Latest / Left of the Projector / L.A. Confidential (1997) with Concessions podcast
Transcript
- 0:00All Speakers: I had a Mountain Dew now after you were... Now I actually feel like I do want
- 0:03All Speakers: to have a Mountain Dew for the first time in 20 years.
- 0:05All Speakers: The last Mountain Dew I ever had on my... I think it was my birthday last year or two years ago.
- 0:11All Speakers: For some reason, I was like, fuck it. I'm getting Taco Bell.
- 0:14All Speakers: And I had a Baja Blast with that. And that was... Ew. A blast?
- 0:20All Speakers: Baja Blast is so much better than just plain old Mountain Dew that I don't even
- 0:27All Speakers: lump them together, really.
- 0:30All Speakers: Yeah they now that you mentioned it like oh did
- 0:34All Speakers: you ever do that growing up where um did you ever
- 0:36All Speakers: do the hulk at taco bell it's like a secret soda
- 0:39All Speakers: where you do it's like two-thirds regular
- 0:44All Speakers: mountain dew one-third baja blast and i swear it looks like it will make your
- 0:49All Speakers: insides glow the color that comes out of that it's beautiful it's like the color
- 0:56All Speakers: of uh flubber yeah Yeah, basically you're drinking Flubber.
- 1:02All Speakers: I wonder what Flubber would taste like. It seems like it'd be kind of delicious.
- 1:07All Speakers: Someone actually recommended to do that episode on Flubber as like a kid's kind
- 1:11All Speakers: of a kid's. I haven't seen it since it came out, so I have no clue.
- 1:15All Speakers: No memory of it. How that would age. Yeah, Flubber.
- 1:20All Speakers: Yeah, I don't think I ever even saw it as a kid. Came out of what? Ninety?
- 1:25All Speakers: This is a 90s one. Seven. Really?
- 1:29All Speakers: Just like L.A. Confidential. The same year as this. So, I mean,
- 1:32All Speakers: if you're... They were competing at the Oscars.
- 1:37All Speakers: Who's to say which one has more cultural cachet, which has a longer tail?
- 1:41All Speakers: All I know is that people know Flubber. You say Flubber, they know exactly what you're talking about.
- 1:46All Speakers: And especially if you ask a guy named Dwight Garner about this L.A.
- 1:51All Speakers: Confidential, he will tell you that Flubber might be a better movie.
- 1:54All Speakers: Well, we'll get to that. I'll get to the couple of quotes. Was Dwight one of
- 1:58All Speakers: the only naysayers as far as Rotten Tomatoes? The only one.
- 2:02All Speakers: The only one. There was 172, and he was the only one with a negative review.
- 2:08All Speakers: Man, what a king. Oh, yeah. I'm excited to hear what he said.
- 2:28All Speakers: But yes, as you heard in the intro, we are discussing L.A. Confidential.
- 2:32All Speakers: And with me back on the show again, glad to have you here, is the host of Concessions.
- 2:38All Speakers: I have Dan and Jared. How are you both doing today?
- 2:41All Speakers: Oh, we're both doing great. And I speak for Dan. And I can tell you that he's
- 2:45All Speakers: doing great. Actually, I can see him right now. He's smiling.
- 2:48All Speakers: He's wearing a baseball hat. He's wearing a politically charged T-shirt.
- 2:52All Speakers: He's in his element. And so am I.
- 2:56All Speakers: I'm sorry, Dan. How are you doing? wait and he's
- 2:59All Speakers: wearing a very important shirt that is sending sending
- 3:02All Speakers: props to a true champion of the
- 3:05All Speakers: people um oh man i need to get his name down
- 3:08All Speakers: exactly because uh well evan did you hear about this yesterday the the great
- 3:13All Speakers: morning that we all should be in right now oh yeah the plan is in morning oh
- 3:18All Speakers: what did i yes have you ever heard the uh it was like an old youtube video or
- 3:22All Speakers: this might have been pre-youtube to be honest i don't know when it came it's
- 3:25All Speakers: just like has always been on the internet.
- 3:26All Speakers: It was like this random Australian guy with like this super high theatrical...
- 3:30All Speakers: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know who you're talking about now.
- 3:32All Speakers: Yeah. A meal? A succulent Chinese meal?
- 3:37All Speakers: Yeah, he passed away this week. The week we were recording this.
- 3:41All Speakers: And the world is a little darker. I just... I have a message for God.
- 3:46All Speakers: God, I hope you know your judo well.
- 3:49All Speakers: This episode is in his memory, so RIP, King.
- 3:52All Speakers: I bet Jack Carlson probably loved LA Confidential.
- 3:56All Speakers: I would think so. Apparently, as we'll get to later in the episode,
- 4:00All Speakers: only one person on all of Rotten Tomatoes critics did not like this episode.
- 4:05All Speakers: Even people who I would have thought might find it to be, you know, not as good.
- 4:09All Speakers: But in any other year, it would have won more awards. But yeah,
- 4:12All Speakers: so as I mentioned, we are talking about L.A.
- 4:15All Speakers: Confidential. It boasts a pretty phenomenal cast.
- 4:18All Speakers: It was directed by Curtis Hanson. It has all your favorites and people who weren't
- 4:23All Speakers: big at the time, like Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, David Brathren,
- 4:29All Speakers: Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito, and last but not least, Kevin Spacey. We hardly knew thee.
- 4:36All Speakers: I would argue least. Actually, yeah, last and least.
- 4:39All Speakers: Last and least. Okay, that's fair. Although I did see recently he's trying to
- 4:43All Speakers: make a comeback but not in America because...
- 4:45All Speakers: Apparently, we aren't ready to forgive his disgusting deeds.
- 4:49All Speakers: He's doing Lydia Tarr right now. Yeah, he'll continue to be quite a successful
- 4:55All Speakers: contributor to the world of film in Europe. They take our garbage like that all the time.
- 5:01All Speakers: Yes, they do. And so I guess before we talk about the movie and kind of your
- 5:07All Speakers: first impressions on it, because this is officially.
- 5:10All Speakers: You know, by name or by Wikipedia, a neo-noir, you know, given all the kind of tropes from it.
- 5:16All Speakers: I'm curious if there are any other noirs from, you know, the 50s or even,
- 5:21All Speakers: you know, more recent ones other than L.A.
- 5:23All Speakers: Confidential that you have seen or enjoy or would recommend,
- 5:28All Speakers: I guess. Yes. Um, I like I was never really a big noir guy.
- 5:33All Speakers: Like most of the ones I've seen, I've kind of been sometimes,
- 5:36All Speakers: you know, you sit down and you see a movie because you're like,
- 5:38All Speakers: okay, this is like, quote, unquote, an important one.
- 5:40All Speakers: And this will be a it will fill a gap that I that I need to educate myself in
- 5:45All Speakers: my own film self education.
- 5:47All Speakers: So like a lot of those I've watched with like, sort of the respect and not like
- 5:50All Speakers: really, and I mean, I enjoyed it.
- 5:52All Speakers: But it's just like, noir is not my thing, where I know people that they'll just they'll just snort up
- 5:56All Speakers: every single thing that says noir on it
- 5:59All Speakers: like it's cocaine um but a couple of noirs
- 6:03All Speakers: i was like looking through the movies that i've seen that i enjoy oh one
- 6:05All Speakers: that came out a few years ago which i think is kind of close to this in spirit
- 6:09All Speakers: where it's like really really leaning into like the golden age of hollywood
- 6:13All Speakers: kind of aesthetic and that whole like nasty grimy noir but they can they don't
- 6:19All Speakers: have the haze coat underneath them so they can kind of let a little bit more
- 6:22All Speakers: loose with It was Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley.
- 6:25All Speakers: I feel like that movie did not get the attention it deserved.
- 6:27All Speakers: That's a good thing. Yeah, I'm not super well-versed in kind of classic film
- 6:33All Speakers: noir, although I've seen some of the...
- 6:38All Speakers: Big mainstays i think just in this
- 6:40All Speakers: last year um i saw maltese falcon
- 6:44All Speakers: for the first time and that movie has earned its kind
- 6:47All Speakers: of you know timeless classic status i want to say that movie's like
- 6:50All Speakers: 80 years old now or something uh i believe i believe it's in this movie like
- 6:54All Speakers: isn't that the movie that lynn bracken is watching in this movie yeah that's
- 6:59All Speakers: why that's why it came to mind then um as far as i guess at this in the grand
- 7:06All Speakers: scheme of things we may think of this movie as just.
- 7:10All Speakers: Classic film noir even though at the time i'm sure
- 7:12All Speakers: it was considered neo-noir but also for the first time this year
- 7:15All Speakers: i saw chinatown for the first time which obviously this
- 7:19All Speakers: is extremely indebted to um as
- 7:22All Speakers: far as um true like
- 7:25All Speakers: neo-noir you know of the last 20 30 years where
- 7:29All Speakers: there was the whole sort of resurgence I
- 7:32All Speakers: would definitely put the movie seven in that category um
- 7:35All Speakers: doesn't get more noir than that
- 7:38All Speakers: really um uh and then uh
- 7:41All Speakers: a movie that shares a star
- 7:45All Speakers: with LA Confidential that I think is uh obviously a
- 7:48All Speakers: neo-noir masterpiece Memento is probably my
- 7:51All Speakers: very favorite neo-noir film even just
- 7:55All Speakers: like thinking of this movie as a neo-noir is a a little bit of a stretch because
- 7:58All Speakers: it kind of just seems like it's a throwback to the classic noir without
- 8:01All Speakers: being uh super neo even
- 8:05All Speakers: though curtis hansen uh said the exact opposite and set out to make a a very
- 8:11All Speakers: modern movie with a noir spin i don't know if i agree that he he yeah well that's
- 8:17All Speakers: a good point well we will get to that for sure um and yeah speaking of momento or memento i uh.
- 8:24All Speakers: Obviously no one makes a ton of noirs, and I feel like the big one there is
- 8:29All Speakers: The Dark Knight, which is basically a noir that's in like,
- 8:32All Speakers: bringing well batman 2 is kind of a noir story as
- 8:35All Speakers: well in general or as a character i think it
- 8:38All Speakers: actually some of the which we can get into
- 8:40All Speakers: later some of like the themes about like policing and
- 8:43All Speakers: justice and what does it mean to run a like
- 8:47All Speakers: how to keep a society in order like i feel like la confidential and the dark
- 8:51All Speakers: knight kind of agree in some ways that actually makes me like the dark knight
- 8:55All Speakers: a little bit less hmm interesting well here i'm curious if what you again this
- 9:01All Speakers: we don't need You could spend like three hours talking about all the characteristics of noir,
- 9:05All Speakers: neo-noir, and what's this and what's that.
- 9:07All Speakers: But I was racking my brain because I went through a phase maybe a year ago where
- 9:11All Speakers: I watched a lot of the 50s and Maltese Falcon, a lot of those kind of movies, Sunset Boulevard.
- 9:16All Speakers: And I was actually thinking, do you think that Fargo is a noir, a neo-noir?
- 9:21All Speakers: Because if it is, I would say it's probably my favorite one. Kind of one.
- 9:25All Speakers: I mean... The Big Lebowski is definitely one.
- 9:28All Speakers: But i yeah i mean fargo's yeah it's tough
- 9:31All Speakers: to draw the line like we were talking about before uh we hit
- 9:34All Speakers: record where it's like you know if there's a mystery and an
- 9:37All Speakers: unreliable protagonist that just automatically makes something
- 9:40All Speakers: a noir yeah yeah maybe not to
- 9:43All Speakers: the extent that like blood simple is now
- 9:46All Speakers: i'm just like yeah going through cohen cohen filmography
- 9:49All Speakers: but i don't know fargo has a lot of the characteristics
- 9:52All Speakers: as far as like the mystery and the crime and like
- 9:55All Speakers: the the literal real darkness uh and just
- 9:58All Speakers: but it also has this like comic edge you
- 10:02All Speakers: know that just mixing that noir those noir
- 10:05All Speakers: stylings with just the like midwest like
- 10:08All Speakers: goofiness sorry dan almost like
- 10:11All Speakers: get like kind of almost stretches the the
- 10:15All Speakers: film noir label yeah i think past
- 10:18All Speakers: its limit uh i would i would say no there might
- 10:21All Speakers: be a season or two of the show that are
- 10:24All Speakers: more like noir noir but the movie i
- 10:27All Speakers: think the movie has too much like it's like a black comedy to
- 10:30All Speakers: it yeah it's more of a black comedy yeah yeah more
- 10:33All Speakers: in bruges i would say it's closer to yeah another
- 10:36All Speakers: another one that just comes to mind just because it's one of my favorites i don't necessarily
- 10:39All Speakers: think it's a neo-noir but it's clearly trying to be one it's
- 10:42All Speakers: who framed roger rabbit oh yeah which is one of which
- 10:45All Speakers: is one of one of my favorites as a kid and i did that as an early episode and it's.
- 10:48All Speakers: Uh i mean especially given the time period that
- 10:50All Speakers: it takes place i mean that's the other thing too is whether it does it have
- 10:53All Speakers: to be a period piece and again we could spend we
- 10:56All Speakers: could spend uh less time talking about lilly confidential and more time talking
- 11:00All Speakers: about these things but i think i'd speak for both of you that we should talk
- 11:03All Speakers: more about l.a confidential so i'm curious uh i think dan you said this was
- 11:07All Speakers: your first time watching it so what did you what were your uh your thoughts
- 11:10All Speakers: because i hadn't seen I saw it two or three times recently, but it hadn't been since it came out.
- 11:15All Speakers: So this was your first shot at it. Yeah. I mean, it's always one that kind of flowed around my radar.
- 11:22All Speakers: The poster is really splashy. You see really big names on it.
- 11:26All Speakers: And I know it's like one of those big seminal 90s posters.
- 11:29All Speakers: In this glut of they were doing send-ups of, like, classical Hollywood kind of styles.
- 11:34All Speakers: And I don't know, it just never really jumped out at me until we,
- 11:38All Speakers: like, talked about doing this for the episode.
- 11:40All Speakers: So when I watched it, no, I mean, I thought it was really good. I had a great time.
- 11:44All Speakers: I thought it was really, really well executed, I guess would be the way that I would describe it.
- 11:51All Speakers: Like, will I walk away, like, three years from now, like, really ruminating
- 11:55All Speakers: on, like, the themes in the movie?
- 11:56All Speakers: Probably not. not but it's one of those movies where like when
- 11:59All Speakers: it's done it's like that was really impressive what they pulled
- 12:02All Speakers: off like that's a that's good movie making right
- 12:05All Speakers: there if that makes sense what about you jared you you
- 12:08All Speakers: hadn't seen it for a while either right yeah maybe maybe in
- 12:11All Speakers: your position where oh gosh i maybe a
- 12:14All Speakers: couple years after this movie came out like i was i was
- 12:17All Speakers: too young to seek something like this out in the movie theater i
- 12:20All Speakers: think i was like 10 or 11 when this came out um but
- 12:23All Speakers: i this was one of the very first movies that i
- 12:26All Speakers: obtained on dvd in like i don't know
- 12:29All Speakers: 1999 or 2000 or something and i
- 12:32All Speakers: don't know what i don't remember like the circumstances of my first viewing
- 12:37All Speakers: because again it's like kind of a weird movie for a 12 or 13 year old to seek
- 12:40All Speakers: out also um maybe i want to say like it was used for like a dollar like at the
- 12:48All Speakers: bookstore underneath underneath my library in my hometown.
- 12:51All Speakers: So like I bought the DVD for like a dollar or two or something,
- 12:54All Speakers: not knowing what it was and watched it and then watched it again and again and again and again.
- 13:00All Speakers: Yeah. I probably, I probably watched this movie like, you know,
- 13:02All Speakers: 10 or 12 times in like the year 2000.
- 13:06All Speakers: And absolutely loved it. Obviously, if I watched it that many times,
- 13:11All Speakers: but yeah, when you're a kid, you do that.
- 13:13All Speakers: And hadn't really thought about it in the last almost 25 years until this past
- 13:19All Speakers: week when you invited Dan and I on to do this that we're doing at this moment.
- 13:24All Speakers: And honestly, still kind of love it. Yeah, I saw it for the first time around
- 13:29All Speakers: when you did. I didn't see it in the theater.
- 13:31All Speakers: But do either of you remember the DVD format that was around,
- 13:36All Speakers: I think, from 99-2000 called DivX?
- 13:41All Speakers: DivX? No, I don't even know that word. It was this ridiculous thing where you
- 13:45All Speakers: would buy a DVD, I think it's Circuit City.
- 13:47All Speakers: And I think it was part of Circuit City's company.
- 13:51All Speakers: Essentially, you bought it for a couple dollars, like a rental.
- 13:53All Speakers: And if you liked it, you could then buy it outright to unlock it.
- 13:58All Speakers: So basically, it only lets you watch it one time.
- 14:01All Speakers: And then if you paid for the whole thing, you would get it. And I remember buying
- 14:04All Speakers: this. I bought a few other movies right around 99, 2000.
- 14:09All Speakers: And I'm like, Oh, this was pretty cool. Even though I don't think I really understood
- 14:12All Speakers: the movie that well, or, you know, it's the best I could for a 17 year old.
- 14:16All Speakers: And then I bought it. And I also watched it a few times around 99, 2000.
- 14:21All Speakers: Okay. So it came out in 98 and discontinued in 99 because it was a complete flop.
- 14:28All Speakers: Yeah. Apparently. Yeah. Yeah. The thing I remember most fondly about DivX is
- 14:33All Speakers: that it was very easy to...
- 14:36All Speakers: To rip so you'd pay the the few dollars to
- 14:39All Speakers: like rent it quote unquote but then you would like rip it
- 14:42All Speakers: using a dvd burner and then uh they would
- 14:46All Speakers: it would make its way onto file sharing websites even back then like
- 14:49All Speakers: you'd like even like on limewire and stuff you'd see like la confidential dot
- 14:53All Speakers: 1997 dot divx dot mp4 like whatever it was you know and uh yeah i remember there
- 14:59All Speakers: being a ton of pirated divx files out on the internet when i was a kid that
- 15:04All Speakers: makes that makes perfect sense i I don't think I had a DVD burner at that time.
- 15:08All Speakers: I think they were still somewhat expensive, but that makes sense.
- 15:11All Speakers: But yeah, so I saw it then, and I remember liking it. And then I only re-saw
- 15:14All Speakers: it when it got added to the Criterion Collection maybe two months ago, a month ago.
- 15:19All Speakers: And that's where it came back on my radar. I'm like, oh, I should revisit this.
- 15:23All Speakers: And I'm glad I did because I think maybe like you were saying,
- 15:26All Speakers: Dan, it may not be like a movie I'll think about forever.
- 15:28All Speakers: It's not like an all-time great, but I still gave it five stars.
- 15:32All Speakers: I still think it's a really well-made movie. I think whether it's a neo-noir
- 15:36All Speakers: or a noir or it's part of both, I think you said, Dan, like the first half is
- 15:40All Speakers: more noir and then it kind of shifts a little bit.
- 15:43All Speakers: But I don't know. I think what you said, Jared, actually, is the thing that
- 15:47All Speakers: we're curious is the director of the film said he didn't want this film to be a noir.
- 15:51All Speakers: He didn't even want it to be a period
- 15:53All Speakers: piece, but just a modern movie that happened to take place in 1950s.
- 15:57All Speakers: And I think that that's such a weird, I don't know.
- 16:00All Speakers: I don't know what to make of that. It's just, it's such a wise,
- 16:04All Speakers: even, I don't know. I'm at a loss for words.
- 16:08All Speakers: I don't think if that's what he wanted to do, I don't think it works on that
- 16:12All Speakers: level. Like, I don't I don't like seeing it through that lens.
- 16:16All Speakers: I'm like, well, that's not what's going on here, because then,
- 16:18All Speakers: like, these characters would have modern sensibilities, which they just don't.
- 16:22All Speakers: And they would like because that's what, like you were mentioning,
- 16:25All Speakers: it's like the whole second half of the movie is kind of a commentary on the first half.
- 16:29All Speakers: And the first half is pretty much a by the numbers noir film with noir characters
- 16:34All Speakers: behaving like people in the 50s.
- 16:36All Speakers: It's like I guess that would have been interesting if you put characters in
- 16:40All Speakers: there that had like 1997 or sensibilities in this movie.
- 16:44All Speakers: But like none of the situations or the themes or the way people are responding
- 16:49All Speakers: make me feel like this is a modern movie that just happens to be set in the 50s.
- 16:54All Speakers: Yeah, or or the aesthetics like I mean, if you're sending out to not make a
- 17:00All Speakers: noir throwback, why would you start your movie with like Danny DeVito doing
- 17:04All Speakers: his best radio announcer voice?
- 17:05All Speakers: Using as much old-timey slang as he possibly can. Yeah.
- 17:11All Speakers: It almost makes me wonder if he... I don't know.
- 17:14All Speakers: I saw that his influence, the director's influence of this was Alfred Hitchcock movies.
- 17:20All Speakers: That kind of was his... Curtis Hanson, like those movies, is a younger person.
- 17:24All Speakers: Came across the book that this is based on by James L. Roy and thought,
- 17:28All Speakers: I'm going to make it a modern thing, but keep all the aesthetics of the book.
- 17:32All Speakers: I don't think he did any of those things, except I didn't read the book.
- 17:35All Speakers: So I assume it's similar. He tried to keep it to be like the book from what I read.
- 17:39All Speakers: I don't know. Maybe it just doesn't matter what he wanted to do.
- 17:42All Speakers: Right. I mean, he made this movie.
- 17:44All Speakers: We saw it. It's a no are for the most part. It has griminess.
- 17:48All Speakers: It has, you know, uh, the femme fatale of, you know, Kim Basinger and,
- 17:53All Speakers: uh, Danny DeVito as the sort of creepy, you know, uh, what would you call it?
- 17:59All Speakers: His, I got, he's like a paparazzo. Yeah.
- 18:02All Speakers: Yeah, exactly. Just doing, making, you know, crappy, you know,
- 18:06All Speakers: it's like the New York post back then or something equivalent.
- 18:09All Speakers: Uh, I don't know. What's the L.A. version of that? I don't know.
- 18:11All Speakers: What's the L.A.? L.A. must have a bunch of those like tabloid papers.
- 18:14All Speakers: Do they have like a rag kind of thing? I don't know. Yeah, there's all sorts
- 18:18All Speakers: of those that still exist.
- 18:19All Speakers: I mean, the modern version of that is probably like TMZ.
- 18:24All Speakers: But also TMZ is now like shifted into like actually just being quite good at
- 18:29All Speakers: reporting the news really plainly.
- 18:31All Speakers: But they do still like have that sort of paparazzi rag type of vibe to a lot of their content.
- 18:38All Speakers: Content but yeah i see that as like an old old old school
- 18:41All Speakers: tmz in a way yeah that like
- 18:44All Speakers: gave me whiplash when i started seeing there's that phase when
- 18:47All Speakers: like buzzfeed was actually doing some good journalism i'm
- 18:50All Speakers: like what the fuck is buzzfeed doing out here now where are their listicles right
- 18:53All Speakers: right right right right it's like they got tired of being considered just like
- 18:57All Speakers: a complete rag and like well i mean i guess also now journalists need jobs right
- 19:02All Speakers: and so they want to do the best reporting they can i guess more power to them
- 19:06All Speakers: okay so i don't even think this is a neo-noir. Like, I think this is just a noir.
- 19:11All Speakers: Like it's, I mean, yes, it's, it was made in the late nineties and it's sort
- 19:16All Speakers: of couched between a lot of actual neo-noirs where it's like noir,
- 19:20All Speakers: but it's updated and it's got a lot of modern sensibilities,
- 19:23All Speakers: not just aesthetically, but thematically and everything.
- 19:27All Speakers: But this movie is just like Dan said, these are all like old fashioned people
- 19:31All Speakers: like doing old fashioned things in old fashioned ways.
- 19:35All Speakers: This is a good old fashioned movie where it's like plot heavy and all of the
- 19:40All Speakers: intricacies of the plot really begin and end with the intricacies of the characters and the performances.
- 19:46All Speakers: Performances like it has all of the trappings of
- 19:49All Speakers: noir and almost none of the trappings of like modern
- 19:52All Speakers: filmmaking or modern like modernity other than
- 19:55All Speakers: this is clearly like a post-scorsese and post-tarantino level of like brutal
- 20:02All Speakers: violence and sexuality and like you know like all of like our morbid curiosities
- 20:07All Speakers: sort of laid bare but still the template of like a 1940s noir yeah um yeah Yeah,
- 20:13All Speakers: I would say the thing that for me makes it neo-noir, where like you said,
- 20:17All Speakers: like this is what noir would be without the Hays Code.
- 20:20All Speakers: Like all the things are implied and gestured at in noir. This is right out in front and center.
- 20:27All Speakers: But I would say like, and I actually even checked this, like when the main,
- 20:32All Speakers: the diner. Oh, what's this?
- 20:35All Speakers: The late night diner i always forget the name of the diner um but when they when they saw the.
- 20:40All Speakers: Night owl the night owl yeah yeah when they like initially solved
- 20:44All Speakers: that murder when that case is closed like i actually checked the
- 20:47All Speakers: time i'm like wait is the movie ending like this feels like we're
- 20:50All Speakers: wrapping up and i'm like oh no we're only halfway through where i see
- 20:52All Speakers: in second half as the neo-noir part
- 20:56All Speakers: because it's kind of deconstructing all this stuff that's going
- 20:59All Speakers: on in the first half of the film that it
- 21:02All Speakers: does play pretty much like a straight noir and then it's
- 21:04All Speakers: commenting like like how social forces at the
- 21:07All Speakers: time how set how i like ideologies at
- 21:10All Speakers: the time basically push the cops in or the
- 21:13All Speakers: the main detectives into these spaces and like
- 21:16All Speakers: especially with like how he just like fucking blasted those
- 21:19All Speakers: three black guys like with no hesitation or someone's like
- 21:22All Speakers: well yeah you got manipulated into this because like of course you would
- 21:24All Speakers: do that as a cop in this scenario so it's like it's
- 21:27All Speakers: starting to comment on itself which i think gives it the quote-unquote
- 21:31All Speakers: neo bit for it and like and with like the
- 21:34All Speakers: bucking of haze code uh haze code uh limitations
- 21:37All Speakers: which is like why neo or why noir had a lot of its specific tropes and and sensibilities
- 21:43All Speakers: like especially with the end like the criminals get away with it which was like
- 21:48All Speakers: explicitly not allowed in uh noir film so i think that ending and like and showing um cop or like
- 21:57All Speakers: forces of justice as that corrupt, like you could do that in noir a little bit,
- 22:01All Speakers: but you couldn't show it nearly as much, or it couldn't be as integral to the
- 22:05All Speakers: plot as it is in this one. So like, I think that like.
- 22:09All Speakers: Kind of recursive nature commenting on itself and commenting on the form and
- 22:13All Speakers: then pushing against it in what probably feels like a more realistic light of
- 22:18All Speakers: how this shit could have gone down, I think does give it its neo-credential.
- 22:24All Speakers: Yeah, basically, like I think you said, Dan, it's like this is what,
- 22:27All Speakers: when you watched old movies from the 90s, from the 40s or 50s, those noirs,
- 22:33All Speakers: the police officer usually, you know, at the end was the guy that got the criminal
- 22:38All Speakers: and everything was happy, you know, happy ending kind of situation.
- 22:42All Speakers: And this, it's the cops are all pieces of shit. The people who are involved
- 22:46All Speakers: in Hollywood that are part of all the crime racket are all terrible people too.
- 22:50All Speakers: There's really no one in this movie with the exception of maybe Kim Basinger's
- 22:54All Speakers: character that are actually good people at all.
- 22:56All Speakers: Yeah, and it makes a point to like, Guy Pearce's character wants to do things quote unquote right.
- 23:05All Speakers: He's kind of the upright guy eye and you're
- 23:08All Speakers: kind of sucking this rock in a hard place for like yeah
- 23:11All Speakers: he's technically squealing on his uh his compatriots
- 23:15All Speakers: or his compadres or whatever but like these people are pieces of
- 23:17All Speakers: shit he should squeal on them like right in
- 23:20All Speakers: a properly running justice system cops
- 23:23All Speakers: like that would get like pushed out uh but he's like portrayed as it's portrayed
- 23:29All Speakers: as like a tension and like you don't know whether to root for him and and the
- 23:32All Speakers: only way that um he gets through and quote-unquote saves the day and is lauded
- 23:37All Speakers: for it is by basically lying to the entire public.
- 23:41All Speakers: Misrepresenting that this whole organ or the whole organization of the police
- 23:45All Speakers: are rotten from the inside out and being this public face for this lie um so
- 23:50All Speakers: yeah it's basically showing like no it's impossible to be a cop and a good person yeah yeah totally.
- 23:57All Speakers: Like the way he does like uh captain dudley
- 24:00All Speakers: uh james cromwell like lists out you
- 24:03All Speakers: know those three questions like would you do this in order to do
- 24:06All Speakers: that and like he's like no no like those are and then by the end of the movie he's
- 24:09All Speakers: done all of those things um like yeah
- 24:12All Speakers: it it almost seemed like they
- 24:15All Speakers: are saying that you know you know it's not
- 24:18All Speakers: that there's like good cops and bad cops they're all bad
- 24:21All Speakers: cops but they're just a product of their environment that's just
- 24:23All Speakers: the job bob that's just the city also did
- 24:26All Speakers: anyone notice um did he suddenly get more irish
- 24:30All Speakers: as the movie like continually and as
- 24:33All Speakers: he got like more clearly evil i feel like i
- 24:35All Speakers: noticed his irish accent or yeah how many times
- 24:38All Speakers: did he say the word lad with an irish accent yeah yeah
- 24:41All Speakers: um well okay uh i wonder
- 24:44All Speakers: how intentional that may have been but and james cromwell
- 24:47All Speakers: let's just get out of the way he's absolute s-tier actor oh yeah
- 24:50All Speakers: oh he's so good and he's like but yeah
- 24:53All Speakers: he i always thought it was like that's just his voice like
- 24:56All Speakers: when he when he speaks in any role or in just as himself in interviews and stuff
- 25:01All Speakers: he always has that like fairly strong irish lilt even though he's just american
- 25:07All Speakers: he's like born and raised in la and has remained there as an actor his whole
- 25:12All Speakers: life he like he's just like Like, I mean,
- 25:14All Speakers: I assume like his parents were Irish immigrants.
- 25:17All Speakers: I mean, that would be odd if they weren't. But yeah, I always thought it was
- 25:21All Speakers: it was kind of weird that he just sounded like a full on Irishman,
- 25:25All Speakers: even though he's just red blooded American.
- 25:27All Speakers: Yeah, his he's actually from he's actually Scottish, Scottish.
- 25:31All Speakers: His parents are Scottish descent, says.
- 25:34All Speakers: Actually, I didn't realize that his father was blacklisted during the McCarthy
- 25:37All Speakers: era. Oh, that's interesting.
- 25:40All Speakers: And that we're like in the height of during this film. um well
- 25:43All Speakers: that that's another weird thing about this movie like
- 25:46All Speakers: there's a lot of things that would clearly be going
- 25:49All Speakers: on in this movie that's like aren't
- 25:52All Speakers: acknowledged and like okay the mccarthyism or especially within hollywood like
- 25:56All Speakers: i'm not surprised that's not really pointed out so much like there's that danny
- 26:01All Speakers: devito line where he's like well he's not queer and he's not a red so like this
- 26:04All Speakers: won't this isn't like scintillating enough to put in a uh in my articles but like Like,
- 26:11All Speakers: World War II is just not mentioned. Like, wouldn't all these guys be veterans?
- 26:14All Speakers: And, like, this would kind of be, this could have been a tension where,
- 26:18All Speakers: like, it seems to me that, like, Guy Pearce's character, instead of being in
- 26:22All Speakers: war, he was, you know, in the police academy or something like that.
- 26:25All Speakers: And there's definitely this more, like, rough and tumble side of the police
- 26:30All Speakers: force that feels like they probably are, like, a little PTSD addled from World
- 26:34All Speakers: War II and a little bit more comfortable with violence.
- 26:36All Speakers: And like, I just kind of sensed that that was going on, but like,
- 26:39All Speakers: it's never really discussed.
- 26:41All Speakers: It's almost like instead of using war or whatever as the backdrop of,
- 26:48All Speakers: you know, the things that led to their violent tendency,
- 26:50All Speakers: as they're saying, it's really living in, you know, this corrupt Hollywood that's
- 26:54All Speakers: kind of created their their whole thing, because that's sort of like the beginning,
- 26:57All Speakers: which I think it's a good I like Danny DeVito sort of opening little,
- 27:01All Speakers: you know, description of what's
- 27:03All Speakers: going on, how, you know, Hollywood is this beautiful romanticized place.
- 27:07All Speakers: But really underneath it, there's just all the shit that I have to report on,
- 27:11All Speakers: because if I don't report on it, who would know about it or whatever?
- 27:14All Speakers: And it's all very it's a terrible place beyond or I guess it's the average person
- 27:19All Speakers: doesn't maybe know what a terrible place Hollywood really is.
- 27:22All Speakers: But I think, I don't know, the cops are all very much just kind of this weird
- 27:27All Speakers: caricature of evil in a way that's, you know, very explicit from the beginning.
- 27:33All Speakers: And the only person you're ever meant to think is good is Guy Pearce's character.
- 27:37All Speakers: And then you also briefly see Russell Crowe's character being a little bit,
- 27:41All Speakers: you know, sympathetic towards women who are being abused by men.
- 27:44All Speakers: So there are these little things like, oh, if it weren't for that,
- 27:48All Speakers: who would stop all the violence toward women?
- 27:52All Speakers: It's like, well, I don't think this one guy, Russell Crowe, is going to stop
- 27:56All Speakers: all of that across all of LA.
- 27:58All Speakers: It's a much deeper problem, just as the police is a much deeper problem that
- 28:02All Speakers: they don't ever really address, which I wouldn't have expected them to address
- 28:07All Speakers: the fact that maybe it's just implied that cops are just corrupt and it's impossible to.
- 28:13All Speakers: Do anything about that, right?
- 28:15All Speakers: Because Exley, Guy Pearce's character has eventually, like you said,
- 28:19All Speakers: Dan, has to cover everything up because if they did, it would destroy their
- 28:23All Speakers: reputation. They can't have that.
- 28:24All Speakers: Yeah, it's like they kind of all act like their own little Batmans, it seems like.
- 28:30All Speakers: Vigilantes. Yeah. Yeah, as like outwardly moral as Exley wants to portray himself,
- 28:36All Speakers: at the end of the day, he's still got the sort of like classic like Greek tragic
- 28:43All Speakers: flaws where like his ambition and his pride and stuff is still going to like win at the end of the day.
- 28:48All Speakers: He just doesn't die because like, you know,
- 28:51All Speakers: heroes in these types of movies get shot and don't die
- 28:55All Speakers: but um yeah he's uh there
- 28:58All Speakers: really aren't any like total like moral anchors here and they're really like
- 29:04All Speakers: shouldn't be it probably wouldn't be realistic if there were yeah yeah because
- 29:08All Speakers: i'm thinking speaking of the the opening you know monologue or yeah the opening
- 29:12All Speakers: monologue from danny devito is like it's such a good sign or.
- 29:16All Speakers: Encapsulation of like what southern california was at
- 29:20All Speakers: like four people there and how it's projected out in
- 29:23All Speakers: the u.s in the post-war boom because like i didn't
- 29:26All Speakers: realize that until i moved down here like orange county literally didn't really
- 29:29All Speakers: exist until the put like after world
- 29:32All Speakers: war ii it's like and a lot of the wealth that came from there
- 29:35All Speakers: yeah it came up from la and hollywood and like southern california in
- 29:37All Speakers: general like this is a huge military hub down
- 29:40All Speakers: here and there's a ton of people that make a
- 29:43All Speakers: lot of money off the military down here and like and
- 29:46All Speakers: then like related industries and so you
- 29:49All Speakers: see like hollywood as this sort of projection outward
- 29:52All Speakers: of america now of you know we've won the war where we're now sort of the top
- 29:57All Speakers: dog at the point the cold war is starting to really like shift into gear and
- 30:01All Speakers: hollywood has always been this form of soft power that we project out and like
- 30:06All Speakers: show our culture and show us at the the very us at our very best and how we want to be And so L.A.
- 30:12All Speakers: Is like an encapsulation of that in Southern California in general.
- 30:15All Speakers: And especially like what you're saying, where Danny DeVito is saying,
- 30:18All Speakers: it's like, oh, well, if I don't report this, no one would because it's the 50s. There's no Twitter.
- 30:21All Speakers: There's no social media for like actual on the ground evidence of what's going on in L.A.
- 30:25All Speakers: Is for the populace. So the only thing everyone gets like within the country
- 30:30All Speakers: and around the world about what L.A.
- 30:32All Speakers: Is like, what America is like is from our movies. And it's really idealized
- 30:36All Speakers: versions of ourselves where, you know, the reality of it. I mean,
- 30:40All Speakers: this is the fucking 1950s. Like, we know now, like.
- 30:43All Speakers: All the bullshit that was going on at that point in
- 30:46All Speakers: the u.s but like none of that was getting well a
- 30:49All Speakers: little bit of it was getting out but for the most part it's just
- 30:53All Speakers: this rosy glitzy uh place like
- 30:55All Speakers: hollywood and they had to use hollywood as this uh which isn't
- 30:58All Speakers: addressed in this movie but is a way to counter you know
- 31:02All Speakers: the soviet union and what their portrayal of
- 31:05All Speakers: america was which is most likely much more accurate than
- 31:07All Speakers: than uh something like this and it's yeah it's
- 31:10All Speakers: interesting how they have to portray it through that um but yeah that
- 31:13All Speakers: does like that does remind me and it's kind of addressing this film too that
- 31:16All Speakers: like that was a big uh like a contradiction that
- 31:19All Speakers: the soviet union would do using their own propaganda abroad it's
- 31:23All Speakers: like oh all like all these african-americans all these latinos all these native
- 31:27All Speakers: americans they went and fought to defeat fascism and then you came back to your
- 31:31All Speakers: own country and you're basically under the same thumb that you just tried or
- 31:35All Speakers: you went out and uh defeated so like what's going on guys what's going on over there it's not quite
- 31:40All Speakers: the shining beacon on the hill that you that you're portraying yourself as.
- 31:44All Speakers: I guess this is more to the movie itself,
- 31:47All Speakers: but I thought it was worth mentioning is that one of the things that Hanson
- 31:51All Speakers: wanted to do with this was to include actors that weren't as well known sort
- 31:56All Speakers: of intentionally to, he apparently kind of discovered the book by accident,
- 32:00All Speakers: the, the, that it's based on.
- 32:02All Speakers: And so he almost wanted people to discover a bunch of actors.
- 32:05All Speakers: And so for this to be, you know, Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe's,
- 32:09All Speakers: not their first movies, but their first big ones.
- 32:12All Speakers: I think that Russell Crowe was in some medium or a bigger movie before this,
- 32:18All Speakers: but I'm blanking on what it was at the moment that came out before this, Virtuosity. Yeah.
- 32:23All Speakers: I think he was in, which is a Denzel Washington movie. But yeah, so I don't know.
- 32:27All Speakers: I mean, just for me, I think that it's kind of cool he did that, give us some new people.
- 32:32All Speakers: But I thought that Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce were magnificent in this,
- 32:37All Speakers: as for pretty much every performance in this.
- 32:39All Speakers: It was kind of a top to bottom of just masterclass.
- 32:42All Speakers: And some of the behind the scenes sort of making of this was talking about how
- 32:46All Speakers: both of them don't have, they're both not from America.
- 32:49All Speakers: And so they had to change to the American accents. And apparently it was very
- 32:53All Speakers: difficult for Guy Pearce in this because of the style that the kind of the dialogue had.
- 32:58All Speakers: And so he apparently initially had some trouble with it, but you wouldn't know it from watching it. No.
- 33:03All Speakers: Yeah, he does a great job with the American accent. He's like one of those guys
- 33:05All Speakers: when I was a kid, like I was I was surprised to learn he wasn't American because
- 33:09All Speakers: when I saw this, I knew him from this and from Memento.
- 33:12All Speakers: And yeah, I had like absolutely no idea he wasn't American.
- 33:16All Speakers: Yeah, I remember being surprised the first time I heard him speak.
- 33:19All Speakers: And there was, you know, an Australian accent coming out. yeah that
- 33:22All Speakers: was um russell crowe felt the same way for me where um
- 33:25All Speakers: when key like first time you know you heard an interview or
- 33:28All Speakers: something like that you're like holy shit i thought he was he's he's
- 33:31All Speakers: one of us what happened but the biggest example of
- 33:34All Speakers: that and that's my own fault for that is like i didn't grow up with uh uh dude
- 33:39All Speakers: who's the guy who played house uh not hugh laurie is he you laurie yeah you
- 33:43All Speakers: laurie yeah it's my introduction to hugh laurie so i thought it was very serious
- 33:47All Speakers: actor man from america and then the first time i saw him like being a silly
- 33:50All Speakers: little british guy i'm I'm like, who is this guy? What's he doing over here?
- 33:55All Speakers: Yeah. And I was also like reading up on some of that kind of behind the scenes pre-production stuff.
- 34:02All Speakers: And yeah, Hanson really had to go to bat for Pierce and Crow because they weren't American.
- 34:08All Speakers: And like not only were they unknown, but they were also un-American.
- 34:12All Speakers: American and um and uh
- 34:15All Speakers: but but luckily shining shining beacon of
- 34:18All Speakers: a of American patriotism Kevin Spacey was there to get top
- 34:21All Speakers: billing and uh yeah
- 34:25All Speakers: that that was like the compromise is like okay well we need like an actual star
- 34:28All Speakers: for the third lead in this um and uh but you know there's some other like heavyweights
- 34:35All Speakers: and they're like Danny DeVito's pretty big star Kim Kim Basinger was It's pretty big star. Um, yeah.
- 34:42All Speakers: James Cromwell and David Strathairn were known, even though they're more like
- 34:45All Speakers: character actors, they're like very respected, kind of well known actors.
- 34:49All Speakers: But yeah, I mean, that is pretty ballsy to cast your two leads that really are
- 34:57All Speakers: the protagonists that have to carry the movie that audience has to root for,
- 35:00All Speakers: like not movie stars, like in a movie that's kind of about movie stars.
- 35:04All Speakers: Stars um that is pretty wild like
- 35:07All Speakers: the opposite of that would be like once upon
- 35:10All Speakers: a time in hollywood where it's like oh the two biggest stars on
- 35:13All Speakers: the planet are the leads you know so like
- 35:16All Speakers: you know given that this is kind of a similar movie with sort of similar aims
- 35:21All Speakers: here and there that is pretty wild and you know now we've got the like gift
- 35:25All Speakers: of foresight that yeah of course guy pierce and russell crowe would be awesome
- 35:28All Speakers: they're amazing everyone knows everyone knows that but um yeah Yeah,
- 35:32All Speakers: I mean, I think that's that's pretty awesome.
- 35:34All Speakers: But also, like, makes me bad.
- 35:38All Speakers: Also, like just watching this movie and thinking like, you know, 26,
- 35:42All Speakers: 27 years ago, they're still making these like relatively big budget,
- 35:46All Speakers: like, like dark movies for adults that had a lot of like great actors in them.
- 35:55All Speakers: And then the movie comes out and, you know, makes back like five times its budget.
- 36:00All Speakers: It like i missed that i
- 36:03All Speakers: wish i could have been like this age and that being
- 36:06All Speakers: the state of the movie industry it kind of like bums me out that it's not in
- 36:10All Speakers: this movie such a good reminder of that have you rated and reviewed left of
- 36:21All Speakers: the projector on apple music funny you should ask Yes, I have.
- 36:26All Speakers: And you should too, dear listener. Give it a five star rating.
- 36:30All Speakers: Give it a like. Give it a review. Say nice things. Mention him on Twitter.
- 36:35All Speakers: It's fun to do. That's what the cool kids are doing. That's what the good cops are doing.
- 36:43All Speakers: Guy Pearce, he was cast as the baby face in this. And he pretty quickly stopped.
- 36:50All Speakers: He never got that typecasting. disgusting and uh
- 36:53All Speakers: like if you like just even the difference between this and like memento a
- 36:56All Speakers: couple years later like where he's just like very dark and
- 36:59All Speakers: brooding and just kind of you know enigmatic and stuff like the difference between
- 37:03All Speakers: that and like i got glasses and i'm a good guy is like we took off the glasses
- 37:10All Speakers: mind you well that was the thing too they kept saying he had to not wear his
- 37:14All Speakers: glasses because it was too dorky to be in the cop police force i guess with glasses which is,
- 37:19All Speakers: you might need those not to shoot the wrong guy yeah I think it was Dudley just
- 37:23All Speakers: being a criminal mastermind and planning ahead like oh I'm going to be in a
- 37:26All Speakers: shootout with this guy someday and I don't want him to have his glasses on too
- 37:30All Speakers: bad he used a god damn shotgun you don't really need aim for that one.
- 37:34All Speakers: Well, yeah. And so one of the other like big common,
- 37:39All Speakers: I mean, pretty easy, I guess, obvious things that happened in this movie that
- 37:43All Speakers: I think is worth referring to, at least briefly, is the police in general, just like the idea that,
- 37:51All Speakers: you know, cops are seen as these elite police force in Hollywood.
- 37:55All Speakers: I had watched another movie that I'm trying to remember just recently where they talk about.
- 38:00All Speakers: Oh, no, it was when we're talking about Rambo on your show, how like the cops
- 38:04All Speakers: were these like elite training machines.
- 38:06All Speakers: And that's how they're able to avoid getting killed by Rambo.
- 38:09All Speakers: I think it's a very similar thing.
- 38:10All Speakers: Also in Beverly Hills Cops, too, where they talk about cops as being this like
- 38:14All Speakers: polite, you know, great force that's well trained. And, you know,
- 38:19All Speakers: we can train it all out. But in this, they kind of just strip away that veneer.
- 38:23All Speakers: And one of the very first moments you see them is just beating the shit out
- 38:26All Speakers: of a bunch of Black people who were accused of a crime they clearly did not commit.
- 38:31All Speakers: And just like that falling over to just the overt racism of,
- 38:35All Speakers: let's just see what Black people we can use to pin this murder on.
- 38:40All Speakers: And it doesn't matter. So there's no even attempt to show Cops as being good
- 38:46All Speakers: except for Exley, which we then, as you said, Dan, like the second half of the
- 38:51All Speakers: movie shows that he is not good in any sense of the way of the world.
- 38:55All Speakers: Well, I mean, he still I mean, actually still has like a far,
- 38:59All Speakers: far, far stronger moral compass than any other character. No doubt.
- 39:03All Speakers: He just also he just also has like far more like kind of general classical flaws.
- 39:10All Speakers: Like I was talking about, like, you know, he's got the classic ambition and
- 39:14All Speakers: pride and like all that stuff that usually feels like, you know,
- 39:17All Speakers: tragic figures in the Greek.
- 39:19All Speakers: Freak but you know he all but at the end of the day he also like
- 39:22All Speakers: he's using strong arm police tactics just like
- 39:25All Speakers: anyone else yeah i think that's in the interview oh sorry go ahead there oh
- 39:29All Speakers: yeah i thought oh man yeah the interview's i'm sorry um yeah so that's actually
- 39:34All Speakers: pretty brilliant the uh like what you're saying is like the way that they manipulate
- 39:38All Speakers: the the black characters in this one where it's like you can already tell that this is like.
- 39:43All Speakers: The third or fourth layer, you can kind of see the how the prison system works
- 39:48All Speakers: to basically, you know, keep them under their heel and keep them under their boot.
- 39:52All Speakers: Really, when they're talking to the character is a boxer, like the way they
- 39:56All Speakers: basically get him to like snitch on people in his own community is like,
- 40:01All Speakers: hey, you know, your brother that we also have in jail that we can use as leverage.
- 40:05All Speakers: Like, we're going to lower that
- 40:07All Speakers: sentence, which like you also see they probably aren't going to do it.
- 40:10All Speakers: It's kind of implied at the end of the scene there, like that they can leverage
- 40:15All Speakers: the fact that they've locked up so many people from their community already.
- 40:18All Speakers: They can use them as sort of negotiation tools and nothing more like that's
- 40:25All Speakers: all they are to these cops.
- 40:26All Speakers: Yeah. And if you don't do what they say and give them information.
- 40:30All Speakers: They'll just you have to fear that they're going to just pin some fake ass crime
- 40:34All Speakers: on them. And so that, you know, you're kind of you're you're stuck.
- 40:37All Speakers: And it's also this is also when maybe not quite as much as the 80s under Reagan
- 40:42All Speakers: with the growth of like the prison industrial complex.
- 40:45All Speakers: It's very clear that I meant to do research in this.
- 40:48All Speakers: I didn't get a chance to. I was curious to see like how much prison growth occurred in the 1950s.
- 40:53All Speakers: I have to think, especially in California, it must have gone up a lot because
- 40:56All Speakers: they were trying to clean up, in quotation marks, Hollywood and LA to make it
- 41:01All Speakers: white and rich and not the opposite.
- 41:05All Speakers: You don't want other people that are going to make our property value go down.
- 41:08All Speakers: And so I wonder if at the time, all these arrests of people is partly that they're just...
- 41:13All Speakers: Increasing that you know prison system for basically
- 41:16All Speakers: you know prison labor and i don't know if that's uh
- 41:19All Speakers: if either you have any idea about what what happened then
- 41:22All Speakers: well yeah i mean that's you know that's a tale as old
- 41:25All Speakers: as uh well i think it's the 13th amendment where it's like yeah slavery the
- 41:28All Speakers: ball if you're if we imprison you then we can basically use you as de facto
- 41:33All Speakers: slave labor which a lot of that had was actually used to build up a lot of the
- 41:37All Speakers: infrastructure that is now out here which is southern or in what is now a lot
- 41:41All Speakers: of the the major cities in southern California.
- 41:43All Speakers: So it's like the way of basically crude accumulation of wealth of capital resources
- 41:49All Speakers: that people can use this free labor.
- 41:52All Speakers: And like, what's the we see it in its most explicit version during the war on
- 41:57All Speakers: drugs when the prison population booms, but there's no way that those factors
- 42:02All Speakers: weren't at play in the 50s as well.
- 42:06All Speakers: Yeah. So according to a prison policy.org, it
- 42:10All Speakers: wasn't really that the growth started in about
- 42:13All Speakers: 1977 and in the 80s of course but so
- 42:16All Speakers: in the 50s it it does actually seem like in california it
- 42:18All Speakers: was going up more than other places so i guess that makes makes sense yeah you
- 42:24All Speakers: could you could do yeah you could do a whole episode probably on uh prison industrial
- 42:27All Speakers: complex related to movies and things because they just always almost kind of
- 42:32All Speakers: just like a foregone conclusion that the bad guy has gotten gone went to prison And in this movie,
- 42:37All Speakers: at least they kind of turn that around and they're saying clearly the innocent
- 42:40All Speakers: people are in prison and the cops who are the ones doing the bad things just
- 42:45All Speakers: get what they lose their pension. That's their punishment. Yeah.
- 42:49All Speakers: Or just get like executed in the street if they're really bad.
- 42:56All Speakers: I guess some of them did right in this.
- 42:59All Speakers: Yeah, but not in that they, you know, have been breaking the law and destroying
- 43:05All Speakers: the lives of common people around them bad and that they pissed off the guy
- 43:09All Speakers: who's ultimately the most corrupt
- 43:10All Speakers: among all of them. Well, that actually leads me to a portion of this.
- 43:15All Speakers: For anyone who hasn't seen it, I didn't describe the plot, really,
- 43:19All Speakers: because I think it's fairly...
- 43:21All Speakers: There's a lot of different strands that all kind of come together in the last
- 43:24All Speakers: act of this, which I think was one thing I saw occasionally of people who didn't
- 43:29All Speakers: like this is they felt the first third or two thirds were a little bit slow in developing all of it.
- 43:34All Speakers: It but i think they're both wrong and i think it makes the
- 43:37All Speakers: last third of the movie so good is all that coming together but
- 43:41All Speakers: didn't seem like they were uh together but you
- 43:43All Speakers: have the character that's played by uh
- 43:46All Speakers: david strathern which is kind of like this he's referred to as a pimp in here
- 43:51All Speakers: i guess you could say that's what he is he's essentially giving plastic surgery
- 43:55All Speakers: to women to look like famous movie stars to essentially uh you know pawn them
- 44:00All Speakers: off to men and that's what kim basinger's character kind of becomes free of.
- 44:05All Speakers: But they're clearly showing that there's no positive depiction of Hollywood at all in this.
- 44:11All Speakers: And they're very much showing that the leaders and the wealthy people in Hollywood are just scumbags.
- 44:19All Speakers: And it's interesting to draw that line between like a
- 44:22All Speakers: pimp and a simulacrum of a
- 44:25All Speakers: uh of an actress and like the real
- 44:28All Speakers: world of like producers people hire and
- 44:31All Speakers: actresses are playing on hollywood or or yeah
- 44:35All Speakers: the real well who's she supposed to look like not rita hayworth that was another
- 44:38All Speakers: one uh i don't remember who she's supposed to look like but like the the parallel
- 44:41All Speakers: between like the the hooker and the actress and the relationship they have to
- 44:46All Speakers: the wealthy and powerful man is It's like a pretty straight line,
- 44:49All Speakers: I feel like. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 44:52All Speakers: I mean, it's really driven home in that hilarious scene where Johnny Stompanato is there in the bar.
- 44:59All Speakers: That is Lana Turner. Oh, I know. Oh, yeah. I mean, whatever.
- 45:03All Speakers: Like, a whore dressed up as an actress is still a whore. No, that's Lana Turner.
- 45:09All Speakers: Oh, yeah. That scene is very good.
- 45:12All Speakers: It's a funny scene, but it's very much gesturing at
- 45:15All Speakers: Dan's point that there's like at the end of the
- 45:17All Speakers: day there there is a subtle difference between like an
- 45:20All Speakers: actual pimp and a hollywood producer during the golden era
- 45:23All Speakers: yeah it's like just a difference of degrees really up until
- 45:26All Speakers: like literally like eight years ago six seven years ago yeah i mean the only
- 45:30All Speakers: difference is like well i was going to say like maybe in one case you don't
- 45:34All Speakers: actually have to sleep with anyone but i guess that's not the case at all because
- 45:37All Speakers: you think of people who harvey weinstein scene and such who did force you to do that to get part.
- 45:43All Speakers: Or Kevin Spacey. Or Kevin Spacey, who is last filled in this movie,
- 45:49All Speakers: even though he's on the cover of the book. Yeah.
- 45:52All Speakers: I don't know about you guys, but I don't quite buy him as a suave ladies man.
- 45:58All Speakers: Is it because of what we know of him now? Or is it a little bit of a tough sell?
- 46:03All Speakers: Well, I guess I didn't read him as necessarily a suave ladies man in that like,
- 46:08All Speakers: he's just naturally magnetic it's more like he's a
- 46:11All Speakers: man in position of power and he has like he
- 46:15All Speakers: has access to all these connections and all the big hollywood people that like
- 46:20All Speakers: that would be the appeal of him not that like oh kevin's like this guy in the
- 46:24All Speakers: white suit is so handsome it's like oh this guy can help me like get out of
- 46:28All Speakers: the fucking slums or get out of like yeah being a person to this industry and
- 46:32All Speakers: get me into the middle that's more it that is more it
- 46:35All Speakers: but i mean i still feel like he's characterized as sort of like the cool one
- 46:38All Speakers: yeah he seems like the
- 46:42All Speakers: guy who fancies himself the cool one i yeah
- 46:44All Speakers: i guess i mean i hope that's more it it almost
- 46:47All Speakers: seems like danny devito is kind of like playing him up to be that to get him
- 46:51All Speakers: to do what he wants right like oh here's 50 bucks which i guess i think i looked
- 46:56All Speakers: it up was equivalent of something like 400 which isn't nothing but i mean given
- 47:01All Speakers: can't imagine they're paid that well you know as police officers in LA.
- 47:05All Speakers: I mean, that was... And it seems like also very funny how all of the other officers...
- 47:10All Speakers: He's kind of a joke amongst the rest of the people when he goes to Vice to have
- 47:14All Speakers: to do his little stint because he gets kicked out of his regular division.
- 47:18All Speakers: It's very much like he's this pretty boy, playboy wearing...
- 47:22All Speakers: And here's another thing to kind of illustrate the point.
- 47:25All Speakers: Did you notice the neckties that they all wore were very distinctive to kind
- 47:30All Speakers: of their personalities?
- 47:31All Speakers: Kevin Spacey had these really colorful colorful, flowery neckties.
- 47:35All Speakers: And Bud, who's the played by Russell Crowe, he's wearing just like a black,
- 47:42All Speakers: straight black necktie, I think, most of the time. Like a really skinny one, even.
- 47:46All Speakers: Yeah, skinny one. And then I can't remember. I saw something where it mentioned
- 47:49All Speakers: them and all of the different ones, but it's clearly they were showing.
- 47:53All Speakers: And also, Kevin Spacey has that big white sport coat that kind of seemed like
- 47:57All Speakers: it's three sizes too big on him or something. Yeah.
- 47:59All Speakers: I don't know. They clearly were playing
- 48:03All Speakers: him up as this very strange uh like a
- 48:06All Speakers: playboy yeah i guess that's right well and you can tell like
- 48:09All Speakers: just by like the cars he's
- 48:12All Speakers: driving the the suits he's wearing the
- 48:15All Speakers: lifestyle he lives like he makes way more than an average cop
- 48:18All Speakers: like he is definitely a tax bracket above all of them yeah being like a consultant
- 48:22All Speakers: on a tv show right so yeah and also getting his tabloid kick kickbacks hmm yeah
- 48:29All Speakers: it's well here's the thing that's interesting about them it seems like with the exception of the um.
- 48:37All Speakers: Captain Smith, James Cromwell, they all seem to have a eureka moment where they
- 48:46All Speakers: realize that they're the ones being controlled by someone nefarious.
- 48:51All Speakers: Kevin Spacey, he is in the bar and leaves his $50 bill on the whiskey or whatever.
- 48:57All Speakers: He realizes something's going on.
- 48:59All Speakers: And even Guy Pearce from the beginning has his good guy mentality.
- 49:04All Speakers: Russell Crowe even, I feel like, kind of has this moment where he is being kind
- 49:08All Speakers: of taken advantage of by people who just know he's just like a guy who can punch people.
- 49:13All Speakers: So they all kind of have that moment where they realize there's probably something better.
- 49:18All Speakers: And the only one who actually gets out is Russell Crowe, right?
- 49:22All Speakers: I mean, the other ones are either dead or still caught.
- 49:25All Speakers: Yeah, he just has to get like shot in the face and hit some ladies himself.
- 49:31All Speakers: But he gets to move to uh what's arizona
- 49:35All Speakers: arizona yeah again he'll fit
- 49:39All Speakers: in over there he could be
- 49:42All Speakers: like a uh a bouncer at a uh i don't know a local bar yeah he has the saddest
- 49:48All Speakers: story i think like oh because we i think it's well established that he wants
- 49:53All Speakers: to be a good person and he has a lot of righteous fury that's earned and it's directed towards...
- 50:03All Speakers: Abusers and stuff like that and it's like i think it's like
- 50:05All Speakers: sad and realistic that like you know we know that
- 50:08All Speakers: he was brought up like around a lot of physical abuse and
- 50:11All Speakers: that sort of thing and like it's just like he continues the cycle like it's
- 50:16All Speakers: like so sad that he hits her like i think that's so tragic and it sucks like
- 50:23All Speakers: as he was i think even more so than exley he is like the most morally upstanding
- 50:27All Speakers: person he just has a really traumatic childhood.
- 50:31All Speakers: It's really sad and like even even like the way they like use that
- 50:34All Speakers: that like hot streak like like what dudley
- 50:37All Speakers: does like where he's like i'm gonna put you on homicide homicide i'm
- 50:40All Speakers: gonna be investigating no you're gonna be torturing and
- 50:44All Speakers: he's like oh okay it strikes
- 50:47All Speakers: me too as like among all the the police characters is
- 50:50All Speakers: definitely the most working class or the lowest
- 50:53All Speakers: class among them which is then encoded as
- 50:56All Speakers: stupid to all of the other uh completely
- 51:00All Speakers: and then because he's like pigeonholed as
- 51:03All Speakers: that he is like he yeah he's just used as the goof like the tough uh where as
- 51:08All Speakers: like they're it's kind of funny that the movie like directly addresses it where
- 51:13All Speakers: people realize that way they're like oh maybe maybe johnny johnny working class
- 51:18All Speakers: isn't a giant big dum-dum as we We thought because he didn't go to college.
- 51:22All Speakers: We thought he was dumb. But turns out his brain does work good.
- 51:25All Speakers: Well, is it is it implied to the Kevin Spacey's character also?
- 51:30All Speakers: I mean, clearly his. So the actually played by Guy Pearce, his father was a
- 51:36All Speakers: cop. You mentioned that specifically.
- 51:37All Speakers: They ever say what the past of Kevin Spacey is like.
- 51:40All Speakers: Do you think he's also wealthy or is it just a wealthy now because he's like
- 51:44All Speakers: making up? I also got the sense that he might have been like a working class
- 51:47All Speakers: guy that is like making up for it now by doing, you know.
- 51:51All Speakers: He's like reaching beyond the station. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess it doesn't
- 51:54All Speakers: matter at all. Just that his dad was killed.
- 51:57All Speakers: Yeah. I bet the book does reveal more about this, but yeah, he could kind of
- 52:01All Speakers: strike me as a bit of a Gatsby figure.
- 52:02All Speakers: Like, you know, someone trying to reach into a, a higher echelon of society
- 52:07All Speakers: and then getting, uh, paying the consequences for such class mobility.
- 52:11All Speakers: Yeah. Go ahead. No, no, I was, I'm sorry.
- 52:14All Speakers: Sorry to cut you off. No, no, please. No, I was just going to,
- 52:17All Speakers: I was going to go to something totally different. So you should,
- 52:18All Speakers: yeah, me too. Oh, Oh, well, then you go first.
- 52:21All Speakers: Do you guys think that Dudley Smith is actually Rolo Tomasi?
- 52:25All Speakers: Do you think that he killed Exley's dad for being also like being a morally
- 52:29All Speakers: upstanding, like an unbendable guy?
- 52:32All Speakers: Yeah, that one. I didn't like when they they had him connect the dots like that.
- 52:37All Speakers: That one I was kind of like, I don't know, like maybe it's more kind of like,
- 52:41All Speakers: you know, another Kevin Spacey movie.
- 52:43All Speakers: Oh, what's the name of in the usual sex suspects? Kaiser.
- 52:47All Speakers: Kaiser Sosa. it's kind of like a kaiser soze thing
- 52:50All Speakers: where it's like it's more that's like a a role
- 52:53All Speakers: that has like that seems to have to exist in la
- 52:56All Speakers: because of like like they said like all this is going
- 52:59All Speakers: on because it was a power vacuum that suddenly uh appeared after
- 53:02All Speakers: they arrested the the head mobster guy um so it's more like this this yeah this
- 53:07All Speakers: this uh this position that has to exist that somebody if it wasn't him it'd
- 53:12All Speakers: be another guy if it was it was like basically the idea of this guy killed his
- 53:17All Speakers: his dad where I think he literalizes it and things like all this,
- 53:19All Speakers: you know, this Irish motherfucker actually killed my dad. But like,
- 53:22All Speakers: I interpreted more as like.
- 53:24All Speakers: This a guy like him didn't or did it i
- 53:27All Speakers: didn't think he did it either i thought it was kind of like a stand-in kind
- 53:30All Speakers: of situation perhaps like a excuse for um
- 53:33All Speakers: he's the easy person to blame because like he he killed
- 53:36All Speakers: kevin spacey's um someone in
- 53:39All Speakers: his family right or no he just figures out who he is right doesn't
- 53:41All Speakers: right before he died he say roland tomasi right before he shoots
- 53:44All Speakers: him oh yeah well what happens is they they're like
- 53:47All Speakers: so jack jack kevin spacey's character and
- 53:50All Speakers: um ed actually they uh they kind of
- 53:53All Speakers: like are they're getting to the bottom of the conspiracy and really
- 53:56All Speakers: the linchpin for all of it is um uh like he follows like the paper trail the
- 54:02All Speakers: stuff and like he basically is like starting to deduce that dudley is like the
- 54:08All Speakers: person that's filling the power vacuum and what happens and this is like pretty
- 54:12All Speakers: convenient because because
- 54:14All Speakers: like uh x or excuse me vincennes
- 54:17All Speakers: jack his last words when he gets shot are rollo
- 54:21All Speakers: tamasi and it's just like a hail mary he throws
- 54:23All Speakers: like oh what's something that only x and i will know that if this guy knows
- 54:28All Speakers: it x will know that he killed me like and he just kind of throws that out there
- 54:32All Speakers: with like his death throw and uh it works because he like brings up rollo tamasi
- 54:37All Speakers: and then all of a sudden he knows that you know he had contact with vincennes as he was dying.
- 54:42All Speakers: Yeah and that does like pretty it's pretty convoluted and like pretty like convenient
- 54:47All Speakers: you know that it all just works out exactly like that but there's nothing deeper
- 54:51All Speakers: than that that's kind of the fun of noir sometimes they can get a little cute
- 54:55All Speakers: with their plotting but it does make me think too like with.
- 54:59All Speakers: Rolo tomasi as like a figure less than
- 55:02All Speakers: a singular guy and like the ending of this movie
- 55:05All Speakers: where it does paint in a much more tragic light because like nothing
- 55:08All Speakers: materially changes whatsoever like that
- 55:11All Speakers: power vacuum is now just open again to
- 55:14All Speakers: be refilled by someone else and now this cycle
- 55:17All Speakers: is just going to keep on turning over because like what
- 55:20All Speakers: materially changed to address everything
- 55:24All Speakers: that happened during this two-hour movie well as i
- 55:26All Speakers: was gonna say it's like they don't they don't actually ever that's why police are
- 55:29All Speakers: don't they don't actually fix things because they're not changing any
- 55:33All Speakers: material conditions of people they're not fixing the societal
- 55:36All Speakers: problems they're just kind of yeah they're not doing any of those
- 55:39All Speakers: things actually leads me to one thing about the movie that i thought was that
- 55:42All Speakers: i noticed is that there's no average people ever
- 55:45All Speakers: there's no like any civilians really other
- 55:48All Speakers: than i guess maybe the people who are framed for the different murders
- 55:51All Speakers: the people who were accidentally shot in the night owl murder
- 55:54All Speakers: you know murder spree you kind of have the police
- 55:57All Speakers: you have the hollywood kind of uh you know
- 56:00All Speakers: sex working ring or whatever and then
- 56:03All Speakers: you don't really see anyone else you have that like one guy who's like the b-list
- 56:07All Speakers: actor who gets killed for you know seducing the the da or whatever and uh which
- 56:12All Speakers: is another separate plot too i don't know i don't know what to make of that
- 56:15All Speakers: but it feels like they're they're not i don't know maybe that goes back to the
- 56:19All Speakers: original monologue by danny devito where he's talking about the.
- 56:22All Speakers: Underbelly not kind of what's on the surface and the
- 56:25All Speakers: on the surface of the people you know the regular people what's interesting too
- 56:28All Speakers: is that in that opening monologue like it's when he's like selling la to you
- 56:32All Speakers: it's like where your average working man can like you know have a great house
- 56:35All Speakers: and a wife and a kid and picket fence and all that stuff and then you see none
- 56:39All Speakers: of that for the entire movie yeah and it is like i am choosing to read it more
- 56:45All Speakers: generously and say that the director of.
- 56:48All Speakers: Purposely did not put any of that in because it's
- 56:51All Speakers: showing that like yeah these you know it's supposed to be the protector
- 56:54All Speakers: of the people this force that's keeping order and for
- 56:57All Speakers: you know for the general populace in a democratic way
- 57:00All Speakers: like and they always talk about this stuff like
- 57:03All Speakers: that's why i'm on hops and that's like the idea of like
- 57:06All Speakers: you know restoring justice but like at no point like if
- 57:09All Speakers: anything the public just seems like a nuisance that
- 57:12All Speakers: they need to like make sure doesn't know what's going
- 57:15All Speakers: on because they'll just yeah yeah i think that was totally deliberate
- 57:18All Speakers: like that whole monologue at the beginning i think isn't intentionally
- 57:21All Speakers: has like this sardonic edge
- 57:25All Speakers: to it that danny devito embodies like really perfectly like i don't think uh
- 57:30All Speakers: we're meant to take those words at face value whatsoever like i think there's
- 57:34All Speakers: that satire starts immediately from the beginning yeah it was almost is interesting
- 57:39All Speakers: because we said at length like how the first half of the film is kind of like
- 57:42All Speakers: a straight noir and that it kind of comes like a new noir.
- 57:45All Speakers: That opening monologue being such like a satirical way.
- 57:48All Speakers: It's almost like you're there, like nudging you, like, get ready.
- 57:52All Speakers: We're going to, we're going to get to you later at this point in this movie
- 57:55All Speakers: where we're going to laugh to see like how absurd all of this actually is.
- 57:58All Speakers: And it doesn't take itself very seriously, but then it like immediately become very serious.
- 58:03All Speakers: It's kind of a, I don't know, in a way you could argue that the movie kind of
- 58:07All Speakers: changes its style and maybe, I don't necessarily think to its fault.
- 58:11All Speakers: I still think it's a well-made movie, but maybe if it was one way or the other,
- 58:15All Speakers: it would have done more. I don't know. Well, I like the tone. Yeah.
- 58:19All Speakers: It was critiquing the, like that's where the satire comes in.
- 58:23All Speakers: So yeah, that's a good point that the opening monologue kind of couches the
- 58:26All Speakers: tone a little bit better or like.
- 58:29All Speakers: Prepares or foreshadows what's about to happen
- 58:32All Speakers: um and so then the second half like kind of
- 58:35All Speakers: then locks in that satire that happened that
- 58:38All Speakers: of the original hour which is played seemingly pretty
- 58:41All Speakers: straight yeah that's true that actually before you before
- 58:44All Speakers: we run out of time i want to i mentioned alluded to this
- 58:47All Speakers: salon.com article by dwight garner
- 58:50All Speakers: that came out on october 19th 1997 as
- 58:54All Speakers: the only person who did not like or
- 58:57All Speakers: rate this uh positively the only
- 59:00All Speakers: prominent critic who did not rate this positively upon
- 59:03All Speakers: its release yes yes that's a
- 59:06All Speakers: better way to put it but so there's a couple funny lines in this and i'm curious
- 59:09All Speakers: i mean i'm not going to read the whole thing because it's it's actually not
- 59:12All Speakers: even that long but i'm going to read a couple parts i think are funny i have
- 59:15All Speakers: not read any books by james elroy so i don't really know too much about his
- 59:21All Speakers: writing style although I can assume based on this movie.
- 59:24All Speakers: I think he also wrote back Black Dahlia as the only other one I can think of that I know about.
- 59:29All Speakers: But in the very beginning, he says, well, for once he says, let's see,
- 59:33All Speakers: I'll read the beginning.
- 59:34All Speakers: He says, novelist James Elroy has pronounced is the history of bad white men
- 59:38All Speakers: doing bad things in the name of authority.
- 59:40All Speakers: L.A. Confidential, the new Curtis Hanson film based on Elroy's 1999.
- 59:44All Speakers: I don't know if you could hear that in the background. He says,
- 59:46All Speakers: Elroy's novel, the same name is something slightly different.
- 59:49All Speakers: It's the story of good white actors stranded in the name
- 59:52All Speakers: of noir in a movie that refuses to kick into gear until
- 59:55All Speakers: it's far too late this didn't have to happen elroy's
- 59:58All Speakers: novel is ferocious caterwalling slab of
- 1:00:01All Speakers: pulp a big buick six of a book that serves up 1950s era la as if only creatures
- 1:00:07All Speakers: who strode the west coast were mobsters hookers corrupt cops and scandal magazine
- 1:00:12All Speakers: editors and then he says and you got off and then he says reading elroy can
- 1:00:16All Speakers: be like deciphering morris code tapped out by a pair of barely scarily sentient testicles.
- 1:00:22All Speakers: Which is quite the line. And so I guess he's alluding to the fact that it seems
- 1:00:28All Speakers: like he really likes his book.
- 1:00:30All Speakers: But then he says, in this case, the trouble includes a series of gruesome mobster
- 1:00:35All Speakers: hits, which Hanson renders in short vignettes, flashes of lurid black and white
- 1:00:39All Speakers: news photographs, trouble at the LAPD,
- 1:00:42All Speakers: a squad that has a real fondness for kicking the crap out of perps, like Rodney King style.
- 1:00:47All Speakers: And then he says, it's spun out and.
- 1:00:53All Speakers: Overly ambitious ensemble piece characters
- 1:00:56All Speakers: who are sucked into this flurry I don't
- 1:00:59All Speakers: know I'm like rambling now but in a way as I read
- 1:01:02All Speakers: it again very poorly I might add he like
- 1:01:05All Speakers: likes lots about it but it seems like he hates that
- 1:01:08All Speakers: it takes too long to get to the point and
- 1:01:11All Speakers: it's like the last line of it he says you know it's the
- 1:01:14All Speakers: film hasn't the confidence or the nerve of either
- 1:01:17All Speakers: of those pictures was referring to Chinatown and Pulp Fiction and you
- 1:01:20All Speakers: emerge from the theater feeling like Hanson finally managed
- 1:01:23All Speakers: to push Ellie Confidential past the usual boundaries if your waiting hasn't
- 1:01:28All Speakers: been entirely in vain but at this point you're already too burned out to care
- 1:01:31All Speakers: so he's saying it's like boring for the first two thirds and I might have to
- 1:01:37All Speakers: cut all this because I poor life I felt like I was distracted,
- 1:01:42All Speakers: fuck that guy.
- 1:01:45All Speakers: I mean wait he said that the pair of testicles hammering out that 700 page novel is a good thing. Yes.
- 1:01:54All Speakers: What the fuck does that mean? I don't know.
- 1:01:58All Speakers: Yeah. Nowhere in his rambling, incoherent response was there anything like the correct answer.
- 1:02:04All Speakers: We're all dumber having heard it. I award him no points and may God have mercy on his soul.
- 1:02:09All Speakers: I thought the only bit that I thought was interesting for a second.
- 1:02:15All Speakers: No, that doesn't work. is
- 1:02:18All Speakers: uh the the idea that he lets the white
- 1:02:21All Speakers: or the movie lets the white characters off the hook which like
- 1:02:24All Speakers: i didn't read that in
- 1:02:27All Speakers: the movie well i mean like there's the whole there's the whole thing like kind
- 1:02:32All Speakers: of you know catalyst event towards the beginning where they're like beating
- 1:02:35All Speakers: up those framed mexican people for like doing nothing basically and like russell
- 1:02:40All Speakers: crowe's all the way participating in it and we're still meant to see him as
- 1:02:44All Speakers: one of the you know most morally,
- 1:02:48All Speakers: upstanding characters like amongst the
- 1:02:51All Speakers: rabble yeah the movie does work hard to
- 1:02:54All Speakers: make sure that a we let russell crowe
- 1:02:57All Speakers: beat up a mexican and b we think it's a good idea yeah
- 1:03:00All Speakers: and like there's four there's four black characters and three
- 1:03:03All Speakers: of them have participated in like the sex trafficking gang
- 1:03:06All Speakers: and rape of a young lady and then get you know summarily
- 1:03:09All Speakers: executed for it yeah well and it's interesting because he also in this review
- 1:03:13All Speakers: he also basically says you know he according to him like it doesn't really get
- 1:03:17All Speakers: good until the night owl murder and but the way he describes like pierce crow
- 1:03:22All Speakers: and spacey is like in a pretty positive light like how they were really good performances,
- 1:03:27All Speakers: so it kind of like confuses me like he seems to almost be writing a bad review
- 1:03:32All Speakers: because like he He wants to be that one guy who said it sucks.
- 1:03:35All Speakers: You know, like, I don't know. I'm going to go against the trend.
- 1:03:38All Speakers: Everyone really loved, you know... Paddington 2.
- 1:03:42All Speakers: Oh, who would have a negative review about Paddington 2? That lovable bear and
- 1:03:47All Speakers: his marmalade sandwiches. I mean...
- 1:03:50All Speakers: What can you say? But I don't know. It's like a it's a very odd thing.
- 1:03:54All Speakers: Actually, what would have been funnier is what you said, Dan.
- 1:03:56All Speakers: If I'd gone to Letterboxd and look for people who wrote like half star reviews
- 1:03:59All Speakers: of it and seen what they think.
- 1:04:01All Speakers: I never actually done that because maybe I don't want to know.
- 1:04:05All Speakers: I'm going to do that right now. But look at us. We all we all generally really
- 1:04:09All Speakers: liked the craft of this movie and enjoyed the hell out of it,
- 1:04:13All Speakers: but still have plenty of like decent criticism about it.
- 1:04:17All Speakers: It but none of our criticism like is uh at
- 1:04:20All Speakers: all leveled against the filmmaking it's
- 1:04:24All Speakers: against like some of the topics that we wished
- 1:04:27All Speakers: it would have like a like you know a
- 1:04:30All Speakers: a clear like any clearer insight into
- 1:04:33All Speakers: that it doesn't like it played by a lot of rules that are kind
- 1:04:36All Speakers: of perpetuating a lot of like sort of like you
- 1:04:39All Speakers: know things in culture that that the three of us wish were
- 1:04:42All Speakers: different but like the movie itself i i
- 1:04:45All Speakers: don't know i feel like it's fairly like untouchable just
- 1:04:48All Speakers: as a movie if you remove like what we wish it would would have done like socially
- 1:04:53All Speakers: yeah i i think so i just ran a search on letterboxd of one-star reviews and
- 1:04:59All Speakers: a bunch of people like the first ones that come up are like that it's boring
- 1:05:03All Speakers: none of it age well it's not accurate about cops which like what What the fuck?
- 1:05:09All Speakers: Like it's saying that it's meant to be accurate.
- 1:05:12All Speakers: Like this is no war. No war was never trying to be like journalistic.
- 1:05:17All Speakers: Like it's trying to show a bit of like a, I don't know, a shit covered lens on it.
- 1:05:22All Speakers: It's also kind of satirizing it because of that opening monologue about,
- 1:05:26All Speakers: I think sometimes people take things too seriously or the opposite.
- 1:05:31All Speakers: Sometimes they take them not seriously enough. I don't know.
- 1:05:36All Speakers: But yeah, Yeah, I agree. I think I agree with you, Jared. I think there I love this movie.
- 1:05:40All Speakers: I would watch it. I don't know, not necessarily against you because I just watched
- 1:05:43All Speakers: it a couple of times. But in three, four or five years, I happily watch it.
- 1:05:47All Speakers: I'm sure I probably will still enjoy it. But I do think there's lots of problems,
- 1:05:51All Speakers: not the least of which is the fact that Kevin Spacey is in it.
- 1:05:54All Speakers: But, you know, you can't. Which I couldn't be helped at the time. They didn't know.
- 1:05:57All Speakers: Well, there's is that a way that I could be good if we could,
- 1:06:00All Speakers: like, remove him and just put, you know, who's
- 1:06:03All Speakers: the guy that who's the guy that replaced him in that ridley
- 1:06:06All Speakers: scott movie i think that guy's dead now though it was like a much
- 1:06:09All Speakers: older actor wasn't it wasn't it like peter o'toole or someone
- 1:06:12All Speakers: uh yeah it was someone really old let's see
- 1:06:16All Speakers: it was christopher plumber oh okay yeah and all the money in the world yeah
- 1:06:21All Speakers: let's just get christopher plumber to reshoot kevin facey's only confidential
- 1:06:25All Speakers: scenes and oh and most importantly all of his all of his scenes in american
- 1:06:31All Speakers: beauty as well Oh, sweetie.
- 1:06:34All Speakers: I don't know. I kind of in like a weird way, I kind of like American Beauty
- 1:06:38All Speakers: better than I know that Kevin Spacey is a sex pest trying to play a sex pest.
- 1:06:43All Speakers: Like I'm just like imagining him working through that on screen and like that nobody knows.
- 1:06:49All Speakers: There's like this added layer of dramatic irony going on. That's true.
- 1:06:52All Speakers: Yeah. I mean, I I don't know. I really don't know how I feel about Kevin Spacey's
- 1:06:57All Speakers: acting anymore because like just knowing what a like a terrible person he is.
- 1:07:01All Speakers: And also just like a creepy weirdo with like some of his like reactions to getting
- 1:07:06All Speakers: cancelled and stuff like that he did like I'm back.
- 1:07:09All Speakers: Like like so like he did it in characters Frank Underwood like so creepy that
- 1:07:14All Speakers: now I go back and I like watch I like while I was watching this I was like he's
- 1:07:18All Speakers: kind of boring like in monotonous as an actor,
- 1:07:21All Speakers: yeah like he kind of just says all
- 1:07:24All Speakers: of his lines like I'm very smart and
- 1:07:27All Speakers: cool and blah blah blah blah blah like and like
- 1:07:30All Speakers: he honestly doesn't have range as an actor it's funny
- 1:07:33All Speakers: you say that because some of the like interviews about the making of it a lot
- 1:07:36All Speakers: of people within the making of it and critics were saying how they thought he
- 1:07:41All Speakers: was really really good in this like particularly and i i don't i think the best
- 1:07:46All Speakers: part i think his best performance was when he died and he was just lying there
- 1:07:49All Speakers: and he was dead i really enjoyed that part.
- 1:07:53All Speakers: Bleeding from the heart he actually did
- 1:07:57All Speakers: like look pretty good when he was just kind of like lying oh
- 1:08:00All Speakers: when it went yeah when when like he didn't like like
- 1:08:03All Speakers: uh dramatically like close his eyes where all of a sudden it was
- 1:08:05All Speakers: just lifeless that was pretty good scene yeah i mean i
- 1:08:08All Speakers: think too that like that was the moment where kind of the veneer of like
- 1:08:11All Speakers: his hollywood cool guy kind of drops and like
- 1:08:14All Speakers: the whole i don't know simulacrum of like the world
- 1:08:17All Speakers: he was living in now all of a sudden the consequences of all
- 1:08:21All Speakers: of it are are flooding in you see like the real guy underneath
- 1:08:24All Speakers: the the playboy facade so you're saying in
- 1:08:27All Speakers: a way this is almost like a metaphor for him in a very kind
- 1:08:30All Speakers: of a way right like i mean he kind of he i mean not
- 1:08:33All Speakers: in the same way i mean i guess is he helping traffic like
- 1:08:36All Speakers: he doesn't kind of help traffic that male actor right i
- 1:08:39All Speakers: mean yeah he does yeah he sure does yeah wow that was just like your like a
- 1:08:45All Speakers: emotional recall for him as an actor he was he's like yeah i like i know what
- 1:08:50All Speakers: it's like to traffic young men to hollywood elites i just can pretend i'm in
- 1:08:55All Speakers: both positions in the oh gosh i.
- 1:08:57All Speakers: Oh boy um yeah just yeah i
- 1:09:00All Speakers: think i don't know i don't i don't know if i just dislike him as a person
- 1:09:03All Speakers: because i used to think he was a fantastic actor but literally i was watching
- 1:09:06All Speakers: this movie and being like this guy's boring as fuck i mean it's just my bias
- 1:09:10All Speakers: that's always a funny thing i've noticed and i remember but my mom was actually
- 1:09:14All Speakers: talking about this yesterday where she like gets annoyed when olympians act
- 1:09:18All Speakers: like dickheads a little bit and i'm like what they're athletes they're not They
- 1:09:21All Speakers: don't have to be morally good.
- 1:09:23All Speakers: They just have to be good at what they do.
- 1:09:25All Speakers: And like... Jump on that trampoline real good.
- 1:09:29All Speakers: Yeah. Where like, for some reason...
- 1:09:31All Speakers: Artists like that divide is much
- 1:09:35All Speakers: blurrier of like you kind of want your artists
- 1:09:38All Speakers: to be good people and you find it harder when like you know that they're bags
- 1:09:42All Speakers: of shit to enjoy like there are plenty of like i don't know tom brady not really
- 1:09:47All Speakers: a good dude kind of a sack of shit but like or aaron rogers like two big nfl
- 1:09:52All Speakers: quarterbacks but like they're good at what they do so kind of like,
- 1:09:56All Speakers: Well, yeah, but it's like it's like throwing a ball really accurately and quickly.
- 1:10:02All Speakers: Like, is that an expression of who Tom Brady is as a person?
- 1:10:09All Speakers: Like, if you're making art, that is an expression of who you are as a person.
- 1:10:14All Speakers: Yeah. And that's where it gets buzzier. I guess. Yeah. This is like this is
- 1:10:18All Speakers: a whole other episode. We're about to start.
- 1:10:21All Speakers: Yeah, I know. But I yeah, that's I can. it's a yeah that'd be an interesting
- 1:10:27All Speakers: conversation too as to how all that falls in but I guess the only last question I had before we maybe,
- 1:10:33All Speakers: send off is on the movie anyway is the thing I like the last thing I wrote was
- 1:10:37All Speakers: like in this in this it seems like no one really wins like it's kind of like
- 1:10:41All Speakers: there is no good person I guess you could maybe say.
- 1:10:48All Speakers: That Bud you know Russell Crowe and Kim
- 1:10:52All Speakers: Basinger kind of like win in a way as you
- 1:10:55All Speakers: said except for getting shot in the face they kind of like get to have like
- 1:10:58All Speakers: a bit of a happy ending but nothing is ever nothing is fixed as you said Dan
- 1:11:01All Speakers: like it kind of all just ends and it's likely just going to happen again in
- 1:11:05All Speakers: some slightly different way because they haven't actually stamped out any corruption
- 1:11:09All Speakers: in the force they've just pretended it doesn't exist so in the end we're just
- 1:11:12All Speakers: going to you know someone can write you know,
- 1:11:15All Speakers: LA Confidential 2 you know 1994.
- 1:11:20All Speakers: I don't know whatever you want to choose oh yeah i have it
- 1:11:22All Speakers: on good authority that the lapd did in fact remain
- 1:11:25All Speakers: shitty well like
- 1:11:29All Speakers: like i said it does remind me of the end of the dark
- 1:11:32All Speakers: night and i'm like oh like all this terrible bullshit happened and we're just
- 1:11:36All Speakers: gonna lie about it and cover it up so that like public order can be maintained
- 1:11:40All Speakers: and like you know that story continues that doesn't solve the contradiction
- 1:11:45All Speakers: there like it it has to be somehow rectified which i guess in the dark knight's case is.
- 1:11:52All Speakers: Blowing up a nuke over the bay of a city for
- 1:11:55All Speakers: some reason but uh but yeah like i could very
- 1:11:58All Speakers: easily see an la confidential 2 of some sort where
- 1:12:00All Speakers: it's just another person fills those shoes because nothing has been fixed it's
- 1:12:07All Speakers: just some people get out yeah the only way you can win like you said it's like
- 1:12:12All Speakers: two people get out of it they fuck off to arizona yeah that's true oh that's
- 1:12:16All Speakers: always such Such a nice high point to end on.
- 1:12:19All Speakers: Yeah, that is a terrible ending to be sent.
- 1:12:24All Speakers: Oh, yeah. Well, here's a better ending than the movie anyway.
- 1:12:27All Speakers: So since we talked at the beginning about noir movies that you might like,
- 1:12:31All Speakers: how about a movie you would send off the listeners to watch that you've enjoyed
- 1:12:38All Speakers: recently, which is slightly copying the beginning of your show,
- 1:12:41All Speakers: which I also have mentioned is Concessions, that you talk about,
- 1:12:45All Speakers: like things that are, you know, you or other guests might be enjoyed recently.
- 1:12:49All Speakers: So maybe something you would recommend to the fair listeners.
- 1:12:54All Speakers: Oh, I've got a good one while Jared cooks one up. The other day,
- 1:12:57All Speakers: it just hit the Criterion channel, the movie The Beast with George McKay.
- 1:13:05All Speakers: It's excellent. It is one of those movies that I kind of had to read what it
- 1:13:11All Speakers: was about afterward a little bit just to get some details down correctly.
- 1:13:15All Speakers: But no, it's it's absolutely wonderful.
- 1:13:18All Speakers: Wonderful um the director has uh twin peaks
- 1:13:22All Speakers: i believe the return or fire walk with me
- 1:13:24All Speakers: as like one of his top 10 movies ever and it makes sense in this uh so i like
- 1:13:29All Speakers: the way i describe it to a friend real quick or my good friends the listeners
- 1:13:33All Speakers: here and my two other good friends of this podcast that we are currently on
- 1:13:37All Speakers: um it's like if cloud atlas was filtered through uh twin peaks trying
- 1:13:43All Speakers: to deal with the death of Laura Palmer. Interesting.
- 1:13:46All Speakers: Excellent. Yeah. That's not my list. I'm going to, um, just throw out one that
- 1:13:51All Speakers: Dan and I just released a quick hitter on.
- 1:13:54All Speakers: Well, I don't know when your dear listeners will be listening to this,
- 1:13:57All Speakers: but, uh, the movie was in theaters at the beginning of August.
- 1:14:01All Speakers: Um, and it's probably available for like, uh, VOD streamings at some point,
- 1:14:06All Speakers: uh, when this episode comes out.
- 1:14:08All Speakers: Um, but it's this movie called kneecap, uh, That just absolutely slaps like so hard.
- 1:14:15All Speakers: It's an Irish movie. Michael Fassbender is in a supporting role,
- 1:14:18All Speakers: but it's it's like an autobiographical biopic with with the real musicians playing themselves.
- 1:14:26All Speakers: This this hip hop trio called Kneecap, who they rap in the actual Irish Gaelic language.
- 1:14:36All Speakers: And they are um some of
- 1:14:39All Speakers: the most prominent activists uh in the uk uh for like parliament to uh officially
- 1:14:46All Speakers: recognize the irish language as a national language of the uk and they actually
- 1:14:51All Speakers: successfully lobbied that and
- 1:14:53All Speakers: that actually like went into effect about a year ago but they were like.
- 1:14:57All Speakers: Quite the hooligan uh uh uh
- 1:15:01All Speakers: you know uh kind of protesting that and um
- 1:15:04All Speakers: the movie is amazing it's kind of got the
- 1:15:07All Speakers: spirit of like a goodfellas or city of god where
- 1:15:10All Speakers: it's just breakneck like editing narration uh funny streak violent streak it's
- 1:15:17All Speakers: a crime movie and it's also a music movie and it's also a biopic and it's um
- 1:15:21All Speakers: it's just amazing like it's such a fun movie and it's It's weighty and also hysterical.
- 1:15:28All Speakers: And yeah. I got to see that. Yeah. Yeah. Kneecap is so good. Kneecap rules.
- 1:15:34All Speakers: Yeah. That's the, those both, both. I just saw also the, that beast was on a criterion.
- 1:15:40All Speakers: I, I, this is only, this is like the newest movie I saw that's in theaters.
- 1:15:44All Speakers: I guess it comes out the day that we're recording. This is the day it releases
- 1:15:48All Speakers: is a cuckoo, which I wouldn't say it was like the best movie I've seen recently,
- 1:15:53All Speakers: but I've thoroughly enjoyed it.
- 1:15:55All Speakers: And I would say if, I don't know when this comes out, maybe it's,
- 1:15:59All Speakers: I hopefully it'll still be in the theater.
- 1:16:00All Speakers: You'll be able to watch it. I would definitely recommend it.
- 1:16:02All Speakers: I think it's, uh, especially the performance by Hunter Schaefer is, uh, is quite good.
- 1:16:06All Speakers: And Dan Stevens is also disturbingly creepy and, um, perfect as well.
- 1:16:13All Speakers: So I would, uh, since it seems like we're getting all these little,
- 1:16:18All Speakers: like, um, lower budget horror movies that everyone should see.
- 1:16:22All Speakers: Well, Why this podcast exists.
- 1:16:27All Speakers: Oh, no, not this podcast. Sorry, yeah.
- 1:16:32All Speakers: Why Concessions exists. Yeah, The
- 1:16:34All Speakers: Guest is the first movie we ever did on Concessions. Oh, perfect. Yeah.
- 1:16:40All Speakers: It's funny. I'm going to cut this. But I've been toying with doing similar to
- 1:16:45All Speakers: your like kind of like quick.
- 1:16:46All Speakers: I guess we did the long leg one, but one where but I might try and do it where
- 1:16:49All Speakers: there's no spoilers where someone could then watch it.
- 1:16:52All Speakers: It and like yeah it's basically unspoiled or like of like the very
- 1:16:55All Speakers: lightest of spoiler you know not yeah we did that
- 1:16:58All Speakers: for kneecap yeah yeah but that episode was like 25 minutes long as a result
- 1:17:02All Speakers: okay yeah well that's the thing that's i almost didn't listen to it because
- 1:17:06All Speakers: i'm like i'm gonna see it probably on in two days from now so i'll wait a lot
- 1:17:10All Speakers: for that but yeah so um for anyone
- 1:17:13All Speakers: listening you should also listen and subscribe to concessions and um.
- 1:17:19All Speakers: I think you have probably heard what your podcast is about, but you want to
- 1:17:23All Speakers: send us off with concessions, uh, elevator pitch.
- 1:17:27All Speakers: Ooh, elevator pitch. I don't know if we've ever officially done this.
- 1:17:30All Speakers: Um, in my head, concessions is two people who spent way too much time babbling
- 1:17:37All Speakers: at each other about movies from like slightly different emphases.
- 1:17:41All Speakers: So it's interesting to see like where they kind of not great against each other,
- 1:17:46All Speakers: but where they kind of overlap, where we have different viewpoints.
- 1:17:52All Speakers: And the idea originally was one of us would concede to the other about movies.
- 1:17:57All Speakers: But then it just turned into, turns out we both just love movies very,
- 1:18:02All Speakers: very much and just come at them from different angles.
- 1:18:04All Speakers: And we just use both of our strengths to do that. Yeah. At the end of the day,
- 1:18:08All Speakers: Dan has this great perspective as someone with a lot of expertise around like
- 1:18:12All Speakers: history and philosophy and politics and kind of the global stage.
- 1:18:18All Speakers: And I come into the conversation with someone with a lot of expertise around
- 1:18:21All Speakers: storytelling and like the film industry.
- 1:18:24All Speakers: And I've been an actor and a director and a writer and basically like my whole life at this point.
- 1:18:30All Speakers: And sometimes those different perspectives put us at odds on how we interpret different movies.
- 1:18:37All Speakers: And by the end of our conversations we've usually educated the fuck out of each
- 1:18:41All Speakers: other and have had a lot of concessions along the way.
- 1:18:45All Speakers: We considered the bigger picture by the end that is and I actually I think that
- 1:18:51All Speakers: actually has happened a number of times where I feel like at the beginning they're
- 1:18:54All Speakers: like slightly different and then as the conversation I think I put jaws to I
- 1:18:59All Speakers: specifically remember like you hadn't seen it before or had seen it for that so but,
- 1:19:04All Speakers: you can listen to concessions on the internets and uh this on the internet and
- 1:19:09All Speakers: you can listen to lots of things on the internet but we will uh catch you next
- 1:19:14All Speakers: time on left of the projector.