[Music]
Hey there, pick six fans. One sec, I'm just wrapping up a text.
I'm sending a message to my co-worker who scratched my car in the parking lot at work,
and I'm trying to get just the right emoji to capture how I feel.
The message reads, "Dear Tim, I know it was you, I know where you live, and you were gonna pay.
So should I do a devil face or a steaming mad face?"
Eh, I'll figure it out later. Right now, I would like to welcome you to the show.
The show in question is pick six movies, and it's a podcast where me, Bo, and my best pal, Chad,
make up some dumb theme and then select six movies that fit that theme, and we call that a season.
This is season 24, one we are calling Pop Culture Club, and you have landed on episode five of that
season. This time around, we are looking at movies based on things that bubbled up in pop culture,
and some very smart movie executive said, "boo, boop, we should make a movie if that thing everyone loves."
Of course, by the time the movie came out, people usually had stopped loving it, but you can't fall
people for trying. This movie is the emoji movie, and nothing says rich characters and high stakes,
like those dumbass smiley faces you use when you text somebody. Maybe broccoli for Tim?
Nah, that doesn't seem right, and I think that's kind of sexual. Anyway, enough of my work problem,
I have vengeance to wreak and you have a show to listen to. Let's get Chad in here to give us some
information on this shortcut shit heap, and I'll be back on the other side to talk with them about
this movie in detail. A lot of detail. Sit back, relax, and let's hit send on this emoji movie.
Winky Face.
On November 30th, 1995, the cable network, Home Box Office, or HBO as the lazy people call it,
debuted the surrealistic, hilarious sketch comedy show, Mr. Show with Bob and David.
The series featured a relatively, at the time, unknown Bob Odenkirk, who would later go on to
much more notable fame as Saul Goodman in the TV series Breaking Bad, and starring as the titular
Saul Goodman in the critically acclaimed spinoff Better Call Saul. The David in the Bob and David
was David Cross, who would later go on to play Never New Tobias on the sitcom Arrested Development.
Mr. Show with Bob and David is one of the greatest American sketch comedy shows ever.
Incorporating elements of Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Kids in the Hall,
Elements of Saturday Night Live showed up, all with the edge of the alternative comedy scene of the
1990s. The show featured early appearances by then unknown stars like Sarah Silverman, Jack Black,
Paul F. Tomkins, Brian Boseane, and Tom Kinney, the man who would later go on to voice Spongebob SquarePans.
The initial season only created four episodes, but those four episodes had an underground following,
and comedy nerds, like myself and Bo, passed around VHS copies of the show. One in particular,
was a high school kid who thought the show was hilarious, and he had a relative, at HBO,
who was an executive and realized they needed to expand to a more youthful demographic and kept
the show on the air. Mr. Show with Bob and David was picked up for three more seasons running through
1996, creating some of the greatest sketch comedy ever. The Titanica sketch, where a death metal band,
Titanica, visits a kid, played by David Cross, in the hospital. After a suicide attempt, where the kid
was listening to one of Titanica's songs and decided to jump into a vat of acid to end his life,
is truly one of the funniest things ever filmed in the history of ever. The lie detector sketch
where Odin Kirk is progressively asked a series of escalatingly strange questions to which he
always responds "yes", and the audience ultimately realizes he's just applying for a job at a shoe
store. Fantastic. The lifeboat sketch, where five survivors on a lifeboat turn out to be people
from a 90s era talk show, actually holds up pretty well. The sketch ends with one person sucking the
ink out of a pen, while another person claims they're gonna fuck a fish. The sketch where mobsters
discuss what's the highest number known to man, it turns out to be 24, pure Mr. Show comedy gold.
White trash icon Ronnie Dobbs inspired a musical parody of the TV show Cops, as well as a major
motion picture, run Ronnie Run, that was troubled by personal conflict, bad writing, and creative
control struggles. The show would effortlessly weave one sketch into the next, and then circle back
on earlier sketches with characters reappearing and bookending jokes that were set up 20 minutes
earlier. It was smart, it was silly, and at times it was great cynical satire. The latter of which
was on full display in the season 2 finale with the sketch titled Green Light Gang, where a group
of movie studio executives absent any original ideas decide to make a movie based on the most
popular coupon in America. A coupon for socks. The movie comes out and it is a financial disaster,
so the filmmakers sue all of America for misleading them into making a movie based on a coupon for
socks, and America loses the lawsuit. So everyone in the United States is sentenced to one viewing
of Coupon the movie. This then leads to a trailer for the film that uses every action movie cliche
to sell a movie about a mom buying socks for her family. This ultimately leads to the
end credits of the show where Coupon the movie is turned into Coupon the Ride at a theme park.
It is stylistic, it is silly, it is dripping with satire. Because no movie studio executive
would ever green light a movie based on something as ridiculous as the popularity of a coupon
until they made the emoji movie. To understand how the emoji movie was made,
we gotta go back to understand how emojis came to be so popular. Throughout history,
people have used different ways to communicate spoken language, written language, sign language,
body language, symbols as a means of communicating date back to the use of hieroglyphics,
all the way up to modern day traffic signs. As the digital age came to be, so too emerged a new way
to communicate. In the early chat rooms of the 1990s, people used emoticons as an early form of
online net speak if you will. Colin Dash Close Parentheses was a sideways smiley face to express
happiness. Swap out that closed parentheses with an open parentheses, you gotta frowny face,
and it's a cute way to express sadness or disappointment. Bring back the closed parentheses and swap
out that colon with a semi colon, you gotta sideways winky smiley face to show your re-insarcast.
Maybe the only use of the semi colon for most people where they felt they were using it correctly.
This ultimately led Japanese artist Shikitaka Curita at the age of 25 to develop a series of 12 by 12
pixel icons to enable people to quickly convey information for Japan's top mobile carrier,
Tacoma. If you wanted to say the weather was snowing, you could just select the snow icon and
not type out the word "snowing". That's a six character collection, just saved yourself pal.
All in all, Curita created 176 emojis, which are included in New York's Museum of Modern Art.
If you're in the neighborhood, you'll step by and see him. He's probably search online.
It'll be a lot easier. Take less time. The word emoji is derived from elements of the Japanese
words for picture, write, and character. "Emoji". It's purely coincidental that the word "emoji"
and "emodicon" bear any resemblance. The original emojis included symbols for weather,
technology, traffic, the moon phases, but they also included ways for people to express emotions.
You know, kind of dress up the messages that they were sending. Instead of just texting,
"We're having pizza for dinner, you could text, we're having pizza for dinner, heart emoji."
And that better? It was a dawn of a new way to communicate.
Tacoma customers loved using the emojis so much that other platforms worldwide,
specifically Apple in the US, incorporated them into their platforms as well.
And Unicode support considerations were adapted, encouraging platforms and vendors to align emoji
standards. As emojis grew in popularity, they grew in variety.
Yellow smiley faces had ever changing variety of emotional expressions.
There were plants and animals, foods, professions. The list went on and on.
And if your platform didn't have the emoji you needed to express yourself, don't worry.
A bunch of third-party apps showed up to help you out.
There were pushes to expand the diversity and representation of emojis by allowing users to
change the skin tone and sex of the emojis to be more representative of worldwide populations.
As the popularity and use of emojis became more mainstream, the digital form of communication
inspired other creative endeavors. In 2016, a musical called "Emoji Land" premiered on the
Rockwell table and stage in Los Angeles. Well, I'm bet that was a rousing success.
That same year, the very first "Emojicon" was held in San Francisco.
But a lot of those people that saw that "Emoji Land" musical went to the "Emojicon" as well.
That's my guess. I'm in 2017. There were episodes of "Doctor Who" and "Samurai Jack" that featured
characters that only communicated with emojis. But the cultural impact on the arts didn't stop there.
Because much like the creatively bankrupt executives who greenlit Koopa in the movie,
as satirized on "Mr. Show with Bob and David," some real-life creatively bankrupt film executives
gave a greenlight to make the "Emoji Movie." You may be wondering how the emoji movie got made.
I'm gonna tell you, as I mentioned, a group of creatively bankrupt studio executives said,
while kids were always stumbling around banging on their iPhones, clicking the clock and texting
these emojons. They love em! I'll bet we could make a movie about emojons. The kids could go
see the movie about the things they love and then we could get some of their sweet, sweet money.
What do you say, boys? Let's get rich. And that's what they attempted to do.
The movie was ultimately directed by Tony Leondas. Early in his career, Leondas worked on the
Prince of Egypt and the sequel to "The Lion King." Yes, that was a thing. He worked on "Cronk's New
Group," a sequel to Disney's "The Emperor's New Group." Also, I guess that was a thing. He worked
on "Lilo and Stitch Tubes." He worked on a bunch of Disney sequels. He finally got to direct an
animated film that wasn't a sequel, so a movie called "Egor" for the Exodus Film Group. Although
I am not familiar with the film, it featured an all-star cast including John Qzak, Molly Shannon,
Steve Buscemi, Sean Hayes, Eddie Azar, Jennifer Coolidge, Jay Leno, Arsenio Hall,
Christian Slater, and John Cleese. How have I never heard of this movie? 39% of rock tomatoes,
cost $25 million, $30 million. That explains it. The onus was working on an original idea for
DreamWorks animation titled "Boo." That's B-O-O, Bureau of Otherworldly Operations,
but that movie got scrapped. During this time, there was a bidding war with Sony,
Warner Bros., and Paramount Pictures all vying to see who would get to make a movie about emojis.
Good God. When the dust settled, it was Sony Pictures Animation that won the rights to make a
movie about emojis. Interly on this with his original idea, which was more or less kind of a
rip-off of Toy Story. I mean, a movie inspired by Toy Story. Leon is with the Sony and pitched his
idea for a movie about emojis, visiting the real world. Calm our heads prevailed, and a producer
said, "Look, just focus on the emoji world inside the phone. Didn't you see Wreck-It Ralph? It came
out just like a couple of years ago. Jesus Christ, man. Why reinvent the wheel?" So Leon just patched
together a story about how the emojis lived in their own world, helping him along the way to also
get some writing credit for Eric Siegel, who wrote some stuff you don't care about, and Mike White,
who was the guy that penned School of Rock, and he wrote a few episodes of "Breeks and Geeks."
And most recently, he's the creator of White Lotus over on the aforementioned
home box office. Leon is who in interviews stated that he is a gay man, felt connected to the main
character Jean's situation as an outcast, and that the film was very personal, originally titled
"Emoji Movie." "Express Yourself" was fast-tracked to get into theaters so they could start printing
money as quickly as possible, or so filmmakers thought. There was immediate backlash from the
public, because it was a movie about emojis. But you know what? The Lego Movie surprised a lot of
audiences in 2015. You know what audience? Maybe you should wait and see what the filmmakers come
up with. It was announced that comedian TJ Miller would play the lead character Jean on July 17th,
2016, which is World Emoji Day. What the hell is that? Leon does wrote the part with TJ Miller in
mind. Miller had growing popularity from his role as Erlich Bachmann on the home box office sitcom
Silicon Valley. He'd also appeared in the Yogi Bear Movie and did voice work in other family
animated films, including Big Hero 6 and How to Trade Your Dragon. Now later in his career,
Miller got in trouble for a whole bunch of stuff, including sexual assault allegations
and making a bomb threat on an Amtrak train. That's another story. But don't go looking for him in
Deadpool 3. Annapares came in to voice the female lead, James Corden from Carpool Karaoke
fame came in to lend his voice talents to the cast, then came the most important casting call of all.
Who was going to voice the shit emoji? I mean the poop emoji. Reportedly filmmakers went to
Jordan Peele, a black man, to see if he would like to voice the character of shit. Peele's response
to his manager was, "That's fucked up." Ultimately filmmakers gave the role to Sir Patrick Stewart.
Other cast members include Meyer Rudolph, comedian Steven Wright and Jeff Ross,
actresses Sophia Fergara, Jennifer Coolager in there, singer Christina Aguilera, and celebrity
chef Rachel Ray. What are we doing here people? So they make this thing. And the marketing for
the movie kicks in. The teaser trailer comes out. He gets 4,000 likes and like 22,000 dislikes
in I don't like a week or a month because it looks terrible. There was all kinds of noise
about the movie coming out, including the filmmakers ringing that bell at the stock exchange.
They turned the Empire State Building, Yellow for Emoji Day. Nobody cares about any of this
stuff when a movie comes out. Sony invited YouTuber Jacksfilms. Who was the film's number one supporter
before the film's release? Well they invited him to the film's premiere, but it turns out Jacks
film's praise for the movie was all sarcastic. Take that boomers. Leading up to the film's release,
there were review embargoes. Ooh that's not good. And the movie comes out on July 28th 2017.
Prime time summer family film going fun. Free pandemic. Movie comes out and it lands in second
at the box office behind Dunkirk. And just ahead of Girls Trip and Atomic Blonde. Spiderman
Homecoming was in fifth place having been in theaters for a month. The best review for this movie I
found came from David Erlich of IndieWire who gave the movie a D on a scale of A to F. That's
being generous. Saying of the film make no mistake, the emoji movie is very very very bad. We're talking
about a hyperactive piece of corporate propaganda in which Spotify saves the world and Sir Patrick
Stewart voices a living turn. But what do critics know? Alright here's a review from a normal person,
like you or me. Well like me anyway. A normal person named Colton Baxter who wrote a Google review
that reads this quote. This is easily the greatest film I've ever seen in my life.
Nothing even comes close to this masterpiece. After I saw this movie I literally had to stop
watching other movies because I knew nothing could compete with it. The plot is engaging.
Animation is gorgeous. This is quite easily the greatest piece of media ever produced without a
doubt. I was on the edge of my seat for the entire hour and a half hoping that Gene would make the
right face. 16 people found this review helpful. You know what Mr Baxter? Think. Make that 17.
The emoji movie was nominated for and took home Golden Raspberry Awards for
Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Screen Combo and Worst Screenplay. The filmmakers didn't
have to sue America for tricking them into making this movie the way the makers of coupon the movie
did. The movie cost 50 million bucks and it pulled in about 220 million worldwide. Is that a lot?
I have no idea. All I know is it wasn't enough to make a sequel and since that's all we need to know
what said we get Mr. Bo Ranzil in here to break this movie down in way too much detail just to see
how bad it is. Ladies and gentlemen eggplants and peaches it's 2017's The Emoji Movie.
[Music]
And welcome to Pick Six Movies. I am Chad Cooper and I am joined by a man who has
ambitiously created his own digital icons for communicating called "Ebojis." Mr. Bo Ranzil,
Bo how are you doing today? Winky Face Chad. Winky Face Middle Finger. Shoe.
This movie is the emoji movie is bad but if you really take a few steps back from it it appears
to have all the ingredients needed to make a slightly competent mostly in offensive movie
that nobody asked for. In the same way that if you stitch together a bunch of parts of different
corpses you have the body of a man but no spark of life. I would agree with that. This movie has a
lot of color there are pop music songs famous voice actors there's a paper thin plot there are
cliched character arcs you know there's there's like the overused themes of being yourself or true
to yourself or something but yeah it's just all shallow and disjointed. Yeah it's a shocking example
of how to make a movie that doesn't appeal to anyone or anything that no one wanted or asked for.
I am not above the no one asked for this kind of movie you know I saw that new evil dead movie
I was like nobody was really asking for a new evil dead movie and then it came out I was like
this is pretty good. I'm not saying you shouldn't make something that no one asked for no one ever
asked for the iPhone and it shows up and everybody suddenly wants smart friends I'm not saying
that that's a reason not to do something I'm saying that sometimes people ask for something
and that's the reason it got made sure like if people were clamoring to make the insert movie
title here that shouldn't be made but people wanted it like the spice girls movie that's something
they're like oh I would see that it's like a hard day's night but with the spice girls and
they're popular like yeah that's something people would go but no one was saying I love emojis so
much I want to see a movie about emojis yeah I hate emojis I don't like using them in fact I rarely
if ever do I think I have a handful of times in fact I hate them so much famously Alan of mutual
Fred of ours she would send me text and include emojis and I would just let's be honest be
rate her for using emojis because as someone who believes deeply in the utility of the English
language I'm like there's a way to express yourself without the use of these stupid little symbols
that became a joke where we would type out emojis so that I would send her a message and then say
pizza slice happy face pineapple right and type that out as opposed to making it an emoji and it
became a running gag and it took literally a decade probably before I ever actually used an emoji
it's a bastardization of communication that I know I'm the losing I'm on the losing side of this and
all I just hate it I think I only use it with one or two people that I know and it's sarcastic I
understand look I'm an old man there is a generation that have grown up in the digital age that the
use of emojis is no different than you or I using spray paint on a bridge or just references to the
movie midnight run it is just eponymous right it's just something that is gonna come out of them no
matter what you want right and I get it I understand it but I just despise it because because you're
an old man it's not it's not for you right and it's not how I communicate it's not how I even when I
text people I've had relatives and loved ones that will say like you don't have to use commas in
text messages you don't even have to use capitalization really and I'm like what kind of monster
writes a sentence without proper punctuation you know it's just yeah the way I am the way I grew up
though there's a focus I have on the importance of the written word and even in text messages I
cannot let that go I agree with you I've had people call me out for using correct punctuation and grammar
and I'm like well that's because you're ignorant right that's because I know how to communicate and
how to express myself and they're not calling me out because I'm using it incorrectly they're
calling me out because I'm using it and it's like haha look at this guy yeah mr. booksmarts
with this periods and his cameras yeah yeah the number of times I read an essay from
my students and it's like they're texting it to me with all the bad grammar and you are instead of
you're and that kind of thing like I just want to stick and the ability to just crack them across
the skull every time somebody writes a formal bit of writing as if it is a text message but it's
the way that they've learned to communicate and also I don't want to be arrested you're telling me
there's wait there's three different ways to use the word to that's fucking crazy it's just a number
right but what no it's stunning and I wonder five ten years from now and maybe it won't matter
because five ten years from now a boss will expect the same kind of communication as they are
giving to them but writing an email like you're writing a text to like somebody higher up in a
company you're gonna be fired on the spot and then they're gonna come for me here's my biggest
problem with this going and I got a lot of them the biggest problem I have is that it never fully
explains the rules of the world that it creates and I'm gonna do my best and I get hung up on all
of these tiny details because when you start pulling on these threads of the plot the entire
film just falls apart and I get this is a movie for children or stupid people I understand that
but still movies like this and by like this I mean movies that are ripping off everything that Disney
and Pixar ever made just put up some guardrails as to what this world is like what is the reality
in which these characters exist so that you can establish conflict and drama suspense just
and purpose it doesn't do that at all I think I could probably without trying list 20 questions
that are not answered in this movie that should have been I don't know that I could come up with
the same just because at a certain point I stopped caring not about doing the show obviously but I
just didn't care about the world that the movie is creating enough that was like I just need to
get through this this movie is 86 minutes long dude that's with credits yeah it's a tight 77 if
you chop those off that was my goal I've just got to get through this because I had seen this movie
before and I remembered enough about it to know that it was terrible pushing back through it it was
like I just got to put my head up like you said all the ingredients are there it's funny because
watching this again I was struck by how blatantly the ingredients are there like this feels like a
dryer race board full of popular ideas and tropes that all get shoved into a movie and somebody
forgot that it also has to be intellectually and or emotionally engaged and we have to care
about the characters in the movie you can't just throw all the ingredients in the potbo you got
to cook with love and it's also hard you know at it's outset to find myself interested in an emoji
that is just by it's a very nature such a one note kind of thing and even if an emoji like the one
in our movie can make different faces it's still just a thing you throw in a text or a email as
happens in this movie and that's it that's all it's ever going to be like I don't need every movie
to have stakes that include the end of the world or anything like that but the stakes in this movie
are so low like everything goes wrong Chad somebody resets their phone that's if everything goes wrong
I don't know but here let's let's get through this this one this won't take too long so this
movie kicks off and we get the Columbia Pictures logo with the woman holding the torch and an
animated set of hands holding a phone comes into frame snaps a picture then places a smiley emoji
face wearing black sunglasses on top of the woman holding the torch is faced and then our cartoon
person text it to someone else I'm assuming that in theaters moments just before this happened there
was a short informal clip asking people mostly the assholes to keep their phones in their pockets
and not be the assholes that they are during the movie but then this movie starts and you get this
real mixed message up come on you can take out your phone come on take it out of your pocket
that guy's gone make a bootleg copy of this movie if you want live streaming we don't give a shit
come on right it fairness I hate it when people use their phones and movies it really does
distract me to no end but if I had seen this movie in a theater I would have begged someone to pull
out their phone just to give me something to look at that wasn't gonna make me angry
peep it over someone's shoulder to see what text they're sending like you tapping them on the shoulder
apes it's why are you apostrophe re by the way if you're gonna begin a sentence with a dependent
clause like that you got to put a comma after the dependent clause to introduce the independent
clause but you don't have to do that the other way you can do independent clause the independent clause
with no comma is this too much yeah just just put the comma okay boomer
right fucking idiot so you need a semicolon because it's two independent clauses you've got there
they're related ideas or you can just common use a conjunction either way but you're going to need
one of those uh if you try to tap my shoulder one more time i'm going to punch you in the face
old man no no not a colon a colon you can't use security security we start this movie after the
god awful thing that they do to the columbia logo with tj miller as you pointed out the problematic
tj miller and who could have seen that coming everybody right based on how he's an asshole and
everything he's in surprise surprise turns out he's an asshole right but he's doing voiceover here
we are in the greatest place in the world the smartphone yeah you're like oh god already i
hate this because i think the smartphone is one of the things that is going to lead to the downfall
of whatever civilization we got left but what do i know i want to get your thoughts on the voice
acting in this movie because the performances that are given except for my erudoff they all just
feel like it's the actors reading their lines and i'm assuming that's because the characters
themselves have no depth and they don't really do anything and they don't have purpose i mean i
don't know what you're going to fill that empty vessel with but tj miller just really feels like
he's reading the script for the first time we'll get to my erudoff later is smiley but she's doing
the overly happy flight attendant or guest services representative but everyone else is it just
sounds like them just being who they are in real life yeah i agree with that i think that everyone
is sort of sleepwalking through this except for my erudoff you could kind of argue patrick
steward but that's just so humiliating luckily he's not in this very much i thought about tj miller
you know if you had to play this role of gene what do you do because the character like the entire
character is summed up with them like why am i such a misfit i am not just a knit
with you can't fire me i quit why can't i fit and blah blah blah which to that point the real plot
of this movie was covered in ranking and basses root off the red nose reindeer yeah that guy's weird
get him the fuck out of here and then they go on a little venture and at the end they come back
and they're like hey could you use your weird misfitness to save the day sure i can do that and then
they have a little dance party and sing a song that you know i would love it if at the end of this
though he was just like fuck you you guys kick me out of your fancy cube yeah i'm just gonna watch
the world burn that's it we're all gonna go to hell together tonight you know see i think this
movie would have been i got a few ways they could have made this movie better one not make it two
it could have been directed by spike jones and have him do to this what he did with where the
wild things are which is a fantastic movie if you haven't seen that come in and make this movie this
surrealistic commentary on the the destructive nature of mobile phones and how they connect us but
also isolate us be down for that this movie kind of dances around the idea of the negative effects
of phones but then it's so busy celebrating apps and text messages and emojis that it
forgets to be about anything right and so the only thing you can come away from is really
the story of jean which just isn't all that interesting so after tj miller says we're here in
the most amazing world of the smartphone each little app is its own planet of perfect technology
providing services so necessary and essential and then the movie pans out of the phone and we see
a bunch of high school kids just wander around with their heads buried in their phones and we meet
Alex who owns the phone that contains all of the emojis we are going to meet in this movie so in
your phone you have a set of emojis so every phone has its own set of emojis that are living
thinking beings that's what we are to conclude that's right every phone is its own universe
connected apparently by Dropbox and nothing else but if you get a new phone you basically you are
the lord and you are causing a flood to destroy all of humanity yeah some say the world will end
and fire some saying ice or you can just reset a phone it's just gonna let the battery run right
right but yeah that's the other thing is like when it overheats because you left your phone in the
car seat and the sun baked it until it just stopped working for a little bit or you let the battery
go down does everything stop to all these people go into some weird like comatose state you know what
would have made this movie better is if they did what the lego movie did and make the people real
people and make the emojis animated i think that would have been better yeah there's this paper thin
story of Alex who gets this text from a cute girl named Addie that he likes
and TJ Miller tells us this is Alex he just like every high schooler his world revolves around his
phone he walks around awkward and embarrassed and horny all the time he's constantly putting his
biology book over his lap thanks to his unexpected and untimely boners and as attention spans decrease
and life moves faster that's where i come in who's got time to type out words just use emojis
and so we swoop into the phone to go to textopolis yeah the home of emojis and it looks like something
out of zootopia it looks like the world of wreck it Ralph but for emojis everything in this feels like
something you've already seen before oh yes the derivative nature of this movie cannot be undersold
no TJ Miller tells us each emoji does one thing and we have to nail it every time and so we see
this Christmas tree and some princesses let's pause on the princesses because this comes in later
these four princesses come out two by two with varying skin tones and and hair hues and they all
just look so pretty and they're trot trot trotting off and having watched this movie twice
twice both in preparation for this i was like why wouldn't because spoilers jailbreak our female
hacker we're gonna meet in a few minutes she turns out to be a princess but she's not one of
these four princesses why wouldn't you make her one of the four princesses here and sort of have
her show her disdain for being a princess instead they all walk out of this beauty salon and they're
t-hanging and giggling i guess because he would ruin the surprise later for reveal that i don't
know that anybody cared about no i cared about it but at the end when they're like oh she's the
princess i'm like yeah but there were four princesses earlier again i'm really gonna try hard to
not pull at these threads but it all of this is just sloppy lazy writing and filmmaking you are 100
correct because the movie doesn't think past the thing it's doing to think about how that affects
other things in the movie because one of the things that we could see here is one of the princesses
like doing the whistle and calling birds thing you could have done that reveal at later in the movie
with jailbreak and her doing that would let you know who she is right and that would be a more clever
way to handle that reveal than just like whoopsie days at your hat fella right and make it part of
the actual plot and not just a beat where you reveal more about this character you could actually
use it and when she does use it it's kind of played as part of an extended gag but it would it would
play so much better if you had that be the defining moment for that character where she uses her
weakness as her strength jean goes on to say the devil the poop emoji the thumbs up they're all
good to go they just have to show up by the way bow devil poop emoji thumbs up that's what i send
my wife every time i leave the bathroom after taking a shit let her let her know to stay away for an
hour so jean says well the expressions though we have it rough because we have to be on all the
time like if the crier wins the lottery they still have to cry or if happyface breaks his arm then
you see this nightmare of this happyface emoji saying like oh my right arm's broken i can see the bone
in this grade and you're like oh my god this is hell for some of these characters and and the cry
emoji comes out of a bodega and is like oh i just won the lottery i'm rich so their society has
currency and millionaires and health care because the one with the compound fracture is headed to the
hospital so do they have like a single payer health care system like canada there's no way their
health care is part of their employment benefits i think everybody works for the same place in town
or at least they're dependent on the monsters ink scare factory knock off how long has this world
been going that it has evolved to a point like as soon as you turn your phone on or all these
emojis just immediately in this culture i think another way you could have made this movie better
i don't have a single recommendation but another approach to have made this movie better would to
have made the emojis unaware of alix and the outside world set it in this environment and let
that be it just lean more into the zootopia side of things that it's emojis and here's what emojis
they're doing it doesn't really have it's not trying to do the satire on apps and the impact of
smartphones on human culture just do a movie about emojis then you don't have these questions
like what happens if the phone dies what happens if you get a new phone like emojis live in emoji
and that's it and the movie it never it never goes beyond the surface of presenting this story of
jean and so forth like it as you said it raises all these questions about this world and how it
operates but it doesn't care about any of that stuff because it's too busy huh cactus emoji right
and look at this guy over here it's poop right and it doesn't do anything with it now we finally get
to meet jean because if you didn't know who tj miller was or recognize his voice you have no
idea who the narrator is turns out it's jean our meh emoji he comes walking out of this brown stone
and he says i'm jean i'm a meh so i got to be meh all the time and when he goes outside he runs
into this pink sprinkled donut emoji that is pushing a baby carriage filled with an assortment
of donut holes implying that they're babies and also jean has parents so do they have sex do they
reproduce right is it a sexual reproduction or emojis fucking and then why would two meh's
have sex to make jean all right look here's another idea you make textopolis all these emojis
and some are real emojis but then there are other emerging emojis that haven't been introduced yet
and you have the jean character and he doesn't know what his emoji is because he's got all these
different expressions and you sort of make the movie a self discovery where at the end he's like hey
i'm not just one thing i'm many emotions all at once like you could do that yes that which is
slightly what they do but not really yes again because they're it's not actually saying anything
you know there's nothing below the surface of jean can't be just one emotion he can't maintain
that emotion you know when he sees all these baby donuts and his expression breaks the donut freaks
out like he just exposed himself or something then he rolls up on some monkey emojis who are in
little suits there's a joke about them being up to monkey business and then he laughs and goes past
them to a crosswalk where a shrimp is there standing beside him waiting to cross the emoji street
and he's like this is going to be my first day on the phone and he ends up knocking over
some emoticons as he's walking which as you said in your introduction we're sort of the precursor
to emojis and he says oh i hate knocking over the elderly like this yeah and then he just grabs a
balloon out of nowhere to float away to work yeah why wouldn't you make this just do the
wizard of Oz you take jean you haven't meet a few people and like he has to go to the cloud
to get the source code or else by a certain day everything's going to be deleted which is sort of
what they do but that deletion doesn't come until later in the movie and it's real random where
Alex is like hey my phone's kind of fucking up i'm going to take it down to verizon or the apple
genius bar and have him fix my phone also for what it's worth having a job title of apple
genius is about as inflated as the subway sandwich artist
neither genius nor artist correct we get to meet jean's mom and dad who as i mentioned are both
meh emojis jean's dad is voiced by deadpan and ultra dry and brilliantly witty comedian
steven right which is perfect casting to play the dad meh but the mom is voiced by jennifer
koolage who some of you know as stifflers mom and she's on those white lotus series yeah yeah
and when i think about her i just think about this over the top sometimes sexy persona and that
did not feel like very good casting i was like look i Rachel dretch probably had a pretty open
calendar yeah Rachel dretch is a good call jean's mom and dad they escort him into the men's room
which again i'm like so these things piss and shit do they eat food would they eat those donuts
dude and also it's poop coming out of the bathroom do they live in the toilets and they're just on
their way to work now i don't know the mom and dad say to jean jean you can't go to work at the
factory or whatever the hell this place is you show other emotions then man jean says that's not fair
all my friends work at the cube and then as you said a little tiny shit emoji comes out and he's
like i'm working at the phone today and i'm only 10 i'm like where are their child labor laws in place
10 what kind of society is this and then the dad shit emoji comes out and he's voiced by
sir patrick steward and he's like that's because i believe a new son and then there's a crack about
them not washing their shit hands are they actual shit also if this baby poop emoji is 10 years old
has alex had a phone for 10 years that's been turned on this entire time i know i know i know
never been reset i don't i don't know this time move faster so that you know one year in textopolis
is a month in human terms like you said there are no rules to this so who knows and nothing matters
the whole movie it feels like it's seeking for any sight gag or hacky pun that they can throw in
i will give credit where credit is due one little joke i thought was funny was that when the kid
shit emoji walks out of the bathroom he has a tiny piece of toilet paper stuck to his heel
which i was like that was kind of clever and as he and his dad walk out they are chanting
we're number two we're number two and and that made me giggle a little bit the number of times that
sir patrick steward has to degrade and humiliate himself in this movie like every line he has is
a line that you're like oh please don't say that you're such a better actor than any of this it's all
wordplay involving shit or assholes or farts there's one star trek reference later on but yes most
of it is just like look son we're poop we're living poop can you believe it look at all the flies
hanging around us jean says mom dad if i'm a working emoji then i'll finally fit in just give me a
chance i'll make the right face i promise dad his parents like all right son you can go to work at
the cube so jean goes to work and the cube isn't really a cube it's a series of cubes and we meet
smiler who is a woman emoji with this grotesque over the top happy persona and big chomper teeth
to match as i mentioned earlier this character is voiced by mia rudolf she does not know how not
to try she gives a hundred percent all the time and she's trying in this it's just nothing she has
to say is very funny so she's delivering these lines with incredible energy but there's just
nothing more than that behind it now and i feel bad for because my rudolf is wonderful and i love
mia rudolf to death yes so she's like look everyone everyone gets their own cube and then when
alix selects you you're scanned and the scan is sate alix's text box and there's nothing like
getting scanned for the first time and at that point i'm like did she is that a fuck joke
well good it seems like a real inefficient way to make emojis appear on a phone because it's like
this stacked row of cubes that are about i don't know what like a hundred long ten high and then
there's a big metallic finger that goes to the appropriate cube and then scans the face of a
living emoji in that cube chat i just had an idea for how to make this movie less worse all right so
what if instead of this scan and they pop up in the text box it's like those old bank pneumatic
tubes that sucks yeah the emojis up to the text box okay every time the text is used they're kind of
called up that way right they kind of shoot up onto this digital stream or whatever into the text
window okay and our hero somehow escapes the phone and is walking around in the real world there he
realizes oh life isn't just one emotion life is complicated and messy and everybody experiences
all these emotions kind of like what the movie does only instead of somebody with all these multiple
expressions realizing that that's okay to have somebody with one emotion understanding that life
is more emotionally complicated than a single emotion all right and so that is the lesson that
he learns and then when he goes back and you could still have kind of the same ending where the emoji
expresses something that's more complicated than a simple smiley face or angry face at the end of
the movie which helps this teenager understand likewise that life and complicated emotions
are just part of the growing process okay you I agree with this but you have Spike Jones directed
and when you say comes into the real world he just comes into the bedroom of the kid who owns the phone
and it's essentially 90 minutes of this kid talking to this emoji and they're having like really
deep philosophical conversations about what it's like to grow from a child to a youthful teen
into a young man and the complexity around that and there's lots of tears and laughter and then at
the end of it you realize that that none of this took place it's just this kid talking to himself
working through some shit oh I like this a lot it's yes yeah yeah I'm totally on board the final
shot is the the kid walking into his parents bedroom and they're asleep and he opens up the nightstand
and it's empty and then you see the kid's hand put a gun in the drawer and then he closes it and
goes back to his bedroom and you're like that kid was gonna kill himself but he didn't I mean it's
dark but I like it better than this I also like the idea I like the idea also of the movie being
our better version of this is him going to talk to his parents about whatever complicated thing
he was talking like maybe they're getting divorced right sure absolutely and then dad's got a high
ball sure mom's on the phone with her personal trainer in quotes but the end of the movie is him
putting down his phone and understanding that this connection that he has with his parents is
something that goes beyond the digital to express these complicated emotions he doesn't need text
messages and emojis he needs to sit down and talk with them yes that is a way to make this movie
say something but I also like that we're we need to talk about Kevin situation was barely averted
thanks to this you know schizophrenia induced conversation he has with an emoji I like that too
all of this would be better all of it would be much more interesting than what it is that we're
dealing with it's smileer leads them to the favorites area which is this like roped off
exclusive club yeah it's like the VIP lounge for emojis there we first meet high five is played by
bane to the national conversation James cordon who's just like please let me in please let me in
and jean slips by to go into his cube where he's gonna work as meh we do find out that high five
has been replaced as a most used emoji because that's who gets to go into the VIP lounge favorited
emojis the ones that use all the time and he used to be a favorite emoji but he got replaced
by the fist bump but that's the kind of thing that you see over on eight chan or so i've heard
that kind of supports those charlotsville protest in january six where it's like do you see that
cartoon documentary about the emojis government's placing high fives with fist bumps fist will not
replace us fist will not replace us come on boy say it after me i didn't understand that's what
replacement theory was that's replacing high fives with fist bumps that is insidious it goes a lot
deeper it goes all the way to top pearl milling company syrup i didn't buy a jamama for different
reasons but i sure as hell ain't buying pearl milling company syrup replacement woke right
anhyzer bush sending cans of beer to some transsexual making it impossible for me to enjoy
a bud light because every time i do i'll have to question my sexuality and am i attracted to
this transsexual it's hard to parse i'm gonna blow up bud light with dynamite and high powered
weapons in protest to a person whom i have never met or heard of since yesterday right and whose
circle of influence does not come anywhere near behind but i am so knee jerk terrified by the idea
that sexuality is more than me drunkenly throwing my dick into my wife that even entertaining the
notion that it is a larger sphere of emotions and physical relationships and identification that
i have to threaten to shoot cases of bud light by a lake or whatever the fuck kid rock was doing
it's just the most small-minded and pointless sword because again you've already bought the
bud light bud light one they'll give a shit if you drink it or not it's a shock anyway i want to
talk a little bit about the fact that high five looks like a naked version of the hamburger helper
mascot kind of with a band-aid on for some reason that's what i want to talk about he's wearing a
band-aid on his index finger which i thought maybe that's supposed to be like a bandana and it really
feels like something that should be addressed in this movie but it is not it's really unsettling
because i immediately go to well is that a masturbation accident because i'm a dirtbag and
so but you're right we we go back to the in quotes real world in this maybe where Alex is in class
debating about what to text this girl Addy so everybody in the cube goes on high alert because
uh oh an emoji is about to be called up in action and jean's parents are there watching him on his
first day of work and this is a real moment of identification i had in the movie where this
teacher is trying to teach a bunch of kids who are just staring down at their phones and not giving
a shit about nothing else yeah sure enough Alex is i guess texting about the class or whatever and
it's pulling up the meh emoji the whole place goes batshit because you know meh is being called up
for the first time but he panics and can't maintain the meh expression and so this messy confused
looking of emoji is sent up the girl ends up putting her phone down and is like what the fuck is this
emoji all about her response is like yeah right and just puts it down because she doesn't understand
what that message is supposed to be and then jean is now asked to leave the cube because he is fucked
up and upset the order of things because a met emoji is what was called for that is not what he
delivered and therefore the phone is now in a race for survival we'll find out because what he
selected and what appeared are two different things yeah he leaves the cube or the wall of cubes and
a sirens are going off and he jumps out and grabs this metallic picking finger that goes
cube by cube it tumbles over due to poor craftsmanship and just smashes through multiple rows of these
emoji cubes does this just shut down the whole operation what happens if this kid Alex in the real
world detects another emoji they don't have the infrastructure or a backup wall of cubes to make
that happen they don't have a sight B absolutely there's no like ela sauna right for emojis or whatever
smileer meanwhile like as everything is falling apart she's like you're a malfunction you're gonna
be destroyed hey that's what happened in rec at Ralph remember she had a glitch and she was an
outcast i liked that movie not like this one that is a farce even the sequel which is not nearly as
good as superior to this in almost every way yeah with with some of the same themes yes but yeah
this is awful so yes smileer she's our villain in the movie or the closest thing we have to a
villain or an antagonist right there she is the antagonist for sure jean goes up to the top of
whatever building they're all working in and his parents come up to comfort him and jean's like
i'm a malfunction but his dad is like how about we go hide you away in our apartment like what
he's like i can't do that i've got to serve some kind of purpose around here i'll show you yeah and
then he just runs off he goes to the board room where they're having this emergency meeting to decide
whether or not he should be slaughtered in the town square inside the emoji elders they decide that
jean is a malfunction and the board comes out and it's some emojis we've seen before one of them's
the shit emoji and jean says to the shit emoji tell me true turd what happened in there
so smileer tells him we're gonna delete you rather than you wreck everything for everyone else
and so here's this antivirus bot that comes out of nowhere and tries to shoot him so jean runs off
again then we cut to high five yep who has snuck into the favorites exclusive lounge yeah as he's
sneaking through here jean tackles him on accident and says any five response are coming and high five
believes this is because he's snuck into the favorites lounge and so he's on the run with jean
right hey did you notice in the vip favorites lounge that beer coffee and dice we're all in there i'm
like i think our kid alex maybe on a downward slide i'll tell you there's one
missing that shows up later it's in the unused basement and i'm like don't worry your time's
coming yeah the fact that it will we'll talk about this i'll say so high five then leads them to the
loser lounge where the emojis that don't get used hang out which as we were hinting at includes the
eggplant emoji yeah and if there is a teenage boy involved oh that's in the favorites for sure
ab so lutely but i gotta ask you yes in the early days of this podcast we used to do a lot of
quizzes remember those days we used to do quizzes uh-huh because we had interns that like writing them
for us you want to quiz i would love a quiz all right i'm going to give you an emoji or a series
of emojis because they're going to increase in difficulty and i want you to give me its
sexting definition as defined by the website bestlife.com bestlife.com the first results that show up when
you're searching for the keywords top dirty emoji meetings bestlife.com is it a legit site you decide
all right moe you ready for this all right all right all right yes yes so we've already talked about
the the eggplant is for a penis okay yeah that's right um the peach emoji vagina clearly it can be
a vagina or butt um here we go okay all right okay sign of fingers isn't that just like the old
school fucking emoji specifically it was anal sex okay so i'll give you how i'm going to give
you have credit for that thanks a pointing finger emoji would that be a penis it's fingering okay
don't overthink it taco oh well that's got to be vagina all correct the hot dog a penis sweat drops
oh well that's ejaculate the judges would have also accept orgasm or semen okay now here we're gonna
we're gonna take things up a little bit all right these are gonna be some combos donut and banana that's
about to be some sex specifically anal sex oh i don't know what's going on over at best life but
i want to find out yeah so it sounds like somebody's getting adventurous over there and i like it
tongue taco sweat drops uh that is oral sex specifically kind of lingus correct on a female uh to the
point of orgasm mouth eggplant fireworks uh that's a good blue job yeah oral sex for for a man that
will blow your mind all right okay here's one waving hand peach devil that's got to be female
masturbation that's a good guess in this case waving hand peach devil was you're gonna get a naughty
spanking okay all right well fair enough okay it's open to interpretation it's not always clear
that's why you got to be careful you don't you you got to make sure you're on the same weave
leak with the people who are getting your your sexy emoji combos all right now these are the
advanced combos all right these are going to be worth triple points all right yes movie ticket
flamingo dancer eyeballs i'm going to a strip club very i very good i want to see you strip yeah
that's very good tongue peach exploding head emoji uh that's got to be like mind-blowing kind of
lingus well in this case uh i'm gonna lick your butt and blow your mind all right rim job or
kind of lingus of all right snake and tulip oh snake and tulip i mean vaginal sex i want to
slither inside your innocent bottom who knew a baguette and a honey pot i mean all of mine are
going to be the same if it is a tube-shaped object go for yeah then i'm saying again this would be
because honey pot it that's what uh the spies were called beautiful spies were called so i would
think that would also be vaginal sex yeah i want to put my penis in your sweet vagina yeah the for
extra credit the heart emoji followed by a bone emoji is that just like i like your dick yes it's
and more more directly i love your penis not the first time you've ever heard me say that you judges
would have also accepted i'd love to bone yes okay um i feel like i acquitted myself well there
i think you did very well considering you were a man who by your own admission does not use emojis
very often you were able to navigate those waters successfully thank you i haven't used those emojis
but i've said almost all of those things mostly to my local clergy do a police officer with as i'm
handing in my driver's license hey you're not a cop are you you got to tell me sir i pulled you
over with flashy lights are you saying you're a cop then jean tells high five hey they're not after
you they're after me i'm a malfunction you know did you see rec it Ralph anyway come on we gotta go
so high five says you're a malfunction we've just got to find a hacker and get you reprogrammed
this will require us to leave the texting app but i've done it plus i heard a mysterious princess
left and she lives on the cloud we need to go find a hacker named jailbreak that is our mission that
is kind of the thrust of our first half of the movie where they decide hey we've got to get some
disguises to get out of here so they just grab a christmas tree emoji and a cactus emoji that they
used to disguise themselves so they can make their way out of textopolis and outside of the text
are they corpses they're not alive they're just like laying on this couch is this like a uh uh
a weekend at bernie's scenario where uh only if every time that you play the bongos if the christmas
tree starts dancing around a little bit we get a bernie's two had honest to good as magic in it
mm-hmm it did well it was voodoo but yeah well that's still magic black magic
well sorry i didn't mean to suggest otherwise i know that well i mean it wasn't like david
copperfield like hiding an elephant from a crowd or something right right no this was
this was more like the craft then now you see me now you see me a movie destined to be on this
show at some point oh my gosh especially now you see me too now you see me too is maybe one of the
most mind-boggling sequels ever made anyway so we're now in the wallpaper of the phone in between
the apps yes the space between worlds high five is like there's a unique world inside each one
don't worry about it we're not going to investigate any of that look let's just stick our face into
weChat where there's a bunch of puppies or something stamping out emojis like it's a
sweatshop i don't even know what the hell weChat is i don't know either like all of this stuff is
sort of this backdoor advertising for a bunch of different apps then they poke their head into
facebook and this is where jean says hey i didn't know that alix had all these friends and high five
says something that sounds like it's going to be a thing that the movie is about and then it's not
which is well they're not friends they just talk about themselves and also you don't need friends
you need fans and that's what these people are likes are all that matters here and you're like
oh okay so this movie is going to be about high five potentially learning that it's friends that
matter not fans but i to the best of my memory this has never brought up again no jean does say
i'll take one true friend over all of that support huh listen learn well forget about that from now on
we cut to jean's mom and dad and the dad says i blame you for jean's disappearance you just wanted
a vacation we had this kid so you enough to work so much our boys on the run we'll go find them
ourselves so off they go to look for him and hopefully a good divorce lawyer high five and jean reach
the piracy app which is skinned to look like a dictionary app there's a comment here where jean
asked kai five why would a teenage boy put a skin on an app what does he have to hide and then high five
gives it's a little side to side with the eyes implying that his phone is riddled with pornography
yeah that seems to be missing from this movie doesn't it like how much porno this freshman in high
school is watching on his phone right like as soon as he sees the internet app whatever that may be
google or whatever as soon as they dip into that the history it's just a hundred open tabs of
like disassociated keyword searches as this young man tries to figure out his own sexuality
shortage anime fuck you know that kind of stuff it's like balloon rough stuff like what
just a fully clothed woman just popping balloons talking asmr green new deal blowjob you're like
what not even sure why we got political so high five is like be careful in here this place can get
rough and they go into the sounds of we're not gonna take it because nothing says this is a rough
place like a 40 year old party anthem yeah it's like it's the star wars bar yes it's a bunch of weird
o's like what viruses and trolls and internet trolls jeffree raw shows up for a paycheck yeah not a very
big one clearly it's a living not much of one the bartender is a Trojan horse which doesn't really
go anywhere high five walks up and says hello we're looking for jailbreak and like uh jail breaks
over there and they turn around and they're like you mean jailbreak is a go go go go go go
all right all right so we meet jailbreak who has blue hair and this dark knit cap with a little
skull logo on the front of it she looks like every clicheed skater girl she looks a lot like
the female character from record Ralph speaking of you've seen all of this in pieces and parts
in other movies high five says to her hello i'm high five i know what you're thinking i'm the
the nude hamburger help a fellow but i'm not um we need your help turning my friend jean here
into a true meh using your hacker abilities and jailbreak says beat it losers and then uh at this
point the avi bot show up to kill jean and jean flips his shit and starts making multiple faces
and jailbreak says hey i can use you come on guys follow me so the avi bot start killing everybody
in the star wars bar jailbreak jean and high five they scamper over to this secret door that empties
into a tunnel that will save them and they go just like in star wars only instead of into a science
fiction action adventure movie they end up in candy crush didn't you feel gross yeah i'm not sure
that if it's the most egregious example of them co-opting a phone thing because i think maybe this
spotify one is dumber but this does feel in defense of the filmmakers if you're making a
movie about a phone and abs i mean candy crush is probably as big as it gets right and they'd
already made an angry birds movie so couldn't do that right so what's the other app that is
recognizable as a game on a phone other than angry birds jean falls into a level of the game
and here jailbreak and high five have to play candy crush but they need to be careful not to
destroy jean but then they realize hey the only way to get him out is to destroy him so they do
that and then he saved the one thing i do like about this moment is there is that cutaway where
jailbreak has a daydream about matching him and then he just explodes into goo hmm she's got problems
i appreciate that i like a little darkness but think about in your own life if you were just
sitting there talking to someone and your mind drifted away to a place where the person you're
talking to their head exploded like scanners uh-huh oh was that it oh um yeah weird so that happens
there's also a parallel scene where alex is trying to make a little time with atison outside of school
and when they're playing candy crush you can hear his phone going delicious divide and alex gets
all embarrassed because they're hearing these words and he's probably got a boner and um he
calls up wireless wireless to make an appointment to get his phone fixed this puts an appointment on
his calendar and we cut up to the boardroom where everybody just starts losing their shit because
they realize that the phone is going to go into the shop they are going to be erased tomorrow yeah if
they find a malfunction so the plan is we got to get jean back and murder him in the town square
to make sure we're clean when we get to the phone store and to make an example to the other emojis
let them know what happens if they step out of line and so jell break tells jean that she is going to
become his knight in shining armor and says all we've got to do is go to just dance from candy crush
and then on the drop box and then we can go to the cloud so we can reprogram you all we've got to do
is use facial recognition to get through the drop box firewall that she's banned from because
she's already tried to get through one time right but because he can make different faces they can
try a bunch of different times yeah jean explains that back to her and jailbreak says yeah that was
my idea thanks for me explaining it to me you dick and so jean's parents make their way into
youtube yeah they go looking for him this goes right other than to just say like hey youtube is an app
and then jean's parents decide that they're going to split up to look for them because they're on the
outs with one another and we see that there are some anti-virus spots sent by smile or to follow them
so that they can you know essentially use jean's parents to find him yes and so jean and then
jailbreak make their way through this tunnel while high five who has been eating all the candy crush
candy is losing a shit on this sugar high jailbreak says i just want to get out of the phone and into
the cloud because there's so much to see and do i want to be where the ones and zeros are i want
to be up there codden hagen typing away on those what do you call them oh yeah keys up where they
code up where they run more code up where they hack all day in the microsoft son system
i want to be like all of this movie is just stuff from other movies i really love musical
breaks in this show when they happen but jean by the way is telling jailbreak like hey i don't
remember any hacker emojis and jailbreak's like i don't want to talk about it hey what's out over
there and high five is like hey mate i think this hacker emojis into you and so they end up going
to the just dance app they have to keep quiet and not turn the app on some music doesn't play and
alert you know the rest of the phone question mark do they are yeah it doesn't wake up giant
sized Christina Aguilera but then high five sees a big red button and pushes it because that's what
he does that's kind of his thing which wakes up giant sized Christina Aguilera with her purple
hair and long ponytail high five says that's fine with me because i can dance like michael
and it's always good when your kids movie references a credibly accused kidfucker i think
that is always important yeah it turns out jailbreak cannot dance uh oh and uh there's this dance off
and Christina Aguilera leading this says you get three chances and if you fail you're gonna have a
digital death and i was like wait can emojis die apparently so because they're deleting jean if he
gets caught by these avy bots so there's the stakes are murder and death apparently long story short
jean encourages jailbreak to dance and she eventually gets into the groove as wams wake me up before
you go go plays to no one surprise high five he's just having a grand old time off on his own
jean looks over at jailbreak and he says hey express yourself that was the name of this movie
originally but they got rid of it because it kind of sucks during this touching scene Bo jean comes
up with a brand new dance move where he kind of plays peekaboo and each time has a new face they
ask him what this dance is called and it's called the emoji pop that's fun though i wonder Chad do you
think anyone in the making of this movie realistically thought this was a thing that would catch on
like the bat dance or something something right like why have this big fancy dance that you're
setting up in this movie if somewhere in the back of your head you're not thinking like people are
gonna be dancing like this people are gonna do this in a club this is gonna be the next
gangdom style yeah right of course the christina agulera avatar loves it and as jailbreak dances
her hat comes off and we see that she is wearing a princess tiara and has combed brown hair not the
shaggy blue hair when her hat pops off the blue hair is attached to the rim of this knit black cap
it looks like a wanes world halloween costume prop yes it does i like the idea that she has stolen
this from like from spencers some spirit store that popped up over in some no longer used app space
it's over in group on they just hung up a sign for 30 days so the avi bots bust in and jean says
don't worry because those robots can't dance and then while the robot goes downloading
funk protocol and so it turns out they can dance disco inferno plays uh-huh and there's one cutaway
where we see that alex is in class when disco inferno starts to play and so we hurriedly
deletes the app and that's where everything goes to shit inside the phone yeah because everything is
starting to disintegrate as our heroes are trying to escape jean and jailbreak get out of the app
then jean reaches back to grab high five but an av bot grabs high five pulling him down into this
abyss of deletion right then another app moves into place as alex manipulates the icons on his phone
and then jailbreak says well high five said he's he's gone in the trash and so we've got to get to
drop box and this is where we get one of the lessons question mark of the movie where jean says we've
got to go get him and jailbreak's like yeah but we're we're right next to drop box we can just step
inside and we're out of here by the way like i've always gotten by looking out for number one
and jean says in a line that makes me wince every time it's spoken in the movie what could
it be in number one if there aren't any other numbers and jailbreak has this apiphany chat where
she goes wow okay good point this blew her fucking emoji mind when he says this it is something that
she never considered this way before because she is a sociopath and a narcissist and jailbreak is like
well we can write the music stream from spotify all the way to the trash icon did you notice whenever
alex has his phone and he gets flummoxed he like pulls it out he boggles it and it squirts out of
his hand like a bar of soap until he finally catches it and then he pulls it in close and kind of
and he looks around it feels very much like something woody the cowboy would do in toy story
yeah i mean like his his movements are comically jerky like even as i watch it's like i feel like
i've seen this before reach for the sky back in tikstapala smiler is stressing and says we only have four
hours until deletion and then she decides that she's going to use this illegal upgrade on one of the
bots is like lightning flashes outside like it's frinking science gas then we see high five wake up
in the trash app with the christina agulera and a spam letter did in an internet troll this christina
agulera avatar is weeping and like her mascara just pouring down her face and she's just almost
automatically just doing her dance moves and crying which they never come back to her like
no she dies in this right and then when high five got pulled into the trash there was a robot
that was yanking him down we don't see that robot there seems like that's a big miss the internet
troll died you know there's so much pornography in there oh yeah i would think that that would be
99 percent of it but as soon as you go to the trash it should just sound like uh uh oh
because this movie doesn't have an original thought associated with it the abyss from the trash is
essentially the place where bing bong dies in the movie inside out a movie that came out i think
two years before this oh yeah that's true i didn't put that together but yeah i like the fact that
jeffrey ross is the internet troll tells high five this is the last face you ever gonna see
gross meanwhile jean and jailbreak ride a stream of songs in a canoe where did this
bow come from la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la
be shy we're going to ride the music you can kiss the emoji trademark copyright it's totally that
jean does ask her during this scene hey let me ask you a question when a princess whistles do birds
fly down from the sky like in sleeping beauty and snow white and is parodied by fiona and
shrek when she's saying real loud and that bird exploded can you do that and jailbreak gets real
pissed off and she says that's a complete myth take that back you piece of trash i'm sorry i'm sorry
because she's bipolar she says let me let me just change the subject did you know that on the first
set of emojis a woman can only be like princess or a bride and i was like wait a minute i thought
the first emoji was smiler that's what the movie told us she's a woman somebody didn't pay attention
to the details of this movie or maybe jailbreak didn't pay attention in emoji history class or
maybe she just cherry picks her facts to a lot of the particular narrative confirmation by as much
jailbreak jailbreak says to him when we get to the cloud you can be whatever you want to be hey look
here's a whale song coming up that we're not going to hear but look up in the sky there's a digital
pixelated whale flying overhead like in free willy and free willy to the adventure home and free willy
three the rescue and in the little known direct-to-video release free willy escape from pirate co you won't
see anything like this sitting in a cube genie boy and jean says you know it's funny you want out of
the cube but i want in and jailbreak says to him jean if it means you can't be yourself what's the
point also what's the point of this movie is it be who you are is it except who you are don't let
others define you no man is an island words hurt more than a fist dancing solves everything you know
what i just think it's cool that you're just the way you are jean's like she thinks i'm cool and he
flies around but sorry that's yeah yeah before they can fall in love too much though they've reached
the end of the stream and wash up on the shores of the app or whatever and in the trash app high-five
is singing and moaning what is he singing about it's a no body knows yeah the old spiritual yeah an
african-american spiritual that came out of slavery again you know it's a kids movie chat this is what
belongs here then this light appears above high-five and all these other individuals thrown into the
trash and jean comes down a rope to rescue high-five one detail we got to mention here is that high-five
does find an old email to atty where he expresses his love and feelings for her and includes a high-five
emoji in the email that will come up later that's right the skylight opens and then they what do they
come down on it's just like a little pulley with rope yeah and as soon as they get high-five up
he's like listen my brothers and sisters here's the rope so you can free yourself and as he turns
around he kicks that pulley thing down the hole too sealing the horrifying fades of our other apps
trapped in there there's no way they can get out with a rope this thing's like 500 feet above their
head yeah best case scenario they should just pile up all of the trash and get to the top and climb
out through the hole but we never see these characters again we assume that they die here yes probably
worth mentioning also that Alex's pal says that the girl that he's interested in atty is going to be
with her friends at the promenade which as fate would have it is where Alex is going to get his
phone reset every time we see Alex he's always got this wingman poking him in the rib like hey man
there's atty go get you some and he's like oh I don't know what to say I should send her an emoji
how about you send her one of those porn videos you're always watching say this could be us she's
got snapchat send her a picture of your car it'll only be there for a few seconds and then you'll
see she'll know what you got going on think she'll like that yeah girls love dick pics do you have
eggplant your favorite send her that and that little squirty sweaty thing that lets her know that
you jerk off to her girls like that stuff she hates mom looks more of an instagram where we see pictures
of Alex and his family in Paris ooh la la and looks real sad because she sees him i think it divorced
she can't start her over at this stage of her life she's got a teenage son she's got a lot of
baggage let's face it she's gonna go with his dad she's gonna move back in with her spencer aunt her
sister the exasperated emoji so jean's mom walks into a photograph of Alex his mom and dad in Paris
and i don't understand this at all she goes into the picture and it's like the matrix it's that
effect where everything is stuck three dimensionally in one location but then there's a character that
can walk through it so it pivots around it's unnecessary she goes over to this fountain she's
like mmm a shitty man i wish i knew where my son was i never should have married that other piece of
shit and mel meh and then mel is sitting on the other side of the fountain he's like mmm i can hear
you but i need to tell you something the reason our son jean is such a malfunction is because of me
i can show other emotions too and he comes around and they make up right and so as our heroes travel
through the phone high five once again sjel break is the truth that what they say about you whistling
and calling down birds and she's like shut up i will kill the next motherfucker that asked me
about whistling yeah and then at this point the av robot the supercharged one shows up and apparently
the filmmakers of the emoji movie saw spider-man too because this thing now has dock-auk extendo
pincher claws and once it gets super sized it reminded me of like a pint-sized version of saurot the big
eye creature from the lord of the rings like it's got a big red eye on top a teardrop shaped black
body and then it starts chasing them and they're like we got to split up yeah and so they do you
because the filmmakers saw the original shrek bow and that's how they escape that dragon that was
chasing them they split up and ran around until the dragon's chain created knots on itself so it
couldn't get after him but it only lasts for a second like they lose the thing for a hot second
and then it just comes back after him but they do escape into drop box in the meantime well you
know every teenager bow has drop box that's the coolest after is right it's not just for old people
that have to you know share files between work and podcast co-hosts and what not drop box but
turbo tax quick books that's what all the cool kids have man right you need a budget is in there
i don't understand why this kid has drop box other than to help progress this movie's excuse for a
plot along but they hop into drop box and the avi bot can't follow them because it has illegal
malware except in two or three minutes it totally follows them so i don't know what happened there
they climb into what looks like a theme park ride like it's three seats across with a little lap
belt and because it's a drop box they get dropped and they zoom down it's all it's wonderfully fun
for people under the age of four to watch this and they land in front of a firewall which is
literally a wall of fire and it speaks with this robotic female voice similar to glattos in portal
or our own beloved pixx bot from this podcast she's a sweetie jean steps up on this platform and
jailbreak is going to start spouting off passwords so jean pulls up one of his faces he says the wrong
password and he gets blasted with a charring stream of fire from below and does this hurt jean
it seems to at least a little bit but he goes through it a hundred plus times and he even asks
do i have to do this every time shut up yes yeah you do they're just trying password after
password and it's jailbreak going through all of you know Alex's personal files to try to find the
word that serves as his password jean at one point says geez i don't know i probably use the name of
a girl i liked and jailbreak is like he's never mentioned any girl i think he might be gay
and then high five is like this is nothing wrong with that whatever he wants to do whatever he wants
to be is fine she's like yeah i know but he hasn't told his parents yet i keep looking in through
the notes on his phone to see if he's like working on a speech or something that he's gonna give them
and maybe to his friends but high five is like no no no i found this email down in the trash he's
definitely straight in fact he says horrible things to this young woman it turns out that here's this
email which actually reads you and i were like diamonds in the sky you're a shooting star i see
a vision of ecstasy shine bright like a diamond then it goes on to say you just seem so cool out
signed Alex and then a high five sign so his love letter to her is just a copy paste of Rihanna song
lyrics yes along with you seem so cool well that's that's how he makes it his own i guess yeah it's a
real seeridow to berserk we got on our hands here Chad jean steps up on the platform he uses the
password addy and the firewall opens up and they get led into the magical land of Oz i mean the
cloud and they trump trump trump in and it's sort of these digital clouds everywhere in these tall
futuristic looking buildings with tubes zips up and around and jailbreak says so i guess i'm gonna
start hacking i'm gonna turn you into a real meh high five i'll get you back in the vip section
and we're gonna be good to go and high five is excited everybody gets what they want but then
jean goes over to jailbreak and he's like hey jailbreak look you're the coolest emoji ever and
my feelings are huge now he's like what he's like i want to stay who i am with all of these
multiple personalities and they hold hands and jailbreak is like whoa whoa whoa man look i got a
plan and it doesn't include me being a princess waiting for some prince like you said i was beautiful
that's nice and all but look i've been dreaming of getting here this is over and then jean's like oh
really well i guess i'm really a mess because you broke my heart and said those mean things
and then that av bot shows up because everything they said earlier doesn't matter how did it know
the password bow i i got nothing for you it comes in and just whips its doc ock claw grabs jean by
the face like he spider man and then he yanks him back to text opolis for that public slaughter
and then we cut to the phone store cellular cellular or whatever wireless wireless uh run by mario mario
right and at the store alloch shows up as like hey i'm early for my appointment and they're like oh
that's okay we can get you in early and this is one of the more exciting customer service scenes
that you're gonna find in this movie i think it's rivaled with the the moment where he goes to the
coffee shop and is like hey do you have hazelnut creamer and they're like yeah we do he says thank
you and leaves them an extra generous tip of seventy five cents i mean for a freshman high school that
seems like you're really doing them a favor yeah i mean he upped it to twenty percent and that's
not nothing for a high schooler so jailbreak has achieved her plan she's on the cloud hooray for
jailbreak yay and then high five walks over and he's like jailbreak that av but just took jean back to
the start of the movie it happened right over there it was really loud and violent i'm so i'm
honestly surprised you didn't hear all the commotion yeah sorry i was too worried about
getting what i want what was your name again hamburger and this is concerning high five says
jean looked more met than i've ever seen him look at me before what did you say to him and jailbreak
says ah it's not what i said to him it's kind of more of the way i said it i mean what i didn't say
all right look we got to go save jean christ i can't believe i got to do this and then in what is a
truly perplexing moment in this movie jailbreak whips off her nik cap with the attached blue wig
and she's got a little crown on her comb brown hair and this whole film she has just been espousing
the offensive nature of female stereotypes but then here she just uses her natural princess abilities
to whistle in an effort to call birds to help them is the message of this movie you don't have to
conform to preconceived definitions of who you are but when you're in a pinch toss your ideals out the
window do what you got to do to get what you need what a better movie this would be if she said no
i can't do that thing that i've been telling you i can't do and instead i'm gonna use this other
talent i have that i had to hide all along right like explosive farts like a sheep
and just like blast it through the air oh boy that'd be good yeah the reason that no one ever took
me seriously as a princess is because i could propel myself into the air like a jet pack only i use
my ass but sure enough she whistles a couple of times nobody comes and then she gives it another
whistle and in flies the twitter bird boy that's aging well yeah at one point in the future this will
serve as sort of a reference to the fact that there was in fact something called twitter sure
that this movie will not age well no no i mean already with the candy crush it's like i think
we've all moved on from that you know it's one of the beauties of the digital age is that the pace of
things is so quick that things are always replaced by better versions or different versions of those
things like facebook is losing subscribers because tick tock is more popular and eventually tick tock
will not be popular and there'll be something else and twitter is dying but oh the guy who invented
twitter it has and has done an app called blue sky and that seems to be the thing that's gonna
supplant twitter it's just this constant churning yeah of abs the best this movie can do is to be a
snapshot of a place in time but yeah when you see this twitter bird show up all i can think is like
oh yeah that is the app that now users that have authenticated blue check marks beside their name
are actively telling people just keep in mind i am not paying for this because i think this app
is garbage so anyway we come back to smileer who says now we can delete gene the technician will
discover that there's nothing wrong with the phone and will all be safe and there's a countdown clock
on the wall with three minutes but alex showed up early for the appointment uh-huh so that doesn't
square and like and then you don't really even need this countdown clock on the wall that doesn't
matter at all no so they show up and gene's there and he's all sad and all of the emojis are there
in their cubes because they're wanting to see a public execution yeah this is like late 18th century
france yes the fact that they don't have torches in the background is is a real miss do you think that
because you know ched when you die all your muscles relax and you end up being and pooping
yourself right do you think that when this happens to gene when he's deleted do you think a little
poop emoji appears maybe that's how they reproduce that would be pretty good but gee's parents show
up to stop smileer and the robot has fired up its lasers to kill gene and his dad is like this is
all my fault because i can do exactly what gene's doing so you'll have to delete us both and sure
enough to say vbot just grabs the dad is like fine i will destroy you both he's like oh i didn't
think this through then sir patrick stewart chimes in as poo and says you're making too big a stink
about all this does everyone get it because i'm poop yeah that uh it makes a stink like poop does
i was in shake speed i'm going to call my agent after this
so his dad tells gene i was all wrong son i'm happy to die with you yeah and at this moment of
apocalypse high five and jailbreak show up they come crashing through the ceiling which is exactly
how shrek and donkey show up at the end of that first shrek movie to stop the wedding oh i didn't
even remember that i guess that's true i know it's true i've seen shrek a bunch in a minute we're
gonna get a scene where all of our characters are being killed which is a tip of the hat to toy
story three i wish that movie had stopped right there in toy story three when they all link arms
and swirling the drain around this open fire pit and just fade to black then you get the word
thin it's been a pleasure serving with all of you it sure has woody
well he sure was a surprise that they all died tonight nobody saw that coming but that's friendship
died with the closest friend in a fire pit it's better than dying alone but not by much not by much
she got french but you still revved in
yes so they're they're trying to turn off this stupid avi butt and jailbreak gets thrown free
and sure enough high five comes to the rescue because he hits all the buttons because he's a
bunch of fingers and it's either hitting buttons or going in butts it's one of the two
so jean's asked jailbreak like hey what happened to be in number one she says well that's the thing
what about all the other numbers and you're like oh i just hate all of this this is not a lesson
this is just a thing that makes me mad to hear it so this buzzer sounds and the phone's about to be
deleted this is the star trek thing where we hear patrick stewards yell red alert red alert and
it's one of the most demeaning things i've ever seen in a movie adi shows up at the phone store
while that's happening jailbreak says we've got time to send just one text to try to get through
to alex and save everybody so we don't have to listen to a randy newman song have to or get to you
be the judge and then the heart face emoji and shy emoji are like you should send us because
that's how he feels and high fives says no no it should be jean because he conveys all of those
those emotions and smileer says an emoji can only be one thing yeah but she got crushed and killed
and she says that from off-camera yeah and that's where jailbreak shows off her tiara and everybody's
like a princess and she's like you can be more than one thing and then as the last of these apps are
dissolving jean has a flashback to all of the wild adventures that he and jailbreak and high five
went on and so jailbreak sends this final emoji message it's a real head scratcher because they're
trying to ratchet up the tension and then jean just has a little pleasant flashback looking through
the postcards of his mind of things that happen throughout this horrible movie right before you
die you remember all the stuff that you did all the friends that you made all the people you knew
and you shit your stuff and fool your pants and poop friendship and oblivion because that's what
waits on the other side you know that's how they could have made this movie better it's like it
feels like they were trying to make something good they should have just leaned into the shittiness
of it and just did what uh like you know how book of mormon parodies that like all of the tropes of
Broadway musicals do that for animated movies like realize like we know this is going to be
shitty let's just make fun of computer animated films oh yeah if somebody had actually cared to
make something that wasn't just a callous money grass just like make it so grotesquely cynical
and then you could truly have them all die at the end you know i mean it wouldn't be a kids movie
but it would be shocking and funny and music by not Randy Newman everybody's time for a movie
i'm gonna sing a song here we go look at us we're instagram here's some pictures of somebody's grandma
but she ain't alive anymore dick pics who wants a dick pic i got a dick pic for everybody so
Alex gets this stupid emoji which is like hard eyes and a kiss and a blush and all these things
and he sends it to Addie who kind of sees it and giggles a little and comes over to him and says
hey i love this emoji that you sent me but i love it because it expresses all these feelings at once
and i like that you're one of those guys who can express his feelings yeah words would you why do
you have your hand shoved in your pants like that would you want to go to the dance with you sure i
would love to go to the dance you would you mind if i go clean myself up in the bathroom you're so
funny it's funny because the guy just came on his cell he never talked to a girl before his pants
are all sticky and she can see everything he didn't expect this when he came to the phone store
it's called all gazels your first org gazel when you're 14 standing back to a girl while he's
humiliated all the abs are dying yeah well all this is going on inside the phone everything is
getting thano snapped or if you want to go old school it's like the nothing from the never-ending
story they are just disappearing jean sees his parents get deleted high five gets deleted
Alex walks over and unplugs his phone from a cable that stops the deletion which that's not how
anything works all the other stuff would still stay deleted but that's not you know sure everybody
celebrates jean like you did it you saved everybody jean and then we go to our next scene or wrap up
where music is playing and jean is going to the favorites area where he stopped by the bouncer or
whatever this is all just a ruse that everyone has set up because they want to play a trick on their
savior and it turns out there's no longer a favorites area because now we live in a communist
utopia where everyone is equal and they all do the emoji pop dance to celebrate the fact that
they're all still alive and then we see Alex take a picture at the dance that he and adi have gone to
he selects jean as the emoji to attach to this even though when he does it jean is not doing the
kind of kissy face shy face he's just making whatever the fuck face he wants to i guess
he's earned that right as savior of the phone sure and then credits the second most embarrassing
thing i think is seen in this movie during the credits where you see and sir patrick steward as
quote poop yeah that's pretty bad but there's also a mid credit scene chat because i didn't see
that why not it's smiler in that dungeon where eggplant is although he's probably been promoted
upstairs it's the dance and she's in braces like her jaws wired shut oh playing gofish with that
little sushi roll and a bunch of others and in the basement and that's it that was a rough one that
is a terrible terrible movie yeah is it the worst we've seen this season maybe we said that a lot like
super mario brothers is so fucking weird like it shouldn't be celebrated but it at least is
this weird blend of something that directors were going for and this other stuff that happened to
the movie and you can kind of see the kernels of something interesting there this is the most
cynical movie that we've done this season that only exists to make more i would agree with that
we've had a few seasons like this before where the entire collective is just right yeah and this
season is pretty pretty bad because they're all cash grabs no one was really trying to do
anything other than make money mario brothers might be the best movie we we see this season it's
quite possible which is shocking that movie was awful yeah yeah it certainly wasn't this movie
and i can't speak to what our season finale is going to be because i have not seen this movie
in decades which bow would you care to introduce what our season finale of this season's theme
pop culture club is going to be by the power of grace gold shed we are going to watch that
dolph longren franklin jellah masters of the universe movie and god only knows it can't be worse
than this franklin jellah is in it and my understanding is that this was a performance that he was
truly proud of and having him coming into every scene chewing the furniture of the walls and the
legs of other characters is gonna elevate to a certain place absolutely i'm not saying it's
gonna be good i'm saying it's gonna be better yes so we're gonna go out on not a high note that's
our first thing we're going out on not the worst note i also want to say just because it's timely
of when we were recording this we really consider doing jerry springer's wingmaster but yeah that
movie was a comedy and it didn't fit it wasn't going to do what we wanted it to do but i just
wanted to say rid jerry springer he provided me personally with hours upon hours of violent white
trash entertainment through my college and early 20s so yeah rest in peace jerry springer and
twicky day forever you know maybe a photo any final thoughts that you have on the emoji movie
they should have just called this movie sopatrix do it because it's cool
i'll see you two weeks time everybody.