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Contentious C

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  1. Pretty sure they both did. I also kinda thought Detroit had a prayer tonight in Boston, since we were missing Horford, Hauser, Holiday, & Tatum, and Porzingis was coming back from an injury on the second night of a back-to-back (not to mention Brown & White being a bit dinged up). Won by 25, DWhite had a triple-double, Detroit didn't win a single quarter of the game.
  2. And TODAY's version of this version was finding Side Roads, a *JEFF SPEAKMAN* joint pre-The Perfect Weapon where he has a porn stache that would make Harry Reems jealous, and yet despite its cover art looking like straight-up Zalman King softcore smut nonsense, it's instead some bullshit wannabe neo-noir with exactly the level of quality you'd expect from it, given that it's starring Jeff Speakman. Truly a How Did This Get Made if there ever was one. I've been watching a ton of Dropout TV lately, especially Game Changer & Make Some Noise, and I swear, the overwhelming majority of Brennan Lee Mulligan's villain monologuing and Jess McKenna's musical improv would put this *actual movie script* so badly to shame that, had those shows existed in the 80s, the writers of the film would have hung themselves rather than make the movie. And yet...here we are, stuck with it. It's like there's really no bottom to the amount of indigestible trash someone else thought would serve as entertainment.
  3. Ten games, anyway. Butler had one of the all-time worst shooting performances in a title game in the final and basically handed them the championship. Not that I'm really complaining, as a part-time UConn fan.
  4. I've always preferred the term, "arboreal bukkake".
  5. The WHOOOSHing sound you heard earlier today was Geno Smith's sphincter unclenching.
  6. I'm pushing closer to 195 myself these days, but then again, I'm trying to and have the frame for it anyway. Leg day was weird in a good way: heavy squats (that's only 225 for me, but DAAAMN my mid back is not equipped to handle squats that well anymore!) for 3x5, then hack squats at 290, 3x10, with a 3-second pause near the bottom to eliminate any stretch reflex. Then back to the squat rack for 3x8 at 135 to fry what was left of my glutes at that stage, then Nordics. Push was pretty light-ish because I was pressed for time (hahah). 3x8 of the 65s for incline dumbbell, then 4x8,7,5,4 of Smith machine military presses which left me with a good crick in my neck. Some super-ROM laterals, some tricep extensions. Today was Pull, and I thought I was going to do some crazy bullshit. Instead I did differently-crazy bullshit. Instead of 3x5 at 185 followed by 3x15 at 135 backoffs, I just did 5x7 of the 185. They were...pain. Glorious, glorious, back-growing, slab-o-meat pain. Curls and some underhanded lat pulldowns (which I'm now doing at 135 lbs for reps, a previously unthinkable number for me) fried the rest. It's probably a little scary that Push day used to be my favorite because I could get through it and not be so sore, but now Pull day is my favorite because I can throw up the Big Numbers AND be super sore afterwards. I'm a sick fuck. And an increasingly jacked one.
  7. Porzingis coming off the Celtics bench in a suit looks like a movie mobster you'd call "The Giant".
  8. Not as fast as he can knock up an owner's girlfriend, but...pretty fast.
  9. Please, Aaron Rodgers. Please take that next job. Please. Do me a favor and sink two ships at once, buddy.
  10. Dulcolax is her Dragon Shout name. Except she doesn't shout with her Voice.
  11. Man, there are a lot of buses in this county, but not nearly enough of them running over my shitty neighbors. Also great to complain multiple times to the building management about it, only to have them, as of 2 hours ago, talk to me like I was fucking crazy and just making it all up. Like I don't recognize people's voices after 2 years or can't tell when things are literally hitting the shared wall between bedrooms. Let's just say the email I sent to that management douchebag's boss was...lengthy.
  12. Needs a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
  13. I wonder if they'll feed PC to South Carolina as a 1/16 just to cut down on travel and also give them a little bit of a "Hey, we won! Aw fuck, we won..." moment.
  14. I watched stuff. Who knows what precious opinions will be shared next! Pearl - OK, fine, I watched it after all; my Paramount subscription was about to expire. Turns out I should have picked something else, because this was on Kanopy or some nonsense instead. Ah well; next time, American Gigolo. But yeah, every bit as boring as X, maybe worse. I think we understood after the first 14 times she was at loggerheads with her mom that bad things were going to happen eventually! We get it! Quit padding your movie with dumb bullshit just to hit a longer runtime! The monologue was fine, but...otherwise, waste of time. But, I suppose they got 2 films out of one film budget, so Kid Cudi made his money back, or something? And the guy they cast as the new Superman does look an awful lot like a de-aged, taller Henry Cavill, so probably a good call there, too. A Place in the Sun - Now here we go. I think I grew up with so much of the "Liz Taylor in the tabloids" nonsense of the 80s that it's difficult for me to appreciate who she was. Then, I watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? about 15 years ago, and that naturally blew me out of the water and up to somewhere best labeled 'ionosphere'. This, on the other hand, was probably the first time I'd seen "Elizabeth Taylor, Dazzling Superstar" and OK, you got me, she might very well have been one of the prettiest women to ever grace the screen. And putting her opposite Montgomery Clift - it's no wonder those two were so close while he was alive, because you can tell right away they have that *something* that makes a movie like this work. Of course, everything else about the story is...some of the most ass-backwards, insane, what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-people kind of stuff that naturally looks that way now because so much has changed in 70 years. I read Sister Carrie in college and have thought ever since that Dreiser was a judgmental fuckface on his best day, and this plot doesn't really make me change my mind, but you do have to start wondering how different the world would be if the pill had been invented 20 or 30 years earlier. The most awful thing this movie does, really, is turn Shelley Winters into a pestering, nagging, horrible shrew (a role she'd end up revisiting about once every 11 years) just because she expects someone, anyone, to do the right thing in a society full of people who literally cannot, will not say OUT LOUD what the right thing is. Maybe that's what Dreiser was trying to say all along: the real American tragedy is our pathetic need to cling to puritanical bullshit despite its place as a see-through fig leaf, instead of speaking plainly and facing difficult truths. I don't know. Movie's pretty good, though, especially the acting. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Yeah, it was Classics week around here, kinda, crossing things off the ol' Letterboxd watchlist. Man, I wish I could say, "the past was really fucked up!" but hey, we're still fucked up, and YOU are fucked up if you think going back to times like this would make us better! Actually, who the Hell am I kidding? This movie is about sugar babies, for Christ's sake: it's as 2020s as a film could be! I should have watched Shiva Baby as a double feature with this. Funny how much more stuff got binned for this, since Peppard's character is gay in the novella and Lula loses a baby (who evidently never exists here). But hey, why not talk about a 13-year-old marrying an OLD MAN like that's normal and put Mickey Rooney in yellowface? Sure! That's cool! Go for it! Ugh. But this is another stellar case where it's best to ignore the time-specific details and focus more on the tone and the acting. There's plenty of Capote's dialogue to pick it up, and the scene where Lula finds out about Fred is Audrey Hepburn on full display; you could call it overdone, but to me, it worked better than any other moment she had in the film. Evidently, she found the role difficult since she was far more introverted than Holly, but I think the introvert is on display in that dark room. Plus, the ending and Peppard's speech are all-timers that get at the heart of why people are still so screwed-up. Yeah, more great acting, ignore the racism and grossness. Tiptoes - After talking about Freeway a while ago, I had to indulge my morbid curiosity and sit through this. And I gotta say, weird. OK, some of the disdain directed its way is deserving; when Peter Dinklage is *right there* in your cast, you really don't need Gary Oldman front-and-center (especially when McConaughey had already been in enough rom-coms to this point to be a star, and so casting Oldman as a top-billed guy wasn't entirely necessary). But...people seem hell-bent on criticizing this as somehow particularly insensitive to its subject matter, when, aside from a few lines, it's really not that at all. Say, does anyone remember all the times we talked about Nerd Blackface? Oh, I'm sorry: I forgot, most of the nation seemed totes-McGotes fine with The Big Bang Theory motherfucking CONSTANTLY engaging in broad, offensive stereotypes, because those could be anyone, right? Give it 13 years on TV and a bunch of annoying spin-offs, right? Please. 90 minutes of this movie does more to engage and get people to think about its characters than that show ever did. But sure, let's pretend this is cinematic arsenic. Is this a good movie? Well, no. It's not even close. It isn't funny, it isn't dramatic, it's more than a bit all over the place, and the ending is equal parts telegraphed and befuddling (maybe that's the 'theatrical cut' nature of it that Matthew Bright complained about, maybe not). I'm sure Chad Everett and Brian J. Anderson shared a moment together during their scenes to commiserate about how far they were from Mullholland Dr. after only two years. But this probably isn't as utterly terrible, nor as crassly offensive, as it's been portrayed for the last 20 years, either. Not as bad as The Crow: Wicked Prayer, is what I'm saying. Bottoms - Hey, let's take every over-the-top moment from Booksmart and turn it up to...not quite 69, because not everyone gets some in this movie? But close? Gotta say, though, I don't think I've seen a comedy that was quite this willing to be as committed to a bit, no matter how too-far-gone or how cringe-worthy certain parts of that could end up being, and I think that's to its credit. You can't really do Yet Another Teen Comedy, But Make It Raunchy and have that fly unless you actually distinguish yourself, and the sheer absurdity of the jokes they run out there is Olympian in stature, if not always in quality. It doesn't hurt that I love Ayo Edebiri, either. Rachel Sennett's pretty great, too. But the real scene-stealer is the kid who resembles Justice Smith, but manages to out-act Justice Smith inside of his first 30 seconds of screen time, leading me to wonder, why the FUCK does anyone cast Justice Smith in anything? I already talked about Dune, go read that, too, I guess.
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