Thomas and Frank talk about a sort-of-sequel to "The Karate Kid" and a confusing art film about the perils of loneliness.
First, Frank reviews "Shootfighter: Fight to the Death" (1993). Then, Thomas reviews "Fallen Angels" (1995).
It's a dark and deadly 90s Double Feature, and it starts right now!
-----
Meet Your Double Feature is a double-blind movie review podcast hosted by brothers Thomas and Frank. Thomas is an event producer and broadcaster from Chicago. Frank is an independent filmmaker living in Los Angeles.
-----
For full episodes, written reviews and more, visit our website at https://www.MeetYourDoubleFeature.com/
For more information on where to watch "Nate and Moriah in Venice", visit https://www.sardonicmp.com/
Follow us on Socials at:
Instagram.com/meetyourdoublefeature
https://bsky.app/profile/mydfpod.bsky.social
Music for tonight's show licensed through Soundstripe
"The Shakedown" by Dresden, The Flamingo
"Soul Tonic" by Cast of Characters
"Sophistikitty" by Cast of Characters
(00:00) Intro
(00:51) Shootfighter: Fight to the Death (1993)
(46:40) Fallen Angels (1995)
(01:24:36) Final Scores and Wrap-Up
(01:36:17) Outro
00:00:09
Tonight on Meet Your Double feature, two young fighters are
00:00:13
forced to compete in a deadly martial arts tournament.
00:00:17
Bonds will be tested and blood will be spilled in Shoot Fighter
00:00:21
Fight to the Dead. Then 4 lost souls wander the
00:00:26
streets of Hong Kong undercover of night, searching for meaning
00:00:30
and companionship in their troubled lives.
00:00:33
Bonds will be tested and blood might be spilled in Fallen
00:00:37
Angels. It's a dark and deadly double
00:00:41
feature, and it starts right now.
00:00:51
Hello and welcome to Meet Your Double Feature, a double-blind
00:00:54
movie review podcast. My name is Thomas, joined as
00:00:57
always by my brother Frank. Frank, how are you?
00:00:59
As always, what do I say? Excited.
00:01:02
I'm always excited. Excited.
00:01:04
You're always excited, You're never not excited.
00:01:07
Yep, I got you. Followed it up with the most
00:01:13
unexcited tone. Anyway, for folks who are new to
00:01:19
our show, our premise on Meet Your Double Feature is very
00:01:21
simple. Each episode, Frank and I are
00:01:24
going to exchange recommendations for films that
00:01:26
neither of us has previously seen.
00:01:28
We'll then review those on the show and find out in real time
00:01:31
if the movies we picked were new favorites for the other person
00:01:34
or a complete dud. And if you've been listening so
00:01:37
far, we have had a few examples of both.
00:01:39
But Frank, I think you're kicking us off today with the
00:01:41
first review I asked you to watch.
00:01:44
I don't remember the year but the film is called Shoot
00:01:46
Fighter, Fight to the Death. Yeah, it's 1993.
00:01:51
Shoot. Fight. 1993 OK, early early 90s
00:01:56
If you caught the end of our previous episode, you'll know
00:01:58
that I selected this entirely based on the cast and premise
00:02:01
because it features a number of actors from the original Karate
00:02:04
Kid movie, specifically like the Cobra Kai guys, Johnny Lawrence
00:02:08
and Sensei Crease. Presumably this was like stunt
00:02:11
casting. They took both of them and cast
00:02:13
them in a different martial arts movie several years later, and I
00:02:17
can only imagine it's a 12 out of 1011 out of 10.
00:02:21
How did we do? It's Well, listen, I have to, I
00:02:27
have to tell you about my experience watching Shoot
00:02:30
Fighter, OK. Oh.
00:02:32
OK. There's there's there's a
00:02:34
preamble to this. So I did what I always do,
00:02:41
right? Let's go on to Google just to
00:02:43
see where the movie is streaming, right?
00:02:46
You know, I'm like, where can I watch this movie?
00:02:48
So I type it in and the only thing that pops up is it's it's
00:02:53
showing on Sling TV, which is one of those like free with ads
00:02:57
services, you know? So yeah, Sling TV, remember
00:03:02
that. That'll be important.
00:03:04
Wait, remember later. There's a quiz, folks.
00:03:06
Yeah, and later is right now because I watched it.
00:03:13
Gotcha. I watched it on Sling TV.
00:03:18
And to Fast forward to the very end of the movie real quick, the
00:03:24
movie ends on a freeze frame. Funny enough.
00:03:28
It's like a freeze frame of this guy getting punched.
00:03:31
And then the title card pops up over the freeze frame and it
00:03:36
says shoot fighter two and I'll wait what?
00:03:40
Wait a second? What?
00:03:40
I was what? I was saying, did you watch Shoe
00:03:47
Fighter 2? I watched the second movie
00:03:50
first. Come on, there's no indication
00:03:57
during the movie that something else had happened.
00:03:59
None. None.
00:04:01
I watched the whole movie without realizing it was a
00:04:04
sequel. Cause were the two actors still
00:04:07
in it? Well, Zakka's still in it.
00:04:11
OK, Johnny Lawrence is in it. Yeah, exactly.
00:04:14
But I got literally I watched the whole movie and I was like,
00:04:18
I thought Chris was supposed to be in this movie too, but but it
00:04:24
literally like the story gave no indication at there's like there
00:04:28
was. No title card.
00:04:30
Not at the. Beginning and early movie title
00:04:32
card OK. And here's the thing, here's the
00:04:34
thing. I blame Sling TV for this
00:04:37
because I, I, this was, this was the difference here.
00:04:43
I tested this afterwards because I, I did this on my computer.
00:04:47
I was watching it on my computer.
00:04:48
Like I said, just typed it into Google, clicked the link to
00:04:51
Sling TV. And then like, you know, I
00:04:53
paused the movie a couple times, like go grab a drink or go to
00:04:55
the bathroom or something. And you know, like on the the
00:04:58
video player like above the progress bar, it said the title
00:05:02
of the movie and it said shoot fighter fight to the death which
00:05:05
is the first movie so. Oh, so we had a legit like UI
00:05:09
problem here. Yes, yes, that it like when I
00:05:13
was sitting there watching it, it was telling me this is what
00:05:15
you asked for. This is the first movie.
00:05:19
And then it wasn't until the very end of that.
00:05:21
My first thought was like, they really thought there was going
00:05:24
to be a sequel already. And then I was like, Oh no, this
00:05:28
was the sequel. Can you imagine just sitting
00:05:31
through this whole review being like, I can't believe they
00:05:33
thought there was going to be a shoot fighter too.
00:05:35
Yeah, yeah. And I'm, I'm serious.
00:05:37
Like there's one line in that second movie where they're like,
00:05:42
oh, you know, that business back in Mexico or whatever.
00:05:45
And I was like, I thought that that was just like to allude to
00:05:50
this character's like past, you know?
00:05:52
Yeah, world building. Yeah, exactly.
00:05:54
But no, that was the first movie that they were talking about.
00:05:59
But that's the only indication that this was a sequel to
00:06:03
anything. So are we now reviewing Shoot
00:06:06
Fighter two or did you watch the first one?
00:06:08
Well, I'm a. Professional.
00:06:09
So I went back and I watched this.
00:06:14
This is why. This is why I asked to push a
00:06:17
recording date to today instead of yesterday because I had to go
00:06:21
back and watch the first shoot Fighter.
00:06:24
Oh, that was yesterday. Oh.
00:06:25
Yes, yes, I was like I got a whole nother freaking movie to
00:06:29
watch here. You played that so cool.
00:06:31
You were just like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, boss, can we can
00:06:33
we wait like 12 hours? Yeah, I.
00:06:37
Didn't want to tell you. I had to.
00:06:38
I had to reveal it in this manner.
00:06:40
That's awesome. You just watched.
00:06:43
Double shoot fighter yes, you're getting a double feature.
00:06:45
Double feature on my end because I got to talk about both of them
00:06:48
so. Honestly, honestly, in a really
00:06:52
weird way, that kind of applies to the movie you asked me to
00:06:54
watch too. I didn't watch 2 films but I'll
00:06:56
get into that when I talk about Fallen Angels.
00:06:59
That's it. There's always some connection
00:07:01
we can make between the movies somehow.
00:07:03
Very loose and I will I will pull on that thread.
00:07:06
OK, OK. Yeah.
00:07:08
So OK, how should we review this though?
00:07:10
Do we need to review Street Street Fighter Shoot Fighter Two
00:07:15
first? Well, I was going to ask you.
00:07:17
I mean, I, I don't know, I feel like we could do them in like
00:07:23
honestly the main one I I want to talk about is the first one
00:07:26
because the second one kind of sucks, but.
00:07:28
Why don't we do the original Shoot Fighter, which you watched
00:07:32
yesterday and then just like a brief touch in on on things from
00:07:37
Shoot Fighter too, Because at that point I'll know the
00:07:39
characters, you know? Yeah.
00:07:41
Oh, they'll be. So yeah, of course.
00:07:42
I'll know their story, their you know how they behave, that
00:07:45
business in Mexico. Business in Mexico, man, that
00:07:48
is. The first movie you remember in
00:07:50
Avengers, like the first several Avengers movies they had was
00:07:54
like Hawkeye and Black Widow kept saying like, oh, that
00:07:56
business in Budapest, remember. And it was supposed to be just
00:07:59
like a a bit. I feel like that's how they did
00:08:01
it in Shoot fighter. That's what I thought.
00:08:03
That's why I didn't even like it, didn't even register that
00:08:06
that might have been events we were supposed to be familiar
00:08:08
with, because they have no bearing on the second movie at
00:08:10
all. It's just like basically a
00:08:13
throwaway line in that second one.
00:08:16
So yeah, so funny. I can't get over this the the
00:08:21
the coalescence of factors that you had to use a resource that
00:08:25
actually just auto played the wrong movie with the title of
00:08:27
the other one. Yes, and by sheer coincidence
00:08:29
the movie and its opening credits doesn't say the title,
00:08:32
but at the end of the movie it does.
00:08:34
Because if it hadn't shown the title at the end, you would have
00:08:36
just been talking about this as if it was the first movie.
00:08:39
Exactly, that was such a jump scare at the end of the movie.
00:08:43
I was like the like the way my brain had to go through the
00:08:46
steps to process what had just happened.
00:08:48
Like shoot Fighter 2 and it's so abrupt too.
00:08:51
The movie just ends. Like I said, it's like mid
00:08:54
sentence almost. It's just somebody getting
00:08:56
punched. Freeze frame title card.
00:08:58
And I'm like, wait, what just happened?
00:09:00
It's like the end of The Sopranos where he's like in the
00:09:02
middle of saying something and then we cut to black, but then
00:09:04
it pops up with Sopranos too. Yes, just as confusing as if
00:09:09
that had happened. It's really funny.
00:09:12
This is my favorite episode. It was it.
00:09:16
Yeah, it was, it was a lot. It was a lot for me to deal
00:09:20
with. I got, you know, I got, we got 2
00:09:24
movies out of it though. Two.
00:09:25
We got 2. Movies.
00:09:26
OK, well let's I guess let's not waste any time.
00:09:30
What happens in the 1st? One well also one last thing I
00:09:33
want to say about finding the movie Sure the first movie is
00:09:36
not streaming anywhere. I I thought I was gonna have to
00:09:40
sail the high seas to find it, but thankfully some person shout
00:09:45
out to whoever did this uploaded like a pretty decent like 720P
00:09:49
version of the movie to YouTube. So that's where I saw the first
00:09:53
one was just somebody uploaded it to YouTube.
00:09:55
Thankfully. OK, yeah, that happens.
00:09:57
I've seen many a good movie randomly added to YouTube by
00:10:00
some rando. Yeah, yeah.
00:10:02
And I feel like, you know, for a movie like this, it's like, who
00:10:04
cares? Who even owns the rights to
00:10:06
that? Just let it be.
00:10:07
It's a. Good question.
00:10:08
I don't think anybody's clamoring to be like what
00:10:10
they're sharing Shoot fighter and then they're like, which
00:10:13
one? What do you mean there's more
00:10:16
than one? No, we just put that in at the
00:10:19
end. That was shoot fighter too.
00:10:20
It was just the credits. It could have been, who knows?
00:10:24
All right, This is a very nebulous film series that is
00:10:28
like is a Karate Kid like spin off sort of.
00:10:32
Yeah, RIP off spin off. I mean, it's exactly, Yeah, to
00:10:35
just get into it. It's exactly like you said it.
00:10:37
It was stunt casting in this first one to bring in Billy
00:10:42
Zapka and it's Crease's name I think.
00:10:45
It's like Martin Cove. Yes, Martin Cove, the credits,
00:10:48
it credits him as a special appearance by Martin Cove, even
00:10:53
though he's like the main antagonist of the film.
00:10:55
And I think the reason for that, if I was like, what I was seeing
00:11:00
on the trivia, is that there was a different cut of the movie
00:11:03
without him in it at one point, which so he was added in, which
00:11:08
kind of leads to, you know, how in Heat, there's that scene
00:11:13
where it's Al Pacino and Robert De Niro and it's like their
00:11:17
first time on screen together, but they're not actually on
00:11:19
screen together because their scenes were shot at different
00:11:21
times. And it's just.
00:11:23
Like I'm loving this comparison already.
00:11:25
Pacino Dinero to the two guys from Shoot Fighter.
00:11:27
Well that's exactly when those two icons sat across from each
00:11:31
other. Everybody got excited and
00:11:34
clapped before they said anything.
00:11:35
This. Is awesome.
00:11:38
No. Yeah.
00:11:42
So they filmed Martin Cove in separately, presumably after the
00:11:46
original shoot of the movie. Yes, because there's a scene,
00:11:49
there is a scene where it's it's it's Billy Zapko and Martin Cove
00:11:52
talking to each other. But it's it's shot in this like
00:11:55
shot, reverse shot way where they weren't actually there at
00:11:58
the same time, you know, and it's just like, oh, but these
00:12:01
are the 2. This is your connection here.
00:12:03
These are your two Karate Kid characters, you know, these are
00:12:06
your Cobra Kai guys. Interesting.
00:12:07
But but yeah, so Zapco was in from the beginning, but but
00:12:10
Martin Cove was added in later. But he's great in it.
00:12:13
He he's he's the main antagonist.
00:12:15
And I think in the original cut of the movie, the guy who winds
00:12:18
up being like his second in command was who was supposed to
00:12:22
be when they originally shot it. He was the main antagonist.
00:12:26
He got demoted. He got demoted, yeah.
00:12:28
And so, but he has he winds up having some great scenes
00:12:31
throughout the film that were presumably there from the
00:12:34
original cut where he's the one sort of like interacting with
00:12:37
the the protagonists of the film a lot.
00:12:40
But he's played by Edward Albert, who you and I know from
00:12:47
he is Mr. Collins from Time Force.
00:12:51
It's oh, Wes's dad. The Red Rangers dad from Time
00:12:55
Force man. See that's the other thing.
00:12:56
We get a Power Rangers reference in every episode.
00:12:59
Oh, and it gets better from there actually.
00:13:02
So this film was it was there's three credited writers, but the
00:13:07
the the top billed writer is Judd Lynn.
00:13:12
No way. Judd Lynn, dude.
00:13:14
And not only that, this was his first writing credit and his
00:13:19
only writing credit outside of Power Rangers.
00:13:22
That's awesome. OK.
00:13:23
I feel like we need to contextualize that.
00:13:25
So yeah, Judd Lynn was a was a lead writer for the Power
00:13:28
Rangers series in the 90s when it was like still kind of a big
00:13:31
deal. I don't know if he was writing
00:13:33
on it from the time that Mighty Morphin Power Rangers first
00:13:36
started, but he definitely carried through it all the way
00:13:38
until, like, 2001, where he wrote Time for Us, which is the
00:13:41
one you and I like the most as kids and as adults, yeah.
00:13:45
I was gonna say that qualifier is not necessary.
00:13:48
Sorry, put down my signed copyright.
00:13:49
Now that's fascinating. So he if this movie was 93,
00:13:54
that's also when Power Rangers started.
00:13:56
So I guess maybe he did this and then immediately transitioned
00:13:59
over and was like, yeah, I can write karate stuff.
00:14:01
Yeah, well, I looked it up. He was a production coordinator
00:14:04
on Power Rangers from the beginning of the series.
00:14:07
And then this was 93 and then from 94 onward, he was a writer
00:14:12
for Power Rangers. And he actually, he left the
00:14:15
series after a certain point. It might have been after Time
00:14:20
Force actually. I want to say it's around the
00:14:22
time that Power Rangers became a Disney property sometime in like
00:14:25
the early 2000s. Yes, but he's recently come back
00:14:28
and now he's a writer for the series again.
00:14:30
OK, anyway this is a huge pot for me.
00:14:33
Big fan of Judd Lynn? Yeah, yeah.
00:14:35
So it's him and Edward Albert, who was a major character from
00:14:40
that series too. So there's a lot, there's a lot
00:14:43
coming together. He also got Bolo Young, who's
00:14:44
obviously. Like Bolo Young.
00:14:46
Martial arts film royalty? Yeah, anyway, then the movie
00:14:50
happens. Honestly I have no idea how much
00:14:54
of that is going to make it into the episode.
00:14:55
It's literally just 15 minutes of us going.
00:14:58
Wow first Frank watch the long movie.
00:15:00
Also Power Rangers. I just thought that was fun,
00:15:04
yeah. That's super fun.
00:15:05
Now I'm keeping that in. That's for the.
00:15:07
That's for the real fans for. The sickos out there that.
00:15:10
Yeah, chuckling heads in the house.
00:15:13
OK, please continue. Yeah, so, yeah.
00:15:17
So you got Karate Kid, you got the Power Rangers, you got
00:15:21
there's a lot going on here. And the movie is honestly it's a
00:15:25
lot of fun. Like you were saying before, 11
00:15:28
out of 10 in terms of just sure sheer like B movie martial arts
00:15:32
action, you know, OK, good. Because some of those are some
00:15:36
of the B movie martial arts movies look like they're going
00:15:38
to be like goofy fun and then they just get like real boring,
00:15:41
you know, like just not a lot of action or like a really awkward
00:15:43
story. Sounds like this avoided those
00:15:46
problems. Yeah, the first one.
00:15:52
The duology of shoot fighter. Yeah, shoot fighter too.
00:15:55
My goodness. But yeah, no, it's it's there's
00:16:00
been a million movies like this. I mean, even at one point I was
00:16:02
talking to you about wanting to. I still kind of do want to write
00:16:05
like a similar type of like martial arts film, but I think
00:16:10
this one was kind of taking. This was around the time when,
00:16:15
like UFC was first taking off. OK.
00:16:19
And so there was like, you would see a pop up in a lot of media
00:16:23
around this time where it was like this kind of mysterious
00:16:26
thing where it was like, there's no rules and no weight classes,
00:16:29
which early UFC was, was a mess. It really was like that, Yeah.
00:16:33
They were shoot fighting. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:16:36
So yeah, they talk about, that's how they talk about it in this
00:16:38
movie, like shoot fighting. Like it's like, what is it so
00:16:43
mysterious? So mysterious.
00:16:45
How does it work? You fight the guy, Chief.
00:16:47
I don't know what you. Yeah, yeah.
00:16:50
But basically to get into the setup or the story of the movie,
00:16:55
it starts with a flashback where it's like Bolo Young's character
00:17:00
and Martin Cove are competing in like, I don't, I guess early
00:17:04
shoot fighting and you know, it shows Bolo Young like he wins
00:17:09
his fight and then Martin Cove is like fighting his friend in
00:17:12
the next round. And he's like after this to me
00:17:14
in the finals, you know, and then Martin Cove winds up like
00:17:17
killing Bolo Young's friend in their fight.
00:17:20
And he literally does the, I can't remember which John Claude
00:17:23
movie this was, but you remember the one where like, I heard he
00:17:25
ripped a guy's throat out and then he like actually does it
00:17:27
later in the movie? Oh, that's actually from
00:17:30
Roadhouse. Patrick Swayze.
00:17:31
I'm sorry, you're right. Yeah, I was mixing it up.
00:17:33
That is a Roadhouse thing, yeah. That is the entire first act of
00:17:36
Roadhouse is them saying that Patrick Swayze, quote, ripped a
00:17:38
guy's throat out. And you're supposed to be like,
00:17:40
I don't know what that means, but don't worry, he doesn't.
00:17:44
It's also like in Roadhouse, they set it up like it's like
00:17:47
this like urban legend type thing.
00:17:49
But no. Then he literally rips a guy's
00:17:51
throat and so does Martin Cove. Martin Cove does the exact same
00:17:53
thing. He just.
00:17:54
Rips a man's throat out and kills him.
00:17:56
And that scene is so awkward because like, Bolo Young is
00:17:59
there and like the ref, like, like Martin Cove's like choking
00:18:02
this guy out. And the ref is like, OK, it's
00:18:03
over. You won.
00:18:04
He's like, leave him alone. And Martin Cove is just like
00:18:06
staring Bolo Young down this whole time.
00:18:08
And Bolo Young just doesn't help his friend.
00:18:11
I'm just like, what? What are you doing?
00:18:13
Like he. Respects the rules I guess.
00:18:15
He's not supposed to be in there.
00:18:16
But the match is over. Like the ref is trying to pull
00:18:18
pull Martin Cove off, but Bolo Young's just like, Nah, he's got
00:18:21
this, my buddy's fine. And then?
00:18:23
Jimmy's going to turn it around. Just a few minutes.
00:18:25
Yeah, he just rips his throat out.
00:18:32
Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. Jimmy, put that throwback in.
00:18:36
Jimmy, we need you out there. Yeah, it's a bullion.
00:18:40
Such an idiot, but good start. Yeah.
00:18:47
Yeah. So then this sets off, I guess
00:18:49
Martin Cove's whole thing is then he gets like ejected.
00:18:52
They're like, you're done, you're done.
00:18:53
You disrespected shoot fighting. You're never shoot fighting
00:18:56
again, kid. Everything about this is so
00:19:02
funny. It is, it is, it's it's honestly
00:19:06
hilarious. And so, but then I guess he just
00:19:08
really wanted to fight Bolo. Like that's his whole thing is
00:19:11
like he wanted to fight him and he never got the chance to
00:19:14
because he got kicked out of the league or whatever and like
00:19:17
exiled to Mexico. I think is is what happened.
00:19:20
Oh, the business in Mexico? Yeah, yeah.
00:19:23
So anyway, then we we jump forward in time.
00:19:27
Billy Zapka is like a student. It literally looks like a scene
00:19:31
straight out of Cobra Kai. It's like the first time you see
00:19:33
him, he's in like a karate Dojo, like teaching these kids karate.
00:19:37
And it might as well be the same set they used from Cobra Kai.
00:19:39
I'm like, what do we? Yeah, I'm like, this is the same
00:19:42
thing. But this is so interesting.
00:19:44
This is like, you know, you had like baby Billy Zapka and Karate
00:19:47
Kid and then like like older in Cobra Kai.
00:19:51
This is like his middle Pokémon evolution like.
00:19:54
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a peak peak SAP code,
00:19:57
you know. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:20:00
And honestly, he's great. He's such a good, like I, I,
00:20:03
he's what carries that Cobra Kai show and like he carries this
00:20:07
movie too. I'm like, he's had a good career
00:20:10
specifically doing these types of like martial arts focused
00:20:13
films, but honestly feel like he could have done more outside of
00:20:16
that. He's not the strongest actor,
00:20:17
but he definitely has a good charisma to him and he's just
00:20:20
entertaining to watch. Yeah, there's something for
00:20:22
being unlikeable. You know, you don't have to be
00:20:24
like amazing dramatic actors as long as you have like kind of
00:20:27
just on screen magnetism. And I agree, he got kind of
00:20:30
limited by by typecasting here. Yeah, totally, totally.
00:20:34
So anyway, he's he's teaching these kids at this karate school
00:20:37
and, and Bolo is, is his sense. He calls him Shifu, which is I
00:20:41
guess. I'm sure that's a term that's a
00:20:44
thing. I'm just not.
00:20:44
Familiar with? Yeah.
00:20:46
Like sensei equivalent maybe? Yeah, I believe so.
00:20:49
I believe so. And so then his friend, who is
00:20:54
also a martial artist comes back to into town and he's like bad
00:20:58
boy, leather jacket, cool guy. And Billy Zapka is dating his
00:21:04
sister. So these are like your lead
00:21:06
characters. It's, you know, Billy Zapka, his
00:21:09
love interest and then her brother, who like the two of
00:21:13
them are friends. And honestly, that guy's great,
00:21:16
too. The actor's name is is Michael
00:21:18
Bernardo. And he's also a martial artist.
00:21:22
Oh, I want to point out too, Billy Zebka does like all of his
00:21:27
own stunts in this movie, from what I can tell.
00:21:29
Oh, neat. He like when when they're doing
00:21:32
his action sequences, they shoot it wide, you know, so you can
00:21:35
tell it's him and he's got some great moves.
00:21:38
I didn't realize. Like, maybe it's been a while
00:21:41
since I've gone back and I guess watched the original Karate Kid
00:21:44
and, you know, I think they did a lot of stunt work, stunt
00:21:47
double work for him in the in the new Cobra Kai series.
00:21:49
But I was like, shocked at how much of like these, you know,
00:21:54
sweet kicks that that Zapko was pulling out himself.
00:21:57
That's really neat. I mean, I I would have assumed
00:22:00
that he could do a lot, but like you said, even sometimes when
00:22:02
the actors are capable, they still use a lot of stunt
00:22:06
stuntmen in the same role just because of the worry that they
00:22:09
might get injured. You know, like if your lead
00:22:10
actor breaks his foot doing a kick then the whole production
00:22:13
is halted even if he does know how.
00:22:15
Of course, absolutely. But in this get out there, Zapka
00:22:19
kicks. We'll just edit somebody else in
00:22:22
if you get it. So we got this other, we got
00:22:24
Bernardo 4 over here. We got Bernardo, we got Ralph
00:22:27
Macchio in the wings. Also, this film was the same
00:22:34
fight choreographer as The Karate Kid series.
00:22:37
Interesting. So this is.
00:22:39
Literally bridging the gap between like 80s martial arts
00:22:42
classics like Karate Kid and Bloodsport to the 90s era stuff
00:22:45
which is mostly Power Rangers. Well I was looking up that
00:22:50
choreographer as well. He also did it was the he was
00:22:53
the stunt and fight choreographer for the live
00:22:55
action Ninja Turtles movies too. See.
00:22:58
This is great. How do we not know this movie
00:23:00
existed? I know it feels like something
00:23:02
we should have watched like a dozen times when we were
00:23:04
younger. Yes, yes, and the first one I
00:23:07
would rewatch the second. One, I'm so excited.
00:23:13
About the second one, the second one is upsetting, but the first
00:23:18
one, the first one's fun. And I like like I was saying the
00:23:22
other character too, Michael Bernardo, cuz he, he is not a
00:23:27
strong actor by any means, but he again goes out there and does
00:23:31
some sweet kicks, sweet kicks, but and they tell an interesting
00:23:34
story with these two. So basically, like where the
00:23:36
story of the movie goes is Martin Cove, like finds out that
00:23:41
these two are the students of Bolo and so he wants to lure
00:23:47
them to his shoot fighting tournament in Mexico in the
00:23:51
hopes that Bolo will come with them so that he can fight Bolo.
00:23:57
That's all he wants to do. It's just like throw hands with
00:24:00
this. Man, so the villain of the story
00:24:02
isn't even really concerned with the main characters of the
00:24:05
story. He's concerned with, I mean, if
00:24:08
you count Bolo Young's character as one of the main characters,
00:24:11
even though he's really not no, but it, but it leads to some
00:24:15
interesting developments for our main characters because like
00:24:19
basically like Billy Zapka, he you know, he's running this
00:24:23
karate school and I guess he like took out a loan from some
00:24:28
loan sharks and they're like after him.
00:24:30
And so he gets into some fights early on in the movie when his
00:24:33
buddy Bernardo is back in town and they're like, you know,
00:24:36
they're beating up these guys who are trying to come after him
00:24:38
for this money. And so then Martin Cove sends
00:24:42
Edward Albert's character to like recruit them and he offers
00:24:45
them all this money to come be in the shoot fighting tournament
00:24:47
in Mexico. And he and Michael Bernard, his
00:24:50
character's name is Nick. It's it's Nick and Ruben, Billy
00:24:53
Zappos, Ruben. And his friend's name is Nick.
00:24:56
He's like, no man, this this seems sketchy as hell.
00:24:59
I don't want to go to Mexico and do whatever shoot fighting is,
00:25:02
but. They can't figure out the
00:25:05
concept of a real fight. There's like, all I know is like
00:25:09
pro wrestling tables, ladders and chairs.
00:25:12
There's. Actually a lot because like,
00:25:14
because the two of them early in the movie, like Ruben and Nick,
00:25:18
they, they fight each other in basically like the all valley
00:25:21
again. It's like it looks like the same
00:25:23
locations it's all shot in, like the valley in California.
00:25:26
So it it just looks like Cobra Kai and Karate Kid.
00:25:30
But it's it's like, you know, there's a lot of dialogue
00:25:33
between them where they're like there's no points.
00:25:35
There's no points in shoe fighting like kill or be killed.
00:25:38
Yeah, Yeah. It's not the like first to
00:25:40
three, Yes, OK, that is a difference.
00:25:42
I mean all of Karate Kid was built around the like point
00:25:45
system fighting. Yes, exactly.
00:25:47
And so like the two of them have like kind of a playful fight
00:25:49
where they compete against each other in some kind of like
00:25:51
competition and Billy Zaco wins that one three points to 1.
00:25:56
He kind of squashed Nick, but. Wow, not making Nick look good.
00:26:01
But this leads to something later in the movie.
00:26:04
But so then they they, you know, because he needs the money
00:26:07
because the guy has these loan trucks after him.
00:26:09
Nick doesn't want him to go, but he's like, I'll go with you.
00:26:11
And then he like lies to his girlfriend about, you know, what
00:26:15
they're going to do. So they wind up and they go do
00:26:17
this shoot fighting. It winds up being really
00:26:19
dangerous The whole time. Nick is like, we got to get out
00:26:22
of here, man. Like this is crazy.
00:26:24
And it leads to this. Interesting intersection between
00:26:29
our two late characters where like at the beginning of the
00:26:31
movie, Nick is like the bad boy, Like he was like out of town
00:26:34
because he was like on the run from some people, Like he had
00:26:36
to, you know, ditch town for some reason.
00:26:40
And Billy Zapka is the one who was kind of like the more like
00:26:43
straight and narrow, you know, he was like teaching this karate
00:26:46
school and stuff. And they kind of start to go in
00:26:48
like opposite directions as the movie goes on.
00:26:51
Nick is like, dude, I don't want to do this man.
00:26:53
He's like, I'm going to go train with Bolo to do like actual
00:26:56
competition martial arts. And Billy Zach was like, Nah,
00:26:59
man, shoot, fighting like you. Got a taste for it?
00:27:04
Yeah. Man, that's funny.
00:27:06
He's an addict. Yeah, yeah.
00:27:08
Well, it's just, it's interesting because I was like,
00:27:10
oh, this is kind of fun, like to see these two characters like
00:27:13
kind of go in these opposite directions.
00:27:16
And there's like, there's even like a montage, you know, near
00:27:19
the end of the film where it's like young is like training the
00:27:23
other guy and they're doing like kind of like classic Karate Kid
00:27:26
type montage training. And then Billy Jack is just like
00:27:30
fighting dudes in the street, like, Oh no.
00:27:36
And so anyway, this culminates with them winding up in the
00:27:41
finals of this shoot fighting thing.
00:27:43
Like, and it had it's this fun sequence where it's like Billy
00:27:46
Zapka. He's like competing in it where
00:27:49
is like, you know, his friend Nick didn't want to, so he he
00:27:52
like stayed behind, But then he goes later to try and basically
00:27:56
save Billy Zapka because when they're fighting in the finals,
00:27:58
you know, they're like fighting to the death.
00:28:00
So he's like, he's going to die out there.
00:28:02
And there's this whole thing, there's this funny like
00:28:06
recurring thing where it's like Billy Zapka just kind of, you
00:28:09
know, he left his girlfriend behind.
00:28:11
And then there's just like a series of scenes where she's
00:28:13
like, where'd he go? And they're like to Mexico.
00:28:16
And then like Nick leaves and then she asks like somebody
00:28:19
else. She's like, no, where did Nick
00:28:20
go? And they're like to Mexico.
00:28:24
So much business down there. And then Bolo is the last one.
00:28:28
Then he leaves and then she's asking somebody else.
00:28:29
She's like, no, where did Bolo go?
00:28:30
And like to Mexico, She's like, damn it.
00:28:32
And then she's out of the movie. Part of the movie there's.
00:28:36
No, there's no resolution with her character.
00:28:40
Like you think it's going to lead to like Billy Zappa kind of
00:28:43
having this redemption and then like patching things up with
00:28:45
her. But past a certain point in the
00:28:47
movie, you do not see her again. And.
00:28:49
She's kind of in line with The Karate Kid tradition, too.
00:28:52
For some reason, Larusso in those movies never has, like, a
00:28:55
real resolution with his love interest, and then they just
00:28:57
tell you in the next movie that she disappeared at some point.
00:28:59
Yeah. She's not in the next movie
00:29:01
either, which is funny because Nick is in the next movie and
00:29:04
like that that's his sister, but she's not mentioned at all in
00:29:08
the second movie. Didn't you have a sister?
00:29:11
What? Not Mexico.
00:29:14
That's got a shoot, fighting, shoot.
00:29:15
Yeah. So anyway, it leads to a fun
00:29:18
ending sequence where, like, Billy Zakko is like, fighting in
00:29:20
the finals of the shoot fighting tournament.
00:29:23
And, like, Nick is like backstage, like fighting these
00:29:27
other guys trying to, like, break in and, like, save him.
00:29:30
And he winds up backstage fighting the champ of the shoot
00:29:35
fighting Arena, who's kind of been this, like, background
00:29:37
character hanging around with the bad guys.
00:29:39
Interesting. Yeah.
00:29:40
I'm like, this is fun. Just a little backstage fight
00:29:43
with the champ back here between Nick.
00:29:46
Now we are doing pro wrestling again.
00:29:47
Yeah, yeah, exactly so. But the conclusion of the movie
00:29:51
leads to like Nick gets captured and Martin Cove like makes a
00:29:57
deal with him. He was like, you know, he's like
00:29:59
you go out there into the cage, you fight one of my fighters.
00:30:02
And if you win, you know, you and and Ruben Billy Zapka can go
00:30:06
free. And then he makes them fight
00:30:08
each other. So it's like the two friends
00:30:11
fighting, like shoot fighting and and Nick wins this time.
00:30:15
So this is. Like.
00:30:17
You know, cuz he kind of got beat very easily by Ruben in the
00:30:20
beginning, but now Ruben's gone down this dark path.
00:30:22
Just the shoot fighting dark side.
00:30:24
And so Nick wins. But then the the end of the
00:30:27
movie, Bolo finally shows up and then Martin Cove's like forget
00:30:31
everything that's I got to fight this dude.
00:30:33
And so then like those two wind up fighting in the cage and then
00:30:37
Bolo wins and then it's like hard cut to credits, movie is
00:30:41
over. There is no resolution for our
00:30:43
lead characters at all. They just sit on the sidelines
00:30:46
for the like the end of the movie.
00:30:49
So weird. Such a like cheap movie thing of
00:30:53
like just end on a on a high beat and don't spend money
00:30:57
filming anything afterwards. Well, it's also like talking
00:31:00
about like, The Karate Kid. They were seemingly trying to
00:31:04
make Bolo their Mr. Miyagi because like, oh.
00:31:08
That's a hard sell. It is and it doesn't work like
00:31:12
because like hard cut after he beats Martin Cove and then it's
00:31:16
like over the like the credits are over this like footage of
00:31:19
him like practicing his karate on the beach or whatever.
00:31:22
And it's like the way they present his character throughout
00:31:26
the movie, like he almost never talks.
00:31:28
But I think that's more of like a language barrier thing than
00:31:30
anything else. That's what I mean, Bolo, yeah,
00:31:32
Like your wise and mentor character needs to be more of
00:31:36
like someone who can speak to the main character and kind of
00:31:39
offer guidance than someone who is just physically capable and
00:31:43
probably still close enough to their prime that it doesn't even
00:31:46
make sense. Like Bolo works as a bad guy.
00:31:49
He could work as the good guy in the movie, but he should be more
00:31:52
involved. Not not.
00:31:53
He's not Master Splinter. Yes, exactly.
00:31:55
And that's how they present him in this and this.
00:31:59
And I mean, this is one of his rare good guy roles.
00:32:01
I think he's usually cast as like the intimidating bad guy
00:32:04
character. There's a hilarious scene where
00:32:09
when it's like during the montage where it's Bolo, he's
00:32:12
training ZAP, his friend Nick. And they like there's no
00:32:17
dialogue in the scene because it's like music is playing over
00:32:19
it. And they come upon this kid.
00:32:21
He's like playing basketball and Bolo's like, let me show you
00:32:24
something, you know, But it's all like pantomimed out.
00:32:25
He's you're just watching this happen.
00:32:27
And he like shows the kid how to do this like trick shot.
00:32:30
And then he tries to get like Nick to do the trick shot and he
00:32:33
can't do it. But like Bolo and the kid can do
00:32:35
it. And then as they're like like
00:32:37
jogging away from that scene, there's just this really awkward
00:32:41
ADR where like the kid like makes the trick shot and then he
00:32:44
just goes a Magic Johnson. Just like what the?
00:32:52
Heck, was that? See, now if they'd paid that off
00:32:57
at the end of the movie and the guy had like punched a dude
00:33:00
through the heart. That does happen.
00:33:02
What he says that Magic Johnson? No, no, no, not the Magic
00:33:06
Johnson part. Oh, why you can't take me like
00:33:10
that? Sorry, that was unclear.
00:33:12
That was unclear there there is there is a part where a dude
00:33:17
gets punched through the chest and has his heart ripped out,
00:33:21
but he. Doesn't say, OK, that's the part
00:33:23
I'm picturing a scenario where you're catching the end of what
00:33:26
you don't realize is shoot fighter two.
00:33:28
Somebody punches a man's heart out, winks at the camera, says
00:33:30
I'm Magic Johnson, and then shoot fighter two pops up and
00:33:33
you're like, am I dead? What's happened?
00:33:40
Yeah, it was pretty close to that already, even without the
00:33:42
Magic Johnson part. That just that just made me bust
00:33:45
out laughing. I was like, why did they put
00:33:46
that in there? Like that's really weird.
00:33:48
Like I get it, he was a popular basketball guy, but that's so
00:33:51
not, that's not what this is about.
00:33:53
It's. Just yeah, yeah.
00:33:57
So anyway, I don't even know where to go from there.
00:34:02
There's so little you need to say.
00:34:04
Like anyone who likes martial arts films is probably already
00:34:08
hooked just because they know who's in this one and they know
00:34:10
that it's not like a total mess. I think if you get some good
00:34:14
action out of it and a serviceable enough story like
00:34:17
that's all you need, right? Yeah, and honestly, the fact
00:34:20
that they're like, again, considering I watched the second
00:34:22
one first and then this one, I was like, oh, there's a story.
00:34:24
That's a nice thing to have, I guess.
00:34:26
That is part of a movie now that I think about.
00:34:30
It checks checks my notes like oh interesting.
00:34:34
Title card too. Did not get that for a while.
00:34:39
Yeah. So yes, the first one is fun and
00:34:44
a lot of intersection of interesting on screen
00:34:47
connections between actors with different franchises and like
00:34:51
behind the scenes too. So this one really kind of like
00:34:55
you said it, this seems like something we should have seen
00:34:57
already. Absolutely.
00:34:59
This feels like a movie we should have gotten from a
00:35:00
blockbuster and been over the moon about and watched like 50
00:35:04
times and then come back to it later and been like, was this
00:35:07
actually any good at all? Yeah, yeah.
00:35:09
But I don't know. I mean, we used to watch, what
00:35:13
was it? We used to watch 3 ninjas all
00:35:14
the time. We had avhs of three ninjas that
00:35:16
we wore out and then I think one of us sat down to watch it more
00:35:19
recently and we were like, wow, this is like a home video.
00:35:21
It's so bad. Oh yeah, 3 ninjas is a tough
00:35:24
rewatch. This, I think this would I think
00:35:26
hold up. It's it's fun, good, like the
00:35:30
action sequences are good, like the kind of visuals of when
00:35:33
they're, you know, they put them in some kind of interesting
00:35:37
locations for this shoot fighting stuff.
00:35:41
It's just silly, like, you know, B movie martial arts action, but
00:35:47
in a good way. Yeah, a good way.
00:35:48
It's a good way. It's elevated by the all those
00:35:50
other factors, you know, like by the cast, by like.
00:35:53
Oh, there's also just one more thing.
00:35:55
There's a pretty interesting sequence in the end where when
00:35:57
Bullo is fighting Martin Cove, like he has these like 2 like
00:36:01
sticks. Like they're both fighting with
00:36:03
like these two sticks. And for some reason, I don't
00:36:06
know why he did this, but Bullo Young starts like kind of
00:36:09
clapping them together to this like beat in the middle of the
00:36:13
fight. And the audience that's there,
00:36:16
they start clapping along with him to the beat.
00:36:19
And then he starts like speeding it up, you know, and they start
00:36:21
speeding up their clap. So he's like hyping the crowd up
00:36:24
with this. And then he just like stops and
00:36:27
then like goes back to like fight, fighting Martin Cove.
00:36:30
But then like the score of the film, like picks up that beat
00:36:34
that he started with the sticks. And I was like, oh, interesting.
00:36:37
That was actually fun. I don't know what the hell he
00:36:39
did that for, but like, that was cool.
00:36:42
Yeah, that's a good blend of like diegetic sound and then
00:36:46
feeding that into the score. That's cool.
00:36:47
Yeah, yeah. It was just, it just didn't work
00:36:50
that like the end fight of the movie was not with our main
00:36:54
characters. It was just the way they had to
00:36:56
like, put BOLO over at the end. I don't know.
00:36:58
It was yeah, that that part was. And the second movie ends the
00:37:03
exact same way. Wait.
00:37:05
What the hell? The Matthew Fighter one 1993?
00:37:08
First off, how soon after did they make the next one?
00:37:12
The second one is 96. Oh, OK.
00:37:14
So a little while later, yes, probably got some sort of good
00:37:18
home video return. So we get to the second one,
00:37:20
Martin Cove is gone, do we? And we get Zapka back.
00:37:24
Is there anybody else from the first one who who makes it to
00:37:27
the sequel? It it, it's just, it's Zapka,
00:37:31
Bolo and Bernardo. His friend Nick is also in the
00:37:34
second one. OK.
00:37:35
So I mean your three leads, your main cast comes back, I guess
00:37:39
that's good. Yeah, yeah, totally.
00:37:41
And they make friends with a third guy in the second movie
00:37:46
who dies. So like, so like watching it,
00:37:55
watching the second one and then watching the first one, I was
00:37:57
like, I kind of get the feeling that they wanted to make like a
00:38:00
bunch of shoot fighter movies, you know, and like these were
00:38:02
going to be your recurring characters.
00:38:04
So it really felt like they brought that second guy in or
00:38:07
that third guy in the second movie just just to die.
00:38:10
Like that's why you're here. Yeah, we just needed to get some
00:38:14
tension, yeah. Yeah, but man, like, I guess I
00:38:18
won't talk about the second one for too long because I wasn't
00:38:20
supposed to watch it, but we were not this.
00:38:22
Was not the homework. But it was so much worse.
00:38:29
It was so much worse. And just like I feel like I had
00:38:34
a much smaller budget. I don't know if the second one,
00:38:35
I didn't look into it too much. The second one might have been
00:38:38
like maybe this first one got like a theatrical release.
00:38:40
And the second one was like a straight tone video thing.
00:38:42
But I mean, you could feel it. It was just so rough around the
00:38:45
edges. And like the main thing that
00:38:47
stands out to me about that one is endless, like when the
00:38:51
fights, the fights in that one are so dull and they are just
00:38:57
endlessly cutting away to these extras in the audience that that
00:39:02
clearly have no idea what they're reacting to, You know,
00:39:05
right. Like it's just, it's just like B
00:39:07
roll basically that they they probably shot later and they're
00:39:10
just like. Well, cuz how else am I supposed
00:39:15
to know how I feel about it? Dude it's comical how many times
00:39:19
they cut to these people and it's like you got to know those
00:39:22
extras better than the main characters in the movie.
00:39:26
See, now in the third shoot fighter, it's about all those
00:39:28
extras. Yes, yes, and it's like it's so
00:39:31
obvious too, because in like the beginning of the movie, they're
00:39:34
there for this like exhibition cage shoot fighting match or
00:39:38
whatever. And you know, it's all these
00:39:40
extras that they're constantly cutting to and then the end of
00:39:42
the movie is in the same location and it's all the same
00:39:44
extras because they clearly filmed it at the same time.
00:39:48
And so you're just, I'm like, oh, so I guess the exact same
00:39:51
people showed up to this fight in the exact same seats wearing
00:39:53
the exact. Same tickets, season ticket
00:39:56
shoot fighting fan. Yeah.
00:39:59
And so it's just that one is so rough around the edges.
00:40:01
And the main villain in the second movie, It almost felt
00:40:06
like they were like playing a mean prank on this guy by
00:40:09
putting him in this movie because what?
00:40:13
Does that mean? Because he's so he's
00:40:15
intimidating, looking like he's like a big dude, but his voice,
00:40:21
he's so low and soft spoken, but he's trying to be like this
00:40:25
intimidating bad guy character and it just doesn't work at all.
00:40:28
It's almost like a comedy thing. Like to try and hear this guy
00:40:33
like deliver his like villain dialogue with his like it's just
00:40:37
like little baby voice. Oh, yeah, That feels like
00:40:41
something you would do is like an intentional joke.
00:40:43
You have like, you're like, we're gonna introduce him to
00:40:45
Tiny, and then this super big guy shows up and you're like,
00:40:48
why is he called Tiny? And then he says like a mouse
00:40:50
cartoon voice. And you're like, that's why.
00:40:52
It's almost that. It's so close to like literally
00:40:55
being that. But yeah, I don't even know.
00:40:59
The second one tries to do this whole thing where the police are
00:41:02
trying to like break up like a shoot fighting thing and like
00:41:06
that's why they go and get Billy Zapka and his friends cuz
00:41:09
they're like that business back in Mexico, right?
00:41:11
Like we need you guys so much business, so much business so.
00:41:16
Many forms filled out. Exactly.
00:41:20
That's why they need them. They're just like, we don't
00:41:22
understand all this paperwork. Yeah.
00:41:24
These dates don't add up at all. You guys are getting audited.
00:41:28
So it's like this like that's like the setup for the second
00:41:31
one is they need them to like go undercover to like break up this
00:41:34
like shoot fighting thing. And like it's just it's like
00:41:37
hilarious how boyly executed everything is in that second
00:41:40
movie. Like Billy Zapka has like a new
00:41:42
love interest in this one who's just this woman who like barely
00:41:46
has any dialogue. She has like 5 lines in the
00:41:49
whole movie and then she gets like killed unceremoniously and
00:41:53
it's just like what what is happening?
00:41:54
What are we doing here? Like and then that one also like
00:41:58
Billy Zapka doesn't even like fight anybody in the end of that
00:42:01
one. That one also ends with like
00:42:03
Bolo Young, like fighting this main bad guy dude, and it's the
00:42:08
same thing. It's just like that fight ends
00:42:09
and the credits start rolling immediately.
00:42:11
It's like we got to get out of there as fast as possible.
00:42:14
Again, that's what you do. Yeah, but that that was the one
00:42:16
that literally ended with like, like a joke because it was like
00:42:19
the undercover cop guy who like recruited them.
00:42:23
They had this like informant guy with them who kind of like he
00:42:26
was basically like Benny from the Mummy.
00:42:28
He kept like double crossing them, you know, And like the
00:42:31
literal end of the movie is like the cop guy making some kind of
00:42:35
like pun at him and then like punching him.
00:42:37
And that's when you get that like freeze frame, shoot Fighter
00:42:40
2 and that's the actual end of the movie.
00:42:43
Those are so lame. That never works.
00:42:45
I feel like it's either, like we said, they don't want to budget
00:42:49
filming any sort of like falling action after the movie peaks, or
00:42:53
they know the movie kind of sucks and they're worried that
00:42:55
like, well, maybe if we end on the highest note, it'll be like
00:42:58
a recency bias and it'll be like, I think it was exciting.
00:43:02
Yeah, yeah, it really, it does feel like they're trying to
00:43:04
trick the audience in that way. And yeah, maybe that was like in
00:43:08
editing, they looked at what they've got and they're like, Oh
00:43:09
my God, this is terrible. We got to try and like punch
00:43:12
this up somehow with. That's exactly what it feels
00:43:14
like. I wouldn't be surprised if they
00:43:15
did film stuff, but they were like, it's, you know, we got to
00:43:19
keep the energy up. Cut back to those extras.
00:43:22
Those extras, man, Oh my God, there's just like, oh, there's
00:43:25
that guy again. Yep, he doesn't know what's
00:43:27
going. On again, he spilled ketchup on
00:43:29
himself in between fights. Yeah, it was.
00:43:34
It was just, it was especially funny in the first one that
00:43:36
there was no falling action of any kind because of Billy
00:43:39
Zecker's love interest character who had a big part in the first
00:43:42
half of the movie, and then it's just completely absent from the
00:43:44
second. Half.
00:43:45
I wonder if that and that I could see being that the
00:43:49
original cut of the movie had a resolution, but they added this
00:43:51
whole bit when they got Martin Cove signed on and they added
00:43:54
the whole new conclusion. And probably at that point we're
00:43:57
like, we're out of money. We don't want to get these
00:43:59
actors back out here. Let's just not even show it.
00:44:02
Yeah, no, I, I think, yeah, exactly.
00:44:04
I think that's exactly what happened.
00:44:06
And then again the whole thing. Was there from the start.
00:44:08
It's not that bad. Even the original Karate Kid
00:44:10
ends pretty suddenly, but you get a moment where Ralph Macchio
00:44:15
wins and then his girlfriend runs up and gives him a hug.
00:44:17
There's no dialogue, but they're at least physically there.
00:44:20
Yeah, and again, it's just it's like it's almost like a rule of
00:44:23
threes thing with her where it's like she keeps getting mad that
00:44:26
people keep leaving from Mexico and then there's just like no
00:44:30
follow up with her. So it's just like.
00:44:33
You know, we could have done, we could have had a scene at the
00:44:35
end where Bolo and the two guys are getting on a plane and
00:44:39
they're walking off at the airport like back in America.
00:44:42
And then we pan across and she's boarding a plane to Mexico.
00:44:46
Like she's like, Dang it, if they're all in Mexico, I'm going
00:44:49
to. And then like, they don't see
00:44:51
each other. And it's just like, uh oh, Shoe
00:44:53
Fighter 2. Yes, that would have been
00:44:59
amazing. That would have been way better.
00:45:00
That would have been anything with her, really.
00:45:02
Cuz she wasn't bad. That's funny.
00:45:04
Yeah, yeah. If we if we can't end on
00:45:06
anything, we could end on a joke.
00:45:10
That's movies. If you got nothing, just end on
00:45:12
a joke. Just end on a joke.
00:45:15
Doesn't matter what the movie was about or what the tone is.
00:45:20
OK, so just to just to reset the board and clarify.
00:45:23
Frank was asked to watch shoot Fighter One for the show and he
00:45:28
did shoot Fighter Two. Technically out of bounds can't
00:45:32
factor into any scores. I wish I could give you credit
00:45:34
for watching an extra movie, but unfortunately no.
00:45:40
That's OK. That's OK.
00:45:43
I blame not myself. Sling TV.
00:45:46
Anybody else? Yeah.
00:45:47
Sling TV. I mean I thought this was you
00:45:52
being a bit of a goof but no, that's that is on Sling TV if it
00:45:55
showed you the correct title from the first movie and the
00:45:57
movie doesn't show you a title. It was just a comedy of errors
00:46:02
that led to honestly such a great like punchline literally
00:46:05
at the end. Of oh, that is a punchline, see,
00:46:08
and that's something funny. And something funny.
00:46:11
I got something funny. See, watch.
00:46:13
We're going to do it right now. It's it's about time for us to
00:46:15
head into our intermission. So, Frank, let's end on
00:46:18
something really funny. You always set me up.
00:46:22
You're always just like, now you be funny.
00:46:26
That's why it's funny to me and there.
00:46:43
Hey, coming back now from intermission.
00:46:45
Frank, it's time for me to review the film that you
00:46:48
selected, 1995's Fallen Angels. Do you recall why you asked me
00:46:53
to review Fallen Angels? I think I was looking at the
00:46:57
director who this was like one of his last big films that he
00:47:02
filmed in China. And I remember, I don't know if
00:47:05
I said this on air, but I know I said a viewpoint that I wanted
00:47:07
us to just every now and again do some foreign films just to
00:47:11
mix it up, you know, and like broaden our horizons for the
00:47:15
show. Absolutely.
00:47:17
I will say I think this movie is going to expose me because it's
00:47:21
a foreign film. It's a lot more of an
00:47:23
experimental film. It's it's higher up on the scale
00:47:26
of art film than anything we've talked about on the show before.
00:47:30
And I think I said a lot more competent talking about
00:47:31
Jean-Claude Van Damme than talking about this stuff.
00:47:36
Well, we're going to find out. We're going to find out when I
00:47:39
have to talk about vague, ambiguous, really visual
00:47:43
storytelling and make it make sense to the listener and kind
00:47:46
of summarize what it's. About Good luck everybody.
00:47:51
Good luck if the video, just if the audio just stops here, it's
00:47:54
because I failed. So you were spot on.
00:47:59
The director for this. Some people might recognize the
00:48:01
name Wong Korwai, who I think his most famous movie is In the
00:48:05
Mood for Love, which is just an extremely well regarded Chinese
00:48:10
like romantic drama from I think that one might be from 2000.
00:48:14
So after this one, he also directed a film called Chunking
00:48:17
Express the year before Fallen Angels.
00:48:20
And this is what I wanted to mention off the bat.
00:48:22
You were talking about the unintended duology of having to
00:48:25
watch both shoot fighters. This movie that you asked me to
00:48:28
watch, Fallen Angels, is in many ways part of a duology with
00:48:31
Chunking Express, which came out the year before, and I did not
00:48:35
actually see that one. So it kind of feels like I
00:48:37
watched the second-half of something, you know what I mean?
00:48:39
Oh see, I was under the impression it was like
00:48:42
thematically similar, but are you saying that they're like
00:48:45
actually narratively? Related.
00:48:48
It's thematically similar is the main thing, but they're so
00:48:51
connected in what they were about.
00:48:53
I, I looked at the IMDb trivia when I was done watching it
00:48:56
because Chunking Express is a movie I've wanted to see for a
00:48:59
while. I just, for a long time it
00:49:01
wasn't streaming anywhere in the US and I couldn't find it at the
00:49:04
library, so I didn't see it. And after finishing this one,
00:49:07
Fallen Angels, I looked at the IMDb and it was explaining that
00:49:10
part of the story for this movie was originally part of the plot
00:49:14
for Chunking Express. It was like one of the vignettes
00:49:16
covered in that film. And then they felt they didn't
00:49:19
need it to finish that movie and so they just expanded on this
00:49:22
idea to make another movie. Does that make sense?
00:49:25
Oh, well, that's interesting. OK, Yeah.
00:49:27
There's also multiple of the same actors are in it.
00:49:31
One of the actors is playing two different characters, but they
00:49:33
have the same name and there's like illusions to what the other
00:49:36
one did in each film. There's also, I think the
00:49:40
director even said that he considers it kind of like a
00:49:43
connected idea because most of the imagery in Chunking Express
00:49:46
from 94 is a lot of like outdoor daytime stuff, whereas every
00:49:49
single frame of Fallen Angels takes place at night.
00:49:51
So it's kind of like a two halves of a whole.
00:49:55
And I think that one of the things I want to talk about is
00:49:57
that I really might like fallen angels more if I'd seen the
00:50:00
other thing first, because I think the balancing act of that
00:50:04
would make each one better, you know, like more than the sum of
00:50:07
their parts. Not to say I disliked fallen
00:50:10
angels, but as soon as I read that I was like Dang it,
00:50:13
probably should have watched that other one.
00:50:15
Yeah, I could see. Well, I didn't, I didn't realize
00:50:17
they were so closely related like that.
00:50:20
That seems they're very like, literally like a day and night
00:50:24
thing between these two. Movies it's a day and night
00:50:26
thing with that tackles similar themes and was made one after
00:50:30
another. It's like 9495 S again.
00:50:32
It's not advertised as such and they are supposed to be stand
00:50:35
alone stories but I just found those connections really
00:50:39
interesting. And ironically my wife has seen
00:50:41
Chunking Express and not this one and now I've seen this one
00:50:44
and not that one. And I was like maybe by talking
00:50:46
about it we can kind of figure out and like Nope Nope never
00:50:48
mind. These movies are way too visual.
00:50:50
I would just need to watch it. I was gonna say you guys could
00:50:54
do an episode of Double Feature. That would be funny yeah trying
00:50:57
to watch like both halves of the of the duology, but to focus
00:51:01
back in on fallen angels. I just wanted to start with that
00:51:03
to put a button on the comment I made earlier when you're talking
00:51:06
about the double double feature thing with with Shoot Fighter.
00:51:09
Yeah, but what you what you do get with Fallen Angels?
00:51:13
It is a story about the lives of 5 or 6 characters who basically
00:51:18
live their lives at night in Hong Kong.
00:51:22
And it tackles a lot of themes related to like social isolation
00:51:26
and people trying to make meaning in their lives when they
00:51:28
feel that there is none. It's about like, love and
00:51:31
obsession and lost connections and all the kind of things you
00:51:34
get from a fancy art movie that I have to pretend I understand.
00:51:40
You keep you keep downplaying your your.
00:51:43
I'm gonna try. I just listen, there's
00:51:45
somebody's gonna come in here, we're gonna get our comment on
00:51:48
this video, and they're gonna be like, clearly you misunderstood
00:51:50
the point. And I'm like, yeah, I agree.
00:51:56
So I mean, that's something about art though, right?
00:51:57
It's interpretive. My interpretation is valid but
00:52:00
maybe I'm not. So I only want to preface all
00:52:05
this because if you hear the description of the movie and you
00:52:08
feel like you don't really get it, it's because it really is
00:52:10
something that is meant to be viewed.
00:52:12
Like for example, most of the characters don't have like clear
00:52:15
names. Like some of them say their name
00:52:18
once or have like a nickname to reference them.
00:52:20
They don't really address each other by name at all.
00:52:23
There's a ton of like mid 90s visual techniques and editing
00:52:28
choices that make the whole thing very trippy.
00:52:30
Not like unintelligibly so, but to the point where I can't
00:52:35
really convey exactly the feel of the movie with.
00:52:37
Unless you like, watch a trailer or something and then listen to
00:52:40
this, you know what I mean? OK, yeah.
00:52:43
So this will this will test your descriptive abilities.
00:52:46
That's kind of what I'm coming around to.
00:52:47
It's like, how do I explain the movie when I literally in my
00:52:49
notes was writing down pretty much every single thing that
00:52:52
happened because I wasn't sure which parts were important until
00:52:55
later? It's like a puzzle.
00:52:58
Yeah, put the pieces. Together I also like usually
00:53:01
I'll just write notes alongside the first time I see the movie
00:53:04
just to kind of like make sure I'm like latching onto any ideas
00:53:06
and they don't escape me. But I often use character names
00:53:09
and I swear some of the character names I had to use
00:53:12
were like Hitman guy, crazy lady, other crazy lady.
00:53:20
Crazy lady too. Crazy lady too, the crazy name
00:53:23
and crazy man. It's a whole family.
00:53:27
So I'm going to try to explain because the movie has
00:53:30
essentially 2 main plots that do intersect, but only very
00:53:33
briefly. So most of the movie they're
00:53:35
they're kind of separate ideas. The first plot is that two of
00:53:39
your characters, who I would call this maybe the a story, is
00:53:42
a duo that works together to arrange professional like hits.
00:53:46
Like the guy is a hit man, he carries out the murders and this
00:53:49
woman is essentially his handler.
00:53:51
She arranges everything. She tells him where to go and
00:53:53
what to do. She sort of like, cleans up
00:53:57
scenes after him. She's always arranging, like the
00:53:59
hideout spaces that he's going to use.
00:54:01
And you get some voice over narration from each of these
00:54:05
characters throughout the film, kind of just pontificating about
00:54:08
their life and their role in it and the nature of their
00:54:11
partnership. Because the thing that's clear
00:54:13
right away is that these two don't communicate very well.
00:54:16
They rarely see each other, but they both have this like, mild
00:54:21
obsession with each other. Like the woman, he's deeply
00:54:24
obsessed with this man. She like, digs through his trash
00:54:27
and like, looks at all of his stuff.
00:54:28
But he also has feelings developing for her and he's
00:54:31
worried that it's going to threaten their working
00:54:33
relationship. So his big inciting action in
00:54:36
the movie is that he tries to end their hitman business by
00:54:41
essentially ghosting this person.
00:54:43
Oh wait, what? But he likes her, but he's just
00:54:46
going to ghost her now, like. Essentially it's it's the
00:54:49
classic, like, I don't know how to communicate and I think this
00:54:52
is getting too complicated. So it's all done so vaguely like
00:54:55
the opening shot of the movie is a snippet of a scene that you
00:54:59
don't actually get until much later in the movie.
00:55:02
And we open with these very strange angles, like visually
00:55:06
every shot in the movie, the camera is like inside this
00:55:10
person's personal space. You know what I mean?
00:55:12
It's so up close and at odd angles.
00:55:14
And they use super wide lenses, like not like a little fisheye
00:55:18
lens, but not terribly far removed from that.
00:55:21
So it's made to be very like unsettling and kind of jarring
00:55:25
right away. And we just open on this close
00:55:27
up of this one woman smoking and like her hands all shaking and
00:55:30
she's trying to talk to this guy while he explains.
00:55:32
Like, we've been working together a long time, but I
00:55:35
think we're too emotionally invested.
00:55:36
And I got to, I got to break it off now and then.
00:55:38
We don't hear the resolution to that until much later in the
00:55:40
story because we go backwards in time after that.
00:55:43
Got it. OK, well, that's interesting.
00:55:44
I mean that's a like, fun way to open the film though.
00:55:47
It's very visually interesting. It's also very snappy at times,
00:55:50
like that scene hard cuts to a shot of the woman walking up out
00:55:54
of this like empty subway. The title card for the movie,
00:55:57
which shows up at the beginning, believe it or not, is on screen
00:56:01
for like half a second. It's like, boom, fallen angels,
00:56:04
short music, sting, and we're out.
00:56:05
Like, there's a lot of intentionally jarring editing
00:56:09
choices, but at the same time, the movie will occasionally slow
00:56:12
down and play these kind of, like, jazzy music.
00:56:15
And it feels the whole thing feels like a rumination on,
00:56:17
like, the chase that people go through trying to find what the
00:56:20
movie often refers to as, like, the right partner in their life.
00:56:23
And mostly that's romantic partners.
00:56:25
But in the case of these other two, they had, like, they were
00:56:27
business partners. They had a working relationship
00:56:29
that their emotions were complicating.
00:56:31
So it's very classic East Asian reflective kind of filmmaking.
00:56:37
It's something you see a lot in films made in China or Japan.
00:56:40
The whole thing is very like mellow and kind of sad.
00:56:45
Well, I mean because I've seen In the Mood for Love and this is
00:56:48
already starting to sound similar like stylistically or
00:56:51
tonally. Tonally, yes, I think the main
00:56:54
thing that's different is that In the Mood for Love, I've seen
00:56:56
that one as well, is shot in what I would call a more like
00:56:59
traditional kind of like Western filmmaking style.
00:57:01
The cameras usually grounded. There's still a lot of close up
00:57:04
shots to like sell that these people feel kind of constrained
00:57:08
in their lives. But the Fallen Angels is like
00:57:10
mostly handheld cameras that are kind of tracking around and
00:57:13
following these people. So it's a lot more like
00:57:16
dreamlike and kind of hazy and it's camera movement.
00:57:20
I, I mean, like, I kind of like that though.
00:57:23
I mean, obviously I haven't seen this film, but I, I like sort of
00:57:27
like experimental filmmaking. So maybe I would have enjoyed
00:57:31
this movie more than you actually.
00:57:33
I don't mean to say any of this off the bat is like, I didn't
00:57:36
like this. I just want to give the a clear
00:57:39
impression as clear as I can about what made this film
00:57:42
unique. I mean, even the cover art on
00:57:45
IMDb, there is a pull quote from a reviewer that says like Wong
00:57:48
Kar Wai, you know, breaks every rule of filmmaking and like to
00:57:51
great success. There is a very strange like
00:57:55
experimental quality to it. I mean, there's frames in the
00:57:58
movie that will suddenly be like partially in black and white.
00:58:02
Like certain portions of the frame are in color and certain
00:58:05
ones aren't or individual objects are in color.
00:58:07
Even that opening shot of the close up of the woman smoking
00:58:10
with the other guy framed behind her, they're all in black and
00:58:12
white except that like you could see the red of like her lipstick
00:58:15
and her fingernails and like the cigarette.
00:58:18
So they just, they're, there's just a lot going on.
00:58:20
That's cool. And it's, that's really
00:58:21
difficult to pull off too, cuz like I yeah, to it's the kind of
00:58:24
thing where, you know, I've heard it said you have to
00:58:26
understand the rules before you can break them.
00:58:29
So cuz otherwise this would just look like a mess of mistakes and
00:58:34
contradictions. Yeah, it'd be incoherent.
00:58:37
Yeah. So it's actually very difficult,
00:58:40
I think to be able to pull that off in a way that has
00:58:44
intentionality behind it. I.
00:58:46
Agree. And I do think that despite all
00:58:48
of these things, those elements like the camera movement and the
00:58:51
colorization and all that, that doesn't really disorient.
00:58:54
Like those are just odd little choices.
00:58:55
The thing that at times makes the movie kind of hard to follow
00:58:59
is just the overall ambiguity and the strangeness of all these
00:59:01
characters. I think one of the guys from
00:59:04
like the B plot has a line near the beginning where he says
00:59:07
something to the effect of like, the people you find out on the
00:59:10
street at night are all kind of crazy and that's who all these
00:59:13
people are. I also kind of like said it's
00:59:17
all at night. I mean is it literally like
00:59:18
every scene of the film is night time?
00:59:21
Yeah, no, I don't think every single frame of the movie is
00:59:24
dark and lit by, you know, cigarettes and neon St. lights.
00:59:28
And it's it's very visually interesting.
00:59:32
And on top of that, the space that all these people live in,
00:59:34
it's these terrible tiny little apartments or hotel rooms like
00:59:38
super boxed in, reflecting the kind of just like simbering
00:59:43
tension of of people living in there, in that place at that
00:59:46
time. Yeah.
00:59:47
I mean, this all sounds great, actually.
00:59:50
Like it sounds like it's really using.
00:59:53
I mean, you know, film's a visual medium, and so this is
00:59:56
like kind of pushing that to its natural limits, I think.
01:00:00
It is. I do think all these elements
01:00:02
are interesting. Also to kind of place it at a
01:00:04
point in time, the lighting in the movie kind of tries to use
01:00:08
the same like sickly green that they used in the Matrix.
01:00:12
Does that kind of make sense? OK, yes.
01:00:15
I don't know if I'd love that though.
01:00:18
It's not the whole thing, but there's a number of individual
01:00:20
scenes that have that kind of like washed out green lighting
01:00:24
over the whole thing. Again, it's supposed to be kind
01:00:26
of uneasy. These people are all very
01:00:29
strange and they're living strange lives, and they're none
01:00:31
of them are happy because they haven't found the right person
01:00:36
to go through their life with. And they're all kind of adrift
01:00:40
because of that. They're trying to form
01:00:42
connections and they're dealing with like, terrible
01:00:45
relationships with people who aren't right for them because
01:00:47
they're so desperate to just have someone else validate that
01:00:51
they exist. You know what I mean?
01:00:53
That's so much of the language in the movie is will you
01:00:56
remember that I was ever here? Yeah, yeah.
01:00:59
And I mean, that also seems to tie in with the fact that it's
01:01:01
all at night time as well. Like that's usually the time
01:01:07
that people are like the most reflective.
01:01:08
And also, if these people are only operating at night, then
01:01:10
they're not being seen by everyone else during the day.
01:01:13
Exactly. And we really do have very few
01:01:15
characters. I think there's like 6
01:01:17
characters and almost nobody else in the movie has any
01:01:20
dialogue I guess to to set up the other half of the story,
01:01:24
which really, and again this is a criticism, ends up being more
01:01:27
than half of the story goes to this other plot.
01:01:30
So we have the Hitman guy. That's plot A.
01:01:33
The other one is about this guy who introduces himself through a
01:01:36
voice over. He says his name at one point,
01:01:38
but I started calling him Crazy Man.
01:01:41
OK Crazy Man explains that when he was a kid, they often end up
01:01:46
talking about their childhoods here.
01:01:47
He says that when he was a kid, he loved to talk, but then he,
01:01:49
quote, ate an expired can of pineapple and lost the ability
01:01:54
to speak. So for the whole movie he never
01:01:56
says anything out loud even though we're hearing from him in
01:01:58
voice over. I'm sorry, he ate.
01:02:01
An expired can of pineapple, correct?
01:02:05
This is just like Soldier. This is like the kid from
01:02:07
Soldier that couldn't speak because he got bit by a snake.
01:02:10
It is kind of like Soldier. That's that's the point in its
01:02:13
favor. So he says this and this is the
01:02:16
connection to Chunking Express. That actor is a different
01:02:20
character in Chunking Express who's always worried about the
01:02:22
expiration dates on food. And specifically he's like
01:02:25
looking at a can of pineapple and worried about eating it
01:02:27
because the expiration date. Wow, that's so interesting.
01:02:31
So very specific, even though those aren't the same person,
01:02:34
but they're played by the same actor and have the same name.
01:02:37
Yes, but yeah, it's like a meta narrative there.
01:02:41
That's fun. Yes, I can.
01:02:43
I'm seeing now why these are kind of a duology.
01:02:47
Exactly. The connections are very strong.
01:02:49
I find Crazy Man to be an interesting part of the movie,
01:02:52
but the one that maybe frustrates me the most because
01:02:54
he takes up so much screen time for what feels like a very easy
01:02:57
to understand bit that doesn't need this much time spent on it.
01:03:01
His main thing when the movie opens, you're hearing from him
01:03:04
and he's this like super unreliable narrator because he's
01:03:07
clearly a bit not all there and he's always explaining his
01:03:10
version of events, but you're visually seeing what's actually
01:03:12
happening because the first thing he explains is because I
01:03:15
never learned how to speak or lost the ability to.
01:03:18
I had trouble making friends. I had trouble holding a job and
01:03:21
so I live my life at night running other people's
01:03:24
businesses in the night time when they're closed.
01:03:26
So we just see that he is like broken into somebody's business
01:03:30
and is like messing with their stuff.
01:03:32
He'll randomly go around like he grabs a pair of scissors and
01:03:36
starts trying to aggressively cut people's hair who haven't
01:03:38
asked him to. And then eventually they just
01:03:40
have to pay him to stop cutting their hair.
01:03:43
Oh. Oh, OK, so he's yeah.
01:03:47
This guy's a lot. He's completely not
01:03:49
understanding what other people are saying to him, but he still
01:03:51
has these very like, coherent personal narrations about what's
01:03:56
happening. You just always are being shown
01:03:57
visually that it's not what he's saying.
01:04:00
And his whole story, again, a lot of it's supposed to be this
01:04:03
very dry comedy, but it goes on for so long.
01:04:06
There's this really long scene where this guy walks up to an
01:04:10
ice cream truck, sees the crazy man is inside the ice cream
01:04:13
truck, and he's like, Oh, no, this guy again.
01:04:15
And so a crazy man, like, grabs him by the collar and drags him
01:04:18
into the ice cream truck and just starts making ice cream
01:04:21
cones and feeding him to this guy over and over again.
01:04:23
And he won't let him leave. He's like, keeps forcing him to
01:04:26
eat more ice cream. And so the guy ends up calling
01:04:30
his wife and who's clearly wondering where he is.
01:04:32
And you hear his side of the conversation where he's like,
01:04:34
yeah, it's that guy again. He's not going to let me go.
01:04:37
He just keeps feeding me ice cream.
01:04:39
I know you don't believe me, but, you know, come see for
01:04:40
yourself if you don't. And then we cut to like, for
01:04:43
some reason the guy's wife brought like their entire
01:04:45
extended family. And so now we have a scene where
01:04:47
the crazy man is feeding like 6 people ice cream that they don't
01:04:50
want. How is he holding them all there
01:04:54
like? They show you a couple instances
01:04:56
where people are trying to physically escape him and he
01:04:58
just like, is too tenacious and they can't get away.
01:05:00
And then it becomes this like, sort of resigned thing.
01:05:02
And that's part of the joke is that they just can't get away
01:05:06
from this guy because he's so persistent about it.
01:05:09
And then that scene goes on way too long.
01:05:12
It's not very funny. I mean, like some of it is maybe
01:05:14
lost in translation, like the timing of the dialogue that
01:05:17
would maybe get a laugh. But then that also transitions
01:05:21
into an interesting shot where we cut 2 crazy guy driving the
01:05:24
truck at night, and the interior in the back is all lit up
01:05:28
because all the people are still sitting back there.
01:05:29
And he's just like driving through the streets.
01:05:31
And there's some interesting cinematography going on.
01:05:33
And that moment's like, actually kind of pretty, but it is
01:05:35
supposed to be contrasted with this super bizarre scene that we
01:05:39
saw right before it, where like the family's actually kind of
01:05:41
happy at the end. Like they're all having a good
01:05:43
time eating the ice cream by the end of it.
01:05:45
Yeah, I mean, when you describe it, it sounds funny.
01:05:48
But it just, I don't know for me, not if it landed.
01:05:50
It's funny because the joke is so obvious and it's mostly
01:05:53
supposed to be funny because they don't let up.
01:05:55
Like the bitches keeps going and he runs into the same guy like
01:05:58
several times and is always doing stuff to him like trying
01:06:02
to cut his hair or feed him ice cream and it just takes up so
01:06:05
much time. And I was while watching the
01:06:07
movie before I knew about the connection to Chunking Express,
01:06:10
I was like, this B plot is like 75% of the movie and it should
01:06:14
have been the other way around. We do not get enough time with
01:06:16
the hitman and his partner and their story feels like if you
01:06:19
told just that part of it, it'd be a short film.
01:06:21
And then when I read that, that part was what was originally
01:06:25
going to be a portion of the story of the previous movie,
01:06:27
Chunking Express, I was like, this lines up for me because I
01:06:30
feel like this movie, Fallen Angels is stretched too thin.
01:06:33
It didn't have enough mean it to cover a full story.
01:06:40
Yeah, because I thought. The idea was they took this
01:06:43
small concept and expanded it into a feature length, but it
01:06:46
seems like they just took what was going to be a small piece of
01:06:49
another film and made it a small piece of this film.
01:06:52
Feels like it. I mean, I don't know for certain
01:06:54
that the Hitman story is the one that was part of chunking
01:06:56
originally, but I would assume so because that is framed as
01:06:59
like the A plot. And again, we do get very brief
01:07:03
crossover of these two stories because Crazy Man's whole thing
01:07:06
ends up being that he finds this similarly crazy lady, crazy lady
01:07:10
number one number one and has a sort of like relationship with
01:07:13
her even though they can't really communicate.
01:07:15
Like none of these characters know how to say anything.
01:07:17
They never look at each other in the eyes.
01:07:19
They never speak directly to each other.
01:07:21
There's so much key information exchanged like over the phone or
01:07:25
through these abstract means. It's people who are too caught
01:07:29
up in their like, small internal bubbles to actually reach out
01:07:32
and make a connection. But we do get some crossover
01:07:36
where, like, I think the hitman guy briefly has a scene with the
01:07:39
crazy guy where he just talks to him for a minute and then they
01:07:41
go their separate ways. And then at the very, very end
01:07:43
of the story, we see a crossover between the hitman partner lady
01:07:49
from the a story meets the crazy guy again, and they have a thing
01:07:51
at the end. But again, I just, I don't know,
01:07:54
like pace. The movie's pacing loses me by
01:07:57
the middle of it. This, you know, this is
01:07:59
reminding me of like especially with comedy, there's a thing
01:08:03
where like some types of movies will perform better in other
01:08:08
countries. Like if it's made here, for
01:08:09
example, and then and then screened in another country.
01:08:12
It it's stuff that is more universal, like horror or
01:08:15
action, I guess. But comedy is always very
01:08:18
subjective. And like, especially like might
01:08:22
have some like cultural connotation too.
01:08:25
Because this is reminding me of like, I just watched this Jackie
01:08:28
Chan movie Miracles, which is a great movie, but this is a
01:08:32
common thing I always run into with a lot of a lot of Jackie
01:08:34
Chan's old films that he made in China where it was like like in
01:08:39
this movie, it was like some of the best like on screen, like
01:08:42
action choreography I've ever seen.
01:08:44
And then it would go for that to like 45 uninterrupted minutes of
01:08:49
these comedy gags that like didn't land, you know, because
01:08:53
it's like some of it was kind of humorous, but it's like, Oh my
01:08:58
God, this is so much of the movie is this.
01:09:00
And and I don't I'm not like engaging with this.
01:09:03
I feel like in the way that it's intended to be engaged with.
01:09:08
Yeah, the comedic timing is so different.
01:09:10
Like, I understand that some of the stuff in Fallen Angels is
01:09:13
supposed to be funny because we keep coming back to it so much,
01:09:16
or because we just don't ever let go of this one idea.
01:09:21
And I can understand why that's maybe amusing, but in the moment
01:09:23
of watching it, the movie kind of starts to drag by the
01:09:27
second-half and that carries through until almost the end,
01:09:30
where it picks up again in the last like 15 minutes.
01:09:32
Yeah, yeah, because it's because you said that that B plot takes
01:09:37
up more of the film than the A plot.
01:09:40
Way more like the the shot. The story about the hitman is
01:09:44
super brief for the most part. He performs a couple of hits
01:09:49
which are shot interestingly like it.
01:09:50
It almost feels like almost like John Woo style, but it like not
01:09:54
exactly the same. You have these kind of slow
01:09:56
motion shots of him with his dual pistols, like shooting all
01:09:58
these people up and it kind of does the effect of using like
01:10:01
almost like a slower frame rate kind of slow motion.
01:10:04
Does that sound familiar? Yeah, yeah, for sure.
01:10:07
So that styling is like, it's not literally what John Woo was
01:10:10
doing, but it felt almost like inspired by that kind of thing
01:10:13
and and modified from that and those scenes take place.
01:10:15
And then we learned that he doesn't want to do this job
01:10:19
anymore because he wants to. He originally took it on because
01:10:24
he was like, I just like being told where to go and what to do.
01:10:26
I don't like having to make these choices for myself.
01:10:28
But then he starts to grapple with that, and he wants to have
01:10:30
more agency and what he does with himself.
01:10:32
So he breaks it off by telling the woman he works with to
01:10:36
listen to some song on a jukebox that'll explain everything and
01:10:41
then just leaves. And he never says anything to
01:10:43
her. And she gets all increasingly
01:10:46
obsessed about this and is trying to track him down.
01:10:48
The hitman then has another short relationship with Crazy
01:10:51
hit #2 whose whole thing is essentially that she just
01:10:56
approaches this guy and immediately tries to like, win
01:10:58
him over and be like, hey, come back to my place, come up to my
01:11:00
place. And then we she reveals that
01:11:03
they already had some sort of a fling in the past, and she's
01:11:05
convinced that he just completely forgot who she is.
01:11:07
She's like, you know, I changed my hair.
01:11:10
And I bet that you don't even remember that it's me now, do
01:11:12
you? And he says that he does, but he
01:11:14
clearly doesn't. And so she's kind of going
01:11:16
through a similar bit of anguish where she just thinks that
01:11:18
nobody sees her and she's not, she's not real because she
01:11:22
doesn't have somebody there to kind of validate that she
01:11:24
exists. And then those two women cross
01:11:27
paths and set up a meeting where the hitman and his old partner
01:11:30
finally, like, finally get to speak.
01:11:33
That's what we see at the beginning of the movie.
01:11:35
And then his partner, I think in a fit of like jealousy, asks him
01:11:40
to do one final job for her and turns it into a setup so that he
01:11:43
gets killed. Oh, she she intentionally got
01:11:47
him killed. Yeah, she sent him in to do a
01:11:49
hit. And then all of these other
01:11:50
people show up. And clearly it's like, and it
01:11:53
almost is played that like, he knew this was going to happen.
01:11:56
And so he just comes to terms with the fact that he thought he
01:11:59
was still searching for the real partner that he needed in his
01:12:02
life. And he thought that if he could
01:12:04
find them, that might really complete things for him.
01:12:07
And he's thinking through his voice over like, I wonder who
01:12:09
that person would be. And then we just see that he
01:12:11
doesn't get to find out because he gets killed.
01:12:13
And then the tail end of the movie is that that woman who
01:12:17
betrayed him, the original partner, she's adamant now that
01:12:20
like she's like, I don't make these emotional connections
01:12:22
anymore. I'm still doing the same work,
01:12:23
but I try to keep it all really distant.
01:12:25
But then she crosses paths with crazy man.
01:12:28
And then they like ride off together to end the movie.
01:12:30
And she has a short bit kind of monologue where she's like, once
01:12:34
again, I'm chasing something that's like going to end poorly
01:12:37
and is not good for me. But it's nice to feel like this
01:12:42
warm swell. It lasts.
01:12:44
Oh, crazy man. Being the ice cream guy.
01:12:47
Ice cream guy. Yep, yeah.
01:12:49
Wow. See this?
01:12:50
This feels like a very like somber, contemplative emotional
01:12:55
film mixed with some dark ice cream stuff.
01:13:00
Yeah, yeah, it's supposed to be dark because this guy's clearly
01:13:04
all messed up. Crazy man has a lot of problems.
01:13:07
He you feel sorry for him, but they just try to use these weird
01:13:11
beats to be to show how eccentric he is.
01:13:14
Yeah. And another interesting element
01:13:15
you get for him is that he has this whole relationship earlier
01:13:17
in the story with crazy lady number one, who, again, is like
01:13:21
herself, obsessed with some man who doesn't want her and is
01:13:24
behaving like a genuinely, like, manic person.
01:13:26
Like, I'm not saying like a crazy lady, like she's insane.
01:13:30
Yeah. But she leaves the story and
01:13:32
then at the end, one of the last scenes we get with crazy guy, he
01:13:35
sees her again. But she has a boyfriend now and
01:13:37
is like a totally normal person and doesn't even recognize him.
01:13:40
Like, she's dressed as like a flight attendant and she isn't
01:13:42
behaving strangely anymore at all.
01:13:44
And she's just like a totally functioning adult now.
01:13:46
And there's something there about like how lost these people
01:13:50
feel when they don't have someone to go through their life
01:13:52
with and how kind of crazy and it makes them and how it drives
01:13:56
them to make all these bad decisions.
01:13:58
But they show you, by contrast with someone who has found like
01:14:01
a real partner can kind of pull everything together.
01:14:05
Oh, that's really huh? Yeah, that's really.
01:14:09
Huh. It's about my review of Fallen
01:14:11
Angels. Like, I can't assail this movie
01:14:16
for anything. Like I it's really well made.
01:14:18
It's clearly made with a lot of intention.
01:14:20
Everything that Wong Kar Wai wanted this to be, it is.
01:14:24
And it gets a lot of credit for being really unique, but any
01:14:27
given person's experience with the film is basically like, how
01:14:30
in the mood for you are this right now?
01:14:33
How in the mood for love are you for this?
01:14:35
For this currently and does it connect with you at all?
01:14:40
Sure. Yeah.
01:14:41
I mean, it almost sounds like a it's funny when you were
01:14:44
mentioning the guys like that doesn't speak, but you hear his
01:14:47
monologues. I was.
01:14:48
It's making me think of like Rorschach from Watchmen.
01:14:51
Yeah. And this movie, The way you
01:14:53
described it, almost sounds like a Rorschach test of like, what
01:14:57
do you see when you watch that's.
01:14:59
What I said I was, I was talking to my wife about it because
01:15:01
again, she'd seen she has seen Chunking Express and was like as
01:15:05
she heard me talk about this, she was like, oh, they're the
01:15:07
same. Like she was going to include me
01:15:08
in like these are very much the same kind of story.
01:15:10
And I said to her, I was like, it's like asking someone to
01:15:12
review a kaleidoscope. It's like, I mean, I don't just
01:15:18
look at it like I can't. Did you see like?
01:15:20
I'm did you see that blue though?
01:15:21
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just see the part where it was
01:15:23
like Prismatic Illusion. All I could say is like Fallen
01:15:29
Angels here it is like I normally my view of the film
01:15:34
kind of lines up with whether I'd recommend it to someone else
01:15:36
or recommend it back to you, but with this one, it's so personal.
01:15:41
I think whether anyone would glean anything specific from it.
01:15:43
The things it gets credit for are for being really uniquely
01:15:46
made and well shot and well directed.
01:15:51
As far as whether the story is boring or not, that's totally
01:15:53
going to vary person to person. Yeah, and I mean, I, I've maybe
01:15:57
said this on the show before, but I, I'm trying to avoid
01:15:59
describing a film as boring because I feel like it's, it's
01:16:02
like a reductive type of analysis, especially for a film
01:16:06
like this too. But that's undoubtedly how
01:16:11
people are going to react to certain films.
01:16:13
Yeah, some people find martial arts movies boring.
01:16:16
Right. Exactly.
01:16:16
Yeah, Yeah, it's. Just those people are wrong and
01:16:19
stupid. Yeah, wrong.
01:16:23
And stupid, as it turns out. As it turns out, the results are
01:16:26
in. You're an idiot.
01:16:29
If you didn't interpret shoot fighter the way I interpreted
01:16:31
shoot fighter, what's wrong with you?
01:16:34
Maybe look in the mirror buddy. Yeah, oh, that legitimately
01:16:38
you've you've reminded me of something else.
01:16:40
So visually, Fallen Angels, huge amount of the movie deals in
01:16:44
reflections. Like I mentioned that a lot of
01:16:46
the characters genuinely don't make eye contact when they speak
01:16:48
to each other. It's that kind of artful
01:16:51
arrangement where someone's like staring down the camera and
01:16:53
someone else is in profile. And we also see a ton of imagery
01:16:57
shot through mirrors and camera lenses and other reflections,
01:17:01
which I just thought was really interesting, like visual motif.
01:17:04
So many of the shots we will be there'll be a person framed in a
01:17:08
reflection, but the camera views them through the reflection
01:17:11
instead of just in the space. Yeah, see, that's the kind of
01:17:14
stuff like that's actually great because.
01:17:18
And that that ties into what kind of where I was going to
01:17:20
with like describing the film or like in terms of like
01:17:22
recommending it to somebody. Because like my personal
01:17:25
philosophy, even, you know, like when like when we were making
01:17:30
our own film too, is like, I was always pushing for more like
01:17:36
visual experimental things and like not so much caring how the
01:17:43
audience would feel, you know, like, in terms of like if they
01:17:47
would resonate with that or not. Just because that's that's to me
01:17:51
is like one of the biggest strengths of the medium of
01:17:55
filmmaking. Yeah, art.
01:17:57
I feel like art as meaning it's supposed to be kind of
01:18:01
challenging. If the movie does not challenge
01:18:04
your thinking or your emotions at all, like, you know, AKA
01:18:08
maybe shoot, fight or fight to the deaf, it could be
01:18:10
entertainment, but it's not necessarily going to move you in
01:18:14
any specific way. Whereas despite my experience
01:18:17
watching Fallen Angels being kind of conflicted of like, I
01:18:20
don't really think I'm resonating strongly with this,
01:18:22
I'm going to remember that movie forever.
01:18:24
Like I will be able to recall the strangeness of it.
01:18:27
And I think that in that moment of conflict with what the movie
01:18:31
is showing you and trying to make sense of it, you can glean
01:18:34
your own meaning from it. So that's when the movie works
01:18:36
best is when it is almost at odds with you.
01:18:39
It's not making things easy to understand and is asking you to
01:18:42
kind of meet it halfway. And that can be great.
01:18:45
But again, it's such a mood based thing.
01:18:47
Sometimes I really want that and sometimes I want to watch shoot.
01:18:49
Fighter Oh, of course, yeah, yeah, 'cause I remember this
01:18:53
might have been back in film school, honestly.
01:18:55
But like, like I'd heard it said that it's like entertainment is
01:19:00
meant to reinforce the ideas you already have and art is meant to
01:19:07
challenge your way of thinking. And films are both.
01:19:12
And so it's like those two things are like inherently
01:19:17
contradicting to each other. But great films still somehow
01:19:21
managed to be both, you know. So that seems to be the, the,
01:19:29
the case primarily. So here with Fallen Angels,
01:19:31
where it's like, it's almost like you said, like I feel like
01:19:35
somebody who what like was really feeling isolated or
01:19:41
lonely would watch this film and and respond to it in a
01:19:44
completely different way. Yeah, I think they might really
01:19:47
get something out of watching it.
01:19:49
I mean, I remember being a pretty lonely, you know,
01:19:53
teenager finishing up high school and being kind of
01:19:55
personally isolated and attaching to a lot of movies
01:19:59
that were about this sort of thing.
01:20:01
And I think I'd have the same trouble going back to those.
01:20:04
As I had watching this for the first time where I'm like, I get
01:20:06
what's happening here, I appreciate what you're doing.
01:20:09
It's not really at the speed that I'm at currently.
01:20:11
And so it doesn't really land as strongly.
01:20:14
Although the way you just described the conclusion sounds
01:20:16
a little almost like, well, you know what would fix your
01:20:19
problems, just don't be lonely anymore, just go find someone
01:20:22
like it's like. Yeah, but these people are also
01:20:25
all going about it. It's challenging them for going
01:20:28
about it the wrong way. They are all defined by their
01:20:32
own inability or refusal to communicate how they feel.
01:20:37
The interactions between crazy man and crazy woman number one
01:20:42
are defined by the fact that like they're never really
01:20:44
talking to each other. They're not really together.
01:20:47
They just spend time around each other and they don't communicate
01:20:50
clearly at all. And the main couple, I guess the
01:20:53
a story group, they refuse to communicate how they feel and
01:20:56
like push each other away. And for the hitman, that ends
01:20:59
poorly because the woman when spurned like chooses to get him
01:21:02
killed because she can't handle him being separated from her.
01:21:06
And then he essentially again refuses to make his his
01:21:09
intentions clear and just won't pursue the feelings that he has.
01:21:13
So it puts all of his blame back on the characters, but does also
01:21:17
frame. The alternative is like you
01:21:19
would all be much more normal if you could just get your act
01:21:22
together. Well, because I was thinking of
01:21:25
the, the one character you mentioned, you said she became
01:21:27
like a flight attendant at the end when she was like once she
01:21:30
was in a stable relationship. I I don't know it like I guess
01:21:33
that was just maybe the resolution for that one
01:21:35
character. We also don't know.
01:21:37
I mean, given how the rest of the story is framed, we don't
01:21:40
know that that's actually the same person necessarily.
01:21:42
I think it's the same actor and the guy crazy guy says it's her
01:21:45
but he might just still be tilting at windmills about it
01:21:49
and like just seeing her as other people.
01:21:52
But his impression is that she like, found someone and now it's
01:21:54
behaving totally normally again. Yes, yeah, OK, yeah.
01:21:58
And then I'm sorry I got my crazy ladies mixed up.
01:22:01
So ice cream man and crazy lady one or two.
01:22:05
Ice together and is with Crazy lady #1 Crazy Lady number 2 is
01:22:09
the short haired woman who had a previous fling with the hitman
01:22:12
and is like devastated that he doesn't seem to remember she
01:22:14
existed. And which one becomes the flight
01:22:16
attendant? The one that he ran.
01:22:18
Off with. Oh, so they don't stay together
01:22:21
that that film doesn't end with them together?
01:22:24
No, we actually end the movie with the start of a new
01:22:27
relationship between crazy man and the hitman's partner, woman.
01:22:31
Oh gosh, so there's so. There's so again, the trading
01:22:34
partners, yes, the A and the B plot don't come together until
01:22:38
the very end essentially. Like there's some brief
01:22:40
interactions between the characters in both stories, but
01:22:43
it resolves that way at the end. And then crazy lady number one
01:22:48
becomes the flight attendant. So like some of the characters
01:22:50
end on a higher note and Hitman is very dead.
01:22:56
I'm so annoyed that I don't know these people's names.
01:22:58
I know they all got a name at some point, at least a first
01:23:01
name, but it wouldn't have been any less confusing me trying to
01:23:04
use those than just call him Crazy Man Crazy Lady.
01:23:06
Sure. Yeah, that.
01:23:07
Yeah, that's fine. I don't mind.
01:23:11
So yeah, I don't know. I don't know that I have
01:23:13
anything else for for fallen angels.
01:23:16
Any any pending questions from you I.
01:23:19
Mean it's it's a hard one to like follow up on because I
01:23:23
think, like you said, it's it's very like it to me sounds like
01:23:28
the type of film I would really appreciate from like a film
01:23:31
making perspective, you know, yeah, totally.
01:23:35
But, and I'm also with you in the sense that it's like I gotta
01:23:40
be in the right mood or mentality to sit down and watch
01:23:43
a film that is that is going to be challenging in some way.
01:23:47
You know that there's not just going to be your sort of
01:23:51
standard entertainment that you're familiar with.
01:23:54
Exactly. So hopefully I'm gonna give the
01:23:56
movie a score that's gonna be based on how I felt about it.
01:23:58
You have to. But in terms of the, yeah,
01:24:00
exactly, we are contractually obligated to do something we
01:24:03
normally don't like doing, just ranking things out of 10.
01:24:06
But the real take away is you kind of have to see for
01:24:09
yourself. If you've seen Chunking Express,
01:24:11
definitely watch this one. They're really, really deeply
01:24:15
connected films. Even if you've seen In the Mood
01:24:18
for Love or something, or just like other films in this
01:24:21
ballpark and you liked them, Fallen Angels is a great movie.
01:24:24
But if you're more like me and are not really up to this kind
01:24:27
of speed right now, watch Shoot fighter two or one not. 2, not
01:24:31
2. Yeah, not 2.
01:24:32
Not 2. All right, Frank, I think we can
01:24:40
roll right from there into final scores.
01:24:43
You're going to be up first. What what What are your closing
01:24:46
thoughts and scores for Shoot Fighter 1, not 2?
01:24:50
Not 2. I mean, you can give 2A score if
01:24:53
you want, but it's not going to count for anything.
01:24:55
No, yeah, that would just be for funsies.
01:24:58
I guess I should have thought about this before we got to this
01:25:00
point, huh? Aw.
01:25:05
Man, I never knew this was going to happen.
01:25:11
This is tough. This is tough.
01:25:12
I'm trying not to conflate the two films in my head and just
01:25:17
stick to the first one. I honestly just like a gut
01:25:22
feeling. I want to give shoot fighter a
01:25:24
nine out of 10. A9 Gosh, I.
01:25:30
Just went I just in terms of like, I guess just the premise
01:25:35
of the show, like if you had just seen this movie or whatever
01:25:41
and like recommended it to me, I'd be like, yeah, no, that was
01:25:44
yeah, that's laps. You're right.
01:25:47
Yeah, shoot, fighter. Fight to the deck PG Like they
01:25:51
shoot it, they fight it. All right, I saw it.
01:25:53
Yeah, exactly. It was all there, Mexico
01:25:55
business, you get it, Mexico. Business.
01:26:00
I do want to make the like full blown comedy version of Shoot
01:26:03
Fighter though, because I feel like we really could have filled
01:26:04
the gaps in that with some good slapstick humor.
01:26:07
I mean, it made me laugh out loud at several points.
01:26:10
The the I'm Magic Johnson, that's gonna stick with me.
01:26:13
That's. Can't I can't the I'm Magic
01:26:16
Johnson. This is not a basketball movie.
01:26:19
It's. Just so unprompted and clearly
01:26:23
ADR too that they just threw over the scene.
01:26:25
I was just like, yes, no, no, it's you are magic Jackson,
01:26:29
correct. So, yeah, I mean like a nine
01:26:32
gosh. It just like, I don't know.
01:26:34
It's like you look at it and it's kind of almost like you
01:26:37
said about fallen angels. It's like I think it knew what
01:26:40
it wanted to be. It did that and I agree.
01:26:44
I agree. Yeah, it's a shameless coming
01:26:48
together of popular action karate movie concepts with
01:26:52
actors people would know. I mean, really, if you told
01:26:54
someone in 1993 you're like, hey, you want to watch the bad
01:26:56
guy from Bloodsport fight the bad guy from Karate Kid?
01:27:00
And then they actually do. You'd be like, yeah, it it has
01:27:03
the fulfilled, right. It has the exact same appeal as
01:27:07
Cobra Kai, where it's like no one would ever accuse Cobra Kai
01:27:11
of being an amazing television show, but it's.
01:27:17
Great nonetheless, you know, like, it's great for people who
01:27:22
like that kind of thing. That's maybe the similarity
01:27:24
between the two movies today. Like, if you are a fan of this
01:27:26
kind of filmmaking, here's one for you.
01:27:29
Yeah, because I honestly like, I mean, I don't know what you're
01:27:31
going to score fallen angels, but I feel like I would, I would
01:27:34
score fallen angels really high too, like given the.
01:27:38
Type of film it is I. Would I?
01:27:40
Would. But you tell me, buddy.
01:27:45
Tell me. Gosh, I'm, I'm torn.
01:27:49
So when I finished the movie, because we, we've said before
01:27:51
that the review score comes after the conversation about it
01:27:54
because that can change how you feel.
01:27:56
I finished watching Fallen Angels a couple days ago and I
01:27:59
think at the time I said it was a six because as much as I liked
01:28:04
what it was doing, the movie did leave me feeling kind of bored.
01:28:07
And I was almost frustrated that we didn't get more development
01:28:10
with the A plot and ended up with so much of that B plot,
01:28:13
considering the part we got less of was much more interesting.
01:28:16
But this is definitely a movie that you ruminate on over time
01:28:21
and in your opinion immediately softens.
01:28:23
Like right away, I'm like a six, come on, you can do better than
01:28:26
that, even though it's my score. What about all the ice?
01:28:30
Cream. Yeah.
01:28:31
What about all that ice cream? Oh my God.
01:28:32
The ice cream scene was shorter, and maybe I could rate it
01:28:35
higher. I don't know.
01:28:36
I'm torn between a six and an 8 because sevens aren't real.
01:28:41
Nothing's A7. I mean, we can, you can give it
01:28:44
a 7 if you wanted, but yeah. No, it's not a real 7A7 out of
01:28:48
10 is. I have nothing to say about this
01:28:50
movie that we decided a 7 out of 10.
01:28:52
Stare blankly at the microphone and don't say anything.
01:28:54
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, 90 minute upload of
01:28:58
like light breathing. I don't know, I guess I could
01:29:03
give Fallen Angels an 8 because again, while watching it I had
01:29:10
conflicted feelings about it, but as soon as the movie's done
01:29:12
and it's just a memory in my head, it feels a lot.
01:29:16
Better. And I honestly feel like that's
01:29:17
one of the strengths of a film like that because if you watch
01:29:21
it like something that is, that is shot more traditionally,
01:29:25
especially shot traditionally is like like standard American film
01:29:29
making, like you're so used to that, that your brain's just
01:29:33
going to kind of filter that out very quickly.
01:29:35
But like something like this where it uses those interesting
01:29:41
visual and like storytelling elements that is going to stick
01:29:44
with you longer just inherently just because it's something your
01:29:47
brain's not as familiar with. That's exactly why I want to
01:29:51
give Fallen Angels a higher score, because we talked about
01:29:54
how that conflict is productive. To be approached by something in
01:29:58
an art form you're used to watching really easy movies in
01:30:01
and be given something a lot harder to digest is meaningful.
01:30:04
And I'm going to remember that so much more than a lot of other
01:30:10
movies that I would say at the time felt easier to get through.
01:30:13
And I think it would be genuinely unfair to write off
01:30:15
Fallen Angels, considering I did have a lot to say about it.
01:30:17
I talked about it for like 40 minutes.
01:30:19
Right. Yeah, exactly.
01:30:21
OK. So that's an 8 out of 10 for
01:30:22
Fallen Angels, a nine out of 10. Unbelievable for sure.
01:30:27
To the death. This show is just a couple of
01:30:31
hacks about these two movies as being anywhere in the same
01:30:35
ballpark. This also means that I, for the
01:30:40
5th episode in a row, have won me your double feature.
01:30:46
OK, just to recap. So when this show started our
01:30:49
first episode, our scores were pretty similar.
01:30:51
Second episode, Total Bomb went off where I gave your pick an 8
01:30:55
and you gave mine a three. So I was in the hole for a
01:30:57
while. I spent some time crawling back
01:30:59
out of there and now I'm just pulled pretty far ahead.
01:31:03
The difference is now pretty much the same, but in the
01:31:04
opposite direction. Where you in season 1 Overall,
01:31:08
your movies have scored a cumulative total of like 6
01:31:10
points fewer than mine. Yeah, you just like don't get
01:31:12
it, man. Like I just don't.
01:31:14
Get it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:31:16
Like if you liked it more and you weren't so stupid, then, you
01:31:19
know, maybe you'd say the right numbers.
01:31:22
Yeah. Just like what?
01:31:22
What are you doing? Like, all right, I just want to
01:31:25
give that context again, because we're in the second-half of
01:31:27
Season 1, we're planning on doing 12 episodes.
01:31:30
If we don't face any production delays, I think the end of
01:31:33
Season 1 will be basically the end of this calendar year.
01:31:37
So stay tuned for the rest of 2025.
01:31:38
Frank has some some some room to make up.
01:31:42
And with that in mind, why don't we get into our picks for next
01:31:44
time? Yeah.
01:31:46
Am I going first? I was just about to ask OK
01:31:48
sorry. So per the rules of the game,
01:31:50
whoever gets a higher score in the episode gets to pick their
01:31:52
next movie 1st and we forget about that every single time we
01:31:55
record. So as much as I was about to be
01:31:59
nice and be like no you go first.
01:32:01
Not allowed. So I believe I could be wrong.
01:32:05
So when episode 8, our next episode releases, it'll probably
01:32:07
be the day before Halloween. And so with that in mind, I gave
01:32:11
Frank the tip off to maybe select kind of a spooky
01:32:14
Halloween season film. And I did the same.
01:32:16
So Frank, your next movie is 1995's The Prophecy.
01:32:21
Oh OK, tell me more. No, just fine.
01:32:28
Yeah. See you later.
01:32:28
No. So The Prophecy.
01:32:30
I've been picking movies a lot lately based on who's in them,
01:32:32
because I think that's the easiest way to gauge like, is
01:32:34
Frank gonna like this if I if I give him a movie with so and so
01:32:37
in it? And this is one of the weirdest
01:32:39
combinations yet. So the Prophecy, First off, is
01:32:42
marketed as, like, every genre imaginable.
01:32:43
It's like an action fantasy horror mystery.
01:32:47
Film. Wow.
01:32:48
That's a lot. The main character is played by
01:32:51
Christopher Walken, but in the rest of the cast we have Elias
01:32:55
Couteus who a lot of people would know as Casey Jones from
01:32:59
the 90s live action Ninja Turtles movies and Vigo
01:33:04
Mortensen AKA Aragorn from Lord of the Rings.
01:33:08
Together at last, you know. Together at last.
01:33:11
Every time I watch Ninja Turtles I think What if Aragorn, son of
01:33:16
Aragorn? I think that about most movies
01:33:20
actually, but. Yeah, yeah, exactly. 1995's The
01:33:23
Prophecy. That'll be for next time for
01:33:25
what is essentially our Halloween episode.
01:33:27
OK, cool. What?
01:33:28
What year was that one? 1995. 95 all right, great cool
01:33:33
do you want one do you want or should we just.
01:33:35
Yeah, yeah, that'd be good. I mean, I could go watch shoot
01:33:40
Fighter two or three or something.
01:33:42
Oh shoot, Fighter five, no. Shoot fighter.
01:33:50
They're not that clever. Don't give them.
01:33:51
That. No, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:33:51
It's not. They don't know how.
01:33:54
Your movie if you want, if you want to watch it, if you.
01:33:57
Want if you if you have time. Not busy is 1999 Tim Burton's
01:34:07
Sleepy Hollow. Oh, interesting, interesting.
01:34:11
I'm familiar with this movie. I haven't seen it.
01:34:14
OK, good. I was.
01:34:15
Yeah, I was like this one. Seems this one is verging on
01:34:18
pretty like mainstream. So I was wondering if this is 1
01:34:21
you hadn't seen before? Because this is Johnny Depp,
01:34:24
isn't it? Right.
01:34:25
Yes, OK, this will be funny. I'm going to, I'm going to show
01:34:28
some vulnerability here. I historically am kind of a wimp
01:34:32
about scary movies. I for some reason even if I
01:34:36
watch the movie and I don't feel scared, it just like gives me
01:34:39
nightmares sometimes if there's a movie with like particularly
01:34:42
upsetting imagery in it. And I think I once was debating
01:34:46
watching Sleepy Hollow with my wife and she was like looking at
01:34:49
the IMDb parents guide and she was like I think this is too
01:34:52
much for you. Because because of Johnny Depp,
01:34:55
you're just. Like, because of Johnny Depp?
01:34:56
Yeah. Aw, man.
01:34:59
This never Woody Allen, Johnny Depp.
01:35:01
Who else we got? They're going to be like next
01:35:02
time Bill Cosby stars all these problematic men.
01:35:09
Yeah, yeah. No, that's like you said, it's a
01:35:12
Halloween episode. It's a Halloween episode.
01:35:15
Episode. Also, I genuinely don't think
01:35:17
it's going to be that bad at all.
01:35:19
No, it's Tim. Burton like.
01:35:21
It's Tim Burton. Although.
01:35:23
What's the worst that could happen?
01:35:24
I do remember when I was younger and I saw Edward Scissorhands,
01:35:28
that movie kind of creeps me out a bit.
01:35:30
Yeah. So.
01:35:32
Well, we'll see. I mean, again, it's a spooky
01:35:34
season episode. If I come back in like a cold
01:35:36
sweat and I'm like, so I watched Sleepy Hollow when I freaked
01:35:39
out. And did you say cuz the lead of
01:35:42
the movie you recommended is Christopher Walken?
01:35:44
You said yeah, cuz he's in this as well.
01:35:46
So. Cool, TuneIn in two weeks for a
01:35:50
Christopher Walken double feature.
01:35:53
Maybe scary, maybe scary, but not too scary.
01:35:56
Or else you'll never hear from me again.
01:35:58
Tell me I'm under my bed forever.
01:36:05
The Prophecy. Thank you for listening to our
01:36:21
show. As always, if you enjoyed
01:36:23
tonight's episode, please consider giving it a like,
01:36:25
giving our show a review, recommending it to a friend, all
01:36:28
the usual stuff. You can also find us on
01:36:30
Instagram at Meet Your Double Feature or follow us on Blue Sky
01:36:33
at Mydfpod. The other big announcement for
01:36:37
tonight is that Meet Your Double Feature now has its own website,
01:36:40
youcanvisitus@meetyourdoublefeature.com, spelled in full just like the
01:36:44
show. In order to listen to full
01:36:46
episodes, you can read some written movie review blogs based
01:36:50
on films we covered on the show. There's going to be some more
01:36:52
additional content landing there as well, and it's just a great
01:36:55
place to find links on whatever platform you choose to listen
01:36:58
to. So again, that's Meet Your
01:36:59
doublefeature.com if you want to follow us and learn more.
01:37:03
That's all for now. We'll be back in two weeks with
01:37:05
our next episode. Until then, thanks for
01:37:08
listening. Coming up next.
01:37:19
It's. Sleepy Hollow followed by the
01:37:22
prophecy on Meet Your Double feature.