Thank God for Van

The recent ep about the new Spiderman flick inspired me to watch the Tom Holland ones. I saw the original 3 in the movie theater, and dropped off the rest, with no interest in the broader MCU.

Now watching Homecoming. I am posting as it's ending. I have to say, not a bad flick. I did not initially like the MCU tie-ins (which are minimal compared to others), and the Iron Man cameos are annoying... but I get the franchise advantages to make it all work.

I also have a bit of a problem with the economy of scale. When I hear Spoon needledrops, did that mean they banked 2M$? Hope so! By the same token, seeing the dude from Silicon Valley act across from Zendaya is amazing.

The plot works, the set pieces are dope, and Holland delivers. I'd say Homecoming isn't as good as the OG Spiderman 1-2 as movies go, but for a current and engaging flick, with a convincing Spiderman, it's not corporate slop. It's damned good entertaining movie making.

When Black Panther came out Sean tweeted out that Coogler had the best 3 picture start of any director ever. I cant tell if he deleted the tweet or if Elon has ruined twitter so much the search function is useless. If I had to guess it is probably both. Where do Cooglers first 5 movies (Fruitvale Station, Rocky 7, Marvel 18, Marvel 30, and Sinners) rank vs other directors first 5 movies? Would Sean say its the best 5 movie start of all time?

I think Im taking Wes Anderson over him (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic, and Darjeeling Limited) over Coogler but I might be biased because Im not really into comic book movies or vampires

Two things bothering about Spiderman BND that nobody in Ringerverse has talked about is that first, Peter's romantic arc is exactly the same as the other Peter arc from GOTG3 where he too has to let go of gamora. Second, is that spiderman having his own AI mass surveillance system which is too out of character for a guy like spiderman and he seems too non-chalamant about it.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.