Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / May, June, July ’26 Movie Roundup
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- Pick Up & Deliver 862: May, June, July �26 Movie Roundup Transcript Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk home. I'm Brendan Riley. [ Intro music ] Greetings, listeners. It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. The sun is a smattering of blue and white, or the sky is a smattering of blue and white. The sun is out. It's warm but not outrageously warm. I'd say low eighties. And I'm walking home from the train. It's the first day of class and I finished. I was looking through the record and I realized it's been a little while since I did a movie roundup, so I thought it would be time for a movie roundup. That's the sound of a projector, I guess. All right, so last time I did a movie roundup, it was March and April. So I'm going to do May, June and July. Now, the reason I'm doing three months this time is I only watched one movie in June. So there's a fair amount of time to cover and not that many movies. So let's jump right into it. To start with, the first movie I watched in May was Sheep Detectives. This is a movie based on a novel called Three Bags Full, which I read a very long time ago. Long enough ago that I hardly remembered it at all. My daughter had read it recently, and after seeing three bags full, she mentioned the novel is very different from the book and from the movie. So okay. But broadly speaking, they have the same plot, which is farmers murdered sheep solve the murder. So the sheep part of the gimmick is the farmer used to read detective novels to the sheep. So they have an idea what solving a murder is like. In the movie, the sheep talk to each other. They are talking animals, like in Babe. But in like in that movie, the people can't hear them. I thought this movie was really fun. It's very thoughtful, very pleasant. It's heartfelt. After I watched it, my son was like, well, I did not expect that. I'm like, what didn't you expect? He said, I didn't expect it to be so heartfelt. So definitely worth checking out. If you are in the mood to see something thoughtful and heartfelt. I really liked the human performances and the voices were really good. There were several voices that I recognised but couldn't place. And then when I watched the credits, I was like, oh yeah, that's them. Oh yeah, of course that's them. Uh, so that was a real treat. And the humans were a lot of fun as well. I particularly like Hugh Jackman. I haven't seen him in a ton of things lately and I really enjoyed that particular thing. So that is sheep detectives. If you're going to play a game to go with sheep detectives, there are a couple games you could think about. One is called Battle Sheep. That game�s fine. There's another game that I used to have which had really nice 3D sheep pieces and I'm forgetting the name of it now, so check the show notes. [Ed note: Shear Panic]. But it was this interesting game where you are trying to solve a bunch of mini games or win a bunch of mini games, and the better you do it, the mini games, the better you do at the overall score. Uh, check the show notes for the name of that game. I will find it and put it in there. So that would be my sheep based game. If you wanted a second sheep based game, a game that has sheep in it, but it's not a significant part. Well, any Uwe Rosenberg game has lots of sheep. You got your Agricola and whatnot. But I would also point to Tipperary, which has a mechanism where the person who gets the most sheep wins or the most connected sheep gets a sort of longest train type award. Okay, next up, we have swimming with men. Uh, this is a film in the category of interesting, goofy British guys and the subcategory of interesting, goofy British guys with a hint of truth. I've seen a number of movies where there is a story about a quirky British guy who does something, and it turns out this is inspired by a true story, or it is a true story. In Swimming With Men, the main actor, whose name I can't recall right now. But he's definitely one of those, �hey, that guy from that thing� actors, at least if you watch British stuff, he plays a like investment banker who is just depressed and sort of tired of life. And he joins a men's synchronized swimming team. And in fact, they declare themselves Britain's official men's synchronized swimming team. And they enter the international competition for men's synchronized swimming. This is very much sort of a middle aged life crisis. Find truth and value in life kind of movie. It was very similar in feel to The Full Monty. If you saw that it was a movie in the late nineties that had the same arc. It's just in that one, the men form a troupe of exotic dancers, and instead of forming a men's synchronized swimming team. I spent a fair amount of the movie trying really hard not to think about the Martin Short bit from Saturday Night Live, which was very funny about men's synchronized swimming, but ultimately it was a heartwarming movie. It not too dramatically unpleasant sort of fits that category of movies like that. I will put links to a couple other movies of that ilk. As I was thinking about games that you might play to connect with this, I was thinking about games that involve physical activity and coordination, and the two that I thought of. Uh, one of them is I've never played this is Castell. This is a game about the Spanish competition of making human pyramids. And the other one is Raas The Dance of Love, which I played at GenCon last year. Not this year. And I'm still waiting for my copy to show up from the crowdfunding that they did. So those are the two games that I might suggest, neither of which is very easy to play with. Swimming with men. But those are the options. Next up, we have a Netflix documentary called The Crash. This is a documentary about a crash and a trial afterward. I stumbled upon it when a TikTok creator that I follow for school related things pointed to that documentary as an example of a child who was not told no enough. And the documentary is about a woman or a child. Her name was Mackenzie Shrilla. When this accident happened, she was a high schooler, and she crashed her car into the wall of a building, killing her boyfriend and another male friend that they had in the car. And the legal case comes from the government arguing and ultimately the jury deciding that she crashed the car on purpose, intentionally trying to kill her boyfriend and his friend, and probably herself, too. But she was wearing a seatbelt and they were not. It's a sad story, but also fascinating in part because she was terminally online. So there's tons of video of her doing things in a variety of ways. And the documentarians are pretty careful in presenting the story in a way that leads you up a narrative path, to think that they were probably right to convict her. But they do sprinkle in her family being able to tell her side of the story as well, and she claims that it was an accident. I don't usually watch true crime documentaries, but this one sounded interesting enough, and it was kind of involving and it was like eighty minutes. So by the time I realized I was watching a true crime documentary, it was over. No, I knew what I was watching before I watched it, but. So that was the crash. I don't have a game to play that would go with that. Next up, we've got Superman. This is the James Gunn new version of Superman. With that has the Astro, the dog, and a bunch of sort of zany DC superhero characters. I saw this once before, but my mother in law was hanging out at our house and my wife had book club, so she was sort of like, we were gonna watch a movie of some sort, and she realized she hadn't seen it, or I realized she hadn't seen it. And I said, oh. And I said, I think she'd like it. And she's like, I don't think I'll like it. I'm like, I think you will. So I'm like, just give it ten minutes, watch it for ten minutes, and if you don't like it, we'll turn it off. And we watched the whole thing, so boom, I knew it would work. So that is Superman. I like this movie a lot. It's a lot of fun. It seems like to remember the fun of superhero movies, which seems to be what James Gunn is good at, right? Guardians of the Galaxy worked because it was fun. The second Suicide Squad movie that he made worked because it was fun. The Superman movie worked because it was fun. I think remembering superhero movies can be fun. This is the ticket. I don't know whether that's going to work to make the whole DC universe continue to roll on. I mean, those movies make a lot of money even when they aren't that successful, so I assume they will keep going. But what do I know? So that was Superman. In July, we watched Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. I really like this movie. It's a funny. Will Ferrell movie with Rachel McAdams. And it is about Icelandic doofuses who go to Eurovision and compete. It's very silly. My family likes it a lot and I'm happy to have watched it again. Again, I don't know what you would put in there. Maybe Rock Hard 1977. If you wanted a movie about putting on concerts or Come Together, which is the. basically the movie, the game about playing doing Woodstock. I guess you could play that if you wanted to do that along with Eurovision. I've got four entries left to talk about. One is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's maybe not reasonable to call twelve hours of cinema one entry, but I've seen them several times, and I ended up watching them because my wife hadn't watched them in a long time. And we watched the first one with my son in preparation for building the Sauron's Keep Lego set, which he bought for himself, I guess kind of as a graduation present. He doesn't do a ton of Lego anymore, but he got his mind, got it in his mind to do that one. And, uh, he decided to do it in one go. So we watched Lord of the rings, The Fellowship of the ring, and he started working on it at seven p m and then, uh, we went to bed. And when I got up the next morning, he was finishing it. But then my wife and I had the taste of Lord of the rings in our mouths. So we watched the other two over the next week because they're good. Obviously the game to play with any of those is any of the Lord of the rings games. I've never played war of the ring. This is the game I would like to play at some point. It is a two player game as I understand it, so I'm not sure that's a hard one to get done, but a game that I hear is really good and I imagine I would enjoy if I had the opportunity. So that's what I would say to go with Lord of the rings. I have three more to talk about. Uh, the first is Jurassic World Rebirth. Boy, was this a stinker. Uh, this is the fourth of the Jurassic World movies, which I guess makes it the seventh Jurassic Park slash world movie overall and among the worst. I mean, I don't know if it's worse than Jurassic Park three, which I thought was pretty bad, but it was pretty bad. The motivations of the characters were poorly sketched out, or if they needed to provide the characters for motivation, they would just give them one scene where they talk about their motivation. And then we know their motivation. The dinosaurs adventures were really dumb. The whole explanation of what was going on was dumb. Like the plot hook. The reason for what they were doing didn't make any sense. Just. All in all, it was not a good movie. I didn't I mean, it's fun to watch dinosaurs run around, but when you care more about the dinosaurs than the people. That doesn't make for a good movie. And it's one thing to be watching PSAs and not mind all the people getting killed, because what you like is the hilarious and gory PSAs stuff. It's another thing in a Jurassic Park movie, I want my people. I want real stakes for my people. So yeah, it wasn't it wasn't good. And I'm glad I didn't spend any money to watch it. It was just available on one of the streaming services we already had. So I guess I did kind of pay money for it, but it didn't feel like it. I guess if you were going to try to play a play a game along with this, if you have the Jurassic Park Legacy game, you could start that. If you have the unmatched Jurassic Park games, you could do that if you wanted an actually really good game. I haven't played the Jurassic Park Legacy game. I'm looking forward to trying that, but I would say a really good dinosaur game is Raptor, and that actually fits, given the nature of the movie where they're trying to capture these dinosaurs. So I'll say Raptor. All right, I have two more movies to talk about quickly and I've got about a minute left. Uh, the first is Legend. This is a Tom Hardy movie about two brothers in, um, Britain in the sixties who were sort of really significant in the British, in the London Crime Syndicate. One of them ended up, or they both ended up going to prison, one went to prison, one went to an insane asylum. Uh, Tom Hardy plays both of them. It's a fun sort of gangster movie, very similar to something like Goodfellas. Uh, and enjoyable for what it is, I think. The Godfather: Corleone's Empire would be a fine game to play along with this. Or maybe Speakeasy, although that game is too cerebral for these criminals. And then finally, I watched Enola Holmes 3, which is a fun little bit of silly Sherlock mania. It's solving mysteries and running around the world. I would say the Sherlock files from indie boards and cards would be your accompaniment for that. Well, that's about it for me today. I want to say thanks for walking with me, and I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. [ Exit music ] Brought to you by Rattlebox games.