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This week, Patches is not dead, so we're back to talk about Netflix's To All The Boys I've Loved Before and the Rom-Com era of Netflix. Then, spurred by a Joanna Robinson prompt, the hosts each pick a movie they think about all the time that no one talks about, then – Sharp Objects wrapped up on HBO – the hosts distill the Amy Adams opus and see what they thought.

Take a listen, embed and/or download below; for more from all of us on Twitter: follow the show (@FITWR), Katey (@kateyrich), Da7e (@da7e)  Patches (@misterpatches), and  David (@davidehrlich) .

Please subscribe on iTunes and KICK US A REVIEW if you like what you hear!

FORMAT

00:00 – Lightning Round: Best Thing You Saw In Theaters '18

01:44 – Intro – Welcome to Episode 227! – Read the Review David is talking about at the bottom of the notes

04:21 – Tidbit: To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before

20:33 – Mini-Segement: A Movie You Think About All The Time That No One Talks About

29:16 – Segment 3 – Sharp Objects Wrap-Up

53:53 – Outro

DAVID TOLD ME TO ADD THIS

Hi Fighting in the War Room,

I’m writing in to tell you all how much I enjoyed the recent Quarter Quell podcast where you all talked about your personal lifelong obsessions. I think the main reason I listen to podcasts is that I get to hear from people who have unique tastes and interests that I share, which I don’t often find in people I know in real life. A couple years ago I moved up to Minnesota from Georgia for a job opportunity, and although I knew a few people up here, for the most part I had to star over with meeting people with similar interests and making friends, which gets more and more difficult the older I get (I’m 29; I moved here when I was 26…I think?). Podcasts can be a good way to hear people talk about things you like when you don’t know anyone else that likes what you like. I really loved your episode because I connected really deeply with all of your personal obsessions. I don’t think I’m unique in being equally interested in Radiohead, musicals, Sherlock Holmes, and trivia, but the coincidence of all four being together was pretty astonishing because those are four things that have all been lifelong interests of mine as well.

I loved David’s unabashed love of Radiohead. I was introduced to Radiohead by a kid in my class that I shared an almost complete overlap in musical taste with back in 9th grade, and we became friends in part based on a mutual interest in music. I think my first album was The Bends, and I remember him burning me a copy (back when you still did that), which I ripped onto my computer and listened to on my 256 MB mp3 player. He bought all the albums in sequence over the next few months, and slowly burned me copies (don’t tell Radiohead) through Hail to the Thief, which was the latest release at the time. I had always liked Radiohead, but it wasn’t till I was a freshman in college when In Rainbows came out, and I became what I consider a superfan of them. I made a lot of friends that first semester from mutual excitement about the album and strange pay-your-price format (I guess I’d been getting free Radiohead music for years, though). That album is a straight up masterpiece and is probably my favorite of theirs. I’ve always considered R.E.M. my official favorite band (I’m from Athens, GA, which is where they’re from, and I’ve got an emotional attachment to them cause of that), but looking at my last.fm stats, Radiohead has always been my most listened-to band. Their music is transcendently good. Every song is different, and seems to have been plucked from the ether fully formed and perfect, and listening to them is engaging and surprising and wonderful.

I’ve always considered myself a movie guy above anything else, and it’s great to hear Katey talk about musicals because when I was growing up, my favorite movie was Singin’ in the Rain. I didn’t have broadcast/cable TV growing up, so I was kind of at the mercy of watching whatever VHS movies my parents happened to own, and they owned several musicals, including Singin’ in the Rain, which I watched over and over and over. I think Katey is right about the musical format having something that no other form of art has, a combination of visuals, music, and editing, combined with this mutual everyone-breaks-out-into-song-together that is just magic when it all comes together perfectly. In my day job, I’m a librarian, and a few years ago I ran a monthly film series where I’d show a movie and talk about it, with a little handout with some research that was me pretending to be a film critic (you guys are living the dream, seriously—that’s what I’d do if I had any balls), and I got to revisit it for the first time since I was a kid. I think the main thing I responded to so strongly in the movie were actually the meta elements, being a movie about making a movie, where the subject is intertwined with the form in such a mind-bendy way. You guys also mentioned the Cyd Charisse musical number, which is a great surreal sequence that primed me for the strangeness of David Lynch and German expressionism. To my shame, I’ve never seen Oklahoma! but I hope to remedy that soon. Da7e’s Sherlock Holmes interest might be the most direct crossover from me, because I’ve also had a lifelong interest in Sherlock Holmes. I was a big reader as a kid too, and my favorite genre was detective stories. You all mentioned the kid detective stories, which I read all of—Hardy Boys, Boxcar Children, Encyclopedia Brown, etc. I graduated to Agatha Christie in 6th grade, and shortly thereafter found Sherlock Holmes from a reading assignment for Hound of the Baskervilles. I liked that book so much, I read everything Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes, except for maybe the last few stories of his very last collection, which were all garbage, since Conan Doyle hated Holmes by that point. (My favorite Homes story, for the record, is The Valley of Fear.) For my high school senior project in English, I wrote a paper on how Conan Doyle’s spiritualism influenced his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, spiritualism being the diametrical opposite of Holmes’ rigorous logic (my thesis was since Doyle hated Holmes, making Holmes rigorously logical was a form of condemnation, since he’d never get to be spiritually enlightened). Since I was such a huge Holmes fan, I got my family into watching Holmes stories on screen, and over the years we’ve watched the entire Jeremy Brett series, as well as most of Basil Rathbone’s Holmes movies. I agree with Da7e that the Robert Downey Jr. movies don’t really have the same flavor—more action than moody detection—and I don’t like them as much. When the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock came along, it became one of my favorite shows ever, and is easily my favorite Holmes incarnation. That show is one reason why I’ve always advocated for reinterpretations of old stories, and have also used the Sherlock show as an argument for Idris Elba as Bond. In fact, when I was a kid, the very first instance I ever saw of a reinterpretation like this was a Masterpiece Theater where Holmes’s brother Mycroft solves a case in Holmes’s absence (in the stories, Mycroft is actually smarter than Holmes; it’s just that he’s really lazy). I feel like I’ve also seen some shows with Watson solving crimes at some point, but that might just be my imagination. I studied English in college and my senior project was about Michael Chabon’s detective fiction, which included a Sherlock Holmes book called The Final Solution, which is a truly brilliant book about a Jewish boy who escapes the Holocaust and seeks the help of a very old Sherlock Holmes in England; I heartily recommend it to Da7e if he hasn’t read it already. Patches’ interest in trivia is a funny one, because when you’re interested in trivia you’re kind of interested in everything. I’ve got 2 connections for this one. First, regarding actual trivia, I really love pub trivia, and I played pub trivia with a team of friends every week for about 3 years. Our name was “This Isn’t Nam, This Is Trivia, There Are Rules,” in reference to The Big Lebowski and to other teams that we were convinced were cheating. Part of the fun, like you said, was figuring out the questions as a way of getting at the answers. The guy who ran trivia at the bar we went to was named Andy, and we called him Drunk Andy, because he got drunk every single trivia as the night wore on, as he would start to slur the questions more and more. He would ask some variations of the same categories every single week—famous people’s birthdays that week, movie taglines (I was always good at that one), American presidents, populations of major cities, etc. etc.—and with a little research, we could usually place in the top 3 week to week. There’s just nothing like knowing the exact answer to a random, useless piece of trivia, because it validates all the strange interests we have that otherwise serve no purpose. The other connection I have to this is a lifelong fascination with encyclopedic information. When I discovered Wikipedia in high school, I literally lost months of my life going down rabbit holes, chasing random facts, but that’s actually served a greater purpose—that’s literally my job now. After I graduated college, I became a librarian, and it’s now my job to help people hunt down information. I really love the feeling that comes from helping someone find out the exact factoid they were looking for.

This email is really long and self-indulgent, and I have no idea if anyone will read it, but I just wanted to say thanks for doing this podcast, and that I get a lot out of it every week. I recently moved to Minneapolis and got a new job and have been nervous about it, and this podcast helped me take my mind off it.

Thanks, Luke

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