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JUROR #2

It’s late-December and, foregoing our usual Christmas-adjacent movie watch, this year TGTPTU has a very special treat for the holidays. That’s right, listener, we bring to you our hot takes on what may prove to be Clint Eastwood’s final film--and even more likely his final theatrically-released film--JUROR #2 (2024) in time for its MAX streaming release so that you might celebrate with us and have yourself a very Merry Clint-mas.

Eastwood’s latest film with Warner Brothers continues what was a trend (excepting Cry Macho and The Mule) of not starring the star of the 70’s ape comedies and the Dirty Harry series, instead keeping Eastwood off camera and bringing in a murderer’s row (some pun intended) of character actors, including Nicholas Hoult from multiple Bryan Singer flicks as the titular Juror #2; Toni Collette from The Sixth Sense as Assistant DA Faith Killebrew who may put her career on the line to explore whether the person she put away for murder is guilty; J.K. Simmons from Postal (and likely some other films) as a former detective on the jury who also has suspicions of innocence; Cedric Yarbrough from Reno 911! as juror out for justice; Kiefer Sutherland from multiple Joel Schumacher flicks as Juror #2’s AA sponsor and lawyer confidant; and even one of Eastwood’s many children--Francesca Eastwood--giving the double bird in multiple, retold scenes Rashomon-style playing the once-and-future corpse.

From The Mule & Richard Jewell, cinematographer Yves Bélanger is back with Mark Mancina returning from Cry Macho for the score. And surprisingly and, as discussed, perhaps as a first for Eastwood as a director, the man who addressed an empty chair at the RNC and practices TM actually worked with the film’s writer to GASP! rewrite the script, an act host Ken who has seen and reported back on every Eastwood film takes to mean Juror #2 is the 94-year-old director’s swan song.

And the song is good! While the hosts conflict on where the movie lands politically in its cynicism and realism, all four of the folx talking in your earholes believe the moving picture a solid mid-budget thriller that harkens back to a time/era of pre-streaming moviegoing. Speaking of an era ending, Warner Brothers appears to believe the Time of Eastwood is done, releasing this latest film from the long-time collaborator in under 50 theaters seven scheduled weeks before releasing it for streaming on MAX.

So get your spoilers here, and listen to the end of the p for what starts as a rant against WB’s treatment of Eastwood and becomes men complaining about previews and ads before films that eventually ends with the four hosts recapping their 2024 movie-going experiences before awarding their best films of the year.

Also fun: Evidence is presented throughout by hosts Ken and Thomas for whether provisional cohost Ryan should be promoted to a full-time host. Congrats, newly fully-fledged host Ryan. Don’t rush to mess this up.

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4X4X3: WILLIAM WYLER CONCLUSION: THE COLLECTOR

TGTPTU wraps its third director of Season 13’s 4x4 with a discussion of a fourth and final William Wyler film THE COLLECTOR (1965).

Like The Big Country, its paired film from last week, The Collector began as a book, this one penned by John Fowles, author whose adapted novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman was covered by TGTPTU during our Meryl Streep season. The Collector was Fowles’ first published book, and Wyler took liberties with its epistolary structure to refocus the movie as, mentioned later below, a “love story.” And like last week’s western picture, The Collector is shot in glorious color, interestingly unlike Wyler’s preceding The Children’s Hour (problematic treatment of lesbianism? who knows? not your hosts, not in time for this ep, but maybe TGTPTU’s loquacious critic Annabel with offer their opinion on a future ep?) whose black-and-white film stock marked a departure from Wyler’s two preceding films The Big Country and Ben-Hur where in the latter someone may have died filming the chariot race and was also a book adaptation.

But as for The Collector, which was very provisional cohost Ryan’s ringer of a movie, that is, the one he pitched when he was sandboxing his 4x4 choice of directors because he was sure it would score, our final Wyler film under discussion misses the post leaving the hosts wonder whether it’s close enough to count as Wyler-essential (horseshoe puns aren’t part of The Collector, just your show note writer’s indulgence).

While a dark tale of sexual abduction and obsession, Terrence Stamp--the titular collector of butterflies but also of at least one woman in his dungeon--was told by Wyler that they were secretly shooting a love story and while Wyler utilized his old-Hollywood directing style by shutting out on set the relative novice actress Samantha Eggar in the role of abducted in this two-hander movie (a cast of seemingly four credited actors) so that she would feel the isolation her character locked away lost in the British countryside, the direction and acting can’t seem to overcome a rather flat script.

But stay tuned to the end to hear the boys rank their Willies, including from the first movie pairing how they prefer their dicks and for all four flicks hear them consider their manhood as Willy exposes it. Throughout the ep, listen for the tension in Ken’s voice as the other three hosts conspire to stretch the recording session into kickoff time with Ryan sharing stories from the streets and country clubs and Thomas striving for an episode parental advisory warning. And laugh alone as the hosts skip right past Ken’s allusion to The Sound of Music.

Next episode: A very special Clint-mas Ep for the wintertime, then back in the new year with the fourth of our four directors, the Danish Darling also known as Lars von Trier.

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4X4: WILLIAM WYLER. #3: THE BIG COUNTRY

(Note: Don't skip the theme song this week)

TGTPTU Host Ryan’s Willie gets a glow-up with THE BIG COUNTRY (1958), the third in our cultivated William Wyler collection.

Shot in glorious Technicolor on large-format Technorama to set it apart from the glut of midcentury black-and-white television Westerns, the big-budget film was not a financial success despite winning one, after being nominated for two, Academy Awards and starring at the time four-time Oscar nominee Gregory Peck in the lead role of James McKay, a stranger who comes into town (thanks, Ken! 50-50 odds on this plot by your own estimation), who reunites with his fiancée out on the American frontier only to be hazed by her father’s foreman Steve Leech played by Charlton Heston (no Oscar noms at the time but a big win the next year on Wyler’s next film Ben-Hur, which, btw, did you hear someone died filming the chariot race?) and later to fall in love/respect/mutual ownership of property with school teacher and Big Muddy landowner Julie Maragon played by Oscar-nominated Jean Simmons (not that one, it’s spelled differently, Thomas). The voice and the eyebrows, the legendary singer and thanks to this film an Oscar-winner, Burl Ives plays Rufus Hannassey, the patriarch of a rival company of cowpunchers who also uses the Big Muddy and gets into a scuffle with Peck character’s father-in-law-to-be. This spat spirals out of control, Peck’s character presents the view with a confident pacificist, and there’s a good plot summary on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

What you can’t get elsewhere is Ryan’s special intro with lyrics and deep cuts even more deeply researched for you cineasts, Thomas’s pun on seamen, re-ranking the Major, a Hal Ashby connection, and a surprise new ghost guest added to the pod’s lore and collection when Charlton Heston’s noncorporeal agent visits the studio. The four hosts on this 4x4 do their best to discuss performative masculinity and the connection to war while ensuring they get their f*cking auto-assigned EXPLICIT CONTENT WARNING from their AI censors.

“Now tell me, you: what did we prove?"

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WILLIAM WYLER: PART 2 OF 4: THE DESPERATE HOURS

Paired with last week’s Detective Story, TGTPTU’s Big Willie Winter continues with THE DESPERATE HOURS (1955), another black-and-white film adaptation by William Wyler and a rare feature from the director to not earn a single Academy Award nomination.

Perhaps first home invasion picture, The Desperate Hours was adapted from a book that itself was inspired by tragic, real events (bonus fact: Richard Nixon would become involved in a lawsuit defending Time Magazine against the real-life victims who hadn’t agreed to a photo shoot in questionable taste at their former family home). Playing the lead heavy, Humphrey Bogart who with his character’s younger brother (played by Dewey Martin who, fun fact, was first married to a woman from Portland, Oregon and subsequently singer Peggy Lee) and a lug with more muscle than smarts on the lam take over a suburban home (bonus fact: the fictional house where the story takes place would later be used for the television show Leave It to Beaver) and soon butt heads with head-of-the household Daniel Hilliard, played by Fredric March, after seeing a bicycle left outside, a key indicator of a family with kids or, as those on the run know, prime hostage material. Wyler shows his mastery as a director getting an amazing performance from a child actor playing March’s son and providing depth and gravitas to all the characters.

Oddly cast from the script and the book, Bogart at age 56 was significantly older than the original story would have his Glenn Griffin (Paul Newman, who would play the role on stage before the film was released, was only 30 years old). But the performance is nuanced, perhaps measured by Bogart’s at the time being diagnosed with the cancer that would soon kill him.

During the course of The Desperate Hours (bonus snark: perhaps more accurately entitled The Desperate Afternoon Leading into that Night and on into Late the Next Day), Wyler ties in his recurring themes of pacifism, masculinity as performance, and the dangers of the police state in this film that, while feeling set-bound, it should be recalled that the play was written and performed after. All the same, a truck flips, a person is run over, and March has to pretend he’s drunk to disgust a visiting schoolteacher and save his family. Good stuff.

So give up sixtyish minutes for respite, ours will discuss it: flowers for Wyler, service ages for WWII vets, the elusive reality that started the Boomer Generation, and perhaps try a Bogart impersonation or two.

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DETECTIVE STORY

Season 13’s 4x4 has reached its 1/2way point with our 9th of 16 movies and a new director, provisional co-host Ryan’s pick of the 15-time Academy Award-nominated, 3-time Oscar-winning director William Wyler. This week, we cover the first of Ryan’s four curated Wyler flicks DETECTIVE STORY (1951).

Up for four Academy Awards, including Best Director, but winning none, Detective Story was Wyler’s 22nd talkie and his earliest we’re covering the for the pod (the directorial powerhouse also shot about thirty silent films prior the talkies and two documentaries during WWII when he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces). Like many of Wyler’s works, the picture was adapted from a successful contemporary play and stars Kirk Douglas (Spartacus nine years later) in the main role of Detective Jim McLeod with stage roles reprised both by Joseph Wiseman (Dr. No eleven years later) as a booked burglar who goes (SPOILER) for a gun and by Lee Grant (featured on TGTPTU seventy-two years later and amazing always) as a flighty shoplifter in a performance that would win her Best Actress at Cannes.

As a play adaptation, Detective Story is staged almost as a bottle movie, escaping its second-floor New York City precinct set only to introduce main characters in the opening minutes and for an aborted car ride. Speaking of abortion, the film’s creative team couldn’t under the Hays Code. This silencing through censorship changed a major component of the play when adapted, namely when Detective McLeod who sees in black-and-white (morally, not just because of the film stock) confronts the messiness of the gray world in his pursuit of a doctor’s medical malpractice manslaughter during a birth gone bad and, subsequently, upon learning of his wife’s secret life prior to knowing him when she’d used the same doctor’s services for...

So join the boys as they kick off Big Willy Winter with Ryan parodying the Fresh Prince lyrics; Ken maps Inspector Harold Francis Callahan (a.k.a. “Dirty Harry”) onto Det. McLeod; Tom gets thirsty for Lee Grant; and Jack stays awake. And keep subscribing and following for next week’s pairing with The Desperate Hours.

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4X4 III: TSAI MING-LIANG 4: DAYS

TGTPTU’s back to finish (cough) the job handily (cough) with a happy ending (oh boy) for our coverage of director Tsai Ming-liang, coming together (really, dude?) to get every ounce our four gents have to offer, pulling and tugging (grow up) on each’s points and hot takes for this fourth and final 4x4 film of Jack’s offering (was that a pun?) called, in its English release (are you serious?), DAYS (2020).

If you like washing your vegetables in your bathroom or the feel of burning paper during your non-erotic electroshock massage sessions and also like to take things slow, boy-howdy do we have a film for you. Or if you like your massage erotic, well, this possibly sad, possible love story might be up your rainy, post-apocalyptic Bangkok alley (or busy street). And for fans of the previously covered Goodbye, Dragon Inn who enjoyed its minimal subtitles due to its paucity of dialogue, get excite: There is even less talk and zero subtitles in this latest Tsai Ming-liang joint.

Naturally, actor and muse Lee Kang-sheng returns. Also billed, Anong Houngheuangsy in his debut film. Lee Kang-sheng plays an older dude who goes to the city for an obscure medical treatment for his back. Anong Houngheuangsy plays a younger guy on his grind (and occasionally Grinder?). About an hour into the film, these two hook up, a gift is exchanged, and the two have a quiet, postcoital meal outside a restaurant. Then they return their separate, silent ways after about forty-five minutes of shared screentime. And with just minutes to spare in this movie just over two hours long, we watch Anong Houngheuangsy’s character at a bus stop as he sits and waits and waits and waits until, wait for it, what appears in BMI and skin tones to be a herd of Americans passes by.

Listen along as the foursome wraps up (and Thomas declines to rank) Tsai Ming-liang’s four covered movies. EPISODE SPOILER: Ken reveals for perhaps the first time to English-speaking audiences the sitcom origins of Tsai Ming-liang’s films.

Next ep, we begin the first pairing of the four William Wyler films chosen by Ryan: Detective Story (1951) and The Desperate Hours (1955).

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2024 HALLOWEEN SPECIAL!

NOTE: Approximately 35 punk rock band names are concealed in these show notes. Play along!

It’s the end of October, which means the four misfits of TGTPTU are back with a special Birth-/ Halloween/Election Day episode, interrupting their regular Season 13 4x4 programming to bring you a tale fitting this celebratory trifecta: auteur director Jeremy Saulnier’s punk-horror-antifascist classic GREEN ROOM (2015).

As a low budget, mostly practical, minimally computer effects (dare one say “NoFX”?) horror/suspense movie, Green Room follows a gang of four bouncing souls in the fictional band the Ain't Rights as they tour by van the Pacific Northwest, stealing fuel and perhaps sick of it all when they find themselves less than jake at the end of their bankroll. In desperation, they take on as the replacements a gig at a club full of laces and braces.

Unlike the typical band road trip setup where their fan base may begin to lag, wagon might break down, or they become pennywise and pound foolish, the members of the Ain’t Rights’ world turns upside-down after playing for that crass, bad religion of white supremacy, i.e., those subhumans we call skinheads, when, post-show gathering their gear, the green day of these four adolescents turns rancid upon discovering a murdered young woman in the titular green room.

Like World War II’s Op Ivy, Ain’t Rights’ members no doubt scheme and raise a black flag of no surrender to escape the compound, but these youths prove only a minor threat and their plan all fugazi when it encounters the racists’ experienced violence. Even when these four self-ascribed “misfits” are helped by a violent femme (played by Imogen Poots, friend the one found murdered), the stooges are outclassed and outsmarted.

Soon the joy division occurs, rending the group who has bandmembers played by Anton Yelchin (rest in power), Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, and Callum Turner come face to face with real murderers and violence, including a skinhead band’s strung out lead singer but also a stone-cold bearded Patrick Stewart in charge who has attack dogs sic viciously the youths with a sloppy, realistic violence unlike one sees on the television. The clash is epic as the Ain’t Rights soon accept without fear suicidal tendencies to try to get out of the jam.

And unlike other movies in the horror genre, these youth of today are lack raging hormones (a.k.a. “ramones”?). Yes, Saulneir’s, a.k.a. Jay Dawg’s, film lacks onscreen intercourse. But while no sex, pistols and violence galore. And for those sensitive to cussing, little guttermouth language is used.

So join us, if not for Halloween, then for Birthday XXI of descendent/offspring Jack and/or Election Day (R.I.P. all the dead Kennedys) for our discussion of this film not part of an AFI list.

Also throughout the ep, Ken, Jack, Thomas, and Ryan explore themes of coming of age and of guilt for accepting money/work/recognition in the face fascism, but describing these are harder for yours truly to conceal punk band names here within show notes, except perhaps to say it’s one big, repeated love fest for the flick, or, hmm, might one be permitted to say “circle jerks”?

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This week’s Season 13 4x4 entry is GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (2003), the third of four films curated by guest host Jack to represent the filmography of director Tsai Ming-liang. The original TPTGTU boys are reunited this ep with the return of host Thomas but divided in their appreciation for what is billed as Tsai Ming-liang’s comedy-drama.

As promised in last episode, this third film by the Taiwanese slow cinema director takes on a lighter tone than his previously discussed movies, a tone that at times even borders on, or some might and do argue achieves, comedy. It’s a movie that allows the viewer to watch others watch a movie, to question the dimensions and positioning of moviegoers in this old Taiwanese movie theater showing its final film before closing, or to observe with mirth a Japanese tourist subtly cruise other males by switching seats and wandering the theater’s halls and bathrooms, or to observe a woman with a limp bring her coworker a bun to eat after cleaning out urinals and stalls.

For those who do not speak Mandarin and are uninterested in reading subtitles, good news! There are only about a dozen lines of dialogue, mostly at the end between one of the elderly actors who starred in the titular 1967 martial arts movie Dragon Inn and some other movie patron lingering in the theater lobby after the movie’s final showing.

Actor Lee Kang-sheng, a.k.a. Tsai Ming-liang’s heterosexual muse, returns as the movie’s film projectionist in a role with no lines but in one climatic (sarcasm) scene determines with the help of fortune teller machine whether he is a Cold Fish or a Casanova (for you Simpson’s fans).

Is this film a comedic experience playing off cinematic expectations garnered from Western films? An endurance test? An homage to earlier cinema? A reminder to all filmmakers to not show a better film in their film? Or some awkward chimera of the above? Listen as the hosts take up positions awkwardly close to each other for long periods of time with their wee-wees out.

Unfortunately, the pod’s best film critic ceded their seat at the table to Thomas back from his Western European tour. You are missed, Annabel.

WARNING I: Do not approach this film expecting laugh tracks or comedic buttons.

WARNING II: Do not operate heavy equipment while watching Tsai Ming-liang films.

WARNING III: Do not allow the dissenting voice to write an episode’s show notes.

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