Originally published 11th April 2024. Our series on 'movies about presidents' continues with a fun discussion of this 1997 'thriller', written by legendary Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman based on the debut novel of David Baldacci, starring/produced/directed by noted chair-interviewer Clint Eastwood, and boasting a splendid cast - including recently-deceased screen legend Gene Hackman - none of whom are given anything very interesting to do. Clint plays a suave cat burglar - with the unlikely name of Luther Whitney - who accidentally witnesses the president of the United States sexually assaulting a woman (far-fetched, right?) and getting her killed. All Hell then persistently threatens but repeatedly fails to break loose. Instead we get a slow, aimless, half-baked movie filled with good elements that don't cohere or go anywhere special. It sparked an amusing conversation though, as we hope you will agree. Full episode was originally exclusive for Patreon subscribers. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
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you Okay, and welcome back, everybody, to the IDSG bonus episode series on movies about presidents.
And yeah, there's no reason to stop.
I mean, there's no reason to be, you know, like existentially terrified whenever anybody mentions the concept of the president of the United States or anything like that.
I mean, you can just carry on talking about this.
So yeah, another episode in that series, movies about presidents.
And the movie that we are talking about in this bonus episode is absolute power.
And you should probably get used to me saying it that way, because every time I say the title of this movie in this episode, I'm liable to say it absolute power.
Daniel, I know nothing about this.
I've just realized I've completely failed to do the normal, basic, baseline, minimum bloody research that I should normally do before coming into a recording.
I don't know what year this was released.
You've probably been looking at this stuff instead, you know, when I haven't.
Tell the listening several all about absolute power.
Sure.
So this was released in 1997.
It was based on David Baldacci's first book, which it was optioned even before it was published.
Like this was like a kind of a hot property moving around Hollywood for a little bit.
Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.
He also produced because he produces everything he's made for the last 30 years or so.
And written by William Goldman.
And William Goldman is the reason that I knew about this film or kind of had it in my memory because William Goldman, among other things, he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride are probably the two things that you would know him best for.
But he was a Hollywood screenwriter for decades and decades and decades and wrote two very good books about screenwriting, one of which included The Process of Writing Absolute Power, which I read back in like 2003 or something like that when that book or the book was released in 2000.
So I probably read it in like 2001 or 2002.
And I reread bits of that book for preparation of this for because he goes into some detail about the problems of adapting the script.
And so I'd always had this movie in my memory because A, I'd seen the trailers back in the day, although I'd never seen the film.
But also, you know, I knew it because of that book by William Goldman.
Also, we were kind of decided to do this because Gene Hackman just died and he plays the pivotal role of the President of the United States of this.
So that's kind of the background here.
There you go.
Yeah.
As you say, it's topical because we just lost Gene Hackman, tragically, and his wife in a very grim series of circumstances, which we won't go into here, except to say, you know, it's very sad and awful.
And Gene Hackman, absolutely.
I mean, we talked a little bit about Gene Hackman in the run-up to recording our last episode, not the one with Craig, the one with just you and I. And your thoughts on Gene Hackman, Daniel?
Gene Hackman is someone I have always like, he's, you know, his, his kind of run of, you know, prolificity.
He made a ton of movies in the 80s.
I think he made, he starred in more movies in the 1980s than any other person.
I think I saw that statistic somewhere.
But I think at one point, I think at one point he was doing six or seven movies a year.
And he's one of those actors like, I think we mentioned like Tommy Lee Jones and Jack Nicholson, but Tony Lee Jones in particular, or Harrison Ford, excuse me, who my dad always liked.
And I, so Gina Hackman, I always, I always think of my dad when I, when I, when I see a Gina Hackman movie and, you know, and in that pleasant way, you remember your father from when you were, you know, single digits.
And so, yeah, I think he's a, you know, if you, he's an actor who's had like, so, who had so many different like phases in his career.
You can look at his like 60s stuff where he was just doing like TV work.
And, you know, you think about like, that could have been like a full career of just, he was an actor who was in a, he was a, who killed in a bunch of great 60s cop movies or cop shows or whatever.
Then you look at his early 70s work or his late 60s, early 70s work, and you get into the, you know, the conversation and night moves and scarecrow and these like very like detailed like character focused works.
And those some of his great performances are, you know, at that time.
And then he does the run of great stuff in the 80s, you know, and it was like each decade could be like a, a, a full career for an actor that you would remember as a great like lead and character actor.
And so Hackman has always been, and yeah, he was always just Gene Hackman, you know, it's funny.
Most people would probably think of him like the obviously the biggest role he ever did was playing Lex Luthor in three of the four Superman movies.
But actually when he died, that was, that was like fifth down the line of the things that I thought of.
I was like, oh, right.
He also played Lex Luther, right?
You know, because I was thinking of Mississippi Burning and, you know, Crimson Tide and all that other stuff that was that just kind of came to mind more as like, oh, that's a, that's a Gene Hackman performance.
And obviously the conversation and night moves, which are two of my favorite Gene Hackman movies.
But this one I had never seen until yesterday.
So this is, this is not really.
Yeah, no, never seen it.
Never seen it until yesterday.
Had you seen it previously?
Yeah.
Just doubling back a little bit before I get into that, Gene Hackman is, he's a really interesting actor.
I mean, you name-checked The Conversation and Night Moves.
Conversation, absolutely brilliant movie.
Very much one of those movies that I saw when I was younger and was a real game changer in my appreciation of cinema, you know, amongst other movies.
Night Moves is a movie that I didn't see until years later.
And I think even today it's a semi-obscure movie that a lot of people haven't heard of.
But people really should seek that one out.
I've really first heard of it.
And I have you and Lee to thank for this.
I really first heard of it when you and Lee, Lee Russell, covered it on Tumblr Doss, They Must Be Destroyed, the podcast.
And you covered the movie on that.
And I really liked the sound of it.
So I sought it out and I was absolutely blown away by it.
I think that's quietly and unobtrusively one of the masterpieces of American 70 cinema.
And Hackman is brilliant in it.
And I've always thought Hackman is, he's kind of the American cinema equivalent of one of those people that you'd call like a jobbing actor in British television, you know, who spends, I mean, you don't really have them anymore, but there used to be this phenomenon of the actor who went right the way through British television 50s,
60s, 70s, 80s, you know, and just was in everything from sitcoms to, you know, Charles Dickens dramatizations to Doctor Who, you know, to just everything.
And Hackman's like, I feel like Hackman in some ways is a prefiguration of the modern idea of a certain kind of Hollywood star or a certain kind of Hollywood actor, because it's very much the thing, you know, these big actors, people like Clooney and Pitt and people like that, they and DiCaprio, they want to kind of do the rounds.
They want to do the big serious movie.
They want to work with Scorsese and so on.
And then they also want to do the comedy and then they want to do the period drama and they want to have done a bit of everything.
And Hackman, I don't know if this was like a career aim of his or how it fell out, but he feels like one of the first of those actors, those Hollywood actors, I mean, to have done that because he did, as you say, he did everything.
He was Lex Luther.
He was in the conversation.
He was always Gene Hackman.
He was just one of those actors who is sort of on the surface a little bit samey, but at the same time, he fit into just about every genre and every tone and every style that he tried his hand at, which, you know, that's a talent not to be sniffed at.
Yeah, I know, absolutely.
And here, I mean, I think that like, particularly if you look at his work in the 70s, I think there's a lot more variety there.
I think there's a lot more, you know, when he, even in the 70s, he was still like 40 years old, right?
So, you know, we can't say when he was a young man, you know, when he was my age, basically, you know, but his 70s work seems to be a little bit more like character focused and a little bit more, you know, the same as kind of comes in the 80s and 90s, I think.
And that's kind of when he becomes, you know, I'm Gene Hackman.
Like he's not playing Popeye Doyle anymore.
He's, he's just, oh, I'm, it's the Gene Hackman role.
And he just steps into the Gene Hackman role.
He does a ton of like kind of, he's playing kind of the bad guy in a lot of, or at least not necessarily the bad guy, but he's playing, you know, he was in no fewer than like six John Grisham adaptations, for instance.
And I think that that kind of speaks to, you know, kind of where he was fitting, where his, where his talents kind of fit in, particularly in the 90s and early 2000s.
And then he retires in 2004.
And he's been retired for a while.
Yeah, he's been, and, you know, he just, you know, he's one of those guys where it's like, you know, I just have fond memories of him and you just never, you know, he just, he, you know, I think he, he published a couple of books in the, in the, in the, in the intervening decades on him, but basically stayed out of the public eye.
And, you know, you know, he was 75 at that point.
He retired.
I mean, you know, give him a break.
You know, that's, that's fine.
But, you know, yeah, no, it's interesting.
It's funny because when he died, I was like, oh, right.
He was still alive.
That was, it was just, you know, he's just one of those things where you just kind of, you always think like, you know, you know, well, I haven't heard of him for a while.
So obviously he's just, he passed on and I just forgot.
But no, he, he, he was still, he was still kicking living in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Yeah.
Sadly suffering from Alzheimer's stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I feel like he's, he's very good.
He's a, he's a villain in this movie that we're talking about.
He's very good at villains, both of the more serious variety, as in this, and the more comedic variety, as in the Superman movies.
I always like him best when he plays kind of conflicted men who...
He's the most interesting thing in the movie.
He's this kind of sad, conflicted, weak man who's caught up in this criminal enterprise and he kind of knows better and he's just adjusted himself to it.
And he's very good in that sort of thing.
And that's similar sort of thing to what he's doing in night moves and the conversation.
I think that's his ideal, his ideal mode for me, playing that kind of man trapped in his own lack of strength.
There is something of that in this character, in this movie, actually, because it's a funny title for this movie.
Absolute power.
Because there isn't really much in it about absolute power.
I mean, even the president, I mean, I suppose if it refers to anything, it refers to that.
It refers to the fact that you have an evil president.
But the whole thing is, it's not really a conspiracy thriller.
The whole thing is very much about sort of misunderstandings and cobbled together plans and it's full of dead ends.
And the president, like the big, you would think when you heard the sort of flyover view of this, that it's going to be about this villainous Machiavellian president.
He doesn't know what the fuck's happening for most of the film.
He really doesn't have any control over anything, does he?
This president character.
Yeah, no, that is in this film.
I think, you know, I like to ask during these recordings, you know, what does this movie have to say about the American presidency?
And we'll get there shortly.
But interestingly about the title, it's a very generic title.
Originally, the title of the book was going to be Executive Power, which is even more generic.
And apparently there have just been so many things with the word executive in the title at the time that it was published that it was like, no, this is not going to be called executive power.
It will be called some or it will be called something else.
And then we're absolute.
We're calling it absolute power.
But I think ironically, like the movie, like structurally, and so the idea is that Clint Eastwood plays this jewel thief, this like high-end jewel thief who's pulling this job.
He goes into this rich industrialist.
He's a cat burglar, really.
He's a cat burglar.
No, no, it's a very, it's a very like, you know, almost thing of the cat burglar.
He's like, you know, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, so he's a cat burglar.
He goes in, he's robbing this guy's safe.
There's this room that's, it's like a vault, and it's got a, it's got a mirror.
It's got a one-way mirror.
And then he, while he's closed up in there, two people walk into the bedroom that's right behind him and they start fooling around and, you know, things get violent.
And then the guy like stabs the, stabs his, stabs his young lady, Melora Hardin, a young Malora Hardin, who's, you know, really good in her like four minutes of this movie, she gets to be in.
But, and then it turns out that this guy is the president of the United States and, you know, the kind of the, the, the wacky hijinks that happen from there.
I think interestingly, like very, like, it's a while into this movie before you realize it's the president of the United States.
Like if you hadn't read the back of the VHS box or if you hadn't, you know, seen the trailer going into this, like nothing in context tells us that this is the president of the United States for a while.
Because, I mean, we've got the two, like, you know, the two Secret Service guys who actually killed a young woman, but they could just be private security goots.
Like, this could just be like the industrialist's house.
This could just be the rich guy's house, you know?
So it's interesting that it has to be the president.
I don't know.
How do you feel about that?
Yeah, I think another movie might well have shown you the president on the TV in a news report or something before so that you know when the character walks in that it's the president.
I think it's an interesting decision not to do that.
I do think as soon as the two Secret Service guys show up and shoot the book, and I should clarify, he doesn't actually stab her.
She stabs him in the course of trying to escape from him because it's pretty clear.
Apologies in the middle of this, you know, some comedic bonus episode talking about a silly film bringing these things up.
But it's pretty clear that he's on course to violently rape this woman.
And she grabs Chekhov's letter opener, which has already been very carefully established for us, and tries to defend herself with it and stabs him in the arm, which you think is going to be a big plot point and it isn't that never comes back at all.
Well, there is a scene where somebody sort of shakes his hand and he goes off, but it then leads nowhere.
And she's about to, or it seems that she's about to stab him again fatally with the letter opener when the two guys burst in and shoot her in the head.
For me, it becomes pretty clear contextually when they turn up that this is the president.
But as you say, it's not definite.
And then the movie does a kind of reveal.
You then cut to the White House and it says, ladies and gentlemen, the president and in walks the same guy.
But it's a strange thing to do because you're going to know from the trailers and the advertising.
And as you say, the back of the box, which is I definitely saw this as a VHS rental, that that's the whole point of the film.
So it does strike me as a bit odd.
It reminds me a bit of how Doctor Who back in the 70s would sort of end 80s, you know, you'd be watching a story that you saw in the Radio Times was called Return of the Daleks or whatever, but the first episode would be teasing you all the way through.
Who is it?
Who is it?
And then at the end, a Dalek turns up and you're supposed to be surprised.
Right.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
Yeah, no, it is one of those things where like artistically they make decisions to like of how to structure these things.
My favorite example of this is Terminator 2 Judgment Day, where, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger was the villain in the first one and he's the hero in the second because he's been programmed to be a good Terminator this time.
And the film, like you watch the film and like it's clearly meant to be a big reveal that he's, that he's actually the one protecting John Connor.
But like the entire marketing material, you know, like Arnold Schwarzenegger was going on, was going on like Shay Leno or Johnny Carson at that point.
You know, like, I get to be the good guy this time, you know?
And so it's, you know, it's, you know, I mean, obviously, you know, it's amazing.
Like sometimes when you see these movies, like it's always fun to watch these things like divorced from like the context in which they were made originally and see how they work.
Because, you know, again, I think, I think, you know, this movie, I think honestly might work even better if it had just been some rich guy, you know, if it hadn't been the president of the United States.
I don't know that like structurally in the movie, that adds a lot to the stakes that are in play here, you know, because, and I think one thing that, one thing that's very clear from Goldman's kind of talking about the writing is that this, this movie was drastically different from the book.
The book has like a dozen lead characters and like apparently Luther, the thief, he dies like halfway through the book.
So I imagine the book, the book may have gotten into a lot of, a lot more of those details and it might have been a little bit more sophisticated in how it plays with this stuff.
But yeah, this movie, I mean, it really doesn't have to be the president.
Like there's very little here.
I mean, probably the one thing is that like at the end, when they've put, when they put Eastwood's daughter, Laura Lenny, she's already been like almost killed by a Secret Service guy.
And then they, you know, she's in the hospital and, you know, she's being watched over by the cops.
And, you know, Ed Harris is the detective who's investigating this and he's talking to Clint Eastwood's character.
And he goes, oh, don't worry.
We even got the Secret Service on that door to protect her.
And then Clint Eastwood has to go save the day again because like the Secret Service is, you know, is, you know, they're in a position of authority and they're out to kill his daughter because they're trying to get to him or whatever, which is, you know, a weird, silly plot point.
But I mean, it works well enough in the movie.
There's just a lot of fumbling around.
There's a lot of movement around and there's very little like through line here.
Yeah, I was struck by it's it seems very it seems very random and disconnected.
A couple of things really struck me were you have a lot of space devoted towards the start of the film to the partnership between the Ed Harris cop and his and his partner.
And I can apologize, I don't remember this actor's name.
I always think of her as Cassidy Yates because she's the actor who played Cassidy Yates in Deep Space Nine.
She's really great.
But she just disappears about halfway through the movie, suddenly it's just Ed Harris working on his own.
And you also have a subplot about E.G. Marshall's character, who is the extremely rich philanthropist, political operator who's sort of behind the evil president.
And it's his wife, his very young wife, that the president was with when the events went down.
You have this whole subplot about him hiring a hitman, and the hitman tries once to kill Luther, and then he just disappears as well.
It's very strange.
It feels like it's one of those movies where you feel like half of the back end of the movie has just been amputated or cut out somehow.
Which I think is exactly what happened.
I mean, you know, honestly, watching this, maybe I almost want to read the book just to see how much of this, you know, how much was truncated out of this.
Because again, apparently Luther dies like halfway through the halfway through the movie.
So I don't know exactly what circumstances those were, but it was described as like a pot boiler.
It sold a bunch of copies.
It was a big book.
Yeah, the actress you're looking for there is Penny Johnson, I believe.
Penny Johnson.
Yeah.
That's right.
Yeah.
She's really great.
So it's sad when she just drops out of the film.
Yeah, no, no.
I mean, you even get, you even get the like, you know, it's, I don't know, there's so little life to a lot of this.
You know, it just feels like it's kind of perfunctory going through the motions of a lot of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's kind of po-faced, isn't it?
Despite being, as you say, a pot boiler and very far-fetched and everything, apart from a couple of scenes mostly centering on Judy Davis and the interplay between her and Hackman, apart from that, the whole thing is very po-faced and serious without really anything very much to be serious about.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, you know, yeah, you mentioned Judy Davis.
Judy Davis is really good here.
I really like Malora Hardin's.
I really like Malora Hardin's performance.
I mean, you know, Malora Hardin, which we probably mostly know from the U.S. version of The Office, she plays Jan, but like she was a working actress for decades.
And I hear she's, you know, she's got a life to her.
She's got like, I mean, you really get a performance out of this woman, you know, and even though all she's really doing here is like, you know, fucking the precedent, you know, because it starts out very consensual.
It starts out as a very, you know, like, yeah, no, we're into this.
And then he slaps her ass and then she's not totally into that.
And then he slaps her face and she hits him.
And then suddenly it's, it's going to be murder.
You know, that's, that's what's on the mind.
But I mean, I love that performance.
She's just so warm and vivacious there, even though she doesn't have a lot to do.
I really love her there.
Another, obviously, Laura Lenny, I just love in everything.
Laura Lenny is just great.
She plays Eastwood's daughter here.
But you know, like, you know, this is a problem that I think the film has in general is that like women are just sort of like left out of the equation a lot of the time, you know, that you know, Allison Eastwood just gets to be, pardon me, well, you know, Allison Eastwood is the, is an art student at the beginning of the film, by the way.
That's Clint Eastwood's daughter.
I think she went on to like writing and directing herself, but yeah, she was in a bunch of his movies.
But, you know, Judy Davis really kind of drops, I mean, she has to be the one who's like, she's the chief of staff.
And she's the evil chief of stuff.
This is a trope.
The evil chief of staff, because we've seen this in at least two others of these films.
No, no, well, you know, and for this president, you know, I mean, they kind of get the sense that, oh, nothing we, you know, it's like, did you hear anything?
And the Secret Service guy goes, nothing we haven't seen before or heard before.
It's like, okay, this is a regular occurrence.
But, you know, Laura Lenny just ends up being basically just apparel monkey.
Penny Johnson just drops out of the movie, you know, halfway through after giving some really great sequences.
And then Judy Davis, I mean, she's, I mean, once they have that one little ballroom sequence where they're doing the ballroom dancing and then Gene Hackman threatens her.
And I think she basically leaves.
That's the best scene in the film.
I too love that scene.
Yeah, you would see her being arrested at the end and that's it.
Oh, okay.
You see her at the end.
But like, you know, women are, women are not treated well by the script or by this by this movie in the slightest.
I think that, you know, you really see that.
And of course, the one, the one guy who gets killed by Clayton Eastwood is the black guy.
He's played by Dennis Haybrook, who's a, you know, a great, great character actor of his own.
This is a young Dennis Haysbridge.
Yeah, Luther just straight up murders the guy.
He just killed.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you know, he's a bastard, but yeah, he just, he just, just fucking murders him.
And it's apparently just all forgotten about it because at the end, you know, he's friends with the Ed Harris cop and it's established that the Clinton Eastwood character broke into the rich guy's house and stole loads of jewels and money.
I mean, he says he, he says he put it back for some reason, but it's still illegal.
I would not have put it back.
No, no way.
No, no.
Fuck that.
But no, the Ed Harris cop's just like, yeah, I mean, okay, he stole loads of stuff and murdered a guy, but he's a good guy.
And I fancy his daughter.
So it's fine.
No, he very clearly was wanting to Mac on that girl.
That was clear.
Yeah, no.
No, I mean, you know, in the one crime, I mean, you know, it's even revealed like, you know, that nobody's laid a hand on this guy for 45 years referring to Luther, you know, and the and the whole logic is that, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't like hurt people, you know, he's, he's, uh, you know, he's not known for that.
He doesn't, you know, like, that's why originally Ed Harris had heard of the guy and is like, yeah, but this guy wouldn't hurt a fly.
He's just a thief, right?
You know, and so at the end, when it's like, you know, you went after my daughter and he's like, you know, looks him straight in the eyes and like gives him that like deadly dose of whatever, you know, morphine or whatever it was.
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's really like totally inconsistent, you know, in a lot of ways.
It doesn't, you know, it's the movie does not earn that, right?
Because like the whole point of this character is that he's supposed to have been, you know, kind of neglectful of his daughter, you know, being in and out of prison and stuff.
And it's like, he hasn't talked to his daughter in, you know, in over a year, since, since mom died, whatever, you know, like, and so there's just, there's just so much of that supply kind of, you know, and then it just gives us a place to where we end.
And it's like, oh, he's reconnecting with his daughter and we're supposed to feel good about that.
But, you know, the movie has not given us really anything to justify that, you know?
No.
No, with the, with the guy that he kills, I was expecting there to be a scene later on where that guy wakes up somewhere, you know, like handcuffed to a radiator or something because it was a, it was a bluff.
He just filled him full of sedative.
But no, he's, he just straight up murders him.
Yeah, just straight up kills him.
But the Laura Linney character, the daughter, Katie, she is, she is just destined to be creeped on by guys.
Because the, I mean, the sort of initial flirting scene between her and what's he called um seth frank the detective the ed harris character that's that's okay that's kind of sweet but then at the end without i mean they've they haven't their relationship hasn't gotten anywhere they've had like one little moment where they flirted a little bit at the end she's lying in bed unconscious after this car accident where the evil secret service agent pushed her off a cliff in the car and
She's reaching out and stroking her hair, and it's cringeworthy.
It's like, get your hands off her.
What are you doing?
You haven't got any right to do that.
And it's on top of the fact that her father apparently has been following her around and stalking her, and he sneaks into her house periodically and checks what's in her fridge.
And when she goes to his house with Ed Harris, she sees loads of photographs of events that he wasn't, you know, featuring her, where he wasn't present.
She says, oh, he wasn't there at my graduation.
He wasn't there at that party that I went to celebrate my first job.
Okay, so, and she's looking at this like, oh, he does love me after all.
No, that's not the takeaway.
The takeaway is that this guy has been stalking you, taking photographs of you without your home.
Like, he was there, but he was such a master, a master of disguise that he was just, you know, unobtrusively hidden in the background of, like, all the great memories of her life.
This is, you know, like, you can imagine there's like a horror movie.
It's like, you know, it's like one of those scenes of like, he was there like a Kaiser Soze, you know, moment of like, oh my God, he was there the whole time.
He was taking photos.
That's heartwarming.
Yeah.
No, that's creepy and weird.
Yeah.
No, I mean, he was, he was there for me all along.
No.
It doesn't count if you don't know he's there.
That's different.
And maybe in a better movie, you could justify this.
Like maybe there is a world in which like this movie works.
If you made it kind of about that, or you gave us a little bit more breathing room, but there's just, there's just no, like, it's all like stitched together.
Yeah.
No, it's, it's, it's.
And I'm really like the, the, the, the, the Kate character, Kate, Kate Whitney, Laura Lenny.
I mean, I love Laura Lenny.
She's good in this.
She, she's does what she's supposed to do.
There.
It's really not necessary for her to be in this.
Like you could have given, you could have given like the little bits of plot relevance.
You could have given that to basically anybody, I guess like her existence is one of the things that keeps Clint Eastwood in the country.
As long as he, he stays, cause he was going to leave.
He was going to leave the country.
That was the original plan, you know?
But he wanted to connect with her first and to, you know, like, but yeah, I mean, it's, I guess it's there for exposition, but it's just like, I don't know, in a movie that's this, that's already, you know, an hour, 40 minutes long and it already has, you know, like kind of a lot of stuff happening.
It does seem like, you know, you could have, you could have put in some of that, like plot juice.
You could have put in a lot of stuff and not really had the daughter character.
So significant.
And again, I'm wondering, I'm wondering if this is just like much bigger in the book.
I imagine this is a much bigger part of the book.
Yeah.
Probably the role.
The daughter should play in the plot is that, as you say, she's the reason that he doesn't just leave the country.
But instead of that, we have a scene where he's at the airport about to flee and he sees the press conference where the evil president is pretending to be heartbroken about the death of his friend's wife and stuff like that.
And it's, you know, he, he, he makes a moral decision.
So it, it, it removes the point of the daughter being in the story.
This really does.
I mean, far be it for me to speak ill of, you know, veteran doyen script writer, William Goldman writer of what was it you said?
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid.
And, and the princess, the princess bride are the two big ones.
Yeah.
Neither of which I've seen.
He also did all the president's men.
He did.
Yeah.
Thank God.
I could, I could look him up.
I could give you a big list of them, but he did a bunch of Stephen King adaptations.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Misery.
He did misery.
It's another big one that he did.
I've seen that, but no, it doesn't, it doesn't feel finished.
It doesn't feel fully written.
It feels like they, they filmed the first draft or something like that.
It's weird.
There are at least four drafts.
Cause he, he does, he does mention that, but it goes through a lot of changes.
And, um, I think it got to a like sellable state and, and this is, I was gonna, I was gonna mention this about like, like Eastwood.
Eastwood is like famous for only doing one take of everything.
He runs his, he runs, you know, a lot of times he doesn't even like tell the actors he's filming is because yeah, just run that through for me real quick.
We're just setting up a, we're just setting up a light.
And then they do the scene and then it's like, nope, we already filmed it.
You're done.
Matt Damon tells a, uh, tells a story of like, he was, he did a movie with Clint Eastwood or he was directed by Clint Eastwood called Invictus.
And like the first day, the first take, you know, Matt Damon does his lines and does this thing.
And he asks, and he goes like, Hey, you want me to do that?
You want me to do that another time?
And he's like, Eastwood goes, did you want to waste everybody's time?
So that's just, that's how Eastwood, Eastwood really liked to be done by four and go out to the, go out to play golf.
Yeah.
So I, you kind of gather that like some of it, like he's making the movie, you know, it's, it's, it's constructed.
It's, it has a beginning, middle and end, but you really wish maybe he had put a little bit more effort in to, uh, to, uh, you know, making some of these decisions and, and, um, you know, but like, so, so.
There's a whole buildup to what seems like it's going to be a set piece.
You have the, the sting where Katie at the behest of the cop, she, she calls her father and says, I want to meet you.
And he, he comes along to meet her in public.
And of course you have her waiting, you have him on his way.
You have the cops ready to, to nab him.
You also have the evil secret service agent ready with a, with a, a rifle to kill him.
And then on the other side of the plaza, you have the rich guy's hit man in a, in a, sat in a window with a, with a rifle and all these threads are coming together and you think, oh, there's going to be a big set piece gunfighter
or something it's and it just doesn't happen you get like a like an accident where the hitman misses he fires the gun accidentally and and that causes panic and clint eastwood gets away and that's it it's it's very strange yeah no i mean you would think this is going to be i mean and i don't know like maybe maybe there was more on the page maybe eastwood didn't want to shoot it maybe i don't know you know that that's it.
That's it, that's a big because it is set up to be like this big.
This, I mean, the opening sequence, the sequence where you know, Luther sees the murder, like that's a that's like 20 minutes of the movie.
Like, we spend a good 20 minutes of the movie in that, in that house, in that room, like kind of watching this all happen.
Oh, and that's another thing.
The thing I was saying before about him being a creep and a stalker about his daughter, there is a kind of a theme buried in here, and I'm not convinced that Eastwood is conscious of this because it's not developed or explored or anything.
But there is a kind of a theme about Luther being a voyeur, because as I say, you have him kind of stalking his daughter, and you also have the scene where he's behind this two-way mirror, which obviously isn't his, but he's behind it watching what is, and for most of what we see, it looks like it's just going to be a drunken sexual encounter.
And he just, he stands there watching.
And even when it turns violent, even when the man is actually beating this woman up, he's got his hands around her throat.
He doesn't, he doesn't help her.
It's, he just watches.
Yeah.
And he says at one point later on in the film, doesn't he?
I couldn't help whatever the character's name was.
And I was thinking, you could have done.
You could have helped her.
You could have come out there.
You could have done something.
You could have done more than you did.
You did jack shit, buddy.
Yeah, no, no, you're absolutely right.
I hadn't even, haven't even put, hadn't even really put that together because it's just like, you know, you sort of get the idea that like, look, I'm a cat burglar.
I can't, you know, like reveal that, you know, he can't reveal himself, especially if you know it's the president.
You know, it's like a, you know, but again, it's, it's, it's so undersold.
And, you know, sometimes that's a virtue in a film.
Sometimes, you know, like, we are going to like under, we're going to no sell this and we're going to kind of like, it's going to be more effective by being understated.
But here it's just like, you know, you just, I don't know.
I think, I think Eastwood was just the wrong person for the, for the role.
I think he's the wrong person for the job here, you know?
I don't know.
Like, it just, it feels not even for the role, but for the, for the, like directorially, I just wish there was, I wish this had been made by another director, you know, and you, you can't expect this to be the Matrix.
I mean, The Matrix is like four years out from this point.
You can't expect it to be one of the born movies, you know, and you kind of like a, you know, like a big action flick, but, you know, you know, this, I mean, there are better movies that were made in the late 90s, you know, that, that, you know, got into some of this and did some, did some more with the sequences, which you would think would be, you know, major set pieces.
And they're just not.
Well, you have a, you have, it's, it reminds me a little bit of a movie, which I believe is from 1999 or 2000.
So it's only a couple of years after this, three or four years after this, called The International.
I don't know if you've ever seen that.
I don't think I've seen that one.
No, it's a sort of corporate espionage thriller with Clive Owen as this Interpol investigator and going after a big international corporation, which is involved in all sorts of crimes and stuff like that.
And it's quite a good movie.
It's an efficient enough thriller, conspiracy thriller, for most of its runtime.
But it does have one absolutely stunning set-piece gun battle.
It takes place in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, actually.
I think it's one of the greatest screen gunfights ever filmed.
It's this amazing, long, complicated set-piece gunfight battle.
And it builds in a similar sort of way.
You have three or four different parties converging on this one place.
And you can tell as it builds and builds and builds any minute now, this is going to explode.
And then it does.
And it's really, really enjoyable and satisfying.
Whereas in this one, it builds and builds and builds with all the parties converging.
And then basically nothing happens.
Yeah, yeah.
So the international, I did remember that.
I did remember that Clive Owen movie.
I just like it completely.
I haven't seen it.
It just completely lost my, I had no memory of it.
But I remember, I googled it and I remember seeing the posters in the trailer for it back at the time.
That one was from 2009, so it's a little bit later.
But the later than I thought then.
Okay.
But the director of that is Tom Tikver, or Tom Tickler.
He's from Germany.
And his first movie, which was made the year after this, was Run Lola Run, which is just pure energy.
So, I mean, again, it's like, you know, you just, you know, Eastwood just isn't that Connecticut director at this point, you know?
So.
No, it's very slow, this film.
It's very slow and static.
And it reminds me a little bit of some of the same issues that we have with Air Force One, where, you know, Air Force One is kind of like, you know, one of the big action sequences is the president of the United States hits the guy with a chair, you know.
And here there's not even that much action.
I mean, you get, you get this great, like, what should be a brilliant set piece and, you know, with the two snipers kind of going after it.
And then the cops are going to chase after him.
And then it's just like it's over in two minutes.
It's just like, yeah, you just see his, his, you know, Clinton Swoods, you know, outer, his overcoat and his hat and glasses or whatever, just sitting in the, sitting on the ground.
And then, you know, he's just nowhere.
And it turns out, oh, he escaped with, he did, he was just wearing a police uniform.
And so he just like, you know, escaped that way.
Yeah.
I mean, you remember we did the fugitive and the fugitive has that brilliant sequence set during St. Patrick's Day in Chicago where, you know, where Richard Cumball has to escape Tommy Lee Jones and he like disappears into the crowd.
And, you know, and that's, I mean, that was made, you know, two years before this.
And that's, you know, just a great scene.
It doesn't have to be like this big like Matrix style action sequence, but it's got to be more than this.
I mean, it's just, you know, it's just so, it's just so undercooked.
It's like a limp noodle.
Another thing that I just kept laughing at were the, were the, uh, the, the quote-unquote brilliant disguises, you know.
Oh, yeah.
The disguises are hilarious.
I remember for another project you were watching, or we're looking at Sherlock Holmes properties.
And I remember watching the Jeremy Brett scandal in Bohemia.
Yeah.
And there's a disguise in there.
Did we do that for Timberdos?
I thought we did it for Todd.
We did a whole series of Timburdos episodes about various Sherlock Holmes.
We did some of the Jeremy Brett's.
We did some of the Basil Rathburn's.
We did the Robert Downey Jr.s with Yumi and Kit.
Yeah, I remember that now.
Very fond memories of those.
Yeah, I remember doing them.
I thought it was for our Sherlock Holmes project, but you're right.
It's probably as part of him but us because we were reading the stories with you, me and Kit.
And then so anyway, you know, but yeah, no, I remember watching a scandal in Bohemia and like legitimately didn't realize that that was Jeremy Brett in one of those sequences where he's he's in disguise.
And I mean, I think it's meant to be obvious, but I mean, it was done well enough that I just couldn't, I just, I didn't see Sherlock Holmes there.
I was like, what are we doing following this character?
And I was like, oh, crap, that's actually, you know, that's, it's actually, it actually fooled me for a few minutes, you know, and nothing here.
I mean, it's all like, okay, you get, you put a little bit of a beard on him.
He's wearing glasses now.
He has a hat.
Like that's the, that's the effectiveness of these, of these disguises.
Also, it's just that anybody, anybody, you know, seeing him walk down the street is just, oh, it's Clint Eastwood in a great beard.
Exactly, exactly.
I mean, speaking of which, even the Robert Denny Jr. version of Sherlock Holmes does, does really, really well with that.
But then again, that's directed by Guy Ritchie, who's this, you know, highly kinetic director who does, you know, brilliant work with his camera moves and everything anyway.
So, you know, part of it, part of it is the way it's directed and part of it is the way it's, you know, it's just put together.
It's just like, we're just supposed to be convinced that like, you know, a small gray beard is enough to like completely fool his daughter, for instance.
You know, he's supposed to be this master disguise and like, we just don't see evidence of that on screen.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Really, the only, the only East, but as I say, the best scene in the film is the scene between the evil president, Alan.
Alan Rickman?
Alan Richmond?
Rickman?
Richmond, Richmond, yeah.
Yeah.
And his evil chief of staff, Judy Davis, because for some reason, Luther is fucking with her by sending her the necklace that the murdered woman was wearing on the night of the murder as if it's come from the president.
And you get this excruciatingly embarrassing scene where she turns up at a sort of a White House do in this sexy dress, wearing this necklace, because, and she starts sort of flirting with the president because she thinks he's trying to put the moves.
I mean, why all these women are sort of falling, I mean, no disrespect, but why all these women are kind of falling over themselves for 50 odd, 55 odd year old Gene Hackman, you know, I don't know.
But yeah, you get this scene where the president sees the necklace and he takes Judy Davis onto the dance floor and he's dancing with her.
And they're both smiling the whole time, but they're exchanging this incredibly tense, angry conversation.
That's really good.
Apart from that, the only scene that really crackles is the sort of fencing between Eastwood and Ed Harris, the first time Ed Harris goes to talk to him.
I was going to mention that sequence.
There's a real, I mean, and again, I can't, I can't, but imagine there's, this is a bigger part of the book, that there's this cat and mouse thing that's going on where Ed Harris kind of kind of knows and kind of doesn't know.
Like he, you know, so he approaches Eastwood's character and, you know, they, they have this, they have this little clever reparte.
It's not, you know, it's not, you know, it's not Daryl Dashel Hammond, but there's a back and forth here.
There's some characterization.
You actually, Ed Harris is like doing things.
He's like trying to solve this murder that makes no sense.
And so he approaches.
All his bits are great.
He has great chemistry with Eastwood.
He has great chemistry with Laura Linney.
He has great chemistry with Penny Johnson.
He really, you know, he's great, Ed Harris.
He just lifts every scene he's in, I think.
Yeah, no, I mean, he's, I mean, he's really the unsung hero of the movie, you know?
Yeah.
You know, he's got more to do.
And again, in some versions of the script, that character would have been sort of the lead.
He would have been the, you know, the viewpoint character that you would go through.
And I think that was the part that was originally offered to Eastwood.
And then Eastwood said, no, I want to be the, I want to be the crook, you know?
And so it's like tailored around that, you know?
So the story gets bent around like the, the ego demands of the star then, doesn't it?
You know, right, right.
Well, to have all this quippy dialogue and I want to be the badass that kills the guy.
And yeah, I see.
Yeah, I mean, but that's, I mean, that's just Goldman himself calls that Hollywood horse shit, you know?
You know, he says, I've spent a career writing Hollywood horse shit, you know, and that's just, that's just the nature of the business is you give the star everything because they're the star and they're the ones getting butts and seats.
So, I mean, you know, this would hardly be the first movie that suffered from that, from that issue.
But it does, it does seem like, you know, for all that the book was just kind of a, you know, a potboiler, that all it was is, you know, an airport book or whatever.
It does seem like there was a whole lot left left on the page when they made it into a movie.
Another way in which Eastwood sort of bends this material around himself is the politics, because Eastwood, of course, is a well-known right-wing conservative Republican.
And the politics in this film is not particularly noticeable, but there's definitely you get the, I mean, we always play this game with these movies.
Is it a Democrat or Republican president?
The president in this movie.
This is definitely a Democrat.
You know that because he fucks.
Yeah.
And he's evil, you know, in the Eastwood movie.
But there's a speech.
There's the press conference that he does with the E.G. Marshall character whose wife has been killed.
And he talks about, I can't remember exactly what he says, but it's definitely a right-winger's idea of pious liberal Kant.
You know, it's all about, oh, we've forgotten about the poor brothers and sisters and stuff like this.
Yeah.
You can tell what's going on.
Yeah, no.
Yeah.
Clint Eastwood was not quite as obvious in 1997 as he would become in, you know, in 2008 about his political leanings or 2012 when he did the empty, he addressed the empty chair and pretended it was Barack Obama.
Like, oh my God, it's got to be like the most embarrassing thing.
And a long career with some embarrassments.
That's just the one to me that stands out.
But yeah, no, I mean, we ask, you know, what does this film say about the American presidency?
And I mean, the first answer is not much because it doesn't, you could rewrite this so it's not the president, right?
Like this, this is, you know, you could, you could do a little skim over this and it's no longer, It doesn't have to be the president of the United States.
And the film doesn't do much with the idea that it's the president, except that, you know, he's famous and he gets to be on TV, et cetera.
But I did think it was interesting the way that there's all these like double crossings that are happening kind of in the background of the political situation.
Like the Secret Service agent is kind of taking it on himself to murder this guy.
He's collecting evidence.
Scott Glenn.
Scott Glenn plays the other Secret Service guy.
And these two Secret Service guys are not in contact with the rest of the Secret Service because they're covering up this murder.
And, you know, our chief of our evil chief of staff here, Judy Davis, she is, you know, she just immediately comes in and is like, well, we got to clean this shit up.
And, you know, we've seen all this before.
It reminded me a little bit of Dave when, you know, when the president dies in a tryst, you know, and so with Laura Linney.
With Laura Linney, yeah, I know.
Laura Lenny has been in two of these things that we've covered in this series, which, you know, speaks to, you know, how lovely Laurie Linney is.
I did feel very much that this is like a dark and boring version of Dave.
Actually, it's very similar in some ways.
Yeah, no, except Dave was, Dave was actually good and had fun.
Dave actually has stuff to say about the American presidency, I think, in a way that this movie doesn't.
No, it absolutely.
I mean, I think the one thing you get is like that it's cutthroat, that it's that power, you know, just like power corrupts.
Absolutely.
Power corrupts.
Yeah.
But it doesn't even, I mean, it's just, it's undercooked even for that.
I mean, so it doesn't, it doesn't say a whole lot about the presidency.
I think it's, it's kind of disinterested in saying anything about the presidency, except that, you know, he's a big, powerful guy and he's a bad enemy to have.
But even then, it seems like, you know, underpowered, supposed to what the president could actually be doing here.
And the fact that the chief of staff like loses the knife, loses the letter opener, excuse me, can't find it.
And then, you know, they don't tell the president.
Like, so, you know, it's like, you know, so, so really the real villains were the, were the Secret Service and, you know, and the, and the chief of staff.
Like the president is until, you know, obviously he was trying to rape that woman, but, you know, like, in a sense, he's not the person that's that, you know, he's just a doddering old fool in some ways.
You know, you could play it that way.
You could play it as if like he just doesn't know what's going on, you know?
Well, he's, as I said at the start, there is something strange about the title because there doesn't really seem to be much power focused anywhere in this system.
The president, he might be an evil bastard, but he doesn't, he doesn't even know what's happening for most of the film.
He doesn't take any sort of effective part in events.
He doesn't use his power to go after anybody.
The chief of staff is the nearest thing to a very powerful person who does that.
And she is completely, I mean, it's kind of accidentally interesting because you have this woman who is exercising power for dark reasons on behalf of this man.
And she's apparently completely in his thrall.
And yet at the same time, she's kind of like his mummy after the death of the woman.
She's looking after him like his mummy and he's a little boy with a boo-boo.
And yet he's a completely impotent, ineffective man.
There's a lot of stuff in this film about male inadequacy, like the absent father thing.
Obviously, that just gets completely forgiven for no particular reason at the end.
But there's also the little thing about E.G. Marshall, this much older man marrying this much younger woman and not being able to satisfy her in bed.
So she tries to get him interested in being a voyeur, which he can't get into.
There's a lot of stuff about, there's a lot of inadequate.
And maybe the most interesting thing the film does, I think, is the Scott Glenn Secret Service character, who is a better man than, you know, or at least he could be a better man than the things he's doing.
He knows that what he's doing is wrong, but he even admits it himself.
He's weak and he can't get himself out of this situation.
And it doesn't lead to anything interesting like switching sides or confessing or turning against.
He just kills himself at the end.
There's this real, it is kind of accidentally interesting, the idea that he is the ultimate sort of just following orders guy, despite the fact that he knows what he's doing is wrong.
And it's kind of bleak, really, because his inadequacy is so total that at the end, he just, he achieves nothing.
He affects nothing.
He just gets to the point where he blows his own brains out.
Yeah.
No.
And, you know, like, again, there could be something interesting there, but the film is not.
It doesn't.
No.
It's just perfunctory.
It's so, it's so like by the numbers.
It's just, it's, it's just, you know, this goes here, then this goes here, then this goes here, then this goes here.
It's, it's very, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a little, it's a wind-up clock.
You know, you wound it up and then you played it and then, you know, people went to see it.
And apparently it was successful.
I think it made money.
Yeah.
It made it as being better than it was.
I, I, I saw it back in the day, VHS rental, I'm sure.
And I went back to it thinking, oh yeah, you know, 90s thriller, Gene Hackman.
I'm pretty sure I enjoyed this back in the day.
I'm going to.
No, I was bored stiff.
Yeah.
God, this movie costs $50 million.
Where did that money come?
Jesus, where did that go?
$50 million in 1997.
Like, that's a, it's a, I don't think it's a big bunch of movies.
I mean, it's presumably Eastwood and Hackman.
And I mean, they're great actors in this, but, you know, it's got a great cost.
Yeah, it's hard to see where $50 million went, but it did make $92 million.
So it was, you know, it was a modest hit.
A respectable success.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And at that time, a movie, you know, you basically have to double your budget in order to actually draw a profit.
But at the time, this would have, you know, VHS, then later DVD.
DVD was going to hit the next year.
And yeah, so, you know, clearly this, this made money for Eastwood and for everybody.
But yeah, it's just kind of, I don't know.
It just kind of lays there.
I mean, I think, I mean, is this the worst movie we've done in this series?
I think it might be.
I think so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do.
I mean, I don't just think there's a, there's a close.
I mean, we did a few good men and, you know, I don't know.
I have fun.
You just re-release that and I re-listened to it and I'm like, yeah, that movie is really bad.
I still have a fondness for it.
I would, I would definitely watch a few good men before I would re-watch Absolute Power.
No questions.
No question.
I think until now, the movie in this series that I have liked the least is definitely Air Force One.
At least Air Force One has moments where it's entertainingly bad.
This is just boring.
Yeah, no, it's boring.
You know, it's got a couple of good scenes, and I think we've kind of highlighted the good stuff.
And, you know, the actors are good in it.
You know, it's hard to, it's hard to blame.
It's hard to blame anybody but Eastwood here.
I'm sorry.
It's just hard to blame anybody but Eastwood.
Eastwood's just, he's not, he's not bringing his A game.
He's not even bringing his B game.
This is, it's pedestrian.
Like this, anybody could have done this.
Oh, Frost Dixon.
Frosted Dixon, I might have liked less than this.
Oh, yeah.
That's a, yeah, that's a toss-up.
I like this.
This is more boring.
I get that this is more boring, but Frost Nixon might be the worst movie.
Might be the worst movie.
Yeah, I think I might, yeah, I think I might agree with you.
Yeah.
This is, this is not quite as bad as Frost Nixon, but it is more boring.
Yeah, that sounds right.
Yeah.
The only other thing I wanted to say was there's a lot in the film about, oh, what if the, you know, this would be such a scandal if this got out.
What do you think would happen today if something like this happened and this got out?
I mean, I know there's not much, like there's not much that Trump hasn't done that we don't know about already.
But if actually, you know, a woman got shot by the Secret Service because Trump had had her in a room and he was in the process of trying to violently rape her.
Do you think this would destroy his presidency?
Do you think this would bring him down?
Oh, I don't think so.
No, there's no way.
I think that's, I think everybody knows that Trump is, you know, just like this.
I mean, you know, I don't.
Yeah.
Like, man, like, it's, I'm trying to imagine like, you know, because, you know, the version that we'd hear is just like, oh, Trump was, you know, you wouldn't hear he raped her.
You'd hear, you know, like, oh, they were in the, in the midst of a, of an, of, a, of a, you know, a wanton act.
And she grabs a letter opener because she's a crazy Democrat or something, you know.
Yeah.
Secret Service said to take her down.
I mean, there, there are ways of like covering this up, you know, even in 97, you could have, you know, there were options.
I think, I think in 90s, for Bill Clinton, this would have been career ending or even for, you know, George W. Bush had been, had been caught like this.
But I think Trump, we just are, you know, everybody knows what Trump is.
And it's just hard to imagine that like anything like would sink Donald Trump from his personal life.
It's hard to imagine that the Republicans would not, you know, would not get on board with whatever, you know, whatever spend they needed to spend to make this happen.
I mean, you know, he tried to, he tried an insurrection.
And then what they like again.
So it's, it's just, you know, it's just, yeah.
It's just an adorable trope from the past.
You see it in lots of things.
The thing where the evil corrupt politician is revealed and the public instantly turn their back on him or, you know, they trick the evil politician into making a speech about how much the public are a bunch of idiots and rubes and they secretly broadcast it without him knowing and the public all instantly turn.
It's like the end of the running man, you know, where the public all just instantly decide that they don't like the running man show after all, because they heard a recording of the of the evil game show host.
And it's like, no, you could, Trump could do this live on camera and it wouldn't make any fucking difference.
I mean, Trump has all but admitted that he is like, you know, sexually assaulted women.
Like, you know, it's almost certain.
You know, there are a little bit of express, you know, like kill somebody on camera and it wouldn't make a difference.
Yeah, no.
Well, I mean, the thing is that like, okay, I mean, you say this is kind of about, I think that's about Trump.
I mean, because Biden couldn't have gotten away with this.
I mean, Biden couldn't, you know, whatever criminality Hunter Biden had was a fraction of this, you know, and, you know, Fox News went over it for four years on it, you know.
Yeah.
Barack Obama couldn't have gotten away with this.
There's just no, there's no question, you know, it's specifically Trump, the personality.
And that's, that's, that's part of what makes Trump uniquely dangerous.
You know, I have, I have long been of the opinion that even through four years of Trump, that George W. Bush was the worst president of my lifetime.
And Donald Trump and Elon Musk are starting to make me reconsider that decision.
Testing your resolve.
Testing my resolve on that.
Like this is, this is, things are getting real, real bad.
And I mean, again, Elon Musk could get away with this.
Elon Musk could get away with this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
These are just people that just have like zones of impunity around them for some reason, for whatever reason.
We've just decided that as a culture, we've just, I'm not in American culture, but you know what I mean?
We just seem to have decided that these people are, that these people are untouchable.
They're just off limits.
And absolutely.
Nobody's prepared to step over the line.
It's, it's truly bizarre.
Okay.
Well, I think we just spent, I don't know how long we were talking, about an hour or an hour or something.
Yeah.
I think we produced more entertaining content than you will get if you watch absolute power from 1990, whatever.
So I hope you're grateful, listeners.
And we are, of course, grateful to you for your donations to our Patreons.
Absolutely sincerely.
Thank you ever so much for listening.
And we will be back with you very soon with more mainline public episodes and more bonus episodes, probably more, probably another move, an episode about a movie about a president, I think, because I think these are fun.
I think we have a couple more we were talking about doing.
I know we had talked about Lincoln and Doctor Strange Love or two that I think we definitely kind of like got on the got on the short list to do as part of this series.
And, you know, we'll keep, we'll keep doing them as long as they're fun.
You know, it was meant to be like up until the election.
And it was like, oh, up until the inauguration.
And I was just like, let's just keep doing them.
It's fun.
It gives us like a structure to go on.
Because if it's just like, oh, pick a movie or pick a bonus topic, it's like, well, what do we want to do?
And no, movies about presidents, it's nice to have a series that we're doing.
So hopefully the audience appreciates them as much as we like to make them, even when the movie is.
I hope so.
It's fun.
It's fun to watch it and then record the episode about it.
