Ep. 254: true crime grift & zombie d**k

[00:00:04] Speaker A: I think we have to be a little honest here, Marco. [00:00:07] Speaker B: One thing. One of our guiding principles is unflinching honesty at all times with our listenership. Right. [00:00:14] Speaker A: Yes, indeed. [00:00:16] Speaker B: It's actually a principle that my life is founded on, that of unflinching, uncomfortable, unrelenting honesty. [00:00:24] Speaker A: Unwanted honesty. [00:00:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Unwelcome honesty that doesn't always extend, you know, to. To within. That doesn't always extend to me. I'm not. I often delude myself. [00:00:38] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. [00:00:40] Speaker B: But I'm honest to others in that I, you know, I tell them that I am. I am an unreliable narrator to myself. [00:00:49] Speaker A: But, yeah. [00:00:50] Speaker B: I will always tell you what is my best possible stab at what is true. Yes. And there are ghetto clauses within that. [00:01:00] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. [00:01:01] Speaker B: But I will relay the truth as I understand it at any given time. [00:01:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Sometimes, you know, it requires going back and figuring it out later, but that's. [00:01:11] Speaker B: Right, you know, the best possible version of what I perceive to be true. [00:01:18] Speaker A: Yes. And, friends, today, what is true is that we had a miscommunication. Yep. And I said a thing that I would like to briefly discuss on this here podcast, which Marco took at Sweet. No more cold open for me. [00:01:39] Speaker B: I got it. You said was. I'd like to chat about this briefly. What I heard was, chill, Marco, I got this. [00:01:49] Speaker A: Exactly. So we're a little bit by the seat of our pants here. I'm gonna open up with what I did want to talk about. Luckily, I did jot down notes about this. Yeah, thankfully. [00:02:01] Speaker B: Look, and there's no end of shit to discuss. There's no end of shit to chat about. 2026 for sake. Well, you know what I mean. [00:02:07] Speaker A: That's right. [00:02:08] Speaker B: And what we aren't gonna do is let a simple communication snarl up deny you the chance to tune in to Jack of All Graves this week. We absolutely aren't about that. We want to spend time with you just as you want to spend time with us. We love that you're here. And we. We serve. We live to serve you. So this week's Jack of All Graves. You got me and Corey. You got. No, no. Real framework. The formats out the window. [00:02:36] Speaker A: Yep. [00:02:37] Speaker B: You know, but you're. That's the important thing. And we're happy about millions of listeners skipping this week's. [00:02:47] Speaker A: That's fun. Now let's hang out, everybody. Let's hang out. [00:02:51] Speaker B: Let's do that. [00:02:52] Speaker A: The thing I wanted to talk about, I wanted to return to something that I brought up probably about a month ago, which was that there's this new podcast called Killer in the code, do you remember me talking about that mark? That ringing any bells for you? Course not. Hopefully when I begin to talk about it, it's going to ring some bells for you. Otherwise, I don't know, we find some sort of memory clinic for you. But this was the podcast that was about the autistic fella who is sure. [00:03:24] Speaker B: Yes. [00:03:25] Speaker A: That he has solved the Black Dahlia, Zodiac. And. The Zodiac. [00:03:28] Speaker B: No. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course I do remember. [00:03:30] Speaker A: Yes. And he is convinced that they are the same person, which the podcast calls Marvin Margolis. Meryl and I have been skeptical, as I was when we talked about this the first time. If you go back, I can't remember what episode this is in. Normally I have that written down, but I forgot or. Well, I wasn't ready for this to be the cold open. But in that episode, I had kind of talked through the fact that, like, the. The two big articles that had come out about this were in the LA Times and the Daily Mail. And I said this was the one occasion in which the Daily Mail actually did a better job story. [00:04:14] Speaker B: Is there a. Is there a US Daily Mail, or are we talking about the same day. [00:04:18] Speaker A: We had the same conversation? [00:04:20] Speaker B: Oh, shit. Shit. [00:04:23] Speaker A: That. I think there is US Daily Mail, but I am talking about the UK one. I think they're the same thing. Anyway, okay, so, yeah, the Daily Mail had this article in whatever episode that is. Hey, if. Go into your podcast app and go to our podcast and hit the search thing, just look up Zodiac, it'll come up. But I had said, you know, there's these details about this that, like, just don't sit right with me. But I was like, I'm going to listen to the podcast. I'm gonna give it a chance. And so I have been. There's five episodes out of this podcast. I can't remember how many there's going to be total. But as it's gone along, the thing that has really, like, stuck with me is that it doesn't address alternatives. Right. Like, so this is a big claim. This guy is saying, basically, Zodiac was a shooter. [00:05:19] Speaker B: Right? [00:05:20] Speaker A: Right, a shooter. And famously, Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, was chopped to bits, essentially severed in half, pieces of her taken out, things like that big mo change if that were to be the same person, which many have pointed out, if you look at true crime Reddit forums and things like that, the Zodiac Reddit forum, like, that's just. It's not a normal escalation. Right? Like, when we talk about serial killers changing their mo, it's Usually a very, like, almost not predictable, but yeah, adjacent. Like, so say the Golden State Killer, who they. Or they call the. The Ear ons. The East Area Rapist. [00:06:03] Speaker B: Indeed. [00:06:03] Speaker A: Original night stalker. Right. That he started with, like, just like home invasions or whatever, you know, he's breaking into and things like that. He escalated to then raping and murdering the people who are in those houses. So those are related crimes. Like, he didn't, you know, change entirely. He escalated a crime he was already doing, which is very different from, you know, you sever a person in half and take pieces of her body and leave it out in the open. [00:06:33] Speaker B: They are absolutely shooting people flip sides of one another. The distance and the. [00:06:38] Speaker A: Yeah, they could not be further apart. [00:06:41] Speaker B: That comes from a sniper. [00:06:43] Speaker A: Right. [00:06:43] Speaker B: That is somebody who, again, I'm no psychologist, I'm no criminologist, but those. Those aren't. Those. Those absolutely do not speak to the same kind of psychology. Unless the. Unless if they are the same person, that is intentional. [00:06:59] Speaker A: Right. [00:07:00] Speaker B: You know, as a. As a kind of a throw you. [00:07:03] Speaker A: Off the scent, which is essentially what the podcast tries to tell you. Right? Like that it's. It's an intentional move meant to sort of throw people off the. The scent. Right. Which. Yeah, I don't. I don't buy that. Right. Like, the reasons why serial killers do things are not usually just about the performance. Like, there's. There's reasons behind this stuff. So I've been listening to this and. And throughout it, it's like they'll kind of gesture at the. The fact that people might have a problem with a conclusion they've drawn or whatever, but then they don't investigate the other side of that. Right. They just leave that. Like, well, well, but they're wrong if they question us about this. So, like. And that's it. You're like, oh, okay. So in one of the very first episodes, what I talked about last time is it brings up, like, this picture that was drawn by Marvin Merrill of the. What they say is of the black dolly. It's a woman whose name is Elizabeth. And I'll come back to that. But this was one of those, like, first sort of red flags to this is that like in the podcast, they basically keep on saying, like, this is. This is a smoking gun. This is undeniable proof. And I'll. Like I said, I'll come back to that. But that was where I was like, okay, well, you need to raise what questions people might have about that. Right? It's a drawing. It's not. It's not a good drawing. You need to address, like, why people might not think that that is proof. And they nod at, like, some people might not think so, but they don't explain this, including that, like, the children of this guy don't think so, but they don't go into it. So on the 23rd, three days ago, so Friday, and a journalist named Elon Green for Defector wrote an article called Michael Connelly should Stick to Fake Crime. And Michael Connolly is the guy who hosts this podcast, who I did the sort of impression of the way that he speaks that sort of drunken cadence with which he presents this podcast. And he is a famous crime author, not true crime crime. So he. Probably the biggest thing is he created Bosh the series Bosh. B O S H B O S. [00:09:35] Speaker B: C H. I do not know this. [00:09:37] Speaker A: It's a huge crime series. I think there's. I think it's the one with Titus Welliver, and it's been on for, like, ages. And then it's like, it'll go off, but then they come back. It's like Luther, you know, where there's, like, seasons and then it comes back with a movie or, like, shorter season, like Luther Dexter, things like that. It's one of those ones that'll just, like, keep going forever. And so he created that and is, like, super, super famous, but he's not in the true crime field. This is, like, his first foray into true crime. And so basically, in this article, Elon Green kind of delves into why this podcast is irresponsible, why it is wrong, why it's not making its case well, and things like that. And it was very validating for me to read it because he brought up a lot of the same concerns that I had about it. But he's a journalist, so he also investigated these things and was able to find, like, bits of evidence as well that sort of disprove this theory, or at least as it's presented in this podcast. Right. So, first of all, one of the things that the show finds shifty is that the man at the center of it, Marvin Skipton Margolis, changed his name to Marvin Merrill and sometimes went by Skip Merrill, obviously based on his middle name, Skipton. His family, however, has a really easy explanation for this. Are you familiar with the last name Margolis, Mark? [00:11:18] Speaker B: Only Miriam, British actor. [00:11:21] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I think she might have an extra letter in there, but yeah. Is she Jewish? [00:11:28] Speaker B: She could be. [00:11:29] Speaker A: She could be. I don't know. I like her. She's great. [00:11:32] Speaker B: Same. Yeah. [00:11:33] Speaker A: Very outspoken. Yes, lovely lady. But yeah, Margolis is a Jewish last name and in this period would have been recognizably so. And anti Semitism was huge and open at this time. And so, in fact, when he was first attending usc, someone had painted KKK on the front of a Jewish fraternity house and burned a cross on the lawn of that fraternity. As such, a lot of Jews at this time were changing their names to try to get away from being an obvious target of things like this. And having been that close to something of that sort, it would make perfect sense that he would be like, fuck this, I am changing my name. And that's exactly what his family says. They're like, he changed his name because we're Jewish. That's it. The whole family knows this. It's not a secret, you know, it's not like, oh, we didn't know. [00:12:35] Speaker B: Credible. That's a credible reason. [00:12:37] Speaker A: Yeah, right. And so this brings up kind of a shitty issue with this pod on its face. They're accusing a dead Jewish man of being a serial killer and leaving his living Jewish family to deal with the repercussions of that. Just not great on its face, just out the gate. So now, as I think I mentioned last time, Elizabeth Short, who is also known as the Black Dahlia, did live with him, but it was while he was at USC with another roommate and only for 12 days. Not a long term romance going gone wrong as this podcast and some others have tried to paint it right. They've tried to make it seem like he was, they were in a relationship and it was really volatile and you know, all this stuff. And then he was a jealous ex who murdered her afterwards. And it's like it was 12 days in apartment with another guy. It's not like it's not that serious when it comes down to it. And in fact, the police of course brought him in after she was killed and talked to him and they cleared him. They had no problem clearing him at the time, which for some reason the podcast claims didn't happen. The podcast is like, he was never cleared. Like, no, they cleared the guy. In fact, I don't think it was in this article, but I think it might have been. One of the Reddit threads that I was reading before was saying that like he was engaged at the time that she was killed too. So like he'd clearly moved on. There's no reason for him to suddenly get mad and murder her. So you can pretty much take that whole jealous ex scenario out of this situation. And also the cops cleared him at the time they checked, they were like, he's fine, we're good. Then there's the location, which is a huge one to me. The podcast insists that he kept an apartment in San Jose under the name Skip Margolis at the time of the murders, while he and his family lived in San Diego. And last time I explained to you, you know, so this is Southern and Northern California. So we're talking about 4 to 500 miles between these places. Right. You know, this was a drive essentially, I made regularly at holidays when I was in school. Takes you, depending on which route you take, takes you somewhere between 7 to 11 hours to drive that. [00:15:02] Speaker B: Did you drive past or near to any of the Zodiac victim kind of kill sites or. [00:15:11] Speaker A: Well, I mean, I'm from the Bay, so Vallejo, where some of these took place was like. So like my family, after I graduated from college and moved to Nevado. And that is up the 37 freeway from Vallejo. And Vallejo is where, like, Six Flags Marine World, I think, is that one? Yeah, I think Six Flags Marine World, sin Vallejo. So I've been there many times. I haven't gone to one of the sites where someone was killed, but I've been to the town a bajillion times. Not. Not far from where my family lived. But anyway, so if he had an apartment in San Jose, that would put him about 70 miles from the location of these killings, which is, you know, it's a ways, but that doable. Right. But when the journalist asked to see what evidence they had of this rev of this residence, nobody could show him any of it. So Alex Baber is the fella who thinks that he's cracked this code and all that stuff. And he basically gave him a trust me, bro. Like, he said to him, like, you know, I wouldn't. I wouldn't say any of this if I didn't have receipts. He was like, can you show me the receipts? And he couldn't. And then so he asked this other investigator that's been working on this podcast with them and who has been sort of a resource as the podcaster worked on Bosch. He's like, basically worked on him, you know, being like his police resource to be like, is this how this would go? And yada yada. And that guy was like, well, you know, no, we may never know for sure if he was in the area at the time, which is a very different thing than this podcast is presenting, saying, oh, yeah, no, he for sure had an apartment in San Jose, and that wouldn't Close enough. [00:17:05] Speaker B: What. What sources is this guy drawing from? Because it, like. [00:17:09] Speaker A: Yeah, because it's like you said, it. [00:17:10] Speaker B: Seems very tenuous, very shaky to be making such huge claims. [00:17:15] Speaker A: Big claims. Right. Like, and he's. I mean, that's the thing is he's cagey about it. And so if you're listening, you fill in the blanks yourself. Right? Like, if you're listening to the podcast, you're okay, I guess he must have gone into maybe tax records or, you know, anything. [00:17:30] Speaker B: You have to guess. You don't know that. That's very opposite of our principle of absolute truth at all times. [00:17:36] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. That we're not getting, like, what those sources are for these things. Now there is a website. I don't know if maybe. Well, no, if it, if it had been on the website, this guy would have mentioned it because he has not seen these records and no one could pull them up for him. And. And then the other guy was like, yeah, we don't, we can't know for sure if he was ever up there. So that's, you know, a red flag in and of itself. And then Elon Green also found evidence that Meryl was in San Diego within a day or two of each of the murders, which is pretty amazing. He actually found records showing where this guy was on random days in, you know, the 1960s, which is incredible. And that makes it super unlikely that he was able to get all the way up to norcal and cap some folks. [00:18:26] Speaker B: That is incredible. Actually, he's. Isn't that 50 odd, 60 odd year old, right. [00:18:32] Speaker A: Records of what this random guy nobody cared about was doing on a random day. Like, one of the records was that he had been handing out missing flyers of the family dog. Uh, and so like there were like, that is actively a thing that there are records of that like the dog had gone missing and he was out handing out flyers. [00:18:53] Speaker B: I find that quite tough to believe that 60 years ago I would leave a paper trail. [00:18:58] Speaker A: Yeah, paper trail enough for this stuff. Yeah, people journaled and stuff a lot more back there than we do. So I think that that makes a lot of difference. But there was stuff like even, like one of the days he had placed a newspaper ad so you could. They had the advertisement in the newspaper that had run that day that he had placed that morning. You know, so it's in the paper that's. It's just. It was there so he could find these records of like, what Marvin Merrill was doing and be like. And those things were happening in San Diego. Yeah, they were not happening in Northern California. So was he. Did he hand out a bunch of flyers about his missing dog and then, like, jump into the car and drive 12 hours and, like, go to his apartment in San Jose and then go shoot some kids? Like, it just doesn't really make sense when it comes down to it. And then there's that sketch that I was talking about that I showed you last week that they claimed was basically a smoking gun that they said on the podcast this was equivalent to a confession. And once you see this drawing, you'll have no doubts that Marvin Merrill absolutely did this. They claimed that it included markings where wounds had been and showed her severed at the waist. Wow. So I showed that picture to Kio this afternoon, and Kyo has no context for this at all. He's not a true crime guy. He doesn't know who the Black Dahlia is or anything like that. I asked him, have you ever seen the Black Dahlia? He's no, I have no idea who that is. Yeah. So I show him the picture, and I say to him, do you see wounds on this? And he's like, I mean, there's, like, some scratches kind of on, like, the arms and, like, one of the breasts, but it kind of looks like bad shading, especially because it's on both arms. So he's like, it looks like it just, like a bad shading job. I was like, yeah, that's kind of what I would get out of it as well. So then I pulled up a picture of Elizabeth short, and he was like, oh, that is. That looks nothing like her. That the other one was blonde, for one thing. And I was like, great call. Absolutely. So as soon as he saw that, he was like this. Whatever this is supposed to be. Those are not. That's not a drawing of that woman at all. Which was kind of my reaction to this as well. And he had stumbled upon something here by saying that the drawing was blonde. Because what the Daily Mail did mention, but the podcast didn't, and I noticed this in that episode right away, was that Meryl was dating a woman named Elizabeth at the time that he made that drawing. His family told them this. Like, yeah, he had a girlfriend named Elizabeth and that Elizabeth was blonde. Like, the picture. Right. So not only is that picture not a smoking gun or confession, it's actually very clearly of someone else entirely. Like, it's not even. There's not a question here. It's clear who that picture is of. It's a cute little nude drawing he did of his girlfriend. That's what that is. Which is like, how do you. How do you make this podcast and not even mention that? That's, like, a. At least a thing people claim. Right, right. That's where, you know, this podcast is covering things, right? Yeah. [00:22:30] Speaker B: And what. What kind of winds me up about an enterprise like that? If. If. If to take everything you've said at face value, then there will be plenty of people who have read a Reddit thread about that podcast or listened to that one episode of that podcast and simply not bothered interrogating that any further. [00:22:47] Speaker A: Right. Yeah, exactly. [00:22:48] Speaker B: And are now walking around in the world telling other people that Zodiac and the Black Dahlia Killer were the same people. [00:22:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And it was this guy. [00:22:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:22:59] Speaker A: Random man who had a family and things like that, you know, tangentially related to this person. They also claim that etched beneath the visible surface of the drawing was the word Zodiac. And Green had pretty much the exact same reaction that I did. You can see this, like, they, you know, magnified it or whatever on the website. And this is a real power of suggestion sort of situation. It's just like when someone, like, plays you, like, an EVP recording and they tell you what it says, and then you can hear it. I looked at this, even knowing it was supposed to say Zodiac, and I was like, that's just Squiggles, Brainstorm, and. [00:23:44] Speaker B: Green needle, isn't it? It's that. That kind of thing. [00:23:47] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yep. Where you can, like, it just depends on what you're told it. It's supposed to say. And you'll hear that. Yeah. It did not look to me like it said Zodiac at all. It just looked kind of like some heavy lines that were kind of curvy. And that's basically what Green's reaction to it is, is that, like, this is suggestion. They wanted it to say Zodiac, and so it says Zodiac. Further, as I said, Marvin did know Elizabeth Short before she died, and no one called her that. They would have called her Betty or Beth. So if he were to draw a picture of her and label it, it'd be unlikely he'd write Elizabeth as the name of his old girlfriend. That's not what she would have called her. When he brought this up to the podcast folks, they brushed it off and said, well, in death, her name became Elizabeth. Like, okay, I don't know why he would. All right, sure. Why not? Well, I guess maybe if he had just obsessed over the case for all this time, or if he did it, he'd just call her what the. The people know her in history as. But it's not what he would have known her as when they were dating. [00:25:06] Speaker B: And just similarly. Right. It's a. It's a. A trope of a couple of the fandoms that I'm involved in. [00:25:15] Speaker A: Right, okay. [00:25:17] Speaker B: To look within shows for clues about the other shows. [00:25:23] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:25:24] Speaker B: Clues about other episodes. Like, I think they've hidden an anagram in here. [00:25:28] Speaker A: Yes, totally. I think. I think this is the lost effect. Right. [00:25:31] Speaker B: It's so shit, but. [00:25:33] Speaker A: Right. [00:25:34] Speaker B: I can't. Look, I am not a murderer. I am not a serial killer. Fuck. Maybe. [00:25:39] Speaker A: I don't know. I think I proved it pretty well. [00:25:41] Speaker B: You did. You did. You did. [00:25:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:25:42] Speaker B: But who does it serve for me to write my murderer name right in the background of a drawing I've done? [00:25:51] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, that's. That's a huge part of this. Right. [00:25:54] Speaker B: Like, that makes no sense. [00:25:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And you have it here. And you have it even with the idea that he did put his name into that letter, which, as I said last time, I have a hard time buying that because you have to be very confident that your code was unbreakable. And you. Because if he had been caught and he had been this murderer, like, death penalty, easy. You know, he killed a group of people, you know, he's. He's going to fry. And so giving hints in any way, whether it's in the cipher or it's in the. The painting, I just don't buy. [00:26:37] Speaker B: No, no. Not even slightly. Not even slightly. [00:26:40] Speaker A: Right. It makes no sense to do that. And Alex Baber, again, the fellow who claims to have solved this, is unreliable at best. Green points out that he once actually claimed to have spoken to the Zodiac, a thing which he has distanced himself from. Now he does not claim that anymore. He also claimed that the Zodiac was responsible for the Atlanta child murders. So he's just clearly been like, throwing crimes at the wall and seeing what would stick or what someone else would be gullible enough to believe. And this one was the one that worked. And then there's just straight up inaccuracies. Like in one episode, they claim that the Zodiac called the police from a payphone that he chose because it was about a block from 444 Spring Road in Vallejo, a residence where Elizabeth and her father had lived when she first moved to California. Only records show that they did not live at 444 Spring Road. They lived at 1237 Nebraska street, which is more than a half mile away. So way too far for that coincidence to really line up in any way. Never mind that it makes no sense that the killer would somehow know the exact address where she had lived for a brief period of time when she first moved to California. Like, how, how would that be a thing? And then, of course, there's the cipher itself that supposedly cracked the whole thing, using the name Elizabeth. The reason people haven't been able to crack it is because it's simply too short, which makes it not quite impossible, but near impossible to crack. It means that there's too many possible solutions. The longer a cipher is, a longer code is, the more sort of. It narrows the options. [00:28:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I can, I can pass that. That makes sense in my head. [00:28:40] Speaker A: Yeah, right. You need to. You need to have other, like, sort of samples and things like that of what this code could be in order to crack it. If you only have, you know, 13 letters or whatever it is, like, that really means that, like, this could be anything because you can't eliminate enough from that. And so on its face, this is kind of, you know, like, this is. This is very difficult because you can really sort of take something and work backwards from it. So, for example, one crypto analyst said that you could use the keyword monasticism and still come up with Marvin Merrill. I saw someone on Reddit use a similar word and say the same thing. So it doesn't definitively mean they're wrong, but taken together with anything else, it's just very clear that they really want it to be this guy and are grasping at straws to make some of these things fit. And then they're also discarding all the evidence that goes against their theory. So, yeah, I gave it a try. I listened to the pod. It's just another overconfident grifter who's convinced the cops and whatnot of his genius. But at this point, it seems like neither listeners nor journalists are really buying it. [00:29:58] Speaker B: Well, good. I mean, yeah, I, I just feel sorry for the, for the people who don't interrogate the story any further than the face value, you know? [00:30:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Because, I mean, some. Someone even when I posted about this. [00:30:10] Speaker B: Earlier, it's disinformation, what he's doing. Information. [00:30:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Someone was like, oh, I kind of liked the idea that it was the same person or whatever, because it's like, yeah, if you just read the headlines or whatever, it really makes it sound like, oh, they have fucking solved this shit, you know, And a lot of people aren't delving that into it, whether because they're like, not super true crime fans or they don't Want to. They're like, I like this theory, but yeah, it's a few. [00:30:36] Speaker B: Is the guy disinformed or misinformed? Do you think he believes that he's the, the. Do you think he believes the theory that he's peddling or does he know that his. [00:30:44] Speaker A: Yeah, it's tough because he's like shaky. Lied before, you know, that. That makes me feel like he's more of a grifter. [00:30:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:53] Speaker A: Than anything else. But I mean, people can convince themselves of their own too. [00:31:01] Speaker B: I don't believe that. I, I don't. I. I think. I think the capacity for self delusion isn't as pervasive as you might think. People know when they're full of it, man. [00:31:13] Speaker A: Maybe. I don't know. I don't. I don't live like this. I, I can't imagine doing this, you know, making a career of, you know, just throwing this shit out there. [00:31:25] Speaker B: No, certainly not. [00:31:26] Speaker A: I don't know. Maybe I'm too credulous about the degree to which one can delude themselves, but. I don't know. All I know is this bullshit, man. [00:31:34] Speaker B: Yep. Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:31:39] Speaker A: Yes, please do. [00:31:40] Speaker B: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [00:31:44] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said mesal said in such a horny way before. [00:31:48] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word sex cannibal recently. [00:31:50] Speaker A: Worst comes to worst, Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:31:54] Speaker B: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm fucking. I'm gonna let it. [00:32:00] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [00:32:03] Speaker B: I think you feel great about it. [00:32:07] Speaker A: I. I need a second. I got nauseated all of a sudden. I'm like starting to sob. [00:32:12] Speaker B: Oh no. [00:32:13] Speaker A: Give me one second to make sure that I don't puke. [00:32:14] Speaker B: You're going to buff. [00:32:15] Speaker A: Maybe it's a possibility. I'll be right back. [00:32:21] Speaker B: Well, incredible turn of events here. I don't know if this is going to get left in or what, but what I've just seen on Zoom is I think what happened was Corey got that kind of, you know, the. I've heard it referred to as the mouth sweats when you just start producing an ungodly amount of mouth water, saliva, oral lubricant. Cuz that's your body shielding your palate and the soft tissues of your mouth from the stomach acids that you're about to void into your mouth. I think that's what I literally Saw happening to Corey in real time there. So she's just bolted out of the webcam frame, possibly to be sick. And we're gonna. We're gonna find out if that has or hasn't happened. Not something that's occurred before in, you know, the five and a half years we've been jo. Agging. This is not something I've ever seen before. If my lack of preparedness had sickened her to a physical degree, if it was the pressure of being placed on the spot like she was just there, I thought it went great. I thought, you know, she did a great job of improvising and busking that intro. It was coherent, it was cogent, it had a thesis, had an outcome, and I think she did a great job, considering. But, you know, she's not back. She isn't back yet. Which. Which makes me wonder, are there horrors afoot right now in Montclair, New Jersey, and further development crew, as I speak, I've just received a message. Maybe give me, like, 10 minutes to run. Maybe give me, like, 10 minutes to Run some cold water over me and whatnot, and then we'll come back. So. Yeah, Mad shit. Corrigan has physically vomited during this week's episode of Jack of All Graves. If you can get your head around that. All right, I'm gonna stop recording here. [00:34:22] Speaker A: Hey, I actually think I might be okay. Getting a little splash helped. [00:34:27] Speaker B: Okay, you're back. [00:34:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I think I'm all right. [00:34:32] Speaker B: Just an update in what must. In what I think is a first for Jack of All Graves. Is it just as a. I'm sure it is, I'm certain. In what might be the most cursed episode of all time, firstly, I didn't prepare anything. And secondly, a half an hour in, after what I thought was actually quite a well improvised opening there, we had to pause the cast so Corry could go off and vomit. Corrie got the six. [00:34:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Being a wave. Yeah, a little bit. Not too terribly. [00:35:02] Speaker B: What is that all about? [00:35:04] Speaker A: It hasn't happened in a minute. I am a pukey person. I was thinking about this, like, a day or two ago. I have always been. Oh. The reason why is because, as I mentioned, I'm rereading all of the Goosebumps books and I'm currently reading Monster Blood and it reminded me. No, no, no, no, no. There's a story here. It reminded me of. You know, as we've discussed, my family was very poor when I was growing up, and so obviously, library kids didn't buy a whole lot of books. So I Had taken out Monster Blood 2 from the library. And then being a very vomitous child, I hurled in the book. But I remember it was like. It wasn't like a, like a really. It was more like thick saliva kind of hurl. So it was like clear. [00:35:53] Speaker B: So was the vomitus. To use your wonderful term, Garbage Pail Kid. [00:36:00] Speaker A: I, I don't know. I'm too young for that. [00:36:03] Speaker B: There was a particular garbage pail. I, I collected a few series of Garbage Pail kids. I, I really went in on those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the stick of razor sharp gum. [00:36:16] Speaker A: Suicide always stale. [00:36:18] Speaker B: Yeah. What was his name? Ralph. Ralph something. [00:36:23] Speaker A: Right. But yeah, Ralph. I threw up in the book. But it wasn't like super obvious. Like you kind of wipe it out. And then when I went to the library I told them that I puked in the book. So of course then my mom had to replace it and she was really annoyed. She was like they never would have known. It's like she's going to give back to. But yeah, I don't, I don't puke as often these days but it is kind of my body. I do this day. It's. My body's like natural reaction to like any like something is slightly off buddy. Just goes like time to expel it violently. And it just kind of came over me all of a sudden. I was like sweating. It's like, oh no, here we go. But we're good now. We're back in action. [00:37:23] Speaker B: Great. And I'm delighted to have you back. That was a quite a worrying, harrowing, very, very, very disturbing moment for me. There are quite a few Garbage Pail Kids. [00:37:35] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [00:37:35] Speaker B: That puke vomit theme. There's a car Sick Nick. [00:37:39] Speaker A: That's a good one. [00:37:40] Speaker B: Yeah, that's my dog. Really, really enjoyed Garbage Pail Kids. I really did. [00:37:45] Speaker A: Was there like a show to go with it or was it just cards? [00:37:48] Speaker B: It was just cards. There was a movie. [00:37:50] Speaker A: Okay. Oh, there was a movie. That's right. [00:37:52] Speaker B: Very difficult to find. I wanted it. Yeah. I wanted it as a watch along for a while and it's very difficult to locate. [00:37:59] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. I wonder if that's changed. You know, sometimes like, you know, things come in waves on, on the streams and whatnot. [00:38:07] Speaker B: Yeah, of course. And I think, I do think I remember you saying it's had a reissue of late. Yeah, there we go. It's at a 4k but it still. [00:38:16] Speaker A: Says coming soon on Real good. Yeah, it doesn't seem to be available yet. [00:38:23] Speaker B: It had a 4K release recently actually. So I Think that's a Watch along coming up. [00:38:30] Speaker A: Yeah, well, once it's. Once it's available here. [00:38:32] Speaker B: Yes. [00:38:32] Speaker A: Not yet, but yeah, we'll keep that in mind. And then, yeah, it's like it was. What year was that? This was 1987, so I was 2. And I think I feel like my parents kind of found it distasteful. I know that there's like a couple like Garbage Pail Kids cards in my binder with all my gremlins. Two cards and whatnot. So they must have belonged to my, my brother. They were not mine because I had. I had never heard of it. [00:39:02] Speaker B: So I seem to remember it having quite a good cast. [00:39:06] Speaker A: Oh, really? [00:39:07] Speaker B: Maybe. Who's the fucking guy? Or maybe. Maybe I'm making this up. Who's the actor? He's bright. You're gonna have to come with me here. He's British. [00:39:20] Speaker A: Okay. [00:39:21] Speaker B: I think he might have been in. Right. I think he was one of the Klingons in one of the really good Star Trek movies. What were the really good ones? [00:39:33] Speaker A: Because famously they don't really look like the actor. [00:39:37] Speaker B: But these Klingons. Klingons in the movies do, don't they? Because they haven't got the massive fucking prosthetics, they've just got the lumps down the middle of the head. Oh, British actor. What. What are the good Star Trek movies? What's the one where you've got the battling on who's quoting Shakespeare? I think it might even have been him. [00:39:54] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [00:39:56] Speaker B: And he's got a load. Since I watched loads more famous roles than that. But for some reason this is what. [00:40:01] Speaker A: That's. [00:40:02] Speaker B: Which. Which Star Trek is that? [00:40:04] Speaker A: I don't, I don't know. I think the last time I did a watch through of all the movies like 15 years ago. So it's. I. They're all blurred together to me at this point. Yeah. I don't know. Right. There's gotta be. I mean, if you look up Klingon, I'm sure that, that right now Ella is yelling at us because I think she's a much better Star Trek historian than we are. [00:40:34] Speaker B: Oh, it's the undiscovered country war. [00:40:37] Speaker A: Okay, Great movie. [00:40:40] Speaker B: That's a good one. [00:40:40] Speaker A: So who is. [00:40:42] Speaker B: Is David Warner. [00:40:44] Speaker A: Oh, David Warner. He's the guy from the Omen. [00:40:47] Speaker B: That's the one. [00:40:49] Speaker A: If you had said the Omen. [00:40:50] Speaker B: Rome Houses. No, here's the test. Was he in the Garbage Pail Kids movie or was this. [00:40:56] Speaker A: I don't think so. [00:41:00] Speaker B: Nah. [00:41:02] Speaker A: Nope. Absolutely not. No. So good talk. [00:41:10] Speaker B: No. Oh, dear. No. [00:41:15] Speaker A: There's also someone who's like a Garbage Pail Kids enthusiast who's been yelling at us this whole time too. Just like. [00:41:21] Speaker B: But what we're not doing. What we're not doing is saying, you know, we've connected the dots and we think maybe David Warner was in the. [00:41:28] Speaker A: Garbage Pail Kids movie. Was. [00:41:30] Speaker B: Because if you look on his IMDb and you take the first names of all of his films and rearrange the letters, says, you know, Garfage, which sounds a bit like garbage Pill Kids. [00:41:43] Speaker A: Yeah, obviously you were not doing that. [00:41:45] Speaker B: Because we're a podcast of unrelenting honesty here, here. [00:41:49] Speaker A: And we are honestly happy to see you. [00:41:52] Speaker B: That's right. You can't do off. My crew laughs at your rhubarb and custard podcasts. That's us. [00:41:58] Speaker A: What? [00:41:59] Speaker B: That was a little something from the streets. [00:42:05] Speaker A: I know that that's like a group, a hip hop group, but it sounded more like you were saying you are from the streets, which I find a delightful. Well, I am idea. The mean streets. [00:42:20] Speaker B: Well, they are. They fucking can be mean. More so now. More so now. Whenever I go home when I see just how mean those fucking streets have become. [00:42:27] Speaker A: I did see a crazy story about Tredeger the other day and I screenshot of it. Yes. But I forgot what it was, so I'm gonna have to. [00:42:36] Speaker B: We are sucking this week. [00:42:41] Speaker A: I'm just saying it was the thing I took a screenshot of and I was like, oh, I gotta show this to Mark. And that was not a thing that I did. And now it's lost in times. Now it's lost to time. [00:42:49] Speaker B: I tell you what we will do though, is we'll tease you a little bit. We'll tantalize you a little bit. It's fine that we're just flailing around like deckheads this week because holy, do we have some episodes coming up. Our next two episodes are big hitters. Big swings. [00:43:08] Speaker A: I'm very stoked about this. [00:43:09] Speaker B: What order are these coming in? Corrigan. What's next week? [00:43:12] Speaker A: Next week we have. I actually don't know how to pronounce her last name. So I am going to have to ask her this so that I don't mess it up when she is on here. But we have two weeks of guests coming up. Two weeks of guests next week. We are finally, after years of saying we're gonna. We're gonna do this. We are finally going to tackle police or prison abolition next week. And we have the leftist lawyer, as she is known Cheryl, I want to say it's Wikal. W E I K A L who is. You may have seen her all over the blue skies or the threads or things like that. She's very popular on the social media. Known for doing a lot of pro bono work in Chicago and talking about sort of what that is like. She's a trans woman who has a lot of experience with a lot of, like, discrimination that she faces in court, which is often just crazy how blatant it is. And I'm very stoked to have her come and sort of talk through prison abolition with us. It's a thing that's come up multiple times over the course of this. We said, you know what? We. We want to talk about it. You know, you often have questions of like, how is this a thing that could be feasible? [00:44:25] Speaker B: I simply cannot get my head around how it would work in not just in the society that we wish existed, but the society that we live within now. I simply cannot picture a world where this would. Would. Would be. Would. Would work. [00:44:39] Speaker A: Right. [00:44:40] Speaker B: I'm pretty curious. How did you make contact with next week's guest? Is she someone who's known to you? Is she somebody you have a priority? [00:44:46] Speaker A: Yeah, we're mutuals on Blue Sk. You know, I was like, I've been thinking about this for a while. And then I was like, let's just, let's just do it. Let me see if she's available. And she was like, well, I think I can do, you know, February 1st or whatever the date is. And I was like, hell, yeah. [00:45:01] Speaker B: Splendid. [00:45:02] Speaker A: Let's do it. [00:45:03] Speaker B: Many, many thousands of followers. Which, yes, does put the pressure on a little bit. [00:45:08] Speaker A: Does to not be total idiots. Maybe re it in a little bit. [00:45:13] Speaker B: More, you know, puts the pressure more on me than it does you. I mean. [00:45:19] Speaker A: I don't know, we both have our. Our times. I just had to leave and puke. So, you know, that is true. [00:45:27] Speaker B: And before we started, I thought of a song from the Wonka soundtrack and started crying. It's true. So we've both got problems here. We've both got, you know, things to watch ourselves around. [00:45:41] Speaker A: We legitimately had to pause before hitting records that Mark could gather. [00:45:46] Speaker B: The song is so wistful. It's so beautiful. [00:45:49] Speaker A: And then as I was puking, he sent it to me on Tidal like, well, maybe you should listen to this. [00:45:53] Speaker B: While you do that fucking. We're a mess. [00:45:57] Speaker A: We are a mess. [00:45:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So look, look, forgive the dick and run this week, but next week is a capital S. Serious episode. [00:46:06] Speaker A: Yes. Which is gonna be great. Followed by everybody's favorite. [00:46:12] Speaker B: It's science time. [00:46:15] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:46:16] Speaker B: The wonderful Eileen, who's gonna come along and talk some science to us. I've got some questions lined up for her already. [00:46:23] Speaker A: I already gave her sort of a big one. [00:46:26] Speaker B: Oh, do we have a topic? Do we? [00:46:27] Speaker A: Yeah, we have a topic. And this one, you know, I'm very interested if other people have come across this, but a thing I've been fascinated by is this whole idea of regulating your nervous system. System. Have you come across this at all in your, your tiktoking and things like that? Because it feels like it's sort of born of, like, TikTok Wellness. [00:46:50] Speaker B: I don't, I, I, I've certainly mentioned this plenty of times on the cast, but even though she's not normally a rube, right? Even though she's not normally given to, you know, woo and slight fancy. Yes, my wife goes to a chiropractor. [00:47:08] Speaker A: Oh, that's right. Yes, we did discuss that. [00:47:11] Speaker B: And I'm reasonably sure she's come back from time to time with, with. With thoughts of regulating her. [00:47:19] Speaker A: Yes, chiropractors are really big, that idea. And so I've seen it a lot with. And this idea of being dysregulated, right, where, you know, if you, if your nervous system is not regulated, then it causes all kinds of other things. It causes, you know, the, basically the negative things that come with stress and anxiety and all that kind of stuff and trauma and whatnot. And so there's a lot of sort of online wellness influencers whose specialty is managing dysregulation, regulating your nervous system. And I've seen a lot of huge claims surrounding this, including, like, one that someone posted the other day that, like, in the caption of this, it was like, you know, dysregulation causes pots and, you know, all these different autoimmune disorders and things like that. And I was like, okay, now hold on. Like, that's not how that works. Like, I don't know if this is maybe a trigger of pots, because POTS obviously has triggers. Autoimmune disorders have triggers. Right. But saying something causes something that is usually genetic, that you're born with, that, to me was like, what the fuck? And so I immediately was like, eileen. [00:48:37] Speaker B: Come and scoff this for us. [00:48:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And actually, I gotta give credit to my friend Melanie. She was the one who suggested this. She was like, she was like, sounds like a topic for your podcast. And I was like, that is a topic for my podcast. And that's when I Messaged Eileen. I was like, I need you to tell me what is real and what's bullshit about the idea of nervous system regulation. I want to. I, you know, don't want to dismiss it outright. There may be elements of this that there's truth to. But I do feel like what I'm seeing on social media is overblown and I want to know more about that. So that's going to be kind of the overarching thing that she's going to like dive into the research on and try to sort of parse for us. And I'm very excited about it. [00:49:20] Speaker B: Superb. Yes. And I've got things that have occurred to me as well. I'd like to talk about radiation sickness just because. And this will lead us into talking about. [00:49:29] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, because this came up on our discord. [00:49:32] Speaker B: It did. Yes, it did. It did. [00:49:33] Speaker A: It did. [00:49:34] Speaker B: But you remember last week I watched House of Dynamite? Yes, because that left me so unsatisfied because it felt like propaganda. I'm reading a book that it was no doubt based on called Nuclear War A Scenario. [00:49:48] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. That seemed like a weird pull, given you are trying not to fall into despair these days. [00:49:55] Speaker B: What I'd like to do is I. I like to go up to the edge of it and see how far I can teeter. You know, you are next. [00:50:03] Speaker A: You are playing, sir. You play too much. [00:50:08] Speaker B: I'll go back to the. I'll go back to the expanse next. I'll go back into deep space next. [00:50:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:50:13] Speaker B: For now, this is a book which has been festooned with praise and won awards. It's from last year. [00:50:20] Speaker A: Festooned. [00:50:23] Speaker B: Festooned. And even though all of the protocols and the systems and the personnel and the actual on paper planning and the unfolding of events that would occur during a nuclear strike are classified, this interviews former White House staff interviews nuclear technicians. Uses historical, exacting, well researched journalism and history and sketches out as close as fucking damn it. A IRL real world view of what would happen in the minutes leading up to and the hours after a bolt from the blue nuclear attack upon the United States. [00:51:12] Speaker A: Sounds interesting, but not very pleasant. Yeah, no, I don't know if I want to read that, but I do think once you finish it, you should watch the movie Failsafe, the original. There's a remake. I've never seen it, so I don't know if it's good or bad. But I do think you should watch Failsafe from the 1960s, which is. I think I might have mentioned it last week, but I know I talked about it on here when I watched it, but about, you know, the possibility of kind of an accidental, like a misunderstanding, the launching of a nuke and these different parties trying to sort of talk out what they do, you know, do they shoot the pilots out of the sky? Like, what's the process by which they're going to take care of what's about to be a really terrible situation? [00:51:57] Speaker B: Well, what has just come across in spades is that, you know, all your nuclear deterrent, Right, as in, sorry, your nuclear protection system, your shield, your last line of defense against an incoming icbm. [00:52:14] Speaker A: Mm. [00:52:17] Speaker B: All of the tests, it had something like a 50% success rate in testing. [00:52:22] Speaker A: Sure. I mean, it's a nuke. [00:52:24] Speaker B: It's a nuke. In both the movie and this book, it's been referred to as trying to hit a bullet with a bullet. [00:52:32] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [00:52:33] Speaker B: Fucking difficult, man. And it's gotta directly hit the missile with another missile and it's. It's very, very unreliable. [00:52:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's kind of like what, like the. What's the thing in Israel is the Iron Dome, Golden Dome, whatever the thing they call it is, Isn't that essentially what it is? It's just firing a missile at other missiles? [00:52:53] Speaker B: That's exactly what it is, right? Yeah. [00:52:56] Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, I don't know, the nuclear thing is one of those that I'm like. I don't know what the. Like, what does it serve me to know this kind of situations? Because, you know, I read a lot of, like, climate books and things like that. I'm reading one right now called we are Eating the Earth, where it's like, I at least feel like, oh, I can like, you know, think about what I can do or what policy changes need to be made and see, like, what innovations are being created. And when it comes to nuclear war, I'm like, you just gotta kind of hope that none of the crazy people who rule these countries, like, yes, hit the button. In which case. [00:53:29] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:53:29] Speaker A: I don't know if I want to know. I'll just see when we get there. [00:53:32] Speaker B: Yep. Well, the thing is you won't, because. [00:53:35] Speaker A: Hopefully you won't, because that's the ideal. [00:53:40] Speaker B: Again, absolutely screams the. The thesis of this book is that it is you can't have a small nuclear war. It is every single nuclear exchange is a civilization. It happens so quickly. Like those. That anti. That missile defense system I just spoke to you about, that has to be launched within minutes of a missile taking off from the other side of the world. [00:54:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:54:11] Speaker B: Using data and telemetry which is just seconds old, which has been transferred from X ray stations across the world, norad, norcom, the fucking Pentagon, a base in Cheyenne, all fucking talking to one another within fucking seconds. And then immediately based on, in the fucking heat of the second decisions, shoot a missile at a missile as it enters fucking upper orbit from space. You know, just. It is not going to work and you will not know about it. [00:54:45] Speaker A: Well, yeah, that's. That's basically my hope is, should it happen, I just don't want to know. I just want to, like, be immediately dead. I don't want to like. I don't want threads. Life. [00:54:55] Speaker B: No, certainly not. That's no life at all. But I mean, talk about threads. Talk about pulling on threads. It's not the first time we've spoken of nuclear war. It's obviously something that I'm fascinated by. It's obviously. [00:55:05] Speaker A: Well, you're a. You're a Gen Xer, even if a late one. And that's always going to be kind of at the man. Somewhere in your mind at any given time is that little bit of, yes, nuclear war gonna happen. [00:55:18] Speaker B: Yeah, but like you've said there, it's. It's something that you might well go your whole fucking life not considering much like, much like. [00:55:29] Speaker A: But only now. That's what's the crazy thing is like, you know, it's only basically millennials and younger who would not think about this. Anyone older than me would absolutely have like, nuclear anxiety and would not go their entire life without thinking about this. But it's like, it's just the younger ones of us who like, were born, like at the tail end of the Cold War or after it, that may not think about this. [00:56:01] Speaker B: It's been in my mind since Ukraine. And you mentioned the Cold War. The. The US still has a policy of not waiting if. If it detects a nuclear strike from a foreign power. The US policy is not to wait until the missile hits the US but to retaliate while the missile is still in the sky. Right. [00:56:25] Speaker A: So if we go down, we go down together. [00:56:28] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly this. But the policy that. That again, I'll say that again because it bears repeating. It's incredible. The policy of the US is to fire on detection, Right. Of a nuclear strike against mainland US to retaliate against that country before the missile even hits, which is a holdover from the Cold War. That's a policy that Barack Obama spoke out about and said he wanted to change, didn't change. It's a policy that Biden Spoke out against, said he wanted to change, didn't change. Reagan spoke out against, wanted to change, didn't change. Yeah, that Strike back policy is a Cold War relic. That really. [00:57:16] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a terrible, you know, relic. Yeah, that's because even the idea of, like, the movie Fail Safe, of being able to, like, do some act of diplomacy before the other side shoots back is. Is out. If that's the case, we just go, oh, there we go. Guess we're. Guess we're all dying today. Absolutely bonkers. [00:57:41] Speaker B: So, yes, I'd like to talk to our scientist, the wonderful Eileen, about what the structures are of, like, nuclear sickness, radiation poisoning, how that might look and feel. [00:57:53] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, well, we'll see. I mean, hopefully she's. Well, she said she's behind by four episodes, although she was catching up. So I'm like, she might not hear this before then. You might have to tell her. Give her a heads up that you'd also like a little interlude about nuclear stuff. [00:58:09] Speaker B: Death. [00:58:10] Speaker A: But, yes, get ready for that. It's going to be a fun time the next two weeks. We got some good bangers, so hopefully give us for. [00:58:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:58:17] Speaker A: Whatever is happening around this week, whatever's going on, we shall redeem ourselves in the coming weeks, and it'll be great. Shall we talk about what we watched. [00:58:29] Speaker B: Before we just, you know, die through some movies here? [00:58:33] Speaker A: Mm. Can I just say, I want to bring up your most recent watch just because I was very heartened that you didn't like Man Bites Dog. [00:58:42] Speaker B: Oh, God. Deplorable. [00:58:44] Speaker A: I saw. I saw that you had put it on your plex, and I was like, oh, he's gonna. We're gonna fight about this movie, aren't we? I was like, oh, no. Nope. Yeah, Awful, right? [00:58:54] Speaker B: Absolutely deplorable. Yeah, we'll start with that. Okay. Why not? Let's start with that. What? I'll talk about my frame of mind. Why did I suddenly want to watch Man Bites Dog? It was a gap. [00:59:08] Speaker A: Had you seen it before? Oh, no, I've never seen it before. [00:59:11] Speaker B: I'd never seen it before, but I guess what. Something I'd seen lately had put me in that mindset, and I can't remember what it was. I'd been thinking a lot about Clockwork Orange. I'd been thinking a lot about verite, kind of fourth wall breaking, transgressive kind of violent crime thrillers, psychology of. Of crime and crime cinema. I wanted something you'd watched. [00:59:36] Speaker A: Taxi Driver. [00:59:37] Speaker B: There you go. That was it. That was what Mindset. I wanted a movie that was going to ask me questions of what I was watching, you know. [00:59:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:59:48] Speaker B: But what I found was a movie that made me question why I was watching what I was watching. Not, not. Not the narrative, not the structure of the film, not the relationship between me and the material. All it kind of did was sicken me, really sicken me. And not. [01:00:08] Speaker A: That's saying a lot. Yeah, yeah, right. Like, it's. That is so rare for that to happen. [01:00:14] Speaker B: But. But I don't want to credit it with doing what it intended to do. It's obviously a movie that wants you to step outside of it and, oh, my God, have a comedy moment. Oh, that isn't what it did at all. Like opening your bin and finding a maggot like a rat in your toilet, this film. [01:00:40] Speaker A: Yeah, agreed. [01:00:43] Speaker B: Just nothing really to say. And all of the. All of the more irritating and weaker because it thinks it's saying something with its own chest. [01:00:52] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:00:52] Speaker B: This is a movie that is convinced that it's. Look at me. I'm gonna shock you. It's. [01:00:58] Speaker A: It's. [01:00:59] Speaker B: You didn't see this coming, did you? It's. It's. Yeah, maybe you are the monster. [01:01:03] Speaker A: I was about to say. Who. Who's the monster, really? [01:01:07] Speaker B: Is it me, a murderer on a screen? Or is it you, the viewer, watching the. [01:01:12] Speaker A: She's. One of my least favorite genres of horror is, oh, is it you who's watching? Who's the monster? Like, fuck off. [01:01:21] Speaker B: But you can speedruns within the first 10 minutes and instead arrive at the reality of what is a tawdry, empty experience full of writers and performers who think they're far cleverer than there are. And all you're left with is slurs and hollow violence. Asking nothing, saying nothing, leaving you with nothing. An absolute waste. [01:01:53] Speaker A: I'm glad you felt the same way that I did about that. It was very disappointing for me because the actor from Man Bites Dog is in, like, my. One of my favorite movies of all time, Romantics Anonymous. [01:02:05] Speaker B: Okay. And I think. Yeah. And he does a lot of voice work, I believe, for. I looked up. [01:02:10] Speaker A: Yeah. He's, like, prolific. He's like a very famous French actor who has gone far from this as his, you know, thing. But he's like a sweet. Basically, it's, you know, a movie about this chocolatier, a man who owns, you know, a chocolate factory or whatever, and this. And he's very shy and a very shy. Like Wonka. Yeah. And then another very shy chocolatier comes to work for him, and they're falling in Love, but they're too shy to tell each other and it's like the cutest movie on the planet. [01:02:39] Speaker B: All right, well, that sounds fun at least. That sounds nice. [01:02:42] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like very adorable. And so when I watch Man Bites Dog, I was like, no, no, please, God, no. But, yeah, so, okay. Glad we were. It's nice when we're on the same page. [01:02:57] Speaker B: It is. Yes. I'll speak on Taxi Driver though, if I may. When did you see that last? Have you seen that recently? [01:03:05] Speaker A: It's probably been a decade or so, I would say. I haven't like made a point to watch it super recently. Not since living here, at least. [01:03:13] Speaker B: Let me think, Let me. I like to. I like to give context. And I think I was. I think I was sad and I think I wanted to go somewhere else and I think I wanted to see. Because it's Gray man. Right. [01:03:25] Speaker A: Even. [01:03:25] Speaker B: Even though for the most part, the seasonal fucking. The seasonal horrors have kind of swerved me this year. I don't feel anywhere near as bad as I have done in years gone by. Right. I don't feel bad at all. In fact, you know. Yeah, I know I said this last week, but I'm active, I'm working out, I'm. I'm engaged. I'm not in the least bit. Kind of dragging myself across the floor like I have been previous January's. [01:03:47] Speaker A: But it's not a depression, but there's a dreariness that hits you from the. [01:03:51] Speaker B: From the weather and whatnot because it's just relentlessly gray and atonal and there's no highs or lows in. In the climate currently. It's just relentless gray and rain. It's hot, horrible. So I thought, right, let's use this. Let's go somewhere. Let's let it take you somewhere. So I sought out Taxi Driver. It is. It is every. Every bit of its reputation. [01:04:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:04:19] Speaker B: So beautiful. So beautiful to film this. I tell you what else led me to seek out taxi rival was in the chain reactions documentary that I watched last week that mentions taxi drivers featuring Texas in the. In the background of one of the shots. [01:04:35] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. [01:04:36] Speaker B: Drives past a movie theater or pictures and they show in Texas because it's 76, I think. [01:04:43] Speaker A: Nice. Yeah. [01:04:46] Speaker B: For a film that for the most part is aimless. Nothing much happens in Taxi Driver outside of the bookends. Before he discovers Jodie Foster's character. And after his disastrous date with Sybil shepherd. The middle of the film is just this aimless, sweaty, angsty, Just tour through scummy Rain, sodden, fucking, stinking New York as viewed through De Niro's eyes. [01:05:23] Speaker A: Right. [01:05:25] Speaker B: To anybody else in this film, to the people he's driving past on. On the sidewalk, it's the most magical city on earth. You know, I mean, tourists, people working their jobs. But from inside his cab, from behind his eyes, with his PTSD and his trauma, bigoted and racist and homophobic that he is, the city takes on this. It's sweatiness and it's stench and. And that is the main character of this film. In the middle kind of 40, 50 minutes of this movie, that's what you are forced to confront in such a beautiful way, such a elegant way. Just the colors of this film, the neon and the light reflected on. Through fire hydrants and puddles on the sidewalk. Everybody is a up in this film, like, everyone. Everyone is a up in this movie. And it's. What's the word I'm looking for? Ambiguous, man. Sometimes bad people doing bad things will accidentally have good outcomes for bad reasons. What very. God, I've got to think through all the angles with this film, you know what I mean? Making me do some of the work. [01:06:48] Speaker A: This is what you were hoping Man Bites Dog is gonna do for you? [01:06:52] Speaker B: It's ask. It's asking me to arrive at conclusions of my own, this film. [01:06:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:06:59] Speaker B: You don't get much of that these days. [01:07:02] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this aligns with, you know, how much I love, like, an old movie or whatever. And sometimes that's just kind of the thing you get is just, like, it letting you sit with, like that. That. You know, I was thinking about this with. I watched Train Dreams the other day, and I was like, this is. It's really good. But I was like, this is a Gen Z nightmare movie. Right? Because it was what we were talking about the other day of kind of that expectation that, like, everything's going to have plot, right? And if it doesn't serve the plot, then it's like, why are we still in this? You know, so something like Taxi Driver that kind of is just letting you sit and meander, you know, it was very difficult for. As opposed to that article that you posted on our Discord where, you know, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, or I think it was just Matt Damon. Matt Damon saying that, like, Netflix encourages you to, like, repeat the plot over and over again and, like, keep things moving. [01:07:57] Speaker B: Big action set piece in the first five minutes, please. [01:08:00] Speaker A: Right. Because you got to keep people in, right? Yeah. [01:08:04] Speaker B: Oh, I'll tell you what, he's fucking white. Though let me tell you something. A couple of nights back, I was so proud of this. You're gonna love this. I found myself with a TV show on, Right. I was watching TV and I have my laptop open in front of me and my phone in my hand. [01:08:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:08:21] Speaker B: Triple screen in mate. Triple screening. [01:08:25] Speaker A: I do that too. [01:08:26] Speaker B: Netflix. If you could just remind me of the plot a few times, that would be great. Thank you. [01:08:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I catch myself. [01:08:33] Speaker B: You triple screen also. [01:08:35] Speaker A: Well, because a lot of times it'll be like, oh, I'm like grading something and then I'm like scrolling on my phone. [01:08:40] Speaker B: And I was. I had no purpose to it at all. I think I had read it. [01:08:44] Speaker A: Yeah, they're just there. [01:08:46] Speaker B: I was scrolling reels on my phone with a show on the big. On the. On the tv. [01:08:50] Speaker A: It's so bad. Yeah. And so it's like, it's hard. That's part of why they don't make like this anymore is just like, we have trouble with it. But like Train Dreams, which is one of the Oscar best picture nominees, is very much nothing happens in this, like, plot wise. Right. And I think. I think you'll really like this one. It's very much like the. The word that, like, you can't help but use for it, which sounds very like, you know, jerk off motion. But like, it's meditative, this movie. And it's. It's about a guy who is born in like, the late 1800s, and he basically never goes more than like 70 miles from where he was born. Never sees the ocean, anything like that. And you are watching basically the span of his life and the things that happened to him over the course of this. Getting married and getting a job and tragedies occurring and then him processing. What does this mean? And there's a narrator who's played by Will Patton, who I absolutely love. If I see an audiobook, that's Will Patton, I'm in. So as soon as I saw that, I was like, all right, I'm into this movie. But, yeah, it has no plot. There's no, you know, abc, there's no act one, two, three to this movie. It's just sort of. You're sitting with this character as life happens to him, and he thinks about, what do the choices that I made mean? What does death mean? What does life mean? You know, and ultimately this kind of idea that life is very brutal, but it's also very beautiful is kind of what you take from this. Yeah, it sounds like. I think it's very much up your alley. Just one that just makes you sit with it and think, Think about it, and nothing happens. It's just what. It just makes you sit there and think about what you think about these things, about your own life. So I would say, you know, if you can sit with these things, friends, turn off, you know, the three screens and whatnot and watch Train Dreams. It's worth it. It's on Netflix. Yeah. Worth your time, I think. [01:11:09] Speaker B: You know, I don't triple screen often. Right. And again, we've said it plenty of times before, but the. The highest and most rarest beautiful compliment you can offer a movie these days is I didn't touch my phone and I picked my phone up during Taxi Driver. It just remained undisturbed. I love the sound of Train Dreams, though. [01:11:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you'll. You'll enjoy that one. You just kind of get in the zone for. That's what you're getting into, you know. [01:11:39] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:11:41] Speaker A: I also revisiting, since we're on the old movie thing with Taxi Driver and whatnot, went back to my old standby taking of Pelham One Two Three last night. Watched that with Kyo while I was finishing up some grading. [01:11:58] Speaker B: Beautiful. [01:11:58] Speaker A: And it's just so fucking. [01:12:00] Speaker B: It is fantastic. [01:12:01] Speaker A: So good. [01:12:03] Speaker B: Laura came in when I was halfway through Taxi Driver and I. And I. The words had escaped my lips even before I knew that I was going to say them right. And I. And I felt like such a cunt after saying it. I actually said. Can you believe I said something so hackneyed? [01:12:19] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness. [01:12:20] Speaker B: Don't make them like this anymore. [01:12:24] Speaker A: It's the thing I try so hard not to say, but there are certain kinds of films, they simply do left. [01:12:30] Speaker B: My lips before I could hold it back. And it's true, they simply do not make those character driven, idiosyncratic. [01:12:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:12:41] Speaker B: You know, measured kind of movies anymore that save their set pieces and they save the violence for when it counts. [01:12:51] Speaker A: Right. [01:12:51] Speaker B: And they. It's all in service of the character and the environment and the. The locations. It's all. It all matters, you know? [01:13:03] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, you see, this is. [01:13:07] Speaker B: Maybe they do. [01:13:07] Speaker A: Maybe they do back into these things. [01:13:10] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:13:11] Speaker A: You know, time and time again when I'm kind of like, I just want that and that's why I watch so much TCM stuff and things like that is just kind of want to go back to that kind of character study and things like that. That. Yeah. It's just. It's not. These aren't the times that people want that. I mean, I Think that's the thing, is you can take that as not a value judgment. I think that's the best way way of looking at it. That's not a value judgment of. Certainly movies were better than. [01:13:36] Speaker B: Certainly not now. Certainly not. [01:13:37] Speaker A: But they don't make them like that because that is not what movies are like now. Simply, you know, that is a neutral statement. They're not made like that anymore. And when I want that, I turn to tcm, you know, I know when I. What I'm looking for. Like when I went through that phase of watching all the 90s action movies and shit, you know, it's like temporally we have these periods in which movies are a certain way, things is different. [01:14:06] Speaker B: That's all. [01:14:07] Speaker A: Things is different. And so sometimes it's just what you want, you know, it's not the thing that they're making right now. [01:14:13] Speaker B: Things is different. [01:14:15] Speaker A: Things is different. You know what? Things is different since 2005. [01:14:21] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Listen, before we do that, let's just talk about the Bone Temple. Or do you want to say that for last? [01:14:25] Speaker A: Well, why don't we talk about. Yeah, let's talk about this one first, because I think we can get through this. [01:14:31] Speaker B: Listen, what do. What movies come to your mind when I mention dimension films? [01:14:36] Speaker A: Oh, that's a. That's a good question. That Scream dimension certainly was. Yeah. [01:14:42] Speaker B: That logo, it gives me nothing but the fuzzies, man. It gives me. [01:14:47] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. It's one of many logos of that age, that kind of, you know. Ah. [01:14:51] Speaker B: I think of From Dusk Till Dawn. [01:14:54] Speaker A: Okay. Yep. [01:14:55] Speaker B: I certainly think of screaming. [01:14:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:15:00] Speaker B: I think of. Let me see. I think of no end of fucking movies. [01:15:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:15:05] Speaker B: You know, the vibe that dimension conjures up. [01:15:08] Speaker A: Yes. [01:15:08] Speaker B: I think of Sim City, perhaps, you know, does. [01:15:12] Speaker A: Well, does. Is dimension. Like, was Wes Craven, like an owner of that or like in some way connected to the studio? I don't know why. I think that maybe I'm. [01:15:27] Speaker B: I think it was the Weinsteins, you know. [01:15:29] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that's right. I was the Weinsteins. Yeah. So which this movie. That seems clear with. We watched the movie feast from 2005. And a thing that I regularly say, Listen, you know how like in a lot of generations people will be like, oh, things were so much better when in my day, you know, things like that. As a millennial, I think a lot of us are pretty well aware that we came up in culturally just a wasteland. It's just absolutely terrible 2000 to like basically the whole 2000s. Just fucking awful culturally. And this Is I, I. [01:16:16] Speaker B: You say that with a lot of confidence. I don't think I can say that with the same confidence as a Brit who was. [01:16:22] Speaker A: Well, yeah. I mean, American culture, to be clear. Yeah. And I said that yesterday too, when I like, wrote that on the thing. I was like US culture in the 2000s. I don't think this is a worldwide phenomena, but, you know, particularly, I want to say post911.911. But it wasn't going great in 2000 either. It's just fucking awful decade in US culture full of just misogyny, homophobia, terrible body standards, the violence of the worst order. Like just cultural bankruptcy. [01:17:03] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, what. What we have here with the Feast. Or is it just Feast? It's simply Feast, isn't it? [01:17:09] Speaker A: I think it's just Feast. Yeah. [01:17:10] Speaker B: Simply Feast. I. I invoked From Dusk till Dawn there. [01:17:15] Speaker A: Yeah. It's definitely going for that kind of siege movie. [01:17:19] Speaker B: Yes. [01:17:19] Speaker A: Thing and definitely has seen From Dusk till Dawn. [01:17:23] Speaker B: This is a film that. That wanted to kind of short circuit Dusk Till dawn with Evil Dead 2 and with Take that kind of Rodriguez. Robert Rodriguez self awareness and grand operatic balletic violence. But to marry it with an almost nasty, casually offensive kind of vibe that, like you said, is very, very early noughties. [01:18:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:18:04] Speaker B: With the most. But. But it. But it. If you're gonna do that, you've got to have a voice and you've got to have style. [01:18:12] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. [01:18:13] Speaker B: You've gotta. [01:18:14] Speaker A: Not really Lucky. [01:18:16] Speaker B: Seen it elsewhere and gone. Yeah. Okay. That I want to do that. [01:18:19] Speaker A: I'll have a little of this and I'll have a little of that. [01:18:21] Speaker B: Yeah, you've got to have a fucking voice, man. [01:18:23] Speaker A: You've. [01:18:24] Speaker B: There's a reason why all of the movies that I've just spoken about. Yeah. [01:18:30] Speaker A: Or like Tremors. I think this takes a lot from Tremors without having a voice like Tremors does for sure. [01:18:36] Speaker B: It doesn't even have a fucking wit to. Of the voice of those movies. And there's a reason why they become touchstones. There's a reason why they become influences is because they're good at it. They invent Feast. Invents nothing. Nothing. But it. The only thing it adds to that mix is it. It takes away all of the wit and humor and replaces it with this base, casually misogynistic. Just this. Just throwaway sexual violence. [01:19:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Right. [01:19:13] Speaker B: Like why jokes just throw away rape gags. [01:19:17] Speaker A: Yeah. Horrific. Like, what are you. The. The pieces too? Like, it's like, you know, you have those things like that. There's like you know, random like gay jokes that gesture for the sake of being gay. Like it's very mean spirited. Like. [01:19:34] Speaker B: Yes. [01:19:35] Speaker A: You know, there's no. Yeah. No interesting, like critique or anything behind any of this. And then like there's. And that's what's. What makes it not work is that there's parts of this that like I kept finding myself being like. I think in another case I would find this funny. Right. Like there's a point in this movie where a woman is like reunited with her child and she's like, my baby, I'll never leave you again. And then it immediately gets like eaten, you know? And it's like that could be a funny bit if this movie weren't so mean. Yeah, right. [01:20:08] Speaker B: It's clumsy also, I mean it's got a fair share of gags in it that had they just been allowed to come and go and live and die, would have been perfectly serviceable. But it milk stuff. Drags it out of every single gag. Just milks it until it bleeds. [01:20:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:20:27] Speaker B: And yeah, look, it's got gore and it's got griblies, but they're so amateurish, man. If you've gone to the trouble of employing people to build you some gribblies. Let me see them. [01:20:38] Speaker A: Yeah, you don't need these like crazy quick cuts every like two seconds so that you never get to settle on anything. [01:20:44] Speaker B: Do you not have the confidence in your own gribblies to give me a couple of seconds to look at them? [01:20:50] Speaker A: Right. [01:20:50] Speaker B: You know, it's not, you know, it's. It's this worst. When the WWE was at its worst, the camera work was like this. It was just flinging the cameras around. [01:21:01] Speaker A: This is. I watched one of those things when I was action. Yeah. When I did Monday night fake fights. I remember that was like one of the things that we watched. I can't remember which what the show was called, but I was like, why is it so frenetic? Like why is everything cutting like this constantly? I don't understand. Yeah, just ugh. Deeply terrible. Yeah. Feast. And I'm sure Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are probably regret having their names on this one alongside the wines. Wes Craven, well, he's not alive to regret it, but I'm sure he would. Is it came from the show. Project Greenlight is the third season winner of Project Greenlight. [01:21:41] Speaker B: Speaking of trash rights, I must remind myself to pick this up in a future episode. I've been reading some very upsetting things about the experience on set of Wes Cravens the last house on the left. [01:22:00] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. [01:22:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll leave that hanging there. But think about the subject matter of that film. Some of the interviews and the DVD commentary and some of what is openly admitted to by some of the cast members of that set that went on there is pretty sickening. I want to think on it before I. Before I, I do a bit on it. [01:22:27] Speaker A: But yeah, I have not heard about. [01:22:33] Speaker B: In the presence of Wes Craven and with his knowledge. [01:22:38] Speaker A: Yeah, see, that's always. That's always rough when you're like this person who, you know, I think highly of allowed this shit to go on. [01:22:47] Speaker B: Yes. But that's a little reminder to myself. Let me come back to that. [01:22:51] Speaker A: Yeah. I will say that I have never watched it, as you can imagine, because clearly I don't want to see that. And also one of the villains is my friend's beloved dad. Like, really? Yeah. David Hess is my high school friend Sarah's dad. He unfortunately died a few years ago. [01:23:10] Speaker B: But yeah, literally him I'm talking about. [01:23:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh. [01:23:16] Speaker B: Some of the. He talks about at fan conventions and on the DVD commentary for that very film is some of the worst kind of on set behavior you could possibly imagine. [01:23:28] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I, I don't think I'd enjoy that. But yeah, we'll. We'll come back to it. [01:23:33] Speaker B: Yes, for sure. [01:23:34] Speaker A: Sure. Let's see. And then what else have we got here? So that I think that pretty much covers it. Until Bone Temple. [01:23:44] Speaker B: Until the Bone Temple, yes. [01:23:47] Speaker A: Bone Temple. I think we had different reactions to. But did we? [01:23:53] Speaker B: Oh, did we? [01:23:54] Speaker A: Well, not like, not horribly, I suppose. I just think, like, you loved it and I was like, that was fine. Yeah, I did. [01:24:03] Speaker B: I super enjoyed it. Here is everything that I didn't get last time. I mean, everything that I was left. [01:24:13] Speaker A: Yeah. From my perspective, directorially, this is a thousand times better than the. Does the other one have a subtitle or is it just called 28? [01:24:25] Speaker B: It's just called 28 years later. Whereas this one is the Bone temple. [01:24:29] Speaker A: Bone Temple. [01:24:30] Speaker B: 28 years later. The Bone Temple, yes. You know what I'm saying? [01:24:35] Speaker A: I mean, it just invites immaturity, especially when you've got that giant guy with the horse dick. [01:24:44] Speaker B: You know what? I. I actually caught myself wondering, did they scale it down on this one? Did they bring it in an inch or two? [01:24:54] Speaker A: Oh, I don't know. [01:24:55] Speaker B: Because I seem to record it being. [01:24:56] Speaker A: Do you think that's not his. [01:24:58] Speaker B: I don't. It can't be. [01:25:01] Speaker A: I don't know. I'm sure someone's Asked him in an interview if that's. If that's his action there. [01:25:08] Speaker B: But. But if it isn't, it's just out so much. It feels like lots of questions, doesn't it? [01:25:13] Speaker A: Does it? [01:25:14] Speaker B: Well, it does, yeah. I mean, during the last film, there was obviously a production meeting where somebody went, why don't we give him a fucking gigantic fucking schlong? Why don't we just dial up the fucking penis on this guy? All right? They didn't have to. It could have just been a normal dick. But sure, for some reason, it's. It's not by any stretch. [01:25:37] Speaker A: I watched. I'm trying to think of what the. What the movie was, but there was an interview talking about casting someone as, like, a stunt dick for something. [01:25:47] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [01:25:49] Speaker A: But they can't. They can't cast for a certain size because of, like, HR issues, basically. So it's kind of a you get what you get thing. They don't. They can't. Like. They don't go through, like, a whole bunch of pictures. Yes. [01:26:03] Speaker B: An agency just for guys with, you know. [01:26:08] Speaker A: Apparently not. Apparently you kind of. You gotta roll the dice on your stunt dick because you're not allowed to, like, go through and, like, hand pick which one you want. At least at the time that whatever this was was made was. [01:26:20] Speaker B: You'd know as a performer, you'd know when you get it right. [01:26:23] Speaker A: Like, you imagine the people who are going in for the roles or whatever would be like, yeah, I know what I. I've got here. So I don't know, maybe they were just lucky with this guy and were like, hell, Or. [01:26:35] Speaker B: Or they built something for him in the design. They pictured this massive fella with a gigantic. And they made it so. [01:26:42] Speaker A: Made it for him. Yeah. [01:26:43] Speaker B: The more I think of it, the more I think that is the case. But I'm also pretty sure that in the second one, they've dialed it back. [01:26:48] Speaker A: A little bit so that it doesn't take up the whole thing. I was. I was noticing at least, like, the amount of it you see is less. It feels like, you know, NeoDokost exercise a little bit of restraint because it. [01:27:00] Speaker B: Did somewhat hog the discourse. No pun intended. [01:27:03] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, it really did. [01:27:05] Speaker B: As. I mean, look, we've been talking about it for minutes now, and all we've. [01:27:09] Speaker A: Talked about is Samson, because it's called the Bone temple. They invite it. [01:27:13] Speaker B: What are you gonna do? Listen, Way better than the last one. Just gave you everything I wanted. It feels like Nyda Costa kept some of the quirks of Danny Boy's. Direction, but only because stylistically, she thought she had to. The. [01:27:27] Speaker A: For continuity. [01:27:28] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Beautifully put. Yes. The shaky cam. She kept some of that in for. For the sake of a through line, but just abandoned everything else and just made a really decent film without trying to fuck about. [01:27:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, you know, to me, I think the first hour of it, I was like, I'm out. I'm not. Not doing this. It just felt. It's because to me, I think the thing is, you know, I don't like Alex Garland, and I don't like his worldview as reflected by these films. And I think this is. This is it at its worst right here. This idea of this, like, just very brutal worldview that he has about, you know, and the first one having the little rape colony and stuff like that. Like, I don't like. I don't like the way he sees things. And so the entire first hour of it, I was just like. It's just, you know, this dismal torture that never lets up. You know, you don't get a break from this. And that's not how I see the world, you know, that's not how I see things. And I think, you know, the idea of this group of violent kids and all that kind of stuff is interesting, but I just don't feel like there's no depth to them either. You know, these are not characters. And so I didn't care. And I was simply just sort of like, okay, I get it. There's a bunch. There's disgusting kids who do this shit following this guy. But once it kind of gets into the last 45 minutes of it, it becomes very fun. It's Alex Garland, so it's very stupid. It's very on the nose. Like it's, you know, beating you over the head with every part of the metaphor and things like that. I don't think it's a smart movie by any stretch of the imagination. However, it does become really fun to watch and gets more, you know, the. The. Only to me, like, obviously all the emotion is wrapped up in Samson. Yep, Samson and Ian. Right? And I felt like basically the whole movie, every time we weren't watching them, I was like, why are they not on the screen? [01:29:36] Speaker B: Just a beautiful. [01:29:40] Speaker A: Yeah, it was like everything else, I was like, I do not give a shit. I didn't like this kid in the first movie. I don't care what happens to him. This group of people, that's not real and they don't have personalities. They just go around tearing people up like who the fuck cares? But every time it went back to them, I was like, okay, I've got something I can, like, grasp onto that makes me feel things. And that's kind of where it sort of heads towards the end of this movie where we really get more of them and then sort of bringing the other characters to them. That becomes more interesting to me is interesting. [01:30:20] Speaker B: I didn't. Sorry, excuse me a sec. Just to almost prove what I've been saying about my own tastes over the last kind of half hour, I will. I am here for all of the torture you want to subject me and your characters to. As long as there is personality to it, as long as there is some quirk, as long as there is a voice in what you're doing. And this movie offsets that relentless grimness with, whoa, hang on. This isn't something I've seen before. You know what I mean? This is something that makes me think about. I don't agree at all that that gang of bastards is two dimensional because they've got ritual, they've got past, there's a life. They don't have characters before the movie started. Yeah, I feel they do. Each. You get clues from each one of them, whether it's their accent or how they deal with situations or how they relate to. To Jimmy Crystal, you get insight into what their life was like before. You know, I think there's more to those characters than just take something like funny games, for example, where you've got no insight at all into the invaders. There are clues into who these kids are before they fell into this guy's. [01:31:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't see it. But maybe that's. I mean, that could be part of the sort of. One of the things that I think is a disconnect, though, because these movies are so British, is not having those cues to, like, look for, you know, I don't get anything from their accent. I don't know anything about that. What I see is characters that don't really say much and just blindly kind of do what this guy does, what it says to do. And I get that. They're like. Basically all I get from them is they love ultra violence. And, like, that's about it. Except for the one girl who you kind of get a little more about. But I don't have any context for them at all. And so to me, that's draining to just be like, I'm just watching them torture innocent people for an hour in the worst possible ways who also don't really, you know, get a whole lot to Say for themselves. But who, you know, some of those people that they torture, you get more information about who they are than you do about the people who are torturing them. And yeah, I just like faceless torture to me. Again, I don't like, I don't like the worldview. That's just what it comes down to is I don't see the world the way Alex Garland does. And I, yeah, I don't find a lot redemptive about the way that he thinks that people are essentially. [01:32:57] Speaker B: Listen, none of which I can, I can challenge in the least because you can't say that over the course of the last 20 odd years, Alex Garland has not quite clearly laid his worldview out. [01:33:12] Speaker A: And at this point you either like. [01:33:13] Speaker B: It or you don't. [01:33:14] Speaker A: Right. Yeah, it either works for you or it doesn't. But like I said, I think the filmmaking is just so much more watchable. [01:33:21] Speaker B: Oh yeah. You know, yeah, it sounds like damning it with faint praise, but it's a far more user friendly film than 20. [01:33:31] Speaker A: Which, and I do wonder, like you were saying that this one did tank box office wise. Like people didn't really go to see it. And I wonder, you know, how much that's because of the last one not being super accessible. But also I do think, you know, maybe I'm not, I haven't been thinking about it this way, but this, like the Britishness of this doesn't translate super well for us. And I think maybe Americans are a little more turned off by it. By not understanding it turned into a. [01:34:00] Speaker B: Very, very interesting franchise. [01:34:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:34:04] Speaker B: With the second one being what it was, just a commercial. [01:34:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Which is my favorite of all of them. [01:34:11] Speaker B: Incredible. [01:34:12] Speaker A: Just completely disconnected from it. It's just a fun, scary zombie movie. [01:34:17] Speaker B: Maintaining continuity and doing all the things I enjoy about sequels. Fleshing out the world, drawing back, showing you more of what you enjoyed. It's, it's, what it has become is a very interesting series. Series of films as opposed to just event movies. [01:34:32] Speaker A: It's weird that it is a series really is what it comes down to, you know, a film that didn't beg for more, you know, and yet it goes on is just fascinating. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm not gonna watch it again. And the next one, I don't, I don't know, I'll probably watch it for like completionist reasons or whatever. But Danny Boyle directs the next one. [01:34:58] Speaker B: Oh. [01:34:59] Speaker A: And it takes. Yeah. And without. Well, I don't want to give anything away, but there are things in this One that. I don't know. I don't. There's not. I don't know where it's going. You know, that's all. I think that's the best way to say it without spoiling it for people. I don't know where. [01:35:19] Speaker B: Probably guess. [01:35:20] Speaker A: Well, yes, I think that's also the case. So. So I don't know. This one was very funny to watch as, like, a former Christian, too. Just like the very, like, over the top. Like, this is the story of the Bible, of all of this. Just like. Oh, boy. Yeah. Know. Okay, I get it, bud. I see what you're doing here. [01:35:41] Speaker B: I think I probably will watch it again, if only to categorically determine. Is the penile length preference. [01:35:53] Speaker A: Is there a difference? There's got to be a Reddit thread about that. [01:35:59] Speaker B: I'm sure I can get a screen grab of the two chapters side by side. [01:36:03] Speaker A: Yeah. Do a little comparison, just for science, you know. Yeah. I mean, you gotta. [01:36:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:36:10] Speaker A: And on that note. [01:36:11] Speaker B: Yes. Did we salvage an episode out of that? I don't know. [01:36:13] Speaker A: Maybe we did, maybe we did, maybe we didn't. But we're glad you're along for the ride. And next week, we promise it'll be, you know, it'll be back on the tracks. [01:36:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And the week after. Good times are coming. Good times are coming. And until then, you say. [01:36:30] Speaker A: Spooky. [01:36:32] Speaker B: Beautiful. [01:36:33] Speaker A: Thank you.