theworstbuddhist

I have seen this film dozens of times. I do love it, even if I find it harder and harder to love Matt and Trey as the years pass. This film is a Zucker/Abrams production in the tradition of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, turning their satire on pro sports not long after the mid-90s MLB player lockout. It is apparently based on a true story in that the Zuckers (and I assume Abrams was their Squeak Scolari) invented this driveway basketball game that mixes horse with baseball rules, and it had a small amount of popularity in their area of California at the time. The cast of this movie is amazing, with Robert Vaughn effortlessly stealing comedy scenes. Matt and Trey are kind of adorably bad actors and Dian Bachar is amazing. And of course the love interests, Jenny McCarthy (speaking of people it's hard to tolerate now) and Yasmin Bleeth.. Ernest Borgnine and a bunch of great cameos. I don't think it's a bad movie but its is not aging well and a lot of its humour is weak, as the characters themselves would say. It's only 20 years old but I feel like someone watching it for the first time now legitimately would wonder how the hell it got made.

Maybe? My take on it, after a long think, is that June should have followed her instincts and recused herself from doing this episode. Because this is the first time I can think of where she not only actually remembered seeing the movie, she was deeply invested in the movie, probably more than anyone in the theatre and more than anyone involved in making it. She credits it with her sexual awakening and with her career as an actor. That is some high stakes for this kind of a show. To disagree with her, it seemed from her responses, was to insult her and her career. She implied that those who didn't like the film just didn't get it, and were not very observant, and maybe dead inside. None of this is acceptable as film criticism, or comedy, or rhetoric. She made it too personal for the rest of the cast to work. And I don't mean to pick on June - the same weird dynamic could have arisen from anyone who was deeply invested in a given film, and this week it happened to be her with this movie. I think if nothing else this episode proves that they shouldn't do an episode about a movie that one of them is in, or is so invested in the film that they may as well have been. Thankfully, this seems like a weird exception in an otherwise enjoyable string of episodes. If the dynamic was like this all the time, I wouldn't listen anymore.

Haha. I really need to catch up, I love Legion.

Love the late Rik Mayall and Phoebe Cates but yeah, no interest in seeing this again. And this episode was really unpleasant to listen to, honestly.

They just did Megaforce at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal and that is certainly a good film for the podcast, but I hope they will consider doing the relentlessly crazy Canadian buddy cop film Bon Cop Bad Cop, in which English and French detectives (Colm Feore and Patrick Huard) must investigate the death of a guy who is dropped from a plane and lands on the sign dividing the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. It leads to a quintesentially Canadian bad guy whose murder spree is caused by a hockey trade. On the way there is a lot of Anglophone/Francohone dark comedy, especially for those who know about Quebec separatism and the FLQ. The film was quite successful domestically but they took over a decade to make a sequel. If the team goes back to Just For Laughs, I hope they will consider doing this one or another equally weird Canadian film, like Foolproof with Ryan Reynolds.

It's all on the wheel, old chum!

Oh man, that reference to Brian Wilson just reminded me of a pretty good Canadian film from the 90s that was about Brian Wilson and his late brother (through a thin layer of fiction) - Whale Music, starring Maury Chaykin and Paul Gross and a bunch of other folks you might recognize. Plus music by the Rheostatics, one of the great bands from this country that never quite caught on in the US. It's on Youtube here: Enjoy.

Yeah. I haven't seen the film since it came out (didn't have time to revisit it last week) but according to the wikipedia page it sounds like it was the classic situation of poor distribution and a bunch of other factors causing it to flop at the box office, but the soundtrack did well and the home video and cable markets gave it a second life. Edit to add: as someone who was a teenager in the 80s this movie fits pretty squarely in with the torrent of baby boomer nostalgia horseshit that was being released at the time, from new albums by everyone from The Moody Blues to The Monkees and films like The Big Chill. @Cameron H., apparently Roger Ebert shared your frustration with the ending, which he said spoiled an otherwise agreeable film.

The film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly is one that I wish Phil could have seen, I think he would have dug it. If you haven't seen it already, Linklater's earlier animated film Waking Life (starring Wiley Wiggins, from Dazed and Confused) was a prototype for those crazy cel-shading techniques and also has a lot of references to PKD.

Yes, indeed. Paul, Jason, June and John, if you were to all sign a copy of Transformers: ROTF and throw it up on a web store, I would plunk down $50 or so for a copy if the funds were going to charity. I might even watch the movie.

Kind of an insult to Pennywise.

I still wish that Paul would either sell the many DVDs he has received for some kind of charity or give them out at the live shows as prizes the way he has with other swag. But maybe there are legal issues around that.

Yeah. It's been a while since I read the original story but I remember that the first film was reasonably close basically up to the point where Arnold goes to Moss - sorry, Mars- and the rest is pretty much invented for the film. Most of the films have been based on short stories, so that will tend to happen.

As a PKD fan I would not mind a remake that is closer to the source, or at least not a big sloppy mess, but unfortunately most of the film adaptations of his stuff are neither. While I'm on about it though I will throw out recommendations for the following PKD adaptations that haven't been widely seen: Barjo (French adaptation of the non-SF novel Confessions of a Crap Artist) Screamers (Low-budget adaptation of the short story "Second Variety" starring Peter Weller) A Scanner Darkly (Animated film by Richard Linklater adapting the autobiographical SF novel of the same name, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson) Also, RIP Rutger Hauer

Dear @HDTGM, please make the [throws drink] shirt.

For real though, the first Eddie and the Cruisers is an underseen classic. Like a lot of films from the time I am guessing it is hard to find due to music rights. Apparently it was impossible to secure music rights in the 1980s?

I prefer to think of them as the Barbarino character from The Greatest American Hero and Dallas from Megaforce, but you do you.

Oh, Zalman King! Mr. Red Shoe Diaries made some "steamy" pictures in the late 80s and 90s. They all were kind of like this.

Wow. Just out of curiosity, what did Guy Fieri look like in 1993? Also, just watched the merry go round scene and it was much more enjoyable once I replaced James Coburn with Trump and Michael Biehn with Eric Trump.

Oh, one cool thing about this movie is seeing Sarah Trigger. She was in PCU with Jeremy Piven, which is not aging well as you can probably imagine, and she was in one of the greatest TV crime dramas of all time, the short-lived EZ Streets by Paul Haggis, starring Ken Olin, Joey Pants, and Jason Gedrick. Hey Netflix, there's a show that should be revived and resolved!

Watching the movie now I get the strong impression that Christoper watched Wild At Heart and wanted to do the same thing, but noir.

This is so sad.

Just added to Netflix, it's a pretty good impression of a Lifetime thriller starring former Disney star Brenda Song as a woman who is in a terrible accident that puts her in a coma. When she wakes her husband whisks her away to a secluded mountain home so she can recuperate in peace. Meanwhile police detective Dennis Haysbert discovers that Song's "husband" is not what it seems. I am not doing it justice, this movie is batshit crazy sometimes. It's like it was made specifically to troll HDTGM.

It worked out ok for Lou Gramm, I guess, but you don't want to count on that kind of dumb luck.

I haven't seen How to Steal a Million in ages. I really must rewatch it sometime. I love Peter O'Toole. Charade is good too, great cast in a kind of late-period Hitchcock kind of story. There are a few films of hers I don't really care if I ever see again - The Nun's Story, War and Peace, Green Mansions - but there is something to like in most of them, I think. I think both Charade and Paris When it Sizzles have been remade in the last decade or so.