The Press Box - 'This Week in Ringer Culture' (Dec. 18-22, 2017) (Ep. 406)

Episode Date: December 23, 2017

This Week in Ringer Culture features 'The Big Picture' talking with 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' director Rian Johnson (00:40), 'The Bill Simmons Podcast' with Ben Thompson on Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox (05:35), 'Damage Control' on Eminem’s new album 'Revival' (12:00), 'Larry Wilmore: Black on the Air' with Vox cofounder Ezra Klein on journalistic standards (18:13), 'House of Carbs' on Philadelphia restaurants (23:47), and 'The Watch' on their favorite people in pop culture in 2017 (28:55). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to this week in Ringer culture. I'm Liz Kelly bringing you the highlights from the Ringer podcast network. This is our last roundup of 2017, but we're still putting up a ton of good stuff on the site before the year officially ends. We've added to our 2017 year in review like the most underrated albums, works collaborations, and even best sweaters of 2017. You can check it all out on the ringer.com. So we finished last week's roundup talking Star Wars and we are starting this show with the same. On the big picture this week, Sean Fentasy talked with Star Wars The Last Jedi director, Ryan Johnson, about introducing new elements in a pre-existing universe. World building is a big part of what you do, not necessarily in maybe the Marvel Cinematic Universe sense, but you're creating a new language at times and creating a new history or a new future.

You're obviously entering established mythology here. What was it like for you to try to figure out how to build your own worlds inside of these stories? Well, I mean, for me, I guess because it was something where, you know, the world of it is kind of me trying to capture what Star Wars felt like, what those movies felt like to me and what they were to me when I was growing up. So I guess, first of all, everyone's going to have a slightly different interpretation of that, you know, that I guess. And that, to me, tonally at least, defines what Star Wars always was for me. But then there's a lot more, obviously. You know, it's a big, complicated question. And that's one that I kind of answered just by making this movie.

This is kind of what Star Wars feels like to me, I guess. Did you have to channel your 13-year-old self? Yeah, you always had to check back. It was an invaluable resource, you know, having that sort of internal compass of does this feel right to me? And it's tricky because every single fan has a different compass because everyone grew up also in a slightly different time. I was, you know, I was 10 years old when Richard. Return of the Jedi came out, I think. So that was, I was in prime age for that movie. So, so, but then as I became an adult, Empire was the one that I got more and more into. But of course, New Hope was like

the very first one I was into with toys. And so all this imagery from that is deeply embedded. Anyway, it's just, it's, it's a very personal thing. I know it's different for every fan. But I, I had to make it personal. I had to kind of make my version of what felt right in it. When you were writing or making the film, would you go back and watch those films or did you try to have a little bit of personal distance? Oh, no. I would go back and rewatch them. I know them so well, you know. It's not like I had to refresh my memory with them, but it was I did find it was good to go back and just get the spirit of them more than anything else.

And inevitably, that was the thing that would surprise me when you go back and watch them, whether it's, you know, the banter on the death start or in their mission between all three of them or. Han Leia and 3PO and the Falcon and Empire, the sense, the way that they always have that slightly, almost like, you know, I don't know, verge, never tipping over, but verging on screwball sense of fun and banter, the way that that is never far apart from our characters in the original trilogy. It was good to always remind yourself of that. Yeah, your movie has a great comic tone. It's something that people have really noticed, which is in Force Awakens, but it seems like it's pitched up a little bit here. Were you worried about any pushback when you were writing the story about what you could and couldn't get in there tonally?

No, I just tried to make it feel right to me, I guess. I mean, I think there is probably a lot of humor in it very intentionally, you know, and I know that I'm sure there'll be some folks that feel like there's too much. I don't. I feel like if you can't have fun in a Star Wars movie, what the hell are you in the Star Wars movie for? But I get, I mean, different people want different things from Star Wars movies. And if it, you know, from me, I don't know, I really enjoyed especially because I knew we were going to be going to be going to some darker, more intense places. Because I knew we were going to be sitting on an island for a big chunk of the movie talking about religion.

You know, I wanted there to be a buoyancy to the movie that kept it light on its feet and kept it feeling like a Star Wars movie. movie. Who is the character you were most excited to sink your teeth into? Kylo, Wren. Tell me more about it. Well, first of all, Adam is just one of my favorite young actors working today. But I mean, I could say that about any one of the cast, you know, Boyega and Oscar and Daisy, everyone. But the fact that with Kylo, JJ and Larry and Michael created this character who, I don't know, the potential just seems so great, you know, to dig into him.

the fact that he wants to be Vader but isn't, the fact that there's a complexity and kind of an emotional vulnerability there, but that he still is an absolutely despicable guy who you hate coming into this because he killed Han Solo. And the fact that we have a perfect proxy of Ray to come at him with, I don't know, I was rubbing my hands together. I couldn't wait to get into Kylo. Moving from Star Wars to their parents,

company, Disney announced on December 14 that they've acquired 21st Century Fox and a move that looks to put them in competition with other streaming services. On the Bill Simmons podcast, Bill spoke with Stratere's Ben Thompson about the acquisition. What was the big takeaway for you when you looked at that deal with, oh, this is smart. I love this. It was exactly that. I mean, what Netflix came along and did, you know, originally everyone viewed it as just another, another outlet, another channel where they could sell their stuff. They're spending all this money. I need to create this content. If we can sell it to one more place.

I think we talked about it once on the podcast earlier this year about making 30 for 30 and sell it to Netflix and you feel great about it and you don't realize that Netflix is getting this sort of evergreen content because the nature of content for Netflix is very different. They're not just interested in sort of the first run. They're interested in building a library so that when you go there, you'll stay there. And it's attractive to all kinds of people who are interested in all kinds of stuff. and the problem is that Disney was based, Disney and all the other, you know, studios were basically

arming a competitor to their best friend, which was the cable companies. Because the cable companies basically had this sort of monopoly on in-home entertainment. And then Disney could come along and say, well, if you want people to sign up, you have to have sports, for example. You have to have the Disney channel.

And we can charge a really high price for that. And Netflix is there saying, well, you don't have to get cable. You could just watch us instead. And that started playing out. and Disney was really stuck with this sort of incredibly profitable, really attractive, you know, model, which by the way, Disney made a great deal.

Remember, 20 years ago, they bought Capital Cities in ABC, which included ESPN at the time. So they were already, like they bought into this game ahead of everyone else the first time. Yeah. And this is almost them catching up where instead of having that cable company in the middle and you're kind of like just using them to get money from customers

and they're taking all the money, they have to go directly to customers. They have to get people to sign up for their service. directly and that means having more content means having exclusive content and the best way to have lots of your own exclusive content is to own it all and you're also you're hurting a competitor which is nice but i you know i look at this where they were five years ago we've talked about this in this pod i've talked about this on other pods hey ESPN was doing so well you you you basically are trying to protect the lead you have instead of figuring out all these different ways to grow the lead

the last couple years, some of the fallbacks they've had and the way some of their competitors have risen and competitors they didn't even realize they were going to have made them kind of rethink their strategy and everything. And this was always the best idea. I never understood this when I was there, why they didn't have their own version of whatever

that they could put 30 for 30 and whatever else they wanted. It was always basically like, in 2009, 2010, ESPN Classic was kind of the playground that we always looked at, and we would send memos for, could this be a sports movie channel? What is this? This channel that they've, it seems like they're going to create now with this library that Disney's going to create, not only is it a Netflix competitor, it might actually beat Netflix. The Disney Library combined with the Fox Library, this is more than a competitor.

I would put them five years from now as kind of the favorite. What do you think? I think it's a, it's going to be a two-horse race. Like, if this goes through and if it's approved, and obviously there's going to be a lot of sort of antitrust questions about this. But one of the, you know, sort of arguments why it should be allowed is Netflix is in such a dominant position right now. Because, you know, it's hard looking back four or five years, like when Disney sold all their stuff to Netflix in 2012, you could see the outlines of how Netflix would sort of take over everything, but it wasn't really apparent then. but everything sort of played out as as you might have expected it. And if you play that forward in another five years, 10 years, Netflix is this sort of

monster that just buying everything, no one can resist it even more than they are today. And it's already sort of that case in Hollywood. And hold on. Wait a second, though. So in 2012, did Netflix know this was going to happen or was this dumb luck? No, this has been Netflix's plan. I mean, what they've done from the beginning is they've taken this sort of sideways approach to content where they

served a problem that no one was serving, which was people wanted to watch movies and out were about weight fees and they were movie hounds and they gave them DVDs, right? And they could do that because DVDs of fair use, there was the second use doctrine, you couldn't charge for them a second time. And so they built up a customer base and they leveraged that customer base into the first streaming deal,

which is with Stars. And I think we talked about this last time, but the idea with Stars was Netflix, it was so different because instead of only having one of the movies available, whatever Stars was showing on TV, Netflix had all of them available immediately. And that was such a sort of like mind fuck in the way you like think about content and what matters as far as that stuff goes. And they got more and more customers.

And then they started buying more content and paying more for content. People were like, oh, Netflix is Middle Bay content. Well, Netflix just pulled out the checkbook. And these Hollywood guys that are so used to will sell to anyone who will buy our stuff, they gave it to Netflix. And meanwhile, Netflix starts investing in their original content. And that original content served two purposes. one, it was a differentiated stuff that you wanted to get to. It was a reason to sign up for Netflix.

And then two, as we're seeing now, it built up a base so that when these guys finally woke up and started pulling their stuff from Netflix, it didn't matter nearly as much as it would have mattered five or six years ago. And what Netflix has is this huge customer base. They're over 100 million subscribers now. And they're all over the world. So they can leverage this stuff all over the place and they just pull the checkbook and they buy more stuff, which makes their product more attractive, which stuff.

and more customers, makes their checks bigger, and they're all doing this buying against the future. Like, they're taking on a ton of debt to finance these shows, but it's playing out because it's being made up with the customers they're acquiring. And it's this virtuous cycle that's going on. If it keeps going on as it is, in 10 years, they're going to be just dominant over everyone. It's going to be the bundle for everything except for sports. And now there really is, if this deal goes through, a viable counterpoint to that. So I think the future is not that Netflix is doomed by any means,

but rather that if this goes through, it'll be Netflix and Disney, and then sports will kind of be on the side of a separate thing. We'll see if it sticks with Disney or not. In our next clip, we're talking music. So Eminem dropped his latest album called Revival on December 15th. So on Damage Control this week, Justin Charity and Cam Collins share their album reviews. Tell me about this album that I listened to two times out of due diligence. I could not tell you a single thing about it except that Biontie was on there

and she need not have been. And that's the first track. We're going to end up talking about the politics of this album and a lot of the anti-Trump posturing that Eminem does in this album. Keyword posturing. Posturing. And because I know we're going to get into that, I will say that musically, let me be a music critic for like five seconds on this podcast.

That's all it deserves. Musically, the album is excruciate. It's trash. It's excruciating. It's so bad. Eminem is writing the line between two different types of Eminem records that I think people will no M&M 4 since the M&M show. And then since songs like Love the Way You Lie, which is like, on the one hand, you have

the M&M records that are these big top 40 pop rock rap ballads. Ba with the Ba era. To be honest. And then on the other hand, you have M&M album cuts, which are these songs that most times don't have hooks and that totally feel like gym class. They feel like a rapper rapping just to show. show you the metaphysical possibilities of rapping and how much they've trained and gotten their breath control down pat and how they can bend words to their will.

And he's writing the line between those two types of records. And he has a lot of those records on his last four or five albums. But this album just feels so long and the mistakes and the missteps feel so pronounced. And Eminem's style of rapping, for one, he's very word. lyrically dense style of rapping, very aggressive style of rapping, and then his musical sensibilities, which have never been great. But his very arena, rock, rap, musical production sensibilities have not sounded more dated and more out of step with what contemporary hip hop sounds like.

He could not sound any more incompatible with the sort of trap, trippy soundcloud mainstream. So here's the thing. Eminem is a white rapper. And it's uncomfortable to talk about sometimes. But white rappers have a different career tract. They have weird nuanced differences in who their fan bases are over time, whether you're talking about Eminem, whether you're talking about McLemmore, whether you're talking about

Mac Miller, whether you're talking about Post Malone, whether you're talking about G Easy, Machine Gun Kelly. The way that white rappers, who aren't always novelty, white rappers, the way they cultivate fanbases, is they can afford to stand out a bit more from the hip hop mainstream and still sell albums and still make money and still do well on tour beyond just having whatever their breakout or viral single is. And so Eminem is the he is the godfather of that. He is the godfather of sounding more and more adrift from the hip hop mainstream every

year and yet selling a boatload of albums first week. But how is it an album like this, which as you point out in your piece, and again, And how is it that he is posturing sort of this anti-Trump thing. Is that alienating his audience? Well, that's a good question. You take him and M out as word. White America is about you. Right.

The album, again, it's called Revival. And the album rollout began a couple months ago. And it didn't begin with a single. It began with the freestyle. It began with this B-E-T freestyle that sort of informally called the Storm. But it's several minutes. And it's Eminem on video. And again, it's Eminem on video after a while of people not really seeing Eminem on video.

So it really seemed like, oh, Eminem just came out of nowhere. Okay, he's clearly dropping it off. Right, right, right. So he does this freestyle. And the thesis, the gist of the freestyle is this anti-Trump rant. And in the midst of that freestyle, he has a couple of lines where he's saying, hey, any of my fans who are with Trump, fuck you. Right.

That's not, I don't stand for that. I'm doing this freestyle to let you know that I don't stand for this. Right. Cism's the only thing he's fantastic for because that's how he gets his rocks off and he's orange. Yeah, sick tan. That's why he wants us to disband because he cannot withstand the fact we're not afraid of Trump. That's why he keeps screaming, drain the swamp because he's in quicksand. You know, Eminem seems self-conscious about the idea that, sure, he has a lot of white fans who maybe think of

him differently than they think of black rappers, even if on more subconscious levels, just being like, I only fuck with white rappers. Right. Yeah. Eminem is self-conscious about it, but I don't think he knows what to do about it. He doesn't really have a sense of, you know, he doesn't have a sense of accountability ultimately about his fan base is politics, I don't think. Yeah, I mean, you're really making me think because when that freestyle dropped.

That freestyle was viral and lots of people talked about it, I should say. Yeah, it was big. It was a big deal. Right. And it's sort of as much as I think the last few Eminem albums from the past five or six years have left a lot of people cold, have left a lot of critics cold. I think people seeing Eminem come back with a very, again, a very passionate and very vulgar freestyle against Trump was basically the most goodwill Eminem was going to earn from people in terms of rolling. out a new Eminem album on. Particularly in the moment of why won't Taylor Swift tell us who she voted for.

Right. This need, this real need that people have. It's not a need, it's a thirst. It is a thirst. People are thirsty. I stand corrected. But this, this, this urge that people have, that just you need, I mean, you need someone like Taylor Swift, to be honest, it is important to me that Eminem does have this stance.

Next up, we have a clip from Black on the air where Larry Wilmore talks with Fox, co-founder and editor at large, Ezra Klein, about the shift in journalistic standards. Yeah, it seems like there's like a loss, a little bit of institutional knowledge, you know, and just how systems work. And there's more of a reaction based on positions. It seems like a lot of journalism has become, you know, rather than reacting to a change and based on institutional knowledge of how systems work.

Is that an accurate way to describe some of this? do you think? I struggle with it to be honest. So, you know, I never want to be overly nostalgic for where we were. Sure. Or overly optimistic about where we are. So on the one hand, you know, I'm part of a movement or a trend in journalism when I come in and also the work I've done in my career, where I don't believe in traditionally, like quote unquote, objective journalism. I think I've, I've written for the news section of newspapers, I've written for the opinion section, I've done news analysis and I've seen how the same story can be in every place. The same story, just depending on how you formally write it.

Sure. I have often thought that objective sort of like formally even handed stories often make it too hard to tell the audience what is really going on. Why do you think that is? Because if you're doing something like looking at the new tax bill, right, the Republican tax bill that just passed. And you've done the work and, you know, you've really looked into. to this question of say, will it increase a deficit or not? Which, by the way, it's kind of hard to do because it seems like it may be hard to get the actual information of the tax bill, right?

In this case, I don't think so. In this case, I think we can say with like perfect certainty that it will. And yet you have to write this story where you have all these folks quoted on the Republican side who in flagrant violation of all the evidence of like literally what the bill says, of like what the entire economics profession things will happen, are saying, well, yeah, the thing will pay for itself, right? Like Paul Ryan says, it'll pay for itself. Mitch McConnell says, it'll pay for itself. And so you're somebody reading and you're, you know, on the one hand, here's like some guy at Brookings, you've never heard of being quoted. On the other hand, some woman at the heritage who you've never heard

of and they're saying opposite things, it is very, very hard to tell what's true. And so I used to have this line that the problem with the news is it makes it too hard to tell the truth. And the problem with opinion is it makes it too easy to lie. Because on the other hand, in the opinion section, they don't have to do any of the work at all, right? They can just write whatever. And it's like, well, that's my opinion. And so on the one hand, I take your point. I do think that we have a lot of pretty bad and ungrounded opinion writing now. And so the feeling that journalism has become suffused with these reactionary takes, I don't think it's wrong. I think that we've really opened the floodgates on that. And on the other hand, the sort of old world where you couldn't say what was

going on, also had these really, really significant problems, and I think we often ended up misinforming people. And I have a lot of agitale about all of it. Yeah. Did you feel any of that while you were at Washington Post? A bit. I mean, Washington Post is a truly great organization. There are a couple truly great news organizations out there. The Post and the Times are certainly among them. Look, did I sometimes have disagreements? Definitely. On the opinion page, for instance, George Will, who I have a lot of respect for in many ways, I think writes things about climate change that are not arguable. They're just untrue. I think that's bad. That's what I mean when I say sometimes I think the opinion pages have lower standards than they should.

But the journalism done at the Washington Post is world changing. And the people who are there, many of them are the absolute best in the field. So, you know, in general, I think that if you're reading the Washington Post, you're doing a pretty good job informing yourself. Yeah, I would agree with that. Democracy dies in darkness is doing a pretty good job right now, especially with, I mean, they're leading the way on a lot of these sexual assault reporting that's been going on this year and the allegations the Post and the Times, I guess, have been in some of the forefront of some of that investigation. Right, and that work, I mean, that work is expensive, right? That's something that I think is so important to often say, and it's why I'm so happy to see people subscribing or getting these digital.

subscriptions to the time to the post. I pay for it. Yes, so there you go, as am I. Well, I like to, I want to make sure those things stick around. That's why I pay for those things, you know. And you should, right? I mean, if you care, I think that that is a bad thing about the way we've come to see things on the internet as being like free almost my birth, right? It's a generational thing. If you want things to survive and stick around, you got to pay for him. So take that story the post did on Roy Moore and his sexual predation of teenagers. They sent reporters down there for, I believe it was about four weeks. And the thing about that story is it might not have panned out. If they could not have got in the right sources,

if people wouldn't have talked, those reporters have been down there for weeks and weeks and weeks and the posts would be paying their salaries and paying their benefits and doing the whole thing. And then at the end, they might have just been like, you know what? We can't publish it. When you're doing real reporting and it happens to us in box all the time, sometimes you get something where you're even pretty sure the story is true, but you cannot pin it down. And it's an expensive thing, right? You got to pay for those misses just as you pay for the hits. And, you know, actually supporting journalism is I really encourage people to do it. Next, we have Joe House and Chris Ryan getting a head start on their holiday eating.

Even though I feel like for House, this is more of a year-round lifestyle during their Philly food tour on House of Carbs. In this clip, they shared their experience at the Philly restaurant Zahav. There were a couple of dishes. One, where it was a great moment for me. We had grilled duck hearts. God. And your boy. Boy House takes one bite and goes, that's the fucking goat, which is pretty funny to hear a house call a duck heart a goat. But we speak the same language. I do exactly what he meant immediately.

That's a next level dish because you go through a range of emotions eating that. Yeah, duck heart. So it is not just a lean protein. There's a natural fatiness to it. And duck all by itself is flavorful. But this is like, it's an organ meat. You can also taste the same. smoke. You can taste those, those, the coals on that. Absolutely. And as an, as an organ meat,

the richness of it that came through, that's what, and I only took a half a bite of the very first one. Now, there's, they, they come in aside so you can eat them all. You just put them, put them in your mouth and down them. But I liked, I wanted to get a half a bite of one, because I wanted it kind of in my nose a little bit. So I thought my chew, you know, you can, you know, you can get the flavor into your nose. That's how I wanted it. The very first one. Mother, it was the effing goat. Until the lamb came out. I know.

So we have, so this is the thing. This is the, what's the French word? The denouement, the, you know, the coup de grace,

whatever. Whatever there. Let me tell you something. Next time you bring me some food, bring me some tongues. Because they brought the lamb out. Yeah. And it comes with like a fork and some tongs.

And Tom was just like, that's just going to fall right apart. And he was right. It was just like, this just gorgeous piece of meat slathered in this amazing sauce we all we had all the little condiments and all the little dips and all the bread

was still sitting there you could make yourself a little sandwich if you wanted to this crispy rice that they had with it that gives it like this little crunch this it was just incredible so the thing about the lamb two elements of it that jump off the page at me in the first place

when it's delivered it has a glau, it has a glau, It has a pomegranate glaze on the outside of it. It's dry age smoke. So it arrives in a heap. And it doesn't look like it is separable. It looks like you might need to use a knife or a fork or something to, you know, break it up into pieces. But Tom says that, like, you know, just take the.

So we took the tongs. Immediately it's falling apart. You're getting a great gob, you know, as much as the tongue can handle. I drop it onto my plate and I want to eat it with. my hands because that's how it looks. It's a little too hot, but I don't care. I grab a great big gob of it and jam it in. I want the fat on my fingers. I want the fat on my mouth. I want the glaze of my mouth. And it was beautiful. That's Troubletown too, because you get into that lamb and you're like, I'm going to be here for a while. And you forget, the great dishes are the

ones that make you forget everything you've eaten for the rest of the day and everything you've got to eat for the rest of the night. And we were like, we were going in, but I think we knew we had more coming. We had dessert. We had everything else. Yeah, so we tackled it properly. We did not annihilate it. We were respectful to it. We had our enjoyment with it. I used both hands. I got both hands. I had to go to the band. I'm OCD, as you know now, spending 12 hours with me when I like to touch food with my hands, but afterwards I need my hands cleaned off that. But we went through that whole deal. We got through the shalac of it. It was a beautiful shalac on top of it. That's a good word for it. And then we were treated to a wonderful array of desserts. None of which the name of who, I mean, I can't tell you one name of them. They did a lot of stuff with Lobna. They did a lot of stuff with the, like there was an almond cake. Yes.

There was a delicious sorbet that had, I think, pomegranate scenes in it, but I'm not positive. And we were just mixing up the medicine at that point. So we wrapped it up there at Zahav, but we weren't done. We weren't done in Philly. No, that's right. And the last thing I want to give shout out to Sahav is the affordability. Now, you can go there and have, like,

like a real, you know, blowout the bank kind of, kind of experience if you want, but you don't have to. There were people sitting at the bar solo, just getting, getting themselves a little something before they were heading home. Yeah, and I respect the, um, the optionality there. It is, it is fine dining. And if you want to go spend $300 on dinner because you have a great bottle of wine and order, you know, a dozen different things, by all means, go do that. But if you just are hungry and you find yourself in town, Philly for business and you want to go try and experience Sahav, there are 16 seats, at the bars, you know, give or take from what we observed. Get in there. And if you don't want to spend, if you don't have it, you can't put it

on the expense account, drop, you know, 25 or 30 or 40 bucks and have a great, unbelievable transport of money. Yeah. Yeah. In our last clip from The Watch, Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald are joined by Jason Manzuchas, where they spend the episodes celebrating their favorite people and projects in pop culture this year. But this clip features one in particular. Check it out. I think I have to put Gail Gadot on my list. Mostly because I wanted to use... Gal Godot?

Godot? Do you mean Gal Gadot? Because you said Gail Gadot. Gail? I'm 100% you're sure. You said Gail? Godot. Let's say it with me again.

It's Ghal. Yes, but Godot. Let me talk you through my appreciation. Keep in mind, I am not Jewish. And you are. It's a strong counter. But sure, tell me about this Gail Gadot. She's my travel agent.

I like that I can hear Zach laughing from the other room. Here's the, here's the problem. problem with saying that name out loud on a microphone. First of all, you're welcome for taking a risk. Sure. This has been a very safe podcast so far. I read recently that in the correct Israeli pronunciation, it's really all about the hint of the tea at the end. And I was so focused on getting there, I didn't care about what rude I took. And I took the wrong one. I'm not going to say her name again. But what I am going to say is that every few years, celebrity culture produces someone who is fresh and beautiful and deserving of it,

and nothing about it seems terrible. And that's very rare. And Wonder Woman was a lot of fun. And her performance was fantastic. And it was a big hit. And I feel like we needed it this year. And then we got that GQ profile of her where she wrestled Katie Weaver on the sand

using her Mossad training. Oh, I didn't know. And, like, fed her hummus. And it just generally seems like a terrific person. Also seems to have gotten Brett Ratner effectively fired from movies. Right. So win, win, win, win. Totally.

And I think she deserves a place. Whatever her name be. Here's what I'll say. Here's what I'll say about Gah, Gadot, or Gail Gadott, as you call it. Good old Gail. Here's what I, here's, for you, and for many people, she will be Wonder Woman. She will be Diana. For me, she will always be Giselle from the Fast and Furious.

Yeah. You had her first. I watched her die. And I wept in Fast and. Holy cow. So for me, as much as I loved Wonder Woman, which genuinely loved Wonder Woman, I thought it was one of my favorite movies of the year. And I thought she was perfect and effortless in both the action and the comedy.

The comedy. She and Pine were great together. She is still to me, Giselle. Okay, that is it for this week. And for this year, you can find full-length versions of all these podcasts and subscribe at the ringer.com slash podcast. Thanks for listening to this and all of our other content. Happy holidays, happy early 2018,

and I'll be back first week of January.