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SPECIAL NOTE: SEASON 15 OF THE GOOD, THE POD AND THE UGLY CELEBRATES THE USE OF THE PRACTICAL AND DIGITAL EFFECT KNOWN AS THE SQUIB. IRL GUN VIOLENCE IS INTOLERABLE AND RENOUNCED BUT... CINEMATIC VIOLENCE WILL BE CELEBRATED IN A WAY THAT MAY DISTURB SOME LISTENERS.

Yo, put the da bomb rap-rock mix CD on the Walkman, brush off your fly three-button boxy suit, and get your pre-9/1l cool on fo’ shizzle, home skillet, as TGTPTU breaks with its patent-pending temporal pincer movement to cover THE WAY OF THE GUN (2000).

Before he (strike as appropriate: ruined / renewed / continued) the Mission Impossible film franchise but after winning the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for 1995’s The Usual Suspects, Christopher McQuarrie would write and direct this (strike as appropriate: possible war crime / secret masterpiece / neo-Western action-thriller satire), and land in director jail. Unlike a highly successful sequel he’d write and produce two decades later also with “gun” in the title, McQuarrie’s directorial debut was not “top,” nor would it receive any Academy noms for Orig Screenplay or Best Pic. Instead, it would be twelve years before McQuarrie would direct again when he’d write and direct Jack Reacher (the one ((strike as appropriate: starring / miscast)) with Tom Cruise).

The Way of the Gun was purportedly McQuarrie’s attempt to unmake the antihero criminal movie popular by the late-90s by going further than other films had in making its felonious buddy protagonists not just unlikeable but reprehensible. Selected for the job, after many turned down the role, Ryan Phillippe who got a haircut and adopted a voice for the role of Parker (no relation to the Richard Stark series) and the always magnetic Benicio del Toro as Longbaugh. These two petty but also not-so-petty criminals happen upon a scheme during their brief road trip’s peeing in bottles, punching women, and distributing sperm to banks for quick cash, a plan involving kidnapping for ransom a surrogate mother named Robin (played by Juliette Lewis) who SPOILER ALERT whose baby doctor is her baby daddy who, despite having a different last name, is SPOILER the son of the expected father of the embryo that didn’t take and the plot gets (strike as appropriate: purposively complex / even dumber / more twisted / majorly buggin’) from there. Another Lewis, pod favorite and Juliette’s father Geoffrey, is introduced (strike as appropriate: losing / winning) at a complex variation of Russian roulette as part of James Caan’s Members-only posse who mount up for the film’s squibbiest moment, a finale at a Mexican cantina and whorehouse.

O.G. host Ken casts Jonah Hill as Jonah Hex in a McG remake of the film while hosts Thomas and Ryan introduce Natural Born Killers into the chat, wondering if it not The Friends of Eddie Coyle for the 90s. Guest host Jack defends the movie’s inclusion in Season 15 as all that and a bag of chips and not wiggity wiggity wack.

Next week is Robocop. Psych! My bad. That’s in the pairing after next. Follow and subscribe if you want the 411. Also, send an electronic mail down the information superhighway to [email protected] if you want Thomas’s copy on DVD. We outtie.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.
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Podcast: goodpodugly
Ken: Ken Koral
Ryan: Ryan Tobias