The Intensely Casual Commentaries: Recent Episodes
IntenselyCasual
DVD-style movie commentaries where we help you break free from the shackles of captive IP fandom by evaluating movies with the Intensely Casual Method.
The Five-Year Engagement is a movie that has huge appeal to us in every way but one: it's really bad. In this commentary we use the The Five-Year Engagement to explain the various ways a story can force you to disbelieve it and ruin your experience, no matter how much you want to enjoy it.
We comment on Disney's Frozen and why we regard it as an example of high quality storytelling despite the fact that neither Chris or I particularly like. In particular, Frozen presents it characters with interesting dilemmas and flaws while it also carefully sets up its twists so that when they occur they are surprising without triggering disbelief.
The Intensely Casual Method uses three dimensions to evaluate whether a story will be worth your time and money. All of us at Intensely Casual love the movie Sideways, and it's Logan's favorite movie. That makes it an ideal subject for us to discuss the element of appeal, the dimension that considers the emotions stories generate in us, positive and negative. People generally choose to experience stories based on appeal, but as we discuss in the commentary strongly liking or disliking a story can leave you blind to its actual merits or faults.
As we approach the release of Denis Villeneuve's new film adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel Dune, Logan and Chris look back at David Lynch's adaptation of Dune released in 1984, and use it to introduce the dimension of context and explore the many ways the it influences how and why we find value in the stories we experience.
In this commentary, Logan and Chris discuss one of the movies that made the Intensely Casual project necessary, the 2016 version of Ghostbusters, and how changes in the way movies are made led to a product that failed to provide value to most of its audience.
A DVD style commentary on the theatrical version of the 1984 movie Ghostbusters, in which we introduce the Intensely Casual Method and use it to evaluate what gives this movie such enduring value.