Listens to Rob and Austin explain the Patriots
Has been playing Magic the Gathering Arena
So wait. Are the Patriots an Annoying Control Deck of a football team? The kind where your opponent doesn’t really get to play the game at all and just has to watch as you beat them?
was there a content warning at the start of this one? I wasn’t paying much attention and then all of the attention. I don’t need warnings but somebody might.
This was my exact reaction as well!
Also, major thanks to Rob for that breakdown. I don’t follow football, so my association with the Patriots has only been “oh, they’re a very skilled team.” That assessment of how and why they win is extremely helpful for putting them into context.
hit the eject button on Be Good And Rewatch It during the Unbreakable episode after the name jokes and the jabs at Shyamalan’s selfishness went by without any investigation or contextualization, but my boredom/curiosity had me thinking about giving the other episodes a go. don’t think i will bother though since in this podcast, when discussing The Happening, the movie is described in quite positive terms yet they go out of their way to note that despite their clear enjoyment the movie contained “no good directing”.
extremely disappointing too hear them repeatedly engage in such a famously racially charged narrative, not only forgoing any critical discussion of it but actually parroting eye rollingly stale examples of it near verbatim. i would have expected a lot more from the personalities involved based on what i’ve heard during other Waypoint podcasts
I mean have you seen the happening…
Aye, sounds like a little drift is occuring in the track syncing. I sometimes get this in Audacity if one of the tracks has suffered from data corruption.
Either that or Patrick needs to work on his clapping…
For me Wargroove just needs to have shorter missions, if the enemy commander actually comes out and attacks missions can be over quickly enough, but if they stay in the base it feels like it just takes forever, and the end of a map drags when the outcome is that i am obviously going to win
You guys didn’t talk about 358/2 Days, if you were still unsure about that.
I’m of South Asian descent, and in fact Tamil like Shyamalan (at least partially in his case). I don’t think this criticism holds water. “M Night” is not his real name and has no etymology in South Asian languages. It’s an Anglicized version of his actual name, Manoj Nelliyattu. I think mild ribbing of his onscreen name is absolutely fair game. Especially as he is no ally of South Asian workers in Hollywood, or other PoC workers in general. His films overwhelmingly star white protagonists and he was responsible for the reprehensibly white washed Avatar: The Last Airbender. I think the Waypoint crew was perfectly in bounds with their jokes in this case.
My definitive podcast document on M. Night Shyamalan is the first season of Blank Check with Griffin and David, because they REALLY dig deep into Shyamalan and never dismiss him as a filmmaker. He has made a couple most irredeemable movies, but when he’s good, he’s good!
So far, Be Good and Rewatch It is most interesting when it discusses narrative structure and theme. With all respect, the Waypoint team ain’t seasoned film critics, and they tend to get broad and vague as they discuss direction. I don’t think that makes them any less valid as film critics, just different. But Shyamalan…his issues are in his writing and his sleaze, not his direction. Even in The Happening, there are visual choices I love in terms of camera movement, production design, and staging the opening violent suicides.
Ciabatta tossed me into the twilight zone. Austin and Natalie explaining the experience that I had currently been thrust into made the feeling sink in deeper.
Love me a good sandwich. Hot dang.
As always love the WP folks explaining sports as the way the Patriots are discussed really helped me UNDERSTAND. Like I knew…but I couldn’t explain it. Thanks! Basketball is a much funner sport to watch than football but the way the league is structured I don’t know if that the payoffs come from the on court actions. Watching the Warriors do their business is rad. Watching Lebron take control of a game is rad. The arc of any team’s season? I don’t know, I personally have a hard time getting invested. But the off court stuff between trades, free agency, ect. is WILD and the stuff that changes teams complexions and narratives in an instant.
Knicks stink.
it’s only a bad look when it’s presented next to equally hack lines like how they don’t deserve credit for directing things you think are “great” while at the same time deserving of ridicule for centering PoC storytellers in a story about PoC storytellers. after hearing it all loudly repeated over and over for twenty years my bullshit detector starts to go off because odds are when i hear one line the rest are sure to soon follow (as was the case here)
It maybe says something about me as a person that when they were talking about Bill Belichick being able to adjust strategy based on what players he has available and that other coaches aren’t as good at that, that I had the thought “the NFL should hire some gamers, I bet people who are way in to strategy games could be good at that”
I’m enjoying the longer podcast episodes recently, although it lead to a problem today where I wanted to listen to the podcast but also wanted to play Apex Legends and I definitely can’t do both of those at once, but I think that’s ultimately a good problem to have.
Ok, I’m not sure what exactly you are trying to say here. I never heard the crew deny Shyamalan credit for anything. Like most directors, the crew liked some of his movies and hated others. Not sure how that equals not giving credit. And I guess your statement about PoC storytellers is referring to Lady in the Water? If that’s the case, I can say that that movie is a piece of narcissistic garbage regardless of the director’s ethnicity.
And not for nothing, three of the people on the pod have nonwhite heritages (Austin, Natalie, and Rob), so maybe consider that their criticisms were fair minded (if exaggerated for comedy’s sake) rather than prejudiced.
does After Earth (a PoC centered movie that broke even) get made at the budget it did without the success of Last Airbender? is After Earth as good as it is without the experience of managing a movie of that type beforehand?
there are so many interesting critical avenues to go down when discussing Shyamalan’s career and how it intersects with race and culture, but by all mean just follow the crowd and ridicule any of the movies that attempt to narratively center PoC while laying full blame to a single individual for the ones that don’t
After Earth gets made regardless because it was a Will Smith vanity project to make his son a movie star. And as a massive fan of the original Nickelodeon show, I’m personally offended that you’re trying to pawn off Shyamalan‘s garbage film as anything approaching “success”.
Shyamalan is at best a hit-or-miss director. But using his ethnicity as a shield to deflect the many many many legitimate criticisms of his work feels disingenuous. In fact, as a brown person, it feels patronizing.
i just mean success in the literal sense (and not a particularly great one based on available information). not trying to pawn it off as anything or do any of the other things you are claiming
We’re going off the rails here but I’m feeling punchy today.
Ok, let’s talk literal success. The movie was a “success” such that it barely broke even when taking in worldwide gross compared to making and marketing the movie ($300 MM all in cost). It sank a franchise that was so well loved and they never made the sequels that were already written. It holds a 5% on Rotten Tomatoes, and was almost universally considered the worst picture of 2010.
Avatar should have been its generation’s Star Wars, that is how good that show is, and Shyamalan turned it into a joke. He couldn’t even get the actors to pronounce the characters’ names properly for godssakes!
So yeah, not even a “literal” success.
I too spent most of the podcast in wonder at the mystery of “sobata bread”
As someone who recently got a stand mixer but has failed several attempts at bread making (I haven’t even bothered with cake decorating that stuff looks hard) I’d be all the way down for rob baking content. Or, at the very least maybe he could point out some good introductory stuff that he used to learn. I can do my family’s various recipes for non-frosted varieties of cake alright but anything else is basically wizardry to me.
