Off Mike - Dune (2021), Starship Troopers, Drive-Away Dolls, and more!

[00:00:00] ["Let's Get Together!" plays in the background.] my characters that I wear a hat and I pull it off. You know, Dr. Sleep is a great movie. And that's why this week we're talking about Dr. Sleep. That's right. Yeah, what's been going on in your life, Mike? What's new with you? Oh, not a whole lot that I want to talk about on the podcast. You know, this is fine. We're hanging out. We're live. We're alive.

[00:01:40] And there's that.

[00:01:41] How are you?

[00:01:41] Yes, yeah, absolutely.

[00:01:42] Fair enough.

[00:01:42] The Han Solo response.

[00:01:44] I'm good.

[00:01:44] We're all great here.

[00:01:45] Everything's fine.

[00:01:48] Yeah, I think. Yes. And so yeah, so we're going to be harkening back to our older days by reviewing a new movie coming out. Dune Part Two, which I'm very excited about, you know, the new Denny Villeneuve film,

[00:03:03] the conclusion of the Dune. Like, Incredible. Which was pretty fun. There was like a, the homemade sandworm that he, that he created and it was cool. But yeah, I've never read Dune. I have considered becoming a Dune guy. I don't know. Do you, do you, do you think I should become a Dune guy?

[00:04:20] I feel like that would really broaden the Mike Smith mythos.

[00:04:23] You just got like really into Dune.

[00:04:26] If next time I see you, but I wasn't something about the story just like kept me apart from it. And now having watched it again, and we'll talk about why in a second, having watched it again, I'm like, I don't know. Maybe because I know part two is coming in a week, like

[00:05:41] it played a lot better for me this time around. Okay. But anyway, that's, that's sort of what

[00:05:46] we're doing today. So we're doing a general discussions for our discussions. All right, it's time for some discussions. So do you wanna start with Dune, Mike, and then just trickle off with a few other things? Or do you wanna do the other things first and then lead into Dune? I mean, we're already talking about Dune. Let's just keep going. We're doing it, you know? Yeah, I think, yeah, when I watched it in theaters, I knew that it was going to be the first half of the book,

[00:07:01] just like having like, you know,

[00:07:03] read film news stories and stuff.

[00:07:05] And I think a lot of audiences were not expecting it

[00:07:07] to be Dune part one and two back to back or anything like that.

[00:08:22] So like if Dune had failed,

[00:08:23] there wouldn't have been Dune part two.

[00:08:25] And so it was just only half of the story.

[00:08:27] Yeah. Right. The arbiter of all culture. Obviously, yes. And yes, I was very, very taken away. I mean, you know I'm a villain you've had. I'm a big, ditty guy. So that's right away, I'm on board pretty much. And yeah, and then just having the availability of it on max, just being able to be like, all right, yeah, I'm going to sit down and just watch some Dune or whatever.

[00:09:42] Sometimes I would watch certain sections of it

[00:09:44] or whatever, because it just looks so fucking cool.

[00:09:46] That's the thing about this movie, Yeah, and I will say, so when I saw it, I saw it in theater and saw it at the Roxy, the indie theater near my house, Missoula, Montana, where I also work, and went to go see it there, saw it in a packed house opening night, and yeah, I know a lot of people I knew were very hyped for it, and I was like, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Like, it's a big sci-fi thing. I liked any villain you have in general, and I think, you know, I was definitely,

[00:11:02] like, you know, taken in by the visual language

[00:11:04] of the movie, like, it looks incredible.

[00:11:06] I couldn't deny that.

[00:11:07] I loved the score by Hans Zimmer, cheated by that. And I'm somebody who like, you know, like when fast X came out this year, I was like, yeah, that makes sense. They're ending it right when he's about to get hit by a tidal wave. You know? I'm in, no questions asked. Yeah, but for some reason with Dune, I felt sort of out of remove from that. Even though, even the going in, like knowing that it's like part one, like as the first half of the book, I guess I thought there would be like some kind of

[00:12:22] more definitive ending than just sort of ending

[00:12:24] like with him walking in the desert or whatever it was.

[00:12:27] And then otherwise, like I be like, oh, yes, this is the gorm jobber or whatever. Like just saying nonsense words. As if we all know what that means. Right. Yeah. And I've watched a lot of wacky sci-fi and fantasy and stuff in my day.

[00:13:40] I'm used to that.

[00:13:41] But doing it is very heavy with that kind of stuff.

[00:13:44] And it doesn't really hold your we know that some conclusion is coming, right? So you don't have that looming over your head, which I felt 100% in Fast X. I was like, how fucking dare you end in this scene? Is my reaction end at this moment? Which I guess is a reasonable reaction to have for Zendaya to try to look at the camera and say this is only the beginning and then cut to credits or whatever.

[00:15:01] Yeah.

[00:15:02] It's like, fuck you.

[00:15:02] How dare I fucking end that?

[00:15:03] Tell me a whole story, you assholes.

[00:15:05] Yeah.

[00:15:07] The Dune rules, so good in Dune. He's great. Stellan Skarsgard is crushing it as Baron Harkonnen. Oscar Isaac as his father, Rebecca Ferguson as his mother. Yeah, and it's just like a really packed, I forgot how packed the cast of Dune was.

[00:16:20] We're like, oh hey, Charlotte Rampling's in the scene

[00:16:22] and she has a needle pointed at him

[00:16:23] at the Chalamet's neck and stuff like that.

[00:16:26] I don't know, there's a lot of people know. I think in terms of introductory sci-fi novels or something, again, not neither of us have read it, but I think if you think of sci-fi novels, Dune comes up pretty quickly. It's a thing that people are aware of, but I think only really hardcore people were into for a long time. In that way, I think it is sort of like Lord of the Rings, right?

[00:17:40] Where before the Peter Jackson, Lord of the Rings movies,

[00:17:43] that was a pretty niche thing,

[00:17:44] like the fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien books.

[00:17:46] And then the movies came out, especially, sort of like a sea change that's sort of happening in audience tastes and what they're going out to see. And with Marvel movies especially,

[00:19:00] Marvel had three movies out in 2023.

[00:19:03] One of them was a big hit, Guardians of the Galaxy 3,

[00:19:05] which was like the farewell to those characters.

[00:19:07] And that director, James like, it seems like bad, but also funny in the ways that it's bad. Whereas Morbius, the other like, you know, prominent Sony,

[00:20:22] I mean, I guess Venom is also one of them too,

[00:20:24] but like Morbius was like bad, but in a boring way.

[00:20:26] And Madam Webb seems bad in a funny way. just had an infinite budget. I don't know how much it actually cost, but. According to Wikipedia, Dune had a budget. Dune 1 had a budget of 165 million. OK, that is a lot of money. No, yeah, it shows. Yeah, it shows, absolutely. But you compare it to, let's say, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Quantimania, which looks like shit and had a budget of 275 million.

[00:21:40] It costs $110 million more to make Ant-Man 3, So maybe in Dune 2 is that he moves further and further away from that life. Maybe we'll see him liven up a little bit, I don't know, I guess we'll see, in a week or so. But it does really serve to highlight just how bro-y Duncan Idaho is and how intense Gurney is. Josh Brolin's character. Josh Brolin's character, yeah. Josh Brolin, yeah.

[00:23:00] Like you said, his sort of woodenness or flatness really makes everyone else elk around him

[00:23:05] pop.

[00:23:06] So it makes it very exciting.

[00:23:07] So, yeah, I don't know. I wasn't crazy about calling him my name. I think it's OK. I think he's fine in it. It just wasn't like, I don't know. I didn't connect with it, I guess. But people loved it. People did love calling him by her name. And that was his breakout movie. But he was also in Lady Bird that same year. Oh, that's right. Hellatite.

[00:24:20] Yeah, Hellatite.

[00:24:20] Douchebag Boyfriend, which I did think he was really good in.

[00:24:23] He's good in that role.

[00:24:25] And he was in Little Women two years later.

[00:24:26] He's popped up in a lot better for me having watched it the second time, knowing there's a second half of the story coming. That's the big thing, I think, for me, that really kind of drew me away from it before,

[00:25:40] was that this feels unfinished.

[00:25:43] This feels like there's more left that I don't get to see,

[00:25:46] and I don't know if I like Timothy Chalamet as the character. It's like, oh, I don't know, check out the movie. It's pretty good. Yeah, that's fair. I know there's a broad, like it's a thing with the books, or with books and movies in general. I remember my mom talking about this when Lord of the Rings came out. Those books are very important to her. She's like her favorite books and she reads them a lot. And she was like resentful of the fact

[00:27:00] that the actors replaced the characters in her mind

[00:27:03] the next time she read the books.

[00:27:05] Oh, okay.

[00:27:06] And she was like, how fucking dare you?

[00:27:07] Like, I've been watching just a couple movies. Mostly I've been playing a video game that just dropped

[00:28:24] a couple weeks ago called Helldivers 2, which I don't know

[00:28:26] if you satirize something, but you don't do it well enough, so people think you end up supporting the thing

[00:29:40] kind of trap you can fall in.

[00:29:42] I don't think it, I think it avoids that for the most part.

[00:29:45] It's a lot of fun and they had a whole bunch

[00:29:47] of server issues. If I had seen it, it was like the TBS or what TNT for you know, that's more of a TNT movie TNT kind of vibe So edited and all that stuff so I had never seen like an actual theatrical version of it and just like holy shit, man How did nobody how did nobody get it? You know is the thing just really so far ahead of its time Well, you know and it's and I think the reason Starship Troopers discourse really kicked off in the last couple weeks on film Twitter

[00:31:05] Was because hell divers to came out and it's very much the same feel

[00:32:02] and Sean Hannity, all those guys are all still around. Yeah, exactly.

[00:32:04] That's who they're making fun of in 1997.

[00:32:06] And they're all still here, which is nuts.

[00:32:09] And yeah, that stuff is great.

[00:32:10] And I love that blend of newsreel footage, which

[00:32:14] is like those sections.

[00:32:15] And then just in general, that the movie is,

[00:32:17] you're watching a propaganda movie from the universe

[00:32:20] the movie is set in, right?

[00:32:22] That's the whole shtick of the thing.

[00:32:24] And it's just so intense.

[00:32:26] I was not, I guessovers and many other things, once upon a time in Hollywood, sanctuary. And Geraldine Bizwanathan, who was one of the girls in blockers and has in general just been really good in the last couple of, over the last few years. But yeah, the two of them are, you know, are both kind of unlucky in love.

[00:33:41] They're trying to just get out of the city.

[00:33:43] They're doing a road trip to Tallahassee,

[00:33:45] but on their way, they get embroiled in some crime capers You're getting half of what you would normally get from a Coen Brothers movie. But that said, there's still lots of like in Driveway Dolls. It's a lot of very funny moments. The cast is having a lot of fun. Margaret Qualley especially is doing like this really fun like kind of Southern accent. She's really channeling like Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona, which I really appreciated.

[00:35:00] So that was fun.

[00:35:01] Also, it's 84 minutes.

[00:35:03] It's like a pretty like quick in and out, does its thing, does it pretty well, and then

[00:35:08] gets going. two movies come out sort of back to back. I mean, Tragedy and Beth's maybe like two years ago now. But yeah, it's cool that they both got these out of their system sort of. And it seems like they are getting back together, the Coen brothers. So that's cool. Have you heard about what they're doing next, Mike? It's like they're planning an outright horror movie. Supposedly, a horror film in the vein of Blood Simple.

[00:36:20] Sounds rad.

[00:36:21] Sounds fantastic.

[00:36:23] And I think Ethan Cowan and his wife

[00:36:24] are actually also making another movie on their own as well.

[00:36:28] Trisha Cook is her name. over scissor hands or my boyfriend's back is kind of a big one here too. And yeah, I had a really good time with Lisa Frankenstein, it's pretty fun. Catherine Newton plays this girl who her mom has died recently and she's kind of in with a new family and she's sort of an outcast at school. She goes to a graveyard and she, you know, is sort of, she's really channeling like 80s when no one a writer in the role.

[00:37:40] Like she's like doing that kind of thing.

[00:37:42] She goes to a graveyard and she's sort of a goth kid

[00:37:44] and she's tortured fun as well. Oh, that's fun. Yeah, there you go. Driveway Dolls and Lisa Frankenstein. What else you got, Mike? What else on your list? I got two more movies. And the first one I'll talk about is from 2022. And that is called Candy Land. This is a horror movie, I guess, slasher kind of thing.

[00:39:02] But the first maybe 30-ish minutes,

[00:39:05] it kind of misdirect little paint by numbers there. So then the back half of the movie is that slasher stuff. Who's this weird new girl? What's this cult? What's going on?

[00:40:20] So I mean, it's cool.

[00:40:21] It's good.

[00:40:21] I think the performances are always really great.

[00:40:23] Billy Baldwin is in it.

[00:40:24] And he's just the sheriff the kind of like slow procedural, you know, how he does that.

[00:41:40] What do you do?

[00:41:41] Uh, him, him following the target and it's got, but it's not really, it's

[00:41:45] got this really interesting blend of, of this kind of noir set up, but also

[00:42:43] day, you know, he's got like three or four days to pull this off and then him realizing, you know, all the stuff that goes wrong and like, oh, the target's only a loan for a very

[00:42:49] short window. So like, it's got to be quick, which means you'll need a gun, which means

[00:42:53] you need to expose yourself to somebody else because you need to buy a gun while you're

[00:42:56] here now. And with more people that could place you in New York at this time, and it's

[00:43:00] just like an escalation and escalation and right all that stuff. And the best part, 77

[00:43:04] minutes, including the credits. So there it is. You're in and Richard Rountree is also in this who played Shaft. He's the original Shaft. And yeah, it's a yeah. And also Jake Lamotta is in it. Like the boxer Jake Lamotta that Raging Bull is based on. He plays detective model. The real guy. Yeah. The real Jake Lamotta is in it. Sam Raimi is in it as a news reporter. There's a few people that pop up in this.

[00:44:23] But yeah, it's an action slasher It's so much fun. Maniac Cop, it's fantastic. And also it gives Bruce Campbell a chance to like, I don't know, be like just the lead of like a horror movie that's not like a wacky like Looney Tunes type thing, like Evil Dead, you know? Like I'm watching Bruce Campbell and he's like, oh, he's killing it.

[00:45:40] He's doing a great job in Maniac Cop.

[00:45:42] And like, it's a movie that has like a camp value to it,

[00:45:45] I guess, but like it's a,

[00:45:46] it's different than Evil Dead is,

[00:45:48] you know what I mean? Campbell loves the Evil Dead movies, all that stuff. Like it was on my list for a long time. I've actually owned the Blu-ray at Bubba Hotel for a long time. I've just never gotten around to watching it. And yeah, have you seen Bubba Hotel, Mike? I have not seen Bubba Hotel. This is another one of those movies that when I was getting into horror movies, Evil Dead, Bruce Campbell, all that stuff, that this is like, oh, there's this movie where

[00:47:01] he plays an Elvis impersonator or Elvis or whatever.

[00:47:04] And I didn't know that it was directed by Don Casarelli.

[00:47:07] That's pretty awesome. unleashed and they have to defeat it. There's this Egyptian mummy that was stolen during a museum tour that is attacking the retirement home and they have to defeat the evil. And it's a movie that is obviously very wacky and silly, but it's also very sincere. It's Bruce Campbell and his story as Elvis, he plays it very straight. And he's going for a kind of emotion

[00:48:21] that I don't think you would expect from a movie like Bubba

[00:48:23] Hotel.

[00:48:23] And it really works.

[00:48:24] It's really fun.

[00:48:25] So yeah, had a great time with Bubba Hotel as well.

[00:48:27] That's awesome.

[00:48:28] Yeah, I mean, it's been one of those things where when I started up, I was like, okay, well, you know, Mean Streets is like kind of considered like Scorsese breakout movie. That was like six years later. You know, sometimes it takes artists like a little bit of time to find their voice. So who knows like how much of Martin Scorsese I'm actually going to see in this movie. Right. And then who's that knocking on my door starts Catherine Scorsese is making and serving food.

[00:49:40] And then, and then the next scene, uh, Harvey Kitell is the lead of the movie.

[00:49:44] It's like his be happening soon. But all right, I think that it pretty much wraps things up, Mike, unless you have anything else. Yeah, that's all the stuff. I'm excited for Dune 2 next week. Yes, and I'm going to put out an invite to some of our friends,

[00:51:02] anybody who's seen Dune 2 and wants to jump on the podcast.

[00:51:05] So we might have some guests next week to talk about Dune Part 2.

[00:51:08] All right, can't wait.

[00:51:09] Yeah. some movie news and all that good stuff. Next week, it's Dune part two. We are taking the trip to Arrakis and it's gonna be a good time. Yes, the spice must flow and we'll be there. Yes, yes, indeed. I'm going to a mac and cheese themed party afterwards called the Mac and Kegger. And I'm creating a Dune themed mac and cheese for the mac and cheese party. That's gonna be my thing.

[00:52:20] I have a-

[00:52:21] Is it gonna have a mild hallucinogen in it?

[00:52:23] Is that what you're doing?

[00:52:25] It's gonna be a lot of spices.

[00:52:26] They're gonna be in the mac and cheese for sure.