Dons & SPL: Kill Zone

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome to Bad Dad's Film Review, the podcast that is to cultural enrichment as a used condom is to a balloon animal. We're paying our respects to the top five dons, a topic with a broader range than it has any right to, from Corleone to Cheadle, Wimbledon to Aberdeen, and we'll be treating them all with the same level of forensic analysis and intellectual rigor you've come to expect from us by now. Didn't go for any suffixes. Yeah, uh, our main feature is SPL Killzone, not the one that Hart's players spent Saturday afternoon in being punched by Celtic fans while the authorities issued a strongly worded statement, but Wilson Yip's 2005 Hong Kong action film in which Don Ien and Samo Hung resolve a dispute about institutional corruption with their elbows. Caution, Bad Dad's film review may contain strong language, trace elements of research and spoilers, not suitable for those with an allergy to wrongness, an intolerance of strong opinions poorly supported, or a sensitivity to the word fuck. Sadly absent this week is handsome Chris, currently in Turkey having his teeth seen too, which on a face like that feels less like an improvement and more like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. But for everyone else, let's meet this week's depleted but no less disappointing collection of middle-aged men who've decided that having a microphone is essentially the same thing as having something to say, starting with Dan. He's so old that when you mention the Hong Kong handover, he asks which one. And the last recorded sighting of one of his fucks was in the 80s, and even that is disputed.

SPEAKER_02 1:43

Yeah, well, you know, I've been right back there with Genghis as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Yeah, yeah, right back to the beginning. Filling Chris's slot in second place, a man who knows that sometimes you have to get on your knees and kiss the Don's ring to get what you want in life, it's Saidy. Hello. And then there's me Riggs, hello. Hola.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

Would you like a walking football update, but it doesn't involve us? Yes. So we were. Our league campaign is over, but we were We're done.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Well it was contingent on the result we were done.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

We were at the behest of result dependent.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

But we we had already known that we've given everything on the field this season that we could. We've lifted a trophy, we've defended our title there, and we weren't really expectant of the yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Yeah, level on points with Portuguese, but they had one more game to go, and if they got even one point, they would have they would have uh won the title. Well, surely that's what happened. No, I went to watch and they did not get that, they lost. So we are now in a playoff with them. Never been in a playoff.

SPEAKER_02 2:48

Wow. It all comes down to this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

But we don't know when that game is going to be, but well, obviously I bet. It's Champions League final next weekend, so you need to not make it coincide with that really, because some of the players are going to be able to do that. I have a feeling it will be on the 31st of May.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

Right, wow. At the home of football Springfield. No, if it was on that date, it would be at Hope Valley. Ooh. But that's p pure speculation. So don't book any flights yet, anyone. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

Yeah. I'm away. I'm in a I beat her. Okay, well.

SPEAKER_02 3:18

I don't know if they're gonna play it out there. No, or broadcast it. I don't know. Broadcast it on Sky TV.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

If it's not then then it's 'cause I don't think it can be this weekend, so it'll be either that weekend or another. Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime may get the rights, we don't know at this stage. I don't want to upset anyone at the Football Association, but organising fixtures seems to be difficult. Very difficult for them. Challenging. They only know like the availability of referees. They have no authority for like booking pitches. Right. So someone else does pitches. So there's just a huge flow of the game.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

I can do this, but you can do that, and blah blah blah.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

So they they tried to put our final on for half time when like everyone's gonna be away. Yeah, like we there was no game then, so people got holidays. Yeah. Oh right, okay, so yeah, anyways, that's a huge promise. But great news that we're still in with a shout.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

We're still in with a shout. Yeah, more than a one-off game, anything can happen.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

That's right, and normally anything does.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

So did you manage to find time to watch any extracurricular content?

SPEAKER_00 4:24

I am well, I am all caught up with the boys. So season five, episode seven. It feels amazing to me that there's gonna be the last episode. Like, there's so much that they haven't bothered resolving in any way. Is there gonna be like a soldier boy spin-off or something?

SPEAKER_01 4:38

I don't know. But um there's essentially loads of I don't know if it's the final one from broadcast because there's loads of stuff on the internet today about how shit the series has been.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

It's really bizarre that no, the final one is gonna be on Wednesday. Right, okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Um I'm still gonna watch it because I've enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Yeah. It's very juvenile, but it's the same sort of thing that it's Trump. Yeah, and yeah, it's very juvenile, and that's Trump, and blah blah blah. But yeah, I've still quite enjoyed it over the it does seem amazing that it's coming to an end without having really come to any sort of conclusion about anything.

SPEAKER_02 5:10

They just had a a huge break between season four and season five. It must have been like over a year that I'd not seen it and then hadn't really invested the time to go back to.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

But every episode's the same. Basically I do enjoy it, but every episode is we gotta go and get Homelander. Yeah. And then they don't go and get Homelander. I mean, that's that's every episode, but I've watched five episod seasons of it, so we keep watching it.

SPEAKER_02 5:38

Yeah. Maybe they're finally gonna get Homelander.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

Maybe. Anything else? No, that's it for me.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

What about yourself? Uh I d oh no, I did. I watched uh well, I haven't finished it yet, but I've been watching Project Hail Mary. Okay. You watched it last week. Yeah. Really, really enjoying it. Yeah. It's nice.

SPEAKER_02 5:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

It's just nice to watch something nice where people are collaborating. Yeah, you know. I don't know what's gonna happen and it might they might all get to shit, but so I'm halfway through and uh been just enjoying it. Yeah. It's a good time. Yeah, no, it is a filling.

SPEAKER_02 6:09

It's really fancy by God's thing as well. Yeah, we all do. Yeah. No, I haven't really seen race. Yeah. I haven't really seen any anything. I've had family time this week. So yeah. But uh hopefully a normal service will resume from here on out. I've been obviously just It was your wedding anniversary, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah, we had uh we walked, we went for a walk down at Seymour Tower when the tide went out. Oh yeah. Those that don't know, Jersey becomes about double the size when the tide goes out because of all the the tide, and it just goes really, really. We have a big tide in. We have a big tide. So we walked down to Seymour Tower, there's family and friends, and um we walked back again, had a a bite or eat and a couple of pints at the Seymour Inn. Sounds nice. And and returned home. Lovely. Yeah, that was very nice. So that did eat into a lot of the movies. What was it, twenty years? Twenty years, yeah. And what is how what is that? That's China. China. Yeah. So when are you going? So no, I bought a a a mug made in China. Okay. Yeah. And I thought that was. Pretty much anything you can buy in the channel. Yeah, anything was made in China. A China teacup and a coffee mug and bits and pieces. I bought a little China trinket case for uh. Could have got a power record. Yeah. Yeah. Could have, yeah. Could have gone for a Chinese. Yeah. Yeah, there was lots of different options. Giving yourself COVID. Platinum is the uh is the modern six of China, I'd say. Yeah, yeah. So that's why I did. I mean loads in the charity shops you can get at China. Broken bits of China. Nice smash China, ne old China.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Right then, should we talk dons? Yes. Let's do it. Why dons? Because Don Ien was in the film. Okay. All right. And he put me on the spot because I didn't and I was thinking, yes, I got I haven't done a top five. And I thought, Don't. And I was like, I think we've done it before, but maybe we dons. I was like, what? Okay.

SPEAKER_02 8:17

So here we are. What was your where did your mind go first when somebody says Don? Donald Trump. You go Don Trump.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

I haven't even got him on my list actually, because I didn't go for any Donald Trump. He's got Don's.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

I mean, we can have you can have him because obviously he's been in the The Apprentice. Yeah. He's been in What was the movie, the Sebastian Stant? Yes. They thought was going to be like, oh we'll we'll really fucking skewer him with this. No. Yeah. Home fucking bulletpropies in Home Loan 2. They're trying to AI him out, aren't they? Oh really? Well, Macaulay Colcomb is petitioning them to get him out of the film.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

There was also I watched him today getting interviewed by Ali G. Alright. And Ali G was talking to him about ice cream and things, and um It doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

No, just he just you know I don't even want to get into it, it's a fucking bell end, but yeah, so Donald, so we suppose that we'll start a low bar of Donald Trump and then we'll move on up from there.

SPEAKER_02 9:11

Yeah. Okay, well I I thought of, you know, Don Corleone. Yeah. Do you have a good impression of him? That's the I won't know because we've we've heard it before. But if he makes an appearance later, that won't be I was agree. But obviously the mafia patriarch of the Godfather films, he's he's the Don. I mean, he's the Don that all other Don't follow, and probably I mean I watched the the the film with Miles Teller in. It was that ten-part series, The Offer, and it was about Albert Ruddy, who produced the Godfather film and all the trouble and difficulties he had to get it over the line because of the mafia not actually wanting that level of attention on them. They liked the way that things were going, and this kind of highlighted them all over again. Who's their secrets? And a few real life dons obviously had started to pay interest in how they were going to be portrayed in in these movies and everything, but Don Corleone got to be mentioned, didn't he? It was the first Don I thought.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

He Brando won the Oscar, didn't he, first? This is the one he sent up. Was it Shacine Littlefeather to accept to reject it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

Yeah, the Oscars. Well, Ruddy won the The Nate the Native American guy.

SPEAKER_02 10:30

Yeah, Ruddy won the Oscar for producer as well. Ruddie now. Have you seen that yet? The the offer?

SPEAKER_01 10:36

No, Paramount. I keep because he gave it a strong recommend. I gave it a strong recommendation. No, and uh, still still there. Yeah. Sinatra hated that film as well, didn't he? Because he knew that they were Sinatra was they hated it because he Johnny Fontaine was basically Sinatra was like mob-owned, basically. So he was he was anti-it. Yeah. Just a half decent film as well.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Peace. As a strong madman fan, the first Don I thought of was Don Draper, John Hamm's character. And it's a great paradox, I suppose, of the programme that he's a character who doesn't actually exist because Don Draper, he was the the real name of the character is actually Dick Whitman, and he was a Korean war deserter who stole the identity of another soldier. Like Sam Oscara. A bit a bit like that, yeah. And then he spends, you know, the next 20 years of his life sort of pretending to be something a bit bigger, which was a massive irony when the whole thing's about advertising in general. Anyway, it's a sort of portrait of masculine anxiety. You want to be here. There's like this great moment where he's just all suave in the lift. Some guy's like giving him shit and work, and he's saying, Oh, you know, I was thinking about you, pissing me off, and he says, or something like, I don't even think about you, whatever it is, and like the door shuts, he's being all suave, and he comes home and he has to fix the sink or whatever, and straight away the shirt comes off and he's into his like vest and he looks fucking amazing and he's fixing the sink. You just want to be him, basically, because he's so cool. But then also he's sort of like alcoholic, isn't he? Alcoholic, yeah, really detached womanizer has a sort of real breakdown.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

So I I started watching it, and for some reason the missus didn't like it at the time. I think she wasn't anti it, but I think it was too work-oriented and whatever, so it got shelved for a while.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Oh, it's really funny, man.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

People talk about the carousel scene. Kodak. The pitch as being like one of the best moments ever. So I have watched that. But watching it in isolation.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

Yeah, you mustn't need to watch it in context because it was like this, yeah. No, watching it in isolation, but some really good moments, like there's a shocking moment where somebody gets their foot lawnmowered in the office and some stuff like that. And just a cast of beautiful people and complicated, interesting characters, and yeah, no, it's really good. I should give it a go, yeah, because it's thematically interesting to me. It is the it is all that stuff's there, and the production design's off the charts as well. The one that writers in the Sopranos as well, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, and Roger Matthew Wiener. Matthew Wiener is the guy who brings it to the screen. Yeah, it's just I really recommend it. I need to watch it again, actually.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

Okay, strong recommend. Dong Key Kong. Yes. First came to light as a villain in the arcade game. It was also the first appearance of Mario. Yeah. But Mario was just jump man. Jump man, that's right, yeah. And he was slinging barrels and I think flight.

SPEAKER_02 13:29

We watched, didn't we? Did we watch that? I certainly watched. We did, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

And that was Doctor Kong Jr. Right. Yeah. So he's been around for a while, and they thought they were going to get sued by like King Kong, because obviously, like it's but they didn't, or there was although maybe there was a lawsuit in Nintendo actually won it. There have been multiple, but the current DK that you see knocking about in like Marikart and whatever is considered to be the grandson of the original Donkey Kong. Okay. And he is one of these characters. It's like a family tree somewhere in Nintendo of all these Donkey Kong related. Slightly different jewelry. There's another, I've got another Don, you'll get it from this cartoon character on my list, who so Donkey Kong wears a shirt or certainly a collar and a tie, but no trousers. Yeah. And Donald Duck. Donald Duck, yeah, is that I've got.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

He wears he wears a shirt and but he doesn't wear any trousers, does he? Yes, same. So they've both got their they've both got their cock and balls out.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Yeah. Effectively. You know, which is fine. Yeah. In in this world. So Donkey Kong. We can get on. Do we do you want to launch it straight into Donald Duck?

SPEAKER_02 14:38

Yeah. Yeah, well I had him down as for duck tails. Go on. Well, that was it. Go on. You carry on.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

He's a global icon, but he's but he's like completely unintelligible. Yeah, yeah. He is. Yeah. It seems to be quite violent and a bit of an asshole. Yeah. He loses temper.

SPEAKER_02 14:57

With Huey, Louie, and Dewey. Dewey? Yeah. The the the three little dogs.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

DuckTales with Scrooge McDuck. Yeah. Do you know there's an an even more incredible connection here because guess who voiced I think it's wait there, I need to get this specifically right. He voiced Was it Paul Daniels? He voiced Donald Duck in DuckTales. It's another Don. It's Don Cheadle.

SPEAKER_03 15:22

It is Don Cheadle. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

He voiced Donald Duck in DuckTales. So there you go.

SPEAKER_02 15:26

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

Well that that just goes that is that is crazy stuff because Don Cheadle was in the green book, I think, wasn't he? Is that the the right Don?

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Do you know Donald Duck has a middle name?

SPEAKER_02 15:42

Does he? Winston? Fauntelroy. Fontalroy Fontlroy.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

I've always liked Don Cheadle the Lord.

SPEAKER_02 15:50

Don Shirley, I'm getting mixed up. Oh he was the character of the Green Book. Remember the the Marshall Arlie. Yeah, and he went through the kind of s South London and of America with Vigo Mortensen as his kind of driver stroke bodyguard, and he was the like this white mafia guy, but he was certainly you know a a tough guy who wouldn't have had the cultural awareness of that period of time, I guess, where you know they would there was a load of racism back really, and all his friends were racist, and then suddenly he's driving a black guy through the south. Yeah. He just came to understand this guy's an absolute genius and he can help me a lot, and they became weren't we all staggered at that one best picture? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

Yeah. We all enjoyed it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:47

It was fairly run-of-the-mill. Yeah. It was a bit white savory, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah, well, it's a little bit better than running a mill, but it wasn't for Oscar kind of stuff. It was um there's no duck tails. There's no duck toes, exactly that. Yeah. I used to like and Scrooge McDuck swimming around in a swimming pool with coins. I always just think about how much that would hurt.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

It would kill you, I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Yeah. Like landing on a you know, solid metal.

SPEAKER_02 17:18

Yeah. That was nice.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

So his coins are just foot like peer coins. Coin, coin, coin. Yeah, coin. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:23

Maybe they were like chocolate coins. Maybe. Still would hurt though, wouldn't it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Don King? Yeah. He stomped one of his own employees to death in a Cleveland street in 1966 over a $600 debt. Yeah. He served nearly four years, and then after that came out and set about becoming one of the most important figures, really, in sport over the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Which is probably it's either an extraordinary rehabilitation story or you know, a reminder that the qualities to succeed in boxing and to beat people to death are the same thing. He promoted The Rumble in the Jungle, the Thriller in Manila, that he was responsible for the Tyson era, the Holyfield era, which were some of the greatest eras of boxing really that happened in the sort of 90s. And he's also been sued multiple times and stiffed loads of people. Tim Witherspoon, who once signed four contracts at once with Don King, one of which was completely blank. So yeah, I don't think he was always looking after the boxer's best interests either. Pop culture has been trying to process him all the time. Lucius Swift, yeah, who uh, as Homer observes, looks exact is exactly as rich and as famous as Don King, and he looks just like him too, but it's not him. Rocky V had the the villain have his catchphrase in that. South Park has the actual Dom King promoting the fight between Jesus and Satan. And oh this is a terrible story. In 2016, Cleveland proposed naming a stretch of Cedar Avenue after him. The only problem was that Cedar Avenue was the place where he killed that dude right at the beginning of all of this stuff. So having a street named after you where you beat a man to death and served nearly four years in jail.

SPEAKER_02 19:12

Yeah, seems seems uh a bizarre thing to even consider. Yeah. There's big money in the fight game. I was looking at the the top richest people, and I seen that Eddie Hearn and his dad, I think they've become billionaires, haven't they? So I imagine Don, yeah, was able to put a few quid in people's pockets, mainly his own. Yeah. Match room sports, isn't it, isn't it? They're looking at Bender Hearns. Right, okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Now they're dealing with Netflix as well, aren't they? So didn't have more than the Ralph C fight, did you? No. Can you miss it? I was 17 seconds long, wasn't it? And I saw a video the other day that claimed that sh Rusi was rehearsing the fight in her like exactly as it occurred in the on the cameras that you can see her rehearsing the fight. So I don't know. I didn't there you go. Putting that out there. Putting that out there, indeed. Making a wild, unsubstantiating claim based on something I looked at.

SPEAKER_01 20:14

I'm into it. What about a couple of musical Dons? Please. Don Henley? Yeah. Eagles. Don McLean. American Pie. Bye bye. It's American Pie. Donald Fagan. Anyone know where he was from? The name rings about. Steely Dan. Oh, so good guy. Um and there's a song by Sonic Youth called Hey Don. Yeah. So there's some musical ones. Then I Don L. I mean the inspiration for the whole list because he's in our main feature was Donnie Yen. Yeah. Some seriously rad martial arts fighting and general badassery. And he was he w he wore a fat suit for one that I watched a couple years ago. It was really good. Can't remember what it was called. It was something like fat fucking man or drunken fighter and all that, but he literally wears a fat suit. And it was it was just too light on the fighting and a bit too much on the like chatty and blah blah blah. Like, no, no. If I'm watching Johnny Yen, that motherfucker would better be fighting, otherwise, what's the point? Yeah. I mean he's good, he's decent looking as well, but great in John Wick as well. Yeah. Is that parabellum? The one that he's in? Yes. So rad. So yeah, Johnny Yen. And I only fucking recently realised that's him as a thingy in rogue one. Yep. Chira in we're going to be a little bit more than that.

SPEAKER_02 21:34

Don Diego Della Vega. Anyone? Anyone? The mask of Zzzoro. Zorro. Yes. So uh Nobleman and Masked Hero. Banderas played this character, as well as him being featured when I was just a young lad, of course. You had Zorro with black and white and he was on your your screen. When he only had four channels. Yeah. He was Zorro, he had that kind of just the slim eye mask that seemed to be much of a disguise. It wasn't much of a disguise, but nobody could identify him. I mean, it was like Superman's Cape and Clark Kent, you know, with his glasses. Yeah. Just like, how can you not see that it's the same guy? But with with Zorro, he was, as I say, the mask of Zorro. Catherine Zita Jones was in it as well. I remember quite liking that movie. Yeah, yeah, it's been a long time since I've seen it. Um Tony Hopkins is in that, isn't he? Is that Banderas? Yeah, yeah, it was Banderas, and it might have been Hopkins in it as well. Yeah, it might have been Tony.

SPEAKER_01 22:47

He was the previous Zorro who was passing the mantle, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:50

And you just think, there you go. Mickey Mantle. You know, yeah. But it must have been paid a few quid for that, surely. But Masker Zorro, Don Diego.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

I've got a quick pair of authors for you, or bookkey type ones. First was Don DeLillo. He's an American author who's spent 50 years writing about paranoia and consumer culture and the slow decline of American culture. Two of his movies have been, two of his books have been adapted into movies. White Noise, which was one I haven't seen. It's about a guy who studies Hitler and starred Adam Driver, the audiences seem to hate when I looked at it online. And Cosmopolis, which I have read and seen as well. It stars Robert Pattinson. It was a quite good book. It's about a billionaire who's trying to cross Manhattan just to get a haircut. The whole book is set in the back of the car, pretty much, while the his for he loses his fortune basically in real time over the course of the book. And then some weird shit is going on outside him. But that really didn't translate to the David Cronenberg film audiences seem to hate it. I yeah, I didn't really like it much either. Robert Pattinson, he had a sort of weird way of sort of Yoda speaking, having like his yeah, speech plans reversed, which was most probably why it's widely hated. And Don Quixote. Oh yeah. What's the other one? A novel written by Cervantes. It's about a man who's driven mad by reading too many books about knights and dreams of that sort of path to chivalry himself, even though knights no longer exist.

SPEAKER_02 24:19

I'm just trying to think who played him.

SPEAKER_00 24:21

I've seen that film. Yeah, there's a Terry Gilliam did it, yeah. 2018.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Was it not Johnny Depp?

SPEAKER_02 24:28

It was Johnny Depp, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_00 24:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:30

There was another earlier version with somebody Mr. Something Remember. I've got his own. He tried to make it twice, didn't he? Yeah, it was a real labour of love together.

SPEAKER_00 24:40

There's a documentary about called Lost in La Mancha, which is about him failing to make it. So yeah, it's a bit of a strange one. And obviously it you know it has that whole tilting at windmills thing. And the dynamic, of course, between the the main characters Quixote and Sancho Panza has been sort of talked about a lot. And Rogue One, you mentioned the dynamic between Chi Chiriminwe and John Little. I think he played him once in the other one is in Venom, Let There Be Carnage. Eddie Brock stands in front of a statue of Cervantes and quotes directly from Don Quixote and describes their relationship as being like Sancho Panzer and doesn't.

SPEAKER_02 25:18

You didn't get that far into the movie before I'd already fucking binned it. Such a shame that there's so much potential, you just thought, oh, that would be quite good. You know, you Venom, decent character, obviously had uh strong, you know, Tom Hardy a strong actor, and you just thought, well, this could be really good. How they made two of them. Three. Three, three, my friend. Well, how they made two more than like making one, it's like, okay, we learned our mistake. But obviously.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

I've got my norm, I think of it.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

Yeah, just a quick round up of some other ones. Well, I had Don Epstein, who was the lawyer father character in Clueless. Alright. Yeah, big, big uh part of the film. Don Kiefer, who was a slight supporting legal figure in the social network. Okay. And you had Don West Lost in Space. He was like the the cocky pilot.

SPEAKER_00 26:15

Oh right, he was the cocky pilot, was he? I thought he was the uh evil scientist.

SPEAKER_02 26:20

Yeah, but no, he he was and we watched that actually, Lost in Space, the series, which was on Netflix, I think, and it wasn't too bad. Oh, that one.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

Yeah, I watched the first episode, but it wasn't too bad. Like most of the original series, seen the movie version. I was like, I don't need to see any more of this fucking stuff.

SPEAKER_02 26:44

I've got I've got just my nom. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

You got any more dons for us, Sadie? Me and some friends from the old shop, we had used to have this game where you had to try and make someone say Don Johnson.

SPEAKER_03 26:58

Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

Yeah. So and the whole premise of it was you would say, you just had to get someone to say the word who, and then you just scream at them, Don Johnson's name you can say in the middle of the office, Don Johnson. And so and to this day, like so it would be a coin here, you know, and it's other guys' itch. And if someone just refers to like completely innocent, you still just go like, do you mean look? You can never I still can never say who, because you're just gonna get screamed at. Yeah. So bizarre. This guy know where it came from that game. So Don Johnson's definitely got to go in. Miami Vice. Yeah. And Donnie Darko is the film that we all know. Of course, Donnie Darko. Other than that, just my nom. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's hear it. Let's hear it. It's it's one of the turtles. Oh Don't hello. Do you remember which one he was?

SPEAKER_00 27:45

He was purple. He had the staff. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

He did, and he was the geek. I think he had glasses on. Yeah. So he was the favourite of all the nerds, and I really like more so the books, I have to be honest, but that guy who says like the original source material. But when they the certainly when we got it over here, it weren't even allowed to call it the Ninja Turtles. It was the Hero Turtles. So they'd really been like neutered and watered down quite a lot. But I in still enjoyed them in almost every format. I really like the shitty films. I played the I didn't even mind the Michael Bay ones were alright. I played the video game on my NES like back in the day, but still like the books are amazing. I started rereading them because they're all on Amazon Kindle Unlimited or whatever. Huge videos. Yeah, really difficult.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

But there's even like crossovers with Batman and stuff in the comment world.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

I completed them all. There you go. Donatello. Donatello, good Don.

SPEAKER_02 28:38

Okay, well, I was gonna go Don Juan de Marco, which is uh no uh Don Juan, the legendary lover, Mr. But this was a man who it was Johnny Depp and Marlon Brando and Faye Dunaway in this not altogether amazing film, but obviously a big actors, Brando in there working with yeah, not his pomp, but I think people like Ed Norton ended up working with him in one film where he was I think might have been his last film, and you know, Brando's kind of dialing it in a a little bit, but he's still got that that presence. And this was Johnny Depp looking his absolute best, you know, and probably around Edward Scissorhands after 21 jumped to it. You know, super sexy, super popular time, uh 1994. If you could remember that far.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

I think I was born down.

SPEAKER_02 29:38

Yeah, well I I was I was yeah, I was I was barely into my 40s then. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

Uh I'm gonna go for Aberdeen FC. Um the Dons. Also known as the Dons, yeah, represented in popular culture, groundskeeper Willie from The Simpsons, go Aberdeen, and he's also described once as the Aberdeen Strangler. Glasgow City Council once tried to claim Willie as a fame famous Glaswegian in 2009, and Aberdeen FC disputed it. The and also in Net right, did anyone watch Adolescence, the Netflix TV? No. It was the One Take Stephen Graham series um about the manosphere and the repercussions of it. And a an actor, an Aberdeen-born actor playing a police officer, mug managed to smuggle in an Aberdeen FC mug, an Aberdeen figurine, a whiteboard reading stand free, which apparently is their uh club like slogan or whatever, into the background of multiple scenes. Uh depending on it's one take. Yeah. Basically, he's managed to get a whole load of Aberdeen references, FC references.

SPEAKER_02 30:44

Who remained the last club to pretty much break up the old firm, I think, weren't they?

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Hearts were broken. And there is the documentary, of course, Aberdeen 83, which is about their magnificent, really astonishing defeat of Real Madrid in the European Cup final, having beaten Bayern Munich in the round before with a team of people that he found mostly within 30 miles off. Is it Patodri where they played? Yeah. It's really an astonishing, astonishing thing when you think about it. So there you go.

SPEAKER_02 31:15

That was Alec Ferguson, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_00 31:17

It was, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:19

So we need Don in Munich.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

Two more dons. Another couple of dons, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:23

Yeah. Okay, well right. Don't be late. You've done a great job. Don leave me hanging. Keep calming, Don. Carry Don.

SPEAKER_01 31:39

Scottish Premier League. Yeah. Colon kill zone. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

Or Sharpo Lang.

SPEAKER_01 31:45

Yes. Now I have to be honest, this movie confused the fuck out of me. Yeah. Quite a lot. But we do start off with a bit of text about three sort of culturally astrologically significant things that can determine your life. The flirty one.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

Good, evil, or whatever, the position of the stars, wasn't it? Yeah. Z, weigh, and do. And a sort of form of fate calculation or something I read about, but I don't know. And then we're on the beach. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

It's like a nice beach.

SPEAKER_00 32:21

C sort of lapping ashore there, and there's a dude and a girl. It looks like a sort of happy scene, but his book ends the movie, and when you know what the information really, what's going on, it's really awful actually. But do we go straight from the beach to the car? We do, yes. It's 1994 pre-handover Hong Kong. It's quite important because the film is set like explicitly before and after the handover to show the sort of impact of the change of having on the on the police force and the people there. And um So this guy There's a police cop driving.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Inspector Chan is is there, he's our sort of main hero in the passenger seat, and he's talking, he's giving him a sort of pep talk saying, Well, the daughter's saying, Can we go away? Yeah. And he said, Well, not quite yet, but we will. And then he's getting a pep talk and he realised he's basically like a star witness against a mob boss.

SPEAKER_00 33:16

This is all done though. This the beginning of the film is quite hard to get into because there's a lot of like split screen and the non-linear storytelling, like seeing the events afterwards, but we try and do it in order. But yeah, so he's he's coaching him basically. You're gonna go, we're on our way to go and give testimony against a guy called Wong Po, who is Samo Hung. Do you know that guy? He's an actor you would recognise. I think we saw him in one of the films we've reviewed before. Possibly. I mean, I've seen him in loads of stuff, and I he's quite chunky, but he can he can still fucking fight a bit. Oh yeah, he can really move. Yeah. I'm a smitbrian. I'm not very good with names. They're on the way to testify, and then suddenly they are We see it first. We see the aftermath. The first shot of the film is the aftermath.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

Which is like there's been a fuck it looks like the car has has been crushed from above because we go sort of almost like a drone shot of the crash, and then we get the camera sort of goes in and think maybe everyone's dead, but maybe not. Obviously, we're gonna see the girl later on, but the star witness basically a guy comes along in a white suit, really distinctive hair. Yeah, he's got like a peroxide blonde bit on top, but then like dark all around the sides, and he's got a little short sword, long knife thing. Yeah, and it just fucking slips. He slips the whip.

SPEAKER_00 34:33

And he has a look at the inspector Chan, Simon Yam, and he sees this big lump of glass like sticking out the back of his head, so he just sort of leaves in there or whatever. So they're all taken off to Hollywood, Hollywood 2 hospital. And when after he's had the glass removed from the back of his head, he's like straight back to business. Oh, I want to go and catch this guy and sort this out like right now. Um, just by the way, and he's a bit like, oh, we need to go and find somewhere to sit to talk about this. He's like, No, just tell me now. So, well, you've got a brain tumour and you're gonna die, basically. So he's like, Cool, and then he immediately just heads straight back off to go to go find Wong Po. Yeah, and uh He does find him he finds him and they they just try this little mini car battle thing, and then he T-bones him. They're gonna they're gonna battle to the death with golf clubs. They've got he throws him a golf club. He's quite gentlemanly about this. He goes, say you want to find Wong Poe, he's got this the fat guy, he's got this like ponytail and that, and he goes to the opens the boot of his car, gets two golf clubs out, throws one to the other guy, like, right, let's fucking do this, and then the police turn up.

SPEAKER_01 35:39

Like a traffic policeman on a motorcycle turns up and he just phones is like, Oh, there's been a crash, and he's like, boss, what are you doing? Because he's just stood there ready to smash this dryhead guy up.

SPEAKER_00 35:50

Yeah. So that he's hauled off, isn't he? And gone away, and then we go for a three years later type affair. And basically, so Inspector Chan, this guy that we've been following, he's got these three dudes who report to him that have all got their own struggles with their families and their sons and daughters and stuff. They've all got that going on individually, or they're disconnected from their and they're like really loyal to him, and he breaks the news about his own.

SPEAKER_01 36:19

We've had we've we have had a very like a brief thing of this guy, Wong Poe, being acquitted. Like, because this guy they've they explicitly show that he there was no evidence he's been acquitted of all charges and set free. And so then the police cops are like, we fucking know this guy is guilty.

SPEAKER_03 36:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:35

He had he had our star witness killed. He's got um they've got like super, super guilt about this girl basically being orphaned and feeling like responsible for that.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

And there's a ticking clock element in the plot, anyway, because of his brain tumour, and also because he's due to retire in two days. I'll say because of the brain tumor. We we've jumped three years in the future. It how's his brain tumour? It's bad, and he's got two days left basically before he's been thrown off the floor. So it's like makes them feel like now is the time, we've got to do something about this guy now, basically. And the other problem, of course, is that the new guy's turning up, and it does take a little while for the new guy to get into it because the movie really only gets interesting when Donnyen gets into it. I'm sure Donnie's in this. Am I watching the wrong thing? And then he does appear. He turns up about nearly half an hour into the movie looking smooth as fuck, these black jeans on and this white shirt, white belt, real sort of you forget how nineties the early 2000s were. Yeah. And he looks like way too pretty to be a fucking fighter, do you know what I mean? Yeah, and then we get his backstory. He was a bit of a gangbanger when he was a sort of beat cop and he smacked this guy so hard that he basically punched him until he was a retard. I don't know how any other way to say it. That's what he did. And then he carries this massive guilt around now and meets the guy and gives him money and goes and loses Street Fighter to him in the arcade. Oh yeah, yeah. To to sort of pay back, you know, because he feels really guilty about it. But everybody's got something a little bit like that going on. So the Inspector Chan and the new guy, Donnie Yen, they meet up and they go out on the prowl, don't they? They go to that a tour of the patch, and he's like, Oh, after midnight, this isn't a police place anymore. This is like Wong Po owns this after this. Watch what happens, and so it does become a bit lawless, and they start throwing people about, and then they really provocatively come out, start waving their guns and badges around, and start beating people up and making that guy walk on broken glass and all that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 38:34

Like, really, because what's the style like in in this? Is it very dimly lit or is it very bright colours or it is that sort of nineties aesthetic?

SPEAKER_00 38:45

Yeah, it's it's there's quite a lot of neon and and that sort of thing, but yeah, it's got a sort of soft focus to a lot of it. Look, that from the early noughties that you would get.

SPEAKER_01 38:57

It's also it's a Hong Kong from you know, this isn't this isn't West So it's a different different sort of culturally stylistic.

SPEAKER_00 39:03

Anyway, Wong Poe turns up and he's banging that bottle against the side and he really like emphasizes his power and he owns all the gangs and all the people there, so you know they're sort of quite lucky to get away with it. So uh the next thing is that they meet this guy who's got a videotape he wants to show them. He's a he's a is he making films? He said he just had a camera there stationed over looking, and unbelievably, like they're really dismissive, like fuck off, we don't, you know, we don't want you to and then one of the guys who works for Inspector Chan watches a video and he's got Wong Po on the video clubbing this guy that they found dead with a base with a uh golf club. Yeah, my and uh weapon of choice. The problem is though, at the end of it, he didn't actually kill the guy, they it shows someone shooting him. I did think, well, how are you gonna mistake somebody's been shot for somebody's been beaten with a golf club? But their idea is we'll chop the bit of the frame off that shows somebody shooting him, and we'll just broadcast the bit that shows Wong Poe beating this guy up with a a golf club, and because he's dead, we're gonna get in for murder. That's the the plan now, the figure.

SPEAKER_02 40:17

The the golf club obviously isn't a bullet, but they were just I don't know, they never really addressed this point as far as I can remember. I suppose you could still sort of say if somebody's beaten the hell out of somebody with a golf club and then the guy next to him shoots him. You're both kind of guilty, aren't you?

SPEAKER_00 40:33

But they're trying to do this all under the nose of the new of Don Ien, who's come in as the new business. Well principled now. But he he's really principled, and they're trying to do this. They know it's dodgy as fuck, and he's they're sort of trying to do all this without him really noticing or being clued in on what's going on. Because they don't want him to know that they're stitching him up, basically. So what happens next then?

SPEAKER_01 40:54

Have they not got people undercover as well?

SPEAKER_00 40:56

Yeah. That's the guy who dies, the the informant. He's their informant who their undercover guy dies. So then their next plan is that they're gonna get a gun and they're gonna pin Oh no, that's right, that's how they address it, the gun thing. They're gonna go and get a gun, the same model of gun, just implanted on him as part of the thing. So they get they meet these guys out in the middle of nowhere to get the gun and that's when one of Jack, the guy from the beginning, starts offing them one by one, doesn't he?

SPEAKER_01 41:32

Yeah, because Wong Po knows that the the net is sort of closing in and that they're really after him, so he just dispatches this guy, his best assassin, Jack such a shit name, to to go and fucking have them all killed, basically. Anybody's gonna be able to do that. So he's like he gets to work like pretty quick.

SPEAKER_00 41:50

Yeah, he starts offing all of the He's got a kind of trademark.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

That that one, that knife that we've seen at the start. Yeah. Right. It's sort of yeah, it's just strange.

SPEAKER_02 41:57

All the investigators on the case are start dropping like flies.

SPEAKER_01 42:00

He likes to really stab people up real nice and then slit their throat at the end.

SPEAKER_00 42:04

And as he's right, so he gets them all really quickly, all the guys who worked for Chan, and Don Ien is just behind them all, and he reaches one of them, wa, and he was the one who said that uh so the guy as he's dying tells him that they'd stolen money from a drug operation that Wong Po had been doing it, and that because Chan had raised his adopted daughter, yeah. So he'd been funnelling him money, so I don't know, it was all part of like this incestuous scheme sort of thing. So Chan then goes back to Wong Po's office, like ostensibly to return the money, but actually to start kicking off and kill them all. And he's quite quickly subdued and captured, so then it's just left to Don Ien now to come up and get away.

SPEAKER_01 42:52

Yeah, he's quite brutal.

SPEAKER_00 42:54

He's well, first off, he needs to be stabbed through the hand, isn't he? Yeah, it's really horrible actually that.

SPEAKER_01 42:59

Yeah, he's sort of crawling on them to get to Poe, and he's got this fucking massive blade sticking out, and it looks really effective, and he's screaming, and then they they actually phone Chan and he can just hear like his mate, well, it's not really his mate, but the other dirty cop like screaming down the phone. He's like, Well, he's still alive for now, but you know, I can't guarantee that when you get here, he's still gonna be alive. Yeah. And when he grew, he has a really fucking cool fight, the best bit of the film. Well, I know the the next two fights are great, actually. Yeah. So there's been a bit light on, there's been a couple of kicks and a few slow-mo bits.

SPEAKER_00 43:30

Um there's one scene where all four of the guys, it's really brief, but Sung's character has Samo Hung's character gets taken down by all four of them, and they have to jump on him to take him down. And there's another bit where he fights them on the roof where they're trying to they tell that guy to jump off the car park roof. Yeah. And Dolly Yen fights them all. But it's been pretty brief on the room.

SPEAKER_01 43:51

Yeah, but you haven't really seen him in like his best. And we've got about 20 minutes to go now of the movie. It's gonna come across so he's watched there's one bit where he's just put. Found himself stuck behind this wire fence when he watches the guy, the the the one you were talking about before, get hit get attacked and slopes in everything, and he can't he's like, you know, rattling against it, can't get to him. Eventually he does come face to face with this Jack character in a c in a big long sort of street.

SPEAKER_00 44:15

It's like an alley, isn't it? It's like really harshly clinically lit, and it's like real manga inspired this bit, like running at each other, running.

SPEAKER_01 44:23

And they just have this fucking brutal fight. Now, rumour has it, according to my research, that the prop weapons hadn't turned up, so they had a real knife and a real battle battle thing, and they just agree that they wouldn't kill each other.

SPEAKER_00 44:35

Well, it's really choreographed, I think the whole movie It's really long takes. It's very long takes, real steady camera, it's the sort of thing that I really fucking like. It's not all that fast edit camera moving around, it's like just watch these like guys do their amazing shit. And then Donnie Yen has choreographed the whole fight. This one's all about weaponry, like you said, the the knife versus the baton, and they find loads of interesting ways to show you how one weapon can be used to blunt another one, basically. And loads of that cool shit that you do see a lot all the time now, like with somebody holding a knife and they drop it and catch it in the other hand, and then the guy blocks it with his thing, all that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 45:13

Eventually does fucking horribly because he's got blunt weapon and he's just like clubbing him a lot till eventually. At one point, I think he lifts his arm. You know, if you were stretching your arm, like you lift your shoulder, you lift your elbow past your head, and he lifts his arm. Donnie does this to Jack, and and so far badly just snaps his arm off. Yeah. And it is fucking like brutal. And then with all these things, the the sound effects are great. Yeah, it really does sound epic. But he gets the upper hand on him and and fucking takes him down. Guts him, he actually ends up, he disarms him. I thought you might see him like completely disemboweled because he does properly get the knife and goes straight across.

SPEAKER_00 45:49

Yeah. But you don't get that. And then he heads off now to go and have the show to the boss fight. The boss fight, Samo Hung's carried to the we've already seen is a fighting badass versus Don Yen. He turns up. There is an amazing moment here where he's got the bag of money and he throws it to him like it looks like it wasn't CGI, and it was an improbable distance and unerring accuracy, and he just throws in this bag of money and it lands right at his feet. And then it just kicks off a very brutal fight sequence, much more sort of it you see it a lot now, but it was new at the time, MMA-inspired moves amongst martial arts. So a lot of arm locks and takedowns, and the sort of thing that you see a trillion times now in John Wick, you know, where grabbing people and taking them to the floor and disarming them and that sort of thing, but was really relatively new in Hong Kong cinema at the time, which is why this film is holding such high regard. And they're so fast, the pair of them. Like it's surprising because he's quite chunky.

SPEAKER_01 46:45

He's huge, yeah. But he the he's sort of he's stronger, and there's a couple of times when when it gets you know to really close quarters, he can just grab him, slam him through a wall, or slam him on top of the bar and do all that sort of shit.

SPEAKER_02 46:58

See, I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, have I seen this film? But I think I haven't. It's just that he's probably inspired quite a few. You probably remember the ending, I would think.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

He gets he gets him. So Don Yen gets him in a kind of sleeper hold, he's strangling him to death. Yeah. And he he's constantly been on the phone, this guy, and and he's had this plot about his partner not being able to have a kid, but now they are raising a kid. Yeah. And his phone rings, and he's like, looking at it, and she's I think leaving a voicemail. Yeah. And so Don Yen just like releases him enough so he can answer the phone and say, Yeah, everything's fine, I'll be I'll be there in a minute, and then he's like eh fucking straight back in. But he manages to overpower a bit, they fight a bit more.

SPEAKER_00 47:39

Eventually he suplexes He does this suplex thing, and then this like I don't know what this maneuver was.

SPEAKER_01 47:44

The camera sort of flipsy way, he wasn't completely clear, yeah. But he's so he probably weighs like a lot more than him. Yeah. And Don In basically suplexes him, spins him over. There's a great big bar, and he just fucking drops him on top of all this glass and fight over, and he's cool as fuck. He just reaches under him to find the bottle that hasn't broken. B feet of gin, it was. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:09

He pours himself a big thing of gin. Fight over. Yeah. Everything's gonna be fine. And in fact, uh, isn't Inspector Chan still alive as well as it's not. He goes, Well, you're not gonna cut me down. Yeah. And he's like, he gets on the glass, isn't he? He pours him a drink. Because I mean at this point he knows that Chan's tried to fit a mission. Yeah. Because that's what the movie's about. How far is it should you go to take down a guy like this? But anyway, so he's just stood there having a drink. By window. By the window, and suddenly, out of nowhere, Wong Poe gets up, runs at him, pushes him out the window, and it sort of goes matrix style as he falls through the window, and then on the car outside with his missus and the kid in it. Everyone's dead. That he would just call in the middle of the fight. Wow. So Don Ien's dead. I've not seen it. Donnie's dead, Wong Poe's dead. The only people who are still alive is the guy with the brain tumour on Wong Poe. So basically all of the the literally everybody you would expect to survive dies, and everybody you would expect to live dies. So the final shot is of the beach with Chan, who is the adopted father of Wong Po's whatever the the kid from the beginning that he feels guilty about, and he just dies on the beach. So that bit that we saw the beginning with him. So he's the beginning of the end. So he just dies like that's it. So bleak. So yeah. So bleak.

SPEAKER_02 49:37

Okay, yeah. It sounded it. Yeah. But a few decent fine fight scenes in there as well. And we watched one for the midweeker, or rather you guys did the eight poles. How's the fight scenes compare?

SPEAKER_01 49:51

So that was that was fighting from start to end, like pretty much non-stop. In in the Shaw Brothers, yeah, a couple of pauses for a little bit of dialogue and a little bit of plot. But this one was the opposite. There was a lot. I didn't enjoy this one as much. I didn't I it was I was clock watching a bit because I'm like, first of all, it's like, where the fuck is Donnie Yen? And then when he does arrive, he doesn't do that much fighting to the end. But when he does, like it's top draw. Yeah, it's fucking brilliant. Yeah. It just takes a little while to get there. But then I was watching, then when he's out the window, I'm like, is is this a dream? Like, is this gonna be a dream for well? You can't.

SPEAKER_00 50:25

Surely he's not dead like surely he didn't just push the guy out to kill his own. Yeah. So we're just left to kind of live with that, like, you know, and that's because it it it's funny to the reason that there's probably not a lot of fighting in it is it's a strongly anti-violence movie, yeah, right. That that is its message, but obviously it's an anti-violence movie that has two really kick-ass Hong Kong action stars in it. So we have to wait a little bit of time to get that. But the fights are really good, like you said. And I did enjoy the fact that there was lots of little character moments that everybody had a little story or something going on and all that sort of stuff. So yeah, good. Strong recommend. Strong.

SPEAKER_02 51:03

Strong recommends, okay. A good week on Don Week. Yeah. We need to come up with some noms for I won't be here.

SPEAKER_00 51:17

You're beefering. I'm a beefer, yeah. You'll be in eye beefer. We're gonna get parking. It's gonna be large. Yeah. We're gonna get my clerk again.

SPEAKER_01 51:33

Okay, well we'll come up with something between Chris Christian will be back. He's back Thursday or Friday this week. Chris will be back from Turkey. So we'll fettle something. All that remains though is to say sidey signing out. Dan's gone. Reese has left the building.