It's the Season 1 Recap! Join Thomas and Frank as they revisit 24 forgotten films from the 1990s, ranking each one from best to worst in one exhaustive list.
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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.
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For full episodes, written reviews and more, visit our website at https://www.MeetYourDoubleFeature.com/
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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
(02:37) Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael & Pump Up the Volume
(16:34) A Simple Plan & The Grifters
(26:13) Gamera & Soapdish
(35:58) Double Impact & Soldier
(47:18) Deep Cover & Everyone Says I Love You
(55:14) The Jackal & Doc Hollywood
(01:03:24) Shootfighter & Fallen Angels
(01:11:38) Sleepy Hollow & The Prophecy
(01:20:27) No Escape & Rushmore
(01:26:52) Sphere & Memphis Belle
(01:31:59) The Wrong Guy & Cutthroat Island
(01:38:15) Babylon 5 The Gathering & The Cutting Edge
(01:46:28) Wrap-Up & Outro
00:00:09
Hello and welcome to Meet Your Double Feature.
00:00:11
My name is Thomas, joined as always by my brother Frank.
00:00:14
Frank, how's it going? Excited.
00:00:16
Excited. For the recap, is that what this
00:00:18
is? Excited for the recap?
00:00:19
That is what this is. I'm also excited.
00:00:21
If you've been listening to our show so far, you'll know that we
00:00:23
just finished our first season talking about forgotten films of
00:00:26
the 1990s, and in doing so we have reviewed 24 individual
00:00:31
films between the two of us in just under six months, which is
00:00:36
kind of nuts to be honest. Pretty cool, Pretty cool.
00:00:40
Pretty cool. And So what we're doing for
00:00:42
tonight's episode is both for people who've been here all
00:00:45
along or maybe anybody who this is their first time listening,
00:00:48
we're just going to recap what Season 1 has been about, revisit
00:00:50
our thoughts from each pair of films that we've discussed, see
00:00:53
if our opinions on any of them have changed in any significant
00:00:56
way. I can tease that, Frank, I think
00:00:59
you and I have both now gone back and watched one of the
00:01:03
movies that we asked the other person to watch.
00:01:05
So there's at least a couple on this list that we have both seen
00:01:08
and can compare notes on for for once.
00:01:10
Oh yeah, yeah, that is true. I I've only watched one of the
00:01:13
of the ones that I. Recommend for you something
00:01:15
that's always been a thing with us, even before we did this show
00:01:18
is like, if I know a movie is good, sometimes I'll be like,
00:01:21
Frank already saw this, so I'll just check it off in my head as
00:01:25
well, which doesn't make any sense, but that's just how we've
00:01:27
operated. Goes in the the shared databank.
00:01:30
Shared Databank, which is what this is going to be because
00:01:33
we've also, or I've also decided to rank all of the movies based
00:01:37
on the individual scores We gave each one out of 10.
00:01:40
So that in summary, we'll essentially have our own list of
00:01:43
like the top 24 underrated films of the 1990s, which is in a very
00:01:48
specific list that I don't think anybody's ever looked for, but
00:01:51
they have it now. You you have those scores in
00:01:54
front of you because I don't have them handy so.
00:01:57
I have. We're going to talk about each
00:01:59
pair of movies in the order that the episodes came out as a way
00:02:02
for us to trace both the history of our conversation and just the
00:02:05
history of the first season of us making Meet Your Double
00:02:07
feature. But as we go, especially if
00:02:10
you're watching on YouTube with the video version, I'll be
00:02:12
updating graphics throughout showing the actual leaderboard
00:02:15
based on the scores that we gave at the time.
00:02:17
We do have a pretty clear #1 only one movie in this entire
00:02:21
list got a 10 out of 10 score from whichever of us reviewed
00:02:24
it, so stay tuned for that in case you have not already seen
00:02:27
which one that is. I know.
00:02:30
Oh yeah, Frank, remember? I was there.
00:02:37
All right, so I guess Frank, we'll just move straight in with
00:02:39
the two films that we talked about in our premiere episode,
00:02:42
Meet Your Double Features Season 1 Episode 1, which I think for a
00:02:46
long time in my notes was just called the pilot.
00:02:48
That was where we talked about, well, I guess I'll let you go
00:02:51
first. What was the first movie I asked
00:02:52
you to review for the show? Well, the the title of that
00:02:55
episode is a title is important, which I like as like the sort of
00:03:00
pilot episode title. So I'll just throw that out
00:03:03
there. I like that.
00:03:04
I was, I was naming the early episodes based on things we
00:03:06
actually said in the episode, because you say at one point
00:03:09
talking about your film, a title is important.
00:03:12
And I just thought that that struck me right away when when
00:03:14
listening back, it's like, Oh yeah, that's it.
00:03:15
That's our pilot. Yeah, that's cool.
00:03:18
That's cool, and it was because I was talking about the somewhat
00:03:22
odd title of the film, Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael, which in
00:03:29
hindsight was a really interesting one to talk about
00:03:31
for the first episode. Possibly the weirdest movie on
00:03:34
this list, like the most unknown.
00:03:37
I've still to this day never seen anybody say a word either
00:03:40
way about this movie, even though it has multiple like
00:03:43
recognizable names in it. Yeah, that's a good point.
00:03:46
I mean, like I, I don't have much to to say to revisit with
00:03:51
Roxy Carmichael, but it it is reminding me of something
00:03:54
completely unrelated in a way. Before we begin something
00:03:59
totally different. Completely.
00:04:01
Well, no, it ties in because it's the title.
00:04:03
You know, I was like, I, I thought this one was an odd
00:04:05
title. I remember positing at the time
00:04:07
that that might have been part of the reason that it it was
00:04:11
somewhat forgotten. It kind of fell in between the
00:04:13
cracks of this era. But I just went to go see at the
00:04:17
Academy Museum, they'll sometimes do screenings here in
00:04:21
LA. And just yesterday I went to go
00:04:23
see the screening of Home Alone and Macaulay Culkin and the
00:04:27
director, the director, Chris Columbus were there.
00:04:30
But I noticed while watching that movie that that that one of
00:04:34
the actresses playing Kevin Mcallister's sisters in that
00:04:37
movie was played by Hilary Wolf, who you and I have a familiarity
00:04:43
with because of that movie. Step kids.
00:04:47
Yeah, I think, I'll be honest, I don't think it made it.
00:04:50
We talked about Step Kids in an episode in season 1, but I think
00:04:53
I cut it for time so people wouldn't have heard that yet.
00:04:55
But that's interesting. Was a movie that we kept seeing
00:04:59
the trailer for growing up because it was on the VHS of
00:05:03
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 Secret of the Use.
00:05:06
So anytime we wanted to watch that, we had to Fast forward
00:05:09
through the trailer for Step Kids, which I guess in its
00:05:12
original incarnation or no, originally it was called Step
00:05:14
Kids, but then by the time it released had like a really
00:05:16
weird, different title, right? And that's that's why I'm
00:05:19
bringing it up because it it's probably one of the worst movie
00:05:22
titles I've ever seen. Honestly, it's so bad.
00:05:26
It's like in the trailer that we saw it was titled Step Kids,
00:05:30
which is fine, but then it was retitled upon release to Big
00:05:34
Girls Don't Cry ellipses. They get even, which is just
00:05:39
like, yeah, I mean this. Is just in the middle.
00:05:42
That's egregious. Yeah, exactly.
00:05:45
I mean, this is like I I always joke about like panic at the
00:05:48
disco type song titles where it's just like a long run on
00:05:52
sentence almost. And like with the whole title's
00:05:55
important that we, you know, we talked about in the first
00:05:57
episode that just reminded me of this one.
00:06:00
And this, I think, is probably the front runner in terms of
00:06:02
like, maybe worst movie title I've ever seen.
00:06:05
So that's just what that first episode reminded me of.
00:06:09
So Roxy Carmichael's not the worst title you've ever seen,
00:06:11
but it's a similar problem. Yeah, yeah, I, I, I think that's
00:06:15
something I talked about Like, I, I thought Roxy Carmichael was
00:06:17
fine. Like, there's there's movies on
00:06:19
this list that, you know, especially with the scoring that
00:06:21
we did, where I would maybe go back and like, now that I've had
00:06:27
some time to reflect on him and seen, you know, several more
00:06:30
movies throughout the course of the season that I would look at
00:06:34
differently. Roxy Carmichael's probably not
00:06:36
one I would like revisit. You know, it's not when I would
00:06:39
go back and watch again. It was an interesting one to do
00:06:41
for the first episode to kind of like get our feet wet with this
00:06:45
concept. Yeah, because it's it's an
00:06:47
aggressively 90s movie. It's a type of movie that's not
00:06:50
made anymore. It seemed from what you said and
00:06:52
what I later saw in trailers to be very like visually, just
00:06:56
obviously a 90s film. And for the record, you did give
00:06:59
it because we decided from the beginning to do scores out of
00:07:02
10, even though as people outside of the show, we don't do
00:07:05
that. I think it's usually kind of
00:07:06
stupid, but you gave Roxy Carmichael a six out of 10.
00:07:09
Which I think it's fair. I think that's fair scoring.
00:07:12
And then, you know, as we go on, I, I, I think we've kind of had
00:07:15
to adjust our scoring system to to, you know, be more, I don't
00:07:20
know, it's difficult. It's a difficult thing to do to,
00:07:22
to kind of narrow something down, which like you said, is
00:07:24
why we don't normally do it. But I think that's a fair score
00:07:27
for Roxy Carmichael. This one, like I, I don't think
00:07:30
I'll be watching it again, but it was fine.
00:07:32
It was. It was.
00:07:34
Yeah, it has Winona Ryder in a post Beetlejuice pre anything
00:07:39
else kind of role because she was like in a lot of stuff in
00:07:43
the 90s and then dropped off for a while and came back way later
00:07:46
as the Mom and Stranger Things. But it's funny to see something
00:07:50
from her peak era in the 90s, her first peak, that most people
00:07:54
probably would have no idea exists.
00:07:55
Yeah, I mean, if you're a big Winona Ryder fan, this would
00:07:58
probably be 1 worth. Checking out if you're Winona.
00:08:02
Ride or die, if you will. Get out, get out, all right.
00:08:06
You're done. But I had a sound effect of a
00:08:08
door slamming. Yeah.
00:08:13
Welcome home, Roxy Carmichael, 6 out of 10 again.
00:08:15
You can hear about that in our first episode.
00:08:17
It is interesting. I went back and listened to some
00:08:19
of our first episode recently. At the time of recording, we
00:08:22
just finished and released episode 11, so the second to
00:08:25
last for Season 1. Listening to the first one's
00:08:28
crazy because I have a background and you and I both
00:08:31
have backgrounds in like media production and broadcasting and
00:08:34
film and all this other stuff. But I never sat down and tried
00:08:36
to just like do a full audio edit before.
00:08:40
And it's immediately episode one has landed in that territory
00:08:43
that a lot of creatives get into where they're like, can I just
00:08:46
delete the first several things we released because you, you
00:08:50
like figure out things later that you end up sticking with
00:08:53
that become more of like your template.
00:08:55
And you just go back and you're like, God, I wish I could do
00:08:57
this again. Can I do like a 20th anniversary
00:09:00
remaster for that episode when we get to it?
00:09:04
Maybe, yeah, maybe we'll maybe. Oh, that'll be fun.
00:09:06
What if we like redid it and then just each watched the other
00:09:10
movie? Like you had to talk about Roxy
00:09:12
Carmichael and then and. That would be actually really
00:09:15
fun. Write that down.
00:09:16
Play, play the door slam again, and then write that down.
00:09:21
Yeah. Pivoting to the other film we
00:09:24
talked about in episode 1, so their first review, Welcome
00:09:26
home, Roxy Carmichael. I asked Frank to watch that.
00:09:28
He gave it a six out of 10. You asked me to watch Pump Up
00:09:31
the Volume from 1990 starring Christian Slater as a pirate
00:09:36
radio DJ. High school boy.
00:09:40
Yep. I was trying to put that all
00:09:43
into one sentence, but it's kind of A2 sentence summary.
00:09:45
He has a disaffected teen in a fairly well off neighborhood in
00:09:49
California in the 90s who starts an underground radio station
00:09:53
where he like speaks truth to power and kind of riles up all
00:09:56
the kids in his school to deal with, you know, the problems of
00:10:00
society in their time as well as like a villainous school
00:10:04
administration. I gave pump up the volume an 8
00:10:08
out of 10 when we first watched it.
00:10:10
This is 1 where given how we sort of honed in on our scoring
00:10:14
process later, I would probably actually rank a little bit
00:10:17
higher, maybe like a nine. Oh I I didn't even remember that
00:10:20
you gave it an 8. That's that's seems high for
00:10:24
what I remember you saying about this movie.
00:10:26
It's interesting. Like I think early on I wasn't
00:10:29
certain if a 10 out of 10 movie was like, reserved for the best,
00:10:33
you know? Does it have to be like Lord of
00:10:35
the Rings or Citizen Kane to get out of 10 out of 10?
00:10:39
Or does it just need to be the best version of itself?
00:10:41
Like, there's no way Welcome home, Roxy Carmichael could be a
00:10:45
10 out of 10 if the bar is that high.
00:10:47
So I think over time it became more of like, is this the
00:10:50
perfect version of what this movie wanted to be?
00:10:53
And I think that Pump Up the Volume was a very effective
00:10:56
comedy drama that is really fun to revisit as a time capsule of
00:11:00
the early 90s and features some surprisingly good performances.
00:11:04
I think the only things I really knocked it for were that
00:11:07
Christian Slater's character as this sort of prophet of the
00:11:11
people who's trying to, like, explain what's wrong with the
00:11:14
world they're all in, wasn't like specific enough.
00:11:16
Like, he didn't have anything really moving to say.
00:11:20
But in retrospect, that's like almost the point.
00:11:22
He's a child. Like, of course, he doesn't
00:11:25
really have the answers to any of this.
00:11:26
He's kind of putting it on the audience and his actual audience
00:11:30
in the story as like, we just all need to have the
00:11:33
conversation. I don't know the answers, but we
00:11:35
just need to try harder. So I don't know that I feel as
00:11:38
strongly about that criticism. That's why I maybe would bump it
00:11:40
to like a nine. Sure.
00:11:42
Yeah. And I mean, that almost sounds
00:11:43
like a case where there's a difference between what, like
00:11:45
the character in the context of the story is trying to say and
00:11:49
what the filmmaker is trying to say, like through those
00:11:52
characters, I guess. Yeah, I think I may be set too
00:11:55
high of an expectation for what that movie was supposed to be
00:11:58
doing, but it's just like a very fun 90s movie.
00:12:03
Again, like it's fun if you're specifically trying to kind of
00:12:05
submerge yourself in that atmosphere.
00:12:08
Both of these movies from our first episode are just peak 90s,
00:12:10
which is funny because they're turn of the decade and were
00:12:13
probably produced in 1989. Yeah, yeah, that's true.
00:12:16
I do wonder how many, like, I mean, you and I, especially
00:12:20
growing up in the 90s, are just such a fan of this era, like
00:12:25
that decade of of filmmaking. I wonder how many like big 90s
00:12:29
movies fans there are, though. A lot of people have a lot of
00:12:33
reference for like 80s films and 70s style filmmaking, 90s almost
00:12:40
like like a forgotten decade in a way in terms of filmmaking so.
00:12:45
That's that's a fairpoint. I would say that in, like the
00:12:48
broad strokes of film history, you can definitely point to
00:12:51
larger developments about, like, filmmaking as an art form and
00:12:55
how it changed in, like, the golden age Hollywood era and
00:12:58
then that 70s, like auteur period in the advent of the
00:13:01
blockbuster film. And then even by the end of the
00:13:04
90s, you're just starting to get into these, like, groundbreaking
00:13:07
VFX movies and what that was going to mean for cinema going
00:13:10
forward. But the 90s was kind of just
00:13:12
like a commercial peak. You know, it's like you had a
00:13:15
lot of fun movies that were sort of piggybacking off of
00:13:20
innovations that have come before them.
00:13:21
But yeah, I would say at that kind of high level view, there's
00:13:25
not as much innovation during that time.
00:13:27
But to your point, we were kids and so we just identify with it
00:13:30
pretty strongly. Yeah, yeah.
00:13:31
I'm just hoping there's a lot of other 90s movies fans out there
00:13:35
that will appreciate. People do, like, I think a lot
00:13:37
of people in America who grew up in the 90s have this like pride
00:13:40
about it because pop culture was kind of booming at the time.
00:13:43
In general, there was just a lot of color and imagination in a
00:13:47
lot of the pop culture exports of that time that people look
00:13:49
back on. It's like things were cool.
00:13:51
We had Toys-R-Us and $1.00 Mcchickens.
00:13:55
You know, we could do whatever we wanted.
00:13:59
We've also pointed it out before and, and I think even in some of
00:14:01
the movies we watched this season, like it was a common
00:14:04
thing to hear in that time period in like media, like it's
00:14:07
the 90s, you know, like that was such a like descriptive thing
00:14:10
you could say like. You could say that up until the
00:14:13
2000s, when the 2000s became both the decade and the century
00:14:18
and the Millennium, and it got really confusing.
00:14:20
But up until that, people would. I remember a line from like an
00:14:22
episode of The Simpsons where somebody's like, Marge, it's the
00:14:25
90s. And I'm like, God, I want to
00:14:26
bring that back because it's now we can do it.
00:14:28
I'm going to be like, hey, it's the 20s.
00:14:31
You know, that thing that predated one of the largest
00:14:33
economic crashes. And then they cut me off and
00:14:34
slammed the door again. I think that type of language,
00:14:38
and this is piggybacking off something I heard from, I think
00:14:42
it was Adam Conover, his podcast that I'm a fan of, but that type
00:14:47
of language has been replaced by generational language.
00:14:51
Like, now we talk about, you know, Boomers and Millennials
00:14:53
and Gen. Z, and it's like that type of
00:14:55
language has replaced the, like, sort of shared decade
00:14:58
experience. I guess that's because up
00:15:02
through the 90s, when the Internet was still in its
00:15:04
infancy, there was more of like a monoculture in the world.
00:15:08
People were more collectively shaped by things that were
00:15:11
trending and popular, and that funnel of what was popular was a
00:15:15
lot narrower and dictated by like what made it to the
00:15:18
newspapers and what was on TV. Where is now?
00:15:22
It's harder to define yourself based on that narrow of a window
00:15:25
of time because like my 20 tens could be so radically different
00:15:29
from someone else's that it's easier to be like, well, were
00:15:31
you born around this time? Because at least if you're a
00:15:33
kid, in the same span of years, you might have had more of a
00:15:36
shared experience. Yeah, that.
00:15:38
Yeah, exactly. And I think that's maybe why I
00:15:42
guess I was such a big fan or, or, or just really am a big fan
00:15:46
of films of this era. Because even if it's like, like
00:15:51
all of these were like 90s movies that you and I had not
00:15:54
seen before, but they still had a real sense of familiarity to
00:15:57
them because of the films that were a part of that monoculture.
00:16:03
You know, they felt similar to those to that shared experience
00:16:06
we had with a lot of other people.
00:16:07
So yeah, I, I that's like there's a weird like nostalgia
00:16:11
for, for stuff you haven't even seen before.
00:16:15
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
00:16:16
Like as soon as pop up, the volume starts.
00:16:18
I'm like, I've never seen a frame of this movie, but it
00:16:20
feels really cozy as soon as it begins, which was kind of a
00:16:24
theme with a lot of what we watched.
00:16:26
Which reminds me, we just did about 20 minutes on the first
00:16:29
episode, and we have 11 more. So we're going to move on to our
00:16:31
discussions from episode 2 of our podcast, where because we
00:16:35
flip who goes 1st every time. I gave the first review.
00:16:38
Frank, you asked me to watch 1998 A Simple Plan from Sam
00:16:42
Raimi. This was probably our least
00:16:45
jokey review we've done all season.
00:16:47
It was such a like, straightforward, like, yeah,
00:16:49
movie is pretty good. Here's why.
00:16:51
It's not funny. Not funny, nothing funny about
00:16:54
it. I think I thought it was funny
00:16:55
because at one point someone gets killed with a shotgun and
00:16:58
Sam Raimi made the body go like flying into the ceiling in a
00:17:00
kind of like cartoonish manner. And that stood out to me because
00:17:03
of how much it felt at odds with the rest of the movie.
00:17:07
But overall, A Simple Plan is a very like serious kind of
00:17:11
Twilight Zone esque story about a group of men, a couple of whom
00:17:17
are very poor and in need of a change in their life.
00:17:19
They come across a bunch of money in the woods and they end
00:17:22
up spending the film trying to grapple with the moral dilemma
00:17:25
of like, whose money is this? Is it safe for us to take it?
00:17:27
Is it right for us to take it? And the natural consequences of
00:17:31
that, which ends with several murders.
00:17:32
So it's a good, solid movie. It has sort of faded from my
00:17:37
memory since watching it, which is that intangible we talked
00:17:41
about with the forgotten 90s films, Like why are we not still
00:17:44
talking about A simple plan? And I think in this case, a lot
00:17:48
of it's maybe because the film felt so strongly like a book
00:17:50
adaptation. This is where we really
00:17:52
solidified our time to book realization theory.
00:17:57
Yeah. I don't know.
00:17:58
It just, it's a great movie. I felt a little underwhelmed by
00:18:02
the ending, which maybe that's another part of it too.
00:18:04
If it didn't end on a strong note, it's easier to kind of
00:18:06
like put it behind you. I remember you were like, my
00:18:10
memory is that was one of your biggest criticisms is, is how
00:18:13
the movie ended and how it kind of missed this sort of easy or
00:18:17
like narratively fulfilling off ramps and just kind of went for
00:18:19
something that just didn't land at all.
00:18:22
It went for the simplest off ramp and then still the off ramp
00:18:26
was too long. Like the movie with the ending
00:18:28
it chose to go with by being a little bit more straightforward
00:18:31
needed to wrap itself up sooner than it did.
00:18:33
So it just kind of drags. And I think the a simple plan
00:18:36
was on track to be a 10 out of 10 with our revised scoring
00:18:39
system of like, is this the best movie it can be?
00:18:42
And instead I dropped it down to an 8 because I was so frustrated
00:18:44
by that last like 20 minutes. So, interesting point in the
00:18:49
race to fall apart, but it kind of did.
00:18:52
You gave both of the 1st movies I recommended to you like high
00:18:55
scores. What?
00:18:56
What happened? You just started.
00:18:57
You got more critical after that you just started.
00:18:59
What happened? What happened to you?
00:19:01
You started picking the worst. Movies.
00:19:03
No, these are blind pics. Yeah, well, pick blind better.
00:19:07
That's the premise, Yeah. At the end of episode 2, 'cause
00:19:11
we started keeping track of the total scores.
00:19:14
So like the first movie, I gave yours an 8.
00:19:16
The second movie I picked, I gave you an 8.
00:19:17
So at that point you had a 16 out of 20, and we ended up with
00:19:20
scores out of a total possible of like 120.
00:19:24
And you were so far in the lead at the beginning that it was
00:19:27
pretty funny that it completely flipped.
00:19:29
And then right before the end we were like almost neck and neck
00:19:31
again. It's a tight race.
00:19:33
Yeah, yeah. So what was your what was your
00:19:36
second movie? He's thinking about it.
00:19:41
It was your favorite movie? The Grifters.
00:19:43
Oh, the grifters. Yeah, Yeah.
00:19:48
I've, I've brought this movie up throughout the entire season
00:19:50
jokingly as like the low point in terms of like films.
00:19:56
I I've forgotten. It was the second one of the
00:19:58
season. I just did not care for this
00:20:01
movie at all. It it almost, I almost have like
00:20:05
a weird fondness for it now, in terms of like how much I've
00:20:08
ragged on it. But it was oddly unpleasant.
00:20:11
And I remember my biggest take away was just that like visually
00:20:17
and tonally and in terms of the pacing, it felt like it was like
00:20:24
if you took like a great crime movie, like a Scorsese type film
00:20:31
and just like stripped all of the flavor and filmmaking
00:20:35
expertise away and like cinematography, it just didn't
00:20:39
have any of that, you know, it was just like, it just had this
00:20:43
blandness to it that that made everything that was happening
00:20:46
even more uncomfortable and kind of dull, kind of dull.
00:20:50
It's interesting that you bring up Scorsese because I think he
00:20:53
was listed as a producer, so he had some contribution to the
00:20:56
film, but absolutely was not in the chair for this one.
00:20:59
I think it was a Stephen Frears movie I did actually.
00:21:05
So I was, I was doing some, some holiday shopping because it's in
00:21:08
December still when I'm recording this.
00:21:10
And I was looking at the yearly like Criterion Collection DVD
00:21:14
sale because I wanted to pick up a few things.
00:21:17
And I nearly as a joke, bought you the 4K Grifters Criterion
00:21:21
Collection DVD because I just thought it'd be really funny.
00:21:25
That's, I mean, that is funny, that's interesting that it's in
00:21:28
the Criterion Collection, honestly, because I, I did have
00:21:31
that movie. It is, it is.
00:21:33
And I, it, it's interesting when you find yourself at sort of
00:21:37
that impasse where it's a film that is very critically well
00:21:40
received. And I think often times if it's
00:21:44
something that's critically well received or really popular, I
00:21:47
can usually understand why to an extent, but just recognize like,
00:21:52
maybe this just didn't click for me.
00:21:54
And I can kind of see that with grifters.
00:21:55
But at the same time, I'm like, I really don't get it.
00:21:58
I I don't think this is a good film like And so it, it does
00:22:03
baffle me a bit that it does have such high critical acclaim.
00:22:07
It is funny like the nature of our format, the idea that we
00:22:11
pick a movie that we think will be good but that we can't verify
00:22:14
because we haven't seen it and know as little as possible leads
00:22:17
to these like weird impasses where you you can't really be
00:22:20
affected by like, well, I have to say it's good because other
00:22:23
people like it or vice versa. You get kind of an authentic
00:22:26
experience watching the movie because you just aren't always
00:22:29
certain if even it's popular or not.
00:22:31
I thought Grifters would be a win because it's the person
00:22:34
selecting it. I saw that it had good critical
00:22:36
reviews, so it was really funny to me in recording that episode.
00:22:39
How much you disliked it? Yeah, I mean that's that's part
00:22:42
of the fun of the show though. Like I people talk about a lot
00:22:46
the like so bad it's good movies and it it's interesting slash
00:22:52
disappointing when a movie falls just short of like crossing that
00:22:58
that line into being so bad it's good and winds up just being so
00:23:02
bad. Like so bad, so bad.
00:23:04
It stinks. It's so bad, it's it's bad.
00:23:09
But yeah, I mean that's you know, like I said, that's part
00:23:11
of the fun of the show. So.
00:23:13
The other funny thing is that for the most part, as we
00:23:15
mentioned, after recommending that the other host watch a
00:23:17
movie, we often do not go back and check out the movie
00:23:19
ourselves. So my entire concept of grifters
00:23:23
is just what you told me in the review, and I'll probably never
00:23:26
watch the movie, but I cannot ever forget talking about John
00:23:30
Cusack's really low return grifs where he'd spend like 30 minutes
00:23:35
and risk his life to to steal like $4 from somebody.
00:23:39
Dude, it was like less than that.
00:23:40
He was stealing like quarters off people.
00:23:42
Like it was. It was ridiculous.
00:23:45
Like, like, if that character was around right now, he'd be
00:23:48
trying to take advantage of them, like taking the penny out
00:23:51
of production in the US And he'd be like, how do I get
00:23:54
everybody's extra pennies and I can turn them into Dimes?
00:23:57
That's that's too big of a grift for him though man, that was his
00:23:59
whole thing is no big grifs. No big griffs.
00:24:02
He's like, I'm going to make less than minimum wage doing
00:24:05
deceptive. It's like go to go get a part
00:24:07
time job, Mr. Tusa. And then the the movie almost
00:24:11
didn't even deliver on something.
00:24:13
It was promising in a way, because a big thing in that
00:24:15
movie was his girlfriend was trying to convince him to do
00:24:22
like a big grift. And then the story never gets to
00:24:25
that point. They get interrupted before
00:24:27
then, you know, because characters start dying and
00:24:30
there's only there's only three main characters.
00:24:33
So like that was a whole thing for his character was like, I, I
00:24:37
only do the small time stuff. I'm not going to do any big
00:24:39
stuff. And like through flashbacks, you
00:24:42
see the type of bigger griffs that she had done.
00:24:46
But in terms of these characters like, they never get to that
00:24:49
point even, which is. That's weird.
00:24:52
Yeah. That makes me picture like an
00:24:54
Ocean's 11 style movie where you spend the first two acts
00:24:57
plotting out of heist, but then instead of doing the heist they
00:24:59
just all die and it never happens.
00:25:01
Yeah, yeah. Or they're just like, man, that
00:25:03
that would be hard. Let's not do that like.
00:25:05
Turns out bank fault, no matter how much montage editing we do,
00:25:09
can't get in there. Can't get in there, can't man
00:25:11
mantage our way around that one. Can't mantage our way in.
00:25:15
Yeah. So Grifters is the worst.
00:25:17
Surprisingly not the lowest rated movie of the year.
00:25:20
You gave it at the time a three out of 10, although you did tell
00:25:23
me later you wish you'd scored it lower.
00:25:26
Yeah, yeah, I mean it, well, it's it's like I said that that
00:25:29
I joked about this one so much because it it became like the
00:25:31
basement, you know, it became like the floor in terms of
00:25:34
scoring. And three felt harsh at the
00:25:37
time. I mean, yeah, in hindsight,
00:25:41
maybe it's a 2, like going below A2.
00:25:43
We've talked about this recently too, that that would be really,
00:25:47
really it would have to be a offensive, like actually
00:25:51
offensive, I think to score than A2.
00:25:54
Yeah, we did mention, like, if you go that low, you're so much
00:25:58
more likely to come back around the other side Pac-Man style,
00:26:01
and just end up at the top instead because you've made
00:26:03
like, avant-garde art. Totally, Yeah, totally this.
00:26:06
The so bad it's good. The so bad, it's really good,
00:26:09
Yeah. Grifters decided to stay in
00:26:11
Slain so bad it's bad. OK, moving from there into our
00:26:15
third episode, I'll call this, for the Super fans out there,
00:26:19
maybe our most underrated episode in that it is literally
00:26:23
been consumed by the least people.
00:26:28
Just coincidentally, just looking at our metrics, I think
00:26:30
fewer people saw this one. And I think it's because I gave
00:26:32
it sort of a bad title. I was still trying to figure out
00:26:35
titles at this point, and I thought it would be funny to try
00:26:38
to like, combine elements of both movies as if it was the
00:26:41
title of one big movie. So our two films for Episode 3,
00:26:45
I, in an attempt to rebound from a horrible pic with grifters,
00:26:48
asked you to watch a Japanese Kaiju film called Gamera
00:26:51
Guardian of the Universe. And you asked me to watch an
00:26:54
ensemble cast comedy film called Soap Dish about a soap opera
00:26:59
production. And so I called the episode
00:27:01
something like Soap Opera Digest.
00:27:03
Did like in parentheses 'cause I was like digested cause Gamera
00:27:08
ate him and then after that came out I was like nobody's
00:27:10
following my logic with this at all.
00:27:13
I got it. I understood so.
00:27:15
Frank got it. So maybe some people will get
00:27:18
it. But yeah, that's my that's
00:27:20
probably my worst promotional job.
00:27:21
Was was that title for that third episode?
00:27:25
I guess if this was the third one, then you went first with
00:27:28
the reviews. So we'll Frank, we'll go
00:27:29
straight in. Tell me, tell me a little bit
00:27:31
about Gamera. Well, I mean spoilers for what
00:27:34
you teased at the beginning. This is the movie I gave a 10
00:27:37
out of 10. Heck yeah it is.
00:27:39
Yeah, it was the only the only one of the season that got a
00:27:42
perfect score. And I'll, I'll stand by that,
00:27:46
honestly, like Gamera was just a blast and no pun intended and.
00:27:52
I don't get it put it in the table.
00:27:55
Because he ate them. You get it.
00:27:57
Because he ate them. Play the door slam again.
00:28:01
You're going to have to actually find that sound effect.
00:28:04
I know I hate, I hate this bit where me in the recordings gives
00:28:07
myself work to do in post production as a joke.
00:28:10
Because, like, this guy's a jerk.
00:28:12
This guy's the worst. I'm going to be awake at 2:00 in
00:28:13
the morning the day before this is supposed to go out like door
00:28:17
slam effect. What?
00:28:20
But yeah, anyway, Gamera was like you said it.
00:28:26
It was that example of a film that was a 10 out of 10 in what
00:28:32
it was trying to be it it was sort of a peak piece of that
00:28:39
genre of filmmaking of like Kaiju filmmaking.
00:28:44
I don't remember that what it's called now, but I during the
00:28:47
episode we talked about there's, there's sort of a broader
00:28:50
umbrella term that that type of filmmaking falls under.
00:28:53
Oh, is it like tokosatsu or something like that?
00:28:56
Yeah, yeah. I think so that, that, that,
00:28:58
that sounds right. But yeah, yeah.
00:29:01
So I mean, I really had, like, almost nothing but positive
00:29:04
things to say about the film, which is funny.
00:29:07
I would think, like, if somebody were to watch it and be like,
00:29:11
what the heck, This is their 10 out of 10 film.
00:29:14
It's a guy in a costume, like running around like, you know?
00:29:18
That was the whole thing we talked about was like the
00:29:20
cultural context in Japan where there's been 6 Godzilla
00:29:25
movies and also like the Power Rangers shows and all those.
00:29:29
I mean, Super Sentai in Japan and everything else in that
00:29:31
genre, there's just a general acceptance of a type of
00:29:35
filmmaking where you just put a guy in a rubber suit and say
00:29:37
he's Godzilla. But like everything in the movie
00:29:40
was self serious and that's what allows it to still work as like
00:29:44
a somewhat dramatic piece of filmmaking.
00:29:47
It's like an intentional sort of contrast that if you open
00:29:51
yourself up to, I think it'd be really fun.
00:29:53
Yeah, and it looked great in its own way too.
00:29:56
I mean, it it's it had really strong cinematography.
00:29:59
Like the scenes outside of the Kaiju action looked good and and
00:30:05
the Kaiju action sequences looks good too.
00:30:07
I I remember praising like one shot in particular that like I
00:30:11
think they achieved something visually that had like a really
00:30:14
grand scale to it. And like was just a super cool
00:30:18
looking shot, like something you would almost expect out of like.
00:30:20
I compared it a lot to like the first Jurassic Park film because
00:30:24
it came out around the same time.
00:30:26
And just visually there's a huge contrast between those two.
00:30:30
So yeah, I think I think it it, it almost feels like a film from
00:30:34
an older era because it's using like a style of filmmaking that
00:30:39
like way predates the 90s, but this was almost like the peak
00:30:43
version of that because it was made in in that era.
00:30:47
Which is what we kept saying about the 90s in general, is it
00:30:50
felt like the culmination of a bunch of filmmaking norms that
00:30:55
were about to all be disrupted. Like there was so many things
00:30:59
that you would do a certain way that became immediately outmoded
00:31:02
by some sort of computer effects alternative that watching
00:31:06
something like Camera, I imagine still haven't seen.
00:31:08
It is really rewarding for Someone Like You who he is a
00:31:11
filmmaker and appreciates, like the artistry that goes into
00:31:15
putting something obviously fake on top of something obviously
00:31:18
real and trying to find a way to make those things blend.
00:31:21
Yeah, absolutely. I that I think was a big part of
00:31:24
me was just appreciating the production value and the
00:31:27
production elements that went into making this movie.
00:31:30
And it just felt so genuine because of that, you know, it it
00:31:35
it felt like a, I don't know, like a labor of love in a way to
00:31:40
to make Gamera. So yeah, I stand by that.
00:31:43
That's that's a 10 out of 10 for this season.
00:31:46
Gamera was was great. That that is 1.
00:31:48
I would rewatch again. 10 out of 10 would watch again.
00:31:52
Gamera Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
00:31:54
I'll be updating this visually for those watching on the
00:31:57
YouTube version as we go. I'm going to populate each film
00:32:00
in the spot that it ended up in, in an actual like leaderboard of
00:32:04
the top 24 forgotten 90s movies. So you'll notice the Gamera now
00:32:07
holds the top spot and will for the remainder of the discussion.
00:32:10
It is apparently the most underrated forgotten film of the
00:32:14
1990s. Yeah, it's it's almost like
00:32:17
cheating because it's so hyper specific and what type of film
00:32:20
that it is. But yeah, I just like no notes,
00:32:25
no notes for Gamera. I can't.
00:32:26
No notes. It was a short that was also our
00:32:28
shortest episode, and I think part of it was for that reason.
00:32:30
Gamera really was like, what all do you need me to say if the
00:32:34
movie's this good? So that was Gamera.
00:32:38
My film, as I mentioned briefly, was 1991's Soap Dish, which was
00:32:42
something I've never heard of. I'd spent so many weeks at this
00:32:45
point looking up 90s movies to, like, pitch for the show.
00:32:48
Never saw anybody talk about Soap Dish.
00:32:50
Really, really odd relic of that time because it's an ensemble
00:32:54
cast with a lot of recognizable names, some of whom are, like,
00:32:59
edited out of the movie and barely appear, others of whom
00:33:02
give like, weirdly uninspired performances.
00:33:05
And ultimately, the movie itself just feels like the people
00:33:08
making it gave up on it. Like while making it.
00:33:10
It's a comedy that's not funny. And what else do you need to
00:33:14
say? Yeah, this, this is the one that
00:33:17
I that I think I have forgotten the most about out of all the
00:33:21
ones we've talked about. I guess like I don't, I remember
00:33:25
you really didn't like it so. It's visually impressive at
00:33:29
times. The whole thing is like a satire
00:33:33
about the people producing a popular daytime soap opera and
00:33:36
how their lives as characters become as overtly dramatic and
00:33:40
silly as those of their soap opera character counterparts.
00:33:44
And you do get some good performances in there too, like
00:33:47
Kevin Klein's in it and he gives a really strong comedic
00:33:50
performance. Like probably the only person in
00:33:52
the movie to do anything genuinely laugh out loud funny.
00:33:54
But everything else is so plotting and uninteresting, and
00:33:59
the movie tries to take you on twists and turns, but just the
00:34:02
final product doesn't feel like it was made by people who have
00:34:05
an affinity for soaps, which I think would have made all the
00:34:08
difference. It felt like the funny idea that
00:34:12
they handed to somebody who didn't know enough to make
00:34:15
authentic in any way. So it just kind of goes in one
00:34:18
ear and out the other. And I think I even knocked an
00:34:20
extra point off because I gave it a three out of 10.
00:34:22
I knocked an extra point off for having like a trans panic
00:34:24
ending, which as we talked about in that episode, was somewhat
00:34:27
common in the 90s. Yeah, I, I think that was the
00:34:31
reason I picked it was because I thought it was a funny sort of
00:34:34
like sandbox to play in, in terms of like you can do a lot
00:34:37
of entertaining things I would think about like a behind the
00:34:40
scenes of a soap opera. But if you sort of have a
00:34:45
reverence in a way for that genre of television which is so
00:34:49
unique in its own way, like so, it feels like almost spiteful or
00:34:55
hateful in a way the way that they handled it.
00:34:58
It did not read as fun or it would like.
00:35:00
It was like the people making it had fun talking about soaps.
00:35:04
Like I think it was a great pick on your end as a blind
00:35:06
recommendation because I, well, I've not, I've not worked in
00:35:10
television, but I have worked in live event production for many
00:35:15
years. I did that for a living.
00:35:17
And there's so much like interesting, unique stuff about
00:35:20
that kind of job, like the weird, fast-paced, so many
00:35:24
moving pieces kind of roll where you're always on your feet and
00:35:27
things are always going wrong and you're trying to fix them in
00:35:28
real time. Those things can be so
00:35:30
interesting, but this movie found a way to make them
00:35:34
visually compelling but not interesting on the page.
00:35:37
So Soapdish. Big disappointment.
00:35:39
I gave it a three out of 10, which ended up leaving it in the
00:35:41
same tier as the Grifters, but having only seen one, I don't
00:35:45
know which one's actually worst. Yeah, and we're not going to
00:35:48
find out because I don't think either of us want to rewatch
00:35:50
either of those movies. No, that would be yeah, if we
00:35:53
get to 1000 views, we'll watch The Grifters again.
00:35:58
Now with that, we'll go on to episode 4 for Meet Your Double
00:36:01
Feature, which I'll be honest, this is the first one we made
00:36:04
that I thought like, this is our show.
00:36:07
I felt like production wise, conversation wise, we really hit
00:36:11
something with this one and I'm going to guess it's because we
00:36:13
both picked silly action movies. Which is very much in our
00:36:17
wheelhouse of films we appreciate.
00:36:19
It's exactly what I think we both assumed we would be talking
00:36:22
about when we pitched this as a premise because growing up,
00:36:25
there was never an action movie we would pass up from that time
00:36:28
period. You could just be like, hey, I
00:36:29
got this goofy one. It's probably awful.
00:36:31
We want to watch it anyway. And we'd be like, of course I
00:36:33
do. And so, well, I was.
00:36:36
Sorry, just to interject real quick.
00:36:37
It was also the era of the action star, which I don't think
00:36:42
exists in the same way now. Like even looking at the the
00:36:46
leads of these two movies, we picked, you know, John Claude
00:36:48
Van Damme and Kurt Russell. And I mean, you look at just the
00:36:54
entire cast of like The Expendables films.
00:36:56
And it was just like all of those guys were in multiple
00:37:00
action franchise films and so many of them definitely bleed
00:37:05
over from the 80s, but all the way throughout the 90s as well.
00:37:09
Yes, they mostly inhabited those two.
00:37:11
You did have some who came into their own more in the 90s, like
00:37:14
Jean-Claude Van Damme, because that was my movie was Double
00:37:17
Impact. His breakout role was
00:37:19
Bloodsport, which was in the late 80s, but like the rest of
00:37:22
his career peak was all in the 90s.
00:37:24
So he came about later than like a Sylvester Stallone or a
00:37:27
Schwarzenegger. But gosh, Double Impact is a
00:37:30
weird one. I ended up giving it kind of a
00:37:33
bad review. I gave it a four out of 10
00:37:35
because it takes all of the things that should work for a
00:37:38
Jean-Claude Van Damme the goofball action movie and just
00:37:42
doesn't let them shine. I mean, he plays, he's supposed
00:37:45
to play 2 characters even though he's not at this stage of his
00:37:48
career, a very good actor that should be funny.
00:37:50
Like we should have had like 2 really over the top performances
00:37:53
just to make sure they felt different.
00:37:55
And instead we get like, you know, Jean-Claude Van Damme and
00:37:58
Jean-Claude Van Damme, but with his hair a different way.
00:38:02
Yeah, yeah, this one, I didn't remember you scored this one a
00:38:08
four out of 10 because I just remember having us having a
00:38:12
really fun discussion about this movie.
00:38:14
We got into a lot of a lot of bits about the 2 Jean Claude's
00:38:18
and about their, like, differing lifestyle and how it ended with
00:38:21
us trying to explain how one of them was going to get cancelled
00:38:25
for being a homophobe because one of them is a homophobe in
00:38:27
the movie and how it would affect his standing socially in
00:38:30
a crime syndicate. Yeah.
00:38:31
Oh yeah. Cancelled from the crime
00:38:33
syndicate specifically. Like, that was the one thing
00:38:35
they didn't stand for. Yeah.
00:38:38
That's it. I double impact it.
00:38:40
It didn't have enough martial arts, which was also a big like
00:38:43
knock. Some of Jean Claude's movies
00:38:45
from that time he seemingly tried to push more into like,
00:38:47
I'm not just a karate guy. I'm just like a gun toting
00:38:50
action star like a lot of my peers and he's like good enough
00:38:54
at that, but it just always feels like an incomplete movie
00:38:56
of his when it doesn't feature more interesting martial arts
00:39:00
choreography on top of it. Well, I think that's also an
00:39:02
interesting thing about this being the era of the action
00:39:05
star, is that they were all, in a way, in competition with one
00:39:09
another to an extent. Especially there was like a
00:39:13
famous feud between Jean Claude and oh gosh, what's his name?
00:39:19
Steven Seagal. Steven Seagal.
00:39:21
Thank you. Yeah.
00:39:23
And I think that probably, like directly affected the films that
00:39:28
they made. Sometimes I remember, I don't
00:39:30
remember exactly what movie it was, but there was like Arnold
00:39:33
and and Stallone was like probably the the top feud of the
00:39:38
era. That was your main event, you
00:39:40
know, your world championship bouts.
00:39:42
Totally, totally. And I remember there was like,
00:39:45
I, I, I don't remember the, the details exactly, but like one of
00:39:48
them like tricked the other into taking a role because like he
00:39:53
made, I think it was like Stallone made Schwarzenegger
00:39:57
think he was interested in the role even though it was like a
00:39:59
dumb movie. And then Schwarzenegger took it
00:40:01
just so that Stallone wouldn't have it.
00:40:03
But like Stallone had like tricked him because he thought
00:40:05
it was stupid in the 1st place like.
00:40:07
Oh, yeah, I think it was the reverse.
00:40:09
I think. Oh, OK, Stallone got tricked
00:40:12
into appearing in a movie called Stop or My Mom Will Shoot, which
00:40:16
was this, like, horrendous police action comedy movie that
00:40:21
nobody liked. And it was exactly what you
00:40:22
said. Schwarzenegger tricked him into
00:40:25
taking it by acting like he was really gunning for the role.
00:40:27
And Stallone was like, ah, I got one over on you.
00:40:28
And then he was just in like a total flop movie, which is so
00:40:31
funny because on paper, it's like, ah, it's just one movie.
00:40:34
You make a lot. But it's like, you imagine
00:40:35
having to go to work every day for months to shoot this stupid
00:40:39
movie. Like, how far into production
00:40:41
before Stallone do you think was like, wait a minute.
00:40:45
Oh yeah. Well, it happens.
00:40:46
I mean, you talked about that recently on the Our Pirate
00:40:50
episode with I'm blanking on. That Rhode Island?
00:40:54
Yes, and how she didn't want to be in that movie seemingly.
00:40:58
And like, like you said, like production, you're there 12
00:41:02
hours a day, like you got to show up.
00:41:04
And if it's something that you really hate, like, I'd be
00:41:09
interested to see that Stallone movie and see what kind of
00:41:12
performance he gives. It is funny, yeah.
00:41:16
Because you have to tap into real emotion to be an actor,
00:41:19
even a action movie hero, you have to tap into some kind of
00:41:23
emotion. And if you're feeling a really
00:41:25
strong real emotion, sometimes that does come through on
00:41:28
screen. So in that case, that might be
00:41:31
funny to rewatch at some point for the sake of double impact.
00:41:35
It's not like a terrible movie, but it is just the least
00:41:40
interesting Jean Claude movie from that period that I've
00:41:42
personally seen. There's nothing like terrible
00:41:45
about it. It's certainly a step above
00:41:47
something like Soap Dish or Grifters, but it's just like,
00:41:50
watch anything else that he's made, you know?
00:41:53
He makes entertaining films like This Is Not To Yeah, like I I've
00:41:57
enjoyed quite a few Jean-Claude Van Damme films.
00:42:00
I think they're fun in a very campy way usually.
00:42:03
Go watch Lionheart. Lionheart's an underrated one.
00:42:06
It's not Blood Sport, which is the obvious pick, but it's like
00:42:08
a really solid movie that he stars in.
00:42:11
Yeah, Lionheart's awesome. Yeah, I I think you actually
00:42:13
recommended that one to me a while ago and and I checked it
00:42:15
out and really enjoyed it. Lionheart's good.
00:42:17
Also a 90s movie, so that was double impact.
00:42:19
I asked you to watch a Kurt Russell sci-fi movie, and this
00:42:22
was a funny one because we've talked a lot about how like the
00:42:25
difference between popular critical consensus and our own
00:42:29
feelings. And I knew going in that this
00:42:31
movie had really bad reviews, like in some places it was below
00:42:35
20% average score. But I was like, Nah, Frank's
00:42:39
going to like it. It's got his favorite actor,
00:42:41
Kurt Russell. It's made by the guy who
00:42:44
directed all those Resident Evil movies that he's always trying
00:42:46
to get me to watch. It's going to be a perfect
00:42:48
storm. And it was, I mean like this,
00:42:53
Yeah, this is, I guess the opposite of Grifters, where I I
00:42:57
disagree with the reviews, but in the opposite direction.
00:43:00
I I think this movie is awesome. I remind me, what did I score
00:43:04
this one? You gave soldier A6 out of 10,
00:43:07
but it was like in a, it was an affectionate 6.
00:43:09
You were like, you know what? This movie does not have a lot
00:43:11
going on, but it's perfectly watchable.
00:43:14
And I do think that for either one of us, anything above A5
00:43:17
means the movies like good enough.
00:43:19
Like I, I don't, I wouldn't steer clear of a movie because
00:43:22
one of us gave it a six. Usually that just means like,
00:43:24
yeah, it's OK. Totally.
00:43:25
And and this is 1 where I think as I've gotten farther away from
00:43:28
it, I would have scored this higher.
00:43:31
I think Soldier is interesting. Favorite movies that we watched
00:43:35
this season it. Was a funny conversation too,
00:43:37
though. We really got into the weeds
00:43:39
with Soldier because of the nameless, emotionless guys who
00:43:43
at one point I genuinely thought were trying to tell me that all
00:43:47
of them had been named Todd, just with different members.
00:43:50
At the end, I thought it was like Todd 117, Todd 118.
00:43:53
And that just created a glimmer for me of like, that's so funny,
00:43:57
I can only imagine. And then you're like, no,
00:43:58
they're not all named Todd. But I wouldn't let that go for
00:44:01
the rest of the review. Well, that's the thing about the
00:44:03
movie though, man, it just had so much uniqueness to it, which
00:44:06
is always like something I'm going to appreciate.
00:44:09
You know it it I enjoyed it even more when I looked into like the
00:44:13
behind the scenes elements and sort of like the the story of
00:44:17
the production itself and how it very directly connected to Blade
00:44:24
Runner, which is one of my favorite films like.
00:44:28
Like literally in the same fictional universe as Blade
00:44:31
Runner. Yeah, it was the same writer.
00:44:32
He was writing them like at the same time and he like
00:44:35
intentionally made connections between the two.
00:44:37
So this one is like a cult classic type film that I think
00:44:43
really deserves that recognition because I think it defies those
00:44:51
bad ratings that it got upon release.
00:44:53
Like I, I really think that those are unfair.
00:44:57
And I talked about it a bit in the review.
00:44:58
It it did like there were some things story to the production
00:45:03
that did affect the the final outcome of the film because they
00:45:06
had sets that they had built and wanted to do visually.
00:45:11
Like the backgrounds were all going to be practical.
00:45:14
But I believe it was like a tornado or a hurricane like
00:45:18
destroyed the sets that they were building.
00:45:21
And so they had to like green screen a lot of like the larger
00:45:25
landscapes, which obviously is going to hurt it visually,
00:45:28
especially when they had a much more grandiose vision for how
00:45:31
they wanted the film to look, which that would have been
00:45:34
really cool to see. But, you know, that's just like
00:45:36
the way filmmaking goes. You got to roll with the
00:45:38
punches, basically, yeah. So much of the time a movie that
00:45:42
doesn't turn out well is because people did not have the means or
00:45:46
the time to make what they originally intended.
00:45:50
I mean that makes me think back to like when Peter Jackson had
00:45:53
to take over The Hobbit movies on absolutely zero notice and
00:45:57
had almost no time for pre production and and and was
00:45:59
basically taking over in the middle of Guillermo del Toro's
00:46:02
pre production. So you ended up with those
00:46:03
Hobbit movies that everybody hated because they were like,
00:46:06
giant, bloated CGI messes. And it's like, yeah, if you'd
00:46:08
given the director the proper amount of time to make another
00:46:12
trilogy, it would probably look a lot better.
00:46:14
And same with this. Like the original intention was
00:46:17
they were aiming high and then they just kind of had to salvage
00:46:20
it as they went along. Yeah, there's a great quote,
00:46:22
which I'll paraphrase because I don't remember it exactly, but
00:46:25
it's from George Lucas actually. And, you know, he said, like,
00:46:30
it's not about like how great a filmmaker you are, it's how
00:46:33
adaptive A filmmaker you are because there's always going to
00:46:37
be those, those hurdles. And he's like, you can't put
00:46:40
like a like a prompt at the beginning of the movie saying
00:46:43
like, oh, well, this didn't work out because the actor was sick
00:46:45
that day or yadda, yadda, yadda. You just have to show them the
00:46:48
final product and and. Then he said jar jar is the key.
00:46:53
Yeah, yeah. Also on top of that, those are
00:46:58
my two things I have to say. This, this is these are the two
00:47:01
things I want people to Remember Me for.
00:47:05
So, yeah, Soldier, like I said, one of my favorite movies that
00:47:09
I, I watched this season and I to me feels higher than a six.
00:47:12
So in retrospect this is 1 I would have scored higher.
00:47:16
Makes sense. OK, moving into episode 5, this
00:47:20
is a weird one for Speaking of production issues.
00:47:23
Jeez, we almost lost this episode completely.
00:47:26
Like we almost had to skip it, which in a normal movie review
00:47:30
podcast would be like such a non issue.
00:47:32
But we of course had to create continuity between episodes
00:47:35
where we announce which movies we're talking about at the end
00:47:38
of 1 episode to queue up the next one.
00:47:40
And we just had so many problems where we were recording the
00:47:45
episode and we talked about Deep Cover, which was your movie.
00:47:49
That recording went fine, except we found out later your
00:47:52
microphone, like the wrong microphone was being picked up.
00:47:55
So your audio sounded way too quiet.
00:47:56
And I had to like, really crank it up and post.
00:47:59
And then my review just got corrupted and we lost it
00:48:02
completely. Oh yeah, that's right.
00:48:04
So so audiences have never heard the original review that we did
00:48:08
for your film. Yes, which is pretty funny too,
00:48:11
because going into this episode, we were finishing up episode 4.
00:48:15
You had forgotten to pick a movie for me to watch for next
00:48:17
time. And you just came in all
00:48:19
sheepishly and were like, you want to watch a Woody Allen
00:48:22
musical? And I was like, oh cool, what a
00:48:25
great idea. I did.
00:48:28
I did have to watch a stupid Woody Allen musical.
00:48:30
And then we talked about it for an hour and a half, but my
00:48:34
computer was like overheating or something.
00:48:36
So the audio was captured, but it was garbled beyond
00:48:39
recognition. I spent days trying to salvage
00:48:42
it through like an AI editor that would remove these like
00:48:47
layers of sound that were messing it up, which I honestly
00:48:50
regret because I, I, I try to avoid using AI tools for
00:48:54
anything in this production because they're just worthless
00:48:57
and they use up so much energy. But I tried to salvage that
00:49:00
because I was like, well, people need to hear it.
00:49:02
And then instead we just recorded like a brief summary
00:49:05
that was like a 15 minute conversation, which of all the
00:49:08
movies to lose, I'm not even mad that we lost that Woody Allen
00:49:10
one. That movie sucked.
00:49:12
Yeah, that's, I mean, that one, we talked about this at the
00:49:17
time, but neither of us just more so coincidentally than
00:49:20
anything else. I've really seen any Woody Allen
00:49:23
films and he's a very influential filmmaker of that
00:49:30
era, but a problematic one as well.
00:49:33
I. Mean if you if you Google Woody
00:49:34
Allen's name today, it's probably going to auto fill with
00:49:38
like Woody Allen, Epstein Island.
00:49:40
So it's like, of course we don't want to.
00:49:42
Of course we don't want to celebrate them right now.
00:49:46
But yeah, Frank, you're right that like in the 70s and 80s, it
00:49:50
was like he was making tons of extremely well regarded films
00:49:55
that we just happened to have not seen even before all of that
00:49:58
came out. And then coincidentally, the one
00:50:00
you selected for me to watch was just like awful.
00:50:03
It was his attempt at a musical where he deliberately hired
00:50:07
people who couldn't sing or, like, instructed them not to
00:50:10
sing correctly on purpose because he thought that was,
00:50:13
like, cute. And it just makes the movie so
00:50:17
painful to watch that by the time it was over, I was like,
00:50:20
why have you done this to me? Well, and it was also the type
00:50:23
of musical where it wasn't original songs either, which I
00:50:26
don't know if there's a specific name for that type of musical,
00:50:28
but there are ones that are good that have done that, but they
00:50:33
were just using existing songs and singing like really bad
00:50:37
covers of them essentially. It was pointless.
00:50:40
The movie as an exercise was pointless, and Woody Allen's
00:50:43
character in it was creepy. And Woody Allen the man is
00:50:46
creepy. Surprisingly, I gave it a three.
00:50:50
Like this was in that category where I think any impulse to
00:50:55
rank it lower would have been unfair because it's like, well,
00:50:56
the movie didn't do these things Woody Allen allegedly did.
00:51:00
But I still just hated watching it so much that I was like,
00:51:03
whatever, this is boring. A couple of the songs were fun
00:51:07
because Woody Allen and his team didn't write them and they were
00:51:09
just real pieces of music. But yeah, very boring.
00:51:12
I guess we skipped over deep cover.
00:51:15
You kind of liked deep Cover as I recall.
00:51:17
Deep and deep cover is actually another one that I would put in
00:51:20
the same campus soldier that the further I've gotten away from
00:51:24
it, the more I appreciate it. And, and I think even over the
00:51:26
course of the review about like talking through the movie, I was
00:51:30
like, you know, actually I really like to cover it was it
00:51:33
was good. Which is funny because I think
00:51:35
eventually you scored it a 5 out of 10.
00:51:37
And that's probably because when I started watching it, I like
00:51:41
the first act of the movie. And this is maybe more on me
00:51:45
than the movie, honestly. Like it just wasn't clicking
00:51:48
with me and it was like sort of a dark subject matter.
00:51:53
And so like early on I had the same thought.
00:51:55
I was like, why does it keep doing this to me?
00:51:56
Why does it keep picking these? Depressing.
00:52:00
Like, yeah, like, I don't want to watch these depressing crime
00:52:04
movies, but Deep Cover had something to say.
00:52:08
It was so stylistic. It was the IT was the exact
00:52:10
opposite of grifters in in the sense that it was so stylistic.
00:52:14
I mean, you can even tell just looking at like the cover art
00:52:17
for the film, like the poster, its use of like colour
00:52:22
throughout the film and the lighting and the performances,
00:52:25
everything about it just just sort of like dripping with like
00:52:28
style. But it just had an oddness to it
00:52:31
that like, and the uniqueness that I appreciated by the end of
00:52:36
the film, but took me a while to get into.
00:52:38
So that's why I think it it sort of landed in like a middle
00:52:41
ground score for me at the time. But retrospectively, I'm like,
00:52:45
no deep cover. That's good film making.
00:52:48
It's unique, it's entertaining in its own way.
00:52:53
You had very charismatic leads and performances from, you know,
00:52:59
Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum.
00:53:03
So this also, I would I would score higher.
00:53:06
Now, the cover, Yeah. Like, of everything we've talked
00:53:11
about so far, Gamera, again, always kind of being an outlier
00:53:14
because that's so hyper specific.
00:53:15
But like these other ones is just sort of being just general
00:53:18
films. Yeah, Soldier and Deep Cover
00:53:21
were were two of my favorites I think.
00:53:24
Yeah, I mean, we did also, again, the movies that I don't
00:53:27
watch but that I recommend my opinion is basically like, how
00:53:30
fun were they to talk about? And we definitely were on a kick
00:53:33
talking about that detail where his Lawrence Fishman's character
00:53:37
had never had alcohol before because he was afraid about
00:53:39
becoming an addict like his dad. But then he just, like you tried
00:53:42
to summarize it. It's like he tried alcohol and
00:53:45
it's pretty good. I just thought that's a.
00:53:47
Line in the movie that is not that's literally he's like
00:53:51
there's a scene where he's like, he's like drinking and one of
00:53:55
the other characters who knows he doesn't drink.
00:53:57
He was like, you're drinking now or something.
00:53:58
He's like, yeah, I tried it's pretty good.
00:54:00
And then he just like gets in a car and drives away.
00:54:02
It's like when. He could we we really latched on
00:54:05
to that as like Larry Fishburne alcohol.
00:54:08
Good question, mark. Yeah.
00:54:09
Oh, he is credited as Larry Fishburne, too.
00:54:11
That's another sort of fun little tidbit about that movie.
00:54:15
Yeah, there was a lot of unintentionally funny stuff too
00:54:18
in that one, because it was so hyper serious.
00:54:21
But then some stuff. There's also that.
00:54:22
Side character who kept talking about Terminator 2 like.
00:54:25
Right. So weird.
00:54:27
It's that kind of stuff where you get into just like what was
00:54:32
who. What talk to a film making right
00:54:36
exactly? I don't understand the
00:54:38
motivation. I can't imagine anybody else
00:54:40
would have done this. Yeah, yeah, totally.
00:54:44
So, yeah, deep cover. Good.
00:54:47
Question mark, deep cover. Good.
00:54:50
Pretty alcohol confirmed Deep cover equals alcohol.
00:54:54
Yeah, well, we'll find out. So I'm glad that that episode
00:54:57
still exists and is now in a very easy to listen to state
00:55:00
because I did not try to include my AI recovered audio of us
00:55:05
talking about Woody Allen. It sounded like sound wave from
00:55:07
Transformers, like that entire half would have been so
00:55:10
distorted and bad. I'm glad I did not do that.
00:55:14
Anyway, 6 out or 6 out of 10 episode. 6 out of 12 for season
00:55:19
1. Another good one, one that I
00:55:21
look back on pretty fondly. I think I went first for this
00:55:25
one because I I ended the previous episode talking about
00:55:28
Woody Allen. Frank, you asked me to watch
00:55:30
1997's Jackal, which is or The Jackal, which was a weird one
00:55:36
because it was a remake of a much more popular and well liked
00:55:39
film from the 70s That changed so much about that movie and its
00:55:44
source material novel that all of the people involved in the
00:55:47
earlier productions like begged them to change the title of this
00:55:50
one. They were like, you're not
00:55:51
making the Jackal, you're making something else.
00:55:54
Don't call it the Jackal. And then whoever was making it
00:55:57
was like, you know what? I'm going to call it the Jackal.
00:55:59
Even harder, I mean. Did we ever get to the bottom of
00:56:05
why, just because it was such a different narrative that they
00:56:09
were opposed to it or like. It's a completely different
00:56:11
story. They change all of the
00:56:12
locations. The only elements that are the
00:56:14
same across all versions are. The story follows a professional
00:56:19
assassin traveling to a different country to arrange a
00:56:22
very high profile murder against like a public individual.
00:56:26
And the story follows that person's meticulous preparation
00:56:30
while also cutting to the law enforcement group trying to
00:56:34
track them down. So it's sort of like an evenly
00:56:36
balanced story, giving you the hero and the villains
00:56:39
perspective at the same time. And this one just centered
00:56:44
everything in America and made it about like the Russian mafia
00:56:48
in the fall of the USSR, like the wake of all of that.
00:56:52
It was a weird pivot that tried to introduce a bunch of 90
00:56:55
specific tech gadgets and stuff too.
00:56:58
And as I talked about at the time, it's the perfect 5 out of
00:57:02
10 movie, which is what I gave it 5 out of 10 because it just
00:57:05
doesn't do enough wrong to make you turn the movie off.
00:57:07
But it stays so close to that point for its entire runtime.
00:57:11
Yeah, yeah. This one, just even thinking
00:57:14
back on it falls into a pretty like nebulous area for me where
00:57:18
some of these it's interesting, like when you're describing the
00:57:21
film to me, I can get sort of a visual for it in my head, you
00:57:25
know, in terms of like what what type of movie it would be.
00:57:28
And I think I have that for the Jackal, but it also just feels
00:57:31
like nothing at the same time. The Jackal.
00:57:33
Yeah, it's it is nothing. It's a very like impermanent
00:57:37
feeling, watching the movie where you're like, sometimes if
00:57:40
you don't pay close attention to something, you walk away feeling
00:57:43
like you only have a vague sense of what was happening.
00:57:45
You could put your full attention on the Jackal and
00:57:47
still feel that way when it's over because it just isn't
00:57:51
There's, it's so shallow. It's a very shallow story that
00:57:53
is told relatively effectively but has nothing to say.
00:57:57
So at the end, you're like, I I guess that was a movie.
00:57:59
I think Bruce Willis was there. I I think he gave a pretty
00:58:03
sleepy performance too from what I remember you saying.
00:58:06
Super sleepy, your two leads. We had Bruce Willis hanging out
00:58:09
by himself doing a really boring quiet man performance and then
00:58:12
we had Richard Gere doing an Irish accent that he couldn't
00:58:15
land. So both of our leads were kind
00:58:18
of messing things up. It just, I don't know, maybe my
00:58:22
opinion of this is actually worsened.
00:58:23
At the time I was like super take it or leave it.
00:58:26
I had no qualms about watching it.
00:58:28
But with a couple of months removed I'm like chackle.
00:58:31
I don't think I'd ever tell anybody to watch it now.
00:58:37
All. Right over to you episode 6.
00:58:43
I asked you to watch Doc Hollywood from 1991, which as I
00:58:47
recall, I think I picked it out because it has Michael J Fox in
00:58:50
it in one of his like lead film roles post Back to the Future.
00:58:55
Obviously his career in Hollywood was very adversely
00:58:58
affected by his Parkinson's, so he like dropped out of the
00:59:01
public eye for a time. And I just thought this was
00:59:03
interesting. This was like later stage
00:59:05
Michael J Fox in something that probably not a lot of people
00:59:08
remember. Yeah.
00:59:09
And and that was my biggest praise that I had for the film
00:59:12
was Michael J Fox. He like, I mean, even thinking
00:59:16
back on it now, it's a pretty mediocre film in a lot of ways,
00:59:20
but he elevates it so much. And that's an interesting thing
00:59:27
when like a film relies so heavily on a single performance.
00:59:34
Like something like Pirates of the Caribbean comes to mind,
00:59:36
where it's like Johnny Depp's performance as Jack Sparrow
00:59:40
completely steals the show in that movie.
00:59:42
But it's a solid movie otherwise.
00:59:45
You know, everything else going on that is is great.
00:59:48
This movie is not bad in any way.
00:59:50
It's just lands in a very mediocre area in most other
00:59:54
aspects except for Michael J Fox.
00:59:57
He's just amazing. And it's a comedy like it's,
01:00:01
it's a very like family friendly comedy, but he's so funny and
01:00:07
like he, he has a great ability to switch between being.
01:00:12
Comedic and serious and just whatever like the narrative
01:00:16
calls for. He he can sort of switch
01:00:18
seamlessly between those things. Yeah.
01:00:20
And so I appreciate it a lot for that.
01:00:23
And especially the like you said, it's a, it's a movie of
01:00:25
his that maybe not a lot of people have seen so.
01:00:28
If you check out our review, you'll hear a lot of that, a lot
01:00:32
of Frank talking up what a good performer Michael J Fox is, but
01:00:34
then also a lot of short shaming.
01:00:36
As I recall, really, really leading into short King Michael
01:00:40
J Fox jokes in what I think was a pretty tasteless display on
01:00:45
the. No, no, no, no, no, no.
01:00:47
You know, I, I think he, I, I think the point I was getting at
01:00:51
is that he owns it in a way that I, you know, I compared him to
01:00:55
like a Tom Cruise, for example. Who?
01:00:58
Who? I don't even know if this is
01:01:00
this. This may be a totally
01:01:01
unsubstantiated claim, but I've heard there's a lot of camera
01:01:04
trickery to make him appear taller than he actually is in a
01:01:07
lot of his films, and they don't do that with Michael J Fox.
01:01:11
He stands on business as a short king.
01:01:13
And he's on business and sometimes in milk crate.
01:01:16
He doesn't though. That's the thing he does.
01:01:19
Not sorry. We're better than.
01:01:21
This yes, they they tilt down the camera.
01:01:29
Yeah, which which fun fact, this is just pet peeve of mine.
01:01:31
I hear everybody do it, even people that work in filmmaking.
01:01:34
You don't pan up and down. You pan left and right and you
01:01:37
tilt up and down. So if the camera goes in a
01:01:42
vertical direction, that's a camera tilt.
01:01:45
And if it goes left, left to right, that's a camera pan.
01:01:50
What's a Dutch angle anyway? No, absolutely that is correct.
01:01:58
I passed a film vocabulary test one time by getting that
01:02:01
correct. I recall how that works.
01:02:03
A film vocabulary? What do you mean?
01:02:04
What was that for? I took film studies courses in
01:02:07
college. I didn't, I didn't get a full
01:02:08
blown film degree like you did, but for some reason in one of my
01:02:12
classes, it was like a third level course.
01:02:14
They gave us like a child's vocabulary test where you just
01:02:17
had to match words to definitions.
01:02:18
And it was just about like, film terminology.
01:02:21
And people like, failed it. And I just was like, what?
01:02:25
What is the most basic stuff like that was in there?
01:02:29
It's like pan versus tilt. What is a jib shot?
01:02:33
Who's Michael J Fox? Yeah, yeah.
01:02:38
Well, I mean, OK, so you know, I mean, I mess it up too.
01:02:40
It's a very common. It's it's just like the way
01:02:43
people naturally speak. No, absolutely, because
01:02:46
ultimately it's not. It's not something that getting
01:02:48
wrong will actually confuse anybody because, but it's just
01:02:51
like technically actually. Actually, yeah, yeah.
01:02:56
So just to be annoying, I thought I'd throw that there in
01:02:58
the TN. Annoying.
01:02:59
Yeah. Just to distract from all of my
01:03:01
short shaming, I thought. Yeah.
01:03:02
Yeah, exactly that. That too.
01:03:05
All right. Well, that is our recap of the
01:03:07
first half of Season 1. That's six episodes and six more
01:03:10
to go. So we're going to head into our
01:03:12
intermission now, and then when we return, we will recap the
01:03:15
second-half of our movie review adventures.
01:03:17
So we'll be right back. OK, coming back for the
01:03:28
second-half of our Season 1 recap here on Meet Your Double
01:03:31
feature Frank Episode 7, the beginning of our second-half,
01:03:35
possibly my favorite episode of Season 1.
01:03:38
Would you agree? Yeah, definitely.
01:03:40
I like this. This is the episode.
01:03:42
Someone asked me recently like to send them an episode to just
01:03:47
jump in with and I think this is the one I would recommend to
01:03:51
most people if you just want to get an idea of what the show is,
01:03:54
and I think it's one of our most entertaining ones.
01:03:57
It just it contains multitudes. First off, the movie I asked you
01:04:00
to watch, shoot, Fight or fight to the death is AB movie,
01:04:04
martial arts action flick starring one of the guys from
01:04:09
Bloodsport and two of the guys from Karate Kid.
01:04:11
So like, such a goofy film. And then the movie you asked me
01:04:14
to watch was like an auteur art film from Long Core.
01:04:19
Yi just was like, that can't be this episode.
01:04:23
Who wants to hear about both of those things in that order?
01:04:27
I do me. And we did.
01:04:31
And not only that, even just that initial discrepancy aside,
01:04:34
you, through no fault of your own, watched the wrong movie.
01:04:39
Yeah, thank you for pointing out it was through no fault of my
01:04:41
own. It was a comedy of errors that
01:04:45
led to me watching two shoot fighter movies for that review,
01:04:49
and the the one that I watched first was way worse than the
01:04:55
original 1, so I'm very glad that that was not the one we
01:04:58
wound up talking about for most of the episode.
01:05:01
Because it was what it was like. The streaming service that you
01:05:04
watched it on said it was called Shoot Fighter One.
01:05:07
Even when the movie began the like sub menu called it Shoot
01:05:09
Fighter One. But then the movie, which
01:05:11
doesn't reveal its title card until it's over, was Shoot
01:05:14
Fighter 2. Yeah, no, it was like I like, I
01:05:17
Googled it. It was like typed in the full
01:05:20
title of the original film and maybe like streaming afterwards.
01:05:24
And then I clicked the first link.
01:05:25
It was on one of those, like, free with ads services.
01:05:29
And yeah, like, it labeled it as that original title.
01:05:33
And it wasn't until the very end of the film that I realized that
01:05:36
that was not the movie that I had been watching the entire
01:05:38
time. Crazy, crazy stroke of luck to
01:05:41
have that happen in this context that it was like captured on the
01:05:44
show. Yeah, I wound up watching them
01:05:46
back-to-back. I I needed like extra time to go
01:05:49
back and watch the original film.
01:05:51
So you. Texted me and you're like hey
01:05:53
can we record tomorrow instead? And I was like sure thing,
01:05:55
whatever. And then I found out later that
01:05:56
that that's the reason why. Yeah, yeah.
01:06:00
So that that's a fun. I specifically revealed it that
01:06:03
way in the recording of the episode too.
01:06:05
So I think that that's that's fun, super funny.
01:06:09
Do you want me to talk about you fighter?
01:06:10
Because. Yeah, I mean, do you like shoot
01:06:12
fighter one quite a bit? Yeah, I think I I think I gave
01:06:15
this movie a nine out of 10, which you did Crazy cuckoo
01:06:19
bananas. It's so much fun though.
01:06:25
Like I loved it. Like honestly, both these
01:06:28
movies, like you said, like who wants both of these things?
01:06:30
Like this is like inside you there are two wolves like.
01:06:37
Yeah, 1 is very Moody and the other one wants to kick that.
01:06:40
Like it's just like, this is like the 2 ends of the spectrum
01:06:44
of like my film interests, you know, just give me that really
01:06:47
campy, fun, silly martial arts movie and then give me something
01:06:53
that's just like deep and weird and like emotional and sad like,
01:06:59
and like visually compelling. Like these are very different
01:07:03
types of films. Because the one I watched was
01:07:07
Fallen Angels from 1995. The Wonk Are Why film, which
01:07:11
other films of his are maybe more recognizable to people?
01:07:14
He he directed In the Mood for Love, which I think got like an
01:07:16
Academy Award nomination. Even the film that predates this
01:07:20
one, Chunking Express, I think has a little bit more reach in
01:07:23
the West at least. So Fallen Angels was like less
01:07:26
popular in his filmography, but it was a challenging watch.
01:07:30
I mean, watching the movie, I was like, how am I going to talk
01:07:32
about this without sounding like a big dumb idiot?
01:07:35
But it was fun and our review actually turned out really
01:07:38
engaging. I think it was just, it's a hard
01:07:41
movie to summarize my thoughts on because there was a lot
01:07:43
happening in it, but I think it was worth watching.
01:07:46
It was it was the type of challenging experience that I
01:07:49
like to have watching films unless I'm in the mood to watch
01:07:52
Shoot Fighter. Yeah, exactly.
01:07:56
Go either way, that that's how it is for me too.
01:07:59
It's like sometimes like you have to be in the right mood to
01:08:04
watch a movie that's going to challenge you.
01:08:06
I mean, we've brought this, I'm sure we've mentioned this on the
01:08:07
podcast before. But like, that's one of the
01:08:10
really interesting things about films to me is the dichotomy of
01:08:14
like art is meant to challenge your way of thinking, where is
01:08:19
entertainment is meant to reinforce it.
01:08:21
And films are both in a way. So it's like these contrasting
01:08:25
ideas. I do think this combined was our
01:08:29
highest rated scoring episode because you gave Shoot Fighter 9
01:08:32
out of 10. I gave Fallen Angels an 8 out of
01:08:34
10. And people who like movies are
01:08:37
like what? I guess that means on our
01:08:40
leaderboard they're like right next to each other.
01:08:42
And street fighters ahead, actually, so.
01:08:44
Yeah, shoot, fighter just a bit better than what?
01:08:48
To clarify, though, to clarify, Street Fighter, I scored it so
01:08:51
high because it it Street Fighter.
01:08:53
Sorry, sorry. Shoot, Fighter.
01:08:54
Very similar title. I do, yeah.
01:08:58
The man, I should rewatch the 90s Street Fighter.
01:09:01
That's a fun movie too. But a shoot fighter fight to the
01:09:05
death, which I think is the first one.
01:09:08
Yes, I scored it so high because in the same reason I scored
01:09:11
camera so high. It's like that it succeeded in
01:09:15
exactly what it was trying to be, you know, like it.
01:09:19
It nailed it. It aimed low.
01:09:22
It didn't aim low, it aimed high in that particular ceiling.
01:09:28
Like it? What a clear visual metaphor.
01:09:34
I mean, I didn't aim low, boss. The ceiling's just feeling.
01:09:38
It's the ceiling's fault, really.
01:09:39
You need to rebuild this whole thing.
01:09:41
No, I know what you mean. And to clarify, like Fallen
01:09:44
Angels probably would have been even higher because I think it's
01:09:47
a very affecting movie. I just found that the B plot in
01:09:52
the movie took up more time than what felt like should have been
01:09:54
the A plot and so there was an imbalance in pacing where you
01:09:57
spent more time with the less interesting characters in the
01:10:00
story and didn't get enough time with the main pair.
01:10:04
So I think the Fallen Angels had all the potential and was really
01:10:06
interesting and my opinion on it has not changed.
01:10:08
I really enjoy thinking back on it now, but just a little
01:10:11
imbalanced otherwise it probably would have scored even higher.
01:10:14
Yeah, if I remember from that conversation, it seemed like
01:10:16
Fallen Angels was a bit of like, it was almost like leftover
01:10:20
concepts from one of his previous projects.
01:10:23
Yeah, it was an expansion on an idea that was first conceived
01:10:26
for Chunking Express, which released a year earlier.
01:10:29
And then I think they tried to, like, staple onto that another
01:10:33
premise. And it just, I don't know, it
01:10:35
makes me want to go back and watch Chunking Express because I
01:10:37
wonder if that one feels a little bit more like like it had
01:10:40
enough detail to fill out a feature, whereas Phony just felt
01:10:43
like it had enough time to feel like a 60 to 75 minute movie.
01:10:47
Yeah. So yeah, that's, that's
01:10:49
understandable. I I think Fallen Angels was the
01:10:51
last like major film that he made before, like in China
01:10:56
before he started making films in the US primarily.
01:11:00
Anyway, that's episode 7. If you had to make one full
01:11:02
episode to revisit from this season to meet your double
01:11:05
feature, I would definitely recommend that one.
01:11:07
Frank, it sounds like you did too.
01:11:08
It's called also my best title. It's called The Karate Kids
01:11:11
Aren't All Right, which I just thought was fun.
01:11:14
It is fun, I enjoy that. I got better at these as we
01:11:17
went. Yeah, yeah.
01:11:20
They're going to get, they're going to get more and more click
01:11:22
baity as we go next season. It's going to be like we watch a
01:11:25
movie. Parentheses gone wrong.
01:11:30
Police called. Hashtag Mr. Beast.
01:11:35
Hashtag beast games anyway. Episode 8, our Halloween
01:11:39
episode, we inadvertently, because of when we started
01:11:43
producing the show and releasing episodes, ended up with like a
01:11:45
full holiday slate. This year.
01:11:47
We had an episode come out the day before Halloween, an episode
01:11:50
on Thanksgiving Day in the US and an episode on Christmas Day,
01:11:54
which is amusing content creation wise.
01:11:57
Those are bad days to release things, but it's just kind of
01:12:01
funny. Yeah.
01:12:03
So episode it was our Halloween episode.
01:12:04
I, I teed that up Frank, for you before we made our picks so that
01:12:07
we kind of both had that in mind and we ended up both picking
01:12:10
horror adjacent movies and frankly 2 of the weirder ones
01:12:14
that we've talked about. You asked me to watch Sleepy
01:12:17
Hollow, which was a Tim Burton movie, but like maybe one of the
01:12:22
less talked about once, you know, not like a forgotten movie
01:12:25
completely, but certainly not the first thing that comes to
01:12:28
mind when you hear Tim Burton and Johnny Depp.
01:12:31
Yeah, but I, I again, I, I think we talked about this in the
01:12:34
episode. This this movie has a sizeable
01:12:36
fan base. At the same time, I would say
01:12:38
it's it's not like completely forgotten and and I'll say this
01:12:42
is the one that I watched of of the ones this season.
01:12:45
All right. Yeah, I teed that up and I
01:12:47
forgot which one it actually was.
01:12:48
So you have now. We've now both seen Sleepy
01:12:50
Hollow. There you go.
01:12:51
Yeah, yeah, I liked it. I I, I thought it was a lot of
01:12:55
fun actually. You know, again, we mentioned
01:12:58
this during the episode, but it's it has that like murder
01:13:01
mystery feel to it for a lot of the film.
01:13:05
And I feel like with with many Tim Burton movies, like how you
01:13:10
feel about his style is going to affect how much you enjoy the
01:13:12
film, especially visually. Like he has such a strong visual
01:13:17
presence. And I think it's this one almost
01:13:22
strikes a good balance. Like it has his distinct visual
01:13:26
style on screen but not like turned up to 11 if that makes
01:13:32
sense. Yeah, it's turned out it's like
01:13:34
8 out of 10 on the Burton scale. Yeah, totally, totally.
01:13:39
But yeah, I mean, I was just going to say, what did you score
01:13:41
this one? I don't remember.
01:13:43
I this was funny. So in our original episode of
01:13:45
the show, I went on this whole bit about how because I hate
01:13:48
scoring and I do this to suffer for people's entertainment.
01:13:51
I hate when people give things a 7 out of 10 because it's a very
01:13:54
hard score to interrogate. It's the perfect like I don't
01:13:58
have to disclose any additional info.
01:14:00
It's a 7 out of 10. It's OK and we just kind of like
01:14:04
turned that into a bit we I kept thinking that we would never
01:14:06
have a real 7 out of 10. But then that's exactly what I
01:14:09
gave Sleepy Hollow. It's like the most for me
01:14:11
straight down the line movie of like it doesn't really do
01:14:14
anything terribly wrong. It's a complete idea.
01:14:17
It has strong performances and a good visual like style, but it
01:14:22
gets a little sleepy in the third act and the mystery
01:14:24
doesn't resolve in an entertaining way for me.
01:14:27
So by the time it was over, I was kind of like this should
01:14:29
have been better than it was. It, it had a lot of the pieces
01:14:32
and, and kind of underwhelmed in ways that pulled this cord down
01:14:35
for me. Yeah, that which that's totally
01:14:38
fair. Something that surprised me that
01:14:40
like, I don't know if you mentioned it as much, was there
01:14:44
was a surprising amount of like action and fight choreography in
01:14:47
this movie that I wasn't expecting.
01:14:48
Like the stunt performer who we did mention.
01:14:52
I, I, I think it was Ray Park, but he was doing a lot of like
01:14:56
like the Headless Horseman had like 2 swords he was swinging
01:14:59
around and like fighting people with.
01:15:02
Which was, like, cool, but also, like, distracting.
01:15:05
Yeah, he was trying to be pretty scary.
01:15:07
And then he would come out and start doing just, like, his
01:15:09
lightsaber choreography but with pumpkin head on.
01:15:12
And I was like, why? Well he never actually had the
01:15:16
pumpkin head on. He was literally just headless
01:15:18
the whole time. Oh well, there you go.
01:15:21
Oh, this was also where our episode 8 was our Christopher
01:15:23
Walken episode because he was technically in both movies that
01:15:25
we talked about, which ended in me trying and failing to do a
01:15:29
Christopher Walken impression that you probably heard glimpses
01:15:32
of in every episode after this one.
01:15:34
Yeah, he stuck around. Walken's always in the booth.
01:15:37
He's ready to go. Walken's in the booth.
01:15:39
He's watching the show. He's sleepy.
01:15:45
He's is he sleepy? It gets worse every time I do
01:15:48
it. I think I kind of had it the
01:15:49
first time which is why it stuck around.
01:15:50
But man, not not my, not my strength.
01:15:54
We got to hear it. Yeah.
01:15:55
And and it's worth noting he he has no lines of dialogue in that
01:15:59
movie other than like screaming, I think.
01:16:02
Which is weird. Why even put him in the role at
01:16:04
all? Very strange, very interesting
01:16:06
cast. A lot of Star Wars alums.
01:16:08
A lot of Harry Potter alums. Yeah, yeah.
01:16:11
But it's cool. I mean, and I think a complaint
01:16:13
you had during the review too, some of them are underutilized
01:16:15
which which I agree with as well.
01:16:17
Oh, I know they have Ian McDermott in there and he
01:16:20
doesn't do anything. Yeah, yeah, it's a bummer.
01:16:24
It's a bummer. Also, editor's note, I spent
01:16:27
quite a while in that review talking about a scene where the
01:16:31
Headless Horseman kills Dumbledore with what I call the
01:16:34
grappling hook. And Frank, I think you wanted
01:16:36
you wanted to clarify that he did not in fact, have a quote
01:16:39
grappling hook. Yeah, it was a he had a rope and
01:16:44
then they were inside a building that was surrounded by like a
01:16:47
white picket fence and he broke the top piece off one of the
01:16:51
fence spokes. I don't know what those are
01:16:55
called. I guess A spoke and he wrapped
01:16:59
the rope around that and then like threw it.
01:17:01
So it was a grappling hook of sorts.
01:17:03
But he wasn't walking around like Legend of Zelda with like a
01:17:06
bunch of items in his pocket. He wasn't leaving bombs next to
01:17:10
like, cracked rock walls. Yeah, yeah.
01:17:13
Going to get the next one with a.
01:17:15
Boomerang. That's a crossover we made,
01:17:20
yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's Sleepy
01:17:22
Hollow. And then one of our more.
01:17:25
I don't even know how to described A prophecy.
01:17:28
I asked you to watch this one, which Walken's like actually a
01:17:31
character in. It's possibly the weirdest movie
01:17:34
we've talked about in the show. I spent the entire review
01:17:37
genuinely struggling to follow your Plot Summary even though
01:17:39
you were just saying what happens in the movie.
01:17:42
Yeah, prophecy was awesome. Prophecy was awesome.
01:17:48
Looks that notes 4 out of 10. Is that what I gave it?
01:17:51
A four. You gave it a four, Yeah.
01:17:53
Yeah, yeah. I don't know, like it.
01:17:57
It's probably more so than anything on this list.
01:17:59
It was very hard to to quantify because I want to give it like
01:18:04
all the points for uniqueness because it it was like baffling
01:18:11
in a lot of ways because it was such a the writer director had
01:18:16
such a clear, I think, vision for what he wanted this to be.
01:18:21
And it translated to the screen in such an interesting way.
01:18:27
And this is another movie that has like a cult following now.
01:18:30
And I get that completely. Like, if you're in like this is
01:18:34
so specific that if this is your thing, like you're going to love
01:18:38
this like, and that's probably why they made so many of them.
01:18:42
Like this was the first of five Total Prophecy films, I think.
01:18:47
Which turned into like a threat that whoever lost season 1 like
01:18:52
scored fewer total points. Was going to have to watch all
01:18:54
the other prophecy movies. And I do think that that was
01:18:58
maybe a bridge too far. We will find some way to cover
01:19:02
prophecies 2 through 5. I'm just going to make you go
01:19:05
watch them by yourself because that just seems sad, no?
01:19:08
We'll see. We'll see.
01:19:08
We're not going to We're not going to like leave that loose
01:19:12
thread. We will revisit the prophecy in
01:19:14
some way it. Might come out at some point as
01:19:17
like audio commentaries, you know, maybe like a different
01:19:19
format for us where you can just use it and watch along the movie
01:19:23
yourself. Because then the people who are
01:19:25
watching it will be those ones you mentioned who are like, this
01:19:27
is my speed. Yeah, totally, totally.
01:19:30
Yeah, so. And, and I honestly, I'm looking
01:19:31
forward to that. Like the Prophecy is weird
01:19:33
enough that it's worth revisiting, and I think it'll be
01:19:36
interesting to see you interact with it more too.
01:19:40
I I I would be curious to see what you would think watching
01:19:43
one of these movies. I would have to get up to speed
01:19:46
on that first one because you, I haven't seen it yet, but yeah,
01:19:50
I'd probably watch that and then we'll see.
01:19:51
We'll see. That'll be something for down
01:19:53
the line. But we have not forgotten about
01:19:54
it. And it was one of the one of the
01:19:57
funnier recurring threads throughout the second-half of
01:19:59
our first run of episodes was talking about the prophecy
01:20:02
verse. Yeah.
01:20:03
And I would score this one higher too, actually, just like
01:20:06
worth noting, like I think some of these, there's been a string
01:20:10
here that I would score higher than I originally did.
01:20:14
You know, sometimes you just have that initial viewing, but
01:20:18
you need some distance from it to really reflect on them.
01:20:20
And Prophecy. It earns a lot of points for
01:20:24
just being its own thing. All right, moving from that one
01:20:28
into episode 9. Frank, I think this would kick
01:20:31
off with your review again. I asked you to watch 1994's No
01:20:35
Escape. This was also one of our funnier
01:20:38
reviews. I think I liked this one a lot.
01:20:41
Yeah, I'd like to no escape honestly, like.
01:20:44
And let's check when he gave no escape. 4 out of 10.
01:20:47
Oh no, barely. Frank Approved means 4 out of
01:20:52
10. Who's doing this?
01:20:54
Who's going around scoring these movies?
01:20:55
Who is this person? Who is?
01:20:56
This. I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm
01:21:02
just like being kinder to all of them now, but no escape had its
01:21:08
issues. I will say that it it certainly
01:21:10
had its issues. I I think in terms of it being a
01:21:14
sci-fi film, one of my biggest takeaways or things that took me
01:21:19
out of the viewing experience was it didn't do enough to
01:21:24
elaborate on and and explore the world that they were in in a way
01:21:28
that made sense to the audience. So I found that very distracting
01:21:31
because it was, it was a very isolated for the most part in
01:21:36
just this one location film, but it was set in a future world and
01:21:41
it just kind of didn't make sense in a way.
01:21:44
We just needed a little more information to flesh that whole
01:21:48
world out. So, but it had, you know, again,
01:21:54
some great character performances in there, like fun
01:21:58
action sequences, again, a uniqueness to it.
01:22:02
Like there's there's like I'm always going to be interested in
01:22:08
something that feels new, feels like something I haven't gotten
01:22:12
from a film experience before. And Noscape had that in in its
01:22:16
in its own weird way. Noscape also kicked off an
01:22:20
amusing trend where in talking about it, you had discovered
01:22:23
that there was a Super Nintendo game for No Escape.
01:22:26
And in order to flesh out their video content, the YouTube
01:22:30
version, which I've been trying to add more like interactivity
01:22:34
to with each new upload, I decided I would just play the No
01:22:37
Escape game for like 20 minutes and put that up while we were
01:22:41
talking about it. Like, so as soon as the game
01:22:42
comes up in the conversation, the video switches to me playing
01:22:46
No Escape. That game is so hard.
01:22:48
I just could not get past like the second level.
01:22:52
As soon as it begins, you're just dropped off in a jungle
01:22:55
being chased by all these enemies, which is like a weirdly
01:22:58
unique element. It's a platformer like Mario,
01:23:01
but you're being chased from behind by enemies from the
01:23:03
second it begins. Very weird game.
01:23:06
Yeah, I will say, actually watching back the gameplay
01:23:09
footage of that, it reminded me of a scene that I didn't mention
01:23:12
in the review where there's a scene where Ray Liotta is sort
01:23:18
of thrown into this like fight pit against this really big
01:23:23
dude. And they both have these like
01:23:25
Spears. And there's, there's like a like
01:23:29
spike pit or something on either side of them or like water.
01:23:33
And it's like setting it up to be this big fight sequence.
01:23:36
And I, and I, I remembered this because I was watching the
01:23:39
gameplay footage and, and it sort of sets that up.
01:23:42
You get to a screen and there's like a guy standing there with
01:23:44
like a big spear weapon. And I was like, Oh yeah, it's
01:23:47
like the scene in the movie, because he like Indiana Jones.
01:23:51
This guy basically like it's setting up to where they're
01:23:54
going to have this big fight and then regular just immediately
01:23:57
just throws the spear into his chest and the guy dies.
01:24:01
It's just very. Like that's a bit different from
01:24:03
the game where, as I recall, I kicked him in the ankle several
01:24:06
times until he died. Yeah, it was pretty much the
01:24:08
same actually. So that's pretty much.
01:24:10
The same. That is a good bit though, of
01:24:12
all the bits to reuse the Indiana Jones shooting the guy
01:24:14
thing. Yeah, yeah.
01:24:16
So I just that that felt worth mentioning because it was
01:24:18
something that I thought was fun that I that we didn't talk about
01:24:20
before. Absolutely no escape.
01:24:23
I think possibly again, in my like, top three of like movies
01:24:27
you reviewed for the show, I just really enjoyed that
01:24:28
conversation. Not so much Rushmore.
01:24:34
Half of that episode. I feel like I spent the entire
01:24:37
Rushmore review just like trying to articulate one idea about how
01:24:42
the movie must read for someone who can relate to its core, like
01:24:46
main character Max versus somebody who has maybe been the
01:24:49
victim of the kind of advances that he was doing to the woman
01:24:52
in the story. And I don't know if that
01:24:54
derailed the conversation too much or not, but it's a very
01:24:56
divisive movie for me because I think it was relatively well
01:25:00
made, but also didn't like, I don't know, I don't feel like it
01:25:05
fully explored the ramifications of what it was about.
01:25:09
Yeah, yeah. Like, I wish I had picked
01:25:13
another one of his films from that era because this was maybe
01:25:19
not. I don't think this was his first
01:25:20
film that he ever made, but it was. 2nd I believe.
01:25:23
Yeah. Yeah, I can feature.
01:25:25
Right. Exactly.
01:25:26
Yeah, that's a good, that's a good distinction.
01:25:28
So yeah, that's unfortunate. Rushmore just sounded like kind
01:25:32
of a bummer because. It was, and I think it didn't
01:25:35
want to be a bummer. I think it wanted to be a
01:25:38
somewhat abusing case study about the emotions behind an
01:25:43
obviously unrealistic like romantic pinting.
01:25:47
Max in the story is a 15 year old who decides that he's in
01:25:51
love with an adult woman who teaches at his school.
01:25:54
And the story is largely about him trying to come to grips with
01:25:57
the fact that, like, that's not a realistic thing to pursue.
01:26:00
But in telling that story, I think there were some decisions
01:26:03
made that, I don't know, it just it made the character less
01:26:07
sympathetic than I think they wanted him to be.
01:26:09
And I tried to articulate, like in detail why that was in the
01:26:12
review. I still thought the movie was
01:26:13
decent. As I recall, I gave it a six out
01:26:16
of 10. So like it's not a bad film, but
01:26:19
I think what I ultimately ended up saying was like just watch
01:26:22
any later Wes Anderson movie because this has all the DNA of
01:26:26
his future stuff, but it's an unrefined work compared to what
01:26:29
he has made since. So just go literally grab
01:26:33
anything he made in like the 2000s onward and you'll probably
01:26:37
have a better time. Yeah, Yep, that's like I said, I
01:26:41
should have picked another one from the 90s, so.
01:26:43
Now that's It wasn't a bad pick. It was a very interesting pick.
01:26:46
I was just, I don't know, I had mixed mixed feelings about it
01:26:49
and it showed in the in the final score.
01:26:52
We go from there into season 1, episode 10.
01:26:56
This, this is the worst thing of all time.
01:27:02
Frank, you asked me to watch for our Thanksgiving episode on a
01:27:05
day where we give thanks. You asked me to watch Sphere 2
01:27:12
out of 10. I have no further comments about
01:27:15
Sphere. We spent an hour in the in, like
01:27:19
the final edited version of that episode is like 50 minutes of
01:27:24
just me trying to communicate the plot of Sphere and how
01:27:27
stupid and gibberish it was. I don't even think we got into
01:27:31
much analysis because it was so hard just to explain what that
01:27:34
movie is to someone who had not seen it themselves.
01:27:36
Yeah, yeah. I listened back to that review
01:27:40
while I was driving to join our family for Thanksgiving dinner,
01:27:45
and you know I came in upset. Hey, happy Thanksgiving Like I
01:27:53
can't right now. I got to go to my room and
01:27:55
they're like you don't live here, but he's I'm sorry, I'm
01:27:57
going to the room. I.
01:27:58
Got to go to a a room. Any room.
01:28:00
It's not this one. Preferably a cube shaped room,
01:28:04
not a sphere if that's available.
01:28:05
There's just no spherical food. Get those meatballs away from
01:28:08
me. We weren't serving meat.
01:28:10
Where did you get them? I brought them with me, yeah.
01:28:14
As an example, in case there wasn't any spherical food.
01:28:17
This is what I don't want. Yeah, yeah, Sphere may be angry.
01:28:22
Sphere got a 2 out of 10. It's just everything we've said
01:28:26
about the other movies that underwhelmed us.
01:28:28
But more so, it's an inarticulate movie that the lead
01:28:32
actor said on the record was like unfinished when it was
01:28:36
released. Yeah, that's the yeah, that's a
01:28:39
huge take away there because I feel like what audiences got
01:28:45
with that movie was just a complete hodgepodge of just what
01:28:50
they had time to do basically. And that with something that's
01:28:54
such a heady premise that like deep kind of sci-fi stuff.
01:28:59
That one was really surprising to me.
01:29:02
There was some of these, you know, like the one we're going
01:29:04
to talk about next where I was like bad reviews, but I'm going
01:29:07
to I'm going to pick it anyway. Sphere though, I was just like,
01:29:11
how bad could it be? Like, look at it, you know, and
01:29:14
then it was just abysmally bad, so.
01:29:16
Just holding the meatball in his hand, like look at it, how bad
01:29:19
could it be? Look at that.
01:29:20
It's just a little round guy. Round Guy Yeah, that should have
01:29:25
been the title of that episode. It so irritated me.
01:29:29
I did post a summary review on Reddit from our official Meet
01:29:35
Your double feature account, just like drum up interest in
01:29:37
that episode. And I had a lot of people in the
01:29:39
comments telling me the book is much better because it's
01:29:41
originally a Michael Crichton novel, same guy who made like
01:29:44
Jurassic Park and a bunch of other stuff.
01:29:46
And a lot of people really liked the book.
01:29:48
So you're one of those people who reads things, go reads, but
01:29:53
don't watch it. Yeah, yeah, whatever.
01:29:55
I'm sure the book is great. That's not what we had to watch,
01:29:57
though. Like this is, you know this is.
01:30:00
It's not. Read your double feature.
01:30:02
Yeah. The sphere was bad, and then
01:30:05
kind of a double whammy because you didn't like yours either,
01:30:07
right? I asked you to watch Memphis
01:30:09
Belle, which was a World War 2 drama.
01:30:12
Not sure what I was on at the time, but yeah.
01:30:15
Me neither. I think you were like
01:30:17
Thanksgiving, World War 2, these two things.
01:30:20
That's kind of yeah. That was basically the word
01:30:21
associated. I was like Thanksgiving,
01:30:22
meatball, World War 2. Is this something?
01:30:25
This is something right? This is something.
01:30:29
Yeah, Memphis Belle, as I mentioned, it had some
01:30:33
impressive technical aspects. It had a scale to it, it more so
01:30:40
than any other film that we watched.
01:30:43
It felt like the first act sort of promised what the rest of the
01:30:48
movie was going to be like, and it just didn't deliver on that
01:30:50
at all. It just from the second act
01:30:54
onward just was this very claustrophobic and just visually
01:31:00
uninteresting and not that dramatic either type film.
01:31:05
And I mean, I'm not like a World War Two guy or anything either.
01:31:11
So it's like if there was some element of that there, it was
01:31:15
lost on me in terms of like, you know, I'm sure there's there's
01:31:19
people out there that are like, oh, that kind of bomber, you
01:31:22
know, that's really interesting. I was like, not none of that,
01:31:25
Yeah. I'm like World War 2 dads in the
01:31:27
chat. Yeah, Let us know.
01:31:30
Yeah. Why is that interesting?
01:31:32
Why do you there's, there's better things out there, you
01:31:34
know. Yeah, but.
01:31:36
Surely you've not exhausted all of the good ones.
01:31:39
Yeah. And then they turn on sphere and
01:31:41
they're like, I don't know, I'm going to go back to my to my
01:31:43
boring planes. Yeah, Sphere's even worse.
01:31:45
I gave that to Memphis Belle. You gave a three out of 10, so
01:31:49
both near the bottom. Quite a stinker in terms of our
01:31:52
actual recommendations, although the episode was pretty funny.
01:31:55
Yeah, the. Episode is fun, the films are
01:31:57
bad that and that's that's part of the fun.
01:31:59
All right, well, we'll go from that straight into episode 11.
01:32:02
Frank, you opened us up on that one with 1997's The Wrong Guy,
01:32:06
which was a Canadian, as I later learned, direct to video comedy
01:32:10
film from the minds of the people who made the Kids in the
01:32:14
Hall TV show. Yeah, and I really liked this
01:32:16
one. I I think what did I give a 7
01:32:19
out of 10? 7 out of 10.
01:32:21
All right, cool. Yeah, no, that's that's totally
01:32:24
valid. This one, as you just mentioned,
01:32:27
you know that 7 out of 10 feels very non committal in terms of
01:32:32
like how you feel about a movie. But I feel like this one, that's
01:32:37
exactly where it lands because I appreciated it.
01:32:41
I liked it. It didn't go above and beyond,
01:32:44
but it didn't overstay its welcome either.
01:32:46
It was just a very competent comedy film that was written and
01:32:51
performed by very competent comedians.
01:32:55
Like it was funny. It was just really funny.
01:32:59
It's. A funny movie.
01:33:00
Yeah. Every time we've talked about a
01:33:02
comedy, no matter how much we dance around it, ultimately the
01:33:05
question is just did you find the comedy funny and it
01:33:08
throughout the season? A lot of time the answer was no,
01:33:10
but for the wrong guy. It was like, yeah, no, this is
01:33:12
just a funny comedy on paper with good performances.
01:33:17
There you go. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
01:33:19
So I, I stand by that 7 out of 10 for that one.
01:33:22
Yeah. We move on to my pick, which you
01:33:24
kind of teed us up on Cutthroat Island from 1995.
01:33:28
This one, this was the most recent episode that's been
01:33:31
edited and released at time of recording, so the conversation
01:33:33
is very fresh for me. It's such a baffling one.
01:33:36
It was a movie that was very expensive and had a lot going in
01:33:40
its favor, and a lot of the work done in the final product is
01:33:43
like very competent. Good music, looks nice,
01:33:46
interesting stunts, but just absolutely horrible performances
01:33:51
and writing that sink whatever this movie could have been on
01:33:55
paper as soon as it begins. I mean just an awful film that
01:34:00
is lost in editing and was just it had no shot.
01:34:04
There were so many pre production hurdles that we
01:34:06
detailed in in the full episode that there was just no way this
01:34:09
was ever going to be good. Yeah, yeah.
01:34:14
Which part of me had a hope? I was like maybe everyone else
01:34:18
is wrong and it is good. I mean, we've had a couple
01:34:23
examples of that where we were not aligned with the popular
01:34:26
opinion about the movie. You kind of like Soldier.
01:34:29
You didn't like Rifters. I mean, there was there was
01:34:31
enough to be suspicious that maybe there was something fun to
01:34:34
this movie, but ultimately the bad just outweighs the good way
01:34:37
too much. Including the lead actor Geena
01:34:40
Davis, who publicly it was known she didn't want to do the movie
01:34:43
because of the state it had fallen into.
01:34:45
And that shines through so much in the performance.
01:34:47
It looks like she's trying to make the movie bomb on purpose.
01:34:50
Which is a bummer. I mean, if that, yeah, if you
01:34:53
can clearly see that on screen, you're like, well, if she's not
01:34:56
happy, I'm not enjoying this either, so.
01:34:59
Exactly, exactly. It just there's nothing fun
01:35:02
about it. And this kind of swashbuckling
01:35:03
action adventure story has to be fun.
01:35:05
It doesn't have to be smart or good, but if it's not fun, it's
01:35:09
like, what am I doing here? I don't want to see like the guy
01:35:13
on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney when he's having
01:35:15
like a bad day and he's just like yar and whatever.
01:35:20
You talk about like the animatronic people at the
01:35:23
Disneyland rides aren't. There real people.
01:35:25
I've never been to Disneyland. This is an uninformed analogy.
01:35:31
Yeah, I assume there was real pirate man.
01:35:34
There, there was real. I I think this is this.
01:35:38
I think this is actually true. The originally they used real
01:35:43
like human remains for the like skeletons on the Disneyland ride
01:35:48
because yeah, I've. Heard that?
01:35:51
Come on. Yeah, yeah.
01:35:54
I mean, Google it like to verify, but I've heard that
01:35:58
enough that I think it's it's verifiable.
01:36:02
That's crazy. How has there not been like a
01:36:03
ghost story set at Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean ride
01:36:06
where the ghost pirates come back?
01:36:08
Except they wouldn't be pirates because they'd be random other
01:36:11
dead people. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:36:13
I don't know. Or it'd be the Ghost Doctor from
01:36:16
the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
01:36:20
Yeah, no, it's mostly it's, it's, I think entirely I, I've
01:36:23
been on the ride once or twice. It scared me a lot as a child,
01:36:26
actually. I think it's entirely
01:36:28
animatronics. I think they added like a Johnny
01:36:30
Depp animatronic that was not they're.
01:36:33
Wait, you run the Pirates of the Caribbean ride as a child?
01:36:36
Yeah, yeah. But really, really.
01:36:38
Young it's a family vacation. I think you.
01:36:41
I think you weren't born yet. I.
01:36:42
Think that was why you missed it, picturing like 10 year old
01:36:48
you on a ride and me just at home.
01:36:49
Like man, where is everybody? Gone for a while, playing a lot
01:36:54
of video games here. A lot of, oh, video games.
01:36:57
There was also a Super Nintendo Cutthroat Island game which I
01:37:01
could not get working, so I played the Sega Genesis version
01:37:03
instead. And that even harder than the No
01:37:06
Escape game. Both extremely difficult, that
01:37:09
one. Looked more fun though compared
01:37:11
to the no escape one. It was the no escape one felt
01:37:14
cheap. The cut the Rhode Island game
01:37:16
was like well realized but had that arcade machine kind of
01:37:20
ethos behind it where you had a set number of lives and if you
01:37:25
died enough on level one that sometimes you'd get into level 2
01:37:28
and only have like one life left.
01:37:30
And the second level of the game is this stupid vehicle section
01:37:33
where you just have to guess whether or not like the left or
01:37:35
the right side of the road is going to have an obstacle on it.
01:37:38
And it's just a memorization game.
01:37:39
So I had to play the first level like 6 times just to get enough
01:37:43
attempts to try to memorize the other part.
01:37:45
And then I finally made it to Level 3 and I broke the game
01:37:47
somehow. I beat every enemy on screen and
01:37:49
just couldn't continue. Where was the end?
01:37:52
They just were like, nobody's made it this far.
01:37:54
Like nobody has that many. Quarters.
01:37:57
Do you know how many? Grifters scams you'd have to do
01:37:59
to get enough quarters to get to this point in the game on your
01:38:02
Sega Genesis? Are you kidding me?
01:38:04
Yeah, Jackie's ex Big grift was actually just financing
01:38:07
Cutthroat Island the movie. That's too big.
01:38:10
Too big of a grift? Well, that's the one we didn't
01:38:12
get to. See.
01:38:13
Yeah, that's true. That's true.
01:38:15
All right. Episode 12, last one of the
01:38:17
season. This recap has gone so much
01:38:19
longer than I thought it would, but I don't know why I thought
01:38:21
it would take less time because it's 24, so I think I went first
01:38:29
again. Frank, you decided to end season
01:38:31
1 by having me watch a made for TV movie, which I just think is
01:38:34
a funny choice. Yeah, got you got.
01:38:37
You got me. Indeed.
01:38:41
You had me watch Babylon 5 The Gathering, which is like the
01:38:43
pilot for the Babylon 5 sci-fi TV series that followed a year
01:38:48
or so after. We really just talked a lot
01:38:51
about Star Trek during this review because Babylon 5 the
01:38:55
movie is fine. It's pretty good, but it feels
01:39:00
like watching TV and not a film. So there's just a kind of
01:39:03
general acceptance of like the production level is very
01:39:05
different. There was no prestige TV shows
01:39:08
at this time where it would look like you were watching a movie.
01:39:10
It was it was ATV show, but for 90 minutes.
01:39:14
Yeah, yeah. And we learned that it's was
01:39:18
actually the precursor to our favorite Star Trek series, Deep
01:39:22
Space 9. And Deep Space 9 was seemingly
01:39:25
the one that actually borrowed a lot of concepts from this one.
01:39:28
Yeah, I spent the whole movie thinking it was the opposite
01:39:30
'cause I thought you had said that when you pitched it and I
01:39:32
just misheard, I guess. So I spent the whole movie being
01:39:34
like, I can't believe how much this movie ripped off Deep Space
01:39:38
9, my favorite show. How embarrassing.
01:39:41
And then I looked it up and it was the opposite.
01:39:42
And I was like, well, there's probably more to this, you know,
01:39:44
we shouldn't cast judgements. World War 2 bombers and stuff
01:39:48
so. Yeah, World War 2 bombers.
01:39:49
Yeah. Yeah, John Cusack.
01:39:52
So yeah, Babylon 5 is like, hard to explain because sci-fi lore
01:39:56
is dense and if you're watching something that's brand new and
01:40:00
has to introduce every new concept to you as it goes, just
01:40:03
takes forever to explain. Like I think a lot of people
01:40:05
through osmosis will know that Star Trek has Klingons and
01:40:10
Vulcans. Because they've, like, heard it
01:40:11
before. You don't really need to spend a
01:40:13
lot of time introducing what that is.
01:40:16
You can understand it in context.
01:40:17
Whereas Babylon 5 is like, you've never seen any of this.
01:40:19
We have to tell you every alien, every major character, the
01:40:23
history of our entire world in as few words as possible.
01:40:26
So it's like, it was interesting.
01:40:28
I think I gave it a 7 because it was like, yeah, pretty good, but
01:40:31
very hard to give a complete judgement because it was so
01:40:33
obviously just a launchpad for a show.
01:40:36
Yeah, yeah, I was hoping it would be a little more than
01:40:40
that. I was hoping it would sort of
01:40:41
transcend that idea a bit because I've seen some pilots
01:40:45
like for shows that tell a really complete story, they they
01:40:50
still leave it open-ended, but it's like kind of like this is
01:40:53
what you're getting and, you know, and here's our kind of
01:40:55
best foot forward. And so I was hoping, given that
01:40:58
this was a movie as opposed to like just a regular length
01:41:01
episode, that it might have it leaned more in that direction,
01:41:05
but. It does, I mean it does give you
01:41:08
1 full mystery that it resolves that has a climax and then they
01:41:12
give you some lore heading into the rest of the show.
01:41:15
You could even say maybe they don't give enough of a lead in
01:41:17
to the show because you mostly just have this one like mystery
01:41:21
surrounding your central character.
01:41:23
But the show, sorry, the movie The Gathering did also suffer
01:41:27
from being kind of low budget like in feel.
01:41:30
I mean Star Trek may have apparently ripped it off
01:41:31
completely, but it is a very high production value show for
01:41:36
the time. Some things have an age 12, but
01:41:37
whatever. Babylon 5 looks cheap.
01:41:40
I mean there's people wearing I'll fitting clothes and there's
01:41:43
like really good alien makeup. But then some other people just
01:41:46
they didn't even try. Like it's a giant mixed bag of a
01:41:50
production that felt like a proof of concept and not like a
01:41:53
a hype machine movie. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's,
01:41:57
that's kind of a shame. I mean, 7 out of 10 is not bad.
01:41:59
That's a respectable score, but. It and that speaks to how
01:42:03
competent the writing is in the movie.
01:42:05
Like I'm sure Babylon 5 the show has a pretty good narrative push
01:42:09
because a lot of it comes from the brain of this one guy who
01:42:12
wrote like 90% of everything that was ever written for
01:42:15
Babylon 5. And it is good.
01:42:16
It's a competent sci-fi drama. If you like Star Trek but have
01:42:19
watched everything from the 80s and 90s, definitely watch
01:42:22
Babylon 5. Maybe you already have, but as a
01:42:25
movie for like general viewing by itself, I I wouldn't give it
01:42:29
anything above a 7 because it's kind of hard to get into that.
01:42:33
Yeah, that's valid. That's bad blood five last movie
01:42:36
of the season also weirdly has a sci-fi connection, even though
01:42:40
it's not a sci-fi film. The cutting edge.
01:42:43
I picked this one for you, Frank, because it made me laugh
01:42:45
when I looked at the credits. It's a romance story about two
01:42:51
people from different worlds. She's a figure skater and he's a
01:42:54
hockey man. But the person who wrote the
01:42:57
film was Tony Gilroy, who many, many years later would write
01:43:01
Rogue One for Star Wars and write and or the like extremely
01:43:04
popular show. I just thought the contrast
01:43:06
between him doing all these like really big scale political
01:43:10
sci-fi stories against cheeky young adult like sports romance
01:43:15
was too hard to pass up. Yeah, no.
01:43:18
And like I enjoyed this one. Remind me when I scored it.
01:43:21
You gave Cutting Edge A5 out of 10, and this, I will say is the
01:43:24
one that I did go back and watch.
01:43:26
I like, I think like the day after we recorded that episode,
01:43:29
I went back and watched it as well and I completely agree.
01:43:31
I also would have given it a 5 out of 10.
01:43:33
Right. It's very middle of the road,
01:43:35
but yeah, like not in a bad way. It's like leaning over into that
01:43:39
positive side of that even split.
01:43:41
I liked it, but I don't feel like I was missing anything
01:43:45
having not seen it. That yeah, that's a good way to
01:43:47
put it. That's a good way to put it.
01:43:48
It was the the two leads had good chemistry and charisma.
01:43:54
And it was a fun, if not like basic concept.
01:44:00
Yeah. And felt like a kind of a
01:44:02
blending of two genres, like it was a sports romance movie.
01:44:05
So there's a lot of appeal, like general appeal there.
01:44:09
A lot of general appeal. I mean, if you're someone who
01:44:11
likes romances, I think the romance elements to the story
01:44:14
are pretty good. It's a classic enemies to
01:44:17
lovers, as they say, because the figure skater woman is very like
01:44:20
standoffish and is always trying to kind of scare off her new her
01:44:23
new partners because she thinks none of them are good enough.
01:44:25
And so of course when this guy comes in and he's like a roguish
01:44:28
hockey player man, he doesn't know what he's doing.
01:44:30
And so it kind of creates this friction.
01:44:31
At the beginning, I did think the movie had some interesting
01:44:33
lighting. Like it was a fairly well shot
01:44:37
film, although they were very hesitant to actually show a lot
01:44:40
of ice skating. It was very like, we can't
01:44:43
easily show you the people doing it, the actors.
01:44:46
So we're going to do a lot of close-ups and shadows during the
01:44:48
actual like third act ice skating parts.
01:44:51
Yeah, which I, I did think lent itself to some good
01:44:54
cinematography at times where the the like stunt performers
01:44:58
who were filling in and actually doing the skating were
01:45:01
silhouetted with some sort of bright overpowering lights
01:45:05
behind them. And I, I thought that looked
01:45:07
really good, especially when they like would sparingly cut to
01:45:10
some some pretty wide shots. I, I thought those looked really
01:45:13
cool. You could have used more of that
01:45:15
though. That's what I mean, like it was
01:45:17
a good cover up for what they had to depict on screen, but
01:45:21
because of how effortful it probably was to even do what
01:45:23
they did, the movie felt like it was skipping over parts that
01:45:26
should have been more climactic. Like I anticipated we'd spend
01:45:29
more time watching them do their final skate routine, but it kind
01:45:32
of just comes and goes and the actual story beat happens before
01:45:35
they begin. I don't know, I think there's
01:45:37
more you could have done, but the movie was probably made
01:45:39
really quickly and for what it was, it was surprisingly fun to
01:45:42
watch. So strong.
01:45:43
Five out of 10. Yeah, good, good, closer, good
01:45:45
one to add on. Good, closer, kind of seasonal,
01:45:48
kind of wintry. We released that one.
01:45:50
That's our Christmas Day episode.
01:45:52
Doesn't feel like it because I think we forget to bring that up
01:45:54
until the episode's like almost done, but.
01:45:56
It's fine people. People will know what day it is.
01:45:59
People will know what day it is when they're like, sorry kids,
01:46:02
we got to open the presents in a few hours.
01:46:04
I got to catch the new Meet You double feature.
01:46:07
Yeah, play for the kids. That's what they like for the
01:46:10
kids. What is our show if not for the
01:46:12
kids? Babylon 5.
01:46:14
They love it. Babylon 5.
01:46:16
They want to hear about the history of the Volcar and the
01:46:21
Drapnar or whatever it was. Play the door.
01:46:24
Door closing sound. Play the door closing sound.
01:46:27
All right Frank, that was an exhaustive recap of season 1.
01:46:31
I would say pretty thorough. Hopefully if you have not caught
01:46:35
much of our first season, this was kind of a good primer.
01:46:37
We are continuing right into Season 2, although we'll have a
01:46:40
bit of a different style bonus episode coming up after this
01:46:43
one. But join us in four weeks time
01:46:45
when we formally kick off Season 2.
01:46:48
Originally I was going to have us discuss the premise for
01:46:51
Season 2 at the end of this recording, but because we've
01:46:53
gone long, I think we'll just figure that out off Mike.
01:46:56
Yeah, that sounds good. So.
01:46:58
Just stay tuned to our socials. Meet Your doublefeature.com is
01:47:02
our website where you can listen to full episodes and read
01:47:04
written reviews. We also are on social media
01:47:07
Instagram at Meet Your Double Feature and also on Blue Sky at
01:47:10
Mydf Pod. And then Frank because I, I
01:47:13
think I forgot to help you pitch this last time.
01:47:15
What is the website folks can go to to follow your filmmaking
01:47:18
exploits? Exploits.
01:47:22
Misadventures. Schemes.
01:47:25
Grips. Yeah, you can.
01:47:28
You can keep up with our exploits as Thomas put it, at
01:47:32
Sardonic. That is Sardonic mp.com for
01:47:38
Sardonic Motion Pictures. That is the name of the
01:47:40
production company that our first independent film was
01:47:44
released under. So you can get updates on when
01:47:48
that will be available on streaming early next year and
01:47:53
any future updates about our upcoming projects.
01:47:56
Fantastic. Yeah, stay tuned for that.
01:47:58
We talked a lot in our first season about the Film Festival
01:48:00
run of Frank's Company's first film, Nate and Ryan Venice,
01:48:04
which was super fun. We were able to promote those
01:48:05
shows as they came and went. But yeah, heading into Season 2,
01:48:08
it'll be more about the streaming release.
01:48:10
So thank you all for listening. This was our Season 1 recap
01:48:13
episode coming up in two weeks. On Thursday, we are going to
01:48:16
have the debut of a new spinoff series here at Meet Your Double
01:48:19
Feature that we're both very excited about.
01:48:21
And then two weeks following that, we will be kicking off a
01:48:23
brand new season. We're going to reset the
01:48:25
leaderboard. So, Frank, for the folks
01:48:27
watching on the YouTube version, I'm going to put up the final
01:48:29
leaderboard right now, which I guess is the definitive list of
01:48:33
the top forgotten 90s films. Yeah, the end, if you will.
01:48:38
This is it. There's clearly nothing that we
01:48:40
missed. Yeah, yeah.
01:48:42
If you think there's something we missed, don't tell us.
01:48:44
We don't want to know. Don't tell us.
01:48:46
We don't want to hear about it. It's Gamera.
01:48:49
It's. Gamera Gamera was the best one.
01:48:52
It's just Gamera. The worst is sphere.
01:48:56
Sphere should be like 500 places below everything else because
01:48:59
it's that bad. But do watch camera.
01:49:01
Do watch shoot fighter, pump up the volume.
01:49:04
Anything in the top five? Very good.
01:49:06
You don't watch whatever you want.
01:49:08
You do you watch. Whatever you want, don't listen
01:49:10
to me. Don't listen to people in your
01:49:12
ears. All right, that's it.
01:49:19
I'll see you in two weeks. Thank you for listening.