Put on a happy face! A new Podcass!
Joker is the big movie release of the weekend and drawing a lot of buzz, so we have a review for you (2:11). Then baseball and football radio segments from WISE Sports Radio. Up first is a preview of the 2019 MLB postseason (15:05), followed by a look at Week 5 in the NFL (27:33).
Referenced during this episode:
For the past 20 years, figuring out what makes villains evil has become an entire creative industry. I don’t know if it started with the Star Wars prequels, but that seems to be where it was popularized. How did Anakin Skywalker become Darth Vader? OK, that question was inherent with the character because we knew that he was Luke Skywalker’s father and a Jedi Knight alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Yet was that story really begging to be told? I think we all — whether “we” means Star Wars fans or general pop culture — thought we wanted to see that story. But would it have been better if Darth Vader stayed ruthless and villainous? Isn’t it enough that we knew he had a change of heart by the end and chose to save his son over his devotion to the Empire and the Sith?
The mystery of what made Anakin turn into Vader added appeal to the entire Star Wars mythology because it invited people to imagine what might have happened, rather than having that story told to them.
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This is the week when we get The Podcass on the schedule I’ve intended. Hopefully, we’ll have shows every Tuesday and Friday from here on out.
First, we get a little geeky, talking about Sony and Marvel realizing they’re better together with Spider-Man (03:06). Then, how about those Detroit Lions, hanging with the Kansas City Chiefs and almost beating them (07:45)? We also review Renee Zellweger in Judy (13:44) before jumping into my radio segments. I appeared on Edmonton’s TSN 1260 to preview the MLB postseason (18:27) and dug into the Cubs-Joe Maddon split and the Angels firing manager Brad Ausmus on Asheville’s WISE Sports Radio (26:36).
As mentioned during this episode:
Judy does what most good biopics do, focusing on a particular period of the subject’s life, rather than try to fit an entire life and career into a two-hour story.
There are flashbacks that show what Judy Garland endured as a young girl, trying to please those who wanted to make her a star at the cost of any sort of normal childhood. Those sequences presume that you know about Garland and her career, which doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable if you’re seeing this movie. If you know Judy Garland was in The Wizard of Oz, that’s probably all you need to get by here.
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Here’s some Podcass for the weekend! (We should’ve gotten it posted before the weekend. Still a work in progress, folks. Eventually, I’ll stop saying that.)
Catching up on some movies, we review Ad Astra (01:51) and Rambo: Last Blood (29:07). In between is my WISE Sports Radio NFL segment (10:24) and a couple of corrections from the last episode (37:06).
Links to a few things mentioned during this episode:
Ian Casselberry 