Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / March/April ’25 Movie Roundup
Transcript
- Untitled - June 13, 2025 00:00:00 Speaker: Welcome to Pickup and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step out of the library and deliver an episode to you while I walk home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good morning, listeners. It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. The sun is out, the sky is mostly clear. I'm seeing a lot of blue. There's a little bit of, uh, white clouds dancing across the sky, but for the most part, pretty clear. I'm walking home on this lovely day, taking an opportunity to talk to you about some board game stuff. Looking at my podcast notes, I see actually that it's been ten episodes or so since I did a movie roundup. It's also been another month, so I thought I would do a movie roundup this time. I have 11 movies to talk about. I'm going to talk about as many of them as I can, because I'm going to talk about March and April of 2025, rather than just talking about March, March and April, because March, I only had four movies. So that's going to be not very many to talk about. My plan is to talk about them kind of scattershot in whatever order I feel like, and see what comes to mind for them. I'm also going to talk about, as I try to do, what's a game that you could play on a movie game night to accompany this movie? So to start off, uh, The Devil Wears Prada. This is a movie I'd never seen before, and my wife and I were talking about something. I think we were talking about Stanley Tucci and like, yeah, I've never seen a Devil Wears Prada. My wife's like, really? I'm like, no. It just never it never got around to it. In 2006 when it came out, it wasn't really a movie I was all that excited about. And it just never, never came up at a time when I wanted to watch it. She's like, well, I want to watch it. So I was like, great. So we watched it. Uh, I could see why people like it. This is a pretty good movie. Uh, an interesting story about a young woman finding her place in writing and magazine culture of the early 2000. An element of like falling in with a group of people and then figuring out your own sense of style in conversation with that group of people. It's pretty interesting. Of course, the boss in that show is unreasonably cruel, but that's I guess that's part of the idea is she holds high standards, so if you can live up to her standards, then you can succeed. It's kind of along the lines of rim shot or something, but I'm not sure I'm willing to accept the core premise that being cruel makes you makes your underlings better, which is kind of at the heart of the idea of her. Although she's seen as being both cruel and having moments of kindness or recognizing the value of her expectations of high success. So yeah, there's an interesting line to draw there. I think if you haven't seen it, it's about a young woman who gets a job as an assistant at a fashion magazine and rises to the occasion to. And it's sort of based on a true story about somebody who worked for the head of Vogue, I think, and about the experience doing that. If you're going to play a game, it feels like it feels like pret a porter or pret a porter. If you're going to read it like an American would be the game to play. It's about high fashion houses and stuff, so thematically it's linked. Even though it's not about publishing a magazine. I can't think of a game that that's about publishing a magazine. The closest I can think of is Fit to Print, which is about publishing newspapers. So and that one does have a high pressure element, as I understand it. So that could be your second choice. If you don't have a copy of Pret a Porter or pret a porter. Okay. Uh, next up is doom. I watched the 2005, uh, Dwayne The Rock Johnson doom movie, which is mostly just, uh, aliens wannabe rip off kind of movie, but then combined with a little bit of first person footage. So it looks kind of like the video game. It's pretty dumb. The effects are fine. I think there are plenty better movies you could watch. If you feel like watching this, just watch aliens I think would be your your best choice. It was fine. I guess if you want something to play with this, you should play doom. There's a doom board game. Next up is Philomena. This was a 2013 movie that I think won Best Screenplay. Maybe. Or was nominated for sure. This one starred Steve Coogan as a kind of jaded reporter who has been fired or laid off from a magazine or newspaper, and he's sort of telling everybody he's writing a book, but he actually can't figure out what to write a book about. He ends up getting connected with this woman who, as a young girl, ended up in an Irish workhouse because she was pregnant and her baby was taken away from her. And so it's about her trying to find her baby and meet her child as an adult. It's based on a true story. So it's a biopic of this woman, Philomena, and it's pretty good. I enjoyed it a lot. It's very much sort of a quiet British story about British people, British in various ways. It's touching, it's thoughtful. Steve Coogan does a really good job. I liked it a lot. If you haven't seen Philomena, well worth it. I have no idea what kind of board game would come out of this. I can't think of a board game that fits thematically. The idea here in terms of solving a mystery, because that's kind of what he's doing, is trying to solve this mystery of this missing child. It feels like something you could do on a Sherlock Holmes consulting detective. None of the cases do that, as far as I recall. But you could. So we'll say Sherlock Holmes would be your play along there. And then I watched The post, which is Steven Spielberg's dramatization of the Pentagon Papers scandal. The the event that made The Washington Post really set as a newspaper to watch. Before this, they were weren't really a significant force after this. Of course, they also broke the Watergate scandal in significant ways. And so those two things together kind of cemented the position of The Washington Post as an important newspaper. And the Pentagon Papers is basically just it was a massive leak in the early or the late 60s or early 70s, in which a huge study that had been done for the US government by the Rand Corporation found that, in fact, we knew we weren't going to win Vietnam, and we still spent sent tens of thousands of well, we sent tens and tens and thousands of men over there and many of them to die. Uh, and so it was scandalous when it came out. It's a great story. Well worth watching again. Makes you love the idea of hero journalists, which is something I feel like we need right now. Also reminds us that the government isn't. The government is responsible to us. It is not. We are not responsible to it. And when the government screws up, it's our job to call it out. And it's the media's job to call it out. Something that I think has been shockingly lacking in the last couple decades. So the post really interesting story 2017 movie. I think about it. I think that both the post and The Devil Wears Prada had Meryl Streep in it in them. So I'm in some sort of Meryl Streep kick. Again, I think Fit to Print is probably the only newspaper focused game that I'm aware of. So that would be your example there too, although that one's not particularly about politics. Maybe the other option would be, uh, Watergate, which is the two player card driven game sort of in the neighborhood of a twilight struggle, but is focused on the Watergate scandal. One player plays Nixon, one player plays reporters, and you're trying to find out what Nixon knew and and reveal him before Nixon manages to cover up the scandal. So I guess that's pretty closely related. So that maybe is where your answer would be is Watergate. All right. Next up, I watched, uh, Thelma. Thelma is a sort of action comedy movie. It purports itself to be comedic. It is not nearly as comedic as it purports itself to be. I thought it was going to be really funny. There are parts of it that are very funny, but there are parts of it that are also very sad. It's about getting older and dealing with the challenges of getting older. Uh, it is an action movie as well, starring senior citizens. It's funny, it's heartfelt. It's really worth a good watch. Uh, but it is very sad. And just be aware of that as you're preparing to watch it, that it there are parts of it that are just heartbreaking. If you were going to watch a movie or play a game along with it, I think probably the game I would recommend is Holding On, which is a thematic game about a man who's dying and it's the game. The gameplay is about providing palliative care while also talking with him and hearing his life story. The idea that hearing his life story gives him relief of a different kind than physical, and is important as well. That's not quite what Thelma is about, but there's definitely overlapping concerns and thinking about end of life. And I think Holding On would be an interesting pairing to play with. Um, Thelma Holding On has a subtitle. It's something like The Life of Billy Kerr or something like that. I don't particularly remember it, but I'll link to it in the show notes. Next up we have Apollo 13. This is a movie I saw many times back in the day. I have seen it many times, but I haven't watched it in probably 15 years. I really like it. It's a cool, uh, discussion of the American space race and particularly one of my favorite kinds of stories scientifically minded people solving science problems in the face of difficult odds. All the better when it's a real a real thing that happened. And Apollo 13 is, of course, the story of the disastrous or the almost disastrous Apollo 13 mission, which had a system malfunction relatively early and then Involved a lot of smart thinking and a little quite a bit of luck to get the astronauts home. I like this movie a lot. Like I said, it's one I've seen a number of times. Very fond of it. I think if you were going to play this, probably there is a game called Apollo, which is about doing the Apollo missions. I think that would be a fine accompaniment to this. You could also, I know that there is a game called High Frontier, which is about the rocket program, but that one sounds much more technical and frankly, not exactly about Apollo particularly. So I would probably pick Apollo Moon missions as your game, but that's another one you could do. I guess if you want something a little more saucy, you could do Mission to Mars, which is a or a red planet. Mars, which is a. Is that what it's called? Mission red planet. Mission Red planet, which is a competitive steampunk Mars exploration game but still has spaceships, so that's a very minor connection. But I would think Apollo is the best one. There's also a game that came out recently called Shackleton Base, which I believe is also a moon themed base game. And then there's also welcome to the moon. So I guess there are several moon themed games you could play, but I think Apollo is probably your best one given the technical nature of the film. Let's see one more. I have 3 or 4 more movies on here, but let's do one more that we could talk about. How about Trumbo? So Trumbo is a game about or is a movie about the Hollywood blacklist particularly? I think his name is Donald Trumbo. Dalton Dalton Trumbo, who was a screenwriter in the 30s and 40s, served in the war. And then he came back and, like several others, was blacklisted for having Communist sympathies or being a communist. In Trumbo's case, he did go to jail for a year, and then he was not able to get work as a screenwriter. So he started doing screenwriting under ghost, under pen names for this sort of schlocky B-movie studio, and used that to leapfrog himself back into public space. He won an Oscar during his time, like so he wrote. I think it was called The Brave One. He wrote a movie called The Brave One that won Best Screenplay, but it turned out the person, the pseudonym he wrote for is not a real person, so there was no public acknowledgement of him. But of course, people in the industry kind of knew. And then his big break back in came when Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger both hired him to be screenplay screenwriter and put his name on the movie at the same time or within weeks of each other. And so Dalton Trumbo became sort of came back into the limelight as somebody who had been persecuted by the Hollywood blacklist. Of course, the matching game to go with This is Hollywood 1947, which is a social deduction game in which you are playing producers of movies in Hollywood in the 40s. Some of you are secretly communists, and you're trying to get communist sympathies into the movies you're making. And again, the idea of the game is to try to find and root out the communists before they manage to subvert enough of the movies to win the game. It's in the same line as Secret Hitler or the resistance. It does have its own flavor. Different characters have different powers, and the powers are not related to which team you're on. So there's an interesting balance there that I think makes for an interesting play. I haven't actually played this one, but I know how to play it because I taught it. I used it in my class, but I haven't gotten to play it myself yet. But the students had a lot of fun with it, and it came back as one of their favorites, so I think we will use it again. I also think it's really interesting to spend some time right now talking about stuff like the Hollywood Blacklist, as we are in a time where the freedom of people to express their ideas is being hampered in really dramatic and unfortunate ways. So that's Trumbo 2015 with a strong performance from Bryan Cranston. I did watch a couple other movies I didn't have time to talk about. I watched The Man from Earth, which is a sort of weird philosophy experiment in movie form. I thought it was fine, and I watched cosmos, which was an interesting movie. I would pair that with like the search for, uh, or with SETI as movies about it's sort of a bottle movie about people trying to find signals from space and having an exciting moment when they do. It's a nice little character piece. And then I watch Heart Eyes as well, which is a slasher movie and has this sort of weird element to it where the killer is trying to kill people who are in love or kills people on Valentine's Day. That's the the quirk. It's a horror comedy walks the line really well. It's pretty horrific. It is pretty solidly a horror movie, but there are dramatically funny parts. But sometimes horror comedies are more comedy than horror. I would put Tucker and Dale versus evil in that category, but this movie is definitely a horror movie with lots of comedy, so check that out if you get a chance. That's heart Eyes. Well, that's about it for me today. I'd love to hear what movies you were watching in March and April of 2025. You can share that with me on board Game Geek in Guild 3269 and beyond that, also, thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. Brought to you by Rattlebox Games.