The Weekly Stuff Podcast #167 – November Game Review Extravaganza! Pokemon, Call of Duty, Titanfall, Dishonored, & More!

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in iTunes by following this link.

We’re back from the Thanksgiving break with an absolutely packed, absurdly long episode in which we review no less than eight – count ‘em, eight – new video games from the past two months. Going back and forth, Sean reviews Call of Duty Infinite Warfare, Dishonored 2, XCOM 2, and Titanfall 2, while Jonathan reviews Pokemon Sun and Moon, Dragon Ball Fusions, and gives more thoughts on Skyrim Special Edition, while both Jonathan and Sean tell more stories from the wonderful world of Hitman. Throw in some quick movie discussions – Arrival and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – and a slew of movie trailers to discuss and make fun of, and you have one of our longest episodes ever, clearing the deck for the busy final weeks of 2016.  

Enjoy!

TIME CHART:

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:03:00

Jonathan talks Arrival, Fantastic Beasts, and Gilmore Girls: 0:03:00 – 0:29:15

Persona 5 Delay News: 0:29:15 – 0:36:10

Movie Trailer Round-up: 0:36:10 – 1:07:05

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Review: 1:07:05 – 1:25:19

Skyrim Special Edition Follow-up: 1:25:19 – 1:33:50

XCOM 2 Review: 1:33:50 – 1:52:39

Hitman Follow-up: 1:52:39 – 2:08:48

Dishonored 2 Review: 2:08:48 – 2:26:50

Dragon Ball Fusions Review: 2:26:50 – 2:54:34

Titanfall 2 Review: 2:54:34 – 3:14:55

Pokemon Sun and Moon Review: 3:14:55 – 3:45:23

Stream The Weekly Stuff Podcast Episode #167

  

Download 'The Weekly Stuff' Episode #167 as an MP3

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in iTunes!

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Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

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The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe in iTunes, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. If you visit www.jonathanlack.com, we also have streaming and downloadable versions of new and archival episodes for your listening pleasure.

"Gilmore Girls" Greatest Hits - The Top 20 Episodes, Part 4: #16 - #20 and the best of the final seasons

So here’s something you may not know about me: There are few things I love on this good earth as much as Gilmore Girls. And with the A Year in the Life ‘reunion’ season debuting on Netflix this Friday, I’ll be spending the week sharing my thoughts on my Top 20 favorite episodes of the series. Why Top 20? Because when I tried to list just 10 I came up with so many more. Gilmore Girls was a qualitatively consistent show – most episodes are at least very good, and few, even during the show’s rougher patches, are obvious outliers one way or another. Normally, I would try ‘ranking’ a list like this, but I quickly found that to be a foolhardy task. I cannot name my favorite episode among these 20, nor can I easily say any of them are better or worse than one another. So instead, we’ll be revisiting these episodes chronologically, from the very beginning to the very end, in four articles, posting Monday through Thursday, featuring 5 episodes apiece. You can read Part 1 here, covering #1 – 5, Part 2 here, covering #6 – 10, and Part 3 here, covering #11 – 15.

So without further ado, let us conclude our journey with Part 4 of the Gilmore Girls Top 20 after the jump…

"Gilmore Girls" Greatest Hits - The Top 20 Episodes, Part 3: #11 - #15 and the best of Seasons 3 and 4

So here’s something you may not know about me: There are few things I love on this good earth as much as Gilmore Girls. And with the A Year in the Life ‘reunion’ season debuting on Netflix this Friday, I’ll be spending the week sharing my thoughts on my Top 20 favorite episodes of the series. Why Top 20? Because when I tried to list just 10 I came up with so many more. Gilmore Girls was a qualitatively consistent show – most episodes are at least very good, and few, even during the show’s rougher patches, are obvious outliers one way or another. Normally, I would try ‘ranking’ a list like this, but I quickly found that to be a foolhardy task. I cannot name my favorite episode among these 20, nor can I easily say any of them are better or worse than one another. So instead, we’ll be revisiting these episodes chronologically, from the very beginning to the very end, in four articles, posting Monday through Thursday, featuring 5 episodes apiece. You can read Part 1 here, covering #1 – 5, and Part 2 here, covering #6 – 10.

So without further ado, let us continue our journey with Part 3 of the Gilmore Girls Top 20 after the jump…

"Gilmore Girls" Greatest Hits - The Top 20 Episodes, Part 2: #6 - #10 and the best of the early years

So here’s something you may not know about me: There are few things I love on this good earth as much as Gilmore Girls. And with the A Year in the Life ‘reunion’ season debuting on Netflix this Friday, I’ll be spending the week sharing my thoughts on my Top 20 favorite episodes of the series. Why Top 20? Because when I tried to list just 10 I came up with so many more. Gilmore Girls was a qualitatively consistent show – most episodes are at least very good, and few, even during the show’s rougher patches, are obvious outliers one way or another. Normally, I would try ‘ranking’ a list like this, but I quickly found that to be a foolhardy task. I cannot name my favorite episode among these 20, nor can I easily say any of them are better or worse than one another. So instead, we’ll be revisiting these episodes chronologically, from the very beginning to the very end, in four articles, posting Monday through Thursday, featuring 5 episodes apiece. You can read Part 1 here, covering #1 – 5.

So without further ado, let us continue our journey with Part 2 of the Gilmore Girls Top 20 after the jump…

"Gilmore Girls" Greatest Hits - The Top 20 Episodes, Part 1: #1 - #5 and the best of Season 1

So here’s something you may not know about me: There are few things I love on this good earth as much as Gilmore Girls. It pretty much goes 1) my family, 2) my dog, 3) the gift of life, and then televisual trips to Stars Hollow.

OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But I’m one of the people who finally caught Gilmore Girls when it came to Netflix a few years ago, and discovering it there was like meeting the long-lost family I never knew existed, finding a language and a tonal wavelength that hit me right in the heart, on a practically chemical level. I have already watched the entire series start-to-finish twice, and I’m more excited for Netflix’s upcoming A Year in the Life revival than almost anything else this or any other year.

I love going to Stars Hollow. It’s easy to call this series ‘comfort food,’ as many do, but I think that undersells its achievement – that it’s not just comfort food, but smart comfort food, soulful comfort food, comfort food that is makes one feel at home because it develops complex characters in a wonderfully rich setting, a world that is fully fleshed-out, not free of conflict, nor strictly beholden to reality, but true and honest to itself and its worldview. It is perhaps the closest any live-action American TV series will ever come to having a town as fully inhabited and richly developed as Springfield on The Simpsons (Pawnee on Parks and Recreation would be an obvious #2), and the core character dynamics are so fundamentally strong and unique that the show could frequently build long, endlessly entertaining scenes out of the most mundane interactions (the most dramatic Gilmore Girls sequences are, more often than not, family dinners).

With A Year in the Life debuting on Netflix this Friday, I’ll be spending the week sharing my thoughts on my Top 20 favorite episodes of the series. Why Top 20? Because when I tried to list just 10 I came up with so many more (and because 20 is easily divisible by 4, the number of parts in which I’ll be publishing this list). Like Mad Men, which I also did a Top 20 'Greatest Hits' list for, Gilmore Girls was a qualitatively consistent show – most episodes are at least very good, and few, even during the show’s rougher patches, are obvious outliers one way or another. Normally, I would try ‘ranking’ a list like this, but I quickly found that to be a foolhardy task. I cannot name my favorite episode among these 20, nor can I easily say any of them are better or worse than one another. So instead, we’ll be revisiting these episodes chronologically, from the very beginning to the very end, in four articles, posting Monday through Thursday, with 5 episodes apiece.

Today, we’re looking exclusively at Season One episodes, which has the most entries on the list (there will be one more from the season tomorrow). The first year is, to me, definitely the best – I look at the list of early episodes and how clearly the show was executing on its fundamental themes and philosophy, and it’s kind of staggering just how strong the series roared out of the gate. Each era of the series has its strengths, of course, and there are lots of periods even late in the game where Amy Sherman-Palladino and company were conjuring a kind of indescribable magic in bringing this town and its inhabitants to life in ways that were consistently entertaining and powerful. I love this show, and going on a journey down memory lane seems like the perfect way to celebrate it before Stars Hollow returns to our screens on Friday.

So without further ado, let us begin our journey with Part 1 of the Gilmore Girls Top 20 after the jump…

Review: "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" is a delightful exercise in fantasy world-building

The best thing about Harry Potter was always J.K. Rowling’s extraordinary aptitude for world-building. She could spin a good yarn, sure, but as engaging as it was, the main narrative through-line about Harry’s battle with Lord Voldemort was never the primary draw of the series. Its appeal lied in the hundreds of wonderfully-defined characters Rowling wrote into life and in the palpably complex and vibrant world they inhabited. When I was a kid, my favorite parts of Harry Potter books were rarely the sections dealing directly with the main narrative; instead, I preferred the chapters about Harry’s day-to-day life at Hogwarts, going to classes and meeting new characters and interacting with strange new parts of the Wizarding world. Rowling’s work initially succeeded for the same reason it endures, nearly twenty years past the first novel’s publication: Because her ability to breathe life into a fictional world was a magic trick all its own, and because everyone who got a glimpse of it wanted to go and live there.

It should be no surprise, then, that the Rowling-scripted Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is such a delight. What inevitably started as a panicked Warner Bros. executive reacting to downturns on a spreadsheet in the years since the last Harry Potter film hit theatres finds its artistic reason to exist in the realms of Rowling’s seemingly boundless imagination. The film is a chance not only for her to stretch her Potter muscles again, but to do so more or less completely in service of world-building. Fantastic Beasts has its narrative connections to the original Harry Potter stories, but they are for now modest, and on the whole, the film is a beautiful, endlessly creative extension of a world both Rowling and her audience only previously explored through a relatively narrow lens. With new characters, a new setting, and a new time period, Fantastic Beasts tests whether or not Rowling’s world is deep enough to expand past Harry and his friends, and the result is a resounding success, a richly entertaining experience that stands firmly on its own two feet.

Continue reading after the jump…

An Ode to the Harry Potter Film Series: A Cinematic Achievement Worthy of Reevaluation

It may sound weird to claim that the highest-grossing film series of all time (minus the interconnected sprawl of the Marvel Cinematic Universe), a franchise that is as iconic as it is beloved by millions worldwide, is creatively underrated, but here’s the thing – I think the Harry Potter films are, as works of cinematic art, genuinely undervalued.

It’s something that gets lost in discussion of the films as cultural phenomena or as adaptations, where the works themselves become drowned in discussions about – or discussions amongst – fandom. As far-and-away the most lasting (and most often imitated) of the wave of 2000s ‘young-adult’ properties – a wave it is centrally responsible for creating – Harry Potter is so big and culturally ingrained it can become difficult to separate the art from the hype, the object itself from the cultural furor surrounding it.

And just as I think J.K. Rowling probably isn’t recognized enough in literary circles for just how beautifully and uniquely-written her creations are, so too have the Harry Potter films become underappreciated as outstanding works of mainstream cinematic art. These were spectacularly-made films, produced with a level of artistic passion and cinematic verve we simply do not see much of in mainstream Hollywood ‘blockbusters,’ even just five years past the release of the last movie. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a ‘spin-off’ of the original franchise reuniting much of the behind-the-camera talent – including, perhaps most significantly, director David Yates, who helmed a full half of the original eight movies – has only looked better and better with each second of footage released, and to me, a big part of that is how cavernous the gap feels between mainstream Hollywood in 2016 and mainstream Hollywood through the decade of Harry Potter (2001 – 2011). The Harry Potter movies exemplified an arguably now-dormant belief in throwing the best filmmakers and craftspeople behind a major tentpole, not just making a visual product ‘good enough’ for the masses, but a cinematic experience truly worthy of the surrounding hype and excitement. You saw it also with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films or Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy – properties that, in another time and under most expectations of Hollywood, would have been produced with significantly less artistic might behind them. If you think of the now-dominant trend of superhero movies, we have WB – the company behind Harry Potter and Nolan’s Batman – shitting the bed with downright horrible filmmaking, or Marvel, which produces very good and very fun movies, but often without the sheer level of craftsmanship that went into a Harry Potter. And the less said about the majority of the Potter knock-offs, the better (only The Hunger Games films, of this trend, aspired to similar heights).

In the immediate post-Potter aftermath, I think the industry learned many of the wrong lessons – that a successful long-running franchise was more about heavy marketing and a long-term game-plan that genuine bottom-up filmmaking. People forget that Potter evolved on film organically, moving through directors before it truly hit its stride, and that nobody in the industry was betting this thing would work over ten years and eight films right out of the gate. But as many of the project produced in the shadow of Potter have burned bright only to fizzle quickly (if they burned at all), I am starting to see that some in Hollywood are beginning to learn the real lessons of the franchise. Look no further than Disney’s approach to Star Wars, where they have been hiring genuinely talented filmmakers with recognizable visions, and stacking the craft ranks with heavy hitters in terms of cinematography, editing, production design, music, and more. So much of the key to the Potter magic was that WB invested in these movies as though they were golden-age Hollywood prestige films. They demanded the best of everything, and didn’t settle for less. I think Disney is taking that kind of care with Star Wars, and given the reaction to The Force Awakens and the early excitement for Rogue One, it clearly matters. It makes a difference. Harry Potter was proof.

And I think Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them looks to be a stirring reminder of why those lessons are important. From the trailers alone, this appears to be a movie with more palpable atmosphere, creativity, and cinematic weight than most of what has passed for Hollywood blockbusters over the past few years. It, alongside Rogue One, feels like a resurgence in a wave of movies made in the Potter model, where filmmaking seemed to come first – a wonderful hat trick for a multi-billion dollar franchise where the art object itself can paradoxically seem to be the least important consideration. If I am excited for Fantastic Beasts – and I am – it’s less because I’m a big Harry Potter fan – which, obviously…I mean, just look at this madness – but because it is following in a lineage of truly impressive cinematic accomplishments, a decade’s worth of blockbusters that dared to dream bigger and execute at a higher level that most mainstream Hollywood products of my lifetime.

After the jump, allow me to elaborate…

The Weekly Stuff Podcast #166 – Reviewing Doctor Strange, Hitman, Skyrim Special Edition & More

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in iTunes by following this link.

We get back into our regular routine with something of a catch-up episode, as Sean talks about finishing the Japanese release of Persona 5, Jonathan offers his thoughts on the recently released Skyrim Special Edition, and we both work our way through a few interesting news items. We review Marvel’s latest film, Doctor Strange, which is, to put it simply, a hell of a thing, and a lot of fun to talk about. And finally, we give our impressions of the sixth and final episode of Hitman Season One, along with some brief thoughts on this wonderful experiment in episodic assassination, now that’s come, for now, to a close.

Enjoy!

TIME CHART:

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:05:22

Sean Talks Persona 5: 0:05:22 – 0:19:15

Talking Skyrim Special Edition: 0:19:15 – 0:32:55

News: 0:32:55 – 0:44:55

Doctor Strange Review: 0:44:55 – 1:35:55

Hitman Episode 6 & Season One: 1:35:55 – 1:56:21

Stream The Weekly Stuff Podcast Episode #166

  

Download 'The Weekly Stuff' Episode #166 as an MP3

Subscribe for free to 'The Weekly Stuff' in iTunes!

Follow ‘The Weekly Stuff’ on Tumblr!

Follow Jonathan Lack on Twitter!

Follow Sean Chapman on Twitter!

The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe in iTunes, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. If you visit www.jonathanlack.com, we also have streaming and downloadable versions of new and archival episodes for your listening pleasure.