The Friday High Five

Podcast fever, Batman does taxes, and the silly side of dungeon crawling

The Accountant Warner Bros. Pictures

Every Friday I share 5 things I enjoyed this week. Also, high fives are inherently cool, and I think we can all agree Friday is the bestest day. Hence the Friday High Five. 🙏🏻

Before we get into all the high-fiving, I want to thank everyone for all the condolences after my aunt passed away. I read every message and appreciated them all. It really meant a lot.

High fives all around.

My Favorite Thing

Recording My First Podcast

After a few weeks of procrastinating and psyching myself out, I finally recorded the first episode of the All the Fanfare podcast this week.

Now I’m obsessively re-listening to it to decide if it’s any good. I think it’s alright? Like, I hate the sound of my own voice, and at times I wonder if the person I’m listening to has ever talked out loud before, but on the whole, I’m happy. I am reminded that there’s a reason I’m a writer, where I have literally all the time to make myself sound clever. There’s only so much you can fix in post.

As promised, the first episode is about season 1 of The Wire. It comes in at just under 30 minutes. I was kinda surprised by that, but probably not for the reason you think. I can talk for this kind of stuff for hours. No, what surprised me was how quickly it went by, and even how fun it was. I’m already looking forward to episode 2.

You may be wondering: When can I hear it?

Soon!

My plan is to record several episodes and build up a safety net / backlog, which will help me stick to a weekly cadence. I want to have 4 episodes in the can before I launch in May.

I’ll be sharing more details about the podcast—probably next week—including launch details, the initial line-up, and plans for the future. I’ll also be giving paid subscribers a sneak preview and will be soliciting feedback on topics they’d like to see covered. Much more to come.

Other Things I Enjoyed

The Accountant

This is an interesting film. And by interesting, I obviously mean weird.

So Ben Affleck stars as Christian Wolff, a man with high-functioning autism who has somehow channeled his condition into a kind of superpower, one which enables him to perform Beautiful Mind type calculations and also to murder people with the kind of cold calculus typically reserved for Terminators and wives of cheating husbands. He’s a man living two lives, a respectable businessman by day and an assassin-cum-vigilante by night.

You realize who that sounds like, right?

Bruce Wayne is he clearly not autistic, but he also is clearly more than a little messed up. And he, too, uses his psychosis to fuel his nighttime activities. We can actually stretch this even further—The Accountant came out in the middle of Affleck’s Batman run:

• March 25, 2016: Batman v. Superman

• October 14, 2016: The Accountant

• November 17, 2017: Justice League

The two don’t really have anything to do with the other, but the coincidence is too rich to ignore. Anyway, I’ve wrung entire articles out of flimsier premises.

The Accountant is a traumatic action film. Here’s what I mean by that: The action is on par with John Wick, but it’s not as flashy or disposable. There’s a weight to it. Which is interesting because Wolff is entirely undisturbed by it all.

Perennial my-guy Jon Bernthal co-stars and man, this dude can act.¹ I suppose he was bound to look good playing off the personification of a cardboard cutout—no disrespect to Affleck, he’s great, there’s just not much emotion in his script—but I challenge you to find anyone who looks manlier when crying than Bernthal. It can’t be done.

I feel like the real missed opportunity with this movie is not once does Affleck kill someone while telling them their taxes are due.

Lunchtime Dungeons & Dragons

I semi-regularly mention D&D in this space because it’s the greatest invention known to man. Feel free to scroll on by if you don’t like awesome things.

By the by—I’ll probably also be talking about D&D next Friday. My friend has an April birthday and it is now customary to celebrate our name days with an entire day of dice and merriment. As Khaleesi’s desert handmaidens like to say: It is known.

We play from 11:30-1 every other Monday. Currently, the party is exploring a vast dungeon complex in search of wealth, and in the process, have allied with a displaced tribe of goblins against some damn dirty orcs. The goblin leader, who calls himself Bone King and wears a Mr. T style necklace of bones, sent one of his goblins with the party to act as a guide.

It should be noted that my games include a hefty dose of silly.

The guide has proven an indispensable source of knowledge to the party. That didn’t stop them from tricking him into kamikazing himself.

The party’s wizard muttered some mumbo jumbo and convinced the goblin he was impervious to fire. And then they had him run into a room full of orcs and spike a flask of oil into a roaring fire.

Here’s the replay:

New Line Cinema

Shortly thereafter, the party encountered a small army of short, scaly creatures armed with mops and brooms. The creatures operate as custodians of the dungeon, for reasons that aren’t super clear, and each of them wears a “Hi, My Name is…” name tag.

The creatures were super salty about all the death and destruction the party has unleashed in the dungeon, and were even less happy when the party pointed them toward their latest mess. When they departed, the creatures left the party with a scroll that had a survey on it. Stuff like: “Please rate your satisfaction with the cleanliness of the dungeon.”

In my experience, D&D is best when it leans into the hysterical.

Harrison Ford on Conan O’Brien’s Podcast

I think Conan O’Brien is hilarious. I’ve even talked about him previously in this space. Last week, I finally got around to listening to his podcast episode with Harrison Ford, which my friend Marmi pointed me to some months ago.

Longtime readers know that Harrison is a my-guy, if not the my-guy. He gave us Han Solo and Indiana Jones when I was young and impressionable. He’s been my favorite actor since.

This episode is a bit weird, admittedly. You’re getting the full Conan experience, which I’m down for, but it can be an acquired taste. If you enjoyed discovering Harrison’s snarky side in Shrinking, you’ll enjoy this episode. I also found his stories about his earliest days in Hollywood delightful.

Red Notice

Netflix

This is one of those ‘what the hell movies’ we all tend to accumulate in our streaming queues. You know the kind. You add them because they look interesting but they end up sitting in your watchlist for years. Then one day you find them buried and think, “what the hell—this looks okay.”

Red Notice is a splashy Netflix release that came out during our Covid-lean film years, and somehow I still didn’t watch it until 2024. It stars Ryan Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson, and Gal Gadot in a comedic action movie about thieves and priceless artifacts. Imagine Uncharted, but funny, and also pretty good.

It’s not the best movie or anything, but upon ending the film, I immediately googled ‘red notice 2’ and was happy to see a sequel is planned for 2025. If that’s not an endorsement, I got nothing for ya.

Reynolds definitely has a schtick, and Red Notice leans all the way into it. He also apparently ad-libbed one of the movie’s funniest lines.²

1. On a lark, I googled ‘jon bernthal timothy olyphant’ to see if they’d ever been in anything together. They haven’t, but I was happy to see my site was the second result. I’ll keep putting this out into the universe until it happens, or at least until my site has all the results.

2. Seriously though: What was the costume designer thinking putting a hairnet on the Rock?