with
your brain, and so through the use of rapid fire
editing and the Strobe effect it it definitely has an
unsettling effect on the audience. You are affected by what's

(26:15):
happening here.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah, there's a couple of scenes in particular, you mentioned
the opening, which is one of them. I think if
I have like a borderline gold standard for the right
use of rapid fire editing in this movie, it's when
they arrive at the apartment building and are running up
the stairs while being chased, and they meet Brendan Gleason
at the top of the stairs. But that whole bit

(26:37):
once they start getting chased, as Selena is pulling ahead
of Jim and he's trying to catch up to her,
but he's in the midst of having a minor health
issue because he's got no fat on his body and
he's a little bit worn out. And they're coming up
and there's some really nice sound work as well, with

(26:58):
shopping carts being ridled around, and it just works really,
really well, and to the point where if you actually
pause and think about it, they only go up like
three flights of stairs, like they're most of the way
up there, right. But the editing and the sound design
and the music come together to create this ridiculous high

(27:21):
amount of tension in this really short period of time.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
I like what the film has to say about two things.
It's saying the same thing, but it's saying it differently
given two different sets of people. One, you know, it
speaks to the sensitive humanized people and says, what do
you have to do before they're so before social contracting
and emotional scaffold thing completely collapse and they become animals.

(27:46):
We like to think ourselves as higher order beings. We are,
you know, divined by God if you believe in that
sort of thing, and I know you do, and all
of that, But the biological reality is you, you know,
couple of Jenga blocks from the ten and it all
falls down and where you know, and where this is
what his point is with the rage virus, and we're
all foaming, you know, snarling, teeth rattling animals. So you

(28:10):
look at where Cillian Murphy starts, where he can hardly
kill a fly, and he's just struggling with everything, and
then by the end of it again he's fucking John Rambo.
But I think the more impactful statement is about women,
how women by and large are hanging on to civil
treatment by a hair's breath.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
You know it is. I'm not going to get too
deep into this because a couple of other things about
this movie, in particular I have to talk about briefly
near the before you move.

Speaker 1 (28:40):
One, address this and then do that.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
Okay, none of the following is my endorsement of any
of the following possessions. For the record, but the number
of women contemporarily who have been fed lines from feminism

(29:02):
about the equality of men and women and physical yes,
not like again, this is not an endorsement, but yes,
physical equality. I can do anything you can.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
Do right, anything you can do, I can do better.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
And at this point a number of disaffected men have
begun to take up the Okay, if you want to
be treated equally, when you approach me and behave in
a certain way, I'm going to treat you like what
a man.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
There's a whole cottage industry on YouTube dedicated to this.
When when when men compete equally against women in any
sort of physical activity, just one video after another.

Speaker 2 (29:47):
There's well, there is that in the competition's arena. What's
more troubling to me, and I think to a lot
of people is in the just general physical interact. Because Mark,
if you and I get in have a disagreement, we

(30:07):
decide that you know what, words ain't going to do it.
One of us is going to wind up making a decision.
Am I going to escalate this or am I going
to not? There's a line that got bandied about, and
it's true, not absolutely, but there's an undercurrent of truth
to it. That is important. Interactions between men have implicit

(30:33):
to them the possibility of violence. Now again, this is
overstated and people throw it around because it's a nice
SoundBite more than anything. But it wouldn't be a good
sound bite and it wouldn't resonate if there wasn't a
degree of truth to it. I'm not saying men go
around looking at each other going, boy, I could beat

(30:53):
that guy up. No, generally we don't, but any prolonged interaction,
especially if it's a little but adversarial, we do consider
the possibility of physical violence. I know, I'm getting to
my point.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
Our producer in here. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:11):
And the number of women, especially slightly younger, who are
grew up with the notion that I can do anything
a man can do, while also sort of still existing
around a lot of people who behaved according to previous
social norms have found out that if you hit a

(31:34):
man in public and he decides that, oh, you're exactly
like another man, Well, if you hit me, I'm going
to hit you back. If Mark strikes me in person,
I'm gonna punch him back. That's just how that goes.
That's why we don't so often men in general and
enough men have now heard, Well, women are just like men, right,

(31:55):
want to be treated equally. Right, Well, if you strike me,
I'm going to strike back. Whereas twenty years ago it
didn't matter if a woman hit you. You're a man, you
exercise restraint. But we have lost that bit of the
social contract. So to the point that you raised yes,
when that goes away, boy, is that dangerous.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
So there's a scene in the movie for those that
don't know. If you've seen the movie, you kind of
know what we're talking about. Maybe you don't remember, but basically,
the basically what the soldiers reveal the great horror of
the movie. The twist in the movie is the soldiers like,
we are here. I promised the soldiers that they if
they obeyed my commands and they stayed loyal to me,

(32:38):
I would bring them women, women from reading as we
have to repopulate England now. And so Naomi Harris and
the young girls show up and they go, well, I
it rained, I ken't as the rain maker. I kept
my promise, indeed, And and the women are like, we
are modern women with agency and choice, and this seems

(32:59):
like sex ctual assault. You're you're proposing and it is like,
and he was like, is it sexual assault? When it's
the end of the world? Essentially is his is where
he's coming from. And the thing of it is is
that I'm making light of it. But they kind of
just throw out all the social contracting. And this is
what I mean by women's ability to complete the compete

(33:23):
in the marketplace of ethics and ideals and moras with
men is only held up slightly by that because it
goes as it does in this movie where there's no rules,
there's no enforcement, and the men are kind of thinking
about their own needs and abstractly the needs to repopulate.

(33:45):
The women suddenly became objects. These were not people anymore.
They were sexual objects, period, full stop. And the fact
and Danny Boyle is that's the point that he's making
this whole movie. And then we can move on to
the next one, the whole Oh.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
I got a couple of things about this one. I
need to say that set up how we some of
the stuff I want to talk about with twenty eight
weeks later.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
But so this whole movie is essentially about, like you know,
it's the book of Job, what happens if you take
everything away? What does man do. And his point of
view is that man becomes an animal. You know, it
treats less it treats the le ken, it treats the
lesser sex like objects, It mauls everything around it. It
becomes might makes right. That's his point, and I wanted

(34:30):
to make and I wanted to make the point about
what happened to Naomi Harris because the fact that women
by and large don't seem to realize what a tenuous
hold they have on their place with men in the world.
And that's not me being sexist. That is me talking
about Danny Boyle's points. It's like, hey, ladies, just so

(34:51):
you know this close you're this close to the Handmaid's
Tale at any given time.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
A little bit. Yeah, And well, the other thing about
that is Danny Boyle, this is true through his entire career.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
Mind you, I don't see there's a threat. I say
that as a difficulty with the human psyche in the
Year of Our Lord twenty twenty five. That's the point
that I'm making.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
And somehow that point has become more precient since this
movie was released, because again we're starting to see that
more and more in modern society. A bunch of somewhat
disaffected men going oh, okay, you wanted if you want,
if you wish to be treated equally, here's how I
would treat someone who did this to me. Yeah, and

(35:35):
it goes badly. It almost always goes badly because we're stupid,
all right, So what's the point You're making a couple
of things real quickly. This movie has a lovely sense
of melancholy to it. It has a wonderful humanist whimsy
that comes out in scenes like their shopping sequence.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
I was screaming for someone get jerky.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
It's angler. I don't know they have it, but.

Speaker 1 (36:10):
Well he said nothing you can cork, so that limit
your meat product. But you got to get protein. Robert proteins,
their propriety, get nice, get yep.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
I completely understand. Like their discussion around the you know
what kind of alcohol are we gonna take? Or I.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
Brendan Gleason fondling those bottles of alcohol.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
I can't just take any old crap.

Speaker 1 (36:39):
I don't get uncomfortable around sexual scenes, but that made
me uncomfortable. I'm gonna be honest with you.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
Parts of this movie are as mentioned shot and cut
together like frenetic action. The fact that in the same film,
we also get a bunch of scenes that are shot
almost like David Attenborough and Nature documentary.

Speaker 1 (37:02):
Yeah, and beautiful use of landscape.

Speaker 2 (37:07):
Yeah. This movie again, it had no budget really so
to speak. So to the they couldn't. So if you're
gonna shoot in a major location, you pay the city
and they shut down areas of it so that you
can shoot there. It's kind of how this works. If
you don't want to deal with all the traffic in
the background, normally you can. But so for example, there's

(37:29):
a scene in Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise where he
goes to an empty Times Square. That production paid for
a period of time for Time Square to be shut
down and empty so they could shoot that.

Speaker 1 (37:41):
Right.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
This film could not afford to have parts of London
shut down. So what they did That entire opening scene
or the Tyring Seat with Jim walking around deserted London,
they shot at dawn when there's just no one else around,
and thankfully it kind of worked out.

Speaker 1 (38:00):
It's impossible, I'll give you a twink, get the fuck
out of here, something like that.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
Yeah, the most of their shutdown money went to that
scene where they drive down a very famous stretch of
road in front of the windmills, and normally that place
is like that road is busy pretty much twenty four
to seven. So they only had enough money to shut
it down for one shot, and fortunately it worked, so
they got a great one. But it's impossible to watch

(38:28):
Jim walk around London deserted and not have two things
evoked in my mind. One they did very deliberately. They
very deliberately evoked nine to eleven with the Wall of
Missing People and everything, very famously. That was a thing
in New York, and that was deliberately invoked. What wound

(38:53):
up being just a thing that they stumbled into years later,
as I can't watch that and not think of the
COVID pandemic these days very much.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
This trilogy is a.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
COVID fable, and the fact that two of them came
out so long before, like fifteen years before. What do
you know, Danny Boyle, Well, this the first one actually
wound up coming out in concert unintentionally with an outbreak
of I think it was uff a mouth disease that

(39:28):
or mad cow in the UK. It's one of those two.
Forgive me if I can't remember which one that caused
a lot of problems. There was a bunch of livestock
that had to be destroyed, and people got sick, so
it did actually wind up unintentionally coinciding with something. But
watching him wander around deserted London and somewhere in my
head going, you know, four years ago, you could have

(39:50):
done that and there would have been nobody there. Yeah,
And I bring that up not to make a giant
a grand statement about COVID. That'll wait for the next
couple of movies when it becomes more relevant. But it
is a beautiful haunting scene. Last thing, I want to

(40:10):
say major kudos to the people playing the Infected and
their motion coach, because the priest in this one you
see him very briefly, but he's the one who attacks
Jim when he's in the church. He actually winds up
being the body coach for all of the infected when
we get to twenty eight years later. Oh and adding

(40:34):
walking like a zombie takes some doing. Whether that's a
slow moving dead zombie see Sean of the Dead by
way of example if you want to see a lot
of that, but doing it as a fast moving zombie
like there's a real physicality that has to go into
how this particular virus works, and to constantly give off

(40:56):
the impression that like, there's energy and something inside of
you that can barely be contained by your skin is
a heck of a thing. So kudos to everyone involved
in that. Yeah, the original ending was different. If you've
never seen the alternate ending to twenty eight days later,

(41:17):
they use some of the footage. Ultimately, when the for
the ending that we got the theatrical ending, the original
ending sees them, sees Naomi, Harris and Hannah take Jim
to a medical facility after he shot, but they can't
save him, and he dies, and they head back out
with a renewed sense of hope and optimism given what

(41:39):
he demonstrated to them. I prefer the theatrical ending personally,
though I deeply appreciate the other one. Yeah, this is
It's not quite one of my Desert Island movies if
you only give me like five, but if you give
me ten, this is making that cut for me. This
is I find endlessly rewatchable. Not perfect by any stretch

(42:01):
of the imagination, but one of the most important zombie movies,
and another reminder that the horror genre can be really impactful.
When tackled by a director with vision and ability. Never
mind the fact that Danny Boyle spent two decades almost

(42:23):
swearing up and down he didn't make a zombie.

Speaker 1 (42:25):
Movie with this. Well, the next one is a zombie movie.
We have a change of director. And this is everything
I hate about movie trilogies, movie franchises. There's always a chapter.
Generally it's a third one. This time it's the second
where no one knows why the first one seems to have,
you know, hit people, why it was as effective as

(42:47):
it was. No one seems to know why anyone likes
the first one, and they go and they go with
the low hanging fruit dummy answer of zombies. So this
next one is a zombie movie.

Speaker 2 (42:59):
For the record, twenty eight Days Later comes out in
two thousand and two, has a budget of eight million
dollars and it makes eighty two point eight million, so
wild success financially.

Speaker 1 (43:14):
Yeah, this next one is fifteen million on a seventy
two million dollar box office, So not as much I mean, probably.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
No, But if you want to, if you're curious, like
why we got a sequel in relatively short order, but
for the early two thousands, this is short order. That's why.

Speaker 1 (43:30):
Yeah, this next one was directed by one Carlos uh
President Dio. He has also made after twenty eight weeks later.
Prior to twenty eight weeks later, he wrote and directed
in Tacto. He had a couple of short films before that.
He will go on to make Damsel and Robert won't
even watch it.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
Yep, this guy could be thrown off a balcony.

Speaker 1 (43:55):
So I don't hate this movie or anything like that.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
Now, I don't hate it either.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
It's just other than the fact that it's it's the
same zombies from the first movie, and it's a continuation
of that story. This is twenty eight days later in
name only. This is very much My issue with this
is it takes the it's it's costplaying the first movie. Okay,

(44:25):
more than that, it's kind of like when the kid
dresses up in the Star Wars costume and he has
the lightsaber and he's standing in front of the movie
and he's having a lightsaber duel with the other nerdies.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
With Yeah, I've seen that commercial a few times.

Speaker 1 (44:41):
But that's this movie. This movie's those kids. It's wearing
it's wearing the costume and it's doing the moves, but
it's not the movie. It's just doing an imitation of it,
and it doesn't even know what it's imitating. This this
is a standard. I mean, it's well made. Don't get
me wrong. I'm gonna sound like I hate this movie,

(45:03):
and it's not necessarily the case. I hate that it's
such a wild departure from the first movie because well,
the first movie very much had something to say, and
like I said before, would actually probably upset people because
it's not as much of a zombie movie as you
might hope it to be. And it's like they overcorrected
with the next one, where it's little all it is

(45:23):
doesn't have something to say yet kinda but not not
as loudly or coherently as the first one. This one
is just a bog standard, very nicely shot, fairly well acted,
zombie gory horror movie. And I and I remember Jonas
asked me, like, what do you think of this? And

(45:43):
I'm like, I'm thinking, I love Robert because otherwise I
don't know why I'm putting myself through this, like these
are gross. It's because this is this is the last
thing I say, and then you can kind of cut in. Yeah,
I just find this second one to be thoroughly uninteresting,
and doubly so because the first and the third one
are exceptionally interesting for different reasons.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
I would agree with all of that. Look twenty eight
weeks later, if you just saw it in isolation, if
you didn't see the first one and you just saw
this one, it's not a bad movie. It's really not.
It's not. But because it's part of a trilogy, the
other two of which come from Danny Boyle, who is
a not perfect, mind you, but a one of the

(46:31):
better directors working.

Speaker 1 (46:32):
Quentin Tarantino makes Kill Bill one in two and the
third ones directed by Michael Bay.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
Uh yeah, little I might. Yeah, that's about right.

Speaker 1 (46:43):
Ultimately, so Bill and all the things had to say yet.
But what I really liked was uber Thurman hitting people
with the sword. Great, here's three hours of that. I'm
Michael Bay.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
Yeah, that's that's kind of a vibe here. Now there's
a few good things about twenty eight weeks later that
independent of anything else, I do want to praise first
of all, the opening sequence. I love to death. It
is one of my favorite things in this entire trilogy,
is that opening bit in twenty eight weeks when they're
in the darkened house just trying to avoid being noticed,

(47:18):
and then they opened the door to let a small
child in, and no good deed goes unpunished in this world.
So the infected attack and Robert Carlyle tries to get
his wife out with him, and she won't leave the kid,
and then he gets to the point where well, I
can stay and die with you, or I can leave.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
That nearly caused a fistfight between Jonas and Lily.

Speaker 2 (47:38):
I imagine she wanted him to stay and Jonas was like, no,
he did the right thing.

Speaker 1 (47:43):
Uh huh, that's exactly how that broke out, and.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
Then his run to the boat. There's some really well
shot stuff there. If you see nothing else about this movie,
that opening segment works as a wonderful short film in
the world of twenty eight days later. If nothing else,
that is tremendous, So big kudos to everyone involved in
the as far as that goes. For those of you

(48:10):
who don't know the story of this one, the infected
wind up starving themselves out because they're stupid zombies and
the human body still has to function. So then un
forces led by the United States, Hey, we turned Great
Britain into a colony, briefly show up to try and
start rebuilding, repatriating either finding either survivors or people who

(48:35):
are out of the country and are coming back in.
And things go sideways because the wife from the opening
sequence winds up to not she's a carrier of the disease,
but asymptomatic in herself winds up accidentally passing it on
to her husband.

Speaker 1 (48:52):
Hang on, this is a major problem I have with
this movie. That's no accident. This idgit sneaks past guards
to go to go be with her, and they and
they kiss, and of course you know that goes terribly
badly and then you know he gets bitten and that's
and that's the end of that. And I remember saying
to both my kids, like, you're telling me because by

(49:13):
this point they know that she's a carrier. Yeah, that's
my problem with this. And I know you're trying to
explain like the whole plot, but like, this is a
major problem I have with this movie. This is the
worst part of it for me.

Speaker 2 (49:23):
Because I do completely agree there's a number of ways
they could have gotten another outbreak without it being quite
that dumb.

Speaker 1 (49:32):
Yeah, this is everybody involved in the making and involved
in that scene has to be rock stupid in order
for this to be successful. And like my daughter kind
of like yelled at me about it. He was just
like he just wants to see his wife. Like no, no,
you don't understand. They know she's got infected blood, so
they're gonna use her to make a vaccine. She's the

(49:52):
holy Grail, She's she's a pot of gold.

Speaker 2 (49:57):
But ris Alba's line is you can do your experiments
on corpse. Sure, because unreasonable military man in this movie
very basfly.

Speaker 1 (50:07):
You can get on with it, motherfuckers. Listen, My problem
is THEYDA had like twenty guards outside of her. Oh yeah,
nobody was. That guy wasn't getting to where near her.
First of all, you can't get on a fucking plane
in this world without a proctal exam and a pint
of blood that let alone, you know. And but this guy,
she's utterly left unguarded. There's nobody around. It's a ghost town.

(50:28):
This highly valuable blood specimen in a zombie outbreak is unguarded.
And then like again, it's like the Snicker Wrapper and
fucking Jurassic World after Birth, where like our security measures
here are this far This idiot could walk around a
clean room with a fucking Snickers bar like they wouldn't
have shot him out and beat him with bats outside

(50:50):
had he even tried that one hundred yards of the
target area where the dinosaur is. And here this guy
is able to just waltz in dick in hand to
go see his wife and no one's paying any attention
to it, you know. And Lily was just like, oh
they were distracted. No, you don't understand how the world works.
Then there's no way they'd have left the infected attack

(51:14):
the camp to protect this woman. That's how important she was.
And it was stupid to do it any other way.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
Bless you, Lily for being willing to go with the
emotional journey of this movie despite how stupid it is.
I say that with no moral judgment, no condescension whatsoever.

Speaker 1 (51:30):
Deep affection got It's I miss being able.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
I kind of miss being able to do that personally,
like I have. I am so far gone from that
that I can't anymore.

Speaker 1 (51:39):
But well, look at where I am, like you know,
and I drug you with me. It's it's like I'm
not nearly as dead inside as you're getting there, but
I'm not nearly as dead inside as you are. And
I even I'm like, this is dumb. I'm out. Like
that's the thing, is like, I'm never out of the movie.
As much as I thought Naomi's character was great, Niomi
Harris's character is greeting, I'm never out of the movie.

(52:00):
I'm out of the movie when this happens, this little bit,
this is dick in hand, and I'm throwing bottles of
piece at the screen, going come on, this is this
is dumb, all right? Continue?

Speaker 2 (52:09):
So virus breaks out. They try to contain it doesn't
go well. They fire bomb parts of the city, not enough.
So our primary group is Jeremy Renner, God bless him.
Best part of this movie for the record. He's trying
to get the two kids and the chief medical officer

(52:31):
to Harold Parano flying around in a helicopter because the
kids might have some of the same genetic markers that
their mother had and that could be the key to
developing a cure. So everyone dies except the kids because
body count. They get to Harold Peraneu. He takes them

(52:52):
across the channel to France. Then we get somehow things
broke down over there and we see the infected at
Paris at the Eiffel Tower is kind of where the
movie ends narratively. So I want to say a few
good things about this film, because again, there are a
few good things.

Speaker 1 (53:09):
That subway scene is rock hard. That's that's pretty awesome.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
Yeah, that one again, the opening scene, the subway sequence
when and this one, this one got me thinking of
COVID actually more than twenty eight years later did for
some reason. I can tell you exactly why, because more
than the lockdowns around COVID, I remember, you're wrong. I

(53:35):
remember those I'm not, but I remember like the people
who panicked over other human beings being within six feet
of them. I remember how quickly, more so than the
respiratory illness, the behavior spiraled out of control in places. Yeah,

(53:59):
and the rage virus in that subway scene when they're
all stuck down there and suddenly here's one infected. Yeah,
that kind of hit. That kind of pinged a few
things in my memory, like, oh boy, it helps that
it's very well done to kind of go along with things.
I wanted to give credit to Jeremy Renner. He is

(54:21):
doing a proto Hawkeye, like he could have just sent
this in as his audition for Clint Barton, and I
think they would have cast him because he's doing a
lot of the same stuff. But he It's one of
those weird things where if you watch someone who you
can find, like actors who became bigger stars earlier in

(54:42):
their careers, and they watching them even early on, you
can easily see why they went on to be bigger. Deals.
Renner in this movie shines because he's that good. I'm
not saying Oscar Contender or anything, but he's one of
the big things that everyone remembers from this film, and
I think it helps that his character gets a pretty

(55:03):
unfortunate ending put it mildly, so that's a positive. Yeah,
there's that's kind of it. This movie's a bit over
long for what it is. It way overallies on the infected.
It like you said, it leans weight. Put another way,

(55:24):
the first movie twenty eight Days Later is very British.
Twenty eight weeks Later is very American. Yeah, insensibility for better.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
What he is a joke of any British film. There's
any bit of business America wom you know, it's like
a room with the view of the kitchen, and then
in America it's like it's the room of the view
of hell.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
Yeah, that that line is very apropos Here last thing
I wanted to say, and this is one of my
big critiques of this film, the positioning of Robert Carlyle
as this very like detestable character when all he did
was re act normally. It is a strength of the

(56:07):
writing that he's not just a cowardly character, Like he
tries to save his wife. He tries to do the
right things. But you're in a terrible situation. So when
your options are die with your wife or run for
your life, he made the same choice that any the
like ninety percent of people would like you. He tried,

(56:30):
He made a good faith effort, Like he didn't scamper
as soon as they showed up and say to hell
with all of this.

Speaker 1 (56:35):
They shoved his wife in front of the infected.

Speaker 2 (56:38):
Yeah, he's not He's not you know, Bobby Heen and
hiding behind sensational sherry. He's not doing one of those numbers.
So the writing is smart enough to not make him
utterly detestable, But then in tone, everyone treats him that way,
and so it's a giant bit of dissonance in the

(56:59):
writing that really hurts the overall film at the end
of the day. But I like Robert Carlyle, so.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
He it's so funny because like we tend to blame
like you know, oh, you know the twenty fifteen you know,
me too woke and all of this other stuff. It's
like the ship was the ship was there? Yeah, Like
the seeds of what the next decade of film will
become are already like percolating in, you know, in in

(57:30):
the soil, in the in the in the early two thousands.
We have some comments here really quick, so this friend here,
don't get me wrong. Twenty eight Days and twenty eight
weeks were our fine movies. But if I can just
say one thing, twenty eight years is better than both
other movies combined. We're gonna get there shortly, pal.

Speaker 2 (57:47):
But thank you for coming here. Yep, for the record,
not my assessment, but you're entitled to it, and I
don't think you are. I don't think that is an
unreasonable standard stance to take.

Speaker 1 (57:57):
So it is definitely better then twenty eight weeks later.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
Yeah, twenty eight weeks later. Again, there's a couple of
scenes in Isolation that are very good, but ultimately this
movie is missing a lot of the quiet moments. It's
missing a lot of the human the humanist touch that
Danny Boyle brought to the first one. Yeah, and it
never quite overcomes that.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
But well, it's funny. It's like, this first movie makes
so much money. What if we do a real big
crowd pleaser that it's sure to make millions of dollars?
And it's like, now missed the ball hit the umpire?
You did?

Speaker 2 (58:32):
Yeah, a little bit. So here's the thing about you
might be asking yourself, why is there a giant gap
between twenty eight weeks later and twenty eight years later.
What happened to twenty eight months later? Mark? What happened
to it? Well? Production, hell happened to it? You see,

(58:55):
twenty eight weeks later is still a financial success. It's
not as big, it's not as profitable as the first one,
but it still makes money. It's still well thought of.
More or less, there's clearly places you can go with
this given what happens. But it enters production. Hell, there's
ideas for it. They tried to get it twenty eight

(59:15):
months later, going issues of rights, issues of creative vision,
all the fun stuff that leads to stuff lying dormant,
and it drags on until by the time we finally
do get twenty eight years later, you couldn't do twenty
eight months later. It's been too long. So they just
take some of the ideas from that one and jump

(59:36):
forward an appropriate amount of time more or less. So
there's your interstercial between. There's why we got four years
between the first two, give or take, and two decades
between between the second ones.

Speaker 1 (59:54):
So yeah, now we're the twenty eight years Later, which
just came out this past June. It had a budget
of sixty million to one hundred and fifty million. I
think it actually beat Ilio in its weekend if I
remember correctly.

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
I believe it did, if memory is served. Yeah, it's uh.

Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
I remember talking about that because we were just like, oh,
poor Pixar can't catch a break.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
Well, some of that's their own doing, but that's for
another discussion later.

Speaker 1 (01:00:19):
We've already had it. So I'll tell you I like
this movie better than the second one. I think this
is closer in spirit to the first one.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
Oh, thank you guys, both Danny Boyle and Alex Garland
back for it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
Yeah, so this whole thing takes place like that there's
a colony that's on Ah do you want to make yeah,
just well before you do, okay, because I want to
set this up appropriately. I will tell you that this
was the first time in these three movies where I
didn't understand the world I was living in anymore, Like, Okay,
there's stuff that happens in this movie where I have

(01:00:55):
to keep going to either the wiki or chat tipt
like what the fuck is this? Like there were certain
things that are happening in the movie that I can
kind of point to and go, Okay, that's my emotional
hook here, and that's what I'm gonna focus on. This
is the first one where the fantasy world building, high
sci fi horror elements were utterly confusing to me, and

(01:01:19):
like I very much feel Look, if you got this
and you think I'm a toaster Robin, I have more
power to y'all. I'll take that. But this I feel
like Jane, and I'll tell you this is backed up
by some of the critics, So roll toaster ovens together.
I guess there is definitely sort of a muddled, coherent

(01:01:41):
message coming out of this movie and a coherent, muddled
presentation that I think a lot of people are struggling
with so where like it looks good, it's acted well,
but I'm not entirely sure if what he was trying
to say got through, And at times I'm not even
entirely sure what he's saying. Also, I'm I'm not entirely
sure this world makes any more sense to me, any

(01:02:03):
sense to me anymore, given all the things that have happened.
So with that said, Okay, I frighted out this Gordian
not for me.

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
I will do what I can to help you with that.
So this is this is the one. This is the
one where part of the world building makes me go
on my COVID tangent. I promise we're not going to
delve too deep into this, but just it's impossible not
to look at the writing choices and not think they
weren't informed by that. So that's why I have to

(01:02:31):
bring it up when I get to it. So anyway,
so twenty eight years after the initial outbreak is where
we get to. Twenty eight years later, we do have
to kind of do a damn you Hollywood for this.
So actually I do get to do a full plot
synopsis gave me.

Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
So the infection was Robert, that's why you're here.

Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
Yeah, I know. I could be replaced with AI with
a Texas speech and chat GPT, but and a cute girl.

Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
Don't never forget that. They'll never forget the cute girl.

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):
If you put an anime girl as the avatar for
the text to speech.

Speaker 1 (01:03:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
So the infection was stopped on mainland Europe. And if
you delve into some of the wiki and some of
the information on the twenty eight years later website, they
tell you they just nuked Paris. It was spreading. They
couldn't stop it, literal nuclear bombing to stop it. And

(01:03:26):
the way the world has decided to go about this
is okay, everything on the British Isles, nobody touches it,
Nobody leave alone. Nature has reclaimed it. Stay over there.
There are still people there as we see. That's where
the movie comes from. But everything outside of that has
progressed normally since two thousand and four or when did

(01:03:50):
the first one come out? Two thousand and two. Yeah,
everything else has progressed normally since two thousand and two,
two thousand and four ish, So keep that in mind.
Our story follows one of the surviving colonies on the
British Isles. Our opening scene is kind of an homage
to twenty eight weeks later, where a small child's a

(01:04:14):
group of people are attacked. He goes to see his dad,
who's a priest who's gone insane, who hides him away
and then gets attacked by the infected because he believed
this is divine judgment. Then we jump forward and our
primary group.

Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
Of messaging, of the anti religion messaging is a bit
heavy handed.

Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
It's gonna be more so in the sequel. We'll talk
about that when we get to it. Hang on, I
believe me we'll we'll get to that. So because I
don't think Garland and Danny Boyle have like overt anti
religious beliefs.

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
They are skeptics.

Speaker 2 (01:04:50):
Yes, well, I'm not talking about like their I shouldn't.
I should rephrase that. I don't think they're trying to
get an anti religious message across.

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (01:04:59):
I don't think that's a big part of their of
what they're doing. I think it's a part of life,
and consequently it's a part that they have to that
they feel compelled to discuss in some degree. But moving on,
so we follow Spike, who's our primary character that we're
going to follow. He is with his dad, Aaron Taylor
Johnson in full on Craven the Hunter, Physique and mode

(01:05:21):
Un tell that we're shot around the same time. He
is taking his first trip from their island to the mainland.
This is a big deal. He's twelve years old. It's
time for his coming of age. So they live on
a small island off the coast. It's attached to the
mainland via a causeway that's accessible at low tide. So
they go out. This is where we get a little
bit more world building. We see a few different kinds

(01:05:43):
of infected. Now the virus has evolved over time as
they don't want to do We see some that have
developed eating bugs. They are big, bloated, low to the ground,
and we encounter a few of them. They kill a
few of them. We go scale, averaging around. We see
a herd of deer. Yeah it is, and the second

(01:06:06):
one will be more of the more of that, but
more on that in a minute or two. Then we
see a giant herd of deer because nature is starting
to reclaim things. Then we encounter an alpha. These are
a subset of the infected that have evolved to metabolize
the virus to be like a steroid for them, so

(01:06:26):
they are huge, they are ripped, and they have rudimentary intelligence.
So these are the one The alphas will attract kind
of a pack of other fast infected and they will
feed them and guide them and try to keep them
from hurting themselves too much.

Speaker 1 (01:06:44):
They also apparently meet.

Speaker 2 (01:06:47):
We'll get to that. I. Yeah, that's the thing. We'll
we'll get to it sort of. So they encounter in Alpha,
and they wind up staying out late, but they make
it better. The Alpha chases them across the causeway. They
are saved at the gates of their civilized eight, of
their little settlement.

Speaker 1 (01:07:07):
They go in, and.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
The kid is unhappy because Aaron Taylor Johnson understand that
the truth is important, but so is the story. So
he's telling a story about his kid's first time out,
which has true elements to it and is somewhat exaggerated
as well, because both these things are equal and are important.
And Spike's like, but he's lying the truth, and everyone

(01:07:32):
arounds him like, kid, you're twelve, Yes, the truth's important.
Don't forget it. You don't have to tell it the
whole You don't have to tell nothing but the truth
the whole time. The story and the community is important.
We wind up with more conflict between Spike and his dad,
because teenager teenage boys and their fathers have conflict. Who

(01:07:53):
have thought This one is exacerbated by uh, his mother.
Jody Comer does great work here. By the way, one
of the highlights of this movie is her actual.

Speaker 1 (01:08:07):
Treasure as an actress. We talked about her with the
Motorcycle Bike Riders. The Bike Riders, Yeah, and was it
the Motorcycle Diary. Is that's a whole other movie.

Speaker 2 (01:08:15):
Whole other movie that's lionizing schae Grivera because we need
more of that.

Speaker 1 (01:08:19):
Yes, yes, anyway, she's great. She I talked about how
great she is in the Bike Riders, like she's one
of because she's not in sexy movies. But she's just
a phenomenal actress. Nobody knows, nobody remembers. She's awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:08:31):
Yeah. So she's the mother and she's suffering from dementia
something similar. It's brain cancer, which you know I clocked
and I imagine you did as well. But so Spike
is like and Aaron Taylor Johnson has started having an
affair because my wife is dying of.

Speaker 1 (01:08:49):
Brain cancer and I have and I have new Gingrich disease.

Speaker 2 (01:08:53):
Well, he also has to deal with the stress of
it all, and I'm more sympathetic to him in this
than I am to a lot of people in some.

Speaker 1 (01:09:00):
Molar situations, but specifically, yes.

Speaker 2 (01:09:05):
Specifically nude Kingridge. But there's a little bit of conflict there,
and Spike winds up hearing from both another elder guy
on the island and his dad about a doctor who's
on the mainland. This is a Ray Fine's character who
is our Kurt stand in, because there's always a Colonel
Kurtz character in an Alex Garland movie. He loves Apocalypse now.

(01:09:28):
It's one of those things that you can't unsee once
you once have been pointed out to you about his work.
So Spike sets fire to their storage shed, the community
storage shed seems like a big deal, and smuggles his
mother out to go see the doctor to try and
get help because he's twelve. And as they're going through
the he they stumble across a soldier from one of

(01:09:50):
the NATO or UN patrol boats that crashed and the
a few people wound up on the shore, most of
them die one of them lives long enough to meet
up with these two. There's a little bit of world building,
a little bit of comedy as this twenty year old
kid who's grown up in the modern world interacts with Spike,

(01:10:12):
who's grown up in what's left of England, and there's
some funny stuff there. He winds up dying when they're
attacked by another Alpha on a train because they go
they go there. There's a pregnant infected woman who gives birth.
She doesn't attack Jody Comber, and Jody Comber shows up
because female solidarity I only half kid. This baby's born,

(01:10:36):
they stop it from getting infected, and then the infected,
the alpha over this particular pot of infected shows up
and is like, rah kill giving back my baby is
what is heavily implied, and he kills our poor Swedish boy,

(01:10:58):
just tears his head off, starts chasing Spike.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
And do you like predator? Did you want to see
more of that sort of thing?

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
Starts chasing Spike and Isla. They are saved by Ray
Fines and his voodoo I kid like. He has a
very powerful sedative that he shoots into this big guy
and it knocks him out on his feet and Ray Fines,
who is another glorious highlight for this movie, by the way,
I love Ray Fines his work. So he takes them

(01:11:30):
to where he has made his home, where the fire
is always burning. It is the Bone Temple, his monument
to death and life. And I can talk about some
stuff that I really like about that later. I just
got to get to the plot. So they go there
and the doctor examines Jody Comer and says, yeah, you've

(01:11:50):
got cancer. It's metastasized. It's everywhere. It's in your brain,
it's in your lymph nodes. You got it all, lady.
This is like stage four point seventy five. I got nothing.
And Spike goes, but you're a doctor. Isn't there medicine
in the old hospitals? And he goes, and poor ray
Fines has to tell this child, even if she was

(01:12:14):
in a real hospital in the real world, by this point,
all they can do is give her a morphine. Kid,
there's nothing I can do other than ease her pain.
There's a very tearful goodbye between the two of them,
and ray Fines euthanizes her. He Spike then takes the baby,
who he names Alah back to the colony, leaves it there,

(01:12:36):
and he says, I'm going to continue my walk about
because I feel like this is something I have to do.
I'm still figuring out who I am. I'm still a
twelve year old boy. And if the movie had ended
there and it felt really good about it, it continues
for long enough for Spike to encounter Jimmy from the

(01:13:00):
opening bit.

Speaker 1 (01:13:02):
The cock Power Rangers, the euro.

Speaker 2 (01:13:05):
Trash Power Ranger Sentai Hour shows up. And this bothered
me more because I understand what they're doing thematically and
where they're going to go with it. I really do,
and I think it's a good direction. But something about
the execution of all of this just really rubbed me
the wrong way. Anyway. So Jimmy Saville our Jimmy Seville
stand in, which is a real deep cut reference to

(01:13:29):
the yur like UK culture, shows up and says to Spike,
I'm Jimmy. You've seen my name carved into hanging upside down,
infected a little bit, Nothing bad will come of this.
Pay no attention to the inverted cross on my chain.
Let's be pals. And that's where the movie ends, and
presumably where Bone Temple will pick up because twenty eight

(01:13:51):
years later is actually the start of another trilogy that
will be twenty eight years later, twenty eight years later,
the Bone Temple and the third one that because they
twenty eight years later and Bone Temple back to back
Bone Temple is not directed by Alex Garland. It's directed
by Na DaCosta. And if that sends a shiver down
your spine, it probably should, and not a good one.

(01:14:14):
But yeah, that's where it ends. So it's kind of
setting up the first part of another trilogy since we're
doing this, this one in particular, a little bit more
damn you Hollywood style. I'm gonna stop talking. Let Mark
talk about the movie.

Speaker 1 (01:14:26):
So I look at more than the second one. This
one fact that she feels like a twenty eight days
later movie. I think I struggled with it because I
wasn't quite like your explanation made sense. Oh, okay, the
the infected are just evolving and they have to eat
or they'll die. So some of these have involved to
eat bugs and this is why, this is why they've bloated.
And look the way that they do. You talking about

(01:14:49):
how they metastasize, the metabolized the virus so now they're
all like you know, for WWE wrestlers.

Speaker 2 (01:15:01):
Mad would love all of the alphas.

Speaker 1 (01:15:03):
Yeah, he'd put them all on a fucking stable.

Speaker 2 (01:15:06):
He'd also have ensured they stayed nude so that we
could see the giant prosthetic dongs flopping around.

Speaker 1 (01:15:11):
That's all I heard about from my son. By the way,
he was like, I've seen it. I'm like, all right,
I good, okay that I saw it, and I was like,
that's seem worse.

Speaker 2 (01:15:20):
So anyway, yeah, it's really not that gratuitous, like it's there.

Speaker 1 (01:15:25):
But so a lot of the stuff with I mean, like,
I know, we make fun of Aaron Taylor Johnson, but
like I said, he is a victim of whatever project
he's in. So when he's in Craving the Hunter, he sucks.
He's in this, he's good.

Speaker 2 (01:15:39):
He's lesser bullet train, he's good.

Speaker 1 (01:15:40):
Like he's not a bad actor, right, He's just absolutely
a victim of it whatever project he chooses. The kid
I started to think more of as like he has
a very nice arc. You know, he's bumbling in the beginning,
he is unsure of himself, and by the end he
was like no, no, no, what I am but I
don't want what I'm not, and you know, and he's
off on a journey. I think I I'll be curious

(01:16:02):
to see what they do with him in The Bone Collector.
I'm curiously what the next steps of his journey are.
But the movie that that this was about him, and
you know, he's a POV character, and the question being
asked of this is, you know, what do you do
when you're presented with this world? Do you do you
lean in?

Speaker 2 (01:16:21):
Do you.

Speaker 1 (01:16:23):
Do you become an animal? Do you maintain your humanity?

Speaker 2 (01:16:26):
And this is this is his struggle, this is his
central conflict that's gonna be where we go with the
second one. Is Jimmy showing him like the worst side
of things.

Speaker 1 (01:16:35):
Yeah, it's it's you know, it's the old Pleasure Island thing.
So I thought it was insane. The only used bows
and like you only get one shot and then you
get overrun. I mean, bullets need production and if you
ask do guns also I was thinking about that with
the first one. It was like, you can't make this
movie in the United States. We all have weapons, We're

(01:16:57):
heavily armed people.

Speaker 2 (01:17:00):
That's one of the things that George Romero tackles a
little bit in some of his movies.

Speaker 1 (01:17:03):
Well, I was thinking even more like Zombie Land. Yeah,
walking around with guns.

Speaker 2 (01:17:08):
Yeah, again, there's a It's why the first and third
work a little bit better is they have very distinctive
British sensibilities about them in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 (01:17:19):
He's the guy who who's been commenting on YouTube they
could have brought a club or something. Well, they're using
arrows because they're protect that weapons.

Speaker 2 (01:17:26):
And I think the other reason you don't see a
lot of melee work is because we spend so much
time with Spike and if you give a twelve year
old a club and tell him to fight me off,
it ain't working so well.

Speaker 1 (01:17:39):
Yeah, so anyway, yeah, this is my Yoda shouldn't have
a lightsaber argument. We please know how to understand how
melee weapons work. Anyway, So things I liked about this
movie Aaron Taylor Johnson's acting, Jody Khmer's acting, the cinematography
is still great. England's a beautiful country. It's it's really

(01:18:00):
weird because like when you think about England, you always
get like this. My daughter brought up. The aesthetic of
the first one is very punk rock and punk rock
and dystopia share, you know, have a shared history together. Yeah,
this is this is more Planet of the Apes more
specifically the more recent Planet of the Apes movie. Okay,
where look at look at the natural beauty of this

(01:18:22):
planet when civilization is washed away? Which I like, I mean, like,
do I want to go back to the key living
in the caves?

Speaker 2 (01:18:29):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:18:29):
Am I? You know, Am I a conservationist? Not necessarily
though I'm really against you know, mass polluting when it
can be avoided. I think it's a reasonable stance. So
I like nature, you know, says the city Boy. I like,
you know, I like beautiful landscapes and England And like
I said, England's a beautiful country in this movie reminds
you of that's a good use of the landscape. The
Lord of the Rings us New Zealand as an as

(01:18:51):
an example. The infected are interesting looking. Now that I
have some more contacts, I can appreciate them more beyond that,
I think, you know, now that we're talking about it,
I'm you know, hyper focusing on what do you do

(01:19:13):
when presented with a world turned upside down? Do you
descend into madness or you know, in violence, or do
you maintain your humanity. But now this feels like an
unfinished story.

Speaker 2 (01:19:25):
Well it is intentionally, so it's right.

Speaker 1 (01:19:28):
But I hate that sort of thing, Robert, and I'll
tell you why, and you know why. But I'm doing
this for effect. Make the movie you're making, don't make
the movie you're intending to make. Like I understand, this
is the first part of a trilogy. But unless you've
got it signed on the dotted line and you're shooting,
you're doing a Lord of the Rings and you're shooting
all three at the same time, you don't know if

(01:19:50):
you're gonna get a second one. Well again, you do,
but but you see what I'm saying, Like, I just
wish we would go back through the days of make
an encapsulated product. And if you're if you're grace enough
with success, with financial success, and you want to do
another one, do another one, but don't make that, you know,

(01:20:11):
don't bet on that that being the case, especially now
when a successful film is a tenuous bet. Ask the
people who made Fantastic for our first steps in Superman.
And by the way, you should see the comments I
got when you know, I took our discussion about that
from Monday, made that a TikTok.

Speaker 2 (01:20:28):
Oh, Lordie, I'd be happy to go through those comments
with you at some point, because I also saw that
you're in that you're real got cut off because you
went longer than the allotted time.

Speaker 1 (01:20:40):
Oh why did you watch it on Facebook?

Speaker 2 (01:20:42):
I'd tried to Instagram too, and it still did the
same thing.

Speaker 1 (01:20:45):
Meta is the same on both, And yes, you only
get a minute in thirty seconds, which is why I'm
which is why, like if it gets close to a
minute and thirty, I'll still put it there. But like
my ones that are five minutes, I don't even bother anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:20:55):
Yeah, yeah, anyway, yes, so yeah, I would. Well, they
did shoot one and two back to back, so they
had that.

Speaker 1 (01:21:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:21:05):
Uh three they're already making.

Speaker 1 (01:21:07):
So I know this isn't totally fit the thing that
I'm making. I think it's more of an overall critique
about modern film. Oh yeah, please just make an encapsulated
story for fu sake. And this doesn't feel like that.
So TV is not movies. Movies is not TV. If
you're trying to make an over long episode of television,
I get rubbed the wrong way, and nobody wants to

(01:21:28):
rub me the wrong way. I guarantee that your thoughts
are now.

Speaker 2 (01:21:32):
I don't disagree with you. And like I said, if
they had cut this with the with his monologue and
we hadn't met Jimmy, right, I think that that's a
strong standalone movie, and then you could use the Jimmy
stuff at the opening of.

Speaker 1 (01:21:48):
The sequel, which is what we should have done.

Speaker 2 (01:21:51):
I'm not in charge of that. I don't have to
create a stinger for another movie that they felt they
had to include.

Speaker 1 (01:21:56):
So I know you're wrong because I know somebody listening
this is like what he did not like it or something. No.
I loved it. Actually, I was laughing my ass off
at it because of the use of music, you know,
and when the power range is aesthetic of the fighting
style of like, this is all great stuff, utterly misplaced
in this fucking movie. There was this total whiplash like
I hadn't seen quite some time and annoyed the pits

(01:22:16):
out of me.

Speaker 2 (01:22:18):
I'm kind of with you on that again. I understand
thematically what they're going for with that and where they're
going to go with it, and fair play, that's a
perfectly valid way to take the story. But it felt
really out of place and it really left me a
tad sour. Yeah, I'm gonna I'll read this one. They

(01:22:38):
could have done the Jimmy fight during or after the credits.
I would have been okay with it happening during the
credits personally, because we.

Speaker 1 (01:22:45):
Know we're getting a second one. That would have made
more sense, Like like, I mean, I know we're all
kind of sick of the Marvel after credit scene, but
it's a part of the culture, now deal with it.
So end the movie with his monologue, show a minute
or two of credits, and then mid credit scene is
that or even better, wait the credits are all the
way done and say coming soon the Bone Collector and

(01:23:08):
you know, and whatever, coming soon, but you know, the
giant Boner and then they show that scene.

Speaker 2 (01:23:16):
You know, there was a stinger before the credits at
the end of Back to the Future two. For Back
to the Future three, right, they could have done something
like that.

Speaker 1 (01:23:26):
And I think in the re release of The Empire
Strikes Back, they showed a clip of Return of the Jedi.
I think at the time it was Revenge of the Jedi.

Speaker 2 (01:23:34):
It was Revenge of the Jedi originally, but they changed
the title because.

Speaker 1 (01:23:38):
Well, that's what I'm saying, like, I think what they
showed the Stinger for the third movie it was Revenge
of the Jedi.

Speaker 2 (01:23:44):
Yeah, so I'm in agreement with you on that. It
it felt weird. This is a movie that for me,
starts very strong. The first act is very good. Yeah,
then it meanders a little in the second. The second
is still okay, but it meanders a bit. And unfortunately

(01:24:05):
the third, while it is emotionally resonant, it really struggles
in the very ending. Again, it just did not right
with me.

Speaker 1 (01:24:14):
The more we're talking about I think, you know, I
think an awful lot these days about the way that
you know are the culture of parenting and the you know,
and we're kind of dealing with the aftermath of a
wave of overparenting, helicopter and lawnmower parenting, that sort of thing.
And I'm doing a lot of talking these days on

(01:24:37):
social media about letting your kids experience the world in
a way that they will either fail or succeed. That
isn't the point. The point is to let them experience
it so that they learn, and you're just you're there
to make sure they don't go too far over the
edge in any any direction. And I'm thinking about this
kid's journey of you know, he's it's a metaphor from

(01:25:00):
at least from where I was coming from while I
was watching the movie, and as we're talking about it,
of he's in this very sheltered place, and he outgrows
this sheltered place. He's like, this isn't a good fit
for me. I need to you know, this is the
German show. I need to, I need to sail and
I hit the wall. You know, this is all of
these stories about kids kind of throwing off the yoke

(01:25:21):
of their parents and you know, and trying to find
their own identity. And that was That's what I feel like.
This movie is a metaphor for that. The guy said
it earlier in our in our chat here, you know,
this is a coming of age story. And in more
ways than one, this is absolutely about that maturation process
that a lot of people don't get to go through

(01:25:41):
because they're you know, traumatized, you know, throughout their youth
and over you know, and parentified, so they don't get
the very important, very also very important developmental stage of
developing your own personality. Who are you as a person?
And I think this is what a lot of people
struggle with now a lot of gen Z and you know,

(01:26:03):
you know, elder millennial folks out there, probably gen X,
but we're close to perfect. So who knows where uh where?
Because some of us lose that part of our lives,
we don't. We struggle as adults on you know, morals, ethics,

(01:26:25):
you know, emotional scaffolding, coping skills, because we know we
don't get that opportunit. We never got that opportunity as kids.
So this is like that kid's journey of ascending into
adulthood fully formed with you know, with good scaffolding. I
I the more I talk about it, the more, but
that's me taking a lot out of the movie as

(01:26:47):
opposed to what the movie is presenting.

Speaker 2 (01:26:50):
Well, I don't think you're wrong because a lot of
your analysis is very well supported. You're dealing with a guy,
a character in Spy who is presented with two sort
of extremes initially with his parents. Aaron Taylor Johnson is
very he's not full on militant, but he doesn't see

(01:27:15):
the infected as humans. He sees them as there's no
more mind to them, there's no more soul to them.
They are dangerous and frankly, killing them is a mercy
to them.

Speaker 1 (01:27:28):
I was gonna say they're alligators or bears.

Speaker 2 (01:27:32):
Yeah, they are wild animals to be encountered and to
be avoided or dealt with if necessary. And Jody Comer
is that, by contrast, you know, very very humanistic about it.
She doesn't want her son to go. He's too young
for this, you know. And so Spike is stuck between

(01:27:55):
those two kind of extremes, and it's actually a bit
more with our with Ray finds that we see the
way forward that he seems to more adopt, which is
an acknowledgment that yes, the infected are dangerous, and yes
I will have to defend myself, but if I forget

(01:28:17):
that these were people, then I lose something very important
to myself.

Speaker 1 (01:28:25):
And such is a lesson about how we're currently interacting
with each other as people that one side seems to
forget the other political side are people still.

Speaker 2 (01:28:35):
Both sides do it at this point, and it's gross
and dangerous and that's a whole other thing. But Ray
finds kind of speaks it out in two different Latin
phrases fairly simply. One of them is memento MORI remember
that you must die. It's an important thing. But more important,
almost is to remember love, to remember life, to remember

(01:28:56):
what makes life worth living and what makes it important
if I may.

Speaker 1 (01:29:00):
I was doing a couple therapy last night and I
said to the guy, I said, the challenge has been
put in front of you, stop drinking and spend time
with your family. Do it or don't, but that's the challenge.
And I looked over at the wife and I said,
what do you think You're perfect and you don't have homework.
Your homework is this be kind but a cost you nothing,
you don't have to earn it with. It comes with
the human starter kit. Show your husband kindness, like it's

(01:29:24):
not that hard, and that's what you're talking about, you know,
Like that's why I said, like kindness is such an
essential part of the human anatomy, the human way of being,
and it's often neglected. It's like fruit that dies on
the vine, you know, of rot, and it's like people
have to remember that without kindness, you don't get to

(01:29:45):
social contracting and social contracting that like build civilization and
Jesus Christ, why are we losing these things? I say?

Speaker 2 (01:29:53):
In a film discussion, well good film discussion and gender
is that and we're losing it because everybody forgot the
purpose of the Chesterton fence moving on. So uh yeah,
that's kind of the some total of that movie where
it stands again. The sequel will be out in January,
I believe of twenty six.

Speaker 1 (01:30:13):
Yep, it's on the calendar.

Speaker 2 (01:30:15):
So we'll have a full damn you Hollywood for that
one when it comes out, assuming nothing else comes out
to challenge it. And it's January, so that's a.

Speaker 1 (01:30:21):
Funny joke because they know it's fuck you. It's January. Yeah,
it was coming out in May. That's a problem. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:30:29):
Yeah, to kind of close again, I really like this movie.
It sunk a little in my estimation the more I've
kind of sat with it, not bad like this is
this might make my top ten. It's a little iffy,
but it's there right now. Whether it stays there or not,
we got four more months. We'll find out.

Speaker 1 (01:30:50):
Yeah, I don't think it's how about my top ten?
And it's definitely an honorable.

Speaker 2 (01:30:53):
Mention minimum minimum. This would be like if this were
if we got like twelve spots, it would easily be there.

Speaker 1 (01:30:59):
I think for me, by the time this is all said, Yeah,
it's a top twenty movie of this year by far.
But you know, did I like it or do I
think it's better than like Companion or some of the
other ones I thought were number one?

Speaker 2 (01:31:10):
Manas No, yeah again me, No, No, that's you, And
I'm not disagreeing with you necessarily. Like where it ends
up on mine, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:31:22):
I mean it's no electric fence, you mean the electric state? Yeah?
Whatever point? Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:31:31):
Yeah, So if you haven't seen this, give it a look.
It's definitely it's definitely a good good If you like
this franchise, it's pretty darn good. Uh. It's very Danny
Boyle and Alex Garland for better and for worse.

Speaker 1 (01:31:48):
If nothing else, say this is better than Civil War?

Speaker 2 (01:31:51):
Oh easily, Well that's talking about Alex Garland.

Speaker 1 (01:31:55):
I don't it's hard to compare to warfare. Warfare. It's
very much its own thing. But if we're talking about
just Alan Alex Garland stuff, this seemed less shrill than
Civil War.

Speaker 2 (01:32:10):
It helps that Garland is tempered here by Danny Boyle.

Speaker 1 (01:32:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:32:16):
The two have collaborated a lot, and I think they
do work well together. They kind of remove some of
each other's Rougher edges with the way that they collaborate.
But yeah, I'd much rather watch Garland stuff in the
hands of Boyle than in his own hands.

Speaker 1 (01:32:35):
As a general, speaking of getting your hands on something.
On Monday, if you enjoyed this review and you want
to see Mark and Robert talk about the great cinema
classics of the modern film age, don't watch Robert and
I take on just a masterpiece of technology, really a

(01:32:57):
crossroads of technology and human anxiety. That is War of
the World's twenty twenty five that went direct to Amazon
Prime and have even gone there, starring luminary actor and
musician and all around cultural icon Ice Cube.

Speaker 2 (01:33:20):
I wonder if most people could pick him out of
a lineup these days.

Speaker 1 (01:33:25):
I subscribe, but I can't promise anything, you know what.

Speaker 2 (01:33:28):
Thank you for the subscribing.

Speaker 1 (01:33:29):
Bad Yeah, absolutely, thank you for the subscribing. But boy,
if I had a nickel for every time someone said
I can't promise you anything, he says, I just came
to rant about twenty eight years. We appreciate that. We'll
take it.

Speaker 2 (01:33:43):
We are glad to have you, glad to have your
perspective on things, and sincerely, thank you for interacting with
us a little bit much appreciated.

Speaker 1 (01:33:51):
If you I have to start saying this more on TikTok,
but if you more importantly than I think than anything else,
if you like what we're doing, if you like something
that we said, share it with people. Just hit the repost,
hit the share. You know, it's an easy enough thing
to do to cost you nothing. That's the way this
grows is when it starts getting into that sort of citric,
concentric loop of shared social media. So or not, it's

(01:34:15):
up to you. I don't tell people what to do,
like I say in therapy. You're you know, you're an
adult with agency and freedom. You do what you feel
is right. But if you would like to do as
a solid in a favor, please share around, repost, et cetera.
With that said, let me back up a second. On Sunday,
Jesse and I are doing a source material because I
was scolded told stop doing multiple twenty twenty two issue books.

(01:34:42):
We're only doing twelve in total. We're doing the original
Crow because we talked about everything else the Crow, but
the actual book itself.

Speaker 2 (01:34:50):
We've reviewed the movies. You've done a long Road to
Ruin for all the direct to video ones and all
their terribleness.

Speaker 1 (01:34:57):
Yeah. So we've talked about all four the original Crow movies.
We talked about the worst movie of last year, the
Crow Remake soundtrack. So we've never talked about the actual
comic that inspired the franchise. So we're gonna do that
on Sunday, in addition to which we're gonna talk uh,
The Butcher of Paris and then finally The Many Deaths

(01:35:19):
of Layless Star, which got a lot of press online
about uh, you know, good non superhero related comic book.
So we'll see how that turns out. Then Monday, like
I said, damn you, Hollywood is back. Fuck you. It's
August and September are always chock full of streaming movies,
you know, and just other stuff we don't get to

(01:35:40):
for the first half of the year. This is usually
like our ketchup months, So a lot of a lot
of triple features in Damn you, Hollywood's with streaming movie.

Speaker 2 (01:35:48):
You're bless you for not asking me to do this.

Speaker 1 (01:35:53):
By the way, Oh what the prov Fear Street prom
Queen the Old Guard to and Fountain of Youth.

Speaker 2 (01:36:00):
No, that's a bad one too, but Happy Gilmore too. Yeah,
Happy of State right right, I can't believe you're gonna
watch Heads of State.

Speaker 1 (01:36:14):
It's a new John Cena conn. Like again, I'm trying.
I don't want to do what I did last year round.
I know, I.

Speaker 2 (01:36:21):
Dude, it's so bad.

Speaker 1 (01:36:23):
But I learned my lesson the first time and not
not to involve you in this sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:36:27):
And that's what I appreciate. Not being invited to that one.

Speaker 1 (01:36:31):
Make us give a fuck. So you know, yeah, we
really fun. Trouble features coind of Okay, so just to
the point of fact, it was Happy Gilmore too, Heads
of State, and The Thursday Murder Club, all of which
I was like, no that that Robert gets on Monday off.
But that's not coming out until September anyway. So this

(01:36:51):
week coming up, like I said, we have those comic books,
we have I'm in the wrong month. Now we have
War of the World.

Speaker 2 (01:36:59):
Really, the aliens aren't even the biggest threat. Mark, No, No,
it's the.

Speaker 1 (01:37:04):
Data, Robert, don't you understand it's the data. And then
Robert will be back for a good damn you Hollywood
hosted by Alexis. They'll be talking weapons.

Speaker 2 (01:37:11):
Yeah, that's gonna be the two of us and Jason Teasley.
Weapons seems to be getting good reviews. A lot of
people seem to be enjoying it. I haven't seen it yet,
but I will before the review.

Speaker 1 (01:37:22):
Sprocket in Virginia. Well, I'm at Tode the red Sprocket
in Virginia. Alexis and Jesse will be talking Stranger Things
season one because everyone has to bite my rime. So
now they're doing old TV shows. And speaking of old
TV shows, we are finally fucking done with The West Way.
We'll be reviewing season seven. It's not good.

Speaker 2 (01:37:43):
Remember I told you season five was when it started
to get bad, and you looked at me like I'd
grown a second head because you liked season five.

Speaker 1 (01:37:48):
Yeah, who was right?

Speaker 2 (01:37:50):
Mark?

Speaker 1 (01:37:51):
I thank you, Robert kids, Thanks Robert. This past Monday,
speaking of which, we reviewed The Naked Gun twenty twenty five.
Once ag again, Alexis led Robert and Jason down a
gilded path. They reviewed together and then I stole their
material into the TikTok and.

Speaker 2 (01:38:06):
You got the wrong Franco brother listed.

Speaker 1 (01:38:08):
It's it's not my fault. I don't check the AI Listen.

Speaker 2 (01:38:12):
It is entirely your fault that you don't check the AI,
you can't trust it.

Speaker 1 (01:38:18):
So you how little I cared about that movie. Speaking
of which, speaking of Monsters.

Speaker 2 (01:38:21):
Oh you would have loved it. Mark, It would have
spoken to you on a deep personal level.

Speaker 1 (01:38:26):
Believe. Yeah. Now that I read that, I was like,
I really should see this. I should watch this with
Jonas when it comes on PBOD. Last night myself and
Alexis reviewed Monsters, which is the Monster season two. The
first Monster was Jeffrey Dahmer, which is in the archives.
This one is the Lyl and Eric Menendez story, hence
the plural on Monster and yay.

Speaker 2 (01:38:43):
For Javey or Bardem reminding everyone that he's a good actor.

Speaker 1 (01:38:46):
Yeah, unlike his little Mermaid roll.

Speaker 2 (01:38:48):
So that look the check cash.

Speaker 1 (01:38:51):
That is all for me. Go ahead, Robert, do you plugs?
We can get out of here all right.

Speaker 2 (01:38:55):
As mentioned, next week, we'll be reviewing Weapons, which is
getting a lot of good buzz and looking for to
that one. Last week Mark and I reviewed Naked Gun. Then,
as mentioned, Alexis, Jason and I reviewed together. So listen
to those in the archives if you're so inclined. I
cover mixed martial arts and professional wrestling over at four
one one mania dot com ww snackdown on Friday's UFC

(01:39:17):
events On Saturdays intermittently, I pinch hit another location, so
you might find me over there at other times. This
week we've got the fallout from SummerSlam return of brack Lesner. Hey,
I'll let you have that, And Saturday we have UFC

(01:39:41):
on ESPN seventy two. They're still in the warehouse. It's
still not a very good night of fights, but I'll
be covering it if you want a full preview of that.
In a review of last week's card, I host the
four one one Pound MMA podcast. Wherever you listen to
your podcasting needs, you can find me over there talking
to wide wack you wonderful world of mixed martial arts
and combat sports in general. Well, I express my desire

(01:40:02):
for Connor McGregor to stay far far away from everything
this time around and talk about the proposed amendments to
the Muhammad Ali Act in boxing, and almost none of
them are good, So tune in for that if you again,
if any of that speaks to you, go give it
a listen. I appreciate the heck out of it, and
mostly we appreciate you listening to us. At all. Thank

(01:40:24):
you very much much much appreciated. And yeah, we'll be
back next week, so thank you. In advances important.

Speaker 1 (01:40:35):
For Robert Winfrey. I have tiktoks to post and record. Well,
be safe and behave, yeah,

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