In this week’s episode, I rank the movies and streaming shows I saw in the first half of summer 2024.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and Reader Question
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 210 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July 19th, 2024, and today we are discussing the movies and streaming shows I watched for the first half of summer 2024. Before that, we’ll have an update on my current writing projects and then we will go into Question of the Week.
So, my current writing projects. I’m pleased to report that the rough draft of Half Orc Paladin is finished at about 81,500 words. Next up, I’m writing a short story called Paladin’s Hunt that newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook form when Half Orc Paladin is out, hopefully in early August. I’m also 23,000 words into Ghosts in the Tombs. I’m not 100% decided what I’m going to write next once Half Orc Paladin is out. I have to make a decision soon obviously, but it’s probably going to be either Shield of Conquest or Cloak of Illusion.
In audiobook news, the audiobook Wizard-Thief, as narrated by Leanne Woodward, is almost done. It’s just got to get through the various approvals at the audiobook sites, so hopefully that should be out in early August. Recording is going to start very soon on Shield of Darkness. So that’s where I’m at with my current writing projects.
We have a question about the Shield War series from reader EM, who writes in to ask: I was rereading Shield of Darkness and occurred to me that Connmar Pendragon would have had a much easier time finding his way to Owyllain if he had a Corsair Lord or whatever they called themselves back then, who had the Hidden Eye navigating for him. Am I right and this will be revealed in the Shield Wars series? No, Connmar did not have a Corsair or anyone with the Hidden Eye ability navigating for him, and he basically found his way to Owyllain by accident. At that time, there were people living on the Isle of Kordain, but they hadn’t really coalesced around the Corsairs of the Isle of Kordain as their national identity yet. I mean the process was underway but hadn’t reached the form it would by the time of the Frostborn series. And while some of them had the Hidden Eye ability, they hadn’t quite fully understood what it meant yet, and they hadn’t lived on the isle long enough for the mutilations from the dwarven engines to fully take hold. We’ll reveal more details about that in Shield of Conquest when I write that as my next book or the book after my next book.
00:02:26 Question of the Week
Now on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire enjoyable discussion of interesting topics. This week’s question: subscription services such as Kindle Unlimited, Spotify, Netflix, Thrive Market and Xbox Game Pass are an inevitable part of modern life. If you have a subscription service, which one is your favorite? No wrong answers and bear in mind that “subscription services all cost too much and I hit them all with the fiery consuming heat of 1,000 cores of 1,000 suns” is a perfectly acceptable answer as well.
Surabhi said: Disney Plus, because Marvel movies are my therapy.
Ray says: I only use Bookbub and Google Play.
Justin says: I do not use subscription services. I prefer to purchase the books, games, and programs I buy outright rather than rent them. Connectivity can be a problem where I am so being able to read, work, or play without being tethered to the Internet is a good thing.
That is something to keep in mind when considering a subscription service. If you have questionable Internet connectivity in your area, that may not be the best choice to sign up for a subscription service that relies on the Internet.
Our next comment is from Venus, who says: I can’t afford any subscriptions services, although if Barnes and Noble did one for ebooks, I’d consider working something out. I refuse to support Amazon and don’t like the fact that apparently books on Kindle Unlimited can’t be anywhere else.
That is indeed one of the annoying features of the Kindle Unlimited program, which is why only four of my 153 novels are currently on Kindle Unlimited.
Barbara says: my husband and daughter subscribe to some streaming services, but I’m not sure which ones. I don’t subscribe to any. I don’t watch television. I already own the games I play and I purchased my digital books so I don’t have to give them back.
John says: I think I get by far the most bang for the buck from Amazon Prime, but my favorite subscription service is probably my local weekly seafood delivery service, Sea Forager.
Bonnie says: I gave up the ones I had because I don’t watch TV anymore and can’t afford it. I have Prime, but only really use it for ebooks. If I need background noise, I use local radio.
Local radio remains free, so I suppose that is the most cost effective of all the subscription services.
Juana says: Kindle seems to have the most content and good price. I looked at the other platforms, too.
Becca says: I have Prime and agree it has a ton of benefits. I canceled Netflix because it doesn’t work on my TV. Hulu has some great shows (I recommend Crazy Fun Park, an Australian teen show about ghosts and friendships and changes. Surprisingly mature and well-acted).
William says: given the sheer quantity of great Star Wars series that Disney produces, theirs is hard to beat.
Gary says: Spotify.
David says: for value, you can’t beat Prime: movies, free shipping, and music. Netflix is very good for original content and Hulu for old stuff.
And Joseph says: I also have Prime mostly for the free shipping. Everything else there is just a bonus. I also have Kindle Unlimited. Totally worth it for me as I read daily and read two or three hundred books a year. That is down from 400 to 500 the first couple years of retirement. It is diverse enough that I can always find a good read.
For myself, the one I enjoy most is Nintendo Switch Online. I’ll pay for a month of Netflix when they have something I want to see and then we’ll cancel again after I’ve seen it. I used to have Xbox Game Pass, but all I ever actually play on the Xbox is Skyrim, Starfield, and the first three Halo games, so there is no point in keeping it. But Nintendo Switch Online lets you get the classic Mario and Zelda games from the NES and Super Nintendo era. Given that Nintendo’s attitude towards the legacy properties tends to veer between complete indifference and wrathful litigation depending upon the month, it’s good that Nintendo offers a relatively affordable way to get them legally because at my age, sometimes the best way to relax at the end of the night is to just play a few levels of the original Super Mario Brothers. So that’s it for Question of the Week this week.
00:06:26 Main Topic: Summer 2024 Movie/TV Show Review
And now let’s move on to our main topic: 2024 Summer Movie Roundup, Part 1. Summer always has a lot of movies, so I usually split the Summer Movie Roundup post in two halves and this would be Part 1.
I was surprised at the number of sports movies I watched this time, since, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t usually follow professional sports all that closely. That said, while the NFL and the NBA might not have quite the cultural hegemony they had at their peak in the 1990s and early 2000s, they’re still hugely central to American culture. I don’t think you can really understand the United States without grasping the central role of professional sports in mainstream culture. I expect there’s a similar phenomenon with association football clubs in the UK and many European countries. Besides, one of the abilities of good storytelling is to make you interested in a story about a topic you might not otherwise care about, like athletic shoes.
So here are the movies and shows I watched in the first half of summer 2024, ranked from worst to best. As always, the rankings are totally subjective and based on nothing but my own opinions and observations.
So first up is Madam Webb, which came out in 2024. Oofffff. This wasn’t quite the crime against cinema that the Internet thought it was, but it still wasn’t great. Sony has the rights to a bunch of Spider-man adjacent characters, and the company is holding those in a death grip and has been trying to make a Spider-man Cinematic Universe happen for some time, with mixed results. The Tom Hardy Venom movies had been pretty good, the others, not so much.
The plot of Madam Webb: cynical and jaded EMT Cassandra Webb works with her partner Ben Parker (later in the Uncle Ben of Spider-man fame) and is almost drowned in an accident. While drowned, Cassandra starts developing precognition and clairvoyant powers. She starts seeing visions of three young women who will be murdered by a powerful real estate developer named Ezekiel. Turns out that Ezekiel has Spider-man powers that also include precognition, and he wants to kill the girls before they someday kill him.
The scenes where Cassandra wonders if she is going mad, but gradually starts to realize that she can see the future were actually quite good and cleverly laid out since they did in sort of a time loop where she experiences the event before it happens. That said, this movie could have been an interesting concept, but it didn’t really work.
For one thing, the dialogue was just clunky. Dialogue is a hard, hard art to master, both in movies and writing novels (as I know first-hand). But Madame Webb didn’t get there. Many of the dialogue scenes were just wooden. Additionally, the movie felt padded and drawn out, which is interesting because the runtime was under two hours. Ultimately, I think Madam Webb succumbed to the illness of a shared cinematic universe. It felt like the incomplete prologue to a more interesting movie, and not every side character in the Spider-man mythos needs an origin story. The trick to making a shared cinematic universe is that each movie must stand alone on its own, especially in the beginning, and the stories have to be interesting. Madam Webb, alas, couldn’t quite manage either. Overall grade: D-
Next up is The Acolyte, a streaming series which came out in 2024. There is quite a furor about this show on social media, but you can’t believe most of what you see on social media. To be blunt about it, I’ve come to believe that social media is designed to induce mental illness in as many of its users as possible in order to increase their time spent on the site, which in turn raises ad revenue. Very cynical. But I suspect that’s the basic business model of Facebook and YouTube, which is why you see so much rage-filled clickbait on both sites, since that’s what drives engagement and increases revenue, but that’s a problem beyond the scope of a movie review podcast episode. Back to The Acolyte. I would say that The Acolyte wasn’t the crime against cinema that YouTube thought it was but instead an uneven mixture of some strong points and some weaknesses.
The plot: former Jedi Osha has left the Order and is working as a mechanic on a trade federation starship. Meanwhile, a woman who looks exactly like her has started murdering Jedi Masters. Osha is arrested for the murders, but her former teacher, Jedi master Sol, quickly figures out that the murderer is in fact Osha’s twin sister Mae, who has been presumed dead for the last sixteen years. Osha reluctantly tagged along with Sol to help track down Mae, which means she needs to delve into the dark secrets of her past and discover who trained Mae to be a Jedi killing assassin. The Jedi assume a renegade member of the Order must have trained Mae because the Sith had been extinct for a long, long time. Or have they?
This show did have its strong points. The lightsaber fights looked good and were fun to watch. Lee Junge-jae as Sol, Manny Jacinto as Qimir, Charlie Bennett as Yord, and Dafne Keen as Jecki all gave good performances. In particular, they stole episode 5, which was overall the strongest episode of the series. The design of the Sith Lord’s helmet (dubbed Darth Teeth or Smilo Ren by the Internet) was good. The nods to the old Expanded Universe, like cortosis ore, were nice. There was enough of a compelling mystery -who is the Sith Lord and what actually happened in the twin’s past- that can hook the viewer through to the end of the series. The show also did a good job of showing how complacent and political the Jedi had become, to the point where 100 years later the Jedi High Council would meet with Supreme Chancellor Palpatine every day for thirteen years and completely failed to realize that he was in fact the Sith Master who had been pulling the strings all along.
That said, I think the show did have four significant problems. 1: the whole good twin/evil twin thing was kind of lame. Playing identical twins is hard for any actor, and sometimes I had a hard time keeping track of whether Osha or Mae was in a particular scene. I kind of wish the characters had been brother and sister, or at least not identical twins so they had been easier to tell apart. 2: As much as I appreciated the nods to the Expanded Universe, I think it relied too heavily on them and assumed the audience had a high level of Star Wars knowledge, like the weird Force cult where Osha and Mae grew up. In the Expanded Universe, there are all kinds of weird half-baked cults with an incomplete knowledge of the Force that run into serious problems when they encounter an actual Jedi or an actual Sith. One advantage of visual media over novels is that it’s much easier to show instead of tell, but I don’t think Acolyte explained its premises well. The Mandalorian explained its premises better, gradually exposing the viewer to the Mandalorian’s culture as he dealt with the Monster of the Week. Mando gradually learned about the Force and the Jedi, a race of enemy sorcerers, as he tried to save The Child from the Imperial Remnant.
By contrast, The Acolyte kind of dropped viewers into the middle of things, didn’t bother to explain any ambiguities, and simply assumed they would all understand the references. 3: The problem with the Jedi Order is that its philosophy is essentially stupid. The reason for that is that Jedi philosophy is basically a highly watered-down version of 1970s style Hollywood Buddhism, which is itself a tremendously watered down version of actual Buddhism. The Jedi are basically left with “don’t feel fear or anger” and “don’t get attached to people” but lack the religious and philosophical underpinnings which would allow those concepts to make sense in actual Buddhism. In real life, eventually we learn that both suppressing anger and fear or allowing it to dominate us is unhealthy. Both anger and fear serve useful functions. Fear warns of danger and anger is a good response when one is forced into circumstances where you have no choice but to fight. Anger and fear make for good servants, but awful masters, but Jedi philosophy completely misses that point.
4th and finally: the show was the wrong genre for the kind of moral relativism it had. Moral relativism worked well in Andor, which was a spy thriller about criminals gradually realizing that they had to fight the Empire and do terrible things while doing it. That worked because Andor was a spy thriller. By contrast, The Acolyte was about Kung Fu space wizards using space magic that literally comes in good and evil flavors. Moral relativism works less well in that kind of setting where there is literally good or evil space magic. So I would say Acolyte was a mixed bag. I admit, if there’s a second season, I’ll watch it just because I want to see what happens, but given Disney’s significant financial woes, that seems unlikely. Overall grade: C-
Next up is Unfrosted, which came out in 2024. It is an absurdist comedic retelling of the creation of the Pop Tart breakfast food, told as sort of a parody of corporate biopics like Ford versus Ferrari and Air (which we will talk about later this episode). This movie was silly and kind of dumb, but it knew it was silly and kind of dumb and so leaned into it and therefore worked. Jerry Seinfeld plays Bob Cabana, a high-ranking employee of the Kellogg cereal company, which is locked in a bitter rivalry with the Post cereal company for the breakfast market. One day Cabana uncovers everyone at Post is working on something that will upend the breakfast market, a fruit filled breakfast pastry that can be toasted. Alarmed with this information, the CEO of Kellogg, Edsel Kellogg III (played by Jim Gaffigan as a sort of parody of ‘60s era U.S. business executives), launches a crash effort to match Post’s effort. Cabana must recruit a heist style team to build Kellogg’s breakfast pastry, including numerous obscure figures from 1960s pop culture. The race is on to build the Pop Tart. Anyway, this was an entertaining movie, but it has no connection to factual accuracy. Also, Bill Burr was hilarious as President Kennedy. Overall grade: B-
Next up is The Hit Man, which came out in 2023. It is an amusing cross between a dark comedy and a sort of Hitchcockian thriller. Glenn Powell plays Gary Johnson, a mild mannered and somewhat ineffective philosophy professor. Due to his skill with electronics and microphones, he frequently helps out the police with sting operations. One day, the officer who usually goes in for sting operations gets suspended for beating up some teenagers and having it go viral on viral on YouTube. Gary is drafted at the last minute to go undercover as a hit man and get a suspect to contract his services. Gary does it so well that the Police Department uses him more and more and Gary starts disappearing into his roles as various hit men in a sequence which is quite funny. This works well until Gary meets Madison, a woman who wants him to kill her abusive husband. Gary talks her out of it and starts seeing her, a situation which quickly escalates out of control.
It was interesting that the movie went through a sudden genre shift about 1/3 of the way through, from dark comedy to love story, a bit darker than I usually prefer, to be honest, but enjoyable nonetheless if you don’t mind the strong language. That said, I watched this right after Madam Webb and the contrast between Webb’s clunky and wooden dialogue and the much better written Hitman was night and day. What was interesting was that the movie only cost $8.8 million to make. Given the economic climate, I expect we will see more of this: movies that have to be disciplined about keeping the cost down, as opposed to the enormous 295 million budgets of something like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Overall grade: B-
Next up is Boss Level, which came out in 2021. This movie is best described as Groundhog’s Day but as an action movie. Former Special Forces soldier Roy Pulver, played by Frank Grillo, is caught in a time loop that repeats the same day over and over again, which always ends with him getting killed by assassins that have been hired to hunt him down. This happened after he tried to reconnect with his former girlfriend, a scientist working on a secret project overseen by the sinister Colonel Ventor, played by Mel Gibson. For a variety of reasons, let’s just say at this point in his career, Gibson is very believable in a villain role. At first, Roy succumbs to despair in the time loop, but then decides to spend the endless day trying to reconnect with his estranged son. Eventually, this causes him to rally and fight back against the loop and he realizes that his ex-girlfriend deliberately put him into the time loop because he was the only person she knew who could stop Colonel Ventor’s evil plans for his project, which turns out to be a time machine.
I’d say the biggest weakness of the movie is the opening, which is a sort of record scratch “you’re probably wondering how I got here” opening I complained about in Episode 203 of this podcast. Also, I think it maybe should have been five to 10 minutes longer. The ending is sort of implied but it would have been far more satisfying to have actually been shown what would happen. But overall, I like this movie. Solid B-level thriller/science fiction stuff. It’s interesting to compare this to Groundhog’s Day because Groundhog Day had to spend so much time establishing the premise because the plot idea of a time loop wasn’t as widely known back then as it is now, whereas nowadays you just say “Groundhog Day loop” and most people will immediately know what you’re talking about. Overall Grade: B
Next up is Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which came out in 2024. This wasn’t quite as good as Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but I still enjoyed it. In this one, Ian Spengler’s daughter, her good-natured boyfriend, and her teenage children have returned to New York City to restart the Ghostbusters business. They were bankrolled by original Ghostbuster Winston Zeddmore, who is now a wealthy businessman funding a variety of ghostbusting projects. When one of Zeddmore’s employees stumbles across a dangerous artifact holding a powerful ice ghost, both the new and original Ghostbusters must team up to save the day.
I really like how the new Ghostbusters films handle the original characters. The original characters are no longer the main focus but they’re now mentoring the new characters and providing advice and support. I like this a lot better than the Disney/Lucasfilm approach of the original character as being sad old losers that the new characters must rebel against and then surpass. It was also great that actor William Atherton returned as government apparatchik Walter Peck. Back in the first movie, Peck was an officious EPA inspector who accidentally released a ghost horde upon New York. In the grand American political tradition of tradition of failing upward, he is now the mayor of New York City and still hopes to disband the Ghostbusters. I think the movie’s biggest weakness was that it was too complicated and there were a lot of different characters and moving parts to keep track of. Overall grade: B
Next up is Inside Out 2, which came out in 2024. It is a terrifying descent into the nightmarish hellscape that has the mind of the average teenage girl. I am, of course joking (though, if you have teenagers, you know that I’m only mostly joking) but Inside Out 2 is a strong follow up to the first movie. In the first movie, the anthropomorphized representations of emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust) tried to control themselves inside the mind of young girl Riley. At the start of the second movie, Riley is now 13 and doing pretty well, but then puberty kicks in. Suddenly new emotions arrive in her head: Ennui, Envy, Embarrassment, and Anxiety. Anxiety in particular runs amuck and seizes control of Riley’s mind. As Anxiety starts to send Riley spiraling out of control, the other emotions have to rally behind Joy and find a way to save Riley’s mind and sense of self. It is both quite funny and poignant. I can see why this movie cleared a billion dollars. As of early July 2024, is the biggest box office movie of the year so far. Overall grade: A
Next up is Ford versus Ferrari, which came out in 2019. This is a biopic of the rivalry between Ford Motor Company and Ferrari in the 1960s, which is an interesting bit of history. In the ‘60s, Ford Motor Company, under the leadership of Henry Ford II (founder Henry Ford’s grandson), decided it needed a cooler image, much like how Microsoft bought a bunch of indie gaming studios in the 2010s so Xbox would seem cooler. So Ford Motor Company spent years negotiating with Enzo Ferrari to buy Ferrari’s company. At the last minute, negotiations collapsed and Ferrari famously went on a rant insulting Ford as an ugly company that made ugly cars and also called Ford II a lesser man compared to his famous grandfather. This was a major public failure and humiliation for Ford Motor Company, and needless to say Ford II took this very, very personally.
He threw a ton of resources behind Ford’s racing car project with one goal: beat Ferrari at the famous Le Mans 24 hour race. To pull this off, Ford recruited Carroll Shelby (played by Matt Damon), a former racing driver who turned to race car designing because a heart condition no longer let him race. Shelby needed a driver, so he recruited Ken Miles (played by Christian Bale), a talented driver and mechanic with a combative streak and knack for making enemies. Shelby, Miles, and their team set out to build the GT40, Ford’s first proper racing car.
Since this is all in the historical record, it’s not a spoiler to say that they succeeded in the 1966 Le Mans race. Ford Cars finished in first, second, and third positions, locking out Ferrari entirely from the podium. This was a very enjoyable biopic. All the actors disappear into their roles and give strong performances. The racing scenes all look cool. It is also interesting from a historical perspective to see how the Ford executives had a very bad habit of acting like feudal lords who would dictate their will to the consumer rather than what they actually were, which is merchants who needed to give the customer what they wanted. This attitude was one of several reasons the US auto industry hit very hard times in the 1970s. I’d say the only thing wrong with the movie is that it feels too long, though for the life of me I’m not sure what they could have cut. Overall grade: A
Next up is The Last Dance, which originally came out in 2020. I originally watched this back during peak COVID, but after watching Air (which I will discuss shortly), I decided to watch this again to refresh my memory. The Last Dance is a documentary about the Chicago Bulls NBA team and the renowned three-peat champion streak back in the 1990s. I have to admit it is an amusing feeling to have lived long enough that things I lived through are now considered history and have prestige Netflix documentaries made about them. The documentary mostly revolves around the career of Michael Jordan, though it includes interviews with many other people involved in the experience of the Bulls championship run, including brief interviews with two ex U.S. Presidents. The documentary got a lot of criticism for focusing too heavily on Jordan and portraying him in a positive light, especially from the other members of the 1990s Bulls team.
Interestingly, I thought Jordan did not really come across all that great on the show. He seemed somewhat vindictive and petty and prone to holding on to grudges for decades. He was presented as the sort of man who is afflicted with an all-consuming competitive streak, who is irresistibly compelled to win at everything he does, even if it’s a casual golf game between friendly acquaintances. For that matter, professional basketball players in general all tend to be highly competitive type A personalities who like to win and hate to lose. Getting them all to agree on an account of events beyond the objectively observable facts is probably impossible. Despite that, I suspect the simple fact is that the Bulls would not have won their championships without Jordan. There’s no denying that Jordan was probably one of the most famous people on Earth in the 1990s. Honestly, no one can stand up to that kind of scrutiny well, especially after a personal tragedy like when Jordan’s father was murdered in the mid-1990s.
When Jordan talks about how winning requires complete focus and absolute dedication, I’m afraid that he’s right. Winning in the competition at a level like the NBA does require 110% focus, even to the detriment of every other aspect of one’s life. I’ve heard athletes say that champions have no balance and Jordan himself seems to be a living example of both the benefits and the extremely high personal costs of that. Amusing anecdote: when I originally watched this documentary in late 2020, I texted my brother that he should check it out because I thought he would enjoy it. His response was something along the line said he had seen when it first came out on ESPN and I really ought to engage with the culture more. Overall grade: A
Now for the best movie I saw in the first half of summer 2024 and that would be Air, which came out in 2023 and is related to our sports documentary topics. This is a movie about Michael Jordan and his family negotiating deal with Nike about the Air Jordan shoe. I didn’t expect to like this movie very much, but it turns out it is quite excellent. As I mentioned earlier, in full disclosure, I have minimal interest in the NBA and while I could tell you the NBA team of the US state in which I currently reside, I think if pressed, off the top of my head, I could probably tell you the name of maybe five other NBA teams. Additionally, I lived through the 1990s and had no money for all of it, and so at the time I really resented the peer pressure around Air Jordan shoes and other sports apparel, because that stuff was always so expensive. As I mentioned, I had no money.
All that aside, that shows Air was a good movie because it made me care about a story involving a topic in which I have no interest and perhaps mildly dislike. Anyway, the movie’s plot is set in 1984. Matt Damon (back again) plays Sonny Vaccaro, who was working with Nike’s struggling basketball shoe division. At the time, Nike was the biggest maker of running shoes in the US that had only a minimal presence in the basketball shoe market. Vaccaro has the idea of building a shoe brand entirely around an upcoming young NBA rookie named Michael Jordan. At the time, this was an enormous gamble and had never been done before, but needless to say, it paid off for the company in a big, big way.
All the actors gave good performances and the dialogue was sharply written, simultaneously conveying the character of the speaker and moving the plot forward. If you want to learn how to write good dialogue, you could do much worse than to watch Air. I recommend this movie, even if like me, you have zero interest in sports apparel. Perhaps that is one of the functions of art, to give you glimpses of worlds into which you would otherwise never visit. Overall grade: A+
So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you find the show enjoyable and useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
