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Contentious C

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  1. I know people do the "they were still alive?" thing when celebrities die, but when he "officially" dies, I'm going to cite this as evidence he's been dead since the pandemic.
  2. Welp. Notting Hill - Of course, I've watched this before, as I do about once a year or so, once it lands safely on one streaming service or another long enough to remember I haven't seen it in a while. But somehow I hadn't written about it during a prior rewatch. I go back and forth as to whether I prefer this or When Harry Met Sally... - I think the latter is better-written and has the virtue of brevity, but I also feel like I identify a lot more with William Thacker than I do Harry Burns (even if I probably come off a lot more like Harry than William considering my attitude toward life and society). But really the smaller roles make this, especially Tim McInnerny and Gina McKee. It's probably the least heavy lifting Julia Roberts ever had to do, and of course that makes it one of her most believable roles in the process. Probably the last really, really great rom-com, before the genre became too self-aware and stopped being enjoyable. The Devils - Yeah, that's quite the transition in content! This, uh...well, I didn't see the British/BFI cut, but I don't know that I necessarily missed much by missing Vanessa Redgrave diddling a charred thigh bone. To be honest, Oliver Reed was Yet Another Dude I Don't Appreciate, but this might have been the movie that set me straight on that to some extent. I still don't understand in the least why *everyone* was so relentlessly horny for him, but be that as it may, it's still played well enough. And I love Redgrave in...well, just about everything. But anyway, yeah, I have a hard time personally seeing why this remains "controversial", but that lack of shock is very much a case of preaching to the choir (haha) with me as the audience, because its opinions on religion don't differ a great deal from my own. And it's also pretty delicious to see the degree to which this wound people up when the parallels to a certain end-of-life story are rather obvious. I don't know when or if I'll go out of my way to watch it again, unless I get my hands on the less-edited copy, but everyone with a genuinely critical eye owes it to themselves to see it at least once. Million billion stars. Hot Boyz - SPEAKMANIA, CHAPTER FOUR! It's telling that the people who think guns are badass but don't actually know how to handle them are capable of gunning down dozens of other perps without taking so much as a flesh wound on their side. Hootie-who knew firearms worked that way? The same people who have a movie called Hot Boyz where the main character is named Kool, evidently. Seriously, the first hour of this makes next to no sense (like, you've had 10 years of Law & Order episodes by now, The Sopranos, Homicide: Life on the Streets, and you can't figure out people have to be read their charges?), and the last half-hour is such an embarrassing pile of self-aggrandizing bullshit that I would have been less offended if Master P had just filmed himself sucking his own dick for the full 30 minutes. It's basically just an entire film full of callbacks to other scenarios in other, better movies, where, in between lines of coke, our dear writer/director must have thought to himself, "You know what this movie really needs? More karate, more carnage, more craziness, more of my licensed apparel: that's the stuff. Just watch until everyone sees my joint." *SNOOOOORT* But somehow, *somehow*, the two car chase scenes in the movie are actually rather good. The Fast and the Furious came out a year and a half after this and didn't have stunts as good as this. The mind boggles. Zack & Miri Make a Porno - Just when you need to set things right again from watching total garbage, you watch...Kevin Smith? Eh, no, no, no, no, no. Maybe YOU do, but I fucking don't. Gotta say, the first 30 minutes or so of this worked for me, and then, meh. It just collapses under its own lame need to be like Every Other Rom-Com and give the same stupid ending, except with the added bonus of Smith's weirdly puritanical, highly insecure fucking nonsense about how it matters, apparently, if certain Ps went into certain Vs or not, instead of the adults in the movie, I dunno, ACTING LIKE ADULTS. For a guy who makes so many movies about sex shit, he is a motherfucking fruitcake when it comes to understanding actual relationships. Too bad literally anyone else didn't write the back half. Street Knight - SPEAKMANIA: EPISODE FIVE~! (Yeah, I know, chapter, episode, we're not sticking with a theme here, just deal.) The utterly goddamned ridiculous dedication at the end of the film almost justifies sitting through the rest of this dishwater-quality trash. Really, guys? You think your movie where you try (and fail) to innovate new ways to blow people's heads off is going to raise awareness for the need for GANG TRUCES? What in the sandwich fuck. This is massively overedited, badly paced, badly acted, badly written, badly shot total bollocks; the only reason I wouldn't go lower with a rating is because, hey, it isn't as bad as the particularly dreadful Side Roads, in that at least a few actors have some chemistry with one another, and the boom mic is out of every shot. But, damn, if this isn't quite possibly the stupidest Xerox-of-a-Xerox-of-a-Xerox (don't sue me like you did BoJack, guys) of the Die Hard plot imaginable, then I don't know what is. Former cops somehow have enough resources to buy up real estate and use high-quality equipment but not enough resources (or sense, evidently) to come up with a less complicated way to make money (like there aren't a million more-or-less legal scams running in the U.S. on a daily basis). Oh, but revenge! Yeah, sure, that plot line is so well-developed, its abs have abs. /s Once again, Speakman's true nemesis remains his insistence on wearing pants (and button-up shirts, for that matter) that make him look like an old guy in a Seinfeld episode.
  3. Is The Vanishing the original or the remake? They're as disparate in quality as Insomnia 1997 and Nolan's ill-advised, pointless retread, so, watch if original, delete if Jeff Bridges. Being There andOn the Waterfront are the only two other must-watches (though I find almost anything from the non-Kurosawa/Ozu end of the 50s to be a little dull). Le Samourai didn't do that much for me, either, but Melville's stuff is pretty clinical and blunt, which may not hit the same in an era when tons of directors go for that style.
  4. I went over it a grand total of twice while in the area and it kind of scared the shit out of me both times. And then the "why" happens. Thanks, Capitalism.
  5. We got a guy a little like that, well...several on squats, but the one who makes me want to punt him into space makes a bunch of noise, you can't understand anything he says if he says something, ties up 2 machines at once, and does this lame-ass tempo bullshit with 80% of his "workout". But then has fucking chicken legs and does shitty taco squats with no weight and bad range. At least he doesn't use the Smith.
  6. Draymond Green and AT&T can go fuck themselves.
  7. I did some of the Technico Special today for incline. But only 3 sets and only 150 lbs. I think I'm going to keep doing it for a while instead of dumbbells. A couple of years ago, I got up to 200 on the pin press version of that; wouldn't mind pushing closer to that number again with proper ROM. Did some of Arnold's old lateral raises where you lay on an incline bench and swing the weight in front of you, too, and those felt a bit better today than the behind-the-back cable raises I'd been doing lately.
  8. Might have 2 with the Alabama game pace of play.
  9. Well, the real bonus of the Smith is that it lets you safely overload things you may not otherwise. You can much more safely overload a military press or an incline bench there than you could with dumbbells or a barbell. For whatever reason, my mid-back is not great at stabilizing those, especially OHPs. I guess I could try push presses, but I feel a lot better about using the Smith for overloading that. It's a total game changer for lunges, too. Again, the capacity for overload is higher *because* stability is taken out of the equation to a large extent. It's not like I don't also do squats or Bulgarians or something else to get my adductors and hips working. But being able to really focus on glutes or quads or getting deeper than normal is really helpful. Basically, the Smith machine is cereal: part of a balanced breakfast, not the only thing you should gorge yourself on.
  10. Kentucky about to choke it away... couldn't happen to a nicer coach.
  11. The real March Madness is seeing closed captioning butcher, "Oh, Champs-Elysees" into, "Oh, Sean's ABC".
  12. Well. This ought to be strange. Starman - Probably the first John Carpenter I ever saw but one of the ones I'd seen that I remembered the least clearly (likely caught bits & pieces on HBO or something when I was maybe 7). Not at all what I was expecting; one Letterboxd reviewer referred to it as "E.T. for adults" and I think that's about right, both good and bad. I think it just feels a little too formulaic for me to think it's that special: of course there's comical misunderstanding with the alien, of course there's weird sex stuff with the alien who resembles the dead husband, of course they bring up the no-babies thing so it gets fixed at the earliest possible convenience. Some of the visuals are pretty good - certainly better than some of the similar stuff that would keep coming out over the course of the decade, like Cocoon or Flight of the Navigator. But if it has staying power, it's because it's an interesting meditation on grief; makes you wonder why Carpenter took it on. But, I don't love it; leave me in Team They Live, I suppose. Side Roads - Heyo! Here's a hardcore contestant for the WOAT Title if there ever was one. Jeff motherfucking Speakman rocking the porniest porn stache I've ever seen in a movie that (at least gauging by its poster/cover art) seems to want to be a sleazy late-night Skinemax type but instead is just the most 68-degree-bathwater of lukewarm, lame-ass neo-noirs you can imagine. Having watched Kiss Me Deadly recently, you can picture that movie strangling this movie until it's dead and then dumping it in a lake; it's that bad. In fact, it almost looks - in terms of the way it's shot - like the director wanted to make an actual porno, couldn't find anyone to go along with it, and then just settled for this instead. Plus, the boom mic makes a cameo in one scene and a Life Net makes its own later on. Is this as bad as The Crow: Wicked Prayer? Maybe? But when you adjust for talent, production value, and expectations, this was in a sewage ditch before it ever began. It's probably more comparable to A Better Way to Die, which is a movie that feels like Scott Wiper saw this movie and thought he could do a better job with it (but couldn't, actually). Slaughterhouse Rock - Here's one for you sickos: Jeff Speakman's Best Film of 1988! Because Side Roads was the other one, so, duh. Is this good? Not really. The main actor is the son of one of the producers and is quite possibly the best non-Trump argument against nepotism any of us will ever see. Just wooden and terrible beyond belief. But the visual style here is a LOT better than you'd expect from something this low-budget. Granted, they were clearly stealing from a lot of far superior horror films, since the 80s are littered with them, but at least they picked the right things to steal from. Plus, Toni Basil, she of the Weirdest Career in Hollywood, makes an appearance, and DeVo does the soundtrack, even if it is a low water mark for them musically. I'm sure plenty of you have already seen this and have stronger opinions than I do, but hey, it's not a total waste of 90 minutes. Fallen Angels (1985) - This is, uh, NOT, I repeat NOT!! the Wong Kar-Wai movie. Much like Side Roads, you have to do some well-placed digging on the Interwebs to find this, but find it you can. It's a very early documentary about the porn industry as it transitioned into VHS, and, hey, it's surprisingly good. I landed on it by seeing a review of Serial Mom, forgetting that John Waters directed that and loved casting Traci Lords in things, then after looking at her filmography on Letterboxd, I realized they actually include *ALL* of her films, no matter how legal they are. Ick. This, strangely enough, is one of the only ones from the era that is actually legal, because she only appears briefly for the premiere of one of her movies. But that's not the biggest reason this might be relevant. It's also evidently a big influence on Boogie Nights, down to lifting shots from this. It became pretty apparent as well when Hal Freeman's case is discussed, and one of the women in his films gets threatened by the police with having her kids taken away (a direct line to Julianne Moore's character arc, you may recall). But yeah, otherwise, it's exactly as depressing and fucked-up and wrong and ugly and horrible as you might expect. Not much has changed in that department, or, at least, not enough. Horrible Bosses - Hey, here's some of the usual stupid garbage as a palate cleanser, right? Big shock that Brett Ratner produced this shambolic turd. And why is Jason Bateman famous, again? I mean, I get it, Arrested Development, but why did he even land that gig after doing a bunch of straight garbage in the 90s? Charlie Day and Jennifer Aniston are the only parts of this that aren't awful, mostly because it just doesn't give Colin Farrell time to really flesh out his potentially much funnier role. No, let's spend 40% of our time with Kevin fucking Spacey; that's a decision that's held up well in retrospect. Otherwise it's just bouncing from one stupid moment where you want to punch Jason Sudeikis in the face to the next.
  13. Ehhhhhhhhhhh. This has got to be the least interested I've ever been in an Alien movie. Granted, the last one being so fucking grim and smug did no favors there. I liked the metatext of Prometheus but they really need to do something new here. Beats the shit out of me what that is - different scale? Different stakes? A better look at why we're doing so much dumb bullshit off-planet that risking this kind of thing seems sensible? This is probably going to break my streak of seeing them in theaters since # 3.
  14. Don't worry, his wife is older than you.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. I've always preferred the term, "arboreal bukkake".
  19. The WHOOOSHing sound you heard earlier today was Geno Smith's sphincter unclenching.
  20. 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.
  21. Porzingis coming off the Celtics bench in a suit looks like a movie mobster you'd call "The Giant".
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