‘The Gambler’ (2014) With Bill Simmons and Chris Ryan

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Speaker 1 The Rewatchables brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where you can find a lot of the videos that we've done of episodes on the Ringer Movies channel. Now we have a Ringer TV channel.

Speaker 2 We do. Ringer TV on YouTube.

Speaker 1 Are you cranking it on there? We sure are. Some cranking? Yeah.

Speaker 3 You're cranking it on a YouTube channel?

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's cranking it. The watch is cranking away.
You did some three-person stuff.

Speaker 2 Yeah, me, Joe, and Rob did a little bit of a holiday recommendation kind of list for people, for people who are looking for stuff to watch over the holidays was one of them carry-on with on netflix uh this the second we're done here i'm going home to watch it i watched the first 40 minutes how was it

Speaker 1 ah slow slow start oh really really evil bateman though i love evil bateman didn't know it didn't he's not on the not on the poster well ozark kind of buried him he was pretty evil in ozark i guess he became evil well I don't know how to describe the character in the gambler.

Speaker 1 Is he evil? Is he a good guy? What the hell is he? What is this movie? He's a teacher. It's a teacher.
We're going to talk about the gambler on the rewatchables. It's next.

Speaker 1 I've seen V half a million dollars off.

Speaker 1 Spend up two and a half million dollars.

Speaker 1 But the rules don't make to lose. I will kill your entire bloodline.

Speaker 2 Just change.

Speaker 1 What's going on? Trying to get away from me.

Speaker 2 I've never done anything like this before.

Speaker 4 You gotta meet me.

Speaker 1 You understand the gravity of your situation?

Speaker 4 The gambler. I came to play Ritted R.

Speaker 1 All right, CR, this movie came out. We knew each other.
Yeah. We were at Grantland.
Yeah. And Wesley Morris skewered this movie.
And then you did a blog post and you really liked it. I loved it.

Speaker 1 You guys were like

Speaker 1 Jack and who's the other guy in Lost? Oh, Jack and Swords. Jack and Locke? Yeah, Jack and Swords.

Speaker 1 Jack and Locke, yeah. And

Speaker 1 you've been nudging me on this movie for years. Yeah.
I've been like two-thirds of the way there for a while. And then I caught it last year, and it finally fell into place.

Speaker 1 And then I watched it twice this week, and now I'm all in.

Speaker 2 It's about a bunch of stuff that we like.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Genius, writing, gambling, and college hoops. So it's already got a bunch of stuff that we're interested in, but it's one of those weird,

Speaker 2 you know, mid-2010s movies that we would call like five o'clockers that at like on a Friday at Grantland or whatever, we would kind of like cut out a little bit early and then go see something over at the movie theater right by LA Live.

Speaker 2 And this was one that just kind of came and went.

Speaker 2 Like even, even with Wahlberg, it didn't really like make much of an impact either commercially or critically, but it's kind of like, at least for me, lived on.

Speaker 2 And I go back to it really often just to see just how fucking weird it is at times.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember he passed through the whole Granland universe because he really promoted this. Yeah.
And he did my podcast. This was like an Oscar movie.
Yeah. He lost lost all this weight for it.
He

Speaker 1 I remember being excited because he did the podcast and he never really talked about boogeynights that much, but during the podcast, I asked about boogeynights because we were doing oral history for it.

Speaker 1 We were able to grab what he said and put it in there. But he was really confident this was going to be a big movie.
And it just wasn't.

Speaker 1 But now it has this whole second life and it's been on cable a lot. And I also think it's one of those movies you really do have to watch a few times.

Speaker 1 So that feels like a cop-out, but I don't think it is because there's a lot. there's a lot of themes in this movie.

Speaker 2 It's mostly a movie about ideas.

Speaker 2 I know people might laugh at like a Mark Wahlberg gambling movie being a movie of ideas, but this is based on a James Toback film from the 70s, but is also based on a Dostoevsky book.

Speaker 2 And most of the scenes are not about like dramatic tension of what's going to happen.

Speaker 2 They're about two or three characters exchanging their points of view and their ideas about like how to live, how to live honestly, what people need to do to live successfully.

Speaker 2 And I think that that winds up rewarding on multiple viewings. It's also strangely a movie that you kind of sometimes need to have subtitles on for.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of mumbling, but there's also a lot of really dense dialogue and dense speechifying. So it's just one of those things that if you have it on and on, you kind of get more out of it.

Speaker 1 It also has a fundamental question, which we've been sitting with for 30 years now with Mark Wahlberg as an actor. Because you could make a case, he's the perfect actor for this movie.

Speaker 1 And you could make a case that there's 20 actors you would rather have in this movie and that his limitations as an actor and for what he's willing to do and not do in a movie hold this movie back or it's perfect and i don't really know where i've landed on that this is kind of like

Speaker 2 this is the road not taken for wahlberg you know like this is the diggler this is departed this is doing prestigious stuff working with really good scripts and he has since kind of almost at this moment gone in a completely different direction where he because it didn't work now he's like all right let's do this yeah yeah crank out like two family movies and an action movie every year and that's kind of like what he's sort of done with the rest of his professional career along with obviously like fitness training regimen stuff and supplements and exercise gear so i feel like this was actually like his last stand of being taken seriously as an actor Yeah, there's I'm in conflict in so many ways with this because this is an English major movie.

Speaker 1 As you know, I hate English majors. It's got a lot of big pretentious themes and it's trying to do a lot of stuff, which instantly I'm against.
I really do like Mark Wahlberg.

Speaker 1 I also don't know if he's that interested in going to certain places. And it's hard.
And I've seen this movie now a bunch of times. It's hard not to imagine.
I'll just step on a casting couch now.

Speaker 1 This to me would have been the perfect Bernthal movie.

Speaker 2 Oh my God, dude.

Speaker 1 Like, just perfect. This is everything I would have wanted from a bernthal movie.
The character would have made more sense to me.

Speaker 1 But I also think, like to step on a casting wood if later leo was initially attached and i'm like i kind of like that direction too um but on the other hand so the this the rewatchable side of me the five o'clocker side of me the unintentional comedy side of me i kind of love wahlberg in this because he's there's moments where i'm not with him but that's what's fun about it we're like oh man mark wahlberg just didn't have it here but then other moments where he's really good you can make the argument that i mean honestly we could sit here for half an hour listing actors who probably would have nailed this oscar isaac ethan hawk mark ruffalo like so many different character actors who probably would have been a really good probably would have been able to

Speaker 2 bring a little bit more familiarity with the teaching segment specifically

Speaker 2 but there's something so weird about wahlberg talking about shakespeare and whether or not shakespeare actually authored his plays and yeah Camus and like the stranger and when he's like doing that stuff you're like I he's trying so hard to be believable.

Speaker 2 And he apparently spent like all this time watching professors do lectures that it gives it this like otherworldly quality. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Well, Niasa has a very strange haircut.

Speaker 1 Everything about it is a very non-Wahlberg performance. The way he handles the gambling scenes is just super, it's, everything he's doing is some sort of weird Wahlberg choice.

Speaker 1 that I kind of like, but I almost wonder, was this a better part for somebody else?

Speaker 1 Because the remake, the original movie the james conn movie it's just a classic james con swagger part like just him being james con it's part of like a constellation of con parts like like the like the thief godfather one thief rollerball all these movies where he's just like james con swinging around he might get the shit kicked out of him anytime he might kick the shit out of somebody else don't leave your wife or your girlfriend with them just machismo all the time and wahlberg

Speaker 1 it's probably closest to dirk diggler and it's funny because he lost all this weight for the movie. So he actually is the Dirk Diggler face, but he's got this weird hairdo.

Speaker 1 And I feel like he wants to go to this crazy place here.

Speaker 1 But yet, really, the only time he breaks down is the beginning of the movie when he's saying goodbye to his grandfather. There's that.

Speaker 2 There's the scene in Amy's apartment where he like tells her what he wants when she jumps him. Yeah.
But that's really it. Everything else.

Speaker 2 The whole point of this character, Jim Bennett, is that he just tells the truth. And it's actually like a really incredible

Speaker 2 dramatic not invention of the film, but like a thing to do is just, what if you had a character who was just always telling the truth, more or less? He actually doesn't really even lie to the bookies.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a good point. I'm trying to think, did he try to fib out anybody? Never.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, you could say at the end with the Lamar stuff, he doesn't tell all the truth, but he is telling the truth. I mean, he is being honest.

Speaker 2 When Lamar is like, when he goes to talk to Lamar, it's not like he's like, he's just like, you can do it for the money for you, but don't worry about me. Like it's going to happen either way for me.

Speaker 1 All right. So let's get English majority then.
Okay. So is this a movie about somebody with a gambling problem? Is it somebody who's self-destructive? Is it a movie about genius?

Speaker 1 Is it a movie about all of these things? What is it?

Speaker 2 I think it's a movie about a guy who wants to obliterate himself to rebuild himself. And I think one of the coolest things about this movie is that there is no discernible trauma.

Speaker 2 to this character that he is trying to recover from. Like most, multiple characters confront him with that idea.

Speaker 2 Like Bri Larson's character is like, did you not have like you have no problems? So you had to invent them for yourself. John Goodman is like, oh, you're suicidal.
Like Michael K.

Speaker 2 Williams is always asking him like, what his problem is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like you're a good-looking guy, normal family, you have money.

Speaker 2 I think he's a character who, by all accounts throughout the film, wants to live like this ecstatic, special life. And because he doesn't feel that way, he's just going to destroy the life he has.

Speaker 2 Like the the idea of being like relatively happy, honestly, the entire fuck you speech, I don't think he, that, that to him wouldn't be happiness to have like a 30-year mortgage, a reliable car,

Speaker 2 money in the bank that's paying 3% to 5%. That's not what he wants.
He wants to like feel things on a massive level. He wanted maybe to be a novelist, but knows he's not good enough.

Speaker 2 And so now he's like destroying the thing he is to feel anything at all.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like he would, he would rather have Jameis Winston as his quarterback.

Speaker 1 That is honestly exactly right.

Speaker 2 He wants to see a guy throw for 150 yards to the other team than see Jalen Hurston.

Speaker 1 He'd rather have Joe Burr Jameis. And he's like, I would love Jameis.
I would love the roller coaster rides on. Yeah, because, I mean, we'll dive into some of his blackjacks.

Speaker 2 I feel like it's incidental to the movie.

Speaker 1 He's stacking. Yeah.
So when you stack, you just, you're on a death wish. Yeah.
You're basically like, I'm trying to win everything I can

Speaker 1 or go broke yes and that's it so

Speaker 1 he loses all that money

Speaker 1 and then it's i i guess my fundamental part my problem with the film which isn't really a problem but he's just losing all this money so he it kind of seems like he wants to be murdered he wants to either be reborn or die yeah like he there's no path for him being reborn because he's just losing crazy amounts of money that he's not going to be able to pay back yeah i mean unless then he he meets Brie Larson and it feels like that's given him a shred of hope that he's like, maybe I should get out of this.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, he's not a suicide wish.

Speaker 2 I actually am feel drawn to you. Like even in the conversation that they have in the classroom, he's basically like, physiology is the only thing that I can't explain.

Speaker 2 He's obviously like getting closer and closer and closer to her.

Speaker 2 So he feels like, obviously, like, this is the first thing that's come along in a while that makes me want to be anything else than what I am.

Speaker 1 It's like how Doug Peterson just goes for it on every fourth and five. He's like, I can't feel anymore.
I'm going to do this QP rollout with Trevor Lawrence.

Speaker 1 It's the only way I can feel anything anymore.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so this movie is

Speaker 1 the big themes are like, to be or not to be. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All or nothing. Yes.
What's the point of all this? If you're not a genius, don't try. Is it worth even, should you just be an electrician at that point?

Speaker 1 It feels like everything they're trying to say in the movie is the first speech he gives to the class. Yes.
Where he basically uh

Speaker 2 he basically evits her it's the entire class then he points out to the brie larson character and she's like this is the only one who has a chance yeah and he's like if you were shakespeare because they're talking about whether or not the works of shakespeare were actually authored by somebody else and like the kid in the class is like oh do you think it's because you know the earl of oxford and he was just like if you wrote hamlet can you imagine not putting your name on hamlet right yeah and he's like there's only like five of these people 20 of these people 100 of these people like everybody else is just is playing for scraps everybody else is kind of lying to themselves and he's like i won't lie to myself i just kind of it's just a very unique character for both him and for a 2014 movie to kind of present to us this seems like the kind of movie if you could have said what script are you jealous of

Speaker 2 this would have been a script for you this is this monahan's kind of one of my guys so monahan wrote kingdom of heaven which is this really scott movie that's incredible if you see the really scott director's cut he wrote the departed yep yeah and and he did this and then he's had some ups and downs since then with like movies that he's tried to direct and and do work on but this is just a riff movie you know like every character in here is just like hey man here's like three pages of stuff to just riff on yeah doesn't really even like the first time he goes and sees goodman you're just like i don't what was the point of that you know what i mean you didn't take his money that he offered you but they're just like they're just podcasting they're just vibing with each other yeah you have multiple characters who definitely wouldn't be this this deep in real life.

Speaker 1 And yet all of them are super deep. Even like the college basketball player, like really self-aware, just has some awesome thoughts.
Then you go to John Goodman.

Speaker 2 He's definitely been moved by the stranger.

Speaker 1 John Goodman, who's just a murderer.

Speaker 1 He has these deep thoughts about the position of fuck you. And then the Michael K.
Williams character, same thing. Like really interested in human connection and the reasons why people do shit.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure real life works that way, but that's what makes this movie so fun. Yeah, I think.

Speaker 1 It's this alternate universe of what the gambler would be right and there's also like i think for people one of the reasons why it was disappointing is that exactly what you were saying about stacking is there's actually not a lot of juice to the gambling scenes and that was my biggest disappointment the first time i saw it yeah i didn't really under it i was so ready for gambling shit and i also really liked the james conn movie and it was so different than that from a sense of what it was trying to do

Speaker 1 that I just had trouble with it. And then it would pop on and be like, oh, all right.
Yeah. And then you're like, I kind of like that.
Brie Larson. Well, because it's a much bigger star now.

Speaker 2 The card playing is boring, but what he's saying during the card playing is kind of interesting.

Speaker 1 He must be new here.

Speaker 1 This is no limit. Also, he's delivering all his lines, like Andy Sandberg doing the impression of him.
Say, hi to your mother for me.

Speaker 1 He's got this like weird edge to his everything. It's such a weird, this would be a really fun Oscar to hand out every year.
Like, just, this is a weird one for you. Yeah, this is a a weird one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, here we go with that. It's a weird one for you category.

Speaker 1 Just people kind of going sideways of the movie.

Speaker 2 I also wonder whether part of the reason why you and I like this movie is that it is to,

Speaker 2 if Den of Thieves is like the JV version of heat, this is kind of the JV version of Thief and maybe like collateral. Cool LA movie.
Yeah. Guy with an open shirt coat.

Speaker 1 I would have thrown in rounders.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I mean specifically like the Michael Mann, like there's like they use like the deep synth kind of score here a bunch of times.

Speaker 2 And it kind of gives you a little bit of that feeling of driving around LA or running around LA in the end

Speaker 2 and having this kind of breakthrough moment in this weird, weird city, but it's not quite as good as those films.

Speaker 1 Well, it has one other element that you and I both love is when movies create this little mini world inside a city we already think we know.

Speaker 1 And it's like you're going down downstairs and that's, or you're parking your car and you're getting out.

Speaker 1 It seems like you're vowing for a party, but actually, you're going into this whole crazy secret blackjack world, or like this whole secret card world,

Speaker 1 and just this whole underbelly, kind of the high-class underbelly, which I think John Wick really nailed in a great way.

Speaker 1 John Wick's like, we're taking the high-class underbelly to a whole other level with the continental.

Speaker 2 There's a, there's, you know, obviously in heat, there's BJs on Alvarado, the nightclub that Al Pacino goes to.

Speaker 2 And I feel like Rupert Wyatt and William Monaghan, when they made this movie, were like, we have to like, we have to double down on BJs on Alvarado.

Speaker 2 So like when he goes to the Korean, Koreatown card playing like

Speaker 2 casino at the end, he goes through like an internet cafe, an opium den, a noodle bar, and then he gets to the casino.

Speaker 1 Well, that, and that rounders place too, the place the Russian with the Chesterfield.

Speaker 2 Anytime a guy walks into a pretty nondescript place and then takes an elevator somewhere, Michael Clayton, Rounders, like any, we go into a back room that then also has a back room.

Speaker 1 I'm in. And there's like a, there's some sort of hot waitress or cash register person

Speaker 1 who has that look like, uh-oh, he's back. And you just kind of know what you're in for.

Speaker 2 But she's also like a philosophy major. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And also totally ready to hook up with him again. It's such a strange Wahlberg movie.
It made me think like.

Speaker 1 What are my favorite Wahlberg movies? What's my relationship with Wahlberg in general? Because he's, we've now had him for three decades and he's been in a lot of stuff.

Speaker 1 He's in one of my favorite movies ever, Boogie Nights, which I think is probably still my favorite, Wahlberg.

Speaker 1 But he's also in a lot of other stuff I like, like the Italian job. Fears a super weird movie.

Speaker 1 The fighter, 2010.

Speaker 2 I mean, the yards, iHeart Huck could be.

Speaker 2 He does a lot of like, he, for the first 10 years, 15 years of his career, was still like searching around for that.

Speaker 1 The departed. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like he, I think he was like kind of not on Christian Bale's track, but was like, he was more than through these kinds of roles, though.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he was in, it was somewhere like Damon and DiCaprio both turned this part down, and next stop was Mark Wahlbert. Yeah.
A lot of times. Like, could he, could he have done the boring identity?

Speaker 1 He probably could have.

Speaker 2 Now, after this,

Speaker 2 pretty much after a gambler,

Speaker 2 he more or less does a couple of Pete Berg movies where he's kind of like doing, you know,

Speaker 2 but like Deepwater Horizon.

Speaker 2 And then after that, it's like Transformers, Daddy's Home, Mile 22, Spencer Confidential. Like, he makes two or three movies a year.
There's one family, one, and one thriller or action movie.

Speaker 1 And he does Ted two years before this, which is a really funny movie that had,

Speaker 1 I don't know, had some legs. Did you do it Ted Rewatchables? Not yet.
Okay.

Speaker 1 But that was a weird choice. So there's like a sense of humor with him, but I also am not positive he has a sense of humor.

Speaker 1 I think it's a very because I remember he was like really mad about the Sandberg thing and he had to come on the next week and he like made fun of Sandberg back because he was pissed.

Speaker 1 It seemed like he was going to like fight him. Say hi to your mother for me.

Speaker 1 He also, before he did this, he sought the blessing of James Kahn.

Speaker 1 Do you think Jimmy Kahn was like, Jimmy, Mark Wahlberg here? How are you?

Speaker 2 There's a dead man on the other end of this phone.

Speaker 1 Jimmy Kahn's like, don't do it. Well, I'm going to do it anyway.
They already paid me.

Speaker 2 So Tobak wasn't happy about this either.

Speaker 1 I don't think. I wasn't happy about it when I I heard about it.
Because, you know, anything mid-70s on, if it's still watchable,

Speaker 1 I'm always going to have my guard up. But they did really make it different than the original in a lot of ways.

Speaker 2 There's also just, I think for me,

Speaker 2 you know, like Michael K. Williams is passed on, but this is like.

Speaker 2 One of those movies where the star keeps walking into scenes where he's getting his doors blown off by the other guy in the middle of the scene.

Speaker 1 Even Brie Larson. Yeah.
Like Brie Larson, Michael K. Williams, Goodman, even Dom from Entourage, whatever that guy's guy's name is.

Speaker 1 He's a good actor. Jessica Lang.
Jessica Lang's good. You're right.
He's always like, it feels like he's the second best actor in nine scenes.

Speaker 2 I think Emery Cohen cooks him a little bit, like in a good way, but like that character is really cool.

Speaker 1 Well, Goodman's incredible in this.

Speaker 1 And this is like,

Speaker 1 Goodman has put together so many just awesome, memorable, supporting parts. Yes.

Speaker 1 That I almost feel like that's a bigger part of his legacy now for me than Roseanne. Even though Roseanne was one of the biggest shows of the 90s.

Speaker 2 One One of the great character actors of all time.

Speaker 1 But nobody's talking about Roseanne in 2024. But I think he, some of these movies that he's in, that he just is able to just kind of fly into like a gust of wind.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he could just, what's he, in three scenes in this movie?

Speaker 1 Four. I mean, like three and a half scenes.

Speaker 2 He has the one in the bathhouse, the one at the course track, and then one at the end when he shows up at the Korea Town Play.

Speaker 1 I don't think he's ever been nominated for an Oscar.

Speaker 1 Probably won some Emmys. I don't think so.

Speaker 1 Probably

Speaker 1 won some comedy Emmys once upon a time, but it's a great movie for him. It's a great movie for Michael K.
Williams, aka Omar,

Speaker 1 who really hit a nice stretch after The Wire when he would pop up with stuff and you would be delighted to see him. Did he win or no? He did not.
Yeah. You're right.

Speaker 1 So based on

Speaker 1 Dostoevsky's novel originally, kind of, sort of. I researched this and it really doesn't seem like it's based on all of it.

Speaker 2 Did you, I mean, I think it also like draws from, I draws heavily from the stranger and the idea of like an existential sort of mindset. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What was the closest you came to him in this movie? You're just ready to throw it all away. Was there a New Bear Comics moment?

Speaker 2 I think when Ryan Howard tore his Achilles,

Speaker 1 I was like, fucking take it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So directed by Rupert Wyatt really well. This is, I think, a superbly made movie and turns out to be like one of the peaks of his career.
And I think he was a promising director.

Speaker 1 It seemed like it was a good thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he he did a Planet of the Apes movie. He did this.

Speaker 2 And then has kind of like done some sci-fi stuff, but has kind of fallen out of his mind.

Speaker 1 Had some scandal stuff with Kristen Stewart.

Speaker 2 No, actually, that was Rupert Sanders.

Speaker 1 Oh, that was a different guy. Different Rupert.
Damn. I got my Ruperts mixed up.

Speaker 3 That was my fault.

Speaker 2 I told you that. And I was like, oh, wait, I got to double check this.
He also,

Speaker 2 this is shot by Greg Frazier, who's one of like the four or five best cinematographers. Like LA looks awesome.
There's some great photography in this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, LA looks so awesome. I had trouble figuring out where we were in almost every scene.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was trying to figure out where he lives, where Jim's not figured out.

Speaker 1 Tenga, maybe couldn't figure it out. He's got that little like even where he's running all the way through the end.
I can only figure out it's kind of seems like he ended up at our office.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, I think he's in.

Speaker 2 He's supposed to be in Koreatown, but it seems like he's running through downtown Los Angeles to get back to like a little bit north of MacArthur.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you this: that is a much more action-packed run than maybe they made it seem in the movie.

Speaker 1 $25 million budget made $33 million.

Speaker 1 Here's what Wesley Morris wrote for Grantland. Shout out to Wesley, who's been on this podcast many times.
Mark Wahlberg's grown so much in the last 15 years that you forget his limitations.

Speaker 1 He still can't show you what's happening inside a character. He needs dialogue.
He needs somewhere to run. The gambler gives him both, but they're both terrible.

Speaker 1 The dialogue never leaves the surface, and the running across LA happens in the last sequence.

Speaker 1 It's supposed supposed to thrill you, but it's such a cliche that your embarrassment extends to the crew member has to fall with the camera as Walbert chugs along. Wasn't a fan.

Speaker 1 Wesley, tell him how you really feel. I wonder if, like, 10 years later, Wes is like, no, I kind of like it now.

Speaker 1 Because he's done that with some other ones.

Speaker 1 Roger Ebert was sadly not alive.

Speaker 2 RogerEbert.com gave this two stars.

Speaker 1 Well, I had to do chat GBT, Robert Ebert. Roger Ebert.
I know you hate this. Unethical.
Why is it unethical? It's a sin. He's dead.

Speaker 2 You can't ask a robot to imitate him.

Speaker 1 He wanted to find out.

Speaker 2 Don't do this to me.

Speaker 1 He said, Chat GBT said probably two and a half to three stars.

Speaker 1 Ebert was known for his sharp eye with character-driven dramas and his appreciation for films that explored moral complexity and self-destruction. Not wrong.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Why are you so nervous? He was often skeptical of remakes and tended to hold them to a high standard. True.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 He may have praised Mark Wahlberg's committed performance, but questioned whether the character of Jim Bennett was as richly drawn or compelling as Axel Fried in the original.

Speaker 1 In summary,

Speaker 1 Ebert's review would have likely been a thoughtful balance of praise for its ideas and critique of its execution.

Speaker 2 That sounds about right.

Speaker 1 The rookies are coming for us.

Speaker 2 He would have been a little annoyed about them remaking a 70s, you know, cult classic.

Speaker 1 Yeah, during a time that 74 to 77 stretch when it feels like all of those movies just should not be touched. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Did you do, are you three days of a Condor TV show?

Speaker 1 The TV show?

Speaker 2 Yeah. I watched a bit of it.
Yeah, I thought it was cool, but it was just like, that's one of the great 70s movies.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I won't watch it. Okay.
I'll watch Carry-On, though, with Evil Jason Bateman.

Speaker 2 Based on

Speaker 1 Alan Bakula's.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now it's time for the most rewatchable scene brought to you by Den of Thieves 2 Pantera. Yes.
Ready for a new Killer Heist movie? Gerard Butler and O'Shea Jackson Jr. at back

Speaker 1 in the sequel to the original hit, but this time, the cop goes gangster. See Den of Thieves 2, Pantera only in theaters January 10th.
We'll be seeing it before January 10th. Yeah, I hope so.

Speaker 1 Be calling in some favors. Christmas night.

Speaker 1 Let's make that a big franchise. All right, most rewatchable scene.

Speaker 1 This movie just kicks right in. Let's go gambling.
Yeah, no, no opener, no like him at a Dodger game playing in the day, no coffee house scene, no him. He's just gambling right away.

Speaker 2 Tell me if I got this rate. Walks in with 10 grand.
Yep. Goes up 80,

Speaker 2 blows it. Now owes 240.

Speaker 1 Well, I want to talk about the gambling because we just, of course, we're going to have to. Obviously, I love blackjack.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So he's stacking from 10. He wins on a 19.
Fair. 15 against a king

Speaker 1 hits, which I would hit to gets a 621. So now he's up

Speaker 1 10 and 20 so now he's up 40.

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 15 against a 13

Speaker 1 he stays which i think is the right move and bust and he throws a he gets like a face card right like he gets like a 10 yeah he stays dealer gets the face card bus so now he's up 80

Speaker 1 at that point you've won four you've won uh four in a row you're gonna be like that was great you've probably taken half the bets going back he's like fucking all in

Speaker 1 14 hits bus.

Speaker 1 Starting over. Gets mad at the dealer.
Double it.

Speaker 3 You must be new.

Speaker 1 Double it.

Speaker 4 Double it.

Speaker 1 Make it 80,000.

Speaker 4 I'm on Mr. League cover a lot more than that, buddy.
You must be new. Double it.

Speaker 1 Gets a nine against a five, gets an ace, stays on 20, and then anyone who loves blackjack knows what happened next.

Speaker 1 next to her gets the 15 and the six now all of a sudden he's down what 150 yeah he owes 240 and then he borrows 50 grand from neville from michael k williams at 20 points interest can we just call him omar for the rest of the podcast or no michael k i'll call him michael k he earned the michael k

Speaker 1 michael k says It's an unequal general situation.

Speaker 2 Does he say it's a losing proposition? And he's like, so is life?

Speaker 1 Yeah, he says, life's, this is what Wahlberg says, life's a losing proposition. You might as well get used to it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So when he says that, you're like, all right, this guy's fucking suicide packed with himself with gambling.

Speaker 2 So he gives Mr. Lee 40K and he keeps 10 to gamble.

Speaker 1 Leads me to

Speaker 1 the next. It's a small rewatchable, but Mr.
Lee says, your luck is no good tonight. You came in with 10,000 in cash.
You didn't give it to me.

Speaker 1 And Wahlberg says, well, this is a gambling establishment. You owe me $240,000.
I want it in seven days. And what happens? He takes the 10K,

Speaker 1 gets 21, and 20. Gets a new dealer.
New dealer, 21 and 20, wins the first two, gets a 12, she busts. So he's won the first three hands.
He's back.

Speaker 1 He's back kind of on the road again.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he also has one of my favorite lines of the movie where she goes, it's for your protection. And he goes, you don't come here for protection.

Speaker 2 You come, you don't come here for protection from yourself. You come here for the fucking opposite.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So deal the cards.
Right.

Speaker 1 First, he goes to the pit. But don't look at him.
There's no limit.

Speaker 1 Fuck my protection. Please deal with the cards.

Speaker 1 I didn't know Jim Bennett was from fucking South Africa. I'm giving him the South Dam.
I'm giving the departed accent. Please deal with the cards.
Fucking that. Fucking Belichick.

Speaker 1 So Blackjack turns 80K into 200K.

Speaker 1 And then decides to take it over the roulette wheel, which is yet another. So he's just clearly trying.
Yeah, he's up 160 or whatever.

Speaker 2 And he goes and bets on Black and loses fucking Fucking masterpiece scene. I could watch that scene, that 10 minutes over and over and over again.

Speaker 1 He goes on black. Michael Kay goes, it's becoming up red all night.
It's like, all right, fine, black.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's it. Really enjoyable.
It's like 20 minutes all the way through. We get to meet some characters.
Great stuff.

Speaker 2 Mr. Lee's Casino seems to be on the PCH.

Speaker 2 Get the ocean view. Maybe a little bit in.
Palisades? I don't know. Is there a lot of illegal gambling establishments?

Speaker 1 i was thinking a little like slightly seedy venice it's in the hills oh it's in the hills yeah oh yeah you're right he goes up

Speaker 1 seems like palisades yeah palisades has to be the answer then because we could see the ocean and he's going uphill

Speaker 1 next one wahlberg's uh his big speech about how hard it is to be a novelist yeah

Speaker 4 i mean we accept genius in sports as something we cannot do, but it's no more likely that you could be a writer that you could be, what, an Olympic pole vaulter?

Speaker 4 Because what you have to be before you try to be a pole vaulter, hello, is a pole vaulter, no?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You are one.

Speaker 1 A pole vaulter?

Speaker 4 A novelist. No, I am not.
For me to be a novelist, I would have to make a deal with myself, that it was okay being a mediocrity in a profession that died commercially in the last century.

Speaker 4 All right, people do that. I'm not one of them.
If you take away nothing else from my class, From this experience, let it be this. If you're not a genius, don't bother.
All right.

Speaker 2 The world needs plenty of electricians, and a lot of them are happy.

Speaker 4 I'll be fucked if I'll be a mid-list novelist getting good reviews from the people I give good reviews to.

Speaker 1 Just some gems in here. What was your favorite part?

Speaker 2 I think him dunking on

Speaker 2 the nerdy kid who's trying to get into his good graces. And he's just like, absolutely not.
But I think probably it's just all about the unequal distribution of talent.

Speaker 2 And I love the when he somehow has

Speaker 2 one of the first-round draft pick NBA player, like coming, a featured first-round draft pick, and the number two tennis player in the country in his class, and a genius writer.

Speaker 1 That's quite a class.

Speaker 1 I don't remember any of those classes at Emerson. My classes, I had like Jacko.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like I got Jabari Smith Jr.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Worst case scenario, you're the third pick of the draft. I like when you talk about it.

Speaker 2 I also love when he's talking to Emery Cohen about tennis and he's like, as you, when you realize that you were the best, what did you start to think?

Speaker 2 And he's like, oh, I started to think about the game. And he goes, that's an IQ breakpoint, brother.

Speaker 1 What the fuck?

Speaker 1 I love it. I don't know what that means.

Speaker 1 If you're not a genius, don't bother. The world needs plenty of electricians and a lot of them are happy.

Speaker 1 I'll be fucked if I'd be a mid-list novelist giving good reviews to the people I give good reviews to. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That is very funny.

Speaker 1 And then he points out Brie Larson

Speaker 1 at a very early Brie Larson stage of the movie. Right after those guys.
Nothing has really happened for her yet.

Speaker 2 In the movie or in her career?

Speaker 1 In her career.

Speaker 2 She's done Short Term 12, which is like this weird, awesome movie, but is also like her. Robbie Malik and Michael B.
Jordan in the same movie right before they all get famous.

Speaker 1 Like she's two years away. Is it Trainwreck with Amy Schumer? 2016.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then rooms.

Speaker 1 Rooms right after that.

Speaker 1 She's in a couple other ones.

Speaker 1 One of those ones, you always liked her, but you never kind of totally know what was going to happen there. And then all of a sudden, she became Brie Larson.
Yep.

Speaker 1 She chooses to hide and blend in there with the rest of you. Why?

Speaker 4 But do you know who does write at the highest level? When most of us, and even I, even I, write barely adequately.

Speaker 1 Do you know who it is?

Speaker 4 In this room, who is it?

Speaker 2 Don't give me that look.

Speaker 4 No, no, no, no, no, no. It isn't the one who talks the most.
You're an NPR host hops, okay?

Speaker 4 The literary person in here

Speaker 4 is Miss Phillips.

Speaker 4 She's the least obstreprous in this room,

Speaker 1 the quietest, and the only one

Speaker 4 who can have a real career at letters. Some of you can have one perceptually.

Speaker 4 Only she can have one in reality.

Speaker 4 She is better at writing than our U.S. President League amateur number two is at tennis.
Yet she chooses to hide or just blend in with the rest of you.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 1 And she answers, being in the middle is the safest place to be, which I think is one of the themes of the movie. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And that's what he refuses to accept.

Speaker 1 He doesn't want to be in the middle. He'd rather just be killed in an alley because he lost $250,000.
Because he kept stacking. No money, no advantages.
Genius is magical, not material.

Speaker 1 I mean, basically, he's you're that douchey guy in your hall in college who's just has these big crazy things that he's saying about how society works.

Speaker 1 And everybody's like, fucking Tommy's going nuts over there.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Also, like the English teacher who smells of cigarette smoke, kind of has red eyes.

Speaker 2 you know, likes the books that aren't on the syllabus.

Speaker 1 Definitely hooking up with one of the students.

Speaker 2 You know, has like a kind of tattered Cormac McCarthy novel in his back pocket. And you're, you're completely enchanted by him.
You're just like, oh my God, this guy's spitting.

Speaker 1 Professor Smith is amazing. Next one, John Goodman's first scene.

Speaker 2 Shaving his head.

Speaker 1 He sees three problems.

Speaker 1 with Jim.

Speaker 1 He wants to live like a monk. He wants to dance with the devil and he wants to borrow money to pay off debts that he can't pay off.

Speaker 2 Associate professors, let's just say he teaches at USC because that has to be someplace that would be a program big enough for Lamar to get considered to go to the NBA, right?

Speaker 1 I had either UCLA or USC. I don't see if he's in LA.
It has to be one of those two schools. I feel like

Speaker 2 he's just in central Los Angeles a lot.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Associate Professor makes $150K USC?

Speaker 1 I guess that's...

Speaker 2 That's what's in the ballpark, right?

Speaker 1 Successful novelist.

Speaker 2 No, because he says says he only made 17 grand off his novel.

Speaker 1 People knew the novel. There was a little

Speaker 1 Michael K. Williams is like a reading your novel.

Speaker 2 My favorite Frank line in this scene is what he's like: birth, education, intelligence, talent, looks, family money. Has all of this been some real comprehensive fucking burden to you?

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 I like that you want a little logia. You use that cross logia in Goodman.

Speaker 1 I need this money because I'm a scumbag gambler. Say it.
Say I am not a man.

Speaker 1 I need something from you.

Speaker 1 What? Collateral? No.

Speaker 1 I need you to tell me.

Speaker 1 I need this money because I am a scumbag gambler.

Speaker 1 I am a scumbag gambler who is drowning in his own shit. That's the kind of man I am, Frank.
And I want you to loan me.

Speaker 1 A dying suicidal asshole, a lot of money. That's too much to remember to repeat it

Speaker 1 well i'll make it simpler for you you want this money you tell me i am not a man

Speaker 1 say it

Speaker 1 say i am not a man

Speaker 2 and so he won't right he won't do that so this is like he's a man of principle and he if he's if you go by the adage that jim is always honest in this movie he must part part of him must think because he keeps telling people i am not actually a a gambler.

Speaker 2 This is more of a means to an end to erase something about my

Speaker 2 ego, you know.

Speaker 1 Next, when he goes to see Lamar, and Lamar tells him he's got a knee, Jim Nance with a huge impact on this movie. This is right when Jim Nance was just skipping verbs, talking about body parts.

Speaker 1 But I really like that Lamar scene. I think it's good.

Speaker 2 The Lamar scene is really good, and his, like, I'm not happy, you know, why?

Speaker 1 Because I'm teaching the modern novel to a classroom full of students. Right.

Speaker 2 Don't give a fuck.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Casino Blackjack with

Speaker 1 Bree. Goes to the casino with Bree,

Speaker 1 which I think is the Marongo, which I've been to.

Speaker 2 And I have this written down as Jim's reverse 82-point game. It's how fast can I blow?

Speaker 1 Well, he starts off by doubling down on an 18,

Speaker 1 demanding a three and gets it. And you just know the night's not going to go well after that happens.

Speaker 1 That is not going to be the sign that you're going to have a four-hour run. That's usually super lucky.

Speaker 1 I have a great shot gorder award for this the fast forward is super cool oh yeah really hard gimmick to pull off it usually fails in movies limitless did it too yeah um usually when people try it it's not great no it's it also does a good job of like all the different emotions people are going through but he's completely static through i have a nitpick that's too important to wait on okay

Speaker 1 he just shows up and he's got a shitload of money and he's just dropping whatever two pit bosses would be behind the dealer like asap saying what though

Speaker 1 Just watching. Okay.
You're just not doing that with some random dealer betting the kind. They wouldn't be like, change 250,000.
Like it, that, like, the whole casino would stop.

Speaker 1 Everybody would come over behind the table.

Speaker 2 I was going to ask you about, like, what is it?

Speaker 2 How does it, because I only play blackjack when I go for like summer league or whatever. Like, I don't gamble up, but

Speaker 1 Sean's playing poker by himself. So you need somebody like that.
Guess what he gets? Sean's headphones on and turns into fucking Raymond Babbitt for nine hours.

Speaker 1 You're actually right. I would love to gamble, but Sean won't do it.

Speaker 1 Sean's just listening to William Friedkin movies on audio and his headphones.

Speaker 2 He's listening to director's commentary and playing fucking hold him against like an 80-year-old Navy veteran.

Speaker 1 He's listened to the sisters, Brian DaCalba, Decomma Director's.

Speaker 2 He exactly loses $120 instantaneously and we just go drink for the rest of the night. But how does it get translated around the

Speaker 2 around the room? Oh, let's go watch this guy. He's on a heater or let's go watch this guy.

Speaker 1 If there's that kind of money from the table, you would get the crowd behind, but you would have way more people. There would be at least two, three people behind the dealer.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Because normally you would bet that kind of money at the high stakes table.

Speaker 1 So if you're just sitting down with the common people betting that, there's people, they'd be watching the fucking cameras going on.

Speaker 1 That was one of my disappointments with the movie that he never like did the fuck you at the camera.

Speaker 1 Because he was such a fuck you kind of guy. I felt like, turn that fucking thing off.
Like he didn't do any of that.

Speaker 2 I want to just mention that one of the most captivating moments of my adult life was watching Bill, House, and Chang

Speaker 2 podcast from Caesars.

Speaker 1 The day after we gambled all night.

Speaker 2 The morning after Chang and House had gone out for gumbo.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like, I think, did Chang sleep that night?

Speaker 1 No. Right.

Speaker 2 So gambled all night and just went straight out and had gumbo in some weird Joe House spot.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Off the street.
And then we potted.

Speaker 2 And then potted about like Chang winning a bone colored chip that he had to like go fucking show his social security number.

Speaker 1 It's great.

Speaker 2 Chang is kind of like the uh and that's also when I learned about people betting into people from like you can just be like, I'm gonna bet on this guy.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, that's fucking crazy. Chang's a little bit like Jim and the Gambler.
Like, if he has a run, he's got to self-sabotage it somehow. Let's go to craps.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to start betting on random shit.

Speaker 1 Uh, next one, Goodman's second scene.

Speaker 2 Oh my god, the fuck you speech.

Speaker 1 I've been up two and a half million dollars. What do you got on you?

Speaker 1 Nothing.

Speaker 1 What'd you put away? Nothing.

Speaker 1 You get up two and a half million dollars. Any asshole in the world knows what to do.
You get a house with a 25-year roof, an indestructible Jap economy shitbox.

Speaker 1 You put the rest into the system at 3-5% to pay your taxes, and that's your base. Get me? That's your fortress of fucking solitude.
That puts you for the rest of your life at a level of fuck you.

Speaker 1 Somebody wants you to do something? Fuck you. Boss pisses you off.
Fuck you.

Speaker 1 Own your house. Have a couple bucks in the bank.
Don't drink. That's all I have to say to anybody at any social level.
Did your grandfather take risks?

Speaker 1 Yes. I guarantee he did it from a position of fuck you.

Speaker 1 I think this is my favorite. This is the best.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Everyone's been there once. If you're there twice, I can't help you.
Some really good wisdom in this. Do you have the brains to walk when it's time to walk?

Speaker 1 But then the big speech, I guarantee he did it from a position of fuck you. A wise man's life is based around fuck you.

Speaker 1 The United States of America is based on fuck you. You're a king.
You have an army, greatest navy in the history of the world. Fuck you.

Speaker 1 Blow me. We're fucking up ourselves.

Speaker 1 He's amazing in this scene. And I actually really agree with him.
I like the position of fuck you. It's one of the, this is why both of us would defend this movie to the death.

Speaker 1 Like this movie has great themes and thoughts in it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's, it's like every one of these guys is either trying to entice him into a life of servitude or get him to see like what he could be.

Speaker 2 You know, and they're, they're always like kind of, they're almost like these kinds of religious or spiritual tests more than they are like bookies. And I kind of love that, you know?

Speaker 1 It's a good movie trope of just random people who aren't good people, but for some reason care about this other person that in real life they would just I don't know why Frank cares that much.

Speaker 2 I guess the implication is that he knew Jim's dad or grandfather the grandfather it's it the the the neville thing the michael k williams character is basically like i want to set up like a a gambling ring that goes on for years yeah the basketball game i wanted to ask you about this i thought it was solid it's i actually thought it was pretty realistic just too dark

Speaker 1 Well, because I think they probably couldn't afford fans.

Speaker 1 Nowadays, they would just see Jad the fans, but we were still in that world of you have like Rockies, the worst yeah where it's like it's the lights are down so you have to darken out the entire spectrum so that was it but I actually thought uh

Speaker 1 I kind of liked his game yeah who who is he like Lamar Allen uh I think he's a like a proto Jabari Smith Jr.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but he's a little shorter rangy now, he seems like he's he's like 6'8.

Speaker 1 You think he's that tall?

Speaker 3 No, they listed him. He was 6'5.
They showed it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I thought he was a little more.

Speaker 2 We're gonna get into like what this movie communicates properly and doesn't about NCAA sports.

Speaker 1 I thought he was a little DeMar de Rosany, but

Speaker 1 almost like what Shabazz following in DeMar's footsteps. What Shabazz Mohamed should have been, but wasn't.

Speaker 1 Like theoretical. You want to just say theoretical Shabazz Muhammad.

Speaker 2 An hour and a half being like a little bit of a young Norman Powell.

Speaker 1 Because he was like a slasher.

Speaker 1 He had like this inside-outside game, but he wasn't that big.

Speaker 2 I guess that Shabazz Mohamed

Speaker 2 for such a long time.

Speaker 1 Just never worked out for him.

Speaker 2 Clean Anthony Early, maybe, you know?

Speaker 1 Oh, Clean Anthony Early. Then last one, the The Big Bet, he bets Black.

Speaker 1 Really good setup. Another great underbelly place we get to go into.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 multiple people watching him. Bets Black gets 22.

Speaker 2 Do you think that this movie is actually saying that gambling is all chance and that there's no skill to it?

Speaker 2 No, did you want a great blackjack scene at the end of this movie?

Speaker 1 I mean, that always is my preference, but I don't think the movie is interested in gambling as much as self-destruction. The gambling is just like

Speaker 1 a way for him to fuck up his life. I don't think it really cares about it, which is probably

Speaker 1 that's the thing. Like

Speaker 1 I wanted when I watched this the first couple of times, I wanted the gambling to matter more in the movie because I love the gambling.

Speaker 2 But if you view it more now, he's leaving Las Vegas or something. Like he's it's just self-destruction.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 All right, so we have the same rewatchable scene. Yes, borrowing from Frank.
All right. That was the most rewatchable scene brought to you by Dennett Thieves to Pantera.

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Speaker 1 Gerard Butler, I really think out kicked his coverage for me with movies that he made.

Speaker 1 Like if you were going

Speaker 1 flight to Australia for the Australian Open and they were like, we have no other movies today for Gerard Butler, I'd be like, I'm fine.

Speaker 1 That's 20 hours. I'm in.
For the Australian Open.

Speaker 1 It's like, we just have Gerard Butler. That's it.

Speaker 1 Let's take a break and we'll come back, hit the rest of the category.

Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by Dead Man's Wire, the new film from Roque Entertainment.

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Speaker 1 Like Zodiac, a movie that we did a long time ago that I wasn't on, and I want to be on that podcast again. But a classic just diving into something that, wait, did this happen?

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Speaker 1 All right. What's the most 2014 thing about this movie? This is easy.
Young Brie Larson. Oh, sure.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 She seems like such a young pup in this. And now is Brie Larson.
It's just, it was just notable to watch it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. There was also like, this was an era of

Speaker 2 crime-adjacent movies.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like they

Speaker 2 be like, hey, Richard Schiff. Hey, Michael K.
Williams. Hey, John Goodman.
Yeah. We need you for like four days.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 You know, can you come in and nail this scene? And like, you know, like, so that was like, I feel like triple nine.

Speaker 2 Like there was a bunch of movies right around here where it was like, man, this is just like kind of trashy, but really like way more, the acting is way better than it needs to be.

Speaker 1 You know, that's an interesting concept. And I wonder when that started because

Speaker 1 you think like when Jack Nicholson did the Joker.

Speaker 1 And people were like, oh, this is cool. Yeah.
So you can have the biggest star of the movie and Malkovich.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then that jack nicholson starts the villain era and then everybody wanted the villain part i wonder when the the dm waiters era started basically yeah like i can come in and just do because goodman does this in flight too so that's 2012.

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 departed

Speaker 1 you have a lot of like really good that's 2006 yep you have a lot of good actors in like small part like baldwin's in that movie not that much but just killing every scene he's in so it's it's somewhere like mid-2000s when actors realize like this is a huge huge win for me if I crush these four scenes.

Speaker 2 Yes. I'll just do this like weird Casey Athletic cop movie where I come in and I'm like a heroine dealer.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know,

Speaker 1 I mean, maybe, maybe it goes all the way back to like,

Speaker 1 you know, Gary Oldman and True Romance like that. That's actually a good thing.
Copper walking. Maybe that's when it starts.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What's age the best?

Speaker 1 A hot girl making a wait, you're gambling again. Oh, no, face.
When has that not worked in a movie?

Speaker 2 But the funny thing is, is that this relationship starts with him already in the tailspin. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So she was not like, she's not going to be like, oh, I thought I was going to start dating Jonathan Franz in here.

Speaker 1 I have some more thoughts on that later. What's age the best? I always like when in the credits, when it says it was cast by Sheila Jaffe.
Yeah. I always think she has good taste.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Sheila, not quite rewatchable's category status, but.

Speaker 1 Super job, Sheila.

Speaker 2 Best casting.

Speaker 1 Best caster. I see her.
I always know the movie's in good hands.

Speaker 1 How about King of Spades as an iPhone address entry? Oh, yeah. Do you do anything with your iPhone where you put, instead of the person's name, you put other stuff?

Speaker 1 Like a funny, like, like, you know, Mr.

Speaker 2 Like something for fantasy where it's like, Mr. Freaking.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 No, I have

Speaker 1 some mean stuff in my phone.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah. There's a couple agents that I have.
It's, they come up as fuck face, dot, dot, dot on my phone. And you know who you are.
Agents are the worst.

Speaker 2 Is that a shot at Bernie Lee?

Speaker 1 No, Bernie Lee is in my phone as Bernie Lee. I like Bernie Lee.

Speaker 1 What do you have for what's age the best? Cause I have a few more.

Speaker 2 Michael K. Williams.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Just awesome. Kind of, I'd forgotten that his particular, how big his part was in this movie this most recent rewatch.
And it's just so awesome watching Cook. He was taking this man.
That sucks.

Speaker 2 I love the connections between the scenes of where they have like these ideas that seem to be getting passed from scene to scene.

Speaker 2 So like talking about Frank talking talking about like suicidal gamblers almost goes immediately into the Camus scene about Jim being like, saving the sixth bullet is something no one ever noticed except for me.

Speaker 2 And that is why I am here. And that is actually a William Monahan, like, he was like, I noticed that.
And that kind of sent me down the road of writing about literature for a while.

Speaker 1 Well, you had Far Woodsage the best of Moynihan dipping into old departed dialogue, right? What did he do? World needs plenty of electricians.

Speaker 1 World needs plenty of botanists. He's like, I'm just going to run that back.

Speaker 2 Also, just got to say, man, if you put a scene in Koreatown, your movie is a B, at least.

Speaker 1 I'm trying to think of any time Koreatown is in every. And the funny thing is, when you go to Koreatown, which

Speaker 1 is one of my favorite places in LA and one of the best food places in the country. But if you're there at night, you feel like you're in a movie no matter where you are in Koreatown.

Speaker 2 If you're there during the day, you're like, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's getting during day. It's like, what's going on here?

Speaker 1 I have the soundtrack is just funky and weird.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah, John Bryan and Theo James, I think, did it, and it's like two M83 songs, yeah.

Speaker 1 You big M83 guy, not really, okay, but I like that, I like the way they use the music in this.

Speaker 1 You've got a BMW M1, How Are You Unhappy? I'm just blind in on any line like that in a movie. I know I'm in the right hands of the movie if somebody said that to somebody else.

Speaker 1 Did you write this because you believed in it or because you thought it was what people wanted?

Speaker 1 She asked asked him at one point, just a good idea. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And his answer was he probably wrote that book because he thought that's what people wanted as a book, but not, it didn't come from his heart, which I think is a big thing, another big theme in this movie.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 2 quick exchange that Neville and Jim have, where he's like,

Speaker 2 you could go like there's only $10,000 against it at Warner Brothers, and Neville's like, it's an indie at best when they're talking about the adaptation of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's good. It's very good.
I like Lamar's third-person routine.

Speaker 1 And then when he talks about himself in third-person, but my favorite is Michael Kay and his crew watching the point-shaving game, and it becomes like the first alt-gambling cast.

Speaker 1 This is the barstool. Yeah, the

Speaker 1 settings.

Speaker 1 This sets up.

Speaker 1 This is on Turner. You can watch the NBA Cup quarterfinals, or there's Jalen Rose and Kurt Goldsbury and Michael Kay Williams.

Speaker 1 And it just keeps cutting to him. He's like, oh, man, what the fuck is he doing? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Do you think Big Cat saw this and was like, this is a good thing?

Speaker 1 This is Big Cat.

Speaker 1 the uh all right next category the fortune three clap award for most gifable moment what'd you have for this probably goodman shaving his head

Speaker 2 what do you did you have one didn't

Speaker 1 it's probably some sort of blackjack him losing something or but the thing the thing is he didn't and i think he played it intentionally this way but i just don't think burnthal would have you didn't feel the pain of any of the losses and i think because he was trying not to have the pain i was i think burnthal would have been more interesting with it.

Speaker 2 Bernthal, actually, just as soon as you were saying that, it popped into my head is just after presumed innocent Jyllenhall.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Like watching him go, watching it come up red on him and just be like, oh, fuck. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Denneth's Benihan Awards, scene stealing location.

Speaker 1 You could go Koreatown. You go to the casino in the beginning.
You go to the casino in the end. Where do you want?

Speaker 2 I think I'm going to go the last casino in Koreatown as they go down all these different levels through like the weird like cabaret singer. Yeah.
The noodle bar.

Speaker 2 I looks like an opium den, and then into an internet cafe and then into the casino.

Speaker 1 By the way, if that place actually exists, I'm going there tonight.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Would it be weird if I took out 100,000?

Speaker 2 Maybe that's where we should do our first gambling stream.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 The Michael McDonald's Sweet Freedom Award for best needle drop. Or the kids.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
What did you have? The choir singing creep as he's kind of breaking up with.

Speaker 2 The only problem I had with that was that was Fincher used that in the trailer for social network. Yeah, yeah.
So I felt like it was stolen valor.

Speaker 2 It's like you guys are coming in after he's already made that iconic.

Speaker 1 Closing credit song, I saw it too. Is that the one you're talking about?

Speaker 2 No, Common People is the one that Brie Larson's listening to when she's walking around campus, the pulp song. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Big Kahuna Burger Award for best use of food or drink. Nobody like eats or really drinks in the...
Cereal eating. I guess the cereal.

Speaker 2 When did you cut cereal out of your everyday?

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 there was that first wave of how bad cereal was for you articles, and I still held on for another seven to 10 years.

Speaker 2 I still had Cheerios in the house.

Speaker 1 My wife still gets it. Like she'll do like some fiber stuff or some like healthier stuff.
So occasionally I'll just kind of lose it like

Speaker 1 almost like smoking marbler reds again.

Speaker 2 I feel like if you're going to do it now, you might as well just go back to like honey nut. You know what I mean? Like you might as well just have the 40 grams of sugar and say who gives a shit.

Speaker 2 Cause it's like, like I don't really want to eat a bunch of like thumbtacks, but I'll if somebody put frosted mini weeds in front of me, I would probably go after it.

Speaker 1 What was your number one cereal?

Speaker 2 For like for Cheerios.

Speaker 2 I just eat Cheerios.

Speaker 1 I really loved rice krispies. Yeah.
I liked hearing them crackle.

Speaker 1 I really loved frosted mini weeds for a long time. It was another favorite.
I liked when they would get soggy in the bottom. I can't tell you what a giant cereal guy I was in the 90s.

Speaker 1 I just have it for dinner.

Speaker 2 I mean, Golden Grams is one of the all-time greatest tastes of my life.

Speaker 3 I still eat cereal all the time, big cereal guys. I love cereal.

Speaker 2 Do you eat healthy cereal or just regular cereal?

Speaker 3 I've pivoted to healthy cereal.

Speaker 2 Do you think it really matters?

Speaker 3 I honestly just like having like any kind of corn flake in milk. Tossing a banana, it's good too.

Speaker 2 So also, this is one thing that is really underrated is that cereal is the perfect, like, I have to go somewhere. Like, let's say you're going to a movie at seven.
You're not going to get dinner.

Speaker 2 You get a quick bowl of cereal before you go.

Speaker 3 It's in between a snack and a meal.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It actually does tide you over. And also, like, you know, people.

Speaker 1 My sophomore year in college, I just basically ate cereal and then occasionally house and I would go out and eat, but I weighed 160 pounds at one point.

Speaker 2 In a good way or a bad way?

Speaker 1 I was playing basketball like five, six days a week and just eating cereal. Yeah.
You were just doing it. And then occasionally

Speaker 1 we would go to like Papa Geno's and get all you need pizza. And my body was like, what's going on? What are you doing to me?

Speaker 1 I love cereal, though. I might make a cereal comeback over the break.

Speaker 2 I think we should do it. Maybe we should document it somehow.

Speaker 1 I will say one thing.

Speaker 1 I'm not a huge, like, like getting douche about almond milk soy milk oat milk all that stuff but i do think almond milk's pretty good with corn flakes yeah it's it's about as tolerable as it gets with almond milk if you want to go slightly healthier i think that if i was going to do it i would go back full whole milk in a in a bowl that's what i do baby yeah full cow's milk favorite kind of cereal bowl

Speaker 1 deep because i like i like the deep high ones yeah yeah i like to dig in i like when the cereal gets kind of soggy in the bottom in college in Boston, I lived off craft mac and cheese and cereal, pretty much.

Speaker 1 That was basically

Speaker 1 frosted flakes was another one. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I would splurge every once in a while in Charlestown and go to 99 because they have like the $9 chicken parmesan. Like I'm going chicken parm tonight.

Speaker 3 This went longer than what's aged the best.

Speaker 1 Cereal's great.

Speaker 1 Should we do a cereal podcast?

Speaker 3 We could probably get a good video sponsorship.

Speaker 2 I bet that would do very well.

Speaker 1 It's like new podcast podcast from the ringer, the cereal podcast.

Speaker 2 I think what we would have to do is do like a Huberman pod where you and I go on a pure cereal diet and see how it affects us.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing about cereal: it's the most involved in people's life, but the least discussed. Yeah.
Everyone has like favorite, least favorite cereals. This is never talked about.

Speaker 1 Nobody would ever bring this up at dinner.

Speaker 2 John Hamm says this about crude oil and land man.

Speaker 1 This is the one thing in life. But the other thing with cereal is like people of all ages eat cereal.
Yeah. Like

Speaker 1 your kids turn like

Speaker 1 three and they're eating cereal.

Speaker 2 This is the one time where I've let the hive mind tell me what to do, where I've let group think everybody's just like, this shit is so bad for you. I'm like, I guess it's bad for me.

Speaker 2 I guess I won't have anything.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you can't eat a bowl of Captain Crunch anymore.

Speaker 1 You'll like really.

Speaker 2 But like, I should be eating Cheerios.

Speaker 1 There's certain cereals that are bad, though. Like, like Froot Loop stuff with like the dye in them, that, like, that's proven.
You can't eat it. And by the way, I fucking love Fruit Loop.

Speaker 1 I've never seen it.

Speaker 2 Wyatt's listening to this and it's just like, fuck, I can't can't believe my work is finally being recognized.

Speaker 1 And then we go on a 10-minute fucking cereal.

Speaker 1 Did you like Fruity Pebbles?

Speaker 2 I was never a big tricks Fruity Pebbles guy.

Speaker 1 Were you a cereal mixer? Because that was another thing I used to do. I used to do the cornflakes with the rice crispy.

Speaker 2 Because if you get the little boxes and you go Lucky Charms and Applejacks and just like, who gives a shit?

Speaker 1 I loved Applejacks.

Speaker 1 Applejacks are still okay, right? No?

Speaker 3 No, they're really sugary, but they're great. They taste amazing.
Cereal's so good.

Speaker 2 Jack, has your generation abandoned cereal?

Speaker 1 Hell no.

Speaker 3 Honestly, people should just have it for dessert. That's it.
Starting your day with it is the problem, but just have it as a dessert.

Speaker 1 That's what I've done a few times. I go on binges, and now, unfortunately, I'm going to go on another one with cereal.

Speaker 1 Anyway, that was the big Hoonberger award for best use of food or drink.

Speaker 1 The Butch's Girlfriend Award week link of the film.

Speaker 2 I like Jessica Lang before you say it.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 it is a choice what she's doing, but I think what she has to say in the film is quite effective.

Speaker 1 Oh, I really like her.

Speaker 2 Okay, good. Just making sure.

Speaker 1 I don't know why Brie Larson's character would like Jim.

Speaker 2 I think that that's a huge question. That was a

Speaker 1 huge question. First scene in the movie, she sees him fucking on the self-destructive bender.
Yeah. He's a terrible professor.

Speaker 1 Well, you're supposed to inspire students and he's like, you guys all fucking suck. You have no chance.

Speaker 2 Which I read. Yeah.
There is another character in the movie. It was supposed to be played by Leland Orser, and he's cut out, but he's like his adversary at school.

Speaker 2 And he's basically like, you're a fucking genius, professor. Like, I hate you, but you are like the best of

Speaker 1 those. Yeah.
You used to be the best. What happened?

Speaker 2 But I think maybe we're catching Jim at a little bit of a low point in his professorial career. Like, I think he's supposed to be like inspiring to these people.

Speaker 3 Why is a 20-year-old bookworm at USC working at like an underground gambling ring as a waitress?

Speaker 1 waitress because I think they

Speaker 1 must be incredible but how did she even find that job she's a book like I feel like that she's not exploring yeah she sits in the middle of class but she's also like this illegal blackjack cocktail waitress and they never go back to it she has no opinions I actually have an answer

Speaker 1 in the research In the research, they decided they just really liked the Brie Larson character and they were just looking for things to shoehorn or be like, I don't know, I'm gonna gamble a bit. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
I have no idea why she likes him. It makes no sense.
And there's got to be two scenes of them where they talk about cereal that's just got taken out of the final.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I just think that this is a two-week relationship. This goes hot and heavy.

Speaker 2 And then the second Wednesday that he's like still like moaning about how he's not Dostoevsky, she's like, I got to try something else here.

Speaker 1 Do you believe in the students getting involved with the professor as a Hollywood thing or a thing that happens in real life?

Speaker 2 I think that it did happen for a very long time. I mean, there are a lot of novels about a professor who gets really horny for his student.

Speaker 2 That is like the bedrock of Philip Roth's career, right?

Speaker 1 We had one in college. A friend of mine got involved with the professor.
And when she told me, I was like, it was like, you could have told me.

Speaker 2 A TA or like an actual like graying professor?

Speaker 1 No, it was a professor.

Speaker 2 Was he an English teacher?

Speaker 1 Not going to, not going to give any more info than that. But I was like so blown away.
I was like,

Speaker 1 and you're in his class? Like, I just, I couldn't believe it.

Speaker 2 I feel like it happened

Speaker 1 less now. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I would hope so. Yeah.

Speaker 2 This is probably,

Speaker 2 I have this as what shades the worst, but like, this is like getting involved with your professor.

Speaker 2 It's kind of wild to watch this movie and be like, oh, wow, like Brie Larson's probably 21 in this movie and he's supposed to be 40.

Speaker 1 He's a degenerate fucking maniac gambler,

Speaker 1 40-year-old just getting involved with his team.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the movie ending with him running for nine miles to a 20-year-old's 20-year-old's dorm.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway, that was a weak link for me. What do you have, CR?

Speaker 2 Weak link, I thought, would just be the fact that there's just not very sophisticated gambling going on.

Speaker 2 So like, I think that when you, you don't get enough gambling movies that we can get a gambling movie where there's just no real skill or like strategy deployed and it's just like stacking and it's just destruction.

Speaker 2 That being said, it is, it is a very like entertaining thing to watch to see this guy do this.

Speaker 1 Can I make a suggestion? You know how I always talk on the rewatchables, and we've done almost 370 movies at this point about how I can't believe anyone making a sports movie wouldn't just call.

Speaker 1 Maybe do we have to start a sports movie consultancy, whatever.

Speaker 1 I also think I should be gambling consultant for these because I would have told them, scrap the blackjack, go right to craps. Much more fun as a, as, for movies in, in a Vegas thing, just craps.

Speaker 1 There's more going on. There's more people.
There's dice. There's things thrown in the air.
There's guys pulling in. You can bet on all these different things.
I just think it works.

Speaker 1 It's also like Wahlberg lives in Nevada now.

Speaker 2 Like he, like, I assume he gambles, right?

Speaker 1 Right. Black Jack's just so generic.
And they use like these big square things.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 The Mallor Rubin Award for did this movie need a better sex scene. Probably not.
Because that would have been a good thing. Probably because it would have been weird.
She's like 20.

Speaker 2 She jumps him. Yeah.
But they don't show it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 we'll never know mallard's thoughts

Speaker 1 i don't think mal's seen this we'll taste the worst other than stuff we've mentioned i wrote down wahlberg's hair looks like he's a 1974 right wing and the flyers

Speaker 1 he's like rick tuckett he's on dave schultz's line like what what the hell is this hair cut

Speaker 2 i assume I assume this was like he had come off another movie or was going on to another and it just looks like he's got like 18 wraparound hair like like strands this there's like stuff in the back it's just really strange

Speaker 1 the guy who plays dexter

Speaker 2 emery cohen

Speaker 1 i wrote down he's like david arquette after a stroke do you know who he is he was just in rebel ridge

Speaker 1 that's the same emery why did he play this part of dexter like this this is right after or right around place beyond the pines i think and he was like a hot young ass going for it yeah he's awesome i love i i like it you don't like it i don't okay he reminds me of uh of timothy hutton's brother played by david arquette and beautiful girls

Speaker 1 hey you think he's beautiful i'm gonna go take a shit

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 2 i have two big ones he would definitely be the coolest

Speaker 1 weirdest number two player in the country of all in tennis history tennis players are super boring just in general yeah no but no tennis player has even half as much weird personality speaking of tennis what stage the worst Jessica Lang's tennis, just abysmal.

Speaker 1 I don't like her outfit. They have to do the quick, the close cuts of her because she's doing a serve.
She's serving like this. Like, there's just nothing going on there.

Speaker 1 Would have gone golf maybe for that scene.

Speaker 2 Oh, like, but that would take out Dexter being her tennis instructor, which I thought was another sort of thing.

Speaker 1 Maybe play doubles with him. She had to try to hide the tennis more.
Just wasn't good enough.

Speaker 2 Like, well, now she's playing

Speaker 1 pickleball, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, or Padelle. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Is that what it's called? Paddle? What are you talking about? I don't even know. P-A-D-L.

Speaker 2 Do they try to make pickleball sounds?

Speaker 1 Peter Schrager's always trying to get me to get excited about paddle. Is that a different game or is that pickleball?

Speaker 2 I thought it was pickleball.

Speaker 1 No, it's like the kind of more tolerable pickleball.

Speaker 2 Oh, is it like squash versus racquetball version?

Speaker 3 What kind of ball do you use?

Speaker 1 It's more like it's basically paddle tennis, but now

Speaker 1 it's got a rebrand. And paddle tennis is kind of fun.

Speaker 1 Pickleball should be shot into the sun, and everybody who plays it should have to atone for their sins when they die.

Speaker 1 What's H to worst? Broke college purse pre-NIL.

Speaker 1 Now Lamar is just getting, you know, Chick-fil-A sponsors.

Speaker 2 The collective has come through for Lamar.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Also

Speaker 2 hard to imagine sports science being what it is that he can hide whatever's going on with his knee.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is like a 1982 plot.

Speaker 2 Also, like, we'd just be like, just get surgery. You're a junior.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah.

Speaker 1 I had that as well. I think if he was this good, he would have come out as a a sophomore.
I agree. Why is he in college for three years? Get the fuck out of there, Lamar.
Go make some cash.

Speaker 2 Maybe he loved, he loved the works of Albert Camus and maybe the teachings of Jim Bennett.

Speaker 1 Ruffalo Hannah Rubinik Partridge over Acting Award.

Speaker 1 They knew and they let it happen.

Speaker 2 Don't you call me lady? I come in here. I give these things to you.

Speaker 1 Give me all your gut. This and give me all your gut.

Speaker 1 I treated you like a son. You fucking stabbed me in the heart.
Fuck you. Fuck you.
Fuck you.

Speaker 1 Professor Wahlberg dialing it up.

Speaker 2 The Shakespeare speech.

Speaker 1 Awesome. Really trying hard.

Speaker 1 Going up. Playing outside of the bank being like, do I embarrass you? Yeah, yeah.
She's in there too. Was there a better title for this movie? No.

Speaker 1 The Can You Dig It Award for Most Memorable Quote? A Wise Man's Life is Based Around Fuck You.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Do you agree with this philosophy?

Speaker 2 This, you get a house with a 25-year roof and an indestructible Japanese economy shitbox, and you put the rest in the system at 3% to 5% to pay your taxes, and that's your base.

Speaker 1 That's what I've been telling you for six years.

Speaker 2 I just got to keep playing blackjack with it.

Speaker 1 That's why it has to work for you. I need the money.

Speaker 1 The CR thinks Luke Wilson could have been Harrison Ford. How does Take a Word? I got one.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Is this movie more interesting if the central relationship is just jim and lamar

Speaker 1 we don't have brie larson take her out just

Speaker 2 like do the new cut there's if you take bri larson and just edit her out of the movie with all due respect why would we do that because i love brie larson because the lamar relationship is almost more so two more lamar scenes yeah and the ethics of whether or not he can ask lamar to do this and why lamar is doing it what's lamar's deal What does Lamar think of Shakespeare?

Speaker 1 It's an interesting idea.

Speaker 2 So Lamar is just basically blown up into a much bigger yeah you basically have like a lottery pick to be and a self-destructive professor is like the kind of central relationship you kind of Brie Larson scenes are not integral to the story and it becomes an Adam Sandler

Speaker 1 no idea

Speaker 1 with the Safty brothers yeah

Speaker 1 and then Lamar gets shot at the end yeah yeah interesting

Speaker 1 my uh

Speaker 1 my hottest take

Speaker 1 I don't know what Wahlberg's legacy is going to be as an actor,

Speaker 1 but he has worked with, I think, the best collection of very attractive actresses at the perfect times of their career. I'm just going to go through a list.

Speaker 1 And I'm not really counting Rhys Witherspoon in fair because that was a little early for her, but he did catch the Rhys Witherspoon train pretty early.

Speaker 1 Heather Graham, Boogie Knights, Diane Lane, Perfect Storm, Charlize, The Italian Job, Elizabeth Banks, Invincible, Kate Mara,

Speaker 1 Grantland Hero and shooter. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Your girl Amy Adams in the fighter. My girl.
Mila Kunis and Ted and Brie Larson and the gambler. And that's all within 20 years.
Craig, it's impressive.

Speaker 1 Great work by him. No, no, no.

Speaker 1 Like really, really good taste.

Speaker 2 Ronda Rousey and Mile 22.

Speaker 1 I didn't have her in there.

Speaker 2 Who do you think he had the best chemistry with?

Speaker 2 Because I think it might be Brie, even though I've just made the case for cutting around at the phone.

Speaker 1 It's good in Prix, but I mean, Charlize in the Italian job. Okay.
I actually had to replace a plasma TV because she'd burn out the bulb.

Speaker 1 She was so crazy hot in that movie.

Speaker 1 Did we do Vincent Chase?

Speaker 1 No, but we can. May I ask you something? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Would bookies be this permissive?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 It's a lot of money.

Speaker 2 It's like, there's a cap on this, right? Yeah. Like, these guys all know what he's doing.
And it seems like, obviously, for the story, it makes it really interesting to give him seven days.

Speaker 2 It's got like the countdown element to it with juice, but like, why would you give this guy $240,000? Like, is it just because they think they can then go after his mother and take her house?

Speaker 2 Like, and liquidate movie trope, yeah, it's too much money.

Speaker 1 It should, it's like, probably like 25k would be

Speaker 1 a lot. So, I'm with you.
Okay,

Speaker 1 we'll take a break and then we're gonna do casting win-ifs.

Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by salty, cheesy, cheese-it crackers. Should this whole podcast just be me eating cheese-it? That would be a top-notch podcast.

Speaker 1 You could hear them crunching in my mouth. You could think about how salty and savory and delicious they are.
You could just get cheese-it on the brain.

Speaker 1 Oh, man, those cheese-it cravings, they get you. Anyway,

Speaker 1 what was I talking about? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, cheese-it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, cheese-it crackers. Go check them out.

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Speaker 1 Casting what ifs? Paramount got the rights in 2011, and it was supposed to be Scorsese and Leo and Moynihan,

Speaker 1 as they call it, the CR dream team.

Speaker 2 The departed trio, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and uh, Scorsese dropped out. Todd Phillips in there for a second, yeah, known to gamble from time to time.
Is he?

Speaker 1 In a pretty famous game in L.A. Oh, yeah,

Speaker 1 and uh, and he dropped out, and then Wahlberg and Wyatt came in. Okay.

Speaker 2 Not a lot of casting stuff for this. No.

Speaker 1 Well, this is the problem: we haven't had enough time since the movie was made to

Speaker 1 the internet to make up stuff. It's like Ben Affleck was in there.

Speaker 2 This would be an interesting Affleck role.

Speaker 1 I'm sure he's a little older.

Speaker 1 No, he was at the right time of his movie. In 14, he was at the right age, right? That was like his.
He's a couple of years older than Wahlberg, right?

Speaker 1 They're around the same age. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Best that guy award. It's got to be uh Dom from Entourage.
The Wire.

Speaker 2 I kind of think of him as Dominic Lombardosi. So I was going to ask you, could we throw this to Marcus Johnson as the color guy during the basketball game?

Speaker 1 Oh, that's interesting. So you think he's Dominic Lombardosi now?

Speaker 2 To me, he is.

Speaker 1 What do you think, Craig?

Speaker 3 None of these guys are ever Dominic Lambardosi, to me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't think people. I think to us he's that, but I think most people are like, hey, it's Dom from Entourage.
Oh, the guy from The Wire.

Speaker 1 This guy is quite an IMDb, by the way. Lombardozi? Yeah, because you know what else he was in.
You know.

Speaker 1 Miami Vice. Yeah.

Speaker 2 He's one of the cops, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So he played,

Speaker 1 he played that crazy Vince's cousin character or friend or whoever. What was he? Vince's friend? Or he was on Entourage?

Speaker 1 He was his buddy. He had like a three episode.
He's his buddy from Back East, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 He was Detective Stan Switek

Speaker 1 on miami vice yeah he's uh he was also in for love of the game as the tow tuck drive tow truck driver he's been in a lot of uh rewatchables kind of secretly yeah

Speaker 1 he was in

Speaker 2 maybe not that many i like that guy he was in the irishman yeah he was in bridge of spies gambler yeah public enemies he's worked with man a couple of times He was in SWAT.

Speaker 1 Deion Waiters, John Goodman is the winner. Michael K.
Williams is in it too much, I think.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 he's got like five, six scenes.

Speaker 1 Shout out to Omega Watch Guy, the guy who's trying to buy his Omega Watch.

Speaker 1 Recasting Couch Director of City, I already had Bernthal as Wahlberg. This is the Bernthal part I've wanted for seven years.

Speaker 2 I think this is what American Gigolo was supposed to be for him.

Speaker 1 Never got there.

Speaker 1 You have anything for this?

Speaker 2 For this, I think it would be cool if it had been like Oscar Isaac or Ethan Hawk, like a kind of like a little bit more of a movie.

Speaker 1 You like Oscar Isaac more than me. I know.

Speaker 1 You know why I don't like Oscar Isaac for this? Because it's not like an incredible movie. And I don't know if there's, he doesn't bring unintentional comedy for me.

Speaker 2 That's a good point. Do you think Ethan Hawk would? Gyllenhaal certainly would.

Speaker 1 Ethan Gyllenhaal, definitely, but now Gyllenhaus almost shaded too far toward the end.

Speaker 1 And I don't even know if he's being unintentionally funny.

Speaker 2 I think he might think that if you were like, can you lose some weight for this part? He'd come back looking like the guy in Nightcrawler.

Speaker 1 Right. And you'd be be like, well, this isn't really effective.
He said, if Wahlberg lost 50 pounds, I'm going to lose 80.

Speaker 1 Romo Collinsworth or someone else for the director's commentary.

Speaker 2 I see you, Mr.

Speaker 1 Allen.

Speaker 2 You're getting to your spots, making your shots, and keeping the score strangely within the spread.

Speaker 1 You may have degenerative cartilage damage, but your mid-range game is strong. We salute you, sir.

Speaker 1 I should know that was coming.

Speaker 1 Just because he took the North Carolina jab this week, I'm going to go Bill Belichick. This is not doing meet anymore.

Speaker 2 No, he is.

Speaker 1 You see, he's going to do Macify still.

Speaker 1 That won't last. Okay.
I don't see that happen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Jim's got to do better with Blackjack.

Speaker 1 When you're stacking bets like that,

Speaker 1 you got to cash some of the chips and put them in your pocket because eventually the odds of winning seven, eight straight bets, you're just not going to

Speaker 1 win eight straight bets. You're just not going to, nobody's that good.

Speaker 2 We're on to Morongo.

Speaker 1 Nobody's that good at all. Half-Fast Center Research.
This was George Kennedy's last movie. Tough last movie for George.
He just looks brutal.

Speaker 1 Here's one. Each day in the movie,

Speaker 1 Jim's shirt color gets lighter.

Speaker 1 Starts all black and starts getting lighter. And then by the end, it's white.

Speaker 2 Because that's and when he's finally free.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
See, a lot of deep shit going on in this movie.

Speaker 1 Craig, how many pounds do you think Mark Wahlberg lost in this movie?

Speaker 3 He's pretty thin in this movie.

Speaker 3 I bet you he lost, no, 40.

Speaker 1 He lost 61 pounds.

Speaker 1 CR.

Speaker 1 He went from 198 pounds to 137 pounds. Liquid food, vegetables, a workout of strictly cardio.
And he wanted to be 137 because the thinnest he'd ever been for a movie was boogeynights at 138.

Speaker 1 And he wanted to be one pound lighter. And he said he would never, ever do this again.

Speaker 3 He doesn't even look that bad.

Speaker 1 When he's shirtless, he doesn't look like that

Speaker 2 emaciated. He's like kind of heroin chic.
Yeah. Basketball diaries era.

Speaker 1 Also, you mentioned this earlier, but he sat in on college courses around different colleges and analyzed professors and their mannerisms.

Speaker 2 Can you imagine like you're going to fucking the modern novel and Wahlberg's sitting there? He's like, don't mind me.

Speaker 2 You don't have to fucking look at me.

Speaker 1 Look at him. He's teaching.
Say hi to you, motherfucker.

Speaker 1 Can you imagine like you're like a loyal Amerimount poli-sci professor and like Wahlberg's coming to your class for a week and you're so excited for the gambler to see how Walberg Wahlberg is.

Speaker 1 And that's how it's represented. It's like, oh, my God.
Is that what he saw?

Speaker 1 And then he wins on 22 Black at the end.

Speaker 1 So in the Sting,

Speaker 1 Redford bets on the roulette whale and it lands on 22 Black. Oh, that's cool.
I don't know if that was intentional. I'm sure it was.

Speaker 2 Monahan, they pretty much shot Monaghan's script.

Speaker 2 There's scenes excised, but there's nothing really fundamentally changed about it.

Speaker 1 Apex bound. Wahlberg, no.

Speaker 1 Lang, no.

Speaker 1 Brie Larson, no.

Speaker 2 Not Blackjack, right? On screen.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 What's the best Blackjack's? Cereal?

Speaker 2 Well, that's an interesting point.

Speaker 2 They never really show us what the cereal is. It looks like he's eating crackle and oat brain or something.
Are we going back to cereal now?

Speaker 1 I had it written down.

Speaker 3 This is Apex Mountain for cereal conversations, I think.

Speaker 1 This podcast. Cereal, gambling, no.

Speaker 1 Michael K. Williams, no.

Speaker 1 Shaving points in a movie? Blue chips. Blue chips.
Omega watches.

Speaker 2 In film.

Speaker 1 Watching basketball indoors with sunglasses on.

Speaker 2 Definitely.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Definitely.
We finally got one.

Speaker 1 You asked best blackjack scene. I'd really have to think about that and maybe come back.
I don't know. I don't want to just

Speaker 1 give that answer just quickly.

Speaker 2 This might be actually Apex Mountain for cocktail waitresses in movies because between Brie Larson and the woman at the horse track when he's like

Speaker 2 she's like this this this kid's like the grandson of the 16th richest man in California and she's like does he drink

Speaker 1 well so I'd be with you on that but what about swingers oh yeah that's true Dorothy yeah that's true um

Speaker 1 best blackjack scene in a movie well there's there's rainman right it's probably rainman

Speaker 1 Casino Royale they're playing poker yeah uh i'd have to think i'll have an answer in a later pod. I really want to research this because I don't want to leave anything out.

Speaker 2 Open guess the lines with.

Speaker 1 Rainman is the best.

Speaker 1 Hangover, do they play?

Speaker 2 Do they actually play that much?

Speaker 1 Hangover, they do it.

Speaker 3 But they're just making fun of Rainman and AR.

Speaker 2 They play poker in California Split, right?

Speaker 1 All right, I just Googled this. 21 was a movie built around Black Road.
That's right. The Kevin Speaker.
I didn't really like that movie that much, though.

Speaker 1 And then...

Speaker 1 Man, really not a lot of great black. I'm sure there is.

Speaker 1 Maybe the listeners will have one.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it's mostly poker because poker actually takes strategy and like skill and the hands have like arcs to them, whereas blackjack's just like, oh, fuck.

Speaker 1 Maybe somebody someday will make the movie about my blackjack career where eventually all my friends leave and it's three in the morning and they're vacuuming everybody. Kobe comes back.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Jobe's like, how are you still awake? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Cruise or Hanks?

Speaker 2 This is easily a cruise to me. Easily.

Speaker 1 This is the easiest cruise in a while. And it made me think like this actually

Speaker 1 would have been an incredible, incredible cruise. What year, though? What year of cruise?

Speaker 2 After like 90. 2002.
Do the firm era.

Speaker 1 Oh, I think you're going to be able to do that. Oh, younger? Yeah.

Speaker 1 How old do you want him to be?

Speaker 2 Like 35?

Speaker 2 So how old is he?

Speaker 1 So maybe right after Jerry Maguire? Yes. Vanilla Sky.

Speaker 1 Yes. I think you're right.

Speaker 1 Decided. Cruz needed it.
So now he's three back.

Speaker 3 Yep, 19 to 16. Has Cruz ever been a professor?

Speaker 3 I would love to see Cruz molding young minds.

Speaker 2 I mean, he does that.

Speaker 2 He teaches film to all of us.

Speaker 1 He's been a student in cocktail. Yeah.

Speaker 3 He's been a lawyer, but he's never been a teacher, right?

Speaker 1 Crew's doing the

Speaker 1 first

Speaker 1 teacher in Top Gun Maverick.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, he is. He's an instructor.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Racehorse, rock band, wrestler, or fantasy team name. I'll give you Lamar's Point Shavers or King of Spades.

Speaker 2 I had Mr. Lee's.

Speaker 1 Oh, I like that. Yeah.
Okay. Pick a it.

Speaker 2 Got a few.

Speaker 1 I mean, Lamar needs a senior year to boost his draft stock.

Speaker 1 What is this? 1974? Right. Like that.
What was the last year anyone said those words with college basketball? He's his second. The sports consultants right here.
Yeah. Come on.

Speaker 1 Wahlberg gets the shit beaten out of him,

Speaker 1 I think, three times more severely than his actual injuries.

Speaker 2 The Korean nail place where he gets fucking drop kicked.

Speaker 1 Multiple broken ribs. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Concussion.

Speaker 1 I think he has a broken orbital bone at one point. Definitely maybe a hairline fracture of the skull.
Yeah. Concussion.
He's fine.

Speaker 2 You're absolutely right.

Speaker 1 What else did he, what did you have? Well,

Speaker 2 crucial sports are error is that

Speaker 2 Neville says

Speaker 2 Lamar is playing Michigan. And then when they actually get to the game, the team he's playing against is the Bulldogs, which is not Michigan Wolverines.
And it's also in conference.

Speaker 2 It's the conference semifinal.

Speaker 1 Oh, I didn't. And I'm like, come on.

Speaker 2 I mean, now USC and Michigan are in the Big Ten together, but in 2014, this wasn't happening. Great one.

Speaker 2 How does Jim know that Amy is this genius? Like, how many pieces has he read by her that he's like, she is the one person in this generation? who's actually talented?

Speaker 1 I don't know. Because it's a lit class.

Speaker 2 So how much, like, is he just reading her like essays and stuff?

Speaker 1 Yeah, we need a scene where he's at his desk reading the paper.

Speaker 2 The only other thing is that Frank doesn't really live by his teachings because if you're in a position of fuck you, like, why are you also a loan shark?

Speaker 1 That seems like an unnecessary. Why are you helping people who aren't going to pay you back? Yeah.

Speaker 1 My two big ones.

Speaker 1 So they just give Lamar, they're going to fix the game. Hey,

Speaker 1 we put a big, giant bag of cash in your locker. It's not suspicious at all.
Well, I was. It's a giant, big gym bag right in the locker.

Speaker 2 Since we're talking about the basketball game, can I do two of my unanswerable questions that are also nitpicked?

Speaker 2 What was Jim's bet?

Speaker 1 So it's oh, I have all this later. Okay, yeah, all right.
I'll do it in unanswered.

Speaker 1 All right. What's the other question?

Speaker 2 What would happen if Danny Hurley had been coaching that team?

Speaker 1 God damn it, Lamar.

Speaker 3 There's no way Lamar gets back in the game.

Speaker 1 Jesus fucking Christ. Sinking to his knees.
He's fucking crying because Lamar missed a mid-range jumper. Didn't run horns properly

Speaker 1 the giant bag of cash in the locker is ludicrous should i bring should i make danny hurley the new win i'll throw him in there

Speaker 1 you had you had to commit to it though and fall to the ground

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 end of lamar's game so they're up seven it's like five seven then they have the ball near the end The other team's not fouling and they're also not dribbling out the clock. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's idiotic.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's going early possession shots when all you have to do is like choke the game out.

Speaker 1 Also, like sports consultant, yet again, can't believe I'm not hired for these.

Speaker 1 The move should have been they foul Lamar with like three seconds left up seven, and he goes to the line and you don't know whether he's going to make it or not.

Speaker 1 And he's shooting the free throw and then it cuts to Michael K. Williams celebrating.

Speaker 1 Instead, it was like, oh, he's just going to shoot up seven with one second left. Like, what the fuck is this? This would never happen.

Speaker 2 Why is it that when Lamar is practicing on his own, he's like playing in the gym that Zoe used to play middle school?

Speaker 1 Basketball?

Speaker 1 It's supposed to be USC. It's supposed to be like a giant gym.

Speaker 1 Sequel, prequel, prestige, TV all, Blackcast, or Untouchable. There's a prestige TV case for this movie.
Yeah, I mean, I would love some big ideas.

Speaker 2 A show about Los Angeles's underground gambling culture. Yeah.
And bookies, but like a professor.

Speaker 1 It's awesome. I learned David Chang.

Speaker 1 It sounds unbelievable. Where John Goodman shows up at Major Domo and is like, I will fucking take this place over.

Speaker 1 I am not here for the BS fries.

Speaker 1 Is this movie better with Wayne Jenkins, Danny Treo, Danny Hurley, Sid Goldberg, Sam Jackson, J.T. Walsh, Nell, Byron Mayo, Harling Mays, Evil Laughing, Ramon Raymond, Long Legs, or Philip Baker Hall?

Speaker 1 Should we get rid of a couple of these before the end of the year?

Speaker 2 Let's do a little bit of accounting here. Let's do an audit.

Speaker 1 Who has never won? The Sid Goldberg? Maybe we had a nice run with Sid.

Speaker 2 Nobody, we have never done Raymond Raymond Ramon.

Speaker 1 Yeah, all right, I'll get rid of him. It's fair.

Speaker 2 I like it, but it's just like we've never done that. I think JT Walsh, I guess, we could get rid of.

Speaker 1 Sorry, JT.

Speaker 1 Sid Goldberg, we could probably get rid of. Okay.

Speaker 1 He's pretty obscure.

Speaker 1 Wayne Jenkins, Danny Treyo, Sam Jackson, Nell, Byron Mayo, Harley Mays, Long Legs, or Philip Bakerhoff. Or Danny Hurley.
Or Danny Hurley. Danny Hurley.
Freddy Sportswoman.

Speaker 1 Jesus fucking Christ, Christ. What the fuck are we doing? Are you hitting on 18?

Speaker 1 Get the fuck over him!

Speaker 2 That's a pretty obscure cut for people. We need to follow UConn's Maui invitational press conference.

Speaker 1 We need somebody else at the ringer to hold you back from the microphone as you're screaming.

Speaker 1 I would say

Speaker 1 Sam Jackson in this movie wouldn't have been a bad thing.

Speaker 2 Sam Jackson is Neville and Sam Jackson and Goodman in the same movie would have been awesome.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I'm trying to think what Sam Jackson,

Speaker 1 could he have been like,

Speaker 1 how do we work him in?

Speaker 2 He could be Andre Brower is in one scene in this movie as the Dean.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that was another one. Like, why do we have Andre Brower?

Speaker 2 There's more Dean stuff in the script, I think. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just one Oscar who gets it, Goodman.

Speaker 1 All right, I have some really good unanswerable questions.

Speaker 1 So Jim wrote a book called Uphill Both Ways that that they show the cover of. What was this book about? Book of fiction? Uphill Both Ways.
What does that even mean?

Speaker 2 I wonder whether it's like tries, it's like supposed to be like a demon copperhead like working class tale, but it just didn't ring true because it wasn't really like what his experience was.

Speaker 1 Or you don't think it was like an adult catcher in the right?

Speaker 2 I mean, that's what he is, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 As long as I it, I wonder, what do you would you read a book called Uphill Both Ways?

Speaker 1 I would never read any book like that ever.

Speaker 1 no the answer is no

Speaker 1 is 2.5 million really you money because in 2014 because john goodman really felt committed to that specific figure it wasn't two it wasn't three it was like i've been up two and a half million so he's so john goodman just decides that's a great number i'm good at i'm good with that okay

Speaker 1 how many miles does he jog at the end because it seems like he goes from koreatown i don't think it's that all the way to the arts district no i think she lives in,

Speaker 2 what is it, like the Los Altos apartments? I don't know if that's real.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's what they're called, I think.

Speaker 1 But those actually exist? Los Altos Apartments. It's on Wilshire.
Oh, Wilshire and what?

Speaker 2 It's on Wilshire and Bronson.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like Wilshire and Wilton.

Speaker 2 So it's actually not that far of a run.

Speaker 3 That's like a fucking one-mile run.

Speaker 1 What are they doing?

Speaker 1 at some point? At one point, he's in downtown LA for some reason. Yeah, I know, I know.
I think so. Did he run all the way down here and then run back?

Speaker 2 I think they say it's Koreatown and he actually starts down by like Grand Street or something.

Speaker 1 Or maybe he's in, but they say Koreatown, though, right?

Speaker 2 Maybe he's so fucking hungry.

Speaker 1 Is it possible he's been

Speaker 2 the entire time that he runs down into downtown by accident?

Speaker 1 Is it possible he's in Chinatown? No, they said it's Koreatown.

Speaker 2 They're like, come to the Korea town.

Speaker 1 Come down to that to Los Altos. That's like a mile.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like you said, a very exciting mile.

Speaker 1 Jesus. I feel completely disillusioned by this.
All right. I figured out exactly how much money Jim owed.
You ready? Yeah. He owed the Korean 200,000.

Speaker 1 He owed Michael K 60K.

Speaker 1 He got 260K from Frank with 10% juice.

Speaker 1 And he got $100K from the Korean with $10 juice.

Speaker 1 And he had to pay Lamar $150K before the game,

Speaker 1 which gave him $210K left.

Speaker 2 Then he gives.

Speaker 1 But he owed $310,000,

Speaker 1 $286,000,

Speaker 1 and $60,000.

Speaker 1 So he owed $656,000,

Speaker 1 and he had $210 left,

Speaker 1 which he bet on the basketball game.

Speaker 2 He also gives Dexter 50 grand.

Speaker 1 I haven't gotten that yet. He wins on the basketball game, bets 210 to win 200 on the basketball game.
So now he's got 410.

Speaker 1 So he pays the 60K to Michael Kay.

Speaker 1 He's got 350 left,

Speaker 1 but he owed 596

Speaker 1 to the two bags.

Speaker 1 Offers 50k to Dexter, doesn't take it.

Speaker 1 So he still has the 350.

Speaker 2 Also, Dexter being like, I'm going to go pro in tennis and I'm going to maybe make 50k.

Speaker 1 Terrible character.

Speaker 1 Bets 350 on black and wins. So now he has 700.

Speaker 1 Everyone gets paid and then some, which is why Goodman at the end says, I got an extra hundred for you.

Speaker 2 Oh, right, it's the cream on top, right?

Speaker 1 So he actually won more money than he owed, which I think is very stealth in the movie, but it's what happened.

Speaker 1 He just wants to be free, he doesn't want to actually be so he gives those guys the extra, and then Goodman gets it. And that, I think, is how the money shook out.

Speaker 2 Okay, so what

Speaker 2 was what was that Michigan game, the Lamar game, paying out then?

Speaker 1 So he paid Lamar 150,

Speaker 1 and his cut was probably 150,

Speaker 1 which is, I would say they probably got 30 to 35% of the cut. Okay.
So maybe those guys each won 500K, something like that. Because if you're getting

Speaker 2 a bet that Neville knows about it after the fact, where he's like, I heard somebody showed up in Vegas and like smashed the money line or whatever it was. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Best double feature choice. Two for the money or the original gambler? Original gambler.
Yeah. Yeah.
Would you first or second?

Speaker 2 No, I watched the Jim Con Jimmy Conn movie.

Speaker 1 I know, but would you watch it first or second?

Speaker 2 I would watch this second as like a palette cleanser because the Jimmy Conn movie is very, like,

Speaker 2 very, very serious.

Speaker 1 The Indian Red Zawatan Award for what happened the next day. So Jimmy.
I just wrote down Jim Get Dump.

Speaker 1 Jim gets canceled.

Speaker 1 What's the fucking social media

Speaker 2 gets a hold of Jim? It's like, this guy slept with a student and fixed the game and shaved college basketball Pac-10

Speaker 1 conference game.

Speaker 2 And then also,

Speaker 2 he gets driven insane when Amy writes like a Sally Rooney novel and becomes hugely famous.

Speaker 1 I don't even think they make it that long. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What piece of memorability would you want from this movie?

Speaker 1 Could I offer you the sunglasses? I could offer you the duffel bag that held the 50s. I think the duffel nice bag.

Speaker 1 Jessica Lang's tennis racket?

Speaker 2 Could I get Jim's like Topanga house, Topanga Canyon house or Beachwood Canyon?

Speaker 1 It's a pretty cool house. I like that.
Is it Laurel? Like, where is he living? It feels like a little Beechwood-ish.

Speaker 3 You don't want Uphill Both Ways?

Speaker 1 Oh, that's true. That's fine.
I want Uphill Both Ways. The actual book of Uphill Both Ways.
Yeah, that's cool. I love that it's

Speaker 2 featured in the hallway of the English department.

Speaker 1 Coach Finn Stock award: Best Life Lesson: Always Be in a Fuck You Position.

Speaker 2 Oh, I actually said you owe somebody money.

Speaker 1 Don't fuck around. Okay.

Speaker 1 Who won the movie?

Speaker 2 I'm going to say Monahan, the screenwriter, just because this this is like unvarnished, his thing.

Speaker 2 I think that a lot of

Speaker 2 the characters are speaking from his POV. These are his riffs on society and existence.
And I think it's more or less a vehicle for his kind of music. So I'm going to go William Monaghan.

Speaker 1 I like that.

Speaker 1 You're going to go Goodman. Yeah, I think I am.
Because it's

Speaker 2 that Goodman part isn't that good. If it's like the movie falls apart.

Speaker 1 Yeah. If it's

Speaker 1 somebody overacting. Yeah.
Somebody trying too hard.

Speaker 1 All right, Craig had never seen this movie. It did come out in the last 10 years, which is a bonus.

Speaker 1 What were your thoughts? Yeah, I had never heard of it.

Speaker 3 I don't know if that is that surprising to you that I've never heard of it.

Speaker 2 I think that there's a lot of probably mid-10s movie that fall into obscurity

Speaker 2 before you start like watching stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 3 As usual, I like this movie more after hearing you guys talk about it for 90 minutes, but it's more memorable. It will be more memorable than it deserves to be, I think, for me.

Speaker 3 It's kind of the Jordan pool of movies, but parentheses complimentary. Because

Speaker 3 the movie puts up 34, but a very inefficient 34.

Speaker 3 12 for 28, 34 points, but like a couple incredible threes.

Speaker 1 Gets punched once.

Speaker 2 Absolutely like backbreaking turnovers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right.

Speaker 3 But there are moments, like the highlights are great. And yeah, I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 3 I think that there's, there are misses in this movie, but ultimately what I like is that there are five really good actors kind of just playing dress up up and going for it.

Speaker 3 And ultimately, I respect that. And I think I see less and less of that nowadays.

Speaker 3 I'm like watching Mark Wahlberg, Goodman, Michael Kay, Brie Larson, all these people being like, yeah, we're going to try to win an Oscar and we're going to really go for it in kind of an overwritten gambling movie.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's just, it's just fun to see them all collectively agreeing to do it.

Speaker 2 There was, there used to be like a Howard Hawks saying about like how many good scenes a movie needed for the movie to be good.

Speaker 2 This has enough to make me re-watch it. You know what I mean? Like, I think that you need five.

Speaker 1 to- I also think five years from now, you're going to be like, I really like this movie.

Speaker 3 I think so, too.

Speaker 3 I think the movie to me hinges, it became unintentionally funny when his big speech as a professor in the classroom, like he wanted that to make, like in his head, that's like the Lydia Tarr scene.

Speaker 3 Yeah. But it doesn't play.
And I think after that, you're like, okay, this is now a different movie in my head. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Still very memorable.

Speaker 2 I think he obviously did a lot of research. I've made this joke before we talking about this, but like he's, he's almost like he's reading phonetically.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Like, I don't know that he knows what he's saying in that scene as an actor.

Speaker 1 Whereas, like, Berntha would have crushed it. Yeah.
Or Ruffalo would have been. I'm so slick with it.

Speaker 3 I almost don't even know what he's saying because he's running through it so fast, like, he's memorized it and he's trying to get it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like he's emphasizing weird parts of his speech.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's like when we found out that the lady Colin Farrell hooks up with the Miami Vice, didn't speak English and memorized all the phonetic sounds of her dialogue.
And I was like, oh, okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Maybe that's what Mark Wahlberg did.

Speaker 2 Possibly.

Speaker 1 That's a good point.

Speaker 1 All right. That's that's that review didn't surprise me at all because I didn't really like this movie that much the first time I saw it, but it kept my interest and made me more mad than any.

Speaker 1 And now, 10 years later, I've arrived at a great place.

Speaker 2 This is just a really good Sunday afternoon. There's nothing to watch.
The four o'clock NFL games suck. Just throw this on.
You won't be sorry.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you another thing about this movie. People are watching it.
Are they? It's

Speaker 1 always on in the Showtime bundle if you're flicking the cable guy. Yeah, it's on Paramount.
It's a gambler. It's on Paramount.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's,

Speaker 1 it's, I think it's, it's out there. It reminds me of what happened with Focus, which was another movie that I don't think did.

Speaker 1 We did that on the rewatch too, but that was another one that it was like, I think I like that, but it had some faults.

Speaker 2 I'm sure this is that you and I are very easy dates if it's about sports or gambling.

Speaker 1 Yeah, or the criminal underbelly or the criminal underbelly of either.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I think Focus exploded on streaming in the last year.

Speaker 1 Because of Margot Robinson.

Speaker 1 And Will Smith because he punched Chris Rock.

Speaker 1 CR, a pleasure as always. Craig and Jack, thank you for producing.
You can watch this on the Ringer Movies YouTube channel as well. And we will see you.

Speaker 2 See, subscribe to Ringer Cereal if you haven't gotten a chance yet.

Speaker 1 Ringer Cereal, Ringer TV, Ringer Movies.

Speaker 3 Yeah, 10 years ago, what really started podcasting was cereal, the podcast, and now it's a new one. Yeah.
Just spelled a little differently.

Speaker 1 And we have an actual Christmas movie next week. That's right.
Yeah. Very excited about that.
See you then.

Speaker 1 Ja sell na Bicnac, McNuggets. O un sausage, egg and cheese, McFriddles, pie tuento jocamun meo y a hora.
Oof, nada comodarte un gustaso por tam poco. The extra value meals are

Speaker 1 regressive.

Speaker 7 Gana por la mañana con el extra-value meals, sausage, mc, muffin with egg, hash browns, and a cafe.

Speaker 7 Poros X dollars. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.
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