Ep.#466 - The One, with Michael Shanks

Speaker 1 Hey, listeners, just a few quick words up at the top to remind you that Flop TV is going on right now. It's the first Saturday of every month.

Speaker 1 If you want to watch it live and chat with other listeners in the chat, viewers in the chat, send us some messages to be answered perhaps at the end of the show.

Speaker 1 We've been having a lot of fun going through famous bad movies of the decades. All of that will be available video on demand as well for ticket holders up through the end of the flop TV season.

Speaker 1 You can get a season pass and watch all of them. You can binge them during the holidays.
It's a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 So if you're interested, go to theflophouse.simpletics.com and check out our extra flop streams. On this episode, we discuss The One.

Speaker 1 A movie so filled with new metal that it is only allowed to see its children on weekends.

Speaker 1 Hey, everyone, welcome to the Flop House. I'm Dan McCoy.
Oh, hey, Dan, I'm Stuart Wellington.

Speaker 2 Dan, Stuart, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Elliot Kaelin, and I think I have the answers to your problems.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's nice to hear. And we are joined today.
Wait, wait, wait. I want the answers to my problems.

Speaker 2 No, you know what? The time is over. Stuart, we're fine.

Speaker 1 Let's move along. Live with your problems.
And we are joined today by writer-director of the hit movie together. That's right, Michael Shanks is here.

Speaker 3 Hey, guys. Great to be here.
Long time, first time. Love the show.

Speaker 1 Oh, thank you.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 The most professional a guest has ever introduced themselves.

Speaker 1 I'm very impressed.

Speaker 3 I am to please.

Speaker 1 Elliot has not had the pleasure in person yet, but we had a good time here in Brooklyn

Speaker 1 getting to meet Michael when he was promoting his movie together and going out and having a bunch of tequila and soda. Yep, and Dan.

Speaker 1 Dan is still shaking from the moment when Alice and Bree touched him on the arm. Squeezed my shoulder briefly.

Speaker 3 I'm sure that's true because Dan sent me a message afterwards saying, thanks for making that happen.

Speaker 1 There's a tone of voice that you're adding.

Speaker 1 Yeah, normally it was actually way creepier in his head. No,

Speaker 2 I imagine the message we're like, oh, thanks for making that happen.

Speaker 1 There you go. Oh, boy.
Oh, geez.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 this is a, this is a, we're going back. So what happened was

Speaker 1 we were dreaming.

Speaker 2 So this is a podcast. This is a podcast where we watch a bad movie and we talk about it.

Speaker 1 We're all already telling the story. Okay, so this podcast where we watch a movie and talk about it.
Well, back after watching

Speaker 1 a screening of Together, we were all drinking at the Brooklyn Inn along with your friend

Speaker 1 Kiss.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 3 Kiss, who is a very tall man. And at a certain point, some guy came up to him and said, mate, we've been taking, I just do an Australian voice when I do a drunk guy, sorry.

Speaker 3 Like, mate, we've been taking bets.

Speaker 1 How tall are you?

Speaker 3 And there were a bunch of people staring at him from across the bar.

Speaker 1 Very rude thing to do.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, that's the Brooklyn Sometimes they draw, let's say, a younger crowd who don't know how to behave themselves.

Speaker 2 I'm assuming they were just surprised because the only Kess they were familiar with was the kestrel from the movie Kess, which is very cool.

Speaker 1 I will say, I mean, like, yeah, very hard.

Speaker 2 Oh, what a sad movie.

Speaker 1 Clearly, a kind of a rude question to ask,

Speaker 1 but a very striking man, like

Speaker 1 a barbarian.

Speaker 2 He struck them after they asked the

Speaker 1 romance novel cover. Islam

Speaker 1 struck. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Very handsome, very tall. I don't think that's a new experience for Kess.
And just quick shout out to Kess. Actually, 10 years ago, Kess turned me onto the show, and I've been listening ever since.

Speaker 1 Yep, never stopped. And Kess was there to witness the moment when I said, you should, I think I was like five or six drinks in.
I'm like, you should totally be on the show and we should do the one.

Speaker 1 I think we were both talking about how great the one is and Dan's like, what?

Speaker 1 Scoffed, I think. I didn't.
I wasn't dubious. I was just, I never had gotten around to seeing the one.
And I'd only seen it once in the theater because, you know, it's called The One.

Speaker 1 So I figured I could only watch it the one time.

Speaker 1 And it. That's the instruction.
Yeah, it struck me. And I was like, I need to, like, this movie was great.
And so I was very nervous to re-watch it.

Speaker 1 Because, you know, when you watch a movie from, what, 24 years ago?

Speaker 2 You were like, I can only watch this movie once every 24 years. Otherwise, it'll overwhelm me too much.

Speaker 1 That's the thing.

Speaker 1 I mean, you have movies like that. There's some movies that I've watched, and I'm like, like, I really want to re-watch.
I saw the TV Glow, but I'm like, the first time I watched it was super intense.

Speaker 1 I don't know if I'm ready to do it again. Yeah, I mean, I remember when I was on

Speaker 2 lazy Saturday sitting around, I remember a friend of mine seeing Irreversible in the theaters and saying, it was great. I'm never going to watch it again.
And I was like, yeah, I understand that.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah, I just watched Salo or 120 Days of Sodom in the theater a few weeks back.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I was like,

Speaker 1 just

Speaker 1 caught a matinee of that one. Yeah,

Speaker 2 it was the early day showing where you can bring toddlers if they talk in the theater.

Speaker 1 Open captions. Yeah, the

Speaker 1 open captions.

Speaker 2 So yeah, it was the moms and babies. So what was where was this? I assume this was a special screening.
It's not having another limited run or something.

Speaker 1 Someone's crazy. I think so.

Speaker 3 I don't think it's being rebooted anytime soon.

Speaker 3 It was Cinnamonova in Melbourne doing a retrospective.

Speaker 2 Oh, cool.

Speaker 2 That would be a very funny thing if they're like, we're running out of IP. I guess we got to do sallow.

Speaker 3 I could imagine somebody like Parker Finn or doing it, somebody that's that's got kind of a

Speaker 3 horror sensibility that's sort of got a bit of like a prankster heart as well.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 3 Ariaster maybe producing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, one of the, or one of the many provocateurs working in cinema these days. They're like,

Speaker 1 what if there were 121 days?

Speaker 1 Be long.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 It was better when it was sallower than 120 days of summer.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 well,

Speaker 3 I can talk a bit about my history history with the one, which is because it was my memory that I brought it up. I'm not trying to claim responsibility.

Speaker 3 I was, except for the fact that I was worried that maybe it was my fault if you watched this and hated it.

Speaker 3 But my memory of this film was that it came out when I was 10, and I saw the trailer, and I was so excited because in the trailer, there was this shot that had this, we'll talk about it, this kind of mixed time remapping bullet time shot.

Speaker 3 And Jet Lee was in it, who I thought was the coolest guy. And then I watched it at a sleepover at my friend Flynn Hargreaves' house, uh, in Wichita.

Speaker 2 Shout out to Flynn Hargreave, yeah, shout out, and uh, I feel like I feel like we need the audience needs a like cast of characters for all for everyone in Michael's life that is getting mentioned tonight.

Speaker 1 We'll hand out

Speaker 1 a pamphlet like a dune, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 There was a kid named Jerry Tonkin Hill that I barely remember, but I've always thought that was a fun name.

Speaker 3 And I believe we rented this in like a we went out to Blockbuster or Video Easy and got uh this and Jimmy Neutron.

Speaker 1 And we watched it. Video Easy is a great fucking name.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that was the other Blockbuster kind of competing franchise down here.

Speaker 3 And watched this and Jimmy Neutron. And I remember being a little disappointed by both.
Really disappointed by Jimmy Neutron.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a bit.

Speaker 3 I'd kind of forgotten everything about the one except for the cool bullet time and

Speaker 3 the amazing final moment, which we'll get to. But I went to re-watch the final moment after watching it, watching the whole film the other day.
And the bar on my YouTube history was fully read.

Speaker 1 I've definitely watched that final shot multiple times.

Speaker 2 It's weird when you see a movie that seems to be like, it's only in the last minute that it's like, here's the movie. And you're like, wait, what?

Speaker 1 Hold on a second. It's the funny thing.
This is the movie I want to see the whole time.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's, yeah, it's like the end of what, Dead or Alive or any of those other movies where you're like, holy shit, where was this movie where they're pulling like balls of light out of their chests?

Speaker 1 Okay, Dan.

Speaker 3 And just because of the age that I am, I'm just, I'm quite nostalgic for like new metal cinema,

Speaker 3 going back to things like the one or like Underworld or like House of Wax. Just there's a certain era of like early 2000s, leather coats and papa roach

Speaker 1 just kind of

Speaker 1 makes it a vibe.

Speaker 1 What makes the recent Crow remake such a bummer for me is because I'm like, you should have just fucking swapped the fucking soundtrack with this stuff.

Speaker 1 Like throw in maybe some deft tones for the love scenes, but like, oh, yeah. Instead of like, whatever, you know, whatever.

Speaker 2 It's funny because, as Michael, the way you feel about that, because I'm a little bit older than you, is the way that I feel about like mid-90s stuff, where it's like, oh, yeah, all this stuff where the internet, they didn't really know what it was.

Speaker 2 You know, this is great. All this glowing blue and gray and stuff.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, I agree with you, Elliot. Although, like, I find as I get older, my window of nostalgia grows.
Like, stuff like what Michael's talking about is like stuff that like drove me nuts at the time.

Speaker 1 And now I'm like,

Speaker 1 it's like, it's like a hot, warm bath.

Speaker 1 once it's no longer like a limp biscuit

Speaker 2 once it's no longer current and therefore not a thing that you have to have like a real opinion on it's so much like the the right i'm working on something right now that has a lot of 90s music in it and it's like yeah well we definitely need to try to put in this song that i hated when it was new like we have to have it in there so well yeah i mean it's also like the degree to which it's like shoved in your face versus like now i'm choosing to shove it in my own face

Speaker 1 so dan did you that's my consent, Dan. You're right.
It's very important. Did you have any experience with the one, either when it came out or afterwards? My memory of it was just that I was like.

Speaker 1 What's your favorite Jet Lee movie of all time, Dan?

Speaker 1 I don't know that I've seen a lot of Jet Lee. Don't say Lethal Weapon 4.
He was in that. I remember

Speaker 1 on the leash.

Speaker 1 Slash Danny the dog.

Speaker 1 And that's where he's literally a freak on a leash. Yeah, that's true.
Not even like one of the Once Upon a Time in China movies or anything. I haven't seen them.

Speaker 1 No, I know I must have seen him in, you know, like foreign language pictures. Hero, maybe?

Speaker 1 Yeah. No.
I've never seen the hero in the theater.

Speaker 2 That's a good thing. The other one's great.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. I remember seeing Romeo Must Die, which I think it features Ja Rule, maybe

Speaker 1 TMX. I can't remember.

Speaker 2 I used to get that mixed up with Romeo is bleeding. Romeo's having a hard time of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 I don't think things are going to end well for young Romeo.

Speaker 1 This is just so funny. Same Juliet.
Why not? And Romeo.

Speaker 2 I didn't see the one in the theaters, but I remembered so well from the commercials, the shot of him picking up that motorcycle and hitting somebody. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes, I remember that. I was literally

Speaker 1 holds up.

Speaker 1 The one thing I was going to say was like my history with it was like when I was a kid, I was such a, I was so enthralled to like reading Roger Ebert's reviews of things, and he did not like this movie.

Speaker 1 So I'm like, eh, okay. You know, like it was, it didn't speak to me, so I didn't seek it out.
But now I'm like, yeah, this is the kind of dumb stuff that I want. I feel like Roger

Speaker 2 is a few years away from there's a review he did whenever, or maybe it was before. This when did Air Force One come out? Was that in the early 2000s? Was that in the late 90s?

Speaker 1 I think late 90s.

Speaker 2 Oh, never mind then. Because he wrote this review of

Speaker 2 a Gamera movie.

Speaker 2 And he was like, you know, when you grow up, you think you're supposed to like what are grown-up movies, something like Air Force One, but sometimes you just want to see a giant turtle flying around the screen and you get bored by something like Air Force One.

Speaker 2 And I feel like he've swung back and forth between that feeling and the something like the one where he's like, ugh, gross, dumb.

Speaker 1 I mainly feel like it would be weird if Air Force One came out like shortly after 9-11, right? Wouldn't that have been weird? Yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 That sure would have been weird. That sure would have been very weird.

Speaker 1 I do feel that part of the problem is at the time. I like this movie, which came out almost two months from 9-11.
At the time, like as we were saying.

Speaker 2 It came out November 2nd, it says. So it was a little bit less than a month after 9-11.

Speaker 1 As we were saying about like what's getting shoved in your face, like at the time, I feel like this was very much like looked at as like, oh, it's chasing the Matrix, but without

Speaker 1 the headiness, without

Speaker 1 the skill that is shown in that movie, so like people were down on it.

Speaker 1 Whereas now, as it stands alone, I'm like, yeah, like this is a movie where like Jason Statham is in it, and that's the level I see. And Del Rolando.
And Del Rolando.

Speaker 1 I mean, you do point, you said without the skill, which is, is true.

Speaker 1 However, it does have a skill that I feel like the Matrix does not quite have, and that is Jet Li's incredible martial arts ability.

Speaker 2 Well, and we'll talk about that.

Speaker 2 I feel like the problem with a movie like this is that it undervalues and undercuts Jet Li's actual martial art prowess with all the effects and stuff like that that it uses.

Speaker 1 Okay, so let's get into the movie. Why don't we?

Speaker 1 So, we open up with, we get an open, we open with like a text sequence that kind of feels like a, like you're at a seminar and they're explaining things to you.

Speaker 2 It feels like you're at a planetarium.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Like the trailer had started playing. I rented the wrong thing.

Speaker 1 It feels like

Speaker 1 an ad for another movie.

Speaker 2 Here's an Apple TV show that you're going to want to, that we're going to advertise for you before the movie starts.

Speaker 2 It's weird to start a movie this way, but Stuart, describe it.

Speaker 1 So like, yeah, so the text keeps like appearing on screen. It's kind of like a blue background, like a screensaver.

Speaker 1 And the opening text explains that, you know, we live in a multiverse. It's not just a singular dimension, but many dimensions.

Speaker 1 Something that is

Speaker 1 nowadays does not need explaining anymore. Every movie, every movie, action movie takes place in the multiple times.
Every movie

Speaker 1 takes place in the multiverse.

Speaker 1 The next fucking

Speaker 1 Fast and Furious, they're going to have like a multiverse or something, right?

Speaker 1 Family is multi-dimensional.

Speaker 2 I forgot who it was.

Speaker 2 I forgot who it was who was telling me that their theory about the next Fast and Furious is that they are building up to a multiverse time travel story so that they can go back in time and have Paul Walker in it again.

Speaker 2 And Vindy's will meet himself in the past and can reflect on how much he's changed over the course of the movie.

Speaker 1 That's actually a really good idea.

Speaker 2 I I think they're going to do it. But I think now you'd have to use a movie that has an opening once it goes, the opening to a movie, you have to say, there is one universe, just one.

Speaker 2 Decisions are irrevocable.

Speaker 1 There's only one of you. You are unique.

Speaker 2 This is that story.

Speaker 1 And don't try and fly super fast and make the world go backwards and go back in time. That doesn't work here at all.

Speaker 2 It doesn't really work that way. That's not how time works.
Yes, gravity does bend space-time because it is one fourth-dimensional fabric, but not in the way that they do it in that other movie.

Speaker 2 You know the one I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 I do think it's funny. The story begins with, yeah.
We had to like build up to the current multiverses we have with like the infinite multiverses because this one's just like the cut rate.

Speaker 1 We're like, yeah, there's 125 of them.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's a very funny thing. It is very funny, yeah.

Speaker 1 We had to figure out how many universes.

Speaker 2 It's 125.

Speaker 1 That's it.

Speaker 1 This movie had like that idea hadn't been done to death yet.

Speaker 2 That's true.

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 3 Not in the movie. It's crazy that like the

Speaker 3 Jason Statham like Delroy Lindo characters that we'll get to.

Speaker 3 That is something that's so in like, I haven't watched a fears but like rick and morty this sort of like we've got to contain like police the multiverse same in like low-key and that kind of thing yeah so their characters

Speaker 1 their characters rotiker and funch are members of the mva or multiverse authority who are trying to keep the like law and order of the multiverse together.

Speaker 1 But before we get into that, we open in the Anubis universe and we open in a prison complex with a bunch of kind kind of sci-fi prison cops led by Dean Norris.

Speaker 1 We're all pretty excited to see him.

Speaker 1 And there's just like little things that make you believe that this isn't the world that we're used to. For instance, President Al Gore on TV.

Speaker 1 We are introduced to Jetly, playing a character named Lawless, who's in jail, and he's some kind of evil criminal that's being transferred.

Speaker 2 It's kind of nuts.

Speaker 2 You name your kid Lawless. He's going to end up in jail.
That's not fair. Unless you're losing Lawless, so I guess somehow escapes.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 She's on the run.

Speaker 1 He does have a scar on his face. That's his defining feature.

Speaker 1 And they,

Speaker 1 you know, after a little bit of a kerfuffle, they make it out to the parking lot where he is killed by, what, another Jet Lee?

Speaker 1 This is Gabriel Yu Law, an evil, multi-dimensional, space hopping guy who is going through the multiverse, killing all the versions of himself. He escapes the

Speaker 1 Highlander. He's like, Yeah, he's like that.
And in fact, there's a point where he's listening to various pop music and he turns it off until he gets to heavy metal and then he smiles.

Speaker 1 I'm like, he's the Kurgan. He is the Kurgan.
Yeah. Which, I mean, if you're going to rip a fucking movie, rip Highlander.
That's not a bad one.

Speaker 1 Okay, so he escapes. He escapes the police by running super fast.
He is pursued again by Del Roy Lindo and Jason State.

Speaker 2 I will say. Wait, I was going to say the super fast effects are very funny.
And it has the thing that

Speaker 2 it always happens in movies where someone's supposed to move really fast, and the effect is that they look like they're moving slower than a normal person. And it's just like,

Speaker 2 I don't know what to tell you, movies. Just make him do things faster instead of like, I don't know.
The effect is very funny.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a mix of

Speaker 1 sex under it.

Speaker 1 That's how he feels. He's moving fast.
Yeah. Yeah, there is a mix of him moving kind of normal speed while everyone around him moves slowly, which is like a bullet time.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But the funny times are when he's running, and all of a sudden, like the camera's on him, and then it's just like whoop-woop-boop-boo.

Speaker 3 He's kind of just a time-lapsing background.

Speaker 1 It's so funny.

Speaker 3 I'd love to just underscore that that bullet time effect, which was the thing I remember from the trailer as a kid, I think holds up like when he is kind of punching a guy and then he goes slow-mo, so gently like sprints away.

Speaker 3 And I love the moment Yulan appears, it drops straight into Drowning Pool's bodies. And it's like, oh, this era has arrived.

Speaker 3 It really woke me up. I was very, very excited by this opening scene.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 that's like that needle drop alone. I'm like, hell yeah.
This is, we're almost at the best one in the movie, but it's incredible.

Speaker 2 It is the movie is shouting at you. It looks like the future, but it's 2001.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 There was also a slight economy to the way they introduce Yulan that I quite appreciated.

Speaker 3 It's like a simple trick, but the opening five minutes is just people gearing up, like badasses, putting on armor and like taking all the precautions. And then you meet Jet Lee.

Speaker 3 So like, oh, that's a badass guy. Like, they need all these guys to protect him.
And then a different Jet Li immediately kills that guy.

Speaker 1 So you're like, this guy's even the bigger main boss of the video. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's great. And

Speaker 1 he is, you know, it's a science fiction movie because Jason Satham has long flowing hair.

Speaker 1 And they manage to track him down to where there's a

Speaker 1 they track him down to where there's a wormhole opening up to travel to a different dimension and they kind of hijack it using their own technology and they all get sucked through a portal that's Delroy Lindo, Jason Satham and Jetly all get sucked through a portal into the multiverse authority building where they're all kind of fucked up.

Speaker 1 I do kind of like that when they go through the wormhole, they're all like pretty fucked up for a bit, right?

Speaker 1 It looks so painful.

Speaker 2 It looks like it hurts so much. And why would anyone ever do this?

Speaker 2 And so, and that was a cool effect, but it wasn't just like, they didn't look cool, it looked like this is a terrible thing to have to go through, and they just end up all rolling around on the ground, screaming like babies.

Speaker 2 Like, it was great.

Speaker 1 We learn why you would want to do that because we find out that you law has been traveling to other dimensions, murdering other versions of himself.

Speaker 1 And we see a parade of other Jet Lee outfits with different haircuts, different haircuts.

Speaker 1 It's so great. Jetly, a man who, like,

Speaker 1 I would argue, has limited

Speaker 1 emotive range. Yes, So it's funny to see him in a bunch of different outfits.

Speaker 2 And I think working in English really highlights, I think, what that, the limitations of that.

Speaker 1 Steve Kasansky, I assume, saw that I logged this on my letterbox and sent me a photo of one of them. He's chilling with dreads.
Yeah, the red one.

Speaker 1 He's just like grinning. So he's like, so happy to have these dreads.

Speaker 3 The one of him in a blonde wig really got

Speaker 1 a laugh out loud from me.

Speaker 3 I was rereading the Wikipedia summary, and I think it says one of the jet Jetlies is a Rastafarian.

Speaker 1 They list the, I think the Wikipedia entry lists the characters in the movie and it lists Jetly and all of these variants and I'm like, he doesn't really play them.

Speaker 3 He stood in front of a blue screen and they put different wigs on him and wrapped it up in 20 minutes.

Speaker 2 In the same way that I played an old-time gunslinger when I had a

Speaker 2 novelty photo taken at a state fair, you know, I put a hat on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you are wanted dead or alive, though. Yeah, that's the only thing on a steel horse I ride.

Speaker 2 That's the thing. And they say, you should ride a real horse, not a steel horse.
And I go, no, I'm riding the steel one. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is why there's 125 worlds, though, I assume, because as we all know, there are just 125 types of people. Although,

Speaker 1 I guess there's one world that doesn't have one of them in it. There's the Jet Leeless world, which will the wig shop had 125 wigs, and they're like, gotta call it here.

Speaker 1 I would argue that one, one of the jet leases got killed by Yulaw. That's my

Speaker 1 favorite.

Speaker 2 I would like to believe that

Speaker 2 much as Star Wars aliens, they all do the same job, every member of that species, that on each of these Earths, everyone has dreads. There's another one, everyone's a surfer.

Speaker 2 There's another one where everyone's a murderer.

Speaker 1 I think that's a rick and morty bit right there. So,

Speaker 1 okay, so we learn that he has been traveling, murdering these versions of himself because by killing them, he kind of absorbs their energy Highlander style. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 No, not really, but we know what the plot of the movie is at this point, right?

Speaker 1 But also,

Speaker 1 he doesn't seem to absorb it directly. It's more that that energy gets dispersed than amongst the remaining characters.

Speaker 2 There's a certain amount of, Jason Statham explains it very clearly later on: that everyone is connected with their variants, and there's a certain amount of limited energy that everyone shares together.

Speaker 2 It's just like, I assume it's a reference to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, where they talk about how there's just one big soul and we just have a piece of it.

Speaker 1 And so, whenever,

Speaker 2 so whenever he kills one of his variants, all the other variants get a little bit stronger too. And now finally, when there's just him and our and

Speaker 1 Gabe, then they're very strong. Gabriel law, yeah.

Speaker 2 Gabe Real Law. They're finding they're both super strong, super fast, et cetera.

Speaker 1 Okay, so but let's cut back to you law. We're currently at the multiverse authority.
He is being sentenced to be sent to the Stygian universe

Speaker 1 to like exile on a prison planet. So they strap him to a chair and they're about to send him through a wormhole.
There's an audience, like people come in to watch this happen.

Speaker 1 And one of those audience members, that's right, it's Carla Gugino in kind of a space dress.

Speaker 2 And she is, she is, of course, introduced butt first because this is a classy movie.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Is it a space dress or is this really tight? It's a tight dress.
I'm very tight dress. It's kind of futuristic.

Speaker 2 But she does have space shoes because they have a hidden compartment

Speaker 2 that hides a mouse inside it.

Speaker 2 So this is the silliest plan to free a mass murderer.

Speaker 1 I love space.

Speaker 1 I love her so much that she shows up and during this during this procedure, I I guess, where they're going to send him through, he's sentencing, a little door opens in the back of her platforms, which I guarantee you, you can buy those exact same shoes down the street.

Speaker 1 And in that universe, sure.

Speaker 2 I don't know about this universe.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 a little mouse with a needle strapped to it comes wandering out of

Speaker 1 her shoe and walks up to the glass, at which point Jetly winks, and then we get the needle drop from disturbs down with the sickness. Down with the sickness, yeah.

Speaker 3 And it is. It kicks in with the ooh wah.

Speaker 1 Ooh, and it just drops. That is pure cinema to me.
You cannot show me a better example of movie making.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's right up there with the stand up and cheer moment of 2001.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, the mouse explodes, blowing the window out.

Speaker 2 Stuart, it's right up there with the cat going to Harry Lyme's shoes and the light from the window revealing that it's Orson Welles himself, Harry Lyme, in the third man.

Speaker 2 It's just right up there. Yeah, just pure cinema.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Storytelling. There's something that I'm confused about in this scenario.
And it's not what you might think. The third man?

Speaker 2 Well, anyway, so Joseph Kyle shows up in Vienna. He thinks his friend Harry Lime,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 1 I think that's where you're probably.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you've been calling it a Zion a lot of time. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 That seems wrong. That's a silly name for a thing.
No,

Speaker 1 it's Carlo Gagino. It's like, yeah, it's Carlo Gagino.

Speaker 2 What's the problem?

Speaker 1 Well, I guess the idea is like across the universes,

Speaker 1 these these two are together in different versions right yeah but he just arrived in this universe like which version

Speaker 1 of geogena is this is his home universe oh yeah we learned that he was a uh multiverse

Speaker 1 of the multiverse yeah thank you but he learned all this stuff and he's like i'm gonna be the best you know what no objections to the screenplay at all anymore it all makes sense it all hangs together

Speaker 3 a couple of notes on the mouse quickly did everybody else notice that it had giant testicles

Speaker 1 that was not someone big testicles

Speaker 2 on an iPad. That's why I didn't notice that.

Speaker 1 Do you think they pointing down the line of those things? Do you think they cast the mouse because of its testicles or in spite of?

Speaker 2 Oh, I think it was a real casting couch situation for sure. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Or do you think they had to make some prosthetics? You have some experience making prosthetic mouse testicles. I've got experience with prosthetic genitals.

Speaker 3 They look disgustingly real to me.

Speaker 3 It's such a crazy plan because there's no reason, as said, for it to be a mouse.

Speaker 1 It moves from her shoe two feet and then explodes. Like a two feet.

Speaker 2 She could have just taken a gun out of her shoe.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Do you think they tried a gun or a grenade and they're like, this doesn't work? Hey, my friend has this mouse with enormous tests.

Speaker 2 It feels like for a moment, for one day, David Lynch was on the set and they were like, we don't know how to free Jetly from the sneels.

Speaker 1 Why don't you have her shoe open up? And a mouse with big balls comes out and then he blows up.

Speaker 2 And they're like, David, you're a genius.

Speaker 1 We got to do it.

Speaker 1 See, the thing is, like, a gun would have set off the metal detector, but an exploding mouse doesn't. You're right.
She doesn't have metal shoes.

Speaker 1 She doesn't have metal shoes. Yeah, I mean, this is an era where there was like metal buckles on everything.

Speaker 2 And I guess they didn't have.

Speaker 2 I don't know what kind of x-ray technology they send them through that doesn't detect mice.

Speaker 3 The outfit she wears as well is just like immediately like, oh,

Speaker 3 she is the villain of this scene. Like, she comes in like an absolute sci-fi femme fatale.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. So

Speaker 1 he used this distraction to blast some cops, and then he reprograms the wormhole machine to send him to the last remaining universe. I think it's the.

Speaker 1 I wrote it down, but I can't read it. It's the Cheris universe.
He goes to the Cheris universe where the last remaining variant is at. That's right.
Gabriel Law. Let's find out how this goes down.

Speaker 1 I want to take a moment.

Speaker 1 We've said the names Gabriel law and gabe you law or you law yeah you law so uh someone on letterbox pointed out that the the difference between those names adds up to real you

Speaker 1 oh

Speaker 1 let me just uh

Speaker 3 see this movie is smart

Speaker 2 you'll notice that the criminal who gets killed in the beginning is named lawless so oh and he's named lawless

Speaker 1 okay okay

Speaker 1 a little less you know what you're right it doesn't make any sense

Speaker 1 so he is.

Speaker 3 It's a little less mouseblowing.

Speaker 2 It's not quite at the level of the level of the names in War of the Worlds, which are some of my favorite ridiculously on-the-nose character names that we've seen in a while.

Speaker 3 I was just thinking of War of the Worlds, the Jeff Wayne musical from the 70s, because Yula is the exact sound of the heat ray that comes out of the Martians thing.

Speaker 3 So every time that comes up, I think of that. For any Jeff Wayne heads out there,

Speaker 1 right in. So this is when...
Tell me who Jeff Wayne is.

Speaker 1 you know the musical war of the world so good yeah i feel like that's right up your alley it's like

Speaker 2 it's old-timey i like i remember i remember seeing that on a the first time i ever saw that album was at my dad's friend's house and i was just like what is this and they refused to play it so it was years later so i finally got together

Speaker 1 too much kid you know

Speaker 3 yeah so many you laws uh

Speaker 1 so This is when Jason Satham and Delroy Lindo are

Speaker 1 after him, hot pursuit. Again, they're the only two people they send, even though this is like a multiverse spanning threat.

Speaker 1 To explain their roles real quickly, Delroy Lindo, of course, is the like old grizzled veteran. And Jason Satham is like, yeah, yeah, is like the young hothead.

Speaker 1 He's a hothead because, of course, he's got so much hair on his head. It's making him hot.

Speaker 2 I think the same thing happens to my younger son. He wants to grow his hair long.
He gets overheated. He gets sweaty.
He should have a short haircut. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And they luckily travel to a multiverse that uses a different universe that has uh speaks and everyone speaks the same language, which is really great.

Speaker 1 Uh, although, actually, there's some Chinese spoken in the Cheroce universe between Gabriel Law and uh his wife, TK, of course, played by Carla Gago.

Speaker 1 Thank you, but this is good, Carla Gegino.

Speaker 2 What I love is her name is TK, which makes me think that they didn't put a first name into the script.

Speaker 1 Sorry, that's what I was distracted, I couldn't answer. Like, Stuart gestured to me for the name Carla Gegino, and I was thinking about TK.

Speaker 3 I was thinking of Tonki Kong the whole time.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow! I was like,

Speaker 1 is that like a telekinetic? Like, why is that written down? Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 3 Well, when we get to this universe, though, they recreate the opening scene, but instead of showing Al Gore, we see George Bush.

Speaker 1 So presumably we're in the universe.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, seeing it was seeing Al Gore at the beginning of the movie to show that it's an alternate universe really hit, it really punched me in the gut hard when I was watching it this time.

Speaker 2 Because I'm like, oh yeah, that's when it all started going this way.

Speaker 1 And you watched it shortly after Tuesday's election results. So you're still reeling after your boy Andrew Cuoma lost.

Speaker 1 Your favorite.

Speaker 2 No, I was a slew ahead all the way.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Come on. If you've got a, if you've got a shiny jacket and a beret, you should be the mayor of New York City.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 He battled his way all the way there. Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah. This is all very

Speaker 1 literally just walking around on the street for our guest.

Speaker 1 I'm sure. Mike, I'm sure you're a New York guy.

Speaker 2 You're very aware of Curtis Lewis' history walking around on the street bothering homeless people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, sure. Of course, yeah.
And he loves cats. Okay.
And he does love cats.

Speaker 2 He had an old cat tie that he was wearing that night.

Speaker 1 So as Michael said,

Speaker 1 we arrive in the chairs dimension and we have a like a mirror image of the first the opening sequence, although there are some subtle differences, i.e., there's no Dean Norris.

Speaker 2 And in some cases, that's the saddest thing about the universe the movie takes place in is it's Dean Norris-less.

Speaker 3 Got the no in Norris.

Speaker 1 And in this case, we find out that Jet Lee's character, Gabriel Law, is actually working for the L.A. Sheriff's Department.
He's not the criminal. No, they're involved.

Speaker 2 He is a gang member. He's in the L.A.
Sheriff's Office because the L.A. Sheriff's Office is ribbon with gangs.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you're right. Now that I'm a little more aware of.

Speaker 2 I'm surprised that made it over there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, he's seen, you know, he's seen like, I don't know, like

Speaker 1 Assault on Precinct 13 and stuff like that, right? Yeah, yeah, sure.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 uh, during this prisoner transfer, an attack happens. Everybody assumes they're attacking the prisoner, but no, this is you law.
He's arrived and he's attacking Gabriel Law.

Speaker 1 But Gabriel Law has the upper hand, not the upper hand, but he has almost like a sixth sense because, as we mentioned, he has gained some of the energy from all the dead jet leases in the universe.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it makes you wonder why Lawless didn't gain any of that dead jetly energy.

Speaker 1 He probably did, but he just wasted it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah,

Speaker 3 well, he's such a uh well, Lawless does because whilst he's walking down the sort of the green mile or whatever, the line of cells, he kicks some of the bars and they bend.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, oh, he does have the power. Yeah, he might, is he the one?

Speaker 1 Okay, so

Speaker 1 I'm like, I keep just wanting to say jelly, but there's like so many jellies.

Speaker 1 There's a Rastafarian one.

Speaker 1 So Gabe.

Speaker 2 It's okay. There's two living jellies.

Speaker 1 I'm going to call the good guy Gabe and the bad guy Eulaw. So Gabe chases after Eulaw, who's trying to escape, because he realizes this fight might be a little bit too difficult for me right now.

Speaker 1 But in the process, he gets shot by Eulaw after jumping over a super high wall, which gives us an indication that they both have superpowers.

Speaker 1 But before Eulaw can kill Gabe and become the one, he is driven off by... Our two space cops.

Speaker 1 That's right, Funch and Roediker using their like slightly futuristic pistols, and he runs off, I'm assuming, super fast.

Speaker 2 They have their laser pistols, and they also have this thing that unfolds to show them where wormholes are opening. And every time they open this thing, I found it so funny.

Speaker 2 It looks like a giant space lollipop with a screen on it. It just opens up every time.

Speaker 3 It like

Speaker 3 the screen is like a Winamp visualization. It was so 2001 kind of Windows design.

Speaker 1 It's 100% exactly the same shit that like Carlo Eugeno was using in Spy Kids, made the same year. Wow.

Speaker 2 So you think she brought it to this set?

Speaker 1 I can only assume.

Speaker 2 Or I guess Rob Rodriguez was probably working the way he does on a shoestring. And so she was probably, he was like, does anyone have any super technology they could bring to be in Spy Kids?

Speaker 2 And she's like, you got it. Yes.

Speaker 1 Here it is. I like to think that, yeah, Carla Guggino just has endless tech items in her.
She smuggled it off set in the back of her shoe. The same year as Spy Kids.

Speaker 1 That has blown my mind as much as anything else. We've talked about.

Speaker 2 What a year for Carla Gogino. I was just looking up to see if that was the same year that

Speaker 2 her TV show was on. What was the TV show that she did?

Speaker 1 She was on Spin City as well as Sin City. No, no.
She was on both sides.

Speaker 2 She was another one where she was the star of it. Sin City.

Speaker 1 She was Shin City.

Speaker 1 Spoon City?

Speaker 2 Spoon City. That's what it was.
Spoon City.

Speaker 1 Okay, so we have a little after action report. Oh, are you thinking of the Elmar Leonard one? Yes.

Speaker 1 The one that was, she played the same character that was in Out of Sight.

Speaker 1 San Francisco.

Speaker 2 That's the one. Yeah, yeah.
No, that was a couple years later. It was a a couple years later.
But that's the one I was thinking of, yeah.

Speaker 1 So we learn a little bit more about

Speaker 2 the show about the guy who's the mayor of the spoons.

Speaker 1 Mayor of Spoons.

Speaker 1 Lord of all spoons. Starring Kate Winslet and Jeremy Renner.
Isn't it wild that there's a mayor of East Town and Mayor of Kingstown, both shows kind of playing like roughly the same time?

Speaker 1 Well, we ran to the bottom of the round. Random people get confused.

Speaker 2 Well, aren't they spelled differently and they mean different things?

Speaker 1 Yeah, but if somebody's just saying it out loud, you'll get confused.

Speaker 1 Okay, maybe I'm just old. Okay, fine.
No, I'm on.

Speaker 2 No, it's fair. No, it's true.
It's true. We'll talk to the title authority.

Speaker 1 Now that this, now that this big opening is done,

Speaker 1 we get to learn a little bit more about the Cheris dimension.

Speaker 2 Which is just our dimension.

Speaker 1 Our dimension. Yeah, I'm going to keep calling.

Speaker 1 From now on, I'm referring to our dimension as the Cheris Dimension forever. Okay.

Speaker 1 So Carla, we find out that Gabe is is married to Carla Gugino, who's a veterinarian, so she can't treat his wounds.

Speaker 1 And they are in love. She can speak, she can speak some, what, I think that's Mandarin? Cantonese, I can't tell.

Speaker 2 I mean, I would guess Cantonese, I don't know. I don't know enough of it, but I really liked that moment that it was a, that it was, that like, she can speak Chinese.

Speaker 2 They speak together very casually. I thought that was really cool.

Speaker 3 They have a really cute wedding photo that they do a close-up on.

Speaker 1 Yes. And I would say, having seen Jet Lee in a number of English language movies, this is the most like chemistry and rapport I've seen with him and a potential romantic interest.
I'm going to give

Speaker 1 more than Aaliyah.

Speaker 3 I just want to shout out the line when he says, you can fix me up. And she says, hey, Newsflash, I'm a vet.
You don't have paws and a tail.

Speaker 1 And, you know,

Speaker 1 as best as she can.

Speaker 2 It's so funny because it's like the human body and animal bodies are so completely different. We evolved on different planets.
Don't you remember that?

Speaker 2 That's part of the backstory is this is a different planet that humans came to. And those are all we're carbon-based life forms.

Speaker 2 So all these animals, which looks like dogs and cats, are actually nitrogen-based life forms.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it is very funny that she would single out. You don't have paws at a table, tail, as if that's the pertinent thing to like fixing an injury.

Speaker 1 Like whether she couldn't just like sew him up or whatever.

Speaker 2 She's like, I learned my lesson. I can't deal with parrots.
I cannot deal with snakes. Only things with paws and a tail.

Speaker 3 Well, it's because if she just said, you know i'm a vet that's just too much exposition but you couch it with this really funny gag

Speaker 1 yeah it's flennel oh we got some screenwriters here oh look out james wong for uh yeah your sins against screenwriting um okay so she does her best i won't i won't hear much said against carlo tucino look no

Speaker 1 so uh We learned that like he's been having some weird issues. He had checked himself out of the hospital instead of actually staying there after being almost killed by Yulon.

Speaker 1 And he is being kind of quiet about the identity of his attacker. Nobody quite got a good look at him except for Gabe.
And Gabe realized that's me. Not just looks kind of like me, that's him.

Speaker 1 So his wife convinces him to go back to the hospital.

Speaker 2 It would be so funny if you saw him and he goes, that guy looks just like Jet Lee.

Speaker 1 Convinces him to go back to the hospital to get checked out, to go get an MRI. That's where he sees his sheriff buddies.
And they all like, they're pretty like buddy-buddy, right?

Speaker 1 Like, I don't know, like,

Speaker 1 they feel like, yeah, they all love him, which he's turned on pretty quick. They do turn on him pretty quick, and then he just beats the shit up.

Speaker 2 I was, to be fair, I was, I must have missed something. This movie, I know you, I know you guys, well, I'm guessing some final judgments that are going to be positive about it.

Speaker 2 There, there were times when this movie flowed past my eyes without it really registering past my eyes in my brain.

Speaker 2 And so by the time that they were on the run trying to get Gabe, I was like, I don't really remember why they're after Gabe.

Speaker 1 I know what you mean.

Speaker 1 Yes, I think that things are generally going to be sort of positive,

Speaker 1 but this is a less than 90-minute movie, and some of it is so fleet that I'm like,

Speaker 1 almost as fleet as the fast-running you live. I don't know what's going on.

Speaker 1 How did we get here? I guess it's not important. There's going to be a lot of people.

Speaker 2 There definitely were parts of the movie about an hour in where I was like, oh,

Speaker 2 we're a lot farther into this movie than I thought.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I love it.

Speaker 1 It's like a child growing up.

Speaker 2 You look away for a moment, suddenly they're ready to go.

Speaker 1 So she convinced him to go get checked out and go get an MRI. That'll play almost some part into the rest of the movie.

Speaker 1 So he's getting an MRI. While he's getting his MRI, Eulaw shows up to try and, I don't know, kill him while he's getting his MRI.

Speaker 1 There's a brief fight, and then Roediker and Funch show up, and there's some blasting. The MRI machine briefly disarms you law by magnetizing his gun out of his hand.

Speaker 1 But it starts it off. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of like jumping and shooting.
And the good guy's able to get out of an MRI machine somehow.

Speaker 1 I was like, as someone who's had his share of MRIs, I don't think you can just push your way out the way. I 100% think Jet Lee could.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that the X factor here that we're not thinking about, Dan, is that you're you and he's Jetly.

Speaker 1 He's almost the one.

Speaker 2 He also has one powers.

Speaker 1 He's one of the power powers.

Speaker 1 Like, Jet Lee is, you know, like a top 1% of most athletic dudes in the universe. He's currently the penultimate.

Speaker 2 I think so, Dan. We're going to have to have you go to each of the other 124 universes, kill your variants, and then get in an MRI, except for one, and see if you can do it.

Speaker 1 Are you going to kill him, Dan? Are you going to use like bolos?

Speaker 1 Honestly, I just had the saddest thought. It's almost like too sad to put on the podcast, but I'm imagining me coming up and like killing the, you know.

Speaker 1 coming up to myself to kill myself and the other guy being like okay

Speaker 1 i thought that is

Speaker 2 I thought you were going to say you were going to go up and try to kill him, and the first guy you try immediately kills you.

Speaker 1 You're done.

Speaker 1 I'm out. Yeah, what would happen if you like found a Dan who's like super like ripped?

Speaker 2 Are you implying that this Dan is not super ripped?

Speaker 1 I'm even more ripped than this Dan.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Like noticeably more. Not, you know, yeah.

Speaker 2 What about if you found a Dan on a bench over 350, since I know you've been struggling to get to 350.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you plateaued to 345.

Speaker 1 Someday I'm going to push it. Oh, that's pounds, not kilograms.
Oh, I had to see 345 p.m.

Speaker 1 3.45 p.m.

Speaker 2 is when he stopped. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, so in the ensuing conflict, there is confusion as to who the attacker is, and all the sheriff's department are like, you know what? Our friend Gabe,

Speaker 1 he's the problem. He must be the assailant.
Maybe he had some kind of a mental break and they're trying to talk him down.

Speaker 1 And then he just kind of beats them all up, but he does it like disarming style. It's pretty cool, right? I don't want to hurt you.
Hey,

Speaker 1 put the handcuffs on.

Speaker 1 I thought that was cool.

Speaker 3 You're going to get like a Jackie Chan sort of, you know, prop kung fu, which you know.

Speaker 2 If you put your finger on it, it's very Jackie Chan-y, and it means that there's not a lot of effects.

Speaker 2 It's all, it's like close-up magic, you know, he's really doing it with his hands as opposed to stuff where you're like, well, at some point,

Speaker 2 no matter how good Jetly is, he can't be in two places at once jumping 50 feet in the air. So like, and so it, that has to be some computer.

Speaker 1 But one thing I did like for the vast majority of the martial arts sequences,

Speaker 1 they do put a green mask on the stunt performer's face that's fighting opposite Jet Lee

Speaker 1 so they can map his face on there if necessary.

Speaker 1 But for the most part, it's two guys doing physical stuff as opposed to, I feel like if there was a Marvel movie where this was happening, it would be like, we got two wireframed CGI dudes punching each other.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, there would not be an actual

Speaker 1 kind of style. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 I thought the Jet Li versus Jet Lee stuff looked really good. I thought they did a really good job of

Speaker 2 making it seem like he was fighting himself.

Speaker 1 I also later on like when Jet Lee beats up Jason Satham very quickly and easily and Jason Satham cannot fight anymore and I'm like, wow, that's before his contract stipulated that he has to win his fights.

Speaker 2 I was thinking the exact same thing. Jason Satham was not a big enough name yet that he could say, I'm not going to lose in this movie.

Speaker 1 Do you think this is the movie that changed everything for him? That he took a date to the movie and she was like, ugh, gross. You got beats.

Speaker 3 I watched the trailer after watching the movie and he gets like a solo title card in the trailer, which sort of surprised me at this stage of his career.

Speaker 3 It was about halfway through the movie where I turned to my partner, who was reluctantly watching the movie with me, and said, oh, did JC Statham just try and do American for that line?

Speaker 3 And she said, he's been trying to do it the whole time. And then I realized he was completely failing to do an American accent of consistent.

Speaker 1 Yes, Michael,

Speaker 1 you've had the true flophouse experience of watching a flophouse movie with a reluctant spouse.

Speaker 1 I almost got to watch.

Speaker 1 She said, wasn't good.

Speaker 2 I almost got to watch a flophouse movie with my spouse recently for flop TV. We did Xanadu recently.
And my wife was like, oh, I'd watch some of that with you. And then she saw about a minute of it.

Speaker 2 And she's like, actually, I won't. Never mind.

Speaker 1 I think there's some

Speaker 1 closets that need to be rearranged.

Speaker 2 You know what? I think I just have to lie down and stare at the ceiling and think about whatever.

Speaker 1 Oh, what's that crack doing?

Speaker 2 Looks like a rabbit, like that hospital I was in in France as a child.

Speaker 2 That's like Madeline.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 both Gabe and Ulaw managed to escape the hospital. And that means our MVA guys are going to need to split up, even though that goes against protocol.

Speaker 1 So Delroy Lindo goes after you law, and he says this thing like, well, if you see this thing flash, that means we're both dead.

Speaker 1 And you have to, Chase to save them, you have to kill Gabriel Law, because if I kill you Law, then that means Gabriel Law is the one, and we can

Speaker 1 know what's going to happen.

Speaker 2 No, there must be balance in the universe. If there's just one, the one, then the whole universe could explode for something.

Speaker 1 It's better if there's two, is what they say. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And what he actually says is it takes two, bae, hey, hey, be. It takes two, be, hey, hey, be.

Speaker 2 And he says, me and you. And Jason Satham is like, wait, but we're not the two.

Speaker 2 You law and Gabe Law are the two. And Dori Lindo's like, don't worry about it.
Don't worry about it. And he walks away.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Very amusing. Jason Satham

Speaker 1 catches up with Gabriel Law and he kind of explains the rules of the multiverse.

Speaker 1 We all know this stuff.

Speaker 2 He explains that while Gabe Law is walking away from him, wanting to be anywhere else, but listening to this explanation, right? Which I found very funny.

Speaker 2 The only thing that could have made it better is every now and then he just went turned back behind himself and went, stop talking to me.

Speaker 1 Stop it. I'm not interested.

Speaker 3 Oh, just quickly, one thing that really bugged me, or not bugged me, but I was just like, oh, we all know where this is going.

Speaker 3 It's such like, and then the payoff doesn't come for a really long time is that when Gabe gets out of his hospital gown, he immediately changes into the exact same outfit that Yula is wearing.

Speaker 3 And so we know that eventually we're going to get the shoot that one. No, shoot that one.

Speaker 1 But it takes two acts of the movie to then get there.

Speaker 1 And then it's almost immediately done away with.

Speaker 2 And yeah, they don't care right away. But this, or they've figured it out.

Speaker 2 It takes... Yulaw taking off his shirt for a fight, his outer shirt for no reason.

Speaker 2 And then right before the moment where it's supposed to happen, I don't remember why Gabe's shirt comes off, but it's not

Speaker 1 fire. He has a wormhole versus

Speaker 2 it was such, it was a very artificial reason for them to suddenly end up in the same clothes.

Speaker 3 Well, I really wanted Gabe to be like, hey,

Speaker 3 this is obviously going to happen eventually. I'm just going to put on some lipstick because I really don't think the other guy's going to put on lipstick.

Speaker 3 And just thought it wouldn't have been funny for the second half.

Speaker 3 He went like crazy over the top lipstick.

Speaker 2 He just gets a big face tattoo over most of his face.

Speaker 1 This falls off.

Speaker 2 If we fall into the ocean, I'll still know I'm me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. If it gets splashed with blood of the battles that we're doing.

Speaker 1 But the other thing is, like, that's exclusively for the audience because it's not like if you're watching two guys fight, you're going to be like, okay, I just got to remember the good one has his kind of shirt tied around his waist for some reason.

Speaker 1 The other, the bad one does not. So if we all get jumbled up, that I, I got to keep this straight.

Speaker 1 You're not going to do that.

Speaker 1 Okay, unless, I guess, guess I'm not, that's probably why I'm not a multiverse agent.

Speaker 1 Okay, so

Speaker 2 you failed the physical.

Speaker 1 I failed the physical. That's the thing.

Speaker 2 You're being too strong.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Okay, so Roddicker, played by Del Roy Lindo,

Speaker 1 gets the drop on Yula, who's driving what? He's driving like an ambulance.

Speaker 1 And he's, as I mentioned before, listening to some heavy metal. In the English release, it was sinners by Drowning Pool.

Speaker 1 But apparently in the Chinese language release, they changed it to a Lincoln Park song. So maybe, you know, better for them.
Wow. Lincoln Park is still huge in China.
Where do you find that?

Speaker 1 You were on the New Metal message boards.

Speaker 1 Trolling for this trivia? Or where did this come from? I mean, this is all IMDB. Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 IMNMDB, the internet movie new metal database. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So this is where, you know, they fight. Of course, you law being the two manages to defeat Del Roy Lindo.
And Del Roy Lindo's like, okay, you have two options.

Speaker 1 I have this live crazy grenade in my hand. You have two options.
You either come with me or you die. Of course, Jet Lee runs over and snatches the grenade and kills him.
And he's like, option three.

Speaker 1 And you're like, oh, sick.

Speaker 2 I think it was so funny to me that he's like, you got, okay, obviously I have you at a disadvantage right now.

Speaker 2 And it's like he forgets that he's dealing with a superhuman, you know, someone who can move faster and is stronger. Del Roy Lindo, not a surprise.
Does a great job with

Speaker 2 not very much. He's He's an amazing guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's really good.

Speaker 3 He kind of sells it by being just, he just takes it seriously. He's not overdoing anything.
He's not sort of trying to do a wee bit of an American accent like the other guy is.

Speaker 1 I mean, Delray Lindo has the American accent.

Speaker 2 So like

Speaker 1 he's got that taken care of.

Speaker 3 He should have tried to do a Cockney accent.

Speaker 1 I mean, that means

Speaker 1 that this film has in context with like

Speaker 1 in common with Highlander.

Speaker 2 Sorry, what were you saying?

Speaker 3 Oh, just the this plot is really similar to Highlander and also similarly to Highlander. There's lots of people's accents on display.

Speaker 3 Obviously, Jedly speaking with this natural accent and then Jason Statham trying to do it in America and not quite getting there in the way that Sean Connery and

Speaker 1 impeccable Spanish accent. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, Sean Connery is somehow an Egyptian, an ancient Egyptian who's pretending to be a Spaniard and has the heaviest Scottish accent.

Speaker 1 Connery just got to a point where he was like, you know what? I'm not doing it. And I'm like, God God bless you, Sean.
You're right.

Speaker 1 You're right.

Speaker 1 You can't do it. So just don't.
We don't care.

Speaker 2 No. He was like, I am just going to be myself.
And eventually I will be old enough that I win an Academy Award for just doing myself. And he did.

Speaker 1 I'm not shocked that Delroy Lindo does a great job.

Speaker 1 That Delroy Lindo does a great job with this.

Speaker 1 You know, like kind of goofy sci-fi plot.

Speaker 1 He was so great in, did you guys ever see the movie Blood of Heroes, also known as Salute of the Jugger, where he plays a post-apocalyptic athlete in a traveling sports team?

Speaker 1 No, these sound like made-up titles. He stars Rugger Hauer and Joan Chen.
If you haven't seen it, I totally recommend this probably a million times on the podcast.

Speaker 1 It's super good.

Speaker 1 Vincent D'Anofrio is also in it as another member of this traveling sports team where they, okay, so the idea is there's a traveling team that goes from like wasteland settlement to wasteland settlement, and they all they play this game using a dog skull where there's there's two uh there's two like scorers or like runners that fight over the dog skull and try and stick it on the opposing team's spike while the opposing team has guys with like big sticks kind of like american gladiators and then also guys with like chain whips that are trying to keep you from doing that we're in the inception part of the podcast where the where stewart explains where the plot has been superseded by the juggle plot yeah

Speaker 2 this this is the floppy tunnel sarcasso manuscript all of a sudden and we've forgotten the original story and are now onto something else.

Speaker 1 That's because I'm really trying to build up anticipation because, as you mentioned, Elliot, we are dealing with a superhuman, and that shit is on full display.

Speaker 1 Because after killing Delroy Lindo, some cops show up and Jetly, aka Ulaw in this case, runs over and he punches the cops off their motorcycles and then picks up the motorcycles and starts swatting dudes around like they're baseball bats.

Speaker 1 It's incredible.

Speaker 2 It's just the best part of the whole movie, right?

Speaker 2 He's just picking up motorcycles and swinging them around.

Speaker 2 What's the best?

Speaker 2 The mouse that comes out of the shoe.

Speaker 1 The mouse coming out of the shoe with the ooh is the best part.

Speaker 1 Well, that is actually

Speaker 1 final shot as well. Final shot.
Okay.

Speaker 2 And actually, the final shot is, I mean, the final shot, it's like, it promises a much better movie. We'll get to it.
A much better movie than the one we saw, I think. But anyway.

Speaker 1 Okay. So

Speaker 1 Gabe and

Speaker 1 Gabe and Funch decide to team up because Gabe goes.

Speaker 2 The names in the movie are ridiculous.

Speaker 1 TK goes back to their family home

Speaker 1 with the sheriff's department in tow, and she believes that her husband is injured and hiding inside, but she's not sure. And

Speaker 1 she actually sees him hiding up in the ceiling.

Speaker 1 But then she suspects, you know what? This might be...

Speaker 3 He's scary.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's like sticking his little head out through the attic

Speaker 1 hatchway.

Speaker 1 And then she sees,

Speaker 1 I think this is what happened. She sees her husband outside and she realizes that the one she's talking to inside is actually Eulaw, the evil one, after she like tests him with a little

Speaker 1 bit of classic.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 wasn't it great that time we did that thing? Oh, no, no, no, we didn't do that.

Speaker 3 That we'd be in this situation after all those years where we met at the bookshop.

Speaker 1 I believe is the I would be absolutely fucked if I was in this situation because I have a bad memory and I drink too much. So I'd be like, yeah, whatever, babe.
Oh, no, I'm dead.

Speaker 1 Audrey's constantly being like, do you remember when we had dinner at that restaurant? I'm like, that's a, we were there. We went there.
That's the thing we did.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this happens. This happens.
It's just a part of growing a lot of people.

Speaker 1 Okay, so

Speaker 1 Eulaw just fight having

Speaker 1 as we've learned, he's a superhuman. So he blasts a couple cops and then he turns the gun on TK.
And in front of Gabe Law, he kills. TK,

Speaker 1 Gabe Law's wife. Not a fan of that.
I was shocked.

Speaker 3 I really thought that we'd reveal that she wasn't mortally wounded and that she was just

Speaker 3 recovering and she'd kind of reappear.

Speaker 1 Do you think he did it because he's like, I'm trying to make my girlfriend in the other dimension the one? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's part of the deal, yeah.

Speaker 1 I feel like there's from different dimensions.

Speaker 2 There's like a limited amount of boobs that all everyone in each dimension

Speaker 1 has. No, let's explore this idea.
Let's have a total recall stripper happen. No, no, I don't think that makes sense.
Happy.

Speaker 1 Another woman got killed.

Speaker 2 If this was, this was a, this this movie is coming out at a time when not only would could you get away with just murdering the the main guy's wife like that, but I think if they didn't do it, they would have been like, This isn't some soft wussy movie.

Speaker 2 Come on, this is a new metal movie. We got to do this.
And so it's she's dispatched very casually. It's pretty

Speaker 1 casually.

Speaker 3 It's like a glancing shot to her gut, and she just falls out of frame. And then it's like, bye TK.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's a TKO for TK.

Speaker 2 That's a wrap for Carlos Vagino, everybody. Thanks, guys.

Speaker 1 I know Spy

Speaker 2 Carla, can I see your bag? Are you trying to steal props from this movie to bring to spy kids?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's her weak spot. She's got a little uh-oh spot where if you shoot her in the tummy, she dies.
Okay.

Speaker 2 She was shot in her existence port, and that's why it hurt her particularly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, unlike the rest of us. So we get some, we get a little bit of.

Speaker 2 If you get shot in the tummy, you just shrug it off. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Take a lap. Yeah.
So

Speaker 1 walk it off. Rub some dirt on it.

Speaker 3 Ricochets into your head.

Speaker 1 Yeah. oh no.

Speaker 1 So you law escapes, and we get

Speaker 1 a little bit of speed up. Funch and Gabe decide to team up to take down Ulaw.
They show up at an industrial plant that seems to manufacture sparks.

Speaker 1 They walk right into a trap.

Speaker 2 And not the band sparks. They don't make that, just a physical thing.

Speaker 1 So they walk right into a trap using one of those funky sci-fi grenades that almost explodes them, but it does not. It just blows up their guns.

Speaker 1 And then they get in a fight. Jason Jason Satham gets beat super fast and has to like limp around for the rest of the fight.
But then we get a fight between Yula and Gabe.

Speaker 1 And this is kind of the centerpiece of the movie where we have two Jet Lis fighting each other.

Speaker 1 And one thing that I do want to point out is that both Jet Lis use different styles of martial arts, which is kind of cool. Like a subtle difference.

Speaker 1 Obviously, it's a nod to the fact that Jet Lee is an incredible martial artist.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a nod to the Jet List.

Speaker 1 It's a little history.

Speaker 1 For those people who are aware, Jet Lee is history,

Speaker 1 the discerning viewer will note that Jet Lee's good at martial arts.

Speaker 1 Of course,

Speaker 1 Gabe Law, being of pure heart and mind and body, becomes, and filled with the rage of a dead wife, decides to become the ultimate battler and he defeats you Law.

Speaker 1 There's a couple of moments where like they're fighting with an axe and he like flips it up and catches it super fast and almost cuts him in half.

Speaker 3 It's so sick.

Speaker 1 It's sick as hell. Put that shit in the trailer.

Speaker 2 I will go to the trailer party yeah i i'm i think there was a this movie is moving so fast i think they skip over a couple of like the a stent the obligatory beats that a movie has to have and they're just like you get it you get it he find he figures out his his true power or whatever anyway he comes he's better now than than than law you law is it's like but do we are we gonna see him we do see him we do see him training one time in his home That's true.

Speaker 2 We do see him training in his home one time. But it's like the movie is like, you know what happens in a movie.
Come on, let's just get to it. Let's get to it.
Come on.

Speaker 3 We skipped over a not terribly important scene, but one that was, that's kind of fun where they go to a gas station,

Speaker 3 which I would call a petrol shop.

Speaker 1 Thank you. And

Speaker 1 Alex, erase that. Believe that Alex.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm Jason Stathaming.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they get to a gas station and bump into that universe as Del Roy Lindo. And Jason Statham is able to be like, I just want to say thank you for everything you've done for me.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. That's a good thing.
Which means nothing to me.

Speaker 2 And Joey Lindo's like, get out of here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so I'm going to go call the cops. Yeah.
But they never run the camera.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because he says the Chinese guy kicked the Chinese guy's tear in this place of car because he kicked a lamppost that falls over.

Speaker 2 We never see this, this universe is funch, though, because he is, of course, in England.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I do like that. It means we get extra Del Roy Lindo, so I'm not mad at him.
Yes.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, it's great. It's just like, it's, I mean, it's obviously films are full of conveniences, but it's like, why did that? It's very fortunate that they bumped into the Delroy of this thing.

Speaker 3 And it's not even

Speaker 3 connected to what his job is in the other universe or anything.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it feels like for the most part, everybody else is somewhat similar in the different dimensions.

Speaker 1 You know, like Carlo Ducino's like a criminal Gumar in one, and the other one, she's a veterinarian in every other dimension.

Speaker 2 There's at least, yeah, one other dimension where she's a veterinarian. Yeah.

Speaker 2 In one dimension, the law law has dreadlocks. In the other ones, he is dreadless.

Speaker 1 I feel like the blonde law has still got to be the best. Okay, so the

Speaker 1 word blonde law sounds like a Ryan Murphy show. That's actually true.
Yeah, it does. Yeah.

Speaker 2 We only take the blonde. They're sexiest, most scandalous cases.

Speaker 1 Syrah,

Speaker 1 legally blonde.

Speaker 1 Yes, that is legally blonde.

Speaker 1 Blonde law sounds like the like

Speaker 1 Somalian poster for legally blonde. Yeah,

Speaker 1 where she's chopping chopping someone's hand off plus she's firing it easy in someone else.

Speaker 1 It's a lion. Okay.
So Block Law

Speaker 2 sounds like a silk stocking specifically type show

Speaker 1 in USA.

Speaker 1 Okay, so a wormhole arrives just in time to suck both Laws and Jason Satham back to the multiverse authority, where they are both very dazed and they're, you know, the one Law's like, oh, get him.

Speaker 1 He's the bad guy. There's a very brief moment where they almost send Gabriel Law to the prison dimension dimension because it's like

Speaker 1 good enough for me. Open the portal in three, two, super fast timer.
Like they're like, shit, we got to go, man. I don't got a clock out.
I got to, I got dinner on the stove.

Speaker 1 This is funny for me because I was waiting, you know, I was waiting for the moment. I'm like, oh, okay, he took the shirt off because it was on fire.

Speaker 1 You're going to have the moment where there's the confusion. And then like immediately, like, they scan them with some sci-fi thing.
And we're like, yeah, this is the one.

Speaker 1 And they put the one in the chair. And like, they don't really explain.
I mean, I probably missed something, but like why the scanning was wrong.

Speaker 1 But in my head, like for a second, I'm like, wait, they set up the thing and they didn't even have Spider-Man pointed himself. Like, I don't understand what's going on here.

Speaker 1 There had to have been a cut where they sent the wrong law back, wrong law to the possibly the prison dimension.

Speaker 2 I mean, a cut of this movie that was more than 87 minutes long, which this one is.

Speaker 1 88 minutes, maybe.

Speaker 2 Sorry, yeah, it was an 88.

Speaker 1 There's one minute they cut out where they handled all that stuff. So they zorch you law away, and then they're strapping Gabe Law into another one.
And they're like, I guess we got to send him.

Speaker 1 Wait, they want to send him back to the cherris dimension because they're like, that's where he's from. That's the rules.
And Jason Sathan's like, that's fucking crazy, man.

Speaker 1 They're going to think he's like a criminal because he killed all those people.

Speaker 1 And so he's like, actually,

Speaker 1 I know how to do this. I'm going to send him to the, I'm going to send him back to the cherish dimension.
I know how to do it. And they're like, okay, I guess.
So let's go ahead.

Speaker 1 Fuck, it sends me the work.

Speaker 2 There's an NYPD detective who caught a murderer, and the murderer is putting in the electric chair. And he's like,

Speaker 2 I'll flip the switch. I'm pretty familiar with this equipment.
You got it, sir. Then anyone can do this.

Speaker 2 That's your job now. Yep.

Speaker 1 Technically, it's your birthday. So when it's your birthday, you can do whatever you want.

Speaker 1 So they

Speaker 1 send.

Speaker 2 I would love it. I know, that would have been such a funny addition to this movie if throughout it he was just like, it's my birthday.
Let me do this.

Speaker 1 Hey, hey, it's my birthday. Let me break the rules.
They don't explain a lot of their dynamic.

Speaker 1 And also, that's why he's like such a hothead because he feels like it's his birthday and he's running out of time and

Speaker 1 he's got to corner this killer or whatever. He's turning hair five.

Speaker 2 No, he says he's only five away from 40. He's going to, yeah, so it's, you know, he wants to be.

Speaker 3 He's no longer an Olympic level diver.

Speaker 1 That's true. Which I believe he was, right? You know what's crazy is looking at Jason Satham in this movie and being like, man, he's.

Speaker 1 Got to be younger than I am now, but like, I can't imagine Jason Satham being younger than me. No, Jesus.
And if I've seen Bruce Willis and Bruce Willison fucking diehard.

Speaker 1 I'm like, he's what, like 30?

Speaker 2 That's crazy. That's the experience I've been having watching Seinfeld recently, where I'm like, all these characters are younger than me, yet they dress like they're in their 60s.

Speaker 1 And they complain about diner food all the time.

Speaker 2 But you know what? Jason Sathan was 34 years old when this movie came out.

Speaker 1 So, yeah.

Speaker 1 This ending, though, I usually explain it, but I don't know.

Speaker 1 So first off, so Gabriel Law gets sent back to, he gets sent to a a completely different dimension, one that I'm assuming the law was killed by you law. And he

Speaker 1 almost gets hit by a car. The car runs over a dog's paw, and he is like, wait, that's my dog.
And so, he takes that dog to the.

Speaker 2 We should mention also that we see the goofiest-looking car.

Speaker 3 An insane car.

Speaker 3 And so, it's like, oh, this universe is going to be a crazy sci-fi universe. That's just one weird car.

Speaker 1 No, it's just that one car. That's the one guy driving the wacky mobile.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so that,

Speaker 1 you know, a car that's like not cool enough to like actually hurt anybody.

Speaker 1 So cool enough. No, I know.
I don't know. That's what

Speaker 1 you say. Oh, you got me.

Speaker 2 As Stewart was saying the same thing.

Speaker 1 Send me to the stitching universe. I deserve it.
It's rural. I see you saying that.

Speaker 1 And as you're saying it, you're like, oh, no. One.

Speaker 1 Sorry this way.

Speaker 1 So, of course, he scoops up the dog,

Speaker 1 which in a a different dimension was his dog, and he goes to the conveniently placed veterinarian clinic that's going to be a little bit more. He's like, I'm just scooping the meat.

Speaker 1 Not the whole dog. Yep.
Two meters away, which is what, like 100 feet? I don't know. Yeah,

Speaker 1 something like that. So five miles.
He bursts through the door and he's like, somebody save this dog. Of course, the person he's yelling at, that's right, turns around.

Speaker 1 It's none other than Carla Gagino looking incredible. And he's like, oh, Mama Mia.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he wolf whistles. We've invoked,

Speaker 1 because it's, you know, such a heavily multiverse, like, goofy show, we've invoked Rick and Morty before. And they do stuff like this on that show because that show is inherently cynical.

Speaker 1 And it's like a joke how cynical it is.

Speaker 1 Here, it's just like the movie is not interrogating at all the fact that it's just like, okay, well, your Carla Gagino died, but one's just as good as another, right? Like,

Speaker 1 Dan, it's just like the story.

Speaker 2 It's just like the story of Job. He lost his whole family, but then God gives him another one.
He's just supposed to be happy with it. You know, that's the

Speaker 1 in this case, God's

Speaker 1 Jason Statham.

Speaker 2 The J and Job stands for Jason Statham. Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 Jason Statham's OB is what it stands for.

Speaker 1 It's incredible in a production of Job.

Speaker 2 Production of Job?

Speaker 1 The musical Job exclamation point.

Speaker 2 What happened to my stuff? They took all my stuff. I think I've had enough because they've got all my stuff.

Speaker 1 Now I'm covered in sores. Oh, my lord.

Speaker 1 So, what were you when I invented Leviathan? When I was in college, my college girlfriend was

Speaker 1 a theater major, and she, part of being a theater major is you had to help other theater majors with their senior projects.

Speaker 1 And so she had to help another guy who was doing a theatrical production of the story of Job. And she was playing Job's wife.
And her costume was like basically a bathrobe.

Speaker 1 And on opening night, on her opening night, we like went into the theater and the Earlham College, the theater's pretty small. But there was a massive poster.

Speaker 1 I feel like it was like a 20-foot-tall close-up of her face looking sad, and she's like, I didn't know it was going to be like this.

Speaker 1 Sucks. That's what happens when you're a star, baby.

Speaker 2 But this is the ending here. It is the, it is the, the time, the, the time travel alternate universe fallacy also of like, oh, you look the same as my wife and you have the same job.

Speaker 2 You must be the same person and you will fall in love now. Yes.

Speaker 3 Who cares that she's dead and I'm a stranger?

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's also the exact, we hear the backstory of how Jetly and Kali Gougino met in the first time, which is he found it in Jadog and took it to the vet and she was there. It was love at first sight.

Speaker 3 So when this happened, though, I was like, is this a time travel thing?

Speaker 3 Because

Speaker 3 how did Jason Statham know, oh, I know in another universe where this exact moment is.

Speaker 2 I think they transferred him to a universe that was a couple years behind. the one he came from.

Speaker 2 So he was from the Charis universe, and this was the like, this was the like Charis is late universe.

Speaker 1 Like it's always a little late.

Speaker 2 But it's, it reminds me, it reminds me so much of the end of Time Cop, where he has managed to change the past so that his wife and is alive and he has a family.

Speaker 2 And as he's walking to his house, I just kept imagining, I always imagined him thinking, like, oh boy, I gotta pretend I know who these kids are.

Speaker 1 It's just gonna be rough.

Speaker 1 Maybe if I actually should trip on the way and pretend that I get amnesia. Oh, I got a concussion.

Speaker 2 I don't remember. Can you remind me what your names are and how we met?

Speaker 3 That actually is the plot of that.

Speaker 3 What was it? That Joel Edgerton Apple TV show where he's like universe jumping. And Joel Edgerton jumps into another dimension and steals a place and then has to be like, yeah, I'm your dad.

Speaker 3 This is good, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's arguably the plot of the most recent season of Peacemaker, except instead of, you know, Jean-Claude Van Damme, it's John Cena. So they're both, you know, big guys.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's arguably the plot of the last season of Sopranos. You'd lose that argument, but you could argue that.

Speaker 1 I'd make that argument. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So uh, two dollars, so let's get to the real, let's get to the real meat on it.

Speaker 1 We've eaten all the vegetables around the plate, let's get to the meat that's in the middle of the plate.

Speaker 2 And that is this how you organize your plates.

Speaker 1 There's like an island of meat and then a moat of vegetables around it. Yeah, how do you do it?

Speaker 1 Riley just scoops all the vegetables into the garbage.

Speaker 1 I make a food pyramid, okay,

Speaker 1 based on the old just the ancient alien. And that's a good transition to the end of this.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's true.

Speaker 1 Okay, so speaking of pyramids, we cut to the stygian universe where Yula wakes up and he's surrounded by rough-looking customers. And he is not.

Speaker 2 The customers all look much older than him and weaker than him. None of them look like that intimidating.

Speaker 1 And they are on a, he is on a prison planet that is lashed by lightning, covered in massive pyramids. And there's all kinds of science fiction stuff.

Speaker 1 And his first reaction, they're like, oh, goody, there's a new inmate, fresh

Speaker 1 fish. You've got a pretty mouth, they say.

Speaker 1 This is disgusting. Uh-huh.
It's, yeah, it's disgusting. But I mean, it's accurate.
It's Jelly. He's gorgeous.

Speaker 1 And so gently, and then his

Speaker 1 stands up.

Speaker 2 And they get a fan, they go, you've got a pretty mouth. And then he gets a fan.
They go, a prisoner can't compliment another prisoner these days.

Speaker 1 I'm from the anubis dimension. We compliment each other's mouths when we meet them.

Speaker 2 I'm from the sexual harassment dimension.

Speaker 1 This is considered etiquette where I'm from. So this is when Yula stands up and he addresses the crowd and he says, I am Yula.
I am nobody's bitch. You are mine.
I'm like, oh, wow. Okay.

Speaker 1 This is an interesting turn of events.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, he starts beating people up while we hear Papa Roach start blasting. And I'm like, hell yeah.

Speaker 1 And the camera is a little bit more. He's on top of the Ziggurat.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the camera pulls back. He's on top of the Ziggurat, and there's like a swarm of dudes running up to get beat up by him.

Speaker 1 He's a Doom video game, but instead of

Speaker 1 fighting demons, he's fighting rough customers.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yes,

Speaker 1 it is awesome.

Speaker 1 You want to send your audience out on a cloud and you know what? Success.

Speaker 1 I have to say that the way it pulls back, I kept expecting, I mean, it would be totally needless and it would not make any sense to have like this last time.

Speaker 2 For to be revealed, it's all in a snow globe being held.

Speaker 1 Oh, like to reveal, like, oh, you know, like, there's the Empire State Building. It'd be like, oh, this is like

Speaker 3 the fallen statue of Liberty.

Speaker 1 I don't know why they would do that, but it was that kind of pullout. But it pulls out and it's just a reflection in Jonathan Price's eye at the end of Brazil.
And you're like, whoa, that is cool.

Speaker 2 He's like, the only way I could escape the torture was to imagine badass martial arts.

Speaker 2 But it is, it feels like such a, but this feels like such a, I mean, it's an awesome ending, but it feels like such a tease.

Speaker 2 I just was like, this is the movie I could have been watching all this time? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, the thing is, they know that the movie that they could make with the budget they had set on that prison planet would not be nearly as the cool as the one in their head.

Speaker 2 No, that's very true. That's a good point, especially on the budget they have.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that's the one, guys. We fucking did it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I was looking it up. Like,

Speaker 1 you know, I think that they maybe wanted to do more. This was

Speaker 1 a $50 million movie that made 80 million. So it did okay for like the time, but probably was not ultimately profitable.

Speaker 1 I feel like the name and the I guess the poster's not like the one poster with Jet Lee on it's okay, but the other one's just like a glowing orb or something, and that's not a good poster.

Speaker 2 Even the one with Jet Lee on it, it just looks like his body is kind of like dissolving into cubes, into pixels.

Speaker 1 It doesn't really, I feel like I break you into little cubes.

Speaker 2 I feel like the

Speaker 2 poster should be two Jet Lee's facing off against each other, right?

Speaker 2 That feels like that's your poster. Why are you doing it?

Speaker 1 It would confuse people, though. They'd be like, I thought it's called the one.
I don't understand.

Speaker 2 I'm seeing double here.

Speaker 1 Two jet leaves. Well, I don't want to know the story behind that.
You won't get my ticket money.

Speaker 3 I think, though, I was just thinking there's

Speaker 3 a plot hole of the ending, which is that

Speaker 1 they can't allow

Speaker 3 one of these guys to become the one because nobody knows what will happen. Some believe that if somebody becomes the one, they will explode.
Some believe he will implode.

Speaker 3 Some believe he will become a god, they clarify. And Jason Statham says, Well, it might just destroy the universe.
Maybe it'll destroy the multiverse. One of these jetlis still will die.

Speaker 1 Like, one of them will die of old age.

Speaker 3 And if they can't let either of them die, perhaps sending Yulor to a like an infinite fight that he cannot win the end of the first video game Half-Life,

Speaker 3 he's not going to last long.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're making a good point.

Speaker 2 You really put your finger on what is wrong about the movie in general, which is that you're right. Unless everyone in each universe is dying at the same moment, this would be happening all the time.

Speaker 1 All the time.

Speaker 2 In an infinite or

Speaker 2 25-universe universe, like people are going to die at different times.

Speaker 2 And you'd think that suddenly you'd see an old man who can run super fast and lift up a car because all his elderly counterparts have died just a couple days before him or something.

Speaker 1 Can you imagine?

Speaker 3 I would love to see that.

Speaker 2 What if it's the same movie, the one,

Speaker 2 but it's with Burgess Meredith instead of Jennifer? Oh, my God. He's an incredibly old man.

Speaker 1 The way he chooses the scenery, that would be great. And the thing is, like, we don't even need this idea, like, oh, you know, once it becomes the one, it might destroy the universe.

Speaker 1 Like, those stakes are not necessary to the movie. It could just be a movie about, like, this is an interdimensional.
criminal

Speaker 1 who's about 123 people incredibly dangerous, like more powerful than anyone in the world. We have to stop him.
And that's enough.

Speaker 3 I guess

Speaker 3 because they need to give a reason to kill that, oh, we need to kill Gabe as well, but it could just be, well, no one individual should have this power, it's just too dangerous, right?

Speaker 2 But it really is the same way that the multiverse aspect of it is a forerunner to so many of the movies now.

Speaker 2 The fact that they felt like they needed to throw in, and the universe could be destroyed, like, is also a forerunner to the best.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there has to be some kind of highest stakes possible. I would say, I'm not going to say this is a plot hole, but it

Speaker 1 I feel like it's a missed opportunity because because apparently all these sequences that were shot in the hotel, that hotel, the sequences that are shot in the hospital.

Speaker 1 Now, that's not the hospital's just like a hotel for sick people. It's the same based on the prices, it's even more expensive.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, not you are weird. I mean, they are providing medical care, so like it really should be more expensive than a hotel.

Speaker 2 I was just going to say a hotel is not performing surgery, it's not providing medications, round-the-clock service. Maybe the hotel is not a good thing.

Speaker 1 Who's putting the bill? We can argue about that. But

Speaker 2 You're going to these kind of Infinity Pool type hotels where there's all sorts of stuff going on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm always going to Infinity Pool hotels.

Speaker 1 What I was going to say is the hospital that they shoot that sequence in is the same hospital that

Speaker 1 they shot Scrubs in. And I think it's a missed opportunity that the Scrubs gang didn't just wander through some of those action sequences.
I'm not going down there. Can you imagine JD meeting TK?

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Was it really? John's the guest could have gotten in on that shit.

Speaker 2 Was it really the Scrubs Hotel?

Speaker 1 Scrubs Hospital? Wow, now everyone's really doing it.

Speaker 2 I worked with some people who worked on Scrubs, and they were like, oh, yeah, that place was disgusting. It was infested with raccoons.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 We every day had to go in and like fight off raccoons to clear out the set.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's great. Yes, that is a true fact.
I did not make that up. I'm not that creative.

Speaker 1 Now is the time where we render our final judgment, which, of course, are binding in all courts of the land.

Speaker 1 I've got a pretty good feeling about how this one's going to shake.

Speaker 1 A good, bad movie, a bad, bad movie, or a movie we kind of like.

Speaker 1 I'm going to say, yeah, I kind of like this movie. I will say, like Elliot, occasionally my brain would slide off it.

Speaker 1 And too often it would happen like during the stuff that is theoretically the reason for the movie existing, like the fight scenes.

Speaker 1 Like sometimes I would just like be like, oh, I should be paying more attention to this. This is like the meat of like why this exists.

Speaker 2 This is what's happening in the movie.

Speaker 1 This is when the bodies are hitting the floor. But it is.

Speaker 2 They're just letting it happen.

Speaker 1 I guess there's nothing wrong with it.

Speaker 1 It is so silly and big and like

Speaker 1 fast on its feet being silly and big that I had a good time watching it. So yeah, I liked the one.

Speaker 1 Stuart. Yeah, it goes down super easy.

Speaker 1 You know, I was a little concerned that it wasn't going to be as good as I remembered. And I still think it's like

Speaker 1 a fucking super straightforward, like dumbass

Speaker 1 90s style act like high concept action movie like the aforementioned time cop um but the added advantage is it does have a great ending it has a killer soundtrack and of course it has uh you know young jason statham jet lee carlo gougino del roy lindo uh dean norris briefly yeah so uh i still liked it this is still a movie i kind of like i think for me it's kind of on the line between movie i kind kind of liked and a good, bad movie.

Speaker 2 I think for that reason of I had trouble feeling invested in watching it.

Speaker 2 I'm not asking to be invested in the characters or their emotional journey, but like any movie where I find myself kind of going into a haze or a trance and then I pick up and I go, oh, oh, yeah, the movie's on.

Speaker 2 Did you see the block at some point?

Speaker 1 Smack somebody with a motorcycle.

Speaker 2 I think what it really is, there was more stuff like, I feel like there are stretches in the movie that are not as imaginative or like fun.

Speaker 2 And considering that people who made it, where it's like, this is you know, James Wong directing it, and he and Glenn Morgan wrote it, and they wrote some of the best episodes of the X-Files.

Speaker 2 And like, James Wong did what, Final Destination?

Speaker 1 Final Destination.

Speaker 2 Like, I would, I want, I wish there was like more, a few more scenes like the motorcycle fight or that big pyramid fight at the end, where I was just like, whoa, like, what, what is going on?

Speaker 2 This is intent over the top, you know.

Speaker 1 Apparently, this movie was originally meant to be a project starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson. Really?

Speaker 1 He would have been

Speaker 1 a movie. Yes, I think it would have been a different movie.
I think it would have had less, probably martial arts.

Speaker 1 Yes, probably, probably less martial arts.

Speaker 2 Probably he wouldn't speak Chinese with his wife in the movie, but you never know.

Speaker 1 Probably.

Speaker 3 John Cedar might have.

Speaker 1 He speaks Chinese. I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 Oh, if it's my turn. What's your final judgment, Michael?

Speaker 3 I think that this was a... Well, I actually kind of agree with Elliot.
It's a movie I kind of like, and I also think it's kind of a good, bad movie. Like, it was really fun to watch.

Speaker 3 I'll put it as a movie I kind of like because there's so many moments of, you know, new metal and martial arts and I am nostalgic for this period.

Speaker 3 In the opening action sequence, there were practical muzzle flashes that just like just got this physical reaction for me because I haven't seen that in a long time and it was just lighting up the frame and there's some really cool effects that I think hold up and some goofy effects that like don't.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 3 I think kind of what you guys have been saying, it begins in a place that has a lot more science fiction to it and ends in a place that has a lot more science fiction to it.

Speaker 3 And there's kind of a portion in the middle where, oh, now we're in our universe and it just becomes, yeah, a little less inventive, a little less creative.

Speaker 3 And that's maybe where it gets to a bit of a zone out, but then goes out on maybe the highest of highs.

Speaker 2 It is, I mean, yeah, that ending is.

Speaker 2 I did. I feel as much as it was losing me at times in the middle, that ending, I was like, okay.
And then the movie ended and I was like, oh.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I feel like you could have like zhuzhed up the science fiction stuff by having like other dimension hoppers like bounty hunters trying to track down you law, maybe because you know interdimensional bounty hunters always a thumbs up for me, or maybe like the other Carlo Gugino would have shown up and she's like, You promised to kill the other me's.

Speaker 1 Why aren't you? I do.

Speaker 2 That's the thing. I was surprised that that character had such a strong impact on screen right from the beginning, and we never saw her again.

Speaker 3 And it felt like swarms of mice coming out from her shoes.

Speaker 1 She's like this bemfel

Speaker 1 Willard, literally.

Speaker 2 She's femfital with mice in her shoes, and she's got such a connection with

Speaker 2 Eulaw. And it was just, I was surprised that she just didn't come back.
It was surprising to me, yeah.

Speaker 1 To have her

Speaker 2 and pretend to be KT and like try to trick Gabe or something.

Speaker 3 Oh, that would have been great because, of course, he's grieving her, and then to see her again unexpectedly would have been,

Speaker 3 I mean, I can't imagine.

Speaker 1 Did James Wong direct Dragon Ball Evolution? Yes, the answer is yes.

Speaker 3 I think he produced Willard that you just mentioned or something like that.

Speaker 1 Oh, maybe.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's great. He's maybe a producer producer on that.

Speaker 3 I believe he was also a producer on the show Millennium that I only know of from Stu mentioning it 30 times throughout the show.

Speaker 1 He did indeed produce Willard. So remember,

Speaker 1 man. Yeah.
With Chris Oliver.

Speaker 5 Hey, I'm J. Keith Van Stratton from Go Fact Yourself, and I'm here with Max Fun member of the month, Josh Mentor, who has been a Maximum Fun member since 2016.
Hello, Josh.

Speaker 6 Hey, Jay Keith, how are you doing today?

Speaker 5 I'm so well, and thank you so much for being a listener and supporter of our show. What made you decide to support MaxFun in general and to support our show, Go Fact Yourself?

Speaker 6 Jordan Morris on Jordan Jesse Go has a thing that he likes to say, which is, you know, you tip your bartender a buck of beer. You tip your podcaster a buck a month.

Speaker 6 You know, I get way more use out of MaxFun podcasts than I do like Disney Plus or Netflix.

Speaker 5 Well, it's something we very much appreciate. And by the way, when was the last time Netflix selected you as a member of the month?

Speaker 6 Exactly.

Speaker 5 Exactly. Josh Mentor, congratulations and thank you again for being the MaxFun member of the month.

Speaker 3 Thanks so much, guys.

Speaker 7 Become a MaxFun member now at maximumfun.org slash join.

Speaker 1 Walking About is the podcast about walking. It's a walkumentary series where I, Alan McLeod, and a fun, friendly guest go for a walkabout.

Speaker 1 You'll learn about interesting people and places and have the kind of conversations you can only have on foot. We've got guests like Lauren Lapkus.

Speaker 2 I figured something out about this map.

Speaker 1 Like how to read it. Betsy Sedaro.
I had no key. That's awesome and nuts.
John Gabris. This is like great first date for like broke 20 something, you know.
And more.

Speaker 1 Check out Walkin' About with Alan McLeod on maximum fun.

Speaker 1 Hey, it's it's dan here uh with some late breaking news stuff that wasn't ready for air at time of recording but uh now we can talk about uh we're coming back to san francisco sketchfest on january the 25th at 4 p.m at cobbs comedy club yep it's it's uh it's an afternoon show for once so you can get in see us have dinner and then go wherever you want to go you know it'll be a little more laid back.

Speaker 1 We're very happy to be back at Sketchfest. The best way to get tickets for that are to go to sfsketchfest.com and click on the schedule.
Find Sunday the 25th. And

Speaker 1 there should be a buy tickets link connected to us, the flop house. We don't know exactly what movie we're doing just yet.

Speaker 1 We're pondering if there's maybe something San Francisco based or just a big old flop,

Speaker 1 an historic flop that we haven't covered just yet.

Speaker 1 But we always have fun at SF Sketchfest. We're happy to be back.
We hope that we will see you there.

Speaker 1 This podcast, yes, this one, the one you're listening to right now, the Flop House, is brought to you in overwhelming part by listeners like you who have become members at maximumfund.org, allowing us to continue having a artist-owned podcast that is supported by the efforts of a worker-owned collective, all very rare, very valuable things in the world we live in right now.

Speaker 1 But we also have a couple of sponsors from the outside world, and one of them is Squarespace. Squarespace allows you to have a presence online, and these days...

Speaker 1 You got to have a presence online if you're doing pretty much any kind of business.

Speaker 1 So if you want to build your website, Squarespace gives you everything you need to do to offer services and get paid all in one place.

Speaker 1 With professional on-brand invoices and online payments, you can ensure that you will get paid on time, which is the best way to get paid, honestly. That plus, you know, it being a lot of money

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Speaker 1 You don't need to know how to code. You can just use Squarespace.
So head to squarespace.com slash flop for a free trial.

Speaker 1 And when you're ready to launch, use offer code FLOP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Speaker 1 We're also sponsored by Aura Frames. Hey, what if you could give a gift that brings your favorite holiday traditions and memories to life every day?

Speaker 1 You can keep Christmas with you all through the year, in the words of Christmas Eve on Sesame Street. Well, with an Aura Frame, you can.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 I enjoy the holidays.

Speaker 1 I am a particular fan of Halloween, of course, but that one's past. That one's past.
We got Christmas coming up. And as a kid who

Speaker 1 loved things,

Speaker 1 I certainly loved getting presents. But I also loved looking back on

Speaker 1 family moments together. And I've been very happy to have an aura frame where I can look back on the last several Christmases with Audrey and my family.

Speaker 1 And those will cycle in along with many other photos like our wedding photos, which,

Speaker 1 you know I feel like if you do wedding photos the traditional way they go in an album maybe you pull them out at your anniversary this way we get to see our friends surround us through the year that's the beauty of a digital picture frame like the ones from aura you can just download the aura app connect it to wi-fi to unload upload unlimited free photos and videos.

Speaker 1 You don't have to choose between this picture of your cats and that picture of your cats. You can have all the pictures of your cats that you want to disgust and dismay your friends.

Speaker 1 You can preload photos and keep adding from anywhere, anytime. And every frame comes packaged in a premium gift box with no price tag.

Speaker 1 This holiday season, you cannot wrap togetherness, but you can frame it.

Speaker 1 That's a little copy from Aura. You can't wrap

Speaker 1 togetherness, but you can frame it.

Speaker 1 I kind of sang it that time. For a limited time, visit auraframes.com and get $45 off Aura's best-selling Carver matte frames, named number one by Wiredcutter, by using promo code FLOP at checkout.

Speaker 1 That is A-U-R-A Frames.com. Promo code FLOP.
This exclusive Black Friday Cyber Monday deal is their best of the year. So order now before it ends.
Support the show by mentioning us at checkout.

Speaker 1 Terms and conditions apply.

Speaker 1 And speaking of us, uh we continue to do our uh flop tv streaming series our once a month brought to your home via the internet we're not gonna we're not like a traveling show uh version of our live shows um we just uh did xanadu in uh November and coming up, we're going to do Zardaz in December.

Speaker 1 That is a movie that we've talked about a lot, but I personally have never seen, although I did a special report for this that I'm very keen on the guys saying I had a lot of fun recording the video for that.

Speaker 1 So if you're interested in that show or any of the shows, go to theflophouse.simpletics.com and you can get

Speaker 1 tickets for one episode or you can get tickets in season past form where you can watch all the episodes. And don't worry if you missed the ones in the past.

Speaker 1 They're still up there through the end of the Flophouse season. There'll probably be maybe a slight grace period.
You can watch all of those those on demand.

Speaker 1 So just go to theflophouse.simpletics.com to enjoy flop TV.

Speaker 1 And now back to the show.

Speaker 1 Let us answer a couple of questions from the mailbag. Let's open up the old mailbag.
Let's do it. Mailbog.
Let's get this way into the mailbog. It's just bubbling

Speaker 1 churning piles of mail.

Speaker 1 It's hard to read because, of course, it's all wet and the ink is run, but here we go. This is from Hannah.
Hannah, last name withheld. Who writes? And her sisters or just Hannah?

Speaker 1 Just singular Hannah.

Speaker 2 Hannah Montana and her sisters.

Speaker 1 Longtime listener.

Speaker 2 Hannah, the girl of the best.

Speaker 1 Straight up fucking movie trivia team name right there. Hannah Montana and her sisters.

Speaker 2 You're right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Put that in my back pocket. Longtime listener.

Speaker 2 I think you got to put another trivia team name in your other pocket just so that I'm just balancing it don't fall down.

Speaker 1 That's how it works.

Speaker 1 Long time listener. In fact, I've been listening long enough to have sent an email years ago, and Dan replied with his daily show email account.
It's only been like five years since I've

Speaker 1 been like

Speaker 1 so long.

Speaker 1 I volunteer with.

Speaker 2 Right, Dan, it makes sense that you still use that credit to get tables at restaurants.

Speaker 1 Elliot, you know very well that credit would go nowhere.

Speaker 2 That's true, yeah.

Speaker 1 I volunteer with a program that goes, that goes to elementary schools and reads with second graders who need a little extra help getting up to their grade level in reading.

Speaker 1 Today, I had the joy of introducing my student to Elliott's books, Sharko and Hippo and Horse Meat's Dog. Oh, thank you.
I thought he liked them and he loved them.

Speaker 1 At the end of our meeting, he picked Sharko and Hippo as his favorite of the day. All praise aside, good, we got that praise out of the way.

Speaker 1 My question is...

Speaker 2 I was as uncomfortable as you were, Dan. Thank you.

Speaker 1 What books do you remember reading as children that were laugh out loud funny? For me, it was Superfudge by Judy Bloom. Thanks for all the years of entertainment, Hannah.

Speaker 1 I'm going to sidestep the question slightly to talk about children's books that I really thought were cool. And of course,

Speaker 1 I'm going to say Monster at the End of the Book, baby. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Monster at the end of the book's a great book.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I actually found like a couple of classics really funny as a kid.

Speaker 1 The Winnie the Pooh books always had things that made me laugh in them, actually. Like the idea, for instance, that

Speaker 1 he doesn't wear pants, just a shirt. That Pooh's scheme for getting honey in one of the stories is to pretend to be a cloud, a rain cloud, to get close to the bees.

Speaker 1 And he does this by rolling himself in mud, floating up on a balloon, and having Christopher Robin go around beneath him with an umbrella going tut-tut, it looks like rain, which is

Speaker 1 that's a pretty funny notion.

Speaker 1 And Eeyore, I obviously found very funny.

Speaker 1 And I remember laughing out loud at a lot of the banicula books.

Speaker 1 There's always something funny in there. I found them to be very scary.
So

Speaker 1 the idea of eating vegetables.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, horrible.

Speaker 4 Are they only? I wonder if the letter writer only wants books we read as kids, or can we mention modern books?

Speaker 1 I'm sure you can say you can do whatever you want.

Speaker 4 As a parent who is also married to a children's librarian, we read a lot of children's books in our house, and there's a lot lot of really funny books out there.

Speaker 4 I'm going to mention some of them: Nothing Rhymes with Orange by Adam Rex, hilarious. The picture book recipe written by Angela and Michael Ann Petrella, super funny.

Speaker 4 The first cat in space series that Mac Barnett writes.

Speaker 4 And why am I forgetting the artist's name? Sean, something. Anyway, I'll look it up.
But that book seems really funny.

Speaker 4 I Want My Hat Back by John Classen. That's a really funny picture book.
Snapseed the Alligator Does Not Want to Be in this Book is a really funny book with art by

Speaker 4 my Tim Miller, who did the Horse Meets Dog, uh and uh my other most recent book uh City Mouse Wrecks the House but uh director of Deadpool no that's a different Tim Miller uh but there's also uh when I was a kid I really loved the stinky cheese man by John Sheska and Lane Smith uh which is a very funny fairy tale picture book um and I guess it's not this is kind of like Stewart's answer uh they recently announced they're making a movie of my favorite chapter book as a kid, which is Lizard Music by Daniel Pinkwater.

Speaker 4 And Daniel Pinkwater is such a funny writer. He wrote so many books for kids, and they're so funny.
But I'm a little trepidatious about them making a movie of this book.

Speaker 4 And it's one that me and my younger son, I read to him. Does it stars Jared Leto or something? No, well, it's if The Rock is going to be in it, but like, you know,

Speaker 4 or Dwayne Johnson, but in a role that it's not, it seems a little strange for him to be doing. Is there like a giant rock man in it?

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly. He's playing a rap.
Is there a

Speaker 4 yeah, but it's it's a book that has not a lot of, it's like a kid discovering strange things that all seem to be connected, but there's no like conflict in it.

Speaker 4 And I'm very worried that, like, it's about a kid who discovers an island of talking lizards that in a lake near near his home.

Speaker 4 And they, at night, his television can pick up their signals, their television signals.

Speaker 4 And I'm worried they're going to like make it one of these stories where it's like, we've got to save them from a developer or something like that. We got to hide these lizard people.

Speaker 4 And I don't want it to be that. But that's it.
But I love that book. I think that's a book I'd recommend highly.

Speaker 1 I just remember something. Sorry, did you? Any of you ever read the Arabelle's Raven book? Arabelle's Raven books? It's

Speaker 1 a series by Joan Aiken, who is better known for the wolves of Willoughby Chase and sort of like

Speaker 1 gothic

Speaker 1 sort of pseudo-Victorian thrillery, young adult stuff. But

Speaker 1 I think these were forgotten, but it's about a young girl and her her raven. And I found them very funny, but they seem to have fallen out of print.
Michael, is there something that you remember?

Speaker 3 Well, I can't top Elliot, of course, with his intimate knowledge of children's books, but not really.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think kind of young at heart and brain.

Speaker 3 The ones that come to mind to me, I think, were when I was a little older.

Speaker 3 Any Australian listening wouldn't be surprised to hear about Paul Jennings, whose like wicked books are unreal, just kind of iconic, funny, but kind of gross books for kids.

Speaker 3 But when I thought of like the books that I read as a kid that I laughed at, I would have been 12, 13 when I read like Hitchhiker's Guy.

Speaker 3 And I know that sounds like an older thing, but that felt like those were the first times I was laughing, like really laughing out loud at books.

Speaker 3 I used to read Spike Milligan parody books that he'd like do, like Spike Milligan's Frankenstein or something.

Speaker 3 I think that they were a bit too adult for me at the time, but I still found them very silly and funny.

Speaker 1 Nice.

Speaker 1 This one is from Aaron Lasting Withheld, who writes, Brockovich.

Speaker 1 I was listening to your episode on

Speaker 2 there's deadly chemicals in your podcast. What are you going to do about it?

Speaker 1 I'm going to sue you. I was listening to your episode on Until Dawn with Star of the Pod, Halloween.
Until Dawn.

Speaker 1 And I wanted to say, thank you for the theme song.

Speaker 1 I wanted to say that I wholeheartedly support Dan for pointing out that the main characters in the movie were hard to tell apart because they're all brunettes.

Speaker 1 That's how you get a letter on the show, by the way. I know it might be easy.

Speaker 2 I'll tell Dan he's right about something.

Speaker 1 I know it might be easy for you folks who can easily distinguish faces, but I appreciated Dan giving a shout out to those of us who struggle with it.

Speaker 1 I, like many others, have something called proso-pagnosia. I hope I said that correctly.

Speaker 1 Almost certainly not. It occurs because there's a special area of our brain that specifically recognizes faces and that area may be impaired for some folks.

Speaker 1 In light of this, my question is, are there any movies, TV shows, or even podcasts where you've had trouble distinguishing between characters because they look or sound very similar or because they disguise the actor so well in a later scene?

Speaker 1 As an example, I couldn't watch Orphan Brack because every time Tatiana Mazlani appeared as a new clone with a different look or personality, I couldn't tell if it was a clone or a completely new character.

Speaker 1 Thank you all for keeping on, keeping on. Aaron Last name with health.
And actually, like

Speaker 1 when Audrey heard that episode, she's like, why didn't you just say you were thinking about me?

Speaker 1 Because part of it is like, I don't think she has full, what you would colloquially call face blindness, but she has

Speaker 1 an interesting form where like sometimes she's like, I know I've seen this person and can like get it. And sometimes she looks at one thing of a person's face and thinks they look exactly like that.

Speaker 1 too many middle-aged white guys with beards look alike yeah

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 yeah i don't i mean i they included podcasts i gotta say that my first years listening to my brother my brother and me i had trouble telling them apart and now they're brothers now it's in the name i find it wild that i ever had any difficulty

Speaker 1 you know i mean especially now having met them but like but it was it just seems very strange to me that i had that trouble but sometimes when you're not familiar with something

Speaker 1 you just yeah, I mean, that's why it was really essential that we brought in an Elliot to zhuzh up the vocal diversity in our show.

Speaker 2 Because you guys have kind of like uh voices, and I have kind of a

Speaker 1 voice.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think I felt that way around this podcast at the beginning.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard that about people having trouble between me and Stuart.
I don't think that we sound that much alike, but that's one that we have gotten.

Speaker 2 But you also think the word pin sounds like pen.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 you know, I mean, I'll find some regional problem of yours to because we're both Michael. I don't think there is.

Speaker 2 I'm just playing Super Mario Brothers over here.

Speaker 4 I have a movie answer to this, which is: I really enjoyed the movie Dunkirk, but I could not tell most of the characters apart. They all looked like the same guy to me.

Speaker 4 And so I had a lot of trouble keeping track of who was who. Luckily, that's a movie where it doesn't really matter.
It's not rich with unique characters.

Speaker 4 But I had a lot of, I felt like every new character until

Speaker 4 Mark Rylance came on as the guy who owns a boat. I feel like everyone, I was like, oh, it's like a young, Britishy guy with dark brown hair.
Okay, it's another one of those. I don't, vaguely handsome.

Speaker 4 And I could not tell anyone a part in it. So, yeah.

Speaker 4 Good thing, good thing. One guy is wearing, is in a plane with a mask over his face.
The most famous, the other most famous guy in the movie.

Speaker 4 But, you know, can't understand what he's saying, but I know who he is. But that's how I knew who he was because I couldn't understand what he was saying.

Speaker 3 I really struggled with this movie called The One to differentiate between the characters of Gabe the New.

Speaker 3 I kind of have the opposite answer whereby

Speaker 3 re-watching like The Prestige, where there are two Christian Bales, spoiler alert for the Prestige, and they're trying to disguise him.

Speaker 3 I thought the first time I saw it, I was fairly young and I didn't notice it. But knowing that twist going in, it's crazy to me that nobody can tell that those are two Christian Bales.

Speaker 3 They do a great job, but it's just, it's a very famous, recognizable guy.

Speaker 4 Once you know it, on that, that one especially, I love that movie. And when I first saw it, it really took me by surprise.
But yeah, once you know it, you're like, oh, okay.

Speaker 2 Like, they're barely, it looks like them.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's a little bit like they act wildly differently

Speaker 1 from scene to scene.

Speaker 3 He's always turning away. They really avoid showing him too frontant.
He's always kind of a presence that you don't see the face of too much.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 It's like, I love the movie, The Fin Man, and I'll watch it with people and I know who the killer is and they don't. And I'm like, geez, Louise, they're making it so obvious.
This is this is bonkers.

Speaker 4 How the hell is nobody picking up this? But I didn't pick up on it the first time I saw it. So just shows you it's easy to know something.

Speaker 4 It's easy to figure something out when you know the answer already, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, the

Speaker 3 one time that I noticed it, you know, like straight away, there's a movie called You Should Have Left with Kevin Bacon and Amanda Safe Reed from 2020.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 3 the opening, it's directed by the guy who did Stir of Echoes.

Speaker 1 I haven't watched this movie, but I remember the ads and realizing, I'm like, are these, are their characters supposed to be married in that movie, Amanda Sleep? Yeah. But like,

Speaker 1 that was one of the few times where I saw an ad and I'm like, I need to check the age difference.

Speaker 1 Because it's like 25 years. I don't know.
Okay. Go on.
Sorry.

Speaker 3 She could definitely be playing his daughter and possibly has in other films.

Speaker 3 But my old spoilers for this movie, the opening scene, there's like a dark character that's dimly lit, like talking nefariously, kind of front onto the camera.

Speaker 3 And it's just so obviously Kevin Bacon with like a moustache

Speaker 3 and some makeup on that. They don't disguise it well enough at all.
And then it like cuts to Kevin Bacon's a normal guy, and we're going to learn that there's something going on with him later.

Speaker 3 And it's just like from the first moment, okay, Kevin Bacon's going to be the kind of spooky guy.

Speaker 1 That made me remember it's not the exact, it's not the same thing at all, actually, but like

Speaker 1 this movie, A Murder of Crows, which I watched because it was directed by Rowdy Harrington of Roadhouse fame and stars

Speaker 1 Cuba Gooding Jr.

Speaker 1 Cubie

Speaker 1 Gooding Jr. Tom Baron Jr.

Speaker 1 Eric Stultz. Eric Stoltz.
Eric Stoltz. From Killing Zoe.
Speaking of Eric Stoltz, there's a...

Speaker 2 Almost from Back to the Future?

Speaker 1 Spoiler.

Speaker 1 There's a part in the movie where a character is wearing such obvious makeup that it's like, I can't believe this

Speaker 1 thought I wouldn't know that it is this other character. It is insane that they're trying to build a twist around this makeup that they've put on this person.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 if you want to see some truly zany

Speaker 1 thriller filmmaking, check that one out.

Speaker 3 The makeup thing is kind of like in Prometheus when you watch that for the first time. You're like, well, Guy Pierce is going to get younger.
Like he can't just stay like this.

Speaker 1 And then he does.

Speaker 2 I find that so funny that they were like, well, we're going to have the flashback scenes. So we need to have him play the old man, too.
Then they cut all the flashback scenes.

Speaker 2 It's like, oh, we should have hired an old man.

Speaker 1 What are we doing? Oh, perfect.

Speaker 1 It's one of those things that when you first see it, you're like, is this a flaw? But then you think about it and you're like, no, it's great. Leave it in there.
It's enriching the text.

Speaker 1 Let us

Speaker 1 recommend a few movies.

Speaker 1 If you're not in the mood for a new metal actioner,

Speaker 1 what else could you have to recommend a non-new metal actioner.

Speaker 1 I want to quickly say.

Speaker 2 Well, if you were going to recommend a new metal actioner, Stewart, what would it be?

Speaker 1 I'll put you on the spot.

Speaker 1 I went out and saw a rep screening of John Carpenter's The Fog, a movie that I know.

Speaker 2 Oh, is that why you texted us about The Fog?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Sometimes I think it's funnier if there's no context, but I know that it baffles.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I know that there's been a reclamation of The Fog, a movie that at the time time was, you know, not very well received, but it has had in the past never been one of my favorites.

Speaker 1 Like I recognize, I'm like, oh, there's like stuff in here I like, but I kind of get bored trying to watch it at home.

Speaker 1 Outside of Halloween, have any John Carpenter movies been like received super well?

Speaker 1 Because like the thing wasn't super well received when it came out. There was,

Speaker 1 I know that

Speaker 2 Assault on Precinct 13, but I mean, that's not quite pure-ass.

Speaker 1 I know he had

Speaker 1 that was super well received.

Speaker 2 When it came out, I think people were like, oh, this is, it wasn't like a huge movie, but it was like, oh, this is special for the kind of movie that it is. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think.

Speaker 1 Because the villain, the criminal's name, like Napoleon Casanova or whatever. Immediately sidetracked me.

Speaker 2 That was the bad guy in The Mystery Men?

Speaker 1 I think so, yeah. No,

Speaker 1 that's Casanova Frankenstein. Okay.
Played by Jeffrey Russell.

Speaker 1 I know Escape from New York was a legit hit. Oh, okay.
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's true. That's true.

Speaker 1 Anyway, I don't have anything. I saw Escape from L.A.
twice in the theater, so it must be. Starman was big.

Speaker 2 When Starman came out, that was big. People really like that a lot.

Speaker 1 I don't have all the receipts in front of me. All I know is I saw the fog.

Speaker 2 But, Dan, you're John Carpenter's accountant.

Speaker 1 I saw the fog.

Speaker 1 All this money's been on video games.

Speaker 1 My suspicion.

Speaker 2 John,

Speaker 2 you can't buy any more cents.

Speaker 2 You're believing yourself dry. You have too many cents.
You're like Johnny Depp with houses. You're just buying too many cents, John.

Speaker 1 my my suspicion that it would play you know super better for me in the theater where I kind of have to be locked in was correct like all of the stuff that at home felt a little slow in the theater like felt like like beautiful atmospherics like building the community slowly building up sort of the the vibes um it just looks really pretty it's maybe his prettiest movie i i also feel like when i watched it before like

Speaker 1 as a younger dude, I'm like, I want a movie that's really going to be really scary. You know, and now like

Speaker 1 horror movies, like

Speaker 1 I want to know that guy.

Speaker 1 Horror movies are, I've seen so many of them that they don't scare me that much at all. Like, so it's not necessarily the first thing I'm looking for in a horror movie anymore.

Speaker 1 I just like the form of horror movies. I like the genre tropes.
I like seeing what people do with it.

Speaker 1 So I was a lot more open to this, you know, which is also a very old-fashioned ghost story in a way that I think before might have felt corny to me, but now it feels like classic and cozy. And

Speaker 1 it's just like a fun thing to hang out in. Dan, do you want to, do you want to see a really scary movie? Why don't you watch the news?

Speaker 1 Do you think that the news is a movie?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I watch it for 90 minutes and then I turn it off. Okay.

Speaker 1 And you can just walk away from it. There's no sequels.

Speaker 1 Speaking of sequels, I'm going to recommend a sequel that I watched earlier today.

Speaker 1 I'm going to recommend Den of Thieves Pantera, the sequel to Den of Thieves, both movies starring Gerard Butler and O'Shea Jackson. O'Shea Jackson Jr.
is it? Jr., I think. Jr., yeah.

Speaker 1 And this is like peak, like Michael Mann wannabe, but with the like divorce dad element tiled up a little bit. It's super great, like heist movie action cinema.

Speaker 1 The first movie is a fairly narrow, the first movie, Den of Thieves, is a fairly narrow scope set in LA about robbing a Federal Reserve. Gerard Butler plays a like genuinely gross,

Speaker 1 like somewhat corrupt cop, I guess very corrupt,

Speaker 1 who gets kind of involved in something.

Speaker 1 Big Nick, right?

Speaker 1 He's big Nick, yeah. And he, like, I applaud the movie for how gross they make him.
Like, he looks like he has not showered in weeks.

Speaker 1 He, like, you can smell the like cheap cologne and booze sweats on him, uh, emanating from his Wilson's leather jacket. He's wearing at all times.

Speaker 1 Um, and this movie, like, it opens it up a little bit. It's set in France and it involves a heist of a diamond exchange, but it's still got like, it's still a lot of vibes.

Speaker 1 The action sequences are genuinely really tense and good.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's really, it's really fun.

Speaker 1 I like them.

Speaker 1 In the words of one of my bartenders, film critic, Margaret Barton Fuomo, it rips.

Speaker 1 I'm glad you had to quote someone for

Speaker 1 that. Yeah, I'm giving her a shout out.
That's

Speaker 1 I get like a nickel every time I give somebody a shout out. Michael's been doing it all fucking day with his fucking crew.

Speaker 1 his sleepover crew

Speaker 4 and all of his friends

Speaker 4 uh i'm going to uh i'm going to recommend a sequel also this is not this is a sequel probably our our listeners have listened to already heard about already because we've talked about it before but i you know me i don't get to watch a lot of movies these days except flop house movies but um luckily for me uh on halloween i introduced my younger son to a certain movie that I really love and he wanted to see the sequel, which I also really love.

Speaker 4 We watched it. And I was like, wait a minute.
in the one, Dean Norris is like part of this like tactical squad. In this movie, Dean Norris is part of a tactical squad.

Speaker 4 And that movie is Gremlins 2, The New Batch, where Dean Norris makes a very short appearance as part of this tactical squad. So I'm going to recommend.
We watched it.

Speaker 4 We watched Gremlins on Halloween, me and my younger son. He really loved it.
He loved it so much. And so he wanted to watch Gremlins 2 when we finished watching it yesterday, Gremlins 2.

Speaker 4 And he was going, literally made him two wound up and he had trouble going to bed afterwards.

Speaker 1 He was so excited.

Speaker 4 He was like, He was like, This is my favorite movie now. This is my favorite movie before it was over.
So, I'm going to recommend Revlin Su, the new badge. It's just so fun watching it.

Speaker 4 I was like, This movie's so fun.

Speaker 1 We went to it. We went to a screening of the Nighthawk, and I got too wound up.
Yeah, he's running around, he's running in the aisles.

Speaker 2 It was so hard to dance.

Speaker 4 There's something about seeing

Speaker 4 like that, and just the older I get, the more people in the cast I recognize for their other work.

Speaker 4 And so, like, when I was a kid, I didn't know who Paul Bartell was, But, like, now seeing him in the movie, you know, seeing Nicole Kogan is so funny to me.

Speaker 4 And just seeing, like, I don't know, just everyone who shows up in it, seeing,

Speaker 4 why am I forgetting his name? Who

Speaker 4 plays the

Speaker 4 seeing John Aston in it, seeing Henry Gibson show up and just in a, in a wordless role?

Speaker 1 Like, it's so funny. Dick Miller?

Speaker 4 Dick Miller. I mean, of course, Dick Miller, but like seeing the actors who are in it.
It's just so fun. So I'm going to say Gremlins 2.
Why not? Watch it. It's super fun.
Do it.

Speaker 3 Hell yeah.

Speaker 3 um really quickly on gremlins too i was just in uh spain for the sitches film festival and um i i never know what's going to happen to these festivals because i just like arrive and somebody kind of you know takes me around to what i do i'm not really a planner but um there was one thing it's like oh there's a dinner tonight just you and some of the other directors you know we'll just show up here get in a car you go to dinner and i got in the car and there was an older gentleman and he said oh hi i'm joe i'm one of the directors and i was like are you fucking Joe Dante?

Speaker 3 He was like, yeah, I am. And then he was super nice.
Him and his wife were great. And it was a totally unexpected night of eating paello with John Joe Dante.
And I never thought that would happen.

Speaker 1 That's amazing.

Speaker 3 He was very cool.

Speaker 3 That's awesome. Now that my pathetic name dropping's out of the way,

Speaker 1 I might mention somebody we'd heard of after talking about your childhood friends.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 3 Shout out to my New Zealand childhood friends, Michael Van Beek, Thomas Sullivan Robertson, Samuel Dunford Baker.

Speaker 1 Miss you guys.

Speaker 1 Well, I don't know.

Speaker 2 Like an yearbook ad over here. Anyway,

Speaker 1 an ad for a year.

Speaker 3 My favorite movie that I've seen this year, I think, is a movie called Nirvana the Band, The Show, the Movie. I don't know if that means anything to you guys.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Nirvana the Band is this show, this kind of comedy duo slash collective that's been making stuff for almost 20 years now, starting on the web and then becoming a television show.

Speaker 3 And then they've made this film, Matthew Johnson, you might know from, he directed things like BlackBerry and some other stuff. But I watched this movie and it is, it is just kind of,

Speaker 3 it's so fun. It's so funny.
I was at the premiere at South by Southwest and just the vibes and the laughter in the room was insane.

Speaker 3 Like not only is it just an insanely funny kind of back to the future parody about traveling back to 2008, but it is like a feat of low-budget filmmaking that it's incomprehensible how they pulled off some of the set pieces.

Speaker 3 A lot of the stuff that those guys do is they will kind of shoot in public with slightly hidden cameras.

Speaker 3 And then if a member of the public gets involved in the scene, they'll happily bring them in and then like rewrite other scenes to shoot earlier in the movie so that this weird interaction that they haven't written feels like a perfect payoff to something that was set up.

Speaker 3 So it has this just really elastic quality to it where the film is just like a joy from start to finish, but thinking back on it from a technical point of view,

Speaker 3 it boggles the brain that it exists. And I was really, really flabbergasted of it as a work of filmmaking.

Speaker 1 And so it's super, super fun.

Speaker 2 Do you know is it? I was reading about that the other day and I was trying to figure out how I could see it. I was wondering, do you know if it's available anywhere?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's being distributed by Neon, but I think it's a pretty limited distribution. I think that they were doing a city-by-city tour in the States.

Speaker 3 I'm sure it'll come out to streaming sometime eventually. But if there's any chance to see it in a cinema, I think it would be, it was a raucous experience for me.

Speaker 3 And I went as a fan, but I went with somebody who'd never heard of them, never seen any of their stuff. And he had a great time as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah,

Speaker 1 I've heard a great word about that. I'm very curious about it.

Speaker 1 But now we should give you a chance to

Speaker 1 plug your own stuff

Speaker 1 if you so desire.

Speaker 1 Oh, sure.

Speaker 3 I don't have a lot to plug. I guess I'll plug the movie together, which I wrote and directed and came out earlier in the year.
It's now available on streaming.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 1 check that out. It's about two people battling to become one, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it really, really is.

Speaker 1 How apropos.

Speaker 3 You know, it's a horror movie. It's a body horror.

Speaker 3 I'm really proud of the film, and I think Dave, Franco, and Allison Bree are great in it. I've got Dave in my background here, kind of screaming at us, which is good fun.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's you'll laugh, you'll cry, it'll change your life.

Speaker 2 I heard it was a movie about Alison Bree touching Dan's shoulder.

Speaker 1 Okay, that's not.

Speaker 1 Yes, it was. Thanks again for that.

Speaker 1 I didn't. That makes it seem like I sent like a voice memo.
I was just, I, you know, casually was like, oh, that was a high point.

Speaker 3 I didn't know it said that text message could be sweaty.

Speaker 2 The text message said in parentheses, creepy.

Speaker 1 Thanks again for that.

Speaker 1 But it seems like the movie's been received really well. That's, that's great.
Does that, was that like a shocker for you? Or are you.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, it was a shocker too.

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, this is my first feature film. It's a completely independent film that we shot in Melbourne, Australia.
And then I spent months, you know, in the editing room down here.

Speaker 3 And I did a lot of the visual effects in the film myself. So I ended up spending extra months just kind of in this room here with my computer, just kind of making the film finish off.

Speaker 3 And then we premiered at Sundance and we like hadn't test screened it and nobody had seen it before. And it ended up selling for the highest amount at Sundance this year.

Speaker 3 And the reaction in the room was like, the first joke landed, the first jump scare got a gasp. And you could just feel that you had it.

Speaker 3 And yeah, I spent most of the screening holding my partner's hand and holding my producer's hand and just kind of happily weeping. And so for it to have come out and to be

Speaker 3 received so well like around the world,

Speaker 3 it's been an amazing and unexpected experience. Honestly, it's been quite overwhelming.

Speaker 3 So I'm sort of enjoying having just got back from Spain, just kind of taking a minute and trying to readjust to live post the movie. But yeah, it's been a treat.

Speaker 3 And it allowed me to meet two of my three favorite floppers in the flesh in New York City.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's the important thing. You get to tour the world and meet podcasters.
Well, they were like, hey, do you know anybody in New York?

Speaker 3 We've got your tickets. And I'm like,

Speaker 3 I guess I'll reach out to Stu on Instagram.

Speaker 1 Thank you. It was very kind of you to do that.

Speaker 1 Oh, my pleasure. Yeah, I'm like,

Speaker 1 who did I get a random DM from?

Speaker 1 Wait a minute. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, actually, this film came together from a random DM, from a producer being like, hey, we saw a short film you liked. What else you got? So, you know, sometimes there's gold in those hills.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a lot of it is like, I will say, almost all the good things that have happened in my career have been me randomly saying yes to things that seemed crazy.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you

Speaker 1 for being on the show, particularly because as reference, you're doing it from the other side of the world. So we had to

Speaker 1 coordinate a schedule that, I don't know, wasn't too miserable for anyone, hopefully.

Speaker 3 Hey, what else would I want to do on a beautiful Saturday afternoon?

Speaker 1 Excellent.

Speaker 1 I'd like to, before we go, thank our producer, Alex Smith. He goes by the name Howell Dotty, all over over the place online.
You can watch his Twitch streams, listen to the streets.

Speaker 1 He's just howl dottying all over the place.

Speaker 1 Man, that guy loves to howl dotty.

Speaker 1 You can go to maximumfund.org, check out other great shows on the network.

Speaker 1 You know, hey, just another plug here at the end for Flop TV, right? Why not? Why not? We don't mention it at odd moments to surprise the listener enough so they can't skip over it.

Speaker 1 Flop TV is going on. Theflophouse.simpletics.com.
Okay. But

Speaker 1 thank you all for listening. For the Flophouse, I've been Dan McCoy.
I've been Stuart Wellington.

Speaker 4 I've been Ellie Kalen, author of Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy, Other Nonsense on bookstore shelves. Now, I should have mentioned that earlier at the top of the show when I introduced myself.

Speaker 4 And we've been joined today by Michael Shanks.

Speaker 3 Thank you very much for having me. And thanks to the listeners for listening.

Speaker 1 Oh, that sounds professional. You heard it.
Bye.

Speaker 1 You can't unhear it.

Speaker 1 Elliot's in a seductive mood because it's

Speaker 1 late as hell over there. What, 6 o'clock?

Speaker 1 5 o'clock on the 4th.

Speaker 1 Oh, man.

Speaker 2 This is when we get pretty loose around here.

Speaker 1 This is where Elliot starts sending his U-up texts.

Speaker 2 This is when I take a break from work, and then I don't pick up again until 9 p.m.

Speaker 1 Pretty hot.

Speaker 1 I see by your card, Stuart, that you're on summary duties. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Would you also like to introduce our guest? When

Speaker 1 okay,

Speaker 3 um, it's fascinating to see the sausage get made.

Speaker 1 Yeah, oh, wow, yeah, you're like, wow, I didn't realize it was so safe. It's sort of like the sausage kind of like falls down the stairs and somehow gets into the casing during the process.

Speaker 1 A lot gets so stand-aid, yeah.

Speaker 1 Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artists-owned shows, supported directly by you.