The Friday High Five

Unlikely pairings, accidental yet hilarious vehicular manslaughter, and one cool chick

Lionsgate

Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High Five. 🙏🏻

My Favorite Thing

Dungeons & Dragons Birthday Party

Last time talking about D&D for a while. I promise.¹

This past weekend my friend celebrated another trip around the sun with a day-long game of D&D. It’s a tradition dating back about 10 years, started by yours truly in the dank depths of my basement.² In the words of Montell Jordan, this is how we do it.

I won’t burden you with the details—the only thing more boring than someone else’s D&D game is a story about their fantasy football team—but we did various and sundry heroic acts. We Peter Venkmaned that dungeon.

Being that it was his birthday, the Dungeon Master was loath to let us have cake and eat it too.³ Turns out the feeble old woman we thought we were helping was actually behind all the nefarious activities. She passed into some sort of ghastly unlife during the climax while taunting us for being unwitting pawns in her scheme. I believe her exact words were, “You fools!”

It was more hilarious than shocking. He pulled the exact same move last year.

Fox

Other Things I Enjoyed

Long Shot

I’ve heard zero buzz about this movie, good or bad, since it released in 2019. I can only assume everyone was just as confused by the poster.

Lionsgate

I don’t know what vibe I’m supposed to get from this, but it reads as hopelessly uncool.

It’s really too bad because Long Shot is one of the funnest, most progressive rom-coms I’ve seen, possibly ever. It’s also hilarious. In my experience, rom-coms tend to be neither romantic nor comedic. Most fall into a nebulous gray zone of “cute but forgettable.”

Looking past the implausibility of Charlize Theron dating Seth Rogan—whose character dresses like a high school gym coach and has a hilarious masturbatory mishap on the level of There’s Something About Mary—Long Shot is a heartwarming movie and a great way to spend a Friday evening.

Boyz II Men also have an extended cameo, which delighted both my wife and me endlessly.

Long Shot is currently streaming on Netflix.

Far Cry 6 With My Bro

By happenstance or fate, my brother and I both bought Far Cry 6 for each other as Christmas gifts. The Far Cry series is a first person shooter with overly complicated politics that exist solely to give you a reason to run around shooting people. I’ve had flimsier premises.

My brother and I grew up gaming together. Tecmo Bowl, Madden, Contra, NBA, NHL—if it supported 2 players, we played it. After college, we settled down about an hour and a half from each other. Too far to sit on the same couch, but fortunately this coincided with the rise of multiplayer gaming on consoles.

We spent most of our 20s playing games like Halo and Gears of War. Those marathon weeknight sessions started dying out in our 30s, as kids and responsibilities took root. There were times when I’d come home after work, turn on my Xbox, and just sit there staring at the screen, too tired to even decide what to play. (Invariably, I just watched YouTube or Netflix.)

Recently, we started talking about finding a game we could play online together. That’s where our Far Cry 6 Christmas miracle comes into play.

I should maybe clarify that we exchanged the game during Christmas 2022. And we just now played it together for the first time. In our defense, you have to play through about 5 or 6 hours of introductory story before the game opens up and lets you invite someone else into it.

Wednesday night, we drew swords together.

We ruined some drug lord’s poppy plants, assassinated a general, infiltrated two tanker ships and eliminated all the hostiles, Seal Team 6 style.⁴ We also ran amuck across the countryside in a military jeep and, for one brief shining moment, a motorcycle with a sidecar. It was about this time we discovered vehicles are actually the most dangerous weapon in the game, to the horror of countless hostiles, a handful of innocent citizens, and two horses.

Suits

I try not to continually talk about the same TV show every Friday, mostly because novelty is a good thing. But as I’m nearing the halfway mark on my Suits marathon, I gotta bring it up again.

Man, this show. I can’t quit it.

If you don’t know or have forgotten since last time—Suits is a drama about lawyers with thousand dollar haircuts who sometimes do duplicitous things in the name of duty or love, but somehow always remain the good guys. The main characters are an overly cocky lawyer who makes Maverick look modest, and his genius-level protege who convincingly cosplays as a lawyer. The show makes it relatively easy to root for these two, even if you’re positive you would seriously dislike them in real life.

There is a procedural/formulaic element that becomes obvious after a couple of seasons. One trope they love to lean into is someone coming to a sudden epiphany based on an unrelated comment. Other than that minor quibble, this show has it all. The writing is smart and often peppered with pop culture references. It’s funny and heartwarming. Characters grow and change. (It’s shocking how many times I’ve reversed my opinion on Louis Litt, the show’s sometimes antagonist who deep-down is a hurting little boy.)

And then there’s Donna.

She may be the coolest character I’ve ever seen. The fact that I even need to think about how I’d rate her against someone like Han Solo should tell you all you need to know.

Suits originally aired on USA, I guess, but is currently streaming on Netflix. I can’t give it a fuller endorsement. (Did you see I just compared someone to Han Freaking Solo? C’mon, man—that’s my version of awarding an Oscar.)

Damsel

Netflix

I thought of the perfect pitch for Damsel while I was watching it: The Descent meets Eyes Wide Shut, with swords and dragons, produced by Disney.

That’s only a superficial comparison—for one thing, there are no orgies in Damsel… that we see, though the vibes coming off Robin Wright and her crew are super cultist and a bit naughty. But I think it’s an accurate idea of the general tone you’ll get from this one. I thought I was going in for a fantasy movie where Millie Bobby Brown wields a sword, and that does happen (see above), but it’s more a footnote than the actual meat of the story.

It is a rather predictable movie. I called my shot, out loud, about 10 minutes into it and am happy to report I was right on the mark. Despite that, I enjoyed the journey. Millie’s character undergoes an outward transformation to match her inner change; the whole thing is super on the nose, but damn if it doesn’t work anyway.

1. I will, in fact, be talking about D&D on one of the first podcast episodes.

2. My basement is actually super nice, and has a room dedicated to D&D and all things nerdy. My previous house had what’s called a Michigan basement. I don’t know if that term travels outside the Mitten state, but it’s somewhere between a crawl space and an actual basement. Low ceilings, concrete block, spiders.

Ours had what we dubbed The Murder Room, a small wooden enclosure with a padlock door and a small window. There was graffiti on the inner walls. None of it read, “I don’t want to die,” or listed off interesting details about human anatomy, but that didn’t make the room any less murdery.

3. We did have delicious donuts though.

4. If Seal Team 6 tactics involve accidentally setting yourself on fire.