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Coming up. And I will always love you. Me and Van Lathan, The Bodyguard, next. A bodyguard lives by three rules.
Never let your guard down. Never let her out of your sight. Never fall in love. Kevin Costner, Whitney Houston, The Bodyguard, Ringer.
Now playing at the Ringer. All right, Van. It's just a Friday afternoon here. We're taping this on a Friday.
Two guys talking about The Bodyguard. Totally makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. A classic, and I'm going to start here.
I texted you, and I was like, I want to do The Bodyguard. I just want to have the Whitney Houston conversation. This was really her last NBA Finals win before it starts to slide downhill. It is an incredible eight-year run.
She's magnificent in this. She looks great. She sounds great. This movie was a massive hit.
She never really approached it again from the movie side. She dabbled in the pop culture side, but this was really the last peak for her. I thought she was a comet. I'll never forget her.
What do you think of anything in this movie? I just think of being captivated in every single way surrounding it. Whitney Houston has six songs on The Bodyguard soundtrack. The six songs are all definitive Whitney Houston songs, for the most part.
There's a cover of I'm Every Woman in there. These are songs that when you watch the movie back, they were just playing over and over and over and over and over again, almost as if the film itself was an excuse to release the soundtrack, which, of course, also had I Will Always Love You on it, which was the biggest song of that year, maybe a couple years there. When I think about her, I think about just like a perfect pop star, a perfect pop R&B star. And she was grabbing at that last rung on the ladder with this movie.
This was her attempting to become almost like a Cher in how Cher went. She did Moonstruck. She became like a very serious actress and went along with her movie legend. The Bodyguard was supposed to be the thing that was going to propel Whitney Houston to that side of movie star relevance.
And the Diana Ross Barber-Straeis game. Diana Ross Barber-Straeis game as well, of course. I wrote this in 2009 while Whitney was alive. Let's say you rated a young female singer from 1 to 50 in five categories.
Likability attracted this singing voice, pedigree, and stage presence. Young Whitney was a 50. Has anyone ever cracked 45? One of the many fascinating sub-files in the mid-80s.
You had a male singer, Michael Jackson, a female singer, Whitney, a boxer, Mike Tyson, a baseball pitcher, Dwight Gooden, and an actor-community, Eddie Murphy, who peaked out precociously young ages, convinced us they were headed toward being the greatest film in the genre of all time. Only none of them made it. Not one of them. And I would argue that Whitney barely edges out Gooden as the biggest tragedy of the five.
She should have been the Black Streisand, an iconic singer-actress who aged with her audience, lasted for decades, I'm going to break with you on that. All right, let's argue about it. So when you – and I think when I went back and I looked over Whitney Houston's career, first of all, there were two – there were certainly two facets of her career, right? It was Whitney Houston.
What you said about her checking every box is almost something that you can't accomplish now anymore. It would be very difficult to accomplish. I remember every story I heard about Whitney Houston when I was a kid was different. My mother and them would talk about how I was Sissy Houston's daughter and Dionne Warwick.
My brothers would talk about how fine she was and she was a model. And then the ladies in the church would talk about just the absolute devastating perfection of her singing voice. So she had all of this stuff coming at the same way and it just kept building up. She didn't get to the point movie-wise where she was supposed to go.
But if you look, Whitney Houston still sold over 200 million records. She's still – when you talk about the great voices of all time, she's going to be one of the five people that you talk about. She has to be mentioned. If it's three people, five, seven, she's mentioned.
I personally don't think anybody sounds better than her. I agree. I personally don't think anybody sounds better than her. I think the infamy that the later part of her life took with some of the things that we learned about her personal life and some of the exploits between her and Bobby and stuff, I think it didn't – at least for my community – it didn't subtract away from everything that Whitney Houston was.
And really, in a weird way, it humanized her. It humanized her in a way – this is not to say that anybody loved to see Whitney Houston struggle or go through these things, but it made a lot of people – it almost made her into sort of a folk hero. That she, despite all of her prodigious talent and everything that she had accomplished, she had moved past just being one of us who dealt with these sort of issues all the time. And in a way, it just made her – we rooted for Whitney until the day that she passed away.
Like, we rooted for Whitney and loved and uplifted Whitney despite everything that went on with her until the day that she died. The outpouring when she died seemed unusual to some people. It didn't seem unusual to me. I think that was the true measure of her impact.
And ironically, Costner gives the best UOG of the whole funeral. And I don't think people realize kind of how much affection he had for her. They knew they made the movie together, but I don't think they realized the depth of the relationship. And he was just heartbroken and gave this amazing speech about it.
But I just look at it like, she should still be here. Yeah, for sure. And then the cousin to that. It's really hard to fly that close to the sun and keep it going.
And that's why one of the reasons I respect LeBron so much. Like, he was given all the talent, right? But he also – he pulled it off. You know, he kept it going.
He didn't get sidetracked really by anything. And he just kept moving forward. He's still moving forward to this day. I think you look at somebody like Tiger, who is the most talented golfer probably ever.
And at some point, it's just – he lost his steering wheel, literally. And I look at Whitney, and I'm just like, that's the most gifted performer, I think, in my lifetime. Turned Streisand. Because Streisand, I think, has slipped through the cracks a little bit with maybe people under 40.
You go back and you – she was one of the biggest movie stars in the world in the 70s and had a voice that was – at least in the conversation with Whitney. It basically depends on preferences. You think Barbra Streisand sounds as good as Whitney Houston? I think she's in the conversation.
I'm just telling you. She has to go listen to The Way We Were at Evergreen. Like, she has some classics. I can listen to all of those things, Bill, until I'm blue in the face.
I think we're talking past each other right now. I said, in the conversation. Whitney is number one for me, period. Right.
Barbra Streisand, The Way We Were – I want everybody that's on this right now to listen to The Way We Were. They go listen to How Will I Know and tell me – and tell me what happens in your soul. Shout out to Barbra Streisand. I love Yentl.
Love that movie. Well, the thing with Whitney, we were waiting for the movie for a while because she was so charming. I sent you the clip. I remember I was in high school.
I don't remember if I was a sophomore or junior or whatever when she went on Letterman for the first time and she saved all my love for you and just absolutely crushed it in a way that watching it on television, you're like, oh, my God. I was watching a UFO land or something. And Letterman comes out at the end and he's just so thrilled and so enchanted by her. And she carries in the bodyguard.
She has a charisma and a warmth to her. And then the singing scene is obviously pushed over the top. But there's a couple scenes. The scene when they go on the date, she's really enchanting.
I really feel like she could have done this if she had kept her life together. I think she could have made a lot of movies. I think she would have been good. Yeah.
It's funny that you say Letterman was enchanted by her. He was leaping out of his skin. Dave had a moment, man. He did.
Yeah. Dave was having a moment. She was a lot. It's weird.
So I remember as a kid hearing The Greatest Love of All and just being like, what the hell? And my mom would hear the song and she would just turn the song all the way up and she would fall into Whitney Houston's voice. She would just like disintegrate and fall into it. And the song was so moving.
And if you look back at it now, and it seems schmaltzy, almost like elevator music, but Whitney had that, she had that thing that would take you to that next level. Remember when she sang The Star-Spangled Banner? Oh, yeah. And you're like, it's just, she, it's this aura, this sort of, you can't put your finger on it, it's just, the whole thing, it brings you to that point.
And to your point, in this movie, like when she's around, you feel it. Like you feel the push-pull between her and him. And she's giving off so much star power, even in these scenes, and he's trying to match it because he's trying to stay professional. He's actually playing this whole movie, trying to not do what David Letterman did when he actually was confronted with the real Whitney Houston.
And it makes for a good little interplay between their characters. Yeah, he almost can't handle it. Yeah. Her voice was so great.
You know, I've just had a daughter who was going up to elementary school and they would have these singing stuff that they would do in school. And it's basically like, if you're a little kid saying, Whitney or Adele, that was a bad parenting job by you. Just stay away from those two singers. Just period.
Just stay away. Don't go near them. It's embarrassing for your kid. It's embarrassing for you.
It's embarrassing for us. Like, just steer clear. And that was, you watch this, she's just belting it out left and right in a really special way. Costner, meanwhile, is on the run of runs here.
And this is like, you know, it goes back early, the mid-80s, he's in Silverado and America Fires. Hasn't really started. Then it's 87 to 92. He's in The Untouchables.
No Way Out. Bull Durham. Field of Dreams. Revenge.
He's the only stinker. That movie's still made money. Dance with Wolves. Winning every Oscar.
Robin Hood. JFK, The Bodyguard. And that's in six years. He produces The Bodyguard.
And his fingerprints are all over it. He wanted Whitney Houston. It was the only actress. He thought that, he thought the part had to be played by a really famous actress.
I mean, a famous singer. That it had to be authentic. Whitney couldn't do it. They waited a year for her schedule to clear so she could be in it.
And all of his instincts were like, this is the one. This has to be it. And it's funny. You read the reviews and people were like, this movie didn't get great reviews.
I think it's one of the reasons why we're having a rewatchable is because it's literally rewatchable. I think the chemistry is really good. The reviews are like, eh, not really. I'm not buying it.
All these years later, I think the chemistry is there. Didn't you feel it? I think it's good chemistry in hindsight. Yeah.
I watched it last night. I thought it was great chemistry, but I think we were in a chemistry era and there were other movies where there were these two dynamite. I think about this. Is this before or after like Basic Instinct?
It's before Basic Instinct. It's after Pretty Woman. Right. So there's these movies where these leads are like, I was, it seemed like these people are made for each other.
Like Basic Instinct is something completely different. It seemed like they were made to have sex with each other. But when you watch Pretty Woman, it's like they are just completely developed in one another and it works perfectly. So I think there was a standard there that maybe this movie didn't quite meet to a lot of critics that watched it.
But now almost no movie is like that. Nobody even cares about the chemistry amongst the leads. They don't even make cute films like this, like that much anymore. There's no real Pretty Woman for this era.
So when you go back and look at it, you're appreciative of just how they got together. Like there's a scene, you know, the Samurai sword scene. I watched it last night. I texted you.
There was real tension. I was like, I was really on some fly shit when I watched the movie. But maybe it didn't quite come across at that time. It preserves a little bit better than it presented when it came out.
It was also a really understated Costner performance that I think threw people off. Right. You know, and it was, he did it for a reason. He basically wanted that character.
He was playing Steve McQueen. Right. He was like, how would Steve McQueen do this? The quiet, simple, hard to read guy.
He even got a Steve McQueen haircut for it. And it works. But I think in the moment, especially following Robin Hood and JFK and people are like, wait, where's Field of Dreams, Bill Durham, Costner? What happened to that guy?
Yeah. And it's because especially in Field of Dreams where he was so exuberant about everything. So, yeah. So likable and American.
Yeah. He felt like he was so full of life and he's, he's listening to the voices and he's playing, you know, catch with his father and all that stuff. And for this movie for him to be cantankerous for a large part of it. Yeah.
Like almost, you don't want to fall in love and she didn't want to fall in love and the audience doesn't want to fall in love. The audience of this movie begrudgingly falls in love with Farmer because he's just so disciplined and so heroic. But he played it a little, a little straighter. And this was the start of a couple of, a couple of movies where he would do that.
Yeah. He did that in this movie. He essentially was the same guy, Wyatt Earp a couple of years later. And then, you know, there was a whole water world thing to where he was juggling what kind of star he wanted to be.
The mid-90s were kind of rough for Costner. He did Perfect World. Perfect World. Any kind of thing.
Yeah. He got it back with Tin Cup and a couple others. And kind of got his much away. But Tin Cup was him going back to the Costner.
Going back to the old Costner. Yeah. It was going to Tin Cup is a perfect film for me. So it was Whitney's first movie.
Lawrence Kasdan wrote this movie. Lawrence Kasdan. One of the best screenwriters in the last 50, yeah, 50 years. I gotta say, I didn't realize it either.
So I started doing the research and there's a whole story behind it. This was his first big script, 1975. Wait, what? Yeah.
It was his first script he tried to sell. Somebody bought it, 1975. Took the agent two years to sell it. All these people passed on it.
And then it kind of did that Hollywood development thing. And there's some good casting what ifs from the 70s that we're going to bring up. We'll get this. But then he writes Body Heat, does Big Chill, and then he's off.
And then he becomes one of the hottest writer-directors of the 80s. And he's like, now I really want to get the Bodyguard done. He's on Silverado with Costner. They're doing it together and gives Costner the script.
What do you think of this? Costner's like, we got to make this. Costner's not a big enough star yet. Then Costner gets untouchables.
No way out. Pull through him. We're making it. Let's go.
And they end up making it. And they write it. And then they wait for Whitney. Kasdan said he'd always seen Rachel, Whitney's character, as a superstar singer.
But by the 90s, her early success had plateaued a little bit. And the executives were like, eh, we're sure. She started, she was dating Bobby Brown at that point. I realized, and I'd forgotten, this is still the best-selling soundtrack album of all time.
Oh, yeah. We have to be. This was massive. By the way, let's get Saturday Night Fever.
This sold 45 million copies worldwide. Yeah. For all of my nerds out there whose ears are bleeding right now after the casting discussion, we're aware of the casting, before he wrote those films that Bill was talking about, the Star Wars and stuff like that. Just make sure that you, I just want to always try to cater to the nerds.
The Raiders of the Lost Ark. Raiders of the Lost Ark. A relatively relevant movie. Just want to make sure.
Because people are out of the directors. Yeah. I know. People are out there going, oh, you're talking about, he wrote, we know.
I would say he's one of the five best writer-directors of the last 40 years. When you add the screenplays that he just wrote for other people and the stuff he directed himself. The album won the Grammy, which is rare for a soundtrack. Two Best Original Song Academy Award nominations for I Have Nothing and Run To You.
I don't know where the fuck I Will Always Love You was in the Oscar thing or how that didn't win, but maybe it's because of the original song. Yeah. It doesn't qualify as a cover. How about this?
Change the role. Just change the role. Most important song in a movie probably in that decade. That song sold 20 million units worldwide.
Still the biggest by female artists, right? Ever. Yeah. Also, the film received seven nominations at the Golden Raspberry Awards, including worst picture, worst actor, worst actress.
Just fuck the Golden Raspberry Awards. I don't like the Razzies now. Bad taste for them. $25 million budget made $411 million.
Nuts. Second. in 1992 behind Aladdin, which somehow opened the same day. And Roger Abert, three stars.
He said, this movie does contain a love story, but it's kind of guarded passion that grows between two people who spend a lot of time and keep their priorities straight. There's one more piece of this that we should just talk about quickly before we get to the categories. Sure. This was a white bodyguard falling over with a black famous singer.
And this was during the stretch in the early 90s when Hollywood was starting to dip their toes into it carefully because we had the Michelle Pfeiffer Dennis Haysbert movie. We had Jungle Fever. But we're coming off the 80s where they wouldn't even let Eddie Murphy kiss Charlotte Lewis and Goldenshaw. They just cut it.
They didn't let Eddie Murphy basically hook up with anybody. You didn't see him have sex in the 80s until Boomerang in the 90s. But this movie does not consider race at all. It's not a plot.
It's not mentioned. And Costner's actually said we didn't feel like that was a story about. At the same time, it's hard to watch this 30 years later and think stuff like Rachel winning the Academy Award, which would have made her the first black actress to ever win the Academy Award. I kind of feel like that would have been mentioned by somebody.
Because when Halle Berry did it, I don't know, 12, 13 years later for Monster's Ball, it was a massive story. So it kind of decided, the movie chooses to ignore all of this. How did you feel about that? I was surprised about how much of a non-thing it was for me.
And I think that had to do, at the time, I don't remember it being a thing. I remember it being, I remember looking at it and going, oh wow, you don't really see that too much without it being the main driving point of the plot of the movie. You know, Jungle Fever comes out and that's the point of Jungle Fever. The whole point is that he's black, she's white.
I love that movie, by the way. That's the whole point of Jungle Fever. And then with the Dennis Hayes thing, I remember the story and Michelle Pfeiffer Lovefield, I remember the story was a little bit like, oh, this is an interracial situation, interracial love story. But then after that, it just kind of went away.
And I think one of the reasons why it went away is because of the place that Whitney Houston occupied in American pop culture. Yeah, because everyone was in love with her. I think that she, and this was a weird thing that happened then. See, back in that time, it was almost a badge of honor to say, as crazy and fucked up as it sounds, it was almost a badge of honor to say that a black star had transcended race.
Remember that whole thing to do the right thing where John Turturro is talking to Spike Lee and Spike is telling him, hey, your favorite guy is your favorite singer is Prince and Michael Jackson. Your favorite basketball player is this guy, your favorite place. And he did, John Turturro says, but those guys aren't black. They're not like black, black, right?
Because that was the whole thing that star, that that time was full of such huge mega stars that sometimes there was this narrative that those people had in a way transcended race. And in a way they kind of did because they existed in a plane that didn't have to do too much with blackness, right? It didn't. And so that was kind of thing.
Now stars, if you do that, Twitter will just eat you alive. So you have to in some way show that you're deeply, deeply connected to the culture. I say all I have to say that the fact that it wasn't that big of a deal says more about who Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston were at that point in their career. They were just mega, mega, mega stars.
And if you were going to go into that movie believing that they were in love, it was more about Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston than it was about a white man and a black woman. I'm sure I was 12 years old at the time. I'm sure I'm overlooking something piece somewhere that discussed this. But I can just remember that it didn't seem like it was made that big of a deal at the time.
There was one thing that happened during this that during the Twitter would have been a huge deal. The poster. The poster, you couldn't see Whitney's face. There's a poster that's on the billboards, the whole thing.
He's carrying a woman. It seems like it's Whitney but if you really look, you can't really see her. And there's some good stuff about this. In a 93 interview with Rolling Stone, Whitney even addressed it and said, look, people know who Whitney Houston is.
I'm black. You can't hide that fact. But people were mad that you couldn't see her face in the poster. They thought Hollywood was intentionally hiding her face to hide the fact that this was an interracial relationship.
Now, the other thing that happened during this time, Pelican Brief. Denzel and Julia, two of the seven biggest stars in the world at that point, they do the movie. They have a love scene that gets cut out. So they have this weird tension.
It's in the book. It's not in the movie. It's cut out. It's the movie you watch.
I like that movie but that last third of the movie, it's off and it's because whatever relationship they have, the movie kind of runs from it. So it's not like, it was unusual, I think, that Costa and Whitney that they went for it in this movie compared to what else was going around. Neither it was marketed as a huge part of the movie. It was never just kind of not addressed and I really admire that about the movie, actually.
Yeah. Look, looking back on it, I would have thought, it's just weird. I watched it and they're like, I don't know, man, they go together. We're going to take a break and we're going to do the categories.
All right, most rewatchable scene. Look, the last 15 minutes of this movie are going to win. I'm just telling you now, but we'll go through some of the runners up. I like when he meets her.
I like when he goes to the rehearsal. Frank. Hello. Hi.
Oh, you don't look like a bodyguard. What did you expect? Well, I don't know. Maybe a tough guy.
This is my disguise. Oh, this time is good. This is Nikki, Rachel's sister and the personal secretary. I like the fact that they're rehearsing for the video or whatever.
Not at a rehearsal space somewhere in Van Nuys. They're doing it a full-on production like at her crib. Yeah. With a bunch of people and a smoke and a whole nod and a director like at her crib.
They're doing this whole thing at her crib. I like that. And it does a good job of capturing like, all right, this person's really famous. She's ordering people around.
She's a little pouty. I get it. She's a superstar diva. Establishes everything about us.
I just have this all together. Rachel performs the dance song in the club. All hell breaks loose. Frank saves her.
It was a push full between them. That was the scene where she essentially had to surrender control to him. Because remember, there are people that keep trying to come up there and she keeps saying no to him. She keeps saying, don't intervene.
Don't intervene. Don't intervene. Don't intervene. That's one of the underlying things of this movie is that how do you protect somebody who has too much hubris and is too proud to admit that they need protection.
It was about him finding his, they both have to find a certain degree of vulnerability. He has to find connection. She has to find vulnerability. And so in that scene, it just keeps going and going and going until she realizes that she's in over her head and she needs a little help.
And that's kind of the point of the scene. So that's one of the best things that kind of connects them to as they start to build some trust right there. That song is kind of Whitney. She goes out of the Whitney stereotype for the kind of music she sings.
It kind of goes right to Janet Jackson I feel like in that song. Oh, you like it? Yeah, I like that song. It was an unusual Whitney choice but I think she wanted to show like a different pitch.
You know, she wanted to show her splitter. It's fine. It's not the era. It's not a song that could come out now but it was that weird Jody Wattley, Janet Jackson era.
But remember that whole era for me was like, that whole era for me was like, you remember Black Cat by Janet Jackson? Yeah. Like people love that song. I never liked it when they went there.
Like everybody was like, oh, they're gonna get slashed on guitar and I'll be like, no man, I do miss you much. So it's not even that it's that song. It's that whole little era. Although I did like Whole Heart and Snake by Paula Abdul, that joint goes.
But yeah, that's not my favorite Whitney. I like when Whitney smooths it out a little bit. Next rewatchable scene, Frank and Rachel's Date. This is a great, great, great like seven minutes.
This is my pick. Over the ending. Over the ending, this is my pick. This is my pick.
This is the case. Okay, so the Allman Brothers, what's she on the top? So like my pick for this is because there's so many little subtle things in that scene that to me are awesome. Number one, the part when they do the classic romantic movie cliche but then they bail out of it.
Remember he's sitting there, he's like, his head is down. She's like, did you guard somebody and then she died? Now in every other film, that's what happened. Yeah, and he's gonna tell the story.
He's gonna tell the story. We're gonna relive the pin scene from Lethal Weapon. Yeah. Lethal Weapon 2, I think it is.
Like in this thing. And he's fucking with it. Nice try though. It was less dramatic than that.
He makes a joke. They get a little closer together. She talks about the lyrics to I Will Always Love You and how depressing they are. That's because she can't understand the sentiments of the song yet.
Or country-western music. Oh yeah, right, right. She's like, you can just tell she doesn't like, you know. But the callback factor of that, knowing that it's gonna come late is, you're right, that's what makes that scene so great.
What? I mean, it's not depressing. How do you listen to the words? It is kind of depressing.
Yes, it is. It's one of those. Somebody's always leaving somebody's song. After a while, she understands what the song is actually talking about that not everybody that you love that you can be eternally connected to.
Sometimes you have to love somebody who then, for whatever reason, has to leave. And she's had so many people catering to her that everybody that's around her, like they're right there because they have to be. And then, by the time they get back to the apartment, she picks up a samurai sword. She thinks it's innocent.
She thinks it's nothing. She doesn't know that everything around him is deadly. And he has to show her how dangerous he is by lifting the silk up and letting it cut. And then she realizes, you know, just who it is that she's fucking with.
I thought that whole thing, that's one of the best date connection movie scenes I think that I've ever seen in a movie. I agree with you. I had this for What Stage the Worse or a nitpick somewhere in there later, but I'm actually mad that they didn't have a couple more scenes together like that. Now, in a way, it makes you appreciate that scene more because for like eight, nine minutes, they're really connecting in a way that's hard to do in a movie.
But then the next morning, he wakes up and he realizes they made a mistake. And that's really it. They don't really connect again. You know?
I might have done like two, three more scenes. Keep that going. All right, I got the Run For You performance just because if this movie, if I could re-edit it, first of all, it's way too long. But just Whitney singing, you're never going wrong.
Even the ending when she does the I Will Always Love You, I just would have stayed on her. I never would have gone to the banquet. Just like Whitney Cook for three minutes. Let her go.
But then the last 15 minutes, which we're going to dive into in a couple different categories, but we have the Oscars. We have Robert Will hosting the Oscars. I've been talking about that. We have her presenting an award.
We have kind of like, almost like her body double or her voice double singing her song, which was a really interesting choice. We have her winning. We have Frank in slow motion. We have the guy with the freaking camera rifle, which was pretty cool.
Yeah, which was an interesting invention. A random Debbie Reynolds. Yeah, Debbie Reynolds. She just pops up out of nowhere.
And I guess that was a moment in the theaters. I didn't see it in the theaters, but I guess it was a moment in the theaters where everyone goes, Debbie Reynolds just pops up and they give her a little shine right there. It's so weird. They have Debbie Reynolds and then no other famous people.
It's all like pretend actors, pretend films in the categories, the whole thing. And then, you know, then the whole thing, it seems like he's going to die leading to the airport, which it's one of the great endings. It really is. Her stopping the plane, running out of it, it's just hard not to get caught up in it.
Wait. And I will always love you. The song kicking in, the fact that it's acapella, which apparently was Costner's suggestion according to research. Said, no, no, let her go.
She's got the greatest voice of anyone alive right now. Let's go acapella. So that's my choice. So you have the Frank Rachel Date as your choice.
I have the Frank Rachel Date. I just think the Frank Rachel Date is adorable and very, very important to the plot and the connection of the two characters. What's the best? I mean, other than Whitney and Costner in their, Whitney's late prime, Costner, I have to speak.
I love professional bodyguard movies. I really like a movie that Ridley Scott did with Tom Berenger and Mimi Rogers called Someone to Watch Over Me. It's excellent. And it's a similar presence to this.
He's kind of protecting her and they kind of fall for each other and they shouldn't, but in that case, he's got a family. But what was that show that was set in England? It was like a terrorist show where the guy had to protect the ladies on Netflix. I can't remember.
I think it's called Bodyguard. I like that one with the Game of Thrones guy. Yeah, I think it's his name. I like when people have to be protected and then lines get crossed.
Feelings are had. Right. Because it's such an intimate thing. How can you care about somebody that much where you would put your life on the line for them and then just move on to the next job?
Those guys are always interesting guys that do that. They're always, I have discipline. I'm rigid. And then some person gets to the gooey center of who they are.
You make me feel safe. Now, why don't you really make me feel safe? Come on in my room today. Exactly.
Let's make some sexual secrets. There's a good one from the mid-2000s that kind of came and went, but I think it's pretty rewatchable. The Sentinel, Michael Douglas. I missed it.
He's like a secret service agent and he gets framed for something and Kiefer Sutherland has to chase it down. It's good. I recommend the Sentinel. Morbidation is the best.
The soundtrack, just the bangers. I mean, there's a reason it's the best soundtrack of all time. It's freaking loaded. The I Will Always Love You, the Dolly Parton connection always gets me that it was a Dolly Parton song and it kind of bounced around as a song.
I don't know if it was one of Dolly's three best songs. I don't know enough about her career, but then it finally finds the right voice. By the way, the Dolly Parton thing, I literally learned like four years ago. Wow.
I literally, I was legit at TMZ. We had a huge Dolly Parton fan at TMZ and they were like, they were like, you know, Dolly Parton is like, that's her song. I was like, what do you mean? They were like, well, she sang the song first.
And I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? But I'd never in like heard that. Dolly Parton for me is me and little Randy. Right.
That's my Dolly Parton. I never knew about this joint because that was such a huge song. I had no idea that it was a cover. Like all that time, as much useless fucking information as in his brain, I did not know that that was a cover until all of it took, until literally I was 37 years old.
Well, she owned it. She loved it. She was honored. She had a whole story about it the first time she heard it.
She had to pull over on the side of the road. She played it the right way. There was no bitterness at all. Another What's Age the Best.
The concept of the resentful sister slash assistant thing. I don't feel like has been tapped into it. We'll get into the complications with that role in that story arc when we get to What's Age the Worst. Just in general, though, I'm your sister.
I'm older than you, but you're doing way better than me and you kind of stole my thunder. I was suggesting that in movies and TV shows. I like this quote. I'm no good in a permanent position, Monty.
My feet go to sleep. Another What's Age the Best, the widescreen. So when this movie was on in the first 15 years after it came out, the square TVs, the way it's filmed, it's filmed really widescreen. So on the TVs, it would always be like hard to follow and they would have to do the thing where the camera was too close to everybody.
So the widescreen really helped it. Costner's hair, I felt like he kind of made that a thing. Clooney took it to another level in the yard and then even Jake. What are we talking about here?
It's a bowl cut situation? It's like a crew cut, bowl cut kind of McQueen thing. Then Clooney, Clooney did an ER and all hell broke loose. Jake tried to do it in Melrose Place, didn't really catch on as much for him.
Grant Show was the man for a second though. Grant Show is red hot. Grant Show, see, this is the shit, Bill. People don't remember shit like that.
Like people, I wonder what it's like to be Grant Show because it's like, Grant Show was such a thing. Like he would get like those little things from my mom. I'm like, hmm, who's that? I'm like, that's, you know, he was like the biker from Melrose Place whenever they had the backdoor pilot where he was talking to Kelly on 90210 or whatever.
And he was like, Andrew, shoot too. These guys were huge big deals and then it just kind of doesn't go. Grant Show dated every single good-looking woman on that show. Oh, did he?
Yeah, no, I mean on the show. You see the poster and you're like, wow, there's a good-looking woman on there. It's like Jake was involved with each person. Heather Lackler, Sidney, the hooker, you name it.
He was there. Costner's idea to start the I Always Love You with the acapella was great. And then the other piece that's Age of the Best, which I didn't even know, is the whole story about how it's supposed to be what becomes the broken hearted was supposed to be the cover that they used, but then a movie called Fried Green Tomatoes used it in the movie, 1991, and they were like, oh shit, we need to find another song. So just the fact that all that happened with Age of the Best.
Here's, I'm going to just read you quickly Costner's eulogy, just a piece from it, because this is Age of the Best. And maybe, Craig, if the audio's good enough, maybe we could just play Costner. But here's what Costner said. He was talking about how she didn't have a lot of confidence when they were filming The Bodyguard.
Whitney, if you could hear me now, I would tell you, you weren't just good enough. You were great. You sang the whole damn song without a band. You made the picture what it was.
A lot of leading men could have played my part. A lot of guys. A lot of guys could have filled that role. But you, Whitney, I truly believe that you were the only one that could have played Rachel Maron at that time.
You weren't just pretty. You were as beautiful as a woman could be. And people didn't just like you, Whitney. They loved you.
Wow. Fucking Costner, man. We've got to do a whole other movie on whatever this thing Kevin Costner had for Whitney Houston was. He was Kevin Costner.
He looked like he wanted a little cocoa. You know what I mean? There was something going on there, man. Whitney's fucking Whitney Houston.
Who wouldn't fall in love with her? If you're spending every day with her filming a movie, you're falling in love with her. You're at least building a crush. I'll say this.
Costner came to a Grantland party. Kimmel brought him. And any women at the party, including married people, all he had to do was just wave them over and it would have been over. Yeah, it was a whole thing.
He's got it, man. This was six years ago. Oh, six years ago. He's still doing his thing.
Okay, great. He still has it. He probably has it right now. Any other ones that you're best for you?
Secret Service guys. Oh, yeah. So there was a little wave that they had with Secret Service guys during this time because they had this movie and then around the same time, Bruce Willis was in a movie with Daniel Wayans, which I still adore, which nobody else fucking cares about because they think it's a lethal weapon knockoff. The Last Boy Scout.
Wait a second. Wait a second. Hey, first of all, it's on the list. And if you want to be invited with me and Chris Ryan, you're invited.
Hey, how dare you? How dare you? It's the Last Boy Scout. We fucking love that movie.
I pulled a Logan. Remember when Logan explained to us who John Hughes was? And I got over here and did the whole Last Boy Scout. Shout out to Logan.
But the reality is that those two movies were the first time I ever saw Secret Service guys depicted on screen. And since then, there's been a little run of Secret Service guys. Well, one guy was actually a Capitol Police guy. I remember he was protecting the president and was fucking Channing Tatum in the White House down or whatever.
And then the other one was, of course, Gerard Butler. And Angel has fallen. Then Olympus has fallen. Then my acting ability has fallen.
And then all of that stuff. But so Secret Service guys, after a certain time, became like leading men type characters. And I think it was even like at the end of the decade, there was a whole Secret Service way. Because remember Dave, Ving Rhames was a Dave.
He was a lovable Secret Service guy. The whole nine. So Secret Service guys have aged pretty well. I'm glad you threw that in at the end because I was going to come in off the top rope and say my favorite Secret Service guy ever is Ving Rhames and Dave.
Ving Rhames and Dave, yeah. Dave, I would have taken a bullet for you. What's Dave's the worst? Wow.
The sister's confession, the motive. That's the answer. It's just so bad. I still don't understand it.
Did Whitney, did she know that it was her sister? Like, why? You're paying somebody. You can't stop.
You can't change your mind. It's all so confusing. And then it's like, I never would have killed Fletcher. I never would have killed the baby.
It's like, oh, so you just take his mother out? That's cool. What is going on? It's so weird that Lawrence Kasdan, one of the great writers we've had, just had such a loophole in this movie.
Yeah, I think that was him trying to get twisty twisty. Like, it's coming from somebody that you definitely wouldn't think that it was coming from. But looking back, first of all, I don't know why, but I was strangely attracted to the sister when I rewatched it. I don't know why.
I wasn't feeling that way. I don't think it just didn't make very much sense. They didn't ever really show Whitney's character mistreating her. They didn't really ever show, it seemed like she was living a charmed life being with her sister.
There's a couple of evil looks in the rewatch. There's like two or three kind of stink faces she was making, but that's it. There's a gulf, a canyon of space between, my sister's a little annoying because she's entitled as a star, and I'm going to put a hit on my own sister. Like, there's a gulf, a chasm between those two things.
So when I went back and watched it, I'm like, that's kind of the only thing that doesn't work now. She's drunk in confession. The drunken confession's bad. Yeah, hold on.