Send us a text

MYSTERY ROAD

It’s the end of the road for Season 14 as TGTPTU’s four White fellas travel across the world to the land down under for host Ken’s 1x1 flick pick and this season’s final film: MYSTERY ROAD (2013), sponsored this week by the Criminal Island’s very own Hoppy Joe Beer (Get Your Hop On!).

Directed by (and written by and lensed by and edited by and music with sound design by) Ivan Sen, this Aussie neo noir film that will launch a sequel and multiple standalone seasons of a TV season is the Australian filmmaker’s first genre film. Sen’s work is made with considerations to the conditions of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (a.k.a. First Peoples, a.k.a. First Nations, a.k.a. Indigenous Australians), and when news of his making a crime fiction film spread, an all-star cast of Oz acting talent lined up to join, beginning with Australian Broadcasting Corporation mainstay Aaron Pedersen, for whom Sen wrote the part of the film’s protagonist Detective Jay Swan, with second cast Hugo Weaving whose star power from the past two decades of Hollywood IP films subsequent to serving the Matrix franchise as Agent Smith helped draw in Ryan Kwanten, Bruce Spence, and an early appearance by Samara Weaving, a pod fav who made an appearance in an early TGTPTU Halloween episode.

Plot: A local First Nations girl is found murdered, and Detective Swan freshly back in his hometown from time away catches his first homicide case and must reckon with his family left behind as investigating the homicide brings him into the town’s underworld of drugs and prostitution, a world not unknown to his estranged wife and daughter. Pedersen’s character also encounters alcoholics (it’s Australia after all) drinking themselves to death; a mysterious death of a rookie officer and, separately, a senile man’s pet; aspiring cop-killer children on bicycles; mutant dogs; fast barefoot humans; overt and covert racism; Chinese food; and two crack shots in H. Weaving’s and Kwanten’s characters.

This week Ken and Jack recover from a week-long cold; Thomas brings his comedic A (short for "Australia") game; and Ryan offers background on the growth of media by First Nations peoples in Australia and later demos next season’s theme song--all on this special, concluding, evening-record episode of TGTPTU. “Is that a fact?”

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.com
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/TGTPTU
Instagram: https://instagram.com/thegoodthepodandtheugly?igshid=um92md09kjg0
Bluesky: @goodpodugly.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6mI2plrgJu-TB95bbJCW-g
Buzzsprout: https://thegoodthepodandtheugly.buzzsprout.com/
Letterboxd (follow us!):

Podcast: goodpodugly
Ken: Ken Koral
Ryan: Ryan Tobias

Send us a text

RISKY

Sometimes you gotta say, “What the Fuck” to research, make your move. This week Season 14’s penultimate 1x1 is co-host Ryan’s pick: RISKY BUSINESS (1983). His reason: TGTPTU normally pairs filmographies of a single director or actor, and the writer-director on this film was so triggered by the experience of having his written, shot, and edited original ending replaced in the final cut that he never directed another film again… or at least not until his second film in 1990 (WTF, Ryan?).

This film that would go on to become part of 1980s iconography by first-time director Paul Brickman, who had previously written the Michael Pressman-directed The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977) and the Jonathan Demme-directed Handle with Care (1977) and would later be one of three credited writers on Clint Eastwood’s True Crime (alternately known as Speed Zoo) (1999), Risky Business as dark teen comedy and potential Reagon-era satire stars a number of early roles by actors who’d become comedy stars of the 1980s, including as the protagonist Joel’s fellow yuppie North Shore friends and entrepreneuring high school seniors in their first film appearances Curtis Armstrong (also known as Booger in the 1980s) and Bronson Pinchot (aka Balki in the 80s). It costars Rebecca De Mornay (later in the 90s known for her roles as a terrible nanny and as Milady de Winter) as the business-savvy prostitute, and has an early movie appearance by Joey Pants (known in the late-90s for taking the blue pill, Ralphie Cifaretto in the 00s, and a Bad Boy 4 life) as Guido the pimp.

Oh, and it’s also the first time that actor born Thomas Mapother IV, better known later in life by his stage name Tom Cruise, stars in the leading role in a film (but not the first time he danced in his underwear or kissed a female person, if DVD commentary tracks are to be believed).

Behind the camera, you have two cinematographers: Eastwood’s 70s and early-80s collaborator Bruce Surtees as well as regular Hollywood comedy lenser Reynaldo Villalobos. Pod-favorite Tangerine Dream scores. And the film scores big with first watches by host Tom and guest host Jack and with the Gen X’ers Ken and Ryan.

It’s a wild ride, so mind your parking brake. In this episode Ryan explains the economic milieu behind the 80’s yuppie culture to the two young hosts while drawing comparisons to American Psycho (2000); the two Zoomers discover how to shorten future episodes; and Broom Hilda’s creator, whose life strangely overlaps with Ken’s past and present, drops by studio.

Our podcast is The Good, The Pod, and The Ugly. We deal in human fulfillment. We grossed over eight thousand listeners in one night. An hour of your life, huh, kid?

FURTHER NOTES

Thomas requested we share the following Wikipedia links for those who’d like to perform additional research or to simply follow along:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Booker%27s_marathon_speech

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Detroit

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cop_Rock

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Renegades

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.com
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/TGTPTU
Instagram: https://instagram.com/thegoodthepodandtheugly?igshid=um92md09kjg0
Bluesky: @goodpodugly.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6mI2plrgJu-TB95bbJCW-g
Buzzsprout: https://thegoodthepodandtheugly.buzzsprout.com/
Letterboxd (follow us!):

Podcast: goodpodugly

Send us a text

Friends of Eddie

The second 1x1 feature rounding out Season 14 and, chosen by Jack, the film is THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (1973). Directed by Peter Yates, whose career TGTPTU is unlikely to cover in a future 4x4 despite having Krull and Bullitt in his credits, TFOEC is an adaptation of George V. Higgins’ inaugural novel and notable as a unromanticized depiction of crime in artistic response to The Godfather, the Puzo book and Coppola film each preceding, respectively, the book and movie versions of TFOEC by one year.

Higgins would take issue with the book as his debut novel. The former deputy assistant attorney general claimed to have written and burned 14 novels over 17 years prior to TFOEC and would go on to author over 30 books, both fiction and nonfiction before his fatal heart attack in 1999, but none with the impact of his first. As seasonal guest host Jack points out, nearly all the dialogue in the film is as it is on the page, and the pages are dripping with dialogue that creates the setting and action for this ironic story of “friends” who double-cross and live less than glamorous lives as Irish mobsters and criminals in Boston.

Yates populates the film with faces, faces that we don’t see much anymore, distinct faces and every one telling a story, from the titular Coyle plated by Robert Mitchum who earlier in this life reluctantly left the assembly line to be an actor to actor Alex Rocco who starred as Moe Greene in The Godfather and helped Mitchum meet some of his old criminal friends whom Rocco had to leave behind after he (the actor Alex Rocco) was held for questioning in relation to the murder that kicked off the Boston Irish Gang War of the 1960s to James Tolkan before he’d lost his hair a decade prior to portraying Principal Strickland in the Back to the Future movies and Detective Hugh Lubic in the Cannon Films classic Masters of the Universe.

For this episode, everyone did research: Jack and Thomas pair off for book report; Ryan covers the career of Mitchum; and Ken covers Yates and laments how now Hollywood lacks hacks as well as provides a new shaggy dog with The Pals of Charlie Brown.

Make sure to wipe your prints clean on this one before listening with a friend.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.com
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/TGTPTU
Instagram: https://instagram.com/thegoodthepodandtheugly?igshid=um92md09kjg0
Bluesky: @goodpodugly.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6mI2plrgJu-TB95bbJCW-g
Buzzsprout: https://thegoodthepodandtheugly.buzzsprout.com/
Letterboxd (follow us!):

Podcast: goodpodugly
Ken: Ken Koral
Ryan: Ryan Tobias