The Dogg Zzone by 1900HOTDOG - Dogg Zzone 9000 - Episode 4, The Over The Top Genre

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

Seanbaby and Brockway demand the presence of author Jason "David Wong" Pargin to explain the most important movie genre: Over the Top. Also discussed: Road House, The Wizard, and Duets. You will literally not believe us about Duets. You'll look it up after this.

1,900, Frankfurt! 1,900, Frankfurt! Our podcast is over! And with Maximilian, ciao! Do you say Frankfurt podcast? Correct! Yeah! The craft is not trapped, it's not without!

Send it to the dog zoo for an hour! Come on Sean, you'll catch it! 1,900! 1,900, Frankfurt! 1,900, Frankfurt! 1,900! 1,900, Frankfurt! 1,900, Frankfurt!

Yeah! Noi, 1,000! Welcome to episode 4 of the Dog Zone 9000 podcast, the official podcast for 1,900 hot dog. With me as always is cracked legend and sci-fi author Robert Brockway. Oh wait, I'm the cracked legend and sci-fi author. Exactly! You're gonna have to be more specific. Isn't that wonderful that we have a second cracked legend

and sci-fi author here with us. Jason Parger who writes his David Wong. Welcome to the show. So you know how like the walking dead had that after show where it was just Chris Hardwick and some celebrities kind of sitting around like bored talking about the episode that had just occurred? Sure. Don't take this the wrong way, but I feel like this podcast is just the after show

for that theme song. That's a very good point. The audience came for that, but they're just kind of still got their device on so we'll just talk, we'll just sit with them for a while just to keep them company while we're all digesting the theme song. I'm gonna be curious how people like the new German version, which again we... There's a German version? Yeah, and we have no idea why we made it.

We just said, let's fucking do it. And it made us laugh and so we did it. We don't have a bit about it. This will not be a German themed podcast. It could be Oktoberfest. Like a... Right? We didn't mention this in October.

That's my seventh favorite Dennis Miller joke. Oh, that was a Dennis Miller. You didn't get from my impression. No, that was like maybe a little bit Christopher Walken, but like a drunk Christopher Walken. Maybe I should have brought in something about Oingo Boingo, babe. Yeah, there you go. See, drunk Christopher Walken. But really, what better tribute to Dennis Miller than to do a reference that everyone else in the room completely missed?

Because only you know the bit you're doing and the rest of us are like... Because there was a few years when all of America was required to laugh along with Dennis Miller because we were afraid that maybe we were wrong. Yeah, like... I didn't get it. That Crispin Glover movie that he mentioned. Great. Kierkegaard.

Yes, I studied Kierkegaard. My favorite. I'm sitting there age 15 acting like I know who all of these 70s TV stars are that he's referencing. Everybody do your favorite bit from Dennis Miller right now. Your favorite joke. What is it? You know you've got it. What's the big deal if the temperature rises a few degrees? I guess we'll tell the grandkids we moved to Arizona, babe.

I'll take the money. Was that a real one? I'll take the sweaters and use it to buy a rifle to hunt to carry a boat, babe. That's real. That's real. You did have a real one. My God, I am astonished. I thought for sure. There was a discount like furniture and other crap store in Portland under a bridge.

We'd go in there to like laugh at the obscure old items they had. One day in like, I want to say probably 2012, we went in there and they had an entire shopping cart full of talking Dennis Miller dolls. All the same doll. And they were like a dollar and nobody had taken a single one. It was like a thousand there. I would have bought the whole cart. That's what I am with Dennis Miller. How many are in this cart and then double it and that's what I'll give you.

I probably could have offered him like five bucks for the whole cart and then just started like a really creepy army built a shed out of Dennis Miller dolls. Just put strange messages on them and hide them around Portland. Anyway, that's my perfect memory of Dennis Miller. We've all got one. What's yours? The topic of today's show is not actually Dennis Miller. I'm going to try to get some fucking reins on this. We're going to be talking about over the top, the film, but not the film, the genre of film.

And I think between the three of us, Jason, you're probably the best communicator. If you want to try to explain what over the top is as a genre. Okay. Before I explain the over the top genre, the too long didn't listen version is. In movies, sometimes they want to do a movie about a specific subculture. You know, the way I like staying alive is about disco or the way that kickboxer was about. I don't remember what sport that was about. But yeah, exactly.

They were they want to do a movie about a subculture. But the problem is the screenwriter doesn't actually know anything about the subculture and also the subculture either doesn't exist. Or if it does, it's in a very limited and sad form. So occasionally they will make a movie that really acts like some deeply uncool job or hobby. The movie takes place in this big money high stakes world of blank. For example, over the top is a 1987 film starring Sylvester Stallone. The character's name was either of you. Hawk.

A top McGillicuddy. No, the real name. You're not going to outstupid the real name of a Sylvester Stallone movie. I'm sorry. It's Lincoln Hawk. And this movie is about the high stakes big money world of professional arm wrestling. I remember that movie. They would like be watching arm wrestling like in every bar in every airport.

It was like the most popular televised sport. That's the point because this is the thing that you see happen in movies where it will be about some and we're going to run through a few examples. Something in real life if you like it exists. There's professional arm wrestling competitions. I do not doubt it. But this is a film in which that's like America's sport the way you know like karate kid. They took place in a town or a world where like teenage karate is the sport everyone is obsessed with. Everyone's life revolves around that thing.

And then over the top. It's funny to bring that up because I do think the new Cobra Kai show which is weirdly good is a perfect example of how to handle that whole high stakes world that these people live in. Because you never stop being reminded while you're watching that show of how it's important to these characters but the rest of the world does not give a shit. Like the stakes in Cobra Kai are like the gym memberships of 11, 15 year olds. And there's even a line in the movie where Johnny and Daniel San run into each other on a double date. And those women's like oh you guys know each other and Daniel San's wife says oh yes their schools have rival karate wars. And it's so ludicrous even in the show. Like everyone just instantly knows how absurd it is for these two characters to have this as their motivation.

And so I guess I just want to point out that this genre is not necessarily bad but we will probably be picking absurd examples of it. Yes. For example one of my favorite movies of all time is The Color of Money the Tom Cruise Paul Newman pool playing movie. I have no idea if pool hustlers if they actually have this whole subculture where they play $50,000 a game and eventually wind up in Vegas. I don't know. But in the case of over the top that's why we're calling this the over the top genre. Because over the top the plot is Sylvester Stallone is a truck driver driving across America to go to the world arm wrestling championships. And to try to win the love of his estranged son.

Right. And like $250,000 plus like a half million dollar truck. It's not just love it's like hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money. What a huge likelihood of that being a pain in your ass. If someone gave me a big rig I'd be like god damn I don't even know what I'm going to remark that. Exactly. That's the glorious thing about over the top. The prize is $100,000 in cash in a semi truck worth $250,000.

And he came from the trucker division. That was his thing. He was the champion of the trucker division. That's right. Arm wrestling which is why he got in there. It was a subgenre of a subgenre. Yeah. Just truckers arm wrestling.

That's why every single stop every single truck stop he went to it wasn't just like taking a shit in a shower and trying to find a hooker. They were all just in there arm wrestling every single person. Because this is a world like in kung fu movies where you can a fight will break out in a grocery store and everybody in there knows kung fu. It's like that only with arm wrestling. Right. It only if this is a world where everyone knows how to arm wrestle. Like you're not a respectable person unless you've got some level of arm wrestling. And yeah if you happen to get into that division if you're not a trucker then too bad.

This is the prize and that's that. And so the reason I'm bringing up all of these plot details is that the main like emotional through line of the movie is that the like his wife's parents or whatever. Whoever has custody of the kid don't approve of his lifestyle as a mere trucker. But when they come see him compete as an arm wrestler and he wins they realize he is a suitable father for this child. Right. And he wins custody of the child by winning the arm wrestling competition because in this universe if you go to an adoption agency and they ask what's your job. And you say I'm a professional arm wrestler. That makes you more likely to get the child.

They give you several opposed to like a truck driver where they're like truck driver. Nobody does that for a living now arm wrestling. That's a career. So this is the point. And the thing is that even though I think I'm not even sure all of our examples were made after over the top. It doesn't matter once over the top was made that became the genre. It owned the genre. These are the over the top genre of films.

Now are we acting. Are we going to sit here and pretend that the real world does not turn on the whims of arm wrestling because it does. That's true. It did change the world. So I think before over the top came out we would have found it absurd. Now of course we all have our favorite arm wrestlers and we all went to arm wrestling school for a couple years. If any of you seen the new snakes on a plane money plane. I don't think so.

Have you heard about that? I've definitely watched seven or eight YouTube reviews of it because that's how I was like film now. It was the snakes on a plane of this generation I guess where like everybody wants to make a meme about it. Nobody wants to watch it. But apparently that movie which was by and for and almost exclusively starring the Lawrence brothers of Joey Lawrence Blossom fame. With Kelsey Graham. Kelsey Graham was the big bad. Do you know how that movie got made?

No. Arm wrestling. I'm not kidding. The youngest Lawrence. Is that a weird joke? No I'm going to explain. The youngest Lawrence, Andrew Lawrence met up with the producer and the producer challenged him to an arm wrestling match. But the stakes being Andrew Lawrence would have to be in his next movie for free if he lost.

And Andrew Lawrence countered with if I win I get to direct it. That's amazing. And he wrote and directed money plane. You can check. If I would have given that movie a 2 out of 10 it now is at least an 8 or 9 out of 10. It's a movie made by and exclusively by arm wrestling. The Lawrence is our incident. But I'm going to have to push back a little bit here because I feel like that's the exception that proves the rule.

I think that Sean if you went to a truck stop tonight and you found a large man who said hey if I beat you in arm wrestling you have to be in my movie tonight. I don't think Kelsey Grammer would be in it. And if he is there's like a 50-50 chance as a snuff film. But either way it's probably not going to happen. I would have to kill Kelsey Grammer if I lose this arm wrestling match. He would kill you. Can we be real? What are the rules?

No you're right. Kelsey Grammer would probably kill me. Like before it even started I just see a knife come out of my chest and hear his laugh. You've got too much love in your heart to take him. You might be right. That's what people say about me. Not to get us off on another tangent here because we've been flowing so smoothly so far. But the premise of Money Plane for those of you who have not seen it.

One, the movie appears to have been made on a budget of like $2,000. Like after they paid Kelsey Grammer. It's like one room with a curtain. It's all they could raise by arm wrestling. They literally have like an interior airliner set that's like 10 feet of it. And they just keep walking through like a curtain and pretending like they've entered another room. They just redecorated that one. But the entire premise is that they have a high stakes casino that's on an airliner.

Yeah, an international water. So like you could just do whatever. So of course everything is legal. Everyone knows that's the rule. Like if you're taking an international flight. If you stab somebody on that flight, there's nothing they can do. Fair game. Sky Law is what they call that.

Yeah. If you've ever ridden on a plane before. I want you to imagine like a roulette wheel or any kind of casino game that involves chips or any kind of like cards staying on the table. Like these are not, this is not like a smooth operation. This thing hits some turbulence. Like your entire game is now on the floor. If I recall they pay lip service to that in the movie. Like they have some sort of a special stabilizer and also they hire the best pilots in the world.

I think it's like they know that you're thinking that and so like no audience. We've at least established why that's not the case. Like how it implies the just complete lack of morals on behalf of pilots. The best pilots in the world are willing to drop everything and fly the money plane. A man routinely fucks an alligator like every flight. Also the only reason you ever have turbulence on your plane is because your pilot is garbage. Yeah, that's how air works. Mother fucker.

Anyway, over the top movies. Yes, let's get to the over the top movies. You know what? Before we start, I would like to point out to our listeners that Jason, David Wong, Parjan's book is in stores now. Zoey punches the future in the dick. I'm only halfway into it, but I love it. I want to say some nice things about you and make you very uncomfortable before we start.

I love the dark dystopian future you've created that feels like all of the things I hate about. Right now, if it gets accelerated in the future, like, like the idea of in sales and internet trolls sort of becoming larger communities and like dictating how we have to deal with the world and interface with others is a is a super dark way to look at the future. So congratulations for making me a little squeamish. That's unusual. I can feel the, the work you put into the book. It's, it's, I don't want to sound like a fruit loop, but like, you know, you can read a Murakami book or a Cormac McCarthy book and it's kind of exhausting. You have some of that, but it's not exhausting like characters will make observations that are very clever and funny. But it, it doesn't distract from the flow of it.

So I just want to say that it's, it's very well written and congratulations on a, on a good book. I have finished it and I would like to chime in with that it ends super strong. I love it and I can't wait for more. I think, and this, this means a lot. I think I like it better than John dies at the end series. It's such a good book and it's, it's very timely without, I think maybe not meaning to be timely. It explains everything about the world without actually talking about our exact scenario. It is not overtly political, but it's very social and everybody should buy like everything.

It's just, it feels very wise. Also, you're a very good looking man and an intensely sexual creature. Sweet dick basket. It's because, okay, that's extremely kind. I guess to reassure the listeners, it's not darker than like our present reality. Like it is, the title is literally Zoey punches the future in the dick. It is, it is a, it is a light, it is a light tone. I don't want to give the wrong tone and there's a lot of whimsy,

but I'm saying that the, the implications of this dystopia is troubling to me more so than just like a regular apocalypse. Yeah. But also, but our current apocalypse is also very stupid and silly. You can be both and I think the book is both. But there's not like a president Denny Trump. No, it's not about. It's not about, that's what I was saying. It's not about now.

So. Funk's old brother. Anyway, but that was it. The, the risk that Sean took there, like selling the book that he's only read the first half of knowing he could go, he could go home tonight and finish it in the whole second half is just like, well, if you think about it, the, you know, the, the Holocaust, we don't really know that it happened. But no, that was a, that was a huge twist. The whole book was all about.

But with a three year old getting halfway through a book is a pretty huge accomplishment. Like, I don't really get a lot of reading done. We also have a website where we do daily updates. So time is not like my best friend. That website is called something. I can't remember the name though. Right. Right.

Only there was something about pizza and song. No. I was in German today. I forget. I forget what it was. 900 frankfurt. Dot com. I can't remember the last book I read for pleasure where I wasn't like something they sent me to give like a blurb on.

Like I just, and that's all I have to do now. I'm full time. The Bible author. Yeah. It's, I have my processes. I buy books and store them on my Kindle. And they just, they just sit there. It's, I guess it's, it's all I can feel like I did something by buying them.

And by the way, just again, we, we will get to the over the top movies in just a moment. But I think this whole podcast should be us talking about how we're going to get to the movie. Turned out we actually lied about having more examples. It's like innocence. I did not come up with anything. You came up with a great premise for a podcast, but none of us fucking watched a single movie. Yeah. It's no one, no one did it other than, than over the top, which invented the genre and then killed it.

No, for people out there who are only showed up to Sean and Brockway's work through one 900 hot dog is the name of the site. Me and Sean have been tangentially working on kind of one thing or another for 20 years. Because my first website was on the UGO network in 1999. That's part of a portal of comedy sites back when they used to have web brings and web portals of stuff. And they still owe me like 11 grand. Yeah. Oh yeah. They stopped paying all of us when the bubble, when the bubble first one of one of multiple industry collapses.

I have lived through, but it's, it's weird because that's one of the longer work relationships I've had in my life. But most, this will be, you know, like the longest we've spoken on the phone. And of course we're recording it for podcast purposes, which is how all of my relationships go. I worked with Jack O'Brien every single day for 10 straight years. And the only time we spoke on the phone was for podcasts. We invited all of the audience to listen in. Monetize your human connection so that other people can feel like there. Well, I'm glad that on one of our first conversations, I could make you so uncomfortable with all those compliments.

Does that make you uncomfortable when you get complimented like that? On one hand, it should. But on the other hand, you cannot survive as a creator unless you're willing to spend like half your day telling people how great your, your thing is. So at this point, you've come to believe your own height. It's like, it's like, you know, I because at some point I'm going to write a book that everyone hates. And I it's like, I have if I'm going to have all of the abuse when that comes, then then I should have the right to accept people being nice to me about about the book because this is literally the only thing I know how to do. I have no other skills. I cannot.

I cannot play a musical instrument. I'm not good at managing money. I don't make friends. You know, I'm not handsome. I have no athletic ability. I cannot dunk a basketball. I can only write things. It's the one thing I have.

So yes, I can, I can accept compliments about this because like this is all this is all I've got. I have personally seen you dunk a basketball lying piece of shit. You're so humble. I have. I do have a pitch. What about the over the top of plate spinning the whole novel about like the world's greatest plate spinner trying to get to the, you know, world champions of plate spinning? What do you think? Here's the thing.

Once we get through these examples, we're actually going to come up with a reliable template for making that happen because you've got to have like the evil plate spinner. You've got to have the person who's trying to like to like rig the contest. Right. You've got to have the case where somehow you have to win the heart of someone else and it has to be in a world where everyone just you have to vet like slang. Yeah, it has to start low key. It has to start in like dive bars and shit where you're like, this is the underground world of this and we make it to the professional world of plate spinning the big time. And there's got to be there has to be both work like one superstar plate spinner that you aspire to face someday. But also dread.

That was in over the top. The guy who was the five time world champion and the hawk had never beaten him. So anyway, but yeah, we've we'll I will bet most of our examples today have have got something something to the tune of that. Who wants to go first? Why don't we go? I can do it chronologically. Oh, that's a great idea. All right.

Jason first or that but Rockway first. When was Roadhouse was Roadhouse post 1989 Roadhouse was 1989. Oh, shit. I'm bringing the wizard. I didn't write down the year Roadhouse takes place. Jesus Christ. I wrote an entire article about Roadhouse that is will be on the site by the time you guys hear 89 sounds right. Did you get the month?

Did you not get the month of Roadhouse? Because my it's also 1989. You did not come prepared for this situation. I do think Roadhouse is the most well known of the movies. Let's do it. I'll start with you're up. Roadhouse is a Patrick Swayze movie from I think 1989 because it was the next movie he made after dirty dancing. And so he set out to make just the most heterosexual movie possible straight because he was scared that dirty dancing.

Like he didn't want to get typecast as like the dancing guy. He wanted to be the tough guy and in the late 80s like we were it was a different time. But in many ways it was not a different time. But he plays in Roadhouse a bouncer but not just any bouncer. He plays one of the world's top bouncers a cooler which is like the king of the bouncers. But it's his job is if someone's routing a bar he comes and gets them to leave the bar and cools them off. There you go. Or he puts them in a cooler.

Sometimes. Yeah, either way because I think he's like the bouncer who commands the other bouncer. But he got to that position by being the superstar the Michael Jordan of bouncers. In this movie Patrick Swayze makes $400,000 a year as a bouncer and drives in Mercedes because he is at the top of the top bouncer wise. I did the math on it and he actually in today's money he makes about a quarter million dollars a year assuming he works five days a week. Yeah, but he was getting paid in cash and there's no tanks taken out. Either way it's he making more than like what a doctor or a lawyer would make in that era. Because when a bar in America is so overrun with hooligans they can bring in Patrick Swayze.

His last name is Dalton. They all just call him Dalton. I honestly do not remember what his first name is. It's not Sam. I'm not sure they even give him one. Davey. Davey Dalton. Probably.

It's just Dalton because the point is in this movie when they say Dalton everyone in the world knows who that is. That's the world famous bouncer Dalton. Oh shit that's Dalton. He doesn't need two names. And that thing the Brockway just said there he's citing people people say that in the movie over time. Like that's Dalton. Oh fuck that's Dalton. Yeah, because everywhere in the world you go any bar they know Dalton because he's the he's the best.

And then Patrick Swayze early in the movie Dalton like casually says well actually Sam Elliott's character. I'm so sorry I can't don't have his name in front of me. It's always just Sam Elliott. It's Sam Elliott. You're not going to forget it Sam Elliott. It's like well actually it's Wade Garrett. Wade Garrett's the best. It's like well he's got no look.

Yeah you're the man now. So he the movie opens with him bouncing in a bar in New York that's packed and it's huge and there's a ton of rich people there and you see him doing his bouncer thing. And then he gets this guy comes to him and says hey I've got a bar in Missouri that I need cleaned up. And then Patrick Swayze gives him like his ridiculous term that's like 500 bucks a night cash you know and you pay all my hospital bills blah blah blah he's like done done you're Dalton like you name your price. Like I got your first class paying tickets right here and that's like his life. He just goes around to these bars and then once he gets all the ruffians out of the bar then the bar thrives and makes millions of dollars which of course is exactly how it would work. Because this movie opens with Dalton. It's like there's these guys in suits because it's like a high class bar and one of the guys gets unruly and there's a woman sitting across from him and he like kicks her in the vagina.

It's a classic vagina kick. All time top 10 vagina kick there. Dalton asked them to leave because that's you know it's a frown upon in that establishment. And the guy like pulls out a switch blade and says I think I can take you Dalton. I've always wanted to try you because it's always a little boy I've dreamed because this is a universe in which little kids dress as Dalton for Halloween probably like. You guys have never gone into a bar and thought I could fuck that bouncer up never that's not crossed your mind whether or not you could fight the bouncer to the death. Always always thought I could take him. First thing that enters my head when I go into bars.

It will be from now on oddly enough. Because the bouncer is always someone who's trained in like eight different kinds of martial arts as opposed to just like the biggest fattest guy they could find. You know he just kind of like shoves guys out the door because it's you know they have obviously these break out into choreographed fight scenes and all that because this is the glamour. Glamorous high stakes big money world in life and death world of bouncing because to be clear in this movie about a bouncer like 12 people die in this movie Patrick. I believe the I believe the period covers less than a week like including flight time. I believe it's just it would be like more murders that have actually occurred in the state of Missouri that in the year 1989. One of the strangest things about this movie is that it's kind of like The Warriors which is I guess a good over the top movie about gangs but there's just nobody has a gun except for like the super rich bad guys but it's like rural Missouri where everyone would have at least a hunting rifle and probably a couple side arms. And no one thinks to just shoot these terrorists that it just show up at the people's businesses and there's like 11 of them like you could kill them in an afternoon with your.

Yeah the authorities are never nobody even thinks of involving right because if the crime happens in the bar that's bar crime and it must be dealt with by Barley. They're fucking pulling knives like they're already assaulting with a deadly weapon they might as well use a gun and here's this don't know what happened in a bar good karate bar Marshall. The romance subplot is Dalton gets gets wounded as you know as happens frequently and so he has to go to the hospital and gets sewn up by the the hot just like the hottest doctor that's ever been. Yeah the hot young lady doctor and she like asked him his job and he tells her he's like a bouncer and she's just totally swooned over him and he like invites her to come see him at his bar. He also tells her that he has a degree in philosophy which I think if you've ever known anyone who had a degree in philosophy I don't think it's like the panty dropper that the writer of the movie thought it would be. Like if you told the girl hey I'm a bouncer but I have a degree in philosophy she's going to roll her eyes so fucking hard. Yeah that's why you became a bouncer I guess. Well I mean the plot line of someone with a degree in philosophy winding up working at a bar like that's possible.

I guess you might have a couple questions. I mean Patrick Swayze is obviously a beautiful man. He could probably tell someone he had a degree in diarrhea and get through it. Well see this is my point. She like agrees to come to his bar and you know. Come watch me work baby. Come watch her like she shows up there and he even does this thing like who are you here to see. Like he's forgotten about her.

Right. And then they went and she loves it. Going out on a date in the whole time she is like so awestruck that this bouncer this high class upper end four hundred thousand dollar year bouncer whatever that he deigned to date a mere doctor. Right. And they're like in this diner and he has like his bouncer buddy that came with him Wade Garrett Sarah Sam Elliott's character and they're like telling bouncer stories about like yeah and I cracked his kneecap you know and then I did this and this doctor like she's just sitting there like her eyes like wow you're so oh you're so cool. I love that you hurt people.

I am a doctor. Yeah. She's a doctor and they're not asking her to tell any doctor stories like she saves lives. Right. You know. She finds things in people's butts. She could talk all night. Yeah.

She went to medical school and has to be able to read like an entire textbook in 72 hours and works you know these 70 hour shifts and she's just sitting there like oh my gosh. To be around these these famous bouncers like it's like a dream for every little girl's dream. And it's so amazing because it's this alternate universe where yeah it's you know bouncer bouncer is a job where you can tell a doctor that's what you are and they're like gosh can. I mean would you could you be seen with someone like me. Yeah. You know you graduate from esteemed bouncing colleges. Yeah. You're bouncing internship.

Which again if it was just like if they made it a plot point where she's kind of wild and it's like well look he's he looks like freakin Patrick Swayze. You know he looks like. Yeah that's enough. He looks like yeah looks like he's got a pretty good hog on him. You know I'm a doctor I can tell. I can tell by looking at a dude how much of a hog he's got. That's something you learned in medical school. There's a class.

If her whole thing was like if they had made her her temperament more like yeah I'll go do this like you know it'll be fun like I'm you know I'll get away from my boring doctor friends and go go to this guy sleazy bar that is so overwhelmed with violence that they had to bring in the world's best bouncer. If someone dies here every night you know it would be one thing if she was like slumming it and then that's like she gets like a sexual thrill out of and then that becomes like a source of tension but it's not like that at all. It's because Patrick Swayze has a philosophy degree like he's this he has this like Samurai's honor code that as you know bouncers have. Yeah the bouncers code. What I really liked about Patrick Swayze the most in the movie is he kind of refused to engage in like one liners like the guy would show up and he'd go prepare to die. And Patrick Swayze goes you're such an asshole and I just I love that it's like they never got around to writing as one liners and God what did he say. He goes I used to fuck guys like you would prison which is an amazing line. Patrick Swayze's response is like shut the fuck out.

He doesn't even try. And then he kicks me guy was just improving that entire movie. Do you think everybody else had lines and then they were just like be Patrick Swayze about this whole deal. I got this. I got this. Like all right action. Patrick you want to try that one again. No I call them an asshole.

That's good right. His response to that line is to kick that guy in the dick several times and then rip his throat out. Yeah. He got beat to death like eight times over and then just left. He got beat so bad that Patrick Swayze his own girlfriend ran to check on him. Yeah on the bad guy that he don't do it. She's like and by the way not a deal breaker for the relationship at all. This doctor like she witnesses him kill six people with his bare hands and then the final scene of the movie is them skinny dipping together under like happy.

Bang it in front of a blind dude. That's my favorite part. Let me their blind friend come and listen to them. Gotta listen to the slapping of the river. I love this. I love when you fuck ladies. It's quite clear what you're doing. I hear I hear water slapping what you're doing.

Jesus Christ. All right cut that out of the pie. We can fix this in editing. Okay. I'm not very alarmed that some of your listeners who did not see we're not around for the 80s or maybe we're kind of on the young side that they're going to think that over the top and roadhouse are comedies. They are not the self aware. They were not originally. Yeah the self aware movie that like makes fun of Hollywood tropes the 80s that was not a thing.

It's they they made these movies. Well last action hero came out and we fucking hated it. It came out we're like no no no we don't make fun of these things. Wasn't it. Yeah I mean it was post 80s but like that was pretty much the first one I think that was like guys this is all this stuff we're doing is ridiculous right. Let's make fun of it. And we're like no no no. No come back in about 10 years and we'll be ready to have that conversation right right now we're no we will watch a movie about a high class wealthy.

Bouncer and we will just believe in that world. And at the time I watched that movie I was just sure this was a thing. It didn't occur to me. Yeah I want to be. I believe karate kids so hard that I thought that was like I just wanted to be karate when I grew up. Yeah. Did it work. Did you.

I did so much. I did. No I found out like I don't know 12 years old that karate doesn't work very well on like anything. Yeah. I just shattered my world. My first fight I was like this is blocking is not working at all when when they're not like letting me get ready. I'm getting punched in the face. Oh I went for like high flying kicks and shakes.

I thought that was more powerful right. And that didn't work. Like the cooler it looks the more powerful it is. No no it actually turns out that if you get like a flying spin and start screaming the name of the kick you're going to do that it really prepares them for that kick. That's good to know. Like because obviously when karate kid came out the number of kids being enrolled in karate classes exploded like it happened like they started karate classes like some local gym where I in the tiny town where I live because every kid had to have karate class. Now I took I took Taekwondo but the very first day in class like they're having you do this basic sparring against another kid. So I go in the corner and I like I wrap my fists and I put like glue on my fist and I rolled them in broken glass.

Of course. I don't like oh you don't do that. And you're like the fuck I don't. Yeah it's like. Those are night classes. You think on the street you know I'm going to go out there I'm going to fight some guy without you know without gearing up in advance. It's like no you're going to take every inch of that. I just walked out.

It's like this is BS. It's bullshit. This is real. You can't teach me anything. I can teach you a little something. There's no sand on the floor where I can throw sand in the guys eyes and then have them like overreact and over the top way and then I can get the cheap shot in. Because my obviously I was going to be the bad guy karate guy like my goal is to be the villain in the karate movie. Do you know how shockingly low priority they put on doing the full splits in karate class like they didn't even ask.

That's the first thing we did in my karate class two guys just grab you by the ankles and you're doing the full splits whether you like it or not. Was that karate class. I don't think thinking back I don't think that was karate class. But I invented a special Sean baby's book game just for today's podcast. So we're going to play a round of this now. The way this one works is you did win that one game against yourself but you've lost here to defend the title. So I have a book in front of me called one thousand three great things about being a woman and each of you is going to select a page between one and three hundred sixteen. And you will enter into the film Roadhouse with all of the abilities you have now plus whatever superpowers you pick up from these woman abilities.

So OK I have no abilities right now. Well you'll have two to three more woman abilities. Wait I can write a motorcycle that's like a road that might come in handy. And OK so the fucking you do Jason. So this is to survive the film Roadhouse using your skills plus the ones you get from this book. So Jason you're a guest so please select first between one and three hundred sixteen two fifty five. Very confident guess. Let's see what.

OK this is what this page says is again one thousand three great things about being a woman. Womaner. One mantra. Womanhattan. Shealy I'm shell a copter. And going back this is from a chapter that's just called words we'd like to see. So. So womaner I imagine you now have the ability to poop like a woman.

Which is to say you probably don't or if you do there's nobody else in the house. One man through one mantra. I guess that would be like a meditation but for ladies. Womanhattan you'd have the powers of Manhattan but for a woman so I would imagine to be excellent shopping great restaurants. Shealy I'm which is lighter than air but for the ladies and of course a shell a copter which I think is very very strong. That's a lady. I think he mostly he has the ability to add one or two letters to a word and make it worse. That might be the only ability we get from this.

This is I should mention a really fucking stupid book. For fans of mine who are joining the first this is your first episode of the one nine thousand hot dog dog zone podcast. Thank you for getting that name right. Sean has a vast library of books that are often titled things like one thousand one blank one thousand one places to have sex one thousand one tips to liven up your love life something like that. And these are cheap cash grabs that publishers crank these things out over the last decades where the author spent maybe a week writing their list of a thousand things and each one of them they only had about twenty seven ideas. And then have to think up another nine hundred and seventy three that are either repeating the same idea over and over and then somewhere around halfway through the book that they descend into utter nonsense. They'll find little tricks to get a whole bunch out of it like this. This lady's like just let's take some names that have a male sort of suffix and change it to a lady suffix.

I need a fucking million entries out of that. Yeah she's been up for like seventy two hours just trying to think anything about women. This is why I picked a page number that was fairly late in the book. Right. Or an item number because I knew that was well beyond that they had come they had actually used up their clever ideas. And these are books where the editor doesn't even look at them. They will repeat pages. There'll be like like entire words missing.

They don't even flip through it. It just goes on the shelf. People buy them as gag gifts or something. And then in this has been an entire industry and Sean collects these because they are all amazing in their own way. Because when you see a very untalented writer trying to stretch premise like the hardest thing you might ever have to do. I don't know why there are so many and they always pick it because that is that is a nightmare for a writer. Yeah we couldn't get a thousand good things about whatever the stupid principle. I would like four.

So anyway that's where that's why he didn't just pull this off. He has an entire I assume an entire building that's just a vast library full of these because he has a supply of them. I'm going to take the same tactic as Jason except I'm going to go the opposite way. I want forty two because I think it's early enough. You might they'll still be giving me useful tips that I can use to conquer my way up the bouncing ladder. This is from a section called what we'll never know. So you might have actually you might be losing superpowers on this. You'll never know.

God I'm so bad at this. What's so great about the matrix. Why are money costs so much less in Milan than it does in Florence that it does at the Mall of America. How to convert to centigrade and how to convert to kilos. So you actually just lost some specialized skills that I lost valuable knowledge. I need that Armani shit and if I'm going to survive the deadliest bar in Missouri. What's the premise of that. They're going to ask me about where I got my Armani matrix.

I just the idea is that women don't get why it's good. That's that's a lot of the book is like gender stereotypes that you would probably. Yeah I feel like this is a little sex. Yeah you would tell someone if you're in a writer's room of like hey we're going to do like sort of a romantic comedy with a lot of like you know gender stereotypes. Here's the ones we want to stay away from because they're so fucking tired and stupid. Like that's what this book would look like. It is frankly shocking that I managed to lose that round. Just just for my edification.

What is the very first item in this book. Okay. Where did they start from. That's your turn. That's your turn. I need I need every little bit I get you and the children go first in the lifeboat. So kind of like the first thing you think of I guess it's appropriate. But that does give you the ability by the rules of the game to always escape a scenario first.

That's true. That would have been a probably useful power in Roadhouse. I mean this is there's no contest. Jason won that so he actually came out of that as a lady helicopter and you actually like forgot to fucking do pounds to kilos. I forgot temperatures. Yeah. I forgot like basic math. Congratulations.

And now and now he can escape first. That's great. Plus the ending of Roadhouse the main and not to spoil Roadhouse for people who wanted to watch it. But the main villain is defeated because they discover his weakness which is being shot in the torso with a shotgun four times. Like I actually have turns out even the rich can't take shotgun blasts. I actually have that ability because after an entire movie of like melee combat they've somebody finally finds a shotgun in Missouri. I actually have the ability to fire a shotgun. I've done it before.

So I feel like just bringing that plus anything else would help me win. Because I could do the end boss. I would do the same thing they did only I would do it right away. Yeah. He's been in this town forever and no one thought to just go to his house and shoot him. Yeah. And it works out. So you're the boss of Roadhouse and I'm the first guy that gets his ass kicked which means I'm the vagina kick.

I think you're the panties on the vagina that gets kicked to establish the stakes of this bar. Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm worried that the listeners think that I made up the vagina kicking thing. Please go watch Roadhouse. I wouldn't make that up. That's exactly that's the first thing you see happen in the movie. The things happening in that opening scene at the bar are like unthinkable.

This waitress is just sexually assaulted. She drops all of her drinks. Like it's the kind of thing that would shut a bar down and like oh my God this guy is a maniac. And that guy made the waitress drop my drink. I'm gonna get him up. And the vagina kick. I can't imagine seeing that and not like attacking that guy. And this is in the bar that is post repair.

This is the one that he has successfully fixed up and is now ready to move on to his next bar. This is like this is the level of violence after he's got it under control. Well she didn't die from being kicked in the vagina. She survived that. I mean certainly physical therapy but that's an improvement. Yeah because it's that very night that Dalton leaves that bar because he has nothing further to do there. I have nothing more to teach you. That was my last lesson.

Don't kick women in the vagina. Okay we should move on to the next Road House movie. I agree. The next over the top movie. Oh damn it. No they're Road House movies now. Welcome back to the Joe Rogan experience. We're talking about sidekick and gorillas.

Sidekick gorillas. Do you want one? I want one. Have we started doing the podcast again because... Sure. It's all the podcasts. We need to come up with like a cleaner... We're back.

Hey speaking of gorillas there was Donkey Kong right and that's a Nintendo game and that brings us to our next movie. The Wizard. The Wizard. That's a fantastic transition. That was... Come on that was actually pretty good. Right. That's good.

That's Joe Rogan. Alright I'm gonna bring the Wizard. The 1989 Fred Savage vehicle. The best kind of vehicle. Same year as Road House. It really feels like you could see over the top sort of changing the world one year at a time. And 1989 was really hitting on all cylinders. And like I was torn on bringing the Wizard because it's kind of come true now.

Like 30 years later. Now the Wizard is kind of happening. Now you would kind of believe the Wizard. But I want to stress the plot of the Wizard in 1989 was fucking absurd. And that plot is that there is a family that has been separated. They divorced. Nobody in the 80s could handle a divorce. That was the worst thing that ever happened to anybody in the 80s.

And one child Corey Fred Savage goes with his father and another child Jimmy goes with his mother and something happened to Jimmy. Something we don't find out until later that turned him basically autistic before we had a word for autistic. Very non-verbal. Very good at being gay. Very non-verbal and like certain things set him off. Magic. Like you were magical. And very much magic.

Like everybody that had a mental disability in the 80s was also magic at something. Like that was your trade off. Like you could fly or you were powder. You almost weren't allowed to be super good at something without exchanging it for a mental disability in the 80s. And Jimmy's was Nintendo. So Corey Fred Savage's brother goes to break him out of the home where he's been institutionalized because he thinks if he takes him to California which he's obsessed with it'll fix everything. And along the way he discovers how good Jimmy is at Nintendo and he thinks in what is possibly the best child logic I've seen on film that if his parents find out how good Jimmy is at Nintendo he won't need to be institutionalized. Those are the stakes and they made sense.

So those are the stakes. Those are the stakes in the movie is that if he wins at Nintendo he doesn't have to live in what is essentially a child's insane asylum. And that's... When you put it like that it sounds crazy. That's the real plot of a movie with like very little embellishment on my part. And this is actually closer to the over the top genre than Roadhouse because it's got like it's literally the same like they're trying to get to a big Nintendo what is it a big tournament or whatever. It's got the road movie aspect. It's got the family.

It's got the traveling hustle like they're sort of like oh we don't have any money but don't worry about it. Next stop we'll use our Nintendo skills to get some money. It is like a beat for beat steal from over the top. They do everything along that way. Like they have the relationship at stake that's not you know officially on the line but it's everything. And it all rides on this final contest. I think one of the things that sticks out to me about The Wizard is that it's kind of like a law and order episode when they sort of do something like they go to a convention and it kind of gets everything wrong. Like you know when you're watching one of those CSI shows.

It's called Furry Call. They eventually get to a hobby that's your hobby and they're like this is not how people in this hobby talk. And that's kind of how the movie is where like the dad's like I've got the scroll weapon. You're like that's not really how you would do that. They show all sorts of shit like they keep showing them play these games and like people did play games or scores in like certain sections but at one point he's playing Metroid in an arcade for score. And like anything you know about video games every part of that is right. Like all of the games we're playing Ninja Gaiden in a championship. It's a single player game and it's not score based.

Which again we're playing Double Dragon. That does have a score. Oh yeah. Like now that the Ninja Gaiden speed running scene is a thing and people probably do. It came true. But in 1989 again the Nintendo Entertainment System only came out in 1986 in America. You know it was not in every single household at that point. So the idea that there's this sprawling subculture where everywhere you go you're judged by your top notch Nintendo skills.

And then the fact that at one point they whip out the power glove as like the thing that's going to put you over the top instead of making every game impossible to play. Right. Yeah the power glove had two stations and that was like go left forever or suddenly has turned off. And like in the movie in the movie he's like virtually steering a wheel and it's tracking like the wheel motions and he like kind of points and it goes faster. It was your first introduction to this thing and it promised everything. I can guarantee it did not do that in real life. Heartbreaking. It was I know I got one at one point like a couple years after it was cool of course because we were not rich but it was just the worst goddamn thing you could ever try.

And I had a power pad as well. And that wasn't worse than the power pad. I didn't use it a lot but I like the idea of it. It caught a hop. You could hop and it would it would catch that like power glove could not run it anyway anyway. The early hustle is the over the top progression. It goes from the early hustle to like their championship video game to like we've redeemed this relationship with video games. But the early hustle the first people the very first people we see them beating and hustling are 60 year old traveling salesman.

They see in a bar that also has an arcade. None of which happened like I was I was a kid in 1989 and I can tell you even kids in 1989. They were still beating me up for admitting that I like Nintendo like all of us like Nintendo. But you couldn't admit where you would get beat up and these 60 year old salesman are playing. I don't know. I think Double Dragon or something. Yeah. I think the Nintendo version of Double Dragon in the arcade. Yeah. And they they see him and Fred Savage's character. I think his name is Corey goes like oh salesman.

Perfect. That implies so much. That line implies so much. Like not only are traveling salesman famous famous for the love of arcade games in 1989. But also their willingness to gamble large amounts of money against young children. And they're also apparently famous for how bad they are at that ensuing game. Yeah. Right. And so of course he goes on to beat the holy shit out of them and they're like oh geez wow.

Oh Jim we'll try again next time. Like they just wander the country playing children and losing in video games. If I lost to a child and found out he was magic I wouldn't pay up. I'd fucking welch on that bet. I'd say this is a hustle. It's that kid. That kid's like mentally disabled or something. You didn't tell me it was mentally disabled. That's not fair. This is fucked up. I'm going to call the cops. Also we need to touch on briefly the whole 80s thing of kids doing something that in the real world you assume would have gotten them murdered.

Right. Because you know they would just go out on their own on their bicycles and go interact with strange adults and do all sorts of things. So the premise of this movie is that they leave their parents behind and they hitchhike across the country solo as three 12 year old and younger children. Which is the whole genre. The little kids going off on their own adventure that was an entire genre. And hitchhiking specifically hitchhiking and being picked up by strangers and everything's okay. That was the message we wanted to tell them. At no point did any of these hitchhikers try anything or act unseemly except like one car like robs them of their money and it's like $40 and then they just leave them. They like it's like the gentlest robbery. They're just giving that money. All right. See you later.

And again I know this movie is not going to have like a child molestation scene. I'm not expecting it to. It's just that they did close though. Yeah they did reference it. There was there was that child bounty hunter which again not a career pretty sure. Pretty sure there's no bounty hunter for children and his job was to kidnap them before they reach the contest. And what was astonishing about the movie was how many times he would run into like a public place. They're in like a restaurant and he would just like grab a child and run away and the child was screaming and like nobody would bat an eye. Everybody's like yeah this is fine. Like she had to specifically say hey that guy touched my breast and then people were like wait that guy running off with that child like holding him by the crotch. Okay that's not a good guy.

You need to rewind because there's some people in the listenership who've never seen this movie or less don't remember it or have black out the memory. And you need to describe the context of the child saying he touched my breast. This is a real scene in the movie. Please. Are they in Reno? They're in the massive arcade in Reno and he's playing his games. I can only say autistically. We'll fix that in editing too. No but that's what the movie that's how they did it in the 80s. I am not saying I do not have. He did find like a secret in Super Mario Brothers 3 that you absolutely would never find without knowing it was there.

The game came out that day. Nobody had ever seen it before but because he has a mental disability he has a super power. See that's the thing I think is problematic I don't think. Me calling that out. He means it in a clinical way everybody. Yes. And the bounty hunter runs up and quite literally grabs him by the crotch and lifts him in the air and starts running away and he's screaming and Hailey the girl in the movie pauses in the middle of the casino and yells that man touched my breast. And then like everything stops. It did not stop for him lifting the child by the crotch and running out with him while he screams. Nobody cared. But once she says that everything stops and like later truckers chase him down and just. Well he comes back alive but basically murder him right for for this false rape report that she issues which is another.

And how old is she. How does that character that the one she's like I want to say 13. Yeah. 13 which is why like I've said this before I'm going to say it again don't hire child bounty hunters guys. It's just it's never worth it. You know you don't know where they come from. And if you're a child hitchhiking across America if you run into older men offering to like bet you something and if they can beat you in a video game. Don't take the bet. There's no there's actually no there's actually no winning because even if you win they're going to say oh I've got the prize out. It's out in the trunk of my car. That's definitely true. You have to crawl in there. You have to crawl in there and get it. You're not coming back from that alive. And that's that's my problem with this movie that teaches it teaches a lesson that I hope many children. This is like a movie specifically designed to kill children. I feel like if I had to give a child advice on like how to commit suicide in a way that does not violate an insurance policy.

I would be like have you watched the every 80s movie. Goonies was like hey if you go down into a wall or the local cave there's probably gold in there. Don't don't always trust mutants. I don't know how we survive. I want to I want to touch before we leave on touch on a big competition which was called video Armageddon whose prize was $50,000 for video games who had like a multi hundred thousand dollar set designed for this one time competition. And I believe the announcer from beyond Thunderdome the Thunderdome announcer. I think that might be the same guy or if not he's definitely jacking the vibe where he's like weirdly solemn and also super antagonistic and every single person in that arena because it is an arena that it's totally full. Like a strip mall arcade with sticky carpet and like one board teenager who's not paying attention because that's every video game competition I've been to as a kid. I did go to the Nintendo World Championship. There was some spectacle there. It was around 1989. Oh yeah? When was that? 1989. 1989? So this therefore everything in the movie is true.

Are you trying to undermine Brockway's premier premise? It was there was no $50,000 prize. If I recall, I think you got like, you know, less than a thousand if there was any cash prize at all. Yeah, you got like a Nintendo college certificate for 500 bucks or something. My last favorite detail before we move on now that you've completely destroyed everything I've been talking about. I'm just I'm just deleting all of my notes except for except for just shame. I've got the word shame. Just unrelated to the movie. But before we leave that entirely, my favorite quote from the movie is when they're when they're brushing up to let go to this competition. They called the Nintendo power hotline and Haley just stays on it for like two days straight, which would be far more than the 50 days prize money.

But and also that she gets the same patient man who drops his entire life to spend two days straight on the phone like frantically working her through every video game. Yeah, before they find out like what they have to do. They find out like he has to get good at potentially could be any game and they go. Right. Get good at every video game. So they just call the guy and had him conversationally explain every single game on Nintendo. Right. And he did. He dropped his whole life to do that because he was passionate. Amazing. But the quote was a get good at every video game in three days. There must be 70.

That's what that's what 1981. So two things. One, I love the idea of this giant competition taking place at an era when hardly any kids had played these games. And also they don't tell you what game you're going to be playing. Right. So you could have like this $50,000 prize or whatever it was. And then it's between like two people who like they don't even know the controls. Like they don't even know what the goal of the game is. And so it's like trying to the first minute is just him being like, is this Trump?

Yeah, you're like China. No, they've got the jump and attack button three first. I keep screwing it up and it's like falling off the ledge and stuff like you can fall. I didn't make it. It's eight minutes of that. I guess we have to declare this one the winner. Because it wasn't like this upper high level Nintendo gaming scene in 1989. I'm sure it wasn't.

And then the whole twist is like, no, you have to we're going to spring it on you. It's going to be like an iron chef thing where you're going to be surprised by what game you play in the finals. That's great. Right, because that's what video game skills are like. You must be able to like pick up any game like a masterful chef could make something with any. It has nothing to do with memorizing the map or shortcuts or anything else. It's like this would be a high level competition is just it'd be like having an arm wrestling thing between like two random people. You just pick out of the audience and make them arm wrestle.

And then the final round is you actually have to fist fight. But the other thing I like is the idea of being in an arcade. I didn't spend some time in 80s arcades. I don't know if you guys did. But and you're sitting there and you got your quarters and then you're behind a guy playing Metroid. He just plays all the way. It's like 17 hours later. He's just backtracking backtracking.

Can't figure out how to get through this fucking little nook. Oh, you got the high score on that. He's trying to find like all the little hidden areas where you glitched through the map and all that stuff. And you're sitting there. I got the missiles. It's time to walk back across the entire map. Waiting for your turn. He has a cost of 25 cents.

He's been playing all week. Well, I think we're ready for the book game to see who would win. Oh, God damn it. It's not even over. My humiliation has to continue. We have to drive. You have to win this or you're going to lose the whole day. So desperate times.

You're going to select first. Remember, you have all of your skills. Would you say you're one between the two of you who is better at video games? It might be a watch, right? Probably. It's got to be Broadway. Because you play like Destiny. You play fast twitch games.

You've got the game of reflexes. Right, but I'm not very good at them. I'm extremely good. I like them. I'm the guy who gets the game. I turn the difficulty down to easy immediately. And so I can just coast through it. I don't.

Well, Sean's the only person here that's good at video games. I don't know why we're even talking about it. I'm not in the competition. We don't even know. I would have done really well in the wizard. Because I'm nonverbal. I do talk to a lot of strange businessmen when I'm a child. I am just great at being lifted by the crotch.

I've got crotch reinforcements. I did. My dick is like a handle. I have a few months of pro wrestling training. I've had many strong hands on my crotch. All right. One to three, 16, right? Pick 77.

Okay. So you have all your powers plus. What is the start of this chapter? Which is motorcycles and nothing. The chapter is called why we can't get rid of anything in our closet. So exhibit A in my lawsuit against the dry cleaner. Do you have to read it? Is it right to give the homeless cruise wear with a missing belt?

Never wore it. Never will. But too expensive to throw out. I honestly don't know what the fuck any of that means. But a person. I believe it would be taunting. One of them is taunting the homeless, which I think would come in handy in an 80s movie. No, I think that would get me fucking annihilated in the first few minutes of roadhouse.

I'd be the vagina kicker like taunting the homeless guy because of his lack of a belt. And then Patrick Swayze would come in and just know you're in the movie. The wizard now. You're not in the movie. Oh, right. I'm in. I'm in the wizard. So I'm taunting the homeless in front of children who are very good at video games.

The rules of Sean's game are so clear. I don't know why you don't get it. This is by far the strangest game we've had. You're right. I can't imagine that serving me very well in the world of the wizard. I think you just picked a weird page. I don't know what you're getting out of this other than taunting the homeless. So this, you're in a lot of trouble here.

I can ride motorcycles and taunt the homeless at the same. I asked, why do you impose the page 316 or the item 316 limitation on this? They're not afraid. They're not numbered. So I'm reading pages instead of actual. Oh, okay. Because I don't even know if there's a thousand three. I should actually check and make sure I bet I bet that's nobody has ever checked.

There's like 40. Most of the times I read these books. I'm quite sure I'm the first person that's ever fucking read them all the way through. It takes like six minutes, but like they clearly don't have an editor. Well, they usually have one item per page. It's not always a thousand, but like they really try to space out the amount of white space in the book. There's not a lot of giant text. Okay.

I'm going to like some clip art. I'm going to pick the very final tip on the very final page. Okay. Men just don't get it the way women do. Wow. So, so I guess if we have to translate that into like your new abilities, you like have everything you know as a man. So, I, but, but know everything.

Right. And the woman in this would be might be a superpower in the world. She did a fake sexual assault accusation is the only thing a female character does the day in the wizard. Whew. You know what? I'm going to give it to Brockway because I think Jason's choice actually undid everything he brought to it as a man.

Oh my God. Thank God. So you're still in it. All right. I can rapid drive by homeless taunting is what won the day here. I know people who are of a certain age who will not watch what they consider old movies and anything from the 80s they consider an old movie. Fair enough.

I really want to emphasize again the extremely, extremely problematic things we're bringing up. These are in the movie. Right. It's none of the three of us would have made up a joke about a 12 year old girl accusing a man of rape in order to get out of a comedy slapstick scene as as occurs. That's that's as a light hearted solution. We're citing the event of the film.

There's actually no way to discuss this without without getting into that. It would be a glaring omission. Now why why Sean chose to focus on this decade for his entire life's work? That's a separate question. Well, I'm very happy to announce that my movie that I selected today for my over the top movie is from the year 2000, which is at least we didn't have any problems when everything was better. So I think my movie is a very special one and I also think not a lot of people have seen

this. It's called duets. And this was a Gwyneth Paltrow, Huey Lewis movie that was originally going to be Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt, but then they their relationship fell apart. I think they were dating or married at the time, maybe a next logical choice. Actually, the Brad Pitt part was played by Scott Speedman, who you may know he's been at some stuff, but he sort of looks like Brad Pitt. He's very likely been called the poor man's Brad Pitt before this, and this couldn't have

been good for self esteem. And then all of the romance was written out of it. So he's sort of in the movie, but it's now it's mainly a movie about Gwyneth Paltrow reuniting with Huey Lewis, who is her father. So let me take you through duets, which I think is the perfect over the top movie of karaoke, because that's what this movie is about is about karaoke as a spectacle and as a hustling, a way to make money. It's very insane.

So it was directed by Gwyneth Paltrow's father, and it was written by a man named John Byrom, who was a Sesame Street writer before he like just became recognized for his talent. And they would just sort of hire him to write a movie if someone says, Hey, I want to I want to write this kind of a movie, get me a talented, competent guy. So if someone said, we're going to make a fucking karaoke movie, get me that guy. And he did. Okay, so it opens up with a guy named Lachlan Monroe. You probably also seen in many films.

And he is the huge swing and dick of this karaoke bar. He's got like a big sequined red jacket. He's like the biggest fish in a very small pond. And Huey Lewis just starts hustling it because that's Huey Lewis' bit is he goes from bar to bar making his money as a karaoke hustler. You might have noticed that that is not a thing that even could conceive a movie. So he meets this guy. I'm not trying to interrupt you, but can you clarify in this in this universe are people

gambling on the karaoke? They aren't gambling on karaoke. I've not seen it. You two have both seen this large, large sums of money. Okay. Karaoke in the in the movie, generally, there's a prize for being the best at karaoke. So it's like you'd come to the bar and you'd say, what's the money tonight? And they would say, I'm sorry, the shade hut, right, you go to the shade hut and there's

a lot of weird vernacular that I swear they made up for this fucking movie. Yeah, they made up a karaoke language to go with the karaoke hustlers, not the world of karaoke, but specifically karaoke hustling. The high stakes big ones. Or as I call them K heads, they call them K heads. So this, this K head that K talks, he's, he says, I make $1,000 a month at karaoke. And that's on top of what he makes at the meatpacking plant. And so like, he's, he's rolling in it.

So Huey Lewis is like, what do you call this shit karate, okay? And Huey Lewis is kind of a, not a talented actor, but he's playing a guy who doesn't give a shit, which is exactly what I imagine Huey Lewis was when he was called to play this role. So he's just fucking does not give a shit. He's completely disinterested in every line he's reading. He pulls out 690 bucks and the other guy can match that with the stuff in his wallet. This guy is such a karaoke high roller that he's just walking around flush from that

karaoke cash. And so Huey Lewis gets up on the stage and you're, you might know that Huey Lewis is a fucking great and charismatic singer. So he lights up the place and they all love him. And one of the women actually leaves her husband in the middle of his song and the scene cuts to her fucking Huey Lewis singing the song that he was singing that got her to leave her husband. It's, it's amazing.

And that's how, that's how good this movie is. Yeah. The sex scene with her singing the song that he sang to him in his face as she fucks him. And that's, that's the opening scene. That's the first, what, what would you say, five minutes? Easy. It, all of this happens to let you know, like, if you're good at karaoke in this world, not only do you make a ton of money, but like just women will throw their lives away to

jump on your dick and sing the song that you sang at karaoke. Like she must have been doing that the whole car ride to her place the whole time they were having sex. Yeah. That was the, that was like, he was firmly into the middle of the song at that point. So she had at least been singing that into his face for like two and a half minutes and he has maintained an erection while being. I got, I got the feeling that they were having sex for like a long time.

Like we're talking hour, hour and a half, the whole time, just from the top, I'm feeling all right. We, we're going to have to edit that out. We didn't, we can't afford the rights to that song. Not, not even to not even that much of it. I know that's free. We can't afford it. So now let me talk to you about the other characters in this movie, because this is like

an ensemble movie where all of these characters are sort of brought together through their own karaoke journeys to like a final karaoke destination. All karaoke hustlers. Yes, they're all karaoke hustlers. So Paul Giamatti, he is a disaster. He's like a salesman and he's like in the wrong city because he's just on a different flight every day and he lost track of time. Who was actually in the movie.

John dies at the end. Movie version. Yeah, Sundance. Nice guy. Personal connection. A fan. He was in this moment. Fantastic actor.

And he is, I want to say his acting is good in this movie, but his singing is so bad. His, it's just, um, not, it's not like he's a bad singer, but it's almost like he's doing sort of a bit character from an Adam Sandler movie about karaoke. Like if Adam Sandler was like, look at this guy and it would cut to the stage and Paul Giamatti is doing what like that guy would be doing. Someone who's just too absurd to even imagine. But in the movie, he's supposed to be. Absolutely.

They love it. Top of the top of that. Yeah. He wins, he wins cause he wins contest after contest. So, uh, after, after, of course, after karaoke, utterly destroys his life immediately. The first time. So Paul Giamatti has a terrible family. They all ignore him when he comes back from his business trip and his wife doesn't

like him. So he just walks out of his life and that's it. And that's, um, that's Paul Giamatti. After, I should say to specify, he tries karaoke one time and realizes that his entire life is a lie and karaoke is the answer. Exactly. And he abandons his whole life, becomes addicted to every drug he can find, immediately changes his entire persona and goes on the road to live karaoke hustling because he's

saying karaoke wants. Just a two week karaoke back after no sleep. After, after getting no joke, karaoke enhancing drugs. Yes. That's what started it. So the other character we meet is Scott Speedman, who is a cab driver and he picks up, uh, an old lady from prison and she's a third grade teacher and they recognize each other and she says, you never live up to your potential.

Like this is how efficient this screenwriter is that he can jam in this kind of exposition through, uh, completely insane circumstances. So we're learning so much prison who got some old lady. He's just a cab driver who went to the prison to pick up somebody getting out of prison. It turns out the old lady is a prisoner who is like 34. She's supposed to be an old lady. Yeah, they kind of did some makeup on her, but yeah, that's the kind of movie we're in where, where every single line is so like meticulously written to deliver as much

exposition and advance the plot as much as possible. Like I want to say, like, I don't think this movie is bad. It's just based on such an absurd premise that like, you can't ever take it seriously, but you could use this to teach a screenwriting class if you want it of like how to advance the plot and, and sneak in information and character development. The efficiency in which it makes an insane movie is just off the charts. This is the most efficient way to make the strangest fucking movie. We're just tumbling through the insanity.

So now Huey Lewis meets his daughter, uh, at the funeral of her mother and his ex. And he'd like walked out on them when she was like three years old. So they don't know each other. And I think they try to fuck each other. Like she's over, like over and all in the mother's coffin, open casket. She's like, could you just hold me? This is Gwyneth Paltrow, by the way. Gwyneth Paltrow.

So he's pulling the old game of thrones. She's flirting with him. She's like, ooh, I think I'd remember you. Like it's very strange that there's a lot of sexual chemistry. And then her grandmother walks in who of course knows them both. And it's Angie Dickinson. And she's like, oh, hey, that's your dad. And they're both like, oh, my God, thank God, you came here because we were

about to fuck on this dead body. And that's how we meet those two. Again, we are maybe 10 minutes. We're just meeting characters and we're going to be here all night because that's how dense the screenplay is. And it's all important. I can't really skip anything. And especially since Jason hasn't seen this.

OK, so then why didn't we make the whole episode about this movie? Why did we waste it like an hour and a half talking about this other nonsense? You have a good point. Jesus Christ, because we don't know what we're doing. This is episode four. What do you expect? It's the fourth time I've ever even talked in no microphone. And the first time I've talked about duets and I'm having a great time, gentlemen. This is the fourth podcast I have ever listened to.

Angie Dickinson gives Huey Lewis the mission to like fix Gwyneth Paltrow's life because I want to say that Gwyneth Paltrow, who's very obviously like an affluent, like pretty lady, is playing like a Vegas dirtbag. Like she she's supposed to be like this super naive, like white trash character. But it's Gwyneth Paltrow. And she's like 28 years old when they made this and she's got these pigtails. And you're like, what is she like mentally challenged? She is playing 16 for sure.

It's fucking weird. And so she joins him on the karaoke hustle tour because as you know, why not? And it was now he has this new mission to turn her life around while he's hustling karaoke. So now Paul Giamatti finds karaoke. We kind of will skip past as we talked about this already. But it is a pretty fast, a fantastic introduction to karaoke because he has no idea what it is.

And this very flirty bubbly girl like literally throws him on stage after giving him some beta blockers to take away his stage fright, which she which she builds as karaoke, karaoke and dancing drugs and then kisses him on the mouth to just, you know, loosen him up. He gets on the stage. He has no idea what they're going to put on. And they put on, of course, the crowd pleaser. Hello, it's me by Todd Rungren.

Of course, we all know that song. You start singing Todd Rungren. Everybody knows it and loves it. Right. Hello, it's me. Then it is again. I think that's the next word. He fucks it all up. They have to start the song over to explain how karaoke works.

And he just the crowd goes crazy. And he is like taking off his jacket and he's switching the microphone one hand to the other and they fucking everything he does. They love it. That's it. Now, now he's hooked that he's a karaoke junkie. Now we get Maria Bello because we're still not even done with the main characters of the movie. She gets off a bus and she is a not a prostitute,

but a karaoke hustler who will perform sexual acts to get favors or money or whatever. So she asks the first homeless veteran at the bus station where the karaoke bar is. And he's like, I have no fucking idea. The shake. Yeah, she uses karaoke terms that he wouldn't know. And he doesn't know.

So she takes his change and that's how we meet her. She steals from the homeless and now she's in search of a karaoke bar to hustle in. So she goes to, to be fair, throughout the movie, there's only one thing she really emphasizes, and that's that she loves sucking dicks. She just loves sucking dick for money, goods and services. She doesn't need money because she can suck dick. There's like a moment where or that she leaves a cab or something.

And what's his name? Scott Speedman is in there and he's like, he basically says, hey, get us a hotel room, but don't suck any dick. And again, I'm paraphrasing only a little bit. She wakes back in and is like, hey, I'm gonna suck some dick. Don't tell me what to do, Speedman. I'm going to get that dick in my mouth. That's her character.

That's her character trait. She loves sucking dick. So she goes to a karaoke bar where there's one Japanese man singing what I like about you just barely in English. It seems very lonely and sad. And that's it. It's just him and then Scott Speedman having a fight with his girlfriend who just cheated on him.

And she runs up to the bar and she says, what's the person that she it whole? And I actually wrote down the quote. She says, hey, you got money up on the karaoke or is this some kind of shadow hang? And he knows what she's talking about. He's like, not today, strictly barbers and phantoms, which they do not explain.

I don't know what those people are. They don't need to explain. I assume the Japanese businessman is a phantom because it doesn't seem like he has the energy of a barber, I guess. So she screams, I'm marooned because her only plan was to sing in this karaoke bar for money. And now that she can't make that money, she's just fucked.

Because one would reasonably assume that any karaoke bar they go into, you will be able to sing a little bit. And so Scott Speedman, who's just drunk out of his mind, she offers to have sex with him for a ride to California. And I think they're in Utah, they're really far from California. And we're still not done with the main characters

because Andre Brower is getting dumped off in Utah by a truck driver. Captain Holt. Yes, Captain Holt from 99. And so he holds up the truck driver with a gun and says, look, I'm sorry I have to do this, but the only skill I have is singing. And that's how we meet this character.

The only black mate. Across the whole thing. Wait, Maya Rudolph is in the movie, which I think she's by Rachel. What Maya Rudolph? She's the... There was so much happening, I do not remember. Okay, so Paul Giamatti, who's on a bender,

is just drug-eyed and drunk. And he's leaping his car over hills and driving on the wrong side of the highway. And Andre Brower is in the middle of the fucking desert by a 25 mile per hour speed sign, which had to have been a prop, because again, it's the middle of nowhere. And he screeches to a halt

and he's gonna pick him up as a hitchhiker, but this white man is fucking on drugs. There's no way I'm getting in the car. But he is an escaped convict. So what choice does he have? Paul Giamatti explains. He knows, he knows the face of a man whose life has been derailed by karaoke.

He's gonna just see it. Paul Giamatti is not only obviously on a bender, he is speaking a code that no one could understand. He's screaming, I scored some benes off some shadow in the K bar. And when Andre Brower looks at him like, I don't know what any of that means. Paul Giamatti screams, it's K-Talk!

Which means. It's K-Talk, baby, you know. Which means the language of the karaoke singers. And no further explanation is given. Can you, okay, I'm gonna say something. If you can edit this into the beginning of the podcast, there should be a content warning here. If any of you listening, if you've lost friends or family

to karaoke and had their lives be swallowed up by the siren song of the irresistible lure of karaoke. Mistress K, as we call her. Fortunes destroyed, yeah, as we all call her. Just please know this may be triggering to you because obviously, while we make light of the trauma depicted in this movie, who knows how many people have actually been lost

to a lady, to our- R.A.P.K. The shadows in the K bars. I don't wanna use too much K-Talk in case our listeners are not. I've known so many barbers that have turned into shadows and it just day haunts me at night. I can barely get the K-Talk out of my head.

So now Huey Lewis is at his hotel. He's absolutely ditched Gwyneth Paltrow, but she tracked him down by like calling around to hotels and asking for him. And so she just shows up at his room. Have you seen Huey Lewis? Say again? Have you seen Huey Lewis?

That's how you find Huey Lewis? Yes, they're like, yeah, Huey Lewis is in room 402. Go ahead and head up there. So she comes in and gives a long rambling story about how she stayed with Wayne Newton for a month. And Huey Lewis is like, you fucked Wayne Newton? She's like, no, it wasn't like that. And it's very clear that she might be a virgin.

Like she doesn't even seem to understand that it would be implied that she would have sex with Wayne Newton if she was staying in his hotel room for a month. And so again, this is a 28-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow playing Vegas White Trash, who is also naive about sex. And so try to wrap your head around that. Now, all of these characters are convening on Omaha,

where the final karaoke competition is taking place. And most... Right, they have to hustle their way there, as is the over-the-top way. So Maria Bello... They have to hustle and suck dick all the way to Omaha, as is the over-the-top way. These are destitute people.

The only thing they have is karaoke. Paul Giamatti has walked away from his life. Andre Brower is on the run from the law. Maria Bello has nothing. And Scott Speedman is just giving her a ride. Scott Speedman doesn't actually sing karaoke in this movie. He's just there to kind of be the love interest in the original draft that got written out

after Brad Pitt dropped out of the movie. He's kind of a karaoke pimp. I suppose you'd be calling it. Like he kind of... He gets like a little bit of something somehow, and he protects her while she does her karaoke hustling. He's her karaoke, her international karaoke pimp. Yeah, K-Pimp.

K-Pimp. He's a K-Pimp. He's on the scene. He's a K-Pimp. So Paul Giamatti and Andre Brower just screeched to a halt because they saw a karaoke bar. And of course Andre Brower has no idea what it is, but he is a singer.

And so Paul Giamatti shoves him up, and they sing a tri-little tenderness, again, to a screaming crowd. But Paul Giamatti is just kind of wailing it out, and Andre Brower is lip-syncing someone else, obviously singing very confidently. And it's for $50. Like this is how they're making their money.

They keep doing the same story beat of a character not knowing what the hell karaoke is, like being thrust into karaoke like for the first time on stage. They also, they win the $50. It's true. Sorry to take that. Again, this is a very good screenplay.

So there's cops there, and Andre Brower sure they're there for them. But he walks up to Andre Brower and he says, I was gonna like sing, but you guys are such good singers that we're not even gonna try. And it's like, oh, they're not here to arrest me. They're here to tell me how great I am at singing.

Because everybody from all walks of life lives karaoke. It's, you may be close already. How do they decide who won the karaoke? That's a very good question, because it is absolutely not made clear in the movie. There's no applause meter. There's no judges. And in fact, you just know.

You just know. Like with real karaoke, you just know. That guy won karaoke. So remember in prevention of the nerds when they performed their song and they just walk up and say you're the grand champions of like the college Olympics. That's how it works in this.

Like you sing your song and if it's good, they come up and say you won. And it might happen in the middle of the night. It might happen at the end of the night. Who knows, but like. And there is money attached to winning. So it's just, it's a real, real arbitration. Speaking of money, the next scene we go to

is Huey Lewis going, doing a hustle against some people in a bar, but now he's involved his daughter. Like the daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow is over flirting with a guy being like, oh, you must be the greatest karaoke stinger in the world. And the guy has his karaoke manager there. Dead on Gwyneth Paltrow, dead on.

Thank you. Thank you. His manager is there. And I'm not sure you heard me. His karaoke manager is there. That's how fucking crazy this movie is. So. So Huey Lewis, like does the same hustle.

Like, hey, I bet this karaoke is all stupid. This is dumb. It's not even worth my time unless you have $1,000. He also, wait, no, there's another moment I really like here where he implies that their relationship is gay. Like that he's not as karaoke manager, but his lover. And the guy immediately. Which would be far more reasonable.

Right. But the young, the singer is like a young kind of buff guy and the manager is like a middle-aged bald guy. And the middle-aged bald guy, it looks like he's gonna fuck up Huey Lewis and the young buff guy stops him. He's like, no, no, no, we're not gonna fight. We're gonna solve this on the karaoke stage. So Huey Lewis runs up to the KJ.

Sorry for the K talk and he hands her a CD, which I think is a, I think that's tipping your hand a little if you're trying to like play this off. Like you've never heard of karaoke before. And you're like, here's my custom karaoke CD. So he puts it in and of course Huey Lewis just lights up the stage again. He's a true talent and the guy knows it's a hustle.

So he just goes up and starts a fucking fist fight with Huey Lewis on the stage of the karaoke bar. And to his credit, Huey Lewis does his own fight scene, which is more than Steven Seagal has done in 25 years. So that's pretty cool. That is pretty cool. I've never seen this movie, but I would love it if that fight scene looked just like the raid.

Like they're just destroying each other. Just picking up weapons. They gotta like watch some Jackie Chan outtakes of all the people that were like intensely wounded. It's like dragging their face across glass and like just puncturing the guy's chest 36 times with a knife and it's 45 minutes of the movie. He trained for a year for that one scene.

Huey Lewis emerges from that just like a bloody hand print on his face, no shirt, victorious, but he's lost his humanity. That's just how it goes. It's all part of the K lifestyle. It's K talk, babe. You haven't even had a fight. But no, it is very implied that he does this a lot.

Like oftentimes these hustles will turn into fist fights. So he's a very competent fist fighter. And anyway, like you do, you just cut to another scene. Who cares? You get a fist fight in a bar. There's no consequences. And the next scene is Paul Giamatti shooting a gun into the furniture of a hotel

because they would accept his frequent flyer miles. Like he is fucking off the rails and they run out and let's see. Because he tried beta blockers and did karaoke. Beta blockers. Yes, he's on some beta blockers. Not always prescription drugs. I mean, he's on him now,

but he gate weighed on beta blockers, which are the drugs that calm you down slightly. But still far more sober than the average actual karaoke singer in the real world. Karaoke would not exist if prohibition had stayed in effect. That's, you know, so I do want to make it clear that I've probably done karaoke in the top 5%ile of people.

Like I really enjoy karaoke. And I was actually going to open a karaoke bar with my friends in San Francisco because we were doing it more than once a week to the point where it's like, maybe we should just like be more wise with our investment. It's, you know, like that's real. That's who I am.

Oh, you have a cape problem. So I know for a fact, I do have a bit of a cape problem, but I know for a fact that no one talks like this. So the next scene Maria Bello sings. And like I mentioned earlier, she just is declared the winner the moment she finishes her song.

Just seems like, yeah, that was good. Here's $500. At this point, Paul Giamatti, I don't know if they have a great makeup artist or if he's such a method actor, if he just stayed up for four or five days straight. Cause he looks like a fucking mad man. He looks,

He really does a good job selling like karaoke has destroyed my life. And I'm a shell of the man I used to be. I didn't think you could do that. I didn't think that was like a thing an actor has done, but he should win an award for it. Cause he really looks like, like karaoke just cost him.

He looks like karaoke ruined his life. If you saw him on the street, you'd say, Oh, another, another life lost to karaoke. But you would absolutely not serve him at your bar. You'd be like, Was it, was it special specialist K? The specialist of K. Yeah, it was.

So Paul Giamatti is now ambushed by his wife cause Andre Brower called her and says, dude, you got to get over here to Omaha and fucking put a leash on your husband. He's pulled the gun like four, four different times. So they sit down for dinner and he is ranting at her about like how the world's all one big strip mall. He pulls his gun out on his wife.

And that's just to keep you updated where Paul Giamatti is in his karaoke journey. But now here we are. It's the Omaha karaoke finals. We've all made it here. We've either hustled or shot our way to Omaha. And now it's very strange. There's like this.

Or suck dick. Some people suck dick. Or suck dick. There was at least two dick suckings. There's a positive route. So like you do in the world of karaoke travel. So they're performing here in the finals and they just have this weird cast of characters

singing like every genre of music, which seems kind of lucky, I guess, that they have one of each for the finals. But a lot of interesting cameos, like Michael Buble is, he's crewing a song. And James Cameron is singing like a do-op song with some strange lady. And that's kind of weird.

One person is credited as karaoke Carl, which implies maybe these were some sort of local karaoke celebrities. I don't know. Yeah, for the authenticity, you would want to sell it for the true K heads. You need to have some like the actual. The fact that I'm revenge on the nerds four.

Right, the guy that this screenplay was based on, karaoke Carl, has to show up in the movie. It's like a little nod. This is his story. Yeah, it's in his memory. He died of K drugs. In editing, it was tragic. So Maria Bello is so scared all of a sudden

that she's puking, which again, it feels very strange that she's gotten here just through her bravado and dick sucking skills. And now all of a sudden she's like, Oh my God, I can't sing in front of 25 people. I'm gonna, I got a puke. And so she sings sweet dreams are made of these and it's terrible.

And she's sort of doing that. Clang, clang, clang goes to the trolley type dancing. I don't know. I don't even know how to describe it. It's very unlike. That was a bucket of enough. I got it. Okay, good.

But it's terrible, but the audience is going crazy. Paul Giamani goes up to the bar and he says, Cerveta, por favor. You would never give this fucking guy a beer. He is, he looks like- That's the former bartender. That I do have that written down on an appkin. Don't give anybody a beer if they ask for it.

You wouldn't even have to say anything. You would just point to the sign behind you and says cash only, no Cerveta, por favor. Get the fuck out. And the $5,000 grand prize, I do not see the ROI for this. I don't know how the fuck the bar even comes close to making that five grand back.

Here is where shit goes a bit off the rails. Like Huey Lewis sings with Gwyneth and it's actually really good. Like I know we're here to make fun of shit, but Gwyneth Paltrow's kind of got a pretty voice. Not a big vocal range. Huey Lewis is a national treasure. And for the first time in the movie,

they sing something where the crowd like going crazy is appropriate. So they all love it. And then Andre Brower sings an acapella goodbye to Paul Giamani. And he chooses Freebird as the police come in. And the police are waiting for him to finish this song. And if you know anything about music,

you know Freebird's 14 fucking minutes long and he's doing it acapella. So no one would wait for this to finish. You would hear someone say, hey, I'm gonna sing this acapella and say the first syllable of Freebird, you're like, nope, get the fuck off. Nope.

So the cops are waiting for him to finish. And so he, like all karaoke journeys end like this. He pulls out a gun and aims it at the police and suicides by cop. That's right, the movie duets with Huey Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow ends with suicide by cop. And that's how the screenwriter wrapped it up. He's like, which of these main characters is gonna win?

Wait, I got it. What if we shoot Andre Brower to death in the middle of a Freebird acapella? So that is pretty much the movie. That's the movie duets. If you wrote the movie duets off, suicide by cop is how duets ends. He does.

Apologies, Monty wraps things up with his wife at the fucking bloody crime scene of Andre Brower. Of his only friend. His only man. Yeah, like the chunk behind them. No, that is at least two, maybe three lives destroyed by karaoke. And then they all get into the pink cab

and drive to the next town to sing. Like Maria Bello, Scott Speedman, Huey Lewis, Gwyneth Paltrow, they all get in the same car. And they're like, hey, we're karaoke buddies now. Yeah, he abandons his life to be her international kimp. Yeah. Which means now they have to hustle away across the country, but when they get $50 a night,

they have to split it four ways. So I don't know how that's gonna work. That's a lot of suck dicks right there. Right. And this is like far from the first competition that has ended with somebody getting gunned down by the cops. Like this is not unusual for any of them. Like this is-

Right, we didn't mention this, but that's how the wizard ended as well. The Nintendo competition. That's the over the top formula. You get to the final competition and then you commit suicide by cop and everybody learns something. California.

All again. I just, I mean, clearly I've been tipped off to duets when you told us what you were gonna do and I watched it. And I just, I would never, both my wife and I just sat there for like 10 minutes afterward going, what? I've never heard anyone make fun of this movie. I've never seen like a huge-

Nobody's ever mentioned it. But I've never heard anyone bring it up as like one of the all-time weirdest or worst movies ever made. But I'm glad I came in cold. Cause I- Me too. Cause I-

Cause I straight up- I was blindsided by every detail of this thing. But it is the perfect, like, like ideal example of this. And I do feel like this genre of movies should be called the duet genre of movies from Alan. Yeah, that took the cup, man. The whole thing is, among the world of great authors,

if an author is going to write about, like if somebody's gonna write a book about whales, they would actually go get a job on a whaling boat and do research for months and months. Like, I don't know if that's ever happened. I'm just using that as I just pulled that example out of my ass just, but, you know. I'll look it up later.

It probably has happened. Yeah, I don't know if there's any books about whales out there, but, or if they did a book about biker gangs, they would go like a real journalist, like they would go hang out with a biker gang for a year. Because, see, once upon a time, like if you were writing content for like a magazine,

you would get like a yearly salary and you'd write like one article a year. And the rest of the time, you would spend like experiencing life that you could then write about later. The business model, a little bit different now. We'll do a separate episode about that. In the world of screenwriting, it's a little bit different.

Because the way movies are made, and I'm sorry, some of you listening to this, I don't want to dissolution you. If you're sensitive to being disillusioned about Hollywood, please turn off the podcast now. If you've not already. In many cases, a lot of the movies you watch and at the theater, or wherever you see them,

are not the result of someone's, of the writer's like deep creative dream they've been pursuing their whole life. And this is the culmination of their ideas and all the things they want to say about the world. It is instead a producer in an office saying, hey, karaoke is big right now, or salsa dancing is big right now,

or lambada or something. Grab one of our stable of screenwriters and tell them they've got like two weeks to write us. Right. And so this is of course what the movie Barton Fink was about, the Coen Brothers fans, like the whole thing is this guy's like a great playwright and then he goes to Hollywood

and they're like, he just becomes one of their writers. Like, yeah, we want you to write a wrestling movie. And so when you're tasked with writing something like that, rather than, you know, keep in mind, like in the era of The Wizard, they couldn't even sit down and Google what the video game scene looks like. Yeah, you had to know up to one teenager.

Right. Or he's got something for that. More likely you met with some people from Nintendo and they gave you a list of games and peripherals you had to show off. And then you just... Here's all the weapons in THMU Ninja Turtles. Yeah.

The scroll weapon. Oh, that's good. No, you're done. We'll use that one. I just need one line. Really only need one detail. We just need one line for that scene. And so they do like the barest minimum amount of research

and then just make the rest of it up. This is why I love this genre of movie because it is extremely telling where they choose to, how they choose to depict this. And the fact that this, their karaoke movie is like, hey, we need a karaoke movie. Everybody's into karaoke. Just the, you know, the ads with people singing karaoke,

that'll get people to watch it. And like, you know, like Bachelor of Rets will watch it at a party or whatever. Cause they'll think it's like a fun karaoke thing. And this guy sat down and wrote this just erotic drug fueled, bloody nightmare of depravity. Either. And all the commercials just advertised it with that clip

of going to Paltrow and Huey Lewis singing Cruisin. Yeah, that was it. Everybody wants to see this movie based on that clip. When it's like, I want to watch them sing this nice song. And then at the end, they're just like, oh my God, we need to defund the police. If they handed any of the three of us, like if we really needed money

and they handed any of the three of us like, hey, you've got to knock out a screenplay about karaoke in two weeks. Like we could look up like screenplay formatting. And then generally we've seen movies before. So it's like, you've got two people. They're like, maybe they're, let's say it's a romance and they're kind of rivals and they bicker

and they're like rival karaoke singers. And then they, they break up at the 60 minute mark. But when they get back together, it's because they're forced to perform together and they've already committed to do the duet performance. And so I guess I realized I'm describing the plot of that Silver Line Needs playbook, whatever that Bradley Cooper movie,

Jennifer Lawrence movie was. The perfect movie. It sounds like you're describing our plate spinning movie that we were talking about earlier. Exactly. Like you can try something and then the duet of the title is them singing together and it's cute. And you figure like, you know, housewives will like this.

And you can bang that out. There's a template. It would not involve anyone performing fallatio across America and there's somebody committing suicide by cop and a guy's life. Like it goes so far off the rails that either one of two things happened. Either one, it was like, the guy wrote it as like a prank.

He was like mad that they gave him the karaoke movie because he wanted to decide. This is the assignment you give me? This, he wanted to do something gritty. So he just made his gritty karaoke movie and it was too late to have it rewritten. Cause they're like, you know, Gwena Patrick was in this. Like, well, yeah, she was in seven.

It's like that. It's basically seven meets three. But karaoke instead of a serial killing. But there is some serial. It's hard to find the seams of where like the original first drafts almost certainly was the Scott Speedman character in Gwinneth Paltrow falling in love. Cause they do like run into each other at the finals

and like flirt for like 10 seconds. And it's very strange cause it just feels like they kept like one page of the original like love story. But all this stuff. This should be noted over, over the suicide, of course, over the suicide bike. Right? Yeah.

Yeah, they, they watched a nice suicide together. And then they're like, hey, you're looking good. Hearing Sean explain like the, the history of the casting and all that, the second possibility is much more likely, which is that somewhere there's a sane screenplay for this movie. And somehow it went through so many revisions. And somehow in the course of like running it

through the copy machine, they accidentally mixed in a bunch of. Just the pages. This was supposed to be like a James Spader movie. The cost of perversion catches up with you. Or there was like one producer who was like extremely high on a conference call who was just like, okay, okay, I got an idea.

This is gonna, I want you to take this to place where the audience never is gonna think it's gonna go. I want blood, I want death. I want a woman sucking dick across America for karaoke. I want people sucked into the dark world and everybody's sitting there on the call like looking at each other in the office. And like LA is like, Jesus Christ,

is he, is he gonna have a heart attack? This is why he's in charge. At one point he specified she has to suck dick for a paint job. Somebody they can't say no to. And they've got this, this producer who's like, like masturbating in his office and just, you know, who like died.

He was like found in his pool that next week having drowned himself. But they were like. And this was his legacy. This was his last. This is how we left the world, a better place. Yeah, no idea was thrown out there. Like, what if the main character was an escaped convict

who was great at singing like, okay, I like it. Actually, I had a second idea. What if it was a lady and she sucked dick across America? Like, oh, I like that too. I like it even more. I don't wanna throw out any of these ideas. Could we have one guy that just threw away his life and had like a full on falling down movie

just in the middle of this karaoke movie? Falling down but karaoke, that is perfect. That is exactly what Paul Geomadi is doing in this movie. Yeah, I've got a scene. Cause it's not like he's just, he's not just like, I'm tired of my wife. It's like he's tired of the entire like, yeah, we've got to break the system.

Yeah, we've got to break the system. And we're going to do it. And we're going to rip all this down and we build up karaoke revolutionaries. Now I've got a scene that I wrote in another screenplay that we wound up not using. It's about a mother and a father. They bang on a coffin.

Is there a place for that in here? It's his fantasy screen because no one wants to buy. I try to work it into every script. And then they have sex on the coffin. It's like my giant spider in Wild Wild West. It's sex on the coffin. Okay, I think we did great. We do now have one more book game

to see who would best navigate the world of duets. Just let me die in peace. Jason Parjan and Robert Brockway. This is for the grand championships. Who would survive the over the top films best? Actually, I guess we're calling them the duet films now Right now I have to survive the world of duets with the skills that I bring.

Which are so far... Not the world of duet, but let's go ahead anyway. Yeah, nobody survives intact. But my skills so far are motorcycle riding and taunting the homeless. And I need one more to survive duets. Well, let's do a whole wipe because Jason still has a lady helicopter as a power,

which is just completely OP. So I think... Yeah, that's way better. Wipe the slates clean. You guys have your abilities plus the abilities you're gonna get. Oh shit, this is our golden snitch friend. One thousand three great things about being a woman.

Only this round counts. Who goes first? I think Jason is, it's his turn to go first. Page 69. Oh, now we're talking. Duets appropriate answer. Okay, this is one thousand three great things about being a woman.

We're so imaginative. We believe the dry cleaner shrank our pants rather than face the fact that we've put on three pounds. There's three more here. Our own salad dressing, Green Goddess. Some of the seven sisters colleges are so inclusive, they accept boys. And there were seven dwarves, but only one Snow White.

So... What's the salad dressing thing? I don't get any of the things. There's a salad dressing called Green Goddess. And I guess she's just claiming ownership of that as a woman and in your face. I don't think I understand the woman's journey. I really thought I did.

It's a very strange book. And you now, you're now, I think, cursed with these abilities, not gifted. I thought she phrased it or the author. Who wrote this? Is it a man or... Three women, Lisa Bernbeck, Anne Hodgman, and Patricia Marx.

So Jason now has control over dwarves. Is that where we're at? And I think you control dwarves. Was it phrased that women can make their own salad dressing? Is that a... I think it's just because the salad dressing is called Green Goddess, like women have ownership of that

as the gender that a goddess would be. So that you fellas, you fucking assholes, don't even have your own salad dressing. But we women do. It's called Green Goddess, so in your face. What about all those Paul Newman salad dressings? All right, it doesn't matter. I'm not trying to go down.

Okay. So I'm trying to survive in the world of duets and I have the ability to be better than dwarves. You can lie to yourself about your weight problems. You can take ownership of things that you probably shouldn't expect credit for. Seven sisters college, I imagine that's a religious school. So you have all of theological training

that you would have, we'll call it an undergraduate degree. And you control dwarves. And you can at least count dwarves if not control them. So these aren't nothing. Like the idea of being able to lie to yourself is probably really important in karaoke. Yeah, that's a big one. And controlling dwarves as we all know.

And also, karaoke is about like stealing the glory of someone else's song that they wrote. Very true. And acting like you should be famous for being able to sing this other person's song with their music playing for you while you're in the world. Right, you stole Green Goddess, you can steal Joe Cocker.

That is a good point about stealing because a lot of karaoke, it's not like a thing people make their own, but in the movie Maria Bellow sort of makes the songs her own. She does kind of her own arrangement where it's Gwyneth Paltrow is very much doing an impersonation of all of the original artists.

Yeah, you're the Maria Bellow of the situation. And all the dicks that that implies in your mouth, of course. The difference in those two styles would mean a lot if we had any information about the judging criteria they use when deciding who wins. Which again, you do not. The difference in approaches would be fascinating if the movie was about that instead of anyway.

Yeah, I could, I would see enjoying a movie about karaoke where they just sort of say, here's the rules for karaoke and it's very important to these characters and I'm interested in these characters, but that's not the direction they went. No, it doesn't sound like that. No, I'm saying we got.

You got a tough, tough road ahead of you. It's gotta be a good number. Yeah, I really needed to start this off with a handicap. Thanks to my previous history. Thank you. 102, let's do. 102. 102.

Okay, this is, you know what goes with a pearl choker? A white t-shirt. You know what goes with blue jeans and a sneaker? A white t-shirt. You know what goes with a white t-shirt? A white t-shirt. And you know what goes with a glass of red wine? It's a black t-shirt.

God damn it. You got, oh, okay, this is some bullshit, but basically you have a white t-shirt. Yeah, I got one white t-shirt out of all of my superpowers. I got the ability to own a white t-shirt. Now, another thing you said. Jason has complete control over Dwarves. He has a dwarf army and I'm over here with a white t-shirt.

With some artistic license, you could establish that you're good at sort of breaking patterns like you're like white t-shirt, white t-shirt, white t-shirt, black t-shirt. So I would say this sort of gives you the element of surprise, but not a surprising surprise. Yeah, so I could put like a rat breakdown in sweet dreams or something

and just ruin it for everybody. Or deliver it like a nice semi-expected punch line. Look, you know, we all know where you're going with this. Who's the winner here? The winner is author of Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick. Yeah, go for it yourself. Jason Parjan, who writes his David Wong on the internet and in books.

Congratulations, Jason Parjan. Reigning champion, Jason Parjan, victor of one and new all-time champion. Yeah, that feels great. I was on the edge of my seat there because knowing the scoring system, I could tell it was going to be very close. We use the same scoring system as duets.

As duets. Or you just know, you just know if you've won. You just know. And we just know. This is a very strange game I invented and I apologize to the listeners for what had to have been at least 45 minutes of confusion while we were doing that. But I do hope they get a sense

of how stupid this book is. In every single episode, the 45 minutes of confusion. I like, aside from the joke, we're going to do design video games. And so they should be good, but they're really not. If I'm being honest with myself. And yet there is one consistent factor and that's that I'm terrible at them.

Yes, they always lose. And there's no question. It's not like I'm picking on you. It's just that it's fair. No, it's that I understand that I've lost. It's not a bit that you always lose. Well, congratulations on this victory. And I'm sure the much more disappointing victory

of having an awesome book out this week that everybody should buy, Jason Parjan. Yes, this is be the most stressful week of my life. Selling a book in the middle of a pandemic when half of my half of my audience has lost their employment. Yeah, when nobody has any money and the people that do have money

are investing it in either guns or I don't know, lawyers to help them move to Canada. Would the book act as a good weapon or maybe a bullet shield? No, I felt like a quick read. I don't think so. Can't you remember they really have that? Books.

It's like, it's like just the amount. It does not take that much paper to stop a bullet. If you, but if you had like multiple copies, it would stop almost anything. Yeah, that's true. Especially if you get it wet. Yeah, I think if you, if you took like the Dennis Miller talking doll approach and just like built a shed

out of copies of Zoey punches the future in the dick. I think that might keep you safe. Maybe you could write 1,003 ways Zoey punches the future in the dick. And that'd be a nice thick book and quick to write because you just need like a few ideas. Man, it seems like a sweet gig because I'm telling you right now,

I bet whoever wrote that actually made a decent amount of money because they probably got a four or five grand advance for this piece of shit. And if it took longer than a weekend, I'd be amazed. That's the, that's the point. It's the effort versus what they get. Got hate as I'm saying, cause like you, you've written, Sean has written entire series of columns

about, about specific list book authors and that they will just recycle the same idea over and over and over again. And these things just, I don't know if they sell them like near the checkout stand of like a, I don't know, a gift shop or something like that, you know. They tend to be in self-help sections. Like if you, if you look for them in a bookstore.

To that point, I have written a thousand page book that took me four years. I don't think I made five grand off of it. So yeah, I'm game for writing about a thousand things, writing about a thousand things in a weekend, which is really like 40 things that I'm just gonna repeat. Let's be clear. You do not need to have a thousand things in mind.

Yeah. It's just like 40 things. And then you just kind of look up synonyms for them and put them in a different font and then just, you bank on that nobody gets to the end, which is a good bank. Without starting the whole thing, I can tell you from experience, it's super hard many times to come up with five things.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We got three and then one doesn't kind of fit and one sucks. I did write about that on a, reflecting it recently, how it cracked. It felt very important to construct a list for a lot of ideas. So you'd have these awesome ideas of like this scene from, you know, the dirt bike kid where he masturbates a bike

and you're like, that's what I want to write about. To publish. Now you're like, I've got to come up with like four other movies that are very similar to a kid jerking off a dirt bike. How am I going to write? Like the best robot jerk off scenes of 1986. And you just get stuck in these ruts where you're like, I don't want to write about these other four movies

because they're not funny or good. But now you can just write about Roadhouse, which has been up on our site, 1900hotdog.com. Let me rewind and take a moment. Sean never turned anything into me that he just kind of farted out. It's like, it's my deadline. Like by the time you get it,

he has, it appears to have like 150 hours of work in it. Yeah. Like eight months later. I'm not great with deadlines, but the work is pretty polished. I know that the world maybe didn't appreciate it, especially toward the end, because it's like, well, it's a listing list. They're all over the place.

I just went to Buzzfeed and they had 15 gifts of sleepy kittens yawning. And these kittens are sleepy. And somebody took 20 minutes for it. It would get four million hits. It would do far more traffic than the thing that Sean spent literally weeks trying to put together and tweaking every single sentence

because every sentence has to have a punchline. So, yeah. I wrote them just for you. I was like, you know who'd appreciate this is Jason. The readers, they probably won't notice, but. The modern readers will bail out after the first two entries because they've, anyway. The industry changed.

Let's not, I promised myself I wasn't gonna bring it up. I keep bringing it up on every podcast I go on to. I'm not bitter. That's a different podcast. I think we're also gonna give it to us. Let's all pivot towards 1,001 books. Oh, shit. That's a good move.

That's about due for a comeback. The cyclical nature of retro is coming back. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. The big hula hoops. Listeners out there, now that you're aware of this genre, you'll spot them now. Cause there were some honorable mentions.

We talked, we were gonna bring up like the movie Twister, which is about the high stakes, big money world of tornado chasing. We're in real life. The tornado chaser is like one guy in a van who works like a local station. And that, so he can like get laid at county fairs. Like, that's it.

But this is the big money corporate world of tornado chasing. Cocktail. Yeah, half of all movies are this movie. It's true. I'm partial to White Men Can't Jump, which is the high stakes. That's a good one.

Kick up basketball. Street hustling, basketball, street hustling. And again. Which again, I feel like maybe became a thing. Like kind of like the wizard became a thing. Yeah. In a way, yeah. Yeah.

And that's on the level of the color of money where I don't want to know if it's not real. It's so lovable and so well done in such a beautifully realized world that. I can tell you cocktail wasn't real. Yeah. Cocktail is another example. The underground world of bottle flipping.

The high stakes, big money world of a bartender who's so good at bottle flipping that it like turns the whole operation around. People can tell you from experience, if your boss catches you flipping bottles at the bar, you are fired. Did you really get fired for flipping bottles? That's bullshit.

Amongst other things. Oh, okay, okay. I mean, maybe the bottle flipping wasn't cited, specifically. He couldn't have seen that through the fire that I started, but like. Right. I knew what it was.

I knew he was jealous of my flair. Did you have a whole world of jargon in the bartender? Yeah, that's what we call it. We call it flair. Spelled, F-L-A-R-E, actually. Weirdly enough. It's not how you think. Yeah.

Bartender's notoriously bad spellers. I learned that. It's B talk. Bartender talk. And none of us know the bouncer. We call it spalling. It's spelling, but in B talk. Did the bouncer look like Patrick Swayzee

or did he look more like Sam Elliott or neither of them? No, they all like, best case scenario, they look like bull from over the top. Just eating cigars. Yeah, just an angry, angry man. He's kind of muscular, but you know he's going to die from it. Yeah, Carrie, just enough weight to always have a back that's thrown out.

And the kind of guy that maybe cannot fight all that well and that maybe is not that graceful of a fighter. He just can't reach you when you're behind him. He's really counting on you backing off before then he punches you. It's about white college kids being scared of the guy. That's the bouncer's skill. I've somehow known two people who worked as bouncers

and they were both just big. They were just large people. I mean, that is the criteria because honestly, it's just white college kids causing problems. Like nobody else is really an issue. It actually doesn't take all that much fighting to get them to leave or whatever. Anyway, so what's the traditional way

that you guys wrap up an episode? This is going to sound crazy, but do you have anything to plug, Jason? You've plugged it already. If anybody wants to follow me on my social medias, you just search Jason Parchner or David Wong. They'll come up on Google. There's not that many people.

There's like a famous surgeon named David Wong. I think you'll know that's not the same thing. You know that's not the right one? That's not the right one. He's pretty funny on Twitter, though. I've got to see. I have to have a Twitter site that I wish I could stop using. But because Facebook, as it had ruined our previous lives,

I have Facebook accounts where I have to try to promote the books. But it's the exact same thing with trying to promote things that track. It's like, well, we have an algorithm. And you have 70,000 followers on here. Your post will be shown to 1,500 of them unless you pay. Yeah, if you pay $25, we'll show it to a bot network.

To a bot network, that's right. And we will give you complete falsified stats about the click through and make it seem really successful. Hey, this podcast is about the thing you said it wasn't going to be about. But Twitter is free to use. It only costs you your soul. So I have to maintain engagement on Twitter to sell books.

And if my dream is to reach a level where I can be like one of those super famous people where they clearly have just hired somebody, like Conan O'Brien is clearly not on his Twitter writing jokes. And the only famous people who use it are the ones who it's just broken their brain, like Ricky Gervais, where they're just obsessively just insulting children and things like that.

I want to get to a level where I can just have somebody tweet out vaguely clever promotional things. Yeah, you want to get that like Lay's potato chip money. Yeah, yeah, where I have like a start. Be like a corporate Twitter with like a clever intern. That's how to do it. Occasionally, I can insult another author or something else on there.

But to be able to delete that app from my phone. That's the goal. That's the dream. Help Jason reach his dream. Buy his books so he can delete his Twitter. So I don't have to be on Twitter anymore. Of course, we have our things to plug, 1900hot.com. And this here podcast that you're listening to,

but you should still smash, like, and hit subscribe. Right. Dominate. Do the reviews. Reviews I've heard help a lot. Right. Review us. Dominate that like button.

Obliterate that subscribe button. I don't know. Share your favorite duets movie with us. I don't know. That's engagement, right? That's something we could talk about. Yeah, they've got to Twitter. Find their Twitter.

Reply to their Twitter post about this episode with your favorite duets movie. Because Twitter, these days, also is not showing everyone your tweets. And they also are building. And a market hashtag suicide by cop. An algorithm. So yeah, under the hashtag suicide by cop.

Yeah, under the hashtag assassinate the president on election day. And see, that will get great engagement on Twitter these days. Six emperor tyrantists, everybody. 1900hot.com. Dog Zone, 9000. Brought to you by Benjamin Saran.

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