The Flop House - Ep, #239 - Ghost in the Shell
Episode Date: September 2, 2017We're back, baby! And we're all ready to jack into the matrix to cyber-brain download Ghost in the Shell, or something. Meanwhile, Dan goes all googly eyes, Stuart spins some controversial theories ab...out Middle-Earth, and Elliott takes us down to his seafood restaurant. And yes, we hear that crackling noise on Elliott's audio too. We have no idea why it happened, but we're working on it. Let's hope our cross-country recording isn't bedeviled by Gremlins. Wikipedia synopsis for Ghost in the Shell LIVE SHOWS Sept. 9 – No Elliott, but with Ronny Chieng in New York at the Now Hear This Festival Oct. 8 – The whole gang in Los Angeles, at the Regent Theater Dec. 9 – The whole gang in San Francisco, at the Marines Memorial Theater
Transcript
Discussion (0)
On this episode we discuss Ghost in the Shell.
Was this the Ghost with the most or the shell with the smell?
Nice. Hey everyone and welcome to the Flophouse, I'm Dan McCoy.
Beat Boop, I am Stuart Wellington, Ultimate Otaku.
And from all the way on the West Coast of on the United States of America. It's me Elliott Kalin
Los Angeles edition Qthe music
Dude
You have to wait hold on could you see all the images of me in like convertible
and babes and bikinis and like, yep.
Okay, good.
Okay, that's what that was all supposed to be.
Couple of shots of like hazy palm trees.
Yep, you know what, a surfer off in the distance.
Is that Elliot?
It's not.
And then there's like a dog catching a frisbee
for some reason.
I'm in LA.
In California, raising, uh, hang in 10.
Yeah.
Oh.
You're like, why would he go in the water? He's gonna turn it to a grape. I want you to raise in, hang in 10.
You're like, why would he go in the water? He's gonna turn it to a grape.
Yeah, this is the first episode that we're recording
in different coasts.
Real quick, Dan, this is important.
If you throw a bunch of raisins in the water,
they can turn it to a grape.
Yeah, it's called Benjamin buttoning them.
Okay. Oh yeah, yeah. Let me go check the signs on that. Dan, you're our science guy. Can you
check it? All right. I think that what you get is a bunch of soggy raisins, actually.
Enough fooling around, Dan. What do we do on this podcast? This is a podcast where we
watch a bad movie. And then we talk about it.
We otaku about it.
This week we talked about ghost in the shell.
No, no, no, no.
We're about to talk about it.
We haven't talked about it yet.
Thank you, Stuart.
I was about to correct Dan's 10 cents.
And I'm glad you were on it.
Thanks for listening.
Dan, the only way that that's true that we talked about it is because I'm three hours behind
you on the other part of the country, but even then, it doesn't quite make sense.
That's some pretty deep science fiction you're talking about there, Elliot.
Yeah.
Oh, the things we have to warn you about.
The science fiction of time zones, just like my new science fiction novel series time zone
cop, he's a cop who solves mysteries that involve time differences. Uh-huh. He's
like, wait a minute, that plane was in the air at midnight and somebody fed a maguay.
That's like crashing the cake industry.
Welcome to a possible mystery to this thing. The case of how a Gremlin got on a plane.
Yeah, he's like, there's no way they would have let him
on that plane.
He's like, Gremlin, yeah.
Also, he was carrying more than three ounce of water.
And he's got a mogwize passport.
That's the reason they don't let you take water on planes
because you might drop it on a Gremlin or a mogwai.
Suddenly, they're multiplying.
Or drop it on a raisin, and suddenlywai, suddenly they're multiplying, or drop it on a raisin,
and suddenly you got a soggy raisin.
Yeah.
And how's that raisin gonna sing a duop song
if it's all covered in water?
It can't.
I mean, I'm assuming they would let a mogwai on a plane,
even if it was gonna be after midnight,
because they're like,
who likes airline food?
Am I right?
Oh, okay.
Am I right, Am I right guys?
Wait, what is that? Oh, I see because he wouldn't need. I get you.
Yeah.
I get it.
Well, and then I guess that's the end of the podcast, everybody.
For good.
We're shutting down shop.
The flop house has been condemned. Dan, what
so what do we do on this podcast? We already said that. No, you said we talked about a
movie. We were watching a bad movie and then we talked about it and on this episode
that we're going to talk about. Thank you. Ghosts in Now, there was a movie that we just downloaded into our eyeball brains sometime recently.
Now there's a, it was a big controversy as everyone may know already about Ghost in the
Shell because it's based on a Japanese cartoon based on a comic book from Japan.
But almost everybody in the movie is not Japanese, but they still have Japanese names.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Uh, kinda, yeah.
Dan explained.
Well, uh, by all means, let us as three white guys talk about this controversy.
That seems like-
Uh, it seems like we would just be endorsing our own privilege by taking our privilege
of not having to talk about it.
That's true.
Yeah, Dan.
Uh, why did they do this? Is that what Yeah, Dan. Why did they do this? Yeah, why'd they do it?
So it could have a appeal at home and abroad. They did it because it's a big
expensive movie and they thought like Scarlett Johansson would get butts and seats. They were wrong.
Dan says sadly. Well, let's let's talk about what's in them.
I mean, it's not uncommon for any kind of adaption to when you're going to adapt something
from a different culture to your own culture in a way to change the ethnicity, but that's
the only thing they change about it.
Everything else seems to very clearly take place in, like they didn't de-
Japanify anything about it other than the ethnicities of the leads, which leads to a
strange set of juxtapositions.
But, damn, I don't know what he's talking about, but he said that. He said that in such a pregnant pause way that I thought there is like, guys, I've got
some big news.
I got some big news.
My pause is pregnant.
Wow.
Yeah.
I guess congratulations.
Thank you very much.
Was this planned?
No, it was a little bit of a surprise, but me and my pause, we've been thinking about
starting a family for a long time.
Yeah, well, that's a joke.
There it was, Dan. Anyway, okay, enough of me. You know, people were worried that when we started remote recording, we wouldn't miss a beat.
They were wrong. We missed a couple.
We missed many beats. Let's talk about what's in the movie then, huh?
Ghost in the Shell. So we start with our favorite opening thing, a text crawl,
that explains a little bit about what the future is like.
Now, luckily, it does not start with a voice over
Scarlett Johansson being like, my mother told me,
da da da da da, but that's only because she doesn't remember
her mother.
The text tells us that in the future,
basically, people are becoming more and more cyborg,
and the government is putting a human brain in a robot body.
Then we see that.
Get out of here.
Oh yeah.
They take these surgeons that all have like digital amplifier waves over their faces.
We see them take out a human brain and put it in a plastic body that for some reason has boobs.
And then they put a layer of skin over it that looks kind of like a milk liquid.
And then the milk liquid flakes away
and there's a very pale nude nipple-less
scarlet showhandsome underneath.
And there's lots of like electronic choral music.
Like we're watching the birth of a new stage in evolution.
This is the most amazing thing that's ever happened.
So, Dan, I guess what I'm saying is,
why did they give this robot boobs?
But no nipples.
That's a real question.
I feel like the boobs, you're trying to just make the robot blend in in society.
But then if you forget the nipples, then there's a key component of this disguise that you
left out.
Like how deep cover is she trying to go on to?
I mean, it would only come into play if she was solving a crime at a
nude beach I guess like in the yeah like in our wash what's a
like in the dark a shot in the dark thank you I kept thinking a scent of
something and I'm like that's not what it's not a food so movie sent a pink pan
there skat of the pink Panther.
Oh no.
Yeah, so anything that involved toplessness,
she's just gonna get caught out right away.
Which, as we see though,
her main crime fighting technique
is to take off her clothes and go invisible.
So maybe they're just thinking she's gonna be invisible.
So no one's gonna notice she doesn't have nipples anyway.
Yeah, this is the most important question about the movie.
Dan, you pointed out earlier that we're three guys,
so we were wondering about this.
Now, Scarlet Johansson wakes up.
She's told that she died in a refugee boat that was sinking.
And her French doctor explains-
She killed my terrorists.
And that her, yeah, refugees were killed by terrorists.
And the French doctor explains to her basically what we already know
that she's a human brain in a robot body
And then it gets explained again
So the movie has to the concept of a human brain in a robot body which I feel like it's not that
Hard a concept to figure out it gets explained like three or four times
Pretty early in the movie. Did you guys have trouble?
Was it not till the last explanation that you were like,
oh, I get it.
They put a person's brain in a robot.
Yeah, I mean, she doesn't look like a robot.
You said she had boobs, right?
Most of.
I mean, robots have had breasts for millennia.
I guess, robot copied to you.
I mean, basically just some metropolis.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
Millenia.
Metropolis.
For thousands of years, you robots, bad boobs.
Today on the history channel, ancient robot boobs.
But archaeologists are discovering now.
The, yeah, I mean, it, it feels like the type of person that's going to go and plunk down
some hard earned cash at the
synoplex, to go see a movie called Ghost in the Shell, probably is gonna grasp
onto the idea that that character is a robot with a human's brain in it.
Unless the whole time they're like when's this ghost gonna climb into this
shell? Like they think it's gonna be about a ghost of a hermit crab that's just
looking for the right shell. He's a switches shell.
Yeah.
And it turns out the shell he was looking for
was inside him all along.
Oh, that's really interesting.
Wait, as a ghost?
Yeah, and then he can go to hermit crab heaven,
which is the name of my Jimmy Buffett themed beach check.
Try the herm burger.
It's pretty tasty.
It's really weird though that you're eating a burger made out of hermit crabs at a place
called hermit crab heaven.
There's no better heaven than the human digestive tract.
It seems like size wise, you need to harvest a lot of hermit crabs.
Oh yeah, one patty takes a number of hermit crabs.
But you barely even notice how small the patties are because we put a heaping help in the surf sauce on there.
And you know, and surf sauce is really where the tang comes in that tasty tang you only
get at at hermit crab heaven.
Yeah, it's a cosy-native tang.
Yeah.
Oh, man, you beat me to it.
Now, is that hermit crab burger?
Is that like that one French king, the, the sun king who would make a casserole on a peacock brains
and you're like, how many peacocks did he have to kill? That's crazy. It is exactly like that.
Peacocks were like rats back in the olden days. They're all over the place.
Mm-hmm. Oh yeah. And if you have slaps of mues on them, they'll learn Kung Fu and teach some turtles.
Those those are the main things that peacocks and and rats have in common. Is there a reaction to
ooze and kung fu? So we find that we are in a city of the future back to the movie. It's basically
metropolis meets. But no, I mean, back to that. Oh boy, we're in one of your standard cities of
the future. It's like my tropolis meets blade runner meets the Lego movie meets like a hot wheels
track. And there's like hologram advertisements everywhere.
The whole movie, and this sets the sage
for what I would call
too late visionariness,
where it's like, we had talked about this many, many episodes
back with the Hansel and Gretel movie,
where it was like, if I hadn't seen this exact type
of future cities designed so many times,
I'd be like,
wow, this is really cool.
Like on the face of it, it's pretty cool.
There's big hologram advertisements
and multi-level highways and things like that.
But I've seen it so many times at this point.
So many times.
Like, Hansel and Gretel, like if you hadn't seen
Evil Dead 2 and you weren't aware
that Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter existed,
then it would be like, this is a cool idea.
Yeah, I mean, not that Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter
is a good book or movie, but it is, you know,
the same sort of thing.
I know, I've never read the book.
I just just talked to you.
I just had to.
Somebody is judging without having actually seen.
True.
Well, well, well.
Looks like you're like one of those internet reviewers, or I guess internet commenters,
who gets mad when people review superhero movies negatively, even though they haven't seen
the movie yet.
Mm-hmm.
I'm exactly like that.
Yeah.
That's what Dan Spence is, uh, wait, Thursday before Friday nights doing when
a big, a hot new Marvel property comes out or a, or when a DC movie gets a bad review,
you're like, you're just being paid by Marvel.
You just hate comic books and all superheroes.
But there's really, that's why there's only one way.
That's why every time you see a, a, a movie critic who reviews DC movies poorly, that's
why they're driving around in like
lambo's and they're just spending all this crazy money because Marvel just pays them to
like climate change scientists are just in it for the grant money. Like, hopefully you see them
living it up, you know, we'll open it up at the hotel of California, living it up.
hotel in California, living in the dark. Conveniently located to Hermit Krabhavan, my brother,
Shaq, right on the beach.
So anyway, so we, Scarlett Johansson's character is called
major and she is a major weapon in the fight against crime
and terrorism.
And she, we see her on a mission where she has to go into like
a robo gaysha house full of incredibly frightening
Robo Gaysha's and wait, let me say one thing here. The Ghost N' Shell movie, the original one, the cartoon. I haven't seen it since it came out.
I don't remember it super well. I don't remember loving it at the time. And so any design stuff that's taken from that movie,
it's like, all right, that was a long time ago, but even then that kind of stuff was fairly well-tried and ground after Blade Runner and things like that. So if I'm
to say that the Robo Gaysha's are incredibly frightening looking and not at all sexy, maybe
they're meant to be that way because of the original source material they're supposed
to be horrifying. But you have these like rich guys hanging out in a bar that's staffed
by these horrifically scary robots wearing huge
wigs and gaysha robes. And you're like, this is a weird place to relax. I would not be
able to stay calm in this place. Well, isn't one of those guys, one of those business
guys played by Michael Wincott. Yeah. Yeah, he's terrifying too. Yeah, he's like, I want
to be among my own people. Terrific. The weird thing about those robogacious first off, I think they look really cool.
And a lot of their face transforming is that's practical effects, which is pretty cool.
That is cool.
One of the weird things is the Japanese actress whose face, they modeled those masks from
on the distant performers, gets billing in the movie. Like her name is on the poster.
What?
Is it a star?
I guess she's a pretty big star.
Yeah.
I don't have her name in front of me.
So I'm not going to try and say, well, here's the thing.
The the signs look really cool.
But do you think for a city of the?
They don't look very cool for like, oh, these are people who are going to help me
to relax after a long day of work.
So you're saying it's a poorly designed club.
I'm saying for the function of the film,
which is to be ominous and eerie, perfect design,
for the function of the club within the world
of the film, terrible design.
I mean, the people seem to be loving it.
They're having a great time.
It's the exact...
Until that one sticks all our catholute
tentacles out of our mouth and jacks in the back of the set.
It's the exact opposite of the space diner
in the Star Wars prequel,
where for the purpose of that movie,
that is not a good design.
It's hard to believe that in the far off land of Star Wars,
they have space diners that look like 50 diners,
but for the purposes of the characters in the film,
who just want to go to a comfortable place,
get a quick cheap meal
With friends everywhere and like a real casual sense of I don't have to put on air
So this is just a restaurant for working Jedi like me. It's a perfect design. There's a reason those diner
Call back to like a simpler time when those Jedi's were kids and they weren't burdened with all these crazy things going on in the world
Back when Jedi's like didn't have to worry about what was happening with minorities,
things were just, you know, all of these, you know, politics were a little spoiler.
Yeah. Back when you know, picket fences and, uh, you know, father knows best on the TV and all that
stuff, when Jedi's new that America was the best. Anyway, uh, we're also introduced via telecommunication to Scar Jo's boss, Takeshi Katano, who has
kind of like Quicksilver hair.
Oh my God.
He looks like they are, he looks like a cross between the owl or what's that flat top
from Dick Tracy.
With a little bit of Gary Oldman's Dracula in there.
He looks amazing.
It's something about, I guess Tchaikovic Tano
has reached that point that great actors get to
where they're like, if I'm gonna do this role,
I want crazy hair.
Oh, I didn't really notice it.
Really?
Really?
His hair is a normal hairstyle.
I thought it was like,
it's hair like swooped back.
No, Danny, it looks like Wolverine.
Come on.
Yeah, all right.
Are you like Marvel artists in the late 80s, early 90s
who thought they could just get away with giving everybody
that hair cut?
That's the hair cut nobody could have.
Ever in life, Dan is like looking good, beat.
Maybe I'll look out that hair.
Okay.
Mr. Sada team over there's got a pretty good
do. Do you think to Keshe guitar was like there? Do you think when they when they approached
him about the movie? He was like, he was like, I'm, you know, Johnny N'Monik was kind of a flop.
This one's bound to be a hit. There's but he was like, American movies always want to take my cash and put it into not
very good movies.
And I said, I'd never do it again, but okay, one last score.
And then never again, and he knows he's going to get pulled in again.
So anyway, Assassin's come in.
They attack the head of a, what robotics company or is an executive
at a robotics company.
There's a bunch of robot and hologram effects
and cthulutenticals are coming out of the robo gayshaes.
Major turns invisible, pulls a lot of matrix tricks,
starts shooting, basic super assassin stuff.
And she's fighting like guys with metal bits
all over their faces and like robo arms.
And she's part of section nine
and elite security squad
and it turns out the executives at hanka robotics the one robotics company that is so powerful
it basically controls everybody they had their stuff hacked into and they were murdered
by a mysterious figure.
Yeah.
Who is this mystery figure?
You following all this Dan?
We don't know yet. Oh, okay.
I thought they give him a name. They do eventually. Well, we're not up to it. Anywhere is a
cool cloak, right? Yeah. Eventually I will say eventually you find out his name is
Poozy because he keeps drinks cold. Oh, got him. Somebody just said that to him after they blasted his head off.
Guess you'll be keeping drinks cold in hell.
And that's actually a very hard job. That would be very impressive.
Yeah.
So major is kind of like she's a person, but she's kind of like a robot.
I feel like they kind of like Scrooge Joh Hanson is trying to balance being a trying to figure out, am I human or my robot, what am I?
There's a surprising amount of time in the movie
where people just tell her how beautiful she is
as if she's an object and not a person.
And it's one of two times in the movie where I felt like
I was like, movie, you're basically actually doing that.
Treating her like an object and not a person.
You don't get to have characters doing that
as if you're making a big point.
Like, come on.
Hang a lamp shade on it or hang what's the phrase?
Hang a lantern on it.
Hang a lantern on it.
Hang a lantern.
Hang the red lantern on it.
Yep.
So, she's, and she's doing,
We're introduced to her partner at this point.
Her partner's name is Beto.
Beto?
Yeah. Who's he played by? A name is Batu. Batu? Yeah.
Who's he played by?
A big Hulk in dude.
I don't know.
It's not the bad guy Uncle Gray Joy from Game of Thrones, is it?
I think he might be.
Yeah.
Okay, it looks like him.
And he's like, you know, he's kind of a Wolverine.
He's like a brawler.
He works for the good guys, but you know, he likes to fight and he's close to animals.
He keeps some dogs. He's always asking major to feed his dogs for him. He looks normal. He's got a
really normal human pair of eyeballs. Well, those get, he starts with normal eyeballs like
a human hat. That's such a, like, without the context of the movie, that would be such
a funny way. It's like explaining someone to someone else.
Like, what does he look like?
You know, he's got normal human eyeballs.
I know.
A couple of you guys talking about.
Who knows?
So they're trying to track this,
track down this hacker,
character, this mysterious hacker figure.
So of course, major has to do a deep dive into the robo
geisha. And Major is having fragments of her memory pop in and out. And it's very
disconcerting to her visions of some other past or world. But she doesn't know what it is.
And this is the movie's idea of like deep subtext is she's talking to a doctor and Major
says, how do you tell the glitches from the rest of me? And she doesn't she doesn't feel
human. A doctor says, she doesn't feel human.
The doctor says, memories don't define us.
What we do defines us.
And it's like, have memories ever defined anyone?
Because you can't just go into someone's head
and read their memories, right?
Like, you can only judge someone but what they do.
I don't know that nobody's like, yeah,
this guy seems like a great guy,
but look at his memories.
Oh, forget it bad dude
Is that like a like a
futuristic version of being like don't live in the past dude move forward?
I guess that's exactly what it is, but it's futuristic. So she says beep boop afterwards
Well, she says it and then she removes her eyes from her face
Because her eyes slide off like a weird panel, right?
Yeah, well, that's the other doctor.
The one who works in the autopsy morgue.
So are we talking about the doctor
played by Julia Pinoche or no?
That's the one who says.
Or Pinoche. How do I pronounce that?
That's right.
I'm gonna mispronounce a bunch of names.
Yes, Julia Pinoche, if she was a horrible dictator for a while.
But yeah, major has to do with the help of a, if a morgue technician whose eyes slide off,
so she can plug other things into her robo eyes.
She has to take a deep dive into the robogacious memory because I thought memories don't define
us, but they're judging this robogacious by her memories.
So look at your own self, Scar Jo.
Anyway, her memory is all like creepy hallways
and there's a robed guy. You can't see his face, but he looks like a real Anakin Skywalker.
Looking at a robo body and he force her ulcer into a pile of like dark robots that are crawling
all over her and her friends are like, she's being hacked and they have to pull her out. And when
they pull out, he goes, she goes, I know where he is and it is harrowing right Dan. This is one of these things in movies that
like bothers me because I know that movies need to have some sort of visual language to
do this stuff like because otherwise they're just radio. Otherwise as well. We thought
we were teaching radio but it turns out radio is teaching us. Yeah thanks. And what he was
teaching us was how not to continue an academy award-winning career.
Yeah, snow dogs. Anyway,
you know, we can't just have like a bunch of ones and zeros on the screen like we're like
flying through the matrix or something. So I mean, we could always you can always cite other
financially unsuccessful movie girl with a dragon tattoo, the English language version,
where most of it is just characters looking at a computer with ominous music, playing in the background.
Or they could do it like that, like that CSI and CSI clip that I love so much,
where the two people are both using a keyboard at the same time to fight off a hacker. Yeah, but instead they visualize it by a bunch of like,
like, oopie black hands, like clawing at Scarlet's Johansson and
like pulling her down into their mire,
you know, and that's what being hacked is supposed to be like.
It reminds me of, is it in disclosure where Michael Douglas has to go in and open a digital filing cabinet?
Yeah, he'll like walks down a hall.
He just opens a file.
That's what virtual reality is.
I mean, huge, Hugh Jackman does the same shit in what?
Swordfish.
Swordfish.
Yeah.
But he does it with such a lawn, with such, with such Savvlaw
fair.
Okay.
Anything of another sentiment?
Yeah.
I get a lot of sentiments. Cinnamon buns, cinnamon cookies.
It's only two.
Stallion of the cinnamon.
Cinnamon.
Edible stallion of the...
So Dan, was that so spirit stallion of the cinnamon?
Was that a movie that actually existed or was it just an ad campaign?
I don't know. I think it was just a Burger King toy.
It was almost like they were like, can we make a successful kids movie without the actual movie?
Let's try it out. Yeah. Yeah. I like it's like they made they made a character out of cinnamon.
What a premise is a character out of what is he a blob of shake?
What is he?
I used to know what he was. I used to know what he was, but I forgot what it was.
Somebody that's saying he's a drop of shake. I think that that's I think they're retconning
it. I think they're just like, yeah, grimaces a big shake drop. Like because he I mean,
I know that he used to be a villain and that was why he was called Grimiss and the way he, the design was so appealing, they're just like, let's make him one of
the good guys.
Yeah.
Oh, kind of like Walton Goggins character in Justified.
Yeah.
Very similar.
I mean, they were Venom.
America's favorite villain turned hero.
Right.
He's a hero now. Well, he's a hero now.
Well, he's a lethal protector, Dan. Well, he hasn't been a lethal protector in like 20 years.
I think he's back to being a villain again,
but I'm not sure.
He certainly didn't go from hero to zero.
Okay.
Thank you.
But yeah, grimace is something that,
here's my theory about it, and I have a big theory.
Grimis is Ronald McDonald's liver.
They had to remove it because it was diseased because of all the fatty foods that Ronald
McDonald was eating.
And they were like Ronald, you can either work out or we're going to have to remove your
liver because it's becoming gorge and purple and it has a face now and a kind of an e-ortite voice
and he was like horrified.
He was like, ah, get it out of me.
And Ronald took a scalpel and was trying to cut it
out of his own belly and they had to restrain him
and sedate him.
And his doctor is that bird that's also a pilot.
And...
Birdie.
Birdie.
Wait, what's his name, birdie?
Yeah, that's all.
The imaginatively named birdie. I love the, his name, Bernie? Yeah, that's all. The imaginatively named Bernie.
I love that they used up so much imagination.
Juice on grimace.
They didn't have anything left.
So they're like, the bird, bird's fly, make her a pilot.
What's the name for a bird, birdie?
I'm so tired from grimace.
Okay, these guys, these French fries, what do we call them?
I don't know the fry guys.
It's like they spent four months developing the hamburger and grimace and they
were like guys are presentations in 15 minutes. We're supposed to come up with four characters
only of two. It's a bird named birdie. Some guys made out of fries. We'll call them fry guys.
And that's why Mayor McCheeze has a police officer that looks just like him.
I thought they were related.
Oh, yeah, it's his dumb nephew that he got a job on the first.
Yeah, I thought it was a sign of corruption.
They're like, uh, that inspector McChee's killed another fry guy in the line of duty.
We kick him off the force, but his uncle's the mayor.
Yeah.
Anyway, so that's, that's my theory about Grimiss.
He's like a Michael Mann film version of the Donald land or a Michael McDonald's film
No, I like that. Oh, okay, but about a Michael man Donald
All right, I'm I'm interested. Are we talking about goes in the show?
All right goes to the show anyway, they go to some kind of Yakuza Club.
Everyone's all tattooed up in cyborg because they find out that's where the bad guy's
transmitting from, where he hacked Enthios from.
And Major gets captured by a creepy pervert who starts hitting her with an electro prod.
Well, Batu is talking to the shirtless cyber bartender with a Robo arm.
And Stuart, I want to talk to talk to that's a health code violation
i want to talk to you as the owner of a bar
would you accept a shirtless bartender with a robot arm
he had
that that that looks awesome do you see how unhappy he was to serve him a beer
he looked so incredibly displeased with his job
and he did that movie thing too,
where he came in and just said beer. Yeah, yeah. So he's like, I should ask this guy for ID,
but he's got two human eyes. So he's probably okay. He's cool. And uh,
major is being a guy. And he doesn't need to carry a speed opener because he can just pop off the
the top with his robot hand. Would you think they were trying to go for like a Danny Trejo
in from Dustyldon type vibe with this bartender?
So I was looking at a little bit of thing called IMDB trivia.
Okay.
Okay.
And somebody postulated that it's a,
that that was a reference to the robotic armed bartender
in William Gibson's Neuromancer novel, which this person suggests
was a large influence on Cyberpunk.
Like, uh, no shit, dude.
That was a lot of what I was doing.
I was reading trivia for this and me just saying, oh shit, dude, to my phone while I was
reading it.
Uh, why? Because your phone while I was reading it. Yeah.
And why?
Because your phone was getting you mad?
Yeah, because my phone has given me information.
I'm like, this is super obvious.
I'm a hardcore console cowboy.
You're a real cyberpunk.
You're a real snow crash.
Yeah.
Oh man, now you just look like a
noob. Wait, do they say that? I don't know. Did you? Or did you just
read it? You could be lit, but you're a noob. Wow, we are sharing our energy. Hey
guys, I guess I'll go on the prodigy message board later to talk about this new King's Quest game. Okay, so so majors
under attack by these creepy guys who are really chewing the scenery. They are so
sweaty and pervy and gross. They're like, oh, they're basically human
salacious crumbs, but she doesn't take that for long. She beats them all up.
Meanwhile, Beto has a shootout in the nightclub.
The bad guys have cyber oozes.
They're shooting in a point blank range and they still miss him.
It makes no sense.
I love the idea that they're covered in metal bits, which I'm assuming are meant to be
like upgrades to make them better than humans, but they are way worse than humans.
They have these robot eyes and mouths and it's almost like, it's supposed to like cyber
upgrades, but they function like when someone in World War One would get half his face blown
off and they just make a ceramic face to go over it.
And it would be like, all right, now I have, instead of just having bandages there, I have
a weird, unmoving, unworking face that goes over my real face and I have instead of just having bandages there, I have a weird, unmoving,
unworking face that goes over my real face and I have to take it off to eat anyway.
So thanks, prosthetic technology of World War One.
Dan, do you have a hot take on prosthetic technology of World War One?
It was probably pretty good for the time.
All right, fair, fair point.
You know how to feel bad now?
Yeah, counterpoint.
You're right, I shouldn't be a
hater. So they, they chase this dude turns out, wait, don't they chase him and then he like dissolves
into a bunch of code or something? Yeah, he likes teleports away. And he still looks like a
shambling mass of rags. He teleports away. They've walked into a trap a bomb goes off major has to be repaired and guess what happens to betto's
human-like normal eyes
Nothing right?
There's a best feature. I'm sorry Stewart. They get what I got in these special contacts to wear
I saw my watch bomb to give these contacts and he sold his eyes to value a watch. Oh no. But he needs to get robo eyes.
And he's like, so for the rest of the movie, he looks like he's wearing tiny binoculars
implanted in the space. And you're like, just put some sunglasses on over those dude.
I feel like in a world where they can make Scarlett Johansson, they should be able to make
better robo eyes than the ones that they have on this guy.
Well, I mean, she does suggest like, hey, you pick those weird ones and he's like, yeah,
they're practical, but you're right.
He should put sunglasses over there.
But it's like, I feel like he got just like the budget version.
They were like, this is what your insurance will pay for.
It's essentially two tiny metal tubes stuck in your face.
And it functions like when you're looking down a paper towel tube and pretending it's a
telescope.
And they make a lot of noise when they, when they focus on things like, and here's, but
if you paid for a little more, you can get eyes that at least look like big goofy cartoon
eyes, like they still have pupils and everything.
And it's like, I'm not snow.
Let's let the insurance cover it.
I'll get the tubes.
But I have two big googly eyes, just like craft style googly eyes.
How much is it going to cost, Doc?
I love it.
I want to, I want to how women on the street.
Can I have my eyeballs bug out of my head anytime I see somebody?
Yeah, sure, if you want to pay the deductible.
Of course you can.
I wish that he had gone for big Google-Eyes,
like Godzilla in Shin Godzilla,
where his eyes are just always wide open and kind of cartoony.
That would have been,
the middle made every scene hilarious,
and then it would have gotten creepy.
He always has these like,
judge doom,
Googley eyes on his face.
Oh man, that would have been so much better.
Anyway, major is like, Doc, I've got more glitches
than the doctor says, yeah, you do,
but you're the future of humanity.
Soon we're all gonna be cyber people and cyborgs.
And it's as if to prove that true that Batou shows up
with his Luke Skywalker binocular eyes
implanted in his face.
Major then does what we would all do
after a terrifying brush with death like that.
She takes home a prostitute and touches her face for a while.
And then the shrouded bad guy shows up at the Robo morgue,
kills the technician who had much more realistic
robo eyes because they regularized a slight offer face. I robot eyes because they slide regular eyes to slide off her face.
I mean, they were realistic until they slid off her face.
Yeah, that's true.
Your eyes aren't supposed to do that.
I think I know that the doctor.
Oh, boy.
Dan, I wanted to talk to you about how your eyes are always sliding off your face.
Like two eggs.
He was a question I have for you.
Eggs don't usually slide off a plate, right?
So why was that the first thing we both thought of?
cartoons. I guess yeah cartoons is the reason for a lot of things. It's that the only reason
that as a kid I knew what an anvil was. Yeah. I did not get your dad was in a blacksmith.
And my dad was not a blacksmith. Although, he was a fan of the Smiths.
Oh, that's not true.
That's a good, that's a good, that's a good segue.
My dad was a fan of in descending order,
won the Beatles, two, Bruce Spring Seen,
three, Billy Joel, four, Queen.
And five, five, the song, final countdown by Europe,
but just that one song.
That sounds like a dad to me.
Yep, that was my dad.
It's really funny because we have to listen
to the radio a lot these days
because we drive around in an automobile.
And for some reason, California radio,
it's can be divided into three types, four types of radio.
We've got some hot takes on the different
stream California in New York.
Okay, Spanish language, Mexican radio, which I love.
I love the music on it and it's great.
Hip hop radio, just not really my thing.
Stations that only play hotel California over and over again.
And stations that play a lot of Billy Joel
and Bruce Springsteen.
And I feel like those stations are just for people like me
who grew up in the East Coast and living California now. Because every time what a Billy Joel or Bruce Springsteen. And I feel like those stations are just for people like me who grew up in the East Coast and live in California now.
Because every time what a Billy Joel or Bruce Springsteen song comes on, I turn to Sam
and I'm like, this is the music daddy grew up with.
And it's not even music.
I love that much.
But it's just like such a, it's like this is the music.
I know as a kid.
Sammy, I don't want you to lose sight of your East Coast roots.
The same way every time we've had pizza out here, I'm like, Sammy, you're going to fold
your slice. And he's like, no. and it's like a little piece of my soul
crumbles away. That my son is gonna go out on the list.
Yeah, he says no and then he pulls out some tiny little like utensils like the skexies and
dark crystal. He literally eats them.
Those little finger forks that he can use to just add things. No, and he does is he takes
out a little briefcase, opens it, it's just sliced avocado in
there, puts the avocado on it.
And that's all man.
This is college food.
That's what I say the mourners cottage because I have no son.
Okay, so at the Robo morgue, the major finds out, oh, this is what the technician discovered
that made the bad guy kill her.
It's a list of people who worked on a secret project for the Hanca robot corporation, including my French doctor,
Julia Panache. So wait a minute. The the the Frank Einstein robot man who goes to kill
kill the doctor with the sleight off eyes. That doctor is looking at a like an Nintendo cartridge
that is telling her all the information
about who the guy is trying to kill.
And when the guy shows up,
she just yanks the Nintendo cartridge out of the computer.
And he kills her, and he lets her hold onto the cartridge.
Apparently.
Is that intentional?
Like, is he trying to, do you think he's trying
to lead the major to him?
Or was he just like, eh, was he really paying that much attention?
I think it's like, it could go either way.
I think he is trying to lead major to him
because he has his reasons
for wanting to talk to major.
But it's also one of those things where it's like,
if you really wanted to talk to major
that badly about this, you know where to find her.
She's trying to find you.
Why do you run away every time she tries to find you?
Why did you later into a bomb?
Yeah, why did you try to kill her? Every time he sees her, he says,
like, if you work with Hanco robotics, you'll be destroyed and it disappears.
It seems like in that moment, he can more easily say, hey, I'm doing this for a reason. Let me
explain it to you. The same way that ghosts and movies, instead of like making blood flow out of walls
and making guys peel their own faces off and eat them,
instead they can be like, hey, look,
this house was built on my grave.
I'd appreciate it if you either moved the body
or this would be my real preference
because again, this is sacred ground for me.
Move the house because I'm a ghost.
And there's a lot of ghosts here.
Let me start at the beginning.
Ghosts are real and also Native American tribal mythology.
Also the true religion since that's me and I'm a ghost.
I'm a boy.
So I guess there's a couple things I need you to do with.
My media problems, this house is on my grave.
I want you to move that.
Number two, I'm giving you proof that Christianity,
Islam, Hinduism, all those religions, not the true faith.
This was the true faith. as you can tell by the fact
that I have spiritual power from beyond the grave.
How many Christians ghosts have come back to you
and complained about how's on their graves?
Zero? Well, maybe let's take this as evidence, okay?
But setting that aside, before you spread the word
of this true gospel to the world,
so that we can all live in harmony,
can you move your house?
Please, off my grave, because it's right on my toe and it really hurts.
And that's why I'm so mad as a ghost.
Ooh, I'm so mad.
Otherwise, you know what,
why does it bother me if there's a house on my grave?
It's nice, I get to interact.
When you're watching TV, I get to watch the TV.
I even get to go in the TV
because I'm a poltergeist.
That literally means like a house ghost.
And so if anything, you're helping me achieve what I can
because if I can believe it, I can achieve it.
Now you believe in me, I appreciate that as both a ghost
and as someone who, to be honest, my history has been mostly
forgotten by mainstream America and my sacrifices.
Many of them against my will for your better life
have not been recognized.
So again, I really appreciate that you're listening
to me now as a ghost.
Maybe it took me doing a lot of crazy stuff about your house, but I think now we can open
a dialogue, really get this going. But the main thing is again, number two, number one,
please move your house or at least move it off my toe. You guys are saying, now I hear
what you're saying, but I already paid for this exorcist to come. Oh boy.
So is it Zelda room?
Is it?
Yes.
Okay.
We've worked with her before on a lot of other places.
We can do that.
Don't worry.
She's just going to make it seem like the house is playing and then leave.
And then for some reason it's not playing.
I won't be really explained.
It's a scam that Zelda and I have been running for a while.
Oh, you're very upfront about this information.
Again, I'm a ghost.
So I'm all about honest honesty and transparency.
That little ghost joke for you there, transparency,
because he can see through me.
Speaking of which, Amazon Prime's transparent,
have you seen the show?
They call it a comedy, but there's no jokes in it.
It's really just a half hour drama.
I know this because I watch you watching TV.
I went into that show and I said to everybody,
where are the laughs?
Where are the yucks?
I may be a murdered Native American ghost,
but even I need to laugh every now and then.
And Judith Light, she was so great in who's the boss.
She was on that show and she's like,
hey, let's talk about it.
Let's open a dialogue about this after we deal
with gender issues and I'm like,
that's cool intersectionality.
I can be an ally.
Anyway, guys, it's been great talk
and I should really get back to my grave.
I'll be back in a little bit later
to make some crazy things happen in your house.
See ya.
Wow, like the sign off.
So getting back to ghost in a shell,
like a ghost that lives inside a house.
I think, because isn't a house just a shell for ourselves?
Mm-hmm. And isn't a shell just a house for a little crab, a hermit crab, if you will.
Try the hermit crab burger.
It's with surf sauce.
Now, they call it a hermit crab when hermits aren't necessarily known for living in things.
Like living in...
They live in solitude.
Okay.
Or because they'll a hermital climb into your house and then drag it away on his butt.
What if that was the case that we terrifying?
These super strong hermits.
Because they're little butts expand to the size of your house and then they walk away.
See?
If you give them a bigger house, their butts get bigger.
It's fucking science, guys.
So you're saying hermits, hermitsits would be like a ring of house thieves that Herman was
running like a like a sign of mod British fagin.
And Herman's head, if you will, is like a house for your body.
It's like a house for four people who each have a pretty crazy personality.
One of them is just a sloppy party, dude.
Anyway, she learns this
just in time for the bad guy to take over the minds of two super enhanced garbage men,
give him oozees and try to kill Juliet Benos. Major gets there, there's a shootout, a
chase, invisible major, just a kung fu fight and beat some up, but Batou stops her from
killing the shooter. She's so mad. They take the shooter to a glass room. It's a classic
The bad guys been captured now we think but the shooter has he's had his memory were erased and replaced with a false one about having a child
There's a brief talk of philosophy about memory versus reality and batos like if you remember it
Doesn't that make it true? Oh, it's a difference. I don't know. It's like batto. Don't be an asshole
That's not the same thing.
Come on now.
The bad guy appears in the body of the shooter.
Says some cryptic stuff.
They trace the signal to some kind of bionic crime dorm
where there's a lot of cyber criminals
just kind of hanging out,
maxing, relaxing, cool, and all shooting
some b-ball outside of the school.
But then a couple of guys, majoring Beto.
Show up, looking for no good.
Yep, keep going.
Start to make a joke with an heroine. They got in one little fight and, uh, and majors
discovers a place where there's a bunch of human beings hooked up to wires to create
Kusei's own neural network. They learn his name is Kusei too. Uh, we go to Kusei's
Lair, which is one of those bad guy science fiction layers where there's a lot of machines
and wires, but the floor is always wet and the roof is always leaking.
And it's like, how does anything work in that room? Dan explained.
He got a really good deal on it.
It's got the openness plan, you can imagine. That's how the broker put it. Like, look, this could not be more open plan because it's just a cavern.
It's just a cavern at hot and cold running leaks.
Yeah.
So you have that.
So if you ever want to take a shower, just stand anywhere in the room
because water's leaking down all of your wiring and your machines.
It's like in the matrix how they were like, we're existing in this reality
where we can control things too.
Anyway, let's put on full length leather trench coats and sunglasses and meet in the sewers.
Let's ruin our coats and we'll bump into walls because we can't see anything because
we've got sunglasses on in the dark.
The real it error was explaining to Kuzene was like, yeah, it's sun drenched and Kuzene's
like, but wait, there's just a hole in the ceiling.
That's a skylight. Oh, okay. I got you. I got you. And he's like talking to his friend. And he's like, so my like am I a
Rub because I think this is a scam or is it really a scam? Like am I gonna see her? I think it's a scam
And they're like does your memory think it's a scam because aren't memories
And they're like, does your memory think it's a scan? Because aren't memories kind of real,
depending on who you are?
And he's like, but I want to be judged by my deeds,
not by memories.
Wait, I can't keep this going,
my purpose is to work this way.
And those are the only two ideas in the movie.
No, I don't know if you guys saw,
I did a little bit of impression of Kusei there,
which Michael Pitt, I think, created like one one part general
Grievous and one part, I don't know like a sad emo boy.
Yeah, it's like a wannabe James Dean combined with general Grievous, but he has a like a kind
of Jared Lido face.
But so Kusey can't say it's a lot of what's his name? From Jared Lado from My Soak Out Life.
Jordan Kano.
Yeah, where he just looks at the sky a lot.
Stuff's hands in his pockets.
That's what makes him hot is that he's unhappy.
He seems like he's got a lot of depth until he's started talking to him.
And then you're like, oh, you're a literate. Well, you know, he's just always yearning to get back to the
Catalan coast where he's from. Yeah, because of his name, Catalan, anyway, Kuzhe captures the
major turns out he's a man bought too, but he's not as well made as her. He's like, he's like the
Tin Man in the old Wizard of Oz novels,
halfway between becoming a, with a wood chopper and the Tin Man where he's got lots of metal
pieces all over him. He does not look great. They have the old, we're not so different you and
I speech. And she says he's like that. He's like that other column in that Hellboy story about
the two, the two golems. Oh, I was just thinking about the yesterday two almost human. No, that's not
like it. No, it's called a becoming colossus. Yeah, maybe almost colossus. That's what it's got.
I got there, but yeah, it's like the one golem and the the developed golem and the not developed
golem. Where their plan is to combine to make one giant gola. Yeah, and he ends up melting at the end, right?
Yep.
Yeah.
Because of the flame of Prometheus.
It's pretty simple stuff.
Here's the problem with what we was saying.
They're not really golems.
They're homunculi.
Ooh.
But I guess a homunculus is basically just a non-Jewish golem.
It's like an assimilated golem.
Like, I think that's conversation.
And when the homunculized parents come back, they're like, you never go to synagogue.
Bacon in your house.
And he's like, I'm going to be a homunculized.
Like, everybody else, I'm not a golem anymore.
Anyway, and we can write a 100 year old play about it in the edition.
But so, Kuzae says, we're not so different.
You and I just I don't kill innocent people. And he goes, who's really innocent? So they've got those two Klesheys
right out of there off the bat. He reveals she wasn't the first cerebral salvage job.
He was one, too. And he paved the way for a creation, but he was a failure. And they threw
him away. And he's killing everyone who created him. But he does see himself as man's replacement.
He and major are the future of technology. But he's kind of, again, like we said, he's killing everyone who created him. But he does see himself as man's replacement. He and Major are the future of technology.
But he's kind of, like we said, he's kind of junky.
He has that Max Headroom speech glitch
where every now and then he'll just be like,
ggg, he'll be like, no, we don't have to go,
go, go, go, go over there.
And it's like, I don't know that digital technology
would really glitch like that.
Like maybe he's buffering, do you think that's what it is?
Like he's always buffering. And they're both haunted by the same memory.
She's been using medicine up till now to suppress her glitches and he says, no, no, don't take it.
That suppresses your memory. And he uses the word ghost and shell a bunch. You're a ghost in a shell.
They can take away your ghost even though they made your shell. And then Kusey runs off.
Major goes to her French doctor.
And the French doctor just breaks down instantly
and admits there were 98 previous attempts
to form major and says that they gave her fake memories.
She wasn't really a refugee that was killed by terrorists.
And now, and she gives her what like a hotel key
or something, an apartment key to tell her the future.
You know, this is where your real past is.
Yeah.
And many, like I mentioned earlier, a lot of scenes of people telling Scarletchohansim
that she's beautiful.
Oh, you're beautiful.
You're beautiful.
As if she's just an object, the movie treats her this way.
The other thing that the movie doesn't really get that it's commenting on itself, I think,
is that both Kuse and Scarletchohansim when they learn their true identities, they're both have Japanese names.
They're both were clearly Japanese, but were put into white bodies by the scientists.
Yeah, well, that was the big whitewashing scandal.
It wasn't necessarily like the fact that they just, the fact that they recast with a white
actress.
It was like, oh, in the end, you know, like, it turns out that this white person what used to be a Japanese person within the world of the movie.
And like the idea of like beauty standards, like apparently.
Japanese people are deemed less, you know, like, they don't want to make them into like the perfect robot.
Like, that was one concern that people had.
It just, it feels like the movie is doing it. The movie, the characters in the movie are doing what the movie is doing.
And I don't know if the movie is smart enough
that that's a comment on itself,
that it's like, oh, just like we had to cast white actors,
I mean, to, for a bigger box office,
they took these Japanese characters,
they took these Japanese brains and put them in white bodies.
I can't tell if the movie is slightly like digging at itself or if it's just oblivious and is like, oh, what? I don't
know, whatever. That's a perfect imitation of the movie. Oh, Michael, ghost in the show.
All these plates. I can't carry them all at once. Smash, crash, boot, bash. You're fired from my
restaurant ghost in the shell.
Give me another chance, Mr. Wilkins.
This is my favorite one, realers from the 20s.
Ghost in the shell in, uh, in the food fiasco.
Yeah, it's, it's pretty like, and now in the, I can't remember in the original story,
was it a brain in a robot body
or was it a robot brain with like,
like was there an idea?
Was she totally a robot?
Because, I mean, the idea,
because I remember it having something like,
the idea of ghosts in the shells,
the idea of like a robot having like,
kind of a robot or an AI have a soul.
Yes.
And she's not a robot.
She's got a fucking brain, dude.
That's, she's basically a human.
Well, that's the thing they keep saying.
Like, she's like, what am I?
Am I a person?
I'm, I'm just a weapon and like, well, you do have a human brain.
Like that's, yeah.
Let's see.
I'm taking a look at the, let's look at the, I'm looking on Wikipedia about the original
setting.
All right. So in the meantime.
So let's vamp a little bit.
So I got a new cat recently, Meatball Wellington.
He's adorable.
How is muscles treating him?
Well, muscles is not, well, muscles was behaving very poorly before we got meatball.
And he was just really anxious,
and he was mowing a lot,
and he was jumping all over us all the time.
And we play with him,
but it didn't seem to help.
But since we've gotten meatball,
he's behaving a lot better.
He's not totally sure what to make in meatball.
And meatball doesn't clean himself as well as muscles would like.
So muscles has to get down for some aggressive grooming. Oh, that's sweet. It's kind of sweet. I'm sure it's also like a bullying tactic
where it's like, I'm going to show you how to clean your own butt. Yeah. Yeah. Like bullies
do. That's what I was thinking. Like, is that what I would do to bully someone? Just hold
them down. You've never been bullied in elementary school right where you got held down
and people clean your butt properly. Okay guys, I think I figured it out. Okay. I think she's just a robot.
Okay. In the original? Yeah, although I don't know, let's see.
know let's see. This is good audio.
Yeah.
So Dan, did you ever read the Ghost on the Shelf comic book?
Oh, I see.
So here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
And so she, I think she does, if she is a brain in a body, but she's not sure if she's
actually a human brain or if she's just a full-on robot.
And that's the riddle that the devils are existence.
I'm sorry, it took me so long to reread that stuff.
I reread the entire comic book and then watch the movie again.
Well, you're doing that.
But here, it's pretty clear it's a human brain.
They keep telling her, you're a human, you got a human brain.
It's, there's not this end, the bad guy in the movie, I think, is also a fully cybernetic thing.
But I'm not sure.
Yeah.
In the original.
Yeah, anyway.
It's like an AI weapon that was developed by this, like, developed concurrently by the same
people or something.
I think.
Yeah.
Anyway, let's get back to this movie.
Major has gone swimming in the harbor with Glowie Jellyfish because she says it's the
only place she can escape the data feed
and feel real.
But then, oh, Hanco security.
Sometimes you just got unplugged, Elliot.
Yeah, and you had to unplug the grid.
How do you unplug and go off the grid
when you are the grid and you're made out of plugs?
Oh, man.
It's very hard to do.
Ilkay Dick title.
And what would that title be?
No, how do you unplug and go off the grid when you are the grid and made out of plugs? Oh, yeah, that's a title. And what would that title be? No, how do you unplug and go off the grid when you
are the grid and made out of plugs? Oh, yeah, it's a pretty long title. That's true.
He did. Yeah. Like that one, everything you always wanted to know about crazy alternate
realities. We're afraid to ask asterix. Astrix. The adventurous journey of Philip Gay-Morrigan or something like that.
Because he liked putting just people's random character names into titles too.
There's that one from the mixed up files of Mr. Philip Kay Dickerson.
About those two kids who get lost inside of their own perceptions of reality.
And of course, Mr. Philip Kay Dick and the rats of Nimm.
That's where a bunch of rats were fed space drugs.
Yeah, super smart robots.
So major gets captured by Hanco security.
This is one of those movies where there's a corporation that essentially functions as the
state.
There is a government because the Keshe-Gitano keeps talking about how he works for the
prime minister, but the head of Hanco, whose name is Cutter, so you know he's a bad guy.
He just like has his own private army of masked guys that he sends on missions to fight
people, but no one puts two and two together.
They capture major.
Hanko tells the doctor, Julia Pinot, to terminate major, but the doctor says, no, I won't do
it.
Instead, the doctor frees major.
That's when she gives her.
She gives her some kind of thing and says, here, here, here won't do it. Instead of the doctor frees major, that's when she gives her. She gives her some kind of thing and says,
here, here, here's your real past.
Major escapes lots of hallway fighting.
She drags a guy on a motorcycle.
Then the cutter kills the doctor,
but tells to Keshe Katano that Major did it
and that Major has become corrupted and a terrorist.
Meanwhile, Major's not doing terrorist stuff.
She goes to an apartment building
because what Juliet Benosh gave her was like,
either a key or a disc, something with a room number on it.
One of those Nintendo cartridges.
Yes, yeah.
She finds a cat who likes her and an older lady who says that her daughter, the older lady
with almost no, nothing to trigger it just suddenly starts talking about her life and
how she had a dog who ran away and died.
Well, I don't know that, but she also just invites Scarlett Johansson in.
This total stranger.
She's a huge star, dude.
I mean, I know that the older woman is lonely since her daughter went away, but so she's
like preparing info dump.
Yeah.
It does feel like the movie should have a countdown clock that's like exposition dump
in three, two, one two one and the old age are
going, oh my runaway daughter, she was always writing her anti technology manifestos and then she joined the
squatters on clay and then she died the police said she killed herself, but I don't know that doesn't sound like her.
Hey, I think it's more likely she turned into a robot.
Speaking of which, Scarlett Johansson, you remind me a lot of my daughter.
It's the way that you look at me, which is like, so did your daughter always look at you
with a vague sense of confusion like, why is this old lady talking to me?
Because that's the look on Scarlett Johansson's face.
Major reveals everything to her boss, who believes her, but Cutter is eavesdropping on the conversation.
Uh oh, masked Hanco thugs go to assassinate Kes Keshe Katano, but come up. Big mistake, dude.
Big mistake. He's a badass. Who has, even though they have oozees, he has a six shot revolver.
And the briefcase and a briefcase that he uses as a shield and his hair probably repels
bullets. See, they just bounce off of that cloth. He's awesome. So he kills the thugs.
Hanco's men are trying to kill off the major's team all over the place, but they can't
do it because major's team is so good.
Major goes back online to talk to Kuse.
And he, he leads her into the lawless zone.
Uh oh.
And cutter sends in something called a spider tank, which is exactly what it sounds like.
It's a tank with spider legs.
It is not a tank full spider.
It's not like a fish's a tank with spider legs. It is not a tank full of spiders.
It's not like a fish tank filled with spiders. He says they'll think this is cool. I'll trick them
into thinking they're at an arboretum. Shoot the spiders out. It's tank thing. What do you call that?
No, no, no. It's basically just the grim gritty reboot of that tank that Kenneth Brana has in Wild
Wild West, which was like
that big spider rector set that he would, that he was piloting.
But Scarlet Johansson in the law and so on, shared members in a flashback that she and
Kuse were both these runaways.
They were super close like brother and sister in this squat.
And the police came in and stole them to use them in experiments, or not the police.
I guess it was the Hanco people to use them in experiments, or not the police. I guess it was the Hanco people. To use them in these experiments to make brain bots,
whose name was Hideo and Major was Motoko.
And you're like, yeah, again, this is weird
that they were turned into non-Japanese people.
I mean, you mentioned it before, but like the idea
that they could be trying to make a comment on the idea
of taking these Japanese characters
and putting them in like white robot bodies basically.
Like they could be making some kind of comment on it,
but wasn't there a controversy
where like the visual effects team were trying to,
like make the characters look more Asian?
Yeah, make the characters look more Asian.
I mean, she definitely, her makeup and hair,
it does feel like they're trying to,
and it might just be that they're trying to copy the design of the character from the
I mean, which would make sense. I mean so much there's a lot of like shot for shot stuff in this. Yeah, but it does feel like they tried to make her look a little more Asian like
We'll uh, we'll just fudge it a little bit. We're not gonna go full
Catherine Hepburn and Dragon seed.
Not going to go cloud Atlas with the horror
of Hugh Jackman and Yellowford.
Or not, what's his name?
Come on.
No, the other one,
man, Laurie.
No way, the other guy.
Peter Laurie.
Oh man, my brain's slowly firing up.
Lauren's a dollar.
I'm glitching, guys.
No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, god. I'm glitching guys. No, no.
No, no.
Elrond, Elrond, Matrix man.
What's his name?
Hugo Weaving.
Hugo Weaving in yellow cases.
No, no, Stuart.
No, Stuart, you go Weaving.
Oh man, I can't wait to meet him Sunday.
It's like I make that joke to his face.
Nice to meet you.
Hugo Weaving. No, you go Weaving. That's a little funny when to his face. Nice to meet you. Hugo weaving. No, you go weaving.
Ah, that's a little funny one. Ellie Kaelin. Nice to meet you.
I'd love to work again. So anyway, I wanted to cast you in this movie. Not interested. Okay, thank you.
Not interested. Make sure.
Alan.
After what I said, I don't want to work with me either.
Kuzai says, Gives Are the Old, join me, together will,
whatever will usher in the next stage of Humanities,
and then cut her attacks with his spider tank.
And just like in any of these movies,
the head of the corporation is personally piloting
this device from his house.
When it seems like in a situation like that,
you really want plausible deniability to say that,
like, oh, the rogue operator did it.
It's kind of hard for that when you're literally controlling it
yourself at your house.
They should have gotten Hugh Jackman from Chaffey to pilot it.
He was super into piloting a giant robot.
But he was the head of that company too.
I mean, just that division.
That's true, just the division.
Sigourney Weaver was the head of the company, right?
That sounds familiar.
Yeah, I remember we've had a company. I remember he was talking to a hockey player haircut. Yeah. And how he always had like a gun on his hip,
even when he was just walking around the office. Yeah. And his ill cutoff shorts.
I mean, that's the kind of shorts grown up men wear.
Come on. High and tight. You want you want a three or four
inch inseam. It will you want so you want it so long that it becomes an out seam at a certain point.
Anyway, they get beat up real good by this spider tank. Who's a abandoned his body, but Major
says she's not ready to go yet. They do blow up the spider tank, though.
She punches it so hard so many times that it she breaks it open. Her team saves her from
snipers who have been sent in just in case the spider tank didn't do the job. It's like
the head of the company is like, I'll take care of this myself. Send me the spider tank,
but send in a couple of guys to just in case the spider tank plan doesn't work out. Like, uh, uh, we're gonna, we're
gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna send in a bunch of missile strikes, but also maybe like,
uh, can you send some mean dogs in afterwards just in case, uh, but then to cashy shows up,
arrests cutter shoots him. And for instance, he shoots him in self defense, but cutter's
not dead. And then he calls major and he says, do I have your consent to execute him because
throughout the movie, they would ask Major for his consent
to go in and change your memory,
or do some data mining.
And then at a certain point they revealed,
we never needed your consent.
That was all fiction.
But now, because you get to know Asher for a consent,
she says, I consent and he shoots him in cold blood.
I thought that was actually genuinely kind of effective.
The repetition of, do you have your consent?
And then the obvious, I mean, it was like a clear reveal that like they didn't actually
need our consent, but I felt like that was a way that they got at the themes of the movie.
A little more like leverly. Up until the last part where she's like, do you consent to me totally
killing this dude? Yeah. But before that, no, I totally agree with you. I thought that was cool.
Yeah. Well, that's one of those things where it's like they've set up a legal fiction for her benefit
to continue fooling her and then they reveal it when they don't need it anymore, which is a smart
thing to do. But then it just becomes like, I'm going to say this bad ass thing before I blow
this guy away. And that's justice. Wait a minute. Hold on. hold on, because there is no law into Keshe's town.
The only law is to Keshe's gun.
And that town is called...
To Keshe's Castle.
And it's a game show.
So she goes and visits Motoku's grave and reunites with her mom kind of.
She tells her mom, you don't have to come here anymore,
which is kind of,
I don't think she ever really explains to her,
I'm your daughter's brain inside a robot body.
She's just a tellin' old lady at her daughter's grave,
you don't need to come here anymore.
It's kind of a rude thing to say.
And we cut to everything's back to normal,
big animated hologram advertisements everywhere
and Scarletchohansson,
back to what she does best brooding
over the city in a long trench coat over her naked robot body. She gives a monologue about her
memories don't define us or actions do. That's the message. And then they say your mission is go.
She throws off her coat, jumps off the building for some invisible kung fu,
and salutes the audience as if to say, hey, I appreciate you sitting through this.
Do you think the rooftops of future Hong Kong are just littered with
trench coats that have been discovered? Why does she bother with the code if she's just
going to take it off every time she goes into battle? Because it's part of the fucking illusion,
dude. People are into the fantasy illusion that she's cold. She wants to remain inconspicuous
when she's brooding perched on top of a roof.
If she doesn't have nothing, they're like, what's that weird nippleless robot that looks
like Scarlett Jones doing up there?
But the trench coat, they're just like, up, there's just Scar Joe, cold on a roof.
All right, sure.
So we've gone way long.
We should get to final judgments whether this was a good bad movie, a bad bad movie, or a
movie we kind of liked.
What do you think, Stuart?
I don't know.
So this is a movie that I definitely, I think I'm leaning in between bad, bad, and movie
I kind of liked, because there's things I like about it like.
That's an interesting divide. that's an interesting divide.
That's an interesting divide.
Because I don't think it's a good, bad movie.
Like, it's not like, oh, I watched this dumb piece of shit and laugh about it.
But it's, and there's things about it that I like.
I mean, part of it is that it's reminding me of a movie that I remembered
enjoying watching back in the 90s.
But I like, and I feel like despite the fact that there's,
there's obviously a lot of CGI,
and this is almost all digitally created,
it still feels kind of physical,
like it still feels a little gritty.
And I like that they make a lot of effort
to make every character have some kind of a touch or nuance, like even if it's just like a little bit of metal in their face.
Like I think all that stuff's pretty cool and it's just kind of bland. It doesn't make a lot of sense. It's kind of boring.
But it looks great. Yeah, I mean, I kind of liked this movie.
But that's on the sliding scale of Flophouse movies.
I feel like probably the plot was kind of obvious and dull.
And like at the end, you're kind of like, oh, is that all there is?
Is that all there is to a movie?
Yeah, and I mean, there he is.
That's all there is.
Are you supposed to root for Michael?
Are you supposed to root for Michael Pitt's character?
Cause he's like just changing some fucking poor garbage truck
drivers memories and getting him killed.
Like, that sucks.
That was a scene I didn't quite understand where it was like,
he's like, I have a daughter, you gotta let me out of this prison cell and they're like, he never
had a daughter. They inserted fake memories into him. It's like, why does to turn him into
a super assassin for three minutes? Why was it necessary to give him a fake memory of
a fake daughter? Like, that seems like a weird move for Kuzee. That's like, why why even
bother to put that much imagination into it, Kuzi?
Yeah, but I agree with Stuart that like, I mean, there's a lot of CGI in it, but I like
the look of the film. And I think it'd be like it's stylish without being like flashy
too many cuts kind of filmmaking, Michael Bay over over stylized stuff.
And though it's like flashy and colorful,
I don't think it's overwhelming.
Yeah.
I don't know what a,
like I'm saying all these things that make me sound like
I didn't like it that much.
So it's weird that I said kind of liked it.
But I also don't know about Scarlett Johansson's performance.
Like she's like so athectalist,
and I know that she's supposed to be a robot,
but it's hard to be sort of charmed by her in any way,
because there's no personality there.
I mean, she can be good at playing a character
that's like weird and alien,
like she did in Under the Skin,
where she's like a total mystery.
Wait, she was an alien in that.
I don't know, but for some reason I still kind of have a good time watching it.
I maybe it's just this California sunshine, but I'm feeling much harsher on this than you
guys are.
Yeah.
I didn't think it was a good bad movie.
I didn't like, oh, I want to laugh at it. I didn't think it was a good bad movie. I didn't like, I want to laugh at it.
I didn't really like it.
It's like, it's not, it's a perfectly serviceable movie.
I'm giving it a bad, bad, more just because like,
there are much better versions.
There's literally a better version of this movie
in the cartoon version, but I feel like there are better
versions of a movie set in the future about what makes you
real and what makes you human and like, but what makes you a robot and what makes you a movie, it's set in the future about what makes you real and what makes you human
and like, what makes you a robot and what makes you a person, what makes you a soul.
And like, to make a new version of that and to really make it something that I'm going
to be like, yeah, that was good.
The bar is so high.
And they just kind of, it was so serviceable that just kind of didn't clear it for me.
The whole time I was watching it i was like
yeah i've seen this movie before and it's not giving me for all the stuff they did like practical effects and stuff it didn't have the spark i was looking for a run like that's something i haven't seen before
so call me jaded
mhm
but i'm gonna say by default bad bad
uh... i have a question guys they kept uh... They kept one of the visual things from the movie where
the like secretaries hand breaks open and is a whole bunch of tiny little digits that
they can like tap on a keyboard super fast with. If you can jack your head into the internet,
why would you have to do that with your hands and how much faster can you type? I guess
you could just, I mean, at that point, you think text to speech
would be so much better or just creating the or speech to text and like, or
just in thinking it into words in your head, like, yeah, why are you still typing?
That's just seemed making those super, finely calibrated little hand type
or things seems much more complicated.
Yeah.
There's a fun thing in a lot of,
I feel like they do it in steam punk movies
and that's part of the joke,
but also in future movies where it's like,
it's not impressive looking to show
how you would really solve this problem.
So I'm gonna do it in the same way that like,
we can use the internet and phones and things like that
with amazing power on very small devices,
but they're like, that doesn't look cool, so I'm gonna make this one enormous,
and there'll be huge thick cables lying everywhere, because it looks a lot better,
even though that's not really how we would do it.
Yeah.
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Dan, can you explain, you use a Casper mattress,
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Well, the sink is where you go to get your water
when you do.
And the bounce is this third part of the title, The Big Bounce.
It's a movie that's started on Wilson that everyone forgot about.
Wow.
I'm surprised you didn't say about the movie bounce.
And I feel like it's where the pulp drove.
Oh, yeah.
I forgot about that movie so much that I didn't remember it.
That's the way for getting works.
Do you know the interesting thing about The Big big bounce is that the second part of that title
is the title of another movie called Big.
That is the interesting thing about the big bounce.
Yeah, here's an interesting thing, Dan.
Tell us how much you like using your Casper mattress.
Oh yeah, no, I, that was what you were.
That was what I was trying to set up.
I'll be clear next time.
I'll be clear next time.
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I mean, there's not like air permeating the fabric.
No, not yet, yeah.
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And how many times can you use that?
Like if you're trying to set up like a princess
in the PE situation, right, with a bunch of mattresses,
yeah, stacked on top of each other,
we're a bunch of peas stacked on top of one mattress.
That I don't know.
I don't know what that's like. If you can feel the mattress under this pile of peas,
and truly you're a hobo.
I just can't sleep on these peas.
There's something bothering me.
Yeah, I don't know the answer to that question, too.
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Is it just a big box full of deadpool t-shirts?
Yeah, that's a t-shirt that says
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Parts welcome. Was that the original USA network slogan? They changed it to characters welcome,
which was really parts welcome. What's the font on that one? No, it's not saying these lies about the...
Yeah, Dan, let me talk for a moment.
Okay. For once in your life, let me talk.
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It's made it easier for me to try changing my style up because I get somebody else's input,
you get your individual style coordinator or whatever they're called who personally hand
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and I get it in the mail I put it on sometimes I'm like oh this is not something if
I saw it in the store I would ever think of buying but it looks really good now that I put it on.
And sometimes you get things.
You didn't know you were a tank top guy.
Exactly, yeah, thank you.
But it's literally like a tank, like a top of a tank.
Oh, cool.
Yeah.
And sometimes I'm like, this is too much for me.
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And the brands they have are good,
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So, BOMFEL, won't you?
I'd recommend it.
I use it a lot.
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first-person. When you visit BOMFEL.com slash flop house, it's B-O-M-B-F-E-L-L.com slash
flop house. Hey, when you put on this close, you're going to look like a bomb fell on you,
a fashion bomb. It's for clear-fung. Yes, otherwise it would be terrible.
Why do you, I gave a jumbo tron to to read?
I forget which one I think he gave it to me.
Let me just, uh, Jack into the internet right now, into the flop and it.
Okay, powering up.
Okay, this message is for Jonah.
The message is from Edith Tina and friends.
Jonah, happy birthday and congratulations on starting a PhD.
From all of us, we hope you still have time for bad movies now that you've started
school, especially with the impending, shocktober.
Here's the gift you've always wanted, A message immortalized in an episode of the
flop house. Hopefully read by Stuart from Edith Tina and friends. Meow. That reminds me.
Shocktober was mentioned in that lovely message. I know that this being September, this should
be a small timber episode small
Vember the that's why we watched teeny tiny little movie goes to the show yeah
go small we watch goes to the show because I know how small that goes has to be to fit in that little show
I forgot I forgot that when we were recording it that I mean we're still August right now. I forgot that it would be a September episode.
But what's the weight of a human spirit, Elliott?
That would be 21 grams.
Thank you.
I thought it was seven pounds.
I don't know what that has to do with anything.
But the point is there's two more Saturdays, flop Saturdays, and September. So we're going to have our usual programming on those two Saturdays.
Dan, you don't need to apologize to these people.
I just want to, if anyone was confused, apologize to the us because our favorite time
of year, small, remember.
Because let me tell you what, let me tell you what months people look forward to in the
flop.
Cage Miss number one, Chaktober number two,
Kage miss and July number three,
all the other months and then at the bottom, small number.
I don't think that's true.
Well, I look forward to small number more than...
Small number.
Any other month of the year, I think,
because we get the really crazy shit with the small movies.
What the hell was that?
What was that noise?
We did a little fully work.
What I was moving around some stuff over here.
Okay.
Before I move on.
Because I have my DVD for our first small Vemper movie.
And I want to make sure that it was right here in front of me so I could gaze at it
longingly.
Did you guys,
have you guys ever like bought a DVD or a Blu-ray and you're excited, okay,
no, let me finish.
And you're excited to, excited to watch it, but like you couldn't watch it right away.
So you just like looked at the box a lot.
That was me with, with toys when I was a kid.
I used to, I used to take like video game box, if I couldn't play video, like a video game when I was a kid. I used to take like video game box,
if I couldn't play video game when I first bought it,
I'm like, I'm gonna take this to the bathroom
and read the manual.
And boy, the first time I took a new game to the bathroom
and I found out that they don't package them
with manuals anymore,
because it's all like in-game information.
I was so bummed, I just had to sit on the toilet
and look at a fucking disc.
Dan, look at a fucking dick. I guess.
Dan, Dan, please. Dan. Dan. Dan. Dan. Dan. Dan. Dan. Dan. Dan. Dan. Dan.
Dan. Dan. Please, please, Dan. Dan. Dan. Dan. Dan. Dan, please, please, Dan.
Dan.
Dan.
Yeah.
You got a message for us, Dan?
Dan.
Dan?
Well, Dan.
First off, Dan.
Dan.
Dan.
If you want to get up on the jumbo-tron,
go to maximumfun.org slash jumbo-tron.
But I also want to thank a few people for things they've sent.
I want to thank Alan for the copy of Zola, the extreme sports movie.
Christine for the three Christian DVDs.
Him for the creepy collector card set.
Dan for the copy of Past the Ammunition.
Billy for the three books and Steve for the Monster posters.
So thanks.
And I'd like to thank everybody who came out to my little fly pass meetup at GenCon.
What, I guess that was last week now.
Thanks for coming and hanging out in the lobby of a hotel and playing a game where most
of the answers were me or my friends jokes.
I kind of felt like a dumbass for making people do that,
but you guys were all really cool.
All right.
I'd like to thank all the people who have read our
Flockhouse Funny Scamack books,
and I wanna make sure they know that there's more on the way,
and I wanna thank all the people who are going to be
at our live shows coming up in the fall.
Ooh, exciting.
Ooh, in October, we've got one in LA.
In one in LA, October 8th, we've got one in Toronto,
in October 21st, and we've got one in San Francisco.
When is that December something?
December 9th.
December 9th.
We had said before that the Toronto show was sold out. I heard
a rumor that people were still getting tickets. So maybe check on that. If you are possibly
interested and it could be that we got misinformation, I don't know. Everybody thought they were
getting tickets to chop off Laplace, then they found out they were wrong and they were getting tickets to Chop-O Flop House, and they found out they were wrong, and they were returning them.
Yeah.
Dan, I think Dan, you said you want just a really intimate show of like just 10 people
in there with us, right?
Right.
Yeah, that's it.
It's a more of a cabaret.
And they everyone gets sort of drinks and curly fries.
Is that what they do with cabaret shows?
That's right.
So Dan, what you're saying is
everybody knows that the Toronto show sold out. But what your book supposed is is maybe it didn't.
That's right. That's a Royal Tenervaugh's joke. Okay. There's a joke or was it a reference?
What's the difference in today's internet world, Dan? Make a meme out of it. I don't know.
Alright. So now it's time for letters from listeners. Listers like you. And the first letter is from Janna who writes... The other night I introduced my husband to Elliott product placement, mystery science theater 3000.
Although she was watching the classic episodes,
it's because she says she watched Manos, the hands of fate.
Although it is a very well rated zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes,
I was introduced to my new favorite B-movie character, Torgo.
Well, it looks very clear. Let's be clear introduced to my new favorite B-movie character,
Torgo.
Yeah, everybody looks for a go.
Let's be clear though, this is a Z movie.
This is not a B movie.
That's true.
Manos is barely a movie.
It's as about as low as movies get.
Still, look, you gotta give credit to anybody who says,
I don't know how to make a movie,
but I'm gonna make one anyway.
Yeah, I guess you do.
I guess that's one philosophy of life.
I guess you don't gotta.
Not anything about it.
You don't gotta give credit to guys,
I don't know how to make a movie.
And you're like, maybe you should just like,
not do that and do something else more useful.
Like start a soup kitchen.
Yeah.
Just imagine how bad the soup kitchen
that the guy from Make manos would make.
The soup would be inedible. They just throw it at people and they wouldn't even give it to poor people. They'd give it to us like cats and dogs. Yeah. So anyway, and not and not poor cats
and dogs, not strays, very wealthy ones who do not need that soup. Yeah. They're really good for
the bad justices. They're used to eating fancy feast out of crystal govlets.
Yeah.
Anyway, Torgo has taken...
Just like in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Goblet.
Full of fancy feast.
Boy, that was a disappointing one, right?
They're really looking, they've got, they're going really way down the list for MacGuffins
in these movies.
He's like, legend tells of a crystal goblet that the wealthiest cat in the world would
eat its food out of.
We've got to put it in a museum.
Yeah, mutts on the case.
What?
Isn't that child a boob's character?
Mut?
Yeah, his name is Mut.
That's the name of a dog, guys.
Yeah.
All right.
He's like, I hate cats, guys. Yeah. All right.
He's like, I hate cats, love snakes.
So I hope that answers your question.
No, there's more letter.
Torgo has taken over for my previous favorite Zardads.
I never thought I could find another character.
I could adore more than a floating head that can treat
Sean Connery, post bond, as an inferior being.
It's hell Torgo.
Oh, Torgo. So I questiontorgo. Oh, Torgo.
So I question to gentlemen.
Oh, Torgo.
What is your favorite character from a B movie?
Perhaps the character that most people wouldn't know about,
that won you over because the character made the film
just a little less intolerable.
And a second question, if you have the time,
after the girl on girl, on girl,
on girl, on on girl fight scene in
Manos, I wanted to know what is the best worst fight scene you can remember. Again, that's
from Jana. So there are two big questions. Thanks for writing in Jana. I've got an answer
for that first question. My favorite character from B movie is someone I believe I've talked
about on this podcast. And I know I talked about them on my recent appearance on Jordan Jesse Goe, but that would be the robot janitor
from ROTOR.
ROTOR is a pretty, not very good,
but pretty funny Robocop ripoff,
and there's a robot janitor that works in the laboratory
where they invent a Robocop,
and he is so bumbling and absent-minded that my theory,
I'll just state it again,
that they had written a part for an absent-minded
bumbling janitor and a robot auditioned and nailed the part and they just gave the part to the robot.
But he's he is like such a fun character. I would love to see a movie or comic book
series just about that robot janitor. What do you think, Stu? Robert Lozia, no deposit? I mean,
he's great in that. It's tough for me. Like, both of these questions
are kind of tough because I'm having trouble separating movies that are like B movies
for movies I actually like. And from the B movie, which is a movie I actually like.
No, I'm kidding. I don't like that. Have you seen the B movie? No, I haven't seen the B movie of you.
Guys, let's stop judging things we haven't seen yet.
Okay.
Okay.
So I shouldn't make any more B movie jokes.
Okay, guys, so Dan,
after we're done recording this,
go through all of the episodes we've ever recorded.
Edit out every reference I make
to not liking the B-movie.
And then reput them all up on iTunes or SoundCloud
or whatever you do.
I don't know how you do it, but I don't know
how you do that magic that you do.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, like the first, I mean, I don't necessarily, I would call the Phantasm movies
B movies, but I don't think they're bad.
They're just like, you know, they're kind of B movies.
And Reggie Bannister is a clear star in those movies as Reg.
And he's, I mean, come on, he's awesome.
You don't usually get a balding ponytail,
ice cream man with a vest, with a head, your hero.
Yeah.
But I love about him is, is a, he's a character who,
the older he gets as the series goes on,
the cooler they try to make him out to be.
I feel like in the first movie,
he's very clearly the kind of like goofy sidekick
to the real cool older brother
But as he becomes the hero of the series as it goes on
They're like oh shit. I guess we have to make him the cool guy and it kind of works, but it's still pretty ridiculous
Yeah, oh man, it's so great. He's such a ladies man
Oh, it's awesome
And we don't have to answer the second question if we if we don't have any good answers because you know
She was pretty sneaky sneaking in two questions like that pretty sneaky janna. Oh wait, I have that I have I have a nominee
I don't know if it's the best worst fight scene, but the fight scene in Jim cotta where that pommel horse appears out of nowhere in that
Nidival village. That's pretty good. It's a pretty good bad fight. I
Just remembered something this is not a movie, but I watched.
Watching that really happen to me, but I got in a fight in third grade.
I lost. That was the worst fight.
Yeah. The NBC had their terrible Peter Pan live production.
And I watched some of that.
And at the end, Christopher
walkin and Allison Williams have a sword fight and it is just as skilled as
you would imagine both of those people being as fensors. Like I think I tweeted
at the time that looked like a fight between two windshield wipers that on
slow and that was a pretty bad fight scene.
And we to promote your Twitter feed that's at dank mccoi.
That's true.
On Twitter.
Yeah, I've been speaking of whitewashing.
I've been watching Iron Fist and man, that is some bad martial arts on that show.
No thank you.
But that doesn't square because he's supposed to be the greatest martial arts fighter
in the world.
I know.
Maybe they, maybe they slowed it down for Western audiences to see like they did to Jetley
and lethal weapon for who knows.
And Bruce Lee when he was, when he was on the green hornet show.
Yeah.
They were like slow it down, Bruce, slow it down because he also used to deliver his lines
as fast as he could fight.
Yeah. And you got to get that, as fast as he could fight. Yeah.
And you got to get it out.
Time's funny.
A young boy watched that on TV and was like, Hey, and that boy grew up to be.
Oh no, and that boy's name was the Micro Machines man.
And now you know the rest of the story.
This next letter goes like this.
It's from Trevor last name with held Trevor know your boss. Wow
I'm new to the show so I'm going to your back catalog. Sorry about some of those I just listen to the
I just listen to the Atlas shrugged episode and I have to say I love the addition of new co-hosts Schuban Parang
He's so much more insightful and engaging than that party animal he used to be on the show.
I think his name was Selbert Walking Horn.
It's crazy that you waited so long since the trespass episode
to make him a permanent host,
but I guess Elliot had to go through an audition too.
I can't wait to continue listening to this new
presumably permanent addition to the show.
Yep.
And since he mentioned in the Atlas episode
that he never got fan mail,
hopefully this will make his day. My question is, what actor would you love to see in a remake of
a film you love? I thought Oscar Isaac would do a great job in the Nicholson role in five easy
pieces. And I love the idea of a remake of the conversation starring Nicholas Cage, seriously.
And for some reason, Juben isn't around when you answer this. Feel free to direct this towards whatever awesome dude happens to be in the studio. Love Trevor
Lasting with help. Oh, Stewart. No, it's cool, guys. You know, I take it and stride. Water
off a stew's back. You know what they say. You wait, wait, why would you pour water in
your stew? It's already pretty watery.
It's stew. You don't want to make it. It's going to be thick. I guess, but maybe you want soup to
feed your fancy animals. I guess you want like a thick roux. You know, you don't want it to be
too watered down. Yeah. Rue metana ham. That is. I was going to make her move. I'm just not gonna make her move. I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move.
I'm just not gonna make her move. I'm just not gonna make her move. I'm just not gonna make her move. I'm just not gonna make her move. I'm just not gonna make her move. I'm just not gonna make her move. I'm just not gonna make her move. dated and I you know who might have the chops to be like a charismatic bad guy like Robert Shaw but still dignified maybe like John Travolta.
Okay, I'm following you.
You know, you know, he can play a believable bad ass cool guy like no other actor.
Yeah, and Walter Matthouse part is a real hang dog kind of like Shmo who's just put in
this situation but he's more clever than you think.
So when I think like kind of a like loser who never gets what's going to him,
it's kind of hangdog, I think maybe like
and sell Washington maybe.
Wow, I think you hit the nailed it in one, dude.
Yeah, yeah, that's what I would see, yeah.
I think it would be an interesting experiment though.
If you had to, you had to recast,
taking fell in one, two, three,
who actually would you recast with, do you think?
I'm trying to think of like, like, John Tattaro, maybe in the Walter Math I role, he's kind of like,
got a, like, a bit of the same vibe. I could see that. I could see that. That sound was John
Tattaro driving by outside, honking his horn in approval. Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you who would play the Martin Ball some snazzy guy role.
Wallace Sean.
Yeah.
Oh, perfect.
I would love to see Wallace Sean in the heist.
Actually, I would love to see Wallace Sean in the Robert Shaw role.
I think that would be amazing.
He's just like a super tough as nails guy, but he's very unassuming when you see him,
but he's like pointing guns at people,
he's given mean speeches, I would love to see that.
And you know what, you know who could play
the Walter Matho part?
Who's got to kind of like hang dog feel?
Wallace Sean.
So I think you have Wallace Sean in both parts.
And you call it the taking of Wallace Sean.
One, two, and that's it,
cause there's just two of him in there.
Oh, but he's the Martin Balsam Sneezie guys. That's three. The taking of Wallace Sean, one, two, three, because there's just two of them in there. Oh, but he's the Martin Ball, some sneezing guys.
That's three.
The taking of Wallace Sean, one, two, three, because there's three Wallace Shons in it.
That sounds great.
But I could also see, what if you did a remake of like the front page, Dan, who would you
put, or rather his girlfriend, who would you put in that, Dan?
Yeah, I was thinking about that because I was like, what are some favorite movies
of mine? And I, I, I guess the accepted Carrie Grant replacement these days is George
Clooney. I think, uh, I think he could probably do it in a fun way. I mean, he's no carry grant, but he's like the closest thing we have.
And he's the carry grant we deserve, and even if it's not the carry grant we want.
Yeah.
You need a real brassy dame for the woman.
And I don't know, like, women don't get a chance to like show off that side in movies that
much, so I don't know who would be like, if you're going for like, I mean, keep thinking
Jennifer Jason Lee just because of the HUD soccer proxy, but that's boring.
I feel like the HUD soccer proxy is boring.
You know what I mean.
That's what reviewers at the time said they were wrong, but...
What if you went like more like daffy with the role like...
Like a duck?
Like isle of fissure or something like that.
Like a comedian, a woman.
That might be fun.
Yeah.
And if I had to recast the lead of Lawrence of Arabia, one of my favorite movies, I
think, oh no, I started it like a joke.
But no, I feel like Michael Fastbender has already styled himself as a Peter O'Toole type
in Prometheus.
That'll work for me.
Oh yeah.
That's a good one.
That's a good one.
Actually, this is one I have been thinking about.
And any Hollywood executives are listening
at something I would definitely write,
because I was thinking about who would I cast
in a remake of the thin man?
Like who would be Nick and Norell Charles for me?
And I think I would cast Anna Kendrick
and Michael B. Jordan in those roles
in the Merniloin William Power roles.
And they could pull it off easy.
Easy peasy.
Dirt, what was that face you're making?
I'm trying to remember those movies.
Yeah, all right.
Don't worry about it, it's never gonna get done.
Unless Hollywood call me up, you know my fee.
$7,000.
Oh, that's not bad.
Also, I don't own the rights to that IP,
so somebody else do it.
Steward.
Yeah.
The last letter is directed at you.
Okay, I don't know who it's from.
It's a mystery.
Okay, it goes.
What happened to your cat?
Did your cat eat the rest of the letter?
Like, what do you mean you don't know who it's from?
Just arrived on your doorstep,
so I'm tied to a brick and throw it through your window.
How did it get to you?
So I'm tied into a baby and a bassinet
that they put outside my door,
and I threw the baby away, but I kept a note.
I think that's the plot of Willow.
So it says Stuart, what would happen
if an ant had put on the one ring?
Holy shit, dude.
What would happen if an ant had put on the one ring?
Holy shit, dude.
Have you seen, you got, you guys are hip to the internet, right?
Yeah.
You know that, you know, that, you know, that expanding brain meme, where, you know, it'll be like one thing and it shows a head with a bunch of lightning bolts in it.
Then the next thing, like there's even more lightning bolts,
you know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, yeah.
We're talking about maximum brain lightning bolts here
because the ant, oh my God, would he,
I guess he would see, first off, I guess ends at fingers,
I guess the magic would work that way.
I think the tree would probably turn invisible.
Yeah, it seems like a pretty simple
egg film, I think.
Hear me out, guys.
When the end puts the ring on,
it would turn invisible.
Okay.
Yeah, I can see that.
Case closed.
Thanks.
You did it.
You did it.
People said you couldn't do it. And I also, I also did it. You did it. People said you couldn't do it.
And I also, I also did it.
I also did it.
I also did it.
I also did it.
I also think the end would be able to resist the lure of Sauron.
Yeah.
All right.
So it'd be invisible forever.
Just and every now and then someone would just bump into an invisible tree.
Yep.
Pretty cool, right?
What a story that could have been.
If a tree puts on a magic ring and then falls down and there's no one around to see it,
because it's invisible and they can't hear it either.
Doesn't make a sound.
Wait, but you said it doesn't make sense.
And you said up to the right.
I answered my own question there.
Answer real tummy teaser.
That's a tummy teaser. So What are you all talking about?
So now what do we do on this show?
It's not loud.
I want to know what a tummy teaser is.
Is it when you chew gum and your tummy is like,
oh boy, he's chewing.
Some food's going to show up and then it doesn't.
Because he's going to have to.
To me, it's like a brain teaser,
but it's like, you go to one of those molecular
gastronomy restaurants and they've sent out like an amuse
Bush that it's like one thing that tastes like another thing and they're like, oh, it's a real tummy teaser, right?
Yeah, they're like, please enjoy this
Pride egg and you're like, okay, I'll eat this egg. Wait a minute. This doesn't taste like eggs at all. And they're like
They're the real amps of the gastronomic world this doesn't taste like eggs at all and they're like he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he he instead of going to see Ghost in the Shell, which I think even the ones of us that sort of liked it
would recommend you not do that.
Yeah.
Ellie, what do you got?
Well, I originally was gonna recommend under the skin
as I feel like it tried to do a similar thing
to this movie philosophically in a much more effective way,
but Dan mentioned it already.
So, I don't know if I'm recommended or not.
We're back.
I am.
I am going to say that if you want to see a movie where Scarlett Johansson is
questioning what it means to be human and it's very creepy and spooky,
then under the skin is the one to go see Lucy.
Lucy is not so spooky.
And Lucy is one of those movies that like it first started going and I was like this is gonna be crazy and after certain point
I was like it felt like eating too much candy where I was like
My tummy hurts. I teased it too much. Yep
The I'm gonna I'm gonna make up for Elliott's partial recommendation
Well, I do have I will have, I have another partial recommendation that counts as
one recommendation.
Okay.
Just last night, I watched the movie Captain Fantastic with Vigo Mortensen, where he is a
dad who has decided to raise his children off the grid in the woods because he doesn't
trust corporations or the system we all live in, that it's not a place for human equality
and human potential,
but has to because of a tragedy in their family, he has to take them back into what we would know
as what we call the real world, and they all kind of deal with the fact that for all the things they know
about surviving in the woods, there's a lot they don't know about living in modern life,
and the tensions in that family, And I didn't love it completely.
I felt like it was a movie that still fell into some
of the tropes that like a family on a road trip
to learn something about themselves.
Movie would fall into like a little mason shine
or something, but I thought what I liked about it was
that the acting in it is really good.
Everyone's really good in it.
But that Vigo Mortensen's character is like
this very self-righteous
uh... you know one of these guys is like i'm gonna devote myself to making
my kids as great as they can be and we're gonna live by our ideals
and there are things that are admirable about admirable about him in that way and things that are not and that
he is allowed as a character in the film to be both
charismatic and also a real piece
of crap at times.
And his ideology is neither so much better than everything we do, but it's also not a totally
dumb silly thing.
Like it's a movie that allows its character to be a little right and a little wrong in
a way that a lot of movies don't seem to allow.
And I like that about it.
All right. Uh, I have two, I have two recommendations. And they're both kind of qualified. I recently did some flying around the around the country of ours, this country. And I, uh,
talking to the salt of the earth. I flew to nap time USA.
Yeah.
Uh, and on the flight, both ways I watched a movie, uh, on the way out, I watched, uh,
split them night Shyamalan movie, uh, about James McAvoy having a whole bunch of personalities
in his head.
And, uh, it's, you know, I think it's, I wish you
said this way, but you know, that James McVoy's got a whole lot of personality too much.
Some would say in him night, Trump along split, but you're saying, yeah, Elliot did a better
punch up of split than I just did. It, yeah, I think it's, I think it's a fun little thriller. I think it's a little slight that there's a lot of build up
to get to the end.
And it feels like it doesn't quite need
its whole hour and 50 minute runtime.
But it was pretty fun.
And the fact that it's part of this new MNIDE shine
melanovirus with Unbreakable is very exciting.
That universe called Philadelphia.
And did so watching to there is and there is a really great scene of James McAvoy dancing around,
which is awesome. And I on the way back, I watched a movie called Dave made a maze, which is on streaming a lot of VOD services right now and it's about an artist who
I can never seem to finish projects and while his girlfriend is away for the weekend, he builds a maze out of cardboard in his living room that seems very small, but once he's inside it, he gets lost.
And his girlfriend has to assemble friends of his to go inside this, go inside the maze and get him out of there.
You know, it's much larger on the inside than on the outside. And it's a movie that feels like it was,
I think it was probably meant to be a shorter film
and there's definitely some padding in it,
but the design is so great and the,
like it's this whole maze made out of cardboard
and although all the traps are made out of cardboard And it just looks great and it's it's pretty fun and James urbaniac is awesome in it
He's really charming in us in a support role
I have a movie that I was gonna recommend a different movie, but
The themes of Ghost in the Shell inspire me to recommend a movie that I saw just two days ago, I believe.
I can't remember when I do things. It's called Marjorie Prime, and it's about a world where there
are these things called primes that are fake sort of images of people, like dead people in your life,
that you use as therapy devices to talk to.
And it stars Lois Smith as an elderly woman
who has a prime of her husband played by John Hamm.
And it helps her with her Alzheimer's
and just like being happy in her life and
she's living with her daughter played by Gina Davis and her husband played by Tom
Tim Robbins, sorry, and it's a movie that has a lot to say about aging and death, but also about memory and how
our memories are not necessarily accurate.
They're memories of memories and these primes are learning other people's memories and
sort of what that means to like their humanity,
whether that sort of turns them more human. And it talks about like legacy, these prime sort of
live on after the people that they're representing have gone and what that means to their, I don't know,
is what that means philosophically.
It's a very good movie.
It's just a bunch of conversations in one house.
It was based on a play,
but it still feels engaging even though,
like they haven't opened up the play as they say,
all the acting is terrific.
And it's worth saying.
It's playing in exactly one theater in New York.
So that means that you can't see it anywhere else.
In the world, you can't see it.
But I'm sure it'll be on demand or on DVD.
It's not one of those movies where after the runtime,
they put it in a box in a museum or Martin Screlay buys it.
Yeah, they just give it to Martin Screlay and he webcam's himself watching it, but you can't see it and he just goes,
Oh, it's good. Do I? You'll never see it. Yeah.
So three. Wait, a bunch more than that.
Okay, so what do we do now that we've recommended movies? a bunch more than that. I agree with that. I agree with that. Yeah. Okay.
So what do we do now that we've recommended movies?
Now that we've pushed the bounds of how long a flop has episode should ever go.
Yeah.
And it's our first, as we said, remote episode.
So things went well, guys.
Things are to go.
Yeah, thanks for, thanks for bearing with us.
Yeah.
Yeah, to all of you.
The sound quality will improve, I promise.
What are the other things we can say
Our timing will get better and our rhythm. We'll come back. Although wasn't the rhythm will go
It's gonna get you, you know, yeah, the rhythm's gonna get you. You'll be able to beat it the rhythm of the night
Yeah, flute player play that flute. Yeah, I know you want to get your thing on turn the beat around
Before we go just Caribbean Queen. we're sharing the same dream.
Mm-hmm. Just really quick. We're part of the network.
Maxman Plum Network.
Go to MaxmanPlum.org. Listen to a bunch of other great programs on our network.
And I guess that's it guys. I guess it is.
I guess it is. Hey, you know what? I feel like I've got something to share,
and I need to share it with you guys.
What's that?
It's a song.
Oh, but the episode's so long.
I'll tell you what, I'll do it next time.
Okay.
Well, that guys.
I want to apologize to the listeners
for not having a song this time,
and I want to say the listeners,
you're welcome for not having a song this time.
So I know it's very divisive.
But uh, for the flop as Dan, who are we?
I've been Dan McCoy.
I am Stuart Wellington, beat Boop or am I?
And this is Ellie Kaelin dude from California, man, Hey bro.
Oh no.
It's happening.
Join us next time for a small
November.
And I everyone.
Bye.
That's what they want from the Stuart
Wellington celebrity experience.
Yeah.
Yeah, they got the whole thing.
We all, I gave them all 10 minutes
to scrub me down in the shower.
Oh, okay.
Wait, so wait, they all had 10 minutes as a group
where each person got 10 minutes individually.
Each person.
Wow.
The water was very cold by the time I finished my shower.
It's over a three hour shower. That's a long shower.
You must have been so like you get clean,
but then you get dirty again from a shower like that.
Yeah, exactly.
So much water.
It's a lot of water.
Yeah, because I'm eating chili and stuff in there too.
Yeah, because you need to give the people
at the latin something to clean off, yeah.
Maximumfund.org.
Comedy and culture.
Artistone.
Listener supported.
something to clean off, yeah.