Matthew Wrather hosts with Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and John Perich to overthink the upcoming season of television, Drive, good actors in bad movies, and the moral laziness of Prestige Holocaust Movies.
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Triple tuition due to a paintball fight? I guess that’s what must have happened to every UK university.
It’s so sad I feel cool for knowing Schechner’s real secret email. Or at least, one of them.
Pete, with regards to climbing three flights of stairs to get to the fourth floor, “well actually” the European system of building floor numbering avoids that problem — the ground floor is the ground floor, and the floor above that is the first floor, etc. etc. So to get to the second floor, you do indeed have to climb two flights of stairs.
Same in Brazil actually. The floor directly on the ground is called térreo (adjective for “terra”, meaning earth, dirt, etc), and so the first floor you get to with the stairs is indeed the first floor, and so on. Once again, the world agrees on something and America says no (see soccer, the metric system, etc)
Also on the subject of Brazil, I was so surprised to hear Lee mention Lovefoxxx I actually had to go back twice to make sure. I know they’re famous in the US (a lot more than over here, actually), but I didn’t expect them to be on OTI’s radar at all
*ahem* I mentioned Lovefox. *ahem*
Oh wow, I thought I could distinguish between your voices by now… I guess not :P
Anyway, you have now dethroned Wrather and Sheely from the number 1 spot in my imaginary Favorite Overthinkers list :)
Full list please?
On that note, though, La Liberación is pretty great.
\o/
Wait. That might have been the single stupidest comment on OTI. For that, I apologize.
“Once again, the world agrees on something and America says no (see soccer…”
Soccer is an english term, not an American one. ‘Soccer’ was truncated from ‘Assoc’ which was in turn truncated from ‘Association Football’
Although, it is specifically a posh English word, utilising the ‘Eton -er’ also found in the abhorrent nickame for Rugby, rugger. I would not consider it a word I had any ownership of. But that’s because I’m a massive Bolshevik.
Were you reading the reddit thread today about wrapping yourself in bubble wrap and throwing yourself out the widow? Because this is the second time I’ve come across European floor-numbering systems today, and that seems like a pretty wild coincidence :-)
Is there a spoiler alert in effect for Drive? I want to watch it, but I also don’t want to delay the podcast hitting my ears for even a single second.
I’m the only one who saw it and I don’t think I spoiled anything. Most of what I talk about are stylistic choices and homages to other films. If you already knew that Drive is exceptionally violent and an 80s throwback in a modern setting, then you’re fine to listen.
As to new fall shows, I’m mildly interested in how The Playboy Club (w/Laura Benanti), Once Upon a Time (w/fairytales and Jennifer Morrison), and Suburgatory (a cross b/n Easy A and Awkward?) are going to work out. What I’m actually going to be focused on is The X Factor, Gossip Girl, and Glee. Especially after sitting through the Emmy’s which I’m convinced was all a giant ploy by Fox to make Glee and The X Factor look as enticing as possible compared to the dreck that was the Emmy broadcast.
While it’s possible to recognize that a good actor is in a bad movie, at some point you’re probably not going to be seeing that movie (or you’ll turn it off if you’re watching at home) regardless of the quality of the acting.
I don’t think there really is a “Holocaust film” before Holocaust films because movies were only popularly produced for a few decades before the Holocaust. It would be harder to judge the popularity of plays and novels beyond sales and critical writing but I think that’s where you would need to go to figure out what subjects guaranteed prestige but also could activate certain emotional cues and access a widely understood language of symbolism.
Related to the discussion on Holocaust movies before the Holocaust, here’s a Slate article on who was the go-to example of absolute evil prior to Hitler.
Short answer: Pharaoh.
http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/explainer/2011/10/hank_williams_jr_firing_who_was_the_rhetorical_worst_person_in_h.html?wpisrc=twitter_socialflow
What if you truncate both your names? It comes off sounding maybe a bit B-grade action movie star, but Matt Wrath has kind of a ring to it. The only people who would have trouble spelling it now would be the public school students who couldn’t pay attention in english class.
I don’t think there are any comparisons betwixt New Girl and Whitney other than they are fronted by females. While Zooey Deschanel is certainly well within her wheelhouse as a performance, Whitney Cummings is neither manic nor a pixie nor a dream girl in her show. It is also completely stylistically unaligned with NBC’s Thursday lineup, where it is until 30 Rock returns. I’ve heard the show is quite terrible, and everything I’ve see of it, and everythng I’ve ever seen Whitney Cummings do, has been bad. New Girl, meanwhile, was good, but I don’t know if I will watch it with any regularity.
Also, I disagree with the assertion that Hayden Christensen is a good actor. He was very wooden in his Star Wars days, and he hasn’t gotten any better. There is also a difference between a good actor in a bad movie and a good acting performance in a bad movie. Both Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have been in a ton of bad movies, but usually their performances are mailed in and don’t raise the level of the film at all. Also, Michael Caine in Jaws IV: The Revenge.
Whitney Cummings is also coproducing 2 Broke Girls though, which debuted tonight on CBS, and which I actually thought was really funny & well-done – I’m guessing in part due to the fact that Cummings isn’t in front of the camera. Kat Dennings is kind of pixie-ish, but she’s also tired-looking and deadpan rather than manic, as befits her hipsterish waitress character.
And yeah, Christensen isn’t a very good actor in general; he was pretty good as Stephen Glass, though – in a movie, directed by Billy Ray, who oddly enough happens to be the co-creator of Earth 2. Hollywood is weird.
One more thing: I’m not sure about the logistics of Terra Nova, and I have no intention of watching it, but did they have no choice about when they went back in time? If they did, why didn’t they choose any of the 65 million years or so between the death of the dinosaurs and the dawn of man? I presume they didn’t really have any say in the matter, otherwise this plot hole would be far too large.
I thought about watching 2 Broke Girls, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Didn’t it start Monday? The only new show I really intend to continue watching right now is Free Agents, which was much maligned by critics. I care not, however. I enjoyed Cavemen, and I enjoyed the pilot of Free Agents. No retreat, no surrender.
Also, we all realize that the header on this page says “Overthinking It PODCAT” right?
Regarding the ethics of Terra Nova, I’d say that screwing things up for the future is not a problem, since the the goal of the project is presumably to set up humanity so that it develops without polluting the planet again. The worst-case failure is that they prevent humanity from ever evolving, but is that really worse than humanity reaching the year 20XX before dying out from the pollution apocalypse?
I’m imagining a Dollhouse-style flash forward at the end of season 1, where we see how the humans have delved into Jurassic Science that Man Was Not Meant To Know, and 65 million years later, we see early hominids being struck down by the terrible cyber-raptors.
Finally, for maximum train-wreck potential, I _really_ hope they pull some time-paradox stuff, where one of the protagonists ends up being their own great-great-great-great-great^2600000 grandparent.
The logic of time travel is problematic for even the best shows, and I’m not expecting Terra Nova to be one of the best. However, I do find it truly bizarre that the premise seems to be that we will figure out how to control the very fabric of time before we will figure out how to do basic pollution abatement and population control.
It kind of makes sense – economic problems aren’t the same as technological problems. There were electric cars in the late 1800s, but who would have thought fifty years ago that we’d have a global information network that most of the planet works and communicates on simultaneously, with books replaced by electronic hand-readers that can instantly display almost any story ever and handheld consoles the side of cigarette boxes that can hook you into the great mass of all of human knowledge before we had a commercially viable automobile that ran on anything other than gas?
How about, for the anniversary podcast… you do a listener feedback show ;)
You banned overthinking overthinking, but could you overthink overthinking overthinking?
Idea for the anniversary – overthinking anti-intellectualism. There’s a couple different ways you can tie it to pop culture – hip-hop music, country music, summer blockbusters, lackluster TV.