Nov. 25, 2022

Greener Grass & Polly Pocket

Greener Grass & Polly Pocket

We're going full edgelord this week as we discuss the Top 5 Most Controversial movies, from some of the most distressing cinema we've ever seen to the most divisive. Expect buttery sex acts, cannibals, violence, a discussion about whether movies are guilty by association to their problematic stars, and of course, Star Wars polariser, THE LAST JEDI.
 
Written, directed by and starring LA comedy writers Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, GREENER GRASS (2019) is an absurdist comedy about the extreme politeness, weaponised passive aggression and hostility of the suburbs. Jill Davies' (DeBoer) impulsive decision to give away her baby to best friend Lisa (Luebbe) has far-reaching consequences, threatening her relationship with pool water obsessed husband Nick and exacerbating son Julian's behavioural issues. Based on a short comedy film and with several SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE cast members involved in supporting roles, those roots sometimes show themselves as this is not entirely successful as a feature length movie but its consistent funniness and surreal examination of persistent cultural ideas about not offending people, performative gestures of kindness, the ridiculous keeping-up-with-The-Jones's struggle for validation and how women are constantly apologising for minor transgressions makes this well worth catching.
 
We finish things off with POLLY POCKET which was a fondly remembered plaything for some of our partners and wives but unfortunately was reduced to a charmless animated  commercial when we watched it, with weak characters and poor pacing.   

We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. If it hasn't been completely destroyed yet you can usually find us on twitter @dads_film, on Facebook Bad Dads Film Review, on email at baddadsjsy@gmail.com or on our website baddadsfilm.com.

Until next time, we remain...

Bad Dads

Transcript

Sidey - Greener Grass

Reegs: Welcome to Bad Dad's Film Review. And what's that? Are you feeling helpless, joyless, melancholy, like All Hope has been removed from the world. I could go on, but that would only depress you and I wouldn't wanna do that given the never ending carousel of misery that's going on out there.

Politics everywhere is a cesspool. There's war on your doorstep. Fuel builds will be so high this Christmas that pensioners will actually be burning each other in a futile attempt to stay warm and most egregiously of all. I hurt my little finger last week and it still hurts now.

Dan: does, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

It's

Reegs: guys saw that it was quite an injury, wouldn't it? Anyway, what better way to cheer yourself up than to listen to this week's pod, which starts things up by going full edge, Lord, with the top five controversial movies then we follow that up with the surreal sub suburban social satire, greener grass, and we'll achieve a happy ending with a look at Charmless Toy commercial Polly Pocket.

All that's left to do is introduce the dad, starting with Dan, and they say Opposites attract, which is why his wife is intelligent, refined, and has perfectly adequate hygiene and side whose tip for crunching up baking paper before you use it to line something has absolutely revolutionized my life recently.

Sidey: Yeah, it's a good one, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

Reegs: So

how you doing guys? You know this tip, SI's tip for,

Dan: No. What's this?

Sidey: If you are, I use baking paper a lot when I'm cooking and if you just try and roll it out of the sheet thing and put it in, it's a nightmare. But if you just scrunch it up like you're gonna throw it in a bin, but then unravel it and put it down, it just stays flat.

Dan: Wow.

Reegs: It's genius. It's

changed everything.

So, yeah. You knew. Yeah.

Sidey: We had the night after me on Friday night, we got really pissed.

Reegs: Yeah. We got really

Sidey: really pissed.

Dan: Yes. Nice.

Reegs: Yeah. My fingers stopped hurting for that.

Sidey: Yeah. And Peter was supposed to join us tonight, but he's got something wrong with his face.

Dan: Yeah. He's we thought he was toothache

Sidey: Well, he thought yeah, he thought it was tooth fake, but it's something more severe

Reegs: Mm-hmm.

Dan: He's got face a I mean, we, we've seen it coming really, haven't we?

Reegs: usually

that's how I feel looking at

Dan: Yeah.

Sidey: But he's gonna have to seek medical help.

Dan: Hopefully it's

Reegs: but back to our night out, that

Sidey: it was really was a rip snort, wasn't it?

Reegs: Yeah.

And we played competitive Jenga as well.

Sidey: Creative Jenga and the, the hook thing game.

Reegs: I did get that one once.

Sidey: You know that one where you, you get, it's a hook on a string and you've gotta release it and hook it onto the hook on the wall. It's a good game

Reegs: It's good.

Dan: that. I dunno. That game.

Reegs: Yeah.

Good

Sidey: game.

Anyway. Did you watch anything this week, Dan?

Dan: Yeah, I watched Stutts, which is Jonah Hill's new film. I watched yeah, it may, it may be a mention. We, we may we may bring it into the pod. I did enjoy it. I watched the Ben Carson's story with Cuba Gooding,

Sidey: Frank

Dan: Carson's, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. No, he was a, a doctor at John Hopkins hospital and he separated Simon's twins.

Reegs: right.

Conjoined

Dan: twins. Yeah.

Sidey: what? Like from the hip or where they were actually conjoined

Dan: in the, in the head. Yeah. He was the first person to do it. It was a true story. It was good. It was okay. It was just one I put on later night. It kept on coming up in my feed for some reason.

Inspirational stories, you know, so that, that was my algorithm. What about yours?

Yeah, what's your algorithm? Baby .

Reegs: Mine's mostly demented horror and like talking

animal movies.

So

Dan: Yeah.

Sidey: Did you watch any either of those things this week?

Reegs: well,

kind of both in this week's main feature, but

Sidey: true. Yeah. Did I watch anything? I watched, I watched an eighties music documentary and precious little os. I don't think I was gonna have time. I did a double header this week. I went out Friday and Saturday.

Wow. Which I haven't done for a fucking long time.

And that took, its to, I was fucking late both nights and I was tired, but I managed to find time to digest everything but not much else.

Dan: powered through.

I also watched a phenomenon, which is the film about the RDO on bbc.

Reegs: It's about The Muppet song, So,

Sidey: phenomena.

Dan: Phenomenon. No, no. So that's all on at the moment. Of course. Maybe people follow that, maybe they don't, but it's happening in, in the man cave a lot.

Sidey: Yeah. What about you Reese? Did you catch that head?

Reegs: Well we finished the White Lotus and then went on to the second season of that.

I dunno if I'm as gripped by the second one, but it's, it's lots of good stuff going on. I know you're a big fan of unexpectedly seeing a male member. Yes. So episode one, season two episode one of that is, there's a really giant one. Really? Yeah. The, he has his leg up like that. He's getting changed and you see him shot from behind and you can just see it dangling.

Sidey: Who's the ActX

Reegs: Theo James is the guys now he looks like a cross between a Hemsworth and James Franco.

Sidey: Okay.

Reegs: Mm.

Dan: Sounds a dream boat.

Sidey: news about old Hemsworth, isn't it?

Reegs: Yeah. You were telling me earlier about that. That is

Dan: astonishing. Is this new news that he's found that he's susceptible or he's predisposed to

Sidey: Yeah, I think he's, he's at the highest

like risk category for getting Alzheimer's, which,

Dan: And he found that through a documentary he was making on himself.

Sidey: And then he's thinking, well, you know, fuck, I've been away working so much for, you know, for so long. Because that's what you do when you are a successful act tour. So he is decided to take some time out and spend that with his family instead, which is probably a good idea.

Reegs: Oh

Dan: Wow. If you can afford to do it, why not? That's the meaning of it all, isn't it? That's why you do it

Sidey: now. We did a top five last week and there were quite a lot of responses.

Reegs: We had unprecedented numbers of people willing to contribute to our

Sidey: Yeah.

And e Connolly mentioned one that I'm quite keen for, which was Miracle on 34th Street. I put on my Christmas tree this weekend.

Reegs: That is, it's November man.

Sidey: Yes it is. So that, what day is it today? 21. So it's like the 18th, 19th when I put it up.

Reegs: that is early. You have

Dan: any particular reason? Yeah. To put it up so early.

Reegs: You like it.

Sidey: We

just had the time this weekend because my daughter, we put holes in my daughter the previous week and says she couldn't go to swimming this week because she might get an infection in her ears.

Reegs: Yeah, I think, yeah. Some clarification.

Yeah.

Sidey: And so whilst we just had that extra time, we thought, fuck it. Let's do it then, because it's just so hectic normally. So fuck it, do it. So we put our tree up, we put all the fucking lights up around the house and we went to the in-laws and put that tree up as well.

Wow.

Yeah, big time.

Dan: There's a house at the top of our street up here. And if you.

but it's

like the Griswold or something, you know,

Reegs: my

misses is gonna do that to our house cuz every year she buys one more set of lights and we are starting to get quite a collection. Now she's gonna

like

over

Sidey: to how with energy costs.

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: Do you roll 'em out the front of the house?

Reegs: They're They're out the front. They're out the back.

Sidey: See I've got all mine plugged in to plugs as well, so I just go, Alexa Christmas lights, and they all fucking come on. And it never fails to impress me.

Dan: No way that,

Reegs: got it all plugged into the next door neighbors.

That's

Dan: I've

got some tints up and, and

Reegs: yeah.

So you do, that's a bo is what, that's been there all year,

Dan: It has, yeah. It's been there for a couple of years. Yeah.

Sidey: So I'm, I'm putting hard for Miracle on 34th Street.

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: Jimmy Stewart.

Sidey: Yeah,

Dan: just go for

Sidey: it. It's Christmas movie, right?

I'm thinking of the right one.

yeah, yeah, yeah. It's in boom. But there were millions of other ones, but I think we did mention quite a lot last week, and there are, some of them were Jukes that we had as well. So really good, well impressed with the, with the interaction on that one. So this week's Top five rigs was a category that you put forth. Yeah. Controversial movies. Should we just get straight into it?

Reegs: Yeah. But you can, things can be controversial for whatever reason you deem them. It

Sidey: doesn't have to be. Yeah.

So we've had a few online, but maybe we'll come to those in a little while.

Okay. Do you wanna start the ball rolling?

Mm.

Reegs: Mm. Where am I gonna start? Yeah. I should have really guessed that it would start with me, wouldn't I? Really, my topic and all that. Well, I'll probably start with Cannibal Holocaust. Cause I went through a period of watching stuff I, I said

Sidey: about . Oh, well, I, okay.

You're cannibals phase. Yeah,

Reegs: When I went full edge, Lord. And there were a whole load of video nasties. Do you remember the whole concept of video nasties when you were young? And a lot of them were seventies, sort of exploitation

Sidey: I was gonna say seventies seems to be rife for this sort of category.

Yeah.

Reegs: There was an explosion of him. Mean Cannibal Holocaust was one that I saw really profoundly dis, you know, upsetting.

It's a sort of found footage type thing with a wraparound thing about a rescue mission in the Amazon rainforest and a professor who stumbles upon a film that was happening to this missing documentary crew and his decision whether or not to let it go out on air and all this sort of thing. And I watched it as like a 16 or a 17 year old just at that point of like, you know,

Sidey: masturbating.

Reegs: no , you know, when you're just like exploring stuff but being a real dick about it cuz you're just, yeah.

So, you know, I probably was like laughing along or something, but it's absolutely like horrendous real, almost as bad as Swiss family Robinson in its treatment of animals and different cultures. You know, it's got graphic content, sexual assaults, violence towards animals. It's still banned in some countries and it kind of created a whole subgenre of exploitation movies.

But

this is really the only one I've properly watched.

Sidey: Yeah, quite a lot of what I was reading about online. I, I just haven't seen quite a few of them because I would just, they don't really appeal to me when it's stuff like that.

I just think, well, I just, I don't really wanna watch that.

Reegs: Well I went through a phase where I wanted to look at transgressive cinema and that sort of thing.

So, yeah, I have seen a few of these sorts of things. What is then, what is the most edge lordy thing that you've watched inside on, on your list?

Sidey: For, on the list? I mean, last time Tango in Paris was pretty controversial.

That was especially if you're a big fan of butter, cuz that got a rough treatment in the old

Reegs: It's almost more controversial in retrospect, isn't it? Because it was, there was a bit of, well, subsequently, what's her name? Dan?

Sidey: Well, she said that she was tricked into some of the, some of the scenes, which of course is like fairly.

Like grim when you consider, you know, you thought that a film set might be a bit of a safe place and when you are going to go film stuff like this, that it

would

be,

I

mean, there's, there's stuff happening recently where they talk about having intimacy coordinators. Yeah. And it was at Sean, Sean be who said, no, that's bollocks.

Which it take, it takes the thing out of the you, the realism out of the scene. And, and you know, actors are saying, well, no, actually I don't want that. You know,

Reegs: I gotta say I see it very much like, like a stunt coordinator in a, in an action movie.

It makes complete sense for there to be a romance or intimacy coordinator, however they want to term it, you know, for, for those kind of scenes because they do have to be carefully plotted. You can let your actors be spontaneous, I guess, if that's the nature of what you're doing, but,

Sidey: well, we, Yeah.

Dan: Marlin Brandos.

Reegs: That's right.

Dan: yeah,

Sidey: But that was the seventies one. We watched Clockwork Orange the other week that was seventies and, and very controversial at the time.

I think it's maybe lost a little bit of, its, it's still fairly like, you know, graphically

Reegs: it's pretty unpleasant. I

Sidey: I think at the time it was like the cutting edge of, of violence. Straw Dogs was 1971, same year as Clockwork Orange and that, that has the famous infamous, I should say, rape scene where they kind of imply

that she's maybe into she's after a little while she's into it, which is obviously horrific.

So it was known for that. Yeah.

Dan: Yeah. Okay.

Reegs: Hoffman. That's

Sidey: the h Yeah,

Dan: I remember watching a film when I was a kid, black and white film. And it really kind of left me impacted on, on what I'd seen called

Reegs: Yeah.

Todd Browning.

Dan: And I remember asking my mum, oh, you know, it was, it was like a carnival, a

Sidey: They were real sideshow

Dan: show and Yeah, like reading about it afterwards, you know, you realize that how far they pushed the limits of decency really on this film.

And there was there was even I think a woman miscarrying or something that had tried

Reegs: well, she,

there, there's a bunch of people with disabilities and, and all sorts paraded, kind of like in a ville type, you know, look at them, act it's a horror movie. And she's a trapeze artist. Claire Patrick.

She gets turned into like a human duck type thing at the end.

Dan: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's, it's quite a, a strange, strange movie and I just, I remember watching it as quite young actually. You know, it would've been primary age. And it just came on, came on the tv, I dunno, but stuck with me.

Reegs: Yeah, that was banned for a long time. I spit on your grave was another one that I watched in the sort of Edge Lord phase. It's like a notorious 1978 American rape and revenge movie. And it tells the story of Jennifer, a sort of a writer who gets revenge on four men who rape her. But the rape kind of takes up about the first third of the movie.

It's like quite an unpleasant thing. I guess. Back in the seventies, feminism was still quite a new concept to people, so they couldn't be kind of too you know, there had to be quite blunt about it. Roger e Ber, who, you know, that I love, he described it once as a vial bag of garbage and attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life.

It is a pretty horrible movie, but it.

You know, the point of it is it's so horrible. So you can enjoy the catharsis of the revenge and you know, whether or not you can accept the whole premise of this. But it did create like, you know, it was remade in the, in the early 2010 and there's sequels and everything.

So yeah, it's got an unforgettable scene where she slices a guy's cock off in the bath and then lets him bleed to death.

Dan: a tough way to go, I'd imagine.

Reegs: Mm-hmm.

Dan: mm

Sidey: mm

Uh, well let's stick with the seventies. You have the Exorcist of course. Yeah. 73. They had all kinds of stuff going on there, but I think it's the language that really

Reegs: well, she stabs herself in the crotch with the crucifix as well.

Sidey: Slightly Blas, I suppose. Yeah. There's the Spider Walk bit. That was, that was a, a bit, that was cut.

Reegs: Spider Walk. Also, there was a load of stuff about like subliminal satanic messaging and stuff as well, so,

Sidey: yeah. Pink Flamingos 72, we've mentioned that a few times. We, we always talk about the shit eating, but there's also sex with a live chicken incest and close up of an anus.

Which is always good. Cinematic content. And then life of Brian just squeaks in at

Dan: Yeah, well that was the one I was thinking of.

Sidey: Periodically catch on YouTube, the interview. Is it Par? No, it's not. It's anyway, some chat show, but it's John CLE and Michael Palin and two Churchy people.

I've seen it. Yeah. It's amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's just amazing.

I, it's almost as entertaining as the film.

Reegs: It

Sidey: they dismissed the point completely.

I

Reegs: was gonna say, the irony of religious sells complaining about a film that mox religious sells seem to be lost on them, but

Sidey: Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic.

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: Well, yeah, that's the one I was thinking as well.

But Friday Night Lights um, thought

Sidey: haven't heard about this one

Dan: utter garbage. And it was controversial to me that it should even get made. But there you go. Yeah. Is there, I mean, yeah. As you say, controversy could be found anywhere. Yeah.

Reegs: of different ways. The passion of the Christ was part of the same fictional universe as Abraham Lincoln, vampire Hunter, I think, and John Carter and Mars, and that had Jim Kiesel as Jesus Christ.

And that was directed by a friend of my people, Mel Gibson. Kiesel, I don't really wanna talk about that movie. I don't, have you ever seen it? Yeah. Yes. Just awful, horrible, like torture porn, basically. Him getting beaten up, but veto's weird. Isn't he queuing on and anti-abortion and is he Yeah.

Vocal opponent of stem cell research and all sorts of stuff, so,

yeah.

Sidey: Mm.

Reegs: Q and N's. Disappointing, isn't it? Where, where, what has happened to that? Where did they all go? Is it still going? Is

Sidey: Oh, I'm sure

if

Dan: underground, aren't

Sidey: no, now that Trump's put his name in the hat for 2024, I'm

Reegs: Ke will be Burke

Sidey: be all

over it.

Dan: they've got him back on Twitter now is well,

Sidey: Well, he, his ban is up, but he hasn't tweeted

Dan: Oh, he hasn't returned.

Sidey: He's got truth social now. One that we watched for the pod was mother.

Dan: Right. Yeah.

Sidey: I think there's quite a few religious based ones and, and this one

I dunno, it's like kind of the story of the whole of mankind's

history Encompasses

is in, in this house, in this singular sort of place.

And, and then it, you know, as we know from having watched it and talked about it in the pod, it culminates in this fucking horrendous, you know, scene. And it's a real, I I guess it would be a really polarizing movie because I could, I totally understand. If someone said they fucking detested this, you'd be like, yeah, I get it.

But also, you know, I think we all found ourselves to be surprisingly quite into it.

Yeah. It was yeah, it's a weird one. Even still thinking about it now. It was. And as well as, you know, when you cast Jennifer Lawrence in it, you're probably expecting something totally different. I think I, maybe not cuz Sarah Osky, but also, you know, you thinking like hunger games and you know, like fluffy stuff that she does.

And then you do this, you see this and you think, wow, okay. Different. Yeah.

Dan: I'm just thinking of the worst movie ever made. And we, we reviewed it, Johnny was it Johnny uso? Johnny? What's his name? The the crazy bad director who made

Sidey: Oh Tommy. Wi

Dan: that? Tommy. Not Johnny. Yeah. The room. You know,

Reegs: we

watched the Disaster Artist, didn't we? Yeah, that was good.

Sidey: That was good.

Dan: But the actual film, the Room was often touted as the worst movie ever made. And obviously it's sprung its own legend. And become I think a, a film that actually made money in the end, isn't it?

Sidey: Yeah, well he would do loads of midnight screenings and it had this basically built up a huge cult following where people were like, this communal experience of going to see something that's fucking terrible.

And it probably works better in that environment. Cause if you watch it on your own, I think it would be fairly miserable.

Reegs: Well, bird Box, did anybody see that? The

Sidey: that Sandra? Bullet

Reegs: Sandra, bullet

Sidey: I haven't seen it.

Reegs: it. It's okay. You know, it's, but it inspired that challenge of people trying to do stuff blindfolded.

Sidey: People die.

Reegs: yeah. Yeah. Some idiot teenager in Utah drove with a hat over her eyes and sort of plowed into a fence or something.

So, yeah. That was fairly controversial. Bonnie and Clyde.

Sidey: Yeah.

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: was controversial about Bonnie and Clyde?

Reegs: just. Was That's

Sidey: controversial. Champion

championing the kind of,

Reegs: well they were sort of sadist, nihilistic killing couple, weren't they in,

Dan: but they come, I mean, natural born killers. Remember when that

Reegs: out? Well, that was

also another one that had a fair amount of controversy attached to it.

Dan: Yeah. There was a bit of hype, wasn't there that Oh, you know, a copycat killer or whatever.

Reegs: Well, do you remember um,

Sidey: Yeah.

Reegs: so there's Tinto Brass. He was an Italian filmmaker of the sixties

Sidey: hell a mirror in that?

Reegs: Yeah, she was Malcolm McDowell. He did a, you know, he did a load of erotic films. And this one I remember yeah, McDowell is the emperor. Peter Oto was in it, John Gill. Good. It was produced by this guy called Bob GoCon. He was the founder of Penthouse Magazine and in post production he added a load of graphic

Sidey: sexual

Reegs: uns, simulated sex scenes that he, you know, had put in with penthouse models.

And there were multiple legal issues and controversies over its content and it multiple versions released worldwide. While its uncut form has been available. Guess which version I thought I'd bought from Woolworth's when I was 14 versus the one that I wanted to buy? Exactly. Yeah.

Sidey: Ooh. There's loads of like award-winning ones and it seems to be like, can, or you know, these European

Dan: Yeah.

Sidey: where things win that just, I dunno if they're just picking them to, you know,

make spark Just Yeah, just get, get that going. But I remember crash winning or certainly being about,

and you know, the subject matter of people having the fetish of

Reegs: it's great that Cronenberg That's brilliant.

That movie.

Sidey: Yeah. But it's, you know, you know, conservatives are gonna get fucking all up in arms about

Reegs: that. I think there is a scene that after a car crash where she gets a wound in her leg, James Woods had sex with it, doesn't he? Or was it James Sp Yeah, James Sp had sex with the Wound. Yeah. I, some people probably wouldn't like that.

Sidey: No, I think that's going to get people talking.

Dan: there was the interview. Yeah. Do you remember with Franco and Seth? Seth Seth Rogan. It was around the time where there was a little bit of North Korean chat as well where I dunno if they were gonna go and see him or there was starting to talk again, or they'd made some, there was, they were in the news.

And so it was all good timing and, and for the film, it was probably the hype and the controversy was better than the film, but I, I remember watching it in, around the time thinking, well, you know, what is it all about? And of course, they just take the piss out of a, a north, a North Korean leader or, or whatever it is.

But yeah, that was that was a, a half kind of controversial one that I, I remember being a little bit political.

It kind of leans on that as well.

Reegs: Well, the people at Kazakhstan were greatly offended, weren't

they?

Dan: And, and also, I mean, I haven't actually seen a lot of the Barat stuff I've seen clips though of, of different things.

At one point he's in a, in the USA in kind of a, a rodeo station and the, he gets everybody singing and chanting and things and it's

Reegs: throw the Jew down the, well

Dan: that like that. Yeah. So yeah. Another one

Reegs: who wants some opinions that are probably not all that controversial,

Sidey: but yeah.

Reegs: you know, Manas Steel is the second best Superman film.

Sidey: behind

Mm-hmm.

Reegs: Tron Legacy Better than the original.

Sidey: No, that's fact.

Reegs: Big plot Change in the Watchman movie makes it better than the one in the comic

Sidey: that's hugely controversial.

Reegs: Kingdom is the crystal. Crystal skull is not the worst Indiana Jones movie.

Sidey: it's close, but it is

Reegs: Lord of the Rings is long and boring.

Sidey: It's, well no, but it's better than the fucking rings of power.

Dan: Yeah.

Reegs: blade Runner might have great production design and awesome soundtrack and brilliant world building, but it's often a meandering mess with no clear idea of what it wants to be.

Rumination on being human. A Neon wa detective story, a love story. None of the above nuance takes aren't really all that controversial, are they? So

Sidey: no.

especially when they're just wrong.

Reegs: And finally, David Bowie has more mediocre music than Great, than Great Works

Dan: Yeah. Not,

Sidey: No, we're not just having trolling. That's just

Reegs: dark. All right.

One more. Here's a good one. The Greatest Showman. The soundtrack is really great, but it makes you really just forget how massively problematic the whole movie is with

Sidey: I haven't seen

Reegs: Bag of Freaks and all that. So maybe we should review it because , plot-wise, it's like a real hum. Dinger of a wow. Really.

Sidey: Okay. Should we dip into some of the listener suggestions,

Reegs: please?

Sidey: Darren Leafly said there was like hoo-ha about the ear cutting scene

Reegs: Darren Turnover and New

Sidey: Leafly.

Yeah. He mentioned the ear cutting scene from Reservoir Dogs and then also the Lion King. Apparently a cloud reads

Reegs: Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah. What?

Yeah. Animated in. Yeah.

Dan: would they

Reegs: that?

It's not though, is it? It's SFX or something is supposed to be the black sound effects or something. I don't know.

Sidey: Breach, he mentions porno Holocaust.

Reegs: That's probably one of the ones that offshoot from cannibal, I would think.

Sidey: Yeah. And I do remember when she actually watched this and then, and tweeted about that at the time and said, it basically is just hardcore pornography. With, with like cannibals. Cannibalism, yeah. So probably more your kind of thing, weeks Uh, Visy then mentioned life of Brian Crash, perennial favorite crank winner of most offensive male character awarded by the women's film Critic Circle, which is quite the accolade. And then like this, the way he's come to this one is to say The last Jdi versus the rise of Skywalker.

Reegs: Yeah.

Well Rise at Skywalker is absolutely awful, isn't it? But it's

Sidey: getting at the way Ryan Johnson set up a, a different kind of narrative, which they just were like, no, fuck that. Because fanboys don't like it.

Reegs: It is a pretty controversial movie for fanboy The Last Jedi, isn't it? Yeah.

Dan: I think any, any film as we watched Swiss Family Robinson the other week, any film probably dating back you could look at controversy

Reegs: They're not really on the same timelines though. Swiss Family Robinson and,

Sidey: Well,

you know,

it's a long time ago. Yeah.

Reegs: yeah.

Sidey: United 93

Reegs: the,

Sidey: is the film about

Dan: airplane?

Sidey: one, it was the nine 11 film. Right.

Dan: Right. Okay.

Sidey: But that came out, you know, only five years after. I just think you could probably have given it a bit more

Dan: It was that the controversy, they came out so soon or

Sidey: anymore. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan: Yeah.

Reegs: Yeah.

Sidey: But I just think so soon after the event, it's just a little bit

Reegs: or did it?

Sidey: Yeah. Then some stuff I wanna talk about, some stuff that I haven't seen but

are known to be horrendous. Serbian film,

Reegs: I know all about that

Sidey: not, it's not even getting into it cuz it's just horrific.

Nymphomaniac is bound to be, we have to have lar er somewhere

Reegs: one of his in here. I've got Antichrist in here.

Sidey: Yes. Iphoma is the shagging one. Antichrist is a, isn't it? A two parter where William Defo gets his dick cut off with a pair of shears?

Reegs: Yeah. Yeah. And a fox shouts, chaos reigns

Sidey: No, not for me.

Really? That do you remember Louis CK

Reegs: Yes.

Sidey: Comedian that everyone really liked till it

turned out stuff. So, yeah. So this film got canceled. I love you Daddy. 2017,

Reegs: It's a creepy title already, isn't it? Especially for a guy

Sidey: creepy fucking subject matter as well. It's the storyline in which the 17 year old girl, Chloe Grace Mots, begins a relationship with a much older director, Markovic Mavi, who's being accused in the media of being a pedophile.

So the age difference in the story is like, is the, you know, the thrust of the whole plot. And then, then whilst this was being made or finished, but before it had actually been released, the stuff broke about. Lucy K and his sexual misconduct and, and masturbating in front of female

Reegs: But then didn't Marts talk about stuff as well

Sidey: The film Never saw the light of day because he got canceled. I think he sort of made a comeback. He's done more standup stuff, which, you know, if you wanna go and watch him go and watch him, it's not, you know. But yeah, the film never, never saw the light of day because of all of the controversy.

Dan: Human Centipede never got to see the lighter day in some countries either.

That was

Sidey: well, number two sounds

Dan: the Australians,

Sidey: like, I dunno if, cause I haven't seen any of them. Right. But I, I'm assuming the first one was, was there a point to it or was it just an idea that someone had

Reegs: it's the idea. Yeah.

Sidey: But two is the meta.

One of a guy that liked the film.

right.

Going bigger with it.

Reegs: Yep.

And then in the third one, he does an entire jail. It's brilliant.

Dan: I'm not seeing any of those. No,

I

heard that he kind of sows one guy up to his ass and like that kind of stuff. That's how they do, that's

Reegs: Oh, you've got a big journey to go on. Maybe we should nominate that one

Dan: not sure. I'm not sure I've got that. There was the other one, the greasy strangler I heard

Sidey: that's the listener request that we had right back at the start of the show, which we've never got round to doing.

Reegs: Kramen asked us to do that. The greasy Strangler.

Dan: I've only heard the name, I dunno anything about it, but,

Sidey: said, there's a whole sub genre of controversy that we've not got into yet, but we can get into it with Ghost in the Shell. 2017 because Scarlet Johansen was cast and this is the whole whitewashing controversy thing that goes on where they'd cast a white person in the place of someone who would

ordinarily

Reegs: same accusation was leveled at Cloud Atlas that we reviewed on the pod as well.

Whitewash or,

Sidey: yeah. So casting, you know, a white person in place of someone who, you know, the role was originally either a person of color or whatever it is, different ethnicities and just know, fuck that we want a white person in it, sell better.

Dan: There was the DaVinci code somehow made it controversial. I dunno whether they tried to just engineer this controversy

Reegs: Well, anything to do with like, religious. Yeah.

Dan: yeah, again, you know, there was big kind of debates on whether they'd allow it to shoot within certain old halls and that kind of thing.

So, hallowed places. Exactly.

Reegs: And

whether they would let McKen set up yet another fucking PowerPoint.

Dan: The the deer hunter as well. That was obviously had some harrowing scenes and I think that's probably where the controversy stemmed with that. They've got playing Russian roulette. Yeah. That kind of thing.

Vietnam, you see, we've seen that. We've not reviewed it.

Reegs: What Vietnam

The

Dan: country. The Deer Hunter.

Reegs: Oh, the deer Hunter.

yeah.

Sidey: We we're all pretty big fans of Shane Black, aren't we?

But The Predator 2018, you know about this.

Reegs: Yeah. Go on. Tell me. Yes, I do. But there's a whole bit cut out of it isn't there with,

Sidey: well, it's Olivia Mon

who

is an actress that was in it, and she came forward just before the premier to reveal that Black had allowed his friend Steven Wilder Riegel to Star in the film.

Despite him knowing that he was a registered sex offender,

Reegs: That's right.

Sidey: He'd been found guilty of enticing a minor by computer. In 2010 after starting trying to start an online relationship with a 14 year old girl which apparently Shane Black knew about, which is fairly fucking Barron.

Reegs: Yeah, I was, I've got a whole thing list of like, is stuff kind of controversial by association, like Morbius with Jared Lito and all that. Like, you know, just because he's

Sidey: he's in

Reegs: Weird. Yeah, exactly. Is it, is it controversial by

Sidey: he's not, as far as I know, he's not a registered sex offender.

Reegs: He's been accused of lots of stuff, hasn't he? Yeah. Harassment of underage girls and all sorts of

stuff.

Sidey: Right. That's

Dan: Well, getting straight away from any of that deep Throat was 1970 twos film, and it was

a young woman who went

Reegs: I have actually seen it. She, she can achieve orgasm by

Dan: Linda Lovelace. She goes, yeah, well, she goes to the doctor and says you know, she can't enjoy sex. And he says, well, you can only be treated orally as you like. But it was controversial because they, they championed it for.

First amendment rights and everything. But then it went to trial and and then Linda Lovelace said in the end that she really didn't want do it, and she felt like she had a bit of a gun to her head.

So,

Reegs: Mm-hmm. Sad stories

Sidey: Any more rigs?

Reegs: Oh, probably, I mean, there's a couple, like audition was one with a pretty horrific ending, a Japanese movie. There's some films that are sort of now. Like controversial in retrospect, especially like, you know, offensive, I guess to the, the, the lgbtq plus community like Ace Ventura or Basic Instinct or Chasing Amy, crying Game.

Yeah. Talented Mr. Ripley, you know, silence of the Lambs. They've all got slightly sort of, you know, controversial depictions. I think of people different social, probably fairly worth talking about with the World Cup and all that.

Sidey: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I read an interesting article actually about Buffalo Bill's depiction of like, trans, trans person on, you know,

Reegs: it's really the first, it's the first time probably if I think about it, it might like, other than like some comedians on tv, it's like the first representation of a trans person that I've seen

in A movie is like a skin

wearing serial

Dan: It makes it, yeah. Makes a, a

Reegs: really, yeah.

Sidey: Kids was probably the first one I actually thought of. I remember a huge controversy about this one. Harmony CORs movie kids but never saw it.

Reegs: Yeah, I've seen that. It's got a load of really famous people in it before they were famous. Like Rosario Dawson and

Sidey: Chloe

Reegs: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sidey: And then there was the one that came out recently, which we iden denied about doing on the show. Is it sweet's

Reegs: that

Cutts

Sidey: one. Cutts? That's the one. Yeah. But just think what's the point. No, no. So I'm out.

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: Controversial.

Yeah, I, I am as well.

Reegs: Yeah. Probably one more was Bees Mo. I dunno if anybody ever saw that of fuck me.

Right. Yeah. It's French one with a, you know, just another one that's got a load of banging in.

Sidey: It's kind of weird to say. Now what? Put in a top five?

Reegs: Yeah.

Sidey: Yeah. What are you gonna put in?

Reegs: I am gonna go with, Ooh, I'm gonna go with Antichrist cuz it's just nuts. And Lars One Tree is a bit of a controversial figure.

Sidey: I'll put in The Exorcist cause it's, you know, a great movie and also controversial.

Dan: Okay. I shall put in I actually don't know which one should I put in.

We've talked about quite

Reegs: You've never put we've never had that in the top five

Dan: Yeah. Let's, let's put that in deep throat

Sidey: and then I like Volume Z's life of Brian Shout.

Yeah. So we'll put, that's our four for now and we'll complete the list next week.

Reegs: Nice

Sidey: The green, green grass of home. We watched Greener Grass.

Reegs: Yes.

Sidey: Which I had not heard of. So 2019. Surrealist comedy

Yeah.

And it's available on Prime. Should you so choose to get involved with this? Like what we done?

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: Yeah.

Okay. So, it's, it's quite, I was talking about the other day

to,

a friend I was trying to describe to him, and I was saying, it's a little, you know, it's stylized, isn't it?

It's got that almost

Sidey: well the color palette is very

Dan: that's what I mean to say. It's striking.

Reegs: it's got this past, vivid past look to it that is sort of like a fifties suburbia, but also through an eighties lens.

Sidey: It could have been a music video, some of it.

Dan: It's sort of Wes Anderson e kind of,

Sidey: there's a lot of

attention to detail in, in how it looks, let's put it that way.

Reegs: And it's by two female writer directors. This is their debut, Joscelyn Burr and Dawn Luby. Le Eby. And they feature prominently, you know, they're the sort of two main characters and, and it's sort of a,

a comedy about extreme politeness and weaponized passive aggression and the hostility of the suburbs and the these two ladies competing.

Sidey: Yeah. The sort of American dream as well, I

think. Yeah. In there.

Reegs: And as sort of the ridiculous you know, as the title implies, greener grass, that constant striving for something, you know, keeping up with the Joneses, keeping up appearances, making sure that everything is, is better. It's not really entirely clear when this takes place.

There's like a complete lack of like technology. At one point they do watch the movie Twister , so we know it's after Twister where it's released on DV on video. But anyway, should we get into it?

Dan: Yeah, well it, it opens up where rigged

Reegs: with some verde.

Nobuko, Hebrew slaves, chorus, so some quite imposing classical music.

And then a kid's football game in suburbia on a picture perfect lawn. Some kid is supposed to be playing, but he's just sort of stood in the middle of the pitch, yawning slowly until he's bashed behind from behind by some other kid, all in like dramatic slowmo. And he cuts to him crying on the floor.

Sidey: Yeah, we see his mother.

Dan: so Justin's down

Sidey: again.

Reegs: Julian. Julian, he, they got like the biggest nerd ever to play this kid. It's amazing with these like huge, thick glasses and it's like vacant look that he's got.

Sidey: Yeah, he's down. He clearly is not an athlete. You know, he is not into his sporting pursuits and he's like, oh, he is down again, or I can't tell his father. And then they cut to them having a, a conversation there in, what do you call it?

The bleachers.

And

Dan: the

Sidey: lady,

I forget her name, Lisa, she says, oh, your baby looks cute. I said, oh, thanks so much. That's really nice. Do you want it. And

just, just

Dan: do, do you want

Sidey: just hands

the baby over And you're like, what's going on?

Dan: Yeah. Yeah. And, and you get then the, the sense of how ridiculous all these people are because they, there's conversations just before that, you know, oh, it's so nice.

You're hearing so nice. Or They always so good or so

Reegs: Well, they have a chat about a local yoga teacher who was unfortunately killed which is a shame because they really had both been wanting to take up Yoga

Yeah. And they've all got braces. Everybody's

Sidey: got every single one of

Dan: They've all got perfect teeth already. Yeah. But they, they're all wearing braces.

Reegs: Yeah. So yeah. Lisa does take the baby. The baby is a little reluctant at first. She's been her mom whole life, so, but yeah, she takes it and we zoom right into those braces and the lips just kind of quivering.

Sidey: as though she tries to hold the pose while all the credits flash up on her teeth and on

Dan: That's it. It's, it is holding the smile when you see these kind of little like flickers around the, the corners of her mouth, that that shows that she's almost regretting that as she did it, but doesn't want to lose face. Now that would be worse than anything, you know, that you would be pointed out as not being nice or not being Yeah.

You know, anything other than gotta go with the flow. So she gives away the baby cuz she thinks that will make people like her and be popular.

Sidey: After the credits roll, we get some more scenes of, there's like a party going on. It's a, we meet the husbands. Yeah. And they're both,

Reegs: they're also dressed in pasts and braces

Sidey: Whatever they're wearing.

The color palette always matches the different families of all different colors that they got on. And they, they're talking away and, and it's this like excessive politeness with an undertone of we can't be seen to be like doing worse than them. So there's conversations about how the skirt, the kids in maths rockets rocket maths.

Yeah. And oh, oh. Like, you know, their kids obviously not in it and it is like completely wounded by that. And just

Reegs: and then they're terrifying social awkwardness if they've been invited to swim. But it's like, oh, I left my costume at home. And then everybody's like,

Sidey: They, they say

There's this drawn out sequence at the party that they're having when they kiss the husbands. Yeah. And my sister goes, they, their baby's not swapped and then they do this long kiss where they zoom in on the couple's mouths for ages. Yeah. And these grotesque kissing movements that they do so exaggerated.

And then they go, oh, wrong husbands. And then they swap and do it again. You're like, oh man, this is hideous. It goes on for ages.

Dan: That's because

Reegs: she says I got confused cuz Dennis was holding the baby

Dan: Yeah. Dennis was holding Matilda. I know it's page now.

Sidey: now. Yeah. Page

Reegs: Where they drive, there's no cars in this world. Everybody drives in golf buggies to their perfect suburban homes and they

Sidey: I've been to

Reegs: our

Sidey: like.

Reegs: Yeah. Well, I suppose it emphasizes the fact that everything's just, they're just insular in this little town. And

Sidey: I played golf quite a lot in Florida and there's loads of, you know, places like that where there's, there's communities like gated communities, you know, where the, the golf course is dotted and in amongst all the houses, so everyone does get around and these golf carts quite absurd.

Reegs: Yeah. And their homes are exactly as you'd imagine. They're all these fake looking things that not very, you know. Yeah. Not very real. That's like what fake means. And um, Jill notices that Julian has soiled himself in the golf cart on the way

Sidey: Yeah.

He is. Got a, not just a bed. We problem just, just peeing himself.

Reegs: Yeah.

Husband Nick is obsessed with checking the pool water, the new filtration system.

It makes the pool water absolutely delicious. And his wife, Jill, the one, the way the baby, she starts a new fashion trend where she puts her pants around her neck. Yeah, yeah. And everybody starts copying it. Instagram star. They have a conversation, don't they? She's like preparing dinner and she's like, oh, I hope you're not, you know, mad at me for giving our baby away.

And it's this scene of domestic tension built around giving this baby away. And he just says, next time, just talk to me first. Okay. And, but what he does actually get is, gets more pissy about the dinner, which is Mexican meat pie

Sidey: Yeah.

Dan: Not tacos. And he, he then has become so obsessed with his poor water, which you can drink. He, he won't drink any other water. He, he kind of brings it all the way through the movie with him in

Sidey: Yeah, cuz the next shows up when they go to a cafe and they, they've met for brunch and there's a, a crash where the waiter bumps into another waiter and drops all the food on the floor.

But rather than send it back or ask for something new that awkwardness, they just eat it off the floor. And you're just watching it. And I have to say, my message just was like, this is too fucking weird.

Reegs: It's pretty, it's a pretty weird movie. Yeah.

Sidey: We're not, I don't think adequately really articulating just how fucking bonkers it, it has been up to this point, but it goes even fucking more.

But so what I did notice was that she took us halfway to the other side of the room, got a laptop to that stood up, but I could see she was still fucking watching it. Like she's still completely like, found it compelling enough to like keep looking and see what, and just getting like the head shakes, you know, she's just like, what the

Dan: well it, it was almost being made up of lots of little sketches.

Yeah. All the way through, wasn't it? It was knitted together with a plot and everything, but each kind of time there was some like that restaurant scene and they all, and then it just cut then and they ended up in a, in another scene in another area.

Sidey: Well, we get what's the kid called, Julian?

Reegs: Yeah.

Sidey: There's more, there's more things about Julian's incontinence because she has to go to the school and drop off like a whole hamper of underwear.

Reegs: Yeah. To miss human. It's Darcy card from the,

Sidey: I did like her name

Reegs: from,

Sidey: and she said she has to say every time when everything and anything happens to the child, she's always like, you know, hope his father doesn't find out.

And she's like, next time just don't phone his office. You know, make sure you tell me cuz she's just trying to hide everything and make sure he's not disappointed in him.

Reegs: And Miss Human says, oh, well he did actually soil a, a bean bag. he said, oh, I'll wash it. No, it's pretty bad. Or I'll replace it. Well, it's irreplaceable. My dead mother who killed my father my brother and my sister made it so

Dan: and then she just kind of sorts us back into the classroom, doesn't she? She just slinks away and there's no real reason for her to have said it other than just make her feel bad in the end. Cuz she couldn't fix it.

Sidey: Yeah.

Dan: It's just another little dig. I was feeling quite sorry for her at this stage because although she's given away the baby

Sidey: well, she starts to have second thoughts

about, it.

After all this things starts to happening. And she talks to another neighbor and she says, you know, I'm really put out that, you know, you gave your baby away. And she's like, oh yeah. You know, she's like, no, that you didn't offer it to me first. Yeah. And but Jills obviously, with all this other stuff going on, she's like, oh, do you think we made a mistake given the baby away?

You know, like

Reegs: that's her friend, Kim Ann. She's been recently divorced. And that'll become

Dan: later. Who was that? It looked like it looked like the, the singer girl to me, you know, did Katie

Sidey: Katie

Dan: Perry.

Reegs: It does

look a bit like

Dan: a she. Yeah.

Reegs: She's got kids a grownup daughter called Citronella and twins called Dan and Roo and Dan sat on Roo in the womb and she's constantly reminding him, that's why he is small, cuz her brother sat

Sidey: They're the same

height.

Reegs: Yeah.

And Jill goes to see her. That's, it's brilliant. She brings a dip in and she's like, oh, it's a taco dip. Is it seven layers? No, it's five. And she's like, oh, you can put it on the floor,

Sidey: like,

Reegs: it, and Jill's constantly apologizing throughout the home. 70, 80% of our lines are just her saying, I'm sorry,

Sidey: Well, there's one bit where the four golf carts just pull up at the same, at the crossroads and it's this, I think really hammers home this thing about the politeness and no one's willing to. And, and they're like, no, you,

no, you were here

Dan: like a Mexican standoff,

Sidey: No, no, you were here first. I said, no, no, I wasn't here first. You were here first. And it just goes on and on for ages.

Reegs: and then scenes of social anxiety like you were saying about the test.

Oh, you remember that test? Lisa Bob did average and like the look of crushing disappointment and yeah. There's also like Julian has a few kind of behavioral things and we see it play out over the endless loop of activities that he has. So he has a piano recycle where he's supposed to be playing Yankee Doodle Dandy and he just smashes out this atonal blasting on the piano and that she's horrified and then they go to a karate, he.

Class. And she like undresses him and , like, he's about three years old, but he's about nine. And then he goes off and does this really racist kicking and screaming and shit.

Sidey: The piano bit is amazing. And then they're like, no, that was embarrassing. You can't do it anymore. He said, but I love the piano. I was so bad at it.

Reegs: It . Yeah. There's loads of sort of interspersed sort of TV bits where we find out a bit more about the world. There's like a fake reality cooking show where they sh they have to swap dishes and that's what they'll be judged on. And there's an advert for baby food made without the presence of violence and knives.

So it's chewed up by the mother and spat

Sidey: It's just Yeah. You go spit out as idiots.

Reegs: Yeah.

Sidey: so it's been weird up until this point, right? Yeah. And then we get the party for

Jill's. it's

Reegs: it's Nick's birthday's 40th.

Sidey: and the party goes on. And then I think Julian's embarrassing about something else. And then to,

Reegs: well, cuz he keeps, she, she puts him on the toilet and she's like, I

Sidey: want, that's right.

Reegs: toilet.

And she's like, really stressing out about it. And

Sidey: then it cut, it cuts to him singing happy Birthday to his dad, and

Dan: right in front of everybody on

Sidey: the and you're like, oh, what's like, he's gonna piss like himself while he is singing or something, you know, something.

And he just falls like all of a sudden. He just launches straight into the pool. Her first, I always been like, oh my God. Like what? Like dead kid or something? Yeah, but no He emerges

from the pool as a, as a golden

Reegs: Yeah.

And she says, Julian, are you a dog now? Yeah,

Sidey: it is as weird as that. Then they dress him up in like the kids' clothes,

Dan: he, he comes out the pool and he's still got

Reegs: school uniform on

Dan: isn't he? And, and yeah. So she, she refuses to believe that

Reegs: she takes, she takes him

Dan: think she'll

Reegs: She tries to put his glasses on

Dan: going

into school and Julian always won't work.

She sits him down. The teacher

Reegs: she's talking

Dan: well, you are late. He's late. I know that

Sidey: tardy.

Reegs: where she's talking about the six most prevalent forms of death for people on the frontiers. And she wants people, she says to the kids, list six people, you know, including themselves and think how you'd want them to die. But yeah, she's more fu about him being late than being a dog. And then she makes the whole class sing a lovely song about her mother killing her father.

Dan: Yeah. And then Julian actually has a, he shares a new bond with his father because he's suddenly out there and he can, he can play Frisbee and catch and everything and he's such, he's so quick.

He may be an all star. He's so proud of his son now.

Sidey: we've seen him play catch before and he'd like just under arm throws the ball when he was a human. Yeah. And it just bounces off him and he starts crying and runs in. But now that he can like

properly,

Dan: now he's a dog.

Sidey: really, you know, only interested in his son being sporty.

Reegs: Yeah. Well they'd had a big altercation before his transformation, if you remember correctly, where.

Heat. Julian says to his mom, you are a school, you've got clocks in you and everything. And he sends him to his room and he's like, no. If anything, Julian's the one who's more like a school So yeah, their relationship wasn't great, and he much prefers this new, new version.

Lisa becomes pregnant by putting a ball up her dress during a football match which everyone just instantly accepts. She's like, I'm pregnant now. And Dennis's like, oh, we're having another baby. And then Julian, who's paying for, he's sent off for being constantly offside. And there's a candlelight vigil for Cheryl Ho, the yoga teacher who was killed, and they bring up her ex-boyfriend to, to give a eulogy that he's completely unprepared for, and in which he talks about how awful it would be if what happened to her happened to his new girlfriend.

Dan: just before the sidelines as well.

They'd after Julian had been told he couldn't play, they tell that hilarious joke and Well, he, he kind of does an impression, doesn't he? Yeah. And they're all kind of slapping their thighs afterwards and go, I can't believe it. Going over the top with laughing and again, yeah, just, just more bizarre, bizarre scenes then.

Reegs: Yeah. Well, Lisa and and Dennis's son watches a TV program called Kid Kids with Knives, and it just turns him into an asshole for the rest of the movie, like

Sidey: It's amazing.

Reegs: of stuff.

Sidey: well, Jill

also tells Nick that she's unhappy and she wants a divorce.

Reegs: Well, after her friends tell her to, yeah, Lisa basically, so you know, what is happening as well is that Lisa is sort of socially engineering Jill's destruction, and it really ramps up now where she says, oh, you should get a divorce.

It worked really well for Kim Ann. So she instantly says, okay, and she goes down to Nick and tells him right there, and then

him.

Yeah. And then they have to break the news to Julian and they say, it's definitely not because you're really bad at football. That we're getting a divorce, so don't worry about that.

Dan: Yeah. It's, it's he doesn't want a divorce either. He's really against it, isn't he? He's he's saying, please, please. No. It's around this time. They, she goes round, the divorces happened and the baby has, has been born and it's Wilson, it's a football

Sidey: because they say, they say Wilson. I know that was, that was Tom Hanks' one.

Reegs: Yeah, that was Tom Hanks' baby. Yeah. And so Nick says, how about Wilson?

Sidey: Yeah.

Dan: And they love it instantly.

Reegs: and they go for a family photo. And the photographer, I thought he was really good in this scene, and it's a great, and she asks at the end of it where they're having their photos taken, she says, oh, can you get a seat for me?

I want one where I can sit. And the two, you know, my son and my husband are behind me. And it's like, mm oh, okay. You want something to sit on

like all this awkwardness. And eventually guess his assistant in a wheelchair out and like physically lifts her out the chair and then puts her in the wheelchair for the photo.

She's like, oh, it's not really what I want. He's like, it's very expensive. Did you not bring any other outfits as well?

Sidey: Mm,

It's fucking

twisted.

Reegs: So anyway, it's all starting to fall apart for Jill. Who's left Julian at home and Nick's horrified by that. You know, Julian, she says he sleeps so much now. She goes to get her haircut, which involves like actual blood coming out of her hair.

Dan: She, she's asked for her baby Madison

Sidey: Yeah. She goes to see Lisa and pleads to have

Dan: It's the, it is the second time she's asked for it back. And, and she really doesn't like the fact that she's being asked.

Reegs: She tells her not to be she doesn't wanna be an Indian giver.

Dan: but now you've got twen and you've got another baby. And I haven't got

Sidey: what we haven't mentioned is there's a stalker

going round, sort of repeating what she says.

Yeah. Like, like stalking her very closely and like maniacally laughing and, and repeating and laughing at all her trauma

Reegs: we get like POV shots. Yeah. All the way through the movie of the

Dan: watching. This is potentially the, the yoga woman killer still on the loose. Yeah. And

Reegs: When, so when after it's all fallen apart, she's asked for her baby back. She still can't have it. You know, everything's, she's got a divorce now. And she goes home, back to her house and little Helen this is Dot, Marie Jones is the actress.

You'd know her. She's like a big

Sidey: Yeah.

Reegs: framed woman. And she's in the kitchen cooking maniacally and pretending to be Jill, you know, reciting her lines that she said throughout the movie. And she's plastered her face on the pictures in the background. I think you saw that. So she's, and, and Jill's like, I'm pretty sure this is my house.

And little Helen's like, no, it's my house now. And she's like, no, I'm, I'm, I, I don't really, don't mean to be rude, but I'm really sure this is my house. But eventually she is chucked out.

Sidey: Yeah. She

gets a golf cart

Dan: And she, she goes straight through the the crossroads where everybody's about to, to slow down to spend five or 10 minutes gesturing to each other to go first. She blasts through a little bit late. She makes the news for that one. Such a, a small town. But yeah, she goes back to the house where she grew up.

Reegs: well, just before that she drives and drives and drives and she's getting more and more disheveled. And then she stops and she gets some wire cutters.

And she takes her braces off and this is only a 12, this movie. But it's deeply unsettling the whole way through. And she like snips her actual braces off. You see blood in her mouth and stuff. It's quite horrific. And then she drives on into the night. She's almost hit by a juggernaut, I think is like the only real vehicle we see.

And that's when she drives out where to where she was born. Not in the suburbs, but in the country.

Sidey: Mm-hmm.

Reegs: And we meet

the most recognizably normal human being really in this entire movie.

Dan: Yeah. She's like out of the, the gated community. And she's

that the,

house where she goes to, it's this, this woman, and she's got like seven kids.

Sidey: Yeah.

she just what any normal person would do.

Dan: And she, she knocks on the door and she's asked about it and she asks if she could have one of her kids. And clearly this woman's normal and just slams the door in her face and says, no, go away. And she can't really understand it all.

Reegs: well, one of the kids sneaks out and ends up, I guess, being abducted and going to a diner with Jill Where

she sees on television that little Helen has been apprehended.

Sidey: She is the yoga murderer. Yeah. Mm.

Reegs: And Lisa called it in. But le she saw, she saw Jill and she knew it wasn't her because Jill doesn't have any children. Cuz she gave them all away . It's what she says. Anyway,

Dan: yeah, she, she, she's kind of on tv and she, she says, I did well, I went to the house and she said it was Jill and it wasn't Jill. So I called her up and now I'm on tv and she just kind of smiles and stands there. And then the TV reporter goes, yes, I'm on TV too, And it just fades out again.

Yeah.

And

Reegs: then we come to a truly, truly bizarre, bizarre ending to this bizarre film where she brings the new kid to football. She looks terrible.

Her hair is all over the place. Dirty, bloody teeth. You know, she really stands out, obviously in this pristine

Dan: the leaves in her hair.

Reegs: Lisa offers Bob to her and we see him kicking the shit out, the goal posts and swearing. She's like, no thanks. And then she informs him that she can come round for a swim because she's decided to live in her house now.

Nick is gonna be their pool boy, and she can go and live in Dennis and Lisa's house. And.

As she turns to watch the football sort of processing this news that she's lost everything to this woman. We see that the lawn that the kids have been playing on is actually a graveyard. Yeah. And she asks Lisa, do they, do the children always play football on Graves?

And she says, yeah. And she says, I never noticed that before. And then it just like, Blairs the music and we see the triumphant Lisa, who's, you know, acquired the big house, the pool looks great, and her friend is a broken mess. What a triumph for her.

Dan: Yeah. It's kind of like a, a glow around her and, and then that's it.

Sidey: It's fucking weird.

Dan: Yeah. It really is. It, it, it was like, Made up of so many little bits though there so many little individual scenes that you could just laugh at. And, and then it moved on to the other one, and it was kind of kept together by this ridiculous plot of, you know, chasing and always trying to make somebody else happy and always looking as if the grass is greener and, you know, you should be doing more.

And it, yeah, it was

Sidey: I,

I enjoyed,

Dan: It did, made me laugh a few times. I

Sidey: I did chuckle, especially when the, when the dog thing happened, but it did, I don't think it necessarily worked that brilliantly as a cohesive film.

Reegs: it's, you said it before, it's much more like a series of sketches almost, but,

Sidey: It started out life as a short film.

Dan: Right.

Sidey: And then they've expanded on it and I, I did enjoy it overall, I have to say.

Reegs: I just think it's interesting territory because it's all about, you know,

Hostility in through kindness and you know, how women are constantly apologizing for like really minor transgressions or sometimes in this case really big ones, and like how people are just talking about what houses they have and who their husband is and what their kids do and all this, you know,

Dan: and how people can feel slighted by, you know, somebody's else's success or somebody else's opinion on, on something else.

That is relatively low stakes, but the, they all get high and mighty about it. Yeah, it was it was not like anything I'd kind of seen before like that, you know, there was there was something fresh in you about. The way that they put the jokes together and the way that this society had viewed and the culture of it all.

And I thought it was interesting like that. It probably went on, they're probably a scene or two. They could have cut and it wouldn't have lost much to film me. It might have made it a little more tight to and easier to watch. But no, I, I did, I kind of enjoyed it. It was nothing that I would rush back to, but it was weird and wonderful enough that I would remember it and I'd be interested to see what else they would do, because this is a, a debut say with these two.

And I think this is I dunno if they have done anything else after this to follow up.

Reegs: I'm not sure.

Dan: good research.

Reegs: Yeah, Thanks. I

definitely will look up, look at, out for more stuff though, because I, I thought it looked

really

Dan: interest. She was brilliant. The lead, the lead in this what, what was her name?

Sidey: Joscelyn Burke. Yeah. As Jill.

Yeah,

Dan: I thought she was really, really good in this, I thought. It was excellent. Both the, the lead actors were actually, I thought they were both really good.

Sidey: I couldn't find any information about the budget for it, unfortunately. But do you wanna know, has the guess what it might have done at the box office worldwide?

Dan: Ooh, I, yeah. Okay. Less than 10 mil, I reckon.

Reegs: Two

Sidey: 76,000. So that is definitely less than

10 mil. So you were right,

Reegs: I think it was an award winner, wasn't it?

Sidey: Well it was at Sundance. I dunno that it actually won, like whatever, who cares? I mean, blah, blah, blah. It's a curiosity and I quite enjoyed it.

And Mrs said it was the weirdest fucking things you'd ever seen and what the fuck was the point of it?

So go

Dan: pile pocket. Is that the theme tune? Cause I didn't see this. It was the theme tune. Just,

Sidey: it's,

Dan: I've heard of it

Sidey: more lively and but generic at the same time.

Reegs: Mm.

Dan: How long was, was this

Sidey: a two-parter.

Dan: Wow.

Sidey: we watched series one, episode one. We did, but it's a double whammy.

Reegs: Yeah. I didn't watch both

parts,

Sidey: I don't know what happens.

Cause I only watched the first one.

Yeah,

Dan: Right. Okay. How does,

Reegs: well, it's an origin story. It's her superhero

Sidey: origin

story. I mean, are you familiar with the toy line of

Dan: I am. Yeah. It's

Sidey: miniature stuff. So this could be a honey, I change the size of something spin off.

Because that's what happens.

Reegs: is that

was that big In your house, you've got a, a daughter, did she play

Dan: No, no. Never. Really. I, they, they were there, they appeared for a short period of time, but nothing that they grabbed onto really, you know,

Reegs: I can see the

Dan: Sylvia families is another, is it Sylvia? Yeah. Veian families. Those figures we got,

Reegs: they're worth something I think. You can see the attraction of it.

You can take like a little house with the swimming pool with you somewhere and have your little figures.

Sidey: Yeah, my daughter's got a few, but I think there were more things that she was bought as birthday presents. She wasn't ever, like, she's not an enthusiast, I wouldn't say.

Reegs: say. Yeah. the, the concept of the toy had been around way before

Sidey: Yeah. Cuz the Mrs the Mrs had these when she was a kid. Yeah. So they'd been around a long while.

Reegs: Yeah. There's a fair amount of nostalgia for Pollock, I

would say. Yeah.

This is the 2018 animation

Sidey: Mattel Mattel TV thing. Yeah. Cause that's who it's made by.

Reegs: and we start with her zooming down the open highway in a car in the desert jumping and then it dissolves and she's just playing in her brother's car.

Yeah. Say her brother. And he says little girls can't drive and then he backs into the garbage cans on the way out. Uhhuh

And then we get the intro, which is one of those like horrible music, blinding flash of everything that it's about. Yeah. Type things.

Dan: Animation style.

Reegs: Yes. it, it did,

Dan: did, it did okay.

Sidey: It's bright and kind of generic.

Reegs: I would actually say that probably the animation style was the thing I liked most about this. It was fairly dynamic and colorful. Definitely colorful,

Sidey: Yes, it is loud and visually quite striking, but not, I wouldn't say it's mega distinctive.

CGI

Dan: or cartoon or what are we talking animation is in,

Reegs: it's all done with computers these days,

Dan: isn't it?

Yeah. Right.

Reegs: it's not

Sidey: like in the way the Simpsons is. Yeah. It's not hand drawn. but maybe it is hand drawn on the computer, but it looks like that.

Dan: right.

Reegs: So anyway, we're introduced to her. She's at home making toys and models and stuff with her mother. She's like something. Inventor, she's making a remote controlled car.

The dog comes in, starts causing chaos. She's got a much younger brother, a toddler. So the, the age difference in the family is quite, quite big. That must have been an unfortunate surprise, I assume that toddler

Sidey: Yeah, I mean, I'll be fucking raging if we had another one now

Reegs: And then grandma, then grandma turns up and she's staying for a week and she's obviously very close with grandma and she has a special Locke on.

And though it's suddenly, you know, it's been broken for years, it suddenly opens up. So gra gives it to her to look at cuz she's an inventor, whatever. And she tries to fix it. And then her mates come round there obsessed with a pop singer called Melody who has a new song out and they wanna get tickets for a concert, but they.

Dan: These are all really new, exciting themes that they've thrown into this.

Then something really

Reegs: really, It's

a lot of scene setting to be honest.

Dan: Right. Okay. Cuz it's the origin one.

Reegs: Yeah. Cuz we still haven't got to the like main, you know, you're thinking when are we gonna change the size of things? And that's gonna be soon because she's using a 3D printer, she's manufactured a thing to fix the clock or whatever.

Sidey: Yeah. And she goes full amp man.

Reegs: Yeah, she, it's got something called pocket time, which is like bullet time I guess, but smaller

Sidey: but for pockets. Yeah.

Reegs: Yeah.

Sidey: And so, she does shrink down. And she gets to grips of that pretty quickly. She's not in any way, sort of like ptsd,

Reegs: or phased at all about it, even though she is nearly killed by a Hoover that

Sidey: she's got one of those automated Hoover, like a room, they call them

Why that Comes

out And she has to deal with that and run away.

Dan: Geez, that have

Sidey: the usual kind of shrinking down kind of episodes you might imagine that would happen around the house.

Reegs: And she stops it. It's a thrilling escape. And the dog comes in and licks her and then she sees on the pocket watch the go big and she says it and she goes big.

And so she experiments a couple of times going small pocket dime, go

Sidey: go big. or go home

Reegs: to go big and then go big again and see how big she can get or pocket time, pocket time, pocket time. She never tried that.

Dan: Ah,

Reegs: so

Sidey: that could be

like

the origin of condom Mania.

Reegs: Yeah. Maybe she was prevented from doing so by Marvel.

I don't know. So she shows her friends that she can shrink and they're also relatively calm about this improbable series of events.

Dan: Is she looking to use it to her advantage

Reegs: Yeah. Well, it's funny you should say that because she, it's a bit dodgy this because she uses her powers, right.

Melody, the pop singer that they wanna see is gonna be at the mall. Somehow this massive, like multinational singer is being sponsored by a clothes shop at mall. And anyway, she's there and her Arch Enemy

Glenda

or something, Gwen Gwen Grande and her Grandma Gelle are there.

Dan: Gwenda Grande.

Reegs: Grande. Yeah. Right.

And she gets pushed into a room. So Polly Pocket decides to use her smallness powers to like sneak in through the air ducts to go and see melody, even though she's not supposed to,

but they never deal with the moral implications of.

Sidey: Yeah. Which are terrible,

Dan: I suppose. So she gets into the, the change of room, so then goes, goes

Reegs: live?

No she doesn't. There's there's a fan thing that she nearly gets killed by a ceiling fan. Then she ends up falling into a box that Gelle had full of miniature things because,

Sidey: Elle's been on the hunt for this Locke. Gelle Gelle knows about the locket. She, she's an older lady and she, she's known that this lock has been in existence.

She wants it. She wants to get Probably

for nefarious reasons. Dan, can you believe it? And

so,

Dan: do at

Reegs: cuz it's also revealed that Pollock is one in a long line of lock pocket

Sidey: Yeah.

Reegs: Sir Isaac Newton was inspired by an apple that was heard by a tiny person.

You know, so throughout history

know

Dan: Yeah, right.

Reegs: So I think there was Hitler's wetness, something like that. I don't know. So yeah. Also that's been going on. So her grandma is Penelope pocket. I dunno if you've heard of her.

Something of a big deal in the, in the,

Dan: the, in the pocket world. Okay.

Reegs: Oh, she was sent out into space, wasn't she, in 1969 and helped out with the moon landings.

That was what she did.

Sidey: Of course.

Reegs: And also, of course, what's also obvious is that her arch enemy Gelle has this plan to enslave the entire little town of Littleton in her tiny miniature village.

Dan: They're called Littleton.

Reegs: Yeah. It's almost like, what's that thing called? Where it's nominative determinism or something where it's, where

Sidey: why. Okay. Okay. With that. Yeah. So yeah, that's, that's pretty much it for part one.

Reegs: Grandma reveals it can shrink two people if you're holding hands. Oh, okay. Or touching pins. It didn't say that,

Sidey: but

it's non-specific. I think just contact is what it takes.

Dan: Okay.

So then it just ended on that cliff hanger then, and it didn't suck you in enough to think. Gonna do number two. How long are they? Or maybe you just went for a number two. Did you? After this

Reegs: the main problem is, it's like pretty bland really. And her, she's got barely any personality and her mates aren't that interesting either. So,

Sidey: No, I mean it's an obvious toy tie in thing. That's the, that's the problem for me.

My daughter clocked it straight away cause I put it on when she was, I think running away from the dog at the time actually. And she came in and said, oh, are you watching Polly Pocket? And when I'd put it on, I'd had to go back from series six all the way back to find, you know, one episode

one. So I think she had been watching it at some point.

And maybe cuz she did have the toys and it completely hoodwinked her into watching this. Cuz doesn't really have much about it to be honest.

Dan: No.

Reegs: My youngest has just started watching this just to, in the run up to

Sidey: Right.

Just in Toy Town.

Reegs: to Yeah. Bring a load of this plastic shit in as opposed to whatever the next plastic shit is.

Sidey: Yeah.

Dan: This been around a while though, isn't it? Pocket Poly? I mean it's, it's a longer standing toy. I dunno, I think it's, I dunno if it's toy, then cartoon or this is cartoon and then, Going to the toy.

Reegs: Yeah. No, this was all toy first.

Dan: It was all toy

Reegs: first. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

yeah, yeah. And then they tried

Sidey: they, and they bought

Dan: and now they're

Sidey: powerfully bland Series afterwards.

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: Okay. There you go. Mystery solved. This isn't much good and don't go rushing out to see it

Sidey: or buying it. The plastic stuff. Avoid.

Dan: More eco top tips from the dads. Did we go through food this week? Because res went all out with the buttons.

Reegs: Buttons and skittles.

Sidey: Yeah, that was decent. I brought rounds of loads of those AMT biscuits and I just fucking piled through the whole bag of them. Nice. I'm hooked on those at the moment. I think it might be my turn to nominate. And I was thinking about doing 2010. How would everyone feel about that if that happened?

Dan: I'm gonna go with the flow. You just, yeah,

Sidey: I haven't got any other nominations, so I'll I'll ruminate on that maybe for another 24 hours before I lock that in. But I will let you know.

Reegs: All right.

Sidey: Okay.

Dan: That'd be good.

Sidey: All it remains is to say society's signing out

Reegs: freaks out.

Dan: Dan's gone.