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We all know KitKat Bar's taste delicious, but what about how they sound? It's not just a catchy jingle, it's the satisfying crack of breaking off a piece of KitKat, followed by a crisp crunch. Oh, we forgot one other sound that a company is KitKat Bar's too. It's, or maybe it's more like, all together, KitKat bars are music to our ears and yummy flavors to our mouths. Have a break, have a KitKat. Paul Sheer is an actor and a comedian and he's been in shows like The League and Black Monday
and he was a recurring character on 30 Rock and Veep, both of St. Ed Memory. Sheer has also just published a memoir called Joyful Recollections of Trauma. But Paul Sheer may be best known as a film buff. You may have come across his podcast, How Did This Get Made? It's a conversation among three friends. Paul is wife June Diane Rafefield and Jason Mansookis, analyzing and picking apart bad movies, only bad movies. These guys are connoisseurs of the lousy.
So when I talk with Paul Sheer recently at Brooklyn Brewery, I wanted to get to the heart of things. It's my last week on this planet. Are the five most horrible films that I can watch that I can take to the great deal? Okay. So let me just because I want to make sure we're on the even playing field, there are horrible films like Gary Bucy is in this thing called the Ginger Kill Man or something where he plays the gingerbread. That's fine. Those are bad movies. Those to me are not
fun bad movies. I want to enjoy myself. I want to be sitting there going like I need to show this to everyone. It's our podcast came to be. Like it's about sitting around talking about a movie. I did that all the time through my youth. So the Mount Rushmore, if you will, you have to put the room on it. Tommy was those the room. A movie that just went crazy.
It's just the best. It's the best. And people like I often say that the AFI needs to put the room on the AFI top 100 list because when you create something so epically disastrous, it should be noted. Like it's like it is the worst movie ever made. It needs to be elevated. It is Tennessee Williams through the lens of Tommy was though. He thought he was making street car name desire. And when you watch it like that, it's even more interesting.
You're part of my life. You are everything. I could not go on without you, Lisa. You're scaring me. You're lying. I never hit you. You're telling me partly, Lisa. Why are you so hysterical? Do you understand life? Do you? This is the great surprise. You're sitting there watching one of these movies and so much work has gone into it. And the director and the writer must have thought, this is awesome. Like Glenn and Glenda is really good. Yeah.
Oh, then this is the fear. I don't know if you feel this way, but as a writer, as an artist, you feel like I don't want to have that trick played on me. I don't want to make Glenn and Glenda go, oh no. Like, you know, like, but like, you know, and like, do you ever feel, do you ever have that like, has it that you're writing or you're in the middle of something you're like, oh, I hope or do you know you know, you know, I think it sucks all the time.
Yeah, me too. And then as we're closing the piece and I have to read it six times, it gets worse and worse. And I just want to throw myself off Mount Rushmore. Yeah. What's the second one? So we got the room. I'm going to talk about this movie called Miami Connection. Miami Connection, a great, a great film made by an Orlando owner, an owner of an Orlando dojo, decides to make a movie about ninjas, a movie about finding your long lost father, my father, my father,
a family father. Oh my god. And the drug trade in Miami, even though it's in Orlando. Great film. Really funny the way they found this was the Alamo Drafthouse. They found a real film. Everyone's like, we don't know what this is. Alamo Drafthouse is like, we'll buy it and they bought it and they've screened it like just internally like, this is genius. We're going to re-release this and they did. Like, so Miami Connection, that's number two. We recently did a movie
on our show called Samurai Cop. There's a lot of cops in here. Are you guys have seen these films? Oh yeah. Samurai Cop to me is a new favorite. I can't believe it, you know, it alluded me for so long. It is, again, it's lost in translation in the sense that this director clearly saw a lot of cop movies and tries to create the tropes, but the language barrier is tricky. It's like Google translate, or maybe even AI had like written this film. Like, you know, Danny Glover and
lethal weapon back, I'm too old for this shit. And this movie would be like, I'm too old to take shit. Right? Like, that's the difference. That happens too. Yeah, I mean, by the way, you know, Meta Muscle just stir it up and stuff. Then I'm going to go a little bit more random and it's going to be a dealer's choice because New York especially hates this movie. So they might boom me as I say this. Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a movie that is just Seagulls
talking to themselves. So? With the music of Neil Diamond and me. And it is based on Jonathan Livingston Seagull the book. It is one of the most insane films because it is just footage of Seagulls. Some of them crazy glued to planks. And it's like, wow, I want to fly. I'm flying. I'm flying. The Neil Diamond is like, the bird is flying. And it's longer than it ever needs to be. And it's, you know, pseudo spiritual and science. But I've in the 14 years of doing how to just get made,
I've never seen anything like it. And how many times have you seen that? Only one. I don't think I ever need to see it again. But I'm also happy that it's a new one. Yeah, I was a woof boy. This is the New Yorker radio hour more to come. We all know Kit Kat bars taste delicious, but what about how they sound? It's not just a catchy jingle. It's the satisfying crack of breaking off a piece of Kit Kat followed by a crisp crunch.
Oh, we forgot one other sound that a company is Kit Kat bars too. It's, or maybe it's more like all together. Kit Kat bars are music to our ears and yummy flavors to our mouths. Have a break. Have a Kit Kat. I'm Rachel Martin. You probably know how interview podcasts with famous people usually go. There's a host, a guest, and a light Q&A. But on Wild Card, we have ripped up the typical script. It's a new podcast from NPR where I invite actors, artists, and comedians to play a
game using a special deck of cards to talk about some of life's biggest questions. Listen to Wild Card wherever you get your podcasts, only from NPR. There's a movie called The Apple. All right. The Apple, to me, is like predicting American Idol. It's this future where everyone's doing mandated exercise and American Idol is like the only show on television. It's about dancing citizens. It is now one minute to four o'clock time to stop ordinary activities and prepare for
the National BIM hour. The National Fitness program is watching you. Five, four, three, two, BIM. A movie that was so bad that when they premiered it, they gave everybody LPs like vinyl LPs. They started throwing the vinyl LPs at the screen because they're not nice. Not nice. Not nice. But great soundtrack, a weird movie. I love that level of, again, it's like when I hear a director go passion project, I'm like, I'm in. I'm like, I'm hopeless. I'm like, can't wait.
We gave it a good review. They gave it a good review. Justin Chang just came to New York or in February. Pull its surprise winning Justin Chang. I've heard. He kind of liked it. That movie is a perfect example of something that I love because it may just be weird enough that it could be great because it's so insane. It's like you're just shoving everything in there. I think that's what I love about a bad movie. It's like, Copa doesn't think he made a bad movie. He wanted to make this big up.
He has all the tools to make it. Who knows. But that's what I get off on because I'm looking at it. I'm just like, wow, this is what you wanted to do. Just to be clear on your criterion. So a movie like The Hottie and The Nadi. Love it. Fine. Fine. Parasilton. Parasilton. Vehicle. Great, great vehicle. Fine. It doesn't, but it never wanted to be anything else. It's, yeah, it's not elevating. It's not elevating the form. A garbage pill kids the movie. Great.
Fine. But there are movies like, my brain is so broke that I saw Madam Web and I was like, it's not bad. But then I'm also fascinated by like 50 Shades of Grey because I'm like, oh, here's this woman who wrote this thing. She's not having crazy SNM sex, but she's like imagining what it is. So then we're watching like this kind of chased sexual movie and I'm like, that's weird. But boring. Yeah, boring. It's a worse sexual film I've ever seen. It's like,
I'm like, it's like supposedly titillating. It's like, it's titillating to someone who's never like Googled anything sexual. I'm the editor of The New Yorker, I can't say anything. Okay, sure, yeah, yeah, sorry. Paul, thank you. Thank you. Paul Sheer is a co-host of the podcast. How did this get made? His new book is called Joyful Recollections of Trauma. We mentioned Megalopolis, a passion project of Francis Ford Coppola.
So in fairness, let's give the last word on that film to our critic Justin Chang. Justin before the con film festival where you saw Megalopolis, everybody was saying this was going to be an epic bomb. A huge amount of money was spent on it, much of it Coppola's own. Why was there so much negativity directed at a filmmaker who had made after all the Godfather? Francis Ford Coppola has always elicited this kind of reaction.
When Apocalypse Now, which premiered at Cannes in 1979 and was trailing, you know, epically bad buzz about how off the rails the movie had gone and how over budget it had gone. And people thought it was going to be some, you know, folly. I think people are very uncomfortable with outsized ambition. And I think it scares them. I think talent scares them.
And so I think a lot of the negativity was how dare he do this. And I really take issue with that not just because I like the movie, but because you blow your money, you blow your own money on some epic, you know, artistic or commercial failure. So what? You know, millions, hundreds of millions dollars are blown every day on far worse causes than that. It's not a perfect movie. I don't know if it's an masterpiece or anything. But I think though that it's really disheartening
when critics and journalists suddenly turn into like Hollywood bean counters. And what did you like about Megalopolis? I like this movie. I mean, it's a strange movie. Is it going to work for everyone? Absolutely not. It didn't work for a lot of people. And we argued, I argued with about this movie a lot with some of my closest friends and critics I love and trust. We were all over the map with this. The movie, it gives us this version of New York that is actually called a new Rome. And that is
modeled on the ancient civilization of Rome. And it is sort of asking big questions about the future and about alluming apocalypse. And are we becoming a fascist state? It's asking questions about fundamentally about civilization and specifically Western civilization, especially. The movie is quite theatrical in a lot of ways. The acting is very theatrical and declaratory in a way that I found really interesting and some might find off-putting. There's a
futuristic tinge to it. The movie is engaging with different layers of artifice and reality. There are times when the movie looks like old Hollywood complete with rear projection. And there's something very old-fashioned and almost classical about it. And there are times when the movie looks almost like something from the future, something that does not exist yet. And so the movie is kind of playing with our sense of time. And I just found all of this really stimulating and
interesting and new. And does it all work? No, are there parts of it that sort of, you know, fall flat maybe? But it's just, it's kind of thrilling to see a filmmaker like Kulpelo, who's 85 years old. One of the greatest filmmakers this country has ever produced. Coming out with a movie that in its idiosyncrasies is unlike anything out there on the landscape. You can find Justin Chang's review of Megalopolis at NewYorker.com.
I'm David Remnick, that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbis of Two N yards, with additional
music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, Calla Lea, David Krasnell, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman, with guidance from Emily Boateen and assistance from Michael May, Mike Kutchman, David Gabel, Alex Barge, Victor Guand, and Alejandra Decket. And special thanks this week to Chris Bannon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.
We all know KitKat bar's taste delicious, but what about how they sound? It's not just a catchy jingle. It's the satisfying crack of breaking off a piece of KitKat, followed by a crisp crunch. Oh, we forgot one other sound that a company is KitKat bars too. It's, or maybe it's more like, altogether KitKat bars are music to our ears and yummy flavors to our mouths. Have a break. Have a KitKat. Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the
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