‘The Beekeeper,’ ‘Madame Web,’ and a Dumpuary Extravaganza

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And stay in age, everyone. Worldwide. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is the Big Picture A Conversation Show about Dumpuary.

It's that marvelous time of the year. The studios try to trick us into believing that their mishandled wares are worth our time. But somehow, magically, sometimes they are. Last week we discussed Argyle on the pod, which I would say, not worth our time.

Today, we're talking about a couple of big ones. One of them we know for sure is worth our time. And that movie is The Beekeeper. And joining us to talk about the king of Dumpuary, Chris Ryan.

That's right, I am the hive protector, and I am here. Thank you for your service. This film came out almost over a month ago. And frankly, it's a movie sensation.

People are, they cannot stop talking about this man who keeps bees. And it is just remarkable. Or the tip of the iceberg. Or the tip of the honeycomb, really, with what that guy does.

So it's directed by David Ayer, a long-time action filmmaker. A filmmaker who Chris and I Amanda have had quite a bit of time for. I would say he's not draped himself in glory in the last five years in the aftermath of the Failure of a Suicide Squad movie. Oh, I was thinking about that, yeah.

Give me the Street Kings. Give me the Harsh Times. Give me Fury. Give me Fury.

I'm down with those movies. I don't think I fully clocked before digging into the BD Watch. Absolutely. This is an air-gly.

Did he direct Bright? He did direct. And that was the Netflix film that came out right after Christmas? Did it come out?

Yeah. It was like 2018, I want to say. Yeah. You just, like, you turned it on in Palm Springs one year.

And just, like, played it on in the living. This was before children, thankfully. But as we went about our days, it was just, like, Bright was on the TV screen. I watched the entire film.

And, well, it wasn't good. So David Ayer, it's a coin flip for him these days. You never know. And somehow, he's made one of the more critical cinematic texts of the year.

Sierra, I'm going to start with you. Okay. This is a new Jason Staten vehicle. What did you think of it?

I was deeply, deeply entertained by this movie. As were the 80% capacity of a Tuesday night in February screening at Burbank. Which, this movie is speaking to people. People are coming back to The Hive, which is the theater.

And they're pollinating it. They're pollinating it with Diet Dr. Peppers and large popcorns. And when certain things happen in this film, they clap.

They applaud. Now, whether it's ironic, like, there's a little bit of the, like, has the Nicole Kidman AMC intro now permeated all film? And we're all ironically laughing at everything. That's a great question.

Or, does this movie tap into something very deep and powerful about what it means to be alive right now? Is that something, what if Q Shaman was a trained assassin? It's not, man. It's not.

Oh, it's not? It's not. Wow. I found this movie.

So, do you want to do any setup of it? Yeah. So, Jason Staden's character, Adam Clay, is a beekeeper living on an elderly woman's estate. A literal beekeeper.

He's a literal beekeeper. He's taking care of bees and honeycombs. He's making honey. He's making honey.

And he learns that his landlady has committed suicide because she has been taken for a large sum of money by an international ring of online digital con artists who talk her into giving up not just her personal fortune, but the charity foundation that she manages as well. In what I felt was an absolutely harrowing 10-minute opening sequence starring Felicia Rashad as the woman who is scammed. Felicia Rashad, the first of many talented actors who show up in the film The Beekeeper. And they walk you step-by-step through it.

She's entering the passwords, and you're just like, no, don't. I mean, this was, you know, cybercrimes. That's a horror film. People are really afraid of it.

All people I know are afraid of this happening to them. I would say that some of the things that her character does, wouldn't recommend. Yeah. Wouldn't recommend letting people take over.

But I thought my mom would do it as well. I think that every generation gets the vengeance movie they deserve. And we happen to be living in a time of scams. We happen to be living in a time where I don't think that our faith in law and law enforcement is at its highest.

And the fantasy that there is some sort of extrajudicial justice agent out there, like Justice Capital J, like real moral justice, that could correct these wrongs that seemingly go unpunished in society is actually super powerful. It's actually like watching this movie, I was like, this is ridiculous bullshit. The Death Wish-style seeking vengeance aspect of the movie, I think, is very straightforward and very well done. It's pretty clear that this guy, who is a quote-unquote beekeeper, is enraged, frustrated, and just sort of like almost confused by the evilness of this corporation that is scamming older people.

And so Adam Clay goes off on a vengeance tour to find the people who did this. He goes to the headquarters, this neon-lit, absurd marketplace of financial chicanery. Everything is happening within a 75-mile-per-hour mile radius in Massachusetts for some reason. And somehow he's able to find this location, and he wreaks vengeance on these mothers.

He absolutely goes haywire and is killing security guards and burning buildings down. And what slowly becomes clear is that he is not just a lone man, but he is a trained agent who is a member of a super-duper secret organization known as the Beekeepers. The duper is when you know. The head of the CIA and the president are read in on this, and the head of the FBI, I think.

Happening simultaneous to this is we learn that the man who owns this sort of digital chop shop, played by Josh Hutcherson, is deeply upset by news that beekeepers come to town and is burning shit up. In fact, he doesn't know what a beekeeper is. But very quickly, thanks to the help of his head of security, who's portrayed by Jeremy Irons, the first British man to lead our central television agency. Making no effort to hide his accent.

What a beekeeper is, what he does. Satan's character is a retired beekeeper. He's been deactivated, but he's still got all the tools. And he has a phone number where he can dial in to the actual hive.

And they can say, I thought you were tired, but here's everything that you need to know. Here's all the personal information. You're going to kill them. Pretty confusing, safe play on the beekeepers.

Because within 20 minutes of that moment happening, beekeepers have sent someone the active beekeeper. It's really crucial to not skip a step here. Okay. So Jeremy Irons discovers that a beekeeper is after young Mr.

Danforth. His word. Not really. Not his technical word, but his charge.

And he calls in a favor of sorts. He calls up the current head of the CIA, which is played by Meanie Driver. Oh, yeah. Meanie Driver.

Sorry, Meanie Driver. Meanie Driver is in this film for 93 seconds. She picks up a phone, and then in another scene, she's wearing a gown, and she picks up the phone again, and she goes, I can't help you with this one. What does it say on the phone?

It says alpha. That's the alpha line. I don't know what that means. Once she answers it, she's like, why are you calling this phone?

You're not supposed to be calling. And so the beekeepers do send the current... So apparently, I read a little bit about this. Okay, yeah.

There's only ever one beekeeper. Right. The beekeeper retires a new beekeeper comes in. It's not like an army of beekeepers.

There's just one. So Jason Statham's retirement causes this new woman, who's basically a cyberpunk kind of pink girl deal, to get nominated or promoted into the beekeeper position. Chris, were you attracted to the beekeeper? I thought that was a super fun splash of color in this movie, was to have a techno-punk, purple-haired Lady Gaga, all of a sudden just shooting a 50-cow out of the back of a truck.

Yeah, let's start with my question. Were you attracted to that one? I was. I will tell you the character I was attracted to.

Okay, I'm looking forward to it. Oh, that's really exciting. Oh my god. I'm now guessing.

I'm trying to guess who it is. One of the things that we haven't mentioned is that the daughter of Felicia Rashad's character is also an FBI agent, and while she is grieving for the death of her mother, she also has become involved in the investigation around who this beekeeper figure is. And also the larger fraud rank. Yes, exactly.

The Josh Docterson. Kind of happening in tandem. And who was on the side of right and who was on the side of wrong? She's portrayed by Amy Rae from Enlantman.

Never seen her before. Apparently she's a TV star on the Imperial Academy. Quite simply, one of the most illogical characters in recent movie history. Yeah, it's weird constantly.

It's not her fault. It's not the actress's fault. I have no idea what they were thinking about this character. It's not the actress's fault.

If one of your parents took their own life, maybe sit down for a while. Have a glass of water. Relax. Stop trying to unearth this ring.

Additionally, she's- And it's not just like she's going rogue to do it. But she's also meeting with the head of the FBI, who's just like, link check for however many agents you need. Like, what? There are so many meetings with powerful people that are absurd.

Now, the reason I make the huge shaman joke is I think that there is a- There's a certain text to this film. So there's a version of this movie where Jason Statham simply goes up the ladder of this corporation that's scamming the elderly. Which he does more or less do. He does, but you can stretch that out for 95 minutes, and then at the end he finally kills the person who runs the company, and you're like, yes, finally.

And maybe he redistributes the wealth back to all the elderly people who've been scammed, and you're like, fuck yeah. Instead- A land of milk and honey, thanks to the beekeeper. Midway through this movie, we find out that Josh Hutcherson, his mother, is the president of the United States. And when that was revealed, the enthusiasm of the crowd in our theater was palpable.

Where it was just like, yes, yes! Where it was just like, we are going to the White House to keep bees. Let's go. So how did you read that character?

I'll tell you quite simply that it was pretty amazing that we were just making a movie about Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden. Yeah, of course. It's hilarious. It's almost not subtext.

Like, they don't say Hunter Biden, but it's in the text of the movie. But is the film's political valence that the true demons of our culture are Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden? I think that- Because the Josh Hutcherson character is vile. He's not a good guy.

He's not just some guy who went to China and had affairs with prosecutors. It turns out that he funded his mother's presidential campaign with funds scraped from scanning the elderly. The Danforth Incorporation is, in fact, basically a front for these behaviors. Can I read you guys a Hillary Clinton tweet?

I saw it. Congratulations to Taylor's boyfriend and the entire Kansas City community. You can't beat me again. That's not my- Do you think Hillary Clinton has seen The Beekeeper?

Do you think she's ever seen a Jason Statham film? She wrote a political thriller with Louise Penny called State of Terror, which I read. State of Terror. Yeah.

And it's really pretty trashy. So I think that she is more aware of this genre than you might expect. Should David Ayer adapt State of Terror? Is it about Benghazi?

Is it like a thinly veiled thing? I think that there is like a thinly veiled thing. It is like basically like high, like to even invoke Tom Clancy is like disrespectful to Tom Clancy. And by the way, I like the mystery novels of Louise Penny.

But it's like high trash, political thriller defense of everything that Hillary Clinton ever did in office or, you know, adjacent to office. I think it's very funny that they've chosen to make Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden the archivalence of this story. On the other hand, I don't really feel like it has any political point of view. It's like you could say that that is Jesse Danforth, President Danforth, who's quite striking.

I think- I know that that's- In the CR zone. Deeply in the CR zone. A nerdy blonde with a lot of power? My goodness.

She, uh, I think that there's definitely like, it's a wink, but the emergence of President Danforth also signals this film's complete departure from quote-unquote reality, which is that President Danforth has a beach estate where she seems to be holding a rave and also employing a South African kill squad. Who is that guy in the kill squad in the last half of the film? Don't tell me there's a BKP in it, bro. That guy is a fucking legend.

Who is that? Hold on, I'm going to find a different figures. I saw a beekeeper one time. And he fucking lost his leg?

He thinks that guy like 19 rounds to the heart. He puts up an incredible fight. It can save him. This is such a silly, ridiculous movie.

And I kept trying to figure out what it was trying to say, which of course is the dumbest thing you can do while watching a beekeeper. Because it's not really trying to say anything. I do think that you could be like, you could read it, that the world needs a check on even the highest levels of power. It's fucking Taxi Driver.

There needs to be a great way rain come through. It is. It is very Taxi Driver. It is a little bit Gen 6, you know?

It's extremely Jancis. I can write it. I just had fun watching it. You just came in here and we're like, no, no, no, no, no.

There's like a scene where Jeremy Irons is like informing some other like secret squad about the beekeeper and what they have to do that is just like reverse QAnon. Those guys don't follow his instructions. If you stay like far away from him with rifles, you can probably get him, but don't come into contact with him. And they all try to fist fight him.

But the mythology around the beekeeper is like, his one noble goal is to like protect the order of society. And so he's going to kill. And then there's some stuff about bees, how people will kill bees if the queen. Did you read about bees before this?

No. But there's a moment where the FBI agent is like, bees are really interesting. She's reading like a very, very thin factoid book. You know, like she bought it at Urban Outfitters.

She found it in the truck of the tech. I mean, it's not like an encyclopedia of bees, you know? It's the highlights. And so he's killing everyone.

He's like killing all of the leaders who have failed society in order to protect society as an outsider, which I just, you know, that's what that movie is about. I just want to point out that the South African's name is Taylor James. He plays a character named Lazarus. He was born in Seven Oaks, England, but he moved to South Africa where he was schooled and then moved back to Kent.

So you're getting this very particular blend. He's like Cockney South African. Yeah. But also like the best part about it is that his crew looks like they are being pulled out of like a late period John Carpenter movie, even though like the president is present at this like beach estate.

And it's also like, there's a high security risk, but she's like, what we're going to do is throw a wreath. Well, Josh Hutcherson is throwing the wreath. Oh, that's right. He asked to ask a couple of people, and she was like, yeah, but no drugs.

And that doesn't work. But then she walks in on him doing coke, and she's just like, wet my cigarette for me. Do you think that they knew that this movie was going to make like $150 million? Like if you told me this was just a straight to VOD movie, I'd be like, cool, it happens.

You know, like Jeremy Irons is sometimes in a straight to VOD movie. On the flip side, this is, I think, the biggest movie of 2024 so far. Yeah. And is it because we all have like a bloodlust for Hunter Biden?

Because like, how many of the last 10 Jason Statham movies can you name? Quite a few. Fire away. I mean, The Mechanic.

That was not 10 years ago. The Wrath of Man. Wrath of Man, that's one. A couple of Fast and Furious movies and Hobbs and Shaw movies.

You got F9, Fast X, Hobbs and Shaw. That's four. I don't know. Like, I just feel like they're all the same movie.

They're all like The Mechanic. You know? So that's the thing is, he had been doing only those movies. Wildcard, Homefront, Hummingbird, Parker, Safe, Killer Elite, Blitz.

Killer Elite, I saw that. The Mechanic. That was a remake of a great movie. You know, the Crank movies, the Transporter trilogy.

Like, he's made 20 plus movies that are just like this movie. Some of those movies were hits, most of them were not. Most of them were kind of like mid-tier, like $40 million movies that Lionsgate put out. But this movie, for some reason, has really taken off.

There's something that we talked about earlier in the week, that there's just a dearth of this year, and so this is filling a gap of some kind. I have one other theory about this. If I told you, if you were sitting in the theater and you watched the Beekeeper trailer, I'd say that there's a better than 50% chance you're like, I gotta see this. I gotta see how this guy keeps peace.

I gotta see what he does to these people. Because they give away the Felicia Rashad piece in the trailer. So you're like, I gotta see what he does. The Felicia Rashad piece, eh?

Sorry. And so there's like a baseline of interest in just like, oh fuck man, they killed Mrs. Cosby, we gotta get it. Then there's also an element of just like, yeah, there's nothing else out.

It's like, what are you gonna go see? Would you rather see Beekeeper or One Love, right? Let me tell you, you would rather see Beekeeper. On top of that, like this is why they should make original movies, is because if I told you this was Beekeeper 2 or 3, and you really needed to have seen the other Beekeeper movies to understand the intricacies of like the Beekeeper organization, and Jeremy Irons like hasn't been killed yet, so you have to keep him in like mine.

It's like, this is original storytelling salvations. It's original, but not. Because here's the thing, like, you know, it's cyber crimes and Hunter Biden and all this stuff, but it's also like Jason Statham needs to be on someone. You know, like you under, it is original, but also you know exactly what it is.

But it's the same thing with Wick. When Wick came out, people were like, holy shit, they killed his dog. I don't care about anything else but him fucking up the Russian mob for killing his dog. Wick 3 and 4, it's like, what's the continental, what's like the rules of like the French oversight board?

Like, I love those movies, but I'm just saying, like, I can see that Joe average, I see five movies a year, goes and sees like Oppenheimer, and then the Beekeeper runs before the Oppenheimer. Wait, that's happening. But it's just like, I'm gonna go see this. Let's unpack it a little bit more, because like the premise of the Beekeeper is literally somebody ripped off this guy's landlady and he got super mad.

Well, he says that she was the only person who saw him as a real person and gave him a real chance. Except for the Beekeeper organization, which gave him a career. Well, yeah, but I think they exploited him, you know? And so he didn't get to be himself and now he's just a man making bees.

What's amazing is that the Beekeeper is a canvas that you can paint for your own psychology. You're worried about land ownership. You're thinking like, this company took advantage of him. I'm thinking just like, he seemed like a pretty happy retired guy, but like was into being invited over to dinner.

What do you think the Beekeeper's 401k is like? Like, what percentage of them has? Yeah, I know, but it's just like not. They are the bees.

No, I mean, I understand that. Yeah, right. And then he has to kill the Queen, right? Because the Queen isn't producing the right type of heir.

No, I thought it's that if basically, if the Queen has too many failed sons, then they kill the Queen because she's responsible for the failed sons, which is an interesting sociological thing to unpack. Yeah, well, as a mother of a son, how do you feel? You know, it's just complicated stuff. He's like, that is not on me.

It's a very surprising, kind of funny callback to just what movies were 25 years ago, where a movie like this comes out in January and everybody's like, okay, I guess I'll go see that. And then they all went, and everybody else is stupid, but I had fun. And maybe it's definitely about how Democrats are dumbasses, but maybe not. I think it's also about how much people probably feel like an ambient level of fear about like getting ripped off.

The cybercrime aspect is very successful. It really works well. I think that the internet is just really like magnified like our neurosis about like everywhere I go for like a little bit of convenience, I also go to get like ripped off a little bit. So everything that's cool about the internet that you can just like buy something and it shows up at your house, but it's just like, now my number and my card number is out there.

You know what I mean? Like there's like this dark side of it. And I think it's very effective in that way. I just, I think it would be interesting to chart vengeance movies since Death Wish over like what was actually happening in society and to the degree to which the successful ones corresponded with that.

I feel like we did do a revenge movies episode but I can't recall. I'd like to do something about Kill Bill in the near future too or in the 20th anniversary. Yeah, like when Taken came out, was it just simply that like, it was like Liam Neeson's turn to like, people were just like, this is incredibly special set of skills. I think that there was, this is a lot of things to say, but I think that there was like a human trafficking fear at that time and that it kind of levered that.

Speaking of QAnon. Well, exactly. I mean, these things all come back. We're just, we're six months removed from Sound and Freedom being one of the biggest movies of the year.

I think there's a little bit of that going on. It's really kind of nice. The way you say QAnon shows that you don't really think about QAnon that much. I feel like QAnon.

QAnon, QAnon, I don't really. I don't think about it. Those people need some help. From scratch, why don't you go see that?

Any other thoughts about Beekeeper? Do you want to Beekeeper too? We're going to get one. I'm not sure if I feel as excited.

I do want to ask you, you know, sometimes you say you go to a movie like this and you feel a little bored by just kind of oncoming waves of action. But if done well, you can be interested in it. Where does this fall then on sort of like the John Wick scale of interested or not interested in terms of watching those sequences in the movie? Oh, the action itself?

Oh, it's pretty fun because it's creative. I mean, this is simplistic, but like the fewer guns and the more choreography they have to do, the more exciting it is for me. Did you like it when he tied the guy to the pickup truck and drove the pickup truck off the drip? My favorite part by far is when he wanders into a crowd of FBI agents outside the building and he's trying to penetrate and just beats the shit out of 15 guys in one minute.

I was like, this is speaking. Well, Chris, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts here. Did you want to say anything about Madam Web? I'm really looking forward to this episode of the podcast and hearing you guys talk about it.

Are you going to come with us to see it? I'm on the fence about Madam Web. I am. I guess, can I just, have you guys talked about Dakota yet?

So you haven't done the app as this part of the episode? Yeah, and we haven't seen it as of the recording of it. Are we allowed to say that? Are we mad?

Is it like too much power? Is what Dakota Johnson has done to promote this film, which has given so many people so much joy, is it actually promoting the film? It is for me. I want to explore that after seeing the movie.

I think that we are in a, we're in a kind of Apple Vision pro of marketing around movies. Yeah. it's like everything is in the metaverse. I know you're not actually there, but like, your marketing of movies has gone to a new level of irony that is making it challenging to know what anybody thinks about anything anyone's doing.

What do you think? I'm so excited to go ironically and participate in this experience because of Dakota Johnson. And I love her. And last, on the episode that we just recorded that ran last week, I was just talking about how she is like officially my new queen.

Because she's the only I don't give a fuck celebrity that we have. She still surprises me. Like, I don't know how she's going to be weird, you know? And I just, and funny, and I love it.

Do you think that, just devil's advocate, she is someone who operates from an attitude as if she has contributed somehow to cinema at all, but she in fact has not? I have a whole thought process about this. Okay. Because she just made three independent movies, all of which were very not well received and or didn't even get distributed.

Cha-Cha Real Smooth. Cha-Cha Real Smooth. And then there's a movie called I'm Okay that premiered at Sundance 2022 that got acquired by Max but has still not been seen. Okay.

And then she was just in this film, Daddy-O, with Sean Penn, that premiered at Telluride that also still does not have distribution. Is that the ambulance movie? No. I don't know the premise.

I haven't seen it. So those three movies have all kind of come and gone and she was trying to make movies with young filmmakers that are supposed to be interesting and she's trying to evolve her career away from Fifty Shades and this franchise stuff and she's like, you know, you gotta make movies for money. And none of those movies really worked or at least nobody got a chance to see them and now everybody's talking about Madame fucking Webb and she's like, I did this because my agency was like, you'll get $9 million for this movie or whatever it was. And everybody's like, Dakota Johnson is my new queen.

Amanda is like, totally sure I understand her talents. And so I'm still, I'm holding, I'm holding my powder dry here. Okay. Okay.

Well, this is a segue into our next segment. Momentarily, we will discuss Madame Webb. Thanks, CR. You got it.

From bees to spiders, it's time to talk about Madame Webb. We've now seen Madame Webb. We've seen Madame Webb. On a previous segment, we hadn't yet seen Madame Webb and now we have.

So why don't you describe to the listeners the manner in which we saw them? So after many scheduling adjustments, you informed me that you would be seeing Madame Webb at 2 p.m. on Valentine's Day, opening day, at a theater near our home. And I was also going to need to find a way to see Madame Webb on Valentine's Day.

And the theater was already near our home. So I thought, sure, well, I guess I'll go with Sean. You didn't offer the opportunity to purchase the tickets together. No, I already had bought the tickets.

I also was not invited to the screening of this film for reasons that are so mysterious. Oh, no, no, no. I didn't even know there was one. You purchased a ticket and so I logged on to Fantango to then learn that, of course, you had chosen the time to be able to see Madame Webb in Dolby Cinema.

Of course. Because, yeah, why stamp on quality? Of course. I identified your seat because it's the only one on the aisle.

Purchase the seat next to you. And then we attended Madame Webb at GPM with a one-third full theater. You could hear a pin drop in the entire film despite the Dolby's around. So Madame Webb is the directorial debut of S.J.

Clarkson, who's a British TV film director. She's been trying to get some big projects off the ground in the last few years. This is the one she got signed up for. It is a part of the Sony Spider-Man expanded universe, which we will talk about a little bit in depth.

Let me just read you the plot description for Madame Webb. Cassandra Webb is a New York City paramedic who starts the show signs of clairvoyance. Forced to confront revelations about her past, she must protect three young women from a mysterious adversary who wants them dead. Now, many people are aware of Madame Webb because of the remarkable press tour Dakota Johnson has embarked upon to either sell or anti-sell this movie in which she plays a kind of newfangled spider-inflected superhero.

This is quite simply one of the worst movies of the year. It is one of the worst movies of the decade. I was trying to think of what is the short list and we will get into some serious questions about this movie as we talk through it of the worst studio movies of the decade. Here's the problem.

Can I tag a little? Of course, absolutely. Is it like that bad? I want to talk about it.

I'm glad you put it that way. You know, it's really bad which is really silly and delivers on nothing that you would want from, I guess, a superhero movie, a Spider-Man movie or a Spider-Person movie, an extended universe movie, a Marvel movie, or frankly, a Dakota Johnson movie with the exception of one scene and a baby shower which I do think was very funny and I'll think about for some time. Spoiler alert! It's a baby shower for Peter Parker.

Crazy. Just one of many Easter eggs dropped in the direction of the Spider-Man story. So it's really, really bad. Terrible scripts.

Wooden acting. People are not in the same room together. Incoherent. It's really bad.

But like, I don't know, I've seen a lot of these at this point. It just rolled off me. You know? Yes, I think that's a testimony to your strength.

You know, you have like iguana skin when it comes to this kind of thing. Put me in the hot blazing sign and I will persist. Do things roll off iguanas? I thought they had quite scaly skin.

Well, just that you can't be pierced. Oh, sure. You have strength. I have no idea about iguana skin.

I'm just, I'm risk. I mean, and also they have a lot of ridges so I think there are a lot of obstacles to whatever, rolling off iguana. If you could be a superhero, movie was in terms of tone, in terms of execution, that there could be like such varying levels of quality with the acting, with the script is written, with the films, that once in a while you'd get, well, sometimes you'd get Blade and you'd be like, wow, pretty cool, like vampire, you know, kung fu movie. And then sometimes you'd get Electra starring Jennifer Garner and you'd be like, whoa, this is really one of the worst movies of the year.

Still love Jennifer Garner. She's great. And she's not a bad Electra but it's a terrible movie. Nevertheless, I think, would you be asking that question about its terribleness and whether it is actually that terrible if we did not have the Dakota Johnson press store?

And if we did not have the humor derived from the meme of the line in the trailer, would you, would you just sat down? So there just weren't all the fanfare before Matt and Webb? Amanda is, If I weren't bringing my knowledge You're born on Mars, but in a human society. Okay.

You're not born on the Amazon. Trust me. In this particular case, you're not born on the Amazon. You're born on Mars, but we colonize Mars.

Surprisingly, stress-free water birth given the circumstances. Very quiet throughout. There are actually two women in labor in this movie and neither of them speaks above a whisper. So you said that's not acting.

Yeah. This is a film directed by a woman starring William. You know what I'll never forget? It's like the night I got to the hospital to give birth.

And you know, they're like hooking me up to all the monitors. And then you hear from, you hear a scream from down the hall that is like literally out of a horror movie. It's just like someone is absolutely getting murdered down that hall. And I'll never forget the nurse just like whispering to me like sort of timidly she's like she's not on any pain medication.

Like it's trying to make me feel better about the fact of like what's going down the hall and what's coming for me. People are about, people are having problems and neither of these women have access to epidurals in their circumstances. Well, well. I'm very grateful that I had mine.

Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to share any personal experience on this podcast but I just want everybody to be safe and happy. That's my message. I wanted Madame Webb's mom to be safe and happy but unfortunately she wasn't because she encountered a man in the Peruvian jungle in 1973.

And I'll let the listeners know that Madame Webb's a period piece set during 2003. But it opens on a flashback in 1973. Great year for cinema. Great year for rock and roll music as I recall.

When she's down in Peru and she's looking for a spider. She finds the spider and then there's a guy there played by Zahar Rahim who's like I'm going to need that spider. And he shoots a pregnant woman to get the spider. Very exciting sequence.

But then some arañas, some spider men of the Peruvian jungle save her. Spider people. Spider humans. Spider persons.

I'm not sure what the nomenclature is. They rescue her and take her to a magical pool where a spider bites her. In a cave. In a cave, a spider bites her and that spider I guess grants powers to her then being birthed daughter.

Right. But then she dies in the act of childbirth after that due to a gunshot wound from a man who stole a spider from her. Right. This is the first thing you see in the movie.

And also maybe like bleeding into water. You know. Is that bad? It's not good, right?

I'm getting shot in this particular case. So that's the setup for this movie which then ultimately becomes a story about a very blank affected paramedic who has a hard time relating to people but then increasingly sees the future. And her name is Cassandra. Why is her name Cassandra?

Cassandra sees the future. So why is... Her last name is Webb. Webb with two B's.

W-E-B-B. But the film is called Madam Web. I've constructed a series of questions and it's called Madam Web. Thank you.

I thought that would be the best way to kind of talk through this film. I didn't add this question but it occurred to me. I added it. Oh yeah.

In a sub category so that we didn't tip over from 15. Let's just... Okay, you've got 15 questions here. 15 questions about Madam Web.

This is something I'd like to do in the future when we encounter a film that is befuddling. Remember when we did 100 Things That We Love about Captain Maverick? That was a really good podcasting. Yeah, well, as someone who's just seen Dune Part 2, perhaps we shall return to that.

Oh, that's exciting. Yes. Number one, what happened here? What happened?

This is a movie made by a major studio with a very seasoned filmmaker and big stars. You know, obviously Sidney Sweeney is in this movie which is what we'll have been to momentarily. Harahim is a wonderful actor who's been in some great films yes uh and is it well suited to mad what would you say well to the part where she's a paramedic who can't connect with people sure that was good did you see the clip of her driving like doing the stunt driving no she she can drive relatively fast and take turns relative to normal episodes of the show would you say you did significantly more research and sort of looking into how this film was made because you seem to know a lot about it like instagram explore tab has been working hard to share these clips with me um so she can drive and she can you know roll her eyes in baby shower we're getting to the code johnson question i don't want to get into that yet what happened here what do you think happened was it a bad script i mean i do think it was a bad concept because what is this this is a prequel for like genuinely i don't know whether this is a prequel for madam webb a character who i don't know anything about even after having seen the movie or whether it's a prequel intended prequel by the way because who knows that doesn't seem like there will not be more of this um for three different spider girls only one of whom you told me is actually named spider girl i believe that's right i'm not an expert on this part of the canon and then also how it's a prequel for the birth of spider-man and in a way maybe the way that spider girl and spider-man are related even though they're not in a way that is the case okay we'll get some of that but i don't understand you've got this incredibly valuable idea basically my point is like what is this is the first problem like no one like that's like a preposterous diagram that even even if like there were a completed diagram and someone could tell you yes this is a prequel for how spider girl met her two best friends and then like imported the spider that someone else turned set loose on peter parker or whatever like that's really stupid but so that's problem number one problem number two is that you can't there is actually no real answer to that diagram there's no sense of purpose and then of course three that yields like a preposterous script it's very confusing i can understand how they got to the point where they thought that they should make a madame webb movie that previews who is madame webb well she's a woman played by dakota johnson and cassandra webb right but like in your little spider world who is madame webb i don't know does anyone know yes she's a canonical character she's not a character that i'm up on okay well maybe you should have done that research before this podcast it's actually much funnier if i don't okay so i'm just googling madame webb now she's kind of like the professor x of the spider universe and that's which one is professor x he's the telepath who actor names patrick seward okay thank you james mcavoy thank you does that work okay um she's someone who sort of like uses her mind like her clairvoyant abilities okay to help guide and she yeah i'm reading the second the third sentence of wikipedia she is usually depicted as a supporting character in the spider man comic book series where she appears as an elderly woman with myasthemia gravis sorry for that connected to a life support system resembling a spider web wow okay and that's it oh interesting so the um condition that i couldn't pronounce is a neuromuscular disease which does figure prominently in that story okay so she's a clairvoyant and precognitive mutant of course yes and you know what mutants are um x-men those are the x-men yeah now i don't think there was an intention to bring the mutants to the sony spider-man universe purposefully but you know because the tom holland films have been so successful because venom has been so successful because spider-verse has been so successful sony which has the rights to the spider universe is attempting to adapt other characters and stories we saw um i think um huerto was um the film that bad bunny had gotten into development and they were gonna make that which would have been one of the first uh before blue beetle would have been one of the first uh latin superheroes we had seen i think that movie went into turn around and now it wasn't happening but it was announced around the same time as this madame webb movie but madame webb is not it's not like we're gonna do a wolverine movie after x-men like wolverine is one of the most popular and coolest characters in comic book history i don't know anything about madame webb i've read comic books for 15 years so it was a very weird choice but you could see because they're just desperate to make something but once they got to that point they really needed to have something solid if they were gonna make a movie around this fairly obscure character they simply did not do that okay next question is decode johnson a good actor yes you just gotta put her in the right position well it has been the best use of her thus far very good in the social network okay she's in one scene she's very good in five-year engagement okay i'll go with that um she steals that movie honestly from everybody else okay uh she she wasn't right for the 50 shades of gray movies but that's okay you want some you know she's wonderful in what one of my favorite movies of the 21st century which i think was my number one movie for the year that came out 2015 a bigger splash oh yeah she's really good in that right the 50 shades movie can kind of take a little bit right i don't i don't hate them but they're just not for me she was really good in lost daughter she was yeah she was so she has a place and by the way that those are both dramatic roles and comedic roles you're right we talked about how she is attempting to navigate a modern movie star career which is very hard and we talk about the show all the time i guess you could have made the case we should have done a movie star playbook for dakota here on the other hand she's only gotten more famous yeah at least on the internet over the course of the last month because of the way that she has engaged in every interview regarding this film maybe like more famous to the people at large i mean this is she's been powerful for a very long time remember when she like went on ellen and was like you didn't invite me to your birthday party ellen and yeah like and she is she has had those the architectural digest for i know that i have talked about it many times but it's really one of those you gotta see it for yourself but then the revelation that she was just like making weird stuff up in that because she didn't know what to say because they just addressed it with all these limes um and she hates limes you know it's it's powerful stuff that doesn't come around that often okay so then a follow-up question is she a good actor is she a genius yes like do you think that she is orchestrating these moves or is she a kind of zealot figure who finds herself in remarkable circumstances because she she could potentially have incredibly wry and amusing sense of humor or she could be a little check out on stuff why can't it be both well that's interesting yeah maybe i think she's just special you know special enough if you watch her the please don't destroy sketch from a few weeks ago she's obviously got great comic timing if you watch her being interviewed did you see the clip of her trying to make three spider-man movies which like she has far superseded gwen poutcher forgetting what she was in do you know who dakota johnson is in a long-term relationship with chris martin yes and do you know that she is regularly featured like on gwenna's instagram like they all send things giving together oh that's nice and they're like buds and it's like it's just it's really galaxy brain amazing stuff that's happening where you're on cold play these days what are you doing uh touring the world are they still uh i think in the last couple years yeah i haven't heard it but i like first 2.5 albums bangers yeah like i'm pro the good cold play don't know what's up with them now but i don't really know what's up with music i just learned about jack harlow so from a just learned from a down good donut commercial he's wrong with your man yeah no no that's why i google uh so i asked this is the worst movie of the decade you think it is i i thought fast acts was like really really bad and really worse than this because there was something about the cravenness combined with the bad acting and just the absolutely terrible cgi like this just looks uninspired bad it doesn't look like we spent 500 million dollars to try to convince you that computer pixels are beautiful that you know so i'm a little less offended by it yeah i i i agree i agree is it the biggest joke of the decade maybe because every like almost everyone's on the joke okay at this point so question number four then except except for i guess the people who released it but like decoder johnson is like out here being like i haven't seen it i don't know which i find very amusing yeah um even though she did attend the premiere which means she walked the red carpet and just bailed many people do that so no party afterwards or anything i mean she could have gone to dinner and gone to the parties so people do that where was the premiere i don't know okay so probably somewhere around there uh why is the line from the trailer which is quote he was in the amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died not in this movie so here's my been my theory about that line from the beginning which is that it like it is actually ai that they put in the and that sounds weird that they put in the trailer to cover some like expository trailer problems you know um so that in the span of it was never in the movie yeah you don't think it was cut after they learned that the internet had been making fun of this line this overly expository line no you don't think it was she says incredibly dumb stuff similar to this you know i did feel like some of that was in the delivery which is why i still think it was ai or i mean it could have an adr like from her car you know i find this a curious choice because at a minimum people like cheering you have an opportunity for like a little bit of like a rocky horror the room kind of situation where we can all participate in this moment when the line happens so just be sitting in this 116 minute movie that is so bland and boring i'm not able to get the line i don't know it diminishes the experience i agree wait i didn't want to give us the satisfaction you think that's what was going on they're not that quick on the update when i said everyone is in on the joke i think i met everybody but the people in charge of editing this trailer and movie you know okay so we sort of addressed this already but i mean i just enunciated one more time why did they make a superhero prequel for superheroes no one knows about or cares about i to make try to make money but if you were going to do that i make girl money i love girl money yeah i love when there's money i wish that i could spend more of my girl's money but they never give me the chance i what currency is girl boss money what's paying obviously okay you want to say is it lira it could be right yeah but the inflation is like i like that you're holding your lira though just in case it comes back literally buckets of it to be able to buy like one donut yeah that actually that is how girl boss conversions rates work yes 70 on 100 of course we all understand that uh so there's just no superhero stuff in this movie there's one big final battle sequence yeah she holds a piece of rubble like a shield which is amusing but it's like is this like a captain america callback like is this in the madame web canon that she's good at grabbing a shard of metal as a shield i don't know maybe if you've done that research i know i know i failed today i apologize um i i find the decision making to make this a prequel rather than a movie that is actually about a team of young women who all have spider-like abilities genuinely weird kind of mystifying yeah they don't really do anything except sometimes sometimes dakota johnson aka cassandra webb aka cassie aka madame webb um sees the future but honestly the editing in this movie is so confusing that it takes a while for you to understand whether she's seeing the future or the past and it's not actually really clear what her like telekinetic abilities actually are i rarely well i have a question about that i rarely say this though but i genuinely found that particular aspect of the movie just annoying just the inability to understand what was pre-cognitive and what had already happened and the way that it was cut together unpleasant to watch and i'm usually really willing to roll with it you also weren't really willing to roll with that uh in argyle that's true that's true well maybe the problem is with you they are in a death duel to be the worst movie of the year so far i was gonna say also they were paid for with girl era so maybe the problem is you is that the credits of the end of a movie paid for by girl era um and all proceeds go to the girl bosses of the united states of girl boston uh so what's the deal with tahar rahim's this is like you turned to me 30 minutes in and i like and as i was having the same thought of like he's not actually saying any of these words like his whole performance is 80 yard you see his mouth saying words like four times and they don't match and then all the other times it's on zasha man's face so she's looking at a bunch of tv screens or you know he's racing down the street or he's wearing a mask or he's in a car and we see the we see his head at a weird angle like we're seeing the back of his head while he's talking it's just bizarre like was this character completely different was it because tahar rahim's accent during his performance wasn't right like what happened here i think they must have rewritten every single bit of what was going on which is maybe also why they had to add in lines to the trailer to explain him that don't exist it seems like everything about him was changed it's it's terribly terribly confusing watching the movie and execute quite poorly like it is this movie is dire at times when you're watching like this even a common moviegoer who doesn't really think about how things are made ever is gonna be like why is this character like this anyhow next question so as i said the movie is set in 2003 but was actually meant to be set in the 90s but they changed it to 2003 midway through to fit the tom holland spider-man chronology and i ask this because one it was suggested by a couple of reporters that it was originally set in the 90s and two there's all kinds of 90s references a bunch of needle drops in the movie we hear cranberries we hear four non-blondes we hear meredith brooks and the energy is very no cell phone the energy is very like gwen stefani from style perspective you know she looks so good i mean i i was bored so i spent 20 minutes trying to figure out who makes those jeans that she's making but you're right they're all rain dogs they're all yeah so sydney sweeney celeste o'connor and isabel merced play this trio of young women teenage girls who are imperiled by the spider guy that tahar rahim plays because he has a precognition that they're gonna kill him and so he's got to take them out before they can take him out this is the kind of organizing conflict of the movie dakota johnson intersects because she is also having precognitions and she encounters them and she sees what's happening to them so she has to intervene but it feels very similarly to me to um captain marvel which is it looks like this kind of prefab remember the 90s were so cool girl power tank girl gwen stefani kind of energy the celeste o'connor character has her hair done up almost the way gwen stefani does that's true um there's a lot of midriff exposure but then there are also key needle drops like the the present day circumstances in 2003 opens with a great yayas needle drop toxic plays a role in a movie so i was just confused now sj clarkson was interviewed about this and she said the script that she saw was always 2003 but it just feels it's a tiny bit of that salturn thing where i'm like what what are we supposed to take away from this with all this diegetic music that feels like it was from 1984 and not from 2003 i don't know i'm just throwing it out there yeah i mean i when toxic shut up people are gonna get mad at me but like this it was like mad web and no one was sitting next to us so i did and i turned my brightness down but i did get on my phone to google and make sure the toxic was 2003 because i like anticipated your salt burn anxiety and i was like wait a second i need to make sure this right now do you think mad web is a reliable narrator and that's why all the dates are wrong on all the stuff no what i was gonna say is when i was going i was like wait a second is toxic 2003 or is it later because in my mind as a young woman with her lira you know you catch up to things like a little bit so i have vivid memories of listening to toxic like later in college so which is like later than 2003 so sometimes when you're young you're not like at the forefront of things you're catching up you know so maybe they're just younger and they're catching up to all of this cool music okay that could be the case that's a nice explanation related to toxic why does this movie tease and teasing has a um this jockey come on this song is gonna be a big hit here comes toxic by britney spears right he's a superwoman team-up fight yeah which is a pretty good idea for a superhero movie yeah i would enjoy it and then just turns out to be yet another sequence in which madame webb just like grabs the girls and they run away well she crashed with a taxi into a diner but then just runs away like this movie's just a series of them running away from stuff i mean i agree i don't get it what are madame webb's superpowers now you mentioned that she's a precognitive mutant i mean isn't that also mr x-man's power his name is professor s he's a professor i believe he has a phd phd in mutant genealogy among other things okay uh no he's a telepath he can make things move with his mind he can read people's minds she can see the future maybe she can get there don't they say at some point she's only beginning to understand her powers it's a very good point yeah so uh at a certain point we see throughout the film that she can see into the future very briefly into the future like 30 seconds a minute into the future we are in the film during the big final battle sequence and i love how much of this i retained i feel really good as core memories slide out of my lefty year i have madame webb plot intricacies in my right uh they're on this big pepsi cola sign fighting spider evil spider guy by the way that is absolutely a product placement pepsi is featured throughout the film yes um after dakota johnson almost like drowns and goes into cardiac arrest and then less than 24 hours later she goes to the baby shower and she wants a beer but they offer her a pepsi instead because i love pepsi do you like pepsi i'll drink it i grew up in atlanta which is the coca-cola town so there was a time when you know i when i ordered the regional uh you were in war with pepsi well no like the regional you asked for a coke not a soda not anything you want like a coke please and there was a time when they said it's pepsi i would say no thank you but now i say sure thank you well thank you for that you know what uh during this battle sequence it appears that madame webb her spirit leaves her body and it then extends to the three other women who are imperiled during this fight and that she's gonna reach out to save them but before we see what she can actually do as her body multiplies she gets punched in the chest by evil spider guy and then so we never actually see what else you can do besides see the future and hold that metal shield so that she blocks fireworks from blasting her face this movie is insanely bad um i assume she'll be able to move things around right it's like the mind is limitless we only use like 10 percent of her minds what movie is that from that i mean yeah that obviously and then you take a pill but there's another movie oh it was when i was re-watching defending your life for the 1991 oscars and yeah what percentage very funny that's good how much do you think i'm using um 17 like is it possible that i'm at 98 this is the best i can do at 98 like i'm actually not very impressive and developed but i've harnessed as much power as i can while everyone else is at 10 and they're doing better than me i've gotten like a lot of feedback in my personal life about you not going to the dinner at telluride and that suggests if you're using more of your brain power you're using all the wrong stuff let it not be said that i am not a humble man yeah because i'm willing to share that kind of information what fucking idiot i am uh okay so madame superpowers we don't totally understand we have a rough understanding of them and you've added a useful corollary question here which is why is she a madame i was really hoping that she would like wake up in france at the end of the movie and i would set up like you know madame webb's like adventures it's like the french spider superhero is the impression there that she is like the the leader of the harem of young women like is she running a brothel like what is going on here i don't know and everyone who signed on was like absolutely madame you know well that would be interesting that would be more of a musical adaptation um okay that's fine so an important part of this movie you mentioned that there were some spider-man easter eggs so adam scott is in this film love adam scott wonderful actor severance coming back soon one of my favorite shows last few years uh in this film he plays as you alluded to with your spider-man easter eggs note ben parker aka uncle ben aka the man who is murdered who inspires the spider-man story is uncle ben a paramedic in the is that canon i don't remember because he is also madame webb's like paramedic partner yes um i don't remember what his job is um if you just google uncle ben it says uncle ben wild rice and then uncle ben what happened to him so in this universe does this mean that adam scott who indicates to cassandra webb early in the film that he's met someone special is that in this timeline he's gonna marry marissa tome i asked you that during this film what do you think i think that you need to give me some credit for because as soon as they said ben parker i was like oh that must be uncle ben and then i said is that is he gonna marry marissa tome so that's like three characters that i was able to connect the only superhero franchise that neither you nor i have given up on is spider-man and so we'll have that forever and your deep knowledge of spider-man can continue research into the story of madame webb i think is a boon to the show if madame webb takes up residence in france and just does french superhero stuff like i'll i'm there opening day for every movie okay good to know um i'll bring my friends question number 11 yeah did you picture emma roberts as spider-man's mom no and i wasn't paying attention when that guy dropped i don't know what i was doing i wasn't looking at my phone i think i was thinking about what i was gonna have for dinner um but then you elbowed me and you were like that's spider-man's mom and then i put it all together spider-man's mom i think her name is mary in the comic books and maybe in this movie as well canonically not blonde okay i believe brunette short-haired brunette it's anyway they're breaking the baby shower scene was really funny that's what it's like to be a baby shower and they make dakota johnson like play games what's your favorite shower game i hate all of them one time our very like my best friend who's the first to have kids um the first of many kids yeah she's a lot of children um i love them all she so we all went to a baby shower in the game we're like 25 we're very young none of the rest of us have kids and we're all asked to give parenting advice um that's it and we're also really hungover because we had a party the night before so that was good i my one um friend my doctor friend just wrote like vaccine save lives which i thought was good parenting advice yeah okay but um that was funny just because it failed entirely i haven't really played well we played jeopardy at your baby shower uh the baby shower that riley yeah um i can't remember that but that sounds right i lost that core memory because unfortunately for me that was fine i'm not really a shower person pro babies freak out by showers so i appreciate this representation question 12 if a spider bite would grant you superpowers would you let it bite you so my initial answer to this was yes i'm not really that afraid of spiders so that would be fine okay and i would have superpowers yes but it does seem like once you have superpowers people are always trying to kill you and that good note that is not the kind of life that i'm trying to live perfect answer thank you what's your answer it's a real what are the power situation you know what powers do you not want i definitely don't want precognition that sounds like an absolute nightmare for me yeah that's true i you already think you have it uh well i have enough of it okay i have it in the ways that i need um i would love to fly yeah you know even more so teleportation oh amazing yes i fucking hate traffic yeah just hate it i fucking hate sitting in my car waiting for somebody to turn left in the middle of a busy thoroughfare so yeah teleportation would be good yeah i mean you just save a lot of time that way for me the number one thing i'd like is the mary poppins just snap your fingers and everything's clean oh i leave i mean that's just like that's really interesting uh okay question number 13 and i say this with a couple of caveats one is that there's a new film called immaculate coming out on march 22nd starring this person and that this person has appeared in five films in the last 12 months why did sydney sweeney sign up for this movie because they told her that she would get to be spider girl in another movie and that was something she wanted to do for financial reasons but based on what anyone but you did at the box office which is to say as we mentioned earlier this week extraordinarily well right she could be she could be jean gray in the x-men well no one she could be the most she could be the next wonderful yeah okay but when you're signing up for these movies yeah you don't know that in fact the expectation is probably flipped i would also point out anyone but you also stony movie so maybe the reason that she did this is because they were like hey would you like to make this movie would you also like to do this i believe that's the answer yeah there's a little bit of double double on this one and you know what worked out great and once upon a time on this podcast i said how could they possibly release anyone but you over christmas how could they release this movie over valentine's yeah we have our answer our answer is that this movie is a fucking turkey and that they were trying to bury it in the biggest time of the year to bury a movie and they felt like anyone but you had commercial potential at a time when a lot of people go to the movies and they were right so well done by sonny at least in that respect okay give me an honest reaction to this but as i said this reminded me of captain marvel a movie that was not very good i did not think the marvels was very good i'm very mixed on the wonder woman movies some parts i think are great some of them are not so great there's just not a lot of good female superhero movies like at all and we're really down the line now with this like we're at the end of this and we're looking for whatever we're looking what the new phase is going to be but even in the new phases not a lot of female-led titles so why why are there not good female superhero movies look within john because of men like me i don't know i like the first one yeah i mean up until the third act i mean that's true literally every single one of these movies even the good ones like i don't i don't know what's happening and they're all just like smashing things against each other there's a gradation issue in my opinion that like the final act of wonderment is uniquely bad and ugly relative to a movie that otherwise looks pretty good yeah that's true uh i think they all look pretty bad so i like wonder woman i i i hand to god do not remember anything about captain marvel a movie that i saw with you for this podcast that was pretty rough i liked the young woman from the marbles and her family sure uh yeah she was great that was a good that was a pretty good tv show um what are the which are the other bad ones uh i mean we can go down the i mean you know famously there's like the electras and the catwomen's of the world sure um i mean have there been any other female-led i guess black widow was okay oh yeah the whole russian spy thing it was okay and that's really it's it's electro black widow the marvels cat woman birds of prey that was i like that i like birds of prey oh i like the roller skating sequence i mean you know the very basic answer is that they're always tack on afterwards it's like and now we'll do this but like but for women are carrying like not whatever burden that is but it's just like they have to do all of this stuff while meeting some made up expectations of what you would want to see from like a woman superhero more of a structural issue yeah um i generally agree i think that if they had made a black widow movie earlier in the marvel story that actually would have made it it would have made more sense it would have been better you probably could have got a better filmmaker to make it it wouldn't have been released during covid which would have helped i would like to know that movie would have been like in theaters and not during the covid experience nevertheless um last question number 15 speaking of comic book stories can we just talk about the sony spider-man thing and what's going on with it that's just the question is let's just have a final conversation so the context let me spend it into a question for you okay why did we sit in the theater through the entire credits waiting for a stinger that never appeared it's a great great question and you say what obviously uh well charlie rose we're conditioned we're conditioned to expect that in a film particularly in films that are not terribly good that they'll leave us walking out the door wanting more and the best way to do it obviously is to attach a stinger to the end of these movies it's a sad thing with they poisoned us the sony films in particular have this very awkward balance where they've made three mega successful tom hong spider-man movies in the last decade they've made two unusually successful venom movies they made morbius which was a dud but i believe they have a stinger on it they made two animated spider-verse films which i love i just absolutely adore both of those movies and then later this year we're also getting an addition to madam web craven the hunter and venom 3 oh craven the hunter is a spider-man then he is how he's related to spider-man he is a signature villain in the spider-man story now this what's his issue uh that dan spider won't let me hunt the way that i want to hunt or whatever you know who knows he's a game the world's most dangerous game uh this shows that it's best when you're asking me stupid questions i really feel that way so anyway i mean those movies i've been able to be my favorite movie of the year but might be absolutely abysmal um craven hunter looks not great i gotta say it looks not great and adam webb was a nightmare and is this like mismanagement does it not matter is it all attacks right off i mean you know we stuck around for the stinger because 13 year old boy living inside me was like when will they show me the next sinister six preview there is a movie that they've been leading to here which is the sinister six which is like the six big villains in the spider-man universe team up together and they all try to fight spider-man didn't they all didn't they do that in the last one in which one what was the one with the three spider-man yeah sort of not really a little bit but they're all in those stages next to each other right yes it's not exactly all like for example mysterio is in the sinister six the jayton hall character from the second spider-man he didn't appear in no way home so like and this is a movie that has been long threatened i think drew goddard was attached to write and direct many years ago and it is like in theory one of the only kind of villain movies that you can make that would actually work because those were big characters if you care about spider-man so that's one that they're probably gonna make at some point but aside from that you don't look at the spider-man world and be like there's just there's 300 movies here there's not it's like show me spider-man i want to hang on spider-man even venom is supposed to be much more intrinsically connected to spider-man than it actually is based on where that character came from so i just don't know what they're doing i think this is a really weird way to go about this process then again i don't work in a studio i'm just a guy in front of a microphone so uh i want to thank you for your patience as we work through madam web you're so welcome we had a lovely time together and otherwise um romantic and and thoughtful valentine's day again okay thank you to the people at sticky rice island park for all that you do wow yeah it's fun i would love to be sponsored by sticky rice speaking of fun let's talk about the most sponsored content it was self-funded okay well jennifer lopez spent 20 million dollars of her own money on this is me dot dot dot now colon a love story who owns it now amanda amazon does they paid an undisclosed sum according variety what do you think it was i don't know because it's so they paid for this is me dot dot dot no i'm sorry this is me dot dot dot now colon a love story and the just released just announced to be released a documentary about the making of this album this is me now visual film okay and whatever else she's doing that's called the greatest love story never told ben affleck is featured prominently and it will be released on february 27th also on amazon friend so i haven't seen this and you have you've seen the love story i have i've you know i saw it from afar the first time around i lived the 20 years in between i saw it from afar and in the much documented uh updates on jennifer lopez's blog and in the tabloid media the second time around and now i've seen the musical film did you own the album this is me now on cd so this is me then this is me excuse me i i do not think that i did okay you own any jennifer lopez albums i didn't really own albums like that sean you know i mean not a collector of physical media well i was an after generation child sorry okay and so you advocate stealing i mean actually i didn't have jennifer lopez earned the funds earned the 20 million dollars from dalola her orange soda cocktail and her very successful beauty line okay and i don't know whether she has passion right now i'm sure she does since our um movie start taste test have you had any dalola i haven't personally but i had friends who tried a different one and they liked it more than me like dalola this is me then is the album i'm just like yeah i have some in my water bottle right now i feel like that's sick but maybe not the most professional choice at 12 05 p.m so this is me then is was released in the throes of the tabloid scandal when she was dating that athletic in the aftermath of her relationship with sean p diddy combs that's the album that has jenny from the block on it um it is like it's the ur lopez moment right it's after out of sight she's a movie star she's a recording artist she's beloved she's a tabloid fixture right 20 years gone by she's enormously wealthy she's had great success she's been reunited with her lost love ben what is this movie about so this is a musical visual album basically of this is me now which is like the sequel album she's also releasing right now right so sort of like lemonade uh maybe in format slightly okay i don't want to make any more comparisons i mean i would say that the film like in terms of visuals the reference that popped into my mind the most was ava duvernay's a wrinkle in time um and not integrate the visual palette it's like there is a lot of fantastical stuff going on here so there is a narrative which is that there is a jennifer lopez like figure played by jennifer lopez who has been unlucky in love and it is about her however many years journey through several divorces and like hoping for love and feedback from the public from the people in her life and is she a love addict and how is like is she silly to believe in true love and then at the very end they're like one third of ben affleck's case is shown in the very last frame coming together as because she has finally found true love again yeah do you think of yourself as a love actor no but there is a major um zodiac element of this film okay so the zodiac killer no no i mean really who could say you know like the zodiac signs right so that is the plot point no uh david myers right long time music video director this is like five or six like pretty like opulent music videos strung together with this narrative so that's the narrative but i need to tell you like the various scenes and this is this is not comprehensive by the way so the first one is a dance sequence that like basically it's like a cyberpunk factory okay um and there's a giant mechanical heart at the middle of it that they have to keep pumping by feeding it flowers but then all the gardens are dead so it runs out of flower petals and so the heart stops okay so that and that turns out to be like a dream that jennifer lopez is having i'm sorry like the jennifer lopez character she's unnamed in the film i see and that's a dream that she's recounting to fat joe who's her therapist he's pretty concerned about her addiction tendencies when it comes to love they have a lot of sessions at one point he fires her as his client she finds her way back to him was his uh doctorly advice to lean back i don't think so at any point while they're having therapy or maybe just after she's in this glass like house that comes crashing down on her at one point just to give you an idea of some of the metaphors that are at work here if the mechanical heart wasn't enough but so in that glass house which is really more like a glass penthouse in an apartment in like future new york there's a tv screen playing with like a like a cable news anchor like a right more like o'reilly than tucker carlson as far as i can tell but that's just because of the styling because it's ben affleck with like a tremendous amount of prosthetics and a wig and he's playing it's he's hosting the truth report with rex stone and throughout the musical film he's just like saying like honestly kind of funny bullshit cable news stuff and a lot of this is like mocking media coverage of them and media coverage of stuff or whatever it's like not totally divorced from reality but then at the end he gets like he's a credit sequence and so the very last thing you see after all the credits are him doing like a little report straight to camera and then the last thing he says only you can let the love in your heart die and you should never let it die and then cut so that's what ben affleck's up to drive a motorcycle in like an important motif and like i said he's there at the very end okay the zodiac council so another thing that's happening and what brought me all this is that there is like a there's a council of sort of godlike beings you know it looks like a leftover marvel set like astral plane situation and one person to represent each side and they're there just like watching what's going on with jennifer lopez and they have they have a lot of concerns about the decisions that she's making and she's you know and she's like she's leo and she's like with a libra and that's not gonna work or something i don't know so you asked whether i consider myself an addict to love i don't but i watched this as a fellow leo you know so that is because there was such an emphasis on the signs i was like oh no so jaylo is a leo she's a leo she invented both leos oh it makes so much sense yeah um they don't talk about a leo leo pairing in this have we discussed this about it you just unlocked something oh yeah yeah it's very powerful stuff can i tell you who's on the zodiac council please do jane fonda trevor noah kim petrus kiki palmer post malone mila grass hyson sophia vergara jennifer lewis and jay shetty who's jennifer lewis uh just uh well you would recognize her and we'll go after this okay um and i don't remember who oh yeah yeah she's great the only thing i remember is that post malone is leo on the council so again i just had like a lot of conflicts about my own sign post malone is the leo yes there's a lot going on here and they're also making like vanderpump rules jokes like it's really like they're sort of a narrative at some point after pato fires her she goes to love adx anonymous and there's a big dance sequence i love that's another music video um she also there gives honestly like one of two maybe three like like totally gripping jaylo monologues about the power of love and i was just like that right there is my girl like she still has it and this could be the climax of a rom-com and like i i would buy it every time unfortunately it's like in a like random gym like funded by a billionaire that's where love adx anonymous is happening she also one point lies on the couch watching the way we were i told you this yesterday and mouthing like all of barbara's dialogue along which i thought was wonderful and then at the very end she does like a full singing in the rain like i guess homage um she's like on a set in the rain with an umbrella doing not gene kelly stuff but do you think i should watch this i don't know like it's it's not the worst thing i've seen okay and it's so just weird but clearly something that was in her mind and she wanted to make happen and she made it happen so in 1980 billy joel after a series of six very successful albums that were also critically panned released an album called glass houses the um cover of the album is billy joel looking at a giant glass house while aiming to throw a rock at it and the whole album is about how nobody understands yeah what a great sincere artist he is frankly the album rocks yeah it is a wonderful billy joel album so i'm not against this kind of material yeah this kind of self-mythologizing self-flagellating self-analyzing it's going for it and i honestly like that it is very aware of the public narrative around them and responding to it with ambition and wild weird j-lo taste i mean it's very specifically only one person could have wanted to do it this way yeah and i do also think i haven't listened to the full album yet one of the songs was kind of catchy but i think this is probably enhancing the musical experience certainly if you will so i got handed to her i'm really excited for documentary as you know what did you what do you think of uh la faire de io in which io deborah needed to apologize and then j-lo told righty she came in with tears in her eyes she was so mortified i mean i you know i think tina faye had the the right advice on hospital turistas which is don't say stuff on a podcast yeah often to see we are expensive and dangerous yes is that how you feel i would say that's not your brand oh you mean i just say shit i think you're authentic um oh do you i do i don't know whether i think that's a compliment i know that yeah i think many people would think that it is but i am sort of dated i you're right that i just say what i want to say but i don't really have any interest in then like meeting up with people afterwards you know right this is your superpower yeah i'm content to be in fact you don't want to i really i really don't want to yeah okay so i don't the consequences aren't the same okay well do you feel like we're having a good dumpuary i have a bunch of other films i talk about i don't really want to waste our time um like was this relative to previous dump areas that yeah we learned about hunter biden so you know what of course we're here because one thing i've been thinking about since we did beekeeper is like what's the right way to say q anon you know because he told me i'm q anon like what what is wrong with you i'm not hearing what you're hearing slow down take a deep breath through the nose out through the mouth q anon q anon you got that's okay what was i saying so i'm really glad that that the machines have heard you use that phrase because much like that line from madam webb it will be used against you at a certain point uh i can confirm that the beekeeper was influenced by that movement or jan 6 or hunter biden or hillary clinton but it's a one reading of the film yeah do you think there's a jan 6 reading of madam webb all right let's see if we can do this let's work really hard we've made it hard enough just for the free jambo sample um okay so let's see the cassandra webb is a paramedic right once upon a time she's looking out for the greater good even when the the system is not she operates outside of law enforcement right but she is also empowered to enter complicated circumstances she's got a siren right she's she's creating a found family because the normal institutions of family have failed her and those around her the united states of america behind yeah and the three super girls yes they're all orphans right and so they and they like diner food you know they're just simple you know they're like they're not fancy oh i see yeah there's also the earth they just want some more cherry pie um and what why do they read that thing again why why did why is the third act happen because why is the third act i mean that is the right question about madam webb i can't believe we did 40 minutes on that we returned to madam webb um the beekeeper is a good example of a bad movie that's really good madam webb is a good example of a bad movie that's really i agree and such a delineation exists and madam wasn't fun it sounds like you had a lot of fun with the j-lo film oh sure and that's really what we're looking for in our bad movies you know we're looking for an opportunity to celebrate some of the silliness as opposed to the silliness curdling and then effectively making fun of how we've chosen to use our time right especially thank you the end credits which was a colossus that was really tough um i want to say my thanks to uh our very young hunter biden chris ryan for his contributions to this episode thanks for producer bobby wagner um well next week on the show we're going to be talking about a good movie we'll see you then