The Worst Idea Of All Time - REVIEW: DC Cab

Episode Date: April 2, 2020

This was originally a pay-walled episode available only to Patreon supporters. Please consider if you can #PayTheBoiz at patreon.com/join/TWIOAT.DC Cab aka Street Fleet is a beautiful piece of 1983. M...r T? Check. Gary Busey? BELIEVE IT! Bill Maher? Sure, why not?! This is a movie of a different era and it is jolly good fun. Low stakes, crazy antics and about 100 different characters solely existing to bring laughter and light. Timbo and Guyguy are SO GRATEFUL for this OASIS in the desert of relentless Sex and The City watches. THANK YOU xoxoxox Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 DC cab they've got clients where to baby nowhere with you and they care you charge mr and mrs tomatsu 195 dollars they had a lot of luggage we're the worst company in town and we know it you don't have to shut it down company is closed pending further investigation Hello, welcome along to a special Patreon edition of The Worst Idea of All Time with your friends Tim and Guy. Come on in, put your hat on the rack, take your coat off. Welcome to the Patreon Palace, where you are our Patreon pal. That's right.
Starting point is 00:01:10 that's right uh and this week this day this month this year we watched uh the 1983 comedy action film dc cab that was renamed street fleet and some of its releases um the tale of a hapless group of cabbies in a rundown cab company owned by harold albert comes to town with a dream of starting his own cab company but needs to motivate harold's employees to want to make something out of themselves it's only when albert is kidnapped that the cabbies must decide whether or not they are loyal to albert and his cause that's from imdb user josh pasnack um i don't know how this movie made it to the top of the pile but i'll say this i'm very glad it did yeah same you absolute fucking legends anytime you want to come to new zealand i'll buy you a beer if you're in the patreon club solely for you picking dc cabs for us to watch i had a rollicking
Starting point is 00:02:00 good time watching this in bed this morning roll Rollicking good time. So nice to hear. It's really like it's a movie of a different era. And it's also a movie of a different genre from what you and I traditionally deal in together. Like it was just so simple, low stakes, but competently done. You know who made it? No. done like it's you know who made it no joel schumacher who you might remember from um a director's commentary where we were joined by him as the director of uh batman and robin he both wrote and directed this film oh wow yeah the guy's a fucking lunatic but i love him yeah absolutely
Starting point is 00:02:43 um no i didn't i didn't put that together at all like it's i don't know this is the sort of movie that i would have i wasn't alive at the time but happily go and see at the cinema uh and like just know that you know to me it's the this is this is a pure distillation of what going to the movies is where i don't have to worry about investing myself in the story too much. I have to think about the world like it is pure escapism and it's yeah, like it's obviously it's not flawless, but you've got a lot of different characters. You got a lot of people having fun.
Starting point is 00:03:19 You've got a pretty flimsy story that kind of has enough component parts to keep moving. And like that was honestly in anticipation of talking to you after watching a movie one of the most painless experiences i can recall yeah man it was like a soothing balm in the middle of this season of worst idea of all time it was so lovely and very importantly and i'm sure you will back this up the soundtrack was shit hot from woe to go it was so good yeah it was really um it was of the it was of the era like it it was sort of a uh it was just like 80s pop really wasn't it yeah but it was like there was a lot of synth there was sort of um there was kind
Starting point is 00:04:06 of hints of hip-hop in there there was a bit of funk a bit of soul it was choice i dug it a lot um so this movie i i had no idea what to expect uh when i turned it on i didn't know what the patreon pals you were our good dear beautiful lovely supporters have provided to us sometimes you provide us with nourishment and sometimes poison so when this started kicking off the first thing that i was thrilled to see one hour 40 minute duration all we thank you thank you so much and then i start seeing all of these cast members pop up and i'm like holy hell first of all we've got gary bucey in the role of a lifetime just screaming every 20 minutes or so into a camera that's near him gary bucey yeah i don't think i've ever seen him in a movie before i think i only know about
Starting point is 00:04:58 him from his like latent life um apprentice he was his own he was in um lethal weapon and also from memory uh point break like but i because i i feel like he sort of disappeared for a while and i i again like i only know a little bit of his mythos but it felt like he sort of went off the rails am i correct in thinking that i think that that might be true and how could it not be this was made in 1983 and he looked like an old crazy man in this but then he was like on the apprentice quite recently only a couple years ago i think yeah he uh i felt like he was almost playing himself in this film like it felt like i think he did a lot of cocaine at one point and to me it felt like he was sort of doing his takes in between having a
Starting point is 00:05:45 pretty good time in his trailer which is i gotta be honest kind of it's it's not cool to ruin yourself on cocaine but it is kind of cool to watch someone in a film doing that it's uh it's interesting it brings a lot of energy and uh at the risk of endangering some actors you know i'm kind of for it would you describe this as an ensemble cast i mean that's a good question because when you say ensemble cast i think of something like arrested development where there's a lot of craftsmen at the table who are each bringing their unique bit of artistry to weave into a tapestry this was like here's kind of a clusterfuck of people who you know um but you'll be surprised at what they're doing and why they're here bill ma is in this film and yeah i know i i clicked on that about halfway through i was like i know that voice i think i know that face
Starting point is 00:06:40 it doesn't look like him eh but the voice is the thing that gives him away well the role wasn't a huge stretch he was sort of just playing you know Bill Ma as though he was a cab driver Mr T lest we forget I don't know what the billing was
Starting point is 00:07:00 or who the stars were at the time but he surely I think must have been a pretty top shelf get for the movie Mr T sold this movie i've got no doubt in my mind i'm not basing that on anything more than just like my gut instinct but um he's not in the film that much to be honest if you look at if you look at the promotional poster it's mr t like writ large standing above the the capitol building in washington dc holding a cab door that says dc cab so he was obviously a big marketing vehicle uh and he like he kind of is just doing his mr t shtick at one point towards the end of the movie when they're dealing with these kidnappers they kind kind of misuse him in a very large and comical fashion.
Starting point is 00:07:47 So it's like towards the very end of the movie when the cab drivers are rallying together to recover Albert from these kidnappers who kind of arrive out of nowhere, I thought. And he's on top of a building behind the two kidnappers and you see him put his arms up to make his body large and jump down as though he's going to clothesline or eliminate two of the kidnappers immediately.
Starting point is 00:08:06 But instead, he kind of just lands behind them and then doesn't physically touch either of them at all and just gets into one of those sort of, you know, those standoffs. It looks like Capoeira, like Eddie Gordo from Tekken. Except that one of them has a gun pointed at him. Yeah, but I'm like, he's so high up. And they made such a big song. You've got this action hero. You've got this physically intimidating person. And then the whole application of the climax of the movie was just sort of...
Starting point is 00:08:37 His physicality and presence was vaguely threatening. They didn't actually use it. This is what I love about this film and this era film film because everything has to be kind of done in real life there wasn't a lot of effects there i don't know it didn't seem to me there were a ton of stunt people performing these things we see mr t and these big burly brothers um crash through some fake windows to great comic effect when they um enter the wrong house and just bust into this innocent farm couple's farm while they're having dinner. This is what I...
Starting point is 00:09:10 There's a grittiness to this film, and it's common. It's not just unique to this film, but it's like films of this era. Everything just feels really real. It's, like, way less shiny than the films we get now. Everyone's jumping on cars and shit. The cars all i mean they
Starting point is 00:09:26 were dressed to look completely beat up but they're genuinely fucked like the cabs that they're rolling around in you know they look like they might have been dragged by something because they don't work anymore and it was just kind of cool it's cool to see so much imperfection in films because you don't really get that as much anymore with the movies i'm seeing at the cinema there's too much money involved yeah it kind of felt like a student movie with a decent budget like also in terms of the way they distributed the story like everyone everyone's characters kind of got a bite of the apple i was never and i was never invested all the way in the story but i was also never totally disengaged like they're throwing enough stuff at you that you're sort of
Starting point is 00:10:08 like yeah okay let's get into some of the journeys actually shall we we're sort of talking around them so can i just kick off with mr t what he's there to do yes so 1983 this would have been well i i i imagine this must have been around the peak of the a team um for him to be the the prominent sort of promotional vehicle for this getting out in the cinemas and he's just there to do his whole i keep kids off drugs thing which is what like 80 of his career was i think and so there's this guy who seems to be maybe a pimp, but definitely a drug dealer, and he's got a real flash car. And there's a couple scenes where there's high school age kids
Starting point is 00:10:51 who just flock to this guy to hang around his cool shiny car. And Mr. T is a cab driver for this company called DC Cabs, which the whole movie's about. And while he's doing his runs, he periodically goes and visits his niece who is sort of caught up in in all of this and he's just desperately trying to get all these kids to stop paying attention to this drug dealer with a cool car and that's kind of his whole thing for the film would i be right in saying that that's about it yeah he's it's he's all kind of its moral core
Starting point is 00:11:23 like the the the cabbies with whom he hangs out, they've all got solid gold hearts, but they're pretty derelict and debaucherous. But he also is some sort of leader figure. I think probably because, I mean, it feels like even in the movie, part of it's because of his celebrity stature and also his physical stature.
Starting point is 00:11:43 But like, you know, when Albert, who is, I guess, the protagonist of the movie tries to rally everyone together around this failing cab company he it's his voice he's the first one to come over and say i stand with albert like i'm i'm i'm in on this and that kind of motivates a lot of the other characters to go with him but he like it it kind of feels like yeah he was like well if i'm going to do this movie i'm going to impress my messages inside of it as well it's kind of it's interesting that i it was pretty awesome of mr t to just dedicate his entire life to that like all the celebrity and shit was basically him popping up in different pop culture franchises and going hey remember stop telling drugs i know you just saw me pop up in the teenage mutant ninja turtles but here i am
Starting point is 00:12:31 in real life in a different movie probably not for the target demo that i'm trying to reach right now i hope you haven't picked up that crack pipe you kids you put it down uh would you like to guess how old do you think mr t is now i'm gonna say he is 68 far out that's a pretty sound guess he's actually 66 fuck i was pretty close he's got a cool story about why he calls himself mr t and i can't remember are you looking on his wiki at the moment yeah i am i don't know if it'll even be there it's more like a fun fact than something you put on a wikipedia page for someone um by the way this film was made on the princely budget of seven million dollars and uh from memory i looked up on imdb before i think it made like 17 something like that so it made money but not like a staggering amount yeah it was it just to me it
Starting point is 00:13:26 feels it feels perfectly of its era so i i guess the the lead the guy with whom you know we're we're sort of meant to be uh walking with through the film yeah we're introduced through him is albert hockenberry who is uh i i don't quite know i i sort of was uh just checking in at the start of the movie like where does he appear from because he moves to dc was he in the army he's no no so he's from the south i can't remember exactly they i think they do so maybe tennessee or something and so his father has just died so i think the guy who owns the dc cab company harold was in the army with his father yeah uh yeah yeah that sounds right yeah because harold harold's a fucking legend he's the guy who has this motley crew he's the guy who owns the dc owner of dc cabs he's also an albert on arrival
Starting point is 00:14:21 in dc he does and he's very sweet he's the new father figure for albert albert's like probably 20 years old but the other thing that harold owns is a flamethrower which comes up a few times in the film which is very cool um yeah so albert enters his dad's died um but he's like an adult he's a young adult so it's it's you know it's sad but it's not too sad he has with him some money which is later revealed to be six grand to um from inheritance to get himself started and a pair of boots that are slightly too big from his pops and he just like for some reason has an absolute dream to drive cabs like the guy is so fucking driven to be a cab driver and the like a big part of the movie is just him constantly bothering the guys who work at DC Cabs who do not enjoy their jobs to do ride-alongs with them so he can learn the job really well.
Starting point is 00:15:15 These sort of disgruntled, disheveled cab drivers for DC Cabs. I mean, admittedly, they're working for a pretty ragtag company. But we are to believe that they have dreams beyond cab driving, but the particulars of those dreams are never really spelled out. We just know that they're not entirely happy with their jobs, which is mind-boggling to Albert, who's like, no, what if I told you that this is the dream,
Starting point is 00:15:37 that you are fulfilling your potential, that this is a realisation of what you want to do? And everyone's sort of unsure, but then I guess because it's halfway through the movie and they've got nothing else on their plates they all kind of like well yeah we better actually put our elbows into this because otherwise what are we going to do yeah so he yeah he he's sort of this uh i found him immensely likable by the way there's something about his face which is and he's a baldwin but then i looked him up he's not a baldwin brother just he's not he's an off-brand baldwin yeah he's uh confusingly so that he's played by adam baldwin of the same era as the famous baldwins and a similar sounding name
Starting point is 00:16:17 but an entirely different clan he is um in serenity which i'm sure some people have seen um very good series that was cut in its prime. And yeah, he's in a whole bunch of stuff. But he's a young man in this. It's freaky seeing photos of him now because he's obviously middle-aged. But he's a handsome, charismatic young dude who just wants to drive a goddamn cab. Why won't someone let him drive a cab? That is genuinely all he wants.
Starting point is 00:16:43 In the early 80ss there's this highly regulated market so he's got to um get his licenses a lot about the it's called the hack department right the like governing body that looks after them yeah because the baddie the like equivalent of the dean of these naughty students is the guy who's in charge of the hack department from the government and uh he he takes away their license and stuff there's a few big um incidents that happen so one um old mate albert comes and arrives and he wants to learn how to he's so driven to drive he just wants to drive and um so we we play around with that for a little bit. We meet some cool people.
Starting point is 00:17:25 There's Tyrone, who's this... How would you describe Tyrone? He's an intelligent young man who sort of deliberately plays up his craziness to the people around him, I think to try and protect himself, I guess. He is honestly... He's almost the conscience of the film
Starting point is 00:17:46 like for the the film is uh not all parts of it have aged brilliantly but he is a character who kind of almost speaks truth to power as a as a black man in washington dc in the 80s who's like he represents uh a viewpoint which kind of still seems relevant today i totally like yeah very very prescient bit of characterization and also the it's just kind of sad how little things have changed i guess as well it's a reminder of that but he's kind of he's he's perturbed but sort of accepts the fact that he's you know um working for a white dude and kind of a white man society in new york and uh sorry in washington dc gary bucey goes on like this um this really uh um unhinged racist rant about how there's
Starting point is 00:18:34 so many black people black americans in the u.s army now that they're going to take over the country and you kind of like he spins off into it and you kind of get to the end you're like yeah fucking yeah i get it. Fair enough. There's all of these whole class of people in America who have been underserved by the society for ages and now they've got access to weapons. That seems like maybe that's what should happen.
Starting point is 00:18:57 I honestly think that what he outlined as a movie would have been a pretty interesting, I mean, obviously they just didn't have the time. They sort of went with the guy who loves driving cabs angle and said in all power to them. But, yeah, it's... Joel Schumacher would have been the guy to make that movie too. Like a kind of blaxploitation movie,
Starting point is 00:19:15 that sort of style of just a whole thousands, tens of thousands, the whole section of the African-American part of the armed services uniting and overthrowing America in some sort sort of egalitarian overthrow would have been main but so gary bucey this is why i kind of felt like gary bucey was uh channeling some of his own self because you sort of go on these crazy unhinged rants that had threads of truth and you'd be like all right gary bucey uh but so yeah and there's there's other there's these two muscular muscle men cab drivers who i thought was a really funny gag their their
Starting point is 00:19:49 cab is broken and it can only drive in reverse it's a great so when you first drive around with them like you just hear all these sort of adr off camera voices going out you're going backwards you idiot like everyone yelling at these guys and they're're sort of going, hey, we're driving into the shop. Our car's broken. And it's just good, silly fun. Really, there's so many quick gags in this. There's like hundreds of lots of little jokes. And a lot of them are done in ADR.
Starting point is 00:20:17 People just yelling off camera. It's really nice. It just carries you through. I actually, I wrote down my top three. Like there were some funny little like evergreen turns of phrase. Before you move on from the brothers, sorry. Did you get the sense they might have been wrestlers? Yes.
Starting point is 00:20:33 Awesome. And do you know, I don't know that they were because I looked them up and there was nothing about them wrestling. They were bodybuilders and they had a movie together called The Barbarians. I think they're the Barbarian Brothers. Correct brothers correct yeah i saw that in the credits when the credits rolled they're the barbara and so the movie the barbarians which i mean it could be even just as an extracurricular watch uh is a 1987 sword and sorcery film um i i don't know the particulars like because their surname is barbarian and the movie's called The Barbarian Brothers, so it's one of those movies, I think, that sort of treads a very confusing
Starting point is 00:21:08 and fine line between fiction and non-fiction. And they're not particularly strong performers, but they're fun guys to be around. Yeah, they're big meatheads. Every film needs some big meatheads. Although pretty much everyone's a big meathead in this. You've got a few other drivers you've got this very exhausted and uh put upon the sole woman who works at the at dc
Starting point is 00:21:31 cabs and she's uh she's tired of working for them she's tired of being mugged but like all these kind of threads i don't know like it felt like they were quite there was quite it was like a rube Goldberg machine in terms of telling a very simple story, which is part of what made it feel like, you know, the movie kept going, like, the pace was all right, because once they'd created and resolved one bit of conflict, they'd immediately move into another.
Starting point is 00:21:59 Exactly. And establishing that DC Cabs is a shitty kick- kick around cab company you then meet emerald cabs who like the you know they're the classic uh they're the flash version of it and they're the yeah they are so it's in this film it's it's like i don't know maybe our bar is so phenomenally low because we're in the middle of watching sex in the city um 52 times but it did it seemed like for as many characters as we got thrown at uh who were on screen you could tell everyone had somewhere to go like everyone had some sort of motivation and everyone was kind of fun to hang out with like everyone was bringing a little something yeah they're all very charismatic characters i i do yeah i think we
Starting point is 00:22:46 definitely uh probably not quite seeing the movie as it was made uh but that is you know just a byproduct of what what we do to ourselves there's also just before you do your quotes um a couple of ancillary or not so as the plot progressed characters that were really cool as well there's a guy called bongo who basically has like four lines in the whole movie but he is sort of made out to be like um quite a like rusted dude isn't he isn't that his vibe yeah yeah what does he get asked he gets asked about he goes he wants to do a drive around he goes can you i drive around so you can tell me about jamaica and kingston and he's like, I'm from Cleveland.
Starting point is 00:23:26 Good gag. Fucking good gag. And then there's Mr. Rhythm. Mr. Rhythm is a borderline homeless dude, I think. Does he work for them? Yeah, it's hard to know exactly how he fits in. But he had one of my favorite lines. So these are all delivered by different people at different times in the movie but there were three like evergreen lines that i thought were funny the third one was
Starting point is 00:23:51 um when they get into an argument with emerald cabs at the diner yeah and uh in response to a put down one of the people for dc cabs says come here fuck face come here and fuckface. Come here. And fuckface is just funny. It always is. It's timeless. It's a timeless insult. It's really good. The second one was towards the end of the movie when the kidnappers,
Starting point is 00:24:14 so I don't quite know where these characters come from, but these kidnappers kidnap this diplomat's children. It's in DC, so there are diplomats crawling all over the background of this film. No, they're all Children. It's in DC, so there are diplomats crawling all over the background of this film. No, they're all walking. It's crazy. Hold on, I've just got to reject a phone call. Sorry, Tim.
Starting point is 00:24:33 I thought you were literally pausing for laughter from that lukewarm gag. No, no, no. My phone started ringing. no no no i my phone started ringing um but so uh oh yeah so the the kidnappers take them and there's this one of the kidnappers is a woman and uh she is sort of saying a threat she's saying we should kill the kids who are doing really bad acting because they don't look scared at all but you would be if a woman with a gun under your chin was saying we should kill these kids but one of the kids is so non-plussed by this she actually says uh you are a pitiful bitch it's so good because the girl's like six yeah it delivers the line with such a plum to know that to know the swear word is one thing but to also use pitiful like pitiful is a
Starting point is 00:25:22 50 cent word that's class uh but my favorite line was delivered by mr rhythm himself after albert's had a rough night uh he goes to some sort of ladies night at a male strip club and then as the strip club's closing all the cab drivers they pull up their beaten up cabs and they get on the the bonnets and the roofs and they start dancing in this flock a very excited young woman coming out of the club and they pile into the cabs and all of the drivers drive away to some unknown place where i presume they have some sort of crazy sex orgy like the it's sort of that celebration of these cab drivers like the idea of how valuable they are or how desirable they are at that moment
Starting point is 00:26:00 in the movie sort of syncs up perfectly with albert's understanding or estimation of them as like cab driving is this holy grail of professionalism or you know it's sort of it's not really tethered to reality but as everyone leaves no one's got room in their car for him because he doesn't have his own car and he's this new fish uh he sort of he finds mr rhythm later that night and he says uh you got any advice for me? And the character who plays Mr. Rhythm says, Mr. Rhythm say, if you can go through the night till dawn without committing suicide, then you're okay. And it was just so like, I don't know, it really floored me. It came out of nowhere like a freight train,
Starting point is 00:26:41 but I thought it really got a big rise out of me at the time. But it's that awesome that's what this movie does so well is that there's all these little for as goofy and funny and comedic as this film is either intentionally or not there's all these beautiful bits of social commentary which permeate through and are like fuck that is dead on that is right on joel schumacher well done you and that's definitely one of them of just serving this this homeless dude as being this fountain of wisdom while he's this incredibly downtrodden man um so there's like a couple of big events that happen that drive the plot of this
Starting point is 00:27:19 film so yeah we open with albert being introduced to cabs. We fuck around with them for a bit. Then there is a violin. This is not a compelling storyline, but basically they'd never say this, but they make it out to be a Stradivarius really. Incredibly valuable violin gets left in a cab and it's worth half a million dollars and they assume whoever will find it will get a big cash reward and so
Starting point is 00:27:46 everyone goes nuts um trying to track it down and it turns out that the homeless guy mr rhythm has had it and been playing it like a ukulele for a bit which i can't imagine is doing um good things for the instrument itself but they figure it out they manage to get it back to its owner and um a ten thousand dollar000 reward is offered up. And this kicks off a whole bunch of events where, so the guy who's running the hack department, which regulates and governs all the cabs in the city, he goes, Albert will, no, what's his name? The guy who owns the cab company, Harold, will get all of the money because he owns
Starting point is 00:28:24 all the cabs. And they're kind of the money because he owns all the cabs and they're kind of okay with this because harold's their boss they respect him and they expect he'll he'll probably do something fair with it and then harold's like okay here's what we're gonna do everyone's gonna get a slice of the pie but just so you know this business is about to like cease operation because we have a real lack of money so just putting it out there if you would like to give it back to me your share you will be an investor in this company and everyone sort of dwells on this and trying to figure out what to do and in the ensuing um days his wife takes all of the money and their house and leaves him and uh it's then revealed that she's been sleeping with
Starting point is 00:29:05 his foil for the film the antagonist who is the head of the hack department the sort of dean of this animal house and um that's one of the couple of times we get to see him pull out his flamethrower which is awesome um and then the other separate like big plot event is the young Buck Albert, who this movie's kind of about, gets kidnapped alongside these two school kids. Who's driving them to the embassy every day? Sorry, to the school where all the diplomats' kids go? I can't remember.
Starting point is 00:29:37 Is it Tyrone? It doesn't matter, but it's of those it's it was slightly confusing like the kidnapping did kind of i mean i understand what they were doing but it like when you when i hear all this information presented back i'm like yeah that wasn't the movie there's just just enough going on that you could like you never challenged you can follow it all but it doesn't all quite add up um yeah but it's fine it's all fine and nothing's reinventing the plot wheel is it it's like the violin thing's pretty pretty played out but it's all good i mean there's enough people having fun the biggest compliment i can give this movie is it has done nothing to diminish the value of my day oh high praise i i like i
Starting point is 00:30:24 honestly you know i feel like i might have watched that movie anyway because you know obviously i'm in the i'm in the throes of the fest right now it's the sort of thing you just put on and watch during the day anyway just a while away an hour and 40 minutes absolutely and i'm so happy for that to have been my movie watching experience instead of what i know it will be time and time again while i'm here which is uh sex in the city i do have to pick a bone with something you said earlier though guy that the the kids who get kidnapped um from the school are bad actors wrong you couldn't be more wrong i reckon they were fantastically cast and their performances were a plus because their whole deal and i think they served they served as an ocean of comedic performances.
Starting point is 00:31:06 I think they were some of the strongest performers. Because Albert's really scared. He's this wet-behind-the-ears southerner who's come into Washington, D.C. and doesn't know what for. And these kids are like, oh, is this your first kidnapping? He's like, yeah. Oh, no, they say, have you never been kidnapped before? He's like, yeah. And they're like, oh, don't worry. This is our third time you're gonna be fine and there's six
Starting point is 00:31:29 they're both like six years old and they're these jaded um you know kids of these rich diplomats who have gone through the rigor so much and they're just like throwing out these sensational insults at the kidnappers. And they don't give a fuck. Yeah. When Albert gets out of his ropes and blindfold to reveal that the kids have already done it because they're so experienced. They applaud him. They're like, yay, you did it. Fuck, that cracked me up. That was a laugh out loud moment
Starting point is 00:32:05 for me it was a good bit of fun uh yeah look i think it's it's just it was just a pleasant morning like it was a nice thing to do i feel like i feel relaxed i feel like it's part of a day off and uh i gotta ask you some questions though please it feels like you're just you're floating at this point um so this film was obviously it came out in 1983 there's there's a lot of pretty fucking outdated uh lingo dialogue references um attitudes what how do you sort of reconcile all of that sort of stuff monty seeing a film like that there's you know casual mentions of the n-word um particularly by gary bucey that seemed to really smack you across the face when you're watching it in 2019 but what do you make of all that uh there's nothing to be done about it it's just the movie we watched you know like gary bucey's character certainly, I guess we can just call him Gary Busey,
Starting point is 00:33:05 I'd get pretty uneasy or nervous whenever he'd start talking for longer than a couple of sentences. But I was like, well, what are you going to do? Gary Busey's going to Gary Buse. It's 1983 as well. These things are products of the time, aren't they? Yeah, measuring old movies from different eras against modern standards is always a channel like it definitely jarred you know like it definitely uh you notice it like obviously
Starting point is 00:33:36 enough to to talk about it but uh i was sort of just like the whole movie felt so low stakes to me. I was sort of just like, yeah, yeah, whatever. Just keep presenting this information to me and I'll keep plodding through the film. Like it was, yeah. What did you think? Did it do anything to you? Look, I don't want to introduce sort of personal politics
Starting point is 00:34:01 to what is a fun and very stupid movie review podcast but like i do i i do find it interesting that there's some attempts to um kind of remove and ban um references to stuff from old works like this like old old bits of art and literature and film and music where it's just like i don't know it's they're just they were products of their time that's that's how people used to thought and i think we we should be able to be exposed to those ideas now and go that's dumb and we don't do it but surely people are not coming for dc cabs no i don't think 1983 comedy action hit no i don't i don't think so but their overarching umbrella just feeds into what I think about this, which is like, yeah, this movie came out in 1983. Like, that's pretty much my attitude, start and stop.
Starting point is 00:34:51 Yeah, it definitely came out in 1983, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. Had you heard of Irene Cara before? No, but she is a genuine pop star, so that was probably quite a big gift for the movie i imagine so they do they wear it like that's the case like it was a very big deal that she was there she she pops up in the film and this is at a point where tyrone has fucking bailed on the cab company everyone else decided to stick it out but tyrone left what i can't remember exactly what happened when he left i like just watch this because he didn't get the money out
Starting point is 00:35:30 did he from the violin shareholder payout or did he what do you mean well like he left the cab company but yeah and then he started hawking Americana merchandise on the street. Yeah, dressed as Uncle Sam. But I don't think he got the money from the violin earnings, did he? He didn't get his share out and then leave. No. Well, no one got their share. Yeah. Fuck, I don't know.
Starting point is 00:36:03 That's why Albert had to front his savings because all of the money that they'd anticipated was gone and then somehow they stretched his 6060 dollars of savings into like a fully brand new fleet of cars jackets licenses like they had the 10 grand as well from the violin money so they had like 16 grand to revamp everything. And in 1983, that was about a billion dollars. How much of the money did his wife Myrna take? Oh, fuck yeah, I don't know. They don't even say. I thought what happened is that they all thought it was going to be okay,
Starting point is 00:36:35 and then Myrna takes all the money, and Albert comes and saves the day, and he's like, we're all going to bail out, but here's the situation. I got these savings. It's not quite 10 grand but we work together myrna is a character in this film who is the um the wife of the guy who owns the cab company and she works there just like 24 7 uh on sort of a reception type thing because they've got someone else doing dispatch and um the only time we really learn anything about her is Albert's studying for his exam with, um, with Harold, who owns the cab company. And she comes home and she's like, there's no beers for me. You guys drank all the beers.
Starting point is 00:37:13 You know, I need to drink a beer while I watch Johnny Carson so I can get to sleep. And there's a big to-do about that. And that's kind of it. Um, and I, I, I know she was there to be presented as like a queen bitch you're supposed to hate but i was like i i get where you're coming from you're probably not drawing any money whatsoever out of your husband's shitly run cab company and you're there you know 60 hours away i'm sure absolutely i uh you know eventually they fill out her character to give other reasons to not like her but initially I was like everything that Myrna is saying is well within her rights as a partner in a relationship like yeah it's just basic basic courtesies but again Tim I bring you back to the
Starting point is 00:37:56 point you made not five minutes ago this movie was made in 1983 and if anyone comes into this apartment and tells me otherwise I will push them down an empty elevator shaft speaking of that do you know what quite really stuck with me and i think this is a gary beauty one as well um oh fuck i can't remember how he gets into it but he says oh woman they've got 50 of the money and percent of the pussy there's a few little things like that where it's just like fucking hell man that's that's funny that's a funny line you know there's a there's a funny line i think in uh in even in 2019 i think that's a funny line because it's factually accurate yeah there's one guy who doesn't get fleshed out at all his whole thing is he keeps saying it's hard to be a man
Starting point is 00:38:53 he'd be like an alt-right dude I think these days if he was still around yeah he's not given a lot to do he's Hispanic and he dresses well do he's from he's Hispanic and he dresses well and his whole shtick is it's tough
Starting point is 00:39:10 did you watch to the end to the very very end of the credits when the Grim Reaper or the Merchant of Death gets into the cab I'm so glad to hear you say that
Starting point is 00:39:19 because I'm just on the the cast page now to check up on who who people are and it's got Timothy Carey as Death and I was just on the cast page now to check up on who people are, and it's got Timothy Carey as Death. And I was like, what the fuck? This isn't Bill and Ted.
Starting point is 00:39:30 Death isn't in this. And it was like, oh, it's that guy at the end. He is Death. I just assumed that was Schumacher himself putting himself in the film, because there's no need for that scene to be there. No. It felt like a gag that they came up with in the writer's room, and they were like we'll just stick it at the end yeah he jumps into tyrone's cab tyrone's reading the credits do a fantastic job of keeping you engaged the whole way through though because
Starting point is 00:39:55 it's like you almost feel like there's a little bit more story being bled out uh you never get just the black screen with rolling text it's always like like moving images. And they're not bloopers. They're canon within the story of the film. It's a technique that you don't see a lot of anymore. But I was like, okay, you've got me here. By the way, the thing we missed out. So everything wraps up pretty neatly. So old mate gets the money from Albert.
Starting point is 00:40:21 Maybe he loses all the violin money to his wife. But he gets all the money that Albert's arrived with from his inheritance, six grand. Revamps the company. The company's got a brand new lease on life and is doing fabulously well. Then Albert gets kidnapped with the kids. They eventually save him.
Starting point is 00:40:37 And then the end is the city of Washington, D.C. throws a parade for this cab company, which is fucking dope and reminded me a lot of Washington, D.C. throws a parade for this cab company, which is fucking dope and reminded me a lot of Ghostbusters. And I was like, what a cool 80s thing in film they used to do, which they should bring back, which maybe will be in the next Avengers,
Starting point is 00:40:56 where you just get a nice parade at the end. Yeah, the parade. I don't know. I was like, okay. They kind of got themselves out of a jam they created but sure we'll we'll have a parade um look i think it was because they rescued those kids especially when the kids the kids were fine the kids were like you said the kids weren't worried anyway i'm happy to watch the movie i've got nothing left to say about it it was honestly
Starting point is 00:41:23 a fucking perfectly fine way to spend my morning and for that to my patreon movie i've got nothing left to say about it it was honestly a fucking perfectly fine way to spend my morning and for that to my patreon pals i am grateful yeah i feel like we owe you some money so i'm we're incredibly grateful that you throw us these bones every now and then in amongst doing like you know the brain verse and all the other shit the the like half-baked animated films that never quite got finished that you throw at us i really do appreciate you mixing it up with just some gary bucey nonsense and mr t star vehicles um that are perfectly fine and enjoyable to watch so i would recommend dc cabs um you know put your earmuffs on for the huffing and the cussing there's a bit There's a bit of 1983 bled into the film,
Starting point is 00:42:07 but it's fun, and it's not very long, and I'm so grateful for it. Guy, how cool is it that we got to watch that today? I wish you a great rest of the day. Hey, same to you, my friend. And thanks to all of you for listening and being a part of the Patreon. I hope you're having a good life.
Starting point is 00:42:27 Love you guys. Bye bye Patreon pals. Bye. Bye. See ya. Around the clock We're gonna rock To the rhythm of the street
Starting point is 00:42:36 Down the block Around the clock Yeah, we're gonna rock Around the clock Yeah, we're gonna rock To the rhythm of the street We're going to rock. Around the clock, yeah, we're going to rock. To the rhythm of the speed of the down the block. Around the clock, yeah, we're going to rock.

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