Ep.#444 - Here

Hi, floppers.

Before we start this episode, I just wanted to remind you: we are in the middle of Flop TV Season 2.

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This time, it's personal.

On this episode, we discuss here.

Where?

Here.

Where?

Here.

Okay.

I wonder what it was about that third one that really Stuart understood finally.

Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Flop House.

I'm Dan McCoy.

Hey, Dan McCoy, it's me, Stuart Wellington, your pal.

Hey, me, Stuart Wellington, your pal.

It's me, your guys' other friend, and the third co-host of this show, Elliot Kalen.

Well, we've all established who we are and what our deal is, relationships, regardless, dining absolutely.

We know what Stuart's deal is.

He's Dan's friend.

And we we know that what my deal is, I'm both your friends.

But Dan, we don't know what your deal is.

Oh, I'm both of your friends.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

I am both of your friends.

I'm two people in one.

No, that's my thing, being two people's friends.

So you got to find a new thing.

Okay.

You got to work on a new one.

Maybe

you're like a drifter on the run.

Yeah.

Or like a salty old sea captain who's also got a heroin addiction.

Oh, interesting.

I mean, I guess he would have ready access to heroin since he's riding the high seas.

So what do we do on this podcast?

Well, apparently, we add flavor to my life, but also, uh, it's a podcast where we watch a bad movie and then we talk about it.

A movie that either critics or audience rejected, or both audiences, rather, and uh, or I could say audience, critics or audience.

I could be very uh astute about it.

This sounds like the best way to use the time, and we're already late with our recording.

We had some technical difficulties before this show started, and so this shows.

I'm pulling difficulties, I'm pulling an Elliott, and the less time there is, the more I want to stretch out.

Yeah, we talk about bad movies.

And this one is by Robert Zemekis,

a man.

You might know him.

That's Bobby Z.

He's a famous Bobby Z.

Yep.

He's been cranking out hits.

Banger after banger.

Beowulf.

Polar Express.

Crash.

No, no, what was the not crash?

Flight.

Sorry.

Flight.

You are, for humorous effect, of course, focusing on on his more recent efforts.

This is a director that I genuinely loved during the first half of his career.

And then

it's been a series of disappointing ways.

And then unfortunately, he became more machine than man at a certain point.

Romancing the Stone.

Awesome.

Back to the Future.

Who Framed Roger Rabbits?

Wonderful.

I mean, like, I'm

defending love.

I think Death Becomes her is very funny.

There was a story in one of the New York papers about how there's a big push to get Forrest Gump declared as the number one best movie American movie of all time.

By who?

Who's pushing that?

I don't fucking know.

Whoever's reading the newspaper,

it's probably some dumbass fucking Instagram account.

And I'm not even one of those people who outright hates Forrest Gump, but it is, yeah, but it's a solid movie.

Why do you hate him, dude?

He's just like a nice guy.

Yeah, it's true.

He doesn't mean any harm.

It's really a real solid middle movie, you know, solid middle movie.

But so Robert Simekis, yeah, yeah, he's he's done a, he's had a few really

like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, we just watched again not too long ago at my house.

That's an amazing movie.

That's an amazing movie.

But he's also, yeah, lately, he's gotten really into technology and making movies that are more around what can I do with this tech than necessarily with that about,

you know, strong storytelling.

Let's see.

You know, I feel like in some ways we're getting ahead of ourselves, but on another way, you mean we're telling this out of order, much like the movie here?

You've given me the opening to say one of the things I think is a big problem with this movie, which is we can we'll say up front, the conceit of the movie is it's all sort of from, it's a stationary camera from the same angle,

you know, over decades and centuries, the people who lived in this area here

lived here.

And Dan, even before you get further, I just want to say I was, when I saw the trailer for this movie, I was genuinely really intrigued by this movie.

This movie is based on a comic story by Richard McGuire that I love.

I've loved it for years.

I think I saw it in a, it was in a collection anthology of either things from the magazine Raw or just like best of comics.

I don't remember.

And it was originally like an eight-page story.

Raw was the inspiration for the movie, the French film, right?

Yeah, for both the French film and also for the WWE show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so it was, yeah, Art Spiegelman and François Millie, they were like, how we got it, we got to impact the wrestling world someway.

And

it's a great short comic that he then many years later expanded into a full-length book.

And I love that book.

I love that comic.

With the conceit being, you are always looking at the same geographical physical space, but there are different panels within panels that show you what was happening in that space at different periods in time.

And it starts out saying like, here's what it was like in 1957.

Here's what it was like in 1982.

Here's what it was like in 1973.

With panels kind of

cloud narrator telling you all this shit?

No, no, no.

There is not.

The panels are labeled with the year, but that's the extent of the narration and otherwise and it's really it's not even really telling full stories although you can kind of glimpse stories between the panels it's just this space a lot of eventually there's a dinosaur walking through you know ben franklin's house is nearby or whatever but like there's no there's no there's not really narrative it's more an exploration of space and i love the book of it so when i saw they're making a movie i was like this is gonna be a hard movie to make but i'm intrigued by what they're gonna do but i came into it loving this book so before uh

let's return to the yeah and now that digression Yeah.

That digression setting up what the movie was based on?

No, no, no.

It just looked like Stuart maybe was going to then delay the payoff even further.

And I'm

I could see why that would make a great.

No, no, Dan, it makes a great comic, but I think what you're going to say is...

It makes a great comic because

it plays to the

existing,

I mean, I guess there's, you know, obviously there's a frame to a screen as well, but like it plays to the existing nature of comics, which is a frame that is stationary.

You know, you can see these glimpses.

Whereas, you know, what I like about a movie camera is it moves around.

It's right there in the name.

But what I wanted to say was like off of the, yep, it stands for can

automate

my

extra

recording.

Yeah.

Apparatus.

Apparatus.

Yeah, wow, yeah.

I forgot what it stood for at the end there.

And of course you jumped in.

But

no, but you say that about the technical stuff.

Like the thing is, like, Zemeka seems to be approaching this as a technical challenge.

And this strikes me as exactly the wrong thing to do with this story.

Like, it should be a dramatic challenge.

Like, how do we make this compelling without a moving camera?

Like, what do we do?

And he is doing the most

glossy, goofy-ass way of doing this, I feel like.

He has essentially made a movie that feels like a cross between a play.

The characters in it talk like they're in a play.

Well, here's the room.

You know,

Harry just came back from the war, took a bullet.

Yeah, my husband lost in the Pacific.

A lot of women losing their men these days.

They sure are.

Everyone has to talk louder and it echoes because they're in this one room far from the camera and it feels like a play.

It's a cross between that and a movie you would see at a museum that's kind of trying to get across.

Here's how people lived back in olden times.

The thing is, like,

if it was more like a play, I think I would like it better, though.

Like, if it really played to the artificiality of the conceit, I think that would be better than having, like, I don't know.

It's like, now we're going to see the whole history.

We're going to put some

lifelike CGI indigenous peoples running around.

Well, and now we're going, you know,

have all these like fancy like CGI backgrounds.

Like, just get a...

a green screen for God's sake for this thing.

That's not what he does.

Have a room, you know?

We should also mention.

We should also that the de-aging technology in this is AI-based de-aging technology.

So it could be done in real time.

Don't love that.

Not a big AI guy myself.

My lot to talk, or is this a

Dan podcast?

I'm also taking up a lot of the options.

I just got interrupted when I was trying to say a thing.

I just didn't want it to be a double interruption.

Dan, and wait, and before Stuart talks, I'm going to interrupt again to say that Dan also,

it's this big, glossy, boring story, but it also is Robert Zemekis falling back on the thing that I think he loves to do, which is, here's another baby boomer life story.

Great.

Oh, they saw the Beatles on TV.

Oh, someone fought in Vietnam.

I've seen this story, Robert Zemekis.

It was called Forest Gum.

Stuart, you're sure.

Dan, you don't know what's more of a Stuart's.

Oh, it is a huge bummer, too.

Yeah, I mean, we were talking about how obviously a story like this that's experimental or it tries to explain itself or tries to be told in an experimental way, obviously would work better in comics.

For some reason, this like fixed perspective made me think of Alan Moore's Providence, which would use that fixed perspective to horror effect.

Whereas in many ways, this movie does make me feel elements of horror.

Like I do feel trapped in the movie,

especially

because you watched it twice.

But it's less that you're trapped with a sexually ravenous elder being or a deep one.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

More like I am Rudolph Van Richten trapped in the bleak house in Ravenloft.

Okay, so are we, yeah, I mean, I feel like my general notes, we've touched on a bunch of the things that we've already touched on a lot of them.

I didn't realize the de-aging technology was AI driven.

Well, I guess that's another example of AI looking like dog shit and being the antithesis of artists.

Well, let me clarify something about that because I do think it's interesting how like...

The first time I saw AI Tom Hanks, I didn't know it was AI, but like the first time I saw TGI.

And it's not AI fully CGI characters.

It's just they apparently, from what I read, they used a program that could, in real time, de-age their image.

So they're acting on the state, on the soundstage, and what the image coming into the cameras is an AI smoothed out young anime version.

Look, I mean, I do, apologies.

I don't know the way that this works, like, whether this is like

putting a lot of people out of work, or in some cases, it's a case where like the artists who do these things are glad to have a new technology.

It could be.

It's possible.

This sort of like technological innovation offends me less than like being like, hey, you know what you want to do is like read stuff that is just like culled from other stuff that we've reconfigured together.

And it's like, well, no, we want new human stories that speak to human desires,

unlike here.

But to get back to the DH Tom Hanks, though, the first time I saw him, I'm like, oh.

That's a pretty good effect.

And then the problem was throughout the rest of the movie, unless he was literally then like old man Tom Hanks, I was unclear about how old Tom Hanks was supposed to be at any time because it was not good at like distinguishing, you know, between like even like 17 and 30.

Yeah, he from the age of 17 to the age of about 50, he looks kind of the same.

I will say this for it.

One, it looks better than young man Robert De Niro in The Irishman.

A better movie where he does seem like an old man with dark hair.

Dude, shake his head.

He loves it.

No, no, no, I love that shit.

Why does he also curb something that guy

You can tell he doesn't have a full range of motion in his hips when he's curb stomping.

But also,

actually, going to kill him the next day.

I think this AI,

this AI, honey, you can't even get off the couch.

No, I was curb stomping a guy yesterday.

I'm paying for it.

You know what the doctor said about curb stomping.

I got to do my work.

I got to do my work.

The curb stomping is part of painting houses, guys.

It's essential.

True.

The other thing is that I feel like this, the AI work was really served well by the way I watched this movie, which was on an iPad while I was doing the dishes.

So my eyes weren't always on the screen.

And I would be like, oh, this looks pretty good.

And there'd be times when Tom Hanks or another character would get really close to the character, to the camera, mainly Tom Hanks' character, when he gets close to the camera, and it would suddenly be like, oh, that's not, yeah, that's not a fully real face that I'm looking at there.

A couple other notes.

There is, in addition to that, there is a pretty good CGI baby getting knocked off a couch sequence.

Although that was a good laugh.

pretty funny.

It was a fun laugh and farther than I thought they were going to go.

That baby just falling face first off the couch.

Okay, and as you said, this is fixed perspective.

We are the majority of the story is going to take place in a house, a single house.

And

within the confines of this house, we see, just like to give you an overview, we see a wedding, a funeral, a birth, a death, and basically one of every major story.

The invention of a lazy boy chair.

Yeah, that's true.

I just want to say, you know, there's various stories that we see, we glimpse throughout.

Oh, yeah, we're going to touch on all of them.

And, you know, some of them we come back to more than others.

Exhaustively.

But I think the clear winner is the lazy boy couple, who are the only people who have any verbs and like empowered.

And the only ones with a happy ending, but also the ones that are so totally disconnected from almost every other story.

They're the only ones where they would show up just dancing to 20s music, and I'd be growing 30s music, and I'd be like, what?

I'm not quite sure why I'm watching this.

I don't know, but they seem cool.

Yeah, yeah.

The lead from the Minx gets to be on the other side of the camera i like uh the inventor guy i i think his outfits go hard as hell

as well love that okay they're a very sexual couple in a way that the other couples are not that we see in this yeah um so uh yep as we said it's a fist fixed perspective uh focusing on an area that is uh i guess philadelphia philadelphia uh i mean ben franklin's house will you

it's technically ben franklin's son's house he would

Which I think he lived in New York State.

So I think it might be somewhere in New York, but I couldn't.

There's also, I saw, I saw a note that said potentially Perth Amboy.

Yeah, could be.

It could be Perth Ambay.

Yeah, it could be New Jersey.

Actually, Perth Amboy makes sense.

Yeah.

So there's also the movie opens with a little bit of a montage, and then it goes all the way back to the dawn of time.

We have dawn of time, we have dinosaurs, and then we get to see the meteor striking the earth that kills the dinosaurs.

Didn't realize that happened in New Jersey.

Yeah, that's the thing.

That minds a lot about New Jersey, if you ask me.

That was one of those moments where I was like, I know it's like, again,

the comic book does things a little differently.

It kind of increases the amount of time as it goes on.

So to kind of surprise you with just how far the conceit's going to go.

This does the opposite, where it kind of shows you some rooms, and then it goes back to the dawn of time, which is, I feel like, takes a little bit of the thrill out of it.

But also like, it's one of those things where it's like.

Part of the fun of it is also seeing like a dinosaur moment that is not a historic moment, that this maybe because a story made out of the the everyday moments so to have that meteor strike is a bit of an overkill i know it looks cool but also like i'm like immediately i was like bobby z that took place in mexico like unless this story takes place in mexico you cannot rewrite where the asteroid hit that killed the dinosaurs like come on guys what are you doing

maybe it was like uh like a the friend of the original asteroid okay so it's also i mean it is possible that the asteroid maybe broke up in the atmosphere the main chunk hit uh in the yucatan and then some smaller partle decided to go to Perth Amboy to see if they had opened the movie theater there that I used to go to when I was a kid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's

trying to make its way to Rutt's Hut.

Unfortunately, it didn't make it all the way there.

No.

Rutt's Hut, known for their hot dogs.

Yeah,

millions of years too early.

Yeah.

So, this meteor, of course, ushers in an ice age.

Everything is going super duper fast.

It's super sped up.

Everything is going super well.

It's going super well in the world

and on this podcast.

Okay, we see like a forest primeval, and then we see some indigenous people hunting.

And then, and of course, around now, we see a hummingbird that will show up at the very end of the movie, this eternal hummingbird character, the prisoner of London, or whatever that guy is.

What's that guy known as Turtle?

I think he's the prisoner of London, right?

Yeah, he can travel through time, but he can't leave London.

Yeah.

Yeah, if I'm right, everybody write in, tell Dan that Stuart's right again.

Chug another one, put it on the scoreboard.

I don't remember what this is in reference to.

Okay, so then

we go to colonial times.

We see a big man, like a big manor house being built.

And then we see the building of the house that we will then spend the rest of our time at.

The place we are trapped at for the next hour and a half.

The here.

Jigsaw.

So there are basically.

So there's a bunch of people.

You're going to have to cut off your own leg and you got to watch this Robert Zemeckis movie.

Oh, jigsaw, oof, oof.

I don't want to play a little game.

So there is one main story.

There's one, a story of one family that seems to take

the majority of the movie, but there's a number of side stories that intersect.

And while the movie isn't told linearly,

each side story seems to follow a relatively, all the stories seem to follow a linear path, even though they're, you know, they're obviously

jumping back and forth, I think.

But it's not so radical that you're like, that you, it's clearly told in a way where it's jumping a little bit, but it is a...

mostly a forward momentum through time for each yeah and trying to show connections uh between the the different experiences in this space uh so just to touch on these side stories there's a young indigenous couple at one point they exchange jewelry uh they get married they have a they have a baby she dies we have a funeral and then he mourns her again

Very funny aging situation.

He looks very funny.

This elderly native guy who just looks like a normal guy with a wrinkly face.

Elderly man.

Yeah, like he's one of the kids from Akira.

Right before the shot, they gave him like a real strong prune or like a real strong lemon.

And he just puckered up.

Well, I thought you meant they had him soaking a bath for a long time.

That's what they did.

Now, we're going, of course, we're going through these side stories chronologically, although, again, in the movie, they're all sprinkled throughout.

We have William Franklin, the illegitimate son of Ben Franklin, who's complaining about his father and his politics.

He is a British sympathizer.

There's a sequence where a kid throws an apple basically at the camera and it explodes all over him.

It's pretty funny.

That, I mean, that storyline just basically shows little bits of the Revolutionary War.

We have

a part at the end.

I have to mention this, though, where

a soldier rides up and there's a bunch of continental soldiers there.

And a closer rides up and he goes, news from General, a dispatch from General Washington.

The British have surrendered.

The war is over.

And the other soldiers could not give less of a shit.

And what they do have no reaction to it.

And one of them just goes, what now?

And then it cuts to, you know, America 200 years later or something.

But I thought it was so funny.

I was like, I got to imagine that the soldiers had more of a reaction to learning the war was over and they had won than just the sense of like, okay, another damn thing after that.

I've got another job now.

Let me just change a battle in my schedule for next week to no battle.

I get so depressed when I don't have anything to do.

I just like having something to look forward to, even if it's a battle.

Yeah.

Okay, so just I have limited experience with winning wars, but I seem to remember that when we won World War II, it seemed like people were excited.

There was a confetti, there was a kiss.

Yeah, but at least one.

Yeah.

Yeah, at least one.

We have a we've one of the side stories is a budding pilot, an enthusiastic airplane pilot, and his nagging wife, whose trait is that she has a child and doesn't want him to be flying.

He, of course, does not die from flying his plane to Schenectady.

No, he dies of influenza.

This was so funny to me, the the way this is handled.

He is lying in his casket with a pilot's cap on with goggles on it.

All the flowers are in the shapes of planes and propellers.

And there's two people with their backs to the camera.

And he's like, oh, she was really mad about it.

And she says, what's weird is that you see his wife, his widow, before the funeral saying, how could you let this happen?

Or something like that, which implies, again, it's a flying accident.

She's been attacking his flying hobby the whole time.

And you see the two.

And then he goes, oh, I'm surprised they had an open funeral.

Usually there's an open casket.

Usually there's not much of the body after a plane crash it wasn't a plane crash that killed him and then he turns you see they're both wearing masks it was influenza and it's like

you're just you're just learning this at the funeral do you not know them well but also the sudden reveal of the masks i thought was so funny the whole thing was so funny this plot like you know not to make a bad plane pun, but it sputters out because it's just like, okay, it's like all just build to this punchline that is obviously meant to be like, you know, it's like, it's like COVID, you know.

Because there's some COVID stuff in this movie, too.

It's not saying anything.

Like, it's not saying anything about anything.

No, I mean, not to, maybe I'm just talking tough because I'm with my boys, but.

But the whole movie isn't saying anything.

But what I would say is, if my wife was so against me flying a plane around that she would be constantly complaining about it, if that's my favorite thing to do in the world, I'd get a new wife, dog.

Go fly and find a merchant wife or something.

Wow.

Yeah.

Okay, so we've.

What if your wife's Michelle Dockery, though?

Let me change my story.

Okay, run the numbers on that one.

Yeah.

Okay, so the next one, of course, is, as we said, the Bohemian couple, where she is kind of a flapper, and he's an inventor, and he invents the lazy boy.

Of course,

check the history books.

This guy did not invent the lazy boy.

And also the recliners that existed for a long time.

Yes.

And her entire job seems to be to hang around the house in her underwear and a robe and dance to the radio.

And his job is to invent things in an undershirt and slacks as suit pants.

And I just, I was like, there is nothing about these people's lives that does not involve dancing to the radio, taking dirty pictures of each other, or inventing the lazy boy.

It is, and they have no connection with any other storyline.

Otherwise, it's just so funny to me that they're like, all right.

Breath of fresh air.

And otherwise,

we got to get across the breath of the American experience over millions of years.

Well, we've got to get the invention of the lazy boy in there.

They're sort of like a slob Nick and Nora, Charles, without even the detecting.

The detecting, one of the two main things about Nick and Nora.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

And then

and then we flash forward there is a there's a couple with a teenage son and they have a housekeeper and they deal with COVID and their housekeeper of course dies of COVID and then they move out.

Those are the sides to say I miss any.

This is the couple that like is clearly like, well, oh God, we don't have any black people in this movie.

We should have one family be black and give them nothing.

It doesn't help when the one

is nothing.

There's the one scene where they are explaining to their teenage son, here's how you handle being stopped at a traffic stop by a police officer.

And it feels like a very ham-handed, exactly way of being like, oh, yeah, the black experience.

Oh, boy, you better believe that's part of the American story.

Got to put some of that in there.

And I will say, in a better movie, I would have been like, this is an interesting scene because this is something none of the other families have to deal with.

And I wish that that, I would just wish it was at stronger movies that that moment would have hit a little harder.

Yeah, the problem is like it's clear that that whole family is in there just for that moment.

They don't give them anything else of significance.

They have otherwise no personality whatsoever.

Bury their housekeeper.

And for the housekeeper to have a moment where she can no longer smell, and then the next time we see her, she's dead.

And then they both turn to the camera wearing masks.

That's great.

Okay.

But the bulk of the mask.

But not masks like in the Twilight Zone episode masks where they're like the masks deform their faces or anything.

Or like masks from the cartoon show Mask, where they have like robot masks.

Okay.

And so vehicles change into other vehicles.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So the bulk of the story focuses on, bulk of the movie focuses on the story of the young family.

We are introducing.

You are very old by the end of it.

That's true.

It seems almost ironic.

The first couple we meet is Al and Rose.

Al is recently back from World War II, played by Paul Betney.

He begins by yelling a lot, which doesn't help the feel of watching a bad play, a bad stage.

Yeah, yeah.

Although I will, I mean, it, it is, it is heightened a lot of the stuff he's doing, especially when he's like in rooms by himself, essentially, like, monologuing.

But for me, and this is a credit to how much I like Paul Betney, I think, like,

as much as I liked anything in the movie, I'm like, well, you know, like, this...

This is, like, this feels like a guy, and I have feelings about what's happening when I don't have feelings about other characters, you know?

Certainly, he's the one.

I feel like it's partly the story they give him, which has a lot more depth to it than some of the other ones.

In that, as he's a veteran, he spends decades of his life,

you know, dealing with the frustration and trauma of that.

And he doesn't kind of get over it until after his wife dies, essentially, you know, and like, and he has an alcohol problem and he deals with it.

Like, he has so much more going on in his story.

He has an alcohol problem.

He does.

I mean, there's literally a scene where he realizes that he has to stop and takes all the the bottles out.

He does pull himself together before his wife dies, but it's because she's like having a stroke.

She has a stroke.

But there is a lot of talking really loud for a person who's in a movie rather than in a play.

But I agree.

I did feel by the end of it that I thought Paul Betney had come out kind of on the strong.

Okay, so they buy the house despite it being a little more expensive than they expected because Rose is pregnant.

Al takes a sales job, but he is continually dissatisfied.

He's passed over for promotion.

He ends up getting laid off and has to find a different sales job.

And he develops a pretty severe drinking problem.

He is almost never not drinking in this movie.

Like he's always, like,

every single scene with him for a long section of it, he has a drink in his hand.

He is also a stand-in for like.

You know, like, I'm going to jump ahead to sort of a more general critique of the movie.

Like, part of the problem of this movie is the

characters are meant to be such sort of like broad stand-ins for like swaths of American life, and they don't generate any like personality of their own.

And he is very much like the stand-in of like, you know, this greatest generation, like the dad of our boomer hero who, you know, had war trauma, had a drinking problem with a lot of people.

He's emotionally closed off.

He's nice to his family.

Yeah.

And he's always yelling, God damn it, at his kids.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Especially when his CGI kid gets knocked off the couch.

Yeah.

But I think that that's a a major issue with the movie, Dan.

You're right, is that like these characters are supposed to be so universal in a certain type that they fail to really register as individual people.

And like, it'd be more interesting as individual in the way that that lazy boy couple, like, I'm not quite sure what type they're supposed to be, except like free living 20s, 30s type.

I mean, it's like 1940 by the time they leave that house.

But like, there is something so like.

They don't have much character either, but it's so specific.

Like, they're always in their underwear.

He's inventing the lazy boy chair.

As ridiculous as I find it, it's so specific that it's this.

They feel like characters from an episode of Ghosts, either the British or the other.

Yeah, they do.

I can see that.

Okay.

So they end up having three children together.

Their eldest is Richard, who has an artistic bent that will eventually be played by Tom Hanks.

There is a artistic bent will eventually be played by Tom Hanks.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like a.

Stewart's face fell.

What was that movie we watched where people were, it was like Helen Marin and stuff were representing like symbolic aspects of life?

It's called Herman's Head.

That's what it was.

That's right.

That's right.

Because I remembered it mostly by its Spanish name, La Cabesa del Hormon.

So there's a really funny moment where teenage Tom Hanks, or Richard in this case, is played by a actor, but is voiced by Tom Hanks, and it is very disorienting.

I think it is.

It's a story where Paul Bettney explains that, you know, he's been places, he's traveled all over Pennsylvania and eaten in places you couldn't even imagine.

One night, he took somebody home to his room.

Yeah.

Yeah, I love how Tom Hanks is like, he's like, why are you telling me this?

I'm like, yes, why are you telling us this?

And then this is the kind of thing dads tell their kids when they reach a certain age.

Just have this.

There's also a great line there where Tom Hanks is sitting there drawing pictures of the room, the room that we will spend an hour and a half looking at.

And he's like, who would want to look at pictures of this room?

I'm like, no shit, dude.

The movie has become self-aware.

Say the quiet part loud.

Something that I think is very funny is that we seem to have a generation of filmmakers who cannot imagine that the audience will be able to buy two different performers playing the same character at different ages.

And this is the same generation, pretty much, that made The Godfather Part 2, in which Robert De Niro and Marlon Robert De Niro plays the character Marlon Brando played in the previous movie.

And it's not like everyone was like, wait, that's not what Marlon Brando looked like when he was young.

Like, that's, hold on a second.

Like, the idea that you would have to dub Tom Hanks' voice in for a teenage character is so silly to me, or that you would de-age, or, or the de-aging Indiana Jones' face in

Crystal Dial of Time or whatever it is.

Like the, it just, I couldn't remember the name of it for a second.

It just is, I find it very funny that they're like, audiences are idiots.

They can't imagine two people would be the same person, you know?

Well, that's what, I mean, that ties in.

Like, again, I think that if you'd done this more like a play and concentrated more on, like, okay, how via the blocking of characters within the scene are we going to make this interesting rather than like futz it up with a bunch of digital garbage.

But anyway, but Stuart, you were just about to get to the exciting part of the story.

Yeah.

Uh, yeah, Richard starts dating Margaret.

So Tom Hanks plays Richard.

Margaret is played by Rebecca.

Rebecca.

Robin Wright.

Who are you thinking of?

Who are you right?

Rebecca Hall.

and this and of course this is their long-awaited reunion of tom hanks robin wright and robert zemekis who brought us the aforementioned forest gump a best picture winning classic back in gumptown usa yep not to not to be confused with forest gump too gump again the fake movie that they are making in the movie cecil be demented with kevin nylon as forest gump which i thought

kevin dealon playing himself as far as gump and that the forest gump stuff in that

movie is so funny yeah i haven't seen it in years i'm sure it's tasteless it's john water's movie

Yeah.

Okay.

So despite being young,

they get pregnant.

Or just one of them.

Yeah.

Not both.

Yeah.

Now you said despite being young.

Young is when it happens, Stuart.

Your body is keyed to do it when you're young.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they get pregnant.

They end up having to move in with Richard's parents, Alan Rose.

They have their daughter, Vanessa, who

comes into this world in that room, which we're all very excited about.

Uh

congratulations.

Yeah.

Uh Richard gives up his art to get a sales job so he can support his family, uh, but he can never seem to get ahead, and he also is very risk-averse.

He doesn't want to ever put his family into a position where they might be hurt or disappointed.

Uh, but Margaret longs for a life, she longs for doing things, and she cannot seem to find that with Richard

and a house of their own.

she does not

she spends her entire life basically almost living in her in-law's house and Richard here's the thing about him he wanted to be an artist he was going to go to art school but now he can't because he has a family to support he is so risk averse I don't think he'd make a great career as a as an artist because when you're an artist when you're trying to make a living it is all risk all the time you are you nothing is ever certain and you got to be ready to just roll with the punches and he's not great at that so I wonder if the movie is really saying this guy has the talent but he doesn't have what it takes to survive in the dog, eat, dog world of the art market.

Q Velvet Buzzsaw.

Yeah, you're a lucky dog.

Yeah, why not?

Okay.

In the Doug-Eat Doug world of the art market.

Okay, so Alan Rose obviously age.

Rose has a stroke.

And they,

Alan Rose then end up having to move down to Florida so she can get better care.

Vanessa grows up, goes to college.

I think at one point she's played by Zaja Zemekis.

Yes.

Daughter or granddaughter?

Daughter, I think.

I don't remember.

I think daughter.

Let's check the tape, Dan.

I don't have tape of

Jaja Zemekis.

Good, that's sick.

You shouldn't have that.

Oh, so you do have tape of her.

Disgusting, Dan.

My story keeps changing.

I'm sorry.

Vanessa goes to college, then she goes to law school.

She's the first in her family to go to college.

She listens to a lot of music on her headphones, too.

That's a way they can get some needle drops on the soundtrack.

Yes, yeah, that's true.

In case you're wondering if Robert Zemekis was going to go to his grave without ever including the song Cherry Bomb in one of his movies, don't worry.

He does it in here.

I mean, there is a moment where

they're listening to Fooled Around and Fell in Love, and I'm like, oh, man, this song rules.

Yeah.

So there's a brief moment of Stuart being excited.

Rose passes away, and then Al hurts himself, so he needs some in-home care, so he has to move back to

wherever we're at.

Because they are.

Maybe the secret is that they're all already dead, and this is the purgatory they're in.

They can never leave.

That's what I was fucking waiting for.

There's some kind of fucking curse.

It's just like the Twilight Zone.

They're all dolls that live in a doll house, and it turns out they just think they're alive.

Yeah.

So Al needs in-home care.

His presence, of course, is kind of overwhelming to them.

Margaret tries to make the best of it.

She tries a variety of different things to get over over her dissatisfaction with her husband and her life.

She even brings in her like marriage counselor or whatever,

who is, of course,

who is presented as being a quack.

I would argue.

I don't know.

It's hard to tell.

He's because he's given the accoutrement of a quack.

He's very precise about his title and his the initials that go after his name, and he has an English accent.

But what he's saying is basically like, you guys shouldn't drag each other down if you're unhappy in this relationship, which is good advice, which is good advice.

I mean, you're right.

So Margaret ends up leaving.

Shortly after, Al dies.

I want to say, just because this, you know, movie is so, in a way, plot-light,

that I feel like I should sprinkle some more larger thoughts throughout.

Like, I...

That's allowed.

Oh, I found...

I found some of these parts

moving, but in a way that made me me angry at the movie.

It's not like I wanted to find them moving.

It's just like that the raw materials are sort of impossible not to like feel something of like the raw material is the disappointments of life and disappointments of life.

You can't help yourself from getting older.

And that's all, that's the real human experience.

So it makes sense.

I was feeling the same thing.

I was like, these are real things that everyone has to deal with in their life, and that's moving.

And this is not the most moving way to present it.

You're saying, Dan.

Well, yeah, but I would get kind of mad at the movie because I'm like, okay, you're doing this to me because you're playing with such raw elements, but you're not particularly saying anything.

You're just sort of like coming into my brain, rearranging my emotions, and then like being like, well, gotta, gotta go, you know, without giving me any sort of like lesson or catharsis that.

The lesson is that life is all disappointment, and eventually you lose your memory and die.

Yeah, we'll get there.

But to me, it was sort of like the experience of watching, I don't know, like a long like

Christmas like advertisement for Google or or

film cameras or like something where it's like they're just trying to associate their product with the idea of like a life lived.

And so they have like a bunch of generalized like emotional moments.

Yeah.

So you're saying it's like there was a there was like a Disney ad like that.

It was either Disney or Star Wars not too long ago, where it's just like shots of like kids at different birthdays and parents bonding with their children over Star Wars or whatever.

And I remember watching it and finding it very emotional.

And it's like, but it's not because of the product.

Like, they're just associating the product with

having love and other human beings in your life and getting older.

Yeah.

That's what I'm getting at.

Don Draper.

So, Dan, I think, Dan.

You could elicit tears from a commercial, but I don't feel good about those tears.

Yeah.

I think, unless it's that commercial about the brother and sister who are definitely having sex in the coffee commercial.

Tears of joy.

Tears out of My Wiener.

Yeah, I think it's a Maxwell Health commercial.

Tears from My Wiener feels like it should be like Stu's like memoir title or like his

or his ballads album.

Yeah.

Or my fucking wedding bass.

So Al dies.

He has one final moment where he sees the ghost of his wife walking through the living room and then of course he disappears.

Richard and Margaret kind of reconnect over.

So he disappears like he's a force ghost?

Basically, I know you weren't paying attention to the movie a lot, but there's a lot of moments where people just fade in and out of reality.

I assumed that was the scenes transitioning and not them literally leaving this plane.

There's nothing in the movie that says that.

That's true.

That's true.

I can't add explanations that are not part of the in-camera text.

That's what Roger Ebert says.

Yeah.

Okay, so Richard starts painting again.

He and Mark, he tries to make a play to get Margaret back in his life, but she is not interested.

However,

she also develops what I'm assuming is Alzheimer's.

Yes.

It's very heavily bookmarked because she'll be like, huh, I went to this thing and I forgot why I was there.

Isn't that strange?

And once that happens more than once in a movie, you know, this character has a lot of fun.

That's like when anytime a female character barfs in a TV show, I'm like, damn it, she's pregnant.

Well, and anytime they cough into an into a handkerchief and there's a spot of red, you know, they're gonna die.

Yeah, this is also heavily foreshadowed by some of the clunkiest writing in the movie, where earlier on, a thing that's gonna get paid off early, uh, early in the film, the uh daughter had lost her ribbon, her like

blue ribbon.

First place blue ribbon, yeah.

Yeah, that, and she found it.

And when they find it and the daughter's excited, they say something like,

Well, that's a moment we're never going to forget.

And I'm like, I don't know that.

I mean, it's nice.

It's nice that you found it, but I don't think that in real life I'd be like, now that's that's a keeper for the ages.

I mean, you wouldn't say it.

No, yeah.

Yeah, well, yeah, I might, yeah, I might think it to myself.

Uh, and of course, this is set up later on for

this

loss of memory.

You might say that a better movie would have had them say, Huh, that was funny.

Do you think she'll worry about losing that ribbon?

Nah, she's not even going to remember.

This isn't the kind of thing you remember.

And then later they remember.

Instead, they're like, well, yeah, they're like, put it in.

Well, take that ribbon and haul it up into the rafters because this is a moment for the record burst.

Memory power.

You're going to need this in case your brain ever dissolves.

Yeah.

I would say my favorite earlier moment is when Tom Hanks comes into the the living room with a big thing at McDonald's and he's like, I brought our favorite breakfast.

I'm like, oh, man, now I'm extra sad.

Okay, so

he brings,

they're selling the house.

He's decided to move.

He's finally decided to sell the house.

He brings Margaret for one last visit.

has lost most of her memory, and he is kind of carefully kind of guiding her through this process of showing her the house that they used to live in.

And she starts to remember things um and then as she begins to remember things the camera begins to move it zooms in and then swirls around we get to see the rest of the room they're in which is what i always wished for it would be amazing if we saw

if you saw the other side of the room and there's like a dungeon wall or a laboratory like something you'd be like wow

but the thing that does trigger her remembering is then

the ribbon story yeah the ribbon story yeah exactly when they were in this room and the camera turned was that a CGI room?

It didn't look like a real room to me.

And I was like, at least, at least show me that real quick.

I would show you a real physical space.

I'm assuming it's all real.

Nothing in this movie looked real to me.

And then it like zooms out the window

and we see the rest of Philadelphia, I guess, or wherever.

Perth Amboy, wherever.

Perth Amboy, yep.

And then the camera kind of alights atop the manor house that is across the street.

And then we see that hummingbird flying to camera and we're like that thing's still alive i was like this is this is kind of a nice shot a nice way to end it and tell that damn digital hummingbird

if it wasn't if it wasn't a digital hummingbird i would have let because that because that was the one of the few times where i was like this movie has now inadvertently stumbled into a thought i have a lot which is about the continuity of kind of like animal species and how the natural world and the human world, even though one affects the other, they're kind of on different time tracks.

The natural world is on such a longer timeline than ours is, and the life of a tree encompasses so much time compared to a human life and that kind of stuff.

So, like, it was like, Zimekis, you almost got into an idea that I can relate to, but he did, but it is so CGI, and it's like the, it feels like the rat at the end of the departed, where it's like, eh, get it, wink, you know, continuity, history, eternal.

Also, at that ending, we didn't get into it, but I found it, I don't know, perturbing.

Like, it's it's kind of a desire to like, well, this, this, this movie about how a bunch of people had unfulfilled lives is kind of a bummer, even though we slathered it in sentimentality.

Like, we'll have her remember this thing at the end, and then she'll be like, yes, like, yes, I remember this place.

I love this place.

And I'm like, no, you didn't love this place.

You hated it.

The only movie was how much you hated this house.

You wanted to get out.

But maybe she realized how much she did love it underneath the thick dollops of hate that she felt.

I guess so.

I mean, we haven't seen her, the apartment that she, uh, that she moved to, that she can walk to work from.

Maybe that apartment sucks.

It may be terrible.

Yeah, it might be terrible.

And the only good thing about it is that Richie and Al are not there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is not the message that the movie's trying to give at all, but it just made me feel like Tom Hanks's character was trying to like trick her into being like, see, we had great times here by like bringing up like one nice minute.

We're still married.

You still love me.

I said, so, Dan, I'm curious as to think, because I, you say it's not the message the movie is trying to get across.

Is the movie trying to get across, as you said earlier, any message other than just life, huh?

Well,

that's kind of what bothered me.

Again, I could see how this might work

as a

comic.

It works so well as a comic,

but it's not trying to, it's not trying, it's not hitting you over the head the same way.

The comic is worked through hints and small glimpses, whereas this movie is very much like,

I'm sorry, you know, he's literally like, buy a house now.

Johnson just put through the biggest tax increase since World War two and it's like who nobody talks like that like nobody explains like what time they're living in all the time you know but as a movie benjamin button is only three years old at this point

like as a movie like forgive me for sounding like kind of like a like a crank but uh i know you're gonna ask that this many years in

i've been meaning to get to it uh

my apologies i you know is it because if you don't keep your heart rate up to a certain level, you'll die?

Is that what I'm saying?

Dan, did you have a Hong Kong cocktail?

Is that what happened?

I did have one.

I had a couple.

You can't have just one.

Oh, man.

Okay.

I guess Dan's going to have sex with you.

On a racetrack.

I saw the trailer, and my reaction to it was having not read the book, I'm like, this does not blow my mind.

The idea of like, wow, a lot of stuff.

happened in one place, one like unlike unassuming place.

Yeah, That's the way time works.

Like a bunch of stuff happens over time in one place.

Basically, the movie's message is communicated pretty well by any historical plaque that you see when you're walking down the street.

Even

me standing at a place where something I really care about happened.

This is where I'm going to lose Elliot,

Mr.

History.

I loved it when Abraham Lincoln got shot in the head.

I love going there.

I'm like, damn, what?

How can you say that?

No, Mr.

History is

Elliot's Batman Killing.

I wish I'm Mr.

History and it's all history-related crimes.

Yeah.

Even if I'm standing at some place that is, you know, something meaningful to me happened that I cared about in the world.

I'm like, that's only neat for like a little while.

And then I'm like, well,

it's not happening now.

I don't get to see it.

So I mean, like,

you know, about six, seven months ago, my parents sold the house that I grew up in, that I spent the vast majority of my young life in and they you know they'd lived there for 40 years and

uh walking through it i found to be really affecting um and moving but in like i don't know like a weird way that this movie does not capture yeah i mean like if it was a if it was a matter of personal history certainly but like i don't have that connection to any of the stuff that's going on in the movie and the movie makes it so generic i think

that's the issue partly the genericness of it and also part part, and I'm going to, again, this is my personal axe to grind.

I think it's partly the boomerness of it.

I feel like there are very few generations that are as obsessed with their own personal histories and growing up as, at the very least, the baby boomers that are involved in the media and tell those stories.

And so the idea that like, all right, here's another movie about like

emotionally closed off dad from World War II and his kid has to make a lot of sacrifices to raise a family and we get to see the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.

And like, I'm surprised there wasn't a scene where they're watching the moon landing or something like that.

Or, and the, it just feels very, uh, the movie feels like, um,

it, it takes for granted how interested you are in that particular slice of history, even with these other ones arranged around it.

This baby boomer experience is very much set up as the central experience of the movie.

And I think at this point, you could get away with that when Forrest Gunp came out, but I think you don't, too much time has passed.

Like, you can't get away with that quite the the same way now.

And so it becomes, and so it leaves me cold.

I will say, though, at the very end, like I was genuinely in some ways moved by seeing them very old and having them talk about the past, but it was more in a sense of like, yeah, well, now that I've sat through this whole movie, like I feel like I lived it too, you know, that I saw all those things and now you're talking about them.

But it wasn't a, it was, but it felt, you know, somewhat earned, you know, or it makes you think of like, in a generic way, like I was saying, like a commercial night, like, oh,

someday I will be doing something like this, and then you're allowed to project yourself on that.

But, like, I like, I have a genuine question, which is, do you think this movie gains anything by like jumping around in time and sometimes going backwards?

Because to me, honestly, other than

I can understand the appeal of like, oh, you know, we can have all these stories and we can tell them in more of an impressionistic way rather than having like a full story.

But I feel like any head of emotional steam that could work up is undercut for me by like there's never any like

the parallels between the timelines are never like exciting or interesting in such a way.

I think that's the thing.

I think it's not totally a problem with the format, but the format requires much more precise and powerful content and you know actual plot and narrative within that format to do what they want to do.

And like you look at a movie like Intolerance, the DWW Griffith movie, and that is bouncing around in time between a bunch of different timelines in history, but the narratives all kind of crest at different moments together.

They all like reach a climax together.

And so you get this feeling of these cycles repeating through time.

I don't mean to praise D.W.

Griffith, but you know, but that movie, it works that way.

Whereas this one, because it feels like kind of sort of randomly bouncing around,

I agree that you don't get that feeling of like, oh, there's real connection between these things or we're seeing, except for the fact that everybody dies at the end, you know, in different timelines, you know,

which you walk away from it being like, oh, okay, so the story of life is the story of disappointment and death.

Like, oh, okay.

Well, I mean, I feel like

something like, something like Oppenheimer bounces around in time quite a bit.

And I feel like it manages to work it all together.

pretty satisfyingly.

Yeah.

I think it's, I think it's more, you just have to be so careful.

But that's, that's one story that you're following that bounces around in time.

Whereas like some of the stuff I'm like, yeah, Dan's like, why didn't he do something else other than just invent that stupid?

I mean, like, some of the characters in here just feel like padding because, like, there's nothing to their storylines.

It's like, well, what are you doing here?

Why are you in this?

He's trying to fly a fucking plane together.

Or even the scenes with the scenes with their daughter were like, there's one where she's just like listening on the Walkman and can't hear that the phone is ringing.

And another where she and her friend are doing aerobics and the power goes out.

And it's just one of those things where it's like, yeah, I don't, like, if this was a movie made up of small, kind of the forgotten moments that you wouldn't think about otherwise, that would make sense to me.

Or if it's a movie about the big moments in life, that would make sense to me.

But instead, it's just kind of this mishmash.

And there's a, you're on that, in that, that locked off frame for so long.

And I feel like that, that turnaround where the camera finally moves should hit you really hard, but it's, but it just doesn't, the way that I was thinking of the, um, there's that short that 12 monkeys was based on,

La Jette or whatever, however it's pronounced, Le Jata,

where it's all still images.

And then there's the one moment where the guy is looking at the woman that he's fallen in love with in the past and she blinks.

And you were like, ugh, like the sudden shock of motion.

And it's handled so beautifully there.

And I was like, that was the first thing that came to mind as I was watching.

I was like, oh, I wish it was more like that.

Where it was more of like a shock of sudden change that really affects you.

But I think it all comes down to like, you can have a fancy frame, but the picture inside the frames got to be where the beauty comes from.

Yeah, I mean, that's, it's like, it's not like I necessarily need it to be more conventional storytelling, but it does not seem to be,

it does not have an idea in its head other than Robert Simecus was like, I'd like to try and do a movie where we don't move the camera, you know?

I feel like, I feel like as a, if I'd encountered this movie when I was like maybe a teenager or maybe early 20s where the like form of it I would find really interesting, I think I might like it more, but as an adult, I'm like, this isn't enough.

This is like, there's just not enough meat to this sandwich.

It's all, it's all bread and sauces.

I think, I think that, I think that's not bread and circuses.

I think the most complimentary way you can say is that I think it is an interesting experiment that does not quite come off.

Doesn't play

function.

We're already there, but let's do final judgments, whether this is a good, bad movie, a bad, bad movie, or a movie you kind of like.

I'm going to say it's a bad, bad movie.

It kind of like, in some ways, greatly put me off because it felt like it was like,

you know, not done with any particular insight, but it was also like breaking into my like heart and trying to punch it

at the same time.

Dan, were you on were you

on acid while you were watching the movie?

But I do think that, I mean, if you, if you're the sort of person who's like really

into movies to the degree that you're going to spend time on something that you may not like just because it's kind of interesting.

I don't know.

You might want to check it out because it is interesting that he tried it.

I just don't think it works at all.

Yeah, I mean, there's a moment,

there's a moment about an hour in

that I picked up on in my second watch of this movie where they keep repeating the phrase, time sure flies.

They're talking about how time moves so fast.

And I was like, yeah.

And I can't like, why are you reminding me that I'm spending my precious fucking moments on this thing?

Like,

I'm about to turn 45, guys, at the end of the month.

So, like, maybe this stuff's weighing heavier on my mind, but it feels like I felt this movie felt very, like I felt trapped in it in not a good way.

Like, and yeah, I just, it's not for me.

I don't recommend it.

This is a bad, bad movie.

This is a miss for old Stew.

No thanks.

It's interesting they're saying time sure boost my quickly because a professor Madonna would argue that time moves by so slowly.

uh but anyway setting that aside this is a movie that i i i have to say that this is not a movie that i kind of liked but it's a movie that i wanted to kind of like and i do admire making a movie that is a formal experiment and trying something different um i wish it had worked better maybe that's also some residual love for the original book which i again i really recommend um

but

it feels mostly kind of wrongheaded and to the point also where like the whole movie i'm like i don't think tom hanks is the right guy to play play this part, to be honest.

Like, he's, he's such an innately likable

figure that I kept waiting.

That really, it was like only halfway through the movie that I was like, oh, so he's just going to be like a disappointed sad sack who is mean to people or is having trouble with things.

Most of the movie, I think he's, I think there's something like it was, it was fighting, like his, his innate charisma was kind of fighting that a little bit in a way that made it difficult for me.

But, um,

but yeah, it's a movie that I, I can't, uh, I can't can't really recommend, but it's worth, you know, look at a couple minutes of it and see, or if there's a supercut online of just the lazy boy storyline, then, you know, just watch a happy story.

A couple that loves each other that invent a chair for relaxation and make their millions.

Yeah.

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Hey, why don't you go to squarespace.com?

It's a little secret for you for a free trial.

And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash flop to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

We are also sponsored by Rocket Money.

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We also have a jumbotron

and it goes like this.

Listen up, flop lovers.

One of your compatriots has made their very own game, coming to Kickstarter.

Pizza Rolls, that's R-O-L-E-S,

is a 10-minute hidden rolls style game about awkwardly ordering pizza.

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Simple yet engaging, it's pocket-sized, family-friendly, fun that can really connect people, whether they're young and old, or casual and long-term gamers.

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So Pizza Rolls is coming to Kickstarter, February 2025.

Search Pizza Rolls, that's R-O-L-E-S, on Kickstarter now.

Sounds perfect for a game night, Dan.

Although, I usually like super complicated games that make Dan mad,

but you love pizza, so maybe this would be a good one to

cycle in.

You know, I like a casual, friendly game.

Super intense for me, but I could be seduced by pizza.

Okay,

couple of ninja turtles over here.

Big E is a former WWE champion.

He spent 10 years at the top sharing the ring with John Cena and Roman Reigns.

So, what's next?

When I retire, I'm going to move to the desert.

I'm going to delete all my socials.

I'm going to disappear.

Y'all will never hear from me again.

I'm going to sit on the couch, chill, and live my life.

From the legendary tag team, The New Day, it's Big E on Tites and Fights.

I feel like I need to listen to a few episodes that you guys have because this was really enjoyable.

So,

thank you so much for your time.

Oh, yes.

Oh, yes.

Available on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts.

The following are real reenactments of pretend emergency calls.

911.

My husband.

It's my husband.

Calm down, please.

What about your husband?

He

looks the dishwasher wrong.

Please help.

Please help me.

Where are you now, ma'am?

At the kitchen table, I was with my dad.

He mispronounced those words intentionally.

There are plenty of podcasts on the hunt for justice, but only one podcast has the courage to take on the silly crimes.

Judge John Hodgman, the only true crime podcast that won't leave you feeling sad and bad and scared for once.

Only on maximumfun.org.

Shall we move on to some letters from listeners?

Yeah, why not?

Yes, why not?

Why not, Dan?

Thank you for asking my permission for that.

We treat ourselves.

This one's from Gene Lasting withheld.

Wolf?

Who writes?

Who writes a whole bunch of antique words that we're going to have to look up?

This is

J-E-A-N.

My husband and I recently went on a cross-country road trip.

Cool.

We spent the majority of our driving time listening to the flop house.

Thanks.

Sorry.

Thanks for the laughs as we traversed from Chicago to Portland.

LA to Roswell, Dallas, Nashville, and more.

Sounds great.

During our trip, trip, we randomly parked across the street from the Toreto family, home of the fast and the furious fame.

Understandably, causing the family.

The Toretto family home from the way, Dan, you read that book.

Oh, yeah, it kind of confused me a little bit.

The Toretto family home.

Yes, you're correct.

I was like, were they also at the rest stop that you were at?

The Torreto family?

Well, let me take that again.

During our trip, we randomly parked across the street from the Toretto family home

of the fast and the furious fame.

Understandably, causing us to repeat family at each other for the next few minutes in varying Vin Diesel delivery styles

coherence

here's my question have you ever randomly found yourself in a famous slash infamous filming location or is there a location you would love to stumble upon while traveling thank you for all the fun you guys are the best gene last name withheld I remember being in uh I think it's uh it's a story uh Washington, is it?

Where the goonies, much of the goonies, is the seaside

from the goonies.

And being like, oh, damn, we are in the town from the goonies.

Yeah,

they saved it with all the pirate money, right?

We sure are.

You've got to hide from Ann Ramsey or she might,

I don't know.

Never.

Just twist my ears.

She can kill me if she wants.

You might want to hide from Ann Ramsey or Ayn Rand, either one.

Yeah, probably.

Yeah.

I don't know that I've, I'm trying to to think I've ever stumbled on.

I think mine has been more the opposite, where if I'm watching a movie set in New York, I will suddenly recognize a corner or a building from my real life.

But I've done lots of trips where I have gone to shooting locations.

My wife is from the Bay Area, and that means there's a lot of Hitchcock locations around there.

He did a lot of shooting in the Bay Area.

And so for many years, each time we would go to visit her family, I would be like,

which location from Vertigo are we going to today?

Which location from the birds are we going to?

And it's all really fun.

And I hope someday to go to Vienna and take the tour there to see the locations for The Third Man, which is not a Hitchcock film, but it's very Hitchcockian, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah, I, you know, I spent some time in Vienna, but that was pre-Suart having to watch The Third Man.

So you had no idea.

I had no idea.

I didn't know where to hear good Zither music.

I just assumed it was just

any cafe you walked by.

You just Zither was coming out.

Yeah,

I feel like that's the thing about being in New York is that you're like, you're just constantly running into, you know, things you saw on

Law and Order and whatnot.

Yeah.

Movies like Law and Order.

Corpses.

This is from Brendan Last Name Withheld, who writes, I'm a big sports guy, like I know the three of you are as well.

Yeah.

I was in the hospital.

Couple of leatherheads over here.

I was in the hospital with my first kidney stone.

Oh, I'm sorry.

When we were blessed with the 84 Brady episode, which featured some A-plus acting from former New England Patriots stars Rob Gronkowski and Tom Brady.

And Lily Tomlin, former New England Patriots star.

This episode paired incredibly well with the morphine that was being pumped into me most of the day.

I feel like our podcast usually goes a lot down better when you've got some morphine in your system.

Like most things.

Everyone always wants to know what the worst performances were from athletes, but as true movie experts, I know you need a more difficult question.

What was the best performance you've seen from an athlete or other non-actor in a film?

Thanks for years of laughs.

Bringing the last name withheld.

I thought Marshawn Lynch was very funny in bottoms.

Well, it's very funny in bottoms.

I have to say, I'm withholding judgment a little bit because every time an ad for Love Hurts is on, my older son points out, he goes, Marshawn Lynch is in that.

You got to go see that because Marshawn Lynch is going to be in it.

All right, I guess guess I'll find out how good Marshall is.

I hear worse things about based on the early reviews we're going to be watching.

We may watch it for the podcast.

I think possibly, yes.

Too bad.

Like, what's his face?

Yeah, Keith Hawkwan deserves better.

Yeah.

But maybe Ariana, it's Ariana DeBose.

DeBose, yeah.

DeBose.

Like

DeBose Wave Radio.

Popular Mechanics Best of What's New 1985.

Yeah.

I have a couple.

I mean, it's not like amazing acting, but as far as like acting.

O.J.

Simpson in the naked gun movies?

Is that what they say to him?

Let me tell you some bad news about it.

Why?

I was going to go actually a related direction, but not there.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I think, is funny in Airplane.

Yes, that's true.

He's not asked to do a lot of lifting acting-wise, but he does what he does very well.

But then, you know,

known as a singer, this is her only movie.

I liked Alana Heim a lot in Licorice Pizza movie that I know that people have mixed feelings about, but I think that her performance was.

I think she's certainly the highlight of that movie.

It's not a movie I like, but I like her performance in it quite a bit.

Yeah.

And then I was thinking about there are people like,

it's sort of an open question, like, is this person not an actor if, like, I feel like there's a lot of people out there who didn't intend necessarily to become actors and then had long careers.

Like, they weren't an actor when they started out.

Like, like,

I was thinking specifically of like like Barkad Obji from Captain Phillips, who was a driver when he was cast in that and sort of steals the movie, but then he went on to have a career.

Or I mean, that's the thing about acting is until you have your first professional role,

no one's an actor, and everyone's an actor.

I mean, there are lots of great movies with non-professional actors in them.

One of my favorite movies is The Fall, where the girl in that, you know, was very much, she was not a

no, she wasn't.

She thought Lee Pace was paralyzed.

But with, I was thinking about other athletes.

I'm like, the question for me then is, when does someone stop being an athlete who's in movies and become an actor?

Like, is Carl Weathers or Jim Brown?

Like, they're in tons of movies and they're really good in them.

Like, but are they athletes or are they actors or are they both?

Like Arnold Schwarzenegger is technically an athlete who became an actor and became one of the biggest movie stars in the world, you know?

But also, there's, I was just looking online and I had forgotten about Kevin Garnett in Uncut Gems, where

his performance, I find it is at a like Nicholas Cage, Christopher Walken at times level of like this character is so intensely involved in what's going on.

And so like I really buy his passionate obsession with this gem that he has no reason to become so obsessed with.

I mean, I feel like there's a handful of people in that movie that are not actors.

Yeah, that's true.

Just the heavies.

Yeah.

And the romantic interest, right?

She was a, I don't think she was a, I think that's her first role, right?

Julia Fox.

Yeah, right?

Yeah, I think, I think it might have been her first role, but she's obviously been another.

She was just in the Soderbergh movie, dude.

Oh, that's true.

Yeah, she was in that Soda Bread movie.

So it's a good question.

I mean, like, that's the thing that

feels like some shitty bully picking on Steven Soderbergh.

Hey, Soda Bread.

Ireland wants you back.

What?

Just admit that's you editing all of your own movies.

It reminds me of the worst tackling I ever saw, which was

at a Yankees Red Sox game at Fenway.

Mariano Rivera, one of the greatest closing pictures of all time, was

David wasn't there, but these guys who were Boston guys were sitting in front of us and they were going, hey, Mariano, Playgirl called.

They want you to edit their next issue.

And I was like, I've got to decode what this heckle means.

And they were calling him like marinara sauce.

And I'm like, that doesn't really work as

like an insulting name.

Let's move on to

recommendations of movies that might be a better use of your dwindling time on this earth

than here.

I'm going to very quickly do sort of a dual-linked recommendation.

I think you're going to do a duel with Stuart?

Cool.

No offense, my money's on Stewart.

Okay.

Well, I mean, if it's a duel,

you know, there's weapons involved.

Anyway, yeah, you're not helping your case, Dan.

That'll even things up.

Yeah, I think Dan's going to be much better with a Claymore.

Sure.

I'm going to recommend two movies that

aren't connected, but are kind of linked in my mind in that they are

two movies that don't necessarily make a whole lot of sense or need to make sense on a plot level, but are sort of like

genre dreams you might have.

And I enjoy both of them.

One is Mutant Hunt from 1987, which is

like this very low-budget

sci-fi action kind of

horror element.

Yeah, I mean, you don't have to do too much hard selling when the software is called Mutant Hunt.

For the budget, this thing clearly had, they have some pretty delightful effects at certain points.

There's a sort of corpse robot at the end that's like a puppet animatronic that looks kind of great.

It just feels like say less, Dan.

Yeah, it feels like a dream.

Stop selling past the close.

Well, this it feels like a dream of like an 80s VHS

You know cover and then also I'd like to recommend from 1966 a Japanese movie in America called Black Tight Killers, which is kind of a pop art feeling like it feels sort of like almost like danger diabolic or like the Batman TV show in a way.

It has like

you know, crime going on in Japan, but it has this gang of like go-go dancing girl

black the titular black tight killers who are actually pretty nice when you get to know them but

it's also sort of just a beautiful thing to watch

that sort of like pop art genre feel where it's like it doesn't need to make sense as long as something exciting is being thrown in front of your face every few minutes so those are my recommendations I'm going to recommend a beautiful little movie that I had to pause so I could watch here.

I am recommending La Chimera, a movie that also deals with how people deal with the past, but it does it in a much more beautiful and interesting way.

This is set in the 80s.

It's directed by Alice Rohrwacher.

And

Josh O'Connor from Challengers and other things

plays a kind of a baby girl

archaeologist type guy who falls in from England, who falls in with a group of grave robbers, like tomb robbers, to pilfer

like treasures from the past.

And he has this like kind of almost supernatural ability to sense when he's above a grave site or a tomb, almost like he's, well, literally, he's dowsing for these graves.

And then it turns into, it also, there's also some story, Isabella Rossolini's in it.

I don't know, it's beautiful.

It's great.

I highly recommend it.

It's got that kind of like, it's both like, it feels very real and lived in, but also kind of light and breezy.

And, but everything kind of makes sense.

And I don't know, it's great.

Bakimara, watch that shit.

It's on Hulu.

I'm going to recommend a movie that is kind of the exact opposite of what Dan was recommending.

This is a recent studio almost release that is very

not Coyote versus Acme.

Yep, Coyote versus Acme.

Wow.

I'd love to see that.

But Almost.

So this is

Jura number two, the Clean Eastwood movie that came out this night, which is very visually spare, visually plain.

The storytelling is very traditional.

Unlike all of Clint's other movies.

Yeah.

No, but even like a movie like Unforgiven has a few kind of visual stylistic touches.

And the older Clinistwood gets, and he's very old now, the more I think he's focused on just super straightforward storytelling.

And this is a movie that at first watch, I was like, okay, this is like an interesting kind of like crime,

not quite thriller ethical drama, I guess.

But the more I thought about it, the more it really sat with me and the more it really got into my head about, this is a movie about people who are not bad people who are stuck in an untenable situation and are trying to do their best to do the right thing, but find that there are either elements of their own personality or elements of the world around them that are making it difficult for them to do the right thing.

And the idea that justice is something that is not necessarily a happy or even a fair thing or a nice thing, but a thing that in an almost kind of Greek tragedy tragedy way, justice is something that takes its victims, you know?

And I thought it was, I just, it really sat with me for a long time.

And the closest thing I can think to it is that like, this is Clint Eastwood kind of like his first reformed in a way, which is making it sound more intense or extreme than it is.

First Reformed is a really intense movie because it's a Paul Schrader movie and Paul Schrader is a madman, whereas Clint Eastwood is more generally kind of like a slow-going guy in his later movies.

But I found it to be a movie that had a deceptively still surface, but a lot of depth underneath it, kind of the opposite of here, which felt like it had a lot going on on the surface and not a lot underneath.

And so I really would recommend Jura Number Two and then taking some time to think about it afterwards, you know?

You know, that's a movie that I did like.

And I think ultimately by the end, like the end really landed for me and I had a lot of the feelings that you're talking about.

But

that effective ending was almost undone.

for me personally.

I know that I'm not trying to convince you by like for the whole first half of the movie.

I'm like, this is the dumbest court case.

Like, this is not like the law on this is like laughable to me.

I mean, yes and no, I feel like the,

I feel like the movie has, it's a, it's a case.

It's one of these things where like the court case is not clever or particularly hard to parse.

Like it shouldn't be a hard case to win in some ways, you know, for the, for the defense, because there's like, no, it's all circumstantial evidence and stuff.

But I feel like the...

The movie's not really about that.

I just didn't buy a lot of it is what I'm saying.

Like there's a point at which like there could be a mistrial.

I'm like, yeah, absolutely.

There should be a mistrial at this point.

For one thing, there's a lot of like just obvious ways that this person would be defended that aren't even touched on, but like, that's not what Click cares about.

But it's not, it's not what the movie is about.

I feel like this is not, the movie at times plays like it's starting to become 12 angry men, but it is not.

That's not what it has on its mind.

And it's more interested in these characters kind of dealing with their choices rather than with the actual strengths or not of the case, which is fine with me because I don't really care that much about the case in the middle.

Now, I haven't seen this movie, right?

You're a number one, the first one.

Yeah.

Just imagine I'm someone listening to the Flophouse and you're selling this movie to me.

Now, I note that Nicholas Holt is in this movie.

Does he play a weird little creep?

He does not play a weird little creep in this one.

No, he is the all-American.

He's the all-American guy who has kind of a dark secret.

He has his darker side.

He's not his little creep.

No, it's not his little creep, unfortunately.

This is a movie fairly devoid of weird little creeps.

But like, for instance, so there's scenes in here where you kind of want, you're like, I don't understand why I'm seeing this moment.

Why am I seeing this moment in a person's life?

There's a scene in this movie where

Nicholas Holt and his wife are giving out candy to kids for their trick-or-treaters, and they're dressed as the couple from American Gothic, which is kind of on the nose type symbolism in a way.

But they don't talk about the case.

They don't talk about the plot.

It's just them kind of having this moment of living their life and interacting with the kids who come for trick-or-treating.

And it was like, it's a little, it's not fully realistic.

It's not a naturalistic scene.

It feels like a movie scene, but I was like, I like that this plays thematically with some of the stuff that's going on in it, but it is not, every scene is hitting the plot super hard.

I liked getting this glimpse of another side of their life, you know.

Although there was, as the first time he showed up in that costume, I didn't realize it was Halloween.

And I was like, what the hell is he wearing like old farmer overalls?

Like, what's

that?

It's a, it's an American gothic costume.

Okay.

Yeah.

But anyway, I'm sorry that this one didn't hit the spot

for Dan, but I still recommend it.

I'm still glad I saw it.

I'm not trying to undo your recommendation.

I'm just no, but I feel like this is one where I didn't really feel the power of it until the very end of the movie.

As it was going on, I was like, this movie's fine.

It's okay.

And then once the movie ended, I was like, okay, that wasn't the movie I thought it was going to be.

Yeah.

Well, I guess I'll have to watch it and break the tie.

Yeah, that's right.

That's the important thing.

Tune back in to see who wins the Battle of Jur number two.

And tune back in.

Whether it's enthusiastic Elliot Kalen or denying Dan McCoy.

And tune back in in next time for another episode of the Flophas because this one sadly is drawing to a close.

Oh, man.

But I loved it here.

No, no, no, no, you didn't.

I loved it here.

Don't you remember, Stuart?

This is where you started the episode, and this is where you tried to summarize it, and we kept interrupting you.

And this is where Dan shot down my recommendation.

Don't you remember all these moments in our lives?

I hate it here.

Why won't you let me die?

Well,

let's do it.

Let's.

And it would be so funny if at the end of the movie, he's like, and you gave birth there, and that's where we got married.

And she goes, just let me go.

Why won't you let me go?

Before we go, though, I would like to thank our network, Maximum Fun.

Go to maximumfun.org to check out other great shows.

We're gearing up.

for the drive soon.

We've got some good things planned for that.

We hope you will join us.

And we would like to thank Alex Smith, our producer.

He goes by the name Howell Dotty when he's doing such things as making music or doing Twitch streams.

Why don't you look him up on the internet?

But for the Flophouse, I have been Dan McCoy,

I've been Stuart Wellington, and you know I'm Elliot Kalen.

Okay,

see you later, suckers.

Whoa,

run, run, run, run, run, run, run.

Slam door

Because you have like a million tabs open.

How many tabs do you have open?

A million?

I do not.

Oh, man.

There's like 42, 3, 4, 5.

I have six tabs open.

That's a lot of soda.

Six tabs.

Google search for big naturals.

Uh-huh.

That doesn't seem like Dan's Google search.

No, it's not.

No.

Yeah.

You're projecting your projecting.

That's what mine is.

Okay.

Because I had to use Google for that.

I can't find it.

You know, no other way.

Okay.

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