#311. 'F1: The Movie'
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Mike is out this week, so Sonny hosts alongside JVL and special guest Kristen Soltis Anderson — the show's resident "Cars Go Vroom correspondent" and a genuine F1 diehard — for a review of F1: The Movie, and the verdict is a rave across the board. Kristen calls it "an absolute fever dream," essentially the plot of Cars 3 rendered gorgeous, and praises how the film nails the minutiae of real motorsport (shooting at actual Grand Prix weekends, real wind tunnels, the Williams team) even as it takes wild, borderline-illegal liberties with the plot — Brad Pitt's character would get a lifetime ban for the stunts he pulls, she notes, but the craft earns the film a pass. Sonny agrees it's a gorgeous, expertly calibrated summer popcorn movie — a Jerry Bruckheimer joint through and through, maybe twenty minutes too long but never boring — praising Joseph Kosinski's "feature-length music video" instincts and the Hans Zimmer score, while JVL peppers Kristen with questions about F1 team ownership, race economics, and accessibility rather than rendering a hard verdict of his own. Before the review, the trio runs through a long open: lawn-care horror stories (glyphosate, bindweed, and paintbrushing hydrangeas), kids destroying yards and brick walls, JVL's unsettling first trip back to a comic convention with his son G-Money (cosplay taxonomy, a sad encounter with an elderly Larry Lieber charging $40 autographs), Kristen's secondhand Brussels comic-and-toy shop find, and dueling video-game tangents on Sonny's Death Stranding befuddlement versus Kristen's obsession with the puzzle game Blue Prince, plus a box-office detour on F1's surprisingly strong opening weekend and what it means for Apple's money-losing streaming-film strategy.
From the show notes
KSA fills in for MW on this special episode of the Sub-Beacon!
Full transcript
JVL00:00:00It's got hope for some lucky breaks. Hope is not a strategy. Anything else, professor? Try fast.
Sonny00:00:17Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Sub-Beacon. Mike is out today. So you're stuck with me hosting Sonny Bunch. And I'm not doing any of this. I'm not reading off a script for you people. I'm just I'm winging it. I'm winging it. So Mike, Mike is out. JBL is here. Of course, JBL as always. And we are joined today because this is a show about F1 and it is one of her passions. The great Kristen Soltis Anderson. Thank you for being on the show. JBL was just doing hearts and then hearts exploded on the screen on his Riverside screen. I did not expect that to happen. It threw me off. Kristen, thank you for being on the show today.
Guest00:00:54I feel the love. It is my honor to be your chief Cars Go Vroom correspondent.
JVL00:00:59Yes, for all Fast and Furious movies and for all F1 movies.
Sonny00:01:07You're our fast car Sherpa.
JVL00:01:09Yeah. How have you been? You've had some exciting things happening in your life.
Guest00:01:15I have two small children. I hosted a birthday party for my oldest. She turned three last weekend.
JVL00:01:25Wow.
Guest00:01:26And I learned that like hosting a birthday party. For your three-year-old and her friends with chocolate cake at your house indoors because it's too hot to go outside is a real choice. It's a real choice. It turned out mostly fine.
JVL00:01:40Did you get all of the chocolate out of the carpet, furniture, etc. off the walls? Still working on it.
Sonny00:01:46I was going to say, I hope you don't have any white furniture because that's all finished.
Guest00:01:51We do. We mostly though, again, this was a choice. We've mostly cordoned the children off from away from that. And funnily enough, we've mostly cordoned the children off.
?00:01:59Funnily enough, we've mostly cordoned the children off from away from that.
Guest00:01:59Funnily enough, we've mostly cordoned them into the basement where because the theme was Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Barbecue, she's real into Cinderella. She's real into the 1965 television production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, who I should note. Cartoon Disney Cinderella was the gateway drug, but now she's all in on Leslie and Warren.
JVL00:02:20I have seen that. That's a really, it's actually pretty good.
Guest00:02:22It's good stuff. I'm training her to be a woman of taste. But we had them like make, you know, Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo wands with pipes. Cleaners and pre-cut ribbons. So no scissors, no ink, no glitter, no glue.
JVL00:02:34Stay away from the glue and the glitter. You do glitter in that house. 30 years from now, you'll still be getting it.
Guest00:02:40Yep. No, thank you.
JVL00:02:42Fantastic.
Sonny00:02:46That is fantastic. And you were also saying now you have a yard. You moved to.
JVL00:02:50Oh, we're going to do lawn care talk. I'm so excited.
Sonny00:02:53I want to do some. I want to do some lawn care. Kristen, I was saying, I was saying I, when I moved to Dallas, my biggest worry was like, I've got a I've got like a big yard now, relatively speaking, not like it's not like an acre or anything, but, you know, it's like I have like a corner lot. So it's kind of big, lots of grass. And I was worried about this because I'm not I don't want to I'm not Hank Hill. I don't want to be out there combing the individual strands of grass to make sure everything looks good. I barely even want to have to deal with fucking sprinklers and stuff to say nothing of mowing and weed whacking and, you know, bush trimming and all that stuff. But, you you you have a you have a similar situation to me. I learned.
Guest00:03:34Yes. So it's it's not a very large plot of land, but it does. I do have a yard and I did not when I lived in a house on Capitol Hill. And so when we first moved in, we moved in in the heat of the summer last year. You know, the sod had all been put down like somewhat freshly. And so my my expectations for like, how does my lawn look were very low. Like, does this grass survive the winter? Was my only goal. Then once we got into the spring and into the summer, I began to want more. I wanted more for my lawn. And Reddit, having accurately diagnosed me as a middle aged man, has begun feeding me lots of r slash lawn care content, which at first it was just the algorithm feeding it to me. And now I go I go get it. But I've learned a lot. I mean, my biggest issue is less about the lawn, which I definitely do need to fertilize it. But I was trying to figure out what's the what's the appropriate do you use a weed and feed? Or is it bad to use something lawn care? Reddit is very down on the combination product. They say, don't pick one product that does two things poorly pick two products that each yes, fertilization and it's okay, good. But the other problem I'm facing is we have a lot of weeds that are that I thought, Oh, if you just put down mulch, that will just kill the weeds and they will be gone. And with something like bindweed, which I am learning, bindweed, Japanese knotweed, these are like the stuff of horrors. On our slash lawn care, I have some of it. And so I'm trying to figure out what is the optimal way to kill some of these weeds that are the ones we're simply going out and ripping it out of the ground does not do the job. It lives on under the ground and will keep coming back for years and years and years. Unless you break out the big chemical guns to kill it.
Sonny00:05:17That's where I'm at. Did you get the big chemical guns? I mean, how do I get glyphosate into my life? I don't I don't understand why you wouldn't just buy chemicals and take care of this problem. So eat for some of them, even the chemicals
Guest00:05:29don't work. And the other issue is that I have planted hydrangeas and I don't want to like glyphosate hydrangeas, you know, so I have to figure out some people recommend you go out with a paintbrush and you like paint the leaves with your
JVL00:05:43Oh, that sounds like a really good use of your time. So like a thing that that people without children might do. Yeah, I
Guest00:05:51don't know. Maybe there's a way I can make it feel like a soothing experience. I don't want to. I don't want to discourage you. But
JVL00:05:59I would share just briefly that my lawn journey when I got my first lawn, I was so into it. And I spent so much time caring for it. And I loved it. And it really made me happy. And I was just walk around barefoot in it just to feel the grass on my feet. And by the time flash was like five, we had graduated to the point where he was just digging holes everywhere in the grass and pulling up brass willy nilly just for fun. All the time and then getting a sister to do it. And I would say by year, year five of owning the lawn, I had given up because my children had killed it. And they had killed it for sport. And I get the sense that this is a thing that many small children you are creeping up on. Again, if you just did a three year old birthday party, you're a couple of years maybe just give it up now. Because what are you? Are you going to be the parent who says like, don't go digging in the yard? Oh, you are going to be that parent.
Guest00:07:00Well, I feel like my oldest daughter is unlikely to do that. But the one year old is adorable, but possibly feral. And so I hear that second children just do that's just just do things. So I have I don't know, she may be uncontrollable. We'll see.
Sonny00:07:22I definitely went through a whole digging phase with my children. And I was like, stop doing this. You have to stop doing this work. And yes, but he transferred his attention to the brick wall that kind of lines the so on our in our in our back where the where the grill is, there's like a little concrete patio area that has a step down to the yard. And that is kind of separated from the yard by a brick wall, right? It's like brick wall. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's yay high. It's like, you know, two feet, two feet high, maybe three feet high. And if you're on the ground, it's like slightly higher. It's like four feet. And one day my wife went out there and she made me go out there and I found that he had for no reason at all just started banging on the bricks and and and destroying the bricks on this brick wall. He had transferred his attentions and I was just like, well, you can't do that either. You can't you can't. What can I do, dad? You can't do this. You can't do you can't just destroy things. Stop just destroying things. So we'll see what he I don't I he hasn't destroyed anything in a while. Father, you know, your house is like a museum. Everything's very nice. You're not allowed to touch it. I described Cameron's dad. Yeah, I was. It's funny because I definitely will go through stretches where I'm just like, you have to stay out of this room. You can't come in this room. You can't you you you can't touch anything in here. And it never it never lasts. It never it never works for any extended period of time. But I definitely like my dream of dreams would just be to make them stay in their room. The whole day. Just stay. You just stay in your rooms and read your books. That's what you can do. I got something to share with you guys. Yeah. Last week I went to my first con in a very, very, very long time. First time since I was like 13. And you got it. You got it. You got to spell out what you mean by con here. Did you say con? And I don't know that people necessarily. I don't think there are many different kinds.
JVL00:09:28Of cons. A convention. Aren't all cons basically. I mean, the default, if somebody says a con, the default assumption is that it's a comic book convention. And you have to then, if it's not, if it's like a magic, the gathering convention, then you have to say, I'd have to say, oh, that was a TCG con. Gotcha. So I took, I took G money for his first con. And it was. It was a little intense. It was the Garden State Comic Fest. And I would say that the the principal difference from my memory of going to these 40 years ago, 35 years ago, is the cosplay element. Yes. And I found it disturbing. I don't like to judge. I don't like to kink shame. But holy shit. Well, let me I want to I want to I want to I want to break this down because there's two different kinds.
Sonny00:10:28Of cosplayers. Right. And they could probably be broken down into you have like the fanboys and like the kind of like obsessive autistic types. Right. And then you have and I'm just I'm saying this descriptively, not judgmentally. Then you have the harlots. And there's like there's there's this is these are two distinct separate type of person. And this is what I this is also what I was like totally baffled by when I went to I went to the Dallas Fan Expo two years ago because a friend was doing a show. Right. Yeah. The F and Birds guy, Aaron Reynolds. And that was that was a lot of fun because I had not I had also I'd actually never been to a proper comic book convention. I'd never in my life had gone to a real comic book convention.
JVL00:11:19Kristen, you must have done a con when you were in high school. Absolutely not. Never. Not. Look, my nerd predilections.
Guest00:11:28Just went in a different like that. Just comics were not my thing. I was a theater kid. I was a debate kid. I was in the marching band. I'm not trying to claim that I was the prom queen, but like that was a step too far for me.
Sonny00:11:44Wow. Hey, feeling pretty judged. And I even I did play Magic the Gathering briefly, but like the idea of going to a convention for that. I totally would have gone. I'm not I'm not I'm not saying I'm not above going to a comic book convention or. Or whatever. I just never it never it never came together for me. But no, when I when I was there, I was like it was it was like it was it was like again, it was half half like just real nerds. Some of them had some skill, obviously, at putting these things together, and half of them were like strippers with like handlers. There were like it was it was like a woman who was like pretty scantily clad and always with like a male handler nearby, ostensibly to like pictures, if you will. But like, I was always kind of curious. I was security. Well, so this is so but but what is a pimp?
JVL00:12:35If not, was she charging for the pictures? Is that the deal that like I think that's ten dollars to I think that with her? Yes. And he takes the money because that is literally what a pimp does.
Sonny00:12:45I think that that is what was happening. I think that and, you know, you got to make sure that they keep their hands off the merchandise. And, you know, you don't know touching again. Touching job again. I you know, well, or like strip club bouncer is really kind of more, I think. Where I'm my headspace was with it. But yes, could be could be.
Guest00:13:02So there was zero. Even the characters that know have a handler with them.
JVL00:13:07Zero harlots at this thing. OK, what there was and I would say there are levels that I I was comfortable with. I would say young people like, you know, just like weird, quirky, you know, quirky high school kids who aren't cool and aren't the palm king who go with their friends to Comic-Con dress up like that. Love it. Big thumbs up. Not for me, but no judgment, not creepy. I would say like gentlemen who are there by themselves, who are my age. Who are in full body spandex with enormous gut. That's weird in a way which feels like vaguely serial killer weird. There were then people in costumes that clearly cost thousands of dollars. I mean, there were there were there were people dressed up as like mechs, like, you know, like giant. So, you know, they were like eight feet tall. So the feet they're in, like have stilts and stuff and the full body armor. And I can't even go electronics, right? Flashing lights. And but clearly for them, this is a whole thing like this, I guess, is their version of like being a car guy who buys and restores cars. And then there was. And these were anime types who were dressed up like I am not familiar with all the animes animes like, you know, I just say Sailor Moon, right? I guess, you know, Akira, right? I guess. But they were animes not with their own face showing. They were wearing like a full helmet with the fake hair and the fake hair. The fake immobile anime face, which made them look like something out of a horror movie. So they were wearing head is too large. I don't even know what you call that.
Sonny00:15:08Well, I just want I want to I want to. So they're wearing like a Goku mask with like the big yellow hair.
JVL00:15:15Right.
Sonny00:15:15But also like a Goku face.
JVL00:15:18Goku face. But again, it's all like really legit. Like clearly this whatever this is, it cost a great deal of money. And they're dressed like sort of scantily plaid. Ish. Not a bit like in this like, you know, like Japanese schoolgirl. Right.
Sonny00:15:32And I think for most of them, they were guys.
JVL00:15:37Like, I think they were dudes. Again, hard to say because they're wearing like, you know, tights. But I'm looking at the legs and the body structures and they did not appear to be girls dressed up as anime.
Guest00:15:51No, thank you. I do think that if somebody put a lot of time and effort into dressing like Eva Unit One from D'Angelo. Genesis Evangelion, I would think that's kind of cool. But like, that's a really cool robot, not what you have just described that the anime stuff.
JVL00:16:09I, I was like, gee, money, get over here. Like that. If there was a purge, like another purge movie, like you could see like, oh, that's what one of the purgers would be dressed up. Terrifying. Anyway, that's all. It was a it was weird as shit. And the saddest thing I saw was Stan Lee. His brother was there. So Stan Lee's brother was the last remaining link to Stan.
Sonny00:16:34Wait, Joseph Lieber. Is that his name?
JVL00:16:37Ah, who's his?
Sonny00:16:39Ah, I can't remember. Forgetting.
JVL00:16:41I'm forgetting. But he he worked at Marvel with Stan. Larry Lieber. Larry Lieber. Yeah, Larry. He's like ninety five now. And, you know, like they wheeled him out to sit at a table to just sign stuff, sign comic books that his brother. Had written. While somebody stood there and collected forty dollars in cash for every signature. And that really like, oh, that did not feel good even to see it did not feel good for anybody just to see that.
Sonny00:17:13Well, that like, am I wrong?
JVL00:17:15Like maybe like, hey, this is how he's supporting himself. Like, you know, it's a fine like this is capitalism. Everybody winds up happy. But I don't know, man. I felt really bad just seeing that.
Sonny00:17:25It was bad enough when it was Stan Lee himself doing it. Out of it as he was for the last 10 to 15 years there. Like you, you could see you'd see videos of him at these, you know, at these at the cons. And he was definitely like not not entirely there. And he was just being kind of wheeled out to sign his his old books. And it was like, oh, this isn't. But like Larry Lieber is not a comic book legend. Like, I'm sorry.
JVL00:17:53He worked at Marvel and he was Stan's brother.
Sonny00:17:55Yes. Yeah. These are these are things that are true. Speaking of comic book legends. I'm sorry, Kristen. This is going to get very. Did you see that?
JVL00:18:02Kristen, you are your face is like a rictus of horror.
Sonny00:18:05Yeah. Did you have thoughts about this? I'm here to talk about cars.
JVL00:18:08Will you validate me that this was also feel bad? Yes.
Guest00:18:13Oh, yes. I I've actually never even heard of the concept of somebody you having to pay money to have somebody autograph something. That's like it.
JVL00:18:23That's standard operating procedure, my friend.
Guest00:18:25Oh, man.
JVL00:18:26Yeah.
Sonny00:18:26Well, so it's interesting, too. At the at the again at the Fan Expo in Dallas, there were there was like a comic book alley, which was like it was it was guys who like you would kind of some some you recognize like a Mark Silvestri, right? Or a J. Lee, like guys who whose names I knew and then a bunch of people who I didn't know. But those guys were all signing more or less for free. Sometimes you would have to buy a comic at their table. But it was like it was like they were signing stuff for free. And and one guy had a rule that was like, if I sign it with your name on it, it's free. If I just. Sign my name, it's ten dollars because like he didn't want, you know, flippers, whatever, which I like totally I totally get. But then there's a there was a different area, which is where the the famous people were, where you would have like you had like John Bernthal signing Punisher stuff with Vincent D'Onofrio, right? Like or Shameik Moore, the guy from the end of the Spider-Verse movies or Rosario Dawson was there. Hayden Christensen was there like they and those guys, it was there was like there were like price. It was like eighty dollars for a signature, you know, a hundred dollars for a selfie, etc. It was like a whole it was a whole thing. But yeah, I'm kind of surprised the comic book guys were charging that much money. Was it all of them? Were they all charging money?
JVL00:19:43Yeah, I think they were all charging. I mean, I think Larry Lieber was the most expensive. I think he was 40 bucks a pop. But yeah, yeah, it's all. Yeah, it's like it's like the dark side of Nickelodeon. You know, you're like, hey, I just like comic books. Oh, this is making me feel bad.
Sonny00:20:01I just like comic books. I just like comic books.
JVL00:20:06I'm excited to go to a con with G Money in a couple of weeks that I believe will have none of that stuff that is just comic book dealers selling comic book. That is what I think will feel really good. No cosplayers, no weird just like, hey, it's a bunch of local comic shop guys who rent a room. And so you can go around and like. Hey, they got a bunch of five for a dollar boxes. G Money, go nuts. Get yourself 50 comic books. That'll feel good.
Sonny00:20:36I got to say, I went into a comic book store recently. And it made me feel weird just to be in there because I like I'm not I just felt out of place. I just felt out of place because I have not gone to comic book stores in a long time.
JVL00:20:54You need to find the right comic shop for you.
Sonny00:20:56I don't know. I don't I don't spend enough time reading. Comics to really work on this, frankly.
Guest00:21:00So weirdly, I have purchased a comic book probably more recently, certainly than you, Sonny, and possibly you, JVL, because this is within the last two weeks. I mean, I guess if you were just on, probably not.
JVL00:21:11But I was at my comic shop last week.
Guest00:21:13Oh, never mind. I this was what did you get? I was in Brussels for a conference and through my favorite thing to do is just go like wander around, see what's good, get out of the touristy areas, try not to get pickpocketed and stumbled upon a comic book store. A vintage toy and game store that was like 80s and 90s themed and everything was set up by year. So there was like a 1980s shelf, a 1984 shelf. It was so cool. That's amazing. So the first place I went was like the 93 shelf because my husband loves Jurassic Park. The very first gift I ever got him was on a trip 18 years ago. I was in Europe. I went into one of the Oxfam like secondhand stores and bought him the PAL VHS Jurassic Park. Like we have a history of me buying him like random Jurassic Park merch at secondhand stores in Europe. I don't know. It's weird. But I went in and they did have a Star Wars Episode One Queen Amidala comic. And I was like, that's that's for me. So I brought that home. That was my souvenir to myself. Had nothing to do with Brussels. Wasn't even in like Belgium or it wasn't in like it was nothing Belgian about it. It wasn't in Dutch or in it was just. But there was no Jurassic Park stuff except one massive set that wouldn't have fit in my suitcase. So sorry.
Sonny00:22:36Like what kind of stuff did they have? Like what did they have? It was like Atari games. What was it?
Guest00:22:41It was like action figures, you know, everything from like this, like the little farm that moves from, you know, Fisher Price or play school stuff all the way up to like there was like a big bin of pogs, but they weren't called pogs. They were called flippers or something like that. I was like. Oh, I know what those are. Those are pogs. So stuff like that. Like if you wanted to remember, like what's the thing that I was desperate for for Christmas in 1994? Like they probably had that.
Sonny00:23:10Oh, man. Pogs. Pogs are great.
JVL00:23:14Pogs.
Sonny00:23:15Pogs.
JVL00:23:17Sonny, what do you have, buddy?
Sonny00:23:19Not not a whole lot. I really don't. I really don't have very much here because the kids have been around all all week. It's. It's been summer and one one of them does not have camp this week, which is which has been fun. Kristen, are you are you a gamer? Do you play video games? I do. Are you a Hideo Kojima fan? Am I pronouncing this? Have you played like Death Stranding? I have not. Which is very, very popular right now amongst and I'm trying I'm trying to get into it. And it's it's hard to describe precisely what this game is about, partly because I'm only like. Ninety minutes into it, but. It's it's a lot it I it has been derisively referred to as a walking simulator, and that is not far off from what I have experienced so far in this game. It's it's set in like a alternate or, you know, apocalyptic America world is falling apart. There are the people are the dead are coming back to life. Kind of. I don't know exactly how to describe it, because, again, I'm not 100 percent sure what's happening in this game. They haven't really. Explained the like metaphysics of what is going on in the world yet, but like the long and the short of it is you're you're you're like a courier delivery guy. You're like a you're like a UPS man and you have to you have to travel the you walk and you travel places and you bring packages to them. And I swear to God, this is the game so far. This is one in one of the the first the first level is the first. Which is kind of a tutorial. I was walking around. I was picking things up and I was putting it on my back and I was walking around and you start to your character starts to stumble and you have to press the R2 and L2 buttons to steady them. I swear to God, this is the game.
Guest00:25:12You know, I'm actually still kind of open to the idea that this could be fun.
Sonny00:25:15It's it's it's not it's not terrible is the thing. It's kind of interesting. And again, the the the you know, the whole thing is driven by these extended animatic, you know, kind of cut scene. Things which have like real famous Norman Reedus is the the guy who is the the lead, you know, from The Walking Dead, that guy and and and some other stuff. But like Guillermo del Toro is a character in this, the director. And I think Mads Mikkelsen is I'm seeing Mads Mikkelsen in some of these flashback scenes. And what's her name from the French woman from? The Bond movies. Lea Seydoux is in this and like it's JBL. I think you you might be. But it's but I swear I like I was I was kind of hoping you you played this because I need assurance that it becomes more than just walking around and trying not to fall down. Because if you fall down, the packages get damaged and you lose points. You don't want you don't want to fall down and damage your package. Sometimes you die. And when you die, you come back to life. There's no as far as I can tell, there's no real penalty for dying. Maybe there will be later in the game. You walk around with a little there's like a little baby in a little like fetus sack that's like attached to your chest. And the baby helps you see the demons that are coming back to the. It's very weird.
Guest00:26:50This sounds like really intense paper boy.
JVL00:26:53I was just thinking.
Sonny00:26:56Well, I'll tell you what it is. Which again.
Guest00:26:58I'm not out on that as a concept.
Sonny00:27:00I'm open to it. It's super Japanese paper boy is what it is. Is like it's like, you know, the guy who made this is is like revered in Japan. One of the one of the great game makers. And he has kind of a cult status here in America as, again, a great game designer.
JVL00:27:16How do you say his name?
Sonny00:27:18Hideo Kojima, I think is how you pronounce it.
JVL00:27:21Is that how it's pronounced?
Sonny00:27:22I'm not. I'm not. I'm not taking the bait here. I'm not. I'm not. It's a Hideo. Anyway. But I don't know. Like, I'm I it's it's interesting. And I'm like, I'm trying I'm trying to talk myself into it. Here's and it's funny that I say that it's interesting. It's not fun precisely, but it's interesting.
JVL00:27:46And that is most perfect description of Japanese things ever.
Sonny00:27:50Yeah. And it's it's like I'm not you know, I'm not I'm not opposed to continuing to play this. I just need I need something slightly more than what. I'm getting from the game so far. Somebody in the comments will tell me that I'm a I'm a rube and a in a philistine for not understanding the genius of the the the mind behind the metal metal gear solid series. But I don't know, man.
Guest00:28:15The most recent game that has taken over the Anderson household is a game called Blue Prince. And the premise of this game, this is it. I'm trying to think of what the genre of game is. The premise is basically you are inheriting your grand uncle's estate. It is a 45 room estate. In order to inherit it, you must find the 46th room. But the trick is that every day, all 45 rooms reset. You may not stay overnight in the estate. And as you walk from room to room, you, like an architect, are drafting the blueprints for this room. This game, like you can play it. We probably put in 100 hours in our house. So this is very like get the kids to bed and then stay up and play it. And all of a sudden it's 2 a.m. It is fantastic.
JVL00:29:07Wait, so you move into a room.
Guest00:29:11And you get, it'll like randomly roll you three different options for what the room can be. Maybe it'll be a closet. It has no doors. You could get stuck if you don't have enough doors to keep moving forward. It could be a room that has something good in it. It could be a room that has something bad in it. And so you want to try to build your way to figure out. And access where this 46th room is.
Sonny00:29:31Well, I was going to ask. So you're building it as you go. It's like, yes, here's I want to I want a bedroom.
Guest00:29:36You have a limited number of steps is the other thing. Every time you cross the threshold from one room into another, you lose a step, which doesn't seem like a big problem. Except if you have 50 steps and you're trying to build 45 rooms, you can't really backtrack. If you block yourself in, you can find food throughout the house to give you more steps. Like it's but it's mostly just an incredible brain puzzle of solving. The mystery of like, where is this 46th room? How would you access it? Where would the key be that would open it? What is the code you like? It is. It is enormously brainpower intensive in a great way.
JVL00:30:10Sounds like I would want to murder it. This sounds like a recipe for madness, actually. Is it fun?
Guest00:30:18You should. I think it's enormously fun.
Sonny00:30:20Have you have you found the 46th room?
Guest00:30:24Yes. And it is important to note that once you find the 46th room. You are actually only about 20% of the way through the game. Like some people may find the 46th room and be like, cool, I'm done. There's the credits. There's a cut scene. I'm done. Like you're not even close to done.
JVL00:30:39So what comes next?
Sonny00:30:40Yeah. Does it give you challenges? Do you have to build specific types of rooms and houses?
Guest00:30:44There are challenges. But there's also once you enter the 46th room, new mysteries present themselves that you may wish to continue exploring. Other things about the estate that may be unusual.
JVL00:30:58What, what platform do you play this on?
Guest00:31:01I believe we played it on PlayStation, but I think it's available on Steam and I think it's available on a variety of platforms. Maybe.
JVL00:31:12Maybe.
Sonny00:31:13So, so, so it's like, it's like the Winchester house. It's like the Winchester mystery house. It's like full of weird rooms that go nowhere is what is my takeaway from this.
Guest00:31:22Some of them go lots of places.
Sonny00:31:24Do they go to alternate universes?
Guest00:31:27Not really.
Sonny00:31:28Not really. Does the 46th Room take you to a post-apocalyptic America where you have to deliver packages and sometimes corpses without falling down?
Guest00:31:38Unfortunately, no. So I don't think that these two games live in the same cinematic universe.
Sonny00:31:44That's too bad. See, that could have gotten me into it. Maybe this could have been my prequel to that. All right. Enough of this. Enough of this chatter. Box office. Box office talk. What's going on at JVL? What's going on at the box office?
JVL00:32:01I hear it was a great weekend for F1 and movie stars. I read that. Where'd you read that?
Sonny00:32:09Who said that? That doesn't. No, it's a F1. So it's interesting because F1 was tracking between thirty five and forty million dollars and it did fifty seven million dollars. That's a big.
JVL00:32:21And it only cost three hundred million. But because it was an Apple TV plus movie. But he declares it to be a huge death.
Sonny00:32:30Well, that is.
JVL00:32:30If this had been John Carter of Mars, everybody would be going, holy shit.
Sonny00:32:37No, that's it. So that's like the fascinating thing about this movie and the kind of expectations of it. Right. Which is that Apple movies have historically not done very well in movie theaters, you know, from Argyle to the man in the whatever. What was the man in the moon movie? The one with Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum to Killers of the Flash. Like the Apple movies have not done well at the box office. This is by far their biggest hit. But then it's like biggest hit. Well, OK, it still cost at least two hundred million dollars. It may have cost three hundred million dollars. But then you start you start bringing it down like, well, sure, they spent two hundred million dollars on it. But you know what they did? They sold 40 million dollars of advertisements on the on the uniform of Brad Pitt for this for this for these races. So I don't know. It's like trying to break this down. On a fiscal level is very tricky and difficult and ultimately kind of pointless. The broader idea here is if you are going to spend that money on a movie anyway, you're going to spend that money on a movie anyway. There is no reason you cannot make a movie like this and not put it in theaters. You simply cannot do it. It makes no fiscal sense whatsoever. I mean, and look. This movie is grossed $150 million worldwide. It'll probably end up, I would guess it ends up around somewhere between $400 and $500 million, which is a perfectly fine number for a movie of this sort. An original non-IP kind of, we can discuss whether or not F1 counts as IP sort of thing. Yes, it cost as much as The Flash and grossed about the same amount. And The Flash is a world historical bomb. But like that was also, that's also a different movie in a different genre. Like it's, your expectations are lower for it. Again, this kind of all comes down to what does Apple actually want in the movie business? What is Apple's goal here? Like what is Apple trying to do with Apple TV Plus and Apple Films? Like nobody is 100% sure on that. Nobody is 100% sure on that. And for now, it's fine for them to lose lots and lots of money because Apple has lots and lots of money. I wonder if things start to get tighter as, say, there is talk about forcing Apple to divest itself of the App Store, if the taxes that the EU is kicking around come into effect, if the separation of Apple from gaming revenue, which is happening now as a result of some court rulings, is the sort of thing that like makes somebody at Apple say, we can't lose $200. $200 million on a movie every year. That doesn't make any sense. I don't know. I don't know. But, you know, for now, $57 million domestic, $150 million worldwide. That's a big hit. That's a big that's a big win for Apple. And, you know, good for them.
JVL00:35:46Someday the United States government will force Amazon to sell Amazon Web Services. I mean, I don't know if that's going to be in two years or 20 years, but eventually. Those two companies will be broken up. And when that happens, the money that Amazon just throws away on original screen streaming program content, I assume will just have to go away. Like so many of these things are lost leaders. And I do wonder what happens to the creative industry when they disappear.
Sonny00:36:18Well, you're already seeing it. I mean, you're already like the the I saw a number the other day that in 2024, there was something like a 25 percent reduction in the number of screenwriters reporting revenue to the Writers Guild like that, that that is not it's not just like, oh, well, they they hired fewer writers to do the same. That's because there's 25 percent less stuff being made. There is going to be less stuff being made this year than there was last year. And there's probably going to be less stuff being made next year than there is this year. Like the whole industry is contracting because Netflix has turned off the money spigot to a certain. Extent Amazon has slowed down all of the streaming companies, Paramount, HBO, Peacock, et cetera, have really slowed down the amount of stuff they're making. They're still making stuff, but it is the amount is has has slowed to a trickle instead of a rushing.
JVL00:37:21I'm sure AI will make it better for writers. Yeah.
Sonny00:37:23Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure.
JVL00:37:25All right. Let's hit it because I want Kristen to talk.
Sonny00:37:30Well, I want Kristen. Do you want to do the big boy review? A big girl review. A big a big girl review of Kristen.
JVL00:37:37Will you do a big girl review for us?
Sonny00:37:39You don't you don't have to. I'm putting you on the spot here. I didn't I didn't suggest this before, but do you feel comfortable doing it extemporaneously? Can you? Yeah, because that's how I do it.
JVL00:37:49I can do this every week.
Sonny00:37:50OK, Kristen, how about a big girl review of F1?
Guest00:37:56F1. Starring such a bro, an absolute fever dream of a movie. Asks the question, what if we took the plot of Cars 3 and made it gorgeous, but equally untethered to reality? This movie was great. I love this movie. It is complete ludicrous on track nonsense that also manages to get the little details of motorsport and F1 specificity. So right at the minutia level that it is allowed to get away with absolute madness at the plot level. This movie underbakes some of its characters. Brad Pitt's character, the plot is that he is a aging ex race car driver who suffered a horrible injury during the early 90s when he was racing against legends like Aaron Senna. His career was. Was ended as a result of that injury, and he now sort of finds himself living out of a van and occasionally racing and endurance races as a journeyman driver, and he has his friend played by Harvey Bardem, former racing teammate who is now a suit at a failing F1 company, a failing F1 team come to him and say, I badly need you to come join me as a driver for the second half of this season. And so they off they go to try to turn around the fate of this. This F1 team that is a back marker with a terrible I never swear on podcasts, but shit box of a car and. Spoiler alert, they pull it off, the team and probably has a clause in its contract that says if they do not win a race, which is a thing that would never be in a contract, but nevertheless, they don't win a race, then they have to sell the team, and so they must come up with a way to win the race. And Brad Pitt finds himself teammates with. A young up and coming driver that he nicknames JP Joshua Pierce, the two of them clash because young brash driver who's social media savvy and trains on the simulators. He he's just from a different world than this old school driver who wants to do it the old school way and build a car for combat and all of that. What I love about this movie, though, is it recognizes that Formula One is not just a sport about drivers. What's great about this movie? In addition to it being gorgeous and it having so many things in it that if you don't like F1, you probably still think are cool. And if you love F1, you think are unbelievably cool. But it also gets that Formula One is not just about drivers. It is a team sport. And fundamentally, it is an engineering sport that it is not a competition of driver versus driver. It is a competition of a couple hundred engineers over here versus a couple hundred engineers over there coming up with detailed strategy calls about tire temperatures and all those sorts of things. And I kind of love that they tried to make that Hollywood acceptable. And I think they kind of pulled it off. I loved everything about this movie, except for there were some things in the plot that I just like openly guffawed at in the theater that are things that would truly never occur in a real race. Like Brad Pitt would have gotten a lifetime ban for motorsports within the first 20 minutes of the film. But it doesn't matter because it's just so for what?
JVL00:41:26So what what did he do? That would have gotten him a ban?
Guest00:41:29Intentionally crashing other cars is such a massive no-no. And he does it so flagrantly. And then he brags about it on the radio as if it is a strategic choice in a way that like you would immediately have your ability to compete in global motorsports taken from you. But like setting that aside, JVL, I need to know, did you immediately walk out of the theater the minute that he rejects the Rolex from winning the 24 hours of Daytona? Because I actually like I. Grabbed my chest and was like.
Sonny00:42:00That was cool.
Guest00:42:01You thought it was cool that he rejected the watch?
Sonny00:42:04What did you think about the watches? JVL is not a Rolex guy, though. JVL disdains the Rolex.
JVL00:42:09Doesn't Brad Pitt have Brad Pitt has a watch sponsorship deal? Is he? Is it with Rolex?
Guest00:42:15Oh, I believe in this movie. It might be IWC because they.
JVL00:42:21I mean, in real life. Oh, I don't know. Sponsorship. I don't know. In the same way that like Daniel Craig is tied to Amiga. And so like Daniel Craig only wears Amigas.
Guest00:42:30But like the Rolex Daytona is named the Rolex Daytona because it is the watch you get when you win the 24 hours of Daytona.
JVL00:42:36Yeah. I have so many questions for you. Starting, but I don't want to interrupt. Are you are you still reviewing?
Guest00:42:43I'm I have a million more things to say about this movie. The biggest thing I will say is that the reason this movie is allowed to get big things wrong because it gets so many of. The little things so right, it's not as though they came and they made this movie with like a flagrant disregard for how F1 works. It is so perfect and so cool in so many ways that it's like it has earned the right to do nonsensical things like Brad Pitt throwing a temper tantrum and not leaving the pit box because they didn't put the tires on that he wanted. Like that would not happen. A driver just flagrantly not going around on a formation lap because he wants his tires to be extra hot at what that you can't do that. But I'm OK with it because they showed me the actual wind tunnel that the Williams F1 team uses. They're allowed to do that because Brad Pitt is actually running with the team up like some of the most famous curves in motorsports. He's running around the banked turns at Monza like these things are awesome. They put in the work to do the stuff that real motorsports fans will think is really neat. And so if you have to do some goofy plots. Stuff to make a movie work, I can kind of be OK with it because so much of the other stuff is so neat.
Sonny00:44:04JBL, just for the record, Brad Pitt is a Breitling ambassador.
JVL00:44:07There you go.
Sonny00:44:09Just definitely.
JVL00:44:09I bet I bet you anything that that's why he turns down the watch in the movie because his Breitling deal is that he can't appear on screen with non Breitling.
Sonny00:44:18He does it because he's not in it. He's not in it for material goods. He's in it for the love of the race. That's why he does it. It's not it doesn't have anything to do with your sullying. You're sullying. You're sullying the emotional and and artistic arc of this film by suggesting dirty commerce is the result of the of the Expensify team Apex GP.
Guest00:44:40I have left out one other crucial thing about this movie, which is F1 and motorsport in general is thought of as like a boys club. And I really appreciated that they had the female lead is a female technical director of the team. I was frustrated that she also then becomes a love interest. I suppose there was a level at which that was inevitable, but I liked that she was the lens through which we see the engineering side of this sport.
JVL00:45:11I like that there was the female pit crew member with a love interest who is 30 years her senior. Because that's really.
Guest00:45:21I mean, that's really something ludicrous, but right.
JVL00:45:27That was the thing that I was like, I don't know, like at least 19 years for the record.
Sonny00:45:34I just I just looked at a 19 years.
JVL00:45:36That's not that's not, you know, Jennifer Connelly is not all that far off Tom Cruise's age. Carrie Condon and Brad Pitt.
Guest00:45:44But that's really bother me too much.
JVL00:45:46Oh, OK. Never mind.
Guest00:45:50It didn't bother me as much as like, oh, wow. The first female technical director of an F1 team, and she's portrayed as like hooking up with the director. That annoyed me a little bit.
Sonny00:46:00But he's just too charming. You can't. He's Brad Pitt. He's, you know, again, the arc. I the what was interesting. I just liked Carrie Condon being in this movie because she got to be she got to a use her Irish natural Irish accent, which is always I always like hearing. But also be she got to be a little bit silly. Usually she's very dour on screen or a saddled like not saddled, but like she's often played with parts where she has to be like more serious, like Banshees of an Asheron or there was a recent movie with Liam Neeson. I forget. I forget the the name of it that she was in and she was good. And but it was like she was like a serious IRA member, you know, here she gets to be
JVL00:46:38like kind of fun in her breakthrough role with Ophelia. So kind of on brand, you know, there's a reason they cast her in those roles.
Guest00:46:51So as a as a big F1 fan, I have to ask you all, did you feel like you were being immersed in this new sport? Because as someone who watches F1 a lot, I watched the production of this movie happen at like alongside all of the race weekends over the last two years, you know, that scene of them standing, listening to the British national anthem where a bunch of other drivers are there like, I remember the race when that happened because it was like, oh, Brad Pitt's here. This is really cool. I remember knowing that there was going to be a big crash in the Vegas race because I remember the race. I remember reporting that people at the race were like, oh, yeah, they filmed something terrible happen on the track here. So whenever the Vegas race comes up in the movie, I knew like, oh, somebody is going to something bad is going to happen here. So it was really neat to me to watch. I mean, that they didn't just stage a bunch of this stuff separately like it. A lot of it they did at real F1 weekends, which I thought was very cool and showed.
JVL00:47:52Again, I have so many questions, but I don't want to hijack by doing like batting practice for Krista. And if you have things you want to say, Sonny, so you just tell me when I'm allowed to come in and start lobbing softballs.
Sonny00:48:06I'll say in terms of the immersion into the sport, I was kind of it was interesting because I know nothing about F1 outside of very basic things like, you know, the cars. It's not like a NASCAR where the cars are all kind of the same and designed to be the same there, you know. But again, I like I'm not an F1 guy. And I was kind of torn between like they're explaining things too many times. And also, I still don't really know what any of it means. And like and that that's a that's a mild that's a mild script level problem. But it doesn't matter that much just because the point of the thing is like, look at the cars, the cars go fast. And that is that that's all extremely well done. Like I I like Joseph Kaczynski when he is working in what? That is maybe derisively referred to, but not by me. I mean, this complimentary in a complimentary fashion. I like him most when he is in his feature length music video mode. So like Tron Legacy and Oblivion, like Tron Legacy has this great score by Daft Punk, like probably the best soundtrack that a movie has had in the last twenty five years. And Oblivion, which is his Tom Cruise sci fi movie, has this very good original score by the by the band M83. That is, again, just great. I listen to it's it's it's it works as a standalone thing. And and Top Gun Maverick didn't really have that. It was more, you know, kind of a lot of a lot of like kind of standard pop stuff. And there was some original. But but this is like it's Hans Zimmer doing a lot of Hans Zimmer things, but with like. Euro trash club music on on top of it and like that works really well for for this whole scene, this like there's this shot in the movie where it's it's like a drone comes down onto the track. I would assume it was a drone, not a crane, because it starts way outside the track and kind of comes in and like as it's going towards the cars, it goes by like a female DJ and like a crop top, like throwing her hands up in the air. I was like, this is see, this is why I don't really like F1. This this this part of it, this whole this whole thing. But it works for the movie and it works. It works as, you know, kind of combination diegetic and non diegetic sound for the movie. So I I. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that aspect of it a lot. It's a movie that looks great. It looks great. It's shot. It's shot with IMAX cameras, which is why it got two weeks in the IMAX screens. You know, usually movies only get one week in IMAX. But if you shoot with IMAX cameras, they give you two weeks. It's like having an inducement to use IMAX cameras and IMAX film. But the but the movie looks great. The races all look great. And because Joseph Kuczynski shoots. Brad Pitt and close up so much. Brad Pitt is like. I saw this on the Cinemark Web Chapel IMAX, which is where they show the 70 millimeter IMAX stuff in Dallas. And the screen is like three times the size of my house. Like it's it's it's enormous. And when his like when his face is just up there, it's like, oh, that's that's you know, he's doing lots of he's doing lots of Brad Pitt things, lots of lots of little winks with his eyes and little little wrinkles. Of his, you know, just a very he's a very expressive face actor in a way that I don't think he often gets credit for. But yeah, that's it. That's it. JBL, you go.
JVL00:51:40Go for it. KSA, when did you get into F1 and was F1 your entree to motorsports or were you a NASCAR gal growing up in Florida who then fell into this as you got older and more sophisticated what? Tell me your F1 story.
Guest00:52:00Excellent question. So I grew up in Central Florida. My father was very into motorsports. He would do autocross with his buddies at Martin Marietta back in the day. He would take me as a small child to Daytona for like night practice. But I wasn't I didn't really like watch NASCAR a ton. I would kind of watch IndyCar because that was the thing I think my dad seemed to like the most, you know, kind of to bond with him a little bit. So like some of the names are familiar with to me, but about 10 years ago I was in Indianapolis for a friend's wedding and we were trying to kill some time before we went to the airport and it was the weekend before Memorial Day and we went to Indy 500 qualifying, which I did not know when I walked into Indianapolis Motor Speedway is the single coolest day of the year in terms of global motorsport. It is freaking amazing. It is intense. Indianapolis Motor Speedway is large enough that there's a literal golf course in the infield. And I was just like, I was so overwhelmed by the spectacle of that, that, that like relit the fire. And then during COVID, like many other people, I started watching drive to survive. And so then that was my gateway into F1 and from F1, it spirals from there. Once you get into F1, then suddenly those drivers all wind up going and racing in the 24 hours of Le Mans or the Rolex 24 Daytona. And you know, there's, there's a whole world of motor sports out there that like, once you get in, it begins to. Spread. But so I would say drive to survive is a good entry point. If you are very new to this, it is an excellent, uh, sports television documentary series.
JVL00:53:39So I have always viewed this level of motor sports, like the open wheel racing as an, an F1 in particular, as inaccessible to me, basically for class reasons, like it's, it's like horse racing, right? The province of like the really unimaginably ultra rich. Is that, is that a true sense or no? Is it just the fan base, which tends to be the ultra rich Euro trash types or is liquid? No, Sonny, you're making me making a face at me.
Guest00:54:18I think it depends on what we're defining as fan though. Like in order to succeed in F1 as a driver, it is absolutely true that the vast majority of these drivers come from privilege, um, that it is a very expensive hobby as a child. And so most of the people who make it to the top do come from some kind of money right now on the current F1 grid, there is a team, the Aston Martin F1 team that was purchased by a Canadian gajillionaire whose son is a driver. And so he like bought his son on F1 team. That's not something that you or I are doing. Right. That's not on the right level. Um, but Lewis Hamilton, who is one of the producers in some way on this movie, um, he's, you know, not only like broke boundaries as like not only one of the greatest drivers of all time, but he's black and he, he, he does not come from means he's just like a kid from Stevenage in the UK. Uh, and so it is that like the, there, it is not impossible, but it is much harder to succeed as a driver in the sport if you do not. Come from money. But I don't think you need to be like buying paddock club passes to the Miami GP or a super rich person with grid passes at Monaco to like, enjoy the sport.
JVL00:55:40Like if you have ESPN, no, no, no, I'm not saying, sorry, I'm not, I'm not saying the drawer, but I was just trying to think through like the people who go to F1, like it is phenomenally expensive. Is that a wrong impression that it's a phenomenally expensive thing to go to?
Guest00:55:57If you want to buy a pass to go to the U S Grand Prix in Austin versus if you want to buy a pass to go to the IndyCar race happening at road America, like they will be orders of magnitude different in terms of price. And it will also be very different in terms of fan access. Like something that's cool about IndyCar is like, you can just go to races and kind of like wander around the paddock and like the very top drivers are people that you can have sign your hat for free, not for paying for money. Um, but like at F1. That's it's, it's not nearly as accessible, right? There's a lot more gatekeeping where you have to be with one of the sponsors or you have to have one of these thousand dollar tickets in order to be like really up close to the driver. So there is an element of that, but it's also just a phenomenally expensive sport to produce. Like the difference between an IndyCar and an F1 car is millions upon millions of dollars. When you wreck an IndyCar, it's very expensive. When you wreck a formula one car, it's like you've wrecked a fighter jet. And so it's just like, not even that, like, that is also a reason why F1 is more inaccessible the cars themselves are just like a technologically Marvel that costs a ton of money.
JVL00:57:03And what are, what is the ownership like of F1? Are they typically owned by like Saudi Prince? Is it, is it like premier league soccer clubs or like NFL teams or like horse race? You know what I'm saying? Like it's tough for me to get a beat on how the ownership stuff works.
Guest00:57:21Yeah. So there are some teams that are owned by. Auto manufacturers, those are called like factory teams. So like Ferrari owns an F1 team, Mercedes owns an F1 team, uh, Alpine, which is like the luxury brand of Renault cars. Like they own a team. Um, but then there's like Red Bull is an energy drink manufacturer and yet they own two F1 teams. Uh, there is, uh, a team that is owned by an American, uh, it's called Haas. Uh, that's the team that's probably the closest analog to this like apex GP team. Um, Jean Haas, I think it's like an autumn automated Haas automation. I don't know. They make some kind of mechanical gear. They own a team, um, Aston Martin, I don't believe it's actually owned by Aston Martin. It is owned by Lauren Stroll. Um, but like a team like McLaren is, I think their biggest investor is the Bahraini sovereign wealth. Fund.
JVL00:58:27Wow.
Guest00:58:28Possibly. So like you are, you are right that there is the, the, the ownership structure of these teams. Uh, each of them is very different, but they're enormously expensive.
JVL00:58:39Yeah. Fun. Fun fact about Red Bull, Red Bull does not actually manufacture energy drink. Do you know this about the, about the company?
Guest00:58:47I feel like I've heard this before. Yes.
JVL00:58:49That they, they're a marketing company. Red Bull is purely a marketing company. They contract out the Korea, the, the. Everything about the product is done by this German juice company and all Red Bull does is a pure marketing scam. It's an amazing, amazing story. Um, yeah. So I guess what other, have you gone to an F1 race? I have. Um. Where, where'd you go? Did you go to the Vegas one?
Guest00:59:17I've, so I've been to the Vegas one. Um, I, I went to the very first Vegas Grand Prix, which was a very cool experience. Um, in part because there was a lot of skepticism, like would the Vegas strip make for a good race track? And there were some real technical challenges the first time around, like the way these cars work is they have, they, they basically create a lot of downforce, but like the air goes over them and they kind of like are like suctioned to the ground. And that meant that they were sucking manhole covers out of the, out of the, the Vegas strip and like just completely destroyed one of the Ferrari cars during one of the practices. But the other race that I have been to, and if you follow F1. You are gonna understand why this was a big freaking deal. Was the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in 2021. And this has relevance to this movie. Um, so the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in 2021 is probably one of the F1 races that is like, this one is going down in the history books is one of the most exciting races of all time. Um, in the lead up to that race, it was a year where two drivers, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton came into the race with an equal number of points and the stakes were huge. Max Verstappen won or whoever beat the other was going to become the world champion. If Lewis Hamilton won, he would get eight world champions. He would be the official greatest of all time, cuz right now I believe he's tied at seven. Um, if Max Verstappen won, he would be the first, it would be his first world championship. Um, and in the race, it was like exciting wheel to wheel racing all the way through a red flag gets caused at the end. The drivers all have to come into the pits and can, you know, these questions about who has fresher tires and all that goes down. See what happens in this F1 movie. Um, and in the real life race, Lewis Hamilton loses, um, in like dramatic, stunning, horrifying fashion. And so when I was watching this movie, you get to the end and I'm like, is Lewis just like working out his Abu Dhabi trauma, but like restaging, oh my God, there's a red flag with three laps left. Who's gonna have the fresher tires. Like, are we really doing this? This is Lewis Hamilton's movie. Uh, that was, that was kind of bananas to me, but these, these races are interesting to go to, but kind of fascinating because like you can't, it's really hard to actually watch the race when you're there, you're only seeing the straight or the turn that you're on. And so you have to be seated by like a big jumbotron or else you don't really know what's going on. And that's kind of what happened to us at the Abu Dhabi race where we were seated. We did not have a jumbotron. And so we see the cars go by. And I thought there was still one lap left and all of a sudden the fireworks start going off and it was like, wait a minute, did Lewis just lose Lewis was ahead before what just happened? Like somewhere on the other side of the track, he got passed and we, it was, it was wild.
Sonny01:02:10That does not sound like a satisfying viewing experience, frankly. That is, the vibes are so cool.
Guest01:02:15The vibes are so cool. And I do feel like it captures the vibe of being there. Like even the evil Tobias Menzies, like smarmy villain guy, who's trying to steal the team. Yeah. Who I feel like played that role perfectly. It kind of make a snide crack at the drive to survive people by like him saying like, oh yeah, that's how I got into this. I watched drive to survive. But he like him sitting, standing there in the paddock club, like with all the other rich people drinking champagne while the sun goes down, like they did kind of, that's what it looks like. They kind of nailed that.
JVL01:02:49So what is the viewing experience like when you're at an F1 race, are you like glued to a screen or whatever, or is it basically a social event in which like you watch them as they pass every 10 minutes?
Guest01:03:04Depends on, well, one depends on how excited you are about the actual race. A lot of people are into F1 for the vibes, not for the cars. And like, that's fine. That's Sonny. I think that's what you were reacting to before of like, this just doesn't seem like my, you know, like, yeah, you see the, you see the like celebrities there who like clearly don't know anything about any of these cars. They're just there for the, the vibes like that. That is a part of. But then you can be there and really care and tune all of that out. But there's also how interesting or boring a race is really matters. And one problem that F1 has in the modern era is for a variety of different technological reasons. Like sometimes there will be cars that are just vastly better than the others out on the track. And so they will pull out into the lead and they will go off into the distance. And then like the race doesn't feel that interesting. Like if you really care a lot about who's fighting for 10th place for points, you can get interested. But otherwise, you might just kind of tune it out and go get your champagne.
JVL01:04:00This is like the Red Bull thing, right? Like Red Bull has gotten overly dominant.
Guest01:04:06That was the case a few years ago. This year is actually a really exciting year in F1 because unlike those Red Bull years where suddenly Max Verstappen would win the first like five races and it would just be done, there is a real open question about who will win the driver's championship this year. Max is in the mix, but there are also two drivers at McLaren who are really excellent there in a car that is a rocket ship and they're both pretty evenly matched as drivers. And so I don't know who will be the world driver's champion this year, and that's very exciting.
Sonny01:04:34I'm sorry, I just want to loop back to something that Kristen said about Lewis Hamilton being a producer on this movie. Is that one problem the movie does have is that there almost definitionally cannot be external villains in this movie because so many of the drivers are like real drivers in F1. Like, I'm sure there's all sorts of politics like you can't have like real teams be the villains here. So all of all of the all of the drama in the film kind of comes internally between from the tension between Brad Pitt's character and dance and Idris's character like and in addition to that, you have, you know, the shady board member, et cetera, et cetera. But like it does, it does create a mild drama problem where like. You know, you you don't you don't have a villain on the on the track. You need a villain on the track. You need like a Chip Hicks on the track, right?
Guest01:05:34Yes. Well, and they try to create some drama by making the teammates not like each other. And that is actually a thing that happens in real Formula One, where in some ways your biggest competition is not the other drivers. Your biggest competition is the driver. That is your teammate because you are racing in equal machinery and so therefore you and your teammate, if you lose to your teammate, you can't say like, oh, well, they had a better car. They didn't. They had the same car as you. You just lost. So a lot of the biggest rivalries in F1 actually are within the team. So that was somewhat realistic. But I felt like the the beef itself was weird, like the idea that Brad Pitt's character would in any way be blamed for the horrible crash at Monza that like sends sends his teammate to the hospital like there's no universe. In which anybody is like, wow, Brad Pitt is at fault for this guy accelerating down the street too much like that. That was like a plot point that was like, this doesn't make any sense. And then the fact that they like, just become buddies again, because they have a poker game. And they learned that like, oh, your dad died at 13. My dad died at 13. I guess we have to be friends again.
Sonny01:06:45It's a real Martha moment. I think I wrote that in my notebook.
Guest01:06:50So you know that that was a little bit silly, like I don't I loved this movie, but I can't it's perfect by any stretch of the imagination. There's plenty of things about it that are like, oh, come on. But at the same time, it did enough things that just like delighted me and made me happy that I was okay with it. And I'm even okay with the fact that Brad Pitt like, note that I haven't even said his character's name. I don't think during this podcast, like what is his character's name? Sonny, Sonny. Sonny. Oh, that's right. Sonny Hayes. Sonny Hayes. He's just kind of being Brad Pitt like there's so I mentioned that one of the characters is named Ruben. And he goes, Hey, Ruben, I felt like I was watching Ocean's Eleven. Like it made me very happy every time he would say that, but it was just like, oh, this is just Rusty from Ocean's Eleven, but like he's a race car driver.
Sonny01:07:35Okay. No, he is. It's very much Brad Pitt. I mean, look, it's it's a Brad Pitt movie and it's a Joseph Kaczynski movie, really. It's a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. This is a this is a this is like a pure popcorn, big summer entertainer. It's too it's it is like every Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
JVL01:07:54Days of Thunder, European edition.
Sonny01:07:55It's it's 20 minutes too long, probably. And like but you don't really care because moment to moment it is very fun and and everything that is happening on the screen works like it. It is it is perfectly calibrated in that sense that like it's it's never it's never boring. I will say that I like at like two hours and ten minutes, I looked at my watch. I was like, how is the final race not even started yet? I was like I was trying to figure out what was going on there. But like it was. It is it's you know, again, it's like when when you think of summer movie, this is it. This is like the ideal and there's something to be said for that. That's a perfectly acceptable thing to be.
Guest01:08:38Rock and roll. Did any of you really buy that? There are a handful of scenes where it is actually Brad Pitt driving the car, almost like a Tom Cruise. I'm actually from the helicopter thing. Did any of you buy any of that or did it? I always feel fake.
JVL01:08:56Oh, I bought it just fine because I assume they're speeding up. I assume they're doing movie tricks to make it look like he's going faster than he is.
Sonny01:09:07Or or they're just cutting away when it's going into like dangerous curves and stuff. I mean, he's not he's not taking the curves at, you know, 180.
JVL01:09:13Yeah, because you can you know, there are ways to make it look really fast, right? By depending where you put the camera, right? The closer you are down to the to the ground, the closer you are to the wheel.
Guest01:09:24One of the things that as someone who watches the sport very closely did start to bother me when I noticed it, and I didn't hold it against the movie, I get why they did it. But most of the time you and you see that car, it's not an F1 car, it's an F2 car. You can tell the difference because it's an F2 car is when the flames come out the back. There's no flames that come out the back of a real F1 car. But there are real flames that come out the back of an F2 car. And so you can see like they just shot to shot, they would change like they'd show the back of the car and it wouldn't have the flames, it would be a normal F1 car. And then in another shot, you'd see like the flames coming out from behind Brad Pitt's head. I'm like, oh, now he's driving the F2 car. Okay, I get it. There's like one of the only little details that like, I get why they got it wrong. You can't really drive one of these hundred gazillion dollar cars or even the stunt drivers can't.
Sonny01:10:12But Joseph Kaczynski said in an interview for promote while promoting this that like, you know, we did not want like Tom Cruise had expressed some interest in being in this movie. And it didn't work out. So I did not want Tom Cruise in this movie because if he had been put behind the wheel of one of these cars, he would have wanted to do it all and he would have killed himself. Like it was, you know, I would assume that's just not it's, you know, I did not. I did not assume that Brad Pitt was driving the whole time. I also just didn't. I don't care that that it is that you got any more questions.
JVL01:10:50No, no, I'm good. I got everything I wanted.
Sonny01:10:53All right. Yeah. Well, I think we all enjoyed F1. I think that was a it was a fun. It's a fun episode. And Kristen, thank you for being on today to walk us through the ins and outs and what have yous.
JVL01:11:08The only reason I was willing to do this movie was because I was excited to have you on the
Guest01:11:12show. Oh, I'm so touched. I hope you enjoyed it again. As soon as he handed back that role or was like, I'm not taking the Rolex. I was like, JP, I was going to walk out of the theater.
JVL01:11:22No, I just thought to myself. Yeah. Who? Who is his deal with? Because he's not allowed to wear a Rolex on screen.
Sonny01:11:30Yeah. All right. Make sure to go sign up at Subbeacon.com and we'll we'll see you guys over in the comments. Make sure you say nice things to Kristen. It's always good to have her on the show. I I do I my only my only real car thought after seeing this movie. It ties dovetails into something again that I've seen Jerry Bruckheimer say, which is that he wants to do. He wants to do an F1 the movie Days of Thunder mashup event film, which frankly I think makes a lot of sense. I think you could do that. There's no reason you couldn't do that. Right. You could just have F1 cars racing stock cars.
JVL01:12:15Oh, like Aliens versus Predators. Yeah. Like Aliens versus Predators. Or, you know, I would like that movie just to just so we could do a show with Kristen's screaming. Like three hours.
Guest01:12:29So if you do want to watch a race where there's multiple different types of car on the track at the same time, endurance race, actually endurance racing does this like watch the 24 hours of Daytona is it is they are not all in the same type of car. There are hyper cars which are super fancy. There are one step down from that. And then they have like GTs, which are just like fancy sports cars. And even within that. They have some teams that are all professional drivers, and they have some teams where they require that one of your drivers be an amateur pro and this creates like demolition derby type conditions out on the track frequently.
Sonny01:13:06I'm sure it's fine.
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