A bunch of wrestlers who stan for books hard enough to create a whole library circuit absolutely love to make puns, whoda thunk?

And yeah, I was worried I was gilding the lily by pointing it out, but I figured it was just subtle enough to fly under the radar if the reader wasn’t paying attention haha

One of the most popular wrestlers on the circuit is the fighting librarian, “Richard Shhnary.”

That’s very funny. 10 comedy points for Dick.

I agree. As you mentioned, the quality of Statham’s filmography varies wildly, but I don’t think his performances are ever the determining factor in what the final result is. Idk, if someone wanted to call the 6th consecutive movie where he plays a gruff guy with a checkered past mixed up eith some baddies on someone else’s behalf a ‘slop movie’, I guess I couldn’t fight them on that. However, given that genre is a perennial favorite of mine, I’m not looking for a wide emotive range from that experience. I want cool fight choreography, inventive cinematography, and badass stunts. If I get that, but Statham gives a wooden performance, I’m still going to think well of the movie (not least of all because it’s largely the same performance as what he gives in his ‘good’ movies too lol).

I guess when I think of the prompt, the actor that comes to mind is like a Ben Kingsley type. Someone who won awards for their acting prowess, but who wound up shoveling out direct to video crap in the twilight of their career.

it’s SHITE being Scottish, mate.

I don’t know. Blaming Statham for Ghosts of Mars feels like blaming a waiter for the Titanic: he was just along fir the ride.

This is such a bingeable series. Also, hoo boy this album is way worse than I even imagined it to be. Glad Lou seemed to enjoy himself.

The Ocean movies were my first thought, followed by Logan Lucky. Perfect examples of movies which put fun first, imo.

This has been a good movie week for me!

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Premise: A woman (Kathleen Turner) in the midst of divorcing her high school sweetheart (Nicolas Cage), reluctantly attends her 25-year reunion. During this event, she loses consciousness, and wakes up back in 1960, her adult consciousness inhabiting her teenaged self.

It’s nice! Super sentimental, but it possesses more self-awareness than most nostalgia bait, which helps keep things from getting too saccharine. Turner’s performance as Peggy is a big reason the film is as successful as it is at managing the tone. She quickly comes to term with her apparent time-travel (rationalizing it as a dream, or maybe a hallucination she is experiencing in the moment before death) and largely seems game to enjoy herself. Unlike Back to the Future, which this is obviously of a piece with, there is no apparent ticking clock or “disappearing from the timeline”-type stakes. Given this, Peggy amiably dons her cheerleading gear and reintegrates into her senior year barely missing a beat. However, Turner never lets the audience forget that, despite everything, she is playing an adult Peggy, who is playing her teenage self. Occasionally, this is expressed in a big way, such as when she crumples in on herself upon hearing her long-dead grandmother’s voice on the phone. However, I was most impressed in the little ways that the mask slips, such as when the corners of her lips quirk up in wry bemusement (or exasperation) at the earnestly expressed grandiose plans of her peers. It was like watching footage of someone re-reading their diary, fond nostalgia jockeying for position with acerbic hindsight and embarrassment. A phenomenal, deeply affecting performance, and I’m not surprised she got an Oscar nod for it.

The cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth, also nominated, further enhances the elegiac tone. The reunion is shot through a thick haze, blanketing everything in frame with a gauzy softness that belies the coming magical turn, while also evoking the kind of liminal social space which events like school reunions occupy. Admittedly, I could have just been primed to look for parallels by recognizing his name in the credits, but I thought there were striking similarities between how Cronenweth shot Peggy’s reunion with how he photographed the “retirement” of Zhora in Blade Runner. A little less slow-motion and squibs, to be sure, but the same dreamy quality, the same periodic washes of technicolor peppered with glittering motes of refracted light. Of course, in Peggy’s case, this kaleidoscope comes from rather more mundane sources than Blade Runner’s cyberpunk cityscape, generated by the same rental smoke machines, gel lights, and silver streamers which get trotted out for school events to this day.

Specious though this connection may be (even to me), I find there’s a little bit of thematic resonance between the two scenes. Zhora is a woman pursued by a man with ill intent, whose “crime” was wanting more life. She is shot in the back as she runs down a long hallway, boxed in on all sides, ultimately collapsing with her dreams unrealized. Peggy entering the reunion, then, is Zhora entering that hallway. Despite her best efforts she can’t shake the man chasing her, at first metaphorically (in conversation and gossip), and then literally when Charlie unexpectedly turns up. Finally, she is overwhelmed by the onslaught of emotional and physical stimuli during her coronation as Reunion Queen. She collapses to the floor with a psychedelic kaleidoscope of color playing across her face, mirroring Zhora’s death. Thankfully for Peggy, this ain’t that kind of movie, and she’s afforded the opportunity to address her desire for “more” life. Not “more” in the Blade Runner sense (a quantifiable period), rather, “more” as a qualitative measure: getting more from the life she’s already lived.

That’s more than enough galaxy-brain-film-nerd talk though. Even without the Turner performance and solid craft on display, the movie’s cast is enough to recommend it as a curio if nothing else, with early turns from Sofia Coppola (in a nothing part, admittedly), Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey, and Kevin J O’Connor.

REWATCHES

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), dir. Peter Weir. Premise: Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany have adventures in the British Navy, chasing down one of Napoleon’s privateers along the coast of South America.

Fantastic. I can’t imagine there being a better adaptation of Napolonic-era naval life. Stuffed to the gills with nautical details, but it never becomes pedantic (the way I imagine reading the novels might, happy landlubber that I am). Its perhaps a touch episodic, but I think that’s of a piece with the movie’s emphasis on authentically depicting naval life. There’s not a single character or filmmaking choice which feels at odds with that goal. Crowe is magnificent, Bettany as well. If you haven’t seen it, you absolutely should, even if historical epics aren’t typically your thing. Ideally on a Sunday afternoon with your dad.

Universal Soldier (1992), dir. Roland Emmerich. Premise: JCVD and Dolph Lundgren are reanimated soldiers programmed to be perfect killing machines. Unfortunately, when a journalist (Ally Walker) uncovers their existence, some wires get crossed and JCVD decides he must protect her for long enough to earn the right to return home, while Lundgren leads the team of Franken-soldiers to put them both down.

JCVD’s alleged status as a crook bloke notwithstanding, this is a solid little early-90s action programmer. Feels very of its time, and I mean that in a good way. Has just enough 80s in its DNA to feel dangerous and exciting, while allowing for the fact that the 90s had arrived, and things were different now. For instance, there is gratuitous nudity in the movie, but it’s hero who strips down for the camera, not the damsel (and, whatever your personal persuasion, JCVD’s butt in 1992 is worth seeing).

It’s not high art (the movie, that is; I could and might argue dat ass is in fact art), but things move along at a decent clip, Lundgren seems to be having a ball chewing up the scenery, and JCVD surprised me with how good his comedic instincts were, even this early in his career. Like, I don’t think people acknowledged how self-aware he clearly was until the JCVD movie came out in 2008 and he spelled it out for everybody. Even just no-selling “What accent?” when Walker is trying to find out who he is and where he’s from got a chuckle out of me, and I couldn’t help but laugh at his facial expressions while he’s housing plate after plate of diner food, ignorant of the mounting bill.

For some reason I had it in my head that Rebel Ridge was a product of The Daily Wire’s attempt to “combat woke media” or whatever it is those hacks think they’re doing. Something akin to 2020’s Run Hide Fight, which dared to ask “What if we mashed up Die Hard with Gus Van Sant’s Elephant?” (Spoiler alert: you get a reprehensible turd of a movie.)

Therefore, I had totally written this thing off and not thought about it since. However, now I’m realizing how off-target my assumptions were, and it’s advancing to the top of the watchlist. Saulnier is an excellent thriller director, but “non-lethal” isn’t typically his protagonists’ MO, so that’s an interesting wrinkle. Thank you for the recommendation.

The sequel is good too, though it’s not nearly as satisfying a mystery as the first, which I felt was to film’s detriment (even if that’s sort of the point).

Which movie do you wish were better, Nacho Libre or Be Kind Rewind? Or both? I have very vague recollections of Be Kind Rewind, but, if that’s the one you’re referring to, I’d tend to agree. I seem to recall a lot of the marketing was centered around the main duo’s attempts to “Swede” movies with no production budget. As I recall, that’s certainly present in the movie, but it’s not really the focus to the extent I wish it were.

Nacho Libre I haven’t seen at all, so I’ll take y’all’s word on that front.

The autor of the playlist agrees, since it’s titled “Sisyphus Happy”.

Only if he’s from Britain, anywhere else and he’s just “sparkling self-satisfied”

Fighting fire with fire, they’ll never see it coming

This feels like a highly specific reference to an IRL situation.

Any non-dummies out there willing to dummy this down for me?

If I’m picking up what was being put down, websites typically reserve a small amount of space on a hard drive for any given website to install scripts they need to function. This is done as a matter of course, and is largely the modern Internet working as intended (for better or worse). However, in this case, a compromised website could instruct my browser to reserve a gig or more of space to deploy or install this FROST script. This reports back to the attacker what programs are competing for resources on my computer, including my individual browser tabs and what sites those tabs contain. It can do this despite the location where browsers let websites install/run scripts being nominally sandboxed away from the rest of the drive. It does this by measuring the latency of certain I/O operations occurring on the drive, and feeding that information through some sort of neural network.

Assuming that is generally correct from a layman’s POV, how exactly is that latency information sufficient to determine what programs or websites I have open? Wouldn’t different models of SSD (or even different SSDs of the same type) have minor variations in performance which would make this impossible? Hell, how does the script even know that it is installed on an SSD and not an HDD?

Not saying it untrue, because obviously the folks that discovered this know a touch more about computers than me, but, if this explanation were trotted out in a thriller movie (“well, President Ryan, we know the location of the terrorists’ hideout because we were able to measure the latency of their hard drive, which revealed they were placing an Amazon order in the other tab”), I’d chalk it up to techno-babble nonsense.

What’s funny is that Linklater kind of already beat you to the punch with that concept when he made Boyhood, seeing as that chronicles 2002-2014. Not entirely the same, of course. They’re very different movies, and because (SAY THE LINE, BART!) it took 12 years to make, Boyhood lacks the retrospective quality Dazed and Confused has.

Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is working on something that is in line with your concept right now. I feel like pop culture has been cannibalizing the 90s for awhile now, and we’re primed for the early aughts revival.

From what I understand, there’s an argument to be made that Red Sonja started not holding up at its own premiere haha.

That being said, I can lightly recommend the Red Sonja remake from last year. I did a double feature of that and Deathstalker 2025 awhile back, and had a really good time. It’s kind of wild that we had two revivals of non-Conan barbarian properties released right around one another. Like an even schlockier version of Deep Impact vs Armageddon haha. Admittedly, I think Red Sonja 2025 benefitted from having watched Deathstalker 2025 first. Like the reviewer in the article, I only started to have a good time with the latter film once I A) learned its budget was barely $100K and B) came to terms with its comedic tone. Therefore, Red Sonja’s somewhat po-faced earnestness and modest budget ($17 million-ish) felt like a breath of fresh air by comparison.

Fascinating. My godfather is a mathematician at a local university, I’ll ask him whether this is something he runs into. I’ve heard him grumble about formatting his work in the past, but usually in the context of using Latex, which I gather is something else entirely.

I hate to hit you with such a tangentially related query to your main point, but what is “formalizing a proof”, and why is there such a discrepancy between the time it might take an expert (weeks if not months) vs an LLM?

(It probably goes without saying, but my college career was spent in the Humanities, where there was not much emphasis on proofs, formal or informal, so I’m curious how the other half lives.)