The Worst Idea Of All Time - REVIEW: Gigli & Jersey Girl

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

This was originally a pay-walled episode available only to Patreon supporters. Please consider if you can #PayTheBoiz at patreon.com/join/TWIOAT.You absolute monsters. By popular decree Tim (and sort of Guy) watched Jersey Girl and Gigli back to back. It was not pretty. These Bennifer vehicles are poorly remembered in the halls of cinema history and the boys found out why. While Jersey Girl is pedestrian and slightly annoying, Gigli is confusing, offensive and downright disgusting.Enjoy your democracy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sometimes I think you're involved with bad things. Are you? Oh, man. Beneath a rugged exterior, Larry Sheely was a nice guy. Are you? Get over here. I'm gonna be fine. Putting on a good show.

That's professional. He's just been given his big break. There's a certain witness with psychological defects. And I want him held on to me. But he's about to get He's kidding, he's kidding. an even bigger surprise. Hello.

Salute. Oliver Trinke was on his way to the top till everything changed. Daddy really misses you, mommy kid. I miss her too, especially right now. Oh, shit. Will someone please shut that girl up? Mommy kid, I miss her too, especially right now. Oh shit. Will someone please shut that girl up?

You better shut up! Hello Patreon pals and welcome along to a hellscape you created by your own divine intervention. My name is Tim Batt, a changed man. And I'm Guy Montgomery, more or less the same uh tim good morning good morning describe yourself to me physically i want i want you to work from the inside out i want a vague overview on the state of your internal organs all the way up to the scruff on your chin and maybe the state of your eyes and mouth. You know how when you eat too much or you have too much beer and you feel like there's a lot of wheat in your system and it's not a good feeling? You feel heavy and sort of persistently nauseated and just not tippy top?

That's how I would describe my guts. Just a small amount of dull pain in my temples, but not too intense. Mouth run amok, eyes dry and tired and scratchy. Here on my chinny chin chin, unkempt, and I'm currently sitting in a dressing gown do you know in the best way from the first thing you said i knew for sure that you were in a dressing gown there's just no possible way you could be in anything else no getting around it isn't that interesting dressing gown i love knowing that i love the intimacy between us

that i knew that just from just from the sound of your voice, I thought Tim's in a dressing gown right now. He is. A thin piece of cloth separating yourself from Adam. This one's pretty thick, actually. It's a thick boy. It's kind of felty, right? Like those blankets you put on top of your bed.

There's that sort of material. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's the one. Because it's been some time. It's been, I could probably give you the exact hours, eight, twelve, and another fucking, it's been about 16 hours since I completed the mission,

the mission of watching Jersey Girl and Gigli back-to-back. Did you do it back-to-back, by the way, Guy, or did you separate them off? I did it back-to-back, but there are some details surrounding my uh screening which i feel oh run me through irrelevant for context and then we can get into yours because i think you you did it you know you were your uh pretty straight dick and vagina meat and potatoes yeah straight down the line yeah um i i do do scheduling conflicts had to undertake the entire thing this morning so i had a 5 30 a.m call time oh um and how was set

uh well set was set was not enthusiastic you know i was looking around the place there are a lot of dead and terrified eyes looking back at me um but bastard uh i tried to watch jersey girl first yeah it was too early and time was quite precious and i i could not find a means of watching it from my computer um right i couldn't rent it because it's so hard to find hey it was i had the same issue it's so it was infuriating i i turned on a vpn and rifled through like a million different uh netflix countries jersey girl as it turns out not available in india argentina canada australia new zealand or america um and then yeah youtube and amazon India, Argentina, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or America. And then, yeah, YouTube and Amazon wouldn't let me rent it because I didn't have an American credit card. It's a real, man, we walk the same path.

So I thought, well, I don't have the time to troubleshoot this now, so I'm actually going to start with Gigli, which is available on indian netflix not however in america um of course yeah and so i did that and then afterwards i i ran into exactly the same brick wall i had before with jersey girl so i found a bootleg sort of chaptered copy on YouTube for free that gives you about 45 minutes of the movie and then the uploader, for whatever reason,

decided it was not worth the trouble. So I stopped uploading the movie after 45 minutes, which means I pieced together the rest of the film from the movie. There were 12 movie clips. What the fuck, man?

That they had withdrawn and put up. And I feel like I got, it was a very frustrating screening experience. This is some sloppy fucking work, Montgomery. I feel like I got the thrust of the film. No way, man man that's fucked unbelievable not for one very alone i feel so alone right now i was afraid of this i i i really gave it quite a lot of time and effort um and i just couldn't crack it and then by the time that youtube had told me i i by the time that the youtube series i was watching uh deferred to like the the premium sort of legitimate clips that have

been put up by some channel called movie clip or whatever uh it was just too it was the the task was gargantuan so yeah you you've probably seen about 45 minutes of uh jersey girl that i have not i'm so dark on this i would prefer if you had of like watch neither and just went what a great goof on youtube i've seen nothing i i would also prefer that funnily enough yeah so so let me get this straight you did did you what did you see of jersey girl i saw what did i say i saw all the way up to um what have you watched all of either movie yeah i saw all of gilly that was the first thing okay yeah cool cool cool gilly was no worries uh man but gilly is a worry though yeah yeah gilly of both the movies felt less like

a movie jersey girl to me felt like a sort of uh relatively poorly executed romantic comedy should we get into that let's let's separate them out as uh let's let's dig in. Okay. I watched Jersey Girl first, and I think that that was definitely the correct decision. And I didn't mind it. It was pretty fine. There's some interesting bits. For example, the fact that from memory, this film was very heavily advertised,

marketed on the fact that Jennifer Lopez is in it and she dies in minute nine of the film. Yeah. I feel like I remember some sort of uproar, frustration at that being the case. At the time? Just in my peripheral memory of the gossip news cycle. Yeah, Bennifer were huge, obviously.

And I sort of consumed quite a lot of gossip magazines around then. And I think people were cross that she was written out so quickly. But I am also inclined to agree with you, you know, that Jersey Girl presented as like there's nothing original happening in it, but it was all sort of relatively competently put together. Yeah, it was all fine. So what it is, is it's a story about Ben Affleck is a music publicist who they kind of contradict themselves

because they say that he's got his own, he had his own company by 27 with 100 people working under him. But then later they keep referring to the firm that he worked for. So I don't know what the fuck's going on there. Maybe he's got his own little sub-branch of the wider firm. Anyways, very successful at a very young age.

And then Jennifer Lopez is a literary agent, I think. Yeah. Or an editor. An editor. She's a book editor. And they get together, fall in love, baby jennifer lopez dies at childbirth she's an aneurysm very sad yeah it really was quite sad and then um so ben affleck has to move back in he's in new york city he's in the big smoke, kicking asses and taking names. So he moves back to live with his dad, who is George Carlin,

which was just like, I was shocked. It was so good to see him. Have you dug in to find how exactly? I mean, Kevin Smith is a, I mean, I think he's quite divisive now, but a relatively well-respected comedy director. Is Kevin Smith a bad man? No, but but he's just i think he's like quite an eccentric and he he's sort of you know he has he's a rabble rouser i don't think he has much time for the system if you know what i mean but uh that does remind me of a little known up-and-coming

comedian called one george carlin you know in his Right. But yeah, I was very surprised to see George Carlin pop up. And quite relieved, to be honest. Yeah. And he gave a great performance. Yeah. And he's a cool guy in the movie. And I'll tell you, he's not a cool guy, certainly to begin with.

Ben Affleck. Yeah, man, this piece of shit. He hates his daughter. He hates his daughter. He hates his daughter. There's no other way to put it. He keeps shirking his responsibilities of child rearing, leaving it up to George Carlin, who's an alcoholic, by the way. But they treat that in the movie like it's just a fun little character note.

It doesn't really affect anything. And he's constantly driving so even when he first talks about it he's sort of quite uh he's in quite a chipper tone when he says he's going to go to the bar he says i'm an alcoholic and uh no one sort of says or addresses it in any way it's just like yeah that's my dad and then at no point does his drinking prove to be a problem. Yeah, it's a bit of a Chekhov's beer bottle or something, isn't it? Absolutely. Consequence attached to it. So that's going on.

What the fuck happens in the rest of the movie? She grows up, she gets older. But more importantly, Ben Affleck, did you describe him losing his job? Oh, no, I didn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. That's an incredible scene.

So Ben Affleck, who has been outsourcing the childcare entirely to his father, George Carlin, eventually George Carlin says, I'm really actually getting annoyed about all this, and goes to work one day. He hasn't worked for about two weeks because he's been picking up so much slack behind Ben Affleck. And Ben Affleck puts his child in the car and drives to his dad, who's George Carlin,

who's driving a street sweeper, that's his job, with the baby in tow and says, I'd appreciate it if you let me know when you're leaving the house so that I don't have to drive my child to you to look after inside of this street sweeper. And George Carlin essentially says, fuck you. And Ben Affleck is forced to,

for the first time since becoming a father, confront the realities of such a set of circumstances. And he's got a big announcement involving Will Smith. The movie's set in 1994 at this time so will smith is uh on the cusp of becoming movie star will smith but um ben affleck refuses to believe that will smith will have any capital beyond the fresh prince of bel-air and is actually quite dismissive of him as a you know as an upcoming entity obviously that's played for laughs because the movie was released in 2004. So the assumption is the audience knows

that Ben Affleck's instincts are wrong and Will Smith is about to have a moment. I'm enjoying your summation. Please keep going. Well, he's so sort of overwhelmed and tired and Jason Biggs, who's his kind of, he essentially is Jason Biggs-ing it up as his assistant uh it's like

will smith hasn't he's at an event and there's 300 music journalists and all they want to see is will smith i can't actually remember the specifics of what will smith is launching but everyone's pretty excited for blood what is he launching i honestly what was it it was he uh is it an album no is it a he was a bit i mean i know that independence day was about to come out i think it's about that isn't it isn't it it was like something to do with the release of the movie like there was a song that was getting released alongside the movie or something like that fuck yeah who knows um something like that it's something small that ben affleck what's happening over? Are you scouring through the film?

I want to play my favourite line of audio from the film. Oh, okay. Yeah, this is it here. Hold on. Is that Jazzy Jeff? This is bullshit. Where's the fresh prince? Will someone please shut that girl up? That guy. Amongst the 300 journalists baying for blood, Ben Affleck goes out to say,

Will Smith isn't here yet, but everyone, it's going to be okay. He's already 45 minutes late himself. This is a huge snafu. It's just such a constructed they're all all the music journalists appear to be they're one uh they all are in perfect union you know they're they're unity they're all one being they all uh sort of make general above at the same time and then when

ben affleck arrives they all silence at exactly the same time they all share an exact sense of humor when the baby first appears on the side of stage crying one of them says is that dj jazzy jeff a pretty ordinary line that absolutely destroys in a way nothing i have written or improvised in my eight years as a performer could even dream of approaching. It's like Unity and Rick and Morty. They're all a connected system of entities, these journalists. It's quite a terrifying concept when you think about it, especially because how quickly they turn on people. All it took was a guy being a little bit late and bringing a loud baby for them to throw their anger and attention.

The empathy displayed by this body of journalists is incredible. So yeah, the baby continues crying because it's a baby. What else is it going to do? And then that guy who delivers it like he barely lifts his eyes. He's looking at the ground off camera, just sort of as offhandedly as he can says, would someone please shut that baby up and uh it's like it's the and honestly that line belongs in gilly in the sense that it is the worst

it's incredible seeing the difference of performance of ben affleck between these two movies because i thought in jersey girl he did a fine job like I wasn't so frustrated by him. He was so wooden and geely, you know? Yeah. And that guy, that journalist who's very upset by a baby crying, he's the worst performer in Jersey Girl of the 51% of it I saw. Which is really saying something. What else happens in that movie? So the girl grows up.

It kind of does a bit of a flash forward and suddenly she's seven years later yeah yeah oh no it's not seven years later it says gertrude seven years old or something as a time card i remember seeing it and thinking that's a weird way to say that yeah but from this we are to believe that it is seven years seven human human years later that's so weird that kevin smith wrote this i forgot i kind of didn't like connect that up right and right and directed yeah i guess that makes sense there's a lot of all the uh will smith stuff and the celebrity references is just bloody dripping with kevin smith kevin smith comes back into the movie in

a moment reminiscent of charlie sheen's cameo in ferris bueller's day off we're in a oh so we haven't even got to the bit have we sorry so the reason why ben affleck loses his job is he uh it's not like a hot mic because i think he sees it into the mic he just kind of loses himself for a moment he gets very annoyed and he's he says um you know I don't know why you people even care it's Will Smith his career is going to be around for less amount of time than the it takes for the ink to dry on your shit rags that no one cares about anyway and uh so as a result boom he's out he's out to club he's lost his job and his whole career based on that outburst um and then he actually like seems to be a bit happier during this bit

right at the start where he's got a bit more humility in his work and he is doing things like um what does he do he works i think with george carlin and his buddies in the construction sort of game yeah and he he uh starts being a bit of like a an inspiration to local community members i'm not sure the particulars of what but he sort of inspires them in some way he finds purpose in his life beyond i'll tell you what happens i'll tell you what happens because you may not have seen this bit but he i actually made a gif of it and put it on twitter he gives a speech in a town hall because they've got to shut down a road for like a week to work on it and there's a town hall meeting and ben affleck is actually before the town hall meeting

kicks off in one of those hilarious you know movie moments he goes hey it's it's a street it's three days how angry could people be cut to the town hall meeting and george carlin's line is you were saying which is real funny because if you pick apart like what that actually is george carlin's been sitting on that line for you know at least a day or two and it just would come out of nowhere and you'd be like sorry what he would have had to walk around with his son ben affleleck, going, ah, ah, ah. Every time either of them wanted to say something, he would have to hold the thought so that the context could remain relevant for him to say what you were saying. And they're raising a baby together. Do you know how hard that would be?

You've got to coordinate a lot for that around dinner time and nappies. Yeah. Do they have some fun and games with the notion of this sort of two generations of single men uh raising a young girl no modern day no no they don't no there's all sorts of capers you know at your disposal there this montage that they have is ben affleck taking the stage because he's like hey i used to talk crap and music publicity maybe i could bring these people over and he does in a speech that kevin smith has not bothered to write so there's just a montage music players with him gesturing to the crowd and winning them over over the course of you know 18 seconds uh it's pretty lazy

yeah then it works it's montages are so good but a montage of i mean the thing is that the actual action of what he's doing like this isn't to kevin smith's credit because this is sort of laziness on two counts as opposed to well fair enough it didn't warrant a speech but like it's of no consequence him finding his feet in that setting right like the real heart of the story is him. No, no, it kind of is. This is why you've got to watch the movie, guy. And I know you tried, but this is why you've got to watch the movie. Because this is his awakening or his reawakening that he's like, I've got to get back in the game. This is my calling.

This is what I'm all about. And so this kind of kicks off a sequence of events where he keeps applying for jobs, and he's got this reputation now where he's the one who dissed the Fresh Prince of Balear and no one will hire him until eventually they do. And all the while he's trying to raise his little girl. Did you see the bit with the girl where the boy comes? He doesn't get hired though.

Yeah, yeah, I saw comparing uh bodily parts and then ben affleck sort of sheepishly offers to give the bird and the bees speech and then the way it had been edited down into these small clips after that i actually after that i saw them at the movie store when he is with live tyler live tyler uh who's sort of quite a cool, confident video store clerk, which is like this is kind of Kevin Smith's films, right? Because clerks was his calling card. Absolutely. So here's Liv Tyler's character.

She works at the video store and she's a college student. I think she's 26, they say in the movie. And she's doing some research on uh people's sexual habits and so she ben affleck goes in there and rents a porno uh from the video shop can you believe um do you remember such a thing and so she kind of goes oh do you mind if i ask you a few questions about the fact that you've just rented a a porno and he's like uh i guess that's fine so she starts grilling him about stuff he actually he freaks out and he accidentally gets uh a movie featuring bisexual men and then he gets very embarrassed when he brings it to the counter and love tyler's like is this the movie you wanted and he's like no get me some ladies sexuality is a spectrum unless

you're ben affleck in real life and as whatever character you're portraying you are never to come up even close to the line of having any curiosity in anything other than heteronormative sex and these are the fucking rules so live tyler um chases him down at his oh that's right it comes out so she's like hey does your wife know you're renting porno da da da da and he never kind of corrects her and then the little girl uh comes up with her movie and live tyler's like you know where's your mommy sort of thing she's like oh my mom died during childbirth and live tyler's like oh no so then she actually chases down ben affleck at his house later and then they get a coffee where she's just asking a whole bunch of questions about um when the last time he had sex life

that's right and he has not had sex since the death of his wife. Seven years. And he's very embarrassed to say it. So Liv Tyler grabs him by the hand. Sorry, you go, Guy. Well, I just think that was good acting from Liv Tyler. I really warmed to her in that scene, especially before that,

before she finds out he hasn't had sex in seven years. Her New Jersey accent isn't't perfect i will say that and noah isn't more apparent than that scene that little t-tartette yeah but she's struggling she says something where she says i'm crushing on you now or something i'm kind of crushing on you what was that what does he say to warrant that reaction uh he goes um does he say to to warrant that reaction uh he goes um fuck i can't remember it's something about the kind of fidelity with which he's treating the relationship even though his you know ex-wife is do you say ex-wife his widow his widower yeah no he's a widower his widow this is wife yeah but anyway when you find that he has had sex in seven years she says well we're going out of here

and leads him back towards either his or her house, I think his house, to burst the dam, to finally let that man have some coitus after seven long years of solo masturbation. You've got to get the coitus after the no coitus. You have a period of no coitusitus then you get coitus in there that's right he's tired of masturbating

to straight down the line penis and vagina pornography he doesn't give a shit though Ben Affleck is very unmoved by this proposal I feel like Liv Tyler is driving this boat that's like one of the things which I think creates misconceptions about America and Americans

is movies and moments in movies like this. When you're younger and you watch them, you don't have such an analytical mind. But it's like the characters take such big swings, you know, and people act normal in reaction to them. And it creates like a warped sense of how the world is, you know, where you suddenly think if you walk around telling people you haven't had sex in seven years, they're to be like well don't worry about that we're going to have sex right now and uh you know in my experience the world the world would be better or

worse place if we acted more like that uh i think better if like if it think better on the whole, but there's a lot of high stakes room for error, I think, with people taking big swings like that. Yeah, absolutely. You're increasing the margin for error by 10%, but if the entire world is more like that, if the entire world suddenly uh starts treating treating sex with less uh not like not reverence but you know if it's like you know it's the part of the terror of sex when you when you haven't had it and learning about it is you know it's it's put on

such a pedestal it's the great unknown and it just the longer you don't have it the more importance it has you've got to stop putting that pussy on a pedestal that's exactly right that's um one of the characters from the 40 year old virgin as i recall yeah that's what it was i forgot uh yeah but anyway he then they they go back to his house this is what I've got from my gleaning, so just step in wherever I'm wrong. They are in the shower about to fool around when young Gertie comes in, the daughter, and busts them. And then in a very funny comic turn, the tables turn entirely.

And suddenly young Gertie's giving a birds and the bees talk to Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck. She says, what are your intentions with my dad? Which is a speech that she's mirroring from Ben Affleck giving it moments ago to her after he walked in on these two curious little kids showing each other their bodies. What's going on out there? Is that a saw? So glad you asked.

Yeah. What's happening? Well, I'm staying at a friend's house, Kobe, and there was a very torrential rain in Los Angeles a few days ago, and there's like a built-in AC unit that's half in the wall, half out the wall in the lounge, and during the torrential rain, some water had somehow found its way beneath the ac unit and leaked into the house so i said to kobe hey just so you know some water's leaked in here

and uh kobe said oh okay it's no good i'll tell my landlord and he did and i corresponded with the landlord who assured me that yesterday afternoon yeah uh someone would be around to fix up the exterior so that there wouldn't be any leaks given another torrential downpour. That's great. I sort of scheduled elements of my life accordingly, namely recording quite an audio-dependent podcast on the Saturday morning. No, it's good stuff.

It's good stuff. I like it. I like the sense of we're in the world you know there's some world building elements going on we've got context we've got background it's it's pretty loud so i feel for you yeah yeah it's it's it's not quiet um but all all of this to say look you know jersey girl continues along from there The Gertie very skillfully blackmails everything she wants out of her dad, whose desire to return to the working world of New York sort of begins to threaten their burgeoning connection

to the point that his big job interview is scheduled for the same day as a dance recital that she appears to care about. She loves musicals, I guess. Yeah, it's more of a singing recital. Everyone wants to do Cats, and everyone does do Cats, except they do Sweeney Todd, because Ben Affleck accidentally takes her to Sweeney Todd not knowing how violent it is.

And then she does a scene from that, featuring some of George Carlin's mates from the shop, the company and live tyler does like a really long performance in it which i found fine but weird it's like hey man this is the kids gig this isn't for you get the fuck out of there you're hogging the spotlight yeah pretty much the sort of the crown the the sweet cameo and the crowning moment of the film is ben affleck has gone he's had a blow up with young gertie he's gone to the job interview in new york on the day of the recital and he's sitting in the waiting room and he comes across none other than

will smith the very man who sunk his career unknowingly by being well he did it to himself will smith didn't do shit absolutely but yeah i mean will smith doesn't know he doesn't have any of this context that you know this is how it happened and they just have uh a heart to heart as two men as fathers of children and uh that's all the that's all the the information ben affleck needs to say i actually don't want to go to this job interview do you know what i want to do i want to play around in the dirt with my daughter. I think you saw punctuating that point. There's no moment where Will Smith and Ben Affleck address that he's the guy. No, you've got to feel like that's meant to be twee,

a conscious decision that's meant to... I was waiting for that moment where he was like aren't you the guy who called me a massive impending failure how would will smith know about that though because it was famous everyone in the music industry knew about it he keeps going to job interviews and they're like oh my god you're that famous fucking dude plus he was in a room of 300 journalists you don't think they would have reported on that? Would have been a big story guy. You know, you used to read the entertainment mags. It would have made it in there.

But think about the trajectory of Will Smith's career between 1994 and 2004, wherein he has become such a star, you know, the news cycle isn't so dependent on tweets and, you know, the internet isn't as prevalent in everyone's lives like stories like that would come and go much more likely and people doubted will smith before in his career and would have continued to do so i feel like for maybe the people who were in the room the journalists you know that was a marquee event that was something

that's in their memories as unforgettable it was huge you know this huge pr guy doing the most unthinkable pr gaffe he freaked out but beyond that will smith wouldn't know nor care no i totally disagree i reckon he would i don't think he'd care that much because will smith's a cool guy and he keeps his eye on the prize but um i think he'd definitely know about it. They treat that moment as like huge. There's some information I'd like to give which tie this movie to Gigli because Jersey Girl was released one year later in 2004. And I think the reason that our Patreon pals

wanted us to watch these movies together is because it's kind of remembered as this epic and unthinkable double box office bomb where a real life couple starred in two forthcoming movies together and both of them were catastrophic and if you're in the marketing department that's your worst dream to know that ben affleck and jennifer lopez and your movie coming out in 2004 and before they do that they're in a movie in 2003 which is described as the worst movie of all time. Was that Gigli? Yeah.

Was that first? Okay. Yes. And so what wound up happening is there was a huge scramble from the team at Jersey Girl after the bomb that was Gigli where they were like, oh, fuck, we can't market this as a Ben Affleck and jennifer lopez vehicle and uh this is this is i've i'm on the imdb now so this is uh what i misremembered from earlier

about the marketing materials and jennifer lopez dying quickly so they removed all images of jlo from all promotional materials they pushed back the release date to create separation between gilly and jersey girl oh my word and they publicly revealed before the movie that jennifer lopez's character dies within 15 minutes from childbirth shit that is a full-blown panic attack that is it's ironically sort of mimicking the wild movements that ben affleck is making in his make-believe publicity career in the film absolutely he's they're they're all over the map with that one uh good on them though crisis management has got to be as long as it's a movie and not something that actually matters so fun although i guess everything matters when it's your job but if something like that happens

you're like oh my god we did not see this coming but it turns out the last movie of this twin set of releases is is legitimately one of the worst pieces of art that's been released into the world so far. We've got to make some changes. Yeah, that's the thing. I love it. You've got to think about, I mean, and I assume this is why we were told to watch these two movies. People love J-Lo.

People love J-Lo. But think about Gigli. Think about not just the fact that you watched that movie on a computer in your studio, but just the monumental disappointment that would be going to a movie with the two biggest movie stars in the world and that, whatever it was, unrolling itself in front of you.

Gigli is just honestly one of the worst pieces of cinema. Let's rip into it. It is. Let's open the can. What is it? First of all, what is it? Tell me what this movie is about. What is it?

What happens in the plot? Ben Affleck plays a hitman name hitman named larry sheely pronounced pronounced like really which he has to address i mean how can you name a movie just change the name just change the name of the film if you got to do that much work for it just you you are allowed to change it just change the name absolutely uh so he's a hitman who is sort of in the pocket of quite a lousy boss uh who's this he's like seems like a sort of b-grade mob boss and uh the b-grade mob bosses actions are catching up with him and he's freaking out he's actually under prosecution right now by a district attorney or something like that and so his panic attack is he commissions his hitman, Larry Gigli, to kidnap the sort of developmentally challenged younger brother

of the district attorney and hold him hostage. I did not connect those two things together. Oh, my God. What did you watch? I really watched it, too, or at least I thought I did. I missed that i can't even with that connective tissue this movie was abysmal but i can't imagine what kept you tethered to the screen for two hours it was just like there was a hitman who was ben affleck

who kidnaps this guy and then jennifer lopez who's another assassin who comes to help out because ben affleck's doing such a bad job at his hit manning and i didn't really get that we were told as an audience why it was him but there was a reason but it was being hidden from us so this is quite the revelation i can't i just can't imagine that movie without knowing that because what you wind up watching must have been so infuriating you're like why it was pretty crazy but i just chalked it up to the fact that i'd heard so much about how bad jeely was i was like yeah i'm sure this is just part of it they're not very good storytellers yeah i get what they're trying to do they're trying to like keep something a little bit secret and have it as a twist reveal at the end that's

all good hide a little bit of information but uh hide the sausage from the audience nice one tip of the hat to your filmmakers but no i just i've missed a couple lines at some point anyway so the the thing is that all of this sort of mafioso hitman plotting is barely a construct around which the real meat and potatoes of the movie, the thing we're meant to care about, be invested in, which is the will they or won't they element of J-Lo and Ben Affleck.

So the B-grade mob boss who's commissioned this kidnapping of the brother of the district attorney uh does not trust larry gilli he thinks he's a slightly incompetent hitman so he gets another person in the form of j-lo to keep an eye on him so it's two hit people who uh don't know one another have no connection to one another, keeping an eye on each other because of how important it is that this negotiation tactic, which the movie in itself kind of addresses later. Two tremendous cameos that come out of absolutely fucking nowhere.

Very big. Chris Walken comes in early in the piece as a cop and immediately is acting so hard and so much better than those around him it calls to attention just how bad what you're sitting through is like he walks into the room it's like sitting through a really bad improv show or a play and you're like oh my god two hours of this and then someone with something steps out and you think yes I hope this character sticks around for a very long time. Sadly not.

Sadly, Crystal Hawkins' cameo is reduced to playing the worst cop in the world who has motive and is so close to being on the right trail of cracking this case open, saving us all the embarrassment of sitting through the entire movie. He comes around. He essentially accuses Ben Affleck of having kidnapped the brother,

who he has. He is through one more door. And he also, this character, the brother, is revealed to have verbal Tourette's. Yet they do not, like I feel like they tried to milk one early gag out of it when he kidnaps him and then it is not returned to

but considering the stakes of the movie you know the idea of verbal Tourette's occurring when Christopher Walken is in the house surely if you're so certain that this kidnapping has taken place look around but he just says...

It's weird detective work to walk into someone's house and just give a speech but not kind of check for the thing that you're there for. And then never follow up on the speech or the case again. I mean, Ben Affleck was so sloppy in the way he kidnapped this guy. He walked into his care facility, like took him and just didn't check him out or anything just like walked in sort of you know talked to people took him and that was it if christopher walken

left that house and decided to go and check in at the care facility say how did anyone come here he'd get a profile matching ben affleck's character and go back to the house and say i know you did it but apparently christopher walken walked out of that apartment and immediately retired from the force he said i don't have it anymore i can't chase these cases my instincts are off i'm off the team he just took it he handed in his own badge and gun absolutely so then we're left with uh this romantic comedy between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez playing out in the company of, as you observed, Doug from The Hangover. Doug from The Hangover, folks. Playing someone who is differently abled for two hours. Yeah, and he doesn't do a great job, I would say that.

It's not good. Not good acting work. Man, it wasn't a stunning performance i'm actually going through some of my tweets um from yesterday about it because i live tweeted both movies actually but i did a better job of keeping up with gilly one of the most disgusting things i've seen in the history of cinema is the sex scene between Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck why is it so gross? because I felt that as well

I wanted to throw up and I don't know I was like Jennifer Lopez absolutely gorgeous Ben Affleck very beautiful man these are two sexy people having a sexy time why is filming it making me want to hurl?

because the scripting and the performance that leads up to them having sex is quite disgusting like there's one scene where ben affleck's character is hilarious in this entire movie he is the most pig-headed piece of shit in the world it is unbelievable and ben affleck i don't know what decision he made every day he got on set but it seems to me like it was the decision to not try at all so it's a weird middle ground though because he's very forceful

with his not trying he's going big in the wrong direction it's weird it's really weird he so Jennifer Lopez he makes an advance one night she's staying at his house she's gonna sleep on the floor he says hey look very professional but if you want to sleep in my half of the bed because they're working together on this job now until it's completed

uh if you want to take my half of the bed no worries he hits on her she says i'm a lesbian and he goes oh okay um and then eventually the tension's ratcheting up between them and he sort of starts saying that the penis is perfect there's a huge disadvantage to being a lesbian which is you don't have the you know apex of biological evolution which is his dick and uh then there's a scene where jennifer lopez sort of pointedly explains the appeal of a vagina by equating it to a human mouth while performing pretty incredible... The mouth is the twin sister of the vagina. Incredible yoga.

And Ben Affleck sort of absorbs this anyway. Eventually, they're in the bedroom and this context is all ringing so loud in your mind because it's so recent and uh they kiss and then which is fucked because she's a lesbian it's like the filmmakers don't really know what a lesbian is she's not she's bi she's bisexual you know i thought she was and they're just bad at telling a story i i don't know i think there was an element of her saying she in that initial advance he makes

she says she's a lesbian to temper his expectations but anyway they kiss and then eventually they make out and he's bragged about how good he is at cunnilingus before

after making out and sort of both of them detecting that things are going to advance possibly to full-blown intercourse jennifer lopez lays down upon the bed opens her legs gestures towards her vagina and says it's turkey time gobble gobble fucking immortal there are a few lines in cinema that will be remembered for the ages you shall not pass shaken not stirred and it's turkey time gobble gobble you could carve them into stones and rest them in the earth for when the nuclear fallout takes us all from this mortal plane i want those words to remain for any future species to discover it's turkey time gobble gobble yeah after which you watch the sort of you know the soft uh it's not an explicit scene you know it's it's more like, it's more emotive than biological.

But they spend quite a long and lingering shot sort of on Ben Affleck's wooden cum face. So he is in the throes of ecstasy and the sort of forceful, not trying style of acting he's experimenting with for as long as this movie was shooting means that you look into the cold, dead eyes of a man who is simulating pleasure while his real life partner and partner in the movie is having sex with him it's a style of acting that i'd like to call thumbing it in after a friend of mine andy he

would he would use this term quite liberally at one point in his life thumbing it in was when you did not have an erect penis so you would use your thumb to thumb your genitals into the genitals of your sexual partner so thumbing it in is when it's like look it's it's no good but um we're gonna get it done so that face that you've described that that is the face of an actor thumbing it in oh man and sort of honestly i i can't remember the time code but even if you can get onto indian netflix and click forward to the point of which you can get onto indian netflix folks that's the instruction uh it is it is so good there's another amazing bit where he um jennifer lopez sort of tells off this group of either school kids or bikies maybe a combination

of both uh and sort of uh manages to de-escalate what looks like quite a tense situation that ben affleck and his alpha dog character has created with these guys because they're playing music loudly at outdoor taqueria this was great this is a great great moment in the film ben affleck gets a hot head he's about to go and intervene and smash their stereo to bits but Jennifer Lopez is like hey this is the kind of situation where we'd want to keep a low profile but they start some shit anyway there's a couple of insults that get hurled and then Jennifer Lopez knows she's got to quieten this down so she goes over there and just starts talking at them about um the kung fu that she knows it's actually not kung

fu it's a different kind of martial art that she knows it's like it almost sounds like she's describing carver mcgrath or whatever that thing is called that israeli martial art but anyway she describes a situation where she knows a technique of um jamming your thumb into someone's eye so that it liquefies and then with your index finger you very quickly snap into the socket grab what's left pull it out and that removes your visual cortex from your brain using suction with the force of which you're grabbing the optic nerve and by doing that you forget what sight is like you not only can't see you don't just lose the ability yeah yeah you lose the ability to remember what a sight is because a lot of people don't know is that all of your memories are embedded in your actual

eyeballs well here's the thing man so i put this on twitter because i was live tweeting everything else and uh it started a lot of discussion i also i messaged i messaged my wife um who's a doctor it's you know it's pretty specialty fair i saw that general practitioner but i said the correspondence you shared was you said yeah what did you say to zoe i said zoe if you rip someone's visual cortex out would they lose their ability to remember visual memories and do you think you could do that through ripping someone's eye out hard enough and and she takes back saying what are you up to which is fair it's a fair question to that um but anyway this this started a uh quite lively conversation on twitter between some people um not least of which seem to be a few people who do neuro stuff they know about the brain and the consensus has been that in fact yes um if you remove the visual cortex it is possible and according to one guy has even happened in the past where you would forget

visual memories like you couldn't you couldn't kind of access them in the same way but there is no way that that is connected in any way shape or form to the optic nerve or to the eye so they didn't completely fuck it up yeah that's pretty crazy yeah nearly but not quite nearly but not quite um but that so that in and of itself is an incredible scene but the topper the kicker the cherry on this perfect piece of cinema is jennifer lopez walks ahead like you've been dealt with and then ben affleck as though he's had anything to do with it stands up puts his leather jacket on walks past they have a laptop out for some reason this movie is in 2003 i don't even know unless they've got windows media player that you can do anything on a laptop in the wild he picks up the laptop says cool laptop and then snaps it over

his knee and says suck my dick.com and grabs his genitals and thrusts and walks away um it is the funniest coolest brag smashing someone's computer and he's like i would love to i would love to do that i think it is so baller um in fact you know what has happened in your upbringing guy that you think that's a cool thing to do well it's just it's like such a loose it's carried the whole time it's just like this loose grab bag of things that teenagers think are cool like he does this speech where he's meant to sound like a tough guy which it's honestly like someone uh gave a bot you know uh a handful of words to try and recreate a monologue from Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross. It's fucking wild. It is so dumb.

He's just like, I'm the original fucking gangster's gangster. And it goes on for about a half a minute. You want to be a gangster? Get down on your knees and look upon the pearls that emanate from my awesomeness. But like all of his character traits are like this. They're like...

I just think his character is so funny. It's honestly like a 13... It's like someone who's liked a 13-year-old boy who desperately wanted to be cool. Can you please create a character? Can you please... It's the Homerer simpson of cars of characters the homer simpson car of characters that's a pretty good description it's what you

think you want in a character if you don't know anything about movies yes i still i don't know man this whole movie so it's so crazy and so fucked. She leaves really a wild ride, and I would actually recommend people watch it. It's so hard to get, though. I had to buy a VPN and then rent it from YouTube while pretending I was, I think, in America. Oh, man.

YouTube. Did you have to use an American credit card? How did I pull that off? I don't know. I think it let me use my New Zealand-issued credit card, which is good. Amazon didn't let me do that. But using an American VPN.

Yeah. Because I'm in America, and I couldn't get it on a New Zealand credit card. But that's Amazon. Folks, listen to Tim and Guy. You've got to try and get it off YouTube, maybe. Like, you pay for it on YouTube. I was on YouTube.

Oh, and that wasn't working. Both YouTube and Amazon were like, unless you're using an American credit card, even if you're in America, you cannot rent these movies. Oh, then I don't know. Well, yeah. India and Netflix have it. So get on that, folks.

And it's well worth the trip. What else to say about Gigli, though? There is a lot in it it's a very long movie well so yeah i think there's not just a cameo from christopher walken i think the the most important thing that must be addressed is uh there is another cameo in this film this is the best film i'm much later in the piece in the form of a ponytail swinging, wig wearing, gun toting, Al Pacino. Fish loving. Apartment dwelling.

He's the boss to the B-grade mafia boss. He's the real big fish. Yeah, he's Ben Affleck's mega boss. And he's loosely channeling his character from any given sunday like he gives like one of those sort of gravel voiced uh you know high energy speeches um it's just the whole it's all a gangster pep talk he's talking about thumbs for a very long time talks about thumbs for about a minute and then shoots a guy clean in the head who is his underling in the pecking order it goes al pacino the underling and then jennifer lopez and ben affleck are kind

of at the same tier at the bottom of that pyramid so al pacino in a moment of really showing everyone in the room who's boss boom puts a bullet right he actually this is kind of a cool line he says hey you want to go to med school and the guy goes med school boom puts a bullet and he goes yeah those students they need to learn from bud from like you know cadavers i can't remember the exact line but that's the the you know cut and thrust of it this is kind of fucking cool you shouldn't go shooting people folks god i can't recommend that strongly enough to just not do that but al pacino does it it's cool because it's in a movie and he's a gangster and then i think there's brain matter that falls into the fish tank and

there's a close-up shot of these exotic fish eating this guy's brains and then the kind of speech goes on this this dialogue duologue between he and mainly jennifer lawrence why this guy's just dead bleeding next to them. Which for all the other bad bits of this film, this scene I actually kind of liked. It's got a lot of cool shit going on. Yeah.

Mainly Al Pacino. He's the cool shit. It's... Oh no. Oh no. What's happened? Ugh. I've spilt a juice. Oh no. This is a big spill. God, I'm not going.

I've got to get a cloth. So you're wrapping up the podcast recording of a movie you saw mainly in clips because some juice got spilled. No. This feels like an appropriate end. I saw all of Gigli. I have a lot of hot takes. If you want a rough idea of how bad Gigli is,

they literally had to take one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Jennifer Lopez, off of a movie poster because it was so bad they thought that her property was toxic if you want to know how bad the movie is jennifer lopez one of the top 20 most famous people in the world they publicly released information that her character in the next movie dies within 15 minutes so you don't have to worry about her and ben ben affleck acting against each other that is a movie worth watching. I've really got to get a cloth.

Where was that passion? I'm going to end the podcast on this guy and it's the tweet that I sent at the end of my live Twitter experience of watching these two films. Get it out fucking fast because the juice is spreading. I can do this bit. I'm tethered to the computer. Go get a cloth.

So in conclusion, Gigli, it's a movie. The IPCC informs us the ocean will start to take our species back out of existence within 40 years. I think this is well justified. And as sad as it is to kiss goodbye to all of human progress, it's been a hell of a ride. Can I say fuck you to all the Patreon people who voted this in? You are a unique brand of evil. We will see you in the next one of these thank you goodnight