Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - I'm Chevy Chase & You're Not (2026)

Welcome back, midnight viewers to Father Malone's weekly round up. I'm Father Malone and with me stealing all my bottle caps and Nuka Cola is the littlest vault dweller. Ripley Jean, how are you, my love? I know those critters are scary as fuck. I hope you all had a good first week of twenty six.

It's been interesting. I'll say that last week I met some podcasts that you should be listening to. I've got a new favorite podcast pastime that's finding scary story type podcasts where the host reads stories they find on Reddit or four Chan or wherever the fuck. But it's more specifically those shows where the host has affected a scary voice. Hello kiddies, and welcome back to another round of Yelp yarns.

It's not the show itself that makes these so attractives. It's the on air ad readings because they never drop the act. So it's if you need help building a website, then try square Space. It makes every advertisement sound like a dare a couple of recommendations off the top. I realize we've just survived the Christmas season, so any entertainment with a jingle bell attached is going to be an anatma.

But I watched Santa Con, a recent documentary about that completely annoying event where people descend on major metropolitan cities around the globe to dress up like Santa and get drunk and break shop windows. I was a little fearful going in that it was going to be a Vice type documentary. They are to show you the worst of the worst, disguised as journalism. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that that aspect of it, the drunken, amoral, loudishness, wasn't the focus at all. Instead, it's the tale of San Francisco art collective, the cacaphony society that's been into disruption long before it was a term.

They held car hunts where driverless cars were hunted like big game Safari trophies. They threw picnics on the Golden Gate Bridge, they created Burning Man, and the doc shows how these folk would corral hundreds of Santas to descend on department stores and other conspicuous consumption shrines to point out the over commercialization and commodification of the holiday. The doc shows the event's origins and its evolution, and spread and its eventual decay when cacaphony devolved into chaos, and of course Fallout is back. Everyone is crying about stranger things and I'm just luxuriating in my radiation suit here in New Vegas. I hope you're watching Fallout.

It's pretty magnificent. As you know, I'm not the most dedicated gamer, but I've certainly played the various iterations of Fallout to greater and lesser degree, mostly the lesser. That's an open world. I never had enough time in my life to dedicate to exploring, and then I played in New Vegas. Baby, Is that a provincial bias?

Well, only if you enjoy seeing your hometown in ruins, and I certainly do. I tore through that fucking game, every subplot, every fetch quest, couldn't get enough. So it's really gratifying that that's where this season is headed. Three episodes in and we still haven't made it to Fremont. But boy do I love knowing that the NCR or out in prim Nevada, which is where the border with California is, and the Legion are stationed out by Lake Mead.

They even have a fictional version of the skyline drive in near Lynnwood. I saw the movie Hotshots part due at that drive in. I wish I had known there was a vault behind the screen. If you haven't been watching because you've been burned by too many video game adaptations, rest easy. If you're a purist who doesn't want to see things deviate from its origins too much, rest easy.

This show is in totally capable hands, having been shaped by the team of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, the husband wife filmmaker phenomenon who managed to turn Westworld from a Jurassic park with robots into a mind bending meditation on humanity and consciousness. And while I do not really care for the works of Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker, I think Memento is a pure slice of heaven. It was his brother Jonathan who wrote that Fallout has consistently been juggling plot lines and timelines and a multitude of characters and situations with a deaft and steady hand. It nimbly straddles the line between fealty to the original game and its own new plot lines, and it's refreshing in that there's no fucking mystery to unravel here any revelations are character based almost entirely, which doesn't mean there isn't plenty of action, plenty of a gore Jesus Christ, so so much gore, and yet it still manages to feel lighthearted without falling into parody.

Did I think the first season was light on critters? And then season two starts and they're like, fuck you, here they are, and now I regret it. As a Vegas resident, you are called on from time to time to do battle with scorpions. They're terrifying one inch long. I don't ever want to meet one the size of a buick.

The cast is uniformly terrific here. Yes, Walton Goggins is fucking awesome as usual as the Ghoul. But I want to point out someone in the cast that never quite gets the recognition he should. His name's Michael Christopher. He's the elder Cleric for the Brotherhood of Steel, but he was also recently on Mister Robot and American Horror Story and Smash.

He's got a great fucking presence and a killer voice, but it's not his performance I'm talking about, because, in addition to that skill, he managed as a screenwriter to go from one of the best adaptations of a novel I've ever seen, immediately to one of the worst. He is the author of the screenplays for The Witches of Eastwick High Slide Whistle Noise and then Bonfire of the Vanities slide Whistle Noise, Ah the slide Whistle. Remember that sketch on SNL with Steve Martin and Victoria Jackson where they're measuring his interest in his date via slide whistle. That was right around the time fellow three amigo and former cast member Chevy Chase was slowly destructing with nothing but trouble and Memoirs of an Invisible Man, The Movie That Broke John Carpenter.

How do I know? Because he says so in the new documentary, I'm Chevy Chase and you're not. I'm just trying to figure you out. It's not going to be easy for you. Chevy Chase, citing intalented, very very funny, ready to say something sarcastic or edgy, immediately fell in love with that bumbling idiot untilhen we cut up to you.

He's the asshole who you love? Can I say asshole? A lot of people will. Unfortunately, Chevy had massive movie star hits the force is pulling him, money powered all that, and when Hollywood wants you, they're pretty good at it. The thing about fame is that everything around you changes, and then of course it went down out from there.

It was a mistake to leave SNL. Jeffy Chevy has a deep heart hip and that's the other part of the wild man. Who would you work with him again? Are you kidding me? It's Chevy Chase.

I don't think a lot of people have the happiness I have. I am who I am, and I like who I am. We're rolling? Are we rolling? Yes?

This whole time, I'm Chevy Chase and you're not. You know how cool Chevy Chase was. At one point he made Paul Simon palatable for MTV name another Paul Simon video. As far as SNL goes, I've always been an acroid man. He's my kind of weird.

Andy seems really sweet, but Chase always seems somehow everyone else more important. It's hard to describe. Maybe it was the whole meteoric rise from the news desk to the multiplex, elevating him above the rest of the cast. Maybe it was the fact that he was noticeably older than everyone at sinl That gave him some sort of elder guru vibe. But whatever it was, I like most of America were on board for this incredibly quick, incredibly acerbic slice of white bread.

America turned on its head. He didn't speak truth to power. He spoke truth to truth and did it while indulging in the most primitive form of comedy pratfalls. That's a rare combination the thinking physical comedian. He'd refined both over time, I think reaching its zenith, its paramount in Clark w Griswold, that guy in that First Vacation film smarter than he's letting on, but always earnest, always trying to please, and at the same time just a roiling ball of rage that's waiting to fucking supernova.

If that ain't Chevy, let me go on record here and say that I only recognized the First Vacation film. That movie, while indulging in some outlandish shit for the sake of humor, never feels too far from reality. Every family has had a variation of that trip. In fact, that first film came from an article that John Hughes had written for National Lampoon, and it happened to him on a family trip to Disneyland. That is what I like to call the Matrix phenomenon.

The Matrix was made in ninety nine, but I'd read a treatment in rough draft for it as early as ninety four, maybe even ninety three, which is four or five years of rewriting of an idea that had been percolating in their heads since the nineteen eighties. And then they immediately turned around and put out not but one, but two sequels with no break, no time to ponder. That's how I feel about European Vacation, just a bunch of wacky scenarios of the latter John Hughes variety. When suddenly it was all slapstick all the time. And I know you all love Christmas Vacation and the Shitter's Full and whatever.

I saw all of those sequels. But if I'm spending time with the Griswoants, then Rusty is played by Anthony Michael Hall. Chevy Chains was never really a hit machine. For every vacation, there was a deal of the century. For every foul play, there was a seems like old times.

For every modern problems, there's a modern problems, and a lot of that was the drugs and a lot of it was, well, you know, Chevy Chase is an asshole, straight up, but those who love him love him fiercely, and he does give off the yeah he's a prick, but he's our pricks, So what are you gonna do? Vibe? And we've all got one of those in our lives and bully to him. But then again, bully is a pretty good description of Chase, and he's weirdly oblivious to it or just uninterested in examining it. Former SNL writer alan Zwibel kind of nails it.

I'm paraphrasing, but he says that early Chevy had a sarcastic, even mean bent to him, but there was always a wink. You always felt included. At a certain point, Chevy Chase stopped winking, which unfortunately calls into question whether the wink was ever there at all, but I think it was. The documentary does well at showing the decent side of Chevy. Any man who loves his pets and is that sweet to his wife and kids has to ultimately be of a decent sort.

Wife and four daughters. I should note that's a street gang like Robin Williams and a lot of performers from that era, Chase didn't seem to have an off switch, a coping mechanism for which you can lay the blame on early trauma. They definitely do here, and it's definitely effective and sobering to realize that Chase, who's always been the epitome of upper crust waspiness. His name is Cornelius Chase, his chosen nickname is the same as the wealthiest city in Maryland. But the fact was he grew up rather hard scrabble and at the mercy of a schizophrenic mom and a free with his fists stepdad.

It goes a long way to explaining the levels of hostility that have always suffused his persona. That coping mechanism, the humor as deflection, is on display here. As they start to discuss his childhood, Chase resorts to bits of incredibly unfunny physical comedy, derailing the conversation. But that's just Chevy. Of course, he doesn't want to talk about it, so it's the filmmaker's job to get that stuff.

This filmmaker gets what anyone could have gotten about Chase without his participation, and it all feels a bit manipulative in dirty pool to drop his childhood into the proceedings, just as we're diving into his dissent career wise, the invisible man era, the talk show era, the spiraling out of touch era, the frequently combative and outright hostile era. If you're going to explain away a lot of his behavior with formative times in his life, then we deserve more than the moment he realized he and his brother had a bond when his brother stood up for him. We're told this is a child who was frequently slapped awake by his mother. We deserve to know how he feels about how such early terror relates to his comedy or his anger in general.

At least, these proceedings don't feel like it's apologizing for his behavior, not necessarily, certainly, not like filmmaker Marina Zenovich's earliest effort, the Roman Polansky documentary Wanted and Desired, where she showed the insanity of the legal system Polansky found himself in, and yes, of course, the whole Man affair, all of which was horrifying and none of which begins to offer a wit of justification that led to him sexually assault a minor. Either separate that particular artist from his art or don't bother trying to explain, which isn't me saying that these aren't subjects worth exploring. They are, but there should be nuance, which you're not getting from a filmmaker unable to coax Chevy Chase to talk about himself.

That's his favorite subject. It's also no surprise that the only current big name celebrity they have commenting on the impact of Chase's life and career on shaping their own is Ryan Reynolds. What did we do to deserve the fucking onslaught of mobile phone ads? Read by Ryan Reynolds. You're listening to a podcast right now.

I know that you've heard that Prick's voice at least one time today, just pummeling you with the same level as mid to late career Chevy Chase humor in every labored bit of copy reading. It's also no surprise that Reynolds seems to possess the exact same amount of self awareness as Chase, as he explains to the surprise of not one human being on earth that he based his Van Wilder performance entirely on Chase's persona. We know, buddy, Why am I picking on Deadpool, because fuck that guy. Did you see that red carpet moment from the premiere of the John Candy documentary? Did you see the John Candy documentary John Candy?

I like me, Oh boy, what a joyous, lovely man. Orange Whip, Orange Whip, orange Whip, three orange whips, Just the goddamned exact opposite of everything going on. And I'm Chevy Chase and you're not. It's a sweet slice of the man in another really fun, informative and fucking impressive string of documentaries from Colin Hanks. He did that Tower Records one a few years back.

And the John Candy dock is filled with wall to wall admirers of Candy, like everyone, but mainly his closest friends from the SCTV days, Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara, Dave Thomas, and of course the man who vibed the most with and who had the biggest creative partnership away from SCTV, that's Eugene Levy. Who doesn't love Eugene Levy? Fuck whoever they are, I'll not hear an ill word set again him. So they're at the film's premiere and it's the red carpet and Ryan Reynolds the producer is there, and Eugene Levy, goddamned comedy legend, Eugene Levy best friend to John Candy, Eugene Levy and Ryan Reynolds says bullshit man. And then because they're on the red carpet and you know everyone is filming, Eugene Levy politely says, language, you don't need to speak so harsh.

And then that fucking gin swelling mobile phone salesman says, please don't ever tell me how I can talk to people. He's so Canadian. There's a please in there, but it's the same as shat no telling that sound engineer please don't correct me. It sickens me. They took chummy photos later to smooth everything over.

But fuck Ryan Reynolds, Just like Chevy Chase, he's got one gear. And using John Candy to help resurrect your image and then spoiling that moment by showing what a prick you actually are is just perfect. But that's where the comparison between Reynolds and Chevy ends, because Chevy has always been an asshole, rather unapologetically, whereas Ryan has been pretending he's sweet this whole time. And only recently have we gotten the depths of his assholery. There ain't gonna be a documentary on him, and there should have been a better one about Chevy Chase.

If you have any interest in his early life, and I'm not talking about the childhood here, I'm talking about the late sixties, spilling over it into the days on stage with Lemmings, then you're doing yourself a disservice in not watching, just for the sheer amount of early photos and video of an impossibly young Chase at his shaggiest best around the time he was almost instantly Dan and it almost made me wish for the first time ever that Chase had stuck around past the initial year on SNL because he was Garrett Morris's biggest proponent on the show, always taking the time to write material for him. I remember a lot of Garrett that first season, and then virtually nothing. Had no idea his champion was Chase.

Complicated man deserves better. And that's the end of the round of all for Ripley, Geen and myself. Thank you so much for listening. Later this week, we've got a new Hammer House of Horror that's Rude Awaken with Denim Elliott and Professor Flemon's daughter. It's a dream Loop episode.

And over on the Patreon page we just put Star Trek six The Undiscovered Country up if you want to go over there and be a patron. And here's the latest shuck off. As always, please share the show and like it and subscribe it and on and on. Follow them malone seven one at gmail dot com for comments and questions and such. Until next time, Gang, try to enjoy the daylight.

Yeah, I'm gonna just start using that all the time now