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#56. The Substandard on The Dark Tower, Stephen King, and Box Office Blues
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Box Office: Annabelle: Creation opened at #1 with $35M. Dunkirk held strongly at $11.4M in its fourth week. The Dark Tower collapsed to $7.9M in its second frame (a roughly 60% drop), bringing its total to $34M. Overall summer box office is down 10.8% year-over-year. JVL notes that Wolf Warrior 2 has crossed $660M in China, launching a debate about whether global cinema is fracturing along nationalist lines.
Reviews: The Dark Tower — Sonny solo (JVL and Vic both skipped it). Negative on both counts: bad as a film and bad as an adaptation. Sonny argues the movie fatally pivots to make Jake Chambers the protagonist instead of Roland Deschain, turning a mythic western into a YA adventure; the CGI is cheap and the action sequences are uninteresting. His verdict: it should have been an HBO series first, building the world before attempting a feature. Stephen King adaptation rankings follow. Sonny: The Shining #1, Misery #2, Stand by Me #3, The Mist #4, The Shawshank Redemption #5. Vic: The Shawshank Redemption #1, Stand by Me #2, Misery #3, The Dead Zone #4, then The Shining, The Green Mile, The Running Man, Creepshow. JVL offers a theory for why King adaptations so often fail: what makes King great on the page — parenthetical asides, interior monologue, the author's intrusive voice — simply cannot be translated to screen. The Langoliers TV miniseries is cited as evidence.
Dudes Chatting — topic: The episode title is "Dudes Chattin'!" per the show's own label for the Stephen King rankings and Dark Tower discussion, which constitute the main segment.
Closes with a Corrections segment (JVL corrects Vic's claim from episode 55 that Fast Times at Ridgemont High the book could not be found for under $300 — it turns out paperback copies are available via BookFinder for around $83) and Spirit of the Week (Maker's Mark; discussion of the previous week's Old Forester moving units after the show mentioned it, plus anticipation of an Old Forester Statesman bottle tied to Kingsman: The Golden Circle).
Full transcript
Guest00:00:00I do not aim with my hand, I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun.
?00:00:19I kill with my heart.
Vic00:00:28Hello, and welcome back to The Substandard, brought to you 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 $5 with free shipping by going to dollarshaveclub.com slash substandard. I'm Victor Matus, along with Jonathan V. Last and Sonny Bunch. I'd like to remind you that The Substandard is available on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher. Just look on our podcast, search for Substandard. You'll enjoy it. Please subscribe, tell your friends, leave a review. In addition, we'd also like to remind you Substandard show notes are sometimes posted by Jonathan Last on Fridays at 11 a.m. at weeklystandard.com, probably not this Friday.
Sonny00:01:12Yeah, if you listen to the mini-episode, you'll know. That's right. And everyone should listen to it. Some of you don't listen to the mini-episodes. But you know what?
JVL00:01:20Sometimes I say I'm not going to do it, and then I do it.
Vic00:01:22Yeah, so you have to just stay tuned.
Sonny00:01:23You've got to go to weeklystandard.com at 11. Check every hour.
Vic00:01:29How are we doing this week, Week and Sonny Bunch?
Sonny00:01:33I went to Ikea this weekend. Are you still married? Oh, yeah. Well, so there are two Ikea trips. There are two versions of the Ikea trip, right? The first version of the Ikea trip is you don't really know what you want, and you're just trying to buy stuff for a room. And those are always nightmares because nobody has any idea what they want, and everything kind of looks the same but is slightly different. And the whole thing can turn into crisis. It's at a far point in any moment, and it's a disaster waiting to happen. This was the other type of trip. We knew basically what we wanted. We need bookshelves. We just needed, like, cubby-sized bookshelves for our bedroom. Oh, for your favela? No, not for the favela.
JVL00:02:13Are you going to build her own favela?
Sonny00:02:16Yes, actually. So they have this great system where it's basically just cubes that you put on top of each other, and you kind of put them next to each other. And they're different colors, and it looks, like, pleasingly disorganized. To me, which I'm going to really enjoy. Just to mount these on the wall? Well, you can mount them on the wall, but we're doing ones that are on the ground. They're, like, based on the ground.
JVL00:02:39You're going to need to tether them. Yes, I know we have to anchor them, Jonathan.
Sonny00:02:42I know how—I haven't— One of my daughters pulled a dresser down on top of herself one day from Ikea. Was it the Malm?
JVL00:02:51Somebody had not anchored—I don't know who it was, but one of the parents in our house had not anchored it to the wall.
Sonny00:02:57The anchoring— The anchoring was definitely one of my favorite parts of childproofing the house, because it was the easiest. It was just, like, screw—it was just taking a power drill and screwing things under the wall and screwing them into the furniture.
JVL00:03:09Frankly, I'm surprised that you anchored things to the wall. I thought you were just natural selection, let nature take its course at home, and—no?
Sonny00:03:17Well, I mean, look, I could have done that if I wanted her to be strong, but she's just going to be— She's just going to, you know, go through life assuming things won't fall on her. At all times.
JVL00:03:29Now, Vic, you did all the anchoring of the furniture at your house, right? You got the drill out, and you—
Vic00:03:34We have two very big bookcases that my wife had purchased, and in fact, I did anchor them, and by "I," I mean my father-in-law, Bob Dwyer. Yeah, good job. Well, I was not—I was not there at the time. I came home, I said, "What? He did what? I would have done that." What is that? What are you anchoring? What is that? Okay.
Sonny00:03:53What is an anchor?
JVL00:03:53What is that tool in his hand that's shaped like a gun and spins quickly?
Vic00:03:57Don't do that. Well, one of the things I—you realize that when you have a house, which is really weird, is that everything is not really quite linear and even. Things are uneven in a house because the earth—the earth moves is such a weird thing. Walls—I mean, even slightly, but you'll notice I look carefully at the bookshelf against the wall, and it's not really aligned, and you know what I mean? Yeah.
Sonny00:04:19It's— Well, this is one of the things I discovered when I was creating my favela, is that I was putting the—I was putting the square, you know, the— Oh, yeah. Yeah, your corners in your house are not square. The 90-degree angle wood into the wall, and it was, like, kind of bumping up against it weird, and there was, like, a tiny little gap, and I was like, wait a second.
JVL00:04:36Where the ceiling is—
Sonny00:04:37This wall—this wall is at a 91-degree angle, at least. So, anyway, so that was—that was fun. And I did actually see some great potential future favela shelves. Oh, good. Like, the ones that you—you—you anchor the thing into the wall, and then you put a—oh, man, those—and it's just, like, a long piece of wood, which is my preferred style of shelving, just wood. On the wall. Yeah. Just wood kind of floating out there in space.
JVL00:05:01Well, preferably not real wood, but MDF wood.
Sonny00:05:04Yeah, I mean, something that's been press-boarded into wood-like status. Yes.
JVL00:05:08Is this the, uh, Ikea at Potomac?
Sonny00:05:10Yes.
JVL00:05:11Mills.
Sonny00:05:11Yes.
JVL00:05:11Why didn't you come by? I live six minutes from that Ikea.
Sonny00:05:15Well, if, uh, if somebody had invited me over to their house, if I had, like, a standing invitation—
JVL00:05:20You know, like, my place is way better than Farland. Or not Farland. What do they call it at Ikea? Smallland? Smalllandia? Smalllandia? Because you can only drop your kid there for 30 minutes, which is, by the way, useless.
Sonny00:05:32Well, I—but also, Katie's too small to go in there. You have to be above, like, three feet tall. Oh, she's not tall enough to get in.
JVL00:05:37You could have dropped her at my place.
Sonny00:05:39No, it was—it was actually fine. She—again, we knew exactly what we wanted, so we were in and out. Trying to save marriages here. We were in and out of the Ikea in, like, 30 minutes. It was the greatest Ikea trip of all time. We were there—we were in and out so quickly, we didn't even want to get meatballs. I was going to ask— We didn't even want to get Swedish meatballs after. Do they still have the—do they still have the food out there? Oh, yeah, they've got—oh, they've got a whole cafeteria. It's really pretty fantastic.
Vic00:05:59Oh, yeah, and ginger snaps. You can buy the ginger snaps there, too. You can buy everything, right?
Sonny00:06:02They got Swedish fish. They got the—they got—they've got, like, pancakes. Everything's Swedish. They've got, like, pan—they've got lingonberries. Oh, yeah, of course. You can get pancakes with lingonberries. Yeah, lingonberries. It was like being in the Big Lebowski. So, anyway, that was—it was fun. And we drove past the Prince William Baseball Stadium. How did you drive past that? Or we drove past the sign for it. We drove past the sign. You drove past the sign. So I was like—I was like, okay, that's where JVL goes to his baseball games. That's where the magic happens. That's where all the happiness is.
Vic00:06:30That's right. I cooked a pork schnitzel yesterday. That was my big—the highlight of my weekend. I said, you know what? I'm just tired of the same old thing. What's a pork schnitzel? Oh, I said, okay, get the pork. I told Kate, go— Is it German? Yes. It's Austrian, although technically, where did the Austrians learn it from the Italians? Because it's a Milanese cutlet, right? It's the same thing. If you go to an Italian restaurant, ooh, I'll have the— I'll have the Milanese cutlet. That's a schnitzel. Kate is such a lucky woman. So I said—she was going to the store. I said, pick up some boneless pork chops, and then I'll take that, and then you layer it in between two pieces of saran, and you just pound the hell out of it. And so I just bang and bang and bang, which I'm really good at that, and just flatten it. But you could never make it thin enough, and of course, it wasn't that thin. The great thing is once it's thin, it cooks fast, and then you just dredge it in flour. It should get a little cooked. Cooking segment here. You dredge it in flour, dunk it in the egg batter, and then coat it with breadcrumbs. Throw it in with the oil in the pan. You got yourself a nice, flat pork cutlet.
JVL00:07:36This is great radio. This is— Boy, this is fantastic.
Sonny00:07:38I don't—I don't really under—well, whatever. I love schnitzel. Okay. But so it's basically just a pork chop. Yeah. It's like a— Without the bone, obviously. Right, right, right. It's thin, though.
Vic00:07:47The key is they really have to make it thin, and you just sprinkle a little bit of lemon on top of that, and that's what I—and that was the highlight of—
Sonny00:07:53I always thought schnitzel was like a sausage.
Vic00:07:55Salt and pepper, too. Salt and pepper. No, schnitzel's a cut. Schnitzel's a cut, so it's like a cutlet. Huh. A little schnitzel. In Vienna, there's a place that everybody goes to called Figamola's, and that's like the Mama Leone's of Vienna, so everyone's like, oh, we gotta go there, because that's
JVL00:08:08where— What's Mama Leone's?
Vic00:08:09That was an Italian restaurant in Broadway, and everyone from outside of New York would go there, because that was, quote, Italian food. Like, Sparrow's. Like Sparrow's, Sonny. Oh. That makes sense. He means it was awesome. So it was amazing.
JVL00:08:21Oh, unbelievable. Authentic. It was authentic. I don't understand why this is a joke. I especially like the Mama Leone's at the Molly Pritchard rest stop, too. That was also a great place. Very authentic. Very authentic. Very authentic.
Vic00:08:32But in fact, there's another place called Placuda's, and they make the real schnitzel, and they've been fighting each other, you know, for years now about who has the better schnitzel, and I always wanted to do a piece on the schnitzel war of Vienna. It would be really funny, because they all badmouth each other a little bit about pork schnitzel, the real schnitzel's veal. That's actually true. But I just need somebody to pay for me to go there.
Sonny00:08:53Yeah, boy, this sounds like a real riveting.
Vic00:08:55Listeners out there who want to fund me to go out there and write about schnitzel, I'll do it. JVL.
JVL00:09:03It was fine. We had a birthday for one of the kids, and we're just getting ourselves ready for the big annual trip to the beach. Ooh. Which beach?
Sonny00:09:14I don't really like to say. You don't want to say? You don't want to tell the people? Keep that private.
JVL00:09:18Because it's a secret. You don't want our fans to show up? It's in North Carolina. But it is not any of the usual. North Carolina beaches.
Vic00:09:24Naxxon. No.
JVL00:09:26No.
Vic00:09:27No. Okay. Well, that's something to get excited about. Who else?
JVL00:09:31You know who else is excited about the beach?
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Sonny00:10:50Colon creation. This really is a horror movie. I can't wait to hear Gene Shalit's review of Annabelle colon creation.
Vic00:10:58It all works out in the end. Oh, okay. It was on the spot. It was on the spot. On the spot. No. Gene did not see Annabelle this weekend. It took top honors with $35 million, but Dunkirk, still going strong after a month with $11.4 million, followed by something I've never heard before, The Nut Job 2, Nutty, by Nature. Is that animated? Animated.
Sonny00:11:26Kids film. It's really been a disaster for kids movies this year. And The Dark Tower. This summer.
Vic00:11:32The Dark Tower, which has been out two weeks and did $7.9 million for a domestic $34 million. Wait, what is that percentage drop?
Sonny00:11:38It's about a 60% drop.
Vic00:11:40Yeah. Yeah. So, what is going on? I can't wait for the web series. What is going on with this box office this summer? What happened here?
Sonny00:11:50So, Variety had a piece. Last week, after The Dark Tower numbers came out. It's worth just reading kind of the nut graph here, so you can get a sense of how terrible everything is right now in Hollywood land. From Variety, ticket sales are down 10.8% so far this summer and are off nearly 3% year to date. Theatrical revenues are expected to fall through the next two months. Over the weekend, the top grossing new release, The Dark Tower, opened to less than $20 million. Again, this was last week. During the same weekend a year ago, Suicide Squad kicked off to $134 million. And the simple fact of the matter is that with the exception of the DC and the Marvel movies, every franchise picture has flopped to some extent or another. You know, the efforts to start new franchises, Chav King Arthur and The Dark Tower, were more or less disasters. Chav King Arthur much more because its budget was like three times higher than The Dark Tower, which was relatively modestly budgeted in the $60 million range. And all of the, you know, endless sequels kind of flopped as well. The Transformers movie flopped. The Fast and Furious movie did okay. And it did very well overseas. It still grossed like $1.2 or $1.3 or $1.4 billion, something like that, overall. But domestically, it only did $225, something like that. It was way down from the previous iteration. And what was the other one? Oh, the Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Another giant flop. Another just big, real disaster domestically. Now, some of these movies—
JVL00:13:27171 domestically already. Kongskull Islands, 168.
Sonny00:13:32Yeah, those are bad numbers. Those are not good numbers.
JVL00:13:35Well, but for movies where the U.S. box office is supposed to be 30% of the total, it's not terrible.
Sonny00:13:42Okay. Anyway, numbers are way down. This is just science. War for the Planet of the Apes did okay. War for the Planet of the Apes did worse than its previous iteration. Well, it's a third in the series. And it is going— I mean, again, all of these movies will probably make money, except for King Arthur, and maybe not The Dark Tower. We'll see. But, yeah, it's been bad. It's been bad because I think they're— I mean, the real issue here is that these movies— The Mummy and the Alien. Don't forget those, too. Oh, yeah, The Mummy. Oh, yeah, I forgot about The Mummy. Yeah, The Mummy and the Alien. Really bad. So, anyway, all these movies have been— Great Wall. Bad.
Vic00:14:20Oh, throwing in The Great Wall. Great Wall. Was The Great Wall— Oh, sorry, that wasn't summer. I mean, that was the spring. That was wild. Ghost in the Shell. Ghost in the Shell, another— Shared universe.
Sonny00:14:29Another—
JVL00:14:29Forty million total domestically.
Vic00:14:31Where is everybody? That's what I want to know.
Sonny00:14:34People are watching TV shows. A lot of people watching Netflix. A lot of people watching Amazon Prime shows. A lot of people watching, you know— Series. HBO. This is what everyone talks about now. This is what the social media buzz is about. And as JBL knows, Twitter mentions are the only thing that— Matter, right?
JVL00:14:53Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it's— I mean, the real problem is the screens in the movie theaters are too big. If we could just get movie theaters to hand people smartphones when they walk in— So they could all sit and watch the movie on their phone, because that's what the millennials want. That's what the millennials want. That's what the millennial audiences really are interested in. It has nothing to do with making bad movies.
Sonny00:15:14Yes, exactly.
JVL00:15:16I was going to be a smartass and say, well, there's a secret solution to all this. Make better movies. Make better movies. But then you look at, like, the Pirates of the Caribbean and Cars 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and I don't know, like, maybe that's actually not the solution, making better movies. It is not clear that good movies are rewarded and bad movies are punished at the box office, especially during the summer. Yeah. I mean, there's a correlation, but it's not like a one-to-one correlation here.
Sonny00:15:41I do think that the movies—the better movies have done better relative to their expectations, right? So, like, Dunkirk is a relatively cheap movie at $100 million. It's made $150 million domestically. It'll close out near $200 million, maybe. We'll see. We'll see how it keeps holding. Baby Driver, which was very well-reviewed, it crossed $100 million this weekend, I believe. And I don't know. I mean, I do think that there is some correlation. And again, the movies— Logan did really well. Logan's a good movie. The franchise movies that have done well are the DC and the Marvel movies, and it is—I disagree with this. I know JBL disagrees with this. It is generally accepted that Wonder Woman was the best of the DC movies, and it has made the most of any of those movies domestically. The Marvel movies—again, everybody loves Spider-Man Homecoming. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 was 80% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. These are movies that did well. They're movies that appealed to a wide audience and also were entertaining and relatively well done. So, I mean, I do think there is some correlation between quality and box office revenue. But, you know, as long as China and the rest of the world is kind of subsidizing movies like the Transformer films and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, you know.
JVL00:17:04What if we just didn't allow those people to see our movies? Would that change the economics of Hollywood in a way that was helpful, Sonny?
Sonny00:17:11Well, I don't know. What's interesting is that the Chinese are actually kind of really holding back movies. They're holding back American movies during the prime summer movie-going season. And the biggest story in the world right now is that there is a movie that was released in China that has made something like $660 million already.
JVL00:17:32Wolf Warrior?
Sonny00:17:33Wolf Warrior 2, I believe it was called. Is Jet Li in that? No, I don't think so. I didn't know. So this is a movie that was based on a sequel to another film that did okay business in China, like made $30 or $40 million or $100 million or something like that. But, like, decent to mediocre numbers. Made all of the money so far. I mean, like, I was reading a story about the stats, and it, you know, it did about, I can't, I'm just making up the numbers, so don't freaking tweet at me with corrections. But it did, you know, like, it did like $150 million in its opening weekend, and then it did like $40 million on Monday, and then $40 million on Tuesday, and just, like, made another $150 million.
JVL00:18:14The Chinese Titanic.
Sonny00:18:15I mean, it really, it is. Do we know what it's about? It's about a band of Chinese soldiers. Soldiers that go to an African village to save them from evil imperialists, I believe. It's something like that. It was very funny. I was reading some, you know, again, some left-wing film critic who was complaining about how this movie reminded him of Rambo 2. And, you know, how it's like about, and how it's a white savior movie, but, you know, they're Chinese, so it can't really be a white savior movie. He was really struggling with trying to jam this movie into his kind of, you know, preconceptions about ideological tenets that are good and bad in movies. And I was like, wait, this sounds awesome. It's the Chinese. He's Rambo 2? I wish it was playing near me, but it's not. It's like, it's not.
Vic00:18:55By Rambo 2, do you mean Rambo First Blood Part 2 or, not the, Rambo in Vietnam.
Sonny00:19:00Yeah, Rambo in Vietnam. Not Rambo 3, where he goes to Afghanistan, but Rambo 2, where he goes to Vietnam, I assume.
Vic00:19:06Yeah, and I think 4 was Burma? Myanmar. Well, it'll always be Myanmar to me.
JVL00:19:12Yes. JV. I would say, so if I were, if I were running a journal about American greatness, and I was trying to, trying to take the ideas of nationalism seriously, not just to mean a defense of our president, whatever it is he happens to say today, I would be interested in looking at the question of whether or not globalism has been bad for everybody's cinema. And so if, if, when Hollywood sort of took over the globe, did American movies get better or worse? Did French movies get better or worse? Was the French cinema better when it was made by people who were French and were over there, etc.? Because I would, I would not be surprised if the answer was that everybody is better off. Like, this is like the reverse economic, of economics. Everybody's better off. The quality is better off when people are producing their own art. But, you know, like, why do that when you can just defend, like, a stupid tweet?
Sonny00:20:10Wow. It's fair. Okay, it's fair. Hey, Julius. But I do think it's, How are you, dude? I do think it's, I do think it is an interesting idea that art flourishes when it is created, by an actual culture, and not this kind of monoculture. Yeah, no, this is exactly what I mean. Right.
JVL00:20:25This is one of those cases where, I mean, the actual argument for nationalism, like, not the racist argument, but the real argument for it is that what you gain in economics through globalism, you lose in culture, and that when you really try to balance the scales, the truth is culture is more important than minuscule economic efficiencies. And this is, like, a real debate. This is a debate that if people cared about, like, actual ideas, they would have. How would you measure,
Sonny00:20:49so how would you measure, like, greatness of movies, right? Would you just look at critical reception? Would you look at box office? Or would you just have to write it as a pure critic?
JVL00:21:00Pure critic, yeah.
Sonny00:21:01And just go through and be like, look, the French New Wave is better than the kind of,
JVL00:21:07but I mean, like,
Sonny00:21:08so how would you distinguish, say, like, the French New Wave from the Luc Besson movie factory?
JVL00:21:14Well, I mean, first you do have to see how many movies are coming out, right? And so does the output of the cinema of country X, so does it go down drastically over the course of time or not? And then you have to just make a subjective judgment of, you know, are these movies better or not? Which is impossible to do in individual cases, but it's really not impossible to do in the aggregate. Like, you can look at, like, 1942 movies or 1953 movies and say, this is better than whatever came out in 1989.
Sonny00:21:45I mean, this is a thing which you can do. Well, none of those movies are better than Batman.
JVL00:21:51Tough but fair.
Sonny00:21:52You give me Casablanca or you give me Michael Keaton Batman. I don't see how I'm supposed to take Casablanca.
Vic00:21:59Casablanca versus Val Kilmer Batman.
Sonny00:22:01Well, obviously, that's Casablanca.
JVL00:22:03Let's not get, let's not be ridiculous.
Vic00:22:06Dark Tower. We were going to talk about that. Yeah, Dark Tower. JVL, did you see Dark Tower?
JVL00:22:12Nine.
Vic00:22:13Okay, I did not see it, and Gene did not see it either. It didn't even interest Gene.
Sonny00:22:18So, whenever, so when we get the new iTunes analytics that shows when people turn off the shows, or when they fast forward, this is the moment, right? This is, yeah. Because it's just going to be me talking about the Dark Tower.
Vic00:22:28At 2240.
Sonny00:22:29Okay.
Vic00:22:30Sonny, I'm going to take a break. Yeah. Oh, my God. I'll be back in five minutes.
JVL00:22:34Somebody just tweeted at us. Yes. From their weekend. Uh-oh. It is a picture of a computer screen on which he has Civ, and it's playing as Bismarck, and there's an empty bottle of Schupperhofer in front of it. Oh, my God.
Sonny00:22:46My goodness. We move product.
Vic00:22:48Unbelievable. We move product. That is awesome.
Sonny00:22:51We should send that to the Civ people, so maybe they'll send Victorino a free copy. Yeah, the Civ VI. You know?
JVL00:22:57Sanctum Officium.
Vic00:22:58Oh, yes. Well, Sanctum Officium. Sanctum Officium. If you're listening, feel er folk, mit ihr Krieg. Oh, sorry. What?
?00:23:05What did?
Vic00:23:06We're speaking in code now. Oh, my God. Sorry. Okay, Sonny.
Sonny00:23:09Dark Tower. Dark Tower. So, the Dark Tower is not a good movie, and it's bad in ways that I was actually kind of surprised by. So, the Dark Tower, very, very briefly, is a seven-and-a-half, it's really an eight-book series. One of the books was kind of jammed in later. But it's a seven-and-a-half-book series about the adventures of Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, who is trying to keep the Dark Tower from falling, and he is chasing the man in black, who is basically the devil. And he kind of hops in between his world, which is called Midworld, and our world, shorthand, and we call it Keystoners. Okay, all right. This is, this is what you need to know. It goes on for, it goes on for literally thousands of pages. It's extremely long. This is a, the Dark Tower, the movie, is a, basically a YA movie. It's basically a young adult literature movie. It is a, it is a movie about a little boy in New York who is going, who is being driven insane by visions and learns that his visions are real. This little boy is Jake Chambers. He's a character in the, in the, in the series. Much loved. Everyone, everyone likes Jake. But he, he is a supporting character in these books. And in this movie, he is the main character, which reduces then Roland the gunslinger to supporting character status. The movie is all about Roland trying to help this kid overcome his demons and, and also kind of save the Dark Tower.
JVL00:24:37That sounds fascinating.
Sonny00:24:39Yeah. Matthew McConaughey plays, Matthew McConaughey plays the, the man in black. And I will say that all, I actually really liked all of the performances in this movie. Matthew McConaughey is like, doofily, you know, devilish and kind of like, is clearly having a little bit of fun with the role and is, is, you know, nice and wicked. Idris Elba is fine as the gunslinger. I think, you know, it, it, it's a weird casting choice because they had kind of pitched this movie as a continuation of the series for reasons I'm not going to get into. But like they, they had pitched it as like, this is a sequel to the books. It's not an adaptation. It's not a, it's not, you know, we're not jamming it all into one thing. It's just, it's a sequel. And if you are going to do that, it is, if you're going to call it a sequel, it's a little bit odd to cast Idris Elba to play the role of a man who is literally like made, was written to look like Clint Eastwood. Just, I'm throwing that out there. It's a little bit awkward. But he's good. He's very kind of dry and, and, and, and, you know, steely and, you know, he's got that kind of masculine silence about him. That's very appealing. And the kid is good too. The kid who plays Jake, whose name I can't remember. It doesn't matter because nobody's going to see this movie. Nobody has, seen it. And the, the, the original plan was to have this be the start of a franchise. They were going to have movies and then TV series in between the movies. And, you know, in theory, the TV series is still happening. One of the, one of the walking dead writers is show running it. We'll see if that happens because this, this whole thing was just an artistic and commercial disaster. And it was, and it's, it's bad, not because it's a bad adaptation. I just want to be clear on this to everyone. It's not, I'm not just, a sad fan boy who did not get the dark tower movie that he wanted. I am that. But I, in addition to that, it is just, it's Merkley shot. It's very, the CGI is all very cheap looking. It doesn't have a single interesting action scene in it, which is like when you have, you have a movie that is supposedly about the best gunfighter in the, in the whole of all of the universes. And all the best you can do is just like shoot, cut reaction, shoot, cut react. It just is boring. It's boring to look at and it's boring to watch. And I hate it. I hate this movie. I hate that they made it.
Vic00:26:52Sonny was, you think part of the problem is audiences just aren't, you know, drawn to the movie because they haven't read the book. I mean, some, one of you guys mentioned this before about Stephen King talking to his readers and asking for a show of hands of how we've read these books, that books, and when it came to dark tower. Yeah. It's like, I don't know the book, so I'm not even going to bother. It didn't seem. Well, I do.
Sonny00:27:15I do think that, well, I think that they clearly had no idea how to sell this to people. They, the, the marketing campaign, the marketing campaign has been very, very confused. Like I said, originally, you know, they were kind of pitching it to, to fans of the series as a sequel to the books. And like they, they had a whole marketing campaign that revolved around the horn of eld, which is like this in, in the, in the books. He kind of, it doesn't matter. None of this matters. The point is, the point is like the horn of eld is not in the movie at all. It's like they had this whole marketing campaign around it to generate excitement for the fans. And there's just no mention of it in, in the book. You, I, maybe you see it, maybe he's got it like on his person, but I like frankly don't even remember. So like, this is the sort of thing that they didn't, they didn't, they weren't sure what they were doing. They didn't know if they were making an adaptation. They didn't know if they were making a sequel. They didn't know how to appeal to fans of the book. They didn't know how to appeal to, to, to new, new, new newcomers. Because like, if you were going to appeal to newcomers, just make it the YA, make it, make it the YA movie, make it the, like, this is a kid's adventure through this weird, this weird universe. And all the advertising was all centered around the gunslingers, all centered around Idris Elba, who like, I don't know if you know this, he doesn't open movies. I mean, he just like, that's, he's not a big movie star. So you have this idea of a big Idris Elba, heavy gunslinger action movie. And what you get instead is this like, movie about a kid who's sad. And it just is, it's, it's, it's, it's fascinating and baffling on any number of levels. JVL, do you have any dark tower thoughts right now? Dark tower.
JVL00:28:46No, I, so, you know, HBO is going to be casting about, for something to replace the hole in its life left by Game of Thrones. I wondered if dark tower would have been a better fit for that as a property.
Sonny00:28:58Absolutely. It absolutely, it would have, I mean, the real sad thing about this is that if you wanted to adapt the series, the series itself gives you the roadmap of how to do it. The first book is short, it's less than 200 pages. And, it tells a, like a relatively compact story that also has flashbacks to Roland as a youth. So it kind of sets up, this idea of a guy on a quest who has a tragic backstory and has like these great action scenes. And you could have done that as a two-hour movie before then doing a 10-hour television show of the second book, which takes place more in, well, 1980s New York, modern New York. Like hops in between 1980s New York. Well, that's what they wanted to do, right?
JVL00:29:39They wanted this to be a multi-platform. Right. This was going to be the mythical beast, which moves people from, moves the audience from a cinema screen to a television screen to a computer screen, which by the way, has never worked in history. It hasn't worked in history. This is a corporate golden grail.
Sonny00:29:54It could have, it could have worked here. Golden grail. Holy grail. Holy grail. Yeah. Golden, the golden chalice. Fleece. The golden fleece. Golden gun. The golden, the golden goose. Sorry. Hollywood has killed the golden goose with it. No, but the, so the, the, the, you could have done that with this series in theory, and you could have done it just by following the effing books. Just follow the books. And instead what they did was they, they made a 90 minute, 90 minute movie that takes 2,000, 3,000 pages of material and condenses it.
JVL00:30:24I would propose that this is an impossible task. And the reason it is impossible is because any D-bag corporate suit who wants to do it is by definition incapable of doing it.
Sonny00:30:39Do you mean in terms of, you mean moving from movie to TV?
JVL00:30:44Moving, moving properties from one place to another in a continuous thing so that you are sort of in a circle jerk of audience moving from your, you know, from your different services and mediums. If that is what you are interested in doing, then you are so divorced from the artistic enterprise that you cannot help but fail at it. It's not a smart choice. You know,
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Sonny00:32:34I swear to God, every property in development that I'm seeing ads for all the time is a Stephen... There's a Myst TV show. There's the Mr. Mercedes show. This is a real thing. I saw that. This is a real thing that exists, and I see ads for it on Deadline, and I don't even know how to watch it. I don't know how. But the Mr. Mercedes book is being adapted into a TV show on the AT&T network. I don't know what that is. I don't know what that is.
Vic00:32:58What's the AT&T? I don't know what that is. What number is that on my...
JVL00:33:01There's going to be a Snapchat show. I'm not sure, too.
Sonny00:33:04So, you know, and then, of course, there's It, and you've got all... There's just all sorts of stuff. And I am... I'm fine with this.
JVL00:33:14Please do a takedown of Stephen King. I'm fine with... Please do it.
Sonny00:33:17Why would I do a takedown of Stephen... I would say... I would say this is probably not something I should admit, but I would say I have read more pages of Stephen King work than any other living author. Don't admit that.
JVL00:33:29Living. As long as you say living, that's okay. Probably all authors, frankly. Don't say that.
Sonny00:33:35It's just... I mean, I've probably read, like, 5,000 pages of Stephen King material. So I am happy that all of his books are being adapted into stuff.
Vic00:33:42He must have a great age, and I imagine that even when the movies bomb, he's done pretty well for himself.
Sonny00:33:47Yeah, I would assume so. I mean, I... Who knows? Who knows how much, you know... He's Stephen King. What revenue he gets off this. I mean, he... He owns the state of Maine. I mean, he must be the second richest author in the world after J.K. Rowling, I would assume.
JVL00:34:00Something like that. Anyway, it doesn't matter. No theme parks.
Sonny00:34:03Yeah. So the... But everything is a Stephen King property now. And I would say, you know what? I'm okay with this, because everything that Stephen King does is good.
JVL00:34:13Oh, I'm sorry. Is it the Stephen King universe?
Sonny00:34:17Well, so the interesting thing is, the interesting thing about The Dark Tower... The S.K.U.? ...is that The Dark Tower... Nice, Victorino. S.K.U. The Dark Tower is, like, supposedly the nexus of kind of all of Stephen King's works. Characters from his other books show up in this. So, like, in theory, The Dark Tower series would have been a great way to tie in The Stand and It and all of these other things into, like, one kind of coherent whole. Because it's a multiverse, right? Because it's a multiverse. Because it's a multiverse.
JVL00:34:42Kind of like the early D.C.U.
Sonny00:34:44Exactly. Well, we need a crisis on infinite Stephen King books to really sort out the... I would be into that.
JVL00:34:50Oh, my God, here comes Pariah. Pariah is a total Stephen King character, right? I mean, you can see the character of Pariah having been created by Stephen King. It's perfect. Maybe in Harbinger, too.
Sonny00:35:01Yeah. So, anyway, I am... I'm fine with... I was looking through a list of Stephen King works adapted into film. Did you rank them?
JVL00:35:10And I have a ranking. Please rank them.
Sonny00:35:12But here's the thing, is I actually had a harder time coming up with a worst of ranking than a best of ranking. I thought about a worst of ranking. Because a worst of ranking Like, everyone jokes about how terrible all of these Stephen King adaptations are.
JVL00:35:23And you go through them, and a lot of them...
Sonny00:35:24You know, frankly, most of them are not terrible.
Vic00:35:27Maximum overdrive.
Sonny00:35:28Well, we'll get to that. We'll get to maximum overdrive. Can I... Can I say why I actually...
JVL00:35:32JVL. Do you think most of them are terrible? Okay, go ahead. It is because of this. I would argue that the single most important aspect of a successful novelist is the writer's voice, and that this is as true for Jane Austen as it is for Lee Child. And Stephen King, Stephen King is often, I think, misdiagnosed for his greatness as being, oh, it's his imagination. You know, this guy has this amazing imagination. He does. He's very imaginative. But his writerly voice is fantastic. And yet, this is the thing which translates least well out of a page and onto a screen. And when you lose that, you're losing, like, 80% of what makes Stephen King stuff Stephen King stuff.
Sonny00:36:14There. This is my theories to why
JVL00:36:15Stephen King adaptations just generally don't work. It has nothing to do with plotting. It has nothing to do with scope or anything like that. But you're missing the essence of him in the way that trying to adapt Evelyn Waugh novels, you just can't do that, really.
Sonny00:36:29So, I think that's a very good point. And I do think that there is a kind of, and there's also some, like, kind of structural stuff that he does within the books, like the thoughts being in parentheses. That just doesn't, you can't do that in, he's a very cerebral writer.
JVL00:36:45Yeah, no, he's a writer's writer. I mean, people think that Stephen King is just a, they throw away, you know, a hack. This is totally not true. It's wrong. Any aspiring writers should read his book on writing. On writing. Which is tremendous.
Vic00:36:56Absolutely. Yeah.
JVL00:36:57No, I love Stephen King for all those reasons. Enough with the adverts. Cut back on adverts.
Sonny00:37:00So, wait, if you love Stephen King so much, why are you giving me so much grief about having read so much Stephen King?
JVL00:37:06Because. Just because it's embarrassing. It's a character failing. Okay. Would that be the writer you spent the most time with? I would, yeah.
Sonny00:37:14It's, yeah, him and Neil Stevenson, probably. Which is weird because I don't actually even really love Neil Stevenson. Tolstoy? I just read his books.
Vic00:37:21No Tolstoy?
Sonny00:37:23No. I wouldn't, no.
Vic00:37:24Is that Necronomicon
Sonny00:37:25or other comics? David Foster Wallace, of course. Oh, yeah. That would be the other. Okay. Anyway, so, I have a best of list here, but here are some movies that aren't on it. Carrie. Carrie's a great movie. The Dead Zone. Dead Zone's a great movie.
Vic00:37:42Oh, he's not on the bad list as well.
Sonny00:37:44No, this is not on my best of list. These are movies that didn't even make my best of list. Okay. Firestarter. Not a great movie, but a fun movie. You look at these flicks and you kind of see, like, a lot of stuff that you would like to put on a list, but you don't because it's not the best of the best. Here's his five best. Number five, Shawshank Redemption. Number four, The Mist. And I like these two movies as, like, kind of a pairing because The Shawshank Redemption is a movie that is about never giving up hope. Never give up hope. That's not at all what it's about. But that's okay. Whereas The Mist is a movie about, what happens when you give up hope? Oh, my God. And you do the unthinkable.
Vic00:38:23It's the most depressing ending I've ever seen.
Sonny00:38:25Anyway. Number three, Stand By Me. Number two, Misery. Misery. Great, great horror. Love it. And number one, The Shining. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which is kind of a monument.
JVL00:38:37Here's a question for you. If you could go back in time and have Stanley Kubrick direct another Stephen King property, any one, what would it be? Hmm. You could take a minute. You don't have to.
Sonny00:38:50I don't mean to put you on the spot.
JVL00:38:52Victorino, would you tell me your three favorite Stephen King books that you've read?
Vic00:38:56I'll give up. Uh, books. Yeah.
JVL00:39:00So tell me this. How old were you when you realized that Stephen King wrote books that came before the movies?
Vic00:39:06My sister had a book of short stories called Night Shift. Is that where Gerald's Game is?
JVL00:39:13I don't know.
Sonny00:39:15No, Gerald's Game was a novel. No, yeah.
Vic00:39:17I thought it was a short story. The short story because the paperback had a picture of a hand wrapped in a bandage but there was an eye on the finger or something like that. And that's when I knew that he wrote books but of course I had by that time already seen Salem's Lot which was awful. I'm going to say in the list of movies I did not like, Stephen King movies. What's the old joke, JVL, among writers, you know, when they ask you if you've read a book? Oh, I've read In It. Read In It. I've read In It.
Guest00:39:45Or the other line,
Vic00:39:46read it. I haven't even reviewed it.
JVL00:39:49Okay.
Vic00:39:49That's not true at all anyone who's read my reviews. Pet Sematary. I talked to Sonny about this. I don't like watching kids getting killed anymore. So this is worst of? Worst of. Worst of. I don't like watching kids getting killed and I watched that as a kid and I was already disturbed. Now, you know, the kid gets hit by the truck, he comes back to life and he's got to kill him again. It's just, no, it's just terrible.
JVL00:40:10And what number was that for you? That was like four on the list of worst of. Okay.
Vic00:40:14I didn't like Firestarter. It was good.
JVL00:40:16It was good at the time. It was good at the time. Do you have a picture of Drew Barrymore circa Firestarter in your office with Mr. T?
Vic00:40:22No. Oh, well, yeah. It was after a People's Choice Award. She was sitting on Mr. T's lap.
Guest00:40:27I don't know where that photo is.
Vic00:40:28This has got to be like, what,
JVL00:40:2984 or something like that. Something like that. It's the funniest most 1980s photo I've ever seen.
Vic00:40:33He was at his height at the A-team and I don't know what she had done. Salem's Lot is very...
Sonny00:40:36Well, she'd been in E.T. Yes, by then. And Firestarter, I guess. Maybe she did Firestarter.
Vic00:40:40Yeah, I guess so. Salem's Lot, also very disturbing. I saw that movie around the time that I also saw Phantasm. The worst of. Yeah, yeah. Okay. You ever see Phantasm with a cube? Yeah, sure. No, it's just terrible. Okay, terrible, terrible ending. Children of the Corn.
JVL00:40:57More children.
Vic00:40:59Evil children. But this one's evil children and it involved the deli slicer and I love cold cuts, so that always bothered me that you could get skinned alive on the slicer. Okay, now, here's the movies that I liked. Creepshow. Wait, that was Stephen King, wasn't it? Yes.
JVL00:41:14Okay. What number? Oh, that would be a mic. It's not a ranking if you don't tell me that. Yeah, it's a ranking.
Vic00:41:18We're going backwards. It's number eight. You're going to do eight of these things? Yeah, I'm doing eight. Well, I noticed we're only at 41, so I figured this is a good way to kill time. Great episode, guys. Great episode. I love Creepshow. Are we ready for this? Adrienne Barbeau, Hal Holbrook, and Leslie Nielsen. And Leslie Nielsen's, that short scene involved the drowning of the actor Robert Hayes and his wife. Remember, they put them up to their heads in sand and then the tide would, come in and eventually drown them. And then Leslie Nielsen answers the door at the end of the night and they've come back as drowned, sort of back from the dead. And it was very scary. And it also has the thing with Hal Holbrook wanting to get rid of his wife, Adrienne Barbeau. And there was a crate in the basement that had a creature from the Arctic and it's extremely bloody. There's a lot of blood in that. Okay, moving on.
JVL00:42:10We're going to go into this much detail for the rest of the seven nights? I really don't think that's true. I hope so. I'll move up quickly, okay?
Vic00:42:14Because I'm really interested in it. Good. The Running Man. Love that. It's great. That was as a Bachman book, yes. Yeah. Was it? It has one of my favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger lines after he kills Sub-Zero with a buzzsaw between his legs. He said, he had to split. Okay.
Sonny00:42:29I was reading, just one very briefly. Please. I was reading the Bachman Running Man, the original novella, I don't know, four or five years ago. And it's really good. It actually makes perfect sense as a movie that could be remade again. You could do it as a TV show, whatever. It's like a really great series. $100. You could just do it as it is written in the book, and it would make perfect sense. Right until you get to the end, in the last few pages, which involves an airplane crashing into a skyscraper in a terrorist act trying to take down the government. I was just like, wow. Oh, can't do that. That was definitely before 2001. Cannot do that.
Vic00:43:11But JVL also, who else starred in The Running Man? Yeah, but Cotone.
JVL00:43:15I was going to say Richard Dawson. Richard Dawson is the real hero.
Vic00:43:20Richard Dawson, he's the real hero. I imagined he was playing himself. Like, you know, he's really fun, loving, kisses on Family Feud.
JVL00:43:28In real life, was Richard Dawson that guy, or was he his character from Hogan's Heroes?
Vic00:43:35Oh, he was definitely The Running Man. The Running Man. He was Killian. David Killian.
JVL00:43:39Not, I forget his Hogan's Heroes character.
Vic00:43:41He was a real, this is a real quick aside here, Richard Dawson was a real, shall we say, swordsman. Yeah, he loved the ladies. I'd always heard that. He loved the ladies. He loved the ladies, but how crazy was Bob Crane on Hogan's Heroes that when Bob Crane showed Richard Dawson all his photos that he'd been taking of women, it freaked Richard Dawson out?
JVL00:43:59I've never heard that.
Vic00:44:00I want to put it to you that way. He was like, well, that's great. When even Richard Dawson says, dude, you have a problem. Bob, that's lovely, but I need to go. So that was that. Okay, Green Mile, that was good. The Dead Zone. Okay, for if you do show notes, there's that fantastic SNL. You would put Green Mile. And I like... Like number four? I like The Dead Zone a lot. I saw it at a time that I thought... You know, maybe because I saw it at that time.
JVL00:44:24No, forget Dead Zone.
Vic00:44:25Go back to Green Mile. Yeah, Green Mile was good, but I think it was too long. I loved it too long. But you have it in your number four spot. Just wait for the rest.
JVL00:44:32Just wait for the rest.
Vic00:44:33Okay, The Dead Zone. Look for the... If we ever did show notes, if not, just make a link somewhere of the SNL spoof with Christopher Walken. Oh, yeah. You know? You're going to eat the ice cream too fast. You're going to get a brain freeze. Okay, so that was really good. Shining. Love The Shining. Above The Shining, Misery. I really like Misery. Misery's great, yeah. Kathy Bates, James Caan. They always talk about how James Caan never had great roles. This was a good role for him. And it had the late Richard Farnsworth. Yeah. He's a fantastic actor. May he rest in peace. Stand By Me. That's number one? Two. No. And number one is Shawshank.
Sonny00:45:10Shawshank's fine.
Vic00:45:10I think it was great, but the only reason why it's fine is because we've seen it 600 million times on AMC.
Sonny00:45:17It has been played. TNT has run that movie into the ground, which is too bad.
JVL00:45:21It is a perfect movie.
Sonny00:45:22It is basically a perfect movie. It's pretty good. Bob, the warden actor, he talks about that. It's his fifth best adaptation.
JVL00:45:28I remember when you saw William Sadler in The Brooks Brothers. Yes! I did!
Vic00:45:35Always made me smile. You know what? It also reminds me, you know who else I met once? It was Forrest Whitaker. Really?
JVL00:45:41But that's for the micro. I missed that for the micro on Fast Times, which was many days ago. Yes, we recorded that several days ago. And you know what? Oh, for our Monday. The Monday micro episode, you mean?
Vic00:45:49Yes, the Monday micro episode. And this is just a quick addendum before we move on. And I asked him a very important question. I said, wow. I said, we went to see Brick City, the screening of him. And Cory Booker was there. And I said, it was just really great to meet you. He was so friendly. And I said, you must have put on a lot of weight for your role as Last King of Scotland. Yes, yes, I did.
Guest00:46:10That's great.
Vic00:46:12I saw you in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Yep. Gotta go.
Sonny00:46:16That was my excuse. It's Q&A. You know what? That's really this whole episode in like a 30-second chunk. It's really, that's the quality that we're putting out there. And in fact, I'm done on the show here right now. All right, good.
Vic00:46:30JVL.
JVL00:46:30Maybe we should get Michael Caine in here next.
Vic00:46:32Pass it on.
JVL00:46:33It's that good.
Vic00:46:34JVL, passing it on to you.
Sonny00:46:36Do you have a list of best Stephen King adaptations? Let's bury this thing. Okay. Can we just say, I just want to give a shout out to The Langoliers TV show, which is one of the worst TV miniseries I've ever seen. I don't know.
JVL00:46:47I don't even know what that is. CBS? Oh, I don't know. What was it on?
Sonny00:46:51CBS or ABC, I don't know. It doesn't matter. Yeah, ABC maybe. But it has, it's actually almost worth watching for the like early 1990s computer-generated graphics of like the little monsters eating the earth as the airplane takes off. It like involves people who are like, go through a rift in time and they go to like, they see what happens to the past. It gets eaten by monsters. It's a weirdly literal idea of where the day goes. Anyway. You got to see it just for the little CGI monsters with like a real, it's a real time capsule of 1990s technology.
Vic00:47:27Are we all, JVL? It's more than enough. We're Stephen King'd out? Goodness, okay. Corrections. Tolstoy sucks. And I like Stephen King, don't get me wrong.
JVL00:47:40I'm pro-King, super pro-King. He's, the back page column he used to write in Entertainment Weekly for a couple of years. It was the best thing that that magazine ever did. Fantastic, fantastic. If I ran a magazine, I would pay Stephen King to write a back page column about anything he wanted.
Sonny00:47:59Well, probably couldn't do that for our magazines.
Vic00:48:04Yeah, Tolstoy.
Sonny00:48:05He's a bit of a lefty. So am I. That's a good point. You are a communist. You are basically simpatico politically.
Vic00:48:12I wrote a term paper in high school on Tolstoy without having read Tolstoy. I bet you did. I did some short stories. I read some of his short stories. You got into Georgetown, and I didn't. And, you know, later, much later... Majored in English. Much later, I was at Stanford. I was at Hoover, and I was at Stanford University with the late Arnold Beichman. And he says, oh, we're going to have... Arnold's voice very much likes you, Chouts, by the way. He said, we're going to have a dinner with Joe Frank and his wife, Frenchie. I didn't know who Joe Frank was. And then Matt Continelli told me he was the foremost author, expert on Dostoevsky and Russian literature. And we're having dinner at a Chinese restaurant, by the way. And we had a delicious crispy whole fish that we devoured. And I said, oh, I was writing about something for The Weekly Standard at the time on the Chechen takeover of the theater. Chechnya. And they took over the theater. And I said, comparing them with the Russian history of what was going on there. And Joe Frank said, have you read Haji Murad by Tolstoy? I go, what? Who? Who? Who? And can you pass the duck sauce?
Sonny00:49:17Yeah.
Vic00:49:17Thanks, Mr. Frank, whoever you are. Okay. Corrections, additions.
JVL00:49:24I have a correction for you, Victorino. Oh, no. On Monday, when we were taping our micro episode, you said that you could not find Fast Times on Ridgemont High. Oh, wow. The book for less than three.
Sonny00:49:35It's detainees.
Guest00:49:37This is a day later.
Sonny00:49:37It took me two days to research this. Three days later.
JVL00:49:40Who sent this correction in? And it turns out that on Book Finder, which is the alternative used bookstore I don't know about that. Also owned by Amazon.
Sonny00:49:52And they own A Books, too, right? They own, like, all four. Also owned by Amazon.
JVL00:49:58What I love is that they've kept the user interface exactly the way it used to be, the old, clunky, just an independent used bookstore portal here. Nothing to see here. No Super Bezos thing going on here. Checks being processed in Seattle. You can get a copy for, like, $80. What you were looking at... It's still expensive. Yeah, but I believe what you were looking at is a hardcover first edition, which does seem to start at $300.
Sonny00:50:27But, like, still $83 for a paperback is nuts. There's a great cover, by the way.
Vic00:50:32I can't believe it's out of... Cover illustrations, the photo is great on that book.
Sonny00:50:35I can't believe it's still out of print. They haven't put it in e-books. It's just seemed... The studio... Book publishing houses just throw money away. I don't understand them. Yes, they do.
JVL00:50:45I will say this very carefully. Because some of us, all of us, to some extent, our lives depend on book publishing. If any industry deserves to be put out of business, it's the book publishers. I tell you. I tell you. No comments. And it gives me a little bit of pleasure to watch Jeff Bezos. I mean, it'll be bad for us all personally. Right, right. But it gives me pleasure to watch him destroying their industry. So that is my correction for you on that. There was an ex... There was just great stuff over the weekend. Our Twitter feed... Our feed has become, for me at least, I don't know about you guys, like an enormous source of pleasure. Between Kyle and Substandard Fan and Carl and Smug, our listeners are much funnier than we are.
Sonny00:51:33Yeah, we have like 10 really loyal listeners and we love them more than our own families. The pictures...
JVL00:51:38Their tweeting about the show is really great. The pictures are great.
Vic00:51:41Also, eating and drinking product mentioned on the show, very impressive.
JVL00:51:46Yeah, if you... Are you going to get more? More t-shirts, Sonny?
Sonny00:51:49To send out t-shirts to our buddies? No.
JVL00:51:52Come on, we're probably going to keep doing this show for another four or five weeks.
Sonny00:51:55Yeah, I mean, I already threw down a big chunk of change on one box of t-shirts.
JVL00:51:59I keep telling you that we are ready to reimburse you for this.
Sonny00:52:02And he keeps telling us he's going to write it off. I'm writing it off on my taxes. Like, he's like Kramer. Just write it off.
JVL00:52:07Just write it off, Jerry. Just write it off. It's free. Why did Frank Costanza instead of... Yeah.
Sonny00:52:12Great show. That's a good way to... You know, I have a little something else.
Vic00:52:16Once we get to... Spirit of the Week, I would like to pile on Spirit of the Week. Well, guess what? We're at Spirit of the Week.
Sonny00:52:21All right.
Vic00:52:23Oh, this week's Spirit of the Week is... Wait, I'm sorry. Don't you guys have any corrections? I don't have any corrections. I don't have any either.
Sonny00:52:29Why would I have a correction?
Vic00:52:31Fine. This week's Spirit of the Week is Maker's Mark. It's a perennial favorite at the Substandard. Kentucky straight bourbon. Delicious and nutritious. Okay. But last week's, Sonny, tell us, what's going on there? Old Forrester was a big hit. Old Forrester.
Sonny00:52:48Old Forrester. Lots of people buying it, putting pictures online. You show us that we move product and we'll make you famous. That's great.
JVL00:53:00Can you remind us where this Old Forrester comes from? Sonny, why were we drinking it?
Sonny00:53:06We were drinking... Well, we were drinking it because I got a bottle as a gift from my father. Okay, continue. But because it is featured in... Because it is... Well, so not that bottle, but we were... We were begging for a bourbon that is tied to the Statesman movie. Or tied to... It's made... Tied to the movie Kingsman, The Golden Circle, and it is supposedly made by the Statesman, which is like the U.S. version of the Kingsman. And the good folks over at Old Forrester are going to send over a bottle of Statesman. We will drink it next week if we have it. We'll continue drinking it until we run out. We'll just keep drinking it. That'll be our official...
Vic00:53:47But, Sonny, I think you've really hit on something here about a formula that works, which means that maybe next week or whenever you should bring in a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle that you have and then they'll send us the bottle. No, I don't think that's going to happen. I think there's only one way to find out.
Sonny00:54:03No, I don't think that's going to happen.
JVL00:54:05I could say that there is another piece of product placement from the new Kingsman movie. Oh. Oh. Go ahead. Vermont. I don't even know what that is. Which is... A British watchmaker has produced three models of watch specifically for the movie, which different characters in the Kingsman line, depending on their jobs within the Kingsman universe, wear. And it is a world-time chronograph, and these things are fantastic. And I would be happy... I mean, as a person who's already an ambassador for Prana, the athletic... wear company, I would be happy to become a brand ambassador for Vermont as well if they would like to send one of these, especially the rose gold chronograph, to me. And I would be happy to wear it, and then send it back. I would just wear it for a couple weeks, and I would just like to have some time...
Sonny00:55:04JVL...
JVL00:55:05Some wrist time with it. You are... I couldn't stand up once I was wearing it, mind you, but I would... You're a shameless... I'm looking at it right now.
Sonny00:55:14My favorite thing about this show is how it has devolved into a shameless whorehouse. Whoring. Yeah, well, yeah, I was going to say... In the last, like, ten minutes. JVL is...
Vic00:55:20So what they do is, for the world time... Oh, for show's sakes. I don't... Who cares? It's a watch.
JVL00:55:2524 cities arranged around the bezel, and they represent the 24...
Sonny00:55:30I'm holding my iPhone next to the watch to show that they do the same thing.
JVL00:55:34They do the same exact thing. Except, except, that if there's an EMP, that thing in your hand dies. Guess what?
Sonny00:55:41We're all going to friggin' die anyway if there's an EMP.
JVL00:55:43This keeps going because it's powered mechanically. Who cares? It's mechanical.
Sonny00:55:47So it's a garbage, ancient technology that nobody wants anymore. Who cares? Watches are dumb. Vermont. You know what? Watches are dumb. I would just like to say that...
Vic00:55:56Yes. It's amazing. JVL, you are nothing but a shameless horologist. And that's all the time we are giving to this episode. Questions, comments, complaints, compliments, tweet us at Victorino Matus at Sonny Bunch. Again, be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher. Just type in Substandard on a podcast and we're there. Leave a review, tell your friends, and don't forget, Substandard show notes might be up on Friday.
Sonny00:56:23Make sure to ask at JV Last if they're coming. Tweet him. Tweet him the things.
Vic00:56:28Until next time. If there is a next time... This is the worst. Summer Doldrums. This is a Summer Doldrums episode. It's a bad show.
JVL00:56:43Well, there's nothing out there. Why don't we kill the show? Why don't we put this with a pilot? Because we're going to be gone for the next two weeks anyway. Because I'm just out after this show. After this show, I am done. I'm done with this. I hate it. Will the show survive? I'm pretty angry about this. This is not a good show. Yeah. Well, next week I'm sure it'll be fine.
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