‘Road House’ Blues

Welcome back to this Tuesday’s across the movie aisle presented by Bulwark Plus. I’m your host Sunny Bunch culture editor of the Bulwark I’m joined as always, by the award winning list of Rosenberg of the Washington Post and Peter Souerman of Reason Magazine, Elizabeth. How are you today?

I am okay.

I am so happy to be talking about movies with friends.

Alright. Before we get started, a reminder that across the movie, I’ll Live is happening Tuesday, April ninth, seven PM at the Bryant Street Alamo Draft House in Washington, DC. We’re gonna be showing and talking about arrival. I am very much looking forward to it. I’ve heard from a handful of folks who are gonna be there, and, it’ll be nice to say hi to everyone.

Come come up, say hi. We we love chatting. I think we’re down to, like, the last two rows in the front. That’s all that’s left. So make sure you make sure you get those are good seats folks.

I’m telling you, those are good seats. It’s a dominate division. It’s like it’s like IMAX, but not in an IMAX screen. It’s great.

You’ll learn them. They always wanted to sit in the very front row because they wanted to be the first people where the light would hit their eyes. It’s like they were seeing the movie before anyone else. You can have that experience at the Alamo Draft House in Washington DC on April ninth.

You don’t even have to be a weirdo French director. It’s great. Alright. On to controversies and controversies, where we have a very serious problem on our hands folks. Late night with the devil, which is an indie horror flick that was produced two years ago, has some fleeting shots of AI generated artwork and some some of the background images, have some logos and stuff.

You know, people are very, very upset about it. At least a handful of very loud people in the Hot House of horror, Twitter are very upset about it, and they are happy to let you know about it. Argument that they are making go something like this. Generative AI is not only theft because it is based on plagiarizing big chunks of digital libraries. It is also a job killer because someone could have been paid to make the art that was generated by that AI.

In the case of late night with the devil, which is a found footage style movie, set largely on the set of a TV show in which the host has to deal with demonic possession. The art in question is the logo for the show. You see it in some interstitials. It’s in the background of the sets, etcetera, etcetera. There are a couple of interesting wrinkles to this story.

The first is that the film was shot two years ago, meaning before the strikes during which AI started to be treated like a life or death situation for the artistic community. It was really more of a toy that people were kind of playing with, and I would bet that more than a few of the folks freaking out about this now were gleefully sharing AI generated images of classic slasher villains reimagined as out of ninja turtles or some nonsense. The second is that, the film hired a number of artists to do things like mock up fake magazine covers, etcetera. The third and perhaps most important, look, this is an indie film. It’s made on a shoestring.

Did not actually have a lot of money to burn, saving a couple hundred bucks here and there on a logo. Is actually meaningful to this production. Now I mentioned the budget here because it really does matter. It really does matter. And as anyone who has made an independent movie knows that couple hundred bucks goes somewhere else directly into the movie.

You’re not getting rich on these things. Every dollar counts. And I and, you know, that that means that there’s less of an excuse for something like, say, true detective Night Country, which used AI to generate some posters a character’s bedroom than there is for a movie that costs about as much as any ten minutes of that show using it in addition to hiring, artists and actual art. But look, I am the AI skeptic on this show. I am very, very skeptical about these things.

I think we have to be very careful with how we treat it. How we use it, what we allow, what we don’t allow. And if we’re going to treat AI, like we treat, say, fabrication to journalism, if we wanna make it a penalty style offense. I think there’s a conversation we can have, but there has to be some sort of consistency. You gotta lay out the rules.

That said, maybe Peter, we should just call off the Butler and jihad and let the computers take take over and make all our movies. Right?

Yep. That’s what I’m looking forward to. Look, I I think that it’s coming for us whether we like it or not. If Hollywood bans the use of AI and successfully manages to keep major studios and anyone sort of involved with any of the guilds, the whole sort of professional production apparatus, from using AI in any form. First of all, I don’t think that that’s going to happen.

That seems incredibly unrealistic to me. But, let’s say that you you’d somehow or another managed to completely keep all the filmmakers, all the creatives from using it anyway at all. Guess what’s gonna happen? People sitting in their basements at their computers at their desk at home are gonna start making movies using AI, and they’re gonna upload it to YouTube, and they’re gonna be competing with Hollywood anyway because YouTube is already competing with Hollywood. And all of the people outside of the professional apparatus are gonna end up using it.

And so I hear that the folks who are making movies are gonna have to figure out how to use this stuff and make it work for them, or they’re just going to make that as an opportunity for their competitors for people who are out, it’s already gonna be an opportunity to be clear for their competitors, but they’re gonna they’re going to tie a hand behind their back. It in this, like, in in doing so if they just say, well, no filmmaker can use this. I think that that is absolutely absurd. AI is just a tool for getting things done. And the thing that you highlighted upfront Sunny.

I don’t entirely agree with you that it’s a matter of budget that, like, there’s the you can be harsher on a on a film or a TV show if it has a really big budget. But I do think that it’s the right or or one of the right frames by which to look at the use of AI. So the budget on late night with the devil is rumored to be about two million dollars. That is not a big budget at all. And like you said, this was probably a cost saving measure.

For the the little tiny bit of art that that got used there. But AI, if it works out, if it proves to be useful, is going to be an incredible cost saving measure. And that is going to have a a bunch of really interesting effects on the world of making movies, which is even cheap movies are incredibly expensive. Right? Late night with the devil is cheap, cheap movie, and it cost two million dollars to make before marketing as far as we can delegate.

These are rumored numbers, not, official numbers. Right? But, So it cost a couple million dollars to make. And if you can bring down the cost of filmmaking dramatically and make it possible to do stuff for essentially the price of sitting at your computer and thinking about it for a while and saying and playing with with things. Right?

And it’s just and it and it becomes something more like, I don’t know, like, writing a novel than, you know, than putting together, a team of artists to to make something that costs millions of dollars, and takes weeks or months or, you know, like, if you can bring down the cost then AI is going to revolutionize filmmaking, in ways that might be bad. Right? There might be some problems with that. I certainly think that cheap filmmaking will flood the market with stuff that is not very good, not even necessarily because it’s made by AI just because when you can get a lot of stuff easily for cheap then what you will get first and foremost is a lot of stuff, not very good stuff. But it also means that some people will be able to use it to make things that wouldn’t have been able to be made and that they they couldn’t have made, and in particular is gonna empower outsiders who don’t have access to big studios or even to small, you know, indie budget to make their movies.

And that’s going to be that’s gonna be a really interesting time to be a movie fan, a movie watcher, a movie maker, someone who is trying to break in because I think it’s really it’s it’s gonna it’s gonna create opportunities for people who actually do have a lot of who do have good ideas and who don’t have access to those, to the community, to the professional world, to the insider networks that it takes, and and the huge amounts of money that it takes to make a movie. And so I I just think this is coming whether people like it or not, and it’s absolutely crazy to try and take down films or sit or say This is this is not this is something that we think is totally unacceptable for any movie maker to do ever.

Alyssa, one of the things that you have written about a lot is the is ethical ethical consumption of our testing works. Right? So, you know, one of the one of the subplots of the story is that People on the internet, that that that person, that hoary person, was saying they were saying, alright. Well, you know what, it’s actually okay to pirate this thing. It’s it’s okay to steal this thing because it is based on it’s using art that was stolen from other people to to generate it.

And that’s obviously kind of an stream version of this. But do you think that in the face of what Peter is talking about here, which is huge amounts of money that can be saved by corporate operations by rifling through vast catalogs of often illicitly acquired artwork that is scraped from the internet. And thrown into the AI slush machine. Is there a role for the consumer, for the average thought leader here to play in terms of trying to steer folks away from spending their hard earned dollars on this sort of thing, or damaging these productions in other ways financial.

So I always think that piracy is, a kind of negative and therefore inferior ethical solution to these kinds of dilemmas. Right? Like, when I first started writing about sort of thinking about how to do ethical consumption in some ways, I, I think the first I wrote on this subject was about the adaptation of, orson Scott Cards’s Enderskame, which is a book that was really important to me, growing up, I really, really profoundly disagree with some of what Orson Scott card has written and said about homosexuality, and about marriage equality, And my argument at the time, I think this was twenty thirteen, maybe, was that the it was far more useful to donate the equivalent of a ticket price to a charity that does good things for LGBT people or for the cause of marriage equality than it is to boycott the movie or pirate it. Because the number of actual cents that Orson Scott card was getting out of your ticket money was tiny, and even you know, with those pennies accumulating his bank account, the amount that he would be able to do with that money was less than, you know, an organization like Freedom Camaria would be able to do with somebody’s fusion.

And We very specifically with that one, card, actually had been paid upfront and was not getting any additional back end Yeah. From the ticket sales.

I believe that emerged from after I wrote this piece. Yeah. And so, you know, and piracy by contrast denies or orson’s cop cards some money, what hurts other people who are not complicit in his views who are involved with the movie, and doesn’t make any positive contribution to the cause that you’re saying that you care about. And so, you know, in this sort of narrow case of piracy as a response to this stuff. Again, I think that’s sort of a negative solution that doesn’t actually do anything to help artists who feel like their work has been unfairly expropriated by It doesn’t do anything to help the news organizations who are trying to cut long term licensing deals for their articles to be used as training sets, for these AIs, etcetera.

And so I think it’s always more useful to find a sort of positive solution. If you wanna see this movie buy the ticket because then you don’t hurt the actual live human beings who did work on the movie, But put your money where your mouth is and actually do something that will be helpful to ameliorate the transition AI. And I think this gets to the, sort of, the larger question about developing an ethical regime for AI use, right? Because It’s important to remember, you know, talking about generative AI is a very narrow use case. If you start saying that no production that uses AI in any capacity, is legitimate.

We’re gonna get to a place pretty soon where email systems, production, payroll, a lot of this stuff is much more automated than it was before. There is going to be some aspect of AI in a lot of the routine sort of office work that we do. And so, setting a bright line there isn’t gonna be that useful. I think as more of these chatbots and generative systems, work out sort of licensing regimes, or, or find ways to compensate people whose data is being scraped or used in some way. There may emerge competitors that feel sort of more ethical to work with than, people who are just scraping vast quantities of stuff off the internet and asking forgiveness not permission.

I think, you know, we you mentioned budget, Sonny. I think we will see some kind of regime where there are sort of different standards expected for productions at different levels. Right? I mean, there are certain productions that got, you know, waivers during the strike to keep producing because there’s some level of understanding that not all movies are exactly the same thing. They’re not all sort quantitatively the same kind of production.

You know, I think as we see stronger protections for actors and extras whose licenses are scanned, you know, there will come to be sort of an ethical regime about this that thinks about what someone’s contribution is over not just the life of sort of their own work, but, you know, whether they’re being reproduced multiple times in a crowd scene or whether their image is being banked in case, you know, they’re in a hideous snowplow accident, and the Avengers still need to hawkeye. So this stuff will get worked out over time, and some sort of regime, some sort of equilibrium will emerge, but I don’t think it’s gonna emerge by stealing a movie and telling yourself that you’ve done something like you’ve made some useful strike against the robots.

Yeah. This is, my, as you guys know, as as you, my close friends know, piracy is one of my big bug bears, and it drives me crazy. And it it it is telling, you know, on a certain level how many people immediately rush to. Well, it’s okay to steal this thing and watch for free now because none of these people actually wanna make a sacrifice. They don’t wanna, like, deny themself even the very basic pleasure of watching a movie, at a principal, and they they rush right to stealing as the recourse.

And that, I think, gives the game away in a certain sense. But it also, Peter, I mean, look, the issue here is not just what you see on the screen. It’s it’s what is kind of used to create the things before that. Right? I mean, the the idea that these AI, chat bots, the the, the things that are trained with massive libraries pulled from Google books or whatever, the the images that are trained from scraping information off of, you know, Google search and all that.

There is a question about intellectual property rights and how those are kind of all thrown together and put in a food processor and spat out on the other end. Right? Or no. Is that not something folks should be worried about?

Well, there’s a question that’s in the courts right now in the form of several lawsuits, Sarah Silverman, the New York Times, although in fact, a bunch of the Charlie Sykes sort of points of contention, that Silverman had in her case, have been thrown out of court, but the main copyright claim is still live, at least as far as I know, as of about a month ago. And, you know, I think some of that is gonna be work up, but I would just say that, you know, I’m I’m a sort of well, I’m not a total copyright skeptic by any means. I think the purpose of copy right, is not in fact to enrich creators. It is to encourage work for the betterment of society. And so we want to regime that encourages the most, and the most valuable work rather than one that simply creates a cartel, you know, guaranteed payments for creators.

And the other thing that I would say is that that synthesis and paraphrase and reading a bunch of stuff and then writing something based on that or looking at a bunch of images and then creating your own, your own painting or drawing that is inspired in some sense by all of the things that you have looked at. Has never been Will Saletan you can argue well it’s different because of the scale that AI does. And and and I agree that it is different in some sense, but that’s sort of, work that is it’s synthetic and, is is sort of just taking inspiration from a bunch of different sources rather than simply and flatly reproducing the original work, which is which is the thing that, you know, copyright is designed to protect against. These are different things. And so again, I don’t wanna say, well, there’s just absolutely no concern period at all here.

We will see as this sort of thing works itself out in the courts, and we it may just be a regime where, where creators get to have a say about whether, you know, large language models, open eye models, get to look at their work or use it in, their training. But, this sort of thing is gonna work itself out. And frankly, I, again, will just say it’s coming whether you like it or not. Maybe there are some steps that can be taken to slow things down. Maybe there are better equilibriums and worse equilibriums, but I think just sort of saying, well, we don’t like it.

We are not going to support this. We’re not going to play along in any way. Even if that is your, like, your deeply felt attitude, that’s not going to work. Because someone somewhere, whether it’s in the United States or another country, people are gonna use this stuff. They’re gonna train it in works that are widely available, whether they’re available for purchase, or for piracy, and and the AIs are going to know how to make things in the way that AIs know how to make things.

And so if you are if you are worried about this, try to figure how to make it work for you and try to figure out a system in which there is just compensation and and reasonable opt out, don’t say, well, actually we’re just never not gonna allow this and we think we can hold that line. You’re welcome to try, but you will fail.

I also think there are more and less interesting applications of this stuff. I mean, we’ve seen sort of, you know, the rise of, like, AI characters in movies, right? Like, the entity in mission impossible, dead reckoning, parts, you know, three point one four one five nine. And, you know, I would actually have found the depiction of AI in that movie more interesting and unnerving if it was actually drawn from sort of some of what we’ve seen from large language models, because the sort of offness of stuff that is produced by AI would be much more interesting than the sort of all powerful smooth depictions of AI that we’re seeing in movies. Right?

And so If you’re gonna make auto generate art for, horror movie that’s sort of about things being like a little bit off, the offness of AI is an interesting way to express that artistically. Right? Like, using chat GPT to write the entities, you know, dialogue might actually produce a really interesting effect. And so, you know, thinking about the uses of AI to produce artistic replication, you know, representations of what it is like to live through interacting with AI at this moment, strikes me as something that would be both artistically interesting, but also would reflect the ethical ambivalence of living through this moment.

Think we’re gonna see some artistically interesting uses of AI come out just over the next several years as more ambitious and more seasoned filmmakers get to play with it. There’s a report.

Steven Sutterberg’s AI movie. Right? Like, that’s what we’re all waiting for.

This is exactly it. I mean, there’s a report that Open AI, which is the maker of the Chad GPT and and Sora, which is their their video program that makes, videos basically based just on a sentence or some text that you give it. There’s a report that they’re already having meetings with big Hollywood studios to see how AI can be used and that some filmmakers are already experimenting it. With it. And someone like Stephen Soderbergh.

I mean, he might. I can imagine Stephen Soderbergh being very, opposed to AI and saying I’ll never use it. That’s a possibility. But he is somebody who has used, technology to make movies that are really interesting and often really inexpensive that are experimental in certain ways. Right?

So he released bubble day and date. Was, one of the very first filmmakers to ever do that. He released high flying bird, which was initially an iPhone app before it was an HBO series. It’s just somebody who has really decided that in that instead of being a instead of just saying, I don’t do that because that’s not how we make movies and it’s all analog and that’s all we ever do forever. He said, well, look, there’s all these interesting technologies out there.

And and they give me as a filmmaker freedom and creative options, and they let me do this stuff. They let me do this stuff for less money, and that’s a big deal in an industry where everything is so incredibly expensive to make. Alright.

So what do we think? Is it a controversy or a controversy that an indie film use some AI stuff? In some of the backgrounds and a handful of shots. And, you know, should we should we institute the death penalty for anyone who uses this sort of thing as in as as Frank Herbert suggested. Peter, it’s

not a controversy that the filmmakers used AI. It is a little bit of a controversy that the freakout has been. I think fairly intense if not if not to the point where it’s, you know, sort of on the front page of the trades yet, but it is now, like, in the top couple of sentences in the wikipedia entry about this. This is something that has definitely made the rounds, and I think that’s kinda nuts, alyssa.

It’s a little controversial, but sometimes controversy is how you work stuff out. It’s actually, controversy is useful. It’s not all bad.

It’s controversy, and we should really I’m I’m I just think we should move real slow on this sort of thing. And, I’m not I’m not saying we shouldn’t do the Butler and jihad. I’m just saying it’s the thing we should consider. It’s on the table. It’s it’s a card that can be played.

Put it that way. Alright. Make sure to swing by Bulwark Plus for our bonus episode this week on Patrick Swazy, the dance fighting philosopher poet King of the nineteen eighties. And now on to the main event. Roadhouse, speaking of Patrick swayze, now available, at Amazon Prime, the twenty twenty four remake of the nineteen eighty nine swayze starring classic about bouncer slash bar manager, Dalton, Just one name in the original.

He’s got a second name in this one. It’s Jake Gyllenhaal, playing Elwood Dalton. He’s bringing order to a chaotic dive. He’s a former MMA fighter who left the fighting life behind after an in ring tragedy of his own making. Frankie, who’s played by Jessica Will Saletan them to come help her bar, which is being plagued by local Russians who wanna get it under their control.

The local Russians, they’re in the employ of, this fail son He’s he’s a fail son. Can we call him a fail son? His dad’s in prison. The dad wants the bar so he can tear it down and open his own joint and, you know, put some stuff on the beach there. But the fail son, he’s not getting the job done.

So the dad calls in Knox, played by actual a, m, MMA star Connor McGregor, who, He has to take out Dalton Frankie and the rest of the roadhouse. Staff hijinks ensue. Mayhem occurs, bar fighters, brawls, etcetera, etcetera. Dalton moves on to the next dive bar at the end that needs his help like a Ronan in search of purpose. The movie itself is fine.

Confident piece of storytelling. I’ve always liked Jake Gyllenhaal, and there’s something weird, but charming about the idea of putting the nerdy guy from Don darko in a steroid vat and seeing what comes out. The action is kinetic, though slightly oddly shot. Well, maybe we could talk about that a little bit. But none of it is really it’s it’s not a very interesting movie, except for two things.

The first is Connor McGregor’s performance as Knox, which I can only describe as demented leprechaun, he saunters onto the screen fully nude, though shot tastefully from behind. We only see his his rear. I don’t know, like, forty or forty five minutes into the movie, and then from there, just causes chaos everywhere he goes. His line readings are, like, a variety of shouted gibberish with this Irish brogue, and his face is constantly in this, like, frozen mechanical, maniacal grin, that makes it feel like he’s in a slightly different picture than everybody else altogether. He’s insane is what I’m saying, and he’s totally wrong on any rational level of judging a movie, but he’s also, like, weirdly magnetic and compulsively watchable.

I don’t understand precisely what he’s going for with this performance, but he’s doing it in such a way that I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. And that counts for something. That counts for something in the the world of movies. The second interesting thing here, and this is what I’d like to focus Jonathan Last, at the first part of our discussion here, are the ways in which this movie differs so strongly from the from the original. And I I don’t just mean in terms of plot.

I don’t even mean in terms of characterization precisely, though I do think something is lost by making Dalton graced MMA fighter instead of a wandering philosopher, lover, poet, etcetera. I mostly mean in terms of the vibes, the vibes, man. And I I’ll just set the stage by saying that I’d only ever seen this movie. I’d only ever seen the original roadhouse on basic cable, meaning that I’d always seen a censored version. So when I watched the nineteen eighty nine original this weekend, when I pulled it up on HBO Max and threw it on, I will say I was genuinely shocked by the amount of casual nudity in this thing.

Like, there are whole sequences that exist solely to get women topless. It’s like it’s like one it’s like one of those movies that’s like the kid the guys are on spring break and they’re going to Colorado mountains and their ski bunnies. And it’s just like a series of, like, ski slopes where women are naked for some reason. That’s what this movie reminded me of. For large stretches of time.

Like, there’s a there’s just a dirtbag vibe to it that’s expressed most succinctly. Like, this this is a thing that happens the original. There’s a conversation between swayze’s Dalton, and Sam Elliott’s Wade Garrett. Right? They’re, mentor and mentee.

They’re having a heart to heart about, you know, how to how to get by in life, and, you know, what what what the purpose that they should be pursuing, etcetera, etcetera. And all of this is happening while Wade is keeping half an eye on topless g string competition happening behind them to make sure nobody gets hands. Now look, I am not complaining. There are people who do not like this sort of thing, and I am not of them. Give me the casual trashy nudity from the good old days.

I love it. But one imagines, that this is precisely the sort of thing that, gender theorists we’re complaining about. Right? You know, the male gaze and all that. But the raunchiness, and here’s my point, the raunchiness of the proceedings, and the original give the eventual coupling between Swayze’s Dalton and Kelly Lynch’s doc, real heat, real passion.

And you compare that to the rote by the numbers nature, of Jillen Will Saletan, and Daniella Melchior’s Ellie, which is just like the most paint by numbers, boring love story I’ve ever seen in a movie of this story. Just just it doesn’t it doesn’t matter. It does their dating does nothing. It does nothing but move the story forward at convenient moments. It is, I think I described it to you guys as a sprocket in the clockwork of the pot.

Right? That’s all it is. That’s that’s it. There’s just nothing There’s nothing else there. As a result, the picture as a whole is lesser.

It’s just a less engaging thing. I guess what I’m asking, Alyssa, is whether or not time to bring the male gaze back. How is this how we save cinema from a passionless future? We gotta we gotta get the guys leering. Back again.

Right? Isn’t that what we need?

I mean, something for the ladies too, please. I’m and I’m not quite sure that Conor McGregor is, like, bareass counts as, like, for the ladies. I’m not sure who that’s for. I mean, it’s amusing, but

For Connor McGregor, I think. I think he he really wanted that in there.

Yeah, especially since, spoiler alert, we see him naked again later in the movie. Well, I guess not technically naked. Bear asked, but not technically naked.

We see him bear asked both times. He comes into and out of the movie bear asked just a babe coming into the world and a m old man going out of it.

Sure. So I need to confess that I not only had not seen roadhouse on, like, basic cable. I hadn’t seen it at all until this weekend. The only version of roadhouse I had ever seen, was There’s a an episode in Parks and Recreation where a group of characters are like supposed to be they’re supposed to be watching TV at a party, but the cable is out. And so Chris Pratt’s character Andy Dwyer acts out Roadhouse, in, like, in fairly extended detail.

It’s extremely funny. I sent it to you guys over the weekend, maybe we can put the link in the show notes, but so I had not seen Roadhouse at all. And the original is so funny, just because it’s so weird. Right? I mean, the idea, like, Patrick swayze is amazing in that he can totally sell the idea that, like, that Dalton is a guy who got a philosophy PhD from NYU.

And it’s like it’s really specific about the fact that it’s NYU that’s like in the script. And it’s like floating around the country bringing peace to bars. It’s like, you know, it’s just like, his job is to, like, be the Zenmaster of like dirtbag clubs. And that’s not that’s not an idea that makes any sense, right? I mean, it’s like, it’s a really silly movie in a lot of ways.

Right? It’s like, it’s a movie where one of the bad guys is beaten up by, like, a tax derby polar bear falls on him, and he, like, feels the need to remark out loud. Like, like a polar bear fell on me. And it’s like it’s so strange.

If a polar bear fell on you, what would you say?

Probably, like, something that I can’t say on this podcast without us. I mean, I I don’t think I would be like super coherent. I also, if if I was dumb enough to, like, be in a situation where a taxidermy polar bear fell on me, I feel like I would be sort of embarrassed about the whole but I digress. The thing about the remake of roadhouse is that it feels so generic, right? Like, in stripping away all of those details and giving Dalton, like, a sort of tragic backstory that explains why he’s, like, really, really good at, like, beating people up.

It loses almost all of the original charm. Right? Like, being like, I’m just like, I’m too into MMA fighting. And so it’s like, I I don’t put myself in situations where I can, like, actually really get attached to people anymore. You know, it’s just like, that’s it’s so bland.

It’s so bland. And I actually think Jake Jonah Hall is at times better than this movie deserves. Right? I mean, there’s there’s a moment where His character and Connor McGregor’s character are fighting on a boat and Connor McGregor’s character is like, oh, we’re in our own little octagon. And, Jake, Dylan Hall’s just like, who taught you about shapes.

Right?

Like It’s not even about. It’s just Who do you just get this great, like, weird quizzical look on his face in the mid of the most ridiculous brawl. Just say, who taught you shapes? Right. And it’s one of the best moments in the movie that Yep.

Anyway, sorry. Go ahead. But, like, I actually wanted to single that moment out, as well. Yeah.

Because it’s what it’s, like, one of the only things that makes an Like his character is sort of funny and wry in a way that Chillan Hall’s just quite good at, right? There’s like, there’s that little bit of like, you know, Donnie Darko, the sort of vibe of someone who was, like, probably was bullied once upon a time and, like, learned to be quick with his words about it. And those are the only parts of the movie that are at all sort of charming or interesting. Like, the movie is, you know, just to take Sonny’s point up, and I think we’ll come back to this in the bonus episode, like, kind of anti actual in the sense that, like, Dalton has this sort of light romance with, you know, the, like, the doctor character, again, the doctor character. But he’s like, oh, I didn’t know this was a date, right?

Like Patrick’s ways, he’s like, Oh, yeah. Like, I’m gonna give it to you good. And Jake Gyllum haus, like, I don’t know, man. Like, maybe I should go home. And it’s it’s a weird vibe, especially because the two actors actually, like, that’s one of the better on screen kisses I’ve seen this year.

There’s like some reasonable chemistry there, but the movie just is so uncomfortable with the idea that, like, there would be anything sexual happening at all that it’s just odd.

Look, again, I don’t want I wanna harp on the nudity angle here, but but I do think it’s interesting that, like, the only the compare again, compared to the first where it’s just, like, every sequence, there there’s, like, a forty percent chance that you’re gonna have a naked lady on a table somewhere. Like, this movie, very specifically, you see Connor McGregor’s rear end twice, again, like, coming into and going out of the movie, and then kind of in the background, you see a woman, kind of naked on the balcony who Connor McGregor is fleeing from, I think, in that in that opening moment. And, like, it’s it’s worth pointing out because it is that is the villain of the movie. He’s like the psychotic villain of the movie. The only moment of, like, actual weird, charged sexuality in the comes from the villain.

And that’s I think I think it’s telling of where the the head of everybody involved in this production was. I mean, not not not in the not in a good way. Peter, what oh, what did you make of Roadhouse?

It’s okay. It is as Alyssa says, a movie which everyone is hot and no one is horny. I didn’t, make up that phrase. I think it comes from a writer at New York magazine, but it’s really, a prime example of the ways in which this type of movie has been stripped of a kind of erotic charge that you used to see very commonly in the nineteen eighties. Sometimes Some of which was, gratuitous and exploitative and kind of too much.

And but also, I think we’ve swung a little bit, too far in the their direction. You where you have somebody like Jake Gyllenhaal, who has a really interesting and kind of, weird charm to him and his in his body in ridiculous shape. By the way, I just wanna say as a forty two year old man looking at Jake Gillan Hall, that’s how we all look. That’s the normal way for a forty two year old man to look. So just anybody who’s like unclear, that’s that’s forty two year old man.

Like, that’s the the median forty two year old man right there.

And if you need proof, come to the across the movie on a live taping on April ninth.

Maybe don’t. Don’t take me up on that one. He’s he’s he’s so good and has such a a great off kilter charm in this. I thought I actually really liked him. I frankly liked him more than MacGregor, who I found to be a little bit interesting, and I think probably has a future doing this stuff, but kinda one note in his aggressive, you know, obnoxious weirdness.

It wasn’t bad exactly, but it was like, oh, well, here’s the crazy villain. He’s just gonna be the crazy villain for the movie, and he’s gonna, you know, punch some people and break some stuff, and that’s gonna be that. And and it just it’s not a terrible movie, but it’s not a movie I can imagine watching again. And that really sets it apart from the original roadhouse, which has this incredibly It’s like mystical alchemical charm to it where it’s not exactly a good movie, but it might be the very best, so bad it’s good movie. Every single scene draws you in immediately, and it’s so incredibly rewatchable.

There’s a kind of comfort food aspect to it And that’s why it is actually one of the most played and most repeatedly played movies ever on cable television. And that’s where a lot of the movie was panned when it came out. It was not a, it was not a big hit with critics, although did pretty well at the box office, but the original became a cult hit not so much because people went and saw it once at the movie theater, but because people watched it over and over again on cable. It was on TNT. It was on TBS.

It was on some US say probably on some of the these other kind of like generic nineteen nineties networks that played movies like this and it played they played this and sometimes the shawshank redemption and sometimes it sort of felt like roadhouse was always on especially late at night. And so if you were just, you know, if you were a little bit of an insomniac, and you didn’t have something that you were definitely planning to watch. You would turn on the the television, channeled her for a bit and you’d land on roadhouse wherever it was in the middle of the movie, and you just kinda watch it because because every scene works more or less on its own terms. You’ve got Patrick swayze with this sort of with this like spiritual vibe thing that he’s got going on that’s kinda sexy and kinda weird and, you know, but also has like a a kind of strength to it. Sam Elliot shows up and there’s a sequence in the middle of the movie where I think it’s hard to tell, but they appear to just like drink and dance and fight and talk shit for maybe three days straight without sleeping.

It’s totally incredible. Just one of the best bits of of, like, sort of mid movie like, not, like, the there’s not even a whole lot of plot that happens during that sequence. It’s just Sam Elliot you know, and, and Patrick Swayzey vibing together for for fifteen minutes in the middle of the movie. And you’re just like, yeah, I wanna hang out with these guys. And you wanted to hang out with them.

And I don’t wanna go back and watch this movie again. I don’t wanna hang out with this movie at all. I I just found it kind of kind of very fine. And, and we can talk about the action sequences as well. And I also found the action sequences really, really disappointing and and frustrating.

I can I go back to your point about Sam Elliott? Because I think

So good.

The disappearance of a Sam Elliott like character in the remake of roadhouse, gets at a bigger problem with it, which is in the first, in the original roadhouse, Dalton is like, you know, he kind of moves from to place, but he’s clearly connected to something and to people. Right? I mean, he knows the blind guitarist at the roadhouse that, like, he ends up going to work at. He has Sam Elliott character to, like, sort of call back on, and, like, there’s sort of a, like, there’s a fraternity of people who understand these kind of institutions

You can also view it as a kind of a lore, almost like John Wick. Now it’s not nearly as developed, but it is a kind of a there’s some world building and a weird lore of, like, the bouncer verse, right, that that this movie exists in.

But also, the original roadhouse is a story about, like, him settling down. Right? It’s like, It is the road roadhouse remake has all these explicit jokes about how they’re in a western. But, you know, the original roadhouse is literally like he comes into this Mississippi town, he comes to understand the dynamics of it a really fundamental way, and by being willing to stand up for himself and the place that he’s been hired to work for kind of reinvigorates the civic fabric of the community. And then he stays.

Right? Like, he has found a place where he’s gonna stay. He had the, like, the last scene is him and Kelly Lynch, like, skinny to beg and making out. Like, he’s found a home. Right?

And in the remake, not only do you not have that sort of bouncer verse, but the sort of civic fabric stuff doesn’t quite work. Either in part because like the doctor’s dad has been turned into a heavy as opposed to one of the small businessmen who’s sort of civic pride needs to be like rewarded and reinvigorated. Right? Like, not only does Dalton leave, but he doesn’t create the infrastructure, the sort of social infrastructure that swayze’s character does in the original movie. Ron DeSantis, it’s much more explicit about the westerny ness without the true sort of western’s understanding of community and the question of whether or not you’re gonna build a community that can survive.

Yeah. The original had this, eastwoodian sense of, you know, a stranger comes to town and runs the bad guys out and fixes everything up. Right? But it was totally. It was never stated.

What no one’s c comes and says, man, you’re kinda like Clint Eastwood. Right? There’s there’s not a moment. And this movie, within ten minutes, There’s a little girl who comes out of a bookstore and is like, hey, you’re like the hero in a western who comes to clean up the town. And it’s literally just saying that thing where the the original left you to discover it and get the vibe and, like, get that for yourself if you wanted to.

Again, just

It’s really awesome.

Just not great.

Yeah. Peter, do you wanna do you wanna talk about the fight scenes just for just real quick? Because we’re we’re running long here. So, but they I didn’t I didn’t dislike them. But again, I I just thought they were just kind of, competent and uninteresting.

They’re not terrible, but Doug Lieman, the direct has has put together some really good action scenes, before, especially an edge of tomorrow, mister and mrs Smith, the first born film And he’s a he’s a director who I really admire as an action director. And he in in the before this movie came out, he basically said, well, look, we’ve done some of the most innovative stuff anybody’s ever seen with our action scenes and really kinda hype that stuff up. And then you watch these action scenes, and they just don’t look right. They look sort of stitched together and kinda janky wrong. They’re all of these super, super intense flash pan cut things.

Right? That clearly this was not a real contiguous shot. And then of and then as I’m reading about the movie afterwards, what it turns out that they did is that they use something called the four pass method where every action sequence, every hit, every sort of bit, every set of moves, is filmed four times and you’ve got the sort of initial pass where the actors are just kind of faking it and you’ve got a, another pass where somebody’s throwing a punch really hard and then another pass where somebody’s getting hit basically with a something like a pillow or sort of like a soft thing. Right? And so, and then they stitch all of this together, and it allows and then there the final pass just has nothing in it.

It’s a background pass so they can have the background elements. And they they stitch all of this together and in theory it allows you to show off much harder hits and much more intense reactions to those hard hits. In practice, it just looks like And I’m the AI guy on the show. It just looks like the action scenes were kind of generated by AI. There is something unnatural and and fake looking about them.

Something distracting about the whip pan style of it all. And what’s even more distracting is that that whip pan style gets idiosyncratically moved into a bunch of non action scenes into the movie where the the camera is just sort of roaming around and suddenly was right like four kind of for no reason except I guess Doug Lemann wanted to make it seem like that was a choice throughout the whole movie. I just did not love this, and I especially did not love this. You know, coming after we’ve seen a a a number of years of really incredible physical stunt work in action movies often in fairly low budget at action movies like the first John Wick or even something like the the beekeeper where I just have like really enjoyed the quick punchy pretty natural stunt work and and action that we’ve seen. And this this tried to innovate in a way that I appreciate because I appreciate people using new technology.

But I don’t think it actually worked and I don’t think it was I don’t think it was all that great a tribute to the original which has which ends with just one of the most incredible, you know, iconic and memorable bizarre fight sequences between Patrick swayze and the main henchman, that, like, literally just ends with Patrick swayze ripping the dude’s throat out. And that’s it. That’s what happens. He’s like, oh, okay. I guess that’s what karate teaches you to do when you know all the really high levels.

It’s like the it’s bizarre and the the new movie ends with a bunch stabbing, but the the the just sort of feels like, oh, well, there’s some stabbing here. It doesn’t feel kind of like, what the hell in the way

that the rubbery I hate stabbing and find it really upsetting. Like, we’ve tried, like, Peter and Sunny will often actually, like, warn me of about that. And it didn’t bother me because it was just like, oh, this looks silly. Right? It just looks dumb.

I mean, to come back to the, like, the throat pulling out, I thought that, we were gonna find out that Dalton two point o had some, like, signature move that he’d done that had resulted in someone dying, and he was gonna, like, use it again. It’s like, why would you not replicate the, like, of it all, that the was the throat pulling out. Yeah. Like, it just, like, he just wouldn’t stop punching a guy in the octagon. Like, that’s what it was.

This This movie had consistently has a a problem the original doesn’t have and that is, it’s a real problem for our roadhouse remake. It is afraid to be trashy. It wants to be kind of respectable. And in the end, it ends up being kind of, like, just okay, but not interesting. The trashiness, the the weird sexiness, the the oddball.

Like, this doesn’t make any sense writing of it. The, the the gratuitous nudity. Just like the sort of the the charming level of crappiness to the original was what made it work so well. And this movie isn’t crappy, but it’s not very charming either.

Yeah. That’s a good way of putting it. And the backstory stuff just hit on something Alyssa was getting at. I saw somebody that joked the other day that, you know, people now think what makes a person interesting is, like, trauma plus consumption. Like, that’s that’s what that’s the kind of the end result of therapy culture is is talking about your traumas and and discussing what things you buy and that that that is what defines us.

And there’s there’s a big element of that here, I think, which is the idea that what makes Dalton interesting is not that he is a weirdo philosophy guy from NYU, but that he he killed the guy in the ring and is sad about. And he’s gotta get over the sadness from killing so we can kill again. Like, there’s a it’s it’s I It doesn’t work. It it just doesn’t work. Alright.

So what do we think? Thumbs up or thumbs down on Roadhouse twenty twenty four. Alyssa.

Thumbs down.

Peter. I’m not upset. I watched it, I guess. I just don’t ever care to watch it again. I don’t know.

It’s this is thumbs perfectly in the middle.

I I’m gonna go thumbs down in the sense that if you are given the option between watching the new roadhouse or the old roadhouse, there’s no reason ever to choose to watch. The new roadhouse. Whatever. Alright. That is it for this week.

So many thanks to our audio engineer, Jonathan Last without whom. This program would sound much worse. Make sure to swing by Bulwark Plus on Friday for our bonus episode. Tell your friends, strong recommendation from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcast audiences. We don’t grow.

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