Why Is ‘Murder Mystery 2’ So Popular? Plus: ATMA Live Show!

Welcome back to across the movie aisle presented by Bulwark Plus. I am your host, Sunny Bunch, Culture Editor of The Bulwark, I’m joined as always by Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post. Peter certification of Reason magazine. Alyssa Peter, how are you today?

I am Tann, rested and ready to talk about movies with friends.

I am also ready to talk about movies with friends and happy to be doing so, but not tandem rested? No. No. No.

Alright. Before we get started, I just wanted to let you guys the listeners out there know about a very exciting event. Peter, Alyssa, and I are gonna be hosting a screening of the Matthew Broderick Classic War Games. At the Crystal City, Alamo Draught House on Tuesday, May sixteenth at seven thirty PM. We’re also, I think, we’re gonna try.

We’re gonna try this out. We’re gonna try to tape a bonus episode of the show. Pending our ability to work out a few of the the small technical things. But either way, we’ll be there. We’ll be talking about the movie and the apocalyptic moment.

A film in the nineteen eighties. Tickets are on sale now and they’re only seven dollars because the screening is part of the big freaking deal Tuesdays. So cheap movie on the big screen where it’s seen best with some tasty beverages if you want. You don’t have to necessarily, but I I would recommend it because that’s how the Draught House makes it running and hosted by your favorite podcast. This one, this is your favorite podcast.

I know it. You know it. We all know it. Hard to beat that good deal. Hopefully, we will see you guys there.

Very excited for it. And now on to controversies had non traversies. The the big news last week was Warner Bros. Discovery’s announcement that they’re getting rid of the HBO and HBO Max rebranding their big app MAX. And they’re also moving most, but not all of the Discovery Plus content onto Max.

While also leaving Discovery Plus untouched. But some Discovery Plus content will be exclusive to Max. But not all discovery. Plus content will be on max. Meanwhile, the cost is to remain the same for now.

Unless you want four k and as many as a hundred downloads, in which case is going up to twenty dollars, which means that for those of us with good TVs, the price is going up to twenty dollars. Unless, of course, I’m exempted from this because I get HBO via my cable provider and the new app. Max is gonna come that way. I don’t know. It’s just gonna show up on my TV sometime in May.

This is gonna be Max instead of HBO Max. I don’t know. Here’s the thing. From a marketing perspective, I am totally baffled by WBD’s move here. I mean, literally just kind of confused.

It’s not clear to me what exactly is gonna be on HBO Max. I’m sorry. I mean, Max. I don’t know if I should if I should cancel my wife’s beloved subscription to Discovery Plus since I have no idea which home shows are gonna make the transfer. To h I’m sorry.

Not HBO. Just Max. Only Max. Forever Max. I just don’t I don’t know.

I don’t know. And I’m a person who’s paid to know these things. So if I don’t know, it’s probably gonna be a problem for your average consumer all around. Honestly though, my big annoyance here is the decision to downplay the HBO and HBO Max. Because a certain segment of consumers is intimidated by the HBO brand.

My even bigger annoyance is that WBD is probably right. To do that. HBO puts a ceiling on the brand in a very real way. A slice of the consumer population is just unlikely to subscribe to HBO. Which is affiliated with eyebrow stuff like succession even if its biggest hits involves zombies and as Ian Macshane once colorfully put it, tits and dragons.

So you deemphasize Barry, right, Barry best half hour on TV that currently exists, and you reemphasize doctor pimple popper. And you watch the money roll in. That’s the underpants gnome theory of this plan. It’s not a terrible one Frankly, as the entertainment strategy guy described it, this is a little bit like popularism. Just for streaming.

Popularism, of course, is the argument. Made by some liberal pundits that Progressive should focus on doing things that are popular rather than getting sucked into niche EDUC like Democratic activists forcing senators and purple to come out against fracking dumb. Don’t do that. But rather than pushing candidates to take unpopular stances, they should be nudged. And positions that poll well with the general electorate and progressive voters in particular.

Ditto streaming. Right? Rather than shoving stuff people, don’t want to watch in their faces, the WBD crew wants to focus on low calorie, low effort fluff because that’s what folks actually wanna watch at home. That’s what they get. They stream through it.

They they just watch episode after episode. That’s what they do. The ultimate goal here is to keep people within the ecosystem of the app. Keep them scrolling through international house hunters to flipper flop for season after season. And again, probably the best way to do it.

But it’s still kind of sad that we live in a universe where A three letter byword for excellence is a liability, Alyssa. Should WBD be running from its most beloved brand in favor of reality slop. If it, you know, wants to make money.

I mean, probably. Yes. I mean, I know that, I mean, David Zaslab is unpopular in you know, the tastier versions of the Internet. But he’s not wrong that you know, having blown up their core business model, all of these streaming services need to find ways to consolidate and brand themselves as essential as to survive. And, you know, I am actually several seasons behind on succession because I don’t actually really like watching horrible rich people torture each other.

But I sort of like the succession. I am like less all in on the second Tits and Dragon show. But if several hundred thousand people watch your show, that’s not enough to make a streaming service profitable. And you know, a combination of, like, pimple popping and dragons is probably the way to go at this. I mean, I guess I get why people are up in arms about this to the extent that it’s at all possible for me to understand why people care about sort of the branding of you know, big corporate properties that are going through a weird transition because they were forced into an insane business model by Wall Street.

But it just it seems fairly common sense to call and not that big a deal. To the extent that it’s a controversy, it is emblematic of the sort of constantly shifting strategies and renaming and positioning, not to mention the sort of weird unpredictable content flow in between all of these services. That has made what ought to have been a cheaper convenience for people, just a huge headache.

Well, can I I’ll I’ll suggest one reason why this is at least a little controversial is that, you know, look, we’ve talked about this before, but what was the promise of streaming? Right? The promise of cord cutting and streaming was always, we’re gonna give you more options, more versatility. We’re gonna make it easier for you to watch this, but not that. If you wanna bundle things together, you can do that.

There’s a model for this. Disney. Disney does a pretty good job of it. They have their Disney plus Hulu and ESPN plus brands. If you want all three of them, you can subscribe to them for one lower price.

If you only want one of them, you just subscribe to that one and it and you’ll save money because you don’t want the other stuff. And I I guess the thing I am most confused by is why HBO wants to move away from that idea and that model. I mean, I I kind of understand why in a general level they wanna keep people in one app you’d focus their attention, monopolize it, etcetera. But I still think it’s a mistake. I think it’s just a a mistake to give people less freedom of movement,

I guess. Well, why do you think this is less freedom of movement rather than a reorganization of the kinds of movement that that they are allowed to have. It doesn’t seem to me that it’s obviously less except in the sense that the HBO Max, as we have known it, and Warner Brothers, have been cutting from their streaming strategy already even before the name change was announced, and that’s everything from removing shows. That are being sold off for rights elsewhere to, you know, the the most prominent example was just completely eliminating that woman from their they’re not gonna release it, which was a decision that they made last year. I I guess I think that this makes sense in some ways, but it was handled badly.

So I’m like sort of the in between you guys on this. It seems pretty obvious that what Warner Brothers needs to do or Warner Brothers Discovery, this whole this big corporation, is they need to have one place where you can sort of pay and get into their content. But then what they need to do is maintain the HBO brand within that as a niche. And what this seems like they’re doing is trying to make it more so that people, you know, will sort of not see this thing as primarily an umbrella of stuff underneath the HBO brand. But in the process, they are degrading or sort of downplaying the HBO brand which is really quite valuable, not because it reaches a huge audience necessarily, but because it reaches a a very well connected and relatively well off audience.

What HBO has always done, is connect very well with upper middle class college educated high income households, especially sort of knowledge worker professionals types. Right? And that goes back to the mid nineteen nineties. When I’m someday, I’m gonna have to look up the executive’s name, but the the executive who sort of decided what I want are not shows that are well reviewed in the LA Times and a variety. What I want are shows that are talked about on the op ed page of The New York Times.

That was the the sort of the the guiding strategy was let’s go to political and cultural pacemakers. And so HBO has always has since then really effectively done that. And it seems to me like what HBO needs to be. And what HBO at its best has always been in some sense is what vertigo was for comic books starting in the nineteen eighties and for as long as the vertigo label lasted. So for for people who don’t know the comic book world, vertigo is the publisher of, like, sort of, adult, very smart, often literary comics.

The signal example of this is sandman, then Neil Gaiman comic that ran from, like, nineteen eighty nine through the nineties or something like that. And vertical was an imprint it wasn’t its own label, but it was kind of its own label. And you knew that when you were going to a vertigo comic, that like, when you were picking up a vertigo comic off the shelves, you were getting something that was probably gonna be higher quality that was aimed more at adults at more at sophisticated readers. There

were

occasional sort of crossovers with the wider DC Comics universe, although those were reined in later in in the later years of vertigo, but it wasn’t its own company. It wasn’t its own thing. It was a brand within the DC Comics universe. And it seems to me like, what Max needs to do and what the strategy needs to be here is we’ve got a big thing for everyone. That we’re gonna call it max or we’re gonna call it Warner Bros.

Or Discovery or whatever. We could call it dumb shows for people who like dumb shows. Right? Like, which they’re hilariously. Like, they’re almost literally advertising this as the streaming television now with dumb shows too.

Right? Like, there there’s a quote from one of the the people on the team here. Dropping HBO from the name is cementing that we’re not just gonna be a home for premium programming. We’re the home for anything you wanna watch. Right?

So it’s literally like If you liked good stuff, well, we’ve got more than that. Bad shows too. Right? So I guess I just sort of see, like, Like, you need to be able to, like, go into the max portal and then find the HBO Zone that is not necessarily walled off in the sense of, you have to pay more to access it, but that is walled off in that it has a distinct identity of its own and is filling the HBO niche within the corporate portfolio. But I think you as you’ve said, Sunny, Disney has done a a good job of this, not just in terms of segregating out Hulu and segregating out ESPN, But also, within the Disney plus app, you can just watch Star Wars, you can just watch Marvel, you know that you can just go to the home of those things and those brands and they’re sub brands underneath Disney.

That’s what HBO needs to be for Max Warner Bros. Discovery, whatever the hell they’re gonna call

it. Right. And going back to the Disney example, look, the Disney and Hulu have done a pretty good job of this with the FX on Hulu. Tab. Right?

There’s there’s the FX on Hulu vertical, whatever you wanna call it, on on Hulu. And that’s where FX is stuff lives. FX is probably the best non HBO cable network out there. I I guess as best as I can tell most of their stuff is on Hulu now, but not all of it. Again, there’s there are branding issues here that I struggled to see how the average bet.

And that’s on Hulu thing is probably the closest to what I’m talking about, but I actually agree with you. It’s not totally clear which shows GoTo FX, the TV Bulwark, which shows GoTo the FX part of Hulu, and which shows maybe do both or only one of the to or, like, for which like, it’s it is a little bit non obvious even if you’re, like, you follow this stuff like we do. There’s

been a weird dilution of the FX brand too. I mean, they Disney really made a play to try and use it to, you know, create a sort of HBO application of hulu and did it at a time when FX’s programming honestly hit a little bit of a rough patch. And so it’s produced a kind of diffusion that has also not been helped by Ryan Murphy, who did a lot of the sort of mega franchises for FX, spending more time on his not very successful Netflix deal. So they’ve they’ve been in a weird

place. To defend Ryan Murphy, not very successful until he got into the serial killer business. Because those, you know, those those the damer and the watchers.

Time if they what did they pay them, like, five hundred million dollars? Like

Well, all of these things are unsustainable. Yeah. That’s a that’s a secondary question for for another time, probably when the strike starts. We’ll we’ll come back to that, I’m sure. Alright.

So what do we think? Is it controversy or an controversy that the HBO and HBO Max is a

wait around the neck of the streaming service, Peter. Well, it’s a little bit upsetting, but it’s probably the correct decision from a business perspective even if I think the handling has been a little bit imperfect. Melissa. It’s

my own controversy because people should be forced to consume good things. You take your vegetables young man and you eat them. That’s what I say to the consumers out there, eat your vegetables, and HBO is vegetables. So alright. Make sure to swing over, viable work class for our bonus episode on Friday, we’re gonna be discussing the best movies of the twenty first century so far.

So far, speaking of the best movies of the twenty first century, on to our main event, murder mystery two. Okay. Gotta pull I’m gonna pull back the curtain here for a second. As you guys know, we were off last week. For various reasons, mostly related travel and vacations, just couldn’t get the show to work, didn’t did not work on a from a scheduling point of view.

When I got back to Dallas on Tuesday, I was feeling a little under the weather, and on Wednesday, I was basically dying. So I took a COVID test turns out I had COVID. Caught it during my travels. Boohoo for me, I’m fine now. Don’t worry.

But I could not go to the theaters to see the Super Mario Bros. Movie or air or Redfield or even the Pope’s Exorcist. Couldn’t even see the Pope’s Exorcist. Did not want to risk infecting others. Don’t want to bring shame upon the movie theater house.

So I’m being I’m being a good boy and staying home. So what what were we gonna watch? What were we gonna talk about? While riffing on the consonants this week, we decided to watch something that will likely end up being watched by more people than all four of those movies combined. Yes?

Even Super Mario brothers, which is doing huge, huge business. That’s right. That’s why we’re talking about the new Adam Sandler movie on Netflix, the sequel to murder mystery, one of Netflix’s most watched movies ever, and the new one has been piling up great viewer numbers for Netflix. So you’ll take a look at their Charlie Sykes totaled over a hundred twenty four million hours in its first two weeks. It’s also resurrecting interest in the previous entry in the series, which has been the second And then third, most watched movie on the service.

These last two weeks, it’s a huge hit. Murder mystery two was something like the Platonic Ideal the Netflix movie, it’s incredibly easy to watch. It’s a sort of thing you have on in the background while you’re packing away on your smartphone or you’re doing your taxes. Not speaking from experience here or anything. It’s incredibly popular with viewers because Adam Sandler remains incredibly popular with viewers.

His movies all tend to pop for the service. And there’s a reason they gave the Sandman and his production company mid nine figures to make movies for them over the last decade or so. And while I I don’t know the actual budget here. I guess that it was relatively cheap when compared to something like red notice or the gray man. It’s not a huge big spectacular FX type movie.

It’s in the FX that are in it or shall we say efficiently done. The the plot is almost aggressively simple. And do you love all

the digital fire. Didn’t you?

No. No comment. No comment. Sandler and Anniston play a private investigator husband and wife team who had to I am in paradise for the wedding of their wealthy friend, the MaHA Raja. While there, the MaHA Raja gets kidnapped, body start dropping.

They figure out who did it and why? They go to Paris for some reason. Yada yada, none of this matters. What does matter is that as Sandler and Aniston, I have genuine chemistry. Listener, I am not proud of myself.

But I was literally just sitting in my bed recovering from COVID cackling. Just tackling like an idiot. Their old married couple interplay. They’re not even really making jokes. They’re just vibing with each other.

That’s this is the cinema vibes man, and the vibes are good. Peter, is this the sort of lowest common denominator fluff that the people really want. Am I the people now? Is this what Max should be aiming for?

I do think there are some lessons here for for Max. I’m not gonna say it like you do as as enjoyable as that would be. Right? Like a sort of angry annoyed sheep Noise. Right.

So this movie is not good, but it’s also not pretentious. It doesn’t signal to you that it is good. It doesn’t demand that you think it’s good. It just sorta delivers on its promise in a very basic way. I think the promise that it makes is not really one that I that I would care to engage with if it weren’t for some professional responsibilities here.

But there is something appealing about a movie that doesn’t take itself and not just not too seriously, but at all seriously. And then says, hey, viewers, you don’t have to either. Like, we’re all here to just kind of enjoy ourselves and and like not worry too too much about it. It made me think of a couple of things. One is James Patterson.

So James Patterson is a famous thriller novelist who turned himself into a brand by using co writers, which is to say, basically, ghost writers who would who he would work with Often, he would outline the plots, and then they would do the writing, and then he would do a rewrite pass on the novels, and this allowed him to publish in some cases, ten, twelve novels a year, whereas most novelists who are very successful, you know, are very productive, I should say, would maybe be writing and publishing one novel a year. And James Patterson I might be botching this quote because I I don’t have the source for it right in front of me, but there was a profile of him of maybe ten, fifteen years ago that has stuck with me for a long time. And he talked about how as he sort of developed his plan for becoming a a super successful, like super productive writer, and thinking about, like, I just wanna sell books. Right? And I’m not I’m not trying to, like, I’m not not they’re trying to be literary.

I’m trying to meet people who he said he wanted to write books for people who were afraid of the idea of reading a book. And there is a way in which murder mystery too is a movie for people who don’t wanna go through all the effort and trouble of actually watching a movie. But, you know, it’s it’s like there’s a movie here if that’s what you want from it. And there’s some stuff that’s kinda that’s kinda cute and kinda Bulwark, and it is the same sort of appeal of, like, let’s not in any way pretend that there’s anything going on here except like a a kind of very basic we’ll make a promise to to amuse you for exactly ninety minutes and I

think fifty three seconds or something like that. Eighty two minutes really. If you if you don’t count all the Netflix credits,

the the timer on the screen reads one hour thirty minutes and some number of seconds plus whatever the credits are. And it’s just like, okay. I have I cannot bring myself to hate this because even though it’s not any good, it’s also it also doesn’t look down on its audience. It doesn’t pretend to be anything, it’s not, and it’s not truly wretched, which it could have been. I

wanna ask a list about this because a list of your text message, you’re like, this movie is bad. And I, like, I I intellectually understand and agree with you. But, like, I would rather watch this ten times out of ten than the George Clooney, Julia Roberts movie that we we talked about, ticket to Paradise, I think Sandler and Aniston have actual genuine chemistry. They look like they’re having fun, but they also look like they’re like properly annoyed with each other when they need to be annoyed, and they’re they’re, like, they they just feel real. They feel real in a very, like, kind of, silly sort of way.

That I found deeply appealing, and that’s all this movie is really trying to do is be goofy charming fun.

So I should confess that I think that I might have, like, a medically, diagnosable allergy to Adam Sandler.

It’s the neck beard, isn’t it?

Probably my favorite Sandler productions are, like, the Hanukkah songs that he used to release in, like, the late nineties, early offs. Like, It’s like that uncut gems and like he’s not terrible in Spanglish. You know, it’s this is not fair to Adam Sandler. Adam Sandler, if you listen to this podcast, I’m sorry, it’s not you, it’s definitely me. I just find him grading in a way that I cannot really deal with.

And I can kind of I can manage in something like uncut gems where the point of the movie is free to find him craving and to be like just so unbearably tense in his company that it works. But I just I don’t find Adam’s handler an enjoyable presence. It’s like the sort of whining tone that he has perfected as like his sort of signature schick, just kind of prevents me from connecting with him as an actor. And, you know, I can be persuaded to sort of sit through any number of, like, not very good romantic comedies, although tickets have paralyzed was awful. Like, there’s just a certain amount of junk that I enjoy.

But, like, Adam Sandler flavored disposable entertainment. I was about to say, Adam Sandler flavored junk, and then was just, like, no, I should not say that a little

posse. That’s too late. And I too late.

Just, like, it’s it’s not my thing. It’s like, you know, if I have a choice between like Chex Mix and Fun Yens, I’m gonna go with the Chex Mix. And so I am constitutionally ill suited to enjoy this movie, even watching it as Netflix intended, which was, like, wall chopping vegetables to meal prep for the week. Right? Like, I I watched this exactly the way that you’re supposed to do it with the, like, you know, sixty two percent of your attention that you’re supposed to allocate to it.

It does have one good joke, which is Mark Strong saying, there’s only one thing I hate more than witnesses, and that’s the French. It’s justification for blowing up the Eiffel Tower. And, like, as jokes about the destruction of French cultural heritage, go, like, that’s a good joke. That’s a solid joke. But it was the one time in the movie that I, like, really laughed.

Not every movie has to be pretentious, not every movie has to aim to be great art, but, like, vibes kinda aren’t enough for me in a

movie like this? I don’t know. I just well, I mean, if you don’t like Adam Sanders, you’re not gonna like this movie. And — Yeah. — like the problem here, listen, I I hate to tell you this.

Is that you you actually are a medical freak of nature because everyone many people love Adam Sandler. He they’ve he’s built a whole they built a whole Netflix empire. Around him appealing to the masses.

And that’s okay. Right? It’s like my Netflix, you know, sort of junk stuff is gonna be like all of the Shonda Rhimes, Bridgerton Stories stuff. Like, I will watch that stuff until the cows come home. And that is not like your collective cup of tea, and that’s okay.

But yeah, I just I’m sorry, Adam Sandler. I feel like I’m being, you know, failed. Have you, like, failed at a standler?

Can

we I mean, I’m sure he’ll rest well on his, like, enormous pile of money. Can

we talk a little bit more about the ticket to Paradise comparison because I think that one is actually interesting and really relevant. So in some ways, Ticketsatrade is a better movie. Not maybe overall, but in some of the specific aspects of it. And in particular, when we watched that movie, we talked about the kind of effortless like real big screen charisma that both Clooney and Julie Roberts have. And there’s that monologue in the middle of the movie where George Clooney talks about his house.

That is not actually all that well written and not even really all that pivotal scene in the scheme of the very underwritten plot of that movie, but incredibly well delivered. And it just works because George Clooney is really good at his job. There are not many people who can make a scene like that work in a way that George Clooney can. And so in some ways, it’s a better movie in the sense that there is actual real talent that is like there’s quite unique and quite sort of difficult to access even if it’s used badly and I think I didn’t like the movie and I felt like overall it was really underwhelming didn’t work overall. This movie doesn’t have anything close to that in terms of, though, in terms of, like, oh, that actually really work.

And that was a moment of the kind you can’t get. Like, that’s why you go with movies. Even if the movie doesn’t Bulwark, it’s like, it doesn’t have anything like that. At the same time, it gets us close enough for, I think, many viewers, maybe even most viewers, that this kind of movie. Murder mystery two is the reason why why romcoms, why adult dramas, maybe not adult dramas of the super sophisticated Oscar kind, but like a certain kind of of notch, spectacle driven movie is gonna disappear from theaters or at least or, like, slowly, like, nearly disappear.

And the reason is that murder mystery two is it’s it’s red baring pizza. Right? It’s it’s like it’s it’s frozen pizza from the from the the grocery store aisle. And in most cases, it’s good enough even though it’s obviously not as good as delivery or like the really good, you know, stuff that you get in Brooklyn or whatever your favorite pizza city is. Right?

It’s it’s just sorta fills the the gap there. And as a result, it’s gonna keep people from going to the movies because enough people we’ll look at this and think, why am I gonna go pay twenty bucks to, you know, twenty bucks for myself, a hundred dollars, you know, once you include a babysitter to go see A rom com featuring two big, you know, fancy stars who I’ve heard of. Right? Like, when I can just watch this at home for whatever my twenty one dollars a month on Netflix is. I

mean, this is this is the whole Netflix model. Or at least with regard to Adam Sandler, is that Adam Sandler had hit a point in his career where he was not a box office draw anymore. He had, like, kind of aged out of that category of of folks who were regularly going to the movies. But he was still he was still very, very popular with people who watch movies at home. You know, there’s a reason that, like, big daddy and have Gilmore and Billy Madison were on constant rotation on TBS comedy central, whatever is because those are very popular movies.

People like to kind of

sit around and just hang out with the sandman. This is and Adam Sandler is in some ways a triumph of the Netflix model of giving gigantic deals to —

Yeah. —

the creatives or sort of or stars of some sort because, like, he has I mean, he he got a huge amount of money, but it appears to have paid offer Netflix, at least as well as any of these things, can be said to have paid off in a world where movies don’t make actual box office revenues.

I also there’s one other thing that you can take away from the comparison with ticket to Paradise that shows, like, why this movie is appealing. And it’s there is this sense of You can see another version of this movie that especially in the early going makes a lot of fun of the two main characters as encounter a set of traditions that they’re not familiar with. And, like, part of what is sour and pleasant about ticket to paradise is the two main characters’ attitudes towards like, the idea that their daughter could, like, be happy with, like, a balmy’s, you know, seaweed farmer or whatever. Right? And, like, they’re tense in the situation.

They’re uncomfortable. They’re simultaneously sort of condescending and unable to adapt. And instead of, you know, sort of making fun of these characters as rubs and murder mystery, it puts in a situation where they’re super out of their depth. And, like, just sort of accepts that they’ll figure it out. You know, you have the scene where, like, you have the sort of big dance scene where, like, Jennifer Anderson’s character, whose name I literally can’t remember.

We’re just No idea. That’s gonna be the yes to no idea. Jennifer Aniston

does not remember the name of

her character in this movie. I mean, it’s It’s just Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler as far as I’m concerned.

She’s like, the role that bought me my way back, that’s the name of this character. And, you know, she’s, like, missed the instructions for, like, being in this very complicated damn sequence. And you know what? She, like, kinda wings it and they both figure it out. And they’re okay.

Right? Like, the movie doesn’t, like, make a joke about cultural appropriation when they’re, like, when she’s, like, wearing a sorry,

like,

you know, a critical twist involves her, like, knowing something about how Hannah works, not because she knows a lot about it, you know, the use of Hannah in, like, Indian wedding traditions, but because she’s a hairdresser, like, there is this sort of cultural ease and, you know, if not quite competence, like, you know, and assumed, like, ability of adults to rise to the occasion. And it doesn’t have some you know, sort of weird, sour self consciousness about the characters encountering a culture different from their own. And that was probably the most appealing part of the movie to me. Is it like you have these characters who are like not, you know, they’re not rich, they’re not famous, they’re not like they have not traveled this way before and then we’d be neither sort of condescense them nor does it make jokes at the Indian characters expense. It’s just like there’s an ease to it that actually in some ways feels more sophisticated than ticketing paradise.

I would say that the crucial scene here in what you’re describing, which I think is right. I think that’s the again, the vibes on this movie are great. There’s a a joke kinda early on where Jennifer Aniston is piling food on her plate because she’s so used to Adam Sandler’s character stealing from her that she wants she wants to have plenty of it, which is again, that is familiar sensation, I think, for a lot of married couples. Right? And this kind of snobby British woman, I think

The countess. The countess.

She’s a countess of some sort. She’s French maybe, I don’t know, says —

Russia. — to

cast it down nappy. Did you did you get enough there or some something like that, like, making fun of Jenna Aniston making her feel small. And you just know you just know when this happens that that character, that mean character later is gonna get her come up and she sure does. It’s great. It’s one this is a movie where things pay off pretty much exactly like you want them to, which is which is nice.

Alright. So what do we think? Thumbs

up or thumbs down on murder mystery two? Peter. Thumbs down, but it’s interestingly representative. Alyssa.

Thumbs down, but that’s my fault.

Thumbs up. This is a great movie. Number one movie of the year so far. Adam Sandler can do no wrong. Jennifer Anderson, lovely as always.

Now look, I I Will Saletan, it’s a thumbs up for what it’s trying to be, which is a Netflix original. It is a perfect Netflix original. This is this is what they should be making and not the power of the dog and not all these other nonsense, prestige movies, Roma, they should be making Adam Sandler fluff seventeen times a year. That’s just just put him in everything. Just had drop him in computer animated wise into everything and have him run around.

They’ll they’ll be much better off that way.

Looking forward to Adam Sandler’s red notice

too. Alright. That’s it for this week’s show. Make sure to head over to board plus for our bonus episode on Friday. My tickets to the live show.

It’s Tuesday May sixteenth at the Chris still city Alamo Drafthouse, go make sure you you check it out. There will be a link in the email you’ll you’ll find it there. Tell your friend strong recommendation from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcasts audiences, if we don’t, Girl, we’ll die. If you did not love two days episode, please complain to me on Twitter at sunnybunch, welcome to show that it is a fact the best show in your podcast feed. See you guys next week.