The Watch - 'Better Call Saul' Is Back, Plus Reviewing Summer Movies | The Watch (Ep. 283)

Episode Date: August 21, 2018

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald return to Albuquerque to celebrate ‘Better Call Saul’ and Season 4's artistic achievement so far (6:00). Later they discuss and review some summer films, including ‘Black Klansman’, ‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ and ‘The Meg’ (31:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Everyone knows about the risks of driving drunk. People could get hurt or killed. You could get arrested incur huge legal expenses or even lose your job. If you think drunk driving is no big deal, you couldn't be more wrong. Drive sober or get pulled over. Learn more at nhtsa.gov. Today's episode of the Watch is brought to you by Seekek.

Buying tickets can be complicated and confusing, but there is a simpler way to buy. with Seekkeek. Seekek is the smartest, easiest way to get tickets to every type of live event, whether you're catching your favorite musician on tour, shopping for the perfect gift, or searching for a last minute deal to see your favorite team.

Seekkeek helps you find the best seats at the best prices, fully guaranteed. Nothing beats being there in person for the biggest plays of the year, and Seek will get you closer to the action for a great value. I have Seek on my phone, the app, and it's by far the easiest way I've found

to shop for tickets. I can be anywhere, and with just a few taps, I can instantly find seats I actually just use Seatgeek to buy tickets to El Trafico, L-A-F-C versus L-A-Galxy. I'm really excited about that. Seekek is designed to make your ticket buying experience easier than ever. Seekkeek saves you time and money by searching multiple ticket sites to compare prices and find amazing deals. And to get you the most bang for your buck, Seat Geek grades every ticket based on value to help you immediately identify the best seats that fit your budget.

Plus, every purchase is fully guaranteed so you can shop for tickets on Seatkeek with confidence. Make Seekek your go-to app for finding the best deals on every type of ticket from sports and concerts to comedy and theater. And best of all, watch listeners get $20 off their first Seat-Geek purchase. Just download the Seekek app and enter promo code Watch today. That is promo code Watch for $20 off your first Seekkeek purchase. Seekek, right here, right now, right from your phone. I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now.

Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm Nettitur at the ringer.com and joining me on the other line. Meet me at the Saul. It's going down. Sadie Greenwald. What's up, man? How are you doing?

I'm great, you know, seven days into this hotel stay, and I'm definitely holding it together. There are no cracks, no cracks. What's the first thing that goes for you? Is that what you're fishing for? No, I mean, like, is it, what's the first thing that starts to get to you? Is it like a weird air conditioner sound? Is it the smell of the carpet? Like, what's the first thing where you're like, now I live in a Kafka story?

I think you're grateful for it from it. So I think it starts to get into it gets up in the sinus. Yeah, because your sinuses start to look like the road. Dude, have you been here? And the Cormec-McCurthys sense, yeah. You drive 10 minutes in any direction. It is the road. Yeah, it's just like, hey, there's that guy with the shopping cart.

It's not inaccurate. Greenwald. But I have to say, and I know we were going to get to it later more organically, but as long as you get exercise gotta get fresh air you gotta dip into all the local cuisines make yourself a schedule man just stick to it

you're like what you know downward dog then get some Poblanos just go for it make yourself a schedule what do you think I'm doing do you know how many conversations and meetings I've had and it's not even it's not even end to day here

my first story for Grantland was this, I went to England to do the Champions League, what? First story for Grandland was you went to England? Yeah, you didn't know that. That was the glory days, man. We thought we had it all figured out. I went to England.

I got hired, I was hired to be the Soccerator at Grantland, and I went to England to go see the Champions League final between Barcelona and Manchester United and the Championship Division promotional game at Wembley. So there's these two games at Wembley over the course of like three or four days. And I think I was in England for like five days. And they were like, well, where do you want to stay? And I was like, well, probably somewhere close to Wembley Stadium.

Not knowing that Wembley Stadium was a solid like 50 minutes outside of London. And also was essentially one bar that might have been in Twin Peaks. It was called like the Blue Dot or something. And I never went in because I was too nervous. And then just like a lot of other just post-industrial like carpet stores and stuff. outside of that area. So essentially all I did was go into my hotel room, walk around in a circle, walk back outside,

realize there was nothing to do walk back. I mean, it was like this loop where I was just going in and out of my hotel room 16 times a day, thinking that one day I'm going to leave and it's going to be interesting outside. And then I realized I could just get on the train and go to London. I want to give you held to... And that was like 850 works. You've lapped me since then, though.

I would have liked a travel budget. to really investigate the making of the poster. I'm just saying it was a different, it clearly was a different time for everybody. All right, Andy's in New Mexico, and in honor of that, and in honor of our own tardiness with this show, because I feel like we've never really given it.

It's due on the watch. We are going to be talking today about Better Call Saul, and I suspect we were going to be talking about Better Call Saul a fair amount this season. It's season four debuted two weeks ago, and so episode three of the season is on tonight on Monday night. So we're going to be talking about the first two episodes of season four in the show as a whole. And then Andy and I both happened to go to a bunch of different movies this weekend with a bunch of different reactions to them.

So we'll probably do a kind of summary of some stuff that's at theaters now in the second half of the show. But Greenwald, I thought we really need to get into Better Call Saul because I think that if I were an objective listener to this podcast and I was offering some notes, I'd say probably that this is one of our biggest. blind spots over the last three or four years. I wouldn't go back that far, because we covered it fairly heavily, I think, the first season, having any conversations about it, without ever really realizing we were doing it, we both completely slept on season three. Yeah. And I think it wasn't until season three was two or three episodes old that we even realized

we had missed the beginning format. Yeah. So I was keyed up and ready to go for season, how you found your way back to it. Because even when we realized we had missed a few episodes, even when we got feedback, from didn't feel the urgency. Yeah, and I'm going to say why that is, but I think I might disappoint those people even more in doing so, and we should say right now off the top that we will be,

this is a spoiler zone, so we're going to be talking about things that happen across the first three seasons and the first few episodes of season four. And I can answer that question really simply because it was a revelation for me in watching these season four episodes, man. I didn't care for the character of Chuck. Okay. I really, I know that this is not something that I have an

argument for. It's not something that I have like, here's why this character was holding this show back. If anything, the tension between Chuck and Jimmy was the truly original work of this show. I mean, I think that I have tons of high praise for it and I have lots of detailed reasons why I think it's a great show. But for me, and this is just one of those things that you can't legislate this. Andy and I can't talk you into or talk you out of liking something you like or liking something you don't like. I just never really connected with the odyssey of that character, with his illness. And I found that I just, I would rather honestly watch Kim Lexler do Doc review than deal

any more with the Jimmy Chuck thing. And I just, I never enjoyed it. You know what I mean? And it's nothing about Michael McKean that I dislike. And it's nothing about Bob Oden Kirk's performance with him. It's nothing about the excellent writing that went into that character. I just never really connected on a visceral level with the plot, that plot line. And I think that was a huge, huge thing, because if you don't want to watch a major part of a show, you're just not going to watch it.

So it's interesting. This season four has had a little bit of a noticeable uptick in ratings, and I think that's obviously that Better Call Saul is reaping the same benefits that Breaking Bad did, which is this is ostensibly an AMC show that is high. highly helped out by Netflix because those episodes are readily available to watch in the format which you've suggested is more suited towards this show, which is the binge watch format, and I basically

slammed through season 3 and got through it. Knowing already what was going to happen, just because it had been spoiled for me by the internet, but just I was able to get through it. And then as soon as I hit season 4, man, as soon as I watched Smoke and Breathe, the first two episodes, I was like

now it's the show that I wanted to be. Well, it's worth... Yes. One of the things that I have used repeatedly to kind of just knock it all down a peg, even when I was praising it, was that knowing where things are going to jeopardy yet, hurts the drama and hurts our emotional and that speaks again to Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould and Berge and Gentile negatives turn the middle of meticulous planet. If you know the first three seasons, a better call, if you pitched a show that was about these middle-aged brothers in and around the court pickup. Right. But knowing what

really telling a story, much like breaking back. The emotional season 4 premiere. Yeah, and then goes to mix coffee, yeah. That is 30 hours, 30 episodes. That in general is my feeling about the show. And it's only increasing, you know, the volley-filled road of making it a dramatic that they've done. And to bring it all the way back around,

when the micro push, maybe this is old TV talking, maybe this is an old man. Yeah, it was kind of interesting to think about how this show is always going to be defined by Breaking Bad, and in some ways I felt like the first few seasons of it were a conscious pulling away from that definition, so that the investment that they do in the minutia of these people's jobs, to the point that you and I think were having a lot of fun

at the expense of like Sandpiper class action suits and stuff like that and long montages of highlighting. I think that, look, your mileage may vary. There are probably people out there who felt like the revelation of the show was how different it was from Breaking Bad in the beginning. And now I'm kind of like a Johnny Come Lately who's excited because Gus has a major role on the show that John Carlos Esposito is fully back. And that we're seeing the sort of actually the development of the New Mexico drug empire in front of our eyes rather than having that be something that's off on the margins that Saul or Jamie. me slash Saul will eventually confront. Yeah, I mean, I have to admit, do.

MVP of the show. MVP of the show. Yeah, let's talk about that. So Michael Mando... Yeah, I mean, I think Ray Sehorne is obviously, like, probably my favorite... She's the MVP. Yeah, she's the MVP of the show, but, like, so far, and as his role is sort of developed,

and especially in these first two episodes, I have found myself really infatuated with Michael Mando and his performance, and the way in which his performance now, you know, SEPinwall, Alan Sepenwell, who I would not want to mischaracterize his opinions about the show, he's obviously very into it. But, like, he was sort of saying that this is now two shows,

you know, that there is essentially two shows that are connected loosely by Mike. I agree, but I think that there are thematic similarities between the two shows that make them feel a part of one. And for me, aside from the fact that visually the stories are told very similarly, and this is probably the most texturally rich show

on television. Every jacket, every prop, every set design note, every bit of production design, the cars, the outfits, Kim's ponytail, as was memorialized by Jen Cheney on Vulture. There's so much stuff

in this show that you can almost reach out and touch despite the fact that it's this flat, bland desert light that it feels. feels so real. And within that world, I think that the genius of this early part of the season so far are the parallels of the oppressive relationship people have with work and the inescapable hamster wheel that most people who need to make any money are on with not only the constant need to replenish funds, but the addictive quality of doing that work in the first place. So you

essentially have Saul in this kind of manic state of looking for and rejecting work. You've got Kim who nearly died because she was working so hard. And you've got Nacho who wants sort of wants out of the game to sort of maintain that connection to his father and his family and whatever life he sees outside of the criminal underworld, but is instead at the end of the second episode fully the property of another human being. And the way in which the idea of what we do as a job defines us is something that I think unites the two halves of the show. Well, and it also is the people that I didn't become eyes and articulated. That's Walter White, grinding, frustrating, believing, knowing you are special. And yet your circumsit, the desire,

I mean, you know, for as much as transcending his life. Yeah, I did it for me. becoming a superhero. Yeah. That's really what the show is about. And it's re-Seahorn. Oh, sorry. I don't know, though. So, Alexa.

No, you're right. I've been corrected on that before. That's my bad. I just want to say, we've talked about it in a hundred different ways that is, it is 300 made up things. 360%. It is a performance that is 360 degrees realized. She is completely comfortable in who Kim is when she's in court, who Kim is when she's on the couch. And we understand that just on a molecular level.

And to see her uncork the cannon, so to speak, you know, in that scene with Howard last week, and the show began, I thought, well, boy, they got the empty suit. You know, he could be a game show host. And then you give him, again, and you give them, you walk them at the time we get to this season, and he has to play the notes that he's before. But you have to believe that the character has never played these notes before. It's riveting. And they love it.

Yeah. We could have a granular conversation about, you know, it's a different show completely and it's in its first season. But, you know, just, it's crazy. It's like we're at some sort of Danish design school in Copenhagen, you know, and we're in where it's what a beautiful chair. And it wouldn't work if you had to talk about TV on an artisan. Yeah, and also, I mean, for something that's so detail oriented and has so much plot to communicate because there's a lot of this person is going here and this is. is why this matters and this is why we're showing you this. I mean, even something like Mike's inspection of Madrigal Electromotive, like the plant that he goes to and, you know, talks his way into, which is sort of this heist without a treasure. You know, it's everything about a heist movie except for the heist. I thought that I was, while I was watching that, and I,

we were going to talk about some of these movies that we saw over the weekend. And I, I saw two movies that I did not care for in different ways, but both movies had basic problems with like, why is this happening or why is this scene taking place the way it is written? Why didn't they rewrite this or make it less cliched? And that never ever happens on Saul. I'm never like, I know exactly what's going to happen in the scene.

I didn't know it was going to happen in the nef copier scene. I don't know what's going to happen when Howard's sitting there with Kim. I don't know what's going to happen when not, walks out of that first drug buy after he and his his buddy get the six keys instead of the five if they're going to leave and feel like their big guy like for as much as a lot of this show

is predetermined where it's going to end I have no idea how it's going to get there and that kind of leads me to my last question to you about this show how are they going to pace this thing from on the long tail because this is now in season

four and I think by all accounts everybody involved this is the best job they've ever had. They love working with these people in this place on these characters telling this story. This show is slow. It's weird. It's like it's got this end point,

but it's also slow and also the folks making the show are so creative. I could see them figuring out a way that it goes into that gene territory, which they are obviously fascinated by given the amount of care they've been putting into telling that story visually. So let me ask you.

And I don't mean to be like, I don't want to look a gift horse, but how long do you want this show to be on the air for? Well, I think it's worth no... Well, they insist that every season is like they don't have any... They have a couple of things they want to do, but for the most part, each season is its own creation. Yeah, which I admire, and I think that there's a lot of lessons we learn from... Yeah, I do. I mean, you know, the genius of Breaking Bad isn't that they planned everything.

It's that they painted themselves into a corner every week and figured out a creative way to escape. Right. And, you know, the beginning of the final bifurcated season was the worst thing they ever did because then they had to spend the rest. Oh, yeah. They were just talking. I just read an interview, I think, with Peter Gould, where they were just basically trying to figure out how Mike gets a badge to get into Madrigal and they spent like days trying to figure it out. And yet we never see them sweat. I mean, I think that's the most incredible thing.

That's a dry heat. So this season's opening longer than previous. I don't know what they anticipate. intended, maybe, as we said, they don't know yet either. I believe there will be a point where the, and then do you pick up and do an entire season with Gene? I don't know. That's what I'm saying. Yeah.

It's very exciting to imagine them what they decide with that, you know? I mean, it would be pretty revolutionary if they decided to tell a contemporaneous story with Breaking Bad from the perspective of Saul. I don't know what he was doing in between the episodes. Yeah, or when he wasn't in those episodes or the first. call. I mean, they, if anybody could pull that off, it would be those guys. And the only reason why I'm, I wouldn't be shocked if they did do that is because even though Breaking Bad obviously came to its like conclusion and I think everybody was ready to walk away from the story and it had, it was right to end it where they ended it. It by all, it really did sound like nobody really wanted to stop making that show.

Yes. And I blow it. Right off into the sunset. Yeah. But these guys were like, we love what we do. And we're pretty good at it. So why not keep going? Absolutely, man. All right, we're going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the Meg, crazy rich Asians, and Black Klansman. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by ExpressVPN. You're being tracked online by social media sites, marketing companies, and your mobile or internet provider.

Not only can they record your browsing history, but they often sell it to corporations for profit. Take back your privacy with ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN has easy to use apps. that runs seamlessly in the background of your computer, phone, and tablet. Turning on ExpressVPN protection only takes one click. ExpressVPN secures and anonymizes your internet browsing by encrypting your data and hiding your public IP address.

It is rated number one, the number one VPN service by TechRadar, and it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee and costs less than $7 a month. So if you ever use public Wi-Fi or don't want to hand over your online history to your internet provider, ExpressVPN is the solution. Look, it's no secret that you don't have any secrets. The idea of your personal data is such a huge story right now. ExpressVPN essentially provides you, the consumer, with a peace of mind, which is something that not a lot of places are offering right now.

If anything, I think that we're all living in a time where we feel like anything we do or say online is being recorded, it's being shared, it's being monetized by other companies. This is your shield against that. ExpressVPN is your safety blanket. Protect your online activity today and find out. how you can get three months free at expressvpn.com slash watch. That's EXP, R-E-S-V-P-N.com slash watch for three months free with a one-year package. Visit expressvPN.com slash watch to learn more. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by ADT. ADT can design and install a smart home just for

you backed by 24-7 protection. You can explore the vast number of things you can do with a secure smart home like you can have doorman service, which is an ADT automation that unlocks the door for packages, friends, or your kids. Or you can do turndown service, an ADT automation that arms your system, locks your doors and turns down your lights and thermostat. Or even the worry-free getaway service, which lets you arm your system lock up and set lighting schedules before you go on vacation. That's really crucial. All controlled from the ADT app or the sound of your voice and backed by 24-7 protection. And don't worry about installing and configuring your system. ADT will D-I-F-Y do it for you.

Just visit ADT.com slash smart to learn more about how ADT can design and install a secure smart home just for you. All right, Greenwald, we're back. And one of the, you know, there's not very many things that are in it for me for you to be in New Mexico for this extended period of time. I don't get to see you. I don't get to critique each other's facial hair. But I miss my mask. Is that what you're saying? I miss your mask.

I miss your scent. but we don't we we we do get a little bit of uh cinema andy cinema greenwald is in the building yeah i gotta say we don't need to be on planes anymore we just need a slow weekend without the family you sound like avon you know it's like stringer's just staring over the the multiplex we don't we don't need planes no more no man uh um okay so you know that there are movie theaters here in america that have reclining seats yeah man like like airplanes like there's a button and you did a lie down. That shit's cozy.

You know about that? Yeah. Did they have those in New Mexico? Oh, you thought I was just like Googling comfortable movie seats in other places? How much free time do you think I have? I mean, I went to the movies. Really? Okay, so let's...

It actually made me feel, Chris, like I was on an airplane. I was sober. So what would you say is the best movie you saw this week out of the two movies? I don't like to use... You've heard this podcast before? No, frankly, I don't listen. Big fan, though, of what you do in general. My pronunciation of Reese C. Horton's name.

I have to say, this was a different experience because up until now, unless I was on an airplane, if I went to a movie, it is a commitment. It is a commitment of time. It is a commitment of babysitting money. This was different. This was just seeing movies like a normal. Because I was just experiencing it, and I didn't have the highest expectations one way or another. I was just looking for a small, you know, monocum of dinner.

If you want a burden, surprise me by being not as good as I had hoped and one was better than I thought. Okay. Let's talk about Black Landsman. Yeah. I am a big, big, big Spike Lee fan. Like, and even late period Spike Lee, like, I, weirdly, I love Girl 6. Like, you know, like, I definitely have been on this journey with him for most of my adult life. I remember seeing the right thing in theaters. I remember having a pretty life-altering, experiencing Malcolm X in theaters when I was younger.

So it's, I'm coming to this movie with a real, you know, it's a home field advantage for spike. And I have to say that I found this movie almost unwatchable. Just on like a very basic plot logic scene like scene logistics

level, I found it to be pretty weirdly amateurish in places while understanding that part of the appeal of the movie that it was a feature, not a bug, that it was constantly tone shifting. And I'm happy to be argued with in terms of what certain

certain tone shifts meant for the overall story, but I found it kind of mishandled in a lot of places. And pretty weirdly benign in its impact with me, despite the fact that it's a miracle that a movie like this is in movie theaters in 2018, and it's talking about such wildly urgent shit and stuff that we really need to have in our movie theaters and the kind of thing that I think we all wish we would be,

confronted with more in our everyday movie-going experience, as you say, like when we're mostly just like, oh, let's go see the Ant Man on the Wasp, I guess. Like, it's great that there is this essayistic half-cop movie, half sort of polemical treatise on race relations in America over the last, I mean, since the civil war essentially, leading up to the current state of our national politics. But on a very basic level of like, why is this? guy in this scene but not in the next scene and why are why did this person do this at all uh was i thought pretty much a failure of a movie well i don't disagree with slightly different perspective and much like

you know like if lindsay buckingham makes a solo record i'm going to buy it and i'm going to listen to it and i'm going to appreciate it because i'm just like i there's a way to you buy a ticket you kind of know what you're going to get and you roll with the you know it's a spike lee joint meaning why start the movie once when you could start it three times? Why end it once when you could end it four or five dissolve into modern day news footage? You can do those things if you're shot.

Like you know you're getting certain things. Baggy as hell. Because there is, I think that maybe what you were bumping on it, there's a version of this that is incredibly tight because of the urgency of its message. The footage of Charlotte left me in tears in the theater. I mean, it was in, you know, we could do that. You have the Alec Baldwin.

Like, let's introduce this carat-top movie. I think that a cop movie between John David Washington's more 70s cops to do it. Yeah, it's tough to come out of Black Klansman and be like, I want the flip Zimmerman story. I know. Yeah. But I did. But, you know, it's like this with movies that are critical. I mean, what's being accomplished in it is noteworthy and often very praiseworthy, even as the filming, the day that he lingered.

You know, that's a Spike Lee movie in a nutshell. I don't know if you saw the Boots Riley, the musician from the police see this week, basically being like, and he took issue with that. And it kind of is. I mean, there's just not the Spike Lee fan, Spike Lee movie, but like it's just a late period spike Lee joint ups and down. And I think that the Jordan Peel factor in this movie was probably, you know, I personally thought that if he had any fingerprints on it, it was in this sort of what if a black cop and a white cop had to split the identity of a person trying to pass in the Ku Klux Klan. but you know you could make the argument to me that this was actually a Trojan horse movie

that it was like a cop movie it was a cop movie or is a political film and a political essay masquerading as a cop movie and I would believe you I'd say that that's fine and you know you can go back to you know early 60s or mid-60s godar movies where they're talking about um you know socialism and and feminism and the role of the role of of the individual in society, and that's delivered via either a crime movie, like a band apart, or just a sort of soap opera,

like, you know, there's plenty of examples of that, but this didn't feel like that. This felt like a kind of a bungled cop movie that had a lot of pushing and pulling behind the scenes, which I don't know if that's the case. But I'm saying that, like, the weird tonal energy of when,

they do the sting operation on Landers and everybody's like high-fiving and like congratulating each other or the just bizarre logic of you have to be David Duke's bodyguard and it's like the only reason to do this is for the movie it's not because it makes any sense of a story

or Harry Belponte showing up to deliver a 10 minute monologue about lynching. But if that's the point where you want to end up why not just write the story so that that's where it happens but instead it's like this dude has definitely been talking to David Duke. That's weird. Like, why would you make him be the bodyguard?

Yeah. I don't know. It just didn't click for me on a lot of different levels. I'm really happy that movies like this are out there. And I left thinking about a lot of stuff, which is good. And I even left thinking about filmmaking in a way that was really interesting and thinking about the choices people make and across the board. Another movie that made me think about filmmaking a lot was that.

Like Black Klansmen, the good feelings, I have, Crazy Rich Asians is a triumph of representation, and I'm not the first representation of Asians and Asian Americans on cinema, in cinema and on film, but of people who just want rom-com. Large segment of America is so wildly underserved. They have no idea if you're going to see it. They're crazy, and they have a little movie in the beginning.

And then by the end, I'm like, oh, just, you know, enjoy it. That's a legitimate feeling. And I think that for as much as people should be celebrating issues of inclusion and representation and success at the box office, which is 1 million percent legitimate, let's not forget the other people that have been underserved here, which is fans of that type of movie. And there was a brilliant for those reasons because it certainly succeeds because it really nails those rom-com beats. Yeah, that was good. But the Mindy Project was like a five-season owed to this sort of movie. And then finally, okay, we get it. We have it on the big screen with a budget with running.

And Henry said that's my only. She is legit good. Yeah, she's really good. She's really good. That's good. There's a talk of the town piece about her that I just read where she's basically got to break back into her own apartment with like a, by throwing a jewel charger, you know, like the vape pen. I think she's a real deal. I can all sense.

So now I'm ready. I can just, however good you feel about Aquafina, I feel the reverse about the Meg. I've You and saw it No yeah I because I love Shark movies And I love

Big dumb action movies I really like Jason Statham And this is just A complete fucking turkey Like this is just like A really

Really big waste of fucking time And I'm not Like I don't mean that I should have probably been high for this And I don't really

Do that You know But like You probably need to be somewhat altered to watch this movie because as soon as it starts, you're like, oh,

okay, like they didn't really think this was going to be this big of a box office hit because they spent like $11 on it. You know, it looks like the sets are made of painted styrofoam.

It is almost, it's entirely set in China, which I did not know, which is fine. Like, that's fine. I've actually never seen a shark movie set in China, but it is kind of,

of it just doesn't make any sense, like, at all. And it's essentially, you know, it's sort of like deep blue sea. It's just like there's this, you know, marine biology research center where they're working with, you know, they're trying to discover new stuff. And then they unfortunately, like, put a hole in a thermal layer that allows like prehistoric sharks to come up to the regular sea and wreak havoc. There's this one amazing. moment in this movie that I wanted to tell you about because for a movie that's so uninventive and the special effects are not good and even though Statham and Rayne Wilson and everybody's trying hard like it just kind of never gets off the ground

there's one moment where and I can't tell maybe this is an example of bad movie making or maybe it's an example of like the movie that Jason Statham thought he was making so the whole prologue to this movie I'm going to spoil it for you is that Jason Satham is a deep sea rescuer, you know? And he's like one of the only people in the world who's ever made like an 11,000 feet rescue. And it opens with him having to make the tough decision to seal two of his friends in a submarine as it explodes. That would be a better movie. He seals two of his colleagues in a submarine because he has to make the tough choice of saving them or saving like a

11 other people. Right. So they die. And then when he comes back, the doctor, who has played a doctor in like 30 movies and TV shows, it's like diagnosis with like basically like water pressure psychosis or like whatever you get when you're like going crazy because you've been deprived of oxygen or whatever.

And or you're like too far underwater. And they have this like eventually like Statham comes back to that kind of job. and the doctor is, of course, working on this job, so he has to, like, clear him. And they watch the video of his interrogation of this person. And in this video, which is like this black and white video that they're watching on a laptop, of Statham being like, you have no idea what it was like down there, man.

There's just this gargantuan, half-eaten muffin sitting on the table. I'm so into it. I want an oral history of, who on the set that day who was like we're shooting this thing, it's going to be inside of a laptop, we just need to get like a couple minutes of footage here, we're going to do this, what could we do to really

ground this scene? What could we do to really make people feel like this is an interrogation scene? I know. Billy, why don't you run to Starbucks and get me a banana nut muffin and then maybe like kind of put a little bit in your mouth so that it's crumbling and then just putting this

fucking muffin in front of Jason Statham's hulking excited frame. And it makes no sense. They don't eat for the rest of the movie. Here's what I, here's what I'm so happy you told this anecdote. What you've just done inadvertently

crumb from a mysterious muffin that has no reason for being there. And yet, we must ask why. Why is this muffin here? Who baked this muffin? And who other than, that's why we watch art, Chris. That's why we do this podcast.

I think this is actually quite profound. Well, because Jason Statham has since, said, you know, and somewhat cheapishly, because this movie has made like $300 million already, and there will definitely be a Meg 2. And I bet Meg 2 will actually be way better than Meg 1, because they'll probably be like, we have to actually make a movie now. But he has said this was not the movie that he like read the script for, basically. Like, you know, he signed on to do one version of this movie and it became something else in the production of it. But I wonder if the movie he signed up to make was interior office building

you know, but like whatever this guy's name is, Jonas, sits at a table with an uneaten muffin crumbling in front of him and that was like what drew him to the character.

Yeah. Well, I think he's done many things in his life in his career. You know, he's been a guy who holds a gun, but he's never been a guy who plausibly eats carbs.

He's been a guy who's transported stuff. He's been a guy who's been fast and furious. So he knows the full range of human emotions. So this is a challenge for him. I love.

It's giving me something to think about. All right. We're going to wrap it up there. Greenwald, we are probably, where are we like 50-50 on you for Thursday? I'm feeling pretty good. Okay.

If you're feeling bullish, all right, great. So Greenwald on Thursday, watch Saul. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about episode three on Thursday and we'll have some other stuff for you. We're coming up on Ozark season two, man.

It's so, it's really close. You can smell it in the air. I can smell it in the air. All right, dude. Have a good one. Great job, Francie. Today's episode of the watch.

was brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Everyone knows about the risks of driving drunk. People could get hurt or killed. You could get arrested and incur huge legal expenses or even lose your job. If you think drunk driving is no big deal, you could not be more wrong. Drive sober or get pulled over. Learn more at nhtsa.gov. Today's episode of the watch was sponsored by ADT.

ADT can design and install a smart home for you, backed by 24-7 protection, like doorman service, which is an ADT automation, unlocks the door for packages, friends, or your kids, or turn-down service, an ADT automation that arms your system, locks your doors, and turns down your lights and thermostat. It's all controlled from the ADT app or the sound of your voice and backed by 24-7 protection. Just visit ADT.com slash smart to learn more about how ADT can design and install a secure smart home just for you.