Triple Feature: The Lost Boys/Falling Down/8MM

Episode Transcript
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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 Rattleage or W two
M Network. Please or don't listen at all.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
There'll bespector called they'll be, will be and stuff like
you diver, you were god be movie starring everybody.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
Hero, for rest your happily weak and watch the world.

(01:09):
And we are going to start right here. He no,
and welcome to Triple Feature, a Rattlage and Broadcasting premiere podcast.
I am said Rattlage. And over there.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
I've said or sad because you kind of you kind
of slurred that enough to could have gone either way.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yes, and over there is my partner in crime, the
host of Damn You, Hollywood, the sad Sack, as opposed
to the jolly Roger.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
You just confessed to being a sad man. You don't
get call me the sad Sack.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
The Vader extraordinary communist. Interrupt this, Robert Winfrey, how do
you do, sir?

Speaker 2 (02:11):
I do all right, I do all right? And then
I remember this was our trilogy of movies for this week,
and uh, well there's one really interesting movie here and
two movies that one you will probably find b and

(02:32):
one that you might find moderately interesting, in which one
says a lot. Which one of those two is occupying
the space says a lot about you as a person.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
This is the second time this month that you've not
done a damn of You Hollywood and instead did something else.
The first time we stood deal with the twenty eight
days weeks later movies Damn You Hollywood. But I, Robert
and I had said that year or so ago, maybe

(03:01):
a little less, that we wanted to take some of
the off Damn You Hollywood Knight to do some director focuses.
I had been doing director focuses with Sean Comer. Uh,
we've done a bunch, and Robert was like, well, there's
something I would like to do too, and I said,
there's some I would like to do with you as well,
So I'll mixes up and throw them around. We've done

(03:22):
almost none of them at this point.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
The first one we land on is Jeweler.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
Yeah. We had planned to do Roland Emeric and then
the schedule change, and then I think there was another
one that I also like Booted into next year because
I needed I needed the space for it. Sometimes it's
a matter of a movie comes out that I didn't
know it was coming out. I have to question around.
Sometimes I get asked for things, and then sometimes people

(03:52):
cancel one on me, and if you cancel, I'll just
do a TikTok and fuck off rule. So that's been
happening lately. But yeah, some somehow or other, every other
director focus we had planned that you got delayed, and
the one that didn't get delay was this one. And
that is what brings us to our man. Joel Schumacher tonight.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
One of the uh most bizarre directors. If you look
at his filmography. Most guys you can track. They've got
they've got they've got a style, they've got subject material
they like to use, they've got repeating visual motifs, they've

(04:35):
got all that crap.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
Like Wes Anderson is very is very much. You know
Wes Anderson film when you see it. Michael Bay you
more or less know Michael Bay film. We see it.
Quentin Tarantino unmistakably, Hey, he puts his own stink on
everything he does. The I would say the opposite of
that would be like Battner and Cher. Well, that's the thing.

(05:00):
It's not that Joel. First of all, it's part of
the reason why I wanted to do this night. Joel
Schumacher is a very competent and very interesting director aesthetic
the way that we mentioned in the other ones do.
But he's not a stage manager either. He definitely has
some vision. His vision changes per project. I allow that

(05:21):
thing to be my opening argument and was now going
to be a fucking trial.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Trial. Look, you're I appreciate a different perspective than mine.
I would like to hear that this is kind of
the stuff we're gonna hash out as we go through this,
because the three movies that we're going to be using
to kind of dive our way through this are Lost
Boys falling down.

Speaker 1 (05:44):
An eight millimeter the uh loosey noticed the Power trilogy.
So let me let me get into this before Robert
gives Before Robert, who's over there on the corner, give
it in a way, let me uh.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
How much he used to be? A much used to be? Hey,
what she used to be?

Speaker 1 (06:02):
Second time this month. Joe Schumacher is remembered by most
people from the Wrong Thing in nineteen ninety he released
Batman Robin, a movie that was bright can't be he did.
He did what the studio asked to do, make more,
make Batman more family friendly, more coul more like Adam.

(06:23):
The Adam West nineteen sixty show Free Uh used him
as shorthand for bad director the Man.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
There's no way that's actually in your script. You just
added that we're.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
Gonna interrupt me. I'm gonna add lib fucker ever bad
director of the Man who killed Batman. But Joe Schumacher
was no hack. He was a craftsman with an eye
the style for pop culture, and as tonight's film show,
a sharp sense of what power does to peoples. What

(06:56):
ties the lost Boys falling down an eight milimeter together
is Schuemacher's fashionation with male power. It's lord, its fragility,
and its corruption. These movies are about not about male
power fantasy so much as they are about the seduction
of those fantasies. It's like a teenage power trip, motorcycles,
leather jackets, and immortality. But beneath the fossy hair and

(07:18):
thumping soundtrack is a cautionary tale. Schumacher presents vamporism as
the ultimate Male Club, a seductive brotherhood that promises his
eternal youth and freedom from responsibility. It's cool, it's dangerous, loring,
and it's also a trap. Michael nearly loses himself to
the fantasy, but the film undercuts it with family humor

(07:39):
and a reminder that eternal adolescence is no way to
live see our review of Peter Pan among others.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
That's been an ongoing motif for several movies over the
last seven.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
Falling Down takes us to the other end of the spectrum.
No more eternal youth, no more slick motorcycles. Here we
find in a middle aged man broken by divorce, unemployment,
and the creeping realization that the world no longer revolves
around him. Wellam Foster defends, isn't a hera, but he's

(08:15):
a meltdown in motion. His march across Los Angeles feels
like vigilante wish fulfillment, but Schumacher refuses to give the
audience that catharsis. Instead, he forces us to see the sadness,
the violence of danger, and the angry one madness leaving
destruction in its wake. And then there's eight millimeter. If
The Lost Boy showed us the seduction of power, and

(08:37):
Falling Down shows it's collapse. Eight Milimeter reveals its darkness
form power as control commodified and sold through the lens
of camera. Nicholas Cage's Defect Detective dives into the underworld
of supposed snuff films where wealthy men pay to watch

(08:58):
women supper. Parker shoots it. Not his exploitation, but it's horror,
forcing the audience to confront voirism, the male gaze, and
the chilling banality of evil. Power here is not youthful
rebellion or frustrated anger. It is systemic, predatory, and obscene.
Taken together, these three films from what you might call

(09:19):
Joe Schumacher's Power trilogy, there are stories. They remind us
that while Schumacher's reputation was tarred by neon colored bat
nipples back, credit card back, credit card, you Monster, his
real legacy is more complicated. He was a stylist, yes,
but he was also a storyteller, and who used that

(09:41):
style to interrogate how men chase power, how it destroys them,
and how it poisons the world around them. Tonight, We're
not here, a buried lie not I don't know what
Robert's agenda is We're not here to bury Joel Schumacher
under camp jokes. We had to re examine him to
see The Lost Boys going down an eight milimeter not

(10:01):
as isolated curiosity, but as a coherent body of work
about the seductive, destructive, and horrifying faces of male power.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
All Right, I'm going to sort of counter a bit
of that if you'll allow me to riff.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
Okay, and then can we get to them? You get
into each individually.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
So because I'm going to be approaching this a little
bit as again, these are three stopping points as we
examined sort of Shoemaker's legacy, who he is, what he did,
and through the circumstances. We would include his two Batman entries.
But Mark did a long road to ruin on the
Batman movies several years ago. You can find it in

(10:46):
the archives if you're interested, and he and Sean said
pretty much everything there is to say about those two
movies during the course of that. So I don't feel
the need to really.

Speaker 1 (10:56):
Real that credit card. That's what the exact me doing,
Doug Walker.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
But go on, if you wish to do one of
history's greatest monsters, you could do George Lucas and that
would be better anyway. So allow me to put forth
sort of my thesis here for these three movies. I

(11:21):
think only one of these actually demonstrates sort of the
best of Schumacher. The other two completely fall apart on
different levels. Well completely is a strong word, but have
very very very serious flaws at a minimum, and we'll

(11:42):
get to them when we get to them. But Schumacher
has here's the closest thing I can sort of pick
out about his style as a director. There's a couple
of things he is really good at. He has a
wonderful eye for production design. He has great set that's
he has great costuming. There's a lot of that stuff

(12:04):
on the technical end that he's actually quite good real.

Speaker 1 (12:06):
Quicker graduated from the Parsons School of Design and originally
became a fashion designer. He first entered filmmaking as a
production and costume designer before gaining writing credits on car Watch,
which reviewed, Sparko which we did not, and The Wiz,
which reviewed earlier this year. As a matter of.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
So no surprise, this is very again, that's his background,
so that's what he's got a really good eye for
but when it comes to like an artistic view, a
overarching style, anything approximating good camera work. Again, he knows
how to frame, but direction is more than a simple framing.

(12:43):
That's why you have a cinematographer. Schumacher's really good at
a handful of the disparate elements, and occasionally, when he's
able to team with the right people or just sort
of the other pieces falling the place for him, he
can produce something that is good. He's really really good.

(13:07):
But there's a lot of very very obvious flaws as
well in what he does, and unfortunately there's no getting
around it. And that's kind of what we're gonna again,
that's a little bit what we're gonna probe into here
with this. So let's start when we're starting with Loss
Boys actually doing these sort of unintentionally.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
Releasing let me jump in real quick. I want to
read this really really quick because I want to touch
on something and then we can get into Lost Boys.
Schumacher received little attention for his theatrically released films is
early the actually released films, But the Incredible Shrinking Woman
in DC Cab Real Quick DC Cab When I was
a kid was one of my favorite movies. I'm bringing

(13:49):
this up for very specific reason. One of the reas
why I wanted to do this tonight was every time
we do these director focuses, I go through this like,
oh my god, this director did that moment. Yeah, because
I watched a lot of I'm gonna take a time
out from the podcast to just talk to you, to
talk to the talk to the people. I watched a
lot of movies growing up as a kid. We were
one of the first families with HBO, and we had

(14:11):
it for a really long time before we didn't put
in afford it and then could have afford it again.
And because I was not parented, I watched pretty much
anything I wanted to watch, short of hardcore pornography that
wasn't lying around my house. Long story, I I mean,

(14:33):
the long story is what I saw it and how
I But but I watched a lot of I because
I was allowed watch rate about our movies as soon
as I was able to pick out my own movies,
or I was able to watch whatever was on cable
with no one bothering to say you can't, that's not
for you, you're too young. I watched a ship ton
of movies second to that. And I've talked about this

(14:54):
a ton of times. My dad had a vast VHS
collection of movies he taped off of HBO.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
Most of us the relict of a bygone era, but
boy do I I completely and I know that collection.
Big vhs show handwritten notes on the side.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
Right. Yeah, if you were in a you could get
generally speaking, you get two movies on you know, per
blank cassette. And if you were an adult in the
early eighties, you really should have had stock and whatever
companies were selling blank vhs states because every family had
a library of these that you know that had a
v v DC R. So anyway, so so like you're
a kid, and while I watched a fair amount of cartoons,

(15:36):
I think we could get bored of this stuff. And
I was curious, and I did not have siblings, so
I had to pay myself. So I was always digging
through my dad's movies to watch or I was finding
stuff on HBO. So that's why I came upon DC CAB.
Part of what made me love DC CAB was Mister T.
Because I was a big a teen fan and also
hashtag black books, so I loved mister T. Saw him

(15:58):
in DC Cab, loved C Cab even though he didn't
understand some of it because I was really I was
really young, did not know in this idea, and I
won't know Jo. I won't know who Josh Mocker is
and what he does until Batman forever. But apparently, like
I didn't know he did The Lost Boys until we
decided to do this, I didn't know he did when
I saw he did Falling Down. That was a big

(16:20):
motivator to do this podcast tonight. And the more I mean,
like this guy's fucking filmography.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
Again, I wasn't kidding when I said, like I can
track Emerates. I can track you know, Copola, I can
track a lot of these guys.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
I mean, just really quick from again as a director.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
Period is hang, I might be able to save you
this because I can do this off the top of
my head real quick. Okay, we're gonna talk about eight Millimeter.
That's the movie he releases and does after Batman and Robin.

Speaker 1 (16:53):
Yeah, really quick, DC Cabs, Saint Elmo's Fire Cousins, flat Liners, which,
if you're a kid in the in the nineties, you
know Flatliners, Dying Young, the aforementioned Flowing down the Client
with the Tommy Lee Jones. We already know about Batman

(17:14):
A Time to Kill? But what if she was white, Robert,
what if she was white? That's Joe Schuhacker. We've got
flawless Tigerland, Bad Company with your man Anthony Hopkins, Phone Booth,
Ver Garrant, the Phantom of the Opera from two thousand.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
Things and bad things about that movie. A competent director
would have helped.

Speaker 1 (17:38):
So my point is like, you're not wrong in saying
I think the one thing that you can say, I
think it's fair is that, yeah, he's all over the fucking.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
Yeah. And there's a couple of things that again he's
pretty good at. And we'll get into the mostly and
falling down because that is his magnum opus. That is
the best thing he did he is ever done, and
that I'll spoil some of my thoughts on that one
as far as that goes. But yeah, so as mentioned
Lost Boys comes to us in what nineteen.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
Hair, I'll do some of the demographic stuff here.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
Eighty seven.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
Produced by Harvey Bernhard with a screenplay by Jeffrey Bohm,
Janas Fisher James Jeremiahs. The story by Fisher and Jeremiah
the film and ensemble cast. I had to tell my kids.
So I watched The Lost Boys with both my kids.
I watched Falling Down with just Jonas. I will talk
about that when we get the Falling Down, And then
I watched Date Miller Meter with my girlfriend. I had
to explain to my kids who the Coreys were and

(18:37):
what they're and what they're meaning in the in eighties culture.

Speaker 2 (18:42):
Was eighties popular culture?

Speaker 1 (18:43):
Yeah, yeah, so it was Corey Film and Jamie Gertz
of Twister fame, Uh Corey, Edward Herman, Bernard Hughes, Jason Patrick,
he for Sutherland, Jamison new Leaner, and Diane West. This
thing came out with This thing had a budget of
eight point five million dollars, were saying when they made movies,
and it made a tidy thirty two point four five

(19:04):
million dollars. Hey, wouldn't it be a great thing if
all movies made four times their budget?

Speaker 2 (19:09):
Sure would be.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
All right? So I don't want to do like a
whole like plotsynopsis here. I just want to get into
the movie. But is there anything you preamble you want
to get into with The Lost Boys? Before we just
stopped talking about the movie.

Speaker 2 (19:22):
Not really, except to maybe say the following. There's a
lot of people have about my generation who have deep
nostalgia for Lost Boys. Mm hm, I do not.

Speaker 1 (19:35):
Just it's funny because you know, part of why I
selected this was I I think we decided we were
going to talk about Jill Schumacher because I wanted to
talk about falling down. You wanted to talk about falling down.
Then I just needed to pick two movies. And you
are deferential to me to point of pain at times.
So I picked two other movies. But then I always
have to be like the man in our relationship and

(19:58):
try to guess what's gonna be make you happy. So
I picked the Lost Boy. He's thinking, there's no way
everyone loves the Lost Boys. There's no way Robert doesn't.
And you're like, why did you pick the Lost Boys?
I think was your your remark.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
To me, I would I just asked because I was
curious what your thought process was on the selection. Look,
if I had a dog in the hunt, I would
have said, please include X, and you would have done
it because you're accommodating in that respect. As a general rule,
X X just pick whatever.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
Oh oh, Okay. I was like, I'm looking for them
nothing now, no, no, no, anyway, So I picked The
Lost Boys one because I thought Robert like like a
normal person would love it, because everyone does, but also
because it's a great piece of eighties nostalgia, The Lost Boys.
I was telling my kids about this without digging too
deep into it. I don't want to keep reading Wikipedia

(20:51):
pages all night. But I think The Lost Boys is
like really the first time that I can recall and
maybe you have a different take that cinema makes vamporism
cool in the non Dracula sense, Like it's like you
can you can kind of trace where vamporism in movies

(21:11):
is going by The Lost Boys, interview with the Vampire
and Twilight. So it's like The Lost Boys kind of
gives us through like the visions of like the metal aesthetic,
you know, heavy metal aesthetic, cool punk rock, heavy metal,
bad boys, that that kind of thing that's vamporism for

(21:33):
a while, because The Lost Boys really did settle a
whole slew of other movies that were kind.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Of the supreme irony of the general proximity between Lost
Boys and Near Dark to me, never fails to and
you can get too different takes, and.

Speaker 1 (21:47):
It won't change until Interview with the Vampire, where now.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
Shows up and everything gets gothic and fruity, right.

Speaker 1 (21:55):
And then and then it goes to Twilight, and now
now girls are reading books about fucking monsters. That's how
we get That's how we got there.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
You're you're seriously blaming Twilight for they hear the out
section at Barnes and Noble. Yes, vampires are at least human.
Vampires aren't human, human shaped, human physiology.

Speaker 1 (22:14):
For the most part, I cantral a line from them
from from Waterface wanting to bang, Norton, whatever the fuck
his name is, Edward having a Tourett's moment, his.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
Name of the family is culling.

Speaker 1 (22:27):
For the record, I can. I can trace Bella wanting
to bang.

Speaker 2 (22:32):
Robert is the actor.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
All the way to girls reading books about bang and sasquatch.
I can make that argument.

Speaker 2 (22:41):
I won't, but again, one of these days I'll have to.
I'll have to let you go on that one because I'm.

Speaker 1 (22:46):
Gonna I'm gonna write an essay on it and put
it on TikTok. Have fun with that, okay, So that'll
get you.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
That'll get you some traction to certain spheres of the Internet.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
That'll be That'll be the title of the piece, like
do you want to know white girls are wanting to bank?
Cuthulu Monster's blanked Twilight anyway, going all the way back
to the Lost Boys as a p as a passive
piece of entertainment, I can see why people like this
so much. I do agree with you. It kind of

(23:18):
collapses in on itself towards the end of the movie
for a variety of reasons.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
There's so much awkward writing in this movie.

Speaker 1 (23:27):
Not everyone's in the same movie. That was one of
the things. Yeah, Corey Feldman is not in the same
movie as Corey Ham or Jason Patrick or.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
Keith Keifer Sutherin's doing his own thing.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
Well, I think it was funny. I think the direction
on Keifer sutherlandon was basically be menacing but also charismatic
at the same time, like this takes a lot from
pro wrestling.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
It looked like, yeah, he's up. Yeah, Keifer Sutherland's character
is a very pro wrestling heel. And I don't mean
that as an insult, by the way, but it's not
always the most compelling. What did they do with this?
They did the silhouette test with this, not the character test.
The silhouette test is if I put up just the

(24:13):
silhouette of a character, can you identify them? And it's
a thing for animation and occasionally O they're like more
like visually inclined live action stories. Can you just identify
this character without seeing who the face is? Like? What
does the outline tell you? Most of the especially the

(24:34):
teenage vampires in this past the silhouette test. They don't
pass the characterization test because they're moderately interesting to look
at and you get a reaction when they show up,
and then you have to spend time with them and
suddenly it all falls apart. And this is not a
metaphor for relationships in the modern age.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
Not at all. But so I want to talk strictly
about the craft so that people are just like, are
they ever going to talk about this movie? Corey Hame.
You can see in this movie why he becomes one
of the two Coreys. One he's a good looking kid.
Two he does the earnest little brother thing better than

(25:20):
most I've seen on film. And it took me to
almost my fifties to go back and look at him
and go, oh, Wow, they patterned a lot of characters
after you, and no one did almost nobody does it
as well as you do, because at no point in
the movie is Corey ham grating. He's reacting to a
lot of things, and like, I think an expectation that

(25:42):
a tween kid is going to have all the answers
and handle things appropriately one hundred percent of the time
is asenin on its face. So he's responding to things
kind of appropriately the way a kid in that situation
would respond to things. And he's doing so deeply and
messed in this character without going overboards, being grading, feeling

(26:08):
like he's in a different movie. Like, I really liked
what they did with Corey Haim. You clearly love he
clearly loves his brother, but he's dealing with a fantastical
monster situation and oh no, he doesn't have all the answers.
He's just trying to like figure this out. And oh,
by the way, he's kind of being like half mentored
half bullied by Corey Feldman, who is playing his same

(26:31):
character from Stand By Me. At any given time, he
kept kept wanting him to yell, my father be at Normandy.
And it's so funny because like, I don't know how
Corey Feldman had a career after this, except that he
was attractive to young ladies at the time. Now, granted,
he'll be in stand with he'll be in stand By Me,

(26:54):
and he'll be awesome in it, so no harm, no foul,
But I don't know why the direction of Feldman was.
Have you seen Schwarzenegger's movies do that? He's so like
overly serious, and like I get that, that's kind of
the character is. You know, we are the town's vampire hunters.

(27:14):
You know.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
The problem is like it's the wrong tone for this
movie because it's just it's not quite campy. It wants
it would have been better if it were campier.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
But it's like I don't think Joe, I don't think
Schumacher really knew how to get that out of him, and.

Speaker 2 (27:29):
Just yeah, god at all. And consequently, anytime the Frog
Brothers are kind of on screen, you feel like you're
watching an eighties TGI sitcom, right, rather than a vampire movie.

Speaker 1 (27:44):
This seems like an episode of Full House. All of a.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
Sudden it gets close to it. Yeah, like there's this
wild dissonance.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
Yeah, Like I don't know, I almost feel like Corey
Feldman's character, if you're going to be like I'm the
super serial vampire Hunt and I'm you know, and I
think I'm a comic book superhero, lean a little more
into that. Instead, he just kind of he kind of
settles on, you know, when Macho Man would just would

(28:12):
instead of screaming like an idiot, would just whisper, or
like a Jake the Snake Roberts, like he's settling for
that kind of charisma, that kind of deliberate I.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
Should say, yeah, you know you're not No, I get
where you're coming from.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
There for those that don't know, like Jake Roberts would
like whisper half of his promos, you know, because he
was the Snake, So Jake, but Roberts, being the embodiment
of evil would get on you know, all everyone like
Hokogan and Randy Savage, all these other guys with the
old warrior like screaming and yelling. Yeah, Roberts would kind
of lean in and go, you know, when I get
my coils around you, when God comes down from heaven

(28:49):
and Hell, like you're like what the fuck, you know,
like Satan was talking, I'm.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
Gonna leave you following in the muck of avarice.

Speaker 1 (28:55):
To yeah, like that, Like that's kind of what Mary
Veldman was going for. But it's totally off from the
rest of the movie and so tonally off that I'm
spending a good ten minutes talking about it with you.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Yeah, it's I think the other big issue this movie
had was casting, because and some of this is just
hindsight and not everything ages well. And I'm gonna try
to hold it too much against this movie, but when
I watch your theatrical release and all I see are

(29:28):
TV actors and the house has that look to it,
like when your big at finale looks very like eerily
reminiscent of what the lead vampire will do twenty years
later with Gilmour Girls, we might have a little bit
of a problem here.

Speaker 1 (29:45):
It's funny you mentioned that, because the more we talk
about it, the more I'm realizing that was kind of
my takeaway from this movie was how much this feels
like an episode of an eighty sitcom. Yeah, especially the grandfather.
The Grandfather's line at the end, h that's about this town.
Has I always hated all the vampire is It's like,
d like it should have been followed by fucking ercle

(30:06):
saying did I do that?

Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yep? That's and again, ladies and gentlemen, Joel Schumacher, I
will do what the script says.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
You can see it on the screen in the little box.
But k but some of these I want to put
up on screen just to really talk about them. It's
a bad episode of Buffy kind.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
Of You could just say it's a bad early rendition
of the first Buffy movie, which itself is not very good.

Speaker 1 (30:35):
Say something good about this movie, or I'm gonna turn
off your podcast. Sure it's fun. It's got pacing issues.
It takes too long to get Jason Patrick to become
a vampire like way too long. But on its face,
especially this following the Corey Haym character, that stuff is fun.
Diane West, it's so I'm gona talk about something that

(30:56):
I liked about this movie that nobody else is gonna
pay attention to. I liked and West character and Tanne
then weast sorry Dane West's character. I like the fact
that they make that. She's like, I deserve to be happy.
I deserve to be in a relationship, and your people

(31:18):
seem to be doing everything to mess that up for me.
And I don't appreciate it and it's not nice and
why would you do this to your mother? And it's
like that all tracks for me. I'm good with this.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
She's the she does really good work. It's a shame
that her that like her performance and sort of her
understanding of that kind of character gets lost amongst everything else.
But no, she's actually quite good.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
That's everything they wrote for her, and her performance is great.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
It's just once again in a different movie than everything else.

Speaker 1 (31:49):
Well, that's the problem. Is like nobody wants the Lost
Boys to hear the sad tale of a woman who
just wants to get a life back on track and
camp because their sons and shit heads. It's like, that's
not that's not why anyone saw this. Like the fact
that the fact that I'm taking time out to talk
about this and people are thinking talk more about vampires.
This is also the problem with this movie is you

(32:10):
look at the poster. Look, you know here, I'm gonna
take us both out of us for a second. So
the focus is all on Jason Patrick, Keifer Sutherland. It
is all on the vampires. This is a movie that
should have been like Chuck full of vampires, right, that's
the selling point. This isn't you know, This isn't our

(32:34):
you know, our home away from home, This isn't Mom's
night out. This is The Lost Boys the Vampires. It
takes for fucking ever for Jason Patrick to get into
the Vampire layer, like we get we get Daniel to
mister Miyagi faster than he gets to be a vampire.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
In some respects.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Yes, Also the threat, now that I'm comparing the two movies,
The Lost Boys to The Car Kid, we get to
know Johnny and his goons as a threat faster than
you get to see either up Keeper Sutherland and the
Vampires is a threat.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Yep. And again, if Joel Schumacher were a really good director,
there's a pretty decent movie to be had here. But
because he's Joel Schumacher, this is what we got.

Speaker 1 (33:29):
I think, Joel, if you're if in defense of Joel
Schumacher and this movie, and then because and why I
think it has a lasting legacy. There's the last thing
I say about this, because I don't want to beat
a dead horse. This movie survives entirely on style and
the kind of style that people will give it a pass.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
Yeah. Again, there's a bit. It also needs to be said,
I'm not doing a tremendous amount of presentism when I
critique this movie, which I could, but I try not
to because I think that's unfair what this movie. Unfortunately,

(34:09):
one of the other big, like lasting things about this
movie is it became a solid piece of nostalgia for
people who care about that. And we're probably not that
far from a remake, because nostalgia is the currency of
the day in the realm these days. But this was Yeah,

(34:32):
I get why people kind of Here's the other thing
about this movie, and this needs to be said as well.
If you have to show your kid who you don't
want to show a really serious vampire movie to a
vampire movie so they can feel good, you choose this.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
I think she means presentism.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
Oh, presentism, the unfair application of contemporary standards, practices, more's ethics, morals,
et cetera to things from the past where they're not
as applicable. It's mostly a thing for like historical analysis
more so than this, but I apply it to film

(35:11):
as well, because you get a lot of presentism in
people who talk about movies like, oh boy, this is
so problematic. Look at the language they use like guys,
I was there, so.

Speaker 1 (35:21):
Real quick, real quick, triple feature story. In the early
days of me doing this, I did one that was
based on cars that do stuff to people, so arc
just cars in general. Yeah, So because it was two
out of three that had that, So I did Titan
I think it was called Yeah, And then I did

(35:42):
it was the Stephen King Carr movie Christine Christine, and
then we did the Breaking Bad Car movie like El
el Camino. Okay, So I'm watching Christine and Sean Comer
God bless him. Uh can be sensitive. He's a sensitive soul.

(36:04):
He is an artist, after all. And Sean has changed
in some ways his sensitivities from what it used to
be when I first met him to what he has
become today. And I'm not criticizing that I'm tracking a change.
I am making a point of saying this, of telling
you this story and tracking that change because I'm watching

(36:24):
Christine and they're just like, hey, stop being a fagot.
This was in the seventies, Okay, like the seventies or
eighties whenever this movie came out, when like and then
they're talking about people living in I think it was
the sixties when the movie takes place.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
Yeah, so it's eighties talking about sixties.

Speaker 1 (36:42):
If so, they're using the language of the day, but
it's all problematic through today. Through today's what's the word,
we use a politically correct lens. Now it doesn't bother me,
and I can say that like, hey, well this this

(37:02):
is made at this time, talking about it even the beforetime,
I'm going to give it a pass based on that.
I was scared to death to talk about that with
Sean and that because that's the problem is that it's
like everybody can't do that kind of math all the time.
No to his credit, he was like, what are you

(37:24):
getting all afraid of? Or I'm fine, this is all fine. Stop,
I'm not that guy, please calm down. And I'm like,
you know, okay, but not everybody. And it really it's
kind of annoying because it it's one of those things
where as it's just a quick side tangent. I talked
about this on my TikTok about when you can't engage

(37:45):
with the data, you'll discredit the witness or the presenter
or your discredit the evidence. And it's hard to talk
about stuff mired in new speak because it's a lot
of just discrediting the presenter as opposed to engaging with

(38:06):
the data. So like a movie like Christine You Should
we talked that, we talked then, and I'm bringing it
up now. What it's saying about the culture, what it's
saying about people, what it's you know, how it's presented
as a piece of horror, what it tells us about cars.
But if all you're going to focus on is that
one character called the other character a fag, and throw

(38:26):
the whole fucking movie out, this is how we get
to Orwellian new speak. And I hate it, and it
really and it makes it hard to continue to do
this with any kind of vimen vigor.

Speaker 2 (38:36):
It's why you and I work so well in this context,
because you and I are both more than happy to
just kind of take things at face value and we'll
say like, Okay, this wasn't this may not fly. Now
here's why. Maybe I agree with current uh, the current
politically correct landscape. Maybe I don't, But we can have
that discussion without devolving it into desperately trying to talk

(39:01):
around the actual phrasing issues and whatnot because we're afraid
of censorship or offending each other.

Speaker 1 (39:07):
Recent TikTok. I was talking about black culture and I
had to do the black versus nword thing, and like,
and I don't want to say nword, so instead I
went it was like black culture versus and I had
to find another way to say it, and I went
ratchet blacks. Somehow that's more acceptable anyway. Anything else about
The Lost Boys, I my final thing is as a

(39:29):
piece of as a piece of nostalgia, as a fun
vampire film, as a heavy metalisthetic crossed with the horror genre.
The film works just fine if you do what we're
doing and do too much analysis of it. Yes, the
thing phrase and it doesn't survive the weight, but I
don't think it was meant to either.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
This is also this can be in some respects like
your teenager's first vampire movie that isn't a classic mm
hmm vampire story. No, I want to feel slightly more
if you were the parent of.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
My kids, are like, you're your weird uncle. Which one
would you show him first? This or interview with the Vampire?

Speaker 2 (40:11):
Do I like them? Uh? The answer is this? This
is so much. Here's the other. The other thing about
like if you we're going to compare and contrast to
those two. In particular, there's so much about interview with
a vampire that you do not understand unless you're like
at least twenty. You need, you need a little life

(40:32):
under your belt to actually get giant chunks of interview
with a vampire. I could show Lost Boys to a
six to a fourteen year old and have no qualms
about it.

Speaker 1 (40:45):
So kids are eleven and fourteen. And if you ask what,
and if you talk about Jonas's intellectual age, he's fifty, so.

Speaker 2 (40:52):
Spiritually he's about thirty, he's about eighty two. He's just
he's already done with it all.

Speaker 1 (40:58):
And the and the the experience of my kids watching
this movie, and then we're really are just gonna move
on to Falling Down? Was Jonas was entertained by it.
I thought the ending was stupid. It kind of is
Lily because of who she is and what she likes,
like the movie the way an average person is supposed
to like this movie. It was aesthetically cool. Therefore she

(41:21):
liked it. It is what it is to move on
to here. Yep, let's move on to Falling Down. As
we said, Falling Down the Well came out in nineteen
ninety three.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
Okay, so just real quick to track sort of what
happens between these two films, and we already kind of
ran down a chunk of the guy's fmography, but to
track this a little bit more, Lost Boys pretty good success. Again,
he did stan It almost fire right before that, so
he's actually doing okay in the late eighties into the
early nineties. Then we get Flat Liners, which is a
cult hit, then Dying Young, which doesn't do quite as well.

(42:01):
It's a pure romance movie and was one of the first,
like one of the earlier Julia Roberts does the rom
com thing. Uh, and then he goes from that into
Falling Down. So we've now got we're seeing a guy
who's got more experience. He's spread his wings a little bit,
and the sort of the perfect storm for Joel Schumacher

(42:26):
happens with Falling Down. Thank good. So I wasn't trying
to completely take over your bed there, like, okay, that
that's my lead into you talking about well to your
you know wiki portion reading.

Speaker 1 (42:43):
This thing had a budget of twenty five million dollars.
It made ninety six million, so it was a hit.
It received mixed reviews, with some praising performances from Douglas
and Duval, or criticizing the film's violence and tone. Really
had they seen predators by this point?

Speaker 2 (43:02):
These are not. This is one of those movies where
contemporarily most critics got it wrong, and most of them
reassessed their own position on that not too long after.

Speaker 1 (43:14):
Uh it did it's game cult status with may signing
is one of you Marker's best film, as well as
Douglas's best roles. Yeah, we've compared this to Wall Street
for Michael Bards.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
This is easily the best Joel Schumacher movie. Easily.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
Film has continued to be analyzed for its themes of class,
economic pressure, and mental health as of not that long ago.
Actually the critical Drinker did a whole thing like the
Drinker recommends.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yeah, it was a couple of years ago, but yeah,
this movie visited from time to time for good reason.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
Well, I think so. Falling Down is about a guy
who has lost his white collar job. I actually talked
about the themes of in Falling Down or something. I
talked about my TikTok almost weekly. If not, this is
the guy who, and this is the line straight out
of the movie, did everything right and lost everything in
the end and is mad about it essentially, and it's

(44:11):
kind of taking it out on him.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
Mad in both the anger and mad in the mentally
unwealth sense. You get the dual meaning applies here.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
Yeah, So long story short, he abandons his car on
the side of the road, as you know, and doing
doing the everybody Hurts orim music video. Uh, And he
wants to get to his quot his birthday. Problem with
that is he's got a restraining order because he's done
in one or two domestic violences. Along the way, he
is harassed and accosted. Also, you know, he has to eat,

(44:44):
and he is mild He is mildly inconvenienced and done
what many of us have thought to do but never
actually done. His pull on McDonald's worker. He ends up
having to get new clothing, new shoes, which takes him
into the heart of a Nazis army surplus store, which,

(45:04):
as an aside, have the army surplus stores all disappeared?
Like are we finally done with that part of America?

Speaker 2 (45:12):
They're a little bit harder to come by. There's some
there's a few around. I can find one within an
appropriate driving distance for me, but they're not what they
used to be.

Speaker 1 (45:26):
No, okay, So our friend here from Europe says, I
want to argue if it's unfair to call him mad,
will address it. Let me get well, let's let's get there.
He's a he's a product of his environment. Again, I
don't I don't think it's an unfair rebuttal I just
will get to it. We will dress that in any case.
He So there's that story. And then, because this isn't

(45:49):
a short film, it's a long film, there has to
be a secondary story from the police force. And he's
a I think it's a robbery detective.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
And uh, Robert, I think he works robbery. Hamis more
robbery because of his and.

Speaker 1 (46:06):
He's married to half the women in the Western culture.
And she, you know, it's about done with him and
wants him to retire from the police force now and
pay attention to her. God damn it, and he and
because she has lost the baby. He is well more
than willing for a variety reasons, but that's the reason
he gives. He has more than willing to accommodate her

(46:28):
up to the point where she becomes unbearable and unreasonable.
And then he puts her in her place. It's marriage everybody.
It's for everybody anyway. So he gets because there are
different things that are sort of peppered into this guy's day.
He ends up becoming very much involved in finding out

(46:49):
who this guy is and what he's doing and stopping
him from doing something terrible. At the end of this movie, Uh,
it ends with him. You know that they basically have
a meeting of the minds, which which ends with Michael
Doug was making basically do suicide by cop and he
gets shot and he falls into the water to be
taken off. And you know that's the end of that.
Can I tell you of the of the of the two?

(47:09):
This was my son's favorite. He thinks my son thinks,
my eleven year old genius son thinks Falling Down is
the best movie he's ever seen.

Speaker 2 (47:18):
That. I know what you've shown him. That is not true,
but he's allowed to feel that way.

Speaker 1 (47:23):
Oh, he hasn't seen The Brutalist, which, by the way,
I told him about the Marble Quarry scene and he
was like, I need so many explanations as to why
that s.

Speaker 2 (47:34):
You shouldn't have told him about that. He's a little boy.
How would you do that to him.

Speaker 1 (47:40):
We have fun conversations in my house.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Anyway, spot on me, everybody.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
Oh, I'll put the man who had write back India
from the bot side anyway. That was me cleaning that
cleaning up what I actually said. But Falling Down is
great of the three dates, the best of it. It's
really is. I can't compare, but I think it is
one of the best Joel Schumacher movies, if not the best.

(48:09):
Michael Douglas is outstanding in this. I think it's easy
to misinterpret this movie as like a death wish kind
of a thing, or you know, the angry White Man.
That's not this. It's the loss of the American Dream.
It's the kind of stuff I talk about. I don't
want to pitch you off, but it's the kind of
stuff I talk about with the Wire. It's the kind

(48:29):
of stuff I talk about on my TikTok. When you
commit to the promises of the American Dream and it
becomes your religion, and then you feel that God has
forsaken you, the God of work has forsaken you, and
you now have no job, no family, no money. It's

(48:52):
hard to not pull a it's hard to not do
the job and stay faithful. Many people fail that test.
Why that story's in the Bible. So Michael Douglas fails
that test miserably and goes fucking crazy. And he's hanging
on to the last of what he thinks is important

(49:13):
to his life, despite everything pointing him in the other direction.
But along the way, you kind of get a tour
of of every institution that has failed at in that
era of American life. And it's it's funny to it's
like isolated as like little chapters in a book. It's
funny to look at some of these things, like we've
all had the experience of going into a fast food

(49:34):
restaurant asking, you know, like Adam Sandler, Yeah, it's like
my kid wants my kid wants breakfast. Well it's lunch time.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
There was he should have you're gonna you're gonna get
me grief about two minutes, and like, no, I'm gonna
give you give you a grief about an hour and
two minutes. We stopped serving breakfast at nine. He's just
not done anything like this for so long. He for
doesn't know that they change the window underwhere or breakfast.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
Okay, fair, that's been a while that seems big, daddy.
But that that bit of like I'm gonna make a
small thing a big thing, but go with it, okay,
that feeling of helplessness and such an you know, it
sounds like a stupid thing. Why can't I have breakfast

(50:26):
at lunch? Other places will do this, Other places don't
have a problem with this. But you have done an
arbitrary thing in an arbitrary place just to exert power,
and I have so little of it as it is.
Women everywhere are going you're a white man. Shut up?
Can we everyone stay in their mutual corners? When you

(50:49):
feel like the like you have lost any sense of power,
little things like can I get an egg McMuffin at noon?
Are can be very meaningful. And again, we've all been there.
We've all not necessarily in that position, but we've all
kind of had that frustration with red tape, frustration with

(51:09):
an institution that has become unbearable, too difficult to navigate.
I'll throw out a recent example from my life. Melissa
and I agreed to kind of like a no fault
of force. We agreed on everything and was like, just
go file and pay for it. I'm like, okay, and
I got a letter saying you've missed eighty seven other
things you had to file in order to make this happen,

(51:30):
and we both kind of banged heads together and went, christ,
it's so easy to get married in this country and
really difficult to get in towards even when you are
on everything and have nothing to share with each other,
nothing to give you up, and how frustrated I am
with the entire family law legal process. So take that,
or can't get breakfast at McDonald's or any other thing

(51:53):
going on in the world right now.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
It's sure like you make change for this twenty can't
to buy something?

Speaker 1 (52:02):
Yeah, that's the first thing is to deal with is
the Korean grocer. So there's these little episodes where he
kind of has that McDonald's experience. The Korean grocer is one.
McDonald's is another one, because it's a little bit more
dramatic and dangerous when he gets to the US Army's
pur plush store. But for the most part, this is
about a guy. It's not This is what I've been

(52:24):
trying to say this whole time. It's not about the
movie is not about glorifying violence against the system. You
feel as betrayed you. This is a cautionary tale that
you really should hang on to your sanity or you're
gonna end up like this guy shot and in the water.
Like Joe, Schumacher is very careful to not present this
as something to be admired. You the correct feeling you

(52:49):
should be having. And this a kind of reminded me
of Fight Club, where everyone takes the wrong lessons from
fight Club. I think people take the wrong lessons from
Falling Down, certainly.

Speaker 2 (52:58):
A lot of them.

Speaker 1 (52:59):
I don't think at any given time Jil Schumacher was
saying that this this is my reaction to a world
feeling that feels out of my grasp. No, this is
me saying, this is what happens to fraggical men, and
it's it's you know, it's a tragic tale. It's a
cautionary tragic tale, and I think it's very well told.

(53:22):
I think the violence in it given it is given,
especially given the time that this was made, was right
about where those kinds of movies were, like Falling Down
and Suicide Kings, Rest of Our Dogs, you know, all
my favorite movies all kinds of border around the same
level of violence. And it's you either kind of accept

(53:42):
that or you get second by it your thoughts.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
Yeah, this is a great movie. It's legitimately a great movie.
It's intelligent enough to right. Phrase is badly Michael Douglas's
character is not a good guy. He is certainly not

(54:12):
the so he's not the hero at all. But the
movie is careful enough to not make him for most
of it this out and out like detestable villain. Either.

(54:34):
He's a complicated guy.

Speaker 1 (54:36):
And look at if you have any patience for people
who have had power for a very long time no
longer having power and that doesn't offend you personally.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
Well, the power thing is a metaphor more than it
is anything literal to this guy. He's not a powerful individual, never.

Speaker 1 (54:55):
Has no But I was hoping you'd pick up, well,
that's exactly what I was saying. I do.

Speaker 2 (54:59):
But I'm talking about I'm talking about like how this
has to relate to the character rather than like the
bigger rather than rather than the higher order discussion of
what he represents. Okay, fair enough, because if you present
this character in a way that is like, you know,
he's relatable. But all right, phrase again, I'm trying to

(55:22):
make sure I say this correctly, because contemporary discussion around
this kind of thing somehow relates to unders somehow relates
understandable or relatable with justifiable or good. If I can
understand you where you're coming from, therefore you must be
in the right because empathy is justified and empathy is everything.

(55:44):
Is how a stupid amount of analysis and discussion around
this kind of thing goes. It's a bad way to
go about it. In this movie is a good example
of why it's a bad way to go about it.
But he you know, you said he's got a domestic
violence er too. That's never actually, he's never been violent.
His marriage is troubled.

Speaker 1 (56:03):
What his wife says in the movie, this text from
the movie Robert is he had a really bad temper
and he scared me. Whether so, I'll give you It's
never stated directly, but the implication is definitely there.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
Well, the implication is he's not he's in a bad
spot and the marriage is not working. And I'm not
saying she should have stayed with him, or anything even
remotely approximating that. I'm saying, if you make him a
wife beater, he's not sympathy. He's not even remotely sympathetic.

Speaker 1 (56:34):
Yeah, it's vague on purpose.

Speaker 2 (56:37):
Yeah, so she's not happy, and you know what he
might have got there, I freely admit, Like, again, if
I'm just doing character analysis, is this the kind of
guy who might have come home and beat his wife
for no good reason? There's again, a couple of really
bad days in a row. Yeah he is, So I'm not.
I'm certainly not saying that I'm not taking his side

(56:57):
in that respect. But when the response from the judge
when she goes to get the divorce is well, we
better put a restraining order in place because we can
make an example of him, which is what again line
from the movie. It's this weird combination of boy things
are sort of spiraling out of control, and the actual

(57:23):
mechanisms of authority and leverage are going out of the
way to stick it to him. And the balance between
some of these points is really finally done so that
he is not sympathetic in the sense that we root
for him in his rampage. You shouldn't. But he's also

(57:44):
not this villain who you cheer his inevitable death, and
that can be a really, really difficult line to walk.
A giant chunk of modern media fails to walk similar lines.
This one does it really well.

Speaker 1 (57:58):
A couple of months ago we reviewed as part of
Black History Month Higher Learning, and I remember discussing it
with Jason and Jonas for that matter, the end of
that movie where Michael Rappaport shoots himself and like John

(58:20):
Singleton didn't know how else to deal with that character.
You couldn't make the cops shoot him. The cops were
too busy wanting to shoot Omar Epps, which has never
sat well with my dad.

Speaker 2 (58:30):
Of course it didn't well.

Speaker 1 (58:33):
Omar Apps and Omar Apps and Michael Rappaport are fighting
over a gun and the cops show up, and because
John Singleton is making a statement about systemic racism, the
cops immediately go after Omar Epps, even though they were
both in the wrong and Michael Rappaport is the one
that brought the gun. But because again we're talking about

(58:53):
white on black violence here, the cops immediately go after
Omar Apps. And my father, my father just like what
the fuck, Like they wouldn't do that, you know, Like
he just goes crazy every time he sees that scene.
The It's a very similar thing that John Siglin was
talking about that Joe Schumer was talking about in that

(59:14):
where Michael Rappaport, the entire movie feels like I have
tried to do the right thing, only to have the
rug pulled out from under me every step of the way.
I fucking had it. And when even trying to take
some power back for himself fails and he just blows
his own head off. When Michael Douglass tries to take

(59:35):
a little power back for himself and it all fails,
and you know, and he looks at your ball and
he says and questioning it like like legitimately, I'm the villain.

Speaker 2 (59:44):
I'm the bad guy.

Speaker 1 (59:45):
I'm the bad guy, and all this, oh how happen?
Let me pull out this water gun. You'll think it's
a real gun. Shoot me as you should, and I
don't have to repent for my sins. A lot of
that going on Sarah movie making.

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
Well. I there's another really kind of brilliant thing about
this movie that really stuck out to me when I
rewatched it for this review. Uh, the compare and contrast
that this movie offers between Michael Douglas and Robert devall
Is Stark, And I mean, that is a compliment. They're

(01:00:24):
bizarre mirrors for each other. Michael Douglas was educated, worked
at a defense It was like a something akin to
a rocket scientist designing missiles.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
Yeah, he made missiles. He makes a point of saying that.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
Yeah, had a wife, has had a daughter. Did kind
of everything you're again, like he said, like you're supposed
to do. I went to college, I got a degree,
I got a job, I got a wife, I got
a kid.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
Literally has a white picket fence.

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
Literally, Yeah, that their house to the one he's not
allowed to anymore. And everything falls apart. And then there's
Robert Davall, who's a cop. This is a sadly low
barrier to entry job which has and he is he

(01:01:21):
does not have his daughter anymore. His two year old
had a bout of sudden infant death syndrome. It sort
of implied that something is up with his mentally ill
wife that may have contributed to.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
That personality disorder.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Sure, there's no official diagnosis given.

Speaker 1 (01:01:43):
It just screams it in the subtext.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
And it does. Therapist, it really does.

Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
Remember how I was telling you how Miss test Maker's
character in Superman was a little too familiar and scary yeah,
same thing.

Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
Yeah, well there's also a little bit of like potential
bipolar going on with her if you look at like
the ways her energy levels fluctuating. Anyway, it's the whole thing.
They threw several manifestations of various issues at that character
and just let the actors go.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
In reality, borderline and bipolar tend to swim in the
same pool. Yeah, they are two distinctly different mental health
issues that in many ways mimic each other.

Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
So and there's that. And he is a cop who
likes being a cop, but he is taking early retirement
because his wife is struggling. The fact that their marriage
survived the death of their child at all is a
minor miracle.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
So his police captain like going through this like stage
of creep with him leaving where he's like, are you
sure you want to go? Look, I only told you
that because they made me I fucking hate like wow.

Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
So but that and this is kind of why their
contrast works. They've kind of each got what the other
one wants in some weird way. Like Michael Douglas had
the good job, the wife and the and the daughter Kendergassa,
Robert Taval doesn't have his daughter anymore, has a wife

(01:03:24):
that he is making sacrifices for and loves. In fact,
he makes a point of that. That's the one that's
one of the good line, one of the better lines
in this movie, when his old partner is like, you're
going to lake have a sue, man, you got to
actually have a relative who lives in like have a
so believe it or not. It's like, you know, you're
a cop. You're not happy you've been riding the desk
forever because your wife is just like paranoid. And he's like, yeah,

(01:03:47):
I got home late one day. She thought I was
dead and believed I was a ghost and I had
to chase her around the house to calm her down.
And he and a He's like, well, why are you
doing this? And he gives a couple of reasons, and
then he says, oh, and by the way, I may
not say this enough, but I do love my wife.
Like that's a real part of that character. And so

(01:04:08):
he is kind of dragged back into being a person
of action, almost against his better judgment. I can't say
against his will, because he this is actually what he wants,
his stated desires to get through the last day before retirement.

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
I think it's also he's been written off by the
forest for being, you know, a house cat.

Speaker 2 (01:04:26):
Now you're a dusk jockey, you're a pencil pusher, you
are Sergeant Al Powell in die Hard. You're a dusk jockey.
You're not on the street, okay.

Speaker 1 (01:04:35):
And but he his brain still works, his cop brain
still works, and he's able to put pieces together to
figure out that this is Michael Douglas earlier than everybody
else does, and nobody and everyone's writing him off because
he's a house cat, and he's like, no, but but
but I see, I see the pattern. I know who
this is now, and you know, by the time and

(01:04:57):
everyone figures it out, Michael damage is on as much damage.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
Yeah. But again, to the extent of this as a
commentary on like the masculine relationship with power, it's not
just presented as Michael Douglas as the cautionary tale he is.
But you also get the antidote, you get what we're
supposed to aspire to right in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 (01:05:21):
And again, when I had a conversation about this with
my kids, I was like, I had to tell them
that the Bible story of Job and I said, this
is what happens if Job fails the test, the same story.
God you know, you do you? God graces you with
with all of these great gifts, and as a matter
of testing your faith takes them all away. Are you

(01:05:44):
still faithful or aren't you? And Michael you know? And
Job passes and Michael Douglas fails. I think that's also
why this works because embedded in our culture, whether we
realize it or not, to the girl yelling Sidney sweeneyads
or Nazi propaganda to you and everything in between.

Speaker 2 (01:06:02):
You put me on one end, I am not that
far on that side.

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
By the way, deeply embedded in our culture perspective belief
system is the Jujeo Christian tradition.

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:18):
And there's a lot of Old Testament in Falling Down.

Speaker 2 (01:06:24):
Yeah. I think the last thing because we're talking Joel Schumacher,
So there's a few things I want to say in
his positively about what he does in this movie. One
has mentioned he's smart enough to not present any of
what Michael Douglas does as heroic.

Speaker 1 (01:06:44):
Yeah, this isn't death wish once again.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
Yeah. Michael Douglas, to his superb credit as an actor,
always lets you see the deep pain and hurt in
this character.

Speaker 1 (01:06:57):
There's something very pointed that happens. Michael Douglas doesn't want
to hurt people that aren't hurting him. He is aiming
his vitriol an invective at the institutions. When so when
he like, when he's in the McDonald's, I know it's
not really McDonalds. Who gives a fuck he's in the

(01:07:19):
sure it is McDowell's. When he when he's in the
fast food place, he knows he doesn't really hurt anybody,
but he's mad at the institution. When he's sitting on
the slab and he's accosted by two Mexican gang members,
he does hurt them, but out of self defense. He

(01:07:40):
doesn't hurt this the army surplus guy who so that drop.
By the way, these boots are great for stomping queers.
Is in one of the industrial songs that I listened
to from like years ago. And I've and I because
I'm me, and I just blurt out stuff from my

(01:08:01):
long life of absorbing a lot of culture. I will,
especially around my daughter for a variety of reasons. And
they're great because I know exactly why I did this
the first time she got Doc Martin's and I just
blurted out to her, I'm like, are they good for
stomping queers? Explain myself to several people?

Speaker 2 (01:08:22):
Can I tell you? Also, by the way, that scene
in this movie, I had a visceral reaction to part
of it, which I did not expect. I remember the scene, yeah,
but I'm rewatching it and I'm sitting here going O way,

(01:08:44):
how did this one four minute segment become the entirety
of political discourse in five Now, I don't mean that
that's all everyone's saying to each other, but all everyone,
thank god, I'm not saying nobody says it, let me
be clear, But all we hear is one side going

(01:09:08):
thinly veiled homophobia or whatever ism you want to throw there,
and the other side going shut up your fascist. This
is all we hear. It's ludicrous that I can look
at that one segment of this movie and I can
just I could cut this out and this could be

(01:09:29):
my go to response clip on any social media platform,
which one are you? Because you're one of these two
these days, this is all we hear from each other,
and it's ludicrous. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (01:09:43):
But well I mentioned it. I stopped to talk about
that particular bit because again I'm known for yelling out
you know the great for stomping queers, except that that
line has showed up in so many different like either
the drop itself as a sample or just that line
like there's a no effect song like the you know

(01:10:05):
the my wall filmmakers are great for kicking through the shins,
like combat boots as a part of metal and punk rock,
especially punk rock aesthetic.

Speaker 2 (01:10:15):
Real punk rock.

Speaker 1 (01:10:16):
Yeah, yeah, Like it's funny how much of the of
this stuff from the army in both Britain and America,
I don't know about Australia ended up becoming sewn into culture,
like combat boots wearing fatigues. Like I hate to say

(01:10:38):
something particularly silly, but there's a reason why the Dudley
Boys and the wwwe wore camo yep. So anyway, I so,
I my kids will hear, we'll see stuff on TikTok,
like a lot of sounds and stuff, and then it's
funny to see when they see the movie where it
came from or TV show. And then he said the

(01:11:01):
thing I know that from TikTok. So he goes they're
great for stomping queers. And my sudden looks at it,
he goes, that's where you get that from, And there
I am with the Cheshire grid. The cat has swallow
the canary. Any last thoughts on falling down? Or do
you want to complete the thought you had before interrupted you?

Speaker 2 (01:11:21):
A couple of other things. Just to Schumacher's credit, this
is one of the few movies I think not getting
across environmental elements of your story can be very difficult
because the film is just visual. The fact that this
is one of the few movies I've ever watched where
I like physiologically get the heat response to it for

(01:11:45):
big portions of it. That he actually does. His eye
for production in this movie serves him very very well
because he also makes Los Angeles a character. You and
I talked about this a little bit occasionally. If you're
going to Portland, yeah, if you're if you're going to

(01:12:09):
make a location important to your movie, doing things to
make it feel that way, and Schumacher definitely did a
good job making this particular, making Los Angeles a character
from the different cops, the Venice Cops being the Venice
Cops and our downtown cops being the downtown cops to

(01:12:34):
just like the heat that you feel in this movie
that isn't really alleviated until the very end when he
gets to the ocean. He actually says to Robert davalnot
the end, there probably was hot today, Like he's just
as they're talking, and especially that early, that opening sequence

(01:12:55):
when he's in the car and the flies buzzing, and
there's something about that one that I just I feel that, yeah,
I've been there, and I have to give the director
credit for that. Man, he got that across. So thumbs up. Seriously,
this is the best Schumacher ever gets.

Speaker 1 (01:13:18):
All Right, Uh if the movie starts in gridlock, am
I gonna go?

Speaker 2 (01:13:23):
Oh? Yeah, that's the other That's the last bit of
like why I think Robert Dedaval's character is so pivotal
to this movie. He doesn't get talked about enough. But
those two parallels, again, they kind of parallel and mirror
each other. Robert Daval's in that same gridlock, he's like

(01:13:44):
four cars back, but he's in the same spot that
Michael Douglas is in. One of them reacts very very
differently to the other that being in that same position.

Speaker 1 (01:13:57):
Look, a lot of people get caught in traffic every
single day. Don't all go on rampages?

Speaker 2 (01:14:02):
Well again, if we're gonna literally yes, but also if
we get to high level this, they're in the same spot.
One chooses to, but one goes off, loses it. Yes,
one doesn't. One passes the test of God. So as
the meme, no one fail. As the meme goes which way?

(01:14:24):
Western man?

Speaker 1 (01:14:26):
All right, let's get to the last movie here in
the Power trilogy.

Speaker 2 (01:14:32):
Okay, So, Mark, I kind of wish you smoked still,
so you could just be We could change the lighting
and you could. This could just be your big PTSD
flashback second sequence.

Speaker 1 (01:14:43):
Projecting so much onto me. I.

Speaker 2 (01:14:45):
Oh but again, I'm joking around with you. Will explain
the joke in a minute, guys, if you don't know so.

Speaker 1 (01:14:51):
Eight Millimeter came out in nineteen ninety nine to crime thriller.
It was written by Andrew Kevin Walker. It's a German
American co production. It stars Nickol his cage as a
private IYO dells into the world of snuff films slash BDSM.
Joaquin Phoenix is in this, James Gandolphini hang on.

Speaker 2 (01:15:10):
So this cast is stupidly stacked when you actually look
at it.

Speaker 1 (01:15:16):
Like Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandelfini, Peter stro Mayer, Anthony Healed
and wrote where she Katin Keener is in this and
Chris Bauer from the Wire and the Duke.

Speaker 2 (01:15:29):
I was gonna make that joke. You could have let
me have. I had a thing for that, Believe it
or not. Whatever, I'll make the joke later, don't worry
about it.

Speaker 1 (01:15:38):
Despite being selected for the Golden Baron receiving a standing
ovation from audiences at the Berlin International Film Festival, the
film received mostly negative reviews from critics to successively violent
disturbing content see Falling Down. However, the film was a
box office success. It was forty million dollar budget. It
made ninety six point six million dollars.

Speaker 2 (01:15:56):
Modest, modest success.

Speaker 1 (01:15:59):
I on you don't remember if I I knew I
knew of eight milimeter when it came out, because if
you're if you were, like said a film nerd back then, uh,
certain films got a lot of attention because they were
you know, they were naughty. They you know, they were
outside the norm.

Speaker 2 (01:16:17):
And a movie about the world, you're the word you're
mostly looking for. There is transgressive This is a veryr
This trains and like stuff like train spotting and fight
Club very even if.

Speaker 1 (01:16:30):
You're again, if you spend enough time around film nerds.
Sean and I have talked about this a lot because
we've done some of these, Like there is about twenty
movies that every that between eighty nine and two thousand
and two, everybody fucking knew and you may not have
seen them all, but everybody talked about. Like so there's
some Aquentin Tarantino stuff, but like Requiem for a Dream,

(01:16:51):
run a Little Run Spun, the Basketball Diaries.

Speaker 2 (01:16:58):
Kids are the wrong reason Swordfish.

Speaker 1 (01:17:02):
Yeah, and this was an eight millimeter was one of them.
I think also because the title, people like conflate eight
milimeter with sex, lies and videotape, but the two totally
different movies.

Speaker 2 (01:17:15):
La Confidential, Yeah, Eli Confidential.

Speaker 1 (01:17:21):
Our friend here is have no patience for us. Can
we get back to talking about falling down?

Speaker 2 (01:17:27):
His point above though, like this movie does suffer a
little bit by being in the shadow of seven that
that's a very accurate, that's a very apt point. But
so before we get into this, eight milimeter also exists
in a weird spot in Schumacher's career. So after falling down,
he does The Client, which you met, which is, oh,

(01:17:47):
that's one of those John Grisham adaptations. Yeah, it's a
pretty good one as far as that goes. Tommy Lee Jones,
Susan Sarandon. I missed when those I miss when those
movies could be made. But in the end, after math
of The Client, he's the one that the student that
Warner Brothers calls after they realize we can't trust Tim
Burton anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:18:08):
Yes, when Tim Burton took Batman and made a horror movie,
they were like, stop, we're trying to sell toys here.

Speaker 2 (01:18:13):
So we get Batman Forever, which, believe it or not,
I will defend I will.

Speaker 1 (01:18:19):
I don't like it as much as I like Batman
and Robin being the weirdo that I am. But I
also defended bat Batman Forever.

Speaker 2 (01:18:25):
That's what I was gonna say, Like, you would reverse
those because you're you, And I don't say that pejoratively,
like that's a very that's just your personality, but I would.
I actually will defend Batman Forever as not the worst
Batman movie, not just because Batman and Robin exists.

Speaker 1 (01:18:40):
I think it's better than Batman Returns. It is I'm
on the record as saying that, like, obviously the first
one is the best one, but then it's Batman Forever,
then Batman, then Batman and Robin, and then at the
ass end is Batman Returns.

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):
I might swap.

Speaker 1 (01:18:54):
I would return Returns. It is Tim Burton's worst fucking tendency.

Speaker 2 (01:19:01):
I understand where you're coming from. And as a guy
who is not a big fan of Tim Burton emotionally,
I want to agree with you. Technically and objectively, I
can't so forget, but so and Batman Forever is a
big hit. Yeah, it's a big deal. It's mostly well received,

(01:19:22):
not universally well received, but mostly it's a big success.

Speaker 1 (01:19:27):
And yeah, ton a whiplast that people could not abide by.

Speaker 2 (01:19:31):
A little bit. Yeah, there's a subset of the fandom. Absolutely.
He follows that up with a Time to Kill another
John Grisham movie, But what if? Going from Batman Forever
to Matthew McConaughey and Samuel L. Jackson in a Southern
legal drama.

Speaker 1 (01:19:45):
That heavily embedded with race issues. Again the big like
you know, Luke blows up the death star moment of
a time to kill is at the end of Matthew
McConaughey vividly and graphically dis uh explaining a rape of
a child against a tree, then goes and what if
she was white? And everyone's head explodes.

Speaker 2 (01:20:11):
Yep, because that's the that's the movie. It was so Yeah.
But because Batman and Batman Forever was such a success,
they get him back to do the next one, because
of course there's gonna be a next one. I can't
sum up the difference between Batman and Robin, between Batman
Forever and bat and Batman and Robin any better than
Chris O'Donnell did, because he was in both of them.

(01:20:33):
Batman Forever felt like we were shooting a movie. Batman
and Robin felt like we were shooting a toy commercial.
Batman and Robin is a disaster on every level.

Speaker 1 (01:20:46):
You know. It's the first of those four I showed
my kids right they were babies. But that's why I
also the first two movies I showed my kids of
two different franchises are the fourth ones. In my showed
my son Rocky four first and showed my daughter Batman
and Robin first. Loved Poison Ivy ought it was the

(01:21:07):
best thing ever.

Speaker 2 (01:21:09):
Yeah, that tracks.

Speaker 1 (01:21:10):
You have to know your audiences.

Speaker 2 (01:21:12):
You do, and you do, so combs up. But Batman
and Robin is a disaster. It is a catastrophe. It
is a failure financially, critically, conceptually, artistically, ethically, morally, culturally,
every way you could possibly fail. And Schumacher's name comes over. Yo,

(01:21:37):
chill out. So Schumacher takes a year or so off
and what he comes up with in the aftermath of
dealing with Warner Brothers around Batman and Robin is eight Millimeter,
released in nineteen ninety nine.

Speaker 1 (01:21:57):
Yeah, this is the reason I'm wearing my irreversible shirt tonight.

Speaker 2 (01:22:03):
I have my element of confusion and yeah, this is
where uh, this is where millimeter comes in. This is
his the fact that this is like his his emotional
reaction to everything that went on with Batman and Robin.

Speaker 1 (01:22:23):
Yeah, it really does make Nicholas Nicholas Cage's final word
of the movie, save me that much more like meaningful.

Speaker 2 (01:22:30):
A little bit. Yeah, so did you want to do
the like again? The loose kind of plot synopsis for
this one.

Speaker 1 (01:22:39):
Nicholas Cage is hired by a rich widow to figure
out if a real. Uh, a film reel is real
or not? On this film reel is a BDSM recording
that ends with a girl. It's knife play. It ends

(01:23:00):
with the girl being killed.

Speaker 2 (01:23:01):
It's a violent murder. It's what is portrayed on film.
She wants to know if it's real or fake.

Speaker 1 (01:23:08):
So he has to kind of work his way into
the BDSM underground to find the layer beneath BDSM. I
would like to reiterate that not all BDSM ends with death.

Speaker 2 (01:23:21):
So well, everything ends with death eventually, shut up.

Speaker 1 (01:23:27):
You ought to remove him from my court.

Speaker 2 (01:23:31):
So the judge wants to see where I'm going with this.

Speaker 1 (01:23:35):
No, I'm being serious because.

Speaker 2 (01:23:37):
No, No, I I get where you're coming from.

Speaker 1 (01:23:39):
So it's kind of I have two kinds of things
that sticking my craw both because they're very personal to me.
The poor way in which mental health is dealt with
on screen and the poor way alternative lifestyle is not
necessarily LGBTQI, though that is part of it. But the
BDSM community is portrayed because it because of pure because

(01:24:01):
of our continued adherents to Puritan mores, we cast this
stuff as morally evil. And while there's discussions to be had,
and there's nuanced that should be applied. All Hollywood ever
does is BDSM bead elements, especially back then, elements of

(01:24:26):
LGBTQI bid and mental health is fucking the Ben Stiller
movie with Robert de Niro, I try anger management, That's
what it was. I hate it. I hate all of
it because it it already takes a prejudice and amplifies it,
and that isn't good for anybody in any situation. So

(01:24:47):
the fact that he has to start in the BDSM
underground and work his way into snuff films, and there
really isn't a lot of commentary on one does not
always lead to the other. One rarely leads to the other.
It can happen, sometimes purposely, sometimes accidentally, but it very

(01:25:10):
rarely does. And instead Joel Schumacher kind of wants to
join in with the rest of you know, Western society
and going no, no, no, no, it's it's a it's
the yellow brick road from one thing to the next.
It's just frustrating for me. I didn't let that ruin
my experience with the movie. I just kind of rolled
my eyes.

Speaker 2 (01:25:31):
That's fair.

Speaker 1 (01:25:33):
Anyway. So I said all that because that's what happens.
He starts with bdsm gets the snuff film, discovers this
cadre of goon characters and evil plotsmen. And of course
the attorney for the widow was in on it the
whole time, and he was you know, and he was
never supp and John Rambo was never supposed to return
with POW's He was just supposed to take pictures by God.

(01:25:57):
And so they try to kill Nicholas Case because they
don't really want this to get out that this happened.
But Nicholas Cage is smarter than the average bear. I mean,
he tells the widow about it. The widow fucking kills herself,
but she leaves money for the victim's mother and gives
Nicholas Cage a buttload of money for his services. And
Nicholas Cage then then the movie takes this weird turn

(01:26:20):
where Nicholas Cage does two things. One he has to
get answers, and the moral of the story is evil exists.
That's the answer. Chris Bower's line at the end of
the like, did you think it was like blessed or
something that I have some kind of monster. Nope, I
just like this stuff. It happens a bit reductive, but
it kind of you know, I can kind of go

(01:26:41):
dive with it. In any case, it's a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:26:44):
The problem with that line is that point has already
been made more than once, and it becomes too repetitive
more than reductive. I could deal with it. If this
was like the if this was.

Speaker 1 (01:27:01):
You know what, hang on, Jake the Snakes thing about
in I can't remember which documentary he says this in.
It might have been the one in the WWE. It
might have been Beyond the Mat. Probably beyond the mat
given what I'm about to say. But Jake the Snakes
whole like soliloquy about when you're on the road as
a wrestler and you get group bees and you've been

(01:27:22):
an ugly loser your whole life and suddenly you're an
attractive man because you have money and fame. So see
my thing that I just posted on TikTok about the
wild sex lives of pandas. But uh, it's not an
unsecretary squear, And I believe you if you've been with
me for way too long. Then, But Jake the Snake

(01:27:46):
saying like when you finally have money and fame and power,
and suddenly women find you attractive. It becomes kind of
a drug. And like every other drug, the more you do,
the more you want, it gets harder and hard to
feel what you started feeling when you did drugs as
you keep doing more and more of them. So he

(01:28:07):
starts talking about like women's like you start with one,
then it's two, then it's the two are doing stuff,
but you're watching. Then it's three with toys, and just goes.

Speaker 2 (01:28:17):
On and on and on, and eventually it's a midget
with a donkey. I think it's the line he actually
uses something very close about close to it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:25):
So applying that to eight millimeter, the implication, it's why
I don't want to rake Joel Schumacher and the writer
of this movie over the Coles is the implication is
that the rich guy that dies is having a hard
time feeling things and that he liked what he saw
because it made him feel something he wasn't feeling presently.

(01:28:45):
Same thing with Chris Bauer. Chris Bauer plays this BDSM
masked figure the machine because everybody has to have a gimmick.
And when they're fighting on the lawn and Nicholas Cage
is like, but why Bowers like the joker at this point,
he's just like because because evil exists. He's like, I
what he's trying to say in artfully is basically gets

(01:29:09):
me off. I don't know what's broken inside of me
that this gets me off, but it does. And if
something else has gotten me off, I wouldn't do this,
but it but it doesn't. I like abusing and killing girls,
What do you want from me? Like, it's my kink, alrighty.

Speaker 2 (01:29:24):
And when we're not allowed to kink, shame right.

Speaker 1 (01:29:27):
And so and then Nichol's case fucking kills him because
that's this movie. But the whole thing, this lifestyle. Look,
I don't I don't ever want to assert that the
BDSM kink Polly lifestyle is for everybody, and it's gonna
break a lot of people. It's there's a lot going

(01:29:49):
on with it. You have to be kind of wired
a certain way to exist in it and enjoy it
the way it should be enjoyed. And uh, for a
lot of people, it's not gonna be your bag. And
you should say far away from as possible, which is
the point with Nicholas Cage's breakdown at the end of
the movie is that he got. He walked a little
too far into hell. It changed him and it broke him.

(01:30:11):
And he's in his wife's fucking lap weeping save me.
And that's how the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:30:15):
Ends, uh close to it. There's one scene after that.
But yeah, so this movie has some very good parts
to it, mostly related to the ridiculous cast. Because again,
Nicholas Cage Crossbow, who I'm I just I want to say, Mark,

(01:30:39):
I'm sorry for giving you flashbacks when Peter when they
go to see Peter Storm Ayre and I know you
just went, oh, I know you. You were not nice
to me when I worked for you.

Speaker 1 (01:30:51):
I had more of that with James Gandolfini, believe it
or not.

Speaker 2 (01:30:55):
Okay, you know what, I may have given Rob Black
too much art his stick credit.

Speaker 1 (01:31:01):
Yeah, if Rod Black acted like Peter Storm Mayer, I
had taken less like issue with it.

Speaker 2 (01:31:06):
But yeah, but this really is like I'll say this,
this is a more compelling origin story for Tony Soprano
than the Many Saints of Newarking. But again, you get
a bunch of actors of this caliber together, you give
them something even competent, and you'll get something watchable.

Speaker 1 (01:31:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:31:35):
Yeah, this uh Actually, Joaquin Phoenix has maybe my favorite
line from this movie. It's deliberately poetic and a little
bit purple. But when he warns Nicholas Cage like, you know, man,
you dance with the devil, the devil doesn't change, he
changes you. Mm. And that is proven out time and
again in both human existence and this movie. I think

(01:31:58):
the big problem that this this movie's a little bit
too long. It's two hours and change, and that's all
said and done. There's just a lot of material here
that is a little bit beyond Schumacher's capabilities as a director.

(01:32:18):
So we spend a little bit too long with Nicholas
Cage looking to figure out if you can find out
who the girl is in the video.

Speaker 1 (01:32:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:32:27):
We then spend a lot of time with him kind
of wandering around the slums of Los Angeles before he
finds James Gandolfini and he's able to start tracking him,
and just everything takes a little bit too long to
get through, but all of the individual pieces are so

(01:32:48):
well acted that you kind of wind up being a
little bit pulled through it. I mean, James Gandelfini is
a tremendous scumbag. I mean tremendous scumbagh.

Speaker 1 (01:32:59):
To the point where him more than Peter storm Mayor
got visceral hate. Oh yeah, competing Peter store Mayor feels
like young worm tongue.

Speaker 2 (01:33:07):
There's a there's a line from Nicholas Cage to James
Gandelpini near the right before he kills him. What he
just tells him, You get tell me what I want
to know because I will never get tired of hurting you.
I imagine that one. We all were there with him
on that one. Yeah, like, yeah, this is the kind
of character that you could never get tired of.

Speaker 1 (01:33:29):
So I like a good hard boiled noir story. And
you know, Nicholas Cage is a private eye, you know,
doing a stranger in a strange land. It was fun.
I don't disagree that the movie could have needs another
pass through editing. Yeah, but outside of that, like and

(01:33:49):
some of my some of my some of my issues
with the point of view of the movie, which are
personal and not worth debating, I said, I've already stated
them pretty clearly. I think in the movie's defense, I

(01:34:11):
will now change sides and defend this movie. In the
Year of Our Lord nineteen ninety nine, you can probably
get away with this interpretation of that lifestyle without people
raising too much of a ruckus. In twenty twenty five,
speaking of presentism, it's a little more difficult because a

(01:34:34):
lot of this stuff is more accepted now. Like if
I show eight Millimeter at the Swinger party house as
a viewing, I'm gonna get a lot of really angry women.
Most of the guys won't care. Most of the guys
watch movies and don't.

Speaker 2 (01:34:46):
Get okay, but what would happen after you start the movie?

Speaker 1 (01:34:49):
Huh? But I would almost guarantee you in the you know,
the cult of everything is a slight, I would get
a lot of a lot of I'm gonna be fair,
a lot of people in the lifestyle very offended by
this movie and not being able to separate their feelings

(01:35:09):
from the craft. I would also like to have that
problem in nineteen ninety nine. By and large, I.

Speaker 2 (01:35:16):
Would also like to point out in further in defense
of this movie, it operates in some respects as a
cautionary tale about delving into excess more and the BDSM
lifestyle is the lens through which it chooses to examine
that it could have done it through almost anything, because

(01:35:36):
that's a that's a universal right.

Speaker 1 (01:35:38):
But that's why part of the Jake Roberts thing, and
I think this is one of the movie's failings. We
don't know enough about the god, about the rich guy
who had this maid to understand why he needed to
go to I like watching girls get killed to.

Speaker 2 (01:35:52):
Get me over. Well. I go back and forth on
that because on the one hand, I can't actually appreciate
the sort of ambiguity around it. On the other.

Speaker 1 (01:36:12):
And I want to say something from before, because the
scene they're doing is knife play. Yes, it ends with
her grisly murder, but that's how it starts. And there's
a lot about the BDSM lifestyle that is for many

(01:36:33):
not all grotesque and obviously violent by its nature, knife
play is one of those things. Does it all end
in death? No, very little of it actually does. But
is it a thing people do? Yes? Is that where
this started?

Speaker 2 (01:36:49):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (01:36:50):
Did it end in death also? Yes, which is not
a thing that happens all the time when you're doing
knife play, But it had to or there's no story here.

Speaker 2 (01:37:01):
Okay, here's the other thing I'm going to use to
defend the movie. The critique of power and the critique
of what's going on here has very little to do
with actual BDSM. Yeah, that is, that is the avenue
that the investigator takes because that's the only one available

(01:37:23):
to him. The movie itself doesn't actually comment on BDSM.
It delves into. What it delves into is like, Okay,
here's the people who in ten years, ten in twenty years,
these are the people that live in basements and do
nothing but watch Reddit. But this is where our this

(01:37:48):
is the path our investigator takes. Not again, not a
comment on the actual lifestyle. It is by design he
is not looking at your average practitioner. He's looking for
who are the people who might have been willing to
take money to murder a girl on film?

Speaker 1 (01:38:07):
Correct?

Speaker 2 (01:38:09):
So that's where I mean, I couldn't. There was a
part of me that just went, I'm glad they addressed
it briefly in character in movie when Joaquin Phoenix says, yeah,
all this stuff that I'm taking you through, it's gonna
be obsolete very soon. And because yes, but and part

(01:38:31):
of my mind went, oh wait, you've got a picture
of this pentagram tattooed on machine's hand. Nowadays, you would
literally go to Reddit host that picture and go, hey,
who is this guy? And there's at least five people
who would respond to know exactly who it was, no

(01:38:55):
if center, but oh yeah, that's so, and so he
works with this director, which is where we get to eventually.
So yeah, and then again you got Peter storm Ayer
as this. I want to know who Peter storm Mayer

(01:39:16):
modeled that the character after.

Speaker 1 (01:39:21):
He's doing Young Grim Grimer worm tongue.

Speaker 2 (01:39:24):
No, no, because that those movies don't exist. I mean,
I imagine for a minute you're casting for this. So
Peter Stormyer comes in and his asked like okay.

Speaker 1 (01:39:34):
And he's doing ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon.

Speaker 2 (01:39:37):
No, hang on, I don't mean a character on film.
I mean Joel Schumacher goes to him and says, okay,
Peter storm Mayer, you're a good actor. Thank you very much, sir.
You've worked for directors like this guy. And Peter Stormier goes, yes,
I have, and he goes channel one of them. I

(01:39:59):
want to know who. In Peter Stormayer's head, he's like, okay,
here's what I'm doing for this. Yeah, because I want
to say, like Lars Fontier, but I don't think he
has a career at this point.

Speaker 1 (01:40:10):
So other than the thematic and aesthetic stuff going on
in this movie, Nicholas Cage is really good. This is
before Nicholas Cage becomes silly. Nicholas Cage. Yeah, he's still
very This is him during his and eventually I have
to do an actor focus and have this movie in there.
This is during his Bringing out the Dead phase. There
was a period of Nicola Cage's career where he was

(01:40:30):
in awesome movies. Yeah that weren't silly. That's his bringing
and it's like he's either he's doing two kinds of
movies at the same time and being awesome in all
of them, National Treasure and Bringing Out the Dead. And
this is during that time period where Nicholas Cage wasn't
a fucking satire of himself parody of himself. So he's

(01:40:54):
really good in this. Uh the fuck is the woman's
name again? His wife, Katherine Keener. Yeah, Catherine Keener is
every wife I've ever told to a husband. Please explain
to your wife what is going on in your fucking head,
because she's just watching you act like a lunatic and
doesn't understand what you're doing, and you're making it worse
by not telling her and Catherine Keener like, please that

(01:41:17):
wife really really well, like she you know, she has
no idea what's going on with him and just thinks
like like he's like abandoning his family and is reacting accordingly.
It's great. And also like you know, believe it or not,
in the Year of Our Lord twenty twenty five, some
wives actually love their husbands blacky as they are. Who

(01:41:39):
thought and when Nicholas Cage after everything that he's put
her through through the world of his own he took
a gig in the gig and required secrecy. And also
why would you tell your wife about any of this
stuff unless you unless your therapist tells you, yes, tell
your wife, because in the absence of you telling her,
she will imagine worse stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:41:59):
Hard to imagine worse stuff than what he was looking
at and going through within this one.

Speaker 1 (01:42:02):
But there's a way to handle it all.

Speaker 2 (01:42:05):
I agree, I completely agree. Like again, there's a way
to if you happen to find yourself in the real
world in this kind of situation, there's ways to handle that.
If you're this character in this movie.

Speaker 1 (01:42:15):
So but then when he collapses in her laugh, she
just look Some wives in the Year of Our Lord
twenty twenty five. In the next you know, if at
the extended part of that seat shoved his head to
the floor, but in this movie he.

Speaker 2 (01:42:30):
And if it's a Neil Ruckman project, he comes back
to an empty house.

Speaker 1 (01:42:33):
So yeah, that's.

Speaker 2 (01:42:34):
Notes on my end.

Speaker 1 (01:42:36):
So anyway, but no, she pats his head and she
holds him and he's crying save me and all that.
You know, it's an interesting ending.

Speaker 2 (01:42:44):
And then they get the there's there's a couple of
things that player and again this is Schumacher not having
quite the his reach exceeds his grasp in this movie
a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:42:57):
I want to I want to say this really quick,
and then it's probably the last thing I'm going to say,
because we're almost at two hours uh early movie dealing
with a current problem in terms of trafficking and how
we get from homes that don't feel unsafe for young women,

(01:43:19):
young women feeling like they're making good decisions for themselves,
not decisions that you may think are good, but they
feel like they're doing the right thing. And in some cases,
one in a hundred it actually works out just fine.

Speaker 2 (01:43:33):
You're lucky if it's one in one hundred if your
plan has moved to Los Angeles and become a movie star.

Speaker 1 (01:43:37):
Well, I was thinking more about so there's there's a
lot of research right now about girls that go into
of That's more of what I was thinking about.

Speaker 2 (01:43:47):
Oh yeah, don't do that, because it's a mistaken out
of ten.

Speaker 1 (01:43:53):
Ask your uncle Robert kids. Thanks Uncle Robert. But the
point is this plot about like, here's a girl doesn't
feel safe at home and you know, and decides to
act out and then go out and you know, enter
this world and at the end.

Speaker 2 (01:44:09):
Of all, young Norman ritis by the way, is the
guy she's attached to.

Speaker 1 (01:44:13):
And then ends you know, over her head and victimized
and then dead. I bring it up because we're struggling
with this now. The amount of stories out there about
girls innocently enough taking their trauma and trying to empower

(01:44:40):
themselves with it, only to be victimized far worse than
they ever would have that system is.

Speaker 2 (01:44:48):
You don't get to empower yourself via that system. All
you do is even.

Speaker 1 (01:44:51):
The most successful girls will tell you stories about like
bad things that have happened to them, despite the many
riches they may have acquired. At the extent not a
pretty life. No, I think it was not Pamela Anderson.
It was gosh, it was one of the big time
porn girls wrote wrote an autobiography that I read wasn't

(01:45:16):
Anna Nicole Smith. I'll think of it in a second,
but uh.

Speaker 2 (01:45:22):
Hang on, how how big time? And what did she
go on to do after?

Speaker 1 (01:45:26):
She's probably the most well known besides Tracy Lords, probably
the most well known porn actress of the nineties.

Speaker 2 (01:45:33):
Jenna Jamison, that's the one.

Speaker 1 (01:45:35):
So Jenna Jamison, I only know.

Speaker 2 (01:45:37):
Because she married Tita Ortiz for a period of time.

Speaker 1 (01:45:40):
Are they're not married? Well, if Jenna, Jenna Jamison and
Tito Ortiz can't make it work, they're ready to hope
for the rest of us.

Speaker 2 (01:45:46):
You know what. Probably not If if Tina Ortiz with
the Swiss cheese brain and his word salad can't make
it work with Jenna Jamison, right lost, just throw it all,
just burn it all down.

Speaker 1 (01:46:00):
She wrote an autobiography and Jenna Jamison, I would say,
is a success story in terms of people who go
out and do what she did. Also, book full of horrors,
just absolute horrors of things that have happened to her,
happened to her happened because of just what she does,
Like she's talking about being a stripper. It's funny you
read like a like an autobiography by an athlete, you know,

(01:46:22):
like a football player or something. It it tell you
about I broke this, and I sprained that, and I've
never I didn't even know I had a muscle there
when I tore it. Ye, Jenna Jamie isn't talking about
being a stripper. Same story, Like the amount of polls
I felt I've fallen off of the amount of injuries
I've suffered. Do you have any idea what it's like
to try to navigate those heels like I like genuinely
feel bad for this woman. My point is just to

(01:46:43):
kind of end this rant. I wish I think the
story is very prescient. I wish there had been a
little more focus on that. I think, as you know,
as much as Falling Down doesn't sensationalize what Michael Douglas's

(01:47:03):
characters go through, I don't think there's a lot of
there's enough sympathy in Eight Milimeters. I think he was
I think he was going like, like, you're this adverse
reaction to Batman and Robin made this movie very in
your face and not sympathetic as it not as sympathetic

(01:47:24):
as it should have been.

Speaker 2 (01:47:26):
Yeah, again, there's a lot of stuff here that gets
touched on that maybe again, a more deaf director, a
tighter script could have handled differently. Yeah, the you know,
the fact that he goes to the Center for Missing
and Exploited Children, basically almost like before that exists, and
he's like, all right, I'm looking for this girl. And
he's told, sure, you can have a computer. We'll see

(01:47:48):
how long you'll last because here's all the files. And
when you like, that's one of those abysses that you
stare into.

Speaker 1 (01:47:58):
So I've I've cracked why about it because mccallow's humor
is kind of my coping mechanism for a lot of stuff.
But in the last three months, a story broke on
the internet about a child sex ring out of Alabama
run by the children's parents.

Speaker 2 (01:48:18):
Yeah, like we're.

Speaker 1 (01:48:20):
Still dealing with this. I think that's the point that
I was trying to make, is that weirdly enough, the
batman Robin Bett nipples back credit card guy talking about
an issue we can't seem to deal with today, Like
it's weird that child sex trafficking is going about as
well as the war on drugs.

Speaker 2 (01:48:43):
I could tell you why, or at least give you
a plausible reasoning for why it's going but I'm not
going to because this is not the podcast for it.

Speaker 1 (01:48:51):
No, but I but I think saying that out loud,
why do you guys talk about like movies? Well, because
they tend to bring up issues that are worth talking
about through the prism of art eight milimeter everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:49:06):
This also touches on again like there's real bad stuff
out there, Yeah, and what is the cost to looking
into it? Because Nicholas Cage's character has given several opportunities
to be done with this.

Speaker 1 (01:49:22):
Yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (01:49:25):
Potentially even for both selfish and righteous reasons. He continues,
He perseveres, He's.

Speaker 1 (01:49:32):
There's got I have to find God at the end
of this thing. And then when there is no God,
he's like, what the fuck? What am I supposed to
do with that?

Speaker 2 (01:49:39):
Well, but there's a cost. And that's another thing. Last
thing that I wanted to mention briefly because it's one
of my favorite bits of acting from this movie.

Speaker 1 (01:49:49):
How does that not religious guy keep making all the
religious inferences and references and like the religious guy doesn't
really do that. I just think it's funny that that's
our dynamic.

Speaker 2 (01:49:58):
Because you are, even unintented, searching for a greater meaning
in your life that God, that God represents and can
offer you, and you're not quite ready to make some
of those steps, so you keep looking. I don't feel
compelled to make the observation because I have God in
my life.

Speaker 1 (01:50:15):
Okay, fair enough, keep going.

Speaker 2 (01:50:18):
One of my favorite bits of acting from this movie.
It gets kind of overshadowed because again, we've got generational
talent here. Yeah, in this film, but the old widow
has this really great moment when after Nicholas Cage calls
her and tells her, yes, the film was real, because
that's her big thing is I need to know if

(01:50:38):
this was fake or not, because I need to know
a little bit about like I found this thing and
it speaks something to my dead husband, who I love dearly,
and I kind of need to know what's up with this.
And he calls her and he tells her what's going on,
and she has this very human reaction to it, and
she walks by the den of her decease husband and

(01:51:00):
there's this big portrait of him in there and she
just looks at it and she has this reaction, and
it's such a great bit of acting because there's no dialogue,
she doesn't say anything. It's just a physical response to
seeing this person that you knew well more seriously, but

(01:51:27):
it's just a great bit of acting that has always
kind of stuck with me from this movie, even the
first time I watched it. Just the way this woman
reacted to seeing this portrait of her dead husband after
knowing what he'd commissioned, it's really great. So I wanted
to give that a bit of a shout out, because again,

(01:51:48):
there's a lot of talented actors in this movie that
elevate what would otherwise be very mediocre material to something
that's it at a bare minimum watchable to entertaining if
you got the stomach for this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:52:03):
I think there was also a missed opportunity to speak
more directly about the damage money does when you have
enough money that you can change people's morals or take
advantage of people's lack of morals, thing on where you're going.

Speaker 2 (01:52:21):
The closest we get to that is the scene when
everything falls apart for the bad guys, because Nick Cage
finds out how much this cost, how much was paid
out by the rich guy, And when he's confronting the
lawyer and the pornographer and machine and James Gandolfini, he says,
he brings up the number. I go, okay, you know,

(01:52:43):
was it worth a million bucks to do that? And
James Gandolfini goes, wait, a million bucks? What are you
talking about? And he looks at Peter storm Ayer and goes,
did you screw me on this? And Peter storm Ayer goes, no,
he's not saying I screwed you. He's saying the lawyer
screwed both of us. And they all kind of start

(01:53:04):
menacing Anthony Hill at this point, and Peter storm Mayer
with the line, mister, I forget the character's name, mister lawyer.
If there's no honesty between pornographers and perverts, the whole
thing falls apart because there's no legal recourse for what
we do here.

Speaker 1 (01:53:23):
Yeah, it's like the bit and the wires, like what
are you gonna do? Call the police? Yeah? I am
gonna call the police. And then five minutes later you
got one of those asses. But anyway, it would have
been nice to kind of speak to like if you
don't have any money, you don't have a tremendous amount
of power. And so if you're looking for her, if

(01:53:44):
you're looking to make a snuff film, there's a lot
of risk had to take and you have money. These
people will when you have when you have that much money, right,
there's people willing to do things for you know, there's.

Speaker 2 (01:53:56):
We can get a lawyer who will do nothing but
profit from the misery of brothers that you're say so,
find an unscrupulous, overly artistic doubt.

Speaker 1 (01:54:06):
If you have enough money, you can change the physics
of how the world works.

Speaker 2 (01:54:10):
And I think that certainly change the levers.

Speaker 1 (01:54:12):
Of power and being.

Speaker 2 (01:54:16):
Purposely poetic, being too literal, I know.

Speaker 1 (01:54:20):
That's Mark and Robert for you. Uh, one of us
running in poetry, the other what's governing in prose.

Speaker 2 (01:54:32):
So anyway, hey, that's a great line.

Speaker 1 (01:54:36):
So that's eight milimeter. I wish you had spoke more
directly to how money changes the physics of the universe
and how it can you know, make terrible things happen,
because we're experiencing it now. You know, when you look
at the oligarchies that are developing, the way the government
is going what it's you know, the laws that are
being passed presently. Again, when you have money, everyone knows

(01:55:01):
what the solutions to most of the problems are. But
the people with money don't want those solutions. They want
solutions that benefit them, and nobody has enough and nobody
else has enough power to counteract it. And so here
we are.

Speaker 2 (01:55:12):
Well, there's a couple of things to that point.

Speaker 1 (01:55:14):
One make these and then we're done.

Speaker 2 (01:55:18):
Well, just kind of to what you had said. Two
things with that one. Too many people conflate money with power.
They're not the same thing. There's overlap, don't get me wrong,
but they are not the same thing. Secondly, if money

(01:55:38):
could solve most of these problems, they would have been
solved by now. Unfortunately, I wish it was as simple
as money. If it was as simple as money, California
wouldn't have a homeless problem.

Speaker 1 (01:55:49):
Or the education system wouldn't have fallen apart twenty years later.

Speaker 2 (01:55:53):
Yeah, Like, there's so many of these things that I
bring up, the homeless thing, especially in California, because they've
spent tens of billions of dollars fixing the homeless problem
in California, and there's more homeless people there now than
ever because California. But that money's going somewhere. But again

(01:56:16):
point being, I'm not if money was the only problem,
it would have been solved. And everybody just looks at well,
everyone speculates it would take x billion dollars to fix
this problem, and everyone yells at Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk,
like couldn't you send this money to fix this problem?

(01:56:38):
And everyone with a brain goes one. That's not how
money works for the most part in terms of how
one accumulates wealth. The number of people nowadays who just
do the like we assume Jeff Bezos has a Scrooge
McDuck vault. I'm serious about that, Like you could just
go scoop out this stuff like that not how that works.

(01:57:01):
It really isn't. It would be easier if it was
in some respects, But and so one not exactly how
that works in terms of their individual wealth calculations and
what's available to them. To look at how much money
we've spent on any problem that we've ever had. The

(01:57:22):
number of problems we've ever had that have actually been
fixed by spending more money is really really set.

Speaker 1 (01:57:29):
It before And I'm going into plugs after this. We've
spent trillions on the war on drugs over the past
hundred years, and the problem is just as bad as
it was as it's ever been any So you.

Speaker 2 (01:57:41):
Can go through any number of those. Yeah, I wish money.
I wish money was the only obstacle I really do.

Speaker 1 (01:57:48):
Well. That said, I think we've done a fair representation
of Joel Schumacher and his storied career. Let me and
I would say that I will say this, and then
I'll give you the last ten where or less please.
I think at the start of this I said I
think Joe Schumacher has been mischaracterized, and I think all
anyone ever knows about him as Batman and Robin. I

(01:58:09):
think we've done a I think if this were an
on trial, I think the case was fairly made to
any jury that there's more to Joel Schumacher than Batman
and Robin's four. Is he the most talented director ever? No?
Is he an interesting director? Yes? Has he taken has
he made interesting movies? Absolutely? Should he be judged solely
on Batman and Robin? Absolutely not. Robert.

Speaker 2 (01:58:32):
If you want to judge him solely on Batman and Robin,
I think you're making a mistake. If you wish to
argue that that movie is so bad that it actually
does not weigh the preponderance of evidence, I'm open to
hearing your argument, but credit card hang on. So in
the aftermath of eight milimeter again, this is just what

(01:58:53):
he does before his passing and for his retirement, basically
in twenty twelve and then his passing in twenty twenty
is flawless, which he has too much control over, and
despite its starring Robert de Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman,
no one remembers, which should tell you a lot about
that movie. Tiger Land, which starlars Colin Ferrell, is a okay,

(01:59:16):
little period military piece about uh, basic training before going
to Vietnam. It's you know, certainly no full metal jacket,
but it's not bad. He goes back to the big screen.
I want to say big screen, I mean like bigger
releases with Bad Company, which is not a very good movie,
Phone Booth, which is an interesting premise but can't sustain

(01:59:38):
itself over a run time. Who'd a thought, uh does
the biograph a biographical crime film called Veronica Gorin Grin
that doesn't seem to get off the ground. He does
the two thousand and four Phantom of the Opera, which,
once again, if you need if you want to see

(01:59:59):
the best and worst Joel Schumacher in one movie, watch
that one. That'll do it for you pretty well.

Speaker 1 (02:00:04):
I think that's on an upcoming triple feature that I'm
doing with Shay like that and a couple of other
like movie musicals.

Speaker 2 (02:00:12):
So again, that one will give you kind of the
best and worst of Schumacher all in one, if you
need kind of a mini understanding. He does the Number
twenty three with Jim Carrey, which is a choice. He
does a weird little movie called Blood Creek, which features
a very young Henry Cavill. That's a weird one. Again,

(02:00:34):
it's a weird movie. And he closes it out a
little bit with some weird ones. Twelve Trespass, which is
Nicholas Cage Nicole Kidman. It's a bad version of Funny
Games basically. And and uh, the last thing he directed
doesn't have a wiki endree. It's called Man in the Mirror.
Uh see did he do? He has some producing credits

(02:00:57):
after that. Yeah. Again, he basically retires from making movies
in front of it as an active part of it
in like early twenty tens, and yeah, he's complicated, flawed,
wildly hard to pin down.

Speaker 1 (02:01:20):
I would almost like put him in the category with
Spike Lee. I know you Spike Lee's not your brand
of vodka, but I said as much about Spike Lee where.

Speaker 2 (02:01:31):
That's more appropriate than you know, since I don't drank.

Speaker 1 (02:01:34):
Yeah, but I would say, like Joel Schumacher, Spike Lee,
some of the other directors that we've talked about, it's like,
you know, as many Grand Slams, as bass hits, as
strikeouts and tonally and aesthetically and thematically all over the
fucking play like Spike Lee. It's like all anyone ever
thinks about what Joe Schumacher's Batman and Robin olnyone ever

(02:01:55):
thinks about what Spike Lee is doing the right thing.
It's like, well, he's made a million movies. There's more,
there's more to them than that.

Speaker 2 (02:02:02):
Yeah. Uh so, yeah, this is fun And hopefully Mark
and I will get to do a little bit more
of these because tracking some of these directors' careers like
this I find deeply interesting.

Speaker 1 (02:02:14):
Roland Emeric is on the list. I just don't remember
where I put it on the schedule. Yeah, no, it's
it's on the schedule somewhere and a lot of stuff
had to kick in the next year to move stuff around.
But Roland Emeric is still on the list, and I
think I think another triple Let me look at this
really quick, because there's a couple of triple features I

(02:02:35):
left on the schedule. I just didn't I just moved
them around. So in terms of triple features that you're doing,
we we've got one for Queen of the Ring F
one and Magazine Dreams. We've got uh drop Echo Valley

(02:02:57):
and Sinners. We're finally going to get the Sinners.

Speaker 2 (02:03:01):
Uh. People are not gonna be happy with my review
of Sinners.

Speaker 1 (02:03:13):
I know I threw this one on here for you,
fairly certain I threw this one on here for you
or with you in mind, bad Lieutenant Copland and the Duellist.

Speaker 2 (02:03:25):
Was that a Harvey Kaitel feature that nobody told me about?

Speaker 1 (02:03:28):
Yes, oh, here it is. This is what I was
actually looking for. Volcano Dante's peak in the Core.

Speaker 2 (02:03:36):
All right, we are a video of weird disaster movies.
Because if I I have a few guilty pleasures in
the cinematic genre, disaster movies are one that I know
is a guilty pleasure because most of them aren't very good.
But I can enjoy them. I don't know why, but
I do.

Speaker 1 (02:03:55):
There's the did I completely delete the Roland Emeric one?

Speaker 2 (02:03:59):
You're the schedule master?

Speaker 1 (02:04:01):
That was a rhetorical lass whole? What what? What was
my answer? What was the what was the rolling Emeric
One's which the day after tomorrow? That's what it wasday
That's one of them. Yeah, I may need to remake this.
I somehow deleted it.

Speaker 2 (02:04:21):
We look, man, you do the You do so much
work on the schedule that I shut up and complain
not at all about it.

Speaker 1 (02:04:29):
It's fair, so I appreciate. That's why you're still here.
That's why you're still here. You're still here, all right?
Speaking of schedules, so damn you. Hollywood returns to its
usual time next Monday, Labor Day. As a matter of fact,
we work on Labor Day. That's a hard we work,
hardist working men. In podcasts, we'll be doing the new
Toxic Avenger movie, and then in September, see you and

(02:04:54):
so we got like I said, we got that Queen
of the Ring f one and Magazine Dream it's kind
of a movie movie catch up that I want.

Speaker 2 (02:05:03):
To Yeah, a little bit of a grab bag there.
So hopefully all those will be available on ye.

Speaker 1 (02:05:08):
Should be somewhere. And then at the end of September
we're back with the regular Damn you Hollywood. We're looking
at the new Jordan Peele sports oriented horror movie Him.

Speaker 2 (02:05:19):
And then wait for the villain to be the rich
white billionaire owner of the team.

Speaker 1 (02:05:23):
And then and I think one of the first of
the Oscar contender. Damn you Hollywood's were doing this year
one battle after another, which, by the way, I feel
like by the end of September last year, there were
we had already done some fair amount of contenders for
Best Picture, like Dune for example. I don't I don't

(02:05:46):
think anything that's come out this year is a contender
so far that we've looked.

Speaker 2 (02:05:49):
It's you know, as you mentioned it, you know, the
closer we get to this, the more I'm like, man,
what's what's been what's even been like released that's that
feels like it falls into that category.

Speaker 1 (02:06:05):
Yeah, I I don't know, Like I'll in a month
or two I'll start like looking around for stuff, because
that's a fout when things will come out. You figure
Wicked too, but that won't come out till November.

Speaker 2 (02:06:17):
That'll get a pity nomination. Like that's not actually gonna
be the best movie of the year.

Speaker 1 (02:06:21):
You know, but like one Battle after another is the
only one I can think of, So it'll be cure.
I'll be curious to see what.

Speaker 2 (02:06:30):
We're gonna you know what, you know, what's gonna happen,
Like they're actually gonna have the list, and we're gonna
have seen one, and we're gonna have heard of maybe four,
and it's gonna be.

Speaker 1 (02:06:40):
It's gonna be end up being one battle after another
and then nine others that we didn't see.

Speaker 2 (02:06:43):
Or talk about, probably, so we'll have some fun doing
that catch up.

Speaker 1 (02:06:49):
There be a lot of triple features in our future,
so I have to scramble to find places on the
schedule anyway.

Speaker 2 (02:06:56):
And scramble to find the movies. Really a lot of that.

Speaker 1 (02:07:00):
What was it the black one that like it was
was on Amazon, like that day that drove me off
the fucking wall.

Speaker 2 (02:07:07):
Oh, I can't remember what one it was, but I
remember you being mad about that.

Speaker 1 (02:07:11):
Yeah, like it just it waited forever and then a
couple of these, I had to like go, like in
the middle of the night to go to the theater,
like I'm done with working better hell, but I would
run to the theater to go catch to ten o'clock
showing of a movie in Portuguese.

Speaker 2 (02:07:25):
Ugh.

Speaker 1 (02:07:27):
Anyway, Yeah, Wednesday Night movie the.

Speaker 2 (02:07:32):
Cinematic Experience of twenty twenty five Ladies and Gentlemen.

Speaker 1 (02:07:37):
Wednesday, myself and Harry brought her to be doing another
indie Siders. We will tell you everything that was good
bed and yikes about Forbidden Door.

Speaker 2 (02:07:45):
But I can tell you the good, bad and yokes
Forbidden Door.

Speaker 1 (02:07:49):
I watched it as well, Robert. But we're also going
to talk about Game Changer Wrestling versus Juggle Low Championship Wrestling,
the Two Day War, or as I like to call it,
the Left. I'm watching two nights of indie fucking wrestling.

Speaker 2 (02:08:02):
Harry Broadhurst, is that there is that the card that
featured uh Rampage Jackson, Rampage's kid trying to kill that guy?

Speaker 1 (02:08:10):
Maybe? And then Thursday we're looking at the original four
Toxic Avenger movies. I showed my kids without having ever
seen it before the first the first Toxic Avenger movie,
and my son had a couple of different reactions, one
of which is this is cinema, the other of which is,

(02:08:33):
can I please watch Airplane now? You can't. You can't
hold the booby thing against me. You made me watch
The Toxic Avenger, which has excessive amounts of boobs in it.
Then there's my daughter, who what.

Speaker 2 (02:08:47):
Ever, she either loved that or hated it. There is
no in between.

Speaker 1 (02:08:50):
Well, that's the thing. It's like she hooted and hollered
alongside her brother and I with the movie because it's
there are just great stuff in this. The Toxic Avenger
is fantastic stick for a B movie. However, at the
end of the movie, in terms of the I believe

(02:09:10):
my turn to her and I said, Lily, try to
watch these things with the eyes of the people who
lived during the period the movie was made, instead of
your twenty twenty five fourteen year old self, and she
was like, father, I am, I'm still uncomfortable with it.
I don't want to see boobs, you know, in sex
and in the movies. What's wrong with you? Like, I'm
not saying they shouldn't put it in there. I understand
why it's there. I don't have to look at it,

(02:09:32):
And I'm like, just go go go watch K Pop
Dema Hunters.

Speaker 2 (02:09:37):
You know that's that movie's been a giant hit.

Speaker 1 (02:09:40):
By the way, yes, Netflix doing what Pixar can't. Next
week Jesse and I are.

Speaker 2 (02:09:46):
Another fun bit of trivia about that movie. What it's
the first movie to have three different songs on the
Billboard Top one hundred, your top ten even I think
since Saturday n Fever.

Speaker 1 (02:10:01):
Oh, that's a fun bit of trivia. Sunday, Jesse and
I are reviewing Paris Has Fallen. Monday is the aforemention
of new Talks the Avenger movie. Alexis is reviewing Twisted
Metal season two, and then another director focus this time
is Terry Gilliam. We're gonna be reviewing Time Bandit's Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas and the adventes of Baron Munchausen.

Speaker 2 (02:10:24):
So for the record, Terry Gilliam very identifiable, not always good.

Speaker 1 (02:10:29):
All right, do you plugs? We can get out of
here we are now. I said I didn't want to
do more any work two and a half hour podcast,
but here we are.

Speaker 2 (02:10:38):
So we're not a two and a half yet. So
I cover mixed martial arts like.

Speaker 1 (02:10:43):
Thirty minutes long, we're gonna go over two and a
half hours.

Speaker 2 (02:10:46):
Well, if you stop interrupting me, we'll find out, won't we.
I cover mixed martial arts and professional wrestling over at
four one, one mania dot com, WW SmackDown on Friday's
UFC events on Saturdays, and occasionally other places. Last week
I covered SmackDown on Friday, stayed up an unhealthy amount
of time to cover the UFC event because that was

(02:11:08):
in Shanghai, China started at one am my time, so
I did that because I'm a professional. Then Sunday I
covered aw's ex New Japan Pro Wrestlings Forbidden Door twenty
twenty five, and summarily got yelled at by a contingent
of the AW fan base because I'm a critical critic

(02:11:31):
and how dare you not give this a nine and
a half, sir? This was the best thing AW has
done all year, don't you understand? And I had to
go even other sane AW people don't think that, and
several of them chimed in, yeah no, this ain't close
to the other pay per views they've had this year.
That the best match on that show is Nigel mcginnison,
Zach Saber Junior. Just for the record, do you agree.

Speaker 1 (02:11:55):
I liked MJF and oh, but I don't disagree with
I don't disagree that it was one of the best.

Speaker 2 (02:12:05):
I'll be brief. My problems with MJF and Hangman are
as follows way too long. If your big stipulation is
Hangman can lose the belt on disqualification and then he
then puts MJF through a table in front of the
REF to no reaction from the ref. A dq stipulation

(02:12:28):
being important only matters if you actually enforce the rules.
Just throwing it out there way too long. That matches
thirty minutes. It's a thirty one minute match. But MJF
and Page work well together in general, so not the
worst thing. Ever. The worst thing on that card is

(02:12:49):
Mercedes Monette, because of course it is, and the face
is being stupid in the main event. But I'll I'll
talk with Mark about that later. So I covered that
this week smacked on Friday. There's no UFC event on Saturday,
so I don't know what I'll do with myself, but

(02:13:10):
I'll do something Sunday. I will be covering ww's clash
in Paris, So tune in for that. That'll be fun.
It's it's a card, It's definitely a card.

Speaker 1 (02:13:24):
You're a card for hurt And yeah, you.

Speaker 2 (02:13:28):
Already mentioned it. But next Monday, we've got another Triple Feature.

Speaker 1 (02:13:32):
Right, No, Monday's Toxic Avenger, Right.

Speaker 2 (02:13:36):
Right, Monday's the new Toxic Avenger movie. Okay, so tune
in for that where we talk about how much Peter
Dinklage sucks.

Speaker 1 (02:13:44):
All right, well, solks, thanks for joining this extended edition
of Triple Feature. Because everything with Robert and I is extended.

Speaker 2 (02:13:51):
It's true.

Speaker 1 (02:13:52):
Well, hey, be well, be safe and behave cgain castain,

(02:14:16):
got got cotta

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