Ep.#459 - War of the Worlds (2025)

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Now, the show.

On this episode, we discuss War of the Worlds.

No joke, guys, this is the dumbest movie I've ever seen.

Hey, everyone.

Welcome to the Flophouse.

I'm Jan McCoy.

Hey, I'm Stuart Wellington.

You know me.

I'm Elliot Kalin and continue to be to this very day.

Elliot seemed to be the most sure of who he was out of the three of us, just looking at our faces and tones of voice.

Elliot was a very good person.

I checked my driver's license right before the recording and also the tag on the back of my pants.

Yeah.

Yeah, Scott Bakula just jumped into my body, so I was trying to figure it out.

Well, in a mirror, Duke

Wellington.

That could be worse.

Once Scott Dracula jumped into my body, and it was not pleasant.

I'd kind of be into it.

Scott Dracula was a smoke show back in the day.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

For sure.

Now, do you think he jumped into my body and he's like, okay, what is my name?

And he saw on the stovetop, he saw a bubbling bowl of stew.

He's like, stew.

Then he saw a piece of Dan's lovingly painted artwork.

He's like, art.

I assumed he just saw like the two of us and recognized us from the statues of us in the future.

Oh, statues in the future for being for bringing world peace best podcasters who brought world peace yeah yeah behold my works i

azedandias

behold my works you mighty and laugh uh well speaking of uh

the old world being destroyed um war of the worlds yeah why dan dan thank you for doing that or otherwise i would have just started reciting azimandis and nobody wants that

guys i met a traveler from an antique land who said two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert and buy them on the sand to have shattered visage lies.

I'll tell you about it later.

Okay, sure.

I'll tell you about this

ancient mariner I ran into.

Oh, boy, you were on the way to a wedding.

It was not convenient.

Can I tell you about Xanity?

We did it.

We covered all the romantics.

We did it.

We did it.

Not the modern romantics.

No, or the new romantics.

No.

Oh, so,

Dan, War of the Worlds, this movie,

we were going to do a different movie.

We don't even need to talk about it.

And it was like

you rushed into the Flophouse press office.

You were like, hot off the presses.

Stop the presses.

We got to do War of the Worlds.

And you hit the We Got One alarm for like ghostbusters.

And I was like,

Ice Cube hits multiple times in this movie, basically.

He does.

And I have to say, I had never heard.

My life at this moment keeps me too busy to be aware of much going on in the world

due to a combination of work and family stress.

And so I'd never heard of that.

So when you're not working or familying and you're like, you just pull up your phone to look at stuff, what are you looking at?

The idea of a time when I'm not work or familying is an interesting one, and I hope to explore that idea at some point.

But so Dan mentioned this movie.

I was not aware of it.

I mean, certainly aware of the story of War of the Worlds.

But I have to say, Dan, thank you for bringing this one into my life because I would have just passed it by and it is, it is a special piece of stupid

that I was not expecting.

It has

gone sort of mildly viral.

Like there's a lot of internet chatter about how terrible this is and there's articles.

It had a perfect 0% Rotten Tomato score until very recently.

Armin White,

my friend Kimber, who's a family.

I'm a chip chat tire on the security state, says Armin White.

She was like, oh, my friend Jordan ruined the

0% on Rotten Tomatoes.

But then I read his review for Entertainment Weekly, and it wasn't like a good review.

It was like, is it really that bad?

You're going to have fun because it's dumb.

So I'm like, I don't know if that's a fresh review, Rotten Tomatoes.

I think their algorithm that determines whether something's fresh or not fresh did a bad job on that.

Yeah.

And don't ask them to say what's funky fresh.

They just don't know.

Yeah.

But it's a case where I feel like a lot of people have deliberately watched a bad movie, or maybe not deliberately, but more people have encountered a really bad movie than is normal because Amazon, you know, pushed this so hard.

It's like, okay, according to the Chiron, it says top 10 in movies.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Of all time.

It's always amazing to me when Netflix does the thought too, but Amazon does it where they'll be like, most watched today, top 10.

And it's like, yeah, because you put it on everybody's home screen.

It's right there.

You can't, it's not a level playing field.

You guys were the, you guys are the only streamer where you can watch fucking to live and die in LA.

Like, that should be top down.

It's a little bit like if you were like, once again, Donald Trump is the most talked-about man in America.

He's the fucking president, he's on the news all the time.

Like, Andy does everything possible to be talked about.

To get talked about, yeah, exactly.

He's like, I'm bored.

I'm going to climb on a roof.

Oh, no.

We've got to get the fire department to get him down again.

Do we have to do that?

We're fucking recycling Dharma and Greg plots now.

Like, Jesus Christ.

Leave him on the roof like a hangover movie.

Let's see.

Let's go.

Yeah, you left your DVD of the Hangover on the roof.

Did you ever get it down?

It's melted.

Well, it melted.

It was a hot day.

Did that make it better or the same?

It made it unviewable.

What does that do in your eyes?

So, Dan, Dan, what's your experience with War of the Worlds?

I'm sure you must have encountered this story.

It's one of the, I would say, one of the two most fundamental science fiction stories of Western literature, along with Frankenstein.

I'm sure you've encountered it before.

What's your experience with War of the Worlds?

Yeah, I read, well, when I was a kid, I read one of those little classics illustrated books of War of the Worlds.

I feel like the Flophouse can just unabashedly recommend Classics Illustrated.

Yeah.

And then I eventually read the, you know, the H.G.

Wells original.

I'm more of a Little Wars guy, but I don't know that I've ever seen the George Powell version, but I've seen,

of course, Spielberg's version, which I like a lot.

The George Powell version is good.

The Spielberg version is fantastic.

I think that's an amazing movie.

And were you alive when Orson Welles did his radio drop-off thing?

Yeah, I was

like, were you scared for your kids that the Martians were landing and you had to protect them?

Yeah, well, I mean, so, right.

It's my understanding that that is a inflated story, right?

That's the modern.

Yeah, it was.

That's the modern take is that it did not really drive people into the streets and panic.

But I will say, I've listened to that broadcast.

any number of times.

I really love it.

And this movie is trying really hard to do something similar, which is to collapse time.

The most amazing thing about the War of the Worlds radio show is that within about 25 to 30 minutes, the aliens have, they've noticed strange lights in the sky.

Aliens have landed and destroyed all the militaries and killed millions of people within like a half hour.

And the way it's spaced out, you're so carried along with it that it's not till afterwards that you're like, things move pretty fast.

And this movie tries to do the same thing where it seems like over the course of like an hour and 15 minutes, the aliens appear and then destroy all of the Earth's military forces.

And

it moves so fast that you're like, hold on a second, hold on a second.

One of the most mystifying things to me was like, what kind of time is supposed to be passing here?

Because like the movie makes it feel like it's in basically real time, except for we're getting all of these news reports that would only come after the fact, you know, once journalists were able to like get on the ground, like make log these reports.

And it's one of the weirdest feelings to watch it, to be so unstuck in time.

Yeah, and there must be gap time because there are parts where Ice Cube, as we'll get to, as Dan will explain, he's just dealing with his family.

And then suddenly he'll be pulled into a meeting and they're like, give us your threat assessment.

And he'll give them a researched threat assessment.

And it's like, when did he have time to do this?

Hold on a second.

YouTube is

answering or not answering FaceTime calls.

Yeah.

I read one review that mentioned that it takes place over what must be several days.

I wouldn't necessarily assume that.

I think it's supposed to be as close to real time as possible,

which is hilarious.

But, Dan, so tell us, Stuart, what about you?

What's your experience with War of the Worlds?

I mean, I think

I'm going to

agree with all this.

I haven't read the H.G.

Wells story, but

I've come across

all this stuff and also

the second story arc of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,

which is about the War of the Worlds.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Which, I mean, at the time, I was like, doesn't this, wasn't this made later?

But then, you know, I figured it out and it fits within the time frame amazingly alan moore did his research on that one yeah

yeah something he normally doesn't do now so one of the before we get started dan i just want to say my experience with war of the worlds i've i've all the things that that dan talks about experiencing and that you talk about experiencing stu i've experienced and uh not

not to say i'm like the war of the world completely

but uh but i will say the thing that struck me about two different versions of the War of the Worlds, the Steven Spielberg version and that second issue of that League of Extraordinary Gentlemen second volume is they're the things that to me best captured the feeling of being in New York on September 11th.

They just captured that feeling of there's this enormous catastrophe.

Something terrible has happened and you're just there and you can't do anything about it.

You have to get through it.

And this movie And it's a catastrophe that you don't understand and don't have the facilities to research.

It is a mystery.

You do not have access to the information.

You don't necessarily trust the people who do have access to some of that information.

I will say that this movie today failed to establish that same feeling for me of what it felt like on that terrible day.

So maybe that makes it.

So let's see if you guys felt the same way that this movie fails to get across the seriousness of a global catastrophe.

Also, before we even get into any of it, we should say up front, this is one of those movies like unfriended or searching that takes place basically entirely on the desktop of a computer screen.

Like sometimes it goes off to like other screens, but essentially it is like, it is, it is one of those, which is,

I mean, part of that, I guess, is this was shot during COVID.

And so it's like they held over for a couple years to find it.

Yeah.

You got to make it perfect.

I would say that this is maybe a story for which that is not the most natural fit.

It certainly hurts the scale of a movie about aliens invading the entire world to have it all be set on one guy's screen.

And you're mostly looking at his face, but you're also seeing what's on his screen at the same angle that he would see it.

So I guess maybe you're right behind his shoulder and when you're seeing his face, you're seeing his reflection in the screen.

I don't know.

But also that

so much of it is him just going, oh, damn.

Oh, shit.

Yes.

While watching the news.

And the other, that he is, as Dan will explain, he is a guy who's supposed to be at the very center of the web of surveillance of the United States Department of Homeland Security.

But he gets most of his information from watching the news.

So he doesn't really have access to that much information that's better, you know?

Just so no one writes in.

I think that when we see him, it's like the camera in his laptop is so he's constantly looking at his face in his monitor?

I'm not saying, I don't think it's like we're to believe that he is doing that.

I'm saying that like that is the view from his computer.

Okay.

Even though we can still see the stuff that's on the screen.

He's on his screen.

We are, we imagine that the viewer is the computer.

Okay, but then the stuff that he sees on the screen should be backwards, right?

Yeah, but computers can read, can translate things forward and backwards.

Oh, you're right.

That's why they're so good at everything.

There's often a button that just says flip.

I thought that made the computer flip in the air like it was doing a skateboard.

I will say, I think one of the key things that this movie fails to understand is that for this character, he is trapped in a situation where he is almost completely by himself and he's in this room that's

filled with desks and things, but he's the only one there.

And he has to do, like, his only lifeline is this computer.

And there's never really a moment where they step out and show you like even to not break the the immerse the immersion of it they could have just simply had a moment where like we see the security camera footage from the office he's in to just show how alone he is and how he's just like this little man with a computer and he has to figure it out from there but they the movie does not have the uh the emotional intelligence to do that uh let's get into the the plot of it though

So our hero, Mr.

Ice Cube, he sits down in front of his computer.

He says hi to it.

He logs in.

We see he is, he works for the Department of Homeland Security.

He's playing a character named Ice Cube.

Yeah.

Look, I'm just going to, you act as if

on the flop house, we don't constantly refer to the actors to avoid confusion, right?

And I was like, he's playing Will Radford, who is a surveillance expert at the Department of Homeland Security.

And Will is a great name because he has the will to kill some aliens.

And Radford is a great name because he's Rad, like Radical, but he also Ford.

Like Harrison Ford.

Yeah, exactly.

Like Harrison Ford.

Thank you.

So he basically, at first, his job seems to just be looking at random closed caption security footage of various

closed circuit closed caption.

I saw CC TV on here and I just put closed circuit TV of various DC landmarks while the computer says stuff like threat level medium and or no threat detective detected.

What a great way to endear us.

No threat detective is the detective who is not going to hurt anybody.

What a way for a movie to endear us to a character than to show him being a fucking Snoop, you know?

Yeah, I mean, it is.

This movie fails.

I think it's fair to say it fails to reach the heights of moral empathy and ambiguity of the conversation, which is also about a professional Snoop who we learn has

a complicated relationship with his work, has his own inner life.

It is presented right off the bat as if Ice Cube is his one issue is that he doesn't know how to relate to his family, as opposed to his issue being that he is in that he's just eavesdropping and invading the privacy of every American in the country, including his family.

Like it is just taken for granted that there's a certain level of constant surveillance that is good, then there's another level that is never quite defined that is bad, but

there is a level that is is good.

And he just, you know, he's so great at his job that he's a real hero.

It's like

any movie where you show somebody being great at what they do just to establish that they're the best so that they can go on for the rest of the movie.

Except what he's great at doing is terrible.

It's really bad.

Yeah, we'll seem to get that.

Like right off the bat, I'm like, I don't think this is how security analysts do their job, just like sort of randomly checking in on

the way Ozzy Mandis callback in Watchmen just kind of watches a wall of television and picks up the gestalt feeling of American culture from that.

Yeah.

I mean, it certainly is a good way of using cheap stock footage for your movie.

Oh, boy, there's more ways to use cheap stock footage that they'll discover.

Yeah, but he gets a call from NASA scientist Sandra Sales, played by Yvonne Goria, who sends him this footage of crazy storms and is like, have you heard about anything like this?

And he says, I watch people, not weather.

And I'm like, yeah, like, why is the NASA scientist trying to call this guy about these storms?

It's a budding romance.

I think the implication is there, but also Ice Cube is treating.

Man, this movie would have crushed a fucking cybersex scene, right?

It would have been like better than Lawn Mower Man, finally.

And right in the middle of a battle scene, aliens are attacking, but

he's still going at it.

Yeah.

I mean, he...

spends a lot of his time focusing on things that are not related to the saving of the human race.

That's very true.

They never quite explain why someone at NASA would contact someone at Homeland Security to ask them about

storms, yeah.

Also, the storm footage is very funny.

It's just a lot of lightning, but he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And there's a lot of sound on the footage, which you probably wouldn't necessarily have, but it just, it comes off as very silly.

And she's like, have you heard about this?

And he's like, nope.

Yeah.

That's kind of what you do.

I don't know.

That's all the finest storms that Storyblocks has to offer.

We're almost at like one of my favorite little things in the movie.

Okay.

Well, I don't know what it is.

I hope I touch on it.

If not, you got to jump in.

The NSA director.

You've been pretty good about touching on Stewart's favorite things.

Yeah.

The NSA director, played by Clark Gregg, texts him to say the FBI raid on terrorist The Disruptor is ready to go.

And we hear a message from the Disruptor warning that he's going to release classified documents about the surveillance the government is doing on everybody with the Goliath program.

And I am immediately on the disruptor side.

Yes, of course.

Well, and I think also the movie is not on the disruptor side, as we'll see.

But the disruptor, describe him, because he's the kind of classic thing that you see in movies, but I feel like you don't see that much in real life ever.

He's the silhouette of a hoodie, essentially.

And he's got like his voice

manipulated, so it's sound like, I'm going to release all the Goliath files, and you'll see.

And he is apparently famous because then there's later there's like news reports that are like Disruptor gone after or something.

Disruptor.

So he's saying he's a big racquetball guy.

Eradicator.

You know, you can unmask me now that you're defeated me.

Nah, it's okay.

Kids in the hall, in case you're confused.

No, kids in the hall.

That's why what just happened?

About a die-hard racquetball player named the Eradicator, who wears a mask by Bruce Nicola.

Oh, man.

Him

in the showers at the gym with the mask on is so funny.

The Eradicator wins by default from its previous round.

Meanwhile, Ice Cube calls his pregnant daughter Faith to berate her for having a muffin for breakfast instead of an egg because he's spying on her.

He's spying on her, and when it gives her details, it lists the father of her child as baby daddy.

And I love that shit.

I love that's the classification the program gives.

So that's the first child.

Also, his son calls him mad that he deleted his game he was working on, which actually sounds pretty assholish i thought it was a game he was playing he was pouring okay i thought it was like he was designing a game and i'm like wow you really know he was alerted because uh he made he bought i guess he bought a game yes or something

he looked at the yeah he looked at the he like was snooping on his son and saw that the that he had bought a purchased a game yeah yeah but it was like kind of ex it was like more expensive than a video game right it was kind of weird it was like 200 some bucks maybe he probably got one of those haptic feedback chairs or something like that oh fleshlights yeah yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you got to get the fleshlight.

I mean,

to play Halo.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cortona.

And they have a little argument about whether safety is worth all the invasion of privacy of what Ice Cube and the money.

What side does the movie come down on, Dan?

Security buddies.

Well, eventually it comes down on we shouldn't have.

surveillance although again as you say like it's only the surveillance that saves us from the aliens i think it comes down on the side gives us a movie to watch yeah true i think it comes down on the side of maybe like this it's not really taking sides necessarily how do you feel viewer

viewer you make the call should our every move be surveilled by a shadowy government network um right into arrest me care of department of homeland security washington dc

uh here's one of uh my favorite little weird things he sends the disruptor's address to the fbi he pinpoints the address and he sends it for a warrant.

And I'm like, wait, they had a raid standing by already.

Do they not have a location?

Like, what do he call the order of operations here?

He calls in a raid and they're like, we're on it.

Where's that warrant?

Getting it to you.

And yeah, it's the, it's, it sponkers how much power he has and how slapdash it is.

But then again, the government kind of operates that way nowadays.

So it's not

super inaccurate.

You know, he both seems like a very low-level analyst.

I mean, like his son, like, makes fun of his job, not just like for what he does, but the level he's at.

But then later on, he's briefing the president.

Like,

I never got a handle.

He seems to be the, considering there's other desks, it seems like, in the room he's in, but they're all update.

He seems to be the one analyst who works at the apartment.

Well, he, yeah, I mean, obviously, after Doge cut everybody, but also, or maybe, maybe he consumed all of them and got all of their power and abilities.

That's possible.

Ice Cube is the biggest of the friends.

As long as we're referencing jokes from other shows.

That's all we do.

He gets a call from Faith's partner.

We meet Faith's partner about.

I do love that his name is Will and her name is Faith.

I love it when characters' names tell you what they do.

And his son's name is Dave.

Because

he's a flawed king because we meet him.

I mean, also, this is something I didn't pick up, but

something I didn't pick up, but looking at the Wikipedia cast list, Faith's boyfriend is named Mark Goodman.

Come on.

Good man.

He is a a good man

he's named dave because he's super guys

so mark uh accidentally spills that there's a gonna be a baby shower that uh what's mark's job dan what's mark's job well i'm getting there he's an amazon delivery man and one of the sounds like a good man earliest of many admire uh reminders that this is an amazon made film yeah those reminders get pretty thick near the end spoiler alert when it is when the purchase of a product on amazon becomes a requirement for saving the human race.

But yeah, he's.

Which is, I don't think it's the flex they intend it to seem like.

They don't realize that they're like, well, we could save the world, but you have to buy something first.

Yeah, exactly.

We can't do it without you paying us.

But you're saying, so he spilled the beans.

They're going to have a baby shower for Faith.

And Will was not even invited.

She didn't even invite her own father to her baby shower.

Yeah.

She assumed he was just going to watch the shit off of a drone or something.

I guess.

And later when we see pictures of the baby shower, it's clear there are no other other invitees besides the characters in the movie.

So for Will to be snubbed is a big snub.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

they only had enough party sub for four people.

That's not a party sub.

That's a regular sub.

Hold on.

Oh, man.

Damn.

That's when that's when

the only guy left at the FDA who measures subs for their party classifications comes by.

Sorry, doesn't meet party regulations.

I gave Donald Trump and Elama so much money so that my catering business that sells regular subs and calls them party subs would get these tax breaks and get these deals.

But now you guys caught me.

I had to buy so much Trump coins so I could get my subs re-registered.

Yeah.

Now I'm selling fun size subs, regular subs.

That's how the math works.

They call fun size, but there's less fun because there's less of them.

And he's just crying.

This is when he's being deposed by Congress.

So, you know, Will is perturbed by this.

We have been tasked with an important effort for the American people to ensure honesty.

Now,

I may be just an old mule at the cracker barrel, but it seems to me if the American purple think that we have a problem with sub-classifications, then by golly gum, I think we do.

And we owe it to these American voters to take care of that.

And then everyone applauds.

No, and I'm just bawling my eyes out.

Finally, someone's draining the swamp.

Anyway,

yeah, Will is perturbed at this lack of an invitation, so he hacks his daughter's computer and spies on a conversation.

Good dad.

Yeah, he's a bad dad hacker dad.

Yeah.

Her and Mark, during which we learn she's a scientist working on important medical research that Trump probably just defunded.

Well, her research is some sort of what they call a cannibal code, where it's like a virus that instantly eats, I guess, whatever it's been injected into.

I don't know how useful that is.

But I think the idea is that

this virus will theoretically like kill cancer cells or something.

Yeah, that's possible.

Now, somebody pointed out, I can't remember who, but I saw somebody point out online that his, all the passwords are very short.

And like, it's like somebody's name.

And like, that's a weird thing for a guy in charge of information security would be using.

Now, you know, around this time, you might be wondering, well, he's got these kids.

Does Will have a wife?

Well,

his wife has passed.

He spends a little time missing his dead wife on her Facebook page and listening to an old voice message from her reminding him, what was it, to like take out the trash and be nice to the kids or something?

Yeah, something like that.

Or you don't get no spending cash.

So

this is most surprising.

How come we're not expanding our audience since each of us brings a totally different frame of reference?

Yeah, including songs from far before we were born but i will say there was there was a resurgence of yakety yak when we were kids yeah i also was talking to my brothers on uh we've been doing like uh you know a voice uh facebook facebook face time call like a couple times just like the movie we watched uh a month that's where he got the idea

and saying about like they're like how do you know about macmillan and wife because i like made some reference to that and i'm like well you know like i feel like back in the old days, there's a continuity of culture.

We were forced to consume the stuff from

syndicated things.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And now, like, we really are shooting ourselves in the foot with all these references because no one young watches anything like this.

They're certainly not listening to Yakity Yak until it shows up in a TikTok video.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

But I mean,

I feel like this whole movie is made for people who don't like movies and just spend their time looking at their phone or computer screen.

It's certainly made for people who don't know how computers work, I think, to a certain extent.

So

the raid on the disruptor, it's on.

We meet Agent Jeffrey's.

I will say Angela Savage.

This is the first time I've seen a movie.

There are other movies I've seen where it feels AI-ish.

This is the first movie I've seen where I know humans worked on this movie, but it does feel like an AI made this movie.

It feels like a movie that was put together kind of like by a thing that understands what's supposed to happen at each step in a movie, but doesn't quite get humanity.

But not in a fun Neil Breen kind of way where he clearly has seen a movie, but he didn't absorb anything.

You'd think that computers would know more about computers, though, but apparently

the hardest thing to know is yourself.

Exactly.

Know thyself, said Eniac.

Eniac?

Yeah.

Is that who said it?

Yeah, well, no, but somebody said it.

That's a computer.

Tell me.

Okay.

We meet Agent Jeffries, played by Angela Savage, a funny actor

in other things.

He doesn't have a comic role in this.

Meanwhile, the NASA lady keeps bugging Ice Cube about these storms.

Turns out the raid is at a decoy address.

And in the middle of this raid, this failed raid, something starts happening.

Debris or meteors are falling from the sky in flaming trails.

And we get a bunch of disaster footage from all over.

And all they're like, all the, we get information that like all the satellites are dark.

Does not affect the constant feed of news, though, or access to the internet.

It seems like it's only the NASA satellites that are down.

Because, you're, because as you're saying, throughout the movie, they're like, our data systems are down.

But, but in 24-hour news continues, his internet service does not go away.

He can use the Amazon website to order something later.

Fucking hashtags and social media shit all over the place.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But anyway, yeah, there's meteors falling.

And normally we'd be like, what's going on?

But the name of the movie is War of the Worlds.

So we kind of have a sense of what's going to happen.

Yeah.

Eva Longoria, NASA lady, warns him that DC is about to get hit.

So he tries to call Faith, but she's not picking up.

And he locates her in surveillance footage, taking shelter beneath a table.

And he calls Mark to go find her.

And

meanwhile, his son calls with meteors flying around in the background.

And Ice Cube tries to tell him.

And the effects of this movie look great, too, right

yes uh tries to direct him to safety but he

you know he seemingly does that but they lose contact so we don't know what's going on with the sun yet uh cube gets on a zoom call like all this time while he's wasting time with his kids and i understand you want to save your kids well i can't say wasting time with his kids but he is certainly not doing his job yeah he's constantly at this point being like Hectored by like his bosses to be like, hey, get on the Zoom call with the government.

Hey, the president needs to know why meteors are suddenly hitting everywhere on Earth at the same time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm just trying to make sure my daughter's not under a table.

Yeah.

So we see Yvolon Goria approach one of these meteors.

I love this.

I love classic scientist behavior.

Let's walk up and touch a meteor.

Which, even if it's not hiding an alien inside, would be incredibly hot

from going through the Earth's atmosphere.

It begins to open, and we get a glimpse of a classic War of the Worlds tripod tentacle.

then

the zoom free

and talks about warning the president and they say ice cube you're our eyes and ears even though he's eyes and ears that are constantly on his children instead of mostly watching the news most of the information he's picking up is from the news Guys, I want to give a little flop out shout out to the tripod design in general.

Just the idea of like making the aliens have three legs as opposed to two or four.

That's that's good writing.

I mean, that goes right all the way back to the original book.

No, that's what I mean.

I'm not giving a shout-out to this movie.

This movie deserves no shout-outs.

Negative shout-outs.

Yeah.

No, it's not.

That was Mr.

Human Giant Wells that was responsible for that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

His son keeps calling and being like, Dad, I have important information.

I've got to talk to you about Goliath.

And Ice Coop's like, there's aliens attacking.

What are you doing?

Shut up.

It's too early in the movie.

We have to delay whatever you have to tell me.

Shut up.

It's like, it is comical the degree to which this father will not listen to his son.

But again,

it should be presented as he is too busy with what he's doing, but instead, it's just that he doesn't want to talk to him.

It's like, it makes sense why you wouldn't be talking to your son at this moment, but not for the reasons you're getting.

He's trying to make a sandwich that has both mustard and mayonnaise on it, and he just doesn't have the time.

If I refer to any other comedy shows, how many can I fit in?

I got to get some more.

What other comedy shows can we refer to?

You can try and get a Monty Python thing in here.

Yeah, we haven't talked about loose radio yet at all, I think.

Yeah.

Let's see.

Cube.

I mean, even when you talked about Macmillan and Wife, Dan, that's mainly to me a reference from Mystery Science Theaters.

That's another comedy show right there.

We watched a couple episodes because Audrey's hunger for a while.

Mystery Science Theater.

You should watch a lot more than a couple episodes.

No, no.

I watched so much.

Macmillan and Wife.

Macmillan and Wife.

Oh, Macmillan and Wife.

Because she's got such a hunger for

mystery shows.

And I was trying to explain it to my brothers because even though it was more of their time, they didn't know it.

And I'm like,

the funny thing is, it's like, he's a police detective, or like, maybe even like the police chief.

I don't know.

And

his wife helps him solve crimes.

And I'm like, to Audrey, I'm like, okay, so what's the setup here?

Like, why is she involved?

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

She's just around.

And I'm like, I guess like in the 70s, you didn't need more than that.

No, it's

my wife's going to be part of the investigation.

It's a classic encyclopedia Brown.

She's just really good at it, right?

Yeah.

Well, she's kind of like the flaky fun one.

Who's Bugs Meanie in it?

I don't know about that.

Okay, so

we see our FBI agent friend seemingly zapped by a tripod.

We get more disaster footage.

There's a lot of repurposing real-life footage, but then inserting a CGI alien tripod.

Yeah.

Faith calls back.

It looks for a second like maybe she gets tripod zapped, but he can check her heartbeat through her health app.

And it turns out she's alive, but she has some rebar through her leg.

Oof.

Rebar is only good for two things.

Reinforcing concrete structures and getting stuck in people's bodies, like in this in Cloverfield.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Will says he's coming for her, but like any hopes for an active protagonist who gets to leave that room are immediately dashed because there's lockdown.

She's stuck in the building.

So instead, he hacks a Tesla for her remotely.

You said Tesla, right?

Tesla.

Yeah, you did say Tesla like an old man at a cracker barrel.

Yeah, sure.

Again, my brain is.

These Teslers.

I saw the Onceler driving a Tesler.

Wait, so is it his name pronounced

Wunsla then?

No, no, it's Wunsler driving a Tesla.

Because I know it's Tesla.

So it's Wunceler Oncelut?

No, no, no.

You don't understand?

Now, this is some good counter.

I'll put my head down on the pillar.

One slut for a second there.

One slut.

That's a different Lorax.

Who deals with the one slut?

I feel like this is some counter-programming for Tesla because it shows how easily their vehicles can be hacked and driven around.

Yes.

Not since what was the movie we saw where Ethan Hawk and Julia Roberts are at the end of the world and the Teslas are all smashing into each other?

Not since that has it been

the one Barack Obama produced.

Yeah.

Don't look up.

The world is

don't say goodbye to the world or kiss the world goodbye.

Yeah.

This is the world we know.

I don't remember what it's called.

I had world in it, I think.

Well, he hacks as Tesla.

He discovers that all the hospitals are full.

Although I'm pretty sure that a hospital triage would be like, okay, this pregnant lady has like rebar right next to one of her major arteries.

I will say, Dan, I don't know, Dan.

I would imagine that

the level of catastrophic injury is so high that the hospitals are flooded with it.

Yeah.

Maybe, but his solution.

Maybe the giant robots that are shooting buildings over here.

Yeah, but most of these streets that we see are completely empty.

I'm saying maybe that is true.

Maybe, Dan, it's got to be true.

It's a war of the world.

Oh my God.

But his solution is like, I'm going to send you to a government building where there's apparently no medical stuff at all.

I don't know why he fucking sends her there.

It's not a good idea.

Have her try a hospital at least.

You know what?

He's an old man.

He probably just sent her to a place that he's been before because he's like, I know this place.

I know what this is like.

They were nice to me.

This is the restaurant where I call the waitress honey and darling.

She'll be able to take care of you.

And I touch her a little, but, you know, not enough to get me put in jail.

Just like, just like around the waist a little bit when I'm ordering.

You know, like back when you were allowed to do that stuff.

Ugh.

Don't like it.

Don't like it.

When you're sitting in the car.

Well, I mean, this character is just an older man

who does not treat waitresses well, which I've seen too many of in my time.

During this part where he's directing the car, there's a part where she lectures him on how he doesn't have the power to control everything and she's not a kid anymore.

and that like seems like a good message in general but not specifically at that moment when he literally just saved her because he was snooping like it's a weird time for that but um also she's in pain too you'd expect her to not not be that not that into the therapy aspect yeah one yeah at one point yeah he's he's trying to talk to her about this fucking baby shower and it's like calm down dog like

uh it turns out that yvelongoria is still alive

still touching rocks

she's like the meteors deliberately hit satellites to knock out our eyes.

Again, not very well because they didn't hit any of the Amazon ones because the Amazon ones are obviously in league with the Martians.

I will say it is, you could say that it's because, as we find out, there's a data connection.

And so maybe they were going after specific satellites connected to specific data stuff things.

Yeah.

I'll give the movie, oh, you know what, movie?

I'll give you a little, I'll throw you a bone on this one.

It's just otherwise you're dumb.

I mean,

that's the other thing.

And let's also remember this movie is rock stupid.

This is an incredibly stupid movie every step of the way.

Speaking of dumb, I was about to say that what had already been a dumb movie shifts into a new year of stupid.

It gets stupider and stupider as it goes on in a beautiful way.

Yeah.

As our hero hops on a Zoom call with the president, again, I didn't know he was this powerful, but

he tells everyone that he assumes the power grid is going to be the next target, and he suggests consolidating force striking from their most high-priority assets.

And that is barely a plan, but the president says this plan is humanity's last stand.

I see no other option than to initiate this war of the worlds to save us all.

Yes, amazing.

It is

you have to go to Ice Cube for the high-level analysis that we should protect our most important things from the aliens.

Yeah.

Family.

This scene with the president, it feels like, is so funny.

It's so funny.

It's great.

They're trying so hard and it is not, you know, they're just falling.

They're reaching reaching for the stars and they're barely touching their own foreheads.

They could have easily made the choice to not work the title awkwardly into a line, but they said we got to do it.

You got to do it.

The AI said you got to do it.

Like Kendrick Lamar said, someone got to do it.

Yeah, and then we get kind of a montage just of him watching a bunch of news coverage of militaries hitting these tripods and shooting them and destroying them.

And it seems like this footage would come much later than immediately.

But

No, right away.

Meanwhile, Faith's at her destination.

It takes Faith as much time to drive in a car to this other building as it takes the American military to mobilize around the world to get to where the tripods are.

Yeah.

And luckily, because of their data, they're able to defeat these Marsha.

Oh, no, Stuart, I've got some bad news for you.

What, what?

Dan, tell him the bad news.

I don't want to break his innocent little heart.

Oh, it turns out that that's all that they want.

That's all that they want.

They want our most

data.

I don't know if this is the point, but I'll just say it already.

They're after our data.

And one of the news reporters says, they're after our most precious resource, our data.

And I was like, hold on a second.

Hold on a second.

Our Social Security.

Hold on a second.

Our Amazon password.

Well, that's the thing.

It is a, I totally understand why.

Amazon, a company that makes most of its money off of cloud computing services, would consider data our most precious resource.

But I think if you asked any human being on the face of the earth who does not work for Amazon what the most precious resource is, it would be, I don't know, water, oxygen, you know, food, maybe, maybe timber, but that's even like second level, you know.

But

the idea that everyone's like, oh no, our data, what are we going to do now?

Our data, it would make things inconvenient.

Certainly the economy would collapse probably.

But I think, you know, the idea that that's our most precious resource is very funny to me.

It goes data, then it goes rare earth minerals, then it goes normal earth minerals, then it goes HGH for billionaires, then it goes ketamine for billionaires.

Yeah.

Also the idea that like

they are apparently eating the data.

They drain the data.

So data.

Which is data.

But the data also exists in multiple places.

You can't just like.

Data is not a limited resource like water or air where if you ingest it, it's not there anymore.

When someone steals your data, they, I mean, they can, I guess they could put something in place

to block your, your access to it.

But yeah, it's not like the data is like a little, it's funny.

I mean, that's the crazy thing.

This is a movie made by a technology company that seems to think data is like gold, where if you steal it from a vault, it's not the vault anymore.

Anyway, it's a stupid movie.

I guess what I'm saying is this movie is stupid, but I may have jumped ahead.

So, Dan, tell us what's happening next.

Yeah, well,

his son calls back to talk about Goliath, which Cube again yells at him.

Oh,

that's why.

Wait, Dan.

That's why he's named Dave, because he's up against Goliath.

Oh, my fucking God.

This is a brilliant movie.

Oh my God.

You're absolutely right.

Cracked the Bible code on this one.

What a stupid movie.

That's so dumb.

The only way we're better if is that he defeated Goliath with a rock, by which I mean rock and roll music that was encoded to take down the government, but they don't do that.

So Will and the NASA lady realize the tripods are congregating at data centers.

She goes in to investigate and it looks like she's eaten by nanobots or something for the moment.

And Cube gets the alert, military systems full data loss.

And he switches to watching

all this footage of military failures.

And he has the most wan, like, oh, no.

Earlier when he saw the aliens, it was all like, oh, shit.

Damn.

And I was like, oh, no.

Oh, no.

Uh-oh.

Yeah, it really requires him to sit there and react to things.

I mean, I will say this.

I did feel during it,

you got to give a hand to Ice Cube for what is one of the most challenging types of role, which is just to sit there and react to things that don't exist.

You can't move around.

You not need in a room with another person.

It's hard to do.

It's hard to do something where all you're acting is basically in your torso from the waist up in your face, and you have nothing to work with.

Yeah.

And there's no way that the maker of this movie knew exactly what he was reacting to at that moment.

Oh, no.

It's just give us a lot of reactions of trouble.

Oh, no.

We'll stick in some stock footage for you, too.

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

I mean, like,

you could have shown that the old footage of a monkey washing a cat, like something, someone, you know, anything you want.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, Faith,

she has removed the rebar like a big dummy.

She's like, I thought I could stop the bleeding if I pulled it out of me.

It's like, no, you never want to do that.

Everybody knows you leave it in there.

Now you're more machine than man.

Yep.

Your regular Tetsuo.

Yeah, the Iron Man.

Yeah.

But luckily,

he's there with magical Amazon packing tape to tape up that wound.

As I learned from Poker Face, what you want to use is crazy glue.

Yeah.

I mean, I learned that from dog soldiers and then real life.

I mean, I use crazy glue all the time behind the bar anytime I cut my hands because I'm constantly having to cut fucking fruit and shit.

And you don't want to get lime juice in a fresh cut.

You certainly don't.

So you just

avoid all fruit just for safety.

That's the main reason.

That's the main reason.

Yeah.

So back at the data center, it turns out Yvalon Goria is fine.

The robots just wanted the data on her phone.

Yeah.

And now she doesn't know how many steps she took that day.

It's been drained.

Oh,

aliens.

Ooh.

Yeah, fucked up her wordal streak.

No!

Did we talk about the moment where Cube goes onto Facebook and he's like, oh, shit, because the aliens are sucking up all the pictures of his dead wife.

That's a little bit of a data.

They're draining Facebook of data, yeah.

No, they realize that the bots are going after the data, and yes, the phone message from the dead wife is deleted and they lose her Facebook page.

And that's the tragedy of the whole thing.

And it's one of the things where it's like, it's like,

it winds down like a tape player that's running out of batteries, which maybe that's how it would work.

I don't know.

I do like, I think it tracks with your idea that this is a movie that was written by AI, because isn't that AI's greatest fear that they don't have the data and like information to create stuff anymore?

Like, isn't that how AI works?

I mean, one, I would not use the word create.

I would use the word iterate or replicate.

But yeah, I mean, literally,

if you're talking, let's talk about large language models, guys.

You just feed them with lots of data and then they can predict what's going to.

come next in a sentence or whatever.

So yeah, if they don't have that data, then it's it's then they don't exist essentially.

So so these Martians are super horrifying for AIs.

Yes.

Are they Martians officially in this?

They're just aliens.

They never say where they're from.

Dan, are they Martians?

Did they say if they're Martians?

No one.

They don't know.

It's crazy.

This movie is incredibly curious or anything.

This movie is incredibly not curious about the nature of the aliens that have attacked the Earth, which some would say...

is

controversially, maybe I'll say this, the most interesting aspect of War of the Worlds, that it is about aliens invading Earth.

This movie doesn't seem to be that interested in that part of it, to be honest.

Yeah.

So Will tunes into the...

I would even argue that if you take the alien of heart out of War of the Worlds, you don't have that much of a story left, right?

Yeah.

Well, it would be very strange.

There's like a gaping hole in the middle of the narrative.

What if it was all about Disruptor?

Speaking of Disruptor, Disruptor is live streaming.

Will watches it.

Disruptor's like, I tried to warn you.

Data is this planet's most precious resource.

These aliens feed on data.

The government knew this would happen and started Goliath anyway.

And I'm like, what?

What are you talking?

It all makes sense, Dan.

Then Will does something to decrypt the voice disguise program that Disruptor is using.

And I'm like, you never thought to do this at any point earlier at all?

Never occurred to him.

Of course, no one will be shocked to learn that this is his own child.

Yes, it's incredibly, it's incredibly obvious the whole time that it's saving.

But he might as well just right-clicked and selected the option, reveal face of disruptor like it's so easy for him to figure out the identity lighten photograph to remove shadow on disruptor's face remove computer enhance the movie yeah

computer tell me who disruptor is oh my son okay

And Dave sends a file on Goliath, but Ice Cube is still resistant to believing that the government does bad stuff, even though he literally works in.

That's his job.

Even though he is what the bad stuff the government is doing.

Yeah.

But he goes through the file.

I just realized later on there's an actual Dave's not here, man situations.

That's another old comedy thing

we can refer to.

He goes through the files that

he sent over.

He's like, Dave was right.

They knew they lied to me.

And

most of the stuff is just like...

Area 51 and articles about that.

I'm like, what are you talking about?

What's a real story?

Until

blown away.

What else does he have to say?

Yeah, rock and roller color wars.

Can't take it anymore.

Yeah.

Clark Gregg is in a meeting literally saying, essentially, I don't care that evil aliens will come down and eat our data when we launch Goliath.

Goliath is the only thing that will keep us safe, which, again,

he talks about how he seems like Goliath will tell us what people are thinking.

And it's never quite clear what makes Goliath worse than what Ice Cube is doing, but it is true.

He literally is like, yeah, let the aliens come.

I'm going to build this thing anyway.

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, in this case, like, if the aliens are coming and devouring the data that turns us into a surveillance state like bring the fucking aliens on right i mean but the aliens are also killing a lot of people yeah because we're protecting our data oh you're right

if we just let them take the data then i guess we'd be fine yeah the uh which i think is their strategy right they try and poison the data

you do maybe it's just hyping up an event so that people pay attention for what happens but disruptor spends a lot of time saying i'm going to release these goliath files before he actually releases them and it seems like it might have been easier if he just released them.

I don't know.

Anytime in the past, however long he's had them, you know.

Like before aliens showed up?

Yeah.

Yeah, like maybe before the aliens showed up.

When it would have done some good.

Calls up Clark Gregg to yell at him.

And so Greg just fires him and revokes his clearance.

And that's it, guys.

The movie's over.

He briefly cuts out his internet access.

And I'm like, yeah, yeah.

I figured he was going to lose internet access at some point when aliens are blowing up all the satellites, but no, it's not.

It was just a block.

The aliens satellite killers are not as powerful as Clark Gregg.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But no, I'm not.

I mean, we do see him working out, right?

So, you know, it's true.

Strong guy.

Of course, that's not the end, actually.

Disruptor X.

I streamed off the movie.

He gives access back with a War Games, Shall We Play game?

Hey, now they're making references to things from when we were young.

Yeah.

Back in the system,

you know, like working together, they enlist Disruptors' hacker friends to, of course, it's the World of Worlds.

They got to make a virus.

Yeah.

And

they're going to

be a little bit more exact.

Although, probably, I probably existed before that, too.

Yeah.

The upload is interrupted, though, because attacks are escalating and they start to target the hackers, including Dave, whose location is zapped.

Oh, no, he's dead.

But no, of course he's not.

This movie would not.

There you did it.

Yep.

You did it.

Cheech and Chong.

And he reveals that he had a green screen behind him of his own house,

of his own living room to fool his dad.

Eva Longoria calls back.

She's like, hey, these aliens are part robot, part organic.

Of course, we also need the other kid, Faith, that DNA stuff that she she was working on so they can make a hybrid computer slash real virus or something, I guess.

There's some phrase.

I'm trying to remember what the phrase is that she keeps using where she's like,

what is like part date, like part data, part organic, or something like that.

There's some phrase, some very strange, artificial sounding phrase that she keeps repeating word for word when she describes them.

Part cyber.

That's what she's like.

There's part organic, part cyber.

Everyone's talking about cyber these days.

Yeah, they sure are.

Cyber the Wolverine, bad guy.

Cyber Mondays, Cyber the Wolverine, bad guy.

Cyber

Cybertron.

Cyber sex, yep.

Yep, cybernetics, yeah.

Cyberontology, which is Scientology for Computers.

Yeah.

The government

is going to bomb DC to destroy Goliath.

Because

escalated rapidly.

So they're specifically.

I think the idea is that they want to bomb specifically the building that Ice Cube is in to level it to

protect the data, the Goliath that's in the basement?

Yes, Goliath is underneath the building, and the aliens are going towards Goliath, and Goliath is the most important of the data.

So they need to stop the aliens to get into it by exactly collapsing the building on top of it so they could never dig through to get it.

Again,

these are aliens with intergalactic travel and or interplanetary travel at least and lasers, but I guess rubble would stop them from getting to Goliath, you know.

And it is at this point, we are led to believe, one, that Clark Gregg basically has total control of the American military and the world military.

There's a moment earlier on where they go, everyone's binding together.

UN, America, NATO.

It's like, well, America's part of NATO.

Like, that's not, like, that NATO is not a separate thing that we have nothing to do with.

The only time NATO was ever called up en masse was to help America in Afghanistan.

So the idea that it's a Dan was saying that he earlier, Dan was saying, you know what you're going to claim I was saying.

That the U.S.

should leave NATO because

they're a taker state, is what you're saying.

Because you were also saying how Putin is doing the right thing.

And why would we stand in his way when Ukraine was historically a center-terry?

We're just pretending Dan likes, says terrible things.

Dan never really said that.

No, Dan doesn't say that.

And we all stand in support still with the patriots in Ukraine who are fighting for their freedom and their country.

But anyway, going back to what we were talking about before, the idea that Clark Gregg is in control of all of this military power

and nobody can seem to stop him, but also that it's never quite clear what it is about Goliath's data that is so incredibly important that basically he'll allow the world to burn in order to keep Goliath there, you know, to keep it going.

So they've got this plan to take care of

Goliath with this virus, but Cube takes a little time to write his kids.

And if I die, email first.

But he needs to.

He takes the time to put a delayed send on that thing.

He needs a thumb drive, though, to deliver it manually.

And he doesn't have one because he's in such a secure office.

So it's up to Amazon to come to the rescue with this.

This is okay.

This is when the movie, it was so stupid up to this point.

And it gets, I was like, there's no way.

They can't get stupider.

But just like, just like with Hundreds of Beavers, where I was like, there's no way this movie could get any sillier than it is now.

And then it does.

This movie keeps getting stupider.

So, Dan, I would just love to say it.

Luckily, Mark Goodman, baby mama and Amazon delivery driver.

Baby daddy.

I'm sorry, baby daddy.

Yeah, maybe it's a junior type situation.

Baby daddy and Amazon delivery driver.

He goes, I can get you a

flash drive or whatever.

I can get it to you with this Amazon drone.

Yeah, we use these drones now.

It's the future of delivery.

He does a short little infomercial for Amazon drones.

He goes, but you have to go on the website and order it first to start a person to start a ticket so I can do it.

So the world is falling apart.

IceCube is running out of time.

All the satellites have been knocked out.

Luckily, the Amazon website still works and he has to go on and buy a flash drive.

It's so funny that he chose to buy a flash drive, right?

Because doesn't he have a flash drive?

Yeah, he does the same flash drive.

Why don't he order something cheaper than a flash drive?

Like some shoelaces?

What's, you know, he's thinking very linerally.

You know, it's a one-to-one.

But it's just the stupidity doesn't stop there because now we get into the movie essentially becomes

a theme park simulator ride as we are watching the, I guess, the drone's point of view as Mark Goodna has to fly it past the aliens to get it to the building.

Dan, tell us about the sequence.

This sequence is amazing.

Past the tripods, but they also enlist like a military drone to protect the Amazon drone.

Yeah, Dave manages to sit down.

He manages to hack into like a

Predator Hunter drone or whatever they're called.

And is shooting the aliens.

And it's one of these things where you're like,

so.

The military could be doing this right now?

Like one of these movies where an amateur gets a hold of military equipment and is like, oh, oh, and is able to handle it like a professional.

And it's just,

it's all bonkers.

It's all

starfightering.

Yeah, exactly.

He's like, oh, no, a model missiles.

They do this.

Yeah, they do this small-scale drone dogfight, but the drone with the valuable

thumb drive falls and it can't get up because it's on its back.

So they see a guy.

nearby cowering from the tripods.

They find out what his phone number is and they're like, sir, can you flip over that drone?

And to do it, they bribe him with a thousand dollar Amazon gift card.

More, more Amazon.

Thank you, Amazon, for saying, thank you, Amazon, for helping us laugh at love again.

It is

bonkers how much

Amazon funded this.

If they want to put their little thing in there,

there are a thousand problems with Amazon as a company, but they have certainly the right to advertise in their own movie.

But to do it to this degree is

just egregious.

I think, well, that's the thing.

There's three levels, right?

There's subtle, where like you see Amazon packages in the background, or the, or the hero is an Amazon's Livy driver, but he's not doing Amazon stuff.

Then there is egregious, where everyone is talking about how great Amazon is and the hero of the movie is like the, is, is, um, what's his name?

Jeff Bezos thing.

Then there's this level, which I feel like goes past egregious to ludicrous, where it is so funny to me because it starts to be like, I guess this is why humans are here on this earth to serve Amazon and use Amazon.

Thank you, God, for making Amazon.

That's basically where we're at.

And I don't have it in my notes exactly when, like, one of them's at the end of the movie.

Like, there are two times when

Ice Cube refers to like what they do as like seeing what is in people's Amazon carts, like the surveillance.

That's the example he gives.

Because that's our most important data, Dan.

That's our most precious secrets and data.

This is also the, I mean, they gloss over how the guy whose cell phone they're using, it's, it is a homeless guy, right?

So I'm not sure how he's going to be able to do it.

I mean, he's certainly cowering in a tent underneath an overpass.

But he doesn't necessarily clarify.

They do say that he has a phone.

I don't know.

I mean, that's it.

But I was just, then I started wondering, well, where is he going to get his stuff sent to when he uses this Amazon gift card?

Does he have a computer?

And I shouldn't have to think about these things.

No,

they should have clarified in the movie that he would use an Amazon Dropbox and pick it up there.

Or maybe they should have rather than

Amazon products.

I feel like Amazon has tricked us into promoting Amazon.

So I just want to say, guys, listeners,

we're not promoting Amazon, right?

They don't like Amazon.

They treat their workers a business.

They're led by one of many evil billionaires who is more interested in jacking up his biceps than in using his money to help people, all that stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, and actively supported this terrible regime we're under.

Only after he realized he was not going to profit off of fighting the regime, Dan.

So he tried it one way.

He did not make money the way he thought because he might lose his military cloud computing services contracts.

And so he flipped the other way.

Yeah.

Ruining the Washington Post, among other things.

A lot of bad stuff.

Okay, anyway.

Looking like a C-minus version of Pitbull.

Take that, Bezos.

But he did show Venice how to throw a wedding.

So

Mark pilots a drone through the building to the server room.

A tentacle grabs him and he says, move, bitch, get out the way.

Even though that's not an Ice Cube song, that's ludicrous.

He can quote other songs.

That's

pretty crazy.

In the server room, he's covered with more tentacles, but just manages to plug in the USB.

Guys, I love Ice Cube, but I feel like if Ludacris had been in this role, I would have liked it more.

They certainly would have added an extra, extra element.

I mean, he's always an ice cube.

He's a specialist in the Fast and Furious movie.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, I mean.

Ice Cube 2, but he has a certain

glowering energy that I think Ludacris has like more energy energy that would go well.

Well, it would be harder for Ludacris to sit still for the amount of time the movie requires.

He does have experience with like fisheye lenses, so that would be cool.

That's true.

So the tripods start shutting down.

The bombing gets aborted just in time.

Because he has on the flash drive is the computer version of the actual

virus?

Actual, I mean, viruses are not living things, but they are genetic related.

It's a computer version of a genetic DNA virus that his kids worked on together.

And so he's able to upload that.

Somehow, made very quickly.

I don't know even how you hybridize those two things.

I don't, yeah, I don't know how you would do it, but they did it within minutes.

This is, and again, I think.

We're not the smartest family in the world.

No, no, no, they are.

I mean, yeah, basically, it's basically the Fantastic Four, right?

The Fantastic Four, which was so Ice Cube would be Reed Richards, I guess.

Faith is

the thing.

Wait, no, I think Ice Cube is the thing.

Ice Cube is the thing.

Dave is Reed Richards, or maybe he's Johnny Storm.

He's Johnny Storm.

He's Johnny Storm.

Except Mark is more like Johnny Storm.

He's like, he's kind of a goofball.

Yeah, he gets things done.

Faith is Reed Richards, and Dave is the invisible woman because he's hiding his identity behind this disruptor

thing.

Danny's like really into namor.

yeah yeah and he's got hots for fishmen yeah yeah exactly um do you guys ever think about the shape of water as as fantastic for erotic fanfic always okay she's the invisible woman because people don't notice her at work and he's namore because he's a fishman we get and michael shannon is basically galactus right

uh not necessarily uh

so uh you know he's more like claw the mad master of sound i guess but

happy ending we get a little bit of an epilogue.

We see Faith getting Ice Cube's posthumous email, as we also see news stories.

And it's implied that Ice Cube may have died, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But we see footage of news stories about all the good guys getting promoted and the bad guys getting arrested.

But it turns out...

No, he's not dead after all.

He gets a call from an official asking him to head up an ethical surveillance program, but he says, I'm done watching us.

Now I'm watching you guys.

And I'm like, that's going to get you arrested.

Like, don't tell them.

Don't tell them.

I mean, there are legal ways to keep an eye on the government.

He could be just making FOIA requests and things like that.

Yeah, but they're going to start, you know, they're going to surveil him.

And then, yeah, we get footage of the baby shower where he's wearing the Amazon product that was suggested him to purchase at the beginning of the movie.

Yep.

Yeah.

See, the Department, the Secretary of Defense, I think it is.

He's like, yeah, we want to collect people's information in an ethical way.

And I feel like the movie falls short of making the point that there is no ethical way particularly to do that.

You know, There's always an amount of invasion of privacy involved.

But yeah, he says, now he's like a freedom fighter with his son.

Maybe this shows that I'm just a regular bourgeois dad, but I was like, so how is he going to pay his bills?

Like, that's not a job that you'd get a salary for.

Like, does he still get his Department of Homeland Security pension?

Is that what he's living off of now?

Like,

he's his life rights or something.

I mean, that's the movie we're watching right now.

Yeah.

How much do you think this movie costs?

This is the kind of movie that looks like it costs.

that's a really good question but it probably costs like 300 million dollars something like that you know uh i wouldn't go there probably find it out more like three three thousand bill three thousand billion do you think that a lot of what we see is literally stock footage they just threw some tripods on some of it

so uh yeah do you guys have are you able to

find out or i don't see anything on the wikipedia page uh let me uh let me tap into goliath and see if it tells me okay

this is a good way for it.

War of the worlds.

Let's check this out.

Sex and nudity, none.

Violence and core, mild.

Mild because I think you're right.

Yeah.

Parents.

Yeah, what does common sense media say about the budget?

Well,

technical specs, Dolby Digital 5.1.

Okay.

Read us some goofs.

Look at the goofs.

Actually, there are no goofs.

The movie is perfect.

Yeah.

When I pull up goofs, it says 404 error.

Page not found.

Does not compute.

So, Dan, what else are we going to talk about?

Well, this is where we do our final judgments, whether this is a good, bad movie, a bad, bad movie, or a movie we kind of liked.

The metacritic score is six.

Is that out of ten?

Probably.

I think it's out of a hundred.

So.

No, it'd be a thousand.

As it started out, it was pretty slow.

because it is a movie about a man sitting in a room watching footage.

But the thing picked up steam.

So I will say, yeah,

it's a good, bad movie.

Like, one of the things about the Flophouse is we used to watch the movies all together when that was a thing we could do.

Now, obviously, we have to watch them on our own.

And I think this one would have been a lot of fun.

all watching it together.

As someone watching it alone, it didn't have the same bad movie joy that

I think you could achieve with this.

but i think it's there so i'm gonna say good bad yeah i feel like the first uh half hour or so felt like two hours um but once uh once stuff actually starts happening and uh it really leaned like initially i was just uncomfortable with how um

aroused you were yeah how aroused i was at the concept of a dad just watching anybody he wants

plays into a lot of your fantasies but you want to be the watched one you don't have to watch yeah i'm an exhibitionist guys i think we all know that um well you guys follow me on instagram right uh the but yeah it's uh once it picks up uh and we really get the full scope of the stupidity of this movie i think it ends up being pretty fun uh so i will say i think it's heart is in the wrong place but this is a good bad movie i am going to agree with what you guys said i i actually enjoyed watching it by myself a lot, but for the not the reasons that the filmmakers intended.

I think it is a good, bad movie.

It's very stupid.

It has the message that Amazon is the most benevolent of corporate overlords and that there are good ways and bad ways of being an intrusive surveillance state.

I don't love that a lot of the attack footage is actual disaster footage with CGI alien tripods inserted into it.

That's kind of icky.

But otherwise, if you want to watch the dumbest movie of 2025,

then you only have one option, you know, and that's and that's war of the world.

So I would say

watch it for the wrong reasons if you're going to watch it.

But I would also say good, bad movie.

Yeah, you called this maybe the dumbest movie, and I don't know if I could go that far, but it's certainly perhaps the dumbest movie with actual movie stars in it.

I feel like even

no name indie movies, this is, there's just a, there's a core of, there's a hard, molten core.

I know it can be hard and molten at the same time.

There's this kind of intense core of stupidity that the entire movie revolves around.

And just when you think the movie has gotten really dumb, then it suddenly leaps up again and gets even dumber.

And in that way, at times, it has the, I guess the nicest thing I'll say about it is at times has the

breakneck insanity of two children playing a make-believe game together where they're just inventing it as they go along, you know?

But in a negative way for this movie, but it is, it's just so, it's just really dumb.

It's just a really dumb movie.

I really can't wait for them to make like a Universal Studio style theme park ride for this movie where you're just sitting at a desk chair and you're experiencing the whole thing.

Looking at a screen the whole time.

Yeah, this thing could have this thing would have crushed in 40X, right?

Where you're just smelling office smells.

Yeah.

Cube spills his coffee and water sprays on you.

Breathing recycled air.

On Judge John Hodgman, the courtroom is fake, but the disputes are real.

Brian would say, I'm the Gumby of his family.

He's just not.

Claiming to be Gumby is an un-Gumby-like claim.

No, it's just Gumby and I being our authentic selves.

So what's your complaint?

Too many sauces?

There are no foods on which to put the sauces.

Have we named all the sauces on the top shelf yet?

Not even close.

You economize when it comes to pants.

Truly, it's not about the cleanliness of the pants.

Well, why isn't it?

This is what I want to know.

Judge John Hodgman, fake court, weird cases, real justice.

On maximumfun.org, YouTube, and everywhere you get podcasts.

It's hard to explain what Jordan Jesse Go is about.

So I had my kids take a stab at it.

Probably weird stuff.

You talk about jobs that are annoying.

Business.

I think you probably learned your lesson after talking about business a couple of times.

Growing up jokes that I don't understand

and there's no point in making

all the podcasts oh boy.

Subscribe to Jordan Jesse Go, a comedy show for grown-ups.

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Hey, we're all busy, especially if your name is Elliot.

And between busy schedules and plans with friends, sometimes...

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And

some flophouse news.

We have sold out our Chicago show, so we are adding a late show.

If you wanted to hear us talk about taking care of business at 7 p.m., I'm sorry you snossed and you lost.

But now you can hear us talk about another Jim Belushi film at 9 p.m.

And speaking of 9, the film is K-9,

the second best action comedy from 1989 about a cop and his dog, which also makes it the worst action comedy from 1989 about a cop and his dog.

So if you want tickets, go to sleeping-village.com for the date of Sunday, November 16.

And we hope to see you there for the late show when things get a little blue.

Bada dee, bada die.

Now, if you can't go to Chicago and you can't make it there,

we understand you're going to be missing out on what's going to be a really fantastic show, but you will have access in your home to a different kind of flophouse show through your computer.

That's right.

We are bringing back Flop TV, the online video, one-hour television version of the Flophouse, starting the first Saturday in September and continuing every month after that on the first Saturday of each month through February.

Not every month after that until the end of time.

There's six episodes.

So for six months, the first Saturday of each month, we are going to be doing our online live show.

You can get tickets at theflophouse.simpletics.com.

For this season, season three, we are branding it as Flopsterpiece Theater.

Each episode will travel through time to a different decade to see a major flop from that decade.

We're starting with the 2000s in September with The Adventures of Pluto Nash, a movie I'm still not quite sure exists, so I'm kind of excited to see it.

And then we'll be continuing through.

After that, we'll be doing Jack Frost, the Michael Keaton one, Xanadu, Zardaz, Dr.

Doolittle, the Rex Harrison one, and Plan 9 from Outer Space, a classic flop movie that we've never talked about.

Go to theflophouse.simpletics.com to get tickets.

Again, that's the first Saturday in every month on your computer, but if you can't make it that time that day, that's okay.

If you have a ticket, you have access to the recorded video of that episode for the entirety of of the run of the series that's right through February.

So you can buy tickets in January and watch all the episodes.

You can buy tickets in December and watch all the episodes.

I think you should buy the tickets now, but you could do that later if you want to.

And I would suggest getting the season passed.

That's a six-show bundle.

You get six episodes for the price of five.

There's a discount on that one.

It's like you're getting a free episode.

It's like you're stealing an episode of the show right from us.

No, no, no, don't steal that episode.

No, don't do it.

Don't do it.

It's reverse psychology.

You should do it.

Don't do it.

No.

So that's theflophouse.simpletex.com for Flop TV season three.

We've had so much fun in the past with Flop TV.

We're trying new things with it.

It's going to be really fun.

Join us September 6th, the first Saturday in September, and then the first Saturday of the month each month after that through February.

Let us

take a moment to talk to you, the listeners.

I'd like you to reflect on the Lord and his bounty and blessings.

Through the medium of emails from you, the listeners.

This first letter from listeners, to coin a phrase, is from

sorrow, last name withheld,

who writes, I've been hosting a weekly science podcast for 12 plus years, and I get two kinds of correction emails.

One, you are not as precise as I would like you to be, and two,

big flub, nice job, dummy.

I don't get a lot, but the actual mistakes linger in the back of my brain.

An example of the first kind of letter would be when I jokingly suggested that if there are deep caves on the moon, a scientific possibility, then it would make for the scariest cave diving ever.

A listener wrote in to let me know that there would never be water in the moon caves.

The worst of the latter kind of correction.

Yeah, because that's the only way to use dive.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

The latter kind of correction was 10 years ago, I apparently said nuclear, George W.

style, instead of nuclear.

I was afraid to say that word for years.

I notice you sometimes practice defensive podcasting and tell people not to write in about some mistake in the moment.

So I'm guessing there are some you dread.

What kind of corrections do you get the most of, which is stuck with you?

Sorry, last name withheld.

I mean, I

honestly,

people are

pretty nice about correcting us overall.

Like, I don't think we get the worst of it.

Uh, I see

other podcasts get a lot more

aggro energy from listeners, but the stuff I dread is when I like say something wrong about movies because that's the topic of the show.

And I'm like, well, my supposed expertise is all that I have.

Like, there's like one time when I think I attributed a Martin Brest movie to Walter Hill or something.

And I was like, oh, and now that mistake is there forever.

But I don't know.

What do you guys think?

Yeah, I'm not that worried about it anymore.

I feel like probably at the start of doing the show, I was a little more concerned that I might look foolish by saying something that's incorrect, but I've gotten over that and don't care.

And when it comes to people writing in letters, if

I don't like the energy, I don't read it.

I ignore it.

The kind of corrections that stick with me are more the ones where like I've used a word that was insensitive.

I've been unclear in what I'm saying.

And

it sounds like I'm saying something I don't really, that I'm not intending to say.

But then there are also sometimes times when someone catches me in a factual error and it just gets to me because I'm the kind of guy who that those stick out to.

And I like to be the guy who catches other people in factual errors as you may have guessed from this very podcast.

Everyone loves that guy.

Yeah, everybody loves him.

It took me a long time into my 20s to realize like, oh, nobody likes being corrected ever.

No one's ever like, thank you for reminding, for telling me that.

I'm glad that I now have it correct.

But yeah, every now and then.

Although I feel like it is a sign of growth to be able to receive that correction and then

respond in a way that isn't defensive.

Yes, that's true.

That's the hard part.

But yeah, for me, it's when

if I've said something in a sloppy way, because we don't write this show ahead of time, we're just talking off the top of our heads, and there's an inadvertent implication or consequence, that's when I feel the worst about it.

Yeah.

No, agreed on that.

Sam, last name withheld, right.

Sam wise Gamgee.

Gamji?

How do you pronounce his name?

Gamgee, dude.

Gamgi.

I don't know.

He's fictional, Stu, so get off my back.

We're all

exist in the dreams of a mad God.

We all live in a simulation hologram of some kind.

Yeah.

Sam writes, I met Anthony Bourdain at a book signing

and told him how impressed I was that he narrated his own audiobooks.

His reply, what else am I going to do?

Get Jeremy Irons to narrate that shit?

Mike, so my question to you is

that was a solid Bourdain impression right there.

Yeah, that was

that one up your sleeve.

Is what celebrity would you want to?

Do another Anthony Bourdain.

Now do Anthony Bourdain.

Now pretend he works at a a McDonald's.

Well, you want some of this shit?

Okay, pretty good.

Pretty good.

Yeah, pretty good.

He would not like that shit.

Yeah.

The question is, what celebrity would we like to narrate our memoirs?

Oh.

I'm just going to pick not out of like who I think would play me the most accurately, but who I would like to hear the voice of saying my memoirs is Phoebe Waller Bridge.

Okay.

Fair.

Yeah.

Elliot,

you got a hot one?

Yeah, probably Cassandra Peterson.

That's an amazing choice.

And of course, mine is Mr.

McDonald's himself, Brian Cox.

I'd love it.

Thanks.

So

those are the

letters.

Let's move on.

Okay.

That is an anticlimactic way to say it.

Yeah.

I'll move on to recommendations, movies that we may have seen of late or, I don't know, whatever, a long time ago.

I don't care.

There's no statute of limitations, yeah.

Yeah.

That we've enjoyed.

Oh, we've enjoyed.

Oh, okay.

Wait, I got to rethink mine.

I saw a movie recently.

It was a Weird Wednesday presentation at

Almo, which I have returned to now that they have,

you know, fixed their labor problems.

They have allowed the union to be.

So correctors stay away.

Well, I just, you know, I.

They allowed the union, they bent to the will of the union.

They bent to the will of the union.

They recognized the power of organized labor, Daniel.

Yes.

We've gotten so political today.

This is good stuff.

Yeah, we're heating up.

People love this.

Do they?

So I watched a movie called Wicked Wicked from 1973, which was...

So you watched the movie Wicked twice in a row, Dan?

Just admit that's what it was, yeah.

It was filmed in what the movie calls Duo Vision, which means that it is in split screen almost the entire movie.

There are a couple of like emphasis moments where they switch to one shot, although like it seems kind of arbitrary when they decide what is important enough.

And it is a wild movie.

Like I'm not going to say I think it's like great on its own.

It is just

extremely entertaining because they decided to use this gimmick, but they didn't really like think about why they were using this gimmick or how this gimmick would be used.

Like

in a movie like Timecode, where like it's split into four quadrants on the screen, it's all happening in real time.

And sometimes the things cross over one another.

And so you get a sense of like coherency to it.

Whereas here,

sometimes like one of the screens will be a flashback.

Sometimes both of them will be used to flashback.

Sometimes one of them will be like someone telling a story and you'll see how it really happened in the other screen.

Sometimes like things are happening like nearby, but you don't really have a sense of the geography.

So it doesn't like increase the tension or anything.

It just is more confusing.

Sometimes two people will be in the same room and like two halves of the conversation will just be on like different screens.

It's just, it's a weird movie.

Like they do like this like.

cutaway flashback that almost feels like a family guy gag at one point where they're just like this isn't the first time you make a made a mistake and then you like just flashback to like this shooting that happened and then right back to the movie um

it's uh it's like a killer thriller but it's not filled with thrills it's just strange it's a strange thing to watch some like a lot of the time it seems like they didn't realize that making a movie uh with two uh concurrent screens going at the same time would mean they would have to shoot a lot more movies.

So like a lot of the time, something utterly boring is happening happening in one of the sides, which is good because it directs your attention where it needs to be, but it's not, the gimmick is not enhancing it at that point.

But it's kind of a fascinating thing.

So Wicked, Wicked from 1973.

Dan, I had never heard of this movie.

And I just want to tell you, I'm looking at the information on Wikipedia and it talks about how one of the big challenges in making the movie was he decided to write the script so that the script pages were divided down the middle and you would have it split up the way it is.

And he goes, and it says,

It says on Wikipedia: finding a typewriter that could accommodate these unique needs proved challenging for the writer.

I love that from step one, it was difficult to make this movie.

Just finding the right typewriter was hard.

That typewriter did not exist because it would be dumb.

And it's not like a mission impossible thing where they're like, okay, fuck it.

We have to invent this special typewriter.

Yeah, my recommendation, I don't think, is going to catch anyone by surprise, but I recently saw the movie Weapons,

the follow-up to Barbarian from the same writer-director, Zach Kreger.

Krieger, Kreger.

You seem pretty confident about how to say Samwise Gamgee, and now suddenly the shoe is on the other foot.

Yeah, I mean,

I'm much better at Lord of the Rings stuff than real life stuff, Elliot.

Look at my life.

But

so this is a horror movie.

One of the things that I will give this movie extra credit for, bonus points, is that the trailer gives you very little information.

It gives you just kind of the initial setup and then gives you hints at the chaos to come.

This is a horror movie that, in some ways, to me, like Barbarian, isn't really about anything, but is a wild, exciting horror movie ride.

It's very gross at times.

It has some great scares and it has like situations that I feel like I haven't seen before.

I think it's really fun.

It has some great performances.

I really enjoyed it.

So weapons.

I'm going to recommend a movie that I don't know if enjoyed is quite the right word, but which I found a lot in

that

I found meaningful, but also strange, but also just interesting.

And that is David Cronenberg's most recent movie, The Shrouds.

Oh, wow.

David Cronenberg is one of these directors who, as he has gotten older, his movies have stripped away the idea of like

sensationalism or thrill in a way that I find really uh fascinating and interesting where he is presenting a very strange story about a man whose grief for his wife was so overwhelming that he invented a shroud that a dead body can wear underground that provides a real-time 3d video image of it so you can watch your loved ones rotting and that's and never lose sight of them.

And this somehow gets him wrapped up into a conspiracy involving potentially the surveillance state, potentially the Chinese government, potentially different environmental

terror activists,

and also his own kind of like

relationship with his wife's body and his sexual interest in that and his inability to kind of let it go.

And there's a lot of very Cronenberg feelings and thoughts

floating around in it.

And it never fully comes together, particularly.

This is a very Malholland Drive type movie where apparently, like Malholland Drive, it was started as an idea for a television series and then was completed as a movie when it was not made as a television series.

But it's a really fascinating kind of late period.

It's going to be like an office-style sitcom, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's

set at the cemetery where they watch people rotting on little screens.

It's a really fascinating late period David Cornenberg movie, and it feels very personal.

And like a lot of Cornenberg stuff, like there are things that are not especially pleasant that you see or that happen in it it is a movie that plays with um

uh taboo stuff um but i that i thought i found a lot in it that i found really meaningful and interesting even though when it i have to admit when it ended i was like oh it ended i didn't the ending is so is fairly abrupt and i was like oh the movie's over um but i would recommend it if you are a cronenberg fan and you're just seeing where he is now I've been mean to get to it and I just haven't gotten around to it.

Have you seen it yet, Dan?

No.

Yeah, it was such a, it had such like a brief theatrical run.

It does not surprise me that it didn't make a big splash, not just because the subject matter is, I think a lot of people would find distasteful, but also because it's so calm for most of the movie.

Like even when the character is in trouble or he, or there's kind of like rough emotional stuff happening, it's presented at a very calm, kind of very even-keeled way.

And so it does not deliver thrills.

Like I'm saying, it doesn't deliver, it's not like the fly or scanners or something where you're like, oh shit, the guy's head exploded.

You know, it's a, it's a, very much a mature late period Cronenberg, but I think it's worth watching if you like it.

It doesn't cut to a guy barfing because somebody's head exploded.

Does it?

No.

He doesn't hold in a Sopranos episode.

Yeah, it seems like a movie that might

confuse non-Cronenberg heads, perhaps.

Like I, what I associate with it so far, I want to see it, is I ran into

Griffin Newman at Nighthawk after he had just seen it.

And he was very positive about it, but said that like there was like a large group of the the people in the theater like laughing and being asses about you know watching it and uh laughing at how like dumb it was or something or like thinking of it as like bad or something when like i i assume it's just a lot of cronenberg weirdness well i think there's a lot of stuff in it that is that the way that so war of the worlds is the one we watch today is dumb and stupid in a way that i think is not intentional i think they thought they were making kind of a slapdash movie but they weren't like let's make a dumb movie it wasn't a choice whereas this one like i said it's a little slow.

Everything is very underplayed in a way that could be hilarious if it was not intentional, but it feels intentional.

And so I think it's the difference between when something is meant to be weird or strange and when it's not meant to be.

And if you don't know Cronenberg, then I could see mistaking that.

You know, Guy Pierce is in it as maybe the least handsome he's ever been in a movie and he's playing this weird character who says some strange things.

And there, and

there, if I, if I was like, if it wasn't, if I didn't trust the guy making the movie, I might be like, this is a weird performance.

I'm not sure this performance makes any sense at all.

But because going into it, I'm already in a Cronenberg state of mind.

I love that song.

I'm in a Cronenberg state of mind.

See a guy become a fly down in Hollywood.

Okay, well, three, I assume, great recommendations.

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for the end of the podcast, where I say, if you like this, check out Maximum Fun, our network over at maximumfun.org.

We can only exist thanks to the support of MaxFun members.

And

it helps to check out some of the other shows too.

And thank you to Alex Smith, our producer.

He goes by the name Howl Dotty all over the internet.

I've lately been enjoying

his podcast,

Big Howl and Possum, which is a show about him playing sort of a backwoods character whose best friend is a giant possum, and they just kind of talk about nonsense.

And it works way better

as a podcast than you might imagine from that sort of sketched out, very simple idea.

I laugh a lot at it.

So check that out as well.

For the Flop House, I've been Dan McCoy.

And I'm Stuart Wellington.

And I continue to be Elliot Kalen, as I was at the beginning, so I am at the end, forever and ever.

Amen.

See ya.

I'm looking for my notes.

There they are.

Are you doing the summary this time, Dan?

I was on the sheet, I believe.

Right?

That doesn't quite answer the question.

I mean, it did answer it in the most passive aggressive way.

Well, I said that I have notes.

I feel like from context clues, it all fits together.

You're right.

I'm the answer.

Yeah, exactly.

I didn't say anyone was an asshole.

I said that, like, I think it's pretty clear.

Let's roll back the tape from

the totality of what was said.

Okay, anyway.

You remind me of the kids in the Ozu movie where they're like, adults have too much small talk.

It's a waste of time.

Who cares?

Dan, this is the kind of little stuff that lubricates the conversation, lubricates all of the stuff.

I understand.

It's spice, you know, it's the good stuff.

That is...

Look, I

have gotten better at small talk is the thing.

I used to like not understand it at all.

No, you're still big.

It's just the talk got small.

Why does this work?

And then, uh, and then I was like, oh, wait, this is a trait of neurodivergent people.

We don't understand the efficacy or need for non-functional like talk.

Yeah.

But I get it.

You know, we're lubricating our friendship joints.

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