The Rising, Sean E.

Whenever someone tells me they do not like a Bruce Springsteen album, I tell them that Bruce has never made a bad album, just albums you do not appreciate yet. While this reasoning is a complete cop-out for nearly every other musician ever, I believe in my Jersey boy core that this is true for Bruce. 

With this said, I also think there are Bruce albums that fit very specific moments (Tunnel of Love is for relationship troubles; Wrecking Ball is for economic struggles), while others transcend all situations (Greeting from Asbury Park; The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle; Born to Run; Darkness on the Edge of Town; Born in the USA). The Rising is an album for a moment. Until relistening to it this past week, I always thought that moment was the immediate post-9/11 time period or those drunken nights when you contemplate the immediate post-9/11 time period. While some songs on the album can cut across this ("The Rising" is a comeback song; "My City of Ruins" always makes me think of Asbury Park's economic revival in the late '90s through the early 2000s), others cannot. I have always thought that "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" and "Countin' on a Miracle" are almost unbearably cheesy. However, I think The Rising is the album we need for the hellscape that is 2020. As in the aftermath of 9/11, most of us are angry, afraid, exhausted, and wanting retribution for having gone through all of this. The Rising lends a voice to all of these feelings, but more importantly, it gives us hope. 

"Waitin' on a Sunny Day" is still a cheesy song in 2020, but it is the cheese we need right now, so I am turning it up. Keep on keeping on folks, our sunny day is almost here.

The Rising, Sunny

Jersey-ites always have the one-word defense of Bruce when told their state sucks. Joe's already laid out just how expansive his influence is in modern rock/pop music. The songs work on Top 40, but he also has poignant lyrics and once in a generation showmanship.

Anyway, welcome back to disaster week at PoYB. We can imagine over on Earth B where 9/11 didn't happen Bruce would be quietly waxing his car in 2002. He'd probably make music, and it would probably be good, or fine. But he already sung his best stuff—American dream deferred, working class glories and plight—there'd be little to make hay out of during the "end of history." But back here on Earth A: cataclysm. Most people couldn't see past the top layers: fear, rage, retribution. People are tearing themselves apart, like foxes in traps. That's why the era is full of shlock and you couldn't be counter-culture (lest we forget the Dixie Chicks).

But Bruce's unique position geographically, musically, culturally let him see the other facets of the shape. They got E Street back together like the Expendables to make a great album. And it is great! At its worst, some of the songs conjure up other songs (Why does "Paradise" remind me of the Donnie Darko song?) or border on self-parody/pastiche, but none of this makes them bad songs. On the other hand, you have some interesting stretches (would "Worlds Apart" get a different artist dixie-chicked?) and plenty of absolute slammers.

Instead of jingoistic red blinders, Bruce reminds us of all the other facets of massive tragedy: despair, loss, longing, hope, community, companionship, &c &c. It sounds like everything because it kind of is everything; it's just hard to see that sometimes. How else would 70+ minutes slip by so quickly? He dug in and once again painted the lived experiences of American working class life and translated undifferentiated fear into a landscape—entertaining and meaningful. Thanks Boss, this NJer loves ya too.

The Rising, Nate

There's a trope that all white male journalists and sportswriters are Springsteen freaks. I'm sad to see Joe, who is allegedly "working on himself" and "trying to hear new perspectives," leaning into hurtful stereotyping. Haven't journalists suffered enough?

Anyway, The Rising. Listening to the record now, removed from its context as a balm for a Northeast still raw from 9/11, it's rife with all the corniness and odd decision-making that mars Springsteen's later works (I'm looking at you, "Worlds Apart," with your Irish folk music flourishes and... I don't even know, Southern Baptist meets devotional chanting?). Still, it succeeds in spite of itself. It's soda-shop head nods still hit ("Let's Be Friends" and "Waitin' On a Sunny Day" almost redeem the colonial myth of the 1950s) and, though I feel like a rube for saying so, "The Rising" is as effective now as it ever has been.

So it's cheese, but it's fine cheese. This, after all, is what you come to Outlaw Pete for.

The Rising, Joe

Here's my 9/11 story: It was the fall of 2019, and I'm down in Wildwood for Irish Weekend (same weekend as this). It was like 1 AM. Most of my family is still out at the bar (Pam, being very pregnant, is back at the house). We're at #1 Tavern, drinking Tully Nuts, getting pretty tipsy. And my dad starts going on about what he was doing on September 11, 2001. I dutifully listened to the story, and then asked, "Are we really talking about September 11th right now? Here? Now? At this bar at one in the morning?" It was then that I knew that I don't need to hear another 9/11 story for the rest of my life.

And yet here I am, contemplating it once again, all because our lord and savior Bruce Springsteen has forced me to. There's no getting around the fact that The Rising was inspired by, and is a tribute to, those lives we lost on 9/11/01, and all the grief-stricken ways that our country responded. You don't even have to have been watching TV on December 4, 2001 (like I was at my buddy Ryan's house, asking myself "Who the fuck is Bruce Springsteen?") to know that the songs on The Rising are intimately entwined with the day that terrorists attacked New York City. You can just look through the titles and it's very evident—"Empty Sky," "Lonesome Day," "Nothing Man," "My City of Ruins," like, c'mon. (I'm actually more surprised that this album was actually released in 2002—for some reason, my mind placed it as being released on like September 12th.)

Finally listening to The Rising in full for the first time in my life this week, I'm both surprised and not surprised how vital and energetic Bruce and the band sound on this album. Surprised because this is notably Bruce Springsteen's first "legacy years" record, and typically those types of albums don't pan out very well; not surprised because this is Bruce fucking Springsteen we're talking about, an artist who looms so large over American musical history and my own personal musical history that I've already talked about him at length in another Record Club review.

I actually have a theory as to why Bruce Springsteen sounds more alive here than he does on many other of his latter day records (that claim being relative, of course). Okay, so we watched the Springsteen on Broadway special on Netflix a few months ago, and one of the most striking moments is when Springsteen says something like: "I've never held an honest job in my entire life." It's a line that catches you off-guard, because the man has been singing about the "working man" and blue collar life his entire career, but he makes you stop and say—wait a minute, I guess Bruce Springsteen doesn't actually know what that's like. It's a mark of how convincing he is as a storyteller, that he can filter stories about, say, his factory worker father, and make them feel true coming from a musical artist, and feel real coming to this temporary office drone.

But anyway, my theory is this: if Bruce Springsteen has always contemplated the irony of how he tells these stories while not actually being a part of these stories, then The Rising is him finally shedding the distance between the characters of his stories and the real self. Bruce Springsteen—like you, and like me—is part of the story of September 11th. He is finally singing about himself. He is finally part of the fabric of society whose tales he weaves, as opposed to being a simple observer of it. 

 

And that's gotta bring him some joy on some level, right? That's the joy that is so clearly coming through in these songs. It's obviously not joy from any of the horrific violence and death that happened on 9/11. It's a joy that he was able to connect to his audience in a completely new way, and that these trying circumstances truly did bring everything together.

The Rising, of course, is not a perfect album. I could talk about tonal discrepancies—for one example, what in the world is the (excellent) song "Mary's Place" doing on an album about September 11th?—and we could talk about some of Bruce's weirder production decisions that tend to crop up the most in his 21st century work—the drum machine on "Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin) is so bad—and we could discuss how insanely laden with strings this whole machine is—I mean, I would be on the PRO side of that argument, but I could see an argument against it too.

But it really comes down to how much fun this record, and all E Street Band records, usually end up being, despite whatever trying circumstances bring the gang together. There's a new September 11th story for you—Bruce Springsteen saw the towers crashing to the ground and decided to basically remake The River. As someone who wouldn't mind if Clarence Clemons, Steven Van Zandt, or Max Weinberg played at his funeral, I find this to be a good thing.

Next time anyone tries telling me their goddamn September 11th story while we're at a bar, I'm going to give them a quarter and ask them to go play "The Rising" on the jukebox instead.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

This Is My Blood: Shiner Bock

Not sure why I picked this beer off the shelf during my last go-around. It seemed like a beer I should've had already, maybe? Like, if you gave me a list of 1000 random beers and asked me to "select every beer you've ever heard of," then I would put a check mark next to Shiner Bock, even though I wouldn't be able to tell you where I know it from. I guess it's just a nationally known brand? Especially because it perfectly splits the difference between "we like drinking beers that aren't mass-produced adjunct lager swill" and "we're good ol' boys from Texas and we don't need to fancy liberal city prissy craft beer bullshit."

Yes, as you may recall from the other two Shiner brand beers I've had this year, this beer is from a Texas brewery, Spoetzl. Shiner Bock is far and away their most well-known beer, however. Pretty typical bock—a little sweet, not many hops—except that this was very light on the flavor. I know that sounds like an insult, but I swear it's not. I can't imagine every bock can be considered "drinkable," but this one seems designed for such a purpose. I imagine, if I ever visited Texas, I would be expected to do a lot of binge drinking, and it's important to have such a beer present during a binge.

It also may or may not have been the perfect beer to pair with tonight's movie choice—the Borat sequel. Perfect because Borat starts his second American journey in Texas. Perfect too because it's not advisable to do a spit take with a too-hoppy beer. So let me rope in my short Borat Subsequent Moviefilm review into this beer review, since I want to say a few quick words, but I don't want to make that big of a deal about it (i.e. I don't want to be just another fucking thinkpiece about a goddamn comedy film).

Here's my take: any geographical location in the United States that you could in good faith call "trump country" is already in my mind so backwards and fucked up and frustrating that it's gonna take a lot more than a racist caricature making further fools of these people to move the needle in any significant sense. So if the purpose of this film was to make me "aware" of violently racist hicks any more than I already am, then consider Borat Subsequent Moviefilm an uncomfortable failure. 

 

Really, the only part of the movie that even came close to surprising me was the scene where a "doctor" claimed that it was "god's plan" for a fifteen-year-old to be raped and impregnated by her father. I'm not going to be like my (quite liberal) father-in-law who was in such disbelief of this scene that he can't even fathom that it was anything but fake. I know it's real. I know these people exist. I was surprised to see it in all its depraved realness, but so it is.

That's not to say I didn't laugh at this movie. There were lots of laugh-out-loud shock humor. I'm not above laughing at a character doing a period blood dance. That was funny! What wasn't funny was that, a few minutes before, a very real American man saying straight-faced that he'd pay $500 for Borat's daughter. I get why that's supposed to be funny, but there's nothing funny about a festering wound.

I mean, if we're talking about what I laughed at and what I didn't, then maybe we should talk about the Ghouliani scene at the end. I laughed. I laughed because it was so horrific and so dark and so demented that I couldn't help but laugh into the unending void. No spit take of Shiner Bock here, it was more of a bitter laugh. There's no question that this is the creepiest man on earth taking a young girl (purported to be fifteen) into a bedroom for who knows what. Whether he grabbed his wrinkly ballsack in pleasure can be up for debate, but there's no debate that he flirted with a child, and took her into a bedroom where there were supposedly no cameras, gripping a glass of whisky, handsy as a motherfucker. This is not normal behavior. This is the president's personal lawyer! This is the United States!! What the fuck else can I do but laugh?

My point (and it's not an original one, even hours after the movie was released) is that there's nothing to expose here. This is a comedian holding up a mirror to a country and saying "look what you are!" and all of us are just standing around saying, "um... yeah... we fucking know that already?!" I've known how fucked we are every day for the past four and half years, and single day that unnamed yam-colored conman has opened his flappy mouth. Sacha Baren Cohen, god bless him for at least trying, but I don't need to be reminded of it in this context.

Anyways... this beer was pretty great, and I would definitely buy a 30-bird of it if I see one in 2021. Next time, I'm going to watch some feel-good comedy while I drink it, instead of this feel-existentially-bad comedy.

NOTES

BEER: Shiner Bock

STYLE: Bock

ABV: 4.4%

BREWED BY: Spoetzl Brewery

LOCATION: Shiner, TX

PURCHASED AT: IGA

PAIRED WITH: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm [and a long subtitle that I won't even deign to look up and type here]

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

 

BEER COUNT: 441.5

The Albums That Matter: The Black Hole Understands

Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE.

The Black Hole Understands

Cloud Nothings

2020

Surprisingly, this has never happened before—I already wrote about The Black Hole Understands on the blog, as part of our Song of the Week column. If you want my opinion about how good this album is, I guess that would be a good place to start. Do I really have all that much more to add in my The Albums That Matter column? Not really, but let's see if we can get like five or six solid paragraphs out of it anyway.

I guess it's fortuitous that Cloud Nothings announced last week that they have a new album upcoming early next year, because that really inspired me to think more about how fucking great their most recent album is. The Black Hole Understands really does breathe life into their signature hard-edged pop rock, a formula that was, truth be told, getting a little stale. I'll listen to Cloud Nothings all day, but it'll start to blend together after a while. The songs during The Black Hole Understand's brief 30-minute runtime would stand out in a Cloud Nothings marathon. They are fresh and full of life—ironic that it took a total breakdown of modern society for an album like this to come to fruition.

Yes, this is a "quarantine album," which is a term that will be passed around a lot more once the quarantine comes to an end (officially—I know the majority of Americans are going against CDC recommendations and not even pretending to quarantine any longer). Dylan Baldi and the gang recorded all their parts separately on GarageBand, and then put 'em all together via the internet. The wild thing is that, when we look back at all the quarantine albums that came out in 2020, The Black Hole Understands is going to stand out as an outlier. It doesn't have that "bedroom music" quality that a lot of these albums tend to have. It doesn't strip back the artist's signature sound at all, like, say, folklore did (PoYB—the only blog that's laying down Taylor Swift / Cloud Nothings comparisons).

Rather than go softer to reflect how silent the world was while we were all stuck at home, Cloud Nothings pushed against that tendency, and hard. While it's absent of the face-rippers that tended to populate the past few albums, there is a concentration on melody here, and once the melody is nailed down, then the volume is turned up to max. Songs like "An Average World" are hummable, but then check out that tight-grip ending that barrels toward cacophony. Bedroom pop this is not.

Here's something interesting—the Cloud Nothings album that is being released next February, The Shadow I Remember, has been in the can since before even the first U.S. citizen contracted COVID. The band has been sitting on a completed album for that long, and managed to create and release an entirely different album under entirely different circumstances in the meantime. I understand that this is in actuality due to record label contract peculiarities or whatever, but I'm still curious as to the emotional reasoning in making and publishing The Black Hole Understands during the pandemic, rather than just, ya know, releasing the album that was already made?

We will find out next year what about The Shadow I Remember made it unfit for these troubling times, but we can at least talk about what about The Black Hole Understands made it incredibly fitting for the year 2020. 

Look—it's really easy to take lyrics or quotes from anything and apply it to "these unprecedented times." But it wouldn't be out of line to assume that Dylan Baldi is singing about the pandemic here, since it was created during and because of the pandemic. When you listen to "The Mess Is Permanent," for example, it's incredibly appropriate to assume you know exactly what he means when he says: "It's hard to be in this city / it's hard to be in this town / it's hard to be in this place / when all the walls are crumbling down." What else could he possibly be talking about other than the feelings we have all feeling in the past seven months?

So I'd argue that the generally fun pop/hard rock sound that Cloud Nothings employs on this record works on another level more important than "this is clearer and more melodic than their previous work." It works because we need to hear big, bold, clear, and fun rock music while the walls around us are crumbling. Screaming breakdowns like Attack on Memory's "Wasted Days" still work, but that's not what we need right now. I'm glad that Cloud Nothings didn't lean harder into the nihilism than they usually do, though I'm sure the temptation was there. The Black Hole Understands is the perfect album for an imperfect time in our lives.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If this album sounds interesting, then try this song: "The Sound of Everyone"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stray Observations

• I bought this album on a Friday on Bandcamp. I know there are plenty of artists deserving of our money, and I'm not sure what spurred me to choose Cloud Nothings that Friday in July, but I'm glad it happened. This album is worth ten bucks, easy.
• I read through Dylan Baldi's AMA from July to prep for this blog post, though I can't say I took too much from it. I definitely needed to confirm that the existence of another album was known in July (he confirms it), but otherwise it's just people asking stock AMA questions that bore the piss out of me.
• I also briefly followed Cloud Nothings on Twitter, but unfollowed after a while. I did consider briefly whether I should reach out via Twitter to see if there was an actual explanation for why The Shadow I Know wasn't just released in July instead of making a whole new album... but ultimately, I decided that I'm not that kind of fan.
• I do appreciate that Dylan Baldi and his girlfriend Sad13 (a.k.a. Sadie Dupuis from Speedy Ortiz) are very adorable on social media. And they live in Philly! It's a shame I won't be running into them at El Bar any time soon!
• ALBUM COVER: Fuck, man, I never know what the hell Cloud Nothings covers are supposed to be. Bummer I didn't think to ask him in his AMA.
• ALBUM NAME: This wasn't explained either, but I can imagine that it has to do with being so cooped up and depressed during a global pandemic that you find your relating to the dense nothingness of a black hole.
• Just like I assumed above that the reason The Shadow I Remember was in the can for about a year was because of lame boring record company reasons, I'm also assuming that the reason The Black Hole Understands is STILL not on Spotify is because of lame boring record company reasons. I wouldn't normally give a fuck, but it's rendering the only thing I use Spotify for incomplete.

NEXT TIME: The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance

This Is My Blood: Confliction

confliction — n., kən-​ˈflik-​shən — competitive or opposing action of incompatibles : antagonistic state or action (as of divergent ideas, interests, or persons); or, mental struggle resulting from incompatible or opposing needs, drives, wishes, or external or internal demands.

examples

1) watching a webcast featuring a sniveling boss's boss's boss refusing to take responsibility for bringing his workers back into an unsafe working environment, instead blaming his boss's boss's boss, while workers rightfully ream him out for lacking the empathy to even consider that we could and might all get sick and die for no fucking reason.

2) watching a pissing contest between a reprehensible fucking monster and a much less frightening old man who nevertheless frustrates me almost as much, trying to court the so-called Pennsylvania vote by proclaiming a whole list of bullshit that I do not agree with (supporting police, supporting fracking, basically not being nearly progressive enough for my tastes), knowing that the other guy, the orange one, is wrong in saying that this is all losing my vote, because it's not, the less harmful old man could give a footjob to a police sergeant on national television and I'd probably vote for him (and already did, for that matter, so why the fuck am I even watching this confliction on the screen?).

3) drinking a sour beer even though I know I don't really like sour beers, drinking it because it was two bucks and I know Pam likes these things and I can't keep forcing her to split imperial porters with me, and there's confliction between the smell (burnt rubber, for some reason) and taste (light and refreshingly sour), one that makes me question both why the fuck I'm drinking this and also why the fuck I don't drink more of these. 

NOTES

BEER: Confliction

STYLE: Wild Ale

ABV: 4.0%

BREWED BY: Sloop Brewing

LOCATION: Elizaville, NY

PURCHASED AT: IGA

PAIRED WITH: nonsense

GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5

 

BEER COUNT: 440.5

Never Seen It, #19 of 200: Blazing Saddles

I'm very slowly working my way through a self-made list of 200 movies I've never seen before, and briefly writing about them. You can find the list HERE. This is my attempt to shut the trap of every person who has ever asked me the immortal question: You've never seen it?!

Blazing Saddles

1974

This movie wasn't that funny. Trust me, I do not say that lightly. I realize that my saying that places me squarely in the minority as far as comedy movie audiences go. You might even assume that I am comfortable in that minority, but I am not. I don't like being told that thousands of people find the joy of laughter in a product, and then finally checking that product out for myself only to find nothing. Being contrarian is not pleasant in this scenario, because I feel like I'm missing out. Why do so many people laugh at Blazing Saddles? Why did I barely laugh at all during Blazing Saddles? Is there something wrong with me?

And now, get ready to cringe even more than you already did in the first paragraph: I spent a lot of time thinking about Ace Ventura: Pet Detective while I was thinking too about Blazing Saddles. Ace Ventura was the other comedy movie I've covered in this project that was supposed to be funny, but didn't earn many laughs in the K*** household. Is there something that Ace Ventura and Blazing Saddles have in common that could explain why each were devoid of laughs?

It's possible! At least on the surface. I'll say this—probably the least funny aspect of both films was that they both portrayed either one very obnoxious character or a large group of very obnoxious characters, as if their obnoxiousness was supposed to be the joke in and of itself. In Ace Ventura, Jim Carey was at his Jim Careyest. In Blazing Saddles, well... a bunch of white people say the N-word repeatedly.

First—I'm not going to lie, I felt a little uncomfortable with the amount of N-words that were featured in Blazing Saddles. Any right-wing dingbats reading this would probably argue that I'm being too sensitive about it, but I'd argue right back that I should be sensitive about it. This isn't a word I should be comfortable with. But look, that's not even the point I'm trying to make.

My point is that it's clear that the use of the word is supposed to be the complete joke. The movie intends for you to hear a character deliver dialogue that uses that word, and you are supposed to laugh at it. There's an old white lady who calls Sheriff Bart the N-word, and then later, apologizes for calling him the N-word, while using the N-word in her apology. There's nothing more to the joke than the fact that it's "outrageous" that such a sweet old lady could say something so cruel. You can ignore the fraught history of the slur and just look at this from a comedy perspective—it's a cheap, lazy joke.

Don't let the controversy over the word itself fool you—if there is a way to make racism funny, then Blazing Saddles struggles to find that way even a single fucking time.

 

(Sidenote: Mel Brooks makes it a point to say that Richard Pryor, who was one of the writers for this movie, gave "permission" for the white actors to use the word, but note that there were no people of Asian descent, Mexican descent, Native American descent, or homosexuals on the scriptwriting team to graciously dole out any other permissions.)

And my problems with the "funny level" of Blazing Saddles goes beyond jokes that have anything to do with race. Race jokes are part of it, but they fall under that same umbrella that Ace Ventura did, and many modern frat boy comedies do today. I'm talking about general "jokes" that involve someone being as stupidly obnoxious as possible. 

 

Think about Mel Brooks as the governor. What's the joke in his big scene? That he's cross-eyed? That he ogles a huge pair of tits next to him in the frame? That he is as dumb as a rock, so much so that he can barely speak a sentence without slobbering down his chin? Think about Madeline Kahn as Lili von Shtüpp. What's the joke in her scenes? That she has a lisp? That she has such good sex with a black man that she turns from double- to triple-agent? That she is known as a stage performer but is not good at performing?

I could go on, but you get it. I am a dull, joyless prat who didn't laugh at the movie that AFI claims is the sixth funniest comedy of all time. Great, bully for me.

This is how I felt for the first 7/8ths of the movie, and obviously my general impression of the movie remains the same, regardless of how the final eighth played out. But it would definitely be fair, and maybe even responsible of me to talk about that rollicking ending for a bit. Honestly, the ending does so much heavy lifting as far as comedy goes that I can't in good faith call Blazing Saddles an "unfunny movie." That just wouldn't be true. The ending was fucking bonkers great.

Here's how it goes (SPOILERS! SPOILERS!): having won of the townspeople, Sheriff Bart leads the group of them into town to face the villains who have come to destroy it. A large melee ensues, true mayhem, everyone throwing fists, a cast of dozens going nuts. This scene would've been fun even without what happens next, but then Blazing Saddles escalates the mayhem by a few thousand degrees. 

 

All of a sudden, the camera zooms out, and we see that we're in a movie studio lot. The camera moves over to another building, and cuts to the movie that's being shot in that theater space, a movie that is decidedly not a western. It's a bunch of men in coattails and top hats performing a choreographed dance. The wall crashes down, and the fight scene from the western town has spilled onto this other movie. Now everyone is fighting.

I mean, this shit just keeps escalating, to the point where the villain from Blazing Saddles is buying a movie ticket to see Blazing Saddles to figure out how he can escape. It's insane. The fourth wall is obliterated. I'm chuckling just writing about this shit.

And imagine how insane it is to watch a movie for 85 minutes and not laugh once, and then in the final eight minutes you can't stop laughing. Mel Brooks has to be a genius—who else could have saved a stinker of a movie by literally starting to film another movie at the end of that movie? I'm impressed, I'm flummoxed, I feel everything.

It works because the movie finally gives up the gag about the characters acting like caricatures, and finally makes the movie itself a caricature. That's the difference. I'm okay with a film being obnoxious, as long as the characters in that movie aren't too obnoxious. It's the difference between Mongo punching a horse (the joke, I guess, being "Oh my god that man punched a real horse!") and Mongo flipping over a horse during the final battle (the joke being "This movie is doing 97 things at once and one of them is Mongo flipping a very fake-looking horse!").

Talking solely about the success or failure of the jokes is probably being unfair to Blazing Saddles, because it does succeed in as a comedy in ways that Ace Ventura and even Airplane! failed. While the characters that populate this movie are mostly cartoonishly grotesque, the two characters at the center of the chaos are wonderfully grounded and truly pleasant to spend time with. This allows the movie's plot to have actual stakes—you want Sheriff Bart and the Waco Kid to succeed, and you find real joy in their success. The idea of an outsider winning over the skeptical town that he is in charge of is not an original idea, but it works well here because of how well the two men at the center of it are written.

I don't want to give the script too much credit here, as most of the credit should probably go to the leading actors. Cleavon Little is so goddamn good at being cool and smirking as the pandemonium swirls around him. Watching his performance here made me think that Will Smith had to have cribbed his persona at least in part of from Little, how they are both unflappably cool in the face of ridiculous circumstances. And this is, as far as I know, the only other film besides Willy Wonka that I've seen Gene Wilder in, so I didn't really know what to expect. Consider me delighted that Wilder is able to bring that same infectiously gentle energy to this performance as well. 

Now that I think about it, I probably found these two characters so enjoyable for the same reason I found the ending enjoyable—both characters give the sense that they know they are in a movie. They don't, as far as I can recall, literally look at the camera like Jim Halpert as if to say "Can you believe this shit?", but they might as well have. I like that. I like how Sheriff Bart and the Waco Kid were able to acknowledge how obnoxious the people surrounding them were acting, and I admire the fact that they were able to shrug the behavior away in a manner that I personally am unable to do.

Anyways, yeah, I'd say that the winning leads and the crumbling of the fourth wall were enough for me to give this movie average grades, but it's real tough to ignore the fact that the majority of this movie is just straight-up unpleasant to sit through.

I almost wonder at this point if it's because the movie was released in 1974, and my/our expectations for comedy have changed so dramatically in the past 46 years. It's another form of the oft-discussed "Elvis Theory," in that once-revolutionary pop culture institutions are inappreciable as subsequent generations improve upon their ideas. Was the big farting-around-the-campfire scene radically funny and new in the mid-1970s? Probably! But here in 2020, I'm just watching a bunch of guys farting, and I'm struggling to mine any mirth from it whatsoever.

You could chalk it up to me being an asshole, and I won't fight you on that, but I'm going to go ahead and chalk it up to the comedy being of a different time and place.

GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5

This Is My Blood: Imperial Sunhine / White Claw Raspberry

I interviewed **** about her favorite movie of all time, but I couldn't finish the interview in time, probably because we wasted so much time talking about White Claw. Then I rushed home to have dinner with a wife who hates my fucking guts. Not sure when I'm gonna be able to get Part II of the movie interview in, but in the meantime, here is the White Claw interview.

 

[Editor's note: You'll find a parsed down and edited version of the conversation below, as parts of the interview were later deemed inappropriate by the interviewee, which is her right. So I've cut out any part that I can imagine one might now want pasted on the public internet, and left the bare bones. I've also stripped away the interviewee's name and any other name mentioned in what's left of the interview.]

 

Joe: I need you to tell me about White Claw, because I'm going to use this for my other blog series—

Friend: About White Claw?

Joe: Yes.

Friend: What about it?

Joe: Why do you drink White Claw? I have a daily series where I write about alcohol. This can turn into a very easy post, if you tell me about it.

Friend: I drink White Claw because it tastes good, which is number one. I don't really enjoy the way traditional beer tastes. I'm more of a cider or sour drinker.

Joe: In trying to prepare for this interview, I read as many of your blog posts as I could—

Friend: Oh my god.

Joe: —and one of them [REDACTED].

Friend: Yeah.

Joe: So I did know, coming into this, that you enjoy sour beers.

Friend: I like beer that doesn't taste like beer, essentially.

Joe: Do you feel like there's a bridge between sour beers and White Claws? Or hard seltzers in general, I guess.

Friend: Maybe? In the sense that it doesn't traditionally taste like what you'd have drinking a beer. But neither of those things are technically beer. Seltzer isn't beer. Sour beers aren't beer.

Joe: In the traditional sense.

Friend: I do like things that taste like they've been rotting in the bottom of a sink for six months.

 

Joe: You do like that? Is that what sour beers taste like to you?

Friend: Yeah. And like sauerkraut, or fermented things. I like fermentation.

Joe: Which is involved in all beer, pretty much.

Friend: Yeah...

Joe: So wait, have you always felt this way? When we were drinking Miller Lites twelve years ago, you felt this way? Natty Lights, I should say?

Friend: I never enjoyed how that tasted.

Joe: It was just a means to an end?

Friend: Yeah. With White Claw—again, I like how they taste, and I like that they are 5%. I feel like that's a comfortable ABV for me.

Joe: It's not 9.6%.

Friend: It's not spilled all over the table. [laughter] But it's comfortable. It's also very low in carbs, sugar, calories, and that's another huge driving point for me. I do like beer. I'm interested in beer, and I understand a lot about it. I can drink any IPA, and tell you if it's good or not. I know how beer's made, I know what a good beer is. But this is lower in fucking calories. I like being skinny. There's that.

[Large redacted section]

Friend: Back to White Claw. It's not good. It's like drinking diet soda. I think that's the greatest equivalency.

Joe: Do you get any type of judgment for drinking White Claw from people who don't appreciate White Claw?

Friend: Oh my god, yeah. It's a funny and easy joke that people launch at me, that I'm a "basic bitch." But I'm comfortable with it.

Joe: Probably—man, it was probably almost a month ago at this point. I was near [REDACTED], so I popped by [REDACTED]'s house. He was not aware that I was popping by. It was probably 10 or 11, so he was alive. I went in to use the bathroom, and he had like twelve empty cans of White Claw on the table, that he had clearly drank the night before. I've been making fun of him for it for the past month. Because it was White Claw! I guess it I had seen Miller Lites, I wouldn't make fun of him as much.

[Large redacted section]

Friend: Right. I drink White Claw when I'm chilling at home. It's my Miller Lite. It's a causal, easy thing. I don't love the taste of beer, at least not enough to drink multiple. You were talking about when we were younger, drinking Natty Light... I don't think I ever drank that much Natty Light. Do you remember that one time we were having a kegger in the woods?

Joe: Oh god.

Friend: I came, for whatever reason—

Joe: Which woods?

Friend: Susquehanna.

Joe: Was it one of Basil 249's three kegs to raise money?

Friend: It was a random night in the summer.

Joe: Right. Me and [REDACTED] had kegs to "raise money." The money that we spent all on beer like the first night of that semester.

Friend: So, I didn't have five dollars. Which, now, I'm like, I would always have five bucks on me.

Joe: You "didn't have five bucks."

Friend: Right, I "didn't have five bucks." I was like, "Joe, can I get you back?" and you were like "Nope." You would not give me a cup.

Joe: Well, if the purpose of the keg was to raise money!

Friend: I was like, "Joe, I'm going to get you back. What's up?" and you were like, "No way. Not happening. I'm not giving you a cup. I don't care. I don't care that you're my friend, I don't care about any of that." I was so mad at you.

Joe: This is a Natty Light story?

Friend: Yeah. And then... I'm pretty sure [REDACTED] ended up paying for me. That was the night that someone pretended to be the cops. Like, they put a flashlight up, and we ran.

Joe: Was it raining?

Friend: Earlier.

Joe: I feel like that was the Spring Break keg.

Friend: I don't catalog the series of events. It was specifically that all of us had to run very quickly. I thought it was before we went to college?

Joe: I don't know that we hung out in those woods—at least, not me and you together—before college. Because, I definitely had not hung out in those woods prior to [REDACTED], and that was me, you, [REDACTED], and a few other people, up the street from the woods—

Friend: I thought that conversation was on the roof of the stables?

Joe: I was never on the roof of the stables. What stables? The one I'm going to be living next to?

Friend: Yeah.

Joe: You used to drink on the roof of the stables?

Friend: Yeah. We snuck up there all the time. [laughter]

Joe: Aren't there houses all around there? Didn't [REDACTED]'s family live across the street?

Friend: Yeah, but—

Joe: They couldn't look across the street and see kids drinking on the roof?

Friend: Not facing the horses, no.

Joe: I mean, I don't live there yet—

Friend: You'll know.

Joe: —but does a portion of the roof face away?

Friend: It's a triangle, or like a fucking point. One side is facing the street, the other side is facing the horses. We just used to climb up there and hang out.

Joe: Gotchya. Why the roof as opposed to the entire woods that are around those stables?

Friend: I don't know.

 

Joe: I'm asking this as the future parent of teenagers who live next to these woods.

 

[conversation ends with some lengthy ruminations about the Northeast, which I've already said enough about in other corners of this blog, so let's redact that too.]

 

NOTES (#1)

BEER: Imperial Sunshine

STYLE: American Blonde Ale

ABV: 9.6%

BREWED BY: Blue Point Brewing Company

LOCATION: Patchogue, NY

PURCHASED AT: Pac-a-Deli (been a while since I've been in here, used to hit this place up all the fucking time back when I worked for Zipcar)

PAIRED WITH: bagel from Knead

GRADE: 2 pukes out of 5

 

 

NOTES (#2)

BEER: White Claw Raspberry

STYLE: Hard Seltzer

ABV: 5.0%

BREWED BY: Mark Anthony Brands International

LOCATION: Glendale, Arizona

PURCHASED AT: Pac-a-Deli

PAIRED WITH: trying to get a cab in 2020

GRADE: 0 pukes out of 5

 

BEER COUNT: 440 (3.5 Imperial Sunshines because I spilled one on the table, and then 1 seltzer)

Your Favorite Movie: Titanic, with Sara B.

Welcome back to Your Favorite Movie, in which the kings of the world crack some beers on the lower decks and discuss their favorite movies of all time.

Today's captain of the ship is Sara B******, who needs no introduction, but if I were to introduce her, I'd start by explaining that she loves gouda cheese. This is a group interview, though, so we have plenty of other people here to talk about the movie. There's Pam—you know her. Stephan and Allison are veterans of this column. Sunny writes for PoYB every week so you know him too. Sara's boyfriend Ryan tries to hide the fact that he does not like this movie. And Drew is here, pulling focus like a motherfucker.

Sara's favorite movie is Titanic. Everyone knows Titanic, so this makes it the perfect movie to talk about in a group setting (even though, yeah, 90% of the interview is about Kate Winslet's infamous nudity).

Conducting this interview was about as easy as steering the Titanic, which made for a frustrating transcription experience, but thankfully it ends up being a fun read. We have funny friends! Who were drunk! And have an easy rapport! This is good shit! Be thankful that I cut out a lot of Drew yelling the same thing over and over at the top of his lungs!

The following is transcribed from a conversation we had in the Poconos, with everyone's permission, slightly edited because two people talking at once is impossible to avoid in situations like this. Enjoy!

~~~~~~~~~

Joe: I feel like, just because Titanic is "that movie" from our childhood that everyone watched—that makes it a good movie to talk about in a group setting, because no one had to make an extra effort to watch a movie they've never seen. We've all seen Titanic.

Sara: Has everyone seen Titanic at this table?

Drew: Who hasn't seen Titanic?

Joe: But I also feel like it is a good movie, because everyone has a "Titanic story," like when you saw Titanic for the first time, and how you felt about it. So I thought it would be good to start with Sara's Titanic story.

Sara: Okay, like why it's my favorite movie?

Joe: No, more like, if someone asked you, "Have you ever seen Titanic?" what would you tell them?

Ryan: You'd audibly gasp. [laughter]

Sara: "Finally, someone asks about me!" [laughter] So my Titanic is—and all of you know this, I have very conservative parents. They are wonderful parents, but they are by the book—must be thirteen for PG-13, a we-follow-the-rules, rules-are-our-friend type of family.

Joe: Wait, what is this rated?

Sara: It's PG-13. For titties!

Joe: I thought it might be rated R because of that.

Pam: It's definitely not R.

Joe: Okay! I wasn't claiming it was R, I was just asking!

Sara: So it was PG-13, it came out in 1997, so I was eight years old when it came out, I was in third grade. A lot of my friends saw it, and I was really jealous. Do you remember, there was an ABC commercial, like a "30-Second Titanic"? It was stick figure animation, and they were like, "Yay! We're on the boat!" and then the boat hit the iceberg, and they were like, "Nooo!", and then it was like, "That's Titanic in thirty seconds." Do you remember that? [Editor's note: probably not this one, but I couldn't find which one Sara was talking about.]

Drew: I'd have to look this up.

Sara: It was a 30-second commercial. So anyways, I was not allowed to see it in theaters. I don't remember if my parents saw it in theaters. They probably read a review that said there were titties and were like, "Psh, not in my Christian home."

Allison: Your parents sound so strict!

Sara: They were as straight as arrows.

Joe: And this was you siblings too, right, and not just their daughter?

Sara: It wasn't just because I was their daughter. So my best friend, Hannah, she had the two-set VHS. I was probably ten. It might've been 1999 by the time I saw it.

 

Allison: Was it a sleepover?

 

Sara: It was a sleepover.

 

Allison: Of course.

 

Sara: And I remember the top I was wearing. It was an Old Navy tank top that was teal. And I really liked it, because I thought I looked so grown up in it. And we were there, and Hannah was like "Do you wanna watch Titanic?" and I was like "[gasp] But I'm not allowed to!" "But it's just a movie." "But I'm not thirteen!" And she was like, "It's fine. It's not bad. There's just a few swear words." And I was like, "...okay." So I watched it, and I was utterly obsessed. Because there was a year of build-up! Of preteen Sara build-up for this movie!

Allison: Did you tell your parents that you saw it, afterwards?

Sara: Oh my god, I can't remember. I had to have lied. There's no way I told them the truth.

Pam: Did you go to church and tell the priest? [laughter]

Joe: Was your dad like, "How do you know what Kate Winslet's boobs look like?!" [laughter]

Sara: "Why are you talking about hairy armpits? What are you talking about?!" [laughter] But yeah, I saw it, and I was utterly taken back by it. When I was old enough to watch it, and it was on TV, and I watched it all the fucking time. I introduced it to [my younger brother] Patrick. One time, Patrick and I both watched Titanic, on TBS, at the same time, in two different rooms, and we both walked into the same room, crying. [laughter] Because he had never seen it before! And he didn't realize that they're in heaven in the last scene.

Drew: "Titanic Heaven."

Sara: Even though Rose had a whole-ass family, but she's with Jack in heaven? But we can get to that...

Joe: Heaven could be multifaceted.

Sara: That's where she was at that moment. I get it. But in that moment, Patrick was like, "I've never seen it," and I was like, "I bet you'd like it. It's history, bud." He watched it, and he came in, and he was sobbing.

Pam: That's what inspired him to want to be a history teacher!

Sara: Probably! But that's my general Titanic story. Overall, it's just a fun and quotable movie. And... it's pretty hot.

Drew: What's your favorite quote?

Sara: When Rose's fiancé, Cal, is yelling at her, and maybe slaps her—

Pam: Flips a table.

Sara: [Billy Zane impression] "You are my wife in practice if not yet by law!" There was a vacation I was on one time with Sean and Courtney O'*****, and then the other O'*****s, Jimmy and Kelly, we all just yelled that at each other the whole week. [laughter] For like a week! We were just yelling Cal quotes. There it is. That's why it's my favorite movie.

Joe: Alright, good interview, everybody.

Sara: Let's turn the recorder off.

Drew: That means I get to talk, right? [laughter]

 

Sara: 87 minutes of Drew yelling at me.

 

Drew: "Alright, first of all!!"

 

Joe: That's Drew's Cal impression.

 

Sara: What do you got for me next?

 

Joe: I dunno... I'll present this to the table. Does anyone feel like they can personally relate to any of the characters?

Drew: No.

Joe: Fuck you!

Sara: As a teenager, I probably related to Rose, who wanted to be loved, and out of that relationship. I probably tried to be the ingénue—every teenager wants to think they are the lead character. As it turns out, I'm probably more like Unsinkable Molly Brown.

Allison: That's not a bad thing to aspire to be!

Sara: Looking back, it's like, "Yeah... I'm not a lead character."

Allison: She lived though!

Sara: I don't think the characters are super relatable.

Drew: I apologize if I was being snooty, but that's why I scoffed, because I don't think the characters are relatable.

Joe: How dare you, sir! You sound like a first-class citizen!

Sara: "The Dawsons of Chippewa Falls."

Drew: Oh god! That's so bad!

Joe: Okay, so we can acknowledge that the script has its flaws. But I'd argue that the overall feeling of two people falling in love amidst this catastrophe is... it feels like a real story to me.

Sara: Isn't that relatable though? Didn't you go on a million vacations down the shore with your family growing up, and lock eyes with a girl on the boardwalk, and try to get her number—?

Joe: On the tram car? Fuck yeah!

Sara: And you thought about it for three or four days?

Joe: This tram car's sinking, babe.

Drew: And you watched 1500 people drown... together...

Sara: Yeah, I mean, it's some of that. Joe kept stopping all the Titanic conversations we were having yesterday—

Joe: We needed to save it for the interview!

Allison: Talk about the conversations right now.

Sara: We said yesterday that if there was no love story, then there would be no Titanic movie like there is today. The love story is integral to making the movie what it is. If there's no love story, then it would just be a disaster movie. To me, personally, it would not be as fun to watch. It would be... shorter...

Allison: Only one VHS.

Sara: And scarier?

Ryan: With a disaster movie, there is always some sense of perseverance, like, "But, something good did happen..." 

Stephan: A Kurt Russell movie I saw recently, it's just Titanic without the love story. What movie was that?

Allison: Poseidon.

Drew: Which is a remake of The Poseidon Adventure from the 1970s.

Sara: Which is good, right? When the boot flips upside down.

Allison: The boot? It's a Canadian boat.

Sara: It's boat. Strike that.

Stephan: If I tried to explain that movie to someone, it would be "Titanic without the love story."

Drew: That's a good comparison.

Stephan: It's... not very entertaining.

Drew: To your point, I agree with you that the love story makes it more than just a disaster movie. However, the love story that they present is as cliché, as basic, as Romeo-and-Juliet as you could possibly get.

Sara: Right.

Drew: "I'm engaged to this man, and his rich, and I have to marry him!" And there's a moment when he's like, "Do you love him?" and she's like, "That's an absurd question...!" and she's avoiding answering him—it's TERRIBLE! Awful! The love story is so cliché.

Joe: But you compared it to Romeo and Juliet, which is the classic love story.

Drew: But where do you draw the line between classic and cliché? Classic is everyone knows it, but cliché is everyone knows it in a bad way.

Sara: But everyone knows the story of Jack and Rose, so I think it's classic, not cliché.

Ryan: [makes sound of reluctant disagreement]

Sara: [gives Ryan a look] What?!

Sunny: Snap!

Sara: The transcription should read "Sara gives Ryan a look." [laughter]

Ryan: She will get visibly upset whenever I joke around about Titanic.

Sara: Correct.

Ryan: I'll say things that will get her so upset.

Sara: [egging on] Like what...

Sunny: Put it on the tape!

Ryan: "Titanic was an inside job." [laughter]

Allison: "Icebergs can't melt steel beams!" [laughter]

Sara: Why was it an inside job, Ry? Put it on the internet forever!

Ryan: Nah, it's just to get your blood boiling.

Sara: It's boiling. If you had been to the exhibit, you'd know there was a mirage effect, and the iceberg looked smaller than what it was, but when it flipped it was bigger underneath, and when it hit, it tore through both layers of steel—there were two layers of steel—with the doors, because it was supposed to be unsinkable, so unsinkable that they didn't have enough lifeboats... 

 

Allison: Because the lifeboats didn't look nice on the deck.

 

Sara: First of all, that's so rude!

Sunny: None of that was in the movie, because who gives a shit. 

 

Sara: It is in the movie. They were walking down the deck with what's his name—Victor Garber—Mr. Andrews—she's like [Rose impression] "Mr. Andrews, are there enough lifeboats?" and he's like [macho Mr. Andrews impression] "Oh no, sweetie little woman baby, this is not gonna sink!" [laughter] And she's like, "Oh. Okay."

Drew: He mentioned the opportunity to have these tessellating lifeboats, and that would've been enough, but he's like "But then the deck would've looked too cluttered." So now they just have enough for 50% of the people on the boat.

Sara: Because fuck poor people, right?

Drew: I'll give the movie credit—James Cameron, who almost seems more passionate about deep-sea diving than he does about making movies—

Multiple: Yes!

Drew: Seriously, he takes the camera down, at the beginning of the movie—he was the first person to ever film the Titanic. No one had ever gone down that deep before. And he has all this history about, like, the captain has all these years of nautical experience, was told to get [to America] a day early, and he was like, "Sure, I'll just crank it up 30 knots an hour."

Sara: They wanted to prove a point.

Drew: And that's why they couldn't avoid the iceberg, because they were going too fast. They turned the wheel, but they were going too fast.

Sara: It was essentially human ego that killed all those people.

Sunny: They kept saying "This ship is unsinkable!" over and over again.

Drew: James Cameron actually hand-built a lot of the sets. Like, the fireplace in the background when she was getting drawn—he built that fireplace by hand. And that was his hand drawing her. James Cameron is drawing her titties. And he's left-handed, so they had to flip it!

Sara: I always thought it was Leo's hands. I didn't know it was James Cameron's hands.

Drew: They had to shave his hands.

Sara: That's yucky. [To Joe, I assume?] No offense. Body hair's cool.

Joe: If we're talking about the actual boobs, Kate Winslet's boobs, those no room for the word "yucky."

Sara: Not the boobs! Just that he shaved his hands.

Joe: I don't care. I wouldn't put that word anywhere near Kate Winslet's boobs.

Sara: Oh. Okay. She has wonderful breasts. Probably the first boobs I ever saw.

Sunny: Is that why this movie was so big?

Sara: I think that's part of it.

Drew: This is a serious question—has anyone ever seen another PG-13 movie that showed tits?

Sunny: Romeo and Juliet.

Drew: Which one? The old one?

Joe: Or Baz Luhrmann?

Sunny: I think so.

Drew: Romeo plus Juliet? Do you see tits in that? [Editor's note: I couldn't remember, but a very cautious google search on my work computer seems to indicate that you do indeed see Claire Danes topless in Romeo + Juliet.]

Joe: Apparently Claire Danes [from Romeo + Juliet] was originally supposed to be Kate in this.

Pam: ...Rose?

Joe: Was supposed to be Rose in this, yeah.

Allison: I think Kate Winslet was great in this.

[a separate conversation is happening during this time]

Ryan: That was PG-13?

Pam: What movie?

Stephan: Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Drew: Do we see tits in that?

Sara: I don't know.

Drew: This is going to be a "dot dot dot" in the transcript.

Joe: Nope. I'll always take the opportunity to say that Fast Times at Ridgemont High sucks ass.

Sara: This is my interview, Joe!

Pam: Oh my god.

Ryan: Fast Times—

Sara: This is a Titanic interview! 

 

Ryan: Sorry.

 

Sara: This is a Titanic interview! Okay? This is not about Fast Times at Ridgemont High. If that's your favorite movie, we can—

Joe: It better fucking not be! [laughter]

Ryan: It's not!

Joe: You guys are right about the whole thing where everyone is thinking about the ship being "unsinkable." All the dramatic irony...

Allison: I will say all that ego-driven themes are explored in detail in the musical.

Sara: You clearly just want to talk about that. [laughter]

Joe: We should first say that the musical is not connected to the movie. It was just coincidental that they were released the same year.

Drew: That's not a coincidence. They released it as a cash-grab.

Joe: The musical was released before the movie though.

Drew: Not on Broadway! It got a Broadway run after Titanic became a success. It was off-Broadway before that.

Allison: I don't think so. [Editor's note: me and Allison are right, and Drew can go suck ass—Titanic the musical opened on Broadway on April 23, 1997, almost eight full months before Titanic the movie was released in US theaters. Look, I love Drew, but he made transcribing this interview into a motherfucker of an ordeal, so I'm gonna take great pleasure in pointing out when he's wrong during those few occasions when it happens.]

Sunny: Why are all these people talking about a sunken boat all these years later?

Sara: I think it's one of those crazy pieces of history that are so insane...

Sunny: What about the Hindenburg?

[There's another conversation going on during this as well.]

Joe: Let's pick which conversation we're following, please.

Sara: First of all... it's me. So... I don't think you put together how much of an egotistical diva I'm going to be during this interview.

Joe: So you're like Mr. Andrews. This interview is unsinkable!

Drew: You're confusing the character of Mr. Andrews, who designed the ship, with Bruce Ismay, who financed the ship.

Allison: All characters in the musical!

Drew: He was like, "We need to speed the fuck up, and fuck lifeboats." Mr. Andrews was the artist.

Sara: Let it be known that money ruins everything again!

Joe: Did anyone else look at Bruce Ismay and think that he looked like he could be Drew's uncle? He looks like Drew with a mustache!

Sara: Who was the actor how played him?

Drew: Jonathan Hyde. He was Van Pelt in Jumanji.

Sara: Oh yeah!

Joe: Alright, Pam's got something to say.

Drew: British character actor Johnathan Hyde.

Joe: Everybody relax!

Pam: They talked about him a lot in the museum. He was brought to trial when the survivors got back. He was charged.

Joe: So I guess that was an interesting decision, in that his choices were between death and jail. He chose jail.

Drew: Who wouldn't pick that?

Sara: He probably didn't think at the time that he was going to be tried.

Sunny: And the captain chose to go down with the boat, so the idea of choosing death isn't crazy.

Drew: There was a Norwegian cruise ship that went down in the Mediterranean like five years ago, and the captain was the first one to be like, "...see ya." Not all captains go down with the ship.

Sara: Honestly, that's some honorable bullshit. Get off the boat!

Sunny: Well, if you'd be saying that it was unsinkable for years...

Drew: The captain, as the leader of the ship, doesn't have to go down with it, but he's supposed to be the last one off. He's supposed to make sure everyone is off.

Allison: That makes sense. As opposed to everyone getting off, and the captain still going down on principle, like, "Nope! This is my ship!"

Sara: This reminds me of the scene with Cal, when he's trying to get off the boat, and he picks up a little girl—

Drew: Isn't that monstrous?

Sara: He's such a fucking monster. So disgusting. Like, wonderful actor—

Ryan: Billy Zane.

Sara: Love him, but Cal... I just wanna clock you across the face. There's a little girl, crying for her mom, which is absolutely devastating, and he saves her, but he's like, "This is my daughter!" He gets on a half-filled life boat with a couple other women, and he's like... "Alright."

Sunny: He's gonna raise that baby! [laughter]

Sara: He passed her off to another woman!

Joe: What a classic villain though.

Sara: He is a villain. He's yucky.

Sunny: He never got what was coming to him.

Pam: Yes he did!

Drew: "He put a pistol in his mouth... or so I read."

Joe: Is there any part that was too over-the-top about that character?

Sara: No.

Drew: When he started shooting at them. Shooting at the woman he loves!

Sara: But he doesn't love her. So he does not care!

Pam: It's more of a control thing.

Allison: Right, with his fiancée running around with a "street rat."

Sara: Which, to be fair, is embarrassing. If I was Cal—

Allison: She's down in the belly of the ship, spinning around—

Sara: Up on her tippy-toes—which, on the record, I could do when I was a child, get on the tops of my toes.

Drew: Prove it.

Sara: Not today.

Pam: I think one of the craziest things that I noticed more this time was when they were like, "The ship is going to sink in one hour, two hours tops." Like, shit, two hours goes by so fast.

Sara: When did you watch it last?

Pam: A few days ago for this interview.

Sara: I did not rewatch it before this interview, but I do feel very in tune with this movie. I've seen this movie at least two dozen times. I saw it twice when it came out in 3D.

Allison: That's when Stephan saw it for the first time.

Stephan: I've only seen it that once.

Sara: How did you enjoy it? That's nice that you got to see it on the big screen.

Stephan: They were releasing a bunch of movies like that. I think Jurassic Park had come out in 3D the year before? I think Sunny had said earlier it was for the 100th anniversary or something.

Drew: I did.

Stephan: Okay.

Drew: It was the 100th anniversary of the ship sinking.

 

Stephan: We saw it for Valentine's Day.

 

Sara: That's beautiful.

 

Stephan: It was so stupid.

 

Allison: They had reenactors in period costumes.

 

Stephan: It was so corny.

 

Sara: Ryan, I don't want to put any ideas in your head, but I would absolutely do something like that.

 

Ryan: ...Okay.

 

Sunny: For the 200th anniversary. [laughter]

Sara: When you and I are still together and alive in 92 years.

Sunny: See Titanic in 5D!

Sara: They make us sit on lifeboats.

Drew: It literally feels like you're drowning. [laughter]

Ryan: Do we need to be cryogenically frozen now to make that happen?

Drew: So you can mimic the hypothermia on the Titanic.

Sara: Would you let Sara have the door all to herself, or would you try to get on there with her?

Sunny: You'd start shooting at her after she got drawn by some dude!

Ryan: That's true.

Sara: Are you Cal or are you Jack?

Ryan: A little bit of both. [laughter] Would I give you the door? Yeah. Sure. I'd give you the door.

Sara: I'd like to think you would.

Allison: Would you keep the door to yourself?

Sara: No, I would try to get him on!

Drew: People talk about that, like, "She tried to keep him off." She tried to get him on, but it kept flipping over. But that's a big thing, like [obnoxious voice] "Why didn't she just let him on the door?"

Joe: If Jack fit on the door, and they both survived, would it have worked out?

Sara: I don't know. I go back and forth about whether Jack Dawson was a real character. Have you heard this, Drew, this internet theory that Jack Dawson is not real? That it's all made up?

Drew: It's a nice fan theory, but... I don't know, the staff on the boat was like, "Did you rape this woman?" And they had dinner together on the boat. It's a bit of a stretch.

Sunny: Wait, you're saying that the character himself wasn't in the movie the whole time?

Pam: Like Sixth Sense?

Sara: Because he gets on to the boat by winning the tickets, and his name has no record, the only record is that she changes her name, while she's on the Carpathia, to "Rose Dawson," which is fucking psycho after three days with a man, but whatever...

Allison: But she was trying to distance herself from Cal.

Pam: And she was a changed woman after he died!

Allison: She rode horses and stuff.

Joe: So your answer is no, it wouldn't work out. You're expressing skepticism about their relationship.

Sara: I don't know if it would've worked out. I think her mother would've stopped everything. I think they would've found her, I dunno.

Sunny: Real life gets in the way.

Drew: It's a Romeo and Juliet sort of thing. People debate whether Romeo and Juliet were actually in love, because they fucking met like three minutes before. You could make the same argument here. These people knew each other for 48 hours. Were they really in love?

Sara: It's a vacation crush!

Allison: How many people stay in touch with their girlfriends—

Stephan: I was thinking of Grease.

Drew: They had three months!

Stephan: Or like High School Musical—

Drew: We're all in this together!

Stephan: —they hang out, have a fling—

Allison: They sing one song together

Stephan: —and then they never see each other again... but will they?

Drew: They had a whole summer! Three months is enough time to say you're really into someone. But two days?!

Sara: There's also that terrible trope that Rose lost her virginity to Jack, so there's some sort of "piece" left, some part of Jack that's there forever, bound, because you lost your virginity to him. 

 

Drew: Slaps hand on glass.

 

Sara: That... is a fucking hot scene.

Drew: It's a well-directed scene.

Joe: Who has had sex in a car at this table?

[Literally everyone is talking at the same time. I think some people are raising their hands too, but obviously that doesn't translate.]

Joe: That wasn't an actual question.

Allison: I don't think my parents read this blog...

Joe: If they are, then we should probably say right now—Mrs. N***, please do not fucking vote for trump. [laughter]

Allison: Keep that on the record!

 

Joe: To answer my own question, though, about whether I think Jack and Rose would've worked out, I think that Rose needed something more in her life. She was held back by this asshole who she was engaged to. At the end of the movie, they showed pictures of her doing all the things that she wanted to do, that she wouldn't have been able to do with Billy Zane in her life. Would Jack have impeded her from doing that shit? I don't think so. Maybe he life wouldn't have been improved in the way that she thought it would be improved, if he was alive, but he also would not have been a detriment.

Allison: I don't think Jack was the type of person would was ready to be tied down. The type of person who wins a ticket for a transatlantic ocean voyage with no plan, like, "Yeah, I'm gonna get on this boat."

Drew: "Yeah, maybe I'll make my way back to Wisconsin."

Sara: Drew, help me out here, was Jack Dawson an American person coming back?

Drew: He was an American who had wandered into Europe. He was playing cards with a Swedish guy...

Sara: I don't think "commitment" is his deal.

Allison: I don't think he's the type of guy who's gonna be like, "I made a decision to get on this boat five minutes before the boat left, met this woman, and now I'm going to be married to this woman, and settle down, this is what I've been waiting for."

Pam: Can we talk about how the Swedish guys are named Olaf and Sven?

Drew: Oh my god!

Pam: I've seen Frozen a thousand times.

Sara: That's probably because American writers can't think of any other Norwegian names.

Drew: Like how in foreign films, every American character is named "John Smith."

Sara: Fredrick, or Eidrick, or Henrick.

Pam: They're running onto the boat, and the guy is like, "Health check?" and he's like, "What? No! We're Americans!"

Joe: Now they would be like, "You're Americans?! You're definitely not allowed on this boat!"

Drew: Is he not the worst character? The Italian friend?

Pam: Fabrizio?

Drew: Oh my god, he's so bad. He's such a bad actor.

 

Pam: He was basically Mario and Luigi. 

Allison: It should've just been John Leguizamo.

Drew: It is sad when he gets crushed by that thing.

Pam: Or when Jack is like, "Sorry, you're not gonna see your mom for a long time... because we're going to America!"

Drew: He's the same type of dude as Jack. He was just like, "Alright, I guess I'm going to America. Fuck it. Let's do it."

Sara: That's fucking crazy. I'm not that spontaneous.

Drew: I'll give James Cameron a lot of credit for all these film characters. Throughout the movie, you meet all these little characters, and then as they die, you see these glimpses of how they face mortal peril.

Joe: Cameron hired 150 extras to be on the set the whole time, and gave each of them a backstory.

Drew: You can tell! There's the one dude who a baker, and at the very end, when Jack and Rose are the only two people on top—

Joe: The dude that's drinking.

Sara: Right, drinking to stay warm.

Drew: You see him pop up throughout the movie, and then there ends up being three final people, and Jack and Rose look over at the baker. This dude has been here the whole time! But you see 50 of these little characters.

Pam: Some of those stories pack a punch. The mom... I can't even say it.

Sara: Oh, the mom with the kids!

Drew: Who's also been in a lot of James Cameron movies. She was in Aliens, she was in Terminator 2.

Joe: She was the blue-faced Avatar chick.

Drew: Oh, yes, that one. Kate Winslet is going to be in Avatar 2, by the way.

Allison: And the old couple in the back?

Pam: I'm crying right now.

Stephan: I actually did cry at the end of this. I was so moved.

Joe: Wait, are you talking about Avatar? [laughter]

Sara: Joe, this is about Titanic. There's a lot of Milwaukee's Best in front of you.

Joe: How do we feel about the framing story, how there's this old lady telling the story to this crew, who is looking for financial gain.

Sara: Those are the parts of a movie that I don't ever think about.

Joe: That's fair. But I'm asking your thoughts.

Sara: The biggest thing, my biggest beef—love this movie, obviously—but I don't really like when it cuts in and out, because I hate that. And the guy with the red beard, who's like, [obnoxious voice] "Did you, uh, do it?" and I'm like, oh my god.

Drew: Horatio Sans played him in a sketch on SNL.

Sara: He's just like this sweaty man, all horny about whether this old lady fucked. And her granddaughter is there, and she's like, [old lady voice] "It was the most sexual moment of my life... up until then." It's like, your granddaughter's there, and you're talking about this strange man sketching you with yo titties out. I dunno. That whole part is like, eh. I didn't need that, but I guess they felt they had to weave it in. And at the end, when you find out she has the diamond—the twist—and she goes out with her old lady toes [laughter] and goes [makes that little twee gasping sound that you can hear in your head as you're reading this] and it's just like, are you fucking kidding me?! You got this big ass diamond that could've funded everyone's life—

Allison: You have all those grandchildren! And they're not gonna get dick!

Sara: And they're not going to get anything! And you just throw it away?! This big ass rock into the ocean?!

Drew: Have you ever noticed that the movie opens with that? It's the Titanic theme, and the very first shot is the diamond necklace spiraling into the depths.

Joe: In media res!

Drew: You don't know what it means yet. It doesn't register.

Sara: Wow, I didn't realize that.

Sunny: Cameron does it again!

Joe: I would've agreed with you [Sara], but I think I got more out of it this time, during the most recent watching.

Sara: What'd you feel?

Joe: I never noticed the Bill Paxton line at the end—

Sara: Also, Daddy Bill Paxton [sexual noise?]

Joe: Who's definitely a James Cameron stand-in. But he says—

Sara: For the record.

Joe: He says—

Drew: He was in Terminator.

Joe: He says—

Drew: And Aliens.

Sara: And Twister.

Joe: He—

 

Drew: That wasn't James Cameron.

 

Sara: Bill Paxton.

 

Joe: He says—

 

Drew: He was in True Lies.

 

Joe: He says—

 

Sara: I don't know directors.

 

Joe: [growls in frustration] He says—

 

Sara: Okay, Willow. Stop.

 

Joe: But he says—he's talking to Rose's granddaughter—he says "I never really got it. I've been looking at the Titanic for three fucking years, and I never really understood the craziness of 1500 people dying on this ship." Like, he's always been thinking about the financial gain. But he finally got it. This is a tragedy.

Sara: Because he's an insensitive asshole.

Joe: But that's him acknowledging that he was an insensitive asshole, but is no longer.

Pam: From Rose's story.

Joe: Exactly.

Sunny: That sexy story.

 

Allison: The diamond was within him all along.

Joe: He said he never let it in. But now he's letting it in. That justifies the whole framework of this old lady telling these shmoes the story.

Sara: It justifies the framework, but do you think that she still should've thrown that diamond into the ocean?

Joe: It's hard to say.

Pam: Well, without that, we wouldn't have had the middle of the Britney Spears song, when she's like, [Derrick Barry impression] "I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean?"

Drew: Oh my god. There's wasn't even a radio edit for that song, they played it every time—"I went down there and got it for you!" "You shouldn't have!"

[various people singing "Oops!... I Did It Again"]

Sara: In that red fucking jumpsuit.

 

Joe: Should Gloria Stuart have won the Oscar?

 

Drew: She did not win.

 

Joe: Should she have won? You asshole!

 

Sunny: Listen to the question!

Joe: Kim Bassinger won it for L.A. Confidential, ya dick!

Sara: ...No.

Pam: No.

Allison: No. I get so much use out of the "it's been 84 years" gif. I get a lot of use out of that. [laughter]

Sunny: That deserves an Oscar?

Sara: When was the last time you went to a restaurant?

Sara and Allison: "It's been 84 years."

Allison: She was good.

Sara: I thought she was good but [sarcastic] I didn't have Joe's take on the framing, so...

Pam: Was Kate Winslet nominated in the same category?

Drew: Winslet was in Lead Actress, Gloria Stuart was in Supporting.

Pam: And neither of them won.

Drew: And Leo was not nominated!

Sara: Leo wasn't even nominated?

Drew: He sucked.

Sara: Do you really think he sucked?

Drew: He was okay, but... permission to speak about my qualms with the film? [laughter]

 

Joe: Well, I'd like to hear Sara's point first. 

Sara: It's not a point, it's just like, "Wait, was Leo bad in this?" Because I was so horny for him, he could've done anything... [laughter]

Drew: He's terrible.

Joe: There are certain moments where he's bad.

Drew: Here's what I'll say. Leo was young, he's gotten better. He had an Oscar nomination for What's Eating Gilbert Grape, but I think that was him being young with raw talent and he can pull it off, but he hadn't matured yet, until like 2002 when he did Gangs of New York and Catch Me If You Can. He had a period when he was riding on good looks and some raw talent. The script was bad. The dialogue was not good. When you have bad dialogue, it's tough to make it sound good. Think about a soap opera, people are like, "These actors are terrible." But they have nothing to work with! The dialogue is terrible. So you need a real talented actor to make bad dialogue sound good. Kate Winslet really pulled it off. She took bad dialogue and made it sound good.

Sara: She's fantastic.

Drew: Leo was not mature enough as an actor—yet, he's better now—at the time, he was a heartthrob, who couldn't pull off these terrible lines.

Sara: True. He was a real hottie boom botty. Can I tell you, I felt included when they were in the hull of the ship when they were at the white trash party—not white trash, but all the poor people—"Look Rose, poor people can have fun too!"

 

Joe: A La Salle Friends party.

 

Sara: There's the girl Clara, and he's like, "You're still my girl, Clara!"

Drew: There's a deleted scene where you see her die.

Pam: [sound of disgust] What?

Drew: They deleted it because it was too dark.

Sara: That's so dark.

Drew: I watched the extended cut, where they have all the deleted scenes. Clara and her parents are trapped behind the bars where they are keeping the poor people, and they're like, "Help us! Please god help us!" and it just fills up with water. They cut it out.

Sara: Wow. Thank god.

Drew: But they shot that!

Sunny: They shot every person on that boat dying.

Drew: And that's another thing I'll give [Cameron] credit for. He's not afraid to show children dying. There's that shot where the little kid is down there, and his dad comes, and they both drown. You see them die. The woman with the white baby—

Pam: Oh god. I couldn't watch that either.

Drew: That's a movie rule. Kids can't die. You can't ever show kids dying. I can't believe this movie is PG-13!

Sara: But it does show the gravity of the situation.

Drew: I just give him a lot of credit for showing the true peril. When they show the staff getting hit with water, and they're shrieking at the top of their lungs. You really feel like these people are like, "I'm about to die."

Allison: What's really interesting is, until we started talking about this movie, I never really classified this movie as a "disaster film." It is, but you think about the Jack and Rose romance story, and that's just a part of it. That carries you through it.

 

Drew: [under breath] The worst part of it.

Pam: How horrifying is it that the people were trapped behind the gates? The guards were like "Go back to the main stairwell, go back to your rooms, there's nothing to worry about."

Drew: Because they were poor. I wish they should've more of that. They show a little, like, "I'm rich, you're poor, you have to go back below the deck." But "We don't want to cause a panic for the rich people, so you have to drown," that was... I wanted to see more of that.

Allison: "If you didn't want to die, you shouldn't have been born!"

Joe: Compare that to today. Does that specific class structure exist?

[sarcastic laughter]

 

Sara: No, that doesn't exist now. Not in a situation like that.

Sunny: Are you fucking kidding me? It's way worse!

Sara: Worse?

Sunny: Yeah!

Sara: I don't think that if we were in a situation right now, they'd be locking people below deck.

Drew: They legally can't, because of the Titanic.

Pam: What about protestors who were trapped on 676 and got pepper-sprayed in the face?

Sunny: It's like the door could be locked, and I'm just not going to unlock it. The door has always been locked.

Sara: Okay...

Sunny: As policy, we lock the door where the poor people are, and no one goes down there to unlock it.

Sara: I'd like to think, in my heart of hearts—

Sunny: In the year 1912, we'll all work together when this great disaster happens, that we'll all fit together in half the space, and we'll all work together.

Sara: I guess it is kind of like that fucking shitty meme that went around after September 11th this year—"I wish every day was like September 12th. It didn't matter who you were..."

[general groans]

Sara: "We were all one country!" I was like, "Oh, and also when you were punching Muslims in the face? And calling Mosques to threaten people?"

Joe: That's the difference now. No rich person is saying out loud that there is a difference between first class and third class. They are trying to build the illusion that people who are in third class like us are just "first class in waiting."

Sara: I have another segueway about that—I was in Girl Scouts the same year that the Titanic—

Drew: Sank.

Sara: —came out. We had a dinner to show... they basically did this exercise where we drew numbers to see if you were going to be first class, second class, or third class. It was a way to show disparity in food. If you drew a three, your dinner was cold oatmeal. If you drew a two, it was like spaghetti and sauce. If you drew a one, it was a steak dinner. Fortunately... I drew a one, and I did not learn much from the experience. [laughter] I had a candlelit dinner with a tablecloth, and white gloves on.

Allison: While you were eight? [laughter]

Sara: While my friends ate slop. And I was like, "Wow, you're right, there is hunger in the world." I don't think I learned a lot from that. So if I was one of the first class people, I don't think I would've said much. The exercise was wasted on me.

Sunny: I didn't realize that's what Girl Scouts was.

Joe: "Marxist! Socialist!"

Sara: Really trying to show us that not everyone has the same, and I was like, "Well I have it better."

Pam: When we were at the Titanic Museum, they had replicas of the actual Titanic rooms. It was crazy to see the differences. You could even see it in the movie, like, "Here is your sitting deck." They had a whole deck to sit on! And then the third class were all sharing a chamber pot.

Drew: It won Best Production Design at the Oscars for the set.

Sara: The sets are amazing.

Drew: I will say, as an Oscar buff, this movie holds the record—well, it's tied—for the most awards won ever. It won eleven. There are three movies that have won eleven. There's Ben-Hur in 1959.

Pam: Oh god, we just watched that this year.

Drew: Titanic. And Lord of the Rings: Return of the King—nominated for eleven Oscars, won all eleven.

Sara: I don't like Lord of the Rings. It's weird. There's elves...

Drew: Titanic is also tied for the most nominations ever, at fourteen. The only ones it didn't win were Best Leading Actress—Kate Winslet did not win—Best Supporting Actress—Gloria Stuart did not win—and Best Makeup? I thought the makeup was pretty good. All the people with the icicles in their hair.

Sara: What else was in makeup that year? Maybe it was something good.

Drew: There were three movies nominated that year. Let's see...

Joe: Men in Black won for Best Makeup.

Drew: Actually, yeah, you're right!

Joe: Why do you always act surprised when I know something? I prepare for this shit!

Allison: The man has notes!

Drew: Men in Black had great makeup.

Sara: No, that makes sense.

Sunny: Tough to beat.

Pam: Do you have another question for Sara?

Sara: Yeah, what's the question?

Sunny: Is the Titanic sinking the best thing that could've happened to Rose in her life? This awful tragedy?

Sara: Yes. Getting on the Titanic was the best thing that happened to her.

Allison: Damn. What a bleak life.

Sunny: Should we be looking for more tragedy in life like that?

Sara: I don't think it's a bleak life. It was shit before that.

Allison: Well for her. But 1500 people had to die for her to have a good life?

Drew: She's also a Philadelphia native, I'm not sure if you caught that.

Sunny: Go Eagles? [laughter]

Pam: "Go Birds!" [imitating this infamous clip]

Joe: When she decided that she was going to dock with Jack—

Drew: Dock? Like... dock? Like... docking?

Joe: When Rose said that she was going to dock with Jack— [laughter] Relax!

Drew: When Rose was going to fist Jack.

Joe: —she made that decision before the glacier hit—

Drew: The glacier representing the fist.

Joe: Her life could've been just as good...

Allison: There's so many... she could've changed her mind. Her mother was still there. She still had Cal there. A lot of things could've changed. They're still a couple days away from land.

Drew: They imply that it might not have lasted, when they say that her father left them in a lot of debt, they're out of money—

Sara: That's why she need to marry Cal.

Drew: —because otherwise they are actually going to become poor.

Sara: Her mom's face is forever ingrained in my head. I can just see the little puss on her face, her pinched face.

Drew: Frances Fisher. Fun fact, Frances Fisher was originally cast in Home Improvement as Tim Taylor's wife—

Sunny: [Tim Taylor grunt] [laughter]

 

Joe: Ah shit, how am I going to transcribe that?

 

Drew: —but the studio audience hated her so much that they had to replace her!

Joe: She was hated so much that she was cast in this role in Titanic.

Allison: I cannot see that at all.

Drew: Right! No one could.

Joe: Who is the true villain in Titanic?

Drew: Billy Zane.

Allison: The iceberg.

Sara: Cal.

 

Unknown: [Tim Taylor grunt]

 

Joe: I thought it was the mom. She wouldn't be in the position she was without her.

 

Pam: What about the financier? 

 

Drew: Bruce Ismay.

 

Sara: The villain is the male ego!

 

Allison: Yes!

 

[Sara, Allison, and Pam start clapping and yelling.]

 

Sara: The male ego is why everyone is dead! Y'all—not y'all at this table, I understand you are all evolved men—

 

Allison: This is basically a Lizzo song.

 

Ryan: But if you told me to drove this boat really fast, and said "I bet you'll be able to miss this iceberg," I'd be like, "Well..."

 

Sara: Ryan's out here like [either indecipherable or Sara is doing hand motions of some sort]. I say the male ego is the villain. But also Cal. Mainly Cal. Or the iceberg. Male ice!

Joe: Me and Pam were talking about this. Do you feel that Jack has an ego?

Sara: Yes.

Drew: Because he's so hot?

Pam: I came to this realization watching the movie this time. The whole movie, Jack is telling Rose "You shouldn't let other people tell you what to do," and then the whole movie, he's going, "Rose! You gotta listen to me, Rose! Rose! You gotta climb here, Rose!"

[Lots of people talking here, but I did hear Drew yell "That's bad writing!" multiple times.]

Sara: It's also his ego too, right? "I'm so cool, I can jump onto this deck, steal a coat to look rich," and he walked around like he owned the place. You know who does that? Men! Men do that. [slamming fist on table] I say that with intimation! [slams fist on table again]

Ryan: When was the last time that I've stolen a coat? [laughter]

Sara: I love you, baby.

 

Joe: If we're talking about classes—

 

Sara: Also, I don't think anyone at this table has egos. I'm sorry.

Joe: No, that's okay! 

 

Sara: I'm just smoothing things over.

 

Joe: That's for saying I don't have an ego.

Ryan: Fragile!

Sara: The men in here are great men, who are evolved and progressive men.

Ryan: Thank you.

Sara: I'm shaking hands with my boyfriend.

Ryan: This is not very sexual. [laughter]

Sara: Note that there's a lot of platonic energy.

Joe: I'm going to note in the transcription that Ryan's hand is coming down a sweaty window right now. [laughter]

Allison: How many parents in the '90s had to clean handprints off of foggy bathroom mirrors?

Sara: Sara B******'s parents did.

Pam: Just to reenact it?

Drew: There's something about—I'm divided between that being so fucking stupid and cheesy, or like really great, how she loses her virginity in the back of a car, on a luxury ship, with these leather seats—

Joe: Who's saying she is a virgin? When do they say that?

Sara: She says it.

Drew: She's seventeen.

Sara: She's says that the "most erotic moment" up until then was when she was drawn.

Joe: Who's saying she couldn't have had unerotic sex with Billy Zane?

Drew: It was during a time when people didn't have sex before marriage.

Allison: The rich didn't have to.

Drew: But she loses her virginity in the back of a car.

Pam: [sarcastically?] I'm sure the sex was so good that first time...

Ryan: So... Billy Zane was sexually frustrated [laughter] which was why he was pulling out a handgun—

Drew: And flips a table.

Stephan: It makes a lot of sense now.

Ryan: I'm not siding with Billy Zane, I'm just saying!

Sunny: Think about it—this dude is just trying to get a nut off, and now the boat crashes?!

Allison: He's an incel! I get it!

Drew: According to James Cameron, his father was a Pittsburgh steel tycoon, that's why he has a lot of money.

Sara: What's your next question, Joe?

Joe: I guess I could point out how I thought it was interesting—it's clear that the women were the true second class in this movie—

Allison: [sarcastically] Wow. Hot take.

Sara: [sarcastically] Deep.

Joe: I'm not trying to be deep! I'm just continuing what we were talking about.

Pam: They did let women off the boat first.

Joe: After the table flipped—this was the first time I noticed this—the maid ran over, and you could see how empathetic she was. And it was like, "Don't worry about it," and you could tell that she knew, as a woman, how fucked Rose was.

Sara: Even if you're in first class as a woman, you're still never going to be...

Allison: You couldn't vote.

Sara: If you were rich, you could learn how to read. If you were lucky to have that. Yeah, women have been second class for a long time. Please remember, we have only been able to vote for 100 years.

Drew: At the time of Titanic sinking, it had been negative eight years! [laughter]

Joe: Even when Molly Brown was like "We should go back for our husbands and our sons!" and that dude was like "Shut that hole in your face!" and she just shut up. Because that's how it was. That's hard, man.

Sara: You got two daughters now. Does that make you feel differently?

Joe: I mean, I tell Martha to shut the hole in her face all the time. [laughter]

Drew: You're saying that she's going to be watching Titanic twenty years from now, and be like, "Oh my god! That's where he got that from!"

Joe: "C'mon Willow, we have to go back! Our Cheerios are back there!"

Pam: If I could be a character in Titanic, it would be the Unsinkable Molly Brown.

Sara: My girl!

Allison: That was basically the character I played in Titanic: The Musical. It was a made-up person for the musical based on Molly Brown—

Drew: Molly Brown is a real person!

Allison: No! I'm saying that the character I played was based on her.

Drew: They couldn't legally say her name?

Ryan: Was the name close?

Drew: "Morley Born"?

 

Sara: "Polly Orange"?

Allison: It was like "Charlotte Cardoza."

Drew: Does anyone recall that in 2008, there was a movie called Revolutionary Road, where Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were playing a married couple? No one ever talks about the fact that Kathy Bates was also in that movie! Kathy Bates is a large supporting role. She plays their neighbor. She's third-billed. [yelling—why?!] No one talks about how the three of them are from Titanic! Justice for Kathy Bates! That blows my mind!

Sara: You don't think Kathy Bates has gotten her due?

[Editor's note: Look, I'm not even going to transcribe all the unnecessary Kathy Bates shit from Drew right now.]

Joe: And the glacier was fourth-billed, right?

Sara: So would Titanic happen in 2020—

Drew: No, because—

Sara: —with global warming, and there's no icebergs anymore.

Allison: We're going to have to explain to kids what icebergs were.

 

Sara: [sad trombone sound]

 

Allison: Sorry about that "cold" take.

 

Drew: And ships have enough lifeboats!

 

Joe: I remember talking to my parents about this when I was younger, going on a cruise ship and something like this happening. They were like, well no, we have cell phones now, and helicopters, there's no way they would let it—

 

[Various: "There's no way this ship will sink!" "It's the unsinkable Carnival!" etc. Sorry, reader, it's getting more difficult to figure out who is yelling what at this point in the interview.]

Drew: There was a ship that sank recently in the Mediterranean. Only a 100 people died. [Editor's note: Probably talking about the Costa Concordia here. 32 people died.]

Sunny: Only 100?

Drew: It capsized. This is fucked up, but there were people trapped in the elevators. That was half the deaths.

[various groans]

Ryan: That's terrible.

Drew: They had helicopters, they had enough lifeboats, and they were only a mile from shore. But it hit a sandbar or something, and they slowly went over, but there were people who just couldn't get out in time.

Allison: Jesus Christ.

Drew: It still happens! [Editor's note: Especially if you are Car Seat Headrest.]

Pam: Cruise ships are one of the worst things that exist. For the environment.

Joe: A lot of date rape.

Pam: They treat their workers horribly. 

Sara: Cruises should just be banned.

Sunny: They should be! If cruises come back—

Drew: Cruise ships can't melt steel beams.

Sara: Also, the noroviruses that go around on cruise ships, even before coronavirus.

Stephan: There were those people quarantined on that boat for a while.

Sara: Just floating out there.

Joe: So all these negative things that we're talking about with cruise ships definitely applied to Titanic, the ship.

Sara: Right, but there were also not a lot of ways to travel across the Atlantic.

Pam: You couldn't fly.

Sunny: But why would you need to go transatlantic?

Joe: If you win a poker game.

 

Drew: To immigrate. 

Sunny: General immigration.

Drew: The third-class citizens were immigrants.

Pam: And they were going to Ellis Island?

Drew: Yeah, New York City.

Pam: That was the plan?

Sunny: So most of the people that were coming for the American Dream died on the way? That's awesome.

Drew: 84% of the third-class citizens died.

Pam: There were 2000 people on the ship, and 1500 died total.

Joe: How is anything different today, is my question.

Drew: Well, you have to have enough lifeboats now.

Joe: No, I'm not talking about the ships specifically. I'm talking about the fact that more poor people are dying from Coronavirus than rich people. Much larger numbers!

Sara: Money wins out in the end. But... women can vote.

Drew: Our billionaire president got coronavirus.

Joe: Maybe by the time this interview is published, he'll be dead. [Editor's note: He is not dead.]

Drew: We can only hope.

Joe: I'm not saying I'm hoping.

Drew: I hope he dies. I really do.

Pam: I don't want him to be president again, but it's karmically bad to wish death on someone.

Joe: Well, no, it would be like wishing that Billy Zane didn't get on a lifeboat. Because he spent the whole fucking time saying that the boat couldn't sink, right?

Pam: Cal did?

Joe: Him and his cronies!

Drew: trump is the Bruce Ismay.

Joe: Pretty much! Saying that coronavirus is never going to sink him... and here he is, testing positive.

Sara: I don't want to talk about this anymore.

Pam: Let's transition to Kate Winslet's boobs.

Joe: So, out of the—well, Ryan's in the bathroom, but the other three guys here—who—

Sara: [yelling into the other room] Ry! Were Kate Winslet's boobs the first boobs you ever saw?

Ryan: [indecipherable]

[laughter]

Sara: He said no... so I'm going to ask him who his first set was. [laughter]

Drew: Like Sara, I did not see this in theaters, I saw it on the two VHS tapes in middle school. I do not know if these were the first human breasts I saw. Probably not?

Joe: I don't know either, but I remember seeing those boobs, and—

Allison: They stick with you.

Sara: They were my first boobs besides, like, when I saw my mother's boobs when I was young.

Stephan: It was 2012 or 2013 when I first saw this movie, so... [laughter] It was absolutely the first pair of boobs I ever saw.

Sunny: Are you a Never Nude?

Sara: He just saw Allison's for the first time after their wedding.

Allison: Finally.

Joe: "They look just like Kate Winslet's."

Allison: For the record, they 100% do.

Stephan: They look great in 3D. [laughter]

Drew: Wouldn't that be fucked up if they really did make a point to make her boobs 3D in theaters?

Sara: The 3D was a little lame.

Drew: Yeah, it's a gimmick. They're trying to make money.

Sara: I paid for it, so shut the hell up.

Drew: No—I—before COVID, do you know how many movies I paid to see? I was probably spending a thousand dollars a year! No, not that much. But it costs seventeen dollars in New York to see a matinee.

Sunny: Only in Manhattan!

Unknown: It's fourteen dollars for a loaf of bread!

Allison: I'm walkin' here!

Drew: I was going to the movie three or four times a month. I was spending $50 a month on movies. I can't judge you.

Sara: And also... Titanic is my favorite movie. So when it came out in 3D, I was like, "Here's my money, take it, I'm getting the popcorn, and I'm watching this." Because I had never seen it in theaters!

Allison: Same, I never saw it in theaters.

Sara: It's an awesome movie to see in theaters.

Allison: The scope of it is very exciting.

Sara: It's great when they're out on the deck, Jack and Rose are running through—after they had sex—they're running through where they are shoveling the coals, and it's kind of slow-mo, and it looks like her gown might catch on fire, it's so cool. And they get up on the deck, and the iceberg is hit, and the ice comes at you in 3D. That's one of the best scenes!

Drew: I saw something on how they made that. When you see the iceberg hit from the railing, they literally had people throwing chunks of ice, and they cut them out, and CGI'd an iceberg in. But there's a little line where you have real ice, and they just deleted the people from the shot. It's crazy though! It won Best Visual Effects for a reason!

Allison: It really does hold up.

Drew: And they never sailed the boat. When they're at the front of the boat, with the ocean moving, that's all visual effects! It looks great!

Sara: I think the movie holds up too.

Stephan: I was way more impressed by it as a whole film than I thought I was going to be. When I saw it, I was just like, "This is going to be a cheesy love movie that"—

Drew: And it is for the middle 50%, but the beginning, and the last hour are great.

Sunny: Isn't Terminator just a cheesy love story?

Drew: James Cameron has every right to make one. He had only made action movies to that point. He had made Aliens, Terminator, Terminator 2, True Lies, and then he's like, "I'm going to make a serious drama."

Sunny: This is just a action disaster movie, right?

Drew: This is the first time—and I'm going to reference the article that you [Joe] sent me, that I read—

Joe: That Titanic started the hater culture... of which you are a part of.

Drew: Yes and no. The reasons that they cite in that are the exact reasons that I dislike the film—it's the script. The story is cliché, and the dialogue is ridiculous.

Joe: But what makes a story "cliché"? It's so true that it happens often, right? So saying something is "cliché" is saying that it's true to life.

Sunny: A truth you are tired of hearing.

Drew: You're talking about—again, I'm talking about the difference between classic and cliché. Something that's classic is so universal that every generation can identify with it, or it's been done so many times—

Sara: Falling in love on a vacation.

Drew: Or it's been done so many times that it's like, "Alright, we fucking get it! Stop treating me like I'm a fucking five-year-old!"

Sara: Do you know what love is, baby?

Drew: It's patronizing.

Joe: You gotta zoom out. You gotta appreciate the position that Rose is in, and how true to life... when you're in that position and you find someone or something that is going to be your escape from that position, and how hard you would cling to that thing—

Drew: That justifies Rose, but how would you justify Jack's character, who is a flat, silly, wooden character?

Joe: He's a plot device, for sure. But that doesn't make Rose's motivations less true to life.

Drew: Kate Winslet's performance elevates that role. I will say that.

Joe: Well I completely disagree with you.

Sunny: The boobs elevate the role.

Sara: Stop! She's more than just a pair of breasts.

Drew: I will say many, many, many great things about this film, but I think the script, the writing, and the characters are pretty bad.

Joe: There are clunky lines, but I feel like no one at this table can say that they haven't been in that type of position where they've been somewhere or in some type of position where they didn't want to be and—

Drew: But they could've done a better job with the fucking dialogue! [Editor's note: picture me reaching through the audio recorder to wring Drew's neck.]

Joe: Stop! Relax!

Drew: "Oh no, it's the Chippewa Falls Dawsons."

Sara: It's a joke! It's a joke!

Drew: It's terrible writing!

Sara: Have you ever been a horny nineteen-year-old?

Drew: That's who this is written for.

Sara: That's what he is!

Drew: That doesn't make it a good script. There are only two movies in history that have won Best Picture and not been nominated for a Best Screenplay. Titanic is one of them. [Editor's note: It's a wonder that we were able to talk about anything at all without Drew bringing it back to the goddamn fucking Oscars. Jesus fucking Christ.]

Sara: What's the other one?

Drew: Sound of Music.

Sara: Fuck that movie. On the record.

Drew: Even though this movie has been nominated for more Oscars and has won more Oscars than anything, where they did not nominate was one, script was terrible, and two, Leo's performance was not that great. Those were the two big snubs, and they were well-deserved snubs.

Joe: Sara! Tell us about a time in your life...

Sara: When I was on a boat?

Sunny: When you caused a massive disaster?

Joe: No, when you felt trapped. Quote unquote.

Sara: A time in my life when I felt "trapped"?

Drew: "I fell in a bear trap this morning."

Joe: Shut up! I'm trying to build a case that you can empathize with Rose, not in this specific way, but in a general way.

Sara: I empathize with Rose completely. Especially as a teenager, like when I brought up my LiveJournal earlier today. I think you feel angsty and trapped and there's more to life, more to do. She was an angsty seventeen-year-old. She was going to be married off to a man. She had not experienced anything, and I think that almost all coming-of-age people—myself included—can relate to that. And the idea that you have one path of life, and there's this sexy other path.

 

Allison: "Two paths diverged in the woods, and I took the sexy one." [laughter]

 

Sara: And I've been through that. And I think her story—to Drew's point, do I disagree that the script is bad? Yes! Only because I love the movie so much. If you tied me down and made me read it word for word... I'd probably be like, "Fine, Drew, you're right," but I don't like admitting I'm wrong.

Joe: I think the point should be that the movie is better than the script.

Sara: The movie is better than the script.

Allison: The whole is better than the sum of its parts.

Sara: I watched the movie at ten or eleven, and then watched it over and over again, when I was coming of age, and trying to find my way, and feeling trapped at my parents' house, and was learning what I actually wanted to do, and how I was different. And you see this girl who was trapped in her life, trying to escape. There's funny things, hot scenes, it's exciting. By the time my parents would actually let me watch it, I would watch it all the time. [laughter]

Allison: When your parents finally let you watch it, did you have to pretend you'd never seen it before?

Sara: I absolutely had to pretend.

Drew: "Oh my god, he died? What?"

 

Allison: "What are those?!"

 

Drew: Has anyone ever seen a PG-13 movie with boobs? This has to be the only one!

 

Allison: No, it definitely exists.

 

Sara: You can find it on the internet. Ryan, can you look it up, please?

 

Sunny: Find those boobs!

 

Drew: It's gotta be so artfully done. Because it was art. "You can show that to kids because its like a Renaissance painting."

 

Sunny: Maybe that was the point. He wanted to do a Titanic movie as a kids' movie.

 

Sara: The nudity actually moves the plot along. The use of nudity—I don't want to say "necessary," because I don't think nudity has to be necessary—but I don't think it was used gratuitously. It moves the plot along. They don't actually use nudity in the sex scene!

 

Drew: That's true. 

 

Sunny: It's not pornography.

 

Drew: Oh man!

Allison: There's not a lot of raunchy stuff.

Drew: We just found out that Airplane! has tits, and that's PG-13.

Sara: I knew there had to be one.

Drew: And they are not artful.

Sara: They're gratuitous.

Pam: It probably has to do with the year it came out.

Allison: Apparently The Diving Bell and the Butterfly too. National Lampoon's European Vacation.

Sara: What do you think, Joe? What are you thinking about? [Editor's note: I was thinking about how I should've banned cell phone usage from the interview. That shit always makes the interviews seem so disjointed.] What do you think about Titanic overall? Having to watch it for this interview.

Joe: Okay, so we actually—

Sara: And thank you for doing that. You have two young children, and you subjected yourself to three hours of a movie.

Pam: It's one of the movies I'll always watch.

Drew: Do you have the two VHS tapes? [laughter]

Pam: We watched it in two parts.

Joe: We definitely stopped it where the VHS tapes stop for intermission.

Drew: Where does it stop?

Joe: After the crash. It's right in the middle.

Drew: It's almost as if you could just watch the second disk.

Joe: And it's definitely so interesting how hard the movie pivots from a romance to a disaster movie, and how obvious it is. They have Rose and Jack just looking at the glacier with a shocked look on their faces, and you can just feel, as the audience, that this is a different movie now. 

Sara: It's almost like two movies in one.

Pam: And you obviously know it's going to happen, going into the movie—

Sunny: "I wonder what happens in Titanic?"

Pam: But you're still like, "Oh shit!"

Sara: Or when Jack gets put in ship jail, and she goes downstairs, and has to break him out, and the water is rushing down...

Drew: Think about how well that movie is made. They didn't do CGI, so they had to build all these sets—

Sara: They built them, and then filled them with water.

Pam: Did it win for Best Sound? Because—

Drew: Yes. I can tell you all eleven.

Allison: Please! Please! We can tell you've been dying to.

Drew: There's two categories for Sound, Editing and Mixing.

Pam: But when she was coming to get him, holding onto things while she's holding the ax, and you hear the ship bellowing and creaking in the back. It's so creepy!

Drew: That level of storytelling, when he looks out the window, and it cuts back a few minutes later, and the water is higher. It's very good storytelling. Again, I hate the middle of the movie when they are getting to know each other [Editor's note: kill me now]. But the sinking sequence is jaw-dropping.

Pam: Drew, it sounds like you really like this movie.

Sunny: Yeah, it sounds like you love this movie.

Drew: I love everything except [Editor's note: you get it you get it you get it].

Sara: I would like to know, does anyone at this table vehemently dislike this movie?

Various: No.

Sara: [to Ryan] You don't hate it?

Ryan: I'm indifferent.

Sara: It sounds like he doesn't like it.

Sunny: It sounds like he doesn't like it. Just say it!

Ryan: I respect it—

Sunny: I didn't say you respect it, I said do you like it.

Sara: Like, if I sat down and watched it, would you watch it with me?

Ryan: Too long. No.

Sara: Okay. On the record—Ryan does not like Titanic. It does not affect our relationship at all. [laughter]

Ryan: There are so many parts that are cool about the movie. I could see through it. I dunno.

Sara: If it was on, I could sit through the whole thing.

Drew: The last hour is astonishing. Amazing.

Sara: It does make me happy that people really respect it. I was saying on the way up yesterday, that when you talk about your "favorite" movie, then it's a movie that evokes a lot of emotion out of you. And a lot of memories. There are movies better than Titanic. There are tons of movies that are better—

 

Drew: When it came out, people didn't think so. People said it was the greatest movie ever made.

 

Sara: Right. But there are movies with better storytelling, with characters you can more personally relate to. But I think "favorite movie"  to me personally is something that reminds you of your childhood, a lot of memories, warm feelings, and that is what Titanic is to me. The whole thing makes me think of my childhood, of coming of age, of sexual awakening—

Various: Ooh!

Sara: All of those things!

Drew: With Leo, I feel like it sexually awakened a lot of young girls.

Allison: Who did not have a Tiger Beat poster of Leo DiCaprio on their wall?

Sara: The whole thing is more than a movie to me. It's an entire part of my life. That's what "favorite movie" means to me.

Joe: We were talking about this earlier, how probably a lot of people feel that way? Obviously, it was a popular movie.

Sara: A lot of people my age feel that way, because it's about that age... for the record, I'm 25. [laughter]

Sunny: So you saw this movie when you were two?

Sara: Shut up Sunny!

Allison: No wonder your parents were so protective! [laughter] "This infant cannot see this movie."

Ryan: She was on a sleepover, three years old...

Sara: What was your question, Joe?

Joe: Does that affect your opinion about Titanic, the fact that you are not unique in that opinion?

Sara: No, no. Does it affect my opinion of myself that I liked wearing the same clothes as other girls my age? That I liked Spice Girls? That doesn't affect my opinion.

Pam: But does it make you like it any less, because it was so popular?

Drew: It did rule the world when it came out.

Sara: But I loved that it ruled the world! That's part of what made me want to see it. That there were sketches about it, commercials about it, all these pop cultural things—

Pam: It was all that people talked about.

Drew: It stayed in theaters for over a year.

Sara: "Are Kate and Leo going to be together in real life? Are they best friends?" All those things are part of it, and it doesn't make me feel... I'm not one of those asshole people who are like "I only like cool indie things, you've probably never heard of this movie. It's called Donnie Darko" [laughter] "You've probably never heard of it, and that makes me cool and quirky." That's not me. And if that's any of you...

Joe: Somebody's pointing at Allison?

[Editor's note: Allison tries to respond but Drew insists on yelling loudly over her, so that I can't understand either of them.]

Allison: I was going to say that that was like me, but then Sara got really personal. [laughter] That's very much who I was.

Sara: I'm sorry.

Allison: When this movie came out, I was nine or ten. I didn't see it in theaters. I wasn't into the whole "heartthrobby" culture. I was trying to be a little bit more of an alternative kid—yes, Donnie Darko—so when I finally saw Titanic, I tried really hard not to like it.

[Editor's note: Lots of Donnie Darko chatter that I don't understand because I've never seen it.]

Sara: So you were trying not to like it.

Allison: I tried really hard not to like it, because I wasn't really—

Drew: Hater culture.

Allison: Yeah, I wasn't into romance movies. The first time I saw Moulin Rouge!, for example, I was like, "This is stupid, this is corny."

Sara: Well, also, it is stupid and corny.

Stephan: I fucking love that movie.

Allison: "It's so flashy and beautiful!" and I was like "Uh, true love doesn't exist... fuck everything." I was a weird, angsty child. But so when I saw this movie, I was trying to not like it, even though it was powerful, moving, and beautiful. People were like, "Leo is beautiful," and I was like, "I don't like blonde men. I like my men to be"—

Sunny: Like Donnie Darko.

Allison: Yes.

Stephan: Before Titanic, though, for people who watched it when they were younger—did you watch a whole lot of romance-y shit?

Sunny: Who's watching romance at nine?

Stephan: Some people were!

Sara: All girls. Fairy tales!

Pam: I was in seventh grade when this came out, so I was a teen. A prime time for this. I saw it in theaters three times.

Stephan: But as a boy, that kind of stuff—I would watch that kind of stuff and be like, "This is really stupid and boring."

Drew: As an adult, you can respect it as a film, but when it was at its peak, this was not a movie that eleven-year-old boys were dying to see.

Allison: [male voice] "For my birthday, we're all gonna go see Titanic, and then get a pizza."

Sara: But as girls, that was shoved down our throats. One of my favorite movies was Anastasia, and I was so horny for Demetri.

Allison: The cartoon?

Sara: The cartoon!

Drew: Hank Azaria?

Sara: No, not the dad!

Allison: Bartok can get it!

Sara: I do really think that in girl-related movies, princess movies, [clapping for emphasis] it is romance, it is love, it is the dress, it is the wedding—

Allison: See, I rejected a lot of that—

Sara: Sara B****** was like, "I want to be a princess."

Allison: —for a very long time. Anything that resembled that, I was like, "I do not like this."

Drew: That's why Titanic made as much money as it did. Obviously it was a big blockbuster, and it made a lot of money in general, but you don't break box office records by everyone seeing it once. You break records by people seeing it a second time, a third time, thirteen-year-old girls going back to see Leo time and time again.

Pam: I did see it three times.

Sara: You saw it three times?! I think if I was in seventh grade, I would've seen it three times.

Allison: I have a related Girl Scout story. I was in Brownies. We had a meeting with the Juniors—the older girls—and they had all seen Titanic. And they were all talking about it, and all the Brownies were trying to relate to it, but none of us had seen it. And they were making a big deal about [mumbling] "There are boobies in it," and we were like, "We want to see boobies!"

Sunny: But you had boobies, right?

Sara: Not at that age.

Allison: And even if we did...

Pam: Not like that. Not like Kate's.

Sara: Mine might look like that. [laughter]

Drew: Kate Winslet has normal-sized tits.

Stephan: They were huge in 3D.

Allison: They were very—

Pam: Perky.

Allison: Perky, but also basic.

Drew: That was also the fourth time she showed her tits on screen. She wasn't a huge star, but she had been in movies before. She had already shown her tits three times before that.

Joe: Drew is an encyclopedia of movie boobs.

Drew: She quit doing it because she hit twelve movies when she did it. After Revolutionary Road, she was like, "That's it." [Editor's note: I cannot possibly fact-check this without getting fired.]

Sara: You gotta remember, boobs look different. Aeroles look different. Nipples look different. You gotta remember!

Joe: Besides Rose's boobs, what do you, Sara, think the theme of Titanic is?

Allison: I thought he was going to ask who else's boobs should we have seen on Titanic? The answer is Kathy Bates.

Joe: What is the main thing you should take away from Titanic? In your opinion.

 

Sara: Hmm.

Allison: We didn't even talk about Celine Deon yet.

Joe: We can talk about that first, if you want. Number one hit song.

Sara: I'll answer the question first. I really think it's... part of me says the love story—to Drew's chagrin—but the other part is the catastrophe of it all. The scenes that are that big.

Joe: So an epic story.

Sara: You go away thinking... you should walk away feeling moved. You should feel moved about the people who lost their lives. You should feel thoughtful.

Joe: So we should feel like Bill Paxton at the end—"I'm finally taking it in. I never got it, but now I'm getting it. I understand the atrocity as it happened."

Sara: But as we know, when it comes to history, and how we learn history—it's never the full story. We don't learn the emotional sides of history. It's very like, "This is what happened, these are the facts, okay, then it changed for the better! And this happened, and it changed for the better." You don't get the deep emotional connection with the event.

Joe: So this movie is giving you the emotional connection that we need.

Sara: Yes. And also—another fun fact—my great-grandmother was a nurse, one of the first nurses in Shamokin, Pennsylvania. When the Carpathia came into New York, she went to New York to tend to Titanic survivors. So I also have a personal connection.

 

Stephan: Did you know that before you watched it?

 

Sara: I absolutely knew that, because my dad is obsessed with talking about our family, and is obsessed with our history. There's no way he would've let me not know.

 

Stephan: So you already had, even before the movie—

 

Sara: A personal connection, yeah. I was pumped for the movie because of that, but my parents said no because of titties.

 

Drew: There's a very dark chapter after the Titanic. After it sank, around the world, people said "We're going to have enough lifeboats for every person on board."

 

Pam: Well that makes sense!

 

Drew: A lot of older boats had to be retrofit with more lifeboats. Which made them very top-heavy. For instance, in Chicago, there was a big passenger ship, in 1914, less than two years after Titanic, in Lake Michigan, they had to increase the lifeboats by like 60%. They never tested it out. They filled this boat with, I dunno, a thousand people? The second it shipped off, the lifeboats caused the ship to immediately flip over, and over 600 people drowned. [Editor's note: The SS Eastland, and it sunk in 1915, not 1914, bitch!!!!]

Joe: This is what you got out of Titanic the movie?

Drew: Yes.

Allison: What was the point of lifeboats if there weren't enough for the people on board? What was the point? Why have any? Why have them at all?

Sunny: A security blanket. The same way people would say "we have cell phones and helicopters will save us." Security blanket.

Sara: I am never envious of people who lived in that time period.

Sunny: You'd rather be someone living in our time period?

Sara: I'm currently watching Peaky Blinders. You couldn't pay me enough money to—

Drew: To be in Peaky Blinders?

Ryan: Slicing people's eyes off.

Sara: To wear those clothes, to not have running water, smell horseshit everywhere.

Drew: That was James Cameron's big "I'm a director scene," where the mom is like, "You need to marry this man"—tightens corset—"It'll save our fortune"—tightens corset—"I'm James Cameron, and I'm going to be a director now."

Sara: [to Joe] Is that it?

Joe: ...No.

Sara: What's up? How long are we going? I have to pee so bad. Who's the pee master? Stephan? Can I pee?

Stephan: Sure.

Drew: I don't know what this means.

Pam: Kings. [Editor's note: Whoever pulls a three is the "peemaster," and decides who can pee and when. Clearly, we were playing Kings before this interview.]

Sara: I'm going to go pee.

Drew: Joe, I liked the article you sent me, how they mentioned that, in hater culture, liking "My Heart Will Go On" was the most uncool thing you could have ever done.

Joe: So many people liked it, it went to number one on the Billboard charts.

Drew: It won the Oscar! For Best Original Song!

Sunny: You can hear three notes and know what song it is.

Drew: Great key change!

Joe: It was the song that blocked "Gettin' Jiggy Wit' It" from getting to number one. [laughter]

Sunny: That is the real tragedy of the Titanic.

Stephan: It was the preset song on the first electric keyboard that we got.

Pam: What year did you get the keyboard?

Stephan: I dunno, at sixteen? My grandma got it right after the movie was out. She was like, "I got this thing," and it's not like it was something that my grandma would ever use. The keys lit up, and that was the first one.

Sunny: So do you know how to play "My Heart Will Go On"?

Stephan: No, I gravitated toward "Swan Lake," that theme.

Sunny: So number two.

Stephan: It was not number two. There were way too many presets.

Ryan: Has anyone ever seen the video of that dude playing it on the recorder? Or something like that.

Drew: He also has the 20th Century Fox theme.

Ryan: And Jurassic Park, yeah.

[Drew pretends to play the recorder poorly.]

Sara: Are we talking about the song? My favorite thing about the song is, I think, it's the only music they use in the movie? Is it the only song?

Pam: Joe might know. [Editor's note: Thanks, Pammy. I do. James Horner wrote the song in secret, and had to record the song with Céline Dion in secret, because Cameron didn't want any songs in the film. He eventually gave in when the song was played for test audiences and they liked it. So yeah, this is the only song. I had notes on this, but god fucking forbid anyone answers a question like this when Drew wants to talk about the Oscars!]

Drew: There's a lot more scoring. It won Best Original Score for that. There's a lot of music in it. A lot of variations on the theme.

Sara: Like when they're on the bow of the ship.

Drew: I think the score came first and the song came after.

Sara: Might I say, the song is absolutely incredible. And suck my dick if you don't like it.

Drew: Céline Dion is not credited with the Oscar for that. James Horner won the Oscar.

Allison: Céline Dion does not have an Oscar?

Drew: In parentheses, it says "Performed by Céline Dion."

Allison: You don't get an Oscar for performing?

Sara: Classic men. Taking all the credit. Doing none of the singing.

Drew: She didn't write it! Fuck her!

Sara: You're saying "Fuck her" to Céline Dion?!

[Lots of yelling here, and it's especially indecipherable because Drew was originally going to use the bathroom, but instead decided to do his yelling from the bathroom doorway.]

Sara: Go pee, you're going to get a kidney stone. [laughter]

Allison: Here's a question. You get a performance Oscar for acting, why not for performing the song?

Drew: If you get writing credit, which she did not. It's rare that she didn't get it. Like, Adele got an Oscar for a song. They say she wrote it, but she probably didn't. [Editor's note: I am as ambivalent about Adele as the next guy, but there is absolutely no evidence that Adele doesn't have a hand in writing her own music. Be careful when you get your so-called insider music knowledge from a guy who grew up in a Footloose-style household where music wasn't allowed.]

Sara: You're saying that Adele is better than Céline Dion?

Sunny: Essentially.

Sara: Céline Dion is better.

Drew: She's got a phenomenal voice, but if she didn't write it, than she doesn't deserve the Oscar.

Sara: Please go pee, I need to cool off.

Sunny: No one gives a shit who James Horner is.

Joe: Right, who the fuck is James Horner?

Sara: I don't know who the fuck that man is, but I know who Céline Dion is.

Pam: But now, thinking about the other ways the score was used [sings a bit of it], when they are running down the hallway—or no, at the very end, when she sees everyone?

Sara: It's a beautiful song. When she's in Titanic Heaven.

Pam: Yeah, we were talking about that when we watched it. "I think she's in heaven...?"

Sara: She dies at the end of the movie. Right? We all think she dies?

Pam: Right, because Jack says, "You're not gonna die here. You're going to be an old lady, you're going to die warm in your bed." But that wouldn't make sense—I mean, it does, because it's Titanic—but she was married.

Joe: Maybe because she just spent like four hours talking about Jack. That's why it's the first thing she thinks of.

Allison: Your afterlife is related to the last story you tell? Make it a good one!

Sara: So... to bring up TikTok. [laughter]

Allison: Took you long enough!

Sara: Thank you. There is a TikTok of this girl who does a bit—it's the scene with Rose getting to heaven, Titanic Heaven, and getting to meet Jack, who holds out his hand to her. This girl is pretending to be Rose's real husband, and she's like "Rose! Rose! You finally made it to heaven! Rose! Who's this, Rose? I don't know who this man is! What about me? We have three beautiful kids! I'm so excited you're here in heaven with me!" and she's just like, "Byeee." [laughter] Ignoring her actual husband of forty years. And that was a bit I really enjoyed! From TikTok!

Allison: Am I misremembering this, or is everyone clapping?

Sara: Everyone's clapping.

Allison: That's fucking weird.

Pam: It tugs at your heartstrings though.

Sara: It's a little emotional.

Allison: It's a little weird. Everyone who died, who drowned, are [clapping], and so glad that these two are finally back together?

Sara: "We knew they could make it!" And then to my point again, Rose's husband is just... watching this?

Sunny: Well, he's clapping. [laughter]

Sara: "Thank god my beautiful wife, who I had three kids with, and twelve grandchildren with..."

Allison: The one man who gave her one orgasm 84 years ago.

Joe: What do we think about the line Jack says, that's like, "Life is a gift, and I don't intend on wasting it." For me, I thought that was the theme of Titanic.

Sara: Why did you think it was the theme of Titanic?

Joe: That Rose took that to heart, and she lived the rest of her life by not wasting it. Is that... something that... you live by... [laughter]

Sunny: Or are you wasting your life?

Sara: Umm... no. [laughter] I don't think I'm wasting my life.

Joe: Do you think life is a gift?

Sara: I do. I think we're all lucky to be above ground, and friends and family, and laughter, and jobs. I don't know. I guess I do. I don't see life as a chore. It's a gift. Whoever gave it to us, and whatever happens after. Might as well enjoy it and... have beers. Alcohol is a gift. Pizza is a gift.

Drew: Who doesn't like pizza?

Sara: Does anyone not like pizza?

Stephan: Some weird fucking person who I don't want to be friends with.

Joe: Do you have anything else to say about—

Drew: Are you overcompensating for something? "Fuck those people! I eat pizza every day!"

Stephan: I ate three greasy slices of pizza today, and hated every minute of it.

Sara: Do you have a final question?

Joe: ...That was it, I guess.