Bluff City Movie Club: The Nice Guys

Transcriber: anachilles

0:00:01.0        

Keith:        I had never seen it, and I wanted to go into it fresh, so I watched it today.

Jack:        That's a good idea.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Oh, man. This is very exciting, because I've seen it, uh, four times?

Keith:        Yeah. I know that you like this movie a lot.

Janine:        Oh, okay.

Keith:        I know that because, at the same —

Janine:        Is everyone recording?

Keith:        One time, you told me — yeah, I just started. Yeah.

Jack:        We should probably clap. Are we burning cast?

Janine:        We should, but —

Jack:        Yeah, let's —

Janine:        A little.

Jack:        Let's clap, and we can talk about this stuff on recording.

Keith:        Let's clap, let's clap. 42, now! [claps]

Jack:        Oh, no, no, no!

Everyone:        [laughing]

Keith:        55? We ready 55?

Jack:        No, I don't know. I'm still loading up time.is. I'm on KB's computer, still, so everything's a little alien to me.

Keith:        Okay, let's go 60. Minute, top of the minute. Okay, well, while we wait for Jack —

Jack:        Time.is... okay, I'm good at 60.

Janine:        Wait, what?

Keith:        [laughing]

Jack:        Okay, fine. Quarter past, for seconds.

Keith:        Okay. That's a long one.

Janine:        [laughing] quarter past for seconds.

Jack:        Yeah, you know.

Janine:        Uh... [clapping]

Keith:        Wait, hold on. I like that — I really like, “quarter past for seconds,” because that means that if it was, if it was 3:30 and 15 seconds, you could say it's quarter past half past 3.

Jack:        Oh, Jesus. [chuckling]

Janine:        [laughing]

Keith:        [laughing]

Jack:        Yeah, it's amazing how we've all, we've got a shared vocabulary for time, and as soon as we deviate from it a bit, it just starts getting really confusing.

Keith:        Yeah. Mm-hm.

Janine:        It just falls apart.

Keith:        Mm-hm. Very fragile — time is very fragile.

Janine:        Well there's a, there's a quote about that today on time.is.

Jack:        Is there really?

Janine:        Time is the school in which we learn. Time is the fire in which we burn.

Keith:        Oh, wow, Delmore Schwarz is very grim.

Jack:         As soon as you — [laughing] as soon as you started saying it, I was like, “this is going to rhyme, isn't it?” And it did.

Keith:        [laughing]

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:         Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in [chuckling], in which we burn.

Keith:        So...

Jack:        Man, Dark Souls gone bad.

Keith:        [laughing] That — honestly, that doesn't any, like anything that would be out of place in Dark Souls.        

Jack:        If it didn't rhyme... if it didn't rhyme, if it was like, “time is the school in which we learn... ha-ha-ha ha...” [chuckling]

Keith:        [chuckling] You don't think you could, uh, you could see, like, some guy, lying on the ground, dead, and you go to loot him —

Janine:        Rhyming it makes it seem like a message someone would leave, like a player.

Keith:        I was — yeah, that's —

Jack:        Oh yeah.

Keith:        Uh, I guess I don't have, I have maybe the least Dark Souls experience here, so —

Janine:        No.

Keith:        No? I played Dark Souls one for 3, 3 or 4 hours, and that's it.

Janine:        I played Dark Souls 2 for —

Jack:        So here's —

Janine:        And I'd say half of that, I was using a trainer [chuckles] so...

Keith:        Okay, that's [unintelligible]

Jack:        Oh, damn. That's a great way to play Dark Souls, I hadn't thought of that.

Keith:        Actually, I think, Jack, I think, Jack, you were there for almost my entire Dark Souls life.

Jack:        Yeah, and you were in fucking Blight Town, I think. Uh...

Keith:        No, no, I was in, uh, I was, I had just started the game. I started a fresh save.

Jack:        Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah yeah.

Keith:        It was a stream, years and years ago, that I was doing.

Jack:        Yeah. So... I feel like dialogue in the Souls games is as though it has been passed through Google Translate, and then back again, except the language that was selected in Google Translate was weirder one and a half thousand years ago.

Keith:        [chuckling]

Janine:        [chuckling]

Jack:        Uh, which is like, so good. It's so great. When I learned that they write the scripts for Dark Souls in English, that was fantastic. I had previously thought that it was just because it had been translated from Japanese or something, but no. Like, they want it to sound like that. That's super deliberate. Uh...

Keith:        Uh, that, that, that reminds me of, uh, have, have you played Shenmue?

Jack:        No, I keep meaning to.

Keith:        Shenmue is a bizarre —

Janine:        Well, I've played part of it and watched all of it.

Keith:        Shenmue is a bizarre game because, uh, for a lot of reasons. And one of those reasons is that the director, Yu Suzuki, insisted on hand-picking the English voiceover cast.

Jack:        Oh my god.

Janine:        That's wild, because —

Keith:        Yeah, it's actually, it was, I don't think there was a —

Janine:        They're terrible.

Keith:        Yeah, they're terrible — well, that's the thing, is that, Yu Suzuki doesn't know how to direct —

Janine:        Rio, I don't think you should do that.

Keith:        [laughing] Yeah, that, well that's —

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        Audible breathing!

Keith:         Like, if — I think it's because Yu Suzuki picked them that it's — that, like, it works for what, what he who does not speak very good English, like, it worked for him, but it doesn't work for native English speakers, so it's like this horrible, jilted — I don't think that there is an original Japanese voice cast for that, either.

Jack:        That's amazing. Because —

Keith:        I think that it was all, it was written in English, for English voice cast, picked by a Japanese man. Uh, with a — with bizarre sensibilities, even for Japanese people, I think. [chuckling]

Jack:        I, uh, I just finished, uh, Silent Hill 2, and Silent Hill 2 has incredible weird voice acting, kind of —

Keith:        Yeah, that's another one that was, that was originally written in English.

Jack:        In a similar feel, and like, characters in Silent Hill 2 will just, I mean, firstly, what characters in Silent Hill 2 decide to say is usually wild, like, you know, you'll see this like, awful dismembered body next to a television with static on, and the character will go like, “huh, the television's still on.” And you're like —

Keith:        Oh my god, I — I have —

Jack:        Interesting.

Keith:        I have let'splayed all of those games, or four of those games at this point. And that is always the most fun part, is like, watching what the main character thinks is interesting.

Janine:        [chuckling]

Jack:        [chuckling] It's so good.

Keith:        While, like, being in a room surrounded by bloody meat bodies —

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:        Hanging from chains, and being like, “what's this book doing here?” [laughing]

Jack:        There's a great moment late in Silent Hill 2, where — have you played Silent Hill 2, Janine?

Janine:        No, I have not played a single Silent Hill game.

Jack:        Oh, god. So there's a, there's a —

Keith:        I don't recommend it, but I think Jack might.

Janine:        I don't, I don't do spooky, and I also don't —

Jack:        No, fair.

Janine:        Do terrible camera.

Jack:        Fair.

Keith:        Oh, it's — so, I don't find them spooky, pretty much ever. But it does have terrible camera.

Jack:        It's true. I, uh, so, there's this wonderful moment — oh, hey KB.

KB:         Hi.

Keith:        Hello.

Jack:        How are you doing?

KB:        I'm good. I wanted to get different pants.

Jack:        Okay. You can — [chuckling]

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        Yeah, no, yeah, it's fine.

KB:        Thanks!

Jack:        So there's this moment — we haven't started yet, really.

KB:        Oh, okay.

Jack:        This is all clapcast stuff, I think. And it's now definitely clapcast stuff —

Keith:        Is this not part of it?

Janine:        This is already a bonus podcast, can we do double bonus?

KB:        [laughing] Hi. I'm getting different pants.

Jack:        Yeah, we can, we can definitely do double bonus. So there's this great moment, uh, towards the end of Silent Hill 2, where, uh, James is led on this like, sort of small puzzle that involves opening a large can, sealed can —

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        That has “eggs” written on the side —

Keith:        [chuckling]

Jack:        In a, in a kitchen.

Janine:        What?

Jack:        [chuckling] In a kitchen.

Janine:        Who keeps eggs in a can?

Jack:        You know, I know, this is —

Keith:        Pickled, they're probably pickled eggs, right? They're probably pickled eggs.

Jack:        They're probably pickled eggs, but they'd be in a jar usually.

Janine:        Wouldn't those be in a jar — yeah...

Jack:        We're, we're, we're dodging the bigger question here, which is, why is [chuckling] James interested in a can labeled “eggs?” The answer is because —

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        It's an interactable object —

Keith:        Because the game said — yeah.

Jack:        And James is like, “sure, that's fine.”

Keith:        Yep.

Jack:        So you go on this kind of long circuitous path to [chuckling] find a can opener or something. I think you do find a can opener, to open this can. And you open it up, and...

Keith:        No, there — I think there's a, like a can opener or something that does something totally unrelated to the can, and then you have to use something else weird to open the can.

Jack:        Sure, yeah, like a fork or something.

Keith:        Like, and this is, I'm, this is so long ago that I played this, but, yeah, I think it was like, I remember trying to use the, I remember being like, “oh, we have a can opener,” I was like, “no, we used that, that's gone.” This, I might be totally wrong, but.

Jack:        And you eventually, you, you, you open up this can. Uh, and inside are just, like... 10 or 15 lightbulbs.

Keith:        [chuckling]

Jack:        And, and, and that's all that's in the can. And James goes, “lightbulbs.” And takes a lightbulb, and screws it into his flashlight, like this was the intended end of the puzzle that he was, you know, shooting for the whole time.

Keith:        Uh-huh.

Jack:        And you just leave the room. It's wonderful.

Keith:        Yeah, I — see —

Jack:        It's, it's, it's like a —

Janine:        Huh.

Keith:        See, that's, here, here, the problem with me for Silent Hill — we played, Kyle and I played Silent Hill 1 for Runbutton as a Let'splay. And we mostly really enjoyed it. And it had a lot of that same vibe to it. I think generally, people agree that like, Silent Hill 2 is a better written, has a more interesting story. Uh, but, we forgave a lot of really, really annoying stuff in Silent Hill 1, and came out of it being like, “that was so weird and kind of fun.” And then went into Silent Hill 2, and like all of the stuff that we hated from Silent Hill 1 was still there or worse.

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:        And so like, it was so hard to see, it was so hard to take the stuff that in Silent Hill 1 we saw as like, really fun, and not be like, this is, this is still a, this is still a PS1 game, I can't believe that we're playing a PS1 game on a PS2, and it's —

Jack:        Sure.

Keith:        Still is like this.

Jack:        It's a weird fucking game.

Keith:        It's really weird.

Jack:        [chuckling] It's a weird fucking game.

Keith:        Yep.

Janine:        Also, the real answer to why he wants into the can of eggs, is because the can of eggs represents his wife's fertility.

Keith:        [laughing]

Jack:        Right. This is the other problem with [wheezes] Silent Hill 2, is that fucking weirdos on the internet have decided that the only way to read it is the psychoanalytic — oh, Jesus. I've got beef with this, and you can hear Kat and I talk about it at length on the, on the thing. But like, man! A lot of people in that game want to — a lot of people playing that game want to tell you Freud is involved, in some capacity.

Keith:        I never saw him, is he like a bonus — is he an Easter Egg, or —

Jack:        He is an Easter Egg, you have to —

Keith:        Oh, is he the — so you have to open the can, you have to find the Easter Egg.

Janine:        Oh...

Jack:        You have to [chuckling] open the can, and if you dig through the bottom of the, uh, the, the lightbulbs, there's a matchbook there. And then if you go to the hotel listed on the matchbook and enter the code mentioned on a phone at the beginning of the game, uh, then you're introduced to Jung. But you have to have a series of conversations with Jung before he'll introduce you to Freud.

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        Man, Silent Hill's great! [laughing] Let's play Silent Hill.

Keith:        Uh...

Jack:        Uh, instead we should talk about The Nice Guys, right?

Keith:        Yeah. So, oh, so what I was saying before is —

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Jack, a few years ago, you, like, you like 4 years ago maybe, you, I think what you said was, “have you seen The Nice Guys?” And I said, “no,” and then you said, “you should watch the John Cusack, the unrelated, the only thematically-related John Cusack movie, Gross Point Blank —“

Jack:        Yeah, Gross Point Blank.

Keith:        “And then watch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and then you should watch The Nice Guys.” And then I said, “yeah, I'll do that.” And then I watched Gross Point Blank, and it was really good, and then I didn't do the other two things.

Jack:        That's, you know, that's fine. I feel like when someone —

Keith:        I just, I just missed that, I just didn't get around to it.

Jack:        When someone says to me, “you should engage with this kind of media,” I just... I feel like not doing that is an entirely, a legitimate response.

Keith:        Well, I meant to. I always meant to —

Jack:        Oh, I always [chuckling] mean to, yeah.

Keith:        [laughing]

Janine:        Also, this could only have been 2 and a half to less than 3 years ago.

Jack:        Yes —

Keith:        Why's that?

Jack:        Because The Nice Guys came out in...

Janine:        March of 2016? 2016 either way.

Jack:        Yeah, and I saw it in....

Janine:        I think.

Jack:        I saw it in the cinema in Astoria with Austin and Ali.

Janine:        Mmm.

Jack:        No, I didn't. I just saw it with Austin. Uh...

Janine:        That's still good.

Jack:        I don't think I saw it with Ali. Uh, and then I, I watched it like a few months later with my family, who, liked, uh, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and I was like, “hey, do you want to watch The Nice Guys?” And then like, 2 months ago, I saw it on a plane. And then I saw it again. Uh, so I haven't watched it 4 times necessarily because it's like, a film that I must see 4 times. I've watched it 4 times because circumstances have come up where I've been like —

Janine:        Yeah, it's a film that you would watch, if it happens. Like, sure, I'll watch that.

Jack:        Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'll watch that, the opportunity to watch The Nice Guys is available to me. But this was the first time either of you had seen it?

Keith:        Yeah, yep.

Jack:        And it was your first, I don't know about you, Janine, but it sounds like it was your first Shane Black movie, Keith?

Keith:        I believe so. I believe that it was. Uh...

Janine:        I don't know who that is, so...

Keith:        The director. And writer?

Janine:        Okay. [chuckling]

Jack:        And writer, yeah. He made, uh, Lethal Weapon, back in the day.

Keith:        Yep, I haven't seen those.

Jack:        Uh, and then he made, uh, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer, which is basically a sort of parallel universe version of this movie, in that a lot of the [chuckling] same jokes happen, uh, in a lot of the same ways. Uh, and then recently, he made the new, bad Predator movie, which is an entirely adequate airplane movie.

Keith:        He also, uh, was an uncredited script contributor on the original Predator movie.

Jack:        Oh, okay. I could see that.

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        I could see that being the case. Yeah.

Keith:        Uh, [unintelligible] I, I saw Iron Man 3, which I quite liked.

Jack:        Oh! He made Iron Man 3, yeah. Have you seen that, Janine?

Keith:        He made Iron Man 3, he wrote and directed that.

Janine:        No...

Keith:        That's actually, uh, I haven't seen it since it came out in theaters, but was both my, I think my favorite superhero movie of the superhero movie age, and also, the —

Jack:        [wheezes]

Keith:        When I decided that I was done watching superhero movies.

Jack:        Fair. That movie ends with Tony Stark getting rid of a bunch of his Iron Man suits, so I feel like that was thematically consistent of you.

Keith:        Yeah, yeah, I was just like, you know, this was my favorite one, and I liked it, and then, if this is the one that I like the most, I don't think I'm, this is, these are for me.

Jack:        What if I just stop? Yeah.

Keith:        What if I just stop.

Jack:        That's fair.

Keith:        I was like, I ended on one that I liked, genuinely liked. Uh, yeah.

Jack:        And that was about it.

Keith:        And that was about it. So I have seen one Shane Black movie. This, not — in addition to being the first non-Iron Man 3 Shane Black movie that I've seen, it's also the first movie that I've seen with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe where I liked either of them as actors in it.

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:        I was really taken aback by really enjoying both of their performances, despite not liking them.

Janine:        Yeah, I can... I... so I can't, I'm not going to say anything about Ryan Gosling, because there are a lot of Ryan Gosling movies that are like, on my to-watch, except I don't watch a lot of movies, list. A lot of things like, I really, really want to see that, and he happens to be in it. So maybe I just like him, I don't know.

Jack:        Mmm.

Janine:        I definitely have extremely unfavorable opinions about Russell Crowe onscreen.

Jack:        Yes.

Janine:        And he was just like, he was, he was good in this, in a way where it's like, I don't know if he ever gets cast as a non-shlub again. Because he sells schlub —

Jack:        Right.

Janine:        He sells competent schlub, exceptionally well.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        And it's like, is that the rest of his career? It should be, probably.

Keith:        Yeah, it, you know what it shouldn't be? Is singing Les Mis songs.

Jack:        Sure. Who was he? Was he, uh, Javert?

Janine:        He was Javert, I think.

Keith:        Yeah, yeah.

Jack:        And, and, Hugh Jackman was — is

Keith:        He was Javert with a clothespin over his nose, is I think what they were going for.

Jack:        Was — Jesus Christ. Look, the only Les Miserable I will watch is the Muppets Les Miserables, a film that has not been made, but I pray every —

Janine:        I was going to say, I was going to like, gasp, and say, “did that happen?”

Jack:        No, but I pray every night.

Keith:        Oh, that would be really good.

Janine:        Of course it didn't.

Jack:        So, you know, Human plays —

Janine:        Which Muppet would be Cosette?

Jack:        So this is the thing. All right, here we go. Welcome to, uh, The Nice Guys. We're talking about this as a, as a Bluff City kind of extra, films that have inspired us or, or that we think about with Bluff City. Now it's time to cast the Muppets in Les Miserables.

Keith:        [laughing]

Jack:        I think Jean —

Janine:        My problem is, there are just so few female Muppets, especially young female Muppets.

Jack:        Right, right.

Keith:        There's the drummer from the band.

Jack:        Oh, there is. The blond drummer?

Keith:        Yeah, or is she a bass player?

Janine:        She is like, in her early 40s though, [unintelligible]

Keith:        She's a puppet!

Jack:        Is she really?

Janine:        I don't know, she just has that —

Jack and Keith:        [laughing]

Janine:        She just has that like, smoked herself into middle age vibe.

Jack:        Hey, how old's — hey, how old's Kermit, Janine?

Janine:        [laughing] Kermit's a frog. Uh...

Keith:        [laughing] Frogs have birthdays.

Jack:        They don't age!

Janine:        [laughing] No, I just, I just mean like, the, the, the band lady muppet is like, she is meant to evoke a woman of a certain age more than maybe any other Muppet.

Jack:        Right, that's true.

Janine:        You know what I mean?

Jack:        Okay. So I've pulled up a list called, “all female Muppets: the complete list.”

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        But I think, I think we should start by saying, Jean val Jean —

Janine:        Is that including Sesame Street characters? Because that's —

Jack:        Uh... no.

Keith:        No. Those are not Muppets.

Jack:        Jean val Jean is a human, in the adaptation, I feel, given the tradition of, uh, you know, Muppets moving a —

Janine:        It could just be Hugh Jackman, right? Like —

Jack:        Yeah, it could just be Hugh Jackman.

Keith:        He was fine, he did fine in that.

Jack:        Yeah, he's an all right singer. Uh, [chuckling] he's an all right singer. Uh...

Keith:        And, and Russell Crowe's the one in a band. A band with the worst name of all time, but he is in one.

Jack:        What's his band called?

Keith:        30-odd foot of Grunt.

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        [chuckling] I'm sorry?

Keith:        30-odd foot of Grunt? Or TOFOG.

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:         [laughing]

Keith:        30-odd foot of Grunt, AKA TOFOG.

Janine:        [laughing] What?

Jack:        So, 30 — 30-odd as the... [laughing]

Keith:        Or, they did re... they did temporarily change their name to The Ordinary Fear of God, to keep the acronym TOFOG for the shirts. That's all real, this is true. This is not...

Janine:        Oh, that's what — okay, TOFOG stands for something, [laughing] okay.

Keith:        TOFOG stands for, 30-odd Foot of Grunt, or The Ordinary Fear of God, depending on the week.

Janine:        Okay... that makes sense.

Jack:        Eugh, Jesus. Okay. So... The Nice Guys is a comedy action movie? Is that fair? It's a comedy thriller?

Keith:        Yeah. It is a funny action movie.

Janine:        Yeah, I would lean action more than thriller, because a lot of the things it did, where I think the movie would have crossed into thriller, it stepped back from, and I was grateful.

Jack:        Almost immediately, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Janine:        I, like, I appreciate when things — I had a very similar... this is a weird thing. I had a very similar feeling watching this movie for the first time as I did reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time, last year?

Keith:        No, I see that.

Janine:        Uh...

Jack:        This is, no, this is great. Please, continue.

Janine:        There are just a lot of moments where I was like, oh yeah, and then this shitty thing is going to happen. Her sister's going to die from getting sick in the rain or whatever.

Jack:        Right.

Janine:        And it's like, “no, she's fine,” they just, they just have like some awkward parlor conservations and then the story moves on. Like —

Jack:        Right.

Janine:        Oh, well, this horrible, the daughter, horrible things are going to — no, it's, she falls out of the car, it's okay. It's still bad, but, you know.

Jack:        Yeah. So...

Keith:        Mm-hm. Well, a lot of people die in this movie.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Yeah. I want to, I want to, I want to make sure that we don't get ahead of ourselves in terms of like, people are going to be listening to this and not know anything about The Nice Guys. And I feel that for the next hour or so, to make sense, we should talk a bit about what this movie is —

Keith:        Okay. So, start with the name. These two guys. There are two guys.

Jack:        They're — but they're not nice.

Keith:        Are they nice?

Janine:        Neither of them are particularly nice, no.

Keith:        They're not — neither of them are particularly nice.

Jack:        No, and that's kind of a central joke.

Janine:        They feign, they feign niceness, in a way.

Jack:        One better than the other.

Janine:         Yes.

Keith:        Yes. Well...

Jack:        Uh, the two guys are played by Ryan Gosling, uh, who plays a character called, uh, March?

Janine:        Holland March.

Keith:        Holland March.

Jack:         Holland March, which is an incredible name. Uh...

Janine:        Exceptionally good, I put stars next to it in my notes. I took [laughing] 7 pages of notes.

Jack:        Janine! Can

Keith:        Wow.

Janine:        And I put stars — [unintelligible] there, okay.

Jack:        I took like, I took like 10 bulllet points..

Janine:        They're double — okay, they're iPad notes, so they're like, very generously spaced and large, you know?

Jack:        Sure. Uh, he is a private investigator, who is —

Keith:        A PI, private dick.

Jack:        Yeah. His, he has a, he has a pre-teen daughter called... uh, Holly.

Keith:        Holly, yeah. Is she preteen? I thought she was teen?

Jack:        Teen?

Janine:        She drives, but it's very unclear if she should be.

Jack:        [laughing] She does — no, I don't think she should be driving.

Keith:        I do not think she should be driving.

Jack:        That's a great gag. I had forgotten about that.

Janine:        She looks, she looks on the younger end, for like —

Keith:        I mean, what, what's more illegal, letting your too-young daughter drive, or crashing your car because you're drunk?

Janine:        That's true. The fact he is always drunk, and she's very smart, maybe that's the read there, is that she's actually, she's supposed to be like, 13-ish —

Jack:        This act — the actress kills this part.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Oh yeah, she's great.

Janine:        What's her — uh, I have the iMDB page — I had the iMDB page on Bree, right? I don't know how to say her name? She's very good, though.

Jack:        So Holland March's, uh, uh, wife is dead. Uh, died in an explosion, in a gas explosion, which we kind of learn about later. Uh, but, but, uh, he's —

Janine:        Which he blames himself for, because he got hit in the head and lost his sense of smell.

Jack:        He has no sense of smell.

Janine:        This was weird to me, because she kept telling him, like, “hey, I smell a gas leak,” and he was just like, “okay,” because he couldn't smell himself. Like —

Jack:        I feel like this is just consistent with Holland, right?

Janine:        [unintelligible] I, yes, but it's hard to know how much of Holland is post-that, and how much is, he's just that.

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        Well, it's, it could be like, you know, maybe it was only a day or two of — sometimes you have a gas leak and it's like, ooh, got to get that checked out. Like, sometimes it's not bad enough where you're like, “I think the house is going to explode.”

Janine:        Uh, Holly said she mentioned it like, several times.

Keith:        Oh, okay.

Jack:        Uh...

Janine:        Anyway.

Jack:        I want to get back to the fact that March doesn't have a sense of smell, later, because I feel like it's an extremely good —

Keith:        Oh, I figured it out.

Jack:         Shane Black joke. Sorry, go on, Keith.

Keith:        Sorry, I, sorry Jack, I figured it out. Maybe he didn't know yet that he couldn't smell. Mmm.

Janine:        Oh, maybe...

Jack:        Oh, maybe he didn't know yet that he couldn't smell... are

Janine:        That's interesting.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        How long do you think it would take you?

Janine:        I feel like, I feel like, I feel like you would know the first time you sat down to food, because smell is so much of taste, you know?

Keith:        Yeah —

Jack:        You'd just be like, “something is fucked up with this food.” [chuckling]

Keith:        Maybe it was right after, maybe it was right after, or it's like, it's movies, you know.

Jack:        Okay. So —

Janine:        Yeah, whatever.

Jack:        So, uh, uh, March finds himself entangled with a character called Healy, Jackson Healy, who is a sort of older, more outwardly violent — he's kind of like a fixer, right? He's, he's, —

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        He's sent in to break heads, and, uh, that's not the saying, is it? To bash — what's the saying?

Janine:        Crash heads?

Keith:        Crack some skulls.

Jack:        [laughing] Okay. He's sent in to crack some skulls. And, uh, him and March kind of find themselves as a, as a, as an odd couple, uh, to try and find, uh, uh, a missing girl called Amelia. Uh, because they're being paid —

Janine:        Uh, I also —

Jack:        An enormous amount of money to do this.

Janine:        Yeah. I...

Keith:        Well, at first they're not really...

Janine:        Even that comes in later, yeah.

Keith:        Yeah. They do a lot of work without really being paid very much. And Jackson —

Janine:        Also —

Keith:        Who is... who seems less nice.

Jack:        Oh, go on, Janine.

Keith:        Oh, Janine, yeah?

Janine:        I, I just wanted to point out, like a thing that I feel like is kind of important in this setup is like, March has a gorgeous house and dresses super — like, pretty fucking nicely —

Jack:        Yeah.

Janine:        Like he has all of the things, and Healy is like, paunchy and filthy and lives in a hole, basically.

Jack:        Yeah. Both these characters —

Keith:        Lives in an apartment above a club.

Janine:        We see him really early on —

Jack:        Both these characters look amazing.

Janine:        Like when they, when he's, when we first sort of see Amelia onscreen, Healy is like, setting himself up as kind of a nice guy, but then we get this turn of him being like, “yeah, you're 7 dollars short.” And like, who the fuck cares about 7 dollars? But... it's like a big thing.

Jack:        He extremely does.

Janine:        Yeah, yeah.

Jack:        Yeah. The costumes — so, this movie is set in the 70s?

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        The 80s. The 70s.

Janine:        74? Or 76 or something?

Jack:        And it's extremely the 70s.

Janine:        I remember being surprised there was so little coke, for the 70s.

Jack:        Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if that was like a... a conscious decision?

Keith:        Yeah. Maybe —

Janine:        Like a ratings thing? I don't know.

Keith:        Well, it was R, right?

Jack:        Yeah...

Janine:        Yeah. They mention we'd, but —

Jack:        We — we can talk more about, like, that, as we get to the like, second act of the movie. Uh, this is a film, ultimately, about LA vice, and a sort of conspiracy happening —

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        In the porn scene in LA in the mid-70s? I'm trying to — is this a fair descriptor of what's going on?

Janine:        Yeah. Yes.

Keith:        Yeah. They don't give a year.

Janine:        Uh, like, right out of the gate, they, they do sort of launch in with that angle [unintelligible]

Jack:        Oh, jeez, yeah.

Janine:        Which, I remember being —

Jack:        I kind of balked.

Janine:        Really bothered about that first moment, in the same way that Yakuza Zero really bothered me, because all of the, uh, adult video ladies in Yakuza Zero didn't look like they were from the 80s, they looked really contemporary. And to me, I was really bothered by how contemporary Misty Mountains looked. She did not look like a 70s porn star.

Jack:        Right, right. Yeah. And it's weird, because, like, that whole — so it begins with this like, super stylized, uh, sort of like, exploitation style scene —

Janine:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        Where Misty Mountains, uh, porn star, crashes, fatally crashes her car —

Janine:        Which she was driving with only an open shirt on.

Jack:        Only an open shirt on. Uh, and it kind of lands in the backyard of this young boy, who goes out and finds Misty Mountains sort of like, dying, posed topless over the —

Janine:        And he finds her after, like, immediately after he had stolen a magazine from under his father's bed —

Jack:        Right.

Janine:        And stared at a topless picture of her. So we go from like —

Keith:        In the same pose, too.

Janine:        Her photographed boobs — in the same pose, to her, like — and I get it, staging-wise, but it's like, one of my problems with this movie is, there's a lot of violence, but the way the camera lingers on certain kinds of violence —

Jack:        Yeah.

Janine:        Is very transparent.

Jack:        Yeah, absolutely. Uh, it, it definitely has this feel of like, uh, “we're trying to do a clever thing, and we're trying to do a clever thing about porn in the 70s.” Uh, and like, yeah —

Janine:        Isn't this an interesting image that we're not going to interrogate.

Jack:        Right, absolutely, yeah. Or, we'll interrogate it insofar as, we're replicating a centerfold spread —

Janine:        Yes.

Jack:        And, and, and that's, and that's it.

Janine:        Yeah, that's fair, yeah.

Jack:        Uh, I don't say that to sort of like, suggest that there's more going on in this shot, like, there's clever stuff going on in the shot —

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        But I don't super think there is.

Janine:        It's hard to know how much credit to put where.

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        There's definitely, there's definitely like this genre of... period film, where they show a thing that's familiar and then they go, like, “isn't, now isn't that something?” Without saying —

Janine and Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Without saying like, what the something is.

Jack:        It's the Quentin Tarantino school, right?

Keith:        Yeah, yeah.

Janine:        Remember when it was like this? Wow.

Keith:        [laughing] Now, haven't you seen something like this before? And there's ways to do it, where you come up looking like Quentin Tarantino, and then there's ways to do it where it's like, it's like, a handful of times in a movie that is otherwise like, mostly pretty good about having a point.

Jack:        Sure. I — yeah. Uh...

Keith:        But, but then it stands out, like, it's, you know. It stands out a lot more when it's in a movie that mostly has a point, when there's a handful of shots of like, “now look at this familiar thing.”

Jack:        [sighs] Do you think this movie has a point?

Keith:        Yeah, I think this movie has a point.

Jack:        I think this movie has like four points, and it kind of goes —

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        It kind of goes wading between them, with varying levels of interest and success. Like, I don't necessarily get to the end of the movie knowing that, I don't get to the end of the movie feeling like, “wow, we got, we got to a point here,” so much as like, we moved through three or four fairly well-read Wikipedia entries.

Keith:        Sure. Well, there's like, there's like a very classic, like, specifically private detective story of like, a guy being dragged by the nose through a series of escalating, like, like, what have a gotten myself into? Like, that is —

Jack:        And that's kind of what this movie is, right?

Keith:        Right, yeah.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        It's a series of escalating nonsense that kind of —

Janine:        Maybe we should come back to that at the end, because I definitely have some thoughts about how, like, the way that this movie, like, proceeds and then wraps, it does give me like, Bluff City feelings, so that might be something we want to end on.

Jack:        Yeah, absolutely. Uh, yeah, there's like, you know, aside from you talking about this movie, Shane Black's like, plot and dialogue and pace is, I think about all the time when we're doing Bluff City, and it would be really fun to talk about, you know, the ways that that intersects —

Janine:        [chuckling] There are so many 6s that get rolled in this movie.

Keith:        Oh my god, yeah.

Jack:        There are so many 6s, and there are also so many, like, “oh, you mean 6 as in, hard fail.”

Keith:        Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Janine:        Yes. And then —

Jack:        Yeah, 100 percent.

Janine:        So close to success, you know... so, so, dashingly close.

Jack:        Also, there's a — there's at least one incredible 12.

Keith:        Yes. Yeah.

Janine:        Yes. Yeah.

Keith:        Or like a 9 —

Jack:        When he falls —

Keith:        A 9, that someone aids you on for a 10, you get a 10.

Jack:        [chuckling] Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh, yeah. Yeah.

Keith:        The money, you're talking about the money?

Jack:        I'm talking about the, the fall from the rooftop into the pool.

Janine:        The roof? Yeah, that's, I was thinking of the fall.

Keith:        Oh, okay. I was thinking about the — where they were — so, about, before, before they'd like, really figured out exactly what's happening to them —

Jack:        Before a big double-cross happens, towards the end of this movie.

Keith:        Before a big double-cross happens, yeah, they, they basically, they fuck up into realizing the truth. Uh...

Janine:        I feel like that's almost like, like a, like a 6, but there was like a, someone had like a plus-1 or a hold or something. Like...

Jack:        Right. My favorite, my favorite 6 is, there's a moment when they're kind of getting cornered by a villain who has double-crossed them, and Holly shows up and throws a full pot of coffee, uh, like in a —

Janine:        [chuckles]

Jack:        In a, [chuckling] in a kind of a heater —

Keith:        Oh, yep.

Jack:        Into the villain's face, you know, hoping to like, blind her or something. And the villain — it's just cold coffee, and the villain's just like, “oh, okay.”

Keith:        Why did you just throw cold coffee on me?

Jack:        [laughing] Why did you just throw cold coffee?

Keith:        Because I thought it was hot.

Jack:        But then she immediately, she immediately slips on the, on the coffee on the floor, and knocks herself out on the floor —

Keith:        [laughing]

Jack:        Which I feel is like a success.

Janine:        That's, that's totally the 9 with the aid roll that happens later, right?

Jack:        God, it's so good. It's such a great moment. Uh...

Keith:        This, this movie has a lot of like, the... like, you know, you, you — it's very difficult, and also probably inadvisable to try to make a movie that is a lot like real life.

Jack:        Mmm.

Keith:        And different movies, to different degrees, are like, let's play, let's play really close attention to how things actually work. And this is a movie that doesn't, I think, pay particularly close attention to how things work, because they will just like, they will have a character look like they're going to die and be totally fine, and then they'll have someone slip on the ground and be passed out for half an hour. Uh, depending on what the story needs.

Jack:        It reminds me a lot, yeah, it reminds me a lot of the way we tell stories, right? Where there is a degree of, of, uh, sort of narrative fiat that we will take, right? Just to be like, “no, they're knocked out.” It's, it's, it's the Hitman approach to being knocked out. They're just, they're done unless someone finds them or something.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Yeah, if you put them in a cabinet, no one will ever find them.

Jack:        It's functionally the same as death. Uh...

Janine:        It's storytelling in a kind of sense of... instead of trying to explain everything, just trying to find, like, the melody in it, and like, follow the melody.

Jack:        Yeah, yeah.

Janine:        Uh...

Jack:        And the melody of this movie, the, the cadence of this movie, is where I think, for me, at least, it works the best. Uh... the dialogue has this, just like, bizarre cadence to it. And kind of only lets up when it wants to do exposition, which it will then immediately undercut with a joke or with some sort of weird twist.

0:31:57.9        Uh, the fact that in this movie, almost without fail, every time someone fires a gun, it goes wrong, either they drop it, it hits something they don't intend — at one point, someone asks to be thrown a gun, and the person misthrows, and throws it clean through a window. Uh, and like, I feel that these kind of, these kind of moments in which the, the forward motion of the narrative is, is destabilized and is pushed onto some other track, is stuff that the movie does really well. Uh, but I don't know if you feel the same way.

Janine:        And then there's that moment where they like, they completely flip that, and the thing that goes wrong is the thing that leads to the gun being, you know, doing exactly what it's supposed to in the cleanest, brutally cleanest way possibly, and it is because they have done so much like, slippery hands fucking up the gun stuff, that moment is like, really, uh, brutal —

Jack:        Deeply unpleasant?

Janine:        Like, yeah, it's just like —

Jack:        Are you talking about Amelia's death?

Janine:        It hits you so much harder — yeah.

Jack:        Yeah, do you want to talk about what that is?

Janine:        Oh, I guess. It's [laughing] I've never done like a rewatch style thing. It's hard to know, like, when do we talk about what?

Jack:        Yeah. You're, you seem to be the one with the most notes.

Keith:        I think we can talk about anything, anywhere.

Jack:        So I'm happy to like —

Keith:        That's my —

Janine:        I just worry about, you know, you mentioned like, for people who have never seen this movie, how confusing is it?

Jack:        So, are your notes chronological, Janine?

Janine:        Kind of, but they're not super useful, in that way. Like, I have —

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        I just want to —

Keith:        I —

Janine:        Okay, so I have, you know, my first page of notes here, uh, includes things like, “dog, better be okay.”

Jack:        What? Is the dog okay in this movie?

Janine:        Riverdale — wow, Jughead grew up. Uh...

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        Love to bathe in my dirty boy cop suit. That's the first [unintelligible]

Jack:        Oh, he bathes in the dirty boy cop suit. Yeah, so, what is the first time? So the first time we see our hero, what is he doing, Janine?

Janine:        He's in a suit, but like, in a bathtub full of water? I don't fully understand —

Jack:        He's like, he, he skipped a —

Janine:        I don't fully understand what happened — right, he was passed out. I guess maybe his daughter put him there, in hindsight. Maybe she was like, “you fucking suck, you drunk. I'm going to put you in the tub so you can clean up.”

Jack:        Alternatively, he, he was super onboard with every aspect of taking a bath, except perhaps the second most important one. Most important one, water. Second most important one, [chuckling] take off your clothes before you get in the water. But it's a great introduction to a character, that we just see them [chuckling] fully clothed in a bathtub?

Janine:        And it's also, like, this intro was really confusing for me at first, because it is hopping from one gruff-voiced narrator to another gruff-voiced narrator. Uh, and you see them onscreen, so you can differentiate them, but it is a little like, it, it sets them up in such a way that is like... uh, I don't know what I want to say here. It feels like they are setting them up as equals, even while the rest of the movie tears that apart.

Jack:        Right, right.

Janine:        And kind of fucks that up in a lot of ways.

Jack:        And in this initial moment, we, we, we don't know that we are in March's house. Uh, do we.

Janine:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        It's, it's, it's, we don't get an establishing shot that is like, “this is where this dude lives.” So we just get this kind of like, bizarre mystery of, [chuckling] why is our hero fully clothed in a bathtub? And then he sort of stumbles out of the bathtub to receive a phone call? Does he? Is this when he gets the phone call?

Keith:        Answer his message, I think, from his daughter.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Oh, right, yeah. Uh, and that's when we, that's when we learn that this man is in an improbably fancy house. What's the description for why he's in the house?

Janine:        They're renting it.

Keith:        Uh, they are, he's renting it because they're renovating the, or they are quote/unquote renovating, the burned-down house.

Janine:        Yeah. Yeah.

Jack:        That, that exploded.

Janine:        That is currently just a field that the daughter sits in.

Jack:        Yeah, like walks around in and reads like, Shakespeare or something. Uh... which I don't, feels a little, it's a bit heavy-handed. Uh...

Janine:        You know, precociousness.

Jack:        We get that great shot, I love the shot of, there's a shot where you see, uh, Healy, Russell Crowe's character, driving to March's house, and you get this kind of moving shot of, of Holly seen on the other side of the fence, walking around and reading, and you don't know what we're reading, but it's just this like, great, weird, LA thing of like, you're just looking out of your car and seeing this girl walking around an abandoned lot reading a book.

Janine:        Yeah. I'm really glad that she is a... fully-attended-to character, in this.

Jack:        She is, she is very poorly-attended-to by her caretakers.

Keith:        I mean, attended-to by the script.

Jack:        [chuckles] But she is well —

Janine:        Well, no, I —

Keith:        [laughing]

Janine:        I mean she's like, she's like, very present in the story. She's not just like —

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        She's not just like —

Keith:        The daughter.

Janine:        She's not just like a character that is around and then does one convenient thing at one point.

Jack:        Right. Right. She is very, very openly and honestly, as far as the movie is concerned, the third detective in a film about three detectives.

Janine:        Yeah, she's the, she's the, the third protagonist here, for sure.

Jack:        Uh, and she does some really great stuff in this movie. Uh, she has —

Keith:        Yeah, she, she probably messes up the least out of everybody.

Jack:        Yeah. I mean, she makes some real bad calls. But also, her dad is, uh, Holland March.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, yeah. So, I'm looking at a, at a synopsis of the movie here, which is....

Janine:        I have a note here that just says, “Ryan Gosling cannot sell rumpy-pumpy.” He says that at one point, and —

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Oh, she was British or something.

Janine:        Yeah, but like, he says it like... I, it feels like he couldn't decide if he wanted to do it in an accent or not —

Keith:        [chuckling]

Janine:        And in the end it just ends up feeling like he was very uncomfortable saying it at all.

Jack:        Yeah. Who would be comfortable saying rumpy-pumpy? I'm not.

Janine:        No one, no one should. It's bad.

Jack:        No one should.

Keith:        I —

Janine:        It's yucky.

Jack:        Let's get rid of that word.

Keith:        Yeah, I feel, I feel more comfortable saying it than anything else.

Jack:        You're the only one of us who hasn't said it yet, Keith.

Keith:         Rumpy-pumpy.

Jack:        How do you — it sucks! Don't say it.

Janine:        You like, smooshed it together.

Keith:        Rumpypumpy.

Jack:        You said —

Keith:        Rumpy, pumpy.

Janine:        You're saying it like it's a, like a, like it's a ferret's name.

Keith:        Rumpy pumpy.

Jack:        You're — [laughing] you're saying it like —

Keith:        I'm selling rumpy pumpy.

Janine:        No!

Keith:        I'm the rumpy pumpy salesman.

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        That's terrible. [chuckling]

Keith:        It's very comfortable for me.

Janine:        I also have a note here that Ryan Gosling sounds like a dog when he's saying no, in the scene when, uh...

Jack:        Oh, where he gets his arm broken? [chuckling]

Janine:        Yeah, when Healy shows up because Healy has been informed that he's like, stalking Amelia, because Amelia hires him —

Jack:        Mmm.

Janine:        Whereas, Misty Mountains is the dead pornstar's, aunt, hires Holland, hires March.

Keith:        Right.

Janine:        But, so, Healy goes to March's house to be like, “fuck off, don't talk to my client anymore.” And then like, break —

Jack:        Which we see him do, earlier in the movie.

Janine:        Yeah, yeah.

Keith:        Yeah. Uh, so, I —

Jack:        Oh, sorry. Were you done, Janine?

Janine:        I was going to say, breaks his arm. And it's awkward, and it sounds like, Ryan Gosling sounds like a dog when he's saying no.

Keith:        Yep. Uh, and he squeals. He also squeals. Long squeal.

Janine:        Yeah. He sells that squeal.

Keith:        He really did sell the squeal.

Janine:        Can't sell rumpy-pumpy, but does sell that squeal.

Jack:        That whole scene has such a...

Keith:        Great scene.

Jack:        It has such a weird rhythm to it, that mostly works super well for me, which is, March — sorry, Healy shows up and says, “stop it, stop stalking my client.” And March says, “I'm not, I'm paid to look for her.” And they sort of have this like, vaguely conciliatory exchange. And then, uh, uh, Healy just says, “okay, now I'm going to break your arm.”

Keith:        Yeah. Well, March pulls a gun on him —

Jack:        [chuckling] And he knocks it away.

Keith:        He knocks it away, and then tries to grab it two more times.

Jack:        Uh, yeah.

Janine:        And then he goes [laughing] outside, and the daughter is there —

Jack:        [laughing] Oh yeah.

Janine:        And she's like, “are you a friend of my dad's?” And he's like, “yeah, I'm going to drink this YooHoo that you, that you handed me. Bye.” [laughing]

Jack:        Ugh, which sets up an incredible joke, where, where we see, uh, so he goes home, March goes —

Keith:        He hadn't had a YooHoo in 30 years, he's very excited to have one.

Jack:        Sorry, Healy goes home — what is a YooHoo? Is it like a soda?

Keith:        It's a chocolate drink — no, it's a —

Jack:        It's a chocolate drink?

Janine:        Yeah, it's, it's like chocolate water, right?

Keith:        It is fake chocolate milk.

Janine:        It's not chocolate milk, it's like —

Keith:        It's a non-dairy chocolate milk, yeah.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Oh, okay. Is it very... thin?

Keith:        Is it not dairy? It's at least dairy that you don't have to refrigerate, which is concerning.

Janine:        If it was, if it was chocolate, they would tell you. They would say — [unintelligible]

Keith:        I believe it says on it, chocolate drink.

Jack:        Oh, do they say like, “chocolate drink?” [laughing]

Keith:        Yeah, it says YooHoo, chocolate drink in glass bottle. Chocolate beverage developed in New Jersey.

Jack:        Ugh... [laughing]

Keith:        By —

Janine:        That makes me doubt it's even in a real glass bottle.

Jack:         We — Yoohoo: we make the deals exclusive.

Keith:        It's manufactured by... Keurig Dr.Pepper. That's one I didn't know. I didn't know that —

Jack:        Wait, Keurig as in the coffee company?

Keith:        I believe so. Keurig Dr.Pepper Is one company.

Jack:        That's fucked up. Okay, so we get this great joke where, uh, Healy, uh, leaves, sipping a bottle of YooHoo that was given to him by the daughter of the man whose arm he just broke, uh, and then he arrives back at his home carrying a full crate of YooHoo. Which I guess he stopped off and was like —

Janine:        [chuckling]

Jack:        “Time to buy this thing that I love so much.”

Keith:        Time to buy — it looked like about 40 YooHoos.

Jack:        He arrives at his house, which is above a club, he goes upstairs to the club, and is immediately attacked by two men —

Janine:        Keith David. Keith David is there.

Jack:        And drops the — [chuckling] by Keith David.

Keith:        Always great to see Keith David.

Janine:        And the one with bad hair from Big Bang Theory, I don't know if this is actually him, but it looks like him.

Jack:        Both these guys are fantastic. In the, in the script, uh, they are called Older Guy and Blueface, for reasons that we are, that we are about to talk about.

Janine:        Blueface.

Jack:        Anyway, uh, uh, Healy drops the crate of YooHoo and just shatters it immediately. It's onscreen for about 4 seconds. And we just begin this very energetic fight sequence, in his house, which we are now seeing for the first time. Uh, here's what he likes in his house. He likes his fish, uh, and he doesn't like the fact that his TV and his lights all seem to be hooked up to one switch.

Janine:        Although that helps him out, so...

Keith:        Uh, it does help him out. Could you, I mean, and the — the fight is because, they're, they're searching through his apartment, and they find a bag, and they say, “what's in this bag?” And he says, “don't open that bag,” and they open it —

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:        And Blueface —

Janine:        He literally says like, I think he, doesn't he say like, “don't open that bag, it's like dye?” Doesn't he like allude to the fact that —

Keith:        I think he said that he, it's his friend's — that's my friend's bag.

Janine:        It's dye packs? Okay, okay, yeah.

Jack:        Is the implication here that he just stole a lot of money?

Janine:        I don't know.

Keith:        I... don't know. He doesn't seem like a bank robber.

Jack:        No. But he might have acquired a sealed pack.

0:43:07.9        Anyway, so this man with bad hair opens the bag, uh, in a, in a side room, and blue ink hits the inside of the door. You know, like, when you want to show blood spatter but you don't want to show the character getting killed? [chuckles] In this, they show a character getting blue paint, indelible blue paint put on his face.

Keith:         Yeah.

Jack:        And he comes out furious, and sort of begins this fight sequence.

Keith:        And this guy's, this guy's there, like, he's like —

Janine:        Well he starts, well he starts like, torturing his fish, right? Like he starts being like, “you're going to eat these fish.” I wrote, “Fish John Wick,” in my notes. Because [unintelligible] —

Jack:        Yeah, he's like, you're going to —

Janine:        The thing that [chuckling] starts this fight is, he's like, “I'm going to make you eat your fish.” And he's like, “fuck you.”

Jack:        Yeah, I like this, I wrote down in my notes here that, that this, uh, I wrote, “small, petty acts of violence, fish, et cetera.” And this makes me think a lot about, uh, Faro.

Janine:        [laughing]

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        And, and, and, uh, and kind of to a lesser extent, Gig, in that I feel like Gig is a slightly less loose cannon than Faro. But a thing that I love, a dynamic that I always find really funny with Faro is, uh, when he will propose an unreasonable small act of violence in a situation, and all the characters around him are like, “whoa, no, whoa, hang on!” There was like, we did this yesterday, and I don't want to talk specifically, because I don't know the order these things are released, but with the character that you and I interrogated yesterday, Keith?

Keith:        Mm-hm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jack:        Uh, feels very much like this, eat this, eat the fish moment, and everybody's like, “why are you making me eat the fish? This doesn't seem like it's going to gain anything.” [chuckling]

Keith:        [laughing] Wait, hold on. But, but there's — [chuckling] hold on. This, this guy is clearly unhinged. Uh...

Jack:        I mean, I also want to talk about this, right? I want to talk about the, the way this villain is depicted, uh, as a sort of quote/unquote like, “mad villain.”

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        He, he does want him to eat the — it's hard to know, in this moment, whether or not he's just really upset at having his face covered blue, uh, and, and he's sort of playing at the tough guy act.

Keith:        Well, well, so the eat the fish was, was a —

Jack:        Was pre-blueface?

Keith:        No, no, it was post-blueface. So the order of this, so —

Jack:        [laughing] The order of the blueface fight.

Keith:        So this guy is furious that he has this dye pack in the face, and Healy's like, “I tried to warn you, I said don't open the bag.” And he says, “don't open the bag? Like, fuck you.” And he takes the fish, and he throws one fish at his head, and he's like, like, “you've made an enemy, I'm going to make you eat my gun.” And then he pulls out another fish and is like, “oh, you're going to eat something, you're going to eat your fish.” So it was, it was like a response to, “I'm going to make you eat your gun.”

Janine:        Mmm. Sure. So it was justified. Right.

Keith:        Justified. I don't think it's justified, I'm just saying —

Jack:        Wait, hang on, does Healy say, “I'm going to —“

Keith:        He didn't make up eating —

Jack:        [chuckling] “Make you eat my gun?”

Keith:        He's going to make him eat his own gun. Like he's going to put the gun in his mouth and shoot, shoot the gun.

Jack:        He's going to —

Janine:        Uh... yeah.

Jack:        That, that feels both gross and also a kind of clunky threat, honestly. Eat your own fish is at least clearer and more, more, uh, menacing.

Janine:        I mean, like —

Keith:        All I wanted to point out was that the eating part came from Healy, not from blueface.

Janine:        My, my like read on blueface actually wasn't at all that he was like, you know, I don't, I don't like the word unhinged, but you know what I mean, of just like — I, my read on him, he's like, violent in a way that is, obviously messed up and bad, but also, I think like, even before the halfway point of the movie to me, that read as like, fear, more than him being like —

Jack:        Yeah.

Janine:        A sociopath or anything, like, there, there is a sociopath in this movie, it is not blueface, at all.

Jack:        Oh, no — oh, oh, it's the one who shows up later?

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        Yeah, John Boy.

Jack:        Yeah. Which is another great name.

Keith:        Uh, I don't know, it definitely seemed like he was there and excited to be violent.

Janine:        I thought it was Matthew Good, and it was not Matthew Good.

Jack:        Sorry, what was that, Janine?

Janine:        I was going to say, I thought John Boy was Matthew Good, and it is not Matthew Good, and that's fine.

Jack:        Is it the guy from Firefly?

Janine:        I don't fucking know, I didn't watch Firefly. I looked at his iMDB, and recognized fucking nothing from it.

Jack:        [sighs] Firefly...

Janine:        So...

Jack:        So, uh, is it Sean Maher?

Janine:        It's Matt Bohmer. He was in, uh, Viper Club.

Jack:        Holy Shit, Viper Club. [chuckling]

Janine:        And duplicate, and, uh, and, uh... the Magnificent Seven, which people saw for sure, somewhere. He was in American Horror Story, after I stopped watching it. Uh... [chuckles] A New York Winter's Tale —

Jack:        He's in Magic Mike.

Janine:        Which is probably not Shakespeare, but could be. He was Superman, in Superman unbound.

Jack:        Oh, he looks like a Superman.

Janine:        He does. He looks like... he looks like a Henry Caville understudy.

Jack:        So, one of my favorite things about the Cohen Brothers, who did not make this movie, is that the Cohen Brothers casting team are extremely good at getting people who look amazing, whether or not that means traditionally attractive. Cohen Brothers characters onscreen, you're like, “holy lord, that is a cool-looking person.” And I feel like this movie does a really good job in its costume design and in its casting, of putting people onscreen who just look, look really cool, or look like complete weirdos, and I think that John Boy and Blueface are — and the kind of pair of, of March and Healy, are both these like, very distinctive looking characters, uh, that this movie does super well. Which is good, because there's fucking tons of characters in this movie. [chuckling] what's next on your notes? Janine?

Janine:        Uh... the next thing on my notes is, quote, “I'm a detective and we have a code — this is my favorite Art Martinez-Tebbel character.”

Keith:        [chuckling]

Jack:        [chuckling] What's he saying this in response to?

Janine:        Uh... I think he's saying this in response to... is this before or after the birthday party? Uh...

Keith:        It was, I remember the line, and I remember feeling like it was, uh, stupid. Not like, written stupid, but he was being, like, an idiot.

Janine:        Well he's being, he's being a hypocrite, he's lying. I mean, the thing he's, he's saying is like, he called, I think what this is is, he's saying that he, uh, he quit the job that the aunt had given him because his [unintelligible] was, had came —

Keith:        Oh yeah.

Janine:        Because Healy came and broke his arm. And then Healy was like, “hey, actually, I want you to look into this with me, here's some money. Why don't you call that lady back —“

Keith:        Right.

Janine:        “And also get money from her, then you get to double dip.” Or whatever. And... and he was like, “We have a code, and I'm a detective.” And we find out later that that's complete shit. He doesn't, he's actually terrible about this stuff, in a way that Healy is uncomfortable with.

Keith:        Yeah, and I, I think the implication was that he had already taken her money again. I — I'm pretty sure that he had already —

Janine:        Yeah, well he had like, he had taken the job, and then he had done the thing that we find out he does, where he just like, kills time for a couple days and says, “I need some more money to keep looking,” and he'd done that. And then after that, had canceled it, because of Healy.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        So he's already kind of taken her for more than he should have.

Jack:        This scene is one of my favorite scenes that we do in Bluff City, which is, and kind of broadly elsewhere in the show, which is, two characters attempt to have a serious discussion about something, that is derailed by a third character and their own stupidity. Uh, Holly shows up in this scene. This scene, this conversation takes place at a bowling alley, where Holly is having — is it Holly's birthday party, or a friend's birthday party?

Keith:        It's Holly's birthday party, yeah.

Janine:        I think it's her birthday party, yeah. Because otherwise —

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        I don't think that, that he would be there.

Keith:        The opening scene, uh, —

Janine:        As the parent.

Keith:        The opening scene with March, when he answers the message, like the first thing was like, “remember it's my birthday,” so...

Jack:        Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Janine:        Right, right, right.

Jack:        That's true. And Holly shows up midway through this kind of like, detective discussion, and as soon as she finds out that Healy kind of hurts people for money —

Keith:        Hurts people for money.

Jack:        Is like, “can you attack my friend? She sucks.” [chuckling]

Janine:        My friend Janet, who's like, Janet who you see in the previous scene, uh, because March, March, I think he says like, Jesus Christ at some point in response to something, and she's like, very, very offended that he took the lord's name in vain —

Jack:        [chuckling] Janet, yeah.

Janine:        And like, and like shouts at him, and that's Janet, we learn. Because he's like, “shut up, Janet.”

Jack:        Shut up, Janet! [chuckling]

Janine:        And then immediately in the next scene, what if we hire this old man to beat up Janet, because apparently she sucks that bad.

Jack:        She apparent really sucks. Uh...

Janine:        Don't invite her to your birth — to your bowling birthday party then, jeez.

Keith:        Yeah, if you, if you find someone so annoying that you want to pay an old man to beat her up, then she's not your friend.

Janine:        Don't give her cake.

Jack:        This is also the first introduction of Holly's, I guess Holly's friend Jessica, who, who we meet later in the movie.

Janine:        Mm-hm.

Keith:        Oh yeah, she throws the bowling ball backwards, right?

Jack:        [chuckling] Is that Jessica that throws the bowling ball backwards?

Keith:        I'm pretty sure that's Jessica that throws the bowling ball backwards.

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        Yeah, that's consistent, I feel, with Jessica's role in the latter half of the movie.

Janine:        That's like a, that's like a, that is almost like a Chekhov's bowling ball situation, in terms of really like, oh, she's, she's not on it the way Holly is.

Jack:        No, [chuckling] she's not super... but she's nice enough. She seems nice. [laughing]

Janine:        Yeah, she's fine.

Jack:        Uh, she's no Janet. Uh... so, after that, uh, so they decide that we're going to, we're going to work together. And they kind of get a tip off that Amelia was part of a protest group, or like led a protest group?

Janine:        She, she like founded a protest group called help for the birds or something, about how the birds can't breathe.

Keith:        Yeah, it was, it's an anti-pollution protest group, protesting cars —

Jack:        So this is something, like a background detail that I really liked about this movie, is that current-day Los Angeles is not, doesn't have very good air. In fact, has famously very bad air. But we get a lot of establishing shots in this movie that's like, “yo, it was so much worse in the 70s.” There are these great shots of LA just like, choking on fog. Uh, smog. Uh...

Keith:        Yeah, there's a, at some point there's an announcer who's like, you know, “smog level 2, don't do any unnecessary exercise before 6PM.”

0:53:39.4        

Jack:        Which they still say now during fire season. [chuckling] But not constantly.

Janine:        Yeah, I was going to say, this is still, this is still relevant in other ways.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Yeah. Uh, there was a huge rainstorm here today, just a massive, biggest rainstorm I've seen in, in LA. It's kind of cleared up a bit now, but it was disappointingly rainy earlier. So, they arrive at this protest, uh, where there are like 30 or 40 young people, uh, lying wearing gas masks on the steps of, I guess some local government building?

Janine:        Probably. Or like a courthouse probably, because of the rest of the stuff that's going on?

Jack:        Yeah. And Healy and March begin a truly Bluff City detective technique, which is stand at the top of the steps and say, “Amelia! Where are you?” [laughing] And no one says anything for a really long time.

Keith:        And they ask like 4 or 5 times.

Janine:        Until, another, another like — another extremely Bluff City character does eventually say something, Chet volunteers —

Jack:        Chet! Chet! From Bluff City!

Janine:        Fucking, helps them out, yeah. Had

Jack:        [chuckling] Chet is, could you describe Chet's look for us?

Janine:        Chet is like the dirty boy that Cher Horowitz doesn't want her friend to date in Clueless, but like, a little bit cleaned-up? A little bit not that bad?

Jack:        [laughing] But still not that good.

Janine:        He's, he's 70s dirty, not 90s dirty.

Jack:        Sure. Uh...

Janine:        Uh, and he's also, what's the word he uses? It's not projectionist, it's like, projectionalist.

Jack:        Yeah, he gets it wrong in some [laughing] in some way, doesn't he?

Janine:        I have in my notes, “ Chet is trying, let him live.” Uh...

Keith:        [chuckling]

Jack:        Chet is trying so hard. Uh...

Janine:        But he takes them to his friend's house, who is Amelia's boyfriend, and his friend —

Jack:        And the house —

Janine:        The house is burned, it's extremely burned from a couple days ago.

Jack:        But still smoking.

Janine:        Yeah, still a little steamy.

Jack:        Still a little steamy. Uh... just the house is complete destroyed.

Janine:        It was the guy, who made films —

Keith:        Uh, it's, it's frames, yeah.

Janine:        Yeah, it's all, it's all like, just black and ashy, you know. Frames and stuff.

Jack:        The guy made quote/unquote, “experimental films.”

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, yeah. And then Chet's basically just like, “well, I took you here, peace.” And departs. And leaves. Whereupon, the two detectives are met by a boy who —

Keith:        Oh, Chet's still there. Chet offers —

Janine:        Who loves slurs —

Keith:        Chet offers, Chet offers that kid —

Janine:        Like a slur-loving child.

Keith:        Chet offers that kid 20 dollars of —

Jack:        Yeah, this —

Keith:        Uh, March's money.

Jack:        [chuckling] Oh, of, of March's money, right. So we get this kid who, who, who loves slurs, and swearing. Uh...

Janine:        And also, I have on my note here, in my notes here, uh, that he is the reincarnated soul of Tobey Maguire. He is like a —

Jack:        Oh, is he?

Janine:        He's like a, he, he's like a very small little Tobey Maguire —

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        Who really wants to show someone his dick.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        He, he really does. Uh...

Keith:        They decline and then he offers —

Jack:        This kid means —

Keith:        I couldn't tell if he offered to give them or to take 20 dollars, for showing his dick.

Jack:        [chuckling] This kid means business —

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        And he shouldn't, in any capacity.

Janine:        I think he was, I think he was offering to take 20 dollars. Because I think the way, the way that the bit goes is that Chet's like, “hey, kid, if you saw some shit, they'll give you 20 dollars,” and then —

Jack:        [chuckling] Oh, because like, because —

Janine:        The kid's like, “right, I saw a guy named Sid Hatrack.” [laughing] Or something like that. Something like that.

Jack:        It's so good. It's so good.

Keith:        Yeah, Sid Hatrack.

Jack:        The kid makes this like — it is Hatrack.

Janine:        And he's like — yeah.

Jack:        This completely made-up name.

Janine:        Uh, and then he, then after that is the like, “I'll show you my dick for 20 dollars,” and then the end of that encounter is, “technically we already gave you 20 dollars.” And the kid's like, “oh,” but then it —

Jack:        And just like, cycles off. Cycles off.

Janine:        I think, I think that's [chuckling] supposed to be there. I think that's the arc.

Jack:        We get some fantastic shot/reverse shot of this kid talking, and the detectives and Chet just being like, utterly bemused and repulsed by what's going on. Uh...

Janine:        Kids these days.

Jack:        Kids these days. We get really good —

Keith:        Yeah, you get a little bit of March being nervous for his daughter.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Yeah. We get like, uh, Russell Crowe and, and I think this fits with what you were talking about about the schlubs earlier, playing schlubs, is that Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling do some incredible faces of bemusement and confusion during this movie. Uh, they're frequently, they don't know what's going on, and, and we see that.

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        Uh, so they leave, sort of being like, “well, this was a fucking bust, nothing, nothing good happened here.” And as they leave, they find a billboard for a porn movie, uh, which, did they, did they exist in LA in the 70s? Were people putting porn on billboards?

Keith:        Sure. Well, it wasn't a graphic billboard.

Jack:        True.

Keith:        For a, for a pornographic Pinocchio spoof.

Jack:        Sure.

Keith:        Who we see later on, we see someone dressed up as that character.

Janine:        And just like delivering the easiest joke ever —

Jack:        Oh, we do.

Janine:        He says, “it isn't my nose that grows,” or something like that.

Jack:        The easiest possible —

Janine:        It's just like, okay.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Yeah. Yeah. And he delivers it with about the same energy that you did, [chuckling] I feel..

Janine:        [chuckling] Yes.

Keith:        Yeah. It was very much like a — we see this guy, and he happens to have a line. It wasn't like —

Jack:        Yeah, totally.

Keith:        It was not like, focused in on. Probably because they couldn't think of a better thing for him to say.

Jack:        So they're like — come on, no, first idea, worst idea here, Shane. Although I suppose, I suppose there's a level of quality you expect from Pinocchio porn parody —

Keith:        Yes.

Janine:        Yeah. Also, also —

Jack:        And I would be disappointed if we didn't see it. [chuckling]

Janine:        Also, I feel like every exhausting porn stereotype ever has pretty much come from what was produced in the 70s. So —

Jack:        Right, right.

Janine:        So it is like super at-home in that sense.

Jack:        We, we even get the like, “I'm here to fix the thing,” right?

Janine:        Right.

Jack:        Don't we at one point? Like, “I'm here to fix your television” or something?

Keith:        I don't remember, I don't remember that.

Jack:        I'm trying to remember, because it's not the finale. I might be thinking of the Big Lebowski, [laughing] another film set in Los Angeles, with a kind of slightly similar turn. Uh...

Keith:        One of the two films that [unintelligible]

Jack:        Yeah, one of the two films [laughing] set in Los Angeles. All the others are actually set in Vancouver. So, March and Healy are like, “Sid...” this, this, this porno is produced by Sid Shaddock, who is a local kind of magnate, I guess.

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        And they're like, “holy shit.” And then they find, I guess, that he's throwing a party that night?

Keith:        Yeah, this leads to the start of, uh, I think the best joke in the, in the — it's not a, it's not a movie filled with jokes, even though it's very funny. Uh, but, you can always tell when a callback joke is really good when I pause the movie to tell Isaac about it after the first instance, and then it came back like two other times. And I was like, “oh, that was great the first time, and I'm so glad that it came back,” was — they go to this party, and it's the grammar lesson. Do you guys remember the grammar lesson?

1:01:03.9        

Jack:        Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, we've, we've lost Janine, so we should just hold off until Janine comes back.

Keith:        Oh, okay.

Jack:        Janine's computer has bluescreened.

Keith:        Oh, okay. [typing noises]

Jack:        Uh...

Keith:        Do we have, did we have a backup of this going?

Jack:        No.

Keith:        No. Audacity should save it.

Jack:        Audacity should save it.

Keith:        [laughing] I give, I give them treats to play, they, uh, my cats like to chase treats. So I'll throw them down the hall and they'll —

Janine:        [chuckles]

Keith:        Bolt after them. You should try these with your cats. Yeah, I had never done it with Oscar, until Isaac did it with cricket. And I was like, “I wonder if Oscar would like this?” And I did it, and he's like a nut for it. He loves to chase —

Janine:        [laughing]

Keith:        Treats down the hall.

Janine:        Annie will chase string down the hall, so I don't need to do that too much. She, uh, she plays a good game of fetch. Uh...

Keith:        Oh, I do that too, yeah. I'll do string, or, uh, —

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        There's these, there's like these, there's those cat toys that are everywhere, where it's like a fishing pole with the toy tied at the end —

Janine:        Oh yeah, yeah.

Keith:        Of it. But Oscar only likes a very specific kind, which is a kind where there's a feather as a toy, or like a butterfly with a feather, or something with a feather. Uh, it's butterflies a lot of the times, with feathers, I don't know why. And the string has to be elastic, it can't be, uh, like rope. It has to be stretchy.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        And that's his favorite kind of toy.

Janine:        [chuckles] uh...

Keith:        And he won't, he won't play with it, if it doesn't have a feather, or if, uh, I think if one of those two things isn't there, he's not interested.

Janine:        I kept one of those finishing rod toys —

Keith:         This is a [unintelligible]

Janine:        In a dresser drawer in my office, and I only kept it there for like a month, and this was like, a year ago.

Keith:        Uh-huh.

Janine:        And to this day, Annie will still stand on her hind legs and paw at that drawer, like, “can you bring it out?” And then I'll like, open the drawer and let her get in there, and like, it's not in there. It hasn't been in there for a year. But she still has this habit of just like, sometimes she'll even just lay down under the dresser, like sort of half-hugging the dresser on the floor and then like, staring at me like I'm doing some crime to her by not opening the drawer and pulling the toy out.

Keith:        [laughing]

Janine:        And it's fucked-up because the toy, the reason it's not in the drawer, it's just out in the open now. She could just walk over and get it any time she fucking wants. [chuckling] It's on the ground.

Keith:        Cats are so judgmental, even, and even when it's their fault, they're like, really uppity about it. Cats are jerks.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        They... my cat is a seat-stealer, and so any time I get off of any seat and return to it, there's my cat, lying down, already. And it's like, “it's been 2 minutes, how did you even know that there was a seat open? You were in the other room.”

Janine:        Perfect.

Keith:        And then I'll move him, and then he'll just like, sit, like a, like a gargoyle, hunched over, or like a bird of prey —

Janine:        [laughing]

Keith:        A lot of times he looks like a hawk, like he just like, has like a look like, a real predator, a gnarly predator.

Janine:        That's so good.

Keith:        I guess he is a real predator, he's a cat, but, what a — yeah.

Janine:        We should do another clap, now that I'm back.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        I'm recording again and everything.

Jack:        I'm recording again.

Keith:        I've got time.is here.

Jack:        Yeah. Should we do, uh, 25?

Keith:        30?

Janine:        It is quarter after, so... [claps]

Keith:        That's quarter after, one before.

Jack:        Psh.

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        Okay.

Janine:        Three-quarters to. Okay. So, we were at... right?

Jack:        So they're on their way, they've just arrived at Sid Shaddock's party, which is just like —

Janine:        Is it before — hang on, is it before or after Holly is like, “you know, my dad is friends with a cop,” to, to Healy?

Keith:        This is after that.

Janine:        Okay. I — [laughing] that, I, I really love that scene, for reasons just like, it just had such, it had an energy like the unspoken line was Healy turning to that kid and being like, “I'm going to marry your dad, kid.” Because she's just like —

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        She's like, “my dad is friends with a cop, and he knows, he knows about us, and they like each other a lot.” And, like — [chuckling]

Jack:        God, it's so good.

Janine:        And then it, and then it just trails off, and it just, it was, it was very funny. Anyway, just —

Jack:        Holly has, Holly, a couple times in the movie has — all three, all three of the detectives have this register that they slip into when they want to be tough, or they want to seem tough. Uh, Healy probably does it best. Uh, Holland can't do it super well. And Holly's version of this is just, she's very intense and very sincere.

Janine:        [chuckling] Mm-hm.

Jack:        And she wants to make it clear to this man who, she knows broke her dad's arm, that she's not going to take any shit from him.

Janine:        [chuckles]

Jack:        Uh, and we see her in this mode a couple of other times in the movie, and it's always the best. Uh, so yeah.

Janine:        She also wants to make it very clear that she is totally okay to hang out in a party that is full of quote/unquote, “whores.”

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        And stuff.

Janine:        She's totally here for it. Whores, don't say, “and stuff.” That's just a good joke. It's a good joke that they keep coming back to.

Keith:        It is a really good joke.

Janine:        I liked it, it was funny.

Keith:        This was, this is when you were drop, this is when you dropped out, but that joke comes back two other times, and I could tell it was a good running joke because I, I paused it, I paused it to go tell the joke to my boyfriend after the first one.

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        [wheezes]

Keith:        And then it came back, and each time it came back, I was like, that, they really deserve to do this again.

Jack:        Yeah, yeah. I... there is a conversation to be had about the way this film depicts sex work? Uh...

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        And the way this film depicts sex workers. Which I think it approaches with the same kind of camera as it does that opening scene with Misty Mountains in the car. It's, it's, how did you describe it earlier, Keith? Where it's as though it points at something and says, “wow, that, that sure is a thing?”

Keith:        Uh, yeah, “isn't this, look, isn't this how it, it, how it was?” Without having a real point —

Jack:        Yeah, in that it's very —

Keith:        Like it's showing you, it's gesturing at, it's gesturing at, like criticism, but it's actually like pastiche, is really what it is.

Janine:        Also, when Holly is like, “this party is full of whores,” she's mostly just talking about like, a bunch of women? Like it's —

Jack:        Right, yes, she's seen like three women enter the —

Keith:        She sees women dressed for a party.

Janine:        It's not like, it's not like, they're, there are, there are topless women at this party, but they are not in this scene, as far as I saw.

Keith:        Yeah, they're in the fish tank.

Janine:        Yeah. They're like, doing mermaid stuff, which, that could be artistic at any other party. Like, whatever. Uh...

Jack:        Yeah.

Janine:        And it's, it's artistic at that party, frankly.

Jack:        It's a, it's a — cool mermaids.

Janine:        But, it's, it's just like a weird, it's, it's one of those things that, a lot of — this movie doesn't usually have this problem, but that moment is this moment of just like, this was written, but not necessarily designed, that moment of like, her saying that, is like, they maybe, when this was written, had a different idea of what this party would look like at the door —

Jack:        Sure.

Janine:        Versus deeper in.

Jack:        Sure.

Keith:        Yeah, totally, yeah, I agree with that.

Jack:        So we should say that this party is a kind of truly vast scale bacchanalia organized by, uh, Sid Shaddock, that —

Keith:        It's like a mansion house party, to, to like celebrate, to celebrate the porn industry?

Jack:        The, the, the, the, or the filming of, the or the wrap of —

Janine:        Kind of the release of that Pinocchio thing, because Pinocchio is there —

Keith:        Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jack:        Is there.

Janine:        And so is the horse, and there's also like a tree man, and like —

Jack:        Uh, so, and Holly shows up to this party as well.

Keith:         Poor tree man.

Jack:        Uh, she is in trunk — poor tree man. She is in the trunk —

Keith:         Rip tree man.

Jack:        Of, uh, of the car.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        And, and kind of gets out and is like, “I'm coming with you.” And neither of the detectives can really offer a good rebuke to this? Other than, don't. I'm trying —

Keith:        Yeah, well, the good —

Janine:        Also, her dad is like, “actually, what if you just stay in the trunk and I give this car to a stranger?” [chuckling]

Keith:         Yeah. And the valet refused to take it, and that's why he had to think of something else to do, because the valet was like, “I can't take your car like that.”

Janine:        Get a — call a fucking cab, I don't know.

Jack:        And all three — yeah, which they then try and do, right?

Janine:        Do they?

Jack:        Uh, I think he pitches calling a cab —

Keith:        She gets away from, yeah.

Jack:        Yeah.

Janine:        Oh, right right right, they put her in the cab —

Keith:        No, they, she puts her into the cab —

Janine:        And then she gets out anyways, right?

Keith:        Un, unexplained, shows back up. Yeah, probably just made the guy pull over.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        And so then we, we go into one of my favorite sort of, uh, setups for an investigation scene, which is a large, complicated space that all three characters are doing desert things in.

Janine:        [chuckling]

Jack:        And don't —

Keith:        Yes, and the three different things are, Holly is trying to get information from people, uh, uh, what's the, what's — Healy is doing actual investigation work —

Jack:        Like, like legit detective work, right?

Keith:        And, uh, March, March is getting drunk.

Jack:        Yes. Uh...

Janine:        Maybe also getting drugged? I don't know. He got drunk to a degree at such a speed that it almost —

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        Felt like it was implied that like, he asked a question and someone noticed and was like, and the bartender was like, “I'm going to drug this guy.”

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        He drank a glass of whiskey.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        The bartender was like, “stop talking to that girl, here's a glass of whiskey.”

Jack:        Yeah.

Janine:        And also they like, kind of lovingly focused on the drink that was being poured, but like the pouring had started before he was looking at it? So like, I don't know, I don't know if there's any implication there or not.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        And, and — [sighs]

Keith:        The implication might be that he was already drunk before he showed up to the party.

Janine:        True. Yeah.

Jack:        Yeah. And there's a kind of... there's a kind of sort of like, ooh-ah salaciousness about a lot of this scene, where we see our detectives stumbling through a party by and for porn stars in a way — and, and sort of pulling these faces of like, “oh, a weird thing, a weird porn thing is happening.”

Janine:        Chasing mermaids in the tank.

Jack:        Chasing mermaids in the tank, and there's that moment where the like —

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        The contortionist, he puts a glass down on a contortionist, and it, it's very much like this, like, “wasn't porn in the 70s, you know?” Uh, I'm trailing off here —

Keith:        Wasn't it this?

Jack:        Because I feel like Shane Black is also trailing off. Uh...

Keith:        Right, yeah, yeah.

Janine:        Yeah. Yeah.

Jack:        I feel like, I feel like on the one hand he wants, on the one hand he wants it to feel like this kind of intersection between seediness and glamourousness, and on the other hand he wants to have this kind of like, “everyone here is just doing their job.” Because we get this, like, Holly is like, makes fast friends with some, with some ladies. Uh... but he doesn't commit hard enough to either of them, that it just sort of feels like he's kind of... he has an idea in his head of what he wants a porn star party in the 70s to be. Uh...

Janine:        Yeah, and his idea is E3 in 1998.

Jack:        And as far as he's — his idea is [laughing] E3 in 1998.

1:12:06.9        And we get some really good lines out of this. Uh, we get a great line where, uh, [chuckling] there's, there's a couple of moments I really like. I really like, eventually, Healy confronting March about why he's wet. Uh, and he says that he had to [chuckling] interrogate the mermaids. Uh...

Janine:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        Which is just very much like, that's March's detective work through and through. He says, “I had to interrogate the mermaids.” Yeah, you know? Yeah. Uh... and I think, to sort of move towards how this scene begins to, kind of come to a climax, is [sighs] [chuckling] March, March engages in a conversation with a woman that involves him doing some kind of like, ridiculous feat of strength, right? Doesn't he? It's like, I can jump over this —

Janine:        No, he's doing a dog trick.

Keith:        Oh, he's a cowboy —

Janine:        He's doing a dog trick. She's dressed like a fucking stereotypical —

Jack:        Native American, terrible —

Janine:        Halloween costume bullshit —

Jack:        Oh god. [chuckling]

Janine:        Native American princess, and he's like, shoot me. And so she like —

Jack:        [laughing] Oh yeah, it's so good.

Janine:        And she like, finger shoots him, and he like fakes like, “oh, I'm hit.” And then he's like, “do it again.” And she does, and he like, falls [laughing] over the railing into the fucking —

Jack:        And falls for like a really long time —

Keith:        Yeah, literally head over heels.

Janine:        And there's also like —

Jack:        And she's like, “woo, yeah!”

Janine:        He's — yeah, she thinks it's a joke and then goes back inside. And then he like, sees a lady in the woods, who I think is the... laid whose name I keep forgetting.

Jack:        So he —

Keith:        He sees, he sees Amelia.

Janine:        Yeah, Amelia, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jack:        Yeah, who's wearing a yellow dress.

Keith:        He doesn't recognize her, because he is not able to think clearly.

Janine:        I was — yeah, he's — he's never really seen her before though, right? Anyway? Like —

Keith:        He has a picture.

Janine:        Right, that's true, that's true.

Keith:        Uh...

Janine:        Also it's true, I'll give him credit, whatever.

Jack:        And we've seen her once.

Keith:        Yeah, I think he —

Janine:        I have it in my notes that I wish she was a puma in that scene. I had, I was, I was really expecting her to be some sort of mountain cat —

Keith:        Predatory — yeah.

Janine:        That he had to deal with while drunk. And it's not, it's not quite that kind of movie [chuckling] but it could have been.

Jack:        We kind of — so, so what happens is, he loses his gun. And we get a great — this scene is shot so well. The sound of the party becomes this distant sound. We don't get any soundtrack. We just get these like, very sharp diagetic sounds of him scrabbling around on the floor, looking for, uh, his gun, and cursing about the fact that he's lost his gun. And he goes to — he can't find it, and he goes to light a cigarette, and his lighter doesn't light. And then he goes to light a cigarette again, and this time the lighter lights, and in the light of the flame, we see this like, horribly disfigured face, disfigured by a bullet wound face, of a body leaning against a tree next to him.

1:14:37.9        And he... uh, uh, clocks this. Uh, and then I think we cut to, uh, Healy, who, who is being hailed by March from, [chuckling] from the bottom of the slope. And he asks him how he got down there, and he just says, he fell. Uh, and, and, and March is doing this brilliant silent pantomime of panic, right? Which is like, something I wish we could do in our show, but our show is [chuckling] audio only, where he's like wheezing, and pointing, and, and kind of has no real way to say what he wants to say, which is like, “I found this awful body at the bottom of the hill.” And then does Healy just like, make his way down the hill, kind of stumble down the hill?

Keith:        Uh, so what happens is the body falls from the tree, like, like is leaned up against the tree and falls to the side, and he sees it.

Jack:        Like slumps —

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Yeah, and figures out, like, “oh, you're trying to tell me there's a dead body there.” And then comes down, just sort of like, slowly walks down.

Jack:        And this is Sid Shaddock, the, the, the producer.

Keith:        Yeah, it's Hatrack, yeah.

Jack:        Uh, and they want to, they decide to [chuckling] get rid of the body, because —

Keith:        [laughing] Oh, this is — this part is very funny.

Jack:        This is a hard 6. This is, they've rolled a 6. You know the —

Keith:        They, yeah. So they, they're like, oh, we have to get rid of the body —

Jack:        6 where Austin is like, the 6 where Austin is like, “you get what you want, but what you want is bad?” That's this.

Keith:        Yeah. Yeah. They, they, they decide they have to get rid of the body, because they, someone —

Jack:        Because the gun is nearby.

Keith:        Well, they — there was a girl there that saw him looking for a gun, and there was a dead body, and so they can put him at the scene of the crime. And so, we have to get rid of the body, and they, they drag it to a fence, and they throw it over the fence, and the fence leads to... a different party.

Jack:        [chuckling]

Keith:        And it falls and crashes onto —

Janine:        In like a restaurant or something. Like people at a table —

Keith:        Yeah, like a big dinner party. People were dressed really nice.

Jack:        The synopsis I'm seeing says it's a wedding reception. [chuckling]

Keith:        A wedding reception, yeah.

Janine:        Oh, boy.

Keith:        And so, everybody's dressed really nice, and they, it basically lands on like the bride and groom's table like, while dinner's being served.

Jack:        And we never see this again.

Keith:        No.

Jack:        That plot thread is closed with that punchline.

Keith:        Closed, gone. Yeah.

Janine:        [chuckling]

Keith:        We made a mistake, and we're out of here. Yeah, gone, we're gone. We run.

Jack:        Which is some fucking bold joke construction. I like — there's a, there's a version of this movie, where that thread is more of a problem —

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        For our characters. It is not this movie. [chuckling]

Keith:        There's something, there's something to this scene that I think is really illustrative of a lot of the rest of the movie. And it's illustrative in the way that it is the best example of it, which is, like, you see them doing this thing, and when they are putting the body over the fence, I was like, “they should look over that fence to see what's on the other side, because someone might see them.” And, like, in your head, you're like, “oh, they might be seen doing this.” And what actually happens is, they destroy a wedding. [chuckling] like —

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:        This, so like, seeing a thing and knowing it's going to go wrong, and then it goes wrong in a different and/or much worse way, is a lot of this movie.

Janine:        Yeah, there's like, there is a thing I think about a lot, and this is a thing I think about in regards to, uh, the stories we tell, and it's a thing I thought about a lot in regard to this movie, which is that like, a lot of storytelling is, “here is this big, here's our big thing, here's our big conflict or our character's big goal.” And we tend to think of that like we think of our own goals as a person, which is like, “well, it has all these little steps on the way, and you succeed at each step, and then eventually you get the goal and you succeed at the goal.” And the storytelling here, like a lot of the stories that we tell is —

Jack:        [chuckling]

Janine:        Okay, you have your big goal, you have your big thing at the end, and you have every little step along the way, and you fail 90 percent of those steps along the way, but you still get to the goal, and it's, it's mostly okay, don't worry too much about it, [chuckling] it's fine, it's fine.

Jack:        You ruin these people's fucking... party. Uh...

Keith:        Or, you gave them the most memorable story of their lives. Bright side.

Janine:        That's true. That's true.

Jack:        So, then several things happen at once. We cut to — so, Healy and March rejoin the party, shocked and, uh, uh, a little traumatized, and going to look for Holly, who they've lost.

Janine:        They have also, at this point, bribed Keith David to go to Michigan forever, which, spoilers, he does not do.

Keith:        Yeah. Yep.

Jack:        Right. Because we —

Keith:        Well, Healy kicks his ass first, and he, he offers —

Janine:        Mm-hm.

Keith:        Please let me go to Michigan instead of being here.

Janine:        Yeah. He's like, “you'll never see me again.”

Jack:        Uh...

Keith:        Always create a [unintelligible] though.

Janine:        “I'll go to Michigan.” It's true.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        Uh, I also wrote that everyone at this party is going to get legionnaire's disease from that hot tub.

1:19:13.1        

Jack:        There's a fight, there's an incredible fight in a hot tub, uh, where older guy, so that's Keith David prior to Michigan? Is this where he gets bribed? Or does he get bribed during the earlier scene?

Keith:        Yeah, yeah, it's the hot tub.

Janine:        I think — yeah.

Jack:        Yeah. So, blueface —

Keith:        He shoots him in the leg — he shoots him in the leg, and, and hits him in the face with the gun, the butt of the gun a few times, and then stomps him in the head. And then he says, “please stop, you'll never see me again, I'll pay you, let me go to Michigan.” And he, and he doesn't —

Jack:         Let me go to Michigan is great. I've that a very useful, uh, thing to know, if you're in a situation where you want help, uh, in a public space, is rather than saying, “help,” specifically call a person out and say like, you know, “you, in the red, help.” Uh, because everybody thinks that they're not going to be the one to help. And I feel like saying, “let me go, I'll go to Michigan,” is the fleeing equivalent of that. Where you give a very [chuckling] specific, a very specific location that you —

Janine:        [chuckling]

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        It's not, I'm going to go and you'll never see me again, it's like, “there's a village in the Catskills that I'm going to go to.”

Janine:        [laughing]

Keith:        Full disclosure, Healy does ask, “where are you going to go?”

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Oh, that's true, he doesn't, he doesn't, he —

Keith:        And he offers Michigan, but he, he did have it on call. He had Michigan right there.

Janine:        He didn't have to think about it.

Keith:        Right.

Jack:        Meanwhile, Holly, uh...

Keith:        Which makes sense, because like, presumably the people who hired these guys —

Janine:        Yes, because — yes, yeah. Because this whole story is actually about Michigan and not — it's actually about Detroit and not LA at all.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Holly has been asking about, uh, Amelia, and is led by a presumably well-meaning lady to —

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        I don't know that we can presume that.

Jack:        I, well, I suppose here's the thing. Is this woman in on the conspiracy? Or is she just [laughing] very blasé about this situation?

Keith:        There's also —

Janine:        I think she led a 13-year-old to a weird man's car.

Keith:        Yeah, there's a —

Jack:        Sure.

Keith:        There's just, there's a possibility in between those where these two creeps, older guy and blueface paid some people to look out for —

Jack:        Sure, at the party.

Keith:        Anything about Amelia.

Jack:        Which fits with Janine's, uh, March is drugged theory. Uh...

Keith:        Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah.

Jack:        So, Holly gets into this car, and Holly is kind of... Holly is a little suspicious of this, and she gets into the car and she's right to be suspicious, because in the car is blueface, face all blue.

Janine:        Ol Blueface.

Jack:        His face all blue, a horror comic by Emily Carroll. Uh, he drives away. Has basically like, well, “fucking, okay, this seems to be progress.” Uh, and leaves.

Janine:        But —

Jack:        But — oh, sorry, go on.

Janine:        Yeah, they don't quite yet leave, right? Because he's like, waiting in the car with her, and then they see Amelia?

Jack:        Oh, shit, they do. They do.

Janine:        And like snatch her, yeah.

Jack:        Uh, but then, like — [sighs] there's like, I, I don't, I don't quite remember how we —

Keith:        Wait, they don't snatch, they don't snatch Amelia. They see her from the car, and —

Janine:        Right. Is she like getting in —

Keith:        And, and Holly sees him, sees blueface see her. She's trying to get her own car from the valet. And he aims his gun to just —

Jack:        And Holly's like, “run!”

Keith:        Shoot her —

Janine:        Right, yeah, yeah.

Keith:        And Holly slams the door on his fist, he drops the gun, he's in pain, she says, “Amelia, run!” And they run together through the woods, and then they chase after —

Janine:        I wrote cool teen! Cool teen! With 2 exclamation points in my notes at this point.

Keith:         Yeah, cool teen.

Jack:        Yeah. Talking about Holly?

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Holly is the coolest teen in the movie.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, Holly's cool teen scene hasn't even really started yet. This is just a precursor to Holly's cool teen scene — [chuckling]

Keith:        Although, Holly —

Janine:        She had a cool teen scene where she told the, uh, the sex worker who was showing her a, porn movie, not to say, “and stuff,” when she was talking about anal, to just say —

Keith:        Anal and stuff. Yeah. Just say anal. [chuckling]

Janine:        Anal. [chuckling]

Keith:        That's — the real kicker to that joke is —

Janine:        Just say they're doing anal, not anal and stuff, it's — a lot.

Keith:        Like, repeating the phrase, repeating the phrase without, “and stuff,” at the end.

Janine:        Mm-hm. Yes.

Keith:        Like, “don't say and stuff.” But like the, especially in the first, the first time it's used, there's like, it's, it seems like he's scolding her for using the word whore, but actually he's saying, “don't say and stuff.”

Janine:        Yeah. I mean, that's like the thing he does, though. He also says like, “call them the porno young ladies,” or something like that, and it's like, okay. [chuckling]

Jack:        Yeah, which is again, Shane Black is like...

Keith:        Yeah. It's — it's tough to draw —

Janine:        [chuckling] It's frustrating, but —

Keith:        The line of like, where it's like, okay, this is a really unfocused pastiche of a thing that is probably, like, uh, probably both well-meaning and, uh, I don't want to say accurate, but like, it's, it is trying to draw from, it is trying to draw from an actual culture —

Jack:        Like a history of 70s Los Angeles porn.

Keith:        Right.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        But it has nothing really to say about it.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        And also like, is drawing on it only in vulgar ways, without —

Janine:        Yeah. It's like —

Keith:        Any sort of point.

Janine:        Sorry, I —

Keith:        It's okay.

Janine:        I was going to say, it's like, there is something here, but show me that you care or that you're not scared to care.

Keith:        Right.

Jack:        Sure.

Janine:        Because a lot of it has that vibe of like, you know, that like, that very Millennial-y, not Millennial-y, but like a sort of post-2000s, you're only uncool if you care about something kind of —

Jack:        Sort of like ironic detachment —

Janine:        Kind of feeling.

Jack:        Yeah, totally. There's like another level, I feel, to the way this movie talks about porn, that I want to get into when we starting talking about what the conspiracy is, uh, —

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        And how the conspiracy works, but we're not quite there yet. There's a conspiracy —

Janine:        We're close.

Jack:        And we're about to start talking about it.

Janine:        Because we're about to meet Kim Basinger, shortly.

Jack:        Well, very — yeah. Before that, though, we get a kind of a, a sort of a, a skirmish, a scuffle, a brief fight, in which — oh, shit. In which I, I try to remember how this starts. But it starts with, uh, uh, Healy and Holland hitting blueface with a car —

Janine:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        Uh, kind of accidentally, right?

Keith:        Oh, actually, slightly different. There is, uh, it was, I think that it was a random passerby that hits blueface with the car. He — uh, March —

Janine:        But, don't the — his car like gets hit first or something, and then he gets out of the car?

Keith:        March tries to hit him with the car, but is being shot at, and is drunk and/or drugged.

Janine:        Mmm.

Keith:        Uh, and so he kind of spins out and just parks. [chuckling] Uh...

Jack:        That's so good, yeah. The driving in this film is great.

Keith:        [laughing]

Keith:        Yeah, there's a really great driving seen with a, with a Hannibal Burress cameo that was —

Jack:        Anyway, what this comes down to is, blueface is lying uh, dying on the, uh, on the tarmac, and Healy approaches, and it's like, you know, “we got you.” And blueface starts laughing and says, “no, you haven't. John Boy's coming for you.” Uh, it's real bad news. And then he —

Keith:        He's going to kill the private cop, and his family, and then you.

Jack:        And then Healy kills him. He strangles him to death. Uh...

Janine:        After, after he tells Holly like, “hey, go, go get help, he's —“

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        Because they like, want to —

Keith:        Holly insisted on trying to help this guy and making sure, like, she was —

Janine:        Yeah, because Amelia's like, “we have to fucking run,” and, and Holly's like, “no, we can't just leave him to die.” And then Healy's like, “okay, well you go get help.” And then he chokes him out.

Jack:        Promptly kills him. Yeah.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, kind of sadly. But, like, he does it.

Janine:        I guess, like — I, it — I was frustrated, because that scene wanted me to be sadder than the opening scene did.

Jack:        Yes. Yes, it absolutely did. Yeah. That's a really good way of putting it.

Keith:        Oh, the —

Janine:        And I was like, “I'm not sad about this, actually.”

Keith:        The — sorry, which scene was the opening scene? The —

Jack:        Uh, Misty, Misty Mountains, Misty —

Keith:        Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, yeah. 100 percent. Yeah. Totally. The first scene was like, uh, was constructed as like, “look at this weird kind of eroticized image.”

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        And this scene is like, “what's our guy going to do? Is —“ yeah.

Janine:        Wow, I can't believe he lied to that girl, and she want to save this, she wanted to show mercy, and he was like, “no,” he took that away, he took that away, and he killed him.

Jack:        Yeah.

Janine:        And the first scene totally just wants me to be like, nervously laughing and then go, “oh, that was weird.” So...

Jack:        Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The, the kid comes out with his pajama top.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, great 70s pajamas that kid has. Uh, so —

Janine:        I'm very unimpressed by the 70s wardrobe of this movie, I'll say that. And we can move on.

Jack:        In, in that it feels —

Janine:        In, in general. I think the pajamas were fine, but like, a lot of it was just...

Keith:        Yeah. I, I feel like it's a sort of semi-pass for seemingly not really even trying. It doesn't seem like it's trying to do 70s clothes —

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Except for maybe, like, March's shirt.

Janine:        I feel like movies that are set in the 70s are kind of — I don't know why I enunciated 70s like that. Seven-ties.

Keith:        [laughing] Seven-ties.

Janine:        I feel like —

Jack:        The seven-ties.

Janine:        I feel like movies that are set in the 70s, maybe more so than any other like, decade in, in like, recent history, fall into this kind of high school theme day trap of either going too far or just showing up in a tee shirt and jeans, you know what I mean?

Jack:        Mmm, mm-hm. Yeah.

Janine:        Uh, and I don't know which of those is worse, but —

Jack:        How do you feel — how do you feel about the interiors?

Janine:        Eh, they're fine.

Jack:        Yeah. Yeah.

Janine:        But I think, I think the highlight of the interiors is maybe, maybe March's house, like that sold it for me. Uh...

Jack:        Mm-hm.

Janine:        The bowling alley didn't feel quite far enough.

Jack:        No.

Janine:        You know, a lot of it didn't feel quite as much as, I don't know, I don't know. Who knows. Doesn't matter.

Jack:        So...

Janine:        So, there's —

Jack:        This is when we get the call. Sorry, do you want to go ahead?

Keith:        Sorry, what did you say?

Jack:        This is when we get the call, from Kim Basinger. Basinger.

Keith:        The call.

Jack:        Basinjer? Basinger? Basinger. How do you say it?

Janine:        I don't, I don't know. I've heard it both ways.

Jack:        Let's just decide a way.

Keith:        Kim.

Jack:        [chuckles] Kim.

Janine:        I was going to say Basinger. We could always go with her character name —

Jack:        Basinger.

Janine:        Which I forget.

Jack:        Her character name —

Keith:        Have we tried Basingjer?

Jack:        Is, she has a great name. Her character name is Judith Kuttner, and we're introduced to her by her... uh, uh, —

Janine:        Assistant? Tally?

Jack:        Yeah, Tally, uh, shows up, who is —

Janine:        They're wearing matching tan suits, I think. Or like matching tan clothing.

Jack:        Yeah. Uh, and she's like, “you've got to talk to my, my boss.” And it's here that we learn that Amelia's mother is the head of, I want to say the auto commission?

Janine:        Like the justice department?

Keith:        The, the justice department. She works for the justice department. She is a prosecutor for the justice department.

Janine:        Yeah, she's like a government lawyer.

Jack:        Like a senior, senior government lawyer.

Keith:        Yeah. I can't remember, I don't think that she said she was the head of it. But she's definitely the head of something.

Janine:        She would be like the head prosecutor or something.

Keith:        Yeah, something like that. And she's prosecuting the — she, she's doing two things simultaneously, which is prosecuting car companies, or, uh, trying to, or starting the process of, or in the process of prosecuting car companies for hiding information about catalytic converters and their pollution potential. And, also, trying to keep porn out of LA.

Jack:        Yeah. We get a lot of exposition in this scene.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, which is like, one layer is kind of just explained to us by this woman.

Keith:        It's, honestly it's, what it is is like, okay, so, think of a fighting game. In my head it's Dead or Alive, because in my head, Dead or Alive is the game that goes this the most, or at least has been doing it like this for, it's my first experience with this, which is, you're fighting in a place, and, uh, then all of a sudden you're at the edge of the screen, and a punch happens, and you break through a wall, and you're in a whole different space, and it's much bigger —

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:        Of a, of an arena than you thought. And —

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        And that's, that like, this movie does that a couple different times, and this is that, like the biggest, like —

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        You were in a house and you fall through the ground, and you're in hell now. Uh...

Jack:        So I'm going to, I'm going to read from the synopsis I'm reading, because this describes it really clearly and concisely. Uh, uh, Kuttner, who is Kim Basinger, uh, Kuttner explains that the Vegas mob is trying to push their porn industry to LA, and Amelia is involved because of the experimental movie she did with Shaddock, which Kuttner thinks is the result of her lashing out as a child, or as a, you know, as her child. Uh, Dean, her boyfriend, was murdered in his home as it burned down, so that the movie would be destroyed. She hires Healy and March to find her.

1:32:13.9        So we're back on find Amelia again, but with a completely different client now.

Keith:        And a lot more money.

Jack:        A huge amount of money.

Keith:        Almost 10,000 dollars.

Janine:        And also, also a lot less than they could have had, which is a good moment of —

Keith:        Yeah, yeah.

Jack:        [laughing] So good.

Janine:        She is writing out the check to pay them, she is writing out 10,000 right at the same time as March is hemming and hawing and being like, “we can't, we really can't do for any less than 5,000.” Uh...

Keith:        And then as she's tearing up the check that says 10,000 dollars, he leans over to Healy and winks and gives him a nudge like, “how'd I do, huh?”

Janine:        [chuckling]

Keith:        [laughing]

Jack:        [chuckling] It's so good. These fucking assholes are so out of their depth at this time. I think this is the point at which we're like, “yeah, this has, this has gone too far.”

Keith:        The other, the other thing though is that in, in, in different ways, between the two of them, they are competent at like —

Jack:        Sure.

Keith:        At like, some things.

Jack:        [chuckling] Sure.

Keith:        Right? Like, when they're not making mistakes, March —

Jack:        Or, or drinking.

Keith:        Or drinking, March can like, find clues and follow leads, and, uh, Healy can beat people up, and, I guess follow leads.

Jack:        Sure.

Keith:        And so —

Jack:        I don't think they're very good detectives, Keith. [chuckling]

Keith:        I, I don't think they're bad detectives. I think that they are detectives with different priorities from each other, obviously, and different priorities, sometimes, than solving the case. Uh... but, like, they do find the clues. They never don't find the clues, except for the time when they only found the clues — or, I guess they found the clues by accident several times. But, you know. They're not, like, incompetent in a way where they're unable to do the tasks.

1:34:04.1        

Jack:        True. Where are we up to on your notes, Janine?

Janine:        Uh, we are up to, love to have a smoking pool. Waking up on that diving board is going to be rough.

Jack:        Oh, we get a big, we get a big, “let's learn about these men,” scene, don't we?

Keith:        Hey Jack, you've started, in the last 10 minutes or so, breaking up pretty consistently for me.

Jack:        Oh, hm.

Janine:        It's like a cut-out kind of breakup.

Keith:        Yeah. There was just a bad one, that's why I'm bringing it up now.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        I can join and, and, and leave and join, and rejoin. Leave.

Keith:        Yeah, let's, let's actually all leave and start a new call.

Janine:        You probably don't need to do it that often, but like, a little — [laughing]

Jack:        [chuckling] I'm going to do it 10 times.

Keith:        Let's all, let's all leave, and I'll start a new call.

Janine:        Okay.

Jack:        Okay. Bye! [pause] Hello. Hello!

Keith:        Hello.

Jack:        Hello.

Janine:        Hi.

Keith:        Maybe we'll get, maybe we'll get a different — maybe, uh, maybe Janine was, was hosting, and when she bluescreened and —

Jack:        I think I was hosting.

Keith:        Oh, you were — I mean like —

Janine:        I wasn't hosting.

Keith:        I don't know if Discord chooses the host based on who starts the call or not.

Jack:        Oh.

Janine:        I didn't start the call.

Keith:        But... yeah, that's why I wanted to start the call. Just in case.

Jack:        [chuckling]

Keith:        Uh, but what were we, what were we just saying? Jack, you were saying something but you cut out so I didn't hear you.

Janine:        So —

Jack:        Uh, man — we get a big exposition scene, about these men.

Keith:        Right. Yes. One of the men.

Jack:        Both of the men.

Keith:        Do we? Well, is — March's

Jack:        We —

Janine:        It's mostly Healy, I think.

Keith:        Yeah, he, March tells the diner story.

Janine:        And this is, for, for, for March, this is the revelation, like, this is a rented house because the other house burned down so who the fuck cares —

Jack:        This is when we learn about the explosion.

Keith:        Oh, right. Yeah.

Janine:        And then for Healy, this is the like, because, uh, Tally, Kim Basinger's assistant, had been like, “hey, you're the diner guy.” Uh, March is like, “what the fuck is that about, diner guy.”

Jack:        [chuckles]

Janine:        Uh, and we get the story of Healy, basically he's like at a diner, and this dude showed up with a gun to like rob them or whatever, or just terrorize people. And he like, got shot with the gun, like in the shoulder, the side or something. But also just like, completely obliterates this dude. And like, felt great and useful, and not useless.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        And by the time we get to literally that line, March is snoring on a diving board over a pool full of [chuckling] cigarette butts.

Keith:        About 30 or 40 seconds after saying, “this is the best story I've ever heard.”

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        One line into the story. [laughing]

Janine:        But also still probably like, drunk or drugged, and it's been a rough night, so, you know?

Keith:        Yeah. And this scene I think sets up like, one of the things that Jack, at the very beginning, you were almost going to talk about what the point of the movie was. And I don't know if this is a point, but it's definitely like a major thing that the movie is about, which is like, these two guys and how they're different, which a lot of movies are about two guys and how they're different.

Jack and Janine:        [chuckling]

Keith:        Uh, so it's not like, impressive, but it is definitely about, like, the conflict of like, you've got Healy, who, uh, knows he's a bad guy, but has this sort of, has this sort of idea that he could be better, and does, and also has this impulse to do that. Uh, versus, uh, March, who also is not a good guy, but thinks that he is, and is worried that he might not be. Which is like, two mostly similar people in two very different places, but like, with regards to their own ideas about themselves. Uh, although the movie never had any, uh, real, they never really took any time to show you that, that March had the potential to be a better guy. They kind of just let it, let him worry.

Jack:        [sighs] Yeah. And we kind of get like, towards the end we kind of get these moments where we can see March's understanding of his own failings? But again —

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        I don't think the movie gets, the movie looks at the Wikipedia page for that concept and is like, “okay. Okay.”

Keith:        Yeah. Well there's also, there's this other scene, like the other half of it. So I think half of it is really well-illustrated by the diner story, about how he's, he has these impulses to do good things even though he is a bad guy and knows he's a bad guy, but wants to change. Uh, or at least says that he wants to change, versus like March, when he takes, when, at least, it looks to me like he took that second round of money from the aunt that's looking for Misty, Misty Mountain, Misty Mountains?

Janine:        Misty Mountains.

Keith:        Misty Mountains. Yeah.

1:38:41.1        Uh, he gets in the car, and his daughter's there, and he's like, “be honest, don't pull any punches because I'm your dad. Uh, am I a good guy?” And she's like, “no, you absolutely are not a good guy.”

Jack:        Such a great, such a great moment.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        It reminds me a lot of, this is talking about another movie, so I won't — don't worry, we're talking about The Nice Guys today.

Keith:        Uh, uh, yep, The Nice Guys, and Silent Hill 2, and Shenmue, and —

Janine:        [chuckling]

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:        [laughing] Uh, yeah. So, that, I think, I think that like, we have, we've seen a lot of March as a character being, being a bad guy and not really realizing it, and thinking that being kind of a shithead kind of detective is an okay thing to be. Uh, and I think the diner scene kind of clicks in the other half of like, what the movie's been hinting at for Healy.

Janine:        Yeah. This is like, this is totally the pivoting moment. Because we get that story, and also, that story comes right after, uh, March being like, “okay, we'll worry about this tomorrow.” Because Healy's like, “okay, so what's, what's, what's our next thing.” And March is like, “we'll talk about it tomorrow afternoon.” Like, afternoon, even. Not even tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon.

Keith:        Yeah, and then he's late.

Janine:        Yeah, and then he's, he's late, and like, the, the big plan ends up being like, “okay, well that's great, but let's wait a day, and then we'll go back to her for more money.” So we — that's like the full pivot on, you know, “I'm a detective, I have a code,” to, you know, Healy, who is at least an honest dirtbag. Like, he is at least sort of honest and unpretentious in his morality.

Keith:        Yeah. I, I don't really want to make this comparison, but let's be generous to me here. Uh... it is like, like, Healy is a dirtbag in that he is a lot like a Witcher, from the videogame, “The Witcher.”

Janine:        Yes. Yes — [laughing] No, you're right. Yeah.

Keith:        Yeah. He —

Janine:        You have to ask for money, because if you start doing shit for free, everyone will expect you to do shit for free.

Jack:        Right. [chuckling] Yeah.

Keith:        Right. And, you know, I'm not a hero, I'm a guy that kills monsters, and it's really hard and I need you to pay me, in the same way that he's like, “listen, I do go around and beat up guys who are well-being creeps,” uh, and that's sort of like, one of the early setups is that, if there's a creepy guy, uh, —

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Uh, like it's like, It would, the opening scene was like, he beats the shit out of like a guy that was dating like a 14-year-old girl or something.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        But he gets paid for it because it's his job, and so like, it's good that he's beating up these guys, but he's definitely not doing it for free. Uh...

Janine:        Every now and then, Geralt has his diner moment too, of just like —

Keith:        Yeah. But he doesn't have to —

Janine:        This has to happen. This has to get done.

Keith:        You have to, you have to make Geralt do that.

Janine:        Well, yeah, but you know what I mean.

Keith:        Which I — I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Janine:        Sometimes it's like, this, it's — sometimes it's like, well, are you advancing the story, or are you just going to skip this area? Or like...

Keith:        Yeah. Uh, yeah totally. Because they're like, “I can't pay you.” And then it's like, “okay, well then I can't play this part of the game.” [laughing] Uh... but, yeah. So that's like, he's a dirtbag in a very specific way, which is like, his good deeds are, he considers his day job.

1:42:06.7        

Janine:        He also like, you know, to go back to his living situation, he's like really surprised at March's house.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        He's like, “you live like this on a, on detective's pay. What?” So he does like, Healy does legitimately need money, he does legitimately need to press that.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        Uh, because he's not doing great. But also, you wonder if he's not doing great because every now and then, he does, maybe just like do a thing because it has to get done. Like it's hard to...

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Janine:        It's hard to know why one of them is a successful detective, and the other isn't. In that way.

Keith:        Yeah. Uh, yeah. It's, it's easy to see him taking those jobs where he isn't sure that he's going to get paid for it, because this job is that job. He pays March —

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        To help him, off the clock, without anybody paying him, also.

Janine:        Or, I guess he's also, like March extorts money. That's how he affords it, is he draws every job out twice as long as it has to.

Keith:        Right, yeah.

Janine:        Uh, you know, we also, I guess get that shot [chuckles] I shouldn't say he seems super honest up until that turning point, because we do get that thing, really early on, where he goes to a woman who's like, “my husband's been missing for so — since the funeral.” And there's like an urn of ashes sitting on a shelf behind her, like —

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Janine:        So we do get that pretty early on, that he just kind of goes with it.

Keith:        Yeah.

1:43:24.5        Where are we in the story here?

Janine:        The, the hotel.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        Because in that scene where there's like the lightness and stuff, March is like, “you think I'm just a bum, but actually, that note you have, it's not an airport flight at all, because the airport doesn't do those.” Or some shit, some fucking bullshit thing.

Jack:        So this is a note —

Janine:        It's actually an apartment — and then the apartment was torn down.

Jack:        This is a note, uh, that, uh, Healy found in a, tucked into a costume, uh, for a porn film called, I think it's called, “How Do You Like My Car, Big Boy?”

Janine:        Yes.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, which is the film that Misty Mountains was, uh...

Janine:        It's also her last words to that child.

Keith:        Yeah, her dying breath.

Jack:        To the, to the — yeah.

Janine:        She's dying in his yard, with her shirt open.

Jack:        Yeah. Uh, so they go to this hotel [chuckling] and they do a sort of ridiculous good-cop/bad-cop approach, with the, uh, with the bartender of the hotel.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        The bad cop bit involves just like, slamming his head against the bar. Uh...

Keith:        And then they both get very confused about like, “oh, shit, we were supposed to be doing good-cop first.” That was good-cop —

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        They were like, “what you just saw was good-cop.” [laughing]

Janine:        [chuckling] We can do this the easy way or the hard way, which this is, this is the hard way. Or some shit like that.

Keith:        Easy way, easy way, yeah. Slamming you on the table was the easy way.

Jack:        And it's like, this gets to the heart of, uh, something that I believe anybody who's listened to Friends at the Table will have identified, which is that good-cop/bad-cop is a fun, good frame for improv —

Janine:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        Uh, that leads to [chuckling] interesting situations when, when it's done. Which is why we do it all the time, including on a recording yesterday. Uh...

Keith:        Yeah. Although that, funnily enough, was very much this style of good-cop/bad-cop, where we don't really know —

Jack:        Where we don't really know what's happening. [chuckling]

Keith:        Who's the good cop, or not, and we're both, uh, violent.

Jack:        Yes. Uh...

Keith:        [laughing]

Jack:        So this leads to like a, kind of just three really great idiot people being like, uh, making poor decisions, scenes. Where the men, our detectives are warned not to got up there, because there's like, bad dudes up there. And they have kind of a like a prolonged conversation about whether or not they should, and they decide to.

1:45:48.1        And they, they end up going up the elevator, having this completely non-sequitur conversation about, uh, miscalling a eunuch a Munich?

Janine:        Oh, god, yeah.

Jack:        The capital of, the capital of, uh, of Germany. They get to the top of the escalator, the elevator, and see a man who's had his throat cut, and another man who is shot so many times that he falls out of the window of the top of the hotel. And they just put —

Janine:        But he doesn't, he doesn't fall out of the window until after they get back in the elevator and close the door, because then you get shot —

Jack:        [chuckling] They get, they get —

Janine:        Because it's a glass exterior elevator, and you get that shot of the dude getting like ejected out the window. [chuckling]

Jack:        It's so good.

Keith:        While —

Jack:        It's so good.

Keith:        And while they're going, so it's a close-up of their two faces, and then to the side of the camera, of the frame, I mean, you see the guy falling through the window. And, and, as part of the close-up, you're seeing, uh, March's teeth just chattering, and his whole face shaking.

Jack:        [chuckling] It's so good. It's the purest and most excellent response to fear that — it feels like such a video game thing. We've all done it, in video games, where you enter a room, and are immediately outclassed, and so leave the room before the AI has time to react.

Janine:        [chuckling]

Keith:        Yeah. And it's also very —

Janine:        I guess we're not supposed to be in this forest yet, okay. [chuckling]

Jack:        Yeah, exactly, that's just —

Keith:        Very clear about the like, the sorts of jobs that these two are doing, where it's like, this is not the sort of thing that Healy's doing.

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:        But it's definitely closer to the thing that Healy is doing.

Jack:        Ugh, than what March is doing.

Keith:        And so he's kind of able to roll — yeah. March is like the kind of guy that takes pictures of like —

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:        Cheating partners. Like, that's the — that — or like, like, finds, finds the missing husband who has been on the shelf in an urn the whole time. Like, that is this guy's kind of thing.

Janine:        He even like, makes a point of saying that the cheating husband thing used to be the industry's bread and butter, but then, you know, the state introduced no-fault divorces, so everyone else, all these detectives are really, really struggling now, because they don't need the cheating spouse thing as much —

Jack:        [laughing] Right.

Janine:        They can just fucking get a divorce.

Jack:        [sighs] Yeah.

Keith:        Yeah. Small, small fun thing. Never heard this movie calls private detectives, uh, private cops, which I've never heard before, and there's a lot of nicknames for private detectives, and —

Jack:        Could it just be derogatory?

Keith:        Private cop? No, March calls himself that. And then the, uh, blueface calls him that later.

Jack:        Huh.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        That's really interesting, I hadn't noticed that.

Keith:        Yep. Private cop. Yep.

Jack:        Uh, so they get down, and they're in this, this, they're sitting in this — this is one of my — I wrote this down to talk about Bluff City, as well. They're sitting in their car, having this complete meltdown about, you know, should we go up and save her? Et cetera.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        And there's this really loud — whoop, I just hit my pop shield, so there's probably a really loud sound in the recording. There's this really loud sound, which is, Amelia has jumped onto the, onto the, the roof of their car. Climbs down across the hood, sees them, tries to shoot at them, but, again, falls and knocks herself out.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, and something that I think Shane Black movies do really well, and we approach sometimes in Bluff City, is just like the, the, the grim power of coincidence. Uh, like, they are very lucky that, that events just kind of transpire like this.

Keith:        Yeah, yeah. And later this exact same luck happens in the exact reverse, uh...

Jack:        Yes, 100 percent.

Keith:        Like 3 scenes later.

Jack:        Uh...

Keith:        I do want to, just to make, just to follow up on a point from earlier, uh, the, the, uh, the argument in the car is like, Healy deciding, “no, we have to go back.” And March insisting, “no, she's already dead, she's already dead.” And then, feet on the car, you see the yellow dress that we've seen before, and then oh, it's Amelia, she's there, right now. Uh... so, just more, like —

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        These two guys are these two guys.

Jack:        Yeah.

Janine:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        So they take Amelia home, to their house, and, and —

Janine:        No, right?

Jack:        No?

Janine:        Is, is this — uh...

Keith:        Yeah, they take her —

Janine:        Oh, right they do. Yeah, sorry, sorry, yes. I thought this was the, the money thing. But that's after this, right?

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        It's kind of immediately after. So they take her home —

Janine:        Yeah, because they're able to tell Tally that they, yeah.

Keith:        This, this part, I think, is the sloppiest, or at least, least, the least careful part of the movie, is the scenes with Amelia in it, talking.

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        Uh, the movie really paints Amelia as like, frantic and, uh, almost like, uh, like unserious about her ideas about the world.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Which is so shitty, because they're literally playing out. Like, we're watching her ideas of the world play out in front of us. Meanwhile, the camera is painting her as like, “oh, this kid doesn't, is like, like, she's, has all these ideas that, she's being weird,” and like, March vocalizes those, those ideas. Or, vocalizes what the camera is showing. And Healy has like a little bit of objection to it, but not much. But it's like, the camera is showing it, and March is saying it. Uh, and it's just really sloppy, because she's right. And it's just painted as annoying.

Janine:        This is a thing that I've... yeah. This is a thing that I want to come back to in a bit, because it's absolutely, they are... she's right, but she's right in a way where they are totally painting her as annoying. They are painting her as like, and they're painting her using things that like, I don't think they could have predicted how poorly that would age in a mere two and a half years.

1:51:41.3        Because, like, the things that she says that are presented like her being unreasonable and annoying are calling people fascist and capitalist —

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Janine:        And things like that, and, and railing against this government corruption and stuff like that.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        And it's, all of these things are meant to present her as this like, really —

Jack:        Like, naive —

Janine:        Archetypal — yeah, like a naive, well-meaning hippy wannabe affluent girl.

Keith:        Right.

Janine:        Uh...

Keith:        When, when really she's like an inside player with an accurate idea of the world.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Yeah. So, just for people who haven't seen this movie and are currently getting a really, truly — [sighs] you should have, if you haven't seen this movie yet and you're at this point in the podcast [chuckling] I mean, cool. Experience media how you want. I don't know if this is the best way to experience The Nice Guys. But it's fine. So Healy like —

Keith:        I really like this movie, by the way. It's good.

Jack:        I like this movie a lot. Uh...

Janine:        Yeah. It's interesting.

Jack:        I, you know — yeah. Yeah. So, Amelia wakes up, and they're like, “Amelia, what's the deal?” And she basically says, “it's a setup.”

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        “Everything is a setup. I've been set up by my mum, who is trying to...”

Janine:        She's on the take.

Jack:        Does she actually — yeah, she, she is —

Keith:        Her charge is that her mom is accepting money —

Janine:        The car, to let the car companies slide.

Keith:        Yeah. She has the evidence —

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        She's going to let the car companies slide, she's not going to try to convict them, she's going to say there's not enough evidence. She's taking money from them. And she killed my boyfriend, and, I think that she thinks that she wants to kill her, too.

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        Which I think is maybe the only thing that she's possibly wrong about.

Jack:        Uh, and, and yeah. And we get this like, incredibly damning portrayal. There's this, there's this really painful moment where, I don't know — so Holly and Holly's friend Jessica [chuckling] are also here. Holly was staying with Jessica. Someone in the scene is like, “well, why would your mom want to kill you?” And she's just like, “because she's the man!” And it's this very, like, unbelievable facilely written kind of diatribe that, yeah, just, just, she's right. Everything she's saying [chuckling] here is like, proven by the rest of the movie.

1:53:59.6        

Janine:        The only thing that she's not right about is that her mom isn't at the top of it. Like, I think that's where she becomes wrong about her mom being the one who wants to kill her.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        I think her mom is part of this machine, and I think her mom genuinely would want... [sighs] yeah, I think her mom does actually want her daughter to be returned to her safely, because she wants her —

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        Out of this conspiracy so that —

Jack:        Sure.

Janine:        The people who are above her and who are paying her off won't see a need to eliminate her. And I think, you know, you get that when we get to Tally, who is not — I don't think, I think, like my read on this is, Tally is not really, uh, Kim Basinger's assistant, so much as she is her, like, handler from Detroit.

Jack:        Yeah, like, minder, yeah.

Janine:        So make sure she does what she's supposed to.

Jack:         Yeah. So, and it's at this moment that I think the film is introduced, route?

Janine:        Yeah. Or, this is when the idea of the film is introduced.

Jack:        So we learn —

Keith:        Hold on. I think, this is the money part, is what I thought it was.

Jack:        When do we learn about the film, then? She's saying I made a film.

Janine:        But she's saying like, no, — we learn about the film here because —

Keith:        Oh, sure. Yeah.

Janine:        She's defensive about like —

Keith:        Sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Janine:        “It's not a porno, it's an art film!” Like, it's that thing.

Jack:        Yeah, sure. So we learn that, she, along with Dean and Sid Shaddock, all the people who were killed.

Keith:        And Chet.

Janine:        And Misty Mountains.

Jack:        Uh, and Misty Mountains, worked on a... like, quote/unquote, “experimental film,” that is basically an expose of the corruption inside big auto, uh, and her mother's involvement in it, and the catalytic converters', you know, effect on the environment. Uh, and she figured that the only way to... kind of get this information the audience it needs, is to wrap it in the trappings of a porn film.

Keith:        Specifically, I think what, what the movie was implying to me was that like, that Amelia wants to make this movie about the car industry, and Dean is going to help make it, and the only way they can get it made is but getting help from Sid, who insists, “but it also has to be a porn,” I think is the — like, I think that it wouldn't have been a porn if it wasn't for Sid.

Janine:        Maybe? I don't know if —

Jack:        Sorry, a — a porn, is very [chuckling] funny to me.

Janine:        [chuckling]

Jack:        [chuckling] A single unit.

Keith:        Yeah, one important.

Janine:        I think there is also probably —

Jack:        Yeah.

Janine:        Like, I don't remember if this is the case, but to me, it feels like the case is, there's maybe some awareness of getting eyes on it —

Jack:        Yeah, totally.

Janine:        Like getting it seen properly, getting it distributed.

Keith:        Yeah, yeah.

Janine:        Distribution would be huge.

Keith:        That's the, that was the — yeah, so she, what she says, what Amelia says, I believe, is like, “that was just a commercial element, Sid said we had to —“

Jack:        Right, right, right.

Janine:        Yeah, yeah.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Right. Yeah, that's how it's framed. And, and there's, and like, there's a, they do this joke of like, “no one wants to watch porn for the story, but this is actually one where the story's important.”

Keith:        Ha-ha.

Jack:        Which, again, is very much like, this film doesn't really know how it wants to talk about porn. Uh...

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        And in this context, it's very much like, we put the clever thing in the porn. Uh... and it's like, “oh, okay. Okay, cool.” Uh... which is very much just like, “it's an experiment, it's not —“ I think she explicitly says, “it's not porn, it's an experimental movie,” or something, or something at some point.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:         Yeah, she was not, yeah, into them calling it porn.

Jack:        So, then, they disregard her completely —

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        And call Tally, to be like, “yeah, we got her.” And Tally's like, “amazing. I'll send the family doctor round —“ oh, go on.

Janine:        Wait, doesn't — I think, is it the other way around? Doesn't Tally call them to be like, “hey, I have this money. There's this stuff, the money needs to go somewhere. Can you take it?”

Keith:        So this part I —

Janine:        And then they're like, “yeah, also, we have Amelia here.” And she's like, “oh, cool, I'll send the doctor.”

Keith:        So this part I did not follow. I didn't understand why, what that money was for, and why they needed to transport it.

Jack:        [chuckling] It's really vague, isn't it?

Keith:        It's really vague.

Janine:        Yeah, I also don't —

Jack:        You might have notes on this, Janine.

Janine:        No, I don't. I promise I don't.

Keith:        Here, let me see [unintelligible] the script.

Janine:        The money — the note that I have is, that suitcase is def a bomb, right? And it's not. [laughing]

Jack:        So my, my memory. I'm, let me look at the synopsis to see what Tally actually says. Oh, okay. So the synopsis here just says, the guys — so this is, I want to shoutout the synopsis, this is from the site themoviespoiler.com, and it is submitted by Jeremy. [laughing] Thank you, Jeremy. Uh... I think that they play it as, Tally is being really evasive. She's just like, “I need some good men to make this drop, and I trust you, and you've proven yourselves.”

1:58:46.6        

Keith:        Oh, okay, so I have the answer here. I'm sorry for interrupting you, Jack. Uh...

Jack:        No, go ahead.

Keith:        Uh, this call is from Judith, this is the script here that I'm reading. This call is from Judith's office. Tally:         Mr. March, I got a call from Judith. She didn't explain herself, she said she needed 100,000 dollars in cash. March: 100,000? Why? Tally: I don't know, I think she's involved in something shady, maybe.

Jack:        Yeah, it's great.

Keith:        Well, her daughter's right — yeah, so they're literally just like —

Jack:        This is all very clear.

Janine:        [sighs]

Keith:        There's 100,000 dollars, and we don't know why. So —

Jack:        I love this, it's —

Keith:        So we don't know why because they don't why, because it, this is, that's the twist, is that there isn't that.

Jack:        So they collect the money, and they set off. And [chuckling] on the way, while driving the car, uh, March falls asleep. And he pictures —

Janine:        [chuckling] Right. He, it's important to, to note that like, he doesn't really, it's not, it's not one of those things where like, we know he has fallen asleep. It is just —

Jack:        No, we do not know he's fallen [laughing]

Janine:        I think our first sign that he's fallen asleep is —

Jack:        [laughing] Ugh.

Janine:        He's like, I want to — he says something about wanting to smoke, I think. And, and like —

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        And Healy's like, “you can just take your hands off the wheel, it'll drive itself. The car, all cars do this now.”

Jack:        The feel of this scene is so good.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, we also learn in this scene that, uh, Healy has brought extra protection in the form of an ankle gun. Uh, an ankle gun.

Keith:        In this, by, by in this scene you mean, in the dream sequence.

Jack:        Right, yeah.

Janine:        I have a question about this.

Jack:        An ankle, an ankle-mounted gun. What are, what are those called?

Janine:        Yes. Okay. Okay, so, that's my question about this is, he says he has an ankle gun, and my question is, does an ankle, is an ankle gun a special kind of gun, or is it a, any gun that is placed in an ankle holster? Does the holster make it an ankle gun?

2:00:29.1        

Jack:        I think it's a [chuckling] small gun, I think that makes it an ankle gun.

Keith:        Okay, so, so there is —

Jack:        We see it, right?

Keith:        So there is an ankle holster, and that's a thing.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        And you can put a regular gun in a regular gun-sized ankle holster, but they do make, like, like, 1 to 5 —

Janine:        Like tiny ones. Yeah.

Keith:        Shot pistols, that you might see in Back to the Future 2.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        [chuckling] And, and I think it was one of those. I think it was like a little gun that fires, like, like a round or two.

Jack:        And then, a... a... [chuckling] a bee.

Janine:        I wrote, cool bee.

Jack:        A bee, smoking a cigarette.

Keith:        I think it was, I thought it was a fly. Was that a bee?

Janine:        It's a bee.

Jack:        No, it's a bee, because the bees are dying because of the pollution.

Janine:        I think they call it a bee, too.

Keith:        Right.

Jack:        Shows up. This bee is massive. It is man-sized, and it's sitting in the center seat, and it's played by Hannibal Burress.

Janine:        Oh!

Keith:        It is, it is, yes. It is Hannibal Burress, yeah.

Jack:        Uh, who shows uh, and the bee is basically just like, “hey —“ the bee has some lines about how all the bees are dying, and it sucks. And then, the car crashes. Uh, just, horrifyingly. And the money goes, out of the window? Through the windscreen? And the box is open, and it's revealed that it's just got garbo in there, it's just paper.

Keith:        Yeah, it's like strips of paper. Money-sized strips of paper, which —

Janine:        Yeah, it's just cut-up newspaper, it's a pretty traditional fake money briefcase thing.

2:01:57.9        

Jack:        So they're like, “fuck.” And we cut to... home.

Janine:        A doctor, who's here.

Jack:        The doctor is here. This is Matt Bomer, who we were talking about earlier. And this, is this the sociopath that you were talking about, Janine? [chuckling]

Janine:        Yeah. In my note here, I have, “weird fake face?” I don't know, I think I maybe thought he was wearing like a fake face. [laughing]

Keith:        Like a latex mask thing?

Jack:        This, this performance is great.

Janine:        Like chin putty or something. [chuckling]

Jack:        I love this fucking creepy guy. Uh, this, this, this is an awful, awful hit man. This is a hit man, right? He's just straight up a hit man.

Keith:        By awful you don't mean bad at his job, you mean he's a bad person.

Jack:        He's terrifying, and, and, and —

Keith:        Yeah. Yeah.

Jack:        Unpleasant. And he, he arrives, and to her credit, this is a, this is a very good Holly cool teen scene.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        Mmm.

Jack:        To her credit, Holly immediately clocks, you know, what is going on.

Keith:        Something's wrong, yeah.

Janine:        Clocks as in understood, not clocks as in punches.

Jack:        Right.

Keith:        So, I, I — so the way that I remember it happening is, fucking... Jessica is on the phone...

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        [chuckling] Just to like a friend or something, right?

Keith:        Talk to a friend like —

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Talking about like, the, the case. Like, talking, giving details.

Janine:        Talking about John Boy.

Keith:        Talking, yeah, like literally said John Boy, because John Boy's also a character in a show or something? I don't know.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        And, uh, —

Jack:        It's like the Waltons or something.

Keith:        And, uh, oh, that's who they meant by the Waltons. The Waltons was a show.

Janine:        Yeah, the Waltons, that's if you've ever heard —

Keith:        I thought they kept talking about like the Walmart family.

Janine:        No, no, no, no. If you've ever heard that joke, like, where it's like a bunch of people in a house, and they're like, calling to each other, good night, so-and-so, goodnight. Goodnight Johnboy, goodnight. That's it, I think.

Keith:        Okay. Uh...

Janine:        I think they did it in like the Simpsons and shit. You know, it's one of those jokes that is around.

Keith:        Yeah. Uh, and it's lost, like, its connection to any real thing? [chuckling]

Janine:        Yeah, yes, totally.

Keith:        And, yeah, so she's talking — and so, she says John Boy, and that guy notices, and then Holly notices him notice and is like, “okay, I don't think this is a doctor.”

Janine:        I've got to get some cookies. [chuckling]

Keith:        Yeah. And Jessica's like, “but there's no more cookies left.”

Jack:        Because we've —

Keith:        [laughing]

Jack:        [chuckling] Oh yeah.

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        Shut up, Jessica, I have to —

Keith:        Shut up, Jessica!

Jack:        Uh, because we've, it's set up earlier that March keeps his gun in a cookie jar. Uh, and then we have this like, very small fight inside, that ends with John Boy bodily flinging Jessica from the window. Uh —

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, which leads to one of my favorite lines in the movie, which is, when Healy and March show up at the house, having just seen Jessica come out of the window, uh, John Boy is, you know, going to the trunk of his car —

Janine:        I think they just hear it, I think they just hear a bunch of glass.

Keith:        They hear it, yeah.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, and they see John Boy, and they say, “what was that?” And John Boy says —

Keith:        Did you hear that noise that just happened?

Jack:        And he says, “that was me throwing the little girl out of the window.” And pulls a Tommy gun from his trunk, and just immediately starts a gunfight.

Janine:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        Uh, which is a great, uh, thing that I like in video games, is when cut scenes go directly into gameplay —

Janine and Keith:        [chuckling]

Jack:        And this is that moment. Uh... [chuckling]

Janine:        Here, for this section, directly under, “ Holly is rad,” which I underlined twice, I wrote, “this dude honestly seems sloppy as hell.” They set this guy up as like, serious business, super-murderer, whatever. But like, everything he — he moves so big and so loud that it doesn't make sense to me that he is style in operation, as this like —

Jack:        Sure.

Keith:        So I took it as like, like they got, they got the guy that will make a mess, on purpose. Like, because it's like, oh, there's no —

Janine:        Sure, but like, that's —

Keith:        Like, we're immune here, we can make a mess.

Janine:        I mean, but they're not really immune. Like, if someone shoots up an entire neighborhood, it's a lot harder to clean up than to say, the car companies didn't actually know the full stent of their collusion, or whatever the fuck. Like —

Jack:        This gun fight is gigantic.

Janine:        It's huge.

Jack:        It fells a palm tree!

Janine:        And it's in a residential area in LA!

Keith:        Yeah. But then he, he gets away.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        With what looks like zero trouble. And also, we have the mirror image, or the — I guess mirror image, we have the mirror event of Amelia falling on a roof —

Jack:        Sure. So we know Amelia has fled, at this point. We know Amelia has fled, uh, March's house.

Janine:        They make her hide with the girls in the like, closet or something. And then she hops out the window, and she's like, “tell Healy I said thanks for nothing,” or some shit like that. And then she like, runs to the street, and like flags a car down, and the car is John Boy, and he says something like, “wow,” or something like that. And she's like, “you have to get me out of here!” And he just shoots her in the head. And that's that.

Jack:        And this is such an unpleasant shot.

Janine:        It sucks. And then it like lingers on her face with her eyes rolled back, and like, ugh.

Keith:        Did he shoot her in the head? I, I didn't, I thought it was like, in the chest, or in the heart or something. I might have just missed it.

Janine:        I don't, I assumed —

Keith:        I remember the shot that you're talking about where it lingers on her dead face.

Janine:        I assumed head, because it is a one shot, and then she drops, and that's it.

Jack:        It is so, uh, the, the camera is very far away from the car. First, we see this happen at a distance, right? We see the event happen at a distance —

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        And it's only when we want to push in to frame the death, which is something that Shane Black does all the time, in [chuckling] a variety of different ways, that we move in, and the camera becomes closer and weirder. And so we get this really jarring cut from the impersonal to the personal. Uh, and it's, it's... when I saw this in cinemas —

Janine:        So —

Jack:        It was a real, like, the whole cinema gasped, moment.

Janine:        So it's, it's a weird thing where like, the scene itself, to me, a lot of times when you get a scene like this, it feels cheap. It feels like, like the director and the writer and everyone have made you stand on a rug and then they've pulled that rug out from under you, in a way that is like really unsatisfying and stuff. And this don't quite feel like that, but the reason that it doesn't quite feel like that is the part that is cheap, because they set that whole thing we were talking about before up, where she seems really irrational and really like flighty, and she's ranting about fascists and capitalists and her mom and porn and all this stuff, and then she jumps out a window because she's like, “fuck it, I'm getting out of here, you guys can't do shit for me,” and then she gets herself killed. And all of this makes it feel like we're not supposed to really feel all that bad. Like, we're supposed to —

Jack:        Right. It's like your own fault.

Janine:        It felt, the moment, yes, the moment feels like she got what she asked for in some way. And the thing we're supposed to be sad artificial about is that Healy and March have failed part of what they were doing. And that is the part of that feels super cheap to me, because it's like —

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Janine:        You know, it, it, it sort of comes back to the treatment of Misty Mountains, and just like, that moment is just supposed to make you feel sad in a way where you laugh and go, “ah, that's life. That fucking sucks for her, I guess. Oh, well.” Uh, and that was disappointing.

Jack:        Yeah, totally. There's a... there's a footnote here, like I'm keeping this as a footnote because neither of you have seen the movie, but for listeners who have, I wanted to draw a sort of a link here. Uh, this scene reminded me in a lot of ways of the scene under the bed in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which is another instance of... of the specific way that, and in Shane Black movies, it's often women's pain, is very specifically framed by a camera in a way that is so distinctly different from any other kind of, of — and this is a movie in which people get hurt constantly, with varying degrees of brutality. And is striking to me that in both of these movies, we have these very...

Janine:        It's, there's a degree of like, pain as style, versus pain as aesthetic. Women's pain gets portrayed in a way that is like, that comes off as like, very aesthetic, whereas, for men it's a little more like... it feels a little more like brushstrokes. Like, it's just, I don't know. It's, it's movement and [unintelligible] it's not a thing —

Jack:        No, I agree.

Janine:        It's not a, it's not a still, it's not like a thing that is put there for like, some sort of... I don't know. [sighs] Like, one-shot evocative purpose.

Keith:        I, I know what you mean. It's, if you like, that scene where they come out of the elevator and they see the guy who's been slit, whose throat has been slit, who is like gasping for air, which is brutal, and how that is, it's like, it's there for, it's there to make the main characters afraid —

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        And it's so, like, they set up this thing that could be so much more than what it is, and instead it's just like, they show this guy gasping, and then they're like, “ugh, we have to go.” And it's, it's like, it's so much, so it's like, I don't know, I guess there's a thoughtfulness to the way that — but it's a bad thoughtfulness, versus like an unthoughtfulness that is... I'm stumbling over my — am I —

Jack:        Well, it's like Janine said, it's an aestheticized thoughtfulness.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Right?

Keith:        Yeah, it's, they're showing this guy, and it's very, uh, it's evocative but unaestheticized.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Versus a lot of the, like, a lot of the pain that the movie's inflicting on women is not evocative but still aestheticized.

Janine:        It's replacing a person with a set piece.

Keith:        Right.

Janine:        Like it —

Jack:        Yes, I was going to. Oh, sorry, carry, carry on.

Janine:        No, that's, that's — go on.

Jack:        I was going to, I was looking for the word set piece earlier. I, I, the, I stopped short of saying, like it feels like a scripted sequence, uh, because that's fucking meaningless.

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        Uh, but like, describing it as a set piece is really... yeah. And it's also, it, in terms of the structure of the action of the last kind of 15 minutes of this movie, it's so clearly, so transparently a punchline. Uh, a punchline to lots of different things, right? A punchline to the scale and scope of the violence we saw previously, a punchline to the messiness and sloppiness of the way the detectives fight, a punchline to just the like, uh, you know, abject wanton destruction wreaked upon, uh, —

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        You know, March's home. And then, and then, there's this, there's this like, very grim narrative punchline of like, “well, we're just going to kill a lady at the end of it.” No messing about.

Janine:        Yeah, he — I mean, John Boy brought a fucking Tommy gun to a suburban neighborhood, and all he needed was a single bullet and some, and a lady with bad luck. Like —

Jack:        Yeah. Yeah.

Janine:        And again, it's one of those things where it's like, I can, I can see what you're doing here, I just don't actually appreciate it the way you want me to.

Jack:        Totally. And there's a reading of this that I, that I don't think the movie deserves, but, but I'm calling attention to it because I, I know someone will be listening and thinking, right now, “but like, isn't that a hallmark of the noir genre, which this is film is kind of riffing on left and right?” Uh, and I think that it can be both the hallmark of the noir genre, and executed very poorly, for reasons that we've just talked about.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        I don't think, I don't think the fact that it's noir-esque, in any way cancels out anything we've just said.

Keith:        And I, and I, and I think you're, uh, right or even understating when you say noir-esque. Like it really is, like, uh, you know, I, it's, it's shitty when you get into like, plays on jargon that like, where it's like, in video games where you call something a roguelike and then someone will be like, “it's more like a roguelike-like.” But this is really like a —

Jack:        [chuckling]

Keith:         Noirlike-like. And I don't think that it's trying to be any more noir than it actually is. But it doesn't, I don't know if it deserves, like, like, “oh, well that's like a noir trope.” And it's like, “okay, well why would it use one noir trope?” Because it's not using very many others.

Jack:        Sure.

Janine:        So, I mean, I think we're also coming to this from the perspective of people who, you know, a lot of the games that we do, a lot of the situations and scenarios we run in Friends at the Table that we play in, are things that are playing off of genres, and every genre has its tropes, and a lot of them have tropes —

Jack:        Right.

Janine:        That are shitty. Uh, and we have dabbled in a lot of those genres that have shitty tropes. And we go out of our way to still, you know, to evoke the genre, and maybe address those tropes, but generally not play into them, if we can help it. Like, it's a thing you can do. You don't sacrifice your right to evoke noir just because you treat your women a little differently.

Jack:        Right. [chuckling] Yeah, yeah.

Janine:        Yeah, I... [chuckles] I got feelings, evidently.

Keith:        And, and there's, there's ways, there's ways to use a trope in a more thoughtful way that is acknowledging and criticizing a trope, instead of just acknowledging a trope.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        It's back to that same —

Janine:        Does —

Keith:        First, like first scene, with the car crash, where it's like, it's showing you a — it's like presenting a trope on a tray, and saying, “isn't this more than a trope?” But it's not.

Janine:        Yeah, I think if you asked a lot of people, even, you know, like, I went through a noir phase too, and even during that noir phase, if you had asked me, what do you think makes a really good evocative noir movie —

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        I won't have said, “a camera lingering on a woman who died in a way that I'm not comfortable with.”

Jack:        On a woman who's dying. Yeah.

Janine:        Like, that would never be my answer.

Jack:        No.

Janine:        Uh, that wouldn't even be in my top 10. [chuckling] So, you can do without.

Jack:        Totally.

Keith:        Especially, especially because we're also like, like, almost any genre that involves people dying involves like, women dying as a plot point. Like, as a, like not as anything other than, like, a call to action for other people.

Janine:        Yeah. Yeah.

Jack:        Hm... yeah.

Janine:        So, the car show —

Jack:        I'm glad we could talk about this scene.

Janine:        Yeah, me too. I am. It's, it was, it bothered me a lot. I wrote, “boooo.” With four Os. I was, I had feelings. I put squares around things. It was a lot.

Jack:        Yeah. Yeah. Especially, especially because it's like, you know, we get to the end of that scene, and what do we know about Amelia? Uh, we know she made the Maguffin.

Janine:        She was annoying, she hung out with hippies.

Keith:        She was so annoying.

Jack:        We know she was annoying. Yeah. And that — [laughing] and that's it. She wore a yellow dress. Fine, okay.

Keith:        And like, like, he, she's so annoying that Healy has to like remind March, like, people are trying to kill her. She's not wrong — she's not, like, he doesn't go as far as saying like, “she's right, she's not wrong.” But like, March is like, ugh, he's like, you know, “let's just disregard everything she's saying.” And he's like, “well, there are people killing her. So we do have to still investigate.”

Jack:        [sighs] Okay, so. Now we have all the pieces. We know that the mum is in on it. We know that the film, uh, we, we kind of do a bit of detective work, right? Don't they go like —

Janine:        Yeah, yeah, they go —

Jack:        This is like some very classic detective work.

Janine:        It's, I think it's because the aunt shows up, right?

Keith:        The aunt shows back up.

Janine:        She like, yeah, she shows up and —

Jack:        So this is Misty Mountain's aunt?

Janine:        Yeah, and she's like, “oh, he's helping me find my niece.” And, and stuff like that. And then they like blurt out, because they know so much about this, they're like blurting out what actually happened, and the lady's like, “wait, so you're saying my niece is actually dead?” Or maybe this happens in the house, actually. This happens in the house.

Keith:        So what happened — yeah —

Janine:        I think. After they go —

Keith:        They're, I think they're in a parking, in a parking, in the driveway, I mean.

Janine:        Yeah, yeah.

Keith:        Uh, and so essentially, the thing that kicks forward more investigation, is that, uh, the aunt — they're, March is like, dismissing the aunt and is trying to explain, no, it's over, and she goes back over her story, which is that she saw her daughter in a pinstripe, a blue pinstripe suit, and Healy had seen that outfit, and he remembers seeing it.

Janine:        Yes, yeah.

Keith:        And it's dress — and then March puts the two things together, which is, I know what happened, you saw, you did see your daughter, because it's the movie —

Janine:        Niece.

Keith:        They were watching the movie in the house.

Janine:        Yeah, because the, the jacket that she saw her niece wearing was, uh, in the, in with the wardrobe for the movie. So it was like, a thing that she had worn while they were filming. And then they end up going to the house, and the lady's like, “I saw her standing at this desk” — but there isn't a desk there, and they're like, “oh, actually, the movie was being projected on this wall. So you totally saw Misty at a desk, it was just like, a projection.” Because Amelia was watching the film?

Keith:        Mm-hm. Yeah. March sort of impossibly finds a projector hidden in a desk.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        A very, actually pretty cool contraption, honestly.

Janine:        It reminds me a lot of, uh, uh, Jack, we saw a few of those at the, the, uh, what was that, the museum, the something house? But they had all those like tables that could —

Jack:        Oh, oh! In Copenhagen.

Janine:        Yeah, they had those like, tables that pop open, and it's like, this is a table that turns into a piano, and this is a table that has a tea set in this side, and then a fucking thing in this side —

Jack:        This one has a projector in it. [chuckling]

Janine:        And a — it's like, there's a whole category of tables that were made in the like 18th and 19th century that's just like, you hit this button, and then it turns into a whole different thing. Uh, it looked a lot like one of those.

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        That's pretty dope.

Janine:        That's pretty dope.

Jack:        And so we put two and two — we all put two and two together, and we learn that the film, the experimental film that was shot, is going to be [chuckling], is going to be shown at kind of... car E3, right?

Keith:        Yeah, it was like an industry, it's an industry car show.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Like a big car show.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        At which point we get my favorite thing in movies, they're always so clunkily done, and I'll watch them every fucking time, which is the in-fiction television documentary about the the thing —

Janine:        [laughing] Mm-hm.

Jack:        I'll fucking, I will sit up in my seat in the cinema for these things.

Keith:        Which, what is this?

Jack:        Welcome to the Los Angeles 1974 car show —

Janine:        I think that was real. I think that might have been real footage from that.

Jack:        I love, fucking love it. It's so good.

Janine:        It felt very authentic.

Jack:        [chuckling] Uh... which is basically just like, and that, and that's how this scene is introduced. I love it. It's like the beginning of a fucking Hitman level. I'm so ready to go.

Janine:        [chuckling]

Jack:        Welcome to the car show. Our, our characters are going to go to the car show. It's not super clear, at this point... what the stakes are for our heroes? Amelia is dead. Are we looking for the reel? We are.

Janine:        They're doing what's right. They are looking for the real, yeah. Because —

Jack:        Why?

Janine:        Because...

Keith:        Because the reel has the evidence of the killers. It's, well, they, they tell the aunt that the killers will be brought to justice.

Janine:        Because they believe now. And they also, I think maybe part of this is —

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        Also they know they fucked up. And the other thing —

Jack:        Right.

Janine:        Remember, John Boy's whole thing is like, oh, he's going to kill your whole family, and you also. So like —

Jack:        Sure, and we — he's out on the, he's out on the loose, so —

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Probably a good idea to, you know — okay.

Janine:        And also, they've been fucked over a lot, and like, you know —

Keith:        They're mad.

Janine:        Put the guy's kid in danger, it's he got, got used. Pride, you know. Detective's code.

Jack:        Sure.

Keith:        Yeah, somewhere in between, because we have to finish the movie, pride and do the right thing.

Jack:        Sure — yes.

Keith:        Somewhere in the middle of all those three things.

Jack:        So this is like, the second big location set piece of the movie, if the first one was the party. Uh, and, and, in this sequence we pretty much go through a lot of similar motions. Uh, March seems to be getting drunk, Healy goes to do some detective work — no, March isn't drunk yet. Healy goes to do some detective work, Holly's... here, as well?

Keith:        No, you're right. He does seem to be getting drunk, I think.

Jack:        No, that's a bit after, because we have to see him with, uh, with, uh, Tally first.

Keith:        Oh, you're right, okay.

Jack:        So, we learn that, uh, Chet, Chet shows up, the projectionalist.

Keith:        [laughing]

Jack:        And he is being kind of beaten half to death by John Boy in search of the reel.

Janine:        He's in a dumpster when they find him.

Jack:        But he — yeah.

Janine:        When he [unintelligible]

Keith:        I believe actually that this is after the Tally scene.

Jack:        Oh, okay. So basically, [laughing] they're cornered by Tally at one point. We get the... uh —

Keith:        They're looking for the reel. They know that the reel is somewhere there, and they're looking for it, and Tally shows up with a gun.

Janine:        And also, it's — this is a thing that like, you know, I am white, so maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I'm a little uncomfortable with the fact that Tally shows up and she's wearing her hair fully natural. Or she has it like, I don't know if it's fully natural, I guess it depends on her like curl pattern and stuff, but she has a fro now.

Jack:         Tally is a black woman, if you haven't seen this movie.

Janine:        Yeah. Uh, before, I want to say her hair was like, in a ponytail or a bun or something —

Keith:        Yeah, it was in a bun, I think.

Janine:        And I recall it being —

Jack:        It's like in a, a tight bun or something.

Janine:        Yeah, it's like straightened, though, or like, relaxed, even. It didn't look — I, again, I don't really, this is not my number one field, but, to me her, you know, she's wearing her hair in a very straightened and like, conforming to conventional Eurocentric beauty styles kind of, beauty, you know, expectations kind of way, when she is in this role as Kim Basinger's like, dutiful assistant. And she's so good, and all that. And then when she shows up after the revelation that she's in on this —

Jack:        That she's a baddie.

Janine:        She's wearing her hair in, you know, she's wearing it more naturally. And it's a style that is true to how black women were wearing their hair in the 70s, often, but also it feels sort of shitty. And again, I think they're leaning into the exploitation film kind of thing, because there is that whole lineage. But like, I just found it kind of gross, that like, the like, Tally is a good person version of her has the straightened hair, and the Tally is an —

Jack:        Yeah.

Janine:        Insider who's in on this horrible criminal plot trying to kill people is the one who has the afro.

2:24:33.3        

Keith:        They also, in the script, they also in the script call attention to this by March sort of inappropriately hitting on her for like the third time? Second or third time?

Janine:        Oh yeah, yeah.

Jack:        [sighs] Sure.

Janine:        Yeah. Like, more aggressively this time. He's like really — but also, is he drunk at this point? Like —

Keith:        He is not drunk at this point, or at least, he has not been drinking on camera.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Uh, uh, but definitely does, like, a motion with his hands about how, about where her hair is in relation to her head.

Janine:        I think he says he wants to touch it, which is like the grossest white person thing. Don't ever, ever do that. Uh, also —

Jack:        Yeah.

Janine:        I think we forget to mention earlier is that, when he is at Kim, Kim Basinger's office, he gets her card, but then also is like, “hey, does Tally have a card, can I get her card in case —“

Jack:        Right, yeah.

Janine:        “I have to call her, for reasons.” Uh...

Jack:        There's this like, thruline of him like, trying to hit on Tally. Uh...

Janine:        Yeah. Because she's good with his daughter, I think —

Jack:        This scene —

Janine:        Is basically the reason there. She's doing card tricks for, for Holly in that scene.

Jack:        Oh, she does card tricks for her, which is like a nice little —

Janine:        It was nice, I liked that.

Jack:        Bit of business, yeah. Uh...

Janine:        Anyway.

Jack:        Uh, this scene features two of my favorite jokes in the movie. The cold coffee attack.

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Janine:        [chuckling]

Jack:        Uh, and also there is a truly beautiful, beautiful moment where all — they're in a real standoff situation, and then March dives, suddenly and violently, for Healy's ankle.

Janine:        [laughing] Yes.

Jack:        And goes to pull his trouser up and remove the ankle gun that he saw in the dream earlier.

Keith:        [laughing]

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        But the deployment of this joke is so beautiful, in its, uh, awkwardness —

Janine:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        In that like, we don't ever really get a clear sentence out of March to the extent of, you know, “I had a dream in which you were wearing an ankle gun.” Instead we just get that moment, where he realizes that it is dream, and kind of just splutters his way through some sentences —

Janine:        [chuckling]

Jack:        About an ankle gun? [chuckling] Uh, and, and again, you get a great reverse shot of Tally, just being like, “what the fuck are you doing? What was this about?”

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Can I, I can — can I read that scene? Because it is really funny.

Jack:        Yeah, go for it.

Keith:         March gets on the floor, starts searching through Healy's ankles.

Jack:        [chuckling] “Through” is so good!

Janine:        [laughing]

Keith:        Yeah. March: Shit, no! Tally: What's wrong with him? Healy: I, I don't know. I'm going to ask him. March? March: Yeah? Healy: Uh, what the fuck are you doing? This whole time, he is still patting his ankles, trying to find it, this whole time.

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:         March: I don't know. Oh, sorry, uh, uh, Healy: I don't know, I'm going to ask. March: Yeah? Healy: What the fuck are you doing? March: Did you move it? Healy: Move what?

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:        March: The fucking gun! Healy: What gun?

Janine:        [sighs]

Keith:         March: The fucking ankle gun! Healy: Who told you I had ankle gun? March: You did, in the car, before we crashed! You were like, “oh, check out my ankle gun.” You know, you showed me your ankle gun.” Healy: Come on, are you serious? Are you fucking serious? March: Oh, shit. Healy: Yeah? March: Did I dream that? Healy: Yeah, you moron, you dreamt it. March: No, no, no, no. Yeah, you're right. That was —

Jack:        [chuckling]

Keith:        And then they, then uh, this is where Holly enters in.

Jack:        [chuckling]

Keith:        And like —

Jack:        It's so good.

Keith:        90 percent of that is like, patting and reaching up pant legs. [laughing] It is really, really funny.

Jack:        It's a beautiful moment. I have like, such a great memory of this moment, specifically, because Austin clocked this joke exactly one second before I did. Uh, Austin clocked what was happening when he falls, before he starts explaining it. And so we're watching this in the cinema, and Austin just burst out laughing next to me, one second before a realized what was going on —

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        And also burst out laughing. So I, I think very fondly of that, every time this dumb fucking moment shows up.

Janine:        [chuckling]

Keith:        Yeah, I had this great moment where, uh, I went, where in my head I was like, oh, he's going to get the ankle gun. And then going, “oh, there is no ankle gun.” And then onscreen, watching that play out. [laughing]

Jack:        [chuckling] So then Tally knocks herself out, and March puts a pillow under her head. And there's a sort of like a reaction shot from, from Healy, who's like, “what the fuck are you doing? Let's go.” They find Chet, and then... uh, we, we get some shots of the various —

Janine:        Oh —

Jack:        Oh, go on.

Janine:        I was going to say, we forgot the best part of the exchange where March is trying to be like, “no, Tally, you're so good.” Is, is, uh, Healy is trying to be like, he's trying to do the thing of like, “you've never killed a person, you don't want to kill anyone.” And she's like, “I've killed 3 people in Detroit.” And he's like, “okay — okay, cool. Uh, never mind.”

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        And, [chuckling] and March goes on, being like, “this isn't you, this isn't — you don't, you're not a killer.”

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        And Healy has to be like, “no, she just said she killed 3 people. Like, she can, she's probably fine with this, actually.”

Jack:        So good. This is great.

Keith:        Yeah. It's, here's a — Healy: She just said she killed 3 people. March: I know, but I'm saying deep down. Healy: Hey, look. One's a mistake, but by the time you get to three — March: Don't paint her with that brush! — I can't [laughing]

Jack:        It's really good, yeah. So, uh, we get, all of this is kind of intercut with shots of all the major [chuckling] surviving players, at, at car E3. Uh, including the assassins arriving. I think we even see either a grand duo of blueface and older guy begin to move, move among the crowd. It's a very like —

Keith:        Blueface is dead.

Janine:        Blueface is dead, yeah. You mean John Boy?

Jack:        Oh, right. The ghost of blueface...

Keith:        Older guy is there.

Jack:         John Boy and older guy.

Keith:        Yeah. The avatar.

Janine:        Keith David.

Keith:        Or, no, the arbiter, sorry the arbiter is there. Keith David played The Arbiter in Halo 2.

Jack:        Oh, for real?

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh... and then —

Janine:        Is he also Anderson in Mass Effect?

Keith:        He also is Anderson.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        The film starts playing.

Janine:        And also, not many people know this, he's also... Keith David in Saint's Row.

Keith:        [laughing] Yes, yeah.

Jack:        [laughing] He's, he's great in Saint's Row.

Keith:        Pres, President Keith David, right?

Janine:        Mm-hm. I think so.

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        So the film starts playing, and it is... we see like a bit of it, right? And it's just played like a gag. It's like the, it's the car, it's the car emissions equivalent of, “I've come to fix the television,” right?

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        Uh...

Janine:        Wait, it actually, doesn't it just start as like — sorry, you guys cut out for a second so you might have already said this and I apologize if so. But it just starts as like a normal promo, because the thing they've done is they've spliced it into the middle of another movie because —

Jack:        They spliced it!

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        That's, I think, why Tally was there, was like, they had already checked the film that was already in the projector, and they were like, “well, this isn't it.” But it's because they had spliced it. And when they find, uh, Chet in the dumpster, he says that he spliced it.

Jack:        [whispering] They spliced it in.

Janine:        Spliced into the middle of this normal promo, so it starts with the normal promo, and then cuts to... boobs.

Jack:        We get this great cut.

Keith:        No judgment.

Janine:        Mostly —

Jack:        And everybody —

Keith:        No judgment, but very convenient of John Boy to not kill one person.

Jack:        Sure..

Janine:        Yeah, this is what I'm saying. He's really, for a guy who was introduced to us as, “he's going to come to town and he's going to kill you, and he's going to kill your friend, he's going to kill your friend's family,” he just is like a mess, mostly.

Keith:        Well, they didn't say he was going to finesse it. They just said he was going to do it.

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        It was im — he shows up as a secret doctor, like, I don't know, it just, I don't know, whatever, it's fine. He could have killed Chet, that's all I'm saying.

Jack:        So... [chuckling] so, great, fantastic reaction shots of car E3 getting surprised by this. And then a... uh, it is revealed to us that Keith David has kidnapped Holly.

Janine:        He has not, in fact, gone to Michigan, as he promised.

Jack:        As he promised. Look! You made a Michigan promise.

Janine:        He promised. He took — did he take money? No, he didn't take money. He just went, right?

Jack:        Made a fucking Michigan promise, that's what he did.

Keith:        He offered to give money.

Janine:        Right, yeah.

Keith:        Yeah. I don't think he did.

Jack:        So then, uh, March is just, just a mess. A drunk, crying mess. Uh, and Holly is like, you know, “I knew.” But she's really scared, and she's like, “I knew this would happen,” and, and they're led up to the roof —

Keith:        My dad's an idiot.

Jack:        My dad's an idiot. They're led up to the roof. It's really quite sad, this, Ryan Gosling's performance in this moment —

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Is quite upsetting to watch.

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        Uh, he's just like blubbering, and apologizing, and, uh, and then he reveals that it was all an act, and he hits Keith David with a reel, with a film case?

Keith:        Yeah, smacks him right, right in the head with it, I think.

Jack:        Because they've got a copy at this point. The one copy. Or they pull it out of the —

Keith:        I think that, Tally had it —

Jack:        We have, they, they have a film reel at this point.

Keith:        She had it, and was like, was going to cut out the relevant part. Like she was going to cut up the film, because she had that knife that she threw at —

Jack:        Well there's another bit, it's showing on the screen. I don't understand [chuckling] what we have.

Keith:        Oh, I thought they showed it on the screen and then she took it out of the projector, is what I thought, and like, was working on it.

Jack:        Janine?

Janine:        Because she, yeah, because Tally does wake up, at one point. Like there's, when the guns and stuff start happening —

Jack:        Oh, she does. Yes.

Janine:        It like, wakes her up, so, I could, I think she like, takes it out, but then they like, get it. The whole thing, I think it's important to mention that there's that moment with Keith David and March. The reason March is like crying is because Keith David is like, really taking him to task for getting his daughter involved in this. Uh...

Jack:        Yes.

Janine:        Uh, and March is, is like playing along with it. Uh, in a big way. And then that's when he sort of turns it around. Uh, he's not just crying out of nowhere.

Jack:        Which leads to my favorite, uh, [chuckling] moment of violence in this movie.

Janine:        It's very good.

Jack:        Uh, it's such, it's so Bluff City, and I think about it all the time, when I think about how to frame interesting, uh, melee fights. Uh, where, offbalance Keith David falls from the very top of this roof. And as he falls, he grabs for March, and pulls him down with him. They're at the top of a fucking skyscraper. And we get this unbelievable, uh, uh, bird's-eye shot of both men falling, uh, separating by maybe a foot. Uh, and, at the same moment, Keith David hits the floor and just, you know, splatters completely, and March falls perfectly into a swimming pool. Uh, it's a great moment.

Janine:        And he, like, also, as he falls — so he falls perfectly into the swimming pool, and there is a splash of water, immediately as Keith David falls onto the cement, directly beside the swimming pool, and there is just a splash of blood.

Jack:        It's a gorgeous shot.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        I, it is so, it is so good. It is such a good moment of tension and release, and also a gag. And it's followed my maybe my favorite line delivery in the movie, which is Ryan Gosling getting out of [chuckling] the pool, and telling Healy that he thinks he might be immortal. Uh... [chuckles]

Janine:        Yes, I [chuckling] laughed really hard and loud at this.

Jack:        It's so good. “I think I'm immortal.”

Janine:        Uh, he says, he says, “I think I'm invincible. I don't think I can die.”

Keith:        [laughing]

Jack:        [laughing] It's such a good line. It's wonderful. Because also, sure. That's, that is consistent with what he has just experienced.

Janine:        He's fallen a lot, and mostly been okay.

Jack:        Uh... so fucking funny.

Keith:        Uh, so, just to, just to catch our, ourselves up really quick. The reason that we were confused about whether the movie was or was not playing, was, March, when he's pretending to be drunk and tells Holly to duck, does not yet have the film. It is still playing, and he just punches older guy.

Jack:        Sure. Okay.

Janine:        Right.

Jack:        Then the film gets out, and we have a full-scale action movie, “where is the Maguffin,” chase.

Keith:        Yeah. Lots of guns.

Jack:        With the, uh, reel —

Keith:        Turns out a lot of people in this [unintelligible] have guns.

Jack:        Detroit gunmen show up. Yeah. Oh yeah. There's that like, that really quick series of shots, right? Where like, everybody pulls guns?

Keith:        Yeah, yeah.

Jack:        Uh, the reel does that like, that like —

Janine:        Rolling on its edge.

Jack:        Rolling on its edge, who's got, who's got it.

Keith:        Mmm.

Janine:        There's —

Jack:        These shots I find exhausting as a viewer —

Keith:        Very inherently silly, despite the violence everywhere.

Janine:        And at this —

Keith:        And at this point I'm starting to think, maybe this car show's not on the up-and-up. [laughing]

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        [laughing] Also, uh, —

Jack:        What were you going to [chuckling] say?

Janine:        I was going to say that at this point, Healy and John Boy are having, you know, having their action movie one on one duel. And there is a, I really like that moment where, uh, because it's just, it's a good way to underscore how overarmed and, again, messy, John Boy is as, as a killer. Where like, they are fighting and —

Jack:        [chuckling]

Janine:        Healy like reaches into his jacket and grabs something, and like, he reaches into his jacket as they're fighting, pulls his hand back and there's just a grenade pin hanging off of it. And so he —

Jack:        God, it's so good.

Janine:        He like, runs, and John Boy has that moment of like, he is like, fighting to get his jacket off, and finally whips it off and throws it at some, at one of the like, goons, and it explodes.

Keith:        Yeah. And this is the second showing of —

Jack:        There's also like a —

Keith:        Those grenades, too. Because he used it to blow up a car, for almost no reason, like 5 minutes before this.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Like he just wanted to get everybody out of the room, so they didn't accidentally see something about the car industry in this experimental film.

Janine:        Right, yeah, yeah.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        There's a very good, like, Leslie Nielson sight gag with a rotating car, where someone takes cover behind a rotating car — a rotating car — a car on a fucking turntable, I don't know what I'm talking about.

Janine:        Oh, it's March, yeah. He like, he like dives behind the car and he's like, really pumping himself up, like, okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to stand up, I'm going to shoot at the guy —

Jack:        [laughing] The car is rotating.

Janine:        He does not realize the car is rotating, so the second he gets ready to stand up and shoot, it is pointing the other direction, and his back is to the person who is shooting him —

Jack:        [laughing] It's, it's just a —

Keith:        With a clear shot of, of him now.

Janine:        Yes.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        It's just a good fucking gag. So, then we get —

Keith:        Gags are tough. I want to give this movie credit for how many successful gags it has.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        A gag is one of the hardest things to base a movie on. And —

Jack:        It's something that Shane Black does really well in the other movies of his that I've seen. He has some really good just, sight gags, or sound gags. Uh, even in the recent Predator film, a film that I think is bad just across the board for a whole variety of reasons, there are some, there's some good very Shane Black moments where small set pieces happen. But, speaking of set pieces Shane Black is interested in, Janine, can you tell us about what's going on with, with Healy and John Boy?

Janine:        Uh, wait, what's going on with Healy and John Boy?

Jack:        The conclusion of this, of this scene.

Janine:        Oh, god.

Jack:        The Healy and John Boy conclusion.

Janine:        I don't remember the like, total specifics of it. But like, I totally have a note here of like, you know, Healy gets the upper hand, Healy can totally fucking kill this guy. And then Holly's like, “don't kill him.”

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        And I'm sitting there like — no, but, do it. Like —

Keith:        Yeah, right?

Janine:        Why should I feel sad about, this isn't a conflict for me.

Jack:         John Boy. Right.

Janine:        To kill John Boy.

Jack:         Holly has a fantastic line in this, uh, I feel the same way as you, Janine, I don't think that this is a super well-constructed scene, but I really love Holly's —

Keith:        Do we want the verbatim line?

Jack:        Line, uh, her threat?

Keith:        Yes, I have it here.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        Yeah, what, what does she say?

Keith:        Uh, it's, so it's, uh, —

Jack:        It's delivered with this intensity that we were talking about —

Keith:         Holly: Mr. Healy, what are you doing? Healy: Go away, Holly. Holly: Healy, stop, you don't have to kill him. John Boy tries fighting back, but fails. Holly: Mr. Healy, if you kill this man, I will never speak to you again. Healy turns and [unintelligible] Holly.

Jack:        I love this, I love this moment, because it is, it is the threat of a teenager who cares about someone.

Janine:        And it's like the emptiest, it's the emptiest threat. It's like —

Jack:        Yeah. Yeah.

Janine:        She, even as like, canny and good as she is —

Jack:        She doesn't know.

Janine:        She couldn't like, really — that would, that would work for like, maybe like a few months?

Keith:        Well, so that's usually an —

Jack:        And also like —

Keith:        Empty threat, but killing someone is a, is a serious thing, even if it's John Boy. So like —

Janine:        Yes, fine.

Keith:        If a teenager tells you I'll never talk to you again, if you don't let me go to this party —

Jack:        If you, if you take away my Xbox.

Keith:        If you take away my Xbox.

Janine:        [chuckling]

Keith:        Like, I'll never talk to you again if you choke out this villain in front of me, is —

Jack:        If you kill a man in front of me, yeah.

Janine:        But the other, the other thing here is, there is at this stage, no guarantee that they're ever going to have any dealings with each other ever again, anyway. Like —

Jack:        No, but I think they would like to, and I think that's the, that is where the —

Janine:        Sure. But it's —

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Emotional core of this scene is.

Janine:        I don't know, it just didn't work for me. It's a good, she's good. I really like Holly, but I also... I never really had a reason to understand why she is so against killing?

Keith:        I think it's that she's —

Jack:        Sure. She's a child.

Keith:        Yeah, uh-huh.

Janine:        Which is a weird thing to say about a child, but — [chuckling]

Keith:        She's just, she's like, she's smart and mature, especially for her age.

Janine:        She is really worldly. She is a 13-year-old who can drive, who has an alcoholic father, who has lost her mother, who sits alone in a field in the middle of the night, like, alone, in LA, in the 70s, reading, and she's —

Keith:        In an imaginary floor plan.

Janine:        And she's like —

Jack:        Oh yeah!

Janine:        “Hey, that man tried to kill me, but you shouldn't kill him.”

Keith:        Yeah, and that's the second time, too. A different guy that tried to kill her, also, she wanted to help. And it, I, like, there is, I think that there's like a believabliity in just the like, it's wrong to kill people, and I don't know, I don't have any reason to think that that's not 100 percent true.

Janine:        But they truly do not set her up as a character who would hold a belief like that. Like, there is something really idealistic and warm, and like, loving of the world and that belief. And she's not really presented in way that — like, that to me feels like a thing that, that fucking Jessica would say.

Jack:        Mmm.

Janine:        It does not feel like a thing that Holly would — it feels like a thing, like, this would be happening in front of Jessica. And Jessica would be like, “you can't kill that man.” And Holly would be like — he tried to kill us so many times.

Jack:        Killing is wrong.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        You know?

Keith:        Well, she also couldn't kill him when, like, her friend got thrown through the window because she wouldn't shoot him. She could have shot him.

Janine:        Yeah, but, I can, I can, I can see that more of just like, well, okay, I'm a child, maybe I shouldn't be the one killing people. But adults in my life who are trying to protect me, maybe that's a thing that they might need to do. That's like, it's like a different, I don't know. It just felt weird to me, it was just weird.

Jack:        Yeah. I don't —

Janine:        [unintelligible]

Jack:        I don't like this scene, I don't feel, I think I don't like this scene for the same reason you described, Janine, which is like, basically the stakes feel fucked.

Janine:        Yeah.

Jack:        And the, the, the, the relationship between these characters is not necessarily... [sighs] there are a series of kind of ultimatums going on here that I don't think work together.

Keith:        I think I have an idea about it.

Jack:        I think —

Keith:        Which is, like, the reason that it feels like it doesn't fit and also feels like it doesn't work even on its own, is... that, the movie, which does mostly a good job of like, having Holly be just a main character without any compromise, is now being used to characterize Healy, instead of acting in a way that's congruous with her as a character.

Janine:        Yeah. It, yeah, it characterizes him directly at the expense of her own established character.

Jack:        Ultimately, yeah, ultimately this will tell us about Healy, and it will not tell us about Holly. Where I like this scene, uh, or I suppose, I love Holly's threat, precisely because it is delivered with the same intensity that she delivers her tough-guy, “my dad knows a cop,” uh, lines.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, and because, that actress is doing a great line read on that specific line.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        And I think also I like how empty a threat it is. I like that in this moment, after everything that she has, you know, gone through in this scene, uh, the best that Holly can muster is, “I won't ever talk to you again.” There is a version of this that, where we have more scenes that develop this, where that threat holds more water, if it's speaking about... [sighs] her desire for stability and a father figure, or, or Healy's desire for some sort of emotional connection to somebody. I don't think any of that is earned in this scene. But I think you could get there, and still keep this line, and it would work better. Uh, anyway, John Boy gets punched out. He gets knocked out. He gets Hitman, Hitman knocked out. We, we never see him again. [chuckling] It's all fine. That's all good.

2:45:25.7        And now we're in the fucking home stretch, I think, I think we've got everything we need. So, the police show up. And, uh, we go to the DOJ to talk to Kim Basinger. And we have a, we have a... this is when the movie, you know, starts being interested in another thing, which is about the city of Detroit and the auto industry. [chuckles] Uh, because we have a monologue where Kim Basinger is basically like —

Janine:        She reveals herself to be a pawn in this scene, to me.

Jack:        Yeah. She kills this monologue, I love this performance.

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        Uh, she is like, she makes a, she makes a, a logical and emotive argument for what she has done.

Keith:        Right.

Jack:        And she basically says that, if you get rid of me, someone worse will come, all of this will come, come down.

Janine:        Yeah. Detroit never, because Detroit is, the America I love is made possible by the Big Three. Without, Detroit is America and without it, some... et cetera.

Keith:        Yeah. And I think this is a really good part, does a really good job of tying the, the this sort of like, essential, essentially goose chase together, which is like... the —

Jack:        [chuckling] The — can we just take a moment to, uh, appreciate the fact that the English language has decided that goose chase is an idiom? It's fucking great.

Keith:        [laughing]

Janine:        [laughs]

Keith:        Yeah, it's very — pretty funny, yeah.

Jack:        Love to think about chasing geese.

Keith:        [laughing]

Jack:        Sorry, please continue talking about the goose chase.

Keith:        Okay. Like, uh, so, uh, uh, like you've got, you've got the, uh, you've got her monologue, which is basically like, like, “I did what I had to do, to you know, save Detroit, because Detroit is like the canary in the coal mine for America.” And we, we all live in the present, now, and know about Detroit. Jack, you know about Detroit.

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        Uh, uh, which is — so, basically the argument is like, I'm, like, a United States employee, capitalist, and it's my job to make sure that America keeps working —

Jack:        [chuckling] Right.

Keith:        And capitalism keeps plugging away, and with the inherent irony of, that capitalism keeping plugging away is exactly what tears Detroit apart. Uh...

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        And, and that she is essentially right, that she is another in an endless series of people who will keep doing the exact same thing, which will in turn keep exacerbating the exact problem, uh, that, whether, like, I think this is sort of like a superficially, superficial idea, which is like, the people in charge of the country don't know that these, that they're causing the sickness and making it worse. But that's the idea of this movie, and it's a big-budget movie for a lot of people, so there's only so much you can say.

2:48:29.7        But it's like, in the same way that these two characters, uh, I guess three characters, with Holly, are on this, mired in this nonsense chase that is so much bigger than them, even the people that were the villains are mired in the same sort of muck of like, we're trying to do our job to save Detroit, but the job to save Detroit is also what gets Detroit killed?

Janine:        Yeah, uh... I would say, like, a good thing is, if people are interested in the... [sighs] the Detroit stuff in this movie is interesting to me, and I don't think they really like, they get into it in like the most broadest, in the most sort of —

Jack:        In the last 6 minutes. [chuckling]

Janine:        Yeah, in the last 6 minutes, and like they hint at it here and there, but it's very like, broad strokes. Uh, if someone actually wants to know about Detroit, like especially in this time period, in the like, 60s through the 90s, season 2 of Crime Town. One, first of all, if you are —

Jack:        Oh.

Janine:        If you're even here like, listening to this, and you like Bluff City stuff, season one of Crime Town is a must-listen. Season two of Crime Town — because season one of Crime Town is about Providence, Rhode Island, and like, Buddy Ceancy, and the organized crime set there. And it's like, really fucking good. It is, just — we, I think we've talked about it before on the podcast, even. It's just like, it's very good. Uh, but season two is about Detroit. Uh, and it is about sort of the fall of Detroit as the manufacturing jobs start drying up, and as a series of, of mayors and political figures try to reconcile the, uh, the white flight issue that Detroit was having, where basically, the like affluent and largely white population of the city was leaving to the suburbs and to, to other areas, leaving a largely, uh, black, I think mostly black population in the city itself, that, you know, their needs weren't being represented, and there were, you know, a lot of crime issues, and things like that.

2:50:40.7        It's really, really interesting. I would say it's less like, season one of Crime Town is like, fun, and, and season two is not.

Keith:        Yeah, Buddy Ceancy's a pretty fun... guy. [laughing]

Janine:        Yeah, that's the thing, Buddy Ceancy's story is a pretty much fun story, but the story of Detroit is a thing where like, those wounds are still kind of bleeding, uh, and it's a little harder to, to —

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        Find any jokeyness, entertaining whimsy in that. Uh, but if it's a thing that, that, you know, you watch The Nice Guys, and you're like, “I want to learn more about that,” then definitely listen, that's a really good podcast, and I highly recommend, uh, listening.

Keith:        I didn't know that they did a second season.

Janine:        Yeah, it's fairly recent.

Keith:        I only, I only ever heard about the first season because I live there. Uh...

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        And there, there was a [chuckling] billboard for it, once?

Jack:        [chuckling]

Keith:        Like, in the city, it was like, “listen to the podcast about this place.” Which, I guess if you're going to spend advertising dollars, that's the place to do it, right?

Janine:        Yeah.

Keith:        Like, listen to the podcast about the place you're living in. And [unintelligible]

Janine:        And I don't know if season two is wrapped or if it's close to wrapped, I forget. But, yeah. I've said my bit about that. I made a note in my notes —

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        To do so. So —

Keith:        Anyway, despite, despite that, I think Judith's, uh, it wasn't a monologue, but it was, it was sort of like her time to explain herself, uh, I think she delivered the lines really well. I don't think the lines are written bad. I do not like —

Janine:        It's fine, yeah.

Keith:        I don't like that the most, the best ideas that we get about the last act come from essentially the second to last scene, uh, of the movie. Uh...

Jack:        Yes. Yes.

Keith:        And that there's not, there's really not a lot of it. But I, I think it does play well with the like, being led by the nose, uh, sort of... style of the...

Jack:        It's a really, it's a really interesting moment, kind of structurally, because we've just come off the back of this, like, real shaggy dog action sequence that involved a fall from a building, and the John Boy not-death, and the chase and the grenades, and everything. And it's a kind of bold move to just be like, “now we're going to go talk to a prosecutor.”

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        And I think that, for the most part, just in terms of the pacing, they do pretty well in making it not feel like they've slammed on the brakes really hard.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        And I think a lot of that is, is Kim Basinger just, fucking selling the lines that she has been given.

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        In, in that moment. And, and I think that, after the really loose kind of dynamic camera work of the... car show sequence, that I, I feel like this scene, and I might be misremembering it, is characterized by these just hold, holding shots on characters' faces as they talk. Uh, and I feel like that grounds us in this scene, in a way that works really well.

Keith:        And I, I think there's something like, important about how this scene doesn't feel like it's slamming on the brakes, because like essentially what you're doing is having an agent of government admit to how —

Jack:        Yes.

Keith:        Severely out of hand the powers of government can get.

Jack:        Yeah.

Keith:        And, and then, the line that like, uh, what was it, she says, uh, “oh, boys, do you really think you got something done here? Do you have a clue what just happened?”

Jack:        [chuckling]

Keith:        “It was protocol. I followed protocol.” And it's like, this idea that like, this is, uh, if not business as usual —

Jack:        It's a fucking Austin Walker villain line, isn't it?

Janine:        [chuckles]

Keith:        Yeah, yeah, like, this was like, “I was just following the template. This is all laid, this is just written down. This is what we were —“

Janine:        That wasn't extracurricular, this is my job.

Keith:        Right. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, well whether or not, whether or not it was the justice department calling the shots, or it was the car companies calling the shots, like, there was money, and cooperation, and cover-ups, and murder, and a lot of murder, and that's like — and, and I think we have, I think as a, as a media-consuming unit, people have trouble, uh, taking these sorts of things more seriously. Like, taking the lesson — like, and even writing, like writing it, too. Like I think that a lot of movies will also do this sort of thing, where like, oh, it turns out that the bad guy was the government. And it just never really gets taken seriously. And it's, it's, I'm glad that you have this whole action sequence, followed by this sequence that feels severe. And it is severe, because it's about how the government will kill people. Uh, and as a matter of course, also. Not just by accident, but as part of the written rules.

Jack:        I'm curious — you have the script in front of you, Keith.

Keith:        I do.

Jack:        How do they, uh, end this scene?

Keith:        [clears throat] Uh, starting here with, uh, —

Jack:        Just like the last moment. Like, how do we leave —

Keith:        The last moment? Uh...

Jack:        In what, in what mood are we leaving this scene?

Keith:        Uh... it's all right for you to fail your daughter? Judith: Detroit had her killed. March: I think I read about that. The whole city got together, took a vote. Big turnout. Judith: I wanted her safe. That's why I hired you two. March: You're going to jail, Mrs. Kuttner. Judith: I might be going to jail, but it won't make a difference. You two, you can't take Detroit down. And if I'm not there to take care of it, someone else will. March: Okay. Well, we shall see. And then, jump, jump —

Jack:        Oh, damn. Okay, so they don't end on a joke.

Keith:        No, they do not end on a joke.

Jack:        We just leave that scene with basically her line.

Janine:        They kind of trail it off later, though, right? Like, there's a line about, like, uh, I want to say there's, there's a thing where he's like, “well, we'll all be driving electric cars from Japan in 4 years anyways, so...”

Jack:        Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Keith:        Yeah, this is —

Jack:        This is the next scene, right?

Janine:        It doesn't matter. Yeah.

Keith:        This is, it's, it's Healy being, uh, depressed, and March being essentially hopeful. I've got, uh, and it's, kind of like a, almost, they're trying to play it as a flip of, of their, uh, their opinions. He says like, you're right, or something. Okay, they're going to — this is Healy: They're going to let them off clean, the car companies Scott-free. Not enough evidence of collusion. March: I heard. Healy: The sun went up, the sun went down, nothing changes. Just like you side. March: Look, they got away with it, big surprise, you know? People are stupid, but they're not that stupid. The point is, 5 years tops, we're all driving electric cars from Japan anyway, mark my words, look at this. Grabs his tie — oh, this is a joke. That's a joke. Uh... uh, there was one more relevant line, but I can't find it. Uh... yeah, whatever.

Janine:        I, I don't think characterizing March is hopeful there is correct. I would say more like —

Keith:        Less cynical.

Janine:        Ambivalent. Or like —

Keith:        I think, well, I think his point is essentially like —

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:        Like, “they might not have been convicted, but people are looking at what happened, and they hate it.” Which I think is sort of true, you but also naively optimistic. But also right. Like, people don't like big businesses, and they don't like the government. And didn't change, that doesn't change anything, but it is, like, a, like, a fact of life that there's not a lot of people going around loving GM.

Janine:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        This scene, this very final scene of the movie, where they're at this kind of tiki bar, uh, uh, does two things. One, we get a title drop, at the very end of the movie. [chuckling] Where it's revealed that Holland and, uh, and Healy are going into business together, under a detective company called The Nice Guys. And also, it is revealed that, uh, this is taking place, or at least this scene is taking place, during the holiday season, which is a Shane Black trademark. Shane Black has never made a movie that does not feature a substantial chunk of it —

Janine:        Ah.

Jack:        During the holidays. Uh...

Janine:        There's, there's also a thing where they're looking at the ad for their agency, and March apologizes that the illustration makes Healy look, quote, “Philippino or Mexican.”

Jack:        Ugh... cool.

Janine:        Of which he doesn't really, like, I, I don't see it. I didn't see —

Jack:        He doesn't, right? Does he?

Janine:        Because it just looks like a picture of fucking... Russell Crowe. I, I — [chuckling]

Jack:        Yeah. Which, and that's kind of like, the gag — the gag we leave the movie on, right? Which is like —

Janine:        Yeah, [chuckling] it's like, it's a very weak note, frankly.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        It's a weak note.

Jack:        Look, yeah, look — you got some good gags in this movie, Shane. I'm into some of the stuff you got going here. That bit where, uh, slightly earlier, March says, “fuck,” and the old lady hears and goes, “oh!”

Keith:        Oh, that was, that was very funny.

Jack:        That's a very good joke.

Janine:        She, yeah, she like, she responds in a really projected, really good way.

Jack:        It's —

Keith:        Yeah.

Jack:        It's fantastic.

Janine:        She might be related to [unintelligible]

Keith:        Unfortunately they jump-cut to another shot of her, and she's not —

Jack:        To, to whom?

Keith:        Emoting like that, which is a little bit of a bummer. But, you know, it's tough to make a movie.

Jack:        Uh... but, yeah, if you're gout end a movie on a joke where it's like, “I'm sorry I made you look Philippino or Mexican,” it's like... Shane. Shane.

Janine:        Yeah... [sighs]

Keith:        Uh, to be fair they have one more joke.

Jack:        Just, write one more joke, Shane.

Keith:        They did end on one more joke. Which was, that they have to investigate whether or not this woman's husband is sleeping with Linda Carter, uh, but they have to hurry up with the case, because the guy is 82.

Jack:        That's like an average joke!

Keith:        It's a very average joke.

Jack:        You've done way funnier jokes, Shane. Shane — write down 10 jokes, cut 8 of them... and then replace, what — the two you had!

Keith:        Yeah. Honestly —

Janine:        Those last two jokes, so, the end of this movie, it almost sets, sets — it's so close to setting things up like, “oh, wow, what if they did a sequel to The Nice Guys.” But then those last two jokes are like, “you don't want a sequel. You don't want a sequel for this.”

Keith:        Honestly —

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        Just leave it.

Jack:        We're just going to continue with more of these jokes.

Keith:        Honestly the, uh, like, they, like, literally, “I'm sorry you look Philippino,” if they had cut that line and everything after it, it would have been a really totally fine ending. They apologize — they're both sort of upset that some people were hurt and died, and then, uh, March says, “I'm saying they died quickly, though, so I don't think they got hurt. Look at this.” And then he shows the caricature, and it could have just been that. [chuckling] like, it could have just ended with them being like, “here's the thing, look at us. It's The Nice Guys.” And then over.

3:01:05.4        

Jack:        And just do like one — [sighs] but I can see, I can see how the beat in that script works, right? Where it's like, that is basically what they wanted to do. But then they wanted a joke as they hold up the picture, and they wrote a bad joke [chuckling], and then buoyed with the confidence of their bad joke, they wrote another one.

Janine:        Yeah...

Jack:        [laughing] And then the movie ended. Uh, do we get a... I'm thinking about, so this movie begins, like the literal first thing you see, I really, it's one of my favorite things, like a fake, uh, documentaries, is we have a custom, uh, I, uh, studio logo, and we have a custom soundtrack over the studio logo. We get like a cool 70s version of whoever the fuck is distributing this movie, uh, and we get like a 70s funk soundtrack. Uh, I'm curious, do we end on some neat, custom credits? Like some fucking 70s shit?

Keith:        You mean us, right now?

Jack:        I don't remember.

Keith:        Do we —

Janine:        I wasn't like —

Jack:        No, no — does the movie end on like —

Keith:        Oh, I didn't notice, because I —

Jack:        Fun 70s credits?

Janine:        I think they were in like, a color, but I... you know, I, I feel like it was like a color and a font thing, because I kept them on for a bit, and then I was like, I was waiting to see if there was something at the end, because you never know. Uh...

Jack:        Yeah, you never know. Captain America might show up. [chuckling]

Janine:        They weren't like, standard-ass movie credits, they were like, special to a degree, but to me, they were special in that like, super watered-down way where it's like —

Jack:        [chuckling] Sure.

Janine:        I know, clearly, clearly there was, clearly there was some design —

Jack:        Right.

Janine:        And deliberacy here, but also I don't care. Like, it doesn't do anything to make me go, damn.

Keith:        Uh, [unintelligible] okay.

Jack:        As opposed to —

Janine:        The 70s!

Jack:        [chuckling] Yeah.

Keith:        So the credits have like a pink, accented font, where it's like half in pink and half in white. And that's kind of it. And there's the song.

Jack:        Sure.

Keith:        That's, uh, that's it.

Janine:        They were fine.

Jack:        As opposed to the, uh, Spiderverse credit sequence, which is basically a movie in and of itself in a completely different art style, that you just get to experience for 7 minutes.

Keith:        Oh, that sounds fun. I haven't seen that. I might.

Jack:         Uh, Spiderverse is amazing, and it's —

Keith:        I've heard it's really good.

Janine:        I really want to see it. Desperately.

Keith:        I haven't seen a superhero movie in long enough —

Jack:        Its end — no, I won't —

Keith:        Where if I break my streak I won't be like, “I said I wasn't, I said I was done being disappointed.” And also I heard it was great, so —

Jack:        You will have never seen a superhero movie like this.

Keith:        Yeah, that's what I heard.

Jack:        It's fucking wild, Keith.

Keith:        I'm excited to see it.

Jack:        Uh, do we have anything we want to say about this movie before we wrap up?

Keith:        It was, if, you know, it was a fun movie to watch. And I did like it.

Janine:        Yeah. Uh...

Jack:        It was a fun movie, it has problems —

Keith:        Like every movie.

Jack:        Some of which are more severe than others.

Keith:        Different, every movie has different problems, and this one has a very specific kind of problem.

Janine:        I will say that, like, for a lot of what it did, like it obviously did things that frustrated me, but it was entertaining in the way that, you know, it was entertaining in a way that I found interesting, and it was entertaining in a way that like, a big part of, I don't watch a lot of movies these days. Like, I watch more documentaries than I watch movies. I just, like, I one, don't like movie theaters, so when I watch a movie, it's at home, and I have to like, be in a real particular mood to watch a fictional movie. Uh, and a big part of that is because, I get really, really exhausted, this is the Pride and Prejudice point again, of like, I get really exhausted, just like, “okay, the thing that's going to happen is, the little girl is going to get kidnapped, and they're going to spend the rest of the movie kind of like, casing the guy who kidnapped the little girl —

Jack:        Right. Right.

3:04:30.8        

Janine:        And then she'll like, bite his hand at some point or whatever and like, get free of it, and then it'll be fine or whatever. Uh, I get so tired of that shit, of just those, those story bits, where you just expect some variation of this thing to happen. Like I said with the Pride and Prejudice example. Jane gets sick, you expect Jane to die because it is a book from the early 19th century or whatever —

Jack:        [chuckling]

Janine:        And that's just a thing that happens, and it's... and there's going to be all this — the other thing that I had expected when I was reading that book was, there would be a lot of deliberate, uh, withholding of communication. A lot of like, things that are left unsaid, and —

Jack:        Oh, I hate that.

Janine:        I fucking hate manufactured miscommunication. It is my number one thing —

Jack:        It's the worst!

Janine:        That I fucking hate in anything.

Jack:        Because I'm watching it and I'm just like —

Janine:        Just talk!

Jack:        And just like, sort it out! Yeah!

Janine:        Just talk.

Jack:        [wheezes]

Janine:        Unless you are actual enemies who refuse to talk to each other.

Jack:        Or you can't.

Janine:        It's like, all these situations where people are still polite, and they are still friends, and they are in the same room together.

Jack:        Ugh...

Janine:        And they're just secretly like, “well, I guess he thinks I'm a terrible person who killed someone.” Uh...

Jack:        Oh, god, fucking Tangled.

Janine:        So — [laughing]

Jack:         Tangled does this halfway through and it kills any enjoyment —

Keith:        Wait, sorry, I think I missed —

Janine:        Oh, that's [unintelligible]

Jack:        I have of that movie.

Keith:        What is this thing that, that happens?

Jack:        That we both hate? [chuckling]

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        When you get a character, when you get two characters who each have like, one half of a puzzle, and they refuse to say the one word they would need to say to each other to put that puzzle together. Uh, —

Keith:        Got it.

Janine:        It's, it's like, “oh, you must hate me because of this, so I'm just going to go on assuming that for 200 pages.” Uh...

Keith:        Oh, yeah, I totally, yeah, I totally know what you're talking about. It sucks.

Janine:        You know, I, I want the conflict to not be because —

Jack:        Ugh.

Janine:        Characters aren't using enough words between each other.

Jack:        Right!

Janine:        I want the conflict to be an actual conflict. So I appreciate that this movie —

Keith:        Yeah, yeah. And like, when there's a fight happening because —

Janine:        Doesn't —

Keith:        They're both misunderstanding —

Janine:        Yeah. Yes.

Keith:        And they're just not saying, they're not being specific enough.

Janine:        Yeah. [chuckling] So I, I appreciate —

Keith:        Which never happens, by the way, in any real fight, people are so explicit about what's happening.

Janine:        [laughing] But, you know what I, so you know what I mean. Like, it's, I appreciate that this movie didn't do a lot of this shit that like, makes a lot of movies, especially, uh, action movies, especially things that are sort of cribbing on noir and cribbing on like, exploitation-era stuff, they fall into those traps so easily. And I really appreciate whenever anything pulls my along, and I expect, “okay, this is the trap that they're setting up,” and then it doesn't actually do that. Uh, and Nice Guys is good for that, for the most part, I think. It manages to be like, not like full-on surprising, but it has like, very satisfying peaks, I guess.

3:07:17.8        

Jack:        Yeah. Yeah. I think that's pretty much, I think that's pretty much where I stand on it. I would say that, if you liked this movie, listeners, and you want to say basically the same movie, if you want to see —

Janine:        [laughs]

Jack:        You know in the Sims, when you can say randomized things but keep the hat? Oh, did we just lose someone? Oop. Who's back?

Keith:        Hi, it's, it's me. I, I —

Jack:        It's Keith.

Keith:        I left and came back. I'm getting a weird, like, noise happening through Discord. Pretty sure it's just through Discord.

Jack:        Huh.

Keith:        It stopped when I left, so I think it's Discord.

Jack:        Okay. So, you know in the Sims, when you can be like, randomize everything except hats? [chuckling]

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        Or randomize everything except shoes or something?

Janine:        [laughing] Yeah.

Jack:        And I, you promise you, I do not mean this pejoratively. I like The Nice Guys enough that I am interested in seeing what happens if you run the procedural generator again with the same parameters. Uh, that film is called Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It stars Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer. I do not want to recommend it wholeheartedly, in the same way I would not recommend The Nice Guys. There's some kind of dicey stuff in that movie that I do not think they do well.

3:08:21.9        But, if you're interested in this kind of cadence of dialogue, this kind of way, uh, that detective stories are just like these big shaggy dog things, uh, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one to check out. I would also recommend, uh, the John Cusack film, Gross Point Blank, which is about John Cusack as I, uh, —

Keith:        As Hitman John Cusack.

Jack:        He's a hit man who is, uh, sent to do a hit in the same town as where his high school reunion is happening, and he is talked by his therapist into attending the high school reunion, while also planning the hit. And it is exactly as absurd and funny and kind of like, quietly, uh, quietly brilliant, uh, as that premise makes it sound like it isn't? Uh...

Keith:        Very courageous, I think triple pun in the title? Really brave triple pun, I think.

Jack:        Yes. It's a brave triple pun. It also features John Cusack doing the single most impressive high-kick I have ever seen.

Janine:        [chuckles]

Jack:        Uh, that's, that's, that's about all I have to say.

Janine:        If you like that, you might also like the Whittleton Creek level of Hitman 2. Now in stores.

3:09:29.5        

Jack:        Janine, do you have any connection to the fucking [chuckling] Whittleton Creek level in Hitman 2?

Janine:        I have some connections to the — I like it a lot, uh, and it's good? And I like it. [chuckling]

Jack:        [laughing]

Janine:        And I did some writing in it. It's good.

Jack:        There's a character in that who talks about a bullet, he talks about a bullet journal.

Janine:        Oh, that's weird [chuckling]

Jack:        That's really weird —

Keith:        [laughing]

Jack:        Because you also like bullet journals.

Janine:        That's wild.

Jack:        Don't you, Janine?

Janine:        Well, actually, I don't keep a bullet journal. I find the system kind of cumbersome. Uh... [chuckling]

Jack:        You know, I think I heard a character express a similar opinion [chuckling] in Hitman 2's level —

Janine:        [laughing]

Jack:        [laughing] Whittleton Creek. [laughing] Oh god.

Keith:        My final thoughts on the movie, uh, I genuinely think that the amount of, uh, sight gags that work is impressive. It's really hard to do a sight gag. It's like food — comedy is like food, where the more basic it is, the easier it is to tell when something sucks. That's why people hate puns.

Jack:        [laughing]

Keith:        Uh, because puns is like the sugar of comedy, and if you taste sugar and it tastes wrong, you know immediately. But if something, you know, like a cake, it there's something wrong, it's like, “is it because it's too, is there too much salt in this? What is it that's off in a cake?” But in a, in a pun or in a sight gag, stuff like that, you know right away when it's not working, uh, and so it's hard to do. And there's not many, there's not many comedies, especially action comedies, that can do sight gags. Not just well, like, at all.

3:11:02.4        Like, a lot of movies that otherwise would be pretty good, are just littered with terrible physical humor.

Jack:        And this movie does all right.

Keith:        This movie does all right. Nice job. It should be called Nice Physical Comedy Guys.

Jack:        [chuckling]

Keith:        [laughing]

Janine:        [chuckling]

Jack:        [laughing] And on that note... let's fucking wrap this up. I'm Jack de Quidt. You can find me on Twitter at @notquitereal, and you can find any music featured on the show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com. I'm live right now in Los Angeles, the city where that movie took place. Who else was here? [chuckling]

Janine:        Uh, I'm Janine Hawkins. I'm @bleatingheart on Twitter.

Keith:        Uh, my name is Keith J. Carberry. You can find me on Twitter at @keithjcarberry. You can find the let'splays that I do at YouTube.com/runbutton, and since you're listening to this on at Friends at the Table Patreon, you can also go to the Runbutton Patreon, at contentburger.biz.

3:12:03.8        

Jack:        Thank you so much for supporting us on Patreon to let us do this.

Janine:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        When we started doing Friends at the Table 3 years ago, I don't think any of us thought we'd sit down and talk about The Nice Guys for 4 hours in a professional context.

Janine:        I would have never seen this movie. I would have never even...

Jack:        Yeah.

Janine:        Looked at it.

Jack:        Uh, and in a very real sense, it is your support that enables us to do stuff like this. Uh, I haven't heard any of the other podcasts yet that people are making about these movies, but I'm really excited to.

Keith:        I think we might have been the first ones to record.

Jack:        That's because we're the best.

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        We're very proactive.

Keith:        Mm-hm.

Jack:        [chuckling] We're so proactive. Should we do a clap?

Keith:        Yeah.

Janine:        We should.

Jack:        Okay. Time.is.

Keith:        I'm glad we only had one blue screen in there.

Janine:        [chuckling] Ugh...

Jack:        Yeah, only the one. Should we do, uh...

Keith:        Uh, we could do 5 past?

Jack:        Yeah, 5 past, in seconds.

Janine:        Sure. [claps]

Jack:        How's that?

Keith:        It sounded all right.

Janine:        Yeah, it's fine.

Jack:        I mean, I'm happy with it.