BFG Podcast #086: ‘White Noise,’ ‘M3GAN,’ and ‘Jack Ryan’

In this week’s audio-enhanced edition of the BFG Podcast, editor Neal Pollack, an AI-assisted lifeform, welcomes contributors JonPaul Guinn and Pablo Gallaga. JP proves his versatility and then some, starting off by talking about the Noah Baumbach adaptation of Don DeLillo’s ‘White Noise.’ JP prefers the middle part of the movie, when the “Airborne Toxic Event” means there’s actually some action, and also the closing credits, a dance sequence in a 1980s grocery store set to an LCD Soundsystem song. The rest of the movie, not so much. He doesn’t find statements like “men are killers. They kill” to be very profound. And both he and Neal agree that DeLillo’s jokes about “Hitler Studies”, made in a novel nearly 40 years ago, have aged quite poorly. An arthouse rendition of a book we previously thought was unfilmable, this is definitely not family fun.

Later, JP pops back to talk about season 3 of ‘Jack Ryan.’ This is an odd show, he says, because there’s no actual spy intrigue, and not a lot of fun chase scenes. It’s just kind of boring, and no one will ever be as good a Jack Ryan as Alec Baldwin was in The Hunt For Red October. He and Neal find the Jack Ryan universe so unengaging that they actually end up talking about better pulp-fiction characters who have become TV heroes, like ‘Reacher’ and ‘Bosch.” And then they make fun of the CIA for a bit.

Pablo Gallaga had the fun job of reviewing ‘M3GAN‘ for us, and he and Neal both really appreciate the spot-on satire of artificial intelligence, as well as the many memorable and meme-able creepy doll movements sprinkled throughout the Blumhouse pulp hit. Pablo’s thesis is that horror movies have moved out of their brutal dissection-of-personal trauma phase, and have now just transitioned into bonkers fun.

Just like BFG itself. Enjoy the show!

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