Big Daddy Dispatch: July 2020 (Patreon)

Dispatch Forty Four, July 6th, 2020

Hello WHM Family!

The world around us gets worse and worse but somehow your loyal fat guys keep churning out content like some kind of hellish Human Centipede-esque creation! We are knee deep in the Summer Blockbuster Extravaganza of 2020 and it's honestly the only time of the week we're allowed to have any fun anymore. So we just want to take a quick moment here and thank you all for sticking with us and following us on this crazy journey and especially for being Patrons in a time when scratch is hard to come by. We appreciate the hell out of you all and we hope to have brought you a little bit of joy in this hellish June, and guess what? We're gonna do more of the same in July! More madness! More impressions! More seething rancor between Steve and Chris! More of all of it, cuz what else do we have to do?

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

Image Credit:  WTF with Salacious B. Crumb by Felipe Sobreiro 

WHM GOES TO THE DRIVE-IN! 

While our Summer tour dates have been regrettably, but understandably postponed to the late Fall (see our Tour Page for info on all those dates, tickets are still available btw, and we're still, as of this writing, planning on doing these shows!), we've found a fun venue to be able to share a couple of our favorite horror movies with you all, we're going to the Drive-In!

Please join us on in Middletown, New York, Sunday night August 2nd where we'll be hosting a night of horror, introducing Wes Craven's Scream and quite possibly the most fun Friday the 13th sequel, Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives  at the Fair Oaks Drive-In! This is going to be a very different live experience wherein we'll be introducing both movies with some jokes, but that's it, we just all kinda want to bring you kind folks these movies and enjoy them for what they are. So if you're interested in a Socially Distanced good time with some awesome horror movies, this is the event for you! Tickets and info are here! Hope to see you there! 
LAST MONTH ON WHM

 Episode 487 – Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

FUCKING FINALLY!!! Andrew, Steve, Chris, and Eric go past the worlds end and strange tides to arrive at the latest Pirates of the Caribbean shit-show, starring Javier Bardem as YET ANOTHER GHOST ZOMBIE who needs to kill Jack Sparrow. Is it possible that this is actually better than the last two? Are we supposed to be taking anything seriously after seeing de-aged Johnny Depp? Can we get a normal villain in these god damn movies, please?! At least this is the las—*reads IMDB* OH GOD DAMNIT!!!
Episode 488 – No Country for Old Men (PATREON EXCLUSIVE)

For this month’s Patreon-only WLM episode, the boys ride toward the border to try to save Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men, featuring the best bad haircut in recorded history. Has Tommy Lee Jones given a better performance in his life? What exactly can you purchase at The Gettin’ Place? Is that Tommy Lee Jones brother, cousin, or uncle? You know what? It doesn’t matter. This movie rules.
 

Episode 489 – Scooby Doo 

The gang gets jinky with it in the first entry of Summer Blockbuster Extravaganza 2020, finally tackling the 2002 adaptation of the famed TV cartoon featuring a sober stoner, his talking dogs, and their detective gang investigating a CGI Tim Burton nightmare. Why is the beginning so good and the rest so bleh? Did OutKast seriously provide an original track for this? Is this Matthew Lillard’s best performance to date? It certainly is better than whatever the fuck Freddie Prinze Jr. thinks he is doing here.

Episode 490 – The Mummy (1999)

Andrew, Eric, Steve, and Chris continue on in the Summer Blockbuster Extravaganza 2020 with the 1999 remake of The Mummy, in which Brendan Fraser faces off against a slew of god-awful CGI nemeses, Arnold Vosloo, and Rachel Weisz’s eyebrows. Is this the best Stephen Sommers movie? Will the League of American Hunks survive this one? Do we really need this brother character and Kevin J. O’Connor? If you have a private line to Oded Fehr and his ethereal hotness, please do let us know.

Episode 491 – Shrek The Third

The boys go once more into the breach to discuss the third installment in the most overvalued animated franchise in history, in which a Scottish ogre and his ogre wife consider parenthood, confront destiny, and get their green buttholes itched.  Is Chris Cabin or Eric Szyszka the bigger Shrek the Third fan? Must we pack these animated movies with celebrity voices rather than experienced voice actors? Does anything actually happen in this fucking movie? The Sly and Family Stone cover is just salt in the wound, honestly.
 

Episode 492 – The Expendables

The expendables of podcasting finally take on the most expendable movie ever made, Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, in which a bunch of old men decide to decimate a fictional South American nation to show up Eric Roberts and the CIA. Who here looks the most haggard? Is Jason Statham’s character really named Lee Christmas? What is Steve Austin doing here, who in the hell is Randy Couture and WHERE THE FUCK IS MICHAEL DUDIKOFF?!?
 

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: Well, I would be remiss if I did not write about last Sunday when I finally filled in a Cinematic Blindspot and watched Dirty Dancing in its entirety for the first time ever! Yes, it's shocking. Yes, I grew up with two sisters. No, I don't know how I missed it either. Honestly, it's just one of those films that is so ingrained in the DNA of American Pop Culture that you feel like you've already seen the whole thing. I knew about the sexiness, I knew about the steaminess, I knew about Jerry Orbach helping out poor Penny after her roadside abortion, and I of course knew about "Nobody puts Baby in a corner." I feel like that line is up there with lines like "I'll be back," "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition," "Who ya gonna call," and "DYN-O-MITE," where you could go years and years hearing them, but never actually view the source material.

So anyway, I watched the movie and it's great. Some of the sexiest non-pornography out there! Grey and Swayze are so incredible together, you can smell the sex coming off the screen. Orbach is also great, and it's a real who's-who of a supporting cast, including Wayne Knight, Kelly Bishop and Lonny Price! The anachronistic music caught me by surprise, but I will be damned if my heart is not melted every time I hear "She's Like the Wind," so it's all good!

Chris: Another month of spending most of my time inside has, as you may have guessed, yielded a lot of watching. Despite more than a few late-to-the-party screenings of great (slightly) older movies – Johnnie To’s Election, Hong Sang-soo’s Ha Ha Ha, Sam Fuller’s Park Row, and Ann Hui’s Love in a Fallen City, to name a handful – most of June was spent watching 2018-and-beyond releases. As you may guess, that means a lot of mediocrities (Beanpole, Sibyl, Possessor, Divine Love, and A White, White Day), a few outright disasters (Irresistable, You Should Have Left, and Becky), and a handful of major works (Ema, Tommaso, Bait, Da 5 Bloods, Tesla, Fourteen, and IWOW).
 

Plenty of internet ink has already been spent on Spike Lee’s devastating and thrilling war film and it feels wrong to write about Khalik Allah’s sprawling, inexplicable IWOW when it remains without any sort of distribution, so let me make the case for spending your hard-earned money on the two that are now regularly available through online cinemas. Abel Ferraera’s Tommaso is simply unlike anything the legendary director has made before, a warm yet thorny self-portrait centered on the titular filmmaker (God-tier Willem Dafoe) who spends his day shuttling around Rome, hitting up small cafes and AA meetings, playing with his daughter, and attempting to keep his latest marriage from crumbling into violence, fury, and bedlam. Though there are flashes of the maniac energy that drives most of Ferrara’s films, what is most striking about Tommaso is how sensitive and day-lit the filmmaking is as compared to his recent run of gloriously dark studies.
 

I can also not say enough about Dan Sallitt’s Fourteen, one of the most bewildering, moving, and convincingly complex films about female friendship that I have ever seen. Sallitt has a deceptively simple style that really highlights his impeccable, probing writing and a number of exceptional performances from Tallie Medel, Norma Kuhling, Scott Friend, and Willy McGee. That isn’t to say that his touch is evident, however. Aside from the brilliant images he forges with DP Christopher Messina, Sallitt edits his film into a swirl of potent experiences rather than lean on familiar narrative trajectories. In the process, Sallitt dispenses with a number of assumptions and stereotypes about the people who leave the deepest impressions on us and the limitations of sincere emotional support. I cannot recommend this or his other films enough.
 

Eric: I've been watching a lot of exceedingly random shit lately. After we discussed the Johnny English franchise on oh, one of these here podcasts we put out, I actually sat down and watched Johnny English. That first movie is pretty good! I had a ton of laughs early on when he was accidentally hospitalizing everyone who works for the British government. Also it has a monarchist plot led by John Malkovich of all people! Then I checked out the second one, Johnny English Reborn, which was very much bad. They bloated the budget and tried to give it action movie type set pieces which kinda just destroyed the charm of the original to me. Anyway, I haven't seen Johnny English Strikes Again yet.

I did, however, sit down and reappraise the 1981 stoner "classic" Heavy Metal. I saw this movie as a kid and was very much not into it. I think I get it a lot more now as an adult who somehow has an appreciation for prog rock and weirdo '70s fantasy novels. Trust me, folks, I didn't see that coming. And it could happen to you too! There's decent parts to Heavy Metal, the whole cyberpunk future taxi driver plot was pretty interesting. I think the one that takes the cake though is the quasi-Elric type story of the Eternal Champion lady of the died out Terran race or whatever they were calling it. Good kills and it just reminded me of some books I liked. Plus this movie has voice acting from John Candy and many more that make it a definite curio. However, what I really don't dig about this movie, is the unnecessary nudity everywhere. Did cartoon nudity really work for people? Like did this get dad panting? Can we get animation that isn't for babies and isn't pornography? Is there middle ground, anywhere? And don't tell me Anime, keep your blasted Ninja Scrolls to yourself! I think I guess, The Simpsons and shit like that is the middle ground? Animators remain a deviant reckless class of individuals. 

Steve: I write this on a Sunday afternoon right after the Fourth of July and everything I've watched seems like it's melded together in some kind of otherworldly blob that keeps growing as I pass the time during this accursed year. Anyways, aside from DOING GREAT, what I'm getting at is I'm watching a lot of movies. Lots of revisits as those are cozy in times of peril (read: my wife and I watched Trainspotting twice so far since March), so I've revisited:

The Darjeeling Limited: Does Wes Anderson have any right to make a movie in India? Probably not! I think it's got some major issues insofar as not giving the Indian characters enough agency in the film, but the chemistry between Brody, Schwartzman and Wilson is to die for, the movie itself is exceedingly beautiful and melancholic at the same time, and the tragedy in the middle never fails to bring me to tears. Also, it's maybe his best soundtrack? Possibly! Anyways it somehow winds up higher up in my Anderson rankings than most, even though it is a problematic fave. 

Grey Gardens: This is a weird one to watch during quarantine, so even though it's a classic and one of my favorite documentaries ever, it's NOT A RECOMMEND until we can safely go outside. Although, if you are worried about how you've maybe gone to seed in quarantine like me, watching the ruination of Little and Big Edie will make you feel better about your current circumstances, for sure. Oh, and it must be enjoyed by following it up with the pitch perfect Documentary Now! episode right after. 

8mm: We watched this the night Joel Schumacher died and it's a perfectly weird film that's certainly a Stay Tuned on the H feed, but you kind of can't look away from it. Say what you want about Mr. Schumacher, he was a craftsman above all else and nobody else could make that horseshit script look so slick and enjoyable. 

In the "new movie" front, I've watched:

Da Five Bloods: As a lifelong fan of Delroy Lindo, I was really happy to see him back in a big bad way giving one of the best performances I've seen in years. He's just so broken, let down, and alone and it's stunning to watch. The movie itself is absolutely great, but you can't take your eyes off Lindo. Goddamn what a performance

You Should Have Left: I just need you all to stay the fuck away from this movie. There's nothing here, not even a fun Kevin Bacon performance...just nothing. 

Oh, and on the reading front I've picked up "Dune" for the first time and I'm loving it so far. Incredibly dense, but so readable and hard to put down. I can't wait to figure out what the fuck is going on! I'm only 90 pages in and can't get enough so far. AND I'm slowly making my way through the Denny O'Neal Dennis Cowan run on "The Question" from the 80s and am really enjoying myself. It's exactly that high minded, outdated, Vertigo crap that I can't get enough of. If that's your cup of tea, it's kind of a must. Also Cowan's art is just stunning throughout. 
 PATREON MAILBAG LIGHTNING ROUND
This time around we're changing this up by answering two of your questions! 

This month's patron-sourced question comes from Jamie in Baltimore who asks:

"We all know that Billy would fail up from LA cab driver to being in Trump's cabinet. The question is where would he would be appointed to in the cabinet?"

Andrew: Billy Campbell would absolutely ascend to the rank of Secretary of the Treasury. With the way he's constantly grifting Allison out of large chunks of cash that she breaks her back to earn at D&D, there's no doubt in my mind that Billy would have zero problem going full Stevie Mnuchin and stealing from struggling citizens trying to earn an honest living. Billy is a piece of shit and Steve Mnuchin is an even bigger piece of shit.

Chris: Top aide and chief speechwriter, no question. Think Toby Ziegler from The West Wing, but easily distracted by women and juvenile bullshit. To be fair, Billy would probably be a lot more fun to hang out with than miserable old Toby but he would absolutely think you were talking about a car if you ever talked about Sudan. I also have to imagine we would get incredible, sprawling speeches from Trump about how dumb Alison is for dating Keith and not just drinking hot cocoa with him. And now that I think about it, seeing as we have a few months until November, its entirely possible that President Big Boy will just launch into a tirade about Rhonda getting too much screen time in Melrose Place before Inauguration 2021.

Eric: Billy would definitely be in the Trump Administration. I could see him being a Press Secretary that flames the fuck out like Scaramucci but he'd probably ride the wave for a while like Sean Spicer, or hell, Spicer but if he stayed in that job much longer. I could actually see Billy actually kinda selling the "no, it was the biggest inauguration in the history of this country." And his profound ignorance that exudes a type of arrogant stupidity might have been enough to keep him in that position. He'd just repeat shit, then ask YOU, the reporter dumb questions. It'd be a never ending assault on the American mind. He'd beat you into submission with his meandering pointlessness. I could also see him heading up Homeland Security and aggressively cracking down on his fellow citizens without remorse. If the Melrose Place episode "Burned" is anything to be believed, I think Billy could easily become a jack-booted instrument of the state, helping to expand shit like ICE, or facial recognition software. Bottom line, wherever Billy ends up, we lose. We lose on Melrose. We lose in this fictional hypothetical question. I mean, the truth of the matter, is probably that if Billy was in the Trump Administration it'd be exactly the same as it is now. 

Steve:  I wholeheartedly agree with Jamie's assessment that as a Gen X'er with no discernable skills Billy would fit right in with this administration, but I'm perplexed as to guess where he'd wind up. He's racist for sure, but definitely not racist enough which means he wouldn't go that far. I'm going to guess he winds up the Chief of Staff because that position has been rendered meaningless by a president that has no discernable agenda from day to day. It's the perfect job for a coasting Gen X Slacker, the only beef is he'd have to wear a big boy suit, which we know our man does not like to do. 

JULY 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 July, as the SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER EXTRAVAGANZA rages on!:

Episode 493 — The Mask

Episode 494 — The Terminal 

Episode 495 — Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life 

Episode 496 — Sherlock Holmes (2009)

MELR0210 - Final Month Before Hiatus:

90210: "East Side Story" "A Fling in Palm Springs" "Fame is Where You Find It"

Melrose Place: "House of God" "The Whole Truth"

Patreon Episodes:

Patreon Exclusive We Love Movies — Raiders of the Lost Ark

Animation Damnation — The Mask: The Animated Series: "Mr. Mask Goes to Washington" (s2, e16)

The Nexus: TOS: "The Deadly Years" (s2, e12) TNG: "Q Who" (s2, e15)

Gleep Glossary: Bib Fortuna

Patreon Re-Released Commentary: Sucker Punch
 

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

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Please consult this page and contact Patreon Support if the problem persists. We apologize for any inconvenience you’ve experienced on Patreon and truly appreciate your continued support!
UPCOMING NEWS AND PROMOTION

IJust a reminder that we are donating 100% of all profits we receive from our Tee Public store in the year of 2020 to great causes supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, combating Police Brutality, and supporting racial justice. You can donate directly here or you can donate by buying some SICK WHM merch like our newly designed Order of The Boop Shirt!

If you're not subscribed to our Youtube Channel you are missing out on a ton of great content! Late in June we did a "watch along" with Can't Hardly Wait which was a ton of fun. We also put out a synched clip from our Justice League Commentary about The Skeleton League and a fun clip from The Catsmentary! 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 Space Jam, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, 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! 

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