Ep. 236: microplastics, major problems

[00:00:04] Speaker A: What do you got for us this week, Corrigan? It's your turn, isn't it? [00:00:07] Speaker B: It is. And Mark, for the past few years. [00:00:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:00:11] Speaker B: There's been a back and forth in my town about artificial turf on the high school's baseball field. [00:00:18] Speaker A: Okay. I have some experience of this. [00:00:21] Speaker B: Oh, great. We'll talk about it in a sec. Let me give you a little background here. There's one woman in particular named Anna Grossman who has been sort of leading the charge against the turf on the baseball field. And she's a big environmentalist at the forefront of a lot of the eco causes around here, some more successful than others. And on the turf front, she was unsuccessful. [00:00:45] Speaker A: Now, baseball. Zero knowledge, but I can imagine it. It's a sport with, like, a lot of sliding, isn't it? Sliding on your ass and on your. [00:00:54] Speaker B: It's not usually on the grass, but ye. The. The infield is not made of grass, but the outfield is. And so if you're running for, like, a catch or something, you might dive, slide across it, things like that. [00:01:07] Speaker A: The infield being like the diamond. [00:01:09] Speaker B: Y bit the diamond. Yes, exactly. [00:01:11] Speaker A: Good. [00:01:12] Speaker B: Perfect. Yes. Look at us go. So, you know, the whole baseball team, like, showed up to a town council meeting in uniform to beg to be allowed to use artificial turf on the field. [00:01:27] Speaker A: Why did they want to. Why were they so keen on doing that on the infield? [00:01:31] Speaker B: No outfit. [00:01:33] Speaker A: Why were they so keen. [00:01:33] Speaker B: So replacing regular grass with turf. They had their reasons about why it's better, and we'll get into why. None of that makes any sense, but, you know, for whatever reason, a lot of it has to do with, like, expense and upkeep. [00:01:47] Speaker A: There you go. [00:01:48] Speaker B: The idea that it's much more expensive. Iffy, but more expensive to keep up real grass than it is to keep up. [00:01:57] Speaker A: For what it's worth, that was our main kind of driver. To replace our lawn with a strip of plastic. It's. [00:02:07] Speaker B: Well, you're. You're in for some information here. Okay, buddy? [00:02:13] Speaker A: Oh, no. [00:02:16] Speaker B: This week's episode that you had that. [00:02:18] Speaker A: When I wrote I am wrong. [00:02:20] Speaker B: Yep. Let the record show I did not write this to target you. I completely forgot. So unintentionally, I'm about to target you. [00:02:33] Speaker A: Okay. It's fine. So I'm not as emotionally vulnerable as I was sometimes. [00:02:39] Speaker B: Good place. [00:02:40] Speaker A: When you made me cry because I was vaping. [00:02:43] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:02:44] Speaker A: I'm a different man now. [00:02:45] Speaker B: You're a different man. You've grown in so many ways. [00:02:48] Speaker A: So do the listeners know about that? [00:02:52] Speaker B: I don't Think we've ever. I think we've alluded to it several times. Do we? Do you want. Should I mention it? [00:02:58] Speaker A: I. I don't give a fuck. Like I said, I've grown, but I was quite vulnerable like, a year or so ago, and I'd stripped away numerous vices from my life, and like a fucking drowning man would cling to a lifebuoy. I was just honking on this vape, like, nine hours a day. You still got my vape. And you picked that fucking week to do a cold opener. But how. Vapes are bad. And I was like. [00:03:28] Speaker B: And then I made him cry. I scrapped it all together. Yep. No, we're not. Nope. Absolutely not. You were like, you can put it up. It's fine. I was like, I'm not. That's not the vibe. You're not having me make you cry in front of our audience. At least not like that. [00:03:48] Speaker A: Not my lawn. [00:03:53] Speaker B: So different. Different headspace. Now I can probably. I think I can mock your vapes again now, too. [00:04:01] Speaker A: Yeah, crack on. Because I'm a month vape free, by the way. [00:04:05] Speaker B: Ah, amazing. [00:04:07] Speaker A: Roughly a month vape free. I haven't vaped in a month. On the other hand. [00:04:12] Speaker B: Oh, no. Are you still using the fucking Zinn? [00:04:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I am. I'm tucking those bad boys under my fucking lips all the time, and they are giving me some wicked ulcers, so. They really are. [00:04:26] Speaker B: So it's like the first thing I asked you were like, ooh, but I have these neat things. And I was like, mark, isn't that gonna give you, like, mouth cancer? They do. [00:04:32] Speaker A: They really do. I was. I had one in at the gym, like, literally a couple hours ago. I was like, oh, this hurts. And I discreetly kind of gobbed it into the bin, and I've got, like, a lesion. [00:04:44] Speaker B: Jesus Christ. It, like. It's just. It's so transparently a bad idea that it's like. It's funny. [00:04:54] Speaker A: Got, like, a fucking suppurating abscess on my gum from it, but there we go. Talk to me about my fucking Groton lawn. [00:05:01] Speaker B: Yeah, let me. Let me get on your case about your grass here. So on top of the baseball field thing, the park down the street from my house, which is owned by the county, not the town, also quietly replaced a good chunk of its grass, including the football field and some various patches with artificial turf, and nothing Anna Grossman or anyone else could do seemed to be able to slow the strange march of fake grass in Montclair. [00:05:27] Speaker A: Yep. [00:05:29] Speaker B: Now the concern, or one of many concerns as we'll get into for folks like Anna is something called pfas. Poly Flor pfas. Polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as forever chemicals. According to the EPA quote, PFAs are widely used long lasting chemicals, components of which break down very slowly over time because of their widespread use and their persistence in the environment. Many PFAS are found in the blood of people and animals all over the world and are present at low levels in a variety of food products and in the environment. [00:06:09] Speaker A: Like microplastics in it. They're in our fucking brains, our balls, ovaries. [00:06:14] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:06:15] Speaker A: They are everywhere, all of us. [00:06:17] Speaker B: That's I think wasn't it recently they discovered there's like not a single part of us that are not filled with microplastics. So good at this point. Yes. [00:06:25] Speaker A: Who's to say that it's not just. Yeah, evolution. [00:06:30] Speaker B: This is the next stage is what this is. [00:06:33] Speaker A: Transubstantiating the flesh. That's what it is. [00:06:35] Speaker B: Thalidomide and all those other things ascending. [00:06:38] Speaker A: Ascending to our true form. [00:06:42] Speaker B: Well, these are found in water, air, fish and soil at locations across the nation and the globe. And scientific studies have shown that exposure to some PFAS is in the environment may be linked to harmful health effects in humans and animals. There are thousands of these chemicals and they are found in many different consumer, commercial and industrial products, which makes it challenging to study and assess the potential human health and environmental risks. They're in everything. So like, where do you start trying to figure out like what they're impacting? What, where is your constant, where is the thing that is not, is not contaminated to be able to test off of? As of now, we don't have a full picture of all the risks of these PFAs, which is concerning, but even more so when you consider some of the things that are thought to result from their presence. [00:07:35] Speaker A: Let me tell you, maybe on a broader kind of philosophical level, right? Isn't that just the fucking problem with people and kind of post plastic society what we are? Well, I'm grasping for a thread here, right, but there are so many things, it feels like malign influences that are so ingrained into our fucking culture and our societies and our way of life that it is now impossible to extricate ourselves from them? There are examples of this everywhere that we've spoken about. For you it's guns, sure? [00:08:25] Speaker B: Yep. [00:08:26] Speaker A: There's no way back from guns now. Yeah, not so much for you it's oil. There's no way to Fucking de Oil our society. No, it just isn't gonna. Ever gonna happen. It's. It's growth, corporate fucking growth and expansion. There's no way back from that now. It's plastic. There's no way to deplastinate us socially. It's fucking social media. There's no way back from it now. It's climate change. There's no way back now. You know, something has become so fucking toxic and yet vital somehow to what we do. There's just no way back from it. We're addicted to things that are killing us. [00:09:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's. That pretty much sums it up. And we're going to get more into that. But, yes, if you can sum up everything that has to do with these microplastics and chemicals, that's kind of what it comes down to. A full reliance on these things that are absolutely devastating our bodies and our environment there. We don't need them by any stretch of the imagination, but they're. We want them and we are not going back. We're not putting that back in the bottle. So let me take you back to the early days of AstroTurf, the sort of brand name of artificial. Yeah. In 1965, a baseball stadium commonly called the eighth wonder of the World was built in Texas. The Houston Astrodome. [00:10:05] Speaker A: Such a hubristic name for a fucking sports field. [00:10:09] Speaker B: It wasn't the name of it, the name was Astrodome. But, yeah, you know, it's very unsinkable. Titanic esque, very much so, in naming. But it was the first domed sports stadium in the world. So that would be pretty cool, I guess, if you'd never seen a domed sports stadium before. Like, holy shit, that's pretty neat. But it quickly became clear that it was actually kind of a headache to let natural light in. The dome was made up of a bunch of plastic skylights. But when the sun hit those skylights, the glare would make it impossible for players to see the ball when it was in play. So they corrected this by painting those skylights gray, which solved the visibility problem. But now, instead of a sweet dome that gives you a sense of being outside while you're inside, it kind of dimmed the interior of the arena. [00:11:02] Speaker A: Like a massive hospital waiting room. [00:11:04] Speaker B: Yeah, right. And it wasn't just an aesthetic issue for them. Plants famously need sun and grass is plants, dumbass. The grass soon died under the gray panes of the Astrodome. So they said, well, fuck grass, and brought in something called chem grass. [00:11:30] Speaker A: Oh, God. [00:11:31] Speaker B: Which is. I know, it's a very Ominous name. That's exactly what the grass that does something horrible to people in a sci fi movie would be called. [00:11:38] Speaker A: Yeah, that needs branding. [00:11:41] Speaker B: Exactly. Chemgrass. Made by a subsidiary of Monsanto called Chem Strand. [00:11:47] Speaker A: Made by Monsanto. [00:11:48] Speaker B: Of all fucking people by Monsanto. Of course. Okay, now just to really, you know, this story is going to get bad. [00:11:57] Speaker A: Another Monsanto brand. [00:11:59] Speaker B: It starts at Monsanto. They're out there. What was it like Agent Orange they were making? And also Chem grass. [00:12:07] Speaker A: Oh. [00:12:08] Speaker B: So Chemgrass was made up of half inch thermoplastic fibers attached to a rubber mat and laid on top of an asphalt base, according to the Science History Institute Museum and Library. And perhaps sensing exactly what you did immediately, that chemgrass sounds dystopic. Chemstram worked a little marketing magic and. [00:12:33] Speaker A: Called it fucking Dom Draper on this shit. [00:12:37] Speaker B: Right? They called it Astroturf because it was in the Astrodome. [00:12:42] Speaker A: Very nice. [00:12:43] Speaker B: You see? Yeah. So that's why it's called that. Now you've been on grass, Marco. Real grass. Describe for me, if you can say what it would be like to roll on, like a soccer pitch made of real grass, what would that feel like on your body? [00:12:59] Speaker A: Oh, wow. What a fucking beautiful question. So it would. What kind of day is it? [00:13:04] Speaker B: I'd have a chance to have you describe a sensory experience. [00:13:06] Speaker A: What kind of day is it? [00:13:08] Speaker B: So, you know, it's like a nice spring day with the breeze. You're like. You are suddenly overcome with the need to commune with the ground. [00:13:17] Speaker A: Oh, this is lovely. All right, so it's cooling. Yes, it's cooling under my skin. It is. There is a moisture there. There's dew on the grass. It is, you know, so wet, but not unpleasantly so. [00:13:33] Speaker B: Right. [00:13:34] Speaker A: Soft. [00:13:36] Speaker B: Yes. [00:13:37] Speaker A: There's a tickle, but not in a kind of a. Can you fucking stop that kind of way. A tickle, but in a kind of a pleasant sort of way. There's a scent to it. A beautiful chlorophyll kind of scent. It is nourishing almost. It is refreshing because I know that in the fullness of time it is to that earth I will return. [00:14:01] Speaker B: You know, indeed. Get real philosophical about it. [00:14:06] Speaker A: Physical kind of moment which completes the circle that is our mortality. To roll in the grass is to accept your own death. [00:14:19] Speaker B: Wow. [00:14:20] Speaker A: And it is nourishing. [00:14:21] Speaker B: You know, a kid rolling down a hill. [00:14:23] Speaker A: No. Well, you should have. Maybe you should have. That explains a lot. Maybe, you know, to know that I am of the earth and to the earth I shall return. And that is fine. It completes the circuit, closes the circle. It's wonderful. [00:14:37] Speaker B: I like that. I'm into that. I mean, more information than I was looking for. But you also hit the nail on the head of what I was looking for. Grass. It's, you know, it's soft, it's cooling. You know, there's dirt underneath it, as you alluded to, that you will return to someday. Right now, think of what the Astrodome. [00:14:58] Speaker A: Had installed Chem grass. [00:15:01] Speaker B: Chem grass. Half inch plastic fiber on a rubber mat on top of concrete. [00:15:08] Speaker A: Well, I could. I could grab my MacBook right here and take my microphone and go eight feet to my right. [00:15:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And just go. [00:15:16] Speaker A: And pretty much. [00:15:16] Speaker B: Is that what you're. Is that what yours is made up of? Like, what. What is your. [00:15:21] Speaker A: Okay, situation out there? My quote, lawn, unquote, is not on a concrete bed. So it is on dirt, but the dirt has been planed, has been flattened. [00:15:38] Speaker B: Mm. [00:15:39] Speaker A: And a kind of membrane, almost like a thick, I guess you'd call it a Hefty bag. [00:15:47] Speaker B: Okay. [00:15:48] Speaker A: Type of trash bag. Yeah, exactly. Only more kind of fibrous, like a membranous material has been put down to actually. [00:15:55] Speaker B: Do you know what it's made of? [00:15:57] Speaker A: Oh, oil. I would imagine plastic. Disposable plastic. [00:16:01] Speaker B: Okay. [00:16:02] Speaker A: And that membrane is there to suppress the living earth so that weeds can't actually flourish. [00:16:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Nothing comes up through it, which happens in the one down the street. [00:16:11] Speaker A: Bad nature. Stay the fuck down under black fucking tarpaulin of Chem grass. And then on top of that membrane is possibly backed by rubber or something similar. As a nice little bonus, the layer of what I will henceforth forevermore refer to as my Chem grass. [00:16:36] Speaker B: Yes, please do. Okay. That's excellent. That's really interesting. [00:16:41] Speaker A: The firms who. The companies that make a very handsome living installing this stuff, they, you know, they. The vans are all have the name, like Forever Lawn. And. [00:16:54] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds a lot nicer. Although it also sort of death imagery. But, you know, it sounds like a cemetery. [00:17:01] Speaker A: Yes, it does. [00:17:01] Speaker B: But my grandma's buried in Forever Lawn. Where's yours? [00:17:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:17:06] Speaker B: Like green. [00:17:07] Speaker A: Forever green. Eternal green. [00:17:10] Speaker B: Yes. I will say regarding your membrane there, that keeps the weeds from growing up through it, as we'll kind of discuss here. It may also be doing the job of not letting what's in your astroturf get down into what's below it as well. [00:17:29] Speaker A: I see. Yeah. [00:17:30] Speaker B: But we'll. I'm not entirely sure, but I would wager that there is something to that as well. Because we will talk more about what's in your astroturf. [00:17:39] Speaker A: I might be your chem grass. I might be on one here. Right. But even that in itself is also another kind of demonstration in the natural world. In the human body, for example, what is the purpose of membrane other than maybe to facilitate exchange of gases and nutrients between tissues? You know, like the blood brain membrane, which oxygen and kind of, you know, nutrients flows between. Whereas on the cam. Grass, mate. No, no, no, keep the fucking. Keep them separated. [00:18:15] Speaker B: Yes, right. Very interesting. So this that was installed in the Astrodome was hard, smooth and fast. [00:18:27] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:27] Speaker B: And the manager of the Astros proudly proclaimed the stadium quote, a real utopia for baseball. No wind, no sun, no rain, no cold bounces. [00:18:39] Speaker A: No bad bounces. [00:18:40] Speaker B: Okay, no bad bounces. And again, they could not sound more like the corporate doofuses who unleash chaos and mass death in a movie if they try. Oh, it's a utopia. It's great. No problems here. But in true John Hammond form, their motives weren't entirely terrible. There had been research that showed that military recruits who grew up in rural areas were more physically fit fit than kids who grew up in urban areas. [00:19:08] Speaker A: Oh. [00:19:09] Speaker B: And experts reasoned that this was because they had access to open spaces where they could move and exercise more than a kid in a city could. [00:19:16] Speaker A: Yes. [00:19:18] Speaker B: So Monsanto was tasked with creating something grass esque that could be installed in cities. A considerably cheaper solution than say, pulling up parking lots and replanting them with real grass that would need to be maintained. [00:19:31] Speaker A: Grass gris from Monsanto. [00:19:43] Speaker B: Call Madison Avenue. It wasn't long before stadiums all over the US were like, now this seems like a pretty great invention. Fake turf is cheap, quick to install, and more or less impervious to the elements. So to the people bankrolling this stuff, freaking sold. Right? And this decision fundamentally, fundamentally changed the sport of baseball at the time. So let's do another little, just like, you know, little thought experiment or whatever here. You've thrown a baseball, right? [00:20:16] Speaker A: I've maybe I've thrown the equivalent of a baseball, if not some sort of horrible. Plenty of tennis balls, you know. [00:20:22] Speaker B: Well, not like a tennis ball, like something harder. Right. [00:20:24] Speaker A: A cricket ball. I've thrown a cricket ball. [00:20:27] Speaker B: Are those hard? [00:20:27] Speaker A: They're not bouncy very much so. [00:20:30] Speaker B: Okay, cool. So like a cricket ball then. You've thrown one of those. So what happens if you throw said cricket ball into the grass? Real grass, not your grass. [00:20:42] Speaker A: Well, if I were to throw a cricket ball into the meadow. [00:20:47] Speaker B: Into the meadow, yes. [00:20:48] Speaker A: It would leave a Like a dent. It would leave a little dental in the living earth. You know, there would be some transfer of earth onto the cricket ball, a reminder of the interaction that they shared, however brief. You know, they would know one another. They would experience one another. Do you know what I'm saying? [00:21:07] Speaker B: But what would the ball do when you threw it into the grass? Roll a little bit, kind of thud, Maybe slightly. [00:21:16] Speaker A: A satisfying, earthy noise reverberant with just the sounds of renewal and. Plenty. [00:21:26] Speaker B: Exactly. Right. Now, what if you threw a cricket ball on your gris outside? [00:21:38] Speaker A: Not. No, not much of anything would happen, really. It would just twerk and just kind of stay there. [00:21:45] Speaker B: Really? Oh, because you have dirt under yours. Yeah, that probably makes a difference. Okay, so imagine it's concrete under there instead of dirt and a little bit of rubber. What do you think would happen if you throw a ball at that? [00:22:00] Speaker A: It's gonna roll away, isn't it? It's gonna bounce a little and it's gonna just carry on rolling. It's gone, right? [00:22:06] Speaker B: It's just gonna fucking go. [00:22:08] Speaker A: Same thing as it would if you were to throw it on the street. [00:22:10] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. It's just gonna go and go and go and go and go. That's what it does. [00:22:14] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:22:15] Speaker B: So maybe you'd get a weak bounce or two if you threw it in the grass, but it's not gonna go far. However, if you throw it on AstroTurf, you're gonna get this thing going and going, going because it's a hard surface. So when a batter hits a ground ball, you know what a ground ball is? [00:22:32] Speaker A: No. [00:22:33] Speaker B: Okay, so fly ball is one that's in the air. [00:22:36] Speaker A: Right. [00:22:36] Speaker B: A ground ball is one that's on the ground. Right. [00:22:39] Speaker A: Okay. Yep. [00:22:40] Speaker B: So it can travel way farther and way faster than it can on real grass. You know, if you hit a ball on the ground, it's going to hit the grass. It's kind of stop. Right. It's not going to keep going forever. Whereas on this hard astroturf, these things can just go, right, and maybe hit a weird bounce somewhere. There's seams in the grass. It can take off a different direction. There's all kinds of things that can happen when you are hitting a ball on this way. So this becomes a strategy. Players now know that they don't have to be huge power hitters that can knock the ball into the stands and hit, you know, full home runs. Instead, the real stars become hitters who could hit a solid grounder and then run fast enough to get a couple bases off it as it bounced through the outfield. [00:23:28] Speaker A: And this went. This just blew past the fucking baseball authorities or whatever they were. [00:23:36] Speaker B: But they were on board this. They're modernizing baseball here. [00:23:40] Speaker A: Wow. [00:23:41] Speaker B: And thus stealing bases became a bigger part of the game. You know what stealing bases is? [00:23:47] Speaker A: No, I mean, it's a term I've heard, but nah. [00:23:50] Speaker B: So essentially, right, there's runners on the bases and there's a pitcher pitching of the guy at home. Right. And while he's pitching, there can be a person, say, if you're on first base, that makes you pitching is throwing. Yeah. Throw into the batter. Right? [00:24:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:24:08] Speaker B: The guy on first base can try while you're, you know, winding up to do that, to run to second base without the ball being hit. [00:24:16] Speaker A: Okay, so throw and run that base. I see. [00:24:19] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. So you have stolen the base because no hit advanced you. You are just able to get in there fast enough. [00:24:28] Speaker A: So that widely. Is that widely seen as, like, a shitty tactic? [00:24:32] Speaker B: No, no, no, that's normal. You're supposed to do that. Yeah, that's an important element of running in baseball. They'll have designated runners and things like that, you know, often to, like. You want someone who, like, a designated hitter will come up. Like, the pitcher usually is not great at running. Yeah, like that. So you want someone who can hit the ball and then go speedy around those bases. Right, yeah. So the. [00:25:02] Speaker A: Look, the closest frame of reference I have for this is rounders, which is just little baseball, isn't it? As far as. [00:25:10] Speaker B: Okay. [00:25:11] Speaker A: Do you know of rounders? [00:25:12] Speaker B: No. [00:25:13] Speaker A: You'd play it in school. You'd play it with your family. You know, you've got four bases and you've got a. I'll say pitcher, you know, and a batter, and they twat it. And you run around the bases until somebody catches the ball and taps the base and you're out. That's basically. [00:25:29] Speaker B: Yeah, that's essentially it. It's probably baseball with fewer rules. [00:25:32] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:25:33] Speaker B: Or at least the way you were playing it was. [00:25:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:25:35] Speaker B: Yes. So that's baseball. [00:25:37] Speaker A: I'm gonna say baseball, but fun and casual. [00:25:40] Speaker B: How dare you? I love baseball, but huge shift because of the. Just the way the field is built now because people are hitting differently than they were before when they were using real grass. People are running differently, all of this stuff. And those things certainly make the game more exciting. But there were immediate consequences for the players. They reported leg and back pain from standing and running on the hard surface. And worse, if you ever dove for a catch or otherwise found yourself sliding on the Astro AstroTurf, you'd find yourself with rug burns that one Astros fielder said, never heal. [00:26:22] Speaker A: Yeah, the boys have picked up a few of those on our campus. [00:26:25] Speaker B: I was gonna say, yeah, I'm talking in the past tense here, but there's a lot of fake turf out there, and this still happens. The Science History Institute article referenced photos of 2015 World Cup Women's soccer team who experienced horrific burns during. [00:26:41] Speaker A: During COVID Regularly, we'd have sports day in the garden. [00:26:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I remember you doing that. [00:26:48] Speaker A: Owen certainly picked up a few chem grass burns when diving for a ball. He learned to not do that pretty quickly because of the injuries. [00:26:57] Speaker B: See, you're adjusting play. That's what we do to make up for your chem grass. And the burning can be pretty literal, too, as fake grass doesn't absorb heat like real grass. And when it gets hot, it gets from being super uncomfortable. Yeah, we'll get into that. It's also emits fumes that can make you real woozy. [00:27:20] Speaker A: Oh, shit. I've not experienced that, but, you know, plenty of times during this, just this last summer alone, I've been out to put the washing on the line, and I've. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I've had to go and post. [00:27:30] Speaker B: Absolutely not. Yeah, wait till I tell you what exactly you're standing on when you do that. Meanwhile, football players who are also increasingly playing on AstroTurf covered fields were also reporting more injuries. Injuries including an increase in knee sprains, abrasions, concussions, and even exposure to staff infections. As a result, the NFL Players association called for artificial turf moratoriums. In 1973, the NFL had the Stanford Research Institute take a look at what was going on. Somewhat unsurprisingly, for a study. [00:28:07] Speaker A: Walter. [00:28:08] Speaker B: Walter, there's someone walking a dog outside side. Well, that's. [00:28:17] Speaker A: That's his New Jersey dog way of going. Hey, where are you going? That's him doing that. [00:28:21] Speaker B: He's. He's just being a neighbor. Good Lord, Walton, calm down, buddy. Take a chill pill, bro. So he's like, rumbling behind me. I know you can't hear it, but he's just. [00:28:37] Speaker A: I can. [00:28:40] Speaker B: He looked at me like. Are you making fun of me? All right. [00:28:43] Speaker A: Your other podcast won't. [00:28:44] Speaker B: Let's see, you're famous. So, somewhat unsurprisingly, for a study funded by the people who have a vested interest in finding nothing, it found nothing. They said there was no significant difference in number of injuries between real and fake grass. However, another study published 19 years later in 1992, found that, quote, linemen were more likely to lucky, were more likely to suffer. Jesus Christ, I am struggling with this sentence. Linemen were more likely to suffer sprains during passing plays on astroturf than on grass. Got it out. Meanwhile, Major League Baseball largely shifted back to grass, with the big ballparks built in the 90s, all sort of avoiding the plastic stuff and all, but two eventually switching to, to the real deal. By now it was too late though for several players. And we'll come back to that. While the synthetic turf racket had lost the mlb, Major League Baseball, they were, they were undeterred finding new markets in the minor leagues, colleges and high schools. And to mitigate some of the issues with the horrible hard injury inducing nature of the turf, they made the grass longer and cushioned it by spreading what's called infill between the fibers. I N F I L L An infill is made up of crumb rubber. [00:30:21] Speaker A: Oh God. [00:30:22] Speaker B: Which, yes, according to the Science History Institute, Consists of, quote, rubber from used tires ground into particles about 1 millimeter across, often mixed with sand. This may figure into your membrane that is out there on your Astroturf. Maybe this solved not only the problem of the hard astroturf, at least to a point, but also a problem with waste. Scrap tires are super hard to get rid of because they don't really decompose. [00:30:56] Speaker A: I'm going to tell you, the term crumb rubber is one of the most horrid things I have ever. That is, it's, it's vile. [00:31:06] Speaker B: There were. People started also calling it rubber bug or bug rubber because it was like little bugs in your, in your Astroturf. But yeah, landfills started banning rubber tires in the 60s and 70s because you don't want something that just never breaks down in a landfill. And as such, the US became home to various tire dumps which were full of insects like mosquitoes and vermin like rats, and had the super cool tendency to just catch fire. [00:31:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, a PR thing though I'm sure there's a better name than crumb rubber that would, you know, kind of, I. [00:31:48] Speaker B: Mean, they're not worried about it, right? Like until I said it to you. Did you know what crumb rubber was? No, Nobody's, nobody's thinking about what's in your grass, your Astroturf. So they don't need to brand crumb rubber just is what it is. So these tire dumps also created a shit ton of pollution as they leached chemicals into the ground every time it rained. And you Might be asking right now, Mark, then why the fuck would you use that on the ground on sports fields? To which I reply, I know, right? But use it. They did. And do. A single football field covered in fake turf, uses somewhere between 20 to 40, 000 tires worth of infill. [00:32:38] Speaker A: Oh, great. For rollback. Rollback. Say that again. [00:32:42] Speaker B: A single football field. Yeah, Covered in fake turf, uses somewhere between 20 to 40,000 tires worth of infill. [00:32:52] Speaker A: A single field. [00:32:54] Speaker B: Single football field. Just one. It's a lot of tire. [00:32:58] Speaker A: Do you know, it brings home the scale of our fucking sickness, doesn't it? [00:33:03] Speaker B: Doesn't it? Yes. This whole thing to me is just such a perfect encapsulation. [00:33:10] Speaker A: Doesn't it just. [00:33:11] Speaker B: Everything wrong. [00:33:13] Speaker A: Absolutely. Hammer home the vastness of how diseased we are. [00:33:23] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, and it's. Buddy, it's gonna get worse. [00:33:27] Speaker A: What, now? In this episode? [00:33:29] Speaker B: In this. Yes, in this episode, Yeah. I am barely scraping the surface just now. So this is great for keeping tires out of landfill. If you ignore that, you now have people coming in contact with this toxic material rather than it just being in a dump. The Science History Institute noted tire manufacturers add oils that contain hazardous chemicals such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons to make the rubber stronger and more pliable, and then treat the rubber with zinc oxide, which can contain lead and cadmium compounds during vulcanization to make it more elastic and durable. [00:34:05] Speaker A: Cadmium is not a chemical that you hear of in a good context, is it really? [00:34:12] Speaker B: No. Nope. No, it's not good. We'll. We'll hit that briefly. [00:34:16] Speaker A: Batteries and cancer. [00:34:18] Speaker B: Like, it's. It's not good, you know, on it and stuff, but it's all up in tires and all up in Astroturf. So all that shit that was in the tires is being used for the grass. They're not like, removing it in the process of turning it into chrome rubber. They're just crushing up the chrome rubber. And it wasn't staying on the field. Kids playing on synthetic turf, whoops, my glasses fell down and scrolled three pages up in my notes. [00:34:56] Speaker A: That was an excellent whoops, by the way. I don't know if you're going to keep it in or not, but it was great. [00:35:01] Speaker B: Listen, listen back. See? See how it went? So it wasn't staying on those fields. Kids playing on synthetic turf would come home with crumb rubber in their clothes and in their hair and embedded in their skin and who knows how much crumb rubber dust they were inhaling. On top of that, the EPA tested the turf and found that amounts of the worrying chemicals were below levels of concern. But a nonprofit? [00:35:30] Speaker A: What the fuck does that mean? And this stuff by now is in cities. Yeah, it's in urban areas. [00:35:36] Speaker B: Oh everywh. Yes, 100%. And a nonprofit called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility was like, whoa, slow your roll. You only tested three fields and one playground and you did it in average temperatures. As we were just talking about. Another thing about synthetic turf is that it gets hot as balls, reaching truly insane temperatures on a hot day. The organization's Safe Healthy Playing Fields compiles info on hot turf and features articles with headlines like it's so hot in Texas Turf is Melting Cleats from USA Today and the artificial turf at the Women's World cup was reportedly 120 degrees at kickoff. From the Washington Post. An article in the New York Times noted that scientists at Columbia University found that synthetic turf fields were regularly up to 60 degrees hotter than grass ones. An NPR article cited the NYC health department as saying people can suffer dehydration, heatstroke and thermal burns at field Temperatures above 150 degrees. And the Washington Post article explained that depending on air temperature, turf can get as hot as 180 degrees so far above the threshold for dehydration, heatstroke and burns. For even further context to how dangerous that is, at 115 degrees you start seeing burns in heat stroke. At 130 you start seeing second degree burns in under 10 minutes of skin contact of skin contact. At 140 that time to second degree burns drop down to 3 seconds and 5 seconds to third degree burns. And at 162 degrees human tissue can be destroyed on contact with a possibility of nerve damage. And the turf can be nearly 20 degrees hotter than that, perhaps hotter. The Beyond Plastics website claims that temperatures of over 200 degrees have been recorded on a 98 degree day on AstroTurf. And when it gets that hot, that affects the emissions that come off the crumb rubber. This is one of the things that was missing from the EPA report. The infill also needs to be constantly replenished every few years. And the impact of this, according to a study from Martha's vineyard, is some £4,800 or 2.4 tons of crumb rubber migrating into the local environment, waterways and municipal systems every year indefinitely. Crumb rubber also causes zinc runoff, which is poisonous to the important aquatic life at the bottom of the food chain. The stuff other stuff eats. Other chemicals shown to be contained in synthetic turf fields include human carcinogens such as Benzene, arsenic, cadmium, and crystalline silica, as well as multiple neurotoxins. And several chemicals in the turf are known to be respiratory irritants or trigger asthma, such as chromium, VOCs and SVOCs and particulate matter. [00:38:55] Speaker A: Allow me, if I may, just to ask your sources here. [00:38:59] Speaker B: They're all going to be on jackofallgraves.com but they're all over the place, as usual. They're articles, medical journals, you know, all. All the things I knew there would be. [00:39:12] Speaker A: I knew there would be, but, you know, I. I have to just ask. [00:39:18] Speaker B: Yes, you know, I'm doing my due diligence here. So phthalates, which are reproductive toxins, are in there. And all of these chemicals are particularly harmful to kids. And by the way, none of this stuff is disputed. Right, we'll get into the things that people too dispute, but these things are 100%, absolutely without question in your Astroturf. That's in there. So these chemicals are particularly harmful to kids, in part because their little organ systems are still developing and in part because kids are dumb and will shove their little chemical coated hands into their mouths on the sidelines of their soccer games, causing them to ingest the chemicals at higher levels than we probably would. Although I'm a nail biter, so you know, I probably would as well. Synthetic turf, all full of those nice chemicals, is also super flammable because again, made with the rubber tires that were previously causing dumps to ignite. When that burns, all of that gets into the air. But it doesn't even have to burn for this to happen. Turfgrass Producers International acknowledged in one of their newsletters that one of the adverse environmental and health impacts of artificial turf fields is the heat island effect. This means two the synthetic surface undesirably absorbs, retains, and emanates heat at temperatures and rates that are harmful to the environment. And the turf in its life cycle is responsible for generation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. So yay for that. In 2013, the EPA acknowledged that they'd done kind of a shit job, and they called for more studies. But again, it was too late. That same year, NBC aired a report featuring an assistant women's soccer coach from the University of Washington named Jean Bryant, who had noticed a deeply disturbing pattern. She realized that since 2009, just four years before, 38 players had been diagnosed with cancers, specifically blood cancers like lymphoma and leukemia. And the majority of those players were goalkeepers, which is notable because they're the Ones who would spend the most time on the ground. [00:41:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:41:40] Speaker B: Diving in the artificial turf. And soon Bryant's own son, a goalie, developed cancer as well at the age of 13. By 2015, the list had grown to 53. Or 2015. Yeah. By 2015, the list had grew to 53 University of Washington players, 60% of which were goal people, goalkeepers. Comparing rates of the school soccer players with cancer to statewide instances of cancer didn't necessarily show a disproportionate amount. It was more or less the same for other people in that age group throughout the state of Washington. But the problem people say with that comparison is that it didn't look at causes. So, sure, statewide the averages might have been about right, but there are always going to be places with more and places with less. Right. Like if you live on a Superfund site somewhere, there's probably going to be more cancer. And that balances out by people who live in beautiful, clear places that don't get cancer from environmental factors. Right, yeah. So they didn't compare those causes. They just compared age group and even soccer players. Right. And again, by doing that, they didn't necessarily check to see if, like, those soccer players had played on artificial turf or not or things like that in their entire life. So without accounting for what caused the various cancers around Washington, the result doesn't really tell us a ton about whether or not these cancers are remarkable. Nonetheless, Washington State Department of Health says that while synthetic turf absolutely does contain cancer causing materials and chemicals, there's no reason to worry about them. And honestly, the website is kind of wild to read. It's linked, of course, in the blog and underneath this in the description on whatever podcast app you're listening to. This on the website is like, we have no information that there's anything to worry about. Right. Also says, quote, assurances of the safety of artificial church turf with crumb rubber are limited by the lack of adequate information on potential toxicity and exposure. So basically what this website is saying is we don't have enough information to know whether it's safe or not. So just assume it's safe. [00:44:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. In the, in the absence of hard data, just crack on. It's fine. [00:44:16] Speaker B: Don't worry about it. We don't have. We. Nobody's done that research, so let's just say it's fine. [00:44:21] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. [00:44:22] Speaker B: That's crazy to me. [00:44:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree, I agree. [00:44:27] Speaker B: Two years ago in 2023, the Philadelphia Inquirer published another concerning, even damning article you see in the Wake of building the building of the Astrodome, there was that wave of other stadiums jumping on the Astroturf bandwagon, one of which was Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium. This was supposed to be great because Veterans Stadium was a dual use stadium with both baseball and football playing there. But again, the players hated it. They felt that they were getting injured. More football players would catch their legs in the seams between pieces of turf, causing devastating injuries if the player was then hit by another player. For example, in 1995, Bengals player Kijana Carter's leg snagged on the turf in the Pontiac Silver Dome when he was hit by two players from the Detroit Lions. His ACL snapped and his career, which had been built upon his speed, more or less went down in flames as a result. Another player, Wendell Davis, landed awkwardly on the Veteran Stadium turf and tore both of his patella tendons, both his kneecaps. It ended his career and left him wheelchair bound for several months. And that same day at the Hoosier Dome in Indiana, Steve Emtman tore his acl, MCL and patellar tendon after catching his foot in an Astroturf scene. [00:45:56] Speaker A: Fucking damn. [00:45:57] Speaker B: Ending his career at the tender age of 27. [00:46:01] Speaker A: Ending his fucking career as somebody able to stand up. [00:46:05] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, just truly horrendous. Horrendous injuries. Oh, so this of course was mitigated, at least to a certain extent by adding the crumb rubber info. The injuries reduced, but now you had the heat melting cleats to players feet as they played and the injuries didn't fully stop with the NFL players union claiming that players have a 28% higher rate of non contact, lower extreme extremity injuries when playing on artificial turf. Of those non contact injuries, players have a 32% higher rate of non contact knee injuries on turf and a staggering 69% higher rate of non contact foot and ankle injuries on turf compared to grass. So this is even after you soften it, right. And make it better. It is just horrific. [00:46:59] Speaker A: Just like a bowl. There's no slide, there's no gift. [00:47:01] Speaker B: Exactly. Right? Yeah. It's like, you know what it's like if I've told this story before of my friend and I jumping off of the thing at the cemetery and me attempting to hit the grass but landing too short and landing on the, the, the stone. And it's like, you know what it's like when your feet hit that and absorb all of that, you know, energy and as opposed to if you land on grass and like the, the grass will absorb some of that and soften your fall. So anytime, you know, people are spending a good amount of time on this, as athletes would, they're just sort of running a higher risk of these kinds of injuries happening to them. Further, fields that aren't maintained as well as, say, a multi bajillion dollar professional stadium can get worn down, leading players like high schoolers to complain of things like chronic shin splints. Every single practice. They go out there and they end up with shin splints afterwards. And this should all be reason enough to fuck off synthetic grass altogether. But it gets worse. In 2000, Kansas City Royal player Dan Quisenberry died from a brain tumor at the age of 44. The Royals played on synthetic turf very similar to that of Veterans Field. His manager, Dick Hauser, also died at 51. Brain cancer. Gary Carter. Both of them. Gary Carter, who played on synthetic turf for the Montreal Exposure, dead of brain cancer. And then there were the Phillies themselves. Six different Phillies players died of brain cancer between 2003 and 2022. Ken Brett, Tug McGraw, Johnny Oates, John Vukovich, Darren Dalton and David West. This caused reporters to look into the stats. They found that Phillies players who played at the vet between 1971 and 2003 were roughly 300% more likely to be diagnosed with brain cancer than the average man of the Same age and health. 300%. The investigators had Astroturf samples from veterans tested and found high levels of PFAS in them. A thing no one had even known was an artificial turf until 2019. But synthetic turf is full of microplastics. You are that face is exactly right. For those of you at home, Mark is just stunned. Yes. Yeah, those numbers are unreal. Absolutely unreal. So, like I said, synthetic turf full of microplastics. Due to friction during use, UV radiation from the sun, and general environmental exposure, the plastic blades in synthetic turf break down into tiny pieces of plastic called microplastic. And each synthetic Turf field loses 0.5% to 8% of its blades annually, yielding 200 to 3,200 pounds of plastic waste to environment per year. And these microplastics migrate off the field into air, soil, waterways and oceans. According to the U.S. department of Veteran affairs, known health risks from PFAS include fertility issues in pregnancy, induced hypertension and preeclampsia, increased cholesterol, cholesterol changes in the immune system, increased risk of certain cancers, for example, testicular and kidney cancer, changes in fetal and child development, liver damage, increased risk of fear, thyroid disease, and increased risk of asthma. The Mount Sinai School for exosomic research acknowledged that again, there aren't enough studies for us to know for sure whether PFAS and synthetic turf can get into our bodies and cause health effects, but notes that PFAS chemicals are now major drinking water contaminants and detected in the bodies of nearly all Americans. Some analyses find PFAS in bodies of water adjacent to artificial turf fields, suggesting that it can leach out and enter the environment. And as of this year 2025, Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine's Children's Environmental Health center strongly discourages the use of artificial turf on any form of play surface that children might interact with due to significant concerns about human health and environmental contamination. In their bulletin, they basically laid out that there are a shit ton of concerns, all the ones I've brought up here. And that while we don't know for sure they're unsafe, we equally that they're unsafe, we equally don't know they're safe. [00:51:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:51:55] Speaker B: There is simply not enough research and it makes zero sense to assume the positive knowing everything that we know about pfas. I mean, if someone came up to you, mark, you know, you're a coat guy and they were like, hey, here's a coat. It's stiffer than a regular coat and it will wear out faster than your other coats. It won't break down once you throw it away, and it'll stay in a landfill forever. [00:52:17] Speaker A: It's made out of tires. [00:52:19] Speaker B: There was also a bunch of chemicals in it that possibly could give you cancer. And if your kids hug you, they might breathe in those chemicals and get Hodgkin's lymphoma. But we haven't studied it, so they might not. It can also give you third degree burns on a hot August day. But on the plus side, it's the coolest looking coat you've ever seen. You're gonna look stunning in this coat. And like we said, we haven't tested it, so we don't know for sure it's gonna do all those things. Would you risk it? [00:52:48] Speaker A: How cool would I look in it? [00:52:51] Speaker B: Like real. Like the coolest guy who has ever cooled. [00:52:55] Speaker A: Obviously, I wouldn't. Obviously it's a bit. And obviously, obviously what fucking sane human would? [00:53:02] Speaker B: But you are right, like, that is what is so crazy about this, is that you are. And the park down the street is. And the baseball field is doing this. They're all doing this. That's what's happening with synthetic turf. We know it has all the ingredients to give you cancer 100%. We just haven't done any major research that says one way or another does it? Per an article published in the journal Environmental Pollution, additional studies in in vitro and in vivo translational models, exotoxicological toxicological systems and human epidemiology are strongly needed to consider exposure from both field runoff components other than the crumb rubber sensitive windows of development and additional physiological endpoints. Further, it points out that to date the majority of scientific studies on artificial turf have focused on chemical components and leachates, identifying numerous carcinogens, neurotoxicants and endocrine disrupting chemicals, many of which may have non monotonic dose response curves that indicate there may be no safe level of exposure. Fucking yikes. [00:54:22] Speaker A: Yeah, a little bit. [00:54:23] Speaker B: And perhaps most importantly, the authors point out that, quote, the financial incentives of manufacturers to promote adoption of their products make this a prime target for manufactured doubt and scientific obfuscation. [00:54:38] Speaker A: There it is. [00:54:40] Speaker B: In other words. Dear Marco, the reason we don't have enough information about this and why there's so much throwing hands up and saying, gosh, we don't know is specifically because there's a strong financial incentive for us to never find out that synthetic turf. [00:54:58] Speaker A: Is giving us cancer research conducted by Monsanto Scientific division. [00:55:05] Speaker B: Right. Like notably I found one article that had. Because a lot of this stuff, especially the stuff about the Phillies that came out within the past two years, right? And there was one article that had like two scientists. And I love this because this is always how it works. It's how it worked with climate change, it's how it worked with cigarettes. Two scientists, brain scientists who came out and said, no, that's not what it is. No, we don't have, we don't have any research that shows that that's what's doing it. So I don't think that's it. It's like, yeah, if you take that at face value, you might see that as, you know, these two brain scientists say there's no evidence of this and then you go, oh, phew. Thankfully. But what they're actually saying is there's no research of this. And those are two very different things. There's no evidence and there's no research. So they're completely obfuscating what the real issue is here about why we don't know what PFAS are doing to us. So there's that. [00:56:12] Speaker A: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:56:15] Speaker B: Yes, please do. [00:56:16] Speaker A: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [00:56:20] Speaker B: I don't think anyone has ever Said mise en scene in such a horny. [00:56:23] Speaker A: Way before the way I whispered the word sex. [00:56:25] Speaker B: Cannibal received worst comes to worst. Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:56:30] Speaker A: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm fucking. I'm gonna leg it. [00:56:37] Speaker B: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [00:56:39] Speaker A: I think you feel great about it. The. The guy who started this, recorded this episode 58 minutes ago. Different. Different guy to the one talking to you now, let me tell you. Took the fucking wind right out of my sails. That's it. [00:56:55] Speaker B: 58 minutes ago, you were like, you can't hurt me with this. [00:57:03] Speaker A: 58 minutes ago, I was closing the circuit of body and earth. You know, that guy is gone. He is gone. Maybe, I don't know. Does it speak to a masochistic impulse in me or what? But I kind of enjoy the power that this podcast has weekly to just alter my frame of mind, to alter the emotional state. State that I sit in. [00:57:30] Speaker B: Man, honestly, sometimes it's for good. It's not always like. [00:57:35] Speaker A: I think it's all. It's always for. Look, learning is good. Learning is a powerful thing. And I. I, you know, I find stuff out and forget stuff on this podcast at a dizzying rate. Every single week, knowledge comes into my head, leaves my head at. At a. At a spectacular rate. You know, at least what. And I think I might have said this last week, what we don't do on this podcast is the small talk. [00:58:01] Speaker B: You know, we don't know. [00:58:03] Speaker A: We don't. We don't fuck about. [00:58:05] Speaker B: Small talk is huge. [00:58:06] Speaker A: Yes. We don't fuck about here in Jack of all Graves. We go for the brain. We go for the balls and the ovaries. You know what I mean? [00:58:14] Speaker B: Like microplastics. [00:58:16] Speaker A: Yes, microplastics. Major problems. [00:58:22] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Like it. Put it on a T shirt. [00:58:25] Speaker A: I'm certain some fucking hack has already come up with that. [00:58:28] Speaker B: Hold that up. Outside of. Yeah, whatever buildings in Britain you would protest things at. I don't know. [00:58:35] Speaker A: But that is awful. I mean, where my head is at now is, you know, have I unwittingly dialed up a couple of percentages? The risk of both mine and my family's developing. Fun little brain tumor. [00:58:52] Speaker B: Yeah, It's. You know, and that's the thing is, you know, you've got it in your yard, which is a thing to think about, you know? [00:58:59] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, we aren't sliding around on it. [00:59:02] Speaker B: Right. [00:59:02] Speaker A: Professionally. [00:59:04] Speaker B: Yeah. All day or you know, I was going to say, like it something to think about. Like on a hot day. [00:59:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:59:12] Speaker B: Do you go sit outside or not? Right. Like knowing what's emanating off of that stuff. All right. [00:59:18] Speaker A: What if I said, in the interests of feeling out the. The topic, my chem grass lawn. [00:59:29] Speaker B: Mm. [00:59:30] Speaker A: Never needs mowing, so doesn't use the fossil fuels that would be required for the electricity to mow. It doesn't need water, so reduces water usage. [00:59:43] Speaker B: Look at your coat of many colors. [00:59:45] Speaker A: I don't, I don't mean by that. [00:59:48] Speaker B: The coat metaphor that I just used. [00:59:50] Speaker A: Oh, right, yeah. Okay. [00:59:51] Speaker B: What if you had a coat that would really cool. But also, but they are, they are. [00:59:57] Speaker A: Positive though, are they not? [01:00:00] Speaker B: What? Those things. [01:00:01] Speaker A: The two things that I just came up with. [01:00:03] Speaker B: Yeah, the two things that you just said. Sure. [01:00:06] Speaker A: There you go. [01:00:09] Speaker B: I don't know that the balance is there. I think that's just what like largely they need the studies on. Right. And that all these groups are trying to, to study is what they're saying right now is that no, from what we can tell, the environmental impact is worse. [01:00:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:00:25] Speaker B: Than you were to mow it and water it and whatnot. [01:00:29] Speaker A: Another big takeaway there is, is, you know, henceforth phrases or phrases like there's no research to suggest this. You could probably stop that sentence a few words sooner. [01:00:45] Speaker B: Uh huh. Right. [01:00:47] Speaker A: So yeah, look again. Lots to learn, lots to take away. None of it is fun. But listener. That's why you come back, isn't it? That's why you keep coming back. Because it's comfortable, isn't it? Being a human in 2025 to a degree. If you don't listen to what Corrigan is telling you, it's true. It's comfortable, isn't it? You know, in your air conditioned car. Yeah. In your bright green chem grass lawn. Isn't it good to be alive? [01:01:22] Speaker B: Nothing could go wrong. [01:01:23] Speaker A: Isn't it great? But. But it isn't. That's what we're here to fucking tell you it isn't. The things that you think are fine and great and convenient aren't. They're giving your kids brain cancer. [01:01:39] Speaker B: How about that? [01:01:39] Speaker A: Yay. [01:01:41] Speaker B: How about that? [01:01:42] Speaker A: How do you fucking like that? [01:01:43] Speaker B: And like I said, let the record show that I was not intentionally trying to make Mark feel bad about his chem grass. But hey, I consider it though something that it's always good to think about. Right? Like better, you know, than you didn't know. So now you can like look into what actually that is made of back there. What is that membrane that is separating your. Your grass from the dirt and all of that? And are you unintentionally introducing a whole bunch of microplastics into, you know, your environment? Like I'd probably want to know. [01:02:18] Speaker A: Well, it seems very much like I am. So can we move on? [01:02:21] Speaker B: So we'll move on from there then. [01:02:23] Speaker A: You know, welcome to another. Can't hear you. [01:02:29] Speaker B: How you doing? Other than that, Marco. [01:02:31] Speaker A: Oh, look, other than that, it's. It's. It's a roller coaster, isn't it? It's up, up, up, and it's down, down, down. [01:02:39] Speaker B: You know, get to go on an adventure this week. [01:02:41] Speaker A: Did I. Let me think. No, before that. Did I? [01:02:44] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [01:02:46] Speaker A: Yes, I did. But before that. Before that. Before that, you've got some explaining to do, if you don't mind. [01:02:50] Speaker B: I do. [01:02:50] Speaker A: Okay, I'm gonna give you three words, okay? And I want you to fucking explain them, please. [01:02:58] Speaker B: Okay. [01:03:00] Speaker A: What the fuck is the Presidential Fitness Test? Ah, fuck is that? [01:03:09] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. So earlier this week, this. This is great. One of those little funny things about a, like, being engulfed in your own culture, right? You know, you. The fish can't see the water kind of situation. [01:03:23] Speaker A: Dolphins don't know about Disney World. Here we go. [01:03:25] Speaker B: Dolphins don't know. [01:03:26] Speaker A: I haven't done this for a while, but it's time for some hashtag cultural exchange. Explain yourself. Explain your. [01:03:31] Speaker B: The other day, Mark was trying to figure out why WWE's Triple H was at the White House standing next to. [01:03:42] Speaker A: The big man Trump. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:03:45] Speaker B: And then I saw something. I took a screenshot of it and without thinking sent it to Mark like, oh, this must be why. And it was about the statement of. [01:03:56] Speaker A: Luminaries in the fucking sports air quotes and fitness world that are part of a task force. Let's go ahead and call it that. Everything's a fucking task. [01:04:04] Speaker B: Sure, love a task force into it. [01:04:06] Speaker A: To reinstate something called the Presidential Fitness Test. And I am a British. And many, many hundreds of thousands of our listeners are Britishers. [01:04:18] Speaker B: They are. [01:04:19] Speaker A: We. We don't know what that means. None of us. I've asked us all. We. None of us. [01:04:24] Speaker B: You've pulled. Pulled the audience. [01:04:26] Speaker A: And I'm gonna tell you, it sounds like eugenics in the schoolyard. That's what it sounds like. [01:04:32] Speaker B: This was. The funny thing about it is that as I thought, thought about what it was, it suddenly dawned on me how eugenicsy this is. I didn't know that it wasn't still a thing either. By the way, I'm not in school. I don't have children, apparently. I just look to see when it ended. It ended in 2013. It started in 1950, and the president. [01:04:52] Speaker A: Hasn'T even been gone that long. It's been gone like a decade, Right? [01:04:56] Speaker B: Exactly. There's one generation of school kids who missed it entirely, and everybody else has to deal with it. But it's this thing that we would have to do once a year where we would be assessed on our fitness, and we had to do, like, various things changed by how old you were. [01:05:16] Speaker A: Fucking. Why? To what end? [01:05:19] Speaker B: I. I have no idea. Again, fish can't see the water. No idea that this was weird until you reacted like, what are you talking about? But so, you know, it would involve things like there was this box that you had to, like, lean over and stretch your arms to the end of to see how flexible you were. [01:05:44] Speaker A: Oh, God, yeah. [01:05:46] Speaker B: And, you know, you had to, like, once I was in high school, you had to, like, run a mile. And, like, they would take down your times and, like, how far you could do and, like, how many. I don't know, crunches or whatever. Like, I don't remember exactly what all the tests were, but they would write down the numbers for everyone in the class of how well you did on this test. I was a little jock, so I thought nothing of this, really. I mean, I hated running, so the miles sucked. But other than that, I was like, yeah, Like, I never. It never concerned me. I assume some people didn't pass it or. Well, I don't know what repercussions there. [01:06:23] Speaker A: Were for that exactly. Leading me to my train of thought. I mean, there is. There is an equivalent of this here. Right. This isn't completely fucking alien. And I don't know if kids still do it. In fact, I should have asked Peter this, but I remember having to do something called the beep test in school. [01:06:43] Speaker B: Is that for hearing? [01:06:44] Speaker A: No. No, it fucking ain't. [01:06:45] Speaker B: Okay. [01:06:46] Speaker A: It's for running. So you'd have two cones. [01:06:49] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [01:06:50] Speaker A: Like 50ft apart or whatever. 60ft apart. And you'd have to run to the one, run back to the other one. And then, and rhythmically, a beep would sound. And you had to time it so you were at the other side by the time the beep went off. And the beep would get steadily faster and faster and faster. Right. The beep test. [01:07:08] Speaker B: I absolutely remember that. I had forgotten about it until you just mentioned. [01:07:12] Speaker A: Yeah, we. I did that again. I don't know if it's still common practice. And it certainly wasn't for the fucking Queen or the Prime Minister that had fuck all to do with it. And that's a big red flag, right, as to why? Because those results were documented. You know what I mean? Mr. Fucking Saunders, our PE teacher would be earnestly writing shit down on a fucking clipboard. Mr. Saunders, by the way, who was the. The PE teacher who delivered the. The most fucking deeply wounding epithet I have ever received in my entire life. I know I've mentioned it on this podcast before, but they say you always remember a good teacher, right? You always remember a fucking. Just what I've come to look back on as a work of art of an insult I got from Mr. Saunders to this fucking day. I can see his fucking little bastard bearded face as he said to me in a PE lesson where no doubt I was fucking about and goofing off. Sure, it was pe, for fuck's sake, where he said to me, lewis, you are everything that's wrong with this shitty little town. The fucking hell. [01:08:19] Speaker B: Mr. Saunders, he must have been having a real bad day, you know what I mean? [01:08:23] Speaker A: But anyway, I digress. He would write down the quote, unquote results of the BEEP test where those results went, right? [01:08:33] Speaker B: I mean, that would be because obviously the President does not actually receive results from the Presidential Fitness Test. I imagine it's probably something similar for you guys, wherever this shit went. [01:08:48] Speaker A: And if you. If you were to show me like 20 kids, 10 of whom passed the beep test, 10 of whom didn't, it makes no fucking difference at all. You don't get a fucking voucher or medal or anything. So why would they do that? [01:09:02] Speaker B: Apparently the idea behind this just quickly scam, scamming, scanning Wikipedia is because American children were not keeping up with European children in terms of physical fitness. And so people, you know, thought we were soft and that we needed to do something about it. And so they implemented these various tests. So this included pull ups for boys. This is under Eisenhower in 1956. [01:09:39] Speaker A: I was going after these things put in. [01:09:42] Speaker B: So pull ups for boys, modified pull ups for girls, sit ups, shuttle run, standing broad jump, 50 yard dash, and softball throw for distance. The council later added a seventh item, a 600 yard walk run. So I think pretty much all of that was on it, except we did the mile instead of 600 yards. But everything else I think is pretty much the same thing. So I guess it was implemented by jfk. And you know, he was an advocate for youth fitness, which makes sense based on the guy that he was and, yeah, that's how this thing started. And from what I remember, that's a lot of the same kind of stuff that we. We did when I was. When I was in school, but under Obama, I guess it kind of changed to more of the, like, move more. And I guess I do kind of remember this, but. But, like, this sort of healthy, everyday thing instead of like, yeah, yeah, just get kids to do a bunch of stuff once a year, write it down and see if they're meeting expectations or whatever. [01:10:54] Speaker A: Do you. Do you remember, you know, what treatment befell any kids who failed the presidential fitness test where they ridiculed? [01:11:03] Speaker B: I just remember it being like. I think. I don't think anyone paid, like, a lot of attention to it, but I know it was embarrassing for people to, like, struggle because it's not like they, like, took you into a room to do it. You did all this stuff in front of everyone. And so even if, like, I don't know, which is. Nobody made fun of you. Right. Like, it's still embarrassing to be in front of everyone. I remember, you know, I went to. Obviously I went to Christian School, and thus they did weird eugenics things sometimes. And in my PE Class my freshman year that we had to take, they did, like, a similar sort of thing where we had to, like, run a mile and do all this yada, yada. And then they broke out the fucking calipers to, like, feel our body fat. [01:11:53] Speaker A: Oh, no, no, no. Whoa. Danger. Danger. Yeah, Danger, danger. [01:11:57] Speaker B: I was embarrassed at, like, 125 pounds that, like, oh, no. This is like, they're gonna get this tiny little bit of fat off me. But there were, like, legitimately fat kids in my class, you know, and that's like. That's a horror in front of the whole class. We had to do it on each other, but literally find a partner and have them do the calipers on you and then write down your. [01:12:23] Speaker A: It feels like a very short step from measuring, you know, fucking fat inches with calipers to kind of measuring your skull. [01:12:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:12:32] Speaker A: You know what I mean? [01:12:33] Speaker B: Feeling for bumps like it is. Once you sit with this distance between your eyes, all seems so deeply. Eugenics. [01:12:41] Speaker A: Yeah. For real. [01:12:43] Speaker B: Like, none of this matters. [01:12:46] Speaker A: Why are we doing that a little bit. But anyway, so Triple H is gonna bring it back, is he? [01:12:51] Speaker B: Yeah, and Triple H is bringing it back. So have fun, kids. [01:12:56] Speaker A: Time to play the game. Yeah, I'll see. I want to send. I'm gonna send this fucking episode to Time magazine, you fucking cunts. Crumb rubber. And the Presidential fitness test within minutes of one another. Find me another one of your top 100 podcasts that can offer that bread, that fucking. The fucking menu. The whole menu of human failure is here. [01:13:28] Speaker B: True. [01:13:28] Speaker A: Anyway, I did go on. [01:13:30] Speaker B: Do you want to talk about your adventure? [01:13:31] Speaker A: I did go on an adventure and it was a lovely adventure. And this will segue us quite beautifully into this week's movie segment. Capital C Cinema. The capital C. Okay. On many an occasion I have spoke of. Well yeah, on more than one occasion I've spoke of movie Drome, the wonderful gateway drug on BBC2. The gateway into cult niche genre horror, sci fi, exploitation cinema. That was a little jewel in the evening schedules of BBC2 in the 80s and 90s. How it was a just an on road for me into a lifelong love affair with, with movies. And how it was doubtless the same for God knows how many other thousands of Brits of a certain age. Well, the BFI Institute and their cinema in London south bank are as we speak, programming a like a six week long program of movies which were first featured in Movie Drum. Wonderful thing. So I marshalled a couple of the group chat, me, Paul and my good buddy, good buddies Paul and Rich and we got ourselves together in the same place at the same time and went to see one of these screenings. It was, oh, it was lovely, just wonderful, cool summer evening. It was La en the French kind of gritty street level political kind of action thriller. Think Taxi Driver in France. Set against the background of kind of racial prejudice and police brutality and poverty, gang culture, drug culture, violence, but also gallows humor and music and just thriving life against the odds of urban decay and cultural oppression. And to be sat in what was a fucking full cinema, not a fucking spare seat, not a spare seat in place. And I can only imagine the rest of the of the season had similar attendance. [01:16:00] Speaker B: That's cool. [01:16:02] Speaker A: Before the movie started, printed notes were given out, printed notes made available on the film. And so imagine for me the cinema aspect ratio, right, whatever it is. Before the movie started, you know, you could see the shutter on the projector shrinking and the screen ratio shrank down to tv, the TV aspect ratio. And they played the original introduction to the film from the UK critic Mark Cousins exactly as it went out on BBC2, exactly with the, you know, the CRT, the blurry kind of. It hadn't been upscaled, it hadn't been remastered, it was as gritty and as fuzzy as it would have been in 1996 or five or whenever it was. We had Mark Cousins introduced the Film. And then the screen expanded again and they played the movie and it was just immersive and nourishing and it was just like a warm bath. Like a fucking. Absolute vitamin IV for my fucking heart. That's what it was. [01:17:12] Speaker B: Amazing. I love that. What a great experience. [01:17:14] Speaker A: God, it was fucking great. The company was superb and the film. Fucking hell. Like 90 or 100 odd minutes in the blink of an eye. [01:17:25] Speaker B: I went and got it from the library. Which by the way was funny because their categorization of like of foreign films is not consistent. [01:17:36] Speaker A: Okay. [01:17:36] Speaker B: And so I was like looking under L because that was where they had other. Yeah, like law movies or whatever. But they had it under H, which is correct because obviously it's the before this thing. But I was like, they promised they had it and I couldn't find it. And then I was like, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, look at her age. There it was. So I have it to watch this week. [01:18:01] Speaker A: You will, you will love it. You can. This, this. Well, obviously I've set you up to not love it now. You will not love it. [01:18:08] Speaker B: I mean, this is, this is up my alley more than it is yours, I feel like so. [01:18:19] Speaker A: But yes, you know, or I all. All I can really do is paraphrase the introduction to the film in that for such a street level piece of cinema, you know, no, nothing in the. Everything in camera. Very little in the way of post processing, if any. Just soundtrack and imagery and composition. Split diopters and crane shots. There is so much to see in the frame. There's so much humanity to look at in this film. There's so much detail dialogue that even though it's not in my native tongue, dialogue that just feels like you've put a film on people talking to one another, you know? [01:19:05] Speaker B: Love that. [01:19:06] Speaker A: Nothing affected or artificial or. Yeah, yeah. I can't, I can't prison enough. It's. It's life itself on a screen. It's brilliant. [01:19:18] Speaker B: Yeah, fantastic. I also gave you like a little bit of a midlife crisis after you came out of it. So we were talking and I was like, had you seen the movie before? And you were like, yeah, in college, like 20 years ago. I was like, that's cute, Mark. That's cute. Yeah, that's what I said. Oh, that's cute. And you're like, what? And then once I reminded you how old you are, you screamed into the sky near, rending your garments. It's beautiful. [01:19:50] Speaker A: Very good. Very, very, very good. [01:19:52] Speaker B: Glad you had that experience. I. I can tell you about one that was the opposite experience. This week, I. I knew kind of what I was getting into, to be fair, because everyone was talking about the new Ice Cube War of the Worlds. [01:20:14] Speaker A: Okay. [01:20:14] Speaker B: Movie, which dropped without fanfare on Amazon this past week and has been met with largely just incredulity. [01:20:25] Speaker A: You say everyone's talking about it. I. Honestly, I had not heard of it until you mentioned it. I thought you'd just watch the Tom Cruise one. [01:20:32] Speaker B: Oh, no, absolutely not. No, I love the Tom Cruise one. Think that's a real fun movie At Universal Studios Hollywood, they have, like, the plane crash set there with, like, you know, flames and smoke, stuff like that. And it is, like, super cool. I love War of the Worlds. This War of the Worlds, however, Mark. Oh, boy, it's a doozy. Let me tell you, friends, this is a. There's a. There's a term for it I kept seeing in letterboxd reviews, a desktop. No. Desktop movie. Something like that. So, like, missing and following those ones that take place, like, entirely on screens, I guess. Like post. [01:21:18] Speaker A: Sure, sure, sure. [01:21:19] Speaker B: But, like, it takes place unfriended, on a computer. Unfriended being, like, kind of the first. Oops, sorry, Walt. I just kicked Walt in the face being amongst the first ones. But, yeah, so this is one of those movies where everything takes place basically on Ice Cube's screen. And then he is, you know, in Zoom calls and all these kinds of things. So his face is what you see for a good chunk of the film. And if you're gonna have someone hold up an entire movie. [01:21:54] Speaker A: War of the Worlds. [01:21:55] Speaker B: War of the. Right? Like, on its face. That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard. War of the Worlds, giant alien invasion movie. And you're gonna keep it on someone's computer screen. [01:22:07] Speaker A: Okay, first Red Cross there. Not Greg first. [01:22:11] Speaker B: Exactly. So Ice Cube, here's your second. Who has, like, two expressions, and you have to look at him the entire movie, and it's just. Oh, boy. The entire time you're like, who. Who thought this was a good idea? You know, how did this. How did this get made? The alien, you know, the tripod aliens, you know, they are like Sci Fi Channel at best in their cgi. [01:22:46] Speaker A: You've reminded me. Just to digress a little bit. Sorry. Just to go back a couple of minutes here. One of the great things that Paul showed me in the BFI cinema on the south bank in London that we were at, they have a viewing room in there, right? [01:23:02] Speaker B: Mm. [01:23:02] Speaker A: Free of charge, where you can walk in off the street, plunk your ass down in a little booth, put a headset on and via the touchscreen, search up and watch any show that has ever been broadcast on British tv. [01:23:22] Speaker B: Dang, it's like those old, like, listening booths on steroids. [01:23:27] Speaker A: Exactly that. And the. What reminded me. What reminded me of that in what you just said was on the very fringes of my memory. There was a TV show in the uk, kind of War of the Worlds esque, but more post apocalyptic. It's kind of like. And I can't. Who wrote Day of the Triffids? [01:23:52] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, that's a good question. [01:23:54] Speaker A: And the Kraken wakes Ray something or other. [01:23:58] Speaker B: It's not Ray Bradbury, is it? [01:24:01] Speaker A: I don't. [01:24:02] Speaker B: I don't feel like it is, but. [01:24:03] Speaker A: It is, you know, John Wyndham. John Wyndham. [01:24:07] Speaker B: Okay, that. [01:24:07] Speaker A: Because I've read it. And the TV show is called the Tripod. [01:24:10] Speaker B: One of our shelves here. Tripod. [01:24:13] Speaker A: The Tripods. [01:24:14] Speaker B: Okay. [01:24:15] Speaker A: Or possibly just Tripods. And it follows again, I'm. I'm like. Like this. Like when I talked about this Alfred Hitchcock Present episode, like five years ago. I'm remembering a memory. It follows, like, three guys as they kind of huddle down in their camp after the war. It feels like it was set after War of the Worlds, and. And mankind is like a bartering kind of nomadic species again, because you've got to stay out of the sight of the Tripods, man, because they'll grab you and they'll cap you. They'll put a. Like a. Like a barcode type thing on the back of your head and. Yeah. Oh, man, I'd love to see that. And if I ever find myself. [01:24:59] Speaker B: Well, now you know how to spare. [01:25:00] Speaker A: Yes, that's amazing. Bfi and search it up, up. Anyway, go on. None of which you see in the face of Ice Cube. [01:25:08] Speaker B: No, not at all. So, yeah, on its face, just terrible. It also. It feels like a Christian movie just without Jesus. It's definitely very conservative. It's. Yeah, it's a conspiracy theory kind of movie, which is an odd way to tackle War of the Worlds. And it ends up largely being like an ad for Amazon prime where, like, Amazon saves the day, essentially. [01:25:35] Speaker A: Does it really? [01:25:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's truly horrific. You don't watch it. But other people who, like, just want to experience, like, how this is how bad things can get right, like, the next level of this is just an AI version of the same thing, but, like, this is how bad things can be when they just start making things that, like our Friday the 13th activation or whatever, like this. [01:26:06] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, sure. [01:26:07] Speaker B: This is what we're talking. [01:26:08] Speaker A: How low we're going here. [01:26:11] Speaker B: Yeah. I've never seen anything like this before. Like, the closest thing I can say is a Christian movie or one of those movies you see, or like those videos they show in line at, like, an amusement park to get you ready for a ride. Oh, that's kind of the vibe of this thing. It's. Oh, it's bad as bad. [01:26:34] Speaker A: That's incredible. [01:26:35] Speaker B: Worlds on it. [01:26:36] Speaker A: Because desktop movies can work. They can be great host, for example. [01:26:38] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I really liked following, I think whichever one it was with John Cho, I think. [01:26:45] Speaker A: But yeah, yeah, I remember that one too. I quite enjoyed that one too. [01:26:47] Speaker B: Yeah. I've liked a couple of these things. [01:26:49] Speaker A: But this is not this one. You've kind of piqued my interest. I'm almost tempted because I, like, put. [01:26:54] Speaker B: It on, like, just. Yeah. While you're doing something completely different so that you don't have to, like, pay attention and everyone smile. Oh, this is. I actually kind of wanted to approach this with you because one of my favorite things in this is that, you know, I've. I think I've mentioned this on here before. One of the many reasons I hate the movie Pearl harbor is there's, like, a point in it at which someone says, like, I think we've just started World War II. Like, so stupid. Oh, really? He started World War II just now, and it's such a dumb line. And in War of the Worlds, there is a point where the President says something like, we've just initiated the War of the Worlds. Shut up. And as if that's not bad enough, then the next scene, like, has, like, a news, you know, headline on the bottom about, like, president says War of the Worlds is on or whatever. Like, we know what movie. [01:28:00] Speaker A: That actually sounds really good. I mean, it's so. [01:28:03] Speaker B: It's so bonkers. [01:28:04] Speaker A: I adore a title drop in a film. I absolutely love it when they say the film. It's so good. The. You know, but there's two types of that art, you know, there's. If you can weave in, like, a really obscure title of the film in the dialogue of the film. The best example would be in RoboCop 2 where they. They. They say, RoboCop. We gotta invent RoboCop too, or something like that. I want to throw my hat in the air there. That's fantastic. Brilliant. But what, like what you're describing there is the absolute antithesis of that. It is the. [01:28:37] Speaker B: Yeah, just ham fist. [01:28:38] Speaker A: It's the worst Not. Not the first time I've mentioned it on Joag. But my personal favorite of the bad version of that comes in the Fellowship of the Ring, where Elrond, seemingly like John Lovett in the Wedding Singer, comes out from behind a curtain and goes, you shall be the Fellowship of the Ring. Fucking great. And were I. Were I creating the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I would make that a running gag throughout the last two as well. And in the middle of the film, I'd have Elrond come out from behind a tree and go, you shall be the two Towers. And of course, in. In the last one, you do the same thing. Just Elrond isn't in the movie at all. And then again, he just pops out from behind a rock and goes, you shall be the Return of the King. I would love that. There we go. [01:29:30] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, it's. It's pretty bad. But there's. That's probably the most charming thing about the movie is how terrible that title drop is. [01:29:40] Speaker A: Well, I'm looking forward to it. [01:29:42] Speaker B: Enjoy. [01:29:43] Speaker A: Let's see, let's see, let's see. I've been putting a shift in this week, actually. I've watched movies. [01:29:48] Speaker B: Yeah, you have. [01:29:50] Speaker A: I think it was depression, but I watch Rope. Right. [01:29:56] Speaker B: Horrible way to phrase that. No, but this is. I asked the other day, you know, I was like, oh, I see you watched Rope. [01:30:03] Speaker A: Why? [01:30:03] Speaker B: You know, and just responded in void text. Depression. [01:30:08] Speaker A: No, I was like, oh, Identified a pattern in my behavior because I am human and I'm able to reflect upon my actions and I seem to go to oldies when I'm kind of. And I want something low pace, low velocity, you know, interesting. I want to just watch slow films with people acting intentionally and purposefully. And to that end, Rope, oh, Water tonic, it actually lifted me out of it for, you know, the 80 odd minutes that it was on. You've seen it recently? Of course. [01:30:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I just watched. I mean, that's why you have it on your plex right now, because I made you download it like a month ago. [01:30:52] Speaker A: Of course. Brilliant. You know, clearly adapted from a play, because it is. It's a play. It's a play on screen unfolding in. [01:31:00] Speaker B: Front of you, adapted from a play based on real dudes. [01:31:03] Speaker A: Is that right? [01:31:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it's based on. What are their names? You would know it if I said it. They were the two rich kids. I mean, what the movie is about, right? The two asshole rich kids who are like, we're gonna commit the perfect crime and we're gonna get away with a Murder. And they murdered a guy who was like actually one of their cousins and very easily were caught for, for this. Leopold and Loeb. [01:31:32] Speaker A: Oh yes, yes. The names are familiar. [01:31:35] Speaker B: Based off of them. [01:31:36] Speaker A: Just wonderful. The Hitchcock. All Hitchcock style characters. Hitchcock ladies, Hitchcock guys. And James Stewart. [01:31:44] Speaker B: And I love Jimmy Stewart in that movie. [01:31:47] Speaker A: I, I'm. I'm developing quite a taste for Jimmy Stewart. I like him a great fucking deal. [01:31:52] Speaker B: Yeah, he's so fun in that movie because he's so annoying. Right? Like he comes in and he's just kind of like, he's like very stuck in his like ways or whatever. He's. He can't let anything go. [01:32:05] Speaker A: Yes. [01:32:06] Speaker B: Is the thing about him. And you know, Farley Granger's character knows this. He's like, why the fuck did you invite him? [01:32:11] Speaker A: Yes. [01:32:12] Speaker B: He's going to be like on us this entire time. If anything is weird, he's going to notice. And sure enough, he can't anything. He has to comment on everything and you know, dog with a bone the whole time. And I love that in that character. So frustrating. [01:32:28] Speaker A: There's more to it though. I mean, he, he's. There's a, there's a, there's a small number of performers, James Stewart among them, who seem to be dialed in to something other, otherworldly. And I, I find him very much of that ilk. Jack Nicholson for sure. Nick Cage for another. [01:32:56] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. [01:32:57] Speaker A: Whatever the fuck they're in, they are almost drawing from an ethereal fucking plane in their mannerisms and their voices and even the simplest movements of their face and eyes. It isn't just his incredible voice and his incredible purpose that he performs within that film. It's in his eyes, man. The way he puts the scene together is the, the internal life that you can see in James Stewart in that film is. [01:33:28] Speaker B: It never stops. I think is part of it, you know, is that even if he's not the first focus of a scene, he's still doing all of that, you know, off in the background, still in that zone the whole time. [01:33:43] Speaker A: That is very insightful, Corrigan. Very insightful. Not again. Not for the first time I've made this observation on the cast, but that's something. As a trained dramatist I instinctively look out for is presence. The word is presence. Even when you aren't the focus of the scene, you better fucking still be in the scene. Otherwise get the fuck off my set. [01:34:08] Speaker B: Right. [01:34:09] Speaker A: Amateurs. Fuck sake, man. You're amateurs. Yeah, it's. You are still in the fucking world of that film, even if you aren't the one delivering lines. And you'd better fucking commit and show up or you're out of here. And Jimmy Stewart, he doesn't need to be told that by me, because he just does. [01:34:24] Speaker B: It instantly embodies that to that end. I mean, another thing that I watched this week was Apollo 13, which hadn't watched in a minute. [01:34:35] Speaker A: And what. Can I ask what led you to watch Apollo 13? Because that seems very idiosyncratic a choice. [01:34:42] Speaker B: It was. I was literally scrolling through Kyle's plex, and I was like, oh, he's got Apollo 13. And actually, I think it was on TCM a couple weeks ago, and they had done, like, there's a TCM party, Blue Sky. And like, people watch things, you know, whatever. Like 8pm they're airing this. Let's watch together. And I was like, oh, I kind of would have liked to watch that, but missed it. And so when I saw it on Kyle's plex, I was like, yeah, I'll watch this. And I think, you know, Apollo 13, I hate biopics. You know, talk about this all the time. I watched Gilliard Darlings last week. It was just like, biopics are the worst thing on the planet. [01:35:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:35:21] Speaker B: But with Apollo 13, Ron Howard directs this in such a way that this could be fictional and it would be no different. Right. Like, it doesn't feel like everything is in service of being like, oh, and then this guy did this because he's that guy. And you know, that stuff, it's like, very. It feels like just kind of this actiony, tense movie about these guys stuck in space. You know, it's. It doesn't feel like it's constantly nodding at who they are. There's, you know, of course, a scene where we get, like, a Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong appearance, going to babysit someone's grandma or whatever. But other than that, it doesn't feel so, like, winky naughty or like it's hitting the beats you have to hit in a biopic. [01:36:08] Speaker A: Of course. Yeah. [01:36:09] Speaker B: And I really like that. But another thing about it is, like, this is a movie full of people, right? Like, because you've got these, like, several control rooms. You've got, you know, the wives at home who are being visited by a whole bunch of people. And there's this one point in it that I really felt just was, like, this is filmmaking where they bring, like, the press to. To Lovell's wife's yard. Right. And Spleen. Bill Paxton is indeed in it. Yeah. [01:36:46] Speaker A: Okay. [01:36:47] Speaker B: And they're trying to explain to the wife, like, you know, well, people are invested in this. Like, you should let them stay in the lawn so they can, like, you know, film. And she's like, absolutely not. They go to the window and they're looking out and outside there's like, a police officer who, like, walks up to, like, one of the press guys and like, they kind of like, you know, shake hands or whatever and do stuff. And then another guy kind of like walks in from another angle and, like, kind of interrupts that and they start walking away. And every time they go out the window, these guys are, like, in motion doing something. No one's just like, yes, standing there like watermelon cantaloupe. Like they are. You can tell what they are doing outside of that window. You know, it doesn't feel like extras. Like, this has life in it. [01:37:33] Speaker A: Beautiful. That is absolutely beautiful. You know, there's the. The flip side of that. The negative of that. There's that. That famous fight scene from the Dark Knight Rises. You've seen the clip of that over and over again on the Internet where it's Batman versus Bane in the middle of the street in Gotham while, you know, hundreds of extras around them are having a fight. And just like, literally behind Batman, there are two guys just. Just dicking about. [01:38:01] Speaker B: One job. Like, why are you spaced out doing. [01:38:03] Speaker A: It in a fucking Christopher Nolan film that made it to the screen? You know what I mean? [01:38:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Like, how did no one go, oh, that's not gonna fly. [01:38:12] Speaker A: That was happening like, inches away from Christian Bale of all fucking people. [01:38:18] Speaker B: Like, come on, where was the scripty? Somebody go, like, those guys need to get their shit together back there. Yeah. And it happens in so many things. I think another, like, thing like that is often this will happen in a lot of the Marvel movies and stuff like that. Some big fight or something is going on, and you have people just sort. [01:38:36] Speaker A: Of like, ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. [01:38:38] Speaker B: Dipping like, oh, ah. Big eyes, like, wide mouth. You know, things like that. And it doesn't look like they're. Yeah, it looks like they're reacting to a tennis ball. Just like. [01:38:49] Speaker A: There was plenty of that in Fantastic Four, which we'll talk about in 10. [01:38:53] Speaker B: Fantastic Four. [01:38:53] Speaker A: Plenty of that. [01:38:54] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, that's the Fantastic Four. One of the problems that movie is how empty it is. And when you do see people. Yeah. They are not. [01:39:03] Speaker A: They're not in the same physical space. They're not in the same place at the same time. They're not performing with anything. [01:39:09] Speaker B: No, just crowds of people. Just kind of nodding and smiling or making enraged sounds. Not a part of what is happening in that movie. [01:39:18] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:39:19] Speaker B: So you saw that one? [01:39:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I did. I mean, what can I tell you? It just. Isn't it telling that immediately after the film, immediately after Fantastic Four, I mean, the first thing I did was tell both of my kids. I would give either of you to Galactus in a heartbeat to save the planet. I wouldn't even fucking think twice. [01:39:40] Speaker B: Like, let's be real. [01:39:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I made sure that they knew that on. In the lobby on the way out. Just so you know, boys, if Galactus came for Earth and you two would sate him, I would just. [01:39:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:39:52] Speaker A: Hand you the over. No sweat. [01:39:54] Speaker B: Yeet. [01:39:58] Speaker A: But the. The major thing in my mind while walking out of that film was how badly I wish letterboxd would give us quarter stars. The movie itself exited my fucking cerebellum the second the fucking credits rolled. All I wanted was to differentiate more clearly between Superman and the Fantastic Four by a shred of a star. Because it was better than Superman, but still within that quarter star tolerance level. Sure, yeah, you know, it was better than Superman, but they both were on the cusp of three stars. And I. Please. I know the team at Letterbox are big fans of Jackson. We have a lot of pull with those guys. Tom and Eddie, Sarah, the crew. [01:40:51] Speaker B: Yeah, Big Al, you know, you, of course. [01:40:55] Speaker A: We were hanging out on a Zoom. [01:40:57] Speaker B: Recently. [01:40:59] Speaker A: And I'll say to them now what I said to them then give us quarter stars, but please. Or just give me quarter stars. That would be great. [01:41:07] Speaker B: Specifically for the lackluster comic book movies that have been coming. [01:41:11] Speaker A: Oh, and it is lackluster, isn't it? [01:41:14] Speaker B: I will say though. Though you say that this one is better than Superman. I've been fascinated by the divide on Letterboxd or whatever and Superman is sitting at a four and Fantastic Four has been dropping. Started at like a 3.7, then 3.6, now it's a 3.5. [01:41:32] Speaker A: Is that right? [01:41:34] Speaker B: It seems that the people have decided that Superman is. Is better than Fantastic Four, but I have not seen it. So there. [01:41:42] Speaker A: I think there are mitigating factors there. I think James Gunn has something of a cult like influence on that. I think there are people who in. In not in an entirely. [01:41:51] Speaker B: I think there's a Snyderverse of. [01:41:52] Speaker A: To the Snyder phenomena. I really do. I think they're people who are bought into him and his vision more than they are that singular film. If another. If a journeyman director had turned in that exact same film. I think we would see a similar trajectory. [01:42:07] Speaker B: Interesting, I believe. Yeah, well, I still got to see that one, but I think it's out of the theater by me at this point, so I'm gonna have to wait. [01:42:16] Speaker A: Steal it, man. Steal it. [01:42:18] Speaker B: Well, you'll steal it, and I will gladly then watch it. Yes. The other thing that I watched, besides we watched two movies together, but I. It was a rainy day the other day. I was sitting on my porch, watch. [01:42:34] Speaker A: Context like this I love. [01:42:36] Speaker B: And I was like, I need a rainy ass movie. [01:42:41] Speaker A: I love that now. [01:42:44] Speaker B: And so I was like, what's a fucking rainy movie? And I'm scrolling through. Shudder. Exorcist 3. That was it. And I started. And it is. It's so rainy throughout most of this movie. And it is just. That movie is so much better than it has any right to be. The, you know, detective installment of the Exorcist. And it's so good. Yeah. And so it was just, like, the perfect rainy day pick to sit there and, like, just enjoy that vibe while watching, you know, Our Man Brad Dourif and all those folks in that. Just. Just a great. [01:43:26] Speaker A: Such a strange change of direction they took with the recent installment. Isn't it the Pope's Exorcist? It was almost like a completely different series, wasn't it? [01:43:35] Speaker B: Yeah, almost. [01:43:36] Speaker A: Almost like the Russell Crowe. [01:43:38] Speaker B: Did you ever actually see the, like, real. Like, there was an actual Exorcist movie, right? [01:43:46] Speaker A: Yeah, there was, and it was. [01:43:47] Speaker B: I think you might have seen. [01:43:47] Speaker A: It was very good, but. [01:43:49] Speaker B: No, no, no, no, no. You're thinking of the Last exorcism. [01:43:53] Speaker A: You see my problem. [01:43:55] Speaker B: Yes. [01:43:58] Speaker A: And then because. Because my brain is fucking porridge. I also then I then conflate that with that Sydney Sweeney film, which I also then conflate with the other nun film that came out the same day. [01:44:12] Speaker B: Well, that's the last Dexterism. Right. [01:44:15] Speaker A: Which is the one where they're Jurassic Parking Jesus. Which is that one. [01:44:19] Speaker B: That's the Sydney Sweeney one. [01:44:20] Speaker A: Right, right. [01:44:23] Speaker B: But they kind of do the same thing with the other one. That's a better version. [01:44:27] Speaker A: They do. [01:44:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Where you see her, like, actually birth the demon. [01:44:32] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:44:32] Speaker B: And whatnot. [01:44:33] Speaker A: And then cave it in with a rock. That was fucking great. [01:44:36] Speaker B: That's the only thing I like about Immaculate. [01:44:39] Speaker A: Honestly. Honestly. How can any rational viewer differentiate between those three films? It's impossible. [01:44:47] Speaker B: I mean. Well, you know, this is always my thing with, like, religious horror, Catholic horror. Anyways. Like, it's just the same. They're all the same movie. [01:44:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:44:55] Speaker B: There's one story that they're telling here and that's it. So, you know, I understand that under an increasingly fascist set of world governments, like, okay, we're bringing religious horror back to deal with that. Whatever. But there's got to be more, a different story. [01:45:15] Speaker A: There has to be one more story. [01:45:17] Speaker B: Like Exorcist 3, for example. [01:45:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:45:19] Speaker B: Which at least tells it a little bit differently than the other ones. [01:45:23] Speaker A: Yeah. One of my. Let's see. If it was pissing it down with rain and I wanted a rainy film more to watch, I'd probably watch seven. I would probably reach for seven, I think. [01:45:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Seven is. I mean, that's so, like, similar vibe to Exorcist, isn't it? [01:45:37] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. [01:45:38] Speaker B: Yeah. That's a good one. I would often watch Identity, but I'd just listen to the latest hell rankers of them tearing that movie apart, which is funny. I still. I love that movie. But that doesn't mean they were really wrong about anything in there. But that is. That's often one of my go to rainy movies. But I was like, maybe not right after I listened to them. I'll be paying too much attention to what they pointed out about it. [01:46:06] Speaker A: Let me take a little second here to give a shout out to Hollywood Steve. It's been a while. I haven't. I've not heard from the guy in a little bit. I haven't seen him around on the socials. So I just want to give a fucking moment here to just publicly call out Hollywood Steve. I hope you're fucking good, my friend. I hope you're keeping well. I hope life is good to you because you deserve it. [01:46:24] Speaker B: Yes. [01:46:25] Speaker A: I just want to say that to the guy. [01:46:26] Speaker B: You're here. [01:46:27] Speaker A: Yeah, man. [01:46:27] Speaker B: I hope you dance. I hope you dance. Remember that song? [01:46:35] Speaker A: No, No, I don't like that. Didn't like that at all. Stop. In fact, I'll just breeze past K Pop Demon Hunters because I watched it. [01:46:48] Speaker B: Yes, you did. You did watch it. Did you watch it by yourself or did you watch it with Owen? [01:46:52] Speaker A: No, with Laura and Owen and Peter. The four of us watched it. [01:46:56] Speaker B: Nice. [01:46:57] Speaker A: I'm not gonna sit on my own an adult grown man. [01:46:59] Speaker B: I mean, we had that whole conversation last week. I was like, I know you're not gonna, like, watch it on your own, but if one of your kids wants to watch it again, do it. But the way you phrased it made it sound like you. [01:47:08] Speaker A: They badgered me into it. See, this all stems from Owen, right? He badgered Peter into watching it. Pee Bosch. K Pop demons with me. And Pete was like, no, Owen. But he did and loved it. And then they did a Cobra Kai on me and badgered me into watching it and I loved it. [01:47:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:47:25] Speaker A: Oh, wait, I told you. [01:47:26] Speaker B: It's delightful. Right. [01:47:27] Speaker A: Rolling back. Love is too strong a word. But it's a nice easy three and a half stars. Because it's lovely to see some new ip, isn't it? [01:47:37] Speaker B: Yes. [01:47:38] Speaker A: Great to see some, you know, some new characters, new situations. What initially is a. As a sensory fucking barrage. And within the first kind of five, 10 minutes, I was like, I am not gonna fucking stick this out. I feel like I'm having a seizure. It's horrible. Just. Just give in. Just let ride it. Just let it wash over you. And the colors and the music and the fun characters and it's. It's a lot of fun. [01:48:05] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:48:06] Speaker A: And I think it's at your turn. It's hit big, hasn't it? So it's a pretty safe bet that we'll see, you know, a fucking spin off movie and four sequels and a live action decade. [01:48:19] Speaker B: I'm here for the bird and cat spin off whenever they. [01:48:23] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. [01:48:25] Speaker B: The little bird with the hat on. [01:48:27] Speaker A: And the weird during Fantastic Four. Very. What? What to me was very, very funny indeed. Much like yourself, Laura is a super recognizer when it comes to plots, right? She will fucking within 10 minutes of the film, she'll tell you how it ends. And two thirds of the way. Spoilers for Fantastic Four, by the way. Who cares? About 2/3 of the way through, she leaned over to Owen and went, ah. Now in about five minutes they're gonna ask Mole man for some help. And Owen went, no, silly fucking. Literally five minutes later that Mole man, we need your help somehow. [01:49:06] Speaker B: That is one of the moments in the movie that I, I feel like how whatever context they gave for Mole man in the beginning just went straight over my head. And I, when he, like, I know I saw them like explain vaguely this guy, but I didn't understand like who he was or why that was important. So when he showed back up again, I was like, the fuck? [01:49:33] Speaker A: I did not get your. I didn't feel your criticism at all about it doing too much, too quick at all. [01:49:41] Speaker B: It just, I did not get it intentionally. [01:49:44] Speaker A: Dropped you in and fucking Mark Gatiss tells you everything you need to know in the first 20 seconds. [01:49:50] Speaker B: That to me is the problem because I want it to unfold and instead they dropped it in two and a half minutes with one guy saying it. I don't process Shit like that. So they gave me all the information that I was supposed to retain for the next hour and 50 minutes. And by the time that scene was over, I'd forgotten everything that had happened in it. Like, none of that stuck. I understood that. [01:50:20] Speaker A: Of all the films to baffle you with a fast moving plot, I never thought it would be Marvel's Fantastic Four First Steps. [01:50:27] Speaker B: I can't do like a. Yeah, last time. On my brain just completely. That's unimportant information to my brain. [01:50:39] Speaker A: Very interesting to me that that was the film that lost you. [01:50:42] Speaker B: Yeah, completely lost me. So when the mole man guy showed back up, I was like, who is he? [01:50:47] Speaker A: As well as. [01:50:48] Speaker B: Like, I don't understand why they're mad at each other. [01:50:53] Speaker A: The first 20 minutes of Fantastic Four first steps, right. I shit you not. Are identical to the first 20 minutes of Incredibles 2. They are. I fucking. [01:51:02] Speaker B: And I hate Incredibles too. [01:51:04] Speaker A: I mean, even down to the baddie they fight in the beginning. In Incredibles 2, it's the Underminer underground baddie and they fight. It's the fucking same film. [01:51:12] Speaker B: I've seen other people make that comparison. And I hated Incredibles too. So I guess it makes sense that. [01:51:19] Speaker A: I don't like Elastigirl and your big ass. [01:51:29] Speaker B: Oh, then we have the two movies that we watch together. [01:51:32] Speaker A: Fascinating thing about Incredibles 2 is how Holly Hunter's voice has aged but Elastigirl has not. That is very interesting to me. Like, not even as a bit. That is fascinating to me. The character looks the same and takes place like half an hour after the last movie, but Holly Hunter's voice is like 20 years older. [01:51:52] Speaker B: I was thinking about this because I watched. What was that movie? I watched a couple other people have brought it up, I guess it's on Netflix now. It was something. I had you down. Oh, copycat. I had you download this for me a couple. Couple weeks ago as well. And Holly Hunter is really young in that movie. And her voice is like what you think of when you think of Holly Hunter, right? Like, first thing. But she's so young in this that it doesn't sound like her. [01:52:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:52:24] Speaker B: Aging has made her voice more specific. And without that, it was like, bizarre. My brain, like, couldn't process that. I'm like, that's Holly Hunter. But that's not. Like, that's not all yonder. [01:52:35] Speaker A: This is very niche. But on one of the commentary tracks, either on Evil Dead 1 or Evil Dead 2, I can't remember. I think it's Evil Dead 2. Or an all time fantastic director's commentary on that film. It's Rob Tappett and Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi just fucking yucking it right up the entire fucking movie. And they tell a really funny story about sharing a kind of a dingy apartment with Holly Hunter while they were filming Evil Dead 1. And it's just. It's like 20 seconds long, and it's just super fun. [01:53:08] Speaker B: Interesting. Okay, now I wanna. Let's do 28 years later second. Because then we can have people not spoil it. Because I just. I feel like we'd need to, like, Talk spoilers on 28 years later. So let's talk about the other one first. [01:53:25] Speaker A: Well, Coldfish certainly won't take long. [01:53:27] Speaker B: Cold fish, cold skin. Coltskin. [01:53:32] Speaker A: That's right. [01:53:38] Speaker B: That says everything right there. Coltskin is like, very pretty. It's very well shot. [01:53:46] Speaker A: Yeah. It's respectable. It's Javier Ganz, isn't it? Gaunt. Or however you pronounce his name. [01:53:51] Speaker B: Is that the director? [01:53:52] Speaker A: Yes. [01:53:53] Speaker B: See, I looked at what he directed, and he also did Under Paris, which is one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life. So that was my. I was like, this is a lot better than that. [01:54:03] Speaker A: He also did a fucking absolute ordeal of a horror movie called Frontier Frontiers. [01:54:12] Speaker B: Okay. [01:54:13] Speaker A: Which is when people talk about the kind of new extremism in horror, like martyrs. Frontier is. Is also mentioned alongside that kind of. [01:54:23] Speaker B: Okay. [01:54:24] Speaker A: It's. It's. It's harsh. [01:54:27] Speaker B: Okay. [01:54:28] Speaker A: Frontiers is excellent. [01:54:29] Speaker B: So he's all over the place is what we're saying. [01:54:32] Speaker A: He is. He's. He's commercialized his style a lot since then. [01:54:38] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:54:39] Speaker A: And Coldfish is exact. Fucking Cold Skin. Cold Skin is exactly that. I didn't. [01:54:47] Speaker B: I don't know if I would call this commercial, per se. [01:54:50] Speaker A: It's. It's diluted, for sure. It's not the movie I thought I was gonna see. I want. I thought. I thought we'd get gore. I thought we'd get kind of. [01:54:59] Speaker B: Yeah, like a monster. [01:55:00] Speaker A: Yes. [01:55:01] Speaker B: Attack. [01:55:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:55:02] Speaker B: It's Monster Siege. [01:55:04] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's what it is. It's a monster siege movie. But it's more akin to something like. Oh, what's the one with Freddy Highmore? Netflix movie. They're in a house and there's goblins, witchcraft. [01:55:17] Speaker B: I kind of think I've seen this. [01:55:19] Speaker A: Peter loves it. See, again, my brain, like, this sounds. [01:55:22] Speaker B: Like a thing that you. Someone with kids would watch and I would not. [01:55:28] Speaker A: It's a siege movie, but with fish gribblies. [01:55:31] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:55:32] Speaker A: But it's very family friendly. It's left column as hell. And that's not what I thought it would be. A Spiderwick Chronicles. That's what it was called. [01:55:39] Speaker B: Okay, I've heard the name, but I didn't know. [01:55:40] Speaker A: Good laugh. Comedy goblins. One of whom I think is voiced by Seth Rogen. Not Seth Rogen. Yes, Seth Rogen. Okay, Seth Rogen. Comedian, Jewish guy. Yeah, right. I. I thought. I. I thought. I thought I might have. I thought I meant Joe Rogan. I thought I'd. I thought I called the wrong one again. I'm not kidding. [01:56:02] Speaker B: When I said it would have been weird if you said it that. Yeah, you said it very positively. It would have been weird if you met Joe Rogan. [01:56:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:56:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Cold skin is really just short circuit in myself. Yeah. Very pretty movie. It had sort of promising boat coreness, except that then the boat goes away and you have a guy left on an island with a crazy lighthouse keeper. [01:56:33] Speaker A: Yep. Also had some very promising coat core because our protagonist wears a lovely military style. Great coat in the opening kind of few minutes or something. [01:56:42] Speaker B: Some very fancy boots as well in this movie. But yeah, it. The lighthouse keeper is keeping this sort of mermaid lady. [01:56:54] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:56:56] Speaker B: Keeping her as like a slave. Slash slave. [01:57:01] Speaker A: Which is. [01:57:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it isn't great, but. Well, also periodically her people attack. [01:57:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:57:13] Speaker B: And he has to fight them off, fend them back. Yeah. So that they don't kill him or whatever they want to accomplish. And this new guy gets sort of dragged into the chaos of that siege that is occurring. And the weird relationship between the man and his fish wife. [01:57:34] Speaker A: Yes. And that's all we need to say about that. [01:57:39] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. It's just more drama than horror. And fish drama is weird. So I don't know that I can recommend gold skin. [01:57:48] Speaker A: It's certainly a genre, isn't it? Fish people. [01:57:51] Speaker B: Relationships increasingly. [01:57:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:57:53] Speaker B: People like to see fish fucking. [01:57:56] Speaker A: They do, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's money. [01:57:58] Speaker B: And the problem with this too is once you see him, like going to town on this fish, then every time the fish lady was walking around, like a lot of times she'd be wearing like a sweater and nothing on the bottom and then like kind of squat and stuff. And I just kept thinking, like, her fish usy is just out at all times. Like, if we're to believe there's a hole he's been using. She's just like constantly like gnawing on clabs, crabs, and just doopa dooba doo, showing it off all the time. It's Disturbing. The implications are disturbing thoughts that you. [01:58:34] Speaker A: Too will have upon watching Cold Skin. [01:58:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Can't help but think about. All right, the fish veg. [01:58:42] Speaker A: Let's. Let's wrap this up on 28 years later. [01:58:46] Speaker B: If you haven't seen it and you care, you know, maybe turn it off now. [01:58:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:58:51] Speaker B: So that. Because I think we just need to have the catharsis. Catharsis of. Of working through this real quick. You know, it's super deep into it, but. [01:59:03] Speaker A: Okay. [01:59:07] Speaker B: I mean, to be fair, let's. Let's just. We know that my feelings on Alex Garland have cooled in the past several years and that upon revisiting 28 Days Later, I found I did not enjoy it. I still like 28 weeks later. [01:59:30] Speaker A: Interesting. Isn't it fun? Later is your favorite of the series and is the anomaly in the series in that it's the closest thing. Just a normal film. [01:59:41] Speaker B: It's just. Yeah, it's a regular action movie with zombies, essentially. And that one. That one I have a good time with. It's very stupid, you know, you end up with all of London getting incinerated for these children who just wanted a picture of their mom. But it's fun. [02:00:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:00:00] Speaker B: So going into 28 years, my mindset was kind of like, I'm gonna. I'm gonna hope that this is as good as everyone says. [02:00:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:00:09] Speaker B: And try not to bring my baggage with it. [02:00:13] Speaker A: See, in a similar vein, but from a different angle, the baggage I was coming to 28 years later with was one of bringing goodwill in with me. [02:00:24] Speaker B: Yeah. Higher expectations. [02:00:26] Speaker A: It was, you know, it's a British film. It's got Jodie Comer in it. It's, you know, took an, like, an innovative approach to the cinematography. It's, you know, a high profile piece of British horror cinema. I wanted. I wanted this to be just great, you know? [02:00:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, indeed. And I thought it was like, just on the note of the innovative, you know, production of this or whatever the shot on the iPhones thing. I think this is just a really funny thing to do in my opinion, because one of the issues with the original 28 days later, that whether you like it or not, is it potato quality. Right. Because he did something different and he started the digital trend. Right. So that makes the movie look awful. And then he chose to do this one using iPhones, which to me has a similar effect to me. The entire time I was like, boy, I wish these were framed better and. [02:01:36] Speaker A: Not like, you're so glad you're on an iPhone. I mean, the entire way through it became a barrier to me kind of engaging with the film because it fucking looks like it's shot on an iPhone. [02:01:49] Speaker B: It does. Completely. [02:01:51] Speaker A: And not even, like, in the, like, Apple commercial way where it's super polished. This fucking looks like you shot it on an iPhone. [02:01:59] Speaker B: It does. Very much so. Yeah. And so does distracting. [02:02:02] Speaker A: Grading is really oversaturated and weird. The fucking. And look, this is a choice, obviously, this is a directorial choice in terms of the color of the film, but the whole thing is just like, the saturation has just been whacked up to the right and everything looks artificial and just like fucking Wonka or some shit. The colors are so unnaturally dialed up and pop out of the screen at you. So, yes, obviously a choice, but a weird one, man. But all of them. Yeah, all of them have those idiosyncrasies in terms of visually how they look. [02:02:38] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:02:38] Speaker A: So I'm not gonna. [02:02:39] Speaker B: It's true. [02:02:40] Speaker A: Look, who the. Am I to argue with whoever. But I would. I would. [02:02:48] Speaker B: Danny Boyle. [02:02:49] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. I would not have made those choices. And it did not work for me. It was a barrier to engagement rather than, you know, an enabler of it. And, yeah, it also makes obnoxious fucking choices directorially. That effect, they do, like a fucking really obnoxious bullet time effect whenever a zombie takes a fucking shot to the head where they just. Whoa. Bullet time through the brain. So you can see it from six angles. And it fucking gets so boring so quickly, so old. Like, all right, do it once we get it. Fine. But you're so. [02:03:23] Speaker B: Yeah, if it was like, once effect, you'd be like, whoa. [02:03:26] Speaker A: Exactly. Like, they did that one thing that they fucking loved. And Danny Boyle is like, I fucking directed the Olympic opening ceremony. I'm gonna fucking keep doing this because it's great. [02:03:40] Speaker B: It starts to feel like a video game, you know, Like a video game will show you what your kill looks like up close, you know? [02:03:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Like when you hit photo mode at the right moment on a video game, you can pan around this spatter. So I didn't enjoy that one bit. And that's before you then get into what happens in the film, which is also ridiculous. [02:04:02] Speaker B: So ridiculous. Even people. This is one of the things that I thought was funny is that even people on my letterboxd who loved the movie, just about every single review uses either the word corny or cheesy in it. So I think there's no getting past that. This movie is corny as fuck and kind of takes a very, like, you know, the first half of the movie is very different from where the movie ends up going as well. You know, starting with this weird father son dynamic and switching to the cancer mom. [02:04:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:04:45] Speaker B: And had it. [02:04:46] Speaker A: Much like your problem with Fantastic Four, had it taken a bit longer to get there? Had there been maybe a little bridge in between where the styles kind of shift? Fine, you can forgive that. But it just jumps from one. [02:04:58] Speaker B: Basically, this kid sees his dad having an affair and is like, welp, I'm taking my mom and leaving here, like. [02:05:04] Speaker A: Through the zombie wasteland. All credit to. All credit to Ralph Fiennes for not. I mean, yeah, listen, you know, for earning his money. [02:05:16] Speaker B: Right. For the role is very dumb, but he is eating it up. [02:05:21] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it. It's. It's. It's a big whiff. It shits the bed about a third of the way in and it never cleans up after itself. [02:05:31] Speaker B: No, exactly. I was just. When you finally. There's, like kind of a moment where I think that's what you said. You were like, well, this is. The bed has. [02:05:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:05:43] Speaker B: And I was like, oh, thank God. I could tell you, like, let it be known that I have been being very respectful for you. And it's. [02:05:50] Speaker A: It's also very basic in terms of the Gribblies as well. You said it yourself. I mean, it tries its best to break new ground with its own mythology, introducing a new kind of cast of gribbly. Oh, there's Alpha Griblis. But as you beautifully put it, the only reason, you know, they're an Alpha Gribblies, because whenever one is on screen, they announce themselves with raa. [02:06:14] Speaker B: It becomes so silly. There was a part where I thought it was a joke where, like, one of the characters, they're in, like, a bus and an arm comes down, it goes raw. And I thought it was going to be Ralph Fiennes pretending to be a zombie. And then it actually did grab the person and rip their head off. And I was like, oh. Oh, no, that was. [02:06:35] Speaker A: You mentioned kind of video game design choices earlier, and those Alphas are just straight out of a game. Oh, here's one of the big Gribblies, you know, Better equip my shotgun. Yeah, you know, it's just. Take a few more shots. Just really tropey and really poor. Big, big, big whiff. Big whiff. [02:06:53] Speaker B: Yes, indeed. I thought you were going to say big dick, but. But, yes, whiff as well. [02:06:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Again, odd choices. [02:07:02] Speaker B: Odd choices. Very odd choices. [02:07:05] Speaker A: One cannot talk about 28 years later without at least a passing mention of. Yeah, I mean, you need that whole iPhone wide angle lens setting to get that big old fucking wang in there of the Chief Gribbly. It. It's. It's right in the middle of the screen for a long couple of shots. [02:07:31] Speaker B: Good chunk of it. Yeah. [02:07:33] Speaker A: Like a baby's arm. [02:07:36] Speaker B: Yeah. It's like it draws you away from anything else happening. All you can do is be like. It's like those stories of, like, how Liam Neeson supposedly has, like, the. The water bottle. Someone described his dick as being like a water bottle. And the entire time that was like, what I was thinking. Got one of them Liam Neeson water bottles going on. Yeah. [02:07:57] Speaker A: It's just another. It kind of stacks up its barriers to engagement. That film, the color palette, the obnoxious, bulletproof, frenetic editing. Yes. [02:08:06] Speaker B: The weird game cuts to old footage of things. [02:08:11] Speaker A: Yeah. It seems to be trying to make some kind of allusion to empire, to British empire and military supremacy and even like, you know, Arthurian and, you know, round EDS and, you know, bow and arrow warfare. It keeps cutting to all archive footage of. Of analog warfare and then that. Gribli's big genitals. All of these stand in the way of properly engaging with 28 years later and leaves an air of disappointment in the room when it's gone. [02:08:47] Speaker B: And that's before you get to the Jimmy Savile cult. [02:08:51] Speaker A: Oh, fucking. Yeah. I'd completely forgotten about it. [02:08:56] Speaker B: I have never been so excited and then so let down to see Jack o' Connell in my life. [02:09:02] Speaker A: Big neck, whip wet. [02:09:04] Speaker B: Oh, boy. [02:09:07] Speaker A: Am I misremembering or does it end with the threat that they're gonna molest that kid? [02:09:14] Speaker B: It felt like that. Yeah. Because he says something like, hi, I'm Jimmy, let's be friends or something. [02:09:20] Speaker A: And they're all dressed like Jimmy Savile. [02:09:22] Speaker B: Who is obviously Jimmy Savile. [02:09:24] Speaker A: Britain's most famous and prolific child abuser. And necrophile. [02:09:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Like what? What? [02:09:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:09:33] Speaker B: I don't. Yeah, yeah. Bizarre. Bizarre. Every choice is bizarre and not in a good way. Yeah. I'll be watching the next one when you steal it. And not on a big screen. [02:09:47] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. For sure. Well, listen, another super snappy two hour plus Dragon Ball. Graves. We out here, right? We fucking out here. Here covering the big talk. Big dicks, big swings, big misses Crumb rubber, you know. Peace be with ye, friends. We love you. Keep doing the right thing. Tune in next week and stay spooky.