Oh, God. Oh, my God.
I just kind of know.
What are your poops like?
I'm kind of picturing you just like on the dog crawl across the carpet.
I mean, you don't have to imagine that we've seen it.
I do like a sexy Marilyn Monroe crawl across the carpet.
Oh, gross.
With poop on my thighs.
Oh, I want everybody to like watch blonde,
but then just imagine my face on Marilyn Monroe.
We can probably we got a deep fake you in there.
That'd be great. We got you know, we got the technology.
We have a Peter that might actually make that movie watchable.
I hear it's kind of rough.
Pretty bad. Yeah.
But if my face was on the lady body, mm hmm.
Let me hide. Oh, my God.
It was fine. I just met.
I'm just talking about the the emotional roller coaster we're about to go through
and go from last the last episode to this episode.
Yeah, one was really implying that we all have emotions here.
Mm hmm. Fair. I meant for our listeners.
Oh, yeah. They're invested at this point.
I don't think our listeners have emotions either.
I don't think we have listeners.
There's at least some bots that watched our.
Yeah, they went to town on that one video.
Fifty eight views or something.
It's like 90 now. Oh, damn. All right. Well.
What do we have more bots?
Good question. I think.
Can we please watch some of our other videos?
Which video is it?
It was the it can happen to you.
I was kind of hoping it was the 9-11 one because that would be weird.
That would have been actually really weird.
That would have been awesome if it was like a bunch of people
kind of Googling 9-11 stuff, just trying to 9-11 the facts.
I mean, it was. Welcome to cage match.
This is you really struggled with that one today.
This is this is Sean, your bemused host with my co-host Nick
and our producer Peter. Hello.
Who was infinitely patients patient with our chicanery until not last week
until he's not. Is it chicanery?
Yeah. Chicanery.
Oh, I don't know. Chicanery.
Sean Connery. Sean Connery.
Thank you for being with our Sean Connery today.
Always, always patient with your Sean Connery.
Especially Zardoz era Sean Connery.
I love me some Zardoz era Sean Connery.
So great. Let's talk about that movie.
Yeah. I wish I had a giant floating head that just vomited guns out for me
every morning. That movie is unhinged.
I don't I don't need this, but you want it.
It'd be entertaining.
This is this is the speed this podcast is going to go today.
Nope. We're going to pick it up.
We got things going on. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Do you want to talk about the bad one or the good one?
Oh, yeah. Let's let's let's.
So we're just going to give up give up the ghost here.
This week, we are putting head to head
Paul Schrader's 2014 Dying of the Light thing.
I was trying to think of a kind word to put in front of it.
And just sounded like you forgot what we were doing here again.
No, no. And 1993's Romp.
Red Rock West. Red Rock West.
When walk. Red Rock Rest.
Yeah, this is that.
I mean, that's going to be most of the jokes in this episode.
I would like to talk about Red Rock West first.
1993, Nick Cage plays drifter Michael,
who after driving 1200 miles to get a job on an oil rig
and not getting it because of his bum knee, spends his last five dollars
to get to Red Rock while looking for bar back work is mistaken for Lyle
played by Dennis Hopper, an assassin
who didn't show up.
And Nick Cage is offered $10,000,
$5,000 upfront to murder Larifin Boyle's character,
Suzanne, by her husband, JT Walsh's Wayne.
Hilarity ensues.
Shenanigans ensue. Sean Connery. Sean Connery ensues.
Every time Nick Cage, you know, gets he goes over to the house.
She offers him twice as much money.
He takes that, writes the sheriff a letter saying, you know,
bar owners trying to kill his wife.
You should probably look into that.
Throws it in the mail because time is of the essence and
scoots out of town.
Only did a drifter drive into the hospital.
And when the sheriff shows up to ask questions and guess who it is,
it's the bar owner, Wayne.
And it's all just a wacky adventure from there.
It is a very thinly veiled like farce.
This whole thing is just like a dark farce.
It really doesn't like drive big jokes or anything.
No, everything leads back to Red Rock.
And they're like five times he gets out of town
only to immediately get driven right back to town.
Wayne drives him out of town to kill him in the middle of the forest.
He gets away, runs off, is almost hit by Lyle, the actual assassin,
who not only drives him back to Red Rock, drives him back to Wayne's bar
and is insulted that Nick Cage won't have a drink with him.
What's the name of that tabletop game?
Fiasco. Fiasco. It's Fiasco.
Like everything about this is Fiasco.
It's a Coen Brothers film without witty dialogue.
It is written by a pair of brothers.
That's also true. Yeah.
And directed by one of those brothers whose name is John.
John John. John Dahl. Yeah.
Who mostly has only who's directed a lot of television.
And he got his start directing a bunch of cool in the gang music videos.
That's that's pretty astounding. Yeah.
Doll's first film, Kill Me Again, was about Kilmer.
Was it? Yeah, I believe he was in that.
Well, the reason Nick Cage took this role
and this is my one fun fact for this movie is because his uncle,
Francis Ford Coppola, really liked Dahl's first film,
Kill Me Again, and said, Nick Cage should take should do it.
I mean, I think you said it right, Nick.
You know, this doesn't lead to a lot of big jokes.
It happens. It happens at a clip.
There's a lot of turns leading back to Wedwalk.
Wedwalk. Michael gets seduced by Laura Flynn Boyle's character real quick.
They're on the run out of town.
No money. And she wants to stop for a beer, which turns into tequila.
Yeah, it turns into the comfort in wants to stop for a beer,
but she wants to use his money, too.
It's like he just saved her ass.
They're getting gas.
And she's like, how are you going to pay for that?
And he's like, well, I got like 80 bucks.
And she's like, let me see your wallet.
And then just looks at his ID to like make sure she knew who he was,
takes his money and says, like, I'm getting a drink.
Yeah. Like, bitch.
I mean, technically, he just took, you know,
$10,000 of hers to kill her husband, which he also didn't do.
Well, whatever. She deserved it.
Yeah. And all the money and his gun is in his.
Impounded vehicle. Impounded vehicle.
Oh, and the guy he ran over had two slugs in the chest.
Hence why the sheriff showed up and was like, well,
you clearly tried to kill this man.
I love the enthusiasm you have right now.
I have nothing left in the tank today.
He like this is this is going to be a Nick episode.
Oh, Jesus.
I mean, talk about some of the performances.
Do do the the ancillary characters and then talk some of the cagey bits.
Dennis Hopper Lyle is pretty fun.
I love the Lyle energy. Yeah.
So he he just like gets in that car.
He's like, you know, big Texas attitude. Yeah.
And everything's just like when he's talking about being a Marine
and Nick Cage is like, oh, yeah, I was Marine too.
And like they do a little who thing together.
Let me buy you a beer.
And he's like, oh, no, I don't I don't want to be.
Oh, you won't even let me buy you a beer.
Like just real offended that he couldn't be hospitable.
Yeah. To somebody is like.
Which immediately turns around into I'm going to kill you in the bathroom
when I found find out you took the money that was meant for me to kill a lady.
Yeah, sure. Oh, yeah. OK.
Talk about the truck driver.
Oh, the truck driver and truck driver was cool.
So when Nick Cage escapes the bathroom, he like climbs through the window
and Lyle and Wayne come into the bathroom trying to find him
because that's they knew where he was.
They see that the windows open.
So he climbed out the window.
They go outside and they're looking around out back
and looking around all over for him.
Nick Cage climbed up the HVAC and he was on the roof.
And he takes this two by four and extends it out across the roof
onto the top of this semi truck.
And he he like tight ropes across that and it like doesn't even flex.
So pretty good two by fours they had back in the 90s, 80s, 90s, 93, 93.
Yeah. And gets over onto the top of this truck and escapes.
And, you know, Lyle, you know, kind of figures out like, oh, he
he must have gone on the roof.
So he's on the roof and he sees Nick Cage on top of this truck as they drive away
down the road.
Nick Cage just knocks on the driver's side window from on top.
And it's like, hey, I'm out here.
And the truck driver has to like slam on the brakes and.
Nick Cage holds on pretty well. Yeah, he does.
I mean, he must have expected it.
And besides, he's got a bum knee, not a bum hand.
Quit discounting him. Nick Cage is good at things.
I will. I mean, I will say this is probably the most buff cage we've seen.
No, I don't know.
He was doing those one on pushups in the middle of the highway
in that open opening scene.
Yeah. But do you remember Birdie when he popped that top off?
That's true. Come gutters.
So this is like five, six years later.
Yeah, he's lost it a little bit. Looking pretty good, though.
Yeah, he looks fine.
He looks like somebody who could have arguably been in the military at some.
Yeah. So he like the truck driver pops out of the truck
and he like puts a gun up to Nick Cage's face.
I just feel good.
There is some shit like that.
Nick Cage is like, no.
And then the truck driver is like, what are you doing over here?
He's like, oh, well, I was in the bar.
My wife showed up and she was real angry.
So I just dipped out and like had to hide.
So I like caught a ride on your truck.
And the guy's like, I don't fucking believe that.
You're full of shit.
And he's like, no, you've never met my wife.
So he drops him off in the middle of nowhere on this like in front of this house.
And the house being that of Suzanne and Suzanne, because he now that Lyle's in town,
he's got to warn Suzanne that, hey, this guy's actually coming to kill you.
Yeah. Which I do like those two playing off each other.
There's a lot of back and forth when he's like trying to get her
to hurry the fuck up and get out of the house or to hide because Lyle is right outside.
And she's just fighting him on it.
He's like, just go hide on the porch.
Like, what do you what do you want me to do?
Get a divorce.
Oh, yeah. You're putting two different conversations together there, but.
Yeah, either way.
That's that's the thing about this movie.
It goes at such a clip and it all just meshes together.
But then so Lyle shows up, he Nick Cage
beans Lyle on the face with a trophy or something.
Yeah. He just whips it right across the room.
Good aim on him. Yeah.
Lyle goes down, doesn't go for the like Nick Cage doesn't go for the gun.
They just book it in a Jeep with no gas, which is kind of the running theme
of this film is always out of gas. Yeah. Story of my life.
Yeah. It was actually after he hit him with that statue.
That's when Leroy Boyle's like, my husband's trying to kill me.
And she's like, well, what am I supposed to do?
It's like, well, if I were you, I'd get a divorce.
That was my quote for this one.
Oh, yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. Well, my quote.
So her plan is to like run off to Mexico with Nick Cage.
And when all the cards are on the table, she's like turned on him
and she's like, we can still go to Mexico.
And he just goes, fuck Mexico.
It does have some good little lines in this movie.
He is only like he is just there for this movie.
He makes no decision in this film other than to go back to the house
that drives this story.
It just kind of happens around him.
All the driving points and all the character, like all the character arcs
in this are everyone else.
And he's just in the middle of it very much like a Mad Max movie.
Mad Max, for more, I was going to say, like a USA, like 90s TV show,
like Renegade shows up in a small town, solve small town problems, moves on.
He's like the Incredible Hulk. Yeah.
I mean, this very much felt like they could have just made more of these films.
Just random schmo shows up to town.
Shit goes sideways.
I mean, you could find that like all over the place, like that theme.
Yeah. Right. And it's still popular now, too.
It's like Reacher is really no different.
And that was that's what I was thinking of when I watched this.
I mean, all in all, I thought it was very enjoyable.
Yeah, I thought it was a really good movie. It was fun.
Like there's nothing so terrible in it to like tear down and make fun of.
I mean, Laura Flynn Boyle is like, well, there's a reason
you don't see a lot of her now.
She wasn't that entertaining to watch.
No, I mean, she kind of just was riding the high of being in Twin Peaks, I think.
Yeah, I feel like that's kind of just what she brought to the table.
Well, I guess with this one, too, it's just because it felt like I said,
it felt like a 90s USA afternoon action show.
I just none of the acting like stood out to me in any way
other than it was just there to progress the dumbass series of events.
I don't think any one character.
Well, I mean, Lyle Dennis Hopper, I think, did a really good job.
He chewed that scenery so good.
Yeah, he was also our most larger than life character in the whole thing.
So Nick Cage doesn't talk a lot in this film.
No, he doesn't.
He's a pretty, you know, reserved, easygoing guy.
Yeah. Who, you know, just wanted some money.
So the big twist in the film is after they decide to go to
after they get away and they stay at the comfort in,
they decide they're going to run to Mexico, which is a great idea.
You've just met this strange woman who life is embroiled with,
you know, homicides and you're like, all right, this seems like a good idea.
We're down to our last, I'm assuming, 20 bucks.
Mexico seems fine.
And but she wants to go back and steal half a million, half a million
from Wayne because it turns out they were bank robbers.
I thought you were going to say lizard people.
That would have been that would have been our 9-11 episode.
That would have been our 9-11 episode.
Didn't Laura Flynn Boyle play the alien baddie in Men in Black 2?
I completely purged that film from my mind.
I know Johnny Knoxville was her like wacky sidekick.
I just have a weird encyclopedic knowledge of what Johnny Knoxville's in.
That's fair.
Oh, there you go.
Hey, that tracks.
What else is she doing?
No, it doesn't matter.
This isn't a Laura Flynn Boyle podcast.
It can be.
I'll Google her later.
So but yeah, the
naughtiness ensues.
The cop the cop show up
to arrest Wayne because they find the wanted poster.
Mm hmm. Yeah.
They say what that came from.
It was in Kurt's pocket.
Kurt being Laura's love buddy.
OK, who was the guy that Nick Cage hit with his car?
Yeah. All right.
That guy had a bad go, man.
He got shot twice and then hit by a car in the rain.
Yeah. But he was bleeding out, I guess.
So I'm going to blame the victim here.
What do you guys think of the the accent work between Lyle and Nick Cage's Michael?
Well, luckily, Nick Cage didn't speak a lot because it wasn't the strongest accent.
I thought Dennis Hopper just he had an accent and he committed.
I don't know if there's different regional dialects in Texas.
It's a pretty big fucking state.
I imagine once you get around other border states, it would affect it.
I had a really hard time watching Dennis Hopper in this
because I had just been watching clips from Super Mario Brothers.
I couldn't get that out of my head.
I love that movie.
I did. I want to say I did genuinely enjoy this movie.
I like the Mexican standoff in the cemetery later.
Yeah. Where they're like digging up the money from the bank robbery
and everyone's got a gun on each other.
I like how we keep actually misusing the term Mexican stand up.
Like, no, like they didn't all have guns.
There were enough guns.
Yeah, there were there were guns.
There was a knife. There was a shovel.
Yeah, there was a pocket knife.
I think that counts.
OK, I forgot to count the shuffle.
Very important.
Your Mexican stand.
Lyle trucks a knife into Wayne's throat.
Dude, that was slick.
That was super awesome.
And also when he slipped the magazine out of the pistol before he threw it down,
like ejected the magazine while it was pointed up so he could drop the pistol
and just keep that in his hand and he slid that up.
That's why when Laura Flynn Boyle had it later, it was empty.
Yeah, that was cool.
Yeah. And then Lyle, he's a smooth operator.
You know, when Lyle and him are tussling at the end, Lyle's dragging him over
because there's a statue of a soldier with a bayonet.
And Lyle's just like, I know what I'm going to do.
I'm going to stab this fucker on that.
Nick Cage just grabs him and chucks him on it instead.
I did like that he kind of ghost rider Nick Cage with that chain, though.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It was a good purge.
I did enjoy it. I'm going to watch this movie again.
It might work its way to my rotation.
I like a romp.
I like a comedy of errors.
I like heists that have gone wrong.
This movie has everything in it that I like in a bad movie.
And the bonus is it's not even a bad movie.
It's not even a bad movie.
But did you notice that there was Rainier beer in the house that he burned down?
I did not. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
A case. Oh, awesome.
I I do want to point out that Scotch is not
an appropriate accelerant if you're trying to burn a house down.
It does not have a high enough ABV.
It's not going to burn hot enough or right
for you to even set a blanket on fire.
This is an arson podcast.
I just want anybody out there who thinks that it's.
Let's don't say that we're we're on a list for the 9 11 episode.
Don't start saying this is an arson podcast.
I'm just concerned with authenticity.
We don't condone arson.
But if you're going to do arson, don't do it with Scotch.
Yeah, there's much cooler things.
Just hit me up in the comments and we'll DM each other.
Now, OK, wait, why the fuck would there have been Rainier's in Texas?
Oh, sorry, Wyoming.
Some of this was filmed in Montana.
My time in Montana, I don't remember ever getting like even seen Rainier.
We mostly drank shit like cocaine, Molson, Labatt's.
Wasn't the burned down house type movie?
I mean, that was an abandoned house, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
So it could have been transients, but how did they get it?
I don't know. We're really deep diving on this.
The director of photography was from Seattle, though.
Well, there you go. We figured out the mystery. Maybe.
But the director was from Billings, Montana.
So he should have known better for authenticity.
Oh, wait, one more thing before we jump to the quotes.
All right. What the fuck was up with racing the train and jumping it?
Oh, dude, that was fucking awesome.
So when Lyle gets Wayne out of prison, he's got Michael driving the car.
Wayne and Susanna are in the backseat and Lyle's up front with.
But like so he breaks Wayne out of prison by killing like the deputy
getting Wayne has Michael drive at gunpoint
and they're like driving to the tracks.
Train gets in the way and Michael's just like starting to slow down
and Lyle just like puts his foot on Michael's foot and just like revs down
directly at a train.
Yeah, well, he was trying to get away because the cops saw them.
Yeah, but like just does that with doesn't tell him to turn, just does it.
And Michael has to like scoot down and like race the train
and try and like hop in front of it. It was crazy.
My note for that was them Duke boys is at it again.
Did you hear like after the cop came back out
and he noticed the conversation of like the truck driver and stuff over there?
Did you hear the one resident was just like, oh, man, what an asshole.
Oh, this movie just goes out of clip like scene to scene.
And something happens in every scene to the point where, yeah,
rad train chase I completely forgot about.
Did you notice after that whole scene
when they brought in that chick to run the dispatch for the cops
in the background behind, you could still see the dead cop
laying on the ground with just like a sheet over him. Yeah.
I did like when they're all in the car,
Lyle's talking to Wayne about how like the biggest con
Wayne ever did was how do you become sheriff?
It's just like I got the votes.
But then Suzanne's like, and you buy everybody in town a beer. Yeah.
That's how you become sheriff corruption.
So, you know, authenticity. At least they got that one right.
And so the final scene is they jump on the hop train with the money,
with the bag of money.
And she, you know, she has the gun still that no longer has the magazine.
She's going to take the money and he's, you know, advances upon her.
She pulls the trigger. Nothing happens.
He like takes the money, limps over to the boxcar, open door
and just starts throwing all the money out and then trucks her off the train.
Well, yeah, I thought it was strange that the money in the bag
was just loose bills.
Well, every other time money has been presented here,
it's been like banded from a bank.
There was even one banded piece of money that came out of the bag
and stayed on the train that Nick Cage found.
All the money was loose, except for the one that landed in the train.
Everything else blew away. Yeah.
And then absurd.
After he throws her off the train, he slumps down off to his next adventure
and out of his coat, he pulls one stack of cash.
It wasn't out of his coat. It was trapped in the door.
It was trapped in the doorway. That's right. Yeah.
Yeah. And then he just says, Adios, Red Rocks.
Adios, Weddwock.
Weddwock. Adios, Weddwock.
Do you have a now he's waddo?
Do you have a quote, Nick?
Hold on. Did anybody else legitimately think that they saw Nick Cage's penis?
I had to back it up like five times and I was like,
are we just seeing his fucking meaty dork right there?
And I'm pretty sure it was like the other side of his side.
This was in the scene at the comfort in when he and Suzanne are getting it on.
Yeah. And she like, you know, slides down the stomach doing the
I'm going to give you the time of your life thing.
She's kind of give it a head.
And it just really, really
suggestively looks like his wiener. OK.
Well, we've seen while we're on the subject of his wiener,
you have some on the subject of Nick Cage's body
because we've seen his body a lot.
That's Sternenbush.
He is a hairy man in this film. Oh, yeah.
Whereas I think the most other recent time we've seen his
chastular region was Ghost Rider.
We is smooth like a baby.
Yeah. Most times it seems like he's a well,
most times when he's in a role where he's in fairly decent shape,
it looks like he does a lot of manscaping.
There's a lot of times where it's like, oh, you're just like hairy.
Or it could be a chest marking.
Could be a chest marking.
I just want to say chest marking quotes.
Mine was Fuck Mexico.
That is a pretty good one.
Now, we kind of covered both of mine, but I think I really liked the one
where they start up the Jeep, looks at the gas tank on empty
and just story my fucking life.
So I'm glad we just casually discussed all of our quotes
and really kind of shit the bed here and the big reveal for that.
Yeah, I'm just going to really chop them up.
That's good. My quote is when
and you don't. Mexico.
So our second film today was Army of One.
I mean, Dying of the Light.
It pretty much is just Army of One.
Nicolas Cage plays an insane person trying to track down a terrorist.
Just this time written and directed by Paul Schrader.
So just listen to our Army of One episode and then our doggy dog episode.
You'll pretty much have all our thoughts on this one.
Thanks for listening.
Yeah, good episode, guys.
No, this one is terrible.
Not to give up the ghost too early on which is going to win,
but we were not looking forward to this and it did not disappoint
with being disappointed.
Before we get into this, I do.
This might be an unfair pairing
because the whole reason dog eat dog happened
was because Paul Schrader wanted a redo with Nick Cage
because this movie Dying of the Light was taken out of his hands
in the editing process.
So he and Nicolas Cage feel like the movie that we were given
by the studio does not actually fairly represent their work.
I can't remember because I purged everything about dog eat dog out of my brain.
Did he get final cut on that on dog eat dog?
Yeah. Yes.
Then they're both they're both terrible.
Yeah. Did you guys do any diving into trying to find his recut?
There is not and will never be a recut.
There is a recut.
He took the theatrical version and reedited it to be closer to his initial idea.
But no new film.
Just he took what was released and like, yeah, it's called dark.
Yeah, the audio is kind of fucked up.
And yeah, it's I found it and I started watching some of it,
but I didn't watch this actual movie.
So I was like, this doesn't mean shit to me.
I don't care enough to to see what that would look like.
I don't consider that truly his cut of the movie.
Well, it's no, I'm not asking for a Zack Snyder situation
because that was bullshit, too.
I don't think anyone is really deeply asking for a Paul Schrader cut.
Give us the Schrader cut.
I want to give us a schrader to give me four hours every time Nick Cage is on screen.
It has to start with like slow motion and Amazon music.
And so this film stars Nicolas Cage as CIA agent Evan Lake,
Anton Yelchin, which sad as Milt Schultz
and Alexander Kareem as Mohammed Baner.
So Nick Cage plays an older CIA agent
CIA agent who has been on desk duty
for about 22 years after being tortured by Baner
in a pretty gruesome little torture sequence.
Nick Cage has got a fucked up ear the whole time because he gets tremors to it.
And all I could think was, you know, you think he fucked up his own ear
to be more accurate to the character like he did with the birdie?
No, because the prosthetic looked awful.
Yeah, it looked so bad.
I mean, you could tell it was just something built off of his ear.
Yeah. So now he had one really like kind of wing shaped ear.
Bizarre.
Later on, we used to go into go undercover.
They spirit glue some hair onto his face and give him like a fake ear covering,
which is just him without the bad prosthetic on it.
But when he does take that off for the big reveal at the end,
it's just the big bad prosthetic with an even worse prosthetic glued over.
You don't see him take like the disguise off.
It's just like he reaches up to take it off, cut to Baner
and then cut back to Nicholas Cage.
And he's just got it pulling away from his face.
It was like, hey, you've got something in your ear.
Oh, how did this quarter get here?
How did my disguise?
Oh, how did the CIA credentials show up?
So he has been obsessed with Baner for 22 years since he'd been tortured.
I guess rightfully so.
Someone like took a cricket bat to my head and cut my ear off.
I'd be mad. And he wants back in the field.
They're trying to push him out.
They're trying to get him to retire because he has dementia.
Like he like he goes to a doctor far away and like tries to hide it from,
you know, CIA.
He finds out that he has FTD frontal temporal dementia.
And the next time he goes in, he goes to the Pentagon.
The director calls him into the office and like, you don't think we keep track
of like medical records for our agents?
What's the conceit of this entire thing?
Is it to make him an unreliable narrator?
Like, oh, well, fuck.
What's the point?
There is none.
It's just he wants revenge and he is losing his mind and he wants to like,
finish this last case before he's completely gone.
But this is the biggest waste of the film for a Nick Cage film.
You mean like, why give him this disease?
It's just to complicate things.
I'll try to give this like a quick two minute linear.
Yeah, because I didn't watch.
Yes. So the people at home almost certainly didn't.
And I don't know why I own this movie on Blu Ray and it's beautiful.
So Evan, I almost call him Evan Stone.
It's Evan Lake, the very different actors.
It would have gotten the exact same performance.
Both storied careers.
Evan is tortured by this terrorist.
Some American agents bust through a wall, Kool-Aid man style.
They save him in the rescue.
They determine that Benir is dead because there's this body.
It doesn't have a head, though, so they can't like definitively say,
but they're all like, Benir's dead.
And like, here's the body.
And Evan, but I keep wanting to call him Evan Stone.
Evan, he's a porn star, people, and an awesome one.
Evan is convinced that he never died.
He gets put on desk duty.
He does like speeches for recruits and things like that.
Basically, he gets way demoted because of this.
And he's always trying to like find leads or whatever
into whatever could have happened to Benir.
But can't. He's just like he's hit a stone wall until one day,
this Kenyan courier gets busted in Bucharest,
picking up some shit from a doctor.
He had a USB drive.
And when he's caught, there's a chase.
He ends up throwing his USB drive into the river and jumping in.
The cops go and they like drag it.
They find it.
And they find all these like they say they find.
Porn, Islamic scriptures, angry birds and medical records on this USB drive.
And so they're like, well, it's kind of damaged.
We can't really read it.
So they send it off to Langley.
And that's how it gets back to Evan that there's these medical records.
And he's like, oh, like Benir's dad had this disease and like these drugs are used for
treating that disease.
So finally, you know, like something's going to happen.
So finally, you know, like something's come out, like we can chase this down.
Experimental drugs for a type of rare type of anemia.
Yeah. Yeah.
So you see that Benir's got this like blood disease.
He's got bad bloods, just like Nicolas Cage has a bad brain in this one.
I think that even comes up in their fight.
Is there a dialysis fight?
No.
Fuck.
Kind of.
Well, no dialysis.
But he's hooked up to a dialysis machine.
Benir is.
OK.
Either way.
So it's the exact same movie.
When Evan brings this up, like all this information up to the CIA director,
the director basically starts to like say, no, that's not true.
We put a pin in it.
This is done.
You're going to have to like just give it up.
Then we get scenes with Nicolas Cage finding out he's got this frontotemporal
dementia, which is going to kill him a lot faster than Alzheimer's.
And so he really just kind of wants to take out Benir at this point.
He's like, I've got a lot of time.
And then the CIA has found out that he has this brain disease.
So they're like, hey, man, you can't do your job anymore.
You got brain disease.
You got the brains and you got the brain.
You got the brain.
Well, you don't have the brains. Hence why you have to go.
Yeah. So he's like, there was a fit.
They escort him out.
His protege, Milt, the one who brought him the information in the first place,
played by Anton Yelchin, comes to his house with his stuff later.
And Nicolas Cage offers him some sake,
because apparently that's what his character drinks,
because he goes through two bottles of it in this scene.
They go over the case and Nick Cage kind of just lays out that,
you know, he's going to he's going to do it.
He's just going to go find Benir and like take care of this himself.
Anton Yelchin and Nick Cage go on a wild adventure to Bucharest,
find this doctor, confront him and kind of pressure him into like turning.
So like he'll set up another meeting with Benir's people.
Benir's right hand man went to Bucharest because the Kenyan never came back.
Yeah. And obviously he needs the medicine.
So he's sending more people.
Also was to bring the doctor back to him.
Yeah. So now they're going to do a swap once they've, you know, killed Benir's guy
so that there's no nobody who can say, hey, that's not the doctor.
They dress Nick Cage up as the doctor.
He goes to Mombasa, the asshole of Africa.
Not my words.
I just have to make that clear because I say a lot of terrible things,
but I'm not going to put down Mombasa.
I have a lot of respect for Mombasa.
So he goes out there.
They have a scene where Nick Cage, you know, as a doctor shows up
and he is talking to Benir and goes to the bathroom.
He's like, oh, the toilet won't flush.
So Benir's bodyguard goes in there and Nick Cage,
karate chops him and like knocks him out and locks him in the bathroom.
Then he goes back out and he's talking to Benir and he's like, oh man,
your situation's a lot worse than I had expected.
Blah, blah, blah. Not only is it deteriorating, I'm not a doctor.
And he like takes off the mustache and takes off the little goatee
and the fake ear.
Yeah. And that's when he's like doing the fake ear thing,
the real ear to fake ear to prosthetic prosthetic ear.
Yeah, it's earception. And
I was in Evan Stone movie.
OK, there's my one joke for the episode.
I'm going to go back to bed.
And then they kind of like get all up about each other.
But he's been Nick Cage has been drugged.
And so they just kind of argue for a little while.
And there's a lot of PTSD moments.
He hasn't been drugged.
This is like really the one time we see the unreliable sensory perceptions
because he starts flashing back to the torture while Benir is kind of lecturing
to him. And so Nick Cage is in and out of the moment.
And they kind of both realize that they're both dying.
And just Nick Cage just kind of walks out of there.
They even like say goodbye to each other.
It all kind of like stopped when it was like the call to prayer goes off.
And when he was like, oh, would you help me to like set up my prayer rug?
And Cage is like, no, I won't do that.
And then he just like walks out.
Yeah, that was a good Gary voice.
Yeah, it's like the same movie is the same movie.
One man goes to another country to bring a terrorist back for justice.
How much is left in this?
Oh, like 10 minutes.
Yeah. Of me describing.
Yes. This next scene, though, is probably my favorite scene.
Oh, yeah. The credits.
The pool party. Nick Cage goes back to the hotel, meets up with the
Milt and just tells him like, yeah, I just left him there.
Oh, I thought he told him like he killed him.
Like when they when Milt's picking him up in the car.
Oh, that's not like how was it? Oh, yeah.
Was it everything you wanted?
And he's like, oh, man, you should have heard him scream.
That's right. And it's no.
But then he's just talking about like all the normal stuff he's going to do
when he gets back home and they're just at this nice hotel pool.
And then everybody gets shot.
Yeah. I mean, not everybody, but like Milt gets shot and he's down.
And then there's just like bullets flying.
A lot of other people and so much bad CG bullet holes in people
and like that aren't rendered correctly.
And it just looks horrible.
Yeah. And it wasn't jujitsu bad, but that's what I was trying to think.
I'm like, where have we seen this before?
Yeah, it wasn't quite that bad.
And then he does. Then he goes back.
Yeah, there's a chase.
He like fights a couple like Kenyan bodyguards or well, like terrorist bodyguards
and steals a van from one of them and then goes back to.
And that's when they have their tussle.
And then there's old man fight, which has all the energy of two dying old men
rolling on the ground until Nicholas Cage stabs Binyar
in the fucking eye with his finger, like holding him down and just slowly.
Like, well, Binyar is resisting, pushes his finger through his eye
and then you're just dies immediately from that.
I want to die immediately.
And then while driving back, Evans just like had enough of it.
So he like swerves and just like pitches the van.
The van in front of a semi and kills himself.
Fuck that.
Harrison Ford was originally approached to do this,
but he didn't want to because of what he cited.
I'm sure there was more than just this, but his reason for not doing it
was the bleak ending of the movie.
Did you see who was supposed to be the the young trainee with Harrison Ford?
No. Channing Tatum.
Oh, that would have been a much better film.
And it shouldn't have been directed by Schrader.
I've tried to name my tools at work after like Channing Tatum relating things
like my channel locks.
I just call my Channing Tatums and my my wire strippers.
I call my magic Mike. There we go.
That's good. But do you have a Jupiter ascending?
I do right now.
This movie, as a Nick Cage film, is so wasted
because of the whole story element of him having frontal temporal dementia.
Because let me give you this is early in the film.
And when these symptoms are listed, I get I get so excited.
The doctor's like, you'll be subject to overreaction.
Perfect for Nick Cage mood swings.
Hell, yeah. Unreliable sensory perception.
That could be fun.
And he kind of just gets uppity and yells at people and tells them to fuck off a lot.
Yeah, he's just kind of fussy.
He's yeah, he's just like a fussy old man.
He like twice he mixes up his words.
Yeah, like he diamond diamond ruby diamond Tuesdays.
And that's why I know it was like Ruby Tuesdays.
He likes it.
Tells the director, the CIA director to fuck off when security comes to like
you have to leave the premises.
He starts like hocking his medals and trophies at them.
And like he gets hauled out of hauled out of there.
I just jumped around to random points on the timeline
and watched like 30 second clips.
One of them that stood out to me is he's talking to Anton Yelchin.
He sticks his hand out and then he puts a book on it.
Oh, that was like, what's that about?
Oh, so he's got like a shaky hand.
He's getting tremors.
Yeah. So he like sticks his hand out.
He's like, put that dictionary on my hand.
And then like not even half a beat later, he's just like,
it's that orange book on the I have a quote here because this was my quote.
It's like, put that dictionary on my hand.
It's a book. It's yellow and it's a dictionary.
Yeah. And obviously, it melts like I know what a dictionary is, asshole.
Just the dialogue in this movie is so atrocious.
But like, OK, Nick Cage, actor famously known for going over
the top insane performances and has given a character
who is supposed to be subject to overreaction and just losing his shit.
And all he does is just kind of silently see
than when he's told to put out a cigarette in a restaurant.
He just gets angry.
Yeah. You could have done so much more with that.
Yeah, it was a real letdown.
But it's kind of like if somebody tells you to do something and you're just like, no,
yeah, I don't want to. That's really it.
I don't want to overreact.
I'm going to sit here and do nothing because I do that all the time.
I know. That's how every one of these podcasts starts before we start rolling.
Very easy to manipulate.
You just have to tell me not to do something and I will do it.
Anton Yelchin, I have a hard time looking at his face
because he looks kind of like a baby and an old man at the exact same time.
You mean like babies do? Yeah.
Nick, I'm glad you gave the the breakdown of this film
because I was just looking at my notes for like the timeline of this film.
And I'm like, all right, frontal temporal dementia, but you're also sick.
Hereditary anemia.
A bunch of shit happens. Milt kills a guy. Oh, man.
Yeah, you got it.
How fucking bad is everybody at surveillance in this movie?
Like the Bucharest police are like across the parking lot
when the Kenyan courier comes out
and they're like talking about him and they're in a car and he goes to his car.
And like before he even gets into his car, the cops turn on their car
and like their headlights come up and then the Kenyan sees them.
And it's like, oh, shit, he's made us.
You guys suck at surveillance.
So then they like try to follow him and it turns into a chase.
Then at the end, it's like Evan and Milt are in Bucharest
and they're trying to find who the new Kenyan guy is going to be
when he shows up at the hospital.
So they're like staking out out front and then they see him.
And then like they watch him again later.
But they're like all the way across this like festival grounds that's getting set up.
And they're sitting at a table and both of them are just turned
180 degrees or whatever.
It's a look at this guy and they're staring him down.
So like he comes out of the building and looks out and is like two white dudes
just fucking mean mugging you.
So he ran. Yeah.
Does the CIA agent count as a cop?
I was going to ask that. Yeah.
They're all still government.
I put this in the bad cop category.
Anton Yelchin counts as a good kid, though.
Yeah. Good kid. Bad cop. Good kid.
Bad cop. Good kid. Bad cop.
Yeah, I think a kid bad cop. Bad cop.
I want to go back to that that socky thing.
Like they've got him drinking socky and then later he's in the hotel room.
He's just sitting full lotus on the bed.
It's like, what the fuck is with this character?
Like why they never talk about it?
There's no justification for things like I'm fine with
characters existing beyond the movie.
And I'm OK with like I don't need to have some like everything explained out,
like why they are the way they are.
But these are just two isolated incidents
on either side of the movie that points him to like being a big Japan file
or whatever, a weeaboo weeaboo weeaboo.
Yeah, weeaboo. Is that offensive?
Not to me, because I'm not a nerd.
I fucking don't care.
I'm not even going to look this one up.
Yeah, just publish it, Peter.
We're doing a no edit episode.
Yeah, I just don't understand.
Like those are two things like every other time he drinks a lot in this movie.
And it's a whiskey, except for when he's at his house
and he drinks two bottles of sake, well, him and milked.
That second bottle, he was just mainlining now. Oh, yeah.
Then at the end of the movie, he's just sitting in like the full lotus position.
Why is why are you doing this?
Paul Schrader, why do you do this to us?
Because he doesn't think.
Yeah, I feel like at this point, I've seen enough Paul Schrader stuff to just
know that I don't like him. Yeah.
I'm kind of curious why Cage wanted to work with him
and then wanted to work with him again.
I mean, I get what happened with the, you know, director's cut.
Yeah, Cage does like to do things to challenge himself, as we've learned.
Did you feel like he was challenged in this?
I mean, he did it for a million dollars.
That's a lot less money than normal.
So that is a challenge.
This movie had a five million dollar budget.
And one million.
That was Nick Cage's take home.
And it didn't make fuck all for money.
No, it did not. It made under 700000 worldwide.
So what's your what's your quote from this film, Nick?
Geez, there's so many things that like I enjoyed for different reasons.
Like there's some lines that are just bad.
There's bad deliveries there.
My favorite bad delivery is Nicholas Cage is talking about
like how they're going to get veneer because he's got this
disease and stuff, and he's just like, but you just got it.
It's come out.
It's in his blood.
And it's like, what the fuck?
And he gives it like this stupid like head slide with like sneer.
It's in his blood.
It's like, Jesus.
His first big line in this film is when he comes out on stage.
It's so we see him getting tortured.
We see him get hit with a cricket bat.
Twenty two. Then it immediately cuts to 22 years later.
Evan looks exactly the same except he has gray hair.
Now and it fucked up here.
And he walks out on stage to talk to like new CIA cadets.
And I'm not going to do the whole line, but like just the delivery
and the and the writing here just told me this was going to be awful,
which is what the hell are you doing here?
Haven't you heard the CIA fell from the Berlin wall
and all the president's men can't put it back together again?
Yeah, it's awful. It's the dumbest little speech.
It's broke. It's not reliable, not trustworthy.
And it just keeps going.
And for some reason, like it's in like a freezing cold room
because you can see the steam on his breath.
But all the cadets are in T-shirts.
I do like one of his better freakouts, though, to the CIA director.
You've got your head so far up Obama's ass that all you can see is his shit anymore.
OK. Well, so this isn't like a favorite quote, but I liked it.
And I want to it bounces off of Sean mentioned
when he was told to put out a cigarette earlier.
He pulls out his like plane ticket or whatever.
Let me check something. Yep. I am in Romania.
Are you out of your fucking mind?
This whole country is a smoking section.
I couldn't remember the exact quote. That's why.
Yeah. This next quote starts with the name Baniere,
but my phone auto corrected it to beanie.
So I'm just going to read it as my phone has it.
Beanie boy. Yeah.
It's just like beanie. You think you can hide?
Nobody can hide from the Reaper.
Are you the Reaper? Yes.
Of our time, this and Dog Eat Dog, like the two
Schrader films we've watched for this have been God awful.
This might be my least favorite and least rewatchable film to date.
Dog Eat Dog is at least so weird and has so many just what the fuck moments
that I was entertained and willing to show that I was entertained
enough to watch it twice.
I couldn't watch this one the second time.
This one is a bit of a slog.
I mean, I still watched it twice, but I'm just made of tougher, stronger stuff.
Yeah, that's fine. I don't. I got that good metal.
Oh, yeah, that's it. You can have that.
You can have that metal.
I'm going to I'm going to keep those 90 minutes of my life.
Oh, man. Nick, which movie would you like to move forward with?
That's a really tough one, because I've already set the president
of liking Army of One.
But this isn't nearly as unhinged as that.
No, and that's unfortunate.
Yeah, this one actually should have been more extreme
than the true story.
But it wasn't.
No, I mean, Red Rock West.
Yeah, Red Rock West. But just to go to your point real quick,
you know, sign up for a Patreon.
And if you give us enough money that we can take enough time off,
we'll we'll recut this film with.
Oh, an Army of One mashup. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. So we can watch it dark and then mash it up with Army of One.
Yeah, and we'll just replace all of Evan,
Evan Lake's characters with Gary with Gary.
I fucking love it.
So sign up for a Patreon like and like and subscribe.
Next episode, we've got Raising Arizona.
Yes. Trapped in Paradise with Dana Carvey and John Lovitz.
Oh, just to say it again,
Red Rock West one, not yes, not this terrible Paul Schrader movie.
No. All right. Thanks for listening.
I'll do more coke next time somewhere awake.
Cool. Yeah.
Great review. Subscribe.
Someone give Nick a comment, please. God somebody.
I just want to stop talking about the comments.
Mostly so we can figure out where they are.
All right. All right. From all of us here in my apartment.
Good night. God bless.
By Nicholas Cage. Bye.
Or didn't hear that.
God damn it.
More. I just hit myself in the face with my own microphone.
I have done that so many times.
I fucking hate both of you.
Why did you let me talk you into this?
Well, it sounds like a you problem. I'm aware.
Look, I'm just here because you have a bathroom and limited toilet paper.
Thanks, Hayden. You're supposed to buy toilet paper today.