The Press Box - 'This Week in Ringer Culture' (Dec. 11-15, 2017) (Ep. 400)

Episode Date: December 16, 2017

'This Week in Ringer Culture’ features ‘The Watch’ on the top TV shows of 2017 (00:30), ‘Jam Session’ on a crazy George Clooney gift-giving story (05:30), ‘House of Carbs’ on Pizza Hut��s alcohol delivery (10:15), ‘Against All Odds With Cousin Sal’ with ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm's’ Bob Einstein on his favorite entertainers (13:30), ‘The Rewatchables’ on the 2007 thriller ‘Zodiac’ (18:30), and ‘Binge Mode’ celebrating the droids of 'Star Wars' (23:15). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to this week in Ringer culture. I am Liz Kelly bringing you the highlights from the Ringer podcast network. 2017 is officially coming to a close and as part of our year and review package, we have new articles up on the site, such as Best TV show episodes, best performances, biz action movies, and so much more on the Ringer.com. First clip this week is actually a preview of some of the best of lists we've been creating. We have Andy Greenwald, Chris Ryan, and special guests Sam S.Mail talking about their top TV shows of 2017 here on The Watch. You want to do your Ozark fit or does everyone know?

I think, I mean, I've screamed and shouted about this show a lot. I thought it was actually sneakily, very, very subversive in terms of how we think about protagonists and the heroes of shows in a way that I haven't really been confronted with. I thought that the slow boil of Walter White going from what was the Mr. Chips to Scarface or whatever was the tagline for that, that he starts out essentially a Scarface's accountant and you're like right there in that moral moment with him. And the amount of stuff that they did in terms of like, most shows should spend two episodes talking about something like this.

Most shows should be building up to this moment for half a season. We're going to do this in the first 30 minutes. We're going to be like incredibly candid with each other in terms of characters. And, you know, I mean, I don't want to belabor Ozark. I think we've been talking about it a lot. But like I'm not, I don't ironically like the show. Like I actually thought it was just excellent. And it also was, it felt different than other shows.

I think there's a little bit of a sameness to the, to the look of some shows, and a lot of it had to do with the setting. But I just really was like never sure where this show is going. And I thought that it was, it was gripping. I will say that the, I think it's episode seven, kaleidoscope, one of my favorite episodes of TV of the air. Awesome. Just well made.

We have two shows to talk about it left. I think we all agree we're excellent. Oh, and so it's basically the same two shows for all of us. Maybe the order is different. Oh, my top two are the young pope at two. Oh, that's right. But your number two is... Did you not...

My number two is Mind Hunter, which is... My number one is Mind Hunter. My number two is Twin Peaks. And you, you don't have Mind Hunter? Oh, it was six. We just moved past. I love Mind Hunter. Okay.

I love it. Well, I mean, mine Hunter is... I mean, it's kind of like a kind of pointless for me to talk about because I'm such a Fincher fanboy, but he's, you know, it's, it's, it's well made in a, in the classic 70s film crime noir sense. But it's also just very presence, very new. It still feels very thrilling. And Jonathan Groff delivers.

Can you talk about that performance as a director? I mean, it's, well, I mean, you know. Because we had him on the podcast before I saw the last three episodes, which is the last three episodes of Mind Hunter go masterpiece, masterpiece, masterpiece, and his performance in them is one of the great reasons why. Including the all-time, like, Zeppelin drop of any. And all-time televised panic attacks. of Zeppelin in any piece of pop culture, I think.

The weird, yeah, I agree. I mean, the weird thing about Groff is the thing he plays, the subtext he plays, is that he's like one of these guys. And he doesn't play that at all. He plays the exact, he plays this nerdy, vulnerable, almost the exact opposite of these guys. And yet, I sense, oh, no, that's my assistant calling, by the way, I sense, oh, no, that there is something a little off about Groff, but he doesn't, he hides it in a way that a person like that would hide it.

That character starts out and he has the, oh, I want to move up in the FBI, why I have ambition. You know, I have this sort of a- Wide-eyed and, yeah. And then it turns out that the thing that he's actually interested in is deviance. And he's interested in creating a new language for why these inexplicable things happen. And then the greed comes back. And then the ambition comes back.

And his desire to be, like, he's covetous of credit for all the things that people are starting to say, oh, yeah, I guess you're kind of right about that. He's like, no, but we have to do it my way. We have to understand these guys my way. I'm weirdly protective of these awful, awful people because I want them to be understood through my lens. And it's all about this idea of like how you use language to describe something and how you talk about something. Because the show's about talking. Is what defines its reality.

Let's also just say pure. servicey podcasting right now. This show, if you've resisted watching Mind Hunter on Netflix, it is not what you think it is, almost guaranteed. It is not what you think it is. It is not a murder mystery.

It is not a murder mystery. It is deeply subversive in what it is. It is a terrific watch. It is entertaining. How would you even start like a workplace draw? I mean, it's almost that. Here's the other thing about it.

I am so excited for a second season. And generally, I have sort of lost that muscle where I'm like, I need it now. I want the next thing. Or even, And I just, the season ends, let's let people figure it out and maybe I'll be excited again and I'll start over. This one left me at a point where I actually have a sense of where it could go, what it could be.

And that's, that is thrilling. So, incredible show. Next up, we have to include one insane story of the week. So last week's roundup, we had a story on how a guy avoided his boss for two full years from House of Carbs. And this week, we have Juliet Lippman and Amanda Dobbins talking about George Clooney's absolutely ludicrous gift giving in this clip from Jam session. The Ratt published a story today that is a recounting of Randy Gürmer, one of the co-owners of Casamigos with George Clooney and the husband of Cindy Crawford, telling a story on MSNBC about a time in 2013 when George Clooney gave his 14 best friends, each a duffel bag filled with $1 million in $20 bills and paid their taxes for that year. Okay. I honestly just have to read. We have to read this. Okay. I'll read some details. I just want to highlight right now in advance. I know what you're all thinking. This was 2013. This was way before the sale of Casamigos for $1 billion. Yes. Here's what George. This is what happened per Randy Gerber. So there's a group of guys we call the boys. So they certainly have a group text that they've renamed the boys. George had called me and the boys and said, hey, Mark September 27th, 2013 on your calendar. Everyone's going to, come to my house for dinner. George begins to say, listen, I want you guys to know how much you've

meant to mean, how much you mean to me in my life. I came to L.A. I slept on your couch. I'm so fortunate in my life to have all of you and I couldn't be where I am today without all of you. So it was really important to me that while we're still all here together, that I give back. So give back to his friends, not the community or charity. So I want you all to open your suitcases. And so this is where we should note that there are black designer luggage bags at each setting on the table, which is a fancy way of saying there are fucking duffel bags at every setting at the table. Continue. It's a deleted scene from the film Ocean's 11. Yeah. We open it up and it's a million dollars and $20 bills. Every one of us. 14 of us got a million dollars. Every single one of us.

We're in shock. Like, what is this? And he goes, I know we've all been through some hard times. Some of you are still going through it. You don't have to worry about your kids. You don't have to worry about, you know, school. You don't have to worry about paying your mortgage. And then Gerber said that some of Clooney's boys were working paycheck to paycheck at the time. The restaurateur, he said he initially tried to turn down the gift, but he said if he didn't take it, then nobody gets it. So Gerber then accepted it. And then he says, this is who George is.

That was September 27th, 2013. And then now September 27th, 2014, he marries them all. Now that's good karma right there. So man is it good to be George Clooney. So $14 million in cash. Yes. Means that he has how much money on hand. Plus everyone's taxes.

Right. Okay. So I'm going to go like a 20 million? Cash he doesn't need like 20. Like I don't know. 20 million in cash. It's not like in property. It's not investments.

He's 20 million liquid that he is able to give away to people. I'm squirming in my seat. That makes me so confused and uncomfortable. Here's a question. Do you think they actually pay taxes or do you think he just said that because he was on MSNBC. I don't know. I think he probably paid the taxes.

Okay. So that they didn't get in trouble. I just, how much money does George Clooney have in 2013? I'm looking at the IMDB page. Well, I think we- There were six years from the Oceans trilogy. Okay.

And then he did leatherheads andides of March. Here's the thing about celebrities like George Clooney. Yeah. And by the way, I just want to say, Doug Ross is my favorite fictional man like ever. So I just love George Clooney so much. Okay. As a result of that, maybe even if not warranted.

The thing about George Clooney is that he is so charming. Again, I'm just like squirming in my seat is that he has these incredible endorsements. Like that espresso money is probably worth a lot. And like who knows what else he's doing overseas to get that cash. Yeah, that's a great point. Rich people just find ways to make money. And when you're like handsome and suave as he is, like it just comes to you. It's an unfair world, but it's true.

That's a great point. I'd still, that's an astonishing amount. of cash on hand to be able to give away to your friends. Completely. In a black duffel bag, which just also suggests, I mean, that's the shadiest way to present it. I mean, it's hilarious, but. It's unbelievable.

It's also like, then we got to add in the cost of the duffel bags. I'm sure they were really nice. It's a few, like, many thousand. That's like a drop in a bucket at this point. I'm sure they were donated. Hey, I'm giving my friends a million dollars. Would you like to sponsor this? Sure, George, we'd love to.

It is wild. And then think about all the other gifts he's probably getting for people that we don't even know about. So if anyone out there is feeling that generous this Christmas season and, you know, wants to do the same for me, please send them here to her in your office in L.A. In the meantime, we have exciting news from Pizza Hut, which is honestly a sentence I never thought I would say.

In this clip from House of Carbs, Joe House and Juliet Lippman discussed the pizza chain's decision to start bringing alcohol to your doorstep. Last week, Pizza Hut announced that it will start testing beer and wine delivery in certain cities. This story comes to us from CNN Money.com. And the story says, the service will debut in Phoenix, Arizona,

six packs of all Budweiser, Anheuser-Busch beers, including Budweiser, Bud Light, and Shocktop, and Kilt Lifter, which I'd never heard of. But that is because it's an Arizona-based craft brewer for Peaks. All options will cost a flat 1099. And then, wine delivery will roll out in January. Those details are still up in the air. But yeah, you can have this coming to you in your home.

The move is Pizza Hut's latest attempt to shore up sales. Their Yum brand, which is the company that owns them, has been on a tear, shares up 32% this year, but Pizza Hut hasn't been forming as well as the siblings, Taco Bell and KFC. And so they are trying this out. So I have a question for you. Okay. When is the last time you ordered pizza?

I don't think I've ever ordered pizza hut. However, I am a huge fan of the stuff crust pizza and I've been to pizza hut to have it. Oh, so where is there a physical brick and mortar pizza hut still? I mean, it's been it's been years. I don't know. This is like on the East Coast, but I do I do love stuff crust pizza. So do I. And I thought you were about to tell me that there is a Pizza Hut brick and mortar there in the greater L.A. area that you and I could go sample. We already have chilies on the list. Yeah, we got to go Chili's. We can do Chili's and Pizza Hut in one afternoon.

That would be pretty fine eating. There's one really close to where I am currently. A brick and mortar? Yes. Oh, my God. It's like in Koreatown on Santa Monica Boulevard. It's not really in Korea town. It's like in the Virgil Village area.

So in my youth. It's close to where I live. Yeah. So in my youth, the Pizza Hut pizza bar, like the all you can eat pizza bar, where they just put the pizzas under lamps and you could walk up, you know, you paid your price, you paid the entry fee, that's the way I think of it, and walked up with the plate and then you could eat as much pizza and salad as you wanted. That was a really crucial part of my high school and a little bit of college, and maybe it even bled over into a little bit of law school. I really enjoyed

that aspect of Pizza Hut. When I got to sort of the ordering pizza, to my home stage of a lifestyle. Pizza Hut was not really a big, never really featured prominently in that. My rank of ordering, my priority of ordering pizza delivery, but this six pack of beer thing is taking it to a whole other level.

It's kind of brilliant. And I'm shocked that it's 2017. It's December 2017, and we're reading about this now as a kind of innovation. Next up, Cousin Sal and Bill Simmons struck to curb your enthusiasm's Bob Einstein, better known as Super Dave Osborne. In this clip from Against All Odds,

he discusses some of his favorite comedians and performers. Who's the greatest comedian, Super Dave? If you had an hour left to live and you can watch only clips of one comedian on YouTube, who is it? Yeah. Oh, you loved him, yeah. Red Fox.

He loved him. Now, if you didn't know, him, you were... He was the funniest, down? Joe Lewis on. Do you know what that's like? That's Babe Ruth. Right.

What you're going to do in the middle of Reds monologue, you're going to... What? Wow. Did he really? He came up with a knife for Joe Lewis. That would have been on YouTube.

He was the greatest. I loved him. That was... I've always fascinated by that 70s comedy scene when you had all these amazing talents that were just writing. Yeah. Yeah.

And let me tell you this story. We went right to the Smothers Brothers. And that had everybody. Yeah. Phenomenal in the history of favorite human being of a... Was he better than Lynn Manuel Miranda? No. No.

Not as good as him, but... Almost. Okay. Okay. If you bring that name up again, I'm going to walk into a window. Okay? All right, bye. Yeah.

We would have to say it, but we do a show. Canada called Superdea up here money. He said, I'll call you back tomorrow. Let's me back. Listen, one condition to put him in a stunt. Wow. Did you hear me? Yes, yeah. You put him in a stunt. That's so beyond

wow. Okay. That's so beyond wow. So what we did is we opened the show. Mike Walden was my announcer. He's waiting for me. I wasn't used to driving a stick shift. I said I should have known that when we went through

McDonald's. Donald's 37 times. And we walked in and he did, what did I say? He did every one of my first shows for five, six years. He did my movie, Ray Charles. Wow. That's great. Is that something?

That's terrific. It really is. This next clip is from one of my favorite podcasts, The Rwatchables. 2007 is regarded as one of the best years in recent film memory, and Sean Fantasy, Chris Ryan, and Andy Greenwald commemorate that by taking another look at the film Zodiac and share their most rewatchable scene. This is a sort of complicated film to celebrate any one scene over the other. So I tried to mix it up with a series of more light scenes and then obviously the darker ones.

Now, the cold open, the first murder, is considered one of the crowning achievements in Fincher's career. So I had to include that. And I also included the credit sequence, which sort of sets up the world we're living in with incredible economy and Panache. And it might be the most, you know, for a movie that's the time. So for a director who's so stylish and for a movie that's so visually dense, this is one of the only, like, quote unquote, set pieces outside of the murders. It's the trolley of mail that's bringing the first Zodiac letter to the publisher and editor of the Chronicle. The Grace Smith Avery Bar scene with the Aqua Velva, which is they're sort of coming together.

The Napa murder. The This is the Zodiac speaking with Melvin, the entire sequence, just of the talk show. And I am not the Zodiac, the interrogation scene. Yeah, I have one vote and one honorable mention. Sure. I think the honorable mention is the scene Andy just identified, which is at the very end of the movie, which is Grey Smith recreating Arthur Lee Allen

and I believe Jacqueline is their name, the first victim. And when he says door to door, it's 50 yards. I've walked it. Darlene Farron worked at the Vallejo House of Pancakes on the corner of Tennessee and Carroll. Arthur Lee Allen lived in his mother's basement on Fresno Street. door to door that is less than 50 yards.

There's like a, we solved it moment feeling. It's the only real like we've solved it moment in the movie, except for the questioning of Arthur Lee Allen, where he, the three detectives go and visit him in his office. Or I'm not even totally sure where he works. It's a break room in the factory. And it's just this long protracted, we got him, you know, where he keeps saying things and you keep wondering why he's saying them.

And it is that thing we've, come to understand and is identified in this movie is serial killers want to be caught. So they say things like, those knives I had in my trunk were bloody because I killed a chicken. Right. And you're like, what, what just happened to you? The knives I had in my car with a blood on them, that blood came from a chicken that I killed for dinner.

I had knives in my car that weekend. Maybe Bill saw them and called the other officer on me. Well, we'll be checking in on that. And all the unspoken communication between them when they see the watch and they look at the watch, that scene is just spectacular. I think that would probably be up at the top of my list. I think you mentioned the Napa murder, Lake Bariassas, a scene.

That is the least rewatchable and maybe the best scene in the film. It is so expertly done and so horrifying in such a slow, burning way. And then... It might be one of the most unsettling murder scenes I've ever seen. Yeah, when he slips behind the tree before you really see him approaching, it's incredibly unnerving. Well, that gets the, I still think this, you know, for me, the scary. thing ever in movies is The Shining when walking up the stairs

and the guy in the bear suit and there's just like the person that is just incongruous and it's there and you're so in with those characters and there's the sense of we are by a lake in the middle of a tourist area on a beautiful sunny day. Of course there are other people here.

Of course we're safe. There is no safety. And the movie then, the movie is also a protracted tease of our expectations. There's very little violence except when oh my God there's such awful violence and it hits harder.

So I think that's not rewatchable but is worth mentioning. I'm surprised you didn't have the scene when Graysmith goes to the camera, the projectionist's house at the end, which, again, I have a hard time watching it, let alone rewatching it, but that scene to me is so exceptional

because it's, we almost think the movie's gonna let us go. Like, we think we're out of that part of the movie, and then it's the most, it's the scariest probably moment in the entire film. It's the most horror movie element of the film. You know, the murders are serial killer moments, and this movie, in part because of the movies that they're talking about and the sort of like the darkened home and down into the basement.

And that feeling is, it's almost like a West Craven movie or something, you know, the way that you don't. And when he pulls the chain to turn the light off before Grace Smith scurries out, it's pure like if a zombie killed him in that moment, I wouldn't be shocked. Also, he goes home and his family's gone. His family is gone. Right. And that's when the, you know, you don't know if the first part was in his mind, but this is the reality of what he's done. In our last clip of the week, we have a Star Wars themed podcast on Bidge Mode Week. In honor of Star Wars, The Last Jedi, which premiered on Friday, Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion

shared their appreciation for the droids and their impact on the franchise. And don't worry, there aren't any spoilers. I love BB8. BBA8 is great, man. Here's one of my like seven favorite moments just ever. Sure. A little thumbs up. Yeah, that's great.

It's really great. With the fire. You need a light and it seems to give him a thumbs up. All the droids in the story are really fascinating, the way they interact. not only with humans, but with each other, their commitment to their tasks, but they're not actually these flat, lifeless beings. They have such vibrant personalities,

and it's a particularly impressive achievement with droids like R2D2 or BB8, because they can't speak. You know, C-3PO, you do get to the point where you're like, can you just like shut up for a minute? Also, like, he's mean. He's as much of a bully as anyone.

It's hard to feel too bad for the droids getting bullied when he's as much of a bully as anyone. But R2 and BB8, they can convey so much about their thoughts and their feelings by sounds. They remind me so much of Wally. Like Wally and BB8 have the same pitches and the same tones. And when Bibi thinks that Po is dead, the way that his head slides and sings, it's just like heartbreaking. And then his joy when he sees him again, there's more loyalty there than there is among many of the huge. human characters. And it's just really heartening and sort of comforting to think about,

what if you were in this world? Yeah. What if you were in this galaxy? And what if you had either the opportunity or the burden, depending on your perspective, to try to save people and to try to make a difference? And the one that you could count on was this little rolling ball of bliss right next to you. Glad you mentioned C-3Po's voice because that's like one of the signifiers that Lucas uses like over time is this class division, you know, the upper class kind of Britishy accents, those are often the bad guys. So it's an interesting choice to use that with C3PO. Great. Yeah. Also, Zach Cram, who assists us with research and is just a generally great guy, wanted us to give a shout out to K2SO. K2SO. The smart ass from Rogue One. I liked him. I liked him.

Okay, that is it for this week. You can find the full-length versions of all these podcasts and subscribe at the ringer.com slash podcasts.