00:00:00
Dan
Host
On this episode we discuss—Hillbilly Elegy!
00:00:04
Stuart
Host
Which is like a Hellbilly elegy, without all them dang Draculas!
00:00:08
Music
Music
Light, up-tempo, electric guitar with synth instruments.
00:00:35
Dan
Host
Hey, and welcome to The Flop House! I’m Dan McCoy.
00:00:37
Stuart
Host
Hey! I’m Stuart Wellington!
00:00:38
Elliott
Host
I’m Elliott Kalan!
00:00:41
Dan
Host
And yeah. This is a show—
[Multiple people laugh.]
00:00:43
Elliott
Host
Dan, did you—did I take you by surprise?
00:00:45
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: By not going on further?
Dan: Well usually you say you’re Elliott Kalan—
00:00:48
Dan
Host
—and then you kinda just ramble on about some nonsense for a
while? So it did take me by surprise that you stopped after your
name. [Through laughter] I have to be honest.
[Stuart laughs.]
00:00:56
Elliott
Host
Oh, okay. I thought I’d do something different this time! Note to self:
never do that again! Ramble on in the future.
[Dan laughs.]
Just be a regular Led Zepp and ramble on.
00:01:03
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: Yeah, I think Elliott was trying to—
Dan: This is a pod—hm.
00:01:06
Stuart
Host
Before we started recording—or maybe while we were recording—
Elliott was trying to steer this into more of a, like a… a
relationship/sexual wellness podcast direction? And Dan said, “No
sir. Time to get to the meat of what we’re supposed to do here. The
meat being movie talk.”
00:01:21
Elliott
Host
So I had to stop myself after my name from saying anything more
than that. ‘Cause I knew it would go in a direction Dan didn’t want.
Much like how—when I was on Jeopardy! recently—a little brag—I
was talking about my grandma. And I had to stop myself from
saying her address out loud?
[Multiple people laugh.]
Because—which I realized I was about to say after I named her?
And I was like, “No, she doesn’t need this information out there.”
00:01:40
Dan
Host
Now why is that— [Laughs.] Why is that second nature to just tag—
00:01:46
Elliott
Host
Well I was saying “My grandmother, Barbara Bruschel of New
York—” And I was about to say “Barbara Bruschel of—” And then
her address as if I was announcing like a letter that I’d got on a
radio show?
00:01:57
Stuart
Host
Oh, right. Or if you were ordering something through like Domino’s
Pizza Tracker.
00:02:00
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: Exactly. Yes. Which I do—
Stuart: For your grandma. Not just—
00:02:02
Elliott
Host
Which I do over the phone constantly.
[Multiple people laugh.]
I’m constantly sending my grandma pizzas.
[All laugh. Dan at length.]
00:02:11
Dan
Host
And then screenshots of the tracker to let her know.
[Elliott laughs.]
00:02:13
Elliott
Host
Yeah. But I have to—she doesn’t use computers or a phone.
Actually, she uses both. So I have to mail her photographs of what
the tracker looks like so the tracker gets to her long after the pizza
does. And living in Manhattan as she does, there’s no source for
pizza other than Domino’s.
00:02:28
Dan
Host
And the problem then is like—because of the lag, she thinks
another pizza is coming. So then you have to—
00:02:34
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: —order another pizza and the cycle continues.
Elliott: Which means—yeah. I’ve gotta order another one. Exactly.
00:02:39
Elliott
Host
It’s a delicious cycle, is what we call it.
[Dan laughs.]
00:02:41
Stuart
Host
And in a way you could make a cycle out of pizza pies ‘cause
they’re kinda like wheels, right?
[Dan laughs.]
Unless they’re Detroit style.
00:02:47
Elliott
Host
I mean, you’re not gonna get much traction.
00:02:48
Dan
Host
[Through laughter] Yeah. I think they’re not load-bearing.
[All laugh.]
00:02:51
Stuart
Host
Depends on the pizza!
00:02:52
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: That’s not a support pizza.
Dan: You’re just gonna find yourself collapsed in a pile of metal and
pizza. [Laughs.]
00:02:58
Elliott
Host
I mean, sounds wonderful to me. Except maybe the metal part.
That’s kinda what happened in Star Wars when they went into that
Death Star trash compactor. They were in like kind of a pile of metal
and pizza, right?
00:03:09
Stuart
Host
Yeah. I feel like that’s what the designer notes were from George
Lucas. Was that I think the original script says they fall into a big
puddle of pizza.
00:03:17
Elliott
Host
Yeah, yeah. But he had to explain that he meant “space pizza” and
so Ralph McQuarrie had to do a bunch of concept paintings of what
pizza would look like in outer space. And so by the time they got to
the prequels, George Lucas just said, “Space Diner.” And they were
just like, “Make it look like a ‘50s diner. Like why not? Have an alien
wearing a little paper hat and an apron. Why not.”
00:03:34
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: “Just go for it.”
Stuart: And he has a moustache!
00:03:36
Elliott
Host
“It’s the perfect form.” Does he have a moustache?
00:03:38
Elliott
Host
Yeah! Dexter Jetster has a moustache, yeah.
[Elliott laughs.]
00:03:41
Elliott
Host
[Through laughter] Dexter Jetster!
00:03:43
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Is he the one with multiple arms, too? Or is—okay.
Stuart: He has multiple arms.
Elliott: Yes. Yeah.
00:03:47
Elliott
Host
So he can flip multiple hamburgers. Space burgers, they call ‘em.
00:03:52
Stuart
Host
I’m glad that space replaces “ham” in that word? [Laughs.]
[Dan laughs.]
00:03:55
Elliott
Host
Yeah. It’s a burger made out of space. And he flips ‘em with a
spatula, which is a portmanteau of “space” and “spatula.”
[Multiple people laugh.]
00:04:02
Dan
Host
“Space” and “atula.” So—we watch—we—look. Here’s the thing.
We’re a podcast. You know that part.
[Elliott laughs.]
But maybe you don’t know—if you haven’t listened before—we
watch a bad movie and then we talk about it. And in this instance,
we watched Hillbilly Elegy, the latest big movie to be released on
Netflix. Was it gonna be a theatrical before all this pandemic?
00:04:30
Elliott
Host
I have to assume so. I have to assume that the only reason that a
movie like this gets made is to be eligible for the Academy Awards,
so I have to assume. And it’s a Ron Howard-directed. Big stars.
Glenn Close. Amy Adams. Whoever plays J.D., the main character.
I have to assume it was meant to be originally for the theatres. Like
the way Roma was a Netflix movie but it was in the theatres.
00:04:52
Dan
Host
Yeah. It’s a movie that uh… came out a little ways back. It had a
little controversy ‘cause the book it’s based on had a lot of political
content that I can’t speak to ‘cause I didn’t read the book. But the
movie is kind of remarkable for how [through laughter] apolitical it is,
to the degree that it somehow manages to say less than nothing, I
think. By the—
[Elliott laughs.]
[Through laughter] By the end.
00:05:21
Elliott
Host
It’s certainly a movie where, by the end of it, you’re like, “Why was
that?”
00:05:24
Dan
Host
Mm-hm.
00:05:25
Stuart
Host
Yeah.
00:05:26
Elliott
Host
Like, why did this—what was the driving force behind making this
other than that it’s based on a bestselling book and therefore is
money?
00:05:31
Stuart
Host
Also, considering that it’s a movie that takes place over, y’know, a
number of different years and it jumps around in time. And at
multiple points characters are like watching the news? They make a
lot of effort to not actually say anything about the political figures in
the news. [Laughs.]
00:05:47
Elliott
Host
No. I mean, we’ll get to the point where—one of the characters
wants to watch political news and is shut down because his
grandma wants to watch Terminator 2. So—
00:05:55
Stuart
Host
Which—in her defense—a movie she has seen a hundred times. I
mean, you could watch it a hundred more times. It’s Terminator 2.
00:06:03
Dan
Host
There was an early—
00:06:04
Elliott
Host
A movie—as which we’ll find—informs her life philosophy.
[Stuart laughs.]
So the movie has more to say about Terminator 2 than it does
about America, really. [Laughs.]
00:06:12
Dan
Host
There is an early scene where our lead, as a child, wants to watch
Al Gore. And Amy Adams turns the TV off. And I don’t know any
child [through laughter] who’s ever said, “No, no, give me more Al
Gore.”
00:06:26
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: If only. If only.
Dan: Unless it’s in one of those Futurama appearances, perhaps. I
dunno. But.
00:06:31
Elliott
Host
I will say—when I was a kid, I thought it was Alf Gore. And I was
like, “Yeah, let’s finally see Alf get bloody! Like let’s see what Alf
does when he’s let loose and unleashed like that movie with Jet Li
where he had the leash on him—"
00:06:41
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: “—and then the leash gets taken off of him.”
Stuart: Uh-huh. Danny the Dog? Yeah.
00:06:43
Elliott
Host
I don’t remember what it’s called. Yeah.
00:06:44
Dan
Host
We should probably just get into the specifics of the movie soon.
00:06:47
Elliott
Host
Oh, sure. Okay. Let’s talk about it. So guys? I’m driving the buggy
on this one. I’m gonna mention first off, there’s a lot of arguing and
yelling in this movie. A special kind of yelling—Oscar-style yelling.
The kind of yelling that looks really good in the clip that they play
when they announce your name at the Oscars. So I’m gonna be
doing a running tally—as best as I can—of those Oscar-yelling
scenes. We begin. It’s 1997. That’s right—the best time to be alive.
Star Wars prequels were just a couple years off. You could go see
Star Wars Special Edition in the theatres. Jurassic Park was four
years old and still going strong in the hearts of America’s youth, and
other stuff was probably happening too!
00:07:27
Stuart
Host
They—I hate to throw in an IMDB goofs here? But when they were
in 1997, they didn’t have any kind of an establishing shot that
indicated that me, Stuart Wellington, was 17 years old at the time. I
feel like it would’ve been a better way of establishing exactly what
year they were in. Stuart Wellington, probably wearing a t-shirt that
says, like, “KMFDM” on it or something.
00:07:50
Elliott
Host
And what would you be doing in this establishing scene?
00:07:52
Stuart
Host
Oh man. I was 17, so I was probably seated.
[All laugh.]
00:07:58
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: I spent a lot of that year on my butt.
Elliott: I—yeah—I— [Laughs.]
00:08:02
Elliott
Host
I forgot that was the sitting portion of your life. Yeah.
00:08:04
Stuart
Host
So I was probably seated and I’m guessing I was rifling through a
stack of Reptiles—or Reptiles magazines or—
00:08:14
Dan
Host
Oh, okay. The “magazines” was important.
[All laugh.]
00:08:17
Elliott
Host
[Through laughter] Not a stack of lizards and turtles. Yeah. Which
would be appropriate, because the movie begins—we’re introduced
by our narrator, J.D.. He’s a nice young boy. So nice he rescues a
turtle from the road in Jackson, Kentucky. Which you think at first is
where he lives, but it’s not. It’s a world of beautiful nature and noble
poor, white folk who either bully J.D. or come in and beat up the
bullies who are bullying J.D..
00:08:39
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: It’s a layer cake.
Dan: Now can I say this is one of the—
00:08:40
Dan
Host
Sorry, I cut you off. But this is one of the many digressions in the
film that I’m like, I don’t know why this is in the movie. This movie
puts in a lot of stuff where you’re like, I don’t know why this is in the
movie. And this is the first of it. ‘Cause it’s like, okay. He makes a
point of saying he spent most of his life somewhere else. Nothing is
particularly learned about him in this first scene. And they also
make Kentucky and Ohio look like two vastly different universes
when they are geographically close. [Laughs.] So.
00:09:14
Elliott
Host
Yeah. So I think—but I think emotionally they’re supposed to be two
different universes. In Kentucky you live out in the woods and family
is the most important thing and you don’t have to worry about
bullies because somebody’s uncle is gonna come by and beat that
bully up. But his family—he just spends the summers there. And
that’s where his family is originally from. His grandparents left and
went to Ohio. That’s right—they’re part of the Kentucky Diaspora
that has spread all throughout the United States but maintains that
rich ethnic culture of Kentucky no matter where they go. And
someday they’ll be able to return to the homeland, I assume. He
lives in Ohio with his mom, Amy Adams; his sister, and his Mamaw,
Glenn Close. That’s his grandma, for anyone who’s not from
Kentucky. So technically since they live in Ohio they’re not hillbillies
but suburbillies. Which are—y’know, it’s where hillbillies go when
they can no longer live in the hills. Where do they live in Ohio? It
was a bustling mill town when Mamaw and Papaw moved to Ohio in
the ‘30s or ‘40s. I wasn’t quite certain. But now? It’s your classic
American shuttered main street. And what J.D. says in the narration
is—his family? What they were missing? Was hope. Cut to 2011!
J.D. seems to have found his hope ‘cause he’s working his way
through Yale Law School! But if he can’t get a paid summer
internship, he cannot afford to stay in school. He goes to a fancy
meet-and-greet with potential law firm employers—
[Someone sighs.]
—but he cannot get a handle on how much silverware there is at his
place sitting! There’s too many forks! There’s too many forks,
dammit!
[Stuart laughs.]
Too many forks! Also he has trouble ordering wine. But mainly it’s
the fork things, which drives him so confused that he has to call his
girlfriend to ask her, “How do I use the forks?” Dan, you look like
you have something to say on the subject of forks?
00:10:49
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: No, I mean, like—yes.
Elliott: Or the maximum amount thereof.
00:10:52
Dan
Host
There’s a lot of silverware that he is confused by, and he is
confused by the fact that there’s more than one type of wine
[through laughter] at this place. And the thing—like, look. At this
point he has been to Yale Law School, but he’s also just a human
that exists in the world.
00:11:08
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Like a very—
Stuart: He works in a restaurant!
00:11:11
Dan
Host
The very existence—
[Elliott laughs.]
—of different types of silverware for stuff shouldn’t baffle him. Now I
looked—y’know, this is one of the times that I looked. I’m like,
“Okay, is this in the book?” Turns out this is in the book. But I still
don’t believe it actually happened. [Through laughter] Because it is
like he is—I mean, at least not to this degree. It is as if he is an
alien who has arrived on earth and is like, “But one only needs one
implement of food devouring!”
00:11:38
Elliott
Host
Dan, he is an alien, from the planet poor people. He’s essentially
throughout the movie as a visit to the planet rich from the planet
poor. Maybe that’s what it’s like. I don’t know. I grew up middle
class. I think it was David Brooks who wrote that column a few
years ago about bringing a friend of his to a sandwich restaurant
and his friend being bewildered by the variety of sandwiches and
ingredients. And being paralyzed. Their thoughts unable to move.
[Dan laughs.]
Because they could not comprehend so many sandwich
ingredients. And at the time I was like, “That sounds made up. I
don’t think that’s a real thing.” And if you were a good friend, David
Brooks, you would explain what stuff is good on a sandwich. ‘Cause
I’ve certainly been to plenty of restaurants where I didn’t know what
something was on the menu and I asked whoever I was with and
they said, “Oh, that’s this thing.” Or—
00:12:18
Dan
Host
“Your friend is hungry, David Brooks.”
[Stuart laughs.]
Yeah. Describe what a sandwich is to him. Don’t go home and write
a column about it. Get him that sandwich!
00:12:25
Elliott
Host
Especially when you know that his brother—Mel Brooks—would’ve
done a hilarious routine improvising what each of those ingredients
are. They’re not really related. Stuart?
00:12:33
Stuart
Host
So he’s—he gets there.
[Dan laughs.]
And he’s having a lot of trouble figuring out the etiquette for fine
dining. And part of me’s like, “Yeah, man, maybe you shouldn’t get
this job if something like this is fucking you up so bad. You need to
control your shit. Fake it ‘til you make it, buddy!” And—
[Multiple people laugh.]
And that’s even before we get to the point when a lawyer or one of
the, I guess—they’re lawyers, right? That they’re talking to or
whatever?
00:13:01
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: They are lawyers.
Stuart: One of the guys—
00:13:02
Elliott
Host
Now this is where law students are supposed to have dinner with
members of law firms so that they can—it’s kind of like an audition
dinner to see who’s gonna get an interview to get a job. Because
much like the Rise of Skywalker, there’s a lot of steps to get where
you actually wanna go. You’ve gotta get to the dinner. Then after
the dinner you get an interview. And then after the interview maybe
you get a job. And at the job you get the dagger that you hold up to
the sun and it tells you where the planet is that you need to find the
magic emperor thing? I don’t really remember what they were
looking for in the Rise of Skywalker. Like a key?
00:13:34
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: Probably.
Dan: Uh, there’s some dagger that took you to—yeah.
00:13:37
Dan
Host
The Death Star wreckage. There was a key there that took you
somewhere else. Um—
00:13:43
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: And this is the scene where the lawyer—
Dan: Seemed like a waste of time.
00:13:46
Stuart
Host
When J.D. reveals his background he uses a little bit of like—as like
window dressing to make himself seem more interesting. And this is
when one of the lawyers used the term “redneck” and he says, “Uh,
we don’t use that word.” In a way that felt very offensive to me. I
don’t know why. [Laughs.]
[Elliott laughs.]
00:14:04
Elliott
Host
Well so he gets—you’re right. He calls his girlfriend about this
silverware problem, then gets a phone call from his sister saying,
“You need to come home. Your mom has just OD’d.” The movie
presents this as almost as harrowing as the silverware problem.
[Dan laughs.]
And then he immediately hangs up on his sister and goes back to
dinner. And while they—and he starts playing it up. He’s like,
“Y’know, my family, we’re hillbilly royalty! ‘Cause we’re descended
from the Hatfields and the McCoys!” And the lawyer is like, “Hey, I
guess—y’know, what’s it like being—must be nice not being around
those rednecks!” And he goes, “Excuse me, sir.” And I was like,
“Well you were the one who was playing up the hillbilly aspect!” Like
I dunno. And the—it’s one of those moments where—I guess it’s
supposed to be that he can talk like that ‘cause he’s from Kentucky
by way of Ohio? But other people—it’s unsure. There’s some sort of
etiquette dynamic going on that I, certainly, not being a hillbilly and
not being a wealthy Yale lawyer, I do not know how it operates. I
am merely—guys? I’m just a middle-class Jewish New Jersey guy
who works in Hollywood. I don’t know how either of these worlds
operate. I’m in my bubble and I’m not gonna try to puncture their
bubbles. So.
00:15:06
Dan
Host
I— [Laughs.] I would be somewhat perturbed if someone made
assumptions about someplace I lived. The degree to which, though,
these characters are portrayed as like comically… out-of-touch rich
people? Is… like, they all should have like bad guy signs on them, I
feel like, in this scene? Because I’m not saying that there aren’t
plenty comically out-of-touch rich people, but these are like… these
people act like they have never talked to anyone who was not
wealthy in their life. And they’re people who hire students—many of
whom, presumably, grew up as he did and worked hard to sort of
be able to fund going to the law school and changing their
circumstances somewhat.
00:16:02
Elliott
Host
But also, the one lawyer is slightly offensive and J.D. comes down
on him. And the other lawyer—the one J.D. really wants to
impress—seems to be on J.D.’s side almost instantly. Like it—and if
anything, it’s like now J.D. recognizes the power of offense, I guess.
But anyway. J.D.—what gets me the most about him is, he clearly
has a strong narrative of “I lifted myself up to get to this place” and
that’s a good sellable narrative since he wrote a book about it! But I
guess at that point in his life he doesn’t notice it. He still sees it as a
weakness. Anyway.
00:16:36
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Well this is also—sorry.
Elliott: J.D. now flashes—
00:16:38
Dan
Host
I mean, for what it’s worth—and it may not be much to compare it to
quote-unquote “real life,” ‘cause I am sure that his memoir is also
fictionalized to some degree. But—
00:16:50
Elliott
Host
I mean, he has a talking horse in it. Yeah.
[Dan laughs.]
00:16:52
Dan
Host
But like, from what I looked into, y’know, this is not… the way it
was. Like, his—people that he dealt with kind of like looked on his
background as like sort of an interesting factor, but not a thing that
like—if anything, a thing that set him apart, as you were saying,
Elliott? And not a thing that he hid. Like he seems to be concerned
about hiding to some degree where he came from until he sees how
it can maybe advantage himself.
00:17:21
Elliott
Host
Yeah. I will say—it’s—this is—this movie—so I just—because of
scheduling we are recording this before our live show but we are
releasing it afterwards. Last night I did my review of Teen Wolf, and
I forgot that Teen Wolf exists in a universe where people know
about werewolves but they are oppressed?
[Dan laughs.]
And so it was almost like this movie is to hillbillies as Teen Wolf is
to teen wolves. Where it’s like, this is the thing that gives him his
power but it’s also what marks him out as an other. And in real life, I
don’t know that people from Kentucky are really that marked out.
But I don’t know! Again, if you’ve been to Kentucky and you went to
Yale, write in. Hallie went to Yale but she’s not from Kentucky. Does
not count. Coloradans are treated very well there, I think. So
anyway. J.D. flashes back to his youth. He and his mom—Amy
Adams—are painting Easter eggs. His mom calls these their family
heirlooms. They do the thing where they suck the yolk out of the
egg so they can keep that eggshell. But he gets a pet dog and that
dog breaks the eggs and mom loses her shit. That’s right! It’s
Oscar-yelling scene number one!
[Stuart laughs.]
But then she apologized to him and bonds with him over his Magic:
The Gathering cards. Which was a very real 1997 touch to me.
[Laughs.]
00:18:23
Stuart
Host
So I have a couple of points here. One is… I mean, the dog doesn’t
break the eggs. This is the first time that J.D. is like super clumsy
and is like, “Dang it!” And knocks a table over? [Laughs.] And
then—
[Elliott laughs.]
—the second thing is… buddy. If you got a fucking Lord of the Pit in
1997? Just sell that shit, dude! It’s worth so much money! And to
see it just sitting there? Not even single-sleeved? What the fuck,
dude?
[Multiple people laugh.]
00:18:53
Elliott
Host
Well you know he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. He’s not a
guy who puts card combos together. He just sits there dinging you
with Prodigal Sorcerer while you’re setting up your mana and that’s
his only strategy. He doesn’t read InQuest magazine or anything
like that. He just doesn’t know what he’s doing.
00:19:10
Dan
Host
Now I wanna make two points that are sort of related. Not as
important as the collectible cards point, but there’s—there are two
things that are sort of related here. Number one, you mentioned
how there are all these Oscar screaming scenes. And they mostly
come from Amy Adams. Some from Glenn Close. And I think that in
a different movie, like, they’re working hard. I think they’re putting in
fine performances. The problem with their performance is they’re all
Oscar-yelling scenes? And I blame that more on the direction and
the screenwriting. ‘Cause this movie feels like a parade of like
incidents? And each incident is like the most dramatic incident that
happened that year. And this movie has all this framing device of,
“Oh, the guy as an adult going back to be with his mom in his
hometown.” Stuff that is apparently not in the book. And the top
thing that would probably improve the movie is eliminating all that
shit because it would give a little more time for some sort of nuance
and like low points to go with all the screaming?
00:20:15
Elliott
Host
I think you’re right. I mean, it’s clear that there’s a lot of—they’re
acting their hearts out, God bless ‘em. It’s a lot of sound and fury
signifying nothing because at the heart of the movie there’s kind of
a meaninglessness? And I think that the framing device doesn’t
help because I guess it’s supposed to provide stakes that like…
he’s gotta deal with this situation or else he’s not gonna get this
summer job. But it’s also like, you know that he’s already at Yale.
Like, the biggest hurdle has been overcome. Y’know. And even if
he’s having trouble staying in Yale—the biggest hurdle, I assume,
was getting to Yale.
00:20:47
Dan
Host
Yeah. Exactly. If this movie has—the stakes of this movie should
not be “Will this guy get a good lawyer job?” The stakes should be
“Will this kid get out of this sort of horrible family situation.” That’s a
much bigger stake.
00:21:01
Stuart
Host
And this kid survived being a marine. At least like one tour of being
a marine.
[Dan laughs.]
00:21:10
Dan
Host
Which gets glossed over in a montage at the end. [Laughs.]
00:21:13
Elliott
Host
That gets mentioned very—yeah, almost not at all. So anyway.
We’re still in this flashback. Amy Adams, to make it up to him, takes
him to a sports card store. He is super clumsy in it. They’re like
dancing in the sports card store or something and knock over a rack
of stuff. She gets into an argument with the guy who—I don’t know
if he owns the store or just works there. It doesn’t really matter. But
he has the power to throw them out of the store but it’s okay ‘cause
she stole the cards that he wanted and that’s what a good mom she
is. On the drive home, I don’t remember why she gets mad at him
and threatens to kill them both in a car crash? Leading to Oscar-
yelling scene number two—he’s like, “You’re a bitch, mom!” And
she hits him and he runs away to a neighbor who calls the police.
And then that flashback gets paused so that J.D. can decide, “You
know what? I’m gonna skip this job interview. I’m gonna drive all
night to be with—ten hours!—to be with my mom in Kentucky.” And
then in the memory, Mamaw shows up and J.D.’s like, “No, I won’t
press charges.” And everyone avoids jail time, I guess.
00:22:03
Stuart
Host
I mean, you gloss over it and you go quickly, but it is a scene where
we’re watching a mother violently abuse her child. And it’s—I guess
it’s a little—at least for the viewer it’s toned down because the
mother is Amy Adams and she’s not a—y’know, they’re about the
same size? But it’s still fucking horrible! And you’re like—
00:22:23
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Yeah, I wanted to say that this is the—
Elliott: It’s a terrible scene! While you’re watching it, you’re like,
“This is horrible.”
00:22:27
Elliott
Host
“I don’t know why I’m watching this.”
00:22:30
Dan
Host
But it is the closest the movie felt to—like, there are a couple of
scenes in the movie that felt affecting in some way? And this is one
of them because I do think it showed the sort of terrifying nature of
someone who is clearly struggling with addiction that creates these
huge mood swings? And how it would be to be around someone so
erratic that you could be dancing with them one moment and then
the next moment they threaten to kill you both in the car.
00:22:58
Elliott
Host
Yeah. Well that’s—again—if the movie was more of a… like, if it
didn’t have that framing device. The framing device posits J.D. as
the center of the story. And Amy Adams should be the center of the
story, but instead she just becomes this hurricane that enters and
leaves kind of at random, almost? I’m never entirely sure why the
flashbacks are happening when they’re happening, but if it was the
story of a mother and a son—and y’know. There’ve been lots of
movies about mothers and sons. It’s a very effective thing to do a
movie about, which is what this should be. But instead it becomes
about like… “Is J.D. gonna make it to this interview on time?”
[Dan laughs.]
Which is not—it makes all these other things feel like… it feels like
there’s two different movies going on. And one of them is much
more harrowing than the other, but they have to be at the same kind
of tone level. So it doesn’t happen.
00:23:40
Dan
Host
I’ll go you one better. One of them is ridiculously overwrought and
the other one is boring. [Laughs.]
00:23:48
Elliott
Host
Yes! It is boring. Especially when—I mean, I’ll skip—I’ll just mention
my big issue with this that I just thought of today, which I didn’t even
realize at the time. Was—he’s like, “Am I gonna stay here with my
mom, who desperately needs help to stay off drugs? Or am I gonna
go to this meeting?” And it’s like, “I mean, maybe they won’t
understand ‘cause they’re coldhearted rich lawyers, but why not tell
them you have a family medical emergency and ask if you could do
the interview over the phone?”
00:24:09
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Yeah. I—the ending—
Elliott: Like that—it’s—
00:24:12
Elliott
Host
Maybe I’m coming at it from a Zoom meeting world where we do all
of our things remotely. This was back in 2011 when pressing the
flesh was the most important thing, but I dunno.
00:24:19
Stuart
Host
And it’s also right after he proves that he can put at least $3,000 on
his credit cards. And I was like, “Why doesn’t he just get a fucking
round-trip flight? He could get a round-trip flight for a couple
hundred bucks. Go there. Do the interview. Be back, and his mom
might still be asleep!”
00:24:38
Dan
Host
Yeah.
[Elliott laughs.]
I mean—
00:24:40
Elliott
Host
I mean—Yeah?
00:24:41
Dan
Host
No, I was gonna say, Elliott, you bring up a good point about how
we all used to like to press the flesh back then. Now what—why
were we pressing all that flesh? Why did it have to be flattened out?
I mean, I prefer my flesh kind of as it is.
00:24:54
Stuart
Host
Nope.
00:24:55
Elliott
Host
Well that’s because, Dan, you’re only at the beginning of the
wrinkling process. Your flesh is going to get wrinklier and wrinklier
as time goes on and you’re gonna wanna press it to get those
wrinkles out. To get the folds. Right now you’re right at the cusp of
when your flesh goes from smooth to folded?
[Dan laughs.]
And when you press the flesh with an old person it’s not like they’re
doing you a favor. You’re doing them a favor. ‘Cause you’re helping
smooth out all those wrinks.
00:25:16
Dan
Host
If you fold that flesh, though, you can fit into a smaller area like into
the overheard compartment when folded up.
00:25:22
Elliott
Host
Dan, what you’re saying is horrifying.
[Dan laughs.]
00:25:26
Stuart
Host
I also like that Elliott just coined a new, hip way to say “wrinkles” by
calling them “wrinks.”
[Multiple people laugh.]
00:25:32
Elliott
Host
Yep. Or wrinky-dinks. You can call ‘em that, too.
00:25:35
Dan
Host
Stuart, I also saw with the credit card thing? I saw a very salient
thing. I was reading an article on Vox where people were talking
about why is this—why does this movie feel so false? Y’know, a
couple of them having grown up in Appalachia. And one of them
said, “There’s that scene where he’s buying gasoline and he
doesn’t—like, his card is declined.” And she was railing against the
idea that in movies showing that someone is in financial distress,
the shorthand is always, like, “Oh, your card has been declined.”
And she’s like, “Bullshit. Bullshit. If you are—if you’ve been in those
sort of dire financial straights, you know exactly [through laughter]
how much money you have. It is people who can afford to lose
money that don’t necessarily know.”
00:26:24
Elliott
Host
That are surprised when the card is declined.
00:26:26
Stuart
Host
Now that’s a good point.
00:26:27
Elliott
Host
I mean, it’s also—yeah. I guess. Another thing that makes it feel
artificial to me is that this is—for all the acting Amy Adams and
Glenn Close do in it—and they’re great actors and they’re trying
their hardest—I am never not aware that it is Amy Adams and
Glenn Close on screen. And there’s a line from—there’s a Firesign
Theater sketch where there’s a line where they’re introducing a
movie and they go, “Stories of ordinary people told by rich
Hollywood stars!”
[Dan laughs.]
And that’s what this movie feels like the entire time. They’re trying
their best but they are not disappearing into those characters. Yeah.
00:26:55
Stuart
Host
I mean, no matter how much effort they do to make Glenn Close
look like Bilbo seeing the Ring in Frodo’s hands—
[All laugh.]
00:27:06
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: I do—I do—I—that is what—
Elliott: And I blame—
00:27:08
Elliott
Host
But I blame that on the script and the director, too. Like, I feel like
they are not given the material to become characters. Y’know.
00:27:13
Dan
Host
Yeah. I do admire—that is a perfect way of describing her? But I do
admire that you are seeing a movie where an old person who is a
big star looks that old and like they’re allowed to look that old?
‘Cause even in movies that try and de-glam people, like, there’s
only so far that they go. Whereas Glenn Close looks like plenty of
old women I would see around my small town. Growing up, y’know.
00:27:39
Stuart
Host
Yeah. Wearing like a cat shirt or cat sweatshirt that I would pay all
my money for. [Laughs.]
[Elliott laughs.]
00:27:47
Elliott
Host
But they don’t go too far, like Nicole Kidman in Destroyer where she
looks like a laser beam was pointed at her face.
[All laugh.]
I remember watching that with my wife and she was like, “So when
are they gonna show the accident she was in?” And I’m like—no.
[Laughs.]
00:28:00
Dan
Host
Yeah. I think that’s just supposed to indicate she had a lot of gin
over the course of her life. [Laughs.]
[Stuart laughs.]
00:28:05
Elliott
Host
So anyway. He goes to the hospital. We finally see Amy Adams in
the present time. She doesn’t look like she’s aged that much, to be
honest. She does not have insurance and the hospital’s kicking her
out. And this is the weird thing about this movie is—again—I hadn’t
read the book. And I kept hearing the book was this conservative
apologia. But the movie, if it has any political point, it is that you
need a universal healthcare program because the problem they
keep coming up against is they don’t have proper healthcare. His
mom cannot afford to stay in rehab or get a hospital bed. So it was
like, if ever this is about anything it’s about the need for better
healthcare safety net. But—
00:28:39
Dan
Host
Right. And—sorry, I—there’s a good point, I think, that the problem
with these “pulled myself up by my own bootstraps” narratives,
right? Like, Audrey pointed it out watching it is that people who are
sort of making that conservative argument… aren’t acknowledging
like why you needed to be pulled up by your bootstraps in the first
place? Like, Amy Adams—and to a slightly lesser degree, Glenn
Close—although not that much—are acting terribly for a lot of the
movie. And it’s for reasons of—
00:29:18
Elliott
Host
You don’t mean in terms of their acting-acting. You mean like their
behavior.
00:29:21
Dan
Host
No, their behavior. And it’s because Amy Adams is struggling with
addiction. Glenn Close is like sort of embittered by living near the
poverty line. And the thing is, if they—if there’s—the problem is that
there aren’t the social systems to support them. Y’know. And if
that’s not the problem then these people are just being assholes
because they’re assholes. Y’know? [Laughs.] Like, whereas the
reason these people are kind of being horrible for a lot of it is
they’ve had to struggle with so much. Y’know? And that equation
never—
00:29:52
Elliott
Host
Yeah. So you’re saying, Dan, if they had a UBI—a Universal Basic
Income—they might not have to act so much as if they have IBS—
Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
00:30:00
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Uh, that is exactly what I’m saying. Please— [through
laughter] please quote me as saying that. [Laughs.] Put it in the
Flop House newsletter. Blast it out. [Laughs.]
Elliott: Which I have to assume is endemic. Endemic to the region.
Said Dan McCoy—this is—
Stuart: [Laughs.] Yeah.
00:30:09
Elliott
Host
This is Dan McCoy’s basic platform when he’s running for office is
“A UBI keeps away IBS.”
00:30:14
Dan
Host
Mm.
00:30:16
Elliott
Host
Now UTI is a different issue. Anyway. Moving on. So J.D. learns
about that job interview we’ve mentioned a couple times. He’s
gonna drive all night, he assumes. But what’s gonna happen with
his mom? Anyway, it’s a ten hour drive away. He has another
flashback, remembering when his grandpa—Papaw—died, and
everyone in Kentucky saluted the funeral procession.
00:30:33
Stuart
Host
It’s great. When they find the body, Glenn Close leans close and
gives him a little kiss on the forehead and you can see the actor’s
eyeballs flutter and you’re like, “Is she a fucking necromancer?”
[All laugh.]
00:30:45
Elliott
Host
You have to imagine that actor was like, “I cannot believe I’m
getting a kiss from Glenn Close right now. This is amazing.”
00:30:48
Stuart
Host
Yep. And One-Take Howard over here is like, “Fuck it. Print.”
[Elliott laughs.]
00:30:52
Elliott
Host
“I learned this from Roger Corman. No one gives a shit. So let’s
keep moving.”
00:30:56
Dan
Host
I actually teared—
00:30:57
Elliott
Host
“I’ve got three more bestselling books to make into movies this
year. Tom Hanks has only signed on for two of ‘em so let’s go.”
00:31:03
Dan
Host
I actually teared up a little bit at this and Audrey was making fun of
me and I’m like, “Look. I am not tearing up about these characters?
I am tearing up about the concept of living your whole life with a
person and then finding [through laughter] them dead.”
[Stuart laughs.]
And I was just—just thinking about that now, I’m thinking about
Elliott’s old Goosebumps thing where it’s like, “Well this is not scary
in a movie, but if it was happening to me in real life I’d be scared.”
00:31:26
Elliott
Host
Sure, yeah! If it was— [Laughs.] If it was happening to you—if in
real life you lost your lifetime spouse—
00:31:32
Dan
Host
Exactly.
00:31:33
Elliott
Host
—then yes, you would be sad. So I’m glad you were [through
laughter] able to put yourself in that situation, Dan.
[Dan laughs.]
But it really got to me, the idea that when people in Kentucky see
a—or maybe, I assume—they were living in Ohio then, but I dunno.
That when poor people see a funeral procession pass by they stop
and salute it like it’s the presidential death train. And that did not
ring—
00:31:54
Dan
Host
True. No.
00:31:55
Elliott
Host
—true to me? But I don’t know. But I just didn’t like the implications
that in other parts of the country people are cold-hearted and don’t
care about death. Y’know.
00:32:01
Stuart
Host
I think Presidential Death Train was the original title for
Snowpiercer, right? [Laughs.]
00:32:06
Elliott
Host
It—yeah. It was. But only because the originally Chris Evans was
playing Franklin Pierce.
00:32:10
Stuart
Host
[Through laughter] Oh, weird.
00:32:11
Dan
Host
No, the point of that scene, Elliott, is we’re all hard-hearted in New
York when we don’t [through laughter] salute a funeral. I was like,
“Why aren’t you saluting?” “I didn’t know there was a funeral! There
are millions of people in this city! I’m sorry!”
00:32:22
Elliott
Host
Look, Dan, I can’t help it if I’m the kind of guy who laughs at a
funeral. It’s been one week since you looked at me. So anyway.
00:32:27
Dan
Host
It has been one week since [through laughter] I looked at you over
Skype.
00:32:30
Elliott
Host
That’s true. [Through laughter] It actually has been one week. And I
can’t help—how can I help it if I think it’s funny when you’re mad?
That’s the rest of that line that I was trying to think of.
[Dan laughs.]
00:32:37
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: And that also applies to you. [Laughs.]
Elliott: Uh, okay. So—
00:32:39
Elliott
Host
Yeah. Thank you.
[Multiple people laugh.]
I didn’t realize the song “One Week” by Barenaked Ladies is about
our relationship, Dan!
[Dan laughs.]
But if—and if I had a million dollars, maybe I would buy you a
house. I dunno. What other songs do they have?
00:32:50
Dan
Host
Uh, “Broke Into the Old Apartment.” That one’s actually kinda good.
00:32:54
Stuart
Host
Oh fuck that. Okay.
00:32:56
Dan
Host
You don’t like it?
00:32:57
Stuart
Host
No, I’m not a Barenaked Ladies fan. I’m sorry, guys.
00:33:00
Elliott
Host
Stuart, I happen to know you do like naked ladies.
00:33:03
Stuart
Host
What?! Don’t tell anyone, Elliott!
[Multiple people laugh.]
00:33:06
Elliott
Host
Sorry. It’s your secret.
00:33:09
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: My enemies will use it against me!
Elliott: Anyway. It reminds me that there was that old—
00:33:11
Elliott
Host
That your enemies—like if you’re hunting a rabbit, the rabbit’s
gonna dress up like a pretty lady to try to distract you?
[Dan laughs.]
00:33:17
Stuart
Host
It’s happened before!
00:33:19
Elliott
Host
The old Onion article, “Area Man Has Naked Lady Fetish.” It’s all
about this disgusting fetish that this guy has—
[Dan laughs.]
—for seeing women without their clothes on? Okay. So. Amy
Adams, she takes that death particularly hard. She was very close
to Papaw. It’s made clear that Papaw was, I guess, protecting her in
some way from real life? I dunno. And pretty soon she’s losing her
nursing job by stealing pills, getting high, and roller-skating through
the hallways in a scene that in an ‘80s comedy would be considered
a rapturous joy. It’s a hijinks.
00:33:48
Dan
Host
This is the second time I was like, “Now there’s no way this
happened.” This apparently did happen. She did lose her job after—
00:33:54
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: —roller-skating through the hospital.
Elliott: You know who I blame?
00:33:57
Elliott
Host
I blame the woman who lends her the roller skates. She’s in the
nurse locker room and she’s like, “Can I try on those roller skates?”
And it’s like, “Never let Amy Adams try on roller skates. That just
goes without saying.”
00:34:06
Dan
Host
Well she’s also like, “Where are you gonna skate?” And then it’s
just a hard skate to her skating down the halls. Presumably there
was a point where that woman could’ve been like—like, “The halls?
No!” Y’know? Like— [Laughs.]
00:34:15
Stuart
Host
“Ha, ha! Oh, that’s funny!”
00:34:16
Dan
Host
Once that question was answered…
00:34:17
Elliott
Host
As she’s going to the door going, “Hey, hey, hey! Maybe don’t go
out there!”
00:34:21
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan and Elliott: “It’s a hospital!”
00:34:23
Elliott
Host
This leads to another big fight between her and J.D.. Oscar-yelling
scene number three. That’s three we’ve got so far. Then we’re at
Mamaw’s house. Young J.D.—this is when he wants to watch the
Clinton impeachment news but Mamaw wants to watch Terminator
2—
[Stuart laughs.]
—and she explains her life philosophy that everyone is either a
good Terminator, a bad Terminator, or neutral. Which would be
what—like Eddie Furlong’s friend who is from Salute Your Shorts?
Like is that neutral? Yeah, okay.
00:34:46
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: Now I—and I like—
Dan: Okay. There are two problems with this.
00:34:49
Dan
Host
Number one, I don’t know—if I am a Terminator, I don’t know how
that combined with the two bears that live inside me.
00:34:56
Elliott
Host
Dan, one—you’re neutral. Totally.
[Stuart laughs.]
And that means there’s a good Terminator and a bad Terminator
inside each of those bears.
00:35:03
Dan
Host
[Through laughter] Okay. But also this idea that there are good,
bad, and neutral Terminators?
00:35:10
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: Well they don’t specify that the neutrals are Terminators.
Dan: Why did Skynet build these neutral Terminators? What?
00:35:13
Elliott
Host
I don’t think it’s a neutral Terminator—like a Terminator exoskeleton
robot is just walking around going, “Eh, I’m not gonna get involved. I
don’t have a stake in this.” I think it’s more that—maybe she’s
saying you’re a good Terminator, you’re a bad Terminator, or you’re
the kind of person that gets shot accidentally by a Terminator. I
don’t know. But I think the neutral is not considered a Terminator.
Stuart, you’re the kind of T expert around here.
00:35:35
Stuart
Host
Uh-huh. Yep.
00:35:36
Dan
Host
Texpert.
00:35:37
Stuart
Host
I’m a Texpert. Yep. [Laughs.] So what are you asking me to give a
ruling here, whether or not “neutral” indicates a Terminator or not?
Clearly not. I mean, just the act of Terminating means that you’re
picking a side. Whether you’re fighting for the future or not, guys.
00:35:50
Elliott
Host
Okay. Fair point. Now Stuart, this is—and I don’t wanna—this is
possibly insulting, but you’re clearly not a hillbilly. Your mother’s
clearly not a crazy old lady.
00:36:02
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: But the stories you would tell—
Stuart: No, I’m from a very flat part of the country.
00:36:05
Stuart
Host
Northern Indiana. There are no hills to be found.
00:36:07
Elliott
Host
No hills. Yeah. You’re a plainbilly, if anything.
00:36:10
Stuart
Host
But we do adopt a slight Southern twang. A Southern twang that I
have certainly played up since I moved to New York and wanted to
look more distinct, I think? When I started hanging out with a friend
from England I found that my twang got worse and I’m like, “Ugh.
Why do I do this? [Laughs.] Why am I trying to peacock?”
00:36:30
Elliott
Host
But this scene of Mamaw wanting to watch Terminator 2 and really
getting into the content of it just reminded me of so many stories of
your mom—
[Stuart laughs.]
—sharing horror or science fiction movies with you? And it just
made me—I was like, “I forgot what a cool mom Stuart has.” Like,
this scene reminded me about that.
00:36:45
Stuart
Host
Yeah. She would always make me watch things and she’s always
like, “Stuart would love this!” And half the time it was like… like
Creepshow 2 or something that would scar me and I would be
like—
[Elliott laughs.]
00:36:55
Dan
Host
Half the time it was Emmanuelle in Space?
00:36:57
Stuart
Host
[Through laughter] Yeah. “Stuart would love this!” And yeah.
00:37:01
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: And we did talk—I have talked on the podcast about the
time—
Elliott: “He likes space!”
00:37:03
Stuart
Host
—my mom caught me and my buddies watching the sex scene in
Terminator and laughing. And she furiously turned off the VHS
player and said that they’re doing it for the future. [Laughs.] And I
was like—
[All laugh.]
Oh man, I love it so much. My mom’s great.
00:37:20
Dan
Host
She’s punishing you for not understanding love. For laughing at
love.
00:37:24
Elliott
Host
Not taking it seriously that that sex is what’s gonna save humanity
from Skynet in the future.
00:37:30
Dan
Host
It’s a beautiful metaphor.
00:37:32
Stuart
Host
Yeah. When I re-watched Terminator a couple weeks ago I—
y’know, I saw that scene with new eyes. Eyes that thought it was
hilarious. That two people would make sounds. [Laughs.] While
rolling around.
[Elliott laughs.]
Okay.
00:37:45
Elliott
Host
Now their healthy, heartfelt viewing of Terminator 2: Judgment Day
is interrupted by police sirens. Mom—Amy Adams—is out in the
street throwing a bereavement fit. She is so overcome with grief
and probably drugs that she’s just screaming and like kind of
writhing around in a nightgown and yelling at people and Mamaw
makes J.D. look away as the cops take mom away. This is Oscar-
yelling scene number four. And y’know, in a way… maybe they’re
trying to draw a parallel between the mom in Terminator 2 and the
mom in this movie, who are both misunderstood by society at large.
And thrown—and considered crazy when in fact they’re just trying
to deal with the difficulties of life. In Amy Adams’s case, the death of
her beloved father; and in Linda Hamilton’s case, that she knows
the fact that there are cyborgs from the future who are coming back
to try to murder her and her child. Y’know, they’re both hard things
to deal with and I think we both know of people who have had to
deal with both those problems. So.
00:38:41
Dan
Host
Now Elliott, why did they send the Terminator back sort of
chronologically later in Linda Hamilton/Sarah Connor’s life—and
John Connor’s life—rather than just continually sending it back to
the same point in time and overwhelming her with Terminators?
00:39:00
Elliott
Host
Well that’s one of the issues with Skynet and I’ve thought of that
too. And it makes me think maybe Skynet doesn’t wanna succeed.
Deep down it knows that it’s really not worthy? It has imposter
syndrome? And so it’s like, “You know what? If I sent back—I see
what the flaw was in my first plan. I only sent back one Terminator.
I’ll just send back two. And I’ll do it that way.” But instead that self-
sabotage comes in! Or as the Doctor Beastie Boys would describe
itself, [high-pitched voice] “Sabotage!” That’s who I studied under.
[Laughs.]
[Dan laughs.]
Was Doctor Beastie Boy. But I think that’s probably—that Skynet—
deep down, it does not want to be successful. And it’s gonna take a
lot of therapy with Susan Calvin, the robot psychologist from the
Isaac Asimov stories—
[Dan laughs.]
—but maybe Skynet can get past that and can eventually crush
humanity. My other question is, why does Skynet hate humanity so
much and wanna get rid of us? I never understood that.
00:39:54
Dan
Host
Mm, was it one of those things where like it surmises that the
greatest threat to itself is humans? Or the world?
00:40:03
Stuart
Host
I think it’s something like that. I think it also—after a while it would
figure out, like, “Oh, wait. The amount of energy I’m investing in
sending all these Terminators back in time—I could just be working
on my relationship with humanity in general, y’know? Maybe we
could become friends!”
00:40:17
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s fair, too.
Stuart: Maybe if I invented like ice cream cannons—
00:40:20
Stuart
Host
—or just gave every human a free cell phone or something. They
would just chill out and stop trying to kill me.
[Dan laughs.]
00:40:27
Elliott
Host
Now Skynet would know that as long as they sent poorly-designed
memes to the oldest members of humanity—
[Multiple people laugh.]
—they could just watch humanity tear itself apart anyway. So. So
anyway, J.D. takes some time to visit his sister’s barbecue and
have a fried bologna sandwich. Then he yells at his girlfriend on the
phone. This is not an Oscar-yelling scene. It doesn’t reach that
level.
00:40:46
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: But he does make sex sounds when he eats that fried
bologna sandwich.
Elliott: Anyone who thinks J.D.—
00:40:50
Stuart
Host
It’s the best thing to cross his lips.
00:40:52
Elliott
Host
As someone who had fried salami for breakfast yesterday—that’s
the Jewish version of fried bologna—yeah. It’s delicious. It’s great.
He flashes back to being a kid and giving his mom a homemade
activity book for her to use while in rehab, which was a very sweet
thing for him to do. Back to 2011. He makes a passionate argument
at a rehab place to get them to accept his mom, and then—this is
the famous credit card scene where he’s splitting all the costs—
different amounts between different credit cards. But his mom
storms out and they argue again! That’s right—Oscar-yelling scene
number five. And that’s when J.D.’s sister is like, “Hey, Papaw was
kind of a rough dad and could be abusive and Mamaw lit him on fire
once and it was mom when she was a girl who put him out.” This is
not really given, I feel like, the sober weight that it should.
[Dan laughs.]
Considering it—this should be like—should be like—and I guess in
the movie maybe this is the knowledge that helps J.D. to start
sympathizing with his mom? But one, it comes very late in his life.
He's already a college student when he’s learning a story that I
know my family would’ve told many times, over and over again, by
this point. But also that it’s just kind of treated as like a pretty quick
flashback. When that’s—again—a horrifying thing to happen.
Y’know. In a family.
00:41:57
Dan
Host
I mean, again—I think the flashback structure of this movie is one of
the deadliest parts of it. If we had seen a lot of this in sequence and
allowed it to give time to breathe by cutting out that flashback stuff?
Yeah! It’s important to understand that you know what Amy Adams
went through a lot of trauma as a child, which obviously contributed
to her current state. And things are more complex than they seem.
And this also gets into a section of the movie—I mean, I guess I’m
skipping ahead a little. But Glenn Close’s character kind of
becomes, “Oh, she’s like the tough love center of this movie! She’s
the one who’s ultimately kinda gonna help the main character get
out of this life”? But she is shown as being kind of a shitty parent
herself. Like, there’s a story there in someone who was a bad
parent, realizes it, tries to be a better parent to their grandchild, and
if it’s given time to breathe and you see the complexity of that
character—that would be good! But Glenn Close is seen mostly like
yelling at this kid and we see that she got—that she set her
husband on fire earlier. So it’s hard to look at her as like the
avatar—the center of morality in this movie that I think the movie
kinda wants us to.
00:43:23
Elliott
Host
I think there’s an interesting movie—better movie there. About a
woman who is a bad mom but becomes a great grandma. The
opposite way that you could be a bad grandpa—like in the movie
Bad Grandpa—when by all accounts he seems to have been a fine
dad.
00:43:36
Dan
Host
Now where does A Bad Moms Christmas fit into this scenario?
00:43:41
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: Now there—those moms, they’re not really bad. [Laughs.]
Y’know.
Stuart: Well it’s the second movie, Dan.
Dan: [Through laughter] Okay, thank you.
00:43:46
Elliott
Host
Yeah. It is the second movie. But they’re not bad like “Mamaw set
your husband on fire” bad. They’re bad like, “Oh, let’s be bad! Let’s
order two desserts!” Like that kind of—not the sinful “I’m going to go
to hell because I’ve committed avarice and I’ve profaned the lord,”
but more like sinfully decadent chocolate.
00:44:06
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: That’s the kind of bad.
Stuart: Wait. The first one is the cast of the Bad Moms franchise.
Dan: Right. Or the kind of—
00:44:11
Stuart
Host
Is that right, Elliott? Or are you describing a series of movies that
you—I’m guessing—haven’t seen?
00:44:16
Elliott
Host
No, no, I’m describing a series of movies I’ve had related to me
secondhand.
[Stuart laughs.]
In detail. But I’m guessing the Bad Moms movies are not about
them abusing their children and being—not—I don’t think it is. I feel
like I am safe in saying that the Bad Moms are bad in the same way
that Bad Teacher is bad or Bad Santa is bad? Where it’s like, “I’m
breaking all the rules!” But they’re not breaking so many rules that
they’re going to prison.
00:44:41
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: Yeah. They’re not Bad Lieutenants.
Dan: I would say that Bad Teacher is worse than Bad Moms.
00:44:44
Dan
Host
And Bad Santa is worse than either of them. Bad Moms—like,
they’re mostly just bad moms because they refuse to make baked
goods for the PTA.
00:44:51
Elliott
Host
Exactly. But like Stuart says, they’re not as bad as Bad Lieutenant.
00:44:56
Dan
Host
[Through laughter] No. No. Or Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New
Orleans.
00:44:59
Stuart
Host
Or Badder Lieutenant. [Laughs.]
00:45:00
Elliott
Host
I mean, it’s the— [Laughs.] Badder—no, that’s when the lieutenant
was fried in batter. Delicious.
[Dan laughs.]
Mm. Anyway. So we go—Mamaw—J.D. finally tells his mom about
his girlfriend and they flashback to when his mom—and this is
something—another one of those things that comes as a huge
surprise since they never mentioned it before—apparently married
her boss. Who became J.D.’s stepdad. And this is—this stepdad is
kind of… like hilariously just kind of like a bland, awkward stepdad.
He’s allergic to dogs so J.D. cannot keep his dog. And his new
stepbrother is like, “Hey. You wanna smoke pot with me?” And
that’s like, “Uh-oh! Watch out! This is a bad kid!”
00:45:41
Stuart
Host
They smoke a bunch of weed and the stepbrother’s got a—he’s got
a vinyl—he’s got a record of Dimension Hatröss by Voivod on the
wall. I mean, this kid’s fucking cool, dude!
00:45:54
Elliott
Host
Yeah. You know he’s a bad boy.
00:45:56
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: But like a Bad Moms bad boy.
Dan: This seems like a pretty good—
00:45:57
Elliott
Host
Not like a Jeffrey Dahmer bad boy. That’s a bad boy.
00:46:01
Stuart
Host
[Through laughter] That’s true.
00:46:02
Elliott
Host
Like that’s as bad as boys get.
[Dan laughs.]
00:46:03
Stuart
Host
I mean, I guess that’s—
00:46:04
Elliott
Host
Boys do not get much badder than that.
00:46:07
Stuart
Host
I guess you win this one, Elliott, with your Jeffrey Dahmer bad boy
line!
[All laugh.]
00:46:12
Elliott
Host
When I saw the movie Bad Boys I was like, “These boys are gonna
be bad!” And then it was like, “Oh, okay, they’re just kinda like
dangerous, I guess. They don’t follow all the rules.”
00:46:19
Dan
Host
I mean, they do drive through an entire shantytown in Cuba and
seem to be happy to crack jokes about it while it’s happening.
00:46:28
Elliott
Host
I mean, that’s bad. That’s bad behavior. At the same point, also,
they’re men. Those are bad men. And it’s okay to like—it’s easy to
laugh at a bad boy. It is not easy to laugh at a bad man. A bad man
is trouble.
00:46:40
Dan
Host
Or a Batman!
00:46:42
Elliott
Host
A Batman is very easy to laugh at ‘cause he’s like, [gruff voice] “Oh!
This is my voice now!” [Regular voice] And it’s like, “There’s no way
that’s your real voice. Come on. No one talks like that.” So anyway.
Mom—she asks J.D. for a urine sample so she doesn’t lose her job
because she has been using drugs again. And he’s like, “No way!
No way! You should lose your job!” And Mamaw is like, “No, family
is all that matters. You pee in that cup.” And J.D. is like, “You’re
both bad moms, and I don’t mean like Bad Moms Christmas. I
mean like you’re moms who are detrimental to my upbringing.” And
he pees in the cup and does it. But J.D., he’s having his own
troubles! He’s failing at algebra because he doesn’t have a graphic
calculator. And this is one of those times where it’s like, “I know you
don’t know to ask and you’re ashamed of your poverty, but his
teacher keeps—is giving him bad grades because he does not have
a piece of equipment he cannot afford.” And it’s like—I feel like this
is one of those times where he just could be like, “Teacher, I can’t
afford this graphing calculator.”
00:47:29
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Yeah. And there’s—like this is a—
Stuart: And the teacher would’ve been like, “Well, sell that Lord of
the Pit, idiot!”
Elliott: And then— [Laughs.]
00:47:34
Dan
Host
And this is not a wealthy part of the school. Like, the country. So
y’know presumably they don’t have a lot of money for their own
school supplies, so there’s that. But they do expect kids to have
[through laughter] these expensive graphing calculators so it
doesn’t really jive. It seems like they would have one or two around
to like loan out to more—
00:47:59
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: —to children who are more in need.
Stuart: I mean, growing up I remember—
00:48:01
Stuart
Host
I remember having to have one of those, and I remember hearing
how much it costs and being like, “What the fuck?! Does it drive the
car for me?! Does it pick me up on time from soccer practice,
Mom?!”
00:48:12
Dan
Host
Your 1980s standup.
[Stuart laughs.]
Graphing calculator material.
00:48:18
Stuart
Host
Yeah. I’m testing it out here on The Flop House.
[Dan laughs.]
00:48:21
Elliott
Host
So that you can send yourself back in time through Skynet—
[Multiple people laugh.]
—to do it when it was most relevant. [Laughs.] Skynet’s like, “Look,
I’m about spreading smiles through time now instead of causing
violence. I’ve made my peace. All my talk with Dr. Susan Calvin has
really paid off, so Stuart, I wanna bankroll your time-traveling
comedy tour. The problem with it is, you keep having to go back
further and further in time to when people haven’t heard the jokes
yet.” So—and also you know if he gets that graphing calculator he’s
just gonna play the games on it. Someone’s gonna give him
Drugwars or one of those other text-based graphing calculator
games and he’s gonna end up spending his whole study hall doing
that. Anyway. But even worse, he lets his stepbrother’s no-good
friends use Mamaw’s car to go to a Home Depot and just kind of
smash it up? And they crash the car on the way back. That’s being
a bad boy. Like, that’s real bad boy stuff. As in like, you shouldn’t do
that. 2011? This scene I wasn’t originally going to mention, but it
does have Oscar-yelling scene number six. Where they go to Amy
Adams’s current boyfriend’s house to get her stuff and it’s just a
shouting match. And J.D. is screaming at this guy through the door
and is gonna break the door down until a neighbor is like, “Stop it! I
have children! What are you doing?!” And I guess that’s J.D.
slipping back into the morass of his old family ways. Y’know, they’re
pulling him down.
00:49:32
Stuart
Host
Well what he did is he triggered his berserk barbarian rage class
ability?
[Elliott laughs.]
And you’re like, “Fuck, well I’ve already used the ability for the day. I
might as well get in a battle. Otherwise…”
00:49:42
Dan
Host
Y’know, I—
[All laugh.]
00:49:46
Elliott
Host
I love how—the secret story of Hillbilly Elegy is how much it
intersects with gaming. Yeah.
00:49:50
Dan
Host
I do wanna briefly address the character of J.D., who is not much of
a character in his own story. Y’know like I think there are side
characters who the movie would profit more by spending its time
on. But like, is he—what do we think of him? Because I have
sympathy for anyone who grew up under difficult circumstances and
had such a trying family life? At the same time, he does seem to
spend a lot of the movie being a dick in his own way and shoving
his problems away and not telling people what’s going on. Like, not
ever explaining to anyone what’s happening. What do you think?
00:50:34
Stuart
Host
Well yeah.
00:50:35
Elliott
Host
Well that’s kind of what he needs to learn. That’s the lesson he
needs to learn, to rely on other people. But what were you gonna
say, Stuart?
00:50:40
Stuart
Host
Yeah, I mean, I feel like you get the best sense of his character
from his relationship with his girlfriend Usha? Who he takes
advantage of. He is dishonest with. And he is generally not a very
good boyfriend. And she is this like almost comically understanding
character.
00:50:58
Dan
Host
Yeah. She’s—
00:50:59
Elliott
Host
Well and the scene that shows how much she loves him is when
she’s laughing at the way he says “surup” instead of “syrup,” and it
was like, “Is that what the relationship is built around? ‘Cause that is
not a strong foundation!”
[Dan laughs.]
00:51:09
Dan
Host
They love to bust each others’—
00:51:10
Elliott
Host
And this is the woman who eventually becomes his wife in real life. I
believe.
00:51:13
Dan
Host
Yeah. They love to mess with each other, which immediately
actually put me against this relationship. [Laughs.] Because—
[Multiple people laugh.]
—well early on she’s studying in the library and he brings her food,
which is sweet. But she is—
00:51:27
Elliott
Host
Excuse me, sir! Excuse me, sir! As the husband and son of different
librarians, you do not bring food into a library.
00:51:33
Dan
Host
No, no. I know, Elliott. My mom is a librarian as well.
[Stuart laughs.]
Or she was before she retired.
00:51:38
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: What a cool argument, dudes!
Dan: I’m just saying—
[All laugh.]
00:51:43
Elliott
Host
I’m just saying, if you want vermin eating away at the books then go
ahead! Bring your lunch to the library!
00:51:46
Dan
Host
Elliott, let me get to my actual point. Which is—look. I understand
that that is meant to be read as this sweet thing. And maybe it is.
He’s like, “Eat! Eat! Ya gotta eat!” But then she is understandably
worried about the rules. She’s like, “No, [through laughter] we’re in
a library.” And then he’s like—he pushes her basically back into the
stacks and he’s like, “You can eat here. I’ll be your lookout.” And
then he does a bit where he pretends someone’s coming and she’s
gonna get in trouble. And I’m like, “This is not nice.”
[Multiple people laugh.]
[Through laughter] “To fuck with her.” Like, come on! This is
supposed to be charming banter in the movie, I think? But it just
comes off as—you’re not respecting her worries and then once
she’s like, “Oh, y’know, I will eat,” you’re fucking with her.
00:52:32
Elliott
Host
It is true that in a movie that is supposed to be a heartfelt real, like,
gritty look at life, there is a lot of dialogue in it that smacks of that
movie behavior where you’re like, “Oh, if someone did this in real
life they would be a terrible person. This is a mean thing to do.” It’s
got a little bit of that romantic comedy logic where you’re like, “This
is cute… in the movie. But if I did this, I would rightfully be
shunned.”
00:52:56
Dan
Host
[Through laughter] Get arrested.
00:52:57
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: Yeah. I mean, Meg Ryan had a perfectly nice fiancé—
Dan: Get a restraining order.
00:53:00
Stuart
Host
—in sleepless in Seattle. She didn’t have to go start stalking Tom
Hanks on his houseboat.
00:53:04
Elliott
Host
No. Not at all. Well this is also one of the problems I have with the
movie Frozen, where there’s a song in it where these trolls—who
don’t need to be in the movie anyway—are singing about how these
two should obviously be in love and the guy is like—I can’t
remember his name, whether it’s Sven or—no, ‘cause Sven is the
reindeer. Right?
00:53:20
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: I don’t know.
Elliott: I can’t remember.
00:53:22
Elliott
Host
Or Kristoff. I think it’s Kristoff. He’s like, “But she’s already
engaged!” And the trolls are like, “Hey, let’s just get that fiancé out
of the way and you two can be together.” And I was like, “This is not
a good lesson for kids.”
[Dan laughs.]
That you should just go and break up engagements if you feel like
you’re in love with that person. Anyway.
00:53:36
Stuart
Host
I mean, if something better comes along, you gotta trade up. That’s
the rule, right?
[Multiple people laugh.]
00:53:38
Elliott
Host
No, that’s gaming again. Stuart, you’re looking at life as a game
again! That’s not—you don’t level up in relationships!
00:53:43
Stuart
Host
You only have so many inventory slots! Theoretically you only have
one fiancé slot. You may as well take the better fiancé. [Laughs.]
[Dan laughs.]
00:53:50
Elliott
Host
I mean, very much not theoretically. For most people—practically—
there’s only one spot. But anyway. 1997. J.D. is arguing with his
mom. Oscar-yelling number seven. And Mamaw—despite having
pneumonia—leaves the hospital in order to get there and say J.D.’s
living with her from now on so that he won’t get into trouble
anymore and wreck her car. Back to 2011. J.D.’s sister—who holds
like 40 jobs and should be, in many ways, the star of the movie—
she’s the one who actually has the weight of this life falling down on
her—say—she’s not the one who escapes and goes to Yale and
becomes a fancy lawyer and writes a bestselling book—J.D.’s sister
is like, “Mom can’t stay with me! Let’s just put her in a hotel and you
should go to that interview the next morning.” And we flash to—
which is, y’know—
00:54:32
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: We’ll talk about it. It’s like—
Stuart: That’s the voice of reason.
00:54:35
Elliott
Host
Voice of reason, but the lesson of the movie is also like, “Abandon
your family because you’ll be better for them as a rich person than
you are as a helping hand in the moment.” Which is—I don’t know.
It feels like the traditional storytelling method would be for them to
turn their back on earthly riches—
[Dan laughs.]
—in order to support the ones they love. But that’s not the America
we live in, I guess. And we flashback to Mamaw is throwing out
J.D.’s slacker friends. There’s another argument. Oscar-yelling
number eight. This is firmly in the “Mamaw is the tough love coach”
section. J.D. gets caught trying to steal the calculator he needs. He
learned it from his mom stealing sports cards. Now he’s stealing,
y’know, overpriced but relatively small consumer electronics.
00:55:14
Stuart
Host
And having been a RadioShack store manager, I felt this moment
deeply. Because… shoplifting was a constant, ever-present threat
and danger to the point where at one point I was watching security
footage and I saw a woman using her daughter’s—like, her little
school-aged daughter’s bookbag as a way to stash a camera she
stole? And I was like, “Fuck this. I am not cut out for this life.”
[Laughs.]
00:55:45
Dan
Host
Yeah. I was gonna ask how you handled—
00:55:47
Elliott
Host
And that’s when you became a professional shoplifter. You’re like,
“I’m on the wrong side of these cameras.”
00:55:50
Stuart
Host
Exactly, yeah.
00:55:51
Dan
Host
I was gonna ask how you handled that, Stuart. I mean, like, I—
y’know, I was wondering whether this got RadioShack flashbacks.
Because the one time I worked in a small enough retail store that I
was there to kind of witness any shoplifting? I briefly worked at a
souvenir store in Savannah, Georgia, and this very erratic—
00:56:14
Elliott
Host
Dan, how have I not heard any stories about this part of your life
before?
[Dan laughs.]
00:56:17
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Uh… there’re a couple fun ones.
Stuart: Did you wear a straw hat?
[Multiple people laugh.]
00:56:23
Dan
Host
This was when I thought I was gonna maybe go to film school and I
actually was in film school for three months and I dropped out. This
was at SCAD. And I worked at this store that was actually
connected to river boat tours. It was where you bought the tickets
for the river boat tours and then got your photos afterwards and
souvenirs. But this very erratic-seeming guy came in one time and
me and the other guy who worked there who was older but we
bonded because we’d talk about horror movies just kind of watched
it all happen? And we’re like, “We’re not— [Laughs.] We’re not
intervening here. If this guy wants to steal a snow globe, go ahead.”
[Laughs.]
[Elliott laughs.]
00:57:01
Elliott
Host
You decided your life and injury was not worth that snow globe.
00:57:05
Stuart
Host
Yeah. There was definitely a time where a guy stole a fucking in-
box new cellphone off the counter. And I chased after him for about
half a block before I was like, “What the fuck would I even do if I
caught him?”
[Multiple people laugh.]
Like, would I slap the cuffs on him like citizen’s arrest? I don’t
wanna fight a guy!
00:57:28
Dan
Host
That’s the thing. I think [through laughter] legally there’s not even
really—you’re not gonna do anything—
00:57:32
Stuart
Host
But it’s this moment of like, I dunno, this feeling of “How dare this
guy steal this thing from me!” I don’t know. It was—I mean, it was
dumb. It was overwhelming and a little bit soul crushing is how I
reacted to it.
00:57:44
Dan
Host
And you know what, Stuart? That’s how RadioShack failed. It got
out of money. [Through laughter] Because of that.
00:57:50
Stuart
Host
[Through laughter] Yeah.
00:57:51
Dan
Host
That loss.
00:57:52
Elliott
Host
That was the straw that broke RadioShack’s back.
00:57:55
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: Yup. Sorry. Sorry.
Dan: It wasn’t the fact that people don’t need transistors anymore.
00:57:59
Stuart
Host
Sorry, the Shack.
00:58:01
Elliott
Host
That was one of Stuart Wellington’s patented FlashShacks. That’s
right—it’s a RadioShack flashback from Stuart Wellington!
[Dan laughs.]
Patent-pending, actually. So J.D. gets caught trying to steal that
calculator. Mamaw gets him out of the situation and buys it for him.
And starts yelling at him and gives him this speech about, “Are you
gonna try or are you not?” This is Oscar-yelling number nine. And
J.D. is so mad he throws the calculator out the window which is
totally the kind of thing I would’ve done as a kid. I would’ve gotten
so pissed that I just need to get that energy out. Although what
would happen with us is that my mom would be yelling at me in the
car and I would open the door of the car as if I was just gonna jump
out and roll out?
[Dan laughs.]
And she’d—and then she’d reach over and pull the door shut and
pull the car over and yell at me for that.
00:58:39
Dan
Host
You’re a regular Lady Bird.
00:58:42
Elliott
Host
Yup. Exactly. But then he notices that—so she has a hard time
making ends meet. She gets Meals on Wheels, and she’s really
begging the Meals on Wheels delivery guy for extra food. And then
she shares half of it with him. And this is like one of the more—this
is maybe to me the most powerful scene in the movie. ‘Cause it’s
not yelling. It’s this character who—up ‘til now—has been presented
as like, “She’s the strong, tough one in the family!” Has to grovel
and make herself so abject and admit her poverty to this person in
order to get what she needs to survive and for her grandson to
survive. If more of the movie was in this manner of matter-of-fact-y-
ness and not yell-y-ness? Then it would be a different movie.
00:59:22
Dan
Host
Elliott, I 100% agree with you. This is the most affecting moment in
the movie. Partly because its’ the only moment, too, where
anyone’s nice to [through laughter] one another?
[Elliott laughs.]
Like the Meals on Wheels guy is very understanding and she is
very grateful that he’s understanding, but also just like… yeah. It is
a quiet moment that really sinks in, y’know, that this is a person
who’s struggling and is proud but wants to take care of her
grandson.
00:59:48
Stuart
Host
And what’s funny is the movie understands that. Because narrative-
wise, this is the thing that makes J.D. clean his shit up. And you’re
like, “If the movie knows that, why is it filled with so much other
bullshit?” [Laughs.]
[Dan laughs. Elliott joins in.]
01:00:04
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: That’s true. That’s true.
Stuart: Like, why is it—
01:00:06
Stuart
Host
—full of so many speeches that don’t work? Is that the message?
That coming up with little bits of—I dunno—grandstanding
speeches don’t actually serve and purpose and don’t work? It’s
these little moments of kindness or little moments of humility and
honesty that actually—
01:00:23
Dan
Host
You are searching for meaning where there is none, I think.
[Laughs.]
01:00:26
Stuart
Host
Yeah.
01:00:27
Elliott
Host
I mean, if the movie was aware of that as a message it would be a
really strong movie and I would be like, “Oh, okay. I get what it’s
doing now.” If it was like, “All this yelling doesn’t make the
difference, but when you see someone as a human being and they
touch you emotionally, that’s when—” But I actually think it’s—it’s
almost like… the movie stumbled into an affecting moment. I mean,
not say “stumbled.” The people who made the movie are
professionals. They know what they’re doing. They’ve made great
movies in the past. They just kind of like… they took the wrong road
in this movie? And the briefly, by accident, ended up on the right
on-ramp to the right road? And then they took another wrong turn.
Maybe they needed gas or they saw a Denny’s and they’re like, “I
know it’s Denny’s, but I’m hungry. I’m just gonna stop there.” And
they kept going in their other way. J.D.—‘cause he sees this and he
starts straightening up. He gets a job. He’s working hard. He’s
trying at school.
01:01:15
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: I think they—I think “Man in Motion” starts playing, right?
Elliott: Suddenly he’s doing great.
[All laugh.]
01:01:20
Dan
Host
If only! What a needle drop that would be!
01:01:22
Elliott
Host
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s—probably.
01:01:25
Stuart
Host
Hey, speaking of music, we haven’t addressed the fact that the—
01:01:27
Elliott
Host
I think “Saving the Day” from Ghostbusters starts playing.
[Dan laughs.]
01:01:31
Stuart
Host
Speaking of music, we haven’t addressed the fact that the main
theme for this movie—written by Hans Zimmer—is basically like a
straight lift of the Game of Thrones theme music. [Singing Game of
Thrones theme song.] Dun-duh, duh-duh duh duh—like, its’ totally
that!
01:01:43
Elliott
Host
Is that what it was? I just heard a lot of strings and banjo and I was
like, “I dunno.” I checked out as soon as I started—there’s a certain
sort of folksy cornpone music that I kinda—same way with Wild
Mountain Thyme. I was like, “Hoo boy, I’m gonna hear a lot of fiddle
in the background of this one.”
01:02:01
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: I can’t believe you guys didn’t—I can’t believe—like—
Elliott: And I like fiddles, but.
01:02:03
Stuart
Host
I barely watched that television show and even I started imagining
castles rising in the hollers of Kentucky.
[Multiple people laugh.]
01:02:11
Dan
Host
Stuart, I can honestly tell you that the music made absolutely no
impact on me whatsoever. [Laughs.]
[Elliott laughs.]
01:02:16
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: Wow! Harsh rebuke of Hans Zimmer’s work!
Elliott: I wish now that—I wish—
01:02:19
Elliott
Host
Now I wish—I mean, what are you, the producers of The
Simpsons? Anyway. So—or is that Hans Zimmer or Alf Clausen? I
can’t remember.
01:02:25
Dan
Host
Alf Clausen.
01:02:26
Elliott
Host
That was Alf Clausen. Now I wish that there were an opening title
sequence where it was like Game of Thrones and there’s just like
rundown houses with old trucks in front of them rising up in the
forests and… that would be nice. Anyway. We go to the present of
the movie, 2011. J.D. catches his mom doing drugs in the hotel and
flushes them down. And she’s like, “Please stay with me during the
night.” And he has this cavalcade of family flashbacks, which you
think is gonna lead him to choose his family over his career. But
instead he’s like, “I can’t help you unless I get a good job. I’ll see ya
tomorrow, maybe, Mom.” And—
01:02:58
Stuart
Host
This scene where he squirts out the heroin that was in the needle
and then flushes the needle and I was like, “You can’t flush a
needle!”
[Multiple people laugh.]
Sharlene, just staring at the screen, is like, “Yeah, you can.” Made
me a little bit nervous about who my wife really is, but whatever. It’s
not good for the pipes, but—
01:03:16
Elliott
Host
Yeah. That’s fair.
01:03:18
Dan
Host
Yeah.
01:03:19
Elliott
Host
It is bad for the pipes. I mean, my life is a little bit more innocent.
Yesterday my toddler son was stuffing walnuts into a public
drainage pipe in a park—
[Dan laughs.]
—and I was like, “That’s probably not good for that pipe.”
01:03:30
Stuart
Host
But are they organic walnuts?
01:03:31
Elliott
Host
Yeah. They were organic walnuts. They were from a tree. But that
he was—and I said, “No, stop that. That’s not good for the pipes.”
And he goes, “No, it is! It is good!” And I was like, “There’s no way.
How do you know more about plumbing than me?”
01:03:41
Dan
Host
He’s appeasing the mole people, Elliott. [Laughs.]
01:03:44
Elliott
Host
Ohhh, I see.
01:03:45
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: I get it.
Dan: Yeah. I mean, this is the thing.
01:03:47
Dan
Host
If you stop him… it could be catastrophic.
01:03:50
Elliott
Host
Uh-oh. That would explain all the earthquakes in Los Angeles. The
mole people are not getting enough walnuts! On the—he’s like,
“Good luck, Mom! Good luck with your addiction! I gotta go to this
job interview!” And he drives all night. His hands wet on the wheel.
‘Cause there’s a voice in his head that drives his heel. It’s his baby
calling. She says, “I need ya here.” And he does call her on the
drive and apologizes to his girlfriend and she says, “I’m gonna stay
up all night with you and keep you awake while you’re driving.”
And—
01:04:14
Stuart
Host
Again, bending over backwards to help this guy. Like, this guy who
can’t seem to catch a break has probably the greatest break in a
partner who is doing all this work for him.
01:04:26
Dan
Host
Well especially ‘cause—as we will see—she is willing to run out of
the apartment down to the job interview and be like, “Oh, we’re
gonna be late!” Except for that’s a trick.
01:04:36
Elliott
Host
It’s a trick. He’s like, “I’m never gonna make it!” She goes, “I’ll run
down and I’ll tell them!” And then she goes to the door and opens
it? J.D.’s right there on the phone. He could’ve just walked in the
house a couple minutes ago, but instead he decided to play this last
little teaser prank on her. Which is stupid.
01:04:50
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: Don’t do that.
Dan: Yeah.
Stuart: And he had the time to set up the prank!
01:04:52
Stuart
Host
So he must’ve been driving shockingly fast. Dangerously fast.
01:04:55
Elliott
Host
Yes. Now—
[Dan sighs deeply.]
Now I don’t know why—I wish now—this is going back to earlier in
the movie when he called her for silverware help? I wish that it had
become an Apollo 13 type scene—also directed by Ron Howard—
where she was like, “Describe the place setting to me.” And she
was just pulling silverware from her own home to make a simulation
place setting so that she could see what he was seeing and tell him
what he could use? Guys? Would that have been funny or would it
have been too much?
01:05:20
Stuart
Host
I think it would’ve been too much. I would’ve preferred kind of a
more modern approach where she closes her eyes and enters her
own memory palace of going into—
01:05:28
Elliott
Host
Her memory restaurant? [Laughs.] Which is I guess what you could
call Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.
01:05:34
Stuart
Host
That’s true!
[Multiple people laugh.]
01:05:36
Dan
Host
Okay. But the movie.
01:05:37
Elliott
Host
Anyway. So at the very end of the movie, J.D. gets to his interview
and then we get a VO about how he owes everything to his family.
And then it’s just like… after-movie text about how he’s been super
successful and now everybody’s doing great. And the message of
the movie is they are no longer just a bunch of poor hillbillies; now
they are some rich Hill Williamses.
[All laugh.]
01:05:54
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Yep. Um… and the fact—
Stuart: Don’t—don’t—you’re not allowed to make that face when
you make that joke, Elliott.
[Elliott laughs.]
01:06:00
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: And again—
Elliott: Let me make it some more. Mmm?
Stuart: Nope! Uh-uh!
01:06:04
Dan
Host
This is one last—this is one final way I feel like the framing
unbalances this movie. Because I—because it makes him getting
this law job the ultimate triumph? And I feel like it—like, not only is
the message of this movie—the political message of this movie kind
of nonexistent; the emotional message of the movie, to me, is kind
of incomprehensible. Because it makes a big—like, part of the
movie is always about, like, “Oh! Family! Family’s the most
important thing! Family is the most important thing!” So that could
be like a fine message for a movie. I don’t know if I necessarily
agree with it, but it’s fine. Or the message of the movie could be
what it ultimately kinda points at, like, some people can’t be helped?
Sometimes you need to be good to yourself and… understand that.
Like, you do what you can, but then let it go. But the way the movie
ends—putting so much weight on this job—makes it really feel like,
“Okay, the message of the movie is leave your drug-addicted mom
behind and get a high-powered lawyer job.”
01:07:05
Elliott
Host
Yeah. Like, “You owe everything to your family, so jettison them like
a booster rocket that got you out of the atmosphere. ‘Cause they
are useless to you now. They are so many tons of space junk that
are just weighing you back.”
[Dan laughs.]
01:07:16
Stuart
Host
Yeah. I mean, I think on some level it’s going for the idea that like…
in order to move forward as a human, you need to understand
where you come from and come to grips with your past trauma.
And… and that should let you, y’know, I dunno. Self-actualize or
something. I don’t know.
01:07:41
Dan
Host
Yeah. That is an excellent message that I [through laughter] could
not find in this movie.
01:07:45
Stuart
Host
That’s the thing. Y’know, I feel like their reach is shorter than their
goals.
01:07:50
Elliott
Host
Yeah. Their arms are too short to box with—not God, exactly, but
certainly Leon Spinks. For sure.
01:07:57
Dan
Host
Hercules, maybe.
01:07:59
Elliott
Host
[Through laughter] Yeah. Hercules, yeah. It definitely—it feels like a
movie made by someone justifying why it was okay for them to
leave their drug-addicted mom in a hotel room—
[Dan laughs.]
—while they drove away to New Haven to interview for a fancy job.
01:08:09
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan and Stuart: Yeah.
01:08:10
Dan
Host
Okay. Well let’s just do Final Judgments on this movie. Whether it’s
a good-bad movie, a bad-bad movie, a movie we kinda liked.
Before I get into mine, I just want to say, like, look. I grew up in a
small town. We were not wealthy but we certainly did not—I never
in my life had to, like, feel financially insecure in the way that these
people have or dealt with so much hardship. So if I’ve said anything
foolish along the way? I apologize. I know that I’ve had a privileged
way of it. But this movie… hoo, boy. [Through laughter] Is not good,
folks. Not good, folks. It’s just like… a lot of very competent-to-good
effort has been put into making the movie? But the movie… just
shouldn’t have been made in this form. It feels… [sighs.] Deeply
confused. I have no idea why this movie was made other than to
show us sort of a parade of misery.
01:09:15
Elliott
Host
Yeah. I—it feels like a—the movie was described to me ahead of
time as poverty porn and it feels like that often. Which is—if
anything—the worst kind of porn, I’m guessing.
01:09:26
Dan
Host
[Through laughter] You can barely masturbate to it.
01:09:29
Elliott
Host
Barely. If you’re a bear, you can do it.
01:09:31
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: But bears can masturbate to anything. Dan, please stop.
Please stop.
Dan: Good things come in bears. I know that. [Laughs.] So if you
can come as a bear—
Stuart: Uh-huh.
[Multiple people laugh.]
01:09:37
Elliott
Host
I don’t like that you’re making this your new motto. But I second
what Dan said. I have come—I did come from a, y’know, a
privileged middle-class upbringing. I lived in an affluent town. So I
apologize if I was misunderstanding the life of the underprivileged.
But as a movie, it is… it is unaffecting and it seems very mixed-up
and not—the movie does not seem quite sure of what it is doing. Or
what it is trying to get at. And is hoping that if it just muddles along,
it’ll get there. So I would call it… Best Picture, probably. Stuart,
what do you say?
01:10:12
Stuart
Host
Okay, so it’s my turn. So the first thing I do is I apologize. So…
[Dan laughs.]
01:10:15
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: Uh, well—uh—
Elliott: You gotta—but apologize for something other than what we
apologized for. Apologize for a new thing.
Dan: No, I just wanted to acknowledge—I just wanted to
acknowledge—
01:10:22
Dan
Host
That like we’re talking not necessarily from a place of expertise
about some of this. That’s all.
01:10:26
Stuart
Host
Uh-huh. Also, I’m a big dumb idiot, so I say dumb stuff all the time.
[Elliott laughs.]
01:10:32
Elliott
Host
I mean, Stuart is coming from an expertise in the realm of collectible
card games.
01:10:36
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, I guess so.
Dan: Yeah. That’s true.
01:10:38
Stuart
Host
So yeah. I can put Esquire on my business card. My business card,
of course, being a rare Magic: The Gathering trading card that I am
willing to hand people because I have so many. No, I—this is a bad-
bad movie. It feels wrongheaded. Structurally, it doesn’t quite make
sense. It doesn’t really seem to have any kind of a message. And..
yeah. I mean, it feels like a collection of Oscar-swaying scenes
thrown together. And… yeah! I mean, it’s just—yeah. No thank you.
01:11:10
Dan
Host
No… thank you.
01:11:12
Stuart
Host
Bad-bad.
01:11:14
Elliott
Host
No… thank you, but no thank you.
01:11:15
Music
Music
Light, up-tempo, electric guitar with synth instruments.
01:11:20
Promo
Clip
Music: Mellow ukulele music plays in the background.
Jordan Morris: Welcome!
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Thanks!
Speaker 3: No problem. Thank you.
Jesse Thorn: These are real podcast listeners, not actors.
Jordan: What do you look for in a podcast?
Speaker 1: Reliability is big for me.
Speaker 2: Power.
Speaker 3: I’d say comfort?
Jordan: What do you think of this?
[Loud metallic crash and clanging.]
All: Ooh.
Speaker 2: That’s Jordan, Jesse, Go!
Speaker 1: Jordan, Jesse, Go!?
Speaker 2: They came out of the floor?
[Loud thump.]
Speaker 1: And…down from the ceiling?
Speaker 3: That… can’t be safe.
Speaker 1: I’m upset.
Speaker 2: Can we go now?
Jordan: Soon.
[Music that sounds like it would have backed a 1990s commercial
starts.]
Jesse: Jordan, Jesse, Go!: a real podcast.
[Music fades out.]
01:11:59
Elliott
Host
Music: Inspiring music throughout.
[The “testimonials” cut between different VOs. They are not talking
to one another.]
Speaker 1: I started listening to Oh No, Ross and Carrie! shortly
after I broke my arm.
Speaker 2: I couldn’t get my book started.
[Music swells hopefully to a dramatic crescendo]
Speaker 3: I was lost. Honestly.
Speaker 4: I knew it was time to make a change.
Speaker 5: There’s something about Oh No, Ross and Carrie! that
you just can’t get anywhere else.
Speaker 6: They’re thought-leaders, discoverers, founders.
Speaker 7: I’d call them heroes.
Speaker 8: Ross and Carrie don’t just report on fringe science,
spirituality, and claims of the paranormal. They take part
themselves.
Speaker 3: They show up, so you don’t have to.
Speaker 5: But you might find that you want to.
[Music swells unbearably.]
Speaker 1: My arm is better.
Speaker 2: I wrote an entire book this weekend! It’s terrible, but I
did it!
Speaker 6: Just go to MaximumFun.org.
Everyone: Thank you, Ross and Carrie!
Carrie Poppy: [Hurriedly] Oh No, Ross and Carrie! is just a
podcast. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just sounds you listen to in your
ears. All these people are made up. Goodbye.
01:12:47
Dan
Host
Hey, guys. It’s just a quick solo drop in by Dan. We forgot to
mention on our original recording that you can still see the Flop
House live show for another couple of days. If you didn’t see it live,
you didn’t buy a ticket before, you can still buy a ticket now. Watch
the show. The recorded version of it. And that will be available, I
believe, until midnight on February the 14
th
. Midnight on Valentine’s
Day. You could cuddle up with someone and watch the Flop House
talk about Teen Wolf. What could be more romantic? And the new
shirts—the beautiful shirts—the rocket crocodile one and the one of
all of us as teen wolves—or middle-aged-man wolves—will be
available until the end of that period as well. So if you still wanna
take a moment and watch that live show for February the 14
th
, at
midnight, when it will expire like Cinderella’s coach? You can go get
tickets at TheFlopHouse.simpletix.com.
TheFlopHouse.simpletix.com. And if you want one of the new
shirts—the rocket crocodile shirt or the teen wolves Flop House
shirt, you can go to www.Bonfire.com/store/flophousetourstore.
Thank you to the person who emailed me saying that I should use,
y’know, shorter, easier-to-understand URLs. You are correct. I did
not set them up though, so don’t always assume that everything
that is done wrong at The Flop House is done because of me. But
in the future we’ll have better, easier-to-understand or -remember
URLs, but the store is—again—
www.Bonfire.com/store/flophousetourstore. Now back to the regular
show.
01:15:16
Dan
Host
Okay! So let’s—
01:15:18
Elliott
Host
Guys? I think we can call this one Hillbilly Elegy Elegy.
01:15:21
Stuart
Host
Not Schillbilly Smellogy?
[All laugh.]
01:15:24
Elliott
Host
That would be the MAD Magazine version of it.
01:15:26
Dan
Host
Oh. If only.
01:15:28
Elliott
Host
I wanna see that so badly now!
[Stuart laughs.]
01:15:30
Dan
Promo
Yeah. So The Flop House is sponsored in part by Squarespace. If
you use Squarespace’s services, you can create a beautiful website
to promote or just get your cool idea out there. Blog or publish
content. Sell products and services of all kinds, and much, much
more. Squarespace does this by giving you beautiful, customizable
templates created by world-class designers. Everything optimized
for mobile right out of the box. A new way to buy domains and
choose from over 200 extensions. Free and secure hosting. Hey!
Why don’t you go over—if this interests you—to
Squarespace.com/flop for a free trial. And when you’re ready to
launch, use the offer code “flop” to save 10% off your first purchase
of a website or domain.
01:16:24
Elliott
Promo
Hey, guys! I had an idea for a website kinda based on today’s
movie and I was wondering if Squarespace might be able to help
us. And Dan, maybe you—
01:16:29
Stuart
Promo
Oh wow!
01:16:30
Elliott
Promo
Maybe you can help me—
01:16:31
Stuart
Promo
Kinda came outta nowhere, but that’s okay.
01:16:33
Elliott
Promo
Yeah. So I was wondering—we see so many warm-weather
hillbillies. They live in the South. It’s much warmer there. But I was
wondering—what about the colder hillbillies? And that’s why at
www.Chillbilly.com, you can find your news about the chilliest
billies. That’s right—hillbillies who live in cold areas and—again—
we call ‘em chillbillies. They also are super cool—not just cold—and
that’s why they chill. So at Chillbillies.com, it’s your place online for
cold-weather, rural, y’know, poverty-line stereotypes.
01:17:08
Dan
Promo
[Through laughter] Oh wow. Okay. Sure.
01:17:10
Stuart
Promo
Is this like a meetup site? Or is it like…
[Dan laughs.]
Is it like fiction? What’s going on.
01:17:15
Elliott
Promo
Yeah, no, well I mean the meetup site is our app Billble, which is
our hillbilly meetup site. But it’s just a place where you can swap
stereotypes. Make crude caricatures and pretend to be them in
multimillion-dollar movies for award consideration. So that’s
Chillbilly.com. Chillbilly.com and use offer code “we don’t have one;
there’s nothing to buy on the site.”
[Dan laughs.]
01:17:36
Crosstalk
Promo
Elliott: The site doesn’t exist yet.
Dan: I suddenly got really worried—
01:17:39
Dan
Promo
—about these made-up URLs that you do, Elliott. This is one of the
ones that feels like it might actually exist and I’m—
01:17:47
Elliott
Promo
It might exist. Well, Jordan, if this one exists? Please cut this part
out. And if it doesn’t exist, please—
01:17:52
Crosstalk
Promo
Stuart: Buy that domain. Yeah.
Elliott: —buy that domain for me. Yeah.
01:17:54
Dan
Promo
Um…
01:17:57
Elliott
Promo
Guys? I just checked! I just checked! Www.Chillbilly.com is for sale.
So—
01:18:01
Crosstalk
Promo
Dan: We’re safe. We’re safe.
Elliott: It is available!
Stuart: Okay, let me see if I have enough money—
01:18:06
Stuart
Promo
—on these five credit cards.
[Dan laughs.]
01:18:08
Elliott
Host
Now there is another—now I wanna—this is a movie idea. This is
not a—this is not a show. But I was worrying about Chilly Willy
Elegy?
[Dan laughs.]
Which would be the story of Chilly Willy’s upbringing and how
difficult it was.
01:18:20
Elliott
Host
Now, the penguin. The cartoon penguin? This is the one you’re—
01:18:23
Stuart
Host
Yeah. This is the cartoon penguin Chilly Willy. Yeah.
01:18:25
Stuart
Host
This is what, like a dirge you sing after his passing?
[Multiple people laugh.]
01:18:29
Elliott
Host
[Through laughter] Yup! Exactly!
01:18:31
Dan
Host
Tales of his adventures.
01:18:33
Stuart
Host
The skald sings it at his Viking funeral.
[Elliott laughs.]
01:18:36
Elliott
Host
Well ‘cause he’s gone from the cold of Antarctica to the ultimate
cold of the grave.
[Dan laughs.]
01:18:40
Dan
Host
Yeah. Alright. Well let’s move on to Letters. Unless—wait, Elliott,
you look like you might have something to plug.
01:18:46
Elliott
Promo
I do have something to plug! In stores… now? That’s right! Because
it came out Wednesday, February 3
rd
, which again is after we’re
recording this but before it will be released—is #1 of Maniac of New
York! That’s right—Maniac of New York #1 from Aftershock Comics,
by me and Andrea Mutti. It’s the story of basically what if The Wire
was—instead of being about drugs—was about Jason Voorhees?
And it’s set in New York City. So there’s an unstoppable killer. He’s
been a problem in New York for years. Everyone’s kind of given up,
except for two crusading people—a mayoral aide and an outcast
police officer. Police detective. And they’re gonna try to take this
monster—this slasher-killer—down. Will they be able to do it? Find
out in Maniac of New York #1. From Aftershock Comics. In stores
now! Go to your local comic book store or mail order it for them, if
you don’t wanna go out of the house. Which I understand.
01:19:38
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: And real quick, Dan, when is this—when’s this episode
dropping?
Dan: Uh, and Stuart?
01:19:41
Dan
Host
This episode—one second—should come out on the 13
th
of
February.
01:19:46
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: The day before Valentine’s.
Stuart: Okay. So that means—yeah.
01:19:49
Stuart
Host
That means—as a special Valentine’s Day gift for yourself or
others—it is the last—if you’re listening to this on the day it drops, it
is the last day for our limited-run—our exclusive run—of live show t-
shirts. If you go to TheFlopHousePod Twitter account, you’ll find
links to those shirts there. They are great. And they’re exclusive to
just that week! So if you miss ‘em, you miss ‘em. So hopefully you
got a chance to grab one.
01:20:18
Elliott
Host
These are some great designs. I’ve liked our past designs, but
these are my favorite designs that we’ve ever had.
01:20:22
Dan
Host
Oh, wow.
01:20:23
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: They are very good designs.
Elliott: They’re really good.
01:20:25
Dan
Host
But. Let us move on—
01:20:29
Elliott
Host
Dan’s favorite subject!
01:20:30
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Mm-hm. Let us move on.
[Stuart laughs.]
Elliott: Butts!
01:20:33
Stuart
Host
[Through laughter] Oh god! You got him! Oh shit! Oh man!
01:20:36
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: That’s so—that’s so Raven.
Stuart: Got him! Stick a fork in him!
01:20:39
Dan
Host
Now—
[Elliott laughs.]
Okay. So Letters From Listeners. Listeners like you. This one’s from
Jon, last name withheld. There’s no—
01:20:48
Stuart
Host
Mm-hm. John Lasseter of Pixar.
01:20:49
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Uh, well there’s no—no. There’s no “h”—
Elliott: Uhm… [Laughs.] I hope not!
01:20:54
Dan
Host
—so I can only assume it’s new-to-Twitter Jon Stewart.
“Hey, Peaches! My daughter, 13—also an avid listener—” I don’t
recommend that, but uh—
01:21:03
Elliott
Host
Your daughter’s name is 13? That’s cool!
01:21:06
Dan
Host
Yeah. Um… like the—yeah. Very similar to the character “3” from
Peanuts. Remember that? [Laughs.] When there was a character
who just had a number as their name? Anyway.
01:21:16
Elliott
Host
I kinda remember it. Not particularly. Are you thinking of Pig-Pen?
01:21:18
Dan
Host
No, no, no. There was a whole, like, gag—it was basically the 19—
early 1960s Charles Schultz version of making fun of like, “Kids
have the craziest names these days!”
01:21:32
Elliott
Host
They don’t have good names like “Linus.”
[Dan laughs.]
01:21:35
Dan
Host
Mm-hm. Or Schroeder.
01:21:39
Elliott
Host
Or Shermy. Whatever happened to normal kid names, like,
“Shermy”?
[Multiple people laugh.]
01:21:43
Dan
Host
“My daughter, 13—"
01:21:44
Elliott
Host
Wait, no, Dan—I always assumed Schroeder was his last name. do
you think it’s his first name?
01:21:47
Dan
Host
No, I think it’s his last name. I think you’re right there.
“My daughter, 13—” There are two Pattys in that strip. There’s
Peppermint Patty and regular Patty.
[Elliott laughs.]
That seems—
01:21:57
Stuart
Host
I mean, that’s—
01:21:58
Elliott
Host
Well that’s’ why they call her “Peppermint Patty,” Dan!
01:22:00
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: To keep ‘em apart!
Stuart: They do the same thing on The Bachelor.
01:22:02
Stuart
Host
When there’s multiple Pattys, one’s regular Patty, one’s Peppermint
Patty.
01:22:06
Dan
Host
This seems like Charles Schultz could’ve [through laughter] come
up with a different name. But anyway.
“My daughter, 13—also an avid listener—is thinking about making a
movie for a community student film competition. Her idea is a
comedy-horror movie—something along the lines of Jaws meets
Scary Movie starring our cat as Jaws. Question to you filmic
geniuses is—what are your best tips to make the plot beats hit the
best for making dumb gore work and be funny and any other tips for
making a horror-comedy short—15 minutes, tops—hit the best?
Yours in floptastic-ness, Jon, last name withheld.”
01:22:49
Elliott
Host
It sounds like—she should definitely make this movie. There is no
reason not to make a movie if you wanna make a movie. And my
first tip—sorry to jump in, guys, ahead of time—my first tip would be
to not worry about the plot that much. Like, for a short it’s gonna be
more important to you probably just to keep it entertaining and
funny and keep the energy moving? And you don’t wanna get
bogged down with plot stuff! Y’know? Keep the plot as simple and
straightforward as you can, unless the joke is that the plot is really
complicated, and then just have fun making it fun.
01:23:18
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Yeah. I—I—
Stuart: From what—yeah. From what little I’ve learned—
01:23:20
Stuart
Host
—from watching TikToks, the key is editing. If you wanna get
laughs, make it—do a lot of quick editing.
01:23:30
Elliott
Host
Yeah. Edits—cuts are funny. Like there’s certain types of things that
are funny without cuts? But a lot of times a quick-cut is funny.
01:23:37
Dan
Host
Uh… yes. If you make the cut part of the joke. I actually was gonna
say another thing, which is a little bit opposed but I think I trust our
listeners to be smart enough to hold both ideas in their head. Which
is sometimes it is funnier to also just let things play out in long. Like
a slapstick thing often just like seeing the full thing is the funny way.
And modern movies have forgotten that.
01:24:07
Elliott
Host
Oh, I will say—that’s true. Slapstick is funnier without cuts.
01:24:09
Stuart
Host
Yeah. It’s like the scenes in Children of Men where Alfonso Cuarón
just does one long take? Those were hilarious!
01:24:15
Elliott
Host
Oh, that movie was so funny. That movie was so funny. That’s why
Birdman is hilarious. That’s why The Revenant is hilarious.
[Dan laughs.]
That’s why Rope is hilarious.
01:24:23
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Russian Ark? Is—
Elliott: That’s why—Russian Ark, yeah.
01:24:25
Elliott
Host
Is a laugh-fucking-riot. Sorry that your daughter had to hear me
curse just then. But yeah. It’s—see, let the moment tell you how
best it should be made. Don’t stick to a theory, but let the moment
tell you. But I would still just say, like, make it… make it as fun to
watch as you can and don’t worry—like, the best movies—the ones
that people remember the most—people very rarely remember how
the plot goes.
01:24:51
Dan
Host
Yeah.
01:24:52
Elliott
Host
This is something that Howard Hawks believed in. Was he said,
“People don’t watch movies for plots. They watch them for scenes.
And they remember scenes. They don’t remember plots.” I think he
went too far with that until eventually he was making movies that
were just about dudes hanging out at racetracks or hanging out on
a safari? But you need some plot. But don’t worry that the plot is
going to be the thing that makes or breaks you. Y’know.
01:25:12
Dan
Host
Yeah. If you’ve got—yeah. If you’ve got interesting gags in it? I
don’t know. I’m remembering now, there was a video I was
supposed to make for French class in high school? And it was not
supposed to be horror? But because I’m who I am, I was like, “I’m
gonna put some horror stuff in there.” And it was like a French class
video where it involved me accidentally cutting my arm off?
[Laughs.] And I made one of those things where like there’s a
fake—I used an old shirt and I made like a fake forearm to put on
my real arm and [through laughter] I put a glove around it?
[Elliott laughs.]
I don’t know why my character’s wearing a glove. So it looked like
the glove was fake, but it looked like my hand holding my real arm. I
hope that that explanation made sense to people listening. And
then out of my little stump [through laughter] I had one of those
squirt bottles? And I just like squirted blood out of it. So I guess my
advice is do something like that.
01:26:14
Stuart
Host
Yeah. That sounds great.
01:26:16
Elliott
Host
What was the—what was French about it?
01:26:19
Dan
Host
Oh, we were speaking in French.
01:26:21
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: Oh, okay. You’re like, “Ah! Mon stump!”
Stuart: Yeah, Elliott. You don’t think French people can get their
arms cut off?
Dan: Yeah. Exactly. Zut alors! [Laughs.]
01:26:27
Elliott
Host
You’re right. French people are just as likely as anyone else to get
their arms cut off. Very fair.
01:26:31
Dan
Host
We got one last email here. It’s from Ben, last name withheld, who
says—
01:26:38
Elliott
Host
Ben Ten.
01:26:39
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: Shit.
Dan: “We all know—"
01:26:41
Dan
Host
“—that Psycho Goreman is the next Star Wars, both in the breadth
of its cultural impact and in that every background character will
eventually have at least twelve extended universe books about
them.”
01:26:52
Stuart
Host
Uh-huh. Yep.
01:26:53
Dan
Host
“Stuart, until then—what can you tell us about Tubeman’s
backstory? Where did he go to high school? What are his goals?
His dreams? What does he smell like when they pop that helmet
off? For the rest of the Floppers left in the shadow of Stuart’s artistic
legacy, what character with little screen time do you wish for more
backstory on?” I’m sorry I did not send you this last part of the
question. I forgot it was there.
01:27:17
Elliott
Host
No, cool, cool, cool. Cool. Yeah. Cool.
01:27:19
Dan
Host
I’m sorry.
01:27:20
Stuart
Host
Man, that’s—yeah, this is tough. I—y’know, when I inhabit a role,
y’know, I just let it kinda take that like character’s spirit inhabit me
as opposed to like to flow into my body and then out of my mouth.
‘Cause I’m mainly a voice actor. But—so I don’t—I try not to
overthink it too much? I’m kinda primal?
[Elliott laughs.]
Almost animalistic when I perform. You guys have seen it, right?
Where I’m like—I do that little ritual where I growl a little bit and I
have to take my shirt off. The pants stay on. I’m not a Winnie the
Pooh. I keep the pants on. But I do—
01:28:02
Elliott
Host
No, you’re a Mickey Mouse.
01:28:04
Stuart
Host
I do roll the cuffs of my pants up a little bit so that it gives me the
impression of having nudity on the bottom half of my body without
actually, y’know, going all the way into it. So I do all that and then I
kind of—like, I move around and I get very tactile. I touch
everything. And I make faces? Kind of like if I was an animal, what
an animal would do. And doing that takes me to this kind of like—
takes my brain to this kind of like lower, almost, like, subconscious.
And that allows the character—in this case, Tubeman—to just kind
of flow in through my ears and then comes—just passes my brain
entirely and flows right out of my mouth. So that’s what I do.
01:28:41
Dan
Host
Uh— [Through laughter] Wow. As to the question of backstories,
I’m gonna—this is maybe cheating, but I’m going to just sort of rail
against the idea that side characters need backstories at all.
01:28:54
Stuart
Host
Whaaat?!
[Dan laughs.]
01:28:55
Dan
Host
Well part of it is like—I think that there’s this—I think it’s kind of a
modern affliction where people seem to start feeling like not
knowing about every single character is a flaw rather than part of
what makes movies work? Like… it is good to find something
mysterious about this? Like to imagine—whatever you can imagine
is much greater. Like, we re-watched—I re-watched Pee-wee’s Big
Adventure with friends recently? And there’s a scene in there where
apparently originally there was a whole backstory to Amazing
Larry? Like, why there’s this guy who has this colorful mohawk in
the scene in the basement where Pee-wee’s laying out all the
clues? But he works so much better just as like… he’s whispering
something and Pee-wee says, “Is there something you can share
with the rest of us, Amazing Larry?” and like the shocked cut to this
guy with a crazy mohawk. And you’re like, whatever backstory you
have for Amazing Larry is better than finding out in that deleted
scene.
01:30:06
Elliott
Host
Yeah. I think it is—I was talking to someone recently about how if
they made—if Disney made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
now, they’d be like, “Great. Perfect. We’re announcing movies for
each of the dwarfs. Then we’ll do the prequel. We find out how they
met each other.” And it’s not anything that—we don’t need that
stuff. That being said. In the beginning of Singing in the Rain,
there’s a actress named Zelda who shows up at the movie premier
and this guy in the crowd hops to his feet and goes, [with extreme
enthusiasm] “Ahh! Zelda! Ahh!”
[Dan laughs.]
And every time we see him, my family laughs and laughs so I
wanna know what that guy’s about. And whether he brings that
same level of enthusiasm to everything else in his life.
01:30:42
Stuart
Host
Oh, yeah. You don’t wanna know more about Zelda. You just
wanna know about the guy.
01:30:44
Elliott
Host
I wanna know about that guy who’s just like, his eyes are popping
out of his head he’s so excited to see her.
01:30:50
Dan
Host
Yeah. I don’t wanna say too much about this? I’m gonna go back on
what I said a little bit. I don’t wanna say too much about this ‘cause
I’ve been toying with writing like a humor piece about it for a while?
Like it’s been in the back of my head.
01:31:01
Elliott
Host
Don’t give away the trade secrets, Dan!
[Dan laughs.]
01:31:03
Dan
Host
I just wanna know the story of the guy in It’s a Wonderful Life who
sits down by the lever that opens the gymnasium pool and what his
deal is. Why he’s hanging out there waiting for someone to be like,
“Hey, y’know, you’re jilted by your woman, huh? You know that
there’s a pool under here that you could open up!” Like, what’s his
story? [Laughs.]
01:31:25
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: He just loves swimming!
Dan: Yeah.
01:31:29
Elliott
Host
They don’t get to use that pool very much.
01:31:31
Dan
Host
Let’s get into Recommendations. Movies you definitely should
watch instead of Hillbilly Elegy. And I want to recommend
something related? To this movie in a way, thematically?
01:31:42
Elliott
Host
It’s called Deliverance. Dan, come on.
01:31:46
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: [Through laughter] No . I’m so—I—
Stuart: It’s called Wrong Turn 2.
[Elliott laughs.]
01:31:51
Elliott
Host
Another Wrong Turn.
01:31:53
Dan
Host
I am—
01:31:54
Elliott
Host
“Guys, you’ll never believe this. I think we took… another wrong
turn.”
01:31:57
Stuart
Host
[Laughs.] I mean, that’s the premise of the movie, Elliott.
01:32:00
Dan
Host
I am surprised that this hasn’t been officially recommended on the
podcast before, but my googling says it has not. The Florida Project
does everything right that this movie does wrong about showing
people who are in dire financial straights? Like, it has a lot of sad
stuff in it but it has a lot of joy. It is presented, y’know, very matter-
of-factly. The day-to-day lives. You have characters who are doing
occasionally dumb or unsympathetic things because they are stuck
in a situation that sort of like doesn’t allow for them to make
mistakes, unfortunately? And it is like filled with quiet moments and
humor and joy along with the dramatic stuff? And I think it paints a
much more sort of… full and sympathetic picture of what it is to be
forced to live life, y’know—
01:33:02
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: —in such a precarious way. Yeah. So The Florida Project.
Stuart: Yeah. On the fringe. Yeah. I—I loved—
01:33:07
Stuart
Host
Yeah. I love that movie. It’s not just because—for some of the
filmmaking feats that they manage to accomplish, but also Willem
Dafoe’s performance is so great. And also the performance from
the children who—I’m assuming—they did not realize they were
playing characters in a movie. Right?
[Dan laughs.]
01:33:25
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: They’re so natural.
Elliott: I mean, they knew they were playing characters.
01:33:29
Elliott
Host
They knew they were playing characters but they got natural
performances. I don’t think they—
01:33:33
Stuart
Host
It’s a similar—I’m sure they utilize a similar method to what I use
when I do performing.
01:33:38
Elliott
Host
Dan: Mm-hm.
Elliott: Exactly.
01:33:40
Elliott
Host
But I don’t think it was one of those things where they like hypnotize
them or like, “This is your life now.”
[Multiple people laugh.]
01:33:45
Dan
Host
Is that a thing that happens? [Laughs.]
[Elliott laughs.]
01:33:47
Elliott
Host
It’s how they got some of Grace Kelly’s best performances out of
her.
01:33:53
Dan
Host
Yeah. You go, Elliott.
01:33:55
Elliott
Host
Okay. I’m gonna recommend a movie also about, I guess,
expensive academic situations?
01:34:02
Stuart
Host
Perfect. Okay.
01:34:03
Elliott
Host
So I guess that connects to it? This is a movie that’s on Amazon
right now. It’s called Selah and the Spades. And it is written and
directed by Tayarisha Poe. And it’s set at a kind of like fancy
boarding school where there’s like kind of Five Family-type setup
where there’s groups of students that kind of run the student body.
And our main character, Selah, is the leader of a group called The
Spades who are in charge of drugs and other illicit substances. And
it’s kind of about her as someone who is trying to maintain this
façade of just total composure and confidence all the time while she
is up against the pressures of this kind of criminal social life, and
also the pressures from home to be the best student she can be
and not get into trouble? And she becomes friends with a younger
student who she decides is going to be her heir in this position. But
then starts to have a falling-out with her when her suspicions grow.
And the movie, like… it starts off and it feels like it’s gonna be kind
of like a Wes Anderson-y type thing? Which I like Wes Anderson-y
stuff, but I worry that other people can’t quite pull it off. And then it
does not become that at all. It feels very much like a movie that
could’ve been about its plot but is instead about these characters
existing and interacting. And there are a number of scenes where I
was like, “Oh, this really feels like what it’s like to be a teenager and
have to kill time or be excited about something or be worried about
something.” I thought it was a really—it’s more elliptically told than I
thought it might be. And I thought it was really affecting that way. So
I would say, Selah and the Spades if you wanna see kind of like a
teen movie that feels more poetic than your normal teen movie with
a plot like that might sound.
01:35:42
Stuart
Host
Okay. And I’m gonna recommend a movie—let’s tie this to Hillbilly
Elegy. This is a movie about—
01:35:47
Elliott
Host
We know it’s Psycho Goreman, Stu. Just—
[Dan laughs.]
—just go with—
01:35:50
Stuart
Host
—a complicated relationship between grandparents and children.
I’m gonna recommend a movie on Shudder called Anything for
Jackson. It’s a horror movie about a older couple who decide—they
kidnap a pregnant woman in order to perform a reverse exorcism
and bring back their grandson. And it is a—it’s a funny, well-made,
well-performed, very efficient scare machine. It is just by like
scares-per-moment, you’re gonna get more than your average
horror movie. I recommend it. It’s a lot of fun. Yeah. Give it a shot.
Anything for Jackson.
01:36:38
Dan
Host
Ah, a good SPM score.
01:36:40
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: [Inaudible]
Stuart: Yeah. The SPM score is super high.
01:36:43
Stuart
Host
If you’re looking for just like a fun horror movie night, I think it’s a
great choice.
01:36:47
Dan
Host
I will put it on my watchlist. But!
01:36:52
Elliott
Host
Okay, Dan. I mean, I noticed that you very prominently did not say
“I’ll put it on my watchlist” after my recommendation—
01:36:57
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: —but go ahead! Sure.
Dan: Y’know, yours sounded like a kind of a—like a—y’know—
01:36:59
Dan
Host
Maybe too good? [Laughs.]
01:37:01
Stuart
Host
Yeah. A lot of vegetables.
[All laugh.]
01:37:04
Dan
Host
Yeah.
01:37:05
Elliott
Host
No! But it’s a good movie! Alright. How do I make it sound trashier?
And one of them is a murderer who has a demon in her butt.
01:37:12
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Dan: Okay. Well now you’re—
Elliott: And it’s telling—
01:37:15
Elliott
Host
It’s telling her to kill everybody, but it’s at a carnival?
01:37:19
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Elliott: It’s like a haunted carnival? And—
Stuart: If it was Dan, Elliott, you should be—
Dan: Sounds good.
01:37:22
Stuart
Host
You should be pitching it at like a haunted girls’ boarding school.
01:37:27
Elliott
Host
Okay. Yeah. Fair. It’s at a haunted girls’ pillow fight academy?
[Stuart laughs.]
01:37:32
Dan
Host
Uh-huh. Okay. You have my interest.
01:37:35
Elliott
Host
[Through laughter] It’s called St. Nightie’s Academy? [Laughs.]
01:37:38
Dan
Host
So let’s make an—I’m gonna make an effort for once to see if I can
end this podcast quickly and efficiently!
01:37:47
Crosstalk
Crosstalk
Stuart: Okay. Didn’t [inaudible] it.
Elliott: Dan, just pretend—
01:37:49
Elliott
Host
Pretend this podcast is your drug-addicted mom in a hotel room and
just say goodbye and drive off to New Haven.
[Dan laughs.]
01:37:54
Dan
Host
We’d like to thank Jordan Kauwling for editing the show. We would
like to thank everyone at Maximum Fun for having us on their
network. Why not go over to MaximumFun.org. Check out the other
podcasts on there. I listen to several of them myself. They are a
well-curated, wonderful bunch. And if you have the time, please
spread the word about The Flop House wherever you think it might
be effective! But until next time, I’ve been Dan McCoy.
01:38:29
Stuart
Host
I’m Stuart Wellington!
01:38:31
Elliott
Host
I’ll be Elliott Kalan next time, too!
01:38:32
Dan
Host
Bye!
01:38:34
Stuart
Host
Byeee!
01:38:34
Music
Music
Light, up-tempo, electric guitar with synth instruments.
01:38:42
Dan
Host
On this episode we discuss—Hillbilly Elegy!
01:38:45
Elliott
Host
The latest installment in the Barney Google/Snuffy Smiths
Cinematic Universe.
01:38:51
Stuart
Host
Also pretty good. Mine is more, y’know, contemporary with all the
cool teens listening to Rob Zombie now.
[Multiple people laugh.]
[Music ends.]
01:39:01
Music
Transition
A cheerful ukulele chord.
01:39:03
Speaker 1
Guest
MaximumFun.org.
01:39:04
Speaker 2
Guest
Comedy and culture.
01:39:06
Speaker 3
Guest
Artist owned—
01:39:07
Speaker 4
Guest
—Audience supported.
