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June '24 Movie Roundup · Pick Up and Deliver

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Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
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as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode two while I stroll
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around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good morning, listeners. It's a
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lovely day here in suburban Chicago. We've hit a Friday, and the sun
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is out and the sky is completely clear of clouds, and I'm getting out
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for a little bit of exercise. During the day, I have to walk
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up the library and return a book. So I thought this is a perfect
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opportunity to record a podcast. I was looking back and it's been about a
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month since I did a movie roundup, and since on months where I'm watching
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a fair number of movies, I try to do a monthly movie roundup.
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Means it's time for a movie round up. That's right, all right?
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So today I'm going to talk about movies I watched in June. I have
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five movies to talk about today, and my plan is to talk a little
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bit about what I thought of the movies and then share any inside I have
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about what would be a good game to go with those movies. So the
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first movie I want to talk about is Boys in the Boat. This movie
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was made in twenty twenty three and it is about a group of young men
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who joined the rowing club at a public college in California, and I think
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it was in California, I've lost track of where it was. And they
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were aspiring to do really well at rowing. And the story follows one particular
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man who was the person who told the story to the recorder who wrote the
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very long feature piece, which became a book, which then became the movie.
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This is a true story and it's got a heeping and helping of working
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class hero vibes. You know, it's the middle of the depression. Character
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has been living on his own since he was fifteen when his father said adios,
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you're on your own. He lives in an abandoned car in a shantytown
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and he has a job or he's doing occasional work, but he doesn't have
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much in the way of money, and he also is going to school to
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be an engineer. He is short on tuition money, so he's looking for
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a job and he discovers that the rowing team is recruiting people and if you
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make the rolling team, you get a scholarship and a bed to sleep in
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as part of your scholarship, and you also get a job, an on
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campus job. So he tries out for the rowing team. There's literally a
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couple hundred people there. He makes the cut, of course, because it
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would be a pretty boring movie if the main character didn't make the cut for
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the rowing team, like, okay, that's a short movie. Then,
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and he joins the rowing team. There's lots of learning where they're growing and
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becoming better and better at rowing. There's still second to the varsity rowing team,
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but they're may be better than them. They've got more spunk. The
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main coach, who is an actor I've seen before but I can't off the
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top of my head recall who it is, recruits a coxin, who is
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somebody who's gotten in trouble for something, but they don't really tell us what
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he got in trouble for. But he vows he'll be a good coxin for
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this group, and it turns out he is in fact good at it,
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and they do rowing and end up going to the Berlin Olympics. This is
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all real history, so the ending is very exciting and involves a literal photo
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finish. You can go look at the photo finish online. It's incredible.
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How close together these people were. It's an interesting story. It is very
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low on dramatic tension, except insofar as the athletic contests are dramatically exciting for
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the fact of being athletic contest. Otherwise, it is about what you'd expect
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for a sports movie. Enjoyable. It's no rudy, but it's certainly fun,
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and you know, it's fun to see to see Nazis get shown up
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in any kind of thing. And the movie does have a little bit of
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a nod to the racial inequality that's going on back home, but not very
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much of one. It's meant to be a feel good movie for white folks
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probably anyway. So that's Boys in the Boat from twenty twenty three. I'm
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not sure I have a good game to go with it, in part because
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I think board games about sports generally are not good because sports are essentially just
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large scale dexterity games, and if you're doing a large scale deck I don't
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know why you would want a small, non dexterity version of a large scale
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dexterity game, which is what board games about sports are. I don't mind
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ones that simulate the actual dexterity Crokanol, for example, but I can't think
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of a game that simulates rowing in that way. There might be one,
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I'd be interested to know about it, but as far as I know,
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there's not one. It's going to go to Brendan's maximum that sports board games
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are not good. Next up, we have All the Presidents Men. This
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is a movie I had seen before, but it's been a long time.
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I was watching it because I like watching movies about heroic reporters. As from
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nineteen seventy six. You might call this the er heroic reporter movie, though
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there were certainly ones before that. His Girl Friday is a classic example,
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though that's more of a screwball comedy, but there's a little bit of the
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heroism in there. I'm sure there are other heroic journalist movies from before that.
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If anything, I forgot how flat the drama of that movie is.
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There's a few dramatic moments they're trying to talk to people and stuff, and
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then they write a few stories and then it's over. It's a good movie,
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and it's an important time in history. But given the chaos and the
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craziness of the last five years in American politics, the antics of the Nixon
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creep feel less dramatic to me. It also makes me sad that we don't
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have more brave politicians like those in Nixon's era who are willing to stand up
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to a tyrannical president. So that's all the President's Men nineteen seventy six,
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Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman. Of course, the game to play with that
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would be Watergate, the two player game, card driven game in which you
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are either Nixon trying to cover up the Watergate scandal or you are reporters trying
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to uncover and prove the Watergate scandal. It is literally just a board game
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version of All the Presidents meant so that's the one you should play if you're
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interested in this story as a board game, it would make a nice pairing.
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If you're gonna play, you're gonna watch all the presidents men play a
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game. Watergate would be definitely be the game you could play. I suppose
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you could also play nineteen sixty Making of a President That would happen around the
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same time as well, but worth checking out. Except we have Hitman.
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This is from twenty twenty three. It says twenty twenty three, I thought
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it was brand new on Netflix this year. I wrote down twenty twenty three,
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though, so maybe I wrote down wrong. I don't remember. Hitman
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is a sort of very loosely inspired biopic about a college professor who went undercover,
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who was working for the cops doing wiretap and then ended up going undercover
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to do sting operations to catch people trying to hire hitmen, and he had
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all these different characters that he would play as a hitman. And it has
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a sort of Cohen Brothers element of being sort of funny but also serious and
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having the sort of blood simple like a fiasco movie. Happen right, the
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things get entangled and complicated, and people just trying to do the right thing
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or do the good thing get messed up by making bad choices and it goes
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screwy. I actually thought it was really good. It's better than I thought
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it was going to be. It also had a very funny moment where to
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show that the main character was a dweeb, they had him talking about burning
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and he said that he once saw three piliated woodpeckers at the same time.
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And literally the night before, my wife and I had been out and we
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finally for the first time spotted a piliated woodpeckers, and we saw three of
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them, so it was very funny. Look, we had to pause it
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because we couldn't stop laughing. If you haven't seen a piliated woodpecker before,
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they basically looked like woody woodpecker. They have a kind of mohawk and the
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sort of laughing laugh. They're great huge birds. But anyway, so hit
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Man was very entertaining. I can't remember the name of the main actor,
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but he's got a certain genesiqua, a kind of charisma that, even if
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he's playing an unlikable character, you used to like him. He was in
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Top Gun Maverick as well, and I think he's in the New Twist Streets
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movie. But it's pretty entertaining. I recommend it if you like a good
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Fiasco movie. From that regard, if you're going to play a board game,
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it seems like Fiasco is the board game to play. The plot of
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this movie could very easily have been the plot of an episode of a game
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of Fiasco if you haven't played Fiasco. It's a storytelling game in which players
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are different characters experiencing the kind of fiasco storyline that you see in movies like
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Blood Simple or Fargo, and they're sort of everyday people caught up in extraordinary,
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terrible circumstances making bad choices, usually out of greed or some other human
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foible. It's pretty so I thought hit Man was pretty good. It's on
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Netflix now. I think it was a Netflix original. I thought so anyway,
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And like I said, I wrote down twenty twenty three, but I
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could have sworn it was new. Maybe it was just new to Netflix.
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Either way, definitely worth checking out if you get a chance. That's Hitman.
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I will say. This is different than the movie from last year,
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which had a similar title, in which there was in which one of the
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Scars guards played a hit man. I don't remember what that movie was called.
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That might have been called Assassin. But this is a newer comedy movie
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called Hitman, all right. Next up we have Marlow from twenty twenty two.
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Boy, I like this movie a lot. Marlow is a film adaptation
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of a novel written in twenty fourteen with the permission of the Raymond Chandler Estate,
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using the character of Philip Marlow to tell a Philip Marlow type of story.
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Liam Neeson plays the aging Marlowe, a sort of one man Knight in
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shining Armor on the dirty streets of Las A Angelists trying to do right wheneveryone
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around him is doing wrong. This movie feels like a spiritual successor to to
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something like The Big Sleep. Not only does it have the same character,
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but it's got a lot of the same feel, the same pattern, the
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same inscrutable motives for a lot of the characters, some of the same misogyny.
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It's a bit more nuanced now, but it's not absent, certainly.
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And there's casual use of racial epithets for Mexican people that's really upsetting. I
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don't recall them using any racial epithets for black people, so that's interesting,
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I guess. But it was really good, very well made, very stylish.
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Really, the two differences you'd see between this movie and one from the
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nineteen forties is that this was in color, and the violence was more dramatic
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or gory. That was basically yet everything else was close to how they would
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have made a movie back then, and really good for being that way.
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So if you get a chance to check out Marlowe, you definitely should.
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And for the movie I'm gonna suggest, or the game I'm gonna suggest to
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play along with Marlowe. It's got to be Martin Wallace's PI. It's set
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in that era. You play a private detective trying to solve a murder case,
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and it's great. It is an abstract puzzle. You could also do
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Detective City of Angels, which is a more storytelling game where one player plays
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all of the big witnesses and the other players play detectives trying to solve the
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case. There's questioning and storytelling and scripture read it's good, so I hear.
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I haven't had a chance to play that one yet. The price is
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a little high, and we've always had enough different campaign games. I haven't
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acquired that one yet. Someday I might. So that's marlow from twenty twenty
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two, along with games that might make a good accompaniment. Finally, I
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did get to watch from this year twenty twenty four Dune Part two. This
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is, of course, the sequel to the Denny Villeneuve Dune movie from I
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think twenty twenty or twenty twenty one. In this one, Paul Treades with
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his mother. They're hidden out in the Siech, the town or the community
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of the Fremin people. The sand dwelling desert folk, and he's trying to
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join the community, and he's realized that he is destined to sort of become
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a warrior leader and lead them into war where they will kill lots of people,
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and he can't really see a way around it. He tries, but
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fate inexorably pushes him toward this thing. I think the movie does a very
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good job of highlighting the way that faith is often used to manipulate people,
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and the way that colonizers will take advantage of that to use people for their
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own ends. The movie walks a fine line between the people of the Fremen
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guiding their own path, even if it's to make dumb choices, and being
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manipulated by these other folks. I don't know what you call the opposite of
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a white savior idea. There is a sort of danger in ascribing lack of
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intelligence or bad decision making to the people. But it is a very thoughtful
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movie, really interesting, excellent set pieces, beautifully shot as always with Dunny
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Villeneuve. Well worth a look if you get a chance. That's Dune Part
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two, and it feels like the game to play there, even though I
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haven't played it would be Dune Imperium Uprising. This is kind of the spiritual
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sequel to Dune Imperium. It is apparently very similar to that original game,
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but different enough and robust in its approach to rethinking the story a little bit.
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So it seems like a great second Dune game, fitting with the theme,
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and also supposed to be very good. So if you get a chance
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to try that, probably should. Well. That brings me the end of
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my movie round up for June of twenty twenty four. What did you watch
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in June of twenty twenty four? Head ofver to board game Eguil three two
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six y nine, and let me know over there which movies you've been watching
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and what you thought of them. Until next time, Thanks for joining me
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on my walk. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mind was.
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Bye bye, Brought to you by rattle Box