The Friday High Five
Boyd Crowder rides again; hungry, hungry elves; and cheesy '80s fantasies
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
Fallout
Full disclosure: I am only 1 episode into this. And though Prime has done plenty of good work, I’m still a bit gun-shy after The Rings of Power; you know a show sucks when it calls into doubt everything else a company does. I’ve heard plenty of good buzz about Fallout, so I’m hopeful.
I’ve played all the Fallout video games, so you could say I’m invested. Though I’ve never actually finished any of them. Here’s how I play Fallout:
Get through the introductory prologue.
Quickly forget about the main quest.
Indiscriminately wander the wasteland until I get bored.
Never play it again.
Get excited about the next game.
Buy it at full price.
I like the idea of Fallout more than I do the actual game. Which makes this the perfect show for me. Minimal investment and scratches my itch for irradiated dystopias.
I would’ve watched this much sooner but I dropped Prime like a year ago. Haven’t missed it once. Turns out I can actually live without free 2-day shipping, which ended up being 4 or 5-day shipping more times than not anyway. My son got free Prime or much discounted Prime because he’s a college student—I didn’t really ask and he didn’t really tell, but I’m sure it’s totally fine—which led to an inverse of our usual dynamic. Typically, he’s the one coming to me for things. This might be the first instance in our entire relationship where he had something I wanted, and though there was no groveling, it still felt notable.
Fallout—the games—are a weird blend of bleak macabre and zany 1960s optimism. The show nails the vibe. There’s a bloody set piece that’s a bit humorous despite all the gore. It reminds me of the church scene in Kingsman; Fallout isn’t nearly as kinetic, but both underpin the violence with a nougaty layer of dark humor I really enjoy.1
Though the show sets up 3 characters—each with their own title card—Lucy (Ella Purnell) seems like the main protagonist. Her story is the one I’m most interested in. Funny thing, that—Lucy is the closest approximation to what playing Fallout is like. In the games, something makes you leave the safety of the Vault to explore the wasteland. In Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, it’s a missing father and missing child. So I’ve lived parts of Lucy’s story before, though I never found my missing people because I got super distracted.
That would be the perfect way to adapt the games: Send Lucy out on an epic quest, but she immediately starts exploring interesting-looking places and doing side quests for interesting-looking people, and eventually forgets why she left the Vault in the first place. That would be the truest expression of the Fallout experience.
Mostly though, I’m just super excited to see Walton Goggins.
He shines in the opening prologue. Charismatic, humble, downtrodden, heroic. So when we see him again as The Ghoul, it’s quite a surprise. The Ghoul is Boyd Crowder without a nose. A remorseless killer with just a hint of something going on under the surface, and a dark wit about the whole thing. I don’t know if Walton was intentionally dialing up Boyd, but I’m very much here for it.
Other Things I Enjoyed
Moneyball
Last Friday I watched Moneyball for the third time this year.
In my defense, it wasn’t entirely my fault.
Movie night these days is usually just my wife and me because our kids Have Better Things To Do, which mostly seems to consist of looking at a smaller screen by themselves. It’s fine. Though I am wistful for the days when they actually wanted to hang out. This is the circle of life. You pour everything into your kids and one day they tell you “your powers are weak, old man.”
And the thing of it is… they’re right. They are fully in the bloom of youth and have not yet come into their powers. Everything is still in front of them. Meanwhile, I’ve started the long, slow slide toward infirmity and senility. Now is everything.
I am very cognizant of the dissonance between that statement and choosing to rewatch the same 2 hour and 13 minute movie again. As I said, not totally my fault.
My son elected to join us for movie night—perhaps deign is a better word—and suddenly the pressure was on. My movie taste had been called into judgement after the Superman: The Movie debacle. I needed a win. Otherwise, my son might decide I really had lost it and try to seize the crown for himself. And by crown, I obviously mean the remote.2
Moneyball delivered.
My wife hates baseball and spreadsheets, but even she was moved by the winning streak montage, which ends in goose pimpling fashion. As Brad Pitt says in the movie—twice!—it’s hard not to be romantic about baseball. Even for a self-professed hater.
My son loved it too. Honor and stability have been restored to the Pierce household.
I wrote a long article about Moneyball last time I watched it—in April, sheesh—if you want to hear my opinions about the movie, and why it’s the best Brad Pitt vehicle.
The Hunger and the Dusk
I don’t read many comic books these days. When I do, they tend to be graphic novels, which is really just a compendium of 8 or 10 issues into a single book. My days of buying single issues are long gone.
That might have to change.
My friend loaned me the first 6 issues of a new D&D-esque series called The Hunger and The Dusk. It’s about an uneasy alliance of necessity between two longtime enemies—humans and orcs—who are both embattled by quasi-vampiric elves. The elves sailed into the West and there discovered something unseemly that changed them, and now they’re more or less like the Reavers from Firefly.
The world is also dying, which may or may not be tied into how the elves went full Event Horizon.
There’s only 6 issues out, but more are on the way this summer.
Blank Check with Griffin & David
I recently discovered this podcast and scrolled back to see what movies they’d covered, which lead me to the holiest of grails.
The podcast started in 2015 under an entirely different premise and guise. At that time, it was called The Phantom Podcast, as in The Phantom Menace. These two guys went unfathomably deep on the movie—the first episode covers the first 8 minutes of runtime!—and unearth all manner of interesting nuggets.
That probably sounds super dorky, but this is one of the funniest podcasts I’ve ever listened to. It’s definitely inside baseball, but it’s a must-listen for Star Wars fans.
The first 11 episodes cover The Phantom Menace. Most run longer than an hour. They then move onto the rest of the Prequels in the same level of detail, before doing single episodes on the original trilogy.
Here’s the first episode:
Masters of the Universe
This is not a good movie.
If you doubt the veracity of that statement, take another look at the image above. It reads as 80s fantasy cheese because that’s exactly what it is. Sometimes cheese is tasty, though.
Masters of the Universe is an enjoyable bad movie.
I threw this on this thinking it might be good fodder for an article. And boy, was I right! There’s a lot to say about this one. Most of what I’ll be saying about it is how very Star Warsy it feels.
Rather than repeat myself, here’s an excerpt from an article coming out Monday.
The Star Wars DNA in Masters of the Universe (1987) is so blatant I have to assume George Lucas earned residuals.
That's not a problem in and of itself—he says, nervously, knowing how much he's gone back to this particular moisture vaporator. Star Wars cast such a wide and long shadow in the 80s, it was nearly impossible not to reference it, even if unconsciously. The studios were also keen to somehow run it back—as though creating a billion dollar franchise is just an exercise in carbon copying—and thus, the more Star Warsy a project seemed, the higher the chance of getting it green-lit. Which is why the 80s are full of movies like Krull, Flash Gordon, and The Last Starfighter.
Star Wars isn't the only obvious inspiration.
Masters of the Universe is less a film than it is a quilt. You can forgive the dated effects and the clumsy storytelling—if there's one genre that knows how to make lovable cheese, it's '80s fantasies—but the helter-skelter production never synthesizes. It feels very patchwork, and it doesn't take a discerning eye to spot the stitches.
If you've ever doubted the skills of George Lucas, consider how he combined so many distinct and disparate elements—samurai films, Flash Gordon, westerns, hot rods, Dune, the work of Joseph Campbell—and created one of the most enduring classics to ever grace the screen. That takes a craftsman with generational prowess and a true storyteller's sensibilities. George didn't do it alone—the prequels suffer largely because he was without many of the collaborators who helped make the original films timeless, and instead was surrounded by talented yes-men—but there is no Star Wars without him. He's the Maker C-3PO's always praising.
Masters of the Universe is the first and last film directed by some dude named Gary Goddard. It was written by David Odell, who previously cut his teeth working on various projects for The Muppets and also on The Dark Crystal. I'm not trying to dunk on unknowns that managed to get a big-budget movie made. I'm just pointing out that there's probably a reason you've never heard of these particular makers, and hence, why this movie feels like a clumsy Star Wars hack.
You can read the rest Monday!
What brought you joy this week? Drop a comment and put something awesome on my radar.
Fallout’s dark humor may read as darkly unfunny to some. My wife didn’t find anything funny about the bloody set piece. Then again, she’d never played the games, and doesn’t know the unique joy of reverse pickpocketing someone to plant a live grenade on them.
I am pretty chill about most things, and am content to go with the flow. But the remote control is the one area where I exert my influence. Part of it is everyone else seems to fumble about with it, as though the remote is a newfangled device and not something that’s been with us for 40 years. The other, bigger part—I don’t really trust anyone else’s opinion when it comes to deciding what to watch. I don’t like to watch stuff just to pass some time. I want to watch good stuff, exclusively.
11 hours of dudes talking about The Phantom Menace??
[insert rick and morty 'you son of a bitch, I'm in' meme]
Give me the '80s animated "Masters" any day.