#36. Sad Dads in Space, Plus a Rambo Revolt
Listen to this episode ↗on Substack, where the show lives now
Matt Continetti fills in for Vic, and the three spend most of the hour picking apart Ad Astra without anyone quite defending it. Sonny pitches it as "Fight Club, but way more boring, and it's in space for some reason," praising the first half's moon dune-buggy shootout with space pirates and the murderous baboon before the back half collapses into Brad Pitt being sad about his dad; he goes two and a half of five on Letterboxd. Continetti calls it "Lost City of Z in space" and complains that the payoff never arrives — after two hours of buildup, Tommy Lee Jones says "let me go," Pitt says "okay, bye," and that's the ending — with the ponderous narration ("I'm on my way to Neptune") the worst offender. JVL is mixed negative at two stars but has the most interesting read: the film is essentially unintelligible to anyone from an intact family and works as an unsparing indictment of divorce culture, which he finds strange coming from Pitt. That sets off a genuinely heady stretch on fathers as models for God, with Sonny quoting Tyler Durden, JVL invoking Mary Eberstadt's How the West Really Lost God, and Continetti arguing that the movie's failed search for alien life is secretly an argument for God. Then JVL, who showed up on the strength of James Gray's promise of "the most realistic depiction of space travel," unloads: no grasp of spin versus thrust gravity or astrodynamics, escalators and poured concrete on a lunar base that looks exactly like a Washington Metro station, a Marlboro billboard on the moon's exterior, and killer mutant baboons. Earlier: Continetti's morning ruined by an Uber stuck in traffic, another unpaid Saddleback Leather plug, feeling middle-aged about TikTok and Lizzo, Downton Abbey beating Rambo $31 million to $18.9 million, and a corrections segment devoted to exiling a three-star reviewer named Shotgun Golfer.
From the show notes
#cdata-section -------------- On this week's episode, sponsored by Ethos Life Insurance, Matthew Continetti fills in for Vic Matus. Sonny plays ho...
Full transcript
Guest00:00:00This is Major Roy McBride. I'm attempting to reach Dr. Clifford McBride. This is Dr.McBride's son.
JVL00:00:16Dad, I'd like to see you again.
Sonny00:00:30Hello and welcome to another edition of the Sub-Beacon, sponsored by Ethos Life Insurance. I'm Sonny Bunch, along with Jonathan V. Last. And subbing in for Vic Matus today is Matt Continetti. Just a reminder, the Sub-Beacon is available on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher. Look under podcasts and search for Sub-Beacon. You will easily find us. Please subscribe, tell your friends, and leave a review. We have a review we're going to talk about a little bit later, but you leave good reviews, unlike the bad review that was left, that was falsely left for us. Gentlemen, how are we? JVO!
JVL00:01:00How are you doing? I am great, Matt Continetti! It is awesome to be here. Is this the first time we've ever done a show on the Sub-Beacon without a full-time Sub-Beacon employee? I don't... who's... who's this full-time Sub-Beacon employee? What do you mean? I've been on the show several times. No, no. Have you forgotten? Without. Without a full-time Sub-Beacon employee, because you...
Sonny00:01:25You mean Free-Beacon employee. Free-Beacon employee, sorry.
JVL00:01:28Oh, I see what you're saying. He's still employed.
Sonny00:01:30I'm still employed. He's still... he's still on through the...
JVL00:01:32Well, you're the... I'm still... I'm still the founding editor. Well, sure, but not... I mean, you are on to other great things.
Guest00:01:38Well, I'm compensated for my work. I'll be compensated for my... my services, including this... this show.
Sonny00:01:43You're gonna invoice... invoice the company... You think I would do this for free? No. That's... that's foolish.
Guest00:01:48Hang out with you guys for free? How are you, man?
JVL00:01:52I'm miserable. Yeah? Tell me why. Nothing... Let's get right to that. Did you shine shoes last night? No. So it just wasn't as fun as you thought?
Guest00:02:00Nothing can ruin a day than a lousy Uber ride. And this is the... this is the thing, because... and it's not even... the ride itself was very nice. It was the time between ordering the Uber and the Uber's arrival that screwed up my schedule today. Did you get one of these? And that was just traffic. He didn't have any control over that. Yeah. He just got stuck in traffic. That was just... Fortuna was against me this morning. Yeah. It's hard. So that just put me in a... a funk. Look out, world. Oh, look out. Look out, world.
Sonny00:02:33Look out, look out, Chuck Todd. We'll see him later today.
Guest00:02:37Matt Connetti's coming in hot. Loaded for bear.
Sonny00:02:40Santino, how are you? Note to listeners, this is being taped on a Wednesday. So if you go to MSNBC tonight, on Thursday, when you're listening to this, you will not see Matt Connetti on your screens, probably.
Guest00:02:53Maybe. I don't know. Maybe. Are you doing Thursday, too?
Sonny00:02:55No. Okay. So if you didn't catch him last night, you missed it. You don't need to catch him. You can catch me any night. Everyone needs to catch Matt every night. All right. I'm fine. I'm fine. I don't know. I don't really have anything. Want to talk more leather goods? For the morning, for the weekly wrap-up.
JVL00:03:12Did you get an email from Saddleback Leather after last week's show when we essentially did a 15-minute spot for them with no compensation?
Sonny00:03:19No. No, I didn't. I didn't because I don't send them the things that I say about them. I'm not desperate for free stuff. I'm happy to pay for the things that I like.
JVL00:03:28I don't mean free things, but it would be nice to get a free thing. I don't mean free things, but it would be nice to get a free thing. So I got an email from Saddleback Leather just saying, "We really appreciate that you love our products."
Sonny00:03:34Well, why are we doing another 15 minutes on Saddleback Leather uncompensated if you're so worried about it? Fine. You're so worried about it. Let's talk about the movie. How's your watch collection, JVL?
JVL00:03:45You know, I think we are poised to make an addition. Again? But I don't want to talk about it. I haven't bought a watch in forever and a day.
Sonny00:03:55So like two months?
Guest00:03:57Much longer than that. When did you buy the one that you're wearing? Right now.
JVL00:04:01I did not buy this. This is the Seamaster. This is the anniversary watch given to me by my lovely wife, the Amiga Seamaster. Beautiful. It is beautiful. It's my avatar on Patreon. Oh, you have a Patreon?
Sonny00:04:13JVL's Patreon.
JVL00:04:14We'll talk about that later. What about your Gab account? Speaking of uncompensated ads.
Guest00:04:20TikTok. Is your Patreon linked to your Gab account?
JVL00:04:23What is TikTok? So the New Yorker did a piece on TikTok. I know. So I have not mastered Snapchat. In fact, I found Snapchat too confusing to use after five minutes, so I just abandoned it. But the kids are already off of that and on to TikTok. TikTok. TikTok.
Sonny00:04:40My understanding is that TikTok is a bit like a hyper Vine. Remember Vine? Vine loops? I remember Vine. I feel like TikTok is kind of like that, except a little bit longer and a little bit more involved. You know what I feel like?
Guest00:04:50Old. Old. TikTok is just the latest piece of evidence confirming this fact. The other is the hip hop artist known as Lizzy.
Sonny00:05:00Lizzo. Lizzo. People are talking about her. Starring in Hustlers. Lizzo.
Guest00:05:05She's in Hustlers? Yeah. People are talking about her and it just occurred to me the other day, I don't know who she is. I don't know what she looks like. I think I've heard one of the songs. I didn't really like it. And that's when I realized I'm a middle aged man. And so TikTok, please, it might as well be Neptune, a little foreshadowing there for the movie. You couldn't save that for the transition? God. It might as well be from Neptune.
JVL00:05:30I assume that if TikTok is in the New Yorker, that means it is already passe among the kids and they're already on to something new.
Guest00:05:37No, no. But the author of that piece was Ja. Ja Tolentino. Ja Rule? Ja. Ja. Ja Tolentino. Ja Tolentino. Ja. Oh. I think. And she is, she's one of the kids. She's with the children. She's the second most important essayist of our time. Next to soon to be Nobel Prize winner, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Of course. Question.
Sonny00:05:58Question. Is. Is. And it's working.
Guest00:06:02But I'm not gonna show it to you.
Sonny00:06:03I'm telling you the truth. Is, is TikTok one of these things that will end up being overly, massively overvalued? Like WeWork? Like WeWork or like Theranos? I'm actually listening to Bad Blood right now. It's amazing, right? It's, it is fantastic. The book about Theranos.
JVL00:06:17I wish Len Cariou had done the reading for John Cariou's book.
Sonny00:06:22I don't know. That would have been amazing. Is that a calm reference? Is that a calm reference?
JVL00:06:26No, Len Cariou is a famous Broadway actor who sang originally. The role of Sweeney Todd in Sweeney Todd. He's good. It doesn't matter what. Broadway? Yeah.
Sonny00:06:35What is? What are you? What is this? You wait till we get John Podhortz on the show to talk about, talk about Broadway. All right. You, you save that for one of these days I'm out and, and J-Pod is here. Well, this has been a fantastic start to the show, guys. We're really, we're really staying on track.
JVL00:06:49So let's just, let's just talk about the movie. There's a lot to talk about.
Sonny00:06:53Okay, good. Speaking of old British houses, we were just talking about old British houses. British houses. Right. Over the weekend, Downton Abbey took the top spot at the box office with $31 million, followed by At Aster with 19 million. And in third place was Rambo Last Blood, which took in 18.9 million. Do you guys have any box office thoughts other than decline being a choice that we have made given the trouncing of Rambo by Downton Abbey?
Guest00:07:21That about sums it up for me.
Sonny00:07:22Have you ever watched, who here has ever watched? I actually went to. A minute of Downton Abbey. I've watched. I watched zero minutes of the show. I went to see the movie with my wife, which was a fascinating experience. Jonathan.
JVL00:07:32I watched the first season, and like with Mad Men, this is a show that should have existed for one season because it had a story to tell. And then after it was done with the story, because it was very popular, they just turned it into a soap opera. And so I tapped out.
Guest00:07:47I have never seen a minute of either property. And I have no intention of ever seeing it.
JVL00:07:55You know what, instead of, instead of seeing Downton Abbey, just go rewatch Gosford Park, which is the single best movie. Which is a Robert Altman film. Robert Altman. And I think his best film. Yeah, I've heard that.
Guest00:08:07I've seen scenes of it. I haven't seen the whole thing. It's amazing.
JVL00:08:10Yeah. Absolutely amazing.
Guest00:08:12Sonny, do you love Gosford Park? No. I feel like this is one of those great underrated movies. I don't. Sonny doesn't like Altman as a rule.
Sonny00:08:17I don't either. It's not that I don't like Altman. It's just that I like a very narrow band of Altman. I like Nashville. Nashville. I don't like Nashville. That's the thing. Nashville is him at his most self-indulgent. I'm not a big fan of all that. Shortcuts. Shortcuts is him at his most self-indulgent. No, but Shortcuts is at least funny. Is it? It is. More so than Nashville, certainly, which is kind of dour and full of itself.
Guest00:08:45I don't care for it. You know a movie from that period that I recently watched, Being There, with Peter Sellers? Oh, yeah. Chauncey Gardner. Excellent movie. People love it.
JVL00:08:57I've never seen it.
Guest00:08:57I particularly recommend it to you, considering that there is some relevance to the current political scene. And, of course, Sellers is just so good. He was so good.
JVL00:09:11I believe at one point in time, he was the highest paid actor in the world. Worth it.
Guest00:09:16Yeah.
Sonny00:09:17Worth it. Speaking of Downton Abbey, though, I did go see it. I did go see the movie. I saw it with my wife. She was very, very into it. I, having not seen a single minute of the show, was not into it. Did you need to see the show or what was it like going in cold? It was fascinating because you could see all of the things that were happening in the show. It's a bit like the Deadwood movie, okay? So the Deadwood movie, in theory, I think you probably could have watched that as a standalone property. A lot of things wouldn't have necessarily made sense to you, but at least the overarching story would have made sense. But there are things in the Deadwood movie where you saw what was happening and you realized that this wasn't really an extended episode. It wasn't a two-hour episode of Deadwood. It was a massively truncated season of Deadwood. It was a two-hour season of Deadwood. So there were things that would happen that you were like, okay, I could see how that would play out over 50 minutes and it would be better than this. The movie was still fun. The Downton Abbey movie was very much like that. For instance, there was a whole subplot where some Irish national tries to assassinate the
JVL00:10:22king for some reason. The chauffeur?
Sonny00:10:25No, no. He stops the assassination attempt.
Guest00:10:29For some reason, Sonny. Maybe it's the British colonization era.
Sonny00:10:36Keep your intersectionality out of here. But this Irish guy, he pops up in four different scenes for about 30 seconds each time and it's like, what is going on here? And then all of a sudden out of nowhere he's trying to kill the king, again, for some reason. Don't know why. Everyone loves the king. So you could see that. You could see that playing out over like three episodes of a show, right? That is the thing that each of these appearances should have been about 10 minutes long and we actually get to understand his motivations and blah blah. So the whole movie is kind of like that. It feels like a massively shortened season of a television show, which, you know, it's good and bad, I guess. I don't know. I didn't care for it. My wife loved it. And what's interesting about this film, I saw a screenwriter talking about this on Twitter, is that this is one of these movies that appeals very strongly to a relatively narrow band of the film-going population, older women. And it is a huge hit. Careful there, Sonny. It's a huge hit. I mean, this is...
JVL00:11:42Careful. You're in dangerous territory.
Sonny00:11:44I mean, older being like older than 20, you know, like women above the age of... Because your wife is not an old woman. Right, right, right. Women out of their teenage years. If you're looking at the quadrants, right, it's the over 18 female, you know, market. Right. Thank you.
JVL00:11:57I did that for your own safety.
Sonny00:11:58Thank you. I appreciate that. So it's kind of like narrowly cast at a segment, but it hits it hard, right? And this is the lesson of Crazy Rich Asians, which was kind of narrowly cast at the Asian audience, but then expanded out of it once people realized it was, you know, a good fun rom-com type movie. The older women like that one too. Older women probably like that one as well. Yeah.
Guest00:12:26Mamma Mia.
Sonny00:12:27You know what the commonality is?
Guest00:12:28Matt Continetti has not seen either one and has no interest. I saw parts of Crazy Rich Asians on the seat next to me on a flight returning from Japan. And the female protagonist was quite attractive. Fetching.
Sonny00:12:45She was a fetching lady. Crazy Rich Asians is a weird movie too because it was celebrated for being so woke and so hip. But it is a 100% true. 100% defense of capitalist excess. It is wealth porn. And family. From start to finish. Family and the importance of family. So anyway, interesting stuff there, I guess. I don't know.
JVL00:13:06What happened to Rambo?
Sonny00:13:08Rambo, you know, who needed another Rambo movie, first off?
Guest00:13:15Second off, Matt Continetti and everyone who works at the Washington Free Beacon. You know, I was advised not to come onto this program. This week, precisely because we were not discussing Rambo Last Blood.
JVL00:13:29By who? By who?
Guest00:13:31Aaron Harrison, perhaps? Several of my coworkers said it or that I should that I should out of protest not see Ad Astra. Instead, go see Last Blood and then talk about that. Oh, you should have done that. We could talk about that because I've seen I saw Rambo as well. Well, I haven't seen Rambo because I was a good boy and I went to see Ad Astra, which we'll get to. And I have no complaints about that. But I want to see the Rambo movie. Here's me. I give you my explanation. Yeah. The people who the audience for the Rambo movie, i.e. me, we're too busy. We're too busy to go to the movies. We have lives. We have children. We have NFL football. Now on Sundays, we're entering the Major League Baseball playoffs. We just we're not busy. So what do we do? What does every middle aged dad do now? We wait for video on demand. It's that simple. I'm going to watch it on video on demand in the comfort of my home. I don't have to go out. I don't have to. I can have my own snacks. You know, I can have the coffee if I want to remember I had I couldn't bring in. There was no coffee when I went to see the Bruce Springsteen blinded by the light. That's why I think there's there's like a it's like a middle aged overweight dad strike against the going to. We're just not going to. We're just not going anymore. We just wait. Wait until we can see it on video on demand. Did you like it, Sonny? It's fine.
JVL00:14:59It's fine. Place it. Rank it. Rank the Rambo movies. Ugh.
Guest00:15:04Uh. What?
Sonny00:15:06Daddy seems so. First Blood. Part three. Part two. No. First Blood. First Blood. Number four. The fourth one. Rambo. It's just called Rambo. Uh. Then. So number one is First Blood. Number one is First Blood. Yeah. Which is definitely the best. It's a great movie and has like resonant themes and whatnot. Other than like let's blow stuff up. Which is fun. Very different from the Rambo. But it's very different. It's a very different sort of movie than the others.
JVL00:15:34More like the Deer Hunter.
Guest00:15:35Yes. Totally. And Rocky. Yeah. I mean Rambo and Rocky were. When they came out they were coming from a very specific place. Which was the ethnic working class of this country. And then both franchises assumed something different as they developed.
Sonny00:15:52So. In my own order I would say number one, number four, number three, number two and then this one. I would say this is probably the worst of all the Rambo movies.
Guest00:16:02Wow.
Sonny00:16:03I was. I was. Wow. But that said it was it was definitely a like. So. High concept.
Guest00:16:11It was basically taken. But there's a lot of violence.
Sonny00:16:13It's basically taken on the American border with Mexico. And you're telling me it was the worst of these movies. Yeah.
JVL00:16:20That sounds amazing.
Sonny00:16:21The one where he goes back to Vietnam. The one where he goes to Afghanistan.
Guest00:16:23So much better. Both very good. But again, different times. Better times.
Sonny00:16:29Different places. Better times. Yeah. Trying to make trying to make America. I'm going to make some pop my own popcorn. Put some battered cheese on it. Yeah, exactly. The way I like. I don't have to conform to AMC's rules and regulations. Melt some caramel over it. All right. Okay. Ad Astra. Ad Astra.
JVL00:16:50Want to do a big boy review for us, Sonny?
Sonny00:16:52I don't know. I feel like I've been talking a lot. I don't. Do it. Do you guys want to do a big boy review? JVL. Do you want to do a big boy review? Or do you want me to do the big boy review? You should do it. All right. So Ad Astra is a bit like I and I was very hesitant to make this connection coming out of the film just because the the only real obvious connection is Brad Pitt, but Ad Astra reminds me a little bit of Fight Club with the kind of shallow anti consumerism and the daddy. Issues and all that stuff. If you took all of the humor and all of the irony out of Fight Club and made it super boring for half of the film, that's that's basically my my elevator pitch for Ad Astra. It's like Fight Club, but way more boring. And it's in space for some reason. No, it's Heart of Darkness in space. I mean, you could say that as well. That's fine. That's what everyone else is saying. I'm not everyone else. JVL. I could go my own.
JVL00:17:53That's what that's what James Gray James Gray's literal elevator pitch was Heart of Darkness in space. Right.
Guest00:17:59Except James Gray, the director fails on that level. It fails on that level. The movie to compare it to, though, isn't necessarily Fight Club. It's Gray's previous film, Lost City of Z. It is Lost City of Z in space, in space with with a happy ending or at least an ending where the father spoiler alert, the father doesn't doom. The child.
Sonny00:18:22Yeah. Well, but here's here's what's interesting about the end. So the first half of the film, Brad Pitt is on Earth. Why don't you tell me?
JVL00:18:29Nobody saw this. So give me.
Sonny00:18:31So. So the movie is set on an earth in the near future, whatever that means. Not that near. Since we've colonized the moon, we have we have basically airports on the moon and we have stations at Mars, et cetera. We have some sort of antimatter drive that allows us to traverse great distances much more fast. We then we're supposed to for a hard sci fi movie. The sci fi is not very hard in this, I would say we're going to do a whole thing about that. Yeah, you can you can get on that because I I'm not I'm not super into nitpicking with sort of stuff. But but it is it is very nitpickable. So Brad Pitt lives on Earth. He's a astronaut. He's in the military. And while he is working on some sort of giant antenna array, the pulse happens. It's a big electromagnetic something or other antimatter blast, blah, blah, blah. Cosmic rays, cosmic rays. They destroy all of the electronics. Power goes out all over the world. Lots of people die.
JVL00:19:26Does he turn into a rock monster or does he get stretchy and elastic?
Sonny00:19:30He turned invisible. He turns invisible. So he he is tasked by the United States military to go find the source of these cosmic ray blasts, which it turns out is his dad, who has gone on an event horizon like a mission to Neptune, where he's trying to find life outside of outside of the Earth. So the the whole first half of this movie is kind of about this idea of humanity as an all consuming virus in a way. It is very much about like there there are lines throughout the film in the Brad Pitt voiceover. It's like we just we go everywhere we go, we spread and we consume and then we spread some more. And like I said, there's this kind of shallow anti consumerism.
Guest00:20:13That's a stupid part of the monologue.
Sonny00:20:15Right, right. But that is that's what the whole first half of the film is about, is about the the expansion of humanity in in in its worst ways. And then the second half of the movie is super, super boring. He goes to Mars and then he flies off to Neptune and he blah, blah, blah. The trip to Neptune takes about as long as the trip to Mars, which is which is again, we can nitpick that in a second. The first half of the movie I actually liked quite a bit because it has it has, for instance, space pirates on the moon. There's a whole dune buggy shootout. Best part of the very it's gripping, great, exciting filmmaking. There is also a murderous baboon at one point. Very good part. Very good part of the movie. I enjoyed all of this stuff. I enjoyed the action beats. And I and when you when you mix the kind of like ponderous, oh, humanity is bad. What was us with the action elements? I can live with all that. It's once you get rid of the action. And it's just Brad Pitt being sad about his dad and being abandoned by him that the movie just dies from it. Just I mean, I like I was checking my watch, which I never do in a movie.
Guest00:21:25This is my complaint about the movie. The payoff never arrives. The whole movie is a series of episodes leading up to this supposedly epic confrontation with Tommy Lee Jones, who plays the father, the father who Brad Pitt had thought was dead and had been really an absentee dad, even up to the point where he where he, Tommy Lee Jones left for this mission to Neptune. And the reason he had to go to Neptune, they say, is because it's the first planet outside of the heliosphere. I don't know if this is true, but that means that the radio communications to and from other stars would be better than anything. So the whole movie with the ponderous voiceover, which was for me the worst part of the movie, is this lead up to the encounter with Tommy Lee Jones. All right. And then you have these exciting action beats, right, that are that feel that feel like a
Sonny00:22:19different movie. They're only two of them. Straight out of a different movie. Here's what happened.
Guest00:22:23There are only two of them. There are three, actually. The fall off the tower. The fall is awesome. Yeah. So the three action beats. But what happened was James Gray clearly got to the end of the movie and was like, I'm already at two and a half hours. What's going to happen? How do I how do we lead it up? And so it is such a letdown, this encounter with Tommy Lee Jones. And it literally after years of angst that Brad Pitt has been building up to meet with the dad and to hold on to the dad and to be with the dad. The dad says, Let me go. And he goes, Okay, bye. See you. That's the end of the movie.
Sonny00:22:52Basically. Well, it's not quite the end of the movie. The actual end of the movie is Brad Pitt reconnecting with his wife. So here's OK. So the first half of the movie is humanity is bad. We just consume and we take and we consume and we leave these shallow, empty lives and and we're terrible and awful. And then by the end of the film, the last shot of the film is Brad Pitt sitting in some yuppie restaurant, drinking his yuppie coffee. Waiting for his yuppie wife and realizing that that's all that matters. The world, the universe is empty and terrible. So we should just screw and consume. And that's it. That's all we do. That's the takeaway from the movie for me.
Guest00:23:30He wanted a human connection. He never had any connections. The father was first my other takeaway from this film. I would not want to be James Gray's dad. Because if you compare this to Lost City of Z, again, both movies, the two most recent films by this director are about children who idolize their fathers and follow their fathers. It's to their doom. Now, the difference is in Ad Astra, Pitt is redeemed. Pitt finds a human connection as opposed to being consumed by cannibals, which is the fate of Tom Holland in Lost City of Z. Both films visually stunning, gripping at parts, gripping at parts, but kind of weirdly lifeless at other parts. And that was the case with Ad Astra, Jonathan.
Sonny00:24:13Well, he's just hopefully looking at us, hopefully Brad Pitt took out a life insurance policy before he went on this trip. Speaking of life insurance, JVL.
JVL00:24:24You like to plan ahead. You contribute to your 401K and save for the kids' college fund. If you haven't yet, you should also think about life insurance, especially if you're Vic Mattis. You may be putting off getting life insurance because you think it's complex, expensive, and time consuming. Ethos is a faster, easier, and more affordable way to get life insurance to make sure your family's taken care of. They're committed to finding the plan that's best for you and your budget, all from the comfort of your computer, tablet, or phone, in just 10 minutes or less. Simply answer a few questions online about things like your health, age, and income, then finish your application and get a near instant approval. Everyone is different, but a healthy 35-year-old can get $1 million in coverage for only $50 a month. With Ethos, you can rest easy knowing the people you love are taken care of. Confusing terms and piles of paperwork? Not included. Our listeners can get started by going to ethoslife.com/subbeacon and clicking on "check my price." Again, get a fully personalized quote by going to ethoslife/subbeacon. One more time, make sure to visit ethoslife.com/subbeacon so they know we sent you. JVL, what are your thoughts? Your thoughts on Ad Astra?
Sonny00:25:52Your parents are both still married, correct, fellas?
JVL00:25:57Yeah. Yeah. I think this movie is essentially unintelligible to anybody from an intact family. It is an indictment of the divorce culture. The consumerism is not about the consumerism of the human race. It is about the self-centeredness of fathers who abandon their families. In a weird way, it is so unsparing that there is no happy ending when Tommy Lee Jones is confronted with the legacy of what has happened because his work ... We think for a while that Tommy Lee Jones is on purpose sending the cosmic rays out to kill Earth because things went bad and he changed his mind or something. Or he's in contact with an alien intelligence. Right. Instead, it turns out that just somebody sabotaged and he had ... It was an accident. Yeah, it was an accident. He had no idea that this was going on and confronted with the fact that not only did he abandon his family and come out here on this mission that it turned out was absolutely futile anyway, and that the end result of it is that he's destroying the human race, he is basically unrepentant and says, "Well, that's not home to me. I don't want to go back there," and then decides to kill himself. This is what it has to say to fathers who divorce their wives and leave their children. This stuff is, as you like to say, Sonny, this isn't subtext. This is just text, and it is a little weird for Brad Pitt, who has recently left six of his children with his wife to make a movie like this. Well, did he leave the family or did she leave the family? Yes. Well, he went and started banging somebody else, right? That's what happened.
Guest00:27:37Okay. I just wasn't clear on the details.
JVL00:27:39Yeah. Anyway, all of which is to say, it was Mary Uncle Tiard, I believe. I'm not interested in bringing up the personal lives of the artists who make these things. It's just that it did strike me that this movie, which is, again, so unsparing in what it has to say about divorce. And it was, I don't think it was good, but it's all perfectly intelligible if you view it as Pitt then coming to the conclusion that all of this stuff, the professional goals men set for themselves. Things they want to do with their lives. At the end of the day, that stuff doesn't matter. What matters is life and life is the stuff that happens when you turn inward towards the people who are in your life right now.
Guest00:28:28Definitely the theme of the film.
JVL00:28:29Yeah. And the rest of it, that stuff is unimportant and you will die despondent and alone if you fixate on it.
Guest00:28:36But does it really work as a movie because for me, I was expecting kind of like, the movie sets it up. It has a kind of fugitive reversed with Tommy Lee Jones as the fugitive and Brad Pitt the person who has to confine him and confront him. And so you're to spend two hours waiting for this confrontation and then it's exactly as you described. He encounters a broken person and then just lets him die.
Sonny00:29:10Yeah. Well, I mean, it's hard. I don't know that it's so much he lets him die. He tries very hard to save him. Even after he like repels into the ionosphere of Neptune or whatever.
Guest00:29:23So he does face it. You're right. He faces a choice. Does he die with him? Right. Again, going back to Lost City of Z where the father and son die together. In this case, he does do the separation.
Sonny00:29:33He separates from the umbilical cord to his father.
JVL00:29:37Yeah. You like that? Yeah. But anyway, we were joking before the show. You said it was like, you know, a sad dad movie. I don't view it as a sad dad movie. I view it as a happy movie because it doesn't let the dad who abandoned his son off the hook. What I hate is movies like this where the dad who has spent 35 years of his life like
Guest00:29:54off being selfish at the end repents and gets forgiveness and then everything's fine after
JVL00:29:59five minutes of hugging and learning. That stuff drives me crazy.
Sonny00:30:04So before the show started, I had mentioned that this is also a movie about, it is definitely a movie about God, right? The, you know, the sublime and again, one of the reasons that I thought of Fight Club when this movie, when I walked out of this movie was the line from Fight Club where Tyler Durden says to Edward Norton's character, our fathers were our models for God and if our fathers bailed, what does that tell us about God, right? That is basically the theme of this movie as well, I think. Is that it is saying stop searching for aliens, stop searching for meaning in this kind of, there are several references to God and religion in the film, Tommy Lee Jones frequently, like in the videos, the videos he sends back from the mission says, you know, we're out here searching for God's creation or something, I can't remember exactly what it was. And it strikes me that, again, this movie is a dour and humorless way of making the same point.
JVL00:31:07You know, Mary Eberstadt wrote a book, now two books ago, three books ago, I don't know, The West's Really Lost God, which is about religiosity and demographics. And she makes a point which I've never seen somebody make before, which is that in a divorce culture where absent fathers are, at this point, almost the rule, you know, something like 49%, 47% of all first births happen to unwed mothers, I think it is. How can you understand the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition? Which is God the Father, when you most, half the kids, 40% of kids, grow up without a father, right? I mean, God is always explained as a father figure in the Judeo-Christian tradition in a world where half the kids don't have fathers. How can that make sense? How can you put that together? How can you understand the act of creation is an act of love and all sorts of other things?
Guest00:32:05I have a slightly, it's all very profound for the Sub-Beacon, but I have a slightly See, when Vic's not here, I have a slightly different interpretation of the extraterrestrial life question and its connection to theism, which is, for the advocates of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, many of them are desperate to find ET precisely because it would invalidate biblical religion. So if you go back to Carl Sagan, from the very there, he's like, he would always say, what would it mean? There's this other planet and did the God visit them, right? The fact that we have not found extraterrestrial intelligence and the fact that it's not found in that movie.
Sonny00:32:51Indeed, we're the only ones. That it's explicitly rejected in the movie, that they searched everywhere and found nothing.
Guest00:32:55That to me is an argument for God, because it means that something special is about humanity and human consciousness.
Sonny00:33:04I would agree with you, except for the fact that all of the exploration figures in this film are explicitly religious.
Guest00:33:12And in the context of the movie. That is an interesting detail in kind of the world-building that Grey did, to the extent that he did it. The government in this near future seems to be heavily theistic, or I mean, I don't know if it's explicitly Christian, but they're all because the Space Command people are always saying prayers, Pitt's always saying prayers, Tommy Lee Jones says, so there is some element in that. I mean, yeah. What he's trying to say that I don't know what he's trying to say. This is kind of one problem, I think, with his work other than the dad stuff, which Jonathan's absolutely right about is that he kind of, he like over, he overreaches. I think it was the same thing with Lost City of Z. I mean, when he, if you think about this guy's career, Grey, he started off doing these Joaquin Phoenix films with Mark Wahlberg, and they're all kind of about, they're very kind of urban crime dramas. We Own the Night was the one from about 10 years ago. It's kind of a smaller world. It's a smaller world. You kind of have a, for this last, you kind of have a better grip on it is what I'm saying. For the last two films, Lost City of Z and this, he's really kind of reaching. And there's moments in both movies where he gets it. I mean, just visually in every element of the film, sound, music, it comes together and it's like, wow, that's a great image. Or that there's something, you know, it's really affecting me, my sensibility. But then there's all this other stuff where you're like, well, does that really fit? Why? Is it an action movie? Is it a movie about divorce?
Sonny00:34:46What's going on? It feel, it really does feel like two entirely separate types of sci-fi movie. It feels like it is kind of reaching for that 2001-style sense of the, but except for the fact that Stanley Kubrick didn't have a shootout between the Russians and the Americans around the monolith. You know, he had the confidence in his vision to make it a kind of pure space exploration
Guest00:35:19movie. Or he had the freedom to do it.
Sonny00:35:23Well, this is, there is some question as to how much studio interference there was on some of these sequences. Sure.
JVL00:35:33Can I say a couple nice things about the movie? Which I didn't like.
Sonny00:35:36Well, I feel like we've been very mixed, almost mixed positive on this movie. Definitely mixed positive.
JVL00:35:40I'm mixed negative. I'm mixed negative. So there's some world building parts of it which are interesting. The thing that I found, the single most interesting thing in the whole movie was when Brad Pitt's character arrives on Mars and is being processed on entry into Mars, there is a sign on the wall for suicide prevention saying, you know, call before you do anything. You're not alone. You're not alone, which is a deep statement about what it is like to live, you know, far off in an outpost and what that world is like. But didn't you also like the receptionist?
Guest00:36:15The receptionist behaves exactly as though any other receptionist would.
Sonny00:36:19Except that was, it totally took me out of the movie. When Natasha Lyonne shows up in that role. I don't know who she is. So I guess I didn't have that.
JVL00:36:26That's funny. I thought to myself, has Natasha Lyonne gotten herself together? No.
Sonny00:36:29Is she back and acting? Well, she was, she did that Netflix show, Russian Doll, that got a lot of buzz and acclaim. But she, but her being there totally takes me out of the moment. I'm like, oh wait, that's Natasha Lyonne. It was like when.
Guest00:36:41Oh, I didn't know who she was.
Sonny00:36:42So it didn't affect me that way. You don't remember her from a, what was she in American Pie? Wasn't she the, she, she, she had a bit of a breakdown if I remember correctly.
Guest00:36:49I haven't watched that movie in 20 years.
Sonny00:36:52But it was like, do you get, did you guys see Loving, the movie about Loving v. Virginia? Anyway, there's, there's a moment in that movie, a very serious drama about, you know, race and about where Nick Kroll shows up as a civil rights attorney who is defending the couple at the heart of Loving v. Virginia against the state. And I was just like, what, what is he doing? Why is the guy from the league here? What is happening? Why is he making faces? This is a serious film and this is almost, that's exactly how I felt when Natasha Lyonne showed up.
JVL00:37:22It just took me out of it. The, the other choice that was interesting in this is the notable extent to which computers and robots are missing from this vision of the future. The only bit of that we get is the psych test. That he keeps submitting himself to, which is like, you know, talking to Siri and then Siri says, yes, you're not crazy, which Blade Runner did better Blade Runner 2049 did better.
Sonny00:37:48Blade Runner 2049 did better. Yeah. Same thing. Do that in there.
JVL00:37:53He did take that from there. So I, you know, I, I looked at, I thought that was, again, there's a thing about science fiction in America. I think we have, we're, we have gone through a very fallow period in science fiction over the last 20 or 30 years. 30 years where sci-fi has been nothing like it was in its golden age of the fifties and sixties.
Guest00:38:12We know why that is. And it's because of the internet. And it's because of the social justice awakening.
JVL00:38:16No, I think it's because of the internet. I think the internet has turned us all inward looking and all of the things that interest people about the future then have to do with. Cyberpunk.
Sonny00:38:25Cyberpunk has, has replaced space exploration as the dominant sci-fi theme.
JVL00:38:28And so it is the idea of like looking inward about what we can do to ourselves with computer technology as opposed to what we can do moving outward with. Rocket. Rocket technology.
Guest00:38:39Well, I bet you still get some good sci-fi out of Neal Stephenson or, or, or Gibson, right? I mean, on these questions.
JVL00:38:44Yeah. But I'm just saying it isn't, it isn't like it was in the fifties and sixties when it was the golden age. And a movie like this, which is, has sci-fi ambitions, like real classic sci-fi ambitions in a way that again, even the, the set design is designed to evoke. Tycho base. Yeah.
Guest00:39:01No, totally. When they land on the moon, that is, it's almost, the shot is almost exactly the same. Yeah. The, the beautiful shot of 2001 where you're looking skyward from the, from the base, you know, as the, as the, um, landing pod comes down and the, like the jaws of the gate kind of enclose it. Yeah.
JVL00:39:19Missing from this movie. But to do that, they, they sort of banished the idea of AI and computer networks and robots. I, again, I thought that was an interesting choice to do. Mm-hmm. And so I would give it credit. Can we talk about the hardness of the sci-fi? Yeah, please. Do you guys have any patience for that? Please. What was the cinema score for this, Sonny?
Sonny00:39:37Do you? B minus. I am not surprised. I am surprised it was that high, frankly. I figured this would be closer to a C or C minus. Because again, the first half of the film is what was kind of promised in the trailers and commercials. And the second half of the film is what people experienced immediately before talking to the, uh, cinema score pollsters. So I, I thought that might.
JVL00:40:00So I went into this. Throw it off a bit. Knowing very little about Ad Astra. And what I did know. I did know was the James Gray quote in which he promised, quote, the most realistic depiction of space travel that's been put in a movie. Yeah.
Guest00:40:16Yeah.
JVL00:40:17Well, that's not true. Nonsense.
Sonny00:40:19That is nonsense.
JVL00:40:20Yeah. Nonsense. And, uh, amongst the people who are rocket nerds, they were really angry about this movie.
Sonny00:40:27I'm sure. Uh.
JVL00:40:29Justified. Because it, it is a lit, a, a willfully careless depiction of space travel and everything about space. Uh, it has no concept of gravity or inertia. It does not know what the difference is between spin gravity and thrust gravity. We have a lot of really good and really accessible hard science fiction right now. If you read Andy Weir, either the Martian or, uh, Artemis, which are both great, uh, or the James Corey expanse series, which I was turned onto by our buddy Tom Abella, which is amazing. Is, is just physics porn. Uh, you, you don't have to be a MIT or Caltech guy to grasp and appreciate hard science fiction anymore. And this gets like everything wrong. Uh, even the basics of how the acceleration works as you thrust to go on a long haul trip to Mars or Neptune.
Guest00:41:28But then you slow down because you have to take the Mayday call. Right.
Sonny00:41:32How does it work to slow down?
JVL00:41:34Well, hold it, aren't you, you need to get there to Neptune and, and the gravity is throwing you there. Right. Even, even astrodynamics. So the entire concept of astrodynamics, which, which understands that all of these things are in motion. And so to go from point A to point B, you begin in motion from wherever you're leaving, wherever you're heading is also in motion. You're gonna slingshot around using gravity and you're not going to a fixed coordinate. You're going to where the planet is going to be when you get there. Right. Mm-hmm . So they just sort of carelessly, you know, so he shows, his character shows up on the base on the dark side of the moon for his trip to Mars. And he walks in and they say, we gotta leave in five minutes. The windows for this type of thin trip are so tight that you could not show up five minutes before.
Guest00:42:23Or wouldn't you think also, okay, we've have base, we have a base on Mars. We have a base is on the moon. We can't create some type of safe passage. With all the, you know, with all the. Armaments at our disposal at this point, all of the tech, there's no way to protect from space pirates.
Sonny00:42:39Where are the space pirates getting all of their supplies from?
JVL00:42:42And what do the space pirates want? And it's not clear, they just want to kill the people.
Guest00:42:48Are they trying to take them? They kind of have a throwaway line where they say it's competition for resources. But this again, this is, I think gets to the question of, sorry to interrupt Jonathan, but it does get to the question of studio interference where it's kind of like, yeah, you know, you have this thing and everything. But wouldn't it be cool if there was like a chase on the moon? And indeed it was cool.
Sonny00:43:08It was cool.
JVL00:43:09It was the best part. But it made no sense. So I want to talk about the idea of the competition for resources. If you are up on the moon setting up a colony, you are going to make as much of what you have up there from materials that you can create on the moon or extract from the moon, which means you can use rock, the regolith they have there. You can create aluminum and you can create glass. Or things you could all do in theory if you could set up a nuclear reactor on the moon. When we see the lunar base there, you have all of this steel and poured concrete and escalators. Escalators. It's the metro station. It is literally the Washington Metro Station.
Sonny00:43:54It's an airport. It's an airport.
Guest00:43:56It's got a Hudson News and a Nathan's. I think they must have filmed it in a metro because the walls were exactly like the concrete walls in our metro station.
JVL00:44:03Unless you have got a revolutionary propulsion system, transporting even a gram of weight from Earth to the moon is going to be very expensive. And so you don't transport anything unless you absolutely need it or you can't make it up there. The idea that you would need an escalator in a place where gravity is one-fifth of G on Earth because people can just jump like 25 feet in the air when you're on the moon.
Guest00:44:25Well, and indeed it saves him in the car chase because lunar gravity is what prevents him from just dying. Dying when he falls into the crater. And yet, as you point out, he arrives at the base and, oh, here we are. We're fine. Totally normal gravity. We're walking like we're on Earth. You can walk like you're normal.
JVL00:44:40Everything's fine. You're right. You know why you can't actually have a high-speed chase in a buggy on the moon? Why's that? Because at high speeds, the slightest bump you take sends you way up high into the air.
Guest00:44:55Careening to the void.
JVL00:44:56So again, all of these things. How about this? The shape of the lunar base. It's like a rectangular office park. Do you know what shape it has to be? It has to be a dome. Do you know why? Because you've got to hold pressure. And so, if you're going to hold pressure, the actual structure that's holding it needs to have the same strength at every point, which is what you get in a sphere. That's why we have spherical constructions when we set up our lunar bases and our Martian bases. So, just little things like this, which are fine. I mean, it didn't bother me except that I showed up. Right, right. Thinking that I was being promised hard science fiction. Yeah, yeah. And that bugged me. You know, in a way, like having the, did you notice the Marlboro Man?
Guest00:45:40On the base? On the lunar base. Yeah. There is an exterior.
JVL00:45:44There's also like a Subway sandwich shop. Yeah. No, but this one is exterior. So, who would see it? So, somebody has. Oh, I missed that. When you're coming in on the ship. Somebody has brought. Somebody has spent, I guess it would have been. For a billboard? Billions of dollars. On the moon? To put a billboard on the moon for cigarettes, which I imagine you can't smoke up there, because it's a high oxygen environment and one rule you're going to have in any lunar base is there can't be fire anywhere.
Sonny00:46:06Well, maybe this is what the space pirates are fighting for. Maybe they're libertarians who are trying to overthrow the anti-cigarette establishment.
Guest00:46:12Well, that was the great Robert Heinlein, the great Robert Heinlein novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
JVL00:46:16So, maybe that's a call out to that. One more thing. In a movie, which the director has promised is the most realistic depiction of space travel ever committed to celluloid. To have mutant killer space baboons? Yeah.
Sonny00:46:36Well, I don't think they're mutant. I think they're just...
JVL00:46:39Well, I think they're just... How are they alive? How are they still alive in there?
Guest00:46:42I think the pulse turned them into monsters. The pulse set them free, maybe? I don't know.
Sonny00:46:46Because what happened to the rest of the crew? Space baboons ate them.
Guest00:46:51You don't see any bodies though. That was what's weird. The only body you see is the captain who's murdered.
JVL00:46:57But here's my question. If this is a hyper-realistic... Hyper-realistic depiction of space travel, in the middle of what should be a routine hop from the moon to Mars, you encounter killer mutant space baboons. Don't you think it is something that you might remark upon and be like, "Oh, my God! There's a ship full of killer baboons." And instead, they're just like, "Eh." As if, "Eh, this is just a thing that happens out in space, man."
Guest00:47:23Isn't that supposed to be Brad Pitt's character, though, is he's never... He's never ruffled.
JVL00:47:30...ruffled. He's never...
Guest00:47:32Heartbeat has never gone above 80. He never goes up. But my thing went in the hard science was, so in 2001, which clearly influenced the look of this movie, most of the astronauts on the mission to Jupiter are in cryo sleep. Yes. Because it takes a long time to get anywhere in space. And it's unclear to me when he's going, he's not going to Jupiter. He's going to Neptune, which is the farthest out. He just is awake for those 80, they say in the movie, I think it's like 80 days.
JVL00:48:10Yes. That makes no sense to me. So there are two problems with intrastellar travel, right? The first is fuel, right? So as things stand now, nobody knows how to put enough fuel for a drive because our propulsion drives simply, even theoretically, are too primitive, right? So you can't get enough conversion of fuel source to test.
Guest00:48:37That's why we need our solar sail.
JVL00:48:39But the second problem and the second constraint you run into is the human body. The human body can only tolerate so much g-force. So you can accelerate, right? So acceleration is different from velocity. And when you're up in space, you can say go from zero to 60 miles an hour, and then once you get to 60 miles an hour, you are weightless. There is no thrust gravity. So you can continue accelerating from zero to 60, zero to 60, zero to 60, zero to 60, and get to a very high rate of speed. But then halfway through the trip, you've got to swing the ship around and fire the rockets in the other direction for halfway to slow you down, right? And your constraint on how fast you can ultimately go is how much g-force can the body sustain in terms of acceleration. And this is what keeps you from ever hitting light speed. You just can't go, you can't accelerate hard enough. And in the end, when we get this giant pressure wave because he sets off the nuke and then his ship surfs home, which is insane, well that doesn't work because if he's accelerating at the force of whatever pressure wave is coming out, he is turned to jelly. The metal and all the component parts inside can withstand a lot more g-force than the bag of meat. Right. And anyway, the whole thing is... It just made me angry.
Sonny00:50:01So we can all agree that Interstellar is the better sad dad space movie. Yes. Far, far, many times better.
Guest00:50:08In fact, I had that thought while I was sitting there, that Interstellar does the same thing much better. Arrival does the same thing much better. Ex Machina did a cerebral sci-fi thing much better. So he doesn't quite reach, like I said, it's an overreach, but there are moments that as pure cinema, I was like, "Okay, great. I like this."
Sonny00:50:31Yeah.
Guest00:50:32Again, first hour so much better than the second hour. Those mutant baboons. Also great effect when he decompresses the chamber with the mutant bamboo and the baboon
Sonny00:50:42turns to jelly. Pops. Yeah. That was cool. Which also I think is not quite hard sci-fi.
Guest00:50:47Right. Well, you'd expect it would have been sucked out, right? Which is what happens to Space Leia. Better. Remember, she's sucked out before she uses her magic.
Sonny00:50:57Better movie about a rescue mission to the outer reaches of the solar system, Ad Astra or Event Horizon.
JVL00:51:07You guys probably haven't seen Event Horizon. Event Horizon. I've seen Event Horizon. I haven't seen it. I would say Event Horizon, even though it's a horror movie and not a sci-fi movie. No, 2001 is the better movie.
Sonny00:51:182001 is better than this. 2001 is better than this. Yeah.
Guest00:51:22I'll give you that.
Sonny00:51:23Yeah. That's what I'm saying.
JVL00:51:252001 is also one of the best movies of all time. I agree with you. How about Tommy Lee Jones's eyebrows? Did you guys notice that? No. Because his eyebrows are...
Guest00:51:34Are they caterpillar-like? Well, I know. But what about Donald Sutherland's eyebrows were also... Donald Sutherland, I wasn't sure whether he was acting at some points. He's at death's door and it's either a very convincing performance of just a bag of bones or he's like someone needs to send an ambulance to Donald Sutherland's house because the time is near.
Sonny00:51:54Better Brad Pitt performance at Astra or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Guest00:51:57I haven't, I still haven't seen Once Upon a Time.
JVL00:52:01I don't think this is even close.
Sonny00:52:02But I imagine it is Once Upon a Time.
JVL00:52:04Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is maybe his best performance, maybe the best performance of his career. What about the comparison...
Guest00:52:10And he has had a great career. ...to Tree of Life though, which some critics have compared this movie to has certain... I hate Tree of Life. But his, in which case, in Tree of Life, he's the dad. Yes. And I think, I think that's also the better performance. Yeah. I thought his performance was fine. The problem was the voiceover. Yeah. And I think the voiceover got so excessive at one point where after he's on the rocket to Neptune, the voiceover says, and you're seeing him, the images of him on the rocket to Neptune, and the voiceover reads, "I'm on my way to Neptune." It's like I'm about to scream out of the theater.
JVL00:52:47No . That was lazy. Lazy. Yeah.
Sonny00:52:51Yeah. I couldn't even tell why all of it was in there, like it's not so much that they don't want the viewers to understand what's happening.
Guest00:53:01I just, I couldn't get, I did not understand it. Maybe it was Grey's revenge on the studios for putting the action sequence. I don't believe there's voiceover in Lost City of Z. I have to go back and think about that.
JVL00:53:15I was much more interested in what was going on back in the world, so we are told that there is open warfare on the moon when he leaves Mars with the pantsuit lady who is somehow both the administrator. She's the administrator and boss of all of Mars, but has no power.
Guest00:53:30And has two things in her apartment.
JVL00:53:32Right. And she says, he says to her, you know, they're going to come for you. And she says, yeah, I do. And I thought to myself, I don't know who they, so who does he know? Space Command. But I would like to see, I would rather have stayed with her and find out what happened to her than continue on the trip out to Neptune. And I would like to have stayed on Earth and see how Space Command plays out their cover story about what's happening. To the world as 46,000 people die. And I don't know, you know, the movie really peaks with the opening scene as the antenna blows up and he falls. But the whole time I thought to myself, if this was Tom Cruise, he actually would have built a space antenna and then jumped off of it himself in the way that, did you guys see this video? I don't think we talked about this, the, how they made the halo jump. So they not only had Tom Cruise jump out of a plane and do a halo jump. I had a stunt double who was sitting in for Henry Cavill, who's too much of a puss to do it himself, but then a camera man and then a second camera man filming the camera man. Imagine me the second guy be like, Hey, you're gonna risk your life just so we can do the, how we did this shot video. It was a, have you seen this man?
Guest00:54:45I, uh, I saw a reference to, I haven't actually. It's amazing.
Sonny00:54:48I have to know.
JVL00:54:49That's check it out.
Sonny00:54:50Absolutely amazing. All right. Well, any, uh, parting thoughts on Ad Astra? No. Good. Bad. We're all mixed. Positive mixed negative.
JVL00:54:59One and three quarter stars. Two stars.
Sonny00:55:01Uh, I went two and a half out of five on Letterboxd, but I would say of, of four, uh, definitely
JVL00:55:08two. I'd go two of five.
Sonny00:55:10Uh, yeah, Sonny, do you want to talk about reviews? Uh, sure. What do you want to talk about? Reviews of Ad Astra?
JVL00:55:19No. Reviews of this show.
Sonny00:55:22Reviews of this show. Well, we're, we're headed to that right now. All right. Now we're on to, we're on to the corrections segment. We have a, not a correction because some jerk, uh, let me look up his name real quick here on the iTunes machine, Shotgun Golfer, Shotgun Golfer. He gave us a two star review. I'm sorry. He gave us a three star review, uh, because he said Vic got wrong. The actress who played mom in Hustlers, Vic said it was the mom from big and the listeners listener said, no, it's Mercedes rule. Well, guess what? That is the mom from big. Also he suck. Yeah. There are four people on the show when there are clearly three. So this reviewer had a, had a mistake in his review that was correcting something from the show. He doesn't get to listen anymore. Shotgun Golfer. You don't get to listen anymore. I don't even want you to go back and increase the score of your review. I just want you to never, ever listen to the Sub-Beacon.
JVL00:56:15I would appreciate it if all of our minions would hop on to the iTunes, go to the Shotgun Golfer review and thumbs down it because that's ridiculous.
Guest00:56:27Not helpful. Is that the only mechanism for review accountability is the thumbs up or thumbs down of the review? There's a button.
Sonny00:56:34The meta review. There's a button that asks, was this review helpful? And you can say yes, no, or report a concern. Maybe they could report a concern about Shotgun Golfer.
Guest00:56:41Factuality is a concern.
Sonny00:56:43I don't know. That's about it. All right. That's all the time we are giving to this episode. Questions, comments, complaints, compliments, tweet us @SunnyBunch, @Continetti, @VickMattis if you just want to ping Vic. Again, be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes. Google Play or Stitcher. Just type in Sub-Beacon under podcasts and we're there. Leave a review. Tell your friends. Until next time. Anything else? You have any outtakes for us, Matthew?
?00:57:06Talking to the mic, Matt. We're not done yet. There's still, there's the end of the show. Oh, you do this thing with the... Yeah, we do the thing at the end.
Guest00:57:11Yeah. I know. I like, I like Jonathan's hard, I really like the hard science, sci-fi.
JVL00:57:27Yeah. You gotta read The Expanse. It's so good.
Guest00:57:30Books are too big. They're too big.
JVL00:57:32Just listen to it. Just listen. Audiobook. They're not that big. They're so good. Oh man, they're great. Yeah. I'm taping episode two of my other show today. Oh yeah? I'm very excited. The JVL Patreon? The JVL show. So what's the JVL show? I wanted a hobby. I wanted something that I did for fun that wasn't actual work. And so I am doing another show that is essentially, I bring in a friend every week or whenever I want to. And if I don't want to do it- 'Cause it's your hobby. I don't have to, 'cause it's a hobby. And we just chat about whatever I really want. So I had Adam White on for the first episode and we talked about professional wrestling. We talked about instant replay.
Guest00:58:10So it's not done under the auspices of the Bulwark. No. This is just my little- And so JVL- To listen, you donate to your Patreon and you get a listen?
JVL00:58:19So you can. But right now, I would say the donation is just as a gate to keep out trolls and people that I don't like. Right. It is not, this is not a money-making endeavor. 'Cause you just want something to- I just want something to- Let off steam. Do with my friends. And so- Who are you talking to this week? I'm gonna have Adam Kiper on this week. Oh. And we're gonna talk about robots. Talk a lot about robots because he has been waiting to write a book about robots for like seven years now. And if I can't get him to write the book that I want to read about robots, then I'm gonna get him to talk about robots for an hour for me. Really? Yeah, it's gonna be great. I'm gonna have you guys on eventually too. It'll be awesome.
Sonny00:58:57I'm kinda busy. I got a lot of things going on. I'd be happy. Where do you record this?
JVL00:59:01Just over at my office. We have a studio. I'd be happy to do it. Yeah. Or I'll come over to-
Guest00:59:06Did you see, I don't think we talked about the second trailer of Rise of Skywalker.
JVL00:59:11Oh yeah.
Sonny00:59:13The one that's just all the clips from the other better movies?
Guest00:59:15Which played, oh, you know one thing, this was one instance where I liked the trailers before the movie. Most of the times I don't like the trailers, but 1917 looks really good.
JVL00:59:27Ford versus Ferrari?
Guest00:59:30Ford looks good versus Ferrari. Looked good. I can't wait. Christian Bale, he's, that performance seems great. What else was there? There was, I even thought, I'm not the biggest Kingsman fan, but Ray Fine and Kingsman. I'm intrigued. And of course they also had the Rise of Skywalker thing where they have just all the clips of the movies you liked. What did you think? I just, I'm just like, I'm just so over it. I'm so over it.
Sonny00:59:59I mean, you're still gonna be there Thursday, Thursday night at 7:00 PM. Well, no, no.
Guest01:00:03I go in the next morning, but yeah, I'll be there, but it just, it just.
Sonny01:00:07Did you guys see this? Did you guys see Ad Astra on IMAX or Dolby? Dolby Atmos? No. I saw it at the Boston.
JVL01:00:15I saw it on an Alamo for everyone or Alamo for all screen. So it was lights up and less, they had sort of brought down the volume and the idea is for kids. Oh, I see. So they're like kids can talk and nobody gets up. But at my screening, actually it was all for old people and they acted just like kids. Like they were convincing with one another during the movie and it's only at the Alamo for all. Yeah. That they're allowed to, you don't get thrown out.
Sonny01:00:40If you talk. Was that just the only screening you could make? It was the only one I could make. Yeah. Yeah.
?01:00:45I'm sure it was fine.
Spot something wrong in this episode? Suggest a correction →
Comments
Loading…