Wild at Heart with Tatiana Maslany

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.

This whole podcast, Wild at Heart and Weird on Top.

Okay, good, great, right?

That's when they say the name of the movie.

Right, that's the title of the film is Wild at Heart.

Wild at Heart.

And I turned a world into podcast, which are basically, I mean, they're basically.

We're shaking off the cobwebs.

We're doing great.

Look, we're coming off a little break from recording.

I'll talk about it on the Beetlejuice episode.

Oh, yeah, you'll talk about it on the Beetlejuice episode.

Yeah, because that's like three weeks before this episode.

Great.

Hey, timeline's all going to make perfect sense.

Normal app incoming.

Talking about a normal movie.

Sure.

Here's a thought I had while watching this.

Had you seen this film before?

I had seen this before.

Because you're a big fan of the actor.

Of course.

We'll get into it.

Yep.

I'd seen it before, but only the one time.

Okay.

And that was 10 plus years ago.

And this had never been my favorite film of his, although I harbor no dislike of it.

This does feel like maybe...

the apex of like Lynch just as image maker

where it's astonishing to watch this movie go through shot by shot and you're just like, this guy is so dialed into what his thing is, where every single image, the styling of every single character, every environment, every prop, every wardrobe item, you're just like, he's got complete control of the wheel.

It is wild to watch it play in real time now a movie that we are constantly, I feel like in our circles, having fed back to us constantly via GIF.

And like still image.

Yeah.

I feel like this movie is constantly being fed back to me out of order.

There's a lot of, yeah, there's certain things in this movie that are.

And yeah, you're right.

I agree with you.

Sure.

What's the big gift for this movie?

I feel like

from the very beginning, Nick Cage pointing

right after he's killed the guy with his hand against the railing.

Can I talk or am I seeing it?

If you don't.

Okay, hello.

Hi, guys.

Hi.

What's up?

I had never seen any gift.

I don't think I knew anything about this movie before I saw it the first time.

Like noon, didn't even know it existed.

Did it just, did someone just kind of like lock you in a room and be like, just, just shut up.

I'm going to show you something.

Yeah, my husband, you did a great impression of him.

That's exactly what he did.

That is what he said.

But I was like blown away.

I was like, this is exactly, in so many ways, it's totally the opposite of any movie I would ever want to watch because it's so grotesque.

But it's also like my dream.

Well, that's why you're here.

We got to dig into that.

That's why you're beaming in from another country to talk about this movie with us.

We'll introduce the show.

I'll introduce you properly, but uh, like a month or two ago, you asked what we were doing on the podcast currently, and I said David Lynch, and you went, Oh, I love Wild at Heart.

Like, your eyes lit up like that.

In my head, it went

that great uh little riff, that little stick, hottest riff in cinema.

This is a hot movie, even just the poster you hold up is just the two of them looking hot.

Such a hot poster, yeah.

Just imagine, like,

it's 1990.

You go to the movie hall and you see that poster, and you're like, what's that?

It's just about two hotties.

This feels like the very last time that people might have accidentally seen a David Lynch movie thinking it was going to be a normal film.

Yeah.

This poster, and it's just Laura Dern and Nick Cage looking hot, and you're like, oh, there's like a car.

There's a car.

He's got hairy arms.

He's got a, it's great.

He's got big arms.

Is he wearing the jacket in it?

Is he got the jacket on the stage?

He's not wearing the jacket on the poster.

Turn, can you show?

Yeah.

I want to see this poster.

Yeah,

I feel like it is the classic poster.

Oh, yeah.

This almost looks like, and this is probably totally incorrect, the Conair poster.

It's a little bit in him more classic action hero pose.

Because if you put the jacket on, people are like, oh, there's some weird

doing an LV thing.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

This movie is also, I would put forth maybe.

Here's the Conair poster, a great poster.

You don't get full body, but it's a similar similar kind of pose.

It's like guys stoic staring at you.

Conair has, you know, fiery orange.

Yes.

But Wild at Heart has that bright pink.

Minks draws your eye.

The orange sky.

It's got pose.

It does.

It does.

This movie is.

Let's just talk about the poster.

Yeah.

The Twilight of Nicholas Cage's original hairline, right?

This is like the picture wrap on.

God bless.

Because that first stage of his career where you're like, this guy's like 19 and he feels like he's been alive for eons, for centuries.

He can successfully woo Cher, who's like 15 years old.

He's the hairiest man in the world.

Do you like Moonstruck?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

But also only recently saw it and was like, wait, what was I doing for most of the time?

Let's get into all of this.

Look, this is Blank Check with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin.

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

And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce.

Baby, this is a mini-series on the films of of David Lynch, but also his TV shows.

Sure.

It is called Twin Pods Fire Cast With Me.

That's right.

And today we are talking about what is

the moment where he's kind of on top of the universe.

That's true, because this comes out after the first season of Twin Peaks.

He basically does this and the first season of Twin Peaks concurrently as like Projects hat.

And then Twin Peaks airs as like eight episodes mid-season, runaway success.

Start of 1990.

This plays at the Cannes Film Festival, like a week after the finale of Twin Peaks Season 1 and Wins the Palm Door.

Wins the Palm Door?

And then this comes out in the summer.

It's like this guy is at the absolute center of culture.

Right.

He's like crossed over to the mainstream.

And even when this wins the palm d'or, people like boo it and are like, do we, is it too much?

Do we need to start taking him down?

And then like three months later, Twin Peaks Season 2 and everyone's like, get the fuck out of here.

It's true.

It is like his activity.

What are the qualms with the movie, though what are what's can's qualms with this movie well my guess is i you know although i looked at the uh lineup that year it's not like a you know deadly lineup of so many classics maybe they wanted like the cereneau de vergerac movie obviously that was like a big deal the dipper do yeah yeah and that would have aged perfectly if that was on oh yeah we should revisit that one uh you know there's there's it's not that there's bad movies in here but it's not not movies where you see like major masterpieces but my guess is this thing was uh seen as too slick and violent maybe too stylish no substance i don't know i don't you know camp

real camp in it like incredibly camp very american totally and just like performances that kind of go like yeah ha ha you're watching a movie right now do you know what i mean like they're like unabashedly like this is acting Yes, 100%.

And I'm going to just call her Laura Dern's mom because I'm a dumb-dumb.

What's her name?

Diane Ladd.

Thank you.

Yes.

Her performance, like covered in red, yeah, lipstick, like we're doing right there, and just like shaking, like tremoring in staring in mirrors.

It's so beautifully camp.

Like it must have just been insulting to an audience that's sitting there going like, we need to see you.

Like I assume like real drama.

My theory too is that perhaps when he was like the oddball American fringe figure who could then go to Cannes and the French French would be like, we understand you.

Unlike these slovenly Americans, Lynch felt like theirs.

But at a moment where he's suddenly reaching like mainstream crossover success on American network television, and then he makes this movie that's so steeped in sort of like B-movie, like American sort of like crime genre shit with big stars, they're just like, does he need to get taken down a peg?

Is this like, have we let him go too far?

And is rewarding this going to push him even further off the ledge?

Bertolucci was the jury president.

Okay.

Who,

I mean, it's interesting.

Yeah.

It's like, who probably wouldn't make a movie like this ever, which I always like that theory.

Yes.

That

like film festivals when the chair is a, when the head of the jury is a director, that often the winner is the film.

They're like, I wish I could make something like that.

I could never make that.

They could least imagine themselves being able to.

Spielberg giving it to blue is the warmest color where he's like, I could not make a three-hour lesbian sex drama.

Like, I just don't have that in me.

Like, or Burton giving it to Uncle Boone Me.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Things like that.

Our guest today returned to the show.

Yeah.

Who's our guest?

The great.

Tatiana Mazlani.

The late.

The great.

No, you're not late.

You were on time.

I was late.

Rounding error.

Rounding error.

In the Toronto traffic.

You were early.

That Toronto traffic is brutal, too.

I have been in it.

It is so nasty.

It's not great.

You're zooming in.

We were,

well, because Beale Juice will have come out by then.

Can I say this, David?

We were supposed to record an episode and then your wife went into labor much earlier than expected.

That's true.

That's true.

How dare she?

I know terrible behavior by her.

And the whole time she was doing it, I was like, but Tatiana Maslani is booked for this week.

She's accepted the iCal invite.

Yeah, she accepted the iCali bike for her personal Gmail.

Yeah.

Yes, that's true.

So we have switched to Zoom.

Oh, we were always going to be on Zoom.

I guess, yeah.

But, um, yes, we've been trying to pin this episode down for a while.

You were in the city a couple months ago, you like sparked it wild at heart, you were talking how much you loved it.

Want to get into it.

I do think this is a particularly interesting one to have you on for, not just because this seems to be your personal favorite of the Lynch movies, is that right?

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Yeah, I really liked Eraser Head, though, I have to say.

Good movie, yeah.

Um, yeah, he's so freaky as hell.

This is such an interesting acting movie, and to your point, what you were saying, Diane Ladd in this is one of the only

three acting noms a Lynch movie ever got.

Oh, interesting.

So you got John Hurt and Elephant Man, Richard Farnsworth and Straight Story.

Oh, yeah.

And this.

And this.

That's funny.

The other two nominations were like these incredibly stripped down, emotionally powerful, reserved, sort of unconventional performances for the Lynch move in his two most quote-unquote traditional movies.

And this is the one time they gave an acting nomination to an actor going full lynch.

Yeah.

And I kept thinking while watching this, like, she's giving a soap opera performance.

And I don't say that in any pejorative sense.

It is incredible, her like lack of abandon.

Yes.

I would say that it's like brave.

Yes.

It's like brave on so many levels.

And

it also extends to all of the performances are like incredibly brave in their own ways.

And that's why I like love watching Nick Cage.

And we'll, I'm sure, get to this later, but his recent performances are like no exception.

He's just got like zero fear.

Yes.

Like he's just like, he just goes for it.

He's not worried about like looking stupid on screen or whatever.

No, not at all.

And like consequently, like he's not, he doesn't look stupid.

You know what I mean?

Like he doesn't.

have embarrassment.

And so you're not embarrassed watching him.

This is the movie right after

Blue Velvet, right?

Obviously, Twin Peaks happens in between,

but like Blue Velvet is so much the codification of what the Lynch thing is.

And then to a certain extent, the like the Dennis Hopper performance is like, oh, David Lynch has created a space where you can give a performance like this.

It doesn't feel like this movie is everyone trying to outdo this, but it feels like every actor signs up knowing.

This is now the parameters that I can play in.

This is like a movie.

This is a director where I get to flex things that I, no one else would allow me to do.

And you have people with very different acting styles and different backgrounds and all of that.

But like Cage is the ultimate, yes, like doing the things most actors would be terrified to do and finding some sort of like grounding center in what feels to a lot of people cartoonish, absurd.

He's talked so much about his frustration over like the last 15 years.

And I think he's kind of reclaimed it now, but how the internet kind of fucked him because the obsession with like Nick Cage freak out supercuts and the gifs and the still images made him into like this flattened, Nick Cage is just a guy who does weird shit.

And he's always been like, all that weird shit is like an extension of a grounding, an understanding of text, working with filmmakers.

I'm building to those moments.

They don't happen in a vacuum.

When you deprive them of the context, it makes me just seem like a lunatic.

And it's also a disservice to those filmmakers.

Right.

Yeah, that's the biggest thing is like taking them out of context.

You could like, yeah, humiliate any actor by being like, this is like the moments when so-and-so was weeping or whatever.

Like you can always like shame anybody, but like he doesn't seem to be coming from like a place of like, I need to, like, I want to go viral.

He's not that.

He's like.

living the character's journey and just like taking the biggest swings.

Right.

And he just approaches things like there is, it was either GQ or Esquire that did a profile on him when Massive Weight of Unbearable Talent was coming out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it was the big piece on like Cage's kind of, yeah, Nick Cage can explain it all.

Yeah.

Yes, yeah.

But that was the headline.

And the thesis was like, people like to think that Nick Cage is this collection of just like random eccentricities, both as an actor and his personal life, where you're like, he went.

bankrupt buying dinosaur skulls.

And the whole thesis of this piece is like, you ask him any question and he gives you a very straight earnest answer for how he got there like everything makes sense to him he is fascinating to us as a figure because our brains don't work that way but he's not someone who's just like firing off chaotic like choices for the sake of showiness now this was the crazy thing that i was saying i was going to tell you on my tat that might blow your mind Nick Cage, one of my absolute favorite actors, a guy I'm obsessed with.

I saw this movie for the first time in the middle of a project for a magazine that then went under as my friend and I were writing it to try to watch every Nicolas Cage movie in a two-week period where I went semi-crazy watching like 40 Nicolas Cage movies in two weeks.

So I saw that for the first time in that context, this movie in that context.

This is the first time we have covered Nicholas Cage on the main feed of this podcast going on 10 years.

Yeah, we've never talked about Nicholas Cage movie.

You know, I was trying to think, because obviously we're director focused.

So it's like we've never done the the Cohen brothers.

That would be a Nicholas Cage opportunity.

We haven't done Herzog.

Yeah, we haven't done Oliver

Bay or Oliver Stone, Sherbar DePalm.

Right.

We on our Patreon, we did two episodes on the National Treasure movies.

That's true.

Which were the first times we've ever discussed him.

And I love those movies.

And he's very fun them, but they don't feel totally emblematic of who he is as an actor versus this being like such a core

everything you're saying.

This guy's willing to try anything without any fear of embarrassment.

This is the perfect movie to finally like dig into what is the cage thing.

Well, he's also just like, in so many weird ways, like he's like, uh, like a movie star, but also like a character actor, like a working actor.

Do you know what I mean?

He still does.

He makes choices.

You can see like he's making choices that are like for money, I'm sure.

And like for, but he's always like finding something in in them that is off.

And I think that's why he's so fascinating because he could by all accounts have just been like, he could have been the guy on that poster just looking like stoic.

He could do that if he wanted to, but he'd be so bored.

And he did it.

But not in a boring way, maybe, but he, you know, I mean, there maybe is a moment where you can feel Nicholas Cage

in the early 2000s being like,

you know, what am I doing in this one?

You know, like a little bit.

There's the start of Bangkok Dangerous Next, where he's floating away.

And then there's this this era of his admitted, like...

Well, when he's just making movies for money.

I went to financial ruin.

I have to do seven projects a year.

I try to give him my all, but I'm stretched a little thin.

And like, I would say that.

Go ahead.

Oh, go ahead.

No, no, no.

No, please.

No, please.

No, you please.

This is the time.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

You have twins, sir.

Please speak well.

We want to hear from daddies with twins.

It's just when Wild at Heart comes out, yes, you know, you would have seen this guy pop if you're like, say, it's 1990, you're going to see a movie.

You would have maybe seen him pop in things like Rumblefish or whatever, but really, it's just been a few years of Nicholas Cage as a major actor.

Peggy Sue got married, right?

Probably sort of the start,

like-ish.

Yeah, this is what's crazy.

I mean, you have

to talk about it a little bit, but then you have like the raising Arizona moonstruck year, 1987.

Yeah.

And then since then, it's just Vampire's Kiss, which is like.

just a shot of Nicholas Cage straight to the neck.

I think we do this from the top.

Let's just run through this.

All right.

Because now we're beating around it.

All right.

But like, obviously, he, you know, uh a member of the extended coppola family his brother his dad is francis's like kind of black sheep brother um

uh

did not grow up very close to the family but was just like from a young age very obsessed with the idea of being a movie actor um

and his first real movie is fast times at ridgeman high right but that's valley girl is his first like big part right yes i'm putting fast times at ridgeman high on the board only to say by the time you you get to Wild at Heart, he's been in movies for eight years.

But Valley Girl is 83.

He's like the main love interest.

Yeah.

Rumblefish, he's got like he's supporting role.

Yeah.

Francis is starting to throw him parts.

He changes his name because he doesn't want to be seen as a nepotism hire.

And he starts sort of this thing of like, if Francis is throwing me jobs, then I'm going to do them the weirdest way possible because I don't want to seem like I'm just a handsome nephew getting roles.

Yeah.

And then like, right, Racing with the Moon, Cotton Club, Birdie, it's all kind of like flashy

watercolor

Birdie, that's one of his big, like, oh, he pulled out his tooth and he went harder than most young actors would go.

But at this point, he's like 17, 18.

Like, he's really young.

That Peggy Sue is the one where he's just like,

I'm gonna, I'm gonna play the male lead as Pokey from Gumby.

Have you seen Peggy Sue got married, Tatiana?

It's

you know what?

I don't think I have, but Brendan will probably say that I have.

But I don't recall it.

It's one of Copla's only like hits in the 80s.

Yes.

His like four higher run where this one works.

And it's about like a

person of, you know, 40 something or whatever goes to their high school reunion and then she gets zapped back into her teenage body.

Yeah.

She's like stuck in a

loveless past its due date marriage with her high school sweetheart.

And then she like falls, she faints at her high school reunion, wakes up, she's back in her senior year and she gets a chance to redo everything.

Right.

And so Nicholas Cage is the husband but he's he's cast so he can play young you know right high school boy at the beginning he's in it in old age makeup but you don't really hear him and then playing a huge dumbass i mean right right i mean that's right he's playing like the high school like hunk sweetheart and he does the entire movie talking like this and it was one of these things where like francis ford coppola fought really hard for him And he was like, I'll do it if I can play it this way.

And Coppola was like, what the fuck are you doing?

I just put my neck out for you you're gonna get me fired but his rationale which i think is so smart and i think the performance totally works and it's the beginning of him getting at this sort of like expressionistic style of acting this non-literal representational style of acting is he's like the whole point of the movie is that she like goes back to her high school years with the eyes and the brain right of an adult woman And the kind of guy she would have found cute when she was 17 is going to seem so goofy now.

Oh my God, is that ever brilliant?

Yes.

And it totally works.

He's incredible in it.

And it's like cooks in all of the embarrassment that we have looking back at like

our childhood.

But is a choice that no one else would make.

Aha.

And then that leads to Raising Arizona and Moonstruck, where you're like, this guy has weirdly now become like a low-level leading man.

But as you said, like not a movie star yet.

But like Moonstruck it, I mean, obviously Raising Arizona, he's so good in that.

He's so perfect for like the Cohen brothers sort of smart idiot thing.

Moonstruck, he makes no sense in that movie.

No.

No, that's a tough one.

He's playing 15 years older than he is.

I guess so, or it's just sort of not being addressed.

Yeah.

He comes on screen in this kind of movie that so far has been this like quaint, sweet, like, you know, oh, she's moping and her family.

And then he shows up and starts screaming, which is the tone of the movie, in my opinion.

It is operatic.

Like he's bringing you there.

It's another example of him getting someone needs to be playing the opera of this.

But it is so shocking when you first see him in that movie.

And he is hot, but he's also funny looking.

And his hair is kind of funny looking.

And

his whole affect is kind of like off-kilter.

Isn't his accent goofballs too?

He's got a big accent.

He's got like a wild accent.

It's an accent movie.

You know, everyone's doing it.

It's loud.

It's in bounds.

Yeah.

It's not a wig movie.

It's an accent movie.

Yes.

And then in 88, Vampire's Kiss, which is a movie.

have you seen vampire's kiss it's i haven't but it's very silly movie uh

i mean griff you may have a different take on this than me but it's about a guy who starts to think he's turning into a vampire it's sort of an 80s satire of like you know hot shot guy i'd say it's a totally okay movie that is mostly just its reputation is oh this is when cage just went totally loot like He's just screaming

the whole movie.

There's this notorious scene where he does the alphabet.

Yes.

He's like, A, B, C, D, E, F, and he won't stop.

And you're just like, I can't believe it.

He's live on camera.

And like, yeah, it was just the start of like, what if you just don't reign this guy in at all?

But at this point, it's like, okay, so this guy like has enough of the right look.

You know, he's got enough of a name.

He's been in enough big movies.

His biggest movies have been ones where he's the weird love interest, not the movies where he is the guy.

But that gives him enough juice to be able to get small enough movies bankrolled off of his name.

And he's sort of like, you imagine if we were like film nerds at this time, you'd be like, he's the cool guy.

He's the cool actor.

Isn't it cool he gets a star in his own movies?

When you get to,

you know, and then after that, Time to Kill is like his incredibly weird Italian war drama

about leprosy that I think was mostly because he wanted to do an Italian movie.

Never on Tuesday is a cameo.

And then Wild at Heart is 1990, which feels like, him sort of owning his lane.

It is wild to your point, Tat, to watch him in this and be like, great, this is this guy at his peak.

And be like, five years from now, he will have won an Oscar and be starring in two back-to-back Jerry Bruckheimer action movies in the same summer.

That he just became a very, like, not a conventional leading man, but a mainstream leading man.

That within five years, he was still doing his weird shit within those trappings.

But he became a guy who could star in legitimate prestige movies and huge, like, fucking shopping mall blockbusters for teenagers.

What, what's your relationship with him, Tat?

Like, you know, where did you first see Cage?

Where did I first see Cage?

Great.

I have no idea.

I have no clue, but I don't think I was like versed.

I wasn't Cage versed for a long time.

You were caged.

And

you didn't get on Caged for a while.

In ignorance.

Yeah.

But it's, I feel like it's as I've gotten into movies now in my like 30s that I've appreciated him.

Cause I think I always was like, oh, that guy.

I think I didn't know, I didn't know better.

And

also, he does something, I think because he's so unabashedly like

bold,

he does a thing that like highlights to me that actors are very,

are very like careful most of the time.

And like, you know, he, he just like, there's an idea sometimes in acting of like, don't be caught acting.

So when you watch an actor who's acting so hard, you're like, oh, oh,

like you want to like distance yourself from it, but it's so much fun.

And when you actually get to do that kind of work, it's like the freest thing when you have that kind of freedom and that kind of like

respect from your

collaborators that they're just like, yeah, go for it.

We'll like shave it or do whatever, but we'll like let you go for it on the day.

Which, I don't know, I just off of Blue Velvet, it's like everyone signs up knowing like, this is safe.

He's going to protect us.

Yeah.

And I was watching this like little bit of like behind the scenes with like laura dern too

who okay i have two things to say one is about nick cage like also can shut it off when he needs to like when willem defoe comes in the first time we see bobby la rue who is just like the groovesiest groovesiest man but nick cage like turns it off like he just like gives it over to willem defoe he doesn't pull any focus.

He's like, this is, this is this guy's moment.

And Willem Dafoe's not doing anything like pyrotechnics, but he like the energy goes towards him.

Do you know what I mean?

I absolutely know that.

Nick Cage isn't like showboating or like trying to do anything.

Right, let me win this scene or whatever.

No,

which is also why he's like brave to me.

It goes to this point of like, my defense of Nicholas Cage has always been:

A, he has never been bad in a good movie.

The performance of his that quote unquote don't work, and I would defend most of them, tend to be in movies that have no handle on themselves.

But when a movie works and he's working with a good filmmaker that he trusts, even if he's doing something that feels quote unquote crazy and like outside of the safe zone and unconventional, it always feels like it is in direct, intelligent conversation with the larger story and the larger movie, which A lot of insecure actors who just wanted to be exciting, colorful, dramatic, crazy, would be threatened by Willem Dafoe showing up with the teeth and the energy and the voice and being like, I gotta go.

This guy's gonna steal every scene, right?

I need to, yeah.

Yeah.

And you're right that he knows, like, no, what I have to do here is dial it all the way back.

What is the cage performance that doesn't work for you?

Like, is there one?

It's a good question.

Because there are some where it's like, like you're saying, like, oh, yeah, well, the movie's not very good.

So, you know, but like, is there a

big cage performance that you're kind of like, eh, that one never stuck with me?

I don't know if there's well, okay, like a clunker, yeah.

I think the ones that work for me the least aren't the ones where he's taking big swings, they're the ones where he feels a little lost or checked out, right?

Where, like, if I'm watching next,

I'm like, I wish he was trying more, right?

He's not doing too much in that one.

I've never seen that, he feels a little trapped.

There is stuff like

which one is it?

Uh, Deadfall is a movie that

his brother directed, Christopher Coppola.

And he, I mean, this was my project.

I was trying to watch early 90s.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Early 90s.

It's right

before.

No, it's right after this, a couple years after this.

Because that's the other thing.

Right after this, he goes into a run of like studio comedies.

He does Honeymoon in Vegas, Guardian Tasks, Amos and Andrew.

Yep.

These are.

Can I ask a question?

Yes.

When was Face Off?

Face Off is 96.

So it's sort of like what Griffin is talking about is very, wait, what's your take on Face Off?

Well, no, because that's that I'm realizing.

My intro to Nick Cage was the pay-per-view advertisements for Face Off, where he dances at one point.

And I was like, that's the hottest man I've ever seen.

I never watched the movie, but I watched pay-per-view just to watch that trend.

You should check out Face Off.

That would blow me up.

I have to.

Like, it's true.

What Griffin, I feel like, is saying is like in the early 90s, he becomes kind of a studio comedy guy.

And then in 95, he wins the Oscar for leaving Las Vegas.

Yes.

And in 96, he has The Rock, Conair, and Face Off all in one.

Wikipedia is formatting this weird.

The Rock is 96, Conair and Face Off are both 97.

Yeah, you're right.

But he has two successive movies.

But you know, three Jerry Bruckheimer movies.

Suddenly, a giant action star

is becoming a legitimate serious actor.

And not only is he a giant action star, but he is giving very big Nicholas Cagey performances.

He is not like tamping himself down.

It's what you were saying that he's doing weird character

versions of leading man.

He's City of Angels.

Is he any good in that?

That's one where I think he's a little sleepy.

He's pretty terrible in Captain Corelli.

Yes, it's sleepy.

I was going to say, like, Deadfall is one where he's giving a performance that's insane, but he's in a movie he knows doesn't work.

And he's like, so just have fun.

Like, that's him just being like, it doesn't fucking matter.

Give me a fake nose.

I'm going to do a silly voice.

I would say that's him doing a bunch of shit that isn't really grounded in anything

versus like Corelli, like that chain is like him getting a little lost in sort of stayed leading man stuff.

Because the whole weird thing with leaving Las Vegas is like, oh, here's him giving a very stripped down, realistic, naturalistic performance in a like character-based drama that is sort of sophisticated.

But because he's a drunk, there is a built-in escape hatch.

for him to have crazy Nick Cage freakout scenes.

And he's grounding it in something very specific.

And it's some of the best like alcoholic acting I've ever seen and drunk acting I've ever seen.

But when he's trying to do the same sort of like, I guess I should be a proper serious leading man in his other kind of City of Angels, Captain Corelli shit, you're like, he feels a little constrained.

David, yes, this episode is brought to you, The Listener by Mubi, a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema from around the globe.

From iconic directors to emerging auteurs, there's always something new to discover.

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We have three different visuals going on.

The glove-to-hand pick.

Of course.

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It is.

Look,

it's an exciting project, but it's really funny to be like, guys, Mussolini.

Here's what's funny about it.

Just to peel back the curtain for a second.

We get like messages that are like, hey, you guys good with this ad?

Yeah, here's the copy for the ad.

And as shorthand, it was texted to us as, you guys good with the Mussolini ad?

And I was like, Mussolini sponsoring the podcast?

What do you mean?

To be clear, we decry Ilduce Mussolini, Benito Mussolini, the terrible dictator of Italy.

But we celebrate Joe Wright and his newest project.

The filmmaker Joe Wright

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an eight-episode series about Mussolini's rise to power.

And I will say, not to sound like a, you know, a little nerd over here, but it is actually very interesting to consider Mussolini's rise to power in these times.

You know, he was sort of the original fascist, and the way that he sees power in Italy is,

unfortunately, something we should probably have on our minds right now.

I don't not try to be a loser right now.

You sound like me right now.

This is the kind of thing I say.

It's a very interesting part of history, and I feel like because, you know, other World War II things became

whatever, the history channel's favorite thing, you don't hear quite as much about Mussolini's rise.

Yes, no, you're right, unfortunately, sadly, tragically, frighteningly.

He's not a hugely this is a hyper-relevant time.

And this is a theatrical hyper-visual tour deforest starring Luca Marionelli.

Martin Eden himself.

Remember that?

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checking notes here.

Great.

They start calling it a towering performance of puffed up vanity.

It features an era-bending score by Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers.

That's cool.

Imagine techno beats scoring fascist rallies.

It just sounds kind of Joe Wright-y.

It does.

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You know, know, he won't just do a typical costume drama.

He likes to, you know, think about things in a different way.

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Yeah, no, it's Joe Wright,

one of the scarier people I ever interviewed.

I've told you that story, right?

He knows he's kind of a cool guy.

We've added him around.

He's certainly gotten interesting.

He's very interesting.

And he's made some great movies, and he's made some big swings that didn't totally connect.

Totally.

That's really interesting.

He actually is a blank-check filmmaker, unlike a lot of some people.

I get suggested.

You're like, sure.

It doesn't fit the model.

This one does.

This one does.

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You can watch Mussolini or you can watch non-Mussolini things.

Yeah, they got lots of movies.

I got a lot of things.

Bye.

David.

Okay, okay.

I'll be very quiet.

Oh, I'm used to it.

Producer Ben is sleeping.

Oh,

Hazzy boy is

getting some

multiple dashes.

What's he sleeping on?

He's sleeping on one of the new beds we got from Wayfair for the studio for our podcast naps.

But this is a big opportunity for us.

We get to do the first ad read for Wayfair on this podcast.

No, no, Griffin, you're clearly not listening to past recordings.

Ben did a Wayfair ad for us recently.

You listen to past recordings?

Yeah, sometimes.

That's psycho behavior.

It is.

Look.

He did that when we were sleeping?

Look, apparently we need to talk about how when you hear the word game day,

you might not think Wayfair, but you should, because Wayfair is the best kept secret for incredible and affordable game day fines.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Absolutely.

And just try to, David, just if you could please maintain a slightly quiet, we don't have to go full whisper.

I just want to remind you that hoz is sleeping i mostly just think of wayfair as some a website where you can get basically anything yeah of course but wayfair is also the ideal place to get game day essentials bigger selection created collections options for every budget slash price point you want to make like a sort of man cake

okay fine okay all right sorry you know wayfair uh stuff gets delivered really fast hassle free the delivery is free

if you for game day day specifically, Griffin, you can think about things like recliners and TV stands, sure, or outdoor stuff like coolers and grills and patio heaters.

Like, that's you know, that's all the winter months.

David, you have like basically a football team worth of family at home.

You got a whole team to cheer up.

This is true.

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Your place must be lousy with cribs.

I do have fainting beds.

I have cribs.

Sconces?

Chaise lounges?

I'm low on sconces.

Maybe, maybe it's time to pick up a few things.

This is the kind of thing that would make your home team cheer.

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Cleveland Browns, of course.

Donte Mac, no matter what.

Okay, that's the end of the Adriat.

He's good in this, though.

This is a top cage performance for me.

It's also a top dern moment.

My God.

Massive Dern moment.

The first time I met you, I think, was when we went to see RRR together.

Right?

I think that was the first time we met.

Yeah, I think so.

And I've quoted you saying this anonymously on the show just about the power of that movie.

But we walked out and you just turned to me and Brendan and you went like, those guys can do everything.

Yeah.

you were like that is a movie where these two actors have gotten to do every single type of acting they act they're dramatic they're funny they sing they dance they're doing they do action right they do like slapstick behavioral comedy right yeah and i saw your eyes light up at just like that's like full test

Like they're given a space where they can do every type of acting possible.

And to the point of, I think, a lot of what we're saying, like this movie is similar, where like sometimes he's asking them to play a scene totally real, which must be really scary when you know some of the other scenes in this movie.

And you're like, is that going to bump?

Yeah.

I mean, the journey that they go on, the first half of the film being this kind of like arch, like sexy romance, like rock music video.

into like when the death, when they witness that car crash.

Right.

And suddenly the vibes are ruined.

She's pregnant.

yeah, yeah, but it's like shot so different.

Like, that is actually, I was looking at the time code, and that's like almost like the exact midpoint of the film.

And after that, there's the like

pace of their

relationship goes like, like, goes into this like totally different energy

where all of the romance is out.

There's like puke in the bedroom, and there's like they're shot separately in the bedroom.

At the beginning, they're all like shot always within, it seemed, I didn't like like go back really and look at it, but it felt like they were always within the same frame, right?

Like they're, even if they're in separate spaces, like when she's talking about what happened to her when she was younger, they're still shot in the same, they're in the same shot.

So like they're still connected, but then that like separation and and then performance-wise, it just totally goes in a, it becomes like, it's like their hearts have been broken, like totally.

He's very different.

Like all the fun stuff people think about with Nicholas Cage is mostly in the first half of the movie, right?

The sneakskin jacket, the singing, the, you know, like, that's, I was going to say, beyond them just like being unified in the frame together, the first hour of the movie is just like, they're so iconographic.

Yes.

Like, they're both wearing stung glasses and the rock music's playing.

All they do is like fucking drive.

Like, it's great.

And the movie starts with tragic backstory.

It's not like they're having fun and then things get bad.

But they're like, the tragic backstory is more sort of like 50s greaser movie.

He's a tortured rebel, but it's cool and sexy kind of stuff before the reality of it.

Yeah, her mama won't let her have, you know, fun.

Right.

Like the movie starts with manslaughter.

Very quickly, they start to unfold that like he witnessed her father's death.

Like all this stuff is in there, but is done in this David Lynch, like sort of like pop art rock, rockabilly style that still feels kind of seductive.

And then you're right, like watching this random woman die at the side of the road is just like, oh, they're actually now starting to like process shit well and the woman also is talking about her mother she's saying i i she's gonna be so mad at me because i lost my purse or something she's like worried that her mom will find out that she lost her purse and there's something about that like reminder in for laura dern's character of like because her mother's always this like force that's following But there's something about that like simplicity of like the thing, even in your like, you're about to die.

And like the thing you're worried about is like your mom being disappointed in you.

Correct.

Right.

It's like, it feels like it, like she can't not see something in herself there.

You know what I mean?

It's, and it's like way more poignant than, than I think.

I don't know.

It's like kind of a beautiful, horrible moment.

There's almost this sort of like live fast, die young kind of thing that they're both, and the pregnancy probably is the turning point of like, oh, we have to think about the future for the first time.

Right.

Like, how is this sustainable?

We can't just keep driving

and fucking in new motels.

Right.

There's

now like, right, sort of stakes attached to our behavior.

There's this amazing gesture that

Laura Dern does.

And I would want to talk to you guys about it because it's like she puts her hand in her hair in all of these moments where

sometimes you see it when she's like upset with her mom and she's like kind of like, she's like, kind of like cry, like screaming, and she's got her hand in her hair.

But then it's also these like moments of like ecstasy where she like puts her hand.

It's such a like

cartoon gesture of like sexy, like sexy girl, but it has this like desire and horror in it.

I don't know.

There's something, I don't know enough about like the physicality that he would have worked with her on, but it's that's some of my favorite stuff.

You know more than us about like those little physical choices that actors make that I feel like viewers sometimes might not even pick up on, right?

Like I just watch the remains of the day because I'm watching a lot of costume dramas right now, which is what you do when you have newborns because you just need something gentle.

Yeah.

Like, kind of.

And, like, there's this moment.

And Claire Hopkins where he puts his hand up.

Yes.

Claire is just like, Jesus Christ.

And like,

it's, you know, one of the many moments where the emotional devastation has built to almost a crushing, you know, eruption.

And in this like society of manners, he's like trying his hardest

to show his vulnerability.

He's not going to break down and he's not going to react.

But like you see him bring his hand up just to almost like contain clearly what he's trying or like just cover it a little bit just like he just doesn't want to totally be seen and you look at it and you're like this is the most incredible organic representation but him thinking about how to do that is so interesting right like you know or maybe it was james ivory being like anthony can you do like kind of like a little bit of a hand thing but i doubt it my guest is the actor but right you ask like was that did he do that for only one take right sure sure sure was that something he like thought up on the day day and did?

Was it something that he wrote in the margins of his script immediately?

Right.

How do you do it?

Explain it to me.

By all accounts, Tat, like, I think Lynch is very like, I hire you, you figure it out.

Sure.

And he'll adjust things on the day, but I don't think he's someone who's like working with actors to establish a physical vocabulary to build a character with them in that sense.

I did see.

like one moment in a behind the scenes where he goes up to her and he's like, okay, I want you to like kind of bring your arms up like like this.

And he like does like a gesture.

And I don't know if it's, I don't know if it has like a meaning behind it or if she just like imbues it with meaning because she like repeats them.

But there's also like her hand when she's having, when she's orgasming, that we like zoom on the hand that like opens up.

And then it also opens up in the Bobby LaRuse, or what's his name?

Bobby Laura.

Bobby Furus.

Bobby Furrow.

Yes.

So there's like these, there's, there, there is something about those like gestures.

And I think with Remains of the Day, I would imagine, if I'm jumping into his head, that he probably was like as little, what's that?

Tony H's head.

Yeah.

If there's like as little motion as possible and then like the one movement that means something, like that he would have cut off all of the motion in order to make any, any choice of gesture like really important, you know?

How do you go about that?

Like when you're reading a script, are you starting to map these things out on the day or are you just thinking about it in emotional and intellectual terms and then figuring out those moves once you're actually in it filming?

It really depends.

Like, sometimes I'll like work with, I have like a coach who like works in that kind of stuff often.

She does like dream work, but she's working a lot in like gesture, like a gesture that means something.

And it doesn't mean that you like put it necessarily into the work, but you like.

embody it in a way that it might come up when you're working.

You kind of like create a vocabulary of movement for a character or like create restrictions for a character or whatever it is that will like give you kind of like

the space within which to play.

And I would think like even Nick Cage, who has seems, seemingly like no limits, probably is like working within a structure of like,

you know, this is the spectrum for this character or like discovering the spectrum on the day or whatever.

I don't know if I'm making that clear.

Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense.

I think it's different depending on, yeah.

I mean, I think Lynch is like one of the only dream work directors, or at the very least, he's one of the only ones who is a dream work director who makes films that are watchable.

I think a lot of other people who would try to do this do not know how to translate it into something.

And like, Dreamwork, for listeners who don't know, is sort of this like whole school of acting thought of trying to link things to like subconscious feelings so that there is like, you're pulling pulling from something that feels powerful and primal within yourself, even if the viewer would never totally get what it is that you're pulling from there, you know?

But it's like, rather than just trying to invest your emotions into it, it's like, what are these like images and feelings that are clearly like deep enough inside me that I'm dreaming about them?

And how do I connect them to things in the script?

And Lynch, I think similarly works with like, these are like memories or ideas or images or lines or feelings that have stuck with me and I put them in the script and I can't really unpack them, but I think there's some meaning there.

And then he sort of throws to actors like, can you embody this?

I think it's so much of why like Dern is maybe the single best fit for his work of anyone is like she is someone who seems so facile and like quick to be able to take on anything.

and find some connection to it without prep work, because I don't think he's doing that prep work with them in advance.

I think he is like either recognizing, oh, that gesture you did is interesting.

That thing you did with your hand, I'm going to get a close-up of that.

And maybe we can repeat that in four other scenes.

Or he's saying, I don't know why, but can you do this thing with your arms?

I just feel like I need that right now.

You do see him working on the performances that much on the day, but I don't think he's working with them before filming that much.

It always sounds like when he hires people, he's like, I just want you.

I want your energy.

You know, I might have very strong choices about the costume, but then you show up and we'll figure it out.

And part of it is the flexibility to be like, if I ask you to do it in a totally different way, can you go there?

Don't be rigid and boxed into the quote-unquote correct way of doing the scene.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She doesn't seem like she would ever be stuck in some idea of what the character is this way.

Right.

Let me open the dossier, Griff.

We got to talk about the dossier.

Okay.

All right.

So here's some, some, some facts about Wild at Heart.

Blue Velvet, David Lynch makes that film.

And then he has a bunch of projects he doesn't make.

There is a Marilyn Monroe project written by Mark Frost.

We've sort of discussed.

It's called Venus Descending or maybe Goddess.

Mark made that.

There are his two famous Unrealized Projects, Ronnie Rocket and

One Saliva Bubble.

We've talked about them in other episodes.

But at this point in time, there was a version of One Saliva Bubble that was almost Steve Martin and Martin Schwartz.

Correct.

Yeah.

A comedy.

We don't know much.

Like, you know, I think you can read a script yes yeah but these two projects tap were like the movies every time he made a film he's like up next ronnie rocket or one saliva bubble and he never got either one made they were both i think tied up in dino de laurentis stuff and then his company fell apart and anyway there was also an adaptation of a noir crime novel that we don't know the name of that he set up at propaganda films which is you know the the company that produced twin peaks

And there he meets Monty Montgomery, who will come up again.

We've talked about him before on our episode of The Loveless, Catherine Bigelow's movie, which he co-directed.

He will play The Cowboy in Mulholland Drive.

I think this movie has a lot in common with The Loveless and interesting.

Sure, biker, post-modern biker.

Deconstructing the archetypes of like 50s storytelling.

Monty Montgomery hands him this novel, Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart, The Story of Sailor and Lula,

saying, I want...

to option this movie.

Monty Montgomery wants to direct this movie.

Interesting.

I like this book.

Would you like to produce it?

David Lynch reads the book and he's like, I want to make this and you can produce it.

Sort of takes it over from him.

And he had warned him.

He said, this is great, Monty, but what if I read it and I fall in love with it and I want to do it myself?

And Monty said, if that happens, you can do it yourself.

And so he reads the book and he says it was exactly the right thing at the right time.

The book and the violence in America.

at that moment, late 80s, you know, merged and many different things happened in my mind.

And I called Monty and I said, I really want to do it.

He really loved the relationship between Sailor and Lula.

He loves how they're so good to each other and love each other and treat each other with respect.

But he still felt like a modern romance.

Like Sailor is cool and masculine, but he's still tender.

He doesn't talk down to Lula.

He wanted them to have this sort of equal relationship, very free when it came to sex.

And then his other sort of

encapsulation of his just like, it's a picture about finding love in hell yeah so he was sort of drawn i think to yeah whatever the love at the core of a very chaotic violent story uh the the great uh shea fillmore uh who uh runs the trivia night at nighthawk among many other things um

uh saw her last week marie and i went to the trivia night and she was uh shay was going on about how much he loves david lynch and was like, you know, when I was like a teenager, I'd watch his movies and focus on how weird he is.

And now I watch them and I can't get over how unbearably sad they are.

And I think that's such a key thing of like a lot of people could look at Sailor and Lula on paper and be like, oh, these are great like pop art archetypes.

And Lynch immediately locks into it and is like, this is meaningful.

They matter.

Their emotions matter.

I like want to cry thinking about their relationship.

Lynch wrote the script very quickly.

Gifford, he's messed with the story a lot.

Most importantly, he changes the ending, but also he brings out some new side characters and stuff like that.

Gifford reads the script and loves it.

He says, this is great.

Take the ball and run with it.

I got nothing wrong with this.

Lynch says they made the brighter things brighter and the darker things darker.

And Gifford, for whatever reason, is just not dissatisfied.

And then the Samuel Goldwyn Company, which I think it was kind of a Tony company, like a very, very fancy

sort of pictures,

comes aboard and they read the script OSCE and the ending isn't happy yet.

And they just, they're like, we just don't like the ending.

And Lynch is like, I don't like the ending either.

And they're like, well, why don't you change it?

And Lynch is like, I'm going to go change it, doggonnet.

The ending of the book is, they break up.

It doesn't work out.

Yeah.

And the ending of the movie, obviously, basically is like leading that way.

And then he just is like, no,

like, you know, the good witch tells him to be, you know, to not give up on Lynch.

None of the Wizard of Oz stuff is in the book.

That's what I was going to ask.

That's all coming from David Lynch.

That's all Lynch.

Uh-huh.

Which feels very tied to like this sort of American fairy tale thing.

But also, this, this book, and in particular, this movie that paints with like a very broad brush and bright colors, and yet has like for a hundred years like drilled into everyone's brain has become this language that we all can share of just like we all understand the shorthand of the Wizard of Oz.

It occupies weirdly a place in everyone's mind.

Drawing that comparison there.

I mean, I kept thinking while watching this, because Red Rock West is only three years after this, John Dahl movie, which is a very good movie, and is like Cage and Dennis Hopper and Laura Flynn Boyle, like two other David Lynch actors, and is on paper kind of similar like Western neo-noir, 90s Nicholas Cage, Batman movie.

and like a romance in this backdrop.

And that film's excellent, but it's done as like the sort of like stripped down, brutal, that's a right, hard-hitting version of it.

Uh, and you could have, I imagine, even if Barry Gifford's book is more colorful, adapted this in a similar way to that.

Yeah, you could make like a pretty nasty movie.

Not that this movie isn't violent and scary and explicit and very dark and all that, but like it's not really nasty.

It's too sort of magic in a way.

Although what you were saying, Tatiana, is true.

It's like it does curdle.

Like the first half is, yeah.

No, I was just thinking of that one moment, which is like where you're saying it could have gone, gone so dark.

They're driving in the car and the news is bad.

She like can't listen to the news anymore.

And she's like, turn on some music and she gets out of the car.

And then they just like, he like goes through a few channels and everything is like, like, it's like rape, murder, death,

and then it gets to music and then they just start dancing.

And there's something about that that feels like, like you're saying it could be so bleak, but there's something like hopeful and survivalist about the whole thing, like about the way that they

continue to grab towards like living.

Well, like these two people have already at such a young age experienced so much sexual violence and so much like

other types of violence, you know?

Like one of them has experienced so much sexual violence.

The other one has perpetuated so much violence against other people, both in self-defense and for the sake of making a living.

And they're both just like, we're not, this isn't getting to us.

This is not defining who we are.

We're going to like throw our arms up and go woo and like do Elvis poses.

If it's like too bleak, we're going to change the like station and go to a cool rock song and then we can like dance, you know?

And that thing where he like almost gets into a fight with the guy at the rock club, diffuses it at the last second, and then grabs the microphone and is like, I need to sing an Elvis song feels like him trying to recalibrate things things back to, like, no, this is fun.

Right.

This is fun.

Don't have that fun.

Sings differently than he does in Long Legs, which is fantastic.

That his singing as a crooning, like his crooning is different in both his rock crooning.

He has lay, he's got like levels.

He's got crooning.

He's got all kinds.

Yeah.

He's got range.

I really love Nicholas Cage.

Just saying it.

Yeah, he's the biggest.

He's the best.

It's just, I'm repeating myself, but it's so funny to watch this movie and place yourself in the mind of 1990 and be like, in five years, this guy is going to be synonymous with like mainstream Hollywood.

But in a weird way.

Anyway, look, Dern,

Dern is immediately the only person to play.

Lula, she's worked with Lynch before, obviously.

Sailor, Lynch thought of as a Cage as a very brave actor, says he has nerve and courage.

So he agrees with Tatiana.

Finally.

Seriously.

He's been fighting for years.

He's been at loggerheads.

Cage, great quotes from Nicholas Cage, who gives great quote, always, always and forever.

But kind of surprising they never work together again outside of the industrial symphony.

I guess they both got busy.

Yeah, exactly.

Says, I always had a hankering to play this sort of character who would always, who would do just about anything for the woman he loves.

I'm always attracted to these passionate, unbridled, romantic characters.

But then the other quote I like is,

I've often played roles that are large and sort of manic, and I wondered how I could be that ludicrous, but in a very contained way.

Sailor's a lot more sedate than I've been in a while in a film.

He's a strong character who doesn't need to rant and rave to get attention.

The challenge is to be mega cool in a way that will be totally absurd.

Because

he is big, but he's not doing too much of the cage, like truly like yelling at the camera kind of figure.

Like, I can't believe someone just did that.

Especially coming right off a vampire's kiss, which is like just that.

Just yelling.

I also, I.

Because it's also like important for him to seduce her.

Yes.

Like, it's about her.

Do you know what I mean?

He's not like doing it for the audience.

He's like making himself hot for that character.

Like, he Sailor's doing it for Lula.

There has to be like an actual center to him that she can invest in as like a future for her life.

Yeah.

I also was thinking during this that when he makes his weird pivot into like Action Star, he is kind of doing

like

Sailor at 50%.

Like like when he gets into like gone in 50 seconds like tone down sailor becomes his kind of action star persona right like the closest thing to just like what is neutral nicholas cage is like just a little bit of the elvis thing

you wears the jackets well right he's a little bit cool and absurd at the same time like this does become kind of

This is home base.

Yeah,

you're right.

This is like Formula Zero Nicholas Cage for sure.

Willem Dafoe had auditioned for blue velvet they had clicked then brings him in for this

David Lynch says Willem gave a flawlessly perfect performance from start to finish Bobby Prue was a one-of-kind character and Willem nailed it like nobody's business Later he says that he that's a literal quote from David Lynch later he also he does say he thinks the teeth helped him and Dafoe says that too, that he read the screenplay and it says he has these funky teeth.

And he sits down with David and David Lynch says, are you going to go to the dentist to get the teeth?

And Dafoe's like, what do you mean?

But he goes to the dentist and gets like an entire fake set of teeth that fit over his teeth.

They were like oversized and made his mouth be open all the time in this kind of like stupid slack jawed way.

And he says that completely unlocked how to behave as Bobby Peru.

Dafoe is so fascinating because he's talked so much.

I mean, he was like this Wooster group experimental theater guy who's like, I'm like objective based.

I'm like process based.

Like just tell me what I need to do.

And I execute that the best that I can.

I'm not going to get like hung up on trying to justify a character's motivation.

Right.

And he's one of these guys, kind of like Cage, who can like successfully work from the outside in

of like, let me like obsess over the tangible details and then the rest will start to make sense to me.

A lot of other actors, if you gave them

those teeth, they would just play the teeth and it would overwhelm everything.

Right.

The teeth would walk into the room before them.

Totally.

And he was kind of like, I can't crack the character until I get the teeth, but I'm going to like learn my lessons from the teeth, which like, right, if the teeth are like this, then I can't close my mouth.

And if I smile, it shifts my face in this way.

Right.

And he looks so crazy.

Right.

But then he starts to go, well, a guy who has this mouth.

Sure.

Sure.

Then how does he talk?

And how does that affect people?

And like he starts to do the reverse math, which I feel like he always does of like, you tell me what you want and then I'll figure out how to make it make sense.

But he's such a good fit for Lynch in that way.

Right.

Diane Ladd hated blue velvet, which of course her daughter, Laura Dern, is in.

She told Lynch this.

She told Laura this and Lynch this.

She said her quote was, How could he let one of the most beautiful women in the world, Isabella Rossellini, who he was in love with, stand nude in front of the whole world and light her horribly?

So she was, as a woman, she took an exception to that.

But then she gets a phone call from David Lynch and he says, Diane, I've written a script and it's going to star your daughter, Nicholas Cage, but there's a starring role of the mother.

And then he basically was just like, it would honor me for you to take this role.

And she's like, sure.

After Ladd and Dern get Oscar nominations together for Rambling Rose.

Isn't it right before?

Am I wrong?

Let me find out.

You might be right.

Yes, they, of course, obviously Diane Ladd is Lauren Dern's mother.

Yeah, no, that's the next year.

Oh, that's crazier, though.

That they make the movie Rambling Rose together, where they do the same thing again, kind of, and both get Oscar nominations.

But there's a trick, yeah, that Lynch is playing, but I think this is a trick Lynch loves to play.

He loves Hollywood generations.

He loves to cast actors who have famous parents or have some throwback connection, right?

You know?

But also, what you're saying makes sense with her performance having the energy energy of like, I don't want my daughter to be in a David Lynch movie.

Like the way she looks at Sailor with like absolute fear and disgust.

A hundred percent.

Oh, that's so good.

That's such a great read.

She gets that shock Oscar nomination, I would say, to some extent.

Yeah,

loses to Whoopee from Ghost, which is incredible in this.

She's so good.

Diane Lynch's amazing in this movie.

It is like scenes together.

It's like you say, though, Tatiana, like

you shouldn't, it should not work.

She's just like screaming.

And like her character should just feel zero note where it's just like, yeah, she's just this obstacle, right?

She just doesn't want this to happen.

So all she does is try to stop it.

And instead, you kind of feel for her in a weird way.

She's tormented by it to the point that she's like vomiting into the toilet.

Like it's so, she's so, yeah, torn apart by this.

It's kind of powerful.

Like, I don't know.

Like, I, as much as she's also like, this is a Looney Tunes movie sometimes, and she's a Looney Tunes character.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And she's obviously literally the Wicked Witch and they throw water on her picture and it melts.

Watching all the Lynch stuff in this sort of like concentrated focus

as we, as we do.

Yes.

It really does like clarify for me how much the great Lynch project seems to be him earnestly trying to make sense of how people can do evil things.

Like, so many of his stories come back to these like horrible acts of violence that are committed against people and being like, how can a human being do that?

And so often it is this sort of like

unprocessed emotions within people that are driving them crazy, that are making them sick, that are making them vomit, that are turning them into like old universal horror monsters, you know?

Like in this way where the performance has to be that Tenora, as you said, like she's so tortured that she's like smearing lipstick on her face and puking.

Like everything.

By herself, by herself in her house.

But I,

she barely ever leaves her house.

Yeah.

This thing that I keep going back to that I never really focused on, that I'm curious to hear your

read on that is like

there's this element to Lynch I find fascinating that shouldn't work where he will put such wildly different acting styles in the same movie, in the same scene.

Like not just he will ask his leads, like Dern and Cage, to switch between these different modes.

But I was watching one of the early scenes with Diane Ladd and Harry Dean Stanton.

And you are like,

these are absolute opposite ends.

Harry Dean Stanton is an actor who has never once seemed like he was acting on screen.

Like the trick of Harry Dean Stanton is just like, does this guy know he's in a movie?

He just seems like a guy who rolled out of bed and is breathing, you know?

And he's there like playing the emotion so real.

And he's almost doing this remains of the day, like the scene where he breaks down crying in the car and he's embarrassed that she's seeing the emotion in him.

And meanwhile, like, she's next to him, like, screaming at the top of her lungs, you know, and playing like a cartoon version of Angry.

And you're like, how can these two things exist in the same frame and the movie not collapse?

I was thinking that too.

I was in the scene where she's like crawling on the carpet

and it's he's like sitting in the chair.

And there's this weird jazz music underneath the whole thing.

The first half has like so much of this like weird, like, like

like jazz music that kind of like it somehow makes i don't know what the the choice is there but it like keeps it in this like absurd place but doesn't like take enough of the sound away that you're like nervous like you're it's like joyful it's like fun do you know what i mean yeah um but he's he's like so heartbreaking my god he's so and and like i think imbues her too with like if he loves her like right there must be someone there right totally and the two of them are so solidly in what their objectives are what they're you know how how heightened their performance is that it like yeah like he never like seems embarrassed for her or anything like it's just so and i yeah i do think the x factor is that like

he probably wisely on top of diane ladd being like a great actor who had an incredible career up until this point being like it being her real daughter is gonna give it some extra juice.

I could ask her to go as big as possible, as operatic as possible, and she's still going to be playing it in some sort of reality

because she genuinely cares that much about the person she's talking about and has that honest sense of protectiveness.

I mean, just to like zoom out, how insane the opening of this movie is, right?

Like the opening credits play out over fire and jazz music.

Then you go to like the grandest sort of location you've ever seen.

This like beautiful ball.

Yes.

Nicholas Cage comes downstairs in like a fucking jacket and slick back hair doing his Elvis thing.

A guy corners him and is like, I hear you fucked her mom in the bathroom.

Nicholas Cage kind of pretends that he did.

Sure.

It's a little mysterious.

You're not quite sure if it's.

But you're just dropped straight into like, here's this guy introduced with his hot girlfriend.

Then another guy, a stranger, comes up to him, compliments him on just having fucked that woman's mom in the bathroom.

And then they get into a knife fight.

Nicholas Cage kills him.

And then it cuts to like two years later, he's gone to jail for this crime.

And like very quickly thereafter, the movie starts doing flashbacks to the encounter that he had with Diana Ladd in the bathroom.

Where she basically kind of like confronted him, like it wasn't, yes, at all, what we thought it was.

Right.

And it's not like a Rashaman where you're seeing it from different perspectives, but you keep seeing different portions of the interaction, which only gets more and more confusing.

Where like the first time you see it, she comes in super drunk and is desperately trying to get him to fuck her and being really explicit.

And you're like, okay, so did she frame him out of like embarrassment that he rejected her?

But then when they're in the stall together, she's like.

directly threatening him because of perhaps his awareness or adjacency to

crimes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

He has enough attachment to low-life behavior for her to threaten and blackmail him.

She's fucked with low-life behavior as well.

What she's framing as, like, I don't want my daughter getting sucked into this dirty world is I've spent too much time in that dirty world and he knows too much.

And I don't need my version, my daughter's perception of me being destroyed by this guy.

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.

Booking.

Yeah.

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has the ideal stay for anyone, even those who might seem impossible to please.

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 is one other person in the room.

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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a partner who's sleep light, rise early, or maybe, you know, like you just want someone who wants a pool or wants a view or I don't know, any kind of demand.

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

Sure.

Maybe you're in Europe and you want to make sure that's very demanding to be in Europe.

You got air conditioning.

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

Yes.

You got to have air conditioning.

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 like for me a non-negotiable is i need a gorgeous bathroom for selfies yeah you do you love selfies as long as i got a good bathroom mirror for selfies i'm happy with everything else uh look they're again they they're specifying like oh maybe you want a sauna or a hot top and i'm like sounds good to me yeah please can i check that you want one of those in the recording studio that'd be great you want to start you want to be i'll be in the sauna when we record i was going to say you're you want to be the Dalton Trumbo, a podcast.

You want to be Splish Splash.

You would look good if I had a sauna and a cold plunge.

And while recording, I'm on mic, but you just were going back.

I'm like,

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kinds of demands that booking.com, booking.

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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 Avenger.

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

Macon Blair's remake of...

Reimagining.

reimagining, whatever.

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 order as they asked, which I really appreciate.

Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay,

Taylor Page with Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon.

Tremblay is Toxie's son.

His stepson.

His stepson.

Okay.

Wade Goose.

Yes.

Great name.

Give us the takes.

We haven't heard them yet.

Okay.

You got fucking Dinkledge 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 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 some things you liked about the movie.

Okay, well, I'm a Jersey guy.

I just got to say, the original movie was shot in the town where I went to high school.

Truma.

Yes.

Yes, that's right.

The original film.

Yep.

I grew up watching toxic and trauma movies on porches

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 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.

It's gooey.

It's sufficiently gooey.

Tons of blood, tons of goo,

great action.

It's really fucking funny.

It just, it, 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 and one of the huge hit more interesting yeah theatrical box office phenomenons the last five years want to make that happen again here

tickets are on sale right now advanced sales really matter for movies like this so if y'all were planning on seeing toxic avenger go ahead and buy those tickets please go to toxicavenger.com slash blank check to get your tickets blank check one word in theaters august 29th yep 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.

And they are the most dang-ass freaks of dang-ass freaks.

I'm excited to see it.

And your endorsement, I think, carries more weight than anyone else is in the world on this.

Seriously, get your tickets now.

Go to toxicadvenger.com/slash blank check.

Do it, do it.

So that's the setup of the film.

Then he gets out of prison.

They go to a hotel and he gets his snakeskin jacket back, which is an expression of his personal.

What's the line?

Brendan says it all the time.

Expression of his personal, what is it?

I remember the first time I saw that.

It says individuality, right?

I first saw this movie in college to symbolize my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.

Yes.

Right.

Which was like, didn't he get that?

Didn't he choose to bring that jacket in?

Wasn't that his choice?

I was going to say that line feels like something Cage basically said.

Cage mission statement of like, you think I get that's a six skin jacket just because it looks cool, but actually it represents individuality.

But then it's also cute.

But he's like, thanks, babies.

And I've never tell you this jacket here represents a simple woman.

And she's like, yeah, like 50,000 times.

That's all you say.

But she says it with so much love.

She loves him and he loves her.

And they go have sex and then they go see a speed metal band.

And then they get in a big fight because a guy like bumped up against her in a speed metal concert.

It's not like it's

a coster.

He does this

on the lost highway where you're like,

when he cuts in present-day music, it feels jarring.

What the hell?

Why are they like concert?

They're not stuck in the 50s, right?

But then he brings it back to the 50s by singing Love Me to her, Presley style.

They go to a hotel, they have sex again, and they're like, you know what?

We got to just go to California, forget my parole, because we're in Cape Fear, right?

We're in like

the Carolinas, but let's just drive across the city.

This is super heightened pillow talk.

Like the way they talk about each other's bodies, the way they describe the sex that they've just had.

Like they're in like a dime store novel and they're, they're loving it.

Like the sort of thing.

Which is vastly different from the second half where they're like not having sex.

One of them's in bed.

They're both closed all the time.

And he's so low energy in the second.

He's like, I just got to go to sleep.

When he says that in the second half, there's that moment where he's like, yeah, I just got to go to sleep right now because he doesn't want to talk to her about Bobby Peru.

You're kind of devastated.

You're like, What?

Come on, Sailor always has time to talk to Lula.

No, it's the darkness is there from the beginning.

Yeah.

But like, they're sort of playing the role of being like young and in love and unencumbered.

And they're trying to push that for as long as they can and ignore the other shit.

I think when I saw this in college, though, I was like, Yeah, this is what like, right, white hot romance is.

It's just like, you know, having constant sex in motels while talking about how like amazing it all is and then having to get on the road.

And the movie is, you're so with it, but as I think I often forget about this movie, it runs out of steam intentionally to remind you that yes, you cannot simply outrun all your problems, especially if it's like lipstick covered Diane Ladd trying to kill you.

Like she can't just be run away from.

That's a hard one to run away from.

And as the movie goes on, they witness this car accident.

As you said, basically right in the middle of the movie,

Sherilyn Fenn, right, playing the young victim.

She's so good.

He casts her in Twin Peaks first and then this off of that.

Is that right?

I think so.

Because he does the pilot of Twin Peaks before this and then the show after this, if that makes sense.

And she is a man.

And right.

And it is this kind of like, oh, the illusion's been shattered a little bit.

The vibes are now bad.

And now we're in Big Tuna, Texas.

Yeah.

A wonderfully named town this is mostly a texas movie

it begins and ends in california but most of it's texas and i guess a little new orleans yeah it's mostly shot in those three places yeah huh when you look for big tuna it says jim halpert he's jim big tuna in the office yeah yeah

oh my god i think of bill parcels right the famous big tuna no i think of jim halper

and like For some reason, Big Tuna is like where Sailor is from, right?

This is, right?

This is the plot of the movie.

I'm trying to tell you guys the plot of Wild at Heart.

I need to help with the plot, please.

Big Tuna, you know, he's got his old flame Perdita Durango, who is Isabella Rossellini, looking great with

the blonde hair.

An incredible look.

I mean, just every time I watch it, I'm like, that can't be her.

Yeah.

There's something, it's bizarre how much the hair changes her entire vibe.

And then feels like her eyebrows are even darker and bushier than they usually are in contrast.

Also, her last scene in the movie, it's like she's visibly wearing a wig.

Did you guys notice that?

Maybe they shot it later or something.

Well, like

her first chunk of scenes, it looks like her hair is just dyed, right?

And her final scene in the car, it's like the wig is not fitting properly.

You see

her real hair sticking out from underneath.

It's not just like the wig looks fake, it's not attached properly.

And I think that's intention.

I don't know, because I could also see it being like she comes out of of the trailer.

The wig isn't pinned down.

She's like, I got to fix this.

And Lynch is like, no, that's perfect.

Yeah.

They do look kind of like that.

That last scene where they're driving in the car and it's Bobby Peru and her, right?

Yes.

In like the same seats that the two, that, that our heroes were in.

And then this character is the Rosie Perez movie.

Exists in other Barry Gifford novels.

Correct.

There's lots of Bar Gifford novels about Sailor and Lula and this world.

She's like the Ray Nicolette weaving through all of these.

So there is a different movie called Pertita Durango, also called Dance with the Devil, which stars Rosie Perez.

And Hunter Bardem with one of the worst haircuts in history.

Oh, he does look bad.

Yeah.

Which is

also silly.

He looks bad.

How does he look bad?

I'll show you.

Yeah, I'll send you a picture of that.

Yeah, he looks very silly in this movie.

And, but anyway, yeah.

And so she's kind of there and she's sympathetically lending an ear, but she also knows that Diane Ladd's trying to kill them.

And then Bobby Peru shows up and is just like the worst vibes of all time person, but they can't leave because Lula's pregnant and sick in bed, I guess.

That's sort of what I do spend some of the middle of this movie being like, just leave.

Like, don't hang out with Bobby Peru.

He's obviously no good.

But it's almost this sense of like entropy kicking in.

Yeah.

Right.

Where they cannot figure out.

Right.

It's like they've gotten to the point that they never thought they'd have to actually meet.

They're people who aren't thinking about their future and are trying to run away from their past.

Did you send a picture?

I sent a picture.

Yeah, it's brutal.

It's really bad.

I mean, the guy's not afraid of bad haircuts.

No, no, no.

I was going to say, within a canon of wild hair choices.

But it's not good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I feel like I've heard that movie's good, though.

Okay.

Yeah.

I'll check it out.

Yeah.

I don't, yeah, I believe you.

I mean, I love Rosie Perez.

Yeah.

I'm being honest.

Okay.

Feels like you think I'm being insincere right now, but I'm into it.

Just trying to break through this wall you're constructing, David.

I'll do it.

I'll do anything you want me to do.

No, I think it's just like these are two people who never thought about actually having to make these types of tough decisions.

Yeah.

We haven't mentioned that, like, the flashback, the horrible flashback Lula has to her rape when she's a teenager from this sort of family friend that then when Bobby Peru kind of accosts her

in the hotel, he's in the motel.

No hotel.

He's also kind of summoning up like her worst sort of nightmares.

Right.

Right.

I mean, and she's talked about this from like early on in the film.

She's like told the story to Sailor.

This is sort of the like fake uncle who filled the void when her father died.

And the narrative she'd always been told is that her father self-immolated, that he like set himself on fire.

Right.

Yeah.

And what we're, what we come to understand as the movie went on is uh why am i forgetting the name uh not cactus uh what's the um

cactus is the other guy there's so many like a bad criminal men in this movie um just the guy named cactus marcella santos yeah jay freeman's character yes yes mr reindeer yes thanks the english guy i don't know how i got to cactus yeah i don't know

but but that he was uh perhaps uh set on fire right right this was not intentional he was murdered he was murdered yes.

There is a cut scene from the film of the murder of Harry Dean Stanton that's very long and torturous that Lynch apparently showed at two test screenings, and basically, like, almost all of the audience walked out during it.

And he did after one, he was like, Well, let me try it one more time.

And after a second, he was like, I guess I need to cut this back a lot.

Frankenstein's also like the most sympathetic character in the film.

He is kind of over.

It would be too painful to watch him get punished.

Yes, he sailor agrees to rob a feed store with Bobby Peru.

It's such a bad idea.

I don't know why I'm criticizing

the realism of this movie.

Bobby Peru is this classic, like,

Lynch archetype of one person who seemingly is the manifestation of everything that's bad.

He's not a good guy.

Right.

And there's the notion of like, you need money because you have, you know,

Lula's in a family way.

Yeah.

Just do one crime with me.

Right.

I have a gun for you.

I have a mask for you.

No one's going to get hurt.

They rob the place.

Bobby Peru immediately opens fire on everybody, basically, and then it's like, your next buddy.

Yes.

And it turns out Nicholas Cage has been loaded with blanks.

But also has already sexually assaulted Lula at this point, like comes in with the pitch after he has.

I mean, and that scene is such a good, I think, illustration of what, like...

When, when, when, increasingly in the last, you know, 15 years, when women have felt more comfortable, like, sharing their stories of these kinds of horrible incidents and stupid people will respond by being like, why didn't you just punch them in the face and run out of there?

Yeah.

You know, like, how did you stay in the room?

And I think Durin plays this so well of the actual just being frozen.

Frozen.

And there's like that horrible thing that I think she's contending with, which is like.

The hand thing happens again in that scene.

And to me, that feels like part of her is like also waking up again in a way.

Like she's She's been refreshing it, sure.

Yeah, but like not that it's like, you know, right or good, but that there's something about this, this encounter and this danger.

Like, you know, we've seen her be aroused in a dangerous situation in the past.

And so there's something about this that like shamefully also triggers that in her.

And I think that...

It's so complicated and I don't know exactly what is going on in that scene, but it's also shot in like a weird porn way in the beginning.

It's like such a wide shot, it looks like it's on a stage.

And then suddenly, yes, that motel room is the most like stagey of all the environments in the movie.

Yes, yeah, and especially in that scene, it like backs up like almost to the edges of the walls, and it's like brightly lit, and they're just like sort of these two small objects moving within a very wide frame, and it's very strange suddenly in the like sort of visual vocab of the movie.

Like it feels very like jarring.

And it feels like that thing of like the unwritten rules of behavior are like slowly being eroded in this way where like he comes in and is like, you want to fuck me.

And she says no 20 times.

She says it every way.

And he's obviously completely repulsive and they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

It's like an insane, you know.

She's saying it verbally, she's saying it with her body, she's saying it with her energy, and he keeps moving closer and closer to her and she's freaking out more and more.

And then there's the moment when he actually makes contact and it's like she freezes.

That's when she starts, she stops pushing back as aggressively.

And you're watching it going like, is she enjoying this?

Has something shifted?

Why is she becoming like complacent with this?

Is she too terrified to move?

I do think it's what you're saying of like, she's told.

the stories about her uncle to Sailor early on, but in a way where she's like kind of packaged it neatly.

Yeah.

This is a terrible thing that happened to me and I like hate it and I've come to terms with it and it doesn't define me.

But then when the actions are being repeated, it becomes like insurmountable in the same way that now like she's thinking about the abortion she had in relation to her current pregnancy.

Well, it's like this pattern that she found her life in, right?

Like even running away hasn't stopped this thing from like continuing to haunt her.

And as you said, like Sailor is the exact right amount of danger for her.

She clearly is caught up in a pattern where her like love language is tied to this sense of like edginess and living carefree and breaking rules and whatever.

But it's what Lynch recognized in the book of like, he is emotionally intelligent.

He does listen to her, you know?

It's just the right balance of the two.

And Bobby Peru is only the bad shit.

Right.

And the power imbalance, like they're not looking at each other equally like Sailor and Lula do.

It's like from a totally warped perspective.

Yeah, it's so gruesome.

She doesn't tell Sailor about that.

He doesn't know how Bobby Prue knows that she's pregnant.

And he feels so discombobulated by this like pressure of like, do I actually need to figure out how to be a solid person now?

Like if we have a child, we can't just keep driving forever.

and getting into fights at heavy metal concerts.

And I guess that's why he's robbing a feed store because they will need money.

Right.

It's no longer that they just need like,

you know, gas in the tank and, you know, jizz in his balls.

Like, I don't know what they need, like what they eat even.

Like, I don't understand how they exist, except it just seems like they fuel each other.

And now it's, you know, now it's not going to work anymore.

His plan is so short.

I would maybe not rob a feed store in the middle of fucking nowhere.

I'm not trying to pat myself on the back.

But no, the plan is very short-sighted because you're not like, look, we robbed this one guy.

Each of us makes it out with $5 million.

You never have to worry about it.

$5,000.

This is what I'm saying.

Bobby Pretty doesn't come to him with something where it's like, if you do this one crime with me, your son is set.

Just do it.

Who cares?

Right.

It's like $5,000.

It's like, that's not going to get you through labor.

Yeah.

And he blows his head off in the greatest way.

It is so crazy.

I can only, look, I saw this movie in college on my little television in my room.

I remember I rented it, you know, and I was so pumped for it.

And it was great.

But imagine like seeing this movie live 1990, being like, I don't know where this is going, but the Bobby Peru showdown is so tense.

And then five minutes later, he shot his own head off of his body with a shotgun by mistake.

Like, like it was a balloon.

Yeah.

Just like landed on it wrong.

This shot was altered for America.

And in Britain, it's bloodier in Europe and elsewhere.

And it was, this movie was going to get an NC17 and they slightly unbloodied it.

You can see the differences.

I think the DVDs here have finally caught up to the unrated version, but I'm not sure.

I think so.

I think so.

But anyway, it was a notorious bit of violence.

Wild to me, though, that there's so much

violence in this movie that isn't just

somebody shooting their head off, but like violence towards Lula and that that would be the issue.

Like I know.

Well, that's of course so much red paint all over Lula.

It's the absurdity of the MPAA where right you can have the the vilest content

if it's not like gory enough they're like yeah whatever sure you can do that like yeah like you can have the most upsetting content we should also acknowledge we had to find uh an illegal uh upload of this movie for you to watch attack because you're like on the road filming you were away from your physical copy and this is one of those movies that is currently in an absolute like rights void where it is not streamable anywhere it's not rentable anywhere it's out of print print on Blu-ray.

Most of the

DVDs.

Yeah.

That's why you got to buy DVDs.

I mean, I have the shop Blu-ray, but yeah, I assume it's because this was like a polygram Samuel go, like these companies are odd.

It feels like Lynch has like, you know, so thoroughly hitched his wagon to Criterion and is like, you folks are the preservers of my catalog.

You keep my movies in circulation.

Rialto at Janus like plays them at revival theaters and they're streaming on Criterion Collection.

And this is one of the last ones that is not part of the Criterion deal.

I'm sure they'll figure it out eventually.

But yes, hard to watch now.

I also just want to call out as we like talk about Bobby Peru being this like wild shift in the movie.

The prelude to Bobby Peru is like they stop in this town and then you're introduced to four of the weirdest guys.

sitting around a table.

Like you get four weird guys and then they're like, you think these guys are weird?

Me, Bobby Peru.

Like Bobby Peru is like the aristocrat right in the martin mole version of the joke the classy yeah right john lorry's in is that john lorry yes yes uh john lorry you got jack nance right we've got uh frank collison who's one of those ultimate that guy actors uh-huh um is peru taylor vince one of those guys yes yeah absolutely great guys yes um and this is it for them right it's just that it's basically just that scene it's just to be like oh here are four weird dudes with weird david lynch energy and then bobby Prue comes and just one-ups them all.

There's also the Freddie Jones monologue at the bar, which is another just one of those.

Just a scene of a guy being weird.

Freddie Jones, obviously.

Wait, is that the guy with the munchkin voice?

Yes, correct.

Yeah, he's got to have a munchkin voice.

He's like the big tufty hair.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's what that was a reference to, right?

Like that was supposed to be.

Yeah, he's like a lollipop guild.

Yeah.

I mean, right.

There's this movie, which I have not seen called Lynch Oz.

Have you seen it, Griff?

Yeah, I'm not a terrific fan of it.

Sure, which is a documentary about his obsession with wizard of oz right i don't know much else about that's like a two-hour video essay runs a little thin if you ask me

i've noticed that david lynch likes the wizard of oz right um but even like speaking of uh jack nance is this his no he's in lost highway lost highway's the last

uh jack nance yeah yeah yeah that's his last performance for lynch before he dies but they like roll jack nance out you think he's going to be the ultimate heightening of the weird dudes his character's name is double o spool pretty good name

And his opening line is,

my dog barks some.

Yes, that's right.

That's what he's, and he delivers it beautifully.

Mentally, you picture my dog, but I have not told you the type O dog I have.

Perhaps you might even picture Toto from the Wizard of Oz, but I can tell you my dog is always with me, ARF.

He says ARF.

He says ARF.

Perfect.

How many times has ARF ever been said in cinema?

By a human?

Yeah.

Probably not that many.

Or a human as human, not a human as dog, not the shaggy dog, or right, right, right, right.

Pruchinski, the night bitch, the night bitch, of course.

We all must pay our respects to the night bitch.

She is coming.

All hail the night bitch, yeah, night night bitch coming.

Oh, Lord, she comes, not your heads.

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So the last chunk of Wild at Heart.

And again, as we've mentioned, like in this middle part, Nicholas Cage, Sailor's energy, has dwindled.

And it feels like it only comes to life when Bobby Peru like points a gun at him.

Then finally, he's got a little fight in him left, but then he goes to prison now for seven years, six years.

Uh, Lula has their child, and then they reunite, and uh, he meets his son, and he's like, Well, I guess you're a must, you know, like, and it seems kind of like a big bummer, but almost immediately, it's like, you don't know me, it'd be easier if I just left, right?

He basically is immediately pulling the, I gotta get out of here, I'm no good for you, and it feels like the movie is over, and then he sees Cheryl Lee as the Glinda the Good Witch in her bubble from The Wizard of Oz, the movie.

We referenced it.

Yeah, I did.

Which I've noticed David Lynch likes a little bit.

She says, don't turn away from Love Sailor.

And he,

oh, he's already, he's had the fight with the men and he used a homophobic slur against them.

And then he apologized.

He apologizes

and

runs after Lula and sings Lovely, Love Me Tender to her as a way of reuniting with her.

Sending the audiences out.

Great nose.

I think feeling happy, maybe distressed nonetheless by this sort of like odd, violent movie they saw.

Yeah.

But, you know,

hopeful.

Yeah.

But I also think some people are then like, is he fucking with us?

Why does this movie swerve into this happy, magical ending at the end?

Right.

And I do think it's very

intense,

right?

In a way, like the

swerve.

So intense that you can almost feel like the guy adapted a book with a bad, a sad ending, and then at the last five minutes wrote a few more pages that are like, and then there's a happy ending.

And if it wasn't David Lynch, it might not work at all.

It works fine for me watching the movie.

I don't care.

Like the swings and energy are sort of part of the movie's general swings and energy, right?

I think so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and there's like an undercurrent of like, is this just like them grasping at something that makes them feel young again?

And then like, what happens?

I'm always interested in like, what happens after he finishes this song?

What happens?

Like, when he's just like, the song's done.

And then they like have to walk over to the car and like get in the car.

And then they have to figure out what they're going to have for dinner.

And like, is, is life going to be romantic or is it just going to go back to life?

That's, I mean, his final realization.

And you don't know how he's actually going to be able to ride it out, but that he's like, I got to just try to do day-by-day life.

Like she's now had six years of like being a parent and presumably having some more structured life that I have been deprived of.

Which we don't see one

second of.

And he wants to be a little bit more like a bad thing.

No, but she's got a blowout now.

Her hair is very, her hair is slick.

So you know that she's gotten her shit together.

She's gotten her shit together.

I love the ending of Knocked Up, a movie I think about the ending specifically a lot.

I do too.

And I think a lot of people misread at the time.

Where they have been fighting for half of the movie at that point.

Yes.

Then they just have the baby.

They make up.

I'm putting air quotes around it a little bit.

And they drive home with the baby.

And the ending is happy.

They're going to have the baby together.

They don't do the graduate thing of like, what now?

No.

But it also ends up

kind of an innocuous joke.

The movie ends on him making some joke about traffic.

Yes.

And like, you're kind of like, are they, is this going to work out, number one?

And two, even if it does work out, i.e., they raise this baby together and are married, is that going to be wonderful for them?

I don't know, like, maybe.

The movie's kind of about like, eh, you just kind of have to fit your life around what's happened to you.

Now, I don't know why I'm comparing it to Wild at Heart, but in Wild at Heart, it's like if you sit down for one second and you're like, Yeah, wait, what are they going to do next?

You don't know.

I don't know how their life is going to work or whatever.

Also, the fascinating thing about the time jump, which, as you said, Tat, she's transitioned to a more mature hairdo, right?

She's been raising this kid alone.

Like something shifted within her that he clearly immediately like pushes back against and is like, it'd be, it'd be easier if you never knew me.

You know, it's like you, you two are fine on your own.

He doesn't quite know what his life is going to look like now.

Like she's a different person.

And you kind of get the sense that he spent like six years in jail, just still being Sailor Ripley and ready to come out and put the jacket back on and do his fucking thing

and it's like they're not just gonna be like cranking the music and like riding with the top down for the rest of time

and that's the scariest thing to him is he doesn't know what that looks like you don't know if it's gonna work out

but he's at least decided he must try yeah But she goes off at one point, she like gets out of the car and she's like, has a moment where she like can't, where she's just like crying.

and it's like is that like the disappointment of seeing him again and it's like you build up this person in your head and then you're just standing in front of them or is he gonna leave or is it like what is it i don't i don't i don't remember exactly what she says at the end there but

yeah they're almost like two things of

Is this person failing to live up to the vision or the picture you've been holding on to in your head for years while he was gone?

Or is it like you're reintroduced to this guy and you realize how much you've changed, right?

Yeah, and maybe he's stuck in the same place, right?

He's still the snakeskin jacket guy, Ben.

You haven't weighed in.

You're like, Wilded Hearts of Ben movie, oh, for sure, about a dang-ass freak or two, yeah, some freakery style choices.

Oh my god, yeah, this is such a movie, just for

like, I feel like its style has been like uh referenced in a many of uh fashion brands yep sure right like i feel like people always are looking to this film this is what i'll say

hachi machi oh thank you couldn't have said it any better myself booga booga my eyes are bursting out steam coming out of my ears finest film critic that's really all i have to say okay

okay

Yeah, Griff,

do you feel better or worse about this movie removed from the Nicholas Cage before we do like the box office camera?

Watching it in the Nicolas Cage context was interesting because it was also like, I've been doing a similar thing now where I've been trying to go through Michael Keaton's filmography in chronological order under less duress.

Yeah,

take as your time on that one.

I'm sorry.

Made less, fewer films.

I'm not re-watching as many of the ones I've seen before.

But it does become this distortive effect.

And this was all like leading up to Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, where I'm like so caught up in the language language of how this one guy operates and thinking about his place in time and like what all these movies were as decisions, you know, like watching them in order.

It's like, what was he trying to do?

What was he responding to or like trying to overcorrect from the last movie or what was he working towards trying to change the way people saw him?

And so the first time I watched this, it was in that kind of context for Cage,

where I, you know, wrote this whole fucking piece for an iPad-only magazine that was never published about, like, feeling like I was time traveling through 30 years of Nicholas Cage's life and all his like hopes and dreams and ambitions.

And this just felt like it was one of those movies in the middle, certainly one of the better ones, where I was primarily looking at it through like Cage is just trying shit.

He's like throwing everything at the wall.

This is one of the early times where he's like, been minted enough that people trust him and they want his thing and his thing is proven and he's with the right director who's encouraging him.

I'm, you know, watching it this time, I'm much more in the lynch of it.

I think the thing that's most interesting about this film to me is, you know, he talks so much about After Dune

not wanting to adapt anything ever again,

that he like hated the feeling of being beholden to a book

and not being able to answer everything himself because it didn't come from him and needing to like fight the studio on things versus like, this is my vision.

You just have to accept it.

Versus them having their own ideas of how it would look or whatever.

And then this is only six years later.

And he's adapting a book that inspired him.

I mean,

it's really the last time he does that.

Obviously, like the straight story is based on a true story, but he didn't write that movie anyway.

And it comes to him as a finished script and he just decides to direct it.

Right.

So this is the last time he's doing that, but clearly he had such a connection to Barry Gifford's writing.

And then they worked on a movie together later.

That's what's most interesting to me about this is just this feeling of like,

what did he latch onto so strongly in this that he felt it overrode his own strategy?

I think it makes total sense when he says it's just like it spoke to the violence of like late 80s America to him.

Yes.

And I get that.

Like it's a way for him to reckon with things in his own special way.

Bobby Peru.

And also like him making this simultaneous Bobby Peru, him making this simultaneous with the great Twin Peaks experiment, which is all, you know, if it had run for as long as they hoped it would run, would have been about these never-ending cycles of violence.

Sure.

You know, do you like Twin Peaks, Daniel?

Have you ever done that?

Done it?

Watched it?

Yeah.

Have you ever lived?

I've lived it.

I'm from Saskatchewan, baby.

Twin Peaks as you get.

Yeah, yeah, no, you're right.

Twin Peaks would never have evened out.

It would always be about,

yes, exactly.

Right.

And like his dream was that they would never solve the lore of Palmer Mystery, but when they were forced to solve it, he was like, great, then there'll just be a new crime.

It's about how these things keep happening.

And then when he's forced, not forced to, but when he like makes a movie to try to put an ending on the series that everyone felt unsatisfied by, he makes the movie that is like, you could argue Firewalk with me has a version of a happy ending, but

has an ending.

But that movie is also just about living in the cycles of darkness.

And it's a movie that's stuck in a loop where you know the outcome, right?

You're working towards a bad ending.

You're filling in a gap of suffering towards an inevitable outcome that we know is horrible.

It's very interesting for him to make this movie at this point where he reads the book and is like, and I want like a magical fairy to come down to literally have it be Laura Palmer and like give them a magical release.

of like, hey, guy, stand up and like step up and just kind of do the right thing and try to engage with normal life.

Do you think that was him saying that?

Like that that's his, that that was his vision, like his worldview?

Well, that there is escape.

You know what?

This is what's also interesting about him is he's talked so much about like his failed relationships in his life and his like kids with different women and how he like does struggle to connect with other people.

How like he is so first and foremost married to his art, but and not just his art, but this idea of like, I wake up, I smoke five cigarettes, I have 12 cups of coffee and I paint, you know, and then like, and then I meditate for these hours.

Like he lives this very rigid life.

And he talks about like,

you know, I, I, I keep warning people not to marry me because

I don't know how to like change my lifestyle.

And his lifestyle.

totally wild at heart.

Right.

Like it feels like all the characters kind of pulled apart, you know, like that he could be any of those threads.

And his lifestyle isn't like, quote-unquote, dangerous or rebellious in this kind of way.

And if anything, it's like very controlled, you know?

He talks so much, and I've been saying this a lot this series, but about like, he's like, I wear the same thing, I eat the same thing, I do the same thing at the same times because I'm trying to build my life around routines so that when I stop, my brain has more space for creativity.

because I'm eliminating the decision-making process for most aspects of my life.

But it also

allows a container so that then the brain can go wild, like it can go off in directions that aren't that linear, rigid.

Like there's so little rigidity to what he makes.

Right.

He's like, my life is based on like 10 presets that I don't question.

If anything, once every two years, I change what the three meals I eat a day are, but they're still going to be the same three things.

I could do a whole brand overhaul, but then I'm committing to that for like two more years.

And with his children, I think he's always sort of like, I don't really know how to like build them into my lifestyle.

You know, not that he's like emotionally distant or dismissive, but that, and same with his like romantic partners.

It does feel like that's sort of what's speaking to him.

It is interesting he gives this movie the happy ending of the guy choosing to like double down and try it

when that has often not worked for him.

Is there anything else you want to say about the film Tatiana before we played the box office game?

No, I mean, I think the two times I've seen it now, or whatever it's been, the first time I feel like was such a wash of just like joy at like the playfulness of it.

And I like didn't even like glom on to half the stuff that was happening.

I was just like, this is just a, this is a ride.

And it felt like, it felt like the music and all of his choices were really like making you feel that sense of, like you're saying, like the innocence of falling in love

and the heartbreak of it turning.

And then the second time I watched it, I was like so zeroed in on

these amazing visual patterns.

And maybe that's also like what you're talking about, about the like.

that there is like patterns even visually in what he brings back and that the cycle, even though it feels like chaos, there are these little like touchstones of like repeated images that work on you and that aren't necessarily linear, but like drop in at different moments, these like emotional, because I don't feel like it's like a cold film at all.

Um, it feels really

full of beating heart.

Um, yeah, absolutely, yes, yeah, but I don't have anything smart to say about it, except that I like many smart things.

I like it a lot of things.

I think it's really good.

I think it's a good movie, you guys.

Hell yeah.

Hot tick.

Griffin, this film came out August 17th, 1990.

It was a mild hit.

This is sort of the summer of Lynch, like you said.

Right.

He's kind of hot stuff because of Twin Peaks.

He gets the Palme d'Or.

He gets a lot of sort of newspaper coverage, I feel like, in a big kind of way.

Cajun Dern are on the come up.

Yeah, exactly.

These are, these are sort of right, up-and-coming stars.

And it makes $15 million, which is like not bad for a summer art movie essentially um but it's opening number 10 okay at the box office in sort of semi-limited august 1990 yeah dude this is a weird fun odd list okay so is ghost already out no ghost griffin you have already guessed is number two at the box office having been out for six weeks it's made a hundred million dollars and obviously it is one of the hits of the summer and she makes the pottery wasn't it the highest grossing film of 1990 am i wrong about that i mean if not the highest highest-grossing film, I'm just trying to think of the biggest grossing.

The biggest number one, Home Alone and Pretty Women are the other pretty gross.

Well, those come out later.

Yeah, Home Alone is Christmas.

Is Die Hard 2 still in the top 10?

No, Die Hard 2 is number 11 at the box office.

Have you seen Ghost, Tatiana?

Do you like Ghost?

Oh my God.

Story about Ghost.

Saw it first time about a year ago.

Wow.

Didn't think I was going to survive it.

I wept uncontrollably, like to a point where I was like in a little bit of a depression for two days afterwards.

I was like, that worked really well.

That movie.

Incredibly cheesy.

David recently also

referred to it as a movie that has rocks in its brains, which caused some guys.

I talked to my therapist the day after.

I was like, I was like, I don't think I'm going to be okay for a little bit.

I support you completely.

It is one of those movies.

It's kind of insane that you're like, wait, it's just called Ghost?

What's it about?

Oh,

he's a ghost.

And you're like, what is the plot of the movie?

And they're like, oh, he was in love with her and they made the pottery and now he's a ghost.

And like, you're like, how is this a $600 million

sensation?

And you're not only that, but you're like, what genre is it?

All of them?

Yeah, it's like, oh, it's like a romantic comedy, horror.

Supernatural mystery.

And you're like, is it good?

And people are like, I mean, not really like, but it does completely work.

Like, it works.

If I'm going to watch a Swayze movie, I'm going going to watch Dirty Dancing,

which I think is perfect in every single way.

Ghost is a little more, you know, goopy.

And so it kind of like it's trying to make you cry and all that.

And it is just one of those movies that, yes, when you look back on it, you're like, what?

But when you're watching it, you're like,

Ghost is a total eclipse of the heart for me.

Like, it's the way that I feel when I was 10 and I heard that song for the first time.

That song the first time I heard it, I was like, I didn't know music was allowed to sound like this even correct like

but it's it but it works and it keeps

working there's that and you keep going like okay i think i got the song i think i know what the song

uh number one at the box office though is sort of a comparison

it's a horror film okay it's a sequel

it's a straight sequel is it absolutely is it one of the icons of horror yes it is uh although this is an odd series and its sequels are often only very loosely connected to each other.

And this is one of the most disconnected.

It has, I would say,

for filmers, I would say it has the most famous jump scare of all time.

It has the most famous jump scare of all time.

Whenever you find those lists on websites of like, you know, the most famous jump scares, it's always basically number one.

Is it the Exorcist III?

Exorcist three, William Peter Bladdy's film.

Based on his.

Don't tell me what this moment is because I know I'm supposed to watch it and I was told I shouldn't know what this jump scare is.

I won't tell you and you should watch it.

I bet you've never seen it.

I feel like you're not a big Exorcist guy, Griffin.

I love the original.

Yeah.

But you've never really delved into the Exorcist world.

No, and I feel like two and three were both hated when they came out and now have Defenders.

Well, two was hated.

Three was a sort of solid hit, but people were kind of like, huh?

Like, this is an Exorcist movie?

Because it's really just William Peter Bladdy, the writer of the novel.

adapting another book he wrote called Legion, which is not connected to.

And directed it himself because they were like, how do do we get back to what people liked about this?

And kind of just vaguely bringing it into Exorcist land, but it's really basically a movie about like using the occult supernatural powers to capture the Zodiac killer.

So, shout out Shea Filmore once again, because this happened at Trivia and I'm giving away what the answer is, but you're going to love this question.

But it did boggle our mind until I think Marie finally cracked it.

But it was like, what franchise has filmed entries in these years and only these years?

Ah, yeah, right.

And when you see the Exorcist spilled out like that, it makes, you're like, how could that be possible?

73, 77, 90,

2004, 2005, 2023.

Right.

It is weird, given how universal the Exorcist movies are and like always enduring, right?

People are always watching the Exorcist.

But you're like, it's successful enough that they're not giving up on it, but the gaps are so big.

And then you're like, how could there be back-to-back 04 and 05, but not 06?

And you're like, oh, because they made the same movie twice with two two different directors and then released both of them.

They did.

They did do that.

Crazy.

George C.

Scott, of course, is the star of the Exorcist 3 gang.

A very quiet and small performance.

And Linda Blair is not that one.

No, but Jason Miller is.

Okay.

Spoiler alert.

Number two is Ghost.

Number three

was number one the week before.

It is a sort of sexy horror movie with a bunch of young stars.

In 1990.

In 1990.

It's not Flatliners.

It is Flatliner.

It is.

Flatliner.

With Kiefer Sutherland Canada Zone.

Kiefer Sutherland.

Julie Clayman.

I got him.

Julie Roberts, Billy Baldwin, Oliver Platt, and Mr.

Bacon.

I know it mostly as back when I used to really care about Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

It was a great one for that.

Connects you to a lot of people.

Yeah.

It's a...

That is a movie with rocks in its brain.

Yes.

That is a stupid movie.

It's pretty fun.

Pretty fun.

Joel Schumacher movie where he's pumping the dry ice and everyone's hot and feathered hair and all that.

And then they did their remake like a sequel and and everyone's like, You're pushing it, guys.

Let's get at it.

You can't make us reinvest it.

I was at TIFF.

I've said this before, but I was at TIFF one year that that movie was the September release, right?

The early Labor Day horror movie.

And so I had to watch the trailer for it a million times at the Scotiabank Theater, just playing over and over again while I waited in line.

Anyway, shout out Toronto, where Tatiana currently is.

Number four at the box office, new this week, Griffin.

A very strange movie, one I've never seen.

Crime comedy.

I've probably seen it.

Yes.

Crime Comedy with two big comedy stars that is

also inspired.

It has the same inspiration as a big drama from the year before.

No, the same year.

The same year.

The same year.

There's a big drama movie coming out later this year that is also about this

thing, this guy.

Oh, it's My Blue Heaven.

My Blue Heaven.

Are you aware of this, Tatiana?

No, what are you talking about?

It's a Nora Efron comedy.

She didn't direct it, but she wrote it.

Yeah.

Nicholas Puzzo.

Starring.

Nicholas Peledgy.

Nicholas Peledgy, who wrote Goodfellas, the book, a non-fiction account, right?

Nora Efron is married to him.

The book was called Wise Guy, but yes.

Yes.

Nora Efron is married to him, and she writes a movie about a gangster going into witness protection.

Basically, what is the ending point of Goodfellas where now this guy is living in the suburbs?

And she is so like lit up by that idea that she writes a broad comedy starring Steve Martin.

What?

And Rick Moranis as his like hapless next-door neighbor.

No, Rick Moranis.

Did she say Rick Moranis?

He's the one that's protecting the Fed who's in charge of him.

Steve Martin and Joan Kusek are the couple.

Right.

Are playing Ray Liotta and

Lorraine Gracco ostensibly, but it comes out months before Goodfellas.

Like this husband and wife.

do their own versions of the same story, except hers is kind of a fictionalized sequel it doesn't really make much of an impact i feel like it's not a well-known movie for those actors really martin with like a flat top yeah and like a big zoom have you seen it yeah is it any good it's kind of funny cool yeah

number five at the box office is a film uh that i really enjoy a very fun legal movie that and this has never happened before since got turned into a bloated mini-series on an expensive streaming network recently starring incredibly sane actors starting an incredibly normal actor who's famous and has an Oscar nomination.

Presumed Innocent.

Presumed Innocent.

Oh, Mon Dieu.

Presumed Innocent, the Harrison Ford Alan Pakula movie.

That is a blast.

Great movie, Rob.

You know, I'd always watch it and go, this is too tight.

Could this be 10 episodes?

It's too focused.

With maybe a cliffhanger for season two.

Water this down for.

Yeah, exactly.

Ten hours.

Add stuff that's nothing.

This steak doesn't have enough gristle and fat on it.

I haven't seen Presumed Innocent.

Plenty of people have told me it's a pretty fun watch.

The TV show.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have not seen it.

You know what is also fun?

The movie.

Watching it five times.

Just watch that movie five times.

That's a way to spend 10 hours.

Have either of you seen Presumed Innocent?

The movie?

Yeah, it's fun.

No?

Number six

at the box office is the, I would say, somewhat forgotten Roger Spottiswood movie Air America, starring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr.

I'm sure that was a very normal, chill set.

I think that is one of the, well, that's the start of their relationship.

Yeah.

No, it is.

I mean, genuinely, yes.

Yes.

Yes.

It is the start of their friendship.

Yes.

Number seven is the Disney movie Taking Care of Business, starring Jim Belushi.

Oh, of course.

Have you seen that movie?

I have not.

That's the one where he's, the poster is him like riding a car like a surfboard.

Correct.

He's on top of the car.

He's a car thief who wants

to go to the World Series.

Have you seen taking care of business pen why haven't you seen this movie i have not i don't know he's taking care of

the question does it it what is it about he's just a car thief and he wants to go to the world series

right it was written by jj abrams an incredibly young what uh he's won tickets to the world series but he has two days left to serve in prison and his warden won't let him leave so he stages a riot and escapes from prison to go to the game and then he steals charles grodin's filofax of business stuff.

And then they get involved in a bunch of antics.

It sounds very complicated.

Where's the nearest porch?

I got to go watch it.

Yep.

Ted has pulled up the poster.

There it is.

Yes.

I love it.

And he's oversized.

It makes him look like he's a giant riding a tiny car like it's a roller.

Just because a Canadian, again, a Canadian is on our podcast this week, Bachman Turner Overdrive, who wrote the song Taking Care of Business, they're Canadian.

They're from Winnipeg.

Sure.

Hey.

So there you go.

I love how pissed off Charles Grodin is.

He's not happy with that.

Oh my god, that guy's surprising on his car.

I want to also say, Jim Belushi looks like he's four times the size of Groden.

The scale is so up.

I'm sorry.

I was trying to pull my window.

I was like, Coven vibes where it's like this giant monster dog in Groden's

shaking his fist at him.

I will

maybe four times a year, just when I have some downtime, click on Jim Belushi's Wikipedia, go to filmography, and just kind of marvel at like

10 years.

There were basically 10 consecutive Jim Belushi vehicles.

The principal, real men,

Red Heat.

That's a real canine.

Canine.

Homer and Eddie?

Like these movies where you're like, what were these movies?

These are movies where either he is the lead, Mr.

Destiny.

Above the line.

Yes.

He's either above the, he's the one guy above the title or it's a two-hander.

And you look at him and you're like, was one of these a huge hit and these were the rough?

No, all of them did okay.

There's not one of them

that was like, but he didn't have one that was like one out of the box that had to be there since.

Belushi, he was John Belushi's brother.

People

were so sad at the loss of John Belushi that they were like, we cannot stop making gym movies.

Have you seen Twin Peaks The Return yet?

No, I know he's good now.

He is unbelievable in Twin Peaks the Return.

You're about to see it.

This is the thing.

Anytime he shows up as a character actor now, I think he kind of kills it.

Are you going to like watch it in Europe?

Are you going to be watching Twin Peaks the Return?

What's your plan?

You got to do it.

I know.

That's my plan.

Hey.

All right.

Number eight at the box office: Big Kid Comedy, Problem Child.

Oh, bad.

Many times.

That was a dumb movie.

Yeah, for sure.

Number nine.

That was a movie that I watched and took notes.

Right.

You were like, I'm inspired.

That's interesting.

I like that.

Okay.

Number nine, another pretty dumb movie, Young Guns 2.

Not sure we needed a second one of those.

And then number 10 is Wild at Heart.

But yeah, it's a fun, dumb 90s.

Yeah.

Early 90s time.

Diane Ladd, the only Oscar nomination?

For Wilded Heart, yes.

Somewhat unsurprising, I suppose, in a way.

But yeah, that's it won the Palme d'Or, maybe got like a BAFTA nom.

Got a, did it get a Golden Globe?

Just for Ladd.

Willem Defoe got an Indie Spirit nomination.

And Lynch is at his height.

And as you'll say, as you said, like within a year or two, he's kind of a cooked goose.

And Firewalk with me is coming out.

And people are like,

you know, airs out of this balloon.

There's that Tarantino quote where he talks about going to see Firewalk with me.

And he was like, I just realized I'm done with the guy.

He's cooked.

He's gone so far up his own ass.

He's never coming back.

And the quote ends with, it's like the line from Jackie Brown where he's like, what happened to you, man?

You used to be beautiful.

He's like, I used to love this guy.

But that's like him quoted from when like pulp fiction, Jackie Brown was coming out when it was like, he's done.

There's a five-year gap in between movies.

People don't like Lost Highway at the time.

Like, this is the final moment of him being on top of the world until Moholland is seen as a comeback.

Not to get ahead of our narrative.

Now, are we doing Joker next week?

Is that still the plan?

Are we pushing it a week?

What's our plan?

Tatiana, I don't know if you've heard of The Joker, a man, we call him the Clown Prince of Crime, who finds the things that make us cry funny.

Yes, he's just laughs at the things that scare us.

He's an interesting emotional response.

And I think we have a civic duty.

Now, when you say civic, a moral obligation.

When you say duty.

Yeah, when you say do-do.

D-O-D-D-I-E

to cover

his new film Faliado.

There is a bit of a campaign pushing back against me.

What was your suggestion, Sims?

There's the movie Goodrich

starring Michael Keaton and directed by Nancy Myers' daughter, Hallie.

And we did cover her other movie.

We did.

So we nominally could cover that

instead.

Or we could do both.

Yes.

But if we do both, we have to push Joker a week, I think, to make it a combo episode.

Well, here's what I'm going to say.

Ben, insert the audio clip of what we decided to do right here.

I think taking care of business is a great idea.

Oh, but glad that we're doing it.

Well, see us next week for whatever it is that's something.

It's always something at Blank Series.

Something with us.

Tatiana, you're the best.

Thank you for making time to do it.

Thank you for having me.

Oh, what a joke.

While knee-deep in travel and work.

Is there anything you want to plug?

Yeah.

What's going on?

I guess I will plug the movie The Monkey.

Yeah.

I did with Oz Perkins.

Who?

Long Legs.

Yeah.

Who?

Anthony Perkins' son, director in his own rock.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

Great.

I think it's going to be a fun movie.

I don't know, though.

I'm very excited for it.

Yeah, David Ahmed, too.

I'm all in on that guy.

We're really into it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's a super weirdo and he casts weirdos and he hires weirdos and everybody on his set is very kind and like cares a lot.

Is it coming out this fall?

I think it's coming out in Feb.

Coming out early.

This is a long game plug.

I saw the trailer though already.

Yep.

They've got the trailer.

Yeah.

There's some kind of monkey.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a teaser.

There's sort of a monkey.

There's nothing on his right.

It's a teaser.

Yeah.

And the things that make us cry make him.

He's a bit of a joker.

This monkey's got joker vibes.

He's a little joker.

Played by walking feet.

Wow, what a coup.

You got the guy to show up.

Can I say it?

That guy, kind of the joker of actors.

Yeah, seriously.

He does things so twisted like abandoning the movie five days before it's going to start filming.

The kind of thing that makes.

financiers cry.

Yeah, exactly.

But makes him laugh.

Maybe.

Total Joker vibes.

Very excited for the monkey and everything else you are doing and working on and excited to see you again in person sometime, Tatiana.

That would be nice.

Yes, that would be nice.

And thank you all for listening.

Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe.

Tune in next week for whatever we're doing next week.

Thank you to Marie Barty for helping to produce the show, social media.

Thank you to A.J.

McKeon for our editing.

He's also our production coordinator.

Lane Montgomery and the Great American Novel for our theme song.

JJ Birch for our research.

Jabon Pat Realms for our artwork.

You can go to blankcheckpod.com for some links to some real nerdy shit,

including our Patreon, Blank Check Special Features, where we do franchise commentaries.

The only time we've covered Nicholas Cage in the past.

And right now, we are

in the end of tabletop games.

We just did an episode on Ouija, Origin of Evil, and coming up, we have our Twin Peaks Season 2 episode.

Oh, well,

we gotta record that.

That will be recorded.

Hopefully.

We'll get it done.

And as always,

Wild It Heart is a movie for dang-ass freaks.

Full of dang-ass freaks.

Night that's coming.

Night that's coming.

Jacket.