Episode 181 - Freejack: LIVE!

[The_Triple_Lindy 2482]

When Jagger asks Alex for the ID number, my smart-alec mind immediately went "4". When he said 6, I almost passed out laughing. When the crew talked about it on the show, good thing I was at a red light.

Dude ... is that a Back to School reference?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZfpwfQ58Ds

[FrancisRizzo3 212]

Dude ... is that a Back to School reference?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZfpwfQ58Ds

 

Very likely, at least subconsciously. Back to School is one of my favorite films of all time.

[The_Triple_Lindy 2482]

 

Very likely, at least subconsciously. Back to School is one of my favorite films of all time.

Good answer

 

[PollyDarton 1807]

I suddenly don't think that a "perfect world" scenario is possible with this.

 

The idea about bodyjacking is that they are getting the person from the past at the moment of their deaths, so no harm, no foul to the future -- everyone will proceed as if the guy dies. But we hear Buster Poindexter say that he didn't get the insurance money from Furlong because they couldn't recover his body from the past. This means that Furlong's body being absent after the crash was significant to the events of history moving forward. Therefore, there is likely a timeline where Furlong's kith and kin would have had a normal funeral with his charred remains present. But now, everyone affected by Furlong's death would have a lingering question about what happened and why his body disappeared in the crash, and that absolutely would affect the future. Julie Redlund is 2009 in brooding, sullen, and part of a soulless corporate entity ... who knows just how much of that is based on the lack of closure over putting an empty casket in the ground, but I'd say it has to factor in a little.

 

Not to mention all the other families who knew someone who was jacked ... the more bodies that are jacked, the greater the likelihood of one over-zealous family member seeking answers and altering the past in major ways.

 

There can be no safe bodyjacking if the past is altered even a little bit. The web of human interaction just doesn't work that way.

 

Another thought exercise on this movie -If this technology were real, it would quickly become a service style business model. People living in 2009 (or whenever the technology became available) could now retrieve any person from the past right at the moment of their deaths - particularly people who have died unexpectedly from freak accidents or homicides. There would be intense demand for this. Aside from the "Freejacking" (placing one person's consciousness into another person's body) the retrieval of a person right before their death would be a major river of money ALL ON ITS OWN. It would and could eventually be used within hours or minutes of when the person was killed. Fatal car accident this morning? Bring the guy back by night and he continues with his life as if nothing happened.

 

(Is there a Black Mirror like this?)

 

I guess rather than a business it would probably be co-opted by the medical field and would be a fucking MARVEL of modern "medicine."

[The_Triple_Lindy 2482]

 

Another thought exercise on this movie -If this technology were real, it would quickly become a service style business model. People living in 2009 (or whenever the technology became available) could now retrieve any person from the past right at the moment of their deaths - particularly people who have died unexpectedly from freak accidents or homicides. There would be intense demand for this. Aside from the "Freejacking" (placing one person's consciousness into another person's body) the retrieval of a person right before their death would be a major river of money ALL ON ITS OWN. It would and could eventually be used within hours or minutes of when the person was killed. Fatal car accident this morning? Bring the guy back by night and he continues with his life as if nothing happened.

 

(Is there a Black Mirror like this?)

 

I guess rather than a business it would probably be co-opted by the medical field and would be a fucking MARVEL of modern "medicine."

 

Ha! So, like, someone living in 2009 could go to the "Bodyjack" wing of the hospital and retrieve someone who was killed that morning?

 

That's amazing.

[PollyDarton 1807]

 

Ha! So, like, someone living in 2009 could go to the "Bodyjack" wing of the hospital and retrieve someone who was killed that morning?

 

That's amazing.

 

It would potentially change everything. If there's universal healthcare I guess.

[PollyDarton 1807]

The scene where Furlong goes to find Renee Russo at her old apartment, and the African American family is there...

Did it remind anyone of Back to The Future II?

[PollyDarton 1807]

 

Very likely, at least subconsciously. Back to School is one of my favorite films of all time.

 

I love this movie so much

[The_Triple_Lindy 2482]

Not sure if anyone mentioned that Jerry Hall, who was Mick Jagger's partner at the time, was the reporter who interviews Furlong in the bar:

 

[The_Triple_Lindy 2482]

The scene where Furlong goes to find Renee Russo at her old apartment, and the African American family is there...

Did it remind anyone of Back to The Future II?

I remember a similar moment in Flight of the Navigator, one my all time favs:

 

https://youtu.be/PQ73xIg_U38?t=770

 

It won't let me link to the time, but it happens at roughly 13:00.

[joel_rosenbaum 1269]

Let's get to that audience question. Who would you guys freejack?

 

I would go with Steve Prefontaine.

[taylor anne photo 11311]

I feel like a lot of my grievances with this movie have been talked about, my biggest complaint being exactly what Phoebe brought up when Rene was talking about how much older she was now (I literally said the same thing as her and went "Oh fuck you movie" when that scene happened).

 

But I kept thinking of a Matt Gourley quote when I was finished watching this - "The biggest sin a movie can make is be boring." And honestly I was so fucking bored during every part. There was no attempt to make us care about Furlong before he died other than showing his relationship to Rene, which in my opinion had zero chemistry whatsoever. So by the time he gets sent to the future and he's trying to escape Mick Jagger I found myself not cheering for him just so the movie would fucking end.

 

I'm pretty sure I scrolled through Twitter on my phone twice before the halfway mark (I checked because I could have sworn the movie was about to end and when I looked it was only at minute 46).

[Quasar Sniffer 4174]

Let's get to that audience question. Who would you guys freejack?

 

I would go with Steve Prefontaine.

Honestly, it would probably be The Rock. As someone who's spent the last ten years at 5'7" and 118 pounds... I just wanna know what it's like to lift a heavy thing. And look down at people.

And look good in a suit.

Or even a silk shirt and pastel pants...

 

 

As long as it doesn't result in a Dead The Rock, obviously. I would never want The Rock to die. Maybe a temporary Being John Malkovich type situation?

[Quasar Sniffer 4174]

But I kept thinking of a Matt Gourley quote when I was finished watching this - "The biggest sin a movie can make is be boring." And honestly I was so fucking bored during every part. There was no attempt to make us care about Furlong before he died other than showing his relationship to Rene, which in my opinion had zero chemistry whatsoever. So by the time he gets sent to the future and he's trying to escape Mick Jagger I found myself not cheering for him just so the movie would fucking end.

 

This philosophy of measuring Cinematic Shittiness has been in my mind since I first heard Mr. Gourley express it as well. Having Matt Gourley's mellifluous voice in my head, giving me advice AIN'T BAD. It's why I can explain my love for the Bond movies like Moonraker or View to a Kill: they sure do go for it. Not that I needed an overarching philosophy to justify my love for Grace Jones in a Bond movie, it's just a useful perspective to use when trying to be objective about a film's quality. Freejack feels just so... safe, like someone read the synopsis of a Phillip K. Dick story and said, "let's do that, but replace all the imagination with packing peanuts."

[firsttimecallerlongtimelistenr 3590]

this one is for paul or the interns .... this is most important ... especially if you suffer from any level of OCD ...

 

i was updating the spreadsheet and it turns out that if the next mini is exactly 65 minutes long then the total runtime of minis+movies+episodes will be exactly 25 days (at least by my numbers) ... how cool would that be?

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fNUxhVbJf9FOIHnE1yorJj383JS51T0cjF6XsaE8tA4/edit?usp=sharing

 

unless i've got it wrong then ... never mind ...carry on

[ActionFighter 7]

Long time listener, first time poster.

 

The director, Geoff Murphy, was the biggest director in New Zealand in the 1980s. Goodbye Pork Pie (1980) was a local blockbuster, drawing in crowds like never before. UTU (1984) was also a huge hit, depicting the Maori Land Wars as an action spectacle. The Quiet Earth (1985) won acclaim with its dramatic last-man-on-earth performance of long-time collaborator Bruno Lawrence.

 

He was so successful, he went to Hollywood. And the world got Freejack. Sigh.

 

In 2015, he published his autobiography Geoff Murphy: A Life on Film. And he has some things to say about Freejack.

 

https://pastebin.com/5KJnREyF

 

- He took the job because the studio threw money at him, and he had a huge NZ tax bill hanging over his head.

 

- Linda Fiorentino was the original pick for the role of Julie Redlund. In fact, they were shooting scenes with her and Emilio for the first few weeks of production. One day, the studio executives flew into Atlanta with Rene Russo, had her audition, and Fiorentino was let go. To quote the book

I could not understand why they found Linda so objectionable, and asked Jim to explain his position. He replied, ‘She doesn’t give me a hard-on.’ Well, it seemed to me that his next hard-on was going to cost him plenty. I also wondered why it had taken him so long to come to this conclusion. I would have thought he would have noticed this during the casting sessions: all he had to do was look between his legs.

So all that work had to be re-shot.

 

- Mick Jagger accepted his part on the basis of having seen UTU and having a few drinks with Geoff. They got on so well that Jagger let Murphy and his family use his house and butler in the Virgin Islands when shooting wrapped up.

 

- The first test screening was real bad.

The ‘creative committee’ decided that some of the scenes in Freejack needed to be re-shot. This, these creative experts thought, would require about three weeks. I asked them what scenes they wanted re-shot and they didn’t know. They were still thinking about it.

 

And so I was stuck with the re-shoot. We went back to Atlanta and shot new script pages from a new writer. Some of them were pretty good and definite improvements, but most were simply different. These new scenes were never going to save the picture, because the problem was that there was some basic flaw in the original story and the editing structure.

 

- Murphys last effort to save the movie was to cut it down to 95 minutes. The studio hated it, and spent the weekend doing a final cut which came out at 110 minutes.

 

- Murphy had the credit saying " A GEOFF MURPHY FILM" removed from the opening because he didn't feel it was his movie at all. He kept his DIRECTED BY credit because it would have required legal action.

 

- Geoff Murphy was fascinated by the strip clubs in Atlanta, because they were so different from the ones back home.

 

It's an interesting book. He also talks about meeting Dino De Laurentiis and messing up the chance to direct Conan III, getting paid to not direct Predator, working with Steven Seagal, Mickey Rourke, Peter Jackson etc. Some good stuff, even if you're not interested in the New Zealand filmmaking that makes up most of it.

[grudlian. 4725]

 

Another thought exercise on this movie -If this technology were real, it would quickly become a service style business model. People living in 2009 (or whenever the technology became available) could now retrieve any person from the past right at the moment of their deaths - particularly people who have died unexpectedly from freak accidents or homicides. There would be intense demand for this. Aside from the "Freejacking" (placing one person's consciousness into another person's body) the retrieval of a person right before their death would be a major river of money ALL ON ITS OWN. It would and could eventually be used within hours or minutes of when the person was killed. Fatal car accident this morning? Bring the guy back by night and he continues with his life as if nothing happened.

 

(Is there a Black Mirror like this?)

 

I guess rather than a business it would probably be co-opted by the medical field and would be a fucking MARVEL of modern "medicine."

As What's Its Mission mentioned earlier, the book explained there were suicide booths for people to donate their bodies to be freejacks. We see the ads for suicide in the movie. It's possible there is a thriving business for voluntary freejacks in the movie that is never explored. Certainly, I could see a depressing reality where people donate their bodies as a way to stave off financial ruin for their families. I could also see a future where criminals are sentenced to be freejacks instead of the death penalty.

 

The entire premise of Freejack reminds me of A Sound Of Thunder where an industry is built up to send people back in time and hunt dinosaurs right before they were going to die of natural causes.

 

I feel like a lot of my grievances with this movie have been talked about, my biggest complaint being exactly what Phoebe brought up when Rene was talking about how much older she was now (I literally said the same thing as her and went "Oh fuck you movie" when that scene happened).

 

But I kept thinking of a Matt Gourley quote when I was finished watching this - "The biggest sin a movie can make is be boring." And honestly I was so fucking bored during every part. There was no attempt to make us care about Furlong before he died other than showing his relationship to Rene, which in my opinion had zero chemistry whatsoever. So by the time he gets sent to the future and he's trying to escape Mick Jagger I found myself not cheering for him just so the movie would fucking end.

 

I'm pretty sure I scrolled through Twitter on my phone twice before the halfway mark (I checked because I could have sworn the movie was about to end and when I looked it was only at minute 46).

I'm in the same boat as you. In fact, I went into this thinking I was really going to love this one. I can sometimes like a movie through the lens of what I would have thought as a kid (and 12 year old me probably would have loved this). It has an...interesting cast. So, I was pretty amped for this despite what everyone's Letterboxd ratings said.

 

A few minutes in and I'm sort of liking it even though I'm confused on what's happening and what year it is. Then it just kind of stops being interesting. It kind of recovers when everyone comes together at the end in Anthony Hopkins' office to switch bodies, but it's too late. There was an hour of being boring.

 

That's such a disappointment because I thought I'd like it. But also because there's a lot to explore with the premise. There are so many ways to approach it. This could easily be an action movie. It could be a depressing dystopian, Black Mirror thing. It could be a science fiction mystery. I would love to see how someone like Ridley Scott or John Carpenter would have approached this in the 80s.

[FisterRoboto 7499]

Currently listening, but I just want to say, because I don't think I have yet, I love Jessica St Clair as co-host. She's absolutely hilarious. I would love it if she could be brought on as a permanent co-host. Not as a replacement for June, but in addition to. I know that probably would never work, but she's been so great that I'm going to be sorry when this run ends.

Totally agree. I love her so much. When she was on with Rachel Bloom for the Streets of Fire ep, I tweeted asking if she could be the permanent fill-in for June. And since that tweet got all of three likes and was basically two years before she made another appearance on the show, I'm probably responsible for this run. So...y'all are welcome.

 

(Also, since I brought up Rachel Bloom, she was on last week's Off-Book, and it was probably one of the funniest episodes they've done so far, and you should all listen to that ep if the show isn't in your normal rotation)

[sycasey 2.0 2301]

Am I the only one to have noticed the amazing similarity between Young Jonathan Banks (playing a ruthless amoral bureaucrat with zero regard for human life) and Trump's deporter-in-chief Stephen Miller (a ruthless amoral etc and so on)?

 

No, you are not the only one.

 

 

 

It's uncanny.

[Cockney Mackem 514]

For those of you wondering why Jagger didn't do any more films despite all the quality he demonstrates in Freejack, it may have been his business commitments such as the retail empire he built with fellow Rolling Stone Keith Richard

 

https://youtu.be/VTCSzP6dmmo

[Smigg. 509]

I've not listened to the episode yet, but after seeing the announcement, I just want to say that I am all the way fucking in with Rock Star being done, and I am going to be insufferable in that thread.

 

Thank you.

[sycasey 2.0 2301]

I've not listened to the episode yet, but after seeing the announcement, I just want to say that I am all the way fucking in with Rock Star being done, and I am going to be insufferable in that thread.

 

Thank you.

 

It's been a long time, but . . . . I don't remember this movie being all that bad?

[Smigg. 509]

 

It's been a long time, but . . . . I don't remember this movie being all that bad?

 

It's a bit cliche, but it's not a bad movie. It's more silly than straight up bad.

[sycasey 2.0 2301]

 

It's a bit cliche, but it's not a bad movie. It's more silly than straight up bad.

 

That's what I remember, that if you accepted the silliness of the premise (a massively popular rock band decides to pluck some guy off the street to be their singer), it was pretty much a normal movie after that.

[Cam Bert 8145]

I'm kinda surprised this one line that stuck out to me hasn't been mentioned yet. So when Emilio meets David Johansen at gets the plot breakdown from him he questions why they don't just take current bodies. Johansen's answer was something to the effect of "Are you kidding me these people have lived half their lives with no ozone layer!" Now let's break that down. The first signs of a hole or depletion of the ozone layer was in the late 70s and this movie takes place in 2009. If you have lived half your life without a complete ozone layer that means the median age of the people would be 60 which is crazy high. Then again maybe at some point after Emilio's death the ozone layer was completely destroyed. Say it happened the later in 1991 after Emilio's death, that means 18 years of no ozone so again to say that the people have lived half their lives with no ozone layer would put the median age at 36 which while closer still high.

 

However this is just silly math poking fun of an hyperbolic statement. No the real damning thing is how could the world still be functioning if the entire ozone layer was destroyed? If you don't know what it does, in simple terms the ozone layer keeps out harmful radiation from the sun. If it were destroyed just going outside you'd be exposed to high levels of UV radiation. Cancer would run rampant. More damning than that is that shortly after its destruction all plant life on earth would die off. No plants means no food for animals, which in turn means eventually no food for us. Also, no trees and plants means no oxygen and no rain and a host of other problems. The world is doomed! This must mean they came up with some alternative to the ozone layer in this Freejack world. This then begs the question why not take the very young to Freejack into. This new ozone layer seems to work fine and they younger they are the longer you get to live..