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.
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Well, good afternoon listeners.
It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago.
I'm strolling home from work and happy to talk to you about board games.
Ha! tricked you.
It's not actually going to be about board games today.
It's going to be about movies.
That's right, it's been 12 episodes or so since I did an episode talking about movies
and it's been another month since then.
So I'm going to talk about some movies I watched.
That's right, it's the film roundup episode.
Now as I often do, I will try to think about what would make a good game pairing thematically
if you want to do a game and movie night.
But in reality, this is the movie review episode.
So if that's not your bag, sorry about that.
Hopefully you'll enjoy it.
Unless otherwise, see you next time.
So I thought I would today, I would talk about the six movies that I watched in February
and reflect a little bit on what I thought of them and give my opinion.
Alright, so to start with, this one is one a lot of people saw.
This was Oppenheimer.
From a technical perspective, Oppenheimer is of course an excellent movie.
I enjoyed watching it as is true for me of all Christopher Nolan films.
I've yet to have one that I didn't actually just enjoy.
I'm not sure, I know a lot of people thought, "Tenet was kind of inscrutable."
I did not find it to be that way.
I, whatever sort of weird, strange loops that Christopher Nolan puts into his narratives,
I generally find pretty comprehensible.
And so maybe it's middle-aged white dude to middle-aged white dude.
I can really sympathize with his view of weirdness in the world.
So from a technical perspective, I really appreciated the way it's made.
He does a nice job of building up these three parallel stories from three different time
points in Oppenheimer's life and sort of tracking them simultaneously.
It makes for an interesting narrative that is not linear.
Of course all the actors in the film do a really good job.
I particularly like to Matt Damon's performance.
I think he does a really good job of playing sort of somebody who's a bit annoyed and just
trying to do their best in the face of insanity.
And that felt like what's happening with the Matt Damon character.
I really liked that small part.
Of course, Cillian Murphy did an excellent job as many people have recognized.
I was irritated but not surprised by how little room was given for female actors to do much
work at all.
It's not uncommon for Christopher Nolan's stories to give relatively little space for women.
And this one is another of those.
I thought Emily Blunt did a pretty amazing job in the short time she had as his wife.
And the woman who played the girlfriend, oh I can't remember her name.
She was Black Widow's sister in the Black Widow movie.
She is a pretty big star right now and I'm kind of ashamed that I don't remember her name
but I thought she did a good job as well for what limited space they were given.
You know, there's a lot of commentary about this movie being amazing, right?
And it won all sorts of accolades.
I mean, I thought it was good but I don't really get why people thought it was so incredible.
Apart because I guess just for me like the subject matter feels really covered.
I don't know how people are having new views or new ideas about what the atomic bomb was at
this point.
So maybe I've just read or encountered more of it than your average filmgoer or maybe people
just hadn't thought about it in the same way.
I don't know.
But the broad remit of the film did not strike me as incredibly unusual.
And so like I said, nice job all the pieces but the story itself was I guess sort of what
I thought it would be.
And so it's hard to really see it as the amazing thing everybody seems to think it is when
it was what I expected it would be.
So that's Oppenheimer, three and a half stars.
The next film is a small indie film called The Vast of Night.
The loose premise is we follow a couple teenagers in a small town in America in the 1950s when
something weird is going on and there might be aliens.
The central points of the film are a radio station where one of the teenagers has
a job as a disc jockey, disc jockey and the phone switchboard where one of the other teenagers
has an evening job as a switchboard operator.
The premise is really it works really well.
It's sort of like the Orson Welles' War of the Worlds in that it's a series of sort of
sounds that they hear and incomplete reports and the chaos of not knowing what's going
on sort of shapes the experience.
The two young actors do a really good job sort of portraying this compelling state and
there's a lot of running around in confusion.
There's a really interesting drone shot that follows the characters into like a high school
gym where there's a high school basketball game playing.
All these people cheering and the drone kind of zooms in and zooms around and zooms back
out.
It's a really neat shot that you couldn't you just couldn't do before drones and cameras
got a lot smaller and cheaper.
So this movie is clearly made on a reasonably small budget but really compelling and just
an interesting film.
So like actually give it four stars.
Oppenheimer is this big thing that did what I thought it would do.
The Vast of Night just felt it came out the story a little different.
I really liked it.
The Vast of Night.
That's a 2019 film.
Next up this is a film I watched after I watched The Vast of Night.
I found I just had an evening to myself and I watched The Vast of Night on Amazon Prime
and I had some more time and I was you know how after you watch a movie there's like a
list of movies you might like down below.
So I started watching that or going through that.
And you know a lot of the movies were ones and two stars maybe a three star occasionally.
Then I came across this movie called Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes.
It was like five stars and I said to myself well or maybe four stars four and a half
but way higher than the other movies around it in this list.
And then upon examining it more closely I see it's a Japanese movie it's in Japanese.
You have to watch it with subtitles and I'm like oh American unwillingness to watch
subtitles that's where that's why it's down among these movies people don't want to watch
even though it's very well rated.
So I gave it a try and of all the movies I'm talking about this month this is the one you
should watch if you're only going to watch one.
Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes is a really interesting film about time travel kind of
the premise and I'm not giving away anything that's not clear in the first two minutes or
five minutes of the film.
The premise is that there's a TV in this diner and this TV in this guy's apartment which
is upstairs from the diner and those TVs are connected to one another.
There's a two minute delay between the TV and the diner and a TV in the house and the
big thing is that it's not just like the signal takes two minutes to get from one to the
other.
I guess that is kind of what is going on the signal takes two minutes to get from one
other but that you can see through them.
You can see from one to the other.
So the if you are where the if you are where the past TV is you can see two minutes into
the future is the best way I can explain it.
So it's not a two minute delay it's actually two minutes in the future.
It's an instantaneous two minute gap and the whole movie is sort of about what would happen
if you had access to this and what how would you what would you do with it and it's a nice
little bottle episode of a movie.
It seems to have been shot probably on a handheld camera and if not in one take it was it's
cheated into looking like one take.
There's a lot of going up and down the stairs in the camera following them and stuff happening
in really interesting ways.
It's a very thoughtfully produced movie really fun and something you should definitely check
out if you can.
It's called Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes.
That's my only five star of the month.
That's from 2020 and I watched it on Amazon Prime.
Well we're at our commercial break or we're at three minutes there are three movies that's
halfway in and I realize I have yet to suggest any games to go with these movies but I will
suggest them now.
So Oppenheimer it feels like the game to suggest to that would be Manhattan Project.
I don't have that one.
If you were coming to my house and said Brendan I want to play whatever you have that's
closest, that's Manhattan Project Energy Empire which is a related game but not in the direct
project.
Manhattan Project would be the one to play.
That game is probably very difficult to find now.
It was originally published by minion games and of course minion games folded when James
Mathe sadly passed away.
Some of the games have been picked up for printing but for the most part that concern went when
he passed away.
So that's sad.
So I haven't played Manhattan Project.
I can't say whether it's any good.
I know that Manhattan Project Energy Empire is very good and I enjoyed a lot.
So that's for Oppenheimer.
The Vast of Night.
I'm going to say the visitor at Blackwood Grove.
This is a small social deduction game where one player plays an alien and the other player
plays a child trying to communicate with the alien and there's humans trying to communicate
or the government is trying to intercept it and there's basically the goal is the child
or the children is to communicate with the alien before the government intercepts those
communications.
It's a sort of deduction game, a competitive deduction game that's weird and interesting
and I enjoyed it the one time I played it but there's not really room in my collection
for it so it did go away.
But if you get a chance, this is a return back.
And Blackwood Grove would fit the Vast of Night.
For beyond the infinite two minutes, I think that time you killed me has to be the game
that I would play in connection because that game is so specifically about anticipating
what happens when you move on one place in another place and thinking two or three moves
ahead but also two or three boards ahead.
I've had a number of games of that where I won or lost based on somebody not seeing that
if you jumped from one board to another you could take their piece out and if you're already
missing from one of the boards then that's it.
Really interesting game, well worth playing if you get a chance that's that time you killed
me.
Alright three more movies, I'll talk about a game after each one because I don't know
if I'll get to all three.
Now the first one is The Lost King.
This falls in the category of the British know how to make heartwarming, pleasant stories
with a low dramatic arc movies.
Reminds me of the Bank of Dave a little bit.
In The Lost King, we have the story of a amateur archaeologist and fan of King Richard
the third who led the campaign to try and find the place where King Richard was probably
buried and in fact did find the place where King Richard was buried.
This is a true story.
Of course the academic bureaucracy got in the way and it sort of frustrating to watch her
chafe against these systems of expertise so that prevent outsiders from participating.
As an academic though, I also reflected a little bit on the fact that people with
outformal training or without enough training will sort of stick their oar in whether or
not they really know what they're talking about and so there's an interesting back and
forth about that in this movie.
It's clearly on the side of the amateur though and frankly so am I if nothing else because
the movie makes the bureaucrats look like jerks.
That's The Lost King from 2022.
I don't know what game would go with this I guess.
Tobago maybe I think is a game where you are trying to find a lost treasure that is buried
and you're running around trying to find clues to find where to dig for it that probably
works.
I think it's Tobago.
It might be Kahuna.
I can't remember.
If you know what I'm talking about let me know it's a game where each person draws a
clue and those clues then reduce the number of places that the treasure could be until
somebody manages to figure out where the treasure is and get their truck there first.
So it's definitely a game that's been around a while I can't remember what it's called.
It's something like Kahuna.
It's not Kahuna.
I feel like Tobago maybe but that doesn't seem right either.
I guess we were on a kick for missing things because then we rewatched the Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatem
romantic comedy, The Lost City.
This movie was basically just Romancing the Stone again.
I like that movie a lot and I like this one as well.
In that one, Romancing the Stone, Michael Douglas plays a rather sexist adventurer type
and in The Lost City, Sandra Bullock is the judgmental type who looks at the sort of
ditsy body builder character Channing Tatem with judgmental eyes.
So this is a duel.
This is sort of reversal of that trope.
You got Daniel Radcliffe chewing the scenery.
He has a goofy villain.
He's got all that dissimilar from the character he played in Now You See Me 2.
Both of them sort of hilariously evil.
And I like Daniel Radcliffe taking just kind of whatever part he feels like.
He's got a lot of range and he shows it.
The Lost City also has a fantastic cameo from Brad Pitt.
Well, not cameo but small part from Brad Pitt and really funny chase sequences.
So if you haven't seen The Lost City, I recommend it.
It's very funny.
As a game to go with it I would say the Explorers is perhaps the Temple of Chac which is the
one that has the rolling boulder in the pits of lava.
It fits this game really well.
That would be a nice pairing.
Like Romance of the Stone that game has a fair amount of misogyny or at least sexism built
into the art design.
I guess you could excuse the game a little bit because it's French but mostly it's just
like the female characters are all drawn pretty buxom.
Nonetheless the Temple of Chac is a pretty fun game if you can get a hold of it.
It's long out of print unfortunately so not a game you're going to find most places.
If you come to visit me we could play it.
So that would go with The Lost City.
And then finally just a quick word for Jay Barruchel in Blackberry which
is a relatively simple tech bros trying to solve a problem becoming famous.
Rise and fall of a tech company story.
Starting Jay Barruchel as the tech genius behind the Research In Motion and the company
the Blackberry.
That was a pretty entertaining story.
I enjoyed watching that.
It is kind of what you expected.
There's a great scene where the skeptical businessman says you know that's a problem you
can't solve and they say well we solved it ha ha and that's always fun.
Lots of good information there.
So not a whole lot to say about that movie.
It is kind of what you'd expect it to be.
Tech bros solving problems getting rich then the downfall of those same tech bros
works really well.
I guess if I was going to recommend the game not having played it obviously Smartphone Inc
seems like the game you would play to go along with watching the movie Blackberry
because they're both about you know Blackberries and related products.
Well I became to hear what movies you've been watching in the last couple months.
Those are the movies I watched in February 2024.
In order to share that information with me you can head over to boardgamegeek guild 3269
and I'd love to learn what movies you've been watching.
Until next time.
Thanks for joining me.
I hope your next walk was as pleasant as mine was.
Bye bye.
Brought to you by Rattlebox Games
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