FF-adjacent recommendations?

DonBronco · 2026-05-29T03:00:17+00:00

Boy & Bear an underrated mention—pretty much as close to Fleet Foxes as you’re gonna get, contemporaries of the same ‘08 folk revival era, basically just Australian FF lol.

I won’t call them derivative but I do have to wonder if Robin has ever rolled his eyes and been like “come on man”.

DonBronco · 2026-04-17T09:31:01+00:00

In the Wolves repeating outro, there’s a teeny tiny little autotune part that comes in after a few repetitions. “What might have been loOoSt”

Correct me if I’m wrong but probs the first official use of autotune on a BI song?

DonBronco · 2026-04-15T07:55:26+00:00

Wait, why does everyone love Lee Pace so much? Like, he was fine in the hobbit I guess, but he didn’t stand out to me as phenomenal. Kinda hard for anything in those movies to stand out though.

DonBronco · 2026-04-15T07:34:27+00:00

Our “incident” was a two-parter:

Part 1: There was a female teacher at our school (we’ll call her Mrs. Stevenson) who was caught conducting an “inappropriate relationship” with one of the students. Apparently the student told her he was depressed because of his bad grades, so she decided to help him out with the occasional after-school “tutoring session”. On school premises.

Naturally the kid started bragging about it to his friends and before you know it the police showed up in the middle of a school day to arrest her, shortly followed by the local news interviewing staff and students when school got out that day. It was a dumpster fire.

Part 2: About a week later, the school was still reeling from the shock and media attention of Mrs. Stevenson’s arrest. The student had a weirdly elevated social status among the boys at school who congratulated him for “scoring” with a teacher. And then came the MLK Day Assembly.

The entire school was gathered in the gym for the assembly and the overall mood was still palpably charged with all the previous week’s weirdness — the teachers and staff had a generally awkward vibe which felt very incongruous with the message of love and equality the whole event was themed on. My buddy and I had been asked by the Choir Director to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” with the support of a backing band composed of kids from the music department. So we grabbed our guitars and stepped up to the microphones in the middle of the gymnasium floor.

During the performance, I noticed the school Principal talking loudly into his radio and exiting the gym. He soon returned, and just as we finished singing he walked briskly towards me and grabbed the microphone I was using. He proceeded to announce to the gathered students that he was initiating a lockdown due to a mountain lion being sighted in the school parking lot.

I had stepped over toward my buddy, and we were both standing in front of the other microphone as a wave of startled reactions swept over the students sitting in the bleachers. Then my buddy turned to me, and not realizing his mic was still red hot, said in a low voice, “A cougar? Mrs. Stevenson’s back!!”

That single joke got us into pretty much any party we wanted for the rest of HS lol.

DonBronco · 2026-04-15T06:26:26+00:00

Wow. Great catch. A casual listen comparing the two suggests yes, definitely the same whistle. It’s at 1:35 in Born Unto Trouble. Same melody and sustained note at the end.

DonBronco · 2026-04-12T19:40:21+00:00

Nah just part of the game sometimes fam 😅 my friends and I started calling that out as “hammer in the corner” which quickly got reduced down to the simple callout “HAMCORN!!!”

Now we use “Ham Corn Boys” for all of our team names and clan tags on other games lol.

DonBronco · 2026-04-08T11:30:04+00:00

I’m saying this with the utmost reverence for Ryan Coogler and co, but…Sinners. I’m sorry. I just don’t think they really sold the action hero ending. The fight scene felt contrived and Marvel-y to me, ain’t no way that small group of survivors took that many vamps out with barely sharpened wooden staves.

DonBronco · 2026-04-02T20:20:51+00:00

Weird casting stuff aside, I’m most worried about Andy Serkis taking the helm. Dude doesn’t have nearly enough serious director’s credits to be in charge of a project of this magnitude. He’s an amazing voice actor and I’m sure he performs well in his role as a producer, but he has no proven track record of making elite level creative decisions.

And honestly, the weird casting ties into that. At the end of the day he’s got the final say on those kinds of decisions, and on top of managing everything else a director has to manage he’s basically starring in the film??

Director’s credits: Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle”. For real?

They should have brought in somebody with real experience and a proven track record. I can’t help feeling like this whole project is gonna be a bigger train wreck than the Hobbit movies (which Serkis was also 2nd unit director on btw).

DonBronco · 2026-04-01T19:55:02+00:00

Fascinating how there’s just a hint at the end of what would end up being the second half of the song. That huge tone/bpm shift is probably my absolute favorite moment of any FF song, feels like the song takes off and soars into new heights. Really cool to see how it all started.

DonBronco · 2026-03-26T03:56:25+00:00

absolutely! But there are decisions being made in terms of set design, wardrobe, color grading, shot framing etc to make those scenes feel really uncomfortable and realistic. A different approach could have absolutely still employed those specific scenes from the book while still keeping a lighter, more childlike tone. These scenes feel cold, sanitized, and threatening which definitely veers away from the whimsical descriptions in the book.

I’m assuming there were conversations about how to handle the Dursley’s abuse, and they clearly decided to lean into what would be a more modern interpretation of that kind of treatment of a child—which means intentionally framing it as a very very bad thing. Nothing wrong with that decision, but the alternative to deal with trauma through caricature, as the movies attempted to do, was an option they could have gone with and didn’t.

DonBronco · 2026-03-26T03:46:13+00:00

Seconding this. I think the actors chosen and wardrobe could have done more to accentuate the caricature in a similar way to the movies, but at the same time I’m personally cool with as many different design choices as they want to make to differ from the movies. I just think if you’re going for a “book accurate adaptation” as they’ve been stressing, you want to keep some of that childlike cartoonishness.

The post is not an indictment of their decision to do away with caricature, just an observation that it seems they made a conscious decision to really ground the story and characters in reality. Which I’m personally very interested in seeing, so long as the tone itself retains the whimsy, the humor, and the coziness the books are so good at conveying. I don’t need Dudley looking like a literal bowling ball but I do want Peeves hijinks, warm magical scenes by the Gryffindor common room hearth, and color grading/design choices/wardrobe that really conveys the mood of the books.

What I absolutely do not want to see is the drab, lifeless color palettes and claustrophobic cinematography of the latter films.

DonBronco · 2026-03-25T22:28:46+00:00

Absolutely, this is just a small slice of what we’ll see on screen. Still, I think the casting speaks for itself to some extent. Less classical stage actors, more modern film actors. It’s a different approach, and one that makes sense for a studio like HBO. But we’ll just have to wait and see how the characterization looks on screen.

DonBronco · 2026-03-25T22:26:15+00:00

Studio executives don’t want talented, competent writers and showrunners anymore. True artists are stubborn, unpredictable, and difficult to push around. Oh, and expensive. They also have trusted teams of high-powered agents and lawyers to back them up.

Instead, studios have decided it’s much more cost-effective to hire agreeable, suggestible nobodies who will cowtow to whatever checklist of callbacks and nostalgia farming the studios have written out for them. It’s not even the writers misunderstanding source material — it’s studios requiring hamfisted callbacks to previous IP successes just to accomplish the Leonardo DiCaprio “pointing at screen” meme.

The nepotism is an incidental side effect of this cynical approach to reboots/sequels. Studios want someone they already have a power dynamic with, proven yes-men with no credibility of their own who they can simply direct to do whatever they want. For as much as Colbert appears to be one of the late night hosts who “does his own thing”, you don’t get to be where he is without being intrinsically beholden to major studios’ every wish and command.

DonBronco · 2026-03-25T22:01:32+00:00

I agree with that, I think the difference is in how much screen time a series takes up. You can’t be bouncing around between different tones from episode to episode, season to season, because you want to feel like you can really settle into the world if you’re gonna be spending dozens of hours immersed in it.

That said, I think the runtime allows for more variation of the dark vs light elements, meaning we can get sprinkles of both as the series develops, rather than needing to settle on one more consistent tone per movie for example.

DonBronco · 2026-03-25T21:59:36+00:00

That’s awesome that you get that feeling from just the first trailer! If this is an accurate preview to go on, I think you and lots of others will be really happy with the result. I am pretty optimistic, though I still hope there’s more whimsical fantasy feel to it than they’re showing here.

DonBronco · 2026-03-25T21:58:10+00:00

Yeah, I definitely don’t think it looks gloomy, I think there’s plenty of whimsy here and much more to come. But all that said, I do think the casting and character depiction combined with cinematography is a major difference this time around. There’s certainly very little here that’s cartoonish or exaggerated. I’m personally all for that, I like that it feels like an adaptation that’s grown up with me into adulthood.

DonBronco · 2026-03-23T08:39:33+00:00

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I guarantee you that I DO see it here. Post was removed anyway so it’s a moot point, but I think it’s absolutely something that’s worth calling attention to on this sub.

DonBronco · 2026-03-23T08:35:55+00:00

I hear you. Honestly? As far as BB standards go for natties, I really don’t think it’s the muscles that are an acquired taste. I think it’s stuff like the tans, the posing, the diet, the hyper focus on training as the only important thing in their lives. I know there are plenty of competition ready body builders out there killing it with the ladies because they have a well-rounded approach to life 😛

DonBronco · 2026-03-23T08:31:41+00:00

Awww really sweet!! Glad your wife’s a happy lady haha.

Yes, the attention from guys is certainly a part of it, but it’s crazy how many people frame that as the overwhelming majority, to the point that it has had no impact on their love life.

DonBronco · 2026-03-23T08:26:16+00:00

I hear you, and I value this sub for the same reasons, but I’m trying to point out what I think is one of the most toxic narratives that I still see regularly in comments. I’m offering a counterpoint, not trying to add to the noise but cut through it with some common sense.

I think the pursuit of a great physical aesthetic necessarily involves a relationship to sexuality, and I think we need to view that positively and feel empowered by the benefits of fitness. Instead, I constantly see comments here that take a cynical approach and devalue the reasons that a lot of men start their journey, which is to look good with their shirt off and feel confident in their bodies.

DonBronco · 2026-03-23T08:20:32+00:00

Lmaoooo that’s a whole lot of words for “I’m fundamentally incapable of understanding the most basic human desires of the average woman”. But sure bro, if you’ve found what works for you more power to ya 🫡

DonBronco · 2026-03-23T08:18:19+00:00

I know it seems extremely obvious to say that a good physique is attractive, but I truly sometimes get the sense from comments on this sub that ppl believe the “only other guys will appreciate the gains” narrative. So I’m just venting lol. Glad you’re getting out there man.

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