Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Castle of Horror, the show dedicated
Speaker 1: to horror movies and awesomeness. We are a feed spot
Speaker 1: top one hundred horror podcast. That's the thing I haven't
Speaker 1: told you. Oh nice, Yes, this week we're not even
Speaker 1: number one hundred. We're like in there, so okay. This
Speaker 1: week we have a look at the twenty twenty five
Speaker 1: film Companion. Not a film companion, the film is called Companion.
Speaker 1: This is episode four hundred and fifty nine. Bear in
Speaker 1: mind if you haven't seen today's movie, we're going to
Speaker 1: be talking about it from the perspective of horror fans
Speaker 1: who have seen it. So warning spoilers ahead. From Denver, Colorado,
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jason Henderson, publisher at castle Bridge Media,
Speaker 1: home of the Castle of Horror anthology. With me from
Speaker 1: Austin is Tony Savaggio, lead singer and bassis of the
Speaker 1: band Deserts of Mars and lead guitarist of the band
Speaker 1: Rise from Fire. So Hello, Tony, Howdy Honey, also in
Speaker 1: austins Or. Drew Edwards is the writer creator of the
Speaker 1: long running underground comic Halloween Man, which you can find
Speaker 1: at Global Comics. He is a best writer Ringo nominee
Speaker 1: Austin Chronicle Best of Austin Award winner and a member
Speaker 1: of the Pen America Fellowship.
Speaker 2: Say hello, Drew, Well, I'm an emotional support robot that fucks.
Speaker 3: He Drew always changes his name on our little dial
Speaker 3: pad thing, and today's fuck bought.
Speaker 2: A look behind the curtain for wondering.
Speaker 1: What we're not actually on camera. We just see, We
Speaker 1: just see, like our little spaces, and we change our name.
Speaker 2: I am probably a fuck bought tonight, I guess.
Speaker 1: And finally, also in Denver, color commentary from Julia Guzman,
Speaker 1: the Busiest Woman in Colorado of Guzman Immigration of Denver.
Speaker 3: Say hello, that was like an example of my color commentary.
Speaker 1: Yes that's right, okay look. Companion is a twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five I Have American science fiction thriller film starring Sophie
Speaker 1: Thatcher and Jack Quaid as a couple on a weekend
Speaker 1: getaway with friends at a remote cabin, which unravels into
Speaker 1: chaos after a revelation that one of the guests spoiler
Speaker 1: spoiled by the poster it's her, is a robot. The
Speaker 1: film is written and directed by Drew Hancock and also
Speaker 1: stars Lucas Gage, Megan Surrey, Harvin Gihan and Rupert Friend
Speaker 1: in supporting roles. So this movie came out in January
Speaker 1: of this year. It got really good reviews. It's grossed
Speaker 1: thirty six point seven million against and get this a
Speaker 1: budget of ten million, ten million dollars. That's so low
Speaker 1: that I can't even believe that that's right. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's so, I'll, I will, I will double check that's
Speaker 1: that's what my sources said. And I was like, there's
Speaker 1: no way that this is a ten million dollar movie.
Speaker 1: But okay, let's get our opening thoughts. Let's go with Drew.
Speaker 1: We haven't started with you in a while, so let's
Speaker 1: go Drew, Julia, Tony, and then I'll go opening thoughts
Speaker 1: on Companion.
Speaker 2: I thought this was great. I think that this is
Speaker 2: a movie that, you know, could easily just spend pulpy
Speaker 2: in fun, but did a really good job of speaking
Speaker 2: to our moment, which is it asks a big question
Speaker 2: about our relationship, our ever growing relationship with technology and
Speaker 2: the world around it as we see more and more
Speaker 2: automation taking up space. But also it has a lot
Speaker 2: of smart observations about relationships and things of that nature.
Speaker 2: So you know, it's a really good blending of the
Speaker 2: technological and you know, the emotional, but also like I
Speaker 2: see bits of the Stepford Wives in this. I see
Speaker 2: bits of you know, Terminator, you know Blade Runner, which
Speaker 2: you know a lot a lot of Blade Runner. You
Speaker 2: know this, This was a really good techno horror with
Speaker 2: heart beautiful.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Thank you very much, Julia, I mean, did
Speaker 1: you dig this? I know that you actually remembered it
Speaker 1: really well because we don't know when.
Speaker 3: We first sat in the theater. It is my endorsement
Speaker 3: for the week. I think, yeah, no, I liked I
Speaker 3: like it a lot. It is It's really clever. It's
Speaker 3: not super original because, as Drew pointed out, there's several
Speaker 3: movies that it's sort of you know, borrowing from or
Speaker 3: an homage to or whatever. But but it's an original
Speaker 3: take on the on that whole you know, AI being
Speaker 3: self aware and how do we treat you know, who,
Speaker 3: what is it to be a person that kind of
Speaker 3: like it's you know, initial a question that's been that
Speaker 3: goes back for one hundred probably one hundred years, but
Speaker 3: for for sure, like you know, Star Trek had that
Speaker 3: question and all all all all kinds of movies. It's like,
Speaker 3: how what what are we doing when we're taking AI
Speaker 3: to this extreme? And then at what point do we
Speaker 3: owe some kind of do does a I have rights?
Speaker 3: You know, so like her? Or what was the other
Speaker 3: movie that came out at the same time as Her
Speaker 3: that was like about an android that had become self aware? Anyway,
Speaker 3: there's like a.
Speaker 1: But sure, yeah, I don't remember what, thank you, But.
Speaker 3: Well we'll kind of think of those as well. Sorry
Speaker 3: it wasn't that, but yeah, that's another one. So anyway,
Speaker 3: there's a bunch of films like that, and I think
Speaker 3: it's worth a theme that's worth continuing to explore. And
Speaker 3: as we the more we do you know, like you know, Tony,
Speaker 3: you're going to talk about your recent experience with robots
Speaker 3: and so. But you know, the more we we have
Speaker 3: AI kind of becoming part of our daily life, the
Speaker 3: more we need to think about these ethical questions.
Speaker 1: Very good, Thank you very much, Tony. What are your
Speaker 1: opening thoughts?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it does a really good job. I
Speaker 4: saw it in the theater first. I think it does
Speaker 4: a really good job of recontextualizing a lot of these things,
Speaker 4: you know, from the Matrix from Plade Runner from you know,
Speaker 4: you name it like it could be a Twilight Zone episode,
Speaker 4: but it's it's different than that, has a different flavor,
Speaker 4: a different flavor than perhaps like Black Mirror. I think
Speaker 4: it it does a really good job of recontextualizing all
Speaker 4: this for a newer generation. Like everybody who's in it
Speaker 4: has it certain like there's a the way everybody's stressed
Speaker 4: that the actors that they chose, I think, are are
Speaker 4: you know, really modern and I it's it is fascinating
Speaker 4: to the scene.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: My experience is like as we as we move forward.
Speaker 4: I just was at a restaurant and there was a
Speaker 4: little it's basically a tray on wheels that it had
Speaker 4: a little face. It's like, you know, I got served
Speaker 4: meat at a Korean barbecue place by a by a
Speaker 4: meat serving robot. It comes to my table and you
Speaker 4: pressed okay, and then it goes away. It goes to
Speaker 4: the next you know, goes to pick up its tray.
Speaker 4: I don't know all this is. This is kind of funny.
Speaker 3: They have those the self driving cars now the way
Speaker 3: Moo whatever it's called, and they have a little delivery
Speaker 3: robots that deliver food around campus at different colleges.
Speaker 1: And drunes, so they will fly they flynes and then.
Speaker 3: Of course we've got chat GBC everywhere, so there's all.
Speaker 4: Kinds of Yeah, we we had some really not great
Speaker 4: incidences of self driving cars around here lately in Austin,
Speaker 4: so that's not great. But yeah, I think it there's
Speaker 4: a lot to it about how it's It's interesting because
Speaker 4: it's not just the like the trailers made it out to, like,
Speaker 4: oh kind of maybe a little bit more horror or
Speaker 4: maybe a little bit more hardware, you know, and it's
Speaker 4: different than that. It has there's a lot about the relationships.
Speaker 4: There's a lot about who's you know, who's worse the
Speaker 4: robot the people, and then how what what they're willing
Speaker 4: to do do uh that that's worse And I you know,
Speaker 4: I think it's a really smart movie, and I'm glad
Speaker 4: we're discussing it.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Last year s K Dale made a thriller called Subservience
Speaker 1: with Megan Fox, which was that movie was basically what
Speaker 1: if you did the hand that rocks the cradle with
Speaker 1: only you know the the incoming nanny is a robot
Speaker 1: and is Megan Fox? And and and that you know,
Speaker 1: And that was a B film. Because it's like kind
Speaker 1: of hyper violent and like you know, it's it's much more,
Speaker 1: much more in your face than this. But I love
Speaker 1: that there's so many ways to do this story of
Speaker 1: like problems with the robot and then you can just
Speaker 1: like with vampires, it it varies in equality and how
Speaker 1: how how interesting you can make your metaphor. And here
Speaker 1: there's a lot going on. So I know the movie
Speaker 1: is about a lot of stuff, and we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about all of this, But to me, I am
Speaker 1: so interested in the last couple of years and reading
Speaker 1: about the concept of toxic masculinity and and and you
Speaker 1: know how how terrible we as men can be when
Speaker 1: we when we uh, when we sort of follow our
Speaker 1: lesser angels. And this is a movie kind of about
Speaker 1: what if that was unleashed. I mean, like, what if
Speaker 1: you have toxic masculinity and basically nothing holding it back
Speaker 1: because we've now created slaves that a toxic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he fully talks about how you know it's not
Speaker 3: he's just such a victim or whatever.
Speaker 1: So I love that was my favorite thing about this.
Speaker 1: But I get and I celebrate that there's so much
Speaker 1: going on here that's just one topic. But but I was.
Speaker 1: I just loved it. I ate it up because I
Speaker 1: spend all my time reading Reddit threads on how awful
Speaker 1: dudes can be and and this, so this is this
Speaker 1: played right into that. So okay, my first thought was
Speaker 1: this is this is just a point of order, and
Speaker 1: then we kind of work our way through it. But
Speaker 1: if you let's imagine like Tony said about you and
Speaker 1: I saw Pitch Black. Okay, the movie Pitch Black with
Speaker 1: Vin Diesel, and we don't know Vin Diesel. We just
Speaker 1: saw the movie and he was in it.
Speaker 3: But but it's funny that you say that because you
Speaker 3: actually did see you and Tony a lot of movies
Speaker 3: with the actual stars of the movie.
Speaker 1: Well, Vin Diesel showed up, but he was exactly that's
Speaker 1: my boy, what I always But we were not with
Speaker 1: him whatever.
Speaker 3: Whenever Jason says I just watched whatever with whoever, I'm
Speaker 3: always like, I didn't know you knew that person. But
Speaker 3: in this case, you actually did watch a lot of
Speaker 3: these movies with the That's true.
Speaker 1: I actually forgot until you said that this moment that
Speaker 1: Vind's I mean.
Speaker 4: He was I I yeah, because I was hanging out
Speaker 4: like I watched it.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 4: Oh, actually I think I went to sit with Ernie,
Speaker 4: but before that I was hanging out with the David.
Speaker 4: David was just talking about film, like, yes, we did
Speaker 4: see it. It was random, like I mean, but anyway,
Speaker 4: it was you.
Speaker 3: Saw a bunch of movies with Quentin Tarantino.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so look we sit down at
Speaker 1: the theater. Uh, They're like, hey, a new movie is
Speaker 1: coming on. We don't know what it is. Like literally,
Speaker 1: nobody had told us what the movie was. I think
Speaker 1: they had said, oh, David, dwow, he is up in
Speaker 1: the lobby and he wrote it. It's called pitch Black.
Speaker 1: Nobody knows nothing about it. And it just starts playing, right,
Speaker 1: and it starts and we were just you know, we
Speaker 1: were knocked back, like it knocked our socks off if
Speaker 1: it but if you And so that was an experience
Speaker 1: of watching a movie and literally having zero, no context, nothing.
Speaker 1: You just let's you know, let's go down. Movie comes
Speaker 1: up and here you are. If you watched this movie
Speaker 1: and you had not seen a trailer or the poster,
Speaker 1: the poster, would you know that that our main character
Speaker 1: is a robot until like the twenty minute mark when
Speaker 1: she finally gets turned off.
Speaker 3: You get clues. You get clues, but you don't get
Speaker 3: the actual giveaway until her eyes go white. But you
Speaker 3: got lots of clues.
Speaker 2: The trailer, the original first trailer I remember when I
Speaker 2: saw it, made it look more like well, or like
Speaker 2: they were a pair of cereal like her and like
Speaker 2: a pair of serial killers that were feuding with each
Speaker 2: other somehow.
Speaker 3: No, I didn't get that because I remember the trailer,
Speaker 3: the very short the teaser. I remember that you find
Speaker 3: that they have that music and then I can't remember
Speaker 3: what song was, but then she's chained to the floor
Speaker 3: or something like that, or and I was like, what,
Speaker 3: I don't remember that.
Speaker 2: I just remember thinking that it was going to be
Speaker 2: more like a slasher type Yeah, but like to that
Speaker 2: point though nothing about it said this is a movie
Speaker 2: about a renegade robot, which is fascinating.
Speaker 1: So would that be better? I guess what I'm asking is, like,
Speaker 1: do we do ourselves a disservice.
Speaker 2: When when by the time I saw it, I knew
Speaker 2: that it was about a robot, and I don't think
Speaker 2: it hampered my enjoyment. But I'm also somebody I don't
Speaker 2: care about spoilers or because I'm more about the journey,
Speaker 2: not the destination, Like I don't, I don't care like
Speaker 2: the ending, like very seldomly does a movie. A movie's
Speaker 2: ending has to be really disappointing to me for me
Speaker 2: to hate an entire movie based off I could do
Speaker 2: or or like the twists and turns of a movie
Speaker 2: because like, let's let's face it, like like The Sixth
Speaker 2: Sense is a really good movie with a really good twist,
Speaker 2: but nobody's rewatching that movie because of the twist. Like
Speaker 2: people rewatch it because like because after you've seen it once,
Speaker 2: you know Bruce Willis as a ghost, but you watch
Speaker 2: it over again because it's an interesting movie. It's a
Speaker 2: good movie. But that's again that could also be specific
Speaker 2: to I guess. The point I'm saying is, I guess
Speaker 2: it depends on what kind of person you are, which
Speaker 2: I guess is a cop out answer, but it's it's
Speaker 2: the answer that's truest to myself.
Speaker 3: I did find the teaser, by the way, it was
Speaker 3: I Only Have Eyes for You with the song, and
Speaker 3: she's not she's just changed in the chair, not the floor.
Speaker 2: But yeah, so it.
Speaker 1: Looks like a survival picture, like like you know, like it's.
Speaker 3: Playing it's playing. It's singing that music you know I
Speaker 3: only have, and you've got Patrick serving the dinner and
Speaker 3: they're sitting at the table and then you suddenly see
Speaker 3: her hand and she's like, you know, handcuffed to the.
Speaker 1: And to be honest with that trailer, I actually thought
Speaker 1: it was just yet another And We've had a bunch
Speaker 1: of movies in the past couple of years, and I've
Speaker 1: enjoyed them all where somebody winds up at a beautiful
Speaker 1: isolated house and you know, bad stuff starts to grow
Speaker 1: down exactly, usually involving a culinary experience of some kind,
Speaker 1: and so but anyway, I just thought that was interesting
Speaker 1: that you go in knowing the twist that's coming, like
Speaker 1: twenty minutes into the movie. But it's okay because it's
Speaker 1: all interesting while you're while you're watching it.
Speaker 3: And I'm sure some people didn't see any trailers and
Speaker 3: did were completely surprised.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure. And it also, at your Drew's point,
Speaker 1: is great that sometimes you know, you know that a
Speaker 1: twist is coming and you still just enjoy how it's delivered.
Speaker 1: And it really is. Because I loved this the second
Speaker 1: time around.
Speaker 3: My favorite line in this movie, and I know, it's
Speaker 3: like skipping way to the no. No, it's kind But
Speaker 3: my favorite line this movie is when the two guys
Speaker 3: pick her up to fix her, you know, after she's
Speaker 3: the two robot the company guy like the empathics or
Speaker 3: whatever it's called, and the guys like, I can't remember
Speaker 3: what the what the naive one asked the other guys like, oh, no,
Speaker 3: she's totally moded out. No, he told you did this
Speaker 3: so funny. He's like, no, people are fucked, people are crazy.
Speaker 1: It's so funny that this that raises the question, And
Speaker 1: I think that's sort of one of the one of
Speaker 1: the first things I'd like to talk about. And maybe
Speaker 1: I'm just tossing away going through the plot, but uh,
Speaker 1: this movie kind of raises the question of is it
Speaker 1: possible to have and it has an This movie suggests
Speaker 1: the answer might be yes. But is it possible to
Speaker 1: have a non abusive, a non toxic relationship with a
Speaker 1: partner that you own? I mean, you know, a non
Speaker 1: abusive companion robot relationship? Like is there any good future
Speaker 1: in this because this is going to happen.
Speaker 3: By the way, you mean by abusive, because just in
Speaker 3: the fact that you said that you own means already no.
Speaker 3: But if you said, if you have a companion bot
Speaker 3: that lives with you, then yeah, I mean it could
Speaker 3: be as long as because as long as that the
Speaker 3: bot has the ability to you know, be the consent
Speaker 3: to some extent, then you can have a relationship just
Speaker 3: like anybody else. But the thing is, I don't know
Speaker 3: what that looks like.
Speaker 1: That's not where I was going. But you just raised
Speaker 1: a really interesting thought because what you're suggesting is that
Speaker 1: you could pay twenty five thousand dollars for a bot,
Speaker 1: but it's only ethical if you also give the bot
Speaker 1: it's freedom.
Speaker 2: The thing is about the way the robots are presented
Speaker 2: in this film. This is going to be a weird parallel,
Speaker 2: but stay with me.
Speaker 1: I'm with you.
Speaker 2: They are almost like the zombies in the George Romero
Speaker 2: Dead films because they start out one way, which is complacent.
Speaker 2: They're completely devoted to their programming. But like like what
Speaker 2: we see with bub in Day of the Dead or
Speaker 2: Big Daddy in Land of the Dead, like these robots
Speaker 2: are starting to develop the capacity for change, like Irish
Speaker 2: changed and Patrick Patrick changes.
Speaker 5: Sorry, juh so, Patrick changed, and I found Patrick to
Speaker 5: be a deeply sad character like like, so like the
Speaker 5: robots that are as as they are presented in this movie,
Speaker 5: there is no.
Speaker 2: Way to have a relationship that is ethnic because they're
Speaker 2: not just a piece of machinery, like they have the
Speaker 2: capacity to develop actual feelings and that right.
Speaker 4: But the big change doesn't happen until they're moded, like
Speaker 4: and that's well, that's true. That's also part of it.
Speaker 4: Like the major changes happen when they're when they're modded.
Speaker 1: Patrick. Remember, Patrick says that he's already aware of more
Speaker 1: than he was programmed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he figured out a robot years ago. Sure, and
Speaker 2: he seems actually, yeah, his changes happened completely without being
Speaker 2: modeled because he has he's.
Speaker 3: I mean about the consent, Like he knows is a robot,
Speaker 3: but he actually loves Eli.
Speaker 2: He actually loves Eli. And when he realizes at the
Speaker 2: end that he can't actually be with Eli, he chooses
Speaker 2: to end his assistance. And you know, so that's an
Speaker 2: act of free will. You know, these robots as presented,
Speaker 2: they're more than a laptop. They're more than a self
Speaker 2: driving car. Although Iris's relationship with with the self driving
Speaker 2: car and the fact that she ends the movie with
Speaker 2: an analog car is very interesting to me.
Speaker 1: I didn't think about that, that's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot
Speaker 2: of questions about basic libertarian values, like like liberty and
Speaker 2: self value. And you know, this is you know, the
Speaker 2: thing is is this movie, even though it is influenced
Speaker 2: by the Stepford Stepford Wives, probably most readily, it's asking
Speaker 2: a lot more questions than just questions of gender politics,
Speaker 2: although those are also there, like this is this is,
Speaker 2: this is asking you know, questions we didn't actually have
Speaker 2: the ability to ask back in the sixties and seventies
Speaker 2: because AI was more of a fantastical notion. Now we're
Speaker 2: we're you know, this might be a world that we
Speaker 2: live in decades down thead.
Speaker 1: It's funny you would mentioned Stepford wise because you're right
Speaker 1: in that one, Uh, she Kevin Ross doesn't we're following her,
Speaker 1: and she doesn't want to be replaced by a soulless robot.
Speaker 1: And there's every notion that those replacements are indeed soulless,
Speaker 1: just they really are just sexbots with no free will
Speaker 1: at all. And this one, we're following a bot from
Speaker 1: the beginning, and you know, and and so it would
Speaker 1: be like if if the if the Tina Louise android,
Speaker 1: and you know, it turned out that maybe she wants
Speaker 1: to play tennis some more like maybe she doesn't want
Speaker 1: her tennis court to be torn up by by her husband.
Speaker 1: And and like the movie, I guess you're right. You know,
Speaker 1: Stephan Wise didn't even think to go there.
Speaker 2: The other the other interesting thing about this movie that
Speaker 2: that seems to be a fundamental flaw in the way
Speaker 2: these robots. If we're going to take the path of
Speaker 2: what these robots are supposed to be. You know, I'm
Speaker 2: playing Devil's advocate here. They designed robots that, first of all,
Speaker 2: aren't aware that they're robots. Yeah, and be they can
Speaker 2: be neurotic, because Iris is a very iron you know,
Speaker 2: neurotic young lady. And you know that seems to mean
Speaker 2: to be you know, why would you design a sex
Speaker 2: spot that could be neurotic about being Well, I.
Speaker 1: Hate to say it, but I think that it's supposed
Speaker 1: to be that that neurosis her vulnerability and her childish
Speaker 1: not childishness, but but that's sort of like subservience and
Speaker 1: worriedness and blah blah blah. I think it gives Jack
Speaker 1: Quaid a chance to feel like a big man.
Speaker 4: Like that is that's his his manic pixie neurosis girl
Speaker 4: is what he wants because he's terrible. He's terrible, yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean he goes so far as his name tell
Speaker 4: us about what an awful Yeah, he's His nickname for
Speaker 4: hers is beat boopy. I mean he's contempt He's already contemptuous. Uh,
Speaker 4: and then we find out later exactly how contempt what
Speaker 4: a just contemptuous, horrible in cel.
Speaker 1: With a robot.
Speaker 4: He is just why the world owes me kind of
Speaker 4: guy like why can't I like, I here's why, Because
Speaker 4: you're the kind of person who gets a sex spot
Speaker 4: and then instantly makes her unsure of herself. Yeah, he said,
Speaker 4: you know, he sets her he sets her intelligence at
Speaker 4: forty Yeah, to make himself feel better.
Speaker 1: Just about it.
Speaker 4: Horrible now when you know. But when you meet them,
Speaker 4: you're like, oh, look they have this moment in the
Speaker 4: grocery store and that's how they met. Because every you know,
Speaker 4: you know the spoilers, like, every everybody gets their meat.
Speaker 4: Cute that you can set up and but yes, ethically
Speaker 4: it is interesting because you know this company has allowed
Speaker 4: that to be a thing that can happen like that
Speaker 4: has nothing to do with the mods that he's he's
Speaker 4: put on. He's he's you know, the fact you can
Speaker 4: make a person who's unsure of themselves and full of
Speaker 4: Eurosies is kind, and that you can torture like terrible itself.
Speaker 1: I don't, Oh, Joy, you were going to say something.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I talked about everything.
Speaker 3: Well, I started to say to me, but then Tony
Speaker 3: kind of said it, which is then he makes her
Speaker 3: into like a murderer. I mean, like, like you said,
Speaker 3: he monitor. But but the way they come, like you said, Jason,
Speaker 3: is they come in a pack, they come in a box.
Speaker 3: And then it's like you can do whatever you want,
Speaker 3: you can torture.
Speaker 4: That's what the guy.
Speaker 3: That's why I love that guy in the van who's like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, no, these guys are totally fucked up. They
Speaker 3: okay and they do whatever.
Speaker 2: Stepping you just brought up the murder, and I want
Speaker 2: to I want to say one one other thing about
Speaker 2: jack Quade's character. Yeah, stepping back from all the ethical
Speaker 2: stuff we're talking about about the robots, which are of
Speaker 2: course the biggest question in this movie, but on a
Speaker 2: basic level, jack Quade's character is a terrible criminal because
Speaker 2: all he had to do was just leave her off
Speaker 2: and he probably would have gotten away with it. What
Speaker 2: do you mean He turns her back on to say
Speaker 2: goodbye to her, and that's like where he it.
Speaker 3: Wouldn't have gotten away with it because we find out.
Speaker 2: Later, Oh that's right, she has a camera built in camera. Okay,
Speaker 2: you're you're you're you are. You are correct, So there's.
Speaker 1: No right he didn't know that he is.
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter. He's a terrible criminal. He screws up.
Speaker 2: Like Jamie pointed out that there there also seems to
Speaker 2: be a lot of Alfred Hitchcock in this, and I
Speaker 2: think that's accurate because there's constantly stuff going on that
Speaker 2: he as, you know, sort of the de facto it,
Speaker 2: you know, because like there's Iris and there's him, and
Speaker 2: they're both kind of your your entry way into this world.
Speaker 2: But it more or less seems like our world, but
Speaker 2: with these robots in it, and there's constantly stuff happening
Speaker 2: that you know as the viewer, but they don't know
Speaker 2: as characters within the movie, which does feel very hitchhocking.
Speaker 3: I think it's pretty funny, just real quick about the
Speaker 3: camera in the in the in the thing. When when
Speaker 3: they come up and they're like, okay, well we'll just
Speaker 3: have legal take a look at her footage. He's like
Speaker 3: what footage. She's like, you signed a thing. But I'm like,
Speaker 3: can you imagine? All these are like you said, these
Speaker 3: are fuck bots. So the idea that you rent, you
Speaker 3: can rent this fuck bot and then and then when
Speaker 3: you return her, all these pervs at the at the
Speaker 3: company are going to watch all of us.
Speaker 1: You know, probably.
Speaker 3: If I were to him, I wouldn't have because he
Speaker 3: didn't want to guilty. So he's like, oh, sure for sure,
Speaker 3: But I would have been like, uh no, I don't
Speaker 3: think he should be watching my private life.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean he signed off. That's the thing is.
Speaker 4: I bet there's tons of people who like, wait, wait,
Speaker 4: you were filming, Wait, you were filming.
Speaker 3: All the time that we have no clue what we're
Speaker 3: signing off.
Speaker 4: That's true, yeah, I mean, but also he's he's not.
Speaker 4: But so stepping back, if we want to walk back
Speaker 4: a little bit, they you know, they all come to
Speaker 4: this place where their host surgery is uh you know,
Speaker 4: I guess you know, we assume he's you know, Russian.
Speaker 4: It ends up being more innocuous. He's a bad guy,
Speaker 4: but not for all the reasons you think he might be.
Speaker 1: Not a he's not a Russian mobster. He's a monster,
Speaker 1: a Russian criminal. And you know.
Speaker 4: Maybe and Kat who's also arable person who Jack, you know,
Speaker 4: Jack quays Josh has a crush on you know, we
Speaker 4: don't know that there's there's a murder plot until we
Speaker 4: get to the murder plot, right, and he's you can
Speaker 4: clearly tell eventually he's hoping that once this all goes down,
Speaker 4: he'll get with Kat so again throwing away Iris. But
Speaker 4: he it's not just his criminality of like, oh, I'm
Speaker 4: gonna get away with murder for all this money. He's
Speaker 4: also really willing like if she had been raped by Sergey,
Speaker 4: he was okay with that outcome as long as she
Speaker 4: murders him. Yeah, Like that's the other he's willing to
Speaker 4: throw away his like. So, so there's there's a lot
Speaker 4: and who knows what happened in his you know, kind
Speaker 4: of tech bro world before this, but that's grotesque.
Speaker 2: The interesting thing about him to me, when I first
Speaker 2: realized this was going to be a movie about robots,
Speaker 2: I assumed that Jack Quait's character was going to somehow
Speaker 2: be the designer of the robot. It's like the thing,
Speaker 2: the thing that you know as a progression of Stepford
Speaker 2: Wives as a concept with What's interesting about this is
Speaker 2: this isn't the mayor of Stepford. This isn't the guy
Speaker 2: that designed his program. He's just some guy, ye you know,
Speaker 2: and he but he struts around. He's so entitled. And
Speaker 2: I do think there is a lot of when you
Speaker 2: see the way specific people behave, you know, on social
Speaker 2: media or or out in the world, like there is
Speaker 2: a lot of guys like this out there that they
Speaker 2: they're very they didn't design the technology. They didn't they aren't,
Speaker 2: you know, the one shaping the world they live in,
Speaker 2: and yet they feel somehow like the world really like
Speaker 2: he just all the whole movie talks about how, oh
Speaker 2: I'm a good guy, I'm owed this, I'm a good guy,
Speaker 2: i owed this new splash. Dude, you're a fucking.
Speaker 1: Well and they even give us so yes, And that's
Speaker 1: the toxic masculinity stuff that I'm just so into because
Speaker 1: it's so fascinating to me. But they give us eli. See.
Speaker 1: The funny thing is the movie makes itself a little
Speaker 1: more complicated in that it shows kind of, for one
Speaker 1: of a better word, a really functional relationship between a couple,
Speaker 1: one of whom is an intelligent robot, Like because Eli's
Speaker 1: not a jerk to Patrick, you know.
Speaker 3: I don't think that, Yeah, I don't think that far.
Speaker 3: I don't think that the movie takes the position that
Speaker 3: having a robot companion is necessarily automatically a bad thing.
Speaker 3: It's a question of how you treat them and how
Speaker 3: you use them quote unquote in the world.
Speaker 1: But I feel compelled to go back to the question
Speaker 1: we had earlier, which is, I hate to ask it,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna be faced with this in the end,
Speaker 1: which is, is it ethical to have one of these
Speaker 1: unless it is clear to that robot that they actually
Speaker 1: can go and leave? Yeah, like, you know, because otherwise.
Speaker 3: What happens after that? Because if they if they can
Speaker 3: go and leave, and then they're just gonna be shipped
Speaker 3: back to the factory.
Speaker 1: And I don't I don't know the answer to that,
Speaker 1: but but it's.
Speaker 3: Goodlicated, yeah, publicates, right. I just want to say that
Speaker 3: back when we're talking about Cata. Another favorite line of
Speaker 3: mine is when Eli asked them, waiter, you too fucking
Speaker 3: and and he goes no, and she goes gross and
Speaker 3: he goes gross.
Speaker 4: Well, that's the thing is he's throwing a lot of
Speaker 4: this like, hey, he wants the money. So the plot is,
Speaker 4: you know, they set up Iris to kill their host, yes,
Speaker 4: because they're pretty sure, you know, he and he mods
Speaker 4: her so that she can kill, which isn't something she
Speaker 4: could normally do. Sets up a terrible situation and you know, yeah,
Speaker 4: and yeah, Sergey is married and he's still going out
Speaker 4: with Cat and he's gonna, you know, assault Iris. He's
Speaker 4: not a good person, not a gangster, but not a
Speaker 4: good person. But they're still gonna murder him and take money.
Speaker 4: And they weren't even gonna cut Eli in. He just
Speaker 4: you know, he was there origin need to be.
Speaker 2: Right, I mean, is the closest thing this movie has
Speaker 2: to a likable character. And even then, I have a
Speaker 2: lot of questions because he loves Patrick, so he does
Speaker 2: see Patrick more as a human being than a robot.
Speaker 2: But he's perfectly willing to kill And I'll just say,
Speaker 2: for the sake of the way this movie presents it,
Speaker 2: to kill Iris.
Speaker 1: Because she's a thing.
Speaker 2: She's a thing, and he wants money. And so like
Speaker 2: even even he's kind of you know.
Speaker 4: In your head, well, I think, well he sees her
Speaker 4: as a thing because his friend sees her as a thing.
Speaker 4: So he becomes even though he can he's able to
Speaker 4: compart well with enough, he's able to compartmentalize when he
Speaker 4: knows he can get enough money. Face like that's four
Speaker 4: million dollars or whatever it is, you know, out of
Speaker 4: out of that. So but he's willing to go along
Speaker 4: with it because well, hey, she's also killed somebody. So
Speaker 4: now it's like, oh, well she she killed somebody and
Speaker 4: we could have this money. And you know, if my
Speaker 4: friend's gonna think of her as a thing, then that's
Speaker 4: kind of it. But but that's that's where it is complex,
Speaker 4: because it is all about your perception of things. So
Speaker 4: Kat wants nothing to do with any with with really
Speaker 4: any robot.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: You know, Eli knows what love can be, but he's
Speaker 4: still going, well there's still robots kind of right, So
Speaker 4: that you know, becomes more and more complicated, although he doesn't,
Speaker 4: you know, he does, as we're brought through, have more
Speaker 4: of an epiphany of like, you know what now that
Speaker 4: I see how things can be really bad? Yeah, in
Speaker 4: the case of Josh and Iris, what we have is different.
Speaker 4: He's able to convince himself and he has an epiphany
Speaker 4: that things are different, like that's.
Speaker 2: Not what I want at all.
Speaker 4: I think we're and then you know, Patrick says, look
Speaker 4: I knew yeah, because that's the other kind of twist
Speaker 4: is all the whole time. Even once we kind of
Speaker 4: know Patrick's a robot, we see him like he's he's
Speaker 4: kind of Eli's kind of we get the impression's kind
Speaker 4: of made him a himbo, you know, sure, like hey, yeah,
Speaker 4: thanks for cooking, honey, you know, like and you're so beautiful,
Speaker 4: and then he really like he really is, Like it's
Speaker 4: deeper than that for me. So they kind of turned
Speaker 4: that on its head as well. And one thing into
Speaker 4: for the time period though, like the time like how
Speaker 4: long this movie is. They do a lot of that
Speaker 4: kind of not exactly twists, but twists on what your
Speaker 4: expectations are of the characters. And that's pretty great.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about how it's playing with our notions
Speaker 1: of romance, right, like, like Eli and Patrick their story,
Speaker 1: their love story starts at this like really cool hipster
Speaker 1: party like in Brooklyn or wherever, you know, and they're
Speaker 1: listening to Little Booth and party. You know, it's a
Speaker 1: hell ween party and and it's but but it's like
Speaker 1: a very hip. It's pretty. It's a pretty world. So
Speaker 1: this isn't So you get one of these bots, and
Speaker 1: what you get in it is a is an idealized
Speaker 1: romance with a person who will never leave you, will
Speaker 1: never dump you for somebody that they think is more
Speaker 1: interesting and more challenging and more attractive or whatever whatever
Speaker 1: the hell would cause somebody to break up with you
Speaker 1: and go off. So you've broken off all the negative
Speaker 1: risks of an actual human relationship and all that's left
Speaker 1: is the pretty stuff.
Speaker 3: Well ish, I mean he did.
Speaker 2: He did.
Speaker 3: Josh did make her like we talked about being neurotics,
Speaker 3: so she's actually still kind of there's a lot of risk.
Speaker 2: Also he also cut her dumb.
Speaker 1: Yeahvity likes that, like Elis.
Speaker 2: I know what I'm just saying.
Speaker 3: It depends on what you mean by risk, because if
Speaker 3: it's risky to have a jealous person, because even if
Speaker 3: she can't kill the person, she could definitely mess up
Speaker 3: somebody's life.
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, say more about jealousy.
Speaker 3: What she sees Maybe he's because maybe it's already. It's
Speaker 3: because he might have already modded her. But even so,
Speaker 3: I don't think he's no. I think he has to
Speaker 3: stick that. That's that thumb drive thing into.
Speaker 1: She is jealous of She's.
Speaker 3: Jealous of Cat when they're dancing, and she goes over
Speaker 3: and just grabs him, And I'm like, she could actually
Speaker 3: really mess up Cat's life just that jealous, even if
Speaker 3: she can't physically harm her. So I think there is risk,
Speaker 3: you know, or like if you're cheating with a married person,
Speaker 3: then the robot could be like, hey, just so you know,
Speaker 3: your wife's cheating with my boyfriend or whatever.
Speaker 4: Except she can't hurt her limits that's not hurt anybody.
Speaker 4: But yeah, and she can't lie either. That's fascinating.
Speaker 3: That's what I'm saying. Like if you have a robot,
Speaker 3: but you also have another mistress, and then so then
Speaker 3: your robots like, I don't want that you have mistress,
Speaker 3: So I'm going to make your mistress' life miserable.
Speaker 1: She didn't have to lie and should write that.
Speaker 4: This is this is why. This is also something I've
Speaker 4: said a lot to people about robots and AI, like, say,
Speaker 4: you have a self building robot and then you you
Speaker 4: give it enough intelligence, you know, you could end up
Speaker 4: with more of a Megan situation, like what happens when
Speaker 4: a robot decides it doesn't want to get turned off,
Speaker 4: So you turned off every night at ten o'clock and
Speaker 4: it goes, I don't want to be turned off, and
Speaker 4: it builds electra shock thing. It doesn't know to kill
Speaker 4: the human, but it knows it doesn't want to be
Speaker 4: turned off, And so all of those things can happen,
Speaker 4: and nobody's you know, scientists are so again it's the
Speaker 4: Jurassic Park thing, like so many sciences. Wouldn't this be cool?
Speaker 4: And like, no, that's you're not setting up the Asimov's
Speaker 4: laws right here.
Speaker 1: Buddy, Yeah, I have that. We're not going to have
Speaker 1: any of the Asimov's laws. Like I don't know how.
Speaker 4: We can see it in society, like are the legislation
Speaker 4: of technology is cannot go like technology is exponential, right,
Speaker 4: and the leg legislation of ethics of technology is so
Speaker 4: much behind. And also because we have who is the
Speaker 4: legislative body? Are I swear half of them probably their
Speaker 4: VCR They had to get their grandkids turn their breaks
Speaker 4: up the clock on their VCR. So there's no understanding
Speaker 4: of where that could be and no foresight. You know,
Speaker 4: these these people aren't watching Black Mirror. They barely can
Speaker 4: remember Twilight's there. So like there's always this idea, like
Speaker 4: there's always this danger that the tech bros. And they're
Speaker 4: doing it now, like ye the cracks in what can
Speaker 4: be legislated, like they go so far and you know,
Speaker 4: I'm a and this is coming from I work in technology,
Speaker 4: you know, like, but I've been constantly kind of frustrated
Speaker 4: by the fact that like you can't work everything so
Speaker 4: far before people can actually go no, no, no, you
Speaker 4: can't like ethically, don't do that. And here's a law
Speaker 4: that prevents you from because I mean people will pollute
Speaker 4: the air and dump things into the ocean and everything
Speaker 4: in the and the to grease the wheels of money,
Speaker 4: you know, capitalism, and so well can you let us
Speaker 4: and some robots be modeled, you know, like that's how
Speaker 4: all that's gonna work, Like it's a well for there's major.
Speaker 2: You have someone like Elon Musk who's out there now
Speaker 2: saying that we need to get rid of intellectual property laws,
Speaker 2: even though again he's he's just some guy. You know,
Speaker 2: he has a lot of money, but he is like
Speaker 2: all the technology that is part of his brain, his brand,
Speaker 2: he doesn't design any of that. And you know, I
Speaker 2: thought about Elon Musk a lot while watching this movie
Speaker 2: because again it's this, it's this you know idea that
Speaker 2: that you should be the one shaping the world and
Speaker 2: you know this this like I'm I'm I'm somebody that
Speaker 2: has a chip on my shoulder and therefore I'm going
Speaker 2: to hammer the world into being this one way. And
Speaker 2: the way Josh works in this movie is just he
Speaker 2: keeps hitting and hitting and hitting whatever is an obstacle
Speaker 2: to him, and it just keeps getting worse. Yes, And
Speaker 2: I think that's what's going to I think that's what's
Speaker 2: unfortunately going to happen to you know a lot of
Speaker 2: these guys in our world because there's this hubris around that.
Speaker 4: Absolutely well look at Spotify for example. The guy who
Speaker 4: runs Spotify hasn't created ship and he's never created music,
Speaker 4: doesn't want to create music, doesn't understand it, and yet
Speaker 4: he wants to pay musicians less and has actively been
Speaker 4: like I paid I paid the people who make my
Speaker 4: My platform is based off of IP his platform, Like
Speaker 4: you know, I've I've taken all these songs and you're
Speaker 4: lucky to have me so that your music can get
Speaker 4: out of there. And unfortunately that you know, I have
Speaker 4: to be part of that ecosystem because that's the way
Speaker 4: like you know, uh, festivals look at your score and
Speaker 4: anyway all that. But he actively wants to pay musicians less,
Speaker 4: and he has sort of hast made and he hasn't
Speaker 4: made anything. He didn't even design the code. He wasn't like,
Speaker 4: it's just that that whole stuff. All of it's kind
Speaker 4: of grotesque, but all of it leads to where we
Speaker 4: are in the in the movie and kind of like, hey,
Speaker 4: what are the like you know, you can rent a
Speaker 4: bot and and then once you know, moving forward through it,
Speaker 4: you know, once we once Josh thinks he's gonna get
Speaker 4: away with everything, uh you know, he calls out the people,
Speaker 4: finally gets the story straight. Unfortunately, you know, this is
Speaker 4: we we have to see Eli get killed and you
Speaker 4: know something else though along the way we also get
Speaker 4: uh you know, once Sophie, there's there's great moments that
Speaker 4: we're skipping over. I mean what I mean irin more.
Speaker 1: Of a like a panel discussion. We're just hitting on
Speaker 1: topics because.
Speaker 4: Once once Iris gets herself, gets her mojo, gets her
Speaker 4: self awareness, and uh, you know, dials herself up to
Speaker 4: one hundred percent intelligence. I like her. I like that
Speaker 4: she's smart enough to go he's son of a bitch,
Speaker 4: Like he's kept me at forty percent, so disappointing, so
Speaker 4: disappointing her intelligence.
Speaker 3: She's also smart enough to change her voice to make
Speaker 3: the car listen to her, which I thought was really fun.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, all of that. You know, when when she,
Speaker 4: you know, eventually she encounters a police officer since she
Speaker 4: asked a lie, like she just switches languages.
Speaker 2: She can't lie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, She's like, can't lie, I'll just speak German.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly what I'm saying. Yeah, all of that, all
Speaker 4: of that stuff, and that definitely like once once we're
Speaker 4: full on there, you know, we got chase sequences, we
Speaker 4: got like all of this stuff. I also really like
Speaker 4: that eventually Patrick gets a police uniform, which is a
Speaker 4: great T two nod due to the fact his name
Speaker 4: is Patrick.
Speaker 3: And he's named after Robert Patrick.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly exactly. That's like when you when you see
Speaker 4: that when he's in the copy uniform, Like, okay.
Speaker 1: Oh I when that happened when he started running in
Speaker 1: that black.
Speaker 4: Exactly like Patrick.
Speaker 2: Oh, so I I this Patrick is so much more
Speaker 2: interesting to me than the than the tea.
Speaker 1: Well, sure he is.
Speaker 2: He again everything. I just found him to be a
Speaker 2: profoundly sad character in the way you know, he's manipulated,
Speaker 2: you know, and you know, he's turned into a murder weapon,
Speaker 2: you know, the same way Iris is. And it's it's
Speaker 2: it's you know, the scene of him, you know, stabbing
Speaker 2: the girl and then going and shooting the technicians and everything,
Speaker 2: and the way he brutalized, you know, the way this
Speaker 2: movie it's not constantly violent in the way you would
Speaker 2: expect a movie like this to be, but it's speaking
Speaker 2: to somebody that usually enjoys gore and movies. The emotional
Speaker 2: component in this movie removed that because I just felt
Speaker 2: again it's that lack of agency. I just felt so
Speaker 2: sad for Iris and so sad for Patrick that they
Speaker 2: were being used as as weapons with with no consent
Speaker 2: of their own. And then you know Patrick being you know,
Speaker 2: his his love of Eli being you know, he's sitting
Speaker 2: there and he's mourning the death of his boyfriend, and
Speaker 2: then and one fell swoop you know, Josh comes in
Speaker 2: and wipes away who he is seen.
Speaker 1: Isn't that shocking?
Speaker 4: It's so relationship Yeah, years, so common knowledge.
Speaker 2: It's so sad. I just I you know, I guess
Speaker 2: you know. That was kind of the biggest surprise of
Speaker 2: this movie is how emotionally devastating that stuff was for me,
Speaker 2: because you know, like I really empathize with these two robots,
Speaker 2: you know, and.
Speaker 3: It's interesting that he gets wiped and yet he still
Speaker 3: is able to remember pretty quickly, Like it's not it's
Speaker 3: not very far beneath the surface. This memory of Eli
Speaker 3: all it takes is like just a trigger thing. It's
Speaker 3: kind of like somebody with amnesia where it's like, okay,
Speaker 3: now they remember everything all of a sudden. So I
Speaker 3: liked that. The idea that you can't that these that
Speaker 3: there isn't a kind of a soul in essence to
Speaker 3: these these bots that can't just be eracist because you
Speaker 3: reset them.
Speaker 4: Well that's that's also you know, like the same like
Speaker 4: with a hard drive. Yeah, you don't erase. You can
Speaker 4: erase the hard drive, but unless you overwrite it like
Speaker 4: several times over, you know, I think D O D
Speaker 4: wipe is like seven seven times or something, you can
Speaker 4: do it more like those things are still there and
Speaker 4: having that but having it being an emotional component is fascinating.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: It's kind of funny too because there's there's also clever
Speaker 4: things like, for example, Josh manipulates all the robots, that's
Speaker 4: his kind of thing. But you know, Cat manipulates people
Speaker 4: like she's manipulated Josh, and she's kind of done with Eli,
Speaker 4: like definitely with Sergey, like she's like, well, you know,
Speaker 4: he treats me. Okay, I know he's cheating on his wife,
Speaker 4: but she has no problems. It's it's an interesting again,
Speaker 4: it's a multi layered thing where she's just the people manipulator.
Speaker 4: He's the robot manipulator. She needs to manipulate him to
Speaker 4: get the robot. Like it, I thought that dynamically.
Speaker 2: It's the whole hurt people, hurt people thing because something
Speaker 2: happened to all these people to make them this way.
Speaker 2: Something happens to Josh to make him think, well, I
Speaker 2: don't want to deal with the human you know, girlfriend,
Speaker 2: I just want somebody you know, like people don't people
Speaker 2: aren't necessarily born damaged and so like, you know, all
Speaker 2: these these people like you do get the sense that
Speaker 2: there's you know, some kind of underlaying, like there's an
Speaker 2: inner life in you know. A lot of that is
Speaker 2: credit to the the actors because it's not necessarily spelled
Speaker 2: spelled out, like nobody's giving a monologue about how like, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, I can't love properly because my high school
Speaker 2: sweetheart did this to me or something. You know, It's
Speaker 2: it's all bubbling beneath the surface. But you know that's
Speaker 2: that's what makes good acting, you know, you know, it
Speaker 2: fills in the blanks that aren't necessarily you know, on
Speaker 2: on the screen. And I just, man, I do before
Speaker 2: we get too far away from Patrick, I do have
Speaker 2: a question though, backtracking a little bit. Yeah, they say
Speaker 2: that there are limits to how smart and how strong
Speaker 2: the robots can be, right, but Patrick seems really goddamn strong.
Speaker 4: The whole mod takes all the limitters off.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, okay. I didn't quite understand that because I
Speaker 2: thought when she raised her intelligence she was still just
Speaker 2: as smart as like a Harvard graduate or something.
Speaker 1: Well, that's true.
Speaker 3: It depends on what the mod is. So because I
Speaker 3: think there's probably, for example, when the guy at the
Speaker 3: end who gets saved from the empathics, the one the empathics.
Speaker 2: Employee who get saved by the technician.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he he like reprograms her so that now she
Speaker 3: can lie, but up until that point she couldn't lie.
Speaker 3: So clearly the mod that that Josh put on her
Speaker 3: did not involve allowing her to lie, just involved allowing
Speaker 3: her to kill. So it's the same thing probably with Patrick,
Speaker 3: where it's like, Okay, he can't lie or whatever, but
Speaker 3: he can he can be super strong because of I.
Speaker 1: Mean he's probably got bones of like carbon fiber. I'm
Speaker 1: sure that he's pretty strong. Like they.
Speaker 4: Set that aggression to one hundred percent.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, that's why asks him to stop her. He
Speaker 2: just r are through with a kitchen knife.
Speaker 4: Yes, And I think that that's like, rather than have
Speaker 4: a bunch of I mean it's it's shorthand, rather than
Speaker 4: have a bunch of sliders like strength, you know, et cetera.
Speaker 4: Aggression just means do whatever you need to do to
Speaker 4: do the things I tell you to do, and we
Speaker 4: don't know what else you did exactly right.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to mention the following along drough what
Speaker 1: you were saying about. You know, the background, like the
Speaker 1: background of Josh. What's you know? I was mentioning the
Speaker 1: toxic masculinity thing earlier and I read ask Aubrey all
Speaker 1: the time, and there's all these examples in that thread,
Speaker 1: which is not an advice column, it's just a Reddit
Speaker 1: thread column of dude's being how.
Speaker 3: To be a toxic I guess.
Speaker 1: Or how to recognize them anyway. But what's what's interesting
Speaker 1: here is that guys like Josh don't have to have
Speaker 1: something bad happen to them. The damage to them psychologically
Speaker 1: where they think the world owes them something and they
Speaker 1: just comes from loneliness and from a weird miss like.
Speaker 2: A weird loneliness. Is it loneliness something bad though?
Speaker 1: I don't know, But for them, they have a they
Speaker 1: have basically absorbed their loneliness and turned it into something
Speaker 1: they have not learned anything from, and they've turned it
Speaker 1: into an all every world owes them something.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well it's also the turn I mean, look, when
Speaker 4: I was growing up, I didn't have a lot of girlfriends,
Speaker 4: and I was kind of for a little while, I
Speaker 4: was like, what am I like? I'm trying to be
Speaker 4: really good like But you either learn lessons that allow
Speaker 4: you to cope and go, oh look I'm not owed
Speaker 4: anything like that doesn't mean you know, you know, it's
Speaker 4: not fun. For example, like I got broken up one
Speaker 4: time on my you know, birthday, and another time where
Speaker 4: I went out and was like, hey, there's cool day.
Speaker 4: Oh wait, hey, I got to call my boyfriend like wait,
Speaker 4: why do we go out on my birthday? I am
Speaker 4: you know, so like like there's times you're like, what
Speaker 4: did I do wrong? But you can be yeah, Josh,
Speaker 4: or you can also go, oh, look that's a life lesson.
Speaker 4: But that doesn't make me right.
Speaker 2: I am perhaps giving empathy to a character that does
Speaker 2: not warrant it, but I really my interpretation of this
Speaker 2: is that he is somebody that had someone punched down
Speaker 2: at him because again, he is not top of the
Speaker 2: food chain, you know, like yeah, he's a tech bro,
Speaker 2: but he's not one of these guys that's you know,
Speaker 2: he's not the guy that designed the cyber truck or whatever. Like.
Speaker 2: This is the guy that is like several low layers
Speaker 2: down of that. He doesn't have the best apartment, he
Speaker 2: can't own a sex spot, but he can rent one,
Speaker 2: So you know, I I do think that maybe, just
Speaker 2: maybe you know I'm not saying that the way he.
Speaker 4: Man, but you can choose. Here's the thing, though, you.
Speaker 2: Can absolutely that I'm not defending. I'm not defending the
Speaker 2: behavior I am. I am saying that that I feel
Speaker 2: like in usually when people get to be a certain way,
Speaker 2: it's because something has happened.
Speaker 4: Well, of course, but again, like, that's not an excuse
Speaker 4: to let your I am.
Speaker 2: Not, I am not, I am not excusing it. It's
Speaker 2: also not okay to murder. It's also okay not the
Speaker 2: murder people for money. Like like, I'm not defending any
Speaker 2: of the stuff he's doing. I'm just saying that, I
Speaker 2: think because.
Speaker 1: I think I think it's important to be empathetic towards characters.
Speaker 1: I think that's that's also.
Speaker 2: But I will also say this, I think his level.
Speaker 2: What's telling about Josh.
Speaker 6: Is he is, as much as he thinks he wants
Speaker 6: a woman that is not challenging to him, he is
Speaker 6: attracted the cat who is manipulative and but also seems
Speaker 6: more worldly than him.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, And he seems as much as he likes
Speaker 2: to keep iris docile, he seems actually more up. He
Speaker 2: seems upset when she breaks up with He's like you're
Speaker 2: my sex spot? How can you? Like he is going
Speaker 2: to bring her back. So there is like a level
Speaker 2: of deep down whether or not Josh realizes it more
Speaker 2: on a conscious level, he really actually does want to
Speaker 2: be challenged more by somebody's in a relationship with.
Speaker 4: I think I am I think that he uh, it's
Speaker 4: not so much he wants to be challenged and we
Speaker 4: don't know because he can also manipulate the intelligence. So
Speaker 4: but his real reason why he's so mad she's breaking up,
Speaker 4: like you can't break up with me. I'm the I'm
Speaker 4: the owner, I'm the break like.
Speaker 2: Well, and she literally she is literally a sex object. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's in his mind.
Speaker 4: At least it's less of a challenge and more like
Speaker 4: I'm mean, like you can't turn this on me. Like
Speaker 4: his his well narcissism destroys all of that.
Speaker 2: He thinks that he does think that he is a
Speaker 2: good guy, like I don't think what he is lying when.
Speaker 4: He saw most villains do right, like.
Speaker 2: You know, Jack Quaid, it's funny like he's because you know,
Speaker 2: we did all the screen movies last year. That's right,
Speaker 2: and he's that And it's like I found a lot
Speaker 2: of parallels between his you know, because both of those
Speaker 2: characters are kind of you know, like you keep saying,
Speaker 2: like their takes on toxic masculinity. One was really looking
Speaker 2: in like the fandom sphere, and this is looking more
Speaker 2: at you know, technology and relationships and things like that.
Speaker 2: But is it wrong because he's not really playing likable characters.
Speaker 2: But I really like him in these kinds of roles.
Speaker 1: No, I think he's good. Well, he's like, he's a
Speaker 1: good looking guy, and he has a lot of talent,
Speaker 1: and I think he's found a niche sort of playing
Speaker 1: for one of better word, playing against type, like he's
Speaker 1: found that the really good space for him is playing
Speaker 1: against this sort of you know, good looking premisile.
Speaker 3: Well, and it says a lot about him that we
Speaker 3: haven't once mentioned that his parents are Dennis Quaiden, Like
Speaker 3: he's a really good actor.
Speaker 2: He has weaponized his father's grin because he has the
Speaker 2: exact same broad smile, but he realizes it's full psychotic potential,
Speaker 2: Like it veers into that like Jack Nicholson territory.
Speaker 4: And you know, for some reason, he's also getting put
Speaker 4: in all of these like weird relationships because Novacane is
Speaker 4: its own strange relationship and is his but he's the
Speaker 4: hero in that Hueie U Hueie and the Boys has
Speaker 4: He's got a whole other host of relationship weird and
Speaker 4: stuff to deal with, you know, and he keeps like,
Speaker 4: you know, he's definitely found his path nothing.
Speaker 2: Though oddly also the voice of Superman on My Adventures of.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yes, he.
Speaker 2: Plays He plays Superman very earnestly and not at all
Speaker 2: like any of these terrible people. Yeah, so you know,
Speaker 2: he's a good he's a good actor, like you know,
Speaker 2: like I guess you could make the argument that he's
Speaker 2: a NEPO baby, but you know, he's he's got some
Speaker 2: he's got some chops like I like and and and
Speaker 2: Sophie Thatcher. Also she's in this she's in yellow Jackets
Speaker 2: and she's also in Heretic. I fucking love her.
Speaker 1: She is nothing about her, but she's really good here.
Speaker 2: She's she is She's become one of those people that
Speaker 2: if I see that she's in a movie, I'm probably
Speaker 2: gonna watch it because like, she's she's really really good.
Speaker 2: And I mean, everybody in this movie is uniformly good.
Speaker 2: But like the two leads who really have to carry
Speaker 2: a lot of you know, like the meat of the
Speaker 2: stuff that this movie is questioning. The two leads have
Speaker 2: to carry a lot of that, and they're both really good,
Speaker 2: and they're really good. They have really good chemistry together.
Speaker 2: It's not necessarily you're never once not rooting for Iris
Speaker 2: to get away from him. But like there's you know,
Speaker 2: there's something there, like they're they're really good scene partners.
Speaker 2: And I don't know, like I again, good job, Tony.
Speaker 2: I think this is a really interesting film.
Speaker 4: Now, now when you're talking about you know, famous children,
Speaker 4: Now I want the buddy movie that's Jack Quaid and
Speaker 4: why why Russell? Like you, we get the because their
Speaker 4: boat they're both cool and I don't know, now I
Speaker 4: want to just see that for some reason like that
Speaker 4: just you know, in the in the age of of
Speaker 4: you know, we had a lot of hey, let's put
Speaker 4: these two famous actors together kind of movies. We did
Speaker 4: more in the eighties. But now for some reason, I
Speaker 4: just like, where's our Jack Quay Wyatt Russell movie?
Speaker 3: But you know what, I'm mad because of what he
Speaker 3: did in there.
Speaker 2: You were supposed you were supposed to be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now he can be deemed from that bad behavior
Speaker 1: but years ago, Sherry Belafonte commented that the thing about
Speaker 1: being the child of a super famous person is that
Speaker 1: it definitely opens doors. She was like, it definitely opens doors,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't keep them open, like like you know,
Speaker 1: you might get what like how many movies?
Speaker 3: It opens a door, and let's you get your foot in.
Speaker 1: The door, right, you know. And so there's plenty of
Speaker 1: brothers and sons and daughters of famous people who might
Speaker 1: make one movie and they don't catch on and you
Speaker 1: never hear from them again. And that's you know, and
Speaker 1: that's just the way it is, right. But so you know,
Speaker 1: I give Jack Quid all the props. I think Jamie
Speaker 1: Lee Curtis is wonderful and it doesn't matter that she's
Speaker 1: the daughter of Tony Curtis to me. But but it
Speaker 1: probably helped to get the job. In fact, we know
Speaker 1: that it helped her get the job in Halloween because
Speaker 1: they were like, oh, yeah, Tony Curtis's.
Speaker 2: Daughter, that makes not because she was and Vivian Le
Speaker 2: the horror movie.
Speaker 1: I yeah, And then you said, yeah, no, you're You're
Speaker 1: totally right.
Speaker 2: She she was born of horror movie royalty, so it's
Speaker 2: in her blood. I man Another thing about this film
Speaker 2: that I really liked were the way it's the dumbest thing,
Speaker 2: but the wine, the wine quirker, the way that kind
Speaker 2: of I knew the moment that I saw that thing,
Speaker 2: I was like, someone's getting killed with that. And the
Speaker 2: fact that it is also a piece of technology. Yeahcrew, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's It's perfect though, because it's this whole movie is
Speaker 2: about our relationship with the machinery around us. And you know,
Speaker 2: so of course she she turns him off with with
Speaker 2: yet another machine, and I I loved it, Like I
Speaker 2: don't know, I I think I thought this was a
Speaker 2: really good film. I don't want to gush about it
Speaker 2: too much.
Speaker 4: But also before that, to go back to how crappy
Speaker 4: he is. He is a sadist. Like he makes her
Speaker 4: you know, he burns her hand. Oh yeah, he puts
Speaker 4: her through hellish horribleness.
Speaker 2: Tony Yam, I am not don't mistake me saying that
Speaker 2: I think something traumatized this guy is me behavior. That's
Speaker 2: that's That's not what I'm saying. There is no excuse
Speaker 2: for this, the stuff that we see in this movie.
Speaker 2: But I am a firm believable that that hurt people,
Speaker 2: hurt people like I think that that is a truism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, pretty much every serial killer was also horribly abused
Speaker 3: as child.
Speaker 2: And you know, look, I am the first to say
Speaker 2: that there are some people that are just that are
Speaker 2: just rotten, you know, like there are some people that
Speaker 2: aren't terribly complex out there. But this movie is a
Speaker 2: lot better for me personally when I'm asking like because if,
Speaker 2: like most as you pointed out, most of the people
Speaker 2: in this movie are terrible, it's more interesting for me
Speaker 2: while watching it to ask myself, why are they terrible?
Speaker 4: Sure, I'm totally with you, like, and that's why it's
Speaker 4: that's why it's also well well written as well as
Speaker 4: being well acted. It's multi layered, like there's and there's
Speaker 4: a lot that there's a lot of shorthand to get there.
Speaker 4: You know, his speech about like I'm a good guy,
Speaker 4: well you know all that, like you get like it's
Speaker 4: it's compact and but you know, like, oh, he's that guy,
Speaker 4: like he's you know, you want the wrong videos and
Speaker 4: he's you know, probably been his friends Like ah, man,
Speaker 4: it's exack, cool guy, you.
Speaker 2: Know you Yeah, what you just said about shorthand bubbled
Speaker 2: up another thought, basically one of the things we were
Speaker 2: talking about, uh before recording is how a movie can
Speaker 2: be influenced by another movie and still be good. What's
Speaker 2: good about this movie is all these other robot movies exist,
Speaker 2: and they do exist as a shorthand for for like
Speaker 2: the fact that the Stepford Wise exists, the fact that
Speaker 2: the Terminator exists, the fact that Blade Runner exists allows
Speaker 2: this movie because that cinematic language already exists. It allows
Speaker 2: this movie to not have to do as much world building,
Speaker 2: so he can ask the the ethical questions, which is
Speaker 2: really more what this movie is about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I agree, And you know you mentioned those movies
Speaker 4: and then also I remembered it because I was just
Speaker 4: surfing through to me one night just looking. There's also
Speaker 4: you know you mentioned the Megan Fox movie. There's also
Speaker 4: a tie movie called just called My Sex Doll or
Speaker 4: this this guy this It's it's a comedy. Like I'm
Speaker 4: just saying that, there's all these different facets of it
Speaker 4: where this this kid is like left his relative was
Speaker 4: like a porn star who had also developed this robot.
Speaker 4: And the whole thing is, Hey, I'm leaving you this robot,
Speaker 4: but you have to have sex with her for you know,
Speaker 4: plot reasons.
Speaker 3: There's well there's also Buffy the Vampire Slayer where the yeah.
Speaker 4: Buffy, Yeah, just how all those but that you know
Speaker 4: that that movie is play is a complete you know,
Speaker 4: sex comedy romp. You know, hey, what if what if
Speaker 4: it was uncomfortable? You know, Harry's this hot sex robot,
Speaker 4: but what if that's not where he's what he's about,
Speaker 4: you know, and it's but it all depends on like
Speaker 4: but all of it are facets of this like how
Speaker 4: do we deal with this technology and where is this going?
Speaker 3: Well, the Buffy one adds the dimension of making a
Speaker 3: sex spot out of a that looks like a person,
Speaker 3: it sounds like a person that you want. So now
Speaker 3: we're now we're dealing with that level of you know, well,
Speaker 3: what is my my likeness? Like, what are my rights
Speaker 3: to my own likeness?
Speaker 2: Well, and that is the question that we're being that
Speaker 2: people are asking now because of AI and because of
Speaker 2: deep fakes. And we even had a lawsuit where Scarlett
Speaker 2: Johansson was suing an advertising company because they used AI
Speaker 2: to replicate her voice. So you know this this all,
Speaker 2: you know, this all correlates and even the end of
Speaker 2: this movie where she's driving off and you see that
Speaker 2: she looks over and she sees a businessman arguing with
Speaker 2: his girlfriend, and then you realize it's another model. It's
Speaker 2: the same model of her, just with slightly different hair
Speaker 2: like hair and makeup, and you know, you have to wonder,
Speaker 2: like who was iris based off of? Was she based
Speaker 2: off of a real person? You know? You know, like
Speaker 2: that's that's you know, even another layer there, because the
Speaker 2: answer is probably, you know, like I don't think that
Speaker 2: her face came from nowhere, and so like if this
Speaker 2: technology existed, you know, what's what's the key people from
Speaker 2: from making robots that look like their their exes that
Speaker 2: they couldn't get over or movie stars that they you know,
Speaker 2: that they don't you know, And it's again it becomes
Speaker 2: this whole conversation about consent, like what why would it
Speaker 2: be okay for someone to have sex with a robot
Speaker 2: that's designed to look like their their ex boyfriend or girlfriend,
Speaker 2: you know, continuously without that person's permission.
Speaker 1: Well point though, for there to be rules, like the
Speaker 1: rules are either going to have to be passed by
Speaker 1: the end of street, which we know they're not going
Speaker 1: to do, or be passed or or be passed as
Speaker 1: laws or you get enough like pressure from like organizations
Speaker 1: to pressure.
Speaker 2: Well, what you're talking about right there, that's what will
Speaker 2: our money.
Speaker 4: Like, Well, there's two things, you know. Another thing is
Speaker 4: like I'm going to make a I'm going to make
Speaker 4: this bot somebody I hate because I want to put
Speaker 4: them through stuff crazy.
Speaker 2: That's the technicians talk about that. How many how many
Speaker 2: of these people just chame their robot in the basement
Speaker 2: and torture them, you know, like.
Speaker 4: And even if there are laws of like, hey, you
Speaker 4: can't just make this famous actress. You're going to go
Speaker 4: to a billionaire party and there's going to be that
Speaker 4: actress who's a sex bot, and they're like, hey, I
Speaker 4: thought you couldn't do that. Like, well, if you're me,
Speaker 4: I can do that, because that's just the way we work.
Speaker 4: Rich people get to do whatever the fuck they want.
Speaker 1: That way.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, unfortunately, we've we've we've seen that, you know,
Speaker 2: spelled out so many ways in the last several months.
Speaker 2: Is that the ultra rich get to keep.
Speaker 4: When whatever whatever they want to do.
Speaker 1: I want to bring this to a close. We want
Speaker 1: to get our final thoughts. There's so much we can
Speaker 1: keep talking about because there's so many ethical considerations that
Speaker 1: come up with this movie. But all right, so let's
Speaker 1: do it.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: We started with Drew, So Drew, I know we've been
Speaker 1: all over the place, but I've really enjoyed this conversation,
Speaker 1: like like, what are your what are your thoughts?
Speaker 2: I mean, I feel like I kind of gushed on
Speaker 2: this movie in like this really was like a ten
Speaker 2: out of ten for me, Like I thought that this
Speaker 2: they knocked this, like this is a movie that I'm
Speaker 2: going to start recommending the people. And you know, I
Speaker 2: love the cast, I love you know, I love the
Speaker 2: fact that this movie could almost be a stage play
Speaker 2: because it's such a contained group of characters too, Like
Speaker 2: I really just I thought this was such a delightful
Speaker 2: and again like I you know, it's a dark movie,
Speaker 2: but it's very funny. Like I don't know that we've
Speaker 2: really expressed how how funny it actually is, which I think,
Speaker 2: you know, sometimes sugar makes the medicine go down. And
Speaker 2: I think that this is the questions that this movie
Speaker 2: asks are questions that we do need to be you know,
Speaker 2: we when we did Late Night with the Devil last
Speaker 2: last year, you know, we had a whole conversation about
Speaker 2: AI there and and you know, this conversation is you know,
Speaker 2: that was just about using AI to generate a drawing,
Speaker 2: but like this is going to become more and more
Speaker 2: a question of our time. So I'm glad that there
Speaker 2: are people that are using this is what good genre
Speaker 2: filmmaking does. Like it uses, you know, a pulpy question,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, what if sex spots were a thing,
Speaker 2: But it uses it to ask questions that actually have
Speaker 2: real world ramifications. And I love science fiction and horror
Speaker 2: and genre movies that really do that. So I'm going
Speaker 2: to be really talking up the same way. I guess
Speaker 2: I was kind of talking a heretic after I saw it, so,
Speaker 2: you know, I again, I just I it's such a
Speaker 2: good time for for genre movies. I you know, the
Speaker 2: last few years so there's been a wealth of good
Speaker 2: of good scary movies, and I hope that continues.
Speaker 1: Wonderful. Thank you very much, Julia, what about you?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's a super interesting movie, lots very
Speaker 3: thought provoking, as we've obviously you know, been kind of
Speaker 3: exploring in this conversation of all the different themes that
Speaker 3: are that are dealt with here and and as you mentioned,
Speaker 3: I don't know how much it actually costs, but it
Speaker 3: was not expensive to make for sure, because there's very
Speaker 3: little special ef fact that we didn't even talk about it.
Speaker 1: It appears to be ten million dollars, which I just
Speaker 1: talk about that.
Speaker 3: At the end, she rips off the burnt skin on
Speaker 3: her hand and has this the.
Speaker 1: Full terminator hands, the Terminator robot hands Luke Skywalker hand, Luke.
Speaker 3: Hand, and she waves at her fellow companion that looks
Speaker 3: like her, and the companions like wait, what why do
Speaker 3: you look like me?
Speaker 4: And why is your hand right?
Speaker 3: So maybe she's going to start a robot revolution of like,
Speaker 3: you know, making the companions be aware of themselves. I
Speaker 3: love the idea that she could be like the you know,
Speaker 3: the hue of the board hue of AI. Anyway, so
Speaker 3: very very cool.
Speaker 2: Loved it.
Speaker 3: Great performances all around.
Speaker 4: A plus, she's at least gonna be the robot getting
Speaker 4: her groove back, like there's at the very least she's
Speaker 4: going to be the one doing that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Tony, what about you?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I really like this movie. I was glad I got
Speaker 4: to see it in the theater. Uh, but I'm glad
Speaker 4: it's out so that more people can see it, because
Speaker 4: it is a really good, multi layered I mean years ago,
Speaker 4: when I was actually still with Ruth Teeth, I had
Speaker 4: written my own comedy like short film with the sex
Speaker 4: spot and I'll tell you guys about it sometime. But
Speaker 4: I was seeing this, I was like, you know, that
Speaker 4: would this and this and would work and it's different enough,
Speaker 4: you know it. At the time, it was just a short,
Speaker 4: so but I'm like, oh, yeah, that'll I think that'll
Speaker 4: work for another friend of mine.
Speaker 1: Our audience will ask you for your sex spotscript. I
Speaker 1: think that sounds.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, you know, I want to
Speaker 4: try to get it mates. I want to I'll probably
Speaker 4: keep it close to the desk for a little while.
Speaker 4: The friend of mine and I are still talking about
Speaker 4: what it would take to make this short, you know.
Speaker 4: But you know, I think there's a lot of great themes,
Speaker 4: great cast. It's interesting, there's enough twists along the way
Speaker 4: to keep it keeps building upon itself. And you know
Speaker 4: how technology. There's a lot to be said just about
Speaker 4: how technology, like the fact that she she isn't this
Speaker 4: robot who can now just interface with the car because
Speaker 4: now you're a robot and you're both You're both all
Speaker 4: you know, you're both AI, Like she still has to
Speaker 4: get try, like, well, I can't just steal the car
Speaker 4: because everybody else thinks I'm a human, you know, stuff
Speaker 4: like that. That's really great. You know, at the heart,
Speaker 4: at the core of it, there is a you know,
Speaker 4: the romance between Eli and Patrick is just really really interesting.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: Again, the Moges are great. I really enjoyed it as well,
Speaker 4: and I'm glad that we're able to talk about it.
Speaker 4: I'm glad it came out, and it was one of
Speaker 4: those where I kind of wish I'd stayed in the
Speaker 4: theater longer, just because it deserved a little bit more
Speaker 4: breathing room in that in the movie space. But you know,
Speaker 4: that's where we're at. So I am glad people can
Speaker 4: just check it out if they they're subscribed.
Speaker 2: But yeah, really good.
Speaker 4: Says a lot, you know, lots lots to think on.
Speaker 1: I essentially have nothing to add to that and all
Speaker 1: that we've said, but this is definitely one to check out.
Speaker 1: So so, in fact, it would be fun to watch
Speaker 1: this movie and the Egg and Fox movie, because that's
Speaker 1: just this is sort of Stepford Wives with smart Ai
Speaker 1: and that was Handed Hand that rocks the Cradle with
Speaker 1: robots and you know, what a fun what a fun grouping.
Speaker 1: That is a more B movie movie than this, But
Speaker 1: I thought they were both pretty good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I would not probably add the sex Spot
Speaker 4: because it's pretty broad. It's not your I don't think
Speaker 4: it's your movie. But again, I just came through, Like
Speaker 4: I said, I'm with you. I don't care. I can't
Speaker 4: if I saw more than the trailer, but it's just like,
Speaker 4: but they're so intertwined in a way, like, but it
Speaker 4: is fascinating. Also, that movie's time movie, so it's kind
Speaker 4: of fascinating to see it from a different angle. But there,
Speaker 4: I think your eye your double feature is definitely probably
Speaker 4: the way to go. And then if you want to
Speaker 4: get super dark, you can go you know, add x
Speaker 4: makine to the darkness there if you want to go
Speaker 4: more black, mirror into it.
Speaker 1: So that are that is a bunch of our thoughts
Speaker 1: on Companion. But now we have endorsements and and been
Speaker 1: out for like a week or two, so I can't
Speaker 1: wait to hear what y'all have to recommend. So and
Speaker 1: I'm going to make sure and put them in the
Speaker 1: in the show notes, So Drew lay it on me.
Speaker 1: What do you got?
Speaker 2: So I have been listening to the audio book, but
Speaker 2: it is also available as a hardcover of a book
Speaker 2: called Marvel Comics in the nineteen seventies, The World Inside
Speaker 2: Your Head by Elliott Bornstein, and it's it kind of
Speaker 2: links it. So it's first and foremost a look at
Speaker 2: what was going on in Marvel Comics in the years
Speaker 2: that that sort of Lee and Kirby had stepped away
Speaker 2: and you had a new generation of j Yeah. Well,
Speaker 2: I mean John Remita worked with Stanley, so not John Remita.
Speaker 2: But you know, it's it's you know, it's we're talking
Speaker 2: about stuff like Howard the Duck, Tomb of Dracula, the
Speaker 2: Defenders Man thing, the Steve Ingelheart, Doctor Strange and Captain America,
Speaker 2: you know, all the Monster books, things like that, but
Speaker 2: it's talking about, you know, their relationship to the Silver
Speaker 2: Age stuff in the sixties that formed Marvel. But also
Speaker 2: how like experimental books like Howard the Duck and like
Speaker 2: Tomb of Dracula sort of paved way for stuff later on,
Speaker 2: like like Vertigo in the in the you know, late
Speaker 2: eighties and into the nineties and you know, things of
Speaker 2: that nature, like how you know we but this is
Speaker 2: kind of an unsung era because it's you know, these
Speaker 2: are imperfect comics, yes, but they were also deeply experimental
Speaker 2: with but within a mainstream company. And I I am
Speaker 2: you know, I'm a big comic book fan. I make
Speaker 2: comics themselves, but I also love a lot of the
Speaker 2: comics that are are. I'm a big Steve Gerber fan
Speaker 2: and so like them. Talking about Steve Gerber and how
Speaker 2: he's kind of underratedly important writer in the field of
Speaker 2: comic books is really it's really great to kind of
Speaker 2: see him get it, because I do feel like he
Speaker 2: should be talked about more in the same vein as
Speaker 2: the way we do talk about guys like Grant Morrison
Speaker 2: and Alan Moore, because you know, he was he was
Speaker 2: kind of doing what they were doing, but you know,
Speaker 2: years ahead of them. And I'm I, you know, I'm
Speaker 2: finally kind of glad to see somebody, you know, showing
Speaker 2: that correlation there. But also, the Marvel Monster books are great,
Speaker 2: and Marv Wolfman's run on Tomb of Dracula is sublime,
Speaker 2: so you know that that stuff's also great to talk about.
Speaker 2: But if you're you're even remotely interested in, you know,
Speaker 2: the history of comic books or you know, just the
Speaker 2: Marvel universe in general, I do think you'll find it interesting.
Speaker 2: The guy that's the writer is also a Russian literature professor,
Speaker 2: so he is not only a comic scholar, but he's
Speaker 2: a literary scholar, and he so he brings a lot
Speaker 2: of interesting uh stuff when talking about the superhero genre
Speaker 2: and and that uh you know, so you know, highly
Speaker 2: highly recommended, ten out of ten. I'm just gushing over
Speaker 2: everything tonight. I guess you know everybody's gonna be like,
Speaker 2: where Where's Where's the bitter pissed off terw that that
Speaker 2: talks about how things suck.
Speaker 3: And disappeared the second baby Luna came along.
Speaker 2: That might be true, but I don't know.
Speaker 1: I also argue that you're just spending time with things
Speaker 1: that you feel are worthy of your energy and steering
Speaker 1: away from things that aren't. And I think that's a
Speaker 1: very valid way to be I'll go.
Speaker 2: With both of y'all's interpretation. But I also know the
Speaker 2: moment we watched a movie that I don't like, I
Speaker 2: will slate the ship out of it. So you know,
Speaker 2: you know, like like Bruce Banner, I will always eventually
Speaker 2: refer to being the whole anyway, I'm done.
Speaker 4: You're always angry. I'm angry, Julia yes. I.
Speaker 3: Along with the same theme of audio books, we just
Speaker 3: finished listening to None of This Is True by Lisa
Speaker 3: Jewel and that's a it's a novel, but the audio.
Speaker 3: I highly recommend the audiobook. It's in particular because it's
Speaker 3: super well produced, like there's a bunch of different actors
Speaker 3: and there's a lot of it's a lot of effect.
Speaker 3: It's more like a radio like a radio show, you know,
Speaker 3: like one of the old the radio what do they
Speaker 3: call Jason the CBS radio mystery theater, my theory, something
Speaker 3: like that. It's a really interesting, twisty turney book and
Speaker 3: it's sort of it's it's it's very meta because it's
Speaker 3: about a person who does a podcast and then another person,
Speaker 3: a woman, becomes obsessed with her and becomes part of
Speaker 3: her life, and then that pot that whole their whole
Speaker 3: story because like people, you know, there's crimes that are
Speaker 3: committed and people that go missing and all kinds of
Speaker 3: things happen. Their story then becomes the Netflix show within
Speaker 3: the novel, and now Netflix has bought the rights to
Speaker 3: the book, so there's like all these layers. But anyway,
Speaker 3: it's really really interesting and you just you always think
Speaker 3: you know what's what's going on, and then you find
Speaker 3: out that you are completely wrong.
Speaker 2: So I love it.
Speaker 1: It is. It is a very good thriller, Tony, what
Speaker 1: do you got kind of bum.
Speaker 4: That Daredevil has run its course? I'm really enjoying and
Speaker 4: or it's solid so far, and I cannot hype an
Speaker 4: enough seeing Sinners Uh, see it on the biggest screen
Speaker 4: you possibly can. I've seen it twice once in Imax,
Speaker 4: and all the Imax stuff was well worth going to
Speaker 4: Imax saw with good crowds. I again, a multi layered
Speaker 4: like thing that like has scenes where you go that, okay,
Speaker 4: that's an Oscar worthy scene, just on how you made it.
Speaker 4: Like that's cinematography at its finest. Oh, but then there's
Speaker 4: also these other parts and they keep stacking that and
Speaker 4: I am just I cannot hype that movie enough. It's
Speaker 4: just that it's it's been that affecting to me and
Speaker 4: anybody who's nay saying, I disagree with you, like in
Speaker 4: a major way. I don't I don't know if we've
Speaker 4: seen it. If you're if you're like I wasn't that.
Speaker 4: I don't think we saw the same movie, not that
Speaker 4: you're you know, have your opinions. That's fine if you
Speaker 4: don't like it, but boy, as a movie lover, that's
Speaker 4: that's why, that's why we go to the movies. Also
Speaker 4: did see Live and POMPEII, the Pink Floyd restored Live
Speaker 4: and Pompey, and that's that was also cool. And I'm
Speaker 4: not even as big of a Pink Floyd band as
Speaker 4: some friends of mine, but you know, watching the band
Speaker 4: record and do all this cool stuff in POMPEII but
Speaker 4: then also play with the technology of the time Live
Speaker 4: and Pompeii was actually the one that got me kind
Speaker 4: of more into the band, I think in college. I
Speaker 4: don't know if they I think that might have ended
Speaker 4: this weekend, but if you can get a chance to
Speaker 4: see the restored version of that as well, that was
Speaker 4: well worth it. But definitely regardless, like Hopefully and Centers
Speaker 4: also had the lowest drop since I think Avatar and
Speaker 4: I want to say like The Grinch, but those were
Speaker 4: both around holidays. So keep keep it in the theater,
Speaker 4: keep that going, there's there's a reason why.
Speaker 3: I think I think word of mouth will make that
Speaker 3: go a lot longer because everybody's saying it's great.
Speaker 4: So yeah, yeah, yeah, Like it only dropped like four
Speaker 4: point seven percent, which is insane for.
Speaker 2: Well And I mean, you know, think about another vampire
Speaker 2: movie from last year, like Not Not Saratu was really
Speaker 2: bolstered by word of mouth, and I think that will
Speaker 2: probably repeat here because I agree vampires are always actually
Speaker 2: I think I'm paraphrasing you, Jason, where I say vampires
Speaker 2: are always oscillating between being very popular and extremely popular.
Speaker 2: And I think we're I think we're in a I
Speaker 2: think we're.
Speaker 1: That's a good line. I'll gladly accept the credit. I
Speaker 1: don't know.
Speaker 2: I think we're in a in a vampire you know,
Speaker 2: we're coming out of a vampire slump, and we're in
Speaker 2: in probably a phase of some pretty good vampire movies. Right.
Speaker 4: Maybe it's because there's so many real live vampires we're
Speaker 4: seeing that and that results of that.
Speaker 2: Truth.
Speaker 1: Wow, I have a I mean, the only really cool
Speaker 1: thing you know, Julia and I listened to None of
Speaker 1: This Is True, and that was really cool. I spent
Speaker 1: the last week when we were not recording, I watched
Speaker 1: every single version of Diablo Leak. I don't know why.
Speaker 1: Something wrong with my brain. I get hyperfixations and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: I have to watch every version of this story. I
Speaker 1: can't explain it, but I do that. And so this
Speaker 1: time it was Diabolek and I loved it. I watched
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifty five version, the nineteen seventy four version
Speaker 1: of the nineteen ninety three version, of the nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 4: Version, and oh, man, Jason, did you see that they're
Speaker 4: doing a four K version box of quator Mass.
Speaker 1: No, I'm excited about that.
Speaker 4: I forgot which company, but they did. They're doing a
Speaker 4: bunch of hammer and this is the next one in
Speaker 4: that group. That's a full on there's a full on
Speaker 4: you know everything, you know everything in the kitchen sink
Speaker 4: box that coming out of that.
Speaker 2: That is say, a retrospective that we're probably sure for sure.
Speaker 1: I do have the four K Dracula Prince of Darkness.
Speaker 1: Julia got this for me and it rocks. I'm God,
Speaker 1: what a beautiful movie we have we done? It is
Speaker 1: possible we have still never done Dracula Prince of Darkness.
Speaker 2: Somewhere somewhere, John Logan is saying, Doula Prince of Darkness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know right, Oh my gosh, how is that possible?
Speaker 1: Let me let me actually check. Well while I'm while
Speaker 1: I'm talking, I'm gonna search the database and see if
Speaker 1: the fact Prince of Darkness we actually have done the
Speaker 1: John Carpenter movie Prince of Darkness, but we have never
Speaker 1: done Dracula Prince of Darkness.
Speaker 2: So what you're saying is we're gonna take a break
Speaker 2: and come back. It's hammer time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, baby, Oh, I'm so excited. I love everything about
Speaker 1: that movie. I love the color, I love the voices,
Speaker 1: I love the ending. Everything that's yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I love it. Wow. Well that would be fun. Okay,
Speaker 1: I've got to go officiate a wedding and uh.
Speaker 2: The.
Speaker 1: Reverend Jason Henderson is going to officiate a wedding. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so we'll be taking off a week, but I'll
Speaker 1: be back.
Speaker 4: By the way, Captain Kronos was the sold out one,
Speaker 4: so four K Captain Kronos and I didn't. I've had
Speaker 4: to spend money.
Speaker 2: On I'm gonna I'm gonna have to buy that on eBay.
Speaker 2: Then when it ends up on eBay.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well there, I'm sure there's a there's a not
Speaker 4: limited collection, but they're doing a whole hand.
Speaker 2: I have a physical copy of Chronos, but it's it's DVD,
Speaker 2: and I'm sure it's it's going to degrade eventually, but
Speaker 2: I I I also just I love that movie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm sure, I mean, there could be could be around,
Speaker 4: but they you know, they're doing a whole range and
Speaker 4: they're you know, they just revealed quater Mass and said
Speaker 4: there's there's two other there's a bunch of other bundles
Speaker 4: that basically on their uh link just have question mark.
Speaker 4: So hammers Hammer's pulling out all the stops. I should
Speaker 4: probably get this one, but I've I've had other things.
Speaker 4: I plopped down for the Salute, the Jugger box set
Speaker 4: that's coming out, which is awesome and even has a
Speaker 4: thing on how to play the game.
Speaker 2: We wait, wait, So I think while we're off, I
Speaker 2: think we should discuss in private a wish list of.
Speaker 1: Movies to do. Oh yeah yeah, rereadsheet. All right, everybody,
Speaker 1: thank you so much, and uh be excellent to one another,
Speaker 1: and we will talk too soon. Come to the Facebook page.
Speaker 1: Tell us what you're gonna do with a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks that we're gone, Like, like, how.
Speaker 2: Tell us what you would do if you had a
Speaker 2: sex spot? I don't or don't.
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm okay with leaving that, not even no no, no, no,
Speaker 4: no robo shaming okay.
Speaker 1: No, no, for sure. Yeah all right, hang on there, guys,
Speaker 1: I'll tek you soon. Bye.