The Rewatchables - ‘Kicking and Screaming (1995)’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Andy Greenwald

Episode Date: October 6, 2020

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Andy Greenwald are nostalgic for conversations they had yesterday after revisiting Noah Baumbach’s first film ‘Kicking and Screaming’, starring Josh Hamilton, Chris Eigeman, and Olivia d'Abo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, if you're a fan of the rewatchables, we have done over 150 movies at this point. You can find the complete archives only on Spotify. We moved everything over there. All new podcasts, the last 60 days of new podcasts that we do, they are available on all platforms, along with a couple of the classics that we loved from the last three plus years. But if you want the entire archives, they're exclusively on Spotify. You can find them there. One other note, the podcast you're about to hear,

I screwed up on my recording again, and for some reason, my levels were at a one out of 10, which is really bad. So if you're listening to this, we're using the Zoom audio. I apologize. I'm a moron. My bad. This episode is brought to you by Adobe Firefly, the all-in-one creative studio with AI-powered image and video generation. Built for today's creative process, Firefly helps you generate, edit, and experiment fast. because the asks aren't getting smaller. And the timelines? Ooh, yeah, still tight. With all the best creative AI models in one place,

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Coming up, what I used to be able to pass off as a bad summer could now potentially turn into a bad life. Kicking and screaming is next. That... Is that a pajama top? No. Yes. Your hair drives.

me crazy. I beg to stand Prozac. Just get out. Just remember to follow your heart. Just get out. Out. Go. Use your imagination.

We were an old couple. Dated for years. And I've reached over and kissed you. You wouldn't say a word. I mean, you'd be delighted. Probably face the world. What do you mean? I just wish we were an old couple so I could do that.

Kicking and screaming. Are you wearing mascara? No. All right, Chris Ryan is here. Andy Greenwald is here. We'd like to call ourselves the Gen X crew. This was probably the best Gen X movie ever made. It was not intended to be a Gen X movie.

It was an unintended consequence. It came out 25 years ago this week. It was Noah Bombach's first movie. He became one of the best directors working today. And this is an important movie in the Bomback experience. Andy, not a Gen X movie, but was a Gen X movie. Let's start there. First of all, I'm just honored to be here.

I can't believe that I get the call for these movies that are essentially like the pristine experiences of the making of myself. You had me ever pump up the volume, which was high school. And now I'm back. Now we're doing college. Yeah. I mean, when are we doing Eternal Sunshine? Because then we got most of my adventures or misadventures as a young man.

What a journey for you. We ended all with marriage story. Yes. I think in all senses, we ended all with marriage story. I mean, I can't wrap my head around how important this movie was to me, seeing it at the Avon movie theater, freshman year of college. Like the first movie I saw as a person who didn't live in my home anymore and saw people who didn't just talk like I wished I could talk, but who seemed to be living life like I wanted to be living it with a lot of affectations and literature classes and wanting to smoke even though I didn't know how to smoke. And yeah, this movie, I think if you watch it now, feels like. exactly what that time period was like. And as you said, Bill, it wasn't even successful. So somehow

it laid the groundwork or just intuited the moment to a degree that is just, it's just outrageous. This is a classic film. Chris? Oh, yeah. I mean, this, for better or for worse, this movie probably had the most profound effect on my actual life that anyone we've maybe talked about in the rewatchables. And it's been really interesting talking to you about this, Bill, because this movie came out as Andy and I were going into college. And I imagine it came out as, you know, you were leaving college, correct? Yeah, it was a couple years out. So the difference being, for you, I would imagine,

this was very accurate about your experience. For me, I watched this movie, and I'm absolutely positive. This was not Noah Baumbach's intention, but I watched this movie, and I was like, that's what I want. Yes. I want to have those friends. I want to have that specific girlfriend. I want to be, I mean, I had already had ideas about, like,

what I wanted to do, like, I wanted to be a writer. but I was like short fiction seems great let's do that all these things that were in this movie I don't know whether they inspected me or whether they inspired me or whatever but I had a very similar experience in college so there was a lot more music involved and a lot less talking about philosophy but it was still like eerily similar to my experience all I wanted to do was do enough things to be disappointed by them like these guys like I think that Chris has nailed it in the sense that you could watch this movie in the age of the character or the age of Noah Bombach.

I think he was 25 when he got to make this movie and think that, oh, this is all about stasis and about graduating into a weak economy or whatever. But Chris and I were like, they get to have their own house and buy their own beer and just talk about stuff and ideas and trivia. I mean, this was, first it was escapism and then it was, I don't know, deeply, deeply emotionally affecting as you watch it throughout the years of your life. So this is one of my 10 favorite movies ever. And I know I've said that a few times, but it really is.

And I saw it in the movie theater that was on the Boston University campus. It was October 95. Probably a low point for me. We've talked about that with some of these 1990s movies. Career-wise, professionally, things weren't going great for me, having all the usual problems with keeping relationships and things like that. And when I saw this movie, it was a Sunday night. I didn't really know what it was about other than the reviews.

And they were like, this is a great blah, blah, blah about this year after college. I'm like, wow, that sounds like they made a movie about me and my friends and went to it and was just constantly blown away the entire time with from little pieces where I was like, wow, Grover, me and Grover, I feel like this is my alter ego on the screen. Like his dad's calling him to complain about the Nix, the same way my dad would leave answer to shoot messages. He was a Libra. He was this frustrated writer.

He was drifting. He had friends who were talking about, what are we doing with our lives? Six months have passed. We're in the exact same spot. And I just kind of stumbled out of the theater. And the big thing for me, so many movies have tried to pull off the,

I fucked up this relationship and I can't get it back. But dot, dot, dot. And that dot, dot, dot, dot always gets messed up in movies. And this one did it perfectly, right? She goes to Prague. he doesn't follow her he doesn't try to stop her it becomes almost like an ego battle

she's gone answer machine message on his answer machine he won't even listen to the whole thing finally he listens to it and then this one day on a whim is like I'm going to Prague I'm doing this and in romcops in these movies

that we watch the guy gets on the plane and they hug at the end and in this one he doesn't have his passport and the moment's gone and he knows like she's like he knows he goes to go to Prague tomorrow He's like, he knows deep down he's not going to.

This was the one moment when he's going to be impetuous and actually like, you know, get off his butt and try to do something and stick up for himself and the moment's gone. And that's honestly what real life is like. So by the time this movie was over, I was like, it honestly like floored me. And it's been flooring me ever since for 25 years.

It's kind of an amazing thing that this movie was made by a young person. Clearly a young person who was uncomfortable being a young person and was already like character Mac says. Just look at how those guys dress. I was, I mean, are you going to make me burn my Apex Mountain for sports jacket? I'm holding that one back. But it's not romantic about itself, and I think in a way that a lot of art made by young people is. You know, in the sense that you read it and if it's a book, you read it, if it's a movie, you watch it,

and you're filled with a wistfulness that maybe you felt at that time when you thought anything was possible and you could do things just like buy a ticket to Eastern Europe on a whim. Already he knew that life didn't work that way. And there was a sadness to it. And that's obviously something that's become more explicit in his later movies, like Chris's action film of Last Summer Marriage Story. But it's really astonishing. And that's one of the main reasons, the thing you're alluding to, Bill,

the way it leaves you feeling at the end, that's what's separated at the time. And that's what keeps it up on Apex Mountain for all of us. Yeah. When you watch other movies about young people, whether it's like diner or Days of Confused, or everybody wants some or animal house. I was trying to think of other great college movies.

There's a degree of romanticism involved. These guys are fucking miserable, this entire movie. It starts they're miserable. By the end, most of them dislike one another and are leaving. And it's just like empty. But there's something about the honesty and the fact that they don't put too, like, glossy a coat of pain on everything. That makes you feel like, yeah,

that's actually the way life really is. Like, you really do a lot of stuff that you think is your personality really is just an affectation that becomes a habit. I mean, like, trust me, as somebody who started smoking at 20 and just did it for 15 years, it's not a bit. You just wind up becoming the person that you think you're kind of trying out these different personality quirks. We're like, oh, maybe I'll be a writer, or maybe I'll wear this kind of jacket, or maybe I'll grow my hair like this, or maybe I'll smoke, or maybe I'll drink scotch. And then all of a sudden, that's who you are. Yeah.

And they seem very wary of the longer this goes, the longer this is just going to be my life. And the person who's in their life who's reminding them is constantly, is Chet, Eric Stolice's character, where he just stays in college for 10 years and ultimately just decides like, yeah, this is pretty great. I'm just going to do this. And none of them want to end up like Chet. Yeah. But he's actually happy. But it all comes to a head when they're in the bar when Skippy confronts Max.

about sleeping with Parker Posey, and he's like, I hate you, and it just cuts to Grover, and he's just kind of, it's like, all of his, all these relationships he's had for five years are just in flames,

and he's like, what's going on by life? But I'll tell you, I don't, I think of the internet era and in social media era, and you have more ways to kind of identify with people,

you know, especially if you're lonely or you're battling, whatever thing, there's essays about it. You don't feel like you're alone. I think the difference in 95 and leading up to the internet era was you really didn't have a lot of people to talk about this stuff with. You basically had your group of friends.

You didn't really know if it was just you. And you had the occasional movie like this where you're like, oh, holy shit, it's not just me. Oh, these guys are going through it too. And I can't tell you how important stuff like that or certain books or certain magazine pieces. They had such like an outsized impact. Bill, that's how me and Andy met. Like, Greenwald and I met summer of 96, right? Right? And he was working at Borders Books in Philly. And Chris wanted to know who the space character was from the Josie and the Pussycats cartoon. He had no one else to ask. Sorry, please go on. I was drinking a cold 45, one in the afternoon. No, I... The big ones. I met Andy, a mutual friend of ours was like, you know, was like, come meet my friend Andy who's from college, who works at

this borders, and he was wearing a t-shirt of a band I liked. And that was literally the beginning of a friendship that continues to this day. But part of it was actually just the recognition of, oh, you like some of the same stuff I like. I thought I was alone. And then when I moved to Boston and Andy was in Rhode Island, we would just talk on the phone sometimes. I mean, that was just, and we were just bullshit with each other. And that was, I love how much the phone comes into play in this movie. It's what's age of the best and what's age the worst. There's no texting. There's no WhatsApp or anything like that. But there are missed messages. There are long kind of wandering, meandering phone conversations. There's phone conversations where

people are calling each other because they have nothing else to do. So, you know, Josh Hamilton calls Chris Aigerman when he's at the freshman's dorm room. And that's kind of like very, very specific to that time period. That's human beings are essentially like bats, right? We are always sending out these sonar pings and we need to know that something's coming back to us. And I think that when we talk about these movies that predate the internet era, I think people, I've forgotten until I watch a movie like this, the degree to which we couldn't rely on that many things to sonar ping back to us, right? Like where we are at any given moment. And Chris mentions that scene that really hits different now when he's in the freshman's room and he's drunk and he's not

part of their world whatsoever. And he picks up that white plastic box that everyone had in their room and he calls his friend who he knows his home and they just ping each other for a second. They don't actually say anything, but they just needed to know they weren't spinning completely into the void, the void, I guess, of real life that's threatening to swallow them both up. And it's weirdly touching and it's kind of sad. And it's also probably totally unfamiliar to anyone who is never out of touch with someone else 24 hours a day, seven days. Well, it's reality bites had pieces of it, but was kind of the Hollywood over the top version.

We did that on the rewatchables. Singles was trying to be this movie, but I think Cameron Crow was too old to make it. And I think one of the keys with this is, Bomb Back goes to Vassar, writes this script in like 1991, and then spends the next four years trying to make the movie. Ironically, his college reubate was Jason Blum.

I had no idea about this. Longhouse. This is the first movie he ever tried to produce. But that's one of the reasons it feels so authentic. I think it's really made by somebody who's in it. and is the right age and kind of gets it. And it has a lot of themes that would pop up in future movies with them, right? The dad's divorced.

The kids kind of screwed up from it. Kids screwed up in general. Has fear of commitment, all that stuff. And I think the irony of this was, after this, we waited for Bomback for how many years before he made another great one. Well, he made Mr. Jealousy. We all had season tickets for him, right? Yeah, he made Mr. Jealousy.

and then he was pretty much, I don't know, not in director jail, but he was just trying to get something made for quite a while after that. He kind of was. He made a movie that got butchered and then like half released. I think it was called Highball or something. Yeah. He took his name off that, yeah. And but because of this movie, for some of us, he was a hero.

But to Hollywood, he was absolutely a zero. And one of the more memorable nights of like my early life in New York was going to, there used to be a sushi bar called Avenue A sushi that served food like super late. So after you were already drunk, then you would have dinner beginning of at 11 or midnight. And I went there with the person who is now my wife and our good friend, Chris and our good friend, Sean Howe and Sean brought his buddy Noah, who he, who had just been hanging out at the Criterion Collection Office where Sean worked. And he was a God to us. Yeah. And he was in person, one of the saddest people I'd ever met in my life, drinking sake

with people he never knew, like Grover in the room full of freshmen. Yeah. Just basically being like, I don't know, Wes, Wes is, I'm writing something with Wes and I hope that turns into something. because then was Wes Anderson, who was a fan of his work. They co-wrote, I think, Life Aquatic together, and then helped him get the financing from Squid and the Whale. And then there's, like, Bombok 2.0, which goes to this day. But it's kind of incredible that, Chris, you said at the beginning, this is a movie about people who are already disappointed in life,

even though they haven't really started it yet. And here he was, in real life, a few years after having what, to our mind, was just like this enormous success. Like, you should dine out on this for the rest of your life, a movie this good. And he couldn't get a second chance. Well, it's like even the characters, the way they dress in this movie, they're like these old souls, right?

And it works. But like, the way Grover and those guys dress is absurd. I mean, people didn't dress like that every single day in 1995, you know? Like, sometimes they have the old jeans sometimes, but just the Tweed jackets when you're not going to a job, you're not doing anything. We have to talk about this because I don't know if it's ever come up in another rewatchables, but I feel like there is a line. Like, you know, when you cut into rock and you could see when the different eras of dinosaurs came and went, there has to be a moment when people just stop dressing fancy all the time. Because if you look at pictures of like street scenes in Manhattan or any movie in Manhattan through the 80s, the majority of people are wearing suits. And then at a certain point, they're not.

I wondered, Bill, you are more Gen X than us. When I watched it now, I was like, maybe this was the last generation that wore a sport coat to a... No. So I think it's a combination of a bunch of guys who are a pretending. like their John Updike or something where they're like these patrician short story writers and the combination of that and

the sort of thing in the 90s where people shopped at thrift shops and people got a lot of their clothes at at thrift stores so you could go and I remember like I think unrelated to kicking and screaming like I had like a tweed jacket that I just like would wear sometimes you know what I mean

but it wasn't like something where I went to Brooks Brothers and got it I think I got it for like eight bucks at at a garment district or something. So it was, it was like, I think a combination of those two things. The cocktail party felt a little unrealistic. That was a really nice party for a graduation. Right. Well, Max is supposed to be rich. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like I feel like Max is maybe covering a lot of the rent at the house. True. Well, the dad like throws out at one point, hey, you can keep my, you can use my apartment in Greenwich Village. You just randomly has it.

It's empty. That's not cheap. Yeah, that's the tell because there's the earlier part in the movie where he's like, we graduated. Now I'm pouring your. rich. That was just another fiction we lived under when we were both students at the same college. And then his poor dad shows up and is like, I guess you should probably have my apartment in the single most expensive zip code on the East Coast. I'll leave the cable in. Yeah, leave the cable. That's nice of you pop. I think this movie did the best of hitting that kind of four to five year window that we call Gen X, but just had a lot of the pre-internet stuff. One other thing, I think it did really well. This was part of a

unintentional like kind of cohort of films from this, this era. But so even if these movies didn't necessarily mean to all kind of go together, they do when you look at them. It's singles is in 92. Yeah. Body's Rest in Motion was in 93. Sleep with Me was in 94. Both of those movies were produced, I believe, by the kicking and screaming producer.

Not belong to the other guy. And Eric Stoltz was involved too. Yeah. Eric Stoltz is involved in a bunch of these. Reality Bites, Brothers McMullen, then kicking and screaming and then ending with beautiful girls pretty much. ending. You know, it's like around that. So movies about sensitive white people

talking. That was the golden age. I would throw chasing Amy in there as well. Yeah. Yeah. That was kind of the tail end of that. The thing that it nailed really well was the person that gets away. You know, and even like before sunrise,

the person gets away, but there's hope that they're going to back together. In this one, there's no hope at all. And movies botched that over and over again. And we said before we started the Zoom, I feel like this, you know, people saw this movie and they wanted to write their own version of it. I'm sure myself included.

Nobody was able to pull off this movie again. It kind of was what it was, but there's been a lot of bad versions of it or pieces of it. And it just kind of never goes right. Why is it so hard, Andy? Well, I think that it ties in a little bit to the way that somehow Noah Baumbach, a young person,

wrote a movie about young people with the wisdom of an older person. So it's not annoying. It doesn't, it's not trying to impress you all the time. Obviously, these characters do nothing but run their mouths and attempts to impress the world, but people keep calling them on it. And I think one of the criticisms of the movie, which is, you know, is kind of legitimate. And it was said to me by Parker Posey when I interviewed her for Grantland a bunch of

years ago, which is that she's proud of the movie, but she's always been bummed that she couldn't be one of the guys. Like she just couldn't believe, why couldn't she be one of their friends? And she felt like that was just a limitation of director's worldview at the time, which is absolutely true, right? But the role of the women play in the movie isn't insignificant because they are calling these dudes on their bullshit left, right and center. And I think that going back to Chris's point about like everything being an affectation, which just came from obviously a line in the movie, all of us built our identities brick by brick through outside influence, right? We didn't have an internet of culture to be like, I see the people I want to dress like here.

I can get all the music and I can educate myself and then emerge into the world back when we could emerge into the world as a whole idea. We just crib stuff, like the older brother who had the Smith's records or the girl in school who dressed cool or whatever it was. And so the Jane character here isn't just like a dream girl. We see the enormous outsized influence she just naturally had on him, right, in a way that I think is really honest and true and happened in smaller ways in my life and maybe everybody's life. When she's like, oh, this is the bar I like to go to, this is the cigarette I like to smoke, this is the drink I like to have. taking the retainer out. Yeah. Those are just who she is.

And as she says to him, you just didn't notice me. You weren't looking for me. And in that moment, in that light in the bar with the smoke going between them, he's like, this is the Mona Lisa. This is what I've been looking for in my entire life. And I love the fact that the jaded Grover we see, like five months after they met, we get to see him before he's choked down his first sip of Jack Daniels or whatever it is, right?

Before he started smoking, when he walks into the bar that we've spent half the movie in and he's like, this is a town you. are. The movie calls bullshit on itself in the same way the characters do in a way that is really endearing and, okay, not brave. I mean, you got to make a movie at 25, but it's pretty noteworthy, I think, for someone that young to be able to have some distance from himself and his own ego to have it ring true like that. Yeah, and Bill, to your point, I think that the cool thing that movies set around this period of time in people's lives can do is that they can create these like icebergs coming at the Titanic moments.

But it's things like in Superbad. They know that they're not going to the same college. You know, in dazed, it's the last day of school. And they just, they feel like they're all going in different directions. And in this, I think it's the fact that they know that they are in purgatory. From the moment the movie starts, they know that one of them or all of them are eventually going to leave this place lest they wind up like Chet. In your life, in your like late 20s and early 30s,

I think usually the decisions you make are probably more for personal or personal gain. But at that age, stuff just kind of happens to you. You know, you just get into this grad school or you got this job. Or maybe you followed a girl to a different town, but then it didn't work out. Or she followed you and it didn't work out. Like the things that happen to you don't really have a language to describe yet. So the drama actually feels like it's happening outside of you rather than I just feel like we got to break up. The way that Jane and Grover break up where she's just like, I got into this program, I have to go,

is kind of like how it feels like that shit happens to you when you're in that age where you're just like, oh, man, so you're leaving? Also, she's leveled up. She's not on his level, right? She made a choice and he can't make one. And he didn't know that until that moment. Or how little of a plane you had back then. I remember even decided to go to grad school. It was like a last minute thing just because my dad was like, hey, you're graduating.

What are you going to do? And I'm like, I don't know. What should I do? And it was like, you should go to journalism school. All right. And all of a sudden, I'm speed rushing applications. But, you know, I think it was, people were a lot less self-aware about that stuff 25 years ago. And you could be in a situation where you're just looking around like, fuck.

And Max is the most aware of it out of anyone. He's talking about like, I used to be in college. Now I'm a fucking loser. And all that happened was I graduated. You said that one thing about Parker Posey, though, about how she was bummed that it was. you know, a guy's movie. I really think that's what the mid-90s were like. They were a lot different than they are now.

They were a lot less inclusive. And, you know, I remember for forever, like I was in a fantasy league. I still am, the two fantasy leagues I had that started, you know, one of them started in 1990. We never would have had a girl in the fantasy league. You know, it was like, we had certain things that were like our things. And when Skippy tells Kate,

when he's having the meltdown about Max Sleep with Miami, and he's like, can you leave for a second? I'm having a nervous breakdown. Yeah, that's kind of what the mid-90s were like. It's like, hey, us guys have to handle this. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just saying that's what it was. I agree.

And I think that there's a key moment in the movie in the house, right, when they all tell Max they knew, right? Or that they found out or that I just told them. And Chet is like pretty merciless to him in a very understated way. It's like, I'm not saying what you should do. It's just he's your good friend. And then he leaves because he doesn't want to be a part. of it. And then everyone's appalled for a second. And then Grover says, how was she? And Chet

returns. Right. Chet she sneaks back in. It doesn't reflect well on any of their character in a 1995 way or a 2020 way. But it seems pretty honest. I was so fucking authentic. That's one of the most authentic scenes in the movie. Whether Maxwell would have slept with Miami, I think, is a possible nip-pick. But it's just a really authentic movie. And I think a lot of a lot of people have tried. And for whatever reason, this was the one that did it. What's crazy is it kind of bombed. It had a $1.3 million budget only made $718,000. And it certainly didn't catapult bomb back to anything. It didn't make Josh Hamilton the next superstar. Nobody really came from this movie and you know, you could look at it and go, oh my God, Gwyneth Paltrow was in that. I can't

believe it. None of that happened. And yet, this is like a revered movie for people, I think, who are in, I don't know, what the age range would be. What's interesting is that it's age really well. Because even producer Craig watched it, who's half my age, and he was like, that movie is awesome. I loved it. Usually these movies from the 90s, they feel like they were in the 90s. This one feels weirdly timeless, even though the phones are obviously weird,

there's no cell phones, internet. But other than that, pretty timeless, right, Chris? It's low budget almost, it has that going for it. Like, it actually didn't have enough money to do anything that would date it. Because it's essentially just people in rooms talking. Camera moves a little bit. There's like one or two tracking shots at the party and then the blondie scene walking into the hole. Also, all the bar names, Jesus, they're so perfect.

The hole is a place at Vassar. Yeah, yeah. When we would visit our friend, that was like the bar inside the school where all the stuff went down. I mean, it's from his life. But when I first turned this on the other day, and I'd been a few years since I'd seen it, I was struck by, wow, this looks not cheap, but you can tell it was made for a shoestring.

But as it goes on, you kind of forget what year it is. You know what I mean? You forget that this is taking place during the Pat Riley-Nicks era. Right. Yeah, it's true. There's no bully ball in this movie? There are some Riley stuff.

Bomback said about the Gen X thing. It was kind of a drag for me at the time. I'd been trying to get the movie made since I got out of college in 91. When I wrote it, those labels weren't around. I sort of thought, oh, Jesus, I thought this is about me and my friends instead of a whole fucking generation who supposedly don't know what they want to do with their lives. But I was probably overtly sensitive to that kind of thing anyway. He said that in the 2015 range. It was a well-reviewed, well-respected movie when it came out.

New York Film Festival, they showed it, loved it. Bomback was chosen in Newsweek's 10 new faces of 1996. and I do think it had a little bit of a DVD blockbuster run after that. It was on Sundance a lot and things like that. So it did seem like it built. But our guy, Raj, three stars. He said, what struck me about kicking and screaming is that it captures so accurately the fact dimly sensed by undergraduates, even at the time,

that the college years are the happiest in their lives. I wonder if that's the case now. I think college has gotten a lot more complicated in a lot of different ways. I don't know if people would say it's the happiest time of their life now, right? I don't think they can go right now. Well, they also can't go right now. Yeah, that's also true. Let's take a break and we'll do the categories.

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here. Most rewatchable scene. So I'm narrowing down the cocktail party at the beginning just to the Josh Hamilton, Olivia Diaba, when they're standing on the balcony after they get rid of the other guy and she tells him she's going to Prague and then he does the, oh, I've been to Prague and that whole thing. It's really great. And it's a really great introduction to them. You can see the background of their relationship the whole thing. I think that one of the things, And again, this is a tribute to why this movie is so good, is because, as you guys were saying, it's kind of timeless. But there are certain things that are so inextricably linked to the time that I don't know if they translate, such as the Berlin Wall had fallen in 89.

The Iron Curtain was basically done. And Prague was this thing. Prague was a thing. It was this, like, mythical city where there was just endless amounts of beer and culture, and it was cheap, and it was easy to get around in, and you could live like a king. and everyone... There were English language bookstores there. And everyone was going there to be, to try and find like, you know, Hemingway's Paris or, you know,

Andy Warhol's New York or whatever. And like, that's where it was going to be. But again, speaking to the idea of like no centralized information, everybody kind of heard this on college campuses. But to do it, you had to buy a Fodor's book and you had to go to the campus travel office and get a visa and find a place to stay and travelers checks. And it was a whole thing, right? And so it did become going to Prague, not just actually getting on a plane to the Czech Republic.

And I love the specificity of that. The graduation party and kicking and screaming is up there with the wedding and the godfather for me. It's unbelievable. The extent to what you get to know every single character and you're like, I absolutely have Max down. Like I'm dialed in on Skippy and Max and Otis. And like I know all of these guys.

Let's get on with the movie. Like it's such a perfect framing. Are you wearing a-a-a-jama top? I mean, like, yeah, it's so effortlessly funny. Like, the thing I noticed on, like, the 10th watch or whatever, just the ins and outs of scenes, like, they cut to a bar, and the person we've never seen and won't see again is yelling down the bar. Oh, my brother's gay, so I know.

Anyway. Right, right. With the Prague thing, that was another way this intersected with my life. One of our college roommates, he went to junior year abroad, he went to Prague, came back and did the whole, this place is so small, it's not diverse enough, We're all kind of like, what the fuck, dude? We're all happy. We're just getting truck every day. Why are you judging us? Was it the coffee or the beer that he liked?

I was all of it. It was like pride was so cultured. And so it's just funny that that's where she's not going on a semester abroad. It's one of my big regrets. And I should have and I didn't. Yep, me either. I saw this movie on Thayer Street in Providence, Rhode Island, a year to a year and a half before the first Starbucks opened. So when they were like, coffee is good there. I was like, there's different kinds of coffee. Like, again, this. really was a specific moment in time. This scene also has the classic. You never even been to Prague. Oh, I've been to Prague.

Well, I haven't been to Prague, been to Prague, but I know that thing. I know that stop shaving your armpits, read the unbearable lightness of being, fall in love with a sculptor. Now I realize how bad American coffee is thing. Beer, they have good beer. How bad American beer is, thing. Next rewatchable scene, the book club. Which is funnier when you know that the only reason they can make this movie was because Eric Stoltz had to agree to be in it.

And they had to basically rewrite the script to shoehorn his character in it, which you would never know from watching it. It's such an important character. But they're basically ad-libbing scenes, pieces, all this stuff, including this entire book club scene, which is just like, we need another Stoltz scene. So he ends up being in a book club with Otis. And that movie has like seven laugh out, or scene has seven laugh out loud lines in it. Disturbingly arousing. Mm-hmm.

What are your thoughts? Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, you are, you're right on, I think. You really, you've pinned down the, uh, what it is about the book. Uh, definitely with the prison when, um, when Grady is, and does, he's, there's violence. There's a lot of violence. and it's like night and day.

And when Grady, he saw those horses, I think you were saying. And it was arousing. It was violently arousing. Oh, I mean, the entire thing about all the pretty horses. It's just incredible.

Thank God we speak fluent Spanish. And Otis is like, yeah. Like, I was like crying. And I say that as somebody who, I think, pretended to have read all the pretty horses for a solid year and a half. No, one of the foundational things of my relationship with Chris is that he was always reading the first page of Thomas Pinchin's Gravity's Reader. Purely aspirational college shit.

I got that first sentence down. He nailed it. And he would often bring it up in conversation. Like, it would be a thing to talk about. But we never, I would go on to name blog posts after parts of it. But yeah. Yeah. I eventually read all the pretty horses.

Also, what a roller coaster Hollywood is. Because this movie comes out in 1995, which is 10 years after. Eric Stoltz is removed from the set of Back to the Future because he's not fitting the bill from Marty McFly. Ten years later, they can't make this movie without Stoltz. They need Stoltz to get the money train pulled up. This was back when, though, but they would be like, we got Kitell for reservoir dogs.

Like, we can make it now. Right, that'll sell it. Yeah. Love Stoltz. I just want to say one of my favorite low-key bits in this movie is Chet saying, I'm paraphrasing myself. It's so good. It's so right.

Next scene, Grover confronts Max about sleeping with Miami, leading to everyone's horrified, and then applause and Grover saying, how was she? And what are we supposed to do with this information? I don't want it. Well, then give it back. And stop looking at me, Chet. I can see he's judging me. Stop judging me. Put the room down. Stop cleaning. Well, you'll do what you want to do, but Skippy is your phone. Shut up! Max.

I wish you. And then Stoltz sneaking back into the scene to find out the answer. We mentioned that. I have Skippy. Really, I loaded these for the second half of the movie. Skippy confronting Max when the whole dynamic of their relationship completely falls apart. Grover and Chet at the bar, which is a really important scene because he says, Chet says, saw it as a postponement of my life.

And eventually I realized this was my life. And Grover's just kind of stared at him like, holy shit. Some people need to have a real career, which is something that I've never really understood, you know, why someone would want to be a vet or a lawyer or a filmmaker. I'm paraphrasing myself here, but I am a student, and that's what I chose. You might need to choose something else, and that's... I'm not that far away from being this guy. I like a bartender that drinks, yeah.

Otherwise, I feel like I'm being poisoned. The final airport scene, which is just spectacular. And when he decides on a whim to go to Prague, his monologue's like three minutes in this with the camera on him. It's really impressive. And it's a really, really good monologue, too. This is so frustrating because I'm terrible at conflict. I hate it.

And if I'd imagine this problem with falling asleep one night, I don't think I would have spoken up to you. Even in my fantasy life, I just would have accepted it. That's who I am. But today I have to go. I have to. And when I tell people about this in the future, I know that, you know, it'll be the time that I went, you know? And I know that when I reviewed this whole episode in my head, I'm not going to know what I did or why I did it. I think they've done something with the real Grover.

But it'll make a good story of my young adult life. In the time I chose to go to Prague. I look back on it, I won't believe that I actually went. You know, I went away. So let me go. I have to. I need... just put me on the plane. You let me go. Hamilton's good.

He's really good in this. He's so good, and I was watching it and wondering, like, how many takes do you think he got? Because they didn't have much money, and they were filming on location. It's on film. It's on film, and he's just wonderful in it, you know? And he's a young actor, and he's probably thinking,

like, oh, from this, I'll go to this next thing. And he's still a great actor. He's great on stage in New York all the time, but, like, we'll get to Apex Mountain. but that performance in that scene is really something. And it reminded me, too, so much of the end of the graduate, right? Like there's a kind of a similar energy from Dustin Hoffman banging on the church to when he's banging on this woman at the airport, basically being like, I need this, I need this,

which made me realize that the tone of the end of the graduate after that, when they're on the bus, like one of my favorite endings of all time, also the ending of Michael Clayton, basically, where they're like, we did it, we did it. And the camera stays on them. And then it's like, wait, what did we do? that's the vibe of this entire movie. The movie was inspired, I think, almost entirely from granular DNA elements of that, what did we do?

And if it was Mendez's an homage, it works. If it wasn't, you can just kind of pick up on it. It's an unbelievable performance by him. And it's funny, because if you had asked me at the end of 95, what five young actors would you bet on? I would have had Chris O'Donnell in there because he was so good incentive of a woman. You know, that would have probably been a little off.

I weirdly would have had Damon because I thought he was amazing in school ties. Would you still be hanging on to some furlong stock? I would not have furlong. I would have had Omar Eps in there though. Yeah. Because Omar Epps was on a really great run at that point. And I don't know, probably a couple others

that aren't jumping of mind. But I think Hamilton would have been on there for me. And you think like this easily could have been a Matt Damon part. I think he could have done some interesting stuff with it. but Hamilton's perfect in this. And I've always liked him ever since. As you said, he's gone more in the stage direction, but I do feel like he was as good as those other guys,

at least in a certain kind of part. He's a guy who's also really, really suffered on Google from Josh Hamilton's career as a Texas ranger. Oh, I know. I had that on what stage the worst. Yeah, you're right. He's part of that sort of core New York City theater school 90s crew that also birthed Billy Crudeup and Ethan Hawke is very tight with those guys.

Robert Sean Leonard. Yeah, and I think they are all still tight. They've all had varying levels of success in their career. And Philips and Moore Hoppin kind of came out of that too, right? That's right. And even like when Crude Up was doing the rounds for, he eventually won the Emmy for the morning show, but he was still talking about Josh Hamilton,

his good friend, and they root for each other. And they're just kind of, I think they made it work. Yeah. They didn't make it work on the level that some people expected in 95. Well, that airport seems great. And it's funny because Jessica Hacked is a stewardess who was Ross's, ex-wife's lesbian lover and friends. and it was just kind of weirdly having a moment,

which I don't think they realized when they filmed it, but she's great in that scene too. You can always go tomorrow. No. Killer. He's not going to go tomorrow. He's not going to be back. And then the ending,

which I think is really effective and comes right after the airport scene when they have the little flashback again. In general, I think the way he does the flashbacks in this, which is another device that usually doesn't work or is flawed in some way. And in this, it really works. You mentioned the cigarette smoking when he tries the first cigarette.

The scene before that, is the scene with Max when Max is like, look at you, you smoke like a fucking chimney, affectations have become habits. And then we flashed back to the first time we tried it. It was because of this girl, you know? I always imagine that the flashback is the story he's writing.

Like the flashbacks are a story he's been working on throughout this year. I mean, it's also entirely conceivable that he hasn't written a single word in the year after college because it does seem like these guys wasting the time. He's just playing Tetris on his old PowerPoint or whatever. But yeah, I always imagine that it's like he's writing these scenes. and then you're seeing them. The ending is great, and the ending goes right into the Fridi Johnson song,

which is also great, and it's just kind of perfect. I know I got a bad reputation, and it isn't just talk, talk, talk. As someone who spent the summer of 1994 listening to Fridi Johnson on repeat after getting dumped by my high school girlfriend, it hits. This needle drop hits like a bomb. I got to say that there's something about, and you guys, because you watch a lot more movies and rewatch a lot more movies than I do, could speak to it better. But there's this total balance or balancing act between when you're young, between thinking everything you do is going to be that way forever and thinking everything you do is doomed.

Like, it's never going to last. You have no sense of time because you haven't lived that many years. So you sort of swing wildly between one extreme to the other. And that feeling that's encapsulated in that last line of the movie, which actually happens before everything that we've seen chronologically, where you're just. just like, let's pretend we're an old couple. Yeah. And they don't actually kiss, which I forgot. You know?

Yeah. Because they both sort of have a rueful smile at the hopelessness of everything they're doing. It's savage, but it just really hits. Right. I have for most we watch, I have the airport scene. But I want to give a special shout out to that entire graduation party at the beginning. I'm with Chris. To me, that's like, it's so hard to have those big sprawling scenes.

And when they work, they always seem to work the best. and we've seen there's a bunch of examples. Usually it's a wedding. I'd be happy with any movie opening with a scene like that. You know, I mean, obviously in the firm, you kind of want to get it going a little bit. But like, I love a meet everyone at a gathering scene. I agree with you guys about the choices, but I have to say, first of all, I think every scene in this movie is rewatchable equally, which makes it extremely hard.

It just flows. I almost forget where some scenes start and other ones end because the tone is so consistent. But I have to give a shout out to something. that I know we're going to get to in a different category. So I apologize, but the scene where he'd rather be bow hunting. I'm going to smash that call. I'm going to break your fucking love. It shouldn't be done.

This guy would rather be bow hunting. Don't upset him because he'd already rather be bow hunting in any additional aggravation. I could watch that forever. That's great. All right. What's Age the Best, special Max edition, before we get to the actual What's Hage the Best. our nominees. I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday.

That whole monologue. It's just great. What I used to be able to pass off as a bad summer could now potentially turn into a bad life, which is one of the best yearbook quotes, I think, ever muttered in a movie. I would urge high schoolers out there to use that. I caught myself right and go to bed

and wake up in my date book as if there were two separate events. Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the futon this morning. Just so biting. So 90s, too. I don't do they even have futons anymore or they do, right? I mean, sure shit did back then. I don't know.

Oh, my God. Everyone had a fucking futon back then. Joe House ruined mine once. I'm not going to describe why. Jesus. Isn't it bad enough to be whipped by your own mother? You have to have this wussy relationship with Grovers. He's just so mean to Otis.

Because he's he like, oh, how is Julie? How is Julie? Hey, Grover, how's your dad? That was mom. Oh, how is Julie? Isn't it bad enough to be whipped by your own mother? to have this wussy relationship with Grovers? You are a jack-a-n-a-a-a-a-a-chaunapes.

Jack-a-Apes. Who's that? Jane 2, Electric Bugaloo? Great 95 joke that you couldn't make down nobody would get it. And then this guy would rather be bow-hunting. Don't upset him. He'd already rather be bow-hunting.

I have one more Max moment. Go. The most true moment in my life as represented in this movie when Max very carefully, very delicately, and very painstakingly writes a sign over a broken glass that says broken glass. I had that in Woodstage the best. It was great.

Unbelievable. Perfect. So what's your favorite max moment, Chris? I think it's his date with Kate. I think it's the entire meeting Kate for the first time for real at the mess hall and then going on the date with her and getting into the confrontation,

watching her be like, I'm going to break your fucking legs to the guy who doesn't say a single thing in the pickup truck. Can I say also that there are people who are probably a generation above us who talk about actors like Robert Redford or Paul Newman and they talk about just how beautiful they were and like when they saw them on the screen

and Sydney Poitiers too, like that generation of actors in the 60s and everyone's like just the way they looked they were like gods and the way they performed and what they stood for and what they meant. I think that for certain sliver of our generation Chris Eagerman deserves the same sort of veneration because between this and the Velvet Underground where it's like not a lot of people saw it

but everybody who did was like, holy shit that made a huge impact He basically was that guy in three foundational, not unseen movies of that era, Metropolitan, Barcelona, and this one, right? And he is so incredible. Like, can you imagine anyone else playing that part? Can you imagine anyone else lurking in the car saying that he'd already rather be bow hunting and repeating it? I mean, he is a genius. Wasn't he in last days of Discoat, too?

He was in all those movies. Yeah, he's been all of Wood Silman's movies. See, it's weird. Because I remember he ended up, he ended up in a sitcom. And I don't remember what the sitcom was. I do. He was in the LA version of Science. It was supposed to be the LA version of Seinfeld, right?

And it was going to be this whole thing. It was another show about nothing. And Jennifer Gray was his neighbor playing herself. It was called It's Like You Know. It was just from the lab. They were going to recreate that Seinfeld magic. And that was his shot. And it lasted, I mean, Chris might have Wikipedia open.

It lasted a handful of episodes. Two years. He was on Malcolm in the middle for a while. Like he did a lot. And he was on Gilmore. he's a working actor, but the way he was then is just incredible. I look at it, like, I don't understand why he wasn't Frazier. You know, like, younger, like some show where it's like younger Frazier,

I really feel like his force of personality was such a distinct character. I think it heard him in movies because it always felt like he was the same guy in whatever movie he was. But for a TV show, it would have worked. If he was like, if he had been Frazier's brother and Frazier, it would have been like, wow, that makes total sense. Yeah, I wonder, because I, I think one of the first two born movies, Josh Hamilton is one of the guys working in the, like, the lab with like all the other CIA agents or all the other NSA agents.

And I always wondered, like, did Chris Eagerman just not want to do those kinds of rules for his just like, ah, fuck it. I just kind of want to play these like smart as yuppies. I mean, there's a vibe. Like, there's also, I guess, life choices come into play. Like, eight years ago, I saw a reunion screening of this at Bam in Brooklyn Academy music. And they showed the movie and Bombach and all the actors got together. and they all had a great time and talked about it and laughed about it. I think Chuck moderated it. I think that was why I was there. And you just got the sense. Like, they all live in, like Hamilton, Igeman, Parker Posey, they just live in New York. And you could say that they live in New York because Hollywood didn't want them, or you could say that they live in New York because they just didn't want to do the bullshit. They didn't want to have to audition all the time in case one of them turned into something else. And they all seem pretty well-adjusted and married with families. But Parker Posey, without a family, but very fun and very well-adjusted. And it just,

You wonder if was it a choice or were they pushed? We don't know. Bill, I have a couple of non-max. What's age the best? I was about to get to it. You want to get? Give me a couple and I'll do mine after. We talked about this a bit when we did swingers,

but the idea of always talking about the next place you're going to be drinking, even while you are drinking in a place. So they do that. The day they go to the penguin and the hole and, you know, whatever the other bar is, but they're always kind of like, oh, it's cocktail time. let's go. It's one o'clock. Let's go to the whole. Then they have another one. Then they have like, it's always moving on to the next place. I just remember most of my 20s being dominated by

either like, this place is dead anyway or, you know, where are we going next? I also think that this movie, for a very specific subset of people, perfectly captures post-college home decor. Where you're like, this is just the shit that we happen to have and we have made it into its own kind of aesthetic. It was just like a bunch of dark beat-up furniture. And I had, I lived in a house in Mission Hill in Boston that was like that where it was by, for, you know, like, we had a living room and a dining room and stuff like that, but nothing there matched or went together. It was all stuff we had kind of found on the street or at thrift stores. And we had like an air hockey table hanging on the wall as art and just like random board games and TVs that didn't work or

remotes that were disappearing because guys accidentally took them home with them for Christmas or something. And it's so perfect the way that they have this house. What was Otis's poster that he takes to the airport twice? It's of a... I think it's a John Wu movie. Isn't it the killer? Yeah, I couldn't even figure it out. Everybody had like their two posters they love. He also packs the remote control twice, which is such a small thing. And it's so funny. I want to circle back in terms of what's aged best. I don't know if, I can speak to this because I have not been in college in 20 years, but I have to believe, I want to believe, maybe Craig can confirm this for us, that certain things are evergreen, like the Euro guy,

who may or may not actually be from Europe, like the fan, which he correctly identifies you on the East Coast anyway, you only need for the first three weeks of the first semester and then you never use again. Or that very, very specific feeling of realizing, oh, I could go get drunk in the middle of the day, and then you walk out and it's the middle of the day, and you have homework and or class to go to, those things to me, I hope, are evergreen. I think they are. Morwood's age the best. We mentioned Fridie Johnson.

Bad reputation. Any mid-90s playlist, if you're going retroactive, it just has to be on. It absolutely has to. Otis working in a video store. Yeah. The perfect outcome for him. Well, it's just like, it makes me think of this era where that made total sense as like, for the next two years, I'll be working in a video store.

I don't know what the equivalent of that is in 2020. I have to go back to us for a second interview at video planet. They're like, you have a second interview at video planet. Was this shot to Tarantino? I don't know. I think it was. I love the manager too. The managers, he's going to come up later in Dean Waiters,

but that guy's just throwing heat. It's incredible. He wants to make his version of Lolita. I'm shocking you. You're shocked. And he does the, someone put terms of Adairman in prison movies. I love for what's age the best and what's age the worst,

the answer machine as an actual plot device. It seems incomprehensible now. I don't even know how you would explain that to me. Grover's cigarette smoking, affectations that become habits, broken glass sign you mentioned. Grover's dad leaving sports messages, totally identifiable. Parker Posey, who we'll get to later, but just I'm so glad she's in this.

Yes. she has just an enormous sway over the mid-90s that I can't even totally explain to future generations. She was the person all of us always wanted to have in our life and that we felt like was missing in our group of friends. And all of us would have been in love with her. All of us were going to hang out with her. And she was just kind of a force of nature. She's a force of nature. That's what I was going to say.

And like all these dudes in the movie, whether you do limited acting ability in some cases in the breakup scene or in just, general, like they're just, they're just, you know, bound up and buttoned up with their sport coats. In that scene when she breaks up with Skippy, she is absolutely a tornado. And he doesn't know, and he says, I don't know what to do with this. I don't know. And it's true, because she brings this injection of actual manic-brained emotion to the movie that is otherwise so intellectual. And I think kudos to her performance, but also kudos to Bombok for being like,

this movie needs that heat. I used to get sincerely so starstruck by her when I would see her at the record or I worked out in New York. She's so cool. I would just be like, I can't believe you're actually a real person. Well, and then she had this incredible comeback

on that Louis episode, which now Louis's been wiped off the planet. We're not even allowed to discuss it anymore, but that was like this awesome throwback. Oh my God, Parker Posey's can still throw 97 miles an hour? That's what I interviewed her for. It was tied to that episode because she was just so astonishing. She's great.

She hit a point where if she was in the movie, it was just great to see her. It's like, oh, cool, Parker Posey. There she is. A couple more. I just wanted to mention Jessica Hex, mid-90s, IMDB, has Seinfeld Friends kicking and screaming and party of five in like a year-long stretch.

Great job by her. Rover describing his love life as a C-plus. It's the concept of just grading things into your life I really like. I wish I had done that more often. A Perry Reeves cameo. Mrs. Ari on Entourage, I believe. Yeah, it becomes Arie. Ari has this whole second life way later as Mrs. Ari Gold.

But you see her young. And then I have for Woods Age the best no internet, no cell phones. I think it really helps this movie. Oh, yeah. I think on the internet. If they could, if they could have emailed it would have been. I mean, they had some email capacity back then. But like, I mean, if Grover and Jane are emailing, it's kind of a completely different

movie. It's also a completely different movie if they can just check in with people who are in New York, even though I think ostensibly this is Vassar and so ostensibly they're just like a short drive away it feels like they're on moon base alpha like they're so far away from any other hub of life and that adds to that

feeling of dislocation that's central to their lives. So what do you have for age the best, Friddy Johnson? I'll give this one to Fridi. I mean I love to give Fridi whatever he wants, he deserves it. I think we could just give it to Eiglin, to the Max's character. I agree. What's age the

worst. So Will Ferrell 10 years later makes a 2005 movie that they call kicking and screaming, which is just infuriating. I don't know why they did this. Awful. And there's been huge brand confusion. You Google it. Two different things come up.

You Google Josh Hamilton kicking and screaming. You won't end up where you think you're ending. Right. So apparently, Bomback thought about fighting it at the time and ultimately he wasn't going to win it because movies have this has happened over and over again over the years. I mean, I'm sure that whenever you say we're doing kicking and screaming,

there's going to be, like, if there was a tweet about this, people would be like you're doing the Will Ferrell movie. I mean, that movie really did take over a lot of the... Well, that's why even when we have the title for The Rewatchable, Craig's going to have to put kicking and screaming, parentheses, 1995. Yeah. Because I think a lot of people know the other movie. Bombach said, Will Ferrell's made a lot of brilliant movies,

but I'm lucky that none of them were called kicking and screaming. Kind of a... We'll dig. A little tiny dig. It's earned. Another would take the worst. Chris mentioned earlier that Josh Hamilton then became a famous baseball player.

It would be like if Matt Damon was the troubled slugger of the Rangers. Yeah, this is weird. More age the worst. Grover dating a 17-year-old. Just got to mention it. Max. That's my only one. Yeah, it's Max dating a 17-year-old.

That's number one on my hit list. And you watch it, you're watching that scene, and she's like, I'm 17 tomorrow. And I'm, like, cringing. I'm like, couldn't you have made a day? 18 and you realize he couldn't have made an 18. Yes, there's the joke about reading 17 magazine and getting all the references. Good joke.

Probably could have cut it. Yeah, or she could have just been a girl he meets who happens to work in town. You know what I mean? Like, in retrospect, it could have been, you could lose the 17 joke and have her be like of an appropriate age. I just think, I think the 90s were different. Like even Kobe Bryant met his wife. His wife was 17.

He started picking her up at high school and getting her then. Like, there's a lot of examples of this. For some reason, Jerry Seinfeld, Shoshana Lodstein. She was 17, right? She was in high school. He was the most famous TV star on the planet. It was a different time. We didn't become reviled by this until about 10 years ago.

Morewood's age the worst. Playing trivia to pass the time, which is also reality bites has that too, where they're... Or just making up dumb games. Yeah, dumb games just to waste an hour. But also, Bill, did you guys do this thing? And it's like things that you remember, but you had no way of knowing were true or verifiable, like the go bots or something. Like was there a whole other type of transformable toy that we used to play with for a period of time?

Remember? Or mask. Like sometimes you'd be at a bar, you'd be in college and someone would bring that up. And it would be, A, that thing of like, oh, we know each other. We recognize. We lived a similar life. But also, you couldn't verify it. You could only remember what other people remembered because there was no way to just Google it.

And so we passed a lot of time doing that. It has aged the worst, but it's very accurate. Bill, you mentioned like it would have been, this movie would have been worse if they have the internet. It's great that they don't have like the internet on this. But the scene where they finish the stain remover commercial is indicative of how fucking bored we could be back then. Oh, yeah.

Where it would just be like, yeah, let's just finish this infomercial that's on before a rerun of cheers. We used to, in college, we used to watch Save By the Bell on Saturday mornings. hung over. And it was about as exciting as it was going to, what else were we going to do? Yeah. My roommate's a nice, we started watching days of our lives. We would rush home to have lunch in our dorm so we could watch a soap opera.

Like, what else were we going to do? The year this movie came out was the OJ trial, and I remember that being a godsend for me. It's like this barely employed sports writer slash working in the restaurant industry, occasionally person. And it was like, cool, the OJ trial's on. That'll kill some hours. That'll eat some meanings. So much time.

One more, what's age the worst? Scott had mentioned the blue jeans. There's a couple shots of them. I don't know what we were doing. I know I had a lot of pairs of them. They're the kind of faded, heavy-looking, big gaudy. They went out the window about 10 years ago. Casting what-ifs.

I don't have a lot. This movie was originally called Fifth Year, which I think I like more than kicking and screaming. What do you guys think? Fifth Year are kicking and screaming? I like fifth year. I think fifth year was good. Yeah.

Fifth year is classier, but I think that they were trying to, I mean, Jason Blum talked a few years ago, I saw this interview where he said, now if he could make this movie, if he was a kid, they would have made it for $50,000, not a million dollars. It's a better story. And the $50,000 movie is called fifth year, and it's just, it's not doing flashy things like adding Eric Stoltz to put butts in seats, right? Kicking and screaming is an attempt to make it sound more viscerally,

exciting than maybe it is. Yeah. Apparently, there was another actor. I've not been able to find out the name who was scheduled to be in the lead role, who dropped that at the last minute. And that's what led to Eric Stoltz because Tri-Mark. We don't think that's Ethan Hawk, right? Is it possible?

I'm just, I mean, if you were looking for the type of person who would play that role, I mean, there's not a ton of, who are the other options, right? So it would have been Ethan Hawk as Grover? I'm just throwing it out there I assume it's Grover because that's who would have been the star Right I'm glad Ethan Hawke

I love Ethan Hawke but I think that would have been weird I'm sure I'm wrong But if they were looking at other people I mean there was there was like a group of six or eight actors Omar Fs Yeah Pock

So I don't know who that was But that's how Chad ended up in the movie Next category Best That guy AK.K. The Joey Pants Award We gotta go with my guy Jason Wiles of Skippy, who had two parts. He had this, and he was calling Jenny Garth's coke addict boyfriend a 902-0,

who got Jenny Garth hooked on, Hook, gave her a taste. It gave her a little taste. Give her a little taste. And then ended up on the run, and they found him in the season finale. So in this same year, he had this pretty substantial 902-0 part where it becomes a villain, and then he's in this movie as well. And then I don't know what happened after that. When are we talking about Carabono?

When are we talking about the legend? What about Buono, though? That is Blono. We can do it right now. I don't feel like she's not of that guy because she had the huge bad band. And was soprano. She did the double duty.

And stranger things. Yeah. That's true. Okay, so she might not be that guy, but she comes in thrown heat. I'll tell you this. For years, I had the stock from her in this movie because as we'll get to,

actually, let's just do it now, Dian Waiters. Domneys are Carabuono. How do you say her last name? Wono. Wono? Yeah. Wono.

Yeah. Elliot Gould, one scene and a couple answer from machine messages. He's got to mention him. And he still mattered in 1995. He was a legacy to this previous generation, but he, you know, the graduate generation. Eric Stoltz is in this movie too much, not eligible. Parker Posey is only in a couple of scenes.

I feel like she is eligible. And then I got Perry Reeves, who is thrown heat. her two scenes. But I don't think this is much of a conversation. I definitely think this is Parker Posey. If she's eligible, which I think she is. I question her eligibility because I think she's one of the main characters.

Also, because I want to vote for Blono, though. I just think. I think Andy's right. I do feel like she's one of the five biggest characters in this movie, right? Okay. It's the three guys. It's Olivia Diabo, Parker Posey, and Chet. Those are like the six people.

All right. And you don't see Buono coming, right? She's just there in that first scene. And then all of a sudden she's in the dining hall. Hall and then she's threatening a bow hunter with a tire iron. But I'm going to allow this. I'm going to allow it. She's in like four scenes.

Can I just give a shout out to the Elliott Gould thing? Because I am a big fan for obviously personal reasons of movies or TV shows made by Jews. And then they cast non-Jews as lead characters who are clearly Jewish like Grover. So Elliot Gould is Josh Hamilton, whose father? Okay, sure. But I think we all know what his presence in the movie means and I respect it. Bill, we haven't done this in a while where we try to exactly. figure out what games people are talking about.

Like, we did this in Die Hard where we figured out the Lakers Celtics game that the robbers are talking about as they enter the Nakatomi Plaza. Yeah. I was trying to figure out what, like, so it's, he's talking about exhibition games for the Knicks going into what season you think. I had, so I had net picks, this for nitpicks. It's the start of school. It's like late August, right?

Mm-hmm. And Grover's dad calls like, call me, Nick's preseason, like, whatever. It's like, first of all, preseason does start for another month. Second, like, my dad and I talk about sports probably as much as any dad's son combo ever on the phone. And we've never been like, hey, Seltz preseason. I'm worried. Did you talk about like, would you ever talk socks spring training? No, preseason spring training is kind of out.

The only thing is football if you had like some backup QB or something who is. incredible or like the Michael Bishop type. The most amazing thing is, isn't it in one of those conversations that it sounds like, you don't hear Elliot Gould, but it sounds like he's asking Grover if he thinks Pat Riley is happily married? Right. Yes. I have no reason to believe it's not a happy marriage.

He's worried about Pat Riley. Well, so when they filmed this, this was the last Riley season because he goes, he basically goes to the heat. I think that by the time the movie came out. So maybe Noah Baumbach knew something. Yeah, I would think when he was worried about the Knicks, it was probably that they beat the Pacers and then they lost to Orlando.

Was that who they lost him? Oh, no. The Pacers beat them in 95. That's what it was. Ewing missed a finger roll. So maybe that's what. Yeah, because Ewing comes up in trouble. Yeah, right, right.

Call me. All right. So Carabuno wins that one. Vincent Hanna, give me all you got a word. That's got to go to the crazy foreign guy. He's dialing it up the whole time. Friedrich. He's on steroids, this whole movie.

Agree. All right, recasting catch. I just want to talk this through with you guys. I think this movie's perfectly cast. I would not recast any of the top eight. I'm going to give you a couple people for the Olivier Diabo role. Okay. Just to marinate on.

Heather Graham. No. If Heather Graham was in this movie, Boogie Nights, and Swingers, I probably would have just moved to L.A. to try to find her. If it had been those three in a row, I don't know what I would have done. Next one.

Kate Winslet. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. There's something, the thing about Olivia Dabo, I think, like, you could nitpick the performance, but I think the nitpicks are what make it perfect. Agreed.

There's something that's, kind of like gawky and awkward about her at times and like there's the her laugh and then being saddling her with the retainer which is must have made her miserable like actors hate stuff like that but it brought out this kind of goofy humanity like when she dances to the country and western music at the bar I in my memory I wasn't a big fan of the performance but rewatching it I was like she kind of is is perfect for him to just completely lose itself over I think she's incredible in this their Winslet and Dabo are both British I think that

Winsley could probably have made it work gosh, that's a really good shot. Do you have another one? I have one more, but Winslet would have been 20 which I was thinking right age too. The thing with Diabo, she's flawed and quirky, but in ways that if you're in that situation,

you kind of fall in love with because she's not perfect, but she's imperfectly perfect. I think that's why it works. But Winslet, I just wonder if there had been a better, because she's a good actress. I don't think she's a great actress. Had there been a really, really, really top-notch young actress in that part, if it's a little bit different.

I think Heather Graham, I just think is out of it. Heather Graham doesn't work. No, I was just third. And Winslet is such a great actor, but she's such a stage actor, you know? I think she would have, like, performed the little flaws and quirks of the character in a way that would have really drawn a line. It would have felt like a different movie, I think, because everyone else is just kind of slumping through life in their bad genes.

Two more. Joey Lauren Adams, we just have to mention because she was in a lot of these movies over the time, almost would have felt like that was cliche. But then this one I thought was interesting. Gwyneth Paltrow. She's not famous yet. It would have been like her first,

first important movie. She was the right age. She definitely has that kind of elitist air about her. Like you could see her being in Prague, writing short stories. Doesn't feel like she's foreign in a way that Olivia Dabo kind of does, but at the same time, I could see her.

I think she could have done it. I don't know if it would have been better, but I think she's the best alternative. I don't disagree. I just think there's something about her. Remember her first movie was like flesh and bone or something in the 90s? And no one remembers that movie, but every review of that movie was like, who is this? This is a star. And I think that

if you cast someone who just naturally had that kind of charisma and star wadage, you couldn't have her say the line, you didn't notice me for four years? Good point. What about our Queen Samantha Mathis? Mathis is in this conversation. I think she's too old.

Chloe 70 in there? Oh, early Chloe. Yeah. You and Sean always liked her more than what I do. Half a Saturday research. Most of the movie shot at Occidental College. At some point, we need to do a ringer theme week about all the things shot at Occidental College,

including like three 902 and 0 seasons. I had to check again. Every time I watch this movie, I check. I don't believe that this movie was shot in California. It's so crazy. And they did a great job because I still assumed they shot it at Vassar or somewhere at like Sunni purchase or something because it's just so deeply based on Vassar

and all the characters are so East Coast oriented and some of the actors are too. But I guess they got the funding to do it here. It's very odd. Chris, field trip to Occidental College, just walk around, wear some Tweed jackets. I'd love it. it. Yeah. You win? It's close.

Go to the hole? There's an internet rumor that the film was accepted in a con, but they want to know Obama back to cut 15 minutes and he refused. Not true. We mentioned that Jason Blumpton, he obtained financing after receiving a letter

from family acquaintance Steve Martin, who endorsed the script, and sent that script around to everybody with Steve Martin's letter on it. Well, Steve Martin says it's good. Here's a million. What a weird time the 90s were. Yeah.

And then Bomback said, quote, I was just writing comedic versions of what my friends and I talked about and the use of pop culture references and trivia. Those were things that seemed at least somewhat novel at the time. As I can attest, because that's what we were doing back then. We had a lot less things in common to talk about.

We had sports and pop culture and pop culture references and only a couple of other keys. Can we call attention to three other small appearances in this movie? Yeah. I don't know if you have this in another can. category, but the last freshman that Grover takes back to or goes back to her dorm room is, is Giovanni Revisi's twin sister, Marissa, the ex-wife of Beck in an early film performance. The professor who thinks all of the kids talking about literature is bullshit is Bombach's father,

Jonathan, who inspired the Jeff Daniels character and corrosive film Squidin the Whale. And then finally, Bombach cast himself. He hitchcocked in this movie, which I don't think he ever did again as the guy asking people if they'd rather fucking cow or kill their mother. Yeah. I should put that at one stage the best. I enjoyed the cowfucker. And it just keeps going behind them in the scene.

Who's asking? Apex Mountain. Jason Wiles, maybe the all-time Apex Mountain that we've ever covered in this category. When you're ripping off kicking, screaming in 902 and O at the same time, you're on the top of the mountain. It's never going to get better. Josh Hamilton he's had a really good

respected careers but in a lot of good stuff but I have to imagine this was the most important movie he's been in. It is for us because this movie has so much

importance to us I remember the same thing you're saying where it's like you see this movie you're like Josh Hamilton just bet on that guy but this movie like you said

it did not do well it was like it was like beloved by dozens or hundreds of people people. But it just like, so to call it his Apex Mountain, I would almost think like some supporting role he played a few years into the future. Like I'm not looking as I am alive. Maybe. Yeah, honestly alive. Alive. Would be his Apex Mountain. What about Carlos Jakat?

Who plays Otis, who is Bombach's really good friend and still shows up in all of his movies. He was the town car driver in Meyerowitz stories. He's a producer and marriage story. He's so funny in this because it was written for him. He's such a unique performance. I mean, we didn't even mention in that scene you guys love so much in the opening, I love it too, when he's like, I'm a little person. And Chris Ogerman is like, look at you, you're a monster. You're gigantic. What do you mean? I think the thing I laughed at the most last night, like hysterically, was the food in his beer. Food in here. In the beer, there's food in the beer. I'm turning it. No, I mean, I don't want to upset her. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want to

bother her. She seems really irritable. A little distant. I'm like, I don't know. It's just been a hard day for her. This might just set her over the edge. I want her to like me. I like this better anyway. And Josh Hamilton being like, don't complain to me about it if you're not going to say something. And he drinking the Cheeto or the chicken wing or whatever is in his beer and the face he makes. He's like, I don't upset her. She seems like she's had a bad day and I want her to like me.

That has happened. Either we have been that person or we have been at a table with that person in our lives. 100%. I'm going Apex Mount for him. although I root for him every time I see in a movie. He's been in some stuff. I remember he was in Seinfeld. He was like a TV executive.

He's done a whole bunch of things. No, Bombach, no. Chris Aigman, probably not. Some people would say Barcelona because it was more successful. I think Barcelona might be his best performance and his showy's performance, but he's playing the refined version of the dick that he played in a lot of those Woodsylman movies. And in this one, he's a little bit sadder and he's a little bit soft. and you kind of see the heart a little more.

I think it's a sweeter performance. Livia Diabo, no, because she was the sister in the Wonder Years, which was a really important, massive show for an entire generation. Yep. And then Fridi Johnson, I'm going to say yes. This is a Friddy Johnson Apex Mountain. Didn't he play Saturday Live? His song comes on at a great ending of a movie that's been out for 25 years.

But didn't Can You Fly? Like, what didn't that win the past? and Joppole and didn't like Chris Scow say that this was the most important singer-songwriter since Dylan. Like there was this moment when Chris and I were scouring the village voice when we could get our hands on it when we were still in high school and you'd think you would know something and be like

oh it's REM or it's REM derivative or they're from Athens and then there was just some guy named Fridi and we all had to get in line. I literally went to Harold Square because of this guy just to check it out. Well, what year was that? 93? All right. That's fine. No, Can You Fly was earlier but yeah. Jessica Heck, great career, but being on Friends when this movie came out, it's pretty good.

Bill, is this Apex Mountain for college movies? For non-over-the-top college movies? It depends on what you consider a college movie. So their social network is ostensibly a college movie. Nah, it's not, right? Animal House? Animal House is a college movie. Old school?

College. Yeah, yeah. But those are like the comedy college movies. I don't know if they totally count. Well, everybody wants some I like quite a bit. Me too. This. What are some other ones?

There's one I just saw that I really like called Shithouse. Oh, yeah. But I don't know. Apex Mountain would be a little bit. Yeah, yeah. I'm just trying to think of other college movies. They're really... School days.

School days, the Spike Lee movie is pretty great. Higher learning. Yeah. College movie. Weirdly there's been as many boarding school movies as college movies. Yeah, that's the thing. explanation for that. Sinamos Fire, a college movie?

Kind of is, right? Post-college. What about the program? College movie. Blue chips. Blue chips. That's going on one. Blue chips. Yeah, I don't know.

It's definitely in the conversation. Yeah. Tweed jackets, Andy. That's the thing I got to say. I mean, I really believe in my heart there was a time when relatively young people dressed like this. But maybe it's fully for it.

just from my experience watching this movie and as the son of someone who wore jackets with patches on them throughout my childhood. I just thought that that was what one did, right? Like that you went out into the world doing that. And if you look at, I don't know again if it's accurate, but if you watch Bright Lights Big City, different movie, different time, different location. But everyone's wearing sport coats. So even like at the cool clubs, right, or if you watch last days of disco, people are wearing sport coats to Studio 54. So I feel like they were a thing. But this specific kind of I would like to be a professor, but I've barely got my BA degree, this is the Apex Mountain of that. Here's a good one. Eric Stoltz. Here's the case.

It's a year after Pulp Fiction, he's become an indie darling at this point. And we have real evidence that the only way they were able to make this movie is if he was involved. It's definitely Apex Mountain of his clout. And I love the performance. Yes. But is it his best, is it his best performance? performance? What else is in the running? Mask? Not the one we were talking about before, Chris? I really like Eric Stoltz. This is the best use of him of any movie I think he's been in. I think he hits a fucking home run in every scene. He is in, perfect use of him. He was very good as the soulful English teacher on the little appreciated ABC drama once and again. My favorite young Evan Rachel Wood. Do you guys remember that Stoltz movie from 92 called Water Dance? It's him and Wesley Snipes.

Oh yeah. Helen Hunt. He's fucking incredible. incredible in that movie. He's kidding that. Sweet with me is another good one. Yeah. He's had some good ones. Pulp Fiction, I think, was probably the biggest movie. Probably, yeah.

Not counting back to the future. All right, here's my best apex mount for you. Prague. I'm trying to think of a boring movie. Our check listeners may have some issues with that. How about Prague as a movie as a destination in a movie? that we never actually see. It was a motif actually ripped off, or at least it inspired.

Do you remember there was a book called Prague by Arthur Phillips a few years later that was a big bestseller? And it was a book about people in Budapest feeling sorry for themselves because they weren't cool enough to be in Prague. So once again, so he inspired something here. Prague, the shadow of Prague. Picky Knits mentioned the preseason thing. I never understood on the 100 times I've watched this movie why Grover's roommates didn't erase

her answer machine message? Because usually you listen to her instrument and then you just rewind it and would tape over it. I'm getting the feeling like Grover is the only guy who's getting messages anyway. I can answer this knit. He took the tape because later when he's sitting working, he's listening to that tape on the boom box. That's right. Great. Like who's calling Max though? How did Grover and Max pay for stuff? I'm telling you, I think Max is underwriting. It's like a 7525, 65, 35, 35 split. The one bump I had, I want to ask you guys about this because maybe I just missed something. But there's the scene early on where Max is like, it's 1.30.

It's cocktail hour. Let's go to the penguin. And they're like, Chet tell Grover when he gets off the phone or whatever, we're going to the bar. It cuts to the penguin and Chet is serving them beer. So is it a different day? No. I think what happens is- go out the back door and race to the bar or is this later round?

Grover gets off the phone when they go tell him, oh, we're going to go to the penguins to just come with us. And he'll probably be like, I'm getting off the phone now. Or did they have their first round and then Chet took over when his shift started? I thought it was a takeover. He had like the 4 o'clock and on shift. Do you remember being able to drink that much beer? Wait, Bill, I have one more.

They just drink beer all day. They drink pitchers of beer and whiskey and they're fine. Wait, not only did we do that back then, but we drank beer from places where we knew the taps were dirty and you would have huge headaches the next day. No, I know. It was like half the price of doing bottles. We didn't know we had choices.

No worse feeling than when you would get a pint and then you would kind of like about to take that first sip and you just smelled something kind of weird. Yeah, it was like a metallic skunk smell. But it was like, it was just kind of like you were like, this is what I guess this is the hand I was dealt. I'm going to get mildly ill from this.

You're like Otis. You didn't want to upset anybody. Yeah. Bill, I have one more hip. In college, we had, you know, nobody ever ordered a bottle. He was always pitchers. You're always trying to.

cut costs left and right. Did a keg, you always did like, you know, the keg that was 60% of like a really good cake. Most of those places had like two for one deals with kegs. Yeah, you were always trying to cut costs on that. Cheapest shots possible, anything. So here's my one big thing. If we say this is Vassar, I guess, like wherever you want to say that Muntin is, right? Like I don't ever think it's particularly made clear where it is. It could be Western Massachusetts. I mean, I think Otis is going to Chicago, right? or Milwaukee at one point. He's flying.

But he's flying. So I just want to say that for as much as the end of this movie is just absolutely perfect, that airport does not have any international flights. It doesn't even have a sign that says international flights. That airport is essentially the Burbank Airport. It's about, it's got like four terminals or whatever. It's, it is, you could walk across it in 10 minutes. I don't think that even there would be a sign that's like, yeah, you can get to Prague from here.

I disagree slightly because she says there's a shuttle, which presumably is like a 30-minute flight from wherever they are in upstate New York to JFK, where then this airline has a service, a partner. They're the regional airline, and you fly to Paris. Then you go to Prague, go to Prague, right? But I would instead put this under things that have aged the worst, which is the impetuous desire and freedom to travel the world. Right. Where she's like, yeah, you could be in Prague tomorrow morning if you just give me a credit card and a passport right now. Right. I don't think people do. I mean, did either of you ever go to an airport and buy a ticket? Never in my life. But, I mean, I do.

I did twice. I've been to the airport to like, I, I've, like, you would go wait for someone's flight to arrive. So you would just like hang out at the airport while their planes are right. Bill, where did you go? I was dating somebody who didn't live in Boston and there was a couple on the whim. Oh, these flights are super cheap. You would actually go to the airport. It was cheaper to do it that way.

You did it. you're the anti-Grover. That's so romantic. Yeah. Didn't work out. Didn't work out. Best quote, we've mentioned most of them. I liked your airport thing, by the way, Chris. It's trying to think what, like it's almost like the Westchester airport. Yeah. Would be the kind of size of the airport that we're thinking for wherever they were. And I agree with you. I'm not sure they'd be part in a prize. It's just hard to, it's hard to negotiate how, like, he's like, I'm going to Prague like right now, no clothes, no, he's not very liquid at that moment. and he's not to have a lot of money. And he's just like, I think I can just get on this plane.

And you would just be like the first thing you need for international travel is your passport. Yeah. Was he leveraging the apartment in Park Slope, shouts my old hood, that he was apparently going to live in? I mean, he's kind of low-key a real estate baron. He claims he's down to his last $20, but he's considering apartments all over the city in the Tony of Zipcoats. She mentions, Libby and Diablo's character mentions Brooklyn at one point. That's where they were going to spend their summer. But Brooklyn wasn't even, in my opinion, not really on the radar yet in 1995 as a place anyone lived.

But Bombok from Park Slope is where he grew up. So shout to his home hood. I don't know if young people were going there yet. I felt like that was like an early 2000s thing. Best quote, we mentioned almost a album. We didn't do, how do you make God laugh, make a plan. And then I like that you drink. I like a bartender drinks.

Otherwise, I feel like I'm being poisoned. I like that you drink. I like a bartender who drinks. Otherwise, I feel like I'm being poisoned. I totally agree. There's something comforting about the bartender and the bar that you go to occasionally just being like, yeah, I'm going to have a whiskey. I'm like, this is great.

I'm so glad you're drinking with me. The feeling that you get inside when a bartender nominally recognizes you, like the first time a bartender's like, hey, you want a Miller? And you're like, yes, that's what I drink, is insane. it feels so good. It just means you go to the bar too much, but it is fantastic when you're like, this guy knows me.

He knows what I need right now. Could this be remade as a 10-episode Netflix show is our next category? I think it probably, that would have been his goal probably 25 years later, right? Probably would have tried to turn this into a Netflix series or an Amazon series. I mean, it's so well-written.

It's just outrageous. It's just so consistent and so well-written that, yeah, I mean, presumably he could have just kept going. You probably got a lot more anecdotes. Yeah, you got to bring Jane back if that's the case, though. A little more time with Frederick. Can I actually set shout out one of my best quotes to speaking of Friedrich when he goes, you know racism spans the globe. From Howard Beach to Crown Heights, we witness acts of hatred. And Max is like, what does that mean from Howard

Beach to Crown Heights? That's like saying from the living room to the dining room, we witness acts of hatred. Or what about the moment when he's doing the panning shot in the dining hall and the guy, like the the LARPERS or whatever they're called, like the dude in the full body. The Renfair guys. The Renfair guys. He's just like, don't even start with me because I've had a day. Yes.

So good. Probably unanswerable questions. We covered Josh Hamilton. Should he have been a bigger movie star? I still see us. Is Prague overrated? It was one of my unanswerable questions. It's this big thing.

Everybody's got to go to Prague. Everybody has opinions on it. Most people have been there. Are we overrating Prague? Is there some other city? We should have been touting more. My college girlfriend did her semester abroad in Prague. I visited.

And it's very beautiful. Lovely place. Respect to all the Czech fans that we offended moments ago. But I did not pick up those downtown 79 vibes, I must say. I did. It was great for what it was great for at that time. but Paris was still Paris. That was my, that's my reflections as a 20-year-old

first-time European traveling. That was like the big, the big draw. Oh my God, that's right. Was you got to go to Prague and you got to drink absinth and you're going to trip your balls off. And I think that in retrospect, we all need to just kind of like, reorganize our principles here and be like,

you know, probably Amsterdam is the craziest place. You know, if you want to have like a wild experience, there's like Amsterdam, Paris, whatever. Prague was like, there's this drink that'll really fuck you up. When I went there before I visited my girlfriend there, I went there to do the Eurail thing. And I just can't, I hope the movie Hostel had a good effect on people. Because I remember getting off the Ural train with my college pal that I was with. And a guy coming up to us, a guy with the same energy as the video store clerk, but check, being like, you need place to stay?

Come with me. And we were like, okay. And we went with him to some like ninth floor walkup where we roomed for three nights with two girls backpacking from Finland. And yes, we were safe. And yes, he was like, you come to drink absinth? Like, that was what they were advertised. I think when I stayed in Prague, I literally stayed in like an ex-USSR dormitory.

One more probably an answerable question. So they do the before sunrise sequel, before sunset, where Jesse, he writes a book and his last book tour stops in Paris. and then Julie Delpy shows up and then the second movie's on. You kind of couldn't have done this with this movie. You could have had the kicking and screaming thing where Grover writes his first book and he basically could have done the same premise and I think it would have worked, right? You're opening a huge can of worms here though, which is what happens to these guys.

Well, that's what I wanted to get to. Yeah. So. They never see Otis again. Otis is gone. Do you feel like in 2010, 2011, you're talking to Grover. about covering the Knicks for Grantland. A literary spin, you know, on the ups and downs of a season of the New York Knicks

from this one-time New Yorker writer. Short story, right? Yeah, a critically acclaimed, but under-read book. He wrote a whole book about LaTrell's Freewell. Not a lot of people read it, but it was really great. It was like that Black Planet book about Gary Payton. Yeah. Same kind of premise.

Just be fascinated by a player. Yeah, now he's writing for Grantland. It's like a senior writer for us. I think it's in play. I think it's in play. I think he's fully embraced the cafe lifestyle at that point, the one that he disparages in this. Yeah.

I got to be honest, they could have gone 20 more seconds into Grover's hoops shops. Never got a full feel for it about like, I don't know, we were revolving on Mason too much. Yeah, it's all just playing off his dad. Yeah, but he's doing that more high-minded thing that I think would have worked for us at the website. because remember he's talking about Pat Riley's home life.

He's really focused on the psychological stories of these players. He can't do like a Kirk Goldsbury shot chart, you know what I mean, but he can tell you how people are feeling. Sure. And there's value in that. What was Grover's last name? We learned at the end, it's Kerry. Oh, Grover Carey.

So Grover Carey, new on Grantland? I see it. I could see him. All right. That's fair. That's a good one. Who won the movie? Cover Carey spends two months with Andrea Bargnani.

Can I also say, though, You'd think with a filmmaker like Bombach, who kind of is always talking a little bit about where he is in the world through his characters, we could have had the sequel if he hadn't ended up, you know, sad drinking with me and my friends five years later due to his career thing.

And then when he got his turn again, he went all the way back to his childhood for squid and the whale. And then he leapfrogged over these characters and started making movies about either middle-aged or pre-middle-aged people. So I feel like we were robbed of that chance. But I wonder if in a drawer somewhere

he has a script that even if it's not about these people, it is about that next five-year period. Unless I'm mistaken, he didn't really make movies about people who were 30. He kind of jumped over that. Grover would be the one that we ended up with again. And maybe Grover wrote a book, it got sold. He went to L.A. to adapt it.

And now it's Grover in L.A., but it's really bomb-bikes experience of when he had to do the Hollywood thing and trying to navigate that whole world. So it's a less toxic Greenberg, basically. Yes. Okay, I can see that. Do you think that these guys are still friends?

Or do you think that Max and Grover at least remain friends? Max and Grover are still best friends. Okay. I think so, too. I think Otis, they lost touch with a little bit. When does Grover call Max to talk to him about whether it's appropriate that he's dating a high schooler? In 1995, nobody blinked. There was a reason for it.

I don't know why. Also, out of all these dummies, Miami is the most successful because Skippy makes fun of classes, but she's clearly doing like MCM, we called it around like modern culture and media. She's way ahead of this stuff, right? So she's ready to write the essay on about the second screen experience before any of us know what that means. Like she's dialed in to where the culture is going. No question. She probably starts the Huffington Post in 10 years. I think that you got Grover for Granland and you reached out to Miami, but she declined. Too successful. She's right for the New Yorker. Yeah. Absolutely. She was flattered though. She was flattered because she's

supportive of what we were trying to do. But yeah, now, she's too good for us. Who won the movie? I think it's Aigman. I think it without Aigman, it's not the same movie. I agree, but I kind of want to vote for Bombach because... I have Bomback as well. I just think that it's an incredible movie.

And even if he never made another one, I hope we would have been doing this episode. But it's pretty amazing that he made this movie at 25. And it's probably still my favorite one of his movies, even though he's clearly his chops of him. and his writing has gotten deeper, et cetera, et cetera. But it's just an incredible film that means a lot to us. I just know I had season tickets for him after the movie and I kept them after some dark years.

Yeah. And you were there. Kept going to the games. At Staples Center all by yourself. Watching Baron Davis throughout Leaps to Zibo, just wondering if it was ever going to get better. But, no, I think one thing I love about this movie is if, and they haven't done this because the movie was successful,

but if the screenplay was available as a book, I think it would be really fun to read. The dialogue is so dense and everything is so just efficient. And there's just not a lot of movies that have been like that. But especially for this era, it's like the perfect year, 95.

It's right when people started to try to make movies like this. You know, the next year is when like the beautiful girls chasing Amy. Everybody's kind of trying their version of this because I think they all love this movie. but this was the only one that did it. And also think about, I can't believe this. I mean, I'm sure he has complicated feelings about this movie,

both because of its relative lack of success and also how old he was, et cetera, et cetera. But like, think about anything that you did or that we did at 25, especially trying to make sense of like first love or aspirations to be better than you were, to write novels or whatever. It's cringeworthy, right? Like, that's part of the process.

You kind of, the emotion or where you are with this stuff, you look back on it and you're like, oh, God, you had to fail like that to become who you would be later. but he got it right. And it's kind of, it's just incredible. And it's this monument to a very specific way of feeling that I think we all felt at that period about what we wanted to be or what we wanted to be like. But it had the self-awareness not to be, not to suck.

It's really incredible. All right. That's it. Chris Ryan, Inde Greenwald. We can hear you guys on the watch. This is really fun. One of my favorite movies ever.

This has always been on the list. And it was, it was really fun to break it down. Don't forget, if you love the rewatchables, the entire archives is on Spotify. So that's where you're going to find everything. There you go. We'll see you next week. Thanks for letting us ding in.