Sardonicast - Sardonicast 171: Alien: Romulus, American Beauty

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

Support the Show for $2 a month and receive all future episodes early at https://sardonicast.com and https://www.patreon.com/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 0:53 Alien: Romulus 1:14:42 American Beauty 1:54:56 Questions 1:28:17 Outro + recommendation

Three, two, one, half in the bag. I'm Adam from your movie Sex, this is Sardana cast. I brought a couple bottles to sewage you that I'm not going to be drinking, but just for the sound effect. That's it. That was nice. I can't believe we haven't done that yet, to be honest. Yeah, same. I don't think we have.

Yeah. I was, I thought maybe you were going to launch off with the, uh, for you out of. I'm, I've got five or something, you know. But you went with the classic YouTuber intro, I appreciate it. What was that from? Did I forget that line already from something? That's from American Beauty. Oh, okay.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I just changed the name. I just changed the name. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I remember. Yeah. Did you say here you are? Yeah, the half in the bag.

I just watched on two times speed because I didn't have that much time before the podcast and because I'm efficient. I just watched their Romulus video. Oh, interesting. Right. We must be on a similar wavelength. As in we both saw the film. And we both seen that review.

Oh. I don't normally jump ahead and watch other reviews before. I have my own thoughts, like, figured out. But this one, this one is just too curious to me. I'm too fascinated by what people are saying, what people are thinking. Because so far, I haven't found anyone that really aligns with my thoughts on it fully. Oh. bits and pieces from all these different critiques but I'm kind of like waiting to hear that

opinion that resembles mine a bit more because I really haven't agreed with any so far. Okay. Yeah and the only expectations I have with your opinion is that tweet you sent out which I already have disagreements with. Sure. Nothing to do with a number just a certain comment in there. I'm sure we'll get down to the worst than covenant comment. Yeah, that's the one.

That is the one. That is a perfectly acceptable thing to disagree with. Hmm. I'm sure we'll get into it. Yeah. fucking get into it. Put them up. Want to fight about it? Yeah, where do you... genuinely yes. Yeah. Do one of those like boogie versus wings like drama events, you know, make it a whole thing. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, I thought Covenant was

worse. No, I thought Romulus was worse, let's go. Yeah. Yeah. I'm down. Kickboxing. No arms allowed. Just kicking. I feel like you got longer legs than me. I feel like you got an advantage. I know. Also I'm a horse but my arms are like broken so... Yeah. So I can't do regular boxing. So that evens out. That's fair. Okay. Yeah.

You know what? That half in the bag review was a bit vindicating, not because I consider their opinions to be, you know, like this sort of untouchable, like, oh, now everybody has to agree with this sort of thing now that they've said it sort of thing. But because other people consider it to be that. And now, now since I came out ahead and I was getting so much shit, people go and like, this fucking guy doesn't like anything. It's like, okay, well, now your fucking messiahs

have said the exact same fucking thing. And they both also said that they would sooner rather watch Covenant and Prometheus than this film again. So, yeah, you're all fucking cheap. You're all fucking NPCs. You're just waiting to see where the tides are going to fucking turn, okay?

That's why all of you on fucking Twitter only ever fucking pile in once other people are doing it, you're just waiting for permission. You don't have real opinions. You just wait. for what your messias will say. And some messias are IPs. Some messias are the alien franchise itself, right?

Some people, the messiahs at night. You're just, all you're doing is just waiting, waiting and seeing what other people will say. And you're dumb. Yes. Whereas my kind of stance on the alien franchise at this point is that it's pretty deflated. No. I feel like I'm more positive on Prometheus than I. a lot of people. I actually thought there was something interesting going on there. It's got like

pretty good production design. I don't love how it's so kind of glossy and futuristic looking compared to that like 70s future from the original. But I guess, I don't know, I could picture a world with a, it was like a grungy working class alien trilogy and then a more like philosophical, glossy Apple store, Star Trek. Like, hey, this is the complimentary universe that's kind of playing in the same sandbox, but doing something else. But what we've got is just this horrible mess combined. all these ideas. And yeah, I guess before this one we had Alien Covenant, which personally to me, the worst alien movie. Great. Holistically. I cannot stand that movie. Worse than resurrection? Resurrection is bad, no doubt. No, no, get me wrong. Don't

get me wrong, but it's much more interesting, much more. All the other alien movies have something kind of curious about them, like a weird director. It feels like... Emily. Yeah, the weird French director. It's got some crazy ideas, some like crazy set pieces. It's bad, but it's weirdly memorable. Water. Yeah, exactly. The water. It's a little bit of a James Cameron. Yeah, a little bit James Cameron. It was like written by Joss Whedon, so it has this weird like firefly thing going on. It's really weird and interesting to me. Yeah. Kind of entertaining as a result. Whereas Alien Covenant, I revisited it a couple years ago when they added it to Disney Plus with the 20th century merger or whatever. It's even worse than I remember this. There's something more

egregious to me about the man, the man returning. not for a second time, but for a third time and still not, you know, being able to capture that thing that made it what it was to begin with. Yeah. So confusing, so irritating to me. But at the same time, and this is something that they brought up in the half in the bag review as well. At the same time, there is something to be said about trying to go a different direction, right?

So it's whether or not we believe that Ridley Scott was actually trying to, quote, unquote, recapture what made the original movie special, right? So Covenant and Prometheus, don't get me wrong, extremely flawed movies and Covenant is bad. I'm not going to disagree with that sentiment. Covenant is a bad movie. I agree it's a bad movie. But I do kind of like that they're so fucking weird and different and out there. I like that there's a dumb, cringe, hilarious scene of Michael Fastbender robot flirting with himself talking about how... That's the only memorable scene in the movie. No, I wouldn't call it the only memorable. It's the memorable scene. But I, you know, in the same way that, you know, Amelie director kind of brought in some new, almost kind of like different directors bring in almost like different genres to this film.

In that same way, Alien Covenant brought in slapstick humor, which I love. And it didn't intentionally do that. Maybe. This is all unintended, yeah. But like, the reason why I would see Covenant again, maybe not for, you know, the Red Letter media people, I think that they appreciate the fact that it was at least trying to do something, right? Whereas, whereas. That's where I disagree with those, I think. Romulus is, you know, just a cynical, like, member berries cash grab for the most part.

I feel like Covenant is exactly that as well. Covenant does do that. The reason why I would rather watch Covenant again is because I think it's funny. And I love cringe and I love bad. But Romulus just goes in a cringe bad direction that is not fun. So in the same vein as like we literally just had our M-night episode, right? Trap is less satisfying than the happening. Yes.

In that scenario, I would say the happening is a worse movie than Trap. But I would actually say that Romulus is a worse movie than Covenant, at least from memory. And I haven't seen Covenant since it was in theater. I just, no. Can I ask you, when was the last time you saw? resurrection gosh yeah I would say within five years I went through them all in in a row yeah and I found something to enjoy about all of them to be honest outside of covenant that's the one where I'm just like this is sad because

like Prometheus yeah we said it's flawed it missed somewhat didn't really get the returns they were looking for but that is the movie I feel like you're talking about with the it doesn't even have alien in the title you know so I can forgive it for like honestly the worst things about it are the things that tie it to the alien franchise also like it the the philosophical ideas and the sci-fi setting and all that kind of stuff the cast is great in that movie the music's great the atmosphere and mood is top notch it like it builds itself up really well but it just crumbles that opening scene with a waterfottle waterfottle very memorable waterfottle waterfall yeah some reason bottle came into

my head but you know one of the great differences between prometheus and alien covenant too is while the aesthetic isn't exactly the way i'd like it in line with alien It has some really impressive visual effects and like monsters designs that hold up really well to this day. They were lit right. They look right. Which one? Which one? Pyramethius. Yes. Covenant is not that way. No. The effects in Covenant are so messed up and I watched like a behind this scenes documentary just a few days ago of like they did have all these practical effects built and they

incorporated them when shooting it and so to get these performances out of the actors. But then for some reason, I guess it didn't look right in post and they just see G'd over all of it and it's horrendous. I actually kind of like the build up in the first section of Covenant, like that whole, you know, it's the Mass Effect Tandromeda kind of setup where they're like going to another world, they're setting up, all of the alien movies honestly have good setups, good premises, all of them, even though like the ones people consider the worst are kind of interesting starting off points, but just most of them just don't know how to carry it.

Just like an M. Knight movie. Well, yeah. Exactly. Like, we got M. Knight fresh in our brains. He makes concepts and then doesn't deliver. I guess what annoys me the most about. Covenant with it being Ridley Scott with the alien coming back and it's like oh I guess Prometheus didn't land we got it let's do alien dash covenant now and now

the the xenomorph is back and we're gonna have this whole rar last act with the xenomorph is running around killing people and like a slasher movie again flying away even yeah but like if that was the focus of the movie where was the tension there was no scene of tension all I remember about the alien in that movie is it just kind of like like wide shots of it just like walking around or like doing action scenes on platforms that are flying around and so just the CG mess and it's like everything about Hollywood sucks and it's no that that film is a big hard no and it's no surprise to me that it did not connect even though they were like pandering

to the oh we need xenomorphs everywhere just like waylon Uttani do ironically in the movies you know so so that's your one like big contention with my perspective is is just worse than covenant if that was not in my tweet you would yeah you would find it an agreeable tweet pretty much I just think the man it was such a strange experience because my, I didn't, I really didn't have expectations at all. The Alvara's director, I really didn't like his evil dead. I thought the Don't Breathe films were, but the first one was fine. It was kind of a fun premise explored for what you want to see with that kind of.

Yeah. Shockey idea. It's his best film and it's not great. Yeah. And it definitely feels like an alien film made by that director. Yeah. But I guess with the, the experience of it, yeah, my expectations were low. And when it began, I was kind of like, oh.

Oh, okay, this is, might you're like, sound this up. You got these interesting characters going on here. You got like a return to the aesthetic we want to see. The music kind of sounds right, the sets look right, kind of sounds right. Yeah. This is building up to something kind of interesting. I like this kind of just stripping it back, you know? It's just like a group of like 20 year olds.

They have this kind of mission, abandoned space station. It's simple, it's just tearing it all back to basics. And there were two major points to me where it was just like, oh no, oh God, we really can't come back from like this exact frame right here, can we? Man, it really tries, I guess, but people keep comparing it to Rogue One. I didn't think it would be quite so literal in some degrees. Like, are we doing spoilers yet? Sure, let's do it. So is a spoiled discussion?

Is this as if you could spoil this movie? I think you could. I was not expecting them to deepfaker Ian Holm to begin. Like that was really for me the first like, there were things happening here and there that were like annoying me. But I was like, I can give that, whatever. This is this is actually surprising me with how decent this is. Then, yeah, you get to that scene, that reveal. And then it just feels like a landslide of memberberry stuff that.

Yeah. An onslaid. Don't be wrong. Is there a little bit at the beginning. Aggressive. Like, you know, there's the, you got the physics bird like in the background and whatnot. And I really don't even need that. You know, even that can be annoying to me, but that's a nitpick.

But yeah, the Ian Holm Inclusion and just all these things they kept shoving into the movie where it's like, this kind of could have been solid if you'd known what to not show, what you'd known not to trim, kind of in a Rogue One sort of way. Yeah. And all that goodwill and kind of build up an excitement that I thought it did a good job of setting up in that first act does feel like it's kind of thrown out the window towards the end. when it does become a list of like, oh, this is just a, remember that scene from the ones you like and remember that scene from the ones you don't like? And it's like, what I just, what a bombardment that last section of the movie is? Like, uh, everyone's saying how crazy and hype and fun it is or

whatever. And no, I do think some of the set pieces are good. Some of the like scenes are good. It's one of the things I hate about Covenant where it's like horror movies. They're about like these set up, these scenes trapping characters in these like bottles and like the five. of watching him scramble trying to get out while they're being hunted by this creature. It's like, seems pretty simple. And it hasn't delivered on that basic premise for it feels like so long because these characters have been written to be so dumb, so unrelatable, so unlikable. But I was actually kind of connecting with the main two characters especially here at first. And I was like getting lost down, where are they going to take this?

I thought I was going wild imagining like, oh, is this going to be like a situation where it ends up with the AI being the only one alive and this kind of spin on that? There's so many directions it could go to surprise me. And I basically did all the opposite ones. And it's like, way more interested in reminding me of the other things that I'm already familiar with and already kind of sick of, to me honest. Oh, yeah. It doesn't need to exist. It's like the most pointless fucking alien movie.

Like, it doesn't bring anything to the table. And even the things that it does that are just like purely to remind you of the other films, it's not like they're done better. it's not like they're done even nearly as good. They're just like, hey, remember this other movie that you like? And then it's like, oh, okay, thanks. Like, why don't you do something yourself at some point? That'd be nice.

I liked the structure of some of these set pieces, some of these scenes. I did like slowing it down and being like, okay, we're raising the temperature of the room, we're going to sneak through all these crawlers all over the place. Or fast forward to later on when the alien is loose on board. And there's that whole conundrum with the pregnant woman who's on the other side. the door. The sneak through the crawlers thing, you enjoyed that part? Yeah, it was a cool setup. I liked the, just slowing it down and like giving us a chance to breathe and like up the tension. I thought the tension building was pretty decent for these

set pieces. I thought the tension building was decent in the first 10 minutes and that's about it. Oh, I'd give it more than that. Beyond that point, I thought I was just like absolutely fucking fake, absolutely just fucking phony. Like every single scene, the attempts at adding tension. Like, oh my God. So it starts with them crawling through the vents. And even then, it was just like, okay, you're clearly trying to do something, but you're just like, you're not quite getting it. Like, I never felt colostrophobia during that scene. I never felt the intended effects. It was just like kind of like, okay, we're going off the checklist here. And then they introduced the whole like. Oh, they allude to aliens, yeah. Sorry? They're crawling through the tube like in aliens,

like Bishop does. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, like in in Romulus, they're crawling through the vents before they realize that the gravity is malfunctioning, they see the rat. And it's like, okay, we get really obvious setups, really unsatisfying payoffs to those setups. So when the setups happen, you know that it's going to be called back. And then when the callback happens, it's the most unsatisfying thing in the world. But like the gravity one, you didn't like that? No. Callback.

No, I didn't. It was shit. I kind of like that. I didn't mind that the mechanics of like the ship and build. putting in the engineering and this things like that. I thought were kind of interesting actually. It felt it felt like they were just like, it felt like dead space. It felt like a very weird out of place like video gamey inclusion.

That he's very video game. Yeah, I'll give you that. Insanely video gaming in ways that, not not in good ways. Yeah, I don't know. I mentioned the Ian Holm moment and like just so many questions coming up like, why did you you didn't think that looked good, right? It's one of the weaker examples I've seen of this deep fake, like, I don't know, it's insulting. The man's dead.

I know his estate got paid for this. It's just like, but you didn't have to do that. Like, even if you wanted to reuse the, I know, like, in law excuses that this was just a model, a mass produced model that would have been on all sorts of different research centers all over the galaxy, I'm sure. But you couldn't just, I don't know, you could pour some more acid on his face and have it be like an animatronic more or you could do anything. You could have it be a different robot. You could have it like, it wants to tie. sell to Prometheus and the other one so badly, why not have it just be Michael Fassbender?

True. Go into the cornyness like that hard, you know? They should have. Oh my God. You had options with that. Because that is, that is like, yeah, anybody, what's so weird is the marketing implied, like, we're going back to its roots. So you never would have anticipated that Prometheus and Covenant, like, not at all.

I was not expecting that at all. In there would be so intertwined in ways that are just so... Inescapable. Like, like they, it's like, okay, yes, this is canon for sure. Yeah, there's no removing that. They, like, they didn't even have to reccon it. They could have just not acknowledged it. Just not mentioned it.

Yeah, there was no reason to. No, it literally stops the movie. It halts the movie in order to integrate it into those ones specifically. Like with the, you mentioned the rat and the anti-gravity, but there's another funny rat shot where it gets crushed by, oh, that was the hydraulic presses. Oh, my God. That was good. That was good.

the rats head exploding because it got the fucking antidote that was that was the funniest fucking thing there's so many shots in this movie where at the end of a scene it'll just like cut to a room where the characters are not in and then just something on the monitor for the audience like that like oh rat's head explodes bloop just so we know like when they when he tries to give her the shot he's like oh this will probably work it worked fine on the rats and rats share our DNA mostly and then our main character gets to say, I don't trust it and I have good intuition so the audience knows that she made the right decision instead of leaving it up to imagination which like, why not? Why not? There would be like more tension there if we didn't

know because then we wouldn't know if she made the wrong decision, right? But it's, but it makes it very clear and very obvious, yes, you made the right decision because we saw the rat's fucking head explode. It's like, okay. What does that give us? The fucking, the, the, the, that they do member berries in this film. This is the other shot with the just for the audience sort of thing is when we get to the the containment, there's something in the water, which by the way I was meaning on that line before red letter media just in case anybody says I'm ripping them off. Watch my trailer reaction. Plus a Brits. Oh god, we'll talk about that in a second. But when we get to that scene like what the

The absolute pointlessness and brazen fucking like fan serviceiness of all right we're gonna just now cut to this room

that no characters are in and then show on the monitor this image of the face hugger right? Like ooh this is what's coming guys.

Every single time one of the forms of the alien was shown on screen it was like that fucking that shit that I criticized in the Lion King

2019 of Mufasa showing up right and the sun the sun right behind him and it's like oh I'm supposed to clap now I'm supposed to clap now even when the one woman was the pregnant woman was like crawling through and then the real big alien comes it's like woo yeah the thing the thing yeah everybody who one thing that red letter media pointed out that I didn't remember until just watching their video like 30 minutes ago or whatever was that fox is owned by Disney now I forgot that yeah I was like oh god yeah like this does feel like a Marvel Disney version of an alien film.

Like that that's absolutely correct. Yeah, it feels like Marvel Star Wars, it feels like those new Jurassic world movies almost kind of where it's like the reverence is baked in. It's not even reverence, it's more like ass eating. That's how it feels to me where it's like... Ass eating. It's... In a bad way?

Dick sucking. In a dick sucking. It's just so like egregious, it's so... Fuck. They're, it's so obvious. It's so like, is that anything that someone wanted from an alien movie is to like be clapping and for scenes to be edited with like referential dialogue to other movies where it doesn't even like thematically make sense. No, yeah, exactly. This is what people want.

This is what people want. And before the red litter media fucking thing came out, everybody was like, oh, this is the best movie I ever seen. This is the best movie since, this is the best alien movie since the James Cameron. Like, that's what I don't understand is like, yeah, Prometheus. clearly the message was that's not really what people wanted. So then they shift to Romulus where you, sorry, God, there's some of the damn movies. Covenant. Yeah.

Covenant where you do get the silly alien garbage you want, but that also didn't do well. But then I guess enough time has passed where this was just able to be sold and is now making money and is reviewing pretty well. And people seem to be liking it. I, yeah, it does make you question, but like broadly what audiences are like looking for because. treats. I was yeah, I was really saddened by the, man, just like every scene is so by the end when it's just like you're just watching Ripley pretty much, almost shot for shot in like the same outfit and the same.

Less interesting. Setpiece at the end. Yeah. And it's like we've already been through this with The Force Awakens where it's like, well, yeah, we got to like soft reboot this, you know, for the audiences, for new people. Yeah? Yeah. We like that right?

right and everyone kind of ate it up including me at the time so we didn't know what they were gonna do yet and also we weren't in an onslaught of every movie doing exactly that yet where so like sure we can look back retrospectively and and criticize the Force Awakens as this like bad idea that it that has been pervasive and just just absolutely essentially destroyed a lot of franchise It's very cynical when we look at it now at the time it was like oh my god Thank you for using like practical effects yet and remember like the previous Star Wars films before that point What were the prequel trilogy right? So that was like an extra level of

Refreshment of going back to basics and being like oh thank you for you know and the first one sure Beat by beat it was a new hope right beat by beat and it was pretty obvious and everybody watching hopefully knew that that's what it was doing but that was not seen as a negative thing at the time and it there was also room to grow from there it's like okay this is your starting off point it's very clearly an homage let's see where you go from there and they didn't go anywhere good but at the time but it seemed like they had potential right so Hollywood's definition of homage is very interesting to me because like it doesn't feel like an homage it just feels

like anymore no it it feels like literal you know it's not like you want to do any work. Oh yeah. To recognize it. It's a happy pace. This is literally that thing you love. Again. Full stop. Yeah. And that to me does seem so blatant and obvious. And it's like, oh man, you kind of had a good thing going here. Like if you just took some of these dumb decisions out, I, because I love, I really love the AI character that they introduced here with the, introducing details that haven't really been explored in the other alien movies with this AI with like multiple different personalities. Almost like, you know, split from a.

M-night or whatever. And the way they were playing with that was really interesting to me. And I thought provided like a good excuse to have like exposition delivered through that character. Another weird reason actually why they put so much on Ian Holm, CG Monster to deliver that when it's like, you can just like build Ian Holmes AI personality into this new character and have him perform it or something. That would have been way more interesting to me than, yeah, this egregious. Yeah, if you're going to bring him back anyway, it's not a bad idea. Exactly. Then there would be some sort of justification maybe, kind of.

Maybe justification, some consistency. It wouldn't be insulting Ian Holm and like his performance. And like, the way it affects everything, you know, the second that character is introduced where it's, it's not just reusing that character again. It's the fact it's a ripped in half version of that exact same character. They hook him up to a computer just like in the first movie. He's saying the same dialogue at times from the first movie. Like word to word. Just in case. Just in case you either didn't clue in or because you want more treats.

You want to clap again. Yeah. Yeah. Like a baby. And yeah, it is, there are scenes that are edited exactly like in Rogue 1 when C3 and R2D2 are on screen for no reason. Or exactly like in Jurassic World when the T-Rex comes on screen and the camera lingers waiting for the applause. It's kind of like that exact same formula with this just dick suck to the alien and aliens. And it's like, it's so gauche at this point.

Like, who isn't inspired by the original alien, you know? Like, it's so, it's so kind of like tired. It's Trey Gauch. That's the impetus. But like, it wasn't a complete wash to me, which also almost makes it more irritating. Exactly. Is that they could have done something. You're saying about, oh, man, why can they just leave this to the imagination or whatever?

And that's kind of like the whole problem with the movie to me. And the problem with the alien character fundamentally at this point, the risk with doing what they did with Prometheus was that it completely undoes everything cool about alien, really. You know, the space jockey, the reason that is so interesting and cool in the original alien is that no one knows and no one even like asks the question in the movie. It's just like, this is so, this is cosmic horror at its core. We don't understand this. We don't even know how to break this down.

It's better that you don't know. So we're just going to leave it. The only exposition you needed to explain the alien was from the first movie where Ian Holmes character says, it's the perfect organism. That's all you need to know. Everything can be inferred around that. So from this point. But it's the next step in human evolution now. Yeah, exactly.

Whereas, like, I was going into this expecting it to try and distance itself from that mess in order to go back to what was scary. Like, the alien, the way is designed is like a. symbol of like space and the unknown. It's this like black sexual creature, this like kind of mechanical kind of unknown. It's scary. It's like it's as smart as humans. It's it's a horrifying image. It's got the like parasitic nature. It's the stuff of nightmares. But it starts being scary when you when you find out. Actually, um, though you find you see the engineers on their home world kind of sort of they were upset by the fact that, uh, when they sent an engineer to earth. They killed him with the Jesus story. And then that actually meant that they had a chip

on their shoulder about humanity. So then they designed this black goo. And it's like, oh my God, this is so dumb. This ruins the whole thing for me. Love it. So it was, while the Ian home thing was like such a disappointing reveal when they showed that. I was like, you know what? Maybe they can do something still with this. Maybe. And then you get to the Prometheus black goo scene. Yeah. And you're like, so if we were doing this the whole time, could we not have just gone dumber with this? Yes, exactly. That's why Covenants better.

Because that first half is kind of like, the first half is like, oh, you actually kind of care about this. You're pretending. Investing with this time into these characters. And it's like, oh, but the end goal was kind of like ultimately a redux of the scene from resurrections, but with engineers kind of thrown in there too. Right. That sucks. Like I'm sorry, that's that's not satisfying. But boy, some people I see are interpreting it as like, oh, this is like a nice way that ties all the franchise together. Because we'd never had the covenant stuff like merge in and all become one before. And it's like, well, I guess you got it. And I'm happy for those people that like that, I guess. But ain't interesting to like me as a contemporary alien enjoyer. Like. It's not the answer, in my opinion, to do this. Because now I feel like we're just going to get stuck in that same conversation. It's like, oh, now they can go kind of original next time.

Now this one's done well, we can just go original. But it's not going to happen. No, yeah, exactly. Who knows? Who knows? But, like, the problem is, like, we've all rewarded them for this because it's making bank. So we've taught them that doing exactly that is what you should do. Which is what we told the last, what, fucking,

Rise, whatever the fucking, Force Awakens, thank you. Yeah. Thank you, my subconscious. Which is what we told Star Wars when they did that, which is what we told, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then it never turns out, like, it always just falls flat on its fucking face. So remember how bad the fucking Jurassic World trilogy was? Yes. Like, that was, ooh.

Oh, so bad. Holy shit. So bad. But look how much money they made. Oh, yeah, billions. Yeah. You gave me a really good idea, actually. Just imagine a scenario.

where they could still incorporate everything for the fans, but make it less explicit in a way where the conversation about the connections would be had on the internet in fan theories. Like, what if the character found like a chip from, like, let's say, Ian Holmes robot was unrecognizable or something, or the chip was somewhere on the ship or something just separate from, the body, they put it in and then he was acting like that character and then you had to infer only the fans of the original film would interpret it that way rather than it being explicitly

shoved in our faces, literally with lines from the original, literally showing his fucking dead guy face, deep fake, right? That would be so cool. Yeah. That would be awesome. That way you actually could reuse lines and it not be as irritating if you did it in a more like subtle way. And Like, that was the clue. Yeah, that would be a clue. That would be a hint. And that's, and I think that works really well, especially for the horror genre. People love fan theory shit in this genre, right?

Like, when you make something more subtle and you give, there's a story behind the story, right? Like, that's part of why even, you know, five nights at Freddy's is so successful. It's because people have, like, fan theories about, like, what actually happened and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That'd be nice to have in a franchise like this, especially if you're going to ride off of this fan enthusiasm of the original films, which they're 40 years old. Right? Yeah. Like, 40-something years old? 45?

How old? This is a long time. It's late 70s, 79. Yeah, it's 45 years old. Very long time. It's 45 years ago. It kind of goes back to that question, though, of like, how do you actually make a contemporary alien movie? you and have it be good. Like, is it even possible? Like, it doesn't even seem like worth or,

you know, like what, what big IP that is that like historic is still going and is releasing interesting sequels? Like, especially when it was based on A. Star Wars, on an alien where it was like this thing that was made and it had to be made when it was for it to be as good as it was. And now we have to revisit it because it made money and people know it's an IP. It just never works out. Like, what can you do with this character? I've joked before on this very podcast that like the xenomorphs like in fortnight. How do you make that scary? Yeah.

You know, unless you take it in ways like video games have with that space, with Halo, with so many different aliens inspired like everything. We've seen like what it can create and what what it can inspire. So like going back doesn't seem like it's delivering much. It's just not a good creative spark for like telling a story, you know, because all the stuff I like about it is production design, is the practical effects, is I love seeing these miniatures of these ships, I love this atmosphere and lighting and a lot of technical stuff, but yes, a lot of that writing that is, uh, just drags the whole thing down for me.

Yeah. This, this film is one of the best examples of how rotten tomatoes can dupe people. Because even at the very end of the half of the bag review, like they were making fun of the critics that watched this movie and they were just like, oh yeah, they probably just watched the first 30 minutes and wrote a glowing review sort of thing. Rotten Tomatoes overinflates their ratings in ways that people don't understand. It's a percentage of fresh to rotten. And sure, somewhere on the website that I don't even know how to access at this point, because they never use it. But it's very, it's not clear. And it's not on the front, depending on, I don't know which platform you're using

to access it. It's very disingenuous. Like, you only see the fresh. to rotten and you don't see the average weighted review unlike Metacritic where that's what it is, right? Sure, they have that somewhere on their website on Rotten Tomatoes. I don't know how to access it, but if you look at the Rotten Tomatoes versus Metacritic for these, the Metacritic is a lot more reasonable, which, I mean, is the case with every movie, and I think people should stop using Rotten Tomatoes. So Alien Covenant gets a 65 tomato meter, which is still high. It's still high. But then Alien Romulus, 82% tomato meter. So if people are only looking at rotten tomatoes, which a lot of people, like, it shows up on the fucking DVD covers now. It shows up on the, like,

literally like non-removing, not even a sticker. They'll put it in the actual fucking printed cover for a lot of movies now, like, fresh, certified fresh on rotten tomatoes. This movie is certified fresh on rotten tomatoes, which is crazy. And I think that the average person who's, you know, into the hype of like, I want to see a new space horror. And I've talked about this a million times. People are just itching for a new good space horror, right? Like people are just, they want that so bad.

Run Tomatoes gave a very, like, it's not an honest reflection of how you should set your expectations. No. You look at Metacritic, Alien Covenant 65, Alien Romulus 64. So slightly lower, right? But run tomatoes, it's like a huge jump. It's a huge jump higher. Again, those are both higher than I would give both of those movies for a personal out of 100 score.

But the Metacritic is a lot more reasonable in terms of like setting expectations if you know how to set expectations from like a review aggregator website. Right? Yeah. You got to add so many of your own filters for any of them to have like any actual useful information. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So it's weird that

I don't think critics really were like so hyped on this movie. I just I think that Rotten Tomatoes tricked people into thinking that it was like a universally acclaimed film where everybody was giving it like a fucking 10. I think I genuinely think this is just a rotten tomato syndrome type conversation. It's a mix with that and I guess I guess expectations are already like so low and non-existent for this franchise. Yeah, and the marketing.

Especially post-covenant. Because the marketing was very much, they tricked people into being like, this is like going to be a soft reboot sort of thing. We're going to use practical effects only. I guess, yeah, that's the big difference. It's like the idea of soft reboots, while that might have been interesting to me a decade ago, like, it's just not, we know where often where that leads now. So I'm just like, why?

You know, you can't get some like interesting up and comer and give them half this movie's budget and do something like original and a bit more risky. Well, of course not. Yeah. So at what point in the movie did it lose you? Ian Holm. That was the point? Showing me him fully, yeah, that fully like destroyed a lot of the momentum it was building, like the goodwill that I feel like it was building. That like attention to detail and whatnot was starting to mean less than.

me. It was like, what? I thought like the whole thing, all just like with this evil dead movie, talking about like the practical effects and this dedication to this old movie. And then you do that? How? Like, why? How could you do that? You've like, even if it just, just how it looks, even taking the fact that they're seeing home out of it, the way it looks, it's so poor. I don't think I've ever seen like a deep fake look this, this bad in a film. It is very bad. I mean, they look bad. They look, like, it looked bad in Rogue One. It looked bad in Indiana Jones.

Like, it's always noticeable. But I haven't quite seen it like this where it almost looks like the mouth is like out of sync. Yeah. It's so distracting. I think maybe their excuse was that like it's mechanical and so it, like, maybe it's like more roboty. In that case, just make a practical effect then. I know. Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. You know? They got the people from aliens to do some of the practical effects again. Like all these old teams coming back to do it. And it shows a lot of the time. Like the whole added sequence with the showing the stage between the chess buster and the, the bigger alien and they just build that huge vagina on like the wall.

Amazing stuff. Like I love the the crunchy real nature of it. That does add something to me. And I did think there was some crispy kind of tense scenes. Like I didn't really get it fully get to get it out earlier. But I thought there were some decent scenes with the alien that like, Like, we're reminding me of that original movie as far as like taking one of these xenomorphs and making it kind of scary to me. I did like how they kind of up the intelligence somewhat and made it more like this, this like cat that's playing with its prey before killing it.

I wish they'd leaned into that a bit more. I loved that decision at the door where it's like the logic brain AI is like we cannot open this, but all the humans are like freaking out that you have to let this pregnant woman in. I thought that was dark. I thought that was alien. I thought that was cool. More of that would have been great. And yeah, it was like delving into these cool setups, these cool scenes. and like cool ideas for set pieces.

But for me it was the way it was tied together and the whole excuse for it and the where it winds up. Yeah. I just kind of wish they'd been more honest about the integration of like if it if we'd known from the beginning this was some big celebration of the whole franchise. The greatest hits. Maybe it would have hit different. It'd be more, it'd be more like a, if it was more like a goofy saw kind of thing or it was like, this is such a mess. This is so ridiculous at this point or like, like, Reson Evil or something where it's like, it's been going on so long. Let's just, let's just have fun with this.

Let's just be silly with this. Yeah. with how serious is taking itself and like where it goes and integrating the covenant and Prometheus. It's like, yeah, it's kind of funny and bad, I guess, but it ruins all the good stuff that was built up to me. Yeah, it, uh, I would say it lost me like just somewhere after the 10 minute mark. By lost, I mean, I was just not invested. And I was like, okay, even if I come out of this with a positive review at the end, I'm not going to forget how bored I was during all this exposition with characters that are, completely uninteresting to me.

I liked some of the character dynamics. I liked some of the character, you know, like goals and the way that things are kind of set up for some of the characters. But like, you know, past the point where like immediately after she gets rejected for going to another planet or whatever, they're like, sorry, you have to work more times two.

Yeah, like I'm doing. Immediately after that, when she's, now we have the entire cast ensemble where she's with all these other characters and they're starting to explain their plan about like, okay, well, you have a robot that can do this and we can do this. I was like, damn, I'm thinking about a lot of other things right now

and I had to like catch myself to get back into the movie. I was like, holy fuck, these characters are kind of boring and they're not really bringing much to the table. Sure, because it's like, oh, they're alien fodder. They're supposed to get killed or something. I would still like something a bit more intelligent. Not even necessarily intelligent, but like interesting. The first alien film, even if Ripley wasn't in it, you still have a cast of strong characters.

The characters are strong. Very strong. Even without Ripley. And Ripley is a super strong character for narrative purposes. It's just, there was nothing even remotely like that in this film. Like, sure, there was it like, the girl's supposed to be Ripley, but. Literally, yeah. There was nothing like to chew on.

There was nothing to care about, really. It just, it really fell flat in that department. And I was wishing so many scenes that I was seeing. I was just wishing like, fuck, I wish I could see this scene with characters that were interesting in the slightest that I cared about. You know, it just, that was a huge problem for me. And I feel like even a lot of my criticisms with this film, wouldn't be as strong if there were just stronger characters.

Yeah, I could see that. I mostly was into the main two, the AI and the new Ripley, whatever, which is another just kind of like annoying thing, just briefly going back to Covenant where it felt like, oh, I guess Catherine Wardston's going to be the new Ripley, right? So every one of these movies has been like an attempt to try and get a new Ripley on the scene, you know, because she's like too old now. And the same kind of the same in the like Prometheus and the other one, like the, the shore character who never really got a complete arc or any of that stuff and now it just feels like oh now we've got an even younger model or actor with more potential for

sequels because she's so much younger so we can have her around forever we got new Ripley now you know yeah it's hard to get past that especially when it's so I just find it hard to get into these new characters when it's like okay we got this British guy what's his thing oh he kind of does that scene from aliens where he teaches how to use the gun yeah And he's, uh... Yep, there doesn't really give him much to do, you know? Like, most of the characterization is done in that first act.

And they're not giving much else outside of that, you know? So there's two British brothers. And, uh, one of them I could understand. And the other one I could not understand. How was your experience with this? They were the only people I could understand. Everyone else was nonsense to me. Yeah, I thought that was interesting.

I didn't... That's another thing I love about the original cast of the first alien. It's kind of a varied age range and just type of person range. So all these working class people representing a lot of different perspectives, whereas this is, you know, there's a group of 20-year-olds that feel a bit more similar. Yeah. And it did keep reminding me of like the evil deb where it is, again, sort of a sort of a similar thing, or don't breathe, you know, these younger characters going up in space, but

it feels like familiar with this director and this kind of story. Yeah. Yeah, with what, the main things that differentiate it being like this, this AI character inclusion and the fact that it's set in the alien universe. Speaking of don't breathe, you've reminded me to go back to the, uh, sneaking past the facehuggers scene. The way that they set that up, again, feels like very video game. me and um just like okay we're gonna we're gonna make the temperature match our body temperature

we're gonna change the spaceship temperature to match our body temperature because they see heat but i get they can they can also hear i guess because we have to be very quiet right yeah but the way they said this up is so funny they say if you get scared your body temperature will raise and then they'll see you so don't get scared right yeah yeah but also if you get nervous and you sweat then your body temperature were lower so like goosebumps so you can't do that either

and so it just adds this like insisted just through dialogue like level of tension that only resolves itself like it felt like the entire fucking point of that scene was just leading up to the way it concluded which was a jump scare

and there was just a guy hanging from the roof and then we get this like completely non-diagetic dumb fucking loud sound. By the way, three major jump scares in the film. Every single one of them was not only ineffective, but like embarrassing. Like, oh God, you actually tried that. And like the sound design was fucking horrendous,

like atrocious sound design with these jump scares. Like, it was actually embarrassing. And I was like, wow, we're really doing this. Yeah, it's, I didn't love the jump scares. We're really doing these terrible non-diogenic jump scares. I'm trying to. I remember a good moment. moment in that sequence though where it is it's jumping between an A and a B thing

where the in A they're trying to be quiet and sneak through while in the B storyline it's the pregnant woman trying to do something that requires them to talk to her to add to the tension of like this guy really wants to talk to her but you can't because he'll alert them and it all like explodes into this big chase scene or whatever. Yeah it was completely ineffective for me. I thought the tension building was decent. I the most tension I felt was like literally in the first five It's just because of how they paste it with the tone and I like that there were silences I was like silence silence is good for this genre I like silences that like that's tension

That's fun. Yeah even though nothing was happening yet I was like I was impressed with how they were handling it And then just from that point on the movie lost all sense of style the movie lost all sense of style through the editing and the the Filmmaking and just general presentation like all of the shots were just so so so much less well realized after that point when we get to the oh my god what are the worst scenes in the entire movie was when they go through like the spooky house where it like the walls are goop and it's like a right yeah that it when it gets into aliens more so

it's like you're you're at the fucking cheap ass carnival fair and then the camera does this stupid fucking thing where it cuts to a shot of like just one of the the prosthetics on the wall like a dummy like you're like like you're filming a cable TV promo for your your local spooky house at the at the county fair like it's like I'm supposed to be scared by that imagery and just the way that it cuts and oh god see I never thought it looked to that bad it was terrible I thought the production design was pretty consistent I just

And the style as well was, I mean, it was there, but it was more just like, oh, it's the style of alien and aliens with a bit of Alien 3 even, or maybe even a little bit of Alien resurrection or Prometheus thrown in there, you know. Yeah, it lacked its own voice or identity for sure. But I don't think it looked bad. In fact, I wish this level of production design for the creatures and whatnot was in Covenant. I think it would have improved that movie a hell of a lot, to be honest. and yeah, the miniatures and all this kind of stuff I love and I want to see more of, and it's a shame it's kind of in this film I don't really care about and don't really want to revisit. And it's like, they just kept stumbling almost onto these ideas that like I kind of love.

Like the imagery of vacuum sealed facehuggers was like, this is kind of cool. This is like a corporate assembly line like a visual metaphor you're going for here. I wish there was like more of that because I was so deeply ingrained, But all of that corporatism is kind of undone by the Ian Holm character who is, his dialogue is so bad. He's this mustache twirling, irritating villain. He just over explains everything and like when that seamer goes back to him and like shows him dying. And it's like, what? Oh, yeah.

No. Why are you doing this? That was fucking hilarious because the ship was already crashing and exploding and they already like jumped off of like the station. And now they're on this other ship. And then they're talking with him, like, through the television, and he's like, oh, I'm glad you made it. Just, and I guess he was in the very end corner room on the ship. So it's the last one that blows up, because it's already blowing up. It's already crashing and, like, disintegrating.

Yeah, that was going to happen. But we get, like, an entire, like, minute-plus long conversation where the only point to it is so that our main character can be like, actually I reject your application it's like it's her her little revenge to wail in yeah it feels like that moment in the Disney movie where they beat the mustache swelling bad guy yeah yeah like at that point I legitimately

forgot he was on that station because it didn't make any sense like I was I completely forgot he was supposed to be on the thing that is currently exploding because he was just having a normal fine conversation gravity affected.

I've just had another realization for or another excuse as to why they didn't need to include that Ian Holm character. In the original alien, there's a whole other character that could have been returned to of mother, which is like an AI terminal, that they constantly return to. Again, that would have been a better way of delivering exposition and that would fit in, because we haven't mentioned this film is set between Alien 1 and Aliens in whatever. It's a prequel, I guess, technically. Shoveed into that mess.

But yeah, we don't even... There's so many ways around these bad decisions that is kind of confusing. And it's like, who wanted this to happen? You know, because that's almost a unanimous critique of the film is that, is that, you know, deep fake thing. And I feel like I'm riding on it a lot, but it really kind of is symbolic of the overall issue with this movie. Yeah, it exemplifies everything that's wrong with it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

It is emblematic. Yeah. I started enjoying the movie again for like another minute when Wenigade Woebot Man was chasing after the Asian girl. Because then it started, the tone started shifting. There was a bit more rhythm to the soundtrack. It was like, okay, now we're getting something a bit faster paced, you know, a bit with a bit more energy to it. And then that immediately dissipated and then we were just back into more. dumb bullshit pretty quickly.

Really, I thought I actually had a pretty good sense of pace and energy as it went on. I like just kind of like the original Alien race got that really slow buildup to begin with. And then once shit hits the fan, it's kind of a consistent like, oh, God, this is escalating and getting worse and worse for the characters. How we get there, messy as hell, but I did actually think there was an escalation with that, including all the way up to the weird revisit of the resurrection new creature. I like the buildup to that with showing like her. finding all these different stages of it coming out and the imagery of that.

But yeah, I wasn't in love with that creature or anything and just felt like, again, kind of been here before. The guy? Hmm. The dude, the slender man guy. Yeah. The smiling man. I didn't love that design.

I thought the newborn was actually a lot creepier and weirder in resurrection compared to that thing. Yeah, true. But I guess people like it. They had an actor kind of playing it. You can go on IMDB and look at the dude who played that creature. He's like a giant man, which I guess they put prosthetics on. Is it the guy that was in rec?

No, actually. I think because that guy's like really skinny, right? He's more of like a giant man, this one, I think. And again, like, there's some cool ideas in there with, they tease with that pregnant character. She's like looking at that famous painting with the baby drinking. And then like that comes back later with this horrible monstrosity that like feeds on her before. It's like really dark and messed up and I just wish I, yeah, it was someone I cared about or just something not so damn familiar. It was not only familiar but everything they did was just so fucking clunky and rushed.

For a movie that's like two hours by the way. And also for a movie that felt like it was actually attempting to be moody and patient in the first 10 minutes, which I love. But like every single beat that they hit, it was like they were trying to cram in so much memberberry bullshit and hit all the fucking notes on the checklist that every single time a sequence happened or every single time something was included. It was like the fastest most confusing, just confusing from a sense of like tone and pacing thing in the world. the way that, you know, like, we get from like the face hugger to the chest burster in like two minutes. And also, again, all the setups and payoffs are so lame. Like the setup of like, oh, cool, I can x-ray my arm with this. Ignore that until she gets back on the fucking pod or whatever.

That's quite obvious. And then she grabs it again. She's like, look it. It's in my chest. And then just immediately burst like, isn't that cool? Blah. And then, you know, bursts in her fucking. her leg hits the joystick controlling the ship and her friend just like I don't know instead of trying

to do anything to make it so that the ship isn't about to crash and she has a lot of time to try and help this she instead just like holds her seizing friend and that's it like okay you're you're gonna crash I didn't mind that actually because she has that line of like she's kind of she's in like like freeze she's freezing and just saying like on repeat I don't know what to do or something I didn't mind that actually. They did give an excuse for all the characters to be dumb, I guess. Because they're just a bunch of dumb kids and that real scientists or anything. There was that. And they also kind of played into it at times where I felt like the main character wasn't always dumb and she actually had some sensical things to suggest

now and again and also having the AI there to be the like brutally logical one was kind of cool to me. Oh, I can't forget about this. In the play. You just reminded me about how fucking incredibly stupid it. that they felt the need to tell the main character out loud a story involving an AI doing the trolley problem. Right. Where she's like, what's his deal? Why does he hate AI so much?

Because there was an AI that his mom died because of the AI in a trolley problem where he sealed her behind a door to save like six other people because otherwise if they didn't do that, then all of them would have died. She's like, I can't believe an AI could do that. It's like, yeah, well, you know, if they're programmed to save people, then they're going to save the maximum amount of people. It's really not that hard to understand. They told her this out loud, and then we get two trolley problems involving her friend AI, the first one being like, okay, we can't let them out of this thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, we got to kill this or try to stop whatever, the Asian girl, because we're all going to die if we don't do that.

And then we get the second trolley problem of pregnant woman behind the door We can't let her through because we're all going to die Because the alien's literally right behind her Adoy it's waiting for us to wait Open up the door right And from that the way it's so It doesn't make any fucking sense how they justify what's happening in the script here

From that moment Beforehand she she understood its programming Its prime directive I think she said Was to protect her That was how was his name Alan Andy Andy that's how Andy functioned was his prime directive was to protect her somehow for some reason even though the trolley problem that exists where he trapped

pregnant woman behind the door to save the main character obviously and all of them for some reason she sees that as going against his prime directive because right after that she says has your prime directive changed what's wrong with you even though first she was literally told about this trolley problem thing fucking 30 minutes earlier right explicitly couldn't have been clearer for some reason

that incident of the trolley problem where he's saving her she goes what's your prime directive changed what's your prime directive now and the only reason that happens is so that Andy can reveal his prime directive is now because of the new chip the new chip to

serve the interest of the Wayland Corporation right yeah how they get there doesn't make any sense because what he did did not go against his, what she believed to be his existing prime directive, which was to save her. Everything he was doing was still to save her. Even if his prime directive did change,

there would be no reason for her to question that. But the script needed there to be this extra layer of like, oh, now there's another piece of tension to try and be like, okay, how is she going to get the chip out? Because now she has to get the chip out, right? Now she knows, because he said it out loud to her, for some reason. Now she knows that she has to get the chip out.

But it doesn't make any sense how they got there. That was the moment she started questioning. Because before that, it was establishing the different AI personalities based on that disc. Had it come up before then that she was kind of unsure who he was or what personality he was in or what had changed with him? Well, because he started talking different. I mean, like she recognized a difference there. As far as I remember, the moment that made her. question his prime directive was when he was already doing something to save her, which makes

no sense because that was his prime directive, was to save her. Like, why would she, am I getting it wrong? I don't know. Sometimes I misremember things because when a movie is so fucking stupid, I get hung up on what happened five minutes ago. I'm not sure. I'd have to pay more attention to the specific mechanics with that one. It just seemed like they were trying to get to a point in the script where she now had that

that conflict, but they just didn't care how it comes. got there or maybe you had several different writers and they didn't uh cohesively uh check with what was on the previous page i don't know yeah i yeah there was that kind of stuff but i just found the more egregious stuff to be the memberberry stuff like the we haven't mentioned the worst line in the movie the well we kind of did the the aliens get away from her you bitch moment. That was... Get away from you, you, bitch! I was like, yeah, I removed like a full star almost from that because I thought that was such

a misjudged decision. Like what... You're supposed to clap. You're just winking at the audience going like, hey, ha, ha, remember this? Clap now, please, please clap. It just doesn't, it straight up doesn't make sense. No, not at all. Even the way he says it.

They've never met these other characters. Starts would get away from her. Which is fine. But then why does he say that? Yeah. For the audience? It's for the audience. That's it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I can't, I was quite shocked by that. I put my hand over my mouth. Oh, no. Why are we? No. What a waste.

It's, it's obnoxious. It's insulting. It's demeaning. It shows a lack of respect for the audience. Like, genuinely. Yeah, I don't know. Like, they think you're fucking stupid. That's crazy.

Some people are rewarding that, but you know. Did the 2013 Evil Dead? I didn't like it and I've only seen it the once, but was it that egregious? No. With stuff like that? I don't like, because that that is bad. That was also more of a remake that wasn't trying to like tie itself into the same timeline. That was like, what if we did Evil Dead again?

There are different characters and we made it more modernized in terms of like what you could show with gore and like the practical effects that are at our disposal and I didn't even love that movie but like there was a bit there was something a bit more like pure towards its goals for sure and it served a bit more of a purpose in existing compared to to this film but also this remember this is like Disney Fox and I don't think yeah I don't think Feday Alvarez I don't think this was his baby I think he was a director for hire and he was taking notes from Disney Fox and also from Ridley Scott. And Ridley Scott probably had the caveat of greenlighting this movie because he, I'm pretty sure he owns the IP. I'm glad you mentioned

Ridley. Well, I guess maybe Disney does, but I think, I think Ridley Scott has some level of control over what happens and he has some, you know, I think he has some power in terms of like what appears in the film. He's a producer on the movie. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't have gotten any reference to Covenant and Prometheus. That has to have been in. I think that's a fair assumption. Yeah. Yeah. I think this only got made with with that caveat, I think. You've got to make Ridley happy. He wants to do this Prometheus bullshit in here. It's the only way that you will be handed this project and it won't stay with him because I read some interview from, I think it was just before, just after Covenant came out where he was like, oh, I'm ready to make this a million,

million alien movies. I want to make Covenant 2. I want to keep going and going and going forever, you know? But obviously what happened with Covenant happened. And I guess, uh, blanket on the name of this director again. Ridley? No, no. How do you say is Fede, Alvarez? Fedet. Yeah, yeah.

Is it Alvarez or Elvarez? I don't know. Alvarez, yeah, yeah. Uh, but he apparently pitched some idea to Ridley like years ago. Oh. And that is what, where they went after. I just, I don't know. I find it so I wish I could be a fly on the wall for some of these conversations with

like legacy directors and legacy IP and like the conversations that had for it's like, I got this cool idea for a little alien movie that's more like the first one, Ridley. Oh, that's cool. Can you like make sure you make it my thing though? Yeah, we can't, we we cannot retcon my retconning, please. Yeah. We we that that that is my one demand is that it has to explicitly and clearly inescapably tie into Prometheus and Covenant. That is important to me.

Yeah. Glaze me, please. And yeah, you can't like build in any critique of it or make fun of it in any way. It has to be, yeah, just a complete glazing. Yeah. You know, even if my, one of my problems with the setups and payoffs in this film is like, you can have an obvious setup in a way that. that sure, you can know it's going to happen.

But it would be more satisfying if the payoff just showed anything that looked cool at any point ever. That was one of my problems. By the time that they were like, okay, we're actually using the guns, the zero gravity thing comes back. You know, the implication with the aliens, you know, floating around in the hallway and the, you know, the gravity thing just happens to be on the wall behind them too. The controls for that. very convenient. It didn't even look cool. Like it didn't,

it wasn't satisfying because it just, it felt so egregious. You're talking about the acid and... Yeah, the like perfect cylindrical, uh, tornado that they could float past or whatever. Like,

I don't know how gravity wound up making that happen, the zero gravity, but I actually thought it kind of looked cool, but it was doing the rule of cool at the expense of like what it just set up. We're like, yeah, as you were just saying,

the aliens just a second ago, they were swarming and they were kind of like gone now. This is like blood just left. I kind of like the visuals of it is very video gamey. It's very like dead space, like the zero-g stuff. I was fine with that. It's like eating a Mars bar or something. It's like empty calories. It's kind of entertaining and like a schlocky kind of way for me.

I'm not really into the characters by that point. But I do think like plenty of stuff looks cool. on like the most superficial kind of surface level way. Like I think the xenomorph looks like great, to be honest, like in most shots that it's in. Yeah, it is one of the better looking xenomorphs. I just wish it was in a good movie. Yeah, same.

Like, it's at the expense of it, it's just, it's not in service of anything. Yeah, that's kind of what's the most upset to me where it does feel like wasting this production design. when, man, you had some cool ideas for a story here. We just went too broad with this. We went too big. Went too franchisee with it.

It's weirdly like the opposite of Prometheus where like, you're given nothing to think about. Nothing. You know, where Prometheus is kind of open-ended. It's philosophical. It's thought-provoking in certain ways. The ideas they're thrown out there. There's nothing like that in this movie.

There's nothing. It's very simple in that way. Die, motherfucker. It doesn't leave things open like the original alien either. There's no, there's no query anymore. You know, there's no quandary. And as much like schlocky fun as it is to go to the lab and have, you know, the secret experiments and whatnot. I love all that kind of schlocky stuff.

We didn't spend enough time there. We didn't really indulge in that. It's like, what is this adding to the franchise outside of a, of it simply being a celebration of the franchise, which to me is not interesting because I could just watch the original alien and not have to go through any caveats and just. just, you know. Yeah. Very clunky. And everything that it tried to do felt very unearned. You know, we get to the fucking, that whole thing at the end where it's like,

every excuse that they have for like some degree of like tension or conflict, it just feels like the most bullshit thing in the world. Just like, oh, I'm about to pull the lever, but I get pushed right before. Oh, I'm about to like jump off this platform. with the zero gravity so I can go up the elevator shaft. Oh, but I get pulled right before and I lost my gun and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, you can, these, these pathetic excuses for adding to the stakes can exist in movies that just have stronger characters, right?

Like, they can be a bit more forgivable. But when the entire premise and everything that we're seeing is already just so cynical and just, it feels so dishonest and insincere, then all we're left with is just those moments of just like, oh, that dumb thing happened. And that's what I remember. That's what I remember is just the dumb things that happened

because the entire experience is just like fucking, it doesn't exist for any purpose that is like artistic. It's just money. No. That's it. It's, uh, yeah. How do you feel about the lots of people calling it a fan film or like,

going back to the Rogue 1 kind of comparisons I guess I can kind of see that but it's kind of been that way for a while to be honest outside of the first one they were kind of like fan film interpretations to me this James Cameron's one it's you know Ridley Scott's second attempt

third attempt this weird French guy's attempt it's David Finch's attempt yeah you're listing all these other directors and Red Lair Media made this point in their video this one has the least amount of like a voice from the director where this is just this is just playing the greatest hits and trying and pathetically failing

at just recapturing little little tiny moments or like tiny shots or references or lines from the other films and it just like it doesn't do anything it doesn't do anything new it doesn't do anything interesting it doesn't do anything satisfying or genuine or real how can you have your own voice when you're stuck between Ridley's cheeks, you know?

Yeah. What are you actually supposed to do? If the whole thing is built around reverence, how are you supposed to have your own voice? It is the Force Awakens Conundrum. And it's the same with the Jurassic World stuff. All these IP legacy sequels, they are stuck. They're so rigid within that IP.

Yeah, finding a new voice is like nearly impossible. And the directors who established it can't even do it. So how, how's this guy going to do it? 4 out of 10 At least Covenant wasn't just fucking going through the motions Right Oh it was no I definitely was

At least that film was was I mean it was but it added slapstick And flute playing And gay robots and finger James Franco burning to death Yeah It was funny It's got some humor I guess

My I'm slightly higher than you I gave it two and a half stars Like right down the middle 5 out of 10 maybe you could go lower if I see it again, but I don't want to see it again, to be honest. Exactly. Never going to watch it again. Quite disappointed with the ride of this movie, kind of being won over to begin with, then this little chip damage here and there, and then a bigger bit of chip damage, like a big punch to the face.

You get at least two or three big punches that really took a lot of that initial endearment away for me. And now I'm just kind of left like, God. Honestly, the scenes that are jumping out loudest to me. are these cringe-worthy recreations of scenes from previous alien movies. And it's, yeah, it is a shame that the good ideas are kind of lost within this just endless jerk-off of stuff from the past. We have to stop. Please.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You could make three original sci-fi movies with this budget. I'm disappointed that, yeah, we haven't really learned from this Disneyfication. of everything, you know, it's, it's sad, it's maddening, you know. Yeah. And if you want, if you want like a cool, like kind of spiritual successor, sci-fi, space, weird, unknown world thing, scavengers rain.

I'm going to shout that out here and watch that. It's a cool animated HBO show. Everyone should watch that. It's got weird sci-fi, body horror, creatures. It's beautiful. Check that out. I've seen the first few episodes. It's pretty good.

I dig it. Yeah, it gets better. Okay, nice. Yeah, I got a return to that one for sure. Man, oh man. What a journey. I hate it. What a journey.

I hate it. Yeah, it's a bit disappointed too. Fenni Alvarez has never made a good movie, by the way. Some people would disagree. Entertaining, maybe. I found Do Breathe is kind of entertaining. Don't Breathe was kind of entertaining. Yeah, that's his best movie.

It's not even good, though. It's cool entertaining. Exactly. I was I wasn't bored during Romulus personally. I was kind of annoyed at points with some of the decisions they were making,

but I was personally never bored. I thought it was actually pretty frenetic in the way it made. I was checked out for a lot of it. I guess that's the difference where I was fairly engaged with what it was showing. It was just kind of stupid. Uh-huh.

All right, American booty. Well, yeah. So my rec for this episode was 1999's American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes, written by Alan Ball. A, man, I feel like this, especially with what's happened with Kevin Spacey, you kind of have to stop there, I feel like. This movie has got an interesting place in my mind, because growing up, it's quite a, like, important movie this to me when I first saw it.

It was, I don't know, it was interesting. it was different. I love that music. I love the look of it. It felt like it was saying a lot, even if I was pretty young at the time. I haven't seen it in a while. And yeah, well, the Kevin stuff has happened, this drama. I read a few sort of articles about how American beauty is, God, it's aged poorly, all this and all that. So I wanted to talk about it again and revisit it. And I don't know. I've got a lot of thoughts here to break down. The basic story is, He's kind of loosely based on a drama that happened early in the 90s with this woman called Amy Fisher. I had this scandal, which was supposedly the impetus for Alan Ball, who wrote the script here.

His inspiration for this story combined with him seeing a plastic bag floating in front of two towers when they were still there. And yeah, it's kind of a deconstruction of the American dream, the suburban life in the 90s, and the idea of like, hmm, things don't feel happy. Why am I unhappy even though everything material is good? You know, the 90s is such an interesting time for me now, especially like being born in right in the middle of it, but not really getting to experience it properly. I talk to my uncles who got to live properly through the 90s and like party through the 90s. And there was this kind of sense of hope is the impression I get. Optimism. Actually, the optimism, the economy was fairly good.

99 had this kind of obsession with these films of like breaking out of something or these worlds that are being broken down or explored, The Matrix, Fight Club, even Magnolia, office space, American Beauty, and other being one of them, this idea of like breaking out of conformity or something that's been falsely sold to you. I think it has a fairly decent job of that. And yeah, being released in 99, it's obviously pre-9-11 even. It's pre-the-housing crisis. It's one of the confusing critiques I've actually seen, and it's like blatantly just there on the Wikipedia page under like in popular culture and accolades and whatnot, and retrospective, it's critiqued there as the critical guard. the critical regard waning because of its themes being seen as trivial after the September 11 attacks and the Great Recession, which is interesting to me because I almost feel like the, that's what makes this time capsule movie so kind of poignant to me, where it is like a little snapshot of the thought process of suburbia in the 90s and what was going through people's minds and these specific issues that were there and explore quite well, I thought.

And why does that matter that it's horrific things happened in history after it? And that's not what the film's about or it doesn't really undercut what it's even necessarily saying. So I find out to be a strange, strange place to even include like a conversational point about it. Like plenty of films were made before 9-11 or didn't mention the economy or whatever. And yeah, that's just a weird little standout moment thing for me. But broadly, I enjoyed this. There were a couple of things I didn't love as much. from memory, but I thought it actually held up pretty well.

I don't think it's like a subtle drama particularly, but I think for what it's going for does a pretty good job. I'm more kind of into the springboarding it gave to Alan Ball, the writer to go on and found and write six feet under, which is kind of similarly, deals a lot with like the idea of your life and death and what that means to somebody and the meaning of life. these kind of things in a, you know, a 63 episode show with a way more time to explore these

themes and deep characters and concepts. But you don't get that without this movie being the hit it is. How did you feel revisiting it? I think we have fairly similar. This film sits as something fairly important to both of us in our film kind of history. It's been such a long time since I saw it that I was kind of experiencing it anew again, even though I knew where things were going. Yeah, yeah.

But I, you know, experiencing it at an older age, I was able to kind of get a bit more of like the nuance and I guess what it was going for in terms of like how it was presenting certain characters and, you know, like the titular beauty character. And I definitely got more out of what it was saying in terms of like her just wanting to be loved and feel like she was special. and the kind of self-destructive tendencies that, you know, she's trying to be a model and wasn't really,

she was doing things in ways that she didn't even realize was, like, harming her that she would probably, you know, when she grows up and looks back at herself, she would probably either regret or view under a different lens for sure. I don't think it aged terribly at all. There are definitely clunky aspects to this movie. Most notably, just like, within the first five or ten minutes, some of the dialogue and some of the conversation,

there's this kind of like, maybe a little bit pretentious, but like kind of like preachy, like kind of explicitly delivered ideas that are being expressed in the film. But it handles itself so well in terms of how it's paced, how it's edited,

the amount of, I guess, stakes and conflicts in the film and just the level, of interest between each stake in conflict, even as simple as the ones like the wife character, and she just wants to be the best realtor, right? Like, there's something fun about that. There's something, there's something interesting and engaging about it. And it works really well in this ensemble of different stories where every single performance

is fantastic, except maybe the daughter character. And she's not even bad, but she's just, there's just like a lot of competition. Yeah, exactly. Compared. Like everyone around her is like giving an Oscar worthy performance and she's just like fine. She's fine. She kind of sticks out. But, you know, all of these different ideas being packaged in this single film that is what, like two hours?

Yeah, two hours, two minutes. Yeah. It flies by. Yeah. It feels really short to me. It very much is a time capsule movie of 1999, especially with tones and ideas like, I got reminded of so many other films from, I think, all pretty much the same year, like Fight Club, like Magnolia. This felt like a much more focused version of Magnolia where a lot of our criticisms with Magnolia is like, okay, how do you tie all these different ideas together and all these different stories?

And a lot of them are really interesting. And it kind of like drags on for too long, whereas this, this feels like if you had a director's cut of Magnolia in a way where, well, not director's cut, but like, where you trimmed some things out and like, yeah, took another year with the script and then really decided like, okay, what are the most important stories? And then how can we make them all feel like they're actually connected and it's actually grounded? And it doesn't really feel like we're just going back and forth between a lot of like, I don't know, semi-related things. These are all characters that are like in the same block as each other. And it makes sense.

why they're interacting, but all of their stories feel real, like all of their conflicts feel justified within the purpose of the story. Yeah, and it's a fairly small pool of characters that are all linked through certain themes with one of them being like this sexual aspect. Every single character is impacted some way through their sexuality or the way they're repressing it or using it or something like this. I love that as a through line to like tie all these characters together and it never feels like, oh, we're spending time with this character now.

like in Magnolia, you know, it's like, I wish we could just get to the heart of this or what's interesting about this, but it's so snappy and well-paced, it never really gets stuck on a singular character that isn't interesting or a dynamic that isn't interesting or some, some interesting idea that it's playing with. Mm-hmm. They just, to me, it kind of, it simply boils down to, do you feel something during that plastic bag scene? If that scene works for you, I feel like the film's going to work for you.

And if it doesn't, you're just not going to get on with that. I have this vivid memory of, um, must have been about 17. And I loved this film at that time. I sent it to this girl. Um, she watched it. Uh, and after watching it, she was like, that was so pretentious. Nice. That plastic bag shit, that sucked.

And we kind of stopped talking after that, but, um, I, I do feel that way though. I feel like if that scene doesn't work for you, then it's an indication that this style of writing probably isn't going to either. Because it's quite heady. It's quite, it's not subtle. It really isn't. It's almost surreal. Like, especially with that character we're talking about who delivers that plastic bag speech. He's almost this, like, mystic character.

He doesn't really feel like a real person, but that doesn't matter to me. I love what he does to the story. He's like this instigator character. He's kind of part of the main character going through whose change with, like, the weed stuff. And, you know, him quitting right in front of Kevin Spacey's character and being inspired by that kind of stuff. Yeah. where he affects the daughter and this like, uh, obsession he has with documentation and, and his link with his dad.

There's like a lot of complexity going on there. And it's like surveillance thing he's doing, storing all these tapes. And it's another kind of like late 90s, like rise of technology and surveillance kind of thing that's put in there. And I love that that's part of it. Fascinating. I wouldn't even say that he doesn't feel like a real character, but he does stand out in a way that like, it's clearly intentional in a way where it's like, okay.

Yeah. I still believe that you're a young person, but you're written to have an old soul. Yeah, you're wise. Yeah. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Like, he's a much more wise kind of like, he's gone through enough shit and enough introspection and smoke too many superweeds or whatever. That's the only thing.

Yeah, that also kind of helps sell it as well, the fact that he is a teenager that's like a stoner and like, I made that joke with someone I was watching it with. It was like, this guy definitely smokes weed. Some of the stuff he was saying, it's, like, funny and introspective and philosophical like that. But I feel like it works as a character. He's core to the movie working. He seems like a character that's, like, going out of his way to, like, solve his own mind. Like, he's, one of his goals is his own introspection.

And he uses his own introspective experience to try and help other people get to where he thinks they should be. in their lives sort of thing. And like those characters do exist, like in real life. Yeah. So, yeah, I wouldn't even call that like unbelievable. I would say that like how certain dialogue is delivered. And there is like there is definitely a heavy handed nature to how ideas are presented in this film.

But I'm able to not really feel as though that's much of a problem because I do feel as though one of the core elements to this film is that it's a critique of this modern American family kind of life. And, you know, again, kind of like Fight Club is like the critique of modern society and work and corporations. Musculinity. Right.

So with the element of critique there, with the element of it being a criticism of these things, There is also inherently a level of satire. And so that's how I feel that helps the heavy-handedness and some of the, you know, some of the conversation. I feel like that helps it to work because it is as much as it is a drama and a comedy, it's very much like a satire film. Like those elements are very clearly present for me at least. Oh, definitely. Yeah, the balance of the humor and the drama.

is also another factor that I feel like makes it actually work. It keeps it within the just believable enough, just kind of cinematic enough, just surreal enough to sell everything it's going for. Because, yeah, when it gets serious, it does emotionally land when it is funny. It's really funny. Yeah. It's got some great dialogue in there. It's so weird that it's that it's balancing all of these different elements and still

feeling like the most 99 movie ever made in ways. and there's like bits and pieces of other 99 films in here. But the way that it is able to handle all of these things at once, like it's, it is an incredibly hilarious movie and it is satirical, but it doesn't take away from the seriousness and the misery of the characters, right? There are some very serious things going on in these characters' lives, and at no point in the movie does it ever feel as though that is being hindered by the other things that it's trying to do.

You know, you have this film where you're able to, you know, even the wife character, like when she cries, when you see her insecurities, when you see her interact with a fucking head honcho, big eyebrows, real estate guy. Oh, buddy. Yeah, yeah. And he gives her this piece of like, oh, yeah, you can work with me or whatever. Like, the performance and the way that she's written and how she's, She's acting and she's acting really incredibly and you can see that she's drunk, but you can also see that she is kind of like taken aback by that in the sense that she wasn't expecting that.

And you knew that she needed that at that point in her life. And she was like hoping and waiting for this sliver of hope. And you can really feel the compounded like decades of misery being built up in these characters in ways where with her, she's expressing it by now having this affair with the realtor guy and trying to take control of her career and make things feel like she's finally on the right path. And with Kevin Spacey's character, he's doing the whole fight club Sigma Mail, like, fuck you to everybody and I'm going to blackmail you and I'm going to get the car I've always wanted. I'm going to smoke weed every day.

Society sucks. And there is like it's balancing all these things at once, but it feels real and it's somehow fits and it somehow complements each story within the film. Like, these things work better together than if they were separate, which I think is really cool. Every character is in a state of like disillusionment except for Wes Bentley's character, which part of what makes him work as he's like the instigating agent of like the change in the daughter character, in Kevin's character. And yeah, just bouncing it with that tongue and cheek.

doing a lot. And even though it is throwing out lines like in a way, I'm dead already, like he says in the opening monologue. I don't know, it might sound corny when you just say it like that, but it is feeding into a central theme that is explored, I feel like very well. Yeah. This like lethargy to this experience they're living in, the idea of like, is the American beauty, like should you put a question mark after that? Is it them not seeing the beauty that is in front of them that they're refusing to see because they're so distracted by like material or jobs or just just the kind of innate irony of Kevin Spacey's change kind of being instigated by this like kind of pedophilic urge in and of itself is this like I guess critique on

the idea on the way high school sexualize children in cheer or whatever and yeah that being the thing that is simultaneously the the thing that instigates change for the character, but it is also his downfall. I feel like is the film acknowledging, it's not endorsing the behavior, which I feel like is some of the things I've been seeing. It's like, oh, it's romanticizing this idea of this man going through that, even though I feel like the film actually goes far and beyond to take any subtlety out of that situation as regards to the complexity of it.

He's manifesting and living our intrusive thoughts. there is something inherently satisfying about watching him do all of that even though we could all agree it's a moral and he's an asshole right it's framed as empowering to him exactly but it's not it's not framed as like a good thing either in fact the the character's arc ends with him not going through with what he was doing and the second she reveals that she's a virgin which and then he sort of returns more to being like a father figure and looks at the picture of his family, which is when he has this realization and then dies. Yeah.

He's killed in like a tragic sort of way, which I feel like is, that's kind of a bold, like, complex character arc to put in the lead of the movie, like, distracting Kevin Spacey, real life stuff aside, there's like a really creepy interview you can read about with him describing as like process and like love for this character in this movie. It's like, yeah, it's sort of like, more like how I am in real life. Ormette. They're sort of fucking weird like to read about now. method acting.

I don't think, I don't think Kevin Spacey really, and that character are hurt by that innately. I think it's actually one of the more interesting things that the film plays with. That's, that is a bold thing to do the late 90s there and to like follow through with it. And they're a bunch of, they had like lists of actors and because Sam Mendes was a first time director on this. Insane. It was pitched around to all sorts of different people, but there was declined. based on the subject matter of it. Cust and Dunst even declined an acting role in it because of like the,

the nature of the script and what it was playing with. So yeah, I don't think that is, I wouldn't blame someone for not enjoying the style of writing or the style of characterization or like the presentation or the, I think it's purposefully sort of like saccharine with the rose integration and having this kind of red color palette go throughout. But I like that. That works for me. I'm still trying to figure out what is exactly the part that is aged particularly badly outside of the fact that this is just kind of like it is in the conversation with like a fight club where you just absorb it through osmosis and like yeah, it is parodied in Madagascar and a family guy and it's just like everyone I guess knows it at this point. Like I think the family guy did a parody of it in 2022. It's just one of these I feel like. And it was accepted. popular at the time. I was reading that it was the the conversation at TIF specifically when it came out and it's like a huge huge movie. It did exceptionally well under DreamWorks a huge commercial success on a very small budget

considering. Mm-hmm. Yeah, 15 million. Yeah, only 15 million dollar budget for a 350 million gross. I mean, which is a good chunk and I went like it still we can look back at this point in time in 1999 where I don't know. What do we call that with inflation? Like 30 million at this point? Maybe even more. Maybe even more. Like, we need these, like, not micro, but not huge, but, like, good enough budget to be able

to have, like, Oscar-worthy performances and actors being involved on a project, not even necessarily, like, name actors, but, like, really talented people. They took big pay coats, too. And really great ideas. really great original ideas. Like, I'm longing for, like, that's my nostalgia bait there is like getting back to a point where you can fund these types of projects where, sure, they're taking a risk. They're taking, it's not Deadpool.

It's not alien, you know, like, it's not an existing IP. But you get creative people that, like, I don't know, was this like Alan Ball's, like, first writing project, too? Like he wrote two He wrote on sitcoms before Yeah written on some television series This is his feature length debut as a writer First time director

Sam Mendez And really like There's something to prove Yeah yeah exactly Like an out there Controversial concept I just I wish we

could have more things funded like this Where it has enough money to do exactly what it needs to do and still be ambitious without being like overinflated without being you know

a fucking hundred million dollar disaster or anything you know exactly yeah yeah that does involve like uh yeah vision people that have the the drive like Sam Menders who just come off stage directing I think has something to prove it shows in the direction I feel like especially that

dedication to the stage there's some really great blocking that seems very intentional. Oh, yeah. The blocking in this film is incredible. Yeah. Like one that pops into my head immediately is when Kevin Spacey first meets the Buddy character and it's framed a very particular way where Buddy, he's like on a step elevated. So his head is in like the top right of the frame.

And Kevin is like way down lower than him in the bottom left of the screen just to indicate that kind of power imbalance between them and where he is as a character at that point. And just just details like that. explored throughout the entire runtime. When the, the army dad is like sitting on the couch watching that, like older film and, uh,

you can see the wife like on, like on the very edge of the couch and her, her knees are like cheated outwards away from him, like implying set. Great show. It's telling such. Says so much. A deeply layered story through just how characters

are shown in a scene without dialogue, just shown. how they're sitting next to each other or how they're standing next to each other, you know, like, these are things that are important in films. And they work on our brains in ways that to many people are very subconscious, right? To many people that don't think about the how or whys to a film, it still works in a way that they might not understand. Yeah, that's why you do it.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's a level of detail that I really appreciate. and I wish more films remembered is a way that you can tell a story. The restraint and knowing what not to show, because I was like reading about some original ideas that were in the script and whatnot, like there was a whole for the kernel character that was supposed to be a whole flashback sequence with him, like showing how he fell in love with someone when he was in the army and all this.

But it didn't need it. It didn't need that as part of the structure. It's basically inferred anyway by what I have. happens with the character and it's much more powerful, I would say as a result, like instead of like breaking the flow of the narrative, let's just put a flashback in when the rest of the movie doesn't have that structurally. We know what to show. We know what to focus on apparently the Colonel's wife character as well, had a lot more dialogue and whatnot. They know exactly how to trim around that and again, imply, again, making it more powerful. Yeah, they just know the screen time

that these characters need, what they need to do for their arcs, how to tie them all together, how to edit between them. Yeah, it all fits very. kind of naturally. And the way it plays is really satisfying. Very, yeah. It's crazy how well everything works together despite how ambitious it is with how much it's trying to say.

You don't see a lot of that. You expect it to be a mess. And in many ways, it very easily could have been because there are so many lines delivered by Kevin Spacey where I think about what that is in the script or just like the line itself. And I think I couldn't imagine the overwhelming majority of actors being able to pull that off because it feels like a weird line that you'd have to put a lot of thought into how you're

going to deliver that line. But Kevin Spacey does an incredible job. His deliver is incredible. Yeah. And it's one of those things where I think a lot of the conversation in terms of like how this film is aged, I think that most of that probably just has to do with Kevin Spacey being a big piece of shit. And so I think the average person is probably less able to separate the lead performance of a film

from like the actual person when in reality, like there's so many people involved in this project. And I can still appreciate that he is, you know, in terms of like acting in performance, like there's a reason why he was that big. Like he's incredible at that. He's not incredible at being a good person. But he's pretty incredible at being a bad person. Yeah, he does a fantastic job in this movie. And I'm not going to deny that.

Yeah, exactly. I was so obsessed with Kevin Spacey growing up. He was like, one of the reasons I like got into the film. Like it's like how I used to watch movies was like, oh, let's just go through like everything Kevin Spacey's been in because I was like so into it. Um, so yeah, I've been dealing with that whole Me Too fallout and what that means with art and separating it from the artist for a while now. But yeah, I do think his performance holds up. I think it is just the combination of his chemistry with these different actors, the performance he brings the writing. I do love it. Yeah, empathetic and understanding. Yeah, just this quiet desperation that it communicates quite well. You mentioned it.

already but I love that shot where the estate agent the you know Annette Benning character does the blinds up before she does has a breakdown just little stuff like that like it's it's really hammers home these these ideas and themes quite well or like the uh the only characters actually see the like goth girl he's coincidentally the only one who's recording like nearly every interaction they have like what does that mean what does that say it's quite a weird like everyone else looking past each other, not seeing who they really are, and he's the only one who is, but it's with the added inclusion of this camera that's like documenting all of it. Yeah.

Storing all of it. And it's like, something kind of off-putting about that. Yeah. And like the repeated kind of motifs of this voyeurism. And like a lot of like key plot points are delivered just by like people looking through a window at someone else. Yeah. Right?

Mm-hmm. And you get some great shots from that too. when the menace Savari kind of lead American beauty character, as you called her. She sees him recording from the other house across the way. And she's like acting all kind of flamboyant and, you know, sexual. But he's not interested in that. He zooms right past her to Thorough Birch's reflection in that little circular mirror, which again, I know that just self-explanatory shot.

There's loads of great just imagery like that that communicates everything it needs to without a single word, which I guess leads us into the soundtrack, which we haven't mentioned. Another thing I fell in love with with this movie is quite a unique soundscape and like style that they're going for here. How do you feel about that music? I'd love to know what your thoughts are on that because it's quite unique, like the sounds and the rhythms that they're pulling out here. Yeah, I love it.

What's kind of funny about it is it wound up kind of like, it's one of these things that because it got so popular, you saw a lot of like copycats, especially in the soundtrack, where I feel the soundtrack for this film was doing something really special and effective, but unfortunately now it's like also kind of reminiscent of something that does feel like insincere

that a lot of other movies like tried to emulate with tone, which is kind of interesting, but again, you kind of have to just remember what it was at that place and time. And also, even even considering that, I do love the tones that it's going for. I do love that we have like almost this kind of like energetic, weird, percussive, like kind of theme that happens, especially when he's doing like his like hallucination fantasy scenes, right? I feel like the music works so well for that. I feel like the music is incredible and really helps the scene with the paper plastic bag scene.

Like the editing and how that's thrown together. It's all cohesive and it all, every piece fits in that sense. Like you couldn't. Yeah. Couldn't have it without the music. Yeah, I've always loved the score from this film. I think Thomas Newman can have some kind of repetitive sounds in the palette after a while when you watch enough movies that he scored.

But I do think this is a standout one and it complements it perfectly. And it really sells that tone, that kind of complicated tone we've been getting at, where it does kind of highlight the more important parts, but it sells that whimsy and comedy as well very well. Yeah, what other elements are there to mention in this? I'm still kind of curious on the, the revisiting and these articles that have been written about this because... They say it aged bad?

But yeah, like, let me just like read a quote from one here. American Beauty was a bad movie then and it's bad now. Kevin Spacey plays middle-aged suburban husband, Lester Burnham, with a good but boring job who recognizes how empty his life is when he develops an obsession one he almost acts upon with his teenage daughters' school friend played by Menace Savari. The debut film of director Sam Mendes, who's already made his name in the theater world, American Beauty, was crafted in the most pristine and soulless way manicured and buffed a bland tasteful, is one of the most laughably square movies about the destructiveness of conformity ever made. I just really do not agree with that. Who wrote that? That seems like a...

This was, I think, a Time article written in 2019. Yeah, there were a few kind of infamous articles that are linked in the Wikipedia that was going through. Yeah, yeah, this was the Time article. Huh. Yeah, I wasn't... you said that there's been this re-examination that says it's poorly aged. I just assumed like Redditors. I didn't know that there were these articles. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, there are a few different articles that you can go and read, but I

read them in full and the quotes on the Wikipedia are fairly disingenuous when you read the full article actually because a couple were like actually, they kind of started scathing, but they end with quite a, yeah, it kind of depends on you ask though and there's actually kind of some interesting conclusions we're reaching here and everyone has like these different interpretations and there's a lot to like break down but um yeah yeah i'm curious also what the community would think on that specifically to how it held up for them because i don't know there's an interesting part of the conversation with this i did a live watch along and i mean people really enjoyed it a lot we're watching for the first time so it almost seems like uh are we just like a

a contrarian thing right now? Are we just doing this because of how big and popular it is? And we go to like... I think it's literally just Kevin Spacey. I think that people's brains are just literally that simple. Just like the conversation about alien. It's just the treats. I'm so jaded at this point. But I'm just like, whatever, whatever dumbest answer is probably the correct one, but at this is point in life.

It's sad, yeah. Yeah. It's just like, just reading through little details like I never knew about this movie. Conrad Hall, it's the DP, who were coincidentally shot In Cold Blood that we did an episode on. American Beauty, Butch Cassidy, Road to Perdition. Really well short and lit. I do like the look of the movie a lot.

I love that kind of surreal look it's going for, including those dream sequences. It's just, yeah, a very good like production, effective all round. I guess the only other thing I've really got written down is this funny kind of MTV movie awards controversy, which is kind of funny. The most prestigious awards ceremony. Yeah, yeah. But like there was, this film was nominated for the best kiss. Uh-oh.

April 2000, MTV Movie Awards between for the kiss between Kevin Spacey and Lester, Burnham and a. No, Savare is Angela. DreamWorks rejected MTV's request for a clip stating they did not want to glorify the inappropriate kiss between the characters. A 42-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl. MTV rescinded the film's nomination. That's the fucking hum-movite. That's so funny.

The fact that they rejected it. So did they include it still just without a clip? Like what? Yeah, I don't know where the, where this originates from. I'll press on the source actually and see what it links to you. A Guardian article. American Beauty's screen kiss is too hot for MTV. Too high.

Friday. It was just too high. April 2000. That was the problem with it. That's fine. Oh, okay. Interesting. Just another time capsule movie.

But I enjoyed we visiting. I unfortunately don't really find Sam Menon. is to be that much of an interesting director nowadays. No, not at all. You really feel like you had something to prove with this, which I just don't really feel with some of his other movies, you know? Especially the later ones. I enjoy Road to Petition or whatever.

I had my film in 1917, but it's never felt like this movie again with him. But yeah, I will also shout out that Alan Ball. I would highly recommend six feet under. Great show that I haven't seen. for probably 10 years or so. That has been a long time for me. Yeah. It's probably been a similar amount of time.

But for how long it's been, I remember a hell of a lot of detail about that show. And I remember these characters still. I remember a lot of these moments. It's memorable to me in a similar way to American beauty, except just like stretched out and you have these really complex, lovable characters. So yeah, definitely check that out.

Hell yeah. But how do we feel about ratings? I think I had this on a 10 before. Same. And I'm like, I don't. I'm actually still kind of undecided because there's some things that I, um, you know, I can acknowledge their flaws, but I think that there's still something like important about it standing the test of time and not only being a classic, but a classic with like

such iconic imagery, you know, like where, where, where. Yeah. You have a thought in your mind of like an idea of a scene, and it was so good that it like, it didn't even get attempted to be recreated outside of like parody. Yeah. You know? Like the plastic bag, like the rose petals and the,

like a lot of that is just like, okay, that you, you made something memorable that stuck with the culture that is only attached to this. And I sometimes feel like in my mind, like that, not that in of itself, but like that along with other things kind of like encapsulates like a rating of a 10 in a way. But like I don't know. I'm kind of, it's it's it's no lower than a nine for me is what I have to say. Yeah, I'm kind of stuck between a nine or a 10 personally. Yeah. I just I can't get past the fact that each time I revisit this film I get a more complex understanding out of.

it or something more nuanced that I missed before. I do think there is something really powerful about that plastic bag image. I'm not surprised that he was inspired by that. And like the takeaway I really got from that scene this time. I don't know if I'm projecting this onto it, but it to me felt like a kind of like an agency thing. The film feels about, you know, personal agency and this kind of stuff. But no matter how you try to control the agency you think you have, there are elements that are out of your control, like a bag in the wind. You're not choosing which way the wind blows and the sooner you accept that, the more peace you'll find, like, the character eventually does in the movie. I think there's something beautiful about that.

And maybe that is a... Fuck it. I'm just going to give it 10. After this conversation, I feel like that kind of cements it for me. Yeah. Like, the criticisms I have with it are very mild and very easy to forgive. Yeah. or it's something to do with the fact

of when it was made and that time capsule nature of it like yeah it's all worth the rest of the film and the rest of the film is goes so above and beyond in terms of what it achieves and if a rating is going to be like a weight

of achievements versus flies then you know like it's it's way up there like it created something like super iconic and memorable and important. So yeah, fuck it,

10. Wow. Nice. I'm kind of glad it went that way. It's always sad when you revisit something and it's like, it doesn't hold up or it's like, man,

this. A low 10. A low 10, yeah. Sweet. Hell yeah. Questions? Let's do some questions then from a Sardonika's community.

Head over to the suggestion thread over on the subreddit if you want to ask questions for future episodes just like exeus prip did do you ever have any reoccurring dreams all the time you do good ones bad ones mixture of both i have like vivid vivid dreams like every night like i'm i i have i have more memorable dreams than like anybody else i know i'm living a second life really Do you have a dream channel? Yeah, I mean, like I write things I haven't note them down

My most, the song That I've written the most recently I wrote in a dream I wrote the song in a dream And then when I woke up I just translated it And just recorded it in real life Wow, that's really cool

Damn, you got some connection With your REM sleep or something Yeah, I think my brain Just never fucking shuts off It's the problem Yeah, I can relate to it. that because I've almost got like a similar affliction but in a different way where like my dreams or imagination can be so detrimental because it's so good I've basically

had to like train myself to return to nice recurring dreams I've got like a couple that I've like basically forced my brain to like okay you're stressed about this thing or whatever and you're You have to return to this one image, which, well, I've got a few different ones, but one I always return to is like just the image of like a bird just kind of like riding the air over the sea or something. Mm-hmm. And it's just like stuck in my dreams. But yeah, I'm kind of jealous that you can do that. Like for me, it's like a fight where it feels like that's more of almost like a creative landscape to draw ideas from for you.

The one thing I don't like about it is like 95% of them are set in like Edmonton. Like my, like either in the backyard or basement or main floor of like the old house that I grew up in. That pisses me off. Really? You don't have more like abstract. You'd wish you have more abstract dreams. I definitely don't get shots of birds in my head. Minor, yeah, like a bit, but like I, I think like the overwhelming majority of,

them like I am like a character within it experiencing a thing like I'm myself okay yeah and I get like what's weird about it in my dreams like there's like this um sometimes I'll like get like violent like in ways that just don't translate to real life where like I think about a week ago there was like a dream and like some fucking I was in a grocery store or something and some kid was like just like kicking me and like wouldn't leave me alone and so I just grabbed his leg and fucking like lift it up and just like rotate that bitch and then I woke up I'm like damn that was awful like I'm glad I don't do that in real life but in my dreams I'm just like it's there's something there's a there's less restriction like I'll fight back yeah you know oh you actually

are able to fight back because no yeah normally my dreams I'm like frozen or I'm not able to or the the I need to be running from something or getting away from something but like I can't control my body oh there's a weird so I get that too so if there's like a dream where there's like a like a looming threat or something or something is like chasing after me or like zombies or like a witch or something yeah I've learned to uh when I can't run I'll do this thing where I'll like very comically kind of like move my arms up and down in a way like I'm almost like an exercise like imagine if there are like two like paddle boards on like an axis or something that that are on either side of your body and you're pushing them down palms

facing down it would be like that except without the paddle boards existing so I'm like flapping my wings, but not like fast, but in a way where it's like, I'm almost like inflating a hot air balloon or something. I go like, and then I get like a little bit of ground each time. And they can never fucking chase after me. I just like fly the fuck away. I'm like, I'm like, I'll just go over here. And then I'll have like really cool. Some of the best dreams I have are like when I'm like in that flying state and I get this really nice like just very great view of like landscapes or like trees or mountains. or like it's cool being that high up and not have any consequences to it.

That's nice. Yeah. Man. Whereas a lot of mine just like horrifying. Like I actually had like kind of a movie moment dream where I was like screaming in my dream. Screaming. And it turned into reality. Like you know in the movies where they wake up like screaming.

Oh yeah. Dream within a dream? I did that. Kind of, yeah. But then it turned into reality as well. Like, I woke up mid-scream, like, sat up. Oh, that sucks. With my girlfriend, just like, what the, what the fuck is happening?

Um, I don't know. I don't even remember what the dream was about. I just know I was screaming in the dream. And that became reality. That was wild. I've had dreams that were like three layers deep where I've, like, woken up in the dream, but I was still dreaming. Inception.

Like, like, literally, it's crazy. It's fucking nuts. It's so weird. I used to, I have, I got traumatized so bad by my own psyche when I was like four, maybe younger, I don't know.

But like at the very oldest, like four years old that I, that I can remember, I can still remember certain like dreams that I had, that it was just like absolute, just like terrifying, psychologically damaging shit. Just every single fucking night.

Like I would have nightmares every single fucking night when I was like four years old. And I guess I got, I got it all out of my system in the sense that like I continue I continue to have dreams every night but there's a part of my brain that's like learned that that's not real I guess to just be able to cope and deal with that sort of thing so that I'm not getting traumatized every single night so now when like if if let's say and this happens a lot less frequently if let's say I have a dream where like there is a threat and something's like trying to kill me or like zombies or whatever

and there's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. For some reason, my psyche just, like, doesn't take it as seriously anymore in the sense that, like, even if I don't have the lucidity of knowing that I'm in a dream in a conscious way that I'm telling myself, I don't wake up, like, sweating. I don't, like, it's just like, it's like I watched, like, a mid-horror movie where I'm, like, not affected by it, which is nice. But, yeah, that doesn't happen nearly as often anymore. Yeah, I used to be obsessed with the idea.

of lucid dreaming. Like that that's a cool concept to me, like being able to control your dreams or whatnot. Um, have you ever had sleep paralysis though? That is nasty. A couple times. It's too, it's too far. This is the line being blubbed. I hate that. Like, I, my one was, uh, I've only had it one, one time, one time. Um, but I, I, I saw a figure of a man walking into my bedroom and just walking to the side of me and just like staring at me and like, that's what I thought I saw. It was like, oh, horrifying. God, it was horrible. It just seems so real. What was your one? I'll have like, I used to have dreams where, like, everything would be dark and I would try to turn on a light.

And the light wouldn't be working. I'd be like in a basement. Like very, very similar vibes to Skinnamarink. Okay. Oh, freaky. Yeah, I know. It was like that's part of what makes the film really cool is it's very uncanny in terms of its like dreamlike atmosphere. Yeah, I love dreams in films and the way different filmmakers explore that idea because it's so, it seems so different for everybody. Have you ever seen Waking Life?

No, it doesn't ring a bell. It's a Richard Linklater rhodoscoped film. Oh, but mean it's checked those on. And within that film, they actually, like, taught me that, like, apparently one thing that your brain is not capable of doing in a dream is changing lighting like that. So flipping on and off a light switch is a way to tell whether or not you're in a dream. And there's another one, right, with, like, the text or, or, like, time watches or something. You know what's weird? People said you can't read text in your dreams.

I've 1,000% read shit in my dreams. 1,000 billion percent, because I remember learning about that and then having dreams later where I was reading something on my phone. I remember specifically remember dreaming about like shit that like I was reading something on my phone. I was like making a social media post in my dream or something. But I remember waking up and being like, okay, well, that's debunked. Or at least for me.

Right. Yeah. It's normally too abstract for me to. have that level of control. It's like, I'll be in like a beach that looks like the end of Evangelion and there's like a giant crab and like I just have no control of it's just so crazy.

So are you like usually not even like a character in your dreams? Sometimes it would be like as if I'm stood there observing by looking at it but I can't really control anything and nothing's really reacting to my presence. It's very, very odd. almost like a Salvador Dali painting or so.

It's very unsettling for me. Sometimes I'll have a dream where I'm like myself watching a show or a film and then like seamlessly the show that I'm watching I'm in. Does that make sense? Have you ever experienced that? Yeah, no. Yeah, I have experienced that. Yeah.

And then your dream self doesn't understand that there's anything illogical about that. And then you're watching something and then you're in it. And then maybe later the layer will come back and you're still watching that. But your brain's like just trying to tell a story, I guess, of like, you know, the way that I describe dreams or the way that I've come to understand dreams personally is that it's your, there's a part of your brain that's always responsible for creating a narrative. Because what we're doing right now, like us talking or you listening at home, what you're doing is you're just throughout. every point in your life, you're just receiving stimuli. There's a part of your brain that's responsible for taking that stimuli and turning it into something that's a narrative that makes sense, a story that you tell yourself that you're able to

use to function and make quote-unquote decisions in your day-to-day life to survive evolutionarily. You need that in order to, you know, not eat the bad berries or whatever. Escape predators, et cetera, et cetera. Now do taxes. But that part of your brain never really. truly see it doesn't cease to exist when you're in your sleep mode like a computer needs to restart every once in a while get back its memory and so when you're sleeping the narrative part of your brain where even though a lot of your brain functionality is shut down there's still

a narrative part of your brain that's trying to make sense of stimuli that that you're receiving. And this can be evidenced by things like if you know yourself well enough and also anecdotally, there's lots of tons of experiences that other people have had with this, where like if they eat a food that makes them like kind of stomach icky before they sleep, like right before they sleep, you can have nightmares. If like if let's say you ate like five pepperoni sticks and a tub ice cream and then you go right to bed, you're probably going to have nightmares. And I think that that's your brain's way of feeling a kind of stimuli being like, oh, something. wrong but in your sleep state your brain is telling us it needs to tell a story like that

part of your brain doesn't shut off you're always gonna be be needing to be fed some sort of narration so your brain goes like oh what must be happening here is you're being chased by a monster or something right like that must be explaining the feeling yeah it's something to do with when you like sleep is healing it's like when we yeah When we heal, then it's a soft reset. There must be a processing thing. Yeah, basically. Yeah, it is like when you press a reset on your PC and it's like filtering through the memories,

but it's getting a little bit stuck sometimes as it's putting some of them together and showing them to you and you don't really able to break down that process. What are unique, like, phenomena? Yeah. Describe. It's like the same idea behind like, this has never worked on me and people tried to do it to me. But apparently this works on some people. You like take a sleeping person and then like put their hand in warm water and then they like piss their pants because it's like your brain is like,

oh, what is warm? What? Like it's trying to explain the stimuli. I guess you're going pee right now or something. So that apparently works on some people. It doesn't work on me. I consider one of my superpowers to be able to have to pee in real life, in a dream, pee and not pee in real life. So I'll like, I'll literally in my dream billions of times. Like so many times I'll use the bathroom in my dream. Wake up, I'm fine. And like maybe I have to pee like in real life. But I have my regular life self doesn't piss the bed, which is awesome.

That is a superpower. I'm very happy about that. It really is. I'm glad for that. Damn. I wasn't expecting that much fuel that. of the... Oh, I have...

The dream one, but... The dream one, but... I do like thinking about it and trying to... I don't know, people like, study these things and we still don't really fully know for sure, right? It's not like... Yep, we've figured that one out. The brain is just so... Incredible.

But let's do this one from Cynic Docky. Two, three, nine. It was recently reported that Jimmy Kimmel will not be returning to host the 2025 Oscars. Which group of host should take his... place. He's got five lists here and you've got to pick. One, The Rock and Jason Statham as Luke Hobbs and Owen Shaw. Two, Michael Keaton and Eddie Redmayne to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Birdman's best picture win. Three, Joaquin Phoenix, James Corden and digitally resurrected slash AI voice generated Philip Seymour Hoffman. Oh no. Four. Tilda Swinton and Jimmy Fallon or

five, Alex Belmont and Joe Vargas. I obviously wrote five. Hell yeah, five all the way. We almost had it like not an easy answer, but you go to it. All right. So what's your second place then? Because they made it too easy. It's got to be Keaton. Keaton Redmond.

Yeah, what were you thinking? I mean, I like to tell the Swinton enough that like I would just like to see. Yeah, I mean, but it would make it would make her even better next to Jimmy Fallon. True. Yeah. Are you able to actually distinguish the Jimmy's? Like, can you picture in your head who Jimmy Kimmel is and who Jimmy Fallon is? Unfortunately, yes.

I know what you mean. I know exactly what you mean, but yeah. I've seen too much of Jimmy Kimmel to not have that burned into my brain in a negative way. Right. Yeah. Whereas I feel like if I had to like draw Conan O'Brien from memory, I could do that or some of these other people. But these, dude, Jimmy Kimmel and Fallon, they might as well be the same person to me. Too many Jim, Jimmy's going around right now.

Too many Jim Jams? Way too many Jim Jams. James Marsden 0472 says this. Have you guys had and enjoyed Brat Summer? Yes, actually. And it took me a long time, and I'm glad this question was asked now and not a month ago because I finally got around to listening to Brat and I love it. And I wasn't...

You know, I wasn't huge on Charlie X-CX before, and Gael recommended me an album at one point. I was like, eh, not quite... And I knew that she worked with Sophie, and I love Sophie. But, yeah, there's something about Brat that really works for me. And there's quite a few tracks that I really enjoy. And I've listened to the whole album like at least three times now. and might listen to it some more when I run some errands in my vehicle today.

What songs you listen to of it? Because I've also listened to it a couple times, so I enjoy it. Oh, I just listen to the whole album from start to finish. And then maybe eventually I'll like pick a few tracks out to add to my bangers playlist on Spotify. It's publicly accessible if anybody wants to hear one of the most jarring playlist. in terms of like different genres. I might have to add that. Yeah.

How do I find it? Just, I don't know. How do you, let's see if I can find it. Normally, like, is it got like a playlist, a playlist name? Because I've got a couple like public playlists. Um, if you just search their name. Is that what it's called? Uh, yeah.

Uh, hold on. If you search Adam Johnston Spotify, bangers with a Z or Zed. Adam Johnson. Then you should be able to find. I found it on Google. it's just literally any song that I currently like and some of them are nostalgic

some of them are like newer ones and they're just yeah I keep updating it sometimes I'll remove a few sometimes I'll add a few I hope you yeah so I'll be adding some tracks from this album to that for sure some of the tracks I don't know if I could name but like that slower moody almost kind of like

image and heapy kind of one I really fucking love I was just surprised by the whole album, to be honest. Again, I was never really a Charlie X, CX. Same joyer. Like the name was always there in the background. Whenever I'd hear one, I was like, yeah, I get it. It's not really for me. Yeah, somewhat about this.

I guess it is a brat summer because some of these songs really speak to me, man. This production, this like kind of electronic sound they're going for. I'm right there for it. Yeah. And like the some of the interviews with her talking about it are funny. I haven't you know. She's talking about like she's British, obviously you can hear it. She's like a big figure here.

But there was this strange interview with her talking about like, yeah, I just want I get what she meant by it. She was saying like, yeah, I didn't really want to use metaphors. I wanted this to be like simple. This is about just like going to the club. Club classics is very like, you know, torn back. And she was almost doing herself a disservice in that interview. She's a pretty good, like, lyrics in here.

The metaphors you do implement are actually really good. I like the metaphors in Apple, for example, or whatever. Yeah, I don't know too much about her, but I like the branding too as well with just the, that green album cover and the one word and there is a vibe to it, I guess. Good branding, right place, right time. Yeah. There's a lot going for it. For sure.

Okay. Should we do, should we do one more? here? Let's do it. Let's end on this one from The Des Killer. After about 10 years of any closure on the main story, Adult Swim released a film for their meta-metallocalypse. Metal-Oclips show back in 2023. Out of any TV show, book, film, music that has been left unfinished,

what would you like to see you get a proper ending? Let's see, I don't know. Game of Thrones would be nice if they ever finished it. It's funny or that it's bad. as a person who doesn't watch it. I feel like it's over. There's no way yet at this point. Like, I don't think the books are ever even going to come out.

All right. I want to see book two and three, M. Night Last Airbender trilogy. We can still do it. It doesn't matter if they're like all in their 30s now. Same cast. It might improve it. Yeah, honestly. Kung Pow would love a sequel to that.

I would love a spirit. Successor. I was thinking about this the other day. There's room for that like black dynamite is almost a spiritual successor in the sense that it's just like a very funny parody movie, but like I want to see I want to like I feel I feel like someone could just dig through like nonsense unheard of bad like kung fu movies or something and just find something that you could make a spiritual successor to Kung Pow with and not even even like half the pay royalties because it you know it could be a genre sort of thing. I always want more spiritual successes. It's kind of what I was getting at in that alien discussion where it's like,

let's just see stuff that's inspired by these things you love. We don't need to see it again. Exactly. Let's just filter this a little bit. Because a lot of the, I'm trying to think of like some big, what was like the last like big, oh man, this this was shaping up to be good.

But because it didn't perform, we didn't get a sequel to it. Because that's what I was scared of happened. to doon after part one like if it didn't perform then we never would have got a part two or whatever but uh tron tron legacy oh we're getting that we're literally getting that um yeah outside of Game of Thrones I don't really have anything hmm yeah I don't know scarranger there's a few that uh I should be thinking of that I am not yeah leave in the comments if you think of a good one all right

that was a question that was question time thank you for the questions thank you time for a wreck what you got fuck it waking life let's do it oh sweet yeah there works for me yeah i've got the umd to be open right here hour 39 2001 let's go directed by richard link later if you would like to not get spoiled for waking life watch it before the next episode. These episodes come out every two weeks. You can listen to them early. Sardonicast.com.

Sign up for premium. It's only $2 a month. Also, patreon.com slash sardonicast. Also, click the join button on the YouTube thing. You'll also get them early. You'll get them particularly early because we're recording a few episodes early before I leave for TIF.

So support the show. Help us out. Money, please. Please, please, money please. Have a happy Shrek 5, a crispy. Have a crispy Shrek 5. That's crispy. Fuck this shit.

I'm so mad that we have something that we're going to keep meaming on from Trap. Because it reminds me of the movie Trap. You loved Trap, didn't you? Oh, I loved it, yeah. All right, thanks for listening, everybody. Bye-bye.