You gotta admire the self awareness at least…

“I’m not done wanting to work with great directors, but when you work with the lineup of directors that you just read, you’d really have to not be paying attention to not learn anything.” Still, he admits, the learning curve has been greater than he anticipated — not in terms of working with actors, but in terms of knowing how to artfully use a camera. “I was surprised by how little of the science of filmmaking I’d managed to absorb.” He adds, “I have no visual sensibility, it turns out.”

lol

I overall liked this movie. It followed a typical romcom arc. It was light on laugh out loud humor, I usually prefer a little more, but still funny enough. I had two primary issues with the movie. Spoilers ahead.

1. It is expected in a romcom that something goes wrong or a character is keeping a big secret. I have an issue with the big secret in this movie. Essentially Emily ruins Owen's life with her selfishness- using him to progress her career. She intentionally pushes him to do self destructive things. Her big apology scene at the end is underwhelming. She effectively says "I trashed my presentation so now we are even please go out with me". Is that not also a selfish way of looking at everything? She did nothing to help Owen in that scene and her presentation was morally and professionally dishonest anyway so sabotaging it was the correct move for just her, leaving Owen out of it. I do think the filmmakers did enough to show that they had good chemistry and they had feelings building throughout the film so that was supposed to be the counterweight to her betrayal but to me the reconciliation needed to be more elaborate and have longer screen time so we could more effectively deal with the weight of what she had done to Owen and make the forgiveness less abrupt.
2. The premise of the movie is set up only if Owen doesn't know how to contact Amelie. The filmmakers had fun faking us out by making it seem like she would walk out of the bar and Owen would simply let her go. But then he does the logical thing and steps out to get her number quickly. I appreciated that they made this change to the trope of character stupidity causing the communication issue. But then the writers had a problem. If he is able to communicate that he wants to contact her the next day then something else needs to go wrong so that he can't reach her. They can't have her give him the wrong number because Owen has to be more confident it wasn't intentional (as all the haters later tell him she just didn't want to go out with him). So instead she accidentally leaves out a number, making it clear that it was likely a mistake. The problem is a mathematical one. The most likely thing that happened is she left out the last number- that would mean that there are only 10 possible phone numbers that she could have and Owen could call/text all of them. This wouldn't even come under the category of desperate and Owen was desperate. Wait, maybe she left out a number somewhere else. Well there are 11 possible slots she could have left out a number from and 10 digits for each so 110 possible phone numbers. You could knock all those out in a couple of hours max. A desperate Owen runs all over campus but can't be bothered contacting 110 phone numbers? It doesn't make any sense. While it's possible Amelie also made an error in a different digit, there is no indication that Owen even tries these phone number combinations, which would have proved whether or not there was an error as well. The writers should have come up with any other idea for why he couldn't contact her that didn't have such an obvious solution.

Added an extra day to my vacation and, after all the hype, decided I’ll catch The Devils tomorrow afternoon! I know almost nothing going into it. Who has seen it already?

Was so cool hearing Sean reference Mark Kermode re: the Devils on the pod, as an avid listeners of both it warmed my heart. My two favourite film podcasts! (Along with Empire). I’d love to see them together one time that would blow my mind

I'm a James Bond superfan and I'm tired of guessing whose screen test will go best. So let's speculate about the next most important thing in any Bond relaunch: the rest of the MI6 team — M, Moneypenny, Q, Tanner. Between the way the Craig run concluded and such a long lag, feels safe to assume that Fiennes, Harris, Wishaw, and Kinnear aren't returning and that Heyman and Pascal will want to start from scratch.

Who would be good in those roles? Some suggestions to get it rolling:

M: Chiwetel Ejiofor, David Oyelowo, Rebecca Hall
Moneypenny: Lily James, Sophie Turner... or gender swap it and go with someone like Asa Butterfield or Kit Connor
Q: even if it's just for one film, I just want to see Tilda Swinton be a kooky quartermaster
Tanner: Sam Claflin, Richard Madden... could also do a gender swap here and cast Michelle Dockery or Gemma Chan

I’ve been listening to The Big Picture consistently since the oscar season earlier this year but now I have an office job where i listen to podcasts all day to break up the boredom and the 2 new episodes a week isn’t enough. So what are everyone’s favorite pre-2026 episodes to load up my playlist? Will also accept rewatchables, blank check, other film pod recs…etc. (Vincent Hanna voice) Give me all you got!

https://youtu.be/5vri0LVrMIE?is=Nse_DZN3CFD84VCo

i love sctv and all. 

this trailer slurps dumpling dip. 

would've loved to see some moments get to land. maybe even.. a joke. the audience cackling. or maybe a joke bombing. couldve been watching an actual demonstration from this legendary show the trailer keeps yammering on about, telling instead of showing. 

also i think the score was entirely innappropriate for the material. sctv is like, counterculture, right? why do i feel like someones about to whisk me to paris for a christmas wedding? 

and with Eugene levy's sentence is broken in half with that obvious sound editing cut or whatever? miss me its beyond trite. 
netflix im curious to know how good of a film you have hiding behind this nothing trailer. 

Conan was fine. 

oh shit im not done.

so i guess my review would then countinue AND ANOTHER THING about this trailer mr netflix promotional director: oh theyre telling is the show is good? whhaaaaat? let me look into my box of extremely well trodden facts about sctv i have from years of word of mouth

1 its somewhere in the narrow region of canada
2 you HAVE to check it out its so good
3better than snl
END OF LIST
FUCK ME ive already heard people say its good. The fourth understood fact about SCTV was 4: but we'll NEVER get to see it we are in american plus it if we ask our parents to rent it theyll have to think a second to try and remember how riske the episode they say five years ago was. (i know i spelled it wrong shut up!)

just lemme see finally all i know is poorly told recountings of what had been seen. rough sketches of sketches. retold by the black shirt fan chain necklaced kid banger goth in eighth grade who consistently managed to be high every day. thats our source for how big the little skull car that that metallica guy drives on stage is (we had no mtv either)

whats a good episode to start on?