Sean Nance reaches up from his gray sofa and turns out the lights.
With the flick of a switch in his Vancouver home, Nance has initiated what might be the most ridiculous, hilarious, heartwarming yet masochistic weekly ritual in Clark County. It’s July 18, and Nance and his good friend Eli Schwartz are watching “Transformers: The Last Knight.”
To be clear, Schwartz, 31, and Nance, 33, don’t like this movie, the fifth installment of the Transformers’ series. But their goal is to watch it each week for an entire year, and record their podcast, “All Aboard the Hype Train,” after each viewing. They will continue until “Bumblebee,” the sixth Transformers movie comes out Dec. 21.
This is week 27. They are more than halfway done.
“We have to fight this dumb movie every week, and not let it beat us,” said Schwartz, an industrial supply salesman.
Schwartz and Nance aren’t alone in their disdain for “The Last Knight.” The film only received a 17 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 27 score on Metacritic.
Barry Hertz of Toronto’s The Globe and Mail newspaper wrote: “It is not so much lazy filmmaking as it is a very expensive middle finger to common sense and the basic concept of entertainment.”
So why would anyone subject themselves to a middle finger every week for a year?
“Bad movies are a lot more fun to review than good ones,” Nance said minutes before adding that, “other people’s misery is entertaining.”
The real reason they’re attempting this feat runs deeper. Nance and Schwartz are best friends. They met in their freshmen year of high school at St. Helens High School in Oregon. After high school, Schwartz and Nance lived in New York State, Oklahoma, Astoria, Ore., Portland and Vancouver together over the course of a decade.
But Nance, who is a machinist with Kyocera, got married in April, after moving out of a house with Schwartz and his family last summer — Schwartz has a wife and two kids himself. Schwartz could sense their friendship slowly fracturing with adult responsibilities and commitments creeping in.
At the time, Schwartz was listening to a podcast called “The Worst Idea of all Time,” where comedians Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery watch the same awful movie, and review it every week for a year. Schwartz saw an opportunity to save his friendship.
“I realized that as we were getting older, we were growing apart. I didn’t want to lose my buddy, and I didn’t want to cease that friendship,” Schwartz said. “This would be fun because it would be something stupid we could get involved with. The ritual and the regularity of it would help suture our friendship together and keep us closer.”
Energy drinks a must
The movie viewing and podcast recording generally takes place on Wednesday nights, with the podcast posted online Friday or Saturday. Schwartz and Nance eat dinner out, then grab snacks and energy drinks before watching. They takes notes throughout the two-and-a-half-hour movie. They’ve developed so many theories about the film at this point that it’s as if they’re watching a different movie than they were when they started watching in early January.
Schwartz’s notes look like scribbled conspiracy theories — scrambled ideas in thought bubbles, sometimes connected to other thought bubbles with lines. Nance’s notes are neat full thoughts and sentences.
Nance’s Pomeranian Chihuahua Rocky sometimes sits on their laps during the movie. They have five copies of the film — two regular DVDs, two Blu-rays and one digital version — and cycle viewings between their homes. One of their Blu-ray copies is beginning to burn out because it has been watched so much (though unverifiable, it’s likely they have watched “Transformers: The Last Knight” more than anyone on Earth).
On the July 18 watching, they snacked on Muddy Buddies, banana chips, peanut M&M’s and peach rings. Around the 10th time they watched the movie, Schwartz started having trouble staying awake, so energy drinks became a must.
Schwartz purposefully buys gross energy drinks because he wants his drink choice to be thematically consistent with the movie. They have, at times, had to will each other through viewings. It’s a comparable experience to working a day job you despise with your best friend.
“There are weeks where I don’t want to do it, but I know I have to for Sean,” Schwartz said. “And there are weeks where Sean doesn’t want to do it, but he knows that he has to for me.”
Schwartz gave Nance a bye week from the movie for his honeymoon. Schwartz watched and recorded the podcast with his wife Mandy that week. Mandy mentioned that as crazy as their feat is, it takes “imagination and talent” to watch the same movie each week, and produce a different podcast each time. Schwartz also has utilized one bye week himself, and they posted a previously recorded buffer podcast to fill in. Outside of those exceptions, they’ve been watching it every week since they started.
After a viewing is done, they tape their hour-long podcast, and finish up around 10 or 11 p.m. The podcast averages nearly 50 listeners. They’ve had a couple notable guests: John Wilson, co-founder of the Razzie Awards, the Academy Awards for the worst films; and Jack Packard, an editor of Red Letter Media, a film and video production company. The Packard episode had about 1,300 listeners.
Nance and Schwartz said they aren’t partaking in this hellish experiment for fame. They both would rather have this become more of a Clark County staple than a national viral attraction. Their hope is the Kiggins Theatre or another local venue will let them host a screening and live podcast with a Q&A in mid-October before the holiday season begins, and they enter their final run.
Schwartz and Nance aren’t sure what comes next. They’ll probably find another bad movie to watch. At the very least, “Transformers: The Last Knight” made them better friends.
“We shouldn’t be sad when it’s over,” Schwartz said. “We should be proud of what we did, even if what we did is nothing important to anyone.”
