Bricking News

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Like a Virgin. I'm Rose Damu.
00:00:03
Speaker 2: And I'm Fran Tirado.
00:00:04
Speaker 1: And I have already admonished Fran today because it is the first day of fall. I made her take the metal straw out of her iced coffee glass. We will only be drinking hot coffee going forward while we record.
00:00:19
Speaker 2: Queerphobic, transphobic.
00:00:23
Speaker 1: Aren't we past the whole gay people love iced coffee thing?
00:00:27
Speaker 2: No. As a matter of fact, we're not. Okay.
00:00:31
Speaker 1: I drink. Everyone loves iced coffee. It's not a specifically gay thing.
00:00:35
Speaker 2: Your hair looks so good today, Rose. I have to say. I was with you on the day that you got your hair done. But now that I see it. did like that kind of like two day three day kind of like PC hair it looks so delish what kind of product do you have in it right now.
00:00:49
Speaker 1: There is no product in it whatsoever I blew it out yesterday because I was doing Stradio Lab which y'all can have to look forward to I'm not sure when it's coming out but I am an upcoming guest on Stradio Lab and um when I got home I was like well I blew my hair out I should try to maintain it and then I was like well I also want to take a bath um So this is hair that was soaked in a tub, slept on, and then brushed out this morning. That's all that's happening.
00:01:21
Speaker 2: Sometimes the best hair is that. It's the hair that's not trying. Same thing with makeup. I like love next day makeup. I love next day eyeliner. Okay.
00:01:31
Speaker 1: Well, you should never be sleeping in your makeup.
00:01:34
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, next day eyeliner specifically. Sure. Like when there's like a little bit left on. It's still not great, but. For your health, but for your look, for your nerve.
00:01:46
Speaker 1: It's gorgeous. Gorgeous.
00:01:49
Speaker 2: Rose. Okay.
00:01:50
Speaker 1: It's the first day of fall, Fran. Happy fall.
00:01:53
Speaker 2: Is it really? It is.
00:01:54
Speaker 1: Don't you see the pumpkin behind me?
00:01:55
Speaker 2: It is. I see it.
00:01:56
Speaker 1: I bought a pumpkin at the farmer's market this weekend. virgins.
00:02:00
Speaker 2: I want to know if you would be interested in us just like dropping the unedited Riverside videos of our, no one can ever see that. Well, I'm just saying if they want to, if you, would you pay extra for that?
00:02:11
Speaker 1: Because we would drop that, but I'll do it for money until then.
00:02:15
Speaker 2: Rosa and I will be now dropping clips of our records on our social. If you don't follow us, you should at like a virgin for 2069 on Instagram. Um, But, yeah, the one thing they would have to benefit from is, like, we will see, I will see, and the Virgin should see, increasingly Halloween-y decor in the circumference of your recording setup.
00:02:41
Speaker 1: So I actually think the decorating really starts today, now that it's the first day of fall. Um, and well, no, not today because I, when I started, you started when we got back from Dalmatia, let's be, no, I actually didn't. I really held back. I, I, I have not decorated for fall at all. When I was in, when I was home, uh, two weeks ago, my mom and I went to home goods and I bought a bunch of, a bunch of Halloween decorations there that I then made her ship to me. The shipping cost was so expensive. I paid for it. But I still have to take all of my Halloween decorations out of the closet, you know, sort of survey everything I have, pull in the new things and figure out where I'm going. I also just bought a bunch of vintage Halloween die cuts on eBay.
00:03:32
Speaker 2: Wait, what's a die cut?
00:03:33
Speaker 1: A die cut are those paper things where it's like, you know, like a witch flying across the moon.
00:03:39
Speaker 2: Oh, that you stick onto a window. That you stick onto a window. Classic. Classic. Yeah, classic suburban mom decor.
00:03:46
Speaker 1: We had one growing up that I believe my mom still has that was a skeleton, and we used to call it by the name of one of her boyfriends that she dated in between divorcing my dad and marrying my stepdad. Shade. Yes, it was Shade, because he was very skinny. I guess we were just making fun of him for being so thin.
00:04:06
Speaker 2: So you were body shaming him.
00:04:07
Speaker 1: We were body shaming him. Was he the boyfriend who was really into The Matrix?
00:04:12
Speaker 2: Yes.
00:04:13
Speaker 1: He's probably a chaser now. Chase?
00:04:15
Speaker 2: He knew. I feel like I need to rewatch the Matrix movies because if the virgins remember from our Matrix episode, I didn't love them slash I fell asleep during the first one. And I now own sunglasses from the Matrix movie. I am the ultimate kind of poser. But some things, again, are like I like the style even if I don't like the substance and.
00:04:42
Speaker 1: Okay, gag on this eleganza. As you know, I recently bought a 4K Blu-ray player to start my physical media journey. And one of the movies that I did purchase was The Matrix. So let's have a kiki. Let's have a movie night. Watch The Matrix.
00:05:05
Speaker 2: We have so many things to watch. I would love to. Honestly, I would come over tonight. But I have to say that you've pitched... trinity to me as a halloween costume.
00:05:14
Speaker 1: Yes it would be so perfect for you i.
00:05:17
Speaker 2: Think it could possibly be too expensive i think like the leather that i would need to get would need to be nice um because i want to wear it again i try not to buy things that are just for hell.
00:05:30
Speaker 1: Well i do have a recommendation for that i actually bought well first it's not leather it's like pvc yeah so um i actually bought from this Italian brand that they like make everything custom, like a PVC black sort of like bustier tank top. And it was only a hundred bucks. So I do feel like, and I'm pretty sure they carry bottoms as well. I will send you the link. You could absolutely make it happen. And yeah, absolutely. If you're going to do a Trinity Halloween costume, it does need to be something custom.
00:06:10
Speaker 2: I would have to, I would feel like a little bit of a poser. I think at my rewatch would be necessary, but something else that the virgins don't know is, and I think we will continue to brainstorm on Halloween costumes over the course of the next like month or two. Yeah.
00:06:23
Speaker 1: I have a whole list.
00:06:25
Speaker 2: I want to know your list actually. Maybe it's too early to talk about it, but well, I.
00:06:28
Speaker 1: Don't want to, I don't want to reveal anything.
00:06:32
Speaker 2: I will share with you privately, but I will say to the virgins that, Rose and I are going to Gothic Renaissance at 11am this weekend. And that may or may not be for Halloween costume.
00:06:45
Speaker 1: One of the things I love is that when you texted me that, you said that you were going to make me go to Gothic Renaissance, as if that's something I would ever need to.
00:06:54
Speaker 2: Be forced to do. Yeah, true. Oh, please.
00:06:57
Speaker 1: And we will be making a little stop into Halloween Adventure as well.
00:07:02
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. And also 11am, Rose's Preferred shopping hour.
00:07:07
Speaker 1: Yes. Please.
00:07:08
Speaker 2: When it opens?
00:07:08
Speaker 1: I'll have been awake for six hours already.
00:07:12
Speaker 2: Your sleep schedule is fucked.
00:07:14
Speaker 1: No, I love it.
00:07:16
Speaker 2: Yeah. You're just like Dolly.
00:07:18
Speaker 1: I watched two complete films this morning before I even started doing any work.
00:07:24
Speaker 2: What films?
00:07:25
Speaker 1: Well... As we will be talking about later in this episode, I saw the new Resident Evil movie this weekend, and I have been watching some of the Resident Evil films from the early 2000s.
00:07:38
Speaker 2: Oh, fierce.
00:07:39
Speaker 1: So I watched the second one this morning around 5.30 a.m. Oh, I can't wait to hear your recommendation. I kind of want to dig into the catalog. Well... We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it. But yeah, I'm really loving my mornings of having... so much time and it being so quiet and still and no one's doing anything it does mean though that my day needs to be over around like 3 30 p.m or i or i need a lot of coffee and then i'm i'm in bed by 9 30 at the latest and like i can't wait to go to sleep but I've been falling asleep so easily. This has been amazing for my insomnia. I'm actually considering just not smoking weed anymore.
00:08:29
Speaker 2: Honestly, look, going to bed at 930 and waking up at like five is very like Dolly Parton slash genius hours. Like this is like all of the kind of like geniuses and like kind of Mozart-y kind of like you know, savants that we talk about, they all, you know, had these hours, baby.
00:08:47
Speaker 1: Well, I prefer the term genius.
00:08:49
Speaker 2: Right. Savant is also, isn't that like offensive now or something?
00:08:52
Speaker 1: Well, the term idiot savant is, I believe.
00:08:57
Speaker 2: I've never heard that term before. That one, a movie used it recently.
00:09:03
Speaker 1: I can't remember. Yeah, it is a derogatory term. So sorry if saying it offended anyone, but it is, I think, think supposed to mean someone who is generally very stupid or has some kind of development developmental disability but oh my god a lot about one specific thing or really good at one.
00:09:26
Speaker 2: Specific thing I also have to I'm just googling the word savant for the first time in my life and I hadn't I've been using this word for so long and I had no idea that you don't even need the word like idiot for it to be a kind of slur like The word savant literally implies that it's a skill set in tandem with a developmental disability.
00:09:51
Speaker 1: Yikes. That's crazy.
00:09:52
Speaker 2: I can't believe I did not know that.
00:09:55
Speaker 1: You know what? We are we are uh providing people with new slurs not to use i thought i thought it was about this podcast is so informational i thought.
00:10:02
Speaker 2: It was about someone who is young and a genius or like a prescient genius uh an unexpected well that would be a prodigy yes prodigy that's the word thank you anyways we can move on from that because rose do you know what we have on our docket today.
00:10:19
Speaker 1: Uh, what?
00:10:20
Speaker 2: We have breaking news. Rose.
00:10:23
Speaker 1: A new segment, a new sec, new, new segment alert. Um, named by one. Rose. Rose. Breaking news. I think it's pretty genius.
00:10:33
Speaker 2: It is genius because it's literally a version of what we already do, which is a curation of the hottest topics at the intersection of nerds, perversion, and transsexualism. Um, Maybe like sometimes we'll like talk about like things that are happening on the internet, new stuff we're listening to, new stuff we saw, but like we're not spending a ton of time on it. This is breaking news.
00:10:57
Speaker 1: I do feel like now that I'm kind of in my editing bag, having edited literally like one thing into our Dolly, Tim Curry deep dive, I kind of want to become one of those podcasts where they have like sound effects for the different segments. I'm not promising.
00:11:16
Speaker 2: Anything, but I feel like that could be a long-term goal is like having like a soundboard. I would love.
00:11:24
Speaker 1: A la Nympho Wars. I don't know about soundboard, but I think theme jingles for the different segments would be nice.
00:11:30
Speaker 2: Yes, I would love a jingle. I mean, I like soundboards. You know, Nympho Wars didn't invent the soundboard. But it's like.
00:11:38
Speaker 1: So much work in the moment and I don't know how we would use it. recording remotely, but it's something that I could.
00:11:44
Speaker 2: It has to be in person.
00:11:45
Speaker 1: It's something that I can very easily do in post. I also think we do need an intro song at the beginning of the podcast to sort of... And I have almost put one in, but I know it's the kind of thing where if I put one in without you approving it, it will be an issue.
00:12:05
Speaker 2: I would need to approve it. You know how I... I know how you are. Not approve. Like, we like to find an intersection of what we like. And that is like, sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's really easy.
00:12:17
Speaker 1: Well, it's also, the thing is, I'm usually the one who's like, yeah, this is fine. And you're like, no, no, no. We need to find the absolute perfect thing that we both agree on.
00:12:26
Speaker 2: For The Virgins, our first theme song was kind of that. But like Rose did, there were a few different things that Phoebe and Rose were kind of like peeling through. And they were like, oh, this sounds great. Oh, I love this. And I really was not latching on to anything. But ultimately, we found something. And I remember you saying, what if it sounded like this? And you sent a song through. And I was like, yes, and also this. And you were like, I love that. And then we found something kind of quickly after that when we found our references, if I remember correctly. But this is breaking news. Rose, okay, do you know who Amanda Lear is?
00:13:00
Speaker 1: I have no idea.
00:13:02
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:13:03
Speaker 1: But you're about to tell me.
00:13:05
Speaker 2: I'm a little shocked because she does seem like a diva that you would deeply care about. I mean, she's French. She is a smoky kind of like pop star, but like a under the radar kind of French pop star. And she's also a stealth trans woman, allegedly. And so she's someone who's like in the culture in a lot of ways and I think has probably reached her apex of cultural recognition at this very moment because she has accused Miley Cyrus of plagiarism. Have you seen at least those tweets?
00:13:43
Speaker 1: Because this is all over Twitter. Did Amanda Lear write See You Again? No.
00:13:49
Speaker 2: So on Miley's extremely mid-album album, Called Bass Persuasions. Oh, yeah. Bass Persuades.
00:13:57
Speaker 1: I haven't even listened.
00:13:58
Speaker 2: Bass Persuades. What a weird album title. Bass Persuasions, I think, would have been a better title. Why can't Miley just make better music? She hasn't really released something that's captured our true, true, true imagination. Since Plastic Hearts.
00:14:17
Speaker 1: This is her last good album to me.
00:14:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, yeah, I did not understand the flowers of it all. I did, I think Plastic Hearts and the subsequent live album slash live concert that she did where she curated a bunch of her hits and covers from fans and reinterpreted them as like rock anthem. She did like a full rock concert, like a pure rock rendition of each song. That to me was the last great cultural contribution of Miley Cyrus that was in 2022.
00:14:49
Speaker 1: Even the Hannah Montana anniversary thing was kind of a flop, right?
00:14:53
Speaker 2: I don't know if it was a flop in terms of the numbers, but I definitely didn't hear.
00:14:58
Speaker 1: Anyone talk about it. It didn't have any cultural impact. And that is more important. That, to me, is how I identify a flop. I'm not really a by-the-numbers girl. And if the virgins don't remember, we love Miley on this podcast. We love Miley. We love Miley. And we want better for her because she has such an amazing instrument and she is... so compelling but she seems to be addicted to releasing mid music i would.
00:15:27
Speaker 2: Love to know what she could do on a not live pure rock album i think that she is such a talented that's what plastic hearts was yes exactly exactly like i want her to go back to that and i think that i I think Miley's one of the greatest rock vocalists of this generation and that no one's, I don't think if, if, if somebody in rock music criticism were to hear that they might like keel over and die. But I actually do think that it's it's Miley's body of work in rock music is not super impressive, but her vocal stylings are so singular to me. She has a voice that sounds like an espresso machine and, You know what I mean?
00:16:11
Speaker 1: That is incredibly apt.
00:16:13
Speaker 2: It's true. She just sounds like a kind of... You know what I mean? Yeah, she's growly.
00:16:18
Speaker 1: She sounds trans.
00:16:20
Speaker 2: So on Miley's latest album that I did not listen to, Bass Persuades, she has a song called Red Lights. And it is a song that... It might be a single because it has higher stream... It has slightly higher... No, it's not a single, but it has some slightly higher streaming numbers. Amanda Lear, this French pop star I was talking about, who I'll give a little background on, has accused her of plagiarizing her song, The Sphinx, probably her greatest known song, The Sphinx, in this track, in Miley's track, Red Lights. And if you were to listen to Miley's Red Lights next to Amanda Lear's The Sphinx, girl, they are the same chord progression. Like, indisputably, like, you hear that.
00:17:07
Speaker 1: It's giving separated at birth.
00:17:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Miley, when it comes to her prowess as a songwriter, I actually don't know if she is credited on every single album she's ever written. I kind of want to know.
00:17:26
Speaker 1: We certainly don't think of her culturally as someone who writes their own music. And that might be a misogyny or a fallacy or something, but she doesn't give singer songwriter yeah no she gives she gives a bunch of people wrote on this album and i sang the songs and so okay and so i'm i'm finding yes like miley was a songwriter on a lot of these songs however i i agree with what you're saying she's not the songwriter diva and i'm kind of wondering if somebody on her team like stole something and didn't say anything because you know I know this is like a really kind of out-of-pocket comparison, but I'm thinking about when Ru did, I.
00:18:18
Speaker 2: Believe it's Smile on the.
00:18:25
Speaker 2: Okay, so RuPaul did a song that is like a true rip of Charlie's anthems. Have you ever heard the side-by-side for that?
00:18:35
Speaker 1: No.
00:18:36
Speaker 2: Okay, Ru has a song called Smile, and it sounds so completely and totally like Charli XCX's anthems. If you listen to them side by side, it's actually a much more nasty rip than what we're looking at between the Amanda Lear and Miley Cyrus of it all accusations. But Miley has since responded via Instagram comment on Amanda Lear's post of the accusation. She commented on the accusation and she just said, who are you anyways? Stream-based persuades.
00:19:11
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm Team Miley. Sorry, that's a sickening way to respond to that.
00:19:18
Speaker 2: It kind of is. And here's the thing. Here's something you need to know about Mandela Lear and then we can move on from this bricking news. She was in the 1960s. She became a kind of muse in the French and Spanish art scene. So she was a model for Paco Rabanne. And then she met Salvador Dali. I'm like, is Salvador Dali a chaser? But like they were like kind of basically closest friends for two decades. And she became a bit kind of one of his muses. And there are early in her career when she was like releasing music, she says in multiple interviews, I'm biologically a man. I'm like spiritually a woman. She confirms in many early interviews that she is transgender. But the thing is, if you were to watch one of these interviews where she's talking about herself as trans or talking about her almost genitalia, because it is referenced at least in one interview, it reminds you a little bit of the Gaga hermaphrodite scandal. Do you remember that?
00:20:39
Speaker 1: Yes, of course.
00:20:40
Speaker 2: And so later in her life, and this is something that you can learn more, but if you're curious about Amanda Lear, I think this whole like Amanda Lear, Miley accusation, like the whole gist of it is just like nothing really matters. Just go and Google Amanda Lear because she is kind of fierce on her own right. And you should watch this documentary by Zachary Drucker. It is an Amanda Lear documentary called Enigma.
00:21:06
Speaker 1: Okay. so Lady Gaga stole Enigma from her.
00:21:12
Speaker 2: This came out after it's called Enigma and she's asked later in her life many times like are you trans and she's like no all the time anytime she's asked later in life she's like and she says in these interviews oh I did that as a publicity stance like that was something I did to get press that's not true Amanda Lear has also posed nude for Playboy like She has, like, really, you know, kind of gone the other way and been like, yeah, I have a really deep voice, but, like, I just kind of use that to my advantage.
00:21:47
Speaker 1: Imagine if the girls these days were lying about being trans for, like, cultural cachet.
00:21:52
Speaker 2: Well, it feels... If you watch the interview, it feels... Okay, I'll say this is all allegedly, allegedly, allegedly. But if you watch the interview in this Amanda Lear documentary, it feels pretty clear to me that she... is a stealth trans woman.
00:22:09
Speaker 1: Okay. So she put the brick in breaking news.
00:22:13
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think that there are some... There are varying... She has a lot of conflicting stories, a lot of conflicting claims about her gender identity, her relationship with Dali. Some even claim that Dali was the one who started the rumor that she was transgender. All these different things.
00:22:37
Speaker 1: Maybe he just painted her pussy in a really surrealistic way where it looked like a dick. Right.
00:22:44
Speaker 2: Yeah. That's actually it. I honestly need to read more about Amanda X Salvador Dali. But the gist is, virgins, go Google Amanda Lear. Listen to Amanda Lear's The Sphinx. I do think it's bomb. We have another kind of thing that we want you to listen to. Actually, Rose just texted it to me right ahead of this record.
00:23:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, Perfume Genius. Definitely my favorite gay pop star.
00:23:12
Speaker 2: Sorry, Troye Sivan.
00:23:14
Speaker 1: Do love Party. Mostly the video rather than the song. But Perfume Genius just released a new song called Natural High. And I fucking love it. It's so droney. It's like a It's a five minute and 45 second song. It's droney for the first like three minutes and then it gets very dancey. It's the most should be in a Twin Peaks edit song I've ever heard. It's also kind of like Backroom's core and it has steel drums on it. And I am a huge advocate for more steel drums in pop music.
00:23:58
Speaker 2: Babes, you know what steel drums always make me feel, always makes me think about? What? How do you know that you love her?
00:24:09
Speaker 1: How do you show her you love her? Okay, Enchanted rewatch happening soon.
00:24:15
Speaker 2: Yes, you can see Enchanted's influence on Mike Hadrius when you listen to Natural High. I also love this song as prompted by Rose Damu. Perfume Genius is definitely one of the artists of my life. one of the artists that really cultivated my sense of personhood when I was in college, on Tumblr, just barely out of the closet, feeling sad, experiencing my first heartbreak, my first gay heartbreak. Perfume Genius is the music of first gay heartbreak. And I think the first gay heartbreak is very specific because we idolize and glorify this concept of coming out and this concept of exiting the closet and being like, oh, everything is going to be free. You're on brighter horizons. The Emerald City is ahead of you. You're finally liberated and you're in some sort of paradise in being out and gay on the other side. And then you experience your first gay heartbreak and you're like, oh, right, being gay is still a part of the human experience, which is often something that feels really bad. And even gay people can be bad. Gay people are often bad. I don't know if that's as true as Gen Z growing up with a much more robust access to the internet and different representations of gay people. But my generation, I think it was a lot more difficult to imagine gay people as also being evil and villains when you were first coming out. Sorry, this is a really roundabout way to say that Perfume Genius is a legend. Mike Hadrius, Fab. We need more songs that are six minutes long in the culture. And there's something- The only people who are doing it are him and Ethel Kane.
00:26:05
Speaker 1: Truly. Truly. I mean, Madonna's- Madonna. And occasionally Florence Welch.
00:26:13
Speaker 2: Yeah. We need the cowards to vie away from the Spotify algorithm and to give us songs that progress- and this song fucking does, something else about the kind of droney quality. This might be a little bit of a crazy comparison, but it reminded me a bit of, like, OK, Lou. Yeah, I can hear that. And then behind that reminded me a bit of, like, have you ever listened to the composer David Weiss's, like, tracks for, like, the original Donkey Kong video games?
00:26:51
Speaker 1: I have not, no.
00:26:52
Speaker 2: I'm going to send them to you.
00:26:53
Speaker 1: Please do.
00:26:54
Speaker 2: One of them, I think if you listen to a song called aquatic ambience, you'll kind of like hear it a little bit, but I think it's, it has a little less to do with this specific perfume genius song and a little more to do with like this overarching trend of like drone electronica.
00:27:16
Speaker 1: I forgot how much you love Mario and its associated properties. When we're, We might need to go to Epic Universe when we're in Orlando next month so that you can go to the Mario World.
00:27:28
Speaker 2: If David Weiss' compositions are in that, absolutely.
00:27:31
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a whole Donkey Kong ride.
00:27:34
Speaker 2: Babes, we're going. Donkey Kong is the hottest Nintendo character. Period. Like, he is so, like, fuckable.
00:27:45
Speaker 1: I like Bowser.
00:27:47
Speaker 2: Bowser is so hot, obviously.
00:27:48
Speaker 1: So hot.
00:27:49
Speaker 2: To me, Donkey Kong is the hottest.
00:27:50
Speaker 1: I send you a lot of Bowser X Luigi porn.
00:27:54
Speaker 2: What's the Donkey Kong porn giving? Is it good?
00:27:56
Speaker 1: I don't know. The video I sent you earlier of Batman getting dicked down, I have been watching on a loop since 5 a.m.
00:28:07
Speaker 2: It's so good. Batman porn.
00:28:09
Speaker 1: Batman is... So we will be doing a Batman deep dive. And as I think I mentioned, like my, my kind of recent obsession with Batman was very much spurred on by getting into super bat, which is Batman X Superman fan fiction. And I only will read fanfic where Batman is the bottom because it's just correct.
00:28:33
Speaker 2: Our upcoming patron episode has to dive into the porn. I think you should assign some of the porn to me.
00:28:38
Speaker 1: I will. And I'm also going to, We want to run through some other stuff we've been consuming recently that we like, and I have some Batman recommendations. But first, I want to hear about Bowen in O'Mary, which you saw his first performance last week.
00:28:58
Speaker 2: Okay. We talk about O'Mary on this podcast probably too much, but it is.
00:29:03
Speaker 1: Well, we're contractually obligated as a queer podcast.
00:29:07
Speaker 2: Yes, Cole Escola is actually in the corner right now holding a gun to my head. No, I'm just kidding. We don't have to do that in order for this to be promoted. It's literally the greatest contribution to the Broadway world in decades, in my opinion. It's definitely... Watching the very first O'Mary, I think I've already said it, but I'll say it again. The number one... theatrical experience I've ever had, probably. Like, I just, like, just a truly sublime relationship to the material that is O'Mary. And if you don't live in New York, lucky for you, O'Mary is traveling all across the country starring Alaska Thunderfuck. And it's also coming to HBO, a pro shot of, I believe, the full original cast.
00:29:53
Speaker 1: I mean, at least Cole.
00:29:55
Speaker 2: Cole. Yeah, for sure. I'm so excited for that. That was such a surprise.
00:30:00
Speaker 1: And also something I believe I predicted like.
00:30:03
Speaker 2: A year ago. Right. I mean, I remember saying on the podcast, like, it's probably in development, you know, as a movie, but actually like a pro shot, I think makes a lot more sense because it is truly a state. It's It lives on the stage. And I think a lot of it doesn't work without the stage itself and the audience. But yeah, so Bowen Yang debuted as O'Mary. This is the third time I've seen O'Mary. How many times have you seen O'Mary? Twice. Okay.
00:30:34
Speaker 1: I saw Cole and Jinx.
00:30:36
Speaker 2: I saw Cole and Jinx as well. Bowen will be your third. I know you'll go and see him.
00:30:43
Speaker 1: I would like to, but I don't want to pay for it.
00:30:46
Speaker 2: You'll get press tickets. Just wait for them to be on for a little bit. You'll get some press tickets.
00:30:50
Speaker 1: How long is he in it for?
00:30:52
Speaker 2: I don't remember. I believe they've already extended. I think they had to make that decision pretty early. But at least through January. Oh, well, I'm seeing 12-week limited engagement. I'm seeing December 6th. Um, I'm seeing December 6th. I've been told through other sources that it might go through January. We'll see. Oh, Merry Christmas. Um, here, if you've never seen Oh Mary, here's something that I can say. It is that any actor that takes up the mantle of Mary ultimately is going to inject their kind of comedic style sensibility into the play itself. But ultimate, but ultimately it's, they are resting on a plinth of Cola Scola. Of course. Cola Scola is the foundation on which the rest of this rests because it is a very specific kind of like dark, kind of wackadoodle, violent, intense, and also at times slapstick slash old timey, like referential to an era of just after silent films.
00:32:12
Speaker 1: Vaudeville.
00:32:13
Speaker 2: It's vaudevillian. And seeing Jinx perform as Mary, which I think, if I'm going to be totally real, did not have the restraint or control that I would like in a kind of Broadway movie. at times, even though I'm a number one Jinx fan. I love Jinx Monsoon. She is like one of the top three, top five favorite drag artists of all time for me. So I'm a stan, and I'm saying that as a stan. I was watching the show, and I was like, well, I can tell that you're high on stage, first of all. And second of all, yeah, I think sometimes I was like, I feel like I'm watching a Snatch game, and I actually want to be watching Broadway. You know what I mean?
00:33:05
Speaker 1: I felt differently, but I can hear where you're coming from.
00:33:09
Speaker 2: Bowen is an extremely precise comedian. He is so good at basically raking through the material with a fine-tooth comb and finding every single nook and cranny that he can inject a punchline or an ism or an aside into. The comedic density... that Bowen Yang has injected into O'Meary, which is shocking because it is already a bajillion laughs per minute show. I was like, oh my God, Bowen is such a fucking kind of like master at what he does. You can just see everything that SNL kind of trains you into put into this performance. He's so at ease. He's so... untethered he's such a good screamer the screaming made me laugh so frequently and he does he adds new jokes one of which is at the end and I won't spoil it for you because I think you're going to see it Rose but we will discuss there's a joke in the final moment of the show that is so fucking funny that the audience almost stood up and clapped. He was so good. Love our friend Bowen. Go see him in O'Mary. Right fucking meow. But yeah, I think about O'Mary. If I were to watch every single O'Mary performance, I think there are just layers of things that are being built on top of each other based on every actor that came after and before. O'Mary, I think, is sort of becoming this... really cool kind of like parfait. It's like a sedimentary rock of divas that are like, does that make sense? Like that are like kind of like there's a, there's a base layer of coal and that, and then like Titus came in and like added a little, you know, a few little rocks and then like, you know, Jane Krakowski or like Jim, Jim, John Cameron, James, John Cameron Mitchell comes in and adds like a layer. And I think we're like, we're getting like a really thick layer of Bowen. being added to the show right now.
00:35:35
Speaker 1: Love that i do think the rock and the parfait is a mixed metaphor but i get.
00:35:39
Speaker 2: What you're saying i said parfait and then i switched to rock i think parfait sounds a bit more delicious a bit more campy maybe i should have stuck with parfait yeah so like i just like being able to say was the yogurt coal was the yogurt and then we've got you know like preserves and fruit and whipped cream and jane krakowski from what i understand was maybe one chocolate chip Sorry, I shouldn't say that, actually. I shouldn't disparage the show. But the Bowen layer is fucking delish. And I'm so, so excited for you to see it.
00:36:14
Speaker 1: I am so excited to see it if and when I receive free tickets.
00:36:18
Speaker 2: You have to email. I'll email for you.
00:36:20
Speaker 1: Okay, great. Love that. I want to give some rapid-fire recs of things I've been consuming recently. Please. So as I said, I've been doing a whole comics journey. I have been diving deep into the Batman canon, going through what are sort of heralded as the best Batman runs, and also the ones that are the most foundational to his mythology. I started with Batman Year One by Frank Miller, which is regarded as kind of like the best origin story in comics. I really agree. You get It is the basis for every Batman film which has done a Bruce Wayne origin story. It all comes from Batman Year One. Really loved that. I also read Batman the Man Who Laughs, which is the introduction of the Joker, which I didn't love quite as much, but was still really enjoyable. And then DC-related, Joel Kim Booster, friend of us and friend of the show, recommended... absolute wonder woman. So the, the absolute franchise is something DC has done where they take their classic heroes and then give them alternate origin stories. I had never read any wonder woman. I've always found her to be kind of lame. Um, and I think like that is the point of this take on her. So in this take, she is raised in hell by Cersei, the witch who is an antagonist in the wonder woman comics run. So this version of Diana is an Amazon, but she's also a witch.
00:38:02
Speaker 2: Wait, I didn't know Cersei was in the Wonder Woman canon. That's sickening.
00:38:05
Speaker 1: Yes. It's really good. I read the first two collected volumes, and now I'm going to read the comics as they come out. So big fan of that. For books recently, I read Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk, which is about a lullaby that kills people, even if you sing it or think it. It's a really gnarly book. Lots of child death. It's like everyone in the book is a horrible person, which I personally love books like that. I'm currently reading The Tommyknockers by Stephen King. It's my most recent in my year of reading all of his works that I haven't read yet in order. And The Tommyknockers is very much like his... Well, he has a lot of cocaine books, but it's the most clearly the one about addiction and the influence of substances on an artistic practice because it's about this woman who finds a spaceship in her backyard and it gives her and I'm guessing everyone in the town amazing inventing powers.
00:39:12
Speaker 2: I don't have anything to add to that other than the fact that Tommyknockers does sound like a kind of Hooters satire that would appear in a 30 Rock episode. For sure.
00:39:24
Speaker 1: For sure.
00:39:25
Speaker 2: Step on up to Tommy knackers.
00:39:27
Speaker 1: Uh some movie wrecks i because of a podcast i listen to uh the hello sydney podcast i usually like to to to watch the movies that she's going to talk about i watched blair witch 2016 which is a direct sequel to the blair witch project rather than blair witch 2 book of shadows which is like not that at all And it was surprisingly like tasteful. I like would recommend watching it if you like the original Blair Witch Project. I think it's a nice addition to that canon.
00:40:05
Speaker 2: Was that like critically panned?
00:40:07
Speaker 1: I don't know about panned, but I think it maybe just kind of landed with like a wet fart of like, why are you going to make a sequel to like one of the best horror films of all time?
00:40:15
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:40:16
Speaker 1: Um, also for that podcast, I watched this morning, this movie called pie whack it, which is about this like emo girl who hates her mom and like summons a demon. It was fine. It was whatever. Uh, recently I watched the people under the stairs, which is a Wes Craven movie from 1991. Um, and like, there's so much that's been said about it already. I won't like go into depth, but, It's so good. It's really funny, really spooky, definitely worth watching. And then the other night, Ryan and I, after we installed my new rug, decided that we wanted to watch a Lifetime movie and landed on one called Deadly Mile High Club, which is about a flight instructor who, after... accidentally killing her lover in a crash, becomes obsessed with a trainee at her flight school, and decides that she's going to, you know, obsession style, destroy everything in his life that isn't hers so that she can have them all to herself. The most compelling part of it is that the guy's wife wears a plot significant pink fedora. that is one of the most shocking items of clothing I've ever seen on film. Chekhov's fedora. It literally is Chekhov's fedora. It is such an important part of the plot.
00:41:57
Speaker 2: I'm not going to watch it. Can you just tell me what happens?
00:41:59
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:41:59
Speaker 2: Just tell me what happens.
00:42:01
Speaker 1: So the flight instructor to drive a wedge between her man and his wife during one of their lessons, she flies him over their house and has hired actors to make it look like she's cheating on him with someone. And the way that she sells it is she has the woman wear the pink fedora so it can be seen from the sky. It's crazy. I, when we run this episode, I will, I'll.
00:42:33
Speaker 2: I'll, I'll give them whiplash. Um, I'm never going to see it. I'm so glad you told me. Yeah. Um, I don't know. Huge wreck 4.2 on, um, run a 4.2 out of 10 on IMDb. Wait, I'm trying to see it's like Rotten Tomatoes score. Not that that matters.
00:42:52
Speaker 1: I think I gave it a, I think I gave it a, I think I gave it two and a half stars.
00:42:55
Speaker 2: Two and a half. Letterboxd.
00:42:58
Speaker 1: Um, a film that I gave many more stars to though is our, our main topic of discussion this episode is, the new film resident evil directed by Zach Kreger written by Kreger and Shea Hatton based on the iconic video game franchise, which has like over 10 games. This is like a kind of a soft reboot. It's not necessarily connected to any of the other films in the resident evil multiverse, which largely came out in the early two thousands. And yeah, I had never seen a Resident Evil film before I saw this movie. I had never played the game. You asked me after I saw it if you could also similarly go in blind, and I said I did, and I enjoyed it, so I think you can. Was I correct? Yeah.
00:43:48
Speaker 2: It definitely is a gorgeous, gorgeous way to adapt a highly recognizable, highly adapted IP game Resident Evil has, what, there have been like 10 movies before this or something like that. It's like been a lot of, it's a lot of video games that have come before this. A lot of movies that have come before this. It is like one of the most known kind of video game franchises you could name. And so for him to kind of enter, to put his entry into the canon and to say it's a complete capsule, like I'm sure there are Easter eggs here and there. But for it to be a capsule that lives and breathes on its own is the smartest fucking way to play fanservice while also saying, this is my stamp on something that could have been, you know, just fanservice.
00:44:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a quick rundown of the plot. Spoiler warning.
00:44:44
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:44:46
Speaker 1: It's basically, one of the things I loved about it is it's essentially like a movie about an NPC from a video game. Like it's not the hero. It's just like a side person. So it's about this courier who delivers organs, you know, for transplants and gets sent with a package to Raccoon City, which is like the city where all of the Resident Evil stuff takes place. And he winds up embroiled in zombie shit. And he has to get what turns out to not be an organ, but the cure for the T-virus, which causes the zombie-ness in this world, to this hospital so that an antidote can be made for the virus. Disease that is turning everyone into zombies. So this movie really rests on its main character, played by Austin Abrams. He was in Weapons, Zach Krieger's last film. He played the Junkie, who I think was low-key the best part of that movie. He was so fucking good. So funny. He's also in a movie coming out next month called Whale Fall, in which he gets stuck in a whale while scuba diving.
00:46:14
Speaker 2: Oh, I saw the trailer for that.
00:46:16
Speaker 1: And only has like an hour to get out, which I'm so excited to see because, you know, deep ocean stuff scares the fuck out of me.
00:46:24
Speaker 2: I will see it with you.
00:46:25
Speaker 1: I would love to. I think he's like kind of cementing his place as a new scream king.
00:46:31
Speaker 2: Can I say... He's so fine.
00:46:35
Speaker 1: I think he's so sexy.
00:46:37
Speaker 2: He has the most perfect, beautiful rat face, perfect, beautiful rat hair.
00:46:41
Speaker 1: So rat face. He's giving, he's kind of giving the twink from the pit. He's an alt version.
00:46:48
Speaker 2: The twink from the pit has eye bags, which is very different from rat face. I guess the twink from the pit does have a slightly pointed nose, but that's just a twink nose. Rat face is a specifically, my head is triangular shaped. Okay. I have a triangular shaped face. I have a teeny little mustache. I have little pieces of hair that fall into my face and are a little bit greasy. I have overgrown brows that accentuate the triangulation of my face. And then a nose that completes the rat fantasy. Like he is the quintessential rat. hot rat boy face.
00:47:29
Speaker 1: And he is so, he's so charming in this movie. Every time he does his little smile or like he's, he screams, he's basically alone for most of the film and is constantly like narrating his inner monologue, which is basically like, what the fuck? What the fuck? I have to get the fuck out of here. Fuck this. This is crazy.
00:47:52
Speaker 2: Stupid fucking, you know, stuff like that.
00:47:55
Speaker 1: It's, It's such a funny movie. I do think sometimes to its detriment, I think sometimes it leans a little too hard on the jokes and on the humor. Specifically, the last 10 minutes I found very annoying with the guy from Severance and all the other lab technicians. I was like, no, I actually kind of want this to be a very serious, scary, dramatic film.
00:48:23
Speaker 2: Oh, you thought that the ending... Well, let's talk about the ending at the end. Yeah. Because I want to talk a bit about, I'm surprised by that take. But, you know, something else that, if you don't know, if you're not familiar with Zack Krieger, Zack Krieger directed the Oscar-nominated slash Oscar-winning.
00:48:43
Speaker 1: Oscar-winning.
00:48:43
Speaker 2: Winning, because Gladys did win. Yeah. Weapons.
00:48:49
Speaker 1: Also Barbarian. And Barbarian.
00:48:51
Speaker 2: Two of, I would say easily, my favorite horror films that I've seen in the last decade. I do kind of feel like, I'm sorry, I thought this was a perfect film. I thought it was five stars. Resident Evil, that is. I kind of watch it and I was like, I feel like Zack Krieger is kind of three for three, has produced, in my opinion, three perfect films. Like, perfect, I'm using, a term that I'm using pretty sweepingly but like perfect in the sense that like I walk out of that film and I'm like I really really crave a movie watching experience that feels like that where you go like you know you're always there's like turns there's twists there's surprise there's delight there's laugh out loud humor and tons of rule breaking, right? Like the thing about Zach Krieger's style, I think that you would learn if you watch Barbarian first, is that he is totally not afraid to say, I know all movies are made this way and I'm going to take a hard turn and structure the movie this way. Like he zigs when any other filmmaker would zag. And I think that a lot of times, if that gets too experimental with other filmmakers, it's like kind of, it becomes like a chore to watch. It becomes like homework. And when Zach Krieger does the zagging, when he takes some sort of like structural creative license, it never feels like homework. It always feels like it's in support of the entertainment value. Right. Like he's, his movies are fucking entertaining and.
00:50:34
Speaker 1: He does not overly rely on jump scares, which is so rare in modern horror cinema.
00:50:40
Speaker 2: And he also, like, Weapons was, I think, is very thought-provoking, and there's so many different themes bubbling under the surface that make it a complex horror film. However, all three films are still, in my opinion, rollercoaster rides. And I like that they're not bogged down.
00:51:02
Speaker 1: It's a good way to put it, yeah.
00:51:03
Speaker 2: They're not bogged down by introspection the way that, sorry, and I think this is a fair comparison, a kind of Jordan Peele might be, right?
00:51:14
Speaker 1: There's a little bit of it in this movie.
00:51:17
Speaker 2: Introspection?
00:51:18
Speaker 1: No, girl.
00:51:18
Speaker 2: There's one emotional stake about a baby.
00:51:22
Speaker 1: Yes, because he finds out that his girlfriend is pregnant early in the movie, has a really bad reaction to it, and then late in the film, after he has, spoiler alert, been bitten by one of the zombies, so he knows that he may possibly turn into one of them, he records a message for his girlfriend about how he should have been excited about them having a baby together and he loves her. It's something to humanize this guy a little more than just him being a doofus.
00:51:56
Speaker 2: It's necessary, but it was so sparing.
00:51:58
Speaker 1: It's necessary, but it's a little heavy-handed.
00:52:00
Speaker 2: No, I disagree. I think it was so sparing. It was in the movie literally twice.
00:52:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, but the movie does kind of grind to a halt so that he can leave that voicemail and cry. And, and I love, I loved how propulsive the film was and not just, it gave me a chance to think about what I was watching for the first time in a while. And this is a movie that is very much served by not thinking.
00:52:31
Speaker 2: Yeah. Um, I, I mean, my, my, Well, okay. I don't know if this is in agreement with what you said or if this is in contrast, but I think that this essentially one turn of emotional stake in an otherwise rollercoaster-y film or a high comedy rollercoaster with really good scares. More of a dark ride. A very dark ride. I love that it was used so sparingly. I felt like it was used very sparingly And I think that I'm thinking about that in comparison to a landscape of horror that really wants to talk about, oh, the horror, it's all about grief. Oh, it's all about losing your mother. Oh, it's a metaphor for losing your mother. Oh, it's a metaphor for divorce. Oh, it's a metaphor. It's like a lot of contemporary films, I think actually post Jordan Peele, I think this is actually Jordan Peele's influence, are really trying to be introspective But they're also trying to have their cake in being serious movies and also thrills and chills. And I love that Resident Evil was like, all thrills, all chills, one stop for emotions, and the rest is a ride.
00:53:52
Speaker 1: It's a minor problem I have with the execution. And what I did appreciate was that there was a scare payoff when he goes into the maternity ward and there's the zombie baby. So that was, that made that whole storyline worth it for me.
00:54:10
Speaker 2: And not to mention the emotional scene was like kind of cut short with a punchline, which I really love. Like it really, I think the film really knew itself. And anyways, okay. I want to hear more about your experience in the theater. And by the theater, I mean in the Alamo theater, did you get any names there? About those that were torturing your experience. Rose, please tell the versions what happened.
00:54:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I was at the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Brooklyn, where I always am.
00:54:41
Speaker 2: And I will be complaining about Alamo after your rant. Sorry.
00:54:45
Speaker 1: Do you need to complain about it again?
00:54:47
Speaker 2: Yes, I do. Okay, okay.
00:54:50
Speaker 1: There was a couple in the back of the theater. I would imagine they were teenagers or maybe like early 20s who.
00:54:59
Speaker 1: You know, this is a horror movie. There is an acceptable amount of commentary allowed in a horror movie. Agree. Don't do that. Oh, my God. She did that. But this was as if we were in these people's living rooms and we were intruding on their viewing experience.
00:55:19
Speaker 2: Full sentences? Full sentences.
00:55:22
Speaker 1: And I... Phone use?
00:55:25
Speaker 2: Okay. Okay.
00:55:28
Speaker 1: Towards the end of the film.
00:55:30
Speaker 2: No.
00:55:33
Speaker 1: One of the people in this relationship, their phone rang.
00:55:38
Speaker 2: No.
00:55:39
Speaker 1: Volume on.
00:55:40
Speaker 2: No.
00:55:40
Speaker 1: And the ringtone was, hello, Moto.
00:55:44
Speaker 2: No. Yes.
00:55:47
Speaker 1: And he took the call and spoke for approximately 20 to 30 seconds. That was the point in which I could know. If I had been closer to them, I would have said, can you please stop talking? I wasn't. So instead, what I tried to do is what Alamo suggests you do, which is you can use their app to snitch.
00:56:15
Speaker 2: If you've never been to an Alamo draft house, what is the message that happens at the beginning of the film, Rose? It's like, warning, warning. This is a phone-free zone. It's very threatening. It's a very threatening message that the audience gets.
00:56:26
Speaker 1: Now they've put a new turn on it because all of the ordering now happens through an app. So they make this whole joke about reporting phone use on your phone. I noticed that I was not the only person giving them the, like, ugh kind of looks. And that there were other people who were using the app to request service.
00:56:48
Speaker 2: Oh.
00:56:49
Speaker 1: And yet, no one who worked at the theater ever came in to tell them to shut the fuck up.
00:56:55
Speaker 2: Okay. So, my gripe, once again, with the Alamo, the worst theatrical movie experience that I ever have at any movie theater, once again, I find the opening messages at the Alamo Drafthouse to be so grating. Tonally, you say jokes. I find no jokes in these openings. There's no comedy to be had. I think there's an attempt at comedy. I never think it's funny. The threatening nature toward its patrons to be like, hey, if one of you fucking talks, I swear to fucking God, I'm going to come down there. I'm going to get you. And if I don't get you, they're going to get you. And it doesn't even work. To conscript the patrons of the Alamo Drafthouse into policing each other is so psychotic.
00:57:48
Speaker 1: Kill the cop in your own mind.
00:57:49
Speaker 2: It is such a psychotic thing for the Alamo Drafthouse to have as an offering. I think it's like really, really fucked up and crazy that they have a option in the app to snitch on people that talk or use their phones during the movie. I think that's psychotic. Mind you, doesn't excuse the behavior of the people sitting behind you. However, it is so crazy that the Alamo even has this And for them to threaten every single audience of patrons at the Alamo Drafthouse, every single film, and to create such an unwelcoming movie-watching experience, because we are all now in a police state, as created by the Alamo Drafthouse, that they won't even respond to the snitch reports?
00:58:37
Speaker 1: I know. I know. I do somewhat disagree with your characterization of the policy, but yes, it was very infuriating to just have this go totally undealt with. I did on the way out say something to the person working at the desk.
00:58:59
Speaker 2: Say something.
00:59:00
Speaker 1: They gave me a coupon for a free movie.
00:59:02
Speaker 2: Oh, I love that.
00:59:03
Speaker 1: What the fuck am I going to do with this? I already have a membership.
00:59:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can give it to me.
00:59:08
Speaker 1: I actually used it for... for, Cherry and I were supposed to see Ghost in the Shell yesterday and then she had to cancel. So like, I just lost the free use. I also like kind of wanted to cancel anyway because I didn't really want to go to the movies yesterday.
00:59:24
Speaker 2: Damn.
00:59:24
Speaker 1: But that sucked. But besides that, And that definitely did color my experience. I ended up giving this movie four stars on Letterboxd, which is very much in line with my opinion on Zach Krieger's other films, which I have really, really liked. And four stars is a high score for me, but five stars to me is perfect and not in the way that I think you're saying perfect. I mean, like literally perfect. One of the best films I've ever seen. I do not give five stars lightly. Four stars to me is like, I really enjoyed this. There were some things I didn't love or wanted more of or whatever. But I had such a fun time at this movie besides those jokers and back.
01:00:16
Speaker 2: I am not lying when I say that I think this movie is better than The Odyssey. Yeah. I think that I go and I see movies and I want my experience to feel like this. And I am an uncomplicated woman, okay? That's such a lie. I love the cinema. I love to have my brain wrinkled. I love thought-provoking kind of filmmaking that is awards-worthy, what have you. And also... I will pick the roller coaster every time. And this was such a well done roller coaster. It was every single turn to me, perfectly executed. Even when the CGI was not like, it was very video gamey, even as someone who doesn't care about video games. Even as someone who is like... I'm always trying to extract deeper meanings from the film. This film really did not vie for any sort of deeper meaning. It just was, to me, excellent filmmaking within this genre.
01:01:33
Speaker 1: It's popcorn entertainment in its purest form. Which I very much appreciated. And it did make me want to pick up a Resident Evil game and play it. I have played... A couple of horror and horror adjacent games, specifically Alien Isolation, which is so good and actually like very scary. I do think like video games are a place where you can do horror really well because of the sort of immersive nature of playing a video game. It also did inspire me to watch, as I said earlier in the episode, some of the other Resident Evil films, which are.
01:02:15
Speaker 2: Not good, right?
01:02:16
Speaker 1: Not good. The first one is okay. It's fine.
01:02:23
Speaker 2: We love Mila Jovovich. What did she do?
01:02:26
Speaker 1: She's the main character. character which is interesting because from what i understand she's like not based on a character from the games and was just like fully made up for the for the movie it also stars daniel mead from ugly betty.
01:02:39
Speaker 2: Love that who's perfect for.
01:02:41
Speaker 1: That then becomes like a zombie monster in the second movie and like the actor doesn't return for it but it's like his character.
01:02:48
Speaker 2: Wait wait what it's.
01:02:50
Speaker 1: Not like they recast him but it's like it's like a he looks like an orc from lord of the rings okay okay um The second movie was way worse and I will not be continuing to watch those films, I think. But I do want to play one of the games so I can be scared. Speaking of scary, I want to hear what you thought were the scariest moments of the movie. For me, the little girl with the tentacle legs freaked me the fuck out because I knew it was coming and it was grosser than I could have even anticipated.
01:03:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's something about, so this girl is discovered inside a trailer, and the trailer is discovered inside a long, dark tunnel.
01:03:36
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that whole sequence was so terrifying.
01:03:40
Speaker 2: I do think that was the most scared I was pretty much the whole movie. I think I might have to agree with you, but it actually, to me, entering the tunnel felt scarier. The amazing thing about this movie is that it is such a love letter to video games i mean i don't know actually if zach krieger would say that um but it's.
01:04:03
Speaker 1: I think he would i've seen some interviews with him he's he's a big resident evil fan.
01:04:08
Speaker 2: Okay the camera work is extremely video gamey and the tropes of i'm gonna get this gun oh does it have any bullets gotta find the bullets oh i've.
01:04:16
Speaker 1: I loved i loved how often it was brought up oh i need more ammo i need more.
01:04:21
Speaker 2: Oh i got oh i'm gonna upgrade to a bigger gun gotta find the bullets how do i use this gun like it's like, it was so perfectly video gamey. And also there were kind of like levels and bosses. The, I also think something that's really perfect about this movie and the horror franchise is that his absolute need to make the worst choice every single time. So I was like sitting in my chair, like, no, don't go.
01:04:51
Speaker 1: Into that room. And for everyone around him, To make the worst, most selfish choice. Yes. Which I do think leads, we should, let's talk about the ending.
01:05:00
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, just on the video, the other thing about the video game-y-ness of it all is like, it introduced so many different kinds of monsters that I think there's kind of a something for everyone in this movie. Like, no matter what you are afraid of, whether it's- Primarily tentacles. Yes, tentacles, like big things, small things, creepy crawly things.
01:05:28
Speaker 1: Babies.
01:05:29
Speaker 2: Babies, little children.
01:05:32
Speaker 1: Zombie rats.
01:05:33
Speaker 2: Dogs, things that are more alien.
01:05:36
Speaker 1: There was just a real, real good... The dog, that was a really good jump scare.
01:05:41
Speaker 2: The creature design was stunning. It was just really, really well done.
01:05:47
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the ending.
01:05:49
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:05:49
Speaker 1: So again, spoiler alert. We are going to spoil the end of this film.
01:05:54
Speaker 2: Yes.
01:05:55
Speaker 1: So the main character gets where he's been headed the whole film. He has been bitten by one of the zombies, so he is becoming infected. He gives this team of scientists, led by that guy from Severance, what they need to make the cure. and is sort of trying to unobtrusively ask them to cure him without giving away that he is rapidly turning into one of these creatures only to through a series of like, you know, uh, mistakes and unfortunate events. Uh, the, the final antidote gets, you know, mishandled and lost. And he does become this like Uber monster, uh, you know, sort of clinging on to his humanity as much as he can while this like giant mouth is opening in his stomach and fully eating people. It's like really cool visuals. I really like all that. And I like, again, spoiler alert, that he doesn't get cured and it ends with him now being this huge tentacle monster. I love that.
01:07:05
Speaker 2: What I did not like was that we were still doing jokes up until the last minute of the film. I like I just wanted to feel the stakes.
01:07:15
Speaker 1: Of it all a little more. And I thought that the over-reliance on humor and how annoying the scientists were just like did color my enjoyment of the ending a little bit.
01:07:28
Speaker 2: Well, my question to you is what's your relationship to the horror comedy genre?
01:07:34
Speaker 1: I typically don't love horror comedy. I like my horror.
01:07:37
Speaker 2: I like horror.
01:07:40
Speaker 1: I like comedy sprinkled in horror, but I don't like a hard horror comedy.
01:07:49
Speaker 2: So you don't like Jennifer's Body?
01:07:52
Speaker 1: I like Jennifer's Body, but it's not in like the upper echelon of horror movies for me. I prefer a.
01:08:00
Speaker 2: Tense, terrifying... What about like Zombieland or like Shaun of the.
01:08:05
Speaker 1: I think the closest... Shaun of the Dead.
01:08:07
Speaker 2: Or Cabin in the Woods.
01:08:08
Speaker 1: No, I like Cabin in the Woods. Probably the most I've enjoyed a horror comedy is Evil Dead or Evil Dead 2. But those films, I think, like, there is a point in the film where the humor does kind of stop.
01:08:26
Speaker 2: Oh, interesting.
01:08:27
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I would say, like, by the time we're at the third act, or maybe, like, truly, like, the last 10 minutes... it's pretty much all scares, all stakes.
01:08:39
Speaker 2: I found when I watch horror comedy, I find relief in the comedy, right? So when the stakes of a certain scary moment are happening, or when a certain jump scare is like in our midst, or we're facing something that looks really terrifying, to me, the horror comedy genre offers the sweet relief of a punchline. And I honestly don't really remember. I haven't seen those first two Evil Dead movies.
01:09:14
Speaker 1: Oh, girl, you need to.
01:09:15
Speaker 2: I need to.
01:09:16
Speaker 1: You need to, especially because there's an evil dead haunted house at Halloween horror nights. I'm going to put together a syllabus of things you need to watch before Halloween.
01:09:23
Speaker 2: Can I watch two without watching one? I don't really want to watch.
01:09:25
Speaker 1: You can actually, because two, um, basically they recap the entire first film in like the opening five minutes of the movie. So yeah, you can go straight to two. And I do think two is the better movie.
01:09:41
Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. Um, but like when I, like cabin in the woods and zombie land, like, Those are like, and Shaun of the Dead, like those are like punchlines till the very end. And I like, well, so then I think I'm, for me, going into critique this film, I always want to try to accept a film for what it's presenting to me. And I actually do think you should consider maybe what you want. I think you wanted maybe the film to be a slightly different genre of Um, but also like, you know, Sure.
01:10:16
Speaker 1: But I can still feel the way that I felt about it. No, no, no.
01:10:20
Speaker 2: I'm just, you know, probing into it because I, I did like, I just thought that this was such an A plus film and I kind of thought you would feel the same, but now I'm like hearing more about like what you like hearing more about like what your desire was, um, from the film's tone helps me understand a bit about like maybe what I didn't, get or did get out of it, you know? Yeah.
01:10:44
Speaker 1: And I, I, I'm so happy that you enjoyed it so much because I wasn't sure if you were going to, we didn't see this together. Right. I, and you know, but between the two of us, I'm more into horror and that might be like where the divide is because I did go into this film because I had no prior knowledge of resident evil really. expecting something that was going to be more straight up scary. Right. And I totally agree with you about the place.
01:11:17
Speaker 2: It was a hard, it was a hard comedy. Yeah.
01:11:19
Speaker 1: I totally agree with you about the place of comedy in horror. Like, because some of the most cathartic moments in a horror movie are when something is so scary that it becomes funny. Or when you smash cut to something funny from something scary as Zach Krieger did, like, geniusly in Barbarian, you know, with that quick cut to Justin Long after like Bill Skarsgård gets like taken by the, you know, big titted mommy. Like the laughter is such a great way to relieve or build up tension in a horror film. I just like, it got a little annoying for me. It got a little hat on a hat for me towards the end. And I can also recognize that my experience was tinged by what was going on in the theater.
01:12:08
Speaker 2: Here's like another thing that I'll say is I think that referencing his other films is like smart though, like Barbarian and Weapons are not hard comedies. I would say Barbarian has tons of jokes. I think Weapons has a few jokes and a really funny ending. But this movie is a hard comedy as a hard horror comedy, you know, genre. The reason I want to give it so many flowers is because I think about other horror comedies, and I'm like, I actually like... This movie is so much better than, sorry, Shaun of the Dead, Cabin in the Woods, Zombieland. I don't know. I remember loving those movies, but they did not make me feel the way this movie made me feel. I think... I wonder if there's a version of this movie... that felt a little more like get out where get out is like hard comedy set up. Um, really, really fucking funny while also being really fucking scary. And then the ending, the, like the, the kind of climax and the latter portion of the film is like almost no comedy.
01:13:20
Speaker 1: Right.
01:13:20
Speaker 2: You know, it's all horror. It's all spooks.
01:13:23
Speaker 1: Um, I mean, the end of Get Out is still pretty funny. Like, when his friend comes to rescue him.
01:13:28
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
01:13:29
Speaker 1: There's still a lot of jokes right up until the end.
01:13:31
Speaker 2: Right. And that's, like, such a perfect film to me. But that film, you know, got an Oscar. And Resident Evil's not getting any Oscar noms, I don't think.
01:13:39
Speaker 1: And of Jordan Peele's films, I do prefer Us. Oh, right. I prefer Us to Get Out. And Us, like, has more of a, you know, serious kind of bummer ending. And that is usually... what I'm looking for in horror. And this movie does end like the, the hero dies, you know, like, so it does end on like kind of a sad note. I just like, I kind of wanted the tone to match that. And I'm not saying that it's a bad movie because it didn't, it just like doesn't necessarily align with my personal taste, but I still really enjoyed this movie. And I feel like this is the kind of movie that, That's going to have a lot of rewatchability for me.
01:14:22
Speaker 2: Yes. I want to watch it again. I will watch it again with you. Just as a quick aside, where does Nope rank in your Jordan Peele ranking? If Us is your favorite?
01:14:34
Speaker 1: Us is my favorite. Nope has to be third, right? For me, Nope is third. It's third, but it's a close third because I really loved Nope.
01:14:46
Speaker 2: I need to re-watch Us, honestly.
01:14:48
Speaker 1: Us is incredible. Us is a masterpiece. Nope.
01:14:52
Speaker 2: I think I need to re-watch as well, but it was such a beautiful fucking film and Kiki's so fucking good in it.
01:15:00
Speaker 1: Put them on your spooky season watch list. I have made mine, by the way, and I'll share it on the pod next week.
01:15:07
Speaker 2: Okay, share it immediately. It's a sh-emergency. And this show is shover. Yes, virgins, please subscribe at patreon.com slash like a virgin for twice monthly bonus episodes. This month, we have a major Patreon special on Dolly Parton and Tim Curry at the intersection of transsexuality, perversion, and nerddom. We would really love for you to tell your friends about our Patreon page. I know we talk about it every week, but you got to know that the number one way to like support the futurity of our work and us just like having fun while we're doing it and being able to keep doing it is, is like word of mouth, our listeners sharing the show. So please share the main stay episodes or share our Patreon and subscribe to our Patreon.
01:16:01
Speaker 1: And engage, get in the comments. You know, we, we want to hear, What you thought about the things that we discussed. We want to know if you agree with us or disagree. And also, you know, just generally how funny and sexy we are.
01:16:16
Speaker 2: And trust.
01:16:16
Speaker 1: And smart. And trust.
01:16:19
Speaker 2: You're going to want to be a Patreon subscriber when spooky season comes along. Okay. In October, the Patreon pops off. Okay. So you better get in while you can because Rose and I are in our fucking bag in October. Okay.
01:16:37
Speaker 1: Love you. See you next week.
01:16:39
Speaker 2: Mwah.