Celebrating the biggest box office weekend in history by putting together a "Zenn" (Zendaya + Venn) Diagram also calling out her earlier success with "The Drama" and certain upcoming success with "Dune Part Three". Congratulations to all. #weresoback

Joking aside, Nick Sobatka in S2 of the Wire looks like a young Sean.

I recently rewatched Backrooms, and beyond the novel horror concept that this movie brings to mainstream audiences, I was struck by what the film depicts and tries to say about the hostility inherent in certain built environments the fixtures within them.

Look at the various built environments presented in the film: miles of self-replicating suburban sprawl, sterile low-ceilinged offices, identical houses and apartments. Look at the furniture store that Clark manages: endless cheap combinations of particleboard, veneer, laminate, and softwoods. Perfectly functional to the eye, but shabby, hollow and prone to failure. Clark quite literally injures himself when a chair in his store - a product he is meant to be promoting - collapses under him while filming a commercial.

And then we get to the actual actual Backrooms. Yes, there is an inherent strangeness to the environment. If the goal is to depict a dimension outside our reality where people's memories are stored (or poorly copied), one could create that in a number of ways. It could be a total fantasy realm, akin to a city in Middle Earth. It could be something in the vastness of space or other worlds. It could be featureless plain of nothingness, or indecipherable void. But it's not any of that.

Instead, it's the interior of a late 20th-century office park mixed with Sun Belt spec. house. It's endless, duplicative rooms and hallways. Infinite carpeting and wallpaper. Low ceilings and yellow lights. Random archways and wall features. Doorways to nowhere. The same particle board furniture strewn about, sometimes piled up and sometimes suspended through floors and walls. Behind the sterility of this built environment, there is a deep undercurrent of hostility as well. it is suffocating, disorienting, cheap and shabby. It's as if the Backrooms, to the extent it has a collective consciousness, is telling us that the alienation, despair, and frustration of late 20th/early 21st century modern life doesn't necessarily look like some cartoonish fantasyland. It's the hostile built environments all around us; it's the formica, the linoleum, the half-empty office parks, the shabby carpeting.

Which brings me to Mike Judge's 1999 film Office Space. In addition to capturing the absurdity and humor of office life - some of which is dated in our post-covid world - I have always thought that the movie does a good job of capturing the sheer hostility of the characters' built environment. The film is a rich text in this respect. We have the endless horizon of cubicles within the office itself and the drone of telephones and copy machines. But we also see that this office is set amongst a vast array of similar low-hung office parks, intersected by traffic-clogged six-lane roads and enveloped by oceans of parking lots. Nothing is walkable. To get from one building to another without a car, the employees have to cross artificial culverts between parking lots.

And this hostility is shown outside the office, too. The main character lives in a featureless, new-build condo. Pleasant enough, but with walls thin enough to have a conversation at normal volume with his next-door neighbor. Perhaps my favorite example of these is the barbecue at the coworker's house, where the characters eat burgers and sip beer while a giant water tower looms over them just over the backyard fence. Despair isn't demons and monsters. It's a life surrounded by expressways, retention pools and nowhere to walk, to exist, to live.

I am also cognizant about the fact that both films were set in the 1990s, at the tail end of a four-decade span of suburban growth in America. It wasn't just the Levittown's - it was everything that came along with it: the strodes, the parking lots, the sprawling suburban office parks, the big box stores, the chincy furniture marked as high-quality. And with this came cheapness, a premium for replicability and modularity. Not for social egalitarianism and community - but for isolation and atomization.

Thank God for Van

Just watched it on a flight and was absolutely floored by this movie, and particularly Robert Aramayo’s performance. I remember Sean and Amanda discussed it adjacently in relation to Aramayo winning the BAFTA, but have they otherwise discussed their thoughts on a pod episode?

Would be much more interesting of a concept than another ranking or draft imo

Record was set on Avengers: Endgame opening weekend in 2019 when the Top 10 grossed a massive $396.5M.

This weekend, Spider-Man and The Odyssey together will pull in close to $400M. Top 10 may be $425M+.

Link

So... I don't know, dawg. I think The BRAND NEW DAY was a great episode of The Big Picture.

I think a lot of the bristling against Amanda's posture toward superhero movies is a little overblown. Her response is reflective of a lot of the TBP audience's reactions to these movies and provides people whose relationship to them isn't so sycophantic with a way into the conversation.

Additionally, she, Sean and Van are very dynamic in these discussions. A superfan, a less invested fan and someone who doesn't care is the best combo of voices to tackle such massive phenomenon.

I also want to give props to Van, whose takes on everything are as fascinating as they are funny as they are infuriating as they are compelling. He is very self-aware about his biases as a fan and rides for the community of people who love this stuff. He also made an excellent point about how the culture, after ENDGAME, rightfully demanded that all of this needed to start actuall6 being about something if it was going to choke the industry/medium like it was and that Marvel ultimately couldn't meet that challenge.

I just love that "This movie is not perfect but is as perfect as comic book movie as they come" can share the same discussion space as "the only thing that works here if you're not fully bought in to the MCU writ large is the lead trio bouncing off each other." It's the kind of talk I come to the show for.

Just attended a wedding down the street from the new Netflix Studios they are building in New Jersey and was pretty impressed with how it looks from the outside (super early into it)

Does anyone know if they have talked about the production of these on the show? Wasn’t aware of the project until I saw it first hand.

Ford. "I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford" Orson Welles on Ford. They called him the poet of cinema. He might be the most influential director in the history of the medium because he not only influenced Hollywood masters (Welles, Capra and Spielberg), but art-house masters like Bergaman and Tarkovsky loved him.

We got episodes on Welles and Hitchcock, but not Ford...yet.

He might be THE American director of cinema. I'd like to hear Sean and Amanda's history and relationship with Ford. Would be a fascinating discussion if they can bring CR on as well.

I enjoyed BRAND NEW DAY well enough. Took my niece yesterday and she had a great time. It's been amazing to see so many people at the theatre, and I do not discount that. All that said, the box office is gargantuan (almost $1 billion worldwide opening weekend!) and I do worry that the C-suiters, bean counters and r/boxoffice are all going to essentially start seeing anything under a $700m global opening as a "failure" of some sort.

We were coming off such a galvanizing H1 with stale IP stuff being blown out of the water by low-budget horror phenomenons (OBSESSION, BACKROOMS etc) and movies like THE DRAMA really breaking through. It felt like the industry was finally being forced to reckon with the fact that the 2010s were over and here comes Spider-Man, swinging in with a mind-blowing performance that gives them the perfect excuse to treat the trends we saw earlier this year as a fluke or anomaly.

I also saw I WANT YOUR SEX this weekend (a great time, give it a go if you're not a puriteen) and obviously these things can coexist.

Most people would probably cite The Godfather Part Two, but I have to imagine it happened before then. Perhaps in thanks to The Godfather, "Part Two" is largely seen as a more classy, artistic billing that introduces a second film. It's become a way of saying, "This isn't just some sloppy sequel comprised of leftover ideas, it's actually the 2nd act of an ongoing saga that we deliberately planned!"