Episode 220 - Hobbs & Shaw: LIVE! (w/ Adam Scott, Nicole Byer)

[Cam Bert 8145]

On 8/18/2019 at 10:31 AM, PollyDarton said:

So... A commercial flight from Moscow to Apia (the capital of Somoa) is, at the fastest, 36 hours. It has 2 stops.

Kevin Hart says they chartered a flight, which could mean less stops, although I imagine they may have had to stop to refuel? Best possible scenario... 24 hours?

Hey! I'm the one that does the maps around here! 

This is great and awesome but we have to look at the bigger picture here. Vanessa Kirby has 72 hours from initial injection of the virus, correct? So outside the events of the movie and things like the time taken to let the Rock know, there is a lot of travel going on. First, the Rock is in LA and gets the info and flies to London. Next from London the squad flies to Moscow. From Moscow they fly once more to the Ukraine to infiltrate the Eteon Factory and then they fly to Samoa. So ignoring the times in the movie, how much of that 72 hours is just spent in transit?

From LA to London, non-stop commercial, the fastest time is 10 hours 15 minutes

From London to Moscow, non-stop commercial, the fastest time is 3 hours 45 minutes

From Moscow to the Ukraine, as we don't know the actually destination within the Ukraine the average non-stop commercial flight times for the country is approximately 2 hours

From the Ukraine to Samoa, we have Polly Darton's wonderfully researched 36 hours, but seeing as we know this is a chartered flight we can assume it's flying as direct as possible so no doubling back on itself. If you combine just flight times alone flying from the Ukraine to India, India to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Fiji, Fiji to Samoa in flight time along is 25 hours and 10 minutes.

This all in total adds up to a grand total of 41 hours and 10 minutes of just flying! 

Now we could assume The Rock is flying with the government on a private jet from LA and the flight they took from Moscow to the Ukraine was also seemingly a direct non-commercial affair. This will shave off some time but we are still looking at probably a minimum of 40 hours of flight time in the entire movie. 

To get into pure hypothetical territory here  and say they spend 12 hours (we do know it's at least half a day) with the Rock's family in Samoa plus flight time. That's 41 plus 12 plus the 2 hour and 16 minute run time of the movie that give us a total of 55 hours about. That gives them 17 hours for non-on-screen action. If Ryan Reynolds is immediately informed of the virus, immediately tells the Rock the Rock goes straight to London and from that point everything happens in the quickest most efficient way it *might* actually be plausible. Strong emphasis on the might.

[taylor anne photo 11311]

8 hours ago, Blast Hardcheese said:

Is Hobb’s daughter’s mother dead and was this already mention in a previous F&F film? Who took care of Hobb’s daughter when Hobb’s went out on missions/got imprisoned/beat asses like Cherokee drums in the previous films if he’s estranged from his extended family?

New theory! The Eteon voice is the mother cause she's pissed as fuck that he took her daughter away. Or she's just actually always been a villain and that is why he took the daughter away.

[Smigg. 509]

One thing that made me laugh in the movie, during the Truck Centipede scene, when The Rock said "We need more weight", and then the fat guy turns up, like that's an anomoly.  Not to go into racial profiling here, but Samoans are known for two main things.

1) They're incredibly nice people, welcoming, kind, they treat strangers like family.  Unless you piss them off, in that case, just run away, run really far, really quickly. 

In fact, here's a story about that.  Pat Patterson was wrestling in San Francisco against Peter Maivia (The Rock's grandfather).  Peter Maivia was a hero to Samoans.  Well, there was going to be an angle at the Cow Palace, where Patterson attacks Maivia and injures him.  Patterson calls Peter's wife saying he doesn't want to do the angle, because he was scared that the Samoan fans (and in San Francisco, there's a large number of them) would storm the ring and they'd kill him.  The Rock's grandmother said "Pat, don't worry about it, they're gonna be at the top of the arena, they're not going to get to you."

They ran the angle, and here come the Samoans, they want to kill Pat Patterson.  One of the cops who was working the event took his baton out, and hit Sika Anoa'i (Roman Reigns' father) over the head with it.  Sika didn't even flinch, and looked at the cop, with blood running down his face, and said "Brother, don't you EVER do that again!" and the Cop, instead of doing his job and stopping these Samoan fans from trying to kill Pat Patterson, said "Fuck this", and ran away.

2) They're fucking massive.  Not even like they're lazy slobs, they're just huge Rugby playing, Football playing, Pro Wrestling, big motherfuckers. Case in point, Roman Reigns, when talking about his family, he referred to himself as "One of the little ones", Roman Reigns is 6'3" and 265lbs.  How is a 6'3" 265lbs dude "one of the little ones?!"

[WatchOutForSnakes 807]

Okay, two things: 

1. Are we not going to talk about Helen Mirren's full hair, makeup, and jewelry? Is she getting the Al Capone treatment in there? 

2. We've established that Hattie injected the virus in capsules into her hand. The capsules will dissolve after the longest 72 hours ever and then.. end of humanity. When they plan what to do if they can't extract the virus in time, why does she have to die and burn her body? Why not just amputate her hand?! Is that a fate worse than death? Why is this not an option? 

[theworstbuddhist 572]

19 minutes ago, WatchOutForSnakes said:

Okay, two things: 

1. Are we not going to talk about Helen Mirren's full hair, makeup, and jewelry? Is she getting the Al Capone treatment in there? 

2. We've established that Hattie injected the virus in capsules into her hand. The capsules will dissolve after the longest 72 hours ever and then.. end of humanity. When they plan what to do if they can't extract the virus in time, why does she have to die and burn her body? Why not just amputate her hand?! Is that a fate worse than death? Why is this not an option? 

 

[E.Lerner 111]

18 hours ago, Smigg. said:

They ran the angle, and here come the Samoans, they want to kill Pat Patterson.  One of the cops who was working the event took his baton out, and hit Sika Anoa'i (Roman Reigns' father) over the head with it.  Sika didn't even flinch, and looked at the cop, with blood running down his face, and said "Brother, don't you EVER do that again!" and the Cop, instead of doing his job and stopping these Samoan fans from trying to kill Pat Patterson, said "Fuck this", and ran away.


How's this cop working a pro-wrestling event and not realizing that Samoans are canonically immune to head injuries?

[E.Lerner 111]

3 hours ago, WatchOutForSnakes said:

2. We've established that Hattie injected the virus in capsules into her hand. The capsules will dissolve after the longest 72 hours ever and then.. end of humanity. When they plan what to do if they can't extract the virus in time, why does she have to die and burn her body? Why not just amputate her hand?! Is that a fate worse than death? Why is this not an option? 

We see the virus capsules have entered her bloodstream, so they would have quickly circulated around her entire body, not remained in her hand. 

This is as good a place as any to break down just how ridiculous the virus-extraction machine is in terms of a fake piece of biotechnology. Nicole's Theranos joke was one of the best lines of the episode, but at least Holmes' bullshit was in the general vicinity of scientific plausibility. This machine, however, is so straight-up magical that Cliff Curtis fixing it with a 3D printer is one of the more realistic aspects of the movie. 

Putting aside how the virus is actually designed to work, let's focus on how it's delivered and that it's designed to be extracted if necessary. The virus appears to be encapsulated in engineered particles that are roughly the size of red blood cells. These particles are designed to naturally degrade in 72 hours, releasing the virus into the bloodstream. Let's also assume that these particles have been engineered to flawlessly hide from the immune system for that long, and aren't getting caught in any of the body's physical filtration systems, like the kidneys or spleen.  

All of this is impossible to do with the level of precision necessary to prevent the carrier from being pretty much immediately infected, but the real challenge is getting every last one of those particles out of the carrier's body before your Domino's order is delivered.  The zoom-in shots we see of the particles being sucked up implies that a sharp metal tube knows the difference between them and the surrounding blood cells, but since that's the equivalent of "a wizard did it," let's walk through what it would need to do if it was working like a super-fast dialysis machine.   

Once Hattie's blood is inside the machine, it needs to be able to identify and capture the Eteon particles while leaving the red blood cells (and the various other healthy blood components) alone. The options are basically either a physical filter, which would be need to be tuned to the particles' exact weight, diameter, etc., or a chemical sensor, like antibodies, custom DNA strands or complex molecules that bind to biomarkers found only on the particles' exteriors.  

These are more-or-less in line with the kind of multi-purpose blood diagnostics machines Elizabeth Holmes was trying to build with Theranos. The problem she ran into is that all of these technologies are so delicate — dealing with physical properties that are right on the edge of single-molecule detection — that they can't be reliably used to tell whether you have high cholesterol, much less prevent you from contracting Genocitus-Shmenocitus.

And that's assuming you know exactly what physical properties you're looking for on these 5-micron-wide particles. So unless Cliff has a scanning electron microscope in the back of his remote Samoan chop-shop, plus a fully equipped wet-lab for making new reagents, plus a forced-air-sterilized clean room for doing the nanoscale fabrication necessary for actually getting the particles back into the vial, everyone is shit out of luck.

All of this leads me to believe the only thing that could be broken on the machine is the screen and the injection microfluidics — two things Cliff would absolutely be able to fix due to their similarity to the nitrous systems on his cars.         

[gigi-tastic 2322]

On 8/19/2019 at 10:44 AM, taylorannephoto said:

Okay I believe it is time for the moments in movies when I get most frustrated...

That's right it's time for This Week in Feminism.

I was delighted to hear an audience member mention things that I also wanted to mention, because one of my first points was, "Where are the fucking women?" But the response of the crew didn't satisfy me and here's why -

Yes, Hattie is a badass through and through. She was an operative for MI6 and went head to head with Luke Hobbs without even blinking an eye. She sacrificed herself so that Idris Elba wouldn't get the virus, and at the end of the day it was her plan that got the blood machine so that she could ultimately live. Definitely a badass. However, that doesn't actually answer the question. Hattie is one woman. To answer the question, "Where are the women?" with, "Well Hattie is a badass," implies that multiple women can't just be in scenes talking to each other because we already have the one woman being a badass and that's good enough right? They also mentioned the team of vigilante women lead by Eiza Gonzalez in Russia, but here's my problem with them - Only Eiza has any lines. There are 4 other women in this group and their only purpose for this movie is to look sexy in lingerie and be intimidating. That's not really showing any other badass women considering we never actually got to see them in action. The marketing for this movie completely hyped up Eiza's role and it really disappointed me that she didn't have anything better to do for a longer portion of the movie.

Michelle Rodriguez had posted after F8 that if this franchise didn't step up it's representation of women then she would leave the series, and I think with this movie they took one tiny baby step in the right direction. Now I know this movie is a spin-off and has nothing to do with the set of movies that Michelle was actually talking about because she's in the camp of "fuck Hobbs & Shaw" but it's still part of the series none the less. With Hattie being a total badass and being central to the plot instead of a side character I do think that they want women to be part of the story, but in my opinion, even though Hattie is a total badass, she's just a plot point she's not actually involved in her own story a la Natalie Portman in Thor: The Dark World. If you took that virus out of Hattie's blood she no longer becomes relevant to this story, and it still all resolves around Hobbs & Shaw more than likely doing the bulk of the work to get the virus away from Eteon. She's kidnapped twice to be rescued by the two men, and in the final climax fight of the whole movie she's regulated to sitting in the rain with a gun pointed at her head. To me, this isn't badass empowering writing. This is lazy "feminism" that is stuck in the early 2000s.

But honestly the thing that frustrated me the most is that this didn't even pass The Bechdel Test. It would've been so fucking easy for them to do. They had multiple named women who were literally standing in the same room together, but never once do any of them address each other, instead they talk to the men about things the other woman brought up instead.

• The female guard with Helen Mirren doesn't have a name - Fail
• Hattie is the only woman on her entire team - Fail
• Eiza is the only named and speaking woman on her team - Fail
• Hobb's daughter never speaks to the woman she is staying with - Fail
• Hattie and Eiza stand face to face and only talk to Hobbs & Shaw - Fail
• Hobbs's mother doesn't have a name (she is named on IMDB but they never once say it in the movie) - Fail
• There are no lines between Helen Mirren and Hattie at the end of the movie - Fail

It's the simplest of things that in 2019 should literally be the bare minimum for writing female characters. I'm not asking for the entire story to be changed, because honestly the overarching thing doesn't bother me despite poking holes in the "baddassery" of it. But to not have two women even speak to each other when they're literally standing face to face discussing ultimate plans for how to get a blood machine is absolutely ridiculous.

Literally I just want women to be able to talk to each other about things not related to men. That would be grand.

YES!! THE QUEEN HAS RETURNED!  

I'm so happy you're back! I've missed This Week In Feminism ( and you of course!). 

I fully agree about the lack of women with true power and agency in these films. It's a strange version of the Smurfette Principal.  From what little I've observed of the movies it seems like yes there's more than one woman with a decent role in the groups but they tend to either be romantically linked with a man in the group they belong to or want to be ( be that The Family,the various Bad Guys team, the FBI, etc)  they are related to someone ( Mia, Samantha Hobbs, Hattie and her mother, I guess wives might count?), Or they are villains to take down. Which great give me complex women! But I don't feel like they do that very well. I will be honest and admit I haven't seen them all and I'm not a huge fan of them but it always seemed like every woman i on screen was either in love with a guy, his sister or mom, or trying to kill him and even then they seem to want to fuck them. 

 

[gigi-tastic 2322]

Have we talked about how there's going to be an all female Fast and Furious apparently?!??!?!???

https://www.themarysue.com/all-female-fast-and-furious/

[PollyDarton 1807]

On 8/20/2019 at 5:00 AM, Cam Bert said:

Hey! I'm the one that does the maps around here! 

 

I was in way over my head anyways, Cam. Thanks for the rest of the pertinent info.

[PollyDarton 1807]

10 hours ago, WatchOutForSnakes said:

Okay, two things: 

1. Are we not going to talk about Helen Mirren's full hair, makeup, and jewelry? Is she getting the Al Capone treatment in there?

This made me giggle in both of her scenes. The last time we saw her she was in a fairly decorated room. It's an interesting choice to have that and never talk about it.

[taylor anne photo 11311]

1 hour ago, gigi-tastic said:

YES!! THE QUEEN HAS RETURNED!  

I'm so happy you're back! I've missed This Week In Feminism ( and you of course!). 

[Cam Bert 8145]

1 hour ago, PollyDarton said:

I was in way over my head anyways, Cam. Thanks for the rest of the pertinent info.

[DanEngler 5249]

13 minutes ago, Cam Bert said:

I assume everyone has seen the article that made the rounds last month revealing that this guy is Robert Redford?

[Cam Bert 8145]

2 minutes ago, DanEngler said:

I assume everyone has seen the article that made the rounds last month revealing that this guy is Robert Redford?

I thought that was a clickhole article at first.

edit: Yes, I was well aware of this fact and I didn't realize this was a riddle that needed to be solved.

[DanEngler 5249]

5 minutes ago, Cam Bert said:

edit: Yes, I was well aware of this fact and I didn't realize this was a riddle that needed to be solved. 

It never occurred to me. I always figured it was from an early Grizzly Adams movie or some Guy on A Buffalo-type shit.

[Cam Bert 8145]

4 minutes ago, DanEngler said:

It never occurred to me. I always figured it was from an early Grizzly Adams movie or some Guy on A Buffalo-type shit.

One of the best videos I've seen in awhile

[gigi-tastic 2322]

7 minutes ago, DanEngler said:

It never occurred to me. I always figured it was from an early Grizzly Adams movie or some Guy on A Buffalo-type shit.

I honestly thought it was Zach Galifianakis in something like a Funny or Die type thing

[DrGuts1003 462]

On 8/20/2019 at 1:17 AM, Blast Hardcheese said:

Is Hobb’s daughter’s mother dead and was this already mentioned in a previous F&F film? Who took care of Hobb’s daughter when Hobb’s went out on missions/got imprisoned/beat asses like Cherokee drums in the previous films if he’s estranged from his extended family?

As someone who has never seen any of the F&F movies, I too was wondering if there was a backstory for The Rock’s wife that I wasn’t aware of. There is a throwaway line when the Rock is talking to his daughter where he says that she needs to stay with her aunt.

This makes that whole family tree project confusing.  Why wasn’t this aunt included on the tree?  And even if the Rock’s wife is dead, wouldn’t the wife have had some relatives that she could have added to the tree as well?

[DrGuts1003 462]

Can someone explain to me why they needed to take the blood machine out of the Ukraine facility?  Wouldn’t it have been easier for her to remove the virus there while Hobbs and Shaw distracted everyone?

Given that this was a time-sensitive matter it seems stupid and reckless trying to get the machine out of the facility.

[gigi-tastic 2322]

18 hours ago, WatchOutForSnakes said:

Okay, two things: 

1. Are we not going to talk about Helen Mirren's full hair, makeup, and jewelry? Is she getting the Al Capone treatment in there? 

2. We've established that Hattie injected the virus in capsules into her hand. The capsules will dissolve after the longest 72 hours ever and then.. end of humanity. When they plan what to do if they can't extract the virus in time, why does she have to die and burn her body? Why not just amputate her hand?! Is that a fate worse than death? Why is this not an option? 

I mean it's pretty clear she runs the prison and is just biding her time in there. I *almost*  feel like she went to prison and stayed in as an elaborate plot to get the Shaw siblings ( That matter because fuck Owen he's apparently the Shaw family Gob) back together again. The family that breaks mom out of prison is the family that stays together! 

in conclusion this entire family could give a fuck about Owen Shaw. 

 

[taylor anne photo 11311]

11 hours ago, DanEngler said:

It never occurred to me. I always figured it was from an early Grizzly Adams movie or some Guy on A Buffalo-type shit.

Thanks I finally got Guy on a Buffalo out of my head after 9 years and you've just brought it back. In return I present a Mothman song to the tune of YMCA.

[taylor anne photo 11311]

9 hours ago, DrGuts1003 said:

As someone who has never seen any of the F&F movies, I too was wondering if there was a backstory for The Rock’s wife that I wasn’t aware of. There is a throwaway line when the Rock is talking to his daughter where he says that she needs to stay with her aunt.

This makes that whole family tree project confusing.  Why wasn’t this aunt included on the tree?  And even if the Rock’s wife is dead, wouldn’t the wife have had some relatives that she could have added to the tree as well?

I assume she's an aunt the same way I'm an aunt to my best friends' babies. Because she seems to not only not know who her mother is but she's never met a single person from Luke's side of the family until the very end of the film. This poor girl has had her entire family kept secret from her so I'm really just guessing that this "aunt" is a really good and old friend of Luke's that he trusts enough to consider family.

[Smigg. 509]

I watched "The Fate of the Furious" on TV a couple of days ago.  And I noticed something a little interesting.

When the football team The Rock was coaching performed the Siva Tau before the game, The Rock stuck his tongue out.  Now, before the fight in Hobbs & Shaw, the Rock leads another Siva Tau, this time, there's no tongue (I realise that sounds weird now I've just read that back).

Here's where it's interesting.

There have been many who believe that in ancient polynesian culture, sticking the tongue out after performing a war dance, such as a Haka, or a Siva Tau, signals an intent to cannibalise their enemy.  However, that shows a level of respect.  As the belief was that by eating the enemy after defeating them in battle, they will consume their "Mana", their fighting spirit, their strength, and what made them a warrior, thus making the victor stronger.

So, if you go by that line of thinking, The Rock was showing more respect to a girls football team, than he was Idris Elba and his army.  Which adds a subtle layer to the themes of heart, and humanity that the movie had.  Idris, and his army, were cybernetically enhanced, they had no warrior spirit, and were not worth consuming.

[gigi-tastic 2322]

12 hours ago, taylorannephoto said:

Thanks I finally got Guy on a Buffalo out of my head after 9 years and you've just brought it back. In return I present a Mothman song to the tune of YMCA.

The mothman YMCA song I know is "Mothman! There's no need to be down I said Mothman! Eat a kid off the ground! " Which while shorter paints a very vivid picture in a few words.