Welcome to Nice Ashes, I'm Mike.
And I'm Nate.
What are we smoking, Mike?
It's off to a sweet.
We are smoking the factory smokes, sweet.
And we were Jabber John before we started the show as we do.
And we licked the caps and we're like, wow, we need to start recording now.
God damn.
It is sweet and like mouth puckering is what I would say.
It actually makes me excited.
It reminds me of fishing with my dad.
I'm pairing this one with a Ursa Minor Brewing out of Duluth, Minnesota, Galactic Face Slap,
which is a hazy IPA.
But we should get lit and then we'll talk about what we're going to talk about, right
Mike?
Absolutely.
I'm pairing mine with ice water and also some iced coffee.
There you go.
Hey, the first puff was actually quite pleasant.
I was a little worried with how sweet the cap was that it was going to be, I don't know.
I am still getting a lot of sweetness, a lot.
It's not unpleasant though.
No, it's a lot of sweetness.
But when it's lit, the sweetness is tolerable in a pleasant way.
I don't mean to say it's bad.
It's pairing very well with iced coffee.
For those of you who liked iced coffee, it pairs very well.
Well, I do like iced coffee, but usually when we record, I like beer better.
Absolutely.
Now, Mike, you're on a new mic, right Mike?
I am on a new mic.
Yeah.
We were, I don't know, what, 20 minutes?
We were fucking around trying to get the new mic to work and different browsers and stuff.
Something like that.
Yeah, different browsers.
Just the joys of podcasting.
Yeah, I could see it on the original browser.
It just wasn't connecting and my old mic was working.
You know how these things go.
If it was easy, everybody would do it.
Yeah.
Mike had to switch from his OnlyFans content setup to his podcast content setup.
That's right.
Nobody cares about audio quality on OnlyFans.
As long as he can show us the goods.
That's right.
Speaking about OnlyFans and showing us the goods, what are we talking about this episode,
Mike?
Dune 2.
Dune part 2, Worm Harder.
Dune 2, Worm Harder.
Dune part 2, not enough people of color from Africa and the Middle East.
We're going to talk about some of that stuff.
It's garnered quite a bit of buzz around the internet.
We're going to talk a little bit about some of those things.
I want to talk about our initial thoughts and then we can go into some of the things
because I'm sure, and I have specific articles pulled up to talk about the things that I
know we want to talk about already.
Okay.
So I went and watched it with Al and I immediately wrote my list in the car in the parking lot.
Yeah.
I remember I saw it before you and we had talked a little bit about it and you went
kind of radio silent for three hours, which is about the runtime of the film.
And then the first thing you texted me was I officially have my list of complaints or
something.
That is correct.
Which was awesome.
Yeah, and my Sarah and I got a rare date night and got to go see it.
So thank you to Nick for watching the kids while we went and partook in some spice.
Hell yeah.
Partook in some spice.
Very nice.
I feel like I want to say this upfront and I'll see if you agree with this statement,
Mike.
Dune part 2 is a good movie.
Dune part 2 is not a good adaptation of the source material.
I would agree generally with that statement.
I put it a different way, but I said pretty much the same thing.
Okay.
Yeah.
So it's about a three hour movie.
It kept me entertained the whole time and it wasn't until probably the last 20 minutes
where I kind of came to my senses and said, wait, wait, what about this and what about
that and how is this the ending and what are they doing with these characters?
So I mean, it kept me entertained.
So that's why I say it's a good movie.
It's shot really well.
I think it's edited really well.
Some people thought it was kind of slow and the pacing wasn't good, but I felt like the
pacing was pretty good.
The music was good.
The acting was good.
I tried to go in without any ideas, but it was hard because I went on the third weekend,
I think.
Yeah.
I couldn't go the second weekend, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, about an hour and a quarter in, I started noticing that the pacing was
off.
The reason why I noticed the pacing was off is because I started to see scenes that were
missing that should have been there and alterations to the story.
I thought to myself, why are you adding this in, cut all this out, add in half as much
of what's in the book, make it shorter and have the stuff that's in the book in it?
Yeah.
I want to tell you a funny story about the ending of the movie.
So we went in to the movie, it's like, you know how this is going to end already, right?
I'm like, well, I read the books, so I know how it's supposed to end.
Maybe I wasn't even that coy.
I was just like, yeah, I know how it ends.
We got to the end.
For a refresher from the book, and Mike, you can help add in some stuff if need be, but
the end of the book differs from the end of the movie pretty significantly.
I don't know if this is the most significant change, but I believe it is.
I believe it is.
In the end of the book, well, in the book, Chani, I don't think ever doubts Paul at all,
maybe initially, but otherwise she's always a steadfast supporter.
She's the one that administers the water of life to Paul.
Her and Jessica actually get along and she is A-okay with Paul marrying Princess Irilin.
And that's not how the movie ended.
The movie ended with them at odds and Chani riding off to fuck knows where into the desert.
And my first thought was, well, if he's ever planning on doing any rest of the story, he's
going to have to spend at least half an hour, 45 minutes undoing this bullshit rom-com stuff
that he's doing, like split the two lovers because you can't have any of the other stories
without Paul and Chani having kids.
And I was so upset about the end of the movie and I told my wife, I said, Sarah, this is
not how the movie ends.
And she's like, well, how did it end?
And I told her on the ride home and I said, he could have easily done this because it's
literally a sentence or two at the end of the book.
So we got home and it was midnight or one o'clock in the morning.
And I marched downstairs and grabbed my copy of Dune and opened it up to the last page.
And I said, here, here's how it ends right here, where Paul is basically saying, Irilin
is my wife in name only and she's not going to know the tenderness of my touch or anything
of that.
And you will be my true wife and everyone will know that you're my true chosen partner,
blah, blah, blah.
And Jessica's like, yes, we're the best in the galaxy because we're the chosen ones of
these strong, powerful people, I guess, more or less.
I mean, I had a problem with that, but I don't think that's the biggest change.
I think the biggest change was that they took a multi-year long process of taking over Dune
and turned it into six months, something like that.
Oh, I thought you were going to say that the biggest problem was they took 10 years of
taking over Dune and Jessica was pregnant the whole time.
Exactly.
Well, I mean, Aliyah was supposed to be like...
Well, she's the one that kills Barrett Harkonnen.
She's the one that plays...
Yeah, she's old enough to start killing people.
How old was she?
She was like eight.
She was like eight or something, wasn't she?
Yeah, yeah, she was.
She was too young to be killing people.
Within the world of Dune, she was born with all the memories of all of the women in her
entire life.
Yeah, and she spoke with an adult voice and...
Right.
She's like an adult in a child's body.
I don't know if it was...
Yeah, I don't know if it was truly like she spoke with an adult voice or if it's intended
as she spoke as an adult would speak instead of as a six or eight year old would normally
speak.
Yes.
Probably more so than the latter.
Before she was even born, she had the mind of an adult because she was an abomination.
So there we go.
Yeah, and they had the Benedicessor call Paul the abomination for killing Raid, and that's
not even how that would go or how it should go.
No, no.
And so...
Paul was not the abomination.
Aaliyah was the abomination.
But again, they took, let's say, nine years, give or take, we could say 10, and turned
it into six months.
So there's a lot of time that passes that they could have done that in the movie.
It's not as if the book had a lot of detail about those 10 years.
It was just updates and rumors.
Yeah, and the book is short.
Yeah, the book is short.
Yeah, it's not a Game of Thrones length book.
I think the other thing, and they skipped this too, is they skipped Paul and Shawnee's
first child, Leto, who was part of the catalyst to get Paul to accept his fate and become
Maudib, or Lisa Alky.
The turning point in his career was the death of his child and the rage.
They missed a lot of things.
I have a list.
Okay, yeah.
So just briefly surface level, I think I really liked Stilgar in the first one.
And the second one, he was good in some scenes.
And then he was almost too cartoony, where it was like, oh, Paul took a shit.
That's in the prophecy.
It's in the prophecy, everyone.
Right, in the book, he was not the most devout for Dyken.
He was the skeptic.
No.
He was the skeptic.
And in the book, when Paul won Stilgar over to his side, Paul mourned the loss of Stilgar.
Because once Paul won Stilgar over, he lost out on that contradictory viewpoint.
So he lost him as that mentor and he gained him as a follower instead of as somebody who
would challenge his authority and challenge his decisions.
Right.
And he gained it back after he left, because Stilgar then started to question the program
after Paul died.
I also wanted to mention, yo, yeah.
Oh, I was going to say, how are they going to do that?
Let's say that they make Dune 3 and Dune 4.
And now we're talking about Leto II and the Worm God.
How are they going to have Stilgar be the questioner?
Yeah, it's great.
And how are they going to have Aaliyah be the new Paul and have Stilgar be the questioner
who's contemplating murdering them all and returning Dune back into the desert?
Right?
And how are they going to have that dynamic, which is the major plot point of the story?
I was going to kitty catapult kittypult.
I don't know what the word is.
I was going to also mention something along a similar strain where in the first part and
the book, you have Lea Keens, who's a planetologist who in the book was very sure of being able
to kind of terraform Dune to have plant life and not be so hostile and to be more hospitable
to life.
And that was kind of a big thing that the Fremen wanted to have happen with their planet.
And in in so in this part two of the movie, I think the biggest two departures it made
well, and we'll talk about more of them, but it just in tone, Chani never doubted Paul.
So they're basically changing the core of a character.
And Paul, as far as I know, at least in the first book, never betrayed the Fremen for
glory.
The Fremen are people that have been held down by the entire galaxy and they want to
terraform their planet.
And Paul wants to destroy the spice to prove that he's serious about not letting the Fremen
be downtrodden anymore.
Yeah, it's well, it's a movie that was meant for my Sarah to enjoy.
It was not a movie for me to enjoy.
Does that make sense?
It does.
And it's such a disappointment because part one, this is what I told my buddy who had
watched it and then he came and watched our kids.
It's written like the story is written.
Film the story.
You have an unlimited budget, the best technology in the history of filmmaking.
You have one of the greatest composers composing for you.
You have all these actors who are young and ready to do this and excited for the opportunity
to be part of a massive sci-fi universe.
It's written.
You don't have to change things.
I get it.
They cut the dinning, the dinner scene out of the first part.
And when I read the book, because I read the book after I saw the movie, that dining scene
really laid out all the different factions vying for control and all the different stuff.
But it's mostly told with inner thought.
So how you can't, unless you do a lot of voiceover, which gets pretty old.
It gets very old, but you could show it.
You could show it.
You could show it, but I feel like they did a good enough job.
I understand for a film, you distill things.
So if you wanted to distill it to basically be the Harkonnens and the Atreides, fine.
And you have the Bene Gesserit kind of hanging out in the background.
You don't really have to get into the Sardaukar and the emperor and all that stuff till the
end.
I mean, the emperor is there for just a short time anyway.
I have a problem with this.
So they had the emperor show up and the Harkonnens were failing to kill Paul.
They didn't know it was Paul.
Who they didn't know it was Paul.
But it was only six months, number one, only six months.
Number two, they pretended like the emperor had informants amongst the Fremen, which is
impossible because the Fremen are not in contact with outsiders on purpose.
And in fact, they pay to not be in contact with outsiders.
And as we saw, they wanted to kill Paul and Jessica if they couldn't win Paul over.
Right.
And as we saw, they showed multiple scenes of the planetary observation deck.
And they pretended, they didn't say, oh, yeah, we can't, we don't have any satellites on
the south side of the planet.
The Spacing Guild, they could have said, oh, the Spacing Guild can't have their satellites,
can't last there.
They could have mentioned something like that.
It would just be a quick one liner and it would explain it all.
Right.
And they had multiple scenes in this room where they could have had the Spacing Guild
mentioned.
They could have had the system of satellites and the storms and so on and so forth.
And the southern polar ice cap, which they had a base on the very southern polar ice
cap.
Yep.
It could have all been shown on screen and talked about.
But instead they have the Harkonnens running around killing random people of their own
group.
Yeah.
It was nonsense.
I have more complaints with the Harkonnens as well.
Because they weren't menacing.
They were stooges.
They were stupid.
They were like Colonel, they were like Schultz in Hogan's Heroes.
Yeah, they were running around killing their own generals and stuff, like a bunch of morons.
Yeah.
So I liked Skarsgård's before, or not Skarsgård.
I can't remember the actor's name who played Fade, but he played Elvis in the Baslerman
Elvis pick.
Aaron Butler, I think.
He was great as Fade, I thought.
The character that Sting played in the other one.
I thought the actors were fine.
Not that the writing was bad.
The actors did well.
Yeah, I know.
I was saying I liked Aaron Butler's performance and I liked the intensity that he brought
to it and I liked everything about that.
I didn't like how they kind of relegated the Baron to kind of be like a tertiary or whatever
number is after that character.
But I also don't think that Aaron Butler's character, Fade's character, could take down
Drax the Destroyer as easily as he did in that scene.
It's based solely on the body mass that they were showing us, but you got to let some things
go, right?
I thought that scene was fine.
I'm glad they included it.
I was okay with it.
I didn't like Lady Fenring.
I didn't think she was attractive enough.
Lady Fenring is supposed to be very attractive.
And she had bad teeth, this woman they had playing Lady Fenring, who was going to seduce
the air.
And it's like, you can't have a woman with bad teeth seduce this guy.
What's going on with that?
And then they had him do the...
He was the one...
He had the pack of the cannibal slaves, right?
Cannibal prostitutes or whatever?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the cannibal slaves.
I think he's okay with teeth as long as they're sharp.
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
They didn't have Lord Fenring, which was a problem.
This character that's important to the story later on.
And then they also...
They had him do the box.
I now can't remember the name of the damn box.
Yeah, yeah, the pain box.
Yeah, the pain box.
Now I can't remember it, but that's not supposed to happen either.
Why did you add that?
And that's what I mean by the pacing.
They added in a bunch of stuff that didn't need to be there when they could have been
telling the real story the same amount of time.
Well, why would they even do the pain box on Fade?
They don't even think he's the Kwisak Hatterak.
They just want his bloodline.
They wanted his daughter on their planet, which was the whole point.
Like I say, they had a lot of missed opportunities.
They could have just followed the story and took the same amount of time and it would
have been great.
Yeah, exactly.
And then...
And you know what?
You know what the beauty of this whole thing could have been?
Is Denis Vienvue has had the biggest budget any Dune production has ever had.
The best access to actors any Dune production has ever had.
The best access to composers and special effects artists and technology that any Dune production
has ever had.
All he has to do is follow the fucking book.
And then you know what?
If he doesn't want to make Dune 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, let some other director do it.
Timothy and Zendaya will still do Dune as long as the story calls for them to do Dune.
You know, it could be an alien-alien situation where you've got Ridley and James and they
both put out fantastic films that were sequels of one another.
With the same with Sigourney Weaver as the main character carrying us through.
So it's not like Dune has to sit there and say, oh if I follow the book then I have to
do 18 of these.
No, just do the part one and part two and finish up the first book as written.
You know, shirk trim things out or compress things as need be.
But at least leave it in a place where somebody else could come and say, hey I'm going to
make part two with you know, Timothy and Zendaya and we'll cast somebody new for whatever.
Like not a big deal.
If I were Warner Brothers, which I am not, I would have made very sure that he followed
the book because I just checked.
I have read 25 Dune novels and I am not like super fan, have Dune posters.
You know, I'm not a super fan, but I've read them all.
I think you are a super fan, but just without the posters, Mike.
Maybe but I've read all 25 and if Warner Brothers, let's say owns the rights to all of Frank
Herbert's works, they could make a mini series for a decade off of all the stories in all
these books, plus his other writings.
He wrote a ton of other science fiction movies or books that could be adapted to a Dune
universe.
Yeah, and if they do the Brian, Brian, his son's works, then every one of those like
The Butlerian Jihad could be its own mini series.
The different house books could be their own mini series.
You could do the main eight books in the main timeline as movies and that's, you know, let's
say somewhere between eight and 16 movies if they're going to split them up.
Stargate lasted 10 seasons and it could have lasted 20 seasons and Stargate is nowhere
near as good as Dune.
So they just got to follow the book.
It's not that hard.
Yep.
It really isn't.
I think I'm about halfway at the cigar bike.
What do you think so far?
It's still sweet.
Very sweet.
Yeah, it is.
I think at least as sweet as it started out.
I mean, the cap has mellowed out a bit, but it's still very sweet.
I think this one would have been a better one to have the Midwest Shenanigan ladies smoke.
Yeah, it's not unpleasant, by the way, guys.
Oh yeah, not unpleasant at all.
I'm pairing it with coffee and the coffee like levels it off.
Really nice.
Yeah.
Well, even the hazy IPA is okay.
It's you know, the hazies are a little sweeter, but if you had a more bitter drink like coffee,
I guess Mike, right?
Or one of those kind of enamel peeling IPAs maybe or not really a stout or porter, but
like a dry cider maybe.
A breakfast tea.
Yeah.
Like a really dark tea with a lot of tannin in it.
Maybe a glass of wine.
You could do like a bitter wine.
Yep.
Yeah.
Or what are they?
Not bitter, but.
A dry wine like a Syrah or something.
Yeah.
Or a sour.
But it's been solid and consistent.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Yes, yes.
Do you want to go through your list or do you want me to read some of these articles
here?
I don't know if I can read the whole article.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, let's do your list.
Let's do my list.
I thought they missed an opportunity when they came back and they didn't do the, when
they did the death still for Janus and they didn't have his family there and have that
dynamic.
I know why they didn't do it because it goes against the message.
You can't have Paul inheriting Janus' belongings and children and house and wife who eventually
marries Stilgar and you know, blah, blah, blah.
You can't have that, I guess.
But it should be there because it shows how the Fremen operate in a backwoods culture.
Well, I think you can't be upset that there are no Fremen playing Fremen in the movie
and then say, well, you can't show us people ownership.
Right.
Well, then that's-
Or whatever part of their culture might be.
That's part of it too is that-
Not necessarily ownership, more like the care of, right?
And the water rings-
It comes from Middle Eastern culture.
Yeah, the water rings and everything.
And it comes from Middle Eastern culture, that's why they have four wives to my understanding,
which is limited.
That is kind of like their welfare system.
So men can marry their dead brother's wife so his children aren't on the street because
women aren't allowed to work or they weren't, you know, a thousand years ago.
So it was a way to keep money-
In the Dune universe to this day still in real world.
Right, exactly.
So and that plays into they didn't make a line between the regular Fremen and the Fadiken.
They were using those two words interchangeably in the movie and I didn't like that.
That was, they didn't explain it.
It would only take one 30 second scene to separate the Fadiken from the regular Fremen
and then they couldn't move forward, which who knows, they might never make another Dune
movie and it won't make a difference.
We talked about-
They're still going to get one just because I feel both of these performed very well at
the box office.
So I feel like they'll make another one, but I honestly, it's going to have to go off the
rails of the main storyline because you can't have Chani out doing fuck knows what and Paul
not being Paul, but whatever.
And then they're going to go full-
And then somehow get back on track.
They're going to go full Disney and Chani is going to fly too close to the sun because
it's not going to be a Dune book.
They cannot have a Dune book because they've gone off the rails with the main characters
in the story are not-
Yeah, which set everything else in motion for the remainder of the series.
Yeah, for the other 25 books, you now have ruined the foundation for your future 10 year
mini series that would generate $200 a year in my household.
I was subscribed to HBO for the length of that show just to watch that show for sure.
And again, I'm not a Dune super fan.
I don't have a Dune tattoo or whatever.
Hey man, I've seen your lady Fennering waifu pillow.
So don't go pulling anything over on me.
There we go, right?
This goes back to the Harkinens being kind of clownish instead of frightening.
Because they only had a six month war, they didn't have a real war.
So in the Dune-
It's like that battle where they wanted to fight the sea.
So the, what was it, Roman or Greek guy was like, march into the sea and start stabbing
it.
Well, he wanted to fight Poseidon, but anyway, go on, Mike.
Yes, that was Commodus, I think it was.
Then Commodus go to, he was going to invade Britain, but they couldn't, his generals were
like, we're not crossing the ocean.
So we had his guys walk out into the sea and stab the ocean and then they went back.
Something like that.
I can't remember which one it was.
Yeah, I have something on this Harkonnen thing, but I want you to finish your thought first.
Okay.
So they had a scene where they're attacking the CH and they're like blowing up the mountain
with guns and then they run into a sandstorm, which is stupid.
They're acting like morons.
And instead of all this nonsense that they made up, they could have just had them commit
war crimes against the outlying communities and they have those outlying communities go
out to the desert and have the Fremen absorb them by orders of Paul.
And then they grow the Fremen and then they could call from these angry people who just
got war crimes more and more fadikin who are death soldiers.
They're death commandos in the story.
And that's who Paul is having going on raids.
He's growing the death commando group to astronomical numbers.
That's how this all got out of control.
It wasn't the Fremen that were the problem.
It was the death commandos kept on growing and growing and growing because the Harkonnens
were committing more and more and more war crimes.
People were getting angrier and angrier and they got more and more militarized and it
just snowballed out of control.
It's hard to show that if you're doing a six month timeline instead of 10 years, but they
could have done 10 years.
It could have been just seen, seen, seen.
And then you could have had Aliyah grow older and older and older and through her age, you
can see time is passing that way.
If I can imagine it, it would be easy.
If I can imagine it, surely they can imagine it.
You know what I mean?
Surely.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Mike is the writer of Forrest Gump and other beloved classics.
So I'm just teasing.
I mean, it's very easy.
You know, film, you show, you could show, you could show, you could show.
You don't have to tell, tell, tell.
You don't even need Aliyah to be in the front.
You can have her in the side of the scene and you can see her getting older and older
and older, you know?
So, go ahead.
Yeah.
One of those sweet like time lapse things.
I want to talk about the Harkonnen's a little bit because I remember in the book, because
I read the book in between part one and part two of the movies and well, I read all eight
books because I guess I read faster than Hollywood produces movies.
But anyway, in the book, there are scenes of Baron Harkonnen being very, very vile,
more vile than any Dune movie has ever shown him being.
I remember it like, oh.
I'm going to say the English term and our listeners can look it up.
It's nonce, N-O-N-C-E.
That's the English term for what the Baron's proclivity.
Okay.
Because there's a scene in the book where he's asking one of his aides, he says, bring
me that young boy, the one that looks like Paul.
And then he does sex acts upon this young boy because he's got a rage boner for his
grandson or whatever.
But Paul was not 15 at the time.
That was before.
Yes.
And I saw something where somebody was saying, hey, we're glad that the director took out
the homosexual stuff from the Baron because Frank Herbert was a homophobe and blah, blah,
blah.
And I had to sit there and I had to say, you know what?
No, no.
Being a pedophile has nothing to do with homosexuality.
They did studies.
They did studies done on this.
People that are pedophiles are not homosexuals by and large.
Even if they have a same sex attraction to a child, they're attracted to the child, the
age thing, not the gender thing is how I've seen it.
The science stuff behind it.
I don't look this stuff up because yucky, but that's how I understood it.
And so I don't understand like this person is evil and pedophilia is evil.
So I don't understand why people are glad that now he's less evil.
And to your point, Mike, they're not hardly evil at all in this next one outside of shooting
up a mountain.
Yeah, they're doing stupid things.
They're not doing evil things.
The Harkonnens are supposed to grab street kids and put them in island arenas and hunt
them with dogs, that sort of stuff.
That's how Duncan Idaho came to be in the story, which from the first movie we saw,
Jason Momoa is Duncan Idaho.
That was his background.
He survived.
For all of seven minutes.
Yeah, for all of seven minutes, but he survived the Harkonnen hunting rings, right?
And then they-
Well, yeah, and everybody on the Atreides side had been violently wronged by the Harkonnens.
The Souk Doctor, Thufir, Duncan, and Paul and Jessica, and Gurney, and all these people.
That was one of the scenes that made me mad too, is because he went to his death and he
said for his Duke or whatever, didn't mention his sister, didn't mention his family.
That was the back story of the- it would have been just change the words in the scene, no
different length.
Now you have the story, right?
You know what I did like though?
You know what I liked is the size of the basalette was much more appropriate than whatever Patrick
Stewart was lugging around in the 1980s version, where it was like a contra bassoon.
Right, yeah, it's supposed to be like a guitar.
Yeah, or like a ukulele.
Somewhere between the size of a ukulele and a guitar.
Right.
So on to Cheney.
Let's talk about the Fremen still.
Where was the weirding way?
Why was- the weirding way was in the first one, and then it just kind of fell apart.
Where was the weirding way?
This is all part of the mystique, right?
Yep.
Well, Al actually pointed that out.
He was pretty mad about that.
Yeah.
Well, why put it in the first one if you're not going to follow up with it?
Just, if you're going to cut that part out, just cut that part out and be done with it.
Right.
I mean, I'm not saying cut it out.
I'm just saying be consistent with your choices.
You have two movies and you had extra time to make the second one.
So I don't understand.
It's like they don't read or go back and watch the thing they made.
Right.
Well, it's just a scene by scene.
They could have tweaked.
We could re-edit it and make it better.
Just tweak it.
I know.
I thought if they did, if they had, if they filmed, I'm like, oh man, I hope he filmed
the actual true ending of the book.
And then the editor was just like, I've never read this stupid story.
Here's what makes sense to me.
And then you can get a nice fan edit and it's actually a good movie and it actually follows
the book.
But I don't know.
Right.
I feel like there's not going to be any deleted scenes or anything.
He's like, what's the cutting room floor stays there or something.
So whatever.
Interesting.
He's the new Baron Harkonnen, I guess.
So I had a problem with Cheney and the Cheney Girl Power story.
This is a consistent thing in Hollywood right now.
And I'm sure that most, most if not everybody is aware.
And there's so many things.
There's a lot of crying.
There should be zero crying.
I think there was two crying scenes that weren't the one crying scene that was supposed to
be there.
The one crying scene was supposed to be at Janus's funeral, which again, they skipped
all the important parts about that funeral and they added in the dumb parts.
But then there's crying.
There's no crying in Fremen.
There's no crying.
No, absolutely not.
And this was after the scene of Stilgar or somebody saying, don't waste water for the
dead or whatever.
And then there was like all these crying scenes and I'm like, what the fuck are they doing?
And they did the spitting scene in the first movie and it's wasting the spit is like showing
respect.
There's no crying.
So I did it.
There's no crying in baseball.
Yeah, there's no crying in baseball.
We're going to go strictly to Cheney.
They had premarital sex and then she was big.
There is no premarital sex in the Fremen society.
There's not really a marriage.
There's no, well, there's, there's an agreement.
There's an agreement between the man and the woman.
If the woman wants to leave or the man wants to leave, they have an agreement that they're
no longer going to be together, but you have to have that committed agreement in order
for boing a boing a time.
And she was the bongos.
Exactly.
I, I didn't like the girl power Cheney.
She was not the, the Fadiken murder killer woman who was a zealot that she needed to
be, right?
She was supposed to elevate the crazy side of the Paul story.
Yes.
She was supposed to be the one pushing Paul and Stilgar was the one supposed to be pulling
him away until he didn't.
Yeah, they flopped that.
Yeah.
And they, they flip flopped it, but now how are they supposed to do the second or a third
movie with children involved and planet takeovers?
Yeah.
We just kick off the rest of everything else.
That was one of the coolest parts of the later, the later books is the Fremen come back from
the big jihad and they're like, ah, I saw planets full of water and this and that, and
you know, kind of all their war stories from coming back.
But I don't know how I, they can still do that stuff, but I don't, I don't know how
you can do any of the other stuff because without Chani or Cheney, you, you don't have
a Dune story.
No, she's integral to the Dune story.
Literally nobody else.
And then what you're going to have Paul and Princess Irwin have kids and then call them
like that's not even going to work.
Like how is that even supposed to work?
And then, but then you're so far off the Dune thing and just kind of taking these characters
and making your own kind of fan fiction about the Dune story, which you could just do on
the internet for free.
Like why waste people's time and money to put it on a big screen?
I liked the foreshadowing of Irulan recording Imperial events.
I thought that was good.
Oh me too, because there are so many quotes of that in the book before they do the chapters.
They have little quotes and.
They had quotes of her before you knew who she was.
That was the coolest part.
Oh yeah, that's so cool.
You know what I mean?
It was great.
Uh, but yeah, they're, they're, they're off the rails.
It was way off the rails as far as they missed an opportunity.
They, they could have stole a thousand dollars from me.
I would have bought HBO Max forever.
Yeah, they, they had, they had a similar choice as Lato 2.
You have the golden path laid out before you, except instead of letting sand trout take
over your body and turn you into a giant worm, and then you can't have sex later with this
smoking hot chick.
All you have to do is follow the fucking book and you can make more money than any you or
your descendants would know what to do with.
There's 25 books.
And somehow you didn't, and somehow you didn't, somehow you didn't take them.
Came out last year.
Oh yeah, right?
Yeah.
There's 25 doom books.
The last one came out last year.
It was a bestseller.
Yeah.
Like that's not even a hard decision.
A hard decision is do I let these sand trout encase my body and then I turn into a giant
worm and die for the golden path.
The hard decision is not, should I just follow the fucking book so I can make 25 fucking
movies and make bank off the royalties?
That's not a hard decision.
No.
And they could have done it so easy.
I mean, they could have had war crimes.
They captured some harconans.
Cheney tortures one of them.
Right.
And then boom, now you're, you're good to go.
Right?
Like you don't need a lot of scenes that explain the situation.
The book didn't have a lot of scenes that initially explain the situation.
You can infer a lot of things just from looks or brief little scenes.
You don't need to go in depth with a lot of stuff.
Right.
Yeah.
The bloodlust of the Fremen or the Fadikin women, because that's really who you're dealing
with in the doom books.
The Fremen women are there.
Don't get me wrong.
But there's two separate groups.
The real psychos and then the normal, the normies, if you will.
Yes.
I guess my list of complaints is over because it's all wrapped up into the, the rest of
it's all wrapped up into.
Oh, it's all, yeah.
The girl power.
They just can't have it.
The power was there.
It just wasn't the story they wanted.
Right?
You could have had the bad-ass Fadikin murder person story who was this fanatic, but they
didn't go that direction.
So yeah.
Oh, also they captured a crisp knife.
I'm sorry.
I had a real big problem because they captured that lady and she had a crisp knife and somehow
Fade Ralpha got his hands on a crisp knife, which is against the rules.
That doesn't happen.
Never happened.
Hadn't happened in the thousand years that they were there.
No, those are the lore.
As the crisp knives are as revered to the Fremen as water.
Yeah.
So the chance of an outsider ever getting one not happening.
Zero.
When Lady Jessica got the crisp knife in the first book, that was supposed to be a big
deal.
Yes.
There's been a lot of talk about this ending and Dene Villenevue has been saying, oh, this
ending is much more romantic and blah, blah, blah.
But there's been a lot of talk about this being very anti-colonizer, this movie being
anti-colonizer and making Paul to be the villain that he truly is according to the director
and other people around the film.
And I never really saw Paul as a bad guy.
Paul is a complicated character, which is great because complicated characters are super
interesting.
He doubts the religious prophecies that surround him or surround this thing.
He doubts all that stuff.
He doesn't want to do it.
He's a reluctant, kind of a reluctant pawn in this game.
But when he takes that water of life and gains his full prescience, then he can see how to
out manipulate everybody on the playing field.
And he's not, I never really got the sense that he was doing it for himself.
So I feel like he's been pretty selfless through the whole thing outside of the time where
he was not willing to commit fully in the book I'm talking, Mike.
Sure.
Well, so I don't, I don't know why they're lumping, maybe I don't know why they're having
Paul or why they decided to lump Paul in with the quote unquote colonizers, like the Harkonnens,
like the Atreides weren't never portrayed as colonizers.
They were a great house for sure, but that doesn't mean every great house is a colonizer.
The Harkonnens had Dune for how many years?
Decades or whatever, you know, and raped and pilfered and pillaged it.
The Harkonnens had it for 70 years before the Atreides took it over.
So if anything, the Atreides are the anti-colonizers.
They are anti-colonizers by nature because they wanted to enrich the population.
Yeah, and harness the desert power to make the desert power be its own power without
them.
You know, I don't think they ever wanted to rule and subjugate the Fremen.
Right.
Well, it wasn't explained well in the movie.
No.
Go ahead.
I was going to say, like, I feel in the book anyway that the Atreides mindset to Dune was
they could make some money, of course, because of the spice production, but they didn't understand
how that all worked and all the players involved.
And they almost looked at the Fremen in a Lewis and Clark expedition type way where
they wanted to befriend them if they were able to.
Like, they didn't come in hostile at all.
No, no.
So it wasn't explained well.
Even though it could be seen as hostile because they took over the same buildings that the
Harkonnens had and stuff, which is weird and would be weird if you were a Fremen, but it's
not like the majority of Fremen were living in the towns anyway.
So it's not like the Fremen would actually care who was living where.
Right.
They skipped a lot of the water scenes where the Atreides started handing water out on
like the Harkonnens and they were changing their policies.
It also wasn't explained very well.
Oh, go ahead.
Go ahead.
I was going to say, was it Jessica or was it Paul that found the garden in their complex
and they decided to stop the garden and give the water to the Fremen, right?
That was the whole thing.
Yep.
They did the ritual of spilling water on the floor during parties and selling it to the
poor instead of just giving them water rations when they threw parties, which is what they
ended up doing.
This is a completely visual thing and I know why it was done, but it's the candy apple
merchant from Hocus Pocus 2 again, Mike, when Stilgar was showing Jessica the water reserves
and it's an open air, like vast, massive lake thing and they're like, we don't drink this.
I'm like, okay, but that's just evaporated, yo.
I don't know what to tell you.
That's gone.
The CH was not sealed.
They didn't have it sealed.
Yeah, it was like an open air thing.
Yeah, no, no, no.
I understand because in the books, I think they're like tanks.
Jessica's looking at all these tanks and they're sealed tanks that are holding water and she's
like, oh my God, do you have all this water?
And I understand tanks are not fun to look at.
That's not visually appealing.
Nobody likes looking at tanks.
We go to great lengths to hide tanks.
We build wooden fences around tanks.
We build, you know, I get it.
Like I understand it, but they could have, if they're going to show it as a giant underground
thing, they could just have Stilgar say, yeah, we're deep enough here.
The humidity, the water doesn't evaporate.
It's great.
I don't care.
I don't care how you explain it, but you know, it's just, they didn't go that little bit
extra length that was required of them to go to explain the little things that they
decided to do, you know?
And I think that was consistent throughout all of part two.
Yes.
I would, that would be my summation is that consistently where they could have shined
with just a little effort, cut what they did just a little bit and add in the same amount
of time or even less and modified it.
Just little modifications here and there.
Just returned back to the source material.
In the book, wasn't, wasn't one of the, didn't one of the camps of Fremen have actual plants
that they showed Paul?
Yes.
That they were growing because they were, they wanted to terraform it on their own.
And it wasn't like it was Paul's great idea to terraform Arrakis.
Like he wanted to do that because they wanted it done.
And Lea Keans, who was Chani's father, mother in the movie version, that was his slash her
goal to get it to where it had plant life to support more life and more moisture.
And yes, one of the major reasons why in the book they paid off the spacing guild to not
have satellites on the south side of the planet was that they had open air growing plants
on the south side of the planet.
Yes.
And wind, wind generation and all sorts of development that they did not want.
Well, they did all this to make Paul out to be a villain.
And Paul's only doing what the Fremen wanted.
If they want Paul to be this, this bloodthirsty villain that's now oppressing the Fremen,
which was never ever true, not even once.
No, if anything, the Fremen were pushing Paul in an area he did not want to go, but which
he turned to once the ball got rolling.
Yes.
So I don't know.
I think overall, I think in terms of movies and production and things, I think it's a
good movie.
At least I just watched something today and it was terrible.
It wasn't terrible.
It was very eye opening where this film reviewer was saying, look, a lot of these movies that
we're liking these days, we only like because they're not as bad as everything else being
put out these days.
And I think this was a film made by a competent filmmaker, not maybe necessarily, you know,
the story was lacking in places.
And that's why I said at the very beginning of the episode, I think it's a good movie.
I don't think it's a good adaptation of the source material because if you want to tell
a story about a white desert Jesus coming in and freeing people, then this is a good
story.
If you want to tell Dune, you're not really telling Dune with all the changes you made
in part two.
This reminds me of the Half-Blood Prince movie where it was a teenage love movie, right?
It had nothing to do with the book really.
And a lot of people really liked that movie, but they're all the people that didn't read
the book because I hate that movie.
I think it's garbage.
Like, I hate it.
How do you really feel, Mike?
Yeah, exactly.
But they didn't explain the politics, which is hard to do in a movie.
I understand.
It's hard to do, but it's not impossible.
You can do it.
Yes.
And he knew, well, he didn't know.
So he made part one and he wasn't for certain, he wasn't guaranteed to make a part two.
But I feel like part two was him just ripping off the bandaid and saying, here we go.
Here's all this stuff.
And we kind of forget all of the stuff, or they kind of forgot most of the stuff they
put in the first part.
When in reality, they should have been building off of that.
And even when the souk doctor showed up in the ring fighting Fade, there, it felt kind
of underwhelming because unless you knew who it was and knew, like they should have reiterated
about his wife and stuff.
Like they should have made that more impactful.
And it really wasn't.
Other than that one slave guy that Fade was fighting didn't have the muscle numbing drug,
which they didn't even really explain that either.
So I understood it though.
I thought that was, no, I mean, I understood it.
It was fine.
I'm not saying it.
I'm not saying it wasn't fine.
I'm just saying they had this, the part one, and they had the opportunity to build upon
the stuff that they laid down in part one.
And in part two, they kind of didn't really want to reference back to part one at all.
And they wanted to go and be like, hey, Chani is this great, like awesome person and Paul
is turning evil.
And they didn't really want to reference most of the part one to build up the political
understanding of the situation is what I felt.
They had to follow the message.
You cannot have a woman of color on the screen be a somewhat lunatic, murderous monster person
who's pushing somebody who's also a murder lunatic monster person to get even crazier.
And you really can't have a show in modern world where there really isn't a good guy.
Paul's not a good or a bad guy.
In the Dune universe, he's a guy playing a role in a long sequence of events that lead
to other events.
And most of the people are not particularly moral actors.
No one is really a good actor.
Paul is a pivot.
Paul is like a pivot point, I think, in the timeline of the universe these different factions
are trying to create.
And because Paul happened, it ended up causing a lot of the plans and the plans within plans
and the plans within those plans, within the other plans to take a drastically different
turn.
And I think if you go back and look at the eight books in the main timeline, because
the main storyline that gets kicked off with Dune is eight books.
I think really the only good actor in the entirety of the thing, there's two of them,
and one of them is questionable.
But one I think is Leto too.
I think he's a good actor, even though he was called the Tyrant and did horrible things
too, but it ends up coming back in the very end of the main storyline.
And then Duncan Idaho, I feel, is a good actor.
And he is not a purely good actor either.
He does plenty of bad things throughout the story.
It's not like he's wonderful.
But I think, I know, but I think that's the beauty of the Dune story is they don't have
to be all good actors because what person is an all good actor?
You know, Gandhi was terrible to his wife and children, but everybody was like, oh yeah,
he was great.
Mother Teresa was, you know, defiant and very selfish and whatever.
And she ran a death camp.
Yeah, you know, but everybody reveres her.
But that's the thing is you can have people that you look up to even though they have
faults.
And that's the nuance of Dune that I liked, that I enjoyed.
You know, everybody's self-serving and some people are Harkonnens about it and some people
are Atreides about it, you know, and there's people in between.
So right.
And the Atreides were not all good.
They didn't get into the backstory of Caladan.
They kind of made it sound like they had to abandon Caladan, but that's not the case.
They still had Caladan.
They were trying to build up.
Because Lady Jessica went back there.
Yeah, they were trying to build up operations on Dune and they were so strong on Caladan
that they just left Caladan to be run by the local population with minimal military.
They had military protection, but not.
Yeah, they were not occupying Caladan.
They were from there.
Yeah, yeah.
They were well liked by the population.
But even Baron Harkonnen was pushed to be the Baron.
He was an evil character, but he was twisted even more by the Bene Gesserit to become what
he became.
So the Bene Gesserit are the ultimate baddies who turn into goodies kind of.
Kind of.
Yeah, kind of.
The whole thing is the people with the prescience, namely Paul and Leto II saw all of the different
things because they had visions of the future and they had visions of all the different
paths and they could sit down and explore all the different paths down there.
And there's a scene in one of the books where Paul was worried about losing himself in the
visions and not ever coming back to sanity.
But there are set things that they saw that had to happen in order for the end goal to
be what the end goal needed to be, I guess.
We have to be cagey about the end goal because you don't find out about it until the last
of eight books.
Yeah, I know.
But they're doing a lot of very bad things to prepare for the final bad thing.
Is that a nice way to put it?
Is that the good way to put it?
Yeah, which may or may not be a good thing.
It's hard to say, really.
And I think with everything in the Dune universe, it's not necessarily all good or all bad.
Even though the end might be what the end is, does that mean it's a good ending or a
bad ending or is it a little bit of both?
And it's probably a little bit of both.
I mean, there's all sorts of things that happen.
The main storyline spans over 10,000 years.
So...
Right.
The only jump between the second book and the third book is 5,000 years.
Yeah.
The nuances and things.
It's truly kind of like reading about a butterfly in one book and then three books later you're
reading about the tsunami that was caused by the flap of the butterfly's wing in the
first book.
Right.
It's wheels within wheels.
Yes.
That's wheels within wheels.
It's hard to show that in a movie.
I understand.
Yeah, I understand that too.
I understand there's challenges, I think, that a lot of this...
I mean, I liked a lot of the stuff.
I didn't like the departure, the big departure from the actual story, but I really enjoyed
how they did the voice.
I liked how they portrayed the voice.
And Viscera jumped every time the voice was used.
And I thought it was a very effective way to show the voice on screen, compelling somebody
to do something.
There was a great movie inside of this movie that was lost.
There could have been a great movie made, but they just...
Yes.
They had, they couldn't.
I don't know what the reason is.
I'm gonna guess that it was politics in our own real world wouldn't allow for the story
and the story's controversial and negative in a lot of ways.
That's what made Dune great then and now is it's...
But it's also a bestseller.
Yeah.
So it's a beloved franchise.
I don't...
It's the bestselling sci-fi franchise of all time outside of Star Trek and Star Wars, which
are movies.
Before this, it was all books.
Yeah, Movies First.
These were novels that turned into books years later and never really took off as movies.
Yes.
And I keep going back to what you said and you've said multiple times on this podcast
about the softening of language.
And I sent you that video.
There's a really good video out there of Arnold talking about creating soft kids, soft children.
And you know, adversity makes people strong.
Not that you wish adversity upon people, but by removing all adversity from people, you're
doing a disservice.
And I think in terms of media and fiction for sure, fiction for sure is that's your
opportunity to say, Hey, this is all a fake story.
Let's challenge you intellectually here.
Are you, who are you cheering for in the Dune universe?
Are you cheering for Fade Harkonnen?
Are you cheering for Paul?
Are you cheering for Chani?
Are you cheering for Jessica?
Are you cheering for the Ben and Jesser?
Are you cheering for this or that?
And all of their little like inner motives are revealed in the book and it's very complicated.
I mean, it's, you know, not complicated if you're only one, but if you're seeing all
of the different factions, you kind of start to see all of their goals across these eight
books and what each one is trying to achieve over the course of thousands of years, you
know, cause these are not short-term plans.
There are some short-term plans for sure, but by and large, they're all long-term plans.
And so seeing some of the dichotomy, some of the contradictory even within people, right?
Paul, he wants to end the reign of terror by launching his own jihad.
Okay.
You know, is that right or wrong?
Well, that's an excellent question.
You don't have to water it down.
I think people can handle more than studio executives think people can handle.
I don't, you know, I don't know.
I don't, these studio executives don't care about long-term goals.
I don't think, I think they're, they're concerned about quarterly profits.
They don't care.
And whether or not the movie is going to make money now, it's similar to what they've done
to Star Wars.
There's hundreds of Star Wars novels they could be making stories off of.
And instead of using that backlog to create new shows, they're trying to create brand
new properties with 20 year old writers with the diversity of Los Angeles reflected in
every way in a modern way.
And that the same social problems we have now, they're going to have in an alternate
universe that's hyper-advanced with crazy medical technology that would prevent a lot
of the social problems we have now, basically.
Let's just put it that way.
With crazy technology, you don't have problems that we have now.
Why would you?
Yeah, me basically don't.
It's totally different.
There's no reason for problems.
There's no reason to have them because you have the technology to solve the problem.
So it wouldn't exist.
There's not a lot of reason to have problems these days outside of talking heads on TV
and influencers on the internet.
But I think the quality of writing, I feel that a lot of these film writers are writing
to the lowest common denominator and not trying to challenge the audiences anymore.
And I think that what they think is the lowest common denominator is making them miss a lot
of opportunities and miss a lot of things, naturally.
We watched Argyle, which didn't get really good reviews, but it was fun.
It was fine.
It was one of those movies where you sit there and you're like, yeah, I know what's going
on.
I can predict what's going to happen, but I'm not sure that the modern audience will
follow it because I feel the modern audience just wants something they can sit there and
tune out and like scroll their phone or munch popcorn.
And they don't want to be challenged mentally.
Or maybe that's just the impression that Hollywood is projecting.
I think the writers that they get come from a very specific social class, from a very
specific region of the country.
And they are in such a bubble.
And a very specific background, Mike.
Very specific background, very specific social class, very specific region.
And they do not understand the other cultural dynamics, and nor do they want to.
They want to pretend like those different groups don't exist anymore.
And even when they try to tell a story about those groups, because they don't take the
time to appreciate what it's about, they can't accurately depict it.
And they just shove their own experience on it instead of trying to let it speak for itself.
So something like Dune, where it's really related to a culture in a background that
they don't understand.
And Frank Herbert was a guy that they cannot possibly understand.
They can't do it.
They don't want to.
They could do it, but they don't want to do it.
They want everybody to be just like them.
So yeah, and so much of this is...
I'm just going to call it this.
I'm not trying to offend anybody.
I think a lot of this is just revenge porn.
People are like, well, Paul was white, so he must be bad.
So hating white people is in.
And we'll have Chani then be the next, the true savior of Arrakis.
And she'll leave Paul, who's obviously been corrupted by power and religion.
And Chani will go off into the desert to then save the planet in the next film, which doesn't
follow the book.
And sure, Frank is a white guy, but don't make that movie then if you hate white people.
Make your own movie.
That's the biggest mind boggling thing to me is we have this massive platform that anybody
can access, the internet.
And you have all of these people that can tell their own unique stories.
And we're remaking and adapting and readapting all these things that have already been made.
But they're adapting them and then twisting them to fit the modern narrative.
Make your own unique, original, modern narrative story then.
You don't have to take something that's a bestseller that has its own fandom and twist
it to whatever you want.
Make your own story.
Make your own unique story.
Look at everything ever all at once.
Polite society, parasite.
Look at all of these films that are from these other cultures that are phenomenal films and
unique stories.
They're not remakes.
They're not rehashes.
They're not, they're completely original from non-white people.
And they're awesome.
And I love them.
So it's not about liking white and hating everything else.
We can like things from every culture, from every ethnicity, you know?
And well, the world of Dune is a multi-planetary society.
And there's, the Fremen are racially different than the ruling classes in the Dune universe
largely, right?
And the ruling classes are not good.
It's not like they're good, but they're not solely bad, if I can say that.
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't know.
Well, it's not like, there are multiple ruling classes with the multiple great houses.
And in Dune, you meet two of them and very, very briefly a third with the emperor, the
Kyrinos.
So, and there's more great houses than that.
So you can't really blanket them all in and say they're all Harkonnen level bad.
Maybe, you know, I don't know, but you don't get to meet every single great house.
No.
And the Harkonnens were uniquely bad actors.
Let's put it that way.
Yes.
So I am dumb out my cigar.
Yes.
My fingers are burning.
Yes, I smoked it till my fingers are burning.
I would say the last inch was a little sour.
It wasn't, it was only sour by comparison to the rest of it.
It was perfectly fine.
It wasn't bad.
Yes.
But up until about the last inch, it was sweet.
Whoa.
Yes.
I was actually surprised how much I enjoyed this one after, after wetting the cap.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this one.
This cigar reminds me of what I wanted a wood tip Swisher's Sweet to be when I was smoking
a cigar with my old man fishing, you know, when I was a younger person.
Because the wood tip tastes like garbage.
You want that sweetness and that lovely little smoke.
And this is what that is.
Yes.
It really is.
It was good.
I would, I would put this, I don't want to be blasphemous, Mike, but if you don't want
a prevailing flavor, I would put this up there with a, with a moon trance.
I was going to compare it to that.
The moon trance is not as sweet as this.
Oh no.
This is much sweeter, but the flavor isn't really a distinct, like the moon trance is
very, it's very vanilla flavor.
You know, it's a flavored cigar.
So you get that real vanilla, the bourbon vanilla flavor.
This one is just sweet, but it's good.
And for people like Mike and myself who generally smoke the darker and spicier cigars for us
to say this is a good, a good smoke, it's gotta be good because this is not really within
our wheelhouse of things that we would normally seek out to smoke.
I don't think, I don't know if I'm, if I'm phrasing that right.
No, I, you know, I would consider buying some to have at home just to give to people.
Oh, me too.
Me too.
And this would be a great, I think this would be a great like summer.
Yes.
This is a fishing cigar.
Like I said, this reminds me of fishing with my dad when I was a kid.
Well, teenager, right?
Like that's what it reminds me of.
It's nice.
Of legal smoking age, government officials.
Yes.
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Get back in your cage, fed boy.
That's right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But yeah, it's, it's good.
I like it.
I recommend it.
I like it.
These factory smokes overall were good.
I was really surprised.
These factory smokes have been really good.
I've been blown away by these factory smokes.
I've, I am shocked by how good, I thought for sure they're going to be trashed.
Because I think I spent $2.80 or some ridiculously low amount of money because I got them on
sale.
Yeah, yeah.
And, uh, you can pick these up really cheap.
You can pick them up really cheap.
You get a ton of these for real cheap.
Yeah.
I'm not buying a dark shark or an Odyssey or any of that ever again.
Not anymore.
No, no.
Not with these factory smokes out there out in the world.
Yeah, that's, I recommend if you want a factory smoked Maduro and a factory smoked sweet,
you can pretty much only have those two things and you'll be fine.
Like those, these two, these two are the best of, uh, what, how do, how many of you smoke
three or four of them?
Uh, look, look at the episode page listener.
You look, you tell us we can't remember.
We can't remember.
We cannot recall.
We have too much.
Uh, we have too much dune lore in our heads.
We don't know.
Uh, what's the garbage smoke?
I enjoyed watching the movie and then after I get done, I started to get a little pissy
about it, you know?
Yeah, like I, like I said, I, I was there and I'm just like, yeah, okay.
It's a three hour movie.
I got to buckle in, get ready.
And then it was, you know, two hour, two and a half hours in.
And I'm like, wait a second, where the hell is Lato?
Where is, where, you know, why is Alia not here yet?
Why is Paul killing?
What the fuck is going on here?
They're off the rails.
God damn it.
Like it was very, like it's a, it's a good movie in the sense of movie and pacing and
stuff like that.
But it's not a good adaptation of the book of the source materials.
So it's kind of in that kind of gray area where it was a good movie because I didn't
sit there and I wasn't like checking my watch or like, Hey, I gotta get out of here and
blah, blah, blah.
But it also wasn't a good adaptation of the materials.
So anyway, I was checking my watch often because I was thinking about the review and I was
trying to make my notes mentally.
So I was clocking.
Yeah.
If I wasn't doing the show, I wouldn't have checked my watch.
Obviously.
Yes.
And also I sat in the theater next to a person who had clearly not read the books and she
got very excited about the woman power story.
So they did hit with this middle-aged white woman in the middle of nowhere.
Yep.
They hit a demographic.
They hit their demographic.
The issue is that Dune's demographic is not that demographic.
It's not that.
That's not that.
That's not the demographic.
Well, the Dune demographic is both men and women.
Oh yes.
We're too late in the episode to get too deep into it, but the original demographic
was college-aged students, period.
That was it.
Boys, girls, college-aged students, and it's the best-selling sci-fi franchise ever.
For a reason.
It's supposed to be your college book club, you read Dune, right?
Yes.
And this is not that.
It's kind of like Harry Potter is for both boys and girls, right?
Dune is for both boys and girls, but it's for a specific group.
Yes.
So anyway, we would recommend... I'm going to buy the DVD because Sarah wants to watch
it.
I'll probably never watch the DVD again, but I'll watch it one more time.
Yeah.
I bought the... I was going to wait and not buy the first Blu-ray because they're probably
going to put out a really sick two-disc edition of one and two.
I don't know if I'll buy two, maybe, if it's cheap and on sale at some point, I guess.
I don't know that I'd necessarily watch it again.
I might buy the Blu-ray or whatever just for the sake of... If there are diluted scenes
on there, I'd be very curious to see what they are.
I bought the first Blu-ray the day it came out because they had not announced that they
were going to make the second film yet, and I wanted sales.
I'm like, I can only do it once, so I'm going to spend my whatever dollars.
You did your part to get the Girl Power story into the Dune universe, Mike.
I did.
I watched Dune one twice in theaters.
Yeah.
Well, actually, the Girl Power story is very prevalent in Dune, in the Dune universe, in
the Dune main timeline even, just maybe not as prevalent in the first book as it is in
later books.
I don't know why they had the issue here.
The Girl Power story is prevalent even with Cheney and with Jessica.
It's just not the Girl Power story they feel comfortable telling.
They don't want to tell.
From my perspective, it's like negative Girl Power story where they're murderous.
They're psychos.
And they are concubines.
I don't understand in our modern society with all of the fucking women doing OnlyFans why
they wouldn't want to have a strong concubine story in the Dune universe, which is already
there.
Anyway, we don't need to bog this down.
The scar is great.
If you like good movies, watch Dune one and two, if you really think you're digging the
Dune stuff and want to see the differences, I highly recommend reading the books or listening
to the audiobooks of at least the first eight in the main timeline.
They're classic for a reason.
Indeed.
Thanks for listening.
Don't forget to leave us a review.
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So you can go out and buy them before the episodes even air.
And then you can light up the same stick we're smoking and smoke it while we're talking about
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So if you think that might be kind of neat, check it out.
Otherwise, thanks for listening.
Be safe, have fun, and the spice must flow.