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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather discuss the latest installment of The Trip, directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. This installment takes the frenemies to Greece, retracing the steps (oar-strokes?) of Odysseus, and addresses history, mortality, and masculinity. Fair warning: It’s a lot.
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Further Reading
- “As Not Seen on TV” from the New York Times
Waaaaait, kimchee gets COOKED!? I assumed it would just leak the spice into the oil and kill the sharpness, but that gives new life to the weird jar of radish kimchee living in my fridge.
(Oh, and for the steel cut oats, I can strongly recommend letting the oats–and whatever nuts, seeds, and dried fruit are going in–toast in the pan for a minute or so before adding the water.)
On the documentary-but-also-mockumentary side, the discussion reminds me a lot of Netflix’s #BlackAF, which on one level feels like a remake of ABC’s black-ish but starring creator Kenya Barris as himself instead of Anthony Anderson as a fictionalized counterpart to Barris, but also has its charms.
Specifically relevant here, is where Barris gets into a lengthy discussion that draws a distinction between working while on vacation and being on a vacation that’s justified by scamming producers into funding a project that happens to be where you want to go. That argument sounds comparable to the overall The Trip concept.
Not me going back to pandemic-era Overthinking It podcasts, nosiree. Also an apropos episode to comment because OTI podcasts turned out to be my download of choice when I went abroad, given that YouTube downloads broke outside my home country and 2017-18 era APAC mobile was serviceable at best.
Anyway, the Google Maps on TV view was interesting, as it reminded me of the Somewhere Street travel series from NHK World. The premise was notable in that (1) it pretended to be a “Japanese tourist” who went to less-known places and talked to “real people,” (2) it was more fascinated with urban architecture than the usual travel show, and (3) the way it executed the pretend tourist appearance is to bring a rolling camera tripod around, have local staff talk to everyday people (presumably having cleared first that they were filming for a Japanese channel), and then having the “Japanese tourist narrative” dub over the local-language conversation.
It seems to be a good addendum to this travel episode in the COVID era.