Chapo Trap House - 222 - RESPECT. feat. Adam Friedland and Mike Recine (6/24/18)

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

We talk to some friends of ours about the extraordinary film 'Gotti', but above all we must be loyle to our capos.

Yeah, it's Mike Huckabee coming at you. A little bit. This boy's from New York City are going to talk about John A. Gotti. Well, he Gotti himself was sentenced in prison. But before that, I thought I would cut things up. A couple of meeting people were talking about how they used to lock me, what I would just keep my opinions to myself about how homosexuals turned into pillars of salt and Latinos reproduce asexually. But, you know, I thought I would get some of that shot back with a good old fashioned comedy. Play that Jew from New York's bass line from the show where they all lived in the guy's living room. Doo doo doo doo doo doo. All right, great to see a good looking crowd out here tonight.

All right, so, uh, any of my daughter Sarah ate in a restaurant, you know, they always said, you know, oh, you call her Sarah Huckabee, call her Sarah Sanders, call her Sarah Huckabee Sanders, don't call her late to dinner. Well, it seems like they didn't let her get in dinner at all. I've been in the news lately. I've been around the news, folks. I'm getting big again. Uh, I took half a million. That's a million with an aim. Half a billion dollars from guitar. Yeah, let's do some because I'm a bass player. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. So they're talking about, they're talking about ice, ice agents. I hope you don't abolish my ice cream. I like eating it. Seriously, though, every single person in immigrants

here is a member of MS 13. Think about when you eat a meal with MS 13 in it, you're hungry an hour later. They're over there here. We need the World Cup. Well, I just want I just want a big gold cup full of custard, unflavored. I bring my own flavor packets. You know, you know, seriously though, William Callie did nothing more. You know, I just want to say, you know, it's very humbling for some more console. Come on down here. Tell your jokes jokes in New York City. But seriously, this city will be cast out for its time. All right. Have a good night. Over the course of the run of this podcast, we've discussed a lot of issues, discussed a lot of issues. But on today's show, I think we're going to touch

on the most important issue of all, respect. This is going to be a show about respect, about us giving you the listener respect and you giving it to us in return, giving respect, getting respect and family. These are the things that make life important. And we're going to talk about a film that shows just how you can become a man of respect, a man of honor to run your own family, be it a podcast or the Gambino crime family will get control over this podcast family. You need all five girls that listen to this show. We are talking about honestly, I think like over the run of like the movies we talked about on the show, I think maybe the most extraordinary movie we've done on the show.

Uncomparable. This is a movie that like is in terms of budget and like casting is like more professionally done than the room. But at the end of the day, every bit as baffling and perplexing as that movie, despite its ostensibly professional cast and production, it is to do that stuff astounding. We are talking about the film Gotti. Yeah, the boss, baby, starring John Travolta as John Gotti, the capo, the duty copy, the boss of all bosses. But before we do that, we've enlisted some help, some friends of ours. There's some friends of ours. You know what I mean, some friends of ours to talk about this thing called respect. It's Mike Racine. Thank you. And Adam Friedland. Thanks. Thanks for having

me. Adam. Time out. Adam showed you Adam. That was not a lot of respect. Adam, I was showing you respect, but I got to our podcast. And this is how you treat us. You didn't even take off his hat when he came in here. Sorry. I'm still wearing his bucket hat. Respect. Okay, guys, good job. Respect to all of you. Thank you for having me. That movie was the biggest piece I've ever seen in my entire life. You say that, but we all saw it on Friday. And honestly, I had more fun in the theater watching this movie than almost anything I've seen in recent memory. Yeah. Without a doubt. It was a blast. We definitely ruined that old man's day. Yeah, there's probably enjoy it. There's an old man wearing philas and black

dress socks and shorts and a tank top. And he got mad at us for laughing too much. We were not short respect to the dawn. I saw it in a Kips Bay, which is like a weird enclave for people from Queens to be shuttled in and out of Manhattan. And you know how they say like, you know, this was the most, you know, dollars per movie theater for a thing. A ward that Avatar won and retains. But I don't know if Gotti accomplished that. I don't think they got that much money per individual theater, per room, per screen. But it's probably the most op-eds ever written per theater because everyone in my theater looked like they write 10 letters to the editor every day to the New York Daily News about overhearing rap music

in Astoria. Well, I mean, there are a bunch of trolls behind a keyboard. I love that. Who are you going to trust? People that saw the movie or you seeing the trailer? Well, that is ultimately what convinced me. I didn't even think we were going to do an episode on this. I just wanted to see a movie on Friday. And ultimately, this is what convinced me that this movie would be worth seeing was the publicity campaign that sort of leaned into the universally awful reviews. Zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The fact that this was uniformly panned across the board. That's true. Well, he's sort of the hero of the movie in a way. They should have called it John Gotti, Jr. That's my takeaway. So the publicity

campaign for the movie taking aim at the reviewers of the movie. And striking a sort of populist tone that's very over the time, shall we say, to attack the eggheads and the fake news that are telling you not to see this movie, but telling you, the public, the people with respect that you got to see the movie in order to get respect. I will say I think it worked in the sense that I think everyone who voted for Donald Trump in the New York metropolitan area is probably also pro John Gotti. Yes. And so that if you can get all of them to see this movie, you're in. They're going to love it for years to come. I honestly think that this is going to be

the Rocky Horror Picture Show for guys who are medically prohibited from wearing turtlenecks. This was another interesting side note about this movie. It was directed by Kevin Connolly of entourage. E from entourage. E from entourage. E from entourage. Who was potentially on ecstasy the entire time he was making the movie. Because he was on it. This is a movie in which he's so singularly incompetent in every aspect of its execution that it becomes art in a way. It becomes a kind of genius. I was worried

going to this movie that it would just suck and be boring. It would just be bad. But no, this movie was bad in such a shining shimmering way that it's just specific. It's like you watch this movie and it's bad in a way where all the bad things come together to form this mosaic of an entire mindset and culture. It's just it's perfectly it's literally an educational experience. You know, it was so brilliant about it is that it perfectly mimics the way that a stupid guy who lies all the time tells you a story. Yeah. Like it's disjointed. Characters are typically introduced, but then we don't know anything

about them and they don't do anything. And then we reference something that they've done. So like every time a character comes up, John Gotti will go, Oh, who's that fucking jerk off? And Stacy Keats will go, that's that's Joey meatballs. And then Joey meatballs will flash in text across the screen. And then the guy Joey meatballs is talking to is going, Joey meatballs, my favorite member of the mafia. And then we won't see him for 20 minutes and it'll show up. It'll be like, remember that thing he did. And you'll be like, no, because it's like it's a guy who's lying to you, but he doesn't even remember what he did or didn't lie to you about.

I think interesting that it's directed by E from entourage, because this movie literally is if any of those shitty movies that they pinched, it's Escobar, any chase to do an entourage, any of those actually became a movie. It would be this or even more on point. If you remember from the first season of The Sopranos, when the first screenplay Christopher is working on and it shows a screenshot of the laptop and there's just this line of dialogue, I must be loyal to my capo. If that screenplay got made, it would be this movie exactly. And also if the real Christopher Maltesante directed and produced it like this is exactly like the world view of the movie, the dialogue of it and the execution is exactly what Christopher,

like if Christopher Maltesante were a real person that wanted to make his vision of his own life, this is what it would be. Well, if you guys can trash this movie, I'm going to vote for Trump again. Me and my whole family. Fuck you. So let's dive in. Let's start from the beginning of this film. So we get in there, we sit down and I swear to God from the very first scene of this movie, I knew it was going to be special. Imagine if you will, lights go down, screen comes up. What do you see? The beautiful night Manhattan skyline. New York City at night. Cut to the East River.

It's an elderly gentleman wearing a sort of luxurious winter coat. He's leaning over the railing looking out at Queens in the night sky. He turns around and is John Travolta wearing a ridiculous wig and fake eyebrows, who breaks the fourth wall, turns to the camera and view the audience and says, New York, the greatest city in the world. And at that point, honestly, like me, Adam, Brendan, Matt, we all stood up and clapped. I saluted the screen at that point. It was like I actually, I at my screening, I kneeled. What do you do? You kneel? Forget about it. I was instantly shot 57 times by the 75 year old movie goers. Mozone Park

wall had 38 Derringers in their black dress socks. They should have played the national anthem in the beginning. However, I complain that they didn't. Instead of the national anthem, they has that amazing opening. And then it just jumps straight into the opening credits, which is a montage of real news footage of the real John Gotti at all his various trials. A lot of archival footage throughout the film. It's a montage. It's like an upbeat news, real montage of the real John Gotti set to music by the rapper Pitbull. Like probably the corniest, most bullshit rapper.

It was an original song, right? It was an original song for the film. Are you serious with Leona Lewis? I believe I've also from Avatar. She did one of the songs, Mavitar. Maybe I'm wrong about that. Well, we'll have to play a snippet of the song. Not the only Pitbull song in the movie.

No, well, I swear to God, they had a Pitbull song in the closing credits, too, that I think must have been. If it was original for the movie, then that is even more genius because it's one of the classic movie closing song credit sequence where the song tells you what the movie is about. Yeah. So Pitbull is rapping and he's like, listen, y'all, it's the mob. There's a code. Gotta live by the code or they'll kill you. But I think my song got run over.

That was my favorite scene. I think that was excellent. Even more incredible is there is a non-diagetic Pitbull song in the 80s. What? Oh, he's just saying that like they play it over stuff in the 80s. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, no, they're listening to it in the 80s. They're like, oh, yeah, we got some Pitbull

songs 20 years early. They fell off the truck. So we get that credit sequence. And again, I think the real John Gotti would probably be very insulted to have any kind of Pitbull music associated with it. We're a synatra. It's a choice to use hip hop because as we all know, the blacks are jealous of us. They want to be us. They copy our culture. That's so good to be like a cultural appropriation guy, but Italian, like I know those are my

favorite memes on Facebook are the ones where it's like gangsters and it's just like any black person at all who's like not in a gang. And then it's like gangsters, real gentlemen who wore suits. And it's like El Capone who murdered like 7800 people and had syphilis and tried to fish in his swimming pool because the brain was so rotted by the end of his life, he's like, that's a man. It's cool. He had sex. You're seeing those rapper types having sex.

Hey, Al, congrats on the sex. So the movie begins and it's of course the narration stays with it because they need it. If there was no narration, this movie would literally be just a disjointed collection of things happening. Yeah. It would be even more incomprehensible. And he goes, you either end up dead or in jail. Me, I got both. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not like those other immortal people in jail. Right. Right. I love that. That was right after he said New York is the greatest city in the world. What I love about that is like, I did both. So he's finding a cool way of saying, hey, I died in jail. Yeah. I'm like Al Capone, who's still alive.

Yeah. Like Carlo Gambino dies of old age peacefully because he wasn't a fucking idiot like God. He's like, oh, yeah. But the life came for him finally at age 90. We're going to find out who did this to you. Oh, this cancer prick. That's that's how cancer shirt started. All right.

I'm starting a new I'm starting a new thing of ours. It's called the child. You become a big guy by wearing a shirt that says fuck cancer to a charity 5K to buy more shirts and say fuck cancer. So he begins, you know, we begin to learn the story of his rise to power and how John Gotti became the boss, the boss of us. And apparently the story begins when he was, you know, a Gambino family associate who was tasked by his superior played by Stacy Keach.

Everyone in this movie is like 90 years old. Not a single like young actor. Other than the guy who played John Gotti Jr. Yeah. He's probably secretly 50. So his his sort of boss figure played by Stacy Keach tells him, you know, that there's some crime where someone's kid was kidnapped. They paid the ransom and they still murdered the kid.

And, you know, the mafia is like, hey, kidnapping is one thing. If you pay and they still kill the kid, we're not going to abide by that. So he's saying, I want you to, I'm giving this to you personally. This is a personal matter for the Gambino family. Get me the guy who's always going to prison. So he makes his bones. And he goes, it would be my honor. Yeah.

We all laughed when that. So he makes his bones killing some of the hapless ass. By the way, a botched killing. They're trying to grab the guy out of a bar and take him off and kill him somewhere nice and quiet. But instead he fought them and he just panicked and pulled the gun out and shot him in the bar in front of people in the bar who later identified. Yeah.

So like the big crime that's like is coming out to show what a fucking awesome criminally was is one that he was he fucked up and immediately was caught for. Well, when it's three on one with a squad and you knock somebody, you have to throw them because what if your squad needs heels? Okay. What if Gotti's guys were trapped in the storm before they got to the bar? John Gotti double pumped. Yeah, I'm moving on.

He's talking about video. So yeah, then of course he goes to jail for that crime again. And then in one sequence, he explains that through bribery, he was able to get furloughs for dental work. Yeah, that was. And he leaves the prison, goes to the dentist's office, changes in the dentist's office, into a cool suit, into a cool suit. And then he's like, I had to, I, there's a few loose ends from that, that hit I did.

I needed to clean up and we were all like, what? What loose ends? I only left 48 witnesses. And then it just, it shows him just walking into a motel room with a woman inside it, going to the shower and shooting the guy in the shower six times and then leaving, not killing the woman. Again, movie does not even bother to explain. I think what he said applies that she helped him.

Yeah. Yeah. Good job. Good work. I actually think I have a fan theory about this that I've been arguing with on the Goddy Wikia about this, that perhaps he didn't hire her and Goddy just heard her having sex and was like, oh, good, what you did good at having sex with that guy before he killed him.

Congrats on the sex. So exactly. Again, I just need to underscore like the overall staggering incompetence of every aspect of the like just pacing, writing. No scene relates to the following scene. It is a collection of sketches. Many times one line or even half of a sentence and then it immediately cuts to a completely different thought and idea.

It's, if it wasn't telling the life of one person, it would be so baffling and confusing. This entire, it's like the, you just take any 10 minutes to the movie. The thing you'll see is like John Goddy talking to one of his kids and being like, if you want to be a man, the first thing you got to learn is how to be strong. And the first thing you got to learn about being strong is respect. But the first thing you got to learn about respect is being strong. And then cut to like a bunch of fat old guys in a garage and then they have a tense conversation and shoot like a third fat old guy in the head.

Cut to some fucking social function at John Goddy's house where he's like, whoa, now they got these things, push pops could decide how much ice cream you want. Can I be excused? I missed my grandpa and then it will cut to an entire unedited video local news report from the 1980s. Like a three minute like news report. They to explain one of the murder, one of the awesome crimes that Goddy does instead of dramatizing in any way, they just show an entire remote report for a local news station.

It's going on forever. And the guy's talking like a local witness, Frank Poloski says that he saw car. It's like no information that is any way meaningful to anyone and delivered by an old guy in the 80s. I mean, I don't know, man. You get the sports, you get that. I mean, it is so hard to get a license for a local news report from 1985 on Long Island. You just got to use it if you got it.

It's like Rolling Stone songs. I want to get to that crime that is again, completely obscured by an archival news footage. But before we get there, I want to go to one of my favorite scenes early in the movie that where it begins to try to sort of sketch out what it is. In case you weren't familiar with the mafia or John Goddy, like exactly who he is and what they do, because another staggering thing about this movie is the absolute lack of actual crimes being committed. Yes.

Other than bird brain murders for which the perpetrators are immediately sent to jail for like a million life sentences. Yeah. They only kill bad guys, right? Yeah. So it's like a complete fluff piece on John Goddy's life. He only killed bad guys. He never did crimes.

He talked about running books in ozone parks. Yeah. That was the early in the movie. They showed us the fireworks. He brought the community fireworks. You know what John Goddy was? John Goddy was Italian sons of Anarchy. That's what every crime he does immediately indicts 35 people.

I can only name like two or three profitable operations they had. But the community loves him because once a year he throws a party where he's like, oh, you want to get some hot dogs, marinara on it. You want to get some disgustingly wet chicken wings. My friend in the mafia who looks like James Comey for some reason is cooking. But that's just it. In this one, they don't show them doing any profitable crimes. If you didn't know what the mafia was and you watch this movie,

you would think, yeah, it's a club for old guys to like yell at each other. Then sometimes get killed. That's the thing. It's like you would have to think that John Goddy made money in the GTA way where it's like you kill somebody. Respect increase. Everybody he shoots turns into gold coins because they don't show them doing anything doing hijackings.

They say explicitly we don't do drugs because that that's for the animals. The greatest mafia propaganda. Absolute bullshit. Yeah. But it's they don't show my jacket. They don't. They only they talk about gambling, but only this guy saying stop telling people to use my about for use.

Stop that guy from using my name when he does gambling. So that means we know that guy isn't get like they don't do any crimes. I want to talk about that scene like this is your first impression of what the mafia is about. It shows Travolta and a couple like similarly ludicrous looking people like doing Italian face walk out of one of their social. Clubs in Queens like the Howard Beach. Yeah, the hunting fish club in Howard Beach.

JFK and Travolta is like, you know, pointing with his pinky out. And as Matt was saying, he's like this Greek guy. I don't like him. He's making book. He's using my name. You tell him to fucking cut it out. And like that's basically the only instance you get of like any crime. That's not just associated with directly murdering people who they've felt

disrespect from. Yeah. But it's just like a murderous Kiwanis club. But right, but right after sorry, right, right after he mentions the guy making book and another little bit of local flavor, there's an old woman pushing a grocery cart home and Travolta stops his goons and just goes, oh, oh, help this lady out. And it's like, well, she's pushing a cart.

She doesn't need help carrying it. So to show that they're helping this old lady and they love the community community, one of the guys puts his big meaty hands just on her back and just sort of guys. She doesn't actually help her. But yeah. Then the boxer, yeah, the boxer with like severe CTE walks up to him and this guy looks in no way athletic whatsoever.

He looks like he just wakes up and goes to a Dunkin' Donuts for 15 hours. Yeah. A guy that like literally just sits in a Dunkin' Donuts and steals napkins all day. That's his racket is he's a napkin. Oh, that guy's a good earner. He comes in, he comes in the back of the pork store with Dunkin' Donuts napkins. He's like, oh, I did good today.

They don't make you pay. Yeah. Anyway, so this guy comes up to him and he's like, hey, what's the matter? You, you're not fighting anymore champ? What's going on? He's like, oh, they had to close the gym down, John. It's like the equivalent of like they had to close the teen rec center job. And he's like, don't worry.

I'll work it out for you. Don't worry. And then no, no, no mention of the boxing or the gym. Well, it was such a good insight into the people who are pro Gotti slash pro Trump because it's like anything bad they do is contained in their own world. But also you never follow up the question of why they have so much money. So it's just like in the badger brains of the people who are like pro Gotti slash pro Trump in New York, they're like, oh, yeah.

So this guy, he just sat down all day and he would have some fucking spaghetti argument with some other old piece of shit and kill him. And it would give it, it would just sprout a million dollars for him. And he used that a million dollars for non specific community. Like John Gotti is whatever he conservative thinks about Obama. He's like a fake, he's like a fake community. Oh, yeah, I'll open up that rec center again. Oh, shit.

We spent our entire community budget this year on a barbecue with one grill. The cool, the cool thing about this movie, just, I mean, I don't know if we're distracting from the plot, but it's fine. John Travolta is one of my favorite actors, especially John Travolta at this stage because he is so desperate to convince the public that he does not spend his entire life trying to jerk off meal. He's just like, that's who he is. You know, and he like, he will deny it.

He's like in the church of Scientology, his kid died under mysterious circumstances, but he in every role, have you seen to Paris with, what is it called to Paris with love or something? I saw that in theaters with John Travolta where it's one of the only movies where he goes full bald, which is, he's been bald since like 1981. He's a rug man. Yeah, he's a rug man for sure. But that movie is insane too.

But he is desperate to convince the public that he is not just trying to jack off every single guy that comes in, in his like, in, in his, you know, with our five foot raid. I just want to say Frank Tarranova told me that Travolta is not gay. And the thing with a gay rumor is that you can't deny it. It's, it's so. No, you have to embrace it. Yeah, I guess so.

And also his real life wife is in the movie too. Kelly plays Victoria does play his wife. She's also doing olive oil face and maybe one of, one of the, like, you could do a fucking razzies just of the performances in this movie and they'd all be nominated and then you'd have to pick one. And then I still think the funniest thing to happen in like, in the last 10 years was when he was at the Oscars and he was like on quay loser. I don't know what it is.

And he was introducing the singer Edina Manziel and he said, everyone knows I love musicals. Everyone, please welcome singing. Let it go from frozen. He took the name Edina Manziel and he turned it into a doubt. He's like fully illiterate. He's trying to jack off everyone around him. Allegedly.

Allegedly. And he's like a member of an alien cult and he just wants the public to think he is Danny Zuko still. Here's the real meta thing in like 50 years from now when the guy from the entourage reboot makes the Travolta movie and it's not going to show him doing acting at all. He's just famous for no reason. And it's like, look, he stayed in his own community of Scientology.

He got money by jacking off these pursuers and he was just a cool guy. We were talking about it. And like what's so funny is to contrast Travolta's performance as Gotti with his performance as Robert Shapiro in American Crime Story, which I thought was brilliant. There was just so funny and on point. But what was so funny is they look identical. They're wearing the same dumb wig and big bushy eye brand.

And the Italian suits. But it is so funny the difference between him playing a character like where the writers are in on the joke Shapiro is a laughable figure and the ones in Gotti where the writers obviously are not in on the joke at all. No. Talk about fucking cults. I realize that in trying to describe the plot of this movie is probably a fool's error because it's impossible.

There really is no plot. Things just happen at this weird clip. No one scene is related to a scene that comes prior to it. Things happen with no regard or no effect on the plot later. The only actual plot elements are exposition scenes where Stacey Keats just lists 15 Italian guys in a row that you don't know and have no context where he's like well to do this you're going to need Tony Caligliano, Stevie Vesuvio, Sancho Panza, Luzacco, Vanzetti.

That's just that is how the plot is established. There really was no distinction between the periphery characters like at all. Well, there was probably other than Travolta as Gotti himself, there's probably two or three other characters that you could identify as a viewer as a distinct character including his son and the Stacey Keats character. Everyone other than that just exists in this weird, vague, like there's no distinguishing any of them. It's just a bunch of potato people in track suits.

Here's what I want to say though. We'll get into each of our favorite scenes and moments of dialogue in the movie. What early on in the movie tries to establish is that when you're in the life and the life really matters to these guys, the life is about the code. It's about the code and these life and death rules that they follow and that's what makes them men of honor and respect and what keeps their criminal fraternity together. The writers of the movie and filmmakers clearly take this shit seriously.

The actual movie itself and Gotti's true-to-life story would be proof positive that no one actually cares about these rules and they break them at will all the time. That was the great thing about Sopranos too. It's like you see these guys who believe in this stuff their whole life and then they realize that it's like wrong. Yeah, they're aliens basically. They're dinosaurs living in the modern world. That's why Sopranos was so great.

Yeah, they did all these little things that indicated to you that these guys weren't cool. The malapropisms on the Sopranos were brilliant because it was a very subtle way of showing that they're completely alien from society and think they're a lot smarter than they actually are. But in this movie, John Gotti's the coolest fucking guy in every room. When they sentence him to life and then order his court fees, he's like, oh, the life sentence I could take, but the 50 dollar fee, it's like, oh, this guy is so awesome. Yeah, he has like three or four char moments where he's supposed to be witty and clever and they're all just big shit stupid.

And that's the thing about this movie is that you'd think, well, yeah, he probably was not very clever. Criminals in movies are always way more clever than real criminals are. And that's why this is like the most in its own way realistic mob movie of all time because it's from the point of view, like the actual point of view of people in this milieu as opposed to every other mob movie that is good quote unquote, which is written by somebody who's outside of it and is critical of it. And it's like has a remove and distance and the judgment of it. There's people who they do not taste the water. They don't know they're in water.

They're fishes. They don't own any water and they're just making this like, here it is. This is the thing about these guys is they got a code and they got respect and they take care of the community and the families. Speaking of that code, those are literally gibberish that you're just spouting. One of the things that, again, the outer borough, Gotti slash Trump supporter, if you ask them why they idolized someone like John Gotti, one of the things they'll tell you is like, hey, they may do these murders, but it's only people who are in the life. They got a code.

They don't do violence to people who are just civilians or whatever. One of the first major plot points in the movie shows Gotti doing exactly that. This is, again, a true thing that happened, but one of Gotti's kids was... Do you say allegedly? I don't want to get sued by John Gotti. One of John Gotti's kids was allegedly mowed down by a car. He was just riding his bike in the middle of the street in Howard Beach and some guy hit him with a car, killed him. His young son, and we know he was his young son because, again,

the young son is introduced about a minute before he took part in the car. No, literally before. He got straight A's. He doesn't even have hair in his print. What? No, they showed him in... My son had a tiny-ass dick and now he's dead. Marie, get over here.

We're starting another... You did too many fucking aerobics and you almost gave him a clit. And that's why he's dead. He goes up to the corpse of the kid on the street after getting hit by the car and he just peeks inside of his shorts and he's like, God damn it. One single pubic hand. That's my boy. He didn't even have pubes.

He took it as a collector's item. I don't think he's mine. The pubes are too straight. Hold on, hold on. In case people think Adam's joking, that is actually a line of dialogue about the video, but Gotti's grief at the death of his child is he didn't even have hair on his prick. So what does Gotti do to the driver of this car who, again, wasn't in the life?

He's abducted and killed. But again, the movie does not show you this on screen. It only refers, you do actual news footage of the event. So talk about a whitewash of this guy's life. They could have actually dramatized and shown the moment of kidnapping and then torturing to death some terrified schmuck who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, even with that scene, they still kind of glorified it because they were like,

he didn't even fix the dent on his car. He's still parking it where you can see. This is not way to respect the family. It's really not even the killing the kid. It's the disrespect. It's like every fucking auto repair shop in the tribe, like just tri-state area wasn't owned by someone who knew John Gotti. It wasn't called like Denunzio, Albatino, Bumper Repair.

And all like all their bumper repairs were just people who ran people over on purpose. Yeah, no. And then like after his kid dies, you know, he goes to the social club and there's a bunch of sweaty men out front. And I remember saying out loud in the theater, respect incoming. The whole movie is like, it's like Italian Dragon Ball Z, where they're just assessing respect levels the entire time. And they're like, my God, Vegeta's respect levels are higher than I thought possible.

Travolta does have Vegeta's hairline in this movie. So he's like, he's the prince of respect. I have a working theory. I think Kevin Connolly got really nervous the night before directing this movie. Yeah. Because he did direct it all in one day. Like, let's be clear. I think he just got some guy from China to do it for him.

And he just showed him good fellas one. It would make a lot more sense if the person that directed this movie did not speak English. Yes. It would make a lot more sense. They took like 15 mob movie scripts and ran them through Babelfish to like Japanese and then put them back into English and then they just assemble them at random. This is the first gangster movie ever made by the first build of Skynet. Like, it's like they took all the marginal qualities that people like in other mob movies,

like the sort of jokey banter and camaraderie of good fellas. And the narration. The narration, the intensity, but none of the thing where the plot can be followed by anyone at all or you know who any of the characters are. Yeah, they're just these blobs. You know, it's fine. We're joking around here. We're having a good time, you know.

But but you guys like have the balls to criticize like Islam. Yeah, you know, there are a lot of characters that are introduced way too late in the Quran. I really wish they would have gone into the mafia offering the federal government help after 9 11. That's like another point in how how they were actually good guys. I love that one because like what was help? It's like I saw an Arab yesterday. Well, it's funny because I mean that harkens back to World War Two when the the government did enlist the help of Lucky Luciano. But it was really old and they the insensible that what they said they were doing was that hey,

we know the mob controls the ports in New York. The docks. The docks or whatever. We're going to make sure that no Nazis sneak in. And you know, we need lucky to do that. But really what they were doing was making sure that unions wouldn't organize on those same docks. That's true, by the way. Well, unions were started by Nazis.

The Nazis. This is the big lie. Yeah. National socialists. Organized labor. Organized death camps. I'm thinking back to the line about you didn't even have hair on his prick. I would like if the next scene when they're all gathered at the social club and like everyone's paying the respects and they like some guys in the neighborhood,

some neighborhood kids come up and they're like, Mr. Gotti, we heard your kid didn't have no hair on his prick. We'd like to give you some. This is a tradition from an old country. It's called Tributo Simano. You're giving up you to Mr. Gotti. Here's another amazing, amazing thing from this movie. They speak about like something like early on in the movie, they'd be like, that guy over there, that's Angelo Ruggiero. And then like the screen will pause to show you Angelo Ruggiero.

Who was a rat, by the way? Yep. And like the absurd overuse of name and location cues. At random moments, they'll just be like, it'll cut to a shot of the Plaza Hotel and it'll tell you New York City. And then it'll cut again. It'll be like New York City. This movie doesn't take place in any location other than New York City. I don't know why they would keep reminding you.

Why would it have to? I guess, well, a prison, yeah. But like, again, you would think that that would be obvious when he's in prison and then back in the city where, you know, the difference between those two locations. Yeah, just everything is like copy and paste Wikipedia. All the establishing lines might as well have footnotes. Here's another really funny thing about John Gotti, the character, and like as he's portrayed in the screenplay. One of the things he says repeatedly throughout the movie, like when he first sees the Sammy the Bull character, he goes, I don't like that guy. I don't trust him.

He's never been to jail. And he says it multiple times in the movie. I don't trust anyone who's never been to prison. And then he's affirmed when Sammy the Bull flips on him. Yeah, I knew it. You didn't want to go, you didn't go to jail. But he does cross Sammy the Bull. He put Sammy the Bull in the most important position, insensitive position he could give it.

I mean, I guess he's like me where he like makes a prediction then acts otherwise. You just can't be wrong. Except I don't go to, I don't go to prison when I like call elections or like UFC fights wrong yet. Yeah. You're more of a Tommy Pitera, I think. Tommy Karate for the Banana family. Yeah, you're like a wild card. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, that's what people say when I see me game. It's like sometimes I die seven times in a row. Sometimes I just drop a 20 bomb. And like, okay, so this movie does cover a bit of real history and if like you didn't know about any of this, it would be utterly incomprehensible. But even if you know the slightest, it's more incomprehensible because like there are these big things that happen. Like they show the assassination of Paul Castellano in front of the Sparks Steakhouse in Midtown, Manhattan, which is like a big thing.

This was the moment where Gotti takes over the Gambino family. The five burros. Okay. Yeah. It cuts back to his mentor explaining to him what it needs to take. And one of the best lines of dialogue in the movie, he goes, John, I don't got to tell you about New York. You're a New York guy.

New York is all the Gambino family. That's who we are. If you're going to do this, you're going to need support of all the five burros. New York, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, the Queens, Staten Island. Just listing all the five. They're pausing to give you that. Oh, let me be clear. There are 57 burros.

They are Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn. So Castellano isn't a character in this movie at all. No, he barely shows up. So when he gets killed, you don't feel anything because there's never been even one moment of tension between him and Gotti. Well, the only thing that passed for a plot was him getting compressively annoyed with Castellano and getting the guys together to kill him. And they never meet.

They never have a conversation. They never are shown in any kind of disagreement. It's just sort of, I don't like that guy. He's not like a real guy. He's not a real gangster. I don't trust him. That could have been relatable because I feel like Chapa Trap House is kind of like John Gotti and Paul Castellano is Pod Save America.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Do you hear that Pod Save America? We love going to prison. Yeah. No, it's like I've seen a bunch of Gotti made for TV movies because I had a lot of time alone when I was a 16-year-old. The one with Armando Sante was a dad.

A premium cable. But in all of them, there's the same thing where it's like, because it's like a Jewish screenwriter who wishes he was in the mob because it would mean he would have more friends and like romanticizes it. And he's like, it's the same thing as like the suburban rap fan who thinks Drake is a pussy. It's like, oh yeah, he was a businessman, Castellano, you fucking pussy. You fucking bitch. And so it's always sort of sympathetic to Gotti just blowing his brains out.

And I was expecting something like that. But it's like, it was like, what was that one Mystery Science Theater with Mitchell? Yeah. Where they're like, Garza. Garza. Garza. They're just named these two Italian guys you never see. And they just don't really figure into the plot except they are the crucial plot point.

Like, in the Armando Sante Gotti movie, there's a scene where the disgusting naked Pocastellano emerges from the pool and you see his fat body jiggle about. And I guess the implication of the viewer is like, John Gotti would never do that. He would wear like a Victorian bathing costume or he would be that girlishly fat or something. The Don never wears shorts. Right. But with this, it's just like, look at his house. This piece of shit thinks he's cool because he has columns on his house.

Well, guess what? He's going to die. You take the better than me. Another great piece of New York City mob lore is Vincent the Chin Jigante and his... I love that. That's Nick Mullen, by the way. And his feigned mental illness to avoid prosecution and doddering around in a dirty bathrobe. Think about Vincent Jigante today.

Just putting a cash.mene in his bio. You're like, this guy couldn't be the boss. He's doing another tweet storm. Again, something that could have been done in a way that made him an interesting character or adversary. Nothing. There's a few recycled shots of him doing the bathrobe routine, shuffling about the streets. And then you get one other scene with him when it's implied that like he blew up the car bomb. Some guys in retaliation.

And you get guy that we saw two scenes of and for like ten minutes after, they're like, I can't believe they killed Frankie. There's seven characters in this movie named Frankie. Including John Gotti's son. I thought it was funny because one of the scenes he's wearing a suit. So I was just imagining he'd get home from walking around Manhattan in pajamas. And then he'd change into a Valentino suit and just hang out in his apartment in a suit. Can we talk about the marketing campaign of this movie?

Yeah, sure. So the Twitter, have you guys like checked out the Twitter page for the Gotti movie? No. Oh, the Twitter. So the Twitter page has embodied this like it's like a mafia, like a tough guy Italian guys running their Twitter page. And when they get criticized by like film geeks and stuff, they'll be like, hey, pussy, come over. Yeah, we just we just put ten dimes on film Crit Hulk's head.

Watch out. You don't don't you shoot it. Don't miss. You wouldn't like him when he's angry. OK, so there's this. There's this one critic who very aptly. So this this movie is the first film that's being distributed by movie pass, right? And movie pass.

I have it, but it's it's going to go out of business unless they it's the dumbest business idea. The venture capital idiocy. But so then they decided, OK, we're going to distribute films and we're going to have a second revenue stream that way as opposed to us just losing money by people by paying for. I mean, I saw like 15 movies last month for $10, which is less than even one movie ticket. Anyway, so everyone who has movie pass got a push notification.

Like sometime around last week, which is says, which just said Gotti, the critics hate it. The audiences love it. Like, how about you see for yourself, right? Then if you go on Rotten Tomatoes, which is it is currently at a 0 percent, it is at like a 99 percent audience score. And the reason is because there are a ton, like thousands of people who saw this movie and then decided that we're so passionate about this movie, they decided they were going to create a profile on Rotten Tomatoes and then give it a five star review.

So that led people to believe that, OK, they're like they are fixing the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. And to the extent that I think the Incredibles came out the same week as it and it got slightly I think it made like a billion dollars, like a bajillion dollars. Gotti only had slightly fewer audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes. So basically this whole marketing campaign was that they made a bunch of fake profiles on Rotten Tomatoes and everyone gave a five star reviews and they marketed it in the vein of like the whole Trump, you can't trust the media, you can't trust it.

It's all fake news. And that's like sort of the way they've gone about it. It has been a failure. I think they made a million dollars like opening weekend. So you're saying there's an Italian American troll farm. I don't know nothing about that. I would have become like the Eric Garland, but against Italians on hand our democracy with your greasy hand.

A bunch of guys in a bunker is on the Internet 24 hours a day drinking straight from prego bottles. Yeah. Well, I mean, like this gets into like what is also interesting about this movie as a stand in for the times is that like this is like like the Donald Trump movie. Like every respect stand in for Donald Trump, both like the way he's portrayed in the like moral confusion and degeneracy of the film itself in that it portrays this obviously evil man as some sort of hero or person worthy of admiration or because the only way they

can evaluate actions is by like a series of like three or four fucking bumper stickers that they've memorized about like, you know, it's about family and a take care of the community the same way they are for Trump and it's like, oh, he's a businessman or whatever. Like they only have like these very small concepts that that they apply to this guy. This movie is for people that have a tattoo on their body that just says family, but only talk to their uncle because they think they'll inherit a Zippo that they believe to be solid gold. Well, let's get to we mentioned before this movie's overuse of stock footage of real

newscasts and maybe my favorite point in testimonials is the real testimonials that are real local news footage. And before you do this, I want everyone to go around this room and name an Italian American you respect. Oh, no. We have to do that. No, but this is a real news footage from when Gotti died in 2002. And there's this real news footage from Howard Beach and they were talking to these real

teenagers and people from the neighborhood, all lining up to say, I don't care what anyone says Gotti's a good guy. He kept the street safe. He had class. He's not like these bad criminals nowadays. And I actually saw speaking of the Twitter campaign, I saw someone on Twitter reply to the Gotti account whose handle was like deplorable MAGA USA number one to say Gotti was a good guy.

When he was around, Queens was clean and safe, not like it is now, which is ludicrous because the crime rate in Queens in the 80s is probably 10,000 times higher than it is today. Maybe one of the safest parts of the world right now. Yeah. That's insane. Crime has dropped so significantly. I saw another deplorable account reply to someone saying, if Gotti was around today, he'd have more followers than any of these Hollywood, that's amazing.

Gotti would beat Ninja on Twitch. They think they think of him the same way they think of Trump, because the thing is they all they all these guys going, he was a boss. He was a great boss. He was an objectively shitty criminal. He sucked at crime. Yeah, even if you're in and out of jail all the time and then he fucking did even within the code of the mafia by killing his boss, he committed a violation of their code, but

he was a pussy and then almost immediately he starts going. I mean, yeah, took him a while to convict him, but he was basically on trial for like the entire time he was boss and then he went to prison for life and died there. He's a shitty fucking criminal better than ISIS, but he was on TV all the time. It's the same way they think Trump is a great businessman, even though his entire career is just a bunch of money laundering schemes and bankruptcies. He was on TV all the time. So of course he was a good businessman.

Also speaking to his leadership, also like all the guys in his crew turned out to be rats. Yes, all of them were informants. Yeah. It's like, ah, you know, I keep people close like everyone. You just you have the door literally like just slapping open. Can you? Like John Gotti throughout the movie, he makes a bunch of like weird moral points about how

he's going to beat the government, including refusing comfort medication when he's dying. Yes. And it's just like, yeah, just imagine a federal prosecutor going like, he didn't take Adavan. I'm so owned, but the, I mean, he actually did get over in the government because every single person he talked to every day was wired. And can you imagine the asinine bullshit? Oh my God.

They probably got some version of CTE just listening to this, to the conversations all the time. Hey, you know, I think, you know, you know, they didn't push you about 1935. They didn't have it before that. Now you look, look now that would be, you know, I'm not racist, but that would have been way better though, because they didn't even have any kind of like attempts, almost like one or two attempts at like giving the language, any kind of color. They were just talking about mob stuff in just these things like, oh, you we got to

have a sit down with the capos, just that kind of stuff or saying got mafia wisdom. Like there's one where Stacy Keech goes, the boss is the boss is the boss. They're like, oh yeah, damn right. And then that's, they think that's so fucking insightful that later on in the voiceover, God, he goes, you know, my, my boss, Neil used to say, the boss is the boss is the boss is like, in case you didn't catch that absolutely meaningless fucking slogan that, that is just literally a tautology, let me say it one more time because this is what passes for like wisdom and insight here into this, this movie was written on the toilet.

I'm pretty sure. I mean, this scene, there's a scene where, um, uh, Regario, the other, the, there's one alpha bald fat guy and that's Stacy Keech and one beta one and that's who, by the way, I want to point out was played by Pritt Taylor Vince, who is a big hillbilly from Louisiana and he tries at the beginning to do like, hey, what are you doing? And he, and it's like, okay, but then as soon as, as the movie wears on and he has to do scenes where he's yelling, he just completely drops it. And so he's just going like, look, John, I'm telling you, there's no way than that.

Them FBI guys heard what we were talking about. Oh, John, they bugged my can of candy peaches. What about he, because there's a, they explain this in the most confusing way possible, but he, um, Gary fucks up in some way and, uh, because he tries to kill Anthony, yeah, Anthony Casio Caspipe, who's a fascinating character that we see two fucking scenes of. But, uh, Vincent Gigante wants to kill, uh, the beta fat guy and God, he's like, no, I'm just going to put him on the shelf because that's what, because he loves being in the mob so much.

You'd love their life. There's a heartbreaking scene that's similar to like, it's like old yellow or it's like Harry and the Anderson. We don't want you here where they're like, you can't come to our shitty building where we sit down all day anymore in the back of a store to kill himself. They're like, you can't, you cannot come to the store that doesn't sell anything anymore. And it's, you are fired from the mob, sir. And he's, he looks like, he looks like all of his children died in front of him because

he can't sit on a folding chair and go, Hey, how about the bills this year anymore? And then the movie says that like he dies like two months later of cancer. The VO should have just said it was cancer, but he really died of a broken heart. It literally says that. It says that. You don't remember that? Oh yeah. He literally said that.

And then the following scene is my favorite scene in the movie where it's one line. It's John Travolta looking at his friend's tombstone and he's like, Hey, you fucked up. Sorry about that. Now you're dead. Okay. Bye. That's so Trump. That is so Trump.

Yeah. If Jared like dies in prison, Trump is going to be like emotional day and then he just goes to Jared's mausoleum and he's like, well, who would have guessed that you would be out lived by me? Funny how things work out. It's just so true. But I think we should sort of circle the drain here, circle to the ending and talk about what this movie because the first half of the movie or first three quarters of the movie

is about what a cool guy, John Gotti is the last quarter of it is about how cool his son is. I know that the son is supposed to be cool because in the movie, he's like, he's like the hunk from a nineties teen show. Yeah. A spiky hair. Spiky hair. He's like low body fat.

Whereas in real life, John Gotti, John Gotti's idiot son looked like a Goomba Super Mario. Just the hideous bowling pin shaped man. But in this movie, he's just like in excellent shape. And it's not like they got that guy for his fucking acting ability. He might have been the worst performance. I was convinced that that actor was like a not professional actor. I thought there's no way this guy is an actual actor. He was so bad.

Oh, this is a contest winner. He's like that's what it felt like. Yeah. Yeah. It's like they definitely scouted him from like the fuck team five franchise. He has to pour an actor written all over totally would have done a better job. Absolutely. Hundred percent.

Can we go back to gas pipe for a second? Oh, yeah. No. Yeah. Then we can talk about the Johnny Gotti. Yeah. Yeah. Mike, could you could you tell us the thing you told me about the real gas pipe and

that's six to Ed Bradley interview with him. So it's like tell us who it gas pipe actually was. Anthony gas pipe Casa was the under boss of the Lucchese family. And he was like he tried to kill Gotti with that bomb. And then you have Rogerio tried to kill him. But there's an interview on YouTube of Ed Bradley talking to gas pipe and he's asking about these two Long Island guys who own like a garbage carting business. And the gas pipe killed and he was like, these are family men, men who are trying to make

a living. And he's like, what do you say to that? And gas pipe's like, well, I mean, I, I don't know their family, so I don't know what they're talking about. There's a lot of great moments in that interview. Like gas pipe, like he made a deal with the government and then the government like reneged on it because he was like smuggling cheese into the jail and stuff and getting fights. And he's like, they, they betrayed me and I just think of my daughter, he's like crying

on the interview. But like to underscore again, this is a guy who has dozens of murders on him, like, like murder, torture, executions, like gas pipe was sociopathic, like for the mob. Yeah. Like he was notorious, like in there, he was a terrifying guy and an amazing character. But again, if you only reference him from the movie, it's like, oh, that's sort of like the ratty looking dude who tortured somebody who we never see again. But I wouldn't see any had was pretty cool though, I thought when he's torturing the

guy. Yeah. Yeah, they got in the meat. Yeah. I mean, it's like the guy that got to play him, that guy should play gas pipe in a movie that wasn't produced by an AI for sure, but the Google deep dream algorithm. Yeah. Yeah.

This is this movie was made by the Microsoft AI that had to be suspended from Twitter because it kept posting racial slurs automatically. So you think the movie is ending because the movie has been structured around with these really incoherent flashbacks, but it is the, the, the spine of it are these scenes of, of Gotti, when he's with terminal cancer in prison, trying to convince his son not to take a plea deal on charges that he had and go to trial because you got to be a man, you got to stand up. There's real footage of that.

And that footage is like super interesting because it's Gotti telling his son, like, I would never lay down. I would never like, like putting the life above his own family and just being a complete piece of shit, right? Which really shows you who he was. And then they argue, arguing in the sun's like, I won't close your dad. He's like, no, you got to be a man. And then at the end, he's like, don't do it.

And he leaves and then they show the kids signing papers and you're like, okay, I guess he took the deal. Even though he literally just spent the entire movie being told not to. And then, oh, that's basically, yeah, that's it. It's like closure. That's for guys who got too much education and not enough brains. Good ass with your closure. But he, he leaves and then they show him on the gurney in a hilarious scene.

Like they're trying to get him into like hospice and he won't take pain meds. And they're like, why don't we just let you put you into a coma? You know, this hurts so much. And he's like, he's Robert Mueller. And he's like, every day I'm in here is a fuck you to defense. And then he dies and you're like, okay, the movie's over. And then it decides it's going to follow the legal prevails of John Jr. And it's like, you're, but you're like, wait a minute, he signed the deal, I'm assuming.

But then no, he's out and he's on trial. And then he gets acquitted and then he's out again. And then he like has a scene where he just goes into a garage and yells at some people who you'd have literally no idea who they are. And their argument is incomprehensible. Injibberish. It's just like, he goes in there. He's like, I'm in here because my dad told me to be here.

And they're like, yeah, well, who's saying that I'm saying that, okay, well, I guess you make the rules. Yeah. I also make the respect. Okay, fuck you. And then he goes back on trial and it's like, what dialogue tree do I take to get that? All it is, is the movie is explicitly saying that this kid, this poor guy is being railroaded by the feds, that they're harassing him and that they won't let him go.

You know, it is the real gangsters. She says that Kelly Preston says that you're the real gangsters. And then it closes on a fucking title card that says, you know, John Jugati Jr. was charged over 50 times with crimes, even though it was repeatedly acquitted. The government made deals with bad guys and let him out on the street in exchange for testimony. He just wants to be left alone. I mean, it just becomes an explicit plea to for the government to leave him alone or get up, get a pardon from Trump, which might happen, honestly, and he's like, what the

fuck happened? Where did this movie come from? And it's like, you're trying to tell me that this is an unjust prosecution, but one of the scenes in this film is of John Jr. swearing an oath to become a made member of the Gambino family left, which is never showed or expressed until his lawyer is making his final plea, which is like, come on, let him go. Yeah. The jury's like, yeah, okay.

Yeah. Cool. I like to think the government, like they were in that garage that day and they're like, we got you. You did one day of the mafia. We're going to prosecute you for that forever, but yeah, no, it's just like John Agati later in the movie. He's in this sprawling McMansion, this like idiotic estate, and it's, you know, he has

kids now. He's married to the girl that he met at the Disgusting Barbecue. She's beautiful. She's beautiful. We look like my mother. She's beautiful. But, yeah, so it's this huge house and it's implied that it's like unfair that the cops are arresting him.

They're like, okay, how did he get that house? Like what did he like pass his series seven? He was a job creator. Yeah. It just never explained like how or why or when he left the mafia, just like, or what he quit as of the start of this trial. Let him go. It's like, it's hard to imagine what you could quit because it's just people having

brunch. It's just people sitting around. That's the point. That is the point is like the coolest part of Sopranos is that they like do all these crimes and they're like, they, you know, protection rackets and murders and like all these things, but essentially like what they do it to support is not like having big houses or like fancy cars. They do it so they can hang out in a boys club, like in a clubhouse with their fellas.

They do it so they could be in a frat, but like for their entire lives. And that, that, that is like, there's like a kind of like a, like a, they, they think that they are like, you know, are spit on when they came over in Ellis Island. They had to work and they like always talk about how hard they work. But essentially they really just hang out with other adult men all day. Yeah. Tony, that was like the most clever thing this brand. It was what a fucking great clever show.

But like when Tony always bitches about how hard he works and it's like the previous team often is him eating like him at like two o'clock, I could go for another lunch. This is about, you're right, that this movie is, it shows you what the allure of the mafia is hanging out with your buddies. But the problem is the real downfall, even among downfalls is that it doesn't even look like any fun. Yeah. Like nobody says anything funny.

They don't do anything. They don't even like drink or play cards mostly. We don't even see John Gotti cheat on his wife. Yeah. There's no strip mods. There's no cigarettes in the whole movie. They don't go to the Copa. Yeah.

They're like, there's one scene where they're just like joylessly sitting in a disco and that's it. Yeah. They went, John Gotti went to the club with, with Neil so he could point out people he didn't like. Yeah. He's like, yeah, get out, get these whores out of the way. I want to point out these guys and I don't like the look of that.

Show me another disgusting guy that I'm going to trust for some reason who I hate on first site. I love it. He's just gossiping. Yeah. He's Trump. That's also Trump. Trump goes to the Oval Office with like Don McGahn and is like, who's that guy?

And they're like, that's literally your secretary of treasury. I don't like him. I don't trust guys that haven't been on TV. I want someone following him. It just doesn't look like fun. So here's the thought though, has the power and membership of the mob gone down because of aggressive federal prosecution or because of the availability of gaming and podcasting and the accessibility of male friendships later in life.

That's true. If I didn't have you guys, I wouldn't know what I would do. I might have to join the mafia. Yeah. I think about my gaming plan, I think about you guys. I think about the other, the other fair podcasting family in Brooklyn podcasting family. Come. We're all wearing athleisure and like comfortable velour.

I'm sort of fucking stupid, but I'm very confident when I say things. I don't really work that hard, but I'm always complaining. Yeah. At that issue, this movie is for more than anybody, more than any like general subset of Italians or or Trump voters or anything. It's a very specific group of young of men like Kyle Smith who like the idea of the mafia because it's where they could be with their friends all the time. Like those are the people who are like yeah that's what and that's why there's no crime.

That's why there's no actual mob stuff because that's not what they actually care about. They care about being in a room with your friends being in a big dimly poorly lit room by the way, because they literally exactly where we are right now. But yes, but as a somebody who is watching a movie, I would appreciate an even lighting key so that you can see people's faces in the middle of the frame. Every interior scene in this movie has a big black spot in the middle where all the people's features or clothing become totally indistinct because they just didn't light the space. It's negative space.

I think it's actually an art house decision. You know what? Kevin Connolly is a fan of a verite. It's amazing, at two points in this movie, he accidentally does an homage to Michael Mann and Robert Altman. There's a scene where there's a bar fight that has the overlapped, indistinct dialogue and jittery camera of a classic Altman movie, but obviously totally accidentally. And then there's another scene where John and John Jr. walking down a flight of spiral

stairs and the camera, instead of like following them down with their faces forward while they're talking, like is behind their back and following them from behind and you just see the back of their head. And it's like a tracking shot in a man movie. Once again, totally accidental. It's amazing. It really is like you gave a fucking monkey a goddamn. I really think a Chinese got me.

That's a horrible thing to say about an Irish director. Oh, can I tell you an alterage, a little entourage gossip? Yes. I'm Vinnie from entourage at a coffee shop by my old apartment and he asked them to turn the music down. That's respect. Depending on what music, depending on what music they're playing, that's either respect or a lack of respect.

Some page three shit right there. Juicy. There was a tweet recently that went viral. It was like a group of white men is called the podcast and everyone was like, yeah, but if we didn't have those podcasts, we'd be shooting each other. Exactly, I would be exactly like Meyer Lansky and I would be Bugsy Siegel. Of course. Bugsy Siegel.

Absolutely. Bugsy Siegel. The bug. I didn't even think about that. I'm sorry. I did not even think about that. Would everyone always reply to you with on Twitter when you're just trying to have a good post?

I don't know what you're talking about. The bug. I mean, I think I aspire to sort of a legs diamond figure. Yeah. Irish bootlegging. Dutch Schultz. Yeah. I'll be him loud and excitable and killed in the bathroom most likely.

That's where I will likely die. If I mean, actually, I will likely die in a bathroom like like Dutch Schultz, but we would be the worst mob. I mean, what crimes would be what could we even think like what hustles could we possibly put together to make. All right. So you do you do one podcast. It's free.

Another one. Right. But that's legal. Maybe they forget about the money they gave you. That's racketeer. Here's how you make it illegal. You slander somebody every episode. Ah, yes.

You know what? Agent Napoleon. Nice podcast. You pay us for the privilege of putting it out every month. Every time someone is polite to us and like subscribes to our Patreon from their podcast, we're like, that's respect. We're not just being polite because they met us once. I know.

I think if we did try to become an actual mob, mob, you know, crew to try to try to earn, like, I'm honestly thinking it would be things like lying to Grubhub to get the free like order order refund. But you get the food, you know, and then wait for a cell. Do it. You know, it's smart. You think about it. You take the expense of food out of that.

Boom. Yeah. One of the biggest costs of living. Yeah. You do. It's up. Let me tell you. You just got to you just got to get them on.

You go. Yeah. Yeah. It never showed up. I don't know you're talking about. You're they're all hanging out. I think it's when Paulie gets out from gets out of jail and they're having a party and they're making Sylvia.

They're like, Sylvia, do it. Please do it. Do it. Do it. And he's like, Sylvia, just in his normal voice, he doesn't change his voice at all. He goes, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in and it was like, that sounds exactly like Godfather. Oh my God.

They're all freaking out. But that's like that scene for an hour and 45 minutes is this movie. Yes, I think. Yeah. Absolutely. Every it's just people doing impressions of other mob movies, just like a hundred Italian men doing De Niro scowls. And it's just like, but it's not, but in no way is it anything like like what is good

about any of these. I mean, I guess just like in summation, Gotti is now the movie for everyone who used to look up to De Niro because of good. Yes. The Italians disowned him a long time ago, yes, he had certain preferences that are not acceptable by the church. That's what's amazing is that Italians invented like they were like in the modern context, the first people to be like, yeah, you know, they're getting rid of white people.

Yeah. So I would just say in summation, like with Gotti was actually one of the most extraordinary movies I've ever seen. I would say run, don't walk to see Gotti, you're going to love it. And if you see a critic, do not hesitate to do the most profitable mob activity by killing them with 20 witnesses. And I just don't worry, you get to go to the dentist. If you want to, you know, sit in a dank dimly lit room with other badly dressed men arguing

over what food to eat, incessantly doing movie quotes back and forth to one another and generally being a drain on society, you can either join the mafia or start a podcast. I also want to say that as someone who's like a fan of the show, and like I did come from that kind of like Italian fascist upbringing, you know, where you can't disrespect people. But one thing I respect about you guys is your lack of respect and how you're not afraid to like go after people, you know? Yeah. I don't, I'm afraid to do that stuff.

Well, thank you for disrespect, respecting our disrespect. And I thank you for that in less, of course, literally any member of the Gambino crime family finds this episode, listens to it. I retroactively take back everything I said. I've always respected your guys' work. I just want to say... I think you guys feel a lot more than argue about cold cuts. Adam's address is a...

Yeah. I take it up with him. He told us to do this, we're scared of him. I just want to say publicly that one person that I disrespect is Mr. Donald Jessica Trump. And I think that we strayed a little bit from politics on this podcast today, but it's important that we remember that we have to disrespect him by calling him orange and being rude to him and cheese diddly doodly, you know, like a sort of a Ned Flanders kind of insult. So just keep resisting.

That's all I can say. Maybe the Gaudi move people fucked up by making this the Trump movie. Maybe it was like a resistance movie about Gaudi doing a deal with Trump and Gaudi's like, whoa, I'm bad, but can you imagine if this guy was president? I thought I was a freaking crook. That's how you get... Make the resistance mafia move. Oh, cut this.

I have a billion... I have a billion dollar idea. Yeah. No, just last words for me. I give this film 10 out of 10 Gabba Ghouls and 11 and a half proshoots. My final review, honestly, if like Lars von Dreher or one of those other fucking stupid Europeans made a movie this confusing, people would say it's genius. So I give it 10 out of 10.

So yeah, again, in closing, I would like to thank our two friends, our two friends of ours today. From the other side. Adam Friedland. You already fucking know. Come Town, baby. Microscene of the Sit Down. A great podcast.

If you want to learn more about crimes and the people who do them, Felix, you were just a guest and you actually talked all about John Gotti. An entire Gotti episode. It was very good. I think you should listen to it because we didn't dive as much into the actual life of Gotti on this, but we do on that, but definitely check out the Sit Down. Yeah. If you want to sit down and dive more into the history of crime in this country and elsewhere,

check out the Sit Down with Microscene. We think, guys, does that about do it? Respect. Yeah. Ciao. Respect. Thank you. Three piece soup with a piece by the wasteland

Just in case the motherfucker wanna take man I'ma get mine, get theirs, get yours Cockback, clink clack, gimme that set land My watch, walk out the court Not guilty, filthy, but yet so fresh, so clean So gentleman, so mean So love, so hated Yeah, I killed, yeah, I stored it, yeah

But I'm the god of the mob, fuck it, I made it From nothing to something, scum to thug, thug The gangsta, gangsta, the mobster No part to piss in the posse in life, so bitch, I'm a rockstar The kings and queens, they killed and died