Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - The Roses (2025), The War of the Roses (1989)

We welcome back midnight viewers to all the Malone's weekly around up. I'm Fallow Malone, and I swear I'm taking next week off. Hell, I was not gonna record this one at all, So if it's not the usual length, ha cheese, I say. But then I saw today's topic last night and I figured it deserved a shout out other than that, how are you all? Oh shit, that's right, Ripley Geene is here.

She's been going nuts over the landscapers. Ah, she goes again. I finally watched the Predator bad Lands trailer. I could wait no longer. Not disappointed, way too excited.

I think I've reached no place to go, but down with my enthusiasm. It looks fucking great. Man El Fanning is an android stuck echts three po on Bestman style on the back of a young Predator, and he fucking spoke and I loved it. Please be good, even if it's not good. I'm basking in the glow of cinematic possibility from now until then.

Ah, movies aren't doomed. That's right. I'd love to tell you about some new show or video game, but it's been a production weekend editing and recording and doing artwork and getting ready for that big show in October here in Las Vegas at the Silverton Casino. You like stick as kid, all right, but I've bet and never see them on Yams House. Everybody get a stick, Come get a midnight viewing sticker from me at the Midnight Viewing space at the Nightmare in Vegas Horror Convention in car Show October fourth and fifth.

I'll be there both days and with me speaking of stick is direct from Beantown. Will be frequent collaborator HP. He's my oldest friend and brother from a freak electrical disturbance that took place outside Las Crusis, New Mexico in nineteen forty six, and also not from Beantown, but from Nebraskaville. Host of the Culture Cast, Chris Statue will be lurking. He'll be lurking everywhere at the convention.

Is he in a hot rod? Could be? I mentioned that the Silverton Casino has a bowling alley inside an airstream trailer inside the casino. Maybe he'll be in there throwing rocks. Should I wear my priest collar?

Fuck with everyone's vibe at the convention that is my question to you listeners. Links are below in the comments and show notes section. You know that I have twice now extolled the virtues of Alien Earth, and my pal Ian Banks in Scotland has pointed out that I have twice failed to mention the fucking legend Adrian Edmondson. He plays Boy Cavalier. It's boy right, right, good girl.

He plays Boy Cavalier as a right hand man. I didn't recognize him because he's bald and old and displaying a quiet menace justice frightening as the Zeno morph, which is new to me considering I'll always see him with ginger spikes and stars chiseled into his forehead as Vivian Bastard, the punk representative of the house on the seminal British comedy The Young Ones. There now I've set things right. I did spend a considerable amount of time this weekend at thrift stores. I picked up a bunch of stuff, including these fucking awesome bookends that are fifty style retro rocket ships.

I keep buying bookends. I do not understand why there is never going to be a Sonai where I have extra bookshelf space. If there's a shelf. It's crammed with books and I need them to the edge and beyond. Brother, But I keep buying these super cool bookends with the false notion that one day there'll be a shelf long enough.

Actually, the coolest book ends I have I got as a gift from my friend Josh. Have you met Josh? No you haven't, because if you did, you'd be just like the rest of us his circle of friends, quote unquote, mercilessly abusing the privilege of knowing the Las Vegas answer to mcgiver. Anyway, around the time Captain America's Civil War came out, Josh, knowing what a Captain America freak I am, gave me these awesome Cap and Iron Man bookends where it's stark blasting on one end and cap shielding on the other. They are so cool I wish I could use them.

How fucking random is this? I found a book about Amicus pictures at a thrift store out of the blue, the day after I reached out to an Amicus podcast. If this is a sign, they have yet to respond, But thankfully I did spend a goodly portion of the weekend reading about Freddy Francis and Milton Subotsky. But when I wasn't doing that, I was watching the DVD that I picked up for one dollar. It's called Every Breath You Take.

The DVD just being a DVD wasn't enough of a sign that it's from the early two thousands. It went and spaceballed itself. It's a collection of music videos from the Police, starting in nineteen seventy nine and ending when they did in nineteen eighty six. It is a bare bones you just the videos and then some live performances at Montserrat, including demolition Man. People do know that was a song first right, Murder, Death Kill.

Indeed, I love watching movies from the past that take place in the future, which is now our past. Demolition Man took place in twenty eighteen. Blade Runner was six years ago. Snake Plisken escaped New York back in ninety seven, and that's all he ever did period. This Police DVD ate quite an eight track.

But here's some signs of its antiquity. It had the booklets in the case still plural, two booklets, not only the Hey, here's the DVD you bought, and here's the chapters and we'll never see each other again. Official insert, but it also has the catalog extolling the virtues of the digital versatile disc. It's versatile, not video dummies. Nomenclature matters, and what treasures are being offered?

Well, I'm glad you asked. These are all music DVDs you can get. Ask a woman who knows. By Natalie Cole, she took some time off from ghoulishly puppeting her dad's corpse and put out a DVD with what features? Again, glad you asked?

As seen on public television that's listed as a special feature. How about the Gin Blossoms just South of Nowhere. If you love RHINOFEIMA or nineties alternative lame o rock, you're in luck. Seventeen Live Songs from Chicago, five previously unreleased The three Songs sound check and they say three is the magic number. Yeah it is.

It's a magic number. You'll get three different videos for their song Hey Jealousy. If the first one doesn't make you yourself, Number two is just waiting. And if you survived that, well, Third times the Charm? What else?

The Jam? The Complete Jam two disc set, thirty four European television performances, thirty one music videos, fuck, this actually sounds pretty good. Note to self or note to you audience, get to the Jam DVD. If you listen to this show with any regularity, you know I think nostalgia is a fucking trap and for the past quarter century, just another way for a bunch of greedy focks to make money. So I don't spend a lot of time wistfully remembering a goddamn other time or place.

But I'm not made of wood. People. I enjoy a reappraisal of some work that was important or not in your previous life. In the case of the Police, I was reminded how important they were to me in my appreciation of music. But after rewatching these videos, I think I may have to thank mister Sumner, Summers and Stuart.

Why weren't they all wearing Superman s shirts on stage? I may have to thank them for more than keeping my young ears and eyes diverted. Synchronicity wasn't the first vinyl LPI I owned. I had a pretty good library going by the age of ten, mostly soundtracks. Pop music was fine, But what were they compared to the emotional journey of a film score?

I ask you, But every album, regardless of genre were gifts synchronicity. I sought out with my own money, independently of everyone as they get older. I think we overall paint the things that changed our perceptions as being more innovative than they were overall. I don't know if that's the case here, but as an example, people give way too much credit to Quentin Tarantino for fracturing the narrative timeline in pulp fiction. Citizen Kane is a fractured timeline, and it's a narrative.

Pulp fiction is an anthology. Ah did I mention that nomenclature matters? Look, maybe I just can't experience joy in the past. Is it me? Or is it that everyone was wrong then and you're still wrong now?

Yeah? Thank you, Ripley. I am right, and you're right about me being right. So there I am and cross legged on the floor in front of my Fisher Price record player made of plastic stronger than most cars produced in twenty watching the Tricolor label spin endlessly and reading along to stories of romantic obsession and existential crisis, and the spiritus mundi, the notion of the collective consciousness that unites poets and writers, as popularized by William Butler. Yeats.

I didn't have to look that up now, because I did when I was ten. I found myself doing that a lot listening to the Police. Now, look before I start heaping praise and admiration and thanks on mister Sting, I do want to say, without Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland, Sting would have been a clever singer songwriter who never rose beyond David Gray levels of success commercially and otherwise. And I fully agree with Stuart Copeland that it's a fucking disastrous, missed opportunity that this trio didn't come together every so often and just continue to be the Police, because they were that good and if not innovative, and definitely influential. So Sting, Gordon, mister Sumner, he's kind of an odd kettle of fish.

Remember those leather bikini briefs he had for Steambath as a Harconin. I will never say Harkenin other than to make fun of that bullshit choice. Frank Herbert was on the set of The David Lynch Doone. He heard them say Harconin. He did not correct them.

Nomenclature pronunciation matters too. I don't know where you fall on staying. I think if you were a fan of the police, you could see ten Sumner's tales on the distant horizon. It was faint, but you knew it was coming. And that's where I think I parted ways with him.

That blonde snake began eating its own tail there. But my god, the police, the furious, youthful writing of the man from seventy eight to eighty three just an explosion of not just that great music. He wasn't getting anywhere without his fellow police officers, but his melodies have always been strong. But the poetry and the language, the nomenclature. I can't think of any other bit of entertainment that had me scurrying to the bookshelf just to figure out what the fuck was being said with the sheer regularity of a police record.

And we're talking dictionaries and encyclopedia in this press story age before computers. If you wanted to know, you really had to want to know. I learned dinn litany belch, pream pout looming, and those are just from one song synchronicity too. Whatever I'd end up thinking of Sting and his tantric sex nonsense that motherfucker made me curious about language and how you didn't have to settle for less because it was popular. Remember that study in twenty fifteen where they determined pretty much every genre of popular music was lyrically at about a third grade reading level.

That was for music contemporary to then. But I think it probably holds true no matter the decade. At least the police arose up to high school levels of poetry with occasional forays into annoying sophomore year philosophy student land. Not only did it give me that curiosity, it made me fucking hustle to understand it, which is not a bad trait to pick up from a thirty three and a third spinning vinyl disc. The curiosity and the will to fulfill it that I pretty much knew about myself when I put on this DVD and watched as the admittedly mostly uninspired music videos played across a television That ten year old me would have well, I just wouldn't believed the size of the thing.

What I don't think I realized, and what I really owe to Sting is a debt of gratitude for that one particular tune. Synchronicity too on its surface, it's just a guy wakes up, has breakfast, deals with the family, goes to work, hates work, goes home. But the chorus, if you can call it, that, is a parallel plot about a creature awakened or created at the bottom of a Scottish lock that drags itself onto shore before descending on a nearby house. Now, thanks to the seemingly endless research Sting was putting me through, my tiny brain was able to make the connection of this suburban man's endless frustration and the potential creation of something animate and deadly that has been loosed upon the world.

And that imagery really struck home the distrust of suburbia in the fucking nine to five, we've all just taken a standard and the way of all things. I think Sting inspired more of a punk rock ethos in my mind than the sex pistols ever. Could they just wanted to tear shit down? Sting was warning us with poetry suburbia was deferment of dreams. I couldn't wait to get out.

So thank you Sting and Andy and Stewart. Have you ever heard Stupart Copeland's Strange Things Happened to a man on the road. Now you have. Strange things have to a man on the road. Strange things have to a man.

Back home. You've got a solid life. That life don't mean a thing out here. Back home, you got a loving wife. She can't here.

You call him out here strange. Thanks happened strange, Thanks happen strange. Thanks happen that you never heard about? Hit at HP addship kbeah, thank you HP. You know the number ten name for the new Rolling Stones tour is a van full of grandpa's.

That's a joke from nineteen ninety four, and they're touring right now. Anyway. Deferred Dreams, that's what we're talking about here. Really, we're talking about a fairly bitter novel that became a gent black near slapstick comedy and now a more nuanced meditation on marriage and partnership and the things we do for each other and more importantly, the things we don't do for ourselves. This is the Roses, Do you.

Dear, I do anything I do? You believe that's true? It really is theo Rose, my favorite architect. How's married life? The kids are amazing?

Right? Don't drug ivy some monster success? Would you do photo shoot from New York magazine Neute. I don't think so. I'll do it anyway, but you are still a failure.

He got fired fired, I sense trouble. How was your day? The neighbors dog shouting, the laundry. The kids have got knit together? In my left eyes twitching.

More champagne for me. If you need a shoulder or an inner thigh, a lean run, I'm kidding. Everybody seems to think we hate each other. I suppost sometimes I do hate you, a sporadic hatred. It's infused with taragan.

It adds a bit of bitterness. I likes to leave a little bit of herself and everything she does. I love this fun banter you guys do. Sometimes Ivy's mad at me and I can't even tell. Sometimes he's got his cocking me and I can't even tell you.

We are done, all right, Well, we're done. I just want the house I built it. Oh you're not having the house. We want everything. And he walks out of here with his face still attached.

Right Bernow, you're a bottomist. Me. Don't need making me mad. I get this sport. Jesus hm hmmm.

Because things are getting a little out of hand. Well, you think, I don't think you have the capacity to fix your problems? You actually allowed to say that? That seems unprofessional? Yes, like mild practice.

We'll be expecting to have to discount. Yes, it is a remake of War of the Roses, despite such a clever concealment, although you can't really call it a remake, and I don't mean that in the John Carpenter's the Thing way either. This isn't a proper interpretation of a previously misguided adaptation of a book. The Roses isn't giving us anything from the book that the first film failed to deliver. That film was fairly identical to the novel Beat for beat, not too surprising considering it screenwriter Warren Adler was also the author of the novel.

That's not always a sign of fealty to the source material. By the way, I've seen lots of authors take the screenplay as an opportunity to sweeten their book or story, and in some cases shatter my perception of whether an author himself understood what he had written so badly had he mangled the screenplay. I'm talking about Ray Bradberry here. Great stories, not so great teleplays, but The story in the book is pretty much the story on screen. Oliver and Barbara Rose meet as students, fall in love, he continues Harvard Law School apports him, he becomes a lawyer, She makes a house and home, and raises their two children.

So the book and film are about those aforementioned deferred dreams. In Barber's case, her life has been for some time nothing more than that house in its presentation and upkeep. When Oliver has a heart attack, Barbara, who with the kids grown, has begun refocusing her energy on her own nascent career goals, finds herself not particularly concerned whether he lives or dies. And then a lifetime of resentment and bitterness and petty nonsense come flooding out in both directions, with the house the center of the whole bloody affair. In addition to being an examination of all the odd compromises and arguments and conflicts of a long term relationship, the book, a little more than the movie, it should be noted, is a skewering of materialism.

It starts like the Dandy DeVito film, with our characters in competition at an auction. That's the equivalent of David Kessler in the back of a truck full of sheep at the beginning of an American Werewolf in London. Subtle not Remember the book came out in nineteen eighty one, which was prime commercialism, will kill Us times Dawn of the Dead. Hey, I think the mall has become really important to people. Times how to beat the high cost of living, times fun with the Dick and Jane times.

But that's really just the undercurrent of the novel. Both the book and the first film are dying to get to the fight, which means you can't get used to these crazy kids falling in love and experiencing the good times in equal measure with the bad, mainly because the bad in question is the slow, diffident march of time. It's the drift from giddy romantic love to the banal every day Oh shit, this is work part of a relationship which ain't for everybody, certainly not for a careerist overall, and a partner shoehorned into a traditional life that she accepted for the sake of that initial burst of butterflies and longing. Adler himself noted with much amusement that the most passionate and vocal proponents of both the novel and then getting the movie made had all been through divorces.

Adler himself never had he stayed happily married his whole life. War of the Roses was the third time we'd seen Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner with a side of Danny DeVito mm mmm together on screen. That allowed for an awful on a shoe leather to be dispensed with, as far as an audience getting used to these two getting to know each other and falling in love. The Roses is an odd duck. It's not a remake of War of the Roses, and it's certainly in no way a faithful adaptation of the book.

If anything, War of the Roses would be the response to this early freely adapted version. Yet I found the spirit of the book way more pointedly here. Yeah, the basics are still the same. We follow Barbara and Oliver Rose as they meet and fall in love. He has a career, she makes a home.

They have two kids. They fracture, and they go to war with each other in the end. But that's where the similarities end. First, they got actors and not movie stars here, and ones without a history that we're aware of, so they in the film have to do the work to get us to love these two, and they do, and it does. It fucking works.

Benedict come Ba reigns in all his bomb bass and gives a quiet, funny performance. But it was probably easy to do considering he had Olivia Coleman as Barbara Rose, and she is a fucking beast in any genre. Oliver here is an architect, and right about the time he's having a heart attack. In both the book and original film, he has instead a spectacular career ending disaster, forcing him to be the homemaker, while Barbara turns her local crabshack into a culinary dynasty, deferred dreams for all and get this. Unlike the book and first film, the kids aren't just props here.

They're characters which rich, though unusual lives, and they become as crucial here as the house was in the first film. Rather than simply use the Act one breakdown as a flashpoint for the characters to go after one another for all their choices and actions previous to that moment, the Roses takes it as an opportunity for the characters to swamp careers and points of view. Oh they're gonna fight, don't worry, And as always I'm keeping things brief and spol light for you. But yeah, they go at it in really interesting ways this time around. But by the time we get there, we understand totally and they're both at fucking fault.

See that book and the original film are definite products of their time, and in that case, their generation. You know that nostalgia I hate so much. Guess who the main purveyors of it are, in both experience and commodification. Fucking baby boomers. So that book and movie are as much about that entire generation waking up to the lie they'd all bought intwo happiness is married house, two kids, car wave into your neighbors from your barbecue.

There will be no further complications in your life. So the only way to successfully adapt that book again would be to do it as a period piece. This bit of twenty first century filmmaking sidesteps those obvious generational problems and instead doubles down on the characters and all the ways they fail to connect even with shared experience, even having walked a mile in each other's moccasins, Even though they remain pretty damned Recle throughout the script is very funny, with Cumberbatch throwing away genuinely funny stuff like so much confetti. But I want to point out two SNL alumni that make up the secondary couple and best friends throughout. That's Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon.

I adore Andy Samberg. I've already gone on about my lonely Island love, but he's also done tons of great work on his own and not just comedy. Though I have watched Brooklyn nine to nine at least twice, he's been doing a really good dramatic work. He's little of both here, and his delivery got the two actual laugh out loud moments in this movie for me. Now listen.

I fucking love Kate McKinnon. She was a force of nature on SNL. I liked her odd turn in Ghostbusters. She was really good as that fucked up Barbie in the Barbie Movie. But her character here is just one fucking note.

She's a horn dog. She wants to fuck, and we get that from her in every fucking scene. She pops up near the fucking climax and does it, completely derailing the film rhythm. I'm not blaming her. She's doing her best, but once was enough, trust me.

But that is my only real criticism of the movie. I'm still unpacking it in my mind. In a lot of ways, I was unprepared for this film. Not what I expected from the a tour of Dinner for Schmucks and Austin Powers. This was an odd experience.

I thought it was just gonna be okay. Maybe on par I like this more than the original, which is weird given how fucking far feeled from the book. This one is the heart wants what it wants. I guess sometimes that's an AI video of your spouse smoking crack that you send to all of his colleagues all the more. Aha.

I said this week would be brief, but now I do want to say something very sincerely to everyone listening. July was the best month ever for this show as far as listenership goes, and I was proud and grateful, and I realized that it was a fluke and not to get my hopes up. And then fucking August and demolished July. And that's because all of you all over the globe. I'm now pretty much in this show as much as I'm doing the work.

They actually pay me for so it's really gratifying to know that it's having some kind of an impact. But I would love money. Join the Patreon if you share my pro Father Malone cash in Pockets stance. There you're getting shows early. For instance, you Yauca Fest Predator people, we'll be hearing our take on Predator from twenty ten at the end of the month.

Patrons have had it since Saturday, So there you go. If you have questions or concerns or requests, I'm not above requests. I'll play a tune here for you. A copyright be damned. Speaking of tunes, how can I go out with anything other than the Police, although I could use Happy Together.

It is the title track from this new Roses movie. That's twice in one year for that song. It's the year of the Turtles. Oh no, the Police. You're somewhere somewhere as she were, he says, a fun home now.

Down bad lunch lay on the base of the lake, says. I'm must let's a shout. I'm kind of shop the show on the time. It's kind of show show show Step