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Even though Jonah is off this week, Rob Long has some personal news to share concerning his health and (like Hilaria Baldwin), his ethnicity. Also, John reviews Wonder Woman ’84 and Soul, Rob reveals the most successful man in show biz (no, it’s not himself), John picks the best director working today, and both pick their top 3 of 2020. Happy New Year to all GLoP listeners of all ethnicities and political persuasions.
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A Jonah-free GLoP? As the kids say, that sounds like a feature, not a bug.
Really? Rob gets Wizard Of Oz wrong? It was the Tin Man that wanted a heart, not the Cowardly Lion.
How much of a hurry to finish a line do you have to be in, to say that the Cowardly Lion got the heart that he wanted/needed?
Very classy. Kicking a man when he’s down with Covid.
Chef is on Netflix. It’s good.
Actually Rob Long has COVID, not Jonah.
It was a great podcast. Again.
2020…finished the year by joining – looking forward to the childhood pix of the Latino COVID sufferer. Happy New Year !
My all-time favorite GLoP episode. Thank you for all the laughs.
Can’t wait to see the jpeg….
Señor Long has been notified and your photo should be arriving in the next 24 hours. And welcome!
Agreed. I could have gone without the political stuff though. But I hope this trend of actually focusing on pop culture continues.
Good episode, although I can’t see the Mike Pence high-energy charisma train challenging Trump or most Republicans in 2024.
WW ’84 director Patty Jenkins was all of 13 in 1984. But she was born in Southern California (albeit in not in the ritzy part, but in Herman Mankiewicz’s preferred dry-out town of Victorville), and by the Bush 41 years apparently was taking visual arts at Cooper Union in the East Village of NYC. So while she was old enough to actually have understood 1984, her screenplay comes across as someone who understood it only after hearing the gripes of others in the New York higher education system and the general mindset towards Reagan of those in power over the past 30 years in Hollywood. Giving her the OK to both write and direct (Zack Snyder co-wrote the first film) at a time when Hollywood can’t keep progressive politics out of even their big budget films was just asking for trouble (and it will be interesting to see if Warners lets her also write the already green-lit WW 3 after this train wreck).
On “Star Wars”, the difference is that Disney so far has been smart enough to keep Kathleen Kennedy and the ideologues in her inner circle away from ‘The Mandalorian’, which when it began wasn’t important enough to deserve their gifts of narrative and characterization. Dave Filoni was brought over from the animated Clone Wars series, and Favreau to oversee him. The fact both like Star Wars as originally conceived by George Lucas and were willing to give the franchise’s fan base what they wanted is why the series has been praised, but the Kennedy faction at Lucasfilm does not seem to be happy about the results, or about the talk of salvaging Luke’s reputation that was trashed in “The Last Jedi” via Baby Yoda. (Where this works only if Rey doesn’t have a clue what Luke’s doing. Taking the sequel trilogy’s signature character down from having perfect instincts about everything looks to be causing a rift between the Kennedy and Favreau factions at Lucasfilm, which Bob Iger may have to finally pick sides on in 2021).
Welcome to Ricochet, Jenny!
John’s creation of Commentary’s daily podcast was a big plus this year!
Get well soon, Rob. I told you licking the railings in the NY subways was a bad idea.
Iger is no longer in day-to-day control of the company. That’s Bob Chapek and he has no connection to the movie side of the business whatsoever. Before assuming control as CEO he was head of the amusement parks and before that cut his teeth in marketing.
I personally loathe Bob Iger. I would get tons of company emails from him telling me that the people of the Walt Disney Company was its greatest asset, only to watch him go on firing sprees every two years at ESPN. That division carried Disney through some very lean years. But John Skipper was his boy. Under their leadership they signed a lot of bad rights deals, they encouraged the promotion of left wing politics and a lot of good people were fired when it all went south.
Iger sounds like every chowderhead in a “leadership” position at every company I’ve ever worked for, ever. The blah-blah stuff about people being the greatest asset, etc, kind of self-immolates the second revenues are down and if dividends need to get paid, then, well, people are getting fired.
I’m amazed that the Disney people learned nothing from allowing ESPN to politicize so much of their non-live sports programming under Skipper, and permitted Lucasfilm to go in the exact same direction, with the exact same results in terms of alienating a large part of their core audience (though by the time Skipper was replaced by Jimmy Pitaro, the self-inflicted damage that was “The Last Jedi” was already well toward completion).
We’ll see if Disney makes the same mistake a third time with MCU v2.0. Favreau looked to be headed in the same direction, with Bree Larson and Captain Marvel supposedly to be the cornerstone of the next generation of Marvel films, but they seem to have backed off of that a little, and Favreau has to see the reaction in the Star Wars universe to giving fans what they want. However, I think Female Thor is still in the MCU v2.0 batter’s box, so who knows if they’re learned any lessons.
Disney’s effort during the Obama years to exploit the H-1B visa program, to the point of hiring cheaper foreign workers whose visas tied them to the Mouse Factory, and then having them trained by the people Iger was firing because of the H-1B hires was an action that was met with condemnation on both the right and left. The crony caplitalist Dems and U.S. Chamber of Commerce Republicans were perfectly fine with it, but the blowback on the left may be why Iger quickly scuttled any plans to try and run for president as a Democrat in 2020.
Not that I’m expecting Rob to know anything about Star Wars, but I am expecting someone to remember that as great as Iron Man was that it was followed by Iron Man 2. I guess it shows how much of the conventional wisdom it is to hate Kathleen Kennedy: John AND Rob mentioned both The Lion King and The Jungle Book without ridiculing them. (YES, I would be happier with Filoni and Favreau in charge.)
Jon Favreau has definitely become the face of The Mandalorian creative team. But while he was not hand picked by George Lucas, Dave Filoni was and worked on seven seasons of Clone Wars with him. Favreau’s nerd cred is super strong and the two of them made an excellent team. But huge chunks of Mando’s success formula have a direct line of decent from The Clone Wars and Rebels.
What exactly does Favreau to do with any of that? The name you are looking for is Kevin Feige.
Loved this one guys! Made me LOL! Happy New Year!
I hope all of us loyal, longtime members get to see it too!
Muchas Gracias Senor Long.
When does that other guy come along and refer to Senorita Long? :-)
On the bright side of WW84, the “Trumpy” oil man is Hispanic, so he is not really very Trumpy. His main motive seems to be to show his little boy that he is not a failure.
The screenplay is weak,* but it actually explains why the “wishing stone” turns up in a heist at a shopping mall: the jewelry store is a front for smuggling antiquities.
The big action scene at the mall with Wondie wielding her magic lasso struck me as warmed over Spiderman, though that’s unfair to Spiderman.
*Wondie’s magically reincarnated boyfriend, a World War I biplane pilot, has never seen an escalator, but can fly a jet plane after fiddling with the switches for a couple of minutes.
This episode was so funny I have to listen again. Who knew a case of Covid could be made to sound hilarious. But why do only new subscribers get to see Rob’s photo? 😢
Rob Long gets John Barrymore’s line in Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century (1934) totally wrong, even backwards, in a sense.
Here it is, according to IMDb:
”Owen, take this creature who came to me as an office boy as Max Mendlebaum and who is now Max Jacobs for some mysterious reason and throw him into the street.”
The point of the joke is that the character had changed his Jewish surname, not to a gentile one, but to another Jewish surname.
I watched Soul and then Chef. Both very good.
That John and Rob predict Mike Pence will run for President in 2024 against Trump merely shows how out-of-touch they are.
While Democrats and RINOs would love to see the Republican Party divided this way, Pence will run as Trump’s designated successor or not at all.
But I don’t think Pence has the kind of attitude to carry it off. If he tried to show the same intestinal fortitude, I think it would come across as fake.
I started writing my 7s with bars on them in college. This was to ameliorate my bad handwriting. The bar distinguishes the 7 from a 1 where I left the bottom bar off. I could write a 1 with just the vertical slash but that might be mistaken for a lowercase l. There are a number of other ways I’ve adjusted my writing such that I could read equations after I’d scribbled them and forgotten them.