Vladimir Poutine

As of today: 1) The Butterfly Effect 2) Millennium 3) Ladyhawk 4) Mercury Rising 5) The Cloverfield Paradoxes

U guyz...

Regarding Paul's Gratuitous Nudity Extinction Hypothesis: The boobs in this movie and the director's commentary prompted me to wonder something: I keep hearing Paul lament that 90s movies were the last to feature gratuitous boobs. Most recently it was Time Cop, I think, that he claimed was among the last movies to feature gratuitous nudity. But, um... What is he talking about? Horror and comedy genre films still pretty consistently feature boobs-qua-boobs to this day. What's with the nostalgia for some imagined golden age of gratuitous nudity?

No matter where you go, there you are.

My first thought upon seeing the trailer was, "This is a joke, right?" This cinematic abomination must be dissected for science.

I think it's actually worse than that. A law that says "The same matter cannot occupy the same place at the same time" is just another way of saying, "The same matter has to be somewhere else at any given time because it can't be occupying the space where it is." This is a supremely nihilist law of physics that requires that the only space matter cannot occupy is the space the matter is occupying at that moment. I get that all science fiction has to invent new physical laws or imagine that today's technological hurdles have been surmounted (Star Wars has The Force, Star Trek has Warp Drive...) but it seems pretty glaring to me that Time Cop's contribution to physics is to forbid existence.

Am I the only one who has been playing the Second Opinions theme from this episode on repeat for days?

I'm on Team Emily's Laugh. Her laughter didn't bother me in the slightest. I'll complain when the podcast includes a canned laugh-track or gratuitous off-mic morning zoo-style laughter. A guest laughing on a comedy podcast, though? That's just good times.

I loved that scene where they wake up and think that they've escaped and everything is fine... until they discover that the TV and the books and the computer are all just hollow cardboard displays. Scary!

This wasn't dwelt on for obvious reasons, but revisiting this movie I was horrified by how casually people with mental disabilities and disorders were equated with chimps. (Larry can't experiment on an ape so he tries the simple groundskeeper instead.) Rise of the Planet of the Apes does the same thing. (Desperate to cure his grandfather's Alzheimer's, James Franco sets out to make an ape smarter.) I feel like I've seen this trope in a bunch of movies, too, but I can't recall which. Am I wrong about this?

Pretty sure it's because chimps are in Actors' Equity.

If only Jobe had taken his revenge on a cruel director of photography by flinging digital debris out of a lawnmower at his eye.

After long consideration I've decided that I agree with New Line: this is a Stephen King movie. I don't mean that he wrote it or has any creative influence whatsoever. I mean that it has a painfully uncomfortable portrayal of a "simple" person, supernatural forces with no internal logic or consistency, and every single character is irredeemable and abusive. What's more, by these criteria not only is Lawnmower Man properly identified as a Stephen King film, but so is Punch Drunk Love, The Number 23, and Leprechaun.

"Couldn't he have just been at one of the regular computer terminals in the room?" This speaks to Jason's question: why do they have to simulate weightlessness with gigantic cybergyros? The only reason you'd need something like that would be if you wanted to simulate involuntary movements being forced on a subject, like being trapped in a love goo trap or being knocked around by a wrathful cybernetic god creature.

Paul and company apologize in this episode for not knowing the biblical story of Job well enough to compare it to the movie's pilot, but it's worth pointing out that the movie's writers clearly didn't know the story either. Father Abusey McBeating mutters this dubious exposition for the audience's benefit: "He brings the wrath of the Lord on himself, just like his namesake." I know that he's a horrible priest, but even the worst priest wouldn't get the basics of the biblical story of Job so wrong. Job wasn't an object of God's wrath, and he certainly didn't do anything to invite the wrath of God. The entire point of the biblical story is that Job is so blessed and praised by God that he becomes a target of Satan. This isn't a minor detail or a quibble over interpretation. For a bad priest to say Job invited God's wrath would be as plausible as a bad doctor prescribing nacho cheese sauce to treat syphilis or an art historian describing the Venus de Milo as a sculpture celebrating the body of a double amputee. It's not bad, it's flat out bonkers.

Is "sentient" the new "literally" of HDTGM?

I politely disagree, and am now working to produce a version of Stealth in which all of EDI's lines are replaced by lines from Tommy Wiseau in The Room.

I forget: In the subplot where EDI decides to play out an old hypothetical war scenario, does Josh Lucas try to explain he's on a fool's errand by playing Tic Tac Toe with EDI? Because I feel like maybe one time I heard that this is an effective way to explain the pointlessness of hypermilitary aggression to artificial teenage boys who are mistakenly playing one of those war ga... uh... scenarios.

Are we just going to pretend that teenage hyperviolent boy EDI doesn't rape a blimp when she won't give him what he wants?

ATTENTION MANTZOUKAS: CLOWN ALERT!!!

This is conservatively among my five favorite HDTGM episodes. Liberally it's one of my top three. Fascistically it's just okay, but anarchically it's just great like all the episodes. Also, I'd like to applaud the HDTGM team for spending the last week hammering the term "buns" into my mind.

I am deeply saddened that, upon being asked to sing the Second Opinions theme, the audience did not chant: "Hey, hey, hey, Second Opinions on the way! Hey, hey, hey, Second Opinions on the way!"

I am profoundly disappointed that no one in the audience suggested the alternate title of this movie as, "Xanadu 2: Electric Boogalow."

Also: Does this episode not firmly establish once and for all that Jason really was space-vampire glamoured by Mathilda May? He's hallucinating and seeing her everywhere. I look forward to future episodes in which Jason shouts at Paul, "Let me go! Get outta there you bitch! Why are you so perfect?!"

I'm going to cut Paul some slack for missing the Biblical allegory. Why? Because there's no mention of apples in Genesis. Eve is tempted by the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The reason it's depicted as an apple in western artwork likely stems from a Latin pun: by eating the malum (apple), Eve contracted mālum (evil). Since Paul is a rigorous scholar of religious texts, it's no wonder he didn't recognize the bastardized version of the... Oh, who the fuck am I kidding. Come on, Paul, how did you miss this?!?!?!