In a companion piece to the last public bonus, Daniel and Jack discuss Adam McKay's Vice from 2018, a dense metafictional dramedy biopic of Dick Cheney, unofficial president during the George W. Bush years and architect of the 'War on Terror'. An interesting movie, possibly as flawed as it is brilliant. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. 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 back to I Don't Speak German, to another public bonus episode as part of our series of bonus episodes about movies, about presidents.
And I'm here with Daniel Harper.
Daniel Harper, say things.
Things.
I should have seen that one coming.
But, yeah, arguably, we are the most on topic we've ever been for this series of movies about the presidency, even though, technically speaking, it's not a movie about a president.
It's a movie about a vice president.
But even so, I think, well, I think we'll get into this, but this is very much about the power of the presidency, amongst other things.
This is 2018's Vice, written and directed by Adam McKay.
Daniel, first of all, before we get into that, I think we want to gesture to the fact that there's...
There are several ongoing topical news stories at the moment that you listeners might have expected us to do news brief episodes about, one of them being the case of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, who was murdered in the street, and the person who has been arrested in connection with that crime, I believe he's been charged now, the alleged assassin.
I think we're just mentioning that to sort of signify that we're aware of it and we're aware of the fact that people probably expect us to be talking about this, but we're not going to be talking about it here.
That's all we want to say at the moment, really, isn't it?
Yeah, I think as the thing develops, like, kind of early next year, we might do a news brief on it, like, once more is known.
But for right now, it's still, like, there's still a lot of sketchiness.
And I did see, like, Robert Evans put a piece on his substack where it's like...
He has been radicalized by pain, which was very, very good.
We can put that in the show notes.
Very good piece.
Highly recommend that piece.
That says a lot of what, you know, I do not have chronic pain myself, but I am very close to someone who does, and it speaks to me, for sure, for sure.
Yeah.
So watch this space, maybe.
What is it they say on cable news?
It's a developing story, which means basically we don't know shit.
Yeah.
And we are not held to, like, you know, live at five news coverage standards.
So we get to say, yeah, we'll do this in a few weeks if, you know, there's more to say.
And, you know, I think it's telling that, not to do it before we do it, but I think it's telling that there's been this vast amount of not only mainstream media talk, but also alternative media talk, including left and liberal media talk, and a huge amount of talk about this just among ordinary people talking to each other on social media,
people who are politically engaged, people who follow the news, enormous, enormous amounts of talk about this issue, in contrast to the fact that Yeah, people die as a result of decisions made by healthcare insurance companies every day.
And really, I mean, I am doing it before we do it.
But really, I mean, even on that same day, other people were murdered in gun violence.
And it hasn't generated this kind of conversation.
So, you know, why is it that this particular drama has generated so much consternation and conversation?
That's something that I feel quite strongly about.
So yeah, maybe we'll get into that.
At another time.
We're not going to do this now, so this will be the last statement I have to say on this matter, but were I a man who had access to a copy machine in the area where the jury pool is likely to be selected, I would very much put up many, many flyers, including the words social murder and jury nullification.
Those should be terms that are in literally every person in the jury pool's The term social murder coined by good old Frederick Engels in his book Condition of the Working Class in England.
And jury nullification, which is a very real thing that you're absolutely allowed to do as a juror in the United States.
You are allowed to decide that the person is guilty, but the thing that he did should not have been a crime.
The jury verdict is sacrosanct in the United States.
That is just true.
But...
Any lawyer who is advocating for jury notification will immediately be disbarred and no longer be allowed to practice law.
And so this has to come from, you know, it has to come from below and not above.
Because, like, if I were, you know...
If that was legal, like the, the number one tactic of any lawyer who was, who was trying this case would be to explain the concepts of one social murder and to a jury notification to the jury.
And like, this is, this is, there's no way you can vinch.
There's absolutely no way with the amount of popular support this guy has, regardless of whether you feel like what he did was justified or not.
Like, yep.
There's no way you're going to get a unanimous verdict in New York city for this guy.
It's just, it's never going to happen.
Anyway, we have now discussed it more than we should have discussed it, but we're not doing it anymore.
Having said, we're not going to do it before we do it.
We are now doing it before we do it.
So let's stop and do what we're actually here to do, which is to talk about, as I say, Adam McKay's 2018 movie Vice, which is about one of the most evil human beings who has ever lived in Dick Cheney.
Daniel, you suggested, this was, I think we talked about this a little bit last time when we talked about Oliver Stone's W, and I said I believe that I had not only just sort of on instinct studiously avoided seeing W, I'd also studiously avoided seeing this when it came out in 2018. Doing this film for this series was very much your idea.
So tell me a little bit about your background with this movie.
Sure.
Well, I had seen The Big Short, like on Netflix, like maybe a year or two after it premiered.
So I didn't see The Big Short theatrically, and that's the previous film by Adam McKay.
And I think I like that film.
The Big Short being about the 2007 financial crisis, 2008 financial crisis.
Yes.
And its origins in the subprime mortgage overselling debacle.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And that movie was a revelation to me.
I think I love it artistically more than I love it politically, but I really love that film artistically.
It just speaks to something in me that I just respond to that aesthetically on this DNA level.
And so I was like, oh, that guy with that kind of aesthetic sense is going to do Dick Cheney next?
I am there.
I am ready for this.
This is going to be the greatest film I've ever seen.
I saw it.
I don't think I saw it opening night, but I saw it very near opening night, theatrically.
At a theater here in town.
And I was disappointed.
I thought it missed some stuff.
It's hard for me to reconstruct what I felt at the time.
But I saw it, and I remember being really disappointed.
And then I really didn't approach it again.
And I put it in my head as sort of being like W, where it's a big missed opportunity, as opposed to, like, Oliver Stone doing George W. Bush should be a home run.
That's a hell of a homemade porno, apart from anything else.
Yes, yes, indeed, indeed.
And Adam McKay doing this kind of thing should be a home run, in my opinion.
I suggested it as part of this because I thought that Vice suffered from some of the same defects that W does, which I want to elide for now.
I mean, we'll talk about that in a moment.
And so I was like, it's kind of a double feature.
I knew that Vice was better than W, but I thought it still had...
kind of central problems and then i re-watched it for this podcast and i'm like oh this is much much better than i remembered it the stuff that annoyed me still annoyed me and the stuff that i thought was great at the time i still thought was great but maybe it's because i got i have stockholm syndrome from watching w four times but vice is um after having watched hillbilly elegy like you know like yeah i was gonna
I've been in deep fucking shit in my life movie watching for this podcast.
If watching W gives you Stockholm Syndrome, I'd say Hillbilly Elegy gives you CTE. Yeah, well, I mean, and God, we got to talk about Amy Adams in this, but anyway.
Yeah, no, Vice is legitimately good.
I think possibly great.
I don't think it reaches the heights of the Big Short, despite the fact that I think it's swinging for the fences harder than the Big Short was.
Like, one of the things that I loved about the Big Short is that it's so effortless.
And here it's like, they're clearly putting in the work, and they're clearly getting like 80% of the way there.
80% of the way there is still, like, really fucking good.
And I think maybe I've treated this movie maybe a little too negatively in the, like, six years since it was released.
But I will definitely be revisiting this again, because I got to the end just this afternoon before we started recording, and I'm like, okay, I really did have a kind of a bad taste in my mouth on this one that it really didn't quite deserve.
So, yeah, what's your take on it, I guess?
Okay, well, as I said, this was a film that I, on instinct, just studiously avoided when it came out.
Just total prejudice.
Total prejudice.
I just took one look at it and I thought, Hollywood movie, serious Hollywood movie about Dick Cheney.
Dick Cheney biopic made by Hollywood.
The critics love it.
It's being called...
It's being called radical and confrontational and so on and so forth.
I am going to hate this.
And I think it's a version of something similar to what you were just talking about.
You were just talking about being mired in the disappointment of other films.
And I think it's that, because I've lost count of how many times I have watched a Hollywood movie, an American movie, let's put it that way, That has been called, oh, this is such an intelligent and thoughtful and serious political movie, and it goes places you wouldn't expect, and it's really quite radical, you know, whether it be about the Vietnam War or whether it be about the Iraq War or whatever you like.
And I have found it to be, if not outright right-wing apologia or obscuring of reality.
I've found it to be totally wishy-washy, liberal, centrist, in the worst senses of those terms.
Just propaganda, basically.
There needs to be a word for this.
Propaganda for nothing.
A movie that is very decidedly propagandizing you, but it's propagandizing you to believe nothing, to sort of understand nothing, to come out with just a fuzzy sense of, well, I don't know, things happen, I suppose, because that has happened.
I've gone into movies so many times and that's what's happened to me.
And I'll pass back to you just a second, but I just want to say I'm actually very glad that you kind of forced my hand and made me watch this, because I actually found this movie actually quite impressive in many respects.
It was much, much better than I was expecting it to be, even on the basis of my memories of The Big Short, which is another film that you made me watch.
And I was decidedly less enthusiastic about The Big Short than you were, although I liked things about it.
And I went into this thinking, okay, so this will be, I think it's much better than The Big Short.
I think it's much more confrontational, much more radical than The Big Short.
I was really very pleasantly, you know, again, I have my issues like you, but I was very pleasantly surprised.
I was very impressed with the big short, again, aesthetically, more than politically.
And I was, again, I was expecting this to be, but I knew this was Adam McKay, and so I was expecting it to be that.
If I thought this was like a Frost Dixon sort of movie, then I would have done the same thing you did and just given it a pass.
Like, I was really interested in it because of the director and because I was really hoping that aesthetic would work in the same way again.
And I think it...
I think it does for the most part, but there are some really bad atonal moments in this for me, and stuff where it's just trying too hard.
And I just want to throw this in before we get deeply into Vice's.
We did W, and we did Vice.
And if you told me, if you gave me these two movies without credits on them and said, one of these is made by the auteur who made JFK and Nixon in Natural Born Killers, and the other is made by the guy who made Step Brothers in Anchorman, I would have the exact wrong opinion about which one was made by whom.
This is, you know, this is like, you know, it's so much better than W. It's not even close.
Yeah.
I don't think you could possibly mistake Vice for the work of Oliver Stone because, I mean, Vice is a funny movie and genuinely funny movie.
And Oliver Stone, based on his work, doesn't possess even the most rudimentary sense of humor.
That's true.
That's true.
I mean, just by, like, the editing and just by, like, the seriousness with which it takes the topic, you know?
One of these two films has, like, Nate Corddry playing Ari Fleischer and, like, Danny Newton doing, like, a terrible accent for Condoleezza Rice.
And the other is actually about the atrocities that we've inflicted on Iraq and Afghanistan.
And that's kind of the level that I run into on this.
But I agree, Oliver Stone does not have...
I mean, he doesn't make intentional comedies.
I mean, he's made JFK, which the more you learn about the Kennedy assassination, the more you find that a comedy.
I mean, there are bits of Oliver Stone movies that are funny.
They're just not meant to be.
If you know anything, for instance, about E. Howard Hunt, then the depiction of E. Howard Hunt in Nixon is hilarious.
We've kind of done our big picture, like, talking about this.
There is one other thing that I wanted to say, actually, re-Oliver Stone, which is that there are bits of Vice where I am convinced McKay is actually taking the piss out of Oliver Stone.
There are bits of some of the montage and clip sequences.
It's entirely possible.
It's entirely possible.
Oliver Stone kind of taught the world how to make these movies in a certain way, how to do this kind of juxtaposition of war footage and the mundane and all that sort of thing.
Not that he was the first to do it, but certainly, if you look at the editing of, again, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, that was...
That's a real opening of can of worms that other filmmakers have definitely taken lessons from.
And knowing Adam McKay's sensibilities, it would not surprise me if he was actively mocking Oliver Stone in certain sequences here.
I think it might have been the bit where Chaney is implicitly compared to some sort of sea monster or crocodile or something.
There's a shot of him.
It makes no fucking sense.
It's towards the last 20 minutes of the movie.
I just rewatched that an hour ago, and I'm like, what is this?
What is this metaphor supposed to be?
If you treat this as a little bit of a satire on Oliver Stone, I actually like it more.
That's actually really good.
I like that.
I like that interpretation, for sure.
The movie is a pretty straightforward telling of Dick Cheney's life from young adulthood until the time the movie was made, or at least until the time of his heart transplant.
Yeah.
And it jumps around in time.
I mean, it does a lot of the same things that W does.
And I think, again, that's a comparison between two movies, but it does it so much better.
Whereas W kind of spent most of an hour kind of with George W. Bush as a kid, basically.
This kind of gets the drunkenness and the carousing.
It gets it out of the way in the first five minutes, basically.
Yeah, mercifully, quickly, yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And I remember that being a bigger part of the movie, you know, because I did have...
W in my mind, because I'd seen W, even though I'd only seen it theatrically.
That was nine years earlier.
I mean, there's a really interesting scene where Dick Cheney is.
He's working as a telephone pole operator.
And he's standing on the pole, and then somebody falls and breaks his leg.
And everybody kind of comes around, and the foreman's like, get back to work.
Throw five bucks in his pocket, give him a shot of beer, or give him a shot of whiskey, and get another guy for tomorrow.
And The foreman says, you got a problem with that, Chaney?
And he goes, no, sir.
And I don't know what it's trying to say.
I don't know whether we're supposed to connect that to Chaney down the line, but it's a good scene.
It's a memorable scene.
I remembered it even from seeing it several years ago.
But we get out of that, really what happens is we do, again, five to ten minutes of that at the beginning of the movie, and then Lynn Chaney...
I mean, Amy Adams, like, okay, so first of all, we got Amy Adams and Sam Rockwell in this movie, and they're going to be, like, this series all-stars.
Like, Amy Adams was, of course, in Kill Billy Elgy, and Sam Rockwell was in Frost Dixon.
And, man, Amy Adams, like, for all that, like, she's giving nothing to do in Kill Billy Elgy, she's brilliant here.
Like, she's absolutely- She's a powerhouse in this, yeah.
And really gives, like, I think a very accurate version of Lynn Chaney.
It's interesting because, like, Lynn Chaney is known to be kind of a hard-ass, you know, like, sorry for the ginger language, you know, stone-cold bitch.
In the same way that, like, Barbara Bush is kind of known to be that kind of person.
And, um...
Alan Burstyn was really good at giving that mode in W. It's one of the better performances in W. Obviously, Alan Burstyn can do no wrong.
And Amy Adams is just a revelation here.
I think all the performances are really good here.
You might not say that if you just recently watched the Wicker Man remake from 2006. Oh, is she in that?
She is, yes.
She plays the equivalent of Christopher Lee.
Is that Ellen Burstyn?
Yes, indeed.
With blue paint on her face.
So, I don't know if you've seen it.
Maggie Mae Fish did a really brilliant job of analyzing the two Wicker Man movies, which I've seen neither of them.
So maybe we do this as a bonus at some point.
But that video essay is brilliant, and I will give you the link so you can put it in the show notes.
I highly, highly, even having not seen the movies, I'm like, this makes me...
I already hated Neil LaBeute, and now I hate Neil LaBeute even more.
Yeah, yeah.
It does not surprise me that a female actor is not treated well on a Neil LaBeute.
I... Well, I mean, God, this is a total byway, but I would actually be really interested to talk to you about this.
I just recently did the original Wicker Man on another podcast that I do.
And for the discussion, I decided to watch the 2006 remake with Nicolas Cage, which I knew about by repute, but I'd never actually seen.
The 2006 Wicker Man remake is really interesting because...
It's a movie that really, really hates women.
It's kind of about how women are evil.
Yeah, no, no.
As, again, all of Neil Labute's properties are like that.
Again, that Maggie Mae Fish video, it's perfection.
I will highly recommend it.
Anyway, we need to get back to the movie we're supposed to be talking about.
Yes.
But yeah, no, Amy Adams, she's great here.
I love, I mean, again, I love all the performances.
Like, there's really not a performance here that I don't like.
I do love some of them more than others.
I think Amy Adams is not perfect, but she has a moment.
You know, it was, again, towards the beginning of the film, she's like, I'm a woman, I'm a girl.
She says, I'm a girl.
A girl can't get elected to office.
A girl can't do certain things.
She's in Wyoming.
This is 1967 or something, right?
I mean, she doesn't say this in so many words, but it's like, I have to find somebody who's going to carry me into those corridors of power, and either you're that or you're not.
And he takes one look at her, and their bond is...
It's almost too much to say.
They get off on assessing power, and every scene in which they are tendered to one another is because Dick Cheney is climbing up the steps of the ladder of power.
And when he is not doing that, that's when she is frustrated.
That's when she is...
And, I mean, it's such a...
That's his career.
His career is a series of offices.
Every time he gets a new and bigger office, or an office that's further inside the corridors of power, he calls her, and she gets kind of hot about it.
That's the film...
Yeah, no, no.
I mean, it literally, like, he gets into the office of the vice presidency, which he has made into, effectively, the presidency.
And, like, the movie does this really brilliant thing of, like, he doesn't call her then.
It cuts back to him calling her back when he first got his first congressional office.
Not even when he was in Congress, when he was working for Donald Rumsfeld.
It's an aide to Donald Rumsfeld.
I forget the exact title that he had.
And it cuts to that conversation and that warmth that she's showing to him.
It's so evocative.
It's so well done at that.
And that's stuff that I just completely missed on the first watch because I wasn't prepared for what this film was really trying to tell to me.
I think.
And that's why I feel like I've really kind of, in my mind, given it short shrift over the last few years.
So we tell that story of, you know, he kind of gets into the halls of power.
It elides like he goes back to school and he gets an internship.
I mean, we show him getting the internship with Rumsfeld, who is played by Steve Carell.
Another, I mean, just...
Like, brilliant.
Just brilliant.
Steve Carell, I mean, I've loved him since The Daily Show.
I've loved him for years and years and years.
I know.
Blame my years of failed liberalism.
I still cannot stop loving that era of The Daily Show.
And Steve Carell was always one of my favorites.
And he is so good here.
I love him so much.
He's just such a great Rumsfeld.
I know we talked about the actor who played Rumsfeld in W as being great, but I think Carell is just given so much time to shine, and he gets all the best lines.
It's just great.
I love it.
He's great, yeah.
It's funny, because the two Rumsfelds couldn't really be more different.
The Rumsfeld in W is this weird alien that sort of...
Peeps out at the world through these bottle-end spectacles and spouts incomprehensible lines of syllables while everybody around him goes, what's he talking about?
And this guy is like a frat boy.
And yet they both ring really true.
Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely.
And if you've seen the Errol Mortis documentary, it's the Unknown Knowns.
Yeah.
With, you know, where it's actually a series of interviews about Donald Rumsfeld, which I might suggest we do for this podcast, maybe down the line a little bit when we're away from this a little bit.
But that, you know, Carell strikes me as like, he knows.
He knows what he's doing here.
But yeah, no, the performances are really great overall.
It does the thing, and this is kind of where maybe I was a little bit dismissive of it at the beginning.
Yeah.
thing that the big short does of you know it's kind of it's very like authorial voice forward it's got you know it's got jesse plemons as as we learn towards the end of the film he's the man who gave his heart to dick cheney and this is a fictionalized character um i looked this up yeah it was an anonymous donor it was We don't know whose heart is beating in Dick Cheney's chest.
But it's not Dick Cheney's, because Dick Cheney never had a heart.
I think that's the metaphor they're going for there.
But, you know...
Yeah, I have things to say about that.
We'll get there.
We'll get there.
But it uses this very direct...
It uses metafiction.
Yeah, it breaks the fourth wall, characters talk to you.
It does it constantly.
You've got, like, there's one moment in which they're talking about Dick Cheney as, like, a staffer to Gerald Ford.
I think he's, like, chief of staff in Gerald Ford's administration.
And it's like, Dick Cheney could put up the most absurd things out there, and people would accept it as, you know.
And then, like, instead of doing, like, the actual thing, it says, we should put little hats on our penises.
And then go out on the White House lawn and jerk each other off.
It'll be like a bit show, but even more fun.
And then Gerald Ford is like, I like it.
Let's do it.
And it's a funny joke.
I get it.
But it's also like, all right, Adam McKay, you're pushing just a little bit too hard on this one.
Yeah.
Especially as it doesn't connect to anything, like, any policy that he was pushing in the Ford White House that might have been, like, difficult to explain without describing it.
Like, you do that, and then you say, like, the thing he's actually saying, and then explain why it's absurd.
But since it's not connected to anything, really, in anything else in the movie of, like, you know, it explains the unitary executive theory, but it doesn't explain, like, why this is, like, a really batshit thing to believe about the American Constitution, right?
Yes.
It's like, this is a bad thing, you know, as opposed to that.
You're anticipating some of my reservations, yeah.
No, no, no, absolutely.
And I think the other one that really, like...
And, God, I've actually liked this more on Second on the rewatch that I did today.
The bit where Chaney is trying to decide whether he's going to, like, take up the offer to be...
WSVP. And there's a conversation between Lynn Chaney and Dick.
And it's like, well, we can't show the actual conversation.
Obviously, we don't know what they actually said.
There's no record of this, right?
And so it's like, what if we just cut to a Shakespearean soliloquy?
They mean a dialogue, but you know what I mean?
And then they do this faux Shakespearean thing where Which, I mean, you're a Shakespeare nerd and I'm not.
And so I can't speak to whether this is in any way some decent facsimile of Shakespeare or not, but I'm sure you're about to tell me whether it is or isn't.
But it just takes me completely out of the movie.
And it's just that sort of thing.
It does it often enough that it's annoying to me.
And I think that was one of the things that pushed me away from the film upon a first watch.
It's like, you've got really interesting material here.
You don't have to work this hard to keep my interest.
And I feel like The Big Short didn't...
It would just give you...
This is what a credit default swap is.
It gives you a metaphor, and then we're on and we're doing the story.
Whereas this is like, we have to invent things in order to...
We can't allow the material to stand on its own.
We have to insert these weird little fourth wall-breaking things in order to give it some momentum, because really, it's not there on the page without that, which is kind of where my central criticism, at least to the structure of the film, lies.
So I'm wondering how you feel about that.
Well, it's interesting you say that, because that was kind of the moment where I fell in love with this movie.
Interesting.
I was really...
I was into it.
I was impressed.
I was, you know, favorably impressed beyond my expectations up to that point.
And then you get that scene...
Where the voiceover, which as you say, is directly addressing the viewer.
It's a character who is like a chorus.
He's not involved in the events.
He's just off to one side with his family and occasionally he breaks in and talks to you and looks at the camera and talks to you.
And he's narrating it on and off.
And he says, we don't know, as you just relayed, we don't know what they said to each other, we don't know the decision making, there's no Shakespearean soliloquy where he just looks at you and tells you what he thinks.
And then you get this scene between the two of them, and it's written in fake Shakespeare, it's written in faux Shakespearean dialogue, as a sort of fake scene.
And, you know, as mock-up Shakespeare, it's decent enough.
It makes the point.
You know what's happening when you're watching that.
You know that you're watching Shakespearean or Shakespeare-ish or Shakespeare-esque dialogue.
And you know, if you concentrate on it, you can get the sense of what they're saying to each other.
But I thought that was brilliant.
I had to watch it like four times to really kind of like get like, oh, okay.
I sort of like, I just can't parse that dialogue.
I'm sorry.
It's just, it's taken by brain.
So I had to like, it's like every time I watch it, I just get like a little bit more like, okay, okay, okay.
I get, I get, I get what's going on here.
And I think maybe that, as much as the theatricality of it, the fact that it's just unparsable for me is the thing that made it a hard stop on a first watch.
But please continue.
Maybe it's because it brought all those associations with it, for me.
I mean, it's not just Shakespearean.
I think it's very directly referring to Macbeth, because Macbeth is really the only Shakespeare play where you have a conversation like that, where you have a conversation between a married couple about whether the man is going to essentially take power.
That's Macbeth.
That's the scene where Macbeth is vacillating on whether or not he's going to kill Duncan, and Lady Macbeth talks him into it.
So you have that direct association.
And Macbeth, of course, is a tragedy about a man who annihilates his own soul in the course of seeking power and turns his country into a nightmare, into a tyranny, and kills people in order to get power and retain power.
So it brings all those associations.
It makes that relationship, Lynn and Dick Cheney, into, at least by association, the relationship between the Macbeths.
And that is a profoundly sick relationship.
That is a relationship where the woman is frustrated and she's obviously living vicariously through her husband's power.
She's making him do things that he doesn't necessarily want to do or is thinking better of by taunting his masculinity, by guilt-tripping him, stuff like that.
It's also an erotic set of...
The exchanges in Shakespeare are erotic in their connotations.
And you get that in the performances.
And for me, it really clicked in because we talked about the scenes earlier where Lynn and Dick are talking to each other about his new office.
Rumsfeld's aide or whatever it is and there's a really interesting moment where she kind of almost gets horny with him over the phone she says something like you've deserved a really special treat from your wife or something like that he kind of deflects it yeah he He's not into it.
He's not really all that bothered.
There's really no sex in that relationship.
Obviously there is because they have two kids.
But there's really no sexual click between the two of them.
And that works with the Macbeth reference as well because Macbeth is obviously daunted and kind of afraid of his wife's sexuality and she uses it to control him.
And it works in terms of the metafiction and it works in terms of, you know, the very fact that we get that scene written in that kind of dialogue, it emphasizes the fact that these things, these historical moments are just black holes to us.
We do not know.
And in the same way that, you know, Shakespeare came along hundreds of years after the events relayed in the histories and turned it into plays, we're now doing the same thing now with these events, which will forever just be a black box to us.
And, yeah, it just really worked for me, that scene.
It was the moment when I thought, oh, I actually really like this film.
This is a good film.
I love that what I've now done is revealed that I've never read Macbeth, and therefore I've revealed myself to be the Barefoot Barbarian.
As I normally do, I am fine with that.
But, you know, I completely misunderstood the film because apparently...
Now I feel bad for talking about it.
No, no, no, no, no.
You should not feel bad.
You taught me a thing.
You make me like the film more.
If it's an extended metaphor for Macbeth and I just missed the metaphor, that makes the film so much better.
Now I'm going to have to go read or watch Macbeth and then re-watch the film in order to understand.
No, no.
This is very good for me.
You're teaching me things.
This is great.
I feel like there's a critic, there was a brilliant critic of early 20th century literature who reviewed Ulysses and never noticed that it's a full metaphor for the Odyssey.
It's written with the same number of chapters and such, and I feel like That's the kind of thing, like, somebody apparently explained this to him, and it must have been a mind-blowing moment of, like, well, I just fucked the pooch on this one.
Anyway, that's kind of how I feel.
But yeah, no, no, no, this is great.
This is great.
The fact that, like, because I thought the scene was, like, and I thought, like, a lot of the sequences are, like, really extraneous.
But if that's intentional, like, if that's something that it's building something on...
You know, even knowing that it's a cinema metaphor for Macbeth, at least I know, like, from media, like, the extent of, like, you know, I know Lady Macbeth as a character, and I know, like, generally what the story is about.
Yeah, I just never, I never, I never clicked to me until you just said that, and now I feel like I am very embarrassed, but it is not your fault, my friend.
It is, this is great.
I am going to enjoy this film much more on our rewatch, which I will do definitely very shortly, so...
For sure.
And I don't think it's specifically referring to Macbeth.
It's just that it's who it is.
It's a married couple talking about whether or not he's going to take power, essentially.
That is the closest analog in Shakespeare, by far.
And I think the effect of that, it would have been so easy to do that in a way that...
Elevated the Cheneys, even if that was not your intention.
What it's doing is comparing them to a pair of murderers, essentially.
They're murderous gangsters, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, in terms of what they do.
They have their greatness, they have their tragic dimension as well.
They're great human studies, but they are essentially venal, self-seeking, murdering gangsters.
But even so, comparing them to those characters, those tragic Shakespearean characters, the danger is there that you elevate them.
But that wasn't what happened when I watched the film.
It emphasized their comparative lack of those dimensions.
It emphasized that these are people without the kind of interiority that the Macbeths have.
Because that's what it's doing.
It's saying, we don't have the Shakespearean soliloquy.
And then it gives you a Shakespearean exchange.
So it's emphasizing what we don't have.
And that's not only emphasizing what we don't have in terms of what we know is the historical record.
It's also emphasizing the other thing that we lack, which is that we lack central characters who have that much humanity.
We're looking really at two very nasty, very grubby people who don't have those sorts of tragic dimensions.
So, yeah, you said you had some, I mean, like, you like the film.
I mean, you really get into it at that point.
You, you know, sort of elucidated that pretty well.
And then you said you had some problems with it, and particularly with maybe the Jesse Plemons character.
You know, I've kind of said some of my issues with it, and so maybe you can kind of throw some at me and we can kind of go through them.
I did not like some of the running metaphors in the film.
I did not like the metaphor about Dick Cheney's heart.
I found that far too literal.
And the fact that, I mean, it's a historical fact that the guy kept on having heart attacks and that he eventually had a full heart transplant.
That's just a historical fact.
And I suppose it's probably too much to ask a film director making this kind of film about him to resist that.
You know, it's like dangling a catnip toy in front of a kitten.
How are they not going to pounce on it?
But just the repeated emphasis, to the point where we have, like, extended shots of a beating heart, you know?
Right, right.
I found that a little bit...
Well, no, I found that a lot heavy-handed.
Particularly at the end when we do the entire...
I mean, there's a good five-minute sequence that's about around the heart transplant.
Yeah, and at one point you actually get a shot where the camera is directly above this massive, gaping, empty hole in his chest where his heart should be and isn't.
And it does feel a little bit like the movie is sort of...
Like it's written, Dick Cheney is heartless on a piece of paper and then nailed it to your forehead.
You know what I mean?
That would, if it just had, like, you know, a real Adam McKay moment would be, you know, to, like, go over that and then have, like, it cuts to, like, a piece of notebook paper with the words scribbled down.
Like, that would actually be a more Adam McKay moment for me.
Like, it would have worked better if it had just, like, really put its thumb on that.
But, no, no, I hear you.
I hear you.
And another aesthetic difficulty that I have with the film is the other extended metaphor that runs through it, which is the metaphor of fishing.
Again, I believe it is historically correct that his codename when he was VP was Angler, and he is a fly fisherman.
So again, it's probably a bit much to expect somebody...
To resist this.
But the fact that we get, like, the scene where he's talking to George W. Bush at George W. Bush's ranch about whether or not he's going to agree to be his running mate.
And they're obviously playing chess, you know, because Cheney wants it to be understood that if he agrees to do this, then he's going to expect to have huge amounts of, you know, unprecedented amounts of autonomy and power in the White House.
Essentially, what he's doing is he's saying, I will expect to be your unofficial co-president.
And they're fencing, they're manipulating, and obviously W is completely outclassed at this.
I get that.
I don't really need the intercutting with him casting a line and then catching a fish.
I get it.
Adam, maybe I'm over-interpreting it, but the way I took it to be operating was it's telling me that Chaney is this sort of looming, low, quiet, patient, waiting presence that is just a hunter, and he casts his line, and eventually he reels you in.
And it keeps on telling me that through the metaphor of fishing, even to the point where the end credits are overlaid with...
Fishing wars, yeah.
Lures and fishing floats that are shaped like the Twin Towers and things like that.
And yeah, I found that a little bit too unsubtle.
I think you're right.
I mean, again, it was subtle enough that I missed it, but I wasn't looking for that.
No, I think you're right.
Again, I think you've understood the film better than I have.
Maybe because I was looking at it on a more...
I was looking at it more on a surface level.
I don't want to say surface level, but more on a factual accuracy level, I think, is kind of where I landed on it.
How much of this is real?
How much is manipulated?
How much of it is...
We could definitely talk about some of that.
I think the film does commit one unforgivable sin, and it's the same unforgivable sin that W does.
And that is, it treats W as an idiot.
It treats W as the simpleton who just found his way into this place, as opposed to an active participant in all this shit, you know?
I love Sam Rockwell's performance.
I think it's a great performance.
Sam Rockwell does exactly what he's asked to do.
Sam Rockwell, again, can do no wrong.
Tell me about the bad movie that he's been in.
That's fine.
He was in the first Charlie's Angels.
He was one of the best things in the first Charlie's Angels.
I get it.
But Sam Rockwell is someone I've always loved.
I even loved him in Frost Dixon, which is a legitimately bad movie.
And this is not a bad movie.
This is a very, very good movie.
Yeah, no, I agree.
Sam Rockwell's one of these people, whenever he pops up, you're always glad to see him.
He's great.
They really do make him look like George W. Bush as well.
It feels like they had him have surgery to make his eyes closer together or something, but whatever they did, he looks incredibly like George W. Bush.
This movie won the Oscar for Best Makeup.
Oh yeah, the age and weight makeup around Christian Bale is staggering.
I mean, you would not know.
You just wouldn't, from what's on screen.
It's great.
I mean, Christian Bale, like, disappears into this role.
Like, there's a movie that he did called American Hustle, where he's supposed to be kind of like...
Is that the boxing movie?
No, that's the...
This is the one that's about, like, cocaine deals in the 70s.
Amy Adams is in that one as well.
Actually, a podcast that I have done that I've continued to do with a friend of ours named Lee Russell, it was our very first episode.
It was our very first episode that I don't think ever saw the light of day because Lee didn't know how to record at that point and his audio was terrible.
So I don't know if we released that or not, but it was...
So our very first episode, and I remember seeing, because Christian Bale is like, he plays like this slovenly, like he's fat, he's got a beer belly.
And then like, you look at the makeup and he's got like a beer belly.
You know, he's sitting there, he's sitting there with...
The makeup is there.
The prosthetic is there.
But then he looks like Christian Bale.
He looks like Batman otherwise.
And so you're just completely taken out of the freaking movie because it doesn't look like that.
But Christian Bale, he disappears into this role.
And that's the sign of a brilliant actor.
That is not me.
I'm not damning with faint praise.
He disappears into this role.
Interestingly, he was offered the role of W in W, and he didn't want to do it because the prosthetics didn't work for him.
And this is something that you actually find from certain actors, is they just have to find the face.
They have to find the way they're going to look.
And so if the prosthetics aren't there for them, they can't make it work with their technique, and they don't do the movie.
And like, so, I mean, I think, you know, this movie doesn't get made without like this, like incredibly high level of like makeup and effects, which are the second to none.
Like there's, I've, I've never seen better, like prosthetic work in a movie than we see in this one.
If nothing else, this movie succeeds on that level.
But no, I do agree with you largely about the portrayal of Bush as kind of this bumbling idiot who just sort of fell backwards into the presidency and was taken advantage of by people.
He's far more consciously ideological than that.
And this film does kind of replicate W's sin of leaving out a hell of a lot of the truth about that man, which is that he full-throatedly, if idiotically, believes a hell of a lot of just unbelievably awful things and knew precisely what he was doing and getting into.
I think this movie does a little bit better than W. I agree.
There's one line in particular which I appreciated, and I probably appreciated it because...
We'd just recently done W, which is the scene where Chaney goes to Bush's ranch to talk about whether or not he's going to take him up on his offer to be the running mate.
And there's actually a line where W, played by Sam Rockwell, says, Rove told me to buy a ranch out here to distance myself from my Ivy League upbringing or something like that.
Having just been through W, I was kind of, oh, thank you.
Right.
No, no, no.
I hear you.
I hear you.
It's definitely more accurate to W than W was in a lot of ways.
The scene where Lynn and Dick Cheney are walking through the dignitaries and they have the line of...
in this room want to be us and half of them fear us.
And this, like, it doesn't, but it, it doesn't give us a date, but it does like say that, you know, it does give the dates that like Lynn Chaney and Dick Chaney were at the heads of some like respect, you know, respective organizations.
And those are in the like 87 to 89 era.
And by that point, George W.
He quit drinking in 1986. And so the idea that he's still a bumbling buffoon, and I get why they did it, but it is one of those niggling details where I'm just like, I just don't like this decision.
I don't like the artistic decision.
There are ways of treating him that aren't this, but yeah.
Sorry, that may be a little bit nitpicky, is that you're a year off or whatever on the date that George W. Bush stopped drinking.
I found it difficult just having watched W and having been reintroduced to the details of George W. Bush's life.
And that's where, again, I know that's a nitpicky detail, but that's really fucking annoying.
I'm sorry I even brought that up.
It just annoyed me.
I'm just allowed to be annoyed by it, right?
You know?
That's completely fair enough, you know, because if I talk at length about my issues with this film, I'll be nitpicking as well, and that's mainly the axis of my difficulties with it.
I mean, you mentioned something, you said something very to the point earlier, which was the thing about the unitary executive theory.
Sure.
Which...
This movie was released in 2018, and there are lots of, I don't suppose you could say subtextural, but there are lots of tacit addresses in it to the fact that it's being released into the middle of the first Trump presidency.
I can hardly believe I'm talking about a second Trump presidency, but there you go.
We're going to be doing it for another four years, buddy.
Strap in.
It's going to be fine.
I mean, it's not going to be fine, but...
It's not going to be fine.
It's not going to be fine.
But you and I... It's going to be awful.
We're strapping in for another four years.
It's going to be worse.
Let's hope it is only four.
Yeah, so what I was saying is it's released in 2018, so it's released in the middle of the Trump presidency.
There's loads of tacit addresses to that fact in it, like you have a clip of Reagan using the phrase, make America great again.
And then, of course, at the end you have the scene, again, a metafictional moment where the focus group that we've seen earlier in the film, when the film has been talking about things like...
Lobbying and focus groups and rebranding things and renaming things, renaming things, climate change rather than global warming, etc., etc.
Again, full props to this movie for going there in a way that 99 out of 100 political movies about American politics wouldn't even go there.
So this goes there.
And in the end, you have the bit where the focus group reveal themselves to be aware of the fact that they're in a movie.
They're talking about the politics of the movie that they're in.
And the guy who's obviously MAGA gets into a fight with the liberal in the focus group room.
You know, where the fuck was I going?
Yeah, tacit addresses.
So you have stuff like that all the way through.
The unitary executive theory is something that the Trump people...
That's very relevant in 2018. They're trying to make that happen.
You have Trump appointees on the Supreme Court or just about to be on the Supreme Court who buy into this crazy fucking shit.
And as you said earlier, very acutely, it tells you, it gives you the...
Again, props to them for going there.
You get Scalia, and they talk about it, and they tell you what it is, the unitary executive.
But you don't actually get it explained why that's not only bad, but crazy.
And this reminds me a little bit of when we talked about the...
We mentioned him earlier, Errol Morris.
The Errol Morris documentary, Mr. Death.
But we talked about the fact that he had to actually re-edit that and put talking head interviews into it because he showed his first cut to students.
And he'd assumed that everybody would understand that Holocaust denial was crazy.
And his test audiences were confused by it.
They weren't automatically aware that this is pseudoscientific, counterfactual, historical revisionism.
So he had to put in interviews with people like Professor Jan van Pelt, stuff like that.
It is, I think, a failing of the film that it will, for instance, bring up the unitary executive theory, but it won't then explain to you why that is so dangerous.
It's fantasy, essentially.
It bears no relationship to the actual law that these people claim to be interpreting.
This is a problem.
And this is, sorry to get on my hobby horse, this is like peak liberalism, right?
McKay is with it politically.
He's a progressive.
He did an interview on a podcast that I like called The War on Cars, which is just about urban planning and about how trying to reduce car usage.
And he showed up and did an hour-long interview talking about climate policy, et cetera, around Don't Look Up.
And he did that six months ago or something.
McKay is a very good progressive liberal.
He's like an Obama-era liberal.
He's probably like Bernie Pilled or something.
I was going to say, from this movie, you would think anyway that the person that made this movie would be to the left of Obama.
He probably was an Elizabeth Warren person in 2020, if you made me guess about his.
Adam McKay, if you want to come on this podcast, I would love to have you on this podcast and talk about all of your movies.
Come on the show.
We will be very, very nice to you.
We will be very nice and talk about all the great things, and we just won't talk about Don't Look Up.
It's going to be fine.
Now he will never come with this podcast.
Not that he would ever hear it to begin with.
I don't know.
Maybe he's on Blue Sky.
We have a huge following.
He's on Blue Sky.
He's a very good Elizabeth Warren liberal.
And so if you're an Elizabeth Warren liberal, if you're that level of pledge into politics, the Unitary Executive Theory is something that you've known about for 20 years.
And it's this thing.
I think the real crime here is to treat that as something that's like cooked up by a couple of guys in a back room.
You know, like Antonin Scalia wrote a paper and gave it to Dick Cheney.
I was like, I've heard of it.
I've done this thing.
It's called the Unitary Executive Theory.
Tell me all about it.
And then suddenly we're using that as a way of like it's some like back room deal.
Whereas this is something that like, and this is something that the film, it's almost built into the premise of the film.
And this is something that the film is fails at, which I actually kind of find it hard to blame the film for failing at.
It's like Dick Cheney is the villain.
Dick Cheney is the single functional villain of all of this, who is surrounded by people who are sycophants, who are making things happen because Dick Cheney wants it to happen.
As opposed to Dick Cheney is the product of.
Of a right-wing movement that made it possible for someone like Dick Cheney to exist, to exert that kind of power that he did.
You've just described my biggest objection, my biggest underlying objection to the film, yeah.
A film that I do still basically really like, yeah.
No, no, no.
I'm very, again, I have flipped on this.
I actually really do like this film.
I will watch it.
I will probably put it on at night when I'm trying to go to bed and just re-watch bits of it just to study the way the film is structured and everything.
That's kind of what I do with films I like, but, like, have problems with, is I just sort of explore them, you know, like, ten minutes at a time.
Yeah, no, that's the fundamental problem.
I said the Unforgivable Sin is, like, treating W as the buffoon, but that's kind of part of the same thing.
It's like, W's the buffoon, Chaney is the slick operator, with Len, with his wife, who is, like, treated as, like, 100% part of his whole process, missing the systems-level problem.
is really the problem with the film and i think it detracts from particularly the second half where you get this like extended i've been a very fun sequence with like the playing card not the playing cards like the uh like the the board game the board game sequence where w's here at the center and we put all of our people in front of the people that are like his people and we've like put our people into all these like like places and we filled all the things so that we're we're in the loop more than w is
and that one treats w as an unwitting victim whereas really he was on board with He's like, yeah, by all intents and purposes, he was very much like, yeah, Dick Cheney knows better.
Yeah, let him do this.
Let him do it.
He was fully aware of and fully paid up in agreement with the whole conscious neoconservative agenda, the whole project for the new American century, full-spectrum dominance.
He was not just this carrier that the virus got in via.
He knew what he was doing.
No, no, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I don't know.
Again, it sort of hits me the wrong way.
It hits me in a really bad place when a film does that.
But then again, you actually understand that as an artist, if you're trying to make a film about this and you're trying to What you're doing is trying to dramatize elements as if the individual actors have agency, right?
So you give everything to Chaney.
Chaney's a star, so you give everything to him, and he's the one manipulating events behind the scenes, etc., etc., even if that's not actually how it works out historically.
But it's disappointing, and it's a shame, and it is a flaw in the film.
McKay films always feel like stage plays that have been radically adapted and turned into films.
I felt this about The Big Short as well.
And ironically, Frost Nixon actually was a stage play that was adapted into a film and didn't feel like it.
Whereas this...
This does very much feel like it could be like an ensemble stage play.
If you boiled it right down, and you made it almost completely abstract, instead of putting people in prosthetics, you just have the actor playing Dick Cheney, and you could have him say to the audience, I know I don't look anything like Dick Cheney, but this is a stage play about it.
I'm Dick Cheney.
Go with it.
Adam McKay was a writer on SNL for like five years.
He knows how to do this stuff.
He's still kind of writing for a studio audience.
And I don't mean this to be insulting.
I actually think the things that I love the most about Adam McKay is he got his start in comedy.
Have you seen Step Brothers?
Step Brothers is like the dumbest movie ever made.
It's very funny in parts, but it is literally like Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly acting like five-year-old children as 40-year-old men for an hour and a half.
That's the point of the movie.
It does have its moments.
It does have its moments.
But that's the sort of thing that he produced for most of his career.
He was one of the creators of the old Funny or Die website.
I don't know if you ever had occasion to watch that.
Don't know it.
There's a very famous sketch.
It was one of the first videos posted to Funny or Die.
And it's Will Ferrell plays a tenant who is accosted by his...
By his Chinese landlord, who was played by a five-year-old girl.
He's like, you pay now, you pay now.
That clip is actually one of the culture clips that's in the big short, which is funny because if you know that's Adam McKay, then it's a meta reference.
What I'm saying is he has deep roots in this kind of comedy and this kind of anti-comedy stuff.
And the fact that he's gone to more, you know, quote-unquote, serious material is actually one of the most interesting things about him.
Like, I respect his impulses here.
Like, I really love it when, like, you know, somebody who is well-versed in comedy then decides to do dramatic material.
I think my issues with some of this are just, like, you know, you leaned too hard into it.
You tried too hard for it, you know?
And, of course, the thing that we're always going to say as leftists that, like, you know, well, your politics are kind of bad.
I really like the directness of it.
That's one of the things I really like about it.
Maybe that's my autistic brain.
Eff or Fake is one of my favorite movies.
And that is a video essay.
I love that film.
That is an H-Bomber Guy video, right?
Sorry, I don't want to denigrate either H-Bomber Guy or Orson Welles for that, but that is a video essay.
We said this when we did a podcast about FFA many years ago.
We said, you know, Orson Welles spent years, you know, the back half of his career, scrabbling around trying to get money to make independent films.
Why didn't somebody at the BBC say, Orson, come to Britain and make television essays for us?
Be like...
John Berger or Kenneth Clark or Jacob Bronowski or whatever, just write a script and walk around in front of the camera talking and we can put clips in, we can send you to this location, that location.
Just the equivalent of Kenneth Clark's Civilization or Bronowski's Ascent of Man with Orson Welles just talking about whatever he wants every week.
Why didn't somebody do that?
As with, I mean, I think Adam McKay, like, the thing I want him to do is to do, like, a documentary series, like, here are fucked up things in U.S. politics and U.S., like, culture.
And, like, a Netflix series, like a 13-episode Netflix series of, you know, making these little, like, hour-long documentaries about this stuff.
Like, that's...
Like, he would be brilliant at that.
Like, that would be an amazing thing for him to do because, you know, when you do comedy, you have to...
And I am not a comedian.
I am never going to be a comedian.
Sorry.
One of the things of being, like, a podcast co-host, I try to make this shit entertaining is I'm always reaching for the joke.
I'm always reaching for the punchline.
I'm always reaching for that moment of, like...
Catharsis for the audience, right?
Even though I'm just sitting here and talking about it.
Having that impulse, having that, like, I'm looking for, I'm playing to an audience, really teaches you something about your craft.
And I think that's one of the great things about Adam McKay doing these more dramatic bits is he knows his craft.
He knows what he's doing structurally for the most part.
And I think sometimes maybe I wish he would lean less into that and to find more of a balance.
Because if we think that Vice leaned a little bit too hard into this, which I think it did, don't look up as actively bad.
There are bits of it.
There are things that I look at and go, okay, this is brilliant, but it looks a lot more like Step Brothers or Anchorman than it does The Big Short or Vice.
That's a shame because Don't Look Up could have been Really interesting.
But it's just mostly not.
I agree.
McKay does let these impulses get the better of him sometimes.
And I think Vice does.
I mean, you intuited one of my objections earlier.
One of my problems with the film is the character of the narrator who turns out to be Cheney's heart donor.
I knew almost immediately that I mean, when he first pops up and he says, you know, I'm not really involved, but I am involved, and you'll find out about that later, I thought, oh, he's going to be the guy that died and donated his heart to Dick Cheney.
Oh, I just thought he was going to be a random guy killed in Iraq.
But they kind of want to do that as well, because they have him as a soldier in Iraq at one point, don't they?
They do, yeah.
It's like...
In fact, I misremembered.
I thought he did die in Iraq, and yet still somehow his heart ended up in Dick Cheney.
And then I was re-watching and going, like, that doesn't make any sense.
He'd be like, there's no way the heart would survive, or et cetera, et cetera.
And it's like, no, no, no.
I just misremembered the film, you know?
I'm not sure necessarily that he is meant to have been a soldier in Iraq, literally, because there's another scene where his family appears to be hiding under the dining room table as if they are in Iraq when the bombs start falling.
So I think that the freeness with figurative representation just gets a little bit incoherent.
I think it just gets a bit incoherent.
Yeah, I don't know.
And I'm actually okay with a narrative device in which he's not a person, but a representation of a person.
I'm actually kind of okay with that.
If the metaphor works, then...
But as you said, the heart metaphor kind of doesn't work here.
It's too literal, it's too over-the-top, and it's too...
I don't know, it just feels sentimental and moralistic.
In a film which is really quite sophisticated in how it manipulates tone in other parts of it, then you have this metaphor about hearts and heartlessness which just feels a bit kind of crass.
Yeah.
No, no, I agree.
I've been rewatching a little bit of Three Kings, the 1999 movie by David O. Russell.
And I remember this from when I watched this like 25 years ago, basically, of Mark Wahlberg is being tortured by an Iraqi soldier or whatever.
He's got like a car battery like attached to his chest or whatever.
And the guy says, you know, Something to the effect of, again, I haven't rewatched this part in 25 years, so forgive me.
He talks about his family was bombed by American soldiers, and then you cut to Mark Wahlberg realizing, and then you see his wife and child in their home, their apartment or their home or whatever, being cluster-bombed or whatever.
And I remember that being really powerful at the time, but I'm also like, well...
Now I look back on it and think, well, you couldn't just show the actual Iraqi family being bombed and that being okay?
And this film does better than that.
This film does better than that.
I mean, I feel like I've been more critical in this episode than I meant to be.
I mean, just on the level of subjects that it touches upon...
It shows you the consequences of the decisions made by the Bush government, by these neocons, these radical imperialist statists, as Chomsky called them.
It shows you the torture going on at Abu Ghraib.
Using real footage in some cases.
Which again feels very Oliver Stone.
But it goes there.
And it touches on so many things.
It brings up Roger Ailes and Fox and the rise of the right-wing information media system because it tells you about the Fox.
Fairness doctrine, it goes into Halliburton, Halliburton's profits, and those meetings with the energy CEOs that were kept secret, and the FACA workarounds, and Grover Norquist, and Americans for tax reform, and the decision to use completely unfiltered, unreliable information.
Everybody knew that was a bad idea.
It goes on and on.
John Yoo and the surveillance and torture memos, extraordinary rendition.
It goes on and it shows you very clearly that invading Iraq is the plan from day one, long before 9-11.
Oh yeah.
That elicited a cheer for me because that is still something that most people either haven't got their head around or just refuse to acknowledge.
You know, a film that tells that amount of truth about subjects like this.
I mean, yeah, I mean, on balance, I've been very critical, actually, in this discussion, but on balance, I found it surprisingly forthright, you know, surprisingly ready to go there and put it out there.
But, you know, it's going to sound like nitpicking, but I'm disappointed in the light of all that that we still don't get any reference to what really went down in Florida in 2000, the rigging of the vote.
And I'm angry that it doesn't talk about the fact that 9-11 only happened because of a...
I used to subscribe, you know, when I was very much younger, I used to subscribe to sort of the, they deliberately let the planes through conspiracy theory.
I'm long past that.
I don't believe that anymore.
That's silly now, you know, in retrospect.
But they might as well have done, given the massive failure of national security that allowed 9-11 to happen.
And again, this film doesn't talk about it.
So, you know, I feel like I'm being churlish, nitpicking, given what this film does talk about.
But even so, those things do, it rankles.
As someone who has tried to write screenplays in the past, never asked to read them, A, they're lost to history, and B, they were very bad.
But who knows that screenplays are structured, it's like, you've got to find your through line.
You've got to find your A, B, C, D. And some of the stuff that it chooses to include, it chooses to include because of liberal brain.
Because, like, oh, this is a thing we need to know from the Bush administration.
Leaking the identity of the CIA woman that was married to the journalist.
That's like...
If you remember that scandal, that's a giant scandal.
That's Dick Cheney just being a fucking monster, right?
In terms of we're compromising a CIA agent for whatever we feel about the CIA, etc.
But we're compromising someone who's in the field who is taking enormous personal risk to serve the United States for what we think that's worth.
Because I hold a grudge against her husband.
To do what the film does, and then to not explain it, or to not give it more context, when you have a fourth wall breaking narrator who could give it more context, it's like, it's both there and not there.
And there's a lot of stuff that's there and not there.
Exactly.
That's it.
Yeah.
Just another pass or two on the script.
It's all you needed.
And you could have really elevated this material, I think.
Again, re-watching it, I really like it.
Talking to you, I like it even more.
I'm going to re-watch this.
This is going to be in my rotation.
But I really land on...
As good as this film could have been, it still feels a little bit like a missed opportunity.
It still feels a little bit like...
This could have been a home run.
Instead, it feels like a triple.
I don't know.
It doesn't feel like a triple.
It's still very, very good.
It's just, I don't know.
I still want more from this.
I want Adam McKay.
Adam McKay is good enough to do better than this.
That's the thing.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
Yeah.
This is very good.
But Adam McKay, please come on this podcast again.
You can do better.
You can do better.
Adam McKay, I know you can.
We believe in you.
You can do this.
We will come on.
We will take a pittance of money by Hollywood writer standards, $50,000 each, to go over your scripts and correct them.
I haven't discussed this with Jack beforehand, but I'm sure he would be happy to help that.
Adam, hugely successful, fated Hollywood movie maker, I, a totally creditless nobody, will help you out.
All you have to do is ask.
I will help you out.
I will tell you what you're doing wrong and help you to be good for only several million dollars.
That's all I ask.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Just give us some Shane Black money and believe me, we will retire and write bullshit screenplays for the rest of our lives.
I will explain to you how to write good screenplays.
It's fine.
I'll do it.
I think that's a good stopping place.
Unless you have anything else to add.
No, I think that's it.
Yeah.
On the whole, very positive about this.
Yeah, yeah, very positive.
More positive than I thought it was going to be when I suggested us doing this.
I thought we were going to kind of complain about all the shit we did, but not really like the film.
But I think we both really liked the film upon watching and re-watching, and I will definitely be revisiting this in the future.
Okay, well, that was an episode about 2018's Vice, written and directed by Adam Kay, and as I say, very much about presidencies and presidential power, despite the fact that it's actually about a vice president.
So curiously, kind of simultaneously very on and very off-brand for this series about movies about presidents.
Thank you for tuning in to this, listeners, to this public bonus, and if you've been a Patreon subscriber to myself or Daniel, thank you very much for Being one of those, we will have subscriber-only bonuses for you in future because you do deserve a little extra treat, you lovely people that help us out.
It is very much appreciated.
Helps us keep making the show.
Helps us to stay independent and keep going and feel appreciated, which is important.
And for the rest of you, we are getting there.
We are going to have more consistent and more What's the word?
What could we say?
Material that is more in line with our real mission, shall we say, in the not-too-distant future.
So we appreciate your sticking around and waiting for that.
And we're enthusiastic to be providing it as well.
If you're still listening, I will reveal, as I think we've decided, I'm actually going to prep the Jesse single episode.
So what's your whistle for that?
Them's fighting words, Jeb.
I couldn't remember if we were still doing more of these president ones.
Have we decided if we're still...
No, we are.
We're still doing Lincoln, aren't we?
At least Lincoln.
I know we want to do Lincoln.
I figure we can at least go to an inauguration.
And if we have one or two more we want to do afterwards, that's fine.
I think maybe at this point we plan to do Lincoln.
Because that's the one that I think we both really want to do.
And then if we want to do more about the presidency, we can do those later on.
But I think maybe moving away from this topic and doing The Wicker Man, I think, sounds really interesting.
I think that would be a really fun one, getting you to watch the remake.
I think that would be funny.
Well, I haven't seen either, so I'd watch both.
And we could talk about both, I think.
The original is that Stone Cold masterpiece.
I'm aware it's been on my list for 25 years and I've just never sat down and watched it.
Maggie Mae Fish, again, she had a great, great video essay on...
It's about the remake and it's about how Neil Labute has always been a misogynist and she has to talk about the original and then talk about how he completely fucked the original because he's a misogynist.
There it is.
The original is a critique of imperialism and exploitation and religion and intolerance.
And the remake is a critique of women and feminism and socialism.
