Ep.#464 - The Crow (2024), with Scott Weinberg

Speaker 1 On this episode, we discuss the crow. Is it my favorite bird? No.

Speaker 1 What is your favorite bird? Yeah, you gotta know now. Uh, probably the uh, what's uh, what's the one with the big bill? What's the pelican? Yeah, I like that guy.
Oh man, he's a silly buns.

Speaker 1 Have you seen the way they die for fish? It's bonkers.

Speaker 2 They should make a movie out of that.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Bringing me back to life, carrying my soul in the little bulge of his little bill.

Speaker 1 Hey, everyone, and welcome to The Flop House. I'm Dan McCoy.
I'm Stuart Wellington.

Speaker 2 I'm Ellie Kalen. And today, we've got a special guest, Stuart.
Who is our guest that is special today for us today?

Speaker 1 We have film critic, well-known podcaster, Scott Weinberg, and friend of the pod, returning guest, Scott Weinberg.

Speaker 3 That's true. It's been a while since Artemis fell.
I'm thrilled to be back.

Speaker 1 Hi, Flop.

Speaker 1 A while since Artemis fell. Yeah, that's what America says.
Like, what's Artemis up to?

Speaker 2 America's like, oh, it's been a while since Artemis Foul when it seemed like we had no problems.

Speaker 1 You know, everything was just fine.

Speaker 2 The worst thing we had to deal with was Judy Dench saying top of the morning in a tough guy voice.

Speaker 1 Oh, and she has those like little ears, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, she's like a little, she's like a little elf or something.

Speaker 3 My niece named her son Artemis, and she's never heard of the movie. What are the odds of that?

Speaker 1 How about

Speaker 1 probably kind of high, actually?

Speaker 1 What's like the idea that more people have gone to the Water World stunt show than seen the movie Water World?

Speaker 1 Was it named after a hotel Artemis instead?

Speaker 3 No, but apparently A-R-T-E-M-I-S is the female version, but then there's a male version that's spelled with a U at the end there, Arta Muggs. And when she named him Matt, he's only two now.

Speaker 3 And when she named him Matt, I just went,

Speaker 3 what?

Speaker 3 But now we call him Artie, and it's great.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you for coming to our Name Etymology podcast,

Speaker 1 the Name House.

Speaker 1 So we're talking about the Crow.

Speaker 1 What was this, 2024? Well, what are we doing on the Flophouse, Dan? Oh, that's a good point.

Speaker 1 Thank you for prompting.

Speaker 2 This is a Crow podcast. This is the Claw House.

Speaker 2 Every week we talk about the Crow.

Speaker 1 This is a podcast where we watch a movie that was rejected by critics or audiences or both.

Speaker 1 A bad movie by

Speaker 1 the ruling of the world. Then we see what we think about it.
We talk about it.

Speaker 2 The International Criminal Court declared it a bad movie. And we say, should it be overturned on appeal? That's what we're all about.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And this is, of course, a remake of the beloved 90s, The Crow, starring Brandon Lee, who tragically died during the filming of that picture. A movie that I saw in the theaters

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 Any Disaffected Teen Boy. I loved it at the time.
I tried to revisit it recently. I'm like, well, maybe some things just stay in the past.

Speaker 1 Did you ever dress up as the crow?

Speaker 2 I was just saying, would you do all those pictures? Because, Dan, then you really got into the face paint when you were a teen.

Speaker 1 I was not that kind.

Speaker 1 I hung out with that kind of guy, but I never had the guts to go full that kind of guy myself.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 do you guys have any

Speaker 1 other than obviously we know Dan's a huge crow head, but do you guys have any

Speaker 1 relationship with

Speaker 1 the original movie, the Alex Proyas movie, or with the comic book?

Speaker 2 I'm going to admit, I have actually never seen the original movie and I've never read the original Mike, is it Mike Barr comic?

Speaker 1 James O'Barr.

Speaker 2 James O'Bar. I get him mixed up with Mike W.
Barr is a different comic boy, the James O'Bar comic. And that the

Speaker 2 so I'm I know of the general premise of the crow and the general look of the crow, but I was coming into this naked as a baby, you know, no, no preconceived notions. Top yellow rocks.

Speaker 1 You didn't like crush that fucking, like that soundtrack was a banger.

Speaker 1 It's like a, it was a staple of 90 soundtracks. And I think it features probably the only U2 song I like.

Speaker 1 It has that great nine-inch nails cover of the Joy Division song, Dead Souls. It's just, yeah, sounds like great soundtracks.

Speaker 1 Industrial and goth classic, I would say. Yeah.

Speaker 3 What about the U2 Batman song, Stuart?

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. I like that one too.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 Yeah, apparently YouTube only works for me if they're doing

Speaker 1 Cal Cong music. Yeah, what about their Spider-Man musical?

Speaker 1 They are a very dramatic

Speaker 1 band, so maybe that's like sort of

Speaker 1 where they exist best, you know, where they can like wear their heart on their sleeve. Yeah, yeah.
Makes sense. Scott, whatever.

Speaker 1 And they all have like fucking superhero names like Bono and The Edge.

Speaker 2 The Edge, and probably other names. I can't name a single other member of the band, but probably Spider-Man.

Speaker 1 Something Mullins. Yeah, Larry Mullins.
What's Larry Mullins? I think Larry Mullins. The Edge.

Speaker 2 Moon Mullins. That's a comic name.

Speaker 1 That's true. Moon Mullins.

Speaker 2 Scott, what about you? What's your crow history or crow story?

Speaker 3 It's like Stuart said, there's two kinds of dated. There's dated, like teen sex comedies from the 80s that make you cringe.
And then there's dated where it's still a good movie, but it is of a moment.

Speaker 1 And I think the crow is that second one.

Speaker 3 You know, you watch it and it is pure 1993, 94, 95, hot topic, dark Tim Burton kind of, you know, disaffected, angsty youth.

Speaker 3 And it still works for me. I think it's a good revenge story.

Speaker 3 That's about it. I like it.

Speaker 1 And that was the time that we all, you know, we had our chips in on Alex Proyas. We're like, you know, he made this.
He made Dark City. He's going to be Dark City after this, right? A big director.

Speaker 1 I think so. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I believe so.

Speaker 1 And then, yeah, kind of, kind of biffed it a little bit.

Speaker 2 I think Dark City is not a movie you get to make without having The Crow as a success.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Right. To borrow a term, it's kind of this was his, uh, that was his blank check.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Not familiar with it.
I, uh, so yeah, I remember obviously, you know, seeing the trailer for The Crow. I was like, oh, this is going to be the best movie I've ever seen.
Went to the movie.

Speaker 1 I'm like, this is a pretty, almost the best movie I've ever seen. Went and read the comic book.
And I was actually kind of surprised at how the comic is,

Speaker 1 you know, the comic was written and drawn by James Obarr as a way to work through the loss of his fiancé

Speaker 1 because of a drunk driver car crash.

Speaker 1 And he, so like, the book is, it's much less of like an action-y superhero-y story and a lot more of just like this sad guy

Speaker 1 like thinking like thinking about his his dead uh partner um and then and occasionally going and uh performing acts of violence to these criminals in i think detroit

Speaker 1 And it's like stylish, but not like stylish, like the, it's not like all black leather and like, and strobing lights like the

Speaker 1 movie. Well, this remake is certainly,

Speaker 1 you know, it's faithful to the not being actiony and just moping around for a long time.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 1 there is a big action sequence at the end, but mostly like I was watching this. I'm like, wow, like.
The first, the crow, like, they're dead when we meet them. Like, the first scene is

Speaker 1 their crime scene being investigated, their murder scene. And this movie takes like 40 minutes for any crowiness to happen.

Speaker 2 This is a slow burn, or some would call it a crowburn of a movie. So why don't we

Speaker 2 say James Coburn of a movie.

Speaker 1 I also do want to point out this director is known for delivering kind of like glossy big budget stinkers, Snow White and the Huntsman.

Speaker 1 And also in the vein of adapting comic books that I am a fan of, I noticed that back in 2011, he did a short film of Charles Burns's Black Hole. He did.

Speaker 1 Yes, I have not watched it.

Speaker 1 I don't want to be sad about it. But my spirits were raised when the news just broke about Jane Schoenbrunn, is that the pronunciation is slated to direct

Speaker 1 a live-action black hole, which I can't think of. That's a good fit.
Yeah, that's a great fit.

Speaker 2 That's a great fit. I'll look forward to that.

Speaker 3 That's a a good thing. Stuart, I got a question for you, if you don't mind.

Speaker 3 Having read the comic book, can you tell me if this remake,

Speaker 3 any of it? Because like there's stuff in this remake that's not in the original film. And I'm thinking either they created it, like the idea that the villain is immortal.

Speaker 3 Is that from the comic book? Because it's stupid as shit, either way.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the thing is, is that the Alex Proyes movie took the original comic and added a whole bunch of extra stuff to it.

Speaker 1 And this adds an extra, an even more extra layer of superhero-y nonsense because literally, like the guys who he's getting revenge on in the comic book are like just a gang of like criminals. Right.

Speaker 1 And that's just a

Speaker 3 rotten street gang up against the guy who is back from the dead supernaturally. So it's the supernatural versus the super evil.
And like that works in the original crow.

Speaker 3 This time it really does feel like someone said, let's DC it up.

Speaker 1 I mean, I understand the impulse.

Speaker 1 I think it's wrong, but I understand the impulse of being like, well, the crow has so much not dying powers that to just put him up against like street toughs feels like, you know, he's overmatching them so much, you know.

Speaker 1 So, like, let's have a villain who can take on the crow. Right.
And they get

Speaker 1 Danny Houston to play him.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's hard to take Danny Houston seriously. I love Danny Houston, but man,

Speaker 3 he could do, as the naked gun proved, he could do this kind of villain part in his sleep. And in this movie, he kind of does.

Speaker 2 He kind of does. I mean, well, that's the thing is he is a, they're very lucky.
I think they're very lucky to have Danny Houston because he can do it so easily. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But it's true. It's not fair enough.

Speaker 2 He's not doing more than Danny Houston.

Speaker 1 It also, like, it really makes me want to see an erotic thriller starring Danny Houston. Because he can bring the fucking truth.
He's a sexual dude. He could do it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So let's go to, let's talk about the plot of this movie from the beginning.
So we mentioned this is directed by Rupert Sanders.

Speaker 2 This is his second appearance on the flop house in a movie right because he did uh ghost in the shell yeah he's only done three features and you got him twice yeah yeah

Speaker 1 the uh

Speaker 1 lucky us

Speaker 2 and the uh i remember seeing snow white and the huntsman in the theater and afterwards i was like what was that was that like what was that it was like it was one of the emptiest feeling movies i think that i had seen yeah um

Speaker 2 so let's talk about the crow 2024 version we start out With a classic opening, must be classic crow.

Speaker 2 Kid walking home, finds a wounded horse outside a trailer covered in crows, and he removes some barbed wire from the horse, which I guess scars his hands forever.

Speaker 3 Elliot, if I could interrupt real quick, this moment,

Speaker 3 this moment inspired me to just keep a list of adjectives that this movie is as I ran through it. And the first one I wrote, capital M, miserable.

Speaker 1 What a horrible opening. It's

Speaker 1 a huge horse. Some of that save the horse moment, but it doesn't.
It dies, right?

Speaker 2 It does save the horse. The horse dies.
And also, this is, and it's this. I'm like, okay, I guess this is going to be like the traumatic memory that he's, this is traumatic origin.

Speaker 2 It doesn't, he does, he stops thinking about it pretty quickly. Um, so he's, but he's his adult self is tossing and turning in bed.

Speaker 1 And do you think there was a moment where they're like, hey, can we lose the horse part in the beginning? They're like, I don't know. At one point, he has scars on his hands.

Speaker 1 Will the audience understand what's going on? We really need to do that. There's a motivation for him being sad.

Speaker 2 Well, if he couldn't save a horse once, that'll do it.

Speaker 2 He's, he, and he in voiceover, over

Speaker 2 the pain you have when all the pain you feel when someone you love dies. Credits, the crow.
Okay, we come back.

Speaker 1 What do you think of that credit scene? It's pretty awesome.

Speaker 2 To be honest, I don't remember it.

Speaker 1 Okay. It was kind of like it reminded me of what the Girl in the Dragon chat used to do.

Speaker 1 But without the very cool, expensive sound song choice.

Speaker 3 Did you guys happen to notice how many credits there were for producers?

Speaker 1 No. I'm guessing a zillion.

Speaker 3 I know it's a common, you know, it's a common shticky joke for critics types like us, but there's over 40 producers on this movie.

Speaker 1 You're not exaggerating.

Speaker 2 But that's why it's so good. That's why it's 40 times as good as a regular movie.

Speaker 1 That's the thing. The best meal you're going to have is one when 40 chefs make it.

Speaker 2 Well, there's a common phrase, not enough cooks in the kitchen. And it's when something's just not working.

Speaker 1 You've heard of five napkin burgers. What about five chef burger?

Speaker 3 You know, back in the day when Twitter was entertaining,

Speaker 3 I said something like, oh, this movie I just watched has 28 producers. With that many producers, it must be good.

Speaker 1 Nope. Yeah.
Nope. You're just lucky.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like odds are one of them is going to really nail it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 With that many people looking at the footage, how could the movie fail to be great?

Speaker 1 I guess it's before we, I mean, we're about to be introduced to them.

Speaker 2 We're about to meet the cash. We've only gotten about 45 seconds into that.
Sorry, but yeah.

Speaker 1 We have our two leads. We have our two leads.
One, you know, the crow is Bill Scars guard.

Speaker 2 We'll get to him. We'll get to him.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, because first we meet Sadie and Shelly, these two young women, they're anxious because they have a video they could use to take down some kind of super terrible bad guy.

Speaker 2 We don't know what that video is just yet, but they're like, we've got to get rid of this video. Oh, no.

Speaker 1 Which, after learning about what's going on, we're like, there's no way that would do anything. No.

Speaker 2 It's not going to do what they want. Sadie walks in a world where there are multiple.

Speaker 2 photos of the president next to his best friend, a notorious sex criminal, then people are like, what are you going to do? I don't know. Maybe

Speaker 1 he's in the crow.

Speaker 2 Sadie walks in.

Speaker 1 But it's true that Danny Houston does have whisper in your ear and you'll kill yourself powers. I don't think he's going to be really worried about these.
He's going to probably crazy.

Speaker 2 Well, no, but he is worried about this video. That's why, that's why he is tracking them down.
So Sadie walks into her apartment and finds a character I could only call Lady Bad Guy.

Speaker 1 I don't remember if they ever name her, but she's kind of like, oh, she's... Fuck, she's the she's in Foundation, and this guy directed some Foundation.
That makes sense.

Speaker 2 He directed the pilot of Foundation, right?

Speaker 2 And so this character is

Speaker 2 listed as

Speaker 2 Marion in the credits, I guess.

Speaker 2 But I don't remember her.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't think they ever say her name.

Speaker 2 And she's, or if they did, it's Ethel Louis. But she is the bad guy.

Speaker 2 She's the one who's like, she's the second in command to the real bad guy, and she doesn't get her hands dirty, but she's always there when the thugs are beating people up.

Speaker 1 None of these characters,

Speaker 1 including our heroes, are given personalities, but at least I will say that this actress has presence. There's something about her that's compelling.
Yeah, she's

Speaker 1 in a like a good movie of this, like each of these characters, because they all kind of have like different looks, thumbs up, but they all should have like cool like skills.

Speaker 1 Like somebody should have like a flying guillotine or somebody. Somebody should have like a cool, like, I don't know, really good at kicking or something.

Speaker 1 One of them can slap your head right off. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 2 one of them, one of them farts.

Speaker 1 All these characters could slap your head right off, Elliot. We wouldn't be talking about it still.

Speaker 2 There must be a Hong Kong action movie where there's a guy who can slap so hard he slaps people's heads off. There has to be.
It's called Head Slapper, probably.

Speaker 1 I feel like a granny character that does that is even better.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's called Shaolin Head Slapper.

Speaker 3 Isn't that what Slappy and the Stinkers is about?

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm sir. I've seen Slappy and the Stinkers.

Speaker 1 You are no,

Speaker 1 it's one of the strangest movies about a, what is it, a seal that you could imagine?

Speaker 2 So is the seal Slappy or the Stinkers?

Speaker 1 Elliot, we don't have time to kill like a gang of kids. No, I see.
They're sort of a little rascals bunch.

Speaker 2 So anyway,

Speaker 3 Morose was another adjective. Sorry.

Speaker 1 Morosis.

Speaker 2 And so Lady Bad Guy drugs Sadie and kidnaps her. And Shelly is worried.
She calls their friend Dom.

Speaker 1 She goes, Shelly is played by what? Pop star FKA Twigs.

Speaker 2 FKA Twigs, which stands for Knowing About Twigs.

Speaker 1 That's what I mean.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you go to her for Twig facts. Exactly.

Speaker 3 I looked up in case you're interested. Her real name is Talia Barnett.

Speaker 1 That's a great name.

Speaker 3 It is.

Speaker 2 Beautiful. I think Talia Barnett's, that's a good stage name.
I don't know why you wouldn't use that. That's a Hollywood, that's a golden age Hollywood stage name.

Speaker 2 They'd be like, your name is Doris Kabowski. No, no, you're Talia Barnett now.

Speaker 1 I was born FKA Twigs.

Speaker 2 My parents wanted me to know about Twigs.

Speaker 1 They named me for knowing about Twigs. My parents were eating alphabet soup at the time.

Speaker 1 And Twigs,

Speaker 1 their favorite snack well

Speaker 1 my parents are anyway i'm trying to think what kind of animal eats twigs none of them i guess my parents are termites so

Speaker 2 um so the uh so anyway shelly's worried she wants to get out she's being followed in order to escape she gets herself arrested on drug possession And meanwhile, we're being suddenly started being introduced to a very heavily tattooed guy taking a shower at an institute.

Speaker 2 And that's Bill Skarsguard as Eric.

Speaker 1 My dude has like the crispiest, brand new, fresh set of tattoos for like a covered in stick-and-poke, like classic, like Williamsburg dude tattoo set.

Speaker 2 Now, they all look so they all look like he just got them in the last couple days.

Speaker 1 Like he just rolled into a sticker book. I saw this in

Speaker 1 your letterbox review, Stuart, and I'm like, this is an observation that a man with tattoos would make, but it was lost on me. I wasn't like, oh, these guys' tattoos are like too crispy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, it just looks like they look super fresh and clean for a guy who looks like a guy whose lifestyle would suggest he sleeps in garbage piles.

Speaker 2 He's supposed to, and he's supposed to be a guy who has, who has hit the bottom of the barrel. He's, he's, you know, he's trying to kick drug addiction.
And he's, yeah, he's

Speaker 2 living that scum lifestyle. But yeah, his tattoos look like they were dealing with a straight, with a, like a ruler.

Speaker 3 You know, he looks like a henchman from Chappie.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah, he doesn't.

Speaker 2 He looks like a Deantward. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And for somebody who has hit the bottom of the barrel, my dude is chopped up. He is so jacked and like super skinny.

Speaker 2 He's incredibly depressed.

Speaker 1 and while whereas most people when they're that depressed they channel that into a lack of care about their own life he has channeled into just like just must be constant sit-ups constants yeah that there are a lot of uh uh people addicted to drugs out there with let's call it low body fat percentages but he is i did see i did

Speaker 2 muscly maybe it's because i live in la but i have driven by a number of shirtless homeless men where i'm like that guy is shredded like i could never get and then i have to remember like oh yeah yeah he's probably is not eating much, and that's why all of his muscles are sticking out.

Speaker 1 He's also got one of those cool, like, like, half-mullet hairdos that everybody on Apple TV Plus shows seems to have, and a little dangly earring. This is a thing.

Speaker 1 Did I see a mullet there, too? I think he's a little bit more. Yeah, he's got that little, like, tiny little mullet haircut that, like, Seth Rogan has.
I will not accept the return of the mullet.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry if it makes sense. Dan, you don't get to make the decision.
You don't get to make the decision. He's got a very Australian haircut.
Yeah, I know I don't. I know.

Speaker 1 I'm not, you know, I'll rage at a cloud privately.

Speaker 2 Dan, if you ever want to be be Sigma, you got to accept it.

Speaker 1 So not an attraction. It's just the world you live in now.

Speaker 2 Okay, so we're at Serenity Park. It's a drug rehab institute of some kind.
It is enormous.

Speaker 1 It's nice.

Speaker 2 It's pretty nice. It's very nice.
And it's huge. They must have

Speaker 2 been a lot of people.

Speaker 1 That is the weirdest thing to me. Like, for, like, this is a, apparently, like, this is both run like a prison and they also like seem to have no

Speaker 1 fraternization or like this budding romance between these.

Speaker 2 It felt a little bit like,

Speaker 2 what was it? Mickey, what was the recent Bong Junho movie? Mickey 17. Mickey 17, where it was like, which

Speaker 2 is this is basically a police state on a spaceship, but we have rigid rules, but it seems like nobody really follows them and everybody's just fraternizing all the time. But

Speaker 2 Eric is being bullied. He doesn't want to talk in group therapy, but Shelly ends up at the same facility.
This is going to be a budding romance.

Speaker 2 But first, we're introduced to our villain at a fancy soare. We see Mr.
Rogue. Very, just like very subtle naming.
Played by one Daniel Houston.

Speaker 1 Nicholas Rogue.

Speaker 2 And he has, he has a, I would

Speaker 2 amazing if he's like, yeah, my father, Nicholas Rogue.

Speaker 2 So the, that'd be so, if Danny Houston, the son of John Houston, was playing a guy who was the son of a different director, I would love it. Yeah, my name is Richie Hitchcock.

Speaker 1 Call me Richcock.

Speaker 1 Don't call me that.

Speaker 1 Don't call me that at all.

Speaker 1 I didn't think that one through.

Speaker 2 You think I've had this name for a long time.

Speaker 1 It never really occurred to me.

Speaker 2 See,

Speaker 2 he's schmoozing.

Speaker 2 There's a very low-simmering subplot about him and a young pianist that he has an interest in, which

Speaker 1 is in Vienna.

Speaker 2 But it's always just in the background.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 he keeps taking.

Speaker 3 He goes nowhere. Yes,

Speaker 3 that's the first stuff you would cut.

Speaker 3 That's nothing to do with anything.

Speaker 2 I think it's supposed to be... He's one of these classic bad guys where he's like, he's incredibly decadent and also refined.

Speaker 2 You know, he's been, we find out later he's been alive for hundreds of years, so he loves to listen to classical

Speaker 2 piano with his eyes closed, but he's also savage. You know, he's savage and evil.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and he likes to be the one guy

Speaker 1 sitting in a large auditorium listening to this. Yeah, listening to a piano player.

Speaker 2 And not the player is not playing like,

Speaker 2 so Lady Bad Guy.

Speaker 1 She would have gotten me so hard if she had just started playing ragtime.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 a lady bad guy takes him to see Sadie, Shelly's friend, and he's like, I want to find Shelly. And he's like, I made a deal hundreds of years ago.
I have to send the souls of the innocents to hell.

Speaker 2 And that keeps me alive. And he uses his whisper brainwashing power, which I have to admit, when he uses the power, I think it looks really cool.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Where he's suddenly whispering really fast and you don't really hear what he's saying. And it takes them over.
And I think they pull off that effect really nicely, you know?

Speaker 2 I mean, but it always just leads to somebody killing themselves. That's it, pretty much.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think what he's doing is he's leaning in and he's just saying, let the bodies hit the floor. And they're like, oh, no.

Speaker 3 Well, it reminds me of what I thought he was saying is predicting how much the movie was going to make at the box office.

Speaker 1 He's saying, and these are the 40 producers killing themselves.

Speaker 2 He's whispering, there's your chance, get out of the movie right now. Kill your character.
Get out of here.

Speaker 3 Right. We've got 40 producers and we're going to make $18 million in total.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'll give this movie this much. You know, it doesn't have the...

Speaker 1 Ironically, because there's so much more opera in this movie, it doesn't have the operatic

Speaker 1 look of the original. It doesn't have like the audacious like over-the-top like visuals, but it is a stylish looking movie in its own sort of like chilly way.

Speaker 1 Like I think that one of the better things I can say about it is like the movie generally looks good.

Speaker 2 I think the movie, so this is this may be a spoiler for my final judgments.

Speaker 2 I didn't, this is not my kind of movie, but I feel like this movie delivers a lot of what it's trying to do, whether what it's trying to do is a worthwhile thing to do.

Speaker 2 But I'm like, yeah, it looks like this is my image in my head of what a modern-day crow movie would look like, where it's a lot of a guy in a long trench coat just kind of gloomily walking down alleys and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 And like, I think it does look stylish, you know, it's a, there's dreary. It looks very dreary.

Speaker 1 It's a dreary sort of style.

Speaker 2 It's dreary in the way.

Speaker 1 It's lugubrious.

Speaker 2 I haven't watched like 12 monkeys in a long time, but I remember seeing that in the theaters and being like, this movie looks in, like the look of this movie.

Speaker 2 is so specifically chosen to be uncomfortable and not pleasant, you know, a lot of the time, you know, every, every place they go to, I'm like, this place is disgusting.

Speaker 2 You know, this is kind of like every place they go to, it's like, this place is depressing. It's dreadful.

Speaker 1 It's like water is dripping from somewhere everywhere they go.

Speaker 2 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 So he talks

Speaker 2 Sadie into killing herself. Now we know what the bad guy's power is.
At rehab, Shelly and Eric meet. They have a lot of awkward talking and flirting.
She likes his drawing and writing.

Speaker 2 He's a very sensitive soul, you know.

Speaker 2 We never learn anything about his past, except, I guess, that he once didn't save a horse and that sent him on a spiral to rock bottom.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 3 he has kind of a mom fixation. Oh, that's right.

Speaker 2 And he has a mom fixation.

Speaker 2 But it's a

Speaker 2 they don't get into it too much, right?

Speaker 1 So they make they make a point of really, you know, like,

Speaker 1 as opposed to the previous film, they spend some time, we get some time with these characters to kind of get a sense of their connection. Dan, do you feel like they had a lot of chemistry?

Speaker 1 I feel like

Speaker 1 in my own letterbox review, I called these a couple of the dullest dim bulbs you'll meet.

Speaker 2 The movie is so reliant.

Speaker 2 This is one of the major failures of the movie.

Speaker 2 This movie is so reliant on their love, seeming like the kind of cosmic love for the ages that will drive someone to damn themselves to get revenge for losing that person or to save them.

Speaker 2 And they are so they seem to have so little feeling for each other.

Speaker 2 And all of the cavorting in apartments, rolling around in bed sheets and curtains and like going to raves, like does not convince you at any moment that they have any feeling for each other and it bought like look i'm gonna sound like an old man again

Speaker 1 i understand

Speaker 1 i adopted my porn i'm gonna sound like an old man again where's my dangers no i i understand that like addiction is a disease it's something that people like struggle with like i and i also don't have anything per se against like

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 reasonable levels of recreational drug use on like non-harmful drugs.

Speaker 1 But like it bothered me that they had this big like love montage to them basically like relapsing, like finding her old stash and doing it and then having their mind.

Speaker 1 This movie I found, this is where I really sound like an old person, I found irresponsible in a couple ways. And one of it, it was that.

Speaker 1 And another is how I feel like it really romanticizes like depression and being like quote unquote beautifully broken as one of the characters says.

Speaker 2 And I think, well, that's the thing. I think that's why I'm talking about like it does the thing that it seems it's trying to do, but whether what it's doing is a good thing is the issue.

Speaker 2 Because like, I think, again, I'm like, I feel like that's what

Speaker 2 you think you're going to get from a crow. And again, I haven't read the original comics, and I wonder if they're more nuanced.

Speaker 2 But I feel like one of the things this is a movie for a depressed teenager who wants to feel like it makes them special.

Speaker 3 Does Twiggy even mention angsty teenagers at one point?

Speaker 1 I think so. Possibly.

Speaker 3 He wants to be like how angsty teenagers will fall in love with him. Something something like that.

Speaker 1 I mean, I feel like that's part. I feel like they're, I feel like both our leads are miscast.
I feel like Bill Skarsgård can really deliver the goods when he gets to play a crazy clown man.

Speaker 1 But, like, he doesn't, he doesn't have a lot of emotion outside of that. And I feel like we didn't need our lead based on what happens in this movie.

Speaker 1 We don't need the lead to be like super muscular because, like, he doesn't do anything particularly.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 just the fact that he can't die is why he he succeeds in this movie. I mean, you need a lot of arm strength to use a samurai sword to

Speaker 1 do that.

Speaker 1 I mean, Paul Giamatti is the crow.

Speaker 2 Here's your version of the crow. Paul Giamatti, he is a middle-aged kind of older man who

Speaker 2 finds love later in life than he expected to. And that love is with another middle-aged person.

Speaker 2 She's killed in a random attack or something, and he becomes the crow. And he is like finding that there's a rage in him that he didn't realize was in there before.
And now he's letting it out.

Speaker 2 I would love to see that version of the crow. That's not a cool, sexy crow that a teen will want to watch, which is.

Speaker 1 And Giamatti would be up for having a lot of cool prosthetic, like golden girls.

Speaker 2 You know, he would do all those, all those fake tattoos. You'd see a scene where he gets those.
But anyway, then it would be called The Left Crovers.

Speaker 1 Hold Crovers, but yeah.

Speaker 1 Hold Crovers sometimes.

Speaker 2 Not like those holdovers.

Speaker 3 I see Albert Brooks doing like the Nest Eggs.

Speaker 1 Also the Crow. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Oh, that would be.
And so and Albert Brooks, you have him doing his character from Drive basically, but like a little bit funnier. So he's like, well, I mean, you can't die.

Speaker 2 It seems like you got something pretty good out of it. So maybe you don't have to kill me.
Maybe that's the, you know, but I would love to see this version of the crow. Sorry, the hold Crovers.

Speaker 2 That's what it is.

Speaker 1 Thank you. I can't remember the name of the proverb.
I don't want to hold those Crovers.

Speaker 1 Dan, I need you to hold these Crovers for me. The officer, I swear, hold these Crovers for rent.

Speaker 2 So the bad guys show up at the facility. Eric helps Shelly escape.
It is incredibly easy to escape this place.

Speaker 2 And they go to a fancy apartment she knows. They spend a lot of time.
They have sex. They do drugs.
They play tell me about yourself games. They try on fancy clothes.

Speaker 2 And she makes him promise to love her no matter what happens or whatever.

Speaker 2 And they're all beautifully broken and whatever.

Speaker 1 Anyway.

Speaker 3 What friend is this that has this apartment that she can

Speaker 3 free reign through?

Speaker 1 Some wealthy guy. Some, you know, some weird wealthy guys just seeing.
It makes no sense. It's probably Justin Thoreau.

Speaker 2 They spend some time. They're bumming around with kind of like alternate hippie types.
They're reading poetry to each other. They're jumping into lakes.
Anyway, they collaborate on an album together.

Speaker 1 Just the funniest parts of it. They have a lot of cool street wear that they get to try on and walk around in.

Speaker 1 At one point, she's like,

Speaker 1 he's, or he's like, we could live this way forever or something like, well, eventually you'll have to get a job to pay for some of that.

Speaker 1 No, Dance. $99.

Speaker 3 He's going to come home eventually and want his horribly ugly fur coat back.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, they're wearing a lot of clothes that look like they are like bum chic, but you know that they're like, oh man, that shirt he's wearing is like $700.

Speaker 2 Yeah. This is a $700 ripped white t-shirt.
Yeah. So they're making an album together and

Speaker 2 she starts playing piano and he gives her trauma flashbacks.

Speaker 2 And she says, when she was young, she was kind of pushed to be a professional piano player and she was playing places she shouldn't have and saw people get

Speaker 1 her Lincoln Park songs.

Speaker 2 And they talk about,

Speaker 2 he's like, we can go anywhere together. And she's like, if I jumped off this bridge, would you do it? And he's like, of course I would.

Speaker 2 Anyway, at a rave, Shelly's friend Dom shows up and he's like, Sadie's dead. You got to get out of here.
And she takes Eric to a mannequin warehouse that also has an apartment in the back.

Speaker 1 I mean, that tracks, dude, that's like, that's movie 101. That's a cool apartment.
Yep, it's a cool apartment to live in. The bad guy henchmen.
Henchmen.

Speaker 2 The bad guy henchmen are there and they suffocate them both. And the suffocation I found very unpleasant.

Speaker 2 This is a very unpleasant sequence.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Not that I want to enjoy this. But also, like, I thought it was like effective.

Speaker 1 Like, I think if you're going to make the, if you're going to make this sequence, like, horrible and traumatizing, I think this is not an like just having them get shot would have,

Speaker 1 depending on how it was done, would be probably kind of boring. But this, I felt, was like, okay, this is horrifying.

Speaker 2 Yes. And so now we're like about

Speaker 2 a little bit less than halfway through the movie, a third of the way through the movie, and we finally get some crow stuff. So Shelly sinks into like an ocean of the metaphysical ocean.

Speaker 2 Eric, however, he surfaces in a kind of old industrial river site.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And there's I saw Vincent Chiavelli.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's basically an abandoned train station.

Speaker 1 It's an abandoned train yard and

Speaker 1 there's overgrown with weeds and there's crows flying around and there's like a lot of, it's very cloudy. And

Speaker 1 this is one of those liminal spaces the kids talk about. It's literally liminal.

Speaker 1 Moby is another actor.

Speaker 2 Yeah, kids are always talking about liminal spaces these days.

Speaker 2 It's just six, seven liminal spaces. That's the kids these days.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Again, it's too bad.

Speaker 1 It's too gloomy for me to get any joy out of, but I thought this was kind of a cool like limbo notion that, you know, it's a neat, I mean, it's a place you wouldn't want to hang around in, but there's an old man hanging around there.

Speaker 3 If you were showing me a book of

Speaker 3 concept art, I'd be like, yeah, this is this artist is good. This is, but to what end?

Speaker 1 To what point? You know, it looks like a really good level of the video game I'm playing right now, Hollow Knight Silk Song. Oh, okay.
So, right.

Speaker 3 I'm playing Power Watch Simulator 2.

Speaker 1 That sounds awesome. These both sound like made-up names to me.
You're just stringing together like four words.

Speaker 1 Sorry, man. After Power Watch Simulator 2, these things.
Very good.

Speaker 2 Stuart, is that the game where the gamers were mad that the B lady was not sexy enough?

Speaker 1 Probably. Okay.

Speaker 2 Is there a B lady?

Speaker 1 I think so. I mean, there's but like you played like a little bug.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it's the bug lady. This was.
So there's an old man there, and he goes, hey, sometimes something so bad happens that someone's someone's soul can't rest.

Speaker 2 And a crow shows up and shows them how to set things right. And Eric's like, I don't believe that.
And he wakes up back at the place where he died. What? What's this all about?

Speaker 2 There's this bad cop that shows up to get Shelly's phone. He shoots Eric, but Eric gets right back up and fights him.

Speaker 2 Eric gets stabbed. That doesn't stop him.
It's almost like this guy has become the crow.

Speaker 1 And do you think that's

Speaker 1 Central? We got a crow. We got a crow.

Speaker 2 We got a 514.

Speaker 1 You ever seen that movie? The crow?

Speaker 1 It's like

Speaker 2 But less operatic. Eric kills the bad cop, and then his wounds heal really quickly, but it's painful.
And he walks around in the rain, followed by a crow.

Speaker 2 He goes back to the bridge that he used to hang out with at Shelly. He thinks he sees her, but he sees her jump off the bridge.
He follows, and he ends up back in the afterlife.

Speaker 2 And the old man is like, she went to hell. But if you get rid of her killer, then you can't, but who, then you can

Speaker 2 kill all the baddies. You can get Shelly back.
If your love remains pure, if your love becomes impure or you doubt your love, then it's not going to work.

Speaker 2 And you can feel pain, but you can't die, which is a very

Speaker 3 places with her, right?

Speaker 2 Is that at this point? I don't know if he has to swap yet.

Speaker 2 But it's like, because I think he has to swap later because

Speaker 2 he doubts his love for a moment.

Speaker 1 He wants extra juice or something.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he returns to Living World and he finds this tattoo artist

Speaker 2 friend of his and gets a gun from him.

Speaker 2 And he tracks down Shelly's mom and finds all these pictures that were hidden in a wall, I guess, or a closet, along with her employee ID for Shelly at Rogue, a theater and arts space owned by Mr.

Speaker 2 Rogue. Interesting.
Look at this detective work. He's really piecing putting the pieces together.

Speaker 1 Mr. Rogue's like, well, Suge,

Speaker 1 don't touch me.

Speaker 2 I don't absorb your powers and memories.

Speaker 3 Who knew that being a concert pianist was so hazardous?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a hard life.

Speaker 1 It's a hard life. Isn't that a movie the Johnny T-Sack in?

Speaker 1 He'd be like, come here, touch me.

Speaker 1 I want your crow powers. Yeah.
Oh, Shug, touch me with them crow powers.

Speaker 2 So is Rogue the superhero? Is she the daughter of Nicholas Rogue?

Speaker 1 Is that what she is?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 No, I know. She's Mystique's daughter.
Anyway, so

Speaker 2 Eric goes there. He finds one of the killers, tries to question him, but he just ends up shooting him.

Speaker 1 Band of the killers?

Speaker 2 He finds the whole band of the killers. He finds one of the henchmen.

Speaker 2 And they have, and then he catches a carload of the henchmen and the lady bad guy are escaping. He fights them all in a tunnel.

Speaker 2 He's in the car, and there's lots of gunfight shots and stuff. And he gets knocked out of the car and run over by a truck.
But of course, he heals painfully afterwards.

Speaker 1 His thoughts on this action sequence you guys love pretty good i actually

Speaker 1 he like he he crashes into the windshield and because he's the crow he just uses that as an opportunity to like get into the car through the broken window and then like he gets pushed out under a truck and gets all

Speaker 2 and i like that they do a good job of having enough times that bad guys are are confused that he's not dying yet, but not doing that too much.

Speaker 2 Not having it happen so long that you're like, come on, guys, like just deal with it. This is the thing.

Speaker 1 This is raised the blood level a little bit so that when he gets like smushed and stuff, he like gets everybody. Like, it was, I just wish it was gross.

Speaker 2 I mean, the final, I think they're saving that for that big final opera fight where it gets very gory.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, he, but he is not, I guess there's that moment where like his guts start to come out of a hole in his stomach.

Speaker 1 That was pretty cool.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, you want to see more of him dealing with that kind of damage.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that, like, that he's like the terror tactic of fighting a guy that if you smush him, he's still fighting you. You want it to be like the end of the flat flat stick body horror version.

Speaker 1 You want it to be more like a game. I want it to be super crazy.

Speaker 2 The end of the Running Man, the book. I don't know if the upcoming movie is going to be.

Speaker 1 Everybody's favorite, right? Where he's crawling.

Speaker 2 His guts are hanging out, and he's crawling to the cockpit of the plane, and his intestines get snagged on one of the seats of the plane, and they're being pulled out of his body as he's crawling towards the plane.

Speaker 1 I'm reading that after having seen the movie and being like, What the fuck? I don't remember this part. They must have cut it.

Speaker 1 They probably filmed it, but cut it. Yeah, probably, probably uh yeah this they probably cut it and just put dynamo in there instead

Speaker 2 i will say like whenever this movie switches into action mode it's pretty good but that is like very rare like eight percent of the film yeah there's it's mostly mope mode mostly moping around that one is decent and then when it gets to the opera house i don't want to jump ahead too far but it in in another film that would be a great set piece it's just there's no personality to it there's no and it's also just one it's just one thing after another we'll get we'll get to that one but it's like there's no there's there's very little build to that it's just like here's a kill here's a kill here's a kill uh so uh shelly's mom tells rogue that eric wants to kill him to bring shelly back and the mom did some got a deal with rogue i don't know and he uses his voice power to make her kill herself too and rogue is like get me eric i want this eric i keep picturing rogue from x-men when you say

Speaker 2 i know it's and i it's it's a dumb name for them to give him like it's it's because he's a bad they might as well call him batty

Speaker 3 i i feel like he was originally they called him Rogue because it's a villainous name. And then Rupert Sanders came in and wrote on a chalkboard, R-O-E-G.

Speaker 1 And all the film students went, ooh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 We sound like they're all Skexies right now. Well, they're all doing blowjobs at the same time.

Speaker 1 That's how they recorded the Skexies vocals.

Speaker 1 Wow. Wait, how was your recording Sexy's vocals? I missed it.
All the vocal performers were receiving blowjobs according to Jim.

Speaker 1 That's what it was.

Speaker 1 Check the trick. According to me, yeah, that was a good idea.

Speaker 1 That's what Jim Henson was like,

Speaker 3 highly inappropriate for a family film.

Speaker 2 No, no.

Speaker 2 Jim Henson was like, there's only one way to get the sounds we want.

Speaker 2 Frank Oz, you need to go into that room and get a blowjob right now.

Speaker 1 And then his were all like, oh, oh, oh. And they're like, it's not working.
It's not working.

Speaker 2 Jave Goles, get in that room and get a blowjob right now.

Speaker 1 Ah, ah, better, better.

Speaker 2 Frank, Frank, do it again. Try it again.
I can't do it anymore, Jim. Don't try it again, but do it, Miss Piggy, this time.

Speaker 1 No, it's not working. It's not working.
I feel like I'm back at the Muppet live script reading I was at last night, featuring our friends Griffin and Hosh.

Speaker 1 That feels like the most tailored to Dan McCoy live event anyone could invent is a live script reading featuring popular podcasts

Speaker 1 doing that.

Speaker 1 Mark Gagliarti, a couple of Max Fun people, anyway. Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 Damn, you're really, you're really traveling in a rarefied area here. This is amazing.

Speaker 1 Well, I bought a ticket to see it.

Speaker 1 Oh, oh, okay.

Speaker 2 Never mind then.

Speaker 1 You didn't get dragged up on stage like that Bruce Ringson video. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Dancing in the dark, that video?

Speaker 3 Courtney Cox?

Speaker 2 Yeah, Courtney Cox in it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Lethargic was another adjective.

Speaker 1 Should I say

Speaker 1 that? Not Courtney Cox, though. She's a

Speaker 1 very energetic, yeah.

Speaker 1 Especially those ads with Lisa Kudreau where they're talking about some mobile game that you can play. It's crazy.
Don't know those. You haven't seen these ads? It's nuts.

Speaker 1 I have been saddened by the cavalcade of celebrities I've seen hawking mobile games. No, Dan, you have to understand.
These people have no money.

Speaker 2 They need the work.

Speaker 1 Well, no, I mean, like, I feel like it is an indication of how bad the industry is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I guess this is a lot of money.

Speaker 2 I think it's more an indication of how much money the mobile games have. It's also a lot of money.

Speaker 3 And they got to spend that money on something, and it's advertising.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So Eric stops by their old apartment, gets a leather coat, mopes around a lot, remembers things very melodramatically.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, that's what he does.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he gets a letter. He gets a leather jacket.

Speaker 1 He hits the jukebox. Yeah, he hits the jukebox.

Speaker 2 He's like, come see me in my office. It's just in the toilet stall.
He finds her phone and he watches a video of Rogue talking Shelly into stabbing a woman.

Speaker 2 And this, he walks through the rain to Gothy Music. He is really distraught at this.
He's disappointed in Shelly. He thought she was pure.

Speaker 2 He doesn't know if he can go on because she was once brainwashed by an evil wizard into killing Shelley.

Speaker 1 his love he is doubting he just saw her stab someone he doesn't know what happened come on holy shit

Speaker 1 i mean i might i can see a video of you stabbing someone and be like uh well he probably got demon whispered into doing

Speaker 1 that's true eric doesn't know about the demon whispering that's true i would hold up in court it will

Speaker 1 though my thought process would have been first one that's got to be ai second one that's got to be a demon wizard third one yeah it's probably third one that yeah he did that one yeah yeah The one where he's eating chicken while he's stabbing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's the one that really, really stabbed him.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So the rogues goons show up and they fight Eric and they kill his friend and they kill Eric because his love has become impure. He's doubted his love.
And the old man's like, you blew it.

Speaker 1 He doesn't do it that way.

Speaker 2 That's the way Sylvester Stallone says it in Copland. Oh, no, it's just Robert De Niro in Copland says that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 The old man says he blew it, but Eric offers his soul in exchange for hers. It'll mean he'll be damned forever.
He'll never see her again, but he'll do it. He just loves her so goddamn much.

Speaker 1 he just he'll go to hell for her yeah and uh this is the point of the movie where i'm like how long did you know this lady right i'm getting that arrested development moment where i'm like her

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 2 yeah uh we had a love for the ages ron howard they they didn't you know

Speaker 2 it's a tornado of crows surrounds him and one slams into him and the old man cuts his hand and then they have

Speaker 2 what they could be blackbirds that's true i mean they look i mean it's i'm just circumstantial evidence. It's called the crow.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're a little blackbird. That's a different origin I wanted.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, they could be ravens, you know?

Speaker 1 Different movie. A magpie, perhaps.
Yeah. And this is where

Speaker 1 he doesn't like weird fluid squirt out of his eyes and turn him into the crow makeup.

Speaker 2 Yes, there's like black blood that comes out of his eyes and he smears that.

Speaker 1 Black of the ear of the earth.

Speaker 1 I mean black blood of the earth.

Speaker 2 And then he goes and drinks a milkshake. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 So then Eric's eyes start bleeding and and he transforms into the crow we all know and love. Now he's got more superpowers, comes back to life, heals his.

Speaker 1 No, he's not your daddy's crow. He's got all those tattoos.

Speaker 2 That's true. My daddy's a crowd.

Speaker 1 Am I wrong?

Speaker 2 I mean, my daddy's crow would be probably Cheryl Crow, to be honest.

Speaker 1 She did some good stuff.

Speaker 3 Did he, I know in the first movie, he had the ability to come back from the dead, but he didn't have actually have like Wolverine healing power.

Speaker 1 I don't remember. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 I don't know. I haven't seen it.

Speaker 1 He was like an unstoppable flip machine. Yeah, he had more martial arts powers than this guy.
Yeah, this guy does not have martial arts powers.

Speaker 1 I will say, I'm a little disappointed for a guy who feels so strongly about losing somebody that he has known for a brief period of time.

Speaker 1 He doesn't really care that his friend got his brains blown out because of him. He does not really care.
It does not bother him.

Speaker 2 He has a single mission.

Speaker 2 Maybe, maybe that's a sign of him becoming, he's becoming less human and more an instrument of vengeance.

Speaker 1 As they say,

Speaker 3 the screenplay isn't. isn't it?

Speaker 2 No, I know it's true. When you go for revenge, dig two graves.
That's what I say, because you want revenge on two people.

Speaker 1 You don't want to pile them both in the same grave. So the first one's going to be terrible.
It's like your first grave.

Speaker 1 You have to be able to square the corners right. You need the second grave with what you've learned from the first grave.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You don't want to bury someone with that. That's embarrassing.

Speaker 3 Dig two graves. Why? Practice.

Speaker 1 Grave twice, cut once.

Speaker 2 When you go up for vengeance, dig two graves because you're going to need arm strength. And digging a grave will give you those arm muscles

Speaker 3 The first one is just for practice to see it like dimensions

Speaker 2 Just to know just to know oh, this is what it feels like to do it Okay, I'm learning a lot now. I can use that in the second grave.
That's the real user. And you know what?

Speaker 2 If you dig that second grave and it doesn't work, go ahead and dig a third grave. It's fine, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, the more you dig, more likelihood you're going to find some really cool rare coins or other treasures.

Speaker 2 What you don't want to do is you don't want to dig a grave as big as the, as the one that Brad Pitt digs in California, which is roughly the size of a meteor crater. You don't need a grave that big.

Speaker 2 That's too big a hole to to dig. You don't need to be.

Speaker 3 Maybe he was trying to bury the gluttony guy from seven.

Speaker 2 I mean, it looks like he's planning to murder an elephant when he's digging that grave.

Speaker 3 I'm impressed that you remember any details from California.

Speaker 1 I was actually going to say that too. Well, you know,

Speaker 1 a similar time period as similar time periods.

Speaker 2 I think maybe that's why it came up in my head.

Speaker 1 Similar kind of

Speaker 1 stuff. And you've been going through all your David DeCovny films.

Speaker 2 That's right. Yeah, I'm almost up to House of D.

Speaker 1 Is that the one you have on the grave yet?

Speaker 1 What was the one where,

Speaker 1 there, and there's the one recently that's all in like an airport?

Speaker 2 Oh, I don't know that one.

Speaker 3 Um, does anybody current David DeCovney? Now, there's a good trivia category. Name this current David DeCovney film.

Speaker 2 I can't do it. Nope.

Speaker 1 No, this is. I know the movie you mean.
I saw it on one of the VMs. I'm not doing his group chat right now.
You can't talk about David DeCovney. I'm sorry.
Yeah, no,

Speaker 2 he's actually writing to the Red Shoe Diaries right now.

Speaker 1 That's the thing. Longtime fan.

Speaker 2 First time diarist. Yep.

Speaker 1 Sorry, speaking of last night, somehow

Speaker 1 Griffin and Hodgman are now arguing the merits of the Muppet Takes Man Fan script. I think

Speaker 1 now is the time for you to wait. No, no, I know.
I'll put it down. If only Didn't have a platform on the screen, I wanted to make his feelings clear.

Speaker 1 What is it?

Speaker 3 Is it that they are separated and then the reunion, the time between the separation and the reunion is almost nominal?

Speaker 3 Is that the problem with the script?

Speaker 1 I don't know what the problem with the script is.

Speaker 1 It lags in

Speaker 1 the third act, I feel like Muppets Take Manhattan.

Speaker 2 It's not up to the level of the previous two movies.

Speaker 1 The ad stuff with the other frogs is hilarious.

Speaker 3 Hi, I'm Bill. This is Gil and Jill.

Speaker 1 That's hilarious. That's some of the best.

Speaker 2 That portion of the movie made a huge impression on me as a kid, and I write about it in my essay in the book, Never Can Say Goodbye, Writers Talking About New York or whatever it's called, which came out many years ago.

Speaker 3 I want the part two where Jason takes Manhattan from the Muppets.

Speaker 1 I feel like Elliot Kalin could write it.

Speaker 2 I would love to. I would love to.
That'd be fantastic. Or they both showed up the same day and they keep bumping into each other.

Speaker 1 Jason versus Muppets.

Speaker 2 Where Kermit gets hit by a car, thinks he's Jason, starts killing the other Muppets.

Speaker 1 Whoever wins, we hope it's the Muppets.

Speaker 1 That's the tagline.

Speaker 3 Animal could take Jason.

Speaker 1 Probably.

Speaker 1 Of course.

Speaker 2 Definitely.

Speaker 1 Animal is the most powerful Muppet in the Muppet extended universe.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's the Tom Bombadil of the Muppets.

Speaker 2 The squirrel girl. He's undefeatable.

Speaker 1 Or the guy who throws Lou Zealand.

Speaker 3 That guy.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, yeah. Luz Elena.
He impales them with a fish or something.

Speaker 1 Damn.

Speaker 2 So the, so

Speaker 2 the bat from Eric comes back to life, kills the bad guys. From bad guy phone, he learns the other bad guys will be at the opera, of course, takes some time to finish one of his tattoos

Speaker 2 and gets his blood makeup together, picks up a samurai sword that happens to be there, and there's more Moody walking through the streets to the opera. And this is the big

Speaker 1 is this the Moody walking to like a

Speaker 1 Gary Newman song or something like, I mean,

Speaker 1 the movie has a couple of like bangers, but I wish they were all like late 90s new metal songs because you want it to be

Speaker 2 the period you associate.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I want it to all be like, but not like the original original The Crow. I want to be like, yeah, I want it to be like Evanescence and shit like that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. But that's not what they do.
But it would be, it's better than if they did it to Randy Newman's songs, which would have been inappropriate.

Speaker 1 A little unusual.

Speaker 3 You've got a friend in Crow.

Speaker 1 Speaking of the Muppets, Paul Williams, if they had a Paul Williams. Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think Paul Williams could do it. I think Paul William Right.

Speaker 1 Pretty amazing.

Speaker 2 Moving right along. Actually, I'd love to see the Crow where he's walking down the street and Moving Right Along is playing.
That's great.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 he goes to the, this is the big, violent action set piece where he's just killing guards left and right as the opera is playing and the and it's just supposed to be these guys probably aren't villains right they're probably just hired goons I mean they are all hired goons that it's like they're all just private contractors I mean who knows what bad things they've done on a lot of work you know he kills them in different ways with it with a samurai sword he eventually gets to the bad guy lady this is like a tanto right it's not like a full katana it's kind of short yeah it's a it's a shorter sword it's kind of waka it's kind of a medieval type sword isn't it's It's definitely a Japanese sword, though, right?

Speaker 2 It's not like a broad sword or something. No.

Speaker 1 Splits a guy's.

Speaker 1 Don't say broad, Elliot.

Speaker 2 It's not a dame sword. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I do like when he splits that guy's face all the way.

Speaker 2 That's pretty good. That's a nice kind of Takashi Mike type moment.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 So the...

Speaker 2 He eventually gets to the bad guy lady, and she's like, oh, you remind me of Rogue. You both hate yourself inside or something like that.
And he kills her.

Speaker 2 He kills her henchman, who's the oldest of the henchmen.

Speaker 2 It's very funny that it's like you're building up to him facing, it's almost like the one issue I really have with Mandy, where after fighting his way through all the bad guys, he then gets to the, the big bad guy who's just an old man in the shower, who's like, I'll suck your dick if you don't kill me.

Speaker 2 Like, I'm like, oh, this is at this, I feel like this is not a heightening moment, you know,

Speaker 2 but I know they're doing that on purpose.

Speaker 2 The crow, he's, he, even though he has had a massive, bloody fight in the public areas of an opera house, no one seems to have noticed he could get away scot-free until he walks on stage with the heads of the last two people he killed and throws them into the audience, which I, as an opera lover, found to be not necessary.

Speaker 2 You're just there to see the opera. You do not need someone to throw a severed head at you.

Speaker 1 Being at the opera is not an endorsement of evil. I'm going to the opera.
I don't want to see somebody be super dramatic. No,

Speaker 1 imagine the headlines for tomorrow's.

Speaker 2 Hold on a second. Hold on a second.
If he came out and he was all covered in blood and he goes, the opera is over. That's one thing.
That's literally, that's basically the way Pagliachi ends.

Speaker 2 But two, I don't want a severed head thrown at me in any situation, but especially not where I paid a lot of money for these tickets.

Speaker 1 It must be open at night because they're all five times. Money buys comfort.
That's all you care about. Exactly.

Speaker 1 I mean, Money does buy comfortable.

Speaker 2 I'm here to celebrate the beauty of music, the beauty of performance. I don't need, there's nothing, no crime involved in that.

Speaker 1 You don't need to throw a heads up. I don't know if you're a person who sponsored this opera.

Speaker 1 What sort of demon powers they may or may not have?

Speaker 2 I mean, I've seen shows at the Disney concert hall. I'm sure they've done some terrible stuff.
I know they've done some stuff.

Speaker 3 Is that what was playing? It's an opera.

Speaker 2 I actually didn't know what opera it was that was playing, but it could be.

Speaker 1 Dan, do you know what opera it was? It's probably some made-up crow opera. Crow opera.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 3 I only know La Bohem because it's Frank Oz gag from the Blues Brothers.

Speaker 1 That's how I know that.

Speaker 2 Maybe it was Salambo, the opera from Citizen Kane.

Speaker 1 No, he goes La Bohim.

Speaker 1 La Bohem.

Speaker 1 Tosca. Tosca is, I think Tosca is often a New York Times crossword question.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Tosca is a great opera. I mean, again, guys, this is not a bid I'm putting on.
I do love the opera. The opera is the Metropolitan Opera in New York is a special place for me.

Speaker 1 You're 1% Kaylin today.

Speaker 1 I am. Exactly.
I'm 1%.

Speaker 3 Elliot, how many times have you been at the opera house and seen an undead, vengeful spirit behead six entrants?

Speaker 2 Good question, Scott. The answer is zero.
And I don't want people to get the wrong idea about opera houses. They are not dangerous places.
You will not be beheaded. Good to know.

Speaker 2 And also, I will say, Stuart, the opera, 100 years ago, opera was the music of the common people, really more like 130 years ago.

Speaker 2 Opera was the music that a working man would go to see see at the end of the day, and he'd remember those songs from the middle of the world.

Speaker 1 That's what you were singing about in that song.

Speaker 1 Exactly. His song,

Speaker 1 yeah, the song in Opera Man, Rowan, by William Shatner. Yes, the shit my dad says, William Shatner.

Speaker 2 That's what he's best known for.

Speaker 1 And so, wait a minute, William Shatner.

Speaker 1 You mean Tech Wars?

Speaker 3 William Shatner?

Speaker 1 Tech Wars, William Shannon. That's right.

Speaker 2 You guessed it.

Speaker 2 I want to name another

Speaker 2 more obscure William Shatner thing, and I'm having trouble with it.

Speaker 1 Degrees Reigns, William Shatner? that Esperanto movie, yeah, Incubus.

Speaker 2 That's what it is. Incubus is William Shatner.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Kingdom of

Speaker 1 Incubus with Brandon. What's his name?

Speaker 2 He was in the band Incubus with Brandon. What's his name? That was the two main members of the band.
It was Bono, the Edge, William Shatner, Brandon. What's his name?

Speaker 1 Incubus.

Speaker 2 So, um, the anyway, I'm just saying, again, I can't let it go. Uh, if you want to go see the opera, go see it.
A guy will not throw a heads at you, I promise.

Speaker 1 Um, so they uh make that promise, though. Yeah, you guys just about that

Speaker 1 In my experience,

Speaker 2 I think my grandmother would have given up her season tickets to the Met if she expected to get heads surrounded her. She had very good seats.
The head would have hit her right in the lap.

Speaker 2 She would have been horrified.

Speaker 2 So the crowd runs off afraid, as they should, and he sees Shelly in the audience. Just a vision he's having.
Eric goes to Rogue's Fancy Country Estate.

Speaker 2 This bit was when I was wondering, I was like,

Speaker 2 where in the world is this taking place? It's just kind of a generic evil city

Speaker 2 where there's a country estate said.

Speaker 3 They They have a piggy factory and a swanky apartment.

Speaker 2 Yeah. They have a hero-villain taunt talk.
Rogue uses his feel-terrible powers on Eric, but his love for Shelly breaks through and brings him back.

Speaker 2 And he pulls Rogue into the afterlife, into that train yard, and beats him up. And it's not really that impressive to see

Speaker 2 him beat up Danny Houston. To be Phil Scarston beat up Danny Houston.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's like the end of a racer where Arnold Schwarzenegger beats up an old James Khan. Or it's like the end of Naked Gun,

Speaker 1 where the nigga joke out.

Speaker 1 That's why Danny Houston was so perfect for that movie.

Speaker 2 Or like years ago when we saw the Green Lantern movie, where it was like, okay, so now he's up against a nerd in a wheelchair. This is the bad guy he has to defeat.
So

Speaker 1 they

Speaker 3 with a deformed head.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 He beats him up. Rogue gets pulled to hell by some kind of like snakey skeletons.
I thought that was, I liked the way those snakey skeletons look.

Speaker 1 Dragged me to hell, yeah. And Shelly both snakingtons.

Speaker 2 yeah and uh shelly floats back up to the surface and she's like i don't want to leave you eric and he goes no it's okay i love you and she goes back to life and uh thanks to an emt that emt it's the old man from the afterlife hold on a second but eric he's stone dead he's chronos he's not going back apparently that's his name chronos oh chronos okay i i that's something i did not pick up from the movie um and eric

Speaker 1 father of titans or whatever yeah exactly yeah

Speaker 2 he's he's been punished for devouring his children that's why he's there yeah and so uh eric he monologues at in the train yard about how their love will live on and everything she ever does um and now he's just the crow and i guess he just hangs out in this gross slimy afterlife now like it he we don't see him go to hell at the end right

Speaker 3 i was expecting him to be uh dragged to hell like the film but if they're not reunited doesn't that automatically mean that she's now a crowess in the fka sequel

Speaker 2 uh i i don't i think i i don't think so i mean now she doesn't get it just like normal

Speaker 1 life.

Speaker 2 I think, like many people who have lost someone, she just has to keep living and continue on with her life.

Speaker 1 He gets to be a crow.

Speaker 1 And the thing is, is that over time, like, she'll just start to forget him. Does she get the chance?

Speaker 2 No, no, no, Stuart. No, Stuart, Stuart.
This will, this, their love will live forever. When in the beginning, you didn't get the feeling that this is a burning passion, a lady on fire style,

Speaker 2 a moor food that can never be equaled, you know?

Speaker 1 Like, if she

Speaker 1 acts real nice in her second life, does she get to go to heaven or is she like still doomed to hell eventually?

Speaker 2 Well, he's swapped with her. So

Speaker 2 that's the thing. They made a big deal about how he has to go to hell and she's going to be okay.
So I guess now she has a second chance, Dan. She gets to decide if she goes to heaven or hell.

Speaker 1 Get up there with all the people.

Speaker 3 So she marries another guy, has four kids, and then she's just like, mommy, tell us the story about the guy who sacrificed himself. So you could come back to life.

Speaker 1 That would have been a way better opening of the movie than a dying horse. Yeah, well, I want

Speaker 1 Titanic, kind of.

Speaker 2 Or I want the sequel where it takes place many years in the future and he goes back to visit her.

Speaker 2 And yeah, she's like a middle-aged woman who has a family and has lost, you know, that kind of fiery young spark has been tempered somewhat by

Speaker 2 just the things of life. And he's like still this like crazy, you know, immortal demon hunk.
And they both have to deal with what this means, that like, he hasn't changed, but she has.

Speaker 2 And has she lived a better life in some ways? You know, is she at a better better place than him? You know, is he disappointed that she's no longer the woman that he once thought she was?

Speaker 3 You know, and the final line is, Eric, I, I don't remember. I don't remember you, Eric.

Speaker 1 Sorry.

Speaker 1 It'd be so funny.

Speaker 1 I get a bunch of details wrong. And he's like, no, he made, he was a demon guy who made you do things.

Speaker 2 She's washing dishes or her husband's washing dishes at night. And Atani goes, hey, you were telling me about that guy, Eric? Oh, yeah.
He was, that was a wild time. I was, he was, he was bonkers.

Speaker 2 I, he, you get, you know, when you're young, you get wrapped on people. Oh, yeah, like that girl you were telling me about that you dated for a little bit.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm glad I got out of that.

Speaker 2 Anyway, so we got to figure out the kids' school schedule for tomorrow.

Speaker 1 Who's picking up who, you know, most of the sequel just takes place when she's like, okay, I should, I should reconnect with him a little bit.

Speaker 1 And they go out to dinner at like an Applebee's or something. Him and Eric.
Yeah. Her and Eric.

Speaker 1 And they're like realizing that they don't have as much in common as they used to.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 He's like, hey, do you still listen to Sisters of Mercy? And she's like, not that much, to be honest.

Speaker 1 Like every now and then, you know.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's do final judgments, whether this is a good, bad movie, a bad, bad movie, or a movie you kind of liked.

Speaker 1 I'm going to say that this is a bad, bad movie that was not as bad as I expected based on the reaction to it.

Speaker 1 Like, I think it was, as I said before, like, in some ways, stylishly made, like, there was some care put into some of it. It's just that all of the characters were a bunch of nothings.

Speaker 1 And like, like, I don't like the message of the movies, and it's kind of boring.

Speaker 1 So, bad, bad. Yeah, that was a little bit like as long as everybody had fun response.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm going to say

Speaker 2 nobody got hurt.

Speaker 1 I mean, arguably, in many ways, that makes this better than the original The Crow movie because nobody got hurt.

Speaker 2 It was a very low bar to clear. Yeah.
This being a better production than the original The Crow.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 1 yeah, I mean, this is a bad, bad movie.

Speaker 1 I think they're like, there are, it has the, uh, the trappings of a professionally made feature, and I think it probably achieves what it's trying to do, but it is wrong. It's like, it's wrong-headed.

Speaker 1 It doesn't really, like, there's no real place for it.

Speaker 1 On some level, it feels like a test reel or a demo reel so that this uh so the people who made it could make a like a full-on Marvel movie or something, like trying to show they're proficient enough to make an actual superhero movie because they didn't actually want to make something.

Speaker 1 I don't know. It's just, it's just very bland and like it doesn't

Speaker 1 nothing, there's not, there's very few memorable elements of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just kind of like a like a blah.

Speaker 1 Blah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because that was the Dracula review of it.

Speaker 2 I have to say that this is a, it's, I think it is not a good movie, but there were at times, it almost became a movie I kind of liked.

Speaker 2 If I was able to tap into the kind of mopey teenager side of myself, where it's like, I could see myself as a depressed mopey teen watching this and being able to look past the fact that it is very slick, like a little too slick and a little too glossy for a movie that's trying to feel like it is about like, oh, it's tortured, broken, beautiful people,

Speaker 2 a love that lasts forever. And the only way to get revenge is to, is to unleash my anger and my pain on the, on those who did it.
And like, I think it is a...

Speaker 2 I think it's a competently made thing, you know, in that way.

Speaker 2 It's just like you guys are saying, I agree with all the stuff about, it's like kind of, kind of dull and the characters are kind of nothing.

Speaker 2 But I think it's, I cannot like it because of what you're saying that like the message of the movie is a, is, is one that I can't stand behind, which is that kind of, kind of

Speaker 2 beautification and glorification of being unhappy, you know, of being, being, being depressed or despairing.

Speaker 2 And I think it is a, it's a dangerous kind of message, especially at a time when it feels like young people, and this is a movie that's most likely, you would think to be watched by young people, is my guess, are when you're in the middle of the day.

Speaker 1 Young people and bad movie podcasters.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and you have bad movie podcasters.

Speaker 1 That young people are, I think, who have no depression issues, by the way. You know, that's the thing.

Speaker 2 I feel like young people now are, more than maybe ever before, are finding it harder and harder to find meaning in life.

Speaker 2 And so a movie like this that glorifies kind of like tragic trauma and sacrifice, I think, is a. is a is a dangerous type of message.

Speaker 2 I don't think young people, at the same time, it's so glossy that I feel like I don't know that it's as dangerous as it could be because it doesn't hit any real emotion.

Speaker 2 You know, it doesn't actually connect in that way. But I like, but every now and then, there's a thing in it I like, like that.
The whisper effect is a dumb idea, but I like the way they pull it off.

Speaker 2 Danny Houston, I think, does exactly what he needs to do. The bad guy lady has presence.
You know, there's elements in it that work better than I thought it would.

Speaker 1 Presence? What? Yes, you brought presence. Yeah, but they're not great presence.

Speaker 2 It's a lot of like, it's a like dried fruit and things like that. But it's the thought that counts, you know.
What about you, Scott? Scott, unload on it.

Speaker 1 Bad, bad.

Speaker 3 And this is coming from a guy who has done 260 episodes of a podcast called Over Hated.

Speaker 3 I hated this movie. And I love your phrase, the trappings of a professionally made motion picture.

Speaker 1 I love that.

Speaker 3 Elliot, what you said about how it's like artsy and mopey and it's all, it's, it's, it's beholden to teen and young angst. That all describes the first film.

Speaker 3 This is just regurgitated, recycled misery.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, I think that's the thing.

Speaker 2 I feel like if I had seen the first movie, because I still haven't seen it, like maybe I'd be like, I feel like this feels like, I mean, it feels a lot of times like a very high-class perfume commercial that stars the crow.

Speaker 2 And I feel like that's, if anything, that's the thing that I think blunts the edge of danger from it because it's like, cause it feels like a, it does, because it doesn't feel real at all.

Speaker 2 You know, there's no, there's no actual stuff.

Speaker 3 Even, even in some of the worst films Hollywood puts out, most of the time, the production designer and the cinematographer,

Speaker 3 they earn their check and they do here.

Speaker 3 But beyond that, I couldn't wait for it to end. I didn't like the, I didn't care about the character alive or dead.
I just couldn't wait for it to end.

Speaker 1 I hated it. I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 I don't want to be the most negative, but I just think it's

Speaker 3 a soulless adaptation of a film that was

Speaker 3 a little shallow to begin with.

Speaker 1 Especially something that like a story that was born out of an artist's real trauma. It's crazy to see like the Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox that this movie is.
Good point. Well said.

Speaker 4 Jackie Cation. Hi, and welcome to the maximumfun.org podcast, the Jackie and Lori Show, where we talk about stand-up comedy and how much we love it and how much it enrages us.

Speaker 5 We have a lot of experience and a lot of stories and a lot of time on our hands. So check us out.
It's one hour a week and we drop it every Wednesday on maximumfun.org.

Speaker 6 Most of the plants humans eat are technically grass.

Speaker 7 Most of the asphalt we drive on is almost a liquid.

Speaker 6 The formula of WD40 is San Diego's greatest secret.

Speaker 7 Zippers were invented by a Swedish immigrant love story.

Speaker 6 On the podcast Secretly Incredibly Fascinating, we explore this type of amazing stuff.

Speaker 7 Stuff about ordinary topics like cabbage and batteries and socks.

Speaker 6 Topics you'd never expect to be, the title of the podcast. Secretly, incredibly fascinating.

Speaker 7 Find us by searching for the word secretly in your podcast app.

Speaker 6 And at maximumfun.org.

Speaker 1 Hey, folks. This is Stuart from the Flophouse telling you, you know what you probably need?

Speaker 1 A website. You know what? The best way to get one of those things? That's Squarespace.

Speaker 1 Now, Squarespace is our sponsor today, so it's important to know that Squarespace gives you you everything you need to offer services and get paid all in one place.

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Speaker 1 Squarespace provides cutting-edge design. That means a complete library of professionally designed and award-winning website templates with options for every use and category.

Speaker 1 I don't know about you, but my wife and I just recently set up a website for ourself, and

Speaker 1 she is a very creative person, but she also,

Speaker 1 if you're like her or I, you will appreciate having examples or templates to work off of as opposed to just trying to pull something fresh out of

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Speaker 1 Hey, and this is Dan over here.

Speaker 1 I also have a sponsor to tell you about, but I also want to say I enjoyed, you know, Stuart learning. What I already know, which is that Squarespace can be a challenging thing to say sometimes.

Speaker 1 Do you feel vindicated, Dan?

Speaker 1 No, I just, you know,

Speaker 1 I feel a warm sense of connection.

Speaker 2 I saw the look on your face, Dan, where you, I, I, I read it as, no, it's Stewart's turn in the barrel.

Speaker 1 But speaking of warm, it's getting uh less warm out. You'll need uh some wardrobe uh items in your rotation that look sharp, feel good, but also feel comfortable, and you'll actually wear them.

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Speaker 2 Hey, the Flop House is also brought to you by The Flop House. The Flop House has a bunch of Flop House things coming up.

Speaker 2 This episode is being released on November 8th, so it is just one week, well, really eight days until we will be appearing live in Chicago.

Speaker 2 Yep, the second city. It's called that because it was the second city in the world after Ur.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 we'll be in Chicago. We're doing two shows in one night.
The early show show is sold out. The late show, by this point, there may still be some tickets left.

Speaker 2 I'm recording this in the past for the future. So you're going to want to check and see.
It's the Flophouse Podcast. Go to flophousepodcast.com slash events.
And you'll find all that information.

Speaker 2 We are appearing at Sleeping Village. It's going to be super fun.

Speaker 2 Each, both episodes, we'll be talking about Jim Belushi movies, Chicago's favorite son, but different Jim Belushi movies. And if you've been to a Flophouse Live show, you know it's a lot of fun

Speaker 2 and you're going to have an experience experience you'll never be able to replicate in a good way. And if you can't make it to the early show, come to the late show.
It's going to be great.

Speaker 2 There'll be two different shows. They will not be the same show done twice.
We wouldn't do that to you.

Speaker 2 Speaking of shows and the flop house and different shows, let's say you can't make it to Chicago. Let's say you're in Chicago and you couldn't get tickets for these ones.
Don't worry.

Speaker 2 As you know, Flop TV is on the air. That's right.
Theflophouse.simpletics.com is where you can go to get tickets for Flop TV. Season 2 is going on right now.

Speaker 2 A week ago, as this episode comes out, we will have done episode 3 where we were talking about Xanadu starring Olivia Fig Newton John. That's not really her name.

Speaker 1 It's not really a Fig Newton.

Speaker 1 Foot more respectable. Mad Magazine over here.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 that was from our Jokes and Schlokes department or something like that.

Speaker 1 Joke and Dagger.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Joke and Dagger. That's what it was.

Speaker 2 So the Flop TV season three, it's been a lot of fun. We're having our great

Speaker 2 Flop TV season three has been a lot of fun. We're doing our one-hour televised on-your-computer over the internet video version of the Flophouse.

Speaker 2 Each episode, you get a presentation, you get us talking about a movie, you get us answering questions, you get video segments.

Speaker 2 It's turning more and more into a real television show, which is very scary to me.

Speaker 2 So go to theflophouse.simpletex.com to get your tickets. If you've missed the earlier shows where you can't make it to the shows when they air live, which is the first Saturday of each month at 9 p.m.

Speaker 2 Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific, if you can't make it that time, don't worry.

Speaker 2 Your ticket gets you access to the recording, and you can watch those recordings, any of them, until the end of February when the show will be finished. So that's theflophouse.simpletics.com.

Speaker 2 And then join us live first Saturday of the month, every month through February at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m.
Pacific.

Speaker 1 You mentioned that it's becoming more and more like a TV show. You'll know when it's become a TV show, when it's covered on Two Boy Talking Tube to Two Dudes Tonight.
That's right.

Speaker 2 That's what you know we have. We have eaten our own tail, like the Ouroboros itself.

Speaker 1 And then podcasts can stop.

Speaker 2 So that's two great ways to see the Flophouse Live, either in person in Chicago on November 16th or on your computer screen the first Saturday of every month or as a recording after the first Saturday of every month.

Speaker 2 Go to theflophouse.simpletics.com for Flop TV. And I also want to mention before we go, I have a thing to promote that's just for me.
Sorry, boys. This is Elliot Emily.

Speaker 2 As this episode is coming out, my book, Joke Farming, How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense from University of Chicago Press will be on store shelves within days.

Speaker 2 You can order it online, and I think you will enjoy it. It's a book all about how jokes work, how to write them, how to develop a reliable writing process.

Speaker 2 It is helpful for the professional writer, but also for someone who's just curious about how humor works. And I think it is a funny book.
It is written to be funny and to be a fun read.

Speaker 2 My wife has been enjoying reading it, and she is not interested in being a comedy writer.

Speaker 1 Or in anything that you do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and she hates most of the work I do. So that's Joke Farming by me, Ellie Kalen.
It's a book. You can read it.

Speaker 1 Let's

Speaker 1 answer some letters from listeners. Why not?

Speaker 1 Hey, we're here. I'm glad that you've given me consent to.
You know what, Dan? No.

Speaker 1 Let's not. Okay, well, what would you say if I said that?

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 You have to come up with a segment then.

Speaker 1 Then let's answer the letters from listeners.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 Tell us more about opera. This one.
I would love to.

Speaker 2 Okay, there have been a few performances that I go back to in my mind often.

Speaker 2 Just really wonderful. A performance of Eugene O'Negan

Speaker 2 that was that I just didn't even want to leave the building when it was over. I just wanted to feel the vibrations in the building afterwards.

Speaker 2 So the Met will often do a double bill, Cavalier Rusticana and Pagliachi, because they're short operas. They'll do those together.
And so I've seen those together a bunch of times.

Speaker 2 In Cavalier Rusticana, they bring a horse on stage, which always makes the audience impressed. And it's just a classic Met opera thing: they'll be like, hey, guess what? There's a horse.

Speaker 2 We just bring it on stage we sing around it take the horse off everybody loves it horses are huge dan continue uh

Speaker 1 so speaking of uh corvids this is a this is a poe poe related uh letter this first man who made ravens famous king of the segways

Speaker 1 yeah yeah this is from uh this letter's from roger allan poe's the raven simone

Speaker 1 i just finished watching robert roger corman's 1963 the haunted palace on 2b the movie really highlights that it is based on Edgar Allan Poe's poem of the same name, but as far as I can tell, the only two lines from it that might loosely have something to do with the movie are, Vast forms that move fantastically to a discordant melody.

Speaker 1 And then in the credits,

Speaker 1 also some unnamed story by H.P. Lovecraft is mentioned almost as an afterthought.
The whole movie is soaked in Lovecraft stuff, Elder Gods, Arkham, Weird Mutated Bodies, etc.

Speaker 1 My question is,

Speaker 1 do any of you guys know why movies switched from valuing Poe to valuing Lovecraft? Also, do you know the earliest depictions of Lovecraft or as themes in movies?

Speaker 1 Thanks for the great pod, Rob, last name withheld.

Speaker 2 So Dan, you're talking about the Haunted Palace there?

Speaker 1 That was, yes, that was.

Speaker 2 I believe that in that, that, I believe, is the first movie that really depicts Lovecraft stuff.

Speaker 3 It's going to be funny that it's on the case of Charles Dexter Ward, actually.

Speaker 1 So the credits, I can give you more info than the credits do, but it's always been like a great movie piece of trivia that it says edgar allan poe's but it's actually based on a lovecraft story oh it's right i think it's kind of funny that the director who's most associated with lovecraft stuff also had a huge affection for edgar allan poe and i'm of course talking about the late great stuart gordon yeah um having done a bunch of stuff and i think one of his last projects that unfortunately never got funded was a uh edgar allan poe biopic or like a biopic about edgar allan poe starring jeffrey combs well because jeffrey combs would do he would do that one-man show as Edgar Allan Poe.

Speaker 2 I think so.

Speaker 2 The switch from Poe to Lovecraft is an interesting one. And I have a couple possible explanations for it.
Let's see what you guys think about these.

Speaker 2 One of them is literally just the changing of generations. Poe was around since the mid-19th century, and Lovecraft wasn't writing until the early 20th century.

Speaker 2 And so there's the people who were making movies earlier on would not be as aware of Lovecraft's work, but they were aware of Poe's work.

Speaker 2 And then later on, you have guys who are writing movies in the 60s. They know Lovecraft's work because that's the stuff it's been around for longer and they percolated with it.

Speaker 2 But I think there's also a, Poe and Lovecraft, they approach similar themes, which is kind of like the idea that behind normal life, there is this darker world or this darker feeling that you can't, once you know it exists, you can't ignore it.

Speaker 2 And there's a coldness about it. It does not care about you necessarily, but now

Speaker 1 it affects you.

Speaker 2 And Poe's was very much for a 19th century world, a pre-industrial world in a lot of ways. And Lovecraft's is very much for a modern world.

Speaker 2 And I think that's the, there's a, there's a greater like mass dehumanization in Lovecraft's work than there is in Poe's. And I think that's a big, I think they speak to different people.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, I was going to say something similar that I feel like Poe, there's a gothic quality to his work that like, unless you are deliberately doing a throwback might feel old-fashioned to people these days, whereas kind of the more upfront sort of unknowability of the horror and Lovecraft might speak to modern people more.

Speaker 2 And you could also say Poe doesn't have monsters.

Speaker 1 Poe has

Speaker 2 strange things and crazy people, but he doesn't have monsters.

Speaker 1 And Lovecraft doesn't eat monsters.

Speaker 2 He doesn't have strange things. Stranger Things was based on a, they say Edgar Allan Poe's Stranger Things, but really it's based on H.B.
Lovecraft.

Speaker 2 And I think they said, once you get to a world that is, I mean, Poe also like Roger Carmen was especially, he loved Edgar Allan Poe and he's making all those Poe movies, but I think it was also a way to like class up what he was doing.

Speaker 2 you know if he can say this is an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe then there's instantly a literary quality to it which is kind of what they did in the 30s with like movies like the raven or the black cat where they're like

Speaker 3 one one theory I have

Speaker 3 is that Poe is is kind of

Speaker 3 like like you guys said if if you're doing something in the 1800s Poe sticks firmly there Lovecraft seems to be much easier to adapt to the modern era Yes, I think that's true.

Speaker 1 And futuristic.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and futuristic eras. And also that, like, Poe was respectable when people were making movies in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and Lovecraft was not.
And it wasn't until probably,

Speaker 2 I don't even know, maybe like the 90s or later that Lovecraft was respectable. That it would Lovecraft was like literature.

Speaker 3 Poe is Argento and Lovecraft is fulchy.

Speaker 2 I guess that's a way to put it.

Speaker 1 But when we say respectable, we also should, of course,

Speaker 1 note that we mean that his literary works became respectable. Oh, not that even though his personal views have become less.

Speaker 1 Lovecraft is less respectable.

Speaker 1 Daniel is exclusively defending Lovecraft's music.

Speaker 2 But also Edgar Allan Poe was like a not great guy.

Speaker 2 I just purely mean that their work has been accepted as literature

Speaker 2 at different times.

Speaker 2 And also that there's a scale difference. Like Poe is working on the scale of

Speaker 2 regular people for the most part, whereas Lovecraft is working on these enormous cosmic scales.

Speaker 2 And so, I think that movies, it's hard to make like a little movie about a little, a little spookiness, unless it's like it's a super low-budget movie. Whereas,

Speaker 2 but even then, like, you don't see a lot of like big budget movies based on you don't like big studios don't make Lovecraft movies that much.

Speaker 1 They're like, I want to

Speaker 1 nah, giant penguins, fuck off.

Speaker 3 Speaking Speaking of Poe, I'd love for somebody to do an adaptation of Hop Frog and do it straight, like just

Speaker 3 directly from the story.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's you get some of that in

Speaker 2 Mask of the Red Death, right? And Fool's Fire, you're right, it's basically Hop Frog. Yeah, that's Hop Rog.
Yeah, yeah. But Fool's Fire, I mean, it's all these puppets and stuff.

Speaker 2 Like, it's not, it's not. Oh, never seen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a very straight adaptation.

Speaker 2 It's something Julie Tamor did years ago that's a, where it's like, I think the main character is a person, and

Speaker 2 there's like two human actors in it, and the rest are all big puppets. Like the king and everything are all puppets.

Speaker 1 This was on stage, right? No,

Speaker 2 it was like a TV special. And they, because I used to show it on PBS, and I remember seeing it as a kid, and it scared the hell out of me.
I thought it was so strange.

Speaker 1 I'll look in. I'll dig it up.

Speaker 3 I want to see that.

Speaker 1 Let's get to the second letter. So that was it.

Speaker 2 Hopefully that was an interesting answer. It wasn't a funny answer.

Speaker 1 Hell, you know. I made some fucking jokes, dude.
Yeah, that's true. That's just

Speaker 1 a lot of people. I made funny jokes.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 1 This is my fucking performance review day. But Dan was right.

Speaker 3 Chris's Lovecraft would be a good epic rack battle of history.

Speaker 1 So, Dan, you and Elliot can do this cool YouTube video where one of you is on the ground and the other is

Speaker 1 rapping at each other. I'm thinking

Speaker 1 should be Lovecraft. And some of us just do some sick raps against each other.

Speaker 2 But I will say, as Dan said, as someone who is a huge fan of Lovecraft's work, obviously his personal views are terrible.

Speaker 2 He was a huge racist. A lot of racism baked into his work in bad ways, you know.

Speaker 1 So both of these letters,

Speaker 1 we're taping this during October, but this is a, this will come out in November, but they both are sort of more October letters.

Speaker 1 This is from Heather. Hopefully the world is less spooky when this comes out.
This is from Heather, who writes.

Speaker 2 Heather writes, how's your October going?

Speaker 1 As part of the spooky season, I was re-watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and my husband and I were discussing parties and movies.

Speaker 1 If you had to choose choose any party in a movie to attend, which would it be? The obvious answer is say it with me, Stu, Bilbo's 111th birthday party. That would be awesome.

Speaker 1 But what other party would you nobody's going to disappear?

Speaker 1 What other party?

Speaker 2 You know that going into the party. At least no one's going to disappear at the end.
Certainly not the birthday boy.

Speaker 3 When you said that me and Stuart are going to say it together, I thought for sure you were going to say Toga.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, that's,

Speaker 1 I feel like I've progressed emotionally past the Toga toga party and Animal Day Eyes while I shut one maybe that would. Yeah, yeah, that's I do not want to be at that party at all.

Speaker 2 So Dan sends us the questions ahead of time, but he doesn't send us the full letters. So my answer was going to be the party in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Speaker 2 But I think instead I'm going to say the New Year's Eve party and the Thin Man,

Speaker 2 when it's all of, it's all of the high society types and Nick Charles's like.

Speaker 2 crime buddies and they're all and everyone's getting drunk and like being silly and it just seems like a really fun party, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 I'm having trouble thinking of parties, but so I'm gonna sidestep this question with a different answer, which is

Speaker 1 concerts I wish I could be at. And that, of course, would be the concert from the end of Bill and Ted's bogus journey when the robots come and punch off other robots' heads.

Speaker 1 If you saw that in a concert, you would lose your shit. I would shit my pants.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and imagine how much scarier it would be if you were at an opera and actual human sever heads were thrown at you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, that would be incredible. If only I could attend such an opera.
I I think that the, I think there's a whole genre of

Speaker 1 like teen parties and teen comedies that are like so much more impressive than any party that I ever experienced when I was young.

Speaker 2 Any teen party in a movie where there's a stage and someone is performing using an actual microphone?

Speaker 1 Oh my God. If I was at that party where they play Scotty Doesn't Know the Song of the Spirit.
Let me be clear. Also,

Speaker 1 in this scenario, I am also a teen. I'm not just me at my grenade hanging.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, similarly. If I did the 50 or 100, I would like that party.
The one Dave just said where old Dan is at the teens party.

Speaker 2 Similarly, if I'm not me, but I'm a gremlin, I want to be the party the gremlins are throwing at the bar and gremlins. That's they're having a great time.

Speaker 1 Or you could go perhaps to any of those gremlins.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But if I'm not a gremlin, I want to be doing 30. Yeah, or I could just go watch Snow White.
They're having a great time too. Gremlins have a great time.

Speaker 1 They do have a great time.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 2 Hey, look. Look at the real heroes of that movie because they enjoy themselves.

Speaker 1 Let's.

Speaker 1 I don't like anything as much as gremlins like breaking shit.

Speaker 3 My answer is simple. I want to go to this sleazy ass bachelor party from Bachelor Party just so I could meet Tom Hanks.

Speaker 1 That's it. Yeah, that's

Speaker 1 good. Then I'd leave.
I mean, this is a mainstream comedy that has like

Speaker 3 mule sex jokes in 1984.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, it's a very well, yeah, only in 1984. With, I mean, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 Well, that's what Orwell said. What he said, if you want to see the future, imagine a boot stomping on a donkey sex joke for all eternity.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 1984.

Speaker 2 Watching that, I mean, I haven't seen that movie in such a long time, but I have to imagine watching that movie is like seeing your actual dad's bachelor party stuff.

Speaker 2 And you'll be like, oh, dad, like, what are you doing, Dad?

Speaker 1 Gross.

Speaker 3 It's such an amiable movie, but so many sleazy things happen.

Speaker 1 Why do they order hot dogs at the male, all-male review?

Speaker 1 It's a football.

Speaker 1 Let us move on to recommendations, movies that are probably a better use of your time than The Crow 2020. Is that even possible?

Speaker 1 I'm going to recommend a movie, as I mentioned, though this is in November. We're recording in October.
I saw this at a friend's Halloween

Speaker 1 horror movie marathon. Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Stuart, for the permission. I see what you're going to recommend.
And this has been on my watch list for a really long time, and I keep mean to watch it. You're building up suspense.

Speaker 1 The film that Stuart wants to watch, and I have seen and recommend, is Next of Kin from 1982. It is an Australian horror movie.

Speaker 1 It is set in

Speaker 1 an old folks' home in a remote area of Australia.

Speaker 1 There are a series of mysterious deaths. It's kind of like

Speaker 1 an Australian jallow in a weird way. It starts out pretty slowly, but as it goes on,

Speaker 1 it cooks and rises to a truly over-the-top great engine so uh i recommend next of kin how do you deep cut man that's impressive all i remember about that is the bathtub scene yeah it was um it was on i think criterion or something as part of their like some weirdo collection um not the patrick swayzee next of kin right yeah not the patrick swayzey one did you did you you said you saw it at a party i was just wondering how i could stream this sucker uh well i because i saw it at a party i'm not sure i think it was on

Speaker 1 a file. I think it was on Shudder for a while, but maybe not anymore.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 I'm going to recommend a movie I saw a couple weeks ago that I've been sitting with and I really liked, and that is the newest Luca Guadagino movie After the Hunt.

Speaker 1 This is the movie that stars Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, IO

Speaker 1 Edabiri. Did I say it right? It was a near.
Okay, it doesn't. Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloe Savini.

Speaker 1 This is a movie,

Speaker 1 it's hard to explain exactly what it's about, but it is about

Speaker 1 allegations of sexual assault or sexual, something like that, in academia and the complications that are caused by everybody's various,

Speaker 1 like looking after their own interests and their everybody's,

Speaker 1 as the viewer does not get to actually see any of what happens. It's all based on everyone's accounts.

Speaker 1 It's a complicated movie, and I think it's the kind of movie that intentionally is designed to force you to question your own biases.

Speaker 1 It is certainly not a movie for everyone, and it deals with some topics that not everybody's going to like.

Speaker 1 But it is a Luca Guadagino movie, so it's beautifully made, and I think it's incredibly well acted. Andrew Garfield, in particular, is incredible.

Speaker 1 And I think it's, yeah, I think it's a really great movie, and I think it's going to

Speaker 1 like, you know, again, I think it's not a movie for everyone, but I think there's a lot of really good stuff in there. So check it out if that sounds interesting to you.

Speaker 3 Saw somebody refer to Cancel Culture, the movie.

Speaker 1 That's, I mean, that is certainly

Speaker 1 a relatively low media literacy take on the movie.

Speaker 2 That's what people said about tar, too, right?

Speaker 1 Well, that's the thing. I feel like it's it's I think it is suffering from a similar, uh, some of the the same responses that some folks had to tar.

Speaker 2 Ah, well, I want to talk about a movie that is equally complicated, equally complex,

Speaker 2 and that is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from 1954, which my younger son is in a big Jules Verne phase right now.

Speaker 2 And so we were watching, and this is one that I had not seen in so many years, and I didn't really remember very well. And we started watching it, and he was just enthralled by it.

Speaker 2 And I was like, this is a much better movie than I remember it being. Like, it moves moves real well.
The performers in it are great.

Speaker 2 Kirk Douglas is having, seems to be having so much fun playing this kind of like his old-fashioned type of character, which is kind of like a brash kind of like guy who doesn't think through things, as opposed to the Spartacus type of, you know, guy who is a noble hero type thing.

Speaker 2 There's one scene involving natives on an island that are probably cannibals that I, that.

Speaker 2 isn't that even though my son loved it i was like this is not this has aged slightly less well but the effects in it look great still all the design stuff looks really great the underwater stuff is still really cool.

Speaker 2 And it's just a super fun movie. It was just, it's just like a fun, old-fashioned adventure movie.
And it feels like it is not,

Speaker 2 it's not afraid to be like fun, but it's also not stupid, you know? So I'd recommend it. It's the original, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
By original, I mean, I think the

Speaker 2 50s one. I mean, obviously the book is the original.

Speaker 1 I remember as a kid just being blown away by the sets. Like the sets are so cool.

Speaker 3 The scale of it is wild, especially if you're a a kid i i saw it when i was like 10 and i loved it i haven't seen it since but it's it's a great adventure movie the the the nautilus effects and everything like that they all still work great like it it really looks cool so

Speaker 3 i would like to recommend an australian art film called primitive war and it is about

Speaker 3 a platoon of vietnam soldiers who are sent on a very dangerous mission and they come across an entire area populated by dinosaurs And it is fun.

Speaker 3 It is, like, it feels like an 80s action movie combined with like a Spielberg aspirant. Not Spielberg, but somebody who is aping Spielberg.
Dare I even say Joe Dante-ish. It is fun.

Speaker 3 Got Jeremy Pippin, which I don't love.

Speaker 1 But other than that, it is, and it's a bit over long.

Speaker 3 It's over two hours. But it's on VOD now.
It's called Primitive War. It is,

Speaker 3 let's put it this way. It's better than the last five Jurassic sequels.

Speaker 1 No bullshit.

Speaker 1 Well, that's been.

Speaker 1 It's also got the brother from True Blood with the really crazy AMS. Ryan Quanton.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, Stuart, this is still up your alley. Anybody would like it, but I was pleasantly surprised.
I thought it'd be like, you know, a bunch of dead air and two good action scenes.

Speaker 1 Nope.

Speaker 3 It's fun. Throughout, it is a good B movie.

Speaker 1 That has been, this has been the first of our episodes in Movember, as I would like to remind listeners that we are doing four full episodes

Speaker 1 in this month. So you're welcome.
Those of you who

Speaker 1 aren't as into the minis as you are the main episodes where we talk about a bad movie, you get four.

Speaker 3 If you're not listening to that two-boy, two-boy, two-beat.

Speaker 1 If you're not listening to those episodes, come on you're missing some gold uh-huh yeah but we thought why not give why don't why don't we give you mo flophouse in the form of four full episodes with four great guests i'm so excited for the rest of movember i'm so excited to see if it breaks the flop house if we can't handle it well because there we are the crucible in which we form an even stronger bond pick a music

Speaker 1 we did pick a mushroom

Speaker 1 uh along with this of course we of course have flop tv but we also have a live show that we're flying to in chicago so it's a lot hold on so we might be broken we might get

Speaker 1 but uh speaking of i'm gonna have to quit my other jobs and dedicate myself wholly to the flop house speaking of great guests you will be beautifully broken beautifully broken thank you scott for being here scott before we fully sign off are there things you would like to plug or point people to oh well uh

Speaker 3 Anybody who's listened to my podcast overhated would know that these three gentlemen separately have all guested at one time or another. And I I hope to have Elliot back on again soon.

Speaker 3 Dan and I just recently did an episode on 1981's Neighbors,

Speaker 3 which is a fascinating, weird comedy.

Speaker 3 Stewart, what was your last episode on Overhated?

Speaker 1 We did Ice Pirates. The Ice Pirates.
Yes, yes, beautiful.

Speaker 3 And a couple years ago, Elliot, you did.

Speaker 1 I don't remember off the top of my head.

Speaker 1 In a while.

Speaker 3 But we're going to have him back soon.

Speaker 2 And I would love to be back soon.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's just basically. Oh, we we did Masters of the Universe, that's Masters of the Universe 1987, perfect, yes.
And it's basically,

Speaker 3 I'm a huge fan of the Flophouse and any kind of uh

Speaker 3 mystery science theater. Anytime you're knocking a bad or questionable movie, I'm a huge fan.
But years ago, I thought, why not try to do the opposite?

Speaker 3 Why not try to take your Ishtars, your water worlds, your cat women, and talk about why they're so dis

Speaker 3 disgustingly hated? Is there some historical reference? Is there some kind of reason? And the guest will always like the movie.

Speaker 1 I do like the twist where it is like a,

Speaker 1 in a way, almost like defending a movie that you remember kind of liking or like at least trying to take a different perspective on it. Yeah.
Yep.

Speaker 3 You can find it at patreon.com slash Scott E. Weinberg to subscribe.
And if you go to your normal podcatcher, you will find some free episodes, but it's mostly a Patreon program.

Speaker 3 And I am extremely grateful grateful to all the patrons and the guests like these three here. So thank you.

Speaker 1 Well, we want to.

Speaker 2 Thanks so much for joining us today.

Speaker 1 Yes. Oh, it was a wall.

Speaker 3 You know, I love doing this show. I love it.

Speaker 1 And in addition to thanking Scott, we would also like to thank Alex Smith, our producer. He goes by the name Howell Dotty.

Speaker 1 You can find his music at Bandcamp. You can find him on Twitch doing Twitch streams.
You can look up his podcast.

Speaker 1 I'd like to thank our network, MaximumFun. MaximumFun.org is where you find all the great Max Fun shows, and you can become a member who supports us and get access to bonus content.

Speaker 1 But for this episode of the Flop House, I have been Dan McCoy. I am still Stuart Wellington.

Speaker 2 I am Elliot Kalen, the robot.

Speaker 3 I remain Scott E. Weinberg.

Speaker 1 Also, a robot. Also, a robot.
Goodbye. The robot virus is catching.

Speaker 1 No, they're all becoming robots now.

Speaker 1 I'm trying to get us both better in the voice.

Speaker 2 You were both in the screen.

Speaker 1 I know, but the screen was more cut off somehow.

Speaker 3 Well, we're not going to use any of this video, are we?

Speaker 1 Because I hate V-Mot.

Speaker 1 We're going to use a little clip, probably,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 I don't know. Not the whole thing.
Not the whole thing. Okay.
We have to, we use a little clip for promos. Is that okay, Scott, if we use a few short clips for social media promotion? Yes,

Speaker 2 none of them will be longer than 17 minutes.

Speaker 1 Okay, no.

Speaker 1 Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows.

Speaker 2 Supported directly by you.