Movie Reviews and Serious Nonsense
Movie Reviews and Serious Nonsense
3 Body Problem
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Greg and Tom discuss the new NETFLIX series 3 Body Problem.
We talk about the series and our impressions of the production. Along with some other invaluable nonsense like Tom's reading of the Audible Book Ping Pong Diplomacy and what else we are watching this week. All of this hours before the Solar Eclipse of April 8th 2024
3 Body Problem Premise
Ye Wenjie is an astrophysicist who sees her father beaten to death during a struggle session in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. She is conscripted by the military because of her scientific background and is sent to a secret military base in a remote region. Her decision at the base to respond to contact from an alien planet has implications for a group of scientists in the present day, forcing them to face humanity's greatest threat.
The three-body problem is an arm of cosmology, where the “bodies” are celestial, like calculating where planets are in relation to each other over time. (Chinese sci-fi author Liu Cixin used the term as a pun for the title of his Hugo Award-winning 2015 novel about murdered astrophysicists.) Applications range from the earliest low-tech ship navigators to modern theories of spaceflight like gravity assists, and the mathematical complexity of the problem itself has made it interesting to both mathematicians and computer scientists for many years.
Podcast music:
Intro music Kamihamiha! - Alien Warfare Stems by Kamihamiha (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kamihamiha/60882
Movie Reviews and Serious Nonsense is a King Dyro Production ©2026
Welcome to another episode of Serious Nonsense with Greg Dairo and Tom Burka. Today we're going to be talking about the Netflix series The Three Body Problem. On with the show.
SPEAKER_01Now, I I actually saw, I don't know why this came up. There was an article in something called The Three Body Pro Problem that was not about this television show on Netflix, but was about the actual three-body problem as posed by, I suppose, a physicist, but I wouldn't read it because I'm like, I don't care. I don't care if it's just about the three-body problem theory. I just don't want anything spoiled. And you know what? I was right in doing that. Because a huge review. First, I I think we should say that we're going to talk about the three-body problem, which just recently started running on Netflix.
SPEAKER_03When I recorded this, I left out David Benioff. So now I'm going to say David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and Alexander Wu are the creators.
SPEAKER_01Okay. And the first two brought us Game of Thrones, so we're happy about that. And I might add that David Benioff wrote an amazing book about the Russian German sniper battle, which is a very quick read, and it's just one of the best told stories ever. The guy is very talented. And obviously, they're all pretty talented. I don't know who this Alexander Wu guy is. I don't know how he got into the picture. Maybe they met at a party. Maybe things got let's see.
SPEAKER_03He was part of True Blood and The Terror in 2018. And I'm going to guess it's the Chinese influence. Maybe he had something to do with the This is true. And who wrote the book that this was based on? It's uh it's a Chinese science fiction author. And it's Yes, and how many syllables? Yeah. I need to and I I can't say the author's name is it's Qin Lu. C-I-X-I-N-L-I-U. Qin. Qin, maybe? I don't know what the X is.
SPEAKER_01I believe it's Xin Lu. I had to read for Audible, I had to do an audiobook with a thousand Chinese names in it, and was given absolutely no guidance on how to pronounce anything. So not surprised, and I was very proud of I did all this research to figure out what the different sounds were, and I listened to recordings of people saying the names on YouTube, and I made a big chart. And one of my reviews is this guy doesn't know how to pronounce Chinese at all. Yeah, yeah. So that was one of my great moments. But uh it's a good book. I recommend the audiobook, whether or not I'm pronouncing the names. It's ping pong diplomacy.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_03Ping pong diplomacy. Available on audible. There'll be a link in the credits. Good. Yeah, we won't talk about it more. Come on. We get that in. No more meandering. If you want to listen to no, if you want to listen to more of Tom, then get this book, this audible book. And you'll get more of Tom butchering Chinese names.
SPEAKER_01You're killing me. Oh my God. After a hangover, I have the hangover. I'll have a hangover.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I have the title that you can do. We'll call it Ping Pong Butchery. And listen to Tom, butcher words in many languages.
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_03You pick the language, Tom will butcher the word.
SPEAKER_01I don't want to ruin my relationship by with Audible by saying that they gave me a book with a thousand Chinese names that was set in China. It wasn't just people's names, there are a billion place names on top of it. So every paragraph I'm mispronouncing some Chinese. And he said that he thought I was in the ballpark.
SPEAKER_03You can be in the ballpark and you can be in a right field, or you can be pitching. So you're still in the ballpark.
SPEAKER_01It's true. Yeah, it's true. You can actually be in the stands. Yeah, behind the green monster. And you're still in the ballpark. You read the book.
SPEAKER_03I read the book, and I don't know. I I thought the first book was extremely boring and belabored. This is this is like a trilogy? It's a trilogy. I have not read the other two books, and I probably should. I thought that there was a lot of emphasis on the if you've watched the three body problem yet. Well have some spoilers, spoiler alert. There's a lot of early Mao revolution stuff going on in Three Body Problem because it takes place in the 60s. And I find the book belabors a lot of that. It's just over and over. It's like hitting over your head the, I know, the Chinese labor camps and the and the Chinese Revolution stuff. I just thought it was dragged on and on. And maybe I need to get in a different frame of mind to reread it. But I definitely think I'm happy with this with the three-body problem on Netflix.
SPEAKER_01Wait, before you get to that, I just want to say that ping pong diplomacy takes place. It's a history of China-American relations through the medium of ping pong and how in 1971 ping pong actually healed diplomacy between our two nations, but most of it is about Mao. It's very connected to all of this.
SPEAKER_03And I know, I know it it's quite amazing that this book, this is a Chinese science fiction book that's discussing and is very negative about the the events that took place in the in the revolution. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Listen, it doesn't even depict the fact that Mao basically starved hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. He was He really was an asshole. I'm sorry. He was a terrible, horrible dictator.
SPEAKER_03It sets up it sets up a lot of themes, I think, within the now we'll talk about the show versus the book. It sets up a lot of themes, I believe, on suppression, cultishness, the fact the revolution was cult-like, and how everybody would go along with things, whether it they really should be going along with it or not. I think the the show Three Body Problem has is exploring that from the past to the present and the aliens. What do you think about that, Tom?
SPEAKER_01Is that did you get the impression of it also focused also on freedom of scientific research, both in modern day times and way in the past. One of our main characters, um I hate to say it, I'm looking up, Yi Wenji. I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure I'm not pronouncing it correctly, but uh played by Rosalind Chow, by the way, who's very good. She's we see her as a young woman during the Mao oppression, seeing her father killed by the revolutionaries, and then she works in, she's just put to work like slave labor for a while until suddenly some people realize that she's a brilliant scientist, and so they recruit her to this program that is just sending signals into space.
SPEAKER_03Oh, here I'll read the I'll read the storyline off of IMDB. I I think this will set it up for our listeners. Set against the backdrop of China's cultural revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signals and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over our world, which they see as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.
SPEAKER_01I'm sorry, that's that's that that is this most ponderous goddamn storyline. Let's just say Yian Ji is working at this Chinese satellite secret facility, and they are beaming messages into space with the hope that they figure there's intelligent life out there. There are what billions of planets, so obviously a couple of them must be similar to Earth, must have similar conditions that would allow life to develop, and so there have to be other intelligent species out there. The problem is, and this is set up very early, is that like Yi when G gets a message, she figures out how to amplify their signal so that it's actually heard out there, and she gets a message saying, Hey, I'm on this intelligent planet, do not respond. Do not respond. Whenever you do not respond, and she sits there thinking for a little while and bam! She responded to the and that really sets into motion the entire plot. Because years later, when she is an elderly woman, I I hate to use that word. What is she in her late 60s, mid-sixties?
SPEAKER_03She has a daughter and a daughter's Yeah, I'm gonna say late 60s or whatever, I'm gonna guess. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Anyway, what I thought was brilliant about this, because you mentioned the fact that there are those who are preparing to defend Earth against the aliens, and then there are those who are almost religious acolytes embracing the idea that the aliens must be good and willing to kill on behalf of the aliens if that is their wish. And it's just a commentary on how stupid uh people in America have become, as far as I'm concerned, and all over the world. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00I was recently sent an excerpt of a young uh woman uh sitting in her car crying because she's like yo, everybody, Helen Keller is not real. She's not real, she was deaf, dumb, and blind, she did not write any books.
SPEAKER_01And I saw this and uh in the thread on X, somebody said, Who the hell is Helen Keller? What nobody's learning anything anymore. People are so awash in misinformation that people just have no compass anymore for what's true and what isn't. And many people are accepting all kinds of bullshit as as real. And taking what you would think are really bizarre stances, like suddenly deciding that Russia is our best friend, incredibly stupid positions like that. Oh, did I inject politics into the anyway? I do think it's a commentary on that to a certain degree. But also I think it's a commentary on scientists. Technology is dangerous.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yes. And each of the characters carries down that the different thought processes of the scientist who who is creating something that will kill and destroy people, and her moral kind of and then other scientists that that are just fine with it, that are friends. So there's different tracks going down each line, so it's being explored.
SPEAKER_01Well, and let me just say, I love we didn't even say this at the outset. I loved it. I thought that it was really well done. Yes. The entire show is very arresting. I found the heavy emphasis on physics and science to be absolutely engrossing. And I also like the fact that scientists are both the villains and heroes in this piece, and that the story is very well told. It starts off with a mystery that you cannot figure out what the heck is going on. Um I'll say asshole one minute and I'll say heck the next. But aside from that self-reflection, totally intriguing. You're hooked from the first episode in, where one scientist suddenly sees a countdown in front of hovering in front of her face, and she's basically told, you have to shut down your incredible nanotechnology research, the countdown, you'll find out what happens when the countdown gets down. And I assume at the same time, all there are scientists who are killing themselves suddenly after suicide. Yeah, and actually I forgot about this as the show went on, but basically the results from particle accelerators suddenly became insane and suggested that all of our science on physics was completely wrong. And honestly, some scientists killed themselves over that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and we find out as the show goes along that the aliens have a way of manipulating what people see in the deep fake as one of our characters describes it. It's a deep fake. And I enjoyed that. I also enjoyed, I enjoyed that there were scientific stuff that there was no exposition on. There was no explanation, which I thought was really good because it's it got explained further down the line. Do you know what I mean? In in in the show? No. But at first, I mean her cutting the diamond cube at the very beginning. There was no explanation. There was no exposition about that really at all. And it didn't dawn on you till I think later when she cut the ship in two in multi-pieces that that diamond was the precursor to that. And very Exactly. That was it was done really well that's, oh, you saw something miraculous going on, but I don't quite know what that was at the beginning. And then further online, you figure, oh, okay, I'm starting to get it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I loved all the references to science that were opaque at the beginning. Somebody mentioned Fair Me at one point. There were all these discussions of academic scientific research, and the show does center on a group of scientists who allowed it.
SPEAKER_03And also, yeah, you all along those lines, the first suicide we saw was the I won't call her the main character, but the person who started the entire thing's daughter. And there was a casual reference to, oh, she committed suicide in a, I think it's a Chernikov of uh Chernikov. And it's I can't say any of these words right today. Uh but there was, again, no exposition on that. And that's what that room was because I saw it, and I'm like, oh, it's full of water, and they're looking for neutrinos. And it's okay, this is cool. And they didn't explain it.
SPEAKER_01And it also showed it's just the coolest looking thing on the inside ever. So the idea of somebody committing suicide in this completely bizarre construct. Yeah, I think it's called a Chernenko tank.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yes, you're right. There's and it's it might be the one up in Canada. I don't know. There's a one- there's a big one up in Canada that's like that. But I'm guessing that they filmed it in that they could have done it all CGI too.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think they used real locations. I don't think they CGI, that kind of thing. I did love the locations in the entire thing. And uh it was really nice to see what's his name from Game of Thrones come back. You you know I'm talking about?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, the guy that's the mysterious leader of everything, the the Oh no, I'm talking about the big guy? Jack. Oh, Jack, yeah, Jack. Jack was good. Jack was good. Uh that's why I said the the group of friends were all different. They weren't, they were all they were friends.
SPEAKER_01They were friends and they all had very distinct personalities. Yes, yes. Um, John Bradley, who is best known for Game of Thrones playing Samuel Tarley, plays a very different kind of person here. He's cockshore, completely full of life and energy. And it was nice to see the contrast between what he played in Game of Thrones, a timid, afraid of his own shadow guy, to this, where he's king of the world. He owns Jack's snacks, which has made him a multimillionaire.
SPEAKER_03I I like the did you notice the big poster of the cover of Cigar Aficionado and his picture on it? No. Oh, you didn't see you have to go back in the in his house, in his in his whatever main living, I don't know, game area. There's a giant poster and it's Cigar Aficionado, and it's him on the cover of Cigar Aficionado smoking a cigar. Oh my God, that's like great. You have to look to find that.
SPEAKER_01He had Captain America's shield hung up on the wall in his bedroom. And the hammer. Right. And based on that, you would imagine that he actually had bought the actual props from the movies at great expense. You know, because he was a total nerd. I mean, his bedroom, on the shelves of his bedroom, among other things, were a lot of Marvel figurines, that kind of thing. Yes. He was a man boy.
SPEAKER_03So there's a lot of there's a lot of cool, subtle stuff within the show. People paid attention to the detail. I definitely, you know, appreciate that when someone's paying attention to whether it's the set dressers or whoever, the appropriate proper things are where they are. And maybe you don't call it out, but it's as you're watching it, yeah, that's right. That's correct. That's not it's not done by somebody that doesn't know what they're talking about. That just makes the stuff up.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no. And here's something in the show that was really screwing things up for me.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01Which is when they decide that they need to send a faster-than, not a faster-than-light vehicle, but a vehicle that moves at a fraction of the 1% light speed. 1% light speed so that it can meet the alien armada and do reconnaissance. And the whole scheme was what we're going to do is we're going to fire this tiny little payload off in an arc, and along the way in this arc, and it looked to me like the diagram showed nuclear weapons spaced out so that this thing would have a sail, and as it passed each nuclear weapon, would be the the weapon would be detonated and it would propel the spacecraft even faster until it reached 1% of light speed. And right.
SPEAKER_03Did you figure that out what it actually was?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that that they had that the arc made up of what is it, a hundred, three hundred nuclear bombs, they were all spaced up outside, just outside of Earth.
SPEAKER_03I believe it was an arc towards the sun, and they were going to they were going to whip around the sun and use the slingshot effect, as well as the as well as the atomic bombs, you know, blowing up. But they had a technical problem. Now, here's my take on that. Because the aliens have the ability or having the ability to manipulate stuff, I'm wondering if it actually did really work, and they just manipulated a scene like it didn't work.
SPEAKER_01Here, this is the other problem with it. And while it's a totally engaging show, at one point, and you see it in the beginning, you don't know why, but there are two supercomputers the aliens have placed on Earth that are almost completely undetectable because they're the size of a proton. They are actually protons. There are two protons on Earth that are supercomputers. Watch the show. And they are capable of manipulating reality to the point where they can they plugged into everything. They know what everybody's saying and doing. And no, there is this is one of the things that I really thought was also very relevant to today is nobody had any privacy from the aliens. Right. The aliens watched their every move. There was nothing that humans could do that they couldn't keep up with or predict. And so if you made a plan against the aliens, we'd pretty much know about it. Unless, and we'll get to this, there's only one way that you can keep the aliens from knowing what is what you're planning. But anyway, if they're so all powerful that they can actually manipulate the vision of People so that they see countdowns, or when the aliens first reveal themselves to everybody on earth, a huge cloud of darkness passes over the entire sky. They just take it over. And so a simple way to beat the humans would be for the aliens to just make everybody blind and black everything out, and you know, and also they controlled every electronic. We have a character who the aliens are trying to kill. This is the uh wallfacer? Right, yes, the wallfacer. Yes, the wallfacer. And there's one guy who the aliens are trying to kill, and he's made a wallfacer. A wallfacer is going to be somebody who formulates all of the planning in their mind, and the aliens can't read minds. So they pick two great military experts, and then this one guy, and it's pretty clear that the reason that they picked the one guy is simply because the aliens are trying to kill this guy, so he must have something they're afraid of.
SPEAKER_03I get it. It seems ridiculous to me if you really think too hard that if they can do all this, then what do they need Earth for? Why can't they just send their little computer things all over the place to a whole bunch of different stars and find a good place to move to?
SPEAKER_01And also they could easily we actually see the computer interrupting, interfering with the operation of a spacecraft in a plane in flight. And we see the wallfacer after two attempts on his life, he gets on a plane. Yeah. And the aliens don't kill him.
SPEAKER_03I don't know. I don't know if they actually interfered with the plane. I think they interfered. Did they interfere with his perception of the plane? Oh, yeah. I think they were interfering with his perception of the plane. Um the deep fake thought that didn't really happen. It didn't really happen.
SPEAKER_01The show is even about deepfakes. Yes, yes. It's about the plague of misinformation.
SPEAKER_03Yes, it is. And that's what we're doing now, disinforming you about this entire project.
unknownNo.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, actually the show doesn't even exist. Sorry, please. You know what we actually did used to do that, right? We used to review movies that didn't exist, yeah. Which we may come back to at some point. Yes. Why not?
SPEAKER_03Yes, that's true. A good movie. Good movie.
SPEAKER_01My favorite was the Clint Eastwood trilogy.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Working on that. What was our third after Gran Torino? Anyway, let's not.
SPEAKER_03It was Malibu, Gran Torino, Malibu, and uh Monte Carlo. Oh yeah, okay. Monte Carlo was the Vegas heist one. Malibu was the one about the detective who wanted to commit suicide. Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And Gran Torino is an actual movie. And Gran Torino's an actual movie. Yes, yes. The Eastwood trilogy. I'm glad. I'm glad that we amuse ourselves. That's that's the whole deal. My two dogs, by the way, are becoming they are so needy that they have to sit on a chair next to me looking at me, and I have to pet them while I'm doing this because otherwise I'm sorry, they're just not getting enough attention. What are you going to do? Do you not have any food, any water, any something missing in your life?
SPEAKER_03Maybe. So, anyway, so my uh our we're midway through here in our mindless chatter. I will say, definitely recommend the three-body problem.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, I would definitely see it. I mean, you're gonna have to suspend your disbelief for trying to figure out what the hell is going on because a lot of things that you think aren't possible are explained later on.
SPEAKER_03Um there are a lot of ambiguities and unexplained things by the end of the season. I say season because hopefully there'll be a season two.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I didn't, I'm sure that Benioff and Weiss and Woo have a big long deal, a multi-season deal with Amazon. Otherwise, they wouldn't have brought it there. And I think that the show was. The show was under production, I think, at the same time that Netflix and the other streamers were throwing huge watts of cash at anybody who they thought were important content creators. And after all, they adapted, they're adapting a trilogy.
SPEAKER_03The the three books. Yeah, the three books are the three three body problem, the dark forest, and death's end. So those are the three.
SPEAKER_01Oh my god, that sounds very definitive. That sounds but by the way, I was about to say, oh yeah, I really loved the detective in this, who ends up playing all kinds of different roles in terms of what he's supposed to be doing. But first of all, he was in Doctor Strange. He had a very prominent role in Doctor Strange, this actor, and so it was really nice to see him in an entirely different light. I mean he's really good. I definitely liked him, liked the character, like and I like the fact that there's no evidence of this woman who comes and speaks to different people on all the cameras around. Like she's just Tatanya. Tatanya, yes, Tatanya, and you think, but she's not there at all. After all, these guys are manipulating what who knows whether she's real or not. And the detective says, look, by process of uh deduction, it's the Sherlock Holmes thing. No matter how improbable, the the only explanation for certain chains of events must be what happens, and so he figures out, he says, No, it's not that this woman wasn't really there, it's that she was scrubbed from every single camera, like instantly. And I just like that he was very practical about this. I thought something supernatural was going on, and he's no, it's quite obvious. I loved him.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, all of that was really good. His observations about stuff, he definitely obviously is going to be a central character through through the entire thing. It's a little bit told through his side as well as the the science friends or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Benedict Wong is the guy. Yes, yeah, he is absolutely fantastic. And again, I love seeing actors in very different roles. And he is a shit dad, as we learned along the way. He doesn't have he's like very middle class, doesn't make much money, he's dedicated to his work, and actually basically he's never around for his kid because he just lives at work. But we also learned that he's been fired from every great intelligence agency that he's worked for, and he's worked for all of them. And they established that in the pilot. I love that kind of detective character, a man who's down on his luck, who doesn't have much of a real life, but uh he's got a sense of honor and dignity in his dedication to his work, right? And I didn't realize this, but the name of the detective is Da Shi, a name which I'm probably butchering, but I'm gonna say it's Da Shi. He's not referred to by name, I think maybe never in the whole thing.
SPEAKER_03I thought I heard it once or twice.
SPEAKER_01I thought somebody I thought it was just a Chinese person cursing. Sorry. I did. Yeah, like that. Like Serenity, yeah. The TV show Serenity where they used as their cursing. As their curse words. Yeah. It wasn't, it was called Firefly. Firefly. Yeah. Serenity was the name of the ship. There you go. That's nerdiness for you. Um no, I would heavily recommend this. And since we're talking about uh television shows that are centered on Asia, the the overriding theme of this podcast, I want to mention uh Shogun. Okay. You know, Shogun was this incredible uh gigantic book by James Clavell, which takes place in feudal Japan, where there are lords and there are uh Ronan and there are samurais dedicated to their lords, and it explores that entire world. It was made into a miniseries, sorry, Toshiro Mufuni and Richard Chamberlain, who is the Englishman who suddenly finds himself in this completely alien culture. Yeah, I mentioned aliens, and that was a great limited miniseries, it was absolutely fantastic. So they remade it now, and it's on Hulu, and it is fantastic. I have only I've only seen the first two episodes, but I know what the story is because I saw the the original miniseries. I never read the book because this was before ebooks, and so the book is just like 18 pounds or something. I would not it's a big book, yes. Yeah, it's a big book. It's a big book. This is this is before you got to Game of Thrones, which was a multi-book series where each book weighed 18 pounds and was never finished, by the way. So I highly recommend that. Of the things that I'm watching, the the three-body problem and shogun are probably the very best. What I I did you see Masters of the Air?
SPEAKER_03Yes, I saw Masters of the Yes, I saw the entire series. I thought it was great. It was great.
SPEAKER_01It was beautifully done.
SPEAKER_03I definitely think so. It I would have liked it to have gone on longer. I think they wrapped up a lot of stuff in the final episode that probably could have been two or three more episodes pulling it together. And the other reason both my wife Gail and I liked it is that Gail's dad was in World War II and he flew B-25s over southern Europe dropping bombs.
SPEAKER_01So let me guess. Okay, a B-25 is half the size of a B-52? Yeah. But I'm bumped. I think it's true, though, isn't it?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, probably. It's a two-engine bomber propeller, obviously. It's not as famous as a B-17, but it is. It's Doolittle's raid on uh Japan was done with B-25s. So that that kind of play. Anyway, the deal was that Gail The Gail watching it realized holy shit, this is what my dad did. He was a navigator on a plane like this with flak and stuff, and he was 18 years old, just like all these kids on these planes, and that's what he did during the war. And he flew like 54 missions over Europe, bombing missions. So she had never, he never talked about it when he was alive and stuff. And she's just really realizing it after watching the series that this is what her dad did during the war at 18 years old.
SPEAKER_01I find that very understandable because my uncle, who fought in Korea and he was part of a long-range reconnaissance uh group that would go behind enemy lines regularly, he's never ever said one thing about how that was. Never mentioned it. Right. I think it was just too horrible for him to recall. It was friends dying around him, having to kill people, which absolutely affects you. And you go into this mode of life and death, so that when you come back after the war, yeah, it's totally alien to you, normal life.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and I that that definitely was the case with uh with her father, and I know that was the case with my dad, who never really talked about Vietnam. He was in Vietnam for for over a year in in 1967 or so. Oh my god. So yeah, my dad never talked about it, but he was a Navy man, right? Yeah, yeah. He was an officer and he was he was there in Vietnam. It wasn't just he wasn't 18, he was whatever, 30-something.
SPEAKER_01Right. So he was he was one of the senior commanders, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, but he was there. And he never really talked about it either. So I I get I get it. But so in that respect, it's really a revelation to watch. Yeah, watching it.
SPEAKER_01Because I when I started watching it, I thought, oh, this is gonna be that this group of B-52 barber guys who are just exceptional and they like are heroes. And instead, you find that even major actors, like there was one actor who I thought his guy can't possibly die because he's like an Oscar Award-winning actor. And he doesn't make it very far. These were the most incredibly this is the story of the bloody hundred, where I don't know, like 85% of the guys who worked uh who flew those planes never came back. The death toll was I I never understood it. I have to confess that I alternate watching real substantive movies and great television shows with the worst reality shows you can possibly imagine. Like I I won't work well, I won't watch The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, or 90 Day Fiance, or most of the Bravo stuff, although I have been known to sample blow deck, but I'm really embarrassed to admit that I am watching Deal or No Deal Island. Oh, okay. I think less of myself now, but yeah.
SPEAKER_03I it gets Gail's ex-husband Bruce loves Hallmark movies, especially during the holiday season. He's a big Hallmark movie guy.
SPEAKER_01Oh my god, I can see why they're not together anymore. Besides the Walton's Christmas special, I can't go much more wholesome than that. It's just too Pollyanna to me. And all the Hallmark movies, which have titles like Christmas in Alaska and The Holiday Gift.
SPEAKER_03There's another Netflix series that that Gail likes. And it's not too bad. It's called Virgin River. That's very much a Hallmarkey kind of a movie. Or not movie, it's a series. And it's a big series, apparently, on Netflix. It's a Canadian production. Everybody makes everything up in Canada TV-wise. It's all lush and rainforest with beautiful trees. And coming from me in the desert, it's oh yeah. You know what I did? You know what I did watch? I rewatched Mortal Engines. The I don't know if you ever saw Mortal Engines. Uh no, I did not. What's that on? It's Peter Jackson. It's on Max, I think. I think it's on Max. I'm not positive. It might be on Netflix. I re-watched it just recently. I don't remember. Look, one of the two, Max or oh, might be I don't know. It's on something, but I just re-watched it recently. I really liked it. It's really it got a bad rap, I think, at the theaters, but it's got some interesting concepts and interesting stuff going on.
SPEAKER_01It's a post-apocalyptic steampunk film, I understand.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, where the cities are on wheels and they're traveling around. It's like James Blish's Cities in Flight, if you ever know that old science fiction where they picked up like the entire city of New York and made it a spaceship.
SPEAKER_01I never read that one.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01I don't know how I missed it.
SPEAKER_03Cities in Flight. There's a bunch of Japanese ones, too, where they take old Japanese World War II aircraft carriers and battleships and outfit them for spaceflight. And so they're flying in space with these battleships.
SPEAKER_01They wanted that visual, didn't they?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and it works really well in an anime kind of way. So Mortal Engines, it's a Peter Jackson's film. He wrote the screenplay. It was directed by Christian Rivers. That's true. That's true. But it's writer's Frank.
SPEAKER_01I am sure he was also Peter Jackson was a major producer, has to be. Yeah. Yes. Along with Fran Welsh, Walsh, Deborah Forte, Amanda Walker, and Zane Wiener.
SPEAKER_03And of course, it's a Peter Jackson film, so it has to have Hugo Weaving in it. So it's kind of Hugo Weaving to Peter Jackson is Christian, not Christian Bale, uh is uh Killian Murphy to um to what's his name? His director.
SPEAKER_01I was thinking of Bill Murray and Wes Anderson.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, Bill Murray and Wes Anderson. Although Bill does not appear in some of Wes's new stuff, I don't think, does he? I don't remember.
SPEAKER_01Maybe not, but Bill Murray has appeared in more Wes Anderson films than any other major actor. Yeah, that's well, that's true. I believe the number is nine.
SPEAKER_03So I was going to say Christopher Nolan to Killian Murphy, and that's Hugo Weaving to Peter Jackson, where he it appears in a lot of stuff. Jumping to the Wes Anderson for a moment into Unreality. My my favorite. My favorite movie, what would you guess my most favorite movie of Wes Anderson's is?
SPEAKER_01The Life Aquatic.
SPEAKER_03Oh my god, yes. I love The Life Aquatic. It's such a wacko movie. I love it.
SPEAKER_01It is it is it is a great movie. I've watched it many times. And actually, I was in an acting class with the guy who did a documentary about the movie. He was just there and he was allowed to just shoot whatever he wanted. And uh it was on the Laserdisc and it was on the DV DVD along with the movie, but I don't know where you can see it now. YouTube, maybe it's on YouTube. It's a good documentary just to see the making of it. But having those David Bowie songs sung by the Brazilian acoustically interspersed throughout the film in itself is just fantastic.
SPEAKER_03It's fantastic. And I never I never realized there's a documentary about Jacques Cousteau. Did you know that Jacques Cousteau's wife was on board his ship and ran everything, just like in Life Aquatic, Bill Murray's wife or whatever, basically runs everything?
SPEAKER_01Life Aquatic clearly was drawn, it drew on Jacques Cousteau quite a bit because they all had their uniforms with their silly hats, which was totally from Jacques Cousteau.
SPEAKER_02Oh they were where it's like, oh, uh, we'll order your hat and stationary or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's right. You you you became a member of the crew and they gave you the hat and the stationary right off the bat, which I mean it's a brilliant, it's also a movie about making movies because after all, Bill Murray's character, like Jacques Cousteau, he's bringing a camera around all the time and they're trying to get different shots, and it starts off with them winning an award in Paris, I think.
SPEAKER_03Yep. There's a line from I'd have to look it up for the exact, but Roger Ebert said, I he he says, I says, I can't quite recommend the film. He says, but you have to see it. Really? Yeah, he gave it this, it was disjointed, it was this, it was that. He says, but you have to see the film.
SPEAKER_01Come on. Roger Ebert sometimes was very strange to me. And I don't look, the first time I see a lot of Wes Anderson movies, I'm not sure whether I like them. And then the next time I see them, I'm like, it's a masterpiece. I love it. Uh the Grand Budapest Hotel, like, I couldn't take the whole thing in. I think that's the problem. There's so many amazing details in a Wes Anderson movie that you might not really get it until the second viewing. Grand Budapest Hotel is probably my favorite of all of them.
SPEAKER_03I'm a little bit I'm a little bit that way on Asteroid City. I could only make it through about half of Asteroid City, and I need to re-watch it because it just I felt like it was going nowhere to me. And I really normally like Wes Anderson. But then as other people tell me, oh my god, this is like the best.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I thought it was in a way his most mature work. Um Wes Wes Anderson uh at the height of his craft in in a nutshell, because the reliance on you know backdrops and boy scouts, and I think they're actually Girl Scouts in this one. Um and also a send up of genre, and also it's a frame tail. It's a it's a double frame tale, but uh anyway, I don't want to go too Far into it. I loved it. But the thing is that this is the advantage of seeing something in a movie theater, which is you're forced to sit through it. I mean, I've only walked out on maybe two movies in my life. And sometimes it's like that medicine is good for you. Being able to pause a movie and go get a snack or watch a movie over the course of three or four nights, that's not really it's not going to have the impact.
SPEAKER_03Same impact. I agree with you on that fact because we re-watched La Land the other day while we were in, I was in Hawaii last week, and while we were in Hawaii one night, we watched La Land, which seems really odd. But we watched it on, I don't know, one of the one of the cable kind of companies, and it had commercials. And boy, does that break up La Land. It really froze, it changes the whole story. Being interrupted. Being interrupted changes the whole story. Seriously. It was like watching it and then boom, a commercial. And even if you have to zip through the commercials, it was like it just messed with the flow of the film. And it didn't feel it didn't feel as good.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. La La Land, which remember for just a moment everybody thought it had won the Oscar for Best Picture. There was so much hullabaloo about it. I I personally think in recollection, like I loved it the first time I saw it, but in recollection, I I don't love it as much as I think it's there's it's a little forgettable.
SPEAKER_03That was our impression, which was interesting upon the second viewing. And I attributed it to the interruption of the commercials, but it may not totally be that so interesting. On that note, I would say three-body problem, a definite, as Roger Ebert would say, thumbs up, but definitely a thumbs up on watching the series. I don't think you're gonna be I do not feel you're gonna be overwhelmed by the science. I I think they the uh the scientists are very relatable personality-wise. Yes, they're doing science, but I think they're hey, the the these are normal people. This is not the gang from Big Bang Theory.
SPEAKER_01They're not No, the people are very well developed. They're all very different in their approaches to life and their work. And they that's it's really about real people. The characters are very three-dimensional, I think, with terrific acting. Although I will say that my ex would never watch the show, would never as soon as they start to get into science, she would turn it off because she's Because Shaley doesn't like uh I'm talking about I'm talking about my second ex.
SPEAKER_03Your second ex. Oh, I'm confused now. I gotta I wait a minute. I didn't get a program beforehand to follow the Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_01You didn't know.
SPEAKER_03Okay, she doesn't like she doesn't like science. No science.
SPEAKER_01I the only reason I mentioned that was because I think that for some people, if if you're not a big science fiction fan, you might not cotton to this show. It might feel like a little crazy hardgoing. After all, the three-body problem, by the way, the for me, them playing the game, I know I'm coming back to this, was that game was fantastic that they had to play with the silver headsets and what they had to figure out at each level. But the triple sun thing, uh I absolutely loved it. Uh I love it was a revelation when the scientists figured out that the reason that these planets were not stable was because they're orbiting the they're being passed around between three suns. Yeah. Instead of saying that, the aliens could have just said, we can't live on our planet anymore. But no, they had to create a game with all these levels. It's indirect when you think about it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's a lot of it's a lot of stuff that it's really. Do you think they'd do that? Let's just, hey, we've got Mars, it's free. Come on, you can move into Mars. It's pretty dry, you can dehydrate, no problem.
SPEAKER_01That's true. They seem to have technology that would allow them to live on many different planets.
SPEAKER_03Uh oh, and and here's my take. It's okay, you got a problem with your solar system, and you got a lot of issues, but you can build an entire space armada and spend 400 years coming from one star to the other. Yeah, that seems to work. Why couldn't you do that there? Build an armada and just live out in space around your three stars. But anyway.
SPEAKER_01No, there are lots of things. Look, I call that the X-Files problem, which is that in order to tell the story with a great deal of mystery, right? There are a great number of elements that if you really think about the situation, don't make a lot of sense. But the fact is that following the mystery is so much fun that you're willing to excuse it. And in the case of the three-body problem, I totally do.
SPEAKER_03Thanks. This has been excellent.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much, Greg. I so look forward to our little chats. Oh, yes.
SPEAKER_03So, everybody, thanks for listening, and stay tuned. We're trying to be on a little bit more of a regular schedule, and uh should have some guests here eventually if we get our our subject.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we have we have a couple of really good guests lined up. Uh we must reveal the names of all of them at this moment. But we have some excellent guests lined up. Yes, we do.
SPEAKER_03Thank you. Oh, thank you. You've been listening to Movie Reviews and Serious Nonsense, a podcast with Greg Dairo and Tom Burka.
SPEAKER_01I think this is an age of storytelling that's unparalleled in the history of entertainment.
SPEAKER_03This podcast is Copyright 2024 by King Dairo Productions.
