Contentious C

This is a little behind, but who cares? I wasn't writing this up on my birthday. It's Day 395 (and counting) of Whatever This Is: If You're Investigated for Stealing Nuclear Secrets, It Won't Be Because You're a Nerd, It's Because You're an Asshole Edition. Your Baby's Dirty Diaper Barefoot - Hey, what's worse than a movie that wastes Evan Rachel Wood's acting talents on a role that infantilizes her and makes light of mental issues? Oh, right: Scott Speedman. He's worse and also here. If the characters were remotely likable; or if the writing around Wood's character was consistent or believable or just simply not insulting; or if it had actually done something with the many other recognizable people who tried (once again, J.K. Simmons, looking at you, but when am I not looking at you; stop being in everything, dude!), this might have at least not sucked so hard, but...yeah, we got none of that. Yet another indie movie that makes me wonder what else could have been done with the money that would have actually helped people. I guess employing the technical crew counts, though. Ugh. 28 Days - Ugh, Sandra Bullock. I want to like her, but then practically everything she's done for about 20 years has been awful. Maybe this is roughly where that streak begins, because this is shitty, and boring, and predictable. We get tied-with-a-bow closure on relationships we don't care about, and we get none at all on things that pop up and disrupt the norm in ways that might not have sucked so bad. We get the world's millionth writer as protagonist, and we get basically no clever lines from her at any stage. The only person who seems like he actually could exist in this world and feel authentic is Steve Buscemi, but when you have that face, it's pretty easy to look like you've been addicted to some drug or another some time in your life. Why have I talked this much about this movie? It's terrible. Avoid. AXE Body Spray Instead of Shower The Lake House - Goddamnit Sandra! I thought I had seen this before, but it turns out I hadn't. I was kind of hoping it would take its gimmick as a bit more of a strange mystery and stretch out the details of it, but it does nothing of the sort, and, in fact, you can see everything coming a million miles away. The only thing that salvages this is that this is one of Reeves' better roles in a serious movie from a period where he churned out a lot of garbage, and Bullock is more convincing than you would expect as someone too committed to her job to look up and appreciate life until it's too late, so you want to see them together. And that's despite the stupid gimmick and the even stupider resolution. Mostly, though, I wonder if someone's written a good SCP article about the Wormhole Mailbox. That reminds me, I need to finish playing Control if I manage to find it less irritating somehow. That'll Do, Pig The Incredible Jessica James - I really wish someone had done a good Google search before naming this film. Ah well. It's...its own thing, that's for sure. I had no idea who Jessica Williams was until I got a little bored 2/3s of the way through and looked her up, and then I realized why she was saying "dope" so much. By the way, no adult human should have a fucking catchphrase. This includes professional wrestlers, who do in fact have catchphrases but are very obviously not adults. But you have to applaud this at least somewhat for the first 30 minutes or so, and that it sticks to its guns in terms of its humor and its sensibilities, even if they don't always work. For a while, it's refreshing, but it's probably good this is so short, because it wears a little thin and eventually suffers a bit from Interstellar disease. I started out thinking this would go higher, but it just doesn't sustain the laughs enough to be anything other than decent. She's Funny That Way - Leave it to Peter Bogdanovich to out-Woody-Allen Woody Allen. Plus, you can like his movies without thinking he's a massive creep, and even if he was a massive creep, the emphasis in Bogdonovich's case would be on 'was', so who fucking cares? All the male casting is pretty good, since, other than Owen Wilson, they're all so schlubby that it's impossible to tell why any of these women would tolerate them, but instead of making it incredulous, it makes it absurd. Austin Pendleton probably steals the show in that regard as the most pathetic excuse of a dirty old man imaginable. If there's one really off-kilter thing with the movie, though, it's Jennifer Aniston's character, whose entire storyline feels shoved in with a speculum, like they had to have someone with a big enough name to get funding and this was the best they could do to make that work. At times, though, this is pretty funny, and Imogen Poots has got to be one of the more quietly and oddly consistent performers in the last 10 years or so; she's never been great, but she's nearly always good, and this is no exception. Inherent Vice - What is this movie trying to do? Is it a noir? Is it a stoner movie? Is it a parody? Is it a film adaptation of Poe's Law? Is it possible to satirize a form so deeply and so completely by following its rules so strictly that you lose where the parody ends and the total adherence to a set style begins? If you're Beck Hansen and you make a career of laughing at the earnestness of singer-songwriters, but then one of your albums makes people cry, are you just being *that* funny or did you become the thing you ridiculue? Is it possible to cast Joaquin Phoenix and not stare at his cleft palate the entire movie? Does Josh Brolin get his head de-blocked after roles like this? Can you really decry police brutality when every moment of police brutality is played for laughs? Is this actually a movie review? I don't know the answers to any of those, and neither does Inherent Vice. Wind River - I've mentioned the Vulture 2010s list a few times during these posts and my own jerk-face 2010s list, but this is one case where they got things a bit wrong. It's weird they said this was godawful and Draft Day was the most meh film of the decade, because I'd probably switch that. This has some genuinely touching moments, and it's beautifully shot most of the time, but I feel like a lot of the problems and criticisms of how women are portrayed in this are at least somewhat valid. All of these tough women, either shown or discussed, are dead or traumatized, and it feels the need to 'go there' for things that don't say anything useful or make a point that isn't already understood. At this stage, you can't really make a film with this kind of content and have some dude-bro out there say, "Wait, I didn't know guys could be that terrible! Wow, I'm enlightened!", because most of us already know this shit, and the rest of them probably aren't going to figure it out - or they'll be on the side of the scumbags. I also kind of hoped the ending would loop back to the mountain lion, which was a bit disappointing when it didn't. That said, the one big action moment in the movie is a pretty solid, rather unsettling piece of quick work, and for all the heroic and/or badass roles Jon Bernthal has had, this is easily his best of both of those qualities. I guess I can see why some people like it, but I think this film has less to say than it thinks it does. Ordinary World - Hey, let's throw a punk rocker who's also a dad in a movie about a punk rocker who's just a normal dad now: that'll work, right? Actually, it's...not the worst? I mean, Billie Joe Armstrong isn't *good*, but he isn't a wooden statue of himself, either. And there are just enough genuine actors who know what they're doing here to keep things moving along when it needs to. But it feels somewhat unresolved and shaky throughout; it's hard to say, though, whether that's the intent, because the message is that no one ever gets things figured out, or if it's just not as well-written as it could have been. The last little chunk of the movie starts to change that with some shockingly insightful chatter, but then it's over, and you're left wondering why the remainder didn't try punching above its weight a little more, too. One Maple-Frosted Donut Hedwig and the Angry Inch - This has been on my to-watch list on Criterion for ages, but after seeing John Cameron Mitchell in The Sandman, I figured it was time. Holy fucking shit. The 2000s, as far as I'm concerned, are borderline unassailable for 'Best movie decade I've lived through'. Add one more stick of wood to that enormous fire. There are things about this I didn't care for, things that knocked it down a peg and would keep it out of the top 20 for its decade, such as the way the Tommy storyline is obviously a huge plot point but then drifts into nothing, but most of this is just fucking great. The acting is great, the sets and locations are nutty and wonderful and so well planned, but the biggest reason this works is because the music is FUCKING AMAZING. The weird thing is that I'd already been exposed to my share of things inspired by this, via the Baltimore Rock Opera Society (which I heartily recommend, assuming it survived the pandemic), so it's like I was primed to love this before knowing what I was loving. Has there been a better musical since this? I doubt it. But now I kinda feel bad I never got to see Mason Park do this on Broadway. Oh well: six inches forward, five inches back. Why They Make 'Em, Why We Watch 'Em Citizen Kane && - I hadn't watched this in probably 25 years, and barely remembered much from the first and only time I saw it. But, then I bought the Criterion 4K. I've dragged my feet a while on whether I should bother saying anything about this at all, because what the Hell could I possibly have to say about the most analyzed film in history? And then I watched the first 45 seconds and thought, "Nah, I'm good." Is this the greatest movie ever made? Is it the most influential? Is it 'perfect'? All of those questions seem stupid when you realize that, relative to the events of the 20th century up to the present, what this movie is, is timeless. If I went on Twitter and posted: "Seventy-year-old Florida man mutters about secrets in ostentatious palace once owned by a news tycoon", would you know if I was talking about this or today's news? The only thing that changed wasn't the politics or the sleaziness or the corrupt nature of man; what's changed is our willingness to go along with all of it. Half of us don't know what to think until we're told what to think, and labels lose their meaning today even faster than words like 'fascist', 'communist', 'American', and 'yellow journalism' are rendered meaningless here. And hey, look, it's a story about a rich guy who thinks he's the One True Voice who can help the little guy while he also snaps up and cages everything! How many of those useless pricks do we have floating around right this instant? About ten? And I wonder if any of them actually understood what this movie had to say. And yet for how much it continues to mirror the times since it was made, this movie is utterly consumed with the notion of impermanence. It hits you even before the movie proper begins, with that big fat RKO title that hasn't preceded a film for decades. Whatever power William Randolph Hearst wielded through his newspapers - even in trying to get this very film suppressed - is long since smashed to pieces; Welles lost the battle but dominated the war. One of the first titles on the screen mentions Xanadu, and more of us know that word from a Nintendo game or our recently-departed Olivia Newton-John than we do from this movie, or a history book, or from Coleridge (Hell, I had to look that up; I was going to say Shelley). Welles' first big speech is about helping the Working Man, and then he sells that out to be the biggest newspaper, and then he sells that out for love, which he sells out to be governor, which he sells out for love again, only this time he's finally able to realize the only thing he loves is himself. And the sole constant is money, which does him no good sitting around and vanishes to buy the thing that only makes him happy for a flickering instant. Ain't capitalism grand? There are certainly things that don't hold up. Aside from Welles, the acting is hit-or-miss at best. Ray Collins as his gubernatorial opponent has a brief scene that is probably the best moment of the otherwise flabby middle, and it's entirely unclear why Joseph Cotten played Jed Leland as a normal drunk guy in the 'younger' scenes while portraying a blind Black trombone player from Mississippi in the 'older' scenes. But all the stuff that works...wow. This is the rare movie that probably works far better in black & white than it ever would have in color, because it's swimming in pregnant shadows. The moment of Kane towering over Susan, with her pupils reflecting just the tiniest light, is actually a perfect shot. The rest of stuff that's relevant and has lasted is, I think, a fair bit more obvious than some let on. There's this persistent myth with this movie that it's been around so long and its techniques are so ubiquitous that you can't tell how influential it is. That's largely bogus. Watch the ending: hi, Spielberg. Watch the scene where Thompson enters the book room: hi, Denis Villeneuve. Watch the nightclub scenes with Susan: hi, Marty and Truffaut. The pilfering fingerprints of other directors are visible all over the place. But still, it's a movie about how nothing lasts, which makes it all the more ironic that time has treated it the way it has. It laughs at the futility of trying to have it all, and we as a society are still at the mercy of fools and clowns who think it's a how-to manual instead of a warning, but the art itself endures.

Crysis 1 is probably still laughing at you about this comment.

Unless you're the Celtics. I don't fucking want this guy, I don't care how many points he scores.

I finished it tonight and will probably watch it again before I can Netflix for another 6 months. It is reeeeeeeeeeeally talky in an irritating way at times, as Dream explains everything straight into the fucking ground. You'd almost think Basil Exposition from Austin Powers was going to show up in the Dreaming. But the casting is still something else, and Holbrook kinda won me over by the end, as his portrayal was like a funhouse mirror of Pinocchio, full of rage and self-loathing that he couldn't be a real boy. If you watch "The Sound of Her Wings" and the room doesn't get dusty, you're hopeless, and all the people who think Death needed to be some tiny Asian chick can fuck all the way off; Kirby Howell-Baptiste might be the highlight of the whole show, so it's too bad she's only in the one ep. They did a nice job weaving stuff together, too, since this covered a lot of different storylines in one pass. I'm sure they'll pull off the same next season. I hope they have the nerve to do something really cool like start with "Dream of a Thousand Cats" as an opener for A Game of You or Season of Mists (or both - really both since Game of You is such a divisive storyline among fans anyway) in the way that Death's section dovetailed into Hob's.

I was today years old when I learned there's a Mount Kumgang in North Korea.

Mediocre filmmaking is everywhere; the tentpoles just have better advertising budgets. I say this approaching day 400 of watching mediocrity. I don't think they're "leading" us anywhere, I think we were already in that space. It's why the Daniels and the Hamaguchis and the Campions of the world find success, since they were always going to do exactly what they wanted, everybody else be damned.

Oh God that would have been so awful. Not even Bowie being alive to play Lucifer could have saved that.

3 episodes down and, yeah, this is really good. I'm not *loving* it, per se, but I think that could be because I know the material and I don't know if there could be a better marriage of medium and story than the original. But they did this as right as they could. The casting is close to impeccable. Sturridge is WAAAAY better than I expected. If there's anyone disappointing, it might be Boyd Holbrook as the Corinthian, which is admittedly a bad role to whiff on, but he's too likable and delivers his lines too fast. It does a good job of pitching the DC-specific continuity points overboard and filling them so you don't think you're missing anything. But I wonder how this plays to anyone unfamiliar with the source.

Not quite as broad a difference as, say, Akiva Goldsman writing enormous piles of shit forever but also doing A Beautiful Mind, but...that's up there.

I can never tell if last post of the page is good or bad. Oh well. Yeah. That thing. It's Day 386 (and counting) of Some Movie Bullshit, Feeding My Move Addiction Helps Break My Power Wash Simulator Addiction Edition. Your Baby's Dirty Diaper The Women - Hey look, a movie that truly lives up to its title. Not a single frame of a dude in the whole film (unless you count the baby at the end, and I don't because it's not like there's proof of it being a boy). Annnnnnnnnd it still manages to be 100000% ABOUT men. Jesus. Someone said The Dark Tower was like trying to jump a fence and failing spectacularly and impaling your balls on the fence; I think they got that idea from having seen this movie before. The only saving grace, such as it is, is Annette Bening, who is pretty good. And there are maybe two legitimately funny, well-written scenes that might push this into the AXE Body Spray category for some of you, but given the nature of its gimmick, I think writing a film that obsesses over the behavior of men is a big fat failure. Also, Meg Ryan is terrible in it, but it's like a coin flip with her work anyway, so that's no huge surprise. AXE Body Spray Instead of Shower 21 Bridges - I wanted to like this more, just because I wonder how long it's going to be before we get someone so effortlessly talented as Chadwick Boseman to come through again, and hey, wouldn't you know, he's in this with another guy who makes it look easy, J.K. Simmons. But aside from the two of them, this is about as rote, predictable copaganda as it gets, with a little bit of John Wick tone and David Ayer/Antoine Fuqua grittiness (Fuquaesque? I guess that works), combined with a hint of Pelham if Tony Scott hadn't fucked up remaking that. None of those familiar details do much to help how all-too-neatly-wrapped-up it ultimately is, or how vomit-inducing the notion of "the one good cop who finds the bad apples" still feels. There is one decidedly eerie moment in the movie, though, where one asshole kneels on some dude's neck, and Boseman's character has to remind him not to do that. Ah, 2019; we were so innocent then. Gorky Park - This is one of those movies that has existed at the periphery of my brain basically since it came out, because I remember it being discussed but not actually seeing it, since I was far too young. I just watched this as an "extra" film, given that I couldn't be sure I hadn't seen it, but it turns out I really hadn't seen it at all. And it's...not exactly great stuff. William Hurt's accent is all over the place, sounding a bit Australian one minute and almost Cockney the next. Lee Marvin is stiff as a board except for the end, and the plot is all stuff you've seen before if you've watched any noir movies. Over and over, the music tries to TELL YOU HOW IMPORTANT THIS SCENE IS. Maybe the book is better? Or maybe this just made a splash because of the only genuinely redeemable and timeless thing about the story, in the way that it uses "Soviet" ineptitude and corruption to hold up a light to how badly American authorities bungle their cases. I guess Joanna Pacula counts as a positive, too, but then again, Hurt gets a little early practice in this film for how he eventually treated Marlee Matlin, so that whole storyline ends up making little sense at all. That'll Do, Pig Eighth Grade - I'm really surprised this made as much of a splash as it did when it came out; excepting the fact that Bo Burnham, of all people, made it, most of the details of it made me think, "...And?" I don't even have kids and I know kids are the fucking worst and behave this way all the time. I think there may, once again, have been a bit of American Beauty syndrome at play here, where any parents dismayed by this were the willfully ignorant ones who didn't want to admit that their fucking brat kids are just like this, or that they themselves were even more insufferable fucking brats at that age. Otherwise, I mean, it's fine, I guess? It's fairly well done, although I really wanted to drive Kayla's dad for a long trip off a short pier because OH MY CHRIST MOST ANNOYING CREEPER EVER. I think it also probably needed to do more to explore its most awful moment, particularly in terms of blowback from the larger group involved, especially when that scene plays like Kayla's friend knows what's about to happen. It felt like it could have been longer and could have gone for broke a little more often. Mean Girls - Yes, I'd never seen this before. Now I have and...ehhhhhhh. I mean, it's funny, sometimes, and at least you give a shit about the characters, but it feels like Tina Fey wrote all the best jokes for herself. And I'm not sure there will ever be a more absurd fall from grace than Lindsay Lohan; going from this to...everything else? Yikes. I know that's an easy target, but holy shit, did the people in her life fail her miserably. I felt sorry for her already, but now...woof. This feels sometimes like there are some compelling echoes to other famous teen movies, especially Heathers, but it ends up veering a little much into fantasy, though not quite The Breakfast Club levels of, "Gee, these teenagers fully developed their frontal lobes and executive decision-making skills in just 6 short weeks!" bullshit. It's on that spectrum, though, especially given how cutesy and inoffensive the ending is. It may not sound like I like this much, and I suppose I don't, but I can also see how it filled a void for teen comedies when they were getting a bit thin. St. Vincent - Hey, Bill Murray being an asshole; maybe he does movies like this every so often to get it out of his system, instead of being awful in his domestic life, where it can come back to haunt him. But this isn't so much funny as it's a subtle pile of moments intended to make you feel mawkish and sentimental. Sometimes that works, like with his wife, but other times it doesn't, such as the ending. Not to mention that the overwhelming majority of "plot", such as it is, is entirely ignored by the time it wraps up. There don't seem to be any real consequences or changes for anything, even when it comes to the relationships that get developed; it sort of ends where it starts. I'm surprised this even got whispers of awards talk at the time; it's really...not remotely close to that kind of quality. Naomi Watts is probably the highlight here, but that's like saying water gets things wet. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore - Hey, this was kinda funny! Sort of. It's like if Blue Ruin were a comedy; I think that's the most succinct description I can give it. It even has...that guy from Blue Ruin, whatever his name was, which I think is probably on purpose. But this isn't terribly gripping or something that keeps your attention well; I think if anything, the frustrating events, especially early on, are so irksome that it's probably a little too easy to sympathize with Melanie Lynskey's character, to the point that I almost didn't want to expose myself to those moments. The plot feels like some sort of goofy comedy country song Roger Miller might have written without ever publishing, or so I thought, and then I heard the last song played, and wouldn't you know, they based the name on a country song, all right. But it's short, and it feels just vindicating enough, even if it's nothing terribly special. Yeah, But... Mississippi Masala - I think my only real issues with this are two-fold. First, most of the male Indian side characters are cardboard cutouts or cheap stereotypes; maybe Mira Nair would argue otherwise, because she knows a thousand guys just like them (and I've met too many of them, too), but you never see them as anything other than stooges or obstacles or plot devices, instead of people. And the second, far less noticeable issue, is that this is only sometimes compelling filmmaking: some of the early landscape shots are *gorgeous*, and once it moves to America, the film becomes considerably more drab. I suppose you could argue that's the point, since it reflects the feelings of our subjects, though. The rest of this is just really, really good. It's hardly Denzel's best role, but it's just another one you toss on the pile and say, "Yeah, that dude's as solid as they come." Charles Dutton will make your skin crawl every time he's on the screen, and it's too bad Sarita Choudhury never really got to carry anything else this big again (though apparently that was by design). But the real standout here is Roshan Seth; he comes off quite a bit like his dipshit relatives on a number of occasions, but you always get the sense that he can't get out of the way of his own foolishness, unlike the others who are just simply fools. One Maple-Frosted Donut Marriage Story - I got about 20 minutes into this before the last time I shelved Netflix, but I decided to finish it off. I think this just squeeeeeeeaks its way into this category because the acting is wonderful, and the story is authentic and well-written and full of moments that are simultaneously uplifting and anguishing. I do, however, have a bit of a problem with the "Oh, this is so pretentious" criticism. What movie did you watch? The first shot - the first goddamn shot after the titles - is Scarlett's face in that on-stage, oh-so-serious, Bergmanesque pose: Baumbach is telling you it's OK to laugh at how pretentious these people are! You are in on the joke. He is in on the joke. That's the joke! Like, how did so many people miss that? During the "observer" dinner scene, there's a damn Whole Foods bag in a shot for about 30 seconds! Yeesh! Pick up on the details, people. Of course they're pretentious, because they're both selfish idiots who don't realize that their problems are entirely self-created and that millions of other people don't have the resources to fly across the country or fight custody battles or change careers at a whim. That's basically the whole journey here: realizing how foolish and self-destructive and solipsistic and pointless their stubbornness and pettiness and grudge-holding ultimately is. The only positive of that is their growth, and we see that in a believable pair of performances. I'm not sure this would have made my 2010s list; it's probably another one of those "just off" picks, and it's definitely not the best thing that year, but it's well worth a watch, even if it does drag in the middle. This means you, @John from Cincinnati: get past that section because that's when all the good stuff starts hitting!

My last Push day was something like: Iso-lateral bench press (best replacement I can manage to do for straight bench - easier to overload than dumbbells without snapping my fucking ribcage again) Flys (2 sets of both arms at once, 1 set of single-arm at the same weight - 140 lb - and crossing over the midline) Ring pike push-ups Cable side lateral raises (focusing on keeping tension in a stretched position and controlling the negative) Single arm overhead cable tricep extensions Ab stuff, since nothing is a strong enough isometric anyway Yesterday was Pull and went: Bent-over rows (wide grip to chest) super-set with bent-over rows to stomach (lighter weight, about 20 reps per set) Single arm lat pulldowns Single arm high-to-low cable rows Rack pulls Seated curls @ 45 degrees Cable hammer curls with rope, mechanical drop into pinwheel/cross-body curls Tonight's supposed to be Leg. Probably something like: Deficit RDLs or sumos Bulgarians Reverse sprinter lunges at landmine station Nordics Leg press myo-reps Calves if I'm not dead (I may be dead after the myos, I wanted to be dead after I did them last week) Repeating that, or something like it, 2x across a 9-day cycle feels like enough volume. Relatively few of the things get repeated every single workout. The Nordics, the ring Pikes, and the rack pulls are all things that are tough as Hell for me but I fucking love doing them, so they stay. I kind of make up the rest as I go depending on what I want to focus on that day over something else. Like, this last Push day was a bit more shoulder, so next time I'm probably going to bias upper chest, or do more vertical pulling the next Pull day. But considering how my lame attempt at a 5/3/1 nearly broke me, I think I'm just kind of done with bench and probably barbell squats, too. I don't know if they're really good enough at getting bang-for-buck. They work for others, but they wipe me out. Especially with squats: all the accessory muscles, or my core, or my CNS are the things that get zapped way, way, way before my legs.

I think I'm probably one of the people who bagged on the idea of this series the most, but Neil Gaiman apparently got to take good care of his baby this time. I've avoided trailers and all that as much as possible, because it's been so long since I read it start-to-finish that it'll be fairly new. Mason Park looks GREAT as Desire, and they're doing The Doll's House this year, so at least one of the best stories will get covered even if Netflix craps the bed. Besides, if The Boys gets a thread, so should this. Who else is excited?

TBF that's been the Seattle strategy going back about 20 years.

Not even the frat people, because you have to go to college to be in a frat. Revenge of the Assholes Who Peaked in High School.

The beauty of the Soto-to-Padres deal is that both teams will still stink anyway.

I mostly keep thinking of that last episode of Arrow Season 5 where they have the big fight where the camera pans in a circle. And Diggle's fight sequence showed more air than Shaq attempting a 3-pointer. Talk about cringe.

Really? I would assume that was a very very small pot, so small that Jimmy Garoppolo could knock up his girlfriend... Burn it all down.

Thanks, Verizon, for slapping unwanted bullshit on my internet service so that, when I come to you to get rid of it, it takes 20 fucking minutes of someone chirping, "Are you happy with your service?!? How do you typically use your internet?!?!? Blah-de-blah-de-blah!!!" I get it's their jobs, but FUCK CORPORATE AMERICA for making it their jobs. You useless fucks.

Compared to Bud Black's playing career, they practically are.

LOL sounds like you're the guy I've been complaining to regarding my orders being mishandled and sent back to the company while perishable lab equipment expires. Or maybe the person I've been complaining about...

Cycling's a lot more likely to fuck with leg days, though. Hard enough rides are leg days unto themselves, but I'd guess you already knew that.

Washington Post weighed in. Even before I read a word of it, I knew I could shorten the article & answer its heading in four words: Not a fucking thing.

I did upper/lower/PPL across the week for the first 10 months I was posting in this thread. See where it got me. I just don't have the energy to keep that up, and frankly, I'm close enough to a lot of my aesthetic goals that I could probably just get away with doing one PPL split per week for pure maintenance and I actually wouldn't care. In fact, I did Push on Sunday and I still haven't done the Pull/Legs since! Probably going today. MAXIMUM EFFORT! (tm Deadpool) Clearly the bulk of my plateaus are mental, but I have no willpower to deal with them right now.

Yeah. Movies. It's here. Day 379 (and counting) of Whatever This Is: Rewatch, Regurgitate, Review Edition. Your Baby's Dirty Diaper Code 46 - This is some real Minority Report/"'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Tick-Tockman"-type crap that just goes nowhere, especially after it manages to basically give away almost everything about the plot of the film in the initial text scroll that massively over-explains stuff. Tim Robbins & Samantha Morton have about as much chemistry as cans full of argon and xenon, and most of the "flavor" regarding the shape of this future world, such as they are, are relegated to the pidgin language the characters speak, shot through with a little bit of everything you'd hear in the Southern Hemisphere. But it's got zero interesting shots, no interesting set design, boring dialogue, and boring characters. This could have been a compelling idea, I suppose, but not in this shape. Before I Go to Sleep - Hoo boy. Sticking famous names on a dull thriller that can't follow its own rules is no way to operate, people. It's weird, though; somehow, Mark Strong and Nicole Kidman (pre-What Nicole Kidman Did to Her Face) have pretty good chemistry together, to the point that you'd almost want to see them in something, anything else. But that might be the only high point of the whole film. That, and the first twist in the ending at least gives you enough time to be good and mad at the Big Bad lurking throughout. Of course, that twist gets completely stepped on by the effects of the second twist, and we're right back in Dullsville, population: everyone who wasted 90 minutes on this. Pointless, gimmicky bullshit. Regression - This movie might have been significantly better if only it could decide what it was. Sometimes it's trying to be Rosemary's Baby, sometimes it's trying to be The Crucible, but it jumps so often from one foot to the other without giving a solid way forward - until one particular moment that makes the rest completely predictable - that neither effect sticks well at all. This has a pile of familiar faces in it, and they're basically all wasted on this snoozefest that needed to be either significantly creepier or significantly more critical - or maybe even both, if it had been put in the right hands. But I doubt that would have entirely saved it, since it's not like the writing has anything at all going for it, and good casts and directors can only elevate garbage so much. Black Rain && - I think I've watched the first half of this probably 5 times in my life, and watched the first two-thirds at least once, but somehow, I'd never seen it all the way through. Now I wish I'd stayed ignorant. I would suggest Michael Douglas spent the entire movie gakked out of his mind on coke, but given Japan's drug laws, that seems a little unrealistic. Andy Garcia brings the only OK moments in the whole movie, and at least Ridley Scott has the good sense to put us all on a bit of an emotionally effective ride with those moments. But the rest of this...man, it's so fucking bad. Laughably racist and sexist, boorish, with a resolution that feels entirely unearned and an action-heavy ending that's one of the hokiest piles of crap I've ever seen. Are we sure Tony didn't direct this? Because this is probably Ridley's worst movie; yeah, I'd even rewatch Legend first, because at least that's a guy out of his element taking a shot at something different, and it has Tim Curry. This is just fatalistic copaganda bullshit that makes everyone come out looking worse. AXE Body Spray Instead of Shower The Wolf Hour - I'm not sure why Amazon/IMDb has this listed as "Horror", but I'd wager that's why it has such low marks. This is...decidedly not a horror movie. It's barely even "Hitchcockian suspense" like it claims. Instead, it's Naomi Watts doing a deep-dive character study of someone who's pretty deeply screwed-up. If you watched Eight, which I reviewed months ago, this is a less fully insane version of that, with the Summer of Sam as a backdrop, but realistically, even that isn't much of a relevant plot point. This drags for the first 20 minutes, but it kind of gets going once the handful of other characters start flitting in and out of the apartment. Watts is usually pretty good in it, but that's probably the only real saving grace of any kind here. Your tolerance of this is probably going to be based on your tolerance for movies that never leave their main character out of the shot. Vita & Virginia - This could have gone lower, too, save for a pretty solid performance from Elizabeth Debicki. Gemma Arterton can sometimes be really good in things, but, uh, this is not one of those times. It looks appropriately "nice" for Edwardian Britain, and some of the attempts at something like location shots are relatively good, but this doesn't have a whole lot of punch to it. Watch this and watch Portrait of a Lady on Fire and try to tell me this movie sings 10% as well as Sciamma's film does. It also has a surprisingly annoying tendency to overlay modern techno/house music for quite a few scenes, even though all that does is muddy the waters instead of make the intent clearer or heighten the emotional stakes. Some of that wouldn't have been fully out of place, but it's almost cacophonous compared to the rest of the score, so it's jarring when it's just some modern track, as opposed to the strains of a modern track reworked to fit a period piece. Angels Crest - Yet another generally crap film saved by reasonably good acting. Then again, it also has some bits at the beginning that are so overdone that they make you want to laugh instead of sympathize with the central character. Plus, it's a Dead Baby Movie, and yet the emotional stakes are mostly just not there. The only things that kind of salvage this are Lynn Collins, who is believably trashy and trashed throughout the film as the alcoholic mother, and the last half-hour or so where Ethan Dekker stops acting like someone in Barry Block's classes and starts behaving like he belongs in a movie in 2011. If there's one other real positive to this, it's the way it puts the lie to the notion of "justice" in the case of something like this. There's no punishing a parent who loses a kid, even when it might be their fault; the loss is the punishment, and everything else is just other people's bullshit. That'll Do, Pig Mystic Pizza - How is this a not-bad movie? Jeez, I was expecting it to be lame 80s dreck, and yet it's actually...kind of well-written at times. It's not particularly clever moment to moment, but at least it's authentic, in much the same way Stanley & Iris was or Gas, Food, Lodging happened to be. This feels like it exists along the same continuum as movies like that, or even Mermaids, which came out a couple of years later, though this had the good sense to be set in present-day, rather than fig-leafing itself into the past. It's also no wonder Julia Roberts is now Julia Roberts; you could tell it even here. That said, it's funny to see her in "thicc" mode (for her, at least); to be honest, I kind of wish she'd continued to look like that. But nevertheless, this actually holds up as a believable look at young women exploring their independence and their sexuality, even if it's a super-white look at those things and even if Dirty Dancing did the class warfare stuff far better. One Maple-Frosted Donut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - Kind of a rewatch, kind of a restart. I watched the first 20 minutes for the 2010s project and this just didn't quite grab me. Clearly I should have given it another 5 minutes. This is easily the most Tarantino-esque movie that he didn't actually make; in fact, this has got the kind of style oozing out of it all the time that Robert Rodriguez probably wishes he could have had in the vastly overrated Sin City (the name of the town here is even "Bad City"). It also felt like the kind of film that drew a direct line to Julia Hart's Fast Color, which had almost exactly the same sensibilities when it came to music. There's such a clear understanding here from Amirpour that the right emotional cue can take something plain and make it electric, or take the electric and make it unforgettable, such as the moment when our twisted couple first falls for each other, which is played with such simplicity and such intensity that the soundtrack just elevates it perfectly. I think the David Lynch comparisons are a little overblown, because this is not dedicated enough to The Weird to really tap into that place, but it's definitely askew in its own way, and it's a way that works for the story being told. I'm not sure this would have cracked my top 100 list, but it's definitely an NCAA tournament-ish, "last 4 in/first 4 out" type of movie. Great stuff. A Heart in Winter && This is a film I have a bit of a weird relationship with, so I thought that, for once, I should do something like a proper review and throw out my usual aversion for spoilers. Plus, it's 30 years old; watch it, or don't. I don't care. I first saw this not too terribly long after it came out - likely sometime in 1993, once it hit HBO or whichever movie channel would carry it - and then hadn't watched it since. It wasn't the first foreign movie I'd ever watched, but it was the first foreign film meant for adults where I paid real attention. And it seemed truly different somehow, the first movie that showed other cultures saw the world completely differently from American filmmakers. I ended up utterly baffled by it, except for the memorable scene where Emmanuelle Beart drunkenly speaks her mind. I couldn't understand this character we'd been presented, but that was because I was maybe 13 at the time and I had nothing close to the emotional range to even begin to grasp what went on in the film. It would be possible to blithely and stupidly state that the film asks, "What is love?" but it isn't the love triangle at the apparent center that makes any headway or gives any explanation. The arc plot, as it were, is a response to that oversimplified question, rather than an answer. Instead, the most crucial threads of the movie are told in extremes, both in its (emotionally) most delicate moments and its most explosive ones. Camille is true to the description others give her, only accessing her true self when she's performing, and that's when Stephane is at his most vulnerable with her; and Stephane casually admits his attempts to keep people at a distance do him more harm than anyone else, which is hammered home with a wordless, terrible last look from Camille, who doesn't mourn in the least for her broken heart but instead senses his heavy burden of a life left unlived. Those scenes are packed full of beauty and tension from a pair of sources: Beart's piercing eyes that sometimes feel like they dominate the whole movie; and the selected works of Ravel that serve as the fulcrum for the film's events. On the other end of the spectrum are Stephane's old mentor, Lachaume, and his live-in maid/special lady Madame Amet. They fight and bicker, they nearly come to blows, they break and throw things like some old Liz Taylor melodrama. But they present a different kind of love than the obvious, sticky, matinee-idol notion; Lachaume is on his last legs, and despite his requests, Amet can't bring herself to euthanize him. She picks him up and cleans his messes and runs herself ragged to keep him alive, but not that. Stephane spies a few of their more indelicate moments, and he gets a glimpse of something else: that love at its purest has to be that thoroughly selfless, even at the end, or maybe especially at the end. It'd be easy to write off Stephane's character as clueless or even sociopathic; today, it'd be more likely he'd be considered an Ace or even on the spectrum to some degree, but it's clear he knows what love is. And what's equally clear is his unwillingness to subject himself to its cruelest whims. He makes something of a devil's bargain, to be free of that suffering, and the price is seeing the world pass by around him. I couldn't remotely understand that as a kid, since I, like lots of teenagers, found myself in love with someone new about once a month, but having dealt with thirty years' worth of rollercoasters, depressions, and anxieties, there's a certain wisdom in checking out of the whole game altogether, even if it's a choice I couldn't, wouldn't make. That's not to say this is some kind of super-classic - I don't think it's *that* good. It feels like a product of its time in terms of how it's shot. And it's more than a little icky in some ways, like how both of its male leads are a couple of old, squidgy wrinklebags, while Emmanuelle Beart will probably live forever in my mind as the pinnacle of the phrase 'fresh-faced ingenue'. And no, knowing that she and Auteuil were married doesn't make that any more palatable (probably less, if anything). But it's the rare film that doesn't give you easy answers or make choices for you. And remarkably, that room to breathe means you have the room to change with it.

Yeah, he would be 37 when the contract expires.