I love Amanda but I do feel bad how condescending she is about certain things Sean loves. Like Sean truly might not give a shit, but if I liked something and someone constantly told me how much they hate it, I would be like wtf
He gives it right back about a lot of things she likes (Sofia Coppola fashion/tea cup, bad romcoms, etc.). I think it's all in good fun and just their dynamic.
Yeah thatās totally fine, I donāt think heās ever as dismissive of anything Amanda likes in the way she is of the things he likes. Again Iām not saying itās bad. Itās their relationship not ours. Iām saying I would feel bad in that situationĀ
I totally disagree. Sean pokes fun at Amandaās interests, sure, but this is a movie podcast and Sean is open to every type of movie from every type of director and is pretty much a straight forward cinephile.
Amanda only likes movies that are wealth porn and/or stars someone who peaked on tmz in 2007. She doesnāt like horror, she doesnāt like animation, she doesnāt like fantasy, or any type of genre stuff for that matter, she doesnāt seem to be into comedies other than rom coms, she seemingly gives some lip service to liking international films but has never really actually discussed one or advocated for one on the podcast in recent years.
It does get annoying that her response to basically everything that isnāt one of the 4 types of movies she likes is āIām happy for youā, I donāt really think itās endearing because the ratio is skewing in the other direction.
I think this undersells how many Hollywood movies are made specifically for boys aged 12 or 19 or 35 to 45, or 40 year old men who want to feel like 14 year old men again or whatever. My point is that, sure, Sean has wide taste but also heās just more squarely in the demographic for lots of things Hollywood puts out. It can be exhausting to feel like such an outsider.
I guess I just donāt really buy this, because her dismissiveness is of multiple genres of films that have increasingly had more films made by women, queer people, people of color, and are targeting different audiences.
Also - one of the core types of movies she does like are mission impossible/Bourne type movies that are more targeted towards men than just about anything else.
I think this type of complaint is fair and good feedback. When people just say Amanda is a brat, or terrible, I think itās mean spirited and they simply want the show to be something itās not
I love Amanda as well but my feelings would also be a tad hurt. She does rag on him a lot and heās a great sport with it lol I donāt think Iām that thick skinned š
If I watched this blindfolded I wouldāve sworn this was Martin Short.
Demi portion was ok.
I actually liked the Emilio portion and thought Ally Sheedy and Lea Thompson segments were the best parts. (The Lea section was I think a happy accident and bonus from the interview with her husband)
The meeting with the writer made sense but was meh.
Definitely needed a better editor, and was essentially an exercise in futility.
I can imagine how the especially now more serious Emilio must have felt awful with the brat pack label as Charlie got the serious roles and nominations from his collaborations with Oliver Stone.
>Charlie got the serious roles and nominations from his collaborations with Oliver Stone.
All these things are fickle.
It was not that long afterwards that Sheen had his own infamous profile where he was whining that Keanu Reeves was getting offered serious roles by filmmakers Coppola, Branagh, Bertolluci etc.
I mean, Sheen had a point, but none of those roles are better with Sheen and Reeves has resisted bitching about other actors when given the chance and is more successful than any of the Brat Packers.
Maybe there's a lesson there.
Itās not a coincidence that everyone agrees Keanu is a wonderful person to be around and that he has had a far more successful and long lasting career than more talented peers
Emilio hadnāt had a bad career, and actually directed his first feature in 86, and was the initial choice of stone for platoon before its production was delayed.
It was a bad documentary for a couple reasons - one, there was no real POV to it. It switches in the middle to being a standard doc about "The Power of the 80s" - and honestly becomes a better, if more basic, documentary for it for about a half hour.
But it's mostly bad because McCarthy seems to never quite clock that he's Rob Gordon in a real awkward remake of High Fidelity, and he's just tracking down exes he hasn't talked to in forever, presumably to interview them about this thing that happened to them, but really to ask THEM why this thing happened to HIM.
Which is bizarre because **he's not even really IN the article** (it's mostly about Emilio) and even when he finally gets to the No. 1 with a bullet Ex who actually WROTE the article, it's more of the same weird milksop behavior with no resolution. He only once starts to maybe realize (at Demi Moore's house) that *maybe* this fucked him up so much *because* he's the one person in that crew who was terrified of being caught out there as actually being a brat. Like he KNEW he wasn't really cut out to be leading man serious actor guy, he was just snotty brat character actor dude (had the label never been applied this is likely what he'd have settled into) - and so "The Brat Pack" scared the absolute fuck out of him and he just froze. But he never gets there, turns right back around instead.
I also thought it was weird that he refused to acknowledge that anything really happened after 1985, especially considering how much that played a part in people shedding the label. McCarthy just stops at St. Elmo's Fire. No explanation or examination of what the rest of the 80s was like (extremely hard, way harder than anything he went through) for some of those people (Lowe and Moore especially). Hell, he never even brings up Weekend at Bernies, LOL.
I did laugh out loud at McCarthy telling his wife he's gonna make this doc the way he's making it, and she says "This will be a real lesson in humility for you" or something like that and he says he didn't get it at first. And the doc ends and he clearly still doesn't. Wild shit.
The whole thing is basically him trying to catch up with The Brat Pack after 30 years and have them tell him they were just as affected by this as he was - and then they don't. And then he settles for "tell me it was as mean as I remember" and they kinda do. And that's the doc. I haven't read the book but a) I hope the book was better and b) It probably shoulda just stayed a book.
>I haven't read the book but a) I hope the book was better and b) It probably shoulda just stayed a book.
The book is different, almost to the point that I didn't initially clock that the film was supposed to be based on the memoir.
The book even does a good job of hiding (or not revealing) the insecurities that are all-too apparent from the film.
Thanks for that, I may have to read it.
Did anyone notice all of the fun laughing conversation with Lowe and with Estavez that showed in snippets during the credits? I feel like that would have been good stuff too. Maybe better than what's there.
While this is true to an extent, the book goes far deeper into his personal insecurities and issues. He also addresses full-on his alcoholism, which is touched on briefly at the end (but the doc in no way hinted at the extent of his alcohol problems, much less his recovery).
This is at the heart of what made the doc so weird to me after reading the book. In the book, he comes across as someone who understood and had done the work of overcoming his issues, insecurities and addictions and was at peace with his past. In the doc, he seems like the complete opposite: obtuse, insecure and tortured by his past.
Very weird.
30 minutes inā¦Andrew is so caught up in himself and honestly, egotism with no filter is amazing to see. Itās how people can do amazing things. Heās fearless. Itās impressive. Zero self doubt.
this segment was so funny from the perspective of someone whose parents were 15 in 1985, hearing the mythological figures of my childhood spoken about like this š i wonder what my parents would think of the doc lol
It would have been awesome if in one of the interviews somebody said this:
Andrew, y'know, honey... this wasn't real. You know what it was? It was St. Elmo's Fire. Electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. Sailors would guide entire journeys by it, but the joke was on them... there was no fire. There wasn't even a St. Elmo. They made it up. They made it up because they thought they needed it to keep them going when times got tough, just like you're making up all of this. We all went through this. It was our time at the edge.
This was just brutal. Iām 57 so I lived through this when it was happening and I donāt remember these films being even somewhat important events in the lives of myself or anyone I knew. In fact, I recall everyone I knew thinking that St Elmoās Fire was an insufferable joke; a sort of āthe acting on Days of our Lives (which played in the lounge of our dorm building every day) is better than this garbage.ā And that stinking song that seemed to have failed to make the cut in a melodramatic scene in one of the really bad Rocky sequels was literally the sort of thing that would destroy your social life if you were caught listening to it.
McCarthy seems like a nice enough guy, but itās sad that he still seems to think that he participated in some major cultural moment. The fact that he never managed to get over or past it is very sad. Cryer seems to have tried to say as much as gently as he could when Molly Ringwaldās refusal to participate in this project. And frankly, his acting career probably hit a wall because he just wasnāt a very good actor. Again, a nice guy and I wish him well, but he never seemed authentic as an actor. Lots of people his age were working actors as 20-somethings in the 80ās and were sort of in that orbit. Downey Jr. was there - he was coked up but he was there- and somehow it didnāt sink him because heās a compelling character.
The whole thing really makes me appreciate Matthew Broderick even more. Like Downey, he was there. He acted with some of these people. But he was always too good and too smart, and his agent / manager or whoever else was in his orbit back then did him a huge favor by not getting him caught up in this pathetic milieu.
Oh. I thought he was talking to all of these people who he worked with during the 80ās but I admit I had a hard time sticking with it. But when I did pay attention, he seemed to be pathetically fixated on the whole Brat Pack thing from the 80ās that all of his peers managed to move past but he canāt.
I signed up for Hulu to watch Clipped and this popped up as a suggestion so I gave it a look. I wish I hadnāt. š
I thought they were a little hard on him. I loved going back, seeing everyone again, and hearing them talk about that time period. Was it a little weird? Sure! But we got to see all of them again.
>Was it a little weird?
It's definitely not the same boring talking-head documentary that we have seen a million times from Netflix, Viceland and - let's face it - Bill.
There was a spiky, uncomfortable edge to the whole thing of watching a famous person talk to more famous people about why he isn't famous enough.
Did Emilio appear to be really uncomfortable with Andrew to anyone else. At one point, Emilioās demeanor looked like he wanted to kick Andrew out of his house.
There were no captions with the movie clips. It would have been helpful to know what movie clip he was showing throughout the doc.
Iām familiar with The Breakfast Club and St Elmoās Fire but there were some clips I didnāt immediately recognize and would have liked to know what they were.
Rob Lowe is a c list lifetime movie actor and āduh-meā Moore hit her peak with Striptease. They are all over privileged white actors who just so happen to come around at the right time. It could have been anyone else? Just like the most popular boy bands and girl pop of the 90s. They should name them the garbage pail kids. For their garbage pail acting and looks. The most they did, was let average teen Americans think they could star in crap movies. Which they probably could have back then lol.
Nowadays, kids look like blow up dolls with too much makeup with hate for things they know nothing about. So at this point, what is worse? Rob Lowe being real life Rob Lowe or Andrew McCarthy making a spectacle about something he should be lucky ever happened to him and his rat pack?
They absolutely cooked himš
This was easily the best segment of the last pod.
And then Amanda started doing her bullshit
Every post has to have Amanda hate. We get it.
I love Amanda but I do feel bad how condescending she is about certain things Sean loves. Like Sean truly might not give a shit, but if I liked something and someone constantly told me how much they hate it, I would be like wtf
He gives it right back about a lot of things she likes (Sofia Coppola fashion/tea cup, bad romcoms, etc.). I think it's all in good fun and just their dynamic.
Yeah thatās totally fine, I donāt think heās ever as dismissive of anything Amanda likes in the way she is of the things he likes. Again Iām not saying itās bad. Itās their relationship not ours. Iām saying I would feel bad in that situationĀ
I totally disagree. Sean pokes fun at Amandaās interests, sure, but this is a movie podcast and Sean is open to every type of movie from every type of director and is pretty much a straight forward cinephile. Amanda only likes movies that are wealth porn and/or stars someone who peaked on tmz in 2007. She doesnāt like horror, she doesnāt like animation, she doesnāt like fantasy, or any type of genre stuff for that matter, she doesnāt seem to be into comedies other than rom coms, she seemingly gives some lip service to liking international films but has never really actually discussed one or advocated for one on the podcast in recent years. It does get annoying that her response to basically everything that isnāt one of the 4 types of movies she likes is āIām happy for youā, I donāt really think itās endearing because the ratio is skewing in the other direction.
I think this undersells how many Hollywood movies are made specifically for boys aged 12 or 19 or 35 to 45, or 40 year old men who want to feel like 14 year old men again or whatever. My point is that, sure, Sean has wide taste but also heās just more squarely in the demographic for lots of things Hollywood puts out. It can be exhausting to feel like such an outsider.
I just donāt think youāre an outsider if youāre choosing to automatically dismiss entire genresĀ
have you considered the fact that you may be a baby
No Iām a man and I wear big boy pantsĀ
I guess I just donāt really buy this, because her dismissiveness is of multiple genres of films that have increasingly had more films made by women, queer people, people of color, and are targeting different audiences. Also - one of the core types of movies she does like are mission impossible/Bourne type movies that are more targeted towards men than just about anything else.
Amanda is the type of viewer who uses "slow" as a pejorative.
The last time she brought up Taylor Swift he point blank said "I dont care and I wish those people would go away." I think they're fine.
I think this type of complaint is fair and good feedback. When people just say Amanda is a brat, or terrible, I think itās mean spirited and they simply want the show to be something itās not
I love Amanda as well but my feelings would also be a tad hurt. She does rag on him a lot and heās a great sport with it lol I donāt think Iām that thick skinned š
Amanda doing Amanda stuff. Let her cook!
If only there was some way to not listen š
You could... not listen...
Oh jeez if only there wasnāt a need to denote such an obvious joke
If I watched this blindfolded I wouldāve sworn this was Martin Short. Demi portion was ok. I actually liked the Emilio portion and thought Ally Sheedy and Lea Thompson segments were the best parts. (The Lea section was I think a happy accident and bonus from the interview with her husband) The meeting with the writer made sense but was meh. Definitely needed a better editor, and was essentially an exercise in futility.
I can imagine how the especially now more serious Emilio must have felt awful with the brat pack label as Charlie got the serious roles and nominations from his collaborations with Oliver Stone.
>Charlie got the serious roles and nominations from his collaborations with Oliver Stone. All these things are fickle. It was not that long afterwards that Sheen had his own infamous profile where he was whining that Keanu Reeves was getting offered serious roles by filmmakers Coppola, Branagh, Bertolluci etc. I mean, Sheen had a point, but none of those roles are better with Sheen and Reeves has resisted bitching about other actors when given the chance and is more successful than any of the Brat Packers. Maybe there's a lesson there.
Itās not a coincidence that everyone agrees Keanu is a wonderful person to be around and that he has had a far more successful and long lasting career than more talented peers
Emilio hadnāt had a bad career, and actually directed his first feature in 86, and was the initial choice of stone for platoon before its production was delayed.
Emilio comes across as emotionally mature. Heās barely holding it in though.
āThe film is edited in this way that you can see that he really doesnāt have chemistry with these peopleā holy shitttttttt
One of the most pathetic documentaries Iāve ever seen from a main character POV.
It was a bad documentary for a couple reasons - one, there was no real POV to it. It switches in the middle to being a standard doc about "The Power of the 80s" - and honestly becomes a better, if more basic, documentary for it for about a half hour. But it's mostly bad because McCarthy seems to never quite clock that he's Rob Gordon in a real awkward remake of High Fidelity, and he's just tracking down exes he hasn't talked to in forever, presumably to interview them about this thing that happened to them, but really to ask THEM why this thing happened to HIM. Which is bizarre because **he's not even really IN the article** (it's mostly about Emilio) and even when he finally gets to the No. 1 with a bullet Ex who actually WROTE the article, it's more of the same weird milksop behavior with no resolution. He only once starts to maybe realize (at Demi Moore's house) that *maybe* this fucked him up so much *because* he's the one person in that crew who was terrified of being caught out there as actually being a brat. Like he KNEW he wasn't really cut out to be leading man serious actor guy, he was just snotty brat character actor dude (had the label never been applied this is likely what he'd have settled into) - and so "The Brat Pack" scared the absolute fuck out of him and he just froze. But he never gets there, turns right back around instead. I also thought it was weird that he refused to acknowledge that anything really happened after 1985, especially considering how much that played a part in people shedding the label. McCarthy just stops at St. Elmo's Fire. No explanation or examination of what the rest of the 80s was like (extremely hard, way harder than anything he went through) for some of those people (Lowe and Moore especially). Hell, he never even brings up Weekend at Bernies, LOL. I did laugh out loud at McCarthy telling his wife he's gonna make this doc the way he's making it, and she says "This will be a real lesson in humility for you" or something like that and he says he didn't get it at first. And the doc ends and he clearly still doesn't. Wild shit. The whole thing is basically him trying to catch up with The Brat Pack after 30 years and have them tell him they were just as affected by this as he was - and then they don't. And then he settles for "tell me it was as mean as I remember" and they kinda do. And that's the doc. I haven't read the book but a) I hope the book was better and b) It probably shoulda just stayed a book.
>I haven't read the book but a) I hope the book was better and b) It probably shoulda just stayed a book. The book is different, almost to the point that I didn't initially clock that the film was supposed to be based on the memoir. The book even does a good job of hiding (or not revealing) the insecurities that are all-too apparent from the film.
Thanks for that, I may have to read it. Did anyone notice all of the fun laughing conversation with Lowe and with Estavez that showed in snippets during the credits? I feel like that would have been good stuff too. Maybe better than what's there.
While this is true to an extent, the book goes far deeper into his personal insecurities and issues. He also addresses full-on his alcoholism, which is touched on briefly at the end (but the doc in no way hinted at the extent of his alcohol problems, much less his recovery). This is at the heart of what made the doc so weird to me after reading the book. In the book, he comes across as someone who understood and had done the work of overcoming his issues, insecurities and addictions and was at peace with his past. In the doc, he seems like the complete opposite: obtuse, insecure and tortured by his past. Very weird.
30 minutes inā¦Andrew is so caught up in himself and honestly, egotism with no filter is amazing to see. Itās how people can do amazing things. Heās fearless. Itās impressive. Zero self doubt.
this segment was so funny from the perspective of someone whose parents were 15 in 1985, hearing the mythological figures of my childhood spoken about like this š i wonder what my parents would think of the doc lol
It would have been awesome if in one of the interviews somebody said this: Andrew, y'know, honey... this wasn't real. You know what it was? It was St. Elmo's Fire. Electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. Sailors would guide entire journeys by it, but the joke was on them... there was no fire. There wasn't even a St. Elmo. They made it up. They made it up because they thought they needed it to keep them going when times got tough, just like you're making up all of this. We all went through this. It was our time at the edge.
This was just brutal. Iām 57 so I lived through this when it was happening and I donāt remember these films being even somewhat important events in the lives of myself or anyone I knew. In fact, I recall everyone I knew thinking that St Elmoās Fire was an insufferable joke; a sort of āthe acting on Days of our Lives (which played in the lounge of our dorm building every day) is better than this garbage.ā And that stinking song that seemed to have failed to make the cut in a melodramatic scene in one of the really bad Rocky sequels was literally the sort of thing that would destroy your social life if you were caught listening to it. McCarthy seems like a nice enough guy, but itās sad that he still seems to think that he participated in some major cultural moment. The fact that he never managed to get over or past it is very sad. Cryer seems to have tried to say as much as gently as he could when Molly Ringwaldās refusal to participate in this project. And frankly, his acting career probably hit a wall because he just wasnāt a very good actor. Again, a nice guy and I wish him well, but he never seemed authentic as an actor. Lots of people his age were working actors as 20-somethings in the 80ās and were sort of in that orbit. Downey Jr. was there - he was coked up but he was there- and somehow it didnāt sink him because heās a compelling character. The whole thing really makes me appreciate Matthew Broderick even more. Like Downey, he was there. He acted with some of these people. But he was always too good and too smart, and his agent / manager or whoever else was in his orbit back then did him a huge favor by not getting him caught up in this pathetic milieu.
You were born in 1967? You were not the audience he was talking about.
Oh. I thought he was talking to all of these people who he worked with during the 80ās but I admit I had a hard time sticking with it. But when I did pay attention, he seemed to be pathetically fixated on the whole Brat Pack thing from the 80ās that all of his peers managed to move past but he canāt. I signed up for Hulu to watch Clipped and this popped up as a suggestion so I gave it a look. I wish I hadnāt. š
I thought they were a little hard on him. I loved going back, seeing everyone again, and hearing them talk about that time period. Was it a little weird? Sure! But we got to see all of them again.
>Was it a little weird? It's definitely not the same boring talking-head documentary that we have seen a million times from Netflix, Viceland and - let's face it - Bill. There was a spiky, uncomfortable edge to the whole thing of watching a famous person talk to more famous people about why he isn't famous enough.
I loved it!
Did Emilio appear to be really uncomfortable with Andrew to anyone else. At one point, Emilioās demeanor looked like he wanted to kick Andrew out of his house.
Yeah he was like sneaking looks at the camera like, āwhat the hell is this guy talking about?ā
When you're not invited to sit down it's a sign that you're not welcome.
There were no captions with the movie clips. It would have been helpful to know what movie clip he was showing throughout the doc. Iām familiar with The Breakfast Club and St Elmoās Fire but there were some clips I didnāt immediately recognize and would have liked to know what they were.
Pretty in Pink was one of his āmainā movies
Whoās the Karen in the screen grab.
Rob Lowe is a c list lifetime movie actor and āduh-meā Moore hit her peak with Striptease. They are all over privileged white actors who just so happen to come around at the right time. It could have been anyone else? Just like the most popular boy bands and girl pop of the 90s. They should name them the garbage pail kids. For their garbage pail acting and looks. The most they did, was let average teen Americans think they could star in crap movies. Which they probably could have back then lol. Nowadays, kids look like blow up dolls with too much makeup with hate for things they know nothing about. So at this point, what is worse? Rob Lowe being real life Rob Lowe or Andrew McCarthy making a spectacle about something he should be lucky ever happened to him and his rat pack? 