Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather consider their favorite combinations of things, really try to figure out what makes a bit work, and then segue into the discourse, disingenuous counter-discourse, and meta-discourse (drink, drink, drink!) of some recent Internet controversies.
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Jumanji! Yes I'm wearing child sized clothes and YES there is a reason! The pay off is worth it, I promise! #Jumanji pic.twitter.com/qBshnhwV6K
— Karen Gillan (@karengillan) September 21, 2016
Things, about which Mark Lee is correct: the appropriate name for a drink consisting of all the sodas at the machine.
Thing, about which Mark Lee is incorrect: golf.
I am not sure if I am alone it this thinking, but I would love to hear the panel overthink the sport of golf in great detail; references to Caddyshack and Happy Gilmore encouraged.
I thought that the mixture of flavours from the soda fountain was called a “swamp water”.
I know we called that drink something different, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what it was. I was originally 80% sure it wasn’t suicide, but after googling other names, that’s the only one that sounds even close to right to me.
As a high school athlete, though, I remember the sprinting version of suicides well, albeit not fondly.
UPDATE: At a restaurant today, I saw a clearly-middle-aged guy doing this at the fill-your-own drink station. He didn’t do all 8 of the available flavors, though – he had what seemed to be a precisely calibrated ratio of 4 different flavors (Sprite, Orange Soda, Pink Lemonde and Coca-Cola Classic).
The rumor about the Jumanji sequel is that in this version a video game version has been made, so Karen, Rock, Kevin, and Jack are all video game avatars, which is why Karen looks like Lara Croft, and all of their character names sound ridiculous; Ruby Roundhouse, Dr. Smolder Bravestone, Moose Finbar, Prof. Shelly Oberon. So it’s kinda like Tronmanji
As a player of board and video games, I like the idea that it would be updated to a video game. The sort of adventure that Jumanji wants the player to have is done much better in video games than in board games because the real time immersive environments can be rendered in a video game, whereas board games take are too slow to be exciting in the same way. There are board games that are about similar adventures, but the examples I know involve the players scattering around the globe to accomplish a common goal. Trying to do that in a video game would leave the players not really interacting with each other. For a jungle adventure game with everyone in the same place, I think it has to be a video game, now that it is an option.
If they are video game characters, I would like to see the movie engage with the difficulty each character might have on a jungle adventure either as video game characters brought to life wondering why things they took for granted before, or, more interesting to me, as players who become the video game characters, and have to struggle with things in reality that are elided in games.
As far as celebrity gossip goes, I can only speak to my own perspective. In 2005, for some reason I had an opinion on Brad Pitt divorcing Jennifer Aniston. In 2016, I couldn’t care less about most celebrity drama. I’ll listen to Taylor Swift, but I don’t care who the songs are about. I agree that there’s more of a perception of falseness and inauthenticity now. But although there is still a thriving culture around celebrities, I have to imagine there’s been somewhat of a cultural shift. I’m not sure exactly what it is but I feel like in the mid-2000’s we talked about celebrities differently. Certainly things were more vicious. You could comment more on a woman’s appearance and make various off-color jokes you couldn’t get away with as easily now. 2006 was the start of E! Live From the Red Carpet. It’s when Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black came out. Ten years ago was a different time.
It may have to do with the rise of reality TV. Reality TV was definitely already around in 2005, but it was a lot more novel and less of a fixture then. And while I agree that we approach celebrity stories about some celebrities differently now, I think there’s still that same sort of off-color, body-shaming sort of gossip around, say, the Kardashians. It seems to me that there are two kinds of celebrities these days: celebrities who are famous for traditional reasons (acting, singing) and celebrities who are famous as “personalities” (pundits, reality TV stars, i.e. people who are “playing themselves.” It seems that it’s still culturally acceptable to denigrate the latter, perhaps because there’s a sense that they’ve invited that scrutiny through their path to fame, but not for the former because they aren’t perceived as fame-seeking, but rather prominent artists who are just doing their jobs.
Seeing the Jumanji photo before any of the controversy, I didn’t even consider her outfit. My thought was oh, they’ve made a cartoon/video game where like many cartoons/video games there’s a diversity of male body types but the female character still fits into this relatively narrow ideal. And then I thought, it’s kind of crazy that the real world has now become the cartoon world.
And then I remembered how much I liked Selfie (which starred Karen Gillan).
And then I started thinking about Jumanji which I watched a lot as a child because I had a bootleg VHS tape of it.
Exactly! Selfie! See my comment below. :-)
When you quoted Marina Sirtis explaining the reasons for Troi’s uniform as a combination of an individual civilian’s choice and “An excuse to see a pretty woman in a low-cut top,” for some reason it reminded me of 2014 TV series “Selfie” with Karen Gillan and John Cho. I first started watching because I wanted to see what these two were doing on such a ridiculous-sounding parody of “My Fair Lady.” As a dad of a young woman in her 20s, it’s not as easy anymore for me to just enjoy the woman in the tight-fitting/low cut/short-hemmed outfits anymore. What surprised me, though, is the emotional depth they managed to bring to the workplace comedy when they wanted to do it. Maybe I am just a fan of Emily Kapnek, because I enjoyed Suburgatory more than a lot of other people, too. I would say both of these are worth watching in honor of what they could have become given the chance.