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Oct. 18, 2024 - I Don't Speak German
01:17:11
UNLOCKED! Bonus Ep33 'Air Force One' (1997)
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Time Text
.
And the patriotic music swells.
.
To introduce us.
In this bonus episode that we're doing.
About a movie.
We do that sometimes, bonus episodes about movies.
Daniel, how the bloody hell are you, Mr.
President?
I'm doing quite well.
Thank you for addressing me by my proper title.
I'll take a bullet for you.
I'd jump in front of a terrorist bullet for you.
Hope you know that.
I am very aware of that, as you should.
You know your betters when you see one.
I hear you.
Ah, so yes, bonus episodes about movies, and I think, you know, this might not happen the way we, because they don't.
You know, we say we're going to do this, and we don't do it, like we promised you a Benjamin Boyce episode, and it never happened.
But the idea is that we're going to be doing, at least for the foreseeable future, we're going to be doing bonus episodes about movies about presidents.
And I can't remember how that...
I have a horrible, sneaking, sort of cold, trickling feeling down the back of my neck that that was somehow my idea.
Did I think of that?
I recall this being your idea, that we were going to...
It was like, oh, well, what do you want to pick?
And we were just kind of vaguely talking.
And you were like, well, it's an election year.
We should just do things about the U.S. presidency.
And so we should just pick movies about the presidency.
Because you and I have discussed movies like The Oliver Stone, JFK, and Nixon are both movies that you and I both quite like for various reasons.
And we've discussed those in various places.
And I think we were talking about doing that.
We were talking about doing that again for this.
And then It's like, well, let's just do a whole – let's just do for the rest of the year up until November or whatever.
I mean we can just do movies about the US presidency, and that would be a fun little side project.
Also, we both really liked doing – Primary colors a couple of years ago.
And so I think we kind of had that sort of thing in mind.
I'm not sure how Air Force One came about.
I'm not sure.
I don't remember suggesting this, but I may be mistaken.
So that's at least how I remember this happening.
Yeah, I don't remember suggesting Air Force One either.
It was just one of those things that kind of, it just somehow became a fact that we were doing Air Force One next.
And it was like, oh, okay, when should we do Air Force One?
And I'm like, oh, right, yeah, okay, when are we doing Air Force One?
And now we're doing Air Force One, and that's what we're doing.
So, yeah, yeah.
On the strength of the movies that we've watched for this series so far, that being one, Air Force One, I'm feeling that this was a horrible, horrible mistake.
I don't know.
How do you feel about 1997's Air Force One, directed by Wolfgang Peterson and starring Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman, Daniel?
What are your thoughts on it?
So I actually saw this theatrically when I was a teenager.
I was 17 years old.
I know I saw it.
I saw this theatrically as well.
Wow.
Yeah.
I have no memory of how, but I did.
I saw this in the cinema.
Yeah, I would have seen this.
I mean, I probably just went with – my dad would have wanted to see it on the big screen.
My dad was big.
He read all the Tom Clancy novels and shit all through my childhood, and so I think this tickled that bit of fancy.
So we didn't go and see a ton of movies, but we did – I remember distinctly going to see this.
This was released the same weekend as Men in Black, the original Men in Black, which is a movie that is – Yeah, I remember it being pretty effective.
Like, at the time, I remember liking it.
I have a weakness for these kinds of action thrillers of the 90s, and I liked a lot of them.
Again, I was a teenager, of course.
I was going to get a lot out of this.
And then have not really considered it since.
Just never really had a single thought about it.
I rewatched it twice for this podcast.
And the first time I rewatched it, I was very...
Like, it's like, wait, this is the movie?
Like, this is crap.
Like, this is just bad.
It's just bad on every level.
And then when I, like, I thought, like, oh, this will be, I don't know, you and I have, we've both listened to at least a bit of the Unclear and Present Danger podcast, I think.
Yep.
And that's a podcast very much about the films of the post-Cold War era and what they say about the times that they were made in.
It's not nearly...
That description makes it sound really, really interesting.
And I think that the two guys who run it are often interesting separately.
But I don't think that that podcast is...
I'll listen to it sometimes.
I listened to an episode today, actually, that did Johnny Mnemonic, which was fun.
But I often find it just a little bit undercooked for something that should be much better.
And this sort of fits into that wheelhouse.
This is kind of what I thought we were getting into is this will be a sort of vessel in which to look at sort of mid-90s paranoia.
What was in the zeitgeist of the political scene in the mid-90s that this was...
Such a huge hit that this is remembered fondly in certain crowds.
And I think I have an angle for that.
I think we can do that.
I will say that re-watching it the second time, I was like, I want to give this another shake.
And I did re-watch it last night before I went to bed, so I stood up late and watched this movie.
And I enjoyed it more, knowing that it wasn't going to be as interesting as I was hoping it would be.
Because I was really hoping there was going to be some meat to this.
And there's really just no meat to this at all.
And it feels terribly dated.
And I don't know.
I think I'll get into more of that as we kind of discuss.
So what was your experience of this?
Yeah, well, as I say, I did see it at the cinema back in the day, so I would have been 21, I suppose.
Yeah, something like that.
20 or 21, depending on exactly when it came out.
I'm a summer baby.
My birthday is in the summer, so I'm almost exactly halfway through the year.
This was released in July 25th.
Right, so assuming I saw it quite soon after its release, I was still 20 years old, but only just, all of which is completely irrelevant.
But yeah, so I have no memory of how I came to see it, or who I was with.
It would have been one of those, you know, a mate says, let's do something, and we walk into the cinema, and there it is.
It would have been something like that, I expect.
Yeah.
Yeah, and like you, really, I remember watching it and just sort of, okay, that was a film, you know, and never thinking about it again.
Except that it's one of those, like, all these years...
I've always kind of had that bit where Harrison Ford kicks Gary Oldman off the back of the plane, and he says, get off my plane!
It's always kind of been in my head as like the ultimate moment of Hollywood cheese, you know?
Like, nothing else about the movie I remember at all, except...
Well, there's a couple of other things that sort of came back to me as I was watching it, which we might get into, because they're about the politics of the piece, which, as you say, is barely even there.
I mean, just to emphasize this point, which political party does our President of the United States...
He is a member of which political party?
Did you find that out in any way watching this movie?
It is not stated.
It is completely unstated, yes.
It is usually unstated in films of this type.
For instance, and this is another film that we're probably going to talk about for this series, in Independence Day, it is not stated which party President Bill Pullman, who's a very, very similar character, actually, in many respects.
Almost like...
I can almost imagine these films being in the same continuity and it's actually the same guy.
I know the name is different, but it's like the same president just played by a different actor.
But yeah, it's usually not stated.
My feeling is that it's probably a Democrat because Republican presidents are not usually actual soldiers.
Democrat presidents aren't either, but they nominated John Kerry.
Republicans don't vote for veterans.
Republican presidents are draft-dodging children of privilege whose fathers got them out of having to even do national service.
Well, I suppose George Bush Sr., he actually served, didn't he?
And W did serve, although he had a very cushy job, to be clear.
But both W and Al Gore, for that matter, also served, but...
Well, there you go.
I mean, Al Gore's a Democrat.
So, yeah, my feeling is probably a Democrat.
And, of course, Bill Clinton was president at the time.
And I usually feel like fictional presidents, statistically, they're more likely to be of the same party as the president who is reigning at the time the movie was made.
That's how I feel.
I have no justification for that whatsoever, but it's how I feel.
And nobody can tell me otherwise.
Yeah, fair enough.
Yeah, I mean, one thing that struck me or one thing that like as I was sitting, as I was watching this, I mean, Independence Day definitely like came up in my thoughts is like, oh, this is very – it came out the year after.
Yes, the year after Independence Day.
What is it really?
Only the year after?
The year after.
That's really weird.
This was the same year as Men in Black, and Independence Day was the following year.
This feels like something...
I mean, it's very, very 90s, but it also feels like something much older than those two, to me, anyway.
Yeah, well, I think that that's partly Wolfgang Petersen's influence.
Petersen is like...
He's always like...
with das boot of course um which is an absolute like classic a stone cold classic and i was like looking at i went as i was watching this the first time i like hit pause and i was like what else did wolfgang peterson do and it's a lot of schlock i mean he had like das boot he had a couple of other good ones and then it's mostly like this like this kind of stuff but um he's a very old school director
The film, the way that the action is structured, the way that tension is built, the way that even certain moments are framed, it feels much more early to mid-80s as opposed to even...
You watch something like Men in Black, it doesn't feel contemporary, but it feels modern in a way.
Independence Day, even.
These are big special effects heavy.
They feel very 21st century, even though they're not.
Whereas this is much more old school.
There is a tiny bit of CGI in the film.
In the final crashing sequence, there is some CGI here.
But this is all practical.
This is all very low-key.
I don't know.
Do you remember?
This is completely off topic, but I guess this is fine.
It's on topic if we say it is.
This is a bonus episode.
We just get to talk.
Did you ever listen to the podcast?
I don't even own a television.
Did I ever share that one with you?
You absolutely did, and I listened to it a lot.
Yes, I know it very well indeed.
For a time there, it was one of my favorite listens.
I have very fond memories of that show.
Yes, no, very well.
I thought that was true, but then my brain started going like, no, you never actually did that.
But no, yeah, no, I listened to that religiously until it got just way too twee for me at a certain point, and so I just had to stop.
But they did an episode on one of the Tech War novels.
for those who don't remember or mercifully never knew was was written by william shatner and it's sort of like that post uh tj written by written by quote unquote written by and um they they they had there was even a tv series that ran for uh i think two seasons and there were a couple of tv movies um And a lot of that is on YouTube, if you ever want to check it out.
I remember liking that quite a bit.
I was 12, so, you know, I haven't really had the energy to revisit that.
But they did describe this very aptly, that a lot of the action in the Tech War books is something that you could conceivably imagine as sort of like...
Yeah.
In other words, you know, William Shatner is writing a book series that stars himself, essentially.
Like, I could still play this character because, like, he's not asked to do- His hero is somebody that he could be cast to play if it got turned into a television series.
Right.
And what I noticed here, what I, what I, is, you know, Harrison Ford, I looked it up, Harrison Ford was 45 when they, when this movie was made and released.
45 is not, I mean, that's a year older than I am now.
But Harrison Ford does not, he is not like, you know, a young, hip, you know, Keanu Reeves in 1995 or anything like that.
He is a middle-aged man.
He looks and sounds and acts just like a middle-aged man.
And so the action is very, you know, There's one of the early, like, scenes of him, like, fighting with these, like, Kazakh terrorists or whatever is, like, he literally is hiding behind a rotating chair, like a revolving chair, and he hits the guy with the chair and then, like, tackles him from above, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, I kept watching this and going, like, you know, I could see a remake of this with Tom Cruise in full Mission Impossible regalia.
Tom Cruise could credibly play the President of the United States at this point.
He's much older than Harrison Ford was then.
But he's a believable action star.
And they know how to make these things now so that it is much more thrilling.
I mean, this is...
It feels dated.
I think it felt a little dated even at the time.
And if you look at, like, contemporary reviews, they talk about it as being sort of a little bit of, like, a 50s throwback in some ways.
Like, it feels like the time between 1957 and 1997 just haven't happened, you know, even though it's obviously the 90s.
And I think there is something to that, and I think that's part of what...
I mean, it's...
It's just such a boomer movie, right?
Yes.
It's like peak boomer movie is what this is.
Yep.
Yeah, absolutely.
I was going to say, you know, it could have been made in the 1950s, except that in the 1950s they had too much self-awareness to make propaganda this fucking blatant.
Right, yeah.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I don't know.
Should we talk about the politics of it a little bit?
I feel like, I mean, God, it's...
I don't know.
For me, it's almost like...
There's no politics here at all.
It's just a – I don't want to say like jingoism.
It doesn't – it's just – it's diehard on Air Force One.
Exactly.
The terrorists seem to not have – Gary Oldman who is – if there's one thing I remember – there are a couple little moments that I remember from watching it as a teenager.
And Gary Oldman's performance is one that I always really liked him in this.
I always thought he was pretty cool.
Obviously, Gary Oldman is Gary Oldman, right?
Sadly.
Yeah, sadly.
For all the positives and negatives, Gary Oldman is just Gary Oldman.
It is like the plot of Die Hard is we're a bunch of thieves pretending to be ideologues in order to throw people off our scent.
And you would almost expect this to have that same kind of twist in it because they're trying to get this guy Radek out of prison and presumably back into office by some mechanism after he's been deposed by one of those pre-credits intro scenes that has a little to do with the rest of the movie.
There's a coup, there's a violent coup that's presumed to be like an American, like a NATO led coup or something like that.
I mean, I've always interpreted that as just an American kidnapping, an extraction, as they call them, you know, just presented completely sympathetically.
Like, yeah, we're gonna parachute into somebody else's country and abduct their head of state.
Isn't it great?
Right.
And they – what's his name?
Marshall.
Yeah, James Marshall is the name of the president.
So Harrison Ford, his big speech at the beginning is – Most generic possible president name imaginable.
President John Doe.
No, James Marshall.
I kept forgetting what the – Harrison Ford has that thing for me.
It's like I really like Harrison Ford.
I've always liked Harrison Ford.
I think he's a fine man.
But I do have the thing where whenever I see Harrison Ford, I can't not see Harrison Ford.
He's just always Harrison Ford to me.
Yeah, he is.
Except for, I think Indiana Jones and Hansel, the younger Harrison Ford, I feel like there's a bit more of a character there.
But I think as he aged, he just got to be like, just, he's just always that guy.
You know, he's just always that one character.
And so there's just one, there's just one character being played by Harrison Ford all through the nineties, basically.
And this is just that guy.
And, yeah, he has a speech where he gives a speech and he's like, it's not the prepared speech, it's the, you know, he goes off script and he's like...
It's the off-the-cuff speech that he makes from an, just, he's overwhelmed by his conscience and all his slimy advisors are like, you can't, Mr.
President, you can't say things in public like, we will oppose terrorism and we will help refugees.
What are you talking about?
Presidents can't say things like that!
What will our allies say?
Yeah, no, it's also like the most pre-9-11 movie imaginable.
Oh, God, yeah.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, I mean, it's a nonsense speech.
It's a, you know, it's...
I mean, it's not nonsense.
It's posturing.
It's throwing your big balls around because you can.
But it's also empty of any real import.
It's just like, we don't negotiate with terrorists.
And then, of course, down the line, the President of the United States actively negotiates with terrorists to save his life.
Yeah.
I mean, if the movie has anything going on, then that's it, isn't it?
It's the difference between the rhetoric.
And the implausible thing about that rhetoric in the speech that he gives is that he admits a mistake.
That's the thing that makes it something that a president wouldn't actually say.
He stands up and he says, you know, we didn't do anything we should have done and we looked away and that was wrong and we're going to change.
You know, they don't do that.
World leaders don't admit that they did things wrong.
Of course, what that sort of rhetoric actually is, is the ideology of liberal interventionism.
It's humanitarian interventionism, I think, before the phrase even existed, or that ideology was in the process of being cooked up.
It prefigures, as we'll maybe talk about a bit later, it prefigures the sort of rhetoric that was used to justify the war on terror.
But yeah, if there's any meat on the bones, then it's there.
It's the difference between what he says in a speech about, we don't negotiate with terrorists, and And the idea of like, oh, but in the real world, which is tricky and difficult and complicated, then sometimes, like the vice president, you know, she's obviously this very intelligent and principled politician,
but, you know, she might have to negotiate to get this guy released and the president, when it comes down to it, you know, to, yeah, if there's anything, I mean, it's not, that's not much flesh, but if there's any flesh on the bones, then it's the distinction between those two things, I suppose.
Well, I think that the film doesn't even consider that for a moment.
I think we have to read that into the film.
Because it's like, the whole point is he's actively, you know, Marshall is actively fighting back against the terrorists.
He's not going to run away.
He's not going to escape in the escape pod and have his, my family's up there, you know, that sort of thing.
As if, I mean...
You know, you and I are not great fans of the imperial presidency.
You're not great fans of, like, nation states in general, I suspect.
But, you know, if you are, like, the president of the United States, I think you have a greater responsibility to the 300 million Americans who, like, you know, depend on you.
Yeah, I mean, somebody actually kind of says that in the film.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I mean, the film has this extended subplot, and you mentioned it.
I think this is the closest thing that this thing gets to being interesting.
On a political level is this sort of debate that's happening on the ground where Glenn Close, the first female vice president, is sitting in the big war room in the cabinet with all the other bigwigs, with the secretary of defense and the yada yada.
And a whole bunch of, like, intelligence operatives.
I mean, you know, it's a huge part of the film.
Probably more actors are in that sequence or in that portion of the film than are on, like, Air Force One.
And another interesting thing is, like, this film is also shot on, like, two sets, which is, you know, something that also makes it feel much smaller than most movies today feel, I think.
Yeah, it does kind of...
It kind of feels a little bit like TV, doesn't it?
I mean, it's just on film, but yeah, because it's actually quite small scale, apart from the cutaways.
The actual action takes place on like two sets.
Right.
And it certainly feels smaller than like modern day prestige TV. You know, I mean, you look at, I mean, even an ordinary police procedural today is, you know, better produced and has like more locations than the Air Force One does.
I mean, and part of that is, you know, you're You're making a movie set on a particular place.
We're trapped on the plane together is part of the point of it.
But even then, you spend most of your time, there's an upstairs area, there's the hold area, and then there's the living arrangements in the upper portion.
And Harrison Ford spends a good, like, 20 minutes of this film just by himself in the holes, right, you know, where he occasionally runs against a terrorist and has to get into a gunfight.
But it's very, I mean, it's very stagy in a way, and I think that's part of what makes it feel old-fashioned, is that staginess.
I think it's kind of hamstrung by...
It's half-hearted, or maybe they sort of change...
It feels like they sort of change their mind about this halfway through the production process.
I feel like it's kind of hamstrung by the extent to which it is Die Hard on a plane, and it's the president.
Like, I mean, Die Hard is obviously...
It's hugely influential.
And this is another reason why it feels maybe like an older film than the films around it, because it is very, very like a version of Die Hard.
And Die Hard is not a 90s film.
It's a late 80s film.
And it's, you know, it's an 80s movie, despite the fact it was 88, 89.
It's still very much an 80s movie, Die Hard.
And this is following it.
And there were a lot of movies that followed Die Hard.
People were doing sort of Die Hard on, you know, whatever.
And, you know, Speed is a famous example.
Die Hard on a Bus.
But Speed opens out.
You know, Speed...
It's funny, I re-watched Speed last year or something, and you spend a good amount of time not on the bus.
Keanu Reeves spends a lot of time not on the bus.
It opens out, despite its premise.
It does open out.
This feels trapped by its premise.
It does sort of...
Get away from the Die Hard template a bit as it goes on.
But certainly the first half, I would say, it's following Die Hard almost beat for beat.
Like you expect when Harrison Ford sort of, you know, he encountered President Ford, he encounters the first terrorist and kills him.
You think he's going to leave his body for Gary Oldman to find, but now I have a machine gun written on his T-shirt or something.
It's not quite that bad.
But at the same time, as you say, it goes away from the template of Die Hard, where they turn out not to be terrorists, they turn out to be crooks, etc.
Whereas this is kind of, rather than do that, it keeps them terrorists.
So it's kind of trapped in the position of having to try to characterize their ideology and their motivation and stuff like that.
And...
I mean, if we are going to talk about the politics of it, really, like, the only thing I have to say about that is that it's totally incoherent.
And it's almost deliberately incoherent, because they very definitely characterize these terrorists as ultranationalists, Russian ultranationalists, right?
That is actually said.
And at the same time, they also seem to be Kazakhs.
And at the same time as that, you have rhetoric from the Gary Oldman character about dragging the capitalists out of the government, and when they release the general, the old-style general who's going to supposedly rebuild the Soviet Union, the prisoners are all singing the Internationale.
Which wasn't even...
That's the old communist anthem from the Revolutionary days.
That wasn't even the...
That wasn't even the anthem of the Soviet Union, but they're singing the International, which is not something that would have been the favoured singing topic of hardline ultra-nationalists.
These people are on different sides, and it's really strange the way they seem to have deliberately mixed all these things up together.
It's just like everybody in Russia who is politically against The American-sponsored, American-friendly program of democratization and liberalization and stuff like that.
By this point, by the way, by 1997, it was very clear to everybody what that meant.
It meant structural adjustment.
It meant privatization.
It meant dismantling all the welfare systems.
It meant the currency being devalued.
It was a catastrophe.
It was an absolute catastrophe.
You know, I'm not defending the old Soviet Union, but the process that Russia went through, where the entire old system has just dismantled and sold off, and it was a catastrophe for the people of Russia.
The IMF said Russia's going to have to sacrifice a generation, and they basically did.
So it's a catastrophe.
So anybody in Russia who's not down with that, by this point it's clear what that is, is kind of an old-style communist and also a far-right nationalist and just everything all mixed up together.
And the irony of that for me, just to put a sort of cap on this, is that That sort of liberal ideology, it's still doing that now with Russia.
Putin is our creature, essentially.
Again, I'm not defending Putin.
I loathe and despise him and everything he stands for.
He's a far-right ultra-nationalist.
Basically, this is the ideology that won in Russia.
And he was our guy.
We supported him for ages.
We in the West brought about the situation that brought him to power.
And yet now, you know, the American Empire and their allies are now threatened by Putin's expansionism.
Again, which is bad, don't get me wrong.
And how does the media characterize this?
It's, oh, they want the old Soviet Union back.
Here's endless sort of visualizations of Putin looking like...
You know, with the old Soviet propaganda wash all over the images and stuff like this, you know, with the Lenin hat on.
We're still doing this.
It's so crazy.
But it's obvious from this film's point of view and from the point of view of the ideology that created it.
It's just obvious that These things that are actually all completely opposites in this real place, Russia, that actually exists, that has real people in it.
It's all just smooshed into this great big ball of this great big homogenous porridge, you know, of bad guy ideology.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, and again, let me, let me just reiterate it's almost as if the boomers themselves were a mishmash of completely conflicting political ideologies for most of their, for most of their lives.
So to some degree, this does just reflect, you know, like the boomer, just the boomer mindset is.
It's just – it's so present whenever you try to think seriously at all about any of these, about this film.
It's just a wash in the incoherence of the time.
And I think that's partly because – and we brushed across this.
It's like we don't know which party the president is in this movie, in part because you want to sell tickets to more than half the – Half the population, you know?
And the other half is not going to want to see...
You know, you can't make the politics really concrete without having your...
Well, decimating, really, your potential audience, ultimately.
And I think that that's...
So, to some degree, the incoherence is the point.
And I mean, I presume that Wolfgang Peterson and the people writing the film are smart enough to know better in terms of are they Kazakhs or are they Russian nationalists?
Are they terrorists?
Are they freedom fighters, et cetera, et cetera?
I think it's just like it just had no There's just no desire to go anywhere more interesting with that.
They're these stand-in bad guys.
They're going to be menacing because they speak with foreign accents, and they scream a lot, and they have machine guns that rarely have ever run out of ammo.
That's just a thing that's common in every single movie of this era, right?
Nobody ever runs out of ammo unless it is a very plot-specific moment, right?
Yeah.
They're spraying bullets from machine pistols all over the inside of this plane, and it never once even threatens to depressurize.
Nobody considers that.
Nobody considers it for a moment that, hey, you might depressurize.
Now, I think that might be just like the plot of Tanium of...
Yeah.
It's Air Force One, and so you can just say, oh, it's like hyper-secure, it's hyper-rigid, it's protected against all of that.
I think that part you can kind of just go, eh, I mean, I'll give it, you know, we'll give it.
Yeah, yeah.
But the fact that it's not even motion to kind of tells you all you need to know about how seriously this movie is taking any of those kinds of issues.
I mean, it's ultimately – it's cheese.
It's big action cheese.
It is – if you were – if you signed up for a movie that has Harrison Ford playing the president of the United States – Whose plane gets hijacked and he has to go and save the day.
This is that movie.
This is exactly...
It is the Big Mac.
It is that exact product, you know?
You know that you're paying to get into, essentially, an adolescent fantasy.
And shit, do you get one?
And yet, at the same time, as you say, it's kind of a boomer fantasy as well.
Maybe that says something about boomers.
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, it's mass market entertainment, and it is – I mean, again, it made a shitload of money.
I mean, it made $350 million worldwide, which doesn't sound like much today, but that was huge.
That was a big movie in those days.
That would have been top 10 of the year for sure, maybe even higher than that.
Yeah.
So, I mean...
It's not very good, though, is it?
I mean, I went in expecting it to be politically egregious and nonsensical, because that's a given, and I went in expecting all this stuff that we've kind of, you know, gestured to...
But I still thought, it'll be fun, though.
It'll be, you know, I'll just switch my brain off.
And it wasn't.
It was boring.
It's really...
The pacing is shot to shit.
Yeah.
It keeps cutting back and forth between the plane and the White House, and neither is developed enough for you to ever get into it.
And it's weirdly characterless.
The president has no personality besides being the president and being Harrison Ford.
But, I mean, as you say, that's kind of expectable.
But it's true of everybody.
The First Lady has no personality.
The Vice President, I mean, Glenn Close does her best, but she has no personality beyond I'm harassed and Dean Stockwell's a bit of an asshole.
And most egregiously of all, Gary Oldman's terrorist leader, he's so...
There's nothing there.
He's characterless.
There's loads of stuff in there for him to chew on, but none of it feels human.
And it's joyless, isn't it?
If they were trying to recapture the die-hard magic...
You know, Hans Gruber in Die Hard, he's doing all sorts of things, but one of the things he's doing is enjoying himself.
He's charming.
The bad guy in this is just joyless.
You know, it's like Oldman is on a different page from everybody else.
He's trying to give this sort of serious, intense performance about this guy who's, you know, one man's terrorist, there's another man's freedom fighter, etc., etc.
But it just doesn't work.
It's like he's trying to find excuses to do his...
Oh, it's time for me to do a villain monologue.
I'll get the daughter in here and I'll sit in front of her and make big eyes at her and say terrifying things.
But you don't come over as a sincere man who's trying to justify himself, who has a viewpoint.
You just come over as like a guy who's doing an evil villain performance.
And I think there's – I mean, there could – I mean, I don't know.
It's hard for me to hate any of the actors in this.
They're just given nothing to do.
There are lots of great people in this, and Gary Oldman, not least among them.
I think this is also the era in which great villain performances were – Completely over the top.
There was this...
You're just a crazy, raving lunatic.
You know, kind of...
You know, like a sociopathic kind of characteristic.
And this is just what villains were in movies at this time.
And I think that...
I mean, I agree, but also, as I say, it's kind of joyless and charmless.
Unlike Hans Gruber, unlike Dennis Hopper's character in Speed, for instance.
He doesn't have any lines like, no, poor people are crazy, I'm eccentric.
Right, right.
Yeah, there's no wit to this.
There's no verve to it.
There are no jokes in it.
I mean, you know, you would expect, you know, it's supposed to be this, I don't know, I just can't, you know, I don't know.
Did you ever read any of the, like, Tom Clancy stuff?
How much exposure have you had to that?
I've seen The Hunt for Red October.
Okay.
I might have seen one of the other, I might have seen one of the Harrison Ford Tom Clancy's.
I feel like I have, but yeah, that's it.
The Hunt for Red October is far and away the best of those kinds of movies, by the way.
I believe it was Clancy's first novel, and they really go downhill from there.
It is worth noting that in the book versions, in the Jack Ryan books, by the time this movie was made, Jack Ryan was president of the United States in the chronology of those novels.
Holy shit!
Yes, yes, yes.
I don't know the details of how he got there, but again, my dad just had these sitting around.
I used to leaf through them.
I read a whole bunch of them.
I have virtually no memory of them.
But there is this sort of focus on...
Isn't he supposed to be like a nerdy analyst?
I mean, that's as I remember it.
The idea of the character is that he's kind of this backroom guy.
I think he's supposed to be an analyst who does some field work, but he's mostly...
But he's mostly there just to be kind of the voice of reason, the voice of expertise in these situations.
And then just as the series moves on, he gets increasingly action-oriented.
And I am not aware of it exactly.
I think he just keeps getting promoted upwards because at the end of each book he has to be given a medal or a promotion or whatever.
And he wrote enough of them that eventually he just has to be president of the United States because there's nowhere else for him to go.
He's jumped out of so many helicopters without a parachute firing upwards with his machine gun at the same time that they just say, well, there's nowhere else for you to go.
You're just going to be president now.
Right, exactly, exactly.
But yeah, no, I stopped reading these long before this period, so I mostly read the ones in the late 80s, early 90s.
I mean, I was a kid.
I was a little kid.
There's also a lot of fucking in those books, and that was very exciting to me as a 12-year-old.
So, you know, that's...
Fair enough, fair enough.
Hey look, never apologize for reading crap.
Yeah, no.
Especially if you make an entertaining podcast about it.
In many ways, this does feel like another, like an unauthorized sequel to the Jack Ryan, to the Harrison Ford Jack Ryan movies.
It fits very neatly in that sort of aesthetic in a lot of ways.
Although with the political intrigue turned way down, way, way down.
But a lot of the pleasures of those books, I think, for people who enjoyed them was that, A, it's a very kind of rah-rah, row America kind of politics in which the Republicans are in charge because, of course, they are because they're the adults of the room, etc., etc., etc.
And they also are filled to the brim with, you know, authentic technical detail about like how the submarines work or how the Air Force works, how this particular plane does its thing, how the gun, you know, how the, you know, what, what, what particular trigger guard are you using on, you know, your modified whatever.
There's a whole lot of that stuff in these books.
And that's, you know, a lot of it is that sort of, that sort of lived in feel of the people who are just into the gear.
And there's a lot of that here.
And you get some of that in Air Force One with the capabilities of the aircraft.
Apparently, the filmmakers, prior to making the film, they actually got to tour Air Force One.
And so this is presumably a pretty close mock-up of the real thing.
Although, for security reasons, they don't give out a whole lot of the details of exactly what kinds of countermeasures are in place.
Bill Clinton saw this movie when he was president and commented on the unrealism of certain factors of the – well, Air Force One doesn't actually do that.
It's the unrealistic part.
Right, yeah.
And, I mean, it does speak to something like, you know, Bill Clinton was a fan of this movie.
Apparently he saw it a few times.
He was kind of a movie buff.
Oh, I bet he did.
He was a movie buff in general as well.
But, you know, he apparently very much appreciated this film as a popcorn entertainment.
He screened it at the White House and said, it's history written with lightning.
Maybe not that bad, but I did want to get back to the scenes with the vice president and in the White House doing their table conversation because I think this is the closest this gets to something – I don't know,
not even thematically interesting, but just like the question of, well, do we relieve the president of his duties – Do we say he's not actually the president because he's under duress, because he can't be possibly making decisions with the good of the country in this situation?
And I think the obvious answer is, well, duh.
There are legal mechanisms to have him step aside as president, to have the vice president take over temporarily.
This happens all the time.
If the president were undergoing heart surgery, the vice president becomes...
De facto president for 12 hours or whatever.
It's totally doable.
Um...
You know, and they even go through the motions of, you know, we're going to, like, relieve him of duty.
We're going to relieve him of this burden, up to the point at which, you know, like, Glenn Close is the city there.
She's got, you're the last signature.
They've got it all filled out.
All you have to do is sign this piece of paper, and then you're the president.
And she's like, I just can't do this.
But no, it's the dumbest possible version of this, you know.
There is a sort of interesting, like, point of...
There is something at least there.
There's something thematically there.
But as much as it pretends like it's wrestling with these questions of power and succession, even that is kind of a limp noodle here.
It just does not fulfill even that minor bit of sort of court intrigue that I think the movie was kind of going for.
Yeah, I was watching it and I was kind of imagining a potentially more interesting movie, which is just set in the Situation Room at the White House.
Right.
You know, over the course of a couple of hours when Air Force One just disappears off the radar or something, or they lose communication, and nobody knows what the fuck is happening.
And these politicians and soldiers and so on have to try to work out what to do.
You know, I was thinking that could potentially be quite an interesting movie.
Whereas, yeah, I mean, it's funny the emphasis that is placed on, you know, like the existential horror of relieving the president of his post, you know?
It's like, it's such a big deal.
At times, it almost seems like whether or not...
The vice president is going to sign the piece of paper that actually sort of relieves the president of his authority.
It seems like the film thinks that's a bigger deal than the actual crisis on the plane.
It's really strange how much emphasis is placed on that.
You know, Glenn Close, I mean, she's doing her best with material that's frankly beneath her, but she puts so much emphasis on, you know, she's staring down the barrel of this and it's like, It's like she feels like that's worse than him being killed by terrorists.
I mean, there is another version of this, in which case, if he wasn't the president, if it was just, okay, he was a Secret Service agent who managed to get caught in the hold, most of the rest of the movie can happen the exact same way.
He would still want to protect the president's wife and daughter.
He would still have all of these motivations.
This is not...
He doesn't have to be the president, except it raises the stakes, I guess, or it turns into this thing where it can play at these kinds of dramatic effects.
It can play at this kind of stuff, but then it doesn't have the heart to really do it for real.
It's always pulling its punches.
I think that's the way I put it.
There's a couple of key moments in the film, I think.
Firstly, there's the slimy advisor from the start, not the national security advisor who gets killed, the other one, who is very upset about the speech.
And the film tells us, this is an untrustworthy guy, this is a bad guy.
Maybe not a bad guy, but he's a politician, unlike our president.
I mean, okay, he's the president, but he's not a politician.
He's too moral and straight shooting, whereas...
This guy here from the world of politics is talking about how it's going to look.
And yet, of course, by the end of the film, he's jumped in front of a bullet for the president.
And that's a key sort of noise in the film, I think.
There's another one where the young woman who is some sort of secretary, I'm not sure, I don't know the character's name and I don't know What her job is supposed to be.
But she comes up with the idea of sending a message by fax.
Which I'm not sure.
I think that's a dangling thread.
I feel like that isn't picked up.
I'd have to watch it again to double check.
No, I was re-watching it last night.
And I believe that's the bit where they have to lower the plane to 15,000 feet.
And so that the hostages can escape, that message is delivered by fax.
And it sort of left – because there's a shot of the piece of paper on the fax machine and nobody's looking at it.
And so I guess it's supposed to be this moment of tension.
But then two minutes later, they're just going and doing the – So, you know, just completely removed all the tension from that.
I believe that's the moment.
But yeah, there was an actual plot detail that happens because of that.
Fair enough.
But the thing I just wanted to say was that there's a bit where she...
She has a little moment with the President when they send the fax and she says to her, Mr.
President, I'm so proud that you stayed with us or you didn't abandon us or something like that.
And then there's another bit later in the film where people gather outside the White House with candles as a vigil or something like that.
And this all makes it clear to me why, within this film anyway, that character has to be the President rather than a Secret Service agent or something like that.
Because this is fundamentally about...
The president as a fantasy figure, isn't it?
This film, it's like the president as the representation of America or America's self-image or the best of America or whatever, you know, is both strong and moral and brave and all these things that we all want to think of ourselves as being, you know, and we all want to think of our communities and our societies as being those things.
Yeah.
And kind of the idea of like...
I mean, it is.
It's fantasy wish fulfillment again.
It's like, you know, here's the president and, you know, he actually lives up to that fantasy.
And he represents us all somehow in so doing.
That's what the film is...
That's its fundamental sort of sugar rush, I think, that it's offering the audience far more than like, you know, the rather perfunctory action scenes.
Right.
no absolutely i mean that that's really what it's it is about this and i think this is something i think this is something that i find interesting in in era in films of this era about the presidency is that like we have within the space of a few years you've got like this you've got dave you've got primary colors you've got independence day um and like that's that's just off the top of my head right um
These are all films that have a young, handsome...
The American President, this is another one.
These are all films with a young, charismatic, you know...
And the West Wing.
Well, yeah, the West Wing.
The meeting that we started.
But these are all properties about a young, attractive, charming president of the United States who is going out to do the right thing.
And it very much – I mean this is – they're obviously stand-ins for Bill Clinton.
It's just – that's what it is.
And it was like – it's completely unironically about that.
Like all of these films to one degree or another are about just being unironic love letters to like Bill Clinton and 90s era neoliberalism.
It's – I mean it's – It's bizarre, but it's just how the propaganda worked.
And I think that part of that is after 12 years of Reagan-Bush and after the years of Nixon and you got Jimmy Carter in there, but that was kind of a shit fest of its own.
I think having this young, attractive, young Bill Clinton in office and sort of going out there and doing the right things in terms of setting American policy right in terms of domestic policy and not being horrible to gay people, etc., etc., this was seen as a real...
It was seen as a real turning point in a way that even more so, I think, than Obama eight years later.
Obama certainly was seen as hope and change, etc.
But when you look at just how...
those early Clinton years were, just how different everything felt in Washington.
If you were reading the news at the time, or if you read books written at the time, it was a real sea change for a whole lot of people in positions of power.
It mattered less to if you're working as a dishwasher, of course, but in the corridors of power, it felt like a real distinct moment.
And I think that Hollywood is responding to that in this way and having all these properties that are about what it's like to have Bill Clinton as president on some level.
And so I think the Glenn Close character is part of that, isn't she?
I mean, she's more like Hillary Clinton.
As she was perceived, at least by some people at the time, than the actual first lady character.
And she, you know, just the presence of a woman vice president kind of represents that idea of the sea change, which was always, you know, it was nine-tenths media image and fantasy impression and stuff like that, the whole thing, both on the left and the right.
You know, the degree to which Bill Clinton was this massively different figure.
But yeah, I mean, it was certainly something that...
I mean, we felt it on this side of the Atlantic as well, I'm sure.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
I think I'm just – for me, I'm thinking through it.
I'm remembering back when – because I was old enough to – I obviously wasn't old enough to vote for Bill Clinton.
I was old enough to remember one of the other things that we used to just have around all the time.
We had a subscription to Time magazine.
And so I used to read all of the columns and all of the news articles.
I got a whole lot of my news consumption, a whole lot of my political understanding of the world when I was 13 years old was through current and back issues of Time magazine.
So that should tell you a lot about what my childhood was like.
But yeah, no.
And so when I say it seems like a big deal, I'm kind of filtering it through that because I remember the 92 election.
It was the first election.
I paid any attention to.
So that 92 election really felt like it was a big part of my childhood and my growing up and sort of being interested in the world.
And so I think I find these interesting just on that level of suddenly we're in this moment and this is what it means to have Bill Clinton as president.
And yeah, I think that's why – I don't know.
I feel kinder to this film maybe than you do.
I mean I think it's dumb.
I think it's silly.
I think it's a bit boring.
But – It is what it is.
I'm just willing to accept it as the Big Mac.
And I don't think that you're even arguing with that.
I think it's just like...
I think the nature of this particular form of pasteurized cheese is very indicative of the moment in which it was made.
And that's kind of what interests me about it.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it kind of transports you back to 1997, doesn't it?
Right.
Very powerfully.
Yeah, no, I mean, the president is always a fantasy figure.
Bill Clinton, no more or no less than any other.
I mean, that's one of the problems that American politics has.
I think one of the weird problems that Biden has is that he's not.
He's kind of the first president in ages who isn't some form of fantasy figure.
Trump, obviously, is a massive fantasy figure for millions of people.
And Obama, very much so as well.
You know, people projected a huge amount into Obama.
And then George W. Bush, again, you know, the image and the reality, you know, the reality of George W. Bush versus the reality of it.
This incompetent sort of trust fund klutz, you know, who's in people's minds, he becomes like this image of, you know, the...
The avenging paladin, you know, who's going to...
You know, the sort of thing.
I mean, Bill Clinton is a fantasy figure.
You know, the idea of him as this great reformer.
Probably the last one before Biden who wasn't some form of fantasy figure is probably George Bush Sr., who kind of just...
He got his one term just based on the basis of, well, you know, we can't have Reagan again.
So we want the next best thing.
And the Democrats are in complete disarray, et cetera.
That was the best they had at the time, I suppose.
Biden got in in 2020 just almost entirely on the basis of how staggeringly, atrociously, apocalyptically bad Trump was as a president.
You know, very specifically during the COVID pandemic.
Yes.
And as a result, it has to be said of activists, people particularly around the protests, the Black Lives Matter protests and stuff like that, getting out there and organizing and activating people to vote and stuff like that.
One of the problems he has coming up this year is that there's no fantasy that people can read into him.
Apart from the liberal centrist fantasy of, oh, somebody competent and everything's back to normal and all that sort of thing, which isn't working for millions of people.
Yeah, especially given the just absolute own goals of, well, his continued support for Notanyahu, among many, many other things.
I think there are many things.
I mean, Biden has been, you know, it's, I don't know, it's like hard to say best president of my lifetime, but like, you know, it's kind of true.
Yeah.
at least on some issues.
Pulling out of Afghanistan alone, I mean, that could have been his legacy.
You know what I mean?
I pulled us out of Afghanistan.
I ended this intractable occupation.
That could have been- And more actual, you know, meaningful legislation towards climate goals than any previous president.
I mean, still nowhere near enough.
That is a very Lent moodle.
I mean, the people who are, like, praising that thing, that's like, no, this is nothing in terms of what we actually need.
But yes, you are correct.
I don't think it's nothing, but it's...
My point is that as inadequate as it is, it's still noticeably better than almost anything in recent memory.
But at the same time, the man is currently engaged in genocide, in funding and arming genocide.
And it's sad to say, probably the bigger problem for him at the polls is, as I say, that there's no fantasy that people can project onto him.
Yeah.
Except, you know, those really worn-in liberals.
You know those kind of, like, globe Twitter types?
You know, like, you know, the – remember, like, all the Hillary fantasies of, you know, in early 2017, you know, if Hillary was first in it, she would already have solved, like, such and such and such as that.
She would be signing her fourth bill of the day.
Before her power lunch and et cetera, et cetera.
And it's like, oh my God.
People actually were writing Hillary fan fiction.
And you see some of that with Joe Biden.
You see some of that in those same circles.
It's like the competent administrator who's doing brilliant things behind the scenes and getting rivals to work together.
And look at – he brought in these progressives who are all backing him, who are all working with him.
And look at – You know, he's taking a party that's divided and making it more, you know, making it more solidified and making it stronger.
I mean, yeah, like the Ezra Klein's of the world, like those kinds of people, you know.
But I don't think that, you know, you certainly wouldn't see a Joe Biden action movie, you know.
You wouldn't even see, like, you couldn't even, like, point to, like, even though, like, Biden is very old.
Like, I think some of the, you know, Some of this talk gets overstated.
He's an old man.
He's tired.
He sounds like a tired old man.
He doesn't have to be able to do calculus in his head to be personally in the United States.
I mean, let's just be real about that.
And no, sitting and talking tough to Putin is not a quality that I think is germane to administering an empire, right?
But I think that there's not a fantasy of There's no image of Joe Biden that you could put in this place where it's like, oh, that is recognizably Joe Biden kicking some ass.
Unless maybe it's the – remember those old Onion headlines in the latter days of the Obama years where it's all the smiling Joe sitting in the back of the White House with his Trans Am and – Shellacking it for the 50th time and offering 15-year-olds a swig of Budweiser.
I think that figure – I mean the writers of The Onion have actually come out and said like, yeah, we were – that was kind of like really irresponsible of us because I think we made Biden look much cooler.
And I think that absolutely influenced some of the things that happened in that 2020 primary.
It's like, yeah, well, you know, sometimes you just can't write satire, obviously, enough.
But, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, they have the...
They have the Dark Brandon thing, I suppose.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Dark Brandon thing.
They try that.
They keep on trying to make that happen.
Every time he makes a joke at Marjorie Taylor Greene's expense or something like that, they're all like, oh, that's Dark Brandon.
It's not working.
It's not working, guys.
Nobody believes you.
And he does legitimately believe you.
Nobody believes that you're this turned on by normalcy.
Well, actually, maybe I do.
Yeah, I do.
I definitely do.
I also think there's this bit of which Biden is legitimately someone who is willing to just tell people they're full of shit sometimes in a way that seems unlike a president, unlike most...
We would consider to be like germane in a president.
Um, and sometimes he does that to people who are doing good things and sometimes he does it to people who are doing terrible things.
So, you know, it's kind of a wash, but he does have, he does have like, he does have some steel in him, but it just feels like that, that just, none of that really comes across in terms of.
You know, how we think about him day to day.
I mean, he's just such a nothing figure.
And so it would be difficult to imagine – like a movie made about the American presidency in 2023 or 2022, you would put a Biden figure in there.
But it's hard to imagine what a Biden-era – You know, movie about the presidency would be like.
It just, it feels, it feels very undercooked, you know, just because Biden just doesn't have a strong, you know, mythos around him.
And, I mean, you're right.
I think that if he loses the election this year, I think it's very likely that's the cause.
You know, it's, you know, it's, It's a lot of other things, but I think that really is the thing that's kind of preventing him from building momentum as a candidate.
It's like Trump, love him or hate him, you know who Donald Trump is, right?
Yeah, I'll say this for Trump.
He has a strong brand identity.
But in fairness to Joe Biden, I will say he could take down a plane full of terrorists single-handed, and segments of the media would still find ways to either ignore it or spin it as a negative.
What I was thinking is watching this film, if the Harrison Ford president is a Democrat, this is 97, so Fox News is up and running.
Fox News is brand new.
Fox News would find a way to make this a negative story.
Yes, absolutely.
Alienating our allies in the Russian Federation, something like that, yeah.
It does help that the president is up against the most ludicrously incompetent Keystone terrorists I've ever seen.
Oh yes, no, absolutely, absolutely.
It's pretty brilliant stuff.
Yeah.
I think that's an episode.
I don't know.
I don't have...
Oh, I did have one more just fun bit that I... Something that I legitimately enjoyed in the film.
The one time when I feel like the film actually starts to have a little bit of life is...
So...
Harrison Ford is in the hold, and he's down towards the bathrooms.
And the terrorists come in and they just shoot everything up, and it's like, where did the president go?
And then the next shot is him crawling out of some vents or something, and he's in this cargo area, which I don't know where this is supposed to be spatially with regards to the rest of the movie, but okay, he's there.
And then suddenly he finds like a satellite phone and suddenly he can use the satellite phone to like call in to the White House.
And he's like, this is the president.
He gets on like the White House, like the switchboard, right?
So the switchboard operators say there's like, this is the president.
Yeah.
I'm here.
I'm calling.
I need to be connected to the vice president right now.
And she's like, okay, sir, you're a lunatic, but I will check it.
And it's a very fun little bit.
It's a little bit of light comedy here in the middle of the movie.
And it leads to what I think is probably the only really effective bit of like thriller mechanics and that like suddenly he's got this phone in his hand and he's on the phone with the cabinet in the White House.
And they are listening while he's being like he's got a gun to his head from one of these terrorists.
And so there is this at least some level of tension and like it's interesting how that dynamic kind of plays out.
It's like the one piece of the film where I'm like, oh yeah, I get this.
But what that is, it's just the walkie-talkies from Die Hard.
It's just that again.
It does borrow its best bits from Die Hard.
But I thought that sequence, that was like the one big sequence that I remembered.
If you remember Gary Oldman getting kicked to the face and strangled as he falls off the plane, I remembered that satellite phone call.
That was the thing that I remembered from my time watching it as a kid.
That's what this film is missing.
It's missing a Sergeant Al Powell.
What it should be is the president's only chance from Air Force One is that he somehow gets on the phone to some ordinary guy.
Right.
Something like that.
And that guy has to get to the White House to try to get somebody to listen to him or something.
That could have, you know, I'm already, you know, I'm rewriting the film.
Or he has to convince that guy, yes, I am actually the president.
Yes, I am actually telling you to do this.
Yes, you are not going to get in trouble for this.
I am the president.
I can pardon you.
Like that sort of thing.
Like that would be the, you know, but again, that would require that you couldn't do the big dumb action movie if you did it that way.
We're not writing sophisticated fiction here.
This is not something that's heady and interesting and politically savvy.
This is just like, let's do the tropes better.
This is all we're asking for.
The thing I've just imagined in my head is more fun than the film I just watched, precisely because the film is not fully conscious of the fact that it is just a big, dumb, jingoistic cheese fest.
It does actually seem to kind of take itself seriously to the point where it's, oh, we're going to have discussions between the Attorney General and the Secretary of State.
No, this is a stupid action film.
Don't get up your own ass.
Make it fun instead.
Absolutely.
Agreed.
Alright, anything else you want to add?
I think I'm ready to wrap up here, unless you got something else.
Yeah, I think we're done.
I mean, we said we were going to talk about this in 9-11, but I think that kind of says itself, doesn't it?
You know, if you know the film, then...
I think there are other ways of getting into 9-11 on other episodes.
We've got some other ones planned, and I think, you know, the...
9-11-ness of it.
One that's really interesting, like a 90s movie.
Just sort of bookmark the Saddam Hussein asides that they put in for no apparent reason except to do that sort of, oh, we're seriously talking about terrorist issues that the president faces.
That's it, isn't it?
Right, right.
One film that I would recommend that I watched a couple of years ago thinking we might do it for this podcast is a movie from 1998 with Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, and Bruce Willis called The Siege.
Yeah, this is actually, again, I rewatched it a couple of years ago.
It's not perfect, but it's actually legitimately interesting.
And it goes to some really dark places in terms of military use of torture and all kinds of stuff.
And again, for a movie made before 9-11, it feels very post-9-11.
So I don't know.
Maybe we'll do that one.
It's not really directly connected to our residency series, but I think we could put that one maybe on the short list and actually kind of talk about that at some point.
But yeah, no, I am going to – we have already decided, and we're going to try to do particularly these bonus episodes, the ones that are just easier to produce.
I think we are going to try to do more than one a month at least if we can kind of get together and record.
So expect another one of these in a couple of weeks.
And I've already purchased my DVD copy of Dave.
Dave next, then.
Dave next.
Have you seen Dave?
Yes.
I remember Dave as being fun, actually.
Dave is fun.
And there actually is some interesting politics in it.
I think it goes places.
It does things that this just can't.
And I think you'll find that a nice cool glass of water.
After Air Force One.
It's a comedy, you know, and comedy, you know, as I said, this could have done with a bit of comedy to sort of loosen things up and be a bit less po-faced.
And yeah, I think, yeah, it's going to be interesting watching Dave again after all these years.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And that one is written by Gary Ross, who had already done big at that point and would go on to write and direct Pleasantville, Seabiscuit, and a couple of the Hunger Games movies.
I know he did a couple of those.
And I know he did some other stuff that I'm just not thinking of, but he goes on to be like, I think Pleasantville is a genuinely interesting movie, although I rewatched a few years ago and it did not hold up as well as it did when I was 18.
But, you know, it's definitely swinging for some fences.
And I think Gary Ross is a much more interesting writer than anything that was happening in Air Force One.
But anyway, I haven't rewatched that in ages, so we're going to have to rewatch that.
And we'll go from there.
Okay.
Well, thanks for listening, everybody.
That was a conversation about a movie so bad that it could actually be a parody of the kind of film that it seriously thinks that it is.
And until next time, thank you very much for listening.
Thank you very much for your help with our Patreons.
And, well, just, I don't know, don't hijack any planes.
Don't negotiate with any terrorists.
No, definitely not.
That's my advice.
That's the last thing you want to do is negotiate with terrorists.
I pitched the American president because you are going to hate.
If you've not seen that, it is Aaron Sorkin.
You've seen it?
Okay, yeah.
No, I know.
I know about the American president.
In fact, the American president steals that thing where the president has to call the White House phone and he gets through to his secretary and she doesn't believe it's him.
That's in that as well.
Yes, it is.
It is.
Which is really interesting.
No, definitely.
I don't know.
It's one of those I saw at that time in my life when I have a fondness for it, but it is just so up its own ass.
It's just terrible.
Oh, we didn't even talk about William H. Macy in this.
Man, William H. Macy, he's in this.
Yeah.
It's so different to, you know, Jerry Lundegaard, isn't it?
Yeah.
And I mean, literally a year later, you know?
Yeah.
He's just so affable here.
He's just, he's like, he's like Captain Boy Scout, you know?
It's not even Captain America.
He's Captain Boy Scout.
I'm going to go in and I'm going to kick ass to take names, but I'm, you know, he's got like a smile on his face, like, you know, like a big happy puppy.
He just runs around in this movie.
He's not as much of it as I'd like to be.
I mean, man, William H. Macy could play the president in one of these, one of these days.
Yeah, absolutely.
He would kill.
In this movie, William H. Macy is just the embodiment of the decent, grave, honest, straight-shooting American military officer or whatever, isn't he?
He's just...
You know, he's like Gary Cooper or something like that.
He's like the patriotic – he's like Mr.
Soldier, just Mr.
America.
You know, he's just like Mr.
– you know, like there's no ill will.
He's like – and I guess that's – sorry, we're talking about this more.
Feel free to like throw this in as a stinger or something.
It's almost like, you know – Harrison Ford in this movie is the vision of America that Americans want to have for America.
It's like he represents this ultimately good shoes, goody-two-shoes, patriotic Americanness.
And he wants us to see America the way he sees America sort of thing.
And he's a regular guy.
He drinks Budweiser and he watches the football.
He makes out with his wife.
He's like, don't tell me the score.
I don't want to know the score.
You've got to put the game on.
The little conversation they have about when he started in politics and he had to get a right.
It makes it clear that he doesn't come from money.
He's a regular guy.
So it's the full fantasy, isn't it?
Yeah, no, it is.
It is very much – I thought we were going to talk about the intro, that first 30 minutes a little bit more, honestly, because it's so tuned to its own reality.
And I think that's the part that makes it feel more like 1950s, is that it is just so unironically homespun American boy turned president, turned superhero.
It just overtly is that – Yeah, no, I think it's both churningly boring to rewatch, but it's thematically interesting in terms of talking about it on a podcast.
I feel like there are movies that I'm more interested in podcasting on than ever watching again, and then there are movies that I love to watch but would never want to record a podcast on.
And this is the former, for sure.
This is the paradigmatic example, I think.
Yeah, no, definitely.
You'll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A. Cause we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way.
Hey Uncle Sam, put your name at the top of his list.
And the statue of liberty started shaking her fist.
And the eagle will fly, and it's gonna be hell.
When you hear Mother Freedom start ringing her bell.
And it'll feel like the whole wide world is raining down on you.
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