BIG DADDY DISPATCH: APRIL 2020 (Patreon)

Dispatch Forty One, April 3rd, 2020

Hello WHM Family!

Welcome to weird and unprecedented times, friends. We hope this finds you well and you and your families safe and healthy. Things have changed quite a bit from the last dispatch, but one thing hasn't: our dedication to keep you laughing with bad impressions, crass jokes, and running gags about Steve shitting his pants and lying about it. As such, Listener Request Month continued unabated and we released our first ever totally remote WHM Prime episode. The WHM studios are closed for now, but we're not letting it slow us down. In fact, to keep ourselves sane, we've actually increased our output by creating a brand new show, MELR0210!  A twice-weekly recap of Beverly Hills, 90210 & Melrose Place, picked apart by four dudes that would never be allowed near either address!

Banner Credit: We Hate Movies The Big Daddy Dispatch by Felipe Sobreiro

Image Credit: The Skeleton League by P.L. Boucher

LAST MONTH ON WHM Episode 472 – Law Abiding Citizen

For the first episode of Listener Request Month, the gang rides along with noted super-genius Gerard Butler as he goes full-Jigsaw in his war against The System and Jamie Foxx in F. Gary Gray’s silly and sadistic thriller. Isn’t three-minutes-in a bit early to have an attempted rape scene? Does Gerard Butler’s character have the worst taste in music? How can no one see a small tank in the graveyard? At least Colm Meaney comes out of this thing without much more than a scratch.  

Episode 473 - Death With IV: The Crackdown

Charles Bronson must once again send dozens of souls to Hell in retaliation for the wanton execution of one of his loved ones and the boys are here for it. Did Danny Trejo star in numerous films for the Lumiere brothers and D.W. Griffith? Does the state of Texas execute prisoners by throwing them on top of carnival rides? What is with Mr. White’s incredibly detailed biographies for all these scumbags? Make sure you pause this one if you have to use the...toilet.
 

Episode 474 – Ferris Beuler's Day Off (PATREON EXCLUSIVE)

This month’s We Love Movies episode finds Andrew, Chris, Steve, and Eric goofing around with John Hughes’ most likable symbol of white flight in the Illinois suburbs. What the fuck is Ed Rooney’s deal and why isn’t he in jail? Same exact question but about Jeffrey Jones. Did Ed Rooney just casually excuse casual incest in that one scene? When do we get the Jeanie movie in which she reenacts Wild at Heart with Charlie Sheen’s stoner? We would also be into a movie centered on those two parking-garage employees and the nationwide road trip they took during the four hours Cameron, Ferris, and Sloane were in Chicago.

Episode 475 –A Sound of Thunder

BEN KINGSLEY’S HAIR! Okay, now that we got that out of the way…Andrew, Eric, Steve, and Chris take a trip with noted former bestie of OJ Simpson and director Peter Hyams into the world of time-travel-as-a-hoppy fiction, wherein Ed Burns must save the world from time waves and Tom Petty songs. Could they not have found some pieces of construction paper and crayons to create better effects? Was that a fish person I just saw? How deep into cousin-play does Ed Burns get? Monkey lizards? Super bats? Super monkey bat lizards? BEN KINGSLEY’S HAIR?!
 

Episode 476 – Queen of the Damned 

The boys travel back to the heyday of nü-metal to discuss the tragic-on-many-levels Queen of the Damned, starring Stuart Townsend and Jonathan Davis’ voice as a drop-D-tuned Lestat looking to bring about the end of man and the rise of the vampires. Did Chris and Steve actually enjoy listening to this bile as kids? Was there a nü-metal band named Bile? What is with this vampire-research society? Where are all these vampire secrets I keep on hearing about? The biggest secret about vampires we learn from this movie is that they prefer Korn and Disturbed to almost every other band that has ever existed on this Earth.

Episode 477 – The Commuter 

To round out Listener Request Month, the gang takes a ride with the notoriously normal Liam Neeson on a magical and violent MTA ride to "Colspring," New York. Do people actually have commuter train friends? Can they stop doing that? Is Jonathan Banks addicted to sex workers? Does the MetroNorth make stops between Grand Central and Harlem-125th now? What the hell is Florence Pugh doing here? Does anyone care about this murder mystery? Remember, if Patrick Wilson ever tries to help you, he is deceiving you and planning your demise. Yes, even seemingly good-natured Conjuring Patrick Wilson is doing this.

WHAT ARE WE WATCHING?

This is a space for us to talk about some NON-We Hate Movies related content that we've shoved into our eyeballs in the last month: TV, Movies, Cartoons, and Sports (maybe?). Just about anything that isn't pornography.
Andrew:  Like everyone else, my life has spiraled into a confusing, eerie, uncertain and upsetting state that doesn’t look like it’s going to shake any time soon. And while yes, part of my career is spent watching screeners of the latest indie/foreign/doc films out there and poring through the past watching retro titles for potential curation, and another part of that same career is spent in WHM Land sifting through (mostly) hot garbage titles that I’d probably take a lot longer to get around to if it wasn’t for the show, I can’t help but in this moment yearn for nothing more than my warm bath viewing options; every day I become more desperate to watch a lot of personal faves that will comfort me. 

All this to say, I’ve spent the last 3+ weeks in my apartment where Chelsea and I are going through tons and tons of Classic Simpsons episodes. We’re not going in any kind of order—indeed, the best way to experience the show in Classic Mode is to create a random playlist that makes sense to you—so the other night we watched the sad, but still hilarious season two episode, “One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish,” the one where Homer believes he’s dying after ingesting poisonous fish at a sushi restaurant. The start of the episode features some quaint 1980’s holdover comedy about sushi being RAW FISH, GROSS!—that wasn't funny either. I also love Bart and Lisa singing the theme to Shaft in the karaoke room. And Larry King reading the Bible on tape is just hysterical. 

We then also screened the season five classic, “$pringfield (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling),” one of my all-time faves. There are so many perfect moments in this episode, so I’ll just ramble off a few: Squeaky-voiced Teen’s delivery of, “He sure showed me,” when Bart starts his own casino in the treehouse; Marge finding the quarter on the floor and wondering aloud if there’s a Lost & Found is classic Marge; Homer’s Boogeyman freak-out culminating in him tossing a shotgun on the bedroom floor and it goes off without anyone reacting; Milhouse getting hit in the face with Robert Goulet’s microphone; and of course the incredible transformation of Mr. Burns into Howard Hughes and the classic line I repeat often: “I. Said. Get. In.” 

Ah, Gamblor... gotta love him! Oh, and I’ve also started playing the delightful Animal Crossing game on Switch. It softens the blow.!

Chris: I haven’t written here since the country went into pandemic hellscape mode. Pretty fucked up, right?
 

To coincide with the release of our Vampires episode, I decided to revisit a few 90s and 00s Carpenter. As you will hear in the episode, I enjoyed Vampires a lot more on my most recent go-around, mostly due to Carpenter’s craftsmanship but also for the lead performances. With the exception of Casino and Videodrome, I don’t know if there has been a better use of Woods in full-blown scumbag mode, and no, that Giuliani movie he did does not count.
 

Still, Vampires is third-tier Carpenter, whereas In the Mouth of Madness deserves to be listed amongst his greatest achievements. It’s clearly a very personal movie for Carpenter, as an artist that has inspired dedication from die-hard fans that is not entirely dissimilar from the crazed obsession shown by Sutter Kane fans. For that and Sam Neil’s exhilarating performance alone, it’s a key Carpenter text but it’s also the rare movie about the end of the world that accurately evokes feelings of dread, madness, and societal free-fall. It also, not for nothing, looks incredible. And not for nothing, Ghosts of Mars is also insanely undervalued, but doesn’t look nearly as good as Madness or even Escape from L.A., for that matter.
 

As for first-time watches, its mostly been crap or half-interesting mediocrities, but there have been a few revelations, including Frederick Wiseman’s Hospital and The Garden, Jacques Rivette’s Duelle, Kazuya Tsurumaki’s FLCL, Steve James’ Stevie, and Kieslowski’s Camera Buff. The thing is, that it's way, way more fun to talk about Carpenter and his movies than any of these very good and even great movies. 
 

Eric: Right now I'm taking a journey on the Battlestar Galactica with my friends Saul Tigh and Gaius Baltar! I watched the show when it originally aired (I came in, like season 2 or 3 and caught up) but when my wife and I moved in together many moons ago, we binged it. We're back to binging! And it's great quarantine fodder. I mean, I say I am binging but I am only like 5 episodes in. We'll get there. Plenty of time! I really cannot overstate how amazing Edward James Olmos is in this thing. I also love that while he's a military commander he has more morals than you'd ever expect to see, especially on a sci-fi show. It was actually surprising in this re-watch to hear him say say shit like this:

"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."

I know a lot of the show was a reaction to the George W. Bush administration but my lord, it hits harder than ever today! Other than that we watched Tiger King on Netflix which is everything I needed right now. I called my mother today and told her to watch Tiger King. 

Steve: Insert general inadequate description of the anxiety, unease, and terror I'm feeling here.

Anyways! As longtime supporters of SlingTV, my wife and I have been gifted with an extended free preview of the BUZZR channel, which exclusively broadcasts re-runs of 70's and 80's era gameshows and it has quickly become the background noise to our workday. We're mostly into Match Game, Hollywood Squares, Press Your Luck and Concentration. Aside from some truly clunker-y pseudo-racist  (lot of CANNIBAL jokes), homophobic, and rampant misogynistic comments what strikes me most is how these games operated back then: wherein there was no structure day to day and if because of their coke feuled "riffing" there wasn't a winner at the end of the hour, welp, we'll just pick this back up tomorrow! Can you imagine any form of entertainment functioning this way in 2020. "Sorry we fucked around too much so we'll figure out the winner tomorrow, once we sober up...Maybe" If you're looking for something that is completely devoid of any semblance of the current shitshow, you could do worse than old gameshows.

Other than that we've been re-watching a lot of movies, but I'll spend some time on What About Bob? and Rushmore and the genius of Bill Murray. I remember watching Ghostbusters as a kid and thinking that Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd were equals—boy was I stupid! Watching Murray vacillate from early 90's big box broad comedy like What About Bob? to the dry as a bone and dripping with pathos performance he gives in Rushmore while remaining totally committed and hysterical in both is just a wonder to behold. I love What About Bob? for it's pure Looney Toon-ishness, so much so that it can only end with Richard Dreyfuss's character tying up Bob with a ton of explosives and fiendishly laughing his way off screen. It's a total delight and Dreyfuss gives the straight man performance of lifetime. He's so damn fun in that movie.

Rushmore more than holds up as one of my favorite movies of all time. I don't think it's my favorite Anderson, but you can really make a case for it. What it does show me is that I wish he would pull back just a little bit narratively, and tell a smaller, less ornate story. I'm all in for the man's penchant for detail (it's his bag, I get it), but there's something so simple about the story of Rushmore that we haven't seen since maybe Fantastic Mister Fox (another favorite). So, put as much as you want into every shot, Wes, but ease up on the story a tad. The only movie of his I out and out don't like is Isle of Dogs and that over-written aspect is there, for sure.
 PATREON MAILBAG LIGHTNING ROUND
April's entry comes from Matt from Newark, DE who asks:
 

"If you had to be quarantined inside any house from a movie, along with the inhabitants of the house, where would you hunker down?"

Andrew: If I had to hunker down in a movie house and retain the residents inside, it would have to be Captain Kirk’s incredible cabin in the woods in Star Trek: Generations. Sure, it exists only in this artificial creation inside the galaxy’s most magical ribbon, and sure, I’d be stuck with James “Never Does the Dishes” Kirk as a roommate, but the place looks impeccably built, is in a gorgeous location in the woods, and removed far enough away from society that during this insane period of time, I wouldn’t feel so nervous going outside. Plus ever day after you make your huge omelet, you just go outside, chop some wood, spy a lady on horseback who is an acceptable distance away from you... It’s all gravy in the Nexus, Baby!

Chris: I will lean into my own cliché and say I would be good hanging with James Franco’s character in Pineapple Express. Dude probably is stocked up on frozen junk food and drinks and probably has hook-up deals with the local pizza/Chinese food delivery person. You might balk at his corny talkative nature but I went to the most liberal of liberal arts colleges in the SUNY system. I have been spending a great deal of my life letting drunk and/or stoned people yammer on while responding in minimal yet sufficient ways and mostly just zone out. The guy is stocked with green, seems friendly enough, and is already acclimated to the work-at-home environment. Count me in. Spending the Corona months with the actual James Franco, on the other hand, is a nightmare none of us should imagine.

Eric: Matt, I'd like to get this over with so I will be quarantining in previous episode Halloween: Resurrection's Michael Myers house. It'd be great too because of all the webcams, you all can see me die whether it's from a white faced murderer's butcher knife or COVID-19! That would certainly make me feel less lonely! Runner up would be Jabba's Palace because those dudes party the fuck on. Drink, kill each other, get slimed by some alien. Perhaps even be fed to the Rancor myself when rations run low. Steve: As you've already learned in this Dispatch, I'm a bit of a Wes Anderson-head, so I think the move for me would be to bunker down at 111 Archer Avenue, the Tenenbaum house from The Royal Tenenbaums. First and most importantly, it's pretty damn big. You've got like 10 bedrooms, a huge backyard, a rooftop with hawks and shit, and an honest to goodness board game closet to beat the fucking band! Margot seems to have a good supply of green, Royal's got the cigars and booze covered, and you can hang out and shoot the shit with the fam. The only drag is you've got to keep an eye out on Richie, making sure he's happy, not listening to Elliot Smith, and not going to do anything stupid. We're gonna get through this together Richie! With booze and boardgames galore!
 

APRIL SCHEDULE

Say what? The Schedule in advance?! It's the least we could do! By subscribing to this newsletter you get a sneak peak at what we're putting out in April: 

Unlock the Vault Release — Man of Steel

Episode 478 — John Carpenter's Vampires

Episode 479 — Raw Deal 

Episode 480 — Cool as Ice

MELR0210:

90210: "The Green Room" "Every Dream Has It's Price (Tag)" "The First Time" "One on One"
Melrose Place: "Friends and Lovers" "Lost and Found" "For Love or Money" "Leap of Faith" "Second Chances"

Patreon Episodes:

Patreon Exclusive We Love Movies — The Thing (1982)

Animation Damnation — The New Adventures of Gumby: "A Music Ball" & "The Elephant and the Dragon"

The Nexus: TOS: "Metamorphosis" (s2, e9) TNG: "Time Squared" (s2, e13)

Gleep Glossary: Qui-Gon Jinn

And coming out of retirement at the $8.00 level, it's...

A Side Order of Sleaze: The Exterminator (1980)
 

Find all this crap and enjoy it legally, just like we do! now!

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UPCOMING NEWS AND PROMOTION

If you're not subscribed to our Youtube Channel you are missing out on a ton of great content!  We just put out a synched clip from our Justice League Commentary about The Skeleton League! Also Eric put out great clip packages like Breaking Down the 10 Commandments, President Nerd, Michael Biehn at Comic Con, Loose Loomis, and many more! Like we said above these are great for sharing and introducing folks to the show. You can also find full episodes like The Fast and the Furious, Die Hard With a Vengeance (with Jon Gabrus), and Return of the Jedi! There's so much content there we can't list it all here. Just go and subscribe already! 

This month on Hooked on TJ Hooker: Eric and Ben check in to The Safari In and find out what the hell happened to Hooker's family in Oregon. Listen here!

Head on over to the Tee Public Store where we've got our new logo (and super cool variations like the one below) on-sale

That's gonna do it for this month's dispatch, thanks as always for your incredible support!

Andrew, Chris, Eric, and Steve
We Hate Movies