Episode 190 - Hurricane Heist: LIVE!

[Elektra Boogaloo 3371]

I'm going to make a grand statement and say that it is very attractive to me that Jason knows this much about Harry Potter. The true ideal amount of HP knowledge.

Agree. I like a man who appreciates Cedric Diggory. Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory!!!

 

I also really appreciated June's "Who Jackie" reference. Well done. I tip my hat.

[Omaxem 232]

" I recognize this as a movie "

 

High praise there from June. This should henceforth be featured in the promotional material for the film ( i can totally see it in the poster )

[grudlian. 4725]

Does this mean the Storm can be reasoned with? if they gave it a proper offering could it have spared this town?

The main guy is a synoptic meteorologist. He doesn't make mention of storms being sentient which leads me to believe he either 1. Isnt aware of them being sentient or 2. Or this is totally commonplace and not worth noting because all storms are sentient in this universe.

 

I'm leaning toward the latter but only because he speaks to the storm occasionally. He says something like "You're stronger than they're expecting." You think he might try tel the storm to calm down a bit.

[Cakebug Tranch 6873]

When Casey and Will are concocting the car bomb idea, Casey says that they can pack a car full of kerosene and fertilizer, "just like Timothy McVeigh did."

 

Thanks, Tim. Your methods were sound and your legacy is intact.

Yes! I couldn't believe that they were using real-life tragedies as plot points - starting out with Hurricane Andrew (real-life death toll: 65) and then name-checking the Oklahoma City Bombing (real-life death toll: 168) without considering that people in their audiences might have been affected by those events. And to name-check the now-executed murderer who set that bomb off is really tone-deaf. And then naming the hurricane "Tammy" when an actual storm called Tammy (a tropical storm) actually happened, and killed ten people in 2005? They went to the trouble of fictionalizing the town they live in, why not fictionalize these other elements that remind us of such terrible things?

[Elektra Boogaloo 3371]

Oh. I wanted to talk about dumb weatherman names because Jason was mad that it's a hurricane movie with a character named "Breeze." I'm actually just surprised that HE wasn't the weatherman. My weatherman in NY was literally named Storm E. Field. If you are named a dumb storm name you are required to become a meteorologist.

 

Actual weather person names (look 'em up, nerds)

Amy Freeze

Dallas Raines

Larry Sprinkle

Sunny Haus

[The_Triple_Lindy 2482]

 

High praise there from June. This should henceforth be featured in the promotional material for the film ( i can totally see it in the poster )

I'd wear that t-shirt

[Smigg. 509]

Oh. I wanted to talk about dumb weatherman names because Jason was mad that it's a hurricane movie with a character named "Breeze." I'm actually just surprised that HE wasn't the weatherman. My weatherman in NY was literally named Storm E. Field. If you are named a dumb storm name you are required to become a meteorologist.

 

Actual weather person names (look 'em up, nerds)

Amy Freeze

Dallas Raines

Larry Sprinkle

Sunny Haus

 

[cruel intenstines 36]

i haven't listened to this episode yet (i've recently succumbed to watching the extremely heterosexual nonsense that is Love Island and I'm so obsessed I can't do anything else), but I watched this a couple of weeks ago in a weather / robbery double bill with Hard Rain and I'm only slightly embarrassed to say that I genuinely had a great, great time watching this movie. I was just gleefully texting my pal about everything ridiculous happening and was screaming with laughter so much at the scene in the mall that I actually had to pause the movie until I calmed down. It's very silly and bad but I really thought it was a lot of fun. Having only seen Toby Kebbell in maybe Dead Man's Shoes, RocknRolla and Black Mirror, I could not cope with that terrible accent though, it was bad wasn't it?

 

I'm much more embarrassed to say that until I opened this thread, it hadn't even occurred to me that Breeze was a ~windy name

[The_Awesometeer 20]

I know the skull face in the hurricane has already been talked about and discussed but I have a new theory about it. What if that skull face is in fact a spirit trapped inside the hurricane. It kills Will and Breeze's dad in the very beginning and we first see the skull face. I think at that moment the old spirit of the hurricane was released and the new spirit, Will and Breeze's dad, has now taken control over the hurricane. This explains why when we jump to the present day storm it never hurts or kills our good guy main characters. It sucks out and only kills the bad guys in the mall scene while keeping Breeze safe. It aids Will in killing people with hubcaps. During the chase scene at the end it helps destroy the other two semi-trucks but not the one our heroes are in. Coincidence or hurricane dad? You decide.

[cruel intenstines 36]

And considering it's a heist movie

 

Robin Banks

 

Marginally related to this, growing up my best buds mum was called Robyn Holmes and even 20 some years later I think about this almost weekly.

[RyanSz 3140]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCn0S_FLolE

 

Oh shit! This really does look like it's worth a watch!

I will say that Bautista is really good in Hotel Artemis, albeit with a horrible Mexican accent, but I couldn't imagine him getting any bigger than his peak WWE days, but somehow he ate his former self because he is gigantic in this movie.

 

Was anyone else flummoxed by how easy it was for all the folks running around to not be effected by the insane gusts of wind? We literally see cars just sliding around the streets but all of our actors are moving around as if it's just a shitty, rainy day.

 

And if we ever want to attack a bank heist under bad weather conditions, I highly recommend:

 

 

As IMDB describes it, "A armored-truck driver and his nephew try to prevent three million dollars from being taken by a local rival gang during a catastrophic flooding caused by a severe storm."

Like Den of Thieves being a near copy of of Heat, this film is a copy of Hard Rain, right down to basically nearly every character but the leads becoming bad guys, and then turning on each other.

 

So did Will and Breeze end up in like foster care after their dad is killed? Do they have a mother? Was she also killed by a storm monster? I kind of want to see a new version of this film where the storm monster takes them in and raises them.

I assume they are raised by the hurricane, it's why Will knows so much about them, and I assume Breeze was influenced to serve in the military after witnessing Operation Desert Storm.

 

Also when did the hacker couple start helping out the good guys, by the end of this movie I was skipping forward a bit and had no idea why the leads were trying to pull them from the truck they were driving. Lastly, the fans of this film are like that of Deep Blue Sea, as many of the positive reviews I read had the phrase "fuck you Geostorm."

[Howibetyourmother 23]

I would like to point out one small, but irritating problem with the reality of this film. Ok, sentient storms? I'm on board. Supercar? sure, whatever. Single central processing center for every trash bill in the country? Fine.

 

What I absolutely refuse to believe is that the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that he has packed in that little console compartment are in any way still resembling a sandwich. Anyone who has every packed a PB & J for a lunch or a picnic knows that you have about 3-4 hrs maximum before that sandwich turns into a sloppy, sticky mess. There was not even a blotch of red on those spotless sandwiches they ate.

 

When the action of the movie began, the tank had been on the road for some time already. Even if he had made them in the morning, they would be piles of mush by the time they got to it (dusk). I also think those sandwiches were made WELL in advance, since every one of them is labeled for a different day of the week. They eat the "MONDAY" and "TUESDAY" sandwiches, but this scenario is presumably playing out just before or on the weekend, since the criminals had been "letting the money pile up all week."That means that worst case scenario, these sandwiches are last week's sandwiches, which he has forgotten about and left in the console, or best case scenario, all this takes place on a Sunday, and he's already eaten today's sandwich, and the Monday and Tuesday are ready to go, but that would mean that he had to make them at LEAST the previous night, which would still leave those sammies a big pile of mess.

 

Furthermore, here's some more questions for the group: Why does he label the sandwiches if they're all peanut butter and jelly? Why is his daily food ration one PB&J sandwich? That can't be enough calories for an adult human. Even if he does label them all, why does he write out the full name of each day? the handwriting looks shaky, like he had trouble doing it, and he seems to have a lot of them on hand, so he struggled through the full name of each day? I don't trust this synoptic meteorologist

[Howibetyourmother 23]

One more thing, and please, check my math on this one:

 

I remember reading an article (found the link, here) saying that a 4 ft. high palette of $100 bills would be about $100 million, meaning that each 4 ft high palette can hold about 1 million bills.

 

In the vault scene, Maggie (not the audience member) walks by what I am conservatively calling 45 palettes, each a bit higher than 4 ft, but let's call it 4 ft for ease of calculations. I paused, rewound, and counted several times, but 45 is about right. Presumably, the thieves are here to steal ALL of the palettes, since they're "letting the money pile up." If that's the case, they're about to steal a lot more than $600 million. Here we go:

 

There's no way to tell exactly what denomination they all are, but we can assume that they are about as distributed as the currency in circulation, which are as follows: (infographic link)

 

$1- 30%

$2- 3%

$5- 7%

$10- 5%

$20- 22%

$50- 4%

$100- 29%

 

so, if there are approx. 45 palettes, then there are about 45 million bills, distributed as above.

The breakdown:

 

$1- 30% = 13.5 million bills = $13.5 M

$2- 3% = 1.35 million bills = $2.7 M

$5- 7% = 3.15 million bills = $15.75 M

$10- 5% = 2.25 million bills = $22.5 M

$20- 22% = 9.9 million bills = $198 M

$50- 4% = 1.8 million bills = $90 M

$100- 29% = 13.05 million bills = $1.305 B for an estimated grand total of $1,647,450,000.

[Howibetyourmother 23]

Was anyone else flummoxed by how easy it was for all the folks running around to not be effected by the insane gusts of wind? We literally see cars just sliding around the streets but all of our actors are moving around as if it's just a shitty, rainy day.

 

And if we ever want to attack a bank heist under bad weather conditions, I highly recommend:

 

 

As IMDB describes it, "A armored-truck driver and his nephew try to prevent three million dollars from being taken by a local rival gang during a catastrophic flooding caused by a severe storm."

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP4MkZUthkA

 

 

Yes! It even has the whole (SPOILER ALERT) trope of thinking the Sheriff is a good guy, and he turns mid-movie!

 

Man, Christian Slater was a plucky hero, wasn't he?

[Howibetyourmother 23]

BTW, is Paul still salty about that hdtgm.com that some a-hole is siting on? His Ben & Jerry's commercial spot seems to indicate so

[grudlian. 4725]

It gets brought up a couple times that How Did This Get Made is affecting the numbers for Hurricane Heist. They also bring up the power of HDTGM and its listeners with Face/Off. So, this got me curious how much money is How Did This Get Made bringing in for The Hurricane Heist. Let's do some math.

 

I looked at the seating chart for the Athenaeum. A quick count puts it at 1012 seats. It cost $14.99 to buy this movie. That's 15169.88.

 

To my knowledge, Earwolf doesn't publish numbers but here is a thread on reddit looking at some numbers based on Soundcloud downloads. These are certainly very lowball numbers because its 1. two years ago and 2. it doesn't include listens from other sources like Stitcher, Howl, etc. But let's just go with 343238 for average listens (subtracting live show attendees for this episode). Multiply that times the $5.99 to rent on Amazon, that's $2,055,955.62. We're looking at a total of $2,071,165.50.

 

From this point on, I'm going to have to do a ton of speculating. We know a ton of listeners never pay money to see the movie. They just don't watch it. They watch it in groups. They share Amazon passwords. They pirate the movie. I'll pull a number totally out of my ass and say 50% never pay money for Hurricane Heist. That still puts us at $1,035,582.75.

 

The lifetime box office gross of Hurricane Heist is $6,115,825. So, HDTGM conservatively brought in 16% of Hurricane Heist's gross in two weeks. That's pretty impressive and I'm sure one of those 29 producers is probably getting a paycheck thinking "Maybe we should have kept this in theatres a second week! It's doing okay on VOD."

[The_Triple_Lindy 2482]

i haven't listened to this episode yet (i've recently succumbed to watching the extremely heterosexual nonsense that is Love Island and I'm so obsessed I can't do anything else), but I watched this a couple of weeks ago in a weather / robbery double bill with Hard Rain and I'm only slightly embarrassed to say that I genuinely had a great, great time watching this movie. I was just gleefully texting my pal about everything ridiculous happening and was screaming with laughter so much at the scene in the mall that I actually had to pause the movie until I calmed down. It's very silly and bad but I really thought it was a lot of fun.

In a similar coincidence, I just watched Masterminds, which is "based on a true story" about an armored truck driver pulling an inside job to steal $14B (it's not great, but it's good for a couple of laughs). And then I started playing Mafia III, and the first mission involves posing as armored truck drivers to steal a bunch of currency meant for decirculation and destruction. I guess now I should watch Hard Rain and, I guess, maybe Point Break, too.

 

Also when did the hacker couple start helping out the good guys, by the end of this movie I was skipping forward a bit and had no idea why the leads were trying to pull them from the truck they were driving.

It wasn't until that very moment that Studio 54 hacker-bandits started helping. Until then, they were huddled behind the seat nursing the British guy's gunshot wound.

 

But that does lead to a quick point: Will and Breeze climb in to takeover the truck, subdue the bad guys (who are dry humping in the driver's seat) and take their gun, and then Will immediately climbs back out to takeover the second truck, leaving Breeze alone in the driver's seat with two bad guys behind them, who we've just seen were armed. Hurt or not, why wouldn't the two baddies try to overpower Breeze after they regained composure? How is there only one gun between them -- don't we see everyone with guns earlier in the movie?

[The_Triple_Lindy 2482]

Let's make a list of all the ways this movie rips of Twister:

 

- child who sees father killed in storm becomes storm-chasing expert

- fancy weather-chasing super-trucks

- tethered bodies flying up into the storm yet sustaining no damage from debris

- treating weather like people

- "We've never seen a storm like this"

- convoys

- storms only effect small town America

- hubris

- love triangle -- Paxton/Hunt/Gertz v. the inevitable survival euphoria menage a trois that Will/Breeze/Casey are gonna have at some Red Roof in Pensacola.

[gigi-tastic 2322]

 

High praise there from June. This should henceforth be featured in the promotional material for the film ( i can totally see it in the poster )

 

I need a list like the AFI Top 100. "The June's" or "Recognized by June Diane Raphael "

 

OR it be like the Canne film award The June's with fancy little palm fronds around it. Please someone with skills make up a coveted June Award symbol for this movie poster.

[gigi-tastic 2322]

I will say that Bautista is really good in Hotel Artemis, albeit with a horrible Mexican accent, but I couldn't imagine him getting any bigger than his peak WWE days, but somehow he ate his former self because he is gigantic in this movie.

 

 

Like Den of Thieves being a near copy of of Heat, this film is a copy of Hard Rain, right down to basically nearly every character but the leads becoming bad guys, and then turning on each other.

 

 

I assume they are raised by the hurricane, it's why Will knows so much about them, and I assume Breeze was influenced to serve in the military after witnessing Operation Desert Storm.

 

Also when did the hacker couple start helping out the good guys, by the end of this movie I was skipping forward a bit and had no idea why the leads were trying to pull them from the truck they were driving. Lastly, the fans of this film are like that of Deep Blue Sea, as many of the positive reviews I read had the phrase "fuck you Geostorm."

 

WHAT IF THE HURRICANE IS THEIR MOTHER?! Clearly Hurricane Mom and their father were going through a NASTY divorce and she just snapped. OR he had stolen their children from their Stormland Dreamhouse (I assume somewhere in Florida because where else would someone be fucked up enough to have two children with a hurricane ) moved to this shitty small town to hide from her and raise his children as best he can. He prays that by forcing them to become obsessed with mundane human thing like football they will inherit his humanity and will never become the StormGods they were meant to be. They fled Hurricane Mom when the children were mere tots and so the older one is the only one who really has any pull towards the weather so he becomes a meteorologist (much to his dead fathers horror I am sure). And as you mentioned it's why Breeze is affected by Operation Desert Storm to go to Afghanistan (also maybe because subconsciously he knows there's no way a hurricane can get to him there. )

 

However when the two find themselves stuck in another hurricane OF COURSE their mother is gong to do what any mother would! She is going to make sure her boys are looked after! She's even nice enough to not hurt that new Lady Friend (who could become more if she nudges them in the right direction? Mom was trying to play match maker!) of her son's! Honestly the real hero of this movie is Hurricane Mom

[gigi-tastic 2322]

It gets brought up a couple times that How Did This Get Made is affecting the numbers for Hurricane Heist. They also bring up the power of HDTGM and its listeners with Face/Off. So, this got me curious how much money is How Did This Get Made bringing in for The Hurricane Heist. Let's do some math.

 

I looked at the seating chart for the Athenaeum. A quick count puts it at 1012 seats. It cost $14.99 to buy this movie. That's 15169.88.

 

To my knowledge, Earwolf doesn't publish numbers but here is a thread on reddit looking at some numbers based on Soundcloud downloads. These are certainly very lowball numbers because its 1. two years ago and 2. it doesn't include listens from other sources like Stitcher, Howl, etc. But let's just go with 343238 for average listens (subtracting live show attendees for this episode). Multiply that times the $5.99 to rent on Amazon, that's $2,055,955.62. We're looking at a total of $2,071,165.50.

 

From this point on, I'm going to have to do a ton of speculating. We know a ton of listeners never pay money to see the movie. They just don't watch it. They watch it in groups. They share Amazon passwords. They pirate the movie. I'll pull a number totally out of my ass and say 50% never pay money for Hurricane Heist. That still puts us at $1,035,582.75.

 

The lifetime box office gross of Hurricane Heist is $6,115,825. So, HDTGM conservatively brought in 16% of Hurricane Heist's gross in two weeks. That's pretty impressive and I'm sure one of those 29 producers is probably getting a paycheck thinking "Maybe we should have kept this in theatres a second week! It's doing okay on VOD."

 

I mean I was at the show and I DEF did not actually buy this garbage movie. I probably have 1,000 new viruses on my computer but there was no way I was paying for this.

[Sirus Moran 6]

The money is going to be shredded by the US Treasury.

Serial numbers on bank notes don't get reused.

The US Treasury is more than likely to keep a record of all bank notes that they destroy.

 

... all the money that is being stolen therefor has all of their serial numbers on record being at the same place and time. They wanted to steal traceable money?

[The_Triple_Lindy 2482]

The money is going to be shredded by the US Treasury.

Serial numbers on bank notes don't get reused.

The US Treasury is more than likely to keep a record of all bank notes that they destroy.

 

... all the money that is being stolen therefor has all of their serial numbers on record being at the same place and time. They wanted to steal traceable money?

Yeah, but businesses won't know the difference when you pay in cash, right?

 

I don't know if that's right.

 

[grudlian. 4725]

Yeah, but businesses won't know the difference when you pay in cash, right?

 

I don't know if that's right.

 

This is what I'm thinking. This money will pass every counterfeit test because it's not counterfeit. A store isn't going to bother checking a bill against a database of stolen serial numbers. But what about banks? Would the Treasury Department or Mint give banks a database to track incoming money? Can the treasury track where the currency the destroy comes from (I suspect they can but don't know)?

 

If the treasury can track incoming bills to be destroyed, then you're probably screwed. They would eventually realize they are getting a lot of bills from a specific region. Then narrow it to a specific state or city. Down to a bank or branch. Figure out the armored car delivery and where they pick up cash from. If you start seeing lots of bills from specific stores, you just get feds to hang out there until the robbers come back once you've figured out a general spending pattern. It also helps that these criminals are certainly on camera the entire time they are robbing the treasury.

 

You could probably bypass a lot of this by living a mildly nomadic lifestyle. If you travel the country, it's going to be much harder for them to get an idea on where you're spending your money next. And I assume there's a time delay on when the Treasury could even track the money of a few days if not weeks or longer. So, you might be good there but, again, you're probably super famous right now. You're picture from the robbery is everywhere and the news is going to tell everyone to watch for people spending cash for every purchase.

 

You could put your money in a bank, but a bank is going to question opening a new account and depositing tons of cash. I'm sure that gets checked and I'm sure the treasury is going to be interested especially after they got robbed. So, banks are definitely out for a while if not forever unless you're depositing small amounts over a long period of time.

 

So, I think this is definitely plausible to get away with it and live a life. I think it would be a weird, tedious life where you probably couldn't spend tons of money on large ticket items that draw attention to themselves with large cash purchases. Who steals $600 million without wanting to splurge a little bit?

[IronMaiden4892 10]

I really thought the opening was setting up a twist where the robbers were the ones causing hurricanes so that they could rob places and the skull was their logo, like when the death eaters attack the quidditch world cup. Until I realized the guy with the drones was the grown up little brother, I thought he was releasing the drones that caused the storm. This is the most June I have ever felt!