Ep.#460 - Lumina, with Ashlie Atkinson

On this episode, we discuss Lumina,

Alien, Arrival, E.T.,

close encounters of the third kind, now Lumina.

Right?

Did I do it right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was great.

You really sold the importance of the movie, yeah.

Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Flop House.

I'm Dan McCoy.

Hey, thanks for welcoming me, Dan.

I'm Stuart Wellington.

I'm Elliot Kalen, appearing by permission of myself.

And we are joined today by a very special guest.

This is a close friend of mine, occasional bartending colleague of mine.

We have an actor actor from things like the Gilded Age and just like that, Black Klansman, Mr.

Robot, and of course, the upcoming The Lost Bus.

That's right, Ashley Atkinson.

How are you doing, Ashley?

Hey, and hello to all my ex-boyfriends who apparently all listen to this fucking

big nerds.

That's what I do.

Definitely, definitely.

You drop my name, I think, on name drop like it's a name to be dropped.

You mentioned my name on this podcast like like a few years ago, I think when Black Klansman came out.

And I heard from so many fucking ex-boyfriends.

Well,

I met you for the first time like formally the other night at karaoke where you confessed that when I sang she's an angel by they might be giants, you were singing along up front.

So I think that there's a lot of nerdishness to go around.

I understand why maybe you attract the sort of people

who listen to this podcast.

You get what you give, you know?

Definitely.

Well, thank you you so much.

I've tried to get Ashley on here, but she has such a busy filming schedule.

We finally made it work.

That is,

what a movie.

What a movie.

I'm so thrilled.

I had to refrain from making a fart noise when you said that.

Just a real thing.

Alex, just add it in.

Add it in, Alex.

Use your soundboard.

Use the soundboard we bought you for Christmas, Alex.

That's all there's fart sounds on it.

It's all farts.

That's all it is, right?

Yeah.

The weird thing is that version was more expensive than the one that had non-fart sounds.

Yeah, well, they know what people want.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that gets put in on the factory.

So, Lumina.

Lumina.

Okay, yeah.

So, today we're watching this is the smart smart.

Oh, man, the whole real Dan McCoy over here.

This is the start of Smallvember.

That's right.

Dan, what's small?

First off, what do we do on this podcast?

Order of operations, first principles.

This is a podcast where we watch a movie that's a critical or a commercial flop or both, and then we talk about it.

And while normally we punch up we pick the big dogs and we start a fight this time

at the risk of my career as i've found a number of times at this point yeah yeah yeah yeah uh you're like one of the one people i know who has a job right now

i said risk dan i said risk not not destroy not destruction yeah exactly but if without this podcast elliot would have so many jobs dan if anyone out there who hires wants me to roast them

I'm available.

I would be the king of Hollywood if not for this podcast causing them to slam their doors in my faces.

Yeah.

I have more than one face.

Yeah.

I feel like Dan is opening up doors toward weird kinks when he's like, yeah, you can pay me to roast you.

And I don't actually mean weird.

Whatever you're into is fine.

As long as it doesn't hurt anybody.

I'm a couple of months away from that.

That's fine.

Yeah, don't kink Shame Stewart.

I would love the idea if Dan was paid to roast people as a kink for them and he had to put sex worker on his taxes to explain what he does.

Why would you love that?

I mean, I feel like it's a totally normal profession, and I think that's actually been an aspiration for Dan McCoy.

So we are, as I said, we are punching down this month.

That's right.

It is small Vember.

That's where we take a look at some small passion projects, independent films, and we rip.

And cinema.

Yeah.

And we, we tear, well, we try and find a bright side.

And we also try to find those hidden gems, those the rooms, those, what, birdemic?

What's Slow Bullet is Elliott's favorite movie?

Yeah, it's my favorite.

Three movies that we've never done on the podcast.

And also, two of which were also famous on their own.

You know, we did not discover those.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, but we would like to

do that.

I think maybe we helped to augment the fame of Neil Breen.

Let's say that.

Maybe we helped to bring Neil Breen to a larger audience.

Now, Ashley, do you have much experience with things like Neil Breen or other teeny, tiny, bad movies that have become cult classics like The Room?

Oh, I love The Room.

I mean,

I watch a lot of teeny tiny movies.

I'm also like a little nervous about doing this only because I tend to do a lot of teeny tiny movies.

And I just know that when I call out somebody on this, I'm going to end up

on a set

of Pittsburgh with them in four years.

And they're going to be like, ah, yeah.

So I feel like I don't.

I don't run in those circles, but I feel like for the most part,

the people who work in film, who listen to our podcast take it in stride.

And if they don't, then they're probably not the kind of people you'd want to work with.

Yeah,

I will say I was on an I don't remember if I told the story on the podcast or not, but I certainly told Dan and Stu.

I was on an airplane when someone recognized me, and it turned out it's because they were a producer on one of the movies that we had done.

But he was very affable about it and very nice about it.

I also feel like that was a movie, if I'm recalling correctly,

too, Dan.

We actually kind of liked it.

It was one of the movies that Dan admitted made him cry while he was watching it.

Brats.

Yeah, Brats.

Country Bears?

Honestly, I'm a little more scared of this movie because I've heard of some behavior from

the director

engaging people on the internet about this film.

Okay, well, that I'm worried about.

I'm worried about only because

I'm doing research.

I didn't realize when I watched the movie that some big name behind the scenes people or some very accomplished behind-the-scenes people worked on this movie.

But the cinematographer and the editor for this movie are like real people, like real professional people.

I mean, they're all real people.

No,

some of them are simulations and holograms.

Yeah.

They're also litiginous.

Did you guys see that there was like a whole ass offsuit?

Oh, man, they're going to own the least of the flop house.

Yeah.

I'll get into that briefly when I get, I give some background that I heard from.

So I do want to point out that this movie is directed by a guy named Geno McCoy, and it looks like most of the producers are his family.

Now,

I promise not to get mad, but dan are you geno mccoy is dan mccoy and geno mccoy the same person and were you just tricking us to watch your movie what a clever uh pseudonym though well he does use a kitchen to throw people off the scent it's uh so i promise not to get mad so i'm like k-o-y a spelling that i'm like i get as an accident from people sometimes who are not familiar with the name and previously it's always made me kind of annoyed because i'm like that's not a like that's not a spelling of McCoy.

Like, that's not one that, and I'm like, oh, well, I guess it exists.

I guess it.

Because I think of

probably everybody here, your name is the easiest to spell correctly.

Yeah.

Ashley is spelled, I would say non-traditionally.

Oh, yeah, there's a lie at the end.

That's all my opinion.

Elliot with two T's, Stewart, you know, sometimes

nobody knows ever how to pronounce or spell.

Yeah.

Kalan.

Yeah,

it's not how it's pronounced.

Or colon.

Yeah, they don't usually say colon, but they could because there's no law against it.

And usually people try and spell Stuart like it's a last name.

And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

I'm not French Stuart.

Or French Stuart Wellington, which would be what?

Like you with a baguette.

Give us a taste of what French Stuart Wellington would sound like if you were French Stuart Wellington.

French Stuart.

Delicious.

Mouth watering.

I took French class, and every time I, only for two years, and every time I would start

speaking, I would always go, uh-huh, and then it would get mad.

And that's what I deducted.

You immediately deduct 50 points from your grade.

Yeah.

Oh, wow, man.

Grivendor lost that year.

You're like, I thought that was JK.

Fuck that shit.

Right.

I took French in Arkansas and you got extra points for the uh

that was pretty much

the whole of my studies.

I took two semesters of German in college and they were, and they always praised my accent.

And I was like, well, I just think to myself, how would Peter Laurie say it?

And the professor did not like that.

But also, like, there's enough, I feel like you have had enough exposure to like Yiddish.

And I think Yiddish has some correlation.

Similar, but the accent's not quite the same.

You know, there's similar words, but delivered in a more like,

like Yiddish is always delivered like, am I right?

You know what I'm talking about.

What do you think about this?

Yeah, there's always eyebrows raised at some point.

So

aliens, guys.

Aliens, what a movie.

James Cameron takes maybe a perfect movie, Alien, and man, just to find a a different spin on it that in many ways is just as good.

I prefer the first one, but the second one's also a masterpiece.

Guys, what do you say about Aliens?

The movie.

Yeah.

So, Michael Bean, The Bean Machine, The Bean Dream.

Love him.

Can't get enough.

Bill Paxson, yum, yum, yum.

Give me more of that guy.

You're RIP.

Give me a hot glass of bean juice.

And I thought it was coffee you were asking for, but nope, nope, not at all.

Nope.

It wasn't for me.

I don't know.

And what's what?

Yeah, this is the...

That's a joke.

We just put Ashley in the hot seat.

I feel like that would be a tough one to argue, a tough stance to argue.

Aliens isn't good.

Yeah, I think that'd be hard.

I'm sure there's someone, I mean, Armand White, bring him in.

I'm sure he'll make that argument, you know.

But yeah, it's a hard argument.

So speaking of...

Just gave aliens three stars on Letterbox, and my eyes.

I hope you excommunicated them.

No, no, I'm not going to argue with someone on the internet, particularly a friend, but my eyes did pop out of my skull a little bit.

I had to.

At least that's how divided America is.

Some Americans think that Aliens is a three-star movie.

Terrible.

How do we reach these people?

Yeah, right.

Speaking of aliens, though, Stuart, I think you were going to talk about a movie that has aliens in it eventually.

Oh, my God.

I am talking about Mac and Bean.

About a man's relationship with mac and cheese.

Yeah.

No, I'm talking about this week.

We are reviewing Lumina from

2024.

This was a micro-budget movie, I'm assuming, that was written and directed by Gino McCoy.

It's either a micro-budget movie or it's one of those movies that somehow has an enormous budget, but the money all went to not the movie that would change.

I mean, I don't know which.

I didn't do any research on it.

Apparently, it went to like hiring those professionals you talked about because I texted you guys being like, you know, like, it's not a good movie.

The screenplay in particular doesn't work, but it looks okay for the money that was spent on it.

And it, like, like, everything's framed well and like, you know, looks relatively good for the level of production it is.

And it cuts together.

I'm like, oh, I see.

Like, the cinematographer worked on Only God Forgives and Eyes Watched is an Academy Award winner.

And yeah, what's his name?

The Editor.

Something?

Tom Noble.

Yeah.

Okay.

He edited Thelma and Louise, another movie that

spends a lot of time in a desert.

Yeah, yeah.

That's

like, ah, I know this landscape.

I will say, like, by the end of the movie,

I definitely, when it was getting into the final, you're seeing alien things, I was like, okay, this is like a higher level of production than I expected from the first three quarters of the movie, which is mostly them hanging around, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, that's a real nice house that they're in.

And, you know,

I'm never I'm never impressed by how nice a house is in a movie because there's a lot of nice houses in porn and for sure

the budget is going necessarily.

No, no, no Well, apparently the budget somehow also went to we'll get into it later I think but uh into distribution that then did not pan out hence the lawsuit.

But you know, I can't tell if this movie is

bad or if I just don't understand Los Angeles.

Like I'm really was it was it the LAPD cop with an English accent that threw you off?

Oh, I love that guy.

That guy was great.

But also, you know, things like this guy's living in this beautiful house with a pool with a girl whose relationship to him is never defined, and you have no idea what either of them do for a living.

And I was like, is that poor poor plotting, or is that just Los Angeles?

I don't know.

It sounds like Elliot's cousin Kato Kaitlin.

I mean, I think

there's a thriving subculture still of LA hangers-on who live inside big houses that belong to their friends.

But I think it was very funny when someone walks into the main character's house and he goes, whoa, what a house.

What do you do?

And he goes, don't worry about it.

So the screenwriter could not be bothered to think of a job for this main character to have, you know.

Right.

Exposition George, who also immediately calls the girl Smokey.

And I was like, I'm so glad someone's acknowledging that this girl's whole job is vaping in the first shirt of the film.

I've been ripping serious clouds the whole time.

But let's talk about it, because I also had the same question of I didn't know.

It was hard to understand what the relationship was between some of these characters.

But Stu, maybe you can illuminate us on that.

Talking about characters, let's look at this rich tapestry of characters.

So we have our hero, Alex or Lex to his friends.

He is this like non-specific young rich guy who I believe is mentioned to have a trust fund.

He lives in a big LA mansion and he lives with Patricia, who is constantly filming things with her phone and vaping.

She does not, other than that, have any other real role other than occasionally giving us exposition on the other characters.

And sometimes judging the other characters too.

Judging them.

And what is there?

And so what are Alex and Patricia's relationship?

I don't know.

Do you know?

Can we write them a letter?

I genuinely couldn't tell Patricia's relationship to anyone.

Her allegiances seem to shift from moment to moment to moment.

Like, I'm not sure.

Is she friends with Tatiana?

Is she friends with Delilah?

Also, these names, like, no one's named Jen in this universe.

Like, no, everyone has really

George showed up, and I'm like, ah, nice, refreshing.

Yeah.

I do.

I originally presumed that she didn't live there, but was like.

in from out of town because there's this party going on later on and like she was just staying there over but then later on it seemed to be like months later this beard is still there the beard shows with time when it grows maybe the funniest,

the funniest fake beard I've seen in forever.

And it really lifted my spirits at a time when I needed it.

I thought he looked cuter with the beard.

I was like, oh, that works for you.

I think it does work for him.

Yeah, he looked a little meat-headed-y before the beard.

Here's my theory, which is not borne out by anything.

But he looked like a bolt.

Okay, yeah.

I mean, he did look like

he should be working with Molotov to undermine the czarist structure, you know, but that's why I like him.

Yeah.

I think the this is my theory.

It again is not in the text.

It's not that I think Alex, Patricia, and Delilah were college friends.

And

Patricia, she's come out to LA to make it in some industry, and she's been staying with Alex, but she never really hit, it really didn't really take off her career.

So she's still staying with Alex.

And so probably like a vape influencer.

Yes.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Influencer and Jason, definitely.

Testing out like various flavors.

I don't, what do people like to vape?

I don't know.

And they literally like lead.

They really like lead getting into their system from very simple.

And you mentioned Tatiana is the outsider to that group.

Yeah.

Now you mentioned Delilah and Tatiana.

Let's find out who they are.

Delilah is Alex's ex-girlfriend who still has feelings for him.

She is convinced.

And no matter what happens throughout the course of the movie, her main goal at all times is to get Alex to come back to her,

even when there's aliens chasing them.

And she is constantly looking at him the way my wife looks at me when I start explaining my character build in the game elden ring where she's very turned on she's very like oh wow

you put all your points into strength vigor and stamina how original you and charlane's relationship is so much different than i thought it was yeah i know it's behind closed doors you never know yeah yeah um and then uh and patricia introduces her as delusional delilah yep um and then we have tatiana who's the new girlfriend and the party is being thrown to kind of introduce her to all of alex's friends and she is blonde and and has a history of being

abducted by aliens.

Which we don't know right away.

That is something that is revealed.

It's not like she's introducing herself to people with that information.

Yeah, she doesn't seem to introduce herself to anyone.

It's a party for her and to introduce her.

Yet everyone in that living room knows her name.

There's a whole sequence where she's walking and everybody's like, Tatiana, Tatiana.

And she's like, hey, hey, yeah, I like your dress too.

You know, all these women follow the sort of lifetime movie rule of hair, you know, where it's like new girlfriend, like acceptable girlfriend has blonde, straight hair.

There's the bad ex-girlfriend that's trouble with like the brunette stuff.

Oh, she has dark hair.

Yeah.

And then, of course, like the absolutely drop-dead, gorgeous woman of color who is somehow friend zoned

and will never be a romantic prospect for absolutely no reason.

They just got to give her a couple of quirks and she'll just hang around.

Yeah, she's very prop heavy.

We also very briefly needs to be because no one's given a personality.

It's like an SBU interviewee where they're like, hey, sir, let me introduce this.

Let me interview this male stripper.

And he's like hanging his little G-strings on the washroom.

The bartender, like, yeah, no, she came in the other day.

It's like, dude, you can do that later.

Yeah, you don't have to do that anymore.

Any personality that any of the characters given is based on something external to them, whether it be a vape, a beard, an aux cable, whatever.

Except for George.

I feel like George is the one guy with any personality because he's the conspiracy theorist.

He's a little bit of a joker.

And he also works with children.

He volunteers his time.

Yeah, that was the biggest shocking twist of the movie in a movie that involves secret alien abductions was that when he's like, yeah, I do a lot of volunteering with children.

Okay, so George hasn't shown up yet.

We have this party where we're just walking around one of those LA style mansions that you're like, am I in like the waiting room for some kind of high-end doctor's office?

Or like, is this a hotel that someone is squatting in and they just made it their house?

Yeah.

and a lot of music is played and i have to say that oh yes there's a song uh with lyrics about a sensei girl and i was like there's no way that this song is not by the director of this movie there's no other reason this would be in here and i looked it up and sure enough all of the music is by gene and what is a sensei girl because i didn't i thought it was like a sensei girl like splinter for the ninja turtles like No, it means

sensitive.

It's not like a slang term.

It's not Cincinnati.

Oh.

Because I put the captions on because I thought I was like, that's a weird way to pronounce sexy.

And I looked up and I'm like, no, put the captions on.

Oh, no, it's Sensi.

What is this?

What does this mean?

Sensey-N-S-Y is how it's spelled in the title of the song and on the captions.

So Sensi.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you just get that feeling and you have to check what the song's about.

Okay, so after the party, Lex tries to...

Actually, I used Shazam to try to identify the song, and my phone exploded.

It hung itself.

Okay, so

at the party, we, you know, the character dynamics get reinforced.

Delilah tries to make a move on Alex, yada, yada, yada.

Afterwards, Alex.

None of them seem to like each other very much.

They are friends

who don't like each other.

She has

been has had

an unrequited love for Alex for years.

She doesn't really seem to like him very much.

He doesn't seem to like her that much.

It's a there's not a lot of affection between these friends.

And so I wonder if this is, maybe this alien stuff was just an elaborate way to like end to end a friendship.

Like

they couldn't find the words.

So this has all the vibes of a guy who's like, I'm going to make a movie and I'll put all my friends in it.

And I don't know, you can be the vapor and you can be the ex-girlfriend and yada, yada, yada.

Like it's very thinly drawn without much background.

These characters don't have a rich inner life.

No.

Okay.

So we're still on the first house.

Yeah, we're still on the first page of notes.

So

after the party, Tatiana goes out to the pool to go for a swim.

And of course, this is when we cut to a lady jogger jogging outside the property, and then aliens attack.

The lady jogger is only shown briefly just so she can have a single reaction shot to the

abduction blast or whatever.

So I don't know.

I'm guessing it's, again, this is another friend of the family who showed up with a high-type ponytail.

Okay, so there's the cops show up.

Was there anything about this sequence that felt normal to you guys?

Before the cops show up, which did not feel normal, I will say that Delilah and there's a moment where Delilah and Patricia are talking to each other, and Delilah's like, I just want that bitch to disappear about Tatiana.

And that's when the light blast abducts or seemingly vaporizes Tatiana.

You mentioned the jogger, but I didn't know whether you actually mentioned the fact that Tatiana turns into

Avengers.

Wait, which one is the one?

Infinity War, yeah, where they all turn into dust.

They all turn into dust.

Yeah, she likes

right before she's blasted,

the liquid in the wine glasses starts to like float up in a pretty cool special effect.

That was actually pretty cool.

I liked that a lot.

I liked the image.

You know, the CTI obviously was not very good, but the image in and of itself.

It's also,

it's

something that happens in movies a lot that I always find very funny where

it's that Jurassic Park kind of like water droplet when a t-rex is coming thing where you see a little thing react to a huge force but not but big things are not reacting to it so it's like oh it has the power to pull up this wine but nothing else oh no person okay i got it the same way how in jurassic park the transource rex it shakes water that's how that's how big his steps are but at the end he's able to tiptoe in and surprise them and eat a raptor he's so sneaky

yeah exactly but that is his tennis yeah yeah he's on his tippy tippy toes i mean I just really liked that you knew that something was going to happen because those women were seated on that couch in a way that women have never spoken to each other in their entire lives.

It's like, so it's a very gendered way of sitting where it's like, I was always told it.

As a young woman, I was told, if you want to speak to a man, you should sit next to him, but face something else instead of facing another person, instead of facing them head on, because that's how women talk to each other.

Yeah, men, I guess you have to sit at a baseball game and like look out at the field and then you can have a heart-to-heart talk.

The cars are good.

These are all things I was told.

Get a real taste of that profile.

Yeah.

Yeah, they are sort of sitting there and Tatiana is framed in between them in a very boderic sort of moment going into that pool, you know, and I was like, well, that's nice.

It is, I never thought about it.

You're right.

When I have a heart-to-heart talk with somebody, I do take them to a natural history museum or somewhere else where there's a diorama we can can both look at at the same time.

Sure, sure.

A planetarium.

I'm a walk-and-talk guy, so I find an office somewhere and we walk down hallways.

And I get some rapid-fire delivery that is like kind of funny, but not super

laugh out loud, funny.

And sometimes, sometimes you'll take like one piece of information and cut it between split it between three different people.

So it sounds like dialogue, even though it's just exposition about how the legislative process works.

Yeah, it's really great.

I'm pretty talented.

So, okay, so again, the windows get blasted open.

Tatiana disappears.

There seems to be like a puddle of smoking lava or something.

I can't tell what's going on.

But obviously, everybody's freaked out.

Alex is running around yelling, where Tatiana, like, where is Tatiana?

The police show up.

Of course, this is where we have the introduction of, I think, all of our favorite characters.

That's right.

He's top with the English accent.

Yeah.

This was the moment.

And a couple of characters in this movie have English accents, or Tatiana does.

And does Delilah also?

I'm trying to remember.

I think she does, right?

But this was the moment where I was like, wait a minute.

I thought this was taking place in LA.

They talked a lot about LA, but this police officer clearly has an English accent.

And I have never encountered an English-accented LAPD officer.

Someone come from another, like another

European country, and then become an LAPD officer.

Like, it's just not a, it's not a thing I've encountered.

But so really, and also his attitude is very funny.

He's so quick to like.

Either it's somewhere between hostility and not caring, which I think

is accurate for an LAPD officer in a lot of ways.

But yeah.

So shortly after we have this introduction to this great character who then disappears from our lives forever.

Sadly.

Unfortunately.

It reminds me of there was some movie we watched years ago where there was a person, I think, holding a little dog in the background.

And we were just like, the movie should be about them.

I think it's right around now that Alex hears the audio of Delilah wishing Tatiana would just disappear.

Yeah.

And he takes that immediately, takes offense to it, and he throws her out of his life.

She's like, she's like, Lex, and he's like, never call me that again.

That's only for friends.

Also, super cold that Patricia boomeranged it.

You know, like,

it's on a loot.

Yeah.

And she's like, I can't seem to turn it off.

It's like, come on, you just press the thing that turns off the screen on the phone.

Like, we don't know how far you can.

Turn your volume down or whatever.

But he also reacts as if, like, after what you did.

And it's like,

yeah, like, I understand in the situation you're in, like, that is very a hurtful thing to hear.

And you're mad that she said it, but she didn't do like make the lady disappear again.

The implication seems to be that as if he now blames her.

If you hadn't wished upon that star,

but it's L.A., you know, maybe they believe in just manifestation to that degree.

That's very possible.

If this was like at the party, I saw you splitting the wishbone.

If these characters were really into crystals, I feel like the whole movie would make a lot more sense to me, all their actions.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

So

time passes.

How do we know time passes, Stuart?

Well, the house remains exactly the same.

Patricia remains exactly the same, living in the house, but there's something

different.

Is there something about Alex?

Did he get like a smudge on his face?

No, no, no.

His hair has gotten kind of messed up, but his beard has gotten crazy.

He has this massive beard.

It looks like he is entering a world's biggest beard competition.

It looks like he is playing Moses in a church play.

Like, it's an enormous biblical patriarch fake beard.

It's so funny.

Grecian formula, Moses.

It's still like very black.

It's still black, very dark.

Oh, no, this is a young hot Moses.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, it worked for me.

I was really like, now, who's this guy?

Also, the pool is really maintained for somebody who's been sitting outside it

for six months doing what he's doing.

He'd pay somebody to do that.

Yeah, he's got people to do that.

Yeah, he just gets Chris Pine from Poolman to come over and get it put into shape.

He's the best.

Yeah, I mean, he was,

that was the story, right?

Is that Chris Pine worked as a pool man for years preparing for his directorial interview?

Yeah.

For 10 years, when he wasn't acting, he was cleaning pools undercover.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Going to Langers and cleaning pools.

So

time has passed.

I will say, it is, Stuart, you're right that like the

time has passed.

You mentioned the house has not changed.

And when you did it, it reminded me of the beautiful sequence in Virginia Wolfe's To the Lighthouse, where she's talking about the house kind of remain

being untouched and remaining the same, the dust that changes, this thing creases a little bit as all these events are happening with the family in parentheticals.

And you know what?

Maybe that's what they're going for with this scene is that so little has changed around the world, about the world they live in,

except for this beard, which is the one element of time in an otherwise unchanging world where people are just one small element, you know, and not necessarily the way that time should be measured by the lives of humans.

Do you think that's what they're trying to get at?

Yeah, I think so.

My favorite part into the lighthouse is when they get to that lighthouse and aliens go buck wild on them.

That's all the last page.

It's all the last 10 pages.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so

someone's like, I fixed to the lighthouse.

They finally get to the lighthouse and there's aliens there.

Where they get to the lighthouse and it's the lighthouse from the movie The Lighthouse.

And they're like, this is a weirder lighthouse than we expected.

Yeah.

Okay.

So he has gotten, Alex has fallen deep into a like a conspiracy hole.

He has been having these dreams that give him visions, dreams of him being abducted or walking through a deep underground military base,

which is repeatedly referred to in the description of the movie as dumb, which I found a very funny choice.

Yeah.

And what does dumb stand for?

Deep underground military base.

Yep, you got it.

For a movie that does not seem to have a lot of sort of diegetic sense of humor, it's very odd that they made this choice.

I was like, oh, is this camp?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Hard to say.

So Alex has put together a big, like, a big collage of newspaper clippings and red string, and he invites his friend George, who is the aforementioned conspiracy nut friend, who also is shocked by by how nice a house Alex has.

George comes over and they just kind of hang out on the couch and start looking at articles on the internet of alien abductions,

like you do.

I was really shocked by how Modge-Podged and well-done, well-appointed the conspiracy room was.

But he did seem to run out of things.

The I Want to Believe poster was on there at least six times.

It was a lot of, it was very much not meant to be looked at closely,

that evidence board, because it was a lot of like just kind of random pages from like the weekly world news and things like that.

And, you know, there wasn't, there wasn't a sense of, oh, he's putting together a research story here.

It was more like, we got to put alien stuff on these walls.

Come on, guys.

I mean, we can shoot tomorrow morning.

There also is no indication that he's good at this.

That's true.

He's really bad at it.

It was very funny to me later on when he gets into a fist fight.

I'm like, why would this guy like know how to fight?

Like, why?

I mean, mean, we know nothing about his background.

We can fill it in.

Maybe he's former special services, Secret Service.

It's just one of these movies where someone turns into an action hero because the person making the movie has seen movies.

It's like, yeah, and they're going to fight.

Like that happens.

Choke out this special forces guy in full tactical body armor.

Oh, yeah.

It is as the glasses and the hat, and all of a sudden he's as.

Yes.

We have a Liam Neesons.

Okay, so as I said, Alex is spurred on for this conspiracy theory by these dreams he's having.

We have shots of him writhing in the covers, kind of sweaty, having these visions where he's walking around a dumb,

wandering around.

That's, again, deep underground military base.

Is this when Patricia goes to wake him up and he starts to go?

Patricia goes to wake him up and he chokes her and they have, let's say, a falling out briefly.

I mean,

if you're going to live in someone's house for months, And you're not

contributing,

maybe you're asking.

That's a hot tank.

Yeah, I actually don't even believe in it.

I did sort of go.

Your value is based on how much you bring to the table.

I really liked how they delineated Dream Alex from Real Alex.

That was one of the clearest things to me in this film, particularly because Alex in bed is screaming and Alex in Dream is just sort of chilling, walking around this base.

But they both have crazy beards, right?

Yes.

Okay.

They both do, but one is in blue light and one is in very sort of green.

For a movie where a character is presented with multiple hairstyles and beard styles, it is weird that

it's like he always views himself as a man with a big crazy beard.

Even when he doesn't have a beard, he carries himself as a bearded man.

Exactly.

That's what I was going to say.

He's an internal beard.

Now, my guess is that they could probably get a better beard.

Do you think this beard was one of the contributors?

Was one of the producers?

Like, it put some funding into the movie.

Oh, yeah.

And that's why they had to put this beard in.

It was like a Kickstarter award.

You get to pick the beard.

Donate your beard.

Put your beard in the movie.

Okay, so do you think, and do you think the actor who played Alex was like walking around with that beard for months and months, wearing it even when not on camera?

He's like, I just got to get into the role.

And his wife's like, or her husband is like, oh, I hate this stupid beard.

And he's like, I think I'm going to keep it.

I really hope that actor's gay.

Like, for some reason, you said that.

And I just, ah,

maybe like him.

I'm giving him more.

20% more.

We're giving him a rich inner life here, unlike the characters in the film.

I mean, I'm sure the actor probably does have a rich inner life, being a human being.

Sure.

Well, I've met some humans without a rich inner life.

That's true.

That's true.

From what I hear,

I hear that L.A.

is full of people without rich inner lives.

Well, thanks, Aldous Huxley.

Yeah,

appreciate the take on L.A.

Okay, so at some point, Delilah returns.

Oh, wait, there's the one-shot of the bloody nose, though.

Oh, yeah.

Which, where, like, all of a sudden, there's just a fuck ton of blood on Alex's hands.

And then, next shot, gone.

Yeah.

No explanation.

No, nothing.

I feel like this movie is filled with moments like that, where I kept rewinding things to be like, did I fucking miss something?

Was I looking at my phone for a second?

And the thing is, I was looking at my phone for a second, but I didn't miss anything.

But you were looking at your phone to look at the plot summary of Lumina because there were gaps.

That's what I was doing.

There are gaps in the movie that maybe they're meant to be the functional equivalent of the lost time blips that alien abductees have, where they don't remember something.

There would be times the characters would refer to something that happened.

I'd be like, I don't remember that happening in the movie.

And I think it's because it didn't happen in the movie.

You know, it's just, yeah.

Or it happened in a cutscene or something like that.

I did appreciate, though, because when George came in, I was like, who's this guy?

I really appreciated Patricia's phone call where she said, you know, that guy that was at the party who kept talking a bunch of bullshit.

He's here.

I was like, okay, thank you.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah.

This is an established constant in this world.

Because the rule is you can't expository yourself, right?

You can't have exposition related to yourself.

It's me, your friend George.

I'm into conspiracy stuff.

I was at your party spouting some bullshit.

You know,

it feels awkward coming from him.

Exposition George could not take that one, but he serves his time later in the film.

So

it reminds me of the kind of, that's the kind of question a kid asks in Sunday school.

It's like, could Exposition George ever deliver exposition about himself, Montseni?

No, well, there's no limits to his power of exposition, but you know, it's at the same time.

Yeah.

So, around now, they all team together, and despite their differences, they decide we're going to go try and find Tatiana and get to the bottom of these alien conspiracy theories.

Yeah.

And I believe their first, you guys can correct me.

I believe their first stop is they have to meet an internet acquaintance of George named Tom.

And apparently pick up some Bakersfield meth, I guess.

Yes.

So they

hop in there.

Do they already have the RV?

No, they buy the RV.

The RV they buy once they get

someone makes a, oh, they buy it in Morocco.

Well, just because it's mentioned, someone makes a, are we going to Wally World joke?

I'm like,

that was a station wagon.

Let's get our jokes correct here.

There is a Wally World in Morocco, though.

So that's why they're asking about it because Wally World Morocco is actually the only one still in operation.

The only one still standing in.

So, but you're right, Dan.

I also bristled at

not a lot of jokes in this movie, so it felt very weird for them to suddenly make one to have it be a reference to an older movie, and also for that reference to not be accurate to what they're driving.

It would make more sense for them to make like a Spaceballs reference, you know, something with a Winnebago in or something like that.

Or everyone's favorite movie, RV, you know, that big hit, RV.

Everyone's favorite movie.

Give me the top four cast in the movie.

Well, Robin Williams was in RV.

Okay, so he's probably number one.

And Barry Sonnenfeld directed it.

And we have reached the limits of my RV knowledge.

Okay, so that's...

I don't know.

I'm not posting that's everyone's favorite movie according to the polls.

Let me guess.

So I'm just going to paint a picture of what the poster probably looks like.

We have the title.

Obviously, you got to have the title of the movie on the poster.

Like the RV tipping off the side of like a cliff or something.

It's on like a giant holder or something.

Yeah, I'm going to look it up.

Yeah, yeah.

It's on a giant.

He's out.

It's a big-headed Robin Williams.

No, no.

If this was a movie from the 60s and Jack Davis did the

banning, yeah.

It's an RV that is balanced precariously on the point of a mountain.

Now, wait, is this the one where Steve Corell's head is on a plate covering?

It's Dan in real life, I believe.

Oh,

yeah, Dan in real life.

Speaking of Dan's in real life, we watched a movie.

So, Dan, here's the rest of the cast of RV.

So, there's also

Jeff Daniels, Daniels, Cheryl Hines, Christian Jonowith, Will Arnett.

A lot of people in this one.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's that's five.

That's five stars.

Okay.

I will say I've read, I think, both of Gary Sonenfeld's memoirs.

I don't remember him talking about RV particularly in them.

Okay.

What did he say about Nine Lives?

I don't think he doesn't touch that one either.

What did he say about

Joan Cusack in Adam's Family Values?

He doesn't talk much about Adam's Family Values in the ones I've read.

Maybe I've only read the first one.

He talks a lot about

throws his copy in the garbage.

Surprisingly, a fair amount about Wild Wild West.

More than you would expect.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like that probably looms large in his brain.

Okay, so speaking of stars, this is where we reach star of the Silver Screen himself, Eric Roberts, playing the character Tom, who

is wearing some kind of hybrid duster thing and a very clean pair of Timbalands.

And Joseph Eric Roberts brought his own word hat.

Yes, that's his outfit for sure.

Yeah, they actually just passed him on the street and were like, hey, you want to make a movie?

Get in.

Get in something.

I'm not doing anything tonight.

Sure, I'll be in your movie.

I've got a movie at 11 that I'm shooting and one at

three.

I just finished shooting a movie and I have another one in three hours.

Yeah.

But if I can wear the same outfit and I can make sure that everyone knows that I have lots of sex in the first

45 seconds of my

And I'll do it.

Yeah, so he brings a real intense energy that this movie was honestly lacking.

And he shows them his hidden little base that's in a junkyard where he has, what, fabricated some kind of alien spaceship.

This doesn't really go anywhere.

And then

he kind of turns on them and starts attacking them.

And they escape while he fires gunshots at them.

And it's revealed that he most likely is a human being who has been brainwashed by aliens.

Is that correct?

He was like working for the government, making a spaceship, but then the funding got cut or something, but he got to keep the spaceship, which does not seem to me the way the government would operate normally, I feel like.

Yeah, I was, you know, I was trying to understand the scene, and then I got to.

That's a mistake.

Yeah, well, I got to the end of the movie.

I'm like, oh, whatever was happening never...

gets cleared up, so it wasn't important.

But George makes sure that you know that it's reverse engineering.

That's the one thing that he makes sure that you know in it.

And also, I guess, so

yeah, it doesn't really ever get cleared up, but this, it's the government, not aliens, but the government is in cahoots with aliens.

Or the government has been collecting alien stuff because they're like Roswell was just the beginning.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's now,

I think, let's pause the movie for a second because

I think this is an important time for us to talk about alien alien conspiracy theories and how they're tied in with the government.

First off, do you guys, no, no judgments here.

This is a judgment-free zone.

Do you guys believe in aliens?

Yes.

Okay.

Like, Dan?

First off, I like your energy.

Look, I'm an actor.

I've got fuck all to lose.

I was delaying because I'm like, did Dan Aykroyd, like, like, bribe Stewart to bring this topic up?

Or what?

Why did we?

I feel like so much of the movie, it's built on that idea of

like this is like the whole idea of the faith in that aliens exist and also that there is another entity that is keeping aliens from us.

Yeah.

Yeah, that there's a cover-up involved.

Not just that aliens exist, but also that for whatever reason, the government is covering up that existence for the average person.

For instance, I can believe and accept the idea that there is alien life out there.

It is most likely not hyper-advanced while also being hyper tough and animalistic.

Well, that's

when we get to later.

I have the same issue I have in a lot of alien movies where it's like, okay, so they build spaceships that can travel interstellar distances and they do these science experiments, but they don't wear clothes.

They don't seem to have a language.

They're just claw monsters with teeth that eat things that just run after people and tear them apart and eat them.

So they're also somehow able to build all this stuff and have science.

And also want to fuck with us.

You know what I mean?

You can do all that.

So

similarly, I believe there's probably alien life out in the universe but does it exist in the same

can it get to us in the same window of uh you know you uh galactic time the like the the age of the universe that we humans are existing in i don't think so probably so the but the thing that i have more trouble accepting is the idea that aliens exist they have attempted contact with humans and that the united states government and i guess the government around the world is very good at kind of hiding that information from us.

Now, what is it about, because I feel like we live in a period of extreme government competence.

What is it about the

world we live in that make you think the government wouldn't be able to pull this off?

You know?

Yeah, I don't know.

I think, yeah, there's just, there's just, I just had this feeling that the people in charge, I don't know, maybe I've just like picked this up over my years of working that like, you know, I feel like the people in charge actually don't really know fucking anything.

I think there's a, it feels like they're all just self-interested weirdos just i think doing their big part of it they're self-interested weirdos also there would be so much like

it would need so much cooperation and so much it's the same way that um people are like the government killed john f kennedy and it's like pretty unlikely that we wouldn't have heard about it in some form up to this point like there's there's a it's very that people are like yeah i'm going to take this secret with me to my grave like people don't maybe people used to do that but nowadays it's like oh can i get a book deal off of this can I get on TV from this?

You know?

Also, back in the days when scandals took down presidents,

the government botched a fucking break-in, a thing that should have been just easy to get away with, and they didn't do it.

So I don't think they're going to keep the aliens secret.

This is the deep, deep politics part of the podcast.

Yeah, yeah.

This is when we turn into it.

We turn into a, now it's, now suddenly it's like a Vox podcast.

Yeah, we're the chap in a flop house.

But yeah, the idea that like, yeah, if there were, if the government had access to a whole bunch of aliens, you know, there would be like a Slack channel of these nutsacks sending pictures of dead aliens with like a fucking tag like, oh, look at this, LOL, like that kind of shit.

I mean, now that's a good idea.

And they'd accidentally send it to the wrong person.

They'd add a reporter to that Slack channel or some kind of mid-level contractor would tell the people that he Twitch video game plays with that he's got aliens in his garage or something like that.

You know, it would not be a secret anymore, for sure.

But also

the idea in the past would be like, oh, the government is using the alien technology and doesn't want people to know where it came from.

And that's why we have microwave ovens and things like that.

And yet I've yet to see, unless our technology is a plan by aliens to ruin our lives so that they can then take over that much more easily.

It seems like the technology we have is not so impressive that we would need aliens to catch it.

Yeah, they were like, let's create pyramids so humans can fuck up their lives.

I mean, that's the other way.

They're like, how could all these different races invent pyramids?

It must be aliens.

Just stack stuff on each other.

And you're a thick face at the bottom.

Rhinos are the most

pile.

If you're building something and gravity is involved, you're going to get a pyramid.

That's what's going to happen.

Also, they don't have like a million fucking things shooting into their eyeballs from their phone every day.

They can just focus on building one thing.

Yeah, that's a good thing.

Also, they enslaved a bunch of people.

That was the other half of that.

Not all pyramids were built by slaves, Dan.

Hashtag not all pyramids.

thank you for correcting the thing that i didn't say

okay but yeah so i think we can all agree that uh in real life we probably don't believe that the government is necessarily doing it covering it up because they're doing too good a job if they are yeah so now back to the movie now that they've escaped from tom they realize that the men in black

from tom

They've escaped from Tom and they realize that they're being followed by men in black, which they're like, you know, I might be going crazy, but I think this van's following us.

I'm like, that's not a van, that's an SUV.

Once again, the misidentification of vehicles in this film.

Technically, an SUV is a light truck for regulation purposes.

The director is car blindness.

Yeah.

So, sir, can you tell us about the car that hit your car with the hit and run?

I can't.

I can't.

It's probably got four wheels.

Probably.

Probably.

Okay, so they realize that the men in black are on their trail so they need to they need to they need to hide themselves so i think this is when uh they all go shopping and they go to the mall and they go buy some new clothes wait talking speaking of fairy sanefeld i will say if the government is covering up aliens

then when we were earlier than the one of the most brilliant psyops that the government then could have pulled off is to turn men in black from a sinister presence whose job is to keep people ignorant into a lovable presence whose job is to protect humanity from bad aliens which is in the old stories was never what they were they were always just about destroying evidence of ufos and things like that but they and intimidating people like and intimidating people yeah whereas in the in the movies thanks to hollywood uh thanks to hollyweird uh now men in black are lovable will smith guys

just burning his career to the ground right now

i'm saying that hollywood and the government are working together to

Well, maybe that's what Gino McCoy was really after, was to sort of like retake the lore of men in black and turn it into something menacing that was a very good shot as uh down that street first of all i was like i i don't think they're on that street but it was a pretty cool shot of the lone man in black standing there yeah the mysterious man in black just standing next to an suv yeah i was like oh that's spooky yeah yeah how'd he get there

uh

probably the suv yeah he took he took an uber um and then he waited for the uber to leave to pose menacingly so he's like get out of here, get out of here.

I might be slightly.

The timing here might be wrong for me because my brain got a little muddled.

At some point, they fly to Morocco.

Yes, they're going to go see Toronto.

Before after Tatiana's, are Tatiana's parents in Morocco?

Tatiana's parents are in Morocco.

Oh,

they look like they live in a medieval times building.

They're like, we should go see Tatiana's parents.

We got to go to Morocco.

And they did shoot in Morocco.

So give the movie credit for that on location.

I like that we don't see anything about them flying, flying, but we see them at a fucking grocery store.

You know what I mean?

Like they're coming out of the mall, but we don't get anything.

We do see one.

We do have some like footage of an airplane flying, right?

Yeah, but

I don't think they hired another plane to shoot them.

No, of course they did not.

Okay, so they meet with Tatiana's parents who are obviously broken up, but they also add some context that Tatiana has always had these dreams of being abducted by aliens.

Here's some art she drew from her memories of her being strapped to a table.

It was pretty funny when they show the piece of child's art and they're like, that's from her memories.

Yeah,

that was pretty funny, yeah.

There's a line in here that I know Ashley also had a problem with.

I'm so mad.

Where the mom's like, how is any of this going to help find our daughter?

I'm like, what?

This is like literally directly going to lead to where your daughter is.

Yeah, George is like, did she ever describe this, this, you know, secret underground, the dumb?

And her dad's like, yes, for the time she was missing the longest.

And then the mother just exhorts, you know, what is this going to do to help find her?

It's like, bitch, that's the first solid lead there's been in a whole fucking movie.

Are you serious?

This is what we wish we could have told that English police officer who works in Los Angeles on an exchange program of some kind.

Yeah.

That would have been a real lead.

It would have been great if he showed up in Morocco wearing like a big like Panama hat.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, like Lawrence of Arabia.

This scene with the parents, I mean, so many scenes, this movie, the Eric Roberts scene, a lot of conversations.

It feels I had so much trouble.

My mind has so much trouble gripping what was going on, like holding on to the dialogue or picking up information because it's so elliptically kind of like, some would say poorly written.

And information is suddenly dropped on you without any lead up or anything like that.

But then the conversations otherwise will just kind of like circle the drain of actual, actual talk.

It It was very,

I don't know if you guys were having this trouble, but I felt like I'd watch a scene and halfway through the scene, I'd be like, I don't, I don't know that I'm registering any of this.

Like, it just kind of feels like

I'm walking through a haze of words that

quite makes sense.

Yeah.

Okay.

I agree.

But I also thought maybe that's Los Angeles.

I've definitely had meetings with my agents in LA that felt very similar to that,

where I walked away going, I don't think I got any concrete information out of that.

Yeah.

So while in Morocco, they stop at a gas gas station and they buy an RV.

Alex buys an RV while Delilah and Patricia get in an argument where they're like kind of accusing each other of trying to take advantage of Alex.

And so Delilah has made it very clear to Patricia that she's going to play along with Alex's fears about aliens because she sees this as the way to get her get become his new girlfriend.

He's such a catch at this point.

And he's such a catch.

The guy who, I mean, he's shaved his beard at this point, so he lost the one thing that was that was great about him.

this guy who has spent months sitting around a pool pining for his disappeared girlfriend and is now kind of driven in this obsessive way to make everyone fly to Morocco and drive around in the desert in an RV.

She's like, I got to keep this guy.

Like, I got to get with him.

Well, I mean, at least he's got hobbies, you know?

He's got something going on.

He's interesting.

He's not just playing video games.

He's not just playing Elden Ring.

Definitely like a Timu Justin Thoreau at that point.

Like, they really

got him squared down.

Timu Justin Thoreau.

I feel like that's like a whole type of man.

Definitely.

Okay, so

they ride around in the desert for a little bit.

They stop at a desert oasis.

Wait, did you skip the part, though, where they go, the two girls

go into the place, they find a woman who like laughs at, like an elderly woman.

just looks at them and does a creepy laugh for a long time and they both kind of just look at each other and back out of the room and then get up and leave, yeah.

They reacted like they went to a haunted house, and that was the like, they're like, oh, what a wacky experience.

Okay, now for the hey, Rod.

I also don't

know.

I don't know what they expected when they went into the building.

I don't know what they expected to have happen, and I don't know why that happened, and I don't know why they let, you know, it's- Oh, no, I think they're very, it's one of those moments where it's like there's fully 25 to 30 seconds given to why they go in, which is to get out of the heat.

I don't need that information.

So they could have just gone in and had this experience.

But then they come out and you get the sense that those scenes right next to each other were filmed months apart, right?

Because they just giggle on their way out like they've been in a tickle fight.

I will say, and I'll give you a little bit of a- That's good direction, by the way.

I'll give you a little bit of a title.

Imagine you're in a tickle fight.

You've never had a tickle fight before.

So just take yourself back there.

Your motivation is that you've just left a tickle fight.

You're a little wistful that it's over, but you're also physically glad it's over because you just can't laugh that hard anymore from the tickling.

A little side-aching, but grateful for the experience.

Exactly.

I will say, if this scene had happened in a different kind of movie, I'd be like, love this scene.

If this was some kind of Eastern European horror movie, I'd be like, I love this scene where they walk in, an old lady just laughs at them, and they walk out again.

But in this movie, it didn't quite work for me.

No, that's too bad.

Okay, so again,

there's definitely a moment at night night where they are arguing about an aux cable and they need to play some music.

I can't remember if this happens before or after they all of a sudden George is outside of the vehicle and he runs over and they find this desert oasis thing at night.

I think it's after the oasis.

I don't know, because the aux cable leads to the song starts playing that

single.

Yeah, and they're like, we didn't ask for this song, but it's kind of catchy and it's clearly another Gino McCoy banger.

100%.

I went through a roller coaster of emotions during this scene because at first I'm like, why are we spending so much time on whether they have an aux cable to play music, just play some music?

And then I'm like, oh, it's to set up the fact that he's going to play another one of his songs.

And then at first, all the characters don't like the song.

And I'm like, oh, Gino McCoy, you're being honest with, you know, or at least humble

once.

No, but they love, they get, really get into it.

But then they get into it.

They turn around.

They're like, you know what?

This is the greatest song I've ever heard.

I wondered if that screech right before it that happens is sort of like a mind control thing that then makes them really love the song because there is that really discordant sound that comes out.

Yeah, and I was like, ooh, that's cool.

The radio waves are being controlled by whatsoever.

It really feels like it's setting you up for the aliens to attack in that moment.

But instead, it's setting you up for this song, which ends like, so is he saying the music

comes from the aliens?

Is that what it is?

Yeah, yeah, Serving with the Aliens by Joe Satriani.

The fancy girl is.

So, yeah, maybe, maybe this track was actually like that loud sound.

It was like the bonus hidden track at the end of the last track on Gina McCoy's record where like

on that last song, after you listen to the last song, you then like wait 20 minutes and then there's like a crazy sound and then you get a bonus secret song.

Yeah.

That's what people love, right?

People love that.

Or here's my read of the rest of this movie.

That screech, that's the moment when their van crashed because they were so busy looking about Oxford.

The rest of the movie is them in the last moments, what they imagine before they die.

It's a real loss of the morphine dream.

That's great.

Okay, so at one point they stop at a nighttime desert oasis.

They meet up with a weird hippie couple, Sonny and Cher, who convince Alex to take his clothes off and go kind of skinny dipping for a moment.

And then they leave.

These characters, again, this is where the movie almost becomes a movie I can respect on a B-movie level.

It makes no sense.

It's dumb.

The Sonny character just grunts.

He's like a caveman wearing clothes.

And the Cher character, for no reason, pretty much takes off her dress and goes, get in this water with me.

We got to get into the water.

And

it doesn't,

these characters show up later, and it doesn't mean anything when they show up later either.

But the nonsensical cartoonish quality of these characters, it's like, oh, yeah, we're sunny.

I'm Sunny.

This is Cher.

And I'm Cher.

This is Sunny.

And it's like, and someone goes like, Sonny and Cher.

It's like, it's like they wandered into a different, sillier, kind of like weirder movie.

And I'm like, all right, let's have more time in this movie.

They're in the same movie with Eric Roberts.

And I don't know.

Like, they're all sort of,

it feels very Bakersfield to me.

I don't know how I can really explain it any further Sonny and Cher are definitely not their real names, you know, and I really respect them being like uh yeah, we're not even gonna pretend that we're gonna be authentic with you.

Yeah, that I also feel like Sonny and Cher were not the names on the script and they're just like uh come up with a name real quick while we're shooting.

Maybe these two, these two, there's such a there's such a Manson family vibe to them.

And it's the kind of thing where I'm like, I want more

genuinely, I want more of this kind of strange, sinister vibe in this movie.

For sure.

Because otherwise, this movie just feels very flat and bland and boring, you know?

So we then,

time for things to get heating up.

So they're while traveling at night on the road, they almost run over a goat.

And then all of a sudden, something smashes into the windshield.

I couldn't tell if it was the goat or something else.

And then I was having trouble with this too, whether it was like the goat's head, I think, or maybe it's an alien thing or it's a tiny weapon of something.

It's very hard to make it out.

Yeah.

So

I watched that part a couple times and I could never quite get it.

There seems to be some kind of a UFO and they

try to get away in their RV, but then the RV crashes and rolls down a hill.

We have a, I would say, probably a complicated stunt shot of

the RV rolling around and the people like bouncing around on the inside.

I was really impressed by that.

That was the one, that was these, this was the one effect in the movie.

This is an okay, like kind of sci-fi channel level type, or maybe a little bit less effects.

But this, when they later on, it's very much like alone in the dark video cutscene in a video game.

Yes.

But when they were, when they're actually cutscene.

When they're actually, when you're inside the RV and it was roll, yeah.

I was like, they must have made a room and that they could turn.

So that was a really good thing.

Yeah, that was really cool, actually.

It looks really cool.

Ashley, you've been in a lot of sets.

Have you ever been in a rolling RV?

I have not.

And I was really disappointed once I thought I thought, bucket list, man.

Let's add it.

But it's funny because it is.

Maybe in the next season of Gilded Age.

Your lips to Julian Fellows ears.

I really, I was like, this is a really effective scene.

And I didn't want any of it.

Like, I really didn't want to see George.

hurting and upset the way yeah the way that i was like no

i've become so attached to Joe.

You care about this character.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

I didn't want to see that guy in pain.

I did not need realistic cuts and injuries

on these ciphers of people.

Like, I really just.

So they climb out of the wreckage of their RV and they are all injured and they're disoriented.

And there seems to be aliens still around.

Up on a bluff, they see Sonny and Cher, who then get blasted by some kind of alien ray, and then they

in order.

alien original alien ray the pizza guy

yeah yeah

yeah the so they they try to take cover from the aliens by running toward a nearby like fort or castle yeah uh

and uh they hide in there and it turns out that that's actually the cover part of a deep underground military base uh they descend into the vowels of this base and this is where it's a pretty standard sci-fi channel uh like sci-fi, I don't know, like science installation type base.

Like a scientific military thing where there's like, yeah, there's like hallways with gratings above you, and there's like doors with glowing stuff behind them.

Lines, yeah.

Lines on the wall that glowing lines on the walls.

Eventually, you're gonna find that.

Yeah, recessed lighting.

Yeah,

eventually you're gonna find tanks with things floating in them, you know, like that.

They're clearly the next step of human evolution.

As George says, the next step of human evolution.

I don't know what he's basing that on because they just kind of look like blubs, like just as blobs and blubs.

Guys in suits.

One of the top 10 places you're going to find tanks full of things floating.

Top 10?

Pet and

seafood restaurants?

Yeah, seafood restaurants and Chinese restaurants.

Underground government installations.

Dentist offices, dentist's office waiting rooms.

Okay.

Any place where they have like a count how many pickled eggs are in the jar, and if you get it right, you get all the eggs, the entire strikes back.

Jeff Kunn's retrospectives.

That's just going to be basketballs floating in tanks.

But again, it counts.

Does it count as floating in tanks?

If it's one of those places that's like

paragliding or whatever, but it's indoors, like indoor skydiving places.

No, that's a good question.

We get it a lot.

No, actually.

It does not count as a tank.

Okay, let me cross it on.

We at the tank

administration.

We in the tank floating listing ranking community.

So walking around this place.

As the Guinness representative for tank floating operations, I'm going to have to say no Stuart.

That does not fit our parameters.

Yeah.

So walking around this place, I think at one point Patricia has a vision of like alien silhouettes.

Yeah,

alien silhouettes and blood flowing around her, what, like faux reptile skin boots.

And then they eventually realize they're being tracked by, it seems like men in black special force type guys.

George and Alex easily dispatch these two soldiers and to easily overtake them.

Yeah.

It never occurs to the soldiers to use the enormous guns that they're holding in their hands.

Guys, if one of you got abducted by aliens, my friends and I would

not be able to find you, and B,

maybe they're being held at the local cineplex

for the bad movie retrospective on the technology.

But also, don't expect me to be able to beat anyone up

in order to save you.

for sure.

If they're not at the bar, I'm not finding them.

Maybe they're at the comic shop.

Okay, so they burst into this hammock.

Yeah.

Don't see him yet.

Better spend a little more time checking.

I was mad the guys got guns and poor Patricia's just got her phone still.

Yeah, but she's getting all this.

George is, as George says out loud, he's going to get rich from this material, which I'm like, how do you own it?

She's the one filming it.

Right.

Way to like.

Is she under contract?

Yeah.

I mean, it's a little, it reminds, it's a little, I mean, but it reminds me a little bit of an issue I had in Nope when they were like, all we need is a picture of that thing, and we'll be, we'll be millionaires.

And I'm like, who's going to pay you them?

I don't understand.

But

I don't think that's a problem with the script.

I would argue that's a problem with their thinking.

No, no.

I still feel like it fits within that world.

I'm like here.

I'm just saying Illumina, Nope, basically the same movie.

Anyway, continue.

yeah,

he's just as good.

Um, okay, so they burst into a room and they find Tatiana strapped to a table being uh over like overlooked by some kind of alien creature who they immediately blast.

And then another alien shows up, they blast that alien, they know how to use those guns with no training again.

They are amazing.

I couldn't even close the gate at your bar two nights ago, Stuart.

I was like, nobody showed me how to do this.

Gotta call you at 6 a.m.

Yeah,

that's true.

I'll give the, let's say that the, let's say that Alex, during what it turns out was his, the abductions he was dreaming about, maybe they trained him in the use of this alien weaponry at some point.

Because we realize at this point, now reunited with Tatiana, that Alex has had the same dreams because he also was being abducted.

And that's where they met, and that's why they have such a deep and abiding love for him.

Clearly a strong connection.

She's his sincey girl.

That's why they have such a strong connection.

That's why Delilah will never be able to interrupt that connection, which is perfect because she falls off a railing and aliens drag her.

I felt so bad for this character who got roped into this dumbass alien hunt and then dies.

And doesn't get a woman ever, right?

She's just trying to stand by her man, you know what I mean?

And then all of a sudden we see her spinal column.

Yeah, that's true.

She should have been blonder.

So, Scentsy, Scentsy, so I guess if that's the LinkedIn, LinkedIn, it's like special, extraterrestrial, neurological,

super.

Yep.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yep.

You got it.

Oh, wait.

Can I give the George exposition?

I wrote this fully out.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So it says, there's a blip where you see them covered in goo

holding hands, and then it cuts back, and George says, it all makes sense.

Both of y'all are connected to each other.

That's how you were miraculously able to find her.

Both you guys having nightmares about the same place.

It all adds up.

It does all add up,

it does all add up.

They're like, we need a line of dialogue that gets across how this all adds up.

I was saying it split it with Tatiana, who then says, because you were also abducted by aliens.

Yeah, because when we first started seeing them covered in goop, I'm like, wait a minute, did I miss something?

And no, I guess we all missed something.

We missed the signs were there all along.

Yeah, I missed Delilah.

Yep.

Delilah, unfortunately, gets her spine ripped out.

Well, she shouldn't have wished that another girl would disappear.

Yeah, so zero style, right?

I think so, yeah.

Yeah, that's some haze code stuff.

Meaning, like, if you wish another girl's going to disappear, you will have your spinal column exposed.

That's the rule.

Okay, so they run through the base.

Yep.

They're being pursued by yellow aliens.

The aliens they shoot, are they the same kinds of aliens as the aliens that are chasing them?

I couldn't tell if it was, if they were the same or different, because the ones that are chasing them are very clearly like they look like kind of like the xenomorph.

A little bit.

Kind of like venoms.

Yeah, like venoms.

Exactly.

They've got long tongues and stuff.

But the ones that they shoot, I thought that they looked a little different.

And I could buy it if there's the scientist aliens and they're enforcer

aliens.

But from that point on, all we see are the venom xenomorph types, which, again, I don't see them as being the kind that can build a spaceship.

They don't even have clothes.

But they're like spinning triangles in their hand.

You know, like there's a shot of of this huge alien.

It seemed, I don't know, maybe the proportions were just off, but it seemed enormous, this alien, just sort of like levitating something in its palm.

And I was like, why does that guy need a Land Rover if he can do that?

Can't he just

sort of get there?

Elliot, is it more advanced to have clothes?

Come on, let's all get naked right now.

Just do it, guys.

I knew I was here for.

So we got, so they, they run through the base, they find a room that like a decontamination chamber that has a bunch of like spacesuits that all fit them perfectly.

They put those spacesuits on, and then I think they like

teleport to another room.

Yeah,

I don't, I can't remember all the mechanics.

Then they walk outside, and they're on, it seems like they're on some kind of alien desert planet.

Yeah, they do.

They're on another planet.

It doesn't look that different from the Moroccan desert that they were just in, but they are clearly talking about it as a different planet.

And George is like, low oxygen.

Don't take your helmets off.

And then they run and they're being pursued.

And I think they go into another alien base that's on this planet.

And then they're going to be able to get it.

That just sounds like you're describing a video game level, too.

I mean, it's all just a bunch of action that doesn't really add up to it.

And then George gets shot and he falls down and he bleeds a lot.

And they're like, we're all going to die here.

And then they keep running.

And then somehow Patricia like breaks her leg and then an alien breaks her neck.

And I'm like, oh, that's unwarranted.

And then

that seems like

an unnecessary and also mean way for the alien to kill her, to then to snap her neck.

Seems like, what is this?

Come on, what's going on?

And then Tatiana and Alex end up in the desert surrounded by evil aliens.

And then what they like explode or something?

There's also like a, there's like a, there's like a chase.

They have like a Humvee chase.

They have a Humvee chase.

Oh, yeah, that looks like it.

Which is hinted at in the first moment of the film, right?

We finally get the resolution of what the scene is about with the little dinosaur lizard guy.

Oh, that's right.

In the very opening of the movie, we're on that alien planet and we see someone drive up in a little car and there's like he finds a broken phone and they're

surrounded and they take their masks off to kiss, even though it's a low oxygen planet and they kiss.

And then like

they, it's sort of unclear what happens whether the very end is like just like a fantasy happy ending, like they're like, they appear to be back on earth kissing together.

Oh, yeah.

That could be like them,

you know, fantasy dying moments, or maybe they get zapped back to earth somehow in that moment.

Like, it's, it's unclear.

I thought they got zapped back to earth, you know, because she's been abducted a ton, which for somebody who's been abducted a ton, that girl's got a lot of quid in her.

You know what I mean?

She's very much, I'm peacing out.

This hurts.

Take off your helmet so I can stroke your face.

And then she's like, Where's the beard?

I'm missing the giant beard I heard.

You would look good with a beard.

Have you ever thought about that?

So then the Aggie just talked about it.

You're right.

They are in Malibu at the end.

I've forgotten.

Doesn't she have like a big, dumb hat on or something?

Yeah.

That's how you know it's Malibu.

And I mean, like, either way, I can't decide which ending annoys me more.

Whether like these two bland lovers survive having killed their friends who were dumb enough to follow them on this adventure

or everyone dies and the movie has even less of a point than it already has.

Well, Dan, did you watch a mid-credit scene or not?

Speaking of points.

No, I did see the mid-credit scene.

I don't know whether Stuart did.

So first off, before we get to a mid-credit scene, which of course I did not watch,

there is a, after this final moment in Malibu, we cut to text on the screen.

Oh, this is the best.

This was, this is, maybe, this is my favorite moment.

This is the moment that we went, no, what?

I said that out loud.

You made me so happy.

Text on the screen explaining the phenomena of alien abductions and how there's been so many, but so many go unreported because of the potential stigma.

But it gives the statistic that it is estimated that one out of every 200 people has been abducted by aliens.

One out of every 200?

That is bonkers.

That means that many people you know have been abducted by aliens.

Many aliens listening to this podcast podcast have been abducted by aliens.

I was like, that is an obscenely low number

for that group.

Like one, if it was like one out of every million people, I'd be like, even that seems like a pretty prevalent alien abductions.

But what out of every 200?

Are they abducting people constantly?

What's going on?

Come on.

Yeah, they said 1.6 million in 2022.

Yeah.

That is more people than are

like erased on that show, the leftovers.

Yeah.

At that point, you're getting into the kind of thinking that was in like the 80s satanic panic, where they were like, oh, yeah, yeah, all these preschools all across America are drugging kids and then flying them around the world so they can participate in sacrifices and then bringing them back so that they can be picked up at the end of the day by their parents.

They're just flying them around?

That was the idea.

That's bomb.

That was the idea.

Yeah.

They were traveling in the middle of the day.

They're traveling them.

But it's a one out of every 200.

I was like, I was, if it's, and I started feeling bad because I was like, if it's one out of every 200 and I didn't get abducted, I feel left out.

Like, I feel like they're just

not choosing me.

Yeah.

They just didn't lie.

I have a bad hang for aliens.

Hell yeah.

Can you explain this mid-credits sequence, though?

Yeah, I didn't see this.

That's what happened.

So, by the way, the credits are very much like somebody took like a Canva credits program and just were like, hit play, insert some names.

Like, all the images they show are not of characters from the movie or of things that happened in the movie.

No, well, speaking of not characters in the movie and not things that happened, the mid-credits scene is less, it's more of a mid-credits joke than a scene where there's a couple guys and an alien sitting in like kind of armchairs

and Eric Roberts.

And they're sitting there and was it Eric Roberts or just someone in Eric Roberts' words?

No, it was Eric Roberts.

No, it was Eric Roberts.

Okay.

And some Timu stormtroopers.

Yeah.

Well, and an alien.

They could afford more Eric Roberts.

Well, that's what I said because this scene was shot in the daytime and the rest of Eric Roberts stuff, it's all shot at night.

But

they're sitting around like a grill and they're mainly just kind of hanging out.

And then at one point, someone goes, who who invited the alien?

And that's the end of it.

And I was like, I don't, I don't know what I'm supposed to be getting from this.

Like, it's supposed to be fun or funny, but I did.

It just, it felt like it so clashed with everything else the movie seemed to be trying to do, you know?

Before we get on to final judgments, I do want to, as teased before, so this is a special report from Alex Gooder of Hollywood Entertainment, who Hollywood Entertainment put together the Clifford reunion we saw at BAM and mentioned in the past.

He was in town recently with some other weird

Are you is the

permission to name him as your source?

Yes, he did.

I had some,

I hadn't met him before, but he was very nice.

I had some drinks with him afterwards.

He was talking about like, oh,

he's like, there's this movie you should do.

And he started describing like, that's the next movie we're literally doing.

But

he had some information that I'm going to bullet point for time.

But so he encountered this.

He heard from a theater manager friend about this nutty Eric Roberts movie.

And the director and the director's producer/slash mother had been emailing the theater with criticism about how it was being promoted and like nitpicking things like there were photos of like where the posters were being displayed and stuff like that.

And the filmmakers had started sending folks to the theater to monitor whether or not the tickets sold corresponded to the number of people in the theater

because

apparently they thought that their box office should have been higher and there's more interest for this out there because this trailer had gone viral on TikTok and they didn't understand how that hadn't converted to butts and seats.

And

Alex says that when he went to see the movie, he said two for Illumina and the ticket seller was like, what?

It was taken aback.

And Alex said, oh, is it sold out?

the ticket taker laughed and got serious and said, wait, are you here with the company?

Because they'd been sending people to monitor how many people were in there uh because they're like they got to be ripping us off which is the the what is going on with that uh aforementioned lawsuit um and apparently this uh the screening they saw started with the electronic press kit being shown um and during that time uh they were the only two people in the theater during that time sure enough someone came in and photographed them in the theater

awesome and awesome and the people the epk listed someone's credits he says he can't can't be sure he's remembering this correctly but thinks that the epk listed someone's credits as having received honors at their university and some other credits included actor since age four and well-known model oh bless

and uh

and afterward he monitored letter boxes and other places letterboxed and other places where people uh put up their reviews where uh the director was getting into arguments with detractors meanwhile mysterious uh similar sounding positive reviews were appearing about how much better this movie was than the just released long legs and like why aren't why is there so much focus on long legs

i didn't love long legs long legs is a billion times better

um

but anyway thank you alex for the uh report uh

he he he guaranteed to take the heat for us if uh gino mccoy sued us uh so cool i appreciate that yeah it's it there's a it seems like a fair a fair amount of.

Oh, man, are we going to have to go in front of Congress and defend our podcast?

There is no defense.

That's the thing.

I'll have to be like, Congress, I cannot defend anything about our podcast.

I apologize.

It certainly seems like a movie that

they paid someone to plant good things about.

in places or maybe they're doing their own because

when you look it up online there's two different types of articles articles about it.

There are reviews which are bad, and then there are articles about like this cult classic, this international new cult classic that it's a mind-bending story.

And it's like, all right, well, this feels like it's straight out of a publicity kit, you know, a press kit or something like that.

But I guess there's the lawsuit involves that it was shown on a lot fewer screens than they thought it should be.

But I got to say, to watching this movie, I'm like, that this was shown in any movie theater screens,

they've achieved what they wanted to achieve.

Like this is, everything about it screams, you you watch this on tubi because it's got a cool thumbnail image and then you're like what am i doing what why what is this thing yeah or you're a bad movie sicko like us yeah exactly um

yeah and speaking of bad movie uh sickos there's a thing we do in the flop house which is called the final judgments where we say is this a good bad movie a bad bad movie or a movie we kind of liked

i don't i honestly don't know where you guys are going to go with this i'm going to say like for me a good oh great movie

for me

good movie.

Watching with my family tonight.

This is definitely, definitely a fun one to talk about.

I found the energy level of this movie to be way too low for me to think it was a good, bad movie, at least watching it alone.

It's soporific.

It's for a lot of this movie.

Yeah.

Like Eric Roberts definitely brings the energy this movie should have, but doesn't for most of the times.

So I personally am going to go ahead and say bad, bad, even though it is a fun one to discuss.

Stuart, why don't you?

Yeah, I mean, I would say this verges on what I would call a good, bad movie and what we call a good, bad movie here at the Flophouse.

Thanks for that.

It's clearly a bad movie that is.

I feel like this is.

I don't, I feel like there's been some conversation about whether or not this is kind of like in the vein of something like The Room.

And I don't think it's quite as silly.

And it also, the runtime is too long.

But it is very silly and weird.

And

despite having some fun moments,

this is a bad movie.

I can't imagine there's an argument about like that people are actually discussing whether this is a good movie, but it's a question of whether or not is this bad enough to be a classic bad movie?

Yes, I agree.

To me, it's a bad, bad movie because

it's just very slow.

And I found it very dull and very, like, I got very sleepy while watching it.

Like, it was a very, whereas your classic, the roomses or burdemics, I feel like, are a constant parade of surprises and things where you're like, what is this?

Why are they doing this?

Wait a minute.

What?

And there's an energy to it.

And yeah, it's just such a low energy movie and like more fun to talk about than it is to watch.

But maybe it'd be more fun to watch with other people than to watch it as I did by myself.

So I don't know.

What do you think, Ashley?

Yeah, I felt, I think I'm going to actually come down on good, bad movie.

And I think when it's not...

The problem was actually with how it was marketed to me.

If I had gone in completely blind instead of thinking that this was about

gone in completely blind, but I would have had Gino McCoy's music pure and unfiltered.

That's true.

It's just that feeling.

I mean, it's all vibes, but I

was so sold on the underground military base that doesn't show up until the last 20 minutes of the film.

If I had sort of ascertained from the opening scenes that this was sort of a low-energy St.

Elmo's fire for 2024

where

St.

Elmo's crackling ember.

It's not quite a fire.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

St.

Elmo's low radiator heat.

That I think I would have been able to get behind it a little more.

I watched it with my husband and we did have fun talking about it.

I also think that for all the low energy, some of these actors are working really hard to try to establish things that are not on the page.

And there are moments where I can see

that they're trying to build camaraderie and relationships.

And so, I just want to shout out to those actors because I have been in a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes movie before.

Wow, Inside Man, the Spike Lee movie?

Absolutely fucking not.

We're going to fist fight,

No, I love that movie.

Pause this.

Pause this.

No, a movie called An Invisible Sign starring Jessica Alba as a math teacher.

Oh, shit.

That sounds like a feature of Wildhouse movie.

I mean, I would love it.

There are some also really great performances in that.

But yeah, I'm going to go with Good, Bad.

Okay.

It's a little slow.

It's a lot slow.

Shared with the bad.

Yeah.

But I

was entertained even if I said, wait, what?

And rewound a lot.

Classic phrase.

I mean, sometimes that sometimes that's the best sign in a movie like this is when you have to rewind and go like, what was that?

What?

But other times it's like, I don't understand what just happened.

So

I'm like, damn, what's that song?

Rewind it.

I want to grab the ox cable.

I want to hear that song.

I got to hear that song.

I got to hear that Scentsy girl song again.

Shout out to that elevator song that Gino McCoy has where he's where the guy hits the button.

It's one of the most dramatic moments in the movie.

Alex reaches out and hits the button.

It's so close to some classical music that I did Shazam it to see if they had spent all their money on some orchestration.

But nope, Gina McCoy's a little bit.

Yeah.

Musical chameleon.

You know, we've been doing my brother, my brother, me for 15 years.

And

maybe you stopped listening for a while.

Maybe you never listened.

And you're probably assuming three white guys talking for 15 years, I know where this has ended up.

But no, no, you would be wrong.

We're as shocked as you are that we have not fallen into some sort of horrific scandal or just turned into a big crypto thing.

Yeah, you don't even really know how crypto works.

The only NFTs I'm into are naughty, funny things, which is what we talk about on my brother, my brother, and me.

We serve it up every Monday for you if you're listening.

And if not, we just leave it out back and goes rotten.

So check it out on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcast.

All right, we're over 70 episodes into our show.

Let's learn everything.

So, let's do a quick progress check.

Have we learned about quantum physics?

Yes, episode 59.

We haven't learned about the history of gossip yet, have we?

Yes, we have.

Same episode, actually.

Have we talked to Tom Scott about his love of roller coasters?

Episode 64.

So, how close are we to learning everything?

Bad news.

We still haven't learned everything yet.

Oh, we're ruined!

No, no, no, it's good news as well.

There is still a lot to learn.

Woo!

I'm Dr.

Ella Hubber.

I'm regular Tom London.

I'm Caroline Roper, and on Let's Learn Everything, we learn about science and a bit of everything else too.

And although we haven't learned everything yet, I've got a pretty good feeling about this next episode.

Join us every other Thursday on Maximum Fun.

This podcast is sponsored in part by Squarespace.

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or domain.

And now some flop house specific plugs.

If you live in the Chicago area.

We have added a late show after our first November show sold out.

We're going to be talking about canine starring a slobbering, good-natured animal and also a dog.

The show is at Sleeping Village on November 16 at 9.30 p.m.

Go to sleeping-village.com for tickets to that.

Also, the flop TV system system, the Flop TV season rather, has already begun.

But it is not too late to get tickets because all episodes will be available on demand for ticket holders for the entirety of our FTV season, which lasts through February of 2026.

The first Saturday of every month, we're doing a streaming show.

That's what Flop TV is: a streaming show covering significant critical and/or commercial flops decade by decade, starting in the 2000s and going all the way back to Plan 9 from outer space in the 1950s.

There's presentations, silly pre-tapes, a live chat, all sorts of fun.

And you can get individual tickets for seven bucks or a price break by getting a season pass to six shows for $35,

plus, you know, ticketing fees because unfortunately, we aren't set up to handle that stuff ourselves.

So if you're interested, go to theflophouse.simpletics.com.

That is T-I-X for ticks.

There are tickets and more info about the season at theflophouse.simpletics.com.

And because we haven't mentioned this in a while, if you go to flophousepodcast.com, you can subscribe to our newsletter, Flop Secrets, where you can get the scoop on what we're up to as a group, individually, as well as some additional writing from me, Dan.

Sometimes we'll answer more letters there, stuff that we can't get to on the show.

I'll post behind the scenes stuff.

It's just a good way to keep in touch.

And we only send it twice a month.

So hopefully no one gets bored.

Let's answer some questions

from listeners, letters from listeners.

Wait, are they letters or questions, Dan?

I'm confused.

Well,

usually we call this letters from listeners, and I just sort of forgot what we do on the show, even though it's been nearly two decades.

I do love that.

Something I think our listeners appreciate is no matter how many years we do this, a refusal to take things things for granted and fall into habits that would help us to get through the show and remember what's going to happen next and what we do.

Yeah.

We treat every show like it's our first.

That's beautiful.

This first one is from Michael Last Name Withheld, who writes, dear Flophouse, one of my greater concerns about the dangers of AI isn't so much about professional artists getting pushed out, but that amateur artists may just decide to use AI slop instead of dealing with the frustration of developing their skills and working through being bad at art in order to become good at it, and that's a shame because I like a lot of amateur art and seeing newer artists develop, even if their work isn't as good as they want it to be.

So, my question for you is: what are some things that you like about newer artists still figuring things out?

That's from Michael, last name withheld.

And

in the case of movies, like one of the things I like,

and it's not necessarily like these are bad artists, these are often like

very good artists, but the early work is filled with so much show-offiness almost because they don't know whether they're going to make another movie.

So they're like every idea they've had, they stick it in there, whether or not it is necessarily like of a piece with what they're trying to do.

And maybe later works are more, you know, quote, mature, but there's so much energy in a lot of early movies.

And that's something I appreciate.

And I also just want to say, like, I really appreciate the

general premise of this letter because I do feel like you have to be bad before you're good.

You have to embrace being bad before you're good.

Like, that's one of the most important things to do is

know that that's just part of the process.

You're working through a lot of bad stuff to get to the good.

And I hope that people out there take that to heart.

Yeah, I mean, the Flop House podcast has always been kind of perfect, and we've never had any slip-em-ups.

Never.

We've never had any growing pains.

That's another way of saying that we have not developed at all over the past 17, 18 years.

Well, emotionally, yeah.

We have changed.

There's a lot of stuff I would change.

Yeah, I mean, like, I love amateur art.

Usually, it's short films that you can find on a website called Pornhub.

And I mainly like it when you can see something in the background, like a cat.

Or there's one where, like, you could see like

through the like window to the porch, you could see a grill.

And in the comment section, some guy was like, Actually, that's that type of grill you should probably put in a garage or something because it can't really handle being out exposed to the elements.

It is so funny.

I love it.

I love the comment section on porn videos because it's either like people are asking for Minecraft, kind of helpful or like unrelated, or it is like stuff you would never want to know, like the exact time code at which someone achieved orgasm.

Right.

Here's the money shot.

Also, dude, have you checked your thyroid?

It looks a little like you might have this condition.

Yeah, the exact time code.

You don't record the exact time code, you bust in case you accidentally have a child, and then you're going to want to tell them exactly the moment you created them.

Diary of such things.

You need to know that information so you can label the ejaculate when you put it in your archive.

We took a weird turn.

Oh, yeah, that's yeah.

Whose fault was that?

Right.

Yours, Stuart.

But I will say, there is something very exciting about seeing someone who clearly has talent, but maybe hasn't yet gotten so comfortable with their skill that they're taking it for granted or they're not excited by it anymore.

That they are often an artist's early work is where they are trying out their ideas that are new to them, or at the very least, they are imitating old ideas in a way that is bringing their own flair to it.

So there's something really exciting in seeing an artist develop and seeing them the energy and excitement of someone recognizing that they're becoming their own self, you know, before that self becomes,

you know, stuck, static, you know, you know, just becomes what it is.

Certainly sometimes when you're seeing somebody's, somebody whose enthusiasm might outpace their skill set.

Yeah, or even, or just that their enthusiasm, like there's a type of, it doesn't happen to all creative professionals, but a lot of creative professionals,

there is that excitement of like, I'm doing this thing, like this thing that I want to do, I'm doing, before it becomes a job or something that they can take for granted.

Oh, of course I do this thing.

This is what I do.

You know, this is the craft that I, that I've made my life.

That is the thing of like, I'm so excited that I'm, I'm doing this craft that I've, that I've wanted to do.

And there's an energy to that that is really exciting.

It's the kind of thing that like, um, there's a lot of,

you know, when you're listening to punk bands, like the early stuff a band puts out where it's like, they're not as good as their instruments, but they're so excited about doing what they're doing, you know, it hasn't yet become a thing that they not take for granted in a bad way, like, ugh, this again, but take for granted as in like that thrill of we might not do this ever again, right?

Has gone away.

Yeah, like we may never be asked to do this,

you know, there's a correlation.

There's this Ira Glass thing that he said a long time ago about how people's taste,

like you have a ta, like artists have a taste level, but they're not gonna hit that taste level for a while.

But your taste, your work is not as good as your taste when you're starting out and enduring through that discomfort of you liking things that are better than what you can make is part of what the journey for the work is.

I think it's really exciting.

I love working with first-time filmmakers.

I think that there is, they've got all of these, the Harper Lee to kill a mockingbird of it all, where it's like they've been germinating this idea for a really long time and they're really excited to get it

out there, but they're also deeply collaborative.

And some, well, some of them are deeply collaborative, but there's also the sense that

anything can be a horse.

You know what I mean?

You're sort of like cobbling together

the often the low-budget circumstances of the movie you're trying to make with the idea that you've had in your head for 15 years.

And I really love how that works because they're not, you know, most of these films,

low-budget first-time filmmaker indies, are not getting sound stages where they're building sets, right?

Like they're borrowing a chicken restaurant that they worked in and they're

filming there.

A movie I did compliance with Craig Zobel, like his second film.

We literally worked in a chicken restaurant overnight, all overnights,

two weeks of overnights, right?

Because they would shut down the KFC, we would come in and change the signage, and then we would shoot until 6 a.m.

Did you change it to Popeyes?

Yeah, exactly.

To

Bojangles, actually.

Yeah.

I love this rolling reveal of movies that I've seen you in unawares in the past.

See, now Dan, you'll see it.

I'm ruining people's suspension of disbelief left, right, and center.

It's really like the non-rolling reveal of Dan having not done research.

Sure.

I know some of it.

I knew

old of age and black clansman.

Dan, I'm just giving you the kind of roast that you're going to be giving to people when they pay you for it for their kink.

Yeah.

Let's do one more letter here.

This is from Anne-Marie, last name withheld, who writes, My husband and I were recently watching a mystery show which prominently featured a woman being pregnant as a plot point, evidenced by her vomiting an earshot of a witness.

I know

in movies and TVs, a woman vomits.

They must be pregnant.

Yeah.

I was ready to be pregnant.

Unless they're vomiting a tiny spot of blood into a handkerchief, in which case they have consumption.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Is that vomit?

I was ready to be.

It's a real nurse holiday.

I was ready to be angry on Stewart's behalf at the laziness of this trope until the end of the episode, which featured a twist where it turned out that she wasn't pregnant at all.

She'd just gotten such horrific and disgusting personal news, she could only react by throwing up.

That's have.

you ever had a movie or TV show subvert a trope you hated into something much more interesting.

Love Anne-Marie.

Like, I know that

better answers out there but for some reason what's coming into my head is like a movie that's all about supporting a trope uh when I first saw my best friend's wedding I really appreciated

that it was not a movie that like cavalierly had a hero ruining a wedding and we're all supposed to root for them like over the course of the movie You're like, oh, okay.

No, no, this is not good behavior that's going on.

And by casting America's sweetheart in that role, that's true.

I think the first one that comes to mind is the,

I, I think the original might be in there as well, but in the Gora Vrubinsky The Ring, the moment where the character has worked so hard to try and appease this ghost, and

this is a spoiler, but her son is like, why did you help her?

Like, I love that reaction where he's like, why did you do that, mom?

It's so funny.

I think for me, it's a whole subset of

the

Kathy Bates has actually made this the latter part of her career, which is the middle-aged invisible woman

being utilized in a way that's really spectacular.

We first see it in Six Feet Under, where Kathy Bates's character shoplifts,

and they ask her why.

And she's like, because I realized that middle-aged fat women are invisible.

And so I just started deciding to do some shit.

You know, I'm gonna pull some shenanigans, and she goes through, and then they make Matlock, the revamp of Matlock, all about that, this idea.

But it's it

hearkens to the 60s, 70s Ruth Gordon old lady shenanigans where she can get away with whatever because she's an old lady, yeah, right, exactly.

And then she like raps, and you're like, okay, hello.

Yeah, she raps about Rosemary's baby,

And it would go something like, Elliot, no, don't encourage this.

With who did she lie?

Just look at those eyes, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I knew he'd

do it.

My name is Satan, and I'm here to say.

Let me tell you about a couple that got a new place.

Suddenly, there's devil all up in her face.

He's in her face.

That's why.

Oh, my God.

You're ruining all of this.

This is going to help his acting career, but you got to ask, hey, what you doing over here?

Okay.

Okay, so that was letters.

I just want to touch on real quick.

A couple episodes ago, we were talking about summer movie memories, and I asked you all to chime in in the comments on the Instagram post.

Some actual follow-up on that.

Actual follow-up.

I'm pretty professional.

So I'm just going to, we had a ton of great responses, but I just want to share two of my favorites.

I'll share them with you now.

The first is from Kate Kleinworth, and her memory is that my mom used to drop me and my little sister off at movie matinees during the summer, giving us each a $5 bill for tickets and a snack.

Once, she accidentally gave us $20 by mistake to go see the Rocketeer.

This was like...

This was like a million dollars in today's money.

My sister and I stared at the money, at each other, and then ran to concessions.

We bought junior mints.

We bought those giant Reese's cups.

We bought popcorn, we got Coke, we got Sprite.

We spent every single penny.

It was the best time ever at the movies, something my sister and I both looked back on fondly.

To this day, neither of us remember a single thing about the Rocketeer.

And I'm like, that's your loss.

That's your loss.

But I'm like, that totally makes sense.

Also, when I was a kid, if I was given $20, I'm like,

there is not even going to be a single penny left.

I'm going to spend every single thing, which is something my father still complains about.

So I think that's lovely.

That is a great movie memory.

And snacks, snacks, snacks.

Okay, here's another good one.

This is from Schmunk241.

When I was about 12 or 13, I went to the cinema.

So that's a clue.

We got a UK listener on our hands.

You're not a pretentious person.

I went to the cinema to see the Scorpion King.

Maybe not so pretentious.

You know what?

Let's go back to UK on this one.

I was not a discerning viewer at the time.

I'd read it about it in Empire Magazine.

Okay, well, hold on a second.

That's another dim off.

I was not a discerning viewer at the time, but even jumped on a double-decker bus to get there.

Okay, that's another clue.

Sherlock Dan, you know, on this one?

I don't know.

Were there crumpets for sale?

Does he say which side of the road it was on?

Yeah.

Being a Londoner.

Okay, no clue there.

I was not a discerning viewer at the time, but even I hated it.

Cut to a week later, and my mate tells me he's

all right.

another clue.

How is this going to help us find Tatiana?

And my mate tells me he snuck into a Resident Evil showing and asked if I wanted to go see it too.

My first R-rated movie?

I was excited and maybe a little scared, but I said yes.

So we're in the theater, we buy a couple of tickets to a showing of some random movie called The Scorpion King, and we're ready to go.

We sit down outside, just waiting for our moment to sneak in, which passes, and we proceed to to chicken out, which is how I ended up seeing the Scorpion King twice in theaters, like a true scorpion.

Those were lovely.

Thank you so much.

Uh, yeah, uh, so finally on the flop house, we like to, you know, not wallow in negativity.

We like to recommend a few too long, you know, we wallowed in it for a while for the lion's share of the podcast, some would say.

But uh, let's recommend some Dan, we got it, we got to stop giving the lions such a big share of the podcast.

I'm scared of it.

I know you're scared of it.

He could tank our careers.

Movie is.

He's the MGM Lion.

He knows a lot of people in this town.

We've seen and would recommend, perhaps in opposition to many of the films we watch for

the podcast.

I would like to recommend, I saw Deep Cover.

Hell yeah.

It was going off.

Deep Cover Spray.

It's going off the Criterion channel.

I'm like, I got to see it while I can.

The opening credits of that movie are so fucking hard as hell, man.

That movie rocks.

It's from 92, directed by Bill Duke.

It stars Lawrence Fishburne and, of course, Jeff Goldblum as a sleazy lawyer.

Both of them kind of at like the height of their movie star powers in that movie, I think.

It's got a lot of crime thriller

thrills, but it's also a very kind of more thoughtful movie about

the drug war and about it doesn't it does exalt cops.

It

shows them to be part of the same

system that causes a lot of pain.

And it was, yeah, it's a beautiful-looking movie.

It's so beautifully shot.

And all this from a guy whose head got blasted apart by Predator and Predator, Bill Duke.

He really came back from the head being blasted apart by the Predator and Predator.

Stuart, do you want to go?

I'm going to recommend a movie I saw a little while ago from a year or two ago called The Order.

This is a movie based on a true story about a, I believe, FBI

involvement in the 70s where they're cracking down on a white supremacist organization that funds their operation by robbing banks.

The movie stars Jude Law and like...

kind of amazing like rundown grizzled dirtbag Jude Law and I kind of love it.

It's totally working for me.

Mustache, two thumbs up.

And

he is opposed by the leader of the white supremacist organization is played by Nicholas Holt, who is really like trading on those like those like babyface, innocent like looks to be this like, you know,

evil jerk.

It's really good if you're looking for just kind of like a small,

like a small, super tense little thriller.

Elliot, would you like to...

Oh, sure.

I was Travis' going to get it going next year.

Iceland's going next.

I'll recommend a movie that...

So we watched Lumina on Tubi, and I was like, I want to watch another movie that's not Lumina, but I'm still on Tubi.

Oh, wait a minute.

This movie I wanted to see is on here.

What's this movie?

It's the one we've all been waiting for.

That's right.

Heroic Times.

This is a Hungarian animated movie from 1984 that is

an adaptation of a 19th century epic about a medieval knight in Hungary in the 14th century.

And it is so beautifully animated.

It looks so gorgeous.

It's like watching paintings moving.

And it's all about, it's a, being an Eastern European movie, it cannot just be about a hero of medieval times.

It has to be about how this guy becomes a knight and then destroys his life and becomes disillusioned with the very idea of nobility and

serving the king.

It's a short movie.

It's like a little bit less than an hour and a half.

It looks gorgeous.

I think it's really good.

It's called Heroic Times.

Now, before Ashley goes,

I checked the letterbox list where you can find all all of our recommendations just to confirm that Stuart has recommended the order before.

So I'm going to assume that your recommendation for this week will be It's a Live 3 Island of the Alive, which we saw together.

Oh, yeah.

I'll also recommend It's Alive 3 Island of the Alive.

Michael Moriarty gives possibly the most unhinged performance I've ever seen on screen.

And you know what, monster babies?

You got to see them.

They freak me out.

Yeah.

That's the one where it's implied

that the monster babies are having monster babies, right?

It's more than implied.

I guess they are just having monster babies.

Pretty much text believe.

I think it says it on the poster.

We blessedly do not see monster babies

copulating with one another.

Speak for yourself, Dan.

Anyway, I

paid for my ticket.

I'm going to see it.

I'm happy.

Do you have anything to recommend?

I have.

For sure, I do.

I hope you guys haven't recommended this before.

I mean, if you have, you have great taste.

I think I would, with my one shot at this, because I can't imagine ever coming back.

Oh, wow, okay,

wow, no, wow.

Oh, I assume because I would not be invited, you know.

So

the way I got naked at the prompt and ran around and stuff, I figured.

Yeah, we cut out a lot.

Alex cut out a lot, a lot of stuff that was going on.

Yeah,

I've got to recommend We Are the Best.

It's We Are the Best Exclamation Point, Swedish film by Lucas Moody Sen in 2013, which is about a group of pre-teen girls in the 80s who form a punk band, mostly

to

talk about their burgeoning feelings and their frustrations, but also to piss off the metal guys that are taking over the Rec Center's one rehearsal room.

It's great.

It's really motivational, irreverent,

really

inspiring.

And I don't love using that word because I think it's been hallmarked a lot and Lifetime Movie a lot, but it really is.

Like these kids are so punk rock.

They get there, they meet a girl who's the only one that can play her real instrument and is also from a fundamentalist Christian family, which scans to me.

And they're like, well, we can't play shit, but we're going to shave your head and let's all go.

And it's delightful it's small it's fun it's sweet it's tough it's coming of age uh mira barkson who plays the main uh lead singer of this group and sort of the kathleen hanna

uh driver of this band uh is fantastic.

I've seen her in nothing else.

I actually did not know a single actor in this cast, but they're all pretty great.

And I just love it.

It makes me happy.

Makes me want to go blow shit up.

That's like five recommendations.

Yeah.

We did great, guys.

Yeah.

We went above and regret it.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for being here.

Before we sign off, is there anything you want to plug at all?

Oh, me.

I was like, Elliot, do you have something you want to plug?

Elliot always has stuff to plug.

I got plenty to plug, so you can plug your own stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, great.

I've got a movie coming out called The Lost Bus.

It is

directed by Paul Greengrass.

It was very cool to work with Paul Greengrass.

It's a movie about the 2018 campfire fire, which was the deadliest wildfire in California history.

And it stars Matthew McConaughey, America Ferreira, Yule Vasquez, and myself.

Matthew McConaughey plays a true person named Kevin McKay, who was a school bus driver, who had not been working as a bus driver very long, who is prevailed upon to rescue 22 kids whose parents worked too far outside of the evacuation zone during the Paradise Wildfires.

And then he battles his way through fire with America Ferreira for hours and hours and hours and hours.

Now, I haven't seen the poster, but here's my suggestion.

You take a bus and put it on a rock or something.

Right on the top of the mountain.

Yeah.

Balancing.

Yeah, balancing, yeah.

I think that captures the tone you're probably looking for.

Actually, they did make a fake post.

The letterbox for it was very funny for a while because somebody did make a poster in advance of the actual poster, which was a very cartoon bus with sort of superimposed Matthew McConaughey and America Ferreira heads on it.

It's pretty spectacular.

And I don't know if there's been another trailer, but the trailer I did see, I think you're the only voice we hear.

Yeah, that's cool.

It's visible, which is how I prefer.

I prefer it.

I'd rather not be perceived visually in my trailers.

That's a challenge for an actor, but I appreciate that.

I consider my limitations as freeing.

It's very liberating.

But yeah, I've had to tell all of my relatives, you have to watch this with the sound up or you're going to be confused why I sent it to you.

That's great.

Okay, well, thank you, Ashley, and thank you to our network, Maximum Fun.

Go over to maximumfun.org and check out all the other great shows on network.

Thank you to Alex Smith, our producer.

He goes by the name Howell Daughty online, where he makes music.

He does Twitch streams.

You can find his podcast, which is very funny.

But that's it for us for the Flophouse.

I've been Dan McCoy.

I'm Stuart Wellington.

I'm Ellie Kalen.

And I'm Ashley Atkinson.

Okay, bye.

Oh, yeah, and Ashley, this isn't a clean podcast.

You can say whatever you want.

Oh, yeah.

We get raw.

Shitballs.

Shitballs and

the tip of the shitbird.

Yeah, exactly.

There's a whole other shitbird underneath.

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