Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to Sneaky Dragon Episode 379!
This week on the show: it’s not divisible by three; unpopular topics – math, grammar, and religion – an example of the sometimes unfortunately neglected Oxford comma; the importance of eating sugar; work wheel; sugars of choice; Lent dispute; scary records and religious misunderstandings; Jesus and the hero’s journey; Jesus shat; no one remembers the jokes; Ian copyrights Scamelot©; an important – yet vague – sidecast announcment; questions and answers of the week – Sneakers respond; Twin Peakery; fever dream; return to risk; peer pressure and how to say no, and the risks of saying no; the Blondie question; sing a song of Nancy; comedy formalism; and, finally, we won’t be seeing Captain Marvel.
Question of the week: Book and/or movie that wasn’t working for you until the end blew you away.
Thanks for listening.
Department of Corections:
Yes, we know Dave confused the ancient TV shows F-Troop and Dusty’s Trails.
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Russian Doll wasn’t working for me for the first few episodes. I found the characters really annoying. But Ian recommended it and I usually like time loop stories so I stuck with it and it really took off for me at epsidoe the end of Ep. 3. It’s more like a 4-hour movie the way each episode builds on the ones that have come before it. If it had come out a week at a time I might not have watched more than the opening episode.
One movie I’m pretty sure will be working for me right from the beginning is this June’s release, Yesterday. It’s directed by Danny Boyle and written by Richard Curtis (Notting Hill, Love Actually, About Time.) It’s about a struggling musician who gets hit by a bus and wakes up being the only person who remembers a band called the Beatles and their songs. I watched the trailer, but I’d say…don’t watch the trailer!! It blows a few plot twists.
Kia Ora,
A movie that was ok, but that wow’ed me at the end was Razor Blade Smile (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0159693/) a trashy and sometimes cringe B grade Vampire film with an ending that makes the whole thing extremely worth while and led to me creating a LARP character in homage to the themes (things did not turn out well for them).
For books it would be “The Servants” by MM Smith (AKA Michael Marshall Smith AKA Michael Marshall depending on the genre he is writing in). In this case a YA aimed book (from an author I didn’t expect to go in that direction) that felt lesser than his other works until it all comes to a wonderful end that left me in tears.
Michael Marshall Smith is also the “Under Approcated Author” I was going to write in about in response to that question a few weeks back and never did. Pick up a copy of “only forward” and you are in for an amazing journey. I’ll even offer a money back guarantee to you, Ian and Dave, I am that certain you’ll like it.
Hello again! I didn’t mean to leave you hanging with that Terry Pratchett aside. The book I brought up was Going Postal!. Despite being book #33 (!!) in the Discworld series, the novels aren’t very serialized, and it probably would be approachable for a new reader.
> Question of the week: Book and/or movie that wasn’t working for you until the end blew you away.
Ex-Machina. I found the movie interesting but slow. The ending was the best part. I couldn’t decide whether I liked the movie overall, but it stuck with me for a long time.
Also, the book Red Shirts by John Scalzi was entertaining, but the three codas after the story ends — roughly a third of the book, I think — were fantastic. They focus on bit characters from the main story, but are introspective and philosophical, when the main story was, of course, a sort of Star Trek rip-off.
Cheers!