Big Daddy Dispatch: April 2021 (Patreon)

Dispatch Fifty Three, March 31st, 2021



Hello WHM Family!

We did it! We did all the content!!! Somehow we put up with all your INSANE selections for Listener Request Month and filled our Patreon to the brim with content including a three part discussion of Zack Snyder's Dead and Bloated Justice League! Between all this LRM, the Snyder, the Enter the Ninjamentary, your four weary uncles needed to sit down with a stiff drink, one that is shaken, not stirred. That's right, you've got four weeks coming at you with THE BIG GUY, Mr. Bond, Mr. Untouchable, Mr. Was He a Huge Scumbag in His Personal Life (it certainly seems that way), Sean Connery! We've already started laying some of this down and we can say confidently you all are gonna love it!

Banner Credit: We Hate Movies The Big Daddy Dispatch by Felipe SobreiroImage Credit:  Fartalanche by Neth Knowles @nethknowles on Twitter

VIRTUAL LIVE SHOW NEXT WEEK: RAMBO: LAST BLOOD

Oh boy, it's been a while since we've done one of these! A virtual live show performed from our homes beamed into yours that is basically a fun-as-shit Friday Night hang with some of your best buds. If you missed out on Terminator: Dark Fate, you DO NOT want to miss this one as we'll be talking in our slurriest voices for Rambo: Last Blood, that uber violent, fairly racist Stallone actioner from two years ago!

The show is going to be on Friday April 9th at 9pm EST, and you want to be there for the live energy, the chat with other fans, and ever important scene cred! But, fear not! If you've got a late night dentist appointment or live in a part of the world where 9pm EST is an ungodly hour, still buy your tickets because you'll get a link to download the show for one whole week after it airs! That means, you can download the show (and then it's yours forever) up to 11:59pm EST on April 16th, but after that gang, it's GONE FOEVER, just like our Dark Fate show.

You do not want to miss out on a one-of-a-kind, never to be rebroadcast, kick ass live WHM experience broadcast all across the globe! So what are you waiting for, butthorn? GET YOUR TICKETS NOW!

LAST MONTH ON WHM

Episode 534 – The Pest



Listener Request Month is blasting off with one of the most requested titles in LRM history and E-FUCKING-GADS, it’s The Pest, in which John Leguizamo cons everyone, gets hunted by German Jeffrey Jones, and offends essentially everyone except for the powerful. So, that’s good, of course. Was this Leguizamo’s last-ditch attempt to become a Carrey-esque comedic sensation? Isn’t this somehow a huge letdown from what you imagine a movie written in three days would be? Where is the closest Eternal Sunshine Clinic and do they have an affordable payment plan available for podcasters? If this movie ruined Rapper’s Delight for us, Mr. Leguizamo will be receiving a flaming bag of poo on his doorstep post haste.

Episode 535 – Warriors of Virtue

Andrew, Eric, Steve, and Chris get mercilessly bullied and have a death dream of the magical land of Tau, where kangaroo-men martial arts masters battle against a glam rock singer with magical powers. Yep, that’s kind of it. What was the creative process for the actual surgeons that produced this movie? Who allowed this shit boy to anchor this movie? What the fuck is with the extremely wet blood on the kangaroo-people and why will it haunt us forever? Plus, a dispatch from Chris Cabin about the sequel that features no kangaroo people.

Episode 536 – Goodfellas (PATREON ONLY)
For the Listener Request Month WLM episode, the boys sit down for some Sunday gravy with Henry, Tommy, and Jimmy, three very cool guys who are awesome for killing people, abusing their loved ones, and doing massive amounts of drugs, in Martin Scorsese’s famously uncritical saga of the modern mafia. Is it possible to watch this film and not make Italian food? Does Scorsese talk about mediocre movies the same way he talks about movies he loves? How did Ray Liotta not become a matinee idol? We’ll see you all at the Bamboo Lounge when all of this is over!

Episode 537 – Poltergeist II: The Other Side
The bad times just keep on a coming as the gang crosses the ethereal plain to help Craig T. Nelson and notorious fat-stacks-getter Zelda Rubenstein explore pretty egregious Native American mysticism, ghosts of religious zealots, and another house full of ghosts. How is the imploding house not still a huge story? Did Jimmy Carter do dub work on Kane? Is Steven Spielberg the prince of darkness or just one of his most successful peons? And the fuck is with this worm-man thing? Grab a beer and hang out in your favorite uncovered burial site for this one!

Episode 538 – Vertical Limit



We’re killing dads this week, folks! Andrew, Eric, Chris, and Steve hit K2 to join ranks with Chris O’Donnell and Scott Glenn as they scale the beast in under 22 hours to save Robin Tunney and a Bransonesque Bill Paxton. Can you bring a sandwich-sicle on a trip like this? Does anyone understand what Ben Mendelsohn and his brother are saying at any point in this? Why did they get a sex doll to play Scott Glenn’s late wife? Also, be sure to keep your nitro away from sunlight. Vampire rules apply!

The Snyder Sessions (Patreon Only)


After years of Snyder die-hards, vulgar-auterism trolls, and devout worshippers of the DC faith crying and shitting their pants because the Lord Snyder’s cut had been abandoned for the demon Whedon’s ghastly soy version, we finally get our eyes on the four-hour-plus opus that Snyder originally intended us to see put together hastily to sedate a frothing, delusional fanbase, reinvigorate his career, and make some extra scratch. Will this actually make anyone happy? Isn’t this just the Marvel formula with the desaturated Spongebob filter put over it? What exact itch was scratched by finding out this all goes back to Nazi Germany? Lord willing, this four-hour discussion will be the last time we speak of this accursed object.

Episode 539 – Double Team


Listener Request Month concludes on a high note as the boys go globetrotting with assassin JCVD and arms dealer Dennis Rodman to stop Greek terrorist Mickey Rourke from feeding Van-Damme’s freshly birthed baby to an angry tiger. I made none of that up, for the record. Could we just get a morsel more of story to explain any of this? Did they buy an entire separate script because they couldn’t think of a second act? Can we get more JCVD splits and less Dennis Rodman in hand-to-hand combat with the English language? Let’s spread out and help find all the abandoned baby-room hospitals across America!

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:  While I would've much preferred being in Austin eating tacos and BBQ while pounding beers and wandering 6th Street, two weeks ago I "attended" the SXSW conference for the film festival portion. It was my sixth virtual film festival since September and I have to say, I'm feeling pretty burned out. Virtual festivals are great for how they can open up availability to folks who might not be able to publicly attend a festival IRL, but for my film curation gig, festivals mean watching as much as I possibly can in the time I'm at the festival. Which is fine when I'm somewhere like Toronto or Austin or wherever where I'm getting up, getting lunch at different places, meeting colleagues for dinner or drinks, going to various networking events, and so on. But for the job I need to do, in the virtual space it's me sitting alone on my couch for hours on end, and with SXSW I feel like I finally hit a virtual wall. Okay, my privileged ranting about film festivals aside, I saw some pretty decent stuff, along with some more disappointing offerings.

Here's the good, the bad, and the meh:

The Good: Ivan Herra's Bantú Mama, Jasmine Stodel's Kid Candidate, Adam Baran's Trade Center, Jaco Bouwer's Gaia, Lázaro Ramos's Executive Order, Julian Terry's Don't Peek, Jeremy Workman's Lily Topples the World, Edgar Wright's The Sparks Brothers (although it's like FORTY minutes too long), Michael Reich & Mike Pinky's A Puff Before Dying

The Meh, The Not-Great & The Bad: Malcolm Ingram's Clerk (I thought it was okay, but absolutely did not have to be 2 hours long), Mickey Keating's Offseason, Philip Gelatt & Morgan Galen King's The Spine of the Night, Jed Rothstein's WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn

Chris: As I’m writing this, it was just announced that Bertrand Tavernier, the famed French filmmaker and buddy boy to Martin Scorsese, passed away this week. He was never a director that I felt moved to really focus on, despite being mostly thrilled with what he did in the few titles I have seen – Death Watch, The Princess of Montpensier, and especially 'Round Midnight. Ominously, I had only finally viewed Tavernier’s ode to jazz and, more importantly, jazz on screen a few days before his death at the age of 79. At the core of the movie is a revelatory performance by tenor-sax juggernaut Dexter Gordon, who plays Dale Turner, a jazz legend in the winter of his life who takes one last sojourn to Paris. Gordon’s croaky, solemn delivery is occasionally indecipherable but, as an auditory device, it communicates so much about Dale’s sense of mortality and his lingering, poisonous yet liberating desires, and does so in ways that dialogue simply cannot. It’s also incredibly helpful in a movie about jazz to have a lead that can actually play the instrument(s). More than all that, what struck me most is Tavernier’s unerring awareness of cinema’s inherent habit of romanticizing places, people, and art. In this case, he at once indulges a nostalgic view of the underground Parisian jazz clubs as the coolest place on Earth, but also undermines it in a few ways. The attendance is not exactly bustling, , and the witty banter you might expect is instead a nighttime orchestra of murmured pleas, for temperance, for love, for another drink, or for a quick screw. The musicians do not live whirlwind lives of sex, high conversation, and boundary-pushing noise but a bleak series of walks from the stage and back to a lonely boarding house. Dale encounters friendship and connection, genuine admiration and meager but consistent support for his work in Paris, but it is, as Tavernier depicts it, a kind of dream that he can never allow to fully sink into before returning to the harsh realities of America, where he and the anguished spirit that fuels his art were created. Really outstanding stuff, and it includes what I would now consider my favorite Scorsese cameo of all time. 

Eric: I have continued to watch Spectacle's free streaming programming on Sundays. They do a 3 PM EST "Fist Church" and a 5 PM EST "Blood Brunch." Fist Church is generally old Kung Fu movies and Blood Brunch is horror. I am surprised how much more I have been enjoying Fist Church. Both are good, obviously, but Fist Church showed me 1983's Duel to the Death directed by Siu-Tung Ching which is about an ancient ritual wherein the best fighters in China go up against the best fighters in Japan. The Japanese, being our aggressors in the film, even go underhanded with a Ninja plot line wherein they kidnap every great Chinese warrior to rig the game. The physics and theatrics of these amazing Kung Fu movies are a blast but when you throw NINJAS into the mix, it becomes even better. Ninjas are supposed to be the most agile and silent killers. So what does this mean? Well, they basically can just fly. There's a great shot of them falling from the rafters which is reversed so they just kinda float up to the ceiling to hide. It's incredible. They even descend upon people using kites to fly, but there's also a sequence where they just fly through the forest. Just ninjas flying around. Duel to the Death is available "free" in the US on Amazon Prime Video. I highly recommend it. Also you can tune into Spectacle showings on Sundays here: https://stream.spectacletheater.comIn addition to this, we've been going through the 1980 Shogun miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain, Toshiro Mifune, John Rhys-Davies and many more. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised how good this is. It's 9 hours. I saw it as a kid during a rebroadcast in probably the early 1990s. I only remember certain parts but boy howdy does this show deliver at times. In the first 3 hour block you get a dude's head being cut off AND a Samurai pisses on Richard Chamberlain. You don't see his cock but you do see that hefty piss stream. Really good stuff and mind blowing that they aired this on NBC. I could never imagine a major television network taking risks or doing anything interesting ever again. And now here's the rub, it suffers severely from soggy middle syndrome and it's not streaming. I had to buy a DVD set. The DVD set too? Guess what. They got rid of "episodes." I really do not understand why they eliminated the broken up into 5 episode miniseries structure. I have 5 discs, I assumed they'd be an episode each but it goes as follows. Disc 1: 3 hours. Disc 2: 3 hours. Disc 3 1.5 hours? I dunno, Disc 4 might be big but I have yet to finish this rewatch. Disc 5? Special features. Oof. It'd be so much easier to watch if I had the 90 minute episodes as intended. I didn't know this also had a blu-ray release which I heard is even broken up LESS? Also there's a 2 hour something movie that's a re-edit of the 9 hour show. I just cannot imagine how this works as a movie despite the promise of “added nudity and violence.” I might check it out eventually. Compare and contrast.

Steve: Well, I watched Snyder Cut, and to be quite honest I feel like I'm still watching it in a real Shining-esque kinda way. Which, ya know. Sucks. I have gone back to Grant Morrison's run on JLA, which is my Justice League, and I'm pleased to say, aside from some unfortunately 90's boob-er-iffic renditions of Wonder Woman, it's still a really exciting "high budget" feeling action comic, that has great characterization and a great grip on DC History. Kind of a bummer not to be able to see anything like that on the big screen.

ANYWAYS, I feel like I've been remiss in catching up on Oscar stuff and ideally next dispatch you'll have more of that to read through. I have been picking through some older stuff that I've really enjoyed, specifically:

Blue Ruin: Why it's taken me so long to finally sit down to watch this is a goddamn mystery, as I loved Green Room as much as any movie I've seen this last decade, and yeah, for whatever reason it was always in my "Next Time, Baby" pile. Well, let this be a lesson to all of you, because I waited so goddamn long I had to watch it WITH COMMERCIALS on Tubi. Annoying, but not an altogether unpleasant experience.

The movie itself is exactly what I wanted but I didn't know I needed (like Green Room) a unflinchingly sad and violent look at the stupidity of vengeance, what that might serve and who wins. Spoiler alert: It's nobody. All of this is anchored by gorgeous cinematography and a impressively sensitive performance from Macon Blair.

Pretty Woman: What a totally insane film. I'm happy to report that I don't see the "fairy tale" this is billed as. I don't think Richard Gere is supposed to be creepy, but lord the way he STARES AND ACTS AND YELLS, I spent most of the movie hoping for Julie to take her money and literally RUN. Cuz, this guy...this guy is up to no good. The box office numbers on this one will totally flabbergast you, because it's like half a billion dollars in 1990 money. Avengers shit for a movie that hitches on Jason Alexander trying to sexually assault your lead actress. Madness.

Oh, and I finally read Lincoln In the Bardo, a lovely and affecting ghost story from George Saunders that was an absolute pleasure to read. Go do it.

PATREON MAILBAG LIGHTNING ROUND

Here's a fun space where folks on Patreon get to ask us Questions directly. This month's entry comes from 

Zack in Manitoba, Canada who asks: 

"Noting your comments on Ron Silver's coif in the Live Wire ep, what are your picks for worst cinematic haircuts, hairpieces, or wigs?"

Andrew: I think one of the stand-out worst cinematic haircuts of all time has to go to Jack Black in previous episode, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. For those who don't recall the character, he's the weed-loving groundskeeper for the bogus resort the gang goes to in that film. I've always been horrified at his atrocious White Guy Dreads. It's a thing that should never happen anywhere, but committing it to cinema forever is a huge sin. Just look at it. What a bad idea.



Chris: John Cusack’s hair has not looked good in quite some time but that’s more of a lifestyle choice at this point. Kiefer Sutherland also has made some very poor decisions in the hair game, including in Eye for an Eye and Flashback (stay tuned!). A big pet peeve of mine is actors rocking long hair when they really shouldn’t be and when it adds very little to the character’s aesthetic. I’m thinking Eddie Murphy in Vampire in Brooklyn, Woody Harrelson in Money Train, and Tommy Lee Jones in the beginning of Blown Away. Also, and I know it’s to make him look more like the guy, but Mike Myers’ entire head-look as Steve Rubell in 54 is an all-out assault on the corneas, no-holds-barred and merciless wreckage done to viewers for no other reason than wanting to see a movie based on the house that blow built. I’m sure if I had some time to really dig through some 70s films I’d be able to find my solo pick for Worst Ever, but these linger and stand out.




Eric: Well, there's a billion to pick from. I think the most glaring to me is whenever they put a little rat on top of Bruce Willis' head, which they do to great acclaim in the 2009 film Surrogates. Hey, I just realized that's now over 10 years old. Ain't that something. 



Steve:  As Chris mentioned there are a lot of great runners up here, but I think the absolute winner here has to be the hack job Courtney Cox received shortly before filming Scream 3. I've honestly never seen an attractive woman look worse. Also, she had PERFECTLY FINE Haircuts for the first two movies? What trauma did Gale Weathers experience that made her do THIS to herself?? 

APRIL SCHEDULESay 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 the month of April!  

Episode 540 — You Only Live Twice

Episode 541 — Zardoz

Episode 542 — Highlander

Episode 543 — The Avengers (1998)

Patreon Episodes:

Patreon Exclusive We Love Movies — Goldfinger

Animation Damnation — The Mighty Ducks: "Puck Fiction" (s1, e16)

The Nexus: TOS: "A Private Little War" (s1 e19) TNG: "Evolution" (s3, e1)

Gleep Glossary: Ree-Yees

Melr0210: 90210: "Beach Blanket Brandon" (s2, e1) Melrose Place: "Picture Imperfect"  (s1, e21)

Once in a Lifetime (Inaugural Episode!): Stalked by My Doctor

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

If you’re having trouble with the RSS feed updating or episodes not appearing in your app, Patreon has acknowledged this bug and they have a fix: "Try un-subscribing and re-subscribing via your app by re-entering the unique RSS feed you were given and is on our Overview section of the Creator page. Or try using a different podcast app or RSS feed reader." 

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




Have you seen our hair lately? You would if you were subscribed to our Youtube Channel We just dropped a massive episode of our live Q&A show, The Green Room last week and we've also been extracting the VHS Trailer game from all episodes  so that they can live on their own with Felipe's fantastic artwork. Eric has also put out great clip packages like David! Muppet Hitchcock Presents, Egg Lawyer, Lak Sivrak, the Wolfman of Star Wars, 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 Lady in the Water, Sidekicks, Wild Wild West, Knowing, Cool as Ice, and The Devil's Advocate! There's so much content there we can't list it all here. Just go and subscribe already! 

This month on Hooked on T.J. Hooker: Eric and Ben have to contend with a HELL of a Bruce Glover performance and a psychic! You don't want to miss this one! Listen here!

If you're a fan of the show and a fan of looking sharp, you should check out our merch on our TeePublic store! We've got awesome designs including some brand new art by Felix for the totally un-crooked VHS Trailer Game! Be sure to check out their awesome art at their instagram @abrakadamnart. We also have a ton of great designs like The VHS Trailer Game Logo, Egg Lawyer, The Order of the Boop, The Kornkast design and many more, with more to come! 

Finally, we'd like to dedicate this month's dispatch to a great guy that we lost this month, Adam Buick. He was a co-founder and moderator over at Muldoon's Pub, which is a great fan community for this very show. Our hearts are with all those folks that were lucky enough to know him.

Take it easy,
Andrew, Chris, Eric, and Steve
We Hate Movie