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#45. The Substandard on Transformers, Michael Bay, and Fireworks!
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Dudes Chatting — Michael Bay's oeuvre, fireworks, and The Dark Knight in the classroom: The episode marks a return from a hiatus. JVL opens by recounting two trips away: to the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs and then to New Haven, where he taught a week-long course on politics and pop culture to high school students. The class's resistance to his "the Empire is good" thesis is understandable, but he is genuinely baffled that the same students who rejected imperial order believed the Joker is the real hero of The Dark Knight because "he doesn't lie." JVL uses this as a springboard to discuss the noble lie at the end of The Dark Knight and Nolan's trilogy. Vic then interjects that he showed his son The Dark Knight for the first time and his son immediately recommended the prisoners be blown up on the boat. The episode's centerpiece is Michael Bay: Sonny gives a sustained analytical defense of Bay as a genuine auteur under the auteur theory — a director with a legible signature style, a recognizable shot (the swooping 360), a consistent editing method, and a coherent ideological worldview that Sonny characterizes as populist, anti-interventionist, and suspicious of the global order. JVL links to (and promises to put in show notes) the legendary fake Michael Bay blog's script treatments of Snakes on a Plane and The Dark Knight. Michael Bay filmography rankings: Sonny — Pain and Gain first, The Rock second, Armageddon third; Vic — the second act of Pearl Harbor (the actual attack sequence) and parts of The Rock; JVL nominates The Island as underrated within the Bay canon.
Reviews: Transformers: The Last Knight — Sonny calls it simultaneously a zero-star and four-star movie: totally incomprehensible, with no spatial coherence, yet an overwhelming sensory experience he compares to riding a roller coaster on meth; he names Anthony Hopkins' gleefully unhinged performance as the film's genuine highlight. JVL walked out with approximately five minutes remaining, having waged what he describes as a battle of wills with Michael Bay — he catalogs a sequence set in an "abandoned town" in South Dakota featuring a 40-story office building with an active janitor, followed by a giant cathedral with a broken toilet in its dome, as evidence of Bay's active contempt for his audience.
Box Office: Despicable Me 3 opens to over $72 million; Baby Driver takes second at $21 million; Transformers: The Last Knight suffers a 62% second-weekend drop and has earned just over $100 million domestically against a massive budget, while performing strongly overseas.
Corrections: Vic corrects a prior episode's claim that Lucy was the scary vampire in the 1979 Frank Langella Dracula — it was actually Mina. Spirit of the Week: Schöfferhofer Grapefruit Hefeweizen, which Sonny tried for the first time and found insufficiently beer-like.
Full transcript
JVL00:00:00Last season on The Substandard.
Sonny00:00:09Number 19, Michael Crichton. Number 18, Michael Gambon. Number 17, Michael Bay. Number 16, Michael Jordan. Number 15, Michael Jackson.
Vic00:00:26And he said, oh yeah, I got some hot buttered corn.
JVL00:00:32Everyone knows King Arthur wasn't a chav. What this movie presupposes is, maybe he was.
Sonny00:00:40And that's why you should kill a hobo at least once. Bam.
Vic00:00:44Hello and welcome back to The Substandard, sponsored by Dollar Shave Club. Stop spending a fortune on gimmicky shave tech you don't need. Make the smarter choice by joining Dollar Shave Club. Get your first month for only five bucks. We'll see you next time. with free shipping by going to dollarshaveclub.com slash substandard. That's dollarshaveclub.com slash substandard. I'm Victor Matus along with Jonathan V. Last and Sonny Bunch. I'd like to remind you The Substandard is available on iTunes and Google Play. Just look at a podcast and search for The Substandard. You'll easily find us. Please subscribe. Tell your friends. Leave a review. In addition, we'd like to remind you The Substandard show notes posted by Jonathan Last are sometimes available every Friday at 11 a.m. at 11 a.m. That's TheWeeklyStandard.com.
JVL00:01:29They will be this week.
Vic00:01:30This week's show notes are actually going to be... We will have show notes. Excellent.
JVL00:01:32They're not just going to have show notes, but they're going to be so great. Oh, man. I've already done like half of them. Woo! It's going to be amazing. We're back!
Vic00:01:39As the guy from Raiders of the Lost Ark would say, what shall we talk about? I am sure our listeners are all wondering where we've been. And specifically, I'd like to know where JVL has been. You're like Don Draper. Did you go out racing cars in the desert? Did you join the... Hippie Commune? Tell us.
JVL00:01:58So we were gone mostly because of my fault. I had to go away to... I was in beautiful Colorado Springs, Colorado. And at the Broadmoor Hotel. Never been. It was really very nice. And then I spent last week in lovely New Haven, Connecticut, teaching for a week. Teaching a bunch of very nice, very smart high school kids who were a little bit morally confused. But other than that, we're really lovely. In what way? Do elaborate, please. It was a class on politics and pop culture. And these children were resistant to our argument as to why the Empire and Star Wars is good. Which is fine.
Sonny00:02:41They're callow youths. They must be taught the ways.
JVL00:02:43I don't mind that. But hold this in your head at the same time. They could not see the Empire from Star Wars as good, yet they thought the Joker was the real hero of the Dark Knight. Do you know why? Because he doesn't lie.
Sonny00:02:59Except for his face. Except for how he sliced up his face. But all he does is lie. He lies to Batman. But not to the people.
JVL00:03:07He's not a phony with fake rules of society. So you think the Joker is holding Caulfield. And she's like, yes! Yes! That's why.
Sonny00:03:17Children are the goddamn worst.
JVL00:03:20But this was your job, to shape these minds. This is an interesting... An interesting window into the mind of the millennial is that one of the things that upset them most... I mean, so The Dark Knight is a movie about compromises and about the ways in which people trying to defend the liberal order can themselves be compromised when faced with an illiberal threat. And one of the things that this class of 20 kids, again, very smart, very nice kids, all were universally upset about was the lie about Harvey Dent at the end of the movie. Because the people of Gotham had the right to know the truth about him. Like, any aspect of, like, well, you know, but in order to get Gotham, like, cleaned up, you have to have a noble lie like that. They did not like the idea of the noble lie.
Sonny00:04:05Well, and this is, but then this is, of course, kind of the meta point of the third movie, right? Which is that the noble lie is in and of itself bad. Right? Is that one of the... That it can undermine the order. I don't know. This is something, this is, well, this is, I know... All lies have consequences. This is an argument that our... That's certainly true. This is an argument that our friend Matt Continetti makes, that the third movie essentially makes the argument that the noble lie is bad. And that it undermines the order too much. Undermines the order more than, like, upholding the noble lie. I don't agree with this, obviously. This is one of the reasons why...
JVL00:04:42I don't think I agree with that. I would agree halfway, right? The noble lie has consequences, and you don't get to do it for free.
Vic00:04:49I allowed Michael to watch The Dark Knight for the first time.
JVL00:04:53Are you kidding? No. We watched it over the weekend. When we were up in Jersey. What sort of parent are you?
Vic00:04:58He was a little scared of the joke. He's like, which is scarier, aliens or Dark Knight? I'm like, well, that's hard to compare. I said, the alien's more vicious. But, you know, the Joker is really sort of psychologically terrifying. And he wanted to watch it anyway. And he covered... He didn't want to see the part where, you know, he knifes the gangster, I think, in the face. But, you know, the scene where the two boats go out. Michael immediately said, well, blow up the prisoners.
JVL00:05:24He's a hard-headed realist. No, but... And then his prediction was they were going to blow each other up. Realpolitik from Michael Matus.
Vic00:05:29They're going to blow each other up at the same time. And that was what he predicted. At the same time, both ships are going to blow up. And I said...
JVL00:05:35Did he have nightmares about the Joker?
Sonny00:05:36No, no, no.
Vic00:05:37But he... In fact, I think the next day, he, me, and we... My mother, of course, took them all to Toys R Us and he bought a Lego Batman. Well, that's good.
JVL00:05:45So you've successfully desensitized your children to even the level of violence in The Dark Knight.
Vic00:05:50He was a little scared about Harvey Dent. And then I explained about, again, the Noble Eye. Why they had to do this and what's happening to Batman right now. And he's going to be, you know, sort of, you know, being hunted. And they have... But, you know, it's for the good of the city. But it's very deep points. Did you manage to convince the students, JVL, of your point?
JVL00:06:10Ah, hard to say. Hard to say. One of our listeners is the guy who runs this program, Rabbi Gottlieb, who's a really great guy. I wish I could have co-taught this course with him because he knows a lot about pop culture. And I am hoping to hear from them. There's a two-week course I taught. Last week, they're doing the second week now. And I hope to hear from him at the end of the week as to whether or not I had any effect whatsoever. It was kind of neat. I went out and bought the kids, like, little souvenirs. I got them all comic books that I thoughtfully chose for them, mostly individually. And then after the class, the kids came up to me. They're like, oh, Mr. I'm sorry, Professor Lass. Oh, they did call you Professor. Professor Lass. Did they really? Would you sign my comic book for me?
Sonny00:06:49Oh, that's very sweet. Wait, was that the greatest moment of your entire life, signing a comic book? It was pretty good. Signing... Signing a comic with somebody else.
Vic00:06:56Did anyone call you Doctor? Doctor Lass? Did anyone... Did that happen? No, it was all Professor Lass. Did you like being a professor?
JVL00:07:04I did. I really enjoyed it.
Sonny00:07:05Did you tell them about our podcast? Did you shill our podcast to your impressionable young children? Most importantly...
JVL00:07:11No, I...
Sonny00:07:14Captive audience, man.
JVL00:07:16Yeah. One of them found me on Twitter. I made the mistake of tweeting about them, like, just once. And one of them found me on Twitter. I was like, oh, look. We're famous. We're famous. And I was like, oh, God, okay.
Vic00:07:28I gotta stop tweeting about my class. Oh, that's adorable. Let me ask you this question. When you left the class for the last time, did any of the students stand up on their desks and say, oh, Captain... Oh, Captain, my Captain.
Sonny00:07:37Oh, God. No. All right.
Vic00:07:39I did host a...
JVL00:07:41Because I'm picturing Dead Poets Society. The best moment of the class, though, was I hosted a screening of The Dark Knight, one of the nights for the class, so we all could watch it together. And the kids were really jazzed by it.
Vic00:07:52Was it the first time for any of them? I went to see it. For most of them. Wow. Wow.
JVL00:07:58Yeah.
Vic00:07:59Well, this is a weird thought, because were they juniors, seniors, sophomores?
JVL00:08:03A split between rising seniors and recently graduated seniors.
Vic00:08:06So these are kids who might have been born in 99, 98?
Sonny00:08:10So the kids who were like 10 when the movie came out, basically. 2000? Yes. 8, 9, 10, somewhere in that range.
JVL00:08:16Kids with no recollection of 9-11 or anything like that.
Sonny00:08:19None.
JVL00:08:19I mean, and no recollection of 9-11 and barely even an understanding of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And for them, the Cold War is what, to us, Vietnam was. Just something that happened in the distant past.
Vic00:08:33Yeah. And speaking of, you mentioned Continetti. He was up there, too, teaching with you.
JVL00:08:38Matt and I were up together. We had dinner almost every night together. It was excellent.
Vic00:08:41I picture him to be like the dean in Dead Poets Society.
Sonny00:08:43Mr. Anderson, sit down, at the end. No, the kids love him.
JVL00:08:46He's such a celebrity. I had one of them come to me. He was like, so do you know Professor Continetti?
Sonny00:08:53And I was like, yeah. It's the power of TV, man. It was something else.
JVL00:08:56No, no, it wasn't even TV. This was because of The Beacon. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. No, the kids love The Beacon. We're huge. We're huge. We're the kids. Huge among the kids. That's good. That's the demographic.
Sonny00:09:06That's freebeacon.com. Everyone's got a free beacon. Well, good for you, JVL. All right. Good for you. How was your weekend, Vic?
Vic00:09:12I was going to say, Sonny, how was yours? Well, why don't you go first? You go first. How was your weekend? Well, my weekend was wonderful. If you want to go back several weekends since we've been away for some time. I don't know that we need a day-by-day breakdown. It was not a day-by-day, but I had two trips to Jersey. I was up at the- Can you rank the days since we were off?
JVL00:09:27Yes.
Vic00:09:28Number one, June 22nd. Number two. I was up at Cape May for the first part, and that was for my in-laws. 50th wedding anniversary. They took all of us up there, including our family, Captain Bill Dwyer and his lovely wife, Erin, and their two kids. We had a lovely time at the shore. And then the second time, until yesterday, I went back up to Tom's River to see my parents. Usually, I take the kids to Island Beach State Park, but since I'm not friends with Governor Chris Christie, no park. Oh. No park. No. The sign said, it said, all state parks closed. Did you notice all those signs on the turnpike? Yeah. Yeah. I did. I did. So that was that. But we did go up to your other neck of the woods, JVL, Belmar. Yay, Belmar. And it was a beautiful sunset. That beach was crowded, and I guess that's not technically a public state park or anything.
JVL00:10:19You've got to pay to get onto the beach. Yeah. Yeah.
?00:10:21Yeah.
JVL00:10:21Yeah.
Vic00:10:21So you pay, and it was crowded, but we ate at an Italian restaurant called La Dolce Vita. I love that place. Really? Yeah. Oh, I love that place. Ocean and Forth, I think.
JVL00:10:31And it is, so you would not think this place is on the beach, and yet the food is great. Oh, yeah. It wasn't always this way. Oh, okay. So it's new owners.
Vic00:10:39Yes, they have a new owner, and I saw the thing on their website. So I got the Zuppa di Pesce, and that's just all sorts of seafood on a bed of linguine. It was fantastic. Did you like it there? I did, and then we checked out the new, there's a new bar near the bridge called Marina Grill. Oh, yeah. There was like a band playing on the inside, but it was so big that, I mean, I don't know how many people were there. It was crazy. I mean, we were sitting outside, ran into an old friend of ours that we hadn't seen in a while, and so it was great catching up with him. And in the distance, this is Sunday night, you could see the fireworks happening, just all in the different directions. All in the different places, because it's all staggered. The different towns have it different. Not everyone had it yesterday on the 4th. Sonny, what about you?
Sonny00:11:29I spent most of the 4th of July weekend watching Glow, the new Netflix series on the gorgeous ladies of wrestling.
JVL00:11:36Would you like to know something? What? Yeah, go ahead. I watched the original gorgeous ladies of wrestling in first run. My brother, sister, and I loved it. We thought it was great.
Sonny00:11:45The show's good. It's entertaining. It's fun. Alison Brie. Oh, I like Alison Brie. She's great. Marc Maron, he plays the director of the show, is very, very funny and caustic.
Vic00:11:58He supposedly has a popular podcast from what I hear.
Sonny00:12:01I don't listen to podcasts, so I wouldn't know. But yeah, so I spent a lot of my time watching that. A lot of fun. Everyone should watch it. How many hours? It's short. It's 10 episodes, and they average to about 30 minutes each. So it's five hours. But it's really good. You really like it? It's good, yeah. I mean, we knocked it out in about three nights. And then last night, I was up till, like, one in the morning because my dog was terrified because jackasses were shooting off fireworks around my neighborhood.
Vic00:12:30Well, let's talk about the fireworks for a little bit. Sonny, do you want to?
Sonny00:12:34Well, here's the thing. What's going on here? Look, I'm, like, not a big fireworks person. Like, whatever. If you want to go to the big shows, fine. If you want to watch it on TV with the orchestral accompaniment, fine. That's, you know, whatever. I'm not going to judge you for your weird viewing habits. Like, the people who live in residential neighborhoods and shoot their fireworks off into the sky or are surrounded by, you know, people who are trying to sleep and have small children, have dogs, whatever, are literally the worst people on the face of the planet. And I used to think this, you know, growing up in, like, the suburbs and kind of out in the country, I used to think this was kind of a white trash thing, frankly. That it was, like, this is what, you know, people did because they like to see bright, bright lights and loud noises, and they're easily amused. And then I moved into Washington, D.C., and I realized it's just a trash thing. There's no racial component, because one of the nice things about living in D.C. on the 4th of July is that you get to play a fun game called Fireworks or Gunshots. And this goes on for, like, a week. It goes on for, you know, like, three or four days before, three or four days after, as everybody's running through their supplies that they didn't shoot off. And I thought it was, like, annoying, but whatever. When I was slightly younger, once I got a dog, it became actively angering, because, like, the dog freaks out any time there's, you know, fireworks. She hates them. Hates them. Crackling noises. It's, like, digging into my side, trying to get underneath the couch, you know.
Vic00:14:01Your daughter was bothered, though.
Sonny00:14:02Well, fortunately, my daughter sleeps about as heavy as any—she sleeps the sleep of the dead every single night. She still sleeps, like, 12 hours as a two-year-old. That's great. But the dog was terrified. But other people have children who don't sleep this well. And for those poor people, for those poor individuals who have to suffer through, you know, really inconsiderate people just firing things off into the sky at 11, 12 o'clock at night, you know, I just—I want them all to know how bad they are. How bad they are at—
Vic00:14:32Like, in Europe, they, like, fireworks, and then they just throw it. Chuck them at people, and they just throw them into the crowds. You ever notice that? You just—
Sonny00:14:38Just another reason Europe's garbage.
JVL00:14:40Hey, Sonny, did you like the video I sent you this morning?
Sonny00:14:43Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was, like—I was surprised that you were able to capture the trash aesthetic so magnificently.
JVL00:14:51So here's what you don't understand about fireworks. We don't have the option to go to the big fireworks. So where Vic and I grew up in New Jersey, there are no fireworks. Even lighting up a sprinkler is liable to get the police showing up at your house. But what we have is that every single tiny town with a population over 200 has its own fireworks display. And so you can literally walk down to the local high school, and at the football field, they will shoot off awesome fireworks, and it's great. In the People's Republic of Virginia, there is none of that. Everything is organized by county, not by town. And the only way to see real fireworks is to trek into the city, which is a nightmare. Why would you try to do that on the 4th of July? So what happens is, people take this into their own hands. And on my cul-de-sac, when we moved there, we were sort of shocked at about 11 o'clock at night on the July 4th to hear what sounded like the Battle of the Somme out front. And it turns out that I would say my neighbors cumulatively spend probably five grand on fireworks every 4th of July. Wow. And they set them off. And it is, I will put the video in the show notes. It's insane. Yeah. Like, it is not like, oh, you some sparkles. It is a show that compares favorably to what goes on in the National Mall.
Sonny00:16:09No, it doesn't. What you just said is a good case for radically increasing the tax rates in this country, frankly. If we have people blowing five grand on this nonsense, then we are massively undercutting our taxed country.
JVL00:16:22That's a very Matt Iglesias point.
Sonny00:16:23Yeah. Well.
JVL00:16:24It's a, no, it's amazing. And it's wonderful. And my, so my, so this starts, so last night, so for us on our cul-de-sac, the fireworks begin at about 6 p.m. and don't really end until 11. So it's really like five hours worth. And it starts with the sparklers and the morning glories. And then it moves on to smoke bombs and poppets. And it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and it builds. And my kids were really into this. I got them, like Cody was running around with a lighter. We were lighting off fireworks. And, and he was just enjoying it until we got to the illegal stuff. Because we have half of the, half the neighborhood goes down to South Carolina for their illegal fireworks. The other half goes to Pennsylvania. And when the first illegal, the first illegal one gets shot off, my kid just jumps into the air and shouts, America! He is essentially like Sean William Scott in old school when Will Ferrell trains himself. That sort of just, you know, overloaded, yes, that's awesome. And it's great. We got to teach kids about danger, teach them about consequences.
Sonny00:17:30Remember when that football player blew up his hand playing with fireworks? Yeah, no kidding. I was glad when that happened because he deserved it for playing with fireworks.
JVL00:17:37I talked to my, it is amazing to me that nobody's ever died on our cul-de-sac.
Vic00:17:41What was that? Was that a bottle rocket that he had in his hand or something? I have no, I don't remember. Because we used to fire him at each other, my friends and I. Actually, they just used to fire him at me. Yeah, right.
Sonny00:17:49They would let you run. They would run around in like a little pen. Yes, yes.
Vic00:17:54Usually I think my buddy Todd Paldino or Josh Buckley, hey Vic, here it comes. And there comes the fire, you know, thing. And in one time. Because you were such a good boy, you would never do fireworks. No, one time one of us put a firework like a bottle rocket into the hibachi grill while my friend Steve Rusher was grilling. No. Yeah, well.
JVL00:18:10What happened?
Vic00:18:11Well, it just blew up and he goes, oh, there it was, you know, and just continued cooking. Did it break the hibachi? No. Didn't crack it? Yeah, that was a small enough thing, but you know, we were crazy like that. But the, you know, when I was a kid. I went to.
Sonny00:18:21Did it hurt the infrared rays? The laser rays cooking the meat?
Vic00:18:26It was a rusty hibachi. I don't think it was affected at all. And it, you know, added flavor. It added flavor to the. Smoke. It was like, it was like fire, fire crackly. When I was a kid, we actually, I remember going to New York and seeing the 4th of July fireworks in the 80s on the East River. And I actually remember seeing Ed Koch on the boat going by and waving at everybody. But I was going to say three times I've done. The fireworks on the mall. And I would never do it again at my age, but I did it when I was in college and then a little bit after college. And the first time I did it was the summer of 92 and everybody drank and I wasn't even of age, but everybody drank on the mall. I think it was like open containers or the police just didn't care. And even in the late 90s, the next two times we did it, then they started to crack down and you sort of had to smuggle in and like what looked like water, but was in fact gin or vodka. And the thing is, this. This is all pre-9-11, so cops were searching backpacks for booze, not for bombs. They were just looking for booze. And I remember back in the day, it was great. Everybody had fun. Everybody got drunk. And then there was fireworks galore. But as soon as the fireworks ended, chaos. All of a sudden, the helicopter comes out with the spotlight on there with my buddy Todd and some of my other buddies. And then you have the mounted police and then women are flashing and men are just peeing while they're watching. I kind of miss those days.
JVL00:19:54Imagine what it was like in the 70s.
Sonny00:19:55What is this? What is this hellscape? That was on the mall.
Vic00:19:58It was on the mall. That was the mall.
JVL00:20:00Imagine it in 1978.
Vic00:20:02No, yeah. It was pretty crazy. But of course, they cracked down. And I guess it was a smart choice for the city to have it less boozy and less chaotic. But you know what else is a smart choice? The Dollar Shave Club is a smart choice. You'll get a great shave at a great price. Conveniently delivered right to your door. It's a no-brainer choice. You no longer have to schlep to the store to buy a cheap disposable razor that gives you a cheap shave or spend a fortune on razors with gimmicky shaving tech you didn't need. When I use my Dollar Shave Club executive razor with their Dr. Carver's Shave Butter, the blade glides ever so gently. It gives me such a smooth shave. Plus, their Dr. Carver's Shave Butter is transparent for a more precise shave. Helps prevent ingrown hairs. Fights razor bumps. Now, listeners to The Substandard Podcast can make the smarter choice by joining Dollar Shave Club. For a limited time, new members get their first month of the executive razor with a tube of their Dr. Carver's Shave Butter for only $5 with free shipping. After that, razors are just a few bucks a month. That's a $15 value for only five bucks. In your first month box, you get an awesome weighty handle, a full cassette of four cartridges and a tube of their shave butter. After your first month, replacement cartridges ship automatically at their regular price. There are no... There are no hidden fees and no commitments. Cancel any time you like, but why would you? You can only get this offer exclusively at dollarshaveclub.com slash substandard. That's dollarshaveclub.com slash substandard. Normally also this weekend, the 4th of July is also a big weekend for movies. Yes. And it was a huge weekend for Despicable Me 3, which did more than $72 million, followed by Baby Driver at $21 million. Confused by Boss Baby.
Sonny00:21:52Right.
Vic00:21:52Although that would be an interesting movie. Boss Baby Driver. Boss Baby Driver. That's next.
Sonny00:21:56That's the sequel. This is the Baby Trilogy. You've got Boss Baby, then Baby Driver, and then...
Vic00:22:00Million dollar Boss Baby Driver. There you go. Directed by Clint Eastwood. And then Transformers 5, which has been out for two weeks, but it's suffered a 62% drop. That's shocking. So it's done a little over... Utterly shocking. It's done a little over $100 million with a $200 billion budget or something. Who saw it? JVL, did you see this?
Sonny00:22:18It's made so much money overseas. Over to China. It made a zillion. Yeah, you ran through the numbers here pretty quickly. You skipped over Wonder Woman.
Vic00:22:25Wow.
Sonny00:22:26Which... Closing on $17 billion. Which could eclipse Guardians of the Galaxy 2 shortly here, which would be a pretty big win.
JVL00:22:37Which would be amazing, because Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is a piece of trash, and Wonder Woman is an okay movie. So it would be nice to see merit winning out for once.
Sonny00:22:45The idea that good movies make more money than bad movies is not an idea that has been proven. In recent years. This is why I'm saying it would be great.
JVL00:22:52I am in favor of it.
Vic00:22:54It has so far been that kind of a summer. Yeah. You see the... I did. I assume you did it.
Sonny00:22:59I did. We both saw it. JBL and I have both seen Transfivers. Oh my gosh. So do you want to go...
JVL00:23:06You know, that makes it sound like it might be a different kind of movie. Careful. Transfiver.
Sonny00:23:11Careful, JBL.
Vic00:23:12More than meets the eye.
Sonny00:23:14Careful. Careful. I don't want to get canceled first episode. Back into our season 1.5 here.
Vic00:23:23The robot actually identifies as a truck. Okay. Sorry.
Sonny00:23:28Very nice. Thank you. Okay.
JVL00:23:29Sonny. Please. Would you like to do the big boy review and then we'll talk about it, Sonny?
Sonny00:23:35JBL, do you want to review it? Because you also saw it. I don't want to step on your... No, I just... I mean, I have some opinions. Okay. So I don't really know how to review this movie for a podcast. I wrote a review. You can... JBL can put it in show notes. You can look at my... archive at the free beacon, freebeacon.com, everyone, if you want to read it. The problem with describing this movie in any sort of, like, serious way is that the plot is totally incomprehensible and, like, utter lunacy. It basically starts in the ye olden days where King Arthur is trying to fight back some invading hordes and to fight off the hordes, Merlin... A drunk Stanley Tucci played with... Like, every other part in this movie, like, played amusingly over the top. Like, the good actors play their stuff amusingly over the top and the bad actors play it kind of seriously and straight. And, anyway, Merlin comes back with some robots that have transformed into a dragon and sort of swoop down and destroy all the invaders.
JVL00:24:45No, no, I'm sorry. I have to correct you. Yeah. The robots have not transformed into a dragon. The robots naturally occur in the form of a dragon.
Sonny00:24:53I don't think that's right. I think they combine... The 12 robots combine into the form of a dragon. I think that is actually how it works. See, this is the problem, is that nobody has any idea how it works because this movie is so, like, incomprehensibly put together that it just doesn't make any sense. Anyway, flash forward to the future where Transformers are still coming to Earth for some reason and the governments of the world have created a new world... This is literally what they call it, a new world order to... To destroy and take out all of these things, except on the lovely beaches of Cuba, where they hang out and, like, kick soccer balls around and stuff. Long story short, Mark Wahlberg is running around trying to save the few Autobots that he can. The U.S. government decides to team up with the Decepticons for some reason to get some sort of weapon. And Optimus Prime is out in space and he brings back Unicron, I think, or maybe Earth is Unicron? I don't know. He brings back... A lady Transformer. The only lady Transformer. There's the squid lady Transformer. There's the squid lady Transformer that he brings back that is basically... It's the only Transformer that is a woman in the series and she's basically a succubus. Is that... Can we... Yes. She's a robot succubus.
Vic00:26:03Okay, now I'm interested. Continue.
Sonny00:26:06So, anyway... She has tentacles, Vic. Yeah. Basically. And automated. Amazing. Anyway, the movie is... If you're going to this movie for the plot, you're a fool. Because what is more interesting about this film is the way... That it kind of washes over you as a cinematic experience. It is... This is... This is a movie where you come out of it and I literally was kind of woozy on my legs a little bit. I was like stumbling, almost like I was a little bit drunk. My heart rate had increased. My pulse was pounding. As I described it, the best way to think about this is like riding a roller coaster on meth. Or like going into one of those wind tunnel generators. And just setting it to like Hurricane Category 5. And like standing there and letting it wash over you. I just don't... There's... And it's funny. And it's... But it like is just an experience. It's an experience. And as such, it is kind of like... It's not critic proof in the normal way that these movies are critic proof. It's critic proof in the way that like... How do you criticize a sensation? You know? How do you like just quantify just how... How incredibly insane all of this is? I don't know. I don't know.
JVL00:27:24See, I... JVL. I felt that way about the first Transformers. Which... I... At the time I wrote it, it was as though Michael Bay had created the holy grail for Hollywood. Which is that a movie which simply cannot be judged by any standards. Intellectual, philosophical, moral. It simply is.
Vic00:27:44And that that was sort of a fun thing.
JVL00:27:47This is different.
Sonny00:27:49But I would say... Compared to the first Transformers movie, which had like an actual story and a plot and some stakes. And like things happen in it that make sense. This movie makes no sense at all. There's nothing in this movie that makes sense.
Vic00:28:04So JVL, did you like the movie? Or what did you think?
JVL00:28:07So when's the last time you walked out of a movie, Sonny? I've never walked out of a movie.
Sonny00:28:13I've actually... I've literally never walked out of a movie.
JVL00:28:15I think I've walked out of movies once, possibly twice. Twice before in my life. Which movies? The one I know I walked out of was like the Night Shift. It's something with Ewan McGregor in it, where somebody was being given an injection to their eyeball. It was like a low-budget Ewan McGregor horror film. And you did? You walked out of that? I walked out because I had no idea what was going on, even like 45 minutes into it. And it was terrible. And I just was like, I'm not reviewing this for somebody. I was here. I didn't pay to see it because I was there as a critic. And I just thought, I'm going to do something else with my evening. I found myself 40 minutes into Transfibers, waging a personal battle of wills with Michael Bay in an effort to stay in the theater. Because I got the sense that he wanted me to walk out. The movie is created with such contempt for the audience. I say this advisedly. I mean, pure contempt for the audience. That it is as if he... He is daring you to walk out. And I was going to not give him the satisfaction. I was going to sit there, and I just kept, like, lock it down. Stay in here. Don't let him win. He already has your money. Don't let him win the battle of wills as well. And I failed.
Sonny00:29:41How far did you make it? I think that there were about five minutes left.
JVL00:29:46And you... Like, no kidding. Like, I looked at my watch. I knew what the run time was. As the ultimate battle royale is about to commence with Optimus Prime on Earth, with the Transformer planet having crashed in, I just tapped out. I said, I can't do this anymore.
Vic00:30:04Was the theater crowded?
JVL00:30:06No, not especially. But on the other hand, it was a very late showing, and it was a weekday. So, I don't know.
Vic00:30:11I mean, I tend to skip these. I saw the first one, and I thought the first one was enough. I mean, the dizzying special effects for me were like emphasis dizzying, if you can get a... A seizure, you know, from... It's just too much. Can I tell you what drove me crazy about this?
JVL00:30:25Sure. And so, when I say content for the audience, I want people to understand, I do not mean that this played fast and loose with physics. I do not mean that the idea of a movie with giant robots fighting in the street is crazy. I do not mean that there's no character arc for any of the characters in the movie whatsoever, or that there's no plot. What do you mean? I assume all of those things. What I mean is that, taken purely on its own terms, this movie fails even the most rudimentary tasks of professional filmmaking. And the scene which brought that home to me, I would like to now describe to you.
Vic00:31:09Okay, sure. Go for it, JVL.
JVL00:31:11The sequence begins in what the title card tells us is The Badlands, South Dakota. The Decepticons come and attack the Autobots. The Autobots flee as cars to a nearby abandoned town. We know it's an abandoned town because we get another character in a scene establishing shot saying they're headed to that abandoned town. Our first establishing shot of the abandoned town is with an elderly African-American gentleman sitting in a chair. I think it's a rocking chair on the porch of his decrepit, falling-down house. And he's sort of staring off in the middle distance. And this is... Okay, so you understand that this is an abandoned town. Your next establishing shot is a sort of aerial view of the two-block downtown street, you know, what is main street of this town. No buildings over, like, two stories. Everything is falling apart. It looks like it was built in the 1930s. And then the robots all start fighting.
Sonny00:32:08So far, so good.
JVL00:32:10You then get a scene during the fight in which, in the background, is a 40-story office building that looks like it was built in 1995. First, I thought to myself, oh, that's an interesting error. They forgot to digitally wipe that thing. And then there's, like, 15 cuts over the next five seconds, and it shows up again. And it was at this moment that I realized, my God, that's not a mistake. This is part of the setting. He's going to do something there. Yeah.
Sonny00:32:37And then they run into it.
JVL00:32:38So they run into this giant, modern 40-story building, which surely is the largest building in all of South Dakota. And in this abandoned town, once the main characters get into the lobby, in the foreground of the shot is a janitor mopping the floors. It gets worse. After the scene in the abandoned 40-story building with the janitor, who is actively caring for the thing, in a small town in South Dakota. Abandoned small town. Abandoned small town. They then move next door to the office building, where there is a giant, but actually abandoned, Catholic cathedral. And I mean giant. It's got spires. It has an enormous dome. It is the size of Chartres. But it's abandoned, at least, because when they get inside, it has cobwebs and dust and stuff. So the main characters get inside the cathedral, and they start to hide, trying to make their way to the highest point in the cathedral. And so they wind up somewhere up inside the dome. And up inside the dome of this cathedral, they find a small set of rooms. In one of these rooms is an abandoned bathroom with, like, a fallen-down, broken toilet. In the dome. And this is what drives me crazy, because these things are not accidents. The plot does not require them. It is not that, you know, in order to make the logic fit or the story work, you have to do this or that. These are active choices made by Michael Bay that have no bearing on anything and make no sense whatsoever. And it is this, as if he is just daring the audience to say, Yeah, you know what? You don't care. You don't care at all. Yeah. You don't care. You wouldn't be in this stupid movie anyway. What are you going to do? Walk out?
Sonny00:34:23Well, here's, I mean, I think you're, you lasted, frankly, longer than anyone could have, if they're, like, trying to make sense of the spatial kind of ordering of the film, right? But you don't even need to make sense of it. The opening, like, the opening sequence in the Dark Ages, I literally could not tell who was attacking who. Oh, yeah. Who was on whose side, where the fireballs were coming from, who, which, I mean, because... It's just sloppiness. The perspective switches... These are active choices. The perspective switches from, but I think it is an active choice. And my friend, my friend Peter Labuza on film, a film critic slash film historian who is on Twitter, at Labuza Movies, he had a very, I think this is a true statement, and whether or not it is a good thing or a bad thing, we can take, but here's a thing he tweeted. Too many film directors try to follow the rules of space. Michael Bay follows the rules of making awesome movies. Now, here's, like... Again, what it comes down to for Michael Bay is he is just putting stuff on the screen. It's like that old... There's an old South Park bit where the military calls in directors to, like, help them muddle their way through a plot, and one of them is M. Night Shyamalan, and he's like, what if the people attacking you are actually aliens? And the general says, well, that's not a plot. That's a twist. That's a movie twist. And then they call in Michael Bay, and he's like, well, what if the guys attacking you are like, and then, like, smash! And then, and then the general says, Mr. Bay, those aren't, that's not a movie. Those aren't plot points. That's, that's just special effects. And, like, that is, that is, I think, the essence of these movies. Now, I think he makes, I think Michael Bay makes other movies that are better, that are not, like, the giant special effects in your face. We are going to assault you and just make you feel the, the, the, the, the pain of all of the millions of souls who have been captured by his camera and are, you know, like the Ark of the Covenant shooting through you. Like, I, I, I.
Vic00:36:26Too bad he didn't direct that movie, Sonny.
Sonny00:36:27Right. Well, I mean, his Raiders of the Lost Ark would be a very different movie. But, like, you know, these movies, these Transformers movies, specifically the Transformers movies, and, like, to a lesser extent, Armageddon and some of the others, are, like, just spectacle, just pure spectacle, overwhelming sensation. And I, there's something to be said for that. Like, I, like, it takes a lot to prompt a reaction from me in the theater, given that I see a hundred movies a year. And this movie prompted a very visceral reaction. Like, literally visceral, like, in my viscera, like, my guts.
JVL00:37:08I, I gotta say, I, I agree with almost all of that. And I understand the spectacle aspect of it. And I appreciate Michael Bay's achievements along that, that vector throughout his oeuvre. Ooh.
Sonny00:37:24How's his mise-en-scene?
JVL00:37:25That said, this movie struck me as, as willfully, as I said, contemptuously made.
Sonny00:37:35But, and, and I, that almost makes me respect it more, frankly. Like, I, like, honestly, I know. But, I mean, like, I, I, I don't like the Transformers movies. I gave the, I gave each of the Transformers movies, you know, between one and two stars when they came out. Yeah. Until this one, which is, like, so aggressively over-the-top and just jolting and face-punchingly, you know, awesome. Just awesome. That, uh, it is both, as I said in my review, which, again, you can, you can find on the internet somewhere, it is, like, simultaneously a zero and four star movie. It is, like, incompetent in every single way, and yet overwhelming and amazing and incredible.
JVL00:38:14It is, it is Schrodinger's movie. I don't even know how to, so if you're gonna rank the Transformers movie, I mean... You would make this number one? I would, this would be my number one.
Sonny00:38:23This would be number one. Yeah.
Vic00:38:27Okay. Now, let me ask this, JVL, since you walked out of the movie, Sonny, did you stay all the way to the end for Stiggers? Do they have Stiggers at Transformer movies?
Sonny00:38:34There was, like, an, there was an inter-credit sequence. Okay. There was, like, a mid-credit scene. Maybe there was a post-credit scene. I didn't, I didn't stick around. Was John Turturro in it? No, it's, like, so the Lady Transformer has transformed into a human and is wandering the Earth and, like, amassing an army or something. I don't know.
Vic00:38:50In other words, they're making way for Transformers Part 6.
Sonny00:38:53Oh, there's definitely going to be another Transformers movie. So there's already, they're already working on, like, a stand-alone Bumblebee movie. I don't know how that'll work, but, you know. Can we talk about the one thing that I, that I really actually love, unironically love about this movie is Anthony Hopkins' performance, which is so insane and over the top. How is Sir Anthony Hopkins, is it one of his best performances? My favorite thing, my favorite thing is when he's, he's in, he's being driven in a car that's doing, like, 90 on the streets of London and, like, cop cars. And the cars come up next to him and he does, like, an old man flip-off and it's amazing. He's just like, ah. And it, like, it was, I was just like, all right, you're clearly having a lot of fun, Sir Anthony. You're having a great time here. I'm having a great time here. We're all having a great time here. This is great. Thank you.
Vic00:39:37Are there Michael Bay movies that we actually like?
Sonny00:39:42I like a lot of Michael Bay movies. I mean, The Rock and Armageddon are...
Vic00:39:47I like parts of The Rock. I find Armageddon, again, seizure-reducing. There's no scene that lasts longer than, what, four seconds?
JVL00:39:54Four? Should we go straight to the ranking? I mean, I want to talk about Michael Bay, qua Michael Bay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. But we could do ranking first.
Sonny00:40:03Well, why don't you, well, say what you want to say.
JVL00:40:06I don't even have, like, things to say. I have, like, things about him. Do you remember, Sonny, is this before your time? I mean, it is before your time, but maybe you would have picked up on it. There was a moment, circa 2005, right when The Island came out, when Michael Bay became, became a point of parody on the internet. And it basically was the most clever thing the internet has ever done. There was somebody who ran the Michael Bay blog. I don't remember that, no. And the Michael Bay blog was a blog as if written by Michael Bay. And it was unbelievably profane. That's right, it was fantastic. And unbelievably awesome. And the high point of it was a script treatment that must have been 5,000 words long. Where the fake Michael Bay blog said, Yeah, so me and the boys at Platinum Dunes went and worked up our own treatment of Snakes on a Plane. This is years before Snakes on a Plane was made. And the Michael Bay script treatment, fake Michael Bay script treatment of Snakes on a Plane is unbelievable. It is the most perfect parody maybe ever. Is it still on the internet? You know what? I made this sort of a personal project and I found a version of it cached somewhere and I went and published it on my site. I will link to it. In show notes. This is why I said show notes are going to be awesome because there's all this fake Michael Bay stuff. And all you need to know is in the Michael Bay, the fake Michael Bay treatment of Snakes on a Plane, the main character is a cop whose partner was killed by snakes while they were being tortured by Haitian drug dealers. And they get on the plane and the snakes who have taken over the plane have been trained to fly the plane because they're going to commit terrorism. But there's one snake on the plane who's good and his name is Ace. And he and the cop forge an unlikely friendship and bond as they fight together to beat the bad snakes on the plane. It's amazing. Like Turner and Hooch, but
Sonny00:41:57with a snake. The only problem with this, and I'm sure Michael Bay would actually be able to overcome it, but the signature Michael Bay swooping 360 shot from below to above would not really work in the fuselage of an airplane. I don't know how you would First off, I don't know how you would create the I guess you could create the parallax effect with the with the seats kind of mimicking against where the windows are. Anyway, it would work. Actually, I take it back. This is the greatest thing I've ever heard. This sounds amazing.
JVL00:42:28The other greatest thing is, somebody again, I have a link to it. I will put this in the show notes. Did the Michael Bay script treatment for The Dark Knight. And it's amazing because this is actually not a script treatment. It's a real script. It's not the whole thing. It's like 10 pages of script with all the cuts in it. And it's I can't even tell you how great it is. There's a great scene where Bruce Wayne, and again he includes music cues in it. Fake Michael Bay. People understand this is not real Michael Bay. And there's a scene in it where the general is explaining to Bruce Wayne what the Joker has done and how he's taken over the internet. And Bruce Wayne says, well there's only one thing we can do. We gotta hack the internet. The general says, hack the internet. That's never been done before. Which one will we even hack? And Bruce Wayne's says, all of them. It's so great. That would work in that kind of a film. It's really, and this is the hype for me the high point of Michael Bay is the fact that we have these great Michael Bay parodies. But there is a school of people, like an actual school of people who take him seriously. I don't know, the Criterion Collection does Michael Bay movies.
Sonny00:43:43So look, whatever you want to say about Michael Bay, if you believe that the auteur theory is a thing, that the director has the ultimate imprint on a film, and that there are people who, like there are people who work in Hollywood movies who use like the Hollywood system to kind of make their own ideas known, and you know, working through a if you believe in the auteur theory, then Michael Bay is a prime example of it. I mean, he has a style, he has a signature style, he has a signature shot, he has a signature editing method, he has a signature, and he has ideas that he kind of works through throughout his films. He's like a very populist filmmaker. You can watch five minutes
JVL00:44:30of any Michael Bay movie without knowing anything about it, and know that it's a
Sonny00:44:34Michael Bay movie. Yeah, yeah. And the imitations are always not as good. I mean, the imitations are clearly imitations, they're not the real thing. There's a video out there that you can put in show notes, JBL, called Bayhem, I believe, and it's one of these video essays about like how the Michael Bay aesthetic works. And it kind of shows you like why his movies, why a movie by Michael Bay works and a movie like Battleship doesn't work. Why it feels less epic, why the like swirling 360 shots don't work as well. Anyway, if you, so I do think that there is something to be said for Michael Bay's aesthetic just by itself. It is an interesting thing. It is like kind of a signature that harkens to an era of, you know, kind of post MTV hyper realism. I don't even know how to like, like beyond realism. I don't, I don't know what it, I don't know what it is
JVL00:45:31exactly. It is a view of how the camera should act in an action movie. Yeah. I think it's probably the way of explaining it. That's not a bad way of explaining
Sonny00:45:39it. So, and like I said, he also has, he has like kind of an ideological idea of what the world should be like. For instance, everyone talks about how he is basically a military porn fetishist, which is true. Like he loves like airplanes and tanks and jeeps and guns and bombs.
JVL00:45:58First film director to ever include a specter gunship in a movie. And that was in the second Transformers. Was that in the Transformers, the first Transformers movie? It begins with a specter gunship circling and shredding an insecticon.
Sonny00:46:11And it's amazing. So he loves the military but he also, he's also deeply skeptical of intervention. He is like deeply skeptical of the global order. He is deeply skeptical of, you know, kind of, he is in a way, he is the perfect avatar of the Trump era. And I don't want to get into it more than that. But like he is, it's, you know, even a movie like The Rock, right? A movie like The Rock where the villains are nominally members of the U.S. military. But they have a legitimate gripe. But they have a legitimate gripe and that legitimate gripe involves nonsense overseas, essentially. You know, I mean, it is, it's like, it's, it is, it is, and my whole, my theory on pain and gain, which I think may be his masterpiece, is that this is basically a movie about hyper focused, or an American hyper power in the 1990s that has no focus and just understands bigness and doing big things and can't quite understand why it hasn't succeeded in the ways
JVL00:47:17it wants to. Will you blow this out into a 1500 word essay for me? I could, I, I would
Sonny00:47:21think about, I, I, I. This is your Act 4 column. No, I mean, this is, I've, I've written a version of this somewhere, I think, but I, I can't, I, I have to find it. Why don't you
JVL00:47:29contextualize this and make this your Washington Post column this week, please? Maybe, maybe. I want to read this.
Vic00:47:33Yeah. Did you want to talk about your favorite Michael Bay movies? Vic, will you rank? Rank? Yeah. You can rank
JVL00:47:39all, here's the thing. He only has 13 films. Yeah. 13 feature films, five of which are Transformers movies. Yes, yeah. So you could do. And I think the other five are bad boys, but. So you could do, I mean, you don't have to do all of them, but you could do, if you want to, you can just do me top three, top five.
Vic00:47:55Top of top two. Top two. That's all I got. Okay. Uh, Parts of the Rock. Parts of Parts of the Rock. Because Nicolas Cage, I find too distracting. I love Sean Connery, and almost, almost everything, I think almost everything he's done. Uh, and also, The Rock has two very sympathetic villains, namely, uh, Ed Harris. Mm-hmm. And David Morse. Yeah, David Morse. David Morse, who I've seen him more as a good guy than a bad guy, and even here, at the end he turns out to be kind of good, and again as you said, they're military, but they're not unlikable. Right, well, and they
Sonny00:48:29contrast to the, like, to the real scumbags who are there for the money. Yeah, the mercenaries. Right, they're, like, Ed Harris is like, alright, we're pulling the plug on this, we're not shooting the rocket at the football stadium or whatever. That's right. That's right. The VX. That's right.
Vic00:48:41That's right. And there's the great scene where I guess it is Nicolas Cage who makes the, one of the villains swallow the green ball. Yeah. That's okay. It's gonna go anyway, that's a good way for that to happen. And the other movie then, on the top spot, is the second act of Pearl Harbor. Assuming that the third act is the Doolittle raid, no. No. The second act, which is the actual attack, I thought was very well, I'll say it was very well done. Yeah. It was very well done. They did things that, you know, Tora, Tora, Tora would have done had they had the power to do it, including as John Podhortz calls it, the money shot. Of the bomb going into
JVL00:49:22the U.S. Arizona. It was amazing how they got the camera to follow that bomb down. It is, and I'm surprised nobody died.
Vic00:49:26I'm surprised nobody died in the crash
JVL00:49:28into the ship. I mean, just being able to work the physics and ballistics of getting a bomb to fall through a smoke stack like that. Just right. But then have the camera following it as well is amazing. You know what?
Vic00:49:40Amazing. Okay. Who's next?
Sonny00:49:43Sonny. I'm not gonna do the whole thing. I'm not gonna run through all of them, but I will do my top three. Three or four. I think that was my phone. Number three, I would say is probably Armageddon. Number two is The Rock, and number one is Pain and Gain. I really think Pain and Gain is like a semi-brilliant film. It's maybe ten minutes too long, and it has some of the Michael Bay issues, but it's got a fantastically funny performance from The Rock. And Mark Wahlberg is great in it. Ed Harris, again, is another good Ed Harris role. I think it is woefully underseen. I think everyone should go see it. It used to be on Netflix. I don't know if it still is. JVM.
JVL00:50:39I would simply say that The Island, I think, is underrated within the Michael Bay. It's what happens when Michael Bay tries to direct a movie with an idea.
Vic00:50:49I'm not saying it's good. That's the Scarlett Johansson, Ewan McGregor.
Sonny00:50:53I don't think I've actually seen the... I don't think I've seen it.
JVL00:50:57It's not good, but it's interesting, because this is what happens when he directs a movie with an idea. It's the only movie he's directed that has an idea in the way that 13 Hours is the only movie that has a plot.
Sonny00:51:09And 13 Hours, I mean, it is very frustrating to watch that opening section of Transfibers in comparison to, say, 13 Hours, which I think is a much more like, carefully edited and, you know, easier to follow action movie than Transformers 5 is.
JVL00:51:33Well, you just
Sonny00:51:33tailed off there, didn't you? Ugh, yeah. Okay.
JVL00:51:37If we're ready to move on.
Vic00:51:39Spirit of the Week. Spirit of the Week. You know, we did an early taping today of The Substandard. Too early for drinks. And, yeah, my stomach's not ready for that right now, or my liver. Well, my liver's been... It's been done for about five years. Early 90s. Yeah, I was about to say that. But, Sonny, you have a Spirit of the Week subject.
Sonny00:51:58Yes. Well, we went out for drinks last week, or maybe the week before. Yeah, we took the interns out. It was nice. Yeah. We did take the interns out. How was it? They did not drink. They were very good. They did not drink.
JVL00:52:10And while we were... Are your interns not drinking age?
Vic00:52:13One of them is the daughter of Weekly Standard Free Beacon friend Jody Bond. Joseph Bottom. No kidding! The one and only, yes. And she's wonderful.
JVL00:52:23Would you like to feel old? Vic, how old was she the first time you met her? I don't know. She was one. I think she was four when I met her. And she's now interning for you. That's right.
Sonny00:52:33So, anyway, we went out and were, you know, having a get-to-know-your-interns lunch. So I ordered a Schufferhofer. Yeah? Yeah! We were at a Belgian place. They had it on tap. It was terrible. It's really bad. JVL, honestly, I don't know how you drink that. This is ridiculous. I thought it was
Vic00:52:54Fanta Orange. It was like,
Sonny00:52:55I mean, it really is like... What a garbage opinion.
Vic00:52:57But like the European Fanta, which is better than
Sonny00:52:59the American Fanta. It's like juice. It's like juice that just... I didn't taste any beer in it at all. It's delightful. It's carbonated grapefruit juice, which, like, if you're into carbonated grapefruit juice, okay. You can have
JVL00:53:11six of them without feeling a thing. It's fantastic. Schufferhofer.
Vic00:53:15Buy one today. Do you taste the... I don't taste the beer in it. Or you're not supposed to taste the beer. I don't know if you are. You know what?
JVL00:53:21Like, the Germans are not into telling you that you're supposed to do this or supposed to do that. They're very laid back. Interesting that the Belgians were serving the Germans beer. Yes.
Vic00:53:32Corrections, additions. I have one. An interesting one, actually. So this goes back to last season. I talked about Dracula starring Frank Langella in 1979. The scary scene I was referring to, I said Lucy, when in fact the terrifying vampire was me to for some reason they switched it from the Bram Stoker and the Francis Ford Coppola version, so I got that wrong. Also, here's a bit of trivia. Who directed Dracula in 1979? I don't know. John Badham.
JVL00:54:03John Badham? The John Badham. My friend John Badham.
Vic00:54:07Isn't that crazy? That's crazy. JVL, Sonny?
JVL00:54:11I don't even remember the last time we took the show, so I don't have any corrections. I'm sure I got things wrong, but I don't have corrections for them.
Vic00:54:17Well then, on that note, I think that's all the time we're going to give to this episode. Questions, comments, complaints, compliments, tweet us at Victorino Matus at Sonny Bunch. Again, be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or Google Play. Just type in Substandard under Podcasts, and we're there. Leave a review. Tell your friends. And don't forget, the Substandard show notes will be up on Friday at 11 a.m. Until next time.
JVL00:54:49It was a good welcome back. Do you have any outtakes?
Vic00:54:55I have one thought, but... Yeah. Sonny, you were going to say something.
Sonny00:55:01Oh, well, I was going to mention a review that we had. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then we didn't do it there at the end, so are we not doing that anymore? No, we hadn't discussed it since we did so far. Everyone should leave reviews.
Vic00:55:15Please leave a review.
JVL00:55:16It matters. Don't worry, I'm going to cut this entire section. Nobody's going to hear any of this.
Vic00:55:21Oh, good. Well, then I'll tell you this part, which is we were sitting around at my parents having a wonderful barbecue, sitting outside, just having a normal conversation, and my dad, sort of out of nowhere, just says, Yeah, did you hear that thing in the news about the guy in Japan who has this wife and they've been married forever, but she doesn't really like him, and she doesn't want to sleep with him anymore? So now this guy has this doll. He brings around a doll everywhere. He goes fishing with her, goes to the park, has sex with a robot doll, and you could do everything with this doll, and it looks realistic. Do you know about this? I said, I have no idea what you're talking about.
JVL00:56:08Did he then ask you if you could find it on the web forum? Yeah, I said, don't worry about it. I'm sure it's fine.
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