1996's The Long Kiss Goodnight is a Shane Black screenplay on the Renny Harlin luge. What is the deal? Is it a spiritual successor to The Last Boy Scout? What is going on? I don't know. I've been sick for months at this point. I thought I was better well after recording but I can feel the sinus infection coming on. Everything all the time.

Kicking off season 6 with a good one! Let's talk a bit about this very fun very slept on movie.

Yes, it's finally here. Over a year late, but better than never? Maybe. Maybe not. Like the guy from Matchbox 20 said, man it's a dense one. Definitely don't listen to this one in the car with the kids. I don't have links or anything here. Things have changed since most of this was recorded. I didn't necessarily go back and update things. Be nice to people.

Quick update on Season 5 which is.... a year overdue.

Yes, it's Network. Could you expect anything else after Medium Cool? Maybe. But you'd be wrong. It's Network. Let's look at this documentary... errr fictional satire from the mind of Paddy Chayefsky and executed with the deft touch of Sidney Lumet. I realize there's an entire laundry list of things that could have been touched upon which I did not. Again, an injury is limiting my computer time. Computer time includes recording and editing so I need to be economical with both. The character of Diana Christensen is probably one of the most interesting because of how she's written but, also, because the romance plot is actually a larger part of the movie than I sometimes realize. So she's got screen time and there's plenty of time to examine her. And I think that, choosing her, to represent what she represents is maybe a bit... biased. Hackett could have easily been that, too, or there could have just been a dude. I know that they, for economy, combined Max's love interest with Max's rival and it works but she's one of the very precious few women in this movie--which is also probably documentarian as well. Maybe bringing this lens to bear on this specific point is fruitless. But it wasn't brought in the podcast. I think I did completely forget to mention the other two academy awards. Faye Dunaway takes it and there's a really good photo of her the next day looking real blase. It's called "The Morning After" and it's the kinda photo that would make me want to be a magazine photographer. Getting to wake up in the morning and do shoots like that is the dream. The other Academy Award was given to Chayefsky for the screenplay which, if you've seen the movie, is no great surprise.

If you have the opportunity to watch this prior to listening, I would want that for you. But it's probably not streaming anywhere. I mean, someone might have uploaded the entire film to YouTube but you never know. Yeah, I'm just digging through my own movie history at this point. Finding the origins of the origins. I've had some physical issues that prevent me from being on a computer for extended periods of time so yeah, there were some things that made it through the edit, and yeah, there were some things that I would normally talk about that I didn't. But I think I get to the heart of the matter well enough.

Yeah, it's back. It's an episode. Check it out. Definitely had a hot take on this one.

Hey everyone, just looking back on 2022 for a second. Just taking a breath. "Late Night Radio" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ I think I only mentioned Hearts in Atlantis for 3 movies this year? That feels like a low number but that's what my data is telling me. Dazed and Confused, Bull Durham, and High Fidelity. Maybe the transcriptions are off.

The squad from High Fidelity are at it again? in what is the kinda prequel, in a meta production sense, and a really great movie in my eyes. It makes me feel good. The cast really brings it, the movie is fun, and I think it set up some conventions or archetypes that carried forward into movies we see today (I think, at any rate). This is the first time I actually make something that sounds like it's in car so if you're in a car it's double messed up. A bold strategy, Cotton. I didn't talk about the action at all. I realize that. The action isn't huge but it's good. They've got Cusack doing the most he possibly can which might have actually been all of it (I can't remember at the moment--it's been absolutely nuts this entire past month and the month before). Makes it feel good. It's not too serious, not too goofy. Groundedly whimsical. There's a lot of daytime in this movie. I think they intentionally wanted it to feel more like a high school reunion movie that has an assassin in it than an assassin movie taking place at a high school reunion. The big action scene is set in the middle of the day. It's cool. It really genuinely is. If I had to choose a favorite little shot I would choose the one set in Debi's bedroom when Martin is leaving. She tells him "you're a fucking psy-cho" and does like a hand talking thing. That was an improvised gesture--she previously saw John and Joan doing that to each other between setups. That's one great part but the opposite shot, John's kinda manic wild "don't rush to judgement on something like that" is just very unique and fits perfectly. Unhinged but just under the surface. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgGTP5Cevrs - (2948) Benny "The Jet" Urquidez • Highlight - YouTube "Cool Rock", "Blue Ska" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ I love the movie. It's worth a look. A lot of nostalgia for this one. Check it out. I'm @coolmarkd on twitter for as long as it lasts.

Top 5 hackiest tropes in media analysis and presentation: * Cribbing aspects of the media itself * Talking about how you can do a thing but haven't and then, in the edit, do the thing. * Not actually organizing thoughts into coherent and structured form * Being late and making it rushed * Starting a Top 5 list and then running out of things so you have filler Yeah, I'm Mark and this is 2000's High Fidelity. Let's get this Hamletesque Annie Hall-like romcom on the road. To be fair the Annie Hall comparison brings a lot of baggage with it that is undeserved. But it's more the deconstruction from a male-centric point of view that I mean. And also the main character slowly losing their mind. The Hamlet link is a reach--I just like alluding to it. Makes me feel like I learned something in school. I feel like I really had Things To Say here but this month has been absolutely destructive to me. No thoughts head empty. So I'll leave you with it. Oh, right! I didn't mention how "High Fidelity" is the opposite of the infidelity that occurs and how that concept is defined. I won't though. I'm exhausted. Smooth Lovin' Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ If you want to reach me, I'm @coolmarkd on Twitter.

What could go wrong when you convince a mathematician at a prestigious university that you're a genius, with the help of geniuses, just to go on a date with her? Not much, right? Right. This is I.Q. and, when I write it out this way, it seems wild. It is wild. Leave your practical brain at home and enjoy the performances, Matthau especially, and conceits of this movie as they come. Do your thing. Odds are you haven't seen and cannot easily see this movie anyway, so stay a while--and listen. @coolmarkd I want to point out that Princeton at this point in time was an absolute pop off of technology and research. I don't remember placing the exact year that this movie was set in (nor do I think that it particularly matters--it's roughly mid 50's) but at Princeton you could have run into John von Neumann who is, arguably, more important than Albert Einstein in a lot of ways. Check him out if you get a chance. This man's biography is where I learned that I do not like reading the biographies of people wildly more interesting than I am. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

This is it. This is the pinnacle of baseball movies. As it is the pinnacle of baseball movies, it is the pinnacle of sports movies. Not in a sports way but in a movies way. This, like THE SANDLOT (which you listened to that episode, right? It's back in season 2 or whatever), has no big game. It's about more than baseball but baseball is both the frame and the delivery mechanism. Baseball teaches us about life so often--as a sport where succeeding 1/3 of the time is hugely successful will--and it has more than just baseball. This is BULL DURHAM. There is a lot going on in this movie. There is a lot that I talk about--it's one of the longer episodes that I've recorded and that's that I already know that I should never record longer episodes. And there is just a ton that I left out. I'll look at some of that here as is my way. Ron Shelton slaps. That's that. Dude is a gangster and lives in a similar space as Linklater. I don't exactly know how to communicate it but I would say it's the writer/director that fully understands their niche and understands themselves and, regardless of whatever copious life experience they may have, understands how to distill these concepts to something that really works in a movie. For more, you can check out my episode on DAZED AND CONFUSED. Sarandon, Costner, and Robbins were almost picture perfect. Costner does this sarcastic chuckle thing that I'm sure seemed cool on paper but it's a little less successful in practice. Other than that he was made for this role. I've heard that Costner is not necessarily the best person to be around while being a mere mortal but you cannot fault him in this role whatsoever. This was also "before he was famous" and that's weird to me because fuck Untouchables or whatever--this is what made Costner for me. Robbins knocks it out of the park. I love watching Tim Robbins--like everyone with cable I've seen THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION only a few dozen times and I still eat it up every time. But he was always that Tim Robbins--even in BULL DURHAM. Even in HIGH FIDELITY. Susan Sarandon was aces in this. She goes on from here to do THELMA & LOUISE which co-starred Gena Davis (yeah, you thought she was going to come up but I said this was the last baseball movie.... for the moment) and was directed by Ridley Scott. She's top-tier. She's stellar. She's in peak form at all points in time--there is zero phoning it in. Sarandon's performance was my favorite as a character in this movie. I only say that because Costner is 100% an actual baseball player while playing a baseball player and knowing the mind of a baseball player because he is an actual baseball player while playing a baseball player ad nauseam. Yes, this movie does have some exploration into homophobia of some sort. It's not as bad as this might make it sound but it does happen. It's probably better than average for a movie coming out in the 80s and is not outright hostile. There is a point where a character questions their sexuality and that's actually interesting--not offensive. This is all relating to the academic paper that I mention in the podcast (at the end). I think it comes from a very reasonable place where the ideal set for masculinity isn't complete domination but instead security and support. The characters themselves are trying to figure things out at times. There's another time where it's just an insult but, to quote Ralph Maccio--politics aside because his views are bad--"hey, it's the 80s". That's actually quoting his character, Daniel LaRusso, who isn't the bully but becomes able to defend himself. I realize that COBRA KAI might take that view a little differently when extrapolated however I'm reading from the text of THE KARATE KID and haven't watched COBRA KAI because, when I tried to cast it to my TV, YouTube wouldn't let me watch it fully. When you watch BULL DURHAM just think of that statement. Not about Ralph Maccio but the statement about masculinity. I've seen se

Yeah, this one didn't stand the test of time. It's unfortunate but it happens. You can tell just from the poster. See what this Cleveland baseball team is up to, again! Wow. My lack of enthusiasm is apparent. But it's 1994's Major League 2 and hopefully some folks made money off of it. This is the second at-bat for the baseball trilogy, and it is... not good. Ground ball to short and a throw out at first, perhaps. It's fine. It was fine for the time. There were a flood of kid-oriented baseball movies coming out that were doing numbers. I get it. But it's not worth going out of your way for in 2022.

Let's dig into one of the most influential sports movies of... the history of movies, I guess. Major League was a stone whose ripples in the pond of American culture are still seen to this day. The late 80's, but especially the early 90's, were rife with baseball movies and the continued success of Major League definitely pushed studios to green light them. Links Brockmire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M95P3DTYxqgMark Hamill doing a Harrison Ford impression https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onMm0DLg8CEDavid Blaine at Harrison Ford's House https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB0wzy-xbwMLocus of control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_controlWade Boggs drinking a metric fuckton of beer https://fanbuzz.com/mlb/wade-boggs-beer/ and to be fair when I first heard this story it was like 40-50 beers but, like any good story, it's grown into myth and then, later, it will be immortalized as legend. I am pretty tired of Sublime. Superstition in Baseball There's a lot to superstition in baseball. Well, there's a lot to the psychology of baseball. The actual mental processes are intense, visceral, and at the lowest level of human performance. This is catching arrows in the air type shit. However the superstition is maybe less impressive. To read about the impressive shit check out this link Going, Going, Gone! The Psychology of Baseball – Association for Psychological Science – APS. If you can't see it go to scummbags.com and view the show notes HTML. Or change your podcast app. I use Pocket Casts and it shows the whole HTML type thing. It doesn't show images, sadly, (and it fucking used to) but you get the links. I hypothesize that the superstitious nature of baseball is more akin to the superstition of gamblers. Baseball has a mostly random reward schedule and it definitely depends on the frame of data that you're looking at to determine how "random" it may be. That's a data science thing. But as a human, having that imminent possibility--nay, the likelihood--of failure and then associating a ritual with success? That's power. Gamblers do the same thing but, in gambling, it's much more a mechanical probability. There's a lot to baseball, as per that previous link, But sometimes you associate power to a ritual and it enables all of those other things to fall into place to the point that you are performing at your peak against the other players doing the same. But even at peak you're losing 7/10ths of the time as a batter. It's wild. Superstitions brace the players for what is to come. Ritual in gambling is not only about winning--it's often about being in the zone. It's about getting into that flow state. At 162 games a year you may need to use that boost to get through. Then you think about the players who have gone back down to the minors and then back up to The Show. It's an ecosystem that promotes this type of... categorization? Correlation? Calling it "thinking" is a bit much but it's definitely an association with the ritual and winning or, more likely, just getting through and surviving.

What do you do with 24 young actors? You make a movie, of course. This is Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused and it's capping off the American Graffiti Sequel Trilogy (that is two episodes) that kicked off Season 4 of Mark's Movies. I said I was going to make a diagram. I didn't. I thought I was going to have something super deep to say here. I don't. Enjoy the episode.

Revisiting things a few years later can be perilous and More American Graffiti is maybe a very good example of this. Even lacking most of the creative team from the first movie American Graffiti still manages to spawn a weird alternate reality sequel to American Graffiti (1973) that comes out a year later called The Hollywood Knights. Knight Time is the Right Time Of the two, The Hollywood Knights is the much more beloved. In writing this episode description I finally cracked the code. I was shocked that an uncredited writer for Two-Lane Blacktop and Aloha, Bobby and Rose would end up making this movie however Floyd Mutrux worked at Second City and, realistically, The Hollywood Knights feels like a very produced graduation improv show where they find a story somewhere in there among all the antics. This movie 100% has Hot Rod credentials. I mentioned Project X and I had known it mostly as a Hot Rod Magazine car because Popular Hot Rodding was on the decline but it, indeed, was the car of Popular Hot Rodding for some time. All of these brands have been eaten up by Motortrend, it seems. The T bucket "rail job" was a cool and very authentic car that rarely shows up in movies. More Isn't Better I wish it was, though. There was some heart and thought put into this movie but I think that the hand of Lucas weighed heavily on the steering wheel of development and production. We can, in hindsight, see that it was inevitable as we've seen the saga of Star Wars but it's unfortunate that it had to be that way. Bill Norton didn't have a prolific credited writing career but was a journeyman TV director. He wouldn't necessarily show up on the list of people who would push back on that as More American Graffiti was at an early point in his directorial career. In a weird tie-in to car movies in general, Monte Hellman was assistant director to Bill Norton on Cisco Pike (1971). Milner was racing what we, today, call a "sling shot" and wearing those masks to not die from the nitromethane fumes was definitely an eye-catcher. Racing was wild back then but these racing scenes, for the most part, are very staged and slow. Other movies have done racing much better (even American Graffiti) but I guess they saved it up for that one last shot. Filming everything for Milner at the track makes it basically a "bottle episode" so I guess that was one way to save some money. Music Matters So the commonality here is the music. A ton of hits. An actual ton. More American Graffiti definitely goes into the later protest songs and hippy movement music while The Hollywood Knights stays in the pockets with The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean (the other The Beach Boys), The Four Seasons, The Chiffons, The Supremes, etc). I think THK shows a bit more range, culturally, than More American Graffiti (which very dedicated to Vietnam and its protests) especially when Newbomb Turk farts "Volare". Interestingly, and I hope it was intentional because I, in my head canon, really want this connection to be real and strong, The Hollywood Knights ends with Martha & The Vandellas' "Heat Wave" and More American Graffiti opens with Martha & The Vandellas' "Heat Wave". For the Audio Enthusiasts Used the WA-47 Jr (cardioid pattern) on the UA Volt 276 with the compressor and vintage modes on. No additional compression was used on the main part of the episode (there was limiting on the whole thing but it was fairly conservative). Stereo section was Rode M5s into a Zoom F6. There was severe wind noise so I cut out a lot of the low end. I did need to run a little bit of voice de-noise because I guess I wasn't speaking very loud and the noise levels around me were wild. The errata part was a Rode VideoMic Go II and I did get rid of some room tone on that one as well. Thanks for listening. Rate, like, and bell that smash for subscribe.

The final entry into Noirvember 2021. Private Investigator? I barely even know her! The 1973 entry into the annals of detective movies by Robert Altman starring Elliott Gould. There's a lot to talk about and I won't mention any of it. I'll try not to. This one is coming out hot so keep your eyes peeled for any updates here. This movie definitely has some content warnings that the 70's just didn't have. Marty Augustine is huge on that. He's the prototype for the Heath Ledger Joker, pretty much. He's like "what if the Joker was a chill dude within the system versus outside of it?" It's wild. High Tower Court is a wild place. Really. https://www.laweekly.com/high-tower-court-what-its-like-to-live-in-the-famous-hollywood-landmark-from-the-long-goodbye/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpgm7SVRws0 High Tower Court like overlooks the Hollywood Bowl (or is super nearby). This area is pretty magical to me. Coming from flatland the elevation changes alone are wonderful. But it's mysterious. It's fascinating. I saw a musical at the Hollywood Bowl and it definitely felt like something. A Simple Favor, starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, feels like an update version of The Long Goodbye. It's an interesting movie. I liked it a lot more than I initially thought I would although it's maybe more inspired by the text than the film. Still, worth mentioning. Also, Michael Connolley's second Bosch book, The Black Ice, is inspired by a mix of the book and the film. I liked that book quite a bit as well. I feel like "el porto del gato" inspired the "GATO!!!" in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Shane Black isn't above that. "El Porto" is an unusual way to say "the door" in Spanish. I'd go for "la puerta" but I learned not too long ago that "porton" was an older word for a door based on the name of a restaurant. So I'll accept it as being fine although, in the book, the Spanish isn't always exactly on point. Chandler was born in Chicago and grew up in England so the actual fuck did he know about Spanish. That doesn't detract from the story or anything but he's such a picky little bastard about his hoighty toighyt literary references you'd think he'd spend a little more time getting that right. But Chandler had a lot of his own issues. I didn't mention Dr. Veringer at all and I'm sure there's a lot to mention there but he's played by the Illinois Nazi from The Blues Brothers, Henry Gibson. Wonderful character actor. I also didn't mention the kid working at the grocery store or Marlowe subsequently seeing him in jail. Good stuff. There's a lot of that. I also didn't mention dogs. But there was the one white dog in the middle of the road that Marlowe calls "Asta". He's got a cigarette in his mouth so it sounds like Astor as if it was a rich person or an Iranian prophet but it's definitely Asta the dog from The Thin Man. The director and screenwriter(s) definitely know about Film Noir and detective movies and books and they consciously chose to not quite do that. The Thin Man movie slaps, though. Super good. I think that Roger Wade was an insert for Chandler but also a reference to Hammett. I organically compared Hammett to Hemingway in that last episode but it turns out that was far from an original thought. He's a tall (6'5" or 195-196cm) bearded man who is wildly alcoholic which is a dead ringer for Hemingway. In Cuba tall men are referred to as a "Hemingway". Or were. Chandler, probably, had a bit of an inferiority complex with regards to Hammett who was the originator--the creator from which Chandler modeled his work. But Chandler also probably used that character as an insert himself--being problematically alcoholic. David Carradine has a cameo that focuses on the prison industrial complex and the impending "war on drugs". That was wild. The car that Marlowe drives in this movie was Elliott Gould's actual car at the time. It was a 1948 Lincoln Continental. Really wild. I maintain that cars got cool in the 50's. If y

The Maltese Falcon That's all I wanted on the first line. If you don't know, now you know. Definitely watch this one before listening. Housekeeping stuff: Yes, I didn't mention Arthur Edeson at all. I mentioned the cinematography but the cinematographer went unacknowledged. The fact of the matter is that, at the time of this writing, which is actually the time before the recording because I'm sick again but in new and different ways, but I know I'm not going to mention him because, to be honest, he needs an episode for himself. And I will aspire to do that. But I need to get watching because he's worked on a bunch of movies. Just the fact that he worked on this and Casablanca makes him an All Star but when you look at his filmography--wow. But it looked like I had more than enough to talk about this episode so instead of getting into all that I'm going to defer talking about him until I can do so in another episode. I was going to prepare some images. I guess I should do that now. And in the process I wanted to use a cool Photoshop 3D arrow (I've used the 3D stuff in Photoshop before and it was pretty cool). I got alerted that the 3D stuff was going away because of Technology and now I can't see anything from the file that I'd spent some time already working on. I don't have the constitution for this right now. Should have been using Paint 3D, amirite? Ok, I just had to close it and open it twice. No big deal, right? One down, and ?? to go. I'll see what tier of Photoshop I can undertake. Oh! Fun fact. That poster image that I have up there is the one from the Blu-ray. The Blu-ray also has several radio adaptations of the Maltese Falcon with the stars of the movie themselves. Very cool. The original movie posters (or original-looking at any rate) where a bit boosted. One has Bogart holding two guns like he's going to use them. Hilarious. One thing I don't think I'm going to mention is just how gross Sam Spade is with women in the 1931 movie. I told you it was definitely hornier and it was. He had something obvious going on with Effie, and then with Wonderly, and with Iva, and who knows who else. But the Effie one really got me. She's just there working and it's all touchy and feely. Yikes. In the 1941 movie Effie is his wingman and I'd like to think that she just knows better. Give her credit. She's young but she isn't an idiot and doesn't confuse Spade's attention with a relationship. I used the AI colorization from Adobe to color in that frame. I really do think the AI colorization is 100% on the money and they did, indeed, wear makeup to make them look better in black and white. I shot exclusively black and white photographs for a few years and life is a little different when you see it that way. I mean it could be off--a pink shirt on Humphrey Bogart might not have flown too far in 1941 but whatever. Probably don't watch that version. The makeup is unnerving. Just a quick search and yes, their makeup was unusual. These images are decently large, btw. Feel free to zoom in. If you're reading this in your podcatcher, well, I suggest a larger screen for the images. I realize that I used several types of arrows. I apologize for that. Just trying out which ones felt right. Turns out it was none of them, a little bit. And that 3D arrow was such a pain in the ass. Why that shade of blue? It's calming. I'm sure you've seen it before. I flubbed the phonofilm explanation--it's a sound on disc system. I probably flubbed some other things. That Willie Mays Hayes reference is from Major League if you didn't pick that up. If you haven't seen Major League... well you should. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/02/mystery-of-the-maltese-falcon This story is so good and so wild. I also really hope people 1. like the orchestra hit joke and 2. get that it's a joke. I don't take myself that seriously but I just didn't have another transition to work with. Again, super h

Yeah, the way this movie was advertised is a bit different from how I took it. That happens. This is a detective x magic crossover event that might get you your fill of both (or not!) and it's called "Cast A Deadly Spell". My DVD copy is "Hechizo Letal" as it's in Spanish. I realize now that I didn't do a great job at relating this to Halloween (as it's actually release on the 31st of October as opposed to November 1st or, as I have so hackishly declared, Noirvember 1st). At the time of this writing I'm actually really sick and coughing out a lung or sleeping most of the day. It's not COVID, thankfully. I did need to record this in various sessions (re-record it at that--I could have nailed it the first time but I figured all I had to lose was time, ironically enough, and it is irony because I'm considering it from the point of an omniscient narrator with knowledge of the future but choosing to not intervene or change the events). But that means there is zero latitude to record pickups or just do it over for the third time. So there is some errata and missing pieces. "Mulholland Drive", the David Lynch picture, came out in 2001. I got "Mulholland Drive" vibes from "Witch Hunt". I wonder if he caught "Witch Hunt" (1994) at some point and it rattled around in his brain--there were two Lynch alums in it so it's quite possible. "Lost Highway" didn't come out until 1997, so my timeline of these movies is wrong, by the way. I don't know if I stated a timeline in the podcast but the way I was thinking about it was a little backwards. "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" had already come out so the aesthetic was there but the main points of my Lynch influence had not taken shape just yet. That's a wild fact check for my dumb ass. I misquoted Lovecraft in this movie. He says "show it some water.. but be discreet". Whoops. I didn't talk about the music in "Cast A Deadly Spell" at all. It actually won an Emmy. A Primetime Emmy. For this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQm7ZAkfkYI. It was also nominated for sound editing. That's pretty rad. Curt Sobel did the music on this movie and it was good. I liked it. He's also done a ton of other work. His most recent credit was for "Rumble" and I was very much hoping that it was a movie about Link Wray & His Wray Men but it was not. Disappointing. Here's the link to a live stream from Sound Speeds Allen Williams about the IATSE stuff. He's also got a ton of sound capture stuff on his channel which is super useful or super interesting--depending on how you approach it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnFTEWvejXY. I know that I talked about "Yojimbo" being an adaptation of Red Harvest but Kurosawa went on record as saying it was actually The Glass Key. I haven't read The Glass Key (just yet) but it lines up pretty good with Red Harvest so.... shrug. I probably also got the timetable wrong there, too. The advertising material paints it as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" but with witches and zombies and that's honestly not a connection I would have made. I really overlooked that completely, but I also really like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" quite a lot... it's just the shoe scene. Wow the shoe scene really messed me up. H. P. Lovecraft was a bit of a weirdo but I did learn, coincidentally, between the recording and the publishing of this episode that his father was committed and died in an asylum which what might have been late-stage syphilis. His mother was also committed at one point and died shortly thereafter. Lovecraft, himself, was plagued with mental health issues for most of his life and I can't help but think that it's linked to early tragedy combined with an intelligence that allowed for learning with out the life experience to contextualize information. That's an incredibly unscientific theory but it feels like it could be true. He also apparently didn't marry his cousin? I don't know. It seems that she was a fiction author. I did finish

1993 was a transitional period. We were slowly, ass a country, shedding the action movie template of the 70's and 80's while experimenting with some headier notions on how we relate to media. Last Action Hero was, is, seeming, a product of this time. Woefully misunderstood or, at the very least, disliked and, probably, mostly unexamined, this episode is really going to try to dig in a little more. I'll drop a quick link here for Patrick (H) Willem's Plot Holes video to set the level. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9HivyjAKlc And additionally, if you would like to just be unhappy with other people on the internet, you can check out the reply or reaction videos. Not my favorites. However the Willems video touches upon the exact concept I was thinking about as I had recorded this episode: verisimilitude. The "joke" is that the movie world of Last Action Hero has a very loose grip on verisimilitude and logical consistency. There are some movies that do exactly that and the Jack Slater series takes that up a notch. Well, several notches, to be honest. To completely ridiculous with a wink, and a nod, and an elbow to the ribs, and a "eh? eh?" and I actually dig that. It's possible that audiences were expecting a more straight-forward movie world. That means that the movie isn't going to be enjoyable but it doesn't make it bad. Those are two different things. There are people so caught up in the verisimilitude of the media they consume that they watch 20 seasons of procedurals who rarely, if ever, deviate from their structures and concepts. They're invested in those worlds. It's quite often that those worlds are ridiculous parodies of our own "real" world--especially when technology is involved--but that doesn't make them "good" or "bad" qualitatively. We all watched The Social Network (2010) and we were not terribly concerned with the inconsistencies with our own reality but, in contrast, immersed in the verisimilitude of that movie. It felt more real than reality in some ways. And maybe that was the part of the execution that didn't land. How do you make falling into a very over-the-top and ridiculous action movie feel real? Movies where cars explode into huge fireballs in a display of exhibitionist pyrotechnics. Heroes who are impossibly wounded still performing at the level of an Olympian at their physical peak. We, as an audience (and by "we" I mean "I"), get into the action movies like that. They're internally consistent, sure, and definitely entertaining and engaging to varying degrees, but they aren't "real". But when you put this in a Picture-in-Picture frame and have something much more consistent with our "real" world (even if it's gone past realism into just pessimism with realistic physics) it can all look very silly. There is a huge contrast in the color palette (if you've seen a US vs Mexico color grading it's about that jarring) and that type of action movie wasn't always quite as bright or childish while, to a certain extent, still being marketed to young boys. Perhaps that's what Shane Black was talking about--maybe it wasn't William Goldman giving the movie "heart" but instead having a cartoon cat voiced by Danny DeVito. Maybe those frames, layered on top of each other, were too different. Perhaps the original intent was lost. Maybe I'm just a fan and forced it to work in my head but, in thinking about Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and believing that this was a dry run for that type of movie, I think that Shane Black could have pulled it off. It just would have been more like Lethal Weapon or The Last Boyscout and I don't have a concept in my head of how that would have worked. I'd love to read the fully Shane Black pass, though. Where he took the Faustian blood-soaked morality tale. The movie still has a message. Would it have kept it? Would it have doubled down on cynicism? Would Danny have actually used the gun on THE PROJECTIONIST? Perhaps that was an empowerment fantasy; the world had already challenged Danny