You’ve Got Mail – Open Pandora’s Fox

Full transcript of You’ve Got Mail – Open Pandora’s Fox.

0:00KT: Welcome back to another week in the For Your Reference household. And we've got another unrequited problematic rom com edition Oti. I also need to address hashtag fake Darcy's. Apparently, Tom Hanks thinks he's a Darcy, but you will come to see as we will all come to see that he is not so. Let's get on with the show. Colin Firth, five ever. Hey, friends and solitaire lovers. Welcome back to the For Your Reference podcast. You got your host, KT.

0:00Oti: And Oti.

0:00KT: Log

0:55KT: out of the over thirties chat room by using two fingers on the backspace key and meet me knowing that I don't know that you are meeting me. Thank you all for meeting us with You've Got Mail this week. We don't do rom coms a lot and I can foresee the rest of the episode is why Oti. Let's get into the general stats and information in regards to this film. It was released in December 1998. It was based off of a 1937 Hungarian play, Parfumerie, Yeah. And there were also two other adaptations,

1:37KT: but in regards to this film directed by Nora Ephron, writers of Nora and Delia Ephron, we had a budget of $65,000,000. I know New York is expensive, but I don't know where that money went, Oti. And a worldwide gross of $250,800,000. Oh, boy. That's a lot of yeah. That's a lot of generic Starbucks orders, Oti. Let's get into first impressions. I would suggest that you go and watch the only recognized BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice with the ever eternal universal KT splooshes many times daily to Colin Firth altar.

2:20Oti: Or for the second time, I'll plug this in. Pride and Prejudice Atlanta on Hulu. Again, there is a certain spice.

2:28KT: There is a certain seasoning you bring to the For Your Reference podcast, Oti.

2:28Oti: It wouldn't be your podcast if I didn't.

2:28KT: Are we welcome? I guess that is for you to decide friends and lovers. Or you can go and check out Bridget Jones. I don't classify Happiest Season as it's definitely problematic, but I don't recommend it as a rom com. But let's talk about this film Oti. Even when I suggested it, you still had it confused with, I think, the Billy Crystal Meg Ryan film, even though we're all about the orgasms.

2:58KT: So feel free to give a general sort of overview of if you've ever watched it. From what I understand, this was the first time you've watched it. Right?

2:58Oti: Yeah. This was a first time. I think

3:07Oti: somewhere between me growing up and this coming out, when people talked about You've Got Mail, in my head, I thought You Got Served. And I was like, yeah, You Got Served is amazing. This for you, little saint. Up until KT kept on saying, You've Got Mail, Tom Hanks. I'm like, Tom Hanks was like, You Got Served. Get out of here. But, you know, I thought it was good. I got a bit, you know, I got emotional at the end and that I think was just part of me being spiteful to KT because

3:42Oti: she hated it. Yeah. But it's a good movie. Like, it's hard to find a movie that you can see through and just enjoy it for what it is. And I think this just played to its strengths.

3:56KT: You know what? I and I'm the one that introduced it into our household. And I watched it a lot, especially during our long distance years. If you are longtime listeners, thank you. Continue to sit on our Jupiter's cock. But for those that are new to our podcast, we have talked a little bit here and there. Most of the time it's relevant about our life story and long distance was for a very long time a part of that.

4:27KT: But I I did watch that film while we were long distance, and I seem to resonate on it in some ways, like the pen pal sort of aspect of it. There obviously wasn't any sexting back then, but there was I think Birdie was the one saying that she was trying to have cybersex. But there you go, friends and lovers. It didn't get as nasty as it gets in the For Your Reference household indeed for sure. Yeah, but I do remember somewhat enjoying it,

5:00KT: but that was not how I felt this time around. I feel like I've watched it a handful of times, so I wouldn't say this is my second time watching it. I think part of the problem is, you know, when you have these rom coms, they are pieces of fiction. Fiction. Right? I'm sorry to say friends and lovers, if you thought steamy McDreamy was going to slip into your bed at night. But unfortunately for us uggers out there, we don't have a chance. Okay? But I think as you get older

5:29KT: or as I specifically my mind self, like, as I've gotten older, like, you start to realize that love isn't that. Right? And love shouldn't be that because God forbid any sort of rom com is a true life story. Or perhaps it's the many long suffering years that I felt that my image of love. I don't know. But this film, I felt like had a lot of problems. If you wanna take it from a point of fiction, then I suppose there are some moments that that you can find some sort of resonance,

6:06KT: not necessarily reprieve. You can feel some sort of warm and fuzzies, but unfortunately, Tom Hanks also wasn't impervious to the creepy rubbing my straight man boner up against you. What? Well, maybe maybe you're just seeing yourself on the screen. There were many sort of, like, no thank you sort of instances in this film. So there we go, Oti. I guess all of all of the love that you gave Pride and Prejudice, now you're transferring it here and I'm not loving a film that apparently

6:43KT: I used to enjoy. I don't know if I used to love it, but I used to enjoy it. So let's talk about some general sort of themes. This film is quite insular. Obviously, there are like some secondary characters, caricatures, I would say. But flesh out your secondary characters, you motherfuckers. And also spoiler spoiler spoiler, otherwise, most splooshy can we can we talk about Greg Kinnear? There was no problem with him in Mindgarden.

7:17Oti: Wow. So he was your Darcy on this. You need to stop.

7:21KT: Alright. That's the last one. You're my Darcy in Pride and Prejudice Atlanta. Oh, thank you. Okay. So there there are a lot of themes that are introduced in this film, and I guess I just wanted to touch on a bit of it. You know, both of us, we talk about being in IT and Oti is a tech aficionado. I wanna talk about the vessel of technology in regards to this film because, you know, the Y2K of it all because it was slowly approaching

7:53KT: the Y2K of it all. And and I guess how how technology was demonized, I guess the same way that people try and say social media is what made them cheat on their most beloveds. Yeah. You know?

7:53Oti: Dust drops are out there, mate.

7:53KT: Well, if you stop if you stop laying the traps, people won't fall for them, mate. But, know, there was talk of solitaire being the downfall of humanity, which apparently some governor in America actually tried to enforce that solitaire included with Minesweeper as well. And then we also had Greg Kinnear's character,

8:29KT: a lone Reed in the corrupt sands of commerce. That's what I thought I sounded like in our Parasite episode.

8:37Oti: Now you're just dicks, dicks, dicks.

8:41KT: Poor dicks. Well, I can handle it all. I I will tell you that much, friends and lovers. But let's talk about technology and how it was utilized in this film. The intro was very no nostalgic, obviously not at the time, but it's very nostalgic watching it now. Very Windows '95, '96. It was before we had experienced whatever the fuck was Windows Vista. The comic sans of Windows. I feel like that's only going to land for, like, 0.0001% of our listeners, but you're most welcome. Mhmm. Well, I thought

9:16Oti: I thought it was, you know, it was such a throwback dialing up. Last time you

9:16KT: Do you remember using dial up internet?

9:16Oti: Yeah. I think those are just the times when I didn't comprehend how vast the internet was gonna be and wow. It just took me back. And I think seeing them or watching a situation where that was the thing and knowing how we had to communicate long distance as well, I was like kinda hooked. I was like, oh, mate, you know, just replace Dial up with some shitty 3G. And it's the same.

9:51Oti: It's the same, man. I felt Kathleen and Joe's pain. More so Kathleen, I think. She was putting herself out there. She was ready to meet Joe quite early. And, oh, man, I think we'll get into this sort of later in the in the in the episode, but wow. Yeah.

10:09KT: And and shout out to T-Pain. We just watched the This Is Pop on Netflix. And T-Pain talks about when you're on the frontier of change, people just automatically reject it because it's something that they don't understand or they don't know. And I think that's how people were with technology, how it was a phase. And I feel like a lot of, like, traditional sort of media had a lot in the hand of poo pooing,

10:32KT: you know, the digital age as well. So technology definitely plays a big part. And don't worry, friends and lovers, when it hits 5PM, I have muted my teams. So no one can contact me till the next day. But it's interesting to see, I guess, a time capsule, how technology was viewed in the late nineties. I want to talk about capitalism as we always like to do. I tentatively penciled in gentrification,

11:03KT: but Kathleen seemed like she was kind of rich. So I don't know if it works if if the mega rich closed the shop of a rich. I think YG put it best. Big bank, take little bank.

11:03Oti: Oh, the type of OT you gonna need to save. The type of money you gonna need a bank.

11:03KT: Yep. See friends and lovers, we can be a hip hop music podcast if we wanted to. Go and listen to our Belly episode.

11:27Oti: Well, I think, yeah, we knew what was gonna happen. I think the the most irritating thing to me was Kathleen's naivety at the start. Yeah. She's supposed to be this sluttered woman who's, you know, who's run this business for quite a while, but she saw no issue at all. Like, oh, there's a big mega bookstore that offers more than just fucking boring books. Yeah. They're offering an actual experience. It's not just a matter of, hey, let me check-in, check out a book and I'm out. Well, according to her, they weren't offering

12:00KT: the level of experience and I guess the learnedness that you're talking about. But it is interesting because I guess to everyone aside from her, even people in her her store, her employees,

12:12KT: they saw the writing on the wall.

12:12Oti: Yeah. The end was nigh for everyone apart from her. And then to to sort of see, I think the journey of her realizing that, hey, shit's bad Yeah. Was quite something to behold because up until she thought, you know, I'd go toe to toe with Joe, put some media up, you know, do some press, and it'll make a change, but it didn't matter. You know, at the end of the day, if you're giving out 35% discounts, know,

12:40Oti: no one's gonna come to you, who's gonna pay more for what?

12:40KT: Well, you're hemorrhaging a loss. Right? Like, you're operating at a loss, especially if you're new, whether you're big or whether you're small, you're going to be hemorrhaging at a because you wanna get clientele, you wanna get people in there. It's to hopefully sustain it to a point where you can survive

13:00KT: and a small bookstore like that couldn't survive. And it's like you said, like, it's one thing to have that sentiment because it was your mom's store and you grew up there and you have so much feels and obviously understandably non spoilery, go and watch Snowfall, especially season four of Snowfall because my beloved little baby Franklin does something in that sort of regard. But at the same time, she had

13:28KT: feel like she was she was she was too smart to not know that that was about to happen. I think we assumed she was smart. Wow. We've been to the house. She's smart. Would you say Joe's smart? Let's unpack that in after hours, friends and lovers. But it's the capitalism of it all. And, you know, love whenever I try to eloquently condense hard social issues, I always reference South Park. And South Park has a great episode where when the community tried to like burn it down, it just keeps building itself

14:03KT: back up. And it's there, it's going to stay there. I guess the irony, if I can be Jon Hamm and Jack Donaghy in 30, the irony here is you've got bookstores, physical media that is struggling at the hands of digital, sort of like the Amazon of it all, because it started off as a bookstore, right? So it's kind of like a dog eat dog world, right? But I guess in this portion of time, big bookstore

14:33KT: chains working.

14:33Oti: Yeah, they're working. You might as well call Joe Fox, Joe Bezos Fox because that's there was nothing that was gonna do the country was gonna do to take

14:45Oti: his thing down.

14:45KT: And shout out to the Dave Chappelle role in this film. Yeah. Apparently, he turned down a role in Forrest Gump because he thought that the film was gonna flop. And obviously, he regretted it for the rest of his life. And Tom Hanks said, I I I will definitely work with you sometime in the future. And that's how this came about.

14:45Oti: Oh, was he supposed to be Bubba?

14:45KT: Imagine the trajectory. Imagine imagine Bubba Gump in the club when Tupac's playing. But he he brings some really interesting sentiment,

15:24KT: you know, into this film as well. And he's like, you know, they're going to demonize us, but after a while, they're going to come in droves. Right? And even later on in the film, he talks about how this is a well oiled machine. He doesn't need to he does shit all night. It quans itself at that point. Yeah. Pretty much. But, yeah, the the capitalism of it all is quite interesting. I do wonder because I've always I've always viewed living in New York as expensive.

15:52KT: And this is back when Brooklyn wasn't gentrified, so it must have been expensive. Right? So I don't even understand how I know she said she had a little money saved away, but me with my, you know, migrant parents, a little money means a couple of coins for bread and milk tomorrow. Like, she said she had a little money saved away and she didn't seem to be worried about the fact that she's about to sell her store. Aside from sentiment,

16:18Oti: I think financially she was fine. Yeah. She seemed fine, man. She owns property in New York. So

16:25Oti: she ain't worrying anytime soon.

16:25KT: So that's why I didn't call it gentrification because she wasn't necessarily being pushed out of the stores because she was poor. But yeah, definitely a lot to take away in regards to the film. I do like that it had some textural layers in regards to beyond the sort of rom com. That was kind of what kept me going in this film. Let's move on to the next theme. Slander,

16:54KT: I would like to call it. There are references too, but then even the characters kind of try to draw, fail, just fail to draw similarities between their characters

17:05KT: and mister Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet.

17:05Oti: No, I think it was quite stark to me at least. I thought Kathleen and Joe are both Darcy's

17:14Oti: to certain extent.

17:14KT: Oh, they were both darling.

17:20Oti: Kathleen hadn't seen the oh, she was a suffering type, you know, living just to be married off to some rich land. No, man. She had her own she was with Frank, you know? And I think part of these movies where they might try and paint

17:39Oti: Frank as some cheesy boyfriend who doesn't really deserve all or something. I'm glad they didn't go down that route or try and paint him as bad. Yeah. I think just showing that I think that was one of the most amicable breakups I've ever seen in TV history. But it made it so unrealistic. I don't love you. I don't love you. No, bro. It's all cool. Yeah. Alright. Woo hoo. Craig, Goatee, David. Who are you with now? You know, it was it was some unbelievable

18:04Oti: stuff right there.

18:04KT: Yeah. No. But that was very unbelievable. It was very unbelievable to me. But I would like to officially, as much as you can officially on a podcast, denounce any sort of correlations between Pride and Prejudice and this film.

18:22Oti: Wait. So we have Kathleen being really mean dickish

18:27Oti: and

18:27KT: Okay. So that was like one or two lines of dialogue and you're pinning her whole personality.

18:27Oti: I'm pinning her personality. I'm just drawing similarities with Darcy. You have your rich rich guy,

18:39Oti: Joe Fox, who seemingly just is oblivious to everyone else's suffering.

18:44KT: You said a lot in Pride and Prejudice. I didn't realize you still had some leftover things to Tissues that can be absorbed by tissues, mate. Yeah. But Darcy's not the one, bro. Don't come for him, fam. Cool, Ed. Cool. Cool. But in in any case, there's definitely no parallels, but I do love that. I'm sure that, like, as much as I feel like I'm a book person, I know I'm not even though please don't kick me out of the fan club. I'll be outside with a table and some lemonade.

19:16KT: Like, I know there are people that don't like the adaptations of film and TV to be on the actual book, but I love seeing Colin Firth in this film. He was my favorite part of this film. Wow. Let's move on. Let's move on. I do not care for and I do not like Joe. I don't like him. He's the first instance of a catfish. He is the ground zero incel and he's disgusting. He's fucking gross. Thoughts, feelings?

19:52Oti: I think he played his role quite perfectly, to be honest. Yeah. To be the asshole dickhead.

19:58KT: Like he made Hugh Grant look like the most pleasant guy around. Nah. Come on now. So I wanna talk about the pen pal nature of it all. And then we can talk about how it trickles into the real life because we haven't really talked about them as characters. But I wanna talk about the vessel and the vehicle of being pen pals on AOL. Takes me back to my high school days when MSN was very new

20:29KT: and you would you know, there'll be giggle gaggle games that you would play pretending to appear offline, but you're really just waiting for someone to get online. So you can be like, lol, wrong convo, but while I'm here, just come and sit on me daddy.

20:45Oti: Good on you, man. I think our internet was more restricted than that. It had small windows. We couldn't pretend we were offline. No. Oh, really? Yeah.

20:55KT: Alright.

20:56Oti: Yeah, mate. Hey. Struggle Street right here. When you're down Struggle Street with Struggle Internet, you can't pretend. No, bro.

20:56KT: Well, the concept of having pen pals

21:06KT: wasn't new. Like, that existed even before, like, digital, like AOL messenger. Did you ever have a pen pal in school?

21:06Oti: Yeah. They taught you to assign us pen pals.

21:06KT: Where was yours from?

21:06Oti: America.

21:06KT: Oh, I thought this was going to be some Cloud Atlas shit where we had been writing letters to each other the whole time. Don't correct me on Cloud Atlas. Don't be that one specific dickhead that corrects people on Cloud Atlas mythology.

21:34Oti: Actually

21:34KT: In

21:38KT: our French class in high school, we had pen pals from France. Oh. I'm pretty sure it was just our French teacher, but it's fine. Yeah. We used to have rotating pen pals yearly, so quite weird. Based on the high school I went to, I don't think they would have paid for the postage, so I'm pretty sure it was my French teacher. Yeah. I don't think my dad sent those letters anywhere. Oh, man. But, like, in this film, I I guess it it is pivotal to,

22:06KT: I guess, the the heights and the emotions and and the progressions arguably with some characters. But the the the character sort of development and the intertwining of storylines that we have, you know, these emails become, you know, foundational to the whole feel and the pull of the film. I

22:26KT: I did like the pacing of it in the sense that they were sending emails the whole time. And I think from Kathleen's point of view, it was very controlled. Like she felt like she was in control and she was going at a pace that she could handle. And then out of nowhere, they started instant messaging. You never got like it hits different. Like you're never going to feel those feels ever again.

22:47Oti: Oh, guaranteed,

22:48Oti: man.

22:48KT: While we're here, let's talk about a foundational qualm that I had while watching the film. And it had to do with the pen pal persona of Joe, as well as the dickhead persona in real life of Joe. Because this is this was a problem that I was having in this film. And you see it, you just wanna poke the bear in the cage. Right? And you just kept saying these nasty little things to me, which usually is splooshy, But in this case, was just infuriating. Yeah. I don't like Joe as a character,

23:22KT: as a label, or as a motherfucking establishment. He's a fucking problem. And identify people like this in your romantic life, you need to hadouken them into landfill friends and lovers. Go and listen to The Sum of Us, which in the linear timeline was our previous episode. But okay. There's there's a lot that I have to say in regards to Joe, but the reason why I don't like him is because he has this I don't prescribe to toxic masculinity,

23:53KT: but he he has this little dick syndrome of always feeling like he needs to be the smartest person in the room. Even if that means he's withholding key information that would just put the other person, I e Kathleen, on equal footing. He needed them to be on an equal footing so he could feel better about himself. All of this snarky. He was he was snarky Sorkin in email form.

24:20KT: Go and listen to our Few Good Men because there's much better dialogue in that film. Wow. But he was a snarky Sorkin in his emails. Right? Oh, Starbucks uses a way for people to be able to generically fulfill to who they are as people through their coffee order. Fuck out of here. Well. Yeah. The crescendo that I'm leading to my love is he knew he was the counterpart

24:46KT: to Kathleen's pen palship. Right? And first we thought that he was going to stand her up. And then he should have just done it even though that would have been gross. He should have just done it because what he proceeded to do was so little dick energy, it was disgusting.

25:01KT: He came in, he was like, oh, where's your friend? Why isn't your friend here? It's fucking gross. Why are you playing games with someone that you're apparently so attracted with and you just wanna learn more about?

25:01Oti: I think it was smart dick energy. I think he played it out quite well because

25:17Oti: he was trying to join these two personalities. Joe Fox, the obnoxious rich guy that Kathleen knows and hates, who's who just shut down her mother's bookstore Yeah. And this NY152 guy who they kept on interacting quite well, they understood each other, all those assemblies of of those spark of romance in the air. So to join those two together, to make those two become one, he had to play it smart. You can't

25:17KT: Don't just

25:46KT: bring international treasure spy skills into this.

25:51Oti: They needed he needed rather to merge those personalities, to make himself Joe Fox, not be that dickhead. Because when he if he had gone there and be like, hey, I'm NY152, Kathleen would have been like, fuck out of here. Without a shadow of doubt.

25:51KT: Hey friends and lovers. It's KT from the For Your Reference podcast.

26:11KT: Possible PSA, possible FYR curriculum, Oti just sampled to you his pickup artist course. The first topic being classic manipulation. Do you not hear, sir, that what you were saying was woefully, toxically manipulative?

26:30Oti: Game is game,

26:30KT: Not

26:38KT: only do you bring us spice, you make our podcast more accessible. Dick it. No. But what I'm saying is when you lay all the cards out on the table, yeah, it's not fucking great. Right? And the the you there will be an immediate rejection from Kathleen. Cool. New York specifically has millions of people. So let's skip on our merry way. I know it makes a terrible screenplay, but that's the end of the film. Like, what? No. Ridiculous. But it's like it it it it's like the PG

27:15KT: sanitized version of the Netflix show You. Right. Just cut out all the scenes of Joe Fox wanking on a doorstep opposite Kathleen's bookstore.

27:29Oti: Wow.

27:30KT: Wow. But it was genuinely manipulative. Yeah. All the facts doesn't sound great, but why does the destination have to be that they have to end up together? And that's part of the fucking problem with rom coms. Right? And we talked about this in Sum of Us. What I loved about it is they had Greg and he wasn't a dickhead and then he stayed a dickhead at the end of the film. Right? And that's usually what happens with generic pedestrian,

27:59KT: if I could steal a Kenya Barris black AF word, rom com. And that's the problem. If you watch it as fiction, then good for you. I think a lot of us keep Katherine Heigl in fiction. Then that's fine. Right? But you know, maybe it's not fiction because I'm starting to realize that people are very messy. And I'm starting to realize that after the whole Malcolm and Marie discourse. Like,

28:24KT: I used to think

28:24Oti: That's another Sunday night at someone's place. Right?

28:28KT: Yeah. Right? But I guess that's part of the quandary that I'm navigating. At first, I thought this was far out fiction. And then I'm realizing there are a lot of messy people out there. Technology is just making it more available for us to be messy everywhere on everybody.

28:47Oti: But I think he just needed to to to try and peel that veneer off so that Kathleen can see him for who he is. And that's part Joe Fox and part NY152. The only thing going for Joe is that he had a dog. And me, Kathleen herself, if you if you wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth, she was like, I think

28:47KT: You never called Tom Hanks that horse?

28:47Oti: If you wanna hear it from the horse's mouth, at the very end she said, I wished it was you.

29:18KT: Vomit.

29:18Oti: I wished you a 1152.

29:22KT: And that's where you got emotional. Yeah. Dick it.

29:27Oti: I was like, that is game. Come on now.

29:27KT: Take

29:32KT: it. You can have it. Leave me alone. Take it, but leave me alone. Please spare me. Absolutely spare me. I do not I do not need that. That was disgusting. Okay. Let's talk about Kathleen because I have positive things to say about Kathleen. I wanna go back to Joe in a second, but let's talk about some positives. The emotional pull in this film was successfully executed via Kathleen and the memories of her mom and what continued her in trying to build and then continue to sustain the bookstore.

30:10KT: Really there was some moments where I really felt some deep pockets of resonance when she was talking about her mom and trying to fight for the bookstore, albeit naive, which we've talked about, But that's where you get the emotion in this film. I loved seeing Kathleen just as a character.

30:29KT: I love seeing her navigate the world. And I guess the compliment would be, she's not Elizabeth Bennet. Because Elizabeth Bennet, we we talked about it. She's like Lisa in Coming to America. She's that strong independent woman until you wave Pemberley in her pussy valley and then she's

30:44Oti: Oh, I can fall for Darcy now. Look at that estate. What the fuck?

30:51KT: And and I guess in way of of, like, double ticks for writing, Kathleen didn't come off as that. But it might just be because she had some riches herself. So it wasn't necessarily a rags to, you know, hold on to the money bags of riches. Yeah. It was like flying first class to getting your own private jet.

31:12Oti: Okay. Like, levels. So to me, Kathleen was, you know, I think if it wasn't Meg Ryan playing Kathleen, I would have been right up hating her character.

31:24KT: Casting is very important.

31:25Oti: Casting is very important. Yes. I think Meg Ryan played such a big part in me believing and wanting happiness and and and Yeah. Future

31:35Oti: successes for Kathleen.

31:35KT: It's like a little baby bird. Like, you just wanna hold her and make sure she's okay. Yep. Anything less and I'll be like, Meg, get in the bin. Because let's be real about this. Everything about her in this film was genuine. There was a big percentage that was naive, but she was genuine the whole time. And that's part of my problem with Joe's character was it was all smoke and mirrors and it was all manipulation.

31:59Oti: Well, Kathleen, I think what we got to see at least in terms of her character development is how breaking free of feeling as if she needed to be boxed in, feeling that she couldn't really express herself or say what she really wanted. I think that was really good to see. You know, from her realizing that, you know what? This is a dead rubber relationship with Frank,

32:23Oti: and I'm just gonna tell him. And it was just lucky that Greg was feeling this that Frank was feeling the same way.

32:23KT: Hi, friends and lovers. It's KT again from the For Your Reference podcast with another PSA.

32:36KT: Stop saying you're a good person and omitting the shitty things you say. That was part of a problem I had with Kathleen. She's like, oh, I'm such a good person. I wouldn't usually say this, but you fucking said it and just own it. Yeah. Just like us when eventually people take out of context sound bites, just fucking take accountability.

32:55Oti: True. True. I think she needed to own it more. It's not, oh, laugh anime laugh at the corner. I

33:03Oti: didn't do that.

33:03KT: No, man. That's subtitles on your giggles.

33:09Oti: Like, just own it. You said some really crappy, hurtful things to Joe, which I really was. I was like, you know what? Kathleen is a shit person just because of what she said. You know?

33:20KT: Sticks and bones, man. It sticks and stones me. I don't know how you idiom in Kenya. I think I use the correct bones. There's a high level of intensity right there. Let's let's focus on the coupling of it all. Apparently, this is one of the only sort of iterations of the adaptation of the play where the protagonists weren't in a relationship. So all of them were single, but in this film, they wanted to be extra messy. So they were in respective relationships.

33:52KT: I wanna talk about Kathleen and I wanna talk about Frank. You've kind of touched on it already. I don't think there was anything wrong with Frank as a character.

33:52Oti: No, it was alright.

33:52KT: So I guess that's good we don't have like bias writing, especially because when they're trying to prime her, the audience, it's to demonize the character so we feel better about the potential infidelity.

34:15Oti: Yeah. I think my problem more so was with Joe's better half because they tried to make her really bitchy and like me, she's the carbon copy of Joe. Can we talk about it?

34:29KT: Can we talk about it Oti? Could you be anymore?

34:34Oti: Mhmm. They try to make it as if, oh, what the hell is Joe with this lady? But no, man. She's exactly the same as you. She's just speaking. She's just she's just saying it. And can we talk about it? Because it is so exhausting

34:49KT: to have to, and in some cases happily interact with other people only to find out that they are and they were shit all along. Like just don't don't try and pretend that you aren't. Right? And that that was the problem with Joe because he thought he was a good person and that's part of the problem. Just like Lawrence from Insecure. You you present yourself as a nice guy, but you're actually a fuck boy.

34:49Oti: Issa made him a fuck boy. Me. Hey.

34:49KT: We are not getting into this.

35:21KT: Not not in the holy year of Issa Rae. How dare you, sir?

35:27Oti: We'll have a we'll have a battle we'll have a battle at the end of Insecure.

35:33KT: We have two episodes of Insecure covering all four seasons, Friends and Lovers, so make sure you go and check that out as well. Jay Ellis is also in Escape Room. That's all. But that's that's the problem that we have because Joe wanted to convince people that he was a good person. I don't know, man. Like, if you're shit, just be a shit person. Mhmm. Put that next to your live, laugh, love in your kitchen, friends and lovers. Because there was nothing wrong with Patricia, you know. She she she was just as venomous,

36:08KT: but she didn't she didn't make any illusion to the fact that she was anything otherwise.

36:08Oti: Yeah. She didn't pretend, man.

36:08KT: Yeah. So what's so good about Joe then?

36:08Oti: He had hopes to be better. I think that's the difference.

36:08KT: Sounds like a fuck boy thing to say.

36:25Oti: I think Joe realized, you know what? I wanna be better. I wanna be better for Kathleen. Be better for yourself.

36:32KT: That's another PSA.

36:33Oti: Be better for yourself, friends and lovers. We're talking about rom com. Self love isn't part of this, man. Don't

36:40KT: don't because rom com me. Don't pickles Christmas me.

36:46Oti: It's a whole reason. They don't need a they don't need ex machina. It's just in the genre, rom com. That's why.

36:56KT: If you say so, going back to Frank, I liked him as a character. It was reminiscent of Carcetti from The Wire when he was watching his own interviews or in any instance, once even Birdie was reading something he wrote and he was mouthing the words like, why didn't you say it yourself then? We just gotta do that. I really liked him. I enjoyed him as a character. Yeah. He was a bit indulgent, but Kathleen didn't seem to have a problem with that up until she didn't have a problem, which is absolutely fine in relationships.

37:24KT: Right? But there was nothing wrong with Frank specifically.

37:28Oti: Nah, he was alright. He was fun.

37:31KT: Him buying a typewriter while he had another typewriter and apparently they were different reminds me of Oti and the PS4 fiasco in our household many years ago.

37:43Oti: Wow. They were different.

37:46KT: Well, so so you maintain to this day, Joe Oti Fox. Mhmm. There was a rhetorical question that was posed in the film that I wanna bring into this podcast. Is it infidelity if you're talking to someone through email? If you're yearning for physical intimate relationship with them, I think it is. If you hear Jodeci playing, you know something nasty is about to go down. But I thought that was quite interesting because it was very early in digital sort of exchanges.

38:18Oti: Yep.

38:18KT: I liked how Joe Fox's character was probably the genesis of hashtag film Twitter and him being a film bro and quoting Godfather all throughout the film.

38:30Oti: The answers to life's problems. Watch the Godfather trilogy.

38:30KT: Maybe just one and two.

38:30Oti: One and two. For the Corleone,

38:39KT: nasty. But I wonder what that's like in real life when you quote films and TV like we do. I hope we don't come off as Tom Hanks. Yeah. I have something that I know hot takes has its negative sort of terms, but I do have something potentially foie go. And I guess before I say it, is there anything else you would like to say before we wrap up this episode, Oti?

38:39Oti: No, I'm good.

38:39KT: I don't get Tom Hanks as a lead in a rom com. Because I know, especially with Pamela's Panini's,

39:17KT: you know, they had Tom Hanks reign in SNL. And I know he is referred to as being the father of America, but that also means Chet Hanks, the white boy summer of it all, is the son of America, which kind of fits. I don't think he fits in daddy wood. I think he's just in father wood by himself. I just don't see him as a lead guy. As much as I don't necessarily fall for the charms of Hugh Grant, even though I've mentioned him more than once in this episode.

39:50KT: I I get it. Like, I get it. I don't get but I also don't understand how Billy Crystal would be a lead in a rom com either.

39:58Oti: Wow.

40:00KT: Well, let's be real about it. There's like though there was an ongoing Family Guy cutaway where muscle men's in the eighties and the nineties just had their pants up really high and they're wearing singlets. Do we call them wife beaters in America? I don't know. I just don't get it. And his voice isn't very it isn't lubricating for my splooshes. Wow. He just sounded like a father telling me to go to bed and I'm like, okay then. We'll unpack that in For Your Reference After Hours. Wow.

40:36KT: And I also wanna say that Oti cosigns everything I say. Just like Dido, I will go down with this ship just like Oti.

40:44Oti: Jumping out of that ship.

40:50KT: That got more heated than I was anticipating. How about you Oti? Mhmm. Alright. Let's finish off in a segment We call For Your Reference,

40:59KT: Oti.

40:59Oti: I only want to miss the beat, so I'll recommend Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle.

41:05KT: Oh, Joe Versus the Volcano.

41:08Oti: I'll

41:10KT: I'll leave that for you. I heard there are Polynesians that have Fanta cans as their clothes.

41:15Oti: Wow.

41:16KT: I'm not sure if I'm ready for that journey. I'm still healing from Moana. And I will reference surprise to absolutely nobody, the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice. Atlanta.

41:31Oti: Woah. Nice. You've I've finally convinced you. All good. All good.

41:31KT: If

41:38KT: you would like to experience fakeotie on Twitter and Instagram, we're @ForYourRefPod. Write us an email at hello@fyrpodcast.com. We're also on Joe Oti Fox podcast if you like to leave a rating and review. And we'll see you guys next week. See you. Bye.