#58. The Hunt, Box Office Breakdown, and Dietary Dilemmas
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All three finally see The Hunt, at home, on VOD, for twenty dollars, which is half the story. Sonny had a good time with it and calls the campaign to kill the movie "one of the big self-owns of the conservative movement in recent years," since the liberal elites are unmistakably the villains and most of the humor comes at their expense; he loves it best when it is most specific, from the hunter squealing that "Ava DuVernay liked one of my posts" to Ethan Suplee explaining that of course crisis actors have crisis babies, and he blames its 30% Rotten Tomatoes score on critics too broken by the present moment to enjoy a both-sides satire. JVL loved it too and recycles the joke he was proudest of from the lost taping: the elevator pitch is "Die Hard for David Brooks," a fantasy for anyone who feels drugged and dropped into a culture war they never wanted, with Betty Gilpin's Snowball dispatching racist rednecks and progressive control freaks in equally gruesome ways. Vic gave it an A and ran the quadrants — a merciful ninety minutes, a clear if surprising plot, no nudity, and Kill Bill-grade cartoon violence, his favorite bit being the woman blown in half into a spike pit who calls her would-be rescuer a snowflake and finishes the job herself. The business news is bleak: the movie grossed about $7 million in ten days, Thursday dailies show Onward leading with $33,000 nationwide, and Universal and Blumhouse have blown up the 74-day theatrical window, with Sonny arguing that Disney's eventual call on Black Widow decides whether the window ever comes back. They also recorded the entire show once and lost it right after the ad read, then did it again. Banter: Sonny's $450 grocery run that yielded no toilet paper and no chicken, JVL's keto diet as his first COVID casualty ("the freshman fifteen, the COVID-19") over Kirkland Baileys and club soda, Vic's Zoom happy hour where Goldfarb used a Chinese meat market as his backdrop, and a 1929 scale on which Vic says four, Sonny seven or eight, and JVL, contemplating reinsurance and a dead cruise industry, says fifty-three.
From the show notes
#cdata-section -------------- On this latest episode sponsored by Warby Parker, we review The Hunt , which we all saw from the comfort of ...
Full transcript
Guest00:00:00Hey there. Help ya? What state is this? Sorry. You don't understand the question? Oh, no, I didn't. Most people know where they are. Why ain't most people? You're in the glorious state of Arkansas, sweetheart. How'd you know they was lying? Well, this ain't Arkansas, so everyone is lying.
Vic00:00:40Hello and welcome to another edition of the Sub-Beacon, sponsored by Warby Parker. 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 podcasts and search for Sub-Beacon. You'll easily find us. Please subscribe like you have anything else better to do. Tell your friends and leave a review. How are things in Texas? I can't imagine that it's worse than it is here. I imagine they're much more laid back and everybody's still hanging out together.
Sonny00:01:40I went to the grocery store today and I bought $450 worth of groceries, which is not only more than any other trip to the grocery store that I've ever made. It's more than any two trips combined. I don't think I've ever... With the possible exception of when I was buying... Beer for a party or something. I don't think there's any chance I've ever spent $450 on two trips to the grocery store.
Vic00:02:07And it was $450 just in toilet paper? Is that what it was?
Sonny00:02:10Toilet paper and aspirin and children's Tylenol. Did you go over the limits? No. Well, so they actually did not have any toilet paper. They did not have any paper towels. So I couldn't get any of those. But I did get a lot of aspirins and Dayquils and Nyquils and that sort of stuff. We're pretty well stocked here at this point. Plus also just like literally probably two and a half weeks of food if we need to stop.
Vic00:02:39That's about the amount that you're supposed to get is about two weeks worth, I think.
Sonny00:02:44Yeah. We're pretty well set here. Assuming the water stays on and the power stays on, fingers crossed.
Vic00:02:50Yeah. This is a good time of year for that. This is not the winter time.
Sonny00:02:54So we should be. I'm part of the problem is what it comes down to. I'm part of the problem. Not so much because of the toilet paper, but only because I couldn't buy 10 packs of it. I would have. I totally would have. You know, I feel like you guys made fun of me when last we were together.
JVL00:03:10I don't even remember when that was. You were saying things like, hey, everybody should have a lot of supplies and we're going to close the movie theaters.
Sonny00:03:18I don't know. I don't know what day it is today. I don't know what day the last time we met was. I literally was trying to remember if we did an episode last week and I couldn't because I couldn't remember what week it was.
Vic00:03:29It is all a blur.
Sonny00:03:31Time isn't a flat circle so much as time is just like a paint spill. It's like, you know, when you pour all the paint together and it all kind of swirls together and none of the colors have like they haven't merged into that weird, gross brown, but they're still like all kind of separate. That's what the day feels like. I don't know. It's Friday. Is it Monday?
Vic00:03:51Look, it's 2024, by the way. I don't know if you know that.
JVL00:03:55Although this show is going to be full of politics, there's no way to avoid it. Just say, just say that for the last 12 months, I've been telling anybody who would listen, Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee.
Vic00:04:07Oh, there was a moment where you thought Bernie Sanders. I remember you were depressed.
JVL00:04:12Yeah, you were depressed and you said Bernie Sanders was going to be the nominee.
Sonny00:04:15Also, Joe Biden is not going to be the nominee because Joe Biden has the coronavirus and that's why we haven't seen him because he's on a ventilator right now. Ventilator.
Vic00:04:24He's got the much coveted ventilator.
JVL00:04:27And I've been saying for a long time. I'm like, hey, this stuff is really bad. Pandemic. It's going to be bad. Pandemic. Here we are. Pandemic. Here we are. That's right.
Vic00:04:38What are we talking about, JVL? What are you saying here? 18 months? That's your dream come true, isn't it? Social distancing is finally happening. No, see, in a way it is. It's not the kind you want.
JVL00:04:51Yes, that's the problem, isn't it? Social distancing from others.
Vic00:04:55That's right. I would like social distancing if it was just me and my gumar, you know? That would be fine.
?00:05:00Yeah.
JVL00:05:01Okay. It's, yeah.
Vic00:05:04But we're so separated now, you know? She's in New York, you know, my gumar, gumar. Okay. Go ahead, JVL. What does that mean? I'm sorry, what is that? Is that like gumar? Yeah, no, no, no.
Sonny00:05:14It's more like gumar, like not gumar. Gumar. You get after a while.
Vic00:05:17We in Jersey, in Jersey, we just throw the R on everything. Okay. So go ahead, please. We're all drinking.
JVL00:05:23All three of us are drinking. No, no, I'm just having water.
Vic00:05:25I had a hard, I hit it hard yesterday. I had a... You know what? My giant, tall martini, let's see here. I think it's what you call... Picture of martinis? A cobbler, a cobbler. A Boston Shaker is what it's two parts.
JVL00:05:38You went out drinking while confined to your home?
Vic00:05:41I went out drinking to my living room. But we did it. We did a big happy hour with all of my Free Beacon colleagues using Zoom.
JVL00:05:53Oh, man. Oh, I knew it was a drink because it was work.
Vic00:05:56Well, it's a happy hour. Of course, it's a happy hour. Everybody had to drink. You were not allowed to drink. And they would have been on. You're not allowed to be on the... Okay, let's see. Eliana, of course, our editor-in-chief. Stephanie, Brent Scher, Aaron Harrison, Goldfarb, and me. So six of us. It was a big party. It was actually very fun. Goldfarb was doing... You know, you can do these special effects. You do the backdrop.
Guest00:06:17Yeah.
Vic00:06:17So it's like different backdrops. And his was of a Chinese meat market.
JVL00:06:23And they're wearing masks.
Vic00:06:25Eating some bat. Yeah. Eating some bat and some pangolin. Eating some bat. I said, that is... It's just sick. Poor Mike.
JVL00:06:30You know, we think we have it tough. He's quarantined with a newborn. Yeah, he's got a... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Harrison too. One week old.
Vic00:06:36Harrison too. And the funny thing is, but Eliana's backdrop, she did the one where it's like palm trees. You're on a beach, you know? And her fiance was sitting next to her. But it's like weird, because if you're not at the actual focal point of the camera, you start getting phased out. And he looked like the brother from Back to the Future in the photo.
JVL00:06:55I was going to say, was he glitchy the way in Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse? Yes, yes.
Vic00:07:00Kind of like... He's fading out, but he's fading out like in Back to the Future. It's like half of him is there. And he's like...
JVL00:07:05So how much did you drink last night at your virtual happy hour that you had to drink for because of professional obligations?
Vic00:07:13Professional obligations. I filled that whole tall martini cobbler. Pitcher. Cobbler. The pitcher. My pitcher's not a pitcher, Sonny. Your martini pitcher. It is not a pitcher, but I tell you what, I got the spoon. You drank one pitcher of martini. The spoon with the, you know, the spiral spoon, the bar spoon, the bar spoon. It was so much fun. Guys, this is... Can I just... So he was gone.
Sonny00:07:31Can I just throw this out there? We're doing this over Zencaster, and this is a million times better. I hope everybody at home appreciates this.
JVL00:07:38Yeah, I know.
Vic00:07:39Sonny, what are you using?
Sonny00:07:40Squadcast, not Zencaster. Oh, we're using... What's Squadcast? What's the... It's what we're using.
JVL00:07:45Squadcast, I've turned onto by our buddy KSA, who killed her own podcast this week.
Sonny00:07:51No. In what sense?
JVL00:07:53The pollsters. The pollsters. She killed it. She murdered it. Why? I think it got COVID-19. I think the podcast got COVID-19. Well, that's going to happen. But she said do Squadcast, and Zencaster is great, and in many ways is a great product, but what it doesn't do is video, and this way, the three of us can see each other. Oh, this is very nice.
Vic00:08:17Oh, you can't do it blind. It's too weird. Well, you can with two people. You can't read each other's cues, I guess.
JVL00:08:21With two people, you can do it blind.
Vic00:08:23When you do interviews and stuff, when you don't see the other person, you really can't talk the way you would normally talk where you could step over people's lines. You notice them. People just sit, wait for the question, done, and then you answer. Here, this is like a free-for-all. It's like we're all in the same studio.
Sonny00:08:42So, Vic, you're drinking water.
Vic00:08:43I'm drinking water right now, and I just got done planking.
Sonny00:08:47You're drinking a clear, odorless liquid. Yes. Yeah, that's right. The author of Vodka's Drinking Water. Probably water. Okay, definitely not. Definitely not.
JVL00:08:59And then, yeah, okay.
Sonny00:09:00JVL, what are you drinking?
JVL00:09:02I'm on my second drink. Ooh. You're about to pass out. Don't pass out until we're done recording. Yeah, this is weird, recording both from home and at night. This is our first Sub-Beacon After Dark. I was ready to ask another. And this is the Kirkland brand Baileys. So, the Costco knockoff Baileys mixed with club soda. And the- Club soda? I don't understand this.
Sonny00:09:33This is the thing I didn't really understand. You know what you're doing? It's my mother-in-law's drink.
JVL00:09:36You're putting club soda and the Baileys mixed together? This is my mother-in-law's drink. I can't explain it. Honestly, actually, and I think it's her mother's drink. You know what it is? I think this is what Irish ladies in North Jersey in 1920 drank.
Vic00:09:50I'll tell you what that is. Yeah, that's the alcoholic version of the egg cream. So, Sprite and vanilla ice cream. So, here's- So, here's- I'm going to steal two jokes here.
JVL00:10:00Ooh. The first casualty in my life, in my little circle of COVID-19 was my keto diet. Because- Oh, no.
Vic00:10:10I didn't even know you were on a keto diet.
JVL00:10:13It's only been like two years. Thanks, Beck. Wait a minute.
Vic00:10:17You were- Oh.
JVL00:10:18I was like big and fat and then I got less fat. I knew you lost weight. I just thought you went without carbs. I thought you just went strictly meat. Basically, I-
Vic00:10:26Okay, well, no.
JVL00:10:27I went- I killed the carbs and the carbs have won. It turns out in a time of pandemic, avoiding carbs is essentially impossible. I find myself- It's not possible.
Vic00:10:37I find myself eating less. It turns out my eating at restaurants was actually putting on a lot more weight eating out- Oh, that's weird.
Sonny00:10:45Than eating in. You're telling me that when you went to Fabio Tricciani's- Folina. Whatever his restaurants are, when you went to all of his restaurants- The Carbonaro? You ate all the healthy fish that was drowned in olive oil. I didn't even have- I never- Or the pastas. Yeah, the pastas. You're telling me that that wasn't healthy? That wasn't healthy for you?
Vic00:11:09Apparently, even if I was to limit myself- The cheese sauces? Even if I were to limit myself to like a small appetizer-
Sonny00:11:14The sausages and the meatballs?
JVL00:11:16And dessert. I'm shocked. I'm going to step on a scale and discover that I've put on the COVID-19. Good.
Sonny00:11:25That should- You know what? This should-
JVL00:11:27Freshman 15, the COVID-19.
Vic00:11:29I'm writing that one down.
Sonny00:11:30You've just created a new podcast for us, JVL, avoiding the COVID-19, and it would just be health tips. Just like a five-minute podcast where we do health tips. The three of us, the healthiest people that we know- That's it. I have to say, I actually have lost like four pounds since this started a week ago, because I have transferred back to my working-from-home diet, which was a bowl of Cheerios and a banana in the morning with coffee. And for lunch, I just have four eggs and an apple. That's it. That's all I eat.
Vic00:12:03How do you do the eggs? Hard-boiled? Raw?
Sonny00:12:05No, no, no. I do fried, but I use Pam. I use Pam. I don't use butter like some people probably would.
Vic00:12:13Butter, that's very good for you.
Sonny00:12:15I just use Pam, the zero-calorie Pam. And then a reasonable dinner, like some salmon. The only problem with the reasonable dinner part is that they have not had any chicken at the Kroger. I keep spending hundreds of dollars at the Kroger on things, but they have no chicken, sadly. There's a chicken shortage, strangely.
JVL00:12:34Is it because you're making a platter of brownies every single night and I'm eating to stay awake because I'm working until two and three in the morning? And also, the world is collapsing around us and we're heading into a second Great Depression. And so the requisite willpower to be like, no, I know the plate of brownies is right there next to it. And I'm just like, you know what?
?00:12:59Fuck it.
Vic00:13:00Let's just do this thing. You're going to have to mark that one down. Let's just do this thing.
Sonny00:13:04Mark it. You know what? I will say that.
Vic00:13:06I'm not a brownie person. I just, it doesn't, I'm not, I don't do chocolates. Well, certain kind of brownies, but you know. The ones with nuts. The ones with nuts. I'm talking about the ones with nuts. The walnuts. Well, the one with the walnuts. No. So, you know, I mean, that just, that's a good thing for me. My big thing is, is safety. Savory. I'm a very much into savory with the, except the only sweet I really, really like is ice cream. That's it.
Sonny00:13:33Well, speaking of which, this is, so this has been the one, the one flaw in my eating at home plan is that now I find myself eating a bowl of ice cream every night. Just, I eat a bowl of ice cream.
Vic00:13:43Are you eating one of the, one of the terrible things is when this whole coronavirus thing started, it was Kate saying to me, I can no longer just go in randomly with spoon into various ice creams and just help myself.
Sonny00:13:56I have not, if anybody in your house, if anybody in your house has coronavirus, so you might as well just be like spitting in each other's faces all the time. I think that's exactly right.
Vic00:14:07No, that's exactly right. No, I, you know, what I like is I've been able to just, this is one of my pet peeves, of course, is as, as a lot of, you know, is I hate waste. I hate wasting food. I hate throwing food away. It drives, it's one of my starving.
JVL00:14:21And what did your parents say? Was it Ethiopia for you?
Vic00:14:24China? They always said, no, I don't know.
Sonny00:14:25We just, we just, and we, every generation has a different, it's true. Now you should, now you should throw it away out of spite, despite those Chinese. That's true.
Vic00:14:34Now that's, that's a Chinese flu. That's a very good point. The foreign virus. That's right. The foreign virus. No, it drives me crazy to see that. And so it's one of my texts. So what the great thing is I've been able to go through the fridge and finding stuff that's on the verge of expiring or has actually expired and I'm eating it. I found a yogurt the other day. It was like four days beyond. The, the, the, the use by, not the sell by, the use by date. I had it anyway. And you know what it was?
JVL00:15:00That's horrifying.
Vic00:15:02I just, I, cause it dried. I don't want to, the worst was we found it. We found a pack of bacon that was past the use by date and I wanted to use it. I can't, I tell you, you know what? I cook stuff all the time for my family. I don't tell them, I don't tell them it's expired. I just cook it. Here it is kids. Eat it up.
JVL00:15:25You know, this is a really good time to need to go to an emergency room with a, with a bacteria. Yeah, I know. Right, right, right.
Vic00:15:31And the only problem is you have so much cheese. Cheese is very, cheese lasts forever. You just cut off if there's any part that get, the hard cheese is if it gets moldy, you cut it off, keep on eating. I can't eat enough cheese, but here's the big difference. I am now like running every other day or sometimes a couple of days in a row. And that's, that's been my help because now the gym is, as you know, sadly that my gym is closed. And I tried, I tried to use that gym. I tried to use the gym in the lobby till the very, very, very end. And it was great because at the end, there was nobody at the gym and I just sweat all over all that equipment.
JVL00:16:04Yeah, but there's no Peloton. I know. Don't you miss her? I do.
Vic00:16:09Are you going to get a Peloton? No, no, I'm not getting a Peloton. No, they're running. So I'm back on the, the, what is it? The Under Armour app that has you, I forget what it's called now. I'm blanking out.
Sonny00:16:20How on, how on earth would I know what it is? How on earth would I know what it is?
Vic00:16:25I'll use Nike Run Club. What do you use?
JVL00:16:28Nike Run Club. Oh, okay.
Vic00:16:31So anyway, that's what's been going on. And you see a lot of people out on the street, I mean, on the roads and on the sidewalks, but everyone's keeping their distance.
Sonny00:16:37You don't need to run. You can just, just eat eggs. Just eat, just eat eggs at lunch. That's all you need to do. You'll be fine.
Vic00:16:45Not with my cholesterol numbers. I was, I've managed to get to the doctor for my checkup for one last time before this whole thing broke loose. And, and just, just a minor upticks. Minor upticks. Nothing, nothing too serious. So, so that's why I'm back to, I was able to skip a hole. Like I was good for a week prior to the blood test so I can game the system.
JVL00:17:07Wait, so you were good for a week and it was still slight upticks?
Vic00:17:10Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So, so what's happening for real? I don't know. I don't know. Okay. So what else is going on? JVL, what, how, how are you doing?
JVL00:17:22It's, here's a serious question. On a scale of, this is just another ordinary day, which would be a one, to this is 1929, which is a 10. Where are you boys? Mentally today as in Saturday night? Or, or just in general?
Vic00:17:49No, four.
Sonny00:17:51Really?
Vic00:17:52Yeah.
Sonny00:17:52Sonny? I would say seven to eight.
?00:17:55Yeah.
JVL00:17:57Somewhere in that range. JVL, you're at about 11. 53. I mean, just as a, for instance, so I, you know, I, I've written about this a bunch, but people often don't appreciate is the cascade effect, right? You know, like the cascades begin, you see one little piece of the system breaking and people can't extrapolate out to what else breaks. So for instance, I was talking with my, my brother-in-law today about the cruise industry. Oh. How is the cruise? Industry going to recover from this, right? Because the people who take cruises tend to be quite old. Uh, a bunch of them are gonna die and the ones who don't die are gonna be really freaked out for a long time. Uh, a cruise ship is a very large piece of capital. You don't buy the ship all at once. If you're the cruise line, right? You are, you know, this is deferred out. There are loans upon loans upon loans, right? Uh, so the cruise industry itself is in a great deal of trouble. That's like part one of the cascade. Right. Part two, like you're a place like national review, which makes a lot of money from cruises. Like all of a sudden you're going to have a gaping hole in your annual revenue picture because that whole part of revenue has just gone for good for you. Right. But stepping like five steps further down, right? So everybody, everybody is insured, right? At the very high levels of finance, people purchase insurance on all sorts of things and insurance companies themselves have what is called reinsurance. Right. There's a whole hidden universe of, of, of the industry called reinsurance, which is typically it's like Lloyd's and one or two other very large companies that nobody's ever heard of who insure the insurers. It is unclear to me how any re-insurer could be backstopped enough to cover all of what they are going to owe from something like this, because this is the economic equivalent of a meteor strike. Yeah. Well, I mean, you just have a whole sector there. There's a whole sectors of the world, which we don't even see, which are simply going to tip over.
Sonny00:19:59Well, I, let me, let me just, uh, talk about this from the perspective of the movie business, because here's, here's what's fascinating to me. I've been watching like JVL. I've been watching this, but from a slightly different perspective, because I have been watching all of the business news out of China for the last four months, essentially watching as theaters shut down, watching as production shut down, watching as basically everything in China related to movies shuts down. And Paul. All of this was happening. There was some question as to whether or not, okay, maybe it is just China. Maybe this is like a SARS thing again, right? Maybe it will be different than, than, uh, it will be different here, but it has been very much the same here. And it is, uh, has led to all sorts of weird, um, and terrible problems. Like for instance, South by Southwest, South by Southwest is a big, big festival, right? South by Southwest essentially sustains the economy of Austin, Texas for, uh, for the year. This is. Like people plan their like annual yearly budgets around it, having the people come to the hotels, having people come to the restaurants, having people rent out the venues, et cetera, et cetera. Um, and not only is the cancellation of South by Southwest bad for all of those people, for all the obvious reasons, you don't have people coming in. You don't have, you know, the service economy takes a huge hit. South by Southwest itself was not insured, um, for disease. Uh, I was insured for other things, but it was not insured. And as a result, the, the festival, which essentially pays for each next year with the money it makes that year, right? Like, so they make the money in 2020 and that basically pays for all of the stuff in 2021. They have no idea how they're going to pay for any of that stuff. Uh, they've laid off half of the, you know, 150 people who work there, uh, on an annual basis. They're probably going to lay off the rest. There's a very real chance that South by Southwest does not happen next year. Um, I would say there's a very real chance that South by Southwest does not happen next year.
?00:21:55Um, I would say there's a very real chance that South by Southwest does not happen next year. Um, I would say there's a very real chance that South by Southwest does not happen next year. Um, I would say there's a very real chance that South by Southwest does not happen next year.
Sonny00:21:55Um, I would say there's a very real chance that South by Southwest does not happen next year.
JVL00:22:25In Austin, right? You can say, we think South by Southwest is overvalued and that over the course of the next 10 years, it's going to die as a festival and you can plan for that. You cannot plan for South by Southwest is going to disappear this year and never come back.
Sonny00:22:40Yeah, right. I mean, this is, yeah, it's bad. I like I, again, just from the perspective of the movie business, Christopher Nolan had a piece in the Washington Post that was edited by my friend Alyssa Rosenberg. She edited Christopher Nolan. That's so awesome.
Vic00:22:56Did it require a lot of editing?
Sonny00:22:58Well, he actually wrote it backwards. Yeah, he was structured like a nesting doll. But, you know, he is obviously very big into movie theaters and the theatrical experience. And, you know, he gets away with making a $200 million movie like Tenet because you get people to go to see it in IMAX. You get people to go see it in Dolby Atmos. You get people to go see it in the theaters. But he's also he's also, you know, committed to the, you know, the idea of theaters as a place of community. And that's what this piece was about. And like, if you look at what is going to happen to movie theaters across the country, many of them are going to go out of business. Some of them will merge with others. We're going to see a very sharp reduction in in in the screen stock. You know, the the the number of screens in the country will just shrink. That's just what's going to happen.
JVL00:23:55Question for you, Sonny, because you know more about this than I do. So in a strange way, the big players, Regal, AMC, they have they have incredibly small reserves, right? The total market cap of AMC is like, what, $275 million or something?
Sonny00:24:15Yeah, I looked at it last week. It was $270 million. I have no idea what it is now.
JVL00:24:20So they may very well simply go out of business, disappear tomorrow. But somebody could go in and buy it. Buy their business and stand it back up in a restructured way, which allows them to blah, blah, blah, blah. But for an exhibitor like the Alamo Cinema Drafthouse, which many people, including me, thought of as the future of the theatrical experience, when they go out of business, and I suspect they will go out of business too, because they are incredibly small, there is nobody who would step in and pick that up, right? It's a small, it's a boutique thing. It's really restaurants. It just goes away. All of these things are going to go away. Like, this is Dust Bowl days. People don't understand how bad this is.
Vic00:25:02Restaurants. You know, if we're all stuck here for 18 months...
Sonny00:25:07Yeah. It was funny. Beth and I got, you know those, you know those, like, ValPak...
Vic00:25:11No way. People are just going to say, forget about it. Go ahead.
Sonny00:25:13You know those ValPak, like, coupon things? Oh, yeah. Sure. Sure. We got one today, and it had a coupon in it, the grand opening of the Asian buffet. Oh! And I was just, I just... I showed the coupon to Beth, and I was like, that's bad timing. That is, that place is not going to ever open or reopen, or it's gone forever.
Vic00:25:35So, you know, I was driving, I drove past today, the Hibachi Grill. Oh, the Hibachi Grill. What was it called? Was it called the Hibachi? What was it called? Yokohama? No. Oh, yeah. That one. What was it called? Hibachi, I think. Yeah. It had a different name. Hokkaido. Hokkaido Grill.
Sonny00:25:52Hokkaido. They used to be called Hokkaido, and they called it, yeah, they changed the name.
Vic00:25:55Yeah, I'm assuming.
JVL00:25:55I bet they're open, because they don't care. So, here is my theory, and I am interested to see what you guys think about this. Do you guys remember Ron Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin, who got dragged and dunked on the other day for saying, like, look, you got to keep this in perspective. It's like, you know, three and a half percent of the population had died. Do you remember this? Like, everyone's like, wow, how stupid. And he was like, look, you know, life's full of risk. 37,000 people die every year driving on the highways. We don't tell people they can't drive cars, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Sonny00:26:31Yeah.
JVL00:26:32And people started dunking on him by doing math and saying, yeah, but, you know, like, three and a half percent of 300 million people is a lot more than 37,000 and yada, yada, yada. I actually think he is ahead of the curve here and that his view is the view from the future. That once we get deep into spring and into July and people understand exactly what the consequences of a total national lockdown are. They're going to come out. Well, the response may be we're doing all of this to protect the old people. Well, you know what? The old people are on their own. Rumor remover, as the kids call it.
Sonny00:27:09I think there are, there's already a movement that is kind of pushing back on that, looking at the math and showing that flattening the curve just extends. Yes. Right. So this is the thing, right, JVL, that if you flatten the curve, what you end up doing is just. Extending the misery for 18 months instead of having a million people die at once.
Vic00:27:30But is it more of a minor? No, no, you see a few people die.
JVL00:27:35So you have fewer people total die. But economic suicide costs go up, right? That's right. The reason you flatten the curve is because you can avoid many of those deaths because the deaths become preventable deaths due to constraints of resources. There's two. The problem is it costs more. That's right.
Sonny00:27:52Well, but also, but no, I like I've seen a second argument that the. If when you flatten the curve, if it still goes on long enough, you basically run at 100 percent ICU capacity for 18 months. Yeah. So like anybody. So you still end up losing most of those people anyway. You just lose them over a longer period of time as opposed to kind of in the first like two months.
JVL00:28:13But the other I mean, the other problem with this view is that our society is not structured to be able to simply lose people over the age of 60. Like, for instance, most of Congress is over the age. Of 60.
Sonny00:28:26Yeah.
JVL00:28:26The president will be over the age of 60. That's right. You know, like everywhere you go, the leadership class is old people. And so, you know, the CEOs, the board members is how is that supposed to work? Because in a pandemic, do these people just live in Elysium? Right. Do they have to all go up to the International Space Station with John Hurt? Like what?
Vic00:28:46Those are two different. Vic, you're on video.
JVL00:28:48I'm waiting for you to give me the.
Vic00:28:50I know. Hello. What is not Clarice? I forget her name. No, it's not. It's not Clarice. Same woman. No, I mean, the two things here. One, I was talking to a friend of mine and he was losing his mind up there in Boston about, you know, I mean, the idea that I mean, imagine if you are imagine if you were sick, right? You were sick. You had it and you're over it. Right. Because people recover from this. Right. Not everybody dies. And the people who recover from it now, they have it in there. Right. They have it built in. They have the antibodies. It's in them now. And you were being told you still cannot go out and get other people sick. And there are other people. There are other people who may be asymptomatic and they don't know it and they're told they can't go out because you might get people sick. And then there are other people who are afraid of just getting, you know, and don't go out. You might catch it and get sick. You might catch it and get symptoms that you don't know you have, but you'll feel fine. That's the problem, I think, is telling all these people that they feel because they feel completely normal. They feel completely fine. And yet you're confined, not allowed to get closer than six feet to other people. And everything around you is shutting down. And it's like I said before, economic suicide. That's the problem. And I think after forget about. The summer, I think after two weeks of this, people are going to start coming out like I don't care. And then what are you going to do? Call the National Guard? I guess it's happening in California.
JVL00:30:02You know, I was the National Guard for sure. We are days, if not weeks away from National Guard being out and travel restrictions in the whole nine yards. I would be shocked if we don't get to that. I was I was texting back and forth with our buddy J-Pod and going through like so we were essentially casting the COVID-19 pandemic as the stand. You know, I. I like to think that I'm Stu Redmond and it's pretty obvious who Randall Flagg is and all this. And John was like, well, who am I? And I said, obviously, your mother, Abigail. We are all going to come and rally to you, John, and you are going to be the one who
Sonny00:30:38leads us. I'm I'm corpse number seven hundred and thirty nine thousand three hundred sixty seven. That's me.
Vic00:30:44Don't they? What do they end up in Vegas? They go to Nevada, don't they?
Sonny00:30:47They go to Iowa. They go to. Well, they go to Iowa and then they go to Colorado. Right.
JVL00:30:54Colorado. And then he goes. Randall Flagg in the trash can, man. And everybody goes down to and Laura, Laura, what's her name?
Sonny00:31:02Laura San Giacomo. Right.
JVL00:31:04Oh, yeah. The Vegas.
Sonny00:31:06Can we can we take a quick break while I refill my drink?
JVL00:31:09That's the beauty of this. Yeah. As long as we're quiet.
Sonny00:31:11All right. Thirty thirty two. Oh, nine. Hey, Vic, if you need to, you can go pee.
Vic00:31:17I'm fine. No, I'm fine. I'm fine.
Guest00:31:20I'm fine.
Vic00:31:21Yeah. You know what? The good thing about this is that you can go pee. The good thing is, the good thing is I don't actually drink at home unless it's for social reasons. Like if I'm at home. So I'm like, there are people who tell me there are people on Twitter. I'm actually going to go pee.
JVL00:31:35Hold on. Save it for the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm back.
Vic00:31:42Wow. That was quick. You didn't even tell us what you're drinking.
Sonny00:31:46I'm drinking. Well, should I wait till? Sure.
Vic00:31:49Sure. Hey, so like I drank yesterday and then they drank the night before. You know why? My phone rings at nine. It's 930 at night and it's, it's Continetti. And I said, Oh, like, is everything okay? You know, what's wrong? Like, why would he call? And at that hour and was it something that his op-ed column, like he needed something fixed for his column for us.
Sonny00:32:11Yeah.
Vic00:32:12No, he just finished off a bottle of Knob Creek and he was in very good spirits. I just wanted to chat. So we chatted for like 30 minutes and I had him in stitches.
Sonny00:32:19That's great. Good for him. Yeah.
Vic00:32:21But that is so funny because it's, I, I, I, every joke, every joke I'm hitting out of the park.
Sonny00:32:27We should, we should get a, we should do a lunch with you and me and John and Matt.
Vic00:32:33You know what? He was very funny. He said, I said, why don't we do one of these zoom things? I said, we're doing one with the beacon folks, you know, the next day. And he said, the problem is when we're with a big group, we always have to break away in individual conversations. What are we going to do? Like, Oh, you and I have left this conversation. Yeah.
Sonny00:32:48Hop on a, hop on a text, hop on a text to each other.
Vic00:32:533209. Okay. Ready? Good. Sonny, uh, you came back. Uh, what are you, you didn't even tell us what you're drinking.
Sonny00:33:03I am drinking old Forrester, the 100 proof. That is, that is what I like. That's what I like to drink.
?00:33:10Good. Good.
Sonny00:33:11Did you mix it with club soda? I, uh, mixed it with ice. Oh, I put a spherical ice cube in there. One of your spherical ice cubes.
Vic00:33:21Very nice.
Sonny00:33:22Very nice.
JVL00:33:23Hold that up.
Sonny00:33:25What a part now it, like it, it, it split in half, but very nice.
Vic00:33:30Did you have, did you want to continue on this wonderful, uplifting, cheerful?
JVL00:33:34Yeah, this is really, you guys pulled out all of your retirement money and turned it into gold and buried it in the backyard.
Sonny00:33:40Uh, no, I just lived it on fire.
JVL00:33:42Bitcoin. I thought, well, how about Bitcoin? Does that work? Either gold or canned goods and ammunition. That's right.
Vic00:33:48The person who is in most, has the most financial security right now is William Devane.
Sonny00:33:55But William Devane and Steven Gutowski.
Vic00:34:00Uh, okay, good. So we're, we're, we're good on this. Can we, can we, can we move onward? Oh, uh, box office update.
JVL00:34:09So we were on a Saturday night. We should be getting to, are there numbers?
Sonny00:34:14Let's look at the daily numbers.
Vic00:34:17I, you want to talk, I was going to mention last weekend. If I can, please go ahead because we skipped it over the weekend onward. Made at the top of the, at the box office, uh, with a massive $10.6, uh, million dollars followed by bloodshot with 9.2 million. And in third place was, I still believe with $9.1 million. That is a box office.
Sonny00:34:43Let me, let me, uh, let me just, uh, tell you what the latest dailies are. So I just pulled up box office, mojo.com for whatever reason. It's the easiest one to type in. Uh, and here are the latest dailies from Thursday. March 19th onward. Number one with $33,000 per screen. No, that's total. That's all the screens put together. The invisible, how many screens it's on the invisible man, $21,800 in the whole country is how much it grossed bloodshot 18th. I mean, these are like, it's, these are almost, these are numbers that you see per screen averages for on like relatively big releases. Not even the huge releases, not even like Avengers Infinity War, you know, $33,000 that that's like a good opening weekend. That's, that's a, that's an opening weekend that gets you at about, about a hundred million
Vic00:35:36dollars, you know, not, not, you know, just, does that mean that there are still theaters open?
Sonny00:35:44There are a handful. There are a bunch of drive-ins, right? The drive-ins have, have actually had a, had a bit of a resurgence because, although I have to say, I don't quite understand. The drive-in phenomenon, because you still have to have those like speakers in your car, right? You like hook them up to your window. There aren't people touching those. Isn't that from the olden days?
Vic00:36:06When I was a kid, we went to drive-ins a couple of times and I remember you just had to tune into a particular station and then you're on your radio in the olden days, like whatever it is, whatever, some weird band. Yeah. And then, and that's how we watched Rocky. We watched Rocky in the drive-in back in the day. Anyway. Awesome. Which one? The first one. Yeah. The first one. And another movie, this one was more of a Mattis family movie called Hiss. And it was about snakes attacking people. And the last snake was like a mechanical one. It was like a robot snake that I think. Robot snake. Yeah. Robot snake. Robot snake. Very dangerous.
JVL00:36:44Yeah.
Vic00:36:44Yeah. Is this a Japanese movie? No, no, no. American movie. American movie. I remember they did one scene where you, the only thing left you saw was like the shoe. Oh. And then like that. And then she got like the snake ate the whole body, you know? This is before Blood Orchid. What is it? Anaconda. This is before Anaconda. Yeah. That's my thought on Drive-Ins. But what is happening here? Box office. More box office.
JVL00:37:12No, I think it's the quality of the movies.
Sonny00:37:14Yeah.
JVL00:37:15These are literally the three worst movies ever to be released in audiences. Just stay away.
Vic00:37:21Yeah. It's Bloodshot. Now, what does I still believe? What is that?
JVL00:37:25Vin Diesel. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, right, Sonny?
Sonny00:37:28I don't know. I don't know anything about Vin Diesel. I still believe it's some Christian movie. I don't know. What's interesting, I mean, the real story here, of course, is what we're going to talk about in a minute, which is that the studios, Universal, took the first step and basically everybody else is following. The studios have said that the theatrical exclusivity window no longer exists for the The way the movie business works, right, for these movies that come out on 3,000 screens is you get essentially a 74-day exclusive window. At 74 days or so, it usually shows up on VOD, and then at 90 days, it's available for home purchase. That is not true. That's not how it works for every movie, but that is like the kind of bare minimum is 74 days and 90 days. And Universal and Blumhouse Pictures, they said, no, we're not doing that for you. We're doing it for The Invisible Man and The Hunt. We are putting it straight on to VOD. We have spent a ton of money advertising these movies. They are not going to be playing in theaters. The theaters are all closed, so we are going to put them on VOD at a price point of $20 per movie, which is, it depends on how you want to look at it. You could say that's either extremely reasonable to see a movie that is in theaters at home, or you could say, no, that's unreasonable. I'm watching at home. I should pay $6 like I pay for every other movie. We can talk about that in a minute. Every other studio basically followed suit. Bloodshot is now, it will be available on Tuesday, I think. Onward, I think, is going to be, is on Disney Plus already. I'm not 100% sure. I just saw a thing about it. It's coming up. It's coming up soon.
JVL00:39:13I saw it for rent somewhere today on VUDU, I think.
Sonny00:39:16Yeah, it's either available for rent now and will be on Disney Plus in two weeks, or it's available on Disney Plus already. I'm not 100% sure. Essentially, every movie that was in theaters the way back, the Ben Affleck basketball movie that is now available for rent, and they have kind of stuck with this $20 price point, which I will be, I think the interesting thing will be to see which studio decides that that is too high and decides to go $10, and then they just start undercutting each other down to back at the $6 point.
JVL00:39:47Because it's a rental, not a purchase. It's a rental, not a purchase. You would get away with it if you told people they were purchasing it for $20.
Sonny00:39:54Yes, I think you could. I think you could, but they don't, that's, again, there's an argument to be made that like, look, if you have four people in a house and you're all watching The Hunt, you would have paid $60 to see that at a theater in New York City. Or, you know, if you were all watching The Hunt, you know. You'd have paid $80 to see that in a theater in New York City. Whatever. Yes. But the point is. No, I'm agreeing. Right.
JVL00:40:16Yeah. Even at $20 at home, it is, that is not an unreasonable price point.
Sonny00:40:21So, so anyway. So what are the. The big question is whether or not this is the end of the theatrical exclusivity window or if it is just, if this situation is so weird and so volatile that, that we, things will go back to normal. I don't know. I honestly am not a hundred percent sure. I think the big question will be, I'm stepping on my own question here, but I think the big question will be what Disney does with Black Widow, because if Disney decides that Black Widow, they would lose too much money by putting it on a VOD, even at a higher price point, even at like $40, let's say, then they, then everybody might be able to just say, this is a, this is a, you know, this is a one-time thing. We're not going to, but I really, I don't know. I don't know if, if that will hold. I don't know. What do you guys think?
JVL00:41:19So somewhere in Disney, somebody has been doing all of the back of the envelope calculations whether it is worth turning their theatrical releases into VOD or just putting them on to Disney plus, which is what they did with frozen too, right? So they accelerated the frozen to move to Disney plus. I imagine that the numbers they see from that and the surge in Disney plus subscriptions will help drive their thinking on what they do with black widow and Milan disagree.
Sonny00:41:53I, I, I think, I think that is basically, sorry, I'm just looking up right now when it is, uh, when onward is coming to Disney plus, hold on. Um, but yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. I mean like onward is a weird one because it had already been in theaters for a couple of weeks. Um, Mulan will be a weird one because I don't know how many people, like, I don't know how many people are going to be like, I have to watch Mulan now, um, instead of waiting, you know, two months for it to be on Disney plus, right? Well,
JVL00:42:23all the people who have been forced to watch frozen, to 97 times by their children in the previous three weeks, we'll be ready to pay anything to put a different stupid Disney movie on for their kids.
Sonny00:42:33But the, the, uh, but the, but the real question is what happens with black widow, right? Because black widow is a big event movie. It is a MCU movie. Everybody wants to see what happens in these movies and they want to see what happens like now. They don't want to, they don't want to be spoiled. They don't want to, you know,
Vic00:42:49two questions for you. One, uh, is, is the filming already done completely for black widow? They don't have, they didn't have to stop anything. They're ready. It was coming out in May.
Sonny00:42:58It was coming. It was, it was scheduled to come out in May. They've pushed back the release.
Vic00:43:02When does it take place?
Sonny00:43:06Uh, it's not a hundred percent clear to me. My understanding is that it is a prequel of sorts. What about, yeah, it would have to be right. And like basically captain Marvel style, like which captain Marvel takes place in the nineties. I think it would. Right.
Vic00:43:19Okay. Well, I'd have the same thing with her because I mean, she can't be, but she's not that old obviously. So it may be the early odds, there's something, I don't know. And what about wonder woman?
Sonny00:43:28Well, so Warner brothers for, uh, there were, there were rumors that Warner brothers was going to put wonder woman straight on the HBO max platform that they are going to be debuting soon. Um, uh, they, they very, they very, they very harshly shot down those rumors. They said, no, we're still a theatrical release. We're not doing VOD. We're not doing HBO max. It is a, this is a theatrical movie. So,
Vic00:43:51uh,
Sonny00:43:52when the next, uh, weekend, you know, Warner brothers has a movie just sitting there that they could put out onto their HBO max. It's got superheroes and everything.
JVL00:44:03What,
Sonny00:44:03what movie is that? Sonny Snyder cut of justice league. Get it, get it on there. Get it on there. Warner's.
Vic00:44:11There's no better time than now. So what are we talking about? The next time we see box office mojo, the weekend, uh, uh, the, the, the weekend box office. When I check it on Monday, what is that going to look like? Those numbers?
?00:44:23Uh,
Sonny00:44:23like a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand dollars. I, how many? Yeah,
Vic00:44:28that number is going to be so small. I'm going to need my glasses. Speaking of which Warby Parker is committed to providing exceptional vision care online and in stores offering eyeglasses, sunglasses, eye exams, and contact lenses. Glasses start at $95, including prescription lenses, sunglasses, progressives, and blue light lenses also available. Also for every glasses, a pair of glasses sold Warby Parker distributes a pair of glasses to someone in need. Almost a billion people worldwide lack, lack access to glasses. This means that 15% of the global population cannot effectively learn or work, which is crazy because glasses were invented 700 years ago. Warby Parker partners with nonprofits like Vision Spring to ensure that for every pair of glasses sold, a pair is distributed to someone in need. I took the online quiz, ordered a home try on kit and got a selection of glasses to try on and believe me, I was skeptical because I didn't think any glasses would fit my head. And look, they practically do. You can see it on the video here on squad cast. Please don't comment in the middle of my ad read. Warby Parker styles range from extra narrow to extra wide. That would be me to fit all face shapes. I selected the Eaton, which is a lovely tortoise shell frame. And I'm telling you, they still fit my head. Two years later, they don't slide off and the lenses still have no scratches. That's that's the truth. Again, the home try on program is a piece of cake. My family helped me decide which glasses to choose. If you have an iPhone X, you can also download Warby Parker's, app where you can use their brand new virtual try on, allowing you to try on eyeglasses, seeing the realistic color texture and size of each style using just your phone. Try Warby Parker's free home try on program. Order five pairs of glasses to try at home for free for five days. There's no obligation to buy ships free and includes a prepaid return shipping label. Try five pairs of glasses at home for free at warbyparker.com slash substandard. There's probably no better time to to try these things at home than now. So there you go.
JVL00:46:35Hey guys, it's JVL here. We had recorded a full show and it was great. And for some reason,
Sonny00:46:42the million times better than whatever crap you're about to get.
JVL00:46:45Yeah. The recording then stopped right after our read of our sponsor. And now we're trying to figure out what to do and do we really want to talk about the hunt all over again? We're all learning.
Vic00:46:57We're all learning.
Sonny00:46:57We're going to do it. We're going to do it for the people. For you. I hope you appreciate that. The people, people, we don't have anything better to do. I'm telling you.
JVL00:47:05Vic is now drinking alcohol.
Vic00:47:07I am.
Sonny00:47:08The show that we don't get paid for anymore. We're going to do it again for you.
Guest00:47:12Nothing out of it.
Sonny00:47:13All right. It's the big boy review of the hunt. So the hunt is the most controversial movie that nobody has ever seen. Right. This is, this was a big thing, right? That when it was about to come out, there was a big shooting. I can't remember if it was a school shooting or a concert shooting. Who knows? There's so many shootings in America. But some of the liberal critics, progressive minded folks were like, is this the movie we really need right now? And then Donald Trump got into the act and kind of subtweeted the movie. He said, you know, I can't believe there's a movie coming out where the elites hunt the deplorables for sport. It's so disgusting. Liberal Hollywood, blah, blah, blah. And so Universal blinked and pulled the movie from its schedule. And as a result, it was rescheduled about six weeks ago. I want to say maybe four, six weeks ago, something like that for two weekends ago or not this last weekend, but the weekend before that. And, and as, as a result, they rescheduled it right in the middle of the Corona virus crisis. So the movie was in theaters for about a week. It's very unloved. 10 days grossed about $7 million all told. And now has been, has been dumped on to VOD. It's, you can watch it on Amazon. I believe JVL and Vic both watched it via Amazon. The movie itself is, I will say that it is one of the big self owns of the conservative movement in recent years to have fought to get this movie pulled from the schedule because it is, it is exactly as the premise makes it sound. It's about a liberal. It's about a group of liberal elites hunting deplorable redneck types and the liberal, elites are very much the bad guys and most of the humor comes at their expense though. This, there is very much a both sides mentality to this. It is a, it's a movie about the, the kind of awfulness of the extremes and the ridiculousness of the world in which we live. And I, I had a pretty good time watching it. I'm not going to lie. It's got this kind of over the top violent aesthetic that is very appealing to the, the eight year old boy in me. And it has a kind of searing condemnation of everybody who does all of the, the, the silliness on social media, which has a very strong appeal to the 37 year old in me. I will say that the movie is at its best when it's most specific. When it, when it is very, when it's landing specific jabs at each of the sides, I'll just use two quick examples here. The first is there's a moment when the liberal elites are all kind of in a bunker and they're talking about, they're basically in between kills. They're in between huntings of humans. And one of them kind of squeals with G with glee. And he's like, Ooh, Ava DuVernay liked one of my posts. And it just made me go fall with laughter in the theater. And kind of on the other side of things, there's a moment where, where one of the redneck characters is like, he, he comes across a series of he comes across a group of, of refugees who are trying to flee. And he's like, no, no, these are crisis actors. It's totally, this is totally ridiculous. It's fine. They're crisis actors. And, and the, one of the characters who's played by Betty Gilpin, who is like kind of caught in the middle of all this she's like, no, but there's a baby there. You know, why would they bring? And, and the guy's like, of course, crisis actors have crisis babies. That, that makes total sense. And the, the, the line, which is uttered by Ethan Suplee, who most of us will remember from mall rats. And also my name is Earl. The way he says crisis babies just again, made me like go fall in laughter. The, the absurdity of it all. So I, I liked the movie quite a bit. It is again, it's, it's disappointing that this has turned into such a object of, of passion and hatred on both sides. But yeah, no, I, I liked it. What, what about you JVL? What did you think?
Vic00:51:15Oh, for goodness sake, JVL, what are you showing us there on your phone? I,
JVL00:51:20I loved it. I loved it. I thought it was great. And I, I thought it was one of the,
Sonny00:51:32it is the political satire we need at this moment.
JVL00:51:37Do you, do you not agree? I mean, so you have to delve a little bit into the plot. What happens is a bunch of deplorables get drugged. They wake up on a manor farm somewhere. It turns out to be like Croatia or something. Uh, and they are in the middle of placed in the middle of a, essentially a shooting war between themselves and a bunch of like the worst sort of, uh, progressive busy body hater types. And the protagonist played by Betty Kilburn, her character's name is snowball. It turns out does not belong there. She has been brought there because she has the same name as somebody else who, who wronged these elites. And, and she proceeds to kill all of them. She, she kills, uh, one or two of the people who are supposedly the deplorables. She kills a bunch of the people who are the elites. And she is the stand in for anybody who feels like they have woken up after being drugged in an American culture war, which they have no interest in and no desire to be in and feels like a foreign country anyway. And it is, I, I joked, I will recycle my joke because I was proud of it from the, the lost taping, the elevator pitch for, this is diehard for David Brooks. So anybody who has really always wished for a militant middle to just say like, forget it, stop the culture war. I want to get off. That's what this is for. And it fulfills all of our, all of our fantasies about seeing both the racist redneck idiot conspiracy theorists and the horrible progressive control freaks. And, uh, you know, just sort of vile human beings, all killed in the most gruesome and wonderful ways. I love it. Vic, give us a run through the quadrants.
Vic00:53:30I'm just going to give you a quick run through the quadrants. Uh, first of all, duration is an hour and a half, uh, which is great. Uh, plot, very understandable, a little surprising. Again, I, I thought it was going to be more, uh, clear cut, but I didn't realize it was a both sides kind of a movie, but it was still very amusing. Um, the violence is out of control and there's a lot of, there is a lot. A lot of cartoonish.
JVL00:53:55No, I mean, isn't it?
Vic00:53:56Kind of like Kill Bill. There's a lot of Kill Bill.
JVL00:54:00There's a moment.
Sonny00:54:01There's a moment when a woman is blown in half and she lands in a pit of spikes. Oh, that was very funny. And she's like, put me out of my misery. And one of the guys is like, no. And she goes, Oh, you snowflake. And then blows her own head off.
JVL00:54:13Right.
Sonny00:54:14Again, it got impaled twice. One of these very like specific moments of humor in the thing that I, that I,
Vic00:54:20that I like. That was ridiculous, but, but very entertaining. Uh, and Benny Gilpin, it's great. I gave it an A. I gave it.
JVL00:54:26You know, you talk, Sonny, you talk about specificity, the idea that the elites who have, who are trying to set up like a little fake corner general store in what they think of as the most redneck place in the world. When the, the deplorables show up and ask what state are we in? And they say, Oh, Arkansas, which again, is it so perfectly? Of course, that's what they think. People who loved Bill Clinton 20 years ago would think that the most redneck place in the world is Arkansas. And there was everything about it was just great.
Sonny00:54:56There's another very good and very specific moment in the movie that they actually explained. But that I just want to highlight here, which is because I actually, I realized this as I was watching it before it happened in the movie, but there's a moment where Betty Gilpin's character orders a pack of smokes. She orders a pack of cigarettes and the, you know, the, the, the cashiers ring it up and they give it to her and they give her $10 and change. And I was like, Hmm, you know, I've just driven through Arkansas. And let me tell you a pack smokes don't cost $10 in Arkansas. That is not a, that is not a $10 purchase in Arkansas. That is a $6 purchase or a $7 purchase in Arkansas.
JVL00:55:38And that's what tips her off. And that's what tips. Well,
Sonny00:55:40but she already knows something is wrong. She like, she, she is, she's aware. I, yeah, I like this movie a lot and I, I like it for a lot of the reasons that the kind of progressive critics of America hate this movie. Which is that it is, it is a movie about both sides. It is a movie about both sides being terrible, that, that both sides have their own specific flaws and their own awfulness. And they're both contributing to the degradation of discourse, let's say. And, and there's, there's, there's a weird thing that has happened with critics in, in our modern times. And it is, it has a lot to do with, with the current president, but it, they, it, it has broken them in a very real way. And the inability to appreciate this movie for what it is, which is, is, it is very strictly a look at the ways in which the extremes of both sides have poisoned the discourse. And the inability to appreciate this movie on that level, it's like 30% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, is I think a real problem with like the, with the way criticism works and with the sort of person who is attracted to it. And we didn't actually talk about this before. So I'm going to throw, this is something a little bit new for our current conversation. The midnight hour. Go for it. But I, I, I actually, I really have, I really, I, I have my, when I, when I look at this movie and I look at the way it was received, it, it is a, it is, it drives home the fact that intellectual diversity is important. And is as important in this sort of thing as any other sort of diversity. I, I do think that this movie suffers because it is being viewed entirely through a prism of people who are so disgusted with one side of the argument, one side of the political sphere that they can't kind of have fun with both sides of it. And it's, it's, it's a, it's, it's a weird little, it's a weird little Rorschach test. I think, I don't know. Vic, what overall grade did you give this movie?
Vic00:57:53I gave it, an A. I thought it was very entertaining. How did it do on the nudity quadrant? Again, no, there were, there was none, but Betty Gilpin's great.
JVL00:58:01I liked her in, you know, I, I, I, I first saw her in Glow.
Vic00:58:05Yeah, I saw her in Glow, which I only, we only watched the first season, but, so I, I found it very entertaining. It's kind of Hunger Games-ish, you know, especially when they all have to reach in there and find different weapons, but they're not killing each other with the weapons, obviously. And again,
JVL00:58:20Is she as good an actress as she seems in this? I've never seen her in anything before, but she's great.
Vic00:58:24She's very good in Glow. She's very good. She's very good in Glow. Very good. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I was a little disappointed, as I mentioned in the, the Lost, the Lost tapes, that I didn't get more Ike Barinholtz and Emma Roberts, and she's much older now.
Sonny00:58:39I like that. I like the fact that they introduce all of these kind of name actors and then dispose of them quickly.
Vic00:58:45It was like Steven Seagal in Executive Decision.
JVL00:58:48Yeah.
?00:58:50Do you remember?
Vic00:58:50I thought, oh my gosh, we're going to have a whole hour. Steven Seagal. A two hours of Steven Seagal.
JVL00:58:54I didn't realize this was a Steven Seagal movie. Right, right. Oh, there he goes. It turns out to be much better. It's a Kurt Russell movie.
Vic00:59:00I can't wait. This, it's like, oh my gosh, Mission Impossible with Emilio Estevez. This is going to be great. So anyway, that's it. do you, I feel like I have no more thoughts on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on,
JVL00:59:14on, on, on, on, on, on, on, Do you think this movie will find an audience? Uh, 100%. It is, it is, this should be a cult classic, shouldn't it?
Sonny00:59:23So there are two, there are two different ways to look at this. There, there is, there is the simple fact of the matter that it is so specific to our moment and that it relies on so much topical humor, um, that it could not, it may be one of these movies that like does not last because people are just, you know, taken out of, out of what they're watching. Cause they're like, what are, what are they talking about? Um, at the same time, um, I do think that there, there is enough cartoonish over the top violence for it to succeed as a, uh, Roger Corman, John Carpenter style, um, kind of be exploitation picture.
Vic01:00:03Fair enough. Yeah. The violence is, the violence is great. Okay. Wow. That was short. See, that was, that was painless.
Sonny01:00:11Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. We had more, we had more before guys, but now we've got corrections and whatnot. Don't check your wifi, Sonny. Okay. Uh, I didn't check my wifi. I was looking up onward, which reminds me onward is, is on VOD. Now it's going to be on Disney plus in two weeks. That's what the, that's what the issue now we know.
Vic01:00:28Uh, and I also mentioned, I think in the last tape that this is basically a reboot of the Gilligan's Island episode called the hunt. And that was where the, yes, the Safari hunter came in, uh, and there was no game to hunt. He chose, he said he chose to hunt Gilligan and he was with the guy. He was with, um, oh, I don't know what his name was in, uh, Ramu, I think it was his name, but, it was, uh, the act, it was a Japanese actor. He had a sidekick, uh, the hunter, and he was the guy who played. Thank you. Thank you, JVL. Where am I? Oh yes. So he was the same guy who played odd job in,
Sonny01:01:06uh, goldfinger. So how did he get off the Island?
Vic01:01:09I, that part, I don't remember, but they, all those people had like, oh, you know what? They probably just got on there. They always ended up getting on their boat and leaving. And for some reason, I don't know why the rest of the crew never just took their boat. The same thing with Harold Hecuba and the, uh, you know, in, in the Gilligan's Island episode, the director, uh, played by Phil Silvers. He left too. Somebody should just go get him. Okay. Uh, yeah, I could talk about Gilligan's Island for a while.
Sonny01:01:32I know you could, we could do a whole Gilligan's Island segment.
JVL01:01:36Harold Hecuba.
Vic01:01:37Okay. Uh, corrections and shout outs, uh, JVL again. Um, finally, this book arrived revolution in time from Ryan.
JVL01:01:47Ryan, we did a whole thing about you. I'm sorry, but it's gone. How'd you read my book? It's in my mind. Yeah.
Vic01:01:51Ryan should tell listener friend who also came to the, uh, our talk at, uh, Georgetown. Uh, he sent you that book. I'll give it to you next year. Uh, okay. Uh, that is all the time that we are giving to this episode. Questions, comments, complaints, compliments, tweet us at Sonny Bunch at Victorino Mattis at JV.
Sonny01:02:10Last he's back. He's back on Twitter.
Vic01:02:12He is. I think again, be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes, Google player or stitcher. Just type in some beacon under podcast, and we're there. Leave a review. Tell your friends until next time.
JVL01:02:34So that we don't have to recapitulate the whole. And should we try to do while things are terrible? Should we try to do like one shorter episode each week to like,
Vic01:02:46since now that we can do it at night and just like, just to catch up with each other. No, no. I'm going to say no, no, no. I was hoping we were going to kill. I think coronavirus would finally kill the podcast. That's what I was hoping.
JVL01:03:00Sonny, do you want to do just like you and me, like chatting about like what to watch?
Sonny01:03:04Yeah, sure. Let me, let's talk offline about it. Yeah, we'll figure out, you know, how we're going to do that.
JVL01:03:09I'm sure I'll keep showing you pictures on my, on my phone tape. Great. I'm sure.
Sonny01:03:13I'm sure it's fine.
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