Looking forward to checking this out tomorrow. I think the pairing with Jackie is going to be awesome.
The Ringer
- Thread starter Cellar-Door
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It is. Jackie Mac is quickly becoming must-hear podcasting. At the end of her every appearance, Simmons gushes about how much he enjoyed it and how good it was... and he's not wrong.
Agreed. It's obvious how much the three of them love the game. The best part about the pod from yesterday is that they all bring a really unique perspective to the conversation and it felt like they could riff for hours. Ryen clearly watches way too much basketball, Simmons the same but with a less analytical eye, and Jackie has the institutional knowledge that would make anyone jealous.
This article is so stupid, yet so fun.
https://www.theringer.com/2017/7/14/16078058/nba-player-wikipedia-photos
https://www.theringer.com/2017/7/14/16078058/nba-player-wikipedia-photos
Comparing the jealousy Durant felt toward Curry in Golden State to the jealousy his older puppy felt toward his newer puppy after the latter arrived at his home was *classic* Simmons.
He can't help himself when he gets something caught in his head, it's hilarious. For a year everything was somehow connected to 2k because his son plays it. Now it's the puppy.
Simmons talking about the Harden trade today and immediately using the 80s Celtics and the 00s Celtics to compare how teams with a big three could co-exist was definitely classic Simmons. Then he was like, "Oh yeah, and the Warriors with KD, yeah, they had 3 great players." It was perfect.
The 80s Celtics have nothing in common with the 2021 Nets right now. Nothing! There is no comparison, in my opinion, because Harden and Kyrie are incomparable.
A few strong Rewatchables this week: First Blood is already up, and Simmons teased the Terminator coming later this week.
I will give him credit since I always talk shit about him, I thought Koppleman was good/great on the First Blood episode.
Greenwald and Ryan had a nice podcast for Tenenbaums but there was a fun irony in that they stated that Tenenbaums was the ultimate vibe movie while their vibe on the podcast was totally off what the Rewatchables vibe normally is. They treated it like a film seminar which I did like because I love that movie and they are smart guys but it wasn’t a blast ; it was still great.
Amanda Dobbins' performance on the last Big Picture episode is truly grounds for getting a new host. She was tearing Sean's head off for reasons that don't make any sense. And it went on for a little bit. It was really off putting and legitimately weird. Even Sean, alarmed, was like, "Are you angry or mad at me? Should we not talk about this TV show on a movie and TV show podcast?"
It was really quite a performance. She's gotta go. Get Liz Kelly or Kate Halliwell in there ASAP. Please.
It was really quite a performance. She's gotta go. Get Liz Kelly or Kate Halliwell in there ASAP. Please.
I got around to listening to this episode over the weekend, and I didn't find that exchange quite that bad. I got the sense that Amanda was incredulous that Sean would go from not liking WandaVision, to liking it, because he read some things online after he watched the first 2 episodes. We can debate that take, but it doesn't seem completely outlandish to me.
I haven't been listening to The Watch for a long time, so maybe Amanda will wear on me the way she has some of you. But I don't find her terrible.
I don’t love Amanda and I think some of her takes aren’t great when hosting a movie podcast (like summarily dismissing entire movie genres) but she doesn’t bother me nearly as much as some people. Different strokes for different folks (IE, I legitimately couldnt stand Tate Frazier but most on the board here liked him)
I started listening to the latest BS podcast about “unicorns” with KOC. I like listening to both of them together because I figure some Celtics pearls will come up...
Bill’s thoughts on unicorns and how he groups them is so nonsensical that it was honestly hard to keep up with. For example, Kareem is DEFINITELY a true unicorn because of longevity yet LeBron....isn’t but has a case to be one?
Jim Belushi was not in Raw Deal. Jim Belushi was in Red Heat.
Additionally, the scene in which Linda Hamilton performs pullups on an upturned hospital bed is in no way "one of the most iconic scenes in movie history." It's a great reintroduction to a character - and an iconic scene in Terminator 2: Judgment Day - but come the fuck on.
I love The Rewatchables, but the errors - and hyperbole - are a bit grating.
Additionally, the scene in which Linda Hamilton performs pullups on an upturned hospital bed is in no way "one of the most iconic scenes in movie history." It's a great reintroduction to a character - and an iconic scene in Terminator 2: Judgment Day - but come the fuck on.
I love The Rewatchables, but the errors - and hyperbole - are a bit grating.
We should probably have a separate "Ringer Podcast Network" thread.
I don't dislike Amanda Dobbins like some here, I think she is generally strong when she's on "The Rewatchables." That is a podcast where people mostly cover properties that they enjoy (Sean on "Inception" is a notable exception, there might be others I am not remembering).
That said, I don't know why they insist on covering comic book properties on "The Big Picture." I only listen to about 20-30% of the episodes, but IIRC Amanda has only ever liked "Wonder Woman," and Sean is embarrassed to admit every time he likes something nerdy. He never covers a genre topic without saying "Of course this whole thing is ridiculous..." To me it's more strange than anything, like they feel a need to cover things because they're hot properties or because of FOMO maybe. I could have told you before Disney + ever existed that Amanda wouldn't like "Wandavision," why make her talk about it? There are a gazillion podcasts out there, why would a listener want to listen to someone discuss something they actively loathe?
I don't dislike Amanda Dobbins like some here, I think she is generally strong when she's on "The Rewatchables." That is a podcast where people mostly cover properties that they enjoy (Sean on "Inception" is a notable exception, there might be others I am not remembering).
That said, I don't know why they insist on covering comic book properties on "The Big Picture." I only listen to about 20-30% of the episodes, but IIRC Amanda has only ever liked "Wonder Woman," and Sean is embarrassed to admit every time he likes something nerdy. He never covers a genre topic without saying "Of course this whole thing is ridiculous..." To me it's more strange than anything, like they feel a need to cover things because they're hot properties or because of FOMO maybe. I could have told you before Disney + ever existed that Amanda wouldn't like "Wandavision," why make her talk about it? There are a gazillion podcasts out there, why would a listener want to listen to someone discuss something they actively loathe?
Yeah that’s why Chris Ryan is good to have around (he corrects the record that Sigourney Weaver was the first woman bad ass in an action movie), but even he can’t call it out all the time. Like T2 is not the “first summer blockbuster” that was supposed to be one or whatever post-hoc justification he made up. Come the fuck on Bill.
Ryan, Fennessey, and Morris are clearly the most knowledgeable people on the podcast. I always appreciate someone who actually knows what the fuck he's talking about.
Having a subscription to Premiere in the early 1990's doesn't make one Pauline Kael.
It’s like you guys want to turn the thread into the nitpicks segment of the Rewatchables. Who gives a fuck about these minor errors. Bill is wrong many many times....it just doesn’t matter
View: https://youtu.be/XM4jJc8w4H0
View: https://youtu.be/XM4jJc8w4H0
I’d like a few more paragraphs, or pages, or volumes actually on why you are smarter and have better taste on every subject than anyone else that has ever lived but I don’t always get that so I do what I can to keep this thread at the top so you will grace it with your presence.
Simmons' podcast also promoted the forthcoming "Sports Cards Nonsense" podcast, that's going to be hosted a couple of investors working the field. Mike Gioseffi sounded like an amiable and informed enough guy, and a Boston native/fan so all good on that score.
My concern after listening to the interview is that the podcast is going to be pimping the market kind of like the shills selling their gambling picks. Gioseffi continually shared anecdotes about cards rapidly going up in value by "2-3-4-10 times" in a very short period of time, in what absolutely sounded like a too-good-to-be-true framework. [So says a guy whose collection is strongly concentrated in junk wax. I love my 1993 Donrusses, but needless to say I missed the value stop on the train line.]
Also felt a little aristocratic, celebrating the potential purchase of very high-end cards from high-end sources. "I got six Joe Burrow premium rookie cards for $800 apiece, and after he had a great game they went straight to $2000" kind of examples. Felt like a show for Simmons and Koppleman and other folks with more disposable income than me. And Simmons' son (who I hope is not really half the spoiled brat that Bill seems to celebrate).
I'll listen -- I do love cards and putting their value in the context of real-time sports is intriguing. But I hope they find a more humble "Cousin Sal" type to get in the mix to rue decisions that didn't necessarily turn out great.
My concern after listening to the interview is that the podcast is going to be pimping the market kind of like the shills selling their gambling picks. Gioseffi continually shared anecdotes about cards rapidly going up in value by "2-3-4-10 times" in a very short period of time, in what absolutely sounded like a too-good-to-be-true framework. [So says a guy whose collection is strongly concentrated in junk wax. I love my 1993 Donrusses, but needless to say I missed the value stop on the train line.]
Also felt a little aristocratic, celebrating the potential purchase of very high-end cards from high-end sources. "I got six Joe Burrow premium rookie cards for $800 apiece, and after he had a great game they went straight to $2000" kind of examples. Felt like a show for Simmons and Koppleman and other folks with more disposable income than me. And Simmons' son (who I hope is not really half the spoiled brat that Bill seems to celebrate).
I'll listen -- I do love cards and putting their value in the context of real-time sports is intriguing. But I hope they find a more humble "Cousin Sal" type to get in the mix to rue decisions that didn't necessarily turn out great.
It pretty clearly matters to some people. Otherwise we wouldn't post about it.
If things were more conversational, sure - it's not that big a deal. But when Bill doubles down with his "Listen, I was really into movies - I had a subscription to Premier magazine" bullshit, he's deserving of criticism.
As Leather said, it's not as much of a problem when he's called out on it. Fennessey is particularly good at it.
In this vein - Bill often refers to "Entertainment Weekly" as some sort of mid-to-late-90s bible that cool people who were serious about film would often read. I'm a little young for this so maybe I'm misremembering, but was that really a thing? I thought EW was for grandmas and the cool people were reading Village Voice or Boston Phoenix or some other independent publication to stay on top of stuff.
I haven't read this entire piece (it's long and I'm "working") but it sounds like it went through a pretty big transformation from its founding in 1990 to at least 2014. The three covers of Jessica Alba are likely telling.
https://www.theawl.com/2014/06/the-trials-of-entertainment-weekly-one-magazines-24-years-of-corporate-torture/
https://www.theawl.com/2014/06/the-trials-of-entertainment-weekly-one-magazines-24-years-of-corporate-torture/
I always hear these remember when statements as trying to give the listener a bit of context of what people were thinking in the moment. “Now we view it this way, in the moment it was .....” ; framing the mainstream pop culture view.
EW was pretty great back in the 80s -- calling it a more sophisticated version of People Magazine is accurate, but also probably undersells it. It would provide well-written reviews and features not only of the big studio movies hitting the multiplexes, but also significant independent films which you really didn't learn about in any other popular resource. Not as academic or challenging as Premiere (much less real film journals), but they had a staff sense of "quality". Ty Burr, who many of you may know as the (excellent, to my thinking) lead film critic of the Boston Globe was a frequent contributor there at the time.
I'm not saying it qualifies you to be a movie critic any more than reading Rolling Stone in the 80s qualifies you to be a music critic, but it's definitely not an eye-roll of a reference.
This is not indicative of anything, but the only mail I regularly received at my fraternity house in the late nineties was my EW subscription. Now, you see 20 variations of "what's coming and going from Netflix this February" in your twitter feed a day, but EW was my source for industry news before I turned to the internet. I loved the Fall (Winter, Spring, Summer) movie previews. 3 months later we'd see a trailer and I could throw out a tidbit about casting changes or on-set issues and sound like a real know-it-all that helped me not at all woo the ladies.
Thanks for that context - I had no idea. It's pretty hard to parse the way Bill uses the royal we vs. I. For example, "Back in the mid-90s, we used to read Entertainment Weekly to know what movies were cool" vs. "Back in the mid-90s, I used to read Entertainment Weekly to know what movies were cool."
100% this. I'm not saying this makes Bill cool, but pre-internet, these season movie previews were often the first I had heard of a lot of upcoming releases.
College in the 90s also featured many trips to the library to read their copy of the Boston Globe for my Sox spring training news.
I wonder if Leather thinks this post is combative. Probably, but also solidly accurate. In fact, it seems pretty fine to me.
This written in 2014, too.
EW has completely fallen off a cliff in the last 18 months. It used to be good because you could read about new stuff that was coming out. It was generally popular stuff, but it was a quick and easy read. It gave you movies, and TV, and music, and games, and books. And they occasionally had great stories, too.
Now the mag is once a month and the one thing it was good for is useless. It's out of date in days. And then the next issue is 4 weeks away. But that is the state of the magazine business in 2021. People just don't read them anymore.
It's tough for those of us of a certain age (I'm 47) to properly explain how important those magazines were to learning about pop culture, movies, TV, music, etc. I used to devour Rolling Stone, Circus, Kerrang, EW, Premiere, etc. back in the late 80s/90s. Hell, I recall buying an annual book of Leonard Maltin's movie reviews that I'd read incessantly. There was just nowhere else to turn for that kind of info.
I think that's part of why a pod like The Rewatchables is so much fun. Movies from, say, 2000 onward have been discussed to death on the internet. But for things released before then, you'd get a little info in the aforementioned mags, talk about it with your friends, perhaps see some fluffy promo interviews with the actors or director on TV, and that was it.
Shout out to Newsbreak on RT 6 in Swansea Ma. They had the best magazines in the mid 90s.
I think Amanda is necessary for Sean, as sometimes he becomes serious movie reviewer guy and doesn't remember they are podcasting on a pop culture website. This isn't Siskel & Ebert here, bringing emotion and baggage into things is perfectly fine. She looks down her nose at some of these movies that Sean takes way too seriously and picks them apart, and I love it.
I’ve been lurking/posting on this board for almost two decades.
If you would have told me back then, when everyone here was shitting on Simmons and I couldn’t understand why, that I would be critical of BS while a chunk of people are saying Bill’s errors don’t matter...there’s no way I would have believed it.
If you would have told me back then, when everyone here was shitting on Simmons and I couldn’t understand why, that I would be critical of BS while a chunk of people are saying Bill’s errors don’t matter...there’s no way I would have believed it.
Alan Siegel's long article on the movie "Big Fan" is highly engrossing.
If you haven't watched it, it looks like it's on Amazon Prime, Peacock, Crackle, Tubi, and others.
The Cult Sports Movie That Tackled the Underbelly of Fandom - The Ringer
If you haven't watched it, it looks like it's on Amazon Prime, Peacock, Crackle, Tubi, and others.
The Cult Sports Movie That Tackled the Underbelly of Fandom - The Ringer
I was a 90s EW subscriber and the thing I remember most were the little blurbs about the TV shows airing in the coming week. Many of them were pretty damned funny from what I recall.
Holy shit make Simmons/Sorkin’s GameStop discussion stop. Throwing shit against a wall with mild understandings and no understanding of downstream impacts. A CEO shouldn’t be allowed to just sell shares whenever but hey let’s get rid of 10b5-1 plans. Jesus.
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The T2 Rewatchable was great, of course, but all 3 kept saying John Connor was 10 (while Edward Furlong was 13). Is that true? I always thought JC was supposed to be a young teenager.
I think they back that out from the timeline not that it’s explicitly stated in T2
Edit: just read it is listed in his police record in T2
The Batman movie released in 1989 had a much bigger takeover of the culture that summer than T2 did in 1991. Not only was there a Prince album release tied to it with a video in heavy rotation on MTV ("Batdance"), but MTV also ran a "win the Batmobile" contest. And you could not walk down a street that summer without running into someone wearing a t-shirt with the bat symbol on it.
E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi... All movies marketed and cross-promoted to the teeth to take advantage of the summer movie season.
T2 was a huge movie, though. Am I the only one that always enjoyed the futuristic scenes in the first 2 Terminator movies? I haven't seen the original in probably 15 years (the effects probably look shitty now), but as a kid I thought seeing the machines and skulls and shit was great, in a grotesque way.
That was a funny few minutes of conversation. They seemed torn on whether or not T2 was a purposeful or accidental "first" summer blockbuster.
Batman was the first movie that immediately leapt to mind to refute all that silliness. Hell, the ghastly Dick Tracy came out in 1990, and was every bit the purposefully marketed summer blockbuster.
It is almost unbelievable ‘ROTJ’ and ‘Batman’ could have skipped his mind given Simmons’ age. ‘Jaws’ I could see since Simmons would have been like 6 years old at the time, though it is the correct answer if you want to find a first mover.