Movie Quotes Are My Love Language
🖐 The Friday High Five #123
Welcome to this week’s Mullet edition of the Friday High 5.
Business in the front: The 5 things I enjoyed this week, free for all to enjoy.
Party in the back: A deeper exploration of something on my mind, for supporters.
Business in the front
Stick
Vibe: Gen X trying to teach Gen Z about life, plus golf.
Deets: Look—I’m an easy mark when it comes to this kind of thing. Owen Wilson as a former PGA professional turned degenerate gambler? You had me at Owen Wilson.
Stick is about a former golf pro (Wilson, duh) whose career exploded in a public and rather tragic fashion. The show picks up 15 years later, with Wilson selling golf clubs in a strip mall golf shop, running cons, and teaching little old ladies to golf. He encounters a teenage golf prodigy and decides to help the kid turn pro, largely so he can draft off his talent and make some easy money.
There’s a redemption story lurking in the wings, but frankly I’m just enjoying Wilson doing his fast talk schtick. Makes me think he’s missed his true calling playing charming scoundrels, though that could be the Han Solo apologist in me talking.
Step Brothers
Vibe: The true face of arrested development.
Deets: I decided to throw on Step Brothers after rewatching The Other Guys last week. I didn’t interrogate the impulse, but now think some part of me wanted to revisit the 2000s era Will Farrell / Adam McKay collabs so I could properly rank them all.
Of the two, Step Brothers is funnier and also superior. I knew that, but nice to have my bias confirmed. The Other Guys is funny; Step Brothers is legendary. Even my wife, an avowed Will Ferrell hater, loves this movie.1
There’s just something magical about Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly playing teenage boys in men’s bodies. Maybe because it’s aspirational in a way—I still feel like a teenager (which is to say, a bit immature) because many of my interests were ones I had back then. And though it’s played for laughs, there’s something profound about retaining the things you love from childhood and not letting life beat them out of you.
Even if your thing was pretending to be a T-Rex.
Inside Out 2
Vibe: We’re out of good ideas, here’s a crappier version of that thing you liked.
Deets: I don’t think I’ve ever ranked Pixar movies, but the original Inside Out is an easy top 5 film.2 It was a brilliant execution of a nutso concept—human emotions as characters, who are both active participants and inactive spectators in the life of a girl whom they are part of but also separate from.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. Like those fish that cling to the bottom of sharks and eat the sloppy seconds. Or the midi-chlorians that give rise to the Force, which we don’t talk about anymore since Anakin Skywalker took his talents to Mustafar.3
Inside Out is so high concept it seemed doomed to fail. So in a way, Inside Out 2 being a much crappier sequel is almost fated. But the movie doesn’t do itself any favors by making the new emotions even more abstract and unknowable—Ennui? Really?
Gone was the whimsy and wonder from the first go-around. I still enjoyed the film, and found myself getting emotional during the finale, but I think I’d have been just as happy having never seen it.
Nine Perfect Strangers: S2
Vibe: Psychedelics + Stockholm Syndrome + Scripted Reality = Therapy.
Deets: Nicole Kidman returns as a Russian therapist who uses very questionable methods to provoke change in her clients. Or perhaps drive them crazy. Sanity is in the eye of the beholder.
Season 1 ended so cleanly that I didn’t know there would be a Season 2. But here we are again, back in another remote location with a fresh batch of test subjects. What Masha (Kidman) is doing is quite clearly experimental, to such a degree that you have to wonder who would possibly sign up for it. Who wants to be a lab rat?
As the saying goes: Desperate times calls for the best hallucinogens money can buy.
I’m only 2 episodes in and have no idea where this story is going. And that’s actually really cool. It feels like we’re discovering the story alongside the characters.
Ted Lasso
Vibe: Relentless optimism is the strongest force in the world.
Deets: After we finished our Parks & Rec rewatch with our son, we decided to keep the good times rolling by revisiting Ted Lasso. It’s actually the first time I’ve watched S1 since it aired. I’d forgotten so much of the first season.
Everything you love about the show is there, but you can quite clearly feel it trying to discover itself. Find its footing. It isn’t quite yet the Ted Lasso we know, but knowing what we know, you can almost watch the metamorphosis happen in realtime. It’s interesting.
The biggest whiplash is the Nate of it all. His arc is the show’s worst—so needlessly unnecessary. Seeing him again at the beginning, before he gets dumb, is both a reminder of who he was and of what’s to come.
Here’s one last realization: As much as I love Ted, dealing with him everyday would be a special brand of exhausting.
Party in the back
Recently my wife and I were hanging out in that way longtime couples sometimes do—in the same room, doing separate things, and sometimes talking to each other.
Her: “Going to the store tomorrow. Need anything?”
Me, not really thinking about the question: “Ehh, no.”
Her, knowing I’m not really thinking about the question: “I’m going to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.”
Me, looking up from my iPad in surprised delight: “Ohh—good one.”
We shared a smile, and then she said something that struck me as profound: “You know, I didn’t quote movies before you.”
Now, to be fair—when you’ve been together since high school, “before you” takes on an increasingly small slice of your life. We’ve been together far longer than we’ve been otherwise. But we didn’t start dating until I was almost 18, and I was quoting movies on the reg long before I knew she existed. I thought everyone did that.
It would not be the first time I mistakenly thought everyone’s lives were deeply invested with pop culture, to the point that they became one and the same.