LOL.

Yesterday I mentioned that I had watched the latest installment of the Knives Out franchise of films. This morning I forgot who played Father Jud (Josh O'Connor) I got an interesting result returned.

Sit back and enjoy...

What's even better? They got Daniel Craig to watch it...

BEIGNET BLANC! BWAH HA HA HA HAAAAA!

And I'm dead.

I finally got around to watching the third installment of the Knives Out trilogy: Wake Up Dead Man, and really enjoyed it. I know many people are saying that it eclipsed the second film but isn't as good as the first. Probably true. Though, upon rewatching it, I've grown more and more fond of Glass Onion. I think it did a very good job of adding some depth to Benoit Blanc, and the cast was sublime. Especially Janelle Monáe, who I don't know as an actor but a musician. She was phenomenal playing a character playing a character. You wouldn't think that somebody with such little acting experience could have pulled that off so beautifully, but she did.

As with the past movies, Wake Up Dead Man has a stacked cast, all of whom are flawlessly cast and give a great performance. You already know that Daniel Craig, Josh Brolin, Jeremy Renner, Andrew Scott, Jeffrey Wright, Jeremy Renner, and GLENN CLOSE are going to kill it... but Mila Kunis holds her own as a police chief and Josh O'Connor in the lead role as Father Jud does not falter scene after scene...

Basically... assistant priest Father Jud is suspected of murdering the charismatic head priest at an upstate New York parish. The local police chief calls in master detective Benoit Blanc to solve the mystery and an interesting case unfolds.

If you liked previous installments of Knives Out then you will probably like this one, which is a bit darker in tone. Writer/director Rian Johnson knows how to craft a good mystery (which makes the cancelation of Poker Face all the harder to take), so I hope Netflix isn't finished with the franchise just yet. This film could have used more backstory for Benoit Blanc, and I am looking forward to that possibility in future installments.

If we're lucky enough to get any.

I'm going to be stockpiling my posts for a couple weeks because I've got a trip coming up but, no worries, I'm stockpiling bullets too... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Shoresy! YES! The new season of Shoresy is dropping for Christmas! IT'S THE MIRACLE WE NEED RIGHT NOW! I've grown to love this show almost as much as Ted Lasso...

I seriously hope that they find a way to continue keeping this show alive.

   
• Boosted Again! Because I am totally fucked if I ever get COVID with my screwed up lungs, I got my tenth booster yesterday. It only seems prudent since I'm going to be traveling and hanging out with loads of people in crowded spaces. So... can somebody please remind me when I'm dying again? I was told I'd be dead within three to six months the first time I got vaccinated. Then I was told I was definitely going to die with each new booster I got. But... nothing. Even worse though, I am still not a lizard person or a 5G relay, as promised by all the conspiracy theorists.

   
• Rolled! There's epic. Then there's this...

Rick Astley is still making music, and released a new album two years ago. He's still got it.

   
• Justice? Every fucking day it seems as though Trump is pardoning another criminal who totally deserves to be serving time for their crimes. Why? And, more importantly, why isn't his base calling him on it? I thought this was supposed to be the "tough on crime" movement. But, alas, that's apparently not the case.

   
• More Krypto! I was going to pass on the James Gunn Superman movie art book because it's only 176 pages, and the Marvel books run 350+ pages... so I thought it would be lacking. But I love the film, Geeks of Doom gave it a great review, and it was on sale, so I bought it. A really gorgeous book, and I'm glad to have it...

Needs more Krypto though! Heck, it could have all been Krypto! Where's that book?

   
• Blame Game! This is a terrific video. Why can't we all just be happy for consensual adults finding each other and making each other happy? Why are we always looking for somebody to blame for absolutely everything? And why are our LGBTQ+ brothers, sisters, and others so often where the blame gets placed? I wouldn't trade my LGBTQ+ friends for anything. Any one of them means more to me than any fifty bigots who would try to tear them down. Any hundred. Any thousand.

Just let people play the hand they're dealt the best they can and find their bliss... just as we're all doing.

   
And now to pack my suitcase...

Turns out the second trailer for Project Hail Mary is even better than the first.

And, heaven help me, this may actually be the movie which has me heading to a theater come March...

I'm more than a little shocked that the trailers are spoiling some of the things from the book that were kinda designed to be a surprise... but it still looks fun enough that it may not matter.

It's dreary and raining buckets here, but I'm not going to let that get me down... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Dating! I know. I know. Playdate got savaged in the reviews and is generally considered a bad movie. But I loved it! Alan Ritchson's character is hilariously random...

This is the kind of off-the-wall stuff that makes Amazon Prime worth the price of admission.

   
• NEWSFLASH: Pasta at Twice the Price? Some Italian Producers Face Huge U.S. Tariffs. If I could find bronze-extruded, slow-dried pasta that was American made... then great. I'd buy it. Happy to purchase American if the quality is good. But I ain't going to buy shitty teflon-extruded, rapid-flash-dried crap that won't hold sauce and is just a slippery gawdaful mess. I'd eat half the pasta... but I'd gladly pay twice the price to get something good.

   
• FedExSNL! This morning I popped in my DVD of Feds, a film from the 1980's which is so much better than it had a right to be. Mostly because the leads were so flawlessly cast...

And I was like "I wonder what Mary Gross is up to now?" But could find nothing current until I found a podcast interview, which was quite a treat!

   
• Hand Me That Paperclip! ZOMG! MACGRUBER IS ON THE EPSTEIN LIST?? I was such a fan. But no more!

UPDATE: Somehow, something has gone terribly wrong with the Saturday Night Live YouTube Channel... videos from the past five months have disappeared? Bummer.

I lie. I still think MacGruber is one of the funniest SNL characters, and I loved his movie and limited series. I'd love to get more of that, but if Will Forte is going to pop by Saturday Night from time to time to keep the character alive, I can be happy with that.

   
• Death of a Penny! Does ANYBODY who's whining about the US Penny ending know how rounding even works? Amount ending in 1¢ or 2¢... round down. For example, you're paying out of your piggy bank and something costs 52¢ but neither you nor the store has any pennies, so you pay 50¢ — But for an amount ending in 3¢ or 4¢... round up. For example something costs 54¢ then you pay 55¢. In the end, the odds are 50/50 that something will go up or down and, given the value of a penny now-a-days, nobody is getting rich off rounding. BUT LISTEN TO PEOPLE GOING ABSOLUTELY MENTAL... "BUSINESSES WILL LOSE MONEY!" And it's like... yeah... 50% of the time they will lose 1 or 2 pennies. BUT THE REST OF THE TIME THEY'RE GAINING 1 or 2 PENNIES! And how many people are paying cash any more? Apparently it's enough that BUSINESSES WILL LOSE MILLIONS! Except to lose one million dollars, you'd have to come up short 100 million pennies in rounding transactions. Okay, boomer... I'll take not wasting money minting coins that are worth less than they cost to make. As for those states which "don't allow rounding"... guess they'll have to fix that. — As for me? I'M MORE UPSET THAT WE'RE LOSING THE HAVE A PENNY GIVE A PENNY, NEED A PENNY TAKE A PENNY TRAYS! BLASPHEMY! THE END OF DAYS ARE NIGH! TODAY NO MORE PENNIES... TOMORROW PAYING WITH THE MARK OF THE BEAST! BET! Guess we're just going to be another penniless third-world country. Like Canada.

   
• Edo! A video from nine years ago which I had never seen popped up this week. It was on the history of Japan, which fascinates me anyway, but this was by Bill Wurtz, whom I was a big fan of back in the day. Which is why I was so shocked that I had never seen it...

If you want a different take on Japanese history which is half as fun but twice as long, here you go...

   
• Ugly! I will not call anybody "ugly" based on their appearance. That's a pretty shitty thing to do. But I don't hesitate calling somebody "ugly" when it comes to what they show us that's on the inside. In that respect, Kim Davis is one of the most butt-ugly, awful excuses for a human I've ever seen. She wants to "preserve the sanctity of marriage" by refusing to do her job of granting marriage licenses... all while having been through multiple divorces and so-called scandalous behavior around those marriages herself...

It's like having a job at a steak house and refusing to serve meat because you're vegan in public, but you eat steak at home. Hypocrisy 101. If the job isn't suitable for you or your so-called beliefs, THEN FIND ANOTHER JOB... LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE DOES. But no. This repugnant pile of heinousness wanted the Supreme Court to give her license to shit on other people's happiness when the PURSUIT of happiness is SUPPOSED to be in this country's DNA. You did what made YOU happy when it comes to marriage(s), so let other people have that too. Or get fucked and go away. That works too.

   
And on that shiny note of perspective... enjoy the last of your weekend.

Diane Keaton, D'Angelo, and Drew Struzan have passed. All of them a punch to the gut.

But the one that hits the hardest is Struzan. His movie posters are iconic, and I have bought some of them over the years to hang up (including Back to the Future II and Blade Runner: The Final Cut)...

I've also got a couple of his books somewhere that I need to dig out.

Struzan's style is unmistakable, and it's no wonder that so many artists have tried to imitate it over the years. Some of the most famous films ever made were advertised with posters he created, And trying to cash in on that only makes sense.

You will be missed, sir.

Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day, everybody!

An episode of Will & Grace popped up while I was working tonight and it guest-starred Bruno Campos, who many people will remember as Quentin Costa on Nip/Tuck, but who most people will know as the voice of Prince Naveen in Disney's The Princess and the Frog.

"I wonder what he's been up to?" I thought. "I don't remember seeing him in anything recently."

A brief internet search revealed that the last thing he did was voice Prince Naveen for the Tiana's Bayou Adventure ride pre-show in 2024. Then I ran by his IMDB page to find out that he stopped acting in 2010, and the only work he's done past that was an occasional job for Disney when they needed Naveen's voice for something.

Turns out the guy quit acting to go to law school and works at a law firm in Washington, D.C.

Turns out that not only is he a native speaker of Portuguese and English, but he also speaks Spanish and Italian. Which might come in handy as a D.C. lawyer, I'd imagine.

Interestingly enough... his Italian also came in handy for playing Prince Naveen. The character is from the fictional country of Maldonia, where the language is based on Italian.

Isn't it great how you can learn random strange facts on a Monday evening?

I somehow forgot the reason why I didn't pre-order Fantastic Four: First Steps. Namely, they're charging $30 for it.

So when I got home and saw an ad that it was released, I actually got excited for a second. Then I saw $30 and was puzzled all over again. I will happily pay $20 for a movie I am dying to see. Might pay $25, if it's something special (like this one). But thirty fucking dollars?!?? No thanks. To rent the thing is $25, but I refuse to pay that much money for something I can't watch again whenever I want...

What's really weird is that Marvel is pricing the film like it was some box office smash that people can't wait to see (or see again). Sure it made a half-billion dollars... but it can't touch the nearly three billion that Avengers: Endgame hauled in. Seriously... thirty dollars?!??

I'm honestly trying to think if there's any movie I would pay that amount for. And I honestly don't think there is.

Oh well. I'm sure it will be on sale fairly soon.

The last thing I remember seeing Robert Redford in is Avengers: Endgame. Turns out other than a voiceover and an uncredited cameo appearance in a television show he produced, that was his last real role. I actually think that's kind of cool, but also quite sad, so it's tough to know where my head is at. On one hand, he went out in one of the biggest movies of all time and was awesome in it. On the other, it was a comic book movie, and his acting talent was so beautifully nuanced that I can't help but feel his last film should have been something else.

But anyway... Redford was Alexander Pierce in the Marvel comic book movies, and was absolutely wonderful in the role. Captain America: The Winter Soldier remains one of the best super-hero movies ever made, and that's due in part to his performance.

But the film which he will forever be remembered for by me is, of course, Sneakers.

I love that movie so much, and was thrilled that Redford's character was so flawlessly cast...

But then again, they were all flawlessly cast.

I think the first thing I ever saw Redford in was The Natural. But it might have been a VHS rental of All the President's Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Candidate, Three Days of he Condor, or perhaps The Sting.

But the thing I will always remember him for most are Sneakers, Captain America: Winter Soldier, Up Close & Personal, Indecent Proposal, and... Legal Eagles?!?

This Redford flick co-starred Debra Winger and Daryl Hannah... and was not great. Nor was it particularly memorable. I just remember it because I saw it on a date that didn't go particularly well.

And so... I'm going to work my way through the Redford movies I loved starting this weekend. Maybe a new favorite will emerge, but it's pretty tough to think that any of his movies could ever top Sneakers.

But who knows? I've never seen The Way We Were, Barefoot in the Park, or Out of Africa because they definitely don't seem like my kind of movie... but maybe if I'm adventurous enough, I'll find out

When you're having to lay on a heating pad from the time you get back from work to the time you wake up because you don't want to have to dig into the muscle relaxer pills for your back, you end up watching a lot of television.

Or, as in my case, YouTube videos.

Here's what occupied my time laying around last night...

First of all, this video right here is everything I love about YouTube. Clever, funny people doing clever, funny things. I've seen Isaac Carlton videos before (and probably shared them), but this one is a great example of what he does so well...

Next up... As much as I loved the original The Matrix, I loathed the sequels. They were outright shitty excuses for stories because they were so far up their asses trying to be esoteric and cerebral and "smart" between the action that they forgot to be entertaining (then we got The Matrix Resurrections, which was somehow even worse). But every once in a while I run across a sequence from the sequels that almost makes me want to watch them again. The highway chase from Reloaded being at the top of the list. Sure, some of the effects are badly dated (the Agent jumping on cars is hilariously bad), but it doesn't change what a cool action sequence it was. Especially for the day. It's just such a shame that it was sandwiched between such shit...

And lastly (because I've got stuff I need to get to, not because I only watched three videos)... I honestly do not understand how Josh Johnson can be this brilliant every time. He never seems to run out of material. Most comics would recycle the same routines over and over and over. With Josh he's just on to the next hilarious bit...

And there you have it. Hope you didn't fall into and Isaac Carlton or The Matrix or Josh Johnson rabbit hole from this post.

But there are certainly worse ways to spend your time.