Episode 252 - Governor Gabbi

[ChunkStyle 1160]

Realizing that this movie was made by native English speakers hit harder than the end of The Usual Suspects.

@SuppleContours post was great and very informative.  Before reading that I actually came here to write that I think this is maybe the first movie that HDTGM has covered that the podcast could buy the distribution rights for the film.  I'd love to see what the logo and fanfare they'd add up front would be.  Of course in the end it would all be a disaster as everyone complains that they are covering too many HDTGM Films on HDTGM.

[gigi-tastic 2322]

I just want to cheer on our actual Vice President from California Kamala Harris! 

[AlmostAGhost 2718]

23 minutes ago, gigi-tastic said:

I just want to cheer on our actual Vice President from California Kamala Harris! 

Governor Gabbi should be named as Kamala's replacement in the Senate!

[grudlian. 4725]

4 minutes ago, AlmostAGhost said:

Governor Gabbi should be named as Kamala's replacement in the Senate!

I want Gabbi in the House as a potential Squad member. 

[theworstbuddhist 572]

I have not watched this movie and probably won't, but I laughed hard at Jason saying "And then HARD CUT: She's wearing a fedora!" Thank you.

[Cam Bert 8145]

Govern Gabbi's first initiative as governor is for people to ride the bus instead of drive cars. The female crony of Balse complains numerous times of riding the bus so we know that this measure went into effect. Yet we have two story points that revolve around Gabbi's friends and family driving. First there is her Grandma and her non-stop car problems which means she's still driving around around and not bussing it which Gabbi is cool with. Also her friend Ellie is driving around getting parking tickets because she refuses to pay for parking. Balse threaten to boot her car because driving means so much to her. Gabbi is also seemingly fine with her friend driving everywhere and not paying tickets. Now if her plan was to force people with environmentally bad cars to stop driving, what's to stop them from buying an old clunker like her grandma or friend? Or rather is this all a deep statement on the hypocrisy of politicians looking the other way when policies would effect their friends and family.

[ErinRene 50]

I watched this movie the night before Biden was announced as winning the presidency, and listened to the podcast hours after the media outlets FINALLY called it. My biggest wish now is that we live in the world that Governor Gabby takes place where you vote one day, the winner is called the next, and that person IMMEDIATELY takes office and begins to govern. 
 

You guys talked about how crazy it was that she was in school to get a degree in baking - but I’d love to know what the curriculum entails. Clearly there is no crossover education with general culinary skills as she is completely unfamiliar with the term “ala carte.” I also can’t figure out why she was outsourcing the baking of the brownies to Stoner. Maybe cut out of yoga a few minutes early and whip the batch up yourself? Not to mention when the “mud pie” is served at the State Dinner (which looks like a backyard with a giant fountain) - she says SHE made it! AND they use canned whipped cream. What self respecting baking student would use canned whipped cream? Disgraceful. 

[Catfish 72]

I want to never stop talking about this movie.
My favorite line has to be when the Senator berates the the moonbats for messing up the plan(?) and says:

"I think I was perfectly clear on this matter…Wasn’t I not? "

Haha…If he was explaining the plan with phrases like “Wasn’t I not”, then no, I don’t imagine he was very clear at all.

I also loved the scene where Mark was getting ready to help Gabbi move the dresser and Gabby is frustrated that Mark is taking a long time to remove his jacket.  They use a clock wipe to show how long he is taking, however the only thing that occurs during the wipe is that he places his jacket on the bed.  How long did that take?  Did he do it in slow motion?

[theworstbuddhist 572]

15 hours ago, ErinZaborac said:

I watched this movie the night before Biden was announced as winning the presidency, and listened to the podcast hours after the media outlets FINALLY called it. My biggest wish now is that we live in the world that Governor Gabby takes place where you vote one day, the winner is called the next, and that person IMMEDIATELY takes office and begins to govern. 

I don't know if I misunderstood some news story that I saw yesterday, but is this what happens with the US senate?

15 hours ago, ErinZaborac said:

You guys talked about how crazy it was that she was in school to get a degree in baking - but I’d love to know what the curriculum entails. Clearly there is no crossover education with general culinary skills as she is completely unfamiliar with the term “ala carte.” I also can’t figure out why she was outsourcing the baking of the brownies to Stoner. Maybe cut out of yoga a few minutes early and whip the batch up yourself? Not to mention when the “mud pie” is served at the State Dinner (which looks like a backyard with a giant fountain) - she says SHE made it! AND they use canned whipped cream. What self respecting baking student would use canned whipped cream? Disgraceful. 

One of my exes was a baker who went to culinary school. It's considered a specialty, so depending on the school you would all learn a basic kind of foundational course and then if you wanted to pursue baking as a "major" I guess your graduation would include the certification of being a baker, which depending on where you live or work, can be a unionized position with pay bands.

Of course, much like other kinds of post-secondary education, the value of culinary school is debatable, as the late Anthony Bourdain and others liked to say. It's perfectly possible to become a great chef or baker without going to culinary school at all, but going there could give you some useful techniques, experiences in cooking situations you might not normally encounter on your own (eg., cooking for large events), and industry contacts.

[Blast Hardcheese 636]

On 11/6/2020 at 1:57 PM, SideofMcG said:

Just to be a nerd. Sorry.

ADR doesn't stand for Additional Dialogue Recording (although I definitely thought it was too for years and I work in film/tv)

It actually stands for Automated Dialog Replacement.

And for a super running ADR gag check out Matt Berry in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. His character's lines are ADRed by himself just to mimic a cheap shitty 80's style. You lot have all seen Garth Marenghi, right?

 

Um...

And if you have not watched Year of the Rabbit yet, do so immediately!

[AlmostAGhost 2718]

17 minutes ago, theworstbuddhist said:

I don't know if I misunderstood some news story that I saw yesterday, but is this what happens with the US senate?

New electees to the US Senate don't take office immediately, it's like on January 3rd or something when they convene and get sworn in. But if you're an incumbent and win, you can just continue like normal.

On a state level, the states all have their own dates for swearing in new senators; there are a few states that pretty much swear in their senates within a few days. 

For purposes of this movie, the California governor usually gets sworn in in early January.

[Blast Hardcheese 636]

This has been spelled-out in many, many discussions of this film, but I feel that I have to put this in words just to get my head around the plot device for Governor Gabby:

Did anyone else find it ironic that the plot of this film has a tenuous grasp (at best) on how the governor of California is elected given the fact that Gov. Gab. was filmed and takes place in the state’s capital, Sacramento? Some scenes seem to have been filmed in a community college or (benefit of the doubt) university class room, so the avoidance of general knowledge of the shooting subject available at hand from a higher learning institution as well as the city around them is absolutely egregious on the filmmaker’s part.

[RyanSz 3140]

On 11/6/2020 at 10:43 AM, gigi-tastic said:

So technically it would be legal for Gabby ( Gabbi?) To run for governor as California is one of the few states with an age requirement of only 18. HOWEVER in 2010 Proposition 14 passed which prohibits write in candidates in the general election. According to the Wikipedia 

" It was a constitutional amendment that effectively transformed California's non-Presidential elections from first-past-the-post to a nonpartisan blanket primary (similar to a two-round system). This had the unforeseen consequence of effectively eliminating third party candidates from the final ballots. "

Therefore its my understanding that it would have been impossible for Gabby to have been elected as she was never a part of the primary and had no party. She would be seen as a write in candidate. 

Regardless wouldn't it just be seen as a typo? Why couldn't they have another emergency election ? I'm sure that could have happened as soon as she was decided the winning candidate. 

Yeah I live just south of Sacramento, got my Bachelors at Sac State, and  have worked in and around the city for years, and I couldn't even place where they filming half the time. I also had to look up the minimum age for Governor as it seemed too young for a college student to be able to run and was shocked to see it was 18 and that one of the biggest economies in the world could have a Ben Wyatt situation on its hands.

On 11/6/2020 at 2:14 PM, grudlian. said:

This was extremely common for Italian movies at the time. Fellini famously had actors say whatever they wanted on set and would finish writing dialogue in post production, to dub in later. I think it was a cost saving thing since cameras and sets were loud. So, it was easier to simply dub audio later than to trying to remove sound during filming.

There's a Hitchcock movie, Blackmail, that used live dubbing with a person off screen speaking while the actress mouthed the words on screen. Talkies were just becoming a thing and the refilmed parts of the movie to cash in on the craze of talking pictures. The actress had a really thick, non-English accent which wouldn't make sense for the character. Audio post production was still in its infancy. So, the solution was have an English woman say her lines off screen.

I can't remember where I read it but another issue was that the crews were also pretty mixed so it became an issue of understanding one another and everyone just ended up talking over each other trying to get things done and you couldn't hear what was being said in front of the camera. It also allowed directors to hire whichever actors that they wanted and not have to worry about a language barrier as it would just be ADR'ed to match the marketplace it was being released in.

Overall I hated this fuck of a movie and the dubbing made me really appreciate the quality work that's done on actual movies. I actually believe this might be the most successful form of what I call nepofilmaking where family members basically work together to get each other credits to look better on resumes. It's almost like giving a fighter a total tomato can to fight in order to beef up their record so that other, bigger promotions can offer them bigger paydays, hoping the beefed up fighter can actually keep winning. I've seen this a couple times on IMDB, usually with kid actors who start popping up in a few movies a year playing the same type of role. Yet looking through the filmography you see it's made up of a bunch of movies made at home that meet some kind of criteria to be listed on the site.

[Doctor Suessicide 42]

19 hours ago, Cam Bert said:

The female crony of Balse complains numerous times of riding the bus so we know that this measure went into effect

When she said this I was fully expecting it to be a joke that the other cronies react to, like "that was a suggestion not a law!" But if it was supposed to be a joke it was dropped on the floor.

[GrahamS. 803]

On 11/6/2020 at 11:38 AM, Cameron H. said:

This movie made me physically ill. (Not joking.)

In what way? Genuinely curious. I watched the trailer to see if I could handle a feature length of this and I decided that I could not.

[GrahamS. 803]

On 11/6/2020 at 11:11 PM, BenA.Varkentine_29772 said:

Her page seems to be gone now, but at one point on Gabbi's instagram there was "test footage" for another project that contained the line

"I just feel like my emotions are insane, and now you want me to become a werewolf , and I'm kind of freaking out, OK?"

This made me want to renounce all possessions and follow the Niebauer's teachings.

This sounds much more entertaining than the preview I watched for Governor Gabbi.

[Cameron H. 23786]

2 hours ago, GrahamS. said:

In what way? Genuinely curious. I watched the trailer to see if I could handle a feature length of this and I decided that I could not.

I'm not sure how, but it was hurting my eyes. I couldn't look at it for very long, much less focus. Something about the way it was filmed also made me feel dizzy, which isn't something I'm prone to. On top of all that, all the ADR crap gave me headache.

I've never had such a visceral reaction to a film. At some point I just stopped paying attention altogether while it played in the background. 

[RyanSz 3140]

1 hour ago, Cameron H. said:

I'm not sure how, but it was hurting my eyes. I couldn't look at it for very long, much less focus. Something about the way it was filmed also made me feel dizzy, which isn't something I'm prone to. On top of all that, all the ADR crap gave me headache.

I've never had such a visceral reaction to a film. At some point I just stopped paying attention altogether while it played in the background. 

This. I tried watching more than 30 minutes and couldn't because the ADR was almost purposely bad. It was like they were trying to ape an early Godzilla film and ended up just being overly offensive with it. Seriously, Tommy Wiseau has a better understanding of ADR work than this film student.

[Cam Bert 8145]

15 hours ago, Doctor Suessicide said:

When she said this I was fully expecting it to be a joke that the other cronies react to, like "that was a suggestion not a law!" But if it was supposed to be a joke it was dropped on the floor.

I mean I think so many of the "jokes" here are so forced and telegraphed if it was trying to be one, it might have been the most subtle.

[DannytheWall 196]

This sounds like an amazing(ly bad) movie. Skipped this one but the podcast was still hilarious. 

Blink (your ears?) and you'd miss it, but Jason thought it sounded like a better movie if Gabbi was a teenager, and that's exactly the premise of the comic book Prez by Mark Russell. 

Jason & Paul talked about Mark Russell's The Flintsones on a minisode somewhere, and yep, that book is in fact a VERY subversive social satire with genuine humor, pathos, and deep thoughts. If you liked that, look up Prez. 

Prez takes place in a near-future dystopia ruled by social media and corporations, a fateful combination that unwittingly allows a 16-year old girl to go viral thanks to an unfortunate hot dog on a stick incident and finds herself catapulted to the highest office in the land. And biting satire ensues. The comic isn't as pointed as the Flintstones, and kind of has to rush to something like an ending, but there's some real gold in there. 

Another crazy fact? This is the *second* teenage president in DC comics. The first Prez was in 1974 written by Jack Simon (cocreator of Captain America) and features a young man named, foreshadowing-ly, Prez, who is a local hometown hero that goes on to win the presidency. It's a more straightforward story, inspired by the then-recent constitutional amendment that lowered the US voting age to 18, but could have used some more comicbook gimmickry like, I don't know, say, dinosaurs on jetpacks as a national emergency or something. It only lasted four issues but remains a perrenial favorite on any "How Did This Get Made" Comic Book Version trivia night.    

You can read Russell's Prez on comixology here   

[Cam Bert 8145]

4 minutes ago, DannytheWall said:

This sounds like an amazing(ly bad) movie. Skipped this one but the podcast was still hilarious. 

Blink (your ears?) and you'd miss it, but Jason thought it sounded like a better movie if Gabbi was a teenager, and that's exactly the premise of the comic book Prez by Mark Russell. 

Jason & Paul talked about Mark Russell's The Flintsones on a minisode somewhere, and yep, that book is in fact a VERY subversive social satire with genuine humor, pathos, and deep thoughts. If you liked that, look up Prez. 

Prez takes place in a near-future dystopia ruled by social media and corporations, a fateful combination that unwittingly allows a 16-year old girl who goes viral thanks to an unfortunate hot dog on a stick incident and finds herself catapulted to the highest office in the land. And biting satire ensues. The comic isn't as pointed as the Flintstones, and kind of has to rush to something like an ending, but there's some real gold in there. 

Another crazy fact? This is the *second* teenage president in DC comics. The first Prez was in 1974 written by Jack Simon (cocreator of Captain America) and features a young man named, foreshadowing-ly, Prez, who is a local hometown hero that goes on to win the presidency. It's a more straightforward story, inspired by the then-recent constitutional amendment that lowered the US voting age to 18, but could have used some more comicbook gimmickry like, I don't know, say, dinosaurs on jetpacks as a national emergency or something. It only lasted four issues but remains a perrenial favorite on any "How Did This Get Made" Comic Book Version trivia night.    

You can read Russell's Prez on comixology here   

Neil Gaiman also wrote a great story about Prez in one of his issues of Sandman (might edit number in here later) that about his presidency and post presidency life that takes the character very seriously.

[RyanSz 3140]

3 hours ago, DannytheWall said:

This sounds like an amazing(ly bad) movie. Skipped this one but the podcast was still hilarious. 

Blink (your ears?) and you'd miss it, but Jason thought it sounded like a better movie if Gabbi was a teenager, and that's exactly the premise of the comic book Prez by Mark Russell. 

Jason & Paul talked about Mark Russell's The Flintsones on a minisode somewhere, and yep, that book is in fact a VERY subversive social satire with genuine humor, pathos, and deep thoughts. If you liked that, look up Prez. 

Prez takes place in a near-future dystopia ruled by social media and corporations, a fateful combination that unwittingly allows a 16-year old girl who goes viral thanks to an unfortunate hot dog on a stick incident and finds herself catapulted to the highest office in the land. And biting satire ensues. The comic isn't as pointed as the Flintstones, and kind of has to rush to something like an ending, but there's some real gold in there. 

Another crazy fact? This is the *second* teenage president in DC comics. The first Prez was in 1974 written by Jack Simon (cocreator of Captain America) and features a young man named, foreshadowing-ly, Prez, who is a local hometown hero that goes on to win the presidency. It's a more straightforward story, inspired by the then-recent constitutional amendment that lowered the US voting age to 18, but could have used some more comicbook gimmickry like, I don't know, say, dinosaurs on jetpacks as a national emergency or something. It only lasted four issues but remains a perrenial favorite on any "How Did This Get Made" Comic Book Version trivia night.    

You can read Russell's Prez on comixology here   

Yeah Prez was one of those random DC series that was brought back for a short revival during one of the recent relaunches along with stories like Dial H, Jonah Hex, and Legends of Tomorrow. Hex at least ran for a couple years but after a while DC wanted to reincorporate him into the modern DC continuity and kind of had to go meta with the storytelling and the series was shortly ended after that.

[grudlian. 4725]

4 hours ago, Cam Bert said:

I mean I think so many of the "jokes" here are so forced and telegraphed if it was trying to be one, it might have been the most subtle.

Are you telling me the 10 minute sequence of two grown adults a wardrobe felt forced?

21 hours ago, RyanSz said:

I can't remember where I read it but another issue was that the crews were also pretty mixed so it became an issue of understanding one another and everyone just ended up talking over each other trying to get things done and you couldn't hear what was being said in front of the camera. It also allowed directors to hire whichever actors that they wanted and not have to worry about a language barrier as it would just be ADR'ed to match the marketplace it was being released in.

This is definitely true. As mentioned earlier, this was definitely done with spaghetti westerns where it seems like they would get an American star to be in the movie which I always assumed was a marketing thing. I remember finding out The Good, The Bad and The Ugly was Italian and thinking Clint Eastwood must speak Italian and dubbed himself. But I was a pretty dumb kid.

Burt Lancaster did a movie called The Leopard and said it was one of his best performances of his career. He thought it never got any award recognition because his entire performance was dubbed into Italian.

[Cam Bert 8145]

10 minutes ago, grudlian. said:

Are you telling me the 10 minute sequence of two grown adults a wardrobe felt forced?

Not at all. I always move my dressers to be in front of my windows and get push and pull confused as well. I guess I always have one foot on that banana peel...

[Cam Bert 8145]

I'm not American or know much about American politics but I assume the whole state votes for the govern correct? So say Gabbi does make it on to the ballot, that means that a majority of the voters still had to vote for her right? Not just her five friends and grandma, but the majority of the third most populated state. California in 2017 had a population of 39,360,000 people. However that population includes youth and people that can't vote not to mention the number of people that don't vote for governor. The 2018 gubernatorial race had a turn out of 12,464,235 voters. That means Gabbi would need at least 33.4% of that vote which means roughly 4.2 million votes. That's more votes than any third party candidate has gotten in the history of California gubernatorial elections and as far as my math can tell more than all third party votes in California ever! What was it that drove them to this candidate they had never heard of?