BIG DADDY DISPATCH: MAY 2021 (Patreon)

Dispatch Fifty Four, May 3rd, 2021



Hello WHM Family!

The weather is changing! It's a new month and we've got a lot of great crap planned for you folks for May! It's kind of a pseudo-ish early start to the Summer Blockbuster Extravaganza, which will indeed start in earnest in June, BUT, we've got some really banger episodes coming your way including....A Talking Simpsons crossover with Henry Gilbert and Bob Mackey, on The Simpsons Movie! We just recorded that one and it is a stone cold blast that we know you folks are going to love. We're so stoked about it we had to make this incredible promo image our header this month, made by the inimitable Nina Matsumoto! Pretty neat, eh?


Banner Credit: We Hate Movies The Big Daddy Dispatch by Felipe SobreiroImage Credit:  We Hate Movies Meets Talking Simpsons Promo by Nina Matsumoto

FRQNCY1: A VIRTUAL MUSIC AND COMEDY FESTIVAL, LIVE FROM BROOKLYN!

We're getting the band back together and broadcasting to you folks live, all together ON STAGE in Brooklyn New York on Saturday June 5th as part of FRQNCY1, a one-of-a-kind streaming music and comedy festival with some of the best names in the business. 

What makes this so different from other streaming appearances we've done in this hellish year is that it is going to be dynamically filmed in an event space where we can play off each other live on stage! It's so damn exciting to be back on stage again for you folks! This show will be the closest to a We Hate Movies Live show we've done in the last year and a half...so yeah, we're excited. We're also excited to be talking Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (aka the one with Tina Turner and all those rotten kids)!

This is going to be part of a LIVE Festival, so, your ticket won't only get you access to our show, you'll get to spend the whole day watching amazing music and comedy acts like Chapo Trap House, Pom Pom Squad, Zola Jeus, Tinder Live with Lane Moore, Throwing Fits, Downtown Boys, Episode 1, and Stay Inside! Our time slot has not yet been announced, but watch our Twitter because we'll definitely blast it out there, when we know! 

This is going to be an all-day blast and the video WILL NOT BE REBROADCAST after June 5th, so you want to make some time for this one! All tickets, including T-Shirts, and virtual backstage passes can be found on the FRQNCY1 website!

LAST MONTH ON WHM

Episode 540 – You Only Live Twice



To kick off Sean Gone month, Andrew, Steve, Chris, and Eric head out to Japan with 007STDs to find Blofeld’s secret lair and stop his pac-man rocket for good. Is this the most stylistically significant early Bond film? Why does "Japanese" James Bond just look like a Romulan? Is the Japanese secret service meant to look this alpha? Let’s get back to the animal-death standard with blockbusters, folks!

Episode 541 – Zardoz

On one of the filthiest episodes of the show ever recorded, the gang travels to the land of the Vortex in 2293, where red-diaper-wearing homicidal maniac Connery is taken under control by a township of immortals who are so bored that they can’t even have sex anymore. Did this movie get wrongly dismissed on the basis of the red diaper alone? Can WHM be handed the keys to the Razzies already? What kind of porn can you get from an all-knowing computer? How exactly do you explain having Charlotte Rampling play a character named Consuela? Can’t wait to see everyone at the step-family reunion!

Episode 542 – Goldfinger (PATREON ONLY)

For this month’s We Love Moves entry, the boys grab a spy plane with Jimmy Bond to face-off against Oddjob and his rotund terrorist-employer, Auric Goldfinger, before they turn Fort Knox into an American Chernobyl. Can we get back to having fat super villains? Is Bond out to destroy the entire Masterson bloodline? Why did Goldfinger spend all this time with the meeting at the stud farm just to kill all the gangsters? It’s good to know that Bond’s need to ejaculate has been his number one weakness from the get-go.

Episode 543 – Highlander

Finally, Eric may ascend to the heavens, knowing his work on this earth is over. The boys head from old-timey Scotland to modern-day New York to follow Connor MacLeod, the titular immortal, as he comes to know his destiny to be the greatest and defeat noted god-on-earth Clancy Brown. Has anyone considered making an indestructible neck shield? Why don’t more rivals meet inconspicuously at wrestling matches? Why is Lambert, a American-Swiss, playing a Scotsman and Connery, a Scotsman, playing a peacocked Spaniard? There can be only one!

Episode 544 – The Avengers (Non-Captain America Division)



Sweet baby Jesus, take us now! Andrew, Chris, Steve, and Eric head back to the swinging 60s, or to modern-day 1998, or who cares because no one who wrote it did…to help one-time TV super spies Steed and Peel hit the big screen for the first time, in the hopes of foiling the doomsday plans of weather madman Sean Connery. Was this released in theaters with a written apology? Why are there no transition scenes? What the fuck is with that weird picture of Uma Thurman above Connery’s organ? Wait, Fiona Shaw’s character was blind? When did that happen?!? THIS FUCKING MOVIE!

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:  Last week I checked out the new Hulu miniseries Sasquatch, Joshua Rofé's Duplass Brothers-produced true crime doc about some wild weed-related shit that went down in the woods of northern California in the fall of 1993. Investigative journalist (and executive producer) David Holthouse is a magnetic presence on camera, and following him on this investigation is so totally watchable. I wound up going through the whole thing in one go and have zero regrets about staying up until 3am to do so. The film rides the line between giving you a bunch of interviews with Bigfoot weirdos and also this totally riveting murder investigation. It also features some great, atmospheric animation by Drew Christie that fills in the blanks when Holthouse tells the batshit story of what he witnessed in a weed farmer's A-frame cabin in the early '90s. 

To keep the true crime thread here, I also watched the absolutely dreadful Netflix miniseries, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. The 4-part-when-it-could've-been-1 doc covers the mysterious death of Elisa Lam. If the name doesn't ring a bell, I'm sure you've seen the viral internet video of elevator security camera footage that showcases Lam acting strange for several minutes before vanishing out of sight—her body was found later in the hotel's rooftop water tank. The doc manages to drag itself out by focusing on a seemingly endless roster of self-professed "internet sleuths'' -- who are mostly all creepy white guys btw -- who are all eerily obsessed with finding out what happened to the doomed tourist. At the end, when the one sleuth mentions he had a friend take a video of Lam's memorial in Canada for him because he couldn't get there himself to pay tribute... I mean, my skin is still crawling. 

Oh, and Chelsea and I just finished This is a Robbery: The World’s Greatest Art Heist (also on Netflix). This one goes in hard on the incredible story of the 1990 robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It’s a tale we are both fascinated by and this doc was a real treat. We’d visited the museum before and knew about the heist, but holy cow did this thing have some info I wasn’t aware of before viewing. A solid recommend.

Chris:  I have been watching movies from 1989 and this has allowed me to pick off a few big titles on my billion-page watchlist, including Aki Kaurismaki’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America (great!), Patrick Tam’s My Heart is That Eternal Rose (stunning!), and Bob Balaban’s Parents (hahaha, what the fuck). It has also allowed me the chance to finally check out Alan Clarke, the director who crafted blunt and kinetic dramas about the primordial codes of honor and masculinity in England’s white youth for some of England’s biggest stars in the 1970s and 80s. Ray Winstone first started getting real traction when he led Clarke’s acidic tale of juvenile borstal boys, Scum; Tim Roth found acclaim as a skinhead on the loose in Clarke’s Made in Britain. This time, I checked out both Elephant, his disturbing 30-minute exercise in cinematic/political violence, and The Firm, his 1989 TV drama about football club hooligans attempting to unionize, starring a positively ferocious Gary Oldman as the would-be king of unified hooligans, Bex. Clarke’s use of the Steadicam and the tracking shot are the key tools in his arsenal, following Oldman as if he were a lead coyote sniffing the trail ahead for wounded prey or to merely confidently strut as the unofficial lord of the locals. The violence erupts when Bex must face two pretenders to his thrown, the yuppy prince Oboe and the brash, insecure maniac Yeti, played with compressed fury by Phil Davis.

Another key to Clarke’s art form? His runtimes. My man keeps his shit short, as befits a TV drama, but nothing feels missing from Scum, Elephant, or The Firm in maintaining a 70-odd-minute-or-less runtime. (In comparison, Mike Leigh is a natural big-screen director and feels confined and substantially less imaginative as an image maker when he is making TV dramas, with the notable exception of Meantime.) Nothing feels rushed yet Clarke’s films are constantly on the move, something that is uniquely true of the chilling Elephant, which you can watch easily on YouTube. Anyway, we were talking about directors who can deliver big movies in tight packages while discussing John Carpenter the God, and Clarke strikes me as a worthy contender. I’ll report back when I get around to the rest of his work.

Eric: I went back to some classic cinema that don't get talked up too much 'round these parts (or any parts, really) but Escape from L.A. remains great. I mention in our upcoming WLM on Escape from New York that I think the movie is better than it gets credit for. I'll leave a lot of that elaboration for the episode itself but I rewatched it in March and despite repeating the plot beats of the original, to me, it shall always remain a banger. I mean, folks, the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills alone.The second movie in the classic cinema pantheon here that I want to talk about is Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy. This was a movie that as a kid I think I unfairly didn't think was AS good as the show, etc, etc. Maybe seeing them curse was jarring to my lil stinkin' 1996 years? That said since I first saw it til now I have had the Cabbie's immortal line “it's made from monkey cum” stuck in my head. It's an interesting movie though and from a time where in North America it almost felt like we were post-conflict, the wars were won, here comes that Fight Club malaise and our biggest concern would be the rise of antidepressant drugs. “Have a Stummies.” So it's a good satire of that but also the Mark McKinney boss role just being Lorne Michaels will never not be delightful. It's also a movie that's way shorter than you remember coming in at like 89 minutes and available in full on YouTube (not streaming anywhere else I could find.) Yeah, 89 minutes. That's what life is like without the Comedy Central ad blocks.

Steve: Well, yesterday I went BACK TO THE MOVIES! Sorry, but I have to scream it out. It was my first weekend fully vaxed and you better believe that was my first stop. My wife and I went to Film Forum and caught a Pedro Almodóvar double-feature of his new short film, The Human Voice paired with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It was a well curated pairing as so much of the set-up of Women on the Verge... is very clearly inspired by the Cocteau play from which The Human Voice was adapted, and watching them both back to back was kind of a knock-out. Having only seen The Skin I Live In, it was interesting to see an Almodóvar classic that is more representative of his work overall, and I just love how Women on the Verge... just keeps building and changing in such a claustrophobic setting. Somehow the comedy and the tension and the emotional stakes keep all intertwined and keeps the movie from being pigeon-holed as any one thing. A really remarkable watch, if you haven't seen it. Regarding The Human Voice, it's just 30 minutes of Tilda Swinton being fucking incredible and a flat out TERRIFIC dog acting performance from her canine co-star, Dash. A really affecting and beautiful short. Movies! In a theater! What a concept!

I also did some Oscar catch-up stuff and was absolutely floored by Minari. A really breathtaking family drama, so gorgeously rendered and performed by its central cast (Yeri Han deserved a nomination too, tbh) that you truly miss them when it ends. 

Also, who liked the Oscars? Nobody right? What a totally disastrous broadcast which has taken the top slot on my least favorite Steven Soderbergh production, beating out Oceans 12! Next year I want a fucking host, some JOKES, clips, and CONTEXT! You'd never know that Frances McDormand is one of the few people to have won 3 Oscars for acting, because the show was too cool to tell you! It takes those fuckers 90 seconds to find the stage, there's plenty of time to explain that. What an absolute shit show.

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

Jonathan in Raleigh, North Carolina who asks: 

"If you go back in time and stop one actor from appearing in one film, who would it be and why? The Twilight Zone: The Movie is not allowed."

Andrew: I dunno, I'd probably go back in time and tell C. Thomas Howell to pass on Soul Man. Or maybe go back and tell Rip Torn to skip Freddy Got Fingered. I mean, an elephant cums on him. The man turned in legendary performances like Bob Diamond in Defending Your Life and Tom Green made him drown in pachyderm semen. C'mon, man. 

Chris:  If I’m playing a full Machivellian game, I think I get Robert Downey Jr. to not get the Iron Man gig. Give it to anyone. Give it to Gosling. Give it to Denzel. Maybe it would be good, but it wouldn’t be the absolute miracle that was RDJ in that role. There may never have been a bigger and more financially rewarding gamble on immensely risky casting than putting the former brat-pack outlier in the role of Tony Stark, and in the back of my mind, I kind of think if you put anyone else in that role, the movie isn’t nearly as big as the movie was, thus slaying the MCU before it’s born. That’s my Baby Hitler moment.

More sensibly, I wish we got the original plan for the 2010s A Star is Born remake, which was to be directed by Clint Eastwood with Tom Cruise in the fading star role and Beyonce in the upcoming star role. It sounds janky as fuck but it’s also the kind of gutsy move on all three counts that might have made for an outright masterwork rather than a sweeping big-screen romance between Bradley Cooper the director and Bradley Cooper the movie star.

Eric: If I could go back and time and stop one actor from appearing in one film, it would be JFK in the Zapruder Film. And you're asking me why, Jonathan? I find it troubling that you'd ask that. 

Steve:  Not to piggyback on Chris's "Baby Hitler" moment, but I have another MCU entry and it's a little different. It's an actor who I LIKE in the role, and a movie I LOVE, which is Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy. Here's my reasoning, he's very funny in the role, but you could put almost any other dude in the role and you'll get just about the same level of success for the film, maybe others are even better or more interesting, and yeah, maybe more than a few make it a worse movie.

Here's my reasoning. I liked 'fat' Chris Pratt. He was funny, likable, and seemed like he was going to have a fun little career! You could see him starring in his own acclaimed HBO comedy, or pop up in like a Bujalski movie or give a really like-able performance as a hacker in an action movie or something. Ever since he got jacked, all of his roles are BEEF HARDCHUCK, the intrepid, aloof, asshole that saves the day! And it's so fucking boring to behold.

Also, it would be fun to not have actors have to starve themselves into achieving 4% body fat to have success in this industry and be treated as an incredible GLOW UP. 
I'm not saying that men have it anywhere near as bad as women in this awful business, but it's a problem that needs to be fixed for everyone, not a gap that needs to be narrowed. 

 If I ever have to deal with Paul Giamatti's INCREDIBLE TRANSFORMATION to play...I dunno The Leader or something, I'm gonna jump off a goddamn roof.

MAY 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 545 — Stargate

Episode 546 — The Simpsons Movie with Henry Gilbert and Bob Mackey

Episode 547 — Saw III

Episode 548 — The Mighty Ducks

Patreon Episodes:

Patreon Exclusive We Love Movies — Escape from New York

Animation Damnation — The Critic: "Dr. Jay" (s1, e10)

The Nexus: TOS: "Return to Tomorrow" (s1 e20) TNG: "The Ensigns of Command" (s3, e2)

Gleep Glossary: General Maximillian Veers

Melr0210: 90210: "The Party Fish" (s2, e2) Melrose Place: "Three's a Crowd"  (s1, e22)

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

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UPCOMING NEWS AND PROMOTION




Have you seen our hair lately? You would if you were subscribed to our Youtube Channel Last month we dropped a massive episode of our live Q&A show, The Green Room 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 are joined by friend of the WHM unvierse and kick-ass critic,  Angelica Jade Bastién to talk about a GANG WAR! 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! 

That's going to do it for this month's Dispatch! Thank you all for your incredible support and we'll see you next time!

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