Episode 138 - The Boy Next Door (w/ Heather Anne Campbell, Ben Siemon)

[Glen Toran 94]

i'm going to post this here and in the howdies thread and then again maybe when the howdies get released:

 

i was going to save this till closer to the date of the howdies but the euros started last night so i might be abit distracted over the next few week.

 

so here it goes ... some of you might remember i made a site with a "beat the intro" type quiz based on pauls intros to every episode and also i made a little hdtgm based memory game. well in honor of the 2nd howdies i put both of them onto the one site and added another couple of things:

 

i know jason loves jigsaws so i made a really basic, and i mean basic, jigsaw puzzle site where you have to reassemble the posters from the movies covered by paul, june and jason.

 

and i put together a howdies 2 wordsearch (you'll have to print this out or else destroy your screen .. it's up to you)

 

so if you're interested click on the banner ... enjoy

 

 

 

oh .. and if you find any issues or have some suggestions let me know ... i'll probably ignore them but if ireland get knocked out early i might have some free time on my hands in about 2 weeks. btw ... i only looked at this on a laptop so i have no idea how it will look on a tablet/phone or how the functionality is effected on same.

 

Outstanding effort Firsttime!

 

18/20 on the 20 question intro quiz. Suck on that ...erm...suckers?

[Smigg 1488]

I'm going for The Ultimate!

[Smigg 1488]

Okay, I got 133... I need to reevaluate my life a little...

[crumbcake 104]

Haha, cutting brakes in movies is always stupid. Who gets up to full speed on the highway without using their brakes once?

 

THIS is the thing that bothers me. I've never had my brake lines cut, but I had a shitty old used car whose brakes just died one morning, and I noticed it before I got out of my driveway because what driveway is set up where you can just hop in your car, hit the gas, and GO? Let alone what neighborhoods is there where you can reach and merge onto a major road without once tapping touching your brakes?

[CooperWiseman 14]

Did anyone notice the asian bully reach over the counter and steal something while the redheaded bully is talking about Kevin's penis purse? Hardware girl is not an observant shopkeep.

[clever_hans 35]

When J Lo is introducing herself to the class and telling them that they will be studying The Illiad (don't you feel like they really wanted to do Oedipus Rex?), she is interrupted when Noah is introduced to the class. She runs out of the class and asks what's going on and is told that she requested him to be in there because he would be "an asset to the class." First of all, he's there as a Goddamn student! What the fuck are you even talking about that he'll be "an asset to the class?" He's not going to be a teacher's aid; he's there to learn! I highly doubt that students are placed in their respective classes like they're in a fucking sports draft.

 

As a high school teacher, I had problems with a few of the educational practices in this movie. First of all, JLo is teaching AP Classics, a course that does not exist, and which if it did would probably have to cover more than just The Iliad over the entire year. And yes, it would generally be weird for a teacher to request a specific student be added to their class without any input from the student themselves, but its especially weird here given that the request was made before the first day of school, and Noah is a new transfer student who, as we later learn, doesn't have a transcript. How would she even know that he would be "an asset to the class"?

 

That missing transcript raises more issues. As Vice Principal Chenoweth says after the fight, she checked Noah's file and didn't find a transcript, so she called his old school and learned that he was kicked out. If they didn't already have any of that information, that means that this high school just let a twenty year old man show up and start taking classes without any official record of who he was or whether he should be there, which is not a great policy.

[RyanSz 3140]

During the episode, they floated the idea of someone writing their own IMDb bio. I can't remember if this has been covered on the show before, but Jeffrey Wright's IMDb (auto)biography is on par with the most insane Second Opinions. It begins:

 

 

The full text is too long for a 619-PAUL-ASS message, but a dramatic reading by Paul would be excellent minisode fodder.

Good thing I clicked the link because I got Wright mixed up with sex offender and HDTGM usual suspect Jeffrey Jones, which made that bio even more insane to me when I first read it.

 

Definitely. But the film didn't establish the kid having asthma, his problem was allergy-related incontinence. And they never bothered to explain his reaction (which apparently can happen to people with severe allergies), he just fell down with insta-hives. I had to rewind it to see if a bee had stung him or something. Nope, turns out he's allergic to boxing.

 

 

I think it's safe to say that whatever the allergy was it was deadly, as Oz proved when the character Supreme Allah was killed by his egg allergy.

 

[RyanSz 3140]

i'm going to post this here and in the howdies thread and then again maybe when the howdies get released:

 

i was going to save this till closer to the date of the howdies but the euros started last night so i might be abit distracted over the next few week.

 

so here it goes ... some of you might remember i made a site with a "beat the intro" type quiz based on pauls intros to every episode and also i made a little hdtgm based memory game. well in honor of the 2nd howdies i put both of them onto the one site and added another couple of things:

 

i know jason loves jigsaws so i made a really basic, and i mean basic, jigsaw puzzle site where you have to reassemble the posters from the movies covered by paul, june and jason.

 

and i put together a howdies 2 wordsearch (you'll have to print this out or else destroy your screen .. it's up to you)

 

so if you're interested click on the banner ... enjoy

 

 

 

oh .. and if you find any issues or have some suggestions let me know ... i'll probably ignore them but if ireland get knocked out early i might have some free time on my hands in about 2 weeks. btw ... i only looked at this on a laptop so i have no idea how it will look on a tablet/phone or how the functionality is effected on same.

134 outta 135 on the nerd quiz.

[tomspanks 9039]

 

As a high school teacher, I had problems with a few of the educational practices in this movie. First of all, JLo is teaching AP Classics, a course that does not exist, and which if it did would probably have to cover more than just The Iliad over the entire year. And yes, it would generally be weird for a teacher to request a specific student be added to their class without any input from the student themselves, but its especially weird here given that the request was made before the first day of school, and Noah is a new transfer student who, as we later learn, doesn't have a transcript. How would she even know that he would be "an asset to the class"?

 

That missing transcript raises more issues. As Vice Principal Chenoweth says after the fight, she checked Noah's file and didn't find a transcript, so she called his old school and learned that he was kicked out. If they didn't already have any of that information, that means that this high school just let a twenty year old man show up and start taking classes without any official record of who he was or whether he should be there, which is not a great policy.

 

I was wondering if "Classics" was a high school class. In high school, we studied The Iliad, but it was in Latin class and translating was involved. But even then, it took only half a semester. The rest of the time, we got to study some ribald Latin poetry, lol.

[FisterRoboto 7499]

 

I was wondering if "Classics" was a high school class. In high school, we studied The Iliad, but it was in Latin class and translating was involved. But even then, it took only half a semester. The rest of the time, we got to study some ribald Latin poetry, lol.

We read it for AP Senior English (which was basically a really, really, really basic World Lit class). It was our summer reading, so they expected us to read it over the summer, and then we talked about it for the first couple weeks of class.

 

Side note: our teacher let us pick what we wanted to read for our last book, and our class voted on Paradise Lost because our teacher loved it so much and we were a bunch of nerds who got excited listening to other nerds talk about the things that excite them (and, btw, I still do, which is why movie podcasts were the greatest thing I ever discovered). After three days, half the class threw a fit and asked to switch books because *gasp* Milton talks about God and Satan in it! (Never mind that we had also read parts of The Inferno in that class already)

[Glen Toran 94]

...After three days, half the class threw a fit and asked to switch books because *gasp* Milton talks about God and Satan in it (Never mind that we had also read parts of The Inferno in that class already)

 

Fuckwits.

What were they expecting from a religious allegory written by a 17th century Christian fundamentalist?

Disco dancing and anal sex?

[Cameron H. 23786]

Are we really not going to talk about how J Lo's "reward" for surviving this whole ordeal is that she gets to get back together with her cheating husband?  They made absolutely no effort in this movie to make him a sympathetic character or someone she should be with.  At no point was I like, "Gee, I really hope they work things out...."  In fact, in one scene, he tries to push part of the blame of his infidelity back onto J Lo when he tells her something like, "I cheated on you because WE weren't working hard enough to keep OUR marriage afloat."  What the fuck, dude?  You fuck your cookie scented secretary and somehow that's J Lo's fault?  He also tells her, "I'm not giving up on us..."  Um, guy, that's pretty much out of your hands.  You screwed up.  It's really up to her if she wants to forgive you or not.  And I have a feeling that awkwardly kissing her as you drunkenly grope her ass isn't going to cut it.

 

What really disappoints me though, is that I feel this movie would have really benefited by being a part of a Shared Universe.  I would have really enjoyed it if--opening opposite this movie--was a romantic comedy called Honey Bunz.  In it, a quirky, San Franciscan baker, who's loveable but unlucky with love, opens Honey Bunz--the titular sweet shop--and begins a torrid affair with a married man (Corbett).  He would play the "bad" choice who disappears half way through the film before she finds "Mr. Right."  Granted, as per the laws of all Rom Coms, you'd have to make change her profession to baker, but it would help to explain why her character smelled so much like cookies.  It would be awesome if you could then play the movies concurrently, so when you finally get enough of a break from all the delightful antics happening in Honey Bunz to think to yourself, "Whatever happened to that cad Corbett?" you can flip over to The Boy Next Door and say, "Oh!  He tried to get back together with his wife and ended up being tortured and shot by her own paramour.  Good."

[RyanSz 3140]

So apparently the writer saw this clip on Family Guy and thought it would make for a great plot point.

 

 

Well that's 2000 comments on these boards!

[Cinco DeNio 5290]

I may have not seen this correctly and I refuse to go back and watch it but I swear that after Noah yells at JLo in the driveway he actually gets in the truck and drives away angrily. Then all of a sudden you hear engine revving noises and Kevin walks up and the camera angle changes and he is there again. Did I really not see that correctly or was that the biggest fuck up of all time?

 

Also did anyone else think that when Noah grabbed a gun and took Kevin shooting that a gun would actually come into play at some point? Why else would they have shown how scarily accurate he was if that was never going to come back into the movie?

The other thing that bothered me about the shooting scene (and similar scenes in other movies): Noah shot all the rest of the pumpkins! If he was expecting JLo's son to target practice what was he supposed to now practice on? You don't show off your skills to demonstrate and waste all the ammunition!

[taylor anne photo 11311]

Wait we haven't talked about how JLo knew exactly where to look for that camera. Did she picture the angle in the photo in her mind's eye and just work backwards from there? Cause it definitely just looks like she walks in the house and picks two things to look behind and oh look at that it's there for her.

[Smigg 1488]

One thing that I'm not happy with, this was labelled as an "Erotic Thriller", I think that's false advertising, nowhere near enough shagging for this to be considered "Erotic".

[Cameron H. 23786]

Another thing we haven't mentioned is how at the end of the movie, Kevin motions to a large tool laying on the ground (a crowbar?) which J Lo somehow surreptitiously grabs, walks the length of the barn to where Noah is, has a full conversation with him, and then clocks him upside the head. Are we supposed to believe that Noah was so enamored with J Lo that he didn't notice her holding a two foot long bludgeoning weapon in her hands? How in the Hell was she concealing that from him? Of course, the whole thing is moot anyway since immediately after laying him out, she drops her weapon, turns her back on Noah, and tries to free her son.

 

To everyone out there, as a general rule, if you ever get the drop on someone stronger than yourself who means to do you or your loved ones harm, you are well within your rights to keep hitting that motherfucker to make sure they stay down.

[taylor anne photo 11311]

Another thing we haven't mentioned is how at the end of the movie, Kevin motions to a large tool laying on the ground (a crowbar?) which J Lo somehow surreptitiously grabs, walks the length of the barn to where Noah is, has a full conversation with him, and then clocks him upside the head. Are we supposed to believe that Noah was so enamored with J Lo that he didn't notice her holding a two foot long bludgeoning weapon in her hands? How in the Hell was she concealing that from him? Of course, the whole thing is moot anyway since immediately after laying him out, she drops her weapon, turns her back on Noah, and tries to free her son.

 

To everyone out there, as a general rule, if you ever get the drop on someone stronger than yourself who means to do you or your loved ones harm, you are well within your rights to keep hitting that motherfucker to make sure they stay down.

[RyanSz 3140]

Another thing I remember about the trailers was that they were promoting an ending so shocking that it would leave audiences breathless. Yet after a movie being as generic an "erotic thriller" as you can get, what were they hoping to think would be so shocking? I think it would have been a great twist if in the end it's revealed that this wasn't the first student or underage kid that she had an affair with or that in those cases she ended up killing those kids to cover up her affair. If they had gone to left field with that, I think it might have been a semi-saving grace for this crap.

[PatrickPohler 2]

Here's a great Planet Money podcast that features this movie! Basically the producer, Jason Blum makes money by highly restricting the budget for each movie. (he made Paranormal Activity for $15K)

 

Blum has very strict rules for his movies

• Not too many speaking parts, speaking extras are on a different pay scale than non-speaking (also explains the empty extra less scenes, sounds like he limited non-speaking roles too).
  
• Not too many locations, most economical is in one house
  
• Pay talent as little as possible, pay using box office bonuses
  

Here are the two reporters discussing how "The Boy Next Door" follows those rules

 

 

 

SMITH: The movie "The Boy Next Door" was designed with these three rules in mind. There are barely any extras.

 

HENN: There's a dance scene in the movie and you're, like, looking around, and you're like, are there people at this dance? Where is everybody?

 

SMITH: I'm also guessing most of them don't speak (laughter).

 

HENN: Oh, I don't think there's an extra in the entire movie who says one word.

 

SMITH: Also the movie mostly takes place in a house and a school - just two places.

 

HENN: And Jennifer Lopez and Rob Cohen are working for the minimum legal salaries. They're getting equity in the film. They get an ownership stake. But if the movie flops, they will earn next to nothing.

 

Also there's nearly zero budget for special effects. They talk about the eye stabbing scene in the episode and I HIGHLY recommend listening (I won't spoil it) on how they had to make it work since they basically ran out of money and the scene wasn't going to be shot and the producer refused to give them more money to finish it.

 

Transcript: http://www.npr.org/t...oryId=439632877

 

Episode: http://www.npr.org/s...ng-in-hollywood

[Smigg 1488]

Not en erotic thriller! I remember when Channel 5 would show an "Erotic Thriller" every Friday night. If Shannon Tweed wasn't boning every 15 minutes, it was a waste of time!

 

I loved Shannon Tweed as a teenager.

[Cinco DeNio 5290]

Not en erotic thriller! I remember when Channel 5 would show an "Erotic Thriller" every Friday night. If Shannon Tweed wasn't boning every 15 minutes, it was a waste of time!

 

I loved Shannon Tweed as a teenager.

Shannon Whirry always did it for me.

[ChunkStyle 1160]

Wait we haven't talked about how JLo knew exactly where to look for that camera. Did she picture the angle in the photo in her mind's eye and just work backwards from there? Cause it definitely just looks like she walks in the house and picks two things to look behind and oh look at that it's there for her.

 

I think there was a deleted setup scene between J Lo and the uncle where he tells her digital clocks are the way to go and he is throwing out all his analog clocks.

[Smigg 1488]

Shannon Whirry always did it for me.

 

Loved her too. There were a few I liked.

 

Late 90s British TV had a plethora of Softcore on various channels. We even had dedicated Softcore channels, like L!VE TV, which had a show called "The Weather in Norwegian", where a woman by the name of Anne Marie Foss would do the weather, in Norwegian, during the week, she'd wear a nice dress, on the weekend, bikinis. They even had a show called "Blue Review", where they would review recent porn releases.

 

That all changed though, we do have Babestation, but that doesn't have the fun of the terrible acting and the cliché saxophone music, and sex groans added in ADR.

[Amy the Gorilla 732]

Here's a great Planet Money podcast that features this movie! Basically the producer, Jason Blum makes money by highly restricting the budget for each movie. (he made Paranormal Activity for $15K)

 

Blum has very strict rules for his movies

• Not too many speaking parts, speaking extras are on a different pay scale than non-speaking (also explains the empty extra less scenes, sounds like he limited non-speaking roles too).
  
• Not too many locations, most economical is in one house
  
• Pay talent as little as possible, pay using box office bonuses
  

 

Everything about that feels scummy as hell. I always wondered why Blumhouse irked me somehow, other than producing awful cheap movies.