Chapo Trap House - 484 - Girls on Film (12/28/20)

Episode Date: December 29, 2020

We rub the magic wish dildo and review “Wonder Woman 1984”.

Hey my dudes, it's been well, yeah, a year to say the least. We almost didn't make it out, no thanks to a fascist genocidal coup attempt and a gotta hear both sides media. After all, we had world-renowned doctors like Dr. Antonio Fauci prescribe lounging on a sectional while eating Grubhub and watching Tiger King, side note what the actual fuck as a healthy choice this year. And they were right! Yeah, 2020 was the guy who comes to the party and demands you start listening to minor

threat and reading from infinite jest. But like Elizabeth Warren exploding in the twilight of her run for the presidency by gangsta check in Mike Bloomberg, there was a huge bright spot at the end. Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman 1984. I'm usually not a fan of action films. I find there usually a morality tell about how just the right amount of toxic masculinity is what will take down a corrupt system a la shooter and equilibrium. Or overly violent snoozers made for brads and braids to high-five each other over.

But this is different. Not everyone will get it. Some disgusting men who have memorized several perfect measurements for women and rate them on a one through ten scale will say it's about how a four can't pretend to be a seven. Others will claim it's the reptilians and the boulderbergs normalizing what GMO foods do to women. This could technically be true, but it's also about female girl, woman, brave woman, female lady girl, me too, agency, brave agency bodies.

People will try to poke holes in the plot. Why didn't Wonder Woman stop the Holocaust? Did you ask the men why they didn't do the Holocaust? Besides, it doesn't matter. This movie isn't perfect. But similar to the Kristen Gillibrand campaign for the presidency 2019 to 2019, it's important and needed to exist. Women need to show that left to their own devices, they could make something roughly

as good as Daredevil, but also three hours long. Wow. Yeah. The movie was Mazeballs. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.

Ow. It hurts. Ow. From beginning to end, this has to be the most confounding movie of contemporary cinema. It's simultaneously boring, chaotic, nothing happens and nothing makes sense. I think it might be the load star or the touchstone of post-Trump liberal psychosis. So gentlemen, thoughts. Tony Blankley.

Well, I've already said my thoughts. I think it's ironic that most men and men-adjacent women are calling this movie... Yo, I love being adjacent to men. They're calling this movie confusing and overwrought, yet men's favorite movies that they all auditorily assault women with is Come and See, which is a very long and confusing movie. Why is that movie good and this movie bad? Okay, true. Men love Gundam and there are about 35 seasons of Gundam.

I would say... Why is that okay? My review of Wonder Woman 1984 is, run, don't walk, to come and see this movie. I feel like, listening to your preamble, I felt like Vincent D'Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket after he gets hit in the stomach 50 times with soap rolled up in socks. Ow. Ow. Ow.

Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. This was Wonder Woman 1984.

I would actually just like to begin now, kicking off our episode on this. I would like to begin by reading a couple of the reviews of Wonder Woman 1984. These are all reviews that were penned by critics who were given early access to Wonder Woman 1984 by the studio Warner Brothers. Early reactions on social media, say Patty Jenkins, Gal Gadot, and the rest of the cast knock it out of the park in a movie full optimism and uplifting positivity is exactly what we need right now. Just another one here.

A joyful, thrilling, and engaging sequel, one that manages to connect to what worked in the first time around, yet is still uniquely its own thing. Emotional, hilarious, and exciting. Oh, it's its own thing, all right. Perhaps even better than the first. Next one. It doubles down on the compassion and cheese that made the first so great as well as tenacious belief in the best of humanity.

The first Wonder Woman is my favorite of the modern DC films, and Wonder Woman 1984 makes all the smart next steps, telling a very human and very beautiful story for Diana Prince. One more thing. I prefer Wonder Woman 1984, but I also prefer seeing filmmakers take big, new swings with sequels, and that's definitely what Patty Jenkins and company do here. I would agree with that part. This is definitely a new type of superhero movie, 100 percent. I think it's twelve different types of superhero movies.

All of them are ones I've never seen before, so I will give it that. It is not more of the same. It's not even really like the first Wonder Woman, and it's not like any of the other WB DC superhero movies. Even though it's clearly was focus grouped into being more marvel-y in its dialogue, it's still not really like any of those either. It is its own absolutely baffling thing. Matt, as Amber alluded to, I was just planning to watch this movie because it was like Christmas

Day. Going to the movies on Christmas Day is a fun thing to do, and now because of the freaking hell world we live in, you can see movies on your TV the day they're released. So I was like, why not, I'll watch Wonder Woman 1984, not planning on doing an episode about it. But what I encountered watching this movie was something so comprehensively baffling and awful that it unlocked a new chamber of what movies can do. I would say that this is a good movie in the sense that I have not stopped thinking about

it even once since I saw it. In the way that AIDS is a good disease, it really lingers, you think about it a lot, it's always with you. It will treat it for the rest of your life, you'll survive. But it's there, and you know that it's there, and it pisses you off that it's there. Why was it in 1984? Why was this a period? That's my first question.

What did that do? What was the point of that? I was like, the whole time, I was just, why is this then? What does then have to do with any of this? To answer your question, Amber, the only actual payoff for this movie taking place in 1984 is one gag in which Chris Pine tries on a bunch of different outfits. That is literally the only thing. Yeah, I think the outfits is the reason, because everyone got to wear delightful 80s clothes,

and that provided a simulacrum of texture. Well, of course, but nothing is not going to be over the top. It's like, hey, look, they're dressed funny, like that's a thing. That's a thing about it. This is the whole thing? Yeah, you need to have a thing. I would say, Amber, rather than comparing this movie to AIDS, I would compare it to that the DuPont Teflon chemicals that perform carbon chains, that molecules that, like, similar

to the AIDS virus, will stay in your body until you die, and then probably long after that as well. So you guys didn't see anything funny about when a guy tries on outfits. You don't think it's funny when a guy wears a weird shirt? First of all, I love an outfit montage scene, and that one sucked. Well, it wasn't a montage. That was the crazy thing, is that the whole point of an outfit montage is that it's quick cuts.

Right. And it's like, oh, here's an outfit. Instead, it was just every outfit got its own three-minute-long thing, and it really seemed like the idea was to allow noted improvisational comedy genius Chris Pine to just riff. It's 60 years, roughly, right, since she's seen this man, who, by the way, can we just bring back the fact that they fucked once? She knew him for, like, a week. Yeah.

She knew him for a week. They fucked once, and she's apparently what, been, like, wearing black and walking the widow's walk for fucking 60 years while getting, like, an anthropology degree or something. Just that good. Just that good. Okay. No, at least he did that good. I will say this.

This is the positive thing I will say. Chris Pine's kind of charming. I didn't expect it, but he grew up with me. So a woman is not allowed to get a post-doctorate degree if her boyfriend does. Okay. Cool. Normal. I also realized, too, the professionalism of it, when, I mean, John, I'm sure you're

trying to get ahead here, but when Kristen Wiig introduces herself, you know, first she fails at introducing herself because her colleagues, you know, they do that thing that men do where they don't help you pick up your papers, you know, that common trope that we always hear about. This is like, this is one of those things that you read about from, like, Twitter feminists. They're like, you know how men are always, like, drinking cranberry juice on a Tuesday? And it's like, I feel like this is a youth thing. So the paper thing happens, and then she gives her rundown of her specialties and her jobs,

and there's like 12. And I realize, oh, you're Dana Barrett from Ghostbusters, whereas in Ghostbusters one, she had, I mean, she had a degree in fancy, right? And the first one, she's like a playing cello. A cellist. She's a concert cellist. Yes. For like, I think the New York Metropolitan Opera, she's in the opera pit or something.

And then in Ghostbusters two, she's restoring paintings at the other met. You know that lateral movement, that lateral career movement. And it, it's weird, but it's fine because they're two different movies. Kristin Wiig introduces herself as a historian of all of the ancient periods and a scientist of the entire natural world. And this is compounded by the fact that they find an antiquity that she, that can immediately recognize as a fake in a, I guess, a Jared's in a 1980s mall, which apparently like keeps a fuck.

It's next to a JC Penney's. This is the most incongruous way to work in a magic wishing rock. I feel like I could be so fucked up and come up with a better way of introducing a wishing rock. Amber, we're getting ahead of ourselves. I feel like our audience, we're going, we're jumping ahead to the magic wishing crystal. Okay. But to get, to get to the wishing crystal, I think we should begin by trying.

I will do my best to summarize the plot of this movie, which will actually be one of the, one of the most difficult things I've ever attempted on this show because I, I, I, I know I remember what happened, but like my attempt to forensically recreate the events that take place in this movie or why they happen will be, I don't know, like trying to split the atom for me. Yeah. Well, and this is a, this is a traumatic moment that we all experienced from different perspectives. So this is going to be sort of a Rashomon, I think.

Okay. So Wonder Woman 1984. Wonder Woman 1984 opens on the beautiful Isle of Lesbos, the, the island where Diana and all of her Amazonian warriors live in a perfect girls only zone in sort of like a, in, in the, in the grand style of classical Greek antiquity. The film begins with a sort of a stadium filled with spectators and like the, the best Amazonian warriors are competing in Amber, as you described it in the, in the, in the work chat, competitive lesbian Cirque du Soleil.

Yes. There's a special horse girl event. And what happens is it's like, okay, so it's like seven or eight of their, their best warriors are about to compete in like this sort of obstacle course slash triathlon. Yeah. And then there's like with ribbon dancers, but then also you have to swim a whole lot and archery and, and then, and then young Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman as a, as a child, like as an eight year old, just is like, I'm going to do this too.

And she gets in with the big girls and, you know, they, they, they kick off the annual lesbian biathlon on the island of wonder. And I was just wondering this scene, like, why did she have to be eight years old for this? I think it's the show that she's more, I think it's the show that she's like the best one. She's the best warrior so she can compete with the adults when she's a kid. Okay.

But why was that scene there? We never go back to fucking lesbian gladiators. It's the lessons that she learns at the end about truth and how you have to have truth. So what happens is, you know, a young Wonder Woman goes through an obstacle course and dives off a cliff, swims to the shore, jumps on a horse and starts shooting arrows at smoke bombs. Um, she, she's in the lead and, uh, and then, uh, I don't know, like he falls off her horse or something and gets, you know, like to pass by like the next three competitors.

And then, you know, what, what does she do? She realizes that there is a, like a slide that takes you down the side of an ill to the exact point that she needed to go to. And then like, you know, she sort of takes a shortcut, jumps back onto her horse, you know, like, like races back up the hill into the, into, into Lesbos Stadium, uh, present by MetLife, Quick and Loans and, uh, and right as she's about to, uh, you know, throw a javelin through a giant sort of ring to, to, to win the, the annual competition, uh, her mentor, Robin Wright Penn, grabs her and scolds her in a thick Israeli accent that, you know,

you cheated. You took the shortcut and, you know, it's, it doesn't matter that you like, you know, we're going to win until I stop you from throwing this javelin, like winning the right way and living the truth is more important than winning by not playing fair or lying. It doesn't appear that there are any clear rules to this obstacle course anyway. I don't even know how you would say that someone cheated. I guess she didn't shoot one of the things. She didn't shoot one of the things.

Okay. So she took all of the rings to have the gas come out and she missed one of the rings, right? Which honestly seems like it would disqualify her anyway and she doesn't need to be stopped from coming back in, but whatever the whole point of the thing is, is you got to work hard. There's no, there's literally no shortcuts, which is of course that then becomes the theme of the absolutely baffling plot of the film.

No, so bad to want a shortcut to anything. So, and this was this, this first scene is the only scene in the movie that features Robin Wright Penn and Connie Nielsen, which I was deeply disappointed about. I know. They're, first of all, they look amazing. Second of all, good on them who can, unlike some people, learn an accent. I mean, I don't know what the hell it was, I don't know what actually they were doing. They're all excited because she can't do a, okay, she made this entire cast of frankly

much more talented actors, well, at least more so in the first movie, learn a dumb Israeli accent because she can't tone it down a little bit. She wants to go to the disco back in Tel Aviv. I have several objections. First of all, everyone knows I don't support the occupation, but it's important for epigenetic trauma. Everyone gets to go on at least three birthrights and spit at a restaurant called Food Mafia. Which birthright was unavailable this year, so Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot decided to

bring Israel home to our living rooms. Again. How are they kind of dating? Like that scene in particular is very, like, there's hot chicks. No one's really questioning the fact that a lot of these, that these are very military events that they're performing at, you know, with the weapons and stuff. Well, they're warriors. It's a warrior culture.

Yeah. Second of all, y'all are telling on yourselves with the game scene because that was a metaphor. Connie Nielsen or the other woman, I don't really notice women by how attractive or not they are. I've never, like, written down measurements of a woman that I see just in a passing glance when I'm on the train or something. I've never done that. So I don't really, I can't really tell them apart a lot of times if they don't have a

lot of lines. But the thing is, that was them saying, like, you can be as good as you can be at your job. But if you don't take time to go through the ring of being kind to yourself, it doesn't count. And I thought that was awesome. It was very inspiring. So I actually like the fact that it was a lesbian island and the final event that you do to win is to throw a phallus through an opening.

Okay. So that is the only scene we get on. The beautiful island of Lesbos, the Wonder Woman country. It's a country of Wonder Women. Yeah. But, you know, as I'm sure Felix should say, you know, all women are wonderful. She can kick their asses at eight. Yeah.

All women are wonderful, but Diana Wonder Woman is the most wondrous woman of all. So cut from that. And we are now in Washington, D.C., 1984, that year that we all remember Bruce Springsteen had just released Born in the USA, Ronald Reagan had just withdrawn all the Marines from Beirut, and a new smokable form of cocaine called crack was making its first appearance on the streets of Los Angeles. So D.C., 1984, we see, you know, in Wonder Woman, you know, as Embers, in the first movie, she helped win World War II.

And if you remember from the first movie... There's one. They wanted you to think it was two. Yes. In the first film, Wonder Woman, the original Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman helps America and Great Britain defeat the Kaiser in World War I by defeating Aries the God of War, who was hiding out pretending to be a British politician who wanted to seek an armistice to end World War I.

And as he explains, as Aries the God of War, nothing is better for the war than I, you know, feed off the energy of than trying to end wars, because that will lead to more wars and you should never trust any politician who tries to end a war. I thought that was awesome. I thought that was like a great exposing of the red-brown alliance and how far it goes back. So it is now, yeah, 60 or 70 years have passed since her one-time lover, Chris Pine, sacrificed his life to keep World War I going long enough for another 80,000 people to die in the trenches.

So Chris Pine has been dead, and as Amber has already alluded to, she has not gotten any D in probably 70 years and is still pining away for this Chris Pine fellow, pining for Pine. But again, they fucked once. I want to make that very clear, they fucked once. I mean, I like Chris Pine, I was surprised to say he grew on me, but the dick cannot be that good. No dick is 70 years ago.

Now, and Felix alluded to this in his preamble as well, but the fact that they chose to set the first movie in World War I and then jump ahead to the 80s implies that Wonder Woman was around for World War II and did basically nothing to stop the rise of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. She was too busy wishing that she was having sex. Why is it a Jewish woman's obligation to stop the Holocaust? No one can explain that. I would like to make a special note, though, about our lead actress, Gal Gadot, and I know

we must have talked about this in our original Wonder Woman episode, but I would put my chips down that she is probably the worst actor that's ever been given her level of prominence as a celebrity. Unastounding. Yeah. I mean, she has, I hate when people say everything as an op, but like, it seems like she had to have been made at a lab in Wei's headquarters or something. How is she in movies?

Yes. How is she, she's, I'm sorry, she's not that attractive. She's about as attractive as an actress generally is. She kind of looks like a deer. Well, she's fine, but is she really that much hotter than the average actress? No. And she is incapable of expressing anything. Yeah.

She is amazing. Women deserve to have an equivalent of Stephen Dorf. Wait, Stephen Dorf is a good actor. I will not stand for any Dorf slander on the timeline or on this show. Okay. Um, I don't, I don't really know any actors, every single time, every single time that there's a scene where she is with other people and they're talking and they cut to her looking at the other people, the look on her face is the look you have when people are speaking

in a foreign language and you're trying to look like, you know, what they're talking about. She is. Yeah. She is a charisma black hole. So, but okay, so it's 1984, she's in Washington DC. She has a job as a archeologist or anthropologist working at the Smithsonian National Museum and you know, sort of dealing with antiquities.

And then like early on in the movie, we get a, the first of probably three actual action scenes in this movie and it takes place in a mall and a robbery happens in a jewelry store at like a sales jewelry store. Well, wait, hang on. Before that, there's a whole montage of her stopping little crimes, like other crimes. Yeah. She's doing a cause by thoughtless men. It's essentially, she's stopping victims of men, of man spreading only that, by the

way, girls at one point do commit a crime. It's a bunch of girls steal like sunglasses, doesn't stop them. Um, okay. This is another metaphor. You notice how like when the guys were stealing the jewelry, it was during a woman's wedding. This was a stand in for class first, uh, type people, uh, because it's like, well, yeah, you can say that the world's unfair and that you deserve jewelry, but like you can't interrupt a woman's special day, which is what they did.

And I thought that was, yeah, exactly. So she's like, you know, she's, she's doing like, she's sort of being your friendly neighborhood wonder woman. She's swinging around DC on her golden lasso stopping, you know, muggers and man spreaders and look at the other way, when it's, when it's girl shoplifting, when it's, when it's a big girl crimes. Yeah. Uh, so anyway, like, yeah, there's, there's a, there's a robbery of the Zales jewelry store

in, in, in the local mall in DC, which has an antiquity section next to it. The guys is the Ark of the Covenant at Jared's. What is going on? Yes. Amber. Yes. Yes. So the robbers come in the store and they're like, we don't want to do this shit under

the glass. We know you've got a secret back room where you keep illegally pilfered antiquities and like they go in the back and you're right, it is like, it is like where they keep the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders and there's just a bunch of old shit in there. And then like, this is where they introduced crucial to the plot, the, the wishing crystal, the wishing stone, the wish stone is just there. The wish rock. It's not introduced yet, but a wonder woman, she, she foils the, the robbery attempt by

these like these bumbling doofus criminals. But critically, I will point out that before, before foiling their crimes and beating them up, she like takes off her sort of like her headband and throws it like a boomerang around them all so that it takes out every single security camera before she, you know, enters a kinetic situation in a public space. Yeah. That's old school. That's Linda Carter, by the way.

That was the queen. Yeah. Act original wonder woman. That was about revenge porn. I thought it was more like a cop turning off his body camera. Yeah. That's what I was going for. No, it's actually the opposite of that.

She's the, she's the opposite of a cop, in my opinion. She gives a, she gives a little inspiring wink to a, to a cute, cute little black girl. It's very, I'm not just fighting crime. I'm also like a fun girl scout troop leader. I was given this movie and the screenplay on the condition that I would review it honestly. And I have reviewed it honestly. That little girl's name is Elizabeth Warren. So okay.

So she foils the, the robbing of magical antiquities from a Jared's in a mall. And then, okay. So then it's back at the Smithsonian and, you know, it's a typical day at work and we're introduced to Kristen Wiig's character, who's a, a charmingly clutzy and befuddled, a gemologist or something like that. And you can't walk in heels, so you're a fucking loser. She's dropping papers. She's wearing glasses.

And I'm just like, as soon as I saw her character, I was like, oh, bye bye, honey. There is absolutely no chance in this movie that this frumpy, nerdy woman is going to show up at any point as like a hyper sexed up dime piece. No way that's going to happen. I'd be really shocked if at any point in the movie, she like takes off her glasses and you're like, what, is she's hot? Yeah. And then Kristen Wiig's character is-

Because none of us know what Kristen Wiig looks like and we couldn't have possibly seen it coming because she's an incredibly attractive woman. Cause like, you know, with her, like her character, she's like, she's the sort of like this, this nerdy academic and like you said, Amber, she drops her papers because she's such a charmingly befuddled cluts. And all the boys, all the men in the office don't bother to help her pick up her papers. They talk over her. They ignore her.

They lay on the I'm a nerd thing. I learned how to, you know, I learned about cryptozoology instead of how to walk and heels. So and then like, you know, so Kristen Wiig, she looks up to Wonder Woman, to Diana. And you know, Diana is the only one in the office who will, you know, treat her with respect or even notice that she is alive at all. And then they introduced the fact like, well, the FBI has actually sent over this evidence from a robbery at a mall for us to authenticate or I don't know, hold for them as part of their investigation.

And one of the things included is the wishing stone. And this is where like, I don't, I don't really get where the wishing stone comes from or like what it is. They never explain it. How, like how anyone knows how it worked. And I would also like to point out that probably the first hour of the movie, literally nothing happens. No.

I mean, I'll get to the one thing that does happen that's one of the most baffling things of all time. But like it's basically like you said, Diana has not gotten laid in 70 years. And then her nerdy friend, Kristen Wiig, finds a wishing crystal that looks like a dildo. It even has like the little extension for the, it has a little like extension for like there's like the shaft and then the little thing with the, for the, the clay. I did not pick up on that one, but this is why I, this is why I like working in a feminist environment.

Thank you for pointing that out. And they're like, oh, like what's this? And they're like, I don't even know how they introduced the idea that anyone knows that this is like a wishing crystal guy, guy wishes for coffee. I don't remember that part. I really don't. But like eventually Kristen Wiig inadvertently wishes that she could be like Diana, sexy, confident, you know, cool.

And then they go on a little date with each other. She's like, let's get lunch. And they do a little girl's lunch. And Diana says, you know, sort of, sort of as an aside, like, well, I know what I would wish for if I could wish for one thing. Keep that in mind. It becomes very important. And I guess I'll just jump ahead because I said like the first hour of this movie, the,

one of the most baffling things about this movie is the pacing in it, which was like literally nothing happens in the first hour that like it is an hour. It's two and a half hours long and it it easily could have cut an hour without losing any plot points. I think the pacing of well, of course, the pacing of every scene is excruciating. It's just the things that they show the people doing are the kind of things that are generally you find in like 80 minute movies that cost like $50,000 where they realized halfway through shooting it that they didn't have enough material.

And so, all right, we're going to have a lot of shots of people walking into offices that has all of them. All of those shots are in here and it's just, it's like, what, what is the thought behind this? It seemed to actually switch like what we were watching, like, like how drastic and weird it was when they were having the girls lunch and talking about like boyfriends or whatever. I was like, are we watching 30 something now? Okay, so this was this again, telling on yourself, they were replicating the pacing of someone,

your girlfriend describing her day at work. And I like that. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God, that's the misogynist thing, misogynist and true thing anyone has ever said on the show. Oh, shit. That's amazing.

Oh God. That's exactly what it is. And then I met this new girl and like, she's kind of boring and I think she's like obsessed with me. Oh God, Felix, you've figured that out. Okay. All right. So this is a plot beat, the introduction of Pedro Pascal's character, who is Latino Donald

Trump. That is all you need to know about his character. He is Donald Trump, obviously a blatant 100% standard for Donald Trump, but here's the thing though. I'm not a con man. I'm a television personality. Exactly. Yeah.

He's like, he's like a TV sort of pyramid scheme guy who has just donated like a lot of money to the Smithsonian and is getting a VIP tour. Here's another question I like, I literally don't know the answer to this question. He is immediately like focuses in on the wishing deal though. And yeah. He knows about it. Is it ever explained how he knows about this no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They cut the at one point they go to his office and they find a bunch of evidence that he

was looking for it, including cut newspaper cutouts of like crimes that he committed like jewelry thefts he committed to try to find it. But how he found out about it in the first place, why he's looking for it, never explained. Or why he believes that it has magical properties. Why he believes it's real and not just, you know, there's a lot of like, most people when they see a fertility statue at a museum, they don't break into the museum because they think it'll make them like get knocked up. They think that he gets some money from it.

The reason that he thinks that it's real is never explained. Yeah. The reason he knows what it would, for example, look like or recognize it or he doesn't show any interest in antiquity at all. And I thought maybe, but I couldn't tell it was alluded to that actually his his oil well scheme thing was actually an attempt to search for it or something. I don't remember. I don't get it.

I don't get it. But like his character is like, okay, he's this he's this flashy sort of like TV huxer guy who is like, as I said, Latino Donald Trump. But here's the thing about this. The weird thing about this movie, though, and we'll get into it as we get to the end of this movie, is he's clearly supposed to be a standard from Donald Trump. But in the moral universe of the movie, you're supposed to feel sympathetic and bad for him. And we'll get to the reasons why him trying to be a good man project dad.

Yes. It's like he all like all he really wants to do with the wishing stone is to have his fraudulent business become successful and so that he can be like his son will be proud of him. And like the another key Donald Trump thing is that like he comes back from the Smithsonian. He's got this flashy suit. He goes into this big fancy office and he's like, you know, cruise to the lobby, okay, going upstairs.

And then he goes into his actual office and it's like bare strip walls, bills piling up that he's not paying. And you're like, oh, he's not really a billionaire. He just plays one on TV. Yeah. It's incredibly heavy handed so much so that whenever I couldn't explain like the presence of like a plot point that went nowhere that's not a plot point or something happened, I was like, oh, this is so this is them trying to jam in the Donald Trump parallel, you know,

whether it's relevant to the plot be damned like I was like, that's how I that's how I got through this movie. And then I'm like, oh, it's just because they're trying to make a Donald Trump. All I could all I could think about as regards to Pedro Pascal character and how this movie treats him is I remembered something Palma told me about sort of a a folk saying in El Salvador that roughly translates to God will never allow a Mexican to prosper. And that that is the message about in this movie as it relates to Latino Trump. God will never see a Mexican prosper.

And that's the thing like he wants to use the risk. This is the weirdest thing because Pedro Pascal is technically the villain of this movie, but he has no actual villainous or evil motivation for any of the things he does. The only thing he's really guilty of is like wanting to be successful and taking a shortcut to get there. But he wants to wish his son literally he's a divorced dad trying to impress his son. And it's like by a Ferrari. Aha.

Here's the here's the answer to this question. And Felix, I'm sure you'll have thoughts on this, the actual true villain of Wonder Woman 1984 is men writ large. The only actual villain villains in this movie are guys who do street harassment, who say smile, sweetie, and talk over women in the workplace. They're the only characters that appear that have any menace or actually like evil malevolence motivation to their behavior. Whereas Pedro Pascal's character is like I said a strangely sympathetic portrait of Latino

Donald Trump. OK, so, yeah, there is another villain and it's Pedro Pascal's toxic masculinity because he's too he's too into the toxically masculine aspects to be like a self made billionaire like Laurie Powell Jobs or Mackenzie Bezos. And he's like thinks he's too good to work hard like they did. And the thing is like I like I've dated women I'm not even sexually attracted to just to hear their stories from work. It's the most exciting thing to me.

And I got a liminal thrill out of this. But it did the moral of the movie. Let me first say that the witching stone is the most intelligent plot device. Yeah, it's the smartest. It's so tidy is the thing. Yeah, it's like it shows up any plot holes. It's very smart. The thing is that it showed, I mean, OK, not just like men are the villain, but also like

women who turn into a cat to impress men of girls I've dated who've told me stories from work. This happens a lot. Actually, a lot of women will turn into cats. So men will think they're cool. And it's similar to people like Rosario Dawson who do metaphorically turn into a cat by supporting like sexist politicians. Something to think about.

Right. And it's because they're jealous of better women who don't have a boyfriend just because they're really still stuck on this guy from 70 years ago. So that's the only reason. So as we will get to, so Kristen Wiig's character gives a VIP tour to Pedro and she's dearly, she's horny up for him. Like Kristen Wiig's character, like her motivation for everybody because she also is clearly horny up when she meets Diana.

She's like, oh, yeah, DTF. And then she meets Pedro Prasad. She's like, yeah, fill me up. Kristen Wiig. She's just like everybody she meets. She wants to fuck. Kristen Wiig's character is about how themselves can break bad. I mean, like the true depiction of this character, though, is like, like this woman would be

in real life a serious sex nerd, you know, she would describe sex as play. Yes. Yes. And she would have so much of it. She would have a harem of early computer programmers. Yes. And she would be fucking paying thousands of 1984 dollars for her polyester panties. Like she's a hot girl who is into a whole bunch of nerdy shit and has like an incredibly

impressive job. Like nerds don't exist in the adult world. I don't think people understand this, at least not when they're hot women. Like you can be a nerd if you're a hot woman. It's fine. Like you're not a marginal person. Why was this movie set in 1984? Because it was before they invented the red hair dye that carried from Mythbusters.

And if you watch the post-credits scene, you know, Kristen Wiig doesn't, like she comes back from being a cat and invents that hair dye in a science lab and then invents being a sex nerd. And so she never has to become a cat again. Yeah. You're right. Yeah. That's this movie literally ties up everything and you guys are complaining about it.

So tidy. Yeah. I need to get to the only other actual thing that happens in the first hour of this movie that is, in my opinion, one of the most baffling choices I've ever seen made in a movie. So you remember earlier where Diana Wonder Woman inadvertently wishes for one thing, the one thing that she actually wants if you could wish for. Suddenly, Kristen Wiig's character is sort of strangely becoming more confident and agile and strong.

Yeah. You know, she's getting better as a person because she can walk and heal. Yes. Literally for all the fucking, like I was watching this with a guy and he's like, look, I know I'm a misogynist for hating this, but they're the one that made a movie about how women rule the world by learning to walk and heal. So Kristen Wiig invites Pedro Pascal to a big gala event. And Diana begrudgingly chooses to attend for some reason.

I forget why. It doesn't matter. So while they're at the gala event, of course, Wonder Woman's walking around and she's being approached by, you know, a heinous villain who just asked her on a date, you know, like that. Dicks are coming at her for all sides. Yeah. That's the level of evil we're talking about here.

And she sort of blows off all these guys until one strange man out of nowhere approaches her and starts talking to her and gives her his watch and says the line to her that Chris Pines said when he died in the first movie. The famous line we all know and love from the first movie that we all know and love. Yeah. Like here. What do I really like that line? And once I get over, I'm doing cognitive behavioral therapy to get over my fear of needles.

I will get a tattoo. So she's sort of like, who are you? Why did you say that? What's going on? The camera pans around as I cut some her back to this totally random fucking guy that you've never seen before, cuts back to her. And then the second time it's Chris Pines standing there. And I'm like, what's the fuck?

Right. And then they have a mirror scene. By the way, the person I saw this with at one point just starts screaming, so it's quantum leap. Yes. It's quantum leap. The wishing dildo. Quantum leap.

Okay. This is like the wishing dildo can do anything if you wish for it. Okay. So when she inadvertently wishes that her dead lover that she fucked one time would come back to life after 70 years of rotting in the fucking ground, they don't just manifest him back and like, what the fuck? It's me, Chris Pines. It's in the 80s now.

No. They quantum leap his brain into another man living in 1984, his body effectively killing him. Yeah. And then at one point he's in that weird diamond prison from the superman movies, but that's what he banished him to. The Phantom Zone, yeah. Yeah.

And then like, yeah, there's a mirror scene where he looks in the mirror and sees like the other guy's face. And then, but Diana and now you as the audience are only seeing Chris Pines, even though in your head, you're realizing that in the readiverse of the movie, nobody is seeing Chris Pines. They're seeing some other fucking random guy. And this guy has a life, an apartment, a job, a family, I'm assuming, that like it never factor into this. And here's the weird part.

After they reunite, they fuck again with this other guy's body who's been hijacked by a guy who's been dead since 1918. So it's fine for men to do necrophilia. Also I want to point out that, okay, so it's cool in Fight Club when Trevor Dunden says, when he says, you know, you're not your apartment or your Ikea stuff, but when they literally do this to the guy by killing him, it's fucked up. Yeah, I will say the whole, I've heard there's some like, that's actually rape because you're doing it with someone else's body.

Part of me has to just be like, yeah, I feel like I felt really bad about how someone rolled in. Okay, first of all, we all fucked up with the dinner, but let's be honest. It's like, sorry, finders keepers, mind now, I'm fucking this shit up. Okay, so like I said, this is, that's the first hour of the movie. There's one incredibly paltry and shitty action sequence. And then, like as Felix said, an hour of women telling you about their day. And then the most bizarre resurrection conceit I've ever seen in a movie.

Okay, then for some reason, Diana begins to understand that the wishing stone is evil or something and it's making, you know, Pedro Pascal wants this for his own purposes. Kristen Wigg, because she's so horny for him, allows him to take the wishing dildo with him back to his... Just wash it off when you're done. Take it back to his oil office. So, and then Pedro Pascal gets the wishing dildo and he wishes that he could become the wishing dildo and he wishes for it.

And the dildo, like, sort of dematerializes into him. And now Pedro Pascal is Latino Trump slash wishing dildo. So, he's a human genie, basically, and that's his superpower. Okay, first of all, very circuitous road to, I would like, a whole bunch of power, which is really just one wish. I want to be the thing that's the weirdest wish you could possibly make. Second of all, as he, you know, becomes, as he starts granting wishes, it makes him sicker. Never explained.

Nope. Like, it's taken a toll on his body. Yeah, yeah. He gets the Joe Biden eye at one point. He gets the Joe Biden eye and why that is happening is never, well, I think it's because the idea is, is that, is that when you get your wish, something is taken from you that and like, you know, that's the classic, it's a classic double-edged sword. And so like, yeah, I'm the wishing dildo and I can grant everybody's wishes, but that

and then take their thing for me the way that the wishing dildo takes things. But then because I am the wishing dildo, then when I get the wish from other people, it makes me have a tough time. Here's another important picture. Right. And also, I get to name my fee that is not negotiated like prior. So it's like, oh, you want a Porsche? Oh, I'm going to, you know, take your, I don't know, I got, there's a monkey's paw thing.

They literally say she uses the phrase, the monkey's paw at some point. Yes. Amber, I wanted to bring that up because it reminded me like the MST3K rule, never remind people of a better movie within the shitty movie you're making. Yeah. They explained the conceit of the wishing dildo by just simply saying, it's like the monkey's paw at least five times. So like a better, like a six page story that like actually makes sense to explain.

One of the most baffling and like incomprehensible like movie plot devices ever created. It's the most what am I looking at here, shit I have ever witnessed. Yes. In the entire scene, you have to spend the entire scene not watching the scene, but trying to, trying to fill in the gaps that they, yeah, that they have just decided that you don't need. And not in like a, hey, we trust the audience to know because a lot of the film is incredibly punishingly, uh, uh, uh, it's, it's punishingly condescending in the way that it, like, oh,

like they have to show Steve Trevor's watch like seven times, like 30 seconds just on this watch. This watch is important. And like, uh, she, uh, fucks up pulling a lock off and they're like, oh, strong lock. Like they morons pay attention to this, but then other things aren't just completely left unexplained as though it, the, the, the, the wishing universe, the rules of the wishing are never made clear. And then they introduced them as you move along and you're like, oh, I guess he makes

him sick. He has a blood eye now. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's one thing if you want to, you know, just, just immerse the audience, but every second that isn't taken to just lugubriously explain something is taken to introduce something that is completely unexplained. This is where my coping mechanism of being like, oh, they did this to jam in, uh, uh, a Trump parable thing just sort of like allowed me to continue without being like, what?

Because I think the idea is that he wants to be the person that gives people things, but in making those promises and giving those gifts, he's actually taking something from them. And truly the people who say, oh, this guy is going to give me thing, they're, they're the deplorable, terrible people because they want something because by the way, if you ask for something, that's how we get Trump, which is the entire moral of this movie, by the way. Okay.

Okay. Um, totally unrealistic, right? A, uh, a force that can give you anything that, uh, fucks up people's organs. Oh, except Trump made the same deal with Russia, who uses polonium to poison its enemies. Here's another important, this was a metaphor for, and it's, okay, Trump had been making deals with the Russians forever. And then he's like, I want to be Russia and he became Russia. Yes.

So here's another important feature of the movie that I think is worthy of discussion. So, uh, Chris Pine, a man who was alive in the early 20th century and died in 1918, is resurrected in 1984 America. And then like a lot of the idiot, like idiotic jokes and like bands and like, like, again, something that fills up probably 20 minutes of time in this movie. There were escalators in the late 1800s. Is him being like amazed by this modern world of wonders that surrounds him? And the thing that he's amazed by is an escalator and the DC Metro, which is like, oh, wow,

a train, what an age of marvels. The London Underground opened in 1860. Yeah. Did this guy is like, uh, we've had escalators forever. The other thing though was he goes, whoa, at some break dancers. It's just like, it's okay. It's just break dancing. And like my immediate thought was, well, I don't know if it's the dancing that he was

really. Yes, Amber. They could have had a lot of the Lindy hop back then. They were literally slipping women over their heads. They had very athletic, popular dancing when he was around. I don't think it, I think it was the dancers. The thing about that scene is where he's showing all of his, his, his wonder one, doesn't make sense because they first showed him already going to the ball and meeting her.

So he had to go through 1980s DC just to get there. And then he was all Marvel soy banter the whole time until that. And then it's like, oh yeah, he has to be wondered by everything. And secondly, uh, once again, instead of it being a crisp montage, they are these just bafflingly long shots, like him watching the train. It's, it's, it's like a man watches train from 1886, the train comes, it empties, it goes on and he's watching it the whole time. There is a scene after that where they go to the air space museum and they're walking

down a hallway and a guy just like an astronaut hands him a pamphlet that was at least 10 minutes long. It's just him walking down a hallway and then getting a fucking pamphlet from a guy in a space helmet. How, how is this, how are this, is this how you're spending your free time? And I will, if anyone wants to put money on this, I believe that this movie got some kind of money or tax break from the DC tourism board. That's the only thing that makes sense.

Like yeah, not enough time luxuriating on the wonders of the metro. Here's another point I'd like to make about the Steve Trevor character. I mentioned prior to this that like the only, the real villain of this movie are like the way men, the way men behave towards women in 1984, i.e. the stand in for 2020. And you know, like there's street harassment and Kristen Wiig sort of like begins to use your superpowers by killing a guy who tells her to smile sweetie. But the only good man in this universe that exists at all is a guy who was resurrected from the night, like 1918, an era in which men, I would hazard a guess, were comprehensively

treated women worse than they did in 1984 or today. Let's just say they were operating under a different set of rules. Yeah. And the idea is, is that like saying that, like, oh, guys were worse than or something, that implies that you, there's any mitigating factor of, you know, environment in behavior. There isn't. There are good people and bad people. And Steve Trevor was a good guy in 1918.

He's a good guy in 1984. He'd always be a good guy. And these other guys are just bad. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, they're bad. And also, you know, romantic love was invented by the graduating class of Sarah Lawrence in 1982, apparently.

Okay. So we've hit about half, well, we're, we're almost at an hour. And we're not even, we don't even get to the second hour of this movie, which transitions from a crushing boredom and like pacing that like defies all logic and reason to a hard shift to a sequence of events where when I was watching it, I was just going, oh no. Oh no. Oh no. And this begins in which they like, they go to Pedro's office and just find like a note

on his death saying, I'm going to Egypt, be back in a day. And then they go to this Aaron Space Museum and steal a jet, you know, like the, they steal the spirit of St. Louis. It's got the keys in the, in the ignition apparently. They steal, they steal the spirit of St. Louis. And they, and then. Which he knows how to drive, can't go from being like a fucking fighter pilot to flying a jet.

It was just. Well, he was the fighter pilot. He was a pilot of fucking biplanes. There's those things that like one rudder in them, like a big wooden stick that you just pulled up or put down. That was it. He was a big rubber band. He twisted it around and it was insane.

And they're like, Oh, I know, we'll just steal this. Okay. So he steals a jet and Steve Trevor flies it and she's like, Oh wait, I forgot to tell you about radar. They can see you with the thing called radar now. And then she's like, Oh wait, I know what I'll do. And she starts doing like jazz hands and she's like, I've been, so this is a little something I've been playing with recently and she makes the plane invisible.

Yeah. Which is a nod to the old school Wonder Woman having an invisible plane, which is by the way, one of the stupidest parts of Wonder Woman, the throwing the tiara thing is way cooler. I would have, I would have liked it if they had a realistic flight where he like packs his messenger bag that she got him and she yells at him thinking they're going to break up and he's like, it's my process and it's 45 minutes. So she, they're flying an invisible jet through the DC night.

And then for some reason fireworks start going off around all around them and Steve is like, what are those? You know, those explosives that have existed since the sixth century fireworks were invented in 1981. He fought in World War one. I don't think he would be wowed by like a small explosive that goes into the air and blows up. Anyway.

So then they go to Cairo. And then we cut to Latino, Trump, Pedro is in Cairo meeting with the Amir of Egypt. Not a thing. This is in 1984. I went to Egypt. I forgot this part of the movie. Well, okay. Here's where it gets into some really, this is where I was just looking at it going, oh

no. Oh no. Yeah. So he's trying to get all the oil from the Amir of Egypt. All that oil in Egypt. Yes. One of the Middle Eastern countries that doesn't have any fucking oil. He's trying to buy all the oil from the King of Egypt.

And he's like, oh, I have, I have already sold it to the Saudis. And then he's like, oh, like, well, if you could wish for anything and I with the Saudis buy oil. Yeah. No, yeah. That is, that is the, because it's the one thing they don't have. They would need it. They saw the oil to buy everything else because it's a fucking desert.

Okay. So here's where it gets really good. The King of Egypt, and he's like, Paige was like, okay, I know you've already sold your oil to the, literally the country that has all the oil already, but. Yeah. Which by the way, bad move on your part. But you know, I'd like to buy the oil and how about, what if I were to tell you that I can like grant you any wish, if you could wish for one thing, what would it be?

And he was like, the wish I have cannot be attained by, you know, it's more than what the average man would ever wish for. And he's like, okay, shoot, try me. And he goes, I want all of my ancestral lands back. And I want the heathens who trot upon it to be banished forever. And I was like, oh boy, here we go. He grants the wish. And then this is again, I cannot describe how I felt watching this immediately after granting

this guy his wish to return his ancestral lands to him, a giant wall materializes out of nowhere that bisects the city of Cairo in half. And then in some throwaway line, they say, it's cutting the people off from their water supply. And it was like, wait, he was talking about his own lands in Egypt, that he's like the king of Egypt. And he wants his lands back from Egypt. Who are the infidels in Egypt?

A cops, I guess. So after I graduated from Sarah Lawrence and was part of an experimental men's class at Smith, I did a short postgraduate problem program at SAIS and USAID, it was called Rapportunities. And using hip hop, we learned Middle Eastern history. This is all accurate. This all happened. This is the king of it. The Emir of Egypt, Egypt has always had emirs.

He, you know, in 1981, that's the only thing the movie gets wrong. He met with Alexander Schultz and was like, I want to, I want to return to worshiping the sun. And then they put a wall up in Egypt. And then, then, yeah, he sold Falcons and oil to the Saudis because they didn't have enough. That happened. Okay.

So then this sets up another, the movie's second out of three action scenes. So probably one of the stupidest things I've ever seen where Diana and Steve Trevor, they chase a convoy of the king of Egypt's tanks that is being commandeered by Pedro Pascal for what reason. I don't know. She fights the tanks and then, crucially, at the end of the scene, swings on her golden lasso to save two Arab children who just won't stop playing in front of a column of tanks, which I thought was a lovely touch.

Yeah. I mean, she loves their children more than they love their children. No, the scene where, yeah, there's a shot where she, there's some small Arab children in the street and she decides to ride a RPG with her lasso to protect them. And the whole time, I'm just thinking, Gaza Beach, shit, it's like they were leaning into it at every level like, yeah, yeah, this is the IDF superhero. That's pretty cool. Isn't it?

I mean, it's like, you know, it's a country with like mandatory military service. Everyone's indoctrinated. It's so like, I saw people like, I'm never going to say she's the IDF and it's like, dude, I don't know what to tell you, like the military. If you were her, you'd also have been in the IDF. But it is not just that this is an actress who did mandatory military service for an imperial country, it's that they're just jamming in like IDF propaganda into the movie. Like very, very blatantly.

It's super weird to watch. Now at this point, my recollection of the movie starts to scatter. I don't know. Like, I mean, maybe you guys remember more than I do, but like, okay, the way is where it accelerates with Pedro Pascal. Okay. Like so Pedro Pascal begins granting wishes to everyone in America, which leads to a kind of like a total breakdown in the social order.

And then he gets to like, he wishes that he could go visit the White House and another utterly baffling thing in this movie is that he goes to the White House in the Oval Office and talks to the president who is a guy that neither looks like or sounds like Ronald Reagan and no one refers to him as Reagan. And it was just a huge question I had is like, is this guy supposed to be Ronald Reagan? Well, no, in 1984 America actually didn't for a brief period, we didn't have a president. We had an Amir, so this is actually accurate, but it's about a very niche part of American history.

Most people don't know. And Ronald Reagan, or not Ronald Reagan, gives him access to a secret military satellite dish that will allow him to appear on every television at the world. To make fake news and to make promises to the American people that are actually a bait and switch, which by the way, they can't be trusted to actually ask for things because they're just going to ask for porches, they don't want healthcare, they're selfish idiots, any political demands you might make on a capitalist or a president or an Amir or a grand poobah is actually, you know, you're building the wall, basically.

By wanting anything, you're putting Donald Trump slash Pedro Pascal in power, your desire for benefits. By wanting them, it isn't wanting it, it is taking a shortcut to get it instead of working for it. That's the claim that creates the crime. It's using the magical dildo. It's using the dildo and the slide. That's the crime.

So this is an important thing, though, because as they come back to America after their brief sojourn in Egypt to buy oil or stop someone from buying oil, they return to America and Pedro Pascal just has like a line of supplicants and he's granting everyone their wish. And that is leading to this kind of breakdown in the social order where some guy wished for cows to walk around his apartment and there are cows there. But, Amber, you bring up a very important point, though, because this is where the movie's going and how it ends up that gets an IDF propaganda side, gets to what I think is actually be truly like pernicious and evil ideology at work in this movie, is that when they depict

everyday average Americans who have been given the ability to wish for anything and haven't granted, every single person wishes for the most selfish, dumb, bullshit imaginable. And what they're saying is that granting people's wishes is lying to them. And if you were ever to give them what they wanted, it would lead to the apocalypse. Yeah. It's one of those, is that pie in the sky, Donald Trump slash Bernie Sanders kind of ponies, literal ponies or horses or cows or whatever. Yeah.

No, you get a pony by being born on the aisle of Lesbos, which is a subsidiary campus of Wellesley and they have an equestrian center. Those people get ponies. So Latino Trump is given access to a secret Star Wars military project that will allow him to go on TV and talk to everyone in the world at once. And again, I don't understand what his motivation was at this point, what he was attempting to do. He wanted to grant the entire world their wishes.

Because he wanted more, because he just wants more. He doesn't care who he hurts. He just wants more, just like Donald Trump and just like everybody who isn't disciplined enough by calisthenics on the lesbian aisle. Okay. It's literally just the, when something doesn't make sense, think like, oh, does this work to jam in a Trump thing? And like, that's definitely, well, why does he want to be on TV and to do the fake news?

That's, what does that make any sense for his character? No, it's just, it's their trend reference. And when he goes on the world to be like the global wishing dildo, there is another amazing montage in a scene in this movie when it happened, I like, I stood up and started screaming. And there is a scene. I did, I did too. I went, ah, there is a scene where it just cuts to, um, to England for some reason. And like, there's a guy fighting with a woman at a coffee shop and the woman behind the

counter goes, I wish all you Irish bastards would go home. And then immediately after you see like, like British police pull up and start like arresting Irish people and throwing them in the back of a van. Yeah. This is during the troubles, which by the way, I was watching this and I'm like, this is the most again, liberal brain kind of, because they're, what they're doing is they're taking liberal anti-racism and they're projecting it on international conflicts where they constructed a world in which the troubles were the results of anti-Irish sentiments

of the English. That was the problem. That's why they were so mad. It's just the English were just really mean and rude to the Irish at the toffee shop or whatever. There's no question. And also they didn't want them to go home. They were a huge like labor source.

What they wanted was their home to be their home, that they were taking the, they weren't like, go back to your own country. They were like, oh, you don't have a country. That's our country. It's just, they're just trying to do the Trump thing of, oh, being anti-immigrant. Yeah. That's it. Yeah.

So they couldn't do it in America because they thought that was like two on the nose or two inflammatory. I'm just going to try to fill in some gaps here. At some point, Kristen Wiig fights Wonder Woman because she wants to funk and sunk Latino Trump. And then on their way to the secret military TV radar satellite, she wishes that she could be quote, an apex predator. Keep that in mind.

Important. Right. And also she gets apparently a second wish because, because now there's a, they never explained this. I don't get it. I don't get it. She got two wishes. I don't get it.

Everybody gets one wish and they establish that you only get one, but she gets two. Yeah. Well, she was, she was wishing upon, you know, the physical dildo and now she's on wishing upon the dildo man. Yeah. But that's, I just wrote that in and I wrote, I wrote that in. They did not bother to do that. This is me trying to spackle over what's going on.

The final showdown commences and it involves at some point, Wonder Woman, Diana, going back to her apartment and breaking out of her like her closet, the golden armor that is like the most sacred relic of the, the lesbian warriors. It's like the armor worn by their most feared warrior who stopped, who single-handedly held off like the Spartans. All the men. All the man's planers. The gaslighting of, you know, Sparta or whatever.

She stopped a thousand bomb kites in that. So Wonder Woman in her new golden outfit, sort of like, you know, touches down on the island after sort of like Peter Parker web slinging from lightning bolt to lightning bolt. Yeah. That's another thing that happens. Very important. By the way, Wonder Woman can't fly. Yeah.

That is an integral part of Wonder Woman use. She can glide. She learns how to, she learns how to glide. It's don't, they broke with Wonder Woman cannon, not to be this person, but that they, that's what they promised you. They're like, oh, and this is what she gets to fly just like Superman. I'm like, she doesn't fly. That's the whole thing.

Yeah. You can't just. Wait a minute. You see, you're saying men can fly. I got a term. I kind of see Felix's point here. You're saying men can fly, but women can't fly. That's literally sexist.

Not Wonder Woman. That's sexism. She can't. She has polycystic ovarian syndrome. It prevents her from flying. Women are actually more likely, women are actually more likely to have hollow bones like birds. So they would be better.

In many ways, osteoporosis is a strength. Yes. Okay. The Golden Wonder Woman and her anti male arbor touches down on the radar satellite TV Island and is going to stop evil Latino Trump from improving the material conditions of every man, woman and child on earth. That must be stopped. Can't have that.

And like literally. It's going to overheat the economy. She's like Larry Seller. Yeah. Exactly. Well, they were, it was implied by the way that they would do that the president's wish was accelerating into World War three. Oh yeah.

Not Ronald Reagan. Because the president wishes for more nukes. The president wishes for more nukes. And then Russia is like. So that means it's going to cause Russia to respond. So okay. A golden armor Wonder Woman is like, okay, we got to stop this from happening. But before she can look in front, Pedro, out of nowhere comes the final form, the final

boss of Kristen Wiig, the fem cell sex nerd, which is she becomes a literal cat person with a tail and everything will she becomes a literal cat lady, cat lady, the most dangerous of all women. She's not getting dick. She's a cat. Okay. Here's their volatile. They're jealous of you.

Here is something. Okay. She, she is in her final form as the character cheetah from the DC comic. One of the most D list villains probably ever created by in any comic ever. She looks like in her scary final boss form, exactly like, I don't know, Taylor Swift and the cats movie musical adaptation. Yeah. That's the same.

Here's the deal though. This is important though. This movie was supposed to be a tent pole summer blockbuster to be released in theaters this past summer because of COVID, of course, it was pushed back and then released on streaming on Christmas day. So they had an extra six months to polish this turd or fix that they had seen the experience happened of the cat's movie come out and everyone be horrified at the nightmare of seeing actors be cat people.

And they saw what happened with that and did nothing to change and this, like one of the most insane things I've ever seen in a movie is Kristen Wiig showing up. By the way, I cannot stress how good a choice it was or how cool it was for her transformation into a cheetah wet lady to happen entirely off screen so that when she shows up looking like Taylor Swift in the cat's movie, you just like you just get the full force of that. Yeah. Like it's boom. Oh, there she is.

She's a cat now. She's a cat now. She's a cat now. And then they have a literal cat fight ladies, calm down, which all which is all by the way, the only reason women fight is because one of them is jealous of the other which is campy friend. And she defeats Kristen Wiig cheetah femcel sex nerd by of course, throwing her in water and like, you know, cats hate that.

So she electrocuted her and it's never explained why Wonder Woman is impervious to electricity. Okay. So then we get to like the final showdown where Pedro is in some kind of like glowing or he's just like standing under a light and using his wishmaster powers to bring about the apocalypse by granting everyone their wish. And then Diana defeats him, I think by throwing her her truth telling golden lasso around him. And which also shows the truth, something they threw in and wrote in at the last minute

to like that's not a thing that the lasso. Yeah. No, that's always been a Wonder Woman feature or her golden lasso. She lassoes you with it. You have to tell the truth. She tells the truth. It doesn't make you see. It doesn't give you clear points.

They wrote, they wrote, they expanded the abilities of an already, frankly, very useful tool. And there's a monologue or like Pedro Pascal and you know, I will, I will say in Pedro's defense, like he was, he was giving his all on this movie. He was doing some real overacting part. He was acting. He was doing like, he was doing like that really like overacting and I don't mean that in a bad sense.

He was just trying to give some juice to whatever you have to do. Yeah. And he's like, oh, like all the wishes will be mine and then she lassos him and does this monologue where I'm trying to, I'm going to try to paraphrase it, but the, the import of Diana's monologue, where she's showing him the truth and countering the power of his wish granting ability is that she just says like, basically, wishes are the same thing as lies. Wishing for anything better or anything at all is a lie.

Knowing people that anything better as possible is a lie and the truth is beautiful and the beauty of the truth is that the world is just fine the way it is. Yeah. And I mean, her and Nancy Pelosi would go to the same fucking Botox doctor, I'm sure. So it does make sense that she would just lift that. And then while he's under the lasso power, you get a flashback to his like life and you realize that like, this is like, gives you this whole sympathetic portrait of him where like, he's bullied as a kid for being a Latino.

He's bullied for having dirty clothes and eating a tamale. And then like, he just, he just wants his business to be successful. He just wants to succeed. He just wants, you know, a good life for him and his, his son, who's named Alistair Crowley or something like that. Yeah. The son is very thrown in. Like there's no mention of like the marriage or anything.

They're like, it's your weekend and then he like leaves the son to make money to impress the son. So, oh wait, I'm sorry, I skipped another very important detail is that like before Diana glides away to confront the final boss, she leaves Steve Trevor on the street after he just tells her, look, there are other guys out there and like, I'm supposed to be dead. And she's like, okay. And she runs away and literally leaves him on like, on an avenue in DC. And that's it.

You never see him again. He's like, okay. It's like peace. You know, she can't have what she wants, otherwise she's being a bad, if she cancels out Pedro's wish granting ability, he like the dead Steve Trevor will go away and he won't get with the thing that she actually wishes for. And Steve's like, it's okay. I'm already dead.

There are other guys out there in the world. Dick is abundant. I mean, God. Yeah. Yeah. Move the fuck on, Lord. Look at you. There are so much dick available to you.

He was like, you know, you know, Diana, like, I've actually, I've been enjoying being nothing. So like, don't worry about me. And then she's just like, okay. And then runs away from him and that's the last you see of Chris Pine ever. Yeah. He also says heaven was nice. It's not made clear, like, he's like, I don't know, someplace it was good. I like it.

And also the movie does not show at any point, like him leaving this other guy's body or any kind of like transition happening. No, he's, she's just like, okay, bye. So she wins all the wishes are reversed. The glorious status quo of 1980s America, her wish, which was apparently an option. The entire. Oh, yeah. Yes.

Wait, wait, wait. I forgot about that. The climax of the movie is the entire world apologizing for wishing for anything. Yes. I renounced my way. Selfish of them. Yeah. I renounced my because they saw on TV that the, I couldn't understand how this happened.

But because Pedro Pascal accidentally confessed his terrible ambitions and it was broadcast across the world and people are like, Oh, he's actually like that. No, no, no, it's she gave the speech. She gives the speech and everyone hears it and it makes them all renounce their wishes. Okay. So she did it. Okay. So she did it.

Because like clearly what happened is that they thought, well, you know, traditional male centric superhero movies, they solve problems through violence. We really want to say that, you know, there are other ways to do it. So our female superhero is going to save the day by, by lecturing people and getting them to feel bad. She's going to hector and scold you into. Yeah. And then that's actually.

The reason, the reason the military industrial complex has prevented a woman from being president is because if a woman was president, she would get on TV and talk about a weird argument she had at her friend's baby showers and it would end all war. Like, yeah, then they cut back to England and the woman's like, I wish the Irish were back. Bring them back. Yeah. And then, uh, yeah, that's it.

That's the movie. Uh, she sees the guy whose body she stole and, and fucked on the street and she's like, Oh hi. And he's like, Hey, I like, I like your outfit. Yeah. Yeah. He goes up to her and he's like, yo, I have like a Gabriel fluffy, a glacias, uh, video at home.

Do you want to watch it with me on my phone? And she's like, yeah. And he's the bad guy from cat person, but he lost weight. So he's good now. Yeah. I, and also she, she figures that he might actually be a better fit for her than Chris Pine was because, uh, when she was dressing Chris Pine, like a paper doll, uh, that erotic thing that all women love doing, uh, he didn't like the outfit she picked out for him.

And this guy was wearing the outfit. Yeah. Yes. So it's like, well, maybe there are, uh, more fish in the sea, ones that I can dress. Well, there you go. That is, I will say just the very last seat, of course, is the, is the closing credit sequence that you need, which is just a chance to have Linda Carter show up, uh, uh, for the people who remember that show, which is literally no one watching.

There are more world war two veterans alive than people who watch that show than that we're on when it was on. But my favorite, I just, I only mentioned that because they had one of my favorite lines of dialogue, which is she saved some woman from getting crushed by a falling pole and the woman says, thank you. And she goes, Oh, thank you. My name is and drop a load or whatever the fuck the chick who saved everyone from the mansplainers whose armor Diana used to fight the cat woman.

And she's, and the other one says, and the other one says, Oh, that's a beautiful name. And she goes, thank you. It's from my culture and I love that because it really does remind you that this entire movie was written with predictive text that there's no, that like every, every word line of dialogue is, is just something that no human being would ever say. And I really appreciated that. It's from my culture because she's from, you can't say like it's Greek because she's not really Greek.

It's from this like kind of Mediterranean island. It's like all, it's like, you don't want to make a specific ethnicity. So but she can't say what it is because it's secret. So they just went with, they just went with, it's from my culture. Yeah. And it's 1984. So you can't say thank you. It's lesbian.

Yeah. Yeah. I didn't even see that part. I think. Yeah. Amber, you turned it off. You didn't know Linda Carter was actually in this movie. No, I didn't know.

Yeah. I love Linda Carter. I love also that there was this period of low budget superhero TV shows that were like fun that they had to like basically write plots around with a doctor who level budget. And because you're like eight, you don't know how shitty it is yet. You're just like, oh, it's Wonder Woman. It's the Hulk. It's whatever.

I like the theme song. And like, I have to say those shitty shows required more thought and effort than this movie. Or rather, this movie required a ton of effort to create something so confusing, so stupid and so frenetic that it's, it's truly depressing. I, okay. Do you remember how I like got depressed after I saw the Warcraft movie? Yeah.

Yeah. And that movie made me depressed because it was like, oh, that's the way that every movie is going to be bad now. It's not even going to be bad. It's going to be bad in the way that like bad grocery store sushi is bad where it's like doesn't even have like a distinct taste or feeling to it. And it's just nothing. It's just flat.

It's just, just not even darkness. It is lukewarm. I cast it out of my mouth. This was the one thing like I unironically found interesting about this movie is like the innovative ways in which it's fucking soft. Yeah. It was special. I think.

It was ground-breakingly shitty. I think it presents, like, if we're being optimistic about it, it's like, okay, so like this is just going to be the one, one like shitty CJS superhero movie that's shitty in this way and the rest of them are going to be bad like the Avengers. But the dark world version is like, this is the new baseline. Yeah. Like every movie is just going to be like, yeah, a mix of predictive texts, AI, AI produced plots and, you know, just algorithm picked stars.

Yeah. And whatever the, whatever Twitter's like ideology of the moment is to like cram in. Yeah. And whatever task breaks from whatever like city they're, they're using to fund the film, whatever probably soft money from whatever government or military thing wants a commercial. Right. But also like the pacing and the plot itself was so fucking like innovatively stupid. Like a stone that gives everyone a wish is like, it's even fucking dumber than Avengers.

Yeah. It's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. Yeah. Like this was like, yeah, I said, you know, that it was like they had, it was like a dying child's last wish to write a movie. It was a really stupid child. Oh my God. Maybe this movie is the product of someone wishing on the wish.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, you know how like, you know, like, you know, you vary, they're very rarely like, how did this get through so many people things in modern movies? Cause like, yeah, they do go through an entire bureaucracy. It's the only actually well-staffed bureaucracy left is, you know, keeping things that will

offend both like, you know, busy body teenagers on Twitter and China outside of movies. Yes. The two most powerful sensors in movies today is China. And they're, they're definitely too many cooks and they're all awful cooks. There were so many people who like this went through who just like, they just were like, yeah, that's fine. Put it in. Who cares?

Who gives a shit? And I did, I hope that's the future of movies like this, and it just like the bureaucracy doesn't give a shit. And it's just all things that were supposed to be cut. And every movie has this like fucked up, like half asleep, Nyquil dream pacing. And I mean, I think it will heighten the contradictions of movies and we'll get the last boys cut. We have to. I mean, cause you got to like part of the reason this movie, the reaction to it was so

swift and universally horrified is that nobody was watching it in a movie theater where just the experience of being in the dark with a big screen kind of like dulls your stuff. It's it does your critical faculty. And you're like, yeah, hey, and it takes you a while to sort of realize how bad it was. Everyone's watching on their TV with their phone in their hand. But the thing is, is that that's not going to make a better because people still watched it. Everyone's going to still watch this shit.

We're going to go from going to be, see big movies, hoping to have one, you know, experience wonder or some sort of immersion to, yeah, no, movies are where you just watch how bad they are, make fun of them. That's one thing that all movies are MST three, you know what, like, I think it's like, but none of you are as funny as Osiris. I mean, like this movie is a paradigm shift in a lot of ways, as the ones you've mentioned and how innovatively terrible it is, how kind of almost special it is in that, like, I would prefer movies to be bad like this in that, like, it's impressive to me that every single

choice they made in this movie was bad, was wrong. Yeah, every single one negative instincts. And it is a paradigm shift as well, because this is the first big like 10 pole summer blockbuster movie that has been premiered on your TV on streaming. And one thing I'm sure the studios are thrilled about is that because of that now, everyone can instantaneously share a screenshot of exactly what Kristen Wiig looks like as the final boss cat immediately, rather than trying to describe how fucking like jaw droppingly awful it is, there's actual visual evidence immediately from like the minute the movie

is like, watch now, and can that can be shared with millions instantaneously. Like I said, I'm sure Warner Brothers is thrilled at how this is going to work out. I believe they've already licensed or gone into production on Wonder Woman 3. Fast-tracked Wonder Woman 3 Patty Jenkins directing again, because hey, it doesn't matter if everyone thinks it's shitty and scarce screenshots of the CGI cat person, as long as they're fucking watching it as it can be a lost leader for a streaming service. And that's all movies are going to be once theaters are gone is like you're not going to have to, you know, because like, yeah, this movie costs 30 bucks if you bought it,

but it was just another movie to watch on the streaming service. So eventually like these movies, you can't justify the cost of a movie you know is going to be terrible. But if it's something on the streaming service, of course you're going to watch it. And then if everyone watches it and makes fun of it, it's been engaged with it, did the job, it got the conversation going, it justifies its next installment. Can I just add one thing that I was personally extremely frustrated, disappointed in Bill Wilder by, which is a very low bar to clear, but a movie set in 1984, no needle drops,

they said no, like anything said to like an iconic pop song of the era. Yeah, I think they went to when they went to the trailer. Yeah, in the trailer, they had an actually bad ass, orchestral remix Monday that kind of got me pumped for this. If that movie was like that trailer where that was just like Blue Monday Wonder Woman punching cat people to it, fine, I would be happy. Literally no pop music in it. That's such a low, just license of fucking songs. They didn't even give us like the fun, you know, unnutritious candy that is a period

like sat in the 80s. I think the opening scene with the mall really impressed me just because they had J.C. Penny, the store like logo was perfect and that they had the ficus trees and it looked like an 80s mall, but even the costuming was like kind of over it was like it was like people in college going to an 80s themed party. Like there wasn't any like none of there was none of the cool fun things about watching a movie about the 80s. It's Wonder Woman wedding singer where you're like, Oh shit.

It's Wonder Woman and Kristen Wiig having a fight in an 80s scene where they're ripping through screens showing iconic films of the era set to Duran Duran's girls on film like easy. Oh, girls on film, that's our, that's our, that's our title. Chris, and you did mention that like it was announced just today that they've already Greenlit Wonder Woman 3, which I'm, you know, I'm already, I'm doing the Birdman rubbing my hands together for Wonder Woman 1994 in which Diana the Wonder Woman uses another ancient magical relic to resurrect Chris Pine's dick in the body of Spoon Man from the Sound

Garden video. That would be, I think like, I would like to get a job working on the Wonder Woman 1994. I think there could be a very cool 45 minute long subplot where like, I don't know, they have Aubrey Plaza learned devil guy, I think it would be a good movie. Wonder Woman 1994 girls to the front. Nice. Yeah. I, the news that a sequel is being fast-tracked, it's, I read that headline, uh, just like

the Bin Laden Determinatory Pack in the United States memo, yeah, this one, like, this may be the, this may be the shittiest thing I've ever watched for this show. It was. It really was. Yeah, yeah. Like there's a scene where, where, uh, right after she meets, that's, reunites with Steve Trevor, they're just walking on the mall and it's supposed to be like a romantic reunion and it's shot from like across the city.

Like they're just, they're like, they're so tiny, the whole, the whole frame is just the background. It's like, this is the wrong, this is the exact wrong choice. Every choice, where to put the camera, where to cut, what to focus on is the wrong choice. They didn't get a, the other thing too is that everything is supposed to be for every age now. Yeah. Yeah.

So like she's been not dicked for 70 years and ostensibly she enjoyed it the first time, which is also pretty unrealistic and, and they don't give her, they don't get like a sexy. No, they're just lying in bed like a perfume commercial. Like a sleepy morning after, yeah, oh, there are a lot of compute perfume commercials, but she comes in that like white, there are a lot of perfume commercial scenes and it was like, white diamonds by Elizabeth Taylor. Like there are a lot of her walking in in a like a 80s gown or outfit or whatever.

And it's like, this is just, I just remember these being from cartoons, like the, the grown-up commercials that were between cartoons that were trying to sell me Elizabeth Arden. It was magnificently and viciously terrible. Well, I am still surprised by it. Well, I still cannot smell rain. Well, I will say now, I think we should probably wrap it up here because the runtime on this episode has now hit about the halfway point in Wonder Woman 1984. Yeah.

So we will leave it there. I will just say like, this one is worth seeing. I would definitely do not pay money for it if you can avoid it. If that's a thing that's possible, theoretically, allegedly for you to do. Like I said, this, this movie is special. Okay. But don't pirate it. You'll get the massage on your hands.

This is, this movie was special. And there you go. Yeah. Now, if you can watch a camera that was definitely recorded on an Android, do it, run, don't walk. If you have HBO Max for some reason, because you're 78 years old, like I am, do it. Same. I get saw the talks about coming in after the bombing of Dresden. This is the, this movie is my Dresden.

I'm still really, I'll carry it with me always. I'll never escape it. There we go, folks, WW84 till next time, gang. Bye. See you in the next one. Bye. Bye. See you in the next one.

Bye.