DannytheWall

I can't believe that you are accusing a film whose main character is named only as "The Protagonist" as being not character-driven. ::Rolls eyes::

Absolutely agree. In retrospect, the best word to describe any industry, especially Hollywood, would be "floundering." The bigger problem, however, is the movie is too obtuse to the point of turning people off. You'd need excitement and buzz for a true tentpole feature, and Tenet just doesn't engender that. Crossreference it with Inception, which could be argued as having a similarly obstuse plot point, lingering questions to the viewer, etc. On the face of it, though, it's "simpler." Like the old tenet (ahem, sorry) about writing science fiction-- "you get one thing." Inception's one thing is-- you can travel through layers of dreams. In Tenet, you start with one thing-- traveling "invertedly"/backwards through time, but then there's another thing with a war in the future, then another thing with arms dealers and artefacts, then another with who's leading the organization... What happened to saving something for a sequel ? The risk of trying to be so twisty is that your audience will turn around, then walk away

I was fortunate enough to see it on the big screen here in Thailand. My first movie in a theatre in over a year! As an added bonus, I had NO idea what the premise was even about, as is often the case -- unless I'm going out of my way to pay attention, information about movies isn't as saturated over here. I only get enough information like titles and filmmakers and it's always a wonderful surprise to see a movie unfold fresh. In terms of spectacle, it didn't disappoint. The sound, the effects, the action. I was on edge, although that was likely just as much to the fact that the movie's plot demands your attention. I love time travel and philosophical mind trips, so I was all in, and pleasantly along for the ride. I anticipated a few of the "twists" of the conceit, but that didn't make it feel cheap; again, I was delighted when they happened. So as far as that goes, I liked it, but I can't say the enjoyment was very deep. Even if I was delighted, it was mentally taxing to watch the film, as any drop of attention threatened your entire comprehension. There wasn't much to grab onto beyond the spectacle, and the time travel/physics was both too strict and too loose at the same time. And people better than me have already analyzed to death the lack of characterization and the excess of, well, pretty much everything else. Someone said something something about a tale full of sound and fury? Oh, right. Ultimately it's signifying nothing. To have the fate entire film industry of 2020 riding on the reception of this movie was poorly chosen.

I took it as a joke, although one I did both laugh and wince at. It hurt, yeah, but if delivered in a different way, was more in spirit of how The Balcony "sucks ass." And Balconiers get roasted and laugh at themselves. Or they used to get. As I pontificated above, it's probably a joke that doesn't work with HDTGM's current brand, which has softened its humour and shies away from personal attacks (and even reviewing particular movies) that they used to not be so shy about. I'm glad you reached out to him, though. I know he genuinely cares about people in his audience, and I think you speak for all of us here.

I laughed when I heard the message board dis. I guess we were all seeing that coming but it's still unexpected. Hearing that, as well as listening to the Burlesque episode/HDTGM Reminisce, it made me realize how far the 'cast has come-- from a simple, edgy, in-your-face riff-off between comedians and into an actual captial-B Brand. At some point, Paul & Co. took the same route that most comedians do. They all start off with the who-gives-a-shit attitude until, you know, there's a wide audience, families, and well, reasons to actually give a shit. Think about early Eddie Murphy and early Robin Williams versus their late career. I suppose most audiences and even their entertainers have come to expect a level of interaction, and immediate interactiviy, in 2021 that wasn't possible (certainly not at the current level) in 2011, or 2001, or at any time. But this interactivity either stays in the extremes and yields a community like 4chan or Louis CK fandom, or somehow dilutes to a moderate level as includes as much as possilbe. Certainly that's a Good Thing, of course! But change is a necessary consequence of time. That said, I don't think Paul has any obligation to speak to me directly as a listener/fan, nor do I desire for him to actually listen to me, either. HDTGM exists outside of my fandom of it, so why should there be an expectation for involvement, which is supposedly the selling point for Discord, his direct-message app, or even to leave phone messages?

So... does the message thread get re-released along with the episode? Altho, I'm not sure after looking at some of the comments

See, this is why we can't have nice things, and people go to Discord.

And why can't it be something like "Sally's Favorite Snickerdoodles" or "Kevin Loves Almonds"? Instead, we should just walk up to the counter and ask for two Sallys, straight up? I forgot to mention that MJH's character backstory is lifted almost entirely from Maggie Gyllenhaal's in 2006's Stranger Than Fiction. There, she plays a baker who was on track to studying law at Harvard or something but spend more time baking for the study groups than actually learning anything so she opened her own shop. Both movies have their different magical realism, but clearly Nutty Christmas is stealing from the better movie, so if you haven't seen Stranger Than Fiction yet, bump it to the top of the queue.

I remember reading a paper once about how we should be more aware of the fact that it's so acceptable to perpetuate "cat-hating" tropes and jokes when cats are, at the same time, often associated with women/feminitiy. Then I thought there might be a similar pattern with coffee versus tea jokes. Then I thought about the association of tea with Asian cultures and wondered if there's a correlation with the unfortunate stereoptypes regarding the emasculation of the Asian male. Then I remembered the time I sprialed into several minutes of private thoughts about grammatical punctuation when I read on a T-shirt: "Does anal retentive have a hyphen?" and had to remind myself that I do overthink a lot of things. I will say that Americans are very much obsessed with refrigeration. After moving from California to live overseas for over a decade, it's weird if I **don't** purchase milk purchased in a box from the shelf, and I've never had to worry about keeping eggs in the fridge. The answer to it is the American food industrial complex, of course For more rabbit-hole falling, coffee doesn't actually dehydrate you since that's not technically what a "diareutic" means. I wish they would have talked about the ice skating scene more. Yes, it's obviously plastic, but it's equally obvious that the actors were not wearing skates at all, right? Was this because the actors can't skate? Because there's some union rules about stunt people? Were the Lifetime producers following some kind of checklist? I mean, maybe it's not a "Bad Scene" at all, becuase it's actually pretty impressive that the cinematographer framed everything just right, that the editors chose just the right cuts, and the actors, well, they did their best.

There was a throwaway line about her father about him being a "rat" or something, and I thought we would be seeing a sudden emergence of a disturbuing family dynamic. Instead we got fake mousetaches. Probably for the best. If you tell me there wasn't such a line, I'll believe you, since I kind of drifted in and out on this one.

I don't know. I'd give the benefit of the doubt on that. Heck, I've read message posts that echoed earlier parts *of the boards,* so more often parellel thinking than not. So I'm either too pessimistic to believe people actually read things, or I'm too naiive about people's theft habits.

Oh it for sure makes sense. In the early (?) days of podcasting, wasn't Earwolf one of the first conglomerates of various casts? Back in the day podcasting was more hobby-ish, and people were either amateur casters presenting their personal passions, or professionals of various media who used it as another way to be visable and promote other things. At some point HDTGM and a lot of these kinds of podcasts became the Thing Itself, and while that's good (higher production values, for one thing) it makes them tip from something casual into full-on business that demands chasing the clicks, or ears, or whatever. There's gotta be some kind of captialism lecture in here somewhere.

Haven't felt too passionate about the movies chosen for the HDTGM treatment recently, but I still go immeditately to the boards after an episode for the discussion. Discord would be a no for me. I've been on and off Discord (mostly for rpgs and things) but it's never been without effort. Discord is so strict about log ins that it feels better served (as it was probably designed to be) for those with desktop computers who don't move around much. Living overseas and juggling devices and locations makes me always have to do 2 to 3 steps more just to log in that it just becomes more frustrating and I don't want to even try sometimes. One of the nicer things about Discord is that, once you're in, it's more one-stop shop so just switch through your servers rather than opening new tabs or sites or whatever. One of the bad things is that Discord will lend for more off-the-cuff responses, and I appreciate being able to compose or edit my thoughts like on a message board. Maybe they want more responses like that caller in this episode who rambled for five minutes about a shakespeare class she took once, but I don't think it really contributed to any correction or ommission or really anything.

This sounds like an amazing(ly bad) movie. Skipped this one but the podcast was still hilarious. Blink (your ears?) and you'd miss it, but Jason thought it sounded like a better movie if Gabbi was a teenager, and that's exactly the premise of the comic book Prez by Mark Russell. Jason & Paul talked about Mark Russell's The Flintsones on a minisode somewhere, and yep, that book is in fact a VERY subversive social satire with genuine humor, pathos, and deep thoughts. If you liked that, look up Prez. Prez takes place in a near-future dystopia ruled by social media and corporations, a fateful combination that unwittingly allows a 16-year old girl to go viral thanks to an unfortunate hot dog on a stick incident and finds herself catapulted to the highest office in the land. And biting satire ensues. The comic isn't as pointed as the Flintstones, and kind of has to rush to something like an ending, but there's some real gold in there. Another crazy fact? This is the *second* teenage president in DC comics. The first Prez was in 1974 written by Jack Simon (cocreator of Captain America) and features a young man named, foreshadowing-ly, Prez, who is a local hometown hero that goes on to win the presidency. It's a more straightforward story, inspired by the then-recent constitutional amendment that lowered the US voting age to 18, but could have used some more comicbook gimmickry like, I don't know, say, dinosaurs on jetpacks as a national emergency or something. It only lasted four issues but remains a perrenial favorite on any "How Did This Get Made" Comic Book Version trivia night. You can read Russell's Prez on comixology here

This movie was amazingly crazy, and the podcast was amazing in response. Thanks of course to June's dissenting opinion, which I love her for even if she's 100% wrong :) Probably from her misunderstanding of pop and lock, and it seemed she was turning around a little bit at the end. The biggest ommission was June not making a comment that she could do that if she wanted to. Did I miss that, or maybe that's a sign of progress? :) Another ommission I missed hearing was some comment about the crowd scenes. I would have loved to hear Paul & Co.'s take on some of the more interesting members, like the Halloween mask, the unshaved armpits, the face makeup, or the fact that Ice-T's rapper outfit looked like he was supposed to perform at a leather BDSM scene but ended up at the wrong address. Things moved so quickly from scene to scene that the editor stood over the editing bay and played it like a scratch record. One minute someone's dancing on the ceiling, then his love interest walks in the door. Another time he's fleeing the hospital in a cast, and the next he's getting a mob of friends to cut it off so he can quick-change into the costume for the dance routine. I know there's supposed to be a 30-day time frame here, but if you told me the movie took place over three days, I say that feels about right.

I think the real estate developers had it all wrong in this movie. These kids weren't particularly meddling, so if the villains dressed up as ghosts to scare everyone away from the rec center, they actually *could* have gotten away with it. Of course, if that happened, we could have had Electric Scoob-aloo, and that sounds pretty awesome, too.

I don't think "sacred geometry" has ever been one single philosophy, in the same way there are some mystical practices like Kabbalah or Wicca or something like that, with clearly (or clear-ish) defined principles and practices. It is also fairly distinct from Numerology. It is usually used as a term to describe the harmonic patterns that exist, mainly in Islamic art, whose tradition of visual art precluded the depiction of God in a human way. The term is used in a more generic way these days, in the same way to Google is to simlply do a web search. That being said, the idea that math and its ability to capture and define patterns, structure, and order upon chaos, has often been associated with mysticism and philosophy from as far back as ancient Greece, Arabia, China, etc. Math/Sacred Geometry exists in a Venn diagram-my sort of way as it overlaps with divination, design and symbolism, and communing with something devine and larger than ourselves. In that sense, the movie's "about" sacred geometry, as by understanding, decoding, and using capital-M Math allows you to tap into the structural being of the universe.

I'm surprised Paul and Jason didn't connect 2:22 to the comicbook heroes Hawkman and Hawkgirl. These two characters have had many incarnations-- as space alien war heroes for their home planet, as star-crossed lovers from different castes in ancient Egypt, to archeologists during World War II. The throughline that connects all these iterations is that they are doomed to reincarnate, be drawn to each other, and to die tragically because of their similarly reincarnated rival who cursed them in the first place. (Jeez, just typing it all out reminds me that comics are weird and I love them.) Maybe because of that, I didn't find the central conceit that difficult to buy into, or maybe I'm just crazy and seeing patterns all over the place. D

I wonder if the filmmakers were going for something poetic by having the meetcute between a pilot and a dancer happen by way of an aerial ballet? No one asked why Sarah was on the plane in the first place? I thought that might have some bearing on the character or plot, but, like most things in the movie, Nope. Paul asks, why go to Grand Central at all if it's supposed to be the site of this tragedy? Well, Jonas' Plan A was to go to the airport, when he picks up Sarah. So yeah, he WASN'T going to go, but then The, I don't know, Unvierse or something sends a text that informs him the plane is canceled, and Jonas very casually says "Yup, let's go to Grand Central." Then elsewhere Jason asks, was Jonas going to kill the woman at the end? He not only has the gun from his studio, but it's in a big holster on his left hip. We can put aside the question if the woman would even have noticed this (perhaps she thought he was just happy to see her?) -- but since we know they were first headed to the airport until he got a text from the airline, does that mean he was going to roll up to the airport with a loaded gun on his hip? There's just so many things about this movie, which I guess makes it pretty perfect as far as HDTGM goes!

Maybe the strangest thing about the Russian roulette scene was that Paul didn't shout out the Unspooled podcast and the most famous scene of The Deer Hunter. Or maybe not so strange, as, like much of the movie, the scene was trying to be both "serious" and kooky at the same time, and just ended up being eyeroll-inducing. I have too many questions. First of all, why they would be firing a gun in what should be a very sealed, pressured, contained enviornment in the first place? Second, what was the emotional trauma of the Cowboy to not just call for the game but also to participate in it? And what are the odds of 20:1 supposed to be for, anyway? Is it just for who wins/loses? Because the odds of survival for the participants do not match in any way the odds of winning the bet. Unless there's a point spread and odds are to place, which still doesn't make sense. Why bother getting into an argument over who should go first? The odds are exactly the same. If there's one bullet in the chamber, it's a 1 in 6 chance of firing, that's over an 80% chance of survival. Intuitively, it would make sense to want to go first. What about going second? Obviously, we didn't get to see that far in the movie, as the Cowbody got unlucky on his first try. But if we assume they don't spin the chamber, counterintuitively, it's the same odds every try. There's two factors of chance at play-- the chance that the other person dies on his turn will affect the probability of whether you have to play at all. These two factors in essense balance each other out. leaving that same 1 in 6 chance every time. Now, if they do spin the chamber, there's always going to be a 1 in 6 chance, but with the compounded probabilitiy of whether you have to play at all, that does give you a slightly better chance of winning, but only in the latter rounds of play, and I doubt McGillicuddy or the Cowboy were trying to play the "long game" in this scenario.

I saw this article last year and keep it bookmarked for easy reference. I'm def not saying it's the be all end all, especially with their number one choice, but it makes some excellent suggestions https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20191125-the-100-greatest-films-directed-by-women-poll

You win. Also... wow. Just, wow. I'll want to read through more than just the end pages, but it's clear the movie is vast improvement on the source.

Yes, I'm not pointing out any plot holes in my reaction - I'm merely pointing out how resonant this situation was for me, personally, and how that led to my reaction. If I were to critique Paul's point that the papers are MacGuffins, I'd argue that it's not technically the case, since the papers are, in fact, "real" in way that MacGuffins usually aren't, but at that point it's pretty much semantics. As far as the German officer not arresting Laszlo, it's my understanding that Morocco was not German-occupied, as part of the southern "Free Zone" of Vinchy France, part of its overseas French protectorates. There was some "official" neutrality to Morocco, although definitely it could never be free from German oversight and presense. Not an historian here, either, but I think there are issues of jurisdiction and diplomacy that make it complicated. And precisely why Casablanca became an important city for refugees. There's also the issue of making Laszlo a martyr, which the film address by having the Germans consider not IF he would be a martyr, but simply which degree and by what means.

This was a weird re-watch for me. Almost every line had a huge emotional resonance. It's a movie whose central conceit is people trapped in a foreign country desperately seeking special papers to flee a country while the world is up-ended under politically-charged circumstances? Uh, check. I'm currently sitting in Kuala Lumpur, in the middle of a transition to Thailand, but facing roadblocks, restrictions, and uncertainty because the fate of my career hangs on paperwork-- a visa needed to enter Thailand, but embassies are closed, flights are restricted, and the world is distruting strangers and sheltering in place. To hear Paul say that papers for traveling are "not real" and essentially meaningless struck me like a knife, I gotta admit. Sure, there is no background of world war to same extent, but replace "Nazis who want to chase you down" with "a pandemic that will infect you if you aren't careful" and the stakes are still pretty high. It is not some "fictional thing." Real people, and a good number in more dire circumstances than mine, have something as "meaningless" as a paper to which to hang the rest of their lives. We don't want to admit that all the safety we construct for ourselves can be taken or given at the stroke of a pen, but it's real.

Anyone else notice Paul's extended conversation about how Bogart was perfectly casted and how casting someone else would have given an entirely different feeling for the film? No one else flashbacked to Amy's conversation about Goodfellas?