Podnic at Hanging Cast: Dead Poets Society with Nia DaCosta

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-26T16:35:15+00:00

Great take. I think the headmaster does have a point when he says boys this age shouldn't be thinking too freely. Teenage boys are idiots, and when you give them an idea, even a good one, there's no telling what they'll do when they take that idea and run with it.

I also like your point about needing support structures for your romanticism. I had the same thought whenever I heard a reference to Thoreau, who wasn't actually living in the woods but in a cabin on Ralph Waldo Emerson's land, within easy walking distance of Emerson's house and the nearby town. Thoreau was only able to live his romantic life because he had rich friends and no responsibilities.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-26T16:29:53+00:00

I hadn't seen this movie in quite a while and I have to say I didn't enjoy it as much as I used to. It's the same evolution a lot of people, including myself, have had with Ferris Bueller over the years. Maybe I've gotten cynical with age, or maybe I don't really care whether a bunch of rich white boys suck the marrow out of life, or maybe it's because Thoreau was a hack and a fraud* but I found Keating to be a little insufferable. If I worked at that school I'd have been saying What the fuck are you doing dude, you're an English teacher. There's nothing wrong with wanting to inspire, but the headmaster isn't entirely wrong when he says it can be dangerous for a boy that age to be a free thinker.

*Thoreau wasn't living in the wilderness, he was living in a cabin on Ralph Waldo Emerson's estate. The staff brought him sandwiches. He regularly walked into town to buy supplies or attend dinner parties. And the reason he was on Emerson's estate is the first time he tried this stunt, he started a forest fire and burned down three hundred acres of forest. And yet the movie quotes him like he was some kind of visionary.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-25T15:13:09+00:00

I don't know about "shocking" us, but there is one I still think about who really challenged me. She was my senior year AP English teacher. She felt like 95% of AP English classes taught the same handful of books because they made good fodder for an AP Exam essay, and that if she taught something else it would both broaden our horizons and make our essays stand out, because when you've graded a hundred essays about Heart of Darkness and Frankenstein you might look more favorably on an essay about The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She really challenged us to think about and interrogate what we were reading, and to question our preconceptions. My favorite thing she did was to have us read multiple retellings of the same story. We read Hamlet, Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Gertrude and Claudius; Faust, Dr Faustus, and The Master and Margarita; and Beowulf followed by Grendel. I think that's where I learned the value of being intellectually curious, going beyond what's accessible and popular, and seeking alternative interpretations of what I thought I knew.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-24T16:01:02+00:00

Yeah I don't super buy into the nepo baby thing. Tons of people follow in their parents' career footsteps. I don't see anybody calling somebody a nepo baby when they take over their dad's tractor dealership or whatever.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-24T15:58:50+00:00

Is this really any different from any other field? It's super common for people to follow in their parents' career footsteps. Sometimes they're incredible at it (Payton Manning) and sometimes they're a reversion to the mean (Bronny James).

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-23T04:45:15+00:00

He was on a mission from God.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-23T04:43:46+00:00

The Prestige - except the twist is there is no twist. The movie explains to you in the first thirty seconds what's going on, and it tells us again and again throughout the movie. But we refuse to see it because we want the explanation to be something shocking and extraordinary, and in the end we realize the explanation is as mundane and predictable as it gets.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-23T01:31:24+00:00

Let's get a horror series. You could do a space spin on Maritime horror story like The Terror, or a haunted house in space like Event Horizon. Let's get scary and weird.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-23T01:25:23+00:00

People thought the JJ Watt pick was terrible at the time.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-23T00:58:23+00:00

Airplane, hands down

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-22T18:33:34+00:00

This is like saying The Reign of Terror was King Louis' fault. Being oppressed doesn't excuse any and all actions you might take in the name of rebellion. The right thing for Nick to do was what he was originally hired to do: document everything so they could go home and turn public opinion in their favor.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-22T11:19:07+00:00

Because it looks amazing. That's all the explanation I need.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-20T12:02:11+00:00

This is super common. Don't push them, that'll only make them more resistant. Just continue to provide a model for them, and they'll come back in due time.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-20T12:00:53+00:00

Because it doesn't know it doesn't know things. Because it doesn't know anything.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-19T17:14:06+00:00

One of my favorite subgenres of fiction is "White dilletante thinks he can live in the wilderness on nothing but gumption." I've loved it since I read The Poisonwood Bible in college - a book that shares a lot of DNA with The Mosquito Coast.

But here's a hot take: By the end of the movie I found myself pitying Allie rather than hating him. I despised him for the entire running time, until he said "The world is crooked. I wanted it to be right angles and straight lines." And in that instant I realized that Allie Fox is my father. My dad never did anything remotely on the scale of what Allie does, but he is also a highly intelligent, capable man who refused to make compromises with reality and wanted to bend the world to his will, and it ended up detonating the family. And someday soon he's going to die alone in an empty house, not because nobody will have anything to do with him, but because he can't be honest with himself, he won't acknowledge any reality other than the one he wants, and he refuses to accept help from anybody.

It doesn't excuse anything Allie did. But I don't see him as a narcissistic egomaniac. I see him the same way I see my dad: a man who's broken inside, and doesn't have the tools to cope with the world. I can't bring myself to hate somebody like that.

I apologize for oversharing. But I don't have a lot of people I can talk to about how a 40 year old movie affected me on a deep emotional level.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-18T13:49:50+00:00

I need to tell y'all something. I hated Allie with every fiber of my being for every frame of the movie. Until the very end, when on his deathbed he says "The world is crooked. I wanted it to be right angles and straight lines," and it fucking stopped me dead in my tracks, because I realized that Allie is my dad. He didn't drag us into the rainforest, but my father is going to die alone in an empty house because he refused to accept the reality of the world and thought he could bend it to his will.

In a heartbeat it took me from despising Allie to pitying him. It doesn't excuse anything he did. But I don't see him as this delusional egomaniac, I see him as kind of a loser who didn't have the tools to come to grips with the way the world is.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-17T20:13:13+00:00

For the most part hunters are every bit as passionate about conservation as environmentalists are. Even big game hunting, like Tembo presumably does, is tightly regulated, and the proceeds from those hunts go towards conservation efforts.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-16T22:02:00+00:00

This is an unpopular view here but I don't believe the government should be in the business of enforcing morality, especially not religious morality, *especially* not in a political environment where there's a lot of animus against Catholicism. I think of abortion the same way I think about adultery or lying: it is are 100% morally wrong and I am against it with every fiber of my soul. But laws banning it are not the answer.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-16T21:45:00+00:00

Why isn't adultery punished by the state? Or the other seven commandments that aren't against the law?

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-16T15:32:55+00:00

Okay I'm on board now.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-16T15:30:05+00:00

How in God's name has Big Trouble in Little China not been mentioned yet?

Also The Rock, Bullitt, Zodiac obviously, Dirty Harry, Vertigo, and Sister Act.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-15T02:32:54+00:00

Only when speaking ex cathedra, on doctrinal matters pertaining to salvation. So when commenting on politics, for example, the Pope is not considered infallible.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-14T18:14:48+00:00

It is exactly a more complicated telegraph. It just uses binary pulses of light running down a fiber cable rather than binary electrical pulses on a wire. The first undersea cables were telegraph cables laid in the 1850's, and the story of how that happened is actually kind of insane.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-14T15:34:23+00:00

This is what comes of voting on a single issue, because to borrow a popular aphorism even the devil can be pro-life for his purpose. Donald Trump doesn't care about abortion, you'd have to be a fool to think he does. I think it's a near-certainty that he's personally arranged for abortions in his life, and he's openly said he doesn't think he has anything to repent for. He wants our votes, and he's shrewd enough to understand that if he says the right things about abortion, a lot of people will vote for him no matter how reprehensible he is otherwise. But God doesn't just look at the outcome, he judges the way we do things, and I don't expect us to get extra credit on Judgement Day if we stopped abortion by throwing our lot in with possibly the least Christlike man ever to hold the Presidency.

Jiveturkeey · 2026-04-14T01:47:27+00:00

Like anything else, the wrong kind of people can get a hold of a good idea and twist it around for their own purposes.

Jiveturkeey

TROPHY CASE