Remap Recommends, Volume XVIII

Remember when you’d walk into a local music, book, or video store and there’d be an adorable section where the employees would recommend what they were interested in that month? 

Welcome to our little version of it, called Remap Recommends. 

It's a chance for the staff at Remap to let you know what they've been playing, reading, listening to, or watching.

Patrick Recommends: Long Story Short

As the saying goes, there is universality in specificity. That is no more present than in one of my favorite television series this year, Netflix's Long Story Short, aka the tremendous new series from Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg.

Bojack Horseman was a bummer. An insightful show, but quite often bleak enough to make it challenging to hold onto the ideas the show had about hope, redemption, forgiveness, and becoming a better person amidst the pain you have caused others. (Forgiveness isn't about another person being "okay" with you, it's living with knowing you fucked up.) Long Story Short channels a similar level of absurdist humor—god, the episode about Yoshi trying to start his own business inside his parent's house—without relying on the visual gag of lol talking animals.

(I am not trying to reduce the show to lol talking animals, but that part helped!)

Long Story Short has little that I can personally relate to in terms of family dynamics. A mother more parts bully than loving parent. Siblings who snipe at each other. A deeply religious household. But I do know what it's like to not understand the person a parent performs in public and the person they reveal themselves to be at home. I do know what it's like to fight with a sibling, while you unconditionally love them. I do know what it means for a family to have passions.

My family is not the Schwoopers, but there is Schwooper-isms in the Klepeks.

P.S. Outside of The Pitt, this might have one of the most interesting and realistic depictions of what it was like to live out COVID-19 in terms of personal experience.

Rob Recommends: John Carpenter’s Christine

The Formula 1 podcast I do with Draw Scanlon and Danny O’Dwyer, Shift+F1, does the standard monthly movie episode for Patrons. We’ve far from exhausted every racing movie and documentary ever made, but we’ve definitely had to expand our purview from movies about racing to movies about cars to movies that maybe just have cars prominently featured. Which is how I unexpectedly found my favorite John Carpenter film.