Contentious C

I suppose I didn't make that clear enough; I have the free "upgrade", not the $20 ripoff one. If I wanted to do Survival Mode, I could have done the mod version years ago. Fishing is the dumbest RNG bullshit possible (how many different Zelda games have a better version of fishing in them? Yeesh), so it bored me from the word go. So really, the only included content that's "new" for me is Saints & Seducers, and...I'll get to that eventually I suppose. I thought "Rare Curios" was going to be something more than a couple of Oblivion tchotchkes and some Morrowind alchemy crap. This playthrough has only been salvaged by also installing Inigo for the first time, and letting him bail me out of a bunch of situations I couldn't have handled on my own. The changes to the load screens are decent, too. Probably helps that I have a bunch of other mods anyway that delay vampires & Dragonborn stuff to specific points, since it never made any sense to me to do a standard playthrough, where you hit Ustengrav sub-level-10 and then suddenly the Cultists are walking out of the fog and electrocuting you and entire towns.

Or for brevity's sake, Westworld.

Hey, it's Monday. You know the drill. It's DAY 300 (and counting) of Whatever the Hell It Is I'm Doing, Enough Already with the Invocation of Body Horror Concepts in Real Life Edition. Hot Garbage Be Cool - I knew this would be awful. I knew it, and I didn't heed the many calls that pointed out how bad it was, and I watched anyway. I hate myself. How did this even get made, anyway? Should it have been skipped because: A) It's poorly acted, poorly directed, poorly scripted, and almost entirely unfunny, B) it's pervasively racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and basically every other thing you can think of (I was going to say "at least it doesn't have pedophiles", but hey, James Woods), C) nobody gave a shit about the characters because it was far too long since the original, or D) all of the above? What in the actual fuck. Still not as bad as The Crow: Wicked Prayer or Seventh Son, though. Acceptable Lost Girls and Love Hotels - This...probably could have gone down a notch, but despite the scarcity of plot and characters who just drift in and out, there are some interesting shots here that make it a little more effective than your typical shitty indie movie. A lot of the quieter and crazier moments of the film do a good job of taking advantage of small rooms and the generally claustrophobic feel of a city full of so many people, people who fail to connect with each other and abscond to hotels to wring some pathetic bit of satisfaction from their lives. And so you're left (even moreso than usual) as the voyeur who peers into their weird, kinky bullshit and wonders if they'll ever get their collective shit together. Alexandra Daddario is more effective than you might otherwise expect as a broken, sweaty, screwed-up beauty who is escaping about 14 things at once, and despite the many, many, many, many bad sexual decisions she makes, she still carries a certain amount of functional (or perhaps willing) naïvete that makes you wonder how long she's got before her choices catch up with her. Strange movie to find on the back end of Hulu's catalog, and while it's not "good" in a lot of ways, the craft here is *just* good enough to overcome some of its other problems. Hotel - Point/counterpoint to the last movie. This was from 2013 and stars Alicia Vikander, and aside from the first 15 minutes and the last 15 minutes, I found it kind of insufferable. The premise is fairly ludicrous, and I say this having just watched Pig. But man, when Vikander wants to be a force of fucking nature, she is that and then some, and she is great in this, albeit in fits and starts. David Dencik is also really great at times here, but most of the rest of the film is flat, unless you have some oddball reason to think the premise is somehow cute or relatable. If you took the quality of acting here and added it to the quality of the cinematography from the last film, you could have had something really nice. Instead, they're both kinda failures, and they're both kinda interesting. Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness - Didn't like as much as the first one, but I appreciate the change of pace. Said more in the spoiler thread, but this is very much an Acceptable Movie. Tucker: The Man and His Dream && - Sort of a rewatch, as I know I've seen chunks of this several times over the years, but never the whole thing all the way through. Mostly I remembered it via the Simpsons parody episode where Homer bankrupts his brother's car company. And while I can do without Coppola's fucking nostalgia bullshit in general, at least the court case stuff at the end lifts this up a little. Then again, if you fuck up court scenes, you have no business directing traffic, let alone a movie. This has got to be the weirdest Dean Stockwell cameo I've seen, too; yes, significantly weirder than Blue Velvet, because at least he was *good* there. Martin Landau is pretty good here, but otherwise, if the story were any less crazy, it wouldn't keep anyone's attention. Rabid - Good to know we actually *did* do a Cronenberg planet for the last 2+ years. This is a pretty clear step down from the stuff he'd do eventually, but it has its moments, and Marilyn Chambers of all people drags this to watchability. The matter-of-factness to this is what really works compared to so many other zombie movies. It's not panic and madness; no, instead it's "Well, let's just pay some snipers time-and-a-half and get some squeegee guys out there, too, and we'll, uh, we'll clear up these zombies as they arrive, I guess. Never enough time to do it right but always enough time to do it again, eh?" Even the undead can't break the gears of bureaucracy. Hustlers - Pretty close to being an Awesome, but as ever, awfully tired of the movie-framed-as-news-story structure. The performances are pretty damn good across the board, even Lopez, who, after all, is just playing a True Neutral version of herself, rather than her actual Chaotic Evil alignment. And it's both damning and sympathetic to nearly everyone, since everyone is not just abused but also some kind of abuser as well. The writing is funny, and Lorene Scafaria just doesn't seem to drop the ball, even if the way it plays out feels like a distaff nod to Goodfellas and I don't like this anywhere near as much as Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. Awesome The Audition - I watched this mostly because of Nina Hoss and some batshit crazy poster on Kanopy that suggested this was her "best performance". I mean, c'mon, really? This, over Phoenix? Nah. Nope. Uh-uh. But she's still great; she spends a huge chunk of this movie perilously frozen between looks, just as liable to burst into a smile as into tears, and it isn't entirely clear why for quite a while. Eventually, though, her story unspools itself, and you begin to understand why she's so self-destructive and so insufferable to her music student (think Whiplash minus wanting to punch everyone in the whole film, save Melissa Benoist, in the face). But that understanding gets turned on its head, literally and metaphorically, by an absolutely nutso ending that leaves you wondering what the Hell you just watched. It would probably feel too surprising or somehow unearned to some people, but the more I thought about it, the more it turned into an understandable through line for a whole family of screwed-up overachievers.

I started a new game because...because apparently I'm completely out of my goddamned mind. Well, I also wanted to see the "new" content and so far, um, there is none? I mean, I can smith some new arrows, and that...is...the extent. Wow. Boring. I'm probably too low level to run off and do whatever Ri'saad cares about. Wasn't about to spend money on this fucking game yet again, either. Plus, this is a little bit of an unusual playthrough. I just, uh, don't have dragons. Bleak Falls Barrow? Nah. Farengar and Baalgruuf? Nah. I'm gonna be over here mixing potions for about 6 months, we'll worry about your dumbass civil war and vampires and freakout sessions later. I think I'll just make my way to literally every single Word Wall and learn them all safely first! Oh, hey, look, they put 3 skeletons in at each of those locations when you haven't spawned dragons yet. Hahahah, oh, those zany skeletons and their attacks, ho-ho, I'm awful spookied! Having shotgunned about 2 months' worth of Witcher 3 at the end of last year, I'm also realizing what a bush-league game Skyrim really is.

There's money in recognizing other sports also happen in the same buildings.

"On to Cincinatti...........'s owner." (j/k, Burrow clearly has that locked down if he wants)

I really hope a certain someone who was long part of the rumor mill isn't the actual casting for a certain male hero, as well. I'm sick of him being in everything and I think he's shit casting for the character to begin with.

I dunno.

Today's Semantle (96) was easy. Just think of the generic term for one of the 3 or 4 biggest pieces of shit you know, and you'll be on the right track!

Hope you have some of those stretchy purple pants the Hulk wears. Not really for your sake, though; mostly for ours.

Yeah. Movies. Monday. Stuff. We're here. It's Day 293 (and counting) of Movie Nonsense, Enough with the Period Pieces Edition. Hot Garbage Deep Water - What EVA said, except Tracy Letts is not the least bit entertaining in this film, because almost no one is. It's still only watchable when Ana de Armas seductively diddles herself, and even then, it's far more dull and dreary than it ought to be. Something is very, very, very, very, very wrong with your movie when the mid-credits outtake of a 7-year-old singing the Bee Gees or whatever in the back of a car is far and away the highlight of your movie. I haven't read Patricia Highsmith's books, so I wonder if this is a case of bad source material, bad adaptation, or the "aromatic" blend of both. Adrian Lyne is still kind of the right guy to make this sort of movie, though, as you can see him sort of going through all the old highlights, if you're familiar with his stuff. Otherwise, skip. A Good Woman - I thought about putting this in Acceptable for a minute or two, but even Oscar Wilde can't save this. It's just...ehhh, it's at best an overacted, uninteresting attempt at something Ivory/Merchant-ish without decent performances or noteworthy direction. For the most part, it just feels like the characters are huddled around so they can riff on the best bits of the script, rather than inhabiting a world of their own. Plus, I found myself wondering how much different this story might have been had Wilde been born in a more modern time; I think if he'd directed it himself, it'd still be funny, but it'd probably also be hilariously smutty and inappropriate, and I wonder when someone's going to have the good sense to lean into that for an adaptation of his. Acceptable Jack Goes Boating - I don't quite know what to think of this, except that I'm not going to watch it again to find out. Hoffman directed this as well as starring in it, and while I've never been as over the moon about his acting as other people were, he's good here, bottled up and clearly a strange, twitchy bastard the entire time, and you just wait for the top to come off, which it eventually does. The side drama of the two friends is believable and well-done and well-acted, but I think my problem with this is ultimately Amy Ryan. Well, it's not her, because I love her and she's never anything less than excellent, but she's probably not the right casting for this role. The character has some traumatic shit of her own to deal with, but you very much get the impression from the way she talks that, even without the events of the film, she was also just as strange and twitchy, and so it's hard to deconvolute the "new stuff that happened" from the "was always this way" parts of what you should take away from her. And putting Amy Ryan in a role where you're expecting her to kind of be a bit small and lack presence at times is a bit of a fail, even if she's a Hell of an actor. Body Heat - I have a pile of movies in my life that exist like this one, on the edges of my memories, where I think I've seen them or was subjected to bits of them when I was younger, but I never sat down to watch them. This feels a little rote as far as noirs go, and that's especially true having watched China Moon a few months ago. The latter movie is in no way better than this - if anything, it's a pale copy - but of course, even this movie is a copy, so after the torrid initial phases of the film, it kind of slows down and feels like it's about 10 minutes too long because you've seen all this before. But Lawrence Kasdan did have a couple of decent tricks up his sleeve that keep it a little unusual at times, like that totally oddball Ted Danson tapdance routine and the shots just before the big finale where everyone gets what's coming to them. And plus, the ending is one of those, "This is the ending, take it or leave it" kind of things you don't really get anymore. But it leans ultra-hard on Hurt & Turner and their chemistry, because it doesn't really have a ton else going for it. That said, it is probably the one and only time Kathleen Turner was even 10% as hot as everyone made her out to be in the 80s. Death on the Nile - I mostly want to punch Kenneth Branagh in the face for a multitude of reasons, but this is one of his less punch-worthy performances of late. I didn't see the other adaptation they did; I'm frankly a little surprised this got made, even, after that flopped so hard. But this isn't too bad. It's not exactly great, either, as ensemble movies are either just enough of everything in the right place, like Tombstone, or sort of rushed and over-stuffed, like this. And of course, if you've seen one Agatha Christie-inspired movie, you've seen them all, because they're all structured the same. On some level, you kind of find yourself wanting to just skip past all that and get to what's different. To the good is the beginning and the ending, which both give some detail and much-needed humanity to the characters. To the bad is some of the CGI, which makes you wonder how much COVID impacted this. Then again, one of the most egregious green-screens in the whole movie is one of our favorite cannibal, Armie Hammer, alone against the backdrop of a hotel, so you wonder, really, how fucking hard is it to get ONE SHOT on location? So, overall, this is unsurprisingly in the middle. Titane - *sigh* I know, I know. Should be higher, right? Well, it should, except for Vincent Lindon. Maybe it's the wrestling, maybe it's my needle phobia, maybe it's my general distaste for almost anything hyper-masculine, but watching some gross old guy cling to his fucked-up notion of who he's supposed to be is something I can do without. Plus, given the implications this movie makes about who he was and the choices he made, he's, well, he's not a good person, and it makes it that much harder to find a reason to support the redemption journey he takes. Agathe Rousselle is great, the visuals are great, the messaging is great, the themes are great, but having half the movie tied up with someone I couldn't relate to, or like, or do less than loathe, really, made this hard to appreciate. Maybe it will age better with subsequent viewings - whenever I actually work up the nerve for those, because YEEESH this is fucking intense. No wonder Cronenberg came out of retirement. Awesome Pig - I think this just squeaks its way into Awesome because it runs contrary to so many expectations. The first 20 or 30 minutes are more than a little ridiculous at times - "Hobo Anthony Bourdain Goes to Underground Waiter Fight Club to Track Down Prize Truffle Pig, Where People Pay a Month's Wages to Fight Him" has got to be the most ludicrous plot point ever in a movie played otherwise this straight. I couldn't agree more that this is one of Cage's best roles, though it just makes me wonder, "Why now?" How many of his other movies might have been improved with a little restraint from time to time? Is the rest of the film really noteworthy enough for him to suddenly show up and hit one out of the park? Maybe, but then again, maybe instead of playing up or down to the quality of the material so severely, he could, I don't know, do fewer fucking movies that are huge piles of shit. But anyway, this! This is just...not what you expect. Both this and Titane are top of the heap with respect to, "The less you know going in, the better." Opening and closing on the river, and that strange, beautiful, terrible monologue in the middle about earthquakes are good perspectives to keep; this kind of washes over you, just like it does everyone in the film, and no one has the control they think they do, no matter how tightly they grasp it. Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner Putney Swope - This is one of those movies that makes me feel like an asshole for even talking about it. What the Hell are you supposed to say about this that hasn't already been said, and probably in a handful of doctoral dissertations a year at that? But I don't think I've laughed this hard at a movie in years. I was a guy who loved Mad Men and still thinks it's a great TV show, but here was this, almost 40 years prior, being a million percent more honest and believable than that show ever was about what those fuckers were and are still doing. It's a good reminder that D. Boon was right; let the products sell themselves. So, I guess I don't really need to talk about this movie; it sells itself, too.

My knee is barking like crazy at me. Not sure if it's the extra squatting or the leg press, but something in there is not great. I can probably work around it, but not 100% sure how. My shoulders, on the other hand, have finally revealed their true evil nature and shown me the real path to pain and suffering. I did some of Arnold's lateral raises leaning into a 45-degree bench, and even a 15-lb weight made my arms fucking SCREAM in the first 20-40 degrees of motion. I don't know if that means I completely fucked my supraspinatus or something else, but I think I can safely say it's not my goddamned rotator cuff. Holy God that hurt - easily the single worst gym-related pain I've ever felt.

When is this board getting a downvote function?

Hopefully it stays that way and turns into Jumbo/Misawa circa '91, instead of Jumbo/Kobashi circa '91.

Really sucks for Justyn Ross. To show out like he did in the championship game against Alabama (and I saw a lot of his games prior to that, he was just getting better as the season progressed) and then have what seems like everything literally break against him for 2 years and end up undrafted is pretty awful. There's a part of me that hopes he gets to play so he can get some money out of his time, but most of the things I've seen about it suggest it's the doctors who oversaw him dropping straight out of the draft entirely. Really shitty situation.

6 more of those, please.

I think I watched that before I knew who he was. Like Deadwood needs any more reasons to be rewatched.

Despite some of the few earlier responses to it, I would say Pam & Tommy is worth checking out. It's ultimately quite sympathetic to everyone involved, no matter how shitty some of their behaviors are. The performances are mostly great, especially Lily James. And while I'm usually against typecasting when possible, the world needs Coked-Out Nick Offerman ALL THE TIME. Best of all Offermans. One thing that kept taking me out of it, though, was how badly they used their music choices. A huge chunk of the 90s hits they used were songs that came out *after* the events covered in their timeline, which was just sloppy as Hell. I mean, one of the first ones they dropped was "Steal My Sunshine", which didn't even come out till '99.

It was the What's Going On? but whatever. I routinely get close to 200 words just because I type fast and think of a lot of words, go with the "throw lots at the wall and see what sticks" method. But did you mean 89 or 90? 89 wasn't too bad. 90, on the other hand, spat out my personal best of 4! "rare" words within the top 1000!

Except for all the people who will eventually catch COVID from him.

What was the other funny scene you're referring to? The ending was obviously one. But this isn't even the most bizarre thing about the movie. There's a bartender who talks to Batfleck about 10 minutes into the film. The name of the guy they cast for the role? Sam Malone.

Bucks/Celtics is going to be one of those bowling shoe-ugly late 90s defensive slugfests. Pat Riley and Jeff Van Gundy are probably going to spend most of the series at home with a bottle of lotion and some Kleenex.

I think it's more like a poker analogy: if you can't spot the ghost in the room, it's because you're it. Bound to fit in their cases.

Yeah, I saw there was a "making of" movie that might be interesting to watch. But that's got to be one of the more compelling tidbits from it, so you may have just spoiled it for me. Just makes the whole movie that much better, if anything, and certainly explains why Cosmatos is a no-name.

Hey, look, Monday again. It's Day 286 (and counting) of some stuff no one else cares about, Curt McGirt Is Wrong as Usual Edition. Hot Garbage The Opposite of Sex - Here's another one of those, "This is somebody's favorite movie and I already know I hate this person without meeting them" kind of movies. Just the Most Tedious of Tedious Narration that drags along a flaccid script that might have made a few 14-year-olds laugh in 1998 but is in fact lifeless and brainless. None of the performances are any good, except maybe Lisa Kudrow, and the story is flimsy and ridiculous and gets a completely undeserved ending, given that the whole thing is jam-packed full of dumbasses and narcissists. Anyone nostalgic for this movie needs to grow up and admit they are just nostalgic for Christina Ricci's boobs, because I can't imagine any other reason why someone would sit through this more than once, and I certainly wouldn't suffer through it again for that. Fuck right off with this. The Ugly Truth - And fuck right off with Katherine Heigl's entire career too, for that matter. Has she ever been good in anything? If there is even the most faded, gray-like-a-corpse silver lining to the idea that tentpole franchises are killing off movies, it's that hopefully, hopefully, just maybe, if we're lucky, fewer of these utterly pointless rom-coms will exist along the way. Or at least they'll exist only on the back end of Amazon's disgusting monopoly on everything ever released, instead of ending up in an actual theater where people might make the mistake of paying to see something like it. I could actually talk about the movie, I suppose, but why flog the flog used to flog the flog that flogged the dead horse of rom-coms we have all already seen a kajillion times? Fuck right off with THIS! Frances Ferguson - OK, maybe don't completely fuck right off with this, but come back when it's a real idea, instead of about a quarter of one. Tedious Narration is not, in fact, made less tedious when Nick Offerman reads it! Kaley Wheless, who you've probably never heard of, is in practically every scene of this, and I can understand why this made at least a couple of waves at film festivals, because she does completely nail her character's state of mind; her delivery is low-key, but so understated that it's rendered even more withering as a result. And boy does she loathe, well, her entire life, pretty much. It's actually surprising, in fact, that Wheless hasn't been cast in about 12 other things since then, because she's really good here. Unfortunately, she's effectively the only good thing here, as it doesn't feel like there's enough development with respect to anything else - the plot, the characters, the sense of time and place, anything - to make you care, aside from the latest annoyed reaction she has to whoever is irritating her at any given moment. Dirty Work - And I guess don't fuck off entirely with this, either. Far from the worst SNL cast member movie, but far from the best, too. Actually, I don't know what would be the best, unless I just default and say Wayne's World. But if you liked Norm's humor, there's going to be probably just enough about this that you'll be OK with it. But man, ENOUGH with the hooker jokes. There are other things that are funny! I dug the running gags with getting thrown into dumpsters or out into the streets, and it's kinda neat that they staged a production of Don Giovanni just to completely take the piss out of it, but really, it's almost OK Norm's dead so I never have to hear him make another hooker joke as lame as these were. Acceptable Gunfight at the O.K. Corral - I had a hankering to rewatch Tombstone, so I watched this first. It's... all right. There are just a lot of much better Westerns than this, and I can't say I like Burt Lancaster. So, this is basically the Kirk Douglas show, and that's usually enough to carry it along. But it's certainly no history lesson, as it hardly has any details right about the shootout itself. What this *does* have, though, is quite possibly the stupidest original song in all of the 20th century, and that's covering some major ground. They just keep bringing it back and rehashing it, and it made me want to hit the mute button nearly every time. Luckily, the guy playing Doc Holliday was pretty good. This seems to be a theme. Lucky - This was also mostly all right. Harry Dean Stanton is pretty good in it, but when is he not? I liked most of the script and the characters, but the big discussion that caps the movie just feels unearned in a way. It's too on the nose, and everyone's reaction to it is hard to believe, as everyone gets wistful and brotherly when the actual content of the dialogue is the kind of stuff that sounds like it ought to have been shouted at each other with exasperation and a bit of self-defeat. But the movie doesn't have the nerve to sever any of the ties it's shown us along the way. It's a weird cap to a movie that otherwise has a decent collection of strange moments worth exploring. I kind of see the comparisons someone else made to The Straight Story, and I kind of don't, mostly because that movie had a better grasp of what it needed to say without literally using its main character to say it. The Northman - Spoilered again for newness... Awesome Tombstone && - Naturally a rewatch, because I'm pretty sure I saw this in the theaters when it came out. It might be impossible to make another movie like this ever again. Not that it's *that* well-written or *that* well-directed (though it's awfully close in both of those departments), but getting all these pieces pulling in the same direction so successfully and managing to wring either the best or second-best performances out of nearly every single actor in the cast is just staggering to watch, even today. And since I hadn't seen it in forever, there were familiar faces I hadn't even remembered: Terry O'Quinn! Paula Malcomson!! Billy Bob Thornton~!~!~! There are plotlines that I wish had received more attention, like having Michael Rooker on screen more often or doing something more to develop the Priestley/Billy Zane subplot I never even noticed before, but there's only so much time you can invest in this kind of thing before it wears out its welcome, and this never does. And goddamn, the ONE thing it has to get right, it gets EXCEEDINGLY right, as the shootout is one of the best choreographed pieces of mayhem there is, and it all hinges on something so small as one drunken jerk winking at a dipshit he doesn't like. Val Kilmer was robbed; in fact, you could have swapped out every nomination for The Fugitive at that year's Academy Awards with something from this movie and it would have been more fair. That speech at the end is also kind of my idea of what love is supposed to be. Especially if I ever get to say it to Dana Delany myself. Good Time - I'd watched maybe the first 15 minutes of this before, so this wasn't new and wasn't a rewatch, either. Gotta say, I really didn't care for Uncut Gems much at all, but this worked for me, largely because it's a movie that leaves you with so much to think about after it's done. Pattinson's great in this, but it's really the scenario and the script that push this to another level. That line of "Don't get confused. It's just gonna make it worse for me" is one of those utterly chilling moments in a movie where someone has done one awful, awful thing after another and yet you just know you'll watch them sink further into the quagmire because they know no other way to be. And the level of criticism thrown at our institutions and social problems is just massive: a turtles-all-the-way-down daisy chain of abusers and the abused, of those with a little more power than the next person and those who get run over by that power, over and over again. You could say the ending is good for Nick, but to me, it still felt like a defeat, a sad and lonely finish for someone pushed around and mistreated who just ends up somewhere where, like so many of society's problems, he can be conveniently ignored instead of understood. I almost want to watch this again just to see what I missed. But holy shit is it 32 flavors of crazy.