joel_rosenbaum

This too! What the fuck indeed. It took the signal a few seconds to get to the nearest galaxy (and bounce back, by definition, since he's sending a radar transmission). That would imply that his signal went somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion times faster than the speed of light.

This fucking movie gave me a headache. Let's start with the plot device that sets everything in motion: Mills sending some kind of radio signal into the nearest galaxy. Mills correctly notes that it would take forever for a radar transmission to reach the Clouds of Magellan, the neighboring galaxy with which he is trying to communicate (?). The Clouds of Magellan are thousands of light years away. To work past this obstacle, he apparently needs to increase the power of his amplifier (the Klystron) with a lightning strike. Well, there are quite a few problems with this. Obviously, you can’t harness the power of lightning when it strikes a radio transmitter. But even if you could, lightning isn’t particularly powerful, at least not compared to an electrical substation. But most importantly, it doesn’t matter how much power you put into a transmission, the speed of light -- c -- is constant. You could make a transmitter with the entire power of the sun in it, and its signal would travel as fast as, you know, sunlight. But even if you grant all that nonsense, how does Mills know that the signal reached the Clouds of Magellan? Are we to assume that Mills’ faster-than-light transmission bounced off a neighboring galaxy back to his radar dish without hitting any interference along the way? That’s especially impressive considering that the Clouds of Magellan are only visible from the Southern Hemisphere. If we are to assume that Mills lives and works in Los Angeles, his radio transmitter isn’t even pointed in the right direction.

Considering that Devin (while he was here) forgot what was even in the Canon on a few instances, I would argue that the actual Canon never mattered.

Comedy is such a specific thing that it's pretty easy to imagine a lack of critical consensus behind any particular one in a given year. Even a movie that seems tailor-made for Oscar appreciation, like The Player, is going to piss off as many voters as it entertains.

So, just finished what I could endure of the movie... All I can say is that I hope Blake got a hold of Jerico Stone for the Origin Story of this one.

You have obviously not seen

Fellowship blew me away in the theaters. A singular experience that was not recaptured by the sequels. I suppose it can only be your first time once. My least favorite was Return of the King, but that was largely due to issues with the source material rather than any production aspects.

Good pick on the Beverly Hills Cop projection booth episode. Definitely got me started on that podcast.

Corona is distributed by Grupo Modelo, who was acquired by InBev-Anheuser Busch five years ago.

I would argue that in a Wes Anderson movie, it's pretty clear that the details are supposed to be noticed. But yeah, Anderson movies qualify as "twee", largely because of their overt sentimentality. I didn't realize that Bret Easton Ellis had a podcast. I'll definitely not check that one out.

Listening to the episode, a couple of early thoughts 1) The intentional lack of swearing (e.g. in Juno) is a stylistic choice that has been used to memorable effect in a lot of movies/television. Obviously it's a practical consideration, but it can be turned around with good world building. A good example is Battlestar Galactica (the new one). 2) The reason why junior/immature films tend to age better is that the target audience grows older with them. Generally speaking, no one asks old folks about the films they loved twenty years ago. 3) I get the conceit of this episode, but it's really two independent episodes rather than one "versus". Might have been better off to run them as separate "blacklist" episodes? It's clear that Franklin Leonard has a great eye for screenwriting. I think it could have held up. 4) Jason Reitman has a better director's resume than his dad, which is remarkable given how (relatively) young he is.

The natural follow up for the next FF movies is some kind of classic montage a la Jay Sherman's student film from The Critic:

I think you're misremembering the time a little bit here, because the landcsape of "indie comedy" was pretty barren around the time of Napoleon Dynamite. That movie was strikingly different in tone than anything by Wes Anderson, Terry Zwigoff, or Alexander Payne. It was a weird little movie that completely came out of left field for its time. It featured a bunch of people who had never been on screen before and for a large part wouldn't be again. I would argue that the reason why Napoleon Dynamite doesn't hold up is that it captures a nostalgia for a very specific time. Those references are completely meaningless to the majority of the film-watching public (more than) ten years later.

So, what you're saying is... more Sharknado?

I mean, you could pick any one of them. But this one has the guy from Wildcats in it.

Back in the previous iteration of the Canon, I suggested Eddie Murphy comedies -- really any of them. Well, in light of the Ghostbusters episode, I think Beverly Hills Cop deserves a dedicated suggestion. The long and short of it is that Beverly Hills Cop established Eddie Murphy as the first mainstream black movie star, is the highest grossing comedy of all time, and the template for the buddy cop genre (for better or worse). I would also argue that it's the best action comedy ever made, although I'm sure others would disagree.

Shit guys, keep this up and Scotty Auks will give you your own show. How's your radio voice?

This has been brought up often in past "versus" episodes, so I wouldn't hold your breath. Everyone can approach this show in different ways, but I think of the Canon itself as being besides the point. It's a useful means by which the hosts can discuss a film (or group of films) and has the added bonus of inviting audience participation.

I'll miss the opportunity to hear Devin speak about his Zamundan coin, however.

I think we're roughly the same age. I went to a large suburban high school (class of roughly 400 students). Cliques were rampant. Even the design of the school promoted it: there was a main hallway that ran the entire length of the school, painted in different colors to represent the different "houses". Everyone was given a house, but who hanged out where was largely a force of self-segregation. And they existed just as strongly in my older brother's day, so I don't think it was anything caused by outside influence.

Interesting to contrast Michael Pare's comments to Blake against Walter Hill's interview with Maron this week. I don't know if anyone else listens to WTF, but they covered most of the highlights of Hill's career. Hill never discusses Streets of Fire directly, but he does say (paraphrasing): "Most people seem to think that directors are acting coaches and that's not what their job is".

I did not connect with Whiplash at all. I haven't been able to articulate why that's so, but this is as good a summary as any.

It's bizarre that Amy and Paul have a discussion about meritorious films from 1984 without mentioning Beverly Hills Cop. But I completely agree with Paul that Neverending Story is an absurd selection for the Canon.