‘The Good Son’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Sean Fennessey

From Hell Month rolls on with a visit to Rock Harbor, Maine, where little Henry is up to no good! The guys revisit the 1993 psychological thriller ‘The Good Son,’ starring Macaulay Culkin and Elijah Wood. Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Matt Pevic The Ringer is committed to responsible trading. Please visit https://fanduel.com/predicts to learn more about the resources and helpline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:06Bill Simmons?

  The Rewatchables is brought to you by The Ringer Podcast Network, where you can find The Big Picture with Sean Finacy.

• 1:11Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 1:11Bill Simmons?

  Newsletter writer.

• 1:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13Bill Simmons?

  How's that going? Projections.

• 1:15Sean Fennessey?

  Good. You know, we're in like week seven and I'm like, all right, so you just every week we do this, cranking out 2,000 words. You know, you did it for, what, 20 years? It's work.

• 1:25Bill Simmons?

  Getting to the habit.

• 1:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:26Bill Simmons?

  Just gotta keep those fingers moving.

• 1:28Sean Fennessey?

  Just keep moving, yeah. When are you gonna start moving?

• 1:30Chris Ryan?

  All I do is pod. I don't write anymore. You know, I'm following in his footsteps. My fingers are broken.

• 1:35Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:36Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, the difference is you'll go on all the pods.

• 1:39Chris Ryan?

  That's right. They use me up.

• 1:40Bill Simmons?

  You're like Dominic Dunn in the 90s, taking dinner invites during the OJ trial.

• 1:49Bill Simmons?

  What time? Table for 10?

• 1:51Sean Fennessey?

  Did you do, was it Ben Shapiro this week? Or you won? You did, okay.

• 1:57Bill Simmons?

  We are still in From Hell Month. Sean, you haven't officially been on From Hell Month.

• 2:00Sean Fennessey?

  No, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 2:02Chris Ryan?

  This is a nice follow-up for 2001, I think.

• 2:05Bill Simmons?

  The Good Sun is next.

• 2:08Bill Simmons?

  It's the Rewatchables presented by FanDuel Predicts. You can predict the summer soccer showcase with FanDuel Predicts. From the opening game to the final whistle, stay locked in. Sign up now for your $25 bonus on FanDuel Predicts. Go to fanduel.com/predicts to sign up. Offered by FanDuel Prediction Markets, LLC, a registered futures commission merchant. 18 plus restrictions apply. See terms at fanduel.com/predicts/bonus-offer-terms.

• 2:54Bill Simmons?

  Guys, Kids from Hell, a staple of the From Hell genre. I'm gonna give you my top three ever and then we could decide who's in the fourth spot on

• 3:03Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 3:03Bill Simmons?

  Kids from Hell, Mount Rushmore.

• 3:05Sean Fennessey?

  I made a top 10 list, just so you know.

• 3:06Bill Simmons?

  I have, oh, you did?

• 3:07Sean Fennessey?

  I did.

• 3:08Bill Simmons?

  Did you really?

• 3:08Sean Fennessey?

  I did. Yeah, well, why don't you do yours and I'll give you, I'll give you mine.

• 3:11Bill Simmons?

  Well, the OGs, Damian Omen. It's all for you, Damian!

• 3:17Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18Bill Simmons?

  Michael Myers.

• 3:19Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 3:20Chris Ryan?

  Kid?

• 3:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's funny. I didn't, I didn't list him.

• 3:23Chris Ryan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 3:24Bill Simmons?

  What?

• 3:25Chris Ryan?

  No, this is why you're you, is because you see the whole, the whole landscape.

• 3:28Sean Fennessey?

  You're right, you're right.

• 3:30Bill Simmons?

  I watched him for 15 years, not staring at the wall, staring through the wall.

• 3:36Chris Ryan?

  I would argue in his childhood, Michael was relatively dormant though, right? Like he had the one bad night.

• 3:41Bill Simmons?

  He killed his sister!

• 3:41Chris Ryan?

  He had one bad night.

• 3:42Sean Fennessey?

  He was a tough night.

• 3:43Bill Simmons?

  He had one bad night. Stabbing! So I have him and I have King Joffrey as my third one.

• 3:48Chris Ryan?

  Oh, great call.

• 3:49Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't, yeah.

• 3:50Bill Simmons?

  Joffrey, like underrated fucking maniac.

• 3:53Sean Fennessey?

  Kind of, yeah. McCauley in this movie is kind of the blueprint for Joffrey.

• 3:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:56Sean Fennessey?

  Where you're just like, it's just pure malevolence all the way down. So I did a slightly different version of it. I did, there's something wrong with the kid movies, which is not quite the same as just evil kid.

• 4:08Bill Simmons?

  But it's, it's in the, they're related.

• 4:10Sean Fennessey?

  It's in the zone.

• 4:11Bill Simmons?

  What else do you have?

• 4:11Sean Fennessey?

  Number 10, there's two Village of the Damned movies. 60 and then Carpenter remade it in 95. Number nine, recent movie Late Night with the Devil.

• 4:19Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 4:19Sean Fennessey?

  Where a young girl gets possessed on live television.

• 4:21Bill Simmons?

  So you count possessions for?

• 4:23Sean Fennessey?

  I am counting possessions.

• 4:25Bill Simmons?

  Okay. Cause Exorcist is a tough one.

• 4:27Sean Fennessey?

  Well, we'll get there. Uh, number eight is Brightburn, a movie I know you like.

• 4:30Bill Simmons?

  Really like Bright Burn.

• 4:31Sean Fennessey?

  What if Superman was evil, basically? Uh, The Good Son is number seven. Number six is The Bad Seed, huge inspiration for The Good Son. I have The Omen at five. I have, we need to talk about Kevin at four.

• 4:42Chris Ryan?

  Kevin over Damian.

• 4:44Sean Fennessey?

  Kevin over Damian.

• 4:44Chris Ryan?

  Wow.

• 4:45Sean Fennessey?

  Number three, Orphan, which is an absolute banger. Number two, The Shining, because Danny, at first, we're like, is Danny gonna be the problem here? Now, there is kind of something wrong with Danny.

• 4:57Chris Ryan?

  I don't think I ever really thought that, but yeah, I'm gonna, I like what you're talking about.

• 5:01Sean Fennessey?

  And then number one, of course, is Reagan in The Exorcist.

• 5:06Bill Simmons?

  I had her as well. Um, two you left out, Children of the Corn, Isaac.

• 5:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 5:11Chris Ryan?

  He wants you too, Malachi. Can we do that, please, one day? Can we do Children of the Corn?

• 5:15Sean Fennessey?

  Have you rewatched it, though?

• 5:17Bill Simmons?

  It's really bad.

• 5:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's not that good.

• 5:18Chris Ryan?

  But I want, I just want to talk.

• 5:19Bill Simmons?

  Even Tubi's like, ah, we're not sure. It has a couple of good scenes, but it's pretty rough. And then the other one I had, which I actually watched in preparation for this podcast, a movie that I somehow missed. That was 92, the year I graduated college. No recollection of this coming out. I don't think it was really released in the theaters that much and then became a cult classic after. It's called Mikey.

• 5:41Sean Fennessey?

  I've never seen this. I was reading about it.

• 5:43Bill Simmons?

  Brian Bonsall, who was the little kid that got added at the end of Family Ties, when they made the classic 80's sitcom mistake of, we need to mix things up on the show. Oh, the parents are pregnant again. Mikey's insane. It's on Amazon. Um, thoroughly enjoyed it. Josie Bissett from Melrose Place and the white guy from Miami Vice, John Deal. One of the backup cops.

• 6:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Bill Simmons?

  They're both in it. But Mikey, he's like literally a serial killer.

• 6:12Sean Fennessey?

  So.

• 6:12Bill Simmons?

  As like a nine-year-old.

• 6:13Sean Fennessey?

  I read that this was one of three movies that were all banned around the same time, including The Good Son in England. Because there was some copycat stuff going on.

• 6:21Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and they were worried about that with this, with The Good Son here, too, where they were just like, if people see Colkin breaking bad, this is gonna be terrible.

• 6:28Bill Simmons?

  I gotta say, Mikey is a nice little appetizer for The Good Son. It's like the more ridiculous, Tubi crazy version of it. What are your evil kid takes?

• 6:36Chris Ryan?

  I mean, I think Kevin is actually pretty high up there for me.

• 6:39Sean Fennessey?

  It's a very disturbing movie.

• 6:40Chris Ryan?

  That's like a really disturbing one. That's like almost more realistic. You know, I mean.

• 6:45Bill Simmons?

  That's like a you need a shower after that movie.

• 6:47Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Bill Simmons?

  Also, the the kid who played Kevin.

• 6:52Sean Fennessey?

  Ezra Miller.

• 6:52Bill Simmons?

  Turned out to be fucking cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

• 6:55Chris Ryan?

  You could throw, just from recently, like you could, you could make an argument about the young version of the Zendaya character from the drama.

• 7:03Sean Fennessey?

  That's funny.

• 7:03Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that's a great one.

• 7:05Chris Ryan?

  And you could make the argument that Alana Heim's character is even worse.

• 7:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we don't see her childhood. Oh, yeah, well, we hear about her childhood.

• 7:11Chris Ryan?

  But she sounds almost more sociopathic about it in some ways.

• 7:14Bill Simmons?

  So you're counting orphan?

• 7:16Sean Fennessey?

  Well.

• 7:17Bill Simmons?

  It does turn out it's a 35 year old Romanian.

• 7:19Sean Fennessey?

  Spoilers for 2009's Orphan.

• 7:22Bill Simmons?

  Come on, 17 years old.

• 7:23Sean Fennessey?

  That's one of the great twists, though, in recent movie history. I, the reveal at the end, I was just like, absolut fucking looney.

• 7:29Bill Simmons?

  It's a massive, massive hit with the Simmons family. As you know, the Simmons family watches all of these, and The Good Son is the perfect family movie, because it's, it's pushing it, but not really. It's scary, but not totally. It's creepy, but it has an okay ending.

• 7:44Chris Ryan?

  It's like 9% better than a TV movie of the week, and it's, it's that 9% where it flies, you know?

• 7:51Bill Simmons?

  So what, so what do you want from medieval kid movies, CR? Do you like the satanic possession angle, or do you like?

• 7:58Chris Ryan?

  No, I like it to be in the parents' hands of like, what are we gonna do about this? Because obviously, like, the instinct, and this is, this movie dramatizes it really well, is the instinct is like, I would give up my life for my kid, and the only thing that matters is my kid. There's nothing that my kid could do that wouldn't make me love it. And this movie asks you, but what if, what if that wasn't the case? Or what if you were pushed to such a far extreme that you had to make a choice?

• 8:21Bill Simmons?

  How old's your daughter now?

• 8:22Sean Fennessey?

  She'll be five in July.

• 8:24Chris Ryan?

  This is a fun conversation.

• 8:25Bill Simmons?

  No, it's not going where you think you're going. So you're gonna be around a lot of kids and a lot of parents from this point on. There's gonna be the one kid where you're like, hey.

• 8:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 8:35Chris Ryan?

  Let's, and if his name is Damian or Kevin, you're already gonna be prejudiced against him.

• 8:39Bill Simmons?

  There will be, there will be the jokes.

• 8:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Bill Simmons?

  Believe me, I made them.

• 8:43Sean Fennessey?

  I was.

• 8:43Bill Simmons?

  Back in the day.

• 8:44Sean Fennessey?

  I was at a birthday party with Alice in, in January and there was a bounce house at the birthday party. I'll just say that there was one kid who was pushing the limits of sadism in the bounce house, I'll say, delighting in punishing other children.

• 8:59Bill Simmons?

  Keep an eye on that kid from that moment on.

• 9:01Chris Ryan?

  Is that kid's name Payman?

• 9:03Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Chris Ryan?

  Payman, another bad kid.

• 9:05Sean Fennessey?

  Pazuzu Johnson, yeah.

• 9:06Bill Simmons?

  Payman's a good one.

• 9:07Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 9:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, Payman's definitely in there. Um, yeah, cause it, well, there's two different versions for the parent, right? One is it's your kid and you're constantly trying to convince yourself that the kid's fine, which is what's so great about that Kevin movie, movie that I would not buy on 4K Blu-ray, cause I don't ever wanna see it again.

• 9:24Sean Fennessey?

  I definitely own it.

• 9:25Bill Simmons?

  I wouldn't wanna be like, hey, what are we doing tonight?

• 9:28Chris Ryan?

  We need to talk about Kevin again.

• 9:30Bill Simmons?

  We gotta watch that Bo Naro scene. Um, so you have that, but then you have the other, the other version is the someone else has that kid. Do we want our kid to interact with that kid?

• 9:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, right.

• 9:42Bill Simmons?

  Which is a whole other.

• 9:44Sean Fennessey?

  And this movie kind of introduces that in its, in the plot structure where it's sort of like, what if a normal kid, or at least what we think is a normal kid, is introduced into a world where there's something wrong with the other kid. So like we have, it's not through the eyes of the parents, it's through the eyes of another child, which is an uncommon thing in these kinds of movies. Usually it's through the eyes of the parents. So I think that's part of what is effective about this movie.

• 10:05Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, all the adults are pretty much viewed through the POV of the kids.

• 10:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 10:09Chris Ryan?

  And that's like different than say, how we did with, he had the rocks of Cradle, where it kind of jumps around a lot. You, you, you're kind of given insight into like what's going on here or there before the characters know it. This is all like, I was, I have a lot of like picking nits about Uncle Wallace, you know, and, and some stuff like that. But like, all we see of him is what the Mark and Henry characters were really what the Mark character sees.

• 10:35Bill Simmons?

  Evil Henry.

• 10:37Bill Simmons?

  Played by Macaulay Culkin.

• 10:38Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 10:39Bill Simmons?

  In a phenomenal performance. Um, the manipulative stuff is great. Everything, all the shit he's doing, he's, he's like, hey, mom, Mark wants to, Mark wants to stay in Richard's room. He's like, no, I don't.

• 10:54Bill Simmons?

  He's just constantly like pushing buttons and figuring out where the limits are. Um, and just trying to quietly torture people, but then he's also a fucking maniac.

• 11:03Chris Ryan?

  He's the Tiger Woods of gaslighting. Like, it would have been an incredible run for him. It ended really soon, you know, ended early.

• 11:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. You want to make some sort of comments like in the NBA.

• 11:14Chris Ryan?

  But what would have been his, his 99 US Open, you know, like what, what could he have done at college? Or in the professional works?

• 11:22Bill Simmons?

  I had that written down, how I wish he hadn't died and I wanted more stuff with him for the sequels. Like, he's running a gambling ring in the seventh grade and just where else it could have gone.

• 11:32Sean Fennessey?

  I just feel like that's small potatoes for him. I mean, he really, he, he was reaching for the stars right out of the chute. He was like, what I will do is I'll murder my brother. Like, he was, he's.

• 11:40Chris Ryan?

  He was building weapons. I mean, it wasn't going to end well for, for Henry, no matter what, but yeah.

• 11:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he had a shed with Mr. Highway that he built, his fake, fake dummy that he could throw at a highway.

• 11:51Sean Fennessey?

  This movie also really taps into something that I think all three of us have talked about a bunch over the years, which is when we were growing up, your parents were just like, all right, we'll see you in nine hours. And you're like, what did you do with all of this free time when no one was looking after you? Which is like, not the experience I'm having as a parent. I'm pretty aware of where my daughter is at all times.

• 12:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 12:08Sean Fennessey?

  But when we were kids.

• 12:09Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 12:10Sean Fennessey?

  You could just build Mr. Highwayman in a shed.

• 12:12Chris Ryan?

  This might have ended the latchkey parenting generation. Just be like, we need to make sure.

• 12:16Bill Simmons?

  It's at the tail end.

• 12:17Chris Ryan?

  We don't have a good son. Yeah.

• 12:18Bill Simmons?

  This is right. The nineties were when this started to flip around and people started to become a little more sophisticated. But yeah, he has this shed where he is Mr. Highway. He has basically the.

• 12:29Chris Ryan?

  He has the fucking no country.

• 12:30Bill Simmons?

  Anton Chigurh air gun.

• 12:31Chris Ryan?

  No country for old men gun. Yeah.

• 12:35Bill Simmons?

  Called it. It's like, wanna see the stuff at my shed? He has a treehouse that it's like 50 50 you're gonna fall to your death as you're climbing.

• 12:41Sean Fennessey?

  A death trap.

• 12:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Bill Simmons?

  He's like, no, no, go this way, the scary way.

• 12:44Chris Ryan?

  They are given free, free rein to go play on cliff sides in the winter in New England where like they could just get blown off.

• 12:51Sean Fennessey?

  And highway overpasses, they're just like hanging out around the highway and on train tracks. Like the, the number of places where they go and just like hang out, every single space where they go is dangerous.

• 13:01Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it's almost like the only thing they're missing is like the subway with the third rail where you'd get electrocuted.

• 13:06Sean Fennessey?

  Right. It's kind of like a Final Destination movie.

• 13:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Sean Fennessey?

  You know, where they keep putting them, they keep putting the characters in scenarios where like something terrible is about to happen here.

• 13:13Bill Simmons?

  Did you know anything about this movie before you watched it?

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Zero.

• 13:16Bill Simmons?

  You, you figured it.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  I assumed Culkin was the, was the good son going into it. Liz and I were like, it has to be Culkin's the good kid, right? They would never, he's a star coming off Home Alone. There's no way he's gonna be bad. But it was way bad. And I, even the way Elijah Wood has a look to him that I thought could be portrayed as sinister. So I was surprised they went the other way, but they were both perfect for it.

• 13:34Chris Ryan?

  He does a good job freaking out.

• 13:35Bill Simmons?

  This movie.

• 13:38Sean Fennessey?

  Ridiculous movie.

• 13:42Bill Simmons?

  It had, uh, oh, I had one more thing about the From Hell All Stars who were constructed in the perfect family. Sleeping with the Enemy guy is the dad.

• 13:52Chris Ryan?

  Patrick Bergen, yeah.

• 13:54Sean Fennessey?

  He's, he's been mentioned on every From Hell month.

• 13:58Sean Fennessey?

  Same director, by the way. Joseph Rubin, who also directed Sleeping with the Enemy.

• 14:01Bill Simmons?

  We're gonna talk about him. I think the mom can't be a From Hell. I think you need one person in the From Hell movie who's not from hell. The mom who's constantly overlooking the signs that something bad's happening.

• 14:11Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 14:12Bill Simmons?

  That's like a Julia Roberts type of actress, whatever. Macaulay Culkin and Alicia Silverstone is the two kids.

• 14:20Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 14:20Bill Simmons?

  I think she's the older sister. DeMornay is the nanny.

• 14:23Sean Fennessey?

  Of course.

• 14:24Bill Simmons?

  Glenn Close is the mistress. And then I think Kathy Bates, Vince Vaughn and Sam Jackson all live next door.

• 14:30Sean Fennessey?

  Who are, who's that?

• 14:31Bill Simmons?

  With Tim Robbins and whoever his wife was in Arlington Road. They're across the street.

• 14:38Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 14:38Bill Simmons?

  Just do some FBI terrorist stuff.

• 14:40Sean Fennessey?

  This is like your all-star team up of all the From Hell baddies.

• 14:44Bill Simmons?

  They're all there, but they're.

• 14:45Chris Ryan?

  Is Arlington Road in From Hell Month?

• 14:47Bill Simmons?

  No, but I do like that movie. It is a good one.

• 14:53Sean Fennessey?

  Nothing better than when you guys look at each other, talking about a semi-obscure movie that nobody cares about and decide you're gonna devote a lot of time to it on this show.

• 14:59Bill Simmons?

  That movie has Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins, and.

• 15:02Chris Ryan?

  Is Madeline Stowe in that? Who's the wife?

• 15:04Bill Simmons?

  There's a really good actress in it, too.

• 15:07Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, it's been a long time. Is it Mark Pellington, the director?

• 15:10Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:11Sean Fennessey?

  Director of the Jeremy video?

• 15:12Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 15:12Bill Simmons?

  It's a good movie. It's got a nice twist. Zoe and I watched it over Christmas break and she loved it. But she seems to like all of these movies.

• 15:19Sean Fennessey?

  Road from Hell, Arlington.

• 15:21Chris Ryan?

  Well, Road from Hell would also be like U-turn.

• 15:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, or The Hitcher.

• 15:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:25Sean Fennessey?

  Or Duel. Truck from Hell?

• 15:27Bill Simmons?

  Truck from Hell. Um, this movie also had one of the great random endings of all time.

• 15:32Chris Ryan?

  Random?

• 15:33Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, where it's like, this is whatever. It's a stupid From Hell movie. But the choice of the mom holding the two kids over the cliff.

• 15:41Sean Fennessey?

  It's incredible.

• 15:42Bill Simmons?

  I think I got 20 years of column jokes out of this about who do you choose? Jalen or Jason?

• 15:49Bill Simmons?

  Holding them over the cliff? Jalen's going, Dad, give me your other hand.

• 15:53Sean Fennessey?

  Where are you at on that right now?

• 15:54Bill Simmons?

  I dropped Jalen.

• 15:55Chris Ryan?

  You did?

• 15:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 15:56Sean Fennessey?

  After the Twitch stream? Do you, yeah, just on this day?

• 16:00Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Sean Fennessey?

  Will Jalen be on the Celtics the start of next season?

• 16:04Bill Simmons?

  So we're taping this on June 4th.

• 16:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 16:06Chris Ryan?

  You think he gets traded or in the draft?

• 16:08Bill Simmons?

  I would say 70, 30 not on the Celtics.

• 16:10Sean Fennessey?

  Wow. Okay.

• 16:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. By the time people listen to this, maybe he won't be on the Celtics, but.

• 16:15Sean Fennessey?

  Sheesh.

• 16:15Bill Simmons?

  But yeah, the good son analogy. I would, I would have it with you guys. I got.

• 16:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 16:20Bill Simmons?

  C R and Sean.

• 16:21Sean Fennessey?

  I think we all know I'm getting dropped. Everybody knows I'm getting dropped.

• 16:24Bill Simmons?

  C R, C R's like, Bill!

• 16:25Sean Fennessey?

  Lunching to a fiery death.

• 16:27Bill Simmons?

  Bill, give me your other hand!

• 16:29Chris Ryan?

  Let me fly, Bill.

• 16:31Bill Simmons?

  What's crazy about this, though, is.

• 16:32Sean Fennessey?

  Does that indicate, who did I drown then in that analogy if I'm the one that gets dropped?

• 16:37Chris Ryan?

  Was Sean trying to throw a rock on you when you were thinking?

• 16:39Bill Simmons?

  I pulled both of you up. I figured, I had some of the strength. I say both of you guys. They filmed this, though. It's no CGI, because we don't have CGI back then.

• 16:48Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 16:48Bill Simmons?

  They have people on. You know, those things like

• 16:51Sean Fennessey?

  Harnesses.

• 16:52Bill Simmons?

  They're actually dangling. They're all at various points. They're all dangling from harnesses. And at some point, Colkin had to do like a 30 foot drop for the end that he, they rehearsed it for weeks. They rehearsed all of it. And it's why it looks so cool. Cause you're watching like, how are they doing this?

• 17:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And he must've landed on one of those big parachute landing spots. When Wendy Cruze's character goes down, um, and it's clearly a stunt woman, but like, it does not look like she's harnessed anything.

• 17:16Chris Ryan?

  No, she falls on like the outcropping of the, of the trees and rocks. That's so nuts.

• 17:22Bill Simmons?

  In general, so Joseph Rubin, you mentioned director, but the way he shoots this, it's really good. I think it's like a really well done movie.

• 17:29Sean Fennessey?

  I totally agree with you. Though like, I, my whole take on the movie is, is that it's ironically written by one of the great novelists of our lifetimes. And it's a very trashy and clearly like it was rewritten and kind of stripped down. And it's like, not a good script. But it is made with a level of Hollywood craft that is extremely high for such a junky piece of material.

• 17:50Chris Ryan?

  That was, and McEwen, who's I think more or less disowned the movie or whatever, even though he got arbitration credit for it was like, the idea was to do something very low class in a high art way.

• 18:01Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 18:01Chris Ryan?

  You know, so it, it does make sense. The thing that they, this movie has is just the, the two kid performances are among the best you can really get from kids.

• 18:10Bill Simmons?

  They're fantastic.

• 18:11Sean Fennessey?

  And they're, they're now, I think widely acknowledged as like two of the great child stars in the history of movies.

• 18:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. It's funny, this whole era and the movies were done. They're all like basically, it's like going to a diner and having like the best patty melt and the best fries and the best shake. That's what these movies are.

• 18:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Bill Simmons?

  They're all really well done with good actors. Like we did Single Way Female and Jennifer Jason-Leigh's like great in that movie. You know, and it's also really well directed. Then we did, uh, Hand That Rocks The Cradle, just Curtis Hansen.

• 18:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 18:40Bill Simmons?

  Couple of years before he does LA Confidential and DeMornay is incredible in that. And this movie like, this would just be like a fucking Lifetime movie 20 years later. But it's like a $20 million movie that had the hottest star under 21, probably the last 50 years.

• 18:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 18:56Bill Simmons?

  And it's really good.

• 18:57Chris Ryan?

  And he basically, I, I was trying to think of any comp, I was hoping you could help me of somebody who would have been like the America's sweetheart, big, huge movie star for his.

• 19:10Chris Ryan?

  Rare as it is that it's a child like this to be like my for my next act, I'm going to be Hannibal Lecter in in a movie like even though I am currently still like I'm Kevin McCallister and everybody knows him.

• 19:23Bill Simmons?

  It was honestly a great zag.

• 19:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 19:26Bill Simmons?

  Cause it's like he you have a five year window when you're a kid star. It's not gonna last. It's just not. You're gonna grow up. You're gonna look awkward and people aren't gonna stay with you. And they I thought they did a good job of like reinventing him.

• 19:39Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm. Well, it's it's such a complicated conversation because obviously his father was playing such a big role in kind of charting the path for his career. And this was really important to his dad to to mess with.

• 19:50Chris Ryan?

  Well, he was treating Macaulay Culkin like he was.

• 19:53Sean Fennessey?

  Like Brad Pitt.

• 19:54Chris Ryan?

  Glenn Powell or Brad Pitt, where he's like, we gotta mix it up. We gotta show people that you can play dark. And I'm like, he's eight.

• 20:00Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 20:00Chris Ryan?

  What are you like, what are you doing?

• 20:02Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, there are other a lot of other examples of like young child stars over the years, like Mickey Rooney was like this. Elizabeth Taylor was like this. Shirley Temple was like this. They got their starts really early on. And then when they started to get into their teens and their twenties, if they stuck around in Hollywood, that's when they would start darkening their persona and taking on more challenging stuff and sometimes playing the villains to kind of upset your expectations. But like you said, he's 10 years old, I think, when he makes this movie or 11 years old.

• 20:27Bill Simmons?

  He breaks through an Uncle Buck and he steals every scene.

• 20:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Bill Simmons?

  And then Home Alone is a phenomenon in 1990. It's one of the biggest movies of the 1990s, right? And then does the My Girl thing, which was a big deal. That he dies in My Girl.

• 20:43Sean Fennessey?

  I loved My Girl.

• 20:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. And then the dad who we're about to talk about, Kit Culkin. He they want to do Home Alone two and he's like, that's fine. But I want my son to be in The Good Son. And they're already like ahead of it. They have the director, they have the stars, they're already about to make it. And he basically gets them to stop production. Wait a year for him to finish Home Alone two. And it's probably the right move, even if he sounds like a psycho. But the next ones after this were getting even with dad with Ted Danson. But two people right after you would have wanted them, like three years after. And then Richie Rich. And then it was over. He stopped acting when he was 14.

• 21:18Chris Ryan?

  The club movie come out? When does?

• 21:20Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, Party Monsters like 10 years later.

• 21:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 21:22Sean Fennessey?

  After those.

• 21:23Bill Simmons?

  Stops at 14. Gets married at 18 to an actress. Ebert, who hated this movie about as passionately as anything we've covered in 440.

• 21:33Sean Fennessey?

  A vicious review.

• 21:34Bill Simmons?

  Just like could not have been more upset about how much he hated it. He wrote during this movie, what were Culkin's parents thinking? When they pushed him into a movie where he drowns his baby sister, tries to drown his little sister, wants to push his mother off the cliff. If this kid grows up into another one of those pathetic, screwed up former child stars, who are always spilling their guts on the talk shows, a lot of adults will share the blame. It's kind of half what happened. Although he seems like a very well adjusted older adult.

• 22:04Sean Fennessey?

  But would that have happened to Macaulay Culkin even if he didn't make The Good Son? I mean, you could just, you could just say that being exposed to that level of fame and being involved in the projects that he was involved in before that. To me, the Ebert reading on this is really interesting because he always gets a little bit caught up in the morality. He had a hard time with slasher movies. He has a hard time with like juvenile comedy and he has a hard time with really mean spirited movies historically.

• 22:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 22:28Sean Fennessey?

  And he comes down really hard on them. He almost always overlooks the craft. He thinks really about like the feeling, which I, I love about him. But he's like so hard on this movie because all he's thinking about is little kids who love Macaulay Culkin, watching Macaulay Culkin in the movie.

• 22:42Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, I was too.

• 22:43Sean Fennessey?

  Is that a way to look at the movie?

• 22:44Chris Ryan?

  I don't think I was like as engaged.

• 22:46Bill Simmons?

  I'm the opposite. I'm like, this movie is fucking awesome.

• 22:48Chris Ryan?

  Well, I think it now, it's almost easier to look at as a museum piece than probably in the moment. In the moment, I'm sure it was just like, like the kid from Home Alone is like a multiple, multiple time murderer and psychopath.

• 22:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Chris Ryan?

  But I think it adds like an interesting layer of like twisted psychology to the whole entire movie. If you think about the fact that Macaulay Culkin's father wanted him to play Henry.

• 23:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 23:13Chris Ryan?

  Like that's fucked up.

• 23:15Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 23:15Chris Ryan?

  But it does give the movie itself like a little bit of like, oh, like this is some seasoning. I didn't expect to have this off screen narrative into it.

• 23:24Sean Fennessey?

  To Craig's point, but when he sat down to watch it, he never thought in a million years, Macaulay would be the villain.

• 23:27Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 23:28Bill Simmons?

  I remember seeing the trailer before a movie. With the trailer probably started running maybe three, four years because three, four months before, we didn't have the same kind of knowledge of what was coming back then as much. And the trailer was really good and it was like. Wait, is he, what's going on here?

• 23:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Bill Simmons?

  And it was kinda shocking. The trailer's really good. Like, they did, he's got the flashlight, and it's clear that he's gonna be the creepy guy. So there was awareness that it was him.

• 23:55Sean Fennessey?

  The, a movie now, though, I guess if it was like, if it was an Ari Aster movie, it would be, it would be as mean spirited. But for the most part, if this was a studio drama now, they would give you at least some indication of why Henry is the way that he is. They would psychologize him. They wouldn't just make a movie about a sociopathic eight-year-old. That, or there'd be a demonic possession or something. This movie is just, this kid is evil. That's it.

• 24:22Bill Simmons?

  Is that better or worse, though?

• 24:24Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think it's better. I don't think it would have been better. I think it's, I think it's more enjoyable that it's just like, this is evil incarnate.

• 24:29Bill Simmons?

  I'm okay with not knowing why he is the way he is and just thinking that he's just a bad, terrible kid.

• 24:33Chris Ryan?

  My favorite part of the research was apparently the novelization is just like, he's a sociopath. Nothing bad happened to him. Like, this is how, he came out like this, broken.

• 24:42Bill Simmons?

  I mean, that was basically what the Kevin movie tried to do, too. Where Kevin was just like, I'm, there's just always been something a little off with this kid. Kit Culkin. You know who, uh, his sister was?

• 24:54Chris Ryan?

  His sister, she's, she's, uh, the Icegate girl. She's the daughter.

• 24:57Bill Simmons?

  Kit Culkin.

• 24:58Sean Fennessey?

  His father.

• 24:59Chris Ryan?

  Oh, Kit Culkin. Who's his sister?

• 25:02Bill Simmons?

  Bonnie Bedelia.

• 25:03Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, no kidding?

• 25:04Chris Ryan?

  No.

• 25:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Chris Ryan?

  Bonnie Bedelia's their aunt?

• 25:06Bill Simmons?

  Bonnie Bedelia's, it was, it was Colin Culkin's aunt.

• 25:08Sean Fennessey?

  Wow. Bonnie Bedelia in Presumed Innocent and, and Henry in this movie, and we'd be able to get along, I think.

• 25:14Bill Simmons?

  He could have been in the house. New York Times wrote a big piece about Kit Culkin in 1993, The Dying Earth. Did you guys read this?

• 25:21Chris Ryan?

  No.

• 25:22Bill Simmons?

  Um, it's basically about Kit Culkin, why is this guy so powerful?

• 25:30Bill Simmons?

  And it come, coming off Home Alone 2, which made 373 million dollars. Mr. Culkin was just rated the 48th most powerful person in Hollywood by Premier Magazine, ahead of Michael Douglas and Eddie Murphy.

• 25:45Bill Simmons?

  Earlier this month, he signed an $8 million contract with MGM for getting him in with dad. And then it goes into all the stuff that when he decided, I want my son to be in The Good Son. And everyone in Hollywood is like, it doesn't work this way, man. You can't just bully people around. And he's like, yeah, it does. If my son's a big enough star, and guess what? He's one of the biggest stars in the world, then it's gonna work this way. And you're gonna give me this, and I'm gonna make this amount of money. And apparently it was just a nightmare. There was all these details about fights about everything, where the camera is set up for a shot, where his hair is done properly, scenes rewritten. You just, he was just running the show for two, three years.

• 26:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Bill Simmons?

  And what happens? As soon as the star starts to fade, Hollywood's like, fuck this guy. And that was it. What's weird is that he's estranged from everybody now.

• 26:35Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 26:35Bill Simmons?

  I don't think Max talked to him in 20 years.

• 26:38Sean Fennessey?

  His kids don't talk to him as far as I know.

• 26:39Bill Simmons?

  He talked, he did an interview recently.

• 26:41Chris Ryan?

  Did he?

• 26:41Bill Simmons?

  He was on the Kate and Oliver Hudson Sibling Revelry Podcast.

• 26:45Chris Ryan?

  No.

• 26:46Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I don't know. Do we need to add that to the ringer?

• 26:48Sean Fennessey?

  Kate and Oliver Hudson have a podcast together?

• 26:50Bill Simmons?

  Apparently.

• 26:50Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 26:50Bill Simmons?

  He said, McCauley said, him and his seven living siblings and all of their kids are all estranged from Kit Kulk and intend to keep it that way.

• 27:00Chris Ryan?

  Wow.

• 27:00Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, wasn't there also a lot about the way that the money was managed and who got what? That was also, I feel like, a part of the controversy there. And so I think they all resent that in addition to the way that he acted.

• 27:09Bill Simmons?

  Well, they had the Rooney Rule where you're protected somewhat, but I still feel like he could probably grab stuff under the table left and right.

• 27:15Chris Ryan?

  The Rooney Rule, like the Mickey Rooney Rule?

• 27:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Chris Ryan?

  Not like the Art Rooney.

• 27:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, cuz I think he just got completely demolished by his parents, all the money he made. That's what's gonna happen to Ben Simmons.

• 27:26Sean Fennessey?

  Hopefully you guys aren't estranged.

• 27:28Bill Simmons?

  Uh huh.

• 27:28Sean Fennessey?

  Hopefully you and Ben are not estranged at any point.

• 27:30Bill Simmons?

  So far, we're doing great. Elijah Wood, who...

• 27:36Bill Simmons?

  Really has a nice IMDb and has been in a lot of stuff.

• 27:39Sean Fennessey?

  One of the great careers.

• 27:40Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 27:41Bill Simmons?

  The war, the ice storm, Deep Impact, The Faculty, a Bill Simmons favorite.

• 27:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 27:46Bill Simmons?

  Three Lord of the Rings movies, Eternal Sunshine, beat out Jake Gyllenhaal for Lord of the Rings. Roger Ebert once called him the most talented actor in his age group in Hollywood history.

• 27:56Chris Ryan?

  And it's just aged beautifully. Like it's really like every five, seven, eight years or whatever, when he's kind of like moved into a different period of his life, has been like in a movie that is like appropriate for that. Like it's, it's just been a real pleasure.

• 28:09Bill Simmons?

  We talked about him in the Ice Storm podcast. Just a really good actor.

• 28:12Sean Fennessey?

  Terrific in that movie too.

• 28:13Bill Simmons?

  He's great in this movie.

• 28:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. He, he's kind of always great. It's weird because he, um, you know, he has, one year later, he's in North, which is like one of the legendary bombs in movie history.

• 28:23Chris Ryan?

  Oh yeah, the Robert Ryan movie, right?

• 28:24Sean Fennessey?

  And he just keeps on trucking, you know, like he's like in Ice Storm a couple of years later. He's in a movie, he's in the war the year after that. Like he, he, he didn't miss a beat. He didn't, it's interesting to kind of map him alongside Macaulay Culkin, who seemed like an absolute rocket ship. Like there was nothing that would ever take him down. And like you said, his career basically stops after Richie Rich and, and Elijah Wood is still going.

• 28:46Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. He's just in Ready or Not 2.

• 28:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 28:49Bill Simmons?

  My guess is Culkin's still probably banking stuff off the movies he made. I'm sure there's royalty stuff and other things.

• 28:55Sean Fennessey?

  And he's slowly been coming back, right? He was in a Home Alone commercial.

• 28:58Bill Simmons?

  I think he's a good interviewer. I was thinking he would actually be really good on that. He'd be a fun podcast to do.

• 29:03Sean Fennessey?

  He's real, he's really insightful in the John Candy documentary, um, because he, he had formed that relationship with John Candy on Uncle Buck. And like, he explains how John Candy basically made him comfortable on camera. And it was cool to see him like reflective in that way. So we haven't, we hadn't seen him much, but now it feels like he's almost like ready to make another movie or something.

• 29:23Bill Simmons?

  Also dated Mila Kunis for. Like four years.

• 29:27Chris Ryan?

  And he's married to Brenda Song now, right?

• 29:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 04

  And she's kind of now, but she's in that Kate Edson show.

• 29:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  Running point.

• 29:33Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. And she's a ball knower. She knows a ton about the Rams.

• 29:36Speaker 04

  Huge Laker fan.

• 29:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Bill Simmons?

  I think Culkin is incredibly likable now.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:40Bill Simmons?

  Every time I've seen him, I'm always like, hey, man, that guy figured his shit out.

• 29:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Sean Fennessey?

  It's always nice when that happens.

• 29:46Chris Ryan?

  Drew Barrymore, same thing where you're just like, way to go.

• 29:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 29:48Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Definitely probably saw some dark moments over the years. I'm still rooting for him to do the Home Alone sequel where he's the dad. That's like the all time no brainer Netflix movie.

• 30:00Sean Fennessey?

  I.

• 30:00Bill Simmons?

  Just call it in, give him the 15 million.

• 30:02Sean Fennessey?

  Feels like it will happen.

• 30:04Bill Simmons?

  You wouldn't watch it? You watch Happy Gilmore 2.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  Against my will.

• 30:08Bill Simmons?

  You watched it, though.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Okay, is that the goal, I guess?

• 30:11Bill Simmons?

  Home Alone.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Time spent on platform.

• 30:12Bill Simmons?

  Home Alone, new generation.

• 30:14Chris Ryan?

  Why would Disney let Netflix have the Home Alone IP?

• 30:16Bill Simmons?

  It's gonna, they're gonna share it.

• 30:18Sean Fennessey?

  There's nothing I like more than teasing Craig about Happy Gilmore 2. No one was more angry about that than he was.

• 30:23Chris Ryan?

  That's true.

• 30:23Bill Simmons?

  Guess what? He watched the whole thing.

• 30:25Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 30:25Bill Simmons?

  He consumed it.

• 30:26Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 30:27Bill Simmons?

  You know what he was, Netflix? 95 minutes of content.

• 30:30Chris Ryan?

  Your eyeballs to us, buddy.

• 30:32Bill Simmons?

  Wendy Cruzen is the mom.

• 30:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 30:35Bill Simmons?

  She's known from this, from three Santa Claus movies, all of which I've missed. I gotta say, I missed all the Santa Claus movies. Yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  The Tim Allen Santa Claus?

• 30:43Bill Simmons?

  Never saw him.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. I love those movies.

• 30:45Sean Fennessey?

  Huge hits, yeah.

• 30:46Chris Ryan?

  Is she the mom in the Santa Claus or something?

• 30:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, she's, yeah, she's annoying.

• 30:49Bill Simmons?

  She's in Air Force One and most importantly, in To Jillian on her 37th birthday.

• 30:54Chris Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:55Bill Simmons?

  One of the great bad movies of the 1990s.

• 30:57Sean Fennessey?

  For years was married to one of my favorite actors, Michael Murphy.

• 31:00Bill Simmons?

  Oh, that guy. Yeah.

• 31:01Chris Ryan?

  How about that?

• 31:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. We'll get into, there are other actresses that were for this part.

• 31:08Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 31:10Bill Simmons?

  I think she's really good for her in this movie, but I also think this would have been a great part for an awesome actress.

• 31:16Sean Fennessey?

  She plays.

• 31:17Bill Simmons?

  If you just put Meryl Streep in this movie, it's like, wow.

• 31:20Chris Ryan?

  The person who was originally cast in this role, you're like, this would have been awesome.

• 31:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah. There's a couple like from that age group where you're like, oh, that would have been.

• 31:27Sean Fennessey?

  She's really rocking a period appropriate haircut.

• 31:29Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 31:30Sean Fennessey?

  That like hyper short cut where it was like a lot of women had that cut at that time, but now that's not something you ever see.

• 31:36Bill Simmons?

  I dated a girl who had that haircut in college. It was like a three year run.

• 31:39Chris Ryan?

  Mary Kay Place kind of thing?

• 31:40Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it was like a three year run for it and it just went away.

• 31:45Bill Simmons?

  You want to talk about the writer?

• 31:46Chris Ryan?

  Ian McEwan?

• 31:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 31:48Bill Simmons?

  What's your relationship?

• 31:49Chris Ryan?

  Love his novels, Atonement and Enduring Love and Amsterdam. This comes relatively early on in his novelist career. And he was obviously like brought out to come out to the coast. We'll get together, have a few laughs.

• 32:01Sean Fennessey?

  It's right, it's like after Comfort of Strangers.

• 32:04Chris Ryan?

  I think it's Child in Time, Comfort and Strangers era. And so they bring him out and they're like, what do you want to do? What are you?

• 32:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:10Chris Ryan?

  He banged this out. I think the bones of it are probably his, but like, I think a lot of the, um, I don't know, maybe the lack of like psychological and character depth is probably brought on.

• 32:23Bill Simmons?

  Well, he despises the movie.

• 32:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 32:25Bill Simmons?

  It's one of those where in the Wikipedia page for this movie, you wonder if he went in there and added a couple of things.

• 32:31Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I don't know if Ian McEwan is doing a lot of Wikipedia editing, but sure.

• 32:34Bill Simmons?

  Or his assistant data or something. You read it and it's like very like.

• 32:37Chris Ryan?

  He just.

• 32:38Bill Simmons?

  Ian McEwan had this great idea and they fucked it up.

• 32:41Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Bill Simmons?

  First sentences on end, but, um, I don't know what the high concept version of this movie is. And frankly, I'm not sure there should have been a high concept.

• 32:50Chris Ryan?

  You know, his, there's a couple of his books that really explore the idea of a moment in your life that changes everything.

• 32:58Sean Fennessey?

  Often in youth.

• 32:59Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 32:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 33:01Chris Ryan?

  And so I can see some faint outlines of McEwan in this of like this idea of like, in a time of one kid's trauma from losing his mother, he goes and spends a weird winter with family and meets this other kid who's like, seemingly possessed by the devil, but the mother is possessed by an angel. Like, I don't know. I mean, like, there's stuff in there, but that, I think they stripped that down and made it more about Mr. Highway.

• 33:27Bill Simmons?

  So it's like the Charles Smith game for Sean.

• 33:30Sean Fennessey?

  Hey, hey, we, look, when we're recording this, we don't know what's gonna happen.

• 33:33Chris Ryan?

  We really don't.

• 33:34Sean Fennessey?

  So like, let's just not even, can we just not even?

• 33:36Bill Simmons?

  Saying that was a bad moment.

• 33:37Sean Fennessey?

  It was a very bad moment. In fact, I spoke about it to my five year old last night.

• 33:41Chris Ryan?

  Did you?

• 33:41Sean Fennessey?

  I did, I did. We were talking about demons.

• 33:43Chris Ryan?

  Was she receptive?

• 33:44Sean Fennessey?

  I, she was kind of barely understanding what I was talking about, but I was trying to guide her through the experience of Nick's history.

• 33:49Bill Simmons?

  Red Sox Yankees playoff game in 78. That was my version of a Ian McEwan novel.

• 33:57Bill Simmons?

  Just the worst.

• 33:58Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I was about the age of the boys in this movie when that Charles Smith game happened.

• 34:02Chris Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:03Sean Fennessey?

  It set me down a dark path.

• 34:05Bill Simmons?

  Joseph Rubin, Dreamscape, nineteen eighty-four, The Stepfather, nineteen eighty-seven, a good movie.

• 34:12Sean Fennessey?

  Solid.

• 34:13Bill Simmons?

  With our guy Terry O'Quinn from Lost.

• 34:15Chris Ryan?

  That's right.

• 34:16Bill Simmons?

  A bunch of things. True Believer.

• 34:19Chris Ryan?

  I like True Believer.

• 34:20Sean Fennessey?

  I've never seen it. Was that James Spader?

• 34:23Bill Simmons?

  Sleeping with the Enemy, an immortal classic. The good son.

• 34:28Bill Simmons?

  Money Train.

• 34:29Chris Ryan?

  Money Train's not bad.

• 34:30Sean Fennessey?

  Banger, yeah.

• 34:31Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 34:32Bill Simmons?

  And then Return to Paradise, that's where the wheels start going off. But he had a nice little run there.

• 34:36Sean Fennessey?

  I saw his first movie that he made a couple of weeks ago randomly, before you even asked me to do this, I just popped it in. It's called Joy Ride. The cast is Robert Carradine, Desi Arnaz Jr., and Melanie Griffith.

• 34:48Bill Simmons?

  Wow, young Melanie Griffith.

• 34:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, about three kids who go up to Canada.

• 34:54Chris Ryan?

  Oh, is it to escape the draft?

• 34:55Sean Fennessey?

  That go on the run, yeah. It is a very strange but kind of entertaining movie. And it's like a real, like, kind of little grindhousey, little exploitation movie, but you can see even in that movie, the bones of like what he's interested in.

• 35:08Bill Simmons?

  He's a From Hell all-star director. Really good at wide shots of awesome locations that seem seemingly peaceful and serene, but guess what? They're not.

• 35:17Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Bill Simmons?

  His evil resides.

• 35:18Chris Ryan?

  He and Hanson were the two masters of it, yeah.

• 35:22Bill Simmons?

  I like him. I like his style. They made this movie in Maine, most of it, built all this. I think they, I don't know if they, I think they might have built the house.

• 35:34Bill Simmons?

  And then filmed it a whole bunch of other places too, where the cliff scene was not in Maine. But the house was Manchester by the sea in Massachusetts.

• 35:44Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, I was gonna talk about this.

• 35:45Bill Simmons?

  Which you can drive up to right now. It's on Redfin. You can go find it. You can go look at it.

• 35:49Sean Fennessey?

  So, I know you've been to Maine. You like to vacation in Maine.

• 35:52Chris Ryan?

  I like, I love Maine.

• 35:54Sean Fennessey?

  You're from New England.

• 35:55Bill Simmons?

  I know. I never, never really crossed the line with Maine. My wife, my wife really loved it up there.

• 36:02Chris Ryan?

  Didn't you guys go to Portland for some reason?

• 36:03Bill Simmons?

  We did. We did Portland. We did Manchester a couple of times, but. The, uh, we just never, never really got over the hump.

• 36:11Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I've been there a couple of times, um, and I really liked it. I only went in the summers. I've never been in a cold winter there, but, you know, it's such a beautiful part of the country, but it's also a very complicated part of the country. Um, and almost all the movies that are made there, and this is in part because of Stephen King, but not just Stephen King, are all really kind of sinister.

• 36:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, there's something about that part of the, the coast.

• 36:37Chris Ryan?

  It's unforgiving. It's unforgiving. It's kind of like the Oregon coast as well. It's like, you can't really swim here, you know?

• 36:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 36:44Chris Ryan?

  It's like, you, it's beautiful, but you can't actually experience the beauty.

• 36:48Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, sheer rock faces.

• 36:50Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. There's like weird bugs that'll come out in like July, all of a sudden, like the worst crazy head mosquitoes come out for like three weeks.

• 36:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 36:58Chris Ryan?

  Maine in the summer is like heaven on earth, but.

• 37:00Bill Simmons?

  And then the one really, really nice part of Maine is Kennebuckport, which the bushes have kind of claimed.

• 37:05Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 37:06Bill Simmons?

  They have like that giant compound there.

• 37:07Sean Fennessey?

  But you stay there when you go, right?

• 37:09Chris Ryan?

  Uh, we go to Portland.

• 37:10Sean Fennessey?

  No, but you stay at the bush compound?

• 37:12Bill Simmons?

  I gotta say, I've known CR for 15 years. This is ironically the 15 year anniversary of this month.

• 37:17Chris Ryan?

  Of our relationship?

• 37:18Bill Simmons?

  Grantland and then Lunch in the Ringer.

• 37:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Bill Simmons?

  Portland, Maine is the most CR place in America.

• 37:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 37:25Bill Simmons?

  If he said tomorrow, I'm out, Phoebe and I are moving to Portland, Maine, I'd be like, I totally get it.

• 37:29Chris Ryan?

  I would love to, if we could just knock out a few more rewatchables, I could summer in Maine. You know what I mean? Because if we got ahead of enough, I could, I could get a summer place.

• 37:37Bill Simmons?

  Portland is like your place, man.

• 37:38Sean Fennessey?

  What about Ben Shapiro? Like, you would just leave him high and dry like that? Would you log in on Zoom?

• 37:42Chris Ryan?

  Me and Ben Shapiro breaking down backrooms. Has he weighed in on backrooms yet?

• 37:47Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't seen, I haven't followed.

• 37:48Chris Ryan?

  You know, he does like movie takes, right?

• 37:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so I've seen, yeah. He had a lot of thoughts.

• 37:51Chris Ryan?

  The thing about backrooms is.

• 37:54Bill Simmons?

  If we brought him on the rewatchables, what would happen?

• 37:57Sean Fennessey?

  I think he'd have a great time, you know?

• 37:58Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I think honestly, that would probably be a big goal for him, is to just come in and be like.

• 38:02Bill Simmons?

  Shapiro?

• 38:03Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I bet.

• 38:03Bill Simmons?

  The other BS?

• 38:09Chris Ryan?

  Oh my god.

• 38:10Sean Fennessey?

  Unfortunately, that would probably outperform the Spielberg.

• 38:17Bill Simmons?

  This movie was eighty-six minutes long.

• 38:19Sean Fennessey?

  It's so beautiful.

• 38:20Chris Ryan?

  Hey, Ben Shapiro, have you ever had a criteria orgasm?

• 38:25Bill Simmons?

  It's a better effect I have. Eighty-six minutes, twenty million dollar budget, made sixty-six million. And so it did make money. Roger Ebert, first time ever, I think, in four hundred and forty movies. A half star.

• 38:39Chris Ryan?

  What?

• 38:40Bill Simmons?

  I don't ever remember him going zero point five stars.

• 38:43Chris Ryan?

  Did you happen to see the TV version of this?

• 38:45Sean Fennessey?

  I sure did.

• 38:46Chris Ryan?

  How was it?

• 38:47Sean Fennessey?

  Um.

• 38:47Chris Ryan?

  Gene liked it?

• 38:48Sean Fennessey?

  They were both very angry.

• 38:50Bill Simmons?

  Like, honestly, really, really pissed off.

• 38:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And Gene, I think-

• 38:54Bill Simmons?

  It's like Tipper Gore, late eighties level, just like infuriated by the concept of it.

• 38:58Sean Fennessey?

  I agree. I think Ebert is like, his point of view is clouded by how upset the movie has made him. Siskel's point of view is really sharp, where he's like, here is what is, he basically does picking knits for two minutes and does say some things that make you think the movie is even worse than it actually is, where he's just like, let's think about the Mr. Highway situation. So those kids, when they drop the Mr. Highway, are in full view. Also, there's clearly a news report and a huge investigation into this, and then there's no follow-up in the story. What happened?

• 39:26Chris Ryan?

  And it's also like, Mr. Highway, pretty distinctive way of doing that, like.

• 39:29Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 39:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so it's like, the movie, because of the way that the script has clearly been torn apart, like, it doesn't really hold up to the level of, you know, investigation that we're gonna be doing here.

• 39:40Chris Ryan?

  It's part of the fun.

• 39:41Sean Fennessey?

  But it's, but that's part of what makes it fun, too.

• 39:43Bill Simmons?

  God, I felt the complete opposite. When I saw it in the theater, I was like, this is great.

• 39:47Chris Ryan?

  You were just like, Henry's throwing a perfect game. It's like watching Greg Maddux.

• 39:51Bill Simmons?

  It was probably like a two-thirty start, ten minutes of previews, and I was out by four oh five. I was like, this is great.

• 39:58Sean Fennessey?

  That is pleasant.

• 39:58Bill Simmons?

  Let's do it this way all the time.

• 39:59Chris Ryan?

  This movie could not have survived being fifteen minutes longer. Like, there's, there's literally no-

• 40:05Bill Simmons?

  I have some ideas for later.

• 40:08Sean Fennessey?

  But part of what is so good about it is, is it never blinks. It's just like, yeah, he's this evil.

• 40:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, they don't, they don't ease into it. It's the moment he takes little Mark out for, for a timeout in the town. Here's what Ebert wrote. Who in the world would want to see this movie?

• 40:27Bill Simmons?

  Watching The Good Son, I asked myself that question, hoping that perhaps the next scene would contain the answer, although it never did. The movie is a creepy, unpleasant experience. Made all the worse because it stars children too young to understand the horrible things we see them doing. This is a very evil little boy. The movie could have been called Henry Portrait of a Future Serial Killer. By the way,

• 40:49Sean Fennessey?

  Banger.

• 40:50Bill Simmons?

  By the way, I would have signed up for that right now.

• 40:52Sean Fennessey?

  That's just a great Eber line.

• 40:54Chris Ryan?

  Somebody should actually just make Henry the Portrait of a Future Serial Killer.

• 40:58Bill Simmons?

  Have you seen that movie?

• 41:01Chris Ryan?

  Probably not a rewatch.

• 41:01Bill Simmons?

  I've told that story. I saw that one in the BU Theater for Assault the Game. It was me and seven other guys by themselves. Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer.

• 41:11Sean Fennessey?

  Six of them went on to be serial killers and then there's you.

• 41:13Bill Simmons?

  All of us sizing each other up halfway through the movie like, ah, keep an eye on that guy over there. Why does he have that big jacket on inside?

• 41:20Sean Fennessey?

  Combat zone in the department.

• 41:23Sean Fennessey?

  Waving tildos at each other.

• 41:27Bill Simmons?

  We're gonna take a break and come back and do most rewatchable scene. This episode is brought to by Ethos. As a parent, life insurance feels like a no-brainer and just gives me peace of mind knowing my family will be taken care of and Ethos makes getting it fast and easy. Apply online in minutes. Get up to $3 million in coverage with no medical exam, just a few simple health questions. Take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com/rewatch. That is E-T-H-O-S dot com slash rewatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary.

• 42:05Speaker 05

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• 42:35Bill Simmons?

  Most rewatchable scene. I'll start with the treehouse scene into the rock throwing scene into the well.

• 42:42Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:43Bill Simmons?

  Henry's kind of feeling him out a little bit. Holding him in the treehouse because Mark, Mark decides to climb up on the hard way. Hey. If I let you go, do you think you would fly? At that point, Mark maybe should have been like, huh?

• 43:00Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, but there's, yeah, I reminded me of like being a kid and be like, you know, again, unsupervised play, being up on like my friend's roof and being like, do you think you could jump to the other roof?

• 43:10Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 43:10Chris Ryan?

  I bet you could.

• 43:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It kind of, it's slow walks you for the first like half a scene. But then by the time like they're smoking a cigarette and firing the arrow.

• 43:20Bill Simmons?

  At the well.

• 43:21Sean Fennessey?

  You're like, okay.

• 43:22Bill Simmons?

  Well, Henry has a pack of smokes, so he would have won over CR immediately.

• 43:26Chris Ryan?

  Already gets the Sean Penn award.

• 43:27Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Philosophies about death a little bit.

• 43:30Chris Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 43:32Bill Simmons?

  What do you think happens? Seems like a decent hang. I think the the worm turns during the scene when they're being chased by the rottweiler.

• 43:42Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 43:42Bill Simmons?

  Which is the next rewatchable scene. Nice little wide shot. And then Henry slams the door and then just goes eye to eye with the rottweiler.

• 43:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Bill Simmons?

  It's like, all right.

• 43:51Chris Ryan?

  Starts barking at it.

• 43:53Bill Simmons?

  All right. This kid might not be playing with a full deck.

• 43:58Bill Simmons?

  Next thing to have is Henry kills a dog and they dump it into a well. With the little nail gun thing.

• 44:04Chris Ryan?

  Is that well decorative, you think?

• 44:06Sean Fennessey?

  Not a functioning water well?

• 44:08Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, like I hope not.

• 44:09Sean Fennessey?

  Full of dog blood?

• 44:10Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 44:11Bill Simmons?

  Top five wells in a movie, creepy wells, Silent Rage.

• 44:14Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, the ring.

• 44:15Bill Simmons?

  Good Son.

• 44:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, the ring. The ring's number one. The ring scared you off. You wouldn't even do the ring.

• 44:21Bill Simmons?

  I don't like the ring. It makes me uncomfortable.

• 44:23Sean Fennessey?

  The ring is amazing. Both versions, the original and the US version.

• 44:26Bill Simmons?

  And I'm just like, that's one of those I'd get unsettled. I don't like being unsettled with a horror movie.

• 44:31Sean Fennessey?

  I completely disagree.

• 44:32Chris Ryan?

  That's what I live for.

• 44:33Bill Simmons?

  No, I don't. Like, I get, like, really unsettled. Like, I'll wake up.

• 44:36Sean Fennessey?

  The Ring in theaters, we were like, oh, god, this fucking sucks. It's so good.

• 44:43Bill Simmons?

  Hey, Mark, where's your sense of humor? Says that at one point.

• 44:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 44:46Bill Simmons?

  So that well, that dog's gonna start smelling about, I'm gonna say, a weekend.

• 44:50Sean Fennessey?

  How deep down, though?

• 44:51Chris Ryan?

  I mean, you wanna start talking about this? Like, how is Henry going back into the house smelling of Marlboros?

• 44:56Sean Fennessey?

  Good note.

• 44:58Chris Ryan?

  Isn't mom just like, and that's a great one, cuz you could just be like, yeah, Mark wanted to smoke a cigarette.

• 45:02Sean Fennessey?

  Well, how old were you when you had your first cigarette?

• 45:04Chris Ryan?

  First? Fifteen.

• 45:07Sean Fennessey?

  Fifteen? That's late.

• 45:08Chris Ryan?

  But I didn't start smoking until twenty-one.

• 45:10Sean Fennessey?

  What about you?

• 45:12Bill Simmons?

  Twenty-four.

• 45:12Chris Ryan?

  What? What?

• 45:14Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 45:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Sean Fennessey?

  I never in a million years would have thought I would have had a cigarette.

• 45:18Chris Ryan?

  My, I mean, it was always like, if you can get through high school, you'll be fine. And it was like, that's the exact opposite. It's like, when cigarettes really hit you is when you get out of.

• 45:25Sean Fennessey?

  Did your parents smoke?

• 45:26Chris Ryan?

  They did, but not with me. They did, like, they stopped when I, when I was born.

• 45:30Sean Fennessey?

  You make it sound like you guys all sat in a smoking parlor together.

• 45:36Bill Simmons?

  I was twenty-three, not twenty-four. Now that I think about it.

• 45:38Sean Fennessey?

  Twenty-three?

• 45:38Bill Simmons?

  I blame Jim Grady.

• 45:40Chris Ryan?

  I was thinking about this the other day. My dad used to be like, multi-packs a day. And then when I came along and into like, my earliest memories are just my dad getting in fights at restaurants about the smoking, non-smoking sections and whether they were too close. And it is kinda crazy that we were just like, there's this invisible line where you can smoke and not smoke.

• 45:59Sean Fennessey?

  On airplanes, they had that, yeah.

• 46:00Chris Ryan?

  As if cigarette smoke didn't roll across, yeah.

• 46:02Bill Simmons?

  Amtrak was great, too. The smoking, non-smoking cars, but you had to walk through the smoking car to go to the cafe.

• 46:08Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:09Bill Simmons?

  You just get, like, instant lung cancer right away.

• 46:12Sean Fennessey?

  You only feel that now in Vegas. It's the only time you feel that again.

• 46:16Bill Simmons?

  Henry causes a ten-car accident with Mr. Highway.

• 46:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Bill Simmons?

  Once you realize you can do everything, anything, you're free. He's not wrong.

• 46:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he's cooking there.

• 46:25Bill Simmons?

  Henry's throwing some advice around. This scene's awesome. I think this is probably my most rewatchable. This is deranged, demented, fucking crazy behavior. It's a, it's a really well shot accident.

• 46:38Sean Fennessey?

  Great truck flip.

• 46:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I feel like they almost like had to do the news report later to be like, don't worry, like, he didn't just kill 13 people.

• 46:45Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 46:46Chris Ryan?

  A miracle, but nobody was injured.

• 46:48Bill Simmons?

  Is this a better movie of, like, he did kill like two people and they're looking for the people who did this?

• 46:54Sean Fennessey?

  I think they need to parcel out his chaos a little bit. So if he, if he's the, the cause of a mass murder event, that would probably make it a little tough.

• 47:03Bill Simmons?

  I think they handled this correctly. I agree with you.

• 47:06Bill Simmons?

  I have Elijah Wood talking to the therapist on the bench about what makes people evil. She says, I don't believe in evil. And he's like, you should. Good Elijah Wood. The skating scene's awesome.

• 47:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 47:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 47:21Chris Ryan?

  Connie on the ice.

• 47:23Sean Fennessey?

  She's underneath there for a minute.

• 47:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 47:25Sean Fennessey?

  I'm surprised that that worked out.

• 47:26Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I don't know if she's going to college.

• 47:28Chris Ryan?

  And like the Camden Maine EMTs are able to revive her. Do you think she's going to college?

• 47:33Bill Simmons?

  Nah, I don't think it's the ship sailed.

• 47:35Sean Fennessey?

  How'd they get the shot of her under the water? I'm like, this is.

• 47:36Bill Simmons?

  I think she has a special instructor.

• 47:41Chris Ryan?

  Because she's brain dead or because she's just like?

• 47:43Bill Simmons?

  I think she's under there a little too long. Yeah, I don't, yeah, the brain's got scrambled.

• 47:46Sean Fennessey?

  It's fucking cold in there.

• 47:48Bill Simmons?

  Really cold.

• 47:50Bill Simmons?

  Hey, Mark, don't fuck with me.

• 47:51Sean Fennessey?

  That's number one. Well, she's my mother now. And then, hey, Mark, don't fuck with me.

• 47:55Chris Ryan?

  This is one thing I will say, well, I'll sleep with her what stage she goes.

• 47:58Bill Simmons?

  Don't sleep on how incredible it was to hear Macaulay Culkin say, hey, Mark, don't fuck with me.

• 48:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 48:03Bill Simmons?

  It was like, oh, um, the mom finds the duck in Henry's shed.

• 48:08Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, among other weird disturbing things.

• 48:10Bill Simmons?

  Henry, you knew I was looking for this. What do you have the duck for, mom? I find it hard to believe she didn't go into the shed. A little more often here. Especially after Richard's mysterious death.

• 48:21Sean Fennessey?

  Got a lot of questions about this family.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  He doesn't even hide the crossbow. That's just out in the shit.

• 48:25Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, but like that is also like one of those things. I would be more disturbed by the fact that it was homemade. You know what I mean?

• 48:32Speaker 04

  It makes no sense.

• 48:33Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 48:34Sean Fennessey?

  Well.

• 48:34Speaker 04

  They should have added that his dad made it or something. He hunts with it. Like, it's just there.

• 48:38Sean Fennessey?

  There's a whole thing surrounding this movie, which is that the plot of the movie is, is that,

• 48:44Sean Fennessey?

  Mark's mother dies, his father has to go on a business trip.

• 48:47Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Sean Fennessey?

  And so he gets dropped off all the way across the country from Arizona to Maine to stay with his family.

• 48:54Bill Simmons?

  Couldn't have been just thrown on a plane for some reason.

• 48:56Sean Fennessey?

  No. So he, he stays with them. Now, this family that he's staying with, staying with has, is recovering, is grieving the death of their very young son.

• 49:04Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 49:05Sean Fennessey?

  Now naturally, first of all, this is not the right family to, to send this child to. They, there's gotta be somebody else who can do this.

• 49:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 49:11Sean Fennessey?

  But they're clearly still having a lot of emotional problems to the point where Henry is doing crazy shit right in front of their face and they're so, they're all so fucked up.

• 49:20Chris Ryan?

  But they're still like.

• 49:20Sean Fennessey?

  That they can't acknowledge.

• 49:21Chris Ryan?

  It's Friday night, let's go out to dinner.

• 49:23Sean Fennessey?

  They're, they're performing normalcy.

• 49:25Bill Simmons?

  We've had this planned for weeks. No babysitter.

• 49:29Sean Fennessey?

  Like there's, there, I, I've seen people say like, it's very obvious that this marriage is on the rocks, like between these two people. And, but the movie is kind of like lightly coasting over, but you can explain a lot of the nitpicking stuff by just being like, these people are not locked in on what's going on around them because of what's been going on in the background of their lives.

• 49:45Bill Simmons?

  Did you kill Richard? What if I did?

• 49:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 49:48Bill Simmons?

  And then the big ending, um, mom, I need your other hand.

• 49:53Chris Ryan?

  Gotta throw one more in there, which is, uh, Mark pulling a shiv on Henry.

• 49:58Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:58Chris Ryan?

  Just be like, oh yeah, it's gonna be a gusher, you know, like.

• 50:01Bill Simmons?

  He's like, yeah, it'll sail that way. He's like basically telling him to do it.

• 50:04Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 50:04Bill Simmons?

  I like when the dad's like, Mark, what are you doing?

• 50:08Sean Fennessey?

  Um.

• 50:08Bill Simmons?

  I'd be like, you're fucking out of here, man. That's, here's your suitcase.

• 50:12Sean Fennessey?

  That same scene.

• 50:13Chris Ryan?

  Suitcase.

• 50:14Bill Simmons?

  The bricks.

• 50:15Sean Fennessey?

  When he's like, when he's locked in the room and then the camera, they do the like overhead tracking shot following Elijah Wood locked in the office.

• 50:23Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 50:23Sean Fennessey?

  What this fucking Scorsese movie all of a sudden for five minutes?

• 50:26Bill Simmons?

  It's crazy. It's really well directed.

• 50:28Chris Ryan?

  Was off the set that day. They're just like, now I can do it. Hitchcock's here.

• 50:33Bill Simmons?

  We talked about how great the ending is. Ebert wrote, everything leads up to a cliffhanging climax that somehow manages to be unconvincing, contrive, meretricious and manipulative all at once. I don't know when I've disliked the ending of a movie more.

• 50:50Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's a little strong.

• 50:51Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Bill Simmons?

  Honestly, fuck you, Raj. Settle down.

• 50:54Chris Ryan?

  The second one of these From Hell movies that we've done, I can't remember how a single white female ends. You have to tell me just like instantaneously after the like, basically like the most important thing happens, there's like one beat of a coda and you're out.

• 51:08Bill Simmons?

  Oh, single white female's opposite.

• 51:09Sean Fennessey?

  Same with Hand That Rocks The Cradle.

• 51:10Chris Ryan?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 51:11Bill Simmons?

  Hand That Rock Cradle is immediate.

• 51:12Chris Ryan?

  She's just like, goes up to Ernie Hudson.

• 51:13Sean Fennessey?

  Ninety seconds later, credits. Yeah.

• 51:15Bill Simmons?

  Single white female goes on for an extra 10, 15 minutes, unfortunately. Uh, so what do you have for most rewatchable?

• 51:21Chris Ryan?

  I like Connie on the Ice. I love like, I love the, the, the, the set piece of it. It's so malevolent. It's so knowing of like, this would be the most, and he's also drowning another sibling. So, yeah.

• 51:34Sean Fennessey?

  I, I'll just add one more, which is Henry showing up at Mark's therapist.

• 51:38Chris Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:38Sean Fennessey?

  Which is like incredible gaslighting moment. Um, my favorite scene is probably Mister Highway.

• 51:46Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 51:49Bill Simmons?

  Most 1993 thing about this movie CR.

• 51:51Chris Ryan?

  Uh, Mark playing Game Boy instead of enjoying Monument Valley.

• 51:55Sean Fennessey?

  I had, if you missed a phone call, you couldn't talk to your dad who's in Tokyo for several days.

• 51:59Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:00Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 52:00Sean Fennessey?

  Like he just, he's just not speaking to his father.

• 52:03Bill Simmons?

  Key landline scenes. Yeah, there's no email, no text. And if you were out of the house when he called, that's it. You didn't get to talk to him. The dad's old Apple computer is pretty great.

• 52:13Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:14Bill Simmons?

  He's got the old, the old school, big box, like just a giant contraption. But I had a, the car accident, none of the cars having cameras on them capturing these two psychos.

• 52:24Chris Ryan?

  And there not being any real highway cameras or anything.

• 52:26Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 52:27Bill Simmons?

  Just no, no, nothing knows what.

• 52:30Chris Ryan?

  Just imagine what we could have gotten away with in the early nineties. If there, the cops probably showed up and they were like, someone threw a doll on the highway.

• 52:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 52:37Chris Ryan?

  I guess we just will never know. Like cold case.

• 52:44Bill Simmons?

  The Floyd Gondally Butter in My Ass and Lollipops in My Mouth Award for something I just enjoy. I have, we haven't talked about her yet, Macaulay Culkin's nepo sister.

• 52:56Chris Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 52:56Bill Simmons?

  I'm sure she's a nice person in real life and probably having a great adult life and maybe a great mom. One of the worst kid actress performances of all time. Just an absolute abomination. Can only say her lines in like this monotone voice, just has a blank face, doesn't seem scared. I don't know what she's going for.

• 53:18Chris Ryan?

  Do you think that's because she's in a movie with like the Dylan Harper and Steph Castle of child acting?

• 53:23Bill Simmons?

  I think that's part of it. The other part is Kit Culkin's like, and she's gonna be in the movie too, is the sister. Fire whoever else you had.

• 53:29Sean Fennessey?

  She did not pursue an acting career. This, I think this is her last movie.

• 53:32Bill Simmons?

  This was her only speaking part ever.

• 53:34Chris Ryan?

  She was in this and Home Alone, right?

• 53:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 53:36Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 53:37Bill Simmons?

  But I don't know if she had a speaking thing in that. I really enjoy when somebody has enough power that they can just shoehorn like their sister into like, not a small part, it's like the fifth biggest part of the movie. She has multiple key scenes.

• 53:51Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 53:51Bill Simmons?

  And, I don't know, just steps on everybody. What do you have for this?

• 53:56Sean Fennessey?

  I love in a movie when everyone knows something is wrong and especially wrong with a kid and they just will not admit it. And there's, you know, there's a great scene between Ellen Burstyn and is it L.J. Cobb in The Exorcist? Where they're sitting at the dinner, or is it George C. Scott? I can't remember who.

• 54:14Chris Ryan?

  Uh, Lee J. Cobb.

• 54:15Sean Fennessey?

  Lee J. Cobb. And they're sitting at the dinner table and that's the moment where it's just like, this is fucked up. There's something like evil happening here, you know, and the movie is like finally letting you accept that Pazuzu is real.

• 54:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 54:29Sean Fennessey?

  And this movie takes a really long ass time to get to that moment. So the whole time you're sitting there and you're just like, how does Wendy Cruisen not see that her son is a murderous sociopath for 90 minutes? And finally gets you to that point, but that's like, that's movie bullshit. It's like great movie bullshit. When no one will come out and just be like, there's something wrong with this kid.

• 54:48Bill Simmons?

  And that's one of the From House staples, when they're just ignoring the signs for scene after scene after scene and then finally admitting it.

• 54:57Chris Ryan?

  Uh, I'd probably go America's Sweet Heartbreak in Bed. So having Kevin McCallister say, don't fuck with me is pretty amazing.

• 55:06Bill Simmons?

  One thing on Quinn Culkin. In that New York Times piece, a studio executive was talking about how she got shoehorned into it. It was like everything else with the father. It starts out as a request and then as it turns out, it's a demand. That's a problem with the guy.

• 55:21Chris Ryan?

  It's like Ace Bailey.

• 55:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 55:27Bill Simmons?

  Oh, this is fun. The Amanda Dobbins Award for Best Piece of Real Estate, along with the Den of Thieves Benihana Award for Seen Stealing Location, the house.

• 55:35Sean Fennessey?

  It's gotta be the house in Rock Harbor.

• 55:36Bill Simmons?

  House is great.

• 55:37Chris Ryan?

  Can I also throw out David Morse's desert, desert, like, uh?

• 55:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, where the fuck are we?

• 55:42Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, he's like living in the-

• 55:43Bill Simmons?

  Is that where U2 did the Red Rocks concert?

• 55:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, it's outside of Sundance.

• 55:47Bill Simmons?

  Is he Colorado?

• 55:49Chris Ryan?

  He's like, I bought this place because U2's playing.

• 55:53Bill Simmons?

  Also, they drive cross-country from clearly Arizona, Colorado, Utah, somewhere.

• 55:58Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 55:58Bill Simmons?

  In that car that has no top, that old school, it was like a Ford Bronco or something.

• 56:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. He puts the plastic covering on, on the Jeep.

• 56:07Chris Ryan?

  Where they get to the Maine in the winter, yeah.

• 56:09Bill Simmons?

  Pretty confusing, but great house, great location. I still have the Sleeping with the Enemy house slightly above it, though.

• 56:15Sean Fennessey?

  That one's also on the shore.

• 56:17Bill Simmons?

  At the end of Nantucket or whatever that was. Uh, what's aged the best? What do you got, Sean?

• 56:24Sean Fennessey?

  Well, one of the reasons why I think Kit Colkin was so perceptive is McCollough Colkin does have a kind of eerie quality as a young boy. He had a precociousness and a kind of like living doll quality that you could say is like, seems kind of evil.

• 56:42Chris Ryan?

  I think even in Home Alone, you could, you could read Kevin as being especially malevolent.

• 56:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, and he could play very sympathetic and very sweet. He's so sweet as Thomas J. and My Girl. And when, when he dies, it's so devastating because he's so sweet, but he could play like, you know, in the black or white video, the Michael Jackson video, he's like a rambunctious kid, you know, rocking out in his bedroom. And the movie is like, his father obviously identified something about him that made him very well suited to this part. So even though it may not have been the best thing for him personally, um, his dad was right, like it aged well to put him in this part.

• 57:17Chris Ryan?

  So is your, is your hottest take going to be Kit Colkin? Should he have been running Disney?

• 57:21Sean Fennessey?

  No, I didn't, I didn't say that.

• 57:23Bill Simmons?

  But did he get Pixar?

• 57:26Bill Simmons?

  I had a incredible evil little kid performance by Culkin, I think his age. So piggybacking on Sean's thing, we talked about the no special effects and the overhead shots and some of the shooting, but my favorite is, this is a plot device for, for movies like this, when there's been sadly a child that has died or something and they don't touch the bedroom. And then there's, they'll throw in the early scene where the new character is like, what's in here? And it's all pristine and then later we find out like it becomes this plot device. It always works. It's a home run 10 out of 10 times.

• 58:04Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:05Bill Simmons?

  It always like, it's like a scab that's sitting there for the movie and then you know it's gonna get picked off.

• 58:10Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:11Bill Simmons?

  It gets picked off in this movie.

• 58:13Chris Ryan?

  Uh, age of the best I had, causing a ruckus in a semi abandoned building with your little friends.

• 58:18Bill Simmons?

  Oh, just breaking shit?

• 58:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, like that whole scene where they're in the, that, that empty warehouse or that mechanics place and just throwing rocks through the windows. That was a big, you know, being six years old and be like, we're not supposed to be here.

• 58:29Bill Simmons?

  No repercussions.

• 58:30Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Uh, and then I also really liked when Culkin does taps for the dog. This is a great fucked up little character beat.

• 58:40Bill Simmons?

  I like when he misses the cat too and Elijah Wood's excited that he missed the cat and Culkin's like, I gotta tinker with that.

• 58:49Chris Ryan?

  That was my Eisenberg.

• 58:50Sean Fennessey?

  Sight's not right yet.

• 58:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 58:51Chris Ryan?

  That was my Eisenberg was like, ah, yeah, sight's not right yet.

• 58:55Bill Simmons?

  Craig, you'd love this movie.

• 58:56Chris Ryan?

  Can't wait for Craig's take.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  Into existence.

• 59:00Bill Simmons?

  Um, yeah, I used to fuck guys like you in prison or word for craziest quote is clearly, don't fuck with me. We call the Culkin saying that. What do you have for great check order, OCR?

• 59:08Chris Ryan?

  Uh, Henry looking down the rope at Mark? Or did you have like the, the, holding the two kids?

• 59:14Sean Fennessey?

  I have a couple, that's a fun moment. I had Henry approaching Connie in the hospital bed and he's lit like Michael Corleone in Godfather part two.

• 59:21Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:22Sean Fennessey?

  Where it's just like, like the, the demon has taken over. There's a ton of stuff in the movie where the, it's just like, it's incredibly well made for such a piece of trash. It's so funny.

• 59:33Bill Simmons?

  Chess Rockwell Brock Laners. I didn't really feel like there was a good character name in this one.

• 59:36Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 59:37Bill Simmons?

  Disappointed.

• 59:38Chris Ryan?

  Pretty generic.

• 59:38Bill Simmons?

  The Big Kahuna Burger, where for best use of food and drink, has the fridge freak out.

• 59:42Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:43Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:45Bill Simmons?

  I mean, did he poison the food? Who knows?

• 59:46Chris Ryan?

  There's another thing I didn't say for Age of the Best. Elijah Wood's character and his performance. It allows for like the 6% belief that he's also crazy, that he's also grieving his mother dying.

• 59:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:00:00Chris Ryan?

  And that he's losing it a little bit, you know?

• 1:00:02Bill Simmons?

  Well, that's always one of the great devices with these movies is that it feels like the person that we know is the good guy. The perception is that they might actually be the bad person and when they can

• 1:00:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:00:14Bill Simmons?

  Play with that, that always works.

• 1:00:15Sean Fennessey?

  One of the best, that's one of the best things about Memento. Memento is a movie that like really messes with that point of view in terms of like, is this person gaslighting or being gaslit? And it kind of gets you right up to the edge of that in this movie, but you still, you've seen Henry do too many evil things to really ever get over the line.

• 1:00:33Bill Simmons?

  Titanic's like that, too.

• 1:00:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, sure. Well, as we know, Rose was evil.

• 1:00:36Bill Simmons?

  People think Billy Zane was the bad person in that movie and it's clearly Rose.

• 1:00:40Sean Fennessey?

  Good guy, yeah.

• 1:00:41Bill Simmons?

  Uh, what do you have for a flex here?

• 1:00:43Chris Ryan?

  Uh, for my flex. Well, I mentioned Sean Penn. I brought my own pack for, uh, for when Colkin's smoking at the well, but I had the

• 1:00:51Bill Simmons?

  Do you feel like that it seemed like he might have blown a dart before that?

• 1:00:55Chris Ryan?

  I think so, and especially when they're like, they give you cancer. He's like, who cares? You're gonna die anyway.

• 1:00:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00Chris Ryan?

  Pretty good. The Richard Chetty Guard Medal Award, uh, for most memorable death by a security guard or other bystander whom the movie treats as inconsequential, but probably had a spouse and the kids who loved him. The motorists, they go to great pains to say that nobody died in that car accident. But like, I'm, I'm pretty sure someone walked away with really bad whiplash.

• 1:01:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Chris Ryan?

  Their, their trauma is completely ignored.

• 1:01:21Sean Fennessey?

  How did that truck driver survive?

• 1:01:22Chris Ryan?

  I don't know. Yeah.

• 1:01:24Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that guy's definitely gone to the chiropractor for like three years. Butch's Girlfriend Award for Weeklink of the Film. So I, we mentioned this earlier, but all the unsafe things in this extended neighborhood, including a terrifying treehouse that doesn't have an actual ladder. Where, who is that guy who did the Netflix climb?

• 1:01:44Chris Ryan?

  Honold?

• 1:01:45Bill Simmons?

  At one point, you're going backwards to climb up the top of it, like it's fucking crazy? I don't know where the mom was on that. Like, hey, Henry, how do you get up on that treehouse?

• 1:01:53Sean Fennessey?

  Did you have a treehouse growing up?

• 1:01:54Bill Simmons?

  No.

• 1:01:55Sean Fennessey?

  Did you?

• 1:01:55Chris Ryan?

  No, but we had treehouse-esque things, you know, like-

• 1:01:59Sean Fennessey?

  Like what?

• 1:01:59Chris Ryan?

  Roof decks that weren't really connected to roofs really well, you know?

• 1:02:03Sean Fennessey?

  Big roof episode for you.

• 1:02:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. All-timer. There's the terrifying deep well that you could have just fallen to your death at any point.

• 1:02:10Chris Ryan?

  The cliff's edge.

• 1:02:11Bill Simmons?

  There's no, there's no like cover on the well, anything. The railroad tracks you mentioned, the highway that you could just fall off the bridge. The, just this walking bridge that has a random killer pit bull that doesn't have a leash, that could just maul anybody, and then all the cliffs. Like at one point, the kids are just lying on the cliffs peeking over like this-

• 1:02:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Bill Simmons?

  Hundred-foot fall to their death. So they drop little Mark off, who's just lost his, uh, his mom. And at no point is it like, hey, just so Mark knows, like, you know, we're really out here in the middle of nowhere. Like, there's some shit, like you could really get in trouble here. No, just put him out there.

• 1:02:49Chris Ryan?

  It's really a miracle that we're alive.

• 1:02:51Sean Fennessey?

  It's not, it's not a very strong advertisement for Maine. It is like this entire state is a death trap.

• 1:02:57Bill Simmons?

  It's how it feels. There's not like a safe part in the movie, even like the shed has multiple things.

• 1:03:04Chris Ryan?

  But that's how Philadelphia felt. Like it was like, go into the park, but don't go down that path because there's supposed to be like a creepy guy down there.

• 1:03:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:11Chris Ryan?

  And they, but it would still be like, but feel free to go into the park otherwise.

• 1:03:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's very, another like very smart thing about the movie is moving from Arizona to Maine, where Arizona is just the kind of like wide open nothingness of the desert. It's like, it's actually not dangerous to be in a place like that. You're always in full view. And in Maine, it's like, no matter where you go, you're about to fall down a cliff.

• 1:03:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. What'd you have for Weeklink?

• 1:03:31Chris Ryan?

  Uh, the adults. I mean, both in terms of their behavior, but also in terms of like, I feel like we were one really cool actor short of that, in that deck, you know? Could have been, could have been a good, I, I think Houston's good, but it would have been good if we had had the original, the original actor cast for it.

• 1:03:48Bill Simmons?

  It feels like that's where they save money. And the that was their inefficiency.

• 1:03:53Chris Ryan?

  Kit was like, I'll take some of that. I'll take that Steenburgen money.

• 1:03:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, they're like, maybe we can cut, cut money with the parents and we'll just give more to Culkin.

• 1:04:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Daniel Hugh Kelly, the dad is, is like, if that was just James Remar, isn't this a better movie?

• 1:04:07Bill Simmons?

  He's a TV actor, like, and I think he was in Cujo was the other movie.

• 1:04:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he's a big stage actor. I was reading about him. I don't want to disparage him. It's just like, he's just not really up to the moment.

• 1:04:18Chris Ryan?

  Now, I can't not see James Remar in this movie, you know?

• 1:04:20Bill Simmons?

  Well, why wasn't David Morse the dad? Did they just have him for two weeks?

• 1:04:24Chris Ryan?

  I don't know. It seemed like they had him for like two days. It's just pre David Morse being David Morse.

• 1:04:29Sean Fennessey?

  But he was on St. Elsewhere.

• 1:04:30Chris Ryan?

  Was he?

• 1:04:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he's, he had a run. And Inside Moves, that's the R refuse to see. Did this movie need a better title? I'm bringing that category back.

• 1:04:40Chris Ryan?

  I had Susan's Choice.

• 1:04:42Bill Simmons?

  Oh. Like a Sophie's Choice.

• 1:04:46Sean Fennessey?

  Call back, I'm already giving away the climax of the movie. I mean, Ebert nails it, right? With Henry Portrait of a Future Serial Killer. I did, I, Every Mother's Son. There's like, something about who is really, who is the true mom to Mark and who's the true mom to Henry in this movie, you know?

• 1:05:04Chris Ryan?

  I like that.

• 1:05:04Bill Simmons?

  Good. I could see that in the Netflix thumbnail.

• 1:05:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:08Bill Simmons?

  I have the winner. Bad Brother.

• 1:05:10Chris Ryan?

  Very good.

• 1:05:11Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:12Chris Ryan?

  Very good.

• 1:05:12Bill Simmons?

  Just a better title.

• 1:05:13Sean Fennessey?

  Well, the Netflix title, you know what it would be. It would be, whoops, I killed my brother. Just kidding, now I'm gonna kill my new brother.

• 1:05:20Chris Ryan?

  It's me, Henry, the guy who killed my daughter, my sister.

• 1:05:24Bill Simmons?

  I don't really understand why it's called The Good Son.

• 1:05:27Chris Ryan?

  Well, because who's the good son? Right?

• 1:05:29Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's riffing on Cain and Abel, the biblical allegory.

• 1:05:34Bill Simmons?

  Bad Brother does a better job, I think.

• 1:05:35Chris Ryan?

  Shout out to Bad Brother.

• 1:05:36Bill Simmons?

  What's Age the Worst? Um, as you know, one of my passions in life is random soccer scenes being thrown into movies.

• 1:05:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Bill Simmons?

  So we have Elijah Wood in the beginning. Um, in classic Hollywood, Elijah Wood's never really played soccer before. Lot of close ups. We see there's some sort of, he's old enough, he's 10, like a 10 year old soccer game's gonna be a fairly high level. It's just a lot of kids clustered.

• 1:06:01Chris Ryan?

  Fairly high level.

• 1:06:02Bill Simmons?

  Well, it's gonna be more spread out.

• 1:06:03Chris Ryan?

  This is, this is more like five year old soccer.

• 1:06:06Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Sean Fennessey?

  Why didn't they just cast Ronaldinho, you know?

• 1:06:08Chris Ryan?

  I know.

• 1:06:09Bill Simmons?

  It looks like an AYSO under five, like first time everyone's played. And he somehow gets a goal in traffic and he's like, yeah.

• 1:06:17Chris Ryan?

  People wonder why America has no chance at the World Cups. Watch The Good Son.

• 1:06:21Bill Simmons?

  It's fucking bullshit.

• 1:06:22Chris Ryan?

  This is what our 10 year olds are doing. Got to have structure.

• 1:06:25Bill Simmons?

  And they all do the same stuff. The, the, our character is always gonna score the goal. It's always gonna be shot way too close up, so we don't have to see anybody running or any sort of setup of a goal or anything, and they're just trying to get through it. And it's, it's a passion of mine, CR.

• 1:06:39Sean Fennessey?

  Did you do any telestration on this sequence?

• 1:06:41Chris Ryan?

  There's nothing to telestrate. It's just 22 kids just running around in circles.

• 1:06:45Bill Simmons?

  It's, there's no 10 year old soccer game that would have that kind of spacing. I'm sorry. Unless it's like a pickup game at recess or something.

• 1:06:52Chris Ryan?

  This is pre Pep Guardiola and our understanding of positional awareness, but I, I, I get what you're saying, Bill. Yeah.

• 1:06:58Bill Simmons?

  Thanks. Uh, the music's pretty bad.

• 1:07:01Chris Ryan?

  It's Elmer Bernstein. This is the second.

• 1:07:03Bill Simmons?

  It's just corny, like.

• 1:07:04Chris Ryan?

  Big Elmer movie we've done because he did Animal House. It's the same problem with Animal House where it's like, did Elmer Bernstein watch this movie?

• 1:07:11Bill Simmons?

  No, he's like, hey, I created some tracks. Just take them.

• 1:07:14Sean Fennessey?

  First of all, just watch your mouths, both of you. Second of all, this is just crazy. Third of all, you also just did Ghostbusters, which is one of the great movie scores of all time.

• 1:07:21Bill Simmons?

  Not everyone, not everyone can hit a homerun every time out.

• 1:07:25Sean Fennessey?

  Guys, he did the score for The Ten Commandments, The Sweet Smell of Success, HUD, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Escape, My Left Foot. One of the great film composers of all time.

• 1:07:35Chris Ryan?

  I'm not saying he's not great. Do you think that the music matches the movie?

• 1:07:37Bill Simmons?

  You're allowed a mail-in every once in a while.

• 1:07:39Sean Fennessey?

  I thought it was good. I liked it. I liked the score.

• 1:07:41Bill Simmons?

  Are you gonna go 52 for 52 in your newsletter?

• 1:07:43Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, when you drive home today, are you listening to it?

• 1:07:45Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like I'm three for seven right now, so.

• 1:07:48Chris Ryan?

  52 for 52.

• 1:07:50Bill Simmons?

  The credit titles weren't great. They're like, the music and the credit titles feel very like early 90s to me.

• 1:07:55Chris Ryan?

  It's like baby boom music. Yeah.

• 1:07:57Sean Fennessey?

  You guys are just fucking assholes. I don't know. What the hell?

• 1:08:00Bill Simmons?

  I think Elmer just gave them, he's like, it's a good sign with Macaulay Culkin. This movie's gonna suck. Here. I'll send you some A-track.

• 1:08:08Chris Ryan?

  You know what would've been good? Okay, so they don't do the credits. They have Mark's, uh, Mark's mom dies funeral. They hit the road. ACDC, Thunderstruck.

• 1:08:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Billy Squires, The Stroke.

• 1:08:21Chris Ryan?

  Dan the stroke.

• 1:08:25Bill Simmons?

  Or it goes to 93 hip hop.

• 1:08:27Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Bill Simmons?

  All of a sudden, they're playing Dre and Snoop.

• 1:08:29Chris Ryan?

  That would be good. Yeah.

• 1:08:31Sean Fennessey?

  You're moving from the west coast to the east coast.

• 1:08:33Chris Ryan?

  No, yeah, I like native tongues.

• 1:08:35Bill Simmons?

  I have one more What Stage The Worst. The whole, if you close this deal in Tokyo, you and Mark are set.

• 1:08:40Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:41Bill Simmons?

  What's going on here?

• 1:08:42Chris Ryan?

  So this definitely just feels like sex tourism to me. I have no idea what's going on, but like, the idea that this is like, almost like the extension of like, the gung ho era of like, people's relationship to Japan in the eighties and nineties being like, you just, I can't break this date. They won't understand that my wife just died.

• 1:09:01Sean Fennessey?

  They were gonna take over my, the economy of America.

• 1:09:03Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, so I imagine he is a small business owner, his own boss, and like, there's nobody he can voice this off onto, but what is the deal?

• 1:09:13Bill Simmons?

  In Japan, it's like, we hear that your wife just died, but the deal evaporates tomorrow and they should come out. I just, I don't know.

• 1:09:21Chris Ryan?

  And if you're going to Japan, you should be a little bit more conversant in Nintendo's products. He's like, oh, you're done bombing the universe over there, big guy? It's like.

• 1:09:27Bill Simmons?

  How about this idea? Bring the fucking kid with you. It's his, it's his winter break or whatever it was. Bring him to Tokyo, get him a hotel room.

• 1:09:34Chris Ryan?

  What is the gung ho era? Uh, just the movie Gung Ho where a Japanese car company takes over an American car factory. And it was just like, there was a movie or two made about like, the relationship between.

• 1:09:45Sean Fennessey?

  Michael Keaton movie?

• 1:09:46Chris Ryan?

  The two cultures.

• 1:09:48Bill Simmons?

  Good movie. I, I think probably has not, there's probably some pieces that have not aged great. I haven't seen it in a while, but my guy Michael Keaton said.

• 1:09:55Chris Ryan?

  Did you fire that up, Reese? You got it on 4K?

• 1:09:56Sean Fennessey?

  I did. I watched it during the pandemic.

• 1:09:57Bill Simmons?

  Yeah?

• 1:09:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. We did a Michael Keaton Hall of Fame. It wasn't my favorite thing that we watched.

• 1:10:02Bill Simmons?

  What else do you have for What Stage The Worst?

• 1:10:04Chris Ryan?

  Uh, when Henry does it, when Henry says, uh, tells Mark that his mom is maggot food, I feel like at any age, Henry's taking a fucking.

• 1:10:14Bill Simmons?

  Right. You're fighting.

• 1:10:15Chris Ryan?

  Here, out. Like, Mark is kicking Henry out of that treehouse. And Mark's just like, no, she's not. I'm like, that's pretty deep cut.

• 1:10:21Bill Simmons?

  That's a bench colonium brawl.

• 1:10:23Chris Ryan?

  Uh, we've obviously just addressed David Morse, the least involved parent of the 20th century. And the ending, the very ending where like, you basically get Mark's weird, like, I wonder if she would make the same choice again. And there's no accountability for Davenport. How did Connie and Wallace react? You know, there's no, there, I just wanted like one extra.

• 1:10:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I put that in Z. Want Neo where I'm like, why are we up Focion Mark now? Like this should, this is now about Wendy Cruisen's character.

• 1:10:51Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Sean Fennessey?

  Like killed her son after losing her other son.

• 1:10:55Chris Ryan?

  And does like law enforcement come through and be like, gosh, turns out there was a huge crime wave that this kid Henry was responsible for. We missed it.

• 1:11:01Bill Simmons?

  I would have added one extra scene, one more soccer game.

• 1:11:04Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:11:05Bill Simmons?

  Another goal for Mark.

• 1:11:06Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Bill Simmons?

  Cuts to Wendy Cruisen with Mr. Highway and they're celebrating.

• 1:11:13Chris Ryan?

  Mr. Highway's like.

• 1:11:16Bill Simmons?

  She throws Mr. Highway on the field and then say to the game. Hans Gruber scale for villain ranking, Henry's like a nine.

• 1:11:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I had an eight.

• 1:11:24Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Sean Fennessey?

  He's pretty, he's pretty mean.

• 1:11:26Chris Ryan?

  So in your, in this rating, Hans is 10?

• 1:11:29Bill Simmons?

  Nobody can be higher than Hans.

• 1:11:31Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:32Bill Simmons?

  That's why it's the Hans Gruber scale.

• 1:11:33Chris Ryan?

  I disagree with you.

• 1:11:35Bill Simmons?

  Who's higher than Hans?

• 1:11:35Chris Ryan?

  I just think Hans had his motivations, like Hans was, you know, first of all, a committed leftist. And second of all, was really just interested in getting his hands on bear bonds. There's a lot more crazy people out there.

• 1:11:47Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 1:11:48Sean Fennessey?

  Where does, um?

• 1:11:49Chris Ryan?

  He wanted the Crimson Dawn out of prison.

• 1:11:51Sean Fennessey?

  Like where does Lou Cypher fit, figure into this scale, you know, like?

• 1:11:55Bill Simmons?

  Good question.

• 1:11:56Sean Fennessey?

  Feel like we could get a little bit more evil than Hans.

• 1:11:59Bill Simmons?

  This was created during a Kyle Brand podcast when we were talking about how bad Powers Booth was in sudden death. Right? And I think we gave him like a one and a half out of 10. And at some point it became the Hans Gruber scale. I don't know if we'd put a ton of thought into whether it should be after Hans Gruber.

• 1:12:15Chris Ryan?

  Look, I may be.

• 1:12:16Bill Simmons?

  I'm going to open up to the.

• 1:12:17Chris Ryan?

  Maybe I'm a Gruber apologist. I don't know.

• 1:12:19Sean Fennessey?

  It's hard to apply this category to a film that has like explorations of sociopathy.

• 1:12:25Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:25Sean Fennessey?

  Or evil, like Payman is a 10 out of 10. Pazuzu is a 10.

• 1:12:29Chris Ryan?

  Well, once he is possessed, yeah.

• 1:12:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, but the demon, the demon itself, right?

• 1:12:35Bill Simmons?

  Like here comes the telephone open.

• 1:12:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, a lot of talk about Apex Mountain for this pod, but you-

• 1:12:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, people obviously didn't see Hereditary.

• 1:12:47Sean Fennessey?

  Ruko doing Hereditary is probably the hardest I've ever laughed on this show.

• 1:12:52Bill Simmons?

  Ruffalo Hannah, Ruben Partridge, overacting award. This goes to Quinn Culkin for the underacting. Can we do underacting for this or no?

• 1:12:59Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 1:12:59Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 1:13:00Sean Fennessey?

  Elijah dials it up a couple of times.

• 1:13:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, when he's throwing all the food down their disposal.

• 1:13:05Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Oh, true. That's good. That's a good answer for this. All right, we'll take one more break and then we got Sean's flex.

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• 1:14:11Bill Simmons?

  All right, Sean's flex, what do you got?

• 1:14:12Sean Fennessey?

  So the reason I put The Shining on my list is because there's a shining criteria orgasm in this movie. You just mentioned the bombing the universe line, which is a direct line that pulled from what Jack Torrance says to his son Danny in The Shining. And the movie, this movie knows what it's doing when it makes that reference to The Shining.

• 1:14:30Bill Simmons?

  Oh.

• 1:14:32Bill Simmons?

  Do we have to retire the category after Spielberg melted your vertebrae?

• 1:14:36Sean Fennessey?

  It's up to you. You tell me.

• 1:14:38Bill Simmons?

  No, I like this category.

• 1:14:39Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I don't know if I'll ever have a better moment in my life.

• 1:14:42Chris Ryan?

  Do you think he will watch Jaws 2?

• 1:14:46Speaker 04

  He said he saw it 20 years later.

• 1:14:48Chris Ryan?

  Oh, he did, okay.

• 1:14:50Sean Fennessey?

  We went to bat for it a couple of times.

• 1:14:52Bill Simmons?

  I snuck it under my breath a second time.

• 1:14:54Sean Fennessey?

  He did, yeah.

• 1:14:55Bill Simmons?

  I really wanted to make it clear to him that I was okay with the movie for some reason.

• 1:14:59Sean Fennessey?

  My big regret was that I couldn't pitch him on why it was an interesting movie. And because he was, you could see he just didn't want to hear it. But, you know, the whole thing about it being like a slasher movie, but with a shark.

• 1:15:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Sean Fennessey?

  That was a cool thing that happened.

• 1:15:12Chris Ryan?

  I wonder if for him, he's like, that would be like me telling you like why Heifetz's version of the big picture really worked for me.

• 1:15:21Chris Ryan?

  He's like, yeah, no fucking way, yeah.

• 1:15:23Sean Fennessey?

  Possibly, yeah.

• 1:15:24Bill Simmons?

  Oh shit, Heifetz is gonna send a pitch now. Have an idea for a spinoff.

• 1:15:29Sean Fennessey?

  Literally every other episode of The Ringer Fantasy Football Show is Craig asking Danny if he's seen a movie and he's like, I haven't seen that.

• 1:15:36Bill Simmons?

  That would be the podcast.

• 1:15:37Chris Ryan?

  How many movies did he see?

• 1:15:38Bill Simmons?

  Him just seeing every movie.

• 1:15:39Speaker 04

  Heifetz?

• 1:15:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's alarming how little very popular movies from the 90s and 2000s he has seen.

• 1:15:45Sean Fennessey?

  He didn't know who No Doubt was.

• 1:15:48Chris Ryan?

  What, like, he's such a unique person.

• 1:15:50Sean Fennessey?

  He's like, Gwen Stefani was in No Doubt?

• 1:15:53Chris Ryan?

  How did Heifetz get hired in the first place?

• 1:15:54Bill Simmons?

  I think the first 20 years of his life, he just was watching football and basketball.

• 1:15:58Sean Fennessey?

  Grinding tape.

• 1:15:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, and that was it.

• 1:16:03Bill Simmons?

  Oh, the CR thinks Luke Wilson could have been Harrison Ford hottest take award. I'll start us off.

• 1:16:09Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:16:10Bill Simmons?

  I think this is Macaulay Culkin's greatest performance, and I don't even know if it's a hottest take.

• 1:16:14Chris Ryan?

  I don't know how hot that is.

• 1:16:15Bill Simmons?

  I genuinely believe it. I think it should be mentioned first. I don't care how popular Kevin McCallister was. I know how big Home Alone was as a franchise. I think this is a much harder role. And he's really good as an evil kid. I don't, like, this movie, it's one of those, we talk about this sometimes on this show. Sometimes movies just shouldn't work. This movie literally needs two of the best kid actors, probably the last 50 years. To both be in the same movie with the director who totally gets it. But I think this movie probably had a 10% chance of working. Or else it's like that movie I watched, Mikey with Brian Bottso.

• 1:16:50Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely.

• 1:16:50Bill Simmons?

  It just goes in that direction and then becomes that.

• 1:16:52Sean Fennessey?

  Becomes pure camp.

• 1:16:53Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I my hottest take is related to what you're saying because I feel similarly and that it's that. This movie should have been an even bigger deal because Elijah Wood and Macaulay Culkin should have both been coming off of. Academy Awards for supporting actor, Culkin for his performance as Thomas J and my girl and Elijah Wood for his performance. In, oh shoot, I forgot what the movie was that Elijah was in right before this.

• 1:17:16Bill Simmons?

  The War?

• 1:17:16Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, no, no, uh, uh, Radio Flyer.

• 1:17:21Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:22Sean Fennessey?

  And Macaulay should have beaten Jack Palance for City Slickers and Elijah should have beaten Gene Hackman in Unforgiven.

• 1:17:29Chris Ryan?

  That's not actually your take. That's like, that's like you're just.

• 1:17:31Bill Simmons?

  It's the hottest take.

• 1:17:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's my hottest take. It's my hottest take.

• 1:17:35Bill Simmons?

  Could Macaulay?

• 1:17:36Chris Ryan?

  Can you imagine Elijah Wood accepting an Oscar and just be like, Hack, it's just great to be nominated with these. These other performers, Hackman, I've looked up to you for all eight years of my life.

• 1:17:47Sean Fennessey?

  If you've seen Radio Flyer, you know what a success that is. Another Richard Donner film maybe you haven't seen, just like.

• 1:17:52Bill Simmons?

  That would have been the worst moment of Gene Hackman's life until the TikTok craze of Gene Hackman's secret tunnel started.

• 1:17:57Chris Ryan?

  But somehow don't think that's bothering Gene Hackman anymore, but yeah.

• 1:18:01Bill Simmons?

  It's somewhere in the afterlife. He's bothered. He's like, really? 95 years, a million great movies.

• 1:18:06Chris Ryan?

  The ghost afterlife where it's either dark or light.

• 1:18:09Bill Simmons?

  These fucking weirdo TikTok people.

• 1:18:10Sean Fennessey?

  Do you have any secret tunnels?

• 1:18:13Bill Simmons?

  Do you know how hard it would be to just make a secret tunnel?

• 1:18:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Didn't you see Euphoria? Zoning here is impossible.

• 1:18:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. But that is what the guy with the secret tunnel would say.

• 1:18:22Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:22Sean Fennessey?

  You know how hard it would be to do this?

• 1:18:25Chris Ryan?

  How crazy would I have to be to have a series of tunnels?

• 1:18:30Bill Simmons?

  Did you have a hot take or?

• 1:18:31Chris Ryan?

  I have two. Uh, one is at the, uh, at the end of the day, I feel like Susan chooses blood over truth and she, she saves, she saves Henry over Mark and she's just like, it is what it is. That's my son. I'm not losing another one and we're just gonna have to figure this out. And honestly, the getaway plan is right there. You could probably blame a lot of it on Mark. Distraught, disturbed. He did Mr. Highway. He's the one who threatened, uh, Kareen or, you know, like you could get away with a lot of like.

• 1:19:01Bill Simmons?

  That was the single way female plot where she was trying to basically set up Bridget Fonda for all of it.

• 1:19:05Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's not even a hot take. I think it's actually the right take.

• 1:19:08Chris Ryan?

  So you would save?

• 1:19:09Sean Fennessey?

  It's not defensible to save Mark.

• 1:19:12Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:12Sean Fennessey?

  It's just, as a parent, it's just not.

• 1:19:14Bill Simmons?

  I mean, Henry did try to kill her three minutes earlier.

• 1:19:16Sean Fennessey?

  He did, but at least like institutionalized the kid.

• 1:19:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. She could be like, he was, he was having like, he was disturbed.

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  Cause it's really only one moment in her eyes that he broke. She hasn't seen any of the other stuff.

• 1:19:26Chris Ryan?

  So she, she has a feeling he killed Richard.

• 1:19:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:29Chris Ryan?

  He was kind of admitting.

• 1:19:31Speaker 04

  But she makes a very quick conclusion, like 30 seconds after he does this one thing to let him die.

• 1:19:35Sean Fennessey?

  Even as a parent, you watch your kids do things and you're just like, I wish they didn't do that just now, but you're like, eh, you know, willing to forgive it. They're my child.

• 1:19:42Bill Simmons?

  Well, you think about it, steals the duck, says, so what if I did? When she asks if he killed Richard and then, um, tries to push her off a cliff and does, and she almost falls to her death.

• 1:19:52Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like the better pitch, the better question here is not whether you would save me or Chris, but whether you would save Ben after revealing that he's killed someone or Chris. If you're holding Ben Simmons and you're holding CR.

• 1:20:04Chris Ryan?

  Murderer Ben Simmons or me?

• 1:20:08Bill Simmons?

  I'd probably at that point, remember I thought Chris got a little chirpy after the Eagles Pat Super Bowl. I'd probably let him go. Just got a split second of chirpiness.

• 1:20:16Chris Ryan?

  Some settled down juices. I throw you into the ocean.

• 1:20:19Bill Simmons?

  Just a little settled down.

• 1:20:20Chris Ryan?

  There's the most settled down juice in the world.

• 1:20:23Sean Fennessey?

  My friend.

• 1:20:24Bill Simmons?

  No more Eagles Super Bowls for you.

• 1:20:27Chris Ryan?

  My other hottest take was that if Henry's parents were just a little bit more engaged, they would have seen that this is an NHL pest and enforcer in the making. And you could have channeled all that aggression.

• 1:20:39Bill Simmons?

  Good skater.

• 1:20:40Chris Ryan?

  Youth hockey.

• 1:20:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:41Chris Ryan?

  That guy's on the Bs by 95.

• 1:20:43Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, he's on the third line.

• 1:20:46Speaker 04

  I was like Wallace, if he had an ounce of an eye as a scout, he would have seen that this kid's accurate.

• 1:20:51Chris Ryan?

  That guy's skate speed was incredible.

• 1:20:53Speaker 04

  He was a great skater.

• 1:20:54Bill Simmons?

  It seemed like it was Culkin, too, doing the skating.

• 1:20:57Chris Ryan?

  He slingshots that.

• 1:20:58Speaker 04

  This poor kid's fucking cooped up. Harness it. He's got cabin fever.

• 1:21:01Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Speaker 04

  He's got nothing to do all day.

• 1:21:03Bill Simmons?

  Didn't love the throwing motion from him.

• 1:21:05Chris Ryan?

  No, but like he looks like McDavid out there. Like, let's fucking tap into it.

• 1:21:10Speaker 04

  I agree.

• 1:21:11Bill Simmons?

  Casting what ifs.

• 1:21:13Speaker 04

  This kid, he plays in sports. What's he doing every day?

• 1:21:16Bill Simmons?

  Casting what ifs, they almost made this in 1988 with Michael Klesick as Henry. I don't know who that is.

• 1:21:23Chris Ryan?

  And then Jesse Bradford, right?

• 1:21:25Bill Simmons?

  With Mary Steenburgen as the mom.

• 1:21:29Bill Simmons?

  And Michael Lehman, who directed Heathers, is the director.

• 1:21:32Chris Ryan?

  Do you think a Michael Lehman directed version of this has like more tongue in cheek black comedy?

• 1:21:37Sean Fennessey?

  For sure, just based on all the movies that he's made in his career, but would that have made sense for this?

• 1:21:42Chris Ryan?

  I mean, I don't know if totally it would have worked. Obviously Kit was like, hit the bricks.

• 1:21:45Bill Simmons?

  Kit Culkin dumped his ass, yeah.

• 1:21:48Bill Simmons?

  Kit Culkin's like, you're out. My son's the hottest star in the world for nine more months. You're out.

• 1:21:53Sean Fennessey?

  He did.

• 1:21:54Speaker 04

  The LeVar Ball of Hollywood, Dad.

• 1:21:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, no question. Best that guy award. I don't think Daniel Hugh Kelly is a that guy, except for Craig's generation.

• 1:22:03Chris Ryan?

  Well, who is he then?

• 1:22:03Bill Simmons?

  Well, I think the therapist is the that guy.

• 1:22:06Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:06Bill Simmons?

  I know, I've seen that lady. I don't, I have no idea what her name is.

• 1:22:09Chris Ryan?

  For a while. I think she's done a lot of like stage stuff.

• 1:22:12Sean Fennessey?

  Wendy Cruzen is not a that guy?

• 1:22:13Bill Simmons?

  Wendy Cruzen is probably the mom from The Good Son. So that would make her that guy, which I think would qualify her.

• 1:22:20Chris Ryan?

  This category is becoming needless to accomplish.

• 1:22:22Bill Simmons?

  Or mom from Santa Claus.

• 1:22:23Sean Fennessey?

  But, but nobody knows that.

• 1:22:26Bill Simmons?

  Most people don't know what her name is. Yeah, that's probably the best answer.

• 1:22:29Chris Ryan?

  Didn't this used to be the Joey Pants that guy award?

• 1:22:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Chris Ryan?

  I say, I feel like we're getting away from the original text.

• 1:22:36Bill Simmons?

  Oh.

• 1:22:36Chris Ryan?

  And you can't be.

• 1:22:37Bill Simmons?

  Some notes from CR.

• 1:22:38Chris Ryan?

  Well, you can't.

• 1:22:39Sean Fennessey?

  Sounds like someone's getting dropped off the cliff.

• 1:22:41Chris Ryan?

  No, I'm just saying, you can't be that guyed in the movie that you're in. You can't be, Wendy Cruzen is obviously from The Good Son. It's, it's Daniel Hugh Kelly. It was from Hard Castle and McCormick.

• 1:22:53Bill Simmons?

  Is that true?

• 1:22:53Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:55Sean Fennessey?

  This is big TV.

• 1:22:57Chris Ryan?

  There's like sixty seven episodes.

• 1:22:58Bill Simmons?

  But he wasn't in Ten Speed and Thunderfoot? What was that one? Remember that one? Ten Speed and Brown Shoe?

• 1:23:03Chris Ryan?

  All the TV shows, when you look up these people's credits, they're just like, did Tarantino make this up? Or is this real?

• 1:23:10Bill Simmons?

  There was some show that was, they did the Instagram video of the, of the opening credits from nineteen seventy seven called Blansky's Beauties. It was a Happy Days skin off, a spin off. And it was set in Vegas. And, uh, and none of us, I was on with people my age, like Jimmy and our friend Rob Mills. And we were all like, does anyone remember the show? It was thirteen episodes of it. And I was like, how did I not know about this show? It was Strippers in Vegas. Like a comedy.

• 1:23:37Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:23:38Bill Simmons?

  Scott Baio was in it. Pat Burrito was in it. But yeah, the point is, shows just came and went. We never knew what was going on.

• 1:23:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It's so easy to make them up too, right? It's just like.

• 1:23:48Chris Ryan?

  Two names.

• 1:23:48Sean Fennessey?

  Jiminy McCorcall, PhD.

• 1:23:50Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:23:51Sean Fennessey?

  He's a, he's a rap scallion professor at a New England university.

• 1:23:54Bill Simmons?

  This would be a good use of AI.

• 1:23:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, well, no. Why, why?

• 1:23:57Bill Simmons?

  No, fake, fake trailers from the seventies and eighties. You have to decide whether they are a real show or not.

• 1:24:03Sean Fennessey?

  I'll get cracking on Jiminy McCorcall.

• 1:24:05Chris Ryan?

  AI is just making Too Many Cooks.

• 1:24:07Sean Fennessey?

  That's what it is. It's, that's what Too Many Cooks did.

• 1:24:09Bill Simmons?

  Supertrain was this big NBC show in the late seventies. Fred Silverman went to NBC from ABC. Big executive. This was his big expensive show, Supertrain. And it was basically Love Boat on a train. And they would just show these wide shots of this train going fast. And then it would be like starring Vic Tabak. And, um, it was an all time legendary TV bob.

• 1:24:31Chris Ryan?

  I don't know any of the names that you just mentioned.

• 1:24:34Sean Fennessey?

  Then they remade it thirty years later as Snowpiercer.

• 1:24:37Bill Simmons?

  Right. Then they decided this is much better as a futuristic horror show. Uh, Dan Waiters was tough. I get the pit bull.

• 1:24:43Chris Ryan?

  I got Morse.

• 1:24:45Sean Fennessey?

  I chose cinematographer John Lindley.

• 1:24:48Bill Simmons?

  Oh, wow. I like it.

• 1:24:50Sean Fennessey?

  Huge moment for him. Went on to shoot movies for like Nora Ephron. Not really the showiest cinematographer in movie history, but five or six times watching this 82 minute movie, I was like, damn.

• 1:25:01Chris Ryan?

  Also, he's kind of responsible for that early 90s look, I guess.

• 1:25:05Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Recasting Couch Director City. We mentioned Mary Steenburgen. Let's go for the big guns here. This is a Michelle Pfeiffer movie. Like, this would have been the fucking perfect Michelle Pfeiffer movie.

• 1:25:17Chris Ryan?

  Young grieving widow.

• 1:25:18Bill Simmons?

  This is two, two years before Dangerous Minds. It's like four years after Fabulous Baker Boys. Realistic that she would have a 10 year old son. I think she would have classic Michelle Pfeiffer faces of being upset, like just like

• 1:25:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, kind of like a proto what lies beneath vibe to it.

• 1:25:37Bill Simmons?

  And even what's the thing she's in now with Kurt Russell? Where she's just like having a glass of wine, looking out sadly and like she's, nobody's better.

• 1:25:47Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. A little bit of a like, what is this smoke show doing in Rock Harbor, Maine, married to this guy?

• 1:25:52Chris Ryan?

  You'd have to upgrade.

• 1:25:52Bill Simmons?

  No makeup for her.

• 1:25:53Chris Ryan?

  You'd have to upgrade Wallace, too. If that's the case, then you need to get

• 1:25:56Sean Fennessey?

  That's when you get remarried.

• 1:25:57Chris Ryan?

  Sam Shepard as Wallace.

• 1:26:00Bill Simmons?

  This sounds like a great movie.

• 1:26:03Bill Simmons?

  We get Hank.

• 1:26:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, upgrade Morse from Hank.

• 1:26:06Bill Simmons?

  Hank's in Pfeiffer. Let's go.

• 1:26:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, sure. Why not? We should just do Cruise at 25 as Mark.

• 1:26:12Chris Ryan?

  Can you imagine Kit Colkin on the set with Morse, with Sam Shepard, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Tom Hanks? It's like, go back to your fucking trailer, okay? Relight my son. Have a snack.

• 1:26:24Bill Simmons?

  What do you have for flex?

• 1:26:25Speaker 04

  We might get a Kit Colkin award. I don't know if that's right. I was all bummed because I thought my Henry should have played hockey. I had that.

• 1:26:35Speaker 04

  I'm gonna go with the OK, motherfucker award for the exact moment when this movie went up a notch. When Connie is drowning and Henry is just kind of limply holding his hand out.

• 1:26:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:45Speaker 04

  And for a second, you're like, oh, okay, he wanted her to get in the water, but he's gonna save her. And the hand is just out of reach. It was kind of a special.

• 1:26:52Chris Ryan?

  No, it's amazing because it's like if you were a witness to that, you'd be like, he tried to save her.

• 1:26:56Speaker 04

  He's trying. Yeah. It's a special kind of dimension.

• 1:26:58Bill Simmons?

  He's just kinda like.

• 1:26:59Speaker 04

  Liz got up and like went to the bathroom. She's like, I can't. This is wicked.

• 1:27:05Sean Fennessey?

  Only thing that would have been worse is if they let Connie die in the movie. That would have been, that would have been truly like the restrictor plate is off.

• 1:27:11Chris Ryan?

  I was like, there's no way they're killing anyone else. The daughter's definitely not gonna die. And then when she sinks down and goes under the ice, I was like, holy fuck, are they gonna kill Connie? Yeah.

• 1:27:19Sean Fennessey?

  That would have been deeply malevolent.

• 1:27:23Bill Simmons?

  Could argue it would have been a better movie.

• 1:27:26Bill Simmons?

  Could argue it.

• 1:27:28Sean Fennessey?

  Is this month actually sick fuck Bill Simmons?

• 1:27:30Bill Simmons?

  I have to say it.

• 1:27:31Chris Ryan?

  Sick fuck month.

• 1:27:32Bill Simmons?

  It's like they, they go 90% there, but not all the way.

• 1:27:36Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36Bill Simmons?

  Uh, half I started a research. The cigarettes they smoked was a tube filled with dried parsley and lettuce leaves.

• 1:27:42Chris Ryan?

  I don't really get that.

• 1:27:44Bill Simmons?

  I think that's bullshit. I think they were ripping darts.

• 1:27:46Chris Ryan?

  They were fucking, yeah.

• 1:27:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. It's early 90s.

• 1:27:48Chris Ryan?

  It's Marvel country.

• 1:27:49Bill Simmons?

  They filmed the cliff scene at Palisade Head, Minnesota, and used tugboats to make the cliff, make the water seem choppy like they're in Maine. They were dangled off the cliff secured by a safety crane and cable. They also constructed a fake cliff to make it easier to shoot the hanging stuff, stunt coordinator, the whole thing. After discussions with Culkin and his parents, he agreed to do a 30-foot fall on a cable on the actual cliff, but wanted one thing in return for this act of bravery, a BB gun. This is actually in the research.

• 1:28:25Chris Ryan?

  That's very Henry.

• 1:28:26Sean Fennessey?

  Shits of Henry, yeah.

• 1:28:27Bill Simmons?

  Also, he got like $5 million for this movie.

• 1:28:30Chris Ryan?

  Get your own fucking BB gun.

• 1:28:31Bill Simmons?

  Just give him the BB gun anyway.

• 1:28:32Sean Fennessey?

  Sounds like Jesus Christ. $5 million, but yeah.

• 1:28:36Bill Simmons?

  They filmed some stuff in Beverly, Massachusetts. It's Manchester by the Sea and blah, blah, blah. And then you mentioned the tie, there's a tie-in novel? I never know what the tie-in novels.

• 1:28:45Chris Ryan?

  Novelization, yeah.

• 1:28:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I never know what to make of those.

• 1:28:48Sean Fennessey?

  Some of them are good.

• 1:28:49Bill Simmons?

  They make Henry a sociopath, where it's just like, they dive into like, he just can't feel anything, basically. Uh, Macaulay Culkin, Elijah Wood, very close friends to this day.

• 1:29:01Chris Ryan?

  Cool. It's great.

• 1:29:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:04Chris Ryan?

  I would get pretty freaked out if I saw the two of them together.

• 1:29:07Bill Simmons?

  And then you mentioned, you mentioned the UK thing. When it finally edited. Uh, was released in the UK in nineteen ninety five as a video release. Two years later, they edited out everything that happens with Mr. Highway. He's basically on the bridge and then she's, you don't see anything.

• 1:29:23Chris Ryan?

  The UK had moved on to Oasis by then. They're like, well, it doesn't really matter.

• 1:29:27Sean Fennessey?

  The idea of being okay to murder a dog, but not okay to drop a, you know, a scarecrow.

• 1:29:32Bill Simmons?

  They were fearing of the copycat thing. That happened. Remember that movie, The Program? Which we've done the rewatchables.

• 1:29:37Sean Fennessey?

  Kids laying down in the street.

• 1:29:38Bill Simmons?

  Laying down in the street became like, that's like, edit that out of the TV. Yeah. Apex Mountain.

• 1:29:46Bill Simmons?

  Colkin.

• 1:29:49Bill Simmons?

  It's probably Home Alone Two.

• 1:29:51Chris Ryan?

  I think this period though, right?

• 1:29:52Bill Simmons?

  This period. He's, he's on Apex Mountain for a couple of years.

• 1:29:56Sean Fennessey?

  I wrote his, it's his apex for bankability, that he could get this movie to sixty million dollars just by seeming evil in the trailer that he described.

• 1:30:03Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Do you think Spielberg understood what Apex Mountain was?

• 1:30:08Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think I do. So, uh.

• 1:30:10Bill Simmons?

  I felt like he was, seemed like he understood.

• 1:30:13Chris Ryan?

  I think he wa, it seemed like he grasped it.

• 1:30:16Sean Fennessey?

  I think, I think he was in a great mood.

• 1:30:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:19Bill Simmons?

  See, uh, when we do Jaws with him next year, cause he claims they're doing it, I'm gonna get rid of these chairs so we can do four chairs in here.

• 1:30:25Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:30:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yep. So it'll be me, Bill, Rob Mahoney and Steven.

• 1:30:32Chris Ryan?

  Steven, Kit Colkin, Bill and Sean.

• 1:30:36Bill Simmons?

  We, we, the, you, the Jaws thing, that'll be it. That might be my retirement podcast. Yeah, that'll be done. I'll be done after that.

• 1:30:43Chris Ryan?

  You guys don't want to do Lincoln as the last one?

• 1:30:46Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, there's any number of movies I'd like to ask him about that he's made.

• 1:30:50Bill Simmons?

  The thing is, he's made so many. What, I mean. Somebody sent me an email. If you took out the top four movies. A director or actor made, you just, you made the list, you wiped out the top four. Would he still, would Spielberg still have one of the best careers ever?

• 1:31:08Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:31:08Sean Fennessey?

  No question.

• 1:31:09Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:09Bill Simmons?

  So how many people, how many people could you say that about?

• 1:31:13Chris Ryan?

  There's like four. Like, if you think about, how many times on this pod have you said, this person, it's like this, this, this and this, and then the wheels come off? You know, and it's like, it's not even the wheels coming off. It might just be like that their hot streak ended.

• 1:31:25Bill Simmons?

  I think Meryl Streep might be the only actress where you could remove her top four. And she would still have one of the best three or four careers ever.

• 1:31:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's it works a little bit better with directors like it's a real confrontation with how many peaks you have because Spielberg has three distinct peaks like Scorsese has three distinct peaks. John Ford has three distinct peaks where they're like in different decades are doing different things that are amazing. Actors is tough because like most of them you get these like two or three iconic roles. One that's like the breakthrough, one where the whole industry is like you're the greatest of all time. And then one late period thing. So it's a little harder for actors.

• 1:32:01Bill Simmons?

  Cruise you could wipe out four.

• 1:32:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, like I was just.

• 1:32:04Bill Simmons?

  And I think Denzel you could wipe out four.

• 1:32:05Chris Ryan?

  I was thinking about Damon because of because of Odyssey and Odyssey is like the third time. He has been the biggest movie star in the world or whatever, you know, or led the biggest movie. And if you cut out Matt Damon's like top five movies, I think it would still be a good career, but it wouldn't be.

• 1:32:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:21Chris Ryan?

  Wouldn't be.

• 1:32:22Bill Simmons?

  I don't I saw an interview with him where he said he hadn't lost this much weight since high school or hadn't been at this weight since high school. Courage Under Fire, he was like a hundred and thirty pounds like.

• 1:32:33Sean Fennessey?

  I got interviews with our friend Zach Baron. Yeah.

• 1:32:35Bill Simmons?

  He just like he was like his health was in danger when he did that movie.

• 1:32:39Sean Fennessey?

  Um, maybe he forgot.

• 1:32:42Bill Simmons?

  Maybe he forgot. Random tangent. Elijah Wood, no.

• 1:32:46Chris Ryan?

  No, that's Lord of the Rings.

• 1:32:48Sean Fennessey?

  Agree.

• 1:32:49Bill Simmons?

  Lord of the Rings is the one with the rings, right?

• 1:32:50Chris Ryan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:51Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 1:32:53Bill Simmons?

  Evil Kid movies?

• 1:32:54Sean Fennessey?

  Well, maybe.

• 1:32:57Bill Simmons?

  What?

• 1:32:57Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe give it a.

• 1:32:58Bill Simmons?

  Piping up over there?

• 1:32:59Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe give it a spin.

• 1:33:01Bill Simmons?

  Lord of the Rings?

• 1:33:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I just did an episode about Masters of the Universe and I was talking about my favorite fantasy movies of all time. And Fellowship is like far and away my favorite fantasy movie of all time. I I just feel like.

• 1:33:09Chris Ryan?

  I think if you like Thrones, the way you do, there's no reason why you wouldn't be able to at least get.

• 1:33:14Sean Fennessey?

  I know it's a quarter of yours to be like, I'm not into this shit, but I feel like you would like it.

• 1:33:17Bill Simmons?

  Is that on 4K Blu-ray?

• 1:33:18Chris Ryan?

  It sure is.

• 1:33:19Sean Fennessey?

  Fuck, yeah.

• 1:33:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20Bill Simmons?

  Good one.

• 1:33:21Sean Fennessey?

  Those three movies are incredible, honestly. I'm this is not me dorking out like I it's they're legitimately great movies.

• 1:33:28Chris Ryan?

  I just watched them for the first time over Christmas and I they were great.

• 1:33:31Bill Simmons?

  What did Heifetz think?

• 1:33:32Chris Ryan?

  Has Heifetz seen Fellowship of the Ring, you think?

• 1:33:34Sean Fennessey?

  He could tell you every line from Lord of the Rings. Really?

• 1:33:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:38Bill Simmons?

  Heifetz. Wendy Cruz and Apex Mountain, probably Santa Claus. I'm guessing.

• 1:33:44Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:46Bill Simmons?

  I'm just that was a huge movie.

• 1:33:48Chris Ryan?

  Not it's definitely not David Morse, right?

• 1:33:50Bill Simmons?

  No. Daniel Hugh Kelly, probably Cujo.

• 1:33:53Sean Fennessey?

  What is David Morse's Apex Mountain?

• 1:33:55Bill Simmons?

  Oh, come on, proof of life.

• 1:34:00Bill Simmons?

  CR knows.

• 1:34:03Sean Fennessey?

  Disturbia, one of my childhood favorites.

• 1:34:04Bill Simmons?

  Oh, that's a good movie.

• 1:34:05Sean Fennessey?

  That's how I know him.

• 1:34:06Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Disturbia is good. Uh, Maine, no. Choosing between two people to live.

• 1:34:11Chris Ryan?

  What is the apex mountain for Maine, just out of curiosity?

• 1:34:17Sean Fennessey?

  Probably it.

• 1:34:20Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I was thinking something in the Stephen King vortex.

• 1:34:22Sean Fennessey?

  Prob- or Carrie.

• 1:34:25Bill Simmons?

  Carrie.

• 1:34:26Sean Fennessey?

  Right? One of those. I mean Shawshank.

• 1:34:29Chris Ryan?

  Oh, there you go. It's gotta be Shawshank.

• 1:34:31Sean Fennessey?

  Cause Shawshank's Maine, right?

• 1:34:33Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, the prison is.

• 1:34:33Bill Simmons?

  I thought it was filmed in Ohio, though.

• 1:34:36Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, but it's.

• 1:34:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, but it's set in Maine.

• 1:34:38Bill Simmons?

  Shawshank is a movie location in Maine. Yeah, that's the answer. Or the Portland Celtics winning the G League title last year.

• 1:34:43Chris Ryan?

  Nice one.

• 1:34:44Bill Simmons?

  Be one or the other.

• 1:34:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I didn't know that.

• 1:34:45Sean Fennessey?

  In the bedroom?

• 1:34:48Chris Ryan?

  Is that Todd Fielder, right?

• 1:34:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. What about Poison Ivy?

• 1:34:52Chris Ryan?

  It's in Maine?

• 1:34:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I did a lot of Maine research for this.

• 1:34:55Chris Ryan?

  Does Stand by Me, is it Oregon or Maine? I can't remember, cause it's set in Maine. They shot it in Oregon, right?

• 1:34:59Sean Fennessey?

  What about Lake Placid?

• 1:35:01Chris Ryan?

  Upstate New York.

• 1:35:02Sean Fennessey?

  No, Maine.

• 1:35:04Chris Ryan?

  Lake Placid is in Maine?

• 1:35:05Sean Fennessey?

  The movie Lake Placid is set in Maine.

• 1:35:07Chris Ryan?

  The crocodile movie. Oh, I thought you were like Miracle on Ice.

• 1:35:09Bill Simmons?

  Mine's Lake Placid. Is In the Bedroom a rewatchable?

• 1:35:13Sean Fennessey?

  To me it is. Deeply sad movie.

• 1:35:15Bill Simmons?

  That movie's fucking awesome.

• 1:35:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's a great movie.

• 1:35:18Chris Ryan?

  Wait, we're just the one with Jackie Earl Haley as the kid toucher?

• 1:35:21Bill Simmons?

  That's a little.

• 1:35:21Chris Ryan?

  Little children, okay.

• 1:35:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:24Bill Simmons?

  Uh, Cruise or Hanks?

• 1:35:27Bill Simmons?

  Cruise or Hanks?

• 1:35:29Chris Ryan?

  Uh, I mean, the roles are pretty slim.

• 1:35:32Bill Simmons?

  This is a Hanks movie as the dad, I think.

• 1:35:35Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 1:35:36Bill Simmons?

  Unless Cruise wants to play young and be Henry.

• 1:35:39Chris Ryan?

  So like Taps era Cruise?

• 1:35:41Sean Fennessey?

  I literally have young Cruise as Henry here.

• 1:35:43Bill Simmons?

  Young Cruise. Five years earlier, Cruise hasn't even decided to start acting yet, but just realizes.

• 1:35:50Chris Ryan?

  Wouldn't it have to be like 15 years earlier to really get great?

• 1:35:53Bill Simmons?

  No, he's playing young. He's 22.

• 1:35:55Sean Fennessey?

  It's Cruise and the Outsiders.

• 1:35:56Bill Simmons?

  He's committed to it. He's.

• 1:35:57Sean Fennessey?

  Or an endless love.

• 1:35:58Bill Simmons?

  I've been studying 10 year olds and how their bodies move. I've been learning how to un-throw stuff, so my throw emotion's bad.

• 1:36:06Chris Ryan?

  Video interview with him talking about how like at one point in his career, he was shooting Cocktail and prepping both Rain Man and Board on the Fourth of July and was rewriting all of them. And I was like, whoever wrote those movies is probably like, what the fuck?

• 1:36:21Sean Fennessey?

  Do you, do you guys feel ready for six straight months of Cruise mania with Digger?

• 1:36:26Chris Ryan?

  Are you kidding? When, when am I not?

• 1:36:28Bill Simmons?

  Not ready for that.

• 1:36:29Sean Fennessey?

  But this is gonna be a whole new level.

• 1:36:30Chris Ryan?

  Do you think he's going out on the road with it?

• 1:36:32Sean Fennessey?

  I think he has to, because it's gonna be, he's gonna be trying to get, win an Oscar.

• 1:36:35Speaker 04

  There's like a 2% chance he does the rewatchables.

• 1:36:38Sean Fennessey?

  I just like-

• 1:36:39Bill Simmons?

  2%? After Spielberg, I'm ready, I'm got the seat for him.

• 1:36:42Chris Ryan?

  So that would be Cruise, Mahoney, Hyphens, Richelieu.

• 1:36:47Bill Simmons?

  That's when we'll have to have four seats.

• 1:36:50Sean Fennessey?

  I, I don't know if I could, I don't know if I could hold it together for that one. That, that would, that would be a lot.

• 1:36:57Chris Ryan?

  You think Cruise would like Zayn Blom?

• 1:37:00Chris Ryan?

  Tall man. From the couch to another couch.

• 1:37:07Chris Ryan?

  And here we are. The superhero. The artist.

• 1:37:12Bill Simmons?

  What movie would you want to do with Cruise?

• 1:37:15Sean Fennessey?

  Um, probably Proof of Life.

• 1:37:19Sean Fennessey?

  Glad to get to be on that one. I got, would it be one of his movies or something else?

• 1:37:23Speaker 04

  I don't know. I don't think it can be one of his.

• 1:37:24Chris Ryan?

  It's so obvious, it's the re-cruising.

• 1:37:33Bill Simmons?

  Do the re-cruising with Cruise?

• 1:37:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34Sean Fennessey?

  I'm trying to think of what's in a movie that he talks about all the time that he loves. Like, he's talked about The Great Escape a bit in the past, how much he loves that. What, what's a movie that is, is essential to, I mean, he's talked a bunch about these, uh, Inari Two movies that he loves so much. He keeps talking about Amoris Peros now. I don't think we'd be doing that on the rewatchables anytime soon.

• 1:37:53Chris Ryan?

  I'd love to.

• 1:37:54Bill Simmons?

  It says that his favorite movie is Singing in the Rain.

• 1:37:59Speaker 04

  That would be incredible.

• 1:38:01Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:38:01Chris Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:38:04Bill Simmons?

  There's an article, "You Won't Trick Tom Cruise Into Naming His Four Favorite Films."

• 1:38:09Chris Ryan?

  No, because he was talking, you know what he loves?

• 1:38:10Bill Simmons?

  He's a cinema diplomat.

• 1:38:12Chris Ryan?

  Him, him and McCrory love the, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And the Once Upon a Time in the West, the Leon Wester.

• 1:38:18Sean Fennessey?

  Sick.

• 1:38:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:19Bill Simmons?

  Apparently he won't do that. What's the, who does that Letterboxd?

• 1:38:22Chris Ryan?

  They like give us their top four and he's like-

• 1:38:23Bill Simmons?

  Tom Cruise is like, "I can't, I love all movies."

• 1:38:25Chris Ryan?

  It depends on what I'm doing. Am I just watching one scene to be inspired, or am I hanging out on a Sunday afternoon?

• 1:38:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. He, I don't know, he sees a lot of movies. He's still, is like, that's his whole thing. He's like, "I'm at, I'm at the cinema, here to see The Odyssey." You know, a lot of selfies of Holden, like, happily eating popcorn. He loves popcorn.

• 1:38:44Bill Simmons?

  Cruise. I don't know if we could do Cruise.

• 1:38:47Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like it's just, if you have.

• 1:38:48Bill Simmons?

  Spielberg's like ultimately like a movie fan like us. Cruise is like, I don't know how you would have a two hour conversation with Cruise.

• 1:38:54Chris Ryan?

  It would be fucking incredible.

• 1:38:55Sean Fennessey?

  But, but what you want to do is just ask him questions for two hours. You don't want to be like, what's your favorite scene from this movie?

• 1:39:01Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, he matches like we're doing Lethal Weapon 2 with Cruise. They killed a South African.

• 1:39:08Sean Fennessey?

  He's like, Chris, Chris, do it, do it. Diplomatic immunity.

• 1:39:13Bill Simmons?

  Uh, I'm gonna add in here the Dennis Peck relationship test for could Dennis have broken up the main relationship?

• 1:39:19Chris Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:19Bill Simmons?

  Think Dennis could easily have gotten in.

• 1:39:21Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:39:23Bill Simmons?

  Two seconds.

• 1:39:23Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:24Bill Simmons?

  I love short haircuts.

• 1:39:28Chris Ryan?

  Major wife come.

• 1:39:30Bill Simmons?

  You're grieving. You need to let some of that grief out.

• 1:39:35Chris Ryan?

  Oh my god.

• 1:39:38Bill Simmons?

  The Ed Norton Reverse Dunk Award for did this movie need a random sports scene?

• 1:39:42Chris Ryan?

  I mean, it has one.

• 1:39:43Bill Simmons?

  It has the soccer, but did it need a scene with Henry in it? We talked about hockey. Is there a touch football scene where he starts to get a little?

• 1:39:50Chris Ryan?

  Maybe he's like a middle linebacker and he drops a kid.

• 1:39:53Bill Simmons?

  Like he takes, he takes Connie over the middle, just like Dexter.

• 1:39:56Chris Ryan?

  It's like, who invited fucking Ronnie La?

• 1:39:59Bill Simmons?

  Another touch football game. All right, here we go. Pickin' Nits. God, I have so many. Sean, you want to start us off?

• 1:40:06Sean Fennessey?

  What the hell is David Morse's character doing in this movie? What, in what universe, after your wife dies and a boy has lost his mother, are you dropping him off somewhere and not spending time with him?

• 1:40:16Chris Ryan?

  And going to Japan for two weeks.

• 1:40:17Sean Fennessey?

  What in the fuck? If this, Eileen and I watched this movie together last night and I was like, honey, if you die, I'm not dropping Alice off with someone. There's just no, I'd be like, Bill, I gotta take a couple of weeks off from the pods, man. I think you'll understand. Like, this is crazy that this is the premise of the movie.

• 1:40:31Bill Simmons?

  With my wife, we were just like, how is this?

• 1:40:34Chris Ryan?

  I think the fucked up thing is like, there's a bit of it where it's just like, is he kind of like, I need to like, get some me time, you know?

• 1:40:40Sean Fennessey?

  Could be.

• 1:40:41Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:41Sean Fennessey?

  Could be.

• 1:40:42Chris Ryan?

  But it's not explained in the movie.

• 1:40:43Bill Simmons?

  What do you have for biggest then pick?

• 1:40:45Chris Ryan?

  Uh, so when Mark breaks away, where he jumps out the window at the end to get to the cliffside, Davenport and Wallace are just like, oh, Mark, you got away from us. Then they just stop. They don't pursue. They don't like.

• 1:40:58Bill Simmons?

  I had that as well. Isn't, why doesn't the dad show up at any point over the next five minutes? Where is he?

• 1:41:03Chris Ryan?

  And then she comes back from the cliff and is just like, yeah, uh, you know, I had to choose between Mark and Henry and I dropped our son. So now you're down two. That's crazy.

• 1:41:14Sean Fennessey?

  How did, how did Wendy Cruisen explain to the cops how Henry died?

• 1:41:18Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 1:41:19Sean Fennessey?

  What did she say?

• 1:41:20Chris Ryan?

  Isn't that like criminal negligence anyway?

• 1:41:22Sean Fennessey?

  Did she say like, my son tried to kill me, so I killed him? Like, what did she, how did she explain?

• 1:41:26Bill Simmons?

  No, I, I think her and Mark get their stories straight for a split second.

• 1:41:30Chris Ryan?

  He slipped out of my hand. I was trying to save him.

• 1:41:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:41:32Sean Fennessey?

  The boys were playing on the cliff. I found them.

• 1:41:34Bill Simmons?

  They fell off. I was trying to hold them and obviously I wouldn't have wanted to kill my son, Henry.

• 1:41:40Chris Ryan?

  The first and last shots of the movie are Mark standing on like a sand dune in the middle of like a national park somewhere in Arizona with no one else around him.

• 1:41:47Speaker 04

  Makes no sense.

• 1:41:48Chris Ryan?

  Like, what's he doing?

• 1:41:49Bill Simmons?

  It's like the start of Dune 3.

• 1:41:52Chris Ryan?

  He's calling the sand worms.

• 1:41:55Speaker 04

  He's like doing the dance.

• 1:41:57Sean Fennessey?

  What about the investigation into Richard's death, the little boy? What happened there?

• 1:42:01Chris Ryan?

  Just, he drowned in six inches of water.

• 1:42:06Bill Simmons?

  I have a

• 1:42:07Chris Ryan?

  I just think that there would just be, we're having a fucking emergency meeting. Richard's dead. The daughter got thrown under a sheet of ice. We've got new kid here who's just causing all, like, we need to just shut it down. We're not going to dinner. We're not just using this old lady psychiatrist. I need like a bodyguard in here. Everybody is on like, is, is grounded. We're gonna figure this out.

• 1:42:33Bill Simmons?

  Mr. Highway is definitely some sort of investigation.

• 1:42:36Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:36Bill Simmons?

  It's like, first of all, very close to their house. There's not like a ton of people that live around there. The news reporter will say, uh, the driver reports seeing two kids pushing something off a thing.

• 1:42:48Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 1:42:48Bill Simmons?

  So that's coming up. Um, so these two guys are brothers, but their families have never hung out? Like their cousins have never met? Ten year olds, like that, not one family vacation, nothing?

• 1:42:59Chris Ryan?

  David Morse is always off to Japan.

• 1:43:01Sean Fennessey?

  Does he know anybody who lives in Arizona who he could drop his son off with? Like, what is it, what is going on?

• 1:43:05Chris Ryan?

  It's also the winter. Wasn't he in school?

• 1:43:08Sean Fennessey?

  They, they don't address that.

• 1:43:09Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:10Speaker 04

  No, they said it's Christmas break.

• 1:43:12Chris Ryan?

  Oh, that's right.

• 1:43:12Sean Fennessey?

  So the movie only takes place in over a two week span?

• 1:43:14Speaker 04

  There's also no Chris, there's no Christmas decorations in the house. Right? There's not a Christmas tree.

• 1:43:18Sean Fennessey?

  There is a tree.

• 1:43:19Speaker 04

  Oh, is there?

• 1:43:19Sean Fennessey?

  There is a tree, yeah.

• 1:43:20Bill Simmons?

  It's very, it's, this is not a holiday movie. It's even less of a holiday movie than Die Hard.

• 1:43:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:24Bill Simmons?

  Um. At one point, the dad says, what a haul, 11 states in three days. Where are you coming from?

• 1:43:31Chris Ryan?

  From Arizona.

• 1:43:32Bill Simmons?

  Isn't that like 38 states?

• 1:43:34Chris Ryan?

  You can actually do the drive and it's like six states, I think. Like it's the quickest route.

• 1:43:40Sean Fennessey?

  With a time machine?

• 1:43:41Chris Ryan?

  No, no, I mean, like, I don't know how long it takes for him to drive it, but it's like, just not that many, less states than you'd think.

• 1:43:47Bill Simmons?

  They have date night. Little Richard has died in six inches of bathtub water and their son's a serial killer and they're like, no babysitter.

• 1:43:56Speaker 04

  It bothered me that they were eating soup while talking about going out to dinner.

• 1:44:00Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:01Speaker 04

  I was like, what are you, you're having?

• 1:44:01Chris Ryan?

  Maybe they don't trust the restaurants, probably not a lot of them.

• 1:44:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:04Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:05Bill Simmons?

  Had some questions about the safety situation at the skating pond?

• 1:44:09Chris Ryan?

  It's just roped off.

• 1:44:10Bill Simmons?

  Just to, just to rope off, but anybody could have.

• 1:44:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:13Bill Simmons?

  Hurdled toward there?

• 1:44:14Sean Fennessey?

  I had that in most 1993 thing about this movie too, where I was just like, yeah, you just like go skating in an insanely dangerous place.

• 1:44:22Chris Ryan?

  I mean, that is like.

• 1:44:23Sean Fennessey?

  The local skate pond.

• 1:44:24Chris Ryan?

  Every 80s and early 90s water park or, or, you know, action park kind of place where you're just like, we probably should not be here.

• 1:44:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:32Bill Simmons?

  And the guys somehow don't fall on the ice as they're trying to save Connie?

• 1:44:35Sean Fennessey?

  That was weird too.

• 1:44:36Bill Simmons?

  I didn't understand any part of this skating scene.

• 1:44:38Sean Fennessey?

  Why do they not go to the part where she fell in to fish her out? They only go to the part where the ice is more solid and they have to ax it out though.

• 1:44:44Chris Ryan?

  It's just another, like, just like Wallace and Wendy Cruze never have a conversation where they're like, hey, have you ever been in a, in Henry's treehouse?

• 1:44:52Speaker 04

  Or the shed?

• 1:44:53Bill Simmons?

  The shed is the bigger one.

• 1:44:55Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:55Speaker 04

  She enters the shed, sees a crossbow, keeps walking, finds a rubber duck, that's the problem.

• 1:45:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:02Speaker 04

  Doesn't say a word. What is this military grade crossbow doing here?

• 1:45:05Chris Ryan?

  She probably thinks it's Wallace's to like ward off wild animals or something.

• 1:45:08Sean Fennessey?

  We don't get any report on the dead dog. Like, didn't somebody in the neighborhood is like, hey, somebody shot and killed my dog?

• 1:45:13Chris Ryan?

  Well, he doesn't know it's in the well.

• 1:45:14Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 1:45:15Bill Simmons?

  Oh, true. My dog's missing. This is the big one. This made my wife really upset. So Connie almost dies. Is in the hospital. We assume still in the hospital in the end of the movie. Both parents are home.

• 1:45:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:30Bill Simmons?

  Just, nobody's at the hospital? Connie's just lying in bed, like with the fucking remote control? She's like seven. Isn't one of the parents there twenty-four seven?

• 1:45:38Chris Ryan?

  One of my favorite tropes in movies is when, like, somebody is like, it's okay, you should go home and get some rest. It's like, my child, or like, my wife is like...

• 1:45:46Bill Simmons?

  Nobody's leaving the hospital.

• 1:45:48Chris Ryan?

  Nobody's going home to get some rest.

• 1:45:49Bill Simmons?

  If Alice almost, if that almost happened to Alice.

• 1:45:52Sean Fennessey?

  I would never leave the hospital.

• 1:45:54Bill Simmons?

  Be like, yeah, let's go home and let's get a bite to eat.

• 1:45:57Chris Ryan?

  We got tons more reservations.

• 1:45:59Bill Simmons?

  They love to do this in movies, though.

• 1:46:01Sean Fennessey?

  Done smart.

• 1:46:03Chris Ryan?

  I like when Henry leaves the hospital room and he goes, let her know I was here. Imagine just you in the hospital and you get like a resi notification. It's like, no, you're in.

• 1:46:12Sean Fennessey?

  A 7pm is opened up.

• 1:46:15Chris Ryan?

  You know what? We, we're not doctors. What can we do for her?

• 1:46:19Sean Fennessey?

  No. That, that, that's why at the beginning of the pod, I was like, this movie is trash. Like, it is really trashy.

• 1:46:25Bill Simmons?

  I love it.

• 1:46:26Sean Fennessey?

  But, because once you start getting into this stuff, it's so poorly constructed. However, it's very fun and entertaining.

• 1:46:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Bill Simmons?

  That's why we love From Helmut.

• 1:46:33Chris Ryan?

  You gotta get the parents out of the house. I get it. Like, you can't have them always be there because Henry needs room to cook.

• 1:46:39Bill Simmons?

  I also love when, uh, something like that happens to a character. And they run to the hospital and the guy says immediately, they said she's gonna be fine.

• 1:46:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:48Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:48Bill Simmons?

  It's like.

• 1:46:50Bill Simmons?

  She was underwater for about two minutes there. Let's, let's give it a week.

• 1:46:54Chris Ryan?

  I wouldn't necessarily...

• 1:46:55Bill Simmons?

  See if she remembers her name two days from now.

• 1:46:56Chris Ryan?

  She's not going to Caltech, but yeah, she'll be fine.

• 1:46:59Sean Fennessey?

  I like that you're really hooked on, like, she definitely has brain damage.

• 1:47:04Bill Simmons?

  She's like.

• 1:47:10Bill Simmons?

  She's fine.

• 1:47:12Sean Fennessey?

  No, Quinn's gonna be fine, you know, just a couple of bite marks, no worries. He'll be, he'll be back.

• 1:47:16Bill Simmons?

  Three minutes without oxygen, she'll be fine. Also, no witnesses for Henry just whipping her toward the dangerous.

• 1:47:23Sean Fennessey?

  Like a hundred people.

• 1:47:24Bill Simmons?

  Hundred and fifty-eight people there.

• 1:47:25Chris Ryan?

  But even if that would, what would have happened, would have just been like, yeah, Henry had her and let go of her, you know, and he could just be like, it was an accident, but.

• 1:47:34Bill Simmons?

  Sequel, prequel, prestige, TV, all black cast are untouchable. I think this is a pretty good prestige TV, Apple, eight episodes that I hope they don't do.

• 1:47:42Sean Fennessey?

  It is, but like by the third episode, you'd be like, somebody's gotta be like, what's going on with this kid? He keeps murdering people?

• 1:47:47Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 1:47:48Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:48Chris Ryan?

  We wouldn't have any of the picking nits because they would just spend eight hours like answering all the questions and stuff like that.

• 1:47:53Bill Simmons?

  Some backstories with the marriage, some.

• 1:47:56Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Why haven't Wallace and David Morse talked?

• 1:47:58Sean Fennessey?

  But this movie is also the length of one episode of prestige television, so.

• 1:48:02Bill Simmons?

  True.

• 1:48:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:03Bill Simmons?

  You, the Euphoria season finale was fifteen minutes longer. Is this movie better than Wayne Jenkins, Fergie the Florist, Zane Low, Robert Evans, Dr. Charles Nichols, or someone else?

• 1:48:11Chris Ryan?

  Henry, man, here you are, standing on the ledge. You've drowned, Richard, you've killed the neighborhood dog, nearly did Connie on a frozen pond. The body count grows, but what's next for you, man? After building your nail gun and terrorizing your immediate family, what stirs you?

• 1:48:33Sean Fennessey?

  Why is, why is Zane talking to Henry?

• 1:48:36Bill Simmons?

  With Henry?

• 1:48:37Sean Fennessey?

  Is Henry in studio?

• 1:48:38Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:39Sean Fennessey?

  Or Zane flying to Maine?

• 1:48:40Chris Ryan?

  No, Henry is in the, in the Beach One studio and Zane is standing at the console.

• 1:48:47Bill Simmons?

  No, Zane's flying to Maine for this.

• 1:48:48Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 1:48:49Bill Simmons?

  There's no question.

• 1:48:49Chris Ryan?

  As the winds, you know, the waves lapping against this shoreline, Henry.

• 1:48:57Sean Fennessey?

  On location, Zane.

• 1:48:59Bill Simmons?

  Just want to ask her who gets it.

• 1:49:00Chris Ryan?

  McCall, McCallie.

• 1:49:01Bill Simmons?

  Culkin.

• 1:49:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:03Bill Simmons?

  Zouattin Airward, what happened the next day? I wrote down, honey, bad news, I dropped Henry to his death, we lost another one.

• 1:49:11Sean Fennessey?

  I, bro, Mark going back to Arizona and leaving that family destroyed in Maine is hilarious.

• 1:49:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and it's just like.

• 1:49:17Bill Simmons?

  See you guys later.

• 1:49:17Chris Ryan?

  Wendy Carson, Wallace, and a fucking kid with scrambled eggs for brains.

• 1:49:24Chris Ryan?

  And he's like, I'm out. I got a date in the desert with myself, just talking all over.

• 1:49:32Sean Fennessey?

  No one's watching him and he's like standing on the. Mountaintop in Arizona.

• 1:49:36Bill Simmons?

  The bad news.

• 1:49:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:37Bill Simmons?

  Connie has to repeat.

• 1:49:38Chris Ryan?

  Bernstein's like, da na na na. What the fuck is happening?

• 1:49:46Sean Fennessey?

  Great movie.

• 1:49:47Bill Simmons?

  Bad news, Connie has to repeat the fourth grade again.

• 1:49:52Bill Simmons?

  Third time, hopefully be a charm.

• 1:49:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, Connie, she lived through the lake, but she had to eat through a straw for the next five years.

• 1:50:00Bill Simmons?

  Probably an answer with questions. Was Henry's mom a murderer?

• 1:50:03Chris Ryan?

  Uh, it's a good, good one, well.

• 1:50:06Bill Simmons?

  Could that have been an involuntary manslaughter charge?

• 1:50:11Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's become clear that the Rock Harbor Police Department is not elite in investigating these issues.

• 1:50:15Bill Simmons?

  It's a good point.

• 1:50:16Sean Fennessey?

  So I feel like she's probably getting away with it.

• 1:50:18Chris Ryan?

  I got two for you.

• 1:50:19Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:19Chris Ryan?

  Did Mark's dad nail the Tokyo deal or what?

• 1:50:22Sean Fennessey?

  Great one.

• 1:50:24Bill Simmons?

  In two weeks.

• 1:50:25Chris Ryan?

  Was that keeping him up at night or was he was just like, he was just like, he got it. He's bringing Hyundai's to Arizona or whatever. And then, uh, what's Mark's dad's relationship with his brother like after this? So the whole dropping Mark off thing didn't really work out great for your family.

• 1:50:43Bill Simmons?

  Turned out to be a different kind of drop off.

• 1:50:45Sean Fennessey?

  If they were estranged before, they're even more estranged now.

• 1:50:47Chris Ryan?

  You think it's just like, we're just never gonna talk again.

• 1:50:50Sean Fennessey?

  Feels like it. Feels like it. I, I think the lingering question is, so Henry is just evil. Like, is he evil or is he a sociopath?

• 1:51:00Bill Simmons?

  Well, the mom can say like, Henry did tell me he murdered Richard.

• 1:51:05Chris Ryan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:51:06Bill Simmons?

  I do think the 86 minute movie is missing a scene in the first 40 minutes. When she's in Richard's room or something like, you need to see the light clicking.

• 1:51:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:17Bill Simmons?

  That she deep down thinks Henry did this.

• 1:51:19Chris Ryan?

  This has never sat right with me. I don't get it.

• 1:51:21Bill Simmons?

  And I don't think they ever really accomplish that.

• 1:51:23Chris Ryan?

  There's that one moment where she's like.

• 1:51:24Bill Simmons?

  Cause I think the mom would know.

• 1:51:25Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Then there's also like, I do like the fact that they've, they come back to it a couple of times. That Mark thinks she's the reincarnation of his mother.

• 1:51:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, I love that idea.

• 1:51:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and that's how he taunts Henry a little bit by saying like.

• 1:51:40Chris Ryan?

  He's like, my mom's alive, she's my mom, yeah.

• 1:51:43Speaker 04

  You could make the case that Mark is the best thing that ever happened to that family. Because if Mark doesn't go to Maine, Connie dies.

• 1:51:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:51Speaker 04

  And maybe the mom dies.

• 1:51:52Chris Ryan?

  Well, we don't know whether Mark's introduction into the family accelerates Henry's shit.

• 1:51:57Speaker 04

  He already killed Richard.

• 1:51:58Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, but maybe he was like, now that I got him out of the way, I'm good. You know, like, I'm the only son, we can focus on my hockey career.

• 1:52:05Speaker 04

  I got my yayas out, we're good.

• 1:52:07Bill Simmons?

  Henry, Henry was like Howie Roseman, though. He was preparing for this moment for years.

• 1:52:12Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 1:52:12Bill Simmons?

  He'd been building Mr. Highway, he'd been building the nail gun.

• 1:52:16Sean Fennessey?

  True.

• 1:52:16Bill Simmons?

  He was just ready.

• 1:52:17Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:17Bill Simmons?

  He was ready for this.

• 1:52:20Bill Simmons?

  2028 draft.

• 1:52:21Sean Fennessey?

  I see you're very concerned about this AJ Brown trade.

• 1:52:23Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, definitely concerned. What was your other in答问题?

• 1:52:26Chris Ryan?

  I did the.

• 1:52:26Bill Simmons?

  You did both, okay.

• 1:52:27Chris Ryan?

  Did Mark's deal in Tokyo go through and what's Mark's relation, Mark's dad's relationship with his brother?

• 1:52:33Bill Simmons?

  The memorabilia you'd most want or not want from this movie?

• 1:52:36Chris Ryan?

  I think you gotta get Mr. Highway sitting with us here.

• 1:52:38Bill Simmons?

  So if Mr. Highway was here right now, it'd be pretty fucking funny.

• 1:52:41Chris Ryan?

  It's gotta be you, Spielberg, Anthony DeBundo, Mr. Highway.

• 1:52:48Chris Ryan?

  Jaws 2 rewatchables.

• 1:52:52Sean Fennessey?

  I love that. He's the AJ Hawk for the rewatchables. He just sits there? That's great.

• 1:52:58Sean Fennessey?

  Just have Mr. Highway cam, it's just on him all the time.

• 1:53:01Chris Ryan?

  What is it? Mr. Highway, Zaylo Fergie? Take it.

• 1:53:06Bill Simmons?

  Coach Finstock, Mr. Miyagi, best, worst life lesson?

• 1:53:10Chris Ryan?

  Get a sitter.

• 1:53:10Bill Simmons?

  Once you realize you can do anything, you're free.

• 1:53:14Bill Simmons?

  But Henry's telling us.

• 1:53:15Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty true to some extent.

• 1:53:17Chris Ryan?

  I would say just pay for the sitter.

• 1:53:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:23Bill Simmons?

  Don't let, don't let your son, who may have already killed one of your other sons, take your daughter ice skating. Maybe is a good one.

• 1:53:29Sean Fennessey?

  Good note.

• 1:53:30Bill Simmons?

  Best double feature choice. I have Mikey. I would watch Mikey first, then Good Son.

• 1:53:35Sean Fennessey?

  So there's a, um, there is like kind of prevailing theory around Home Alone that, you know, Kevin is really the villain of the movie.

• 1:53:43Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:53:43Sean Fennessey?

  He is like the demon of the film. And so just pairing those two movies together is pretty funny, I think.

• 1:53:48Chris Ryan?

  I'd probably go Bad Seed, just because it pulls so much for it.

• 1:53:51Bill Simmons?

  And Culkin wins the movie? There's a decent Elijah Wood case. But I think it's Culkin.

• 1:53:55Chris Ryan?

  I think it's, it's, it's just. For the limited amount of like credits that Macaulay Culkin gets, this is such a crazy outlier. And it's, it's, I think he wins it.

• 1:54:05Sean Fennessey?

  But because of that, I think the winner is Kit Culkin.

• 1:54:08Chris Ryan?

  Jesus, Sean.

• 1:54:10Sean Fennessey?

  As fucked up as that is, I think he like, kind of bull charged his way into being the shadow producer of the whole thing. Forced his son into the project, forced his daughter into the project. And the movie was a big hit.

• 1:54:22Chris Ryan?

  Should we add a new category is how would Kit Culkin have reshaped this movie?

• 1:54:26Sean Fennessey?

  He's like the David O. Selsnick of the modern era.

• 1:54:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Well, it's time. Craig had never seen this movie or knew what it was.

• 1:54:34Speaker 04

  Um, both kids were fantastic. I had very little fun watching this movie until the final battle. I reveled in Henry's death.

• 1:54:43Speaker 04

  You're spending 90 minutes just in Final Destination for children? And this was a blast. And now I feel like going back, it'd be great. But kind of first watch, you're like, this is very little room to breathe. Every scene is like, will a child die for 90 minutes?

• 1:54:56Bill Simmons?

  Yes.

• 1:54:58Speaker 04

  But now, like when you just don't take it as seriously and kind of, you know, live outside the movie.

• 1:55:02Chris Ryan?

  It's the key to from Hell Month. Is you have to.

• 1:55:05Speaker 04

  You have to view it through a different lens. There's just less pulp in this movie than like Single White Female or Hand That Rocks The Cradle. This one is pretty much like, every scene is like, is a kid gonna fall down a well?

• 1:55:16Bill Simmons?

  It's a harrowing movie.

• 1:55:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it is. It is.

• 1:55:19Chris Ryan?

  It's, it's really violent.

• 1:55:20Bill Simmons?

  You get it now, though.

• 1:55:21Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure. You could watch it a second time and have a blast.

• 1:55:23Bill Simmons?

  The unintentional comedy of this movie is off the charts.

• 1:55:26Sean Fennessey?

  That's what it is. It's just fun to talk about. Cause it's so ridiculous.

• 1:55:29Speaker 04

  It's just remarkable that a movie can have so many obvious picking nits. In 1993. And they're just like, oh, who cares? Like, I feel like you can't do that now. If you deliver the script, I mean, maybe for a movie that's just like, goes straight to streaming or something. But for a movie that is going in theaters with a big star, there's like 15 legitimate ridiculous picking nits. And this, any producer would be like, well, that, that doesn't make any fucking sense.

• 1:55:51Chris Ryan?

  I think that there's just as many picking nits now, but like so much of that happens either in like a John Wick style movie or a superhero movie that you're like, oh yeah, I guess they went back in time to like fix this.

• 1:56:00Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:56:01Chris Ryan?

  Flux capacitor thing or whatever. And it's like, this is actually like, no, a cop would have seen this by now. Yeah.

• 1:56:06Sean Fennessey?

  Part of the reason why I keep. Pointing back to the incredible level of craft is because there's like, you know, 100 people worked on this movie. None of them raised any of the notes about picking it, or if they did, Kit Culkin like overwhelmed them. But then there's like nine artisans who are among the greatest craftspeople of their era. And they're like, I'm gonna spend 38 days of my professional life making this very stupid, but ultimately very well made movie.

• 1:56:31Speaker 04

  And no one was like, shouldn't Wallace be chasing Mark? It's like, and they're like, ah, whatever.

• 1:56:36Chris Ryan?

  Funny thing is, that's like one shot of like Wallace like running in the background.

• 1:56:40Speaker 04

  He should have like fallen in the well or something. He just doesn't chase.

• 1:56:44Bill Simmons?

  We didn't mention there was a cemetery too near them.

• 1:56:47Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:56:47Bill Simmons?

  It really was like an all time kid death trap.

• 1:56:50Speaker 04

  The final battle is elite. Like the way that shot, the camera goes up over them as they're hanging. It's pretty nuts.

• 1:56:57Bill Simmons?

  It's a great scene.

• 1:56:58Sean Fennessey?

  Ruben cooking.

• 1:56:58Bill Simmons?

  The good son from Hell Month is just cooking.

• 1:57:01Sean Fennessey?

  Is this it? Is this the last one?

• 1:57:02Bill Simmons?

  No, we're gonna keep going. We might even go through, through the first part of July.

• 1:57:06Sean Fennessey?

  Wow. Well, so do you not consider 2001 a part of this, this week?

• 1:57:11Bill Simmons?

  I think it spiritually is because it's computer from hell.

• 1:57:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:14Bill Simmons?

  And it was the beginning of June, but it's also one of the greatest movies of all time.

• 1:57:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:18Bill Simmons?

  Little insulting to put it in a thing with The Good Son.

• 1:57:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's fair.

• 1:57:23Bill Simmons?

  But at the same time, we could sneak it in. Sean Fantasy, Chris Ryan, thank you.

• 1:57:27Chris Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 1:57:27Bill Simmons?

  Thanks to Craig and Chris as well and Eduardo. Back with From Hell Month next week.

• 1:57:43Speaker 06

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