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June 2025 Movie Round Up · Pick Up and Deliver

• Pick Up & Deliver 773: June 2025 Movie Roundup Welcome to Pickup and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, greetings, listeners. It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. The sun is out, it's beating down. It's very hot. But I'm enjoying myself as I stroll around town. Well, I'm going to be talking about a couple� I looked it's been thirteen episodes since my last one of these, and I usually make myself wait at least twelve to do the next one. Also, the calendar makes it reasonable. So that's right. It's time for the 2025 movie roundup. [sings] I don't. I just realized I don't have like a theme song. [singing] Let's all go to the lobby. Let's all go to the lobby. Let's That's how good the lobby and have ourselves a snack.[stops singing] Okay, so I got a chance to watch seven movies in June of 2025, so I'm going to talk about them a little bit. And with each I will talk about a game that you could play that would fit alongside these movies. If you decide to play a game along with the movies, these are the games you could play. So to start with, the first movie I watched in June was Implosion the Titanic Sub Disaster. Now, I think this was the one that was on. So there was one on Netflix and one on HBO Max, as I recall, and I can't remember which one this was, but this is the one that focused mostly on the trial. So the naval, the United States Naval Authority did a hearing about the Oceangate disaster to try to find out, clarify what happened and see what they have to say about that. So in case this isn't ringing a bell. The Oceangate Disaster. Oceangate is the company that owns a number of different sea faring vessels. Their main one or their big one was the Titan submersible. This is a submarine designed to let eight people, I think six, six people dive down to visit the Titanic on the ocean floor. This was famous because, uh, during the pandemic, I think 2021, the Titan submersible went down and imploded. When it disappeared from contact, they didn't have clear indication that it had imploded. And so there was a manhunt for the ship. They brought in all of these vessels. They spent a lot of money trying to save these six people from this submarine, which is an interesting decision about the use of funds. Had we had that money available in some other way, would there have been a better way to use that money, etc., etc. but that's not really how we think about search and rescue operations. So, as you probably know from listening to my podcast, I am a Titanic enthusiast. I have read many books about it. I've seen many, if not most of the movies. I'm really interested. So this event was pretty interesting. It was mostly about the company and the creation of this sub. Titanic had very little to do with it. But the long and short of it was that the person building the submarine Stockton Rush is his name was his name. He passed away in the event. He built this submarine using a lot of the same principles that that guide Silicon Valley creators, that have been guiding Silicon Valley creators. The idea of like, go fast and break things. Philosophy. So the old wisdom isn't necessarily the good wisdom. We can do something better. And so this guy, uh, worked on this submarine. The main thing was that he worked on this submarine using a material called carbon fiber, which is generally by the people who make these kinds of submarines seen as not adequate for the situation, that it gets stressed over time and is bad. Now, one of the counterpoints that Stockton Rush made was that they hear noises, and by having acoustic monitoring on the hull, they would be able to hear the noises that indicate that something's wrong and they could stop before the problems happened. The thing is, three dives before the submarine imploded, there was a major noise that engineers have in retrospect, and it appears some people at the time said was that wake up call. It was the thing that says this this hull is no longer fit for use. We need to stop using it now. And Stockton Rush did not stop using it. As I said, this event was more about the court case. We heard from a lot of people. There was one sort of dramatic moment where we saw some footage that hadn't been released before that indicated they should have. They knew the boat had imploded, and thus the manhunt was an extreme waste of time and money and frankly, a danger because there were, you know, people out in ships looking for this thing when they didn't need to be. The focus was sort of what kind of legal culpability should there be for Ocean Gate and for the situation? I also had a chance to watch Titan, the Ocean Gate submersible disaster, and that's the other one. Remember I said I couldn't remember if this was on HBO or Netflix or maybe Amazon Prime? Well, the other one, the other documentary that came out around the same time, within a couple of weeks of the first one. I watched that one too. Also in June, that one was also all about the wreck, and it focused much more on Stockton Rush himself. It was almost more of like a biography of this person. Talked a little bit about his young life, but mostly about his arc in creating this company and creating the submarine. It was much more focused on that. We saw a lot, a lot more about the testing process and a lot more footage of him. They had a lot more access to that stuff than the other documentarians did. But in both cases, the films were unflinching in their analysis that Stockton Rush was reckless and foolish and cost these people their lives. These people, of course, signed up for a very dangerous journey and signed a whole bunch of things that said, I know I might die on this event, but the second video particularly focused on the way that Stockton sold this as much safer than he had any reason to say. And that part is sad. So those are the two documentaries that I watched this month. Uh, actually, I still have one more. That's two of the three documentaries, I guess, that I watched in June. Of course, the game to play if you wanted to play a Titanic related game, particularly since we're talking about something like the Titan Gate disaster. Obviously the game to play is Raise the Titanic. The board game of the movie of the Clive Cussler novel of the same name. This is a 1980s board game which is about diving down to find the Titanic rather than these other elements. So that would be the game I would suggest. I guess you could also do Deep Sea Adventure, which is about a bunch of people going down in a submarine and rarely making it back up. Maybe that's too on the nose. I don't know. All right, next up, we might as well do the other documentary I watched. I watched Einstein and the bomb. This was a really interesting sort of docudrama. It was a documentary all about Albert Einstein's life in the twenties through the fifties, and his relationship with the science of physics and the militaristic use of that science toward dangerous ends, particularly the atom bomb. The thing that made this doc, it was a really interesting documentary. There's not a lot more to say about that if you want to learn about it. Rather than having me summarize, I would say go watch it. Of course, he was really conflicted and sad that his science was used the way it was used. He also, though, had a bit of ambivalence about his science. Like he wasn't fully against his science being used for war. Once he realized the Nazis were using his science for war, at least according to this documentary. The thing that I found really interesting was that he was the way, the way this was filmed. They cast. They cast characters for a lot of the important scenes that they wanted to depict, including an actor to play Einstein, and then they acted those out. So this was much more of a docudrama than a straight up documentary where we're seeing footage and stills and recordings. We're actually seeing reenactments with character actors. It was pretty good. I thought it was really interesting. It's not something I had seen before, and I didn't know very much about Einstein, particularly beyond the sort of pop culture representations of him. So that was really fun to see in play. If you were going to try to find a game to play, I feel like the Manhattan Project is the game to play. This is a hard one to find. It was from Minion Games originally. I believe they are doing a new edition of. It was published by James Mathe, who sadly passed away and was a very helpful designer or creator in the board game space, and we're sad to have lost him. So that's Einstein in the bomb from 2024. I guess I was in a World War Two kick. I had listened to a podcast about D-Day that was really interesting and it got me thinking about this. And so I watched a couple more. I watched Dunkirk from 2017. This is a Christopher Nolan film about the evacuation of the troops that were trapped on the beach at Dunkirk, that allowed the British Army to recover many of its soldiers and be able to then assist or lead the invasion of France in on D-Day. If you don't know the Dunkirk story, all these soldiers were trapped on the beach. The German army was pressing their way in toward that beach, and there was a decent chance all these soldiers would be killed or captured. And we didn't. The allies didn't have a way to get those soldiers out of there. There was one big jetty, and they had a ship. They had ships pulled up. But then German, the occasional German dive bomber would come by and blow up the ship. And so they just couldn't get the little ship. They couldn't get people out of there. Uh, what happened was with notice that they had to get as many people out of there, out of there as they could. The British recruited as many people as they could to take out their small craft and sail for the French coast to pick up soldiers. And that's what happened. Thousands of or hundreds or thousands of small ships came out and picked up soldiers in small groups and brought them back to England. What made this particularly interesting, the film was that it's told in three timelines. There's a a pilot, and the pilot's timeline takes place in like one hour. There's a British man who has a small boat, and his timeline takes place in a day. And then there's the soldiers on the beach, and their timeline takes place in a week. And we see the three stories interleaved throughout the film such that the one hour time period, the one day time period, and the one week time period are all going at the same time, and they all kind of converge at this one moment. That's pretty interesting. It's a really well-made film, very compelling and interesting story being told, uh, and useful to know. So I really liked Dunkirk. I don't know what game I would play to go with it. I'm sure there is a war game about the evacuation of Dunkirk. Doesn't seem like the sort of game I'd have fun playing. Unless it's a co-op. I wouldn't want to play the Nazis trying to come in and kill the people on the beaches of Dunkirk, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that that's what the game is about. So I don't have a good answer for the game, for a game to play with Dunkirk. But you should watch the twenty seventeen movie. It's great. Uh, next up, I got a chance to rewatch two films. These are Best in Show and The Mask of Zorro. Best in Show is a delightful Improvised comedy from the Christopher Guest Troupe. I believe the last movie they made as a movie was Allow Me To� or� was the For Your Consideration. It was sort of about a bunch of people who think their movie is going to be turned into going to be winning Oscars and stuff. They also made a TV show called mascots. That was pretty great. I think that's the last thing they made is a TV show called mascots. No, they made a TV show about a guy who goes to America to learn about his family, and then they made a movie called mascots, which was pretty great. I haven't seen anything since then. From them, I should look and see. I don't I don't think there has been, but I might not have heard about it anyway. Best in show is great. There are a number of dog dog themed games, so I enjoy Dog Park, so check that one out. The other movie that I watched as a return was The Mask of Zorro. This is a 1990sd adventure film starring Hannibal Lecter himself and Antonio Banderas, Bandaras, as well as Catherine Zeta-Jones. It's a fun, sword-fighting romp and stomping movie. Uh, and you should watch it if you can. You could enjoy it. I don't know what game I would play with it. Oh, some sort of swashbuckling game. I don't know what that would be. Why don't you head over to BoardGameGeek guild 3269 and let me know in the forum there what you would play if you were going to play something along with Mask of Zorro. You could also let me know what you think of these movies. I'd hope to hear from you. Well, thanks for joining me in my walk today. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. Brought to you by Rattlebox Games.