0:01-1:03:24: Greetings! And welcome to 2021, as well as our first podcast installment of the year. To be honest, we sorta verbally committed to this episode in our last episode of 2020 even though we were scheduled to take it off. So we are splitting the difference by, for all intents and purposes, recording a shorter single-topic podcast episode concerning recent potential-movie-theater-and-franchise-disrupter Wonder Woman 84. This episode is all SPOILERS, soup to nuts, stern to stem, and so on to what have you. So if you have not seen the movie and wish to keep it unspoiled until you do, we look forward to you coming back after you’ve seen it. But we’re just telling you now: (a) shorter then usual episode; (b) single topic (and so therefore super-short show notes, thank goodness for me); and (c) spoilers, spoilers, spoilers!
1:03:24-end: Closing comments/coming attactions/and by coming attractions I mean two podcasters try to figure out how their schedule for the month will now work! (Plus some actual coming atrractions.) Look for us on Stitcher! Itunes! Instagram! Twitter together and separately: Graeme and Jeff! Tumblr, and on Patreon where a wonderful group of people make this all possible, including Dominic L. Franco, and Empress Audrey, Queen of the Galaxy, to whom we are especially grateful for her continuing support of this podcast. (Also, don’t forget about Spotify!)
Next week: Another episode, full-sized this time! Can you dig it?
Here’s the link for copying, pasting, what have you:
https://theworkingdraft.com/media/podcasts4/WaitWhat310.mp3
Borrowing a joke from the computer game world, among people trying to do worthwhile reviews and criticism in such a hype-soaked, marketing-driven environment, after an unfavorable review: So what you’re saying is, 7/10, possible movie of the year. :)
Writing as someone with no intention of seeing the movie, I really enjoyed the review. I will also take the opportunity to suggest that the Reagan casting was inspired by Chester Brown’s Reagan from “Yummy Fur,” who looked nothing like the Gipper.
Great point, Nate! It’s shame you haven’t seen the movie, because I think there’s a good case to be made that the post-credits scene where Reagan ends up as the head of somebody’s penis may also be a shout-out to Yummy Fur?
won’t watch ww84 but i just wanted to echo that HBO Max is probably my favorite streaming site currently
neck and neck with it is tubi though. browse through tubi and it’s like going to a mom and pop video store on friday night where everything you WANT to watch is gone so you’re just piling up the stuff that looks weird.
I wonder if Tubi is a publicly traded company (or part of one). Because man the number of people I’ve heard talking about in the last month or two makes me think it might be one of those things that’s had its standing dramatically upped by the coronavirus lockdowns…
As always, you left no stone unturned in your discussion of WW1984. Bravo!
I went in expecting a Suicide Squad/Rogue One-level trash fire. Surprising, it was just kind of mediocre. There were a few flashes of interesting ideas but nothing was well thought out and I was just left confused more than anything. It was probably on par with your average Marvel movie, with its biggest sin is that it was forgettable. With Suicide Squad, I’ll sit down with someone for 30 minutes and lay out all the problems with it. With this I don’t think I could work up the energy. Since you covered everything worth saying, I’ll just briefly bring up two points.
One, I kept being reminded of better movies from the ’80s that I enjoyed more. Jeff covered all the body swap/romance films of the ’80s it takes cues from (and, yes, I totally remember “One of the Guys,” if for nothing else than the nudity). The second opening, the action sequence in the mall, probably has a number of antecedents because shopping malls to ’80s films is what the internet was to late ’90s films. To me, the shade of Commando were pretty strong in that scene. Next, when WW is jumping from car to car in convoy in Egypt, all I could think of was the truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark. She even winds up under the carriage of the one vehicle at one point. Spielberg is really good at those types of sequences, so I don’t understand why you’d take a swing at the kind if you know you’re going to miss. Max Lord definitely had a Trump vibe, but then they kept trying to humanize him. I was getting more of a Michael Douglas from Wall Street vibe, if I’m being honest. Trump definitely was the quintessential ’80s greedy businessman, but I strongly feel that doesn’t hold true for most people outside of the NYC-area during that time. Most of America didn’t really get to know Trump until The Apprentice. I think just the general image of junk bond traders in the ’80s served as the model for Max Lord to imitate, just as Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor was a stand in for all tech bros.
The second point is I hate period movies that over egg the pudding. That shopping mall had every single stereotype of the ’80s in there, just like Stranger Things. Watch any movie from the ’80s, and they rarely go all in on the fashion that period is allegedly known for. Another case in point was the 6-year-old girl that gets held hostage in the shopping mall. She’s listening to a Walkman because THE ’80S!, but no way, unless her parents were rich, was a 6-year-old gonna be rockin’ a Walkman.