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Jan. 8, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:54
Juror No. 2 Freedomain Movie Review
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Time Text
Okay, so we've got, we are prostitutes at the theater.
Yes.
Because somebody, we didn't know we were going to get paid, but somebody really wanted us to do a review of Jura No.
2, which I was convinced was a sequel.
I don't know.
I just did such a good intro.
Oh, sorry, go ahead.
Spotlight.
Freedomaniens, we are back at it again with a movie review of Jura No.
2. We are yappers.
I'm so good at this.
Beautiful.
I should really just take over the podcast at this point.
What does it want to rename it to?
Oh.
Divine.
Divine Yappers.
Divine Yappers.
Sorry, it's not Freedomanians.
You're now Divine Yappers.
Freedomaniacs.
So the reason that Izzy's doing the intro is Jared's wife won without visible cheating.
Let's just say without visible cheating.
She won at Uno.
She did a crazy victory dance.
That's not...
I don't call that.
What's the name of that tiny hippo?
What?
Mukbang?
Mukbang?
You know, the tiny hippo that's all over social media?
I've literally no idea.
She did a victory dance involving Mukbang or the tiny hippo that's all over.
It was really quite something.
We should have had that as the intro, come to think of it.
But anyway, so she decided who did the intro.
She pointed at Izzy, and Izzy pulled from the very depths of her being, florid language of beauty and perfection.
There was swearing.
No, I'm kidding.
I didn't.
Okay, so we saw the movie Jura No.
2, which incomprehensibly cost $35 million to make and has grossed so far $21.3 million or something like that.
Ooh, skill issue.
Skill issue.
So, directed by Clint Eastwood, who's a famous actor from, I don't know, the 18th century or something at this point.
The man is a ghoul.
He's like, what, 94 or something like that?
He's famous for not giving direction.
Like, nobody knows whether they do a good or a bad job in a Clint Eastwood movie because he's just like, yeah, that's good, or that's a cut, or whatever it is, right?
So it is a weird kind of legal drama insofar as normally legal dramas, like, they span the whole time of the movie, but this one, the trial was over in, like, 25 minutes, right?
Well, my question is, like, what are they going to do if there's a sequel?
Go on.
Because the title's already number two.
Right, right.
Mambo number five.
That's another song.
What if they did it out of order?
The sequel was juror number one.
And then if they did a third one, they could just, some random number?
Juror number 13?
Well, there's this whole series of movies back in the 80s and 90s about this dumb guy called Ernest.
Okay.
So, you know, whatever, whatever.
So, juror two goes to jail.
Juror two goes to jail.
Alright, so this movie drove me a little batty.
Because it seemed so contrived.
So, for instance, the juror was a raging alcoholic, right?
Like, seriously insane alcoholic, right?
But now, he's a great guy.
You know, with a loving wife, who's gonna have a baby.
Now, he needed to be an alcoholic for reasons we get into.
Like, plot-wise, he needed to be an alcoholic.
So it kind of drives me nuts.
When they need someone to be an alcoholic, and then they make him the greatest guy in the known universe that you totally sympathize with.
It's like, I don't know if you all have known any alcoholics.
I mean, but if you've ever known an alcoholic, they're wretched people.
Manipulative, destructive.
And even if he's like, well, I've quit.
Okay, so how old would we say this guy was?
Izzy, what would you say?
32. 32?
Okay.
So a guy's been a raging alcoholic probably since his mid-teens, right?
So let's say...
15, 17 years.
He's raged up.
He quit a year ago.
Was it?
No, I think he was four.
He said he was four years sober.
Yeah, was he four years sober?
But he was tempted, as we'll get into.
Okay, so he's four years sober.
Okay, so he drank from like, I don't know, 15 to 28. Let's make it 16. 16. I'm kidding.
So it's Izzy, who just turned 16. Trollery.
Maintains.
Although, I mean, for me, I mean, 15, but no, I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
I'm hating.
Just the rubbing alcohol you can find at home.
I drink mouthwash.
So let's say 15 to 28, that's 13 years of rampant, raging alcoholism, right?
Now that's going to be somebody with some severe psychosocial problems, relationship problems.
He's not going to have learned how to deal with his demons.
He's not going to learn how to get this wonderful wife that he gets and all of that, like super pretty.
And loving.
So he has to be both the worst guy in the world, in that he was a raging alcoholic for many years, and he also has to be the best guy in the world.
But he's 6'3".
Well...
Is his height thing is a whole other thing.
Make the case.
The counselor.
Good cheekbones.
Good cheekbones.
Blue eyes.
Clean jaw.
Well manicured.
Good hair.
Giraffe.
Yeah.
So, look, I mean, it really doesn't matter what he's done.
I've never felt lawyer noble.
He's 6'3".
And clearly rich, because that was a nice house.
We don't know what he does, do we?
Yes, he writes articles.
Oh, sorry, yeah.
Magazine writers make a lot of money.
And he screw-ups!
So, you got literally everything in one package.
A bad boy who's 6'3", but great hair.
Yeah, the only thing is, like, I don't think he's ever grown a single beard hair in his life.
I think he's strained.
Like he had constipation and managed to pop a few mustache hairs.
Like one.
Yeah, it was not good.
It was not ideal.
But all I'm saying is he really doesn't have to be a good person.
So you've got this guy who's a terrible guy who then has to become a wonderful guy because Lord knows people who are alcoholics and ex-alcoholics have super big consciences, right?
So he's got all of that, right?
That's number one.
Number two, the guy who's on trial for murder is a tattooed...
Aggressive, violent...
Gangbanger.
Gang, drug dealer to children.
But he has to be a great guy too.
Yeah.
Because otherwise you'd be like, throw this guy in jail.
He's going to get popped for something.
He's already dealt drugs to kids.
He deserves to be in jail.
But you have to want the bad guy, the guy who's accused to not go to jail, and you have to really care for the ex-alcoholic that he not go to jail because he's going to be a dad.
And it just...
Kind of drove me crazy.
This opposite stuff is just rank.
It just messes with your head because it reprograms people to think, oh, yeah, some guy was an alcoholic for 13 years.
He'd be a great dad.
Some guy was a...
Did he hit his wife or the girlfriend or whatever, like the woman who died?
She actually...
Well, and one person's telling of it, she hits him, but he never hits her.
But he's yelling at her, and also he seemed to sweep the beer glass off the table.
There was a certain level.
Well, every testimony was different.
Right.
He went up, he's like...
I did this!
And then when the other lady went up, she was like, he did that!
But when they actually showed the images, it was aggressive versus non-aggressive between each one, which was cool.
Yes.
Yeah, so, but he definitely was a thug, right?
He was a criminal, a violent guy, but you're supposed to be rooting for him.
Now, this rooting for the violent guys is really terrible because what happens is then people get let out of jail.
People, they don't go to jail.
And then, you know, like 90% of crimes or 10% of the people just doing it over and over again.
Oh, but he's changed!
He's a good guy.
How tall was he?
Was he okay to not go to jail?
Is he?
Which one?
The thug.
The guy who was on trial.
He looks more, like, buff than tall.
Does that count?
Yeah.
He has a buff.
Okay.
Excellent.
Maybe a few tattoos.
No, but...
Yeah, this sympathy for the devil stuff drives me crazy.
Yeah.
Because if this guy's been a gangbanger, drug dealer, sold drugs to kids, and we know that from the black juror guy, which we'll get to later, but...
So these guys are terrible.
Terrible human beings.
You know, alcoholics, he's driven drunk countless times, which is put enormously in children, women, moms, dads, everyone at risk.
He's probably, when he was a drug dealer or drug user, probably violent with women.
He had this absolutely trash relationship with this woman that was entirely based upon vanity and looks.
Like, just an absolutely terrible human being.
But you have to root for him.
Because the actor played him like, I don't know if he was a complete sociopath, he was just getting up there and like...
Oh, but I've changed, and I'm so much better.
But they have to play it for sympathy, and so it felt so contrived.
Oh, and also the politician with a very strong conscience who just, you know, who's going to work to overturn her entire legal case that she's gone through, you know, because of the...
Because politicians are great people.
Yeah, lots of people...
They just have a deep hunger for justice.
Yeah, lots of DAs who unjustly convict people are often working round the clock.
To undo if they have even the slightest suspicion.
Like, it was just so unreal in the extreme that it drove me a little baddie.
So anyway, that's sort of my thoughts.
But tell me what you guys are thinking.
Well, okay, so another thing that, in the vein of what you're sharing there, this kind of baddie, is that both of these people, the juror and this Mr. Bad Guy who's on the stand...
The accused.
They changed.
So the accused, according to the narrative of the story, ostensibly, this is like, yeah, I was a bad guy, but I've been living a different life.
I'm a different man now.
Well, because he's in prison.
But for his argument or his case, he's like, no, he had changed before that.
He had been changing.
He was dating this woman.
He was in this trash relationship with this woman who was so immature that she'd walk home in the rain.
Rather than have any kind of...
Because she wanted to move in.
He basically had a stalker.
Sorry to interrupt.
But the woman wanted to move in with him.
He was hesitant about it.
And she was so aggressive with him.
Storms off.
Thumbs him in the chest.
So he's in a trash relationship.
He goes to prison and he comes out a pure angel.
No, no, no.
But according to the narrative of the story, he was changed prior to that.
He had been changed.
He wasn't doing the criminal gangbanger stuff prior.
His claim, ostensibly.
And I mean, that makes sense to tell the stories.
Like, you want to sympathize with him to some degree and say, like, okay, he's done a lot of horrible things, but he didn't do this.
You know, can we prosecute him for this?
And so, you know, there's this guy who changes for no reason.
No claim, no come to Jesus.
No, it's because it's in a philosophy.
No, I called my, you know, my neighborhood philosopher and got some, you know, feedback.
But same for jury number two.
All right, now there's this idea that, like, he meets this wonderful woman.
And she gives him a chance.
And that's his, like, his out to change.
But, like, there's this one snap that's not...
Wait, the blunt woman who he had a terrible relationship with?
No, no, no.
I'm talking about the juror.
Oh, the juror.
Okay, sorry, yeah.
Juror number two.
Yeah.
Ostensibly, he's the same kind of person.
We're seeing situation where he's a changed man, free will and all.
There's no explanation.
There's no, like...
Deeper process beyond he meets this woman, she gives him a chance, and so he just all of a sudden changes, turns his life away.
So that's what you want to do.
You want to say to women, find a raging alcoholic and just give him a chance, and he'll be a great guy.
And give him a baby, too.
Oh, my God.
Just wretched.
Wretched.
Yeah, I'm not sure I had something just now.
The thought was something like, there's not really a person you can identify with as, like, a decent, normal person.
Only by suspending judgment.
Just taking people at face value.
I can't stick myself in juror number two's shoes if I think about it for too long because I have to have this history of all this garbage and behavior behind me.
You can imagine, well, what if I did something unawares in Manchu?
I was the trigger for what this guy was accused of.
But that requires all this other stuff to have been true.
And it's like, that would never happen to me.
So this is the problem.
And I would never be falsely accused because another guy was a piece of trash.
Right.
So this is one of the problems with movies, right?
And this is true of TV shows, too.
So in movies and TV shows, you see someone commit the crime.
Now, again, prior to video cameras and all this kind of stuff, never happened, right?
So these are all people describing what happened, but you see what happened in the actual movie, right?
You know it's the juror number two.
So just very, very briefly, there's a couple of spoilers here.
But first, sort of very briefly, this guy, the accused guy, has a fight with his trash girlfriend.
She storms off and walks home in the dark with no light, no reflective clothing in the rain, right?
High heels.
High heels, right?
So then her boyfriend goes to find her or stops heading in that direction, realizes she's not going to listen to him, turns around and goes home.
Right.
But then she ends up being found dead.
On the side of a, like, fallen down a side of a bridge.
An overpass or something like that.
An overpass or something like that.
And it turns out the juror number two, who's the ex-alcoholic, was in the bar, tempted because his wife had a miscarriage, tempted to drink.
He didn't drink.
He drove.
He hit someone, or he hit something.
He wasn't sure what.
He stops and checks.
He sees a damage on his bumper.
He looks around, looks over, but it's too dark at night to see.
He sees a deer crossing.
Yeah, then he sees a deer crossing sign.
He's like, oh, I must have hit a deer.
That's a shame, but whatever, right?
And then he goes on.
Then he's called to jury duty, and he realizes over the course of the trial, the beginning of the trial, that it was him who hit this woman, not the guy who's being accused, right?
So that's sort of the back story.
Now, we see what actually happened.
That does not happen in life as a whole.
So, someone says, like, let's say there's some girl, right?
And you date some girl, and then she says, oh, my ex, he started off totally great, totally normal.
We had a great relationship for a couple of months.
Then he just kind of went nuts, became a stalker, blah, blah, blah, right?
Now, you don't have.
In a movie, you see what actually happened.
But you never have that when people are telling their stories, right?
If your name is, in fact, James.
So, there's this idea that there's this objective view.
It's almost like the God view, right?
That there's this objective view.
So, but you have no, so he says, I wasn't drinking, right?
This is why he has to be an alcoholic, right?
So he's got a sponsor, Kiefer Sutherland, being grim and gravel-voiced for once in his career.
So Kiefer Sutherland is his sponsor in AA, and he goes to Kiefer Sutherland and says, hey man, I give you a buck, your attorney-client privilege, I think I might hit this woman, right?
I thought it was a deer, I came home.
And he says, were you drinking?
He says, no, I swear to God, I wasn't drinking.
And why were you at a bar?
Yeah, you were at a bar, you ordered a drink, and no jury in the world is going to believe you weren't drinking.
Right.
Because otherwise he would have just said, oh my gosh, that was me, I thought I hit a deer, blah, blah, blah.
But because you're an alcoholic, you were at a bar, everyone's going to assume you were drinking.
Yeah.
Now, we know that, quote, know that he wasn't drinking.
Right.
Because the movie says that he gets up, he doesn't drink, right?
Yep.
But we wouldn't know that in the real world.
In the real world, you only have what people tell you.
You don't have God mode looking at the face.
So this is what I mean when I say it was so manipulative, right?
I think it would have been better if they never showed him getting the drink and not doing it.
They should have left that up for audience discretion.
But if they do that, then yeah, we spend all our time arguing, did he have the drink or didn't he?
And then we don't get to what does happen.
Well, they don't really care if you spend your time arguing about what does or doesn't happen because at the end they left us hanging with arguing about what does or doesn't happen.
Oh, too shit.
So if they're going to do that, I think they should commit to it.
Commit to it.
They should what?
Lock in.
Lock in.
So this God Mode stuff, it took me an embarrassing amount of time in my teens and 20s to realize that most people just don't tell you the truth about their lives.
So this guy's going to say, I didn't drink, man.
Of course he's going to say, he's an alcoholic.
He's got 13 straight years of pathological lying, which is what alcoholics do.
He's probably stolen from people.
He's gotten into bar fights.
He's cheated on people.
He's spread it.
He's done all these terrible things because he's a raging alcoholic.
But we have this objective God view where we have to sympathize with this guy because he said he didn't drink.
Now, as is his point, if he said he didn't drink but we didn't know, we would lose sympathy for him.
Right?
So that is this God mode stuff.
I was in a play when I was in theater school called Rashomon, which is about...
Husband, a newlywed and his wife going through the forest and they get set upon by a bandit, right?
And when the bandit tells the story, the husband is begging for his life and pleading and he takes off with the woman, right?
His wife.
When the husband tells the story, he stands down the bandit and beats him up and his wife is like, oh, you're such a hero, right?
And the wife, I can't remember what she does, but something heroic, she beats up.
So everyone has their own version of the story.
We're very tempted by this God mode thing, right?
Very tempted by the God.
I mean, look at January 6th, right?
We got all this video, right?
And people cannot, even with all this video, thousands of hours of video, people can't say what happened, right?
People, like, look at the fine people, right?
People have it on video, and they cannot agree.
Even if you have it on video, people cannot agree with what happened.
None of the stuff that happened that night is on video, except for them, somebody took a video of them at the bar, right?
Where the other guy, the drinker, I thought he was going to show up in the background.
I was hoping he would.
Yeah, but that didn't happen.
So somehow, He was missed in the bar footage and so on, right?
So, even if you get guard mode, people massively disagree.
Do you remember Trump was dumping out the koi food?
And everyone was like, so disrespectful, but it was actually the Japanese prime minister who did it first, and Trump was just following him.
But if they cut that out, it looks like he's overfeeding the koi.
Silly stuff like that, right?
Or me, you know?
I mean, if you've done any kind of public stuff that's even remotely controversial, you realize that...
It's so wild to me.
Like, I was on Twitter the other day looking at this 5.6 million view.
People saying, like, hey, why did Steph got deplatformed?
He seemed pretty milquetoast or whatever, right?
And then people are like, he was the best guy ever.
He was the worst guy ever.
You know, like, if you've been at all prominent and at all controversial, you realize just how that nobody has, very few people have any kind of objective view of you.
So, except for the positive people.
Totally objective.
Absolutely.
So I don't like this in...
You have to always make your information off incomplete.
You have to make your decisions off incomplete information, right?
And so I felt it was very manipulative in that we knew for sure he didn't drink, which nobody can know for sure.
Right.
If he says he didn't drink, why would I believe him?
His wife barely believed him.
I don't know if she actually believed him or not.
She just accepted that he said he didn't.
Right.
Because what other choice does she have?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, she's about ready to have his kid.
Yeah, she has to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But in that situation, like, we haven't mentioned this yet, but, like, with the accident itself, he reported the damage, but he reported on a completely different road to draw his wife away from realizing that he had been at the bar.
Yeah.
So he was already lying there, even though...
He's ostensibly used to protect his wife, but I mean, there's always an excuse, right?
So this idea that we can get to the truth behind what people say, I mean, I also know this from listening to my mother and my father talk about their relationship and divorce.
It's like, it's not even the same planet, man.
Not even the same planet.
And there's no video footage.
And even if there is a video footage, people will completely disagree.
Right, January 6th, they said, oh, well, they unlocked the doors and let them in.
No, no, it was a violent insurrection.
It's like, well, why were there no weapons?
Right, so this idea that we can just look objectively, if you have that, you wouldn't need a trial.
So the trial is because we have incomplete information, but the movie kind of cheats because they give you complete information, and that bothers me a little bit.
Also, okay, let's get into some of the technicals, which is, okay, so this woman was hit by a car, went spiraling over the bridge, And then rains down on rocks and dies, right?
At some point, right?
Now, the coroner says, yeah, that's pretty much like being hit with a blunt instrument.
Yeah, not even a bit.
Like, I'm no coroner, but I watched a little bit of Psych.
Right.
It's not.
It's really not.
It's not.
Being hit by a car, it's not being hit in your head with a blunt instrument.
Yeah.
Right?
What did the med student say?
There's a med student on the jury who looks at the...
Oh, the two clavicles have broken.
Yeah, she's like, this looks like someone got hit in the back by a very strong force.
And she's like, oh, yeah, car accident.
And that was Basil of the Asian expert.
She's not even a coroner.
She's a third-year med student.
But she's Asian.
Yeah, yeah, she basically is.
No, but so was the coroner, wasn't he?
Oh, you're right.
Yes, you're absolutely right.
A little Japan-Korea combat.
Asian cancer.
There was a point at some...
I forget who was talking to the DA, or maybe it was the defense counsel talking to the DA, the DA elect or whatever, the politician running for office.
Prosecutor, there we go.
Something about the coroner having done five autopsies that day.
I don't know if it's a large number or not, but they made it sound large.
So like the coroner skimmed over something.
Five autopsies in one day, yeah.
If it's an eight-hour workday, that's really not a lot.
Well, I guess for like...
If you're considering a possible murder case.
Yeah, yeah.
Unless four of them, if like determining the cause of death is that they were decapitated or something like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, but even then you'll want to know what weapon did it.
Right.
Like stuff like that.
So I didn't believe that the coroner was unable to determine the difference between being hit by a car and spiraling over a bridge.
I mean, if it was like a government.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it was, right?
Yeah.
But that did not...
Seem very believable.
I just know this because I read a lot of books and a lot of murder mystery kind of things.
And whenever there's murder, I always look up the facts.
What happens if X happens to a person?
How long does it take?
You remain conscious.
Oh, right.
A lot of movies will have it, you get shot in the arm or something and bleed out in the eye.
Or you're completely fine the next day and you're lifting stuff.
It's either one.
You have to lose, like, five liters of blood or something to actually die or pass out from blood loss.
Movies are really, really inaccurate because of this.
Or movies and shows.
I mean, and this is a big one.
I think they could have done the setup a lot better.
Like, they could have had...
They just could have had something done differently, I think, with the whole setup for the death.
That would have made it a lot more believable.
Because for me, I get upset over technical problems in movies.
A lot of the, like, emotional and character decisions, unless it's...
Some of the character decisions made in the movie Avatar, as an example, where it's really obvious that nobody in their right mind would do something that stupid.
But in movies like this, it's like, yeah, I can kind of see why you do this.
Yeah, I can kind of see why you do that.
But when it comes to technical stuff, there's no, yeah, I can kind of see it.
It's like, either it looks like it or it doesn't.
Either it is or it isn't.
When it comes to technical stuff, that's my big nitpick with movies.
That's like the rules of reality in the movie, right?
Yeah, kind of.
Yeah, the premise is of the movie.
Yeah, because when it's emotional, you can never say nobody would do that because you don't know what's going through their head.
Right, right.
Okay, but emotionally, there's some stuff that people would never do.
Yeah, but again, there can always be some bad things.
But if you're going to make an exception, you have to make it sort of believable.
You have to come up with a reason.
The main character, now, we sort of had this discussion during the movie, what's the responsibility of the...
Writer or the actor or the director.
So again, my limited experience directing plays and being in plays is that the actor has to be the advocate for the character.
So if I was playing the main guy, we realized this took place over how long do we think?
Like a murder trial can be long.
Because the due date was October 25th and he gets called a jury duty before that, but it doesn't end until well beyond there.
It's like into...
I would say it's at least a couple of weeks.
Yeah.
Do they go to deliberations or they're still doing the trial and they say Happy Halloween?
No, that's deliberations.
It's Happy Halloween, I believe.
Yeah, so yeah, right.
A couple of weeks at least.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Probably closer to four to six if it's a complicated murder trial, but at least a couple of weeks, right?
Yeah.
So let's just say it's three weeks.
So this guy, after a couple of days in the trial, he realizes that he is the one who caused the woman's death.
So now he's got murder.
That he killed, or homicide, let's say, because it was accidental.
He caused her death, but it was not intentional, right?
So he's realized he's taken a life.
He's got a wife who's pregnant, and then he realizes after he talks to his sponsor that he could be facing 30 years in jail, or he's got to send an innocent, quote, innocent drug dealer or whatever to jail, right?
So you really can't pile more stress on a human being.
And then he's aiming for a mistrial.
Right?
Which means that he can be tried again, right?
The bad guy.
Or the supposed bad guy.
So he realizes that the mistrial won't work because his lawyer says to him, nope, there has to be a conviction or there has to be an acquittal.
Right?
So it's one or the other.
So he has got to convince everyone to vote the guy guilty.
Because he can't get everyone to vote for acquittal, right?
He tries.
He tries, yeah.
A couple holdouts, and one guy especially is just like, no matter what, I am putting this guy down.
Right.
You know, I'm certain he did it.
So, he's got just about the most stress that you could possibly have on a human being, assuming he has a conscience.
You know, that's an important thing, right?
If he doesn't have a conscience, he'd be like, whew!
Thank God, you know, this guy's going to take the fall, not me, and I'm going to sail on with my life and never give him another thought, because that happens a lot.
You know, criminals or cops sometimes, criminals will frame someone else, and they will go on with their lives, the criminals, someone else goes to jail, and they're like, well, thank God, not me, right?
And they just go on with their lives.
So this guy...
He wouldn't be puking his guts out the first day.
He's a sensitive guy with a conscience facing the fact that he killed a woman, facing the fact that he's either going to go to jail for 30 years or he's going to send an innocent man to jail for 30 years.
That's massive stress over a couple of weeks, right?
If he's got a conscience, the first thing that's going to be affected is his sleep.
And he just seemed to have this same sort of semi-blank Ken Cupid doll thing going on throughout the whole movie.
He was pretty blank-faced.
Yeah, and he did have an alpha.
So he did have this a little bit blank, a little bit monotone, and you can say, well, that's the director or whatever, but the actor should have been pushing for that and saying, look, if I put myself in that situation, I'm not sleeping.
And if he's not sleeping, he's going to get erratic.
Maybe the director's sociopath.
Well, yeah, it's a whole other question.
So, the character needed more of an arc.
But it's not the writing?
Well...
The direction, I guess, could be like, put makeup on or don't sleep.
Well, just tell him, deliver these lines like you're kind of haunted and haggard.
Yeah, the star doesn't do crap for line delivery.
He's just like, yep.
Yeah, he just, and there was only one point where he really showed any stress and that's when his wife caught him on something.
He can do kind of like a haunted look, you know, for a moment, but he's like, no, this sustained dragon.
Was it just like stare?
Oh, yeah.
You know, the part he got right was that moment where he realizes that it could have been him.
He played that pretty well, because he was trying to keep it together, trying to keep it quiet.
That was really good.
I feel like I would have reacted the exact same way.
He did very decent for that moment, but that was the same kind of, like, any time it was stress, he went right back to that place every time, all the time.
And like Steph said, he was never withered, he was never emotionally drained and taken down at this point.
Like, you see him, like, you've got to...
You lose an HP over time.
You lose a constitution point, you know, because of the loss of sleep.
Now, this guy who, again, raging alcoholic for at least a decade, probably more, and alcoholics often use alcohol to deal with stress and anxiety, right?
So a lot of times it's social anxiety.
They don't know what to say.
They don't know how to be.
But when they drink, they're more fun, right?
So, or they feel, they lose that self-consciousness and so on, right?
The fact that over the course of this absolutely horrible, ghastly, brutal trial where this guy is having his entire life turned upside down and facing 30 years in prison, he never once indicates any desire for a drink.
Yeah, I thought he would go back to the bar and drink or something.
Or something like that, but he had no recurrence of temptation, even though alcohol is almost always a stress management and he's under the worst stress.
How is this worse?
Sorry, how is this not nearly as bad as a miscarriage?
Like, okay, obviously miscarriage is depressing and all, right?
Like, I'm sorry, that sucks, but they never even existed.
Like, they never even got born.
Like, I'm sorry, I get sad, and I guess especially if you've been having problems for a long time, but I can totally get being upset and being sad for some time, right?
Yeah.
But the prospect of...
Leaving the wife and your literal physical child this time, you actually have a baby who's about to be born.
Yeah.
Unless it's something like that, right?
But you literally have, like, it's not going to be miscarriage at this point.
And a wife, and you have, like, your entire life, too, possibly behind bars for the rest of your life, because he said it could be a life sentence.
And he's like, hmm, yeah, this isn't great.
Yeah.
I guess I'm going to have to figure something out.
And he has zero temptation to, like, do anything.
But no, you see a miscarriage is, like, easily 10,000 times worse.
Yeah, that's a great, great point.
I hadn't thought of that.
That's fantastic.
So this is where, to me, I've always been interested in character arcs.
To me, the whole point of a story, like if you think of the present, right?
Rachel at the beginning, Rachel at the end, right?
So to me, the character arc is what matters.
Life of decisions and choices change you, right?
And he just seemed to be kind of monotone throughout the whole thing.
And the same thing I felt was true of just about everybody.
Everybody was just kind of the same at the beginning, the middle, and the end.
The only one who had a bit of a character arc would be the defense attorney?
The darkhead guy?
No.
Oh, you mean the prosecutor?
Oh, crap.
Yeah, prosecutor.
Prosecutor, right.
But she was still, it was barely anything.
Like, her personality didn't change.
Her motives changed.
That's it.
And it's funny, because she will, this is a very famous actress, Toni Collette, she played the mom in Sixth Sense, which was a very warm-hearted character, and she played this one very cold, no, in the Sixth Sense?
That's my memory of it.
No.
So, but she plays this one very cold and serpent-eyed and, you know, like, frozen-faced and all of that.
Very girl-boss machine woman.
Yeah, yeah, girl-boss cyborg machine woman, like something out of Battlestar Galactica.
So she's just a really good actress as far as that goes, although she didn't get very much to.
To work with, as far as the character, to me, is important.
I also thought that the defense attorney was absolute trash.
Like, so, remember the guy who lives, the eyewitness, right?
It's like, through the rain, in the dark, you know, and he doesn't bring up, like, hey, can you see that well at night?
Do you have a prescription?
Have you ever seen Cousin Vinny?
My Cousin Vinny.
My Cousin Vinny.
Apparently that's very famous with lawyers.
It really is, yeah.
How accurate it is, right?
So when the audience, who's not a lawyer, is screaming at the TV like, he can't see, he's an old guy, does he have glasses?
It's raining.
Yeah, so if you're that bad as an attorney...
What do you do?
How do you grab him to school?
Well, he is a public defender.
No, no, I get that.
But then play him as an idiot.
But then play him as an idiot.
But the actor didn't even say...
The actor didn't play him as an idiot.
It would have been funny if he was like...
Like, really, really dumb.
Dropping his papers and I can't find my glasses there on top of his head.
I don't know.
Again, this guy gives no direction, so we can't blame a single thing on the director.
Right.
So, like, if there's bad acting or bad characters, that's on the writers and the actors.
Yeah, it's like, because, you know, they spent about $35 million to make this movie.
You know, spend, I don't know, spend a couple hundred bucks for a psychologist to review the script and say, you know, here's what would happen in this situation.
Here's what would happen in this situation.
I mean, this is worse than war.
Because at least with war, you can shoot and fight and run.
You know, this is like, you've got to convince everyone to lie.
No, honestly, sorry to interrupt.
But aside from paying the actors to act, props could be like...
10,000 max.
Because, like, there's some blood, obviously clothing and stuff, but people could just bring their own personal wardrobes.
You could save money on that.
But then there's, like, maybe to save money of rental, you could just build, like, a mini courtroom.
Or not a mini courtroom, but, like, maybe not the courtroom, because that would be way more.
But, like, the jury table and stuff, and then rent the courtroom for a day or something like that.
It could literally be so cheap, aside from the actors.
And I didn't recognize any big names.
No.
J.K. Simmons...
Keeping his shirt on for once in a movie.
He's the guy from Red One.
Oh, yeah.
That's the only one, then.
Yeah, he was J.K. Simmons.
I'm sure that Toni Collette is...
She's not a movie star star, but she's certainly a competent actor.
But they weren't paying, like, massive fees for, like, Brad Pitt or something like that.
So, yeah, so the fact that the Defender did not even bring up some of the most obvious stuff, you know, which is to cross, like, to say, did he do five autopsies?
How many autopsies did you do that day?
You know, how do you know it wasn't a hit and run?
Like, just the most obvious stuff.
So the fact that the attorney was played as competent and an equal to the prosecutor, the defense attorney, but the audience was screaming at the screen, like, how could you miss this is the most obvious thing known to man, right?
To say that, like, I was sitting there thinking, like, the guy threw rain at night, old eyes, it's not even lit, right?
Right.
He thinks he sees a guy with a beard who's exactly that guy.
He points out this guy.
He's like, I saw that man.
And how many feet away?
How many hundreds of feet?
And then say, how did you know it was him?
Well, the cop showed me a photo.
Did they show you any other photos?
You know, just that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah.
So five photos, put them up and say, which one did you see?
He's not going to know.
Right, right.
So the fact that the defense attorney was so bad, but then that was necessary, right?
So they needed to have the guy credibly convicted, which means...
That the defense attorney had to be absolute trash head.
Like, just one of the worst...
But it should have been played that way.
It should have been played that way, because the guy was played as a, you know, competent, nice guy who was kind of...
I would have found it funny if the guy, like, the criminal guy who was wrongly convicted was up there and was saying the points that the defender or the public defender didn't make.
Like, that was like, when he was up there and he was like, don't forget, man, this guy, he can't even see.
How's he going to recognize me out there?
That would have been funny because it would have made the guy look really dumb.
It would have exaggerated it.
It just seems like maybe in terms of reviewing the script as written before it actually gets to casting everything else, you find something like that which is just kind of an obvious problem.
It's an obvious problem for the defense unless they actually put in a lot more information.
Then the defense's case becomes stronger which makes it harder to convict.
And so his job becomes...
Kind of easier, in a way, because you can acquit the guy.
Yeah.
You know, so it's like, well, you know, review that stuff, and you don't have an eyewitness.
Why was it in there in the first place?
Well, so this is the challenge for me, is that somebody has a good idea, like, wow, wouldn't it be cool if the juror was actually the guy who committed the crime?
Yeah.
I remember reading an old story, a short story about that, but anyway.
That is a cool idea.
Wouldn't it be cool if?
And then what you do is you put all of the pieces together to make that work without any consideration of the actual people involved, the humanity of the people involved.
It's like you're assembling a Lego thing or putting together some clock.
I need this piece to work here and I need this piece to work here.
Without any particular focus on the actual human beings go through your little plot machinery.
Now, I'm not strong on plot as a writer, so I focus.
I'm always battling between plot.
A theme, message, and humanity.
Because the characters, for me, they're always advocating for themselves and say, well, I want to do this.
And I'm always battling with them to try, you've got to follow the story.
Screw the story.
This is what I want to do, right?
Right.
And so I didn't get any, this was so over-controlled.
This was like some philosophically empty Ayn Rand over-control.
Well, the characters have to do this and we're going to make it ironic because of this.
And then we got...
You need to get conviction.
Very clockwork.
And so I found it kind of soulless.
Like when the guy was playing with his daughter, I'm like, okay, but you're just a hollow-hearted guy who's now killed someone and, quote, got away with it.
I don't care.
I think that his wife is an idiot for not noticing any of this stuff and just like, oh.
Well, so they had to make her pregnant so that the stakes were higher for her.
And it's like, well, she needs to be pregnant to make the stakes higher for her.
And it's like, okay, but then if she's a woman who gets involved with and has a kid with a guy who's a...
We don't know how long...
It was after he'd quit drinking, right?
That they got together, right?
I think it was that she met him...
Well, they met each other while he was on community service for his...
Yeah, he was serving community service at the school.
DUI, right?
Correct.
Yeah, he was reading to kids or something like that.
He was teaching the kids how to write.
That's what it was.
So yeah, she met him in his community service and he stopped drinking at that point presumably or whatever.
And we don't know how long that had been before.
I thought it was...
Well, I don't know if that was four years from there or what, but...
His AA token, I think.
I remember four years.
I could be wrong.
I think, from my recall, yeah, his AA token was four years.
He's like, that's four years, you know?
Yeah, I'm going to just see if there's just anything in here.
And this is part of the whole, like, people can change conversation.
Yeah, yeah.
Right, right.
But yeah, I remember that part of the story where, you know, they met on his community service.
So then saying to women, oh, you should totally have kids with a...
Recovering alcoholic who's been drunk for his adult life and is a writer.
God help you, right?
So have a kid with a guy who's 6'3 and good-looking, right?
As long as, you know, he's 6'3 and good-looking, you can overlook the fact that he's a raging alcoholic who's just reformed and he's doing his probation or his community service for DUI. And it's just like, oh my gosh, monstrous.
So, yeah, I thought it was a clever plot, but the real challenge is to get the plot together with the actual motives of the actual people.
And this guy, you know, he needed to look more haggard over the course of the trial.
The other guy is in prison, and he needs to look worse and less, like, either more buff or skinnier, because that's what happens in prison, right?
You either get more buff because you go to the gym all the time, or you get skinny because you're too stressed or whatever, right?
I did not even know.
I didn't.
I was looking.
You know, there's always this thing in movies where the guy gets the guilty verdict.
The quote criminal.
The accused gets the guilty verdict or the innocent verdict.
Yeah.
And you're looking for a reaction.
I get nothing from this guy.
Oh, yeah.
He was just...
Nothing.
Okay.
Eggs, milk, butter.
What else do I have to get from a grocery store?
Oh, I guess I've sentenced to life in prison.
Anyway, so that just kind of drove me.
Cigarettes.
Yeah.
And so that kind of drove me a little bit nuts.
So I think that it was a clever idea.
for the quote story.
And, oh, and the Neil deGrasse Tyson looking guy.
No, right.
I wanted to mention that.
So, you know, the black woman was like, I want to get on my kids, you know, that kind of thing, right?
I don't care.
It's like, you know, with lynching and all of that, you'd think you'd be kind of sensitive about just throwing someone in prison because you want to get home.
Yep.
And then this is sort of the impossibility of some of the race relations that go on in America, I guess most places, right?
It's just like, so the black guy who seemed, you know, decent, you know, whatever, middle class kind of guy, right?
So then it turns out that the black guy had a brother who was in a gang and was sold drugs to, or something, like something, I can't remember, but, you know, and the white guy is like, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know.
He's like, yeah, you didn't know.
It's like, so now, because you don't assume that the black guy's got some criminal...
Family member who was, what, was he shot by someone in that gang?
He died from the drugs from that gang?
Something like that.
So yeah, the accused guy was in a gang because of the neck tattoos, and the gang caused the death of this guy's little brother, or something like that, right?
So the black guy is really angry at the white guy for not assuming that the black guy's family is full of criminals.
And it's like, okay, so what now?
What are we supposed to do?
I mean, if I assume that your family is full of criminals, that's really terrible.
If I don't assume that your family is full of criminals, that's really terrible.
And it's like, this really does not help people be comfortable with each other.
Anyway, just kind of drove me a little bit nuts.
How dare you not assume that my brother was a drug addict?
This is after he basically, like, mimes out Dobie White guy for the drug.
Oh, yeah, he was kind of, oh, I just want to get home.
I just want to be out there and say I did right by that young man.
He's like, you don't really care, you know.
Yes.
That's what the black guy was accusing him.
The black guy was accusing juror number two, like our main character, because when he says, in the start of the jury deliberation, juror number two, everyone else is like, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.
And he's like, oh, hold up.
We're talking about a man's life.
We need to think about this.
And the black guy's like, oh, you don't really care.
You just want to sleep well at night.
Like, ooh, I did right by that young man.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's okay to, like, act out.
You're someone with a conscience.
So that's bad.
Anyway, that just...
And that seemed...
I hate to sort of say racist or anything like that because that's such an overused term, but it did seem a little bit like, okay, so the black guy and the black woman really, really want to rush to judgment, just throw someone in prison so they can get this over with.
I'm like, eh?
And then they start mocking and attacking the guy who's got a conscience and wants to slow things down to make sure you get it right.
I don't know.
It just didn't seem quite...
It was interesting.
Yeah, it was interesting.
And just another one of these, you can't win.
Like, you can't win, right?
So I thought that was kind of tragic.
So, you know, the story's clever.
The story's clever.
I mean, you can't really say much about the scenery.
Very little music.
But the ending...
You know, honestly, I didn't care.
I didn't care.
So the ending is...
Fair.
The prosecutor shows up on the guy's door, and then the movie just ends, right?
Yep.
And is she going to say, I'm not going to pursue you?
Or is she going to say, I'm going to pursue you?
I assume it was, I'm going to pursue you.
Yeah.
We assume at that point, to my mind, that she's going to prosecute him.
So throughout the, towards the end of the movie, we can see that the DA is putting it together, what actually happened.
And then it was actually juror number two that did it.
And she's bound in this conflict of, should she act on it or not?
Yeah.
And they have a meeting where, like, in not so many words.
You know, he's giving her the reasons why she shouldn't.
Journey number two is giving so many reasons why she should not pursue it.
Like, what if he's a good man with a family?
And you pursuing this is just going to destroy a life needlessly.
And then she doesn't act on it at that moment.
And so for the moment, then we later in another scene see him playing with his baby girl.
And that's when there's the knock at the door.
Yeah, so we think, like, okay, well, he got away with it.
And then, yeah, there's a knock on the door and the DA opens up.
So then I have to assume at that point she's changed her mind.
Yeah, yeah, she's going to come after him.
And he has this conversation.
It starts off kind of cryptic and then it gets very not cryptic.
After the trial, he comes and watches the sentencing, right, of the convicted guy, right, and sentenced to life in prison.
So then he's out sitting on the bench and then the prosecutor comes out, right, the Tom Cruise guy, the juror number two.
He's sitting on the bench and then they basically have a conversation where he says, Yeah, pretty much I'm responsible.
And it's like...
Why would you say that?
She's going to be recording.
Well, yeah.
So the idea...
This is from an old movie, Wall Street, and it's happened a bunch of times.
It's like, you know, I've been recording this whole thing.
And now with a cell phone, it's like, you don't even need to wire it up.
You just have your cell phone.
They record everything, right?
Yeah.
So the fact that he went through all of this, all of this, to make sure he didn't get convicted of anything, and then confessing to the DA... Makes the entire movie completely pointless.
Completely and totally pointless.
Because she kind of gets him because of the car records, the repairs, and all that kind of stuff, right?
She kind of gets as a suspicion, and so...
But she doesn't have any proof, and does she want to do the whole thing again if he's going to deny everything, and his wife is going to give him an alibi, whatever it is, right?
Yeah.
So, the whole movie is all of the hoops he's got to jump through to stay out of prison, and then he's like, or...
After I've succeeded in that, I could just confess to the DA or the prosecutor.
And I'm like, so there was no point to any of this.
Like, not even a bit.
Look at all the crazy loops and machinations I have to go through to stay out of prison so at the end of the movie, I can confess to the crime.
It's like he's never heard of, if they find new evidence, they can reopen a case.
Right, right, right, right, right.
That is a real thing.
He would be like, I have no idea what you're talking about.
You know, I just, I wanted to see this through.
Like, first of all, don't go, right?
But he has to.
But again, for the plot, he has to go, right?
And his wife, you know, would say, where are you going?
So is he now lying to his wife again?
No, he didn't tell the wife why.
He said, I'm going to.
Well, he's like, he's at that point, it's out in the open between the two of them.
He's like, you know, I basically put this guy away for, you know, for life.
The least I can do is go to his sentencing.
Well, and what would she say as a wife?
She would say, like.
Absolutely not.
We did not go through all of this.
Like, he's a bad guy, she would say.
You know, he's fine.
Yeah, like, I mean, so, oh no, he can't be part of his gang and sell more drugs to kids or whatever was going on with him, right?
So she would say, like, but he's like, she's like, yeah, off you go.
Here we go, Pat, off you go.
Yeah.
You go hang around that prosecutor and all of that, right?
So it kind of drove me nuts because the whole point of the movie was, like, all the twists and turns and crazy stuff he had to go through to make sure that the other guy went to prison, and then he shows up.
But she has to do, right?
He shows up because it's part of the plot, right?
Yeah.
And so he shows up.
His wife doesn't say, over my dead body are you going?
You set no foot near anywhere of this ever again, right?
Yeah.
But she's like, oh, off you go.
I packed your lunch.
A long one because you'll need it for 30 years.
And then he's sitting on the bench and he basically just confesses to the prosecutor.
And it's like, so the entire two hours was pointless?
Pointless?
Exterminate!
Oh my gosh.
No, that felt like, again, that's just part of the, well, wouldn't it be cool if, and you know what, they've got these things, it's a bunch of writers, I guess one writer, but he's probably, wouldn't it be cool if, oh, yeah, we're going to, he's going to go and then she's going to have this conversation and it's just like, oh, but, you know, have some sympathy for the audience that's invested their time in the story and don't make the entire story pointless by having him confess at the end, basically.
It's like having it all a dream.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Or it's like, well, you know, but he's so guilty, he ends up having to confess.
Right?
He's so guilty that he ends up having to confess.
It's like, okay, but we didn't see any of that wrestle too much over the course of the...
Yeah, and you know what's really good is we know...
If you're going to give the audience the view into what's really happening, we need to get a couple of winks, right?
So we need to see...
We need to see...
We know what he's really upset about.
Which is he's exhausted and he's under all this stress, but he appears to be really unhinged in a way.
And the other people are like, gee, I wonder what's going on, but we know what's going on, right?
So in Hamlet, it's that Hamlet sets up this play to trap the king.
And we know what's going on, but the king doesn't.
And it's believable that he doesn't, right?
So those layers were just not built in.
And, I mean, Clint Eastwood is a bit of a mechanical director that way.
He does more stuff for plot and story, and it wouldn't be cool if rather than the actual.
Humanity stuff.
But yeah, you needed someone who was good with that character arc because, man, that just wasn't the thing.
So it's like, okay, so he goes to prison.
And he's going to go to prison now also for not just homicide, but also for subverting the entire legal process, right?
And being a juror and not coming and saying, I've got to recuse myself because I've got a conflict.
He's toast, right?
Yeah.
And then I'm like, okay, so the bad guy who was a crime guy, gangbanger, as you say, who sold drugs to young people, okay, or his gang did, so he gets out of prison.
Am I supposed to feel good about that?
Nope.
So this guy who got away scot-free and then went back and confessed, he goes to prison.
Am I supposed to feel bad about that?
Oh, no, the ex-alcoholic who killed someone isn't going to be around to be a dad.
Oh, no.
So I don't care.
And do I care that the woman who had the terrible choice in fathers loses a guy because he goes and confesses?
Like...
I don't care about any of them.
Please give me someone to root for.
Oh, man.
Please give me someone to root for.
It reminds me of a micro soapbox I was about to get on in the beginning of this review.
And all of these things, all the movies reviewed, a lot of the conversation we had, like, what goes on in the world, like Elon Musk on Twitter, and all this, like, philosophy is sorely missing from all of these conversations.
Morality and philosophy.
It's nowhere to be found.
Nope.
So, all right.
Anything else that you wanted to mention?
I've got nothing.
You.
Oh, no.
You.
So, well, I have the question of, like, would you recommend for one to go watch this movie?
I would not.
You would watch?
Yeah, I would not, because I found it just a complete empty experience.
You know?
I mean, I was trying to root for people.
I was trying to find the good in someone, and I just couldn't.
I didn't believe the gangbanger who said, but I'm a nice guy now.
Fair.
I didn't believe him.
I didn't believe that the guy was going to be a good dad.
After being an alcoholic for so long, I thought that the woman was a complete idiot to settle down with this kind of guy.
She's a teacher.
And she's a teacher, as you would point out.
Did I care about the DA? I didn't care about the prosecutor.
Did I think that the doofus Italian guy who was the defender was like, I just didn't care about anyone.
And so it was a clever idea, but I thought it was just so badly executed as a whole.
And such a sort of hollow emotional experience that I think the only thing, the only good things ever get come out of this is this review.
Yeah, I do have one sort of thing.
It sort of goes back to basically what you were saying.
There were times where I thought like, and it's just one of those, it wouldn't be cool if probably ideas.
I thought there were times where they flirted with this notion of like 12 angry men.
Yeah, yeah.
Which I thought was like, that would have been interesting.
But they only sort of came approach and then they just started to pour away from it for the rest of the story base that they wanted to put together.
And in that way, it's not satisfying.
Well, the other unsatisfying thing was there was this whole speech where he convinces everyone to vote guilty.
That was the whole climax of the movie.
That doesn't even happen on screen.
Right.
He spends most of the movie getting up to, like, half of the jury to say the guy's innocent, realizes he can't get the full way, and switches gears.
But we don't find out.
We see none of it.
We only find out later.
And he's not even at the reading of the verdict, right?
He's, like, missing from the box.
Right.
Yeah.
And I'm not sure what that was all about either.
Do you not have to be there because she asked, did everyone agree to this?
Fair.
Yeah.
But she's asking the floor person who I think speaks on his behalf.
But yeah, he wasn't there.
I'm not sure if that was explained or if I missed something or I was so roiling.
Because his baby was just born.
Oh, that's right.
Maybe that was what it was.
Yeah.
So I would say no.
I didn't really believe anyone involved, the motivations and the humanity.
I think now that you've heard the review, you don't really need to watch the movie.
The movie was about a cool concept for a story, and you just heard the cool concept of the story, so I don't think it's worth it.
And they janked up executing that concept.
Yeah.
I only care about the people in movies.
I really only care about the people.
It's kind of like in life, right?
I only care about the people, the stuff, and the cleverness and the circumstances.
I don't really care.
And also, I just know enough about human nature to know that there was nobody I was rooting for, except maybe the deer.
I appreciate that.
You convinced me because initially I was like, you know, it posed an interesting enough question.
I think it's worth watching.
But when you point out the fact that they built this up and it just negated the whole thing, I'm like, oh, yeah, you know what?
You're right.
And that is really holy.
Nobody noticed this.
I mean, these are professional storytellers.
Does nobody notice this kind of stuff?
Yeah.
We have the same questions around all set.
All right.
Well, thanks, everyone.
Freedomand.com to help out the show.
Thank you, Izzy, for your stirring introduction.
Anytime.
And apparently if you're 6'3", okay, never mind.
I'm kidding about that, by the way.
Of course.
I'm just, it's a joke.
No, you also have to be wealthy.
All right.
It's 6'2".
6'2".
That's the minimum.
All right.
fredomain.com.
Thanks everyone so much.
Bye.
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