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Yep, it another run through the cultural landscape with your podcast pals Jonah Goldberg, Rob Long, and John Podhoretz. This week, the guys jog through a preview of The Dispatch, Jonah’s new media venture, sprint through some thoughts on The Joker (a movie the guy at Rob’s UPS store insists that he sees ASAP), and examine the various controversies it has spawned, and finally, a fast walk through why it’s just fine for Ellen Degeneres and George W. Bush to be friends.
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Looks like Rob has found a second calling.
Although incredibly bright, John sometimes speaks with tremendous authority on subjects about which he knows little. Yes, Al Pacino made a movie called REVOLUTION in the mid-1980s, which was so bad it kept him off-screen for four years. But he returned in 1989 not with GODFATHER PART III but with SEA OF LOVE, a great thriller written by Richard Price in which Pacino is wonderful. Restrained, magnetic, and terrific.
GODFATHER PART III came out a year later and is famously bad, but Pacino did GLENGARY GLEN ROSS a couple of years after that, and he’s marvelous. It once again features restrained and wonderful Al — not theatrical, scenery-chewing, “pound the table”-Al, who I admit is tiresome.
The TR line was three anemic Christians and three circumcised Jews.
Five points
1) I like Commentary Trivia.
2) Also, JPod does a great disservice to the Batman mythos. According to wikipedia,
3) Let the UPS workers like what they like darn it. It’s a free country.
4) I am in violent agreement with JPod with regard to his observation about GW Bush. No one on the right complains about Ellen. There is an imbalance in leftist hatred. I am equally in agreement Rob Long’s point that leftists can live their entire lives without hanging out with anyone who isn’t totally on board with leftism.
5) Ducks and chimps are way worse than the human species.
Aren’t they all three kind of like that? Sometimes they remind me of what the character Duke Philips says in the great animated show The Critic, when he’s running for president: “You think like the average Joe, the little guy making $300,000 a year.”
All three are bright. More than that: Exceptionally bright. But JPod seems more willing than Rob and Jonah to speechify on subjects that aren’t really his bailiwick (in his case, usually movies and TV) without qualifying his declarations on those subjects with disclaimers like “Correct me if I’m wrong, but…” or “I’m reasonably certain that…” or “I’m 95 percent sure that…” etc. — any of which would help take the curse off his misplaced and often frustrating sense of certainty.
Maybe he shares one of Hugh Hewitt’s mottos: “Frequently In Error, But Never In Doubt.”
You mean anyone who is brave enough to speak up or laugh and slightly wound their precious feelings. To be brave enough to be fired or sued is an entirely different category.
And this isn’t a fact check, just me taking exception to the truly risible idea JPod was floating on the show about the superhero genre being, ah, cape-acious enough (sorry) to accommodate different types of more traditional Hollywood movies such as a Sidney Lumet movie, a Mike Nichols movie, a Western, etc.
This is an absolutely scary and frankly vomitous idea — one that exemplifies, as much as anything else, the decline of cinema as an art form.
Wouldn’t it be funny – and poetic justice, in a way – if the NBA just moves all their teams and everything to China, since there’s a lot more people there who can watch the games.
Eh. Fantastic works of magical fiction worked alright for Homer and the Scandinavians.
Are you telling me those don’t share a similarity?
By the way, still the best UPS parody I’ve ever seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5yjMQSAwW0
Of course they do. But as literature evolved it started telling stories about mortal heroes with terrestrial problems that have nothing to do with myth.
And the question here is whether or not so many movies need to be associated with the superhero mythos. And I vote no.
Wait. Let me revise that. I vote NO!!!
We all should.
Only superhero movies have heroes anymore. Our movies can’t address the death of G-d in our mainstream culture and they can’t address Islamic Supremacism. I’m fine with the whole superhero mythos as long as it can address real evil.
Disagree. We should still be getting movies like CHINATOWN. SHANE. CASABLANCA. DOUBLE INDEMNITY. JAWS. THE STING. BULLITT. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. BODY HEAT. ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN. KEY LARGO. HIGH NOON. DIRTY HARRY. OUT OF AFRICA. THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR. UNFORGIVEN. COOL HAND LUKE. The list goes on and on (and on).
In other words, we can still have movies about mortal people with no friggin’ “powers” whose stories have nothing — bupkis — el zippo — to do with comic books. Some of these characters may be larger than life, some are not. Some may be heroic, some are not. But they are all regular mortals confronting believable challenges in a recognizably human way.
And that should not be such a damn rarity at the movies.
The other kinds of movies — the YA or comic book or comic book adjacent kind — while fine in moderation — should not become the norm.
Because that would be what we call bad.
It’s a goal, if my friends in L.A. are indicative
Usually goes like this on social media
Person 1: Don’t understand how anyone can support this President, found another person I had to unfriend
Person 2: Same, and if you haven’t, [name] also supported.
I am ashamed at how I laughed at this.
One more genre to remake with superheroes: 80’s John Hughes high school movies.
How else would he live up to the line, “John is always wrong.”? The companion to Sonny (Bunch) is always right.
Mr. Michael Garrett
One more genre to remake with superheroes: 80’s John Hughes high school movies.
They sorta did with Spiderman Homecoming & Far from Home. Fun films.
JPod on Ellen and W. being at a “baseball or football game”. Maybe you aren’t invited by Bush to a game because you would have no idea which stadium to go to.
From Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:
[a baseball game is on television]
Ed Rooney: What’s the score?
Pizza Joint Owner: Nothin’ nothin’.
Ed Rooney: [not really listening] Who’s winning?
Pizza Joint Owner: The Bears.
Eustace C. Scrubb (View Comment):
“How can anyone watch sports when they haven’t seen Fleabag or the Marvelous Miss Maisel”
Also Sky High, and Zoom, and probably some others I haven’t seen.
Good lord. “All superheroes, all the time — just in different contexts?! I am so there!!!”
You folks are part of the problem.
Well these aren’t exactly new movies either. Zoom is from 2006 and Sky High from 2005.
Oh, Lord.
Fine, you focus on one or two trees while I look at the forest. Here’s the forest:
You guys don’t care very much that mainstream cinema has been overtaken by comic book, YA, and fantasy fare.
That’s the forest. Now, you can venture in there if you want to. Bring a tent and a backpack. Go enjoy yourself. But me? I hope it all burns down. (Sorry, Smokey).
Hollywood deserves to burn down but it’s not because of fantasy and comic book movies. It deserves to be burned down because it cannot address evil and it corrupts people into thinking that human nature is good and that America is bad. Comic book movies and fantasy fare are the movies that stand against that and it’s not special effects or changing tastes that destroy industries or cultures. It’s bad ideas.
Save the sermon for church, Father. It deserves to burn for the reasons I gave, not the reasons you gave.
Dude we are both sermonizing here. Let’s not pretend either party is either neutral in their outlook or tepid in their pathos.