Blood Magic in Gnomeo Juliet (2011)

➡ The text is a conversation from a podcast where the hosts discuss various topics, including their thoughts on the movie “Gnomeo and Juliet”. They share their personal experiences and opinions about the film, and also reminisce about other movies they’ve watched in the past. They also talk about their experiences as teachers and the movies they’ve shown in class.
➡ The text discusses the creation and rating process of movies, focusing on the G rating and how it can sometimes seem arbitrary. It mentions how filmmakers negotiate scenes to achieve desired ratings and how some scenes are intentionally added to be cut, preserving other scenes. The text also talks about the movie “Gnomeo and Juliet,” its voice actors, and how the director was chosen because he wanted to work with Elton John. The text ends with a critique of the movie’s use of European accents.
➡ The speaker discusses their experience during the pandemic, including teaching classes via Zoom and the closure of restaurants. They also talk about the origin of the pandemic, referencing the consumption of bats and pangolins. The conversation then shifts to various movies, including Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey, and Utopia. They criticize a movie adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, arguing that it removed all the elements that made the original story interesting. They also compare different Superman movies, discussing their varying quality and charm.
➡ The text discusses a movie that the speaker found uninteresting and lacking in originality. They mention the film’s use of Richard Pryor as a serious villain, which they found unfunny. The speaker also criticizes the film’s references to other movies and TV shows, suggesting it’s a sign of a lack of original ideas. They also discuss the history of the Romeo and Juliet story, suggesting that the film’s version is a watered-down interpretation of a much older and more complex narrative.
➡ The text discusses various interpretations of Romeo and Juliet, including astrological ones that liken Romeo to Mars and Juliet to Venus. It also reveals that Juliet is a Leo, based on a line in Shakespeare’s play. The text also explores the idea of Friar Lawrence as an alchemist and the concept of an alchemical battle in the story. Lastly, it criticizes the movie adaptation of Romeo and Juliet for not fully exploring the tragic elements of the original story and for its failure to incorporate more complex themes.
➡ The text discusses the evolution of art and communication, from architectural secrets in cathedrals to Shakespeare’s written words, and then to modern forms like film and music. It highlights how each form has its own unique way of conveying complex ideas and emotions. The text also mentions the influence of famous figures like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven in music, and Kubrick in film. Lastly, it critiques the movie “Gnomeo and Juliet” for its lack of depth and originality compared to these other forms of art.
➡ The speaker discusses the movie “Gnomeo and Juliet,” comparing it to the original Shakespearean play. They note that the movie lacks the depth and symbolism of the original, particularly the theme of blood magic and sacrificial events. They also criticize the movie for its lack of emotional impact and catharsis for the audience. The speaker concludes by suggesting that “Gnomeo and Juliet” is one of the worst adaptations they’ve seen, even suggesting humorous alternative sequel titles.
➡ The text is a conversation about various gnome-themed movie titles and a critique of the film “Gnomeo and Juliet”. The speakers discuss the film’s lack of depth and how it could potentially make viewers less intelligent. They also mention the idea of using the film as a teaching tool in classrooms, but express skepticism about its educational value. They conclude by comparing the film to other works and suggesting that it falls short in comparison.
➡ The text discusses the ending of Twin Peaks and the viewer’s interpretation of it. It also critiques the movie Gnomeo and Julia, calling it the worst Disney movie reviewed so far. The speaker mentions various projects they’re working on, including a comic book about a lunch lady with sentient toenail fungus. Lastly, they promote Paranoid American sticker sheets, which feature cryptids, cults, and killers.

The first attempted murder happens at exactly 3 minutes and 33 seconds. So take that as you will ask about Illuminati sister. Charting the upper. Is it Disney mind control? Is this MKUltra Deluxe? We go from wheel to wheel. I go this day. No more feel business. Ask her back to the movement. I take a convince teacher come to everybody. A convincement focus upon a star. A convincement no long to shall fall. Oh, a convict. A new plan. Hello, welcome to the Occult Disney podcast, where we go looking through all the garden gnomes of the world and see how many of them come to life.

This is Matt here. Over there’s paranoid American. How’s it Gnomon? Don’t tell me what to do. What’s your nomenclature? That’s. Are we gonna have a bunch of gnome puns in this one? That one actually saved this one. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t know, since I just had two in short succession. We’ll see if they continue or not. That was not my plan, but you never know what could happen. No, it’s happening. Yeah. Tap into whatever you can. Let’s get as many gnome puns as possible. Let’s get some juice in here. People are gonna hate me by the end of this podcast because I’ll just.

It’s like when I used to teach environment and we’d get on boats and look for whales and we’d. We were supposed to do teaching on the boat, which I was the worst. That’s hard to teach on the boat, but sometimes you’re on a. On especially we’re on schooner on a wooden ship. I’d start doing a, you know, ARR. With a pirate voice. And then. Then I’d end up doing it for like eight hours. You’re locked into it, and then at a certain point, it will become awkward if you just stop. So then you have to commit the whole time or what? I think something along those lines.

Yes. I was also young and stupid. I was what, 22, 23 when I was doing that? So that’s what 22 or 23 year olds go for. Speaking of which, for Nomeo and Juliet, today’s movie, you. You gave me your quick review right before we started rolling tape. Yeah. I mean, if you’ve ever seen the Critic with Jay Sherman, I think it is John Loveitz. And yeah, Jay Sherman’s a character. John Lovet. And yeah, it sucks. So I watched the first 30 minutes two nights ago, and the rest of it I finished last night. Yesterday at work, I’m teach.

I’m training two younger co workers. One of them, she’s like 32. The other one is like 22 or 20, I think 21. Very young or whatever. And I mentioned that. Oh, oh, it came up that you can watch the movie Dogma, Kevin smith’s Dogma on YouTube. I was like, oh, I haven’t seen that in a while. I should go watch on YouTube. But I can’t do that tonight. I have to finish watching Gnomeo and Juliet. And there it’s like, oh, we love that movie. So, you know, they were as, as teens or whatever. They, they liked it.

That said, the 22 year old did tell me after, yeah, you got to get blackout drunk and watching, then it’s great. So there was that qualifier added to it. Wait, what was the context here? Who were these people that I was training? New workers at my company, new teachers at my company. And I, we were just at the end of the training talking about things like available Dogma’s available on YouTube. So that. That’s good knowledge because Dogma is. It’s been like out of print for ever, I think. So if you want to watch that, you can watch it on YouTube.

But yeah, I was like, I have to watch Gnomeo and Juliet tonight. And they just had like, like all the nostalgia berries about it. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. The complete opposite interpretation that I got watching this movie. This. Right. This movie had almost no redeeming qualities because the first 30 minutes I was on with you. Right. And then. And I still kind of am, but I would just had. When I watched the rest of the movie, it was colored by, oh, I just talked to people who at least fondly remember this movie from childhood. If they watched again, it came with the, oh, you have to watch that blackout drunk qualifier.

Right. So it did come with that qualifier. But they had a lot of nostalgia for this movie. I mean, couldn’t that work for any movie though? I guess my, my version of you have to watch a blackout drunk and then it’s funny would be like Billy Madison. But I would infinitely rather Billy Madison sober than Gnomeo and Juliet sober. Oh, yeah, I don’t watch Billy Madison at any time. I guess I got my Saved by the Bell fixation. But I would watch that sober for. Yeah, this one. I. Well, I did have a couple drinks. I did not watch Novo and Juliet sober, which was probably for the best.

I would, I would really rather watch pretty much any Romeo and Juliet movie, including that weird 2000s MTV one that had Claire. Yeah, I can’t. I can’t Remember who else was in it? But that was not great. But I would rather watch that one than I’d rather watch the OG one that they put on for us in school. I don’t watch that one in school. The original Romeo and Juliet from like the 19. Well, not the original, but like the Zephyrli one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they’re like, what? I’m seeing boobs at school.

And then there was, what, the lawsuit last year. Because they could do it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was definitely the first time that I saw a boob in a movie in school and no one got in trouble for it. Maybe the only time. Did I see another boob in a movie at school? I don’t think so. Except for sex ed films, but that doesn’t count. I’m sure. I’m sure there’s a few. Did you ever see the Rescuers? Ah, not at school. Yeah, it’s first school. I remember I was in the. In the 90s. I remember they put on Glory, the 1989 movie with Edwards.

Rick movies got Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Matthew Broderick. And I was excited that we were going to watch a dude’s head explode at school. But it turned out that there was a cut made for schools where they took out things like the dude’s head exploding. Oh, that’s the whole. I do. I do think that I saw Amadeus in middle school, which was a pretty adult movie to show a bunch of middle schoolers. It depends on if it’s the director’s cut on that one as well. I think the director’s like, knocks it up a rating maybe, because now you have Mozart’s Woman running around topless, which I don’t think is in the theatrical cut.

I don’t know. I can’t remember how cool that teacher was. She wasn’t very cool. So it probably was not the director’s cut. But at least for the past 20 years, it’s been hard to watch theatrical cut. So who knows? Maybe you saw. Well, this. This is a quite a tangent, but I’m just curious. What was the coolest movie you ever saw in school? Like, a sub came in and was just. I don’t care about this job. Here, watch this movie. This is actually when I was student teaching. So I’m just watching the guy do this. This.

I’m still observing. I’ll let this count. Well, student teaching in what grade? This was like 10th, 11th grade. So it was high school. Okay, this counts. So he didn’t feel like teaching that Day. So every lesson he just went to see if the wizard of Oz and Dark side of the Moon fit together. They don’t, by the way. And then a week later or a week earlier, this might also count. The weirdest was the was live 911 footage. I was student teaching when 911 was happening. So I had a classroom of kids freaking out. That was a good movie.

It was up there with Wag the Dog. Yeah, but yeah, yeah, I actually had to deal with a bunch of kids freaking out that day. So that. That made it a little more stressful in Japan. No, this was in Duluth, Georgia. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. These were. Yeah. Japanese kids would just be like, well, that’s weird. And go on with their day. American. Yeah. So that’s kind of what I was. Are we about to die? You know, it was kind of the vibe that day. Good news is, yes, it’s just a matter of how big your timeline is.

True about on astronomical terms. I guess we are avoiding talking about this movie somewhat. But I’ll talk a little bit about the genesis of a Nomeo and Juliet. It took a while, but it’s a little more linear to happening than a lot of these Disney movies, it looks like. Is anyone really in charge of this thing? It feels like the company just made this, to be perfectly honest. Of Disney was this is one of the first experiments in the AI. Well, the egregore of Touchstone, actually. This one is not made like within the confines of Walt Disney Animation.

In fact, it has a sequel that is not Disney at all. I think it’s like Paramount or something. So it is. It was Rocket Pictures. Then it goes into Merrimack. So it looks like the creative flow of this movie, whatever you think of it was linear. But it didn’t have like some guy having a heart attack or getting replaced at the last second, it looks like. But it did go from Rocket Pictures to Miramax, Disney owned to Touchstone, Disney owned. And this is the only G rated movie that Touchstone ever put out. Okay. The G rating changes things a little bit for.

It doesn’t make it better, but it explains. Although there are some very non. This movie. Yeah, as I was saying it, it sounded kind of weird. There is one scene in particular that seems like it would have at least bumped it to a pg. Ratings are weird though. The original Planet of the Apes is G, which seems weird. 2001 A Space Odyssey is weird. That’s G. And you watch, you know like five people get murdered or whatever. Yeah, there’s some other weird GS Star Trek the Motion Picture was a G. I think the newer. The newer cuts not.

But the original cut was a G. And you watch that transporter scene where the people get, you know, melted by a transporter. That’s disturbing stuff. So, yeah, sometimes it’s weird what gets a G rating. There’s a documentary, I want to say it’s called Unrated. I think that’s the name of it. And it’s kind of about how the rating system works in a way. And it is wild that some. Some things just get by, some don’t. Sometimes there’s a negotiation where they’ll be like, all right, we’ve got 14 Fs and, you know, seven Ss. What if we go to nine Ss and drop our Fs down to eight? Will that get us, you know, the PG13 or whatever? And there’s.

There’s a true negotiation dynamic sometimes about, okay, well, we’ll cut this scene and we’ll do this. Will that get us the rating that we’re looking for? And it seems so completely arbitrary. I’m kind of. I hope that AI just takes over that role for whoever is putting together all these stupid ratings. I love it when a director, or whatever filmmaker, maybe the director could be producer, puts in something like, really horrible so that they know will be cut. So the thing they’re worried will be cut stays. You know, they just put something much worse. And so that gets cut.

You know, if I was a studio exact, it would just be like, yes to all of it. Yes. One of my biggest disappointments when I first came to Japan is if you remember Kill Bill Part one, the final sequence was considered too bloody. So they. That’s why it’s in black and white, right? It was filmed in color. The end of Kill Bill is filmed in color. But the ratings board was like, you can’t have an R if you have this violent scene in there. So that taking out the color was the. The arbitration. So I was like, oh, when I come to Japan, I can see the color version, Kill Bill.

And right around that time, it was like re release. It was like three years after a movie. It’s like, special US Version. Like, nobody wants that. So they. Then they released the US Version in Japan and they never released it again. So that’s still like the only one you can find. I’m sure I can find that easily on the Internet now. But in 2004, you know, you still. To buy the DVD, right? Or the. Yeah, yeah. I mean, now, I mean, even in 2004. You just sail the seas and you find what you need. Yeah, but it took forever to get them.

I mean, getting a song would take you like an hour, right? So getting a movie was kind of a not. I did. I remember getting a few movies, I think. You know, like the Horror Wars Star Wars Holiday Special. I remember getting that, like, way earlier than was convenient. I mean, now, you know, you can get that you watch on YouTube. But do you ever watch that, by the way? I haven’t put myself through it. I’ve tried putting it on. I was like, oh, yeah, it’s bad like everyone says it is. And then I stop, just fast forward through all the times when the Wookies are just screaming each other and doing something non interesting.

Now, if Grandpa Lumpy’s looking at his porn, you watch that scene. But if they’re just moaning each other, like without that part, then I. I recommend the Star Wars Holiday Special. I think if you just take out 15 minutes of Wookie screaming at you, though, it’s. It’s the best Star Wars I can try. I’ve. I’ve never really liked Star wars or any of the ancillary Star Wars. This has be author and the Harvey Corman and Jefferson Starship man. I mean, you just watch Gnomeo and Juliet, you know, you can now. You watch it begrudgingly. Yes. So, yeah.

But it doesn’t sound like anyone was really on fire about this. Australian director Adam Elliott was approached and asked to direct a film, but rejected the offer due to the film’s incompatibility with his style. Meaning he probably just thought it sucked. Correct. Director Ashberry got on board because he wanted to work with Elton John. Okay. Which isn’t even really that big of a plot point in this movie. The plot point is that one of the gnomes, whenever he sings, another gnome, a female gnome on the other side, kind of goes into this dream sequence and imagines it’s Elton John serenading her.

And all I can think of is like. Like, should I break the news to her? Like the. Your fantasy is being swooned by Elton John. This is not going to work out in the long term, I don’t think. And everyone knew that in 2011. Yeah. Or 2010, whatever it is. Yeah. The poster. Let’s see the greatest love story you have ever. Gnome. Okay. Gnomeo and Juliet. Oh, this. This is condescending. Gnomeo and Juliet. Parentheses say no me O. They give you the pronunciation. And then under that, immediately. Featuring the music of Elton John with special guest performances.

So they really are pushing some. Some John on this. And I think there was, like, a Lady Gaga duet in this movie, too. That’s correct. That’s the special guest appearance. I guess she wasn’t big enough to have her name actually put on the COVID or what. I think she was. She was definitely. Maybe she was so big they didn’t want to put her name on the COVID You know, poster, whatever. Okay, we got a G to worry about here. We can’t be bringing no Gaga up in here. Gaga’s name. Start with a G. It works. Gnome Gaga.

We got all the G’s. Okay. Yeah. The first dream sequence. So I. I didn’t catch the John part, so I was like. Because I didn’t look at the poster and didn’t pay that much attention to the credits, I guess I was like, what. Why is it. Why is this happening? You know? And then he’s. Benny, did you pick up on any of the voices in this movie? I did. I was. I was looking at them, too, before we started recording. It was like Emily Blunt was one of the voices. I think she’s Julia. Yeah. And I can’t remember who the main character was.

I totally had it pegged wrong, though. I thought it was someone completely different. That’s James McAvoy, young Professor X. I guess if you want to take that route. I mean, no offense at all to any of the European crowd here. This one just did not work for me with all of the European accents. And then out of nowhere, one of the gnomes is a hillbilly redneck chick that has absolutely no English accent whatsoever. Like, none of this worked. I almost feel that if they all had hillbilly American accents, I would have liked the movie more. But having them all have the English accents, it kind of, like, ruined the movie for me.

That was Dolly Parton, by the way. See, if all of the voices were done by Dolly Parton in this movie, it would have been elevated. Ozzy Osbourne was Tybolt’s best friend, which I didn’t count. I didn’t pick up on Ozzy. Hulk. Hulk Hogan’s in there as an announcer. Of course Patrick Stewart does Shakespeare. That’s where you do want the European accent. You know, you want Patrick Stewart doing Shakespeare. That’s just. That’s. Everyone loves that match. I mean, I remember during. When everyone. During quarantine or whatever, people were like, oh, Patrick Stewart reads a song, a Shakespearean sonnet to you every day.

And they were happy about that. So I didn’t have to stay in the house. I Didn’t have to stay home and listen to Patrick Stewart sonnets, but. Or celebrities singing. Imagine. I didn’t have to do that because I had to go to work. We were teaching lessons on Zoom, but I had to get on an empty train. I get on a train and sometimes I would be the only person on the train, which was pretty exciting. I get to work, go into a classroom, set up my iPad, and then do Zoom and then teach my classes.

So I still had to go to work. This is very Kafka esque. It is a little bit Kafka esque. Restaurants are still open for the most part. There’s only one week where all the restaurants around here closed because I’m up at the mountains. Mountains, you know, so we were. We were po. Dunking up here. Just stay away from those pangolin restaurants. I understand. Pangolin. Pangolin, Pangolin, Pangolin. What is that? That’s. That’s why the world shut down. That was one of the original. Oh, that’s one. Okay, okay. Yeah. People were eating pangolin soup or something in a wet market.

Oh, I thought they were eating bat soup. Is that a bat? Well, the, the. Yeah, the bat is like its own tangent, but it was bad. It was all a wet market. And then one of the first reports was like, they’re eating bats and pangolin out here. We got to shut it down. Also, while we’re talking about media programming stuff, when I think to the origin of the pandemic, I just start thinking of Steven Soderbergh’s contagion, the first 20 minutes of that movie. Like, that’s what happened. Right? Which, no, it’s not what happened at all. And there were so many movies that had come out to kind of, you know, I guess predictive programming.

It shows you, here’s what it’s going to work like, so you know how to react. The same reason that Stanley Kubrick dropped 2001 Space Odyssey before he then dropped the Apollo 11 missions to the rest of the public. You gotta, you gotta prime them a little bit. There was also. Both shows of Utopia came out right before any of that happened. And man, if you, if you watched Utopia right before the pandemic hit and then it hit, it really just felt like, okay, who at Netflix is scripting this thing? Well, they were RPG, the whole thing.

But six months before, too, in the fall of 19, I think they were doing the art. The, the, the rpg. What do they call it when they do that? They don’t call it RPG because they want to make it sound more like governmental and stuff, right? Yeah. There’s a few different names. Usually it’s like emergency disaster training or something. That sounds way more official. That’s usually the. The kind of acronym that they’ll throw on it, which is the power players playing an rpg when you get right down to it. So they got. I wonder if they use 20 sided dice.

I hope so. It seems like you might if you were doing that because you would want to have like random outcomes. And how do you choose the random outcome? You probably use a computer. Random number generator. We have Miracle cure. And then it’s like D19. Like damn. Yeah. I guess you don’t see much footage of that sort of thing. So. Voices. Yeah. I think that makes Jim Cummings Winnie the Pooh is. Is the plastic flamingo guy. Featherstone. But he does. I mean he’s an actual voice actor, so he changes his voice a lot. He doesn’t sound like Winnie the Pooh in this.

I was gonna say this movie does have all the action of a Winnie the Pooh movie. Okay. We’re gonna get to that in two movies I think anyway. Which was one of my favorite Disney movies but features a pretty much no action. I think. Yeah. Just singing. Well, yeah. Yeah. Anything else that I really need to spit out on this? I mean it’s. It was quite successful. 36 million budget. 193. 3 at the 4. 194 at the box office. So it did quite well for itself. Yeah. The sequel did not. That fell on its face apparently.

But they could only get away with this once. And I bet it was just the title. People ironically being, you know, like the title probably did work to a certain extent. I mean I get it. But when you look at the reviews now. Rotten. It was like rotten tomatoes 55. IMDb was around like a five and a half or like a six or something. Which I think is generous. But it’s generous in the way that the real bar on IMDb is like a 4. Like if it’s 4 or less, it might as well all be the same score.

You probably know that now too since you’ve been watching like all of the. The worst rated movies on there. Once you get to a certain level of quality, they don’t really get three stars better than each other. They’re just kind of arbitrarily thrown together at that point. So to me this is a four star movie. I can’t. I can’t even get into the mind space of someone that was like, oh no. I thought that was good because it said the critical reception when this movie originally came out was somewhere around a B plus on a scale from F to A plus.

Man, we’re just. We are just churning out people that are destroying everything that I. I love and hold dear. That people would watch this movie and like it and tell you it’s the greatest movie ever. You just got to be blackout drunk to enjoy it’s. Gotta not remember anything about it and be on the verge of having to go to the emergency room. Then. Then you’ll understand how good this movie is. Get your board and get Romeo Juliet. What a weird. And honestly, I just gotta say that the coolest part. Spoiler alert. About Romeo and Juliet is the double suicide at the end and the ironic suicide where one of them takes, like, a sleeping potion.

And then I think Romeo comes in and thinks that she’s dead. So then he actually kills him. Like, that is the. The coolest part of Romeo and Juliet. And there’s a lot of. Of blood spilling in the original stories. And this movie removes 100 of all of that. All of the things that made Romeo and Juliet an interesting story are completely gone in this movie. Here’s what the the Wiki page says about that. A particular challenge, according to director Ashbury, was how to differentiate the ending between the original play in the movie in order to keep daggers and poison and suicide out.

It’s like, the whole point is that Romeo and Juliet has daggers and poison and suicide. That’s like, what makes it edgy, man. Then. And it. And it showed, like, how tragic it was that these young kids that hadn’t even grown up and realized even what the world was about just like, risked it all and lost it on their sort of like, impassioned love for each other. In this movie, they’re not even like, I don’t know, they’re dating, but they’re not even really passionately in love or anything like that. I mean, how could you be? You’re a garden gnome.

It’s like, we’re gonna make the Disney version of Oedipus. We’re gonna have to clean up a few of the details of the story. He keeps his eyes. He doesn’t bang his mom anymore. Exactly. So now it’s just a guy returning home after a while. There’s not much going on there. I mean, you. You laugh, but I can see that happening. Yeah, unfortunately, you’re probably right. But then it’s just. You’re like. You’re using the name. I mean, that happens. I mean, that’s pretty much what happened with Hercules. Isn’t it? You can’t really do, like, proper Hercules in a Disney movie if we’re talking about the legends.

Yeah, but see, Hercules got way closer than Gnomeo and Juliet did. Gnomeo and Juliet is just that there. It’s. It’s like a Hatfield and McCoy dynamic between the two yards, the backyards of these two people, and that these two gnome garden gnomes kind of fall in love. I mean, that’s. That’s where all of that ultimately stops. I. I just got to come out and say this is easily my bottom 10 movie I would rather watch. No Mobile. No Mobile is far superior to Gnomeo and Juliet. Yeah, I’m gonna give that as the higher gnome film that.

That one benefits just by being. That’s where being janky makes it work a little bit, you know? And that one wasn’t afraid. That one was literally about a young male gnome that just was going through all the female gnomes that he could until he find. Found one that he wanted to bang the most. I mean, that if that was also the plot of this movie, it would have been so much more interesting. Okay, we. Let’s. Let’s use a Superman movie comparison. Superman 1, great movie. I mean, it’s got a little. It gets a little dragging near the end, but pretty good.

That still is a standard of superhero movies. Superhero. Superman 2, easily worse. But the jankiness makes me like it better. Like, I kind. And I. I’m talking about the theatrical cut, not the one where they tried to fix and give it the same ending as Superman 1 for some reason. But the, you know, the weird jankiness of it makes it charming to me. You know, Superman 3 is just like Valiant or something. We watched it. It kind of went in one eye and out the other, you know, Like, I wasn’t, like, offended by Valiant. This. This one, I guess, is Superman 4.

Superman Prior 1. Office space, though, wasn’t it? Oh, Superman 3 is the. Is the Richard Pryor one where they wanted a comedian, so they. They got Richard Pryor to come in and told him he could do whatever he wanted. But Richard Pryor turned out, was a really big Superman fan, so he did. He went. He took it really seriously, and he wasn’t funny. Do whatever you want. And he, like, lights himself on fire while he’s crack on. Yeah. Yeah. Really? No, that’s what you want him to do. But what he did was like, I. I need to be a serious Superman villain.

I need to be serious about this and be a villain, you know? And he’s just not that funny in that movie because he’s trying to be a proper Superman villain. But no, me and Juliet, Superman 4, which is just a dumpster fire of a movie. I would Rather watch Superman 4 than this though, because it has like bad special effects that entertain me. And Chris Reeve and Jeevan Hackman are still there. You can also usually tell when one of these Disney or Touchstone or Miramax or whatever. One of these ancillary movies, especially the animated ones, when they’re starting to lose a little bit of ideas or originality, is that they’ll just reference other movies or other TV shows.

So for example, one of the weird, the weirdest scene by far in this movie is when we see a frog fantasizing. Oh no, is it a. Yeah, frog is fantasizing about one of the gnomes. This is while Elton John, I think is serenading the frog. And then the frog has a vision that Elton John is serenading her. But then she shows up like the 17 year old Mina Suvari in American Beauty being scantily covered with rose petals. And not like one of the most famous scenes in that movie. That didn’t feel very G to me. And it was also like, who was that for? That one.

That one was definitely not for the kids. That was for the adults. So now you’ve got some adults in the middle of this weird Gnomeo and Juliet G rated movie. And now they’re thinking about Kevin Spacey as a 40 year old man lusting after a 17 year old. And then it’s back to Gnomeo and Juliet. Like, what a weird kind of like state to put someone in. For what reason? Yeah, this was still Mind Games. Kevin Spacer. Everyone loves Kevin Spacey, right? So. Well, like the shocking bit of that. It’s really just that. Oh, and now here’s a reference to a 40 year old lusting after a 17 year old.

Have you seen that clip of him singing John Lennon’s Mind games at a 911 tribute concert? Kevin Spacey doing this? Yes. And he’s singing as hard as he can remember. He made under a C, right where he’s where he wanted to be. Bobby Darin. Or was playing Bobby Darren, I should say. No, no, but he’s singing as hard as he can, like, and then the audience is like, they’re all in love with Kevin Spacey. It’s just a really funny video to watch. So far he has come out relatively unscathed from all the accusations that have built up over the last, it feels like decade at this point.

Well, he can’t get cast in a movie that’s in America, at least I think he’s been in a couple European movies now. But, yeah, yeah, he’s doing slightly better than Roman Polanski, basically. Well, is he? Roman Polanski still makes Oscar movies, you know. Right. And there’s plenty of photos that show Polanski, like, strolling around on Rodeo Drive or something. Like he’s, you know, like exiled. Asterisk, which just means he wants to come here. He’s got to come on a private jet. Right, right. Don’t. Don’t make yourself. Don’t show your face around too much. Rodeo Drive. And they’re on the biz.

They know it’s up, you know, but let’s see any other. Any other things I have here. That’s the thing with a movie. It has no juice. It’s hard to, like, really riff on it because it’s like. It doesn’t seem like anyone was excited about this movie. The director, it looks like he’s basically a kind of journeyman animator, director. He did Spirit Stallion of the cimarron. Whatever. Shrek 2 there. Defender. That one is 2. No, 2. 2. Still good. It was 3. That was a dumpster fire. Is that how the Shrek’s work? I don’t. I don’t think I hate any of the Shreks, man.

Especially now if I watch Shrek 1, 2, or 3. If I just think of Gnome and Juliet for a split second, it’s like, oh, this is movie is great. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Shrek. Easily better than Gnomeo and Juliet. Smurfs. The Lost Village. What is that? An ugly dolls? I don’t even know what those movies are. So, yeah, just. This is the most juiceless movie I think we’. There’s not, like. Because they’re kind of sort of using Romeo and Juliet, you know, there’s no, like, proxy at work here. There’s that. I saw. You want to. You want to see? Did you see something? I saw nothing along those lines.

A couple small things, but really a lot of it is going to build off of breaking down the original story of Romeo and Juliet. Not. Not the Gnomeo and Juliet version, which is the most neutered. But even Shakespeare’s version was like the fourth or the fifth rendition of a truly older story. So the very first version of this particular archetype was from the year eight. Just the number eight. The year eight. And that was from Ovid, and he wrote Pyramus and Thisbe. I’m probably mispronouncing that. But this was about these two tragic lovers and there’s miscommunication and it ends in suicide.

It is essentially beat for beat, the same general premise as Romeo and Juliet. And then in 1530 there was Julietta and Romeo. And then in 1554 there was Bandello’s version of that. And then 1562 was Arthur Brooks poem version of that. And then they say the remakes come too quickly these days. Well, and yeah, and then William Shakespeare’s version in 1597, about 35 years after that latest one, he basically used Arthur Brooks poem as his rendition of this. So even the story of Romeo and Juliet itself was already 1500 years or more than 1500 years old by the time Shakespeare got his hands on it.

And after 500 years, it clearly has elevated far beyond what Shakespeare was trying to do with Gnomeo and Juliet, where the true symbolism really came. So even on Shakespeare’s version and some of these older versions of the story, a lot of the expectation is that Romeo and Juliet are astrological in some ways because one of the very first lines in the original play is something about star crossed lovers. And that the whole entire play itself could be seen as a procession through different astrological signs. That’s one of the deeper sort of interpretations of this. You’ve also got an alchemical version, which I think probably makes the most sense compared to Gnomeo and Juliet, because in Gnomeo and Juliet you do have the red side versus the blue side.

Although I don’t want to give Gnomeo and Juliet any credit that it hasn’t really deserved. So I almost feel that that’s just the most basic. Let’s take two primary colors and pit them against each other. Just because our audience, these G rated idiots, are so stupid, they’re not going to get that these gnomes are on different sides from each other. So let’s go ahead and do red versus blue. They even call each other reds and blues. So it’s like, so getting like beaten on top of the head of all this. But the red and blue could denote to the alchemical combination of these, these two different substances coming together.

They’d like these forbidden substances, which now the suicide is really just a very violent reaction that results in the next step of the alchemical process. So the original stories of Romeo and Juliet, including the Shakespeare version of, could be masterworks. They could actually be philosophical masterworks of a master alchemist describing the entire process of creating a philosopher’s stone. That’s not what we see in Gnomeo and Juliet though. Although I I would say in that case, it might be the master alchemist’s inside joke if the suicide is a bad reaction at the end. Because that. That’s like, you know, when you’re in high school chemistry class, you want to make your.

Your thing explode. Right? That’s what’s happening. I did have a chemistry teacher that accidentally lit her hair on fire in the middle of one of the classes. That was kind of funny. I don’t remember doing anything particularly interesting. Chemistry class. Mostly I remember staring out the window and writing song lyrics. That’s what I remember from chemistry class. Yeah. No, it was not my shining moment, but that was just one of the very few that the first time that she made education engaging. The rest of the times she sucked. Engage your hair with fire. Setting anything on fire makes things more entertaining.

Right. I also did kind of a random deep dive because I was really interested in the astro. Theological interpretation of Romeo and Juliet. And some of the interpretations that I was reading and other people’s theories were pitting them as Mars and Venus. You know, Romeo is Mars and Juliet is Venus. And it just. It all sounded so perfect. So I actually did find that there is canon on what star sign Juliet is, but there’s not on Romeo. So if anyone cared what Juliet sign was. There’s a line in the Shakespeare’s version of this, and Juliet’s nurse mentions that come llamas Eve at night, she shall be 14.

Well, Lamas was August 1st, so that means that Juliet’s birthday was July 31st, which firmly plants her as a Leo. So she had the qualities of a Leo, I guess, which would be radiant, passionate, theatrical, loyal, which are fairly fitting. Although if you’ve ever seen the research on horoscopes where the college professor, I guess, goes into a bunch of classrooms and he gives everyone report like, okay, we’ve analyzed your star sign. We’ve looked through when you were born. Here are personalized horoscopes for each and every one of you. And everyone reads it. And they’re like, oh my God, this totally.

You know, everyone raise your hand if. If this sounds like you. And everyone raises their hand. He says, okay, now pass the paper to your neighbor. And they all realize it’s the exact same thing. It’s. Everyone just gets the exact same horoscope. So you can kind of tell anyone, like, oh my God, you’re so radiant and passionate. And that doesn’t necessarily. Anyways, that’s. That’s my take on some of the astrology angles on this. But if anyone cared, Julia Is a Leo okay? I’m just checking because I’m seeing what the Japanese fortune I picked up last week says it was at a temple.

Like a fortune cookie? No, you go into the temple and you throw in a coin and you grab it here. It says it’s. If you can read, it just says a written oracle. So that’s kind of trippy. Selling number 36. Yeah, yeah. The fortunes all have numbers. So you actually are picking up a random fortune and they’re numbered, so. Because it’s like a Zoltar machine without Zoltar. Although there is usually a little, you know, a little shrine. So there’s someone around that just doesn’t talk to you, which is too bad. Spirit of the Waka poem. You’ll find success in your career and make your fortune.

As if taking a pleasant stroll through warm spring flowers with cherry blossoms overhead and butterflies fluttering at your sleeves. You will be helped by someone of goodwill. But if your heart is not true, disaster will follow. Huh? That’s my fortune. That’s a long ass fortune. Yeah, yeah. And it seems, and it is more of a poem than a fortune to give you the lottery numbers too. Yeah. Also I got it right after all the cherry blossoms. So it’s more like it was telling me about the recent past, you know, then unless we’re talking 11 months in the future fortune.

There was another line here that the, the person responsible for giving Juliet the sleeping potion. If we’re talking 1400s or you know, 14, 1500s, this guy would. He was a Francis Franciscan friar. Say that 50 times fast. 50 times fast. A Franciscan friar. But he clearly was the link to the occult world here. If he knows how to make these sleeping potions, then he’s kind of an akin to like a paracelsus kind of character where he understands the, the, you know, state of these different herbal remedies. Which is kind of crazy because a lot of those early Christian friars and monks, they were the ones that understood ethno botany and all these different sort of like cultural plants that had been used in sort of practices that hadn’t made their way into the Western world, especially out of the church.

And as soon as I started thinking about the Friar Lawrence being an alchemist and like a paracelsus, and I was like, oh, maybe the gnomes and gnomeo and Juliet are actually homunculi and we’re just seeing like an actual alchemical battle in the backyard of these two opposing alchemists. Even that didn’t make the movie any more interesting though. I was trying to force it. Yeah, yeah, I’ll say that one’s like on this podcast. I don’t sit here and say that sounds forced, but here I’m just thinking that sounds forced. I’m pretty sure that’s not what they were doing in this movie.

I wish they were, man. They just needed to have one person with some occult leanings on the script board for this particular meeting. For, for this movie. It would have just made things better. Just sneak some manly Palmer hall in here. Oh yeah. So just to plug what we’re doing a little bit in the future, before these were recording Evangelion episodes and we were talking about the idea that some of those things that they were kind of throwing, you know, mysticism and Judeo Christian stuff at the wall somewhat. Right. But there it landed in a very interesting spot where it’s very interesting to talk about.

If we’re throwing things in here. Like, I’m like, okay, alchemical battle between the yards. That’s kind of cool. But I’m like, man, if anything’s in here, they really did throw it at the wall. And it didn’t land in a very pleasant spot. We’ve seen so many death fake outs in Disney movies over the last. I mean, we’re like seven decades or something worth seven or eight decades worth of Disney movies. But it’s not unheard of for one of their movies, even a G movie, to have a character die and then come back or die and not come back.

Right. And his mom ain’t doing so well. Yeah, Bambi’s mom didn’t come back. So it’s. It’s not unheard of to see a main character get killed off mid movie. Even though this isn’t a Disney movie. I mean, we’ve seen Disney movies and G movies that are able to pull this off. So again, it’s wild that they didn’t even play out the fact that maybe Julia. There’s one scene. There’s one really. And the. The entire premise of the movie is kind of weird. It’s that whoever can cause the most damage to the other side wins. Or is better.

It’s again, it’s very Hatfield McCoy kind of style. And the way that this plays out is that one side of the gnomes, I think it’s the blue side. The blue side orders this like ten thousand dollar lawnmower and the ten thousand dollar lawnmower ends up exploding and taking out the house that all these, like the owners of all these gnomes. And during that huge explosion, Gnomeo and Juliet, they are Maybe killed off because we see the platform they were standing on, and then it’s gone. And then four seconds later, you see Gnomeo’s hand pull himself up.

And then Juliet comes up for maybe four seconds, you think that they might have died, but, you know, they didn’t die because, you know, this is clearly not a tragic movie. And in fact, they even make a point of finding a William Shakespeare statue out in some park, and he tells them about the original story, and he talks about poison and daggers and suicide and death and all this stuff. And then they’re like, oh, yeah, we don’t like that. And then he’s like, yeah, maybe you’re right. Yeah, that’s the worst cop out. Like, I liked that.

That was Patrick Stewart, of course. But otherwise I’m like, no. What? What? You’re. No, that’s not how this works. You know, you’re telling me how to eat corn flakes. And what a. What a perfect time. They could have just slipped into Francis Bacon reference there and would have gotten some extra brownie points. It would have been great. Oh, yeah, that would have been fun. I mean, the thing is. Yeah, with. With Shakespeare, whoever is writing the plays, you know, he wasn’t a storyteller. I mean, he was a storyteller, Susie. He’s not a story maker. Right. Every.

Every story, basically, it’s history. Or like you said, Romeo and Juliet has 8,000 other versions. He’s a dramacist. So in that case, you know, not to mess with the story here. They’re not dramatizing because they’re trying to, you know, reinvent the wheel. They’re trying to rewrite what is usually considered to be a pretty perfect story there. And again, on this particular adaptation of, like, a Shakespeare version of it. But I recently had been watching some of Jay Widener’s older stuff is Kubrick’s Odyssey and Kubrick’s Odyssey 2. He makes this claim that Stanley Kubrick is a master alchemist and that 2001 Space Odyssey is his philosopher’s stone.

More specifically, the monolith is the philosopher’s stone. And the monolith itself is the cinema. It’s the aspect ratio of the theater, the theatrical release of that movie. Therefore, the philosopher’s stone is the movie. So he created this. So. And. And one of the analogies that Jay Widener mentions in there is that there was that this book, Hunchback of Notre Dame, and in Hunchback and Notre Dame, there’s a reference to how the written word will destroy the edifice, books will Destroy the edifice. And that was interpreted by Victor Hugo, who was talking about Shakespeare, was the new version of the secrets hidden in the cathedrals.

Falconelli wrote a book called the Mysteries of the Cathedrals, where he argued. I guess Rosalind Chapel is one of the best examples of this. That these ancient architects built all these mathematical secrets and heretical secrets into the actual stonework of these, you know, huge, like, cathedrals and buildings and that it took about 500 years. And then Shakespeare did exactly what they were doing, but he did it with just the written words. So now you didn’t have to be a master architect and put together all these, you know, tons of. Of stone and masonry in order to have your information packaged up nicely.

Shakespeare did even better job. And then Kubrick improved on that. Because if a written word or if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video’s got to be worth a thousand pictures, you know, so that gets exponential. So all of that leading up to Nomi Juliet being the exact opposite of all of this as well. Say, let’s make a stop for Bach, too. Doing it with music, I would say, in the early 18th century or whatever. Right. Or you could argue Mozart, who actually got killed for including, like, you know, secret mysteries in the Magic Flute.

I believe I’ll give you a mu. I actually. I prefer to listen and play to Mozart most time. But I’m going to give you a reason. I actually went for Bach on that. By the time you have Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart, they are gallant style, where they’re trying to make things, like, sound cool there. Whereas Bach, I feel like at that period, it was more of pure, like. Like it was mostly not worse spirit, not secular music. Right. So that’s literally constructing sound cathedrals. Whereas Beethoven, by the time we get to Beethoven, he’s trying to express his soul, which musicians had not done before that.

That’s kind of his breakthrough. So just. Just when I’m thinking metaphysically, like, I feel like Bach was creating the sound cathedrals, more or less, you know, and there were two box, right? There was the Daddy Bach and Sun Bach, and they were. Oh, there’s more box if you get lots of box. We’re talking the. The OG Bach, though. Yeah, the OG Bach. And then his son was CP Bach, I believe. And I think he got more into that gallant style, which is. Is more secular. Right? So. And he was Bavarian Illuminati patron. Him. Him and Mozart and Beethoven, all three of them had direct connections to the Bavarian Illuminati, which is a fun fact.

No, they’re living in that part of the world, so it makes sense. I just wanted to throw out that we all have our philosopher’s stones now, don’t we? And they track us for those monolith looking phones. Yeah. Again, the coolest part of that whole Entire movie in 2001, Space Odyssey is basically that the. The bone, just a dead bone that you use to bludgeon your food and your. Your brothers to death, is no different than the most advanced spaceship that to. To us, we’re just monkeys with bones. I did talk to the monkey who told us how that scene came about.

Have you ever heard the story? You talked to the. The guy in the monkey suit? We talked to the guy in the monkey suit who was also John Lynn and Yoko Ono’s right hand man slash handler for two or three years, so. Oh, and I didn’t know that part. No. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we talked to him and he was hired because Kubrick hired him for. He was a mime. So Kubrick hired him, like, to try and teach people how to move like a monkey. Right. Or an ape. So he was like, if we’re gonna do this properly, you should have me do it and I should, you know, train a group of people to do this.

But anyway, it was like the. One of the only scenes they shot actually outside, not with, like, weird front projection or whatever they were doing. And just like one little piece of bone, like, flew off. And I was like, that’s cool. To do a little more. And that’s one he was explaining. This is why Kubrick does so many takes. Sometimes he’s like, hey, that little thing worked. Can you make that a little more? Oh, that. That worked. Let’s make it a little more. So when the bones are just wildly flying off in all directions. It did take 60 takes as one bone spur went off.

And so it is. I mean, it becomes completely, you know, like, philosophically interesting. But it is kind of constructed organically, you know, more intuitively, I guess. Well, that’s what they want you to think. Well, I think the magic of reality is kind of both are true. Right. You don’t think there was the CIA guy in the back room. It’s like, we need you to shoot this exactly 60 times because the gamatria works. Oh, that’d be fun too. But I think the CIA. I think you might have a CIA guy. You know what I’m trying to say? CIA guy is in the back room.

I don’t think he’s necessarily saying you have to do 60 takes or maybe I don’t know. The scene from a Holland Drive. I always, you know, this is the girl scene. Right, Right. Which is one of the most amazing scenes in any movie. Speaking of gamatria and, and injecting symbols into movies. In this movie, no Mio and Juliet, the first attempted murder happens at exactly 3 minutes and 33 seconds. So take that as you will. But it’s when the. I want to say red. I’m just going to make up a color. I think the red team, they shoot a snail into the other yard and it basically goes into one of the gnomes throats and he starts choking and he almost dies on it.

And all of them are cheering. That’s like, yeah, we almost got one of them. So there, there is an implication that these two sides are feuding enough that they’re trying to murder each other. But we don’t. That’s the coolest thing that happens in the entire movie is someone almost dies three minutes in and then all the teeth get basically filed down. See if they had instead of name this Gnomeo and Julia, if they modeled after Small Soldiers, small numbers or something, you know, that would have worked. I don’t think Small Soldiers got a G rating though.

No, it didn’t. And that’s. That was that PG13? I want to say PG13? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I came that movie very late because when it came out, even directed by Joe Dante just. It didn’t. It looked like a kids movie and I was 20 years old, but I, I. Terrifying. I thought it was a, it was a very surreal horror movie. No, I only first saw. My point is I only first saw it like two or three years ago. So like oh geez, you know, so it’s not like it’s, it doesn’t have any nostalgia for me because it’s a recent view because most people.

That’s a very nostalgia movie. The gnomes, I guess follow more like tour Toy Story rules, right? For the most part, yeah. I mean this. Yeah. I. No redeeming qualities whatsoever. I can’t even think of one. Dolly Parton’s in it. It maybe, yeah. Patrick Stewart. I’ll keep saying that. That’s, that’s, that’s my blanket to hold on to for Patrick Stewart. But he’s just a self fledgil flagellating William Shakespeare just for the point of them to have an excuse of like oh no, no, trust us, we know what the good version is. We’re doing this on purpose. We’re doing the bad version.

We know what the good version is. And we’re doing the bad version. They even do something similar to that very first Winnie the Pooh book where it’s like, let’s skip pages because this is kind of boring. They mentioned that in the, in the very beginning of the movie. It’s like, yes, we’re doing that Romeo and Juliet, the one that’s been done too many times already. Well, here it is anyway. And they kind of prep you to like be disappointed and say your daddy’s Romeo and Juliet. It is, it’s like, here it is. Your, your mom and dad’s Romeo and Juliet with even less bite on it.

No, I’m not saying I liked the performance by Patrick Stewart. I just like he was there. If you want animated Patrick Stewart voices, go to American Dad. Right, right, right. This is the wrong place for that. I would just, I was just like, you know, we’re like 50 minutes into the movie. I’m looking at how much more I have on the clock. I’m like, oh, well, at least here’s one of my favorite actors doing, being doing a Shakespeare voice. I don’t like what he’s saying, but yeah, for 40 seconds. I don’t like what he’s saying. What he’s saying is stupid.

But, you know, whatever. That’s the way that he says it, not what he says. Yes. Any other big ones you have. I, I feel like we’re not going to necessarily run normal time today because there’s just. Not again the original story. There’s plenty. But this movie itself, just right. One of the biggest things we miss out is that the original story is all about blood magic and initiation through death. Almost every major plot point in the, in the Shakespeare version of this, blood is used to indicate a turning point. There’s Mercute, Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris, Romeo, Juliet.

Every single one of those has some sort of a sacrificial event that marks a milestone in that. And then you’ve got the Juliet’s dagger suicide. That kind of represents a sacred offering. This is like a ritualistic sacrificial offering. And then the, the Romeo version of it. And all of this thing is getting played out for the audience so that the audience understands what a ritual sacrifice looks like. And as they’re witnessing this, just like any movie that you ever see, there’s a cathartic effect, right. You’re watching the characters go, go through emotions and do things that you yourself are.

Weren’t going to do in that two hour session. Right. If you see someone graduate Harvard and CL Mountain and almost die and come back to life. There’s like a catharsis of you watching all that happen so now you don’t have to go through it and you feel like you identify with someone that just went through a lot of really hard things and then you were able to relate to them. Therefore you kind of take some of their. I don’t like. If you watch Gnomeo and Juliet, there’s nothing cathartic, nothing happens to where you feel that you’ve learned something or taken away a new perspective.

All it’s going to let you know is that, oh, maybe every other adaptation of Romeo and Juliet I’ve ever seen, maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. You could probably go and see, you know, your kids school play of Romeo and Juliet and it would have more drama than this particular rendition. Well, yeah, it’s even in the language of the movie you kept saying die. Gnomes don’t die. They get damaged or destroyed. Right. Like Benny gets damaged. Does Benny still have a brain? You know? Gnomeo and Juliet is an attempt to show us what Alan Watts’s ceramic model of the universe is like.

It’s just homunculi all the way down. That’s all it is. Yeah, that was completely stretching by the way. I don’t believe it at all with Alan Watts there. But yeah, yeah, like, yeah, Benny’s permanently damaged. You know, he’s. I guess it’s. Can they glue his hat back on? Glue a new one on? Is he just going to be a deformed gnome? I mean his, the owners are going to throw him away because he’s been chipped. Well, we, we see one of the gnomes at the very end is completely shattered and they just glue his entire body back together and he seems fine.

Yeah. Ben Bolio, by the way, just disappears from the playgrove, you know, Juliet. So in this case. And if they were keeping it to real with the play, which they don’t at all, he, Benny would just disappear halfway through the film and no one would think about him again. Anti Poochie, you know. Yeah, this is like the, the other daughter and family matters that just like goes up to her room and never comes back down. Yeah. Yes, exactly. What, what are other fun TV characters is weirdly disappear. I know there’s got to be a few. The sister in the 70s show, Eric’s sister because she develops I think like a meth habit or something in real life throughout the course of the show.

So you just start seeing her less and less. I want to say happy days. Has a. Has a sibling that just kind of vanishes real quick, like is in the first episode or two. And then you never seen somebody. Cunningham, remember, Married With Children had a season where there was like, a young, young kid that they add to the family. Oh, yeah, yeah. Cousin Oliver on the Brady Bunch. You know, all of that sort of stuff. Of course, there’s the Bewitch thing where you have, like, different dicks, you know, Dick Sergeant Dick York. Darren’s. Darren’s. Excuse me, I want to say.

Well, one, I just want to say they had different dicks. But those are the actors, right? No, I didn’t mean to say that. I was talking about the actors. Different dicks. Right. Dick York. And then another. Another dick that replaces the first dick. Dick replaces Darren with a dick. The first Darren was phenomenal. I mean, I think everyone’s favorite Darren. And it’s kind of sad to know that. That the only reason he left is because he was in crippling pain the entire time he was shooting that show. I forgot what his condition was. But it was a back thing.

Yeah, it was. It was like, kind of a bad thing. Yeah, but. But that, like, he put his all into that. And sometimes when he gets mad and he yells, Samantha. Like, he’s probably channeling some of that back pain. So there’s like a very real performance to it and all of that. Yes. Happy days. Bewitched Cousin Oliver sees in the Brady Bunch. I would put those over Gnomeo and Juliet easily. Yeah. Oh, come on. Bewitched is like top 10 content of all time. No, I’m just. I’m just trying to wrap back around to what the actual topic says.

We’re really like. I. I am. Look, I’m scrolling through our list now. Okay. The wild was. The wild. Wild was better than this. Wild was better than this. Yep. I mean, very forgettable. I barely remember what happened in that. But it was better in this. Yeah, the wild had some interesting musical scenes and they also had a much more symbolic sort of like, word. Like they went into, like, Plato’s Allegory of the cave and they were worshiping this bull God and it shows how a cult was formed. Like, all that was cool. Okay, here’s a contender.

Is dinosaur worse than this? Because it doesn’t have much history and it looks like garbage. I like dinosaur a lot. Okay. I’m not too into dinosaur. This. This movie is about as good as David the Gnome. And I hated David the gnome. Doesn’t David just die at the end because he’s, like, sad? David the gnomes cooler though, because he rides birds and stuff around like a little like Mario Yoshi kind of thing. Now I’m getting to the real classic stuff. So you know what I think? I think I can declare this bottom of our barrel so far.

I mean, probably bottom three without even have to try. I’m trying to see if there’s anything else that I would even put under it. I think we just find the absolute worst Disney movie. Don’t tell my young co workers. But yes, I think we found the worst one not made by Disney production, just to be clear. So honestly, next time you see them though, you should just let them know like Gnomeo and Julia is bad and you should be embarrassed. Yes. And then they will show me that it may nine times its budget at the box office and screw off.

Would you. Would you like. I can bring up a bit about the sequel, which is Sherlock gnomes released in 2018 as the sequel. Now they’re trying to base it on Arthur Conan Doyle instead. Obviously it still has Nomio and Juliet in, of course, because it’s a for Paramount’s first fully animated feature since Rango. Okay, that’s weird. That one also made money, though not nearly as much. Budget 59, a lot more box office 90. So not great. Sounds more interesting. Although I feel that anyone saw this first one and they were like, ah, you got me. You used a thing that sounded familiar and that made me want to buy it.

And then maybe a lot of people just like wised up to the sequel. They’re like, ah, fool me once. Yeah, fool me twice. You’re not gonna fool me again. Well, let’s see. The gnomes relocate from Stratford upon Avon to a garden in London. The gnomes start vanishing. They hire this. I got bored halfway reading the plot summary. Okay, let me put. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t that successful. I mean, if they’re. If they treat Garthur K and Doyle any. With any level of the same respect they treated Shakespeare with, it’s kind of doomed, you know? Know.

I guess it’s a better template though. Here instead of Sherlock Gnomes, here’s just a few. Here’s a few sequels that I think would have been better. Let me know if any of these thick. Hold on, trigger warning. The puns are probably about to come back. Yeah, no, the puns are going to come back gnome alone. Okay, okay. The gnome father, a little bit of a stretch. Oh, no, no. Malone, by the way, is a singular gnome keeping everyone inside the house through violence. Gnome country for old Men. Oh, yeah. The gnome identity. I think that one could have been kind of cool.

Born identity. But it’s. It’s a gnome. A program to. Gnome. Gnome is where the heart is. Oh, see, no Malone 2. I mean, come on. If no Malone worked was so good. Number alone two probably be even better. And then Nomageddon. Okay, that. That’s a good one. Yeah, that’s the best one. But that’s like Sharknado, isn’t it? Again, Sharknado. Better movie than Gnomeo and Juliet. Time Rider. The Adventures of Lyle Swan. That was the worst movie in Gnomeo and Juliet. I remember seeing that in the 80s on video. What was it called? Time Rider. The Adventures of Lyle Swan.

I want to know if I got that title correct, by the way, since you look like you’re looking it up. Well, I was just looking. Indiana Gnomes. Okay. Gnome Busters. Oh, there’s a good one. Yeah. The Silence of the Gnomes. Yeah. So I’m listening to yours too. Hard to think of any on my own. I’m listening as hard as I can, I think. I mean, there’s so many places that you can bring the gnomes story. Are we gonna have to watch Sherlock Gnomes? Is that going to be on our list? No, because that’s Paramount. Mgm. So Disney realized they didn’t want to have anything more to do with the gnomes.

Okay, well, then there’s some good news that came out of all this. Yeah. They realized that this was IP they did not need to hold on to. They were like, look, look, we’re all about owning your grandma’s nostalgia, but the garden gnomes is just one step too far. And. And I do have to point out that there is the classic amanita muscaria mushroom symbolism in this movie, although Disney even neuters that part. And they make it a blue mushroom instead of a red mushroom, even though I believe both sides have these. But the only one that really gets any screen time or lines, because it is a.

A anthropomorphic blue mushroom. Not a smurf, just like a regular mushroom that hops around and moves around and stuff. But the connection between gnomes and Amanita mascaria mushrooms also is kind of a cool little rabbit hole that brings you into the. The. The holy. The sacred mushroom and the cross and Gordon Wasson’s work and a lot of those other connections between sort of like ancient mystery schools and partaking in Amanita Mascaria. I see in my notes I was gearing up to talk about this and I was like, if I were on shrooms, I bet I’d laugh at this movie much harder.

And then, yeah, they just, he just kind of bounces around for the rest of the movie and becomes like, you know, Pascal, in last week’s Tangled. Yeah. Is there a maybe. Maybe we’re missing something. Maybe the original theatrical release, they gave you mushrooms on the way into the theater and maybe that’s why people have nostalgia about it. They’re tripping their brains out. Okay, well, it didn’t work for the Phantom Menace, by the way. Yeah, I’m. I’m sorry, I’m still not a prequel Defender have not joined that. That thing you said you weren’t in anyway. But yeah, yeah, I was like priming to start writing about that stuff in my notes and it just didn’t happen.

It just fizzled. I mean, everything is movie just fizzles. Okay, Romeo and Juliet, that one of the greatest stories of all time maybe. And no, they’re not going to quite do that either. And they’re going to tell us repeatedly that they’re not going to quite do that. I also like how, you know, Romeo and Juliet, you know, youthful beauty or whatever. And now we got a gnome with a white beard and. And you know, I mean, because she’s a gnome, Julia, and in here basically looks like a frumpy housewife, you know. Yeah. This is also kind of like a Beauty and the Beast sort of situation where no one really is mentioning this, but Juliet is clearly three decades younger at least in.

Unless just every 20 year old gnome has a completely white beard. Yeah, I was thinking about that and I think it is just, well, gnomes gotta have a white beard, right? But at the end, the gnome that Dolly Parton hooks up with in the credits is the Borat version of David the gnome. But it’s also a super old fat gnome with a long white beard wearing one of those slingshot Kinis and then. And then like dancing with, you know, Dolly Parton dressed up as the slutty hillbilly gnome which unexplicably, you know, has an American accent. Yeah, well, she’s visiting.

Maybe she’s not originally from those parts. I mean, I guess they have to have the accents because it does say they are set in Method Stratford upon Avon, which I guess makes sense. But you know what? Yeah, better too is if. If these gnomes were in the actual yards of the hatfields and the McCoys and it all took place in sort of hicktown USA. That’s the Western version of my dude Small soldiers. Right. And this, this. Yeah, they were, they were too polite for a movie that was seven years in production. I know a lot of that pre production, of course.

But yeah, they really, they could have had like a crazy World War II flair where like the, the red side were German and the blue side were Polish or something. Okay, I’m gonna have to do my films and Phil thing, which is that podcast you’re referring to earlier, and read a couple 10 stars. Let’s. Let’s see what people say. Other than you should get blackout drunkard douche rooms in this movie. Oh, you’re Gonna look at 10 star reviews of. No, I got a few. I’ve got a few 10 stars here. Yes, yes, yes. The classic story of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet turned into a wonderful family comedy.

Comedy really helps with schoolwork. Studying this play. Teachers agreed, so he watched in class. Hope you enjoy. Okay, so someone is watching this in class now that’s a bad teacher who watches a G rated version of Romeo and Juliet and it helps them with understanding the real Romeo and Juliet. This, you know, they’re, they’re not improving my, my impression of teachers right now. That’s a 2018 review. This one’s 2011. So it’s about when it came out or shortly after. Imaginatively and delightfully chock full of fun visual and gads gags for kids and adults alike. And a special 3D effects, well worth the price of a mission.

So they were still on the 3D kick. When you consider the talent behind the camera, the caliber of the actors, voices creating these characters, plus Sir Elton John allowed his classic songs to be woven in his tale. You expect the film to be something magical. I thoroughly enjoyed Gnomeo and Julia and found it to be an imaginative and delightfully, delightfully spin on a timeless classic. There’s no one behind the camera. There was no camera. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good point. At the end of the day, all you can ask for is a fun time in the movies that can be enjoyed and shared by young and old alight.

This delightful film delivers the goods and will surely put a smile on the faces of young and old alike. Yeah, like when they just reuse a credit. These are reviews written by grandparents that brought their grandkids to see the movie. So I mean, it’s in 3D. That’s, that’s one of the reasons of doing this. You start reading like none of these are like actual, like, you know, critical analysis. Best British cartoon for a generation. Hell no. Put Valiant above this easily and I Don’t like that movie much. Yeah, no. Valiant wins over this movie because Valiant at least teaches you something interesting that maybe you didn’t know before about the carrier pigeons.

Right. This movie actively makes you dumber as you’re watching it. Right. This makes you forget the. The good parts of Romeo and Juliet. Now you have to go back and read it again just to get rid of how dumb you became from watching Gnomeo and Juliet. So it’s like reverse psychology in the classroom. That’s why the teacher’s showing you this. All the kids feel so dumb they have to read the play now. Honestly, you shouldn’t read Shakespeare anyway. Reading Shakespeare does suck. It’s supposed to be performed, right? Yeah. I almost imagine if in Clockwork Orange, if they show Alex Gnomeo and Juliet, instead of getting sick with violence, he just becomes so stupid he can’t figure out how to use a knife anymore.

A clockwork gnome. Well, they do that in Twin Peaks, don’t they? Where there’s actually a video game for Sega Saturn called Clockwork Gnome, I think. Oh, no. Clockwork Night. I forget the character. That’s what they do with Shelley’s husband, right? And Twin Peaks, who’s the, you know, the violent, abusive guy that’s, like, pretty evil. And he ends up so stupid that he can’t do anything bad anymore. They just give him a bunch of nitrous. Well, I think he’s a vegetable for a while. And then he’s, like, kind of functional. But then one of the villains of the show just has him going off and doing bad stuff.

But he probably doesn’t know what he’s doing. And the final scene just spoiling the end. A very small part of the end of Twin Peaks. It’s like, what is it? He’s like. He’s got, like. He’s tied up and he’s got a rope tied to his tooth, and there’s like a spider if he moves his mouth or something. And then in Twin Peaks, the Return, when they get back to him, they don’t at all. That’s the end of his story, despite there being 18 more episodes of the show. Which is perfect. If you think it’s perfect. That’s why you like that thing.

If you’re like, what the hell? That’s why you don’t like that sort of thing. Yeah. If you watch that show and you’re like, oh, I can’t wait until they explain this Black Lodge stuff they do. If you’re, if you feel it, you, I, I, you, you eventually know what the Black Lives explain it the same way that Lost explains the smoke monster. They do a better job because you feel it, you know, and, and Twin Peaks, you can never explain it. That’s the whole point of the show. That’s why people like it. Spoiler alert is a Twin Peaks.

I guess the, the best interpretation I’ve heard is that the audience is the killer. They’re the ones that killed the girl at the very beginning of the entire show for your entertainment. Are you not entertained? That sort of thing. Okay, that’s kind of nice theory. But anyway, Gnomeo and Julia, I think we can hang our gnome hat on this or knock it off with a lawnmower. So, I mean, if nothing else, we found out where the bottom of the barrel is. Now this. We’ve the worst Disney movie today. It took a while because we haven’t done the 50s and 60s live action ones.

But, but like we said, no mobile. Better. Better. No movie. But I can’t, I can’t think of any movie that we’ve watched so far that it immediately became a discussion of. Wait, is this the worst one? I don’t even think that conversation has even come up. And not only did it come up, but I think we found that yes, this is indeed the worst one that we’ve reviewed so far. Yeah, because usually it’s like, like again bringing about again. We’re like, this seems less than. But we weren’t. Let’s like, let’s, let’s curb stomp this movie. You know Gnomes.

That would be awesome. Oh, what was, what was that movie with Edward Norton in it? American History X. I was about to. When you said what was that movie? I was about to say American History before you even said Edward Norton. American History Gnome would have been so much cooler than this movie. Yeah, sure. But I think you have figured out how they can franchise this, which they did try to do once as we, we know that. So. Yeah, so Curbstone can stomp and gnomes. That’s how we’re going to end this one. What up with you? What up with me? Well, I’ve got a whole bunch of projects always going on.

The best way to find out what those are is go to paranoidamerican.com, check out titaniccomic.com, check out satanic panic comic.com. got a whole bunch of other ones. I actually just started working on the Mold comic again. If any anyone of you are like OG Paranoid American fans. Mold is a book that I’ve been working on for the last few years. I had to put it on hold. Well, it’s. It’s off hold. I’m gonna finish all four issues before I release the whole thing as like a. Like a standalone graphic novel. Or you can buy in four different issues.

It is about a lunch lady that I knew in high school. I’m not going to name her is true story based on a lunch lady I knew in high school and her sentient toenail fungus that helps her get revenge on the horrible kids at school and eventually saves the planet from a reptilian invasion. Again, true Based on a true story. All right, what do we have here? So I guess that’s where I tell you I learned. No, that’s not what I was looking at. There’s a moment when I used to blame everything and everyone for all the pain and suffering and vile things that happened to me they saw happen to my people.

Used to blame everybody. Blame gnomes, Blame society. Blame the gnome. God didn’t get no answers because I was asking the wrong question. Sorry, just trying to work out American history. Gnome here. Here. Yeah. What do I do? I podcast@podcastio podcast.org Films and Filth is where we read a bunch of 1 star and 10 star reviews regularly about movies. If you thought that was entertaining, just finish up the Twilight Zone on Time Enough podcast and just finished the live action Planet of the apes on podcast 1999. That’s what I’m up to. So I’m going to take all my inner hatred out and some gnomes.

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From Cryptids in the night to cults out of sight each sticker is a unique find. Get yours now@paranoid American.com I scribbled my life away Driven the right page Willing enlight to brain give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real to real you will engage it your favorite of course the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hey maybe your language a game how they playing it well without Lakers evade them whatever the cause they are to shape shift snakes get decapitated met is the apex execution of flame you out nuclear bomb distributed at war rather than gruesome for eyes to see max them out that I like my trees blow it off in the face you’re despising me for what though calculated you’d rather cut throat paranoid American must be all the blood smoke for real Lord give me your day your way vacate they wait around to hate whatever they say man it’s not in the least bit we get heavy rotate when a beat hits so thank us you’re welcome for real you’re welcome welcome they never had a deal you’re welcome many lacking appeal you’re welcome yet they doing it still you’re welcome.
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