The boys celebrate the weekend with many beers, films, and television. They fight. They yell. They love. It’s all included in this jam-packed episode of your friendly neighborhood BingeCast.
Head over to Patreon.com/BingeMedia to sign up for the Full Binge! This week the boys create and play a brand new original IMDB Movie game called Wage Against the Machine.
00:00:00 Intro 00:10:40 What You Missed This Week on the Binge Media Podcast Network 00:17:45 GOOGLE VOICE (Part 1) 00:19:42 Baby Boy James plans a visit to Canada 00:21:23 TM wants to do a poopcast 00:25:23 Goudreau wonders what Spielberg has done recently that’s as good as The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable 00:34:21 Chad D. talks Marvel shows and Fear Street 00:47:09 TV ROUNDUP 00:49:30 Monster at Work (Pete) 00:55:00 Kevin Can F**k Himself (Alyx, Pete) 00:58:54 White Lotus (Alyx, Law, Pete) 01:01:57 McCartney 3, 2, 1 (Pete) 01:06:48 Ted Lasso (Law) 01:15:28 WHAT DID YOU WATCH THIS WEEK 01:19:36 Midnight in the Switchgrass [SCREENER] (Alyx, Pete) 01:41:58 Die in a Gunfight (Alyx, Pete) 01:52:16 The Exchange [SCREENER] (Alyx, Law, Pete) 02:02:59 Old (Alyx, Law, Pete) [SPOILERS]
Chad C has your GLASS review. Some of you are gonna hate it and some of you are gonna kind like it. The movie, not his review, I mean. Or do I? What a twist! Shut up.
By the time 2007 rolled around, Die Hard had become legendary. As discussed in this very podcast, if they had stopped at 1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance, the three of us would be praising just how fully entertaining the Die Hard TRILOGY is. But hence, 20th Century Fox had to quadruple dip into the Die Hard pot. The result, Live Free or Die Hard, is a film you either love or hate. Listen to hear two of us discuss how much we hate it. While the other defends it, only to finally determine that he hates is too.
But that’s not all. To make up for the lack of podcast last week, we also talk about 2013’s A Good Day to Die Hard. What, if anything worked about this seen as a train wreck fourth sequel? Whose body does director John Moore know the location of that he leveraged to get into the director’s chair? And how does Batch feel watching this film for the first time in his life? And, you get an already falling out of his chair drunk Ammon to talk about A Good Day to Die Hard, you will laugh at just how awesomely bad he feels about this film. No, he does not hold back.
Well, another month, another retrospective gone. I’d like to once again thank Ammon and Batch for joining me on this journey through the adventures of John McClane. Stay tuned. More with them by the end of the year.
By the time 1995 rolled around, the action genre was still seeing all the remnants of Die Hard’s success take shape in the form of its imitators. Die Hard on a ship. Die Hard on a bus. The movie going public was so inundated with imitations, that the prospect of John McClane returning for another adventure were looking to be dwindling away due to Hollywood’s common ability to over saturate the market with too much of a good thing.
But extrenuating circumstances forced two major players in the franchise to flex their action movie making muscles once again. First, Bruce Willis was in the position of sorely needing a hit. After taking control of what was reportedly a fantastic script in Hudson Hawk, Willis’s ego brought the production to its knees, as he had them do his bidding. Much to the film’s dismay. And the 1993 action yarn Striking Distance wasn’t doing too much fire burning at the box office either.
John McTiernan was also coming off a career slump, as the Arnold Schwarzenegger flop Last Action Hero was still on the tips of tongues of Hollywood executives learning that too much of a good thing, in action’s most successful star and the innovative director that put adventure filmmaking on the Hollywood map, was anything but. The re-teamup of these two in a sequel to their most successful film was all but inevitable. And we at the Aftertaste are here to watch it.
Once again join Batch, Ammon, and myself as we look at 1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance, and decide whether the film seemingly made out of career salvaging desperation was either a good or bad result in our eyes.
Note: Due to our schedules being all over the place this week, there will not be an Aftertaste next Thursday. However, in two weeks, we will return with not one, but TWO reviews. One of Live Free or Die Hard, and the other being A Good Day to Die Hard. Also, keep an eye on this space as lots of surprises are coming down the pike.
Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995) (?/10, ?/10, ?/10)
Released in the summer of 1988, it didn’t take long for 20th Century Fox to realize that Die Hard was a hit, and almost immediately started putting together a sequel concept. However, this time their film wasn’t going to be based on anything by original novelist Roderick Thorpe. Instead, Fox already had the rights to the novel 58 Minutes by Walter Wager, and in a move that will be a theme to this series, just plugged almost all of our favorite characters from the original Die Hard film and made it the sequel lazily known as Die Harder.
But Hans Gruber isn’t the only piece of the 1988 film’s puzzle missing from this film. There is no sly hand of original director John McTiernan at the helm. Instead, we get the upstart, high on his action game Finnish director Renny Harlin at the helm. Join Ammon, Batch, and myself as we dissect whether the sequel’s outlandishly ridiculous concept is able to be overshadowed by the hard nosed action Die Hard 2: Die Harder contains. And whether the still full toupee wearing Bruce Willis brings his A game to another adventure containing John McClane being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Download the podcast that I like to call, Christmas in June. And don’t forget, we will be going down this road of one film a week until we get to the 2013 fifth film A Good Day to Die Hard.
The action landscape was certainly missing something in 1988. Sure, the first Terminator and Lethal Weapon movies had already come out and set the ball rolling. But, the genre still needed that one extra push. Something to come out of nowhere and change cinema forever.
Enter Die Hard. Directed by John McTiernan and starring then relative unknown Bruce Willis, Die Hard rapidly ascended to the top of many peoples’ 1988 Best of lists, and movie quips were no longer owned solely by Ah-nold. Instead, this Bruce guy came in and gave the art of a one-liner a true make-over by giving them, and this film as a whole, something Schwarzenegger and those around him couldn’t. He gave them a naturality.
Join me, Ammon, and Batch as we start our look at the entire Die Hard series by dissecting this first history-making film. I don’t think it’s a secret that we all love it. But how much? What books did the film base itself on? And is this REALLY the first film of the series?
We answer all these questions and more, below. So welcome yourselves to the party by downloading!
In a week of columns from me that celebrate the career of the late director Tony Scott, I decided to take another look at his entire resume of directed films. I will explore the majority of the rest of his oeuvre later in the week. For now, I’m going to examine one of the most exciting movies he ever made, as well as one of his most contentious.
Background: After Shane Black launched the buddy/cop subgenre of action films with Lethal Weapon, he was one of the most sought after screenwriters in Hollywood. So much so that Weapon producer Joel Silver was willing to pay a then record $1.75 million for his next script. The Last Boy Scout ended up being that script, and Silver was determined to make it just as slick, just as amped up as 1989’s Lethal Weapon 2. This is why he called up Tony Scott to take the project on behind the scenes, and then hot action star Bruce Willis to take the lead. Scott obliged, knowing little about what he was in for.
Me, I was a 14 year old teenager who loved action. I was looking so much forward to this movie I could not even contain myself. John McClane in a movie with Homey The Clown, directed by the director of Beverly Hills Cop 2? I was there. I also want to point out that even then, I was really into the outside world of developing cinema. So when I heard Siskel and Ebert were going to be on Oprah, I had to turn it on and see what they had to say. After defending his ‘Thumbs Down’ review of Home Alone, Ebert -a critic who was a huge influence on me- started to talk about The Last Boy Scout, a movie I had planned on watching that weekend. He went on to say he did not like the tone of it, especially an argument between Willis’ character and his daughter, played by Halloween alum Danielle Harris. Though he did say despite all of this, he enjoyed it immensely overall. Believe it or not, this made me even more excited.
It also happened that my best friend who had moved away to Southern California was back visiting for the weekend. We planned an entire weekend around seeing The Last Boy Scout on the Saturday after it opened, and though I had no idea about what the general plot was -there was no quick internet database to refer to- I was all set for a gun blazing, smart mouthed adventure film that only the talent involved could produce.
What I Thought Then: If I was able to make a Top Ten List of my favorite movies from that year, The Last Boy Scout would have probably been on top. The movie blew me away, and my friend & I could not stop reciting its lines. Exchanges between Willis and co-star Damon Wayans were gold (‘I like ice. Leave it the fuck alone’), and the action was so slickly directed by Scott that it is far from the sensory overload future films in the genre would become. The exchange between Harris and Willis that Ebert had warned me about was so in your face that it was highly entertaining, and the main plot about my favorite sport of professional football was captivating. My father had delved into fantasy football at the time, so the thought that people could be killed for betting on the sport was both scary and entertaining at the same time.
I still remember the theater’s response to the film’s opening scene. After future Tai Bo guru Billy Blanks pulled out a gun and shot would be tacklers in pouring down rain, a man about four rows in front of me stood up and moved his arms like a referee, saying in a loud tone ‘Personal Foul. Pulling Out a Gun. Fifteen Yard Penalty, FIRST DOWN!’ Sometimes, it’s the little things that please the senses. On this night and in the months following, The Last Boy Scout filled all these needs and my enjoyment could be compared to that man in the theater. It was loud. It was boisterous. But by God, was it entertaining.
What I Think Now: Coming back to The Last Boy Scout, I was shocked at how mean spirited and soulless it was. It seemed all prior 80s action flicks had at least a flicker of fun in them. But when the most tender moment of a film is a deadbeat cop holding his cheating wife in his arms whispering ‘fuck you Sara’ in her ear as a way of showing a restoration to their relationship, there is a problem. Any audience member not walking around with a black heart is not going to feel a thing other than maliciousness toward its characters. Black’s script is full of ugly sexism and an uncanny intoxication of meanness. Scott’s tendency to respond to his producer’s wishes and fill the void with even more unpleasantness is a huge blow to the film’s tone.
But despite that last paragraph, I want to point out that 24 years later, I am in the exact same shoes Ebert was in when I originally watched his review. I found this re-watch of The Last Boy Scout to be unpleasant, but that doesn’t mean I did not get any enjoyment out of it. I still laughed at Willis’ cynical and sardonic deliveries, Wayans (and his $650 pants) is a lively presence, and the action is slick and well directed. One thing you can say about Scott that I certainly will repeat in my Grumblings column is that you can compare any of Scott’s action scenes from the 80s and 90s to any film of today and their frantic pace, and Scott’s pallets & direction would hold up to ANY of it.
I also noticed something very interesting about The Last Boy Scout this time which I had never noticed before. People -me included- used to say that Willis seemed to take his Die Hard character and just inject it into this film. His character of Joe Hallenbeck was looked at as just an extension of John McClane, a character he had personified twice before. But I look at The Last Boy Scout as an almost new beginning for him. If you look at John McClane, he was a man who had a sardonic, sometimes vicious wit. But what made him likable is that he was a normal man thrown into innormal situations which find him fighting for the lives of both him and his wife. Watch Die Hard With A Vengeance now, and you will see there are more similarities between post Hallenbeck Willis than prior works. He retained the savage meanness, only this time he was not married. So though The Last Boy Scout was not the hit everyone involved was hoping for, it would proceed to change Bruce Willis’ career forever.
In Conclusion: I feel it is telling that the four powerful forces behind The Last Boy Scout never worked together again. The man with the golden action pen Shane Black had no choice but stand back and watch as Joel Silver and Bruce Willis changed around a lot of what his original script was. Tony Scott, until the day he died, always called the making of this film one of the worst experiences of his career. I would say that although I am not as enthusiastic as I was as a 14 year old, I still find The Last Boy Scout to be a highly enjoyable film. The action holds up, and as ridiculous as the film’s ending is, it is still frought with friction and tenseness. Scott’s direction lends itself to one of the darkest films of his entire career. Its action is highly exaggerated and irresistibly undercutting, with the conclusion, as noted, in particular sticking out. Never before has irredeemable ugliness been so nice to look at. So watch out. Satan Clause is watching.
This time last year, as FX was leading up to releasing their new TV show based on the hit 90s movie FARGO, doubts were had all around. A TV show based on a movie? What, are you crazy? That sounds like a horrible idea! I don’t know if I went as far as calling it blasphemous, but the word ‘pointless’ definitely rolled off my tongue. Seriously, you’ve run out of original ideas your remaking movies for TV now? But FARGO pulled through and it turned out to be one of the best TV series of the year. Yes, the year, and hell… maybe even of the last few years (save for BREAKING BAD and GAME OF THRONES, of course).
SyFy decided to follow the same formula with 12 MONKEYS: a new TV show based on the ’90s movie. And is the result as successful as FARGO? Of course not. I checked the first episode out this week and while they sort of hit the concept just fine, the idea of sitting through the Bruce Willy dude traveling to a different time each episode in his quest to find the Army of the 12 Monkeys and save the world… the whole thing makes me tired. For a few reasons (the biggest being that it’s a remake of the movie rather than doing its own thing):
1) There isn’t enough story for a full 10 episodes (10 hours) of TV. There just isn’t. It’s a 2 hour movie, and they’ve already extended the hell out of it for the first episode. I see maybe 3 more episodes until even the most devote 12 MONKEYS fan taps out. And you KNOW they’ll want to keep making more and more seasons of this shit.
2) The dude playing Bruce Willis (or James Cole if you want to be a dick about it). Some joker named Aaron Stanford–this dude lacks the leading man charisma that a show like this so desperately needs… because the whole show revolves around him! If you don’t give a fuck about this dude, you don’t give a fuck about this show. And guess what? This dude can suck a BabaDIIIIICK!
3) The whole Time Travel story device. One episode deep and there are just too many issues and problems with the time travel time lines that I can’t imagine anyone using their brains will be able to ignore.
On the plus side, the production value is fantastic, a dude from THE WIRE appears to be part of the recurring supporting cast, and the main chick / scientist is ridiculously hot (unbelievable, yes, but nice to look at none-the-less). Otherwise, skip this trash. Just revisit with Terry Gillium’s masterpiece (yes, I said masterpiece) and relive the good ol’ days when Willis gave a shit and Brad Pitt acted his balls off.
Okay, it might be a bit of a stretch, but the time change did happen this weekend and did you really need another Halloween list? I’m not the biggest fan of Halloween anyway, and I could never come close to bringing you the lists that a few of the boys gave you last week. So with that being said, welcome to the first of five November editions of Working the Weekend with Luke here at Binge Media.
Before I get going here, I want to welcome the newest member of the Binge Media team, Garrett Collins. I’ll honestly say that I really don’t know anything about him, so I’ll be tuning into the Bingecast with the rest of you for the details. However, we did become friends on the facebook this morning and his cover photo was Rocky at the top of the steps in Rocky Balboa, so I’m quite certain we’ll get along just fine. Welcome aboard, Garrett.
So let’s get to a little time travel. Before I get into the movies, I’m going to start this with one of my favorite TV shows of all time.
QUANTUM LEAP
For those of you who remember Quantum Leap, you know exactly why I love this show. For those who don’t, here’s a quick history lesson for you. Scott Bakula plays Dr. Sam Beckett, a quantum physicist who believes that time travel is possible if one were to only travel within the span of his or her own lifetime. The government wants to shut him down, but before they can get to him, he loses himself in the machine, and the only way to return home is to right some wrongs in the past. Therefore, we’re basically given a new story each week as Sam is given all of the information he needs from his officer on the project, Al, who only Sam can see in the form of a hologram. It ran for five years and most episodes came to their own conclusion before Sam leaped into the next situation, but a couple of exceptions include an amazing trilogy of episodes where Sam leaps into different characters that are all part of the same story, albeit years apart, and the final episode where Sam must make a choice on whether or not to return home. You can still find episodes floating around TV from time to time, and I’m really surprised we haven’t seen a remake or a reboot yet, but that’s a good thing. This show was amazing.
THE BACK TO THE FUTURE TRILOGY
This is the default for the majority of my generation when it comes to time travel. I actually just wrote about this not too long ago in my trilogy countdown. You can check out my thoughts HERE.
THE BILL AND TED FRANCHISE
Let’s be honest. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is what I really meant. The sequel was pretty bad and who the hell knows what that third one is going to be like, assuming it happens anyway. But the original, which actually celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, remains a classic. And hey, you actually do learn something.
THE TERMINATOR FRANCHISE
The third and fourth films aren’t really worth too much of a mention, but the original was awesome and let’s get real, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, remains one of the greatest sequels ever made.
PLANET OF THE APES (1968)
They’re trying so hard to capture the intensity of the original starring Charlton Heston, but nothing the reboots have done can come close to what one felt when you realize that George Taylor was never traveling through space, but through time. This is one of the most iconic images in cinematic history.
TIMECOP
Don’t you dare judge me.
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
Again, don’t judge me. I don’t know why I like this movie, but I do. Much like Timecop, the plot is full of holes, especially in the time travel aspect, but at the time, this was something different for Ashton Kutcher and for a little while, it made me want to punch him in the face a little less.
GROUNDHOG DAY
This may fall into the category of an unconventional time travel movie, but how many times have you watched it anyway?
DONNIE DARKO
Talk to most people about Donnie Darko and all they’ll usually bring up is the demonic bunny, Frank. But there’s so much more to this film. The plot is very good, and it was here that you realized Jake Gyllenhaal actually had some talent. Sure, the bunny is a good conversation starter, but until you fully grasp what’s going on in the movie, you just sound like a douche.
12 MONKEYS
I’ll admit that when I first watched this movie as a teenager, I wasn’t a big fan. But over the years, the movie gets better and better with each viewing. Brad Pitt’s performance is awesome here and Bruce Willis does what Bruce Willis does. Speaking of which…….
LOOPER
If you can get past the initial shock of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s makeup, then you’ll be okay. The story is nicely written, and most of the action sequences are very well done. Throw in one of my big Hollywood crushes, Emily Blunt, and I’m good to go. And speaking of which…..sorry, no kick-ass segue here. I haven’t watched Edge of Tomorrow yet, so I can’t say whether or not I’d put it on this list. Maybe that’s what I’ll do tonight.
THE JACKET
Most people hate this one. Actually, most people I talk to don’t even know what it is. But I freaking love this movie. Maybe it’s because I like Adrien Brody, or maybe it’s nice to see Keira Knightley in something other than a period picture, but there’s something here that I dig.
SCROOGED
Again, this may not fall under the conventional time travel movie, but there’s no denying that you have to include this and any other version of A Christmas Carol. This just happens to be my favorite version and between you and me, the first movie that made me cry. When the little black kid finally talks, come on.
SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE
Okay, I know this is really stretching out, but I had to throw it in. How many times have you referenced this scene, and how many times have you wished you could pull it off?
FIELD OF DREAMS
You probably weren’t expecting to see this on here, but it actually does work. Yes, most of the movie revolves around ghosts, but let’s not forget that Kevin Costner travels back to 1972 when he first talks to “Moonlight Graham”. BOOM!
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE
My last entry falls back into that “maybe” category as George Bailey doesn’t technically travel through time. But he’s given a peek into an alternate time and universe that doesn’t include him, so I’m counting it. It’s also one of my top ten favorite movies of all time, so any chance I get to talk about it, I’m going to take it. And it’s my list. So there.
So what are your favorites? Are you buying some of my logic? Was this a complete waste of your time? Let me know below or follow me and tweet @THElukenorris.
Okay, I give. Here’s a little Halloween something for you. See you next weekend.