The Worst Idea Of All Time - REVIEW: Bucky Larson
Episode Date: April 3, 2020This was originally a pay-walled episode available only to Patreon supporters. Please consider if you can #PayTheBoiz at patreon.com/join/TWIOAT.Your boiz have dived head first into a crazy loss-gener...ating comedy (hold the comedy, thanks) about a small town boy turned porno star. It is an interesting ride. Christina Ricci is in this movie. So is Richard Gilmore (from Gilmore Girls). So is Nick effing Swardson in fake buck teeth. Timbo and Guyguy turn themselves inside out discussing this film, this genre of entertainment and the world at large that created this flick. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Discussion (0)
Hey Patreon powers, this is Tim and Guy.
Yeah, you can't see it but he's pointing at me so he knows that I'm- so I know that he's talking about me.
You've selected a fantastic film for us today. It is Bucky Larson, which we just started and then I said,
I'm pretty sure I remember what this movie's about, and then Guy said,
Do you wanna tell me about it? On mic, it's an exciting new frontier for the form.
It's a brand new segment.
So I'm pretty sure I have vague recollections of this movie.
It's off to a bad start, by the way.
The film?
Yeah.
Or this podcast?
Both.
Okay.
But mostly the film.
Yeah.
I'd say it's doing a worse job than we are.
We're not doing fantastic but um we won't get
into that we've only seen about uh 90 seconds of it from memory i was sent clips and some links to
this from people like it was it around grown-ups time when did this movie come out 2011 okay maybe
it was yeah because this is a nick swanson vehicle and i'm pretty sure in this movie both
his parents are porn stars. Yeah, okay.
And he finds that out later in life.
Maybe that's one of the first things he figures out.
He's just been fired from his job, folks, in the first two minutes of the film.
He's a grocery bagger.
And I think he goes to pursue his parents' profession.
He wants to become a porn star.
Honestly, this is not surprising.
It makes so much sense to me.
That feels exactly like what is appropriate for it.
Just the materials surrounding the movie.
It's a good premise.
The people involved.
Is it?
Yeah.
In the right hands, it would feel pretty different.
But the idea of watching Nick Swartzen, you know,
lampoon whilst, you know, attempt to become a porn star.
It's so negative.
This could be amazing.
This movie could be the best.
Okay, so we're about to watch Nick Swartzen
probably pursue a career in pornography.
I hope so.
I cannot think of a better way to spend an hour and 40 minutes of my life.
We'll see you on the other side.
Love that new haircut.
You get a lot of compliments on it.
Thanks, Mom.
Oh, don't thank me.
Thanks, the ball.
Miss Ballsbob said I look like Brad Pitt.
Meet Bucky Larson.
Get out of here!
You're fired!
Fired!
He was going nowhere.
Don't let these people get you down.
You're destined for greatness.
Until he made...
Tonight, we're gonna watch nude movies.
A shocking discovery.
Is that who I think it is?
That's your folks.
I'm the son of two stars.
We were going to tell you on your 50th birthday.
This is my destiny.
I'm going to go to California and I'm going to be a star on the silver screen.
I'm the son of two movie stars.
That's like a super duper movie star.
So we just finished watching bucky larson born to be a star 2011 comedy vehicle for the great nick swartzen uh tim's guess or memory
was on the money yeah i remember there was some some trailers i'm sure i've seen a trailer of this movie at some
point man fucking wow what a movie this movie to me exists in like a pantheon of or like a
bizarro alternate universe of movies starring you know sandler's friends friends and family
of the sandler verse who you know i for all i know there could be a hundred of these there could be just the ones i've heard of but none of it surprises me so of course this of course this
movie exists and of course this is whatever the listener whatever you sickos who helped choose
this movie are imagining at home yeah you've got it you've got a visual image of what this picture
is we will do uh with your permission guy montgomery my friend and compadre and fellow
adventurer um we'll do two minutes and we'll wrap the whole movie summary like plots okay yeah all
right our time begins now so bucky larson is a grocery bagger in a small town supermarket he
immediately gets fired from his job by his uh kooky manager who strikes himself in the face under the guise
of having a fight. He goes home
to his parents. He's upset.
He goes to hang out with his friends who
figure out he's never masturbated before.
They say, we'll teach you how to masturbate. They put a movie on the projector
that they're teaching him. Very weird scene.
Really weird. Teaching him how to masturbate.
But he doesn't get down to it because instead
he discovers that the stars of the adult film
they are watching are none other than his parents.
He returns home to tell them as much.
No one's weirded out by this.
No, everyone's impressed and happy.
And he says, this is my destiny.
I'm born to be a star.
I'm going to move to Los Angeles and become a nude film star.
He moves to LA.
He has a pretty rough go of it initially,
but soon meets Christina Richie.
Richie?
Richie, Ricky.
I don't know.
I always thought it was Richie.
I could be wrong.
We'll just call her Christina.
She's a waitress at a cafe.
She introduces him to Kevin Nylon,
who's probably my favorite character in the house.
He becomes his flatmate.
And it's not long before he goes out on an audition
to be in a commercial for Mac and Cheese.
He misconstrues the audition as an adult film audition,
masturbates in front of them.
We discover he's got a micro penis.
He goes to...
No, not then.
Instead, he goes to a not then instead he goes to
a party
the director of the commercial
used to be a director
for adult films
you've got so little time left
how long?
45
oh so they go to
an adult film party
a porn party
and he gets
he gets bullied
that's when it's revealed
he has a micro penis
he meets a director
called Miles Deeper
Miles Deeper
who turns him
who gives him his first shot.
He ejaculates on the side of some breasts.
He becomes an internet sensation,
a very niche market for porn
wherein people like seeing his micropenis
because it emboldens the men and women
in relationships.
And he soon becomes a star,
falls in love with Christina Ricci
and they wind up together.
And that is, in essence,
you've got it.
The film.
It is.
With how long left? 10 seconds. It's not worth watching. And honestly, the mean, that is, in essence, the film. It is. With how long left?
Ten seconds.
It's not worth watching.
And honestly, the only bit you missed out is that at the end...
There's a little bit of conflict in the romance.
A tiny bit, like 11 minutes before the film ends.
They just have to engineer a little bit of something.
And you were actually excited by that.
Yeah.
So what happens is Christina Ricciacher's character is uh an absolute
sweetheart in the film no but uh almost almost to the point of something sinister because
she's the movie is populated by the night like the dimmest most uh but she's a woman
yeah and in this world women and men are different species and and women are an absolute sub-genre
of humor that's right and and in the species of men bucky larson somehow just through sheer
like idiocy nick swartzen that like the premise for this movie is nick swartzen and adam sandler
and alan kovat who are the writers, sitting in a room saying,
Hey, what if Nick played someone who is mentally differently abled and we make him have really big buck teeth
so that he reads to everyone who exists in the world of the movie as fuck ugly.
It's like, you know when you put straws in your mouth when you're at a cafe because your friend needs cheering up and you do a funny voice yeah it's a movie of that yeah it's nick
swanson doing that for 90 minutes and they released it in the cinema yeah but so because
of how thick his character is he reads as a beacon of hope and light and accordingly to christina's
character is desirable.
Yeah, he's a little injured fawn that she needs to sort of nest. Which is just so impossible.
But anyway, she's like wholly good,
and without exception she's just this maternal,
very lovely character for him who looks after him.
And then right near the end uh they have sex spoiler alert
they lose their virginity to each other and then christina richie and the um and the morning after
comes back to the hotel room and she's like uh you know what bucky i i think i should go and have
sex with other men you know we both should get out there and explore the you know wonders of the world sexually
both of us so i'm gonna go do that i'm gonna bounce and i cracked the fuck up so it's just like
i hope this is i hope this sustains i know it won't i know there's some dumb reason for this
but i wish that it was just her going hey you know what i can do better than all this i i agree
in principle i love that idea but i was also upset
with myself because i noticed at that time i was i guess it's interesting this is probably one of
the few like genuinely valuable pieces of research that we've stumbled into by doing what we do
is that what do we do guy how would you describe what we do? We meet up and we run our friendship and brains into the ground
by watching either repeatedly one bad movie
or in the instance of Patreon Pills,
bad movies at the behest of other people.
But I was upset for Bucky Larson
because I'd spent enough time with him.
I don't know if this is what I'm wondering.
I was upset because
i think within the movie the fact that there was some sort of seed of something decent or a
relationship uh was like that was the narrative drive that was pushing me through the rest of the
the mess or alternatively i was like i was sympathetic enough towards bucky that i was
upset that he was having his heart broken
at this moment.
I wish I could have reveled in the fact that finally a character, like her character specifically,
had total control over her destiny and was like, this is fucking insane.
Absolutely not.
But do you think that watching movies like this or watching movies as we do has dropped?
Sorry, what was the learning there i i will admit
on mic that i smoked quite a lot of weed to get through this film so what was the thing that we
discovered well like this is what i'm wondering is is is i think it's damaged or impacted my ability
to uh you've lost the cynicism shield to be able to hide behind when you're watching a movie to
go oh they're actors
and this is shit and this character sucks you're still invested in some way in some way yeah yeah
you can't help but be invested yeah when the character is but also at the end of the movie
you were like you because you they they introduce that conflict and resolve it within probably less
than five to ten minutes in a 90 minute movie and you're're like, the pacing is insane. Yeah, it's crazy. But then I was saying, maybe it's not.
Maybe like this is normal pacing and Sex and the City,
because that is a movie with crazy pacing.
It's thrown our entire sense of time off.
Nah, I see other films from time to time.
This was fucked.
Yeah.
This was really weird.
It did.
This is a compliment.
It didn't feel very long at all, like watching this movie.
No.
There's a lot of ingredients to that, and it's hard to tease out what was the movie.
90-minute run time is one of them.
What was the weed?
It genuinely was a short movie.
Hanging out with my boy Guy.
I was lounging in a chair, which is good.
Taking a break from some very boring sort of office-y work uh which is always good gives you a bit of
time um dilution what's the word i'm looking for dilation i don't know it fucks with the perception
of time oh yeah but it just flew by i mean it's just fly by for you yeah it went pretty fast it
was like painful to watch and it was sort of you know it's groan inducing and you sort of
you're looking around the screen you're going oh come on but it is in all honesty i mean i don't have a horrible it's it is bad enough that it's fun to
talk about yeah yeah it is let me let me bring this up as a weird thing this is part of a bunch
of movies and i guess media products and people and this is this is a whole like phenomenon that
happens where it's it's really bad and there's so many things in that where you're like that is absolutely
fucked you can't say that out loud much less in a movie but it's so consistent with that
opinion that you can't it's like you can't reckon with it it's so wrong in so many ways that you
can't it's kind of the trump thing right you just keep hiffing shit out. And so you sort of...
A Trojan horse is the entire project
into your brain a little bit.
I think it just...
These sorts of movies exist outside of time and space.
Yeah, or social mores or normality.
It's not worth...
Honestly, it's inconsequential.
It's not worth the time.
That's what it is, eh?
It's like to do an efficiency rating on
you know what's this like the payoff of trying to dedicate any brain space or time to critiquing
this film just seems like a complete fool's errand and and on that note i would like to celebrate the
performance of kevin nilon who's a he's a funny performer yeah we've seen him live i think in la
i think he might have been on at the store when we
went in it's possible i don't remember that but his his character everyone else they kind of um
that's what makes oh by the way sorry for those who don't know who what would be a good touchstone
for who he plays in the the sand laverse and something and little nicky he's um oh fuck he's
the coach in the water boy. Yeah, that's it.
He was a Saturday Night Live member.
He's in a lot of the Sandler films.
You know him if you've seen him.
He's one of them.
Yeah, but his character,
everyone else, it seems to me that they pick and choose
when they're really stupid
or when they need to be intelligent to move the story forward.
His character, while the character himself is like you know has got no is insane essentially single
play toilet paper thin yeah they they plot they just play ahead with that line of thing that
character line like the whole way so he's a creep he's really into christina rishi and he's aggressive
and he turns up on screen to say fuck you he to Bucky Larson. He's really aggressive to Bucky Larson.
And so he's always on the phone
and he's always talking to someone
you wouldn't expect him to be.
And he always puts the phone to the side
to yell at Bucky Larson.
And the things he yells are sort of silly and offensive.
So when he moves in,
he tells Bucky that he has his own bathroom,
which is down the hall.
The bathroom in Kevin Nilon's room is for him.
It's his private space.
It's a sanctuary.
So the next day, Bucky wakes up and he has to go to the toilet,
and he opens the door, and Kevin Nilon's in there shitting,
and he goes, fuck you, you fucking psycho.
So I thought it was my bathroom.
He's like, no, I can't shit where I shower.
He said, this is, but I shit here.
Yeah, and then anyway, he goes back to the phone.
He goes, hi, sorry, we've got an intern at the office today and then another time he walks in while Bucky's
pouring himself cereal and he goes whose cereal is that and Bucky goes it's mine I bought it and
he goes whose milk you gonna use and he goes uh can I borrow some of yours and he goes no
and then Bucky has to use water and then the next time when bucky has some success in adult
porn as an adult film star he buys a lot of milk and fills up the fridge which is a funny visual
gag yeah he looks really pleased with himself he like looks and this is the thing is that this
movie has enough jokes that a few of them are bound to connect and he gestures with his eyes
towards the fridge like i think you're gonna like what you see and he opens it up and it's just
filled to the hip back to the hilt with
milk and he just looks at but he goes now where the fuck am i supposed to put my grapes and then
he calls him insensitive that's the bit that got me and then at the end there's this weird through
line where before bucky larson moved in he was living with john mayer who skipped out knows him
three months rent and the last scene in this movie on what does
feel like a clipped ending now I think about it
after he experiences some success
and is reunited with Christina they move
to Iowa his hometown he opens Bucky's
famous steakhouse
and he's serving like a family everything's pretty wholesome
and normal at this point
and then Kevin Nealon shows up and goes
you owe me three months of rent
this is exactly like John Mayer.
Just like John Mayer.
And you think, well, this scene's got some space to go somewhere.
And then Nick Swartzen barrels the camera with his dumb buck teeth.
Yeah, he freaks out.
He starts losing his damn mind.
He's one of those sorts of Looney Tunes blackout.
It's called an iris close,
where you sort of have a black circle that comes in to envelop the whole frame.
You would see it with Porky Pig.
He would stick out of the Warner Brothers logo.
That's all, folks.
So the iris shuts and it just stays.
It shuts around Bucky's mouth.
Stays on his dumb fucking freeze-framed face.
On his buck teeth.
And then, so that's the end of the movie, which is jarring enough. And then they've got some pretty solid animator to animate his teeth so that they extend out from his mouth and the iris close onto the black screen and spell out in cursive writing, the end.
It's funny.
It's so weird.
And it's funny.
I've never seen that before.
I'm going to put it on twitter almost worth
watching for the end credit just watch the end credit sequence you don't need to watch the whole
movie but like i didn't i do you know what i didn't like hate this watch the movie is no good
you know that you know that is in part because like the last two days we've met up and watched sex in the city and so to come over and i don't know i don't know i mean is it it's hard to tease out it definitely feeds some of it yeah because i
didn't mind it either but i you know like it's not how i choose why does i choose to spend my
time it's not how i would choose to spend my time oh do you feel like you've got control over your time no oh not really no
no i don't which really bums me out it's mainly because of this podcast yeah that's the thing
um i'm what i'm doing is i want to have a look at the financial performance of bucky larson
well because you you asked early on when he first starts.
Oh, man, they made this thing on a song.
Budget of nine mil.
And box office of?
Give me a moment.
Man, Nick Swardson, though, eh?
Like, what is going on?
Have you watched his Netflix special?
Oh, nah, I haven't.
Do you want to watch it after this?
No.
Unfortunately, I've got shit to do because I have to watch sex in the city every second day which is really long um i would love
to watch that with you but no if you haven't seen oh my god the box office was two and a half mil
this fucking movie lost money on nine million it's not surprising though you see the first scene where
he's being taught to masturbate yeah uh and he starts doing it and he's you know like nick swartzen has to commit to these big
physical bits like the writing is so paper thin that a lot of the humor from his character lies
in his physicality which is he's got admittedly he's got funny physicality but uh so he's like
doing this big sort of apish masturbating and And you said, who is this movie for?
Who is this movie for?
It's for stoned 15-year-olds who are also independent of being stoned, who are thick.
Independently wealthy, independently thick stoners who go to the movies.
It is a weird one to try and think about who the intended
ticket buying is going to be is there a time when you would have found this movie funny bearing in
mind hold on hold on for a second hold on for a second because it's like this is a children's
movie kind of you know like all the humor is it's if you take away the swear words and stuff the
style of humor that's being done is so um ridiculous and unsophisticated it's like a
happy meal of comedy like it's so broad and just massive salty massive fat there's no
nuance to performance or writing or anything everything's so big that it's like a children's
movie but the premise of it is um pornography so they have to have like naked breasts in it
so then you kind of it's not a
kid's movie so then it's no one's film it's that early teenage boy market you know the first gag
in this is a retread of a gag from road trip that that sort of dorky guy has where a farmer they're
on the farm in iowa and a guy is seen digging his hand into a jar of peanut butter yeah smearing it
presumably on himself and having goats come up and lick it off while he talks to one of his family friends.
I forgot about that.
That is how this film introduces itself to the world.
It comes into your house,
it puts peanut butter on its balls
and it gets a goat to lick them off.
Can I read this to you?
Sorry, you were going somewhere.
No, it's okay.
I was just saying,
do you think,
is there a world in which,
or a time in which you would have enjoyed this movie
on its own
terms i don't think this one and i am the first person to stick my hand up and say that i there's
there's a lot of bad movies that i enjoy and there's even worse movies that i used to enjoy
of course you know when i was uh in my adolescence and uh and that's just the facts we we um sat down and watched super bad in melbourne to unwind
um at the end of the trip it was a really nice thing to do it was fucking sweet i had been uh
awake for a long time we've been watching the movies the real rob real rob season two all day
and um we got to the end of it and i had a flight where i had to basically
leave the hotel at five in the morning and it was like 10 p.m i think so it was like okay this is
the bit where we go to sleep and you didn't even say anything you just chucked on netflix and you
put on super bad i was like hell yeah that rules that was nice but that that movie's not so bad
but you know van wilderer. Still enjoyed it.
When I watched it recently, I did the litmus test to see,
does Tim Batts still enjoy this movie?
I think I've got a fucked up brain.
No, but that is steeped in nostalgia.
It is.
If you were introduced to Van Wilder now, it's, who knows?
I couldn't watch it.
I don't think I could watch it.
So sorry.
To answer your question,
I cannot see myself ever enjoying this particular film.
It's too dumb. I'd like to change my my guess and it's impossible to market to this audience but it's not the sort of
14 15 year old teens okay it's for 10 or 11 year olds who find it somehow and like a weird this is
how i would have found it on like a movies channel that you didn't really know exists to place kind
of bad movies and you watch it and the shimmer is beyond your age bracket it's beyond your sort of reading comprehension
but it's an approximation of the humor you are you imagine you're about to grow into
and so you you laugh along because you don't know that none of the actual uh the another actual jokes
are funny they're all like in the style of jokes you imagine you're about to find funny oh it's a whole lot of setups so you're just i i just think it's it's for like
it's for uh pre-adolescent boys who can't get their hands on an actually funny sort of teenage
movie and so you find this and you think it's funny because you don't know any better gotcha
and that's like nick swartzen's entire career It's pitched at people who don't know that there are funnier people out there.
It's like finding really sort of tepid softcore magazines when you were 12.
Yeah.
Before the internet was around.
Yeah.
It's like, I have access to something here.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, I got you.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
But you can't, there's no way to market a movie with titties in it.
How do they...
I mean, did Happy Madison produce this?
They must have.
I think so,
because the main writing credit was Sandler, wasn't it?
He was on top,
and then Nick Swanson and someone else helped out.
And that's the thing...
Which is crazy to me that three people penned this.
He is playing an Adam Sandler archetype,
who's like a thick person.
Yeah, but...
But he's got less charisma than sandler
he does and it also came out even later yeah still so like in the 90s water boy it wasn't
dicey it did very well actually i don't remember there being any critique but 2011 it's like hey
the timing's worse the actors worse yeah the actor's worse, the movie's worse. Everything stinks about it.
I am really worried about my own gauge on films,
because in committing anything to a recorded medium and publishing it online,
because of how out of line what I'm about to read is
with what I said about me kind of not hating watching the movie.
Go ahead.
This is the subheading Critical
under the Wikipedia pageipedia page for bucky
larson born to be a star initially not pre-screened for critics the film was panned by critics on its
opening weekend review aggregator rotten tomatoes reports that all 35 critics who reviewed the film
gave negative reviews bringing the film's rating to a rare 0%. Incredible. With an average rating of 1.6 out of 10.
And the consensus...
I'd just like to say,
you don't need to worry about, you know,
your own opinion not holding merit.
Film critics have a different job from us.
Yeah.
They're measuring it against, like,
some sort of standard.
Do you know what it is as well?
I've always got a, like,
a very childish um
uh need to kind of go against the grain i'm a contrarian at heart you are i am so it's like
if the movie should have said i'm not true nice um i am but i'm not very smart at it so the movie
presents itself as an unabashed piece of shit and it's like obviously i'm supposed to
hate this yeah so i refuse you know yeah it's like i'm gonna look for any pixel on screen that
i can find there is absolutely no surprises to me that all of the critics for like any you know
if you were separate from doing this podcast if you wrote a review of this movie yeah it would not be positive
it wouldn't be positive but it's like i don't know it's almost it's almost punching down to
give it a bad review yeah this does feel like but but sand was on board so it's not he knows what
he's doing even though he did lose what was the math like six and a half seven and a half mil
um so i got zero percent with the average
rating 1.6 out of 10 consensus calling it quote a severely misguided and inept comedy incapable of
even telling its single joke properly that is very well articulated on metacritic the film received a
weighted average score of nine out of 100 meaning overwhelmingly disliked based on reviews from 13
critics making it the worst reviewed wide release of 2011 it was also given the moldy tomato award
for the worst reviewed film of 2011 by rotten tomatoes orlando sentinel film critic roger moore
stated quote the concept and the movie that comes from it aren't funny. And second, Swanson wasn't any more born to be a star than his character.
A New York Times critic,
A.O. Scott,
stated in his review that Bucky Larson born to be a star was so bad that,
quote,
it may have been made to console every actor who has ever been in a movie
that it is a little less bad than this one.
Oh, that is a little less bad than this one oh that that is a little why do you do it to
yourself let me put it put the matter another way this may be the worst movie poorly sure has
been in think about that if you dare go on netflix and test the hypothesis holy shit that is uh
like what yeah poorly sure his cameo cracked me the fuck up just to see him i
think was what got you it was the announcement of him that got me so there's a scene where we're at
the adult film awards so that we can have a turn in bucky larson's career where he becomes uh
critically celebrated in the eyes of the industry giants he ends up with a clean sweep 13 awards with afa is taking down
uh the dastardly dick shadow who is the baddie reigning supreme who never has a moment of
victory in the film but we're supposed to hate him i mean he's being a dick but at no point is
he legitimately kind of empowered but anyway um so that happens and they at the start of that scene
um it's got the announcement uh welcome the emcee on stage.
It says, welcome to the 15th AFA Awards.
Please welcome to the stage your host, Paulie Shaw.
And I was like, fuck, yeah, all right.
You'd love to see Paulie Shaw getting that offer come across this table.
Oh, my God, it was so funny.
It was way funnier than seeing him act in it.
The announcement that you're about to see
Paulie Shaw in a movie is so funny to me.
All of the people in the room are in shock and awe.
They gasp at the announcement
Paulie Shaw's emceeing their awards.
The funny thing is, it's so true to form as well
because I could imagine him hosting
the Adult Film Awards.
Hey, Paulie, we've got an offer for you here.
You're going to play the emcee of the Adult Film Awards
in a Nick swartzen vehicle
sounds good has he got buck teeth in it absolutely why but why would like nick swartzen has feelings
he has a critical gauge yeah he's got emotional responses to things that are said about him
how can you put yourself through this i know no one sets out to make a bad movie but everyone
involved has to know like and this
is what shits people about sandler because he wrote this but everyone involved has to know that
they're making what is going to be just like fucking picked apart i guess i guess there's
the chance it's going to make money maybe it's a tax write-off for happy madison i mean well i mean
we are famous for saying the same about grown-ups too but that made a shitload of money for everyone involved yeah but that had an all-star cast this entire marketing vehicle for
that movie was hey look at the four people we've got on screen together this was all like b down to
f-grade you know secondary players do you think there's a bracket though where this is the grown
ups of that audience segment that's kind of like I don't want to be elitist,
but kind of a trailer trash bracket of cinema goers
who are like,
fuck yeah,
Paulie Schwartz in this movie,
I'm in.
I don't even know if he would have been in the trailer though.
The trailer would be all Swartzen
and not like,
Nick Swartzen's successful though,
isn't he?
He is,
he is.
And I would like to see his specials
because I think his standup isn't like universally bad. He a sketch show i think yeah well like you know anyone who's done
stand-up for a certain amount of time they're gonna have a few funny jokes yeah for sure
yeah um it's an interesting thing because it isolates between the question you're talking
about of are you kind of getting it does nick swanson sort of feel does he take the slings
and arrows that he's hearing hearing those reviews which is like you know it's almost insulting that the
i don't know the journalists have bothered to write them because it's like so obviously this
movie is bad so obviously you know you'd have to seek it out to want to watch it it would be like
getting a professional top tier sports reviewer to go to a little league game and pick apart their technique it's like yeah yeah no shit dude we don't but not even no but no it's like
there's potential in little league so it's not even that it's like it's a professional critic
you're going great an amateur an amateur social sports league that they don't know that someone's
coming to pick apart their technique yeah like a social like to me
this feels like a.o scott kicking in the door on nick swartzen's bedroom where he's like
making a movie for his own amusement and he's like yeah that movie's a piece of shit but you
have to that is that's just part of the deal you're putting a movie out in the world with
an attempt to make money off it this is part of the transaction i don't know what see this is the
fucking mental gymnastics that it makes you do because you almost feel painted into a corner to defend it because it
is so universally shit yeah like it's such a badly written paste acted it's grotesque the thing that
you're saying about nick swanson this is interesting he must have really felt the criticism that came
out with the reviews but even in the making of the film like he looks hideous on screen but he's given himself a goofy haircut and the funny buck teeth
to almost make the joke at his appearance before anyone else can make it at him no no no i'm in on
it guys always a lackey and sand like it's it's swartzen and schneider essentially play the same
role only swartzen seems to i think he seems to have better mental health yeah he's
better he's better at being in on it and yeah and taking it and using it oh yeah but even putting on
the front to do that probably takes its toll oh it can't not but if i don't know you you what is
christina rishi doing in this film now that that's a question. She is so talented.
She is, and there's no getting around it.
And it's probably because she's surrounded by comedy actors who don't need to be classically attractive to make it in Hollywood.
She is so beautiful.
It is crazy how glowing she is on screen.
If she wasn't in the film this doesn't this the film would almost
read better like if they got a different worse actor to play that role in the movie yeah the
movie as a whole would be better because you wouldn't be constantly reminded of the outside
world yeah yeah yeah definitely i'm with you on that but then how who would you okay so would you
put in like a stand-up or something?
I want to see in terms of acting performance.
She's in the movie anyway.
She shows up everywhere.
She's never given a decent role.
Jackie Sandler, Adam Sandler's wife.
Just take a... Like, roll the dice on her as a lead.
She's too good.
I would love to see Jackie Sandler starring in something.
She's fucking funny.
She's all right, She's alright, mate.
No, I think she gets
given such dog turds
and I like what she does.
They're all in her family's movies.
Like, why didn't you say
I don't want to do that role?
Say that again?
What?
She has control
over what role
she says yes to.
Yeah.
Adam Sandler's not making
her be in these.
No, I know.
It's the whole
fucking Hollywood machine, right?
Because she doesn't look like Christina Ricci,
which is why she can't get those roles.
She's beautiful.
She is beautiful,
but she's like not the same kind of,
she'll look like she's 19 until the day she dies,
kind of Christina Ricci anime character face thing,
you know?
Yeah.
Which is what these broad Hollywood movies
always cast woman leads in.
You can put other women in it,
but it's so hard to get a leading lady who has a different look
from that Barbie doll 3D printed thing.
Yeah, but I mean, I haven't seen enough of her body of work to know those,
but I don't think Jackie Sandler's is fucking hilarious I like her in the same way
I like any
secondary character
or cameo character
in the movies we watch
in that I don't spend
enough time with them
to fucking
like detest them
yeah
fuck you're right man
I'm filling in
so much blank space
we are
this entire conversation
is trapped between
having a total understanding
of you know
the mental deterioration
watching these movies
does to us
and, like, being oblivious to it
and sort of championing them for whatever they're meant to be.
It's a real tightrope because, obviously,
we're doing a podcast series here,
so we have to put our voices, you know, online up for debate.
Like, listen to what I have to say.
I have no faith in my judgment of films at all anymore
whatsoever like what the worst idea of all time podcast has broken my fucking brain irreversibly
for film critique it has done the opposite of what media studies did to me in my final year
of high school okay so you went to the cinema recently i did so this is just a little experiment so you went and
saw the avengers endgame yeah and so that is that's a movie that exists separate to the podcast and
you can stop me here but like what is your critical analysis without you know giving away anything
yeah anyone who might want to watch it what's your critical analysis of that film i find it i it's a
hard one actually because i find the avengers movie is really hard to to review because i just think they've got so much work to do plot wise
that i kind of forgive a lot of stuff that otherwise is part of a review yeah i i think
there's so much awkward exposition in those films but no professional film reviewers ever agree with
me with that i think that the so much of the dialogue and stuff is so like weird like guardians of the galaxy is always my favorite
one in that whole universe because it had so much fun yeah not the second one just the first one
because it was so weird and it just embraced it but all the avengers ones i really like them i
enjoy them i love the epicness of it but they're so fucking earnest and long and so much plot needs to go on that it's just like
i feel like they don't have enough moments of fun that's a sound review so like i i feel like
independent from the the podcast and watching movies to talk about for the podcast you've still
got the you know the faculties yeah absolutely but you what you are doing is when you talk about
when you discuss these things i put a g in that word there is none faculties you are doing is when you discuss these things in public. I put a G in that word.
There is none.
Faculty.
You are, I mean, you're pushing yourself.
It's weight training, isn't it, for the real world?
Or is the real world, I don't know, weight training for this?
Like, if someone asked you about this, I guess this is what we're doing right now,
so this seems like
a weird question maybe i'm too high but if you if someone just asked you like hey what was bucky
larson like you you're at a bar with a friend they're just like hey what was that movie like
oh look it was really bad but even when people when i talk to people at bars about movies
they always qualify their question my opinion or they you know like within the context of what i do to what you know
to movies and so someone says hey what do you think of bakula and say well yeah it was really
bad but you know by the standards of my job by the standards of the movies i watch with tim like
it was fine it flew by you know if you buy into the idiocy of it there's some things that you'll
laugh at but it's objectively a really really awful movie okay so let me ask this question then so let's let's stop talking about the movie as a
movie and let us start talking about the watch in terms of us and worst idea okay so the experience
we just had in this room together yeah so i'm saying like you don't need to bear in mind other
people may take your opinion of how you experience this film compared to their own experience of it, okay?
It's not an objective review of the film.
I want to talk about your experience of watching it within our pantheon, especially of the Patreon movies that gets huffed to us.
So, like, was this a terrible watch for you?
No.
And why is that?
for you no and why is that because i uh i wrote a lot i wrote an electric scooter to your house which was fun so i was in a good mood i thought maybe we were watching sex in the city i found
out we were watching bucky larson i was in a better mood i reckon that's a big one i i sat
down in a comfortable chair with my friend tim we started watching a movie we both knew was going to
be awful so we could like, you know,
relish and enjoy the moments when it hit.
And then if it was bad and we agreed in the ways it was bad,
we could look at each other and laugh and make fun of the movie.
Like all of that is fun.
That's all fun.
It's a fun thing to do.
And then it was only an hour and a half.
By the end of it, we went inside, had a coffee,
saw your wife, saw your housemate, played with the dog.
Like it's not a bad three
hours out of my day fucking aim but sex in the city watches are so awful yeah there's something
very bad about depriving your brain of new information let's repeat that is yeah i mean
even when you said that my entire mood and outlook i could see it yeah your body i became uh in a much darker place
it's like your soul leaving your body but i mean you know it's not what we're doing is it's not fun
but it's not bad yeah of course it isn't of course it isn't you know there's people with real problems
out there it just goes do you know what it goes to show everything is fucking comparative eh and
you can twist yourself in knots looking at everyone around you and and and comparing yourself your
situation to those around you but you got to kind of like carve your own path a little bit
and just be cool with it absolutely uh maybe that's the same with nick swatson maybe that's what he's doing with
his career he's like so hard to do i know that everyone um you know can fucking get their clicks
and write their articles on av club about what a fucking monster i am and how terrible my movies
are what a monster he is what an untalented idiot he is. Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah.
But not all of his movies lost money, you know?
And you've just got to keep doing things.
I will always, as a person who has produced things
and knowing how hard it is to pull something together,
I will always have respect implicitly
for people who try to put something out in the world.
I think that in
terms of the um the spectrum the what how we wait um our right to criticize something versus
celebrating that it exists at all is a little bit off kilter by virtue of social media at the moment
how far does that generosity extend into the like world of you know of cynical movie making and you know when there's people
things that they need to be critiqued of course they need to be reviewed and we need to find out
like what you're going to like and also if stuff is just problematic with this which this movie
what like it's just it represents so many fucking awful things on screen it deserves to be called
out but i just think there's such a bloodlust and a
celebration of shitting on everything at the moment that it's like it's just it's such a it's
a big dark cloud i would say everyone gets in response to what you're saying i agree i think
in defense of this movie it's the joy that's generated from shitting on stuff that i object to
it hasn't set out to You know
It hasn't missed any of its goals
Apart from maybe being a comedy for people to enjoy
This comedy movie didn't miss any goals
Except perhaps being funny
But it didn't set out to do anything
Except be a dumb fucking movie about Nick Swartzen
And Buck Teeth moving to LA to become a porn star
Yeah and he got to hang out with Christina Ricci
I think what bothers you or upsets you is
like um is when you know critics decide to elevate the platform on which it exists and shoot it down
for things that it's the joy we should all be sad when something sucks but that's not what happens
at the moment most people are fucking chomping at the bit to to to relish in something sucking
but wouldn't it be so much nicer if we all took the attitude of like um if as a film critic you
went and you didn't go fucking licking your lips going i'm gonna have i'm gonna win a pollitzer
for how um verbosely i can shit on this thing you went i saw a movie and it got finished and it got released to cinemas.
And unfortunately it was very bad and here's why.
And it makes me sad that this movie is shit.
I don't fucking like a pig in the mud
roll around in how bad it is.
You should become that film critic.
You could sharpen your tools.
It's not attractive though, is it?
No one wants that.
No, but if I just watch the mental decay
of a film critic who's constantly
taking it personally that movies are bad, it's if I just watch the mental decay of a film critic who's constantly taking it personally
that movies are bad
that's something
I'm interested in
you've got skin
in the game
with every film
you see like
oh I'm so sorry
to tell you guys
but again
we've got another one
that didn't quite
hit the mark
fuck man
it wouldn't be
sustainable would it
no it would be funny
it would be funny
in conclusion
Tim would you recommend
anyone watch
this movie no absolutely not maybe the same with paulie shaw just to hear the announcement but not
there's no need to see him on screen thank you that was the funniest bit for me what about you
guy absolutely not thank you so much to everyone who chose it uh patreon keeps us going yeah you
are the team work making the dream work so thank you so much um and your suggestions are
always great and always for different reasons like what the fuck was that shit animation one
we watched two times the something kids something street the christmas one yeah that was brilliant
and then um uh dc cab was brilliant a movie marathon of just the movies that the Patreon pals have made us watch?
We should fucking do it.
No, we've seen all of them.
Or we should have a...
You know what would be cool?
I cannot be arsed trying to wrangle this for the rights and stuff,
but doing like a film festival where we just play...
The worst idea, a film festival.
Absolutely.
That's a really funny idea.
Well, anyway, thanks so much.
Please keep subscribing.
Keep paying us money.
It honestly has kept this whole thing afloat.
So God bless you guys, man.
Or whoever.
Yeah, we'll see you soon.
Jar.
Jar bless.
Jar is a god.
Nick Swartzen is.
You don't look like the average porn star.
Oh, yeah, because I'm wearing a sweater.
Bucky Larson.
I've never ridden in a convertible before. Stand up,
feel the breeze.
Holy
cow! Ugh, you got bugs
in your teeth. Oh, it's still moving!
Yeah, yeah. Ow! Bucky Larson.
Born to be a star.