#44. Jojo Rabbit, Midway, and Thanksgiving Movies
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A supersized Thanksgiving-travel double feature pits two very different World War II movies against each other. Midway is the surprise triumph: Vic gives it an A-plus, saying its two hours and 18 minutes felt like ninety minutes, praising it as a straight 1940s war picture with modern effects and no message beating you over the head, and rating the gore as high as the charred Owen and Beru scale allows. JVL agrees enthusiastically — he dragged a reluctant Flash, who loved it — and argues it is really a disaster movie dressed as a war movie, a "greatest hits of the Pacific campaign" running Pearl Harbor to the Doolittle Raid to the Marshalls to Midway, with the space between battles filled not with a love triangle but with Yamamoto-versus-Tojo naval strategy. He calls it everything Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor should have been and singles out Patrick Wilson's quiet codebreaker, plus Dennis Quaid's Halsey and Woody Harrelson's Nimitz; Vic notes Michael Goldfarb clapping alone in the theater when the first Japanese carrier takes a bomb. Sonny skipped it and gets talked into it on air. Jojo Rabbit splits them the other way: Vic gives it an A-plus and finds it interesting despite quibbles about the Stauffenberg-timeline anachronism and where in Germany it's set (he lands on Torgau and Elbe Day), while Sonny didn't like it at all, calling Taika Waititi's film precious, "Moonrise Kingdom but in the Hitler Youth," short on laughs — one person laughing in a theater of fifteen — and objecting to the mother's pointless martyrdom and the Bowie "Heroes" needle drop he groaned at aloud. JVL found the tonal shifting jarring, "like going from third gear to reverse," and, invoking John Podhoretz on X-Men, admits he felt gross laughing, though Sam Rockwell's mascara-wearing one-eyed captain, Stephen Merchant, and Yorkie's "our only allies are the Japanese and between us they don't look very Aryan" all land. Around it: Thanksgiving traffic strategy, the AMC Godfather marathon as ideal background viewing, JVL's theory that the NBA is wrestling for people not sophisticated enough to enjoy wrestling, Vic's Peloton crush on instructor Emma Lovewell set to Nine Inch Nails, and a shout-out to a listener newly diagnosed with gout.
From the show notes
#cdata-section -------------- In this latest episode of the Sub-Beacon sponsored by Circle and ExpressVPN, we discuss Midway and Jojo ...
Full transcript
Vic00:00:00Hello and welcome to an early edition of the Sub-Beacon sponsored by Circle and ExpressVPN. I'm Victor Matus along with Sonny Bunch and Jonathan V. Last. Just a reminder, the Sub-Beacon is available on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher. Look at our podcast and search for Sub-Beacon. You'll easily find us. Please subscribe, tell your friends, and leave a review, but not like the one you tweeted out, Sonny, by the guy who had very mean things to say about us.
Sonny00:00:47What did he say? I forget. Oh, he was... I tweet a lot of things.
Vic00:00:50It was just very disparaging things about all three of us, and like only one of those things was true. But I'm not... I don't know what it was. Which one was the one?
Guest00:00:59I'm kidding.
Vic00:01:00Oh, yeah. No, that... Do you remember that guy? I hope he didn't leave an actual review. He just tweeted out, yeah, listen to this podcast.
Sonny00:01:05Oh, no, no, no. Oh, yeah, yeah. That wasn't an actual review. I mean, I thought he perfectly captured the spirit of the show. I wasn't... I didn't realize that was supposed to be a mean tweet about us.
Vic00:01:14Oh, you didn't think that was mean? That was just... That was just accurate.
Sonny00:01:17No, what was mean was Matt Labash's piece about podcasts. Yeah. About the podcast, but now there's too many. He didn't mention us by name, did he?
JVL00:01:23Yeah, and the whole thing's a sub-essay. It's a sub-tweet, yeah. What's the essay version of a sub-tweet? Yeah, it's a lot of subtext. You know, he assured me over email last night that he did not mean our show.
Sonny00:01:37Everybody else's. Everybody else's. He meant everybody else's. He just didn't want to say it out loud.
JVL00:01:41Typical Labash. In fact, he said that he has figured out how to listen to our show on his Motorola flip phone. It has no apps on it and no data connection, but he has learned how to download podcasts onto his flip phone.
Sonny00:01:53He fires up his BBS modem. His dial. His dial up and then he puts his. Bods. A lot of bods. He puts his cell phone next to the thing, to the speaker, and then runs a little headphone out to it. That's how he does it.
Vic00:02:10No, without mentioning us, it's like Ted Knight in Caddyshack when Ronnie Dage looks at the hat in the golf store. He goes, oh, I wouldn't eat that wearing soup. And he looks at Ted Knight, oh, but on you it looks good.
JVL00:02:22You know, though, I so I was having a I was actually a guest. On another show, the clerical pod. Oh, with our buddies, Father Anthony and Father Harrison.
Vic00:02:32When you go on that show, does that mean you don't have to go to church on Sundays? Yeah, something like that.
JVL00:02:36And it's basically the same as getting communion.
Sonny00:02:41Oh, good.
JVL00:02:42The same as taking the Eucharist, or at least that's what those priests told me. OK, good. Well, yeah. And they said that this is like the podcast era. The podcast is like the garage band was in the early 1980s. It's like everybody's got a garage band, everybody's got a podcast, and some are better than others. Well, that is true.
Sonny00:03:02And you know what?
Vic00:03:03I actually thought that was a lovely way to think about what this little era is. And it's a bubble. It'll all go away at some point. The era is coming to an end.
Sonny00:03:11I mean, there is the bubble that is the advertising bubble. There are only so many podcasts that can be supported by Quip and who are our sponsors this week? The Circle and ExpressVPN. You know, the weak shall succumb and the strong, like the Sub-Beacon, shall go on forever. There's no ending this show. No one, unless one of us decides to just up and quit, there's no ending this show.
Vic00:03:38Gentlemen, how is your week? What's going on? How is Thanksgiving week going? What are your guys' favorite? Who's going someplace? I'm not going nowhere. I have to go up tomorrow, Wednesday. My plan is to leave at 6 a.m. What do you think about that, JVL? Too late? Too late. You think 6 a.m. is too late? You think you're late?
Sonny00:03:57Five. You gotta be on the road by five. Five? What are you, are you crazy? Four. If you're not leaving the house, if you're not leaving the house before four o'clock on Thanksgiving, you're doing it wrong.
Vic00:04:10Thanksgiving Day is okay to drive. No, Thanksgiving Day you can leave at any time.
Sonny00:04:14No, Thanksgiving Day is like the road. That used to be true. There's nothing out there. Really, that's changing now? That used to be true, and then a couple years ago, I went just from my house to my parents' house. My parents live in Stafford. It's like 40 miles away, and it took two weeks.
Vic00:04:26I think local travel does not count, but interstate travel is quiet on Thursday.
Sonny00:04:31It's just 95. I was on 95. It's not, it is the interstate.
Vic00:04:36Maybe everyone's now thinking that Thursday's the day, and then I'm gonna go tomorrow, and there's nobody there.
Sonny00:04:42Everybody moneyballed it, and they were like, well, we gotta, and now it's not a thing anymore, so it's just, you just gotta leave as early as possible. You should leave at midnight the night before.
Vic00:04:52Can I say this? I'll say this, which is the kids are very good about this. They got their stuff together. I got my stuff together. We're ready to go. We leave early, but then somebody needs coffee, so then we gotta stop somewhere. Who? The other person who was in our car. Can I? Not me or the kids. We're ready to go and not use the bathroom, and somebody used coffee. That person might have to use the bathroom later on, take a bathroom break, get hungry, get some food, but you know.
JVL00:05:21You couldn't just like get a can of iced coffee in the fridge and you could take it with you? You know what? Hot coffee's better. What if you got a flask?
Vic00:05:27This person prefers hot coffee.
Sonny00:05:29What if you got a flask of the blood of the earth? That could do it, actually. Then you could just sip on that, and then you get the caffeine, but you don't get the liquid.
Vic00:05:37Yeah, and then when you're done, you could use it for bathroom purposes. I don't know if you've noticed.
JVL00:05:42You'd have to drink a, I mean, that's a. You'd get a heart attack. You'd die. You would die. You would die. If you go to the Funranium Labs website, they sell them not in flasks, but in test tubes. Because the test tube is about as much. As much as you want to take at one time.
Sonny00:05:59I was thinking about this the other day. There was a story, there was a spy story I read once where a spy refined nicotine to a level that it was so potent that it could kill a person. You'd slip it in. And I was wondering if you could do the same thing with this caffeine. You have a target who's like a heavier person maybe, right? And you just pour like eight ounces of this stuff into a normal coffee cup and give it to him. As is iced coffee. As is iced coffee.
JVL00:06:29And then he starts drinking it and his heart explodes.
Sonny00:06:31I mean literally like chestburster, like alien stuff.
Vic00:06:33Sounds like a great book idea.
JVL00:06:35You know, so- Actually, I'll hold on to that one. It's out there now. I have a traffic story. I forget if I've told this on the show before, but we did a number of years ago Thanksgiving in Detroit. And we were going to drive up the day before Thanksgiving on Wednesday. And so I said to my friends out there, I said, okay, so what? How many hours do we have to leave in order to beat the traffic? And they said to me, what traffic? And I said, well, you know, the terrible Thanksgiving traffic that grips America. We from the East Coast, from New Jersey. And they laughed at me and they said, no, that's only a thing that happens like on the East Coast. There's no traffic out here. And as God is my witness- Isn't it funny? So we left at five in the morning and sat in bumper to bumper traffic along I-95 north from where we live. Up to the Beltway, bumper to bumper on the Beltway, bumper to bumper on 270. And the minute we cleared 270, there was nothing the entire rest of the day. Nobody else lives in America. Evidently. They all live five miles away from each other. From each other. That's right. And so they're not going long distances. Not stacked on top of each other like we are out here in the East Coast. Getting up there. It must be better out there. I hear there's no Thanksgiving traffic in South Bend either.
Vic00:07:50There you go again.
JVL00:07:52You and your South Bend. It's going to be great. Okay, fellow domers. Can't wait to be out there. Who do we play this Thanksgiving?
Vic00:08:00Oh, you're just going to full on be that guy.
JVL00:08:03Do we have a big game? Do they play college football on Thanksgiving Day or is that not? As somebody who is new to the college football experience, when do they play that?
Sonny00:08:11They don't have a college football team at Johns Hopkins? They had a team. They had a team.
Vic00:08:18I can't help you either. I don't watch college football for obvious reasons.
Sonny00:08:23As the person who goes to the best college. Oh, wow.
JVL00:08:26Sports school. You went to Michigan? The University of Virginia. You went to Michigan?
Sonny00:08:29The University of Virginia basketball champions, you know, leading the Atlantic Coast Conference division that they're in and football, you know, many soccer titles and lacrosse titles, that sort of thing. I will say that the worst thing about UVA football was that the UVA Virginia Tech game. Oh, yeah. Very strong baseball. Very, very strong baseball. The UVA Virginia Tech football game was always. The Friday after Thanksgiving. So, like, the Virginia Tech stands would be full whenever it was at Virginia Tech. Oh, right. And the UVA stands would always be full of Virginia Tech people. Right. Everyone's on vacation. Everyone's on vacation. But I think that's changing a little bit because, you know, UVA is such a good sports school now. We're a real powerhouse program, powerhouse of excellence. It's something.
Vic00:09:14It's something. Now, you wanted to talk about Thanksgiving movies. Oh, wait.
JVL00:09:19You know what sort of movies people do?
Vic00:09:22Do you guys, what do you do post-Thanksgiving meal? In the olden days. We did not watch. And we talked about this. We did not watch football. Our house was not a football house. So we always went to Blockbuster before that A to Z movies to rent a movie like Patriot Games or something really exciting. And that would be a movie to watch. Patriot Games. This is way, that's way back in the 90s. No, you must have Patriot Games. It's like 95 or 96. That came out way earlier.
Sonny00:09:52Patriot Games came out in 93. That's right.
Vic00:09:5592 or 93. 92, 93. I remember because.
Sonny00:09:58Clear and Present Danger came out in 90.
Vic00:10:00It was like 92. It was like 92. And I remember because.
Sonny00:10:04I could look all this up.
Vic00:10:05Because my friend Peter Lowe was not going all the way back home to Texas. And so I said, come up to our place. It's a lot of food, which is true. It's a lot of food. It's great fun. And of course, he's from Dallas. And that was, I think, when Dallas was going into the playoffs and then ultimately win the Super Bowl. And of course, we weren't watching that at our house. And he was so good. He did not complain. I think he went to the guest room and turned on the TV and watched a little bit there. But that's what we did.
JVL00:10:31Oh, of course. The doctor's house even has TVs in the guest room. Did he just go into the bathroom and turn on the TV in the bathroom?
Vic00:10:38One of those transistors with black and white ones and just watch it. But God bless him. He didn't complain. And later on, I told him because then I got obviously at the football. I said, I can't believe that we did that. And he goes, yes, you did. Yes, you did. And he would never.
Sonny00:10:52We were discussing this with JVL earlier. What sort of Thanksgiving hashtag content should we do for the show? And I suggested Thanksgiving movies. And JVL was like, no, nobody does that. But I don't think that's true anymore. And I'm pretty sure that AMC has had a Thanksgiving Godfather marathon for the last decade. That people just throw on. And this is the perfect Thanksgiving Day movie because you throw it on. It's there in the background. You can kind of tune out. Everybody knows it well enough that they can jump in and jump out at different points. It is beloved by all, of course. It's the great American film. So I do think that that is a thing that people do.
Vic00:11:37Plus, as you point out, Sonny, that movie, you can pop in, watch a little bit of the wedding, go out, have some dessert, take a nap, wake up. You come back and the wedding is still on. It's a very long wedding. Or the communion party. It's not the deer hunter.
JVL00:11:54Is there something to...
Vic00:11:55That movie got a very low rating on the duration. Let's get part of my scale, by the way.
JVL00:12:00To watching these movies on AMC rather than popping a DVD player in, because you get the commercials, and I assume it's lightly edited. But on the other hand, there is a communal viewing experience knowing that, I don't know, five or six million people across the country are watching it at the same time, even though they're commercials.
Sonny00:12:22And even though we all own it on Blu-ray.
Vic00:12:25Is there something real about that? I'm sure there's something also very common, and it's not just in my family, about watching a movie that you own, but you would never pop in, but if it's on TV, like, oh my gosh, this is so good. And you sit through commercials, even though you have it on a DVD, possibly.
JVL00:12:42This happened to me a few years ago. We flipped on, I think Jurassic Park was on NBC. And it was one of the, like, everybody just fell into it because Jurassic Park was on. And I'm, you know, we're sitting there, and I was like, you know, the DVD's right there. I could actually put my hands on it. Why didn't we put it on? But it's different.
Sonny00:12:58It is different. It is different. One other thing to consider is that the commercials do offer opportunities, as Vic says, to get up and leave the room. Again, just to be even further away from people. Not separated from them, just mentally.
JVL00:13:11Vic needs that bathroom time.
Sonny00:13:11And you need the bathroom time. But also, if you are a football family, you can also, like, check in on the scores. You can see what's going on in the game, you know. There is something to be said. And also, I feel like there's also a commitment to putting a movie on. When you put it on, right? So, when you throw a movie on the TV through your Blu-ray player, you're like, we are sitting down and we're watching this. It's a thing that we are doing. Intentionality, as we say in the Catholic Church. Exactly. I guess. I don't know what that means. But when you just have it on TV, it's a very casual thing. It's like, okay, well, this is on. That's right. We can watch it if we want. We can talk over it.
Vic00:13:47It doesn't matter that much. That's right. As opposed to, but if you do watch it, like, when we would watch, like, something on video cassette from Blockbuster, you pop it in. All right. Everybody, we're watching it. You know, don't interrupt. You know, it's a little bit different. But then now with football, I mean, that's great. And I guess there are. The Thanksgiving games always blow, though. There are two games now, right? There are two games. There's always two games. Three? There's like a third game. There's like a.
Sonny00:14:09Yeah, there's a game at, like, noon. There's always Dallas. And a game at four.
Vic00:14:12Obviously, Dallas is always playing.
JVL00:14:14And a game at eight. They have one of them on, like, the NFL Network. I think so. Is that what they've done? And then the night one is on.
Vic00:14:19The night one has got to be on NBC, I assume. Yeah, I think so. And then the Dallas one is going to be on Fox.
Sonny00:14:23But no, there's like 12 hours of football now. It's like the Christmas. It's like NBA Christmas. It's like all day, just football.
JVL00:14:30I hate the NBA Christmas gimmick so much. Why do you hate that? It's just. Everything about the NBA is now professional wrestling for people who are not sophisticated enough to love and appreciate professional wrestling.
Sonny00:14:45Hmm. Interesting. Explain. This sounds like a thing you've been thinking about.
JVL00:14:50No, I've only been half thinking about it. We'll save it for another show. Maybe once the NBA season begins. But the NBA season has already begun. What? Exactly. There's. I don't want this idea that, you know, like the players now run the league by deciding which teams they want to go to and they form their own super teams, then break up. And you have guys who are committing heel turns. Would you say. By making their. Now, I really believe this began with LeBron James. Sure.
Sonny00:15:15LeBron James turned it into. Was LeBron the the Hulk Hogan? Of the NWO for the NBA?
JVL00:15:28I'd have to think about that. He might have been the Hulk Hogan for the WWE of the NBA.
Sonny00:15:33Or is he more of the Holland Nash?
JVL00:15:37Yeah, I'd have to think.
Sonny00:15:39You have to think about. All right. Well, the future show. Future show topic. But.
JVL00:15:42Future show topic. But yeah. And I. And also the. You kept me out of that one. The smarks. The NBA. The NBA Twitter smark world, which is as insufferable. As like the wrestling smark world. What does smark mean? A smart mark. A smart mark. Somebody who is.
Sonny00:15:58Somebody who's in on the scam.
JVL00:15:59In on the scam. But also loves it unapologetically like any straight mark does. But has to let you know that they're in on it. Yeah, yeah.
Sonny00:16:09Unrelated. Semi-related. The movie Uncut Gems. Yes. I kind of want to talk about. And this is this is like a very interesting segue into that maybe. But the the movie Uncut Gems, which is like the new. Serious Adam Sandler movie that's getting a kind of award season push is. I thought that was pretty great.
Vic00:16:27I thought Punch Drunk Love was Serious Adam Sandler.
Sonny00:16:30Same. Same. Same sort of idea. Actually very different. Now it's old Adam Sandler. But but the but but Uncut Gems. I had not realized this is have is extremely interested in the NBA and like the NBA's relationship to gambling and also Judaism. It's like it's actually a very weird kind of collection of interest. But it like it really resonated for me because I have a bunch of friends from New York who happen to be Jewish and into the NBA. And I'm like, you guys are going to love this movie. This is like you've seen this. I did. I saw I saw it a couple of weeks ago. It doesn't come out till till Christmas. It's very it's very. Yeah, I saw the trailer.
Vic00:17:07The trailer looks interesting. I like Adam Sandler. I like Adam Sandler. Like trying to do these kind of things, I think, is interesting.
Sonny00:17:14Anyway, we'll we'll talk about that later. Again, another another day. We are we're really just getting far afield from the topic, which is Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving. What do we do on Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving Day after the food is done.
Vic00:17:24Now, oh, in our family, I was going to say there is the football in the background, normally in the kitchen. There's a little kitchen TV, you know, a TV in the kitchen to small fat. So you go. No, no.
Sonny00:17:35It's only about the size of this here in the office. So you go from the bathroom television to the kitchen television.
Vic00:17:41That's right. OK, there's no bathroom. All right, Elvis. You know, the one that the bathroom one is just the one in the mirror. All right. Elvis Presley. You go to the hotel and there's the TV in the mirror. No, I don't know. I've really never been in a hotel. Really? I've been in hotels like there's a TV in the mirror.
Sonny00:17:55Yes. Like a TV. Yes. Like you see it through the mirror.
Vic00:18:00Yeah. It comes through the mirror. It's actually a hologram. Amazing. What's great? What type of thing you get at the Ritz Carlton? Yeah. Is this like the St. Regis? Yes.
JVL00:18:09Actually, it is.
Vic00:18:10Yes. Because sometimes it's fun. Anyway, how did I get off track? We were talking about. Oh, yeah. But now the big thing is the talent show, which is now three years running and it's coming up.
JVL00:18:22Have you been practicing your number?
Vic00:18:23I've got my I've got all the words down.
JVL00:18:25Have you watched Descendants 3 that you can know what the motivations for your character are?
Vic00:18:30I think just having listened to it, I get it about, you know, him being a deadbeat dad. Hades. For those of us talking about we're talking about Descendants 3 on Disney. He is a deadbeat dad to Mal. Yes. And so she needs his help because I think somebody fell into a coma, a girl, a spell, a bad spell. Spell went bad and they didn't have. They didn't have the Narcan for the spell. So they need to they need to use magic instead. And so they do this duet. And so that's do it. I've got the words down. But now my daughter, of course, wants to work on choreography. I said no one is going to say, oh, you're doing it exactly the way that nobody knows except for his her cousin. Nobody else is going to care. So let's just sort of freestyle it. But she has all sorts of ideas.
JVL00:19:13Are you playing the piano as well?
Vic00:19:14You know what? I actually riffed on it on the piano, but we're actually going to play it on the, you know, on the, you know, the song.
JVL00:19:22Uh, and so easier to get out of the choreography.
Vic00:19:25If you could just do the piano and let her like, you know, I find it very hard to I assume you guys have a full grand piano. It's an old Yamaha upright. Uh, but I can't, uh, sing and play at the same time. Like whatever, like, like I can't do that, uh, that well. Uh, but I get one of those player pianos from Westworld. Oh, yeah, that's it. That's the thing. It's true. Uh, no. So I've just she wants to work in choreography, but it's like working with Fosse.
Sonny00:19:51Um, I honestly don't understand how you do this. I would, I would straight up refuse. I just, I would just be like, Nope, no, you know what? I'm not doing this.
Vic00:20:00There is the option to be a judge and just vote. That's fine. That's 100% what I would do.
JVL00:20:06I, I refuse to believe that you would have that with your power with your daughter. Maybe your son, if your son was like, Hey dad, I want to do it.
Sonny00:20:14Be like, eh, no, absolutely not. Dad, absolutely with me, she can do it herself.
JVL00:20:21I don't think favorite. Has ever even heard me say the word. No. So what about you JVL then after things, are you just straight football?
Sonny00:20:29Just, just nothing but football.
JVL00:20:30No, because the football games always blow on Thanksgiving.
Sonny00:20:33They're never good.
JVL00:20:34It's kind of last time has been a good thing. Kind of true football game was like the dumb when Indomitian Sue stepped on, whoever was stepped on, that was the last exciting moment on a thing.
Vic00:20:43I would say the only reason I watch now is because you, you know, if you're, if you're a betting on the game, yeah, yeah, I have fantasy, but we do that. You know, the, oh, you got action. With, with, with the spreads, you know?
Sonny00:20:53And so that makes me interested. Oh, with the, the office, you can't even feel anything unless you've got money on it. No, that's right.
Vic00:21:00Otherwise I don't care.
Sonny00:21:01This is also relevant to uncut jams, by the way, revisit this.
Vic00:21:05Okay. Uh, so, uh, so you go ahead, you, you finished the tofurkey. You're putting it back. I don't do that anymore.
Sonny00:21:11Do we eat real Turkey now? Do we eat murder Turkey? Murky murky. I do. I eat rather murky. I eat murder Turkey.
Vic00:21:18Okay. All right.
Sonny00:21:19What, uh, I have a question now. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you back full on the murder meats? Yeah. I've moved like two years now. Okay. That's what I thought. I hate myself for it. Well, but you're, but you feel so much better, right? You feel strong. I mean, I'm like, you feel stronger now that you've consumed the spirit of the animals and they're inside you. I'm stronger because I'm 25 pounds less fat.
Vic00:21:39See, so yeah, you know, the spirit of the spirit of the animal. That's like a, that's an old red Dawn reference. Remember they killed the deer and they forced them. See Thomas, how to drink the blood of the deer become the spirit goes.
JVL00:21:50It's not what I was thinking. Okay. That's what I was thinking. So then what happened afterwards? It's mostly just childcare. I mean, I don't know. Like how was it in your, I four kids. What do you think it is? Like, do you think I go and do the thing that I enjoy and around, do you think I go in and just sort of suck the marrow out of life and enjoy the, and just sit and give thanks and get to visit with the other grownups. Is that what you think I get to do?
Vic00:22:12The missus, that's not how my life, the missus takes care of the kids and then you get to a drink that is, that is not how my life is configured. How about you guys? I just told you one. That's what I do. Okay. So you do that. How long is the talent show? How many entrants are there? That's good. That's a good question. I don't know. Five or six. I don't know.
JVL00:22:28Depending for four or five, you know, is it all singing, dancing or is somebody doing whatever you could do? Closeup magic. Yeah. You name it.
Vic00:22:36Uh, do you have requested to be the last act? Do you have to do it? That's how confident we are.
Sonny00:22:42Do you have to do it the last day with your children? Is it, does it have to be pairs? No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Vic00:22:47It's whatever you want to do. Mother boy, I did. Yeah. No, you know, just, okay. What about you? Tells Michael we're going as Sonny and share. Yeah. No, I mean, don't beat it. I said, you can't beat us at this. I said, don't tell any, only tell them as much as they need to know about the act. I want to get, you know, stepped on. Okay. So what about you?
Sonny00:23:08Uh, I mean, we have family over grant grandparents play with the grandkids, uh, which is nice. And I don't know, we, uh, twice of drink.
Vic00:23:17What do you drink on Thanksgiving?
Sonny00:23:19Um, generally. Speaking, uh, red wine with dinner and then a bourbon with the pecan pie and, uh, you know, ice cream afterward. Little bourbon dessert. I probably won't. Bourbon and ice cream is a great combination. But I'm probably, I'm probably not going to drink any of those. This, you know, cause I'm just, I, I don't really drink anymore. So I'll probably just, I'll probably just eat my, my Turkey. Who are you? My stuff. You can have a cheat day. You have totally things. You need it for your body. Your body needs to be thrown off.
Vic00:23:45But it's not even, I tell you what, you know, so that's muscle confusion. That's why, you know, that's what I'm doing right now.
Sonny00:23:50My, my wife, Beth was out of town. Uh, this weekend and what she often does when, or what I often do when she goes out of town is I get like a big steak and I have, uh, I have like a beer or some wine or something with it. And I, because I like, I like to cook it pretty rare. You get like a lean steak or you get like a ribeye? A ribeye, like a straight up, straight up, straight up. So this, this, I did, I, she was, she was out of town this weekend. I, uh, I, I got a big, like two pound bone in ribeye and cooked it. And I felt awful the next morning. I just felt gross, not hungover or anything. Just like. Just, I felt like, I feel, you know, so I don't know.
JVL00:24:24I can't, I can't really eat like that anymore.
Sonny00:24:25I'm sure it wasn't the, the alcohol that made you feel gross.
JVL00:24:28I know.
Sonny00:24:28I, no, I had like one beer. I, I didn't, I didn't have enough to, to, to. Maybe you did have enough to get. Well, not to get drunk, but to feel bad about it.
JVL00:24:35No, but I, like, I think that's it. That's. I'm just saying until you disentangle the steak from the alcohol, you can't blame the steak
Sonny00:24:41for that. I feel like I can. I feel like I have, I have a pretty good handle on what, what makes me feel what way.
JVL00:24:46It's your body. You don't do like. You really listen to your body. It's a temple. It's a temple. If you don't, if you don't listen to your temple. Temple of doom, Tantra baby.
Vic00:24:54If you don't listen to your temple. Temple of doom. Okay. Oh, wait. Well, good. Interesting. And I hope everybody enjoys their Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Whatever you do. Great show, guys. And this is also kind of a, a show that you can listen on for your long, possibly long Thanksgiving. See, we're done. That was easy. And you just play it on a loop. Play it on a loop because you learn things every time. Okay. I just want to give a quick Peloton update. Right? Oh, Peloton. Peloton update. So I am now in my. Third or fourth, I think. And I have a, I have a workout partner and her name is Emma Lovewell. She's a Peloton instructor. So we actually haven't met in person. Emma Lovewell.
Sonny00:25:31Her actual name and not all her stage name. Emma Lovewell.
Vic00:25:35What are you suggesting? What are you suggesting? That when I looked for her on the internet, it was the wrong name. So, and she has a great sign off, which is like live well, love well, get it. And she's great. Uh, and, uh, we, you know, wow. That's your type. That's, that's your type. My type, which is like a good person and a good workout buddy. She looks like Kate. No, she just looks like Kate. Just a little bit darker hair. But, uh, and she did a thing called Tabata. You know, Tabata. That's like a new kind of, that's a kind of workout where you have these intensity intervals and stuff. Right.
JVL00:26:10And vaguely Hawaiian.
Vic00:26:12Yes, I think so.
JVL00:26:13And there's almost a Catherine Zeta Jones thing.
Sonny00:26:16I don't think we're allowed to talk about any of this.
JVL00:26:17Really? Okay. I will say that Google auto. Fills is like the Emma Lovewell. One of the auto fills is, is Emma Lovewell married? Yes. Yes. Yes.
Vic00:26:26That's the one. I just typed that. Frequent searches. I just, it became a frequent search after I typed that last night. Uh, and so we did a 30 minute rock ride. Together. Yes. Together. And the music is great. But then. Did you tell her? Did you text her to let her know that you were going to be on the ride with her?
JVL00:26:41It was recording. Uh, and then, uh, so. It wasn't even live? It wasn't even live. Oh, that's pathetic.
Vic00:26:46But then, you know what song comes on? The Nine Inch Nails song. Closer? Yeah. You look at Sonny's face. Like an animal. Like an animal. Like an animal. And I'm like, uh. And they don't believe it. I want to bike you. And none of.
JVL00:26:59I want to bike you like an animal. Yeah.
Vic00:27:00Yeah. I want to feel you. That's the Peloton version. You know what? And I'm like, uh. And she's like, go faster. Gotta go faster. And I'm like, I'm late. I'm doing a hundred strokes a minute.
Sonny00:27:08That's actually not. Oh. Pedal strokes. What? That's not even. I'm talking about pedal strokes. But that's not even a good. I'm talking about a cadence. That's not even really a good workout song, though, is the thing. It's like. Oh, it is. You know what it is?
Vic00:27:18It is for the. This is for. This is like the cool down period that we're.
Sonny00:27:22Uh.
Vic00:27:23We're doing that like.
Sonny00:27:24I guess if you. If you have like a high resistance, that might be a good one.
Vic00:27:27I'm at 45, which is not high, but it's high for me. Okay. So that's the Peloton update. Things seem to be going well. And the other thing is I was going to say my apologies. If I sound a little bit tired, I have been tired. I have not gotten much sleep. Can the Peloton instructors block you?
JVL00:27:42If they get creeped out by you. Can they? You're not allowed to view their workouts.
Vic00:27:46How would they know? How would they know?
JVL00:27:47Unless they listen to this podcast.
Vic00:27:49Okay. So the other. The other day.
Sonny00:27:52Emma, if you're listening, please mention us on the show. On your ride.
Vic00:27:57I would love them as an ad sponsor. So the other day, the middle of the afternoon at three in the afternoon, the neighbor's tree came down. An 83 year old white oak just came right down away from us, but like diagonal between like two and a half feet. Two other houses that did roof damage and damage a couple of sheds and not like it snapped off from like the branch or mid trunk or something. The whole thing from the base, the roots, the entire ball came out, the root ball. And they said it was the biggest root ball they'd ever seen. The entire like it's like the whole earth just ripped open. And so it took down all the power lines and we were out of power for like 12 hours. So like 1 a.m. The chainsaws at 1 a.m. And then you could hear the. The Minion guys all talking to each other. And then finally at like the doctor's kid lives in this house. We'll fix his thing last. And then finally at 315, the power finally comes out. And thank God, because the heat was working. It was practically freezing. Speaking of which, over the weekend, Frozen 2.
JVL00:29:05Oh, hey, it was really good.
Vic00:29:08Thank you. Wow, that was a delay. Frozen 2 skated its way to the top of the box office with. I just adjusted 130.3 million. Yeah. Followed by Ford versus Ferrari with 15.7. And in third place, a beautiful day in the neighborhood with 13.3 million box office thoughts. Both. I'd like to know your thoughts on the Frozen 2 stuff, but also Mr. Rogers. Did we expect more from that? I mean, it's Tom Hanks. Or is it going to be a long thing where it's around in theaters for a while? Or what? What do you guys think?
JVL00:29:42Would you have guessed? Two years ago, three years ago, if I had said Incredibles 2 opens bigger than Frozen 2.
Sonny00:29:50Would you have guessed that? Because I would not have. I would not have guessed that. We've discussed this before. I find.
JVL00:29:58Incredibles 2 is an amazing story. Well, the Incredibles. As a box office phenomenon. Oh, yeah, no, no. It's insane.
Sonny00:30:03I find the Incredibles 2 success to be weirdly baffling because, I mean, again, I knew people liked it. And I knew that it had, like, a high place in the Pixar canon. But I did not realize it was a $600 million place. I didn't realize it was, like, a $1.3 billion worldwide place. That's crazy. So, yes, if you had told me three years ago Incredibles 2 will outgross Frozen 2, I would not have believed you. But, I mean, still, $130 million is very, very good. It's a very strong opening. I don't know. Imagine what it would have been. If the movie had been any good. I haven't seen it. Have you seen it? No. Not yet. I have not been dragooned into it. You went Frozen? Yeah. My wife and favorite went. What did they think?
Vic00:30:54Well, favorite loved it. My wife said it was. It says it's a train wreck. Oh, yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Just pure cash grab. Everything about it says cash grab. And your daughter has not been clamoring to say, let's see. No.
Sonny00:31:07So, my wife and daughter saw it. Oh, okay. So, they were out of town together this weekend. And they went to the theater together as part of the mommy-daughter. Oh, sure. It's mostly that. And it was funny. So, Beth said that it is like hyper-woke. It is hyper. It is like, I don't know, apology for the genocide of the Native Americans or something. Because everybody in Scandinavia is white. Which is weird because it's set not in America. But anyway, I don't know. We'll see. I still haven't seen it.
Vic00:31:47So, you haven't seen it and you haven't seen it.
JVL00:31:49I have not. I will be dragooned into it eventually, I assume. She says the music is... Actually, I have listened to the music, though. I've listened to the soundtrack. And same team that did the original score and not a single catchy tune on it. Really? I just, again, having only listened to... It's the same team, right? The Lopezes. Same team as the Lopezes. And not a single... Not a single good track on it, to my mind.
Vic00:32:16So, none of you saw it? No. Did Gene see it? Not Gene. Frozen 2 kicks ice! Yes! In Arendelle, our friends were chilling. But now their kingdom is under threat. Quick, get to the chopper! Princess Elsa has ice in her veins. Remember when I said... I said I saw Frozen 2? I lied. Sonny, why are you so cold to my charms? He looks so angry. I hope cooler heads prevail. I look forward to coming back to this podcast
Guest00:32:59when Hellfreeze is over!
Sonny00:33:02Mr. Freeze, everyone.
JVL00:33:04Thank you, Mr. Freeze!
Sonny00:33:06Mr. Freeze.
JVL00:33:06The greatest cameo ever.
Vic00:33:09Did not see that one coming. You didn't see that one? Oh, that's funny.
Sonny00:33:12Speaking of did not see...
Vic00:33:13Oh, right.
Sonny00:33:15We're doing Midway first, right?
Vic00:33:16Oh, right. So speaking of did not see, Sonny, what? Because you're not a true American, is that why you didn't see Midway?
Sonny00:33:22No, my understanding... We were going to see Midway for the show last week, or two weeks ago, and then we didn't do it. And then I have no interest in seeing it. It looks silly. It looks like a, you know, big CGI...
Vic00:33:37Well, you're going to be proven that you're wrong. So we're going to talk about it. I mean, I guess, Jonathan, feel free to chime in I was going to say, related to Midway, I was at Punchbowl. You know Punchbowl Social? It's like a Dave and Buster's bar. I am aware of it. Bars and things. They have a little arcade, and I was there over the weekend. I was with my son, and I played 1943. Oh, that game is great. It's a great game. It's your favorite game ever. Well, yeah, and it's sort of related to Midway, the actual battle, because it's like your target is the Kaga, you know? And the thing is, I could play that game for hours, but that would not be a good thing. What did JVL...
JVL00:34:11No, new sponsor this week. First time ever. Circle. Really cool. Your kids are creative and smart and adventurous, but if they're using their gifts to get onto parts of the Internet, you want to keep off limits...
Vic00:34:23from kids or your husband.
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Vic00:36:02When I saw, based on the trailer, the first time I saw the trailer, I was like, you have to be... Again, I made a joke about this in many episodes again, saying it looked like it looked as good as, was it Red Tails? The special effects. The CGI. It looked really bad. But I said, we're going to do this show anyway. And you went with... It was me and my son, Mike Goldfarb, and his son, who is Devin, I think. Did you sit next to Goldfarb?
JVL00:36:29Or did you sit in another part of the theater in case there was an incident?
Vic00:36:32No, well, there was... When the first bomb hits the carrier, the Japanese carrier, he starts clapping out loud. Yeah! And I believe it was the only person clapping in the theater. But there were a lot of old people. It looked kind of like vets in the theater. And there could have been a good story there if it was better about these things. It looked like an old Japanese guy and an old white guy. And it could have been like... I could see a story right there.
Sonny00:36:56That's an Esquire profile right there. Yeah, right there.
Vic00:36:59Either that or maybe they were...
Sonny00:37:0050 years of friendship. That's right.
Vic00:37:02After the horrors of World War II. He survived the sinking of the Soryu or whatever. But there were a good number of people in the theater. Do you want to do a big boy review of it? I didn't really have anything formalized except for that... Unless you had more formal thoughts on this. I liked it a lot. I give it an A+. If I want to do my quadrant, if you will. Do the quadrant. Do the quadrant. Which is really... Okay. Duration was 2 hours and 18 minutes. But it felt like an hour and a half to me.
JVL00:37:34I agree totally.
Vic00:37:35You're going from one campaign to the next. I could have taken more, honestly. Yeah, I know. Let's go all the way to Tokyo. You know, it was really... So I liked it. It felt like... And again, I talk about this all the time. You guys are editors. You know what it's like when you have somebody who's a really good writer and it could be 8,000 words but only feels like 2,000. And it was one of those situations. The plot, if you're into history, it's fairly easy to understand, right? And the old Midway movie, which is by most standards a terrible movie. The one from the 1970s with Charlton Heston and Henry Fonda. Henry Fonda is such a bad movie and it was like woke in its own way at that time. They had the subplot of Charlton Heston's son being in love with the Japanese girl but then the parents get sent to an internment camp and there's this whole other thing. And this movie... None of that. This movie was, you know, there's a bit of the pilot and his wife. That's great but it's sort of minimal when Mandy Moore plays the wife. And otherwise, this was like a 1940s World War II movie. With better special effects. Nothing more, nothing less. You know, it's not trying to be more than that. And I appreciated that. Let's just cut to the chase. And you go from... They start with Pearl Harbor and then they move on to the Doolittle Raid. The Marshall Islands. I forgot about that.
JVL00:39:01It is like Rocketman or any of the jukebox musicals where they take like the greatest hits. This is the greatest hits of the Pacific campaign. Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid. And the Marshall Islands. And then you get Midway.
Vic00:39:15It's like, wow, I get all my favorite battles in one movie. So, again, the plot I thought was fairly easy to understand. There's other things I would have liked them to talk about, but they didn't. But that's okay. And violence, it's not saving Private Ryan level, but that's good for the kids. You know what I mean? And it's not also... Those old World War II movies, like The Longest Day, that's also... You hardly see anything. You know what I mean? They just fall down, you know what I mean? And then there was a time in the 1950s, 60s, with color films, and the blood, for whatever reason, was an extremely bright red paint. And then, of course, then it got extremely graphic post-Wild Bunch and everything else. This is your area, Sonny. But I thought it was just the right... There's some gore, you know, but there's like a charred body. But other than that, I thought it was just right. And, again, fairly historically accurate.
Sonny00:40:05How charred on the Owen Beiru scale?
Vic00:40:08Oh, yeah. Right up there, at that level. At Owen Beiru. It took me a second to figure that out. Uncle Owen, Aunt Beiru. But, yeah, what did you think, JVL?
JVL00:40:18So it's a... This is the thing. It's not actually a war movie. It's a disaster movie that's painted to look like a war movie.
Vic00:40:27Disaster for the Japanese Navy.
JVL00:40:29Well, yeah, but, I mean, the structure of it is like the Day After Tomorrow or any of the other things where the disaster is Japan's decision to attack. And America then responding to it. So, again, it is structured like a disaster movie. It follows the constant beats and the moving from place to place. But the moving from place to place, the point A to point B-ness of it, are the great battles of the Pacific campaign that we know and love and have always wanted to see on screen. I thought it was everything that we had hoped Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor could be. And more. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. The performances across the border, great. They are not fictionalized. Fictional characters, we're leaning on real characters. We get really fun performances from Dennis Quaid as Bull Halsey, Woody Harrelson as Chester Nimitz. And, you know, I thought the guy who owns every scene he's in is Patrick Wilson, who...
Vic00:41:30Oh, the codebreaker.
JVL00:41:31Who is a naval intelligence officer, who is the bad guy in the Aquaman. The only place people would know him from is the bad guy in the Aquaman movie.
Sonny00:41:40He was also the night owl in Watchmen. And he's in the Conjuring movies, actually. Oh, well. And those are huge. And he was in that great movie. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't oh well me. The Conjuring movies are huge hits. No, I'm not oh well with you.
Vic00:41:52I'm not disagreeing. He was also in that great movie, Little Children, with... Why do you say that? Why that noise, Sonny? What's her name? Winslet, with Kate Winslet?
Sonny00:42:03We'll get to it when we get to Jojo Rabbit.
JVL00:42:05That's an interesting plot. But, so Patrick Wilson is great in this because he's very self-contained and very... He's still in quite... I mean, he just really is not doing... He's doing everything with his eyes and his voice. Not doing a lot.
Sonny00:42:19He's also in a great little movie called Bone Tomahawk from the fine folks at Cinestate. Oh, yeah. Just an FYI.
JVL00:42:24Good plug there. Well, he's fantastic in this. Yeah, yeah. And I don't...
Vic00:42:29Did you like Ed Skrein as Dick Best? You know, I really did. Ed Skrein, I don't remember him from anywhere. Do you know Ed Skrein at all, Sonny?
Sonny00:42:37Yeah, he's a guy who keeps popping up in things, who is like... He's like evil Sam Worthington. Yeah. In that he plays kind of generic white guy bad guys, but I guess he's the good guy in that.
Vic00:42:49Does he always... I just wonder if he always sounds his way because he affected sort of an old school, like the way people... New Yorkers.
JVL00:42:55From that time.
Vic00:42:56Well, his face. Oh, man.
JVL00:42:58He's got a very, very ethnic 1940s face. That's right. Which is great.
Sonny00:43:04So he was the bad guy in Deadpool, in the first Deadpool. Oh. And he was also in Alita Battle Angel. Oh, right.
Vic00:43:12Yeah. He was one of the villains. Yeah. Yeah.
Sonny00:43:14He was in... God, he was in something else that we...
Vic00:43:17Well, he was great.
Sonny00:43:17He was great in this.
JVL00:43:18Anyway, I just... I don't know. I loved everything. So it was... So it's point to point, right?
Vic00:43:23Mm-hmm.
JVL00:43:23Except in the moments between them, what it is filled with is not love story stuff, but naval strategy stuff.
Vic00:43:32I was going to say information. And so, like, what more could people like us ask for, right?
JVL00:43:36That's right. Like, instead of having to deal with a B-plot that's, you know, like about some love story or a friendship... The love triangle. I don't need the love triangle. Instead of that, they give us Yamamoto and... That's right. I'm sorry, Yamato... Yamamoto. Yamamoto and the conversations... Who was on board the Yamato, by the way. Yamamoto having conversations with his little coterie of admirals and them trying to fight Tojo. Navy versus Army. Navy versus Army stuff. Sign me up. What's not to like about this?
Sonny00:44:08The idea about... You guys are really talking me into this.
JVL00:44:10You know what? I'm not kidding. I think you'd love it. When you watch it, when it comes out on streaming, I think you're going to watch it and say to yourself...
Vic00:44:17From a geopolitical perspective, it is very true. It is very interesting. The land army, you know, in Asia, going into China, that is where they thought the action is. That's what we got to focus on. You guys support us. Do your job.
JVL00:44:31You know, Yamamoto having the conversation with Patrick Wilson's character early in the movie before hostilities commence. So you have the American naval attachés, getting together as a farewell when they're pulling out of Japan with their Japanese counterparts. And Yamamoto has a conversation with Patrick Wilson's character where he is saying, I don't want us to go to war here. But we may be pushed into it. And if there's any way to avoid it, you guys have to, like, step off the resources to give me some time to maneuver internally to push the army guys aside.
Vic00:45:10It's just great. Interesting stuff. So again, better than Michael Bay, it's somewhere between the spectrum of Michael Bay and Terrence Malick, and there he is right in the middle there
JVL00:45:16rolling them. I can honestly, what is what is the last war movie you saw that you liked better than this? Right. Because I couldn't think of one. Fury. I prefer this to Fury. There are parts of Fury I really like.
Vic00:45:31That far back. And there's other parts. Yeah, that's right. It's great. I think you'll love it. You're not beating me over the head with some other message right now. Just tell me the movie. Just show me the movie. The only thing I thought they could have done a better job is explaining how the code breaking was achieved, sort of how they figured out that Midway was the target that the Japanese were listening in. They kept on referring to, I think it's A4, whatever the island was, it was that. And it was because they sent a fake cable. The U.S. sent a fake cable about the water treatment plant, the water plant. And then they made a reference to it in the Japanese do in the communique about A4 water plant. That's it. That was really good. In intelligence work, that is called a burium meal.
JVL00:46:09When you place a fake piece of information, then to watch it, to see who... So when the enemy uptakes the fake enemy, you then know how they got it. That's what they
Vic00:46:20do in Miami Vice. And it works. And the other admirals I really like too, both the American side and the Japanese side, Nagumo is the admiral who makes the disastrous opinion about, oh, we're going to switch back, switch over from a naval attack to a land attack, but you've got to switch the bombs out. It's going to take some time, but don't worry. This is how it's going to be done. And he is the old guy. I feel like I can really relate to him. The old guy. They keep him around even though he makes terrible decisions.
JVL00:46:49I was like, why do I feel like I relate to him? Okay. It's great. People will love it. Everybody will love it. And I think that this actually works for most kids. I wouldn't take a young, young kid to see this, but I would say 10 or 11.
Vic00:47:0410 or 11 years old. And it was great. I mean, you're looking at a different time. It was different back then. The fear was an actual physical attack, bombs and missiles. Today, however, it's cyber attacks. Recently, over 100 million people had their personal information stolen in a major data breach. Social security numbers, contact details, credit scores, and more all taken from Capital One customers. There's a good chance you were affected. These kind of attacks are getting more frequent and more severe. It's not just Capital One. Equifax, Facebook, eBay, Uber, PlayStation, Yahoo have all leaked passwords, credit cards, bank numbers, belong to billions of users. That's why I use ExpressVPN. You can't control how big corporations mishandle your data, but you can protect yourself. ExpressVPN is an app for your computer and phone that encrypts and secures your data. Hey, if a breach can happen to Capital One, it can happen to you, right? I never go online without ExpressVPN, and if you care about your privacy and safety, you shouldn't either. ExpressVPN connects with just one click. It's lightning fast and costs less than $7 a month. ExpressVPN is rated the number one VPN provider by TechRadar, CNET, The Verge, and countless others. Use my special link, expressvpn dot com slash WFB right now to arm yourself with an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. Support the show. Protect yourself. That's expressvpn dot com slash WFB for an extra three months free. This is really a mega episode, double feature, because right now we're going to move on and talk about another warm movie taking place on the other side of the continent, Jojo Rabbit, but it seems to be less... Other side of the world. What did I say, continent? Yeah. I'm so tired. Other side of the world, and it seems less of a World War II movie per se than something else. Your thoughts? Sonny, you saw this movie. I did. I saw
Sonny00:48:52this 12 hours ago. I was stepping out of the theater, because I'm committed to this show. I'm trying to make sure.
Vic00:48:59How about a big boy review?
Sonny00:49:00Or something? Jojo Rabbit. Here's the thing. So Jojo Rabbit is a story of a young boy living in Nazi Germany with a single mother whose father is either off to the war or possibly in the resistance somewhere. And he is trying to come to grips with life under the rule of Hitler. He goes to Hitler Youth camps, like Boy Scout camps. But it's Hitler Youth, you know? It's weird. It's wacky. It's directed by Taika Watiti, who is... Am I pronouncing that right? I'm never 100% sure. White Titi? Yeah. Is it White Titi? I think so. Anyway, he directed... It's not White Titi. He directed Thor Ragnarok and What We Do in the Shadows. He is best known for his comedies. This is a anti-hate satire is how it is being sold to people. This is the Jojo Rabbit anti-hate satire. And so anyway, this boy, he's in Hitler Youth. He accidentally blows himself up in a very funny sequence involving Sam Rockwell as the Nazi captain in charge of the Hitler Youth program that he is attending. And while he is recuperating at home, he learns that his mother is sheltering a Jewish girl in the room of his dead sister. It's a little bit weird, but okay. But dead before the war. Dead before the war.
JVL00:50:27No, that's not clear. It's actually not clear at all. Because he doesn't know. They never actually say how she died. Because he does not know that she's dead. He just knows she's not there. And he thinks she may be coming back and the mom... No, I'm pretty sure he knows. She's dead. I don't believe so.
Sonny00:50:44That's the father who he doesn't... I believe it's both. Anyway, the... It doesn't matter what. It doesn't matter. I have to be honest. I didn't really like this movie. I didn't hate it. I kind of expected to hate it. Because it's very precious. And I don't think it has... I don't think Taika Waititi has the same sort of visual preciousness that you need to make a thing like this work. Like a Wes Anderson. I could see a... We were discussing this over... over text messages and... How did you describe it, JVL? Moonrise Kingdom, but in the Hitler Youth. Right. And so Moonrise Kingdom... Which is the elevator pitch. Moonrise Kingdom is the Wes Anderson movie I like the least. I actually actively dislike it. It's the only of his films that I don't care for at all. And this has kind of a similar vibe. I don't know if it's just being so focused on children or what. There was just something about it that I found not even off-putting, just not right. I don't know how to describe why I didn't care for this movie. I just know that I was sitting there in the theater the whole time. There were about 15 people in the theater when I saw it. Only one person was laughing, which strikes me as a bad result for this sort of thing. And I don't know. But it's... There are people who really, really love it, including, I think, our friend Vic Mattis. Okay, so I don't care what you think about this at all. I just want to hear Vic talk for 45 minutes about Jojo Raddick. But here's the thing. No, no, but here's... We've got 10 minutes. Here's the thing. It's very funny. When we first started talking about doing an episode on Jojo Raddick, it was kind of like it was kind of like in the air. It was like okay, yeah, maybe we'll do that. That's a thing that's coming up. We could possibly... And Vic runs out the first weekend. The first weekend that it's available.
JVL00:52:31And I have to say... It was like Star Wars
Sonny00:52:32Episode IV. I am not shocked that Vic wanted to see the adolescent love story set in Nazi Germany. It just like... It seemed to check off a lot of different boxes. For him. Vic, what did you think about Jojo Raddick?
Vic00:52:46Das ist unfair. I used to say when I'm back in my Vienna days, das ist unfair. Oh, okay. I had a question for you, which is box office. Is this as good as it gets for it? It's not going to wider distribution, right? This is it.
Sonny00:53:02If it ends up getting a big awards season push, I could see it hanging around. Hanging around.
JVL00:53:09Hanging around. Will it get a
Vic00:53:10box office? Like Scarlett Johansson
JVL00:53:12character.
Sonny00:53:14Oh, wow. I'm sorry. Was that not? Spoiler. Spoiler. The You know what? That is. Hold on one second. See, that's one of the things that I actually actively hated about the movie. Was the surprise. Is when So, again, spoilers. Spoilers. So, in the last third of the movie, the final act starts, or maybe it's almost even an epilogue. It's like the last 20 minutes or so of the movie. Jojo Raddick is wandering around the city with his cart getting metal and food and whatnot. And he sees a beautiful blue butterfly. And as soon as he saw that butterfly and started following it around, I was like he's going to go from this image of beauty to an image of horror. What will the image of horror be? It's going to be either the Jewish girl or his mother getting rounded up by the police. And instead of that, it was the mother is found hanged. Because she's a traitor. In the public square. She's a traitor. She's hanged in the public square. Vic would say she's a traitor.
JVL00:54:12She's a member of the resistance. No, that's terrible. Absolutely terrible. Sonny, you can say she's a member of the resistance. She's a member of the resistance.
Sonny00:54:18She's a member of the resistance. Though, again like, as I was thinking about this as I was leaving the theater it's like, okay, she's a member of the resistance but what is she actually doing? We just see
Vic00:54:28her like walking around with notes. She's distributing
Sonny00:54:30pamphlets. She's distributing pamphlets and she gets hung for it and she leaves her child all alone to be, I mean, she's doing nothing. She gets murdered for nothing.
JVL00:54:39She's harboring a Jew.
Sonny00:54:41But they don't know why, but that's not why she gets hanged, right? It would be, but like her actual, like the thing, the visible if she is harboring the Jew and she's doing a good job at that and she's great, she's like a good person, a saint, she should be doing everything else. She should be doing nothing else, right? She should just be living her normal life as a German. The war is about to end. She knows the war is about to end. Everyone knows the war is about to end. She should just be protecting her son and the Jewish refugee that she's hiding in her room, right? She's really committed to the cause. So like, anyway, this is like I kind of hated her and I hated her like you know, I am a single mother trying to make it all work, you know, I like you gotta pick, you gotta pick her
Vic00:55:22Also, I took off a few points from my quadrant regarding the plot because they never showed her face. I said, whose shoes are those that he's hugging? Oh, you couldn't
Sonny00:55:32follow it? You couldn't follow it too hard?
Vic00:55:33I said, what's with the shoe? So anyway, box office. It took me a little bit. I'm just saying, immediately. Oh, come on. They did literally
JVL00:55:42three scenes where they focus on her shoes. They just show her shoes over and over again. I'm just like, let's get back to the action, is what I was saying.
Sonny00:55:50Why am I walking out of the shoes? Blue shoes. You know, there were things I like about this movie. Like, I do think Sam Rockwell's very good as the gay captain. Did you like Alfie Allen? And Theon is funny as his adjunct.
JVL00:56:09So, for people who are not going to see this movie because nobody's going to see this, Sam Rockwell plays the captain of the Hitler Youth who has been demoted because he lost an eye in battle and he has a very funny thing about how, you know, because obviously, you know, you can't shoot anyone with only one eye. And he goes to demonstrate how he still can shoot and he can't. And he's a drunk. And he's a dipsomaniac and he's gay as well. And he's also sympathetic to the resistance.
Sonny00:56:41Sympathetic to the resistance. And also, like, and again, this is another thing I don't like about it. Like, he at his most sympathetic is when he is brutally murdered by the allied forces that enter the town. Not the Americans, the Russians. No, they were Americans. They were 100% Americans.
JVL00:57:00Absolutely Americans. 100%.
Sonny00:57:02No, they're Russians. You see Russians first and then you see Americans. The guy who drags Jojo away,
Vic00:57:10100% American. The originally he gets nabbed by the Russians, right?
Sonny00:57:13He does initially get nabbed by the Russians. And you're saying that while he's there, then the guy who comes in is American. I guess maybe because it was the Russians who were collecting everyone that it is. And it's sight unseen.
Vic00:57:24We hear the machine guns. Yeah. I mean,
Sonny00:57:25again, that's another thing I just kind of it rubbed me the wrong way. I don't know.
Vic00:57:29I thought that was a nice touch at the end there. It was very poignant. So, Vic, did you like it? I liked it, by and large, even though it had all the issues. Run through the quadrants.
JVL00:57:40It's very short. Oh, it's very short.
Vic00:57:42Mostly easy to understand, although it was not factually, obviously, not actually accurate. And then violence is fine. It's fun. You know what I mean? And then, well, obviously, that was it. There's a quadrant. There's no nudity. Obviously, it's not that kind of movie. Same thing with Midway. everything has been improved along that quadrant? What?
JVL00:58:04Could the movie have been improved along that quadrant? What did you think of Ilsa?
Vic00:58:08What did you think of Ilsa? Oh, no, no, no. No, you're ridiculous. The actresses is 19, Vic. It's okay. Really? She is? Okay. Everything you said is true, right? And the Wes Anderson thing, I totally thought that it was kind of derivative of that, especially the ending. It's like, I know he's his own guy. He's a great director. I love Thor Ragnarok, right? He's really good, Taika Waititi. But it just felt like a Wes Anderson movie. It was very strange that way. No, but it
Sonny00:58:30didn't feel like a Wes Anderson movie because Wes Anderson has, like, a distinctive visual style and this is just, like, kind of quirky.
Vic00:58:36Well, it reminded me of that. This is more
Sonny00:58:38like Napoleon Dynamite. This is more like
Vic00:58:40a... Okay. Well, and there are things that were factually inaccurate. So he makes a joke. You're telling me that Hitler didn't visit a small child? Besides
Sonny00:58:50that. Repeatedly? We haven't even discussed this. Oh, right. What? Oh, and Jojo has an imaginary friend who is Hitler. The whole, like, shtick of this movie is that, again, the director, Taika Waititi, he plays jokey Hitler as, like, an imaginary friend. An imaginary friend for Jojo. Sure. Which, like, okay. Well, again,
JVL00:59:10like, I get it. It kind of works, but it also doesn't
Sonny00:59:14work for me. I don't know. And it's not like I'm not offended by it. I don't actually I think you can make Nazi jokes and you can make Hitler jokes. I just didn't think it worked. Did you
Vic00:59:24like, well, it's like, I don't know. I mean, it's been done before, obviously, not with Hitler as your imaginary friend. Cloak and Dagger, that was a great movie with an imaginary friend. Danny Coleman. Drop Dead Fred, right? With Winona. No. With, oh, Phoebe Cates. Yeah, sorry. You blacked out there for a minute, didn't you? Yeah, I did. And now this one. And, of course, Harvey, but that was kind of a different story from back in the day with Jimmy Stewart. So Hitler makes a reference to the kid about
JVL00:59:50the Stauffenberg plot. Stauffi? His riff on how much he hated Stauffi and he's like talking about it was hysterical. It was very funny.
Vic00:59:58But then later. Indestructible legs. That's right. Indestructible legs. But then after that, then Scarlett Johansson's character, the mother, says, oh, great news. The Allies have landed in Italy. So that's 43. And Stauffenberg was not until July 20, 1944. So it's out of sequence, obviously. And then the other thing about the Russians and Americans meeting each other in town. I tried for the longest time in the movie to figure out where what town does this take? I was hoping you were going to tell me that. I figured you would know. It feels like somewhere in the West. But in fact, it's like one place where like the Russians and the Americans met famously. And that was Torgau. But that's close.
Sonny01:00:34So maybe they live in Torgau. Oh, this wasn't taking place. And I just assumed it was Berlin.
Vic01:00:38No, you know, I don't
Sonny01:00:40know what I don't know what any of these towns look like. It's a village. It's a village. It's a small town. There's big buildings everywhere. I don't know.
Vic01:00:46It's a small town. And that would have been related to what they call Elbe Day, right? Where the Americans and the Red Army met up. And so, but I mean but they obviously take a lot of liberties. I liked Sam Rockwell a lot. I just thought that that worked for me. And his thing, I think it was very funny.
Sonny01:01:00Okay, what else? And Stephen Merchant. You like
Vic01:01:02Stephen Merchant, right? Stephen Merchant is always good no matter what, even though I was
Sonny01:01:06kind of scared. I was scared. There's this weird shot in the movie where Stephen Merchant is like looming over Sam Rockwell.
JVL01:01:14Yeah. And I can't tell if that's
Sonny01:01:16I can't tell if it's because Stephen Merchant is literally like 18 inches taller. He's a giant. Or if there was, I mean he's tall.
JVL01:01:22He's like 6'4". Is he like 6'10"? No.
Sonny01:01:24He's not that tall. He's like 6'5 or 6'6 maybe. But like. Tom Cruise would be up to his hip. Yeah, but I mean it was like he was looking down at a child.
Vic01:01:32Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was. I liked that I gave it an A+. JVL.
JVL01:01:38So it's a tonally all over the place. And it moves back and forth from moments of clear comedy to moments of Sappiness? Like real
Vic01:01:51tension. Oh, tension. So like
JVL01:01:53when Stephen Merchant shows up, it's hysterical. And then 30 seconds later
Sonny01:01:57it's like there's a lot of tension about
JVL01:01:59oh, is he gonna, you know, are they gonna find the nice Jewish girl? Who looks, by the way, like the 19-year-old version of Rebecca Ferguson. She could be Rebecca Ferguson's younger sister or something. Okay. And I found the tonal shifting jarring. Which is not to say that a movie has to have like one tone the whole way through, but I just didn't, I felt like it was all done very abruptly. Like going from first gear to fifth gear, you know, or from third gear to reverse or something. Like just not not being moved gently along the gradient. And I felt kind of gross laughing the handful of times that I, because there's stuff that is, I think, undeniably funny in it. Much of it coming from the imaginary Hitler who talks and acts in a way that a silly ten-year-old boy might imagine Hitler talking and acting. That's exactly right. That's the whole thing, right? In his mind, this is how it would be like. Also cigarettes.
Vic01:03:00He would not, if you didn't smoke,
JVL01:03:02smoke, drink, or eat meat.
Vic01:03:04You know, so.
JVL01:03:05So John Podhoretz, I remember when the first X-Men movie came out. I think it was the first X-Men movie
Vic01:03:12John was really exorcised about
JVL01:03:14the Holocaust and the opening of that. He said, you know, you shouldn't be able to, you shouldn't make superhero movies about the Holocaust like this. And it's grotesque. And I kind of disagreed with that. And this is the first time I've ever felt basically like that. I felt gross for laughing in any of this stuff. And I don't, I don't know, maybe that's just me. Maybe it's not gross for it. Because there were parts where I didn't feel gross. So he's got this little friend, Georgie.
Vic01:03:42I thought he stole the show. Who's hysterical,
JVL01:03:44right? This fat little kid who is much more of an age appropriate, like doesn't quite know what he's doing. The paper mache uniform that falls apart. The paper-like uniform. So there are parts of it that didn't feel gross that you were
Vic01:03:55laughing at, but parts of it that
JVL01:03:57did. And I, and the stuff that did feel gross like really is what stuck with me more than anything else. And then part of me thought, I don't know, is this like a sub-Rosa like anti-Trump, deprogramming Trump stuff? I don't know. The whole thing was weird and I, I'm not sure I My favorite Yorkies, my favorite line is Yorkie when he talks about, you know, at the end of that final battle and he says It's not a great time to be a Nazi. No, that, no, the
Vic01:04:24other one, he goes, right now our only allies left are the Japanese and between us they don't look very Aryan. Very true.
Sonny01:04:30How they had to reconcile this thing, you know. Yorkie was definitely the best best part and and again, I do, I did think Sam Rockwell was very funny as like He's designing a gun. He's designing this He's got this ridiculously over the top outfit with like feathers on the top and when you see him in battle he's wearing like mascara. You noticed that
JVL01:04:50Yeah, exactly. And it was, like, there again, it was like, it was funny.
Sonny01:04:54It was very, it was funny in a way that I think I think actually the over top that, that over top part over the top part really worked. Yes. In a way that like the imaginary Hitler stuff didn't and I don't know. What about the weirdness? I just, there's something about the thing that just doesn't work for me and I don't know what it is. It's just not funny enough. That might, that might be like the bottom line for me is that it was it was like, I just I just didn't laugh. I liked it because I found
Vic01:05:24it interesting enough. I found it
JVL01:05:26interesting. Maybe the problem is that if you're gonna if you're gonna laugh at the Nazis it needs to be all comedy
Vic01:05:33like, maybe it just has to be full on
JVL01:05:36satire. Full on producers. And you can't you can't commingle that with and look, they murdered the mom. Yeah. You know, like, when you shift tones like that then it's like, hold on, wait a minute. We're being serious about how terrible it is. Then maybe we should not, maybe we should ramp back. But I think that's his way of
Vic01:05:52not everything has to be Sophie's choice. In case in case people give him the criticism that it's too, like, you know what I mean you're, it's inappropriate laughing then he wants to say, well, look what I did. Well, but he's trying to do. And it's based on the book. It's based on the book. And I understand that he's trying to
JVL01:06:06again, I don't actually fault Caging Skies. YTD for this at all because I, he's trying to do something in interesting. Yeah, right. I just don't think as a viewer that it
Sonny01:06:17at least for me that it fully works. Yeah. Would you? It obviously did not work for me. I mean, and again, I didn't hate it. I kind of expected to hate it. I thought that all the ads for this movie, I hated
Vic01:06:29in the sense that it was, you felt it was bad taste.
Sonny01:06:32No, no, not even that it's bad taste. I don't mind bad taste. It just looked too precious. It just looked too precious and precocious. And like, I was just like, is it because of the Beatles music? Is it Hey Jude?
Vic01:06:45No, no, no. Which actually is a Beatles song they did in German because, you know, the Beatles spent a lot of time in Hamburg. So they recorded you know, and also
Sonny01:06:56I did hate some of the needle drops too. Like, I didn't love the Beatles one, but it was like kind of funny with him running through the city like he was going to a Beatles concert. That actually, that worked for me. But the one at the end, We Can Be Heroes. The David Bowie Heroes, like the German version. That was terrible. Which, by the way, is I might have I might have groaned out loud in the theater. I might have just gone, ugh.
JVL01:07:23Yeah, I actually really hated I really hated the end, honestly. The two kids dancing in the street.
Sonny01:07:32No, but that's That's freedom, JVL. Earlier in the movie, they said that the first thing that free people do is they dance. I understand.
JVL01:07:42I understand. It did not work for me. Can we just take one moment though to give a shout out to Taika Waititi for the character of Korg in Thor Ragnarok, because he wrote Thor Ragnarok as well, and I think Korg is the most subversive element in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. The rock creature. The rock creature who is a gay incel and also a What makes you say that? I forget why, but I think it's pretty clear. Korg is gay.
Sonny01:08:11Rock gay. Just because he loves video games doesn't make him an incel.
JVL01:08:15And he lives in his parents' basement and he hates his mom's boyfriend but he's also like a Jacobin type. So he's like, you know, I want to start. We didn't have enough pamphlets to start a revolution. Everything about that character is fantastic.
Vic01:08:30Again, that review, that guy from Twitter is right about that. What? Alright, we're going to move on. Let's move on. Fork you guys. What did he say about me? What did the mean Twitter man say about me? You're fine. You're fine. Corrections, shout outs, anything. Because this is a long episode. I do want to give a quick shout out. It's supersized
Sonny01:08:47for Thanksgiving. People are traveling.
Vic01:08:50I want to give a quick shout out to a long time listener and friend, Paul Yarabino. He works in our office. Building complex. He works for another company but I saw him in the lobby the other day. He came up to me and unfortunately he's not doing well. He shared with me his diagnosis which I think I can share with you guys. Unfortunately he is suffering from gout.
Guest01:09:09Oh no!
Vic01:09:11I told him, I said. Did he catch it from you? It's contagious. And I said to him, we'll get through this together. So I'm kind of like a gout sponsor. Maybe. Maybe. Like what did you eat
JVL01:09:22Paul? What did you eat? Bring him to the Peloton with you and maybe Emma. Emma Lovewell. The gym is free. Miss Emma Lovewell.
Vic01:09:30I know. Does she have a British accent? She kind of, again, she reminds me more like Catherine Zeta-Jones. Interesting. Oh no! You know what she reminds you of? Who is the girl we met at the White House Correspondents Dinner and she was in that Crossing Jordan. The actress who plays Crossing Jordan. Do you remember her? Oh yeah. She's a twin. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's who she reminds me of.
JVL01:09:56Can't even remember anymore.
Vic01:09:58She was on Law and Order. She's one of the ADAs on Law and Order.
JVL01:10:01Jill Hennessy. Jill Hennessy.
Vic01:10:03That's who she was. And that's who she sounds
JVL01:10:06like. I'll get back to that tonight.
Vic01:10:08Okay. That's all the time for my cardio. That's all the time we're giving to this episode. Thank God. Questions, comments, complaints, compliments tweet us at SonnyBunch at Victorino Matus. Again, be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher. Just type in Sub-Beacon on a podcast. We're there. Leave a review. Tell your friends. Happy Thanksgiving. Until next time.
JVL01:10:38I gotta go to the bathroom. What's going on JV? Okay. So I have an update. So when I was out at Notre Dame, hanging with Father Harrison and Father Anthony. Father Anthony and I are all. They were all at Notre Dame too? Yeah. We are big wrestling guys. We are wrestling fans. And we decided we were going to teach Father Harrison about the glories of professional wrestling. So we fired up the WWE app and we're showing him some classic matches. One of which we wanted him to experience Ric Flair. So we showed him this old Ric Flair versus Ricky the Dragon Steamboat match.
Sonny01:11:14And. Wait let me guess. Was this 1990? Maybe. It's like the
JVL01:11:19Chi-Town Heat. Yeah you know some NWA or WCW pay-per-view. And the story being told through the match is that it is working class Ricky Steamboat against Mr. Money Ric Flair. And so the great Jim Ross is the lead commentary guy. And as the match is going on he talks about the difference between the two men and how Ricky the Dragon Steamboat comes from a big family. They were never given anything. They had to work hard their whole lives. Very blue collars. Dad is a blue collar guy. And you know contrasting this with Ric Flair the nature boy who is you know he wears a Rolex watch. He styles. He profiles. Drives around in Cadillacs. Takes private jets. And he says and you know and Ric he went to private schools growing up unlike Ricky the Dragon Steamboat who went to public schools and then the coup de grace as they are hammering home the difference between these two men.
Vic01:12:23Ric Flair
JVL01:12:24son of a doctor. Oh come on.
Sonny01:12:29I'm sure it's fine.
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