We continue our election year series on movies about the US President, with a chat about Ivan Reitman's Capraesque 1993 political-romantic-comedy-drama-satire(???) Dave, starring Kevin Kline as a lovable goofball Presidential lookalike who ends up actually pretending to be the President, kindasorta accidentally pulling off a (well-meaning) one-man coup d'état, enmeshed in the plots of the evil White House Chief of Staff (Frank Langella), and falling in love with the First Lady (Sigourney Weaver). Full episode exclusive for Patreon subscribers. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Be prepared for difficult application process and stressful work environment.
Challenges?
Many.
Rewards?
Numerous.
Failure?
Possible.
Your employer?
The American people.
The few chosen have been the presidents.
And welcome, folks, to bonus episode, whatever number it is, the second in our series about movies about the American presidency.
And our last one, that Air Force one, was rapturously received, I suppose.
I don't know, really.
Nobody said anything to me, but I assume it was.
So, of course, we're going to be continuing And we, by the way, is me and Daniel Harper, who's here also, I hope, anyway.
Yes, I am here.
You are not speaking into the void, or if you are, I am also here in the void, so it's fine.
I was going to say, we're both in the void, in the dark, echoing void.
No, no, it's always good to know that I'm not talking to myself, because I often do that.
Anyway, yeah, so this episode is going to be about the movie Dave.
When was this released?
Because there's some context clues.
1993.
May 7th, 1993.
um, 1993, May 7th, 1993.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The it's, it's, it's very 1993.
I think we might discuss that, so yes.
So Dave is an Ivan Reitman movie starring Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Frank Langella and a billion other people.
Who you will recognize, but whose names you might possibly not know, but you'll go.
It stars hundreds of, oh yeah, it's him.
Or hundreds of, oh yeah, her, yeah.
Faces from the 90s.
And it's a movie about, let me see if I've got this right.
It's a movie about a guy who is hired by the Secret Service to be a body double for the President.
So that he can be seen to be leaving a hotel where he's actually staying so that he can have sex with one of his secretaries.
And this is all apparently official White House stuff, like the staff at the White House organized this.
It's not just... I want to highlight a moment here.
It's not just the Secret Service, although I believe this is done through the Secret Service.
It's literally the White House chief of staff and the like chief communications person like the head community, whatever that, whatever that, uh, whatever that, those are the two people who are like running this operation.
And apparently they're the only two who know.
Um, anyway, we can get into that, but yeah, so this is run not just by like White House officials, but like, like, like the top people, like the chief of staff is personally running this thing.
Like, you know, The president needs to get him some strange from the secretary who works right outside his office, and therefore we're just going to do that now.
It's just presented without commentary, really.
It's just, well, this is just clearly what's happening.
It seems like an overcomplicated way of going about things.
Let me put it this way.
He needs to be seen to be leaving, but he's not actually leaving.
He's staying in the hotel so that he can have a nice night with his secretary, who's played by Laura Linney.
In a very early role.
A very young Laura Linney in a role that's frankly beneath her.
But, yeah, and this is, as I say, this is apparently like the entire White House knows this is going on, or the Chief of Staff and the Secret Service, they're all in on this.
And there's no easier way of achieving this, clearly.
But while he's with Laura Linney, I should say the President is being played by Kevin Kline, who was about like the hottest shit in Hollywood in 1993, I suppose.
And so, of course, is the guy who is his double, Dave, the titular Dave.
And while he's having a very nice time with his secretary in the hotel room, he has a stroke and goes into a coma, literally while they're engaged in stuff.
And so the evil White House chief of staff decides to keep the hapless body double on as a pretend president for reasons.
It seems to be it seems to be like they don't trust the vice president because the vice president is actually like a good man, a moral man who's not going to do all the shit that they want to do.
He's an honest man.
Yeah This this is going to come up later.
This is a significant plot point but They see the Vice President as unable to rise to the occasion for their nefarious plans.
And this really is like, the Chief of Staff is the guy who's like, no, no, I run things.
This is my White House.
This is what I do.
Yeah.
The Chief of Staff, Bob Alexander, who's played by Frank Langella, or Langella, I'm not quite sure how you pronounce that, in total just complete open villain mode.
Like he just goes around just glowering at everybody all the time with these cold, dead, murderous, sociopathic eyes.
And he never speaks.
He's practically playing Dracula here.
He is, basically, yeah.
Yeah, except he's more sinister here than he was when he played Dracula.
Because when he plays Dracula on Broadway in the movie version, he's like a sexy, young, romantic Dracula.
This guy is just...
You know, he never speaks except in a low, dead, quiet, villain voice like this.
He might as well be called Bob Evil, basically.
And it's great.
I love it.
I think it's great.
But as it goes on, it becomes clear that he's got a Richard III sort of thing going on, which I love that.
I love that he's actually... because it's like him and the president...
Who's got the most generic?
We talked last time about generic president names.
This is even more generic.
Last time it was President James Marshall.
This is President Bill Mitchell, which is just like complete, you know, it's not there.
It's basically not there, that name.
There's going to be a quiz at the end of this series as to which president is which in which movie.
So as it goes along, and this is really well written actually, this is one of the things I wanted to say, like watching this it was a real...
window back into a long vanished era where stuff like this, this is completely inconsequential fluff.
There's nothing to this whatsoever.
But nevertheless, everybody involved in crafting this gave 110% and put in a great job and every part of it is beautifully done.
It's written, the plot is perfect and everything, it's timed perfectly, everything.
They literally, I mean I know what I sound like, but they literally do not make films like this anymore.
Just entertainment crap, but to a really high basic standard.
You just don't get stuff like this anymore.
Well they spend too much money on movies now.
Like this movie cost, I was looking at Wikipedia, this movie cost 28 million dollars.
And made 92 million and even adjusting for inflation.
That's not, you know, they don't make movies for $50 million anymore.
Everything has to be 100, but it's either it's either made for like $400,000 or it's $100 million movie and you don't get like big name actors to come into your movie without, you know.
Paying what they're worth, you know, like, and so everything has to be this giant production.
It has to do certain things, and they're just pushed through this development pipeline.
Like, this would have been developed to death if it had been, like, done by a major studio in 2020.
Like, it's just, you know, it's just a different world.
It's a different world.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, a movie is a huge investment of time and money.
It takes like, I don't know, like a big Hollywood movie, it can take a year, two years plus to make.
So there's a huge number of people on the payroll being paid to do it, you know, a huge amount of work for a year plus.
They can't afford to do that now unless they're expecting to make just Hyper profits, right?
You know, so as you say movies like this just don't get made and you can't sell toys on this either Like you can't sell Dave the the action here.
You can't sell Dave the Happy Meal, you know And that's the other thing that goes on is like everything that's made has to be like connected into some like ancillary marketing, you know That's going to give you even more money, you know.
I saw this comment that, you know, all the Marvel movies, it's like, you can like them or hate them or whatever, but these are not movies.
These are commercials for action figures.
That's what these movies are meant to be.
Some of them are more effective at it than others, but that's just what it is.
So, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Big movies now, they exist for the same political, economic reason that back in my childhood, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe used to exist.
It was made in order to flog plastic toys.
This is just a drama.
This is just a comedy drama or a dramedy.
I suppose a romantic comedy There's a strong romantic element to this.
Yeah, definitely a romantic comedy drama satire I don't think maybe I mean I'll give it that it's fine like I don't know which which makes you feel better is that it's it has a tiny bit of satire that's well executed or it's not really aiming for a satire whichever one you think makes the movie sound better it's that one like you know that's how I feel about it you know And I'm afraid that's all you're getting of that, at least for the time being.
If you want to hear the rest of it, you'll have to give myself or Daniel as little as $1 a month on Patreon.
When you do, you'll have access to this episode and all our previous bonus episodes, the entire back catalogue.
