As impossible as it is to imagine if all you ever do is listen to his razor sharp mental gymnastics and displays of intellectual acuity on the podcast, but Bad Dad Dan can from time to time be forgetful so it wasn't completely clear to me at first whether this week’s Top 5 Ice was chosen despite having the similarly themed Snow selection by Dan himself only a few weeks back. And hopefully whilst you ruminate on that shock revelation about the reliability or otherwise of Dan's memory, it will distract you from the fact that I don't actually have a proper way to end this paragraph.
THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND is in some ways a very conventional Judd Apatow film: aspiring tattooist and self-medicating slacker Scott Carlin (Pete Davidson) is an acerbic 24-year-old with delayed onset adulthood. When firefighter Ray (Bill Burr) begins dating his mother (Marisa Tomei), Scott struggles to accept their relationship whilst finally being forced to confront the death of his father, also a firefighter, who died in action heroically attempting a dangerous rescue. Apatow's body of work often places male protagonists with arrested emotional development in situations of extreme life crises, but this is an unusually poignant and moving story arc, made even more authentic and real when you realise that Davidson's own fireman father died during 9/11. An honest and real, if not always likeable, depiction of someone with depression and anxiety processing real-life trauma, the movie finishes with just enough hope to feel uplifting without being corny. Excellent support from Maude Apatow and especially Bel Powley levels out what is a male-heavy cast which also features a great turn from real life former firefighter Steve Buscemi.
Dan picked THE LOUD HOUSE on his daughter’s recommendation, so we watched two episodes "Left in The Dark" and "Get the Message". 11-year-old Lincoln Loud is desperate to watch the live season finale of his favourite tv show about the Academy of Really Good Ghost Hunters (ARGGH) but as the only boy in a family of eleven, he'll have to come up with a way to occupy all ten sisters before he can commandeer the TV. An instantly relatable premise turns out to be a great way to introduce the siblings, with each character getting an early chance to make an impression and some wholesome values on display as whilst the siblings fight it's clear that they respect, love and look after each other which is especially important given that the unexplainedly absent parents are almost certainly drug addicts or dead. The show has extremely strong representation which is something that we like to see with an interracial gay married couple, a trans character and a bisexual. Bit of everything really, so that's nice. Continuing the long tradition here at Bad Dads of finding out that art we like has been made by people of dubious character, writer Chris Savino was Me Too'd like so many other pieces of sh*t we have talked about on the pod. What a majestic world we live in.
We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. Try us on twitter @dads_film, on Facebook B
We love to hear from our listeners! By which I mean we tolerate it. If it hasn't been completely destroyed yet you can usually find us on twitter @dads_film, on Facebook Bad Dads Film Review, on email at baddadsjsy@gmail.com or on our website baddadsfilm.com.
Until next time, we remain...
Bad Dads
