Welcome to Nice Ashes, I'm Nate.
And I am Mike.
What are we smoking today, Nate?
Alright, this is one I have trouble pronouncing, but you've been warned.
It's a Macanudo in Spirado, and it's the red label version.
I believe there's a black label version as well.
Yes, there is.
But this is the red label version.
It's a box press.
It is less girthy than the Rocky Battelle 1990 that we smoked the previous episode.
And it's a little shorter.
I'd say what, it's probably about six inches.
It is a Rabusto, a traditional Rabusto size.
Yes, should be five inches.
Okay.
Whether it actually is, it'd be four and a half, five and a half.
It's kind of like a two by four.
Is it really two by four?
No.
It is originally before they shave them.
So there's a national number.
Well, yeah, you got to finish it.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can get unfinished two by fours at truly R2 by four.
This one lit really easy, which I'm excited about.
This one lit very easy.
Yeah, very easy.
Which is not a bad thing.
Oh no, not a bad thing at all.
It's a smaller size than what we normally or usually smoke.
Not by much, but just by a little bit.
So that could be it, or it just could be a little drier.
Not overly dry, of course, but less oily maybe.
Yes, potentially.
Mine lit a little unevenly.
Oh, mine lit.
Never once mine lit really even.
A lot of times I have kind of uneven.
Mine lit a little uneven.
It tastes, trying to place it.
I don't know if it's, I don't think it's quite oaky.
It's something a little different, like a little lighter than like an oak taste.
It's a medium bodyed cigar.
Yeah.
And it's not overpowering by any means.
No, it's got a distinct taste though.
I think.
Just initially, the first couple of puffs.
I enjoy the taste.
I'm not like a wine kind of sewer or anything.
So I couldn't tell you like, oh yeah, that's whatever.
I can't even think of anything that you would taste.
But it is a little distinctive of taste.
It's a lighter taste, like Mike was saying.
It's not really dark or anything.
It's quite enjoyable so far.
You know, two or three puffs in.
Do you know my favorite joke that I've been telling people recently?
And by people I mean mostly women.
And I think, oh, I told this when I was with you and Sarah.
Okay.
But I'll go and I'll look at them very seriously and I'll say, hey, do you know mansplaining
is short for man explaining?
And I've been getting some really good reactions from that.
Really good.
So I was just thinking about that.
I'm here trying to like, bumble my way through like what this cigar tastes like and I'm coming
up short and have no fucking idea.
So sorry listener, but suffice it to say, I like this so far.
It is good.
I like the box press too.
I'm a sucker for some reason.
And I keep talking about the hex press and by God we're going to do it.
On season one of our show we're going to do this hex press.
Which means before winter.
Not tonight.
Yeah, before winter.
Before winter.
We were talking about that pre-episode is, you know, there's going to come a time here
in Minnesota where Nate will not be sitting outside freezing his ass off trying to smoke
a cigar because we get below zero quite frequently.
Yeah.
I set my shop up to where I have a ashtray and stuff out there and I'll smoke a cigar
outside.
Oh, nice.
In the extreme cold.
But in the, you know, in the shop it doesn't get as cold as it is outside.
Yeah, and I've got to do some work in my garage and I was just telling Mike I don't think
that's going to get done before the snow flies.
Because then I could, then I could go out there and smoke a cigar and we could continue
the podcast over winter.
And I think we'll be able to, we'll be able to do it.
We'll pre-record a lot of stuff.
And I can always go visit Mike because he's got a heated patio we can smoke on.
Yes.
The do all room.
Yes.
So speaking about doing it all, Mike and I consumed a lot of media recently.
Mike even got to meet one of one of my best friends.
Yes.
The one that I typically watch shitty movies with.
And so there's quite a few bits of media that Mike and I have consumed.
I will tell everyone what those media's mediums, media objects were.
And then Mike will get to choose which we talk about first.
So outside of anything we talked about on the podcast here, Mike and myself decided
to reread Animal Farm.
And it comes in at a whopping like 90 pages.
So it takes about an hour to read the whole thing.
So we both have reread Animal Farm.
We talked about on the podcast, we talked about watching the new Predator movie, which
is called Prey.
And so after Mike and myself smoked some cigars at his place, we recorded an episode, then
we stopped the recording.
And what did we do to Kila's cigar?
And it's just as great as it was the first one we ever did.
And then we went over to my buddy Luke's house and he doesn't listen to this podcast, but
he didn't shout out to Luke.
But he's the guy that I always watch shitty movies with.
We watch a lot of like really great movies too, but usually they're more independent,
less known by popular society.
We watched Prey and then we followed it up with Sharks of the Corn, the cinematic masterpiece
which Mike, I believe, said he liked better than Prey.
Yes I did.
And then we watched some...
Lama Gettin.
We watched a little bit of Lama Gettin.
Yep, not a lot.
We just watched a little bit.
And then we watched the Oats Studios, which is the...
I'm struggling with the name right now, but he did District 9 in Elysium.
But we watched the first intro episode to his little like...
How was it?
Hulu?
Or some exclusive studio thing.
Netflix.
Oh, was it really?
It was one of those.
I think I didn't watch the whole thing.
I left.
Yeah, yeah, you had to leave.
I watched part of it.
I watched the intro and it was interesting.
Very great.
Yeah, and it stars Sigourney Weaver.
Neil Blowcamp.
That's the guy.
All right, so Mike, do you want to talk about Prey, Sharks of the Corn, or Animal Farm first?
We should do Animal Farm last because that's the most serious one.
And that's serious, almost depressing to read it now as an adult.
And I read it way back when I was a junior in high school, I think.
That was the last time I read it too, sometime in high school.
And I used to have a copy and I didn't, so I had to go buy one.
I had to.
I was forced.
I was forced to go buy a book.
If you haven't been forced to buy a book recently, go buy one.
Don't care what it is, just go buy one.
I had to buy several books last weekend.
Preferably not from Barnes & Noble.
Go to your local bookseller if you have one.
Most of you will.
So we'll talk about Animal Farm last.
And I think we should probably go with the cinematic masterpiece that is Sharks of the
Corn first.
Then we'll go into Prey and then we'll do Animal Farm.
And Mike, not being a film person, buy-in-large.
Like you've seen film, you've seen TV, you've seen modern cinema.
You know what's up with that, as most casual viewers do.
I found this is a total aside to the content, but I did find the running commentary by two
people who went to film school to be very interesting and informative.
Yes.
So my buddy Luke and I both went to film school.
I have a film degree and have a couple web series and short films under my belt.
And they're out there.
This is not really a cross-promotional, self-promoting kind of thing, but it is Mike and Mike podcast.
So we can talk about what we want.
But that's kind of like Luke and Mike thing is when we're watching a shitty movie or if
we're watching a movie that everybody thinks is good.
We even had running commentary and you chimed in and you had really good points in Prey.
And we'll get to that when we talk about Prey.
But even if it's a good, supposed to be a multi-million dollar blockbuster and it's shitty
because the script or the angles or whatever, we'll talk about it.
We'll be like, oh my God.
What's this?
What's going on?
That's kind of our thing is you get a couple drinks in, you throw on a shitty movie after
you watch what should be the better movie, and then you just kind of trash it.
A lot of people do this, Cinema Sins or Mr. Science Theater.
They do the similar thing.
We're not trying to emulate them.
It's just we're two film school guys that we really enjoy watching movies because they're
fun.
And you've got, before we get too much into Mike's thoughts, let's just preface this
with there are multiple different types of shitty movies.
So there's a shitty movie that is trying way too hard and they're taking themselves way
too seriously.
So it's not really enjoyable, but you can kind of like laugh at them, right?
So you could be like laughing at them.
Not to diminish their effort that they put into it, but if you take it too seriously,
you're not really creating entertainment.
You're not really creating a movie that's going to resonate because you're trying too
hard.
There's a shitty movie that understands that they're a shitty movie and they're just doing
it for fun.
And those ones you can really enjoy because they'll kind of, they'll try and throw you
for a loop knowing that you're a shitty movie watcher, but they know they're making shitty
movie.
So they're going to go and have fun with it and they're going to take it like places
you never even thought it could go.
And those are really fun.
And then there's, I don't know, there's kind of like shitty movies where it's like, it's
like a shoe string budget, but they really came together on the story and making their
circumstances work.
And so it's not really a shitty movie, but it's like a less mainstream movie.
So there's a wide gamut there.
So I'm not telling you to go out and watch like all the shitty movies out there, but
they can be enjoyable if you know, if you kind of just expect going into it.
Sure.
One of my favorite movies of all time is Idiocracy.
And I would consider that to be a shitty movie.
And it's not for everybody.
It's not for everybody.
It's hate it.
It's trash.
And I love it.
It's wonderful.
And it is trash, but I too think it's wonderful.
And it was a couple of years ago, the creators of that came out and said, guys, guys, this
was not meant to be a roadmap for where our country is going.
Right.
So, so I don't know how much warning we gave you, Mike, about sharks of the corn.
I mean, the name said it all.
That's.
I did not know that it was going to be about, but I gather from the.
It was going to be, you know, yeah.
And I like the opening.
The opening was, uh, was great.
Uh, you know, you can't go wrong with the first 10 minutes.
It's like that dialogue.
Drinking, uh, and then blood.
I'm like, all right.
Yeah.
And like a plastic shark going through the cornfield.
And that was hilarious.
Oh my God.
You can see the guys holding the plastic.
Of course you could.
Yeah.
I mean, they're not, yeah.
So, uh, it was great.
Uh, very entertaining to watch.
It opens on a couple, I guess, or I bet in like a one night stand thing.
I don't know.
But they're like sitting in the cornfield.
They were, they were coming home or they were after a county fair.
Oh, drinking.
Yeah.
On the edge of a cornfield.
He was drinking because he had like the whole glass bottle, like the 1.75 of vodka or something.
I was, uh, what the hell was it?
It was new Amsterdam vodka.
Yeah.
So that was the whole film budget.
That's what they, that's what they paid for.
It was the bottle.
They didn't even take the label off.
No, but they always kept it away from the camera.
So you couldn't, yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
For sure.
No.
Well, yeah.
I could tell what it was because I used to drink new Amsterdam vodka when I was in
college.
But, uh, I don't think that man ever left the field.
He always was there with the bottle.
Like, I don't think, I don't think he ever left.
He did not leave.
That was part of the story.
He, uh, sat down on a, uh, oh God.
Fuck.
I forgot that.
Like a, like a scarecrow guy that had a penis made out of a zucchini for some reason.
No, it was a corn.
It was a corn cob.
Was it a corn cob?
Oh, it was a corn cob.
Yeah, it was.
Yeah, yeah.
It was sharks in the corn, not sharks in the zucchini.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was underneath a real life deer hunting stand in the middle of a field.
Yes.
So they obviously went to.
But you didn't see the deer stand until like five cuts later.
And then we were all like, should that, that should have been the establishing shot.
Like you should have told us that stand was there before, but they didn't, you know.
Right.
Yeah, they were playing, uh, strip right around the field or some.
One of my favorite games.
Yeah.
It was like literally strip, strip, strip in the field or something.
Yeah.
And of course this woman.
Who was, you guys described her as she's a single mom with three kids.
Yeah, it is a very average looking rural ish.
Yeah.
A very white woman.
Yeah.
Tractive enough.
Yeah.
It's all good.
Yeah.
It was, it was very entertaining.
Uh, got murdered to death by a.
Yeah.
The sharks only randomly showed up.
It wasn't really like a constant threat, but every once in a while, the shark would
show up and kill somebody.
Right.
Yeah.
And the story went on to be like the serial killer who wanted, who was obsessed with
sharks and.
Yeah, there was.
Oh yeah.
And he had a weird like a shark fetish and like the cops went to question him and he
was like watching like the nature channel shark show.
Well, he was dealing with prostitutes and drug dealers and.
Yeah.
And he was like, do you want me to bite you or something like that?
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
It was, it was great.
And they obviously they got permission from this, clearly a rural motel.
You know, yeah.
It was wonderful.
It was like, they clearly, they shot it all in like rural wherever the fuck.
Yeah.
Idaho.
No, it was at the movie that had Idaho plates or was it Lama again?
Because one of them had a lot had.
Well, so both plates and the other one had Ohio plates or something.
So the only reason we found out about sharks of the corn was because it's made by the same
group of people that did Lama, get Lama, get and I was looking up to see if they'd done
anything else.
And sure enough, sharks of the corn was their next movie.
Sure.
Okay.
But it's not, you know, getting permission to shoot in a hotel is really easy because
I got permission in your hometown to shoot in a hotel there for one of my folks.
Oh, there we go.
So usually the smaller towns, the hotel is just happy to have somebody there.
Yeah.
Even if you're not paying, like they don't care.
Like, hey, yeah, we got an open room.
Go film.
Yeah.
No problem.
So anyway, and then there was like a magical crystal skull.
It's mainly as involved and, you know, some sci-fi shit and, you know, incompetent police.
Yeah.
There are some really weird like police scenes.
I don't know how the police wronged these filmmakers, but they sure did somewhere.
And a special forces guy that clearly had no makeup on, like at all.
Or special forces training.
No, no.
He had razor bumps from shaving his head.
Like you can see.
Yeah.
The shave his head for the movie.
Yeah.
They were like, hey, bro, we want you to be bald for this.
That'd be so badass.
And he's like, oh, I've never done that before.
But sure.
Yep.
It's exactly it.
And, you know, first time he ever had the skin had a look.
Yeah.
And then there was all like their personal cars.
You can see it was their personal cars.
And then there was that overweight guy that was like repeating everything the other guy
would say, like the bad guy.
Yes.
And it was like bad like mafiosos who had terrible.
But not really because they were so like, they were like the comedic relief almost.
I mean, it's tough to say because you have a plastic shark being held by like the guy
off camera going through the cornfield.
So it's tough to say like the mafiosos were the comedic relief, but they kind of actually
were.
Yeah.
And they were trying to act tough and it was like clearly the some dad uncle of a friend
or whatever.
Yeah.
They were like just guys.
But the point of the matter is, as shitty as the movie was, they were just having fun.
And it was fun to watch.
And anytime you can watch a shitty movie and they're going to like, you know, I mean, this
is going to sound a little crass to say, but you don't watch shitty movies really for the
storyline.
You watch it for like the really goofy stuff and for tits.
So they, they definitely delivered on both.
Yes.
And they had tits and below.
Yes.
And they were, you know, like normal titties and I'm a big fan of that.
So.
Well, to harken back to our free the nipple episode, Mike's just a fan of nipples.
So yeah, doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Yeah.
They were just like, I can say it's always good to see not like the weird.
Oh yeah.
Like the scientific project.
Yeah.
Where they actually use the, what is it, the calculus or whatever.
You can calculate the area under the curve.
Like we don't need the Fibronochi sequence or something.
Yeah.
It's a, but it was very entertaining.
Just, just like popcorn and they, they, they fought the alien skull and like this weird
shrine and some guys like a mezzanine style barn that had like a dirt floor.
Yeah.
Like a tractor shit.
And they had a gunfight there too, I thought.
They did.
Yeah.
They had a shoot out.
Yes.
And uh, variated with like a random assortment of pistols that and guns that they, I'm sure
that they just all owned.
Yes.
And uh, I like that sort of thing.
Oh yeah.
It was very entertaining.
You don't have to take it too seriously.
And if the, if, and if you can tell the filmmakers and the cast and crew and everything, if
they're enjoying it and just having fun, like it's just fun.
Right.
Yeah.
Does it make sense that there's great white sharks swimming kind of around this cornfield?
Absolutely not.
Um, but it doesn't matter that they're having fun.
They wanted to tell the story for whatever reason and it's fun.
Um, so that kind of was, I mean, I don't know if it was like the, the biggest highlight.
Cause I really liked the Neil Blow camp, uh, Oats studio episode, but uh, it was definitely
one of the, one of the bigger up, up points of the, of the evening.
I thought it was, I thought it was very, very good.
To start the evening, we started with the, what you would call like the, the main movie
or the, the major Hollywood production movie, which was prey.
And this is, I don't want to say the 15th, but you have predator, predator one, you know,
predator, predator two.
And then there was, I think, uh, well you had the alien versus predator.
There was two alien versus predator movies.
And then there was like predator, predators, and then the predator.
And I'm not sure what order they came out in, uh, but the, the most recent one was,
uh, I didn't like it.
My buddy Luke really liked it, but they did the, uh, get to the choppers and it was a
parking lot full of like motorcycles.
So it was really kind of lame tie in and Arnold in it, that one, cause get to the choppers
or Arnold line.
Yeah.
But it didn't have Arnold.
Oh, well that's lame.
It was a super lame movie.
And then there was like a, they introduced like a predator dog that for whatever reason
looked just like the predators, but it was a dog.
And then one of the characters shot it in the head, but it lived, but it was retarded
then.
And that's not meant to be offensive, uh, other than the fact that, that the fact that
they made this, put this in the script and said, we're going to make the dog retarded
so that it's now friends with the humans, but we're going to keep this dog and it's
very clearly going to be retarded.
Like that's the dis like, I don't know how that cleared, uh, the writing room, right?
Like just, just kill the dog or make it friendly to humans, but don't like shoot it in the
head to the bottom.
Is it and then make it friendly and have it be like the comedic relief because you don't,
it's a, it's a predator film.
You don't need comedic relief.
Uh, but so now pray takes place in, I believe it was 1719.
Yes.
Something like that.
They actually put the date on, which I was really happy about.
They did.
Yeah.
Because it had the Comanche's and they were in, uh, the Rocky Mountain type area, uh,
which would have been fairly accurate to my understanding, more accurate than having them
on the Western Plains.
Yeah.
Uh, which the Comanche didn't move in, uh, to, to much later, uh, due to Westward expansion.
Yes.
Uh, which I believe I made a comment about at the time.
Uh, yeah.
And, uh, so basically the, uh, and this is, you know, if you haven't seen pray and you
really want to, and you don't want spoilers, um, just don't, don't turn us off, but pause
us and then go watch the movie and then come back and hit play again.
Um, sure.
But it could be like, the spoiler is going to be, uh, that it's not good, but anyway,
well, so here's, here's what I would say.
Here's what I would say, Mike is of all, and I've seen every predator movie.
Right.
Uh, did you mention that, uh, your friend Luke had like a miniature library of predator
novels that he, and alien novels.
And so I have read the predator novels that he recommended to me and the alien novels
that he recommended to me and they were fantastic.
And they give a lot of backstory, uh, to how the predators behave in the movies even.
So there's a whole lot of predator lore that's out there that actually works well with the
movies.
And the same was true of like the Star Wars universe until Disney bought them and, and
decided to like retroactively like cancel all of those other Star Wars novels.
But, um, we're not talking about Star Wars in this, in this episode.
Um, but the predators, and even if you watch, you know, the original two, right, they're
very honorable.
They're formidable foes and they get off on hunting, but they're not about cheap tricks.
It's a win.
Right.
They want a fair fight.
And uh, my, uh, you know, one of my, I have a few like complaints about the flick, but
I will say that Prey is my third favorite predator movie behind the original predator
and predator two.
So it's at least like, it's at least trending the series back into the good, good film realm.
I have only ever seen predator one predator two and now pray.
Okay.
And so that would make sense if this was your least favorite predator.
Yes.
Because compared to those two, it's the lesser of the three.
But if you watched any of the other predator stuff, I think there's five other movies.
There's the two alien versus predators and then, you know, three other predator movies.
I think you would be a lot more friendly towards this one.
Um, I'll say the cinematography and the score phenomenal, like really great.
The cinematography was really good.
Um, other than CGI.
Oh, they had the worst CGI animals that I've ever seen in a film.
Bad as sharks in the field.
Not it wasn't literally as bad, but we would consider the budget.
It was embarrassing.
But they would have been better off with a, uh, with like a stuffed grizzly bear and
having one of their cast or crew members like move it around just in front of the camera
and then crop out the hand holding it.
Right.
Like that would have been better than trying to make this fucking CGI bear.
Um, and so there's a scene when they kind of first, it's not when they first reveal
the predator, uh, which is one of my biggest, one of my bigger complaints, not the biggest
complaint, but the bigger complaint is like right at the beginning, you see the predator
get dropped off and you can see him from behind and then he cloaks, right?
And, uh, and then you see like his cloaked form throughout the first, I don't know, half
hour, 45 minutes.
And when you first see him kind of like from the front, he's holding the bear over his
head and the bear's blood is kind of like dripping down and revealing him, which would
have been a, an amazing shot had we not seen the predator like five times previously.
Like if that was the first reveal of the predator, that's a great first reveal.
We've already seen him invisible.
You know what I mean?
Like you'd already seen him.
Right.
So they kind of took all the, all the pomp and circumstance out of their first, you
know, quote unquote reveal of the predator.
Yes, they did.
Uh, it was really funny because, uh, Mike, this isn't meant as, uh, as an insult or anything.
This is, this isn't, this isn't the point of this, but Mike is kind of a self avowed,
like not film guy.
I would say that I am not a film enthusiast, at least when it comes to your level of film
and enthusiasm for sure.
Well, yeah.
So the first, I don't know, the first like hour and the beauty of this movie is like,
it's an hour and 40 minutes.
Like it's not a long movie.
Um, cause oftentimes in modern movies, they try and drag everything out like past a two
hour mark.
And it's like, it was, it was tidy.
It was, it was well paced for sure.
If you don't have that much to say, don't make it a two and a half hour movie.
Just make it the 90 minute movie that it needs to be.
Um, but it's funny cause like Luke and I were really kind of like, we weren't like super
getting into it cause the cinematography was great.
We had some, we had more predator knowledge than Mike had.
So we were kind of like bringing up some of that stuff.
But then there was one scene and it was hilarious cause it went on forever and Mike's like,
where the fuck is all this smoke coming from?
And uh, it was, it was funny and, and even after you left, Luke was like, man, that
was so amazing when Mike was like, you know, getting into the ripping on the movie.
Like where the fuck is all this fog coming from and all this smoke, you know, cause there's
a whole scene where it's supposed to be intense, but then it's like suddenly you're, you're
out on the planes or whatever.
And then suddenly there's like fog everywhere and you're like, where the fuck is all this
fog coming from?
Yep.
Oh yeah.
It's how I, and they had a, I'm going to rip on the movie now.
Because the main baddies was not actually the predator.
The main baddies were French traders who were beasts.
Uh, characters.
They were caricatures of evil French traders, uh, which is all nonsense.
And it was like a party, a band of these French traders.
Well, so here's the funny thing about that is like the first time we saw the French
traders, there was like five of them.
But then they were like, okay.
Okay.
The rest of them come from.
Yeah.
They, they take care of the first five and then suddenly there's like a hundred more
French traders just randomly out of the wilderness.
So by the way, the amount of Comanche's versus the amount of French traders, the French traders
could have wiped those Comanche's off the base of the planet.
Oh yeah.
And somehow magically, cause they have guns, right?
Yeah.
They have modern, well modern for 17, whatever.
1719.
Yeah.
And they could have wiped them off the face of the planet and the predator is just mowing
through these guys like a predator does with all this modern, crazy technology.
Yeah.
And then he has the difficulty fighting bows and arrows.
Yeah.
And there's a problem with that too.
Like we didn't, we didn't, uh, Luke and I didn't like the predator design because instead
of his like modern, uh, face helmet shield, he had like a bone one and his dreadlocks
were like smooth and not kind of like rough, like you've seen in every other predator movie.
Um, and we were kind of saying like what he should have done when he landed and saw that
he was going up against, you know, mostly bows and arrows and Tomahawks is he should
have like stripped off of his, stripped off his weapons and just gone, you know, like
fist to fist with them.
Or he should have fashioned his own bow, you know what I mean?
And put it on equal ground.
Um, and the ending was kind of super lame.
Uh, didn't make any sense at all.
But also the weapons that the Comanche were using were magic weapons that dug inches into
timber, never chipped, never broke.
And uh, we're just like, yeah, incredibly superior to what it was now in a factory.
Yeah, and it was funny because, uh, because the, the main, um, protagonist, the Comanche
woman, uh, Luke was like, oh my God, she's going to put mud all over herself.
And then she didn't because she had some magic native American flour that she could eat.
And it would do the same thing that the mud did.
That's fine.
I didn't have a problem with that.
Yeah.
It was just kind of like, you know, could have just been mud, but, um, I didn't have
as much of a problem with that.
Yeah.
Um, but we're a little, we're a little more versed in like the predator lore.
So it was, you know, neither here nor there, like somebody who's not heavily invested into
the predator lore can watch this movie and say, Hey, some things were good and some things
made no sense.
And we're kind of actually terrible.
Um, so the critics that are saying it's as good or better than the original one, I don't
know what they're smoking, but it's not a cigar.
Um, right.
I had a bigger problem without the animals acted.
Yeah.
The CGI animals were absolute trash, like terrible trash.
They looked terrible, but they acted.
You know, a mountain lion, they, the, the, the commands you were hunting a mountain
lion and the mountain lion instead of running away, which is what mountain lions do when
they know that there's multiple people out there hunting for it.
Right.
They can't, they can't, but they can tell.
Yeah.
Well, they know that there's, uh, other predators out there and they leave the scene, right?
Modern or mountain lion attacks are on a individual basis and you trap them.
Yeah.
They're not attacking a group.
Yeah.
You can shoot them when they're trying to attack, uh, animals, but they're very human averse
creatures, as a rule.
And of course this animal just is like almost active rabbit.
Well, it, it, it wanted to stand toe to toe and fight everything, which is just not going
to happen.
No, that is not a realistic, uh, uh, interpretation.
And people say, Oh, it's a fantasy.
Well, the way it is, but fantasy works is that everything is normal and there's fantasy
elements added to realistic situations.
Yeah.
Everything can't be bullshit.
Yeah.
You can, you can only suspend your disbelief on certain things.
Right.
And if you're a good filmmaker, you know where those areas are and where you can take liberties
and where you need to not take liberties.
Right.
So really quick, I'm over halfway down with the cigar already.
So I have like a quarter of it, uh, to be perfectly honest.
Yes.
So I'm going to say like, if we want to talk about animal farm, we better shift gears.
Well, we could push animal farm to another episode too, or we could shift gears.
It depends.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't really matter to me either.
I'm not going to forget.
Uh, no, no, no, I mean like, so animal farm is not, not a terribly long book.
There's a lot to unpack.
A lot to unpack in the book.
Uh, let's go back to pray though.
Okay.
By the way, the cigar is good.
It's good.
Flavors.
Nope.
It is a one note thing.
Uh, yeah.
I would say, we probably, we probably got to, uh, got to come up with like some terms,
right?
Like one note, one note is a one note.
And then the ones that we like that change, change flavor, would we call those like complex
cigars or would we call them multi stage, multi stage?
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, the, the tobacconist that designed it, uh, had a flavor change in mind.
We happen to prefer that.
Yes.
The tobacconist that designed this wanted a one note cigar that was going to be good.
Is this very good?
It's good.
Yeah.
It's very good.
It's an easy, it's an easy smoke too.
I mean, it lit easy.
It stayed lit.
And uh, I was, I was actually honestly quite surprised.
Uh, because we're like, I don't know, 35 minutes in.
And uh, we've just been talking movies and I looked down and I'm like, holy crap.
Like if we want to talk about something else, we don't have much time left.
So we'll stay on pray and we'll do a big animal farm episode next.
Yeah.
We can do, we can do animal farm later because it's been very quick.
It's it's smoking fast.
Yes.
Um, Macanuto has a reputation for being a simple cigar for people, uh, at like a golf
course.
Yes.
Uh, traditionally.
They're a major brand.
They're kind of like Ashley or Coheba, uh, where you can buy them everywhere.
And it's good.
It's very good.
Yeah.
I like it.
Good.
Yes.
Um, if you're out on a, on a course and you're gonna hit a ball around, definitely something
that you would want to bring with you.
Yeah.
You probably need three or four of them, uh, to finish our 18 holes, but yeah.
I mean, you're going to have a couple of steaks and a couple of drinks and it's good.
Oh yeah.
I would highly recommend it for not probably not for sitting down and bullshitting because
it's not very long.
Yeah.
But, uh, yeah, it's good.
Yeah.
I like it.
Or if you wanted to do like what, uh, what we do watching films, you know, if you wanted
to start with something short and quick, just to get into the mood and then bring out the
big bad later, you know, you could do that.
Yeah.
That's a nice, it's a nice short smoke.
Yeah.
Nice short smoke.
You know what?
It's very good.
It's going to be a good one.
I don't know if it's a good like intro to cigars cigar, but, uh, you know, this one would
be a good, good one for you to smoke or for you to give to a friend that wants to smoke
too.
I would agree.
Yeah.
When I say not bad at all, that's kind of a diss.
It is actually very good.
Oh, it's really good cigar.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's just well made and, uh, not overly interesting.
Just good.
Yeah.
It's not overpacked or over oily or anything like that.
So not overpowering in my opinion.
It's a good stick.
So anyway, back to pray.
Back to pray.
Um, it wasn't overwhelming with the women, good men, bad trope because the other Comanche
men were good, uh, but she did only kill one thing in the whole movie.
Yeah.
She constantly hunted and failed and we talked about this too during the movie where like
she has failed every single time she's tried to hunt or tried to find something or kill
something.
And I don't think it was overly like men, bad woman, good because like her brother,
right?
And so I don't remember if you were still there, if you had gone, but like Luke and
that we're talking about, we wanted more of the brother not because, not because we hate
women characters.
We love women characters like alien and aliens are some of our favorite flicks and that's,
you've got all sorts of characters, uh, you know, but the Ripley character is so well
written and so well performed, uh, by Sigourney Weaver.
Um, and this one, I would say that, you know, the lead female overall felt very flat.
And some of the most interesting parts were her interactions with her brother because
her brother was kind of on one hand, you know, if you have a brother or a sibling, you probably
know, like on one hand the brother was like, come on sis, like what are you doing?
But then he would be very supportive of her throughout.
So it was a very kind of nice, like, like his character was interesting in the fact
that it was kind of like a, like a normal sibling thing and I felt like if we would
have had more of that interaction, we could relate to her better.
Not that, not that women need a man to justify themselves, but they had kind of set this
up in the movie to where he was kind of a nice counterpoint to her kind of stubborn
bullheadedness.
Which he was a badass male character who supported her and her heterodoxy, which is a good place
to start, but it never developed.
Yeah, they didn't do anything else with it, you know, and instead they decided to not
write anymore with those two and then give, I don't know, some middle schoolers, uh, after
effects and had them make a bear.
Right.
The bear that acted crazy as well.
I mean, all the animals acted crazy.
Yeah, and there was like a snake too that acted crazy.
Like they were all like, they were all terrible.
And just, and not even from, so Mike's coming at it from like the animal standpoint of what
like how would an animal act.
And I'm coming at it from a CGI angle where it's like, it's almost scorpion king level
bad CGI.
Like it's that CGI that will snap you right out of the film and you will say, that's a
bad looking CGI bear wolf mountain lion snake, whatever it was, they were CGIing it was all
bad.
Yes.
And I didn't like that.
The guys, they were like out fishing and they had like the full war paint.
They always had the full war paint.
Every time you saw them, they were in full war paint.
It was crazy.
And it's like, and she would wake up like she woke up one morning and she was in full
war paint.
And it's like, well, maybe just show us having her put it on.
Like does she sleep in this?
I remember we talked about this too.
We were like, are they, are they all sleeping in their war paint?
Or how are they getting their war paint on so fast?
You know, and normally, and maybe it's a trope, I don't know, but you know, normally you put
the war paint on before the big fight at the end of the movie.
You know, you're not, you don't go out hunting in war paint.
I don't think.
I don't know.
You don't go out gathering berries in your war paint or hunting in your war paint.
Yeah.
That's insane.
And again, I don't feel, oh, it's a sci-fi fantasy.
Mm.
Sci-fi fantasy works because it's not easy.
It is a sci-fi fantasy, but that's where you can draw the line between like a decent
you know, and I would call this one decent.
It's decent.
It's better than the other Predator movies because they were trying so hard to have callbacks
to the earlier films.
And you know what?
This one did too.
It had some callbacks, but they didn't feel overly forced, except for maybe the pistol
at the end.
But they didn't feel overly forced.
You know, I mean, the, the brother said the same line, you know, like if it bleeds, we
can kill it.
And that was from the first movie, but it kind of made sense, right?
Like it wasn't overly forced.
They weren't trying to somehow bring in lumberjacks and say, let's get to the choppers and have
the lumberjacks help us because they're chopping down trees.
Get it?
Ha, ha, ha.
Right.
You know, they weren't doing that kind of stuff.
So I felt like it was a little more refined than the previous entries to the Predator
franchise.
Well, I can tell you that 17, whatever, Comanche Girl, 1700s, whatever, Comanche Girl had an
incredible understanding of Predator technology by the end of the film.
She had to to win though.
She had to to win.
She had to rapidly learn modern technology.
And you know what?
And we were talking about this, and we were talking about this during it, during it too.
And we were kind of saying, I think you brought this up, Mike, was would a 17, 19, basically
teenager have any of these kind of modern inklings of, you know, fighting the patriarchy?
I don't know.
I wasn't there.
And if any females back then had those feelings, I'm sure they were suppressed.
But you have to understand with films, just for anyone that's kind of like going to an
ASA on Mike or myself is films are a product of when they are made almost first and foremost,
and then secondarily, a product of the era that they're setting them in.
So you know, you can draw analogies or connections to any modern film that you've seen or any
film ever, and a lot of books too.
Like even if they send them back, they still work in some of the modern stuff.
So you can definitely tell just by watching without even looking at, you know, the level
of CGI or the film grain or whatever.
And just by the story, you can tell kind of the era the film was made based on that.
Right.
And there are accounts of Native American women fighting whites as warriors, for sure.
Because they were, there's Buffalo, something, something, something, I wish I had a rubber
to her name off the top of my head, but I don't.
But she's got an incredible story of fighting in the armies of the plains Indians, you know,
various tribes.
Yeah, and we talked about the female snipers and things too, and war heroes.
Oh yes.
Oh, in a previous episode.
Oh yes.
So I'm just trying to say I had less of a problem of having a strong, or you know, the
filmmakers wanting to have a strong female lead set in 1719.
Like I didn't really have a problem with that.
No.
Other than they didn't really do a whole lot of justice with her character development
throughout the thing.
Because she kind of like stubbornly and like bullheadedly rushed into everything and failed
a lot of the times and then just through sheer stubbornness kind of won at the end, you know,
and didn't really go on a character arc journey that you kind of want your protagonist to
go on.
But you learn nothing, you can do nothing.
Yeah.
And she learned nothing.
And again, like, it's fine.
It's not super intellectual cinema.
We're watching a Predator movie.
But again, you know, with like the CGI animals or the animal behavior, even if the CGI was
bad, but the animals acted like real animals, I think the CGI might have been able to be
forgiven.
Because at least they were making them act like real animals.
But those are like the fine dividing points between a decent movie and a great movie.
And you know, the first Predator movie is just phenomenal.
Like it's great.
Like all the characters, they go into the whole thing and they get their whole worlds
turned upside down.
And you know, they have to rally and fight.
And in this one, it was just kind of like she was never in any real danger that I felt.
Like I didn't feel like she was in any real danger.
The French people, yeah, they were in danger all the time because they were, you know,
barbaric morons.
But she was in more danger from the French people than from the Predator.
Yeah.
For sure.
So, but you know, the Predator used all this modern technology and barely succeeded or
barely died.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
And you know, and that's really not.
And so that was kind of our, like, Luke and Maya's biggest complaint was it really didn't
feel like she was fighting a legit Predator.
You know, because like a legit Predator wouldn't have been using all the modern stuff, but
they're still seven feet tall and ripped.
Right.
So it's still going to be a, it's still a battle, even if they don't have laser cannons.
You know what I'm saying?
Like it's not an easy thing to take down a seven foot tall alien that's been bred to
hunt.
Like that's their whole thing.
A medieval knight could have taken out a hunting party of Comanche alone because of the armor.
Yes.
Right.
So to believe that a future alien species could not take out a band of Comanche, even
though they were, let's see, I mean, at any one time he was only battling five or six
Comanche at a time.
Yeah.
Well, the problem was that he never took off any of his tech, which he would have if he
were a true to the lore Predator.
Like he would have even the playing field, right?
He would have, he would have, he would have come at them at a similar technology level.
He never would have used his laser guided arrows or whatever the fuck he had.
Yeah.
Projectile weapons.
Yes.
It would have been much more even match and you would have seen him take that shit off.
He would have been like, you know, I mean, he wouldn't have seen his like facial expressions,
but he would have like, you would have had a shot of him like looking at the band of
Comanches and then he'd like take off his like shoulder mount.
He'd take off some of his stuff and set them like under a log and then you'd go, oh, okay,
he's going to like, you know, meet them where they're at technology wise.
And then it would have been a fight.
And then all the stuff that he did later and struggled with would have made sense.
Right.
You saving the skulls of these animals that he killed.
Yeah.
Like a snake.
You fucking killed a snake and you're going to say, oh, great.
Super advanced alien killed a fucking snake.
You know what?
A six year old native American can kill a snake, but they don't keep the skull because it's
a fucking snake.
Like.
Poachers go out and catch rattlesnakes.
Yeah.
All right.
No, you know, it's actually a problem.
I mean, yeah, but I mean, like it's not that hard.
Kill a fucking snake.
It's not impossible by any means, especially if you have like heat sensing shit and you
can see it before it sees you.
Well, yeah.
And if you're a fucking seven foot tall, like alien and we don't even know if the snakes
here are venomous to you.
Like, right.
Nobody knows.
Right.
It's really hard to kill a wolf that is attacking you and not running away, which is not what
wolves do.
No.
I mean, right.
And wolves are pack hunters.
So there should have been like a whole fucking pack of wolves.
Right.
A solo wolf is not going to attack a predator.
A solo wolf is probably not going to attack much of any one person, let alone a band of
people when they don't even attack.
They don't even attack healthy animals.
They go for the sick in the week.
Right.
So, you know, if you're all like super hopped up on the predator lore, you might not enjoy
the film.
If you have watched any of the other recent predator films, you'll probably think this
is a nice breath of fresh air.
It's beautifully shot.
You know, you can't deny that, but that doesn't carry a film.
It only adds.
So, I wouldn't say it's the best predator film I've ever made.
I wouldn't say it comes close to the first two even, but it's better than any of the
other ones.
I'm officially done with the macanudo.
Yep.
I'm just about there.
But I'd say if you're thinking about watching Prey, and if anything we've said here has
kind of made you think like, man, maybe I shouldn't, you should probably just go watch
Sharks of the Corn or Lama Geden.
Yes.
And just know you're going into something completely goofy, and get yourself in the
right mindset to watch something goofy instead of something serious.
I would hold hard to be agreed with that.
But this macanudo was very enjoyable.
It was very good.
It was good throughout.
Pretty much from the first puff to the last did not change at all, but that's not a bad
thing because it was good.
That is fine.
It's a good cigar.
And that wouldn't be a bad one to just have a bunch of, you know.
And you want something quick.
Want something that's solid, consistent?
That would be your cigar.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, thanks for listening.
Talk to yourselves a good week.