He's been hardened by recent traumatic life experiences, namely the Eagles losing the Super Bowl.
Just What is Apex Mountain: Rewatchables discussion thread
- Thread starter Shelterdog
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Alright. I'll be that guy.
Self-professed "big fan of college rock" Bill Simmons brought up the Replacements' "Bastards of THE Young" and "HUH-sker Dü" in the Adventureland pod. Hey Bill? How about you Hüsker DONT?
Just be honest, dude - you listened to U2. There is literally no shame in that. You liked what you liked.
Self-professed "big fan of college rock" Bill Simmons brought up the Replacements' "Bastards of THE Young" and "HUH-sker Dü" in the Adventureland pod. Hey Bill? How about you Hüsker DONT?
Just be honest, dude - you listened to U2. There is literally no shame in that. You liked what you liked.
Bill has mentioned that the celebrity interviews are his podcasts with the lowest streams, and the hot take sports stuff does best. It's why he sticks the celebrity interviews at the end of a podcast when he does one.
He also mentioned that there is no exclusivity with podcast interviews now and it has lowered his interest. He's also "Chris Farley show" bad at interviews.
The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Van Lathan, and Logan Murdock head to Coney Island to check out the top-ranked basketball prospect in the country, Jesus Shuttlesworth, as they rewatch Spike Lee’s sports drama ‘He Got Game,’ starring Denzel Washington, Ray Allen, and Rosario Dawson.
View: https://twitter.com/MalloryRubin/status/1645863818944446465
haven't listened to this yet, but Mal on the Indecent Proposal podcast.. with nobody to reign her in? This might get wild.
haven't listened to this yet, but Mal on the Indecent Proposal podcast.. with nobody to reign her in? This might get wild.
It wasn't as dirty as you would expect. It was a good episode. Some sex talk obviously but way way way way less ejaculate talk than you would expect. But Bill Simmons did say "ass play" and that was top notch stuff.
Simmons has a weird hatred for Robert Redford, tho, and that is very odd.
Simmons has a weird hatred for Robert Redford, tho, and that is very odd.
I’d bet on some small snub at a party or festival. And the fact Redford probably doesn’t think about him at all.
Isn’t it just an extension of William Goldman’s disdain for Redford? Wasn’t Redford a pain on the set of All the President’s Men?
Kind of a boring episode with halting repartee. I saw Indecent Proposal in the theater and I remember it being kind of a social phenomenon at the time but it was not a film I ever thought of rewatching and the episode didn't really make me want to (unlike other recent Rewatchables about films I'd seen once but hadn't previously rewatched, like Cape Fear, the Verdict and Sideways).
I thought it was OK, but I always think these pods are tough as two-person pods. It works much better when you add a third to the mix. I am also always sad when CR isn't there because it means--among many other reasons--no increasingly ridiculous Wayne Jenkins impression.
I think CR and Simmons can pull off the duo pod but none of the others are great. Simmons, Sean, CR are still the best.
Yes, absolutely. I love CR and BS, but I have yet to listen to one where I don't think "this would be better with Sean" (or Russillo - The Town pod is just great).
I love the Miami Vice pod and I think it is just the two of them but I have an odd affinity for that movie so that may be biasing my opinion.
I should probably go back to this one. I'm definitely in the top 10% of people who like this movie. It's a mess, but stuff like "if you ain't done time with us, you ain't doing crime with us" is great.
Or worse, having to endure the ye olde Simmons' Jenkins impressive, which is cringe inducing.
Bill, I know Chris Ryan and you, sir, are no Chris Ryan. It's pretty sad that Simmons sees how people react to the hilarity of Ryan's Jenkins impression and he just tries to copy him.
I think he also claimed to have rewritten part of the script.
His hatred of Redford is Simmons at his best and worst. If you're his friend, he has your back to the end--and clearly beyond. But he also has a little star f*cker in him, because each time he brings up his hatred of Redford, he's subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, reminding people that he shared a friendship with one of the greatest screenwriters in history. That's our Bill.
Yeah, exactly - it's also Bill reminding us he's inside baseball on this stuff. Because he read a lot of Premier Magazine in the early 90s.
FYI, here's the full list: https://rewatchables.com/
One Kubrick (Shining) and two Coen Bros (No Country and Lebowski) and Bill was not on the Lebowski one as he is still 'saving it.' Airplane and Spinal Tap are still available as comedies. I don't think there's a single foreign film on there.
One Kubrick (Shining) and two Coen Bros (No Country and Lebowski) and Bill was not on the Lebowski one as he is still 'saving it.' Airplane and Spinal Tap are still available as comedies. I don't think there's a single foreign film on there.
Does Dunkirk count as “foreign?” In any event I don’t think he was evennon that one if my memory serves me right.
I'm a little surprised that Amanda and someone else haven't done "Amelie". That seems like a Dobbins movie.
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It's also Fennessy/CR/BS, so it's the big three. I'm at the beginning and it's typically very good. I hadn't realized Alien wasn't particularly well-received at the time. I knew it as a stone cold classic when I was a kid (albeit well after the movie came out).
That drove me CRAZY.
This week, Bill and Kyle Brandt face off for Sudden Death. These sorts of episodes are always immensely enjoyable.
On "whacky BS pronunciation front," and with the caveat that I'm only about 20 minutes in on my walk to work, Bill was calling Van Damme's character from Lionheart (Lyon) "Lion" at least a few times during the pre-category discussion. Brandt corrected the first one but let a few additional ones slide.
But otherwise, yes - bringing Brandt in for some ridiculous 80s/90s action movie always works.
But otherwise, yes - bringing Brandt in for some ridiculous 80s/90s action movie always works.
Also on the pronunciation front, we've heard Simmons say "vahn dahm" many, many times over the years, but apparently he decided (or someone told him) to stop doing that for this pod. He slips once and kind of laughs at himself, then corrects it.
Agreed, I really like Brandt when they do silly action movies. He obviously loves the movies and knows them well, but is also smart enough to know how absurd they are and does a great job poking fun at them. On the other hand, I've never enjoyed when Shea Serrano is on for action movies, because it seems like he actually thinks they're legitimately good and deserve to be taken seriously. I'm not an action movie guy, so it's much easier for me to get with Brandt's approach.
Agreed, I really like Brandt when they do silly action movies. He obviously loves the movies and knows them well, but is also smart enough to know how absurd they are and does a great job poking fun at them. On the other hand, I've never enjoyed when Shea Serrano is on for action movies, because it seems like he actually thinks they're legitimately good and deserve to be taken seriously. I'm not an action movie guy, so it's much easier for me to get with Brandt's approach.
The best part was him not applying a French accent to "Lyon" twice, and then immediately and inexplicably turning the Street Fighter character into the Parisian aristocrat "le Colonial Gweeeel".
So Simmons does Iron Man on the Rewatchables basically so he can take the opportunity to mock nerds every chance he gets.
So petty and small.
So petty and small.
Like so much of this board i'm pretty close to Simmons' age and background and maybe it's anecdata but in my experience the idea that you had to choose sports or nerd culture, that it wasn't cool to like comic books or star wars, was (a) pervasive in mass in the early 80s and (b) is absolutely not what it was like in the rest of the country. (Everybody loved star wars and spider man etc, that's why the made eleventy billions dollars!) Of course you can also grow from that person and come to an understanding that different people like different stuff and that's fine. To coin a phrase, de gustibus non est disputandum
I would add that it's certainly bizarre to anyone under the age of roughly 40 to hear someone crapping on star wars/harry potter/comic book movies; they've been so much a part of the culture for so many people. And if we are in the generation x-ish game of judging people for their tastes, pretty strange to view yourself as having great, cool taste when you're a pro wrestling/karate kid/road rules megafan.
Definitely was not my experience in the 80s, so maybe it was MA related. I grew up on Long Island, where Star Wars was as big as sports. The best athletes in the school would have Star Wars themed birthday parties.
Still, Iron Man came out when Simmons was almost 40 years old. Acting like you're still in grade school and posturing when you're 40 is just petty and small.
Only child Willy.
I also really dislike the two man Rewatchables, never mind the fact it's clearly a movie that Bill doesn't even appreciate. Skip.
Sean and Chris can be ok on two man shows. rewatchables with simmons ususally needs a third.
Yeah I saw this one pop up in my feed today, saw the hosts, and immediately thought "pass".
Bill's entertaining, but he's a weird guy. Who in their 50s is seriously disparaging "nerds"?
Hmmm, I didn't have that experience in Mass. I was squarely in Camp Nerd, but Star Wars was about as mainstream as it got. Maybe things like D&D were mocked by the jocks. Besides, Bill basically grew up in Greenwich, CT. He's just weirdly insecure, especially because he considers himself part of the Hollywood and Silicon Valley cool set now.
I mean, I remember seeing him standing alone at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference about 10 years ago. He's not cool.
Could be just my town. Anyhow, Bill's tastes are always a bit of a puzzler--we've all said it a million times but it's close to mystifying for a 50ish year old purported pop culture maven to be so limited in his tastes as to not like the Simpsons, Coen brothers movies, any IP franchises including marvel Star Wars Harry Potter Star Trek and it seems Bond, foreign films, most movies before 1970, Redford movies, literature of almost any type (although he claimed to be a Raymond Carver fan once), "weird" or "artsy fartsy" or black and white movies, and I'm sure a lot of other cool stuff that I've forgotten about.
I mean, he’s right. Superhero movies are for nerds. The real cool kids are playing fantasy sports and comparing every event in life to fantasy auctions
I agree. The ones that come closest to working on when they do a shitty Van Damme (or whoever) action movie with Kyle Brandt. But it would be about 100% better if you added a third.
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I also remember that him saying something along the lines of he avoided Game of Thrones initially because he didn’t like things “in the forest”.
I also agree that it’s silly for Bill to do an episode for a movie that he’s lukewarm at best on. A three person pod with any combination of CR, Fennessey, and anyone from the Ringer-verse feed would have been perfectly fine. For instance, Joanna Robinson( who oddly has never made an Rewatchables appearance) has a book about the history of the MCU coming out in the fall.
On the Mismatch, KOC did these reads and they sped his voice up for some reason…it was honestly terrifying
Although probably not as terrifying as his new Hotels.com reads…
He said that, he also said he only like movies where he can imagine himself being the star so that rules out movies that happened too long ago or in outer space or whatever. Which kind of says wild things about his imagination (I'd never really imagined myself as Michael Corleone or any of the heat characters and that does take some serious imagination/self centerdeness to view movies from the perspective of being the star of the movie, but then why couldn't you imagine yourself as an elf or mutant or cyborg?
I imagine he'll be skipping the Beau is Afraid rewatchables episode. What has started to grate on me with every movie Simmons discusses is how he tries to take whatever it is about the movie that sets it apart from others of its kind and remove it or correct it so that it's more like other movies with which he's more familiar. Often this takes the form of removing an interesting character actor (or more commonly an actress) and replacing them with a bigger movie star, but it also manifests in simply not tolerating anything that seems to pull the movie in a novel direction.
He also doesn't like period pieces and according to Bill, Game of Thrones was set in the 1300s.
He also said Ghost was absolutely the most accurate depiction of the afterlife, which is just a glorious take.
The Ghost take is particularly amazing because it's seemingly completely earnest.