#73. Greyhound, Collapsing Windows, and J-Pod!
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John Podhoretz subs for Vic, and the movie is Greyhound, Tom Hanks's lean 91-minute Battle of the Atlantic picture that Apple bought for around $70 million after a $50 million shoot. Sonny frames it as almost the entire runtime spent on one convoy crossing outside air cover, with Elizabeth Shue's shore-leave vignette so vestigial it could have been cut, and calls it "a movie about men doing things men need to do," noting how odd it is to watch a commander issue orders in slippers and a radiator-warmed jacket. He liked it — never bored, well-staged action, Hanks radiating star command in small gestures like checking a sailor who cheers a sunk U-boat by reminding him those were fifty souls — and argues that perfectly acceptable is better than 85% of streaming movies. JVL, having devoured C.S. Forester's 1955 source novel The Good Shepherd on the strength of Podhoretz's Free Beacon review, calls the movie "almost entirely forgettable," a paint-by-numbers submarine picture whose choices could have been made without the book at all. Podhoretz agrees the book is a magnificent formal exercise trapped inside Krause's head — cold feet, a full bladder, the agonizing internal debate over whether "very well" sounds too dismissive to a Canadian ship — and therefore unfilmable; Hanks, who bought the book used because he liked the jacket and spent six years adapting it, set himself an impossible task by staying faithful. He also unpacks the religious spine Sonny noticed onscreen, from Krause's silent grace to the closing prayer card, tying the pastor father and the Christ-shepherd echo to Hanks's own quiet faith and his self-appointed mission of memorializing the American fighting man. The front half is a long argument about the AMC-Universal deal letting films hit premium VOD after 17 days, with Sonny convinced it accelerates the death of theaters by a decade and Podhoretz insisting mall landlords and studios needing event releases will keep them alive; they also mock the sixty-game asterisk baseball season, the eight-foot-distance umpire fight, and Netflix's $200 million Chris Hemsworth spend, before Podhoretz closes with his best and worst Broadway musicals, crowning Sweeney Todd and savaging A Chorus Line.
From the show notes
#cdata-section -------------- On this latest episode with special guest John Podhoretz subbing in for Victorino Matus, the gang talks "Greyhound."...
Full transcript
Guest00:00:00Congratulations on your first command, at last.
Mike00:00:06I will always be looking for you, Evie. Even if I'm a thousand miles away.
Guest00:00:13Air escort to Greyhound. You will now be out of range of air cover for the next five days. How many crossings does this make? This is my first. I got something. Most likely a UFO. He's trying to slip under us!
Sonny00:00:30Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Sub-Beacon. I'm Sonny Bunch, along with Jonathan V. Last and subbing in for Vic Matus this week is John Podhoretz. Just a reminder, the Sub-Beacon is available on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher. Look under podcasts and search for Sub-Beacon. You will easily find us. Please subscribe, tell your friends, and leave a review. Gentlemen, how are we? JVL, what's going on with you?
JVL00:00:55What's going on with me? Our five game travel baseball season has been completed. That's very exciting. Which consisted of two tournaments during which Flash went 10 for 15 at the plate with two home runs. And you said one of those was a 300-foot monster? One of them was over a fence that was 300 feet, yeah.
Guest00:01:23So your son has now played more games than the Miami Marlins are going to play this year, is that correct? Yes, I believe that.
Sonny00:01:30Do we think that there is going to be a full abbreviated baseball season this year? Or are they just going to pull the plug in like two weeks when this happens to three more teams?
JVL00:01:43I think it's very possible they'll be forced to pull the plug because they won't be able to fit in the schedule they have. I mean, I think they have 70 days to play 60 games. And if you, I mean, just when you do the scheduling math, right, if this happens to a couple more teams, they may not be able to get in everybody with their 60 games.
Guest00:02:05I don't even understand what it would mean. It's like if you pull out, if one team has to be removed from the play, what does that even mean? How do you have a season that is even creditable as a season?
Sonny00:02:26Well, I didn't understand what the, I mean, I like, I eventually figured it out, but like the idea that you could just suspend play with the Marlins, like what does that even mean?
Guest00:02:37Yeah, like what about the 60 games that they're playing? Where do those teams that they're playing go to play other teams, particularly if you can't then travel across the country since they were all playing only regionally in order to limit their exposure, right? So, I mean, it's, I find this unbelievable. Depressing as a, as an example of what we're about to go through for the second half of the year, that there was a kind of lunatic optimism being expressed by Major League Baseball and the idea that they could do this. And if it, you know, basically all it took was four or five days for the whole experiment to kind of blow up, then aside from everything you guys have been talking about with movie theaters for months and all that, what else is going to collapse? Aside from, the entire American economy, which is already collapsed.
JVL00:03:32So can we agree that what they proposed, 60 games, universal designated hitter, 16 teams in the playoffs that that was not actually baseball, right? It was, it was something interesting and something I would have watched and really enjoyed. Well, that was not Major League Baseball, but it wasn't Major League Baseball. And whoever the World Series winner would be would not be regarded as a normal World Series.
Sonny00:03:53Asterisk.
JVL00:03:54So since we are already in an asterisk anyway, what if we just, every team, sends its five best hitters out to Colorado and we have a single 24 hour long home run derby, the winner of which has won the World Series.
Sonny00:04:09It's as good as any other option.
Guest00:04:11Yeah. I mean, I part of the joke here is like the universal DH is like this a second or fourth or fifth, whatever stimulus bill where you know, they, they also throw in the FBI building. Like what, what on earth does the universal DH have to, what does it have to do with an abbreviated season? It's like, Oh, let's, this is our chance to kind of sneak the DH into the national league through the back door.
Sonny00:04:38Yeah. Well that was the one good improvement, right? Right. Right. JVO. Right.
JVL00:04:44Wasn't that the one? What surprises me is that they actually didn't use the pandemic as their excuse to get the robot umpires because they get to say, we just want fewer people around to stop the spread of the terrible to invisible enemy. And so we're going to have Alexa call, the game from behind the plate.
Sonny00:05:01Did you guys see the gray video?
Guest00:05:03They do that. Why?
Sonny00:05:04Yeah. I, did you, did you guys see the video of the, uh, the umpire put it like, so a manager starts yelling at the umpire from the, from the dugout and he gets up and then the umpire like pulls out his mask and puts it on and the manager pulls up his mask and they have like six feet apart and they have like an eight foot distance umpire manager fight. I was like, this is, this is the perfect symbol for every, everything that is wrong right now with everything. I just,
Guest00:05:29I couldn't, the best was the guy at first base getting the hand sanitizer from the first baseman.
Sonny00:05:37Yeah.
Guest00:05:38I can't remember even who that was. It's like he, he gets, he's safe at first and the first baseman comes over and squirts the hand sanitizer into the hands of the opposing player. Now, if that hand sanitizer had acid in it or had something that might prevent him from, you know, sliding effectively into second, that, at least would make some sense. Yeah.
Sonny00:06:01But no, I, I love all of these great memories that we have of this season, you know, the, the distanced fights in the hand sanitizer, really, it's, it's per again, a perfect symbol of everything else. Well, you mentioned, you mentioned the theaters, a J pod. Uh, what, what happened today? That was, uh, you know, the, the, the death knell of movie theaters, because I'm, I'm convinced that what happened, what we saw happen today with universal and AMC is the death of movie theaters. But, but,
Guest00:06:29but could you fill in? Okay. So basically from what I understand, yeah. Universal, uh, AMC theaters, uh, basically tried this gambit with universal where they said, we're never going to show your movies again because you released trolls, trolls, world tour to, uh,
JVL00:06:49to the Duke of France, Ferdinand being shot to start world war two or something. Right, right. It's world war one,
Guest00:06:55but so they announced this and there was something comic about it since, what possible leverage could AMC, which at the time had announced that there were real, they said they had real doubts that they were going to survive as an ongoing entity. What possible leverage did they have over universal, which is one of the three largest entertainment companies on, on earth? The answer is they didn't have any where I disagree with you, Sonny. So what they did today was they announced that they'd come to it. They'd come to terms, AMC and universal, uh, AMC now accepts that universal can move movies from the theater onto streaming services in 17 days,
Sonny00:07:40premium VOD, premium VOD.
Guest00:07:42That's the $20 a sale point right in 17 days, which is an odd locution, right? I guess three weekends is the is three weekends and then the Monday after the third weekend you can then release it to the premium services. You what the hidden detail here is that AMC is going to get some kind of a cut of the premium service revenue. We don't know what kind of cut it's going to get, but that is part of the deal. And this is where I wonder whether this is not the end of theaters, but the salvation of the, no, no, it didn't just lay it out for you and then you respond. This is a terrible business. The exhibition, business like when, when we learned that AMC was in trouble, right? Then you look at how much money it grosses a year. It's astonishing how little money this thing, this, the, the theatrical business generates. This is the largest chain in the world and it's a barely a billion dollar company, right? So, and it, you know, it's profit, whatever, you know, whatever its earnings are is, you know, in the hundreds of millions, it's really a small, small, lousy, lousy business and it's only going to get lousier and they don't make money off the movies. They make money off the popcorn, whatever, where, however you want to slice it. So they were going to need something as this business contracted to help them stay alive. That wasn't just raising ticket prices or making it so that you could flip upside down on your seat and have a, you know, and have a hooker do a lap dance while you were watching the movie silently.
Sonny00:09:29Theaters in New York so much better than the theaters elsewhere is what I'm taking away from this.
Guest00:09:34No, I'm just a, I'm just, look, you live in, you live in Texas. The Alamo cinnamon draft has kind of, you know, invented this new way of going the movies and it's fine. But I mean, so it just seems to me that the studios are going to have to prop up the theaters. I don't know either. They're going to have to buy them or they're going to have to figure out some way now that they're allowed to buy. Because of course this was the dumbest antitrust decision in the history of antitrust decisions to, to strip the motion picture companies of the right to own movie theaters. It was insanely, that happened right when television was starting, which was the ultimate competition for the motion picture business. Anyway, so that happened. So now, now they can actually own theaters and that's probably, as you guys have said many times, what's going to end up happening. You know, that, that it makes sense for Disney to own its exhibition places. If it's going to produce 50% of the domestic revenue of the movies, you know, they have an incentive to make sure that the movies look good, that the seats are comfortable. You know, the, these theaters have no incentive to keep themselves up very nicely, but Disney will want to exhibit its movies in the best possible way. So just as they run a really nice, clean theme park, they would run a really nice, clean theater chain. But if that doesn't happen, at least in the, in the medium term, sharing revenue is the only way these theater chains are going to survive, particularly if they lose a year of revenue now, like I, you know, okay, that's my theory.
Sonny00:11:16So here's, here's the problem with this is that we are, we are looking at this solely from the perspective of Universal and AMC. And if it was, if there were only one studio and only one movie chain, I, all right, fine. I would grant like, okay, yeah, they'd share some revenue. Then, then that all makes sense. The problem is now every studio is going to want the same 17 day deal. And every movie chain or every, every movie theater chain is going to want the cut of revenue. So then you get into a question of, well, okay, how much, how much is Universal going to have to charge for these PVOD movies for them, for them to make sense financially, if they're sending a dollar on every stream to AMC and a dollar on AM street on every stream to Regal and a dollar on every stream to Cinemark and, you know, like 30 cents on every stream to Alamo or whatever, like whatever the, the, the eventual breakdown is. And you, and, and, and you have to, you, you keep multiplying that, you know, for every studio, every chain. And on top of that, you have to deal with the collapse in box office gross, because what's going to happen is if people say, well, I don't have to go see this romantic comedy this weekend because spoilers aren't a thing for these. I don't, I don't have to go see it the first weekend. I, I'll just wait the 17 days and I'll watch it on Amazon for $20 or whatever. Those, those, you know, so this, this, like whatever we have seen in terms of the collapse of the mid budget movie is only going to accelerate now because, you know, the movie that is aimed at the 25 to 45 year old, right. To go out to the movie. Those people are just gonna be like, I'm just gonna stay at home. I'm gonna stay at home. I'm not gonna, I'm not, why would I go out in, and spend a ton of money when I can spend less and be, do it more conveniently at home, especially in the age of Corona virus. And I don't want to have to go out and risk getting sick, blah, blah, whatever. I, I just don't, I don't see, I don't see any, any real way in which this helps movie theaters, even in the medium term. I, I just like, I don't see how it, how it generates more money for them. I don't see how it, how, how it gives them, anything to hold onto in the future. I mean, I like, you're right. The end game here is Amazon buying one chain, Disney buying another, you know, then you have kind of boutique chains like, like the Alamo's and your Angelica's and, and all those places doing presenting an A plus experience with, you know, a minus food and cocktails and, and wine and all that. And then, and, and, and that's it. I, I just, I, I, like this Corona virus has accelerated many, many things in our society. And I think it stepped up the death of the movie theaters as an experience that we understand by at least 10 years, maybe more. I don't know. JVL, what do you think?
JVL00:14:11So, uh, AMC within the last 10 weeks raised $500 million in private investments. I think those investors are feeling good about that. Now. Uh, I, I, one person on this show has been saying since early, March that movie theaters would not open again in any meaningful way. And I still stand by that. I just don't see, I don't see how they can survive. And I don't know what the incentive is for others to keep them alive. Um, I can see why Apple or Amazon or somebody would do it just as a Lark in the way that Amazon like does Amazon prime streaming as a Lark, right? I mean, the Amazon movie business does not really make any sense for Jeff Bezos. He's just doing it for fun. The same way it's like Apple TV plus does not make any sense for as a business for Apple is if they want to just keep a finger in that pie. Yeah. Okay.
Guest00:15:07I can lay it out for you. Go ahead. Okay. So there, there are two, there are two possible futures, right? There's the future in which somehow there's never a bias. There's never a, there's a, there's never a vaccine and there's never a cure. And we live in this semi hermit state in, in, definitely in which case sounds good. Yeah. I, I understand that you do, but let, let us, let us stipulate that you are an unusual person with unusual behavioral patterns, perhaps assume, let's say that, that we are, we are in for another like bad year, but the year ends and we're in this year of total stasis. The landlords of these movie theaters at malls and various other places, they're not getting paid, right? They're not, they're not, they're not going to pay rent and they're not paying the landlord. And the landlord has literally nothing to do with these buildings because we're in a national, we're in a giant recession. They can't tear them down and put up something else in their place. And when the business comes back, assuming, my scenario here, malls are going to need movie theaters. You know, these retail centers are going to need movie theaters wherever they are to draw crowds, to have people wandering around, willing to buy things afterward. They will have an incentive to keep these places alive because these are large physical plants with a lot of space that they take up and there isn't going to be anybody to move into them anywhere for a long time. For a long time, the movie theater business cratered because they had these big theaters and real estate developers wanted the space and wanted to put up office buildings or apartment buildings or something else in their place. And that is no longer the case, right? There is no, we are, we're moving into a slow growth period if we're lucky or, you know, what trying to figure out how on earth people are going to live after this. So there will be an incentive for the people who they pay rent to and who they, you know, who, who handle them to keep them in business. Similarly with Disney and the studios, which have already proved, I think over the last three, three and a half months that they cannot create the event really with the streaming. They can't create an event that will bring the equivalent of 200 million dollars or 300 million, whatever it was that Avengers made, right? It made $350 million its first weekend. I don't know how Disney does that, how it creates that event or any event from here on in, in the streaming world. So it is going to need a theatrical event to make that possible. Assuming people will go to theater. So they do have an incentive. And the other thing is, and Jonathan, I hate to put this to you, but perhaps you are happy to stay at home forever. When this is over, assuming that it is over 200 million people are not going to, are going to go outside and never go back in their houses for a very long time. They'll go anywhere. They will do anything, anything. They'll play miniature, you know, they'll play miniature golf five times a day. They'll do anything.
JVL00:19:00Will the economics of the exhibition business still work? Right. I mean, because this is the prop, right? So you're, you're Hollywood. You have a bunch of these, these products made. They have to get released. You have to get revenue from them there. We were, as Sonny says, already building all these alternative revenue streams, which turned out to be much smaller streams, but they're the thinking among the studios was that, yes, the streams are smaller, but we're going to be forced to do this anyway. So let's start moving now. And this has, again, just accelerated that trend. I just don't, as you said, the world we lived in up until now was created by this very arbitrary legal decision. Right. And so it was not logical. It didn't make any sense. My argument here is that that is how many alternate realities are created, right? By like things which actually don't make any sense, but, there's some sort of externality which creates a set of facts and then things develop from there. And I think that the pandemic is going to create a bunch of facts that may not make perfect sense, but the world is going to keep on moving from this point.
Guest00:20:15The motion picture business is not going to transition from the big screen to the home screen without a massive disruption of that business. You cannot spend $300 million making the next Marvel movie if you need 60 million people to buy the stream at home.
Sonny00:20:42Unless you're Netflix and you're just rolling in investor nonsense money. I don't know if you guys saw this, but a couple of weeks ago they announced that they're spending $200 million on, I think, a new Chris Hemsworth movie, like a new, Rousseau Brothers movie or whatever. And I'm just like $200 million on a thing that will be in the public consciousness for at the most 10 days before it fades forever into the background of the Netflix algorithm, you know,
JVL00:21:11library million people internationally will have watched at least three minutes of it.
Sonny00:21:15Yes. I know. I mean, but that's, that's what, but that's what Netflix will say. Netflix will say, well, look, we 90 million people watch two minutes of this movie. So it's a success for us. And that's all that really, it doesn't matter if 10% of them finish it. It, it, all that matters is that we captured the eyeballs for the, these two weekends and we're, we're good to go. We're onto the next $200 million thing. And I, I like, I, and there's a weird, there's a weird universe in which Netflix can get away with this, even without the investor money, because they have such a built in subscriber base. They have such a first mover advantage. They don't have to make a bunch of things that are great and last forever. So long as they make things that capture everybody's attention once a month for a, a weekend or two. But you can only have one service like that. I think you can only have one service like that. And what the rest of these, what the rest of these organizations do, I don't know. I mean, I like, you know, I'm as excited as you two are for the Snyder cut to come out on HBO max, but, but like, like that again, that's, that's, that's really going after a very niche audience. And, you know, spending 30 or $40 million to make an alternate cut of, of a movie. Okay. Fine. That works. That works. Okay. But, but you know, they, they have made real investments in, in, in other libraries and in other networks. And I've got a whole, the whole time Warner, whatever universe of everything to, to kind of fall back on. Disney obviously has their huge library and, and like the, the advantage of appealing to parents and children and capturing that, that audience. But like, you know, we'll, we'll get to Apple TV plus here in a minute. But, you know, I look at a service like that and I'm like, okay, I liked Greyhound, which again, we'll, we'll talk about it in a minute. I really liked mythic quest. I don't, I don't know if you guys have watched that at all, but it's, it's really good. But like, if I like one or two things that they do a year, why on earth am I spending, you know, 10 bucks a month for 15 bucks a month or whatever Apple TV plus costs. I don't even know how much it costs. The only reason I have it is because I bought an Apple TV and it came with a year of free, free, free subscription. And so I was like, all right, well I guess I'll check out greyhound. Oh, this is pretty good. But like, I couldn't, I can't imagine actually like paying a monthly fee for this service. I just don't, I don't, I don't see the, the use of it. Okay. Let's let, let,
Guest00:23:41let me adopt Ross Douthat's theory of the decadent, the new decadent society. And what he means by that is not moral. Isn't it sunny? What's that? It's just like, this is a very, this is a very different show. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Ross, Ross hits at least three quadrants. I think. Right? Book, book, book a short. Okay. Pretty short. No sense. It's, for people who don't know Vic, can we just pull back a little bit? And I, I just want to blow, I just want to blow some, I want to blow people's minds about, about Vic. That the, Vic that you know from the Sub-Beacon is not the real Vic. No. It is very important for me to say this. Don't, don't. Because I have known Vic since he was in college. Unlike you guys. He was a wee lad. He was a wee lad. He was my intern at, at, at something called the White House Writers Group in 1992, three, something like that. And then, you know, we hired him when we started the Weekly Standard. And Vic is one of the great comic characters. Vic, the Vic Matus of the Sub-Standard and the Sub-Beacon is a great comic creation on the, you know, sort of like Jack Benny or one of these radio comedians who, who creates a persona for himself. This is not the real.
Sonny00:25:25No, no, this is not the real. This is how he really is. This is how he is all the time.
Guest00:25:29I just want to blow the whistle. People need to know. All right. Okay. Anyway. Decadence. The Decadence Society is that nothing new is being created and that every cultural product is a reference to an earlier product. And this is the crisis that is created by the, by everything becoming streaming. I'll give you an example of this. Disney Plus, like what made, how did Disney Plus shoot? Out of the gate fast when it came out and it got all these people to sign up. The Mandalorian. Right. The Mandalorian series, which is fun and inventive and was shockingly unpretentious and pretty simple and something that everybody could watch at every age level. Eight episodes, I think. And, you know, 30 minutes and, and really. And week to week. Importantly. And week to week. Right. Right. So, so, so you needed to tune in. Every week. Right. And, but what is it? It's, it's the first successful Star Wars knockoff. In 30 years. Right. The, the, the sequel.
Sonny00:26:41What?
Guest00:26:42The sequel. You mean, you mean artistically successful? Yeah. I mean, something that people actually sort of like. Everybody loves Rogue One. We're excited to tune into.
Sonny00:26:50People.
JVL00:26:50Everybody loves Rogue One.
Sonny00:26:51We're talking about how. People loved Rogue One. The Force Awakens was very popular when it, when it was released.
JVL00:26:58I know somebody who wrote a glowing movie review of the Force Awakens.
Guest00:27:02No, that was the Phantom Menace. You're, you got me wrong. Okay. That was my, that's, that's my, that's my, my skeleton in the closet. No, what I mean is that it was like a thing. People were like, oh my God, this is really, this is really great. It wasn't like, oh my God, I guess I have to watch that Mandalorian, you know, like that. But it is Star Wars, right? It's a Star Wars thing. When Netflix makes these things, they're making a thing with Chris, Hemsworth, right? So how do you make another Chris Hemsworth where Chris Hemsworth is already a referent product to Marvel, right? So, and then they make a big movie and now there's Chris Hemsworth and they're going to make, they made extraction and now they're going to make another extraction or some other $200 million ultra violent thing with him. Three, four years from now, where's their product? where, where, where Kevin Feige, the guy who runs Marvel created all these new stars, right? Tom Holland and Chris Pratt and, and, and Chris Hemsworth and, and all the, these brilliant Tom Hiddleston, these brilliant resurrected Robert Downey Jr.
Sonny00:28:14Right.
Guest00:28:15These brilliant pieces of casting and got himself a 15 year franchise out of it. Right. Yeah. What you're describing Sonny is a world in which, nothing is memorable, nothing sticks, nothing is sticky. The things that some of these things have made that are sticky, like stranger things or something that it too is a kind of weird knockoff. It's a Stephen King knockoff. Okay. So how does the entertainment business survive this?
Sonny00:28:44Well, but, but Netflix, I mean this in this, in this argument, and I think that there is a case to be made for this. Netflix is basically the network TV of the what early eighties, you know, uh, early nineties. They're doing a bunch of things that aren't particularly interesting or original, but it's something to watch. It's just something to watch and it's there.
JVL00:29:05And, you know, prime time of the eighties. Yeah,
Sonny00:29:08exactly.
JVL00:29:09Simon and Simon.
Sonny00:29:10There's something. And look, there's something to be said for that. Again, I think it's a very good analogy.
Guest00:29:15You can have one Simon and Simon. Exactly. No producers.
Sonny00:29:19So, I mean, that's the thing. You can have one service like that. And if it's the biggest one, and if it has, you know, two billion, billion dollars rolling in every month from subscriber fees, then okay, you can get away with that. But again, you can only really have one of those. And I like, we have 7,000 services now. I mean, we have more services every, every week. Somebody else busts out a new one. And like, I refuse, I refuse on principle to get the peacock. I just refuse. I won't do it. It's free. I don't even. It's free, Sonny. No, no, but no, it's not free. It has ads. It has ads. I know, but you couldn't pay me to watch. I don't watch ads. Just get there. I get angry. I'm frustrated.
Guest00:29:59But all I want to say is like how, this is why they cannot let the movies die. And they know this. This is a huge problem in the entire field of entertainment. And has been since the atomization of, you know, sort of like the cultural institutions that meant that minted stars and all of this, which is how do you make things pop in a world where, you know, there's all this competing attention for your time. How do you, how do you create the Marvel that wet, that people are, are like waiting, hungering. Okay.
JVL00:30:39But what if John, what if people's tastes have just changed to the point where the next Marvel is going to be created by people who are just taking quick bites of stuff, watching, like they're standing in line at Starbucks and they just, they just want to watch on their phones for three minutes, an original, a series with some, you know, some top line talent producing it. And maybe that's where we will get the next giant mega franchise.
Guest00:31:06You mean the $2 billion that was just wasted on Quibi? Is that what you're referring to? The thing that literally was made to be what you just described. Have you ever, have you tried? I tried to watch Quibi. Did you? Standing on line in the pandemic, like at the grocery store when you had to stand, and what did you watch?
JVL00:31:28T.C. Teigen?
Guest00:31:30No, I didn't. I watched a show with Sophie Turner about a girl in a mental institution. And then I watched some other. How was that on the quadrants? Well, that was, that, that was not bad in the quadrants. I would say, except that you're watching it on an iPhone. So when, when the winning quadrant thing happens, it's very small. I don't know what to say. It's not like when you're walking down a plane aisle in the days when we took the plane. And then there's someone with one of those giant iPads watching a scene from Game of Thrones with Cal Drogo, you know, doing his thing to Emilia Clarke. And there's like, you're walking down the aisle with your kid.
Sonny00:32:21I think I've told this. I think I've told this story before on the show. Yeah. But there was, so, one time when I was flying back from an international trip, the organization had paid for us to fly in business class. So I, this is like the only time I've ever been able to sleep on a flight. I, you know, I had like, I reclined my luxurious, you know, enormous, a couch size chair and was, and was reclining back and passed out. And I left like the HBO channel on. And when I woke up, it was in the middle of, there's a, do you remember the show Rome? You guys remember the show? Yeah. So there was, there was a show. There was, there was a show that was heavy on the quadrants.
Guest00:33:01That should have been Vic's favorite show of all time.
Sonny00:33:04I wake up and it's the episode where a character, a big, he's a, he's a big guy, big guy named Titus Polo was visiting a whorehouse and he's just going to town on this young lady. And like, like splashing wine everywhere. And I like wake up and I'm like, kind of like, Oh God, this is what, and I look over my shoulder and I, I swear to God, there's like an eight year old kid whose eyes are just fixed on the screen. He made his day. Just riveted.
JVL00:33:32He'll never forget that his whole life.
Sonny00:33:34Riveted by the, the, the pervert in front of him who is watching. He's all grossed up now. Yeah. I was, I was very embarrassed.
Guest00:33:42At least that was inadvertent. I mean, seriously, I was walking my, my, my son like back from the bathroom and you know, really, I didn't really know they made these like, you know, these 50 inch, iPads. And there's some guy, I mean, I mean, honest to God, you know, I'm like, Isaac, put your head down. Like put my hands around his,
JVL00:34:08loses his peripheral vision.
Guest00:34:10Anyway, I don't know. I just think that, um, uh, the entertainment business is not ready yet for this transition. It was forced on it. Yes. If we go on for two years and the entire business collapses and all there is left is streaming. But you know, if it goes on for two years, uh, I don't know what new product is going to, I mean, the whole structure of everything goes, goes crazy. You know, how do you make a movie under these circumstances? People are supposedly going back to work.
Sonny00:34:41A lot of zoom horror movies. Um, yeah. All right. Uh, so, uh, speaking of streaming services that nobody really watches, uh, this week we are reviewing Greyhound starring Tom Hanks. It's based on, uh, the C S Forster's novel, uh, the good shepherd Greyhound spends almost every moment of its very lean 91 minute runtime focused on one engagement in the battle of the Atlantic, specifically, uh, a stretch in the middle of the ocean that is out of range of air cover from either the United States or great Britain. Hanks is commander Krause is on his first mission. It's his job to keep the supply ships and his fellow warships safe from, the dastardly German U boats that infest the seemingly endless stretch of the Atlantic. And that's about it. That's the, that's the whole movie. There's one brief vignette with Krause on land saying goodbye to his sweetheart, who was played by Elizabeth shoe. I have no idea what her character's name was. I just, it's like, Hey, it's Elizabeth shoe. Uh, but if we're being totally honest, that could have been cut and we wouldn't have lost much of anything. This is a movie about men doing things, uh, that men need to do to keep civilization safe from barbarians. More importantly, it's a movie about a man leading other men, uh, trying to keep comfortable while doing so. I don't remember many other war movies where the commanding officer is delivering orders and slippers. Uh, and a radiator warmed jacket. It's very much like dad trying to be as comfortable as possible as he's delivering commands in the middle of the ocean. Um, uh, on the business end of things, what's probably the most interesting thing about this movie, at least to me, is that it was a $50 million picture that Apple TV plus picked up for $70 million or so, 70, 75 million, somewhere in there. Um, is this the killer program that the streaming app needs to break through? I don't know. I don't, I honestly, I'm not sure. Uh, but before we get to the, the business end of things, John, you read the novel, uh, on which Greyhound is based. How did it compare to this?
Guest00:36:32Well, so I think Greyhound is a, a good movie. Um, uh, the good shepherd is a magnificent piece of writing. Um, published in 1955. Uh, C.S. Forrester was kind of like the Tom Clancy of his day. Tom Clancy mixed with Patrick O'Brien. He wrote the, Ratio Hornblower series of novels. He was a wildly successful, one of the most financially successful writers of the 20th century. Um, and this is a, a standalone book, uh, that, uh, is a formal literary exercise and that makes it sound boring, but, uh, what it does, the movie attempts to mirror, but cannot mirror because it is pressed up inside, inside the head of this character, the Tom Hanks plays. And it begins as the engagement starts and it ends as it ends. And you are never anywhere, but inside his head. And the entire drama of is not really about here comes the U-boat. Is it on the side? Is it here? Is it there? It's all, how does this man, a guy in his mid forties, as you said, his first command, he's an Annapolis graduate who has not had a particularly successful naval career, but because it's world war two, it's the beginning of world war two. Every, all hands are on deck and he finally gets a command. This is his first time at, you know, at the helm of a boat himself. And the first time that he is leading 37 ships across the Atlantic and they have just started the war and they don't know much about the U boats and they're, they have this new technology. They barely understand, you know, sonar and all of that. And it's all about how his feet hurt, how he needs to go to the bathroom, how he gets chilled to the bone, walking out onto the deck because it is the North Atlantic and he wants to look and see where the ships are. And he gets sprayed with freezing cold water and how his feet hurt so much that he needs to take off his shoes and put on a slip but he doesn't want to look like somebody who puts on a slippers on the deck because his men need to know that he is in command. He needs, he, and it's, it's this portrait of leadership in this most granular way. And it is absolutely spectacular. I've never read a word of Forrester. The book is, is just stunning. And the, the movie cannot capture what is stunning about it because it is all about, the roiling emotions inside a man who on his surface and in his fit is entirely expressionless, tries to drain all the emotion and is deeply concerned that every word that he say be comprehensible and, and, and without any nuance so that people can follow his orders, do what is necessary, make moves immediately to change the direction of the ship and all of that. And it's interesting. Cause what Tom Hanks, Tom Hanks bought the book at a used bookstore because he liked the book jacket and he read it and he became obsessed with it and spent six years writing a screenplay for it and then got it made as a movie. But the thing that he loves about it cannot be really conveyed on screen, except as a tribute to this battle of the Pacific, this amazing moment in time over four years where, thousands upon thousands of men died in, in the water and thousands of boats were sunk in this fight, in this naval fight between the Germans and the allies, all of which was about supplying Europe with the goods that were necessary and bringing troops over and bringing material back and forth.
Sonny00:40:50Uh, JVL, what did you make of the good shepherd or not the good shepherd? Greyhound. Sorry.
JVL00:40:54So I, I based on the strength of John's review in the Washington free beacon, I gobbled up the book. I'm almost finished the book and I watched the movie version of it midway through. I mean, I didn't hate the movie, but it struck me as almost entirely forgettable. Uh, just a very paint by numbers submarine movie basically, even though it's, it's about the destroyer end. And not not about the submarine end. Uh, and the whole time I was really bothered by Hanks's writing choices because I agree, John. So I love the book. I should say, I really, really liked the book, uh, just a ton. And I love Naval pornography. And this is like super duper Navy porn. Uh, I think the book is immensely interesting and to a large degree, unfilmable exactly because of what John says. I mean, it's, you know, he's, he's when, so Kraus, the, the commander does this thing where in every tiny decision he has to make, he runs down the pro and con list in his mind about, well, should I say this to, you know, like leaving, if it is, uh, like the simplest command, well, you know, where you say, uh, very well right now, is very well, is that, is that okay? Or is that too dismissive? Or will the allies take that the wrong way? And what's the, the British ship and the Canadian ship, what do the, the, the nuances of, the language between the two, blah, blah, blah. Uh, and you can't film any of that stuff, but the, the things you can film, Hank's made like just a series of choices that seems to me entirely pedestrian and could have been done totally independent of the source material. Uh, and I didn't dislike it, but the movie struck me as utterly forgettable.
Sonny00:42:49Uh, you know, it, I, the way I described it, I wrote a piece on it for decider.com, uh, and the way I kind of described this movie is that it is like the perfect streaming material, which is to say, I don't disagree with you that it's pretty forgettable, uh, JVL, but I also really enjoyed the whole thing. I was, I was never bored by it. It didn't linger. It didn't outstay its welcome. Um, I thought it was, uh, I thought the action scenes were well done enough and it was gripping intense enough that I was like, yeah, okay, this is fun. This is fine. And I do think Hank's has actual, I mean, like I understand what you guys are saying that this, this cannot capture the intricacies of the novel. I've not read it, but I, I'll, I take your word for it. Tom Hanks has star presence and he has star command and he is magnetic on the screen. Um, and you, you, you do get a sense of a man as a leader from him and watching, um, watching him just kind of, uh, try to earn the, uh, earn the respect and the, the, the admiration of his crew. And it's in, it's in, it's in little things. It's in little furrows of the brow. It's in little, um, uh, the, the moment when he stops, he stops one of his, his sailors short when he's celebrating the, you know, sunk you boat, you know, 50 it's, it's, you know, 50 dead crowds, but it's 50, 50 lost souls or whatever. You know, it's just like, it's little things. I like, I like that. And I, I was, uh, again, I wasn't blown away by it. This wasn't Mad Max furry road. This isn't a, you know, um, it's no sucker punch certainly, but, but it is, it is, it is for what it is, which is a portrait of, uh, a very limited engagement, um, in the grand scheme of things in a, in a massive war. Uh, I thought it was, I thought it was perfectly acceptable. And that is about as, that is about as like, as good as, as, as good as it gets for a lot of these streaming movies, perfectly acceptable is better than 85% of them.
Guest00:44:55Um, I could not love Tom Hanks anymore than I love Tom Hanks. I love Tom Hanks from the first time that I laid eyes on him when I was in college and he was in Bosom Buddies. And I knew the moment that I saw that show, even though it has a drag plot, which I generally hate, I knew that he was going to be a massive star. He's what, it was like the first person I ever spotted where I said, Oh my God, like, who is this guy? And you know, two years later he was in Splash and he was a huge star that he was going to be who was going to be the greatest Hollywood star of the last 40 years that I didn't really know. But I mean, that is really who he is and I couldn't love him anymore. And he doesn't really get this character right because he wanted to be faithful to the book and the character in the book cannot be represented. That is to say in part like the drama is sort of interesting if you're talking about a guy in his mid forties gets a ship, it's his first command and he's very in, you know, he's potentially very unsure of himself and the decisions that he makes, but he knows he has to make decisions and stick to them and all of this. And how is he going to get through it? Right. But that's not what you really see because all, all that in the novel takes place inside Krause's head and his iron discipline is about not showing any of that to anybody. And so most of the words that he speaks in the course of the movie are in the book are right rudder seven, you know, or I mean the dialogue for 200 pages in the book is literally orders to the, you know, whoever's steering the boat to move the boat this and that and the other way that is what it's about. It's. And so if he had changed it up and sort of made the character more dynamic, it would have been truer as a cinematic experience, though not as true to Forrester's experience, but what he wanted, he could not really do. Now, if you compare this to something he didn't write or he didn't do, which is like Captain Phillips, right? Which was the Somali pirates, movie from 2009 or whatever. Sorry. My daughter decided to sneak in and look for a charger while I was talking, but you know, in Captain Phillips where he has to sort of like be a very restrained person and, you know, keep himself in control until he's released from the, the, you know, the, the, they're rescued from the pirates. And then he has a, a 15 minute sequence in which he completely melts down emotionally. It's one of the greatest pieces of acting in contemporary cinema. He can do almost anything, this guy, but he set himself an impossible challenge here. That said, it's a good movie. It's a 90 minute, sharp, short, interesting naval battle movie. And, but you should read the book. You really should read the book if you can, if you have time. Jonathan. What's time? Yeah, what is time? Jonathan hasn't even gotten to the most powerful part of the book yet, which it's not spoilers, but basically the book concludes with you, with you finding out what Krauss's actual story is, what his life story is and how everything that happened to him, including all the disappointments of his life, led him to this moment at this time when the world needed him, and him alone to save this convoy of ships from the Germans. And so everything...
Sonny00:49:06Can I interrupt slightly? Is there a particularly religious aspect to all of this? Now I ask, I mean, not just because of the title, but also it's one of the things that jumped out at me while I was watching the movie was it is a deeply, deeply religious movie. Like it is the Krauss says prayers before his meals. He says his grace, you know, silently to himself. And everyone kind of looks around like, look at the crazy old captain saying his prayers. But like, and it even, it ends with a shot on a prayer card, right?
JVL00:49:42Like, and I remember just thinking,
Sonny00:49:47watching this on my TV at home and thinking, well, is this, was this, you know, were they making a play? For like the church audiences, a thing that doesn't really exist anymore. There's no like group, you know, but like, but also I, but I, you, you, the way that you describe again, the end of the book here is that it, it, it, it, that all comes together a little bit better, I think.
JVL00:50:08Well, his dad is a pastor, right, John? And so throughout the book, he's quoting scripture to himself constantly. Like every other page has a line of, every time he's in the middle of a moment and he has a, a half second respite, he will have a little verse of scripture that is applicable. To the moment to pop through his head, because the guy has basically memorized the Bible forwards and backwards.
Guest00:50:29Yeah, exactly. And, and, and what is interesting about this, there are two interesting things. One is that the pastor, his father who dies when he is just like 16 or 17, and he only ends up in Annapolis because of the intercession of a family friend who knows that he is now an orphan and wishes, wishes to help, help him find his way. This would be like 1921 or something like that. But his father is very loving and his feelings about his father are entirely loving that he was a loved boy, loved by his father, taught well by his father and that this is a deeply important aspect in Forrester's understanding, which is very subtle because, you don't really only see it come together at the end, of why he is a great leader, that he is somebody who could ultimately be confident in his own judgment and maintain this iron discipline that is so extraordinary in the course of the book because he had this solid emotional foundation. Even though he calls himself a dull man, he ruins his own marriage with his own bitterness and various other things, but that because he was loved and that this love of his father mirrors, I think, the love of Christ in some fashion, he is the good shepherd. I mean, he is shepherding the ships, but he is also the good shepherd of Scripture. And the other interesting aspect of this is that every now and then, Hanks, in his life as a public figure, every now and then, Hanks, alludes to the role that God and Christianity play in his life. He is very careful about it. Apparently, his wife, Rita Wilson, is from a Greek Orthodox family. He either converted to Orthodox or he, you know, respects it. But in at least one of his Oscar speeches, he made a point of talking about God. Every now and then, he hints at this. I think it plays a much larger part of his, his life than we know and that he, and that he is given to talk about. But if I would have to guess, I would guess that he was sort of like a quiet, serious Christian. And, and, you know, as somebody who has been a close Hank student for many decades, you know, I retain a lot of these ridiculous knowledge of, you know, minor interviews that he gives. He is one, one of the greatest of all celebrity interviews because he's smart, he's fast, he's funny, and he is very controlled. So he usually only says what he wants to say. And if you want to hear a great interview, by the way, you should listen to Conan O'Brien's interview with him on Conan O'Brien's podcast, which is a fantastic podcast, but because you really get the sense of who this guy is and why he wanted to make this movie. And obviously the other reason he wanted to make it is that he has taken it on himself as his mission, to memorialize and, and mythologize the American fighting man. Right. And the American fighting man in the Pacific in band of brothers, which was his series, the Pacific, which was his series from the earth to the moon, which was all these three series on HBO that he, that he produced and, and, and shepherded and directed several of the episodes of and all of that. And then he was of course, saving private Ryan and, and all, and this is a very big part of his understanding. I think of his cultural mission, not just greatest generation kind of sentimentality, but again, quietly a kind of, you know, old fashioned non, non partisan and non denominational patriotism.
JVL00:54:50Yeah. But he's a Democrat. So, you know,
Guest00:54:52there you go. Yeah. Okay. Fine.
Sonny00:54:56All right. And on that, so a correction, shout outs, we got anything. Wait, Jonathan,
Guest00:55:02you wanted me to do a, you wanted me to save it,
JVL00:55:06save it, John. Don't step on my bit. Sorry. Are we going to save it for outtakes? Outtakes. Oh, okay. I don't even know what that is. We're headed. We're headed there right now.
Sonny00:55:15That's, that's all the time we are giving to this episode. Questions, comments, complaints, compliments, tweets, me at Sonny Bunch. Again, be sure to. Sonny Bunch, where do you work these days? At, I work at the Bulwark. I have become, just recently become culture editor at the Bulwark. Subscribe to my newsletter. I'm hawking it all the time on Twitter. So you'll, you'll see it there. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or just type in Sub-Beacon under podcasts. And we're there. Leave a review. Tell your friends. Until next time.
JVL00:55:54All right. So John, the only reason I wanted to do this show was as an excuse to get you on so that I can ask you to rank two things for me. Okay. And before we did this show, I said, do you want, do you want me to just ambush you cold? Or do you want to know what the topics are? And you said, let's just do a cold. I want your top five Broadway musicals all time.
Sonny00:56:24And your worst three Broadway musicals all time.
Guest00:56:28Okay. Top five Broadway musicals of all time. Do they have to be in order?
JVL00:56:34Well, yeah, it's a ranking. Okay. It's not a list.
Guest00:56:37It's not an alphabet. It's not like any, you know, really can't really, you can't really rank them, but okay. So my top list would be, do I go from five? To one?
JVL00:56:55You know, actually you can go whichever way you want. Okay. Well, I'm trying to think. Okay. No,
Guest00:56:59no, no. Worst to best. Worst. Wait. No ranking ever concludes. The worst of the best or the worst of the worst. And then to the best.
Sonny00:57:09Oh, you can do worst or best first. Okay. You have to do the worst.
Guest00:57:14Okay. Okay. So, uh, greatest musical of all time. Okay. Uh, number five. Show that no one has heard of. City of Angels. 1991. Cy Coleman. David Zippel. Uh, a book by Larry Gelbart. Fantastic show. Number four. Kiss Me Kate. Uh, Cole Porter.
JVL00:57:41The big meta story.
Guest00:57:43It is. Uh, the Cole Porter, uh, revision and, uh, elaboration on The Taming of the Shrew. Number three. Uh, Hamilton. Uh, which I, uh, barely, I don't even need to really, um, introduce to people. Uh, number two would be, uh, Guys and Dolls. The, uh, foremost myth, mythological portrait of New York ever created. And the number one top musical of all time, Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of New York. Of Fleet Street, which is also, I was going to guess Sweeney Todd. Probably the best American piece of theater, period. I remember, I remember,
Sonny00:58:34I remember you, uh, saying how much you liked it in your review of the movie. Yes. For the weekly standard.
Guest00:58:40What's remarkable is that the movie is kind of a bastardization of it. And still it's such a great piece of work that, uh, that it couldn't be ruined. So those, I think, I, you know, that's, that's, that's raw flat. There are many other things that I could, I could mention shows that I love, but okay. So that, that would be what comes into my head. The three worst musicals.
JVL00:59:05And give us a directional. So we understand what you mean. So number one is the worst. Okay. So the least number three,
Guest00:59:12the least work,
JVL00:59:14the least worst,
Guest00:59:15the number three, the least worst of the worst would be, uh, cats. Cats is a horror, an unmitigated nightmare that nearly destroyed all of theater and certainly set the musical back 20 years in such a way that I never thought that it was going to recover and revive. Uh, but it did and cats could be number one, but I I'm going to put it at, at, at number three because it, it, it popped into my, it just, it's the thing that popped, popped into my head. Uh, uh, number two, worst hair, hair, the, uh, hippie, the tribal rock love musical, uh, hippie show that ran for a thousand performances because the interim at the time that the intermission happened, they turned the lights off in the theater and a couple of women got naked. And this, this was enough in 1968 to make something a sensation. It was, it was also like all suck up to the hippies. And there are a couple of good songs, but it's, it's, it's boring and ponderous and, um, uh, very unwoke by the way, uh, by the standards of leftist cultural warrior hippie them now, because it's full of, um, uh, ugly sexual portraiture of the relations between men and women, but it's, it's bad and it deserves to be considered. Bad. And the number one worst show I would say, even though it's not a bad show, but I hate it is a chorus line, a chorus line. Yes. I hate a chorus line. It's depressing and it's, uh, it's sentimental and it's full of drippy nonsense and it has second rate songs. And it is a mythologizing of show business in a way that is particularly noxious and unpleasant. And it was the salvation of Broadway in the 1970s, almost single-handedly. And it just shows how terrible the 1970s were, that that is the show that single-handedly saved Broadway, uh, from, from the wreckers ball. And one way that you can tell that a chorus line is as bad as I say it is, is that, there is a scene in the Bob Fosse movie, All That Jazz, made four years later, where Fosse basically said to Michael Bennett, the person who was responsible for the chorus line, up yours buddy, because he made a 10 minute scene at the beginning of the movie, which is an audition for his, for a Broadway director choreographer's show, set to the George Benson version of, they say the neon lights are bright on Broadway, that blows a chorus line out of the water in just 10 minutes. Like it is one of the greatest scenes in all movies, and it takes 10 minutes, and it ruins a chorus line. It does to a chorus line by saying, you know what, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Stop being so sentimental and full of nonsense. This is what the audition thing is really like. So there you go. Those are my two lists.
JVL01:02:47It was everything I dreamed about. Oh, and Sonny,
Guest01:02:51what's your favorite musical?
Sonny01:02:53Oh, it's this one that goes, I'm sure it's fine.
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