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The full title of this podcast (which we almost never use) is GLoP Culture and this week, we bring it: a little Rank Punditry® on the Comey media blitz, some thoughts on the books business and how it relates to Jonah’s new book Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy (yes, you should buy the book. Go ahead, we’ll wait….). Also Rob Long takes a trip, and finally, what are the four moves that define you? The GLoPsters weigh in with theirs. Leave yours in the comments. And buy the book!
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Until John mentioned My Favorite Year, you guys failed big time on the 4 movies thing. I’ll accept Jonah’s Day of the Triffids, but Rob absolutely failed. Not because of the choices, but for the reasons why the movies were important related to the movies themselves. John is absolutely correct on My Favorite Year, and he even made sense on the Poseidon Adventure. Like I said, I’ll grant Jonah’s Day of the Triffids. But Rob seems constitutionally imcapable of admitting that any film, TV show, song, poem, novel, or what have you–has ever spoke to his soul. I guess that’s why we love him, his insider Hollywood cynicism. He’s an unmoved mover, like Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, but it makes him sorta inhuman as well. I suspect he’s lying.
H’mmm…I think I’d go the opposite way unless Jonah has a chronic fear of wandering around blind and in danger of being eaten by a house plant that he didn’t fully explicate. Or the alienation my eleven-year-old self felt at the end of a movie with a clever imagining of interstellar reproduction, the also clever blindness thing, a monster superior to the Japanese rubber monsters typical of the time (low bar) that was given little screen time (in line with the earlier conversation about how to do cheap movies), and a horrible, horrible, horrible ending. Sea water? No one noticed that under no circumstances do Triffids surf? There was no shame in stealing an ending from H.G. Wells, which was pretty lame when he used it? And then to cap it with a narrator intoning how marvelous that the sea, which gave us life, comes through one more time in the clutch, good old sea. Oy!
Rob, I thought, was well-motivated.
Why does President Trump hiring Rudy Giuliani make 2018 completely crazy?
I thought the few New York City conservatives/Republicans loved Rudy Giuliani.
I think there are a couple of Saturday Night Live comedians and other locals who have never admitted to voting for a Republican — except for Rudy Giuliani who they largely credit with cleaning up the city. (I guess there’s always the London mayor who bans knives.)
Did Rudy Giuliani fall from grace like David Petraeus to where one is only able to like the previous version of him? Wipe away good Giuliani memories like a Confederate statue which suddenly has to be torn down?
Uh oh. I hope my pre-order of Jonah’s book via Audible credit counts towards the bestseller calculation.
I’m gonna have to buy a paper copy now too, aren’t I?
I ordered the paper version and I hardly ever do that anymore so I hope Jonah is appreciative ;)
LOL. When I was in college, my roommate and I used to call the movie “Raising Arizona” our “friendship litmus test.” If you liked the movie, we knew that we would like you.
We could still like you if you didn’t like the movie (an exception my wife relied upon heavily), but if you liked it, there was no way we couldn’t like you. I’ve yet to meet someone that like that movie that I didn’t like.
But then again, those were the pre-Trump days.
I laughed so hard at the first ten minutes of that movie that I almost couldn’t breathe.
On that note, Deterrence is a terrific movie.
I haven’t seen A Quiet Place yet, but having spoken to some that have, it sounds like it fits the bill for movies where the monster is not seen.
A Twilight Zone where showing the closeup of the alien ….. probably made it less scary:
I text this “HAVE A SAFE FLIGHT” to my wife as she’s getting on the plane when she goes out of town.
Dave’s not here, man.
Re the aroma of @jonahgoldberg parents’ living room: a few years ago I visited Johnson Space Center along with my younger cousins. You know the scene in Apollo 13 where the families overlook Mission Control while watching the astronauts who don’t know they aren’t on TV? We got to go in that room. The seats are upholstered in that velvety stuff, colored orange, that movie theater seats used to have and it REEKS of cigarette smoke. I said, you smell that, kids? That’s the 1970s.
Jonah’s idea for an apocalyptic zombie chamber piece (FAIL SAFE with zombies!) sounds intriguing and almost like the kind of thing that could be done Off-Broadway!
In many ways it reminds me of what I imagine THE WALKING DEAD to be like. I have never actually watched it (serialized TV bores me), but I’m told there are numerous episodes where the human characters interact in relative safety as the zombie hordes mass outside.
Remember, with Whispersync, you can read the book on Kindle and your Audible version will pick up where you left off (or vice versa). And if you get an Audible subscription, you can get a discount on the audiobook and I imagine it would still count as a sale. You can then add the hardcover on top of that for your bookshelf, making three total copies.
I’m glad to hear you praise the “low budget” approach to dramatic film making. This worked for the first few thousand years of human drama, from the Greek tragedies to the pre-special effect cinema, so Why abandone it entirely?
Nowadays, a lot of the best TV dramas have a much lower budget than the generic Hollywood blockbusters
For instance, I think both “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” are great examples of high-tension TV, where there was no need for a big budget. Gus Fring in the lab (you know what I’m referring to if you’ve seen it) was some of the greatest 15 minutes of television or film. They did do a bottle episode (“Fly”), which had great tension between Walt and Jesse.
Even the modern blockbusters could learn a thin or two from this approach. Did the Star Wars films improve when we saw the skylines of 12 different planets? Or was it better to see just a throne room and hanger on the Death Star?
Hilarious line from Rob, impersonating an employee of an independent bookstore:
“We may be condescending, but you’re probably too stupid to notice.”
Listening to the end of the podcast while driving, when John suggested it was available for Kindle I did actually pull over and attempt to buy Jonah’s book. Only to find that it’s not. SAD!
I may be alone in feeling this way, but bottle episodes tend to bore the hell out of me. Some of my favorite shows managed to avoid the “set bound” look of low-budget TV. Indeed they looked more like motion pictures.
The first few seasons of THE X-FILES, for example, had no regular “standing” sets. Mulder & Sculley could find themselves anywhere in the country, and did. Same with THE FUGITIVE. Same with ROUTE 66.
COLUMBO had no regular standing sets and was all the better for it.
It’s available for pre-order and will download automatically on the 24th.
Do audio book sales count towards the best seller list? My actual reading time is focused on technical things…
Yes it is:
It does indeed. Get it!
I’m inordinately proud of the fact that I said “hepa filter” before the words came out of John’s mouth.
I applaud condescension from people making $32.5/year.
Hey @roblong I have the perfect solution for the Cheers reboot: Coach’s grandson! Or granddaughter, whichever.
Now that I’ve invented that character, let me know when you need my address for sending the royalty checks. :-)
Make this podcast great again! “Fortnightly” GLoP Culture podcast? FAKE NEWS! 26 days and counting! SAD!
New one coming later today!
Trump-Dass!
My question is, since this was apparently made on the 10th or 11th, why did it take 4 or 5 days to be put up on the site/iTunes?
Podcast was recorded on Friday night. We didn’t receive the files from AEI until Monday AM. We had 20 or so shows to get out and we put them out (roughly) in order over three days. That’s why.