Sardonicast - Sardonicast 146: Barbie, The Edge (feat. Jay McCarrol)

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

Jay's instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaymccarrol/ Support the Show for $2 a month and receive all future episodes early at https://sardonicast.com and https://www.patreon.com/Sardonicast. Buy Sardonicast T-Shirts, and other merchandise at https://teespring.com/stores/sardonicast. Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/sardonicast Website: https://sardonicast.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Sardonicast Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/sardonicast Twitter: https://twitter.com/sardonicast Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sardonicast Sardonicast Highlights: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8AhJ0bzQgs5fb9m_ZCRqkw/featured Alex's channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/IHEOfficial Adam's channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/YourMovieSucksDOTorg Alex's Twitter: https://twitter.com/IHE_OFFICIAL Adam's Twitter: https://twitter.com/2gay2lift Adam's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/YMS Intro music by: https://www.youtube.com/user/anUnkindnessvideo Timestamps: 0:00 Intro + Questions for Jay 36:18 Barbie 1:04:20 The Edge 1:42:33 Questions 2:05:14 Recommendation + Outro

Three, two, one. Come on Barbie, let's go party. I'm Adam from your movie sex. This is Sardana cast. Hello. Ah, ha, ha, yeah. Oh, God. I'm Alex from...

Yeah, I'm Alex I, G. But that's not all. We have a special guest this episode. Do you want to introduce yourself, Jay? Hey, how's everyone doing? Thanks for having me. It's Jay McCarroll here. Jamie Carroll of Nirvana the band The Show, you might know me.

We've also been doing some, a lot of music stuff the last many years. I'm sort of, I jump around. So how did you first get introduced to me, Adam? It was through Nirvana the band, I guess, right? Yeah. So it was really weird. So at one point in time, the only thing that I'd seen for Matt Johnson was the dirties. And then one year at TIF, which I think might have been the first year that I was at TIF,

I decided to get the closing night gala thing. And I was like, okay, whatever, you know, go to this weird party. And I saw him at the party. I was like, oh, hey, the dirties. That was a good movie. And then, yeah, we started hanging out and checked out other stuff as the years went by. So I'm not an OG Nirvana the Band The Show web series fan or anything. I haven't checked out all of that yet, but I do absolutely love Nirvana the band of the show.

That's my favorite thing that you two have done together. Well, your breakdown review of it was, I think, the best review, just that really in-depth. The your movie sucks review you did of it was really great because you clearly had a deep understanding of what it is that we like about it too. And so it was fun. It's always great when people say they love the show, but it's really great when somebody takes the time and just takes a full swing at trying to articulate sort of what makes it so fun in all of its weird complexities and strangeness. So, yeah. Thank you. Much love. Yeah, honestly, it's the, it's the type of thing where, you know, you get more out of it on repeated watches, which is most media that I love. Right. You know, there's certain things where it's like, oh, I'm sure you could get more subtext out of it on a second watch. But the rewatchability alone, even without the subtext is like, it's such a funny show that the amount of people that I was showing it to, just because I wanted to watch it again or introduce it to another person. I started picking up on a few more things. I'm like, okay, there's. something here. There's some fun stuff going on. Yeah. Yeah. And I love the juxtaposition between

the improvisational and like real life elements versus the elements that are very clearly planned out from the beginning. I think having those both coexisting in the same show is really fun. Yeah. We we've always always done that from the from day one of our web series. We started to understand what the currency of the show was and it was that blurring of the seams between the real and the prepared and so both of you probably do a fairly equal amount with the writing would you say or just curious well I mean like growing up I grew up with Matt and he the way we met was that he went to a different high school and his girlfriend went to my high school and he was kind of known at his high school for this guy that was saying, well, I want to be a filmmaker

and I'm going to make some little films and he was running around with his camera. And in my high school, I was a class clown for sure, but I was also known as the music guy who was saying like, I want to do music for movies when I grew up. And it was just fun that his girlfriend set us up where she's like, you know, my, my boyfriend is making his first feature, which was like, you know, just a... complete nothing really small. How everybody starts. Nothing feature.

Yeah. A very embarrassing feature, but we got, we kind of postured ourselves to be doing it the right way and got together for me to do the music for his movie. And then from then on, we sort of both just realized we have pretty much the same taste in so many things, so many movies and comedy. And so the, to answer your question, I've just been kind of like a, a student to Matt's sort of film school that he's, he's just been a walking, he's got this film cinematic aura that he's always had since he was young.

Like he's quite an exceptional guy, my buddy. And so I've learned quite a bit from him on that. And so we kind of grew together. Like when we started the web series, we were just writing together. Yeah, it was like both of us like writing and trying things out. But halfway through the web series, he kind of. of got his footing in terms of what his voice was. And he started to really quarterback the operation.

And that's just been the way it's been. And with Sopruder films, the company, he just kind of plays, you know, the leader and goal keeps everyone's ideas that just sort of flow upwards. And it's a great system of just best idea. And nobody has, nobody's ever really arguing creatively. It's just a nice team. of people that have the same goal in mind, and we're all just sort of clamoring to get there. But absolutely, Matt, is the, I've always called him the quarterback.

That's awesome. Yeah, I've always really appreciated how much advice he gives to younger filmmakers. We have quite a few younger aspiring filmmakers in our audience that are always looking for good advice and something that I think I'll just parrot him saying is, don't be afraid to try. you know, like your first feature is always going to be shit. It's just the act of creating something can help you find your voice. And the first step is just getting something out and then improving on it. And if you're your own toughest critic, then you can improve off of the first thing you make and then improve off the second thing you make.

And then before you know it, eventually, you know, as long as you're being real about what you're missing or what you can improve on or what your voice should be, then you'll get great at it. And being careful not to have that mentality of you being your own toughest critic, which is fine and everything in one angle of it being like a healthy thing to help you. But as we saw with a lot of people growing up, people waited because they were too afraid to, yeah, try and fail because they were. They were smart. Like we knew, we were, we got a lot of, we met a lot of people that like clearly had an understanding. of what their voice was and kind of what they wanted to do. They had great taste. They only liked great things.

And so naturally, they're at this really painful position of not knowing exactly how to execute something that's worthy of themselves. And so they don't try. Yeah, you don't want that to prevent you from trying. But you can escape all that. Like, nobody's going to remember your first five failures. They're going to remember you for that first success. And they will forgive everything else.

Like, you're not going to be defined by that. And especially for people in their 20s, like, you kind of want to slap them and be like, this is not it. People can at age 30, like, reinvent themselves having learned everything they've learned, and they thrive. So it's no point in really getting so swept up in yourself, you know, when you're figuring it out. Yeah. It's a tough thing to have to get past, and I think that everybody has that part of themselves

that second guess is what they're creating and waiting for the right moment or for the right people or for the right situation when maybe getting to that point is just a matter of creating something first, and then the right people will flock to you or the right opportunities will flock to you, depending on what you do and how you've made it. Oh, yeah. So I'd like to talk about, I'd like to ask you about your scoring for films. You've scored The Kid Detective, you've scored Blackberry. And those two examples are pretty different in terms of the musical sound. And so I really appreciate the versatility that you have. When it comes to scoring something like The Kid Detective, how many people were involved in that? How many instrumentalists

did you have? How many instruments did you play? Did you do your own mixing and mastering? What the process like? Yeah, I do it before I add any sort of overdubbed real instruments on a sort of MIDI mockup, I do it all myself and work with the director to just get it all pretty much there, just all on my computer with a bunch of samples and everything. And over the years, I've collected enough great samples and knowing how to write for them and practice mixing with stuff. where you can pretty much get a whole thing together just yourself.

And then after that, it's just a matter of recognizing what's poking out as being maybe a bit fake. And in the case of Kid Detective, I hired some string players to do a few overdubs of the strings I had, a flute player to do a bunch of real flourishy things that samples can't do, a horn player, all just separate things that were overdubbing stuff that already existed. I've never written where I'm like, you know, writing on score sheets and annotating things to then all of a sudden in a live scenario, hear it for the first time. The process is very much a grueling trial and error of just moving and shifting and massaging hundreds of instruments all at once and spinning a lot of plates and trying to keep a handle on what your. whole sound is, like what the whole fabric of the movie is going to be and, you know, the gradient of dynamics and how this queue needs to have as much energy to set up for the next cue and this

queue is a load bearing cue for this final cue. And it is a lot, it's a lot of spinning plates. And for a lot of the process of film scoring, you have to really trust the process because it It doesn't feel like it's fully coming together until some Eureka moments that you have with the director where all of a sudden you guys connect on something. And that's what it's really about. It's about the relationship between you and the director and making sure that that vision is being fully realized from the both of you in your mind's eye.

And then through that, all that trial and error and demoing stuff, once you kind of get that set up, then you're kind of home. free and it's a fun kind of race towards the finish because you have everything set up. But it has been a very interesting switch of genres. I did Kid Detective in 2020, one or whatever, and Blackberry came out and that was, and Kid Detective was like a real, like, lustrous old fashioned Henry Mancini style thing. Very fun to do. and finding new chords that I haven't even played before just through listening and absorbing some stuff was a real pleasure, like hearing some stuff back there.

I've never written anything like this before. It was a very fun, proud moment to finish that one up. And then Blackberry is a completely different thing where all of a sudden I went fully synthesized and modem samples and beeps. And also the fact that the movie was a lot more of a narrow target to hit for how to weave the score in. It didn't really lend itself to having the score kind of pop out ever. You kind of wanted to hide it, yet it needed such an undercurrent. And so it was a bit of a tightrope where you had to sort of like keep energy and keep things pushing, but you could never really poke your head out, which is always the game of the score.

Yeah, just to be complimentary towards the film, right? rather than trying to get all of the attention. I loved those samples. I thought it was really clever with the modem samples in the Blackberry score. Yeah. Would you say that you're more ear trained than by sheet music?

Because I'm the type of person where, like, I understand sheet music. I can't, you know, maybe if I practiced hard enough and I was passionate enough about it, then I could actually play sheet music in the sense of being able to do it in real time instead of just like

staring at the notes and figuring it out and then playing it. I've always loved ear training in the sense that I feel like that's much a much it's like a sense almost. And I feel like a lot of, there's a lot of people on both sides of this where some people who are ear trained wished that they knew sheet music better. And there are some people that do sheet music that wish that they were more ear trained. How do you feel about that? I just haven't found that being, like using any of the theory that I did at some point. learn and absorb. I did go to music school and kind of go through the whole rigorous theory and harmony training and studying complex, you know, jazz chords and movements and cadences and all this

stuff. I just haven't been in a position where my ear is slower than what I could do with the sheet music. The only time that I, that I've ever needed sheet music or just notation is usually when I'm using real players who kind of require it. Although even then, like when I was using all these overdub players for Kid Detective, I would just send them the isolated track that I wanted them to, you know, overdue. Like the French horn, I'd give him a little line. It would be like, do, and I'm like, can you do it where it does that French horn thing? It was like, bo-ro-do.

And just kind of ask and just talk through like what it is what we're going for. And he would just use his ear too to just play. And, um, Anne Fung, who did the flute, she was just fantastic because I could just kind of say, just kind of go nuts over this part. And she would just do tons of flourishes and then I'd be spoiled for choice of little pieces that I could just use to put in. But in terms of just, uh, yeah, I think nowadays when you need theory, I can, I can imagine if I ever get the luxury of going to orchestra with something.

And I have for just something recently. I did a, I wrote a song with a comedian Jan Caruana for Andrew Fung of Kim's Convenience and Run the Burbs to sing at, what's his name, the guy from Kim's convenience, lead guy. Forget his name. Paul Sung, Jung. Paul Sung, Jung. And if I get that wrong, take this out. But he received the Governor General's Award.

Great dude. And so there was a song that was going to be sung for him, a funny song. And I got to write it for orchestra. And I was like, oh, but I've never written for orchestra. I'll just do a mock up. And then they had me set up with a orchestrator who took all my MIDI and just made it all for the orchestra. And I heard the recording back. And I was like, this is amazing.

And he took tiny little liberties with little melodies and kind of. counterpoints and kind of cleaned up this and that. And he kept this part that I liked. And it was a little window into how fun it would be to, you know, have that whole process of a film score being, having an orchestrator translated to get it to that final orchestra awesomeness. That sounds great. So last time we had Matt Johnson on the podcast a while back.

And it seems like it's been the case for forever. you know, Nirvana the band season three. Most of it was filmed and, you know, it's essentially done just looking for a place to release it because of some stupid red tape nonsense and fucking vice Canada shutting down or whatever. Like, I don't even remember. It was like the network that it was on even though you were greenlit just decided to not exist anymore. But I hear now that you're doing a Nirvana of the band The Show movie. Yes. Which I'm obviously very excited for.

It's official. That's awesome. That's awesome. So my question is, how is that being released in relation to season three? Is there a chance of the movie being out before season three is available? Or I'm assuming everything that you filmed for the movie or that you're filming for the movie is all fresh stuff. Or maybe is some of it some stuff from season three? Or what can you tell us about that?

I can say this. There's been a lot of people answering each other's questions about where season three is and a lot of it's wrong. And I don't know why they're kind of claiming that they know this. Like I'll read on some comment somewhere. They're like, where's season? Well, it's all done apparently. And it's just because of vice that they can't do it. And that's not entirely true.

We shot a lot of season three. And the way that our seasons came together was. very wild and chaotic. Like one episode would take about seven months to make. We'd be stacking them, but it would, it would be a lot of reshoots and a lot of rewriting where we'd, you know, we'd shoot something and it would technically be done, but we afforded ourselves the luxury of being able to watch back that first, you know, assembly of it that one of our editors would put together and we would rewrite it because,

that's kind of how we always got the show's writing to be up to par because it took a lot of swings at it. We'd have to just sort of be honest and say, oh, we didn't do this right. The motivation here is all wrong. Or like, oh, he should change by this point. Or, oh, wouldn't it be better if we kind of leaned into this word and had that kind of be the theme? Oh, yeah, then it kind of figures out the ending better. Like, there was so much honest critique that we gave ourselves that we know that so many other productions just don't work that way.

They go and they shoot it, they shoot for the target and then they get it and they finish it. Yeah, it's pretty much storyboarded. So we had shot the first pass of about four episodes of what was going to be eight and got them to a point where really only like one or two of them is like kind of watchable and even then not in our minds presentable. And to and then at that point, Vice completely collapsed and we were left with nothing. So we couldn't really continue and we couldn't really do it on our own or, you know, we couldn't raise the money that we needed to finish.

There were some things that, again, people are always very surprised how expensive. the show was based on how it looked. That was kind of like the trick, I guess, is that you have something that looks kind of cheap and effortless, but there's actually a lot of really exciting things going on and, you know, needle drops. Yeah. Expensive stuff. But we have these pieces of season three and there's a lot of fun stuff and cameos and kind of big set pieces. It's just that we haven't come close to being able to have the...

infrastructure to like finish it properly. And so we haven't, we've been waiting for the proper opportunity and while we were always keeping that shopping around, there was also other things that were kind of coming up. Like BlackBerry was a movie that was kind of slowly coming down the pipe for years before we had it fully made. Like there was a script that we were working on for a while. So that happened and so we're just kind of hoping that, you know, the more we work and the more we're sort of out there doing things and just hopefully just getting some leverage to then when

the opportunity is right to keep Nirvana the band going. In this case, it was a lot easier to get a movie going with the relationship we had with telefilm and that hopefully can just sort of keep the dream alive of what we are going to do with season three. So canonically, like, yeah, it's going to, it's going to. we're still kind of working out how that's going to happen, but it's, we're, we're constantly shifting. We're not trying to rush anything out.

Like, we just want to do it right. Like, we have all those good pieces. And so I know it's been years and I get messages and DMs like almost daily from people that are like, what the hell, dude? Like, I don't, I don't understand. And I just don't have the hard. I started writing back to a lot of them. And I end up like kind of writing a whole huge long thing.

thing and it's very, it's just not worth it. And so I, I apologize to those people, but I get that all the time. There's, there's projects of mine that it's like people are waiting for part six or part two or some other thing. It's like, I would rather it be done right, you know, it's, exactly. You got to, you can't rush art. You got to do it when you can and, uh, you don't want to do it in a way that you can't, that, that, that you're going to regret the, uh, product afterwards. Did I hear that Vice released an unfinished episode at one point accidentally? Yeah, there was something, there was a contractual agreement to deliver and air the first episode of season three. And this was like right kind of nearing the end.

So there was some contractual agreement where we just had to, by contract, air this episode. And there was no details around that. And so we were still working on it. And I can't remember why it was. We've done some shifting around of like how the budget was moved around and we kind of spilled it over into, you know what? I'm not even going to try to explain this. This is like a question for our producer, Matt Miller.

But he, we just needed to contractually air it and just get it over with. And then we could still work on it somehow. So we aired it at like four in the morning on the Vice Network just so we can kind of check that box. And it was basically, yeah, a rough cut. And it was a flashback episode about a young Matt and Jay kind of becoming friends in high school. And it was very touching. We had these two actors come in. We kind of did the whole thing in black and white kind of parodying 400 blows.

and we just kind of got, you know, indulgent with some, you know, filmmaking of it all and took some things from 400 blows and gave it a bit of a, just a bit of an angle that just gave it a feeling. It didn't feel like comedy at all. But there are a lot of little funny parts in it. It could have used a lot of touching up. It still is in the state that we left it, which is just, you know, rough cut. that's why nobody's seen it and why we're not rushing to get it out.

But it's a really nice little short film pretty much. It's a lot of backstory to the guys. Yeah, I heard about that existing, but I never seeked it out or tried to find it because I heard that it was unfinished. And whenever people are like, hey, did you see this leak or this script or whatever? I'm like, I don't want to fucking read it. It's not finished. What's the point of watching a leak?

I want to see the finished product. I know. Anyway, fascinating stuff. Alex, did you have any questions for? Yeah. No, I got a couple. Going back to Blackberry per second. I watched it a couple weeks ago for the first time.

And right after it ended, I was really connecting with that soundtrack, especially that track that plays in the end credits. I hopped onto Spotify to try and find it. I couldn't see anything. There's nothing. Oh, I'm happy to say that there is going to be an official soundtrack release through Mondo Records. Nice. Vinyl?

And... Awesome. Vinyl, yeah. And I'm just kind of working on assembling that right now. I have to kind of put it together because it's my first time doing an actual soundtrack. And in BlackBerry, there's a lot of cues that are short or maybe sometimes not really lending themselves to a... a full listen. So I'm just kind of melding some things together. But yeah, it's all going to come out and there's going to be some new tracks on there too because I'm sure you guys might have

heard that it's also a TV series, like a mini series, a three-part series. Blackberry? Yeah. I do not hear that actually. So it's coming out in the fall on, I believe, okay. CBC in AMC or CBC in Hulu. But you'll, we'll hear about it. And it's been translated into three hour-long episodes. So there's extra footage. And what's really interesting about this is that you're watching the movie again, but certain scenes will go longer or you'll see a different angle and you'll actually get more content and like info or insight into maybe what happened after the scene ended

in the movie. And there are some new ways that we handled some of the storylines and time jumping. So it complements the movie as sort of. of like an extra piece and there's a lot of new music in it too. Because we couldn't license, it's a totally different thing to license a lot of those needle drops for the TV miniseries. So I had to kind of go in there and make some new stuff. And I can't wait actually to put that on the soundtrack.

That's some of the better Blackberry score that actually didn't make the movie. So it made the TV series. But it's all going to be on the soundtrack. Any idea when that's coming out? That's going to be out in the fall. I think November. Awesome. Oh, yeah.

When I was doing some research about some of the projects you worked on, I stumbled across your band with your sister, Cremere me if I'm wrong, Brave Shores. Yeah. And I was like, why is that ring a bell? Yeah, and I went on Spotify. I was like, oh, man, the self-titled album, I was obsessed with that in 2014.

Awesome stuff. I love that synth pop sound. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, we. Yeah. We, that's a real, I'll tell you really quickly just how funny of a era that was for us is I was working at a jingle writing house called Eggplant Collective. And I was there for a little less than a year.

And I was, you know, just writing demos for commercial jingles and sold a few. You know, I did a Ford commercial here, a Cheerios thing there. And it was just fun practice. And the other in-house composers there were. were just awesome and they helped me like I was kind of new at like doing a lot of really quick turnaround stuff and a lot of just working in the DA and little tricks from just moving around so many different genres and these guys were amazing and we were all on like these office phones where we could just sort of like key into each other and just be like how do I side compress

again like doing this thing or and it was so fun but anyway there was this commercial that Bell had where they hadn't shot it yet and they wanted to prepare with this, this music where they needed it to be kind of electropop-y like M-83 or iconop-pop thing. And it was for an underwater phone. And so I just had my sister come in just for fun. I'm like, hey, sing on this little pop number I just wrote in the last 20 minutes while I was eating a sandwich. And that song got picked.

and people really liked it. And we were kind of having fun, like, going on the internet and seeing there were forums being like, what's the song? What band does that song from that commercial? And we were like, yeah, it's funny. We don't even have a band. It was just written for it. But then what happened was I got into a real thing with the jingle writing house

because I was asking them, like, what's the deal? Like, if I want to put this on iTunes, what's our deal? Because I never signed anything with them. and I was just kind of working without any contract. I was just being paid. And then they kind of came at me with this really unfavorable little just word document breakdown of what the deal was. And I was like, this doesn't really sound right.

Like I wrote the whole thing, like top to bottom. I know I did it in your company for the thing. So let's break it down. But like this is really unfavorable to me. And called a few managers that I knew. And they were like, oh my God, what do you have anything? you don't have anything signed, they don't have any ownership at all. They kind of screwed themselves.

And so I went back to them and I kind of hat in hand. I wasn't, I wasn't, I didn't want to slam dunk anything on them. In fact, like, I remember sending them a letter being like, you know, I kind of just want to renegotiate this. Maybe we can talk it out and giving them all the nice, juicy, like, I see a great future here and, you know, just trying to do, do right. And these guys just fucking flip. done me. I think it's because I kind of exposed to the other composers there that they were

kind of running a bit of a operation that was a little bit prone to something like this happening. They didn't exactly want everybody to be armed with the knowledge that like, wait a second, they don't own anything. I could just take off with all my music. So they fired me like gloriously. And I was just like, and I felt so bad at first. And it was like a week later that, But through a friend of a friend, A&R at Universal called. And they're like, can we give you an advance to make a record? And can you guys just like be a band? And, you know, called my sister.

And I was just like, let's be a band. And so we're just totally opportunistic about it. And then we had that song on the radio. We Coca-Cola licensed it for a commercial. And then we had another song on the radio. We played way home. And had a really nice run of doing some tours before ultimately, my sister and I kind of decided like I think we've had enough you know like double it we didn't

want to exactly double down on all the time we were spending with each other on this like I don't know if you guys have any siblings but it's tough to work with them but we totally survived she's the best but we we just sort of saw that that band through and we're still thinking about getting together to maybe just to at least finish some other. demos that were great that we just never released. But I appreciate Alex that you that you liked that album. That was a good time. Yeah, because there's not that much info as far as like putting all the strings together.

I went on Spotify and was looking and I saw like your picture on there. Now, did you see what happened with us on YouTube? No. This is really interesting. Donald Trump. I know this. You know this, right? Donald Trump gets, there's this video that's posted of him dancing to that like hotline

bling thing or he's like all in the color thing. So he's dancing to that and our song Never Come Down's playing and they've kind of overdubbed just before the chorus, we're going to make this country great again. And it kind of lands. It's just this big celebratory thing. And I remember I went on our Facebook group and I typed from Brave Shores. and shared the video and said, wow, seeing Trump in a whole new light now, joke. And then we kind of like, we're discussing it.

And the video was just getting hundreds of thousands of views and climbing and climbing and people were loving the song. It was like the top song of the, what did he have? There's like the Donald Reddit. Subreddit page. Oh, yeah, yeah. So like, yeah, it was just really popular. is like his song that they co-opted.

And somehow, I don't know if, I think it might have been our manager at the time or somebody from our label took the video down, which was a huge mistake because we looked like we took it down because we were butt hurt about it. So people then kind of all these trolls and the real bad trolls too, like the real like, it's actually hard to even be insulted by them because they say stuff and you're like, how are you not embarrassed of your own self for saying this sort of stuff? But they started thinking that we were all running away from it. But that's, that was a unfortunate stain on the Brave Shores story.

But I wish that we kind of had more fun with it. I mean, my philosophy was that like I never cared at all. Like I'm really the philosophy that music is, is free for everybody. I'm certainly, I am no Republican by any means, and I do not like those specific trolley Trump cultists,

but, uh, but they're allowed to listen to this, to the song and use it to dance around in a big Trump circle with each other. Go nuts. Like, that makes me really happy. And plus,

it pays me. So like, what do I care? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's free advertising. Music is free.

Yeah. There's, there's been a history of, uh, people at the top of licensing and ownership not understanding the benefit of meme culture like that shooting stars the bag raters meme like they were taken down every single video

I'm like this is why people know the song right now like you can't just you're taking down all these memes like you're getting money because like at this point in time now artists and labels will request for their songs to be put in TikTok videos knowing that it'll help to promote the track but yeah there's a weird history of yeah people just not understanding like okay you know you're making making money like what do you not want to make money off of this like i don't know anyway i

think that's hilarious that you uh inadvertently uh made a trump anthem and yeah i guess i guess you can claim uh responsibility for the 2016 election results is what you're saying right maybe i think I think I helped make America great again. There we have it. There we have that. Cut that out. Sure. And I'm totally joking, though.

Leave it. All right. We all saw Barbie a record breaking. What do we call this? It's a cultural event film. One that you don't see often. And people are going to the movie in pink. Jay, I know you saw it recently.

It wasn't at the, like, near the premiere or anything. Were people dressing up in pink at your screening still? Or are people still doing that? No, I saw it, I saw it like pretty much in a completely empty theater. Were you wearing pink? I was wearing pink, yes. I did actually have a salmon shirt on. So I think, I don't know if that counts.

It's the hot pink that really is the Barbie. There's an attempt. As long as you try. But you're right, like such a cultural phenomenon and coupled with the whole Barbenheimer thing, you could, I could so easily just eye roll at the internet just doing a big pile on a real mediocre joke in a way, but like I kind of love it just because it's celebrating cinema and everybody's excited to go to the movies and everyone's just going to the movies and what's better than that.

Exactly. The movies are back. Yeah. That's Barbie. And they're both so different and they're both so good in like completely different ways. Yeah. What did you think of the movie?

I really enjoyed it. I kind of was expecting, I still don't even really know what the, any sort of like controversy is or how some people are getting a bit kind of on their back foot about, yeah, but heard about certain, you know, just political. stuff or the way they took aim at men, you know what I mean? But like, it was very funny. It was totally over the top. And, you know, like, I don't know.

Like, it was all just, it was great. That wasn't the big part. The biggest takeaway for me was just the sets. Mm-hmm. Like the filmmaking. Those huge sets and those big, huge sound stages with the reflective floor that just goes back into infinity is like something you were not used to seeing these days. Yeah, great production design.

And done with such a like scalpel of style. It was very great. It was just a feast for the eyes. The criticisms that I've heard of people getting upset at the movie are both that it hates men and not only that, but that it was lying in the marketing as if people, as if they were tricked into seeing something that had like feminist messaging in it. Uh, which is kind of a bizarre take because it's like,

okay, well, if you know who the filmmakers are, and like, it's, it's a Barbie movie and obviously it's, you know, trying to,

uh, market itself towards a female demographic too. But I also feel like what, what's missing from this conversation is just how nuanced the movie was about it because it wasn't an explicitly manhating movie at all. It really wasn't. And it's it's kind of interesting seeing people's takeaways being that or some people's at least because it just it it it kind of seems like they're duped at a certain point because you could only get that from the film if you're viewing it on a purely surface level. But there's plenty of

instances within the film and plenty of clues and you know sometimes pretty explicit. where they are giving a more nuanced take, and they do call the patriarchy not something that, like, oh, this is the thing that exists that is hurting everyone. There's a line in the film where they explicitly say, like, the patriarchy could just be our explanation for how we feel about this, and it, you know, maybe it's not real. And it touched on not only toxic male behavior, but also toxic female behavior. And, you know, the characters were empathetic. And at the end of the day, it wasn't trying to reflect reality in a fucking slice of life drama. This is a very non-serious, very intentionally absurdist comedy where even in the quote-unquote real world scenes, there's no way it's trying to be the real world. You have like the chase scene where they're like not really running and it's like, okay, this is like a timonaric sketch. Like it's not it's clearly not trying to suggest that that is reality and then you know Ben Shapiro will be like well It said that the CEOs for Barbie were all men, but actually there's women in real life. It's like that's not it It wasn't trying to be literal. It was it was very clearly just doing that for the sake of the story and for the sake of the jokes and for the sake of the experience like it was a fun movie and and

you know it's it's it's it's very bizarre to imagine just how offended some people got over it, but here we are. You can have fun, like, kind of, like, I haven't talked to any pals about this where we haven't laughed at that scene when they're in the real world and they're rollerblading down and they both look like so bright and hot. And then, and she's getting cat call. It's like, okay, yeah, yeah, they're doing this. But then they have that guy go up and.

and fully smack her ass and then she punches him and she goes to jail. And that was sort of like a woe. It's a fun thing to laugh at because you just think about, you know, if they wanted to represent the real world there and a guy decided to slap the ass of that girl coming down Venice Beach, the amount of dudes that are just begging for an opportunity to beat a guy up who does that. Because, you know, most of. men actually are begging to see that happen just so that they can beat somebody up.

They're not begging to smack an ass. They want to just beat up that guy who smacks the ass. Yeah. And the film is not, the film is clearly not suggesting that that's reality. It's such a very silly take away from it. Yeah, it's comedy first and foremost. The media literacy is, man, it's kind of embarrassing out there, some of the places it can go. The way like this culture or stuff just bleeds into the way people talk about movies now

is it's inevitable. It's inevitable. Every movie is political now. Just a few weeks ago I saw this clip going around like a YouTube short or a TikTok or whatever. It was like a clip from the movie. It was that gag where they both say Barbie and Ken, they've got like no genitals or something because obviously it's a joke on the fact that they're dolls, but all the comments were just interpreting it a completely wrong way, saying it's, oh, everything is this trans thing now and it's all, and it's all, and it's clearly people who have not seen the movie, like, I guess they, they maybe just go on the Ben Shapiro review or, like, it's, it's such a lightning rod, this movie. It's like, it's hilarious to me that it's much more controversial than the, the, the

nuke movie. Yeah, yeah, you know, the non-political Oppenheimer film. Yeah, yeah. That is, that is very funny. It seems like such a bad faith. way to engage with it because it is so over the top it is clearly a comedy first and foremost that is clearly the goal of the movie and it's like hilarious for that and yeah you just have to I don't you gotta have to have horse blinders on to not to not see that it's like you know horse blinders oh yeah the movie had tons of horses in it fucking horse patriarchy over here she's going up to brick layers first I thought the world was run by horses but no it's men here in the real world when he realizes that it's a patriarchy and he has that montage where he turns into you know man man

that was very fun and he goes to the um car dealership what was what did the guy he said like you you can hire me right because i'm a man he's like actually it's kind of easier if you were a woman it's like i thought aren't you doing the patriarchy he's like yeah no we are we are we are we're just we're just hiding it better yeah that was a pretty funny like winked to reality yeah and it's all again like the nuance is there right Like, you can take away from that whatever you want to, really. It's not so explicitly just providing only one perspective and not understanding the other perspective. It's a very, very nuanced film.

Like, the only part where it felt like a little weird was like the literal preaching scene where she was just, you know, she went on a monologue, the human female lead. And at that point, it was just like, okay, whatever, you know, like. people clapped at the end. I knew they were going to clap. But, you know, I'd imagine there are aspects to that monologue that probably felt pretty cathartic to some women watching. Yeah, I don't think that was directed at us. You kind of just take that and you absorb it and you're like, okay.

It was the character. I followed it all. I really went in thinking that I was maybe going to, you know what I mean, have some thoughts about it and be like, well, you know, maybe this is stirring the pot a little too much. or maybe it's, you know, being provocative in its sort of messaging or like instigating or whatever. And I didn't find that at all, especially at the end there when she's talking to the original inventor of Barbie.

I forget her name. But she kind of wraps it up in a way that kind of... I also forgot her name. She was from Cheers. Yeah. We should know her name. I don't know. Let's go to the live chat.

Yeah. I thought that the Ken song was the best. Like that was my favorite part of the movie. I got totally swept up in that. And so catchy, mixed and delivered really well, total like AAA music treatment on that song. I think they had like slash even playing the guitar on it. Saw some DTS. But Gosling knocks it out of the park.

And that last part when he's on the soundstage. with all the other men and they're kind of doing that, you know, musical when their voices all kind of come in as the chorus. I got that feeling of just, you know, when I'm, it's, I'm not super into musicals, but there have been times when musicals do that thing where it all kind of, everything kind of comes together and it's all winged out and it's just doing that big, big climax moment. And I was getting shivers. I was like, this is so good. I love it.

Yeah. And they didn't, you know, based on the rest of the movie and what it's going for, like, they didn't, they didn't even need to have a great song in there, but they'd put in the effort. I really think that Greta and Noah are both very talented people. I love their collaborations that they've made. And it's, it's fascinating thinking about there was supposed to be an Amy Schumer version originally that got canned. I was thinking about that. Yeah. What would that have been? That would have sucked. That would have sucked. That would have sucked. I think Amy Schumer is pretty funny. Or at least when her sketch show things come up on one of my videos or whatever. Like I'll just all of a sudden come across one. They're always pretty fun. But I don't know what the angle would have been because it would have been different, obviously. I don't think she has the capacity to make something as nuanced and artful as this.

That might be true. perspective. I feel like it would have been a lot more blatant and, and perhaps even the device of nature that some are calling this movie would have been much more explicit in that. Yes, yeah. Yeah. That's very true.

That would have been, because she's, she's more of like a big, like, S&L energy, like making, she would, she would devolve it into like a sketch feeling. And Margot was just great for it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, great casting. great performances. I agree. Ryan Gosling totally fucking stole the show.

I think he should be in more comedic roles, honestly. It's crazy that for a while he was just typecast as this like stoic, blade runner, drive, etc. Character. I'm glad he kind of broke out of that again. He isn't a few comedies now, but... He's funny in the nice guys, yeah. Well, which is interesting because do you know how he started? Was the notebook?

No. What was it? Started on like a kind of sitcom. It was like a kid teen sitcom about, I think it took place on like a boat or something, like a big cruise ship called like breaker high maybe. And he played like this kind of wild, kind of goofy, funny comedic relief character. Who was like big and loud with his behavior. He was like this sort of like zany wearing a lot of neon colors and big clothes.

and he had big energy. Totally different than how he got typecast is stoic gossip. Yeah, and he does all of it well. He's very versatile, very versatile actor. No, he was definitely one of the funniest parts to me. Like, it's that delivery, like he's acting. He believes he's can, you know?

Not for a second, do you see him? He is Ken. Whereas, like, contrasting more to like Will Ferrell or Kate McKinnon, that does feel a bit more S&L-N-L-E sort of. You're totally right. playing up a bit more where like yeah that's why ken really stands out he like he totally steals the show and just like you're going back to the uh the whole kind of like men hating narrative it has it's i don't know it's got like a pretty good message i thought of if you actually

engaged with the movie about like the way so many men use women for like validation and this kind of stuff and being kenoff that joke at the end is like really funny and like a good conclusion And so yeah, both these main characters get like pretty fleshed out arcs and yeah, sure the comedies at the top. But yeah, there's like a bunch of commentary. Yeah. I feel like it's not as simplistic as men bad. Yeah, not at all. And even within, even within that aspect, there's an entire sequence of the film where the women are taking advantage of the men and just being like really insincere.

And they were playing that song, fuck, what's the artist's name? that one that he was playing on guitar like I want to push you around Oh yeah so the history of that song is pretty interesting Yeah yeah in the context of this film Because that was a song that when it came out and when it was popular on the radio It was widely criticized for being like oh you want to push woman around But it turns out that the

The actual that the song was written about him having experienced that from his girlfriend or from a female character represented in the song that is pushing him around. So it's actually kind of perfect for that song to be in this film because we're seeing the exact same sorts of misinterpretations of like, okay, which gender is being shown as the aggressor or the abuser or the manipulator here. It's really up to interpretation. And so I love that there's that nuanced layer within the movie of like even the song choices and how they're used. Like, don't get me wrong. It's comedic and funny on its own. The way it's used in the film, even if you don't look into it or you're not aware of that subtext, it works fine.

But that subtext being there is just another little clue, another little hint that, you know, maybe just don't judge the film on a purely surface level. Maybe it has a bit more to say than just, like, you know, just getting mad at it and just, I feel like there's a certain amount of people that reacted in the way that they did to this movie. because they kind of wanted to in a sense. When I say that, I mean, that's content. And some of these channels exist where the content is specifically only talking about, like, oh, this is woke, right?

Like, Ben Shapiro has never talked about a movie that isn't, like, what he would consider to be woke or anti-woke, right? Like, that's the entire catalog of all of his film criticisms. And so he went to see the Barbie movie pretty much. knowing exactly what sort of narrative he wanted to come out of it with. I don't think he's ever gone and watched a movie and been like, oh, actually, you know, it was a bit more nuanced. Like, I don't think he's capable of that.

And even if he did think that, I don't think he would say it sort of thing. Yeah, the conclusions are made before it's even been watched, you know. You can imagine he's really probably made the nose. That really exposes that you're not worth listening to if you're just in it for your agenda. Yeah, which is funny because that's the criticism that they, have they're like you know the movies have an agenda but it's like okay well then what it what's your channel if that's pretty much all you talk about like the the the catalog of movies that exist in a year is so much so much larger than that in my

opinion it depends on what type of things you're exposing yourself to really yeah I'm extremely curious because what's past the billion club now that's like 1.2 billion at the moment and of course Mattela they're the slap their hands together with glee like oh yes this is a new franchise now we can emceu this yeah this whole thing right now so i guess that's the plan but like could could you guys even imagine a sequel to this i i i don't i can't imagine greta doing it um if she wanted to and she felt right about it then fucking do it yeah but they're not going to leave it i think instead it's going to be because i mean what else does metel have or what other companies are going to be yeah hot wheels or i think they're

actually green lighting a Hot Wheels movie. Who does like Tonka trucks or it's just, yeah, I mean, it would just make sense that anyone who has any sort of gas left in the tank of for nostalgia and an audience out there that remembers this product or this toy. I mean, we've already seen the year this year and Blackberry was a part of it where it's like the origin story of some product. Oh, yeah. We were luckily lumped in with like, you know, Tetris and air.

We loved kind of how there were so many. articles are going on with all these origin stories of these products. But it seems like that's going to continue. And Barbie is just sort of an extension of that too. It's just another product you can make a little thing out of, a big thing out of. Yeah. I feel like the Lego movie really opened doors. Like I feel like you can really have movies like this without that level of self-awareness

taking that brand, like having movie in the title and a little. everything it's like such a this shouldn't work and I can't believe they've allowed this to come together and be yourself aware and have as much kind of commentary snuck in as there is and yeah yeah wouldn't it makes sense to have a super Mario sequel where it's you know Mario card we'll probably see that but they put Mario card in the Mario movie already yeah but not all of it I want to see all the levels mm all the items they could do a TV show yeah or how about a How about a Golden Eye 64? Oh no, they did that with Golden Eye.

True. I found it really interesting that, and also just like a great creative decision to allow this movie to be PG-13 instead of trying to only have this appeal to younger audiences. And it's also funny, we talk about media literacy. Like, there were some parents that brought some kids where it's like, okay, I don't know if you knew. what movie you were going into, like maybe just look up one tiny thing about it before going into it. Even if you're at the theater and you haven't even looked it up like on IMDB or whatever, like it'll say PG-13 right at the theater. So it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody.

Also the trailer, you know, there was the, in the marketing, they had the, I'm going to beat you off and stuff like that. Like, of course. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just trying to think what the more adult humor was. And I was like, why couldn't it be PG? And I guess, okay. Yeah, some of that stuff. But that would, that would, like, that would hide well.

You know what I mean? That would hide in plain sight without, you know, no six-year-old is going to all of a sudden raise an eyebrow to that and be like, wait a second. This kind of sounds sexual. Yeah. But at the same time, you probably don't want them to be endlessly quoting the movie. That's true. To their friends at school, I'm going to beat you off.

No. Jeremy. Yeah, it wasn't, it had every reason to be a bad movie and be just completely generic and devoid of art and creative choices. And they put their faith in a couple of artists that knew what they were doing. And I'm glad that they had the creative freedom to make what they wanted. Unfortunately, you know, as these things go, the takeaway from the studios will probably, not be that. They'll probably,

you know, they're already talking about Hot Wheels like, oh, it's just people want Barbie now. Like, they think in such simplistic terms of why a movie is successful.

And to some degree, of course, the name recognition and the brand recognition did play a part 100%. But the reason why it has such great word of mouth and that people are going back and telling their friends

and seeing it a second time and that long form success that will, you know, people will, buy this on Blu-ray. People will be watching it in 10, 20, however many years from now. That's because of the artistry. And I just hope, I hope that one day, I hope that one day the people in charge of the money going into the movies will see that that is the most important

part. But you never know. Amen. Yeah. That was one of my favorite parts. The fact it felt like a Greta Gourlick movie and not like a cynical brand movie. Exactly. That's why I saw it. Yeah. I wouldn't be watching the Barbie movie if it wasn't made by those people. Absolutely. I remember my favorite joke that she wrote in her Francis Ha, it's so small, but like I remember just being like, I love this person for saying this.

When she's, it's her and her girlfriend in it and they're talking about their boyfriends. And at some point she, she just, it's barely even a joke, but she goes, yeah, he got this new black couch and he's like,

I love it. And for some reason, I think that that's such a funny roast of men. Because I felt like so like, oh my God, you just got me there. And that is so inexplicably funny. Like, I don't know why that feels like you just got me, but you did. And it made me just forever love her. I'm like, okay, you have license to go anywhere you want with roast and men and women. Let's have some fun.

That's where the fun gender comes. Commentary is, in my opinion, is when you can say something that is not like a hyperbolic, like, oh, you just had like a bad date, what the fuck? Like some, not something like that, but when you're, you know, poking fun at mannerisms or stereotypes or some things that can be generally perceived as true to some people, you know, truth within comedy is, is what can really help drive it. And it, yeah, again, it's not, it doesn't feel mean-spirited, you know, there's plenty, plenty of jokes aimed at women and, And, you know, there's a huge difference between jokes like that and, like, actual sexism, you know? Exactly.

Like, I don't even think that I didn't take any of the Barbie fund that they had with the gender jokes to be taking aim at anything. Even the men in the real world and all the CEOs being a bunch of boobs and just, you know, the leering and, and. cat calling, like, there was something about it that just felt a bit like, hey, let's just be real that men and women are different. And let's take, let's just kind of laugh at how they clash. This is not a take aim and let's make a point about something. It was like, well, isn't it funny that there are men in the world and there are women in the world and this is kind of the way it worked out and we're kind of working towards these

things. This is a, what a mess, huh? Isn't that funny? And here's a Barbie story to kind of have fun with that. Laugh with each other. Goodness, I'd better myself. Yeah, awesome movie. I think we've said pretty much everything we wanted to about it.

Great music, great sets, fucking, yeah, great tone, great sense of humor, great just absurdism and all that shit. And yeah, I'm giving this one a seven out of ten. It's closer to an eight than a six, so it might bump itself up to an eight on my second watch. We'll see, but it's probably going to show up in my best of the year list. So, yeah, loved it. Nice. Yeah, I'm right there with you. This would be a seven out of ten for me, three and a half star.

Yeah, echoing all this stuff we've already said. Got a shout out that probably my favorite scene in the movies, just that simple sequence where she sat on the bench talking to that older woman. I love that it like just had representation of like the whole gamut. bit because especially in like cinema older women are pretty like ignored and not really like addressed in a lot of ways so I like that there are a couple of scenes kind of nudging towards that and yeah it's like it's like a good yeah good uh just package over love that production design love the messages yeah I'm we've all to seeing it again I'm right there with you guys

seven out of ten uh surprisingly touching in those I think the music definitely knew how to sort of, when you have that sort of like, warm pads and those over compressed pianos come in to just sort of cue you to be like, this is going to be a touching moment, this is going to be a deep moment. Like sometimes movies can be so good at just manipulating. So like all well up in the eyes before the line is even said, if they're handling it well, because they're just kind of like writing, they got their tendrils in your emotions and you're just like, okay, I'm with you.

Good job. I don't know. Like, I guess I don't even know how I would expect this movie to be better, even though I'm giving it a 7 out of 10. Like, I don't know why it's missing. It's, there's a lot of the comedy that I, I'm not a huge fan of. Like, the Benny, like the chasing around the office and they're kind of just like, like all that stuff I, and maybe a lot of other little jokes in the movie, I kind of

just wait out. Yeah. You know what I mean? I felt like, okay, this is definitely. Definitely not for me. Like, I don't know. I don't even know who this is for. Actually, maybe I heard some people in the theater laughing at that.

I was glad that they liked it. In the empty theater? They can give it a nine out of ten. Yeah, there was just a few people. Yeah, really enjoyable. Perfect. All right, so we have the film recommendation. It is The Edge, 1997.

Why don't you tell us about it, Jay? Because you recommended it. The Edge, starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec, and Alec Baldwin about being lost in the wilderness and surviving. A movie that if you've never seen it, it would be probably one of those synopsuses that, or a poster that you'd see and be like, I don't know if I need to see that.

It's just some 90s movie that was made. But for me, it's quite simply just one of those movies that I can count on a hand or two that I can just watch over and over again. And I suppose I could maybe just speak a little bit and try to find what it is that gives a movie that quality. But really, I don't know. Like, it's just an incredibly enjoyable movie that doesn't ever have me. Like, it's one of those movies where when it's on and you even start it, it just, I watch

it to the very end. I'm completely with these characters because they're just acting so well. I love the acting in it. I love the musical score to it, very inspiring. It's one of those scores that gets to take its main motif and just use it so much. Like the film making had obviously the foresight to have that amount of music kind of carry it. And it's not even that I'm really into like, you know, a bear attack or anything like that. It's just these, it's a character and also about the smart billionaire who's not the evil guy.

You know what I mean? Like he kind of comes in. It was a simpler time. Yeah, an unexpected character, yeah. Yeah. You guys just watched it. Had you seen it before? I don't think either of us have had.

So very interesting. Like it's a dated movie. Certainly some of the, you know, effects and green screen stuff probably doesn't hold up that well. But still, I just watched it again a couple days ago and I just ripped through it again and just loved it. Left me with a feeling again. I wonder how much I'm chalking it up to just the fact that when I watched it when I was young. And I had a few pals too that also loved the movie and we would put it on back in the day when there weren't. a gazillion things to keep your attention.

So you go to your VHS collection and be like, what movie do you want to watch? Let's watch The Edge again. Yeah. Awesome. I'll get us a couple of Pepsi's and we're set. And so, you know, the fact that I have some of those memories attached to it, maybe just kind of makes it a little warmer of a space in my brain. But what did you guys think?

It was very entertaining. That's for sure. It was definitely entertaining. Yeah. There's like a cornyness, a goofiness to it. But man, I was never, it was never bored during that run. time. Yeah, I was enjoying what it was throwing at me. It was, it didn't dilly dally. Yeah, it was pretty, it was pretty, it was pretty funny at points. I did I have this whole bear thing as well, though.

Like I'm, I'm just like so terrified of bears. I don't know if you'd call it irrational. I feel like, I don't know. But yeah, bad way to go. But yeah, exactly. And yeah, I think after watching, um, what's that Bear documentary, the Herzog one. Grizzly Man. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's, yeah. And then like the Revenant and stuff like this. It's not quite on that level, but yeah, there's something really fun about it.

And I was surprised after I watched it to see it was directed by Lee Tamahori. Yeah. New Zealand director. Big fan of his movie Once World Warriors. Can't really say the same about like Triple X, too, or whatever. Those state of the union, bro. Yeah. Yeah, interesting dynamic with the Alec Baldwin, Anthony Hopkins thing.

Yeah, funny characters. A mammoth written movie, you know, like the dialogue is very, like all that mammet type of stuff always seems to have dialogue that really just snaps back and forth to each other really well in a way that's just like once that dialogue goes, most, you know, exemplified in like Glenn Gary where it's just like, as soon as you hear this dialogue start on its track, you're glued to hearing the back and forth of it all. There's something that's so gluey about it, like, that you just can't kind of unglue yourself from its momentum and meaning.

Yeah, this is the same composer, Jerry Goldsmith, as Chinatown, Patton, 1969 Planet of the Apes, Poltergeis. Gremlins. Lulan. Alien, yeah. Yeah, a bunch of shit. So, yeah, really good stuff. Total recall.

I really love watching 90s movies because even in something where it's like, okay, this is just a standard like big budget thing that happened to be released at one point in time. I feel like they hired a lot of people that just knew what they were doing in terms of

musical score. There's not a lot of 90s movies where I feel like, oh, that's like a really shit score or maybe, I don't know, it might just be like a bias or the types of movies that I watch from the 90s. But it's always refreshing to just know that that's something that's basically a given when you watch when you watch older films like, oh, yeah, there's this whole orchestral piece, orchestral piece. I feel like for the most part the soundtrack worked, although I guess during some of the fight sequences, I wasn't as hot on it. It started to become a little, you know, like generic fight music, but...

Oh, definitely, where they're doing the anvil. Yeah, yeah. Anvil strikes, chang, chang, chang, chang. It's really just the, that main theme that keeps getting worked on. just soaring. Yeah, so I was enjoying this movie in, you know, both an unironic and kind of an ironic way in the sense that like it is very cheesy and very funny. And I'm not like a huge Alec Baldwin fan, although he does do a really good job at playing like big pieces of shit.

You know, right? You know, the annoyance that I had with him during the movie, it's like, okay, well, that's also kind of intentional. You know, like, it is, it is funny seeing him in this role. And also, I'm not used to seeing him so young and skinnier as well. And then Anthony Hopkins is, like, obviously really great. Both of their characters kind of playing off of each other. Even if I couldn't take it seriously for the entire movie, it was still fun to watch. It didn't feel like it was meandering or boring.

in that sense, it just felt kind of like this weird 90s time capsule sort of thing. Totally, yeah. You know, I'm able to look back on fondly, even if I hadn't seen the movie before this time. Yeah, it was just the right level of simple as well, you know, like there is just something engaging about people trying to survive in a dangerous environment, being chased by a bear. Like, it's such a, like, simple, like, elevator pitch. And, yeah, with that score, with... Anthony Hopkins it does give it just enough to like carry this nearly two hour long story.

It's very, very simple because it does, it does, it does not require you to kind of have any, you know, afterthoughts about it. You can just sort of take it for the adventure it is. I have after many watches considered just that I am very glued to Anthony Hopkins storyline and his character where he comes in. and he is, you know, this kind of quiet, reserved, know what, he knows everything, right? Oh, you can't stump him. He knows everything. And he's this guy who's, you know, achieved everything, including knowledge. Like, he's got his money, but he's, he's together, he's healthy.

He's got the young model girlfriend. Yet there's something about him that he doesn't feel satisfied. And then he, halfway through the movie when, you know, they're lost and, you know, after they kill the bear, spoiler alert. Spoiler discussion, everybody. He does say to Alec Baldwin, he's just like, you know, all my life, I wanted to do something unequivocal. But he says it with like a type of like, I guess I did it because even Anthony, even Alex is just

like, well, I think this counts. But when you could see that he is the most touched is when these, these. guys treat them like a pal and at the end the very end when he says you know like they died and when he finally breaks down he's like my friends my friends they died saving my life and it just seems like he wanted a a friend maybe he didn't have any friends a story he could tell himself because everybody everybody wanted something from him even the guy who was like running the lodge and then Anthony gets like once again really upset he's just like I thought he would just being courteous.

You just wanted my money. Mm-hmm. There's that line early on, isn't the rich are different, her character says. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good observation, actually, the taking the billionaire who has everything and putting him in an environment where that skill set doesn't really help in the same way. Having loads of money isn't going to protect you from a bear necessarily.

It's all like the theory being put into use. Yeah. We don't really see billionaires portrayed in the same way anymore. It's a very 90s thing. You're like, oh, yeah. We live in a meritocracy. Like, they're billionaires because they know everything and they're the smartest people. It was a fun character, though.

I heard that they had a pretty bad time shooting it. Oh, yeah? I think that they got like hyperthermia and like they did. I don't know how much of that is dressed up. Yeah, Hopkins did. But yeah, I did hear that they were up and they shot it in, Alberta, I think. Or BC.

Some in Alberta and some in BC. The reshoots were in BC, I think. And I guess you can imagine that, like, you know, they're out there and they're shooting that. They have to do it for real. They can't exactly heat them up too easily. Yeah. You could see the breath in the air in a few scenes, which is a very, very good indicator

of whether or not they're actually in a cold environment. Yeah. I know. I found it funny. There's so many moments throughout the film where they, The characters are given, like, very explicit advice on what to do to survive in a situation, and it all just gets ignored every single time. Like, don't leave food out.

And then it's like, oh, okay. When you see a bear, you got to make sure they know you're there and walk backwards slowly. It's like, okay, nobody did that. You got to bury the... I thought I told you to bury those. Yeah. And it's like, oh, oops.

And, like, what did he do? That was, I thought about that, too, where it's like, he takes the bloody rat. from the guy's leg, gives it to Alec Baldwin and says, bury this. And then Alec Baldwin runs off into the woods. He runs off into the woods, right? And so we don't see him. Then later, it's night and they know the bears out there and it's raining. And then Anthony Hopkins sees it where, tied up on a branch up in the air.

So like, not only did Alec Baldwin not bury it. Why did he put it onto a branch? Why would just throw it away? He's a little shit. is what's going on. Very strange. Working with the bear, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it was, it was fun because it was like, you know, there's there's some familiar tropes, especially of like nine news movies. I'm like, okay, this character is expendable. The pilot dies immediately. I'm like, yep. And then I'm looking at the trio. I'm like, I think one is going to die. I think I can tell who's going to die pretty soon.

I wonder if it's going to be. one of the two people on the cover. Yeah. Or this third guy. Yeah. There were some brutal scenes, though. I loved that bear attack scene and his screams, even though, like, it was peaking the mic for a bit, but, you know.

But that's almost what gave it a little bit of extra. Yeah. I like that. And Anthony Hopkins just truly trying to throw himself at that bear while he's, like, he was going to sacrifice himself. And I just love that acting because you can kind of see that's when the movie, if you, if you just go with the movie and the way I watch it or I just completely forgive all of its cheesiness and I'm like kind of I'm riding it in real time with Anthony Hopkins and Baldwin, that's when the movie gets like real. That's their first like sure, they're suffering and they're lost and the guy cut his own leg and everything. but when the bear mulls him to death in that brutal way and they kind of run away,

that's when you get to really start to sit forward in your seat and be like, okay, this is where they realize they're in serious danger. It's all real now. It's all just been fully realized. I think that's an awesome part. I mean, yeah, there's definitely really high stakes in this film. I love that because we recently watched cocaine bear, which was really bad. And one of my criticisms is just like, okay, when you see G the bear, you're spending the entire

production trying to find out how not to show it, right? Because you don't want to spend money on every single shot that you're just spending more money than you have to. So the bear has to like sneak away and not be in it for like half the movie or whatever. But they used a real bear and it's a pretty famous bear, Bart the bear. he's been in a bunch of other movies. Yes. He's a star.

He was in 12 monkeys. He was in a bunch of shit. And it's crazy. I don't know. It was the same bear. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Literally the same bear. So I guess just one guy, one trainer had like a very docile bear that could be used in film for a certain amount of time. Who knows if that's possible ever again or if that was just like the luckiest instance of just a typical bear that you could actually use for films. The other story could have gone that, oh, that's, Oh, that's how Anthony Hopkins was killed. Yeah.

Shooting this movie The Edge with Bart the Bear. Yeah, who knows how close he actually got to the bear? Because in a lot of the shots, I think a lot of it was cheated in a way where they were using stunt doubles. Stunt double. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But it's still, you know, still it feels like the actors, the characters, it feels like they're up close and personal with it, which is something that you can't really say about cocaine bear at any point. Yeah. I think that's what kept me in it. It's like I believed the action. I believed the stunts. Like the, and there is a brutality to it. Like the plane crash is a pretty brutal scene too.

Yeah. It's R rated. It's like, yeah. Yeah, I liked that. And, yeah,

I was never really pulled out by any of the bear effects. So just the fact that it is a real bear and, yeah, contrasting it with, with stuff like cocaine bear. It's just like night and day. Yeah. Just having that real bear there is like such a,

make such a difference if like, that's kind of the crux of the movie, you know? Mm-hmm. You have to sell the bear. And I really thought they were going to be more, I don't know, try and hide that bear more, abstract the bear. But no, you got plenty of bear scenes. It's just as terrifying as you'd imagine.

If you're scared of bears as I am. Yeah, there's a real, it's accessing your other sort of primal interest in seeing real wildlife, the way like a National Geographic documentary when all of a sudden you have a really beautiful, well-lit shot of a bear in a ravine and it's like on screen kind of doing its thing you can't help but just kind of be like look at that look at that bear that's a bear that's a real bear that's a real bear that's just there's on cocaine in and of itself interesting i don't think the cocaine bear they needed to make look real like there's no no that's not gonna like hold the suit would have been a better movie yeah yeah completely agree there's yeah there's a lot there's a lot of fun moments in this the uh the the the the the scene where

he's trying to like hype him up like I'm gonna kill the bear say it I'm gonna kill the bear like that whole long like one man can do another can do yeah it's so cheesy and then he has that real cheesy line

oh I love it because today I'm gonna kill the motherfucker oh I love it and yeah the cheesiness it's it's a part of the entertainment value for me it's it's a part of the experience

especially with how seemingly seriously it's portrayed in tone for most of the film when there's just so much goofy shit happening and especially I'm I'm fairly well versed in I don't know outdoor survival stuff I took Boy Scouts and so I watching this movie there's always a voice in the back of my head I'm like you can't just you can't just wear your wet clothes to sleep like right you take those off like dry them off like they never did that once and the next morning their clothes are completely dry I'm like ah

there was a constant onslaught of just like you shouldn't be doing it. that. Why are you doing that? But, you know, they survived. Have you seen, have you seen the series alone? No, I've heard it's really good though. Yeah, I mean, there's, I've also seen a whole bunch of Survivor, which is its own trash show of just awesomeness. Like, I can't recommend that show enough. Like, Jeff Probst is like the best to ever do it. But alone, you know, I went in kind of skeptical because it's like, well, you know, I know that survivors like a complete, you know, farce in a way. But alone, they take the cameras with them. Like they're dropped in the middle of the wilderness and they have to film themselves.

There's no camera crews. And these are like experts for vilists that need to like qualify to be on the show. And they're out for, they're out there competing for months. And they build their homes and they get malnourished and they get taken out for injuries. And the malnourishment is real. Like you see the before and after pictures, I'm talking like rib cages bursting out of their tiny little bodies. Like they do it for real.

And that was where you could sort of, you know what I mean? Maybe cross-check your knowledge about survival. Because they were talking about that all the time. Like, oh, I want to go out and get that fish trap that floated out there. But if I fall in, it's over. I'm out of the competition. My clothes will never dry. I'm like, is that really a big pit?

fall of surviving is just wet clothes. It can fuck you up. Yeah. I really can. Yeah. The fact that they were all just chilling in their wet clothes and then just continuing to get them wet again, there's the scene where like they're under the shelter and it's raining like right before Anthony Hoppins notices the blood, bloody rag or whatever, the

piece of his clothes. Yeah. And he's just like, he kind of just nonchalantly walks out from the shelter, just like, I feel like being in the rain right now. It's like, it's supposed to be cold. This isn't even warm rain. Like, you guys are shivering in the shelter. So I don't know what the fuck you're doing.

So that was kind of funny, especially considering the character is supposed to be kind of like a survivalist. I'm so glad that I didn't clock that. It was constant, but I was enjoying it for the cheese for sure. I, I, I'm almost like happy that it's not like I'm protective of the movie where it's just like, I don't care about that. You know what I mean? I'll still enjoy it.

But I'm just glad that I have it in my little list of movies where enough things, because I am so skeptical or just cynical about so many movies these days. It's great to go see Barbie. And it's great, great to go see Oppenheimer. It's great. There are too many things. I guess just as you get older when you watch them and you're plagued with these thoughts that are like, well, wait a second.

That doesn't make any sense. And it takes you out of experiencing some good or some just big efforts of cinema. And I'm happy that the edge for me just like actually survives through all of its ridiculousness where I could actually still watch it like an exciting like, oh my God, they got to survive. Like I'm not even watching it enjoying the cheesiness. I'm watching it completely buying what it's selling. me and that's a rare thing that I wish I could be more open to. But then again, I do have a lot of friends that are so, like Matt and some of our pals

are very, you know, we could walk out of the same movie and half our crew is just going to be like, oh my God, that was bullshit. Did you see this? Did you see how they did that? And I'll just be so happy that I just was. able to completely finish my plate that was served to me and just say that was delicious. I loved it. Like we have this big debate or like he he thinks interstellar because we're talking about

Nolan's movies. He thinks interstellar is just such a joke of a movie. It's so ridiculous. And I'm just like, you know what? That's my favorite Nolan movie. Just because I'm completely swept up in its music and heart. and I can totally listen and clock and maybe be like, oh, I didn't pick up on why that's so dumb.

That's true. I'm glad that that doesn't bother me. That doesn't break my immersion for the experience that I got out of it. I've always been a big proponent of enjoying something despite its flaws. Because I feel like there's plenty of movies that I love that are incredibly flawed, but I'm just kind of like, okay, I can recognize that that flaw exists. And maybe to some extent these flaws do bother me. Like, you know, I could give some examples, but I guess they would kind of be spoilery.

But yeah, it really depends on what else the movie has to offer and what else is going for it. The flaws are going to bother me a lot more and have a lot more of an impact on my rating if I feel as though the heart of the movie and the soul of the movie is insincere. Right. So, you know, watching a quiet place, it was all about the flaws for me because. what they're showing is just such an, like, in my opinion, the characters were just props, right? And every single scene was just like, oh, what if they fuck up here when you're supposed to be quiet? And it just felt like there was no care involved in trying to figure out how they should be in danger or why they would be in danger. It was just like, oh, no, they're in danger.

And that just seemed to be the goal with nothing else considered. So in that movie, the flaws stand out a lot more. in this film there's you know there's a bit of both uh i'm i'm not going to pretend like the the annoyances of the film were like things that didn't affect my experience whatsoever but being able to watch something and and have that comforting like 90s cheese sort of enveloping the whole thing made it like a really fun enjoyable experience regardless of what they were showing you know i i get I get a lot of comedic value out of a lot of these things that happen in this film. So it's still a good experience.

There's tons of movies that I just love to watch even if they are flawed or even if they are showing something unrealistic or super cheesy or, you know, something's played really seriously, but it's kind of goofy. Like, that's still something to enjoy. Absolutely. Yeah, because it's consistent the whole way through. You know, it's a consistent tone. Yeah, there's the goofiness there.

but all the characters are treating it seriously. Like Anthony Hopkins, he's like, he's in there, you know. It's convincing. And he's got that gravitas. So like, yeah, he's selling the lines, even if they are, they can be like goofy. Yeah. It's like better that they're playing it seriously instead of doing like a weird ironic thing. I found it.

I did laugh at the end when he looks back at Alec Baldwin and he's in the classic like, I'm dead position. Yeah. There's no face down. No mystery here. There's some fun stuff in it. Alec Baldwin had a lot of silly faces in this movie. Especially at the end there.

Oh, yeah. When he reveals that he still, that he took the note from the cabin and he gives this like dumb like oopsie face. Yeah. There's so much in the performance that is just so entertaining. Even if I don't love Alec Baldwin, his performance was very funny. Very enjoyable. That's kind of what I love about Alec Baldwin is just that he's got that intensity that's

just, it's kind of fun, it's fun. Like, did ever hear that Ed Norton talking about working with him? No. Like, and doing takes with him. Like, Ed Norton does this impression of Alec where he was like doing a take and he'd be like making these weird sounds before, like hyping himself up going to, boom. Zapp! And like kind of like making Ed Norton kind of turn his head.

And then that intensity sort of, I guess, translates to his real self and just how he works because he was doing this impression of him where he's like, he finished a take and then all of a sudden he goes, wait, stop. Nobody move. Keep the cameras going. Everyone just be still. This next take is going to blow your fucking socks off. And he's like holding this.

moment and you could just picture him doing that and it's like, oh, this intensity that is you gets harvested for your characters. And that's just so fun. Sure, he's definitely a ridiculous guy. I mean, there's a whole lot to, I think he's got a whole like paparazzi dedicated to his whole family life and he doesn't do himself any favors with those weird TikTok or Instagram videos. His wife is weird saying that she was like,

from Spain or something. She's really playing up that she's Spanish. And then it's like, no, you're American. And oh, yeah, my mom was really into this thing. She's like, did you hear what's happening now with Hilaria Baldwin? There's all this old footage of her, like, with an accent and it's not real. And it's like, I can't get involved in this. There's a funny Roger Ebert quote for this movie.

He gave the film three out of four stars. But his big criticism, this is a weird one. We love Roger Ebert, but sometimes he has some really weird. takes. He says, having successfully negotiated almost its entire 118 minutes, the edge shoots itself in the foot after the emotionally fraught final moments, just as we are savoring the implications of what it just happened, the screen fades to black and we immediately get a big credit for Bart the Bear. Now, Bart is one hell of a bear. I loved him in the role of the bear, but this credit in this place is a spectacularly bad idea. What a weird. Wow, that's a really funny.

The bear. The bear's the fucking star. Credit the bear. Yeah. Top billing. Bart. It's almost like the least you could do for for putting the bear through that. Like who, I mean, you'd like to believe that it didn't suffer in any way, but we did take this bear that has no idea what it's doing and made a star out of him without his choice, you know. I mean, you'd like to believe that that bear had a great life and was just fed great and just had this attention and maybe it wasn't, maybe it was a bit, like, touched in a way that couldn't even have it survive on its own. It was that docile, like, it had, like, a really low IQ or something or... I don't know.

But I have no problem with that credit there. Not at all. That sounds just about right. Yeah. Well, yeah, the credits aren't really part of the narrative. It's, like, kind of wrapped up, and then you're crediting... He's... Yeah.

Ebert's got a lot of funny shit. He's... He's great. there's a lot of really substantive and poetic review criticism from him. But every once in a while you see one of these things, you're like, what? He's reviewing every movie he's bound to have some weird, weird moments, I guess, in his criticism.

Yeah, there was a, I love that after they killed the bear, they made coats out of it. And they were just like, they spent the time doing that, even though it would probably take forever, like, just they made coats out of it and he was walking around with the bear claw necklace. And I thought I had this moment right after he killed. Well, I guess he didn't kill Alec Baldwin, but he could have. Like if when Alec Baldwin fell in the bear trap,

we just saw a shot of Anthony Hopkins walking out of the woods with like a finger necklace and an Alec Baldwin coat like he skinned him too. Right. That would have been a good ending. I think that's a great. It's something. That's why I'm just glad I didn't first watch. the movie with thinking about that stuff, but where after they kill the bear and it shows them

making all that stuff and they had made it, you just kind of, if you are at a clock, or it's like, okay, so they took the time to do that. Interesting. Yeah. They were hiking with a target destination in mind and their survival at stake, but yeah, okay, they made the coats and he made this really intricate necklace. Did you make one for me? Yes, I did. That's even more time.

Was that like a whole afternoon? Yeah. A couple days? I want to know how long they were gone for. Because when he comes back, his wife doesn't seem to be like that emotionally distraught also, you know? She's kind of just like, oh, I guess you're back. It is one of those. It's great questions that you want to ask.

And I wonder if maybe the internet people have maybe. tried to mathematically break it down best they could. It's the same thing as like, you know, how many days did Bill Murray spend in Groundhog Day? And I'm sure there's some really fun breakdowns to like logically be like, well, if you learn to do this and you do that, then that's at least going to take this. So add that. Yeah. Add this.

How long does it take to skin a bear? How long does it take to skin a bear? Make that necklace. When you think about it, it really feels irresponsible. of their time. Those contraptions that they made too, like the squirrel trap seems like it would be super elaborate. It seemed like it would work much better for like a fish.

Like a squirrel could definitely get out of that shit. And then the trap for the bear that like the spikes in the huge gigantic weight, it's like how did they get that up the tree? Like what the? With what rope? Holy shit. So many questions. They made the rope too.

Yeah. Where did the rope come from? when they're all three of them still around and they were running away from the bear and they went down, they had to cross the ravine. And then Hopkins is just like, all right, this huge tree trunk, let's do it. And then he starts trying to move it and they kind of start propping it up. And then they did this sort of like strange jump cut in time where they had propped it up with these leveraged all these other trees and these big things. And like, I'm like, how big is that ravine and like how much time? Did they...

The pieces were there. All the pieces were there and like perfectly like cradling it. Yeah. Was there no smarter and faster way to get across? It's another thing where you, when you clock the time, you're like, I don't know about that. Yeah. Also, bears are fucking fast. Like, it would have...

If it really wanted to kill them, it would have caught up to them very easily. It was just toying with them. But yeah, maybe the bear was bored, just trying to play. I don't know. It's funny the conclusions that they came to, too. Just toying with us. They were like, the bear. it's a man killer

it's been stalking us this entire time it's called the taste yeah yeah they set that up at the beginning once he's got the taste of man flesh you want nothing else well it's like I couldn't imagine myself being in a situation where like even if I thought that that was a possibility then the best option is to

try and lure the bear to me to kill it like what if I would I would assume that there was a chance that I wouldn't run into it again like maybe you're just not covering your tracks better. I don't know. It's a weird. The bear is the threat. And then we decide, okay, no, we need to lure the bear and kill the bear.

Even though every other time they ran into it, it's not like it's not like it attacked them without them noticing it first. Like, I would just be prepared for the next time it shows up, not necessarily like, oh, we need to make a trap for the bear. And also that trap was fucking, like, that would have taken days. That whole swinging, uh, fucking cannonball spike thing. that was going on. It was pretty funny. It was pretty funny and pretty ridiculous, but I really enjoyed it. Do you think that Alec Baldwin had already at the beginning of the movie, based on his

affair that he had going on that we know was happening with Hoppin's wife? Do you think that he had already had a plan in his mind to kill him? Or do you think that the first, or do you think he just kind of was wading it out so that he would die and that surprise party? at the beginning was maybe him and her idea to be like, yeah, let's really surprise him. Let's give him a heart attack. Let's give him a heart attack. That's what it seemed like, honestly. It was like, it was funny that Alec Baldwin was able to make a very convincing bear noise

when that happened to. Oh, my God. Sampled the full bear audio. You're speaking of audio, there's a really quick shot where it shows the bear's claws and it does that like knife shing sound effect, which I found very funny. Even though it wasn't making contact with anything. It was just there was a point in time where it's like you show something sharp on screen and it needs that sound effect. It doesn't even matter why.

For all the times that I've seen that movie, I don't even, I can't even recall that. So like, talk about it being, you know, effective on some of us where it just works. Yeah. I'm glad you love it and I'm glad you shared it with us. It's always great to hear people talking about things they're passionate about. Alex, did you have anything more to say about the movie? No, I think I'm just leaning more towards the way Jay used the movie, because just being real, I was not thinking about the logic stuff past a certain point.

I was just there with the characters watching them survive. I'm happy for you. Once you have those lines like, yeah, once it had the lines like, yeah, once it has the taste of man flesh, it's going to be coming for you. I don't know, it just set that tone for me. And yeah, it's just consistently goofy. Yeah, and entertaining. I was never bored.

I'd happily watch this again. I don't know if we want to do ratings, but for me, this would be a, this would be just a strong six out of ten. Yeah, I enjoyed my time with it. And I'm also given this one a six out of ten. Bam. Cool.

This one is getting an eight out of ten for me. Beer, bam, bam, bam. Beon, boom. Awesome. Thank you for, uh, thank you for introducing us to this movie. It was very fun. It was a very entertaining watch. What a pleasure to talk about all this stuff. Yeah. Shout out to the poster too. Yeah. I feel like the poster like encapsulates the movie really well. It's like really funny. The faces. Yeah. And also the quote. It says they were fighting over a woman until the plane went down. Now their only chance for survival is each other.

That's perfect. Oh my God. See, what I only remember the, I actually remember the, I actually remember. remember the teaser trailer for this, which was a long shot that's in the movie when it's sort of like a jump forward in time kind of creeping up a wintry mountain to find them huddled together on like a little rock face of a mountain or something. And it just sort of goes and sits on them as they're kind of shivering with each other. It's like this long, you know, 15 and 20 second shot as it kind of pushes into them. And I remember that was a teaser. It was just complete just that. and it was like the edge coming soon or whatever. I remember as a kid seeing that.

I like effective teasers like that. I like ones that just kind of give you a taste of the movie rather than doing this whole weird edited version that doesn't reflect the tone. I like it when you just get like a little sample. These two stars together lost. That's all you need to know. Hopkins and Baldwin are lost together. Cool. I'm in.

Done. All right. time for questions. Cool. Let's do some questions then from the Sardonicast community. Head over to the suggestion thread on the subreddit if you want to leave questions for future episodes, just like identity is found, did. For Jay, I know you and Matt have a high tolerance for what embarrasses you while filming this show, but I just rewatch season two, episode three, Nirvana, the band the show.

We are trying to get into the musician party, and it makes me die of secondhand embarrassment, and I respect the commitment to the bit so much. What would you say is the most embarrassing? embarrassed you've been while filming the show or the hardest it has been to stay in character. Great question. That scene in particular was very difficult on the inside. But, you know, it was mostly difficult because, to be honest, like, that's a bit of opportunity missed for something even better to happen that I just couldn't quite manifest

for myself through the, without breaking reality. it's always kind of tough to not go too over the top because then people will kind of drop their guard and be like, you're just fucking with me. And now you're not getting a good... The best is when people actually are thinking that you are a real person and they're trying their best to just kind of help you out

or reason with you. But there are so many times that I'll be in character and on the street with somebody, and you kind of get into it with them for whatever sort of ridiculousness that you're kind of subjecting them to, and they look at you like with this look where they're like, oh, God, this person's crazy

or this is a ridiculous person, and they realize they're in and they're ensnared in this, like, just back and forth. forth with us. And there is a feeling that you have on the inside that is a cringe feeling that, you know, you, you have this instinct so hard to just break completely. Reach out, put your hand on their shoulder and be like,

I'm just messing with you. Don't worry. Put them out of their misery sort of thing. But the only thing that stops you from doing that is this other meter that you're kind of monitoring where that very cringe level, you know is just going to be gold, especially if we have some options of how to, you know, manipulate it or just at least augment it or show just the right bit from it. You know, you can cut a conversation down to like just the, a couple of back and forth or something.

And it just feels and it's, and it is totally real and it is totally cringy. But you have to have that sort of foresight to be like, well, this is going to be. so special because that currency of reality that gets woven into all of our stuff is really what we celebrate the most. And anytime that we've had those cringe moments, they're really hard to get through. But what pushes us through them without us breaking is just that awesome feeling of like, this is going to be so fun to watch. Perfect.

Yeah. Yeah, it's perfect. Jake Wyman has this to say What are each your favorite movie soundtracks As of Late? Also to J-Berg Great Job with the Blackberry soundtrack And also Kid Detective Oh, that's nice

Thank you As of late What has been out there Oh well I mean like Oppenheimer Was just beautiful That Ludwig score was just So cool All those tempo changes

And that sort of like pulsing That happens under some great, like, just romantic chord progressions. And, you know, the first hour of the movie, there's a lot of just like, you know, three chords oscillating through each other with like through just wonderful tones of, of sort of background score that just pushes that sort of like montage way that they did the first half of the movie. Ludwig

kind of has been killing it I agree I like his stuff even though I totally fell off the Mandalorian because I'm not really a big superhero type of fan but I did like watching the first season of Mandalorian and my God the music was so cool

and the theme song is just perfect like that's what kind of made it to me Like, when you dress something in that much class, it kind of allows you to kind of immerse yourself a little more in its world. You managed to find a new identity that wasn't just aping John Williams. I know. It perfectly took just a little bit of the fanfare and a little bit of the camp, but then had its own thing completely. Yeah, that was a real success. Yeah.

Phantom thread is one that I've really, really, really loved. Johnny Greenwood, I believe. Oh, yeah. Yeah, incredible score. Now, the way I've heard that he scores those Paul Thomas Anderson movies is that, and I'm sure maybe it's not exclusively this way, but I don't think that he does a lot of scoring to picture. Like, I don't think he's receiving a cut and then, you know, writing to these sink points and posts where, oh, I've got to kind of ride this and, oh, I'm going to try to hit his eyebrow movement here. And I don't think there's a lot of that happening, which is a very challenging part of film scoring, I would say.

Just because there's so many very specific targets to hit. What I know that he talked about with scoring those films is that he would have extensive conversations with PT and just know what the different moods and different. angles and colors that are going to be used and where the movie is going to go and then write pieces that then PT will then edit too, which is how we did a lot of Blackberry too. Kid detective I did entirely scoring the picture. It was like very well edited by the time I got it sort of like fine cut. And it was a very targeted approach. Blackberry, I started writing while we were shooting.

So I'd come back on the weekends from shooting and then write a little bit based on how the shoot was going and what it kind of felt like. And a lot of those cues ended up getting just slotted in. Kurt, our editor and Bobby Uppchurch, who was also editing, ended up getting just a whole bunch of library of sounds and little cues that I'd make, just knowing what the script had in it and what I knew was coming up. I know we need this sort of tense, tense moment for this. I know we need this heartfelt moment from Mike and I'd give options and then they would

play around with the editing using that music, which makes it a lot easier to then manipulate and massage once you get the picture back and you're scoring a picture because you don't have temp music. You have your own music. You can then just fix up and get the endings. in there and maybe find some new sync points. Yeah, that makes sense because, you know, there's a lot of films. Quentin Tarantino is a good example of someone who uses existing music and then writes a

scene around it, basically, or edits the film around it. And so that in that same sense, you can still have a fresh piece of music composed for the film, but not necessarily one that is trying to match the beats of the film. Like, it can be done in either direction, which is interesting. It happens quite a bit the movie matching the rhythms of the music. I mean, Interstellar did that with Hans Zimmer quite a bit. There's that famous story of back in the day when they didn't used to do a lot of this when John Williams was doing the huge ending of E.T.

And Spielberg is in the big orchestra hall with them and they're sinking that whole last bike chase all the way to the ending of the movie. It's like an 11 minute piece or something. And it's what it's I think maybe my favorite piece of scoring ever. It's like that is to me the magic of cinema personified. Just that movie, that ending sequence and that music pretty much kind of is the top of movie magic to me. I can't help but just cry the whole that whole last whenever I watch it. But what's amazing about that and how the music.

works so well as that they Williams just scored to picture the whole thing because he's a just total goat for that but he couldn't he was having so much trouble in this really crazy chaotic orchestra cue to sync everything as they have the screen behind them and he's watching and they've got the you know the how they used to sync with clipping holes out of the actual film to give like a little cue and scratch the film to give you a little setup of where your little sink points are, and they were having trouble syncing it because it was just a really wild orchestra piece. And so Spielberg was like, why don't you just record this 11 minutes of music the way you think it sounds best, and then I'm going to go and re-edit to it. And that was like a little bit of something that wasn't done often.

Nowadays, you know, I'm sure Johnny Greenwood wrote a lot of that phantom thread stuff just in the wild, as they say. and just provide PT with like, here's like an album's worth of this phantom thread, what I think the score would sound like. And then maybe you do some back and forth just in the wild. Like, oh, give me a little bit more of this. Or hey,

this part here is swimming around and this stuff. More of this or slow this part down. Like you could build a film score that way without even looking at the picture. Oh yeah. Yeah, I love hearing about that process. I guess for me,

I shout out disaster piece. Nice. Big fan. I watched Marcel the show with shoes on finally. Oh yeah, I forgot they did that. Love that score a lot. Also very versatile. Very versatile.

Yeah, very. Yeah, bodies, bodies, bodies under the Silver Lake. It follows. Random stuff like Triple Frontier. I loved the score for Under the Silver Lake. Yeah. Yeah, really interesting. That's very good stuff.

Good choice. Yeah. Okay. Let's do this one from Mr. Hates this website. Question for Jay. I really enjoyed your part the Dirties and overall just love that film. What was it like shooting a movie under such unique conditions at a real high school?

And did it feel any different working on a movie with such hot button subject matter like that? Looking forward to whatever you do next. I went in to that. Matt told me, I want you to play the teacher for this part in the Dirties. And so I went to the school and I showed up and I had like, you know, my brown blazer on tried to look like a music teacher. And I'm in this. empty classroom and Matt's there and I and I just walked into the class. I just showed up and

nobody was there but Matt and Owen and I said to Matt, okay, so what's, what's the scene? Like what am I doing? And he kind of looked, looked a little bit like, well, um, and he's kind of winging it in a way, right? I'm like, well, what is, what am I supposed to do? Some kid walks into the class sees and Matt, Owen had already infiltrated this school as students, right? So when other students saw them, they kind of didn't really think, oh, here are some guys that are filming a movie. There was no, like, the school was fully operational when they shot in, was it just as one school,

maybe a couple schools, but basically this kid walks in to the classroom and looks at me and she just goes, oh, we have a supply today. saying it to Matt and Owen. And then all of a sudden, Matt just went into character and Jared behind the camera, just kind of hid somewhere. And these kids kind of roll in and I'm just sort of running a class. There was, I didn't even know what the hell we were doing. There was no scripts, no idea at all.

That was just me running a class and just being like, all right, well, I know what this, what he's doing with the movie. I don't know what he wanted to do with Mr. Bird, but here's me being a teacher. It was fun. That's great. Hell yeah. A couple more questions. Let's do this one from the acceptable spot 8678.

Any restaurant recommendations in Toronto? I'll be at TIF and would like to try some good food while I'm there. I should you both have something you could recommend. Yeah, I mean, I love, I'll say what Matt and I have been going to our whole lives here, done a whole, all of our major writing sessions were done at, um, a restaurant called Little India. Yeah. On Queen Street.

Just a great family run business, gotten to know them and just the best if you want to, if you're any sort of butter chicken connoisseur comparing Indian flavors and stuff, this is the place. Um, you know, Banjara is great too, but there's something, uh, very unique about little India. I also love, I always love taking people who have never been to House on Parliament. It's a little out of the downtown area. It's like on, it's on Parliament, but it's a pub that is like, you know, old straight up English style pub, but there's not a lot of like TVs. It's not like a place where you go and you watch TV. It's like very dark and, you know, brown and books and

mahogany and, you know, you get bangers and mash and just really. good kind of like high-end pub fair. And I'm just, I'm always in the mood for that sort of stuff. I, uh, I keep a, uh, Google Maps list of places that I want to go. And House on Parliament is saved because one of the people in my Twitch chat, one of my mods said that it's their favorite burger ever. The Snake River Faris Wagyu Beef Burger. So I will be there to try it for sure.

Yeah, you know, I went to the. rivally and was actually impressed with their food. I thought the Kalimari was really great. Oh, they've got great food. Yeah, the other Appies and stuff that I had there were great. The restaurant is a little bit different than, I mean, the back room, which is their live venue space, very easily gets sort of like just classified as a mid to low kind of almost dive live venue space. even though it's probably better than that.

Like it's got great sound. You can have proper shows there, but it's small, and it doesn't really look like anything crazy. But the restaurant is much higher class than people would think. And that definitely we don't really play up in our show that they have a great restaurant, that all their food is very eatable. Good pad tie.

Yeah, the pad tie. episode. I had, uh, I had some pizza at a place called North of Brooklyn. Oh, I love North of Brooklyn. It was delicious. Yeah. I, I wound up going there because of the Dave Portnoy, a little Toronto tour he did. And that was his, I think his highest rated one. I had it. It was amazing. All right, Frankie. Yeah. Pizza reveal time. One bite. Everybody knows the rules. Now, what do they do here? Like, what? Why do they give me to me like this? Look at this. Hey, what's this? Get this, go around and shoot this guy. Hey, what's up? It's so infectious. It's such a good content to watch.

Yeah, I would love to meet the guy. He seems like such a character. And I guess lastly, I'll mention there's a place called Storm Crow, which is like a... I've heard of it. Yeah, Storm Crow Manor. So this is their third location. They had two locations in Vancouver that unfortunately closed down. And so this is their last remaining one.

And so it's in the, I think in the gay district in Toronto. Pirano, and they took over this huge, like, ancient, gigantic, several-story mansion house thing that's kind of like a heritage home or something, and they turned it into this restaurant nerd bar, and all of the insane, like, nerd shit just displayed on the wall and, like, memorabilia from, like, movies, and they'll have, like, VHSs of, like, cartoons playing, and you can just grab a board game and play it. I will say their cocktails are very way too sweet, very sugary. Like, you know, some people are into that.

Not my thing. But their food is really good. They've got really great food there. And the vibe and just like exploring the place. Like when you go in, you get a table, you're immediately going to want to just walk around and look at, just explore around the entire place as you're there. So that's a good spot. Oh, that's fun.

And yeah, has its origins, I guess, in Vancouver. But not. unfortunately not in Vancouver anymore. So yeah, Alex will hit some of these places up. Yeah, I was not expecting to hear bangers and mash in there. It's from my hands. Yeah. There's a lot of Irish pubs and stuff.

Awesome, yeah. Sweet. One more question? Should you do one more here from Dab Sloth, 710, sorry. This question is for Jay. Hey, Jay, I absolutely love your inclusion in Nirvana, the band, the show. And I have to ask, what is the most difficult thing about creating a score for a movie or show like in Nirvana, the band the show, or your work on the kid detective? Well, scoring for Nirvana the band is easy because it's, you know, also my show.

Like, everything we do in it is sort of like an idea of matinize. Like, it's the synthesis of what we want to see happen. And what the joke is is something that we have in our mind's eye. So scoring that is easy because I'm almost, I'm my own boss there. I have to just get it good enough. But the scoring for another director, or like, you know, even Matt's Blackberry, you know what I mean? Like there is a element of needing to really keep your hand on what the director wants

to do with something. And you really need to understand, like if you weren't in the room when, you're not, you you conceive of this idea, you might not know what that sort of invisible light at the end of the tunnel is or where it is. And so you have to through a series of just discussions and throwing out different adjectives and little, you know, some sort of code words to just sort of get you guys closer to seeing the same thing that doesn't exist yet and then creating it. And so that that's challenging. But it's only challenging at the beginning. And yeah, it's, It's a lot different when you get to score your own stuff.

We did a little cartoon, too, that I did a lot of scoring on. We did three episodes. I love it. And you can still watch them on there. It's called Matt and Bird Break Loose. It's on Amazon Prime. Can't forget about that. And it's pretty much a different execution of the Matt and Jay world.

It's kind of like Nirvana the band re-skinned as a children's bedtime story. And it's clean, but it's still very dark and mackey. Avalian and there's a lot of scoring for that was just, that was actually just one of my favorite projects too because I got to really do a lot of, I kind of storyboarded the whole thing and got to draw us and make all our performances. There's something when you have that much authorship over making everything for that and like scoring it is just a dream. Whereas maybe, you know, there are points in kid detective where I'm, you know,

sending stuff in and Evan is still being like, you know, it's not quite, you know, dreadful meets this enough. And I'm just going, man, but then you just get infected by this determination of just like, what am I not getting right about this? And then you hit it again and those victories are very sweet when you finally hit them. That's dope. Yeah. Yeah, I guess finally I just want to ask.

So I know that Matt and Bird break loose was kind of like a. make it during COVID thing. Will we be potentially seeing any more of that? Is there any possibility? I don't think Amazon is making any more of it as is. And it's actually okay with us. We liked doing it like that, but we'd love to do to kind of reimagine it again.

We still definitely want to, there's a lot of things on the table right now that we're kind of juggling, but we're still trying to keep an iron in the fire to make more of this cartoon or a version of it. where maybe it's still like in the style of a children's story type of thing, but we're allowed to get pretty wild with it. Like it's not actually for the kids.

It's, we can drop a couple of F bombs if we want. It's the same way Nirvana the band is very wild and dangerous, yet really moment to moment, we're not fully gratuitously taking advantage of being edgy. It just, we give ourselves the slack where if, if we need to go there because something works narratively or just for fun, we can.

Yeah, unrestricted. And that would be the ultimate way to do a cartoon version. That would be very fun to do. Okay, dope. Those are some awesome questions, awesome answers. And I guess it's time to start wrapping up the show.

There's a film recommendation. I already spoiled it last episode because I wanted people to catch it in theaters because Neon's doing a re-release. Old Boy 2003. So we'll be talking about that next episode along with some other stuff. So if you don't want to be spoiled for Old Boy

2003, watch it before the next episode. And I am highly suggesting that you do because it's a great movie, and it can be spoiled. You don't want to hear us talk about it before you watch it. You definitely want to watch this movie before we talk about it. Be careful that you don't accidentally watch the 2013 remake.

That's a very bad film. And I made a huge, long, Very detailed review comparing the two films. If you just search YMS Old Boy, if you want to support the show, go to sardonicast.com, sign up for premium. It's only $2 a month. You'll get these episodes early as they're edited. Same with patreon.com slash sardonicast.

Also, we got merch link in the description. Also, we got a Sardonicast highlights channel. Subscribe to that on YouTube. And while you're at it, subscribe to the actual channel, the Sardonicast channel on YouTube, hit the bell. you'll get notified when these come out. Thank you so much for joining us, Jay. That was awesome.

Would you like to plug any socials or anything that people should be following you on or anything you want to promote? Sure, the only thing I really use is Instagram and it's just at Jay McHarell, J-A-Y-M-C-A-R-O-L. And you'll see what I'm up to you on there. And hopefully when we get some more very concrete stuff for the NTB fans, I'll be able to

update everybody on what's happening there. NTBTS. Fun stuff. NTBTS. All right. Perfect. Awesome. Not to be taken seriously.

Thanks for listening, everybody. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Yeah, thanks everyone. Bye.