Joker: Hallie À Goodrich

Blank Jack with Griffin and David

Black Jack with Griffin and David.

Don't know what to say or to expect.

All you need to know is that the name of the show is Black Jack

For once in my pot.

I have some cast who needs me.

Some cast I've needed so long.

Am I singing too well?

I was just about to comment on how you were singing just like Joaquin.

For once I'm afraid I can go where pod leads me.

Has he sung

walk the line?

Pass through.

But that was imitative, right?

That was him doing an imitation.

And he had so much bravado.

Yes.

That even though it wasn't an amazing imitation and his voice wasn't amazing, it was just kind of like, wow, look at him just throwing himself at it.

Let's get right into it.

He also becomes a rapper

in this movie.

He sure does.

Well, no, in the movie.

I'm not there.

I'm still here.

I always get the two fucking titles flipped.

But is that the only time he's and in the song I'm still here?

He does sing his own hook.

And he sings it in a way.

The titular track from, of course, the acclaimed film that resulted in many lawsuits.

I'm Still Here.

The way he sings the hook in that is very similar to the way he sings in Joker.

I think Walk the Line is a combination of many months, if not longer, of coaching, going for a very specific imitative voice.

I think he is the guy where, obviously, Joaquin is somewhat obsessive if he focuses in on a specific task and wants to do it.

And I think there was a fair amount of mixing.

Sure.

If you listen to cash tracks side by side to his tracks, and I think he did those songs well, they changed the pitch entirely.

He like figured out how to make it work for him.

Look, I haven't seen Walk the Line in many years.

I remember thinking that, again, I was more just like, he's making an effort, and I appreciate that, but he doesn't sound like Johnny Cash, my favorite singer of all time, who has like the most incredible voice that nobody could do.

But he pulled off something,

he had the attitude, and it worked.

It worked.

It worked.

Fine.

Doesn't work in this one.

Well,

but I didn't leave this movie being like, Joaquin's singing voice.

What a bummer.

Like, that would be like not even my top movie.

That was the least of my problems.

Let's do a quick speed round.

What's your least favorite thing about this movie?

What's my least favorite thing about that?

I can't speedrun.

That is so hard.

David, what's your rose and what's your thorn when it comes to

bud and thorn, right?

And

thorn.

Rose, bud, and thorn.

Yeah.

All right.

My least favorite thing about this movie is how it

wastes Lady Garth.

I think that probably has to be number one.

That is the biggest sin you can possibly commit.

You get this lady for one movie every 18 months, two years, right?

She has made three movies in total.

Am I wrong?

She's also in like Machete Kills or something, but we don't count that.

Okay.

If we're not counting the two Robert Rodriguez movies, this is her.

It's like the stars.

This is the second one.

No, no, no.

She's briefly in Sin City 2.

Thank you.

But yes, no, she's made

since 2018.

So six years, she's made three movies.

So you get her every two years.

And

this is what we did with her?

In a musical.

Do they let her let loose, really?

No, they do not.

No,

do they let her shake the cup of ice directly on Mike, as it were?

Is that a good way to describe it?

Wow.

Let loose, go full Joker mode.

David got McDonald's before we started our Ben.

Ben, do you have a least favorite?

Is yours the same answer?

I would say I don't really like the jail stuff, which is

very minimal.

That's going to be tough.

Just a little bit.

I had issues though when I say the jail stuff and the courtroom stuff.

I definitely didn't like either of those elements.

Those two elements

were not a fan.

I was not into the part where it's a Joker movie.

I didn't like it.

Some of the other stuff.

I didn't like any live-action sequence in this movie.

I thought the cartoon was okay.

Okay, can we all agree the cartoon kind of rules?

Okay, no.

I got so freaking mad when they started playing the cartoon.

Why?

Because all I could think about was this was the same studio that put

Wiley Coyote vs.

Acme or whatever that fucking movie is called in the garbage.

That it has the gall to open with a Looney Tunes homage.

With a Looney Tunes homage.

Look.

And look, talk about things full circle, full connective tissue between the two seemingly disparate movies we're talking about.

There were two Looney Tune movies that Warner Brothers deemed unreleasable.

Coyote vs.

Acme remains in weird limbo.

The other one, I think, is called The Day the Earth Stood.

It's not called The Day the Earth Stood Stupid, but it's a porky pig, Daffy Duck, feature-length, 2D animated sci-fi comedy.

The Day the Earth Stood Stupid is a futurama episode of Sci-Fi.

Great title.

That film.

Can you look up what this thing is actually called?

I'm trying to find it.

The Day the Earth Blew Up.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Is set for release by a little upstart distributor called Ketchup Entertainment.

Oh, boy.

That's me squirting a ketchup ketchup bottle.

They should do that as their logo.

Brings us to the second movie that we're covering in the second.

Well, first, let's introduce the podcast.

Okay.

What is this?

Who are we?

Where are we?

Who are you?

What's this show?

Blank check with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin.

I'm unfortunately David.

I'm Ben.

And I'm the Joker.

A.K.A.

Murray Barty.

I'm Marie Barty.

Producer Ben, Ben Dooser, Purdueer, yada, yada, yada.

This is usually a podcast about filmographies.

It still is.

Podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their career and have given a series of of blank checks, make whatever crazy passion products they want.

Sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby.

And this is what?

I don't know.

Episode 499, episode 501.

Nope.

Wait a second.

Just check.

I'm seeing here it's 500.

The episode everyone has asked us not to do

is in fact commemorating a massive milestone.

Man.

If we've just not done this, episode 500 would have been Lost Highway, which is next week with David Lowry, which, in my memory, was a really fun, good episode.

That was great.

I quarter it four years ago.

Right.

And instead, this is going to be us just bashing our head against the wall.

At one point, it was going to be Firewalk with Me, which I think also was, in terms of substance, a great episode.

It was a bit of a complicated.

It turned out good.

It all turned out good.

Yes.

But there was a little bit of a crisis.

There was rejiggering, response to the Joker, the release of good, all this stuff.

We were like, let's just fucking pull everything together for a Wonkaman style new release check-in grab bag episode.

This isn't going to be some big fucking back patty milestone 500 look back episode, but it also felt like we wanted to record something that felt a little outside of the mini-series.

What's that?

It's all nonsense.

It just happened this way by mistake.

That's not true.

There was some fucking

there was intentionality when we realized this could be the 500th episode versus an episode where we were like shouting into a laptop to our poor friend in New Orleans who was not being recorded.

There was a part of me that was essentially what that was.

Correct.

It was first Joker episode 250 and I checked and it was close.

Wow.

What was it?

It's like 240 something.

Okay.

Did you introduce the podcast?

Yeah, Blank Chat, Griffin and David.

Yes.

Here we are.

Now, we usually do mini-series on directors who fit the model of what we talk about, but early on.

In our show, we were kind of half committed to covering the TC universe.

Sort of by mistake.

Jumping on and off.

We stopped, to be honest.

We stopped.

Yes.

And

when we did Nancy Myers, who was our first March Madness winner six years ago, we ended that series with Home Again as a bonus episode.

I think we used to do in the pre-Patreon.

A film directed by her daughter, Hallie Myers, Chire, that she was involved with.

Like, she was on set and Charles Chire.

Both very involved.

Right.

Oh, God.

Episode 250 was The Rise of Skywalker.

Another joke.

But Joker's like 241.

239.

Okay, close.

But the fucking rise of Skywalker, Jesus.

But it is wild that, yeah, a Joker five years ago.

It's almost the exact halfway point of this show.

Wow.

That we're now revisiting

500.

I'm trying to find this.

Yeah.

We didn't want to do a Joker 2 episode.

I'm just saying, I'm bringing this out here early, and this is blank check, and we're doing a Joker episode.

I need to own this because I felt like this was my fault.

This is not true.

this is my fault griffin newman's fault i'm wearing this i like flava flav where's a clock that's a callback to aloha movie we also have covered in the history of this podcast it's gonna be quoting a lot of blank check history oh this is fun okay okay so i have not seen joker one

still to this day wow still to this day i tried to watch it when it came out and I made it maybe 30 minutes in before I turned it off because I just was like, why am I wasting my time?

Granted, it was during the height of the pandemic where I tried to watch it.

So it's not like I had many other things to do, but I was also doing a Rock of Love rewatch on Tubi,

which kind of felt like, I don't know, a better use of my energy.

So

yeah, I

was absolutely not interested in this exercise

until Lady Gaga was announced as Harlequin.

And oh my God, they're making a musical.

And then I was like, you guys, this is amazing.

We have to do it.

We have to do.

So let's be very clear.

This is my fault.

David wanted to do Aquaman.

You had the genius.

That's what it is.

Thank you.

No, we can make the devil.

We did a deal with the devil.

We made a deal with the devil.

You.

You wanted to do Aquaman.

I was like, fucking, we're done with the DC thing.

We haven't been covering them for years.

And you were like, but we love James Juan.

And I was like, leave the possibility of James Juan series later.

Marie says, let's combine Aquaman and Wonka.

Wonkwaman.

It's fucking catchy.

It was a hit.

It felt like it was a hit.

It was a fancy thing.

It was a fat, tittied hit.

Thank you.

I can't say it.

You can.

Thank you.

But it was.

And it is an episode that people have come back and said to me, like, that episode's just fun.

Much like our first Aquaman episode.

Which is what I thought was going to happen.

Where I'm like, those movies are silly.

It's fair.

Exactly.

And also, because we record so far in advance, and we have been recording even further in advance than usual because of you being a twin dad, tying back to Goodrich, which we'll talk about in a second.

that we were like, is there an opportunity to combine two things here?

Well, first, I'm like, David, if we're doing an Aquaman episode, you have to agree to Jujoker episode.

Yes, sir.

This became

a double distance.

And I want to be clear.

I said no.

You said no.

I said, that's too high a price, and I won't pay it.

So this is my fault.

Marie does.

David,

I endorse it.

I think the Marie endorsement did help win.

I also did kind of endorse it too.

I'll take some.

My take was.

I thought it was going to be a cultural moment.

Everyone thought it was going to be cool.

Well, okay.

Tagas in it.

Tagas lit.

Not cool.

But I want to defend myself by saying it is undeniably a cultural moment.

It is also a major moment for the purpose of this podcast.

Thank you.

This is almost one year ago.

I finally found it.

I had to search deep in my text message history.

I took a show very far.

I also, I play, I play, I had a phase where I was playing a lot of the video game Balatro, which

where jokers are very important to your strategy.

I also was like hard to find.

Yes, a lot of like me and my friends being like, so what was what were your, what was your Joker lineup for?

Bellatro is like the card?

Yeah, Bellatro, it's like a card game.

You probably like it.

Anyway, it doesn't matter.

There's lots of jokers in it, and you can use different jokers to get different bonuses and stuff like that.

Cesar Romero?

Yeah, like, there's definitely, sure, yes.

All right.

So I'm going to find, I'm going to find, because like last year, we also had this problem of like, we didn't really know what to do for the sort of Christmas episode.

Oh, because we had a mini-series that was because

releases.

There was a question of like, do we go dark for two weeks?

The point is, this has been one year.

Here's Griffin.

This isn't, yes, October 23rd, 2023.

I'm going to say it.

This is Griffin.

I'm quoting.

If this settles the issue, if we're going to do Aquaman 2, I do think we should also do Faliodoo next year.

I say, so you don't want Aquaman to be our goodbye to DC?

And you say, I think Joker is his own thing now.

I have no interest in waiting into future DC.

Followed is just going to be insane.

Aquaman, we should do to say goodbye to DC because James Gunn's taking over and this is the end of an era.

Right.

This is the end of this silly DCEU.

I mean, and it truly was, where Aquaman 2 came out and he, and like Jason Mamo is just doing interviews where he's like, I hope I get cast in the new DC universe as something.

I look forward to playing Lobo fingers crossed.

Like, it's like, hey, you're going to do a sequel to Aquaman?

And they're like, uh, yeah, sure.

Let me know if this suddenly jumpstarts that.

So basically do press for your billion-dollar blockbuster sequel, wearing a barrel with straps on it and a sign that says looking for

reshot this movie eight times.

I don't remember who plays Batman in it.

Like, I don't fucking know.

No one plays Batman in it.

Oh, they just got rid of that?

Fine.

And so that this is my bargaining.

I'm quoting you again.

This is my bargaining.

I will agree to Aquaman 2 if we put Falia Dew on the schedule.

Marie says, let's let David have his Aquaman special.

We don't even know if the Gaga Joker is actually a musical.

So this is how long ago it is.

Wow.

And I said, first I said, like, if we don't do Aquaman, what do we do?

Because I'm like, I'm already shaking.

Sure.

And I say, my biggest fear with Joker is that we hated the last movie so much that we banned mention of the word Joker on our audience, which is true.

Yeah.

To which I said, time to unretire it.

Joker's back in the vernacular.

So we argued about this, but we did eventually give in.

And because I wanted to do Aquaman and we all, and even I, were a little bit like, I don't know, Lady Gaga, Phillips, obviously, certainly a blank check.

That came way later, but the first teaser certainly looked kind of

interesting.

Yeah.

Splashy.

Now, my contention this whole time has been: I think there's a chance it's cool, even for us, a group of known Joker 1 haters.

I'm not a fan of Todd Phillips' film Joker, which paid $1 billion at the box office, won the Golden Line at the Venice Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Picture.

And Joaquin Phoenix won an Academy Award for Best Actor in a storied career, a career I sometimes ding, but Joaquin Phoenix is given a lot of of good screen performances and his Oscar is for Joker.

But let's, this, I'm, I appreciate you outlining all of that very quickly because I feel like this movie is undeniably a cultural moment.

It is being treated like a grotesque crime scene.

How did this happen?

Yes.

Right.

And it's all the things you just listed.

Right.

It's so crazy that people are like, how did they give him all this money to make this?

I'm like, look at what Joker wants.

It made a billion

dollars on

this movie about a mentally ill guy who kills someone live on television.

That's basically a remake of two different Scorsese movies, but worse.

And it made a billion dollars.

The only movie I can compare to the rap sheet you just listed is Oppenheimer, right?

Where you're like, here's like a movie that does not seem like an obvious commercial play that made a billion dollars in theater, one Oscars.

Oppenheimer didn't do the festival circuit, which is this whole other added level of like, we need to repeat, Joker won the gold lion handed by

Lucretia Martel from acclaimed Argentinian filmmaker Lucretia Martel, chair of the jury that year, handed it to Joker in,

I'll never forget, I was sitting at the Scotiabank Theater waiting to see Pain and Glory,

a wonderful 2019 film that does deal with mental illness, among other things.

And I looked at my phone and I said out loud, someone was just walking by me who I didn't know.

And I was like, Joker won the Golden Lion.

And they went, what?

i mean that is like a a near unprecedented level of cachet especially for something that could then very quickly be turned into quote a franchise movie i remember when you said they're doing joker 2 i can't remember if it happened on mic i definitely remember it happening in a studio maybe right before or after a recording and i said how could they do that How did they possibly make a sequel to that movie?

And your answer was, it made a billion dollars.

It's like you just have to.

You have to.

Right.

I part of this movie being a cultural moment is I think this might actually

semi-permanently change a certain vein of Hollywood thinking of maybe a movie making a billion dollars isn't an automatic, we have to make a sequel.

And not just we have to make a sequel, but we have to make a sequel at any price

with no sort of like fettering.

Now, I hate the industry hand-wringing over like budgets

and profits and losses and all the shit that's happening right now.

The tisk-tisking of like Warner Brothers, these fools giving the movie was a huge hit.

It was beyond that.

It was a cultural sensation.

You're going, you should make a sequel.

Like I, I don't think there's anything wrong with that business decision.

No.

Now,

do you maybe want to just like check the script?

kind of just bat around a few ideas.

I think it's beyond that.

I think it's like, you want to make a sequel if they can come up with something good, right?

Whereas I think that's always true.

Their attitude was like, We don't care, guys, do whatever the fuck you want.

There was kind of an alien three, we can put anything in theaters that's called Joker 2, and it will make.

I mean, it's literally, it's that vert-it's literally walking

Phoenix pissing on a wall for two hours and 20 minutes.

Because I think their assumption was worst-case scenario,

if this movie has a major drop-off from the first sequel, it makes 500 million to like worldwide.

But also, on paper, I think this works.

I agree.

I agree.

Because, okay, it's like

we're going to do Chicago, the courtroom musical

with Joker.

New York, New York.

With musical.

This is where you go.

Oh, I got it.

No, no, no, no, no.

Wait, you wouldn't, you don't think that sounds good?

No, it doesn't.

Here's, that's, because that's, and that's, that's was, that is, God, I'm so angry.

Okay.

So

I think this episode's also about Goodrich, but go on.

We're going to talk about Helen Myershire's movie, Goodrich 2, but we'll do that in the back half.

The movie we greatly preferred.

Oh, yeah.

We love

Goodrich.

But we'll do that in the back half because this episode is called Joker, Hallie, a Goodrich, or Joker Rich, podcast.

So if you tell me, we're going to do Joker 2, we've cast Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn and it's going to be a musical.

I'm like, that sounds great.

If you then tell me, so I'm Zazlav or whoever.

Oh, hey, by the way, dude, fuck you.

What are you talking about?

I look like I just hunted an elephant.

Eat my piss, asshole.

So I'm Sazla.

So, right, I'm cutting.

Right now, I'm cutting through the film strips of like Bat Girl, and I'm just like, what is it?

Yeah.

And Todd Phillips is like, okay, here we go, buddy.

Remember, Joker?

Imagine him personally.

He's running a nail gun through the hard drive.

Hey, it's me, Todd Phillips.

Hey, Todd, how are you doing?

Remember my movie Joker made a billion dollars?

Yes.

Okay.

Well, Joaquin wants to come back and Lady Gaga wants to play Harley Quinn and it'll be a sequel.

That sounds great.

It's going to be musical.

It's going to be musical.

Well, Lady Gaga, okay.

It's going to be musical, like a jukebox musical.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Don't worry.

It'll be fun.

Okay, what's it about?

It's going to be like a courtroom drama where we just go to sort of go over the events of Joker 1.

Yeah.

Oh, does anything else happen?

Nope.

That's our whole plan.

It's literally relitigating the plot of Joker 1 slowly.

And making you feel like an asshole for...

any opinion you had on the first movie.

Leaving that movie that is equally contemptuous of any possible reading on the first one.

Leaving attitude aside, I literally just mean, what's the story pitch?

He's on trial for Joker 1.

Then what happens?

Oh, no, nothing.

That's it.

That's it.

That's all that happens.

He just goes on trial for shooting Robert De Niro.

You know what's incredibly telling to me?

By the way, a crime of which he is unambiguously guilty because it happened on television.

So it's just a litigation of, is he crazy or is he sick?

Can I ask a question?

Sorry, can I ask a question?

I can ask anything.

It's very society crazy.

Yeah.

Isn't the whole thing about Joker and Batman villains that they do bad stuff and they get away with it?

I mean, Joker doesn't get away.

People don't like that he does that.

But he, but all I'm saying is, like, it's like, why does he need to be punished?

Why does he need to go

through like

Gotham just?

We'll dig into this, but because Todd Phillips' main driving force in making this movie is to say, this guy isn't the Joker.

None of this matters.

Fuck you.

he is not the joker of of comic book legends he is merely a man then why do we care maybe inspires that is why this movie is inspiring a level of ire that i truly cannot recall the last time because even like megalopolis comes out two weeks before this and people are like i'm flummox we've covered different movies that are hated before sure no but no this is is i mean the obviously the best analogy is the seinfeld finale which lots and lots of people have that comparison.

But the Seinfeld finale, you know what?

The Seinfeld finale, which I don't really like.

Like,

I assume there's contrarian kind of takes on it now, but I'm still not a fan because it's boring.

Well, I think you're like, my whole beef with it is like, is again, it's like, this is just a clip show.

Like, this is dull.

You and I agree with that.

Right.

I like the meat of the Seinfeld finale.

I don't mind the sort of thrust of it, but I also.

The clip show aspect of it sucks.

It's just a boring thing to watch.

Yeah.

And I do think, at least in Seinfeld, Larry David is like, look, I just want you to understand these people are kind of a nightmare.

And like, yes, most viewers were probably, we knew that, Larry, but whatever.

I think the Hangover Per 3 does as well.

Go on.

What, I don't think that's what this movie is doing.

I think this movie doesn't really have anything to say.

I agree.

I was texting with a friend of ours trying not to blow my takes on Mike.

or pre-Mike.

And I said, this movie is the equivalent of like a teenage boy arguing with his parents and slamming his head against the wall as if that settles the argument.

I agree with you.

And it's like, no, that was just a dramatic thing to do.

And in the process, you gave yourself a headache.

Like, the movie's basically like, you don't get it.

Joker is mentally ill.

I got that.

We got it.

I watched the first time.

We talked about it in our episode on the first movie that I was like, the thing a lot of people were saying, like, so this guy we're supposed to extrapolate goes on to become the Joker is able to become like the clown prince of crime.

And you cited an interview Todd Phillips had done where he said something to the effect of, my, my head canon is almost like, this is not really the Joker, but perhaps there is a child watching the TV who sees the Robert De Niro shooting and that inspires him to become the Joker.

He's like the Ertext, which I, at the time, said, then what's the fucking point of this movie?

He has made an entire second film just underlining that point.

Wait, that's crazy.

I didn't know that he talked about that point.

Oh, he talked about it plenty.

That's what's wild about this.

So when the ending happened, I was like, okay, so he really just wants to underline you guys read my movie wrong.

I, but like, how did we read his movie wrong?

That's my question with this movie.

I'm like, what do you think we didn't get the first time?

Right.

But like, he's equally contemptuous of Catherine Keener and the Joker acolytes and the prison guards and everybody, like the people who love him, the people who try to empathize with him, the people who idolize him, the people who hate him.

Like the movie is just constantly like, everyone's read on this guy is wrong.

This guy's just kind of meaningless.

He doesn't fucking matter.

The courtroom thing, you saying how, like, if he goes in and pitches that and you're Zaslav, and you put the scissors down for a second and hear that, you go, let's pivot.

And let's not forget that it's like, and I budget $200 million.

And Zaslav is like, for what?

But anyway.

Catherine Keener is the third lead of this movie.

She is fourth build behind Khalisa.

Klee is third build, but I would call Keener, I would say she has a little more of an arc.

Right.

Yep.

She is not in any of the marketing.

No.

I was astonished to hear that she was in it, let alone in this big of a part, which made me realize, oh, yeah, they basically have kept the courtroom shit entirely out of the marketing for right.

They basically just made the marketing the, you know, Joker and Gaga dancing around.

Yeah.

Can I ask it?

Sorry.

I realize I'm always like, can I ask a question?

You can just ask a question.

I know.

This is like a

statement.

This is a tick I need to work with.

Women have to just be loud and I know nothing about showing podcasts and ticks.

ticks i couldn't relate to this we talk a lot about um movie popcorn buckets do you know about

this rollout for a popcorn bucket question no i'm marie i'm glad you asked for permission thank you so so deeply question number one is is there a rule where we're not allowed to make popcorn buckets for our rated movies uh no there's a terrifier three bucket There's a terrifier three bucket?

Yeah, you can eat an Art the Clown's head with a Santa Claus head on top.

so but were there no joker two buckets correct that should have been the first sign that

something was wrong well i'll

this is a dangerous question you asked marie i'm gonna say this very quickly there was no merchandising for the first joker not even like high-end adult collectible shit, which people assumed they would do.

And it was apparently a Todd Phillips decree in terms of the framing of this is a serious movie and not a franchise movie.

Because all of his stuff would be the jerk off motion right now next to the microphone.

And then like a couple years later, they allowed like $10,000 statues and busts and things that are like absurd, but there's been this real like, even beyond like the fucking Matt Reeves Batman, which is not child-friendly and was merchandised to death in every corner.

Yeah.

It does feel like he has exerted some control of like popcorn buckets frames this as a thing.

I would not be surprised if he kiboshed it personally.

Well, I think that's stupid because in the year of our Lord 2024, if a Denis Villeneuve movie has a popcorn bucket.

Well, this speaks to the way.

Your fucking Joker movie can have a popcorn bucket.

No, it can't, but this is the thing.

Exactly.

This is Todd Phillips's.

But this is what makes me so mad.

There's an insecurity to him.

Denis Villeneuve has the confidence to be like, if they make a fucking popcorn bucket that looks like a flashlight, that doesn't take anything away from my movie.

And Todd Phillips is like, if there are like $300 Japanese dolls of Joaquin Phoenix that take something away from my movie, which speaks to his insecurity about I'm a comedy filmmaker making a prestige movie of a comic book character, and I need everyone to know that this is serious.

I need everyone to know that this is serious, but to quote the Nick Pickerton tweet from a million years ago, do you know the tweet?

The most intensely challenging, daunting role that any actor can play is that of the clown who fights Batman, which is like this, this absurd thing of like, I'm making a Joker movie.

I'm making a movie about the Joker character from comic books who's been in many movies.

Oh, that sounds fun.

Is it going to be like pulpy?

It's kind of pulpy.

Yeah, I'm doing the 70s riff thing.

Like, oh, okay, cool.

But it can't be taken as pulpy.

It must be taken as a serious drama.

It must be entered in the Venice Film Festival.

And what happens?

He fucking wins.

So for this one, he's like, premiere to Venice again, please.

Six weeks ahead of release.

Everyone sees it and is like, wow, we're a pile of shit on a plate.

Like, you know.

But his pretension has gotten the better of him.

And like,

this is a movie that about Joker and Harley Quinn.

Harley Quinn's a cartoon character from the 90s.

Yes.

She's not even some like storied historical, like, you know, Bill Finger created Harley.

No, it's like in the 90s, they're like, there should be a girl Joker.

Right.

But

she talks like this.

Yeah.

And they're like, this is now another member of the American canon of art is fucking Harley Quinn.

Her name's Harley Quinn, like the word Harley Quinn.

And even like Margot Robbie had to make a statement on some red carpet while like promoting the, you know, on the Barbie Awards campaign that was like, look, I always intended Harley Quinn to be a role that could be reinterpreted by multiple actors.

I don't care if I'm not going to wait Disney Gaga's take on the camera.

Harley Quinn is already turning into the Nick Pickerton tweet about Joker where it's like, it's like, yeah, this is also like, this is like America's King Lear and fucking Lady Macbeth is like Joker and fucking Harley Quinn.

Right.

That is multiple actresses playing Queen Elizabeth on the crown.

And it's like,

you have temporary ownership of this.

I'm not here to shit on like Bruce Tim and Paul Dini for making a Harley.

Harley Quinn's a successful comic book creation.

She's fine.

And her movie, Birds of Prey, I like a lot.

I like it.

It's okay.

Okay, let's find it.

You guys are both.

You guys are both.

I like it.

You guys are boys.

I am a boy, and I'm a boy who has a crush on you and McGregor and on half the fucking women in that movie.

Wait, which ones don't you have a crush?

All of them, right?

And the egg sandwich.

I just think that movie is kind of narratively a bit of a mess.

Egg sandwich.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, you don't don't like the egg sandwiches.

Oh, you don't like the egg sandwiches?

No.

Look, that's my only hang up with that movie.

The weirdest thing is that the closest comp to this movie is

Captain Marvel and the Marvels, right?

Like, it's so funny to think about Joker, the esteemed prestige project that actually like did all this, you know, got all these awards and stuff, making a billion dollars.

And then the sequel coming out a little too late, you know, coming out like five years later.

And audiences aren't just disinterested.

They're like, no, right.

And it makes like one tenth of what the first movie made.

It's the exact same journey Captain Marvel had to the Marvels, except no Oscars, no awards.

But Captain Marvel also was this phenomenon that made a billion dollars.

And people were like, I guess we kind of got to give it up.

But like you step back from the Captain Marvel Marvels thing, right?

And you're like, that is this weird, like.

five cultural things all colliding and multiple moments on both movies for why the first one overperformed and why the second one underperformed so dramatically.

And in both cases, very little have to do with the actual

actual product on screen.

Right.

But whereas Joker has to do with these two movies in a weird way and all these autopsies of like, whose fault is this?

Did Mike DeLuca need to like fucking tighten the leash?

Did Todd Phillips need to show self-discipline?

And I'm like, this movie got made because everyone rewarded them as much as they possibly could have for the first film.

They gave them a blank check.

They gave them a fucking blank check.

This is why we're covering it on the show.

Can I tell you my favorite theory about why this movie is bad because bradley cooper and todd phillips dissolved their producing partnership now why did they do that do we know i don't know i mean bradley cooper's a busy man does bradley cooper not have a credit on he does not they stopped working together in 2021 interesting uh and obviously uh todd phillips uh uh produced starsborn right like that goes both ways bradley cooper produced war dogs i think

he produced and he produced joker and he produced joker that's one of his oscar nominations one of his 15 oscar nominations so that tomorrow when he produced todd doesn't get a credit on maestro no no no i don't think so no at that point they are right yeah spielberg and scorsesi get credits on

yes no i've heard him but all i'm saying is if i think if bradley was in the room a lot of those musical sequences well

would have been

different i think a lot of the use of gaga would have been different.

I agree with you, but I also do think fundamentally there had to be someone being like, you need a bigger story structure here than just Relay Gaining Joker 1.

Something has to happen in this movie.

And Phillips is like, no, no, no.

This is an anti-things happening movie.

This is a movie about like mushing the audience's face into like, you're all depraved for liking Joker, like you say, or disliking Joker or for just making an icon of this sick man.

Right.

If you take him seriously, you are like a pretentious, condescending cultural elitist.

Right.

If you, if you

valorize him, you're a psychopath.

Yes.

Yeah.

And the fundamental thing you need to understand is he's just a sick man who dies like a sad death.

Who's unimportant at the hands of like, right, a rando who maybe he becomes the joker.

I don't care.

I don't care about the joker.

We all became the joker.

He's not funny.

He's not smart.

He comes really fast.

He can't hold his that was my okay so if we want to talk about like how slow is he supposed to be if we want to talk about roses and thorns

plays out in a two-shot without a cut and i was like this is going to end in in 15 seconds

i love when he goes can you put it in and then he just kind of awkwardly thrusts and you know what my husband my husband came with me to see this movie because he said he didn't want me going alone okay that's

which i was like why because you're afraid of like joker fans hurting me he was worried you were going to get Joker pilled.

Yeah, no.

He was like, no, I just think it's like so embarrassing for you to go see this movie alone that I

need to be your emotional support human.

The first thing he said was like, wow, it's crazy that Joachim, his last two movies were like him awkwardly thrusting in weird sex scenes.

Because Napoleon

also...

and also has him like just humping the stuff and being awkward and weird.

And then the more I thought about it, I was like, you know.

He does it in the master.

He fucks the sand lady on the beach.

This is a thing that he fucking.

He builds a sand lady just to fuck her poorly.

Yeah.

And I also weirdly think the Joker and Napoleon performances are kind of similar where he doesn't

seem that locked in to either of them.

I like him in Napoleon a lot.

I think he's fine.

I like Napoleon, but I think that the movie...

isn't taking itself seriously in a lot of ways.

For sure, that movie does not take seriously.

Which Joker 2 does feel like it's taking itself seriously.

Oh, does it?

This is another fascinating cultural moment around this movie, right?

Is like starting around Napoleon, there starts to be this unpacking of the history of Joaquin Phoenix trying to quit projects.

Right.

And being like, I don't know what I'm doing.

I have no take on this.

You need to let me quit.

He's quietly notorious for within weeks of a film starting,

having a sort of freeze-up moment where he's like, I don't think I want to do it.

I don't think I know what I'm going to do.

I don't, you know, I want out.

Sometimes having to be kind of talked down.

And other directors have had him run, and the movie panics and they have to cast someone out what was the one recently that came to light shamelin mentioned it he he was supposed to be the star of um the split yeah oh right

i think mcavoy was the one talking about it but that had been reported before yeah and it makes total sense yes because they'd worked together twice before and of course phoenix is the guy you think of for that role totally oh to play a mentally ill person joaquin

and i wish he had done split because then he probably wouldn't have done joker probably he probably wouldn't have been like i already you know what you're totally right.

Right.

And then Feige could have gotten him for Doctor Strange and the MCU could have imploded from within.

But this is the thing.

He was the swipe widget for Feige that he and all these meetings would be like, I don't think our working styles are compatible.

Right.

Like it was all some self-awareness from him.

Right.

Where he was like, this is not me like refusing to engage with the Marvel thing.

I don't think this is going to work.

Feige wanted him to play Hulk.

Bruce Banner in the Ruffalo position for Avengers, wanted him to play Doctor Strange.

Those are the two big ones where like they helped off.

They rolled out the carpet.

They were like, what can we do?

Yeah.

Right.

And he was just like, I have this awareness.

What's come out in some of this like post-autopsy on the Joker failure.

And his recent abandonment of the Todd Hayes.

I want to say that.

But yeah.

That he at one point went to his reps and was like, everyone wants me to do a comic movie.

What if I could do like a villain movie?

Is there a way to do this kind of thing?

So that when Phillips had this Joker pitch, the threads unified.

I do agree with you that like split is a better version of what what he had an itch to do.

And if he had done that, he probably never would have won an Oscar.

Sure.

Well, he probably would have won an Oscar for one of his better performances.

Also, McAvoy's incredible in Split.

That's the thing.

The thing about McAvoy in Split is like it all worked out.

That's a great performance.

And beyond the fact, if you're learning, like, McAvoy basically jumped aboard a couple of weeks before production, you're like, Jesus, what a heroic job player.

His body just looked like that.

I guess so.

He lost a little muscle in order to play the role, but he walks off of this Todd Haynes movie, Rude to another Todd.

He walks off of this Todd Haynes movie in this sort of like calamitous spiral.

Like he has left this production in a lurch.

They cannot replace him.

Treated him very badly.

One of our great artists.

I wish I could do Trump just to do shit.

He's a chameleon.

He wants to try his hand in every genre.

I mean, my Trump is me

one-fourth committing to an impression of James Austin Johnson's impression, who is the only good Trump impression that still exists.

But

yes, there's this huge fallout from this, right?

And there is a public,

I think a widespread backlash of, I'm reading people who are not super engaged with movie culture online being like, why are they not suing this guy?

This is unbelievable.

How do they allow him to act this way?

Everyone else lost their jobs.

Yeah.

Like $10 million for the best.

Right.

It's crazy.

And the thing I kept seeing in comment threads was people being like, hey, guess what?

Joker's about to make a stupid amount of money.

He'll pay off whatever fucking penalty.

When Joker's a hit, everyone will forgive him.

In Hollywood, they'll just ignore the bad behavior, which has always been like, hey, Joaquin hits just enough that even when he does his weird periods, his I'm still here.

When he comes back with a hit or a triumph, people are like, I guess, Joaquin, what are you going to do?

This movie being such an atomic bomb right after the Todd Haynes thing.

Right.

And now this influx of stories of people being like, yeah, there were these other times on set where he was like, like, I do think everyone's backing off and being like, is it worth working with Joaquin?

I think there might be a bit of a Joaquin break for a bit.

And I think

I do think he's going to step back for.

Yes.

And I think the fact that like Bo is Afraid, I think was greenlit at a high budget.

That was partly because it was Joaquin coming off of Joker.

And obviously that movie I think is really, honestly brilliant, but didn't make much money.

And then Napoleon also, Joaquin playing Napoleon, that's a selling point for that movie.

It's like, we got fucking Joaquin Phoenix to to do this.

The gladiator reteam.

And now it's, yeah, I just think it's going to be a few years before that happens again.

I think he might be able to start another wilderness period.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Here's another question.

Don't worry.

He won't get far on foot.

That's the Joaquin movie people forget, man.

People forget that one.

I saw that film in a theater.

100 comic clubs.

He made a gus, but he walked off a Todd.

That is the last Gus Van Sand film.

Really?

That is his most recent film.

You're forgetting forgetting that he directed

the Swanson FX's feud.

Colon, Cody versus the Swans.

Ben.

What's up, Griff?

This is an ad break.

Yeah.

And I'm just, this isn't a humble brag.

It's just a fact of the matter.

Despite you being on mic, oftentimes when sponsors buy ads based on this podcast, the big thing they want is personal host endorsement.

Right.

They love it to get a little bonus ben on the ad read, but technically that's not what they're looking for.

But something very different is happening right now.

That is true.

We had a sponsor come in and say, we are looking for the coveted Ben Hosley endorsement.

This is laser targeted.

The product.

We have copy that asks, is the product a porch movie?

It certainly is.

And what is today's episode sponsored by?

The Toxic Adventure.

The new Toxic Avenger movie is coming to theaters August 29th.

Macon Blair's remake of

reimagining, whatever.

A reboot of the Toxic Avenger.

Now, David and I have not gotten to see it yet, but they sent you a screener link.

Yeah.

I'm going to see it.

We're

excited to see it.

But, Ben, you texted us last night.

This fucking rules.

It fucks.

It honks.

Yeah.

It's so great.

Let me read you the cast list here in billing orders, they asked, which I really appreciate.

Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay, Tremblay, Taylor Page, with Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon.

Tremblay is Toxie's son.

His stepson.

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Okay.

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Yes.

Great name.

Give us the takes.

We haven't heard them yet.

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You got fucking Dinklage is fantastic.

He's talking.

He plays it with so much heart.

It's such a lovely performance.

Bacon is in the pocket too, man.

He's the bad guy.

He's the bad guy.

There's a lot of him shirtless.

Okay.

Looking like David.

David sizzling.

Yep.

And then Elijah Wood plays like a dang-ass freak he certainly does he's having a lot of fun tell us some things you liked about the movie okay well I'm a Jersey guy I just gotta say the original movie was shot in the town where I went to high school

yes yes that's right the original film yep I grew up watching toxic and trauma movies on porches yes with my sleazy and sticky friends it informed so much of my sensibility your friends like junkyard dog and headbanger yeah exactly making toxic crusader jokes and so when i heard that they were doing this this new installment, I was really emotionally invested.

It was in limbo for a while before our friends at Cineverse rescued it and are now releasing it uncut.

But I feel like there have been years of you being very excited at the prospect, but also a little weary.

They're playing with fire here.

Yeah, it's just something that means a lot to me.

And they knocked it out of the fucking park.

Okay.

It somehow really captured that sensibility, that sense of humor, even just that like lo-fi, scrappy kind of nature that's inherent in all of the trauma movies and the original Toxie movies.

And they have like updated in this way that it was just, I was so pleased with it.

It's gooey.

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Tons of blood, tons of goo,

great action.

It's really fucking funny.

It just, it hits.

all of the sensibilities that you would want in an updated version.

Cineverse last year released Terrifier 3 unrated.

Yeah.

Big risk for them there.

I feel like it's a very, very intense movie.

And one of the huge hits.

More interesting, yeah, theatrical box office phenomenons the last five years.

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And Ben, it just says here in the copy, wants to call out that Elijah Wood plays a weird little guy who says Summon the Nuts.

Can you tell us anything about that moment without spoiling it?

Summon the Nuts is in reference to a

psychotic new metal band.

Hell yeah.

Who are also mercenaries.

Cool.

And drive a van

with a skeleton giving two fingies up on the grill.

And that's all I'll say.

Okay.

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I swear to God, you know, I've been really into baseball this year.

It's been like a sort of falling back in love for me thing.

Like, I started last year when the pitch clock came in, but this year, especially, now I'm reading these like old Roger Angel books from the 60s and 70s.

He's like a preeminent sort of poet laureate of baseball, like wrote lots of books.

And you're reading him in the 60s, especially writing about like television essentially coming to baseball, right?

Like that's the dawn of kind of like, ah, the game is sort of changing to accommodate television.

And I'm really sad about this and that, right?

And you just think about like, man, those were the days there were just so few things for us to focus on, right?

That you could be upset that baseball was on television because you're like, ah, shouldn't people just have to go to the ballpark?

Right?

Now it's like, Capote

versus the Swan

is a fucking television event.

Like, remember when Capote had a fight with some ladies in Manhattan, like, high society?

He was mean to the ladies who used to drink with in the press.

Wait, guys.

Let's make a movie about it.

No, no, no, no.

Let's clear out the deck.

10 episodes on this.

People killed themselves, okay?

I know.

It was a feud.

What a feud.

They don't use that title lightly.

It is.

Oh, wow.

Okay, here's another question on the Joaquin line.

That I was field testing this morning.

Do we think they put Joker on the bench for a while?

They should, yes.

Right?

Absolutely.

As James Gunn is preparing to now like do his new strike on the DC universe, first of all, I would bet money that Barry Keogan is the Joker does not return.

I would too.

I think that is.

That performance was a failure, and it's not something that people remember or like about that.

No, and I imagine Matt Reeves and Barry Keoghan meeting in the middle of a dark alleyway, shaking hands and going, I think it's best for both of us.

We're on the exact same page.

What are you talking about?

See, he's barely in it.

He's not in this movie two times.

Maybe, maybe just one time.

Remember the long-term patterns of that movie.

I've seen this movie many times.

Actually, kind of.

There's one

in a comfort walk.

Yeah, no, I makes sense.

Here at the end of the movie.

It's right at the end of the movie.

So if you're putting it on for comfort, you might not be making it to hour three.

It is Academy Award nominee Barry Coogan playing.

I've totally forgot about this.

Exactly.

It's one scene.

They filmed another another scene that they cut stuff.

And there was description of the scene, and people were like, that sounds good.

Why did they cut that out?

And then they put it online and you're like, totally get why they cut it out.

He's also got really distracting

makeup.

Right.

It's like kind of a more extreme version of the Heath Ledger.

Everything about it, it's like

the face is Heath Ledger, cranked up.

The voice is Heath Ledger, cranked up.

That's not enough of a take because there's no further takes to be it's gnarlier.

Yeah, but I'm just saying, like, it's like, there's no new joker.

I go back to my take, which is eight years from now, after a long grace period, right?

Give it a full fucking Batman and Robin to Batman begins.

I want like fucking Richard E.

Grant wearing face paint with no scars, slicked back hair,

classic joker.

I love that.

Thank you.

I love that.

Like, that's, I want fucking emaciated, fancy.

You know, dandy joker.

I want dandy

joker.

But the only place we have left to go is go all the way back to he is a theatrical cartoon character but also if someone just wants to say to me like you know what there's been like a lot of joker stuff and we're kind of just not going to do joker pretty much we're just not going to talk about it thrill i'd be like yeah sounds good i do want to say though that there i do think there is room for interesting joker interpretations still as evidenced by the people's joker

well i think the people's joker rules murder

i i i did not watch joker one to prep for joker two i watched people's joker yeah Well, People's Joker, I already was one of my favorite movies of the video.

But it's also about the conversation we're having, right?

About like, what's the pop culture place of this movie?

You have not seen it yet, right?

Have you seen it, Ben?

I have.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's that, but it's also the thing I was surprised by was I was very interested in seeing it, but I assumed it was going to be more of a like, fuck you movie, that its main reason for existing was to be like flip off IP.

Oh, there's like genuine affection.

I think the whole thing Georgia is doing in that movie, which is like kind of remarkable, is you're like, oh, this movie has like a perfectly structured emotional story in a way Joker Folly Adud does not, that feels very personal.

And is her making the case of like,

there are reasons to reinterpret these characters to let storytellers tell very specific personal stories.

through the prisms, things you maybe can't do without using the like lens of, you know, characters and tropes we know.

She finds new fucking things to do with all of like the supporting cast of the Batman universe.

And is basically this argument for like these things should be like accessible, they shouldn't be like gatekept.

You know, if we're going to contend that like fucking Joker is our like Hamlet and the character that needs to be reinterpreted,

then you actually need to open this up rather than turning this into this fucking dick measuring contest of like who can get more twisted, which is where the dead end we've gotten to is just like, how do you make Joker more and more extreme and bleak and realistic?

Right.

Right.

And there's right.

There's no way to do that anymore.

And so hopefully there's no more Joker for a while.

Thank you.

Should we talk about Joker if only you do just briefly?

Favorite scenes?

I liked when they had sex because it made me laugh.

I ordered, I saw this movie at Nighthawk, which for folks who don't know, it's a theater in Brooklyn, like the Alamo where you can bring food, but it was the original dine-in movie theater in Brooklyn.

Yeah.

Great food.

And they had a special Joker pie.

It looked delicious.

It was really cute.

It was the guy that had the red and green.

It was a key lime pie with cherry whipped cream.

So it was pink whipped cream and then a maraschino cherry on top.

So that was good.

Okay.

The musical numbers, the set, the costumes, anything, guys.

Half-assed, then.

Half-assed?

Half-assed.

I think he films the musical numbers very sort of plainly and like didn't do much for me.

The production value of the film is fine.

Like, much like the first Joker, it doesn't look bad.

Like, you know, it looks fine.

Like, yeah, the costuming and the sets are fine.

The location stuff is fine.

The first movie has more.

I have things to say about this.

I just want to quickly.

But, like, there was no razzle dazzle.

You do the thing with the

Sonny and Cher show or whatever.

Yeah.

But there's like not.

They do more in Saturday night when they show the fucking,

what's this?

Oh,

Burl variety show behind.

Is it his dick in that movie?

No, but he talks about it a lot.

Of course, he would never shut up about it.

I just want to.

Wait, no, do they pull it out?

Does he?

He does pull it out.

I haven't seen it yet.

You haven't seen it yet?

No.

Oh, my God.

Has anyone here besides me seen it?

Okay, I forget.

They might have pulled a Dirk Diggler with like a...

Before we fully move.

Does he show it to Alan Zoybell in the movie?

No,

it's to Chevy Chase and Kaya Gerber.

He's flirting with Kaya Gerber and Chevy Chase.

Sorry, Corey Michael Smith was like, fuck you, old man.

He's like,

fuck her with my giant cock.

I just want to quickly, before we dig into all of this, say that Murray got the drugger pie, which looks good.

Ben also saw it at Nighthawk and said he considered getting the cocktail called That's Life.

And what stopped him was, and I'll read the ingredients, see if you can guess which one stopped Ben from ordering it.

Silky Irish whiskey?

Laird's Bottle and Bond?

I don't know what that is.

Is there a sign check for Be Brouch coming in?

Oh, okay, cool.

Peach liqueur.

Okay.

Lemon.

Sure.

Okay.

That sounds like a perfect flavor zone.

Oh, and also tobacco bitters.

Yeah.

What, what are those?

I don't know, but I will say thematically appropriate.

Yeah, he's just ripping SIGs the entire fucking movie.

50% of this film's running time is shots of him smoking a cigarette, tilting his head all the way back.

Yeah, all he does is tilt back and smoke.

Yeah.

This is like, this is the shit I hate in Joker, which is like Todd Phillips seeing him dance one time and being like, oh, that's good.

We're going to have you dance 20 times.

Landing on that shot one time and being like, fuck, we're going to do this shot 40 times.

To do something that I hate to do, which is praise Todd Phillips' 2019 film Joker.

That film is a little rattling.

And it has moments that really got to me.

I think we both agree that the

sequence is undeniably quite arrested at what it is trying to do.

And like the stuff of him like laughing on the bus and like, you know, working at the weird place with the, you know, where is it that he works?

i can't remember where he works he's like a clown for hire yeah yeah like the clown store the movie

that movie is a portrayal of a very damaged ill person right

and

just sort of descending into this terrible act and i did not think that it was a particularly like evolved movie or that smart i agree like it was somewhat visceral to watch and it's you know whatever it's a movie with a story

and i think phoenix is a ham i've always said that.

He's a hammy actor and he needs to kind of be, have the right guardrails around him.

But he's effective in the movie.

I prefer you were never really here in like, if he's going to do that mode, which I know you agree.

But anyway, this performance is so embarrassing.

His performance in this movie is so embarrassing, right?

That it makes me think he was bad in the last one.

That maybe he's always been bad.

Things like him doing the Foghorn Leghorn voice or the British accent, like when he's like on trial representing himself.

I'm just like,

that is, that's like me being asked in five minutes to be like, what would like a crazy person do, right?

Like, no, like, who thinks he's a comedian, like, no thought whatsoever into how this character thinks or behaves.

He's better in this movie when he's in fleck mode, I guess.

But I also has a little more going on there.

I mean, he's terrible when he's in.

I think this movie is bad and I don't like it.

I'm going to play, dare I say it, Joker's advocate for certain aspects of this film that I.

This film, no, no.

There are certain aspects that are coming after you.

What's his name again?

Regé Jar Page's character.

I can't remember.

Okay.

Yeah.

He's got the action figure on his desk.

There's certain aspects of this film I found compelling.

It's in spurts.

There are pieces of things.

We already talked about the sex scene.

The sex scene is the only good part.

Let's talk about spurts.

Exactly.

I think the cartoon is great.

It's two minutes.

I'm going to do an accounting here.

I don't think the cartoon is that great.

The cartoon is fine.

It's fine.

We can just find some things

or at least

this is the position.

I had a decent burger at the Alamo.

Guess how many people were in my screening?

Where?

At the Alamo?

Five.

Zero?

Goose eggs.

Now, I saw the film at like 12.15.

That actually must have been nice for you because

you've been on daddy duty.

Like, you, you, like,

I want to go see fucking J.K.

Simmons whipping out a a fake dick.

I want to see Megalopolis.

I don't want to see this shit.

You did send a series of angry texts in one of our other group techs that was like, I barely seen any movies in two months, and now I have to see fucking Joker Folly a duh because of Griffin.

And I was like, I'm hearing this.

I have to see it.

I have to see it like with the runway of every critic on earth being like an absolute waste of time.

So you saw it.

It's like not just bad, but just boring.

But also, like, you saw it with zero people in the audience.

It was me and my waiter.

Like day eight of release.

Right.

It was within the second week of release.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the tip of the second week.

Tip of the second week.

Yeah.

I went on Indigenous Peoples Day.

Sorry, what in the night?

And

there were a total of

zero other people.

There you go.

There you go.

It was like your Horizon screening.

Wish I'd just shown, if they'd just been like, sorry, the picture's broken.

We're just showing Horizon.

I would have been like, fantastic.

Hot dog.

I should have gone on Indigenous Peoples Day because

I have

10 free tickets to the Nighthawk that I have bought as prizes.

We're both look, we're both holding hot.

And I was like feeling really good about not paying to see Joker 2.

Yeah.

And then when I got there, I found out that you can't use them on weekends and you can't use them on Fridays either.

You can only use them like Monday to Wednesday.

And you have to wait.

It has to be past the first week.

Right, which I knew Joker,

I was like, oh, it's second week.

That's fine.

We can use it.

But unfortunately, I ended up paying $34 to OCH.

Okay.

Play Joker's app.

We need to move on to Goodrich and we'll circle back to it, but I just want to give Marie a little chance, a little bite at Goodrich.

But some other things you like.

James Seamus, something of a patron saint of the Blank Tribe podcast, a Hulk poster hanging above your shoulder, right?

When I first met him and told him how much I loved Hulk, he sort of went like, oh, the fascination with the wrong object, which is a term that has stuck with me, right?

And I was like, no, I genuinely love it.

And he's like, no, I get it.

I have the same thing of like, when a movie is so confidently made incorrectly, there's something compelling about trying to make sense of it.

And I admittedly have like a big

soft spot for that.

Right.

And like Hangover Part 3 is another movie that I think is bad and doesn't work.

I rewatched it for the first time in 10 years last night in prep for this.

I was astounded by the degree to which it doesn't work.

It's so much stranger than I remembered, but I've always sort of vouched for because I do not like the first two Hangover movies.

I I like a couple Todd Phillips movies a lot.

I obviously stayed really hard for Due Date.

You like Due Date?

I do think Old School is kind of the like frat pack vertex.

There's nothing wrong with all the pinnacle of that for me.

I mean, I mean, there are plenty of things probably that don't hit well these days in old school, but old school, you're like, yeah, that was that, you know, right.

Matt Singer, a friend, writing a book about that whole era.

And I'm like, I do think old school is quietly the key text of that entire comedy movement.

I always fancy did Road Trip.

Yeah.

Road Trip, I like okay.

It's okay.

Full sound drills, I like okay.

Starsky and hot shot, I like okay.

It's okay.

Wardock's kind of interesting.

I feel like you're with me.

I am with you.

It doesn't totally work.

It felt like an interesting transitional movie for like this guy's trying to turn into something else.

Where he landed, we don't like.

But it was the start of him like flexing whatever Scorsese muscles.

You left, you just glossed over the Gigi Allen film.

Yeah, which I do feel like.

He starts out in documentaries.

He does that.

He does a film called Frat House, which was like a big sundance hit.

About like hazing and stuff.

But no, the Gigi Allen movie is, I think we talked about it on the first one.

We talked about it a lot.

It's very, you know, you can see the continuum, right?

Of what interests him.

That he loves like the idea of being transgressive, countercultural, that he is this very bizarre, like wildly successful, largely very mainstream filmmaker working with big stars and big budgets.

who gets off on the idea that he's like fucking sticking it to the man in the institution, spitting everyone's eye, right?

Which is hard to do when you're also fucking winning in the movie industry.

So there is this.

That's so Gen X of him.

Totally.

And there is this horseshoe theory thing that I think has happened two times with this in Hangover Part 3, where when he has to like follow up a movie that was that big.

And Hangover 2, he just kind of did Hangover 1.

He just did it again.

Again, with a bigger budget.

And everyone critiqued him for that.

And he was very defensive of like, it's not the same.

It's got different jokes.

Hangover 3 feels like a similar fuck you.

You want me to not make Hangover 2 again?

And it is a movie that is basically like, these guys are bad.

These are bad people.

You didn't get it.

This isn't fun.

They're actually in pain.

The whole movie, the inciting incident, they're sober the entire film.

There is no hangover.

There is no blackout.

It is a movie of them being like asked to account for the crimes that they've committed that were cute in the first two movies.

It basically has the tone and the aesthetics of blood simple.

It will go long stretches without anything that's even an attempt of a joke.

And the inciting incident of the film is they realize, oh, Zach Alefanakis' character isn't funny.

He is mentally ill.

We need to institutionalize him.

Wow.

And on the way to like, they held an intervention and they're driving him to the desert.

They're pulled over by John Goodman with a gun.

And he's like, fucking Ken Jong stole all my money and you have to get it back.

And they're like, we don't know Ken Jong.

And he's like, really?

Because you guys keep on doing fucking movies with him and getting drunk and doing stupid shit.

I'm going to fucking murder Justin Bartha unless you get my money back.

The movie is so angry and bitter and weird and violent and intense.

It does not work.

No.

I didn't know this.

I've never seen it.

No one knows this.

And it came out and it similarly was hated.

Yes, and didn't do very well.

It also cost a lot of money.

On a scale of didn't do well.

It still made its money, but it made $115 million domestic.

It made $350 worldwide.

I think that's what they assumed the basement was.

on a Joker collapse.

Like, well, but come on, how hard could it actually fail?

And it was hated, but in a way, where since I think most people had been like, Hangover 2 is lazy, we've moved on from this.

Didn't get the same attention as this.

The Hangover fans who went to see it were like, why isn't this funny?

And that was sort of the end of the conversation.

This is the same thing where, like, you've given Todd Phillips everything.

Not only is it his biggest financial hit, but also he won all these awards.

Right.

He was taken seriously as an Otori.

Taken into the embrace of the sort of already critical community in a way he hadn't been before.

He's at the fucking roundtable with Scorsese, you know, who's like,

I watched some of it, I get it.

And there's the part of him that's still angry that he feels like he still isn't taken seriously enough, but there's the other part of him that's like, if I'm playing with house money and now everyone's saying we want you to do your outra thing, he then has to make a movie that hates itself because

like there's a quote, you know, he, when the first Joker came out and people were like, why do you make comedies anymore?

He's like, well, culture's too woke.

You can't get away with comedy anymore.

And everyone's like, fucking jerk off motion, right?

but there's a more telling quote from that press run-up where he's just like look it felt like comedy was changing and studios didn't want to make it and whatever and i was trying to figure out how to transition and being a different kind of filmmaker but still do something that felt like it would scare the studios that his whole thing he gets off on is they're a little worried about him going too far that's his like kink as a filmmaker is being paid 20 million dollars and feeling like he's being 10% too edgy.

And in this case, after Joker working against everyone's expectations, the only way he could do that was basically to make a movie that is boring and self-loathing.

Right.

But boring, I think, is to me the true answer.

That's the, yes, that's the greatest time of some shit in this movie.

Yes.

Why is Joker in jail?

He's shot Robert De Niro.

Let him escape.

Joker, let him escape.

I agree.

I want to see some funny outfits.

You know what would have been truly funny if this movie begins with him escaping from Arkham Asylum.

Yeah.

And then the rest of the movie is him fighting the Batman.

Well,

like the movie is just suddenly like, Joker, someone's after you.

Who is it?

It's a Batman.

And then it just becomes a Batman Joker movie, like in a really ordinary way.

Wait, but isn't Batman like 12 years old?

Yeah, no, I'm saying, like, the movie is just suddenly.

I know.

Bring that little boy Batman.

He just becomes obsessed with this 12-year-old kid who he like, you know, tries to kill.

I don't know.

Marie, I know you didn't watch in Fold.

Do you two remember how the first Joker ends?

Doesn't it shoot him in the head?

Wait, he kills.

Do you remember what the very end of the movie is?

It's him running through the he, there's some conversation with the psychiatrist in the asylum.

Then it's him like running through the halls, having maybe killed the person who was talking to him, but it's kind of ambiguous.

Yeah.

What are you alluding to?

No, I just remember the triumphant image of him standing on top of the abandoned copper.

Well, that's right below.

That's right before.

And that's when he puts the blood on his face.

I forgot that he is institutionalized by the end of the first movie.

But the movie does end, the Joker movie

does end with Bruce Wayne's parents being killed during this kind of like riot that ensues.

I have

show that

it's never been seen or even really spoken to.

Talk about how edgy Todd Phillips was.

He was the first one to say, what if they rip her pearl necklace off?

Fuck.

And they're shot in an alleyway like a dog.

Thomas and Martha Wayne,

not very smart.

Joe Chill, not very nice to the Waynes, but the Waynes, you know, should have left Gotham.

They're sending over their worst.

They're sending their Joe Chills to Gotham.

Did you see that Jerry Seinfeld went on Tom Papa's podcast and said, I really regret that stuff I said about like the extreme left ruining comedy?

Uh-huh.

And he said something that was really interesting.

Okay.

That I really liked.

Okay.

It was God.

So salute, Jerry, for at least owning that you were kind of popping off, right?

Like popped harding off, yeah.

Exactly.

Where he's like, if Lindsay Vaughan is sledding down a hill, skiing down a hill, and they make the gates like really far apart, she'll hit the gates because that's what she does.

Like, it's okay if the gates move around.

Like, good comedians will figure out how to be funny.

Every comedian I respect, that has been their statement the whole fucking time.

And people like at least he owned up to it.

Push Bill Burr and they're like, you must hate comedy getting PC.

And he's like, no, if you're challenged by that, then you're a hack.

Right, exactly.

I mean, that, right.

And that was, yeah.

If you work hard enough, anything could be funny.

So Todd Phillips, take a leaf out of Lindsey Vaughn and Jerry Seinfeld.

I agree.

Unfrosted, better movie than Joker Folly.

I haven't seen it.

I think I had it rated higher.

I'm still waiting for my letterbox ranking.

Wait, what was the point I was about to make?

There was a thing.

The end of Joker, you were talking about Joker 1, to be clear.

Trump's Horseshoe Theory.

Who knows?

Something felt.

Fuck this movie.

I'm going to get back to some fucking idiots.

Except nobody likes this movie.

Yes.

Lex G liked this movie.

Yeah, wow.

I do think this movie looks really good.

I think the movie looks fine.

Yes.

It has production value.

Yes.

Again, not that many sets.

No, it's wild how much of it is just Arkham Asylum.

Arkham Asylum Courtroom, the Sunny and Share Share set, the sort of outdoor set where they do the dancing.

I love conceptually cutting to like inner life musical numbers.

It's not consistent.

There's not a consistent number.

And the choices of songs are so like basic and lame.

Like all the songs are so dreary.

Like there's no fun in any of the music.

Fun musical.

The annoying part, I think the one musical number that works in my opinion.

is If They Could See Me Now, beyond just being a song I obviously love and that we've covered

past many series, I think that sequence has a little bit of a visual idea of them like running around in the rain after she set the fire and then being a little free.

It works sort of for what it is.

His sort of like

live onset audio.

It's their voices are scratchy on purpose, whatever thing.

The part where the movie totally fails is when it goes into those inner life sequences and you're like, there's a sound stage and they're made up and they're playing with like TV variety show aesthetics and whatever.

And then the numbers are like overcut and like lifeless like that's where the movie should sort of show

i do and like she's not even singing to the like the fullness of her abilities i think she's kind of good in this she's an incredibly talented performer movie totally sells her out well because her character is basically just a lecture to the audience of like this is what joker fans are doing i i like idolizing the first hour i was

this is what grad students are like the first hour i was like is she great it is to be clear and then the like complete dismantling of the character made me so angry.

Yeah, no, it's really annoying that she just, to be clear, she's like, I'm a psychiatrist.

At first, she's like, I'm Harley Quinn.

I'm in here for doing a bad thing.

And then it turns out, like, no, she's like some sort of a psychiatrist who was kind of faking being in the asylum to get close to him.

And she made it all up.

I've always,

was she actually pregnant?

No.

I don't think so.

No.

But isn't that crazy they didn't follow up on that?

No, he follows up on it.

And she's just like, on the steps, she's like, I got rid of that.

Yeah.

I mean, that scene is I was

catastrophic.

Really at that point, yes, you're really like end this movie.

Right.

I also it has like five endings in a row.

Doesn't I thought she killed herself in the scene before?

So I'm like, well, isn't it because she holds a fucking gun up to her head.

And then I'm like, is he hallucinating her on the stairs?

Marie.

And then sometimes they'll cut back at him.

You can't even see her on the stairs.

And I'm like, I'm confused.

I don't know what's going on.

We had compared different Reddit leaks we had read about like how the movie ended and that were like in conflict with each other.

And then I saw before you and I was like, the movie ends in a series of sequences that all feel like they could have been the ending, where I fully believe that at different points in time, the movie ended in completely different ways.

It does feel like, and everything I've heard about the production of this movie, and this is a big reason why it costs so much fucking money when people ask, how is that possible, is that they had this massive set.

and a lot of background actors.

They had two massive sets they built, right?

The courthouse.

A lot of background actors.

And that this movie for a pretty talky, fucking grounded thing was sort of made the way the Krista McCory Mishn Impossible movies were made, where they just get to set every day and every actor was on hold every day.

And they'd be like, what do we want to do?

And they just threw a bunch of shit at the wall.

I think this movie was kind of made to choose your own adventure style, which is why it feels like it has conflicting ideas in it, because they were like, I don't know, we'll find it.

You know, I think they had a script going into it, but we're throwing a lot of shit at the wall.

And it does feel like the movie includes both the ending that was intended to be her suicide and the scene where she comes in and explains why in a perfect bow, she's over him.

Like, and then of course like branching timeline things.

And then, of course, we get this wonderful epilogue where he gets killed by a random inmate who then like sits down and carves a smile into his face.

Heath Ledger side.

Imitating sort of the Heath Ledger.

Which it has come out that that was.

part of Phillips' pitch that he wanted to be the ending of the first movie when Joker's in Arkham Asylum.

And that was the one thing where Warner Brothers was like, that is one step too far.

You cannot do that because Christopher Nolan is still a beloved member of our stable, and we don't want to make him mad by like messing with the legacy of that series.

And also, like, making it.

Times have changed.

Just don't fucking touch Ledger at all.

Maybe that's too loaded in every direction.

The movie's only kind of touching it in the Glasgow smile thing is the only thing.

It wasn't as explicit.

It's not like he comes out with the green dyes.

This guy's doing a little bit more of a Ledger impression than I would have expected.

I just was profoundly disinterested by what was being shown to me in that moment.

I just did not like it at all.

Um, I was a little

in the hangover part three, like, I'm fascinated by what this movie is trying to do at war with itself.

Setup of what I thought was a reasonably good spine at setup that the movie completely botches, which is,

and I think the way that the first Joker movie deals with fucking mental illness is really condescending and exploiting.

Quite

simplistic.

I like hate it.

And I hated that the movie did this sort of backpatty victory lap of like, no, this is like a somber like call to attention for the people that society neglects.

And I'm like, this is a movie that gawks over how weird his body looks.

Yes.

For 90%.

It's mostly just look at how weird this fucking guy is.

Right.

There's a lack of discipline that plays against that being the stated intent of the movie that I really think was a added on later awards season narrative.

This movie, I think, is a little more engaged in him actually being a mentally ill person.

I agree with you that I think like the Arthur performance kind of works.

And once he becomes Joker again, it's a disaster.

There's something I kind of like about him being totally canatonic and dead inside at the beginning of the film, although it does go on very fucking long.

It's not that fun to watch.

No, it's not.

The one idea the movie has that I think is a little interesting that it doesn't know how to follow through on, and it's what the cartoon sets up, is here's this guy whose entire complex is, he's ignored in life.

He wants to entertain, he wants to connect to people, he can't do it.

He has finally now become this like weird, beloved celebrity.

Even as a controversial figure, he's got attention and there's like discourse around him and he feels completely disassociated from it because it's basically a persona and not him.

And the movie trying to litigate like, is Joker a different character than he is?

Is that an outpouring of his trauma?

Was that a performance?

What is it?

And like, at the beginning, I was like, like, fuck, am I going to like this movie?

And then increasingly, scene by scene, it was losing me because it just doesn't have a clarity of vision to be able to actually like follow that through to any satisfying endpoint.

That's, that's what I want to say about the film.

I, I think, yeah,

I think the, if you could see me now, number is good.

I think when he sings in the interview with Steve Coogan, that kind of works.

But once again, like, the only numbers that kind of work for me are the ones that are not really musical numbers.

Like the Coogan scene and and Cougan looking hot.

He's looking good.

I mean, you know, as he always is.

But is like just the perfect.

See who is like, but you're Joker from the film Joker and you did this stuff in Joker.

What do you make of that?

And he's like, I don't know.

And I'm just like,

can something happen, please?

Anything.

Action.

Action.

That was the one other thing I was going to say in defense of Gaga.

I don't need her.

She doesn't need defense.

We have nothing against her.

She's doing great.

We blame Todd Phillips for not utilizing her property final thing i want to say about the movie harley quinn as we said created as like a fun comic a cartoon character yes right added to the comics later becomes an incredibly popular character totally has become humongous but there is this thing of like a character who was originally created as just like the joker's mall what if he had like a sassy female sidekick who's in love with him but it's this sort of dark abusive like exactly so over time the dynamic deepens and writers have tried to approach it in a sensitive way and some have done it much better than others but there's this whole idea of it being right, this abusive relationship.

And at times it's like, did Joker like fucking brainwash her?

You know, I think some of the depictions of Harley Quinn are like weirdly depriving her of any agency by making her someone who just got like Joker-fied and now is stuck, like cursed to a life of being Lady Joker.

even as they've tried to make her her own character away from him.

The narrative is always, well, the Joker fucked her up and now she's her own thing, right?

I kind of was into at the beginning of this movie, the setup of like,

no, she's someone who like sees him, quote unquote, that she's like insane, that it's not like he fucking gaslit his therapist and tricked her and threw her.

Oh, yeah, it reverses the narrative where he's becomes, he's like the

submissive to her.

And in that dynamic, Gaga is incredibly good casting.

And I thought she was really electric.

And then as the movie unwinds and is like, no, she's just like some fucking like fangirl who's also like abusive and superficial to him, it bummed me out hardcore.

David, what this episode of Blank Check with Griffin David podcast about filmographies is brought to you by booking.com.

Booking.

Yeah.

I mean, that's what I was about to say.

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God, I'm trying to think of anyone in my life, perhaps even in this room.

Ben, who's like, what's an example of someone I know who maybe has a very particular set of demands?

Bringing me in, and there's only one other person in the room.

There's one other person in the room right now.

This is so rude.

I sleep easy.

I'm definitely not someone who insists on 800 thread count sheets.

No,

that's an example of a fussy person.

But people have different demands.

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Maybe any kind of demand.

I'm traveling and I need a room with some good soundproofing because I'm going to be doing some remote pod record.

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Well, I think of one person in particular, although it's really both of you.

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I need air conditioning if I'm in the North Pole.

Look, if I can find my perfect stay on Booking.com, anyone can.

Booking.com is definitely the easiest way to find exactly what you're looking for.

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You do.

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As long as I got a good bathroom here for selfies, I'm happy with everything else.

Look,

again, they're specifying, like, oh, maybe you want a sauna or a hot top.

And I'm like, sounds good to me.

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Please.

Can I check that?

You want one of those in the recording, Stupid?

That'd be great.

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I'll be in the sauna when we record.

I was going to say, you want to be the Dalton Trumbo podcast.

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Welcome to Pony Murders in the Building, the official podcast.

Join me, Michael Cyril Creighton, as we go behind the scenes with some of the amazing actors, writers, and crew from season five.

The audience should never stop suspecting anything.

How can you not be funny crawling around on a coffin?

Yeah, that's true.

Catch Only Murders in the Building official podcast.

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Terms apply.

There is a catch-up entertainment release

that will have just come out

in some capacity.

It's getting a fairly wide release.

Okay, yes.

I know a lot of our international listeners are frustrated frustrated by this being part of the episode because the movie does not have as strong an international rollout outside of North America.

I do believe it's going straight to Netflix in a number of countries.

Makes sense.

It's going straight to plane, I would imagine.

This movie should go straight to Netflix.

God, if I saw this on a plane, I'd be like, I would just fucking

let's just make this the headline.

Goodrich is maybe the most effective plane movie of the year.

If you put this on on a plane, you are going to have zero regrets.

And I don't mean this as a backhanded compliment.

We all, I mean, look, as the flip side of Joker, we all sat there and we're like, this movie is kind of doing what it promises to do, right?

By and large, yes.

It is not a great film.

No.

I think it's a huge step up from home again.

Even though I wasn't on for that episode, I really like that movie.

I really like Home Again as a...

you know,

an object of fascination.

I repeat the term you threw out yesterday.

Gas leak cinema.

Gas.

Where you're just like is everyone just is there something wrong like yes why are people talking this way like is there a gas leak goodrich is a fascinating goodrich is hallie myershire's second film yes a one hour and 50 minute dramedy about uh an art dealer whose second wife his younger wife leaves him out of nowhere for rehab program And he didn't even know.

He didn't even know she had a drug problem.

He didn't know what kind of problem she had.

He's checked out.

He's a workaholic.

And so now he has to raise his two nine-year-old twins and try to continue to forge a relationship with his elder daughter, who is her own woman, who's pregnant herself.

Mila Kunis plays her.

Michael Keaton plays Andy Goodrich.

Yeah.

The titular Goodrich.

My guy, Michael Keaton.

Absolutely.

What about Andy Goodrich?

I kind of like Andy Goodrich.

I mean, I, you know, you were sitting there at the end of the movie.

I turn to you.

You have tears in your eyes.

Big, tough guy, big, strong guy, David Sims, tears in his eyes, comes up to me and says, you know, representation really matters and it's good to see it on screen.

Twin Dad Cinema.

I feel like we all kind of teared up during this movie.

It got me a couple of moments kind of got me.

I mean,

it's about a dad learning to be a dad

after years of already being a dad.

Look, all four of us have had very different relationships with our fathers, but they're all loaded in different directions.

Dad movies are a pretty effective way to poke buttons.

I think for a lot of people, but I think most of the sentiment this movie succeeds in ringing out does not feel super manipulative.

No.

No, this movie is not manipulative.

My problem with Goodrich, if I have one, which is, you know, like we just described the premise of the movie to you, you can basically guess the arcs of Goodrich.

Yeah.

Like if I tell you, like, yeah,

his second wife leaves him.

He's stuck with his kids.

And he's, and his older daughter is pregnant.

You're like, okay, well, I imagine he like learned some lessons about being a dad.

And he, you know, it ends up with his, his older daughter having a kid, and they kind of make a breakthrough, too.

In a very Nancy Meyers way, it has like four additional subplots that take up a weird amount of time and a lot of people.

It's like supporting how they sort of come together.

But yeah, I was expecting it to much more just be those two threads running in balance.

And it's, there are long stretches where like neither Cunis nor the kids are really part of it.

100%.

There are two, I would say,

right, semi-major B plots.

One is Goodrich pursuing the estate of a dead sort of artist who only became famous late in life.

Well, black female artists.

Because his gallery is not

the same.

They're behind on richer.

Losing our galleries.

That takes them all.

Shows up for maybe like eight minutes of total screening.

It feels more like Badrich these days.

Good poor.

But Carmen Ajogo plays the daughter of this artist who, so he's kind of pursuing her not romantically more as like a

romantic edge.

I felt sexual tension between Michael Keaton and every single character in this movie, including his daughter.

Including 100% Mila Kearnas.

In ways that I think maybe there could have been a little bit of intervention on.

I agree.

I agree.

I said to him.

And maybe he doesn't need to call her babe.

This movie.

Oh my God.

He said babe.

And then it's a big emotional.

The final line.

Well, let's not spoil, but there's a final line.

We're going to spoil the light.

Spoilers for Greg Rich.

Spoilers for Grid Group.

You know what?

You know what?

I'm with Griffin.

Here's why.

Because I think

his final line just to vote

half an episode to this is maybe going to constitute 50% of the entire marketing push for this movie.

People might actually go see this because of this episode.

You're right.

You're right.

You're right.

He used to be a little bit more comfortable.

And we do think people should see this movie.

We liked this movie.

And here's another thing.

Like the type of movie we bemoan a lot doesn't really happen anymore, right?

Like a lot of like this is in a certain way.

This feels like Hallie taking a step away into her own identity, not just doing weird like child of Nancy movie but but also it's like it's getting a little into like Cameron Crowe yeah it was very it was very James L.

Brooks James L.

Brooks

like all these sort of like middlebrow

high-level adult dramed movie star movies that we love a two-hander between Mila Kunis and Michael Keaton and I think going into this if you know who the director is i assumed that we're going to be identifying with Mila Kunis' character, and it's going to be about, it's going to be focused on her and her relationship to her father.

But I was most struck by how

much the film puts you in Michael Keaton's perspective.

It is a good Rich Moby, and it is a good Rich Moby.

And I think that really is like cool that she's able to.

I agree.

You know, I think, if anything, a weird feeling of the movie is that the Mila Kunis character is underwritten.

I agree.

I think she's a little miscast.

I can't decide who would be the right person.

I do think she's a little

underwritten, so I'm not sure anyone's gonna be.

Dakota Johnson.

Oh, putting her in a movie.

What a bold and interesting decision that would be.

Hey, hey, good Dakota Johnson impression, by the way, just saying that.

Did I tell you guys I'm being Adam Webb for Halloween?

Marie!

So you're gonna

talk like this the entire time?

I bought, I bought a trick-or-treat.

I bought a really good wig.

Small my feet.

Give me something good to eat.

I've got a can of Pepsi.

What's happening right now?

Ellen.

Ellen, that's not true.

Connects them all.

I ordered a red faux leather blazer.

I've got sunglasses because I'm only like her after she's become Madam Webb.

Do you guys know that I've now last 30 seconds of the movie?

Yes.

Oh, you're dressing up as the end credits?

Yes.

Do you guys know that I've now seen the mobile?

You're going to be the villain of Madam Webb.

David's doing an impression of Madam Webb.

We have to stop Madam Webb.

The APR.

He's He's moving his mouth more than he's saying words.

I just want to repeat, I have watched Madam Webb four times.

You know what?

I just, I want to get a temperature check here.

Madam Webb, better than Joker Folliado.

Undeniably.

Undeniably.

Undeniably.

I've like, I've really hovered over the purchase button on the Madam Webb steel book.

I had a great time.

Madam Webb is like a wrong object that gives me joy.

Yeah.

That I like, I'm happy while watching.

I have Madame Webb over Tarot and Joker Folliado in my list.

Okay, Ben, have you seen Madam Webb?

I have.

No offense to Tarot.

I I loved it.

It's great.

I mean, yes.

Let's get back.

I'll tell you who doesn't love Madam Webb.

My new character, the villain from Madam Webb.

I hate her.

David?

I can't remember the name.

Ezekiel Sims?

Fuck.

Were you trying to set that up?

I completely forgot that.

I was going to say, I will write you a check for $500 if you can pull the name, and I'm so glad you answered the first.

I can't remember that it was Sims.

Yeah.

Okay, okay.

But it is Ezekiel Sims.

It is.

You nailed it.

Yeah.

My name, of course, is Ezekiel Simpson.

Just one of those things where they're like, can we have fucking the Scarlet Spider?

No, no.

Can we have, I don't know, like, you know, Hydroman?

No, you can't.

You can have Ezekiel Sims.

Who the hell is that?

I don't know.

I just pulled him out of this big folder.

He's who you get from Adam Webb.

Like, that's anyway.

Goodrich.

Good rich.

I have no idea if this is true, but isn't this movie surely about Charles Shire a little bit?

That's what we assume.

I think it has to be.

Because, like, Charles Shire, the father of Hallie Meyer Shire,

left Nancy Myers many years ago.

Yes.

After being married to her for like, I think almost 20 years.

Yes.

Married someone else.

Work partnership, much like in this movie.

It's like they work in the same field.

They work together.

They split off.

She's now more successful.

They became more successful than he was more successful in the 80s and 90s.

She becomes more successful in the 2000s.

And the whole movie is like drops off.

Your thing went out of style.

100%.

Charles Shire now hasn't made a movie in over 10 years.

Correct.

And Charles Shire.

20 years?

Is Alfie his final film?

Yeah, so 20 years ago.

Wild.

And Charles Shire, you know, married someone else after Nancy Meyers.

That marriage ended in divorce.

He has more kids than Hallie.

Yeah.

So I don't know if he had kids with his later wife.

I want to say I think Hallie now is married with a child.

It just feels like her processing her dad.

Anything about him getting remarried?

No, but

he has a marriage after

Nancy.

He was married to a woman called Deborah Lynn from 2007.

Much like in Goodrich, right, it has also ended.

But it ended many years.

He had at least a child in that second marriage.

He has four children total, and Nancy only had two.

So, again, you know, it's just you can imagine at least a leaping off point being maybe like, maybe something like this happened in her family.

When I read the announcement, she had a moment with her dad.

This movie was announced in 2019.

Yes, it's been sort of bubbling for a while.

Back when I was much more engaged with trying to be a professional actor, this was like kids are twins, too, a boy and a girl.

Yeah.

I mean, yes.

This was like an immediate, I emailed all of my reps and was like, I will do anything to be in this movie, both because of my, you know, Meyershire family obsession, but also just like fucking Michael Keaton.

Marie did

an audition tape with me for this movie.

Marie.

I remember.

You're probably auditioning for who?

The Nico Hiraga character?

Like, is it one of the gallery assistants or something?

You could have been the husband.

No.

No.

You're close.

I want to see if you can pin it.

Okay.

so uh michael ure's character no no he's really by the way really really good i mean he's a great actor i love michael but he's really good that was my favorite of the b-plot

okay so not nico hiraga who plays like this the sweet gallery

i thought that guy was really cute not danny not danny deferrari who i'm just gonna say this and i do not mean this as a joke i spent the entire movie being like Is this like Josh Radner with like a sort of a spray tie?

I thought it was Josh Radner the whole movie.

I didn't know it wasn't Josh Radner.

He was just Yeah, the husband.

But I would look at him and I'd be like, no, I know what Josh Radner looks like, and it's not quite this.

Yes.

But it's close.

It was uncanny.

So is Josh Radner like changed?

But then I just saw Josh Radner off Broadway in the, I already forgot the name of that play, but he did so many monologues.

No, it's like,

I don't know,

love to do Christmas and New Year.

That fucking guy.

What is like the obvious one-scene kind of like functional character part that I've the the accountant guy who's like

i'm looking at the numbers and they just say down

the water running again yeah who's that actor i like that actor i always forget his name he played the son on barry henry winkler's son yeah and he was in something else he's in a bunch of stuff

find him

I'm gonna find him.

But the second that scene started, Marie tapped me and was like, I remember we did this.

Anyway, I've been tracking this movie for a long time.

So you did this.

That was those are the lines.

Yeah, we're very familiar with that scene.

Yes.

This movie got delayed because of pandemics and strikes and whatever, but yes, has has long been in the works.

And Keaton is obviously like my favorite living actor in the lead up to Beetlejuice.

And also because I was kindly asked to do a Keaton episode for the big picture.

I started a project of like, let me see if I can go through the whole fucking Keaton filmography.

and fill in the blind spots and re-watch the things I haven't seen since I was a child.

I think there are only five or six of his movies I haven't seen now.

All are in the back half, mostly in the doldrums between

2000 and 2014.

Right, his true like white noise era.

Movies that only got released in Europe, like Quicksand with Michael Caine and The Last Time with Brendan Fraser, where you're like, what the fuck is this?

There's a soccer movie with Robert Duvall.

Like, these are sort of the only ones I haven't seen.

Andrew Lee.

Andrew Lee,

which is very good.

I like him in general.

I'm intensely jealous that he got to do the scene with Michael Keaton.

This motherfucker.

Yeah.

Hey, he earned it.

But

he earned it, Andrew.

Good job, Andrew.

I was trying to do this project chronologically.

So really sort of charting the development and the arc of the Keaton movie star career because his arc is really weird.

And in a lot of ways, it's characterized by this narrative of like, he fucked it up at different times.

He like had the juice and then would blow it.

He would wrong foot it.

He was on Cristella.

He was the will they, won't they in Cristella Davis.

Because Cristella gets the job at the sort of white shoe law firm, and he's the kind of goody two-shoes there.

And they have a will they won't they thing.

And that show was underrated.

I watched

episode.

Yes, that's who he is.

Bring back Cristello.

10 years ago now.

Anyway,

Michael Keaton's career.

Yeah.

You know, the last 10 years, we talked about this in the Beetlejuice episode, but it feels like after his Birdman year and then certainly Spotlight the year after that, it feels like he is like fully minted now as like the guy's never going to be ignored again.

He's like icon status for the rest of his life.

He's made bad movies in the last 10 years.

He's had hits.

He's had flops, but it feels like he's not in danger of like falling into the wilderness again.

He's a Michael Keaton movie every single year.

In the way he was in the mid-80s and the 90s and the mid-2000s, like he's had these real dark periods.

Although his only film in 2022 was his scintillating cameo in the film Morbius.

Where he shows up and is like, I feel like Spider-Man has something to do with this.

And Morbius is like, don't know who that is, but it was nice to see.

Roll credits.

His line is, I hope the food's better better in this drawing.

But isn't he in the Tom Hawk?

Isn't he the vulture?

Yes.

He's the vulture, and Morbius has this post-credits scene where they clearly were like, We were hoping we could get

someone better.

And they're like, You can have Michael Keaton show up for no reason.

As the vulture,

it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

Don't worry about it.

In the end credits of Vulture, which they've set up takes place in a different

of Morbius, which they've set up to take place in a different reality than the MCU because there is a weird, like, fuck, characters can't intercept, Like, Venom can't, whatever.

At the end of Morbius and the end credits, and Michael Keaton was in the trailers in the market.

He was.

He is only in the end credits of the movie in two different end credit scenes.

They pan over to an empty jail cell, and then there is like a 60 Star Trek original series style effect of him basically phasing into the empty jail cell.

He turns to the camera and goes, well, the food's better in this joint.

And then it cuts to like ADR newscaster being like, in a very bizarre occurrence, a prisoner from an alternate dimension has magically appeared in an empty jail cell.

More on this story as it develops.

And you're like, what the fuck is that?

Five more minutes of Morbius credits.

And then there's a scene in which a

Morbius, Dr.

Michael Morbius, just like standing on it.

The living vampire is driving like a fucking Ferrari, like speeding through the desert.

He parks in the middle of nowhere.

Then a fully CGI Michael Keaton in full getup with helmet

shit.

Not on set flies down and in like ADR recorded on like a fucking lunch break, if not a shit break, says, gosh, talking about this.

He actually fell up.

He actually was like sleep talking.

Yes.

Like he wasn't even.

Should I see Morbius?

No, Morbius is what.

Morbius wishes it was Madam Webb.

Okay.

Morbius does not have Morbius gastric.

That's what I wanted to know.

Is it Madam Webb level?

Not really.

Morbius is pretty just like.

I basically just said all the funniest things about it.

I mean, Matt Smith is doing his best to have life in that movie.

Yeah.

But yeah, no, it's not.

Another movie where, like, weird ADR'd, like, what was this scene supposed to be?

Yeah.

Characters, like, outfits changing mid-scene.

And it's also Morbius being like, I have superpowers, and then he does nothing with it.

Right.

Like, it's not like he does good or bad.

He kind of just doesn't do anything.

One scene, he pretends to be Venom.

His whole thing is he's just, he's just got a medical issue.

Yeah.

it doesn't matter he's kind of got a magical cancer and then he comes up with a cure that turns him into the living vampire and he flies through the new york city subway london underground like at one point yeah it's a movie for losers but what i was gonna say is it's been so satisfying to see this michael keaton come back and be like the guy is fully embraced now and he's allowed to do a full range of things including paycheck cameos and the end credits

comedies and dramas and you know yeah i mean

we talked about this after we left the movie

because uh, it's fun to see him do Beetlejuice again to revisit a character that you know was big for him in the 80s.

And he did that with Batman and the Flash last year, a movie that sucks, but he's very locked in.

That's crazy.

Goodrich is his revisiting of Mr.

Mom.

This is my contention, which I watched last night.

My mom always loved that movie, and I watched it as a kid, but I had not seen it as an adult.

It is very much a time capsule, but he is so charming in it.

He is on fire in that fucking movie, and you get why this guy just like exploded instantly where you're like, this is a completely unique, one-of-one comedy leading man.

And it's, it's so, I'm trying to think of other movies that fit this that are like an actor makes a movie like four 40 years later that is kind of like a fault, like an unintentional.

This is like a spiritual

sequel.

Yes.

Yes.

It's yeah.

It's a fun thing to think about.

Which I also think is like reflecting on like a weird cultural phenomenon that is more more unique to now than the time in which mr mom was made which like michael keaton always talks about like yeah like mr mom might seem kind of creaky now but at the time it was made that was a thing that like people weren't talking about 100 and it was like mocked the idea of a man being a like a stay-at-home father and i thought we tried to do it with like a certain amount of credibility learning to like have a relationship with his kids yes a different care of a home but like the have more of a sort of mr mom relationship and like as someone who's has kids older generations are always like, you know, it's crazy that you, you know, you get all this leave and you spend all this time with them.

Like when you were born, like your dad went back to work within a week, right?

Like, that's just how we did it back then.

And you're like, what the fuck?

But, you know, yeah, so just one generation.

There's this modern phenomenon, though, of like,

you know, the generation that refuses to retire or slow down, right?

Who are still, let's say, dying their hair.

We're talking about Goodrich at this point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And going to work.

Right.

And they treated their first kids that way.

Yeah.

No, he's, he has dyed hair in this.

Does he?

Which I thought was a choice that I think fits the character.

This guy would want to dye his fucking hair.

Because Batman, he's gray.

He's mostly gray now.

But in Goodrich, he's playing this guy who's trying to, yeah, still be like tip of the spear of the art world and going to shows every night and all that.

At like 70 something, this guy would be sort of able to like shake out of his like slumber.

briefly enough to be like, I guess I should be a modern father.

I guess I should pay attention to how other dads are doing it.

Like, it's not a thing that people are are mocking as like, this is weird.

Why are you taking your kids to school?

No.

It's him sort of realizing like, I should have been doing this the whole time.

And the Michael Aretha, which is so

nice.

The best scene in the movie

is the scene with Michael Urey, the first scene.

Outside the school.

Outside the school.

So it's like Goodrich.

Oh, no, he forgot his kids exist or whatever.

And he's late to school.

Then he gets to school.

And it's some fancy ass LA school where there's a check-in desk and the lady's like, you're tardy.

So I'm going to have to mark you tardy.

And he says, My favorite line in the movie where he's like, No, we're just kind of like good old-fashioned late.

Like, there's not a reason.

Yeah, we're seven minutes late.

We're late.

Like, who cares?

Like, let him go to school, right?

And then Michael Urey shows up later than him and is waved in.

And the kids are like, Hey, his son is epileptic, so they take it easy on him.

And Crane's like, Oh, oh, okay, okay.

And then he goes outside and he talks to Michael Urey.

And like you said, there's not the loaded thing

of him being

tell me, what's your secret?

Which Griffin literally said to me, I said, What's the overall million bucks?

He says, What's your secret?

Right.

which doesn't happen, and him like kind of fetishizing, like, wow, so you're a dad who like is really connected to his kid.

What's going on there?

No, instead, they just have a heart-to-heart that kind of can happen when you're a parent dropping off a kid where it's a lot of vulnerability and you're all kind of in this same boat together.

I just, even though these are very different people, right?

There's also a nice update of a story beat in Mr.

Mom, which also involves dropping kids off at school with the moms and him being completely like, I have no idea what I'm doing here.

and it's played for laughs yes but then he eventually learns the ropes but from other moms yeah and it's he's the only man in this environment

with other with mr mom is that he's like fetishized by the moms yeah by being like it's so hot that he does all the single moms want to him And in this, it's like this very touching, tender, like Michael Urey, who's still wounded from his like.

Michael Urey, a lovely actor.

And right.

He's like, immediately starts spilling his guts his kid has you know medical issues but they were doing great and we have a great doctor Marie has to go Marie do you want to put any final thoughts on Goodrich on the record no I mean I really enjoyed it um I think it's cool that Milakunis is an entertainment writer a senior entertainment senior entertainment writer um

I uh I also um want to make sure that we talk about the fact that Joker 2 and Goodrich

we'll say we'll talk about that that.

Okay, good.

I promise you.

You won't have to say it.

It won't be.

Marie is going to her day job as an Arkham Asylum card.

Yes.

God, we didn't even talk about Gleeson fucking phone net shit anyway.

Yeah, we're not.

Let's.

I think it's better that we don't talk about it.

We don't have anything to add to that conversation.

There's a scene that the three of us interpreted differently than a lot of people seem to, but also it doesn't feel like there's any reason people made to be gained out of talking about it either.

Bye Marie, love you.

Bye, Marie.

You're the best.

Hey, hey, Marie.

Happy 500.

I love you, guys.

Happy 500, guys.

Now we can talk constantly.

We all love Joker, right?

So good for the boys.

It's a movie for boys.

That's a movie about being a man.

These names don't get it.

I should have that take.

Become like a cultural warrior, like the best representation of masculinity I've ever seen.

Joker gets it.

It's a movie about how men are being crushed in our society.

By women with makeup on, clown makeup.

Killing our seed and painting our faces.

uh joker folly adaptation don't get me started on these sympathetic attorney women i hate them anyway the scene with michael ure michael urey's like yes so my kid this is tough but we're doing okay and then he starts talking about like you know my kid's dad uh left he couldn't handle it like he's you know he's he's explaining something kind of private and so goodrich could just be like ah i'm sorry to hear that man But instead, he

opens up too, right?

He's like, yeah, look, I'm going through something too.

My wife, she apparently had a drug problem.

I didn't even know it.

And he says, He's like, Isn't that crazy?

And then he says, I mean, it reflects poorly on me.

Like, he doesn't just say in a kind of like, can you believe my wife did this?

He's saying, like, how did I not know?

I think the thing this movie is getting at that feels and then they kind of bond.

And then they make out at one point in a scene that I was really worried was going to happen did happen.

And then I was actually kind of happy with how it was executed.

Kind of executed perfectly.

Mostly because I think the way Goodrich reacts is like, he's like, dude, my life is literally too insane for this to really be a blip right now.

But also is a weird mirror of the Mr.

Mom aggressive seduction from all the single moms.

A thing I think this movie is tapping into, which is kind of interesting, and it's connected to this like guy who only has a second phase, second group of kids, second marriage, late in life, new father.

can like wake up to is like a kind of guy like this uh like boomer who basically has been allowed to float for decades, has just sort of been like propped up by society where, like, this guy's waking up and he's like, Wow, I guess this is insane that I have not paid attention to anything that I've just kind of had, like, I've been on a conveyor belt my whole life and had a very comfortable existence.

You know, when people go and they leave and they come and whatever.

And the problem with this movie is you're kind of, you know, it's the classic problem with these LA movies.

You're like, how much do I have to care about this fucking rich guy, like, who has a nice house?

And he's like, I don't have any money.

And I'm like, you have like 18 gallery paintings in your house.

Like, sell one of those, right?

You get a cool 50 grand.

I don't know.

Like, there's a scene where he gets mad at his twins for flying a drone indoors and like knocking over a Ming vase.

And I was like, can we take one more pass at this just to tone this down?

There's gas leak stuff like that.

And there's gaslick stuff.

Like there are scenes where you're just like, that is an insane way for a person to enter a room speaking.

Where you're like, you know, like, who comes in and defines themselves in one sentence?

Explaining a little much, right?

Just, yeah, there's, there's sloppiness to it, but there are like scenes that are really effective.

And I also think in doing this full sort of like Keaton cataloging, which by the way, is why I watched her be fully loaded and logged it on Letterbox.

No other reason.

Not to disappoint anybody.

Like for real, there is no other reason.

Yes.

That Keaton has talked about.

He has this like shot out of a cannon.

You know, he's a stand-up.

he's like part of the fucking Mary Tyler Moore variety show, he's doing like sitcom guest spots, then he gets this like movie star-making role in uh night shift.

Um, you know, he's the second banana, it's the part that allows him to just be the color and go wild.

And the movie's a modest hit, but people immediately are like, fuck, Michael Keaton, he's hosting SNL, Mr.

Mom, he's getting offered leading roles in scripts.

He does Mr.

Mom, Mr.

Mom's a big ass hit.

Yep, big hit.

Big cultural movie.

Yes.

And then I think right after Mr.

Mom, he does Johnny Dangerously, which is his first big flop, is a movie that rules.

And

then he does gung-ho and she's having a baby.

So he has talked about that he had made these three movies in a row and it felt like the Michael Keaton type had been established, which is what he calls the like cocky glib young man.

Right.

This sort of

wheeler dealer, fast talking, thinking out loud, the sort of like manic hand gestures and facial expressions, the swagger, you know, the sort of like confident clumsiness kind of thing.

And he was like, I have to break out of this now or I'm going to be stuck in this forever.

And this is when he starts like fucking up his career for the first time because he was so intentional about like, I need to, he failed to do what Tom Hanks did successfully, which is how do I expand this?

And then like Beetlejuice and Batman are these comeback movies that feel like they've redefined him in a new way, and then he still doesn't totally know what to do with it.

This is like the first time he's kind of done glib young man comedy character like the classic michael keaton archetype i would say i'd say the other guys is doing a version of this

but this is really kind of like a flavor of keaton that hasn't existed since the 90s and especially because this movie's a little more brooksy camerony i was ready for him to be in much more dramedy mode and i was so excited to watch like as you said his reaction to the michael yuri scene where he's just like well no i mean you know yeah i gotta tell honestly you know, I don't do I seem good, but I'm not a fan, right?

That stuff is just catnip to me.

And to see this, sort of like, this was the final piece of the Michael Keaton comeback legend status era we're in right now is him reclaiming this side of his personality.

Now, this isn't a film that will, I think, be little seen on film in cinemas.

It'll probably be, it's a movie to watch on TV.

Yeah, I'm not saying that pejoratively, I'm just saying, like, that's that's the sort of role these kinds of movies occupy very Very well on streaming.

100%.

And that's fine.

And my mom asked me how the movie was, and I was like, you're going to watch it on Netflix and you're going to like it.

This is what I've been saying to everyone.

Like, it undeniably is effective at what it does.

It's incredibly watchable.

I think it's 15 minutes too long.

I agree.

And I think that is the kind of classic Nancy Meyer's problem of just like, like you said, just like, do we need this thread too?

We kind of got it already.

I think it also

specifically does not know how to successfully juggle time management and focus of its threads.

I think so too.

Like in that you're like, I haven't heard from Mula Kunis in a while.

Right.

Like it just, and that's, that's sort of like high-level invisible filmmaking shit that is hard to like credit why it's working when it works.

You take it for granted, but when it doesn't work, you feel it.

But this movie has a straightforward story that basically follows in a way that home again doesn't totally home again, you're like, this character is making odd decisions.

And I'm kind of here for it because it's demented, but it doesn't make it's not very logical no i like that it's also not a like guy solves his life movie like that's what i really like about right because you're saying the like uncompelling rich people problem shit i'm like the movie i was surprised this was closer to than i expected is gore vrbansky's the weatherman a movie i love that is like

yes A movie about a guy having a similar kind of like, my life's a mess crisis, but is mostly him coming to terms with like, I am deeply mediocre.

He keeps trying to get his life together.

And it's a movie movie about a guy being like, oh, I'm not a great man.

Goodrich, I feel like it's more like he's over the hill.

It's not quite that.

He's over the hill.

He's an art dealer.

And, you know, you kind of have to traffic and cool, right?

And like being with it.

And he, you know, he's being able to talk the talk.

He's an old guy.

He's a survival sort of finesse.

And everyone's telling him like, hey, man, we moved into this neighborhood 40 years ago.

It was cool.

Now it's expensive and bougie.

We can't really afford it anymore.

And there's this thread of like, will he get this sort of big estate sale?

And that'll save the gallery.

and learn how to be a father and learn how to save his marriage and be there for Mila Kunis and make up for the lost time.

And he does, it's like two out of four.

He like, he absolutely learns how to be a better father.

He's mostly learned how to be a little better of a sort of, you know, friend and father to Milakunis.

He doesn't save the gallery.

He almost gets it, but Carmena Jogo, you know, you can see it coming because she comes in too early.

Yeah.

And you're like, yeah, this isn't going to work out.

And instead, he has to sort of say goodbye to his career because he's getting old and like, it's not going to work for him anymore.

And he doesn't save his marriage, which is not surprising because that character is not seen in the movie until right at the end.

The other scene I

really like is

the scene with him and Milakunis at the gallery after the goodbye party.

It's a good scene.

And here's the thing I want to say.

This is an emotional high intelligence.

And this isn't even like a faint praise award thing.

I complain so much about the fucking cinematic language of comedies these days, especially because we get so few of them.

And especially talking about how fucking unimaginative

the musical numbers and Joker are, how you feel a lack of confidence in Todd Phillips and how to cover those, how to shoot them, how to edit them.

This is a movie that has many sequences that play out in sustained two shots where actors are controlling the rhythm, especially for an actor like Michael Keaton, who in this mode, you kind of want to film like he's Gene Kelly.

Like Michael Keaton is an actor where he's a full-body comedian.

His rhythms are so weird.

The energy he gets with another actor, if you're shooting that in kind of like sitcom coverage, it plays against the magic of what he's delivering.

And like that Mila Kuna scene largely plays out in like a wide two-shot.

A lot of darkness

doesn't have this kind of fucking sitcom coverage that I hate, which by the way, is also like detrimental to movies that are made on more limited budgets like this because studios aren't supporting.

Nancy could get away with doing a film like this because she has four days for every scene or whatever.

And these movies, you're like, they're probably shooting four scenes a day.

It is actually just smart.

I think this movie looks good.

It has actual choices about like color and lighting.

There's some blocking.

There's some

blocking that sequences where it's like, oh, there's a big pillar between them.

I get it.

There's like nighttime shit where they're only like lit by the reflection of like the moon.

Right.

I like, I was like, there's some actual like sort of like growth happening here cinematically that also looks different from either of her parents' movies.

Is its own thing.

I was like, just very satisfied by this.

It is like a gentleman six

with a couple like incredibly locked in performances and some stuff that is deranged and totally doesn't work.

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Ben, what was your thoughts on Goodrich?

So gentle.

Just nice.

It's nice.

It's a comfy movie.

You were leaning back.

Yeah.

Peeking it in.

Shedding tears.

I shed some tears.

Yeah.

Yeah, the like art world sort of stuff,

I feel like

maybe we could have dug in more or something.

Like, I felt like there was comedy there to be mine.

well like

being his partner you're like oh these two guys together this feels like a good pairing and as marie said he's like just kind of there doesn't really do anything yeah

there's just some stuff that just felt like they

it was just very surface level i mean it's like the classic rom-com thing of like your rich characters either like work in architecture or an art gallery or like the two go-tos.

It feels like you always land on those two.

And to have Hallie Meyer Shire after like home again is about like, my divorced parents were very successful filmmakers.

This time she's trying to get away from filmmaking.

And the best she can land on is like art gallery,

which is a, I would say, a profession that is weirdly overrepresented in film relative to how many people do it in the world.

Of course.

And I'm always a big proponent of like, if you just give your character an interesting job that is not in movies very often, you're already gaining points from that.

Versus Art Gallery feels like kind of a placeholder or whatever.

Yeah.

The

times we see him be a dad to the twins, it's basically dropping them off at school and then dealing with them at home before he goes out, making them lunches and stuff.

I thought this movie was going to be more prestige old dogs than it is.

There's just, there needed to be more.

Just something of it.

But there's, there's, there's the risk with kid characters where it's like, how much time do you want to spend with these kind of cutesy kid characters?

you know it's like it's like you can get a little totally yeah it just it felt you know very surface level yeah i agree um i also the scene where he has to explain rehab to them is like the one that feels the most effective and you're like this guy's figuring out his own language to actually relate to them you know

um it's got it's got good pieces mila's character just is like So

barely anything.

It feels like they had her for 10 days and all her scenes are her walking in and it's just like, well, I just don't know what to do because I have this relationship with my dad.

Like, you know, like she's kind of, like you say, kind of explaining herself.

Truly, it feels like they could have shot her out in a week if they busted their ass.

It's just weird because it feels like that would be the character that would be the one that she would,

she would want to dig in the most looked into.

To Marie's

point about it being interesting.

that the film's not from the vantage point of the character that is seemingly based on the filmmaker, right?

Lorraine Scafaria is the medler.

Great movie.

Right.

But it's also

similar dramedy tone.

But where you're like, oh, Sarandon really is the lead of this.

Like, Rosebyrne is clearly playing a stand-in character for her and her relationship with her mother, but the movie is from the vantage point of the mother.

And it feels interesting to see someone make a film about their experiences and their relationships and not set it from their perspective.

But in that movie, I think Rosebyrne feels like a fully realized person

is a more successful version of this movie in general.

I would agree.

The Medler's a better movie than this, and that's a good director.

But, like, she's having a baby, and the scene is so much more about Keaton's character.

Yes.

And his experience of that.

I kind of liked that in that there's just so many movies where they're like, and now we end with a big baby sequence, right?

And it's like, no, no, no.

She's actually going to be fine.

She has figured her shit out.

Does she have a complicated relationship with her her dad?

Yes, but she knows that.

And she's only mad at herself for kind of like letting him in more.

And then he lets her down a little bit.

And she's sad about it.

But like, she's going to have the baby.

She found her person.

He's nice.

Yeah.

There's a nice scene where he calms her down.

She's a senior entertainment.

He's a bit of a dork.

He's such a fucking dork.

He's such a huge dork.

I was, I was, I was on the same time.

In a sweet way.

Yeah, Keaton's like, fuck this guy.

This guy's such a fucking dork.

And yes, no, it's more about him, which you're right.

You're right that it's a bit of a choice to be like, yeah, this is a Michael Keaton character movie, not a

Mila Cunis.

And you'd think Holly Myersher would want it to be a Mila Cunis movie more.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I'm not mad about it, though.

No, and because we're trying to, you know, be somewhat vague.

Yeah.

But we spoil the basic things.

I do just feel like the line he has at the end, which Marie and I felt like it's an ambitious swing.

She's looking for a big, iconic, a sort of Jerry Maguire-esque, what is the one sentence this guy can say that is an emotional gut punch?

Right.

And it's, it's an ambitious line.

Like you hear it and you're like, that's a wild choice.

I think the movie doesn't quite pull it off, but I also don't want to spoil it because your mileage may vary and your mileage is going to be based on you not knowing what the line is.

There is the very LAE

scenes that are just like fun little

moments.

The nightclub and the class.

yeah yeah i mean the nightclub i wanted i just wanted more

because keaton's good at reacting to that yeah he like his reaction shots during karma jogo's performance incredible unbelievable yeah like that i think

i go to like any feminist art night i can find i think that played the moat for the most laughs yes I mean, the biggest laugh

the entire screening we went to was, I'm a senior entertainment writer.

Well, of course.

The audience, the film, the critic screening audience really laughed at that one.

But also, speaking to how underdeveloped that character is, it's like 40 minutes in, she yells what her job is for the first time and then basically never comes up again.

I understand she's on leave.

You're a great writer.

You'll write a profile or you won't.

You'll quit.

Whatever.

Yeah, she's supposed to already be on leave.

Yes.

Couldn't really figure that out.

Right.

Like the job thing doesn't.

Yeah.

Anyway, apparently Jackie Sandler's in this movie.

Did you spot her?

Who's the daughter or the wife?

Jackie Tatone?

Sandler?

I don't know.

I'm looking on Wikipedia right now.

Let me look on IMDb.

Sadie Sandler's the...

Right.

He's got two daughters.

She's not on IMDb.

So maybe.

Okay, maybe it was cut out.

Maybe it was cut out.

Yeah.

A lot of comedy people in this.

Sure.

Chloe Trost, Lisa Traeger.

Who did Chloe Trost play?

Chloe Trost is

at the bar when he goes to the feminist night.

She's the one who sells him the ticket.

Oh, that scene was kind of funny.

Yeah, she's kind of funny in it.

Yeah, that was

a good thing.

That was a classic Keaton scene because, right,

he just brings a little spice to it, but yeah, she's like, it's $20 or $25 online.

And he's like, I'm right here.

Yeah, and he made that funny.

That fucking rhythm of Keaton dialogue is just like it will never not satisfy me.

Do you want to do the box office game for a Joker Folly a duh?

Yeah.

Box office game.

What about it, Ben?

What about it?

Because, of course, what?

Sponsored by our friends at Regal Cinema.

Fine friends at Regal Cinemas.

Whoa.

It's time to put a crown upon the box office game.

We love to play the box office game, of course, but it is so exciting.

It's very exciting.

That we are sponsored by Regal.

We love the movies and we love theatrical movie going.

And we're very excited to be entering a very nice friendship with Regal.

that is all in the name of trying to support and endorse the idea of going to the the movies.

Yes.

Yeah.

Joker.

So we'll do the Joker Falia Do, the now notorious Joker Falia Do opening weekend.

Let's laugh.

No Joker popcorn bucket.

No Goodrich popcorn bucket.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, you're kidding me.

What would that look like?

But Regal has an excellent venom bucket, which they did send us.

Yeah.

To Marie's point, we have to acknowledge.

What would the Goodrich bucket be, though?

What would the Goodrich bucket be?

That's a good question.

Genuinely.

Is there like a definitive prop in Goodrich?

That's how you can think about it.

The bucket I would want is clearly like a version of the Deadpool bucket, but just with Michael Keaton's face.

I just want that bucket.

What?

Of course, the original Joker, 2019's Joker, opened to $96 million

and made $335 domestic and a billion worldwide.

Her pregnant belly.

Oh, yeah.

Very convincing.

No, you're saying that should be the bucket?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's another weird thing is at the beginning of the movie, his wife, like the movie Cold opens on him getting a call from his wife, who's like, I left for rehab.

I'm gone for 90 days.

I have a pill addiction.

How did you not notice?

It would be impossible to track the passage of time for this in this movie other than Milo Kunis' belly, where you're just like, oh, two months have passed.

So Joker 1 opened very highly.

There was a very good Reddit thread.

Dare I give him credit?

R slash blankies.

about how Joker 2 is falls into the rare category of the inverse of my favorite kind of box office stat.

Okay.

Yes.

It will almost make less, it will 100% certainly make less than the prior film's opening weekend.

Alone, its entire run.

Yes.

Yes.

Which has happened a few times.

Alice with the Looking Glass is the other big experience.

That's another big one.

Yes.

So Joker, Folly Ado, yeah, you know, I think originally they were probably hoping for like, hey, maybe we'll open like Joker.

And then it became like, well, it's probably going to get like 60, 70 mil.

And then it became like, oh, well, we're shooting for 50 mil.

And then it became like, it looks like it's going to be 40 mil.

And then it became, it came in at 37 37 mil.

Yep,

going down.

I mean, David, you're even like, I'm sure their optimism at first was like, does this thing open to like 150?

Sure, we got Lady Gaga, right?

First one opened to like 95 and then one Oscars and also held really well.

Yes, it ended up opening way, like basically close to a third of what the first movie.

And of course, then, not that we're doing this box office game, but the next weekend it dropped 81%, essentially a record.

Yeah.

And we're probably not clear, like 60 million at the box.

I was looking at the list of things that have had worse drops than Falia deux, and a lot of them are like Fathom Event re-releases, which I don't think should count.

Those don't count.

One of the only other major studio movies I saw that was still above it is G Lee.

G Lee, I think, is the only one.

I think it dropped 82%.

Like it's a very similar kind of thing.

It got a D cinema score, which is the worst in the

three of comic book movies.

That means everyone coming out, the average was a D.

Yes.

You know, that's why it's really hard to go that low on the cinema scores right when a movie gets like a b minus cinema score they're like not great bad word of mouth unless it's a horror movie anyway joker folly a do it number one what's number two griffin i think you saw it number two at the box office isn't transformers one no that is number four at the box office film i saw and you did like quite good uh i think you will love it's a real would have been your favorite movie as a 10-year-old I can't wait to watch it probably on streaming.

You watch it.

Sorry, I'm busy right now.

I believe his movie I've not yet seen because I was traveling and I'm now trying to time out taking my little cousins to see it is The Wild Robot.

The Wild Robot at number two, which is chugging along healthfully, got good reviews, obviously.

Small drops.

Animated film frontrunner for the year.

People love it.

Yes.

A triumph.

I haven't seen it yet, though.

Wild Robot number two, Transformers One, number four.

Sandwich in between them, Griffin.

One of the big success stories of the fall.

Oh, Beetlejuice, Beetle.

Beetlejuice Beetle.

Michael Keaton's Hot Keaton Fall.

Which is digitally available to rent and buy right now, or at least rent, and outgrossed Joker Falia

in the next weekend.

Joker's second weekend, with its historic drop.

$7 million.

On like Monday or Tuesday, they amended the numbers and said it actually was even worse than we thought.

And Beetlejuice is ahead of it.

Beetlejuice, like, fucking staying in there.

That's number three.

Transformers are number four.

Number five is a horror remake that did pretty well.

It's a horror remake that did not.

We talked about the actor on this episode.

We talked about the actor on this episode.

I assume neither of us have seen it?

I have not seen it.

I don't think you've seen it either.

It's a horror remake that did pretty well.

Of a franchise or of a single film?

It is a single film and it's a remake of a single film, a foreign horror film.

Oh, it's Speak No Evil.

Yes.

Speak No Evil is a film.

Which I feel people like as well.

I've heard mixed to positive things about it.

The movie it's remaking was one of those Sundance movies where people were like, yeah, good tension.

And then the last act act is the most unspeakable shit you've ever seen.

And I was just kind of like, I'll catch up to it.

Our friend Sean Fantasy was posting about this.

I found it kind of fascinating.

Was doing a sort of like check-in on the year of horror, right?

And for a while, it was like, you could release any shitty horror movie in theaters.

It would open to 15, 20-ish range, like as a basement, and basically get to $50 million.

Right.

Speak No Evil is kind of like, I think it's the fourth highest grossing horror film of the year.

And it's at like mid to high 30s.

Yeah, it's made like 35.

There is a tier of like Alien Romulus, which I think counts.

That counts.

Sure.

Long legs.

Yeah.

And there's one other one.

Oh, oh, quiet place.

Yeah.

Those are the three that like really crossed over.

Then there's a huge gulf.

Everything then is like the 30 range is like Night Swim, Abigail, you know, like movies in their 20s or 30s.

And then he's like, but then the other chunk of it is the amount of like IFC midnight films that made it to 10.

Right.

Like you can make a decent amount of money on your tiny movie like you're in a violent nature or whatever.

Like the middle of horror is kind of shrinking, but the low end of horror is growing.

And let's say the thing that beat Joker in its second weekend was fucking Terrifier 3, which in its opening weekend made more than the entire lifetime grosses of Terrifier 1 and 2 combined by a multiple.

It's like an insane.

homegrown phenomenon.

I will not see Terrifier 3 anytime soon just because this movie's very like, seem very long and punishing i've been meaning to kind of like dip my toe into that world my thing there's part of me that's like check it out need to know but yeah yeah i'll get to it um my friend andrew sort of one of my big horror movie friends has been like pushing it for me but i don't know i watched tarot okay i watched tarot i can't believe you watched tarot well i basically in the throes of like really early parenting these twins i was like look i cannot get outside to see movies so i'll just catch up on any 20 24 movies that i can just watch on streaming right now tarot was one of them uh-huh what else was in that pool?

Oh, I can tell you.

Young Woman in the Sea, which

I can't believe I still haven't seen it.

I know.

I was on Disney Plus.

Yeah.

Wolves.

I watched Spaceman.

Oh, yeah.

Which I really wanted to vibe with more, but like there are things I liked about it.

I watched like Will and Harper, like, you know, stuff that's on

Abigail.

Undeniably effective.

Abigail, I wish, worked better.

But there's stuff in it.

But it doesn't.

There were chunks of Abigail where I was like, is this thing about to start rocking the house?

I think most of the time.

Silver Barrera kind of drags it down a little bit.

And I don't dislike her always, but I think Catherine

is sort of incredible in it.

Yeah, and I liked, you know, I liked Dan Stevens.

Dan Stevens game guy.

I watched Lisa Frankenstein, which I wanted to like more.

I didn't really dig.

I watched The Idea of You, which is like, that's like gas flood cinema.

Where you're like, what is anyone doing in this movie?

Yeah.

I watched Mean Girls, which I thought was pretty bad.

Okay, but Connor?

Yeah, no, that's great.

It's just the thing with Mean Girls is you're like, oh, the dialogue's the same as Mean Girls.

Right.

This is just Mean Girls again.

Some of the supporting actors are right.

And then they do these songs that are like fine.

Yeah.

It's just weird.

But also, you're going to like have them wear the same outfits, Laurie?

Yeah, what the fuck is going on?

Basically, like, yeah.

Beekeeper, liked.

I still need to see Beekeeper.

Monkey Man appreciated the ambition.

Didn't really work.

I wish I loved it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Things like that.

Hey, but at least it's a good like proof.

of concept for him to be bond

i agree sure i mean i he's compelling my single biggest thing walking away from it was like, yeah, let fucking dev do shit like this.

Yeah.

I would be so ecstatic.

I'm just waiting for the bond announcement to be something that I roll my eyes at.

Yeah, it'll be.

He's maybe the only one who would accept it.

It won't be.

It won't be him.

He's too, he's kind of too famous.

Yeah, like Late Night with the Devil.

The Substance Heder.

And if I run, obviously.

Substance is still having very small drops.

Yeah.

Like,

substance will probably outgross the third weekend of Joker.

Oh, yeah.

In its sixth week now?

I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sounds right.

Substance rules.

Yeah.

No, it's an interesting time for horror.

So that's all.

The box office game.

You've also got Deadpool and Wolverine still hanging out.

You got White Bird, a Wonder Story finally out in theaters.

You can go see it if you want to.

The Substance, as you mentioned, Megalopolis chugging along.

Yeah, we forgot to really talk about that.

Have you, you still have not seen it, right?

No, that's why I would have brought it up otherwise.

I couldn't see it because I had to see people were asking why we weren't combining Joker with Megalopolis or doing all Megalopolis episodes.

That's what I think.

I'm like, what are you talking about?

Yeah, we'll get to that.

I'll put it this way.

I unequivocally enjoyed watching Megalopolis in a way I did not with Joker.

I felt a lot more tapped into what he was trying to do.

I could not argue it totally works.

I was compelled by every second of it.

I found it very watchable.

I think for the Goodrich weekend, Goodrich probably not popping on that top five.

We'll have Smile 2, which which I am hearing is pretty good.

I've heard that it's secretly about trauma.

Well,

Terrifier 3 will still be up there.

Wild Robot will still be up there.

I imagine Betelgeuse, Beetlejuice will still be up there.

Very likely still in the five.

And Joker probably won't be.

So I wonder if there's anything else that sneaks in.

If there's anything, what else is coming out this week?

I mean, the question is Goodrich,

which I'm just like, I do feel like the awareness is very low on the night.

Yeah, I don't think so.

He's hosting SNL this weekend, which I'm very excited about.

I love that.

It will have, I guess, just happened when this episode comes out.

Yeah, wait, oh my god, what else is coming out this week?

I just sent you the link in your text message.

Oh my god, this wait a second, not at the box office, but on our computer screens.

What?

Wait a second, what are you excited to say?

T-shirts, new merch drop, and kind of not even that, just a new era for merch.

Yeah, yes, we have changed our sort of uh storefront, right?

We've got new provider of merch, kinship goods.

Look, we've been making a lot of changes.

I think most of them are things that you might not even notice as a listener of the show.

And the ones you do notice will hopefully be just entirely positive for you.

There was a lot of stuff going on this year, especially this summer, especially as David was also in Prep Daddy.

And I'm still going through a lot of stuff, just to be clear.

Absolutely.

Where our heads were down and we were not communicating a lot of things.

And I think people were worried, like, did they just not give a shit about the podcast anymore?

And in fact, the opposite.

We have all been very much given about this.

We've been really actually burning the midnight oil, trying to do a bunch of stuff.

Very excited leading into our 10th anniversary in March.

We have some really exciting things coming up next year.

In every area, we got a lot of stuff we're playing.

We're excited about what's on the schedule.

We're excited about things we're doing outside of the show.

And the new merch we're doing with Kinship Goods.

Correct.

If you are a podcast fan, you might be familiar with them already because of their incredible work doing merch with the Doughboys, the Action Boys, Threedom,

Stay at Homekins,

and

they are now going to be the exclusive home of blank check merchandise.

Yeah.

And so for our first batch of products, we have three t-shirts.

We're doing a limited edition print of our Twin Peaks design by Joe Bowen.

We also have the hashtag two friends, sort of referencing the pet boys type of design.

We previously only had that on a hat.

We're doing it as a shirt now.

We have,

this is kind of a big deal, the debut of Checky.

The first ever Checky merch.

That's right.

Yeah.

God, I'm sure he'll have something to say about that.

We also have some cool stickers and a hat with the logo as well as a

reprint of the clap board.

Yes.

That was a very popular tote bag.

Yeah.

On a canvas tote bag.

And we'll have plenty more deliveries.

Yeah, this is the first phase, but we got got some more stuff coming.

We got big ambitions.

We love kinship goods.

They've been really fun to work with.

Excited about this.

So excited about the more stuff coming?

Oh, yeah, for sure.

We're going to try and really work towards throughout the year.

trying to every few months, quarterly, whatever, let's not over promise, but try to be more regular with offering limited edition and just cool new products.

Yes.

Look,

we just not, I'm not going to, I'm not going to do some big emotional thing.

500 episodes.

As we said, the Joker episode was almost exactly five years ago.

Around that time, we decided we want to go independent.

Yeah.

Stake out on our own, give this a shot, and some things happen in the world

basically immediately concurrent with that decision.

And the whole process of us figuring out how to make the show independently became difficult.

And for a long time, it was just like just figuring out enough to keep the show coming out every week, to keep it afloat, all these things.

And there's been a lot of trial and error.

And it feels like we, after having some time to reset,

have done some re-strategizing that I think is going to be really good for the future of the podcast and will be reflected in things like the merch and a little more intentionality and regularity of things.

And I think for the 10th anniversary, not to call shots before we have them, but that we're talking about some cool collaborations.

some things that might

happen to celebrate the 10th anniversary that hopefully are exciting to people who care about the show.

I hope so.

I love you guys.

Ben has to sneeze.

I'm trying to guys too.

And please keep listening to our show.

I have three children now, and I can eat,

you know, the support.

Let's not stress them out, but we.

Oh,

maybe let's put a little stress on them actually.

Let's stress them out.

Your support is beyond appreciated.

Very much.

It is incredible the way we've been able to grow this thing and grow it to something that

has been able to allow us to hire our friends and work with more and more people and bring more people into the family of the show.

And it's, it's, it's wild.

Yeah.

I look back on it, it's still, it still kind of boggles the mind.

We got good stuff coming up in 2025.

We got fun stuff coming.

I think, look, I don't think anyone could possibly guess what's coming up in 2025.

People haven't the faintest clue, but we have stuff on the schedule that I think is like good shit.

Conceptualizing March Madness.

Excited about everything.

David needs some sleep.

Oh, sure.

What am I going to do?

You know, who do you think sleeps better at this point?

You or the twins?

I sleep better than the twin.

Okay, that's what i was guessing right yeah yeah yeah any other news

no cool good rich good rich 500 more episodes i'm calling let's call it let's call it yeah it's one what should we do for 1000 joker three yeah it comes back it comes back somehow yeah well somehow

i don't know let's joker three Do you agree with me, though, that this will be like maybe an end to automatic sequels combined with the Marvels?

I love that idea of of like, right, them being like, I don't care if your movie was the biggest movie of the year.

I am not sold on just letting you do another one.

We've talked about another blank check history thing, but like Tim Burton's Plan of the Apes being such a big hit and everyone being like, we know we can't make another one that people will reject it.

And then it feels like the studios lost sight of that.

And for a while, it would work and they could trick people into coming back to sequels to movies they hated.

or just didn't really love.

And it feels like, much like Spielberg and Lucas predicted in that fucking interview years ago.

Yep.

Where like these templates are going to start collapsing and everyone's going to have to rethink the whole business model.

Joker 2 bombing at this level, I think, is good for film.

Yes.

It is a profound and necessary rejection.

Not from audience.

Vindictive way where we feel validated that the sequel movie we didn't like is a bomb.

Let's take a new approach, guys.

Yeah.

And if you don't like it, grab yourself

some blank check merchant, kinship goods.

A law hammer?

Is that what they're called?

A law hammer?

A gavel.

Grab a gavel.

Now they're called law hammers.

And by the way, blank check branded law hammers coming to kinship good in 2025.

And bonk your ass.

Yeah.

If you don't like it.

He bonks the judge, but then it's a dream, so who cares?

But isn't it a reference to something?

Or is that Harley that carries the mallet?

She often will carry a mallet.

But Justin, I think more.

No, does she do it in the cartoons too?

Both.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was another thing that he kisses Catherine Keener twice that it feels like it's a double beat where he was just like, I don't know, where does this scene go?

I don't know.

Let's put it in both times.

This movie's so fucking sloppy.

Yeah.

Thank you all for listening.

Yes.

Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe.

Yeah.

Thank you to Marie Barty for helping to produce the show and being here for the good chunk of the episode.

Thank you to Adrian McKeon for editing, being our production coordinator.

Lane Montgomery, the Great American Novel.

for our theme song, Joe Bo and Pat Reynolds for our artwork.

JJ Birch for researching the book of law.

He was on his own private research project trying to figure out whether or not the Joker was guilty.

And he's built a compelling case that, in fact, the Joker did murder the guy that he murdered on camera.

I don't know where I'm going with this.

Tune in next week for

David Lowry.

Return to the show.

Great episode.

Back to Lynch, writing us out through the rest of the year.

Patreon finishing up tabletop games with David's beloved Dungeons and Dragons, Honor Among Thieves.

Absolutely.

As represented by action figures on his desk.

It's a fun one.

It's a fun one.

Yeah.

Having a great time.

Yeah.

And as always.

Should we announce, though?

Nah, wait, or should we just tell him?

Let's just say it.

Fuck it.

Next Patreon series, Andrew Lloyd Weber, baby.

Yep.

Four musicals that are filmed like Superstar.

Yes.

Ivida, Phantom of the Opera.

And we're ending the year on cats.

And cats.

Cats, baby.

Cats.

Cats.

It's going to be good.

And as always, it is worth calling out that both Joker Folly Adieu and Goodrich

end with covers of Daniel Johnson's True Love Will Find You in the End.

These two movies both end with the same fucking song.

At very different interpretations.

To different effect.

At very different meanings.

Yeah.