Guns at the Table - Unbreakable: Media Club Plus S02E02
Transcriber: jay (jay8325)
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Introduction
[“Dr Malcolm and Friends” by Jack de Quidt begins playing]
Keith: Greetings from Media Club Plus, a podcast about plunging into the media that thrills us and the stories that chill us. As always, we've been dragged to you by friends at the table. Before our next season, we'll be subjecting ourselves to the twisted mind of M. Night Shyamalan.
[hysteria from Ali and Sylvi]
Keith: That one feels like it makes a little bit less sense for this one, huh?
Art: Yeah. Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: Maybe we should keep it up more than one movie before settling on a—
Ali: Well, no, you should have done like, a cartoon guy. You should have been like, pow, zap. Welcome to Media Club Plus.
Keith: I think—I thought heavily about doing that and then was like, I think it's really funny to do this voice. You're not wrong. I couldn't, I couldn't find a POW splat angle into it.
Ali: Yeah, fair.
Art: Um, it's gonna get weird. This is gonna get weird.
Sylvi: I can't wait.
Ali: It's gonna be really bad for the next ones, which I think is Signs. But then when we get to The Village, it's gonna be right on the mark again.
Keith: Signs is aliens.
Ali: Signs is aliens. Yeah. Do aliens talk like that?
Sylvi: We don’t know.
Keith: No, but stories—there's spooky stories about aliens.
Ali: Okay. All right.
Keith: Okay.
Art: Lady in the Water, it's gonna be completely—
Sylvi: No, I'm gonna be terrified. That one makes sense. 
Ali: Yeah.
Art: Okay.
Keith: My name is Keith J. Carberry. We are here to talk about M. Night Shyamalan. You can find me online @KeithJCarberry. You can find the Let’s Plays that I do at youtube.com/runbutton. Uh, with me as always is Sylvi Bullet.
Sylvi: Hello, I'm Sylvia. You can find me everywhere online @sylvibullet. You can support the show at friendsatthetable.cash. You can check out Side Story at sidestory.show. That's the gaming podcast that is up on alternating weeks with this one. Get your, get your Friends at the Table fix now.
Keith: Ali Acampora?
Ali: Um, hi, my name is Ali. Um, and you can find me on Friends at the Table, an actual play podcast you might not have listened to if you're just like, a fan of movies or of Hunter x Hunter? Um, I think it's very fantastic and I think that you should listen to it.
Keith: We actually got an email from someone who checked out Friends at the Table because of Side Story, uh, a maneuver that only existed in my imagination until seeing that email.
Ali: Uh, I can see that.
Keith: And Art Martinez-Tebbel.
Art: Hey, um, go to friendsatthetable.shop where you can get some merch. Not about this, I don't think, because of, you know, legalities, but for the stuff that we create, uh, out of whole cloth, you can get merchandise there.
Keith: Out of literal cloth.
Art: Yes, often literal cloth. Um, and you can follow me on, uh, Bluesky @amtebbel. Um, although the last time I had a hit tweet, I got suspended and I got a hit tweet this morning, so I'm sure they're coming for me again.
Keith: Oh yeah, I forgot. I also got suspended for, uh, it wasn't even a hit tweet. It was a bare—barely anything tweet. Um, they're suspending over there.
Art: They're fucking humorless.
Keith: Totally humorless. Yeah. Uh, I was happy to watch another movie. I love movies, you guys.
Art: Movies are great.
Keith: Movies are great.
Sylvi: Moving pictures. Who doesn't love cinema?
Keith: Yeah. Even when they're movies that are perhaps a full letter grade worse than another movie or, or more.
Art: Well, most movies are a full letter grade worse than some movie.
Keith: That's, that's true.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Ali: Um, I, I do agree with you though, Keith. It was really refreshing to watch this movie and be like, I don't know that it holds up.
Keith: How do we—do we all feel that way about this movie?
Sylvi: Yeah, no, this was like a, uh, I liked this. I had fun with it, but it is definitely a solid like, 3 out of 5 and maybe I'm being generous.
Art: I think I'm here to defend this movie more perhaps than others, but [Sylvi: That's fair.] This is not as good a movie as The Sixth Sense, certainly.
Sylvi: No.
Ali: Yeah, I've been a longtime defender of this movie because it felt like it was a sleeper hit, and it's a good movie, but it does kind of just fall apart in the third act. So—
Art: Oh, I think the third act might be the only…
Ali: Uh-oh.
Sylvi: I'm so excited for this podcast, man.
Keith: Yeah, I, I think that one—I think for me, it kind of is constantly oscillating in and out of making sense, uh, as like, uh, you know, constructed piece of art. It's tough because we live in 2025 where there has been something like 9 or 10 superhero movies a month, um, for 20 years. Uh, this movie came out in the year 2000.
Sylvi: Famously was told, uh, we're not marketing this as a superhero movie because only nerds watch those, when this was being pitched.
Keith: And then two years later, Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man would come out and would be gigantic. And, um, yeah, maybe the last—
Art: Came out in between Batman crashing and burning with Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Clooney and Tobey Maguire bringing the whole genre back.  And all we had in this period of time was Blade. 
Keith: It's good that you bring up—
Sylvi: Sometimes that's all you need though.
Keith: I actually haven't seen either Blade movie.
Art: There are three Blade movies.
Keith: Oh. I haven't seen any of the three Blade movies.
Sylvi: Hey, we're pivoting.
Ali: Yeah, we have to stop this podcast.
Keith: Uh, it's a little bit—
Art: We’ll be back in six hours, everyone. 
Keith: We'll be back in six hours for a very long podcast where we talk about Blades 1 through 3 and then Unbreakable.
Ali: Yeah. We could do Blade as a Patreon bonus, right?
Sylvi: Yeah, we're allowed to.
Keith: Yeah, of course we're allowed to.
Art: Not if we're not also doing Blade 2, we can't. I’ll tell you that much.
Keith: I'm willing to watch Blade 1 in order to do a Blade 2 podcast or do a Blade—
Art: No, we have to do both podcasts. I'm sorry to say.
Keith: Okay.
Ali: Yeah.
Art: Um, they're both movies worth talking about. Blade Trinity, not worth talking about.
Sylvi: Are you sure?
Ali: After this, we can just do our favorite superhero movies and it'll be Blade 2. Um, the one that I'm thinking of… Wait.
Keith: Blade 2.
Ali: Yeah.
Art:  It'd be fun if we did Blade 2 4 times though.
Keith: Quick, name one other superhero movie. An almost impossible task.
Ali: It's Sylvester Stallone and he's like a guy from the past and like—
Sylvi: Oh, oh, Demolition Man?
Ali: And the future is too woke?
Sylvi: Yeah, because he has to wipe his butt with shells. That's what woke has done.
Ali: He is the best comic villain ever.
Art: That is not a superhero movie.
Keith: Sorry, what is this movie for people who don’t know what it is?
Art: Demolition Man.
Keith: Demolition Man. Okay, I've heard of that. 
Art: Which I believe at this point is set in the past. I believe it's past the date of Demolition Man. I think Demolition Man is like 2015. It’s like Back to the Future 2.
Keith: Um, wow. That's a, that's a difficult year. Um, yeah, I, yeah, I, I, it's difficult to be in the position of having to like, invent what a superhero movie is, uh, out of whole cloth, the same material that our shirts are made out of at friendsatthetable.shop.
Sylvi: Stupid.
Keith: It does feel like a proto Dark Knight trilogy to me in a way.
Ali: Hmm.
Keith: A little bit. It's, it's dark and foreboding and sad. And—
Sylvi: It's, it's very dour. 
Keith: It's weird. It kind of does kind of have an upswing. The ending is unbelievable.
Sylvi: Okay. We will talk about that.
Keith: We will talk about that.
Sylvi: Um, I was going to say—
Art: The worst part is I don't know what—there's two things you could be talking about right now.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Probably both of them.
Sylvi: Is it too early to summarize?
Ali: No, this is absolutely summary time. Okay, cool.
Sylvi: I'll do—this is just sort of a—if I missed anything, we'll get to it. Don't worry. I was trying to keep this not like, 100 fucking minutes long. Um, okay. After the catastrophic derailing of his train, East Rail 177, sole survivor and stadium security guard David Dunn is contacted by the mysterious Elijah Price, a high-end comics dealer suffering from osteogenesis imperfecta, a condition that makes his bones extremely fragile, and who believes that David is special. As the movie goes on, we flip perspectives between David and Elijah, showing David struggling to come to terms with the possibility that Elijah's right, while filling in Elijah's backstory with a few flashbacks and some scenes showing the extent he's going to, to prove that David really is unbreakable. Like the movie title. You got it.
Ali: Ohhh.
Sylvi: Yeah. David learns he also has enhanced strength and the ability to read people's mind if he brushes against them? While Elijah, meanwhile, breaks his leg and uses this as a reason to speak to David's wife, Audrey, who is a physical therapist, and tell him his theory. In the background of all this, David's marriage and his relationship with his son Joseph have been repairing themselves in the wake of his accident, and a potential separation/divorce is called off. He remembers during all this that he almost drowned when he was a kid. David and Audrey are convinced that Elijah's wrong because of this. But unfortunately, Joseph found his dad's gun and disagrees. This is an absolutely buck wild scene in which he holds his dad at gunpoint until the threat of his parents splitting up again gets him to put the gun down. From this point on, David and Audrey continue to reconcile. He remembers that he did not in fact get injured in the car crash that made him retire from football and brought the two of them together. And he decides to give this superhero thing a shot. He uses his, like, touch telepathy to find out that a janitor at a major rail station is holding a family hostage after killing the father. He rescues them even though he almost drowns again in like, a pretty cla—kind of weirdly enough, when we talked about Spider-Man, kind of feels like the, hey, we didn't see his mask scene or his face scene in Spider-Man 2, I think, when the kids help him. Anyway, that—I didn't write that down. That's me getting distracted. Um, he—so after this, he clues Joseph into what happened with a little like, silent nod, but he notably does not tell his wife. And then he goes to see his boyfriend—I mean Elijah—at the launch of his comics art gallery. This is where we got our twist. Elijah, now calling himself Mr. Glass after something that childhood bullies called him, was behind a plane crash and a hotel fire that have been sort of obliquely mentioned in a few scenes before this, as well as the derailing of East Rail 177. He was causing these events so he could find someone like David, a sole survivor who was completely unharmed. The movie probably could have ended right when he said that, but instead we get these text-on-screen freeze frames explaining that David called the cops and that Elijah has been committed to an institution for the criminally insane. And that's important.
Art: Ends up being important. I'm just saying.
Sylvi: Sure. That's my overview of the movie Unbreakable.
Ali: Yeah…
Art: Uh-huh. That is the movie Unbreakable.
Keith: What a weird movie. This is—it's so weird. What a bizarre follow-up to The Sixth Sense.
Sylvi: Yeah, I think I remember reading that he was writing during post-production of The Sixth Sense or something.
Keith: Hmm. Maybe he was distracted.
Art: This movie comes out very quickly.
Sylvi: Oh, I mean, yeah, it's like 2 years, right?
Art: I think it's less.
Sylvi: Um, wow, you're right. Sixth Sense was '99.
Art: Yeah, it's like, it's like 14 months later. It's incredibly quickly.
Sylvi: Wow. That's wild, actually.
Keith: Um, I, I think that, um, this is certainly the worst performance I've ever seen Samuel L. Jackson give.
Sylvi: That's crazy.
Art: What? No way.
Sylvi: That’s crazy, 'cause he has been in some stinkers.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: To be fair, I'm not like watching a bunch of stinkers.
Sylvi: Fair enough.
Keith: So there's like a, I know there's a, you know, he's got a huge, um, uh, filmography. I'm just like, not watching movies that I'm not like, pretty sure that I'm gonna really like. Like, I haven't seen, I haven't seen a Marvel movie since Avengers. Uh, no, that's not true. Ant-Man I saw. So I haven't seen a Marvel movie since Ant-Man. [Sylvi: Jesus.] And then before that, it hadn't been since Avengers 1.
Art: Well, I wanna tell you that Samuel Jackson has been in more than 150 movies.
Keith: I haven't seen a lot of those. This is the worst movie I've seen him in. I haven't seen Argyle.
Sylvi: That's wild.
Keith: Why would I have seen Argyle?
Sylvi: Oh, sorry. I thought you said, and I've seen Argyle.
Keith: Oh no, I haven't. I haven't seen Argyle. 
Art: I wonder how many Samuel Jackson movies I've seen.
Sylvi: Uh, I know the worst movie I've seen him in, and it's Kingsman, which I saw on a plane.
Keith: I haven't seen Kingsman. 
Sylvi: Really bad. Don't watch it.
Keith: Um, it's, uh, he's like oscillating in and out of an interesting performance here. Or I'll say maybe the performance is interesting the whole way through, but he's—
Sylvi: I like his performance.
Keith: He's oscillating in and out of like being—like, believably delivering his—I feel like he's kind of not into the material. That's sort of how I felt.
Sylvi: Huh.
Art: Oh no, I think—
Sylvi: I don't know if I got that.
Art: I think he's having a good time here.
Ali: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: I'm, I'm surprised that it's Samuel L. Jackson's performance that you call out here because [Sylvi: Yeah.] Especially after The Sixth Sense, I was like, you know, Samuel L. Jackson is, is great in this movie, but like Bruce Willis does not know what to do with his face.
Keith: Bruce Willis is doing nothing in this movie, but at least—but Bruce Willis doing nothing, like—he's, it's also, he's also being asked to do nothing.
Ali: Sure.
Keith: Samuel L. Jackson is being asked to do like, a thing here and like, I don't know that he's doing it.
Art: I don't know that he is being asked to do nothing. His face is in like 60% of the shots. I feel, like, him like, reacting to stuff is the movie.
Sylvi: He, he has the countenance of like, a cat that doesn't want to be washed in a torrential downpour. Like, I don't know how else to put it. He just always looks so. pathetic. And I know that they're definitely going for that, right? Because this is all about him kind of like getting confidence when he realizes his quote purpose or whatever. But he, he's definitely just sort of like, there's just someone, someone please adopt him from the pound is the vibe.
Keith: There's a shot at the end during the twist when it cuts to him and it's like, he just learned that he's a superhero and he looks so sad and schlubby.
Ali: Yeah, he's making a little uwu face. The pleading eyes emoji. That's what he's doing.
Sylvi: 100%!
Ali: And Sylvi, what you were saying a moment ago about like—it's a movie about him gaining his confidence over time, it's interest—obviously the movie is about that, but like, I don't know that any point in the movie they really actually want you to root for him.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Ali: And like, especially the first scene we see him in, he's so pathetic.
Sylvi: Oh my God.
Keith: That scene is rough. I wrote excruciating. 
Art: Oh yeah.
Sylvi: His negative rizz. Yeah. It's bad.
Ali: It's—
Keith: He has a good line. He just doesn't know when to quit. He gets, he gets one genuine line. 
Sylvi: Which is his good line?
Keith: He gets a—he has to laugh. Sorry. It's a good line to the person who laughed at it.
Sylvi: Okay.
Art: Okay.
Keith: Where he says, um, uh, he's trying to flirt with the girl that comes on the train. He surreptitiously removes his wedding ring. Uh, and then, uh, he's, he finds out that she's a sports agent and is like, uh, are you looking for anyone for synchronized swimming? And that's funny. And then he's like, I'm afraid of the water. Um, like, will that hurt my chances or whatever? And like, that's kind of funny, especially because we learn he actually is afraid of water.
Art: Yeah, he's afraid of water, but he doesn't remember the incident why he's afraid of water. Someone has to tell him that happened.
Keith: Uh, in one of the most foreboding scenes in the whole movie.
Sylvi: The way she—we're going to jump around too much if we get into this, because I have a line from that scene that is insane.
Ali: Yeah, in an effort to just slow down a little bit, I think it's worth mentioning the text that this movie starts with and then the actual first scene of the movie before we get into the train scene we just talked about.
Sylvi: Yeah, I always forget that it starts the way it does. Sorry, go ahead.
Ali: Yeah. And I was sitting down to watch this, I was like, oh, huh. So there's a text crawl on the screen that said—well, not a—the text comes up. It's not a Star Wars thing.
Keith: It's like a pre-title. Yeah.
Ali: [reading] There are 35 pages and 124 illustrations in the average comic book. A single issue ranges, uh, ranges in price from $1 to over $140,000. Uh, 172,000 comics are sold in the U.S. every day. Over, um, 62,780,000 each year. Uh, the average comic collector owns more than 30, uh, 3,000. I'm so bad with numbers. 3,312 comics and will spend approximately 1 year of his or her life reading them. [stops reading] Um, and then, yeah, the, the first scene of this movie is about Elijah, our like, titular villain, we will find out. Um, and it's a woman. Having given birth in a dressing room in—I don't know, it's very unbelievable how clean and calm everyone is in the scene, but whatever.
Art: I thought the most unbelievable part was how not racist everyone was for it being like 1962 or whatever. And these white department store staff have no problems with this Black lady giving birth in their store.
Ali: Yeah, I, I mean, she's helped by a Black doctor, so it's a world where like, that's okay. Or even, or maybe there was segregation about medical care in that way.
Keith: I found that the ways that this movie seems to not be about race to be very surprising when we show like, the, the story that they seemed to be setting up to me, like, sort of concludes in act 1 with like Uh, Samuel L. Jackson's character Elijah is just like, a grown-up wealthy art dealer. And that's the, that is the end of like, the little house in West Philadelphia.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: That's not just not the way that I saw the plot of this going. Like it's an M. Night Shyamalan movie. I'm going, I'm watching. I'm like, I know there's going to be a twist. Where's the twist going to be? I will reveal the most—the funniest, wrongest thing I've ever written, knowing that this movie ends up being related to Split and Glass [Sylvi: Oh my god.] Which I don't really know anything about except for the broad, the high-level detail of what's going on in Split, is that I thought that maybe Bruce Willis was Black but didn't know it, like in The Jerk.
Sylvi: Fucking Christ, bro.
[Keith hysteria]
Art: Like in The Jerk?
Keith: Sorry. Like the reverse of The Jerk. Is what I like it—like a reverse Jerk.
Ali: And then you were like, like my good friends and coworkers of a decade are gonna be like, we really have to watch this.
Keith: I, hey, I'm not gonna say that there's not a world where that's possible, where like you could, I, I believe in a world where you could make that movie and people like it and it's actually good and not weird.
Art: Where the twist is—
Keith: The twist is—
Sylvi: The twist is that Bruce Willis—
Keith: The twist is that Bruce Willis was Black the whole time.
Sylvi: I don't know how you'd film that, Keith.
Keith: I also don't know.
Art: Is there another actor? We do like a pan and we pan back and it's Wesley Snipes? 
Keith: Well, and then what I thought, and then what I thought was maybe that like all of the damage that's supposed to be being done to Bruce Willis's character because he has a white kid. So that ends up not being part of it. Turns out they weren't doing that. Uh, uh, I, I have that all, all of the damage that would be being done to Bruce Willis is like being kind of like psychically transferred to other people around him. And maybe he's like psychically linked to Elijah in a way where—because, you know, Bruce Willis could be born in 1961. That feels right to me. Um, uh, like, uh, I thought that we were gonna get a scene—actually, this was my first—the first part of my theory. I thought we were gonna get a scene where, like, it's explained why Elijah is born with, like, broken arms and legs because something had happened to Bruce Willis, and that, that it was like there's a psychic transference between these people.
Art: Some sort of race-based Dorian Gray happening.
Keith: Yes. 
Art: Or is it not about Black people anymore?
Keith: That's really what I thought. I mean, it's not like I had built up a whole thing, but this is—this is what I thought maybe the movie was going to be doing, which is then when the, when the movie was not only not about race, but, but conspicuously, the, the sort of like, the, the race and class construct that they had introduced in the movie kind of fades away, or at least turns into something very different. I was like, oh, well, this movie's doing—obviously is doing something way different than what I thought it was doing from the first scene.
Art: For the record, both Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis were born well before 1967.
Ali: Yeah. I mean, I think the, like, I don't want to say important thing, but the thing we're zeroing in on some of this, thinking through this movie, is that it definitely uses the aesthetics of race and also disability to, I don't know, try to be more dramatic or more cinematic in some way, but not really actually thinking about those issues in reality. I think that's kind of why it's disappointing that it ends up being the movie that gets franchised through Split and the other one.
Sylvi: Glass.
Ali: Glass? Oh, God. Yeah, Glass. Okay.
Ali: And there isn't any real look at the wealth situation or even, you know, Elijah's disability is just something that makes him evil.
Sylvi: It's bad. It is real rough.
Art: Well, his disability doesn't make him evil.
Keith: Well, it gives him the—it gives him the time to become evil.
Art: Again, I don't think that's a correct analysis either.
Keith: Oh, okay. Well, I, I, we should say something that—one of the little clues that the movie leaves is from Audrey, Bruce Willis, David Dunn, his wife.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Keith: When in the scene that Sylvi talked about having the gun, she's like, you can't take what he says seriously because sometimes people who are disabled physically, when they're really hurt physically, their minds also become hurt.
Sylvi: I think she says like, it's sad when they, they, they stop believing in reality or something like that.
Keith: Yeah, she says it. She says it twice in different ways. There's like that way where she's kind of pitying him and then one where she's like begging her son not to shoot her husband.
Sylvi: That scene is crazy.
Keith: That scene is crazy. Oh, okay. So we have—this is—I want to talk about this first scene. In the Philadelphia department store, 1961. This scene is so fascinatingly shot.
Sylvi: I love how this looks, honestly. I really like the pacing of this too. I think the doctor has a really good, like, performance here. It's kind of the, uh, the linchpin to—
Keith: This is Eamon Walker as Dr. Matheson.
Sylvi: Um, the way that, like, you see the, the slow realization that something is very wrong on his face while everyone else is just assuming, like, oh, well, babies cry after they're born.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, is, I think, really well handled. And we get the good like, Shyamalan sort of like, spinning camera around the room for a lot of it.
Keith: Yeah, he is spinning the camera like crazy in this movie. I really like it. Uh, I thought it was, you know, there's a lot of big swings in how the camera moves, and I would much rather sort of a kind of like, goofy shot that like, makes you notice it than a static camera that never does anything.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Um, but, uh, I really like this scene where you're, you're not really sure for a good chunk of it, like, what the camera is actually filming because the mirror looks like a doorway that they're—it looks like they're shooting a doorway, and then they pan in a way that makes you go like, oh, there's—now they're shooting into a mirror, but that was actually reality briefly. And then it finally does the turn to see where everyone actually is standing behind the camera. It's a very cool shot, I think.
Art: Yes. Again, because he looks—he looks at them.
Keith: Yeah, he looks at them through the thing.
Art: You would have to assume he was looking into a mirror. Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. And there's—people are constantly looking at themselves and at each other in mirrors in this movie. What does that mean? I don't know. I couldn't figure—I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't figure out why there's a lot of mirror shots in this movie.
Ali: Mm-hmm. I think—I don't know. I think that, like, for a movie that's trying to be about how we interact with stories, I think a lot of the, like, you know, viewing moments in people's actual life as reflections of something else, becomes really interesting. I think the moment where this is most present is when you're first seeing Elijah and his mother talk in the reflection of a TV screen. And it's giving this Saturday morning cartoon kind of vibe. And I was like, damn, that's—I did the absolute cinema meme in my head.
Keith: What's the absolute cinema meme?
Sylvi: Come on. Martin Scorsese holding up both his hands.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: Okay.
Ali: Have you not seen this?
Keith: I don't think I have.
Sylvi: Keith doesn't know memes.
Keith: I don't know memes. Uh, there is the end of the movie when, uh, Samuel L. Jackson was like, you always know the hero and the villain because they're opposites of each other. It could be, it could be as simple as that. Maybe that's—he's just like, I want to show mirror because we're reversed. Because it's reverse. Um, and the movie is kind of also caught up in like, how you denote that someone is a hero or a villain based on how they look.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Because of comic books.
Art: Well, not how they—it's not about how they look. It's about the choices they make in depicting them that way.
Keith: Yes. Right.
Art: Because we're not—you're not, you're not drawing a real person. They don't actually look like that there.
Keith: Right. Well, which is to say there's no way for a comic book character to look unless someone has made a choice to make them look that way.
Ali: Right. Yeah. I mean, when it appears in, like—this kind of refrain is repeated a lot with Elijah commenting on, like, different illustrations from comic book pages of, like, you can see how they presented the villain and this cues something about their character. But I also thought it was interesting in, like, the way that Elijah like intentionally takes on villain aesthetics. I think that's one of my favorite things about, uh, Samuel L Jackson's like performance and some of this character here. Like, I think, I think the first time I wrote it down and was like, haha, that's really cool, is when he goes into his like, car, his like, evil person black leather car.
Keith: That car looks so comfortable with its jelly seats. It's so—have you noticed how jiggly the seats were?
Art: He puts the key in the middle of the fucking dashboard. It's—yeah.
Ali: It’s so good.
Sylvi: Damn, I should have paid more attention to the car.
Ali: Yeah, it's—
Keith: I, I have—I think I have a shot of the, of the inside of the car because it is like, it is like, it.
[30:00]
Keith: It seemed to me he has to have the world's, uh, plushest car or he will break the bones in his butt. That is what it felt like to me.
Ali: Yeah. But he didn't have to have it be all like evil base swagged out.
Art: Well, like all of his coats have this like lush purple lining. He's—
Sylvi: Oh, it's—he's—he looks great.
Keith: His, his mom, uh, appreciates his favorite color because she wraps the comic book in purple, uh, tissue paper.
Art: That shot rules, by the way. The out-the-window shot of the bench across the street with like the bright purple package on it. That's a killer shot.
Keith: Um, that is a great shot. Uh, just to get us, uh, back on track to get towards, towards that scene, we have the Bruce Willis train scene. I like how they make him seem like a scumbag right away by taking—by surreptitiously taking off his wedding ring in order to flirt with this girl who gets so weirded out that she leaves.
Sylvi: Good for her.
Keith: Uh, yeah, I said his attempts to keep up the conversation with, uh, the sports agent are excruciating. Um, and, uh, she's like, I'm married. And he's like, oh, I don't know what you're even talking about. That's crazy that you'd say that. And she's like, okay, bye. Uh, the whole time, another great—this is the second scene, two for two on the camera. The whole time the camera is a little girl that is a seat in front of them, like watching them have this conversation. I thought that was really funny.
Art: Yeah. And then she gives him the fucking stink eye.
Keith: And then she gives him the stink eye. Yeah.
Sylvi: And then she dies.
Keith: And then she dies. And so does Kelly. 
Sylvi: Along with everybody else. 
Keith: Along with everybody else. We get a brief, uh, like a time dilation where he's like, something is happening and time kind of slows down and then everything gets all white. Um, And then it cuts away to his, um, kid.
Sylvi: Yeah, this is another really fun, uh, like framing for, for the way you like, find out about the, the train crash. Like, him watching TV upside down because he's got his head hanging off the couch. [Keith: Yeah.] Um, I don't know. I liked it. I liked that it, it, I, I always prefer something like this where it's sort of like a slow, like rolling out of information over like, the big, big set piece train crash.
Keith: It's a—it's—there's a lot of good sets in this movie, a lot of great, um, like, you know, everyone is kind of in interesting places and the camera is moving through the places that they've set up in nice ways. Like, I think this is a movie that looks really good.
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: I think we're going to like get to this more as this series goes on, but it's one of the things I like about Shyamalan is even when I don't necessarily write—like the script he's written or the movie he's made, he's very good at getting interesting shots and camera work. Like—
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Art: He's, he's very, he's very interested in how his movies look. And I know that sounds like I'm damning with faint praise. There's a lot of people out there who don't care what their movies look like.
Sylvi: There are so many.
Keith: Um, new DP for this movie. Um, it's, uh [Sylvi: Eduardo Serra?] Say again?
Sylvi: Eduardo Serra, the cinematographer. Yeah. Um, um, who I have a couple credits if you want me to read them.
Keith: I would love that.
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: Like primarily worked within like, European filmmaking scenes. Uh, but I have like, best known to American audiences would probably be like, this movie, Blood Diamond. And then there were some like stupid kids movies about a wizard that he worked on. Um, I don't know.
Keith: Two of the later ones there.
Sylvi: Yeah, that's a joke about a franchise I don't like.
Ali: Um, oh, like this guy makes really gray movies, huh?
Sylvi: He does.
Keith: He does make really gray movies.
Ali: Gray and wet movies.
Sylvi: So blue.
Keith: It's actually—I mean, uh, of the movies I've seen, this is the best looking one, I think.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: Um, I saw Blood Diamond. I thought Blood Diamond was fine. I didn't think that it particularly looks nice. It didn't look wrong. It looked like what it was. But I found that this was an interesting looking movie. So good job. I'm surprised because the last, the last cinematographer that he worked with was storied, to say the least.
Sylvi: Well like, this guy, not to say that this guy, Eduardo Serra, does not have a long resume. He has quite a resume. It's just not within the American filmmaking, like structure. Like he, yeah, he's, he's done a—he had been working since 1980 in like, France and stuff.
Keith: Oh, you know what? Yeah, sorry, I was looking on IMDb and I just like, didn't see that there was a see more button. So it looked like he had a third of the career that he had and that he had only done a handful of things before doing, um, uh, Unbreakable. But that was actually like, uh, two-thirds of the way into his career.
Sylvi: I just—it's interesting seeing who stayed on after Sixth Sense. Like, James Newton Howard, the composer, is the same.
Keith: And, uh, and will remain the same for a long time, I think.
Sylvi: Yeah, I think so. And I, I, it's because I, I didn't—I noted this because I wasn't aware of the quick turnaround on these, and it makes a lot more sense now where it's like, no, you can't get the exact same people to make the same—make another movie like, within a year. They have other stuff going on. You got Bruce, but like, what's Bruce really doing?
Keith: I mean, this is, I wouldn't, I wouldn't call this, I mean, he's doing around this time, isn't he doing the 3rd Die Hard with Samuel L. Jackson?
Sylvi: I meant performance-wise.
Art: No, that must be much earlier.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: I don't remember when that one came out.
Art: And then I believe I went to see Die Hard with a Vengeance on my 10th birthday.
Keith: Okay.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: That was, that was '95. That was '95.
Ali: Okay.
Keith: So they had all—
Art: My 11th birthday.
Keith: Um, I didn't like that movie. I should rewatch it.
Art: Die Hard with a Vengeance?
Keith: Yeah. Um, well, I should give it—I mean, I was, I was pretty young when I saw it, but I saw the first Die Hard. I was like, this is amazing. And then I saw the second Die Hard and I was like, they did the same thing. That's fine, whatever. And then they did the third one and I was like, what is going on here? This is, this is such a bizarre—
Sylvi: This is not the same thing.
Keith: Such a bizarre—it was a bizarre plot.
Art: This is not—
Keith: I think I, I think I got caught up being a kid and being like, this is a very weird plot.
Art: Um, no, I think the interesting thing is that Die Hard is based on a book, and then Die Hard 2 is based on a book about a different character. It was like a separate book. And then Die Hard with a Vengeance was a script that was written not as a Die Hard movie that they like, fit Die Hard onto.
Keith: Yeah, I remember hearing about that.
Art: Yeah, I think Die Hard with a Vengeance is the second best Die Hard movie.
Keith: I would have to rewatch it. I think I could see that that could end up being true for me. It certainly isn't any of the ones that I saw from after this that could take that spot.
Sylvi: Yeah, I was gonna say, not exactly stiff competition.
Keith: Well, one of them had—one of them had Kevin Smith and Justin Long.
Sylvi: I saw that in theaters.
Keith: I, I'm actually—I am a big fan of Justin Long. 
Art: Me too.
Keith: Of course. Yeah. Listen, Barbarians was pretty good.
Art: I have no specific problem with Justin Long. That wasn't a good movie.
Keith: Well, y'all love Dodgebal
Sylvi: You don't like Bruce Willis being like, this, this pansy boy hacker is trying to sleep with my daughter. Grr. That's the—that's all I remember really.
Art: That is what that movie's about.
Sylvi: Yes.
Ali: They drive into a car or a helicopter—they drive a car to a helicopter.
Sylvi: Oh, okay.
Art: Yeah, it's very Metal Gear Solid coded.
Keith: Um, so this kid's flipping through the channels on the TV, which is highly relatable, old school scrolling. Uh, he sees a news report of the train accident that was highly implied to be happening. Um, this whole train derails, uh, and sort of like from the news footage, it looks kind of like it exploded a little bit.
Sylvi: Yeah, it's fucked up.
Keith: Um, which I was like, why would it explode? That doesn't make any sense. Um, here's another guess. Here's another guess at what might be going on. You always got to be guessing. They—because you know that there's a twist. They even tell you another character, two in a row, another time where they say that this movie has a twist, by the way.
Art: Um, oh, that scene hasn't happened yet.
Keith: That scene hasn't happened yet, but it's going to happen. But I knew, I knew. And so I thought that maybe the train was psychically derailed.
Sylvi: Oh, sure. I'm psychically derailed all the time.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: And I maybe even thought at this point that Bruce Willis was a bad guy and that he psychically derailed the train, maybe even without knowing it.
Ali: Wow.
Keith: Yeah. That's what I thought at this point. And, uh, then they cut to the hospital. He wakes up and is being interrogated by the doctor with the worst bedside manner I've ever heard of. This doctor's blaming him for being alive.
Ali: Does anyone know this actor? No.
Sylvi: Is it an actor I should know?
Ali: No, but he's like, he feels like a character actor that I've seen a lot. And I didn't know if like, Keith would know it because he seems like the type of guy who's on podcasts often. But maybe he's just like a character actor. Yeah. Let me see.
Keith: Um, this is Michael Kelly. I don't know who this is.
Ali: Maybe he's just the guy who's been in stuff. Oh yeah. Oh, he's from House of Cards. That’s how I know his face, that's fine.
Sylvi: Oh, he's in The Sopranos.
Ali: He's also in The Sopranos. Yeah. Okay. He's been in stuff. He's been around. Um, I really like this hospital scene. I do think the doctor is—maybe he's a little intense. I don't know.
Keith: He says, why the fuck are you alive, you freak?
Ali: No, he doesn't.
Sylvi: He's not that bad. 
Keith: He says, your train derailed. Some kind of malfunction. They only found two people alive so far, you and this man. His skull was cracked open, and most of his left side was crushed. And to answer your question, there are two reasons why I'm looking at you like this. One, because it seems in a few minutes you'll be the only survivor of this train wreck. And two, because you didn't break one bone. You didn't have one scratch on you.
Art: I mean, I understand, like, he's like asking him where he was in the—like, that's what he's like interrogating about.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: You're sure you were in the passenger car, right? Because everyone else—and like, if you were somewhere else, it would explain what happened.
Sylvi: Right.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: And I mean, I thought this is—I think that the scene is really well set up, even though it's kind of just direct body horror, sort of survival horror kind of stuff. But Bruce Willis, AKA David, is on a hospital bed in the back of the room, and the camera is really more forward. And what you see immediately in the foreground is this kind of body wrapped up in bandages on a table, and these sort of whispers of people talking about gross medical stuff that they're doing to him, like, cut off this thing or whatever.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: And as this sort of, like—the mood of the scene is getting more and more uncanny because, you know, the strange attitude of the doctor, there's a blood spread on the, the body that is in the foreground right in front of the camera. And I was like, oof, damn.
Sylvi: Yeah, that sucks, man.
Keith: At this point, again, I've liked everything that this movie's doing visually. It's all been really interesting and, and fun. And I like how, um, so he gets up to like, walk to his family and see the family of like, all of the like, the deceased passengers looking at him, like, kind of curious, kind of solemn. Some of them kind of like—
Sylvi: Resentful for some of them.
Keith: Yeah, resenting him for being the only guy who's alive. And then you see his family, his son and wife, who—they try, try and fail to hold hands, uh, which was a really good shot, I thought, as they like, walk into a bunch of cameras kind of flashing at them.
Ali: Mm-hmm. Yeah. What's going on there?
Art: Yeah, I think that's a kill—I think that's a really good sequence.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: The walk out there.
Keith: The son is obsessed with his dad. This guy fucking loves his dad. [Sylvi: Yeah.] The dad is not so sure about the son.
[Sylvi laughter]
Sylvi: That is the vibe. Yes.
Keith: Like, yeah. Um, it, it becomes plot relevant that like, that he kind of doesn't, uh—that he keeps his wife and kids at a distance for sure. Um, and, uh, and now he's at home. He's still in his, uh, uh, train crash clothes while failing to eat a bowl of cereal. He's obviously kind of shaken up by this. I thought it was very funny that he didn't change.
Sylvi: That's the first thing I would do.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvi: Actually, well, the first thing I would do is probably die on the train because I'm not invincible, but like…
Keith: Step 1 is die on the train.
Sylvi: Step 2, change your clothes.
Keith: Step 2, change your clothes.
Art: Yeah, I'm saving my what I would have done for a later scene.
Sylvi: Okay. Okay.
Keith: Everyone gets every—yeah, we've, I've already, we've already played our, what I would have done card.
Sylvi: I didn't realize.
Keith: Ali and, uh, Art get to keep theirs for later. These are physical cards. We printed them out, laminated them, and sent them. And we're allowed to play—it says one play per movie.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Um, this is like the first, uh, like real hint that we have, like, he wasn't just trying to cheat on his wife. They're kind of about to get a divorce.
Sylvi: Yeah, she asked him, how was the job interview in New York?
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvi: And he doesn't seem like it went well.
Keith: Yeah. He was like, I don't think I got the job, but I'm still going to New York. Just not yet.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And there's a memorial service for the families of East Rail train 177.
Sylvi: Yeah. I got a question. Is that like—is that like a thing you got to do if you're the sole survivor, is go to the memorial for everybody?
Art: Oh, here I am playing my card. I would not have gone to the memorial if I was the one miraculously unharmed survivor.
Sylvi: Yeah!
Ali: You have to go pay your respects though, right?
Sylvi: At a different time.
Keith: I do—I’m confused. Is it because you don't want to be reminded of almost dying?
Sylvi: No, because everyone there hates your pussy, dude.
Art: Yeah, I think everyone there is gonna hate you.
Keith: You think so? 
Sylvi: Yeah.
Ali: But if they're gonna hate—
Keith: Yeah, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't, I think.
Ali: Yeah, I guess I would rather be damned at home.
Keith: Yeah, but I, but I, I think that it might seem—I think it might seem bad for longer, like, to other people if you didn't go.
Sylvi: Fair.
Art: But like—
Keith: Because the only people that would hate you for going are in that room. Everyone else could side-eye you about that forever. “And he didn't even go?”
Art: But I, I suggest that I would simply not be around anyone who would care about this.
Keith: Fair. Yeah, it could be a future litmus test. Anybody who's kind of weirded out that you didn't go to the memorial service, you just wouldn't have in your life. Um, this is really sad actually, seeing the like, huge boards full of pinned, um, photographs of all the people that died. 
Art: And this is pre-9/11, right? 
Keith: This is crucially—this would have been pre-9/11. And you can feel it.
Art: Yeah, you definitely—this, this scene would not be in a, a movie that came out post- I mean, by now it might be, but like, at the—in the immediate post-9/11.
Keith: Uh, weirdly, this movie is a—is about a series of disasters that killed like 500 people total.
Art: Yeah. And I guess, you know, it's pre-9/11 because one of them's a plane crash.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Right. Yeah.
Sylvi: What were you gonna say, Ali?
Ali: Yeah, I, I do think like—a significant thing about the church scene is that it's another cueing to the audience that David kind of isn't shit moment. Or it's just like, I don't know, grief spam, where it's listing off the professions that the deceased had. And it's like, this guy studied leukemia, and this guy helped with charity and stuff. [Keith: This guy was a businessman.] Okay. Not that guy. But I was kind of getting the sense, especially coming off the weirdness of that very—like, the first introduction that you get to David is just like, what the fuck is wrong with this guy? I was, like, really clued into this scene also trying to be like, the movie is already putting you in this place of what's so special about this guy versus, you know, Why him? And why not all these other people?
Sylvi: Yeah. Well, because like, that's got to be what—like, it's trying to get you in his headspace, right? Because you can tell from the moment he gets out of there, he's also being like, why me? Wha—huh?
Keith: Yeah. I feel like the movie wants you on board that he's unbreakable from the jump with the ER doctor.
Sylvi: Would make sense why they named it that.
Ali: Whoa.
Keith: The ER doctor?
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, they named the movie The ER Doctor.
Keith: Um, because the doctor is like, do you have any allergies? Do you have any this? Have you broken any whatevers? And he's like, no, no, no. And I was like, okay, this guy's the only survivor on a train. Uh, you know, everybody else was like, dashed to bits. 
Sylvi: Crazy way to put it.
Ali: I don’t think the doctor’s supposed to ask you if you have any allergies?
Keith: When you survive a plane crash, like, it's, it's just an—it is—
Sylvi: Yeah. It's a pretty standard intake thing.
Keith: Um, but he wasn't being intoo—he was being outtook. He got up and left the hospital.
Sylvi: Fair enough. Okay, CinemaSins.
Keith: I, I, I think that this is just like, a clever bit of—clever may be in quotes—clever bit of like, we need to put this idea in his head that this isn't like, the first time that he like hasn't gotten sick or whatever for when he should have gotten sick.
Ali: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Um, I, uh, I thought—oh yeah, I wrote, uh, he goes through his spotless medical record with the doctor. And that's where, you know, it's like the first real thing that he does in this movie besides flirt with that sports agent. And it's like, okay, so they're being like, this guy's invulnerable kind of right away. So it's not going to be this whole thing of him learning. And then it actually ended up being this whole thing of him learning. But that's sort of where I thought we were supposed to start taking the title of the movie to be kind of literal about him and not about like, his spirit.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm. It'd be really funny if that was the twist.
Keith: It's—
Art: Oh, his spirit was unbreakable.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Art: He got broken so bad.
Keith: At this moment, it—at this moment, it literally could have been a movie about him being like—this could have been The Rookie with, uh, Randy Quaid.
Art: Like, sure, he would've played baseball.
Keith: He could have been, he could have played baseball. Like it literally could have been anything to me at this point. I, oh, the only thing I knew is that he wasn't a doctor. I'm sorry. He wasn't a boxer. 'Cause you told me that he wasn't a boxer. 'Cause I thought that was funny.
Art: Oh right, that's right.
Sylvi: That's okay. I was like, how did you get to that conclusion?
Keith: Yeah. 'Cause you were like, do I, do you know what this is about in the last thing? And I was like, I think he's a—I think it's Bruce Willis and he's a boxer. And ever—and you all were like, no, I don't know why you’d think that.
Sylvi: I can see why you thought he's—Bruce Willis seems like the type of guy who would play a boxer.
Keith: Yeah, yeah.
Art: And Unbreakable seems like the kind of title a movie about boxing would have.
Keith: Totally. Which is why I thought it was about his spirit until the ER scene.
Art: This is something because the, the trailers for this movie gave away a good portion of—
Sylvi: Oh yeah, that makes sense.
Keith: Yeah, but they don't really hold it back. They don't—they're not like—it's not—I think like The Sixth Sense, the movie is on the side of the supernatural thing very quickly, uh, or relatively quickly to like, the characters, where it takes him a very long time in this movie to admit that he is unbreakable. Um, but the—I think the movie takes it as fact, like pretty quickly. He leaves the church and he finds a mysterious and fancy letter, uh, envelope on his car that says, does it say Limited Edition? What does it say?
Sylvi: I think it does. Yeah. Limited Edition is the name of the store.
Keith: Oh, Limited Edition is the name of the store. That's how he knew to go there. That makes sense. Okay. I missed that. I was like, why is this called—is this like a Supreme thing? Um, just a special brand of fancy expensive envelopes, limited edition. Wow. But it's, of course, it's the name of the comic book store. I don't have a comic book brain, so I don't like, think of things like it didn't literally did not connect the dots. Limited edition, like a comic book might be.
Art: Not a comic book store. It's an art gallery, but yes.
Keith: Well, it's a, it's an art gallery about comics and there's, there's, a big room of comics in the back that we see that looks just like a comic book store.
Sylvi: Uh, do not try to buy these comics if you are a child.
Keith: Do not try to buy these comics if you are a child. Uh, that's another big early clue for me about what's going on in this movie.
Ali: Um, how so?
Keith: Um, he, uh, doesn't seem to like comics. He seems to resent comics and the kids that read them.
Art: No, no, that's not—
Sylvi: That's not how I read it.
Ali: Yeah, Art, tell us what happens in this scene.
Art: Um, so he gets the card and we get like a, we got like a pre—we had a scene of, of Elijah presenting this cover, the cover of the first comic he was given by his mother. Um, the pencil sketch of it, not the pen sketch, but the pencil version of it, a comic book piece goes through pencils, inks, and then colors. Realistically, this pencil version wouldn't exist. It would have been inked over, you know, in the '60s, and it wouldn't exist, but it does here. And there's a pencil version of this, the cover of the first comic book he bought, and he's, he's selling it to this guy. The guy says, I'll take it, my son Jeb is going to love it. Um, Elijah inquires how old Jeb is. Uh, the man says that Jeb is four. And Elijah is very funny and very rude to this man.
Keith: He freaks out. Do you see Teletubbies here?
Art: Asking him if he thinks that this is a toy store and tells him to get the fuck out.
Keith: Uh, I actually have this, his speech about the—we're gonna—we have to go back to him as a kid. Um, but while we're here, I do want to play his speech, his like sales pitch about, um, this.
Art: Do you have the toy store parts too?
Keith: No, I don't. I just have the up to, uh, this is vintage.
Ali: Mm-hmm.
[audio from Unbreakable starts playing]
Elijah: This is from Fritz Campion's own library. This is before the first issue of the comic book hit the stands in 1968. It's a classic depiction of good versus evil. Notice the square jaw of Slayer, common in most comic heroes, and the slightly disproportionate size of Jaguaro's head to his body. This, again, is common, but only in villains. The thing to notice about this piece, the thing that makes it very, very special, is its realistic depiction of its figures. When the characters reached the magazine, they were exaggerated, as always happens. This is vintage.
[audio ends]
Keith: I gotta tell you, I, I think that that's dogshit writing.
Sylvi: Really?
Keith: That's some of the worst writing in this whole movie. Um, uh, I, I like this. I like, I like what this is doing. Uh, I don't like how it's written or how it's acted, but I like what it's doing because to me what this sets up is that Samuel L. Jackson's character Elijah has this sort of like, internal conflict between his love of the comic book and his idea that they are a perversion of reality, that they are sort of ruined by becoming products to be sold instead of what he believes, that they are representations of something that's real about the world, that there is good versus evil, and that you can find that in humans, and that comic books are like, a delightful, titillating—his words—kind of bastardization of an ideal form.
Sylvi: What I like about that scene is the, the, like, it kind of—it's something that I, I didn't think about until you mentioned it, Keith, that you thought Bruce Willis was the, the bad guy.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: But like him talking about how the hero in the drawing has features that are typically reserved for villains. And did I say hero first? The hero has features that are typically villainous, and the villain has features that are typically heroic.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: And I think that is a little bit of a gesture towards some of the, the, the rug pull later on.
Keith: Totally. I'm—by the way, by this point in the movie, I am off that he's evil. I am, I am on that he's—that he is the hero guy. Um, you know, who is, who is more of an un-cartooned hero man than Bruce Willis?
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Art: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: God.
Keith: That's, that is eventually we've, we learn in the next movie that, uh, that is his superhero name. Un-cartooned Hero Man.
Sylvi: Un-cartooned Hero Man.
Art: Yep. I would, I could give you all 100 guesses and you wouldn't guess the superhero name they have for him.
Keith: Oh, he actually is in it?
Art: He's in the third—he's in Glass.
Keith: He's in Glass. Okay.
Ali: Oh God.
Sylvi: I think I had this ruined for me because I remembered it and like, even though I haven't seen that movie and I was like, when do they call him blank?
Keith: Is it like, I don't—securaman?
Art: It's not Securaman. No.
Ali: Is it Mr. Strong?
Art: No, it's not Mr. Strong.
Sylvi: Mr. Glass and Mr. Strong.
Art: Mr. Glass and Mr. Strong. Maybe at the end—maybe we should wait till the end.
Keith: Okay.
Art: Because, like, we should, we should go over the scenes where he does superheroing.
Keith: After watching this movie, it does make me curious. This is a movie that is dying for—to be two movies and to have an immediate sequel.
Sylvi: I think that's how it was envisioned, wasn't it? As multiple—
Art: M. Night Shyamalan denied out the ass that he ever intended there to be another Unbreakable movie. And then as soon as he had full control over what movies he would make, he immediately made two more Unbreakable movies. [Sylvi: Yeah.] So who's to say who's lying or not? But he waited almost 20 years.
Keith: Is it—we do—we know that this is a—that M. Night Shyamalan's like way into comic books. Is that—that's like—
Art: Oh yeah.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: Okay.
Art: You can't make this movie without being way into comic books.
Keith: Yeah. Oh, it is very funny to though, like, to like, you know, have the superhero art gallery.
[1:00:00]
Keith: And to have to explain like, from like, first principles what is happening in comic book art to a prospective buyer. I thought that was very funny. Um, but it's really, it's for the audience, I think, more than anyone—anything.
Art: I don’t know, comics are in a weird place in 2000.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: Because, again, the Batman movies have sort of very publicly flamed out, and we wouldn't—the, the comics boom of the mid-'90s is over. Like, comic books—marvel Comics was on the verge of going bankrupt. It had been bought by an action figure company at this time. Like, comics were on the ropes in 2000.
Keith: So we really can blame Sony for all of this.
Sylvi: Wow.
Keith: All of where we are now, Sony did it.
Art: I guess. Yeah, I think when they sold the rights, they sold them to Columbia, and then Sony bought Columbia. So I'm not sure. Sony's sort of like, a bystander to the transaction that made it happen.
Keith: Well, sure, yeah. But they still like, produced the Spider-Man movies, right?
Art: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: Okay.
Art: But they did it because they bought Columbia Pictures.
Keith: Right. Yeah. Okay. So going back a little bit before Samuel L. Jackson is an adult art dealer, he is the saddest little boy staring at an off TV.
Ali: Yeah.
Art: And I'm not like a TV historian, but I think that this is an anachronistically old TV.
Ali: What?
Keith: You think so?
Art: It did.
Keith: I, it looked, oh, it looked old enough, but not like crazy old to me. It just looks small.
Sylvi: 'Cause what, this would've been the '70s?
Ali: Yeah.
Art: We're almost 1970. I don't think they had like, square TVs by then.
Ali: I, I thought it just had like a rounded sort of CRT thing.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Ali: It's like, in a square frame.
Art: Maybe I'm remembering it. Maybe I've turned it into a 1940s TV in my head.
Ali: I do think, especially the coloring of the scene, it's this really kind of soft blue room, and Elijah and his mom are wearing these bright yellow colors. I think it was trying to give a—I don't want to say as far as Technicolor, but it was giving cartoon.
Sylvi: There's a lot of that.
Keith: There's more color here than almost anywhere else in the movie.
Sylvi: Well, like, there's more variety of color. There's like—this movie is so blue that like, when other colors start to peek in, it makes it feel—I don't know, it pops more.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: But like, it is—it's not to say this is a desaturated movie. It just—because of the, the palette that they've chosen to really work with, that I'm assuming has to do with his like water shit or whatever.
Keith: It's always raining. Everything's always blue.
Sylvi: Yeah. Like I'm assuming it's all tied into like his, his, his weakness and kryptonite or whatever, but like, it, it makes stuff like this. It makes like when you see the like, I mean, we talked about the cool—weirdly enough, when it goes to the cool car and it's like black in the interior, it pops a little more because it's less blue. Um, I think it works mostly when costuming—for costuming choices like this.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Versus like when they just, I don't know how often it's changed up within the actual like setting of a scene, but like, it'll, it'll make like, in the screenshot you posted here, the, God, Bruce Willis's face in this, the I'm not a mistake one.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, his like, brown jacket here.
Keith: And his posture is like, sunken shoulders.
Sylvi: I didn't want to get into the posture because I was just talking about colors, but yeah, he looks insane.
Keith: It's insane.
Sylvi: Yeah, it's, it's, it's a swing—I guess what I think with the, the way this movie looks like, color-wise is that I, I appreciate them taking a swing for like, something a little—I don't know, I thought to say like unconventional, but like taking a swing of all—of any kind. And like when it works, I really enjoy it. And then there's sometimes when I think it—Keith posted an image where I don't think it works that well.
Keith: You don't like this green?
Sylvi: It looks so, uh, I don't know.
Keith: I like the green. I like the composition where he's in the, he's in the right half, but then the, the, his boss is in the center back. And then the green kind of reflecting off his shirt.
Sylvi: I like the composition of it, I think I just don't like chlorine green.
Keith: Sure. Actually, I love this color. It's like one of my favorite colors.
Sylvi: Fair enough, man.
Keith: Um, uh, real quick before we get to this, I'm sorry about that. We, we talked about the limited edition envelope, but we didn't say what it said inside, which was how many days of your life have you been sick? And this question kind of gets to him because he immediately asks, like, the secretary at his job to ask his boss how many sick days he's taken.
Sylvi: I was, um, watching this with my partner who has never seen this movie before, and he was like, wouldn't you just know if you've never been sick? That feels so weird.
Keith: I think it's irking him. I feel like—
Sylvi: I, I do, I do think it is just irking him and like—it is, like, the type of thing that gets under your skin where you're—you can rationalize it, but then there's like, that little like, splinter in your brain you're trying to pick out by getting people to verify.
Keith: This plays into something that we perceived slightly differently, Sylvi, from your intro. I think that he always knew that he wasn't injured in that car accident. He didn't like, realize it. He just kind of was refusing to confront it because it was more evidence for something he didn't want to believe.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And so he's sort of like dealing with something that he knows is true, but is trying to find someone to help him disprove it.
Sylvi: I think that's fair. I think that like, this movie and The Sixth Sense are both trying to play a little bit with the idea of repressing memories, right? So like, I think either way works. I think maybe I was just—both of us were reading into Bruce Willis's fucking slack-jawed face in a lot of these and being like, how does he not know?
Keith: He's so depressed. I don't think they do the legwork for him to be as sad as he is. Uh, like, there's really like, they just like, tell you he's sad and then he acts sad.
Sylvi: But he wanted to play football.
Keith: He wanted to play football.
Art: Well, he's also, like, estranged from the wife he shares a home with.
Sylvi: Right.
Keith: Sleeping in his son's room.
Ali: Yeah. But I mean, the, the movie doesn't really set up who initiated that. And, like, the fact that the movie's answer to why he's so depressed is he's a superhero, but he doesn't know it, and he has to, like, find his calling. [crosstalk] Which is a little dorky to me.
Sylvi: [crosstalk] He's alienated from the means of production.
Keith: Very dorky. Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah. I think that they just needed to do some more legwork with the relationship with his wife in general.
Keith: It would make so much sense if he resented his wife because he gave up—he, unasked, gave up his football career to be with her. And then, like, that is so emotionally coherent to me. Uh, that like he would grow to resent—like he has a stupid fucking security job watching the stars of tomorrow play football at the university stadium, and it like, eats away at him that he's not doing this. And to sort of sidestep that to be like, no, it's actually because you're Superman.
Sylvi: Well, like, it's not complete—like, it's implied. I'm gonna give some credit and say that I feel like they are trying to imply that that was—I don't know. I felt like that. But I think like, like I said, the, like, execution or the legwork or whatever to get to that could have been a little better.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Like, they could have just, like, I don't know, give me, like, another scene with the wife and also give me a scene where she talks like a human.
Keith: I think that this movie would have been way better if it was 3 hours long.
Ali: Oh no.
Sylvi: Oh buddy, I don't know about that one.
Keith: There's so much, there's so much about this movie that would have been fixed by more movie.
Sylvi: I—we should revisit that when we watch these sequels. 
Keith: Okay, fair.
Ali: Could have been a miniseries. Maybe.
Keith: Maybe it could have been a miniseries. Miniseries sounds great to me, for this. That's the other thing. [Art: I—] Sorry, go ahead, Art.
Art: I need you to just map out the other hour and 15 minutes you'd add into this movie, because I think you could argue this movie doesn't start until an hour and 20 minutes in.
Sylvi: Really?
Keith: Yeah, that—well, I'm sure it's like where they're—where they're, um, showing me—there are some funny things, but like, there, there, there's a lot of implication about what's going on that like, um… Okay, there's none of him being a superhero in this movie. It almost doesn't exist. And so there's a lot of stuff that—
Art: It starts at like, an hour and 20 minutes into an hour and 45 minute movie.
Keith: Right. So it felt like they just sort of ran out of money and/or time. And so, so what the movie hinges on is like the character drama, but it also feels like they're rushing through the character drama in order to get to a place where Bruce Willis can be a superhero. So it just sort of felt to me like maybe if they had expanded the character stuff a little bit and the superhero stuff a lot, you could have had something. He goes on one mission and then finds out that his boss is, uh, the bad guy, like, I mean, you know, boss, not in literal terms, but his like superhero handler.
Art: I was like wait a minute. What did the security guy do? Did I—
Keith: No, I mean, I meant, I meant Elijah. Elijah's like his superhero handler who's going to teach him how to be a superhero. We have about 8 minutes of that. And then he's like, brings him into his evil lair to be like, this is where I build my bombs. 
Sylvi: He is—he does kind of—he does basically just do that.
Keith: Yeah, totally unforced.
Art: He does do it by like telepathy, but he also does just have his bomb-making station in the corner of the room.
Sylvi: Right.
Keith: Uh, okay, so it's West Philadelphia, 1974. The kid is watching an off TV with a sling around his, uh, uh, his arm. Um, he is too afraid to go outside. Because he gets hurt all the time. He's sick of getting hurt. The kids call him Mr. Glass.
Sylvi: I'd be afraid of that too, honestly.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: They call him Mr. Glass.
Art: Kids are so clever.
Keith: Kids are so clever. It's funny. That almost sounds like the name of a superhero if you were weird at naming—or a supervillain if you're weird at naming supervillains.
Sylvi: Yeah, it's crazy. My bullies never gave me hard as hell nicknames in school. They just called me gay.
Keith: Um, bullies, that was really popular for a long time.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: Well, I mean, it just seems like you're gilding the lily. If they call me Mr. Glass and also gay, is, you know, it's—
Sylvi: I just think—
Keith: They call me Gay Mr. Glass.
Sylvi: I'm just looking at—no, that's just Mr. Glass. I'm sorry. That—we'll get into it. When I put the Fujo goggles on, I did enjoy this movie more.
Keith: Um. I, I, I didn't get this. I didn't—I heard you say it in your intro. I'm not picking up what you're putting down here.
Sylvi: Um, listen, I, I, I will admit that I probably convinced myself of it to give me a little extra juice. Um, but I don't know.
Keith: I—Art, you already mentioned this. The mother, she's—this is—she is great. She's giving the best performance in the movie, probably. This is Charlene Woodard playing Elijah's mother, unnamed. She's in the opening scene. She's in this scene too. She basically bribes him to go outside. Every time you go outside, I'll give you a little gift. She's like, I left it in the park across the street. There's two shots in a row that I think are amazing. The first one is them looking out the window. Um, uh, and so you see the purple gift across the street. And then the next one is when you, it's the shot from behind the bench. You see him walking up to the present from through the bench. I just love this. I think this is great.
Sylvi: Hey, I really like how this looks. At first I was really like, you're, you're not going to go down with him though.
Keith: Like, it's important to do it on your own.
Sylvi: I was worried about that. And listen, I, at the end of it, I came I came around. [Art: She’s right behind.] She is right behind. And that was the thing that turned me around on it, right? Because I was, at first I was like, that seems irresponsible. And then I was like, oh no, this is actually just a very sweet moment between—yeah.
Keith: I love this. He's got the purple turtleneck under the orange cardigan. 
Sylvi: Oh yeah, he looks great. 
Keith: The gift is wrapped in purple. It's wrapped in purple tissue paper. Uh, and what is it? What's in that box?
Sylvi: I don't remember what it's called.
Art: It's like Active Comics.
Keith: Active Comics.
Sylvi: That's so funny.
Art: No, it's very funny that they have no license. They're not allowed to use any real stuff in this.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: And I mean, there's some real comic books, especially toward the end, but in the gallery sequence at the end, there's a lot of Thor stuff because Thor you can't own.
Keith: Right.
Sylvi: That is so funny. I didn’t notice that.
Art: And so there's a lot of like, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that says Thor on it that isn't real Marvel art. They would have had to license it. And so that's why the gallery at the end has a lot of Thor stuff on it.
Keith: Um, Slayer AC Comics, approved by the Comics Code, featuring the battle with Jaguaro.
Sylvi: I was gonna say, Jaguaro was the character he mentioned earlier that like, that was the only one that stuck with me.
Keith: This is like the only guy they name, I think, Slayer and Jaguaro.
Sylvi: Sentryman.
Keith: Oh yeah, there's the Sentryman book. Yeah, that's not real, is it?
Sylvi: I doubt it.
Art: No, there are some Marvel comics in toward the end, but everything else is fake.
Keith: Uh, this is where she's like, look, every time you come out and play, I'll have another one of these. I bought a whole bunch of them. Yeah, it's really sweet. I hope her efforts don't go to waste. Um, and this is where we get the scene of him saying, it's, you know, this is vintage. I don't know what that means. To me, that is a line that means nothing.
Art: Yeah, I think, I think they just thought it sounded cool.
Sylvi: Yeah. That's the problem. You cast Samuel L. Jackson in something, a lot of stuff just sounds good coming out of him, you know, and it can trick you sometimes.
Keith: Um, I, I can see that that's what they were hoping would happen with this script. I don't know that it did. Uh, I love when he kicks him out for—this was, I mean, this was one of my favorite scenes, even though I'm complaining about it, where he kicks the guy out for being like, this is a gift for my son. Uh, and he's like, get the fuck out of my store. These aren't for kids. These—this is art. And it's like, man, you, your whole life was inspired by this art. What are you talking about? Something's, something's a little askew with this guy. Yeah.
Art: Yeah, you liked these when you were a kid.
Keith: Yeah, we just saw one second ago. We saw when you liked these when you were a kid.
Ali: And why can't it be an investment into Jeb's future?
Keith: Why can't it be an investment into Jeb's future? It could stay hung up on the wall. No.
Art: Yeah, no one's saying you're gonna open it up and let him like, tear it apart or anything. That would be a shitty thing to do.
Sylvi: But right, they cut the scene where the dad says that. He was like, yeah, it's for my son Jeb. He's gonna go to town on it.
Keith: He's gonna go, I buy my son, I like to spoil my son like I never was spoiled as a kid. I, my parents couldn't afford fancy gifts for me, so I like to get my son fancy gifts and watch him ruin them. 
Sylvi: Oh, we need—I don't like this bit anymore. [Keith laughter] That was the scariest delivery you had on that scene.
Art: Yeah, the voice is really doing a lot.
Keith: Um, okay. Who wants to talk about, uh, Elijah's kind of whole deal here when Bruce Willis shows up with his kid?
Sylvi: Oh, you like—
Art: I love—my—one of my favorite lines is the, like, I got a, I got like a thing where I got a flyer or whatever from you. It's like, congratulations, you have a mailbox.
Sylvi: That's a good line.
Ali: That's really funny.
Art: He's just being an asshole on such a, such a level.
Keith: Yeah. Um, and he knows who this is. He's been watching him, obviously.
Art: Oh, that didn't even occur to me. You're absolutely right. It did not occur to me watching it that he knows who this is.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: I thought he was still in a bad mood because of Jeb.
Sylvi: Yeah, I also did.
Keith: Um, yeah, I think, I think unfortunately it may be a more serious issue than that with him. 
Sylvi: What are you talking about? I think we can blame Jeb for everything that happens in this movie.
Art: Finally, someone's coming after the person who deserves it in this movie.
Keith: Fucking Jeb.
Art: Jeb.
Sylvi: I just want to keep saying Jeb. It's funny.
Keith: Um, and that kid grew up to be Jeb Bush.
Sylvi: Whoa.
Keith: Whoa. That's actually what Split is about.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: There's a whole—it's an hour about the hanging Chad.
Ali: Okay, so in this scene, Bruce Willis goes to Limited Edition, um, Elijah's comic book art store after he has had that argument with the Jeb guy. Um, and, uh, learning that the—that being like, hey, you, you put a thing on my, my window, I want to come talk to you. Um, Samuel L. Jackson sits him down and gives him his, like, superhero villain montage of the movie, or at least the first one, which is that he believes that comic book art is, like, a connection to an ancient way of telling art that reflects people's realities.
Keith: Do you want me to hit that button, Ali?
Ali: I would love for you to hit that button.
[audio from Unbreakable starts playing]
Elijah: I've studied the form of comics intimately. I spent a third of my life in a hospital bed with nothing else to do but read. I believe comics are our last link to an ancient way of passing on history. The Egyptians drew on the walls. Countries all over the world still pass on knowledge through pictorial forms. I believe comics are a form of history that someone, somewhere, felt or experienced. Then of course those experiences and that history got chewed up in the commercial machine, got jazzed up, made titillating cartoons for the sale rack. This city has seen its share of disasters. I watched the aftermath of that plane crash. I watched the carnage of the hotel fire. I watched the news waiting to hear a very specific combination of words.
[audio ends]
Keith: Uh, that combination of words is there is a sole survivor, and he is miraculously unharmed.
Ali: There's another combination of words here that is sort of actually your first clue of the audience, of him saying, an airplane crash, a hotel fire, and a train crash. Because these are the three things that he brings up again and again and again. For what we learned to be things that he, he caused himself.
Art: His elaborate slow confession.
Keith: He really is a slow con—I guess it's important that the superhero know who his supervillain is, but he seemed to not have a plan for what to do once he revealed himself to be the villain.
Art: No, I don't think he did.
Ali: And neither did the movie.
Art: I love this—you posted in the chat here, the—of Elijah sitting in his 3 different tones of purple outfit.
Keith: Yep.
Art: In front of this giant—there's a—iI's not so obvious, this—the shot, but there is a wide shot where you see it like goes up to a vaulted ceiling. This giant hieroglyphic tablet behind him kills.
Keith: Elijah is doing very well for himself.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, he is.
Art: And he's—
Keith: He's so rich—
Art: He is making money and he is spending it at the Purple Tailor.
Ali: More power to him.
Art: Yeah. Um, he and Prince are competing for all of the high-fashion purple stuff at this time.
Keith: It's true. And, and, you know, he, he just, uh, was in a movie where, you know, uh, very notably requested his character have more purple.
Ali: Oh my god, you're right.
Keith: This is a year after—
Art: Oh wow, this is in the Mace Windu era.
Keith: This is the Mace Windu era where he basically invented purple lightsabers by asking that he has purple. [Ali: Thank you for that.] I know. I mean, what a—it is, I think, a really special fluke of history that one of the most important things about lightsabers is that they're not just yellow, blue, or I mean, I guess at this point, blue and green is—
Art: Blue, green, red. Yeah.
Keith: Blue, green, red. Right. Uh, is, uh, um, Samuel L. Jackson being like, I want a purple lightsaber and the people on Star Wars being like, yes, sir, Mr. Jackson.
Art: Yeah, I think you could argue that Samuel Jackson is one of the top 5 most influential people in Star Wars history.
Ali: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Top 5. Oh yeah. Yeah, sure. Fuck it. Why not? Top 5.
Art: I started with top 3, but then like, I don't know the names. I don't know how many like executives are—
Keith: I'll say top 10. I'd give you top 10 with no qualms.
Art: I, I won't accept anything less than top 5.
Keith: Okay. Well, we're at, we are at an impasse. This podcast is shutting down.
[group laughter]
Ali: What's, what is it? It's George Lucas. It's whoever edited the Star Wars movies, actually.
Keith: It's Ben—
Ali: And then it's Samuel L Jackson.
Keith: Um, what is his name?
Art: Irving Berlin, probably. Is that the right guy? Who's, who directed Empire?
Ali: Well, didn't his wife do a little bit of that?
Keith: Irving Kushner.
Ali: We have to stop talking about this.
Art: Irving Kushner.
Keith: Um, sorry, I gotta, I gotta get it. I gotta get, I gotta get the Ben Burtt. Ben Burtt, the sound designer for the, uh, for all of the, all the blasters, R2-D2, the lightsaber, the Darth Vader breathing, TIE fighters, all that stuff. 
Art: Yeah. And then right after that, Samuel Jackson's purple lightsaber.
Keith: And right after that Samuel L Jackson’s purple lightsaber.
Art: And then whoever's been in charge of all that Clone Wars stuff.
Keith: Uh, by the way, if you've never seen Ben Burtt talking about Star Wars and sound effects, it's unbelievable. Like, watching him go through his like history with film and with sound and, uh, like being inspired by being a projectionist and coming up with all of—the lightsaber sound. Do you guys know, do we all know about the lightsaber sound and I'm just saying stuff that everybody knows?
Sylvi: Sure.
Keith: Yes. But how it was made? He took a recording of two different things. The whirring of the motor that syncs up the projection—like, the two engines of the projection machine, and then overlaid that with some electrical noise that was, like, at a microphone at his house that was, like, this, like, horrible kind of clicking static noise. He overlaid them together, played them through a speaker, and then recorded himself holding a microphone and waving it in front of the speaker to get the Doppler effect. And that's how the lightsaber sound was made. It's like the, the whoosh whoosh that is like a physical thing that's happening. Very cool. Love Ben Burtt. Anyway, we're not talking about Ben Burtt. We're talking about Mace Windu.
Ali: I do—yeah. I'm curious how other people felt about the scene because like, it is interesting how long this movie is just unsettling.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: Like, I don't know that you're supposed to hear what Samuel L. Jackson is saying and think anything but, oh, I'm concerned for this.
Keith: I'm concerned for this person. Yeah, he’s a wackadoo. He's a total wackadooo. He's off his rocker. I mean, this is—I think that comic books are a secret code to the history of humanity where, like, I understand being like, comic books are in a lineage of people communicating in pictures, but it's like, that is a lineage of art, not a lineage of language. Like, like you can—sure, I mean, you could go all the way back to like, uh, Neolithic cave drawings and being like, this is the closest thing that there was to language. And I'm not a linguist or an art historian, but I have to imagine that someone somewhere has decided that art and language kind of split off into two branching paths, and that there's not some secret truth in pictures that make them and what they talk about real.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: And this is a movie, so it's obviously supernatural stuff exists. I find the premise to be very bizarre. Like, I will swallow the premise because that's what watching movies is sometimes.
Ali: Mm-hmm.
Keith: But I'm, I have, I'm having trouble with like, I can see he wants to make a superhero movie. I don't know why, like, this is the kind of rationale behind why superheroes exist—is, they must exist because we wrote about them.
Ali: Yeah, it just seems like, you know, for a film that is so concerned with how we interact with stories and how the camera is constantly thinking about how people look at things or watch things or react to things, there's so many camera things, tricks in this movie that are specifically like somebody's eye on the comic book and it spins, or the kid watching TV upside down, or, you know... The presence of the action figures in Joseph's hands, and just a lot of other stuff like that. But like, that this thesis that it resolves around ends up being—I don't want to say that it's weak, but it's just another thing of, where is the script's wanting you to direct your feelings around Elijah in this scene. And, you know, Kevin? No. David? David.
Keith: David, yeah.
Ali: David's reaction to this is sort of like an almost immediate disgust, like, you know, a—maybe disgust is strong, but like a, there's something wrong with this person, and I have to get me and my child out of here.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Ali: What he says is, in reaction to this, his first response is, saying, Joseph, don't drink any more of that water and throw it out immediately, because there's a little cup of water that—complimentary—that his son was sipping on. You know, that David starts in a position that is, we are in a dangerous position with a dangerous person. And this is his first scene with the film's villain, so to speak. But the act of the film is getting him slowly more acclimated to this idea and trusting Elijah is an interesting flip. I just don't know—with some of the complaints we've had about the script, I just don't know if it would've been stronger if this stuff ended up in other ways.
Keith: Yeah, or maybe played it a little bit cooler. He seems to have no trouble being like, I believe that superheroes are real because... I believe that comic books are a distortion of reality and not fundamentally a product.
Ali: Yeah. Or even just—yeah, I don't know. I, I—the, the, like, the thesis is a, you know, you're supposed to be off-put by this.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: I'm not even sure… I don't know. It's hard to—it's hard to say whether or not the fact that it's true that David does have superpowers proves that Elijah is correct about this part of this. You know?
Keith: He totally is correct about this. Yeah. That is like the—and that this—I’m glad that you brought it up, Art.
[1:30:00]
Keith: Like, like, to be clear that everything Samuel L. Jackson is saying is true. As far as this one film is concerned, we don't have any other alternative explanation for this. What he says—
Art: Well, but the comic books being a form of history is not necessarily correct.
Ali: Yeah. Especially when he's making it a history.
Sylvi: His conclusion is correct.
Art: I don't know that all of his supporting sources necessarily—sure.
Keith: Well, nothing else is really offered to explain why there's why there's a superhero. And really what, what this sort of supposition that he's making about like, well, obviously it's sort of like the, the historical Jesus, you know, like people are like, well, you know, the Bible might be fake, but, but historians sort of agree that Jesus was maybe a real guy that existed. And I think he's looking at comic books the same way where it's like, well, obviously Superman is fake, but someone had to have the idea for superpowers, and it was probably from seeing someone that really had them. And we don't get any other reason why superheroes might exist, but his ultimate conclusion is that he has—oh, does someone have the name of his thing? Osteo—
Sylvi: Yeah. It's, um—
Keith: I have it too, but I can't remember.
Sylvi: Osteogenesis imperfecta.
Keith: Osteogenesis imperfecta, yeah.
Sylvi: Which is a real condition.
Keith: It is a real condition.
Art: Is a real condition. Doesn't really do what it says in the movie.
Keith: No. That's a good note. But he says, I spent a lot of time in the hospital. I had a lot of time to read this stuff and think about things. And it occurred to me, if I'm on this end of the spectrum, surely there's someone else that's on the other end. I have no bone density and they break all the time. Surely there's someone who's immune to having their bones broken. 
Sylvi: Sure, man. Whatever you say. 
Ali: Yeah. I just like the paired introduction of his obsession with this coming from a form of grief and sort of shame with him—his own self. You know, the like, there must be someone who's the opposite of me because I feel broken, versus the like, well, I believe comic books are versions of real life because people face natural disasters, but then he is the one causing the disasters?
Keith: Yeah, I want to—maybe we should take this as an opportunity to talk about, like, briefly at least, about the the twist of the movie, which I, despite kind of suspecting Elijah of being weird and maybe not so good for a lot of the movie, I do think they do a good job of like—it—they make you feel like he's inspired by the hero.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And that, that, that his looking for an opposite was like, a sort of hopeful endeavor. And then at the end of the movie, they go, no, no, he wasn't inspired by the hero. He was inspired by the concept of good versus evil. And his natural place would be to be evil in that paradigm because he can't be the hero. That's kind of interesting. 
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvi: It's—yeah.
Keith: I definitely never thought that he was killing hundreds of people. It did not occur to me that he was blowing up. I kind of saw him becoming the villain. He's so villain-coded. I mean, he—they even say, like, they even teach you about villain coding in the movie. They teach you about villain coding, and then they show you the most villain-coded guy of all time. Um, and, uh, and then the—but the movie has such an abrupt, maybe the most abrupt ending of any movie I've ever seen.
Sylvi: It's wild.
Keith: It's crazy. Um, uh, so I really felt like it—hey, this needs to be building to him being the bad guy. And then M. Night's like, no, it doesn't. Building? Building to it? What are you talking about? We'll just do it. Um, oh, uh, I'm just looking at my screenshots here. Um, uh, when the mother gives, uh, him his active comics, um, uh, she, uh, she's like, there'll be one of these waiting for you, blah, blah, blah. They say this one has a surprise ending. So two for two in telegraphing his twists.
Ali: Wink wink.
Keith: We're telegraphing that there will be twists. You always have to telegraph a twist or it's just a random thing you do.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: Uh, where are we in this movie? He's sleeping. He's in bed with his son reading the news about himself in the newspaper.
Sylvi: I think so.
Art: As we all do.
Keith: Yep.
Sylvi: Yeah, he's, he's, he's year 2000 name searching.
Keith: He goes into this closet.
Sylvi: Yeah, okay, this is the scene where he goes into the closet and—which does he pull out first? [Keith: Gun.] I have the order of—yeah, he first pulls out the gun.
Keith: Um, yeah, why does he do this?
Art: For Chekhov.
Sylvi:  For Chekhov.
Keith: Oh, of course it's for Chekhov. That's why M. Night does it. But there's a lot of ways to introduce a gun, and take out my gun and look at it and put it away is like, low on the list.
Sylvi: Gotta make sure it's still there.
Keith: Gotta make sure it's still there.
Sylvi: Um, I don't know, part of me is like, was he also considering, like, trying to shoot himself and see if that—if it did anything?
Keith: I also sort of thought that that's where he was going.
Sylvi: Yeah. But no, he just—he looks at it, he puts it away, and then he pulls out his, his journal of broken dreams. Yeah, he starts going through all these, like, they're—it's all newspaper clippings about, like, the promising young quarterback. Local hero, whatever. And then it ends with the car accident that he and Audrey, his wife, were in. And it's like, narrowly escapes death, I think, is one of the things it says, and like—
Keith: Yeah, near-fatal car accident.
Sylvi: Yeah, and you see the like, car overturned and like, I think it's burning too. It's like, it is a gnarly looking car accident, like when you see the image of the car itself.
Keith: Um, but then for calling it near fatal, um, you know, Audrey had a broken leg. That sucks. Um, but, you know, she otherwise seemed to be okay. She was conscious. She wasn't bleeding really. And then he had nondescript, non-visible, nonspecific injuries. Ooh, ow!
Sylvi: Ooh, my arm! Ooh!
Keith: Everything just hurts, doc. I don't know what I could do. Certainly not play football.
Ali: Certainly not almost turn over the car and open the door in this crash.
Sylvi: Yes.
Keith: Yeah, he definitely—I was actually expecting a little bit more from the thing. He does rip off the door from the hinges, uh, but I thought this was gonna be like a sort of a mom lifting the car off her child sort of thing. Uh, I, I love the sad—he just has like, a sad memories folder. I thought that was a really funny idea.
Sylvi: It's, it's, it's wild. They're really like, look at, look at what he gave up. Look at how broken his dreams are. Don't you feel bad? Do you feel like this?
Keith: Do you feel like this? Do you feel like you don't have your dreams?
Sylvi: Um, go get in a train crash.
Keith: He's working at, uh, the college stadium.
Sylvi: Again, real—seems real self-inflicted, some of these psychic wounds.
Ali: It does.
Keith: And it's not a surprise, you know, he's in New York looking for non-sad-related security jobs. It's very funny, the idea that there's, like, not two security jobs in Philadelphia.
Sylvi: Yeah. Yeah, it's Philadelphia.
Keith: He's gotta go to New York to get a security job.
Ali: I also—it's so stupid, but I do love the presence of this job, like highlighting how bad he whiffed it with that lady who passed away anyway. But if he could have just been like a normal person and left his ring on and been like, wow, I work at that college. Who are you checking out? Maybe I can see you while you're there.
Sylvi: He's in the movie too. Like, we see this guy later when he's playing football with the kids. That's the guy that she was coming to see. And I was like, oh, that's a fun touch.
Keith: Yeah, um, that was also—that was another strange bit of dialogue. It was inconsequential, so we didn't say it, but like, he, he's like, do you have any clients here? And she describes that she's going to see this guy that plays for Temple.
Sylvi: And, uh, um, she says like, he's gonna be a god after like, listing some stats.
Keith: She gives like, his height and weight and then says he's going to be a god. And I'm like, as someone that doesn't watch football, this feels like a guy who doesn't watch football description of a football player.
Art: Yeah. Also, he doesn't work at Temple. 
Keith: No, he works at another—
Art: He works at like a fictional, it's like FSU is on his jacket or whatever.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: I see. I see.
Art: And it's not Florida State University.
Sylvi: Yeah. I was going to say, that commute is brutal.
Ali: Well, he still could have kept it cool and maybe, you know.
Sylvi: I mean, if he's—it turns out he could have been like, oh yeah, that's my neighbor.
Keith: Uh, yeah, this is a funny little thing. He's at—so he's at the stadium and they get him on the radio and he's like, go for Dunn, which is very funny, uh, or whatever. He says something like that anyway. And, uh, Elijah is there with a, um, fake ticket. That's weird. Why would he get a fake ticket?
Sylvi: 'Cause he—
Keith: I, I—just to get attention?
Sylvi: That didn't—yeah, to get attention. 'Cause he knows the guy he's going there to see works security there.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Right? So like, why not just make a thing where security has to get involved?
Keith: I guess the question I'm really asking is like, is this supposed to be like, another clue that he's like counterfeiting things or that he's got access to people who have—who's making fake tickets to a college game?
Art: I mean, if your goal is to get caught, you could do it on your printer at home.
Sylvi: Totally.
Keith: Yes, totally.
Sylvi: Exactly what I was thinking too. Yeah.
Art: I could get caught making fake tickets.
Keith: It's true. It's true. It just—I just feel like it's not that hard to get access to a security guard. You just get a real ticket and then go, hey, do you know David Dunn? And they're like, yeah, he stands over there. But I like this. I like this. I'm nitpicking for just because I thought it—I, because I, because I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be like, this guy's weird, or if it was just a funny thing to do.
Sylvi: I, I like this scene a lot though too. Um, like I, I, there's, um, a good callback that, uh, they do where earlier on, uh, David says something like, I meet a lot of guys like you in my line of work, and they always follow things up with, I just need your, uh, credit card number. Which, first of all, you work security at a sports stadium. You run into guys like that a lot in your line of work?
Keith: Yeah, I also—
Sylvi: Moving aside from that.
Art:  A lot of con artists coming down to the football stadium to fleece the marks. 
Sylvi: Yeah, um, but then also, uh, in this scene, um, after Elijah talks to him a bit more, he does the like, and I just need your credit card numbers, and it flops. And he's like, that was a joke.
Keith: I thought that was really good. I really liked that.
Sylvi: I thought that was—I was like, oh, okay, this is good.
Ali: Yeah, they're becoming OOMFs.
Sylvi: Yeah, they're becoming—they're—maybe more.
Keith: Um, I—yeah, I really like that.
Ali: It's kind of cute that they just sort of spend the day together. Like, I, you know, the like David going from being like, I need to get my son away from this man, I don't trust him at all, to being like, I will entertain this man by kind of like letting him shadow me at my security job.
Keith: This is—
Sylvi: It also makes him feel special, right? Like, that's gotta be it too. [Ali: Yeah.] He's so like, pathetic.
Keith: Yeah, like, it's—this is the most productive scene in the movie, literally. Like, I think more gets done to forward the plot here than in any other scene, in good ways and in kind of silly ways. He says, I think this is the first thing that they say. He says, why do you think—or sorry, why is it, do you think, that all of the professions in the world, you chose protection? You could have been a tax accountant. You could have owned your own gym. You could have opened a chain of restaurants. You could have done one of 10,000 things, but in the end, you chose to protect people. You made that decision, and I find that very interesting. Now all I need is your credit card number. Uh, I really like that joke. I think it's very funny to be like, you could have done anything. And it's like, why do you think that? Why do you think I could have opened a chain of restaurants?
Art: I've never been to a sporting event and thought the security guards here are really protecting me.
Keith: Yeah, well, that's the—that's the—this is like the silly—the underly—undercore of the scene is that like, like, they have to thematically, like, keep him close to football because football makes him sad.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: But they also need him to be conceivably protecting people to make this sort of like, see, you're just instinctively, you're protecting people. So they have to, like, pretend that security guards are cops and that he's serving and protecting. And so they have this whole scene where he's like, where he's like having psychic visions of guys with guns and, uh, uh, you know, like he's really on the hunt for crime.
Art: People come and get drunk and then they—the team's doing badly and they want to start something. I don't think I've ever heard of like, the guy who came to a football game and like the game was going badly. So he took out a gun and started shooting people?
Keith: Yeah, it's a total false premise—
Art: I mean, it's America. I'm sure it's happened, but Jesus.
Sylvi: God. 
Art: Thanks.
Keith: If I, if I'm, if I'm gonna extend like, uh, a, some, you know, some, uh, some disbelief to—if we're gonna retract some disbelief from the movie, like he's having psychic visions all the time or whatever, and he's got to like, kind of swallow that with some like, oh, well, this is just me imagining stuff that happens because this stuff hap—like, he's just gotta, like, invent that these are normal thoughts to be having instead of psychic visions. I think it's still kind of a weak idea, but at least they've got these two guys, and Elijah's looking at David and being like, I actually really think this guy might be a superhero. Because when he first sat down, he's used to being disappointed, I guess. He's like, have you ever been sick? He's like 75% sure. He's like, have you ever been injured? And he was like, Dad, you were injured once in that car accident. And he's like, I'm going to be real skeptical about this. So you need to get Elijah back on the side that this guy might have something. Um, and, uh, he gets a vision of, uh—David gets a vision of a guy in line carrying a gun. This is huge for Samuel L. Jackson. Uh, and he like, tells the other security guy, hey, why don't you start patting people down? And it's like, if this guy's got a gun, he'll leave. And this is like really where, uh, Elijah's like, I gotta fucking check this out. This guy, if this guy has a gun, I found my guy. And, uh, how does that go for him?
Sylvi: Not great. Or, or ideally, I guess it—not ideally, but he does get confirmation. Yeah, he also shatters his leg.
Keith: Yeah, most of his leg and most of his hand too. Um, I thought that this—
Art: Yeah, a scene, a scene that I found myself unable to watch. I knew it was coming, and like, when we got there, I was like, you know what? And I turned my head.
Sylvi: It’s upsetting.
Keith: Yeah, I said, uh, he—so he follows him down. David has to go do his job, so Elijah leaves and spots this guy and then starts chasing him. Uh, but he walks with a cane and he walks slowly and carefully, so it's not going well. And he goes down to the subway, which is terrifying for Elijah. Uh, you know, and they do a really good job of making the prospect of him going down these stairs terrifying.
Sylvi: It's so scary.
Keith: They really, they really communicate how tough this is gonna be, and you're like, he's gonna fall. There's no, absolutely no way that he doesn't fall. And he definitely falls. Uh, but as he's sort of like passing out from the pain, he sees that the guy has not just a gun, but he has the exact gun that was described by Bruce Willis, which is a silver gun with a black handle.
Sylvi: Yep. And then he just passes out, right? Like, passes out right after seeing it, or am I—
Keith: Yeah, yeah, he passes out and they cut to like a new, new characterization. The son has become wildly enamored with the idea that Bruce Willis is a superhero and that his dad is a superhero. He's trying to get him to play football with the neighborhood kids and a 20-year-old man.
Ali: I want to back up a tiny bit [Keith: Sure, yeah.] To Elijah passing out, quote unquote, because I think that this is a really interesting performance from Samuel L. Jackson because it's clear that he's in pain, but he also closes his eyes with this sense of relief and elation of like, oh, I sacrificed—I did what I had to do. I knew this was gonna happen to me because this is the thing that happens to me all the time, but at least I sacrificed myself to confirm this thing, is interesting.
Sylvi: Hmm.
Ali: But yeah, then there's some big man playing football with a bunch of kids, so they need another man to play football with another bunch of little kids.
Art: I don't think that's that weird. I feel like—
Sylvi: I don't either.
Ali: Yeah, it's just like one of the kids' older cousins, and he's like, he's an up-and-coming star who's about to be like, a college football player. Well, he's about to get shot, apparently. Yeah, yeah. So, him showing the kids the ropes is kind of cute. But yeah, the scene starts with David being like, you know your mother would be so mad if she saw you playing football.
Art: Yeah.
Ali: Which is—I hate it.
Sylvi: It begins.
Keith: Yeah, this is where they introduce the idea that the mom hates football.
Ali: I—we'll get to the scene when she explains this later, but I just—
Art: It's so weird. It's so weird.
Ali: It's a big failure of her characterization.
Sylvi: Among all the little ones.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Keith: Yeah, I, I think that it's, uh, it's a weird, um, hard, hard line to have in the world. I find it hard to, like, disagree with someone who's like, I hate football. Football hurts people.
Sylvi: No, for sure. I think that's fair. I think the way that she delivers it later is weird, given her profession.
Ali: Yeah. And I also think, like, that the reason that she's morally opposed to football is the reason they couldn't date each other, instead of just being like, if he had continued with his career, he would've moved. Or, he would've been too busy to hang out with me. Or, I was studying nursing and he was—we were going through physical therapy together, is so, like—it just feels so much less realistic and puts the onus on that decision so much more about her than it would in any other situation. Because it's like, oh, I didn't want someone like that in my life, rather than, logistics, which is what human experience and love is like.
Sylvi: That's my problem with it too, is that it just feels like there are so many directions you could have taken this that would have made it feel a little more grounded and human. And instead, it's turned up to 11 in a way that I don't think works.
Keith: Yeah, it's so obviously to serve the decision, which we know that he needs to have faked his injury in the car accident. That, like—so he has to have, like, a drive to do that. And having, like, an ultimatum from this woman who he wants—who he's in love with, like, that's what it would take to get someone to make that choice.
Ali: Right.
Keith: But it's like, the way they get there is so weird. Like, especially because they also have her being like, I never wanted you to stop playing football. I just wanted you to not have played football. I didn't want you to get hurt.
Art: I, I don’t want you to stop playing football. I didn’t want you not to be with me.
Ali: They went on that date and he presumably knew this about her enough to fall in love with her, but not enough to be like, oh, I, I guess when you're in college you just think, oh, we'll graduate and it'll be fine or whatever.
Keith: But like, they could have been friends. They could have been friends for a long time before the date.
Ali: Yeah, it's just like, it—I think the failure of the relationship in this movie and the way that like, makes them hard to root for and makes Bruce Willis seem less and less grounded the more it goes on is that, like, this is such a way that it makes them not feel like partners. She is just like this presence in his life that is like, an added sort of—
Keith: Maybe she's dead.
Sylvi: Well, she's like—god. She's an obligation instead of a character is how it ends up feeling, right?
Ali: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, I think it does a good job in sort of, like, leaving it, you know, not knowing who initiated the separation, and they're still trying to kind of live together and get through it. And, like, the awkwardness of the start of her being like, well, how is New York? After the train crash. And then, you know, let's start dating again. Like, all of that is just—
Keith: She gives a good performance.
Ali: Yeah, it's just—it's just—I, you know, especially going off of Toni Collette in the last movie, it just feels like such—again, such a downgrade of a character that could have, like, whose grief and part of this could have been as much of a boon to the plot as it was when you get that scene with Toni Collette and Haley Joel Osment at the end of The Sixth Sense.
Art: Oh, it's such a waste of Robin Wright. It sort of seems like Robin Wright is is like, reading the script being like, well, Toni Collette was nominated for an Oscar. I guess I should do this movie.
Keith: I actually am not sure what I know Robin Wright from. Oh, she's Jenny in Forrest Gump and she's the princess in The Princess Bride. 
Sylvi: My favorite movie.
Art: Robin Wright has been in many things you've seen.
Keith: Yeah, I just didn't really recognize her right away. Um, of course I've seen both of those movies. This is just what IMDb says right away. She's also uh, uh, Wealtheow in Beowulf, which I saw but don't remember. So I've seen now all 4 of her known-fors on IMDb. So—
Art: And if we're just gonna go back to this, she's also, uh, the, the, the lead of House of Cards after they got rid of their first lead.
Keith: Okay. She's in Moneyball, which I've seen. Um, anyway, uh, but before—
Art: I wish, I wish I could have seen Moneyball—I wish I could have been in the theater with you the first time you saw it. That would have been fun.
Keith: It was actually kind of recently that I saw it. It was only a couple years ago that I saw it for the first time.
Art: It's a weird movie.
Keith: It is a weird movie. I think it's kind of a fun movie, although it is a portent. It's also a portent.
Sylvi: As opposed to a richtent.
Keith: As opposed to a richtent. Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: I want to take a break in a second, but I did want to say one more thing about her performance—oh, it wasn't really about her performance. We have now two movies, two relationships. In one, we have Bruce Willis talking as a ghost to a person that can't hear him while she sort of like, quietly pines for a relationship that they once had but have no longer. And in this one, we have a couple sort of talking past each other, both pining for a relationship that they had, uh, but no longer have. Maybe his relationship is actually with football instead of with her. Uh, but I think it's probably a little bit of both. Um, does M. Night Shyamalan know how to have two characters be in a relationship, or is it always going to be a weird thing?
Art: Oh my God.
Keith: Is this going to—
Art: I don't know.
Keith: Do we need to put a pin in like, every married couple is going to be bizarre?
Sylvi: The only other one I can think of is the couple in The Happening, and I don't want to get into that right now.
Art: It's like, this is the least fate—this is like the least happy marriage that I think you can imagine.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: And coming off of a movie like The Sixth Sense where it's also just like, I mean, ultimately their marriage is not unhappy because, um, they stopped being married when he died, right?
Keith: But he thinks he's in a deeply unhappy marriage. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you sent that clip of that—who's that comedian that's really big right now? What's his name?
Art: Nate Bargatze.
Keith: Nate Bargatze. Yeah. Who was like every—people just bought that he was just in the worst marriage of all time. In retrospect, it's so obvious that he's dead, but when you're watching it, you're like, yep, that's what it's like. Which is a deeply sad joke, Nate Bargatze. Yeah, but I mean, this is a, this is a guy who writes jokes about being married, so I'm not—that's sort of par for his course, I think.
Art: I like Nate Bargatze.
Keith: I like him too, but you cannot deny that he's a guy who writes jokes about being married.
Art: No, I cannot deny that.
[musical sting]
Keith: Where were we? We were talking about—we were right before Elijah shows up to get his, uh, physical therapy, I think?
Sylvi: I believe so.
Ali: I believe we were actually on the scene—the weightlifting scene in the basement.
Keith: Oh, the weightlifting scene in the basement.
Sylvi: Which we cannot skip—
Keith: We can't skip this. It's a bonding moment.
Ali: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: It is. It's so funny how this scene feels like it's from a different movie. It totally is. Like, it's from, like, a Disney Channel movie.
Keith: I—
Sylvi: And I don't even mean that in a negative way. It just, like, it feels like it's like, isn't this wacky? [Ali: Yeah, it’s—] Isn't this wacky how strong he is?
Keith: Go ahead, Ali. 
Ali: It's just part of why this movie—I have no idea what this movie has to say about hope and inspiration. 
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: Because, like, the influence that David's character has on his son in the movie seems bad all of the time.
Sylvi: It's not good.
Keith: It, it's—like a lot of parts in this movie, it goes like in and out of making sense to me. Like, he's—when he, you know, he's, uh, not sleeping in his bedroom, he's sleeping in his son's room. Like, they're obviously very close, you know. He falls asleep holding his dad. It's very sweet, you know. There's not a lot of obvious negative influence happening. But, but the son seems so enamored with the superhero thing, and, and David doesn't really seem to love his son very much.
Sylvi: No, that's fair.
Keith: Um, but it's just this weird half thing where it's like, you know, I think the movie's trying to show you that he's pulling away. His natural state is to be with his wife and with his kids. But he can't help but pull back from it. And so, like, when the son is sleeping, it's fine to hold him. But then when he's awake and he's asking him questions, he's like, no, I can't beat up Bruce Lee.
Sylvi: What if you were really mad and he couldn't use kicks, though? One of my favorite lines in this whole movie.
[Keith laughter]
Keith: He's so—he's so annoyed at the kid.
Sylvi: It's so funny.
Keith: It's really funny.
Art: Um, I'm not sure I read that as annoyed fully.
[2:00:00]
Art: Like, I don't think he's annoyed at the kid. He's just annoyed at the suggestion that he's a superhero because he exists in a world without superheroes. Of course he's not a superhero, you know?
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: He just feels so exasperated, I guess.
Keith: Yeah. Maybe exasperated is a better word, but, um, but yeah, he feels like, like the kid's asking all these questions and he's like—he's already had to tell him not—don't, don't play football. The kid's like helping him lift weights. He's not doing a very good job of helping. He's asking all these questions. You know, I'm like, just trying to be on my schedule. It just doesn't seem like they're having fun together, even though the kid is trying to have fun with him.
Sylvi: It's kind of sad, honestly.
Keith: I, I read it as kind of sad until, until, he puts way too much weight on there. 250 pounds. That seems not like, outrageously high. It's obviously a ton of weight, but it doesn't seem—I think they do a good job of being like, that's more than I lift. I don't really lift 250.
Sylvi: Yeah. That's like, a big deal.
Keith: It is a big deal. But then instead of taking weight off, the kid lies and added weight, added 20 pounds.
Sylvi: You know what we talk about? Uh, we mentioned, I mentioned in the summary that like, water is his weakness, but I think his actual weakness is not looking left or right. Because he didn't do that in Elijah's office either. And he, I think he would have seen the, his kid putting stuff on the—
Keith: He's, this is a tragic case of a double Zoolander.
Ali: Whoa.
Art: Oh my God.
Keith: He's only, can only look straight on.
Art: Hold on, is this before Zoolander?
Keith:  It is before—oh yeah, it is.
Art: Yeah. So Zoolander maybe took that from here.
Sylvi: Wow.
Keith: Wow. A second plagiarism case for Zoolander. Um, what was the book that they got sued by the author of?
Sylvi: I don't know.
Ali: Um, I don't know my Zoolander lore.
Keith: Brett Easton Ellis's novel Glamorama.
Sylvi: Sure.
Ali: I don't know if I saw Zoolander, I would be like, hey, you stole Zoolander from me.
Sylvi: Yeah, that's like, kind of wild.
Keith: Zoolander fucking rules. That movie is so good. Uh, the—my understanding—I haven't read Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama nor any novel by Bret Easton Ellis, so I can't say for—did he do American Psycho?
Sylvi: I believe so. Yeah.
Keith: Uh, yeah, I haven't read anything of his. My understanding of Glamorama is that it basically lifts the whole high-level plot of, uh, of, um, male model assassins.
Ali: It's parody.
Art: It’s not.
Keith:I don't think it is parody of that.
Sylvi: No, I'm with Ali.
Keith: It's parody of—they're doing Glamorama parody.
Ali: Yeah, I don't think that the, the, the, the, the book had that many gags and goofs.
Keith: Did you read Glamorama?
Ali: No, but I mean, how could it? Have you seen the movie?
Art: It's described as a satirical novel.
Keith: It is a satirical novel about—
Sylvi: Yeah, but do they have a water fight with gasoline?
Ali: Yeah, and do they have the, like, scene where they're all smoking weed and making out or whatever?
Art: It doesn't have to have every scene to be plagiarized.
Sylvi: No, that's how it works.
Keith: It doesn't even have to have a single scene. Yeah, well, um, it did lose this law—uh, Zoolander lost this lawsuit. They did end up having to pay out.
Art: Well, they settled.
Keith: Oh, okay, sure. Well, but that's losing. That's—that is when you know you're gonna lose so bad that you choose to lose early.
Ali: How do you think that the scene was filmed in that, like, veins are actually popping out of Bruce Willis's—
Keith: I think they were making him lift heavy weights.
Art: Yeah.
Ali: But do you think they found out how much he could lift and were like, okay, let's get—let's do that?
Keith: I, that was—I had this—
Art: You can lift less than your total maximum. And if you're like, trying like, you can make yourself try harder, you know?
Sylvi: Yeah.
Ali: Oh, sure.
Keith: I think I had the same thought process, Ali, where I was like, I wonder how they did this. And I basically decided, I don't know, maybe I'm totally wrong. Maybe they just made him strain. He's an actor. He could probably do it. I think that they probably were like, well, what can you lift? And he gave them a number and then was like, okay, well, we'll, we'll make you lift basically that amount so that it's really, really hard.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: It's a nice practical way of, of barely being able to lift some weights is to give you some weights you can barely lift. Um, so they—
Ali: Yeah, they just, they keep adding weights.
Keith: They keep adding weights. They run out of weights.
Ali: And attached 4 paint cans.
Keith: The paint cans are so funny. Here's where—I love this scene. I think this is really fun. Um, I personally wish they would have gone a little harder. 350 pounds, that's a ton, but I—does it read as superhero?
Art: Oh yeah. Uh-huh. For someone that size, absolutely.
Keith: Okay.
Art: I mean, let's—I guess not like—no, it's not in like, the Superman category, but we're not in the Superman territory. Like, Bruce Willis 100% can't lift 350 pounds. Like guys who lift 350, bench press 350 pounds like that are like, NFL linemen big.
Keith: What do we think the world record weightlift or bench press is?
Art: Oh, more than that by a bit.
Keith: I have the answer here.
Ali: Well, oh, okay. Then, um—
Keith: It was just set. It was just set in 2023.
Art: 600 pounds.
Sylvi: 700.
Ali: 445.
Keith: The, uh—there's two categories, raw and equipped. I don't know what that means.
Sylvi: Yo.
Art: Fill it in at home, listener. Yeah.
Keith: Uh, Jimmy Kolb set the record for equipped with 1,401 pounds.
Ali: What?
Art: Oh my God. Was the previous record 1,400 pounds? 'Cause that's really doing that guy dirty.
Keith: I—well, maybe they did it in kilograms because it's 635.5 kilograms.
Sylvi: Okay.
Keith: And oh, it's point—actually, it says 0.4 here. So there's 635.4 kilograms. So yeah, maybe they did do someone very dirty. And then the unsupported category, which I assume is closer to what Bruce Willis is doing. He certainly didn't seem equipped or supported. So Bruce Willis was doing it raw.
Sylvi: Don't.
Keith: Held by Julius Maddox, 770 pounds.
Sylvi: Wow.
Keith: So both of those exceed the highest guess here.
Ali: I won.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Oh no, Ali, did you—no, you lost.
Sylvi: Oh no. Yeah, you lost. You got the lowest.
Keith: You got the low—you guessed the lowest.
Ali: But the other two went above.
Keith: No, no, no one went above. Everyone guessed under.
Ali: Okay. I thought I was getting Jeopardy rules.
Art: It's Price is Right rules. You don't guess any numbers on Jeopardy.
[Ali hysteria]
Sylvi: That's fine.
Art: Jeopardy is a trivia show.
[more hysteria]
Keith: Well, no, Ali went by Jeopardy rules because she was the only one that said is it 400?
Ali: We haven't mentioned my favorite part of the scene also, in that as they're adding more and more weights, David tells his son to stay back and go to your mother immediately if something goes wrong. And the shots of him getting further and further away into the last one where he's half inside of a—a utility closet that's in their basement. 
Sylvi: It's so funny.
Art: But what was gonna happen was it like, I'm gonna drop this weight and it's gonna explode? Like—
Ali: I guess it could roll on the floor and hit him in some way. I don't know. I don't know.
[long pause]
Keith: Sorry, I'm—I’m watching the, uh, world record 1,400-pound bench pressing, and I'm having a hard time telling if this guy really did that.
Ali: Okay.
Keith: I'm sorry to, uh, uh, this—for some reason, this, this, uh, Jimmy Kolb. But—
Ali: You're having a hard time telling if he's lifting the weights? That seems bad.
Sylvi: Yeah, that seems like something you'd break.
Keith: Well, yeah, it's hard to tell what exactly that support is doing and how much—there's so many guys there with their hands on the bar being like, making sure it doesn't fall on his face. It's very difficult to tell what exactly he does. It seems like he does—he does one half of a bench press with a big strap on his arms and also a bunch of guys holding the weight with him.
Art: I mean, I think it's really important in competitive bench press maxing that you don't—
Keith: Die.
Art: Crush their faces.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: Also, still, even if he's doing only one half of effort of 1,400 pounds—
Keith: It's a ton. He like, basically collapses after doing it.
Sylvi: Yeah, I would too.
Keith: That's outrageous. That's a rhinoceros. I think rhinoceros is actually way more, but—
Ali: And that's what Joseph is thinking about his dad in this moment.
Sylvi: Damn, Dad, you're a rhinoceros.
Ali: Damn, you're strong as hell. Um, which makes him a hero as well, for some reason.
Keith: Being strong makes you a hero.
Sylvi: And also doesn't—is not going to help with the could you beat up Bruce Lee conversations.
Keith: Yeah, right.
Art: Which is not about bench pressing.
Keith: Well, but if you make it so that he can't kick?
Sylvi: And if you're really angry.
Keith: And if you're really angry, that's such a funny—like, he's trying to find a way to make it work.
Sylvi: That's really good, that bit. Yeah, Joseph has some good, some good bits in this.
Ali: He's a good movie kid.
Sylvi: Yeah, I agree. It's hard to do, but two for two so far, on pretty good movie kids.
Ali: Mm-hmm.
Keith: This is where we get Elijah's sort of diagnosis and physical therapy scene. He shattered the bones in his leg. They give him—it seemed to me they gave him like 18 months to two years of recovery time.
Sylvi: Yeah, because there was, there was a number—aamount of time he'd need to spend in the wheelchair [Keith: Six months.] With—and there's, like, a brace that he has to keep his bones in place. And then also they talked about the, like, physical therapy.
Keith: Yeah. Crutches and physical therapy for another 12 to 24 months or something like that. So this is a long—this is a bad injury. And then it goes right out to physical therapy with someone who I don't know if we knew was a physical therapist at the time.
Sylvi: I don't think we did.
Keith: Uh, Audrey Dunn, David's wife. Um, she's a physical therapist, and Elijah has presumably figured out how to make this happen for him.
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: I don't believe that this is—this is random chance.
Sylvi: No, not for a second.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, especially once they start talking, the two of them, right?
Keith: Like, yes, this—and this is also—he starts to suspect—he's like—he's clearly trying to get information about David from her, and he starts to suspect kind of right away that he was never injured in a car accident.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Which is crucial. This is the first time that this has really—when the car accident first shows up, David looks at his kid. He gives him a look like—that was kind of suspicious. Uh, and then this is the one, this is where like, uh, Elijah's like, huh, maybe he didn't get hit, hurt in that car accident. And this was all fake because this is where she reveals like, yeah, I would never have married him if he played football. I love his, his physical gifts. He was gifted and he was a local hero and it was so awesome. But, uh, I just wouldn't do it.
Sylvi: It's the opposite of what I do in many ways, which I'm like, is that, yeah. How do you feel about the, like, do you not work with athletes as a physical therapist?
Art: Well, she's not marrying—
Keith: She's not marrying them.
Sylvi: Fair enough, but like—
Keith: It's funny because such a normal argument is like right next door to this, which is like, if he ever got hurt playing football, it would have devastated me. I didn't want to play with someone that I—I didn't want to marry someone that I thought would like get—I don't know if they knew about CTE at the time, but like, I didn't want to—I don't know. I don't—but people were, were getting hurt on football fields. Like, I didn't want to marry someone that was going to, like, you know, destroy themselves playing this sport. Um, and then, like, be in grief with them for the rest of our lives. Like, that I think makes sense to me.
Sylvi: Yeah. And you could even, like, tie that into the accident where it's like, we're lucky we got out of the accident, but things could have been way worse if he got hurt playing.
Keith: Or like, there's ways to do it where it feels a little more natural.
Sylvi: I don't think I don't think it's like completely unreasonable for her to have this like big hang-up about football. I think it's totally like, that is a thing people have.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, but I think that the—I think just in general, Audrey's writing leaves a lot to be desired.
Keith: Yeah. Um, and it's not just her, but because they don't give her a lot to do in the movie, it especially stands out.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Um, I wish she had more to do, and I wish that, uh, that they had to kind of figured out how to make this work more.
Sylvi: Yeah. Did we miss the scene where she's like, um, you can tell me if, if, uh, it won't affect me if you, if you were with anyone while we were, uh, separated?
Keith: We did that scene. We did miss that. Yeah, that happened right after the gun.
Sylvi: That scene… We don't need to linger on it. It's just that scene is the most like—what is going on here? To me, I don't know. It just felt so weird.
Keith: She says, you can tell me, it won't affect me. Parentheses, lying. Clearly lying.
Sylvi: Yes.
Keith: I, I think that this is—that was actually, to me, one of the more believable scenes. Like, I believe that that happens. I think that happens probably every day to people who are breaking up, being like, were you with anyone when we were having trouble and being like, having a strong emotional reaction, yes or no. Why did she—I wonder why she was—she kind of broke down because she was with someone else. Did she break down because she had suspected him of having an affair?
Sylvi: And I just assumed it was relief.
Keith: Guilty. And maybe it was relief. Totally. You can cry because you're relieved. Um, maybe she was holding—
Art: Those are all great questions.
Keith: Maybe she was holding back, um, her feelings about the train, which, like, she was not super emotive about the train. And she was like, there was an emotional dam built up that the relief of him saying, like, no, I didn't sleep with anyone else, kind of tore down. And so this is a delayed reaction to the train. These are all believable things to me.
Sylvi: Yeah, maybe I'm being unfair.
Ali: Yeah. I mean, her intention in that scene is being like, hey, let's go on our first date together. So, the sort of like, oh, she was just so overcome with emotion that she like—
Keith: I think that happens a little bit later, but it's definitely a precursor to that.
Ali: Well, no, I mean, that's why they have this conversation. She asks him that question to be like, hey, I've made a decision about this, but I want to know this before I tell you.
Keith: Oh, right. You're right.
Ali: And then, she's like, it doesn't affect my answer at all. And then she starts crying, and then she says, well, I've been thinking about it, and I think that the train was a second chance, and the fact that you're still here means we should try again, and let's try again.
Keith: It's sad how quickly and effectively it felt like Bruce Willis and his wife, uh, loved each other in The Sixth Sense in that opening scene versus this movie where it, it, it seems like creating that spark was very difficult.
Sylvi: Yeah, I'd agree with that.
Ali: Um, I definitely do—yeah. It's—
Keith: There's a cute scene when they, when they have like their one good night when he bridal carries her upstairs. They're like having a cute breakfast.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Ali: I also like, I love the scene of their date because it, it just like really highlights how unlikable both of these characters actually are.
Sylvi: Well, what do you mean? Their favorite colors are so interesting.
Ali: Yeah—I—their favorite colors are rust and brown.
Sylvi: Crazy! 
Keith: I, I can't totally go against rust.
Sylvi: I, I, it's just, it's wild to, to, for them both to be like, yeah, I just sort of like, I like rust and I like brown. It's like, those are the same, basically. I guess they are perfect for each other.
Art: They're not interesting.
Keith: Well, I feel—
Sylvi: My favorite color is beige. That’s the vibe.
Keith: I, yeah, I don't know how I feel about this. I don't know what I like. It's a kind of quirky idea to like, have a re-first date. Like, I think that's kind of cute.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: It's so—why choose rust and brown? That is like a choice that someone, you know, not someone, M. Night, I know that you wrote this in your script, you little weirdo. Why? Why rust and brown? Um, rust. I can't say that I don't like rust as a color.
Sylvi: It's not a bad color. It's just, I wouldn't say my favorite color is rust.
Keith: It's so close to red, which like, is my favorite color, or like, was for decades my favorite color. Um, brown—and brown was my dad's favorite color. So I'm like, these people exist. My favorite color is red. My dad's favorite color is brown.
Ali: Okay.
Keith: But also my dad was a fucking lunatic. So I can't, I can't just say normal people are out here with the favorite color brown.
Sylvi: She does get it back with the Prince, uh, being her favorite song.
Keith: He's so thrown. It's like he's barely even heard of Prince.
Sylvi: It's like they haven't had a conversation.
Keith: It is like that he's been dead for their whole marriage.
Sylvi: Whoa, baby, that should have been the twist.
Ali: Also like, soft and wet. I could think of some things that are soft and wet. He's so weird.
Keith: It's true, but he's like, he's not horny about it. He's like, kind of grossed out by it. He's like, geez, are you actually a freak? That's like, not okay, I think.
Art: But that song's from the '70s. Like, this isn't—it's not a new song. I mean, it's because she could have like, discovered it, but like, people have been together for a presumably a long time. I don't know how long.
Sylvi: At least 10 years, given the canon of this movie. But I mean, no, because they got together in college, right? And they're like, at least like, I don't know, if not in their 40s, approaching it.
Keith: And am I right in saying that we are squarely post-Artist Formerly Known as Prince territory? He's known—he was known as Prince in the year 2000.
Sylvi: I don't remember.
Art: I don't—yeah.
Ali: It might have been when that was sort of like, a novel thing.
Keith: It definitely—I remember that being a joke when I was a kid, like hearing people say the artist formerly known as X as like a joke, uh, or specifically just referencing Prince in that way. And then learning years later when I was like, who's this Prince guy people are talking about? Being like, oh, that was like—
Art: Prince changed his name to the symbol in 1993. Yeah, the artist formerly known as Prince came out of that, right? Changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol, reverted to his original name in 2000. So it sort of depends on when—
Keith: I'll give it, I'll give it, I'll totally give it to her then. The script would have been absolutely written before that change back.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Ali: Um, maybe Prince saw this movie and was like, yeah, man, that does sound great. [laughing] I don’t believe that!
Keith: I thought that the symbol only was like, for like, 3 years. So I take it back. This is me not knowing Prince facts.
Sylvi: We forgive you.
Keith: Which is tough because my other podcast is called Prince Facts.
Ali: Oh, damn. Well, it's about princes, right?
Keith: It's, yeah, it's actually about, uh, the song Two Princes by the Spin Doctors.
[“Two Princes” by the Spin Doctors starts and stops playing]
Ali: Yeah, man!
Sylvi: That's the song you—I wrote in my notes, you could put Two Princes underneath the weightlifting scene and it would read like a Disney comedy movie.
Art: Why Two Princes?
Sylvi: I just couldn't—I had to—it was just the, the, like, Disney Channel vibe of it. Like, the rhythm to it was more what I was thinking of. And I also couldn't remember the name of the, the song that plays last in Matilda, so I went with Two Princes.
Keith: [to the tune of “Two Doctors”] This guy likes to lift his weights. Go ahead now. His kid puts the weights on the thing. It's heavier now.
Sylvi: I'm trying to think of my own and I'm just—I’m in awe, Keith. Well done.
Keith: [still to the tune of “Two Doctors”] Paint cans on the edge of the bar. He's lifting them good.
Ali: You had to do something to the next line.
Keith: [still to the tune of “Two Doctors”] He lifts them up because he's strong.
Sylvi: [still to the tune of “Two Doctors”] Could he fight with Bruce Lee?
Art: I'm unbreakable, baby, can't you see? Does that fit? Does that—
Ali: We're getting closer and closer.
[group hysteria]
Keith: We're getting really close to it. I want to give a special shout out to Swiss Army Man, uh, not because it has the song “Two Princes” in it, but because one of the songs in the soundtrack is, um, narrating exactly what's happening on screen during a montage. And it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life. I love it. I love that movie. It's really weird and funny and weird.
Art: I'm unbreakable, baby. Can't you see? I ain't got no illness or injuries, but—
Keith: Yeah!
Sylvi: Let's go!
Art:  But I could drown in the sea.
Keith: Oh my God.
Art: You know, there are a couple syllables there, but—
Sylvi: This is—is this what people felt like when they saw Mozart playing piano?
Art: We'll have this ready. We'll have our Spin Doctors jukebox musical Unbreakable ready for—
Keith: I feel like Weirdo listening to Dr. Demento on the radio.
Sylvi: I completely lost where we were.
Keith: We are at, um, oh, we were talking—
Sylvi: we didn't really talk about the conversation they have at physical therapy.
Keith: Yeah, with the wife. Yeah, where he's like, um, like, tell me about, uh—oh, he gets caught. He gets like, caught bad. Sylvie, do you want to talk about this?
Sylvi: Oh, what, when he's like, tell me about—so are you married? And then she's like, huh? And he's like, I get nervous, so I wanna like—it helps me to talk.
Keith: Good excuse.
Sylvi: Which like, honestly believable. I am—I constantly yap when I go to get my blood taken because one, the pers—the woman who does it is very nice and I like talking to her, but two, because it distracts me from it. Um, but then how does he—they—she does—the mask like completely slips pretty soon after that, right?
Art: Yeah, he says David.
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvi: Oh, he says David, right.
Keith: He says David, and she's like, how do you know that his name is David? Caught me. I'm a weirdo. 
Art: Yeesh.
Sylvi: Oopsie.
Keith: Hands up, oopsie.
Ali: Yeah, well, I—we don't really see the full fallout of that scene. We just see her saying, like, I never said my husband's name, or whatever. And then I believe it cuts to her talking to... David about it later?
Sylvi: I think, yeah, it's this kitchen scene next, right?
Ali: Oh, no!
Sylvi: I think it goes right into that, because she's talking about, like, the stuff we mentioned earlier, where it's like, oh, it's sad when people get like that because of their condition.
Ali: Yeah. That is the sequence of events.
Keith: This is also the scene where I said that Elijah is a hunter.
Sylvi: Goddamn it. Yeah.
Keith: Elijah is a superhero hunter. He's looking for superheroes. [Sylvi: Ohhh.] He's a 1-star superhero hunter.
Sylvi: Well, and that's pretty good.
Keith: Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense is Residual Nen.
[Sylvi laughter]
Sylvi: Hell yeah, man. Hell yeah, man. I'm shaking your hand about that.
Keith: Um, three of us understand it.
Sylvi: Media Club Plus from now on is just keeping track of who is a Nen user and who isn't, regardless of whether it's Hunter x Hunter.
Keith: Here's my singular sickness, which is, um, seeing two people and going, that's Gon and Killua.
Ali: Oh, that's just being a fujoshi. You're so close to being a fujoshi.
Keith: No, it's different.
Sylvi: Sure, man, whatever you say.
Ali: You have to go the extra step.
Keith: No, I'm, I like this step. I like the step where I explain the Beatles by saying John and Paul are Gon and Killua.
Sylvi: Oh my God.
Ali: Sure. Um, okay. Uh-huh.
Keith: And they are.
Sylvi: Damn. Killua, don't go to your car that night.
[Keith laughter]
Keith: Killua, don't break up the band.
Sylvi: God, we need to talk about this next scene because it's The Scene. Um, not really, but to me it's The Scene.
Keith: Tell me about the next scene.
Sylvi: So, uh, you know, it's—I think it's supposed to be—it's kind of unclear whether it's like breakfast or what, but it kind of feels like it's, it's the start of the day. They're just sort of like doing stuff around the, the kitchen, chatting, and Joseph's just sort of like sitting in the, uh—at the kitchen table and It's, it's like, oh, what's, what's up? And then, oh, uh, Bruce Willis's face sort of falls and he goes, Joseph, what are you doing? And the sh—the camera pans down to see the gun on the table.
Keith: There actually is a couple things before this, uh, that I think are really important. Not to—we don't have to get into deep about them, but, uh, David gets a couple like, false alarms. Um, I'm pretty sure this is the order this happens in, so he's like, especially primed to not want to get shot with a gun, I think.
Sylvi: Oh, you know what? This is—we actually did miss a scene.
Keith: Yeah. The first one is he is—M. Night Shyamalan shows up as a drug dealer.
Sylvi: That is true.
Keith: Or as an imagined drug dealer because, uh, Bruce Willis gets like a psychic tag of a drug deal happening. And so he does a pat-down on, on drug-dealing M. Night Shyamalan, who is a big downgrade from doctor. He's now dealing drugs at, uh, a stadium.
Sylvi: I mean, it's pills all the way down.
Keith: Yeah. Oh yeah, I guess maybe it is actually a lateral move.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: At least as far as raw materials go. And the guy didn't have any drugs on him. They don't really explain what happened here. Maybe I just missed like, an obvious thing of like, maybe he was dropping off, not picking up, so why would he have drugs on him? I didn't really get why this didn't work.
Art: Well, I don't know that it's a false positive. The role in the credits is stadium drug dealer. 
Keith: It’s true. I'm sorry, what I mean by false positive Positive is like, David takes it as a miss. He goes like, oh, maybe I'm not psychic. He feels it was a false positive. And then his son gets bullied.
Ali: Oh, yeah, yeah. I—with the drug deal, is it that the drugs got switched? So there's like, a second part of this that he misses out? Because I know somebody does put drugs into a trash can and takes them out. And I don't know if that was via David Vision.
Keith: That was David Vision, I think.
Ali: Okay.
Keith: So maybe it like, was the future, or maybe it had happened too long ago. Like, we know his visions aren't always like, what literally just happened.
Ali: Yeah. Um, I—this, this part of the movie is really the, the, the like—part of watching Sixth Sense for me was like.
[2:30:00]
Ali: How fucked up is it to be like a kid struggling and then this therapist ghost needs to talk to you? Part of this, for this, for me, the like, ooh, uh, Unbreakable but fucked up, where it's like just this like, security guard who's going through a divorce and is like, buying into these delusions and like, racially profiling this dude.
Sylvi: Yeah!
Ali: And, like, being more intense to the people at his, like, low-level security job.
Keith: Yeah. Hey, serving and protecting. This is real. What he does is real.
Ali: Yeah, you know?
Keith: I'm struggling to think of a more crucial job than security guard at a college football stadium. And then he gets a call about his son. His son was hurt by some bullies. He was trying to stop some bullies from making fun of this girl, and they held him down and beat him—lightly beat him up.
Sylvi: And he's He—in the scene when he goes to pick him up, we learn, one, that Audrey usually handles things like this.
Keith: Yeah. Joshua's stuff, he calls it.
Ali: Yeah, he's not even an emergency contact for his own son that he lives with.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Wild.
Keith: It's very weird.
Art: Whose bed he sleeps in.
Keith: It's very weird though, but then the other thing is that the school nurse, I assume is who it is, is like very—is very—he's giving very weird vibes, like—
Sylvi: There's—the line she has here is so funny. I'm sorry if I jumped on you saying it.
Keith: Because, well, the first thing is that he's like, oh, I don't usually handle this kind of stuff. And I feel like the meaning of that is obvious. Like, he has a, you know, a different schedule than his wife or something. And she like, this is the—obviously he's got issues with his wife and his kids, but I think someone could understand like, like, he's not available, she is. Usually my wife gets these calls. Uh, and instead she goes like, what kind of stuff? And he's like, Joshua stuff, which is a horrible way to say it, I think. Uh, and then she's like, you don't remember me, do you? I sent you to the hospital.
Sylvi: Yeah, that line is wild. Nothing like when I sent you to the hospital. She says it like she beat his ass.
Keith: She says it like she beat his ass. I totally—that's like—I think this is going to be like, a reveal of like, that this woman is evil.
Sylvi: She's made of water and that's how she's able to hurt him.
Keith: Yes. This is the, this is the lady in the water. [Sylvi: Ohhhhh, it’s all connected!] Oh, does M. Night have some water stuff?
Sylvi: Yeah. 
Art: Um, yeah.
Ali: Uh-huh.
Keith: Okay. All right. So we'll put a tag in relationships and married relationships. Put another tag in water. 
Ali: Um, the, uh, that's so stupid.
Art: All right. Keith doesn't know, so.
Keith: So this is—
Ali: Are you remembering more?
Keith: Oh, oh, Signs.
Ali: Yeah.
Keith: Is that what you're saying?
Sylvi: Okay.
Keith: I do know. I, as this is canonical, I've seen the last third of Signs.
Ali: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Keith: Uh-huh. Um, which is, which is a shame. I wish I didn't know. I actually don't know. Is it just War of the Worlds? Is like, it just literally just War of the Worlds? We'll find out. Okay.
Sylvi: I haven't seen it, so…
[Ali gasps]
Keith: Have you seen War of the Worlds?
Sylvi: No.
Keith: Oh, great. Well, then there you go.
Sylvi: Um, but like, I'm aware. 
Keith: Aware of what?
Sylvi: Of War of the Worlds. It is a huge cultural footprint.
Keith: Yeah, it does. Um, but so she—this is where she like, gives him a repressed memory of almost drowning in a pool. Uh, and he was in the hospital for a week recovering from almost drowning. They said he was on the floor of the pool for five minutes. And instead of—
Art: Well, it says that's the story they tell.
Keith: Oh, okay. I thought that that was the part that was real. What was not real was that he died and that he was a ghost.
Art: I took it as both parts could be fake.
Keith: Yeah, that's probably true. But I—but as—because we know he is in fact a superhero, maybe it takes him five minutes to drown. He instead actually takes these two events as evidence that, of course, he was feeding into his own delusions that Elijah was—had put in his head. He's not a superhero. He's just a guy. He can get sick. He almost drowned. He was in a week at the hospital. He can't—he's not psychic. He's just imagining things. And then his son pulls out a gun.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Ali: Well, yeah, I think the important context of the sort of school bullying scene, too, is that his son says, I thought I was like you, but I wasn't. He also says something like, you know, I was trying to help someone who was hurt. That's your hero's code, right? And it seems like such a fatherhood missed opportunity to be like, you don't have to be a superhero to be a good person. You know, you did a good thing by trying to help, but yada, yada, you know?
Keith: Instead, he does the opposite thing, which is like, we are similar. We're both normal humans who can get hurt.
Sylvi: So stop trying to help people.
Keith: Stop trying to help people.
Art: Yeah, cut it out.
Keith: And then he takes not trying to help people to heart by finding a gun and going to shoot—this is the craziest—I—this is one of the craziest things I've ever seen in a movie. In any movie. Any movie. This kid finds the gun, finds the hidden bullets. I've got the scene. Let me play the scene. 
Sylvi: Please. Yay! 
[audio from Unbreakable starts playing]
David: Joseph, what the hell are you doing?
Audrey: Oh my God, 
Joseph: You don't believe? I'll show you. You can't get hurt.
David: That gun's not loaded. He doesn't know where I keep the bullets.
Joseph: In your Rookie of the Year trophy.
David: Joseph, did you load that gun?
Joseph: You won't get hurt.
David: Elijah was wrong.
Audrey: When did he meet Elijah?
David: He was with me when I met him.
Joseph: No one believes him. 
Audrey: Joseph, listen to me. Sometimes when people get sick or hurt for a long time, like Elijah, their mind gets hurt too. And they start to think things that aren't true. He told me what he thought about your father. It isn't true. 
Joseph: I'll show you.
David: Do you remember the story about the boy that almost drowned in the pool? That was me they were talking about. I almost died. That was me.
Joseph: You're lying.
David: I'm not lying, okay? I just didn't remember it, that's all.
Audrey: You know your father was injured in college. You know that. You know all about that. Don't do it. He'll die, Joseph. 
Joseph: I'll just shoot him once.
[laughter from MCP cast]
David: Joseph, listen to me.
Audrey: Joseph, don't be scared.
David: Joseph, if you pull that trigger, I'm going to leave. Do you understand? I'm going to go to New York. You're right. If you pull that trigger, that bullet is just going to bounce off me and I'm not going to be hurt. But then I'm going to go upstairs and I'm going to pack and I'm going to leave for New York.
Joseph: Why?
David: Because I thought we were just starting to be friends for real, and friends listen to each other. They don't—and they don't shoot each other, do they, Audrey?
[audio ends]
Keith: Uh, I cut it off a little bit too soon. Uh, Audrey then goes, that's right, friends don't shoot each other.
Sylvi: [crosstalk] Yeah, friends don't shoot each other.
Art: [crosstalk] Father of the year over here.
Keith: I think three pretty good performances there. I thought that kid did a pretty good job with M. Night's getting good performances from child actors, I think.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Um, uh, he seems terrified to shoot his dad, and who wouldn't be? I really like the change in tactic. It's not working telling him I'm not a superhero, so I'll admit that I'm a superhero and then say, but you don't shoot people, so I'm gonna leave. I'm going to divorce your mom. And go to New York. It'll be your fault.
Sylvi: We're not friends anymore if you shoot me.
Keith: We're not friends anymore. Uh, yeah, that was, that was also like a very revealing line. Like, I thought we were just starting to be friends for real, and it's like, you're supposed to be his dad, not his real friend.
Sylvi: It's like, oh, it—I don't know, it's like a sad little like, twist of the knife in that scene. Yeah, specifically.
 
Keith: I really like that scene even though it was absolutely out of nowhere and completely off the wall insane.
Sylvi: Deranged, but pretty good.
Keith: Yeah. Do we all—what do we think about that? Do we all—are we all on board with this scene?
Art: I think it's earned. 
Sylvi: I don’t think it’s unearned.
Art: The kid's going through something. I don't think—I mean, it's like, it's certainly a strange thing to do, but I don't think it—I think saying it comes out of nowhere is a little strong. And it's a very, it's a very well-executed scene. It's a very tense scene.
Keith: It's such a leap from where they were, I think. Um, my feeling is that they didn't do—this is part of me being like, maybe if this was—this movie was twice as long, uh, like, they get him kind of hooked in. They get, um, Joshua hooked into the superhero idea very quickly and mostly offscreen. Um, it becomes clear that he's really into it, like, uh, right away. But they—they don't do a lot with it. We don't know a lot about Joshua. We don't know anything about him except for that he likes that his dad is a superhero. He's upset that his parents are having a tough time. Like, we don't know about the school. We don't know about anything that's going on in his life. We don't know why he cares about superheroes. Actually, I don't think we've even seen him playing with his superhero toys yet. which is, I think, a big miss.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And so, because it's like not until the scene where they're like, maybe we shouldn't go out on this date because our kid has kind of lost it, that we see him playing with his superhero toys. So I wish that we had gotten like more track for Joshua as a character, but it's such a wild swing that I really…
Ali: Yeah, it's just like, really strange thinking about the whole of this movie and thinking of this being like, the most tense scene in it.
Keith: Yeah. That is true.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Ali: And it's just danger that sort of erupts from—I don't want to say nothing, but it feels... Like, for a child this young to have sort of a swing, like a violent swing, and also, I don't know, the like, I know where my dad's gun is. Like, I don't know. I, you know—
Keith: Second appearance out of two for I know where my dad's gun is in an M. Night movie. 
Ali: Yeah. It just seems like there's a lot of ways to get to this characterization that doesn't seem—that also doesn't have this threat of gun violence on top of it.
Keith: Drop a bowling ball on his toe. Right? Come on, kid.
Ali: I mean, I guess the weight scene is also just like this very clear endangering of his father's safety in a way that is encouraged by his father. So this like, oh, well, safety is not a concern for me anymore, I'm just going to shoot you, is like—
Art: Well, but I guess the image of bullets bouncing off of Superman's chest is such a big piece of superhero imagery that I think you sort of have to do it here.
Ali: Mm-hmm.
Art: When my mom used to work at DC Comics, she did publicity there, and one of those things she did, she arranged for characters to show up on—not public events, but for like publicity events, right? And she told me that they didn't have a Superman costume because you can't send out a guy in a Superman outfit because people will shoot him.
Keith: Wow.
Art: To see the bullet bounce off his chest.
Keith: Now, is that—had that happened once, or is this an idea that people had?
Art: I—for all I know, it was just my mom lying to me. You know, I don't, I don't know.
Keith: I do want to—I do like this as an—sorry, Art, did you have more about that? 
Art: No, but that's why I think that that's like a significant—that like, that it does have to be a gun.
Keith: This is something that I was thinking about recently because Lois Lane had come up about the new [Ali: Superman movie?] The new Superman movie. And I had seen a clip from—because they were—they're like already—they already—when the movie starts, Art, you said when the movie starts they're dating and she knows he's Superman.
Art: They're dating and she knows he's Superman.
Keith: And so, uh, I was just like looking up stuff about Superman, which is not a thing I know a lot about, and I saw that in the recent My Adventures with Superman cartoon, the way that Lois Lane chooses to like prove that Superman is Superman is by throwing herself off of a building. And then I learned that that is not the only time Lois does that. Lois does that kind of all the time, it seems like? At least multiple times has like, to prove that Superman is Superman, throws herself off of a skyscraper or whatever. And so this sort of like, I'll prove that you're a superhero by doing something that is totally off-the-wall dangerous, does kind of fit into the superhero world, I guess, which I don't have a lot of experience with at all. Um, it is funny to see it appear in like, what has been otherwise kind of a grounded movie.
Sylvi: I kind of like it more now, because it is taking the—this whole movie is basically an exercise in trying to take the fantastical and making it more grounded, right? Like, that is the, the kind of idea with superheroes in general and Unbreakable. Um, and so like, when the absurdity of the superhero comic starts to encroach on real life, it should feel like this, you know?
Ali: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Yeah. He doesn't shoot him.
Art: Yeah, he doesn't shoot him. And we immediately jump to him talking to Elijah, and Elijah starts like, I never said you couldn't be killed, which is also sort of interesting knowing where it goes. Yeah.
Keith: Is it the next day and they all kind of agree…? Oh yeah. David tells Elijah not to come around anymore and that he's not special. Is that after um, Audrey suggests like, hey, if Elijah shows back up, we should call the police on him?
Art: I—
Keith: Or is that later?
Art: I think that's after. I think he immediately goes to Elijah, tells him not to come around anymore, and then—
Keith: Okay, yeah. Um, and he's like—this is also, this is also a weird scene. I really like it as a choice knowing where the movie goes. Elijah's like kind of unresponsive in the back of a—seemingly a random comic book store. Um, the actor who plays the, uh, the clerk here is named, um, Boston Christopher, which I just thought was a very funny name.
Sylvi: Hold on. That's, that's like a character in a sketch.
Keith: It is like a character in a sketch, but this is the actual, this is a, you know.
Sylvi: All right, Boston, you do you.
Keith: SAG official name, Boston Christopher. Um, I think he’s just credited as like comic book store—
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Uh, employee or something. Anyway. Um, yeah. Comic book clerk, Boston Christopher. Uh, what do we think about this scene where he's kind of just like sitting in the back of this comic book store, clearly depressed, unresponsive?
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: I don't—it’s hard to say I liked it.
Sylvi: I did like it, yeah.
Art: Good scene.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Um, they kind of inter—intercut this scene with, uh, the re-first date, which we talked about. Um, you know, what's your favorite color? What's your favorite song? When did you know that we were over?
Sylvi: It's your first date. You shouldn't ask that.
Keith: Um, which he does say, and then Audrey's like, there's no rules on a first date. Like, I think that's kind of—it's kind of by default not something you would ask on a first date.
Art: I think first dates do have rules.
Ali: Yeah, I think that's the date with the most rules.
Keith: Hmm. Interesting. That's interesting. Maybe if there were less rules on first dates. Maybe if there were less rules on a first date. People would not go on so many 5th dates and then be like, oh, this person's so—oh, fucking weirdo.
Ali: Yeah, well.
Keith: Um, the comic book clerk is like trying to get Elijah out of the store because he's like just sitting there and they're trying to close. This is a very weird scene. The guy is like, at first he's like, oh, I didn't know you were in a wheelchair, sorry. And then he doesn't say anything. And then it's closing time and he's like, I'm gonna put you outside. And then Elijah starts like fucking with the clerk by like jamming his wheel, like so that he swerves to one side and kicks his injured leg into like, the racks of comic books, knocking a bunch of stuff over.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And it's super intense and weird and kind of creepy. And then they end it on like a comedy beat where he knocks over a, uh, uh, he gets a, you know, he gets a Dr. House idea. He sees a comic book on the ground and he's like, this fucking solves all my thing. And then he's like, how much for this one?
Ali: Mm-hmm.
Keith: And then, and then that thread is over. This like, weird, there's no consequences. It's just, he finds the book that reminds him that every superhero has a weakness. Water must be his weakness. [Sylvi: You'd think he'd have known that.] You'd think that he would have known. He is kind of—he studied the comic book form intimately. Intimately. Just a—this comes up thematically later. The first time that he thought that they might not make it is that he had a nightmare and woke up and didn't tell her, to be comforted by her. That was the first time he thought that maybe they weren't going to make it. Mm-hmm. Um, what happens after this? What happens between this and when, uh, he gets that call from, from Elijah?
Ali: Wait, which call from Elijah?
Keith: He gets the call explaining that water must be his weakness.
Ali: Oh yeah. Oh, well, the call is—no, I mean, it—that's the next scene because that's the voicemail that he gets after. [Keith: Oh, okay.] There's a very short scene with, like, a—there's a comedy moment with a babysitter, basically. But—I don’t know if that’s super important.
Keith: Okay. Right. Yeah.
Ali: But yeah, he gets home that night with a call from Elijah about the comic book that he found and the subsequent weakness. And yeah, I just, you know, David sort of being—Elijah being sort of depressed and listless and just fucking with this guy. It's just like, I do feel like sometimes this movie just doesn't know how to fully execute on its characters.
Art: Yeah.
Ali: And so, it's this sort of like—Elijah's moving the motions through his plans, but now he's kind of out—his one opportunity for hope that he found in David is now gone because David is like, hey, don't talk to me anymore. And also, I drowned once, so I'm actually not a superhero.
Keith: Right.
Ali: But yeah, I don't know. It just seems like, again, the, like, using—even just using Elijah's disability as his sort of, like, this is my weakness, this is my superhero—my supervillain origin story, or whatever. Also just being like, I am going to use that disability to, like, fuck with people who, like, don't know how to treat me socially, is also just, like, sort of a—
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: I don't know. I don't know that you gotta do all that.
Keith: It's a—it is a very weird movie. It's deeply strange. Uh, but, uh, yeah, when David—when Elijah remembers about weaknesses and that he's like, you know, my bones break, yours don't, but we both react to water the same, that, that means it's your weakness. He just calls him. He just totally buys this. He calls him back. He's like, look, I wasn't honest with you, I didn't get hurt in that car accident. And then he's like, what do I do now? And he says, go to where people are. It won't be like the comic books. Real life doesn't fit into little boxes that were drawn for it. Which I think is a fun line, but it's very funny to be like, what do I do now that I'm a superhero, and it’s like, go be a superhero. Go to where people are and stop a crime. Which he doesn't do. He doesn't stop a crime. He does not stop a crime. He punishes someone who committed a crime, which is different.
Art: Well, he sort of stops the ongoing crime.
Keith: He does stop the ongoing—yeah, he does stop—yeah. And he—
Ali: He sees a bunch of other crimes that he can't stop, I guess? Question mark?
Keith: Yeah, he's—I guess it—to me, it felt like he was trying to decide which one was good enough, which is weird because they show increasingly serious crimes. There's a—
Art: Oh, I thought it was that those were over. But like, he couldn't stop those.
Ali: Yeah, that's what I was gonna say.
Art: I thought it was him deciding that like, what he's there to do is not to like, oh, that guy did this racist thing, that guy is a rapist, I'm gonna beat them up. That's like, he found a guy who was actively doing a crime.
Keith: Yeah, but in a comic book, wouldn't you like figure out how to get that guy to the police or something so that he can be prosecuted and that the victim can have justice instead of—
Art: I know that's not an interesting last 20 minutes of a movie.
Keith: No, but this movie also didn't have that.
Ali: Yeah. And I feel like this movie has a really—like, I don't know that it ever gets to a sense of justice. Like, that, you know, that the solution that David finds in that is, like, to completely do it himself and leave unmasked and not, oh, I just found these kids, and I'm gonna call the police immediately, instead of keeping them in the situation where they're in this house where this guy still is. And I'm gonna keep myself in the situation in this house where this guy still is. It just, like, I don't know, it gets further and further away from, like—again, especially in the scene, I'm never like, yeah, David! Yeah, go!
Keith: Yeah, it is a dark scene. It is not—there's—it is very dark. I want to give—Ali, I agree with you, but I do want to give space to that he potentially did call the police, um, but just like not on camera. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the next day it was in the newspaper. So either he called the police or the kids did, or he told the kids to. Something happened where the, the police were involved, uh, anyway. But, uh, uh, so yeah, he sees a, uh, a theft, like a jewelry theft, and then a hate crime. And then he's sort of spinning around like, holding his hands out so people bump into him. He sees an assault at, like, a party, a sexual assault at a party. And then he sees a guy who—this guy's fucking creepy. This is very Serial Killer America.
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvi: Also, everybody that he bumps into has, like, a color.
Keith: Yes. Totally.
Sylvi: Like, a notable color to make them stand out in the crowd, which is visually very fun, but gets really funny as things go on, and the guy he finds is still in his orange jumpsuit from work the entire time.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: Yeah, I do love the way that the scene is lit, even though it sort of just feels like the fever dream of any busy train station I've ever been in. It's the—like, does this like, very intense, almost like, investigation-esque light lighting this big sort of like, open like, you know, lobby that people are just kind of walking through to, you know, either get to their train or say hi to people or yada yada.
Art: Mm-hmm.
Ali: But it's just like, again, when we were talking about the filmographer making really gray, wet movies, like, these two scenes are those. Because the like, zero color to the, the station, um, like, aesthetics. And then most of the characters, aside from the, the evil ones, the ones who have done crimes like, basically just fading into the background.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Ali: Yeah. Is, um, really aesthetically very cool.
Art: Um, and the use of color here is very evocative of the comic books that we're talking about in this movie, like Silver Age books. Like you did have a lot of people when they needed to stand out would have like very contrasty colored clothing like, like in this it was. I believe the use of color here is homage.
Sylvi: I mean, a lot of the visual stuff seems to be homage, right? Like the framing and stuff feels like that too. It definitely did remind me of the like, the meme of the like, I wonder who the anime protagonist is, and there's one girl with pink hair in the classroom.
Keith: Oh, someone here has heterochromia. Okay, I get it. Um, the, uh, so he follows the—so he's—the scene, it's real—this is very creepy. Like, the guy knocks on his door. This is his vision. Um, he opens it. He's like, I like your house. And he's like, what? And he's like, can I come in? And he's like, who are you? Why are you here? And he's like, I like your house. Um, terrifying. This is terrifying. This isn't—this is a product of a nation that's obsessed with serial killers to me. Um, uh, and, um, this guy like, gets into this guy's house and kills him. And that's the vision that, uh, Dunn has. And he kind of follows this guy home. Um, it's very funny that in the vision he's not wearing his work jumpsuit, but he is still wearing a bright orange t-shirt.
Sylvi: He knows—listen, he knows that's his color.
Keith: He knows that's his color.
Ali: You gotta have a signature color. I just, while we're on this beat in the—I want to say out loud that it is very funny to me that David Dunn has Quinlan Vos powers.
Keith: Has what?
Ali: Like, he literally touches people and gets their memories, and that's how he knows they're bad.
Keith: Who is this that you're comparing him to?
Ali: Quinlan Vos from Star Wars.
Keith: I don't remember Quinlan Vos.
Art: Which Star Wars movie is that?
Ali: Oh, he's in a bunch of comics, and he's in one of the prequels for, like, two seconds, and he's also in Clone Wars a bunch.
Keith: Oh, I know who this guy is.
Ali: Please listen to A More Civilized Age for more lore on Quinlan Vos.
Sylvi: That's how I knew what that name was.
Keith: I know who this guy is. Yeah. Um, I just forgot that that was his name and that he had that power. He was in the comics? What comic was he in?
Ali: He doesn’t come up a lot. Um, I don't know. I have a whole omnibus about him. He was in a bunch of like—
Keith: You have a whole omnibus about Quinlan Vos?
Art: You have a Quinlan Vos omnibus?
Keith: A Quinlan Vos-nibus?
Ali: I sure do.
Sylvi: They make a lot of Star Wars slop, dude. Like, are you that surprised?
Keith: It is just because—are you just a particular Quinlan Vos fan?
Art: You didn't buy the Quinlan Vos—
Ali: I should say, I'm surprised I am saying this here and not on AMCA, but the reason I know so much about Quinlan Vos is because even though I was doing an Old Republic Star Wars RP, my friend really liked him and wanted to RP him anyway. So he was just Quinlan Vos. [Sylvi: Oh my God.] But in the KOTOR era. He was the, uh, the trainer to my Jedi OC. [Keith: Wow.] And now everybody knows.
Sylvi: Wow.
Keith: So this is a separate RP you were doing to the Mandalorian one?
Art: See, you gotta watch the entire Ali extended universe to get all of the information.
Keith: Allie, I know that, I know that you had a very long running Mandalorian RP. This is a separate one that you were doing?
[3:00:00]
Ali: No, this was in the Mandalorian RP which is like—
Keith: Oh, okay.
Ali: In the wrong timeline because he just really liked the game. 
Keith: I thought that your character was a Mandalorian, not a Jedi.
Ali: Oh no, no, no, no. She was a Jedi. She was in love with the Mandalorian though.
Keith: She was in love with the Mandalorian. Okay.
Art: This feels like we're dragging Ali at this point, honestly.
Keith: No, I, I, the, it, I already dragged Ali about Mandalorians yesterday.
Sylvi: Damn.
Keith: Someone didn't recognize someone very important.
Ali: I know.
Keith: It's okay.
Ali: Listen to A More Civilized Age. But only if you listen to Friends at the Table first.
Sylvi: Yeah, that's—
Art: Yeah, that is the rule.
Keith: That's the rule. That's—actually, they say that too, which is weird. Uh, do you want to talk about this, uh, this, this horror scene that they've put into this non-horror movie?
Sylvi: Yeah. Art, it sounded like you were really high on this stuff.
Art: Um, yeah, I like this—I like this sequence. Um, I like the way it's shot. I like the, the shot from outside the window with the flapping curtain.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: When he—I’m skipping over some stuff that's like, it's in—it's not not interesting, but it's not like—he goes and he rescues the two kids. He goes to get to the mom and he—and he—they shoot through this thing with this, the flapping window, he finds her, he goes, he looks out the thing, and the, the, the curtain, which is like a sheer curtain, but it's still like when it crosses it becomes opaque, and they use this to hide that the guy is sneaking up behind him.
Sylvi: It looks great.
Keith: Looks really good.
Art: Yeah, I, I think that's a very good shot.
Keith: Um, I want to note that when they find the kids, the style it has—is totally changed to like, um, like, almost like an amateur style. This looks like a sort of flash on a camcorder.
Art: Hmm.
Keith: You know what I mean? Or like, you know, it's just like, it looks like it's on a different—with a totally different lens, with totally different lighting, uh, when they see the kids sort of locked in the closet. Um, uh, this is a very tense and dark scene. I do like it. I love the curtain stuff. I love that they've got his kryptonite here. Of course, on his first job, there'd be kryptonite.
Art: It's also raining. It's also raining thematically, you know. Um, and he gets pushed over the, the balcony on the—in the, in the main bedroom there, falls onto the—falls to the, the ground in a, in a wonderful little tumbly shot there, um, and he starts to get up and we—and he and the audience realize he's on the pool cover.
Sylvi: Fucking nightmare.
Art: Which then collapses into the pool.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: And he starts to drown, as any of us would if we were on a pool cover that collapsed into the pool.
Ali: Um, yeah, whether or not it was our superhero weakness.
Art: Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, it's not that he's especially weak to water. He is as vulnerable to water as you or I, right?
Sylvi: But he's also afraid of it.
Keith: Like, he is afraid of it. Yeah. Um, but he's also like, like that, that, that cover becomes like a net. Like, it's very hard to get out of something like that.
Art: Oh yeah. This is a very dangerous situation to be in. If you were ever considering doing this, don't. 
Sylvi: This happened to my little brother and it was terrifying.
Keith: Oh no. Yeah. That's terrifying. [Sylvi: He’s fine.] They, I think they, they don't really let you get that kind of pool cover anymore because of how dangerous they are. You have to get like, firm board.
Sylvi: Yeah, I'm pretty sure. They're at least very much not a thing a lot of people are getting anymore.
Keith: Maybe I'm wrong. Art, you have a pool. Do you have a soft cover or a hard cover to your pool?
Art: We do. We have, we have a soft cover, which is the kind of cover—or I don't know if it's the only cover, but California requires you to have a cover that keeps—that stops evaporation.
Keith: Okay.
Art: And the one that we got is, uh, soft.
Sylvi: Okay, that makes sense.
Art: It roll—it doesn't do what that is where it's like, hooked on the outside. It's—it exists entirely outside the pool.
Keith: Okay.
Art: Like, you, you roll it up from the, from the end on its own like, little thing, and then on the parts of the year where we're not using it, it just lives in a different place. Um, so I believe that would be safer in this situation because if it collapsed in, you wouldn't necessarily have a part of the pool that the cover wasn't on anymore.
Keith: Right. That makes sense.
Art: But I still don't think it's a good idea to try.
Keith: Right. Yeah, I won't do that. Um, the—so once he gets saved by the kids, I think one of the worst things I've ever seen, the horrible guy is just kind of standing above the mother, who is pretty clearly already dead. I think maybe there's a reveal that she's definitely dead after this, but I had the sense that she was already dead. And is just like, spitting beer at her. Like, he's like putting beer in his mouth and spitting it. It's like true evil, kind of like—
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: This is a guy who's just evil. Like, he's here to be evil.
Sylvi: Um, it's also like letting the audience fill in all the, the, the worst ideas that you—like, anxieties that you have about what this guy would have done.
Keith: Yes.
Sylvi: Is left up for you to interpret.
Keith: Absolutely. Yes, it is. It is definitely implying a lot of things about how horrible this must have been. Uh, and then there's an extremely long scene of David Dunn slowly choking this guy to death.
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Uh, getting bashed around, you know, totally fine. Uh, but like, this guy's like slamming him into the wall, like, breaking the wall. This guy's very strong. Uh, but, uh, of course this guy has superpowers and he is using them to slowly choke this guy to death. And, uh, then he leaves and has a cute moment with his wife and a nice breakfast. Killing this guy fixed his depression.
Sylvi: Saved his marriage.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: He—there is no, oh my God, I killed someone. I took a life. It is purely ameliorative. And that, I found that to be strange.
Ali: Yeah.
Sylvi: Um, a little weird.
Keith: Is this a—is where I know that there's a lot obviously of like, revenge killing in movies, are we at like, a high point of that? Are we at a high point of like, I mean, killing bad people as a, as restoration in film? In the—
Sylvi: It's kind of hard to pick a high point for that, you know? Like, that is such a thing.
Ali: Right. I don't know that like, we, we've gotten full culture on like the Taken movies, for instance, though, which I, I feel like is where you could put that high point, maybe/
Keith: Sure. I actually haven't seen those.
Ali: Also, I mean, talking about how much this movie is talking about serial killers, we're so pre—what's it called? The people who podcast about murders.
Keith: True crime?
Ali: True crime. True crime.
Keith: Yeah. 
Ali: So it—I don't want to say that it's like—it's interesting to see that anxiety here and how it's sort of morphed in American culture over time. But yeah, I mean, he just—he had to get his groove back. He had to do what he had to do. He had to follow his calling.
Keith: Hero, quote-unquote hero, rescues two children. Parents found dead in house. by Nicole Marcella, Telegraph staff writer.
Ali: I also think the idea of him telling his son but purposely leaving his wife out of it is such—like, what are we supposed to think about their relationship?
Sylvi: Right?
Keith: He's secretly playing football. He's doing the thing.
Sylvi: That's what it feels like.
Keith: Yeah. He knows that she doesn't approve of violence, but his calling is violence.
Ali: Right. And we never get—I feel like maybe that's what's disappointing about her, in my estimation, is that we never get a challenge of her idea of violence if we're sort of bought into the idea of, like, oh, no, this is a world of good and evil, and he is more capable than anyone else. Because, like, there's the other version of his life where he's perfectly happy and he doesn't get depressed and unfulfilled because he's just playing baseball. And, you know, he's able to exert his body in this way, but not in any sort of, like, you know, divine, I'm in this world to protect people.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Ali: Because there's this other person who's so unsatisfied with his life that he thinks that there must be someone who could—can protect him. Um, so I don't know, it's just—I don't know, this movie never goes to like 100% with all of its ideas. And I think that's even seen by like, the fact that after this scene there's maybe 10 minutes left.
Keith: Yeah, or less.
Art: Oh, must be less.
Keith: He goes right to the art gallery from here. He has breakfast, he shows the son the thing, he go—she says, uh, hey, we're gonna call the police on Elijah if we see him again. They all lie and agree. And then he goes right to Elijah's art gallery. Literally goes straight there, not to say, we can't hang out.
Art: Where Elijah is sort of telling us how the end of the movie is about to happen too. Elijah's giving that speech about how there are two kinds of villains. There's the soldier who—oh no, it's not Elijah.
Keith: This is the mother. 
Art: The mother says, like, there's two—it says to David, right? There's two types of villains. of villains. The soldier who fights the hero with his brawn, and then there's the mastermind who fights with his brain, and that's the real nemesis. And it's like, okay, we're really being served up the—
Keith: We're really being served up.
Ali: While we're on this movie not being very subtle with its imagery in these moments, we missed my absolute favorite shot in this movie, which is when David is sort of like, medium in Elijah's web at this point. I think it's when he goes to the gallery and either tells him about the drowning, or if it's before that, and he's being like, I've never had a sick day, or whatever. But the piece of art that he's looking at is another pencil sketch of the hero figure, but with the shadow of a villain's grasp around him in the corner that he's stuck in.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: And it's just like, I was like, man, I mean, subtext is text, man, but you kind of fucking did it with this one. That's good. It goes kind of hard. I don't know.
Keith: Yeah, that's good. I like that. Um, so his mom—he meets his mom. Love the mom. Doesn't even get named in the movie, which is sad. I, you know, I would have liked to have a little bit more of Elijah maybe in this movie.
Sylvi: Mrs. Price.
Keith: Um, yeah. And, uh, She says that, and I do—it's very thick. She's laying it on thick. I do like the, the, this dichot—because he looks at the picture and is like, this guy doesn't look that evil. And she's like, ah, but that's because he's a—he's the smart villain, not the strong villain. And that's the real bad guy.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And she's like, I'll go tell David that you're here. And he's like, come on, let's go to my special room. We got to go to my special room to talk about it. How did—I saw—I saw your paper. You saved those people. That's awesome. End of movie. Nothing weird happens and it just ends.
Sylvi: Yeah. And it's normal and they shake hands and it's great.
Keith: Um, that's not what happens. David starts noticing on the walls—first of all, he's got He's got, like, computers that are—have, like, blueprints of bridges. And he's got things pinned up, newspaper clippings pinned up on the wall in other countries where there's been mudslides and airplane accidents. And he's got what looked to me like bomb-making materials.
Sylvi: Yes, very much so.
Keith: Sorry, is this before or after? This is after the handshake.
Sylvi: That's after the handshake where he sees all this stuff. After the handshake, okay. 'Cause he gets the vision.
Keith: He gets the vision of—did someone wanna talk about this vision when they're like, this is where we shake hands? And I think, you know, Elijah's gotta know what's about to happen. I think this is on purpose, right?
Sylvi: Oh, absolutely.
Art: Oh yeah, he has his whole speech prepared.
Keith: Right, 'cause he's like trying to introduce himself as, hey, I'm going to be your archnemesis. So who wants to talk about the visions when he shakes hands.
Art: I'd be happy to.
Keith: Great.
Art: We get the first one, and again, he's in purple, right? That's his color. It's him at the airport. That's another way you know it's a pre-9/11 movie. And the airplane crashes and everyone rushes to the window and he doesn't. He just stands up and walks away. We get a second cut to him at a bar where the security guard? The doorman? Someone who works in the hotel?
Keith: He’s getting drunk with the security guard.
Art: Yeah. Says that if a fire happened on the first 3 floors of the hotel, everyone in the hotel would die. And then we get him leaving the train, um, and being told he can't be in there. Interestingly—
Sylvi: I guess he was in the front of the train.
Art: Yeah, he was in like the, the conductor—?
Ali: The conductor’s booth.
Art: The engineer? Is it the engineer who drives the train? Anyway. [Keith: Sure.] Um, interestingly, in the other ones we actually see them committing the crime. We don't see him like putting a bomb anywhere or anything, but I suppose—
Sylvi: Yeah, the closest we get is with the train.
Art: Yeah. And then, yeah, we—you, you put the photo in here a long time ago, and, uh, you know, Bruce Willis recoils shocked as Elijah gives this monologue about how because he found him, he can understand himself.
Keith: Yeah, I've got that as a button. It's kind of long if we want to just talk about it or if you want to hear it.
Art: I think it—I think it's—I think it's a good speech.
Keith: I think it's great. I think this is the best thing maybe in the movie.
[audio from Unbreakable starts playing]
Elijah: You know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world, to not know why you're here, that's—it's just an awful feeling.
David: What have you done?
Elijah: I almost gave up hope. There were so many times I questioned I hated myself. 
David: You killed all those people. 
Elijah: But I found you. So many sacrifices just to find you.
David: Jesus Christ.
Elijah: Now that we know who you are, I know who I am. I'm not a mistake. It all makes sense. In a comic, you know how you can tell who the archvillain's going to be? He's the exact opposite of the hero, and most times they're friends like you and me. I should have known way back when. You know why, David? Because of the kids. They called me Mr. Glass.
[audio ends]
Keith: I, I love that. I think that that's—
Sylvi: It's really good.
Keith: So good.
Sylvi: I love it. It did undercut it immediately for me by ending on a frame of him smiling with a single tear down his cheek while the screen said Elijah Price was committed to an institution for the criminally insane.
Keith: No, I loved that part too! I love that part too!
Sylvi: Oh my God. I was like, I mentioned earlier, I was watching this with Moose. We both started laughing, but he had to get up and like, walk behind our couch and just like, take a minute because he was so caught off guard by that movie ending on that frame.
Keith: I mean, can you think of a guy so twisted that he thinks that being evil is so good? 
Sylvi: Whoa. That like, some sort of like, like a Joker.
Keith: Some sort of—this guy is so certifiably criminally insane. Uh, we talked about this at the very beginning, but during that, uh, it does freeze frame on them.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: David Dunn led authorities to Limited Edition where evidence of three acts of terrorism was found.
Ali: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Uh, and Elijah Price is now in an institution for the criminally insane. I—this is—I mean, this—the—he blows away anything else that he's done in this movie, Samuel L. Jackson, here. This is—if he had been not like this, like, obviously, like, we needed to have the reveal for this to be who he is. But like, if he was bringing this quality to the rest of the movie, I think I would feel like, way different about it, maybe. Um, and I think that, uh, Bruce Willis is doing a good job here. He looks like, pathetic and used and he looks small and like, uh, Sylvi, what did you say? He looked like a wet cat.
Sylvi: He looked like a cat, like a wet cat, yeah. That doesn't want to be having a bath.
Keith: Yeah. Um, I love this. I wish that there was another movie. Or I wish there was another episode. It's funny, one of the problems with superhero movies became the overreliance on the origin story and how much of the movie is spent telling the origin. This movie is only origin. There's no anything else. Like, this is like, what if the first—what if all of the first Spider-Man movie was the first 23 minutes? This is like act 1. This whole movie is act 1.
Art: I would argue that the last 20 minutes is the break into 2, but sure.
Keith: Okay. Sorry. Yes. The last 20 minutes is the break into 2. Yes, totally. This movie is more—the only movie I can think of that is a successful movie at whatever metric you want to use. The only other movie I can think of that is as strangely paced is Space Jam.
Sylvi: That's crazy.
Art: Oh my God. Um. What a thing to say. But Keith, I have good news for you. In 2019, M. Night Shyamalan made a movie called Glass, and you kept it off of our, uh, watch list. But we can, we can change it.
Keith: Ali suggested already adding it back in, and maybe that might have to happen. I think that—I think, I think we have to know what's going on in Split and Glass.
Art: In the Breakableverse.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: In the Breakable-Split-Glass trifecta.
Keith: By the way, because I, because I know about the multiple personality thing of those movies, or at least one of those movies, uh, this heavily featured into my maybe Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson are the same character theory from the—that I had very, very early on.
Ali: Okay.
Art: I can't wait for you to find out the weird way they tie those movies back into this one.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah, I have no idea.
Ali: It's not just they're all going to the same hospital together and like, that's how it comes together?
Art: No, I mean, no.
Ali: Oh boy.
Art: What if I told you that the James McAvoy character from Split was in this movie?
Keith: Wow.
Sylvi: What?
Ali: Wait.
Keith: Is it the—
Sylvi: Is it the old lady?
Ali: Is he one of the kids?
Art: He is a child, yes.
Ali: Wait, is he one of the kids in the house, or is he one of the bully kids?
Art: He's none of those kids.
Keith: Kids in the house? What house?
Ali: The house that—the kids who were tied up.
Keith: Oh, those kids. Okay, right. Yeah, those kids. Okay. That would make sense, though. I would buy that.
Ali: He's a kid in this movie...
Keith: Oh, oh, oh, oh, okay. Here we go. There's a moment at the stadium where he bumps into a woman, and he gets a brief audio flash of a woman abusing her son, potentially.
Art: Yes!
Keith: Wow!
Sylvi: Wow! Wow!
Keith: I, I was—okay. That's James McAvoy.
Art: I mean, that's not James McAvoy, but that's the same character.
Keith: That's James McAvoy's character. Great.
Sylvi: That's gotta be like a thing he decided later though, right? Like he didn't—
Art: Oh, definitely. Yeah.
Sylvi: There's no way you plan that.
Keith: That's real funny.
Art: Well, he says that he planned to have that James McAvoy character in a second Unbreakable movie from the beginning.
Keith: I buy that.
Art: But presumably if he made it like, 2 years later, it wouldn't have been that, right?
Keith: Right.
Ali: Um, wait, he says that he never planned on making a sequel to this, and then he made a sequel to this, and he said that he planned the sequel.
Sylvi: Yeah, he lied.
Art: Yes, he was lying.
Keith: This is not adding up.
Art: It's called being a liar.
Keith: Is it, is it, this is, is this studio shit where he's not allowed to make it? And so he's just saying, I never wanted to make it anyway.
Art: Yeah, I think it is. The weird combination of studios and production companies said that he couldn't do a sequel. And then much, much later when he had—when no one cared anymore and he was in the revisit phase of his career.
Keith: Is Samuel L. Jackson in any of these?
Art: Samuel L. Jackson is only in Glass.
Keith: Wow. That's so strange. Well, of course he's in Glass. He's Mr. Glass. But that's so odd because the best thing that happens in these movies is this last scene. Like, do you know when, like, a game's coming out but you didn't play the first game and you don't want to play it, so you go on YouTube and watch a lore video about the first game so that you know what's going on? I don't do this, but I know that people do this because I don't play sequels to games that I haven't played the first one of. Um, this movie felt like that, but for a movie where Samuel L. Jackson gets to be a supervillain. That's what I—
Art: Like, I cut this if you don't want to give too much information away, but, but Split is not—Split is not put into this universe until the very end.
Keith: Okay.
Art: They do—Split just exists as a movie, and then at the end you see Bruce Willis hearing about the events on TV.
Keith: Okay.
Ali: Ohhhh.
Keith: Interesting.
Sylvi: Yeah, that is like one of the first things I heard about Split, weirdly enough.
Keith: That's funny.
Art: And then Glass is like the actual sequel. That's when like any of, any of these people return.
Keith: This was such a weird one for me. Um, you know, I had a, I had a decent time watching it. There's scenes that I was so high on and scenes I was really low on. At the end of the day, I don't think that it comes together as a coherent, you know, movie. And I don't think it feels formally experimental. I think that it just feels strange. I generously said at the beginning that this was a letter grade below The Sixth Sense. I think it's probably more than that. But the scenes that I liked, I really liked. And even though I thought that the last… What you—what someone who was just looking at the runtime of the movie would call the last act, uh, was not good. I did think the last scene was so good that it almost justifies the whole movie. It's barely even a twist because I was suspicious of this guy from the very beginning.
Ali: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Um, uh, but, um, it's more like you think that he's going to be evil and the twist that he was already evil. Um, that's—
Ali: You're right though.
Keith: But I really, really thought that the performance and the—just the idea was so out there and interesting and weird, and the acting was so good just in that last five seconds. Uh, and the gun scene. Shout out to the gun scene. Weird idea. Weird idea.
Art: When this movie came out, I think that it was my opinion that this was the best comic book movie that had ever been made.
Ali: Sure.
Keith: You didn’t like Jim Carrey as the Riddler?
Art: Yeah. Uh, or, you know, the, the Donner Superman movies are good. And, um, you were probably—
Keith: You could have been right. This is like a real movie kind of in some ways. Yeah.
Art: And it took, it took the source material and it's not based on anything, but the—it, it respected and appreciated what it was to tell a comic book story in a movie.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Art: And of course, since then, all movies are comic book movies now.
Keith: Yeah, it's very hard.
Art: They put out 10 a month, and there have been some that have been made with a deep reverence to the material and have been very good. And it's probably not true anymore. This is a very slow movie, right? There's also been outstanding comic movies made with no respect for the source material.
Keith: And there's been terrible comic book movies.
Art: Which we'll cover in our episode on Blade 2.
Keith: Those terrible comic book movies with a deep respect for the source material.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: So we're getting all flavors because it's the only kind of movie that they make now.
Art: Yeah, absolutely. And again, I'll probably say this a lot, but M. Night Shyamalan missing is more interesting than a lot of people hitting.
Ali: Yeah, I think that's really where I fall in this movie. It's like, I'm such a fan of his style of editing and his style of sort of putting a scene together and manipulating where your eye is, or calling out certain things either with color or movement of the camera that, like, watching this movie is almost like when you listen to an album by a band you really like, but you feel like the production value isn't really where you wish it was.
Keith: Yeah.
Ali: And I used to be so high on this movie, and it's kind of funny to go back to it and be like, well, some wins and some losses there.
Keith: It's hard to take yourself out of—it's hard for me to take myself out of the superhero world that we live in that I really dislike. The way that movies have gone has become so heavily superhero, a thing that I, on the best of days, tolerated. Uh, you know, a couple of those Marvel movies I thought were—I really liked Iron Man 3. I really liked—
Sylvi: Never saw it.
Keith: Yeah, I really liked Iron Man 3. Um, uh, but yeah, I thought that this was kind of fun. I thought it was weird to see like a—like I see echoes or I see, um, Nolan, the Christopher Nolan Batman movies as kind of in the lineage of this movie. For good and bad. Again, I sort of liked all three of those equally, which is, I think, not—again, not the typical opinion of them. I know we've been going—we're long. I want to introduce a quick segment at the end of these.
Ali: Ooh.
Keith: Which is, I want to have a guessing game about what the next movie is about at the end of the previous one. 
Ali: Okay.
Art: Great, wonderful, love it.
Keith: So, uh, I want to introduce it now because Signs is the last movie on our list that I know even anything about. So I want to introduce it now so that we have it as a, uh, as a thing that we do. And then when we get to The Village and Lady in the Water and The Happening, things that I have no clue, not even a—I know plants. That's it. That's all I know for The Village.
Ali: That's really all you know?
Art: That's a lot.
Keith: Truly all I know.
Art: Plants is The Happening, I'm sorry to say.
Keith: Ah, fuck! See, I knew.
[3:30:00]
Keith: Wait, which one came out in 2004?
Art: The Village.
Keith: Okay. So I thought The Village came out—
Art: There are plants in The Village, but you're talking about The Happening.
Keith: Okay. All right.
Sylvi: I always thought plants was The Village.
Art: All the movies have plants in them, I bet.
Keith: So Signs. Some of this information comes from Scary Movie.
Sylvi: Yes. That is where all of my knowledge of this movie comes from.
Keith: Okay. So they’re on a farm.
Ali: Neither of you have seen it?
Sylvi: I have not seen Signs.
Keith: I've seen the last one. The last third of Signs was on TV when I was at a friend's house.
Ali: Okay, okay, okay.
Keith: They're on a farm. There's crop circles?
Art: Yeah, that's on the poster, yeah.
Keith: Everyone's freak—oh yeah, that is on the poster. People are freaking out about these crop circles, and then I think that one guy has, like, a chase through a cornfield to find a little alien guy. And I think that it becomes a home invasion movie where the aliens are like home invading them.
Art: Uh-huh...
Keith: And I think that maybe an alien gets hit in the head with a shovel before they find out what their weakness is. Because of course, heroes and villains have weaknesses. That is what I know about Signs. I don't know anyone that's in it, and it might just be because of Field of Dreams.
Art: It's a shame.
Sylvi: I know one person who's in it.
Keith: It's a shame that I don't know anyone who's in it, and this might be because of Field of Dreams, but I have a feeling that the Field of Dreams guy is in it. in it. Um, [Art: Kevin Costner, no.] Kevin Costner. Kevin Costner's not in it. Is there a Kevin Costner type? Is there a down-home guy?
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: Oh yeah. Um, you could tell me they offered the part to Kevin Costner and I'd believe you, but—
Keith: Okay. All right. Is it Randy Quaid?
Art: No.
Keith: Or sorry, Dennis Quaid?
Art: Stop guessing. Try not to know until he comes on. See if someone else can put the movie on for you.
Keith: I got Randy and Dennis Quaid confused. But I—so it's not either of the Quaids?
Art: I do not—no, certainly not in the part you're referring to.
Keith: Okay.
Art: Um, you do have some things in this movie correct. You're of course missing the entire emotional content of the movie.
Keith: I have no clue about any emotional content of the movie.
Sylvi: Something to do with a wife, something to do with a marriage.
Keith: Something to do with a marriage. I, I assume that a lot of the emotional content is, wow, it's so scary to be home invaded by aliens.
Ali: Well, yeah, that's—
Art: Yeah, I mean, yeah.
Keith: Is it a sci-fi movie?
Ali: In the fact that there's aliens in it.
Keith: Okay. Yeah. Okay. So it's like a, it is like a, it is like a movie where the bad guys are aliens for no real reason other than that's what he wanted.
Ali: Yeah, I—
Art: I don't think we should get that far into it.
Ali: Okay.
Keith: All right. I think this is a successful, a successful segment. Is there anything, Sylvi, that you want to add because you also haven't seen Signs.
Sylvi: No, I got my little thing in where I was like, oh, he's gonna be like, estranged from his wife in some way, almost definitely.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: But you do know who the lead of this movie is.
Sylvi: I know who the lead is in this movie
Keith: I can't believe it's funny to not, to not know.
Ali: Well, when you find out, you're gonna say, haha.
Art: What if I told you two people that they offered the part to who said no?
Keith: Sure. Yeah.
Art: Paul Newman.
Keith: Wow.
Art: And Clint Eastwood.
Ali: Wow.
Keith: Oh, do they end up going younger?
Art: They do end up going, I think, much younger, frankly.
Keith: Okay. Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood. Would this movie have been better with Clint Eastwood in it?
Ali: I don't know. I mean…
Art: I don't know.
Keith: Forget about the chair thing and that he's a loon.
Ali: Well, you have to—
Art: I mean, I don'tneed to forget about that.
Ali: We have to stop because there are many things to forget about. I don't want to say it again, so we gotta stop this podcast right now.
Keith: Okay, bye.
[“Dr Malcolm and Friends” by Jack de Quidt plays]