The Esteemed Critic Reviews The Odyssey

 

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a brilliant reinterpretation of the ancient story. Matt Damon's Odysseus is a man haunted by his deeds in the Trojan war, whose guilt complicates his decade-long efforts to return home. Nolan's signature muted color palate and disjointed narrative feature heavily here, but it works, as we learn the story from Odysseus as he is weened off the lotus flowers that he has devoured ever since washing up on the sea nymph Calypso's shores, crewless and desperate not to remember. Zeus's hospitality--the ancient law to treat others under your roof as you would treat one of the gods--is constantly referenced. Through tricking the Trojans into thinking Athena has left them a gift, Odysseus ended the Trojan war by opening the gates of the city after exiting through the famous horse. "Ten years of rage poured into the city in one night," he confesses. One of the great twists of the movie involves the appearance of Athena (Zendaya), who periodically appears to Odysseus to represent his conscience. The whole gritty realism trend in media was started by Nolan--his version of Batman strips the character of much of the overtly fantastical--but he doesn't not necessarily do this with the Odyssey. The cyclops, giant warriors, a trip to Hades--these all appear. But the focus of the story is not on building a mythical universe. Rather, it's all about how the powerful destroy civilization by breaking down the basic hospitality that holds us together. Nolan is angry about the modern world (as am I), where the previously unthinkable seems to happen everyday. Odysseus is forced into the Trojan war by Agamemnon who towers over the rest of the Greeks in his intimidating armor. However, when Odysseus meets his king in Hades, Agamemnon tells him not to go home and expect a welcome, as he was slain by his wife for sacrificing their daughter for favorable winds for the journey to Troy. Stripped of his armor in the flashback, Agamemnon is soft, his hair billowing down to his shoulders in luscious curls. He is killed in his bed by a tiny woman, revealing his entire stature to be an illusion. This is why Nolan's Odyssey is dangerous to fascists. It's not the casting of Elliot Page as one of Odysseus's soldiers, or Lupita Nyong'o's portrayal of Helen of Troy (though it does reveal their bigotry) that really endangers them. It's the fear that the powerful will be revealed as fakes like Agamemnon. It's the idea that shame and empathy can mar the feats of a legendary warrior like Odysseus. Elon Musk has threatened to make a non-woke "historically accurate" version of the Odyssey using AI, proving once and for all that he is an absolute moron (Where are you going to find a historically accurate cyclops, Elon?). That he thinks he can surpass Nolan's artistic achievement using his plagiarizing, destructive technology shows that he is a true villain, an man who thinks the rules of civilization do not constrain him. He is Robert Pattinson's Antinous, a coward plotting to steal Odysseus's kingdom while he is away. In the Odyssey, there is a reckoning, and despite atoning for his mistakes, Odysseus goes into exile, leaving his kingdom to the next generation. Such is the way of life, no? The Odyssey is the best film of Christopher Nolan's career, a must-see movie that's about as moving as a blockbuster film can be. 

Weightlifting: A Nearly 41 Year Old Man Chooses to Do the Bulgarian Method for Powerlifting

 

The Bulgarian Method was a brutal live or die weightlifting method developed by Ivan Abadjiev that led to his country competing with the Soviet Union in the 70's despite being unknown for weightlifting beforehand. The program features daily maxes on the Olympic lifts, with multiple sessions per day, all under the watchful eye of a coach while aided by a copious amounts of drugs. Powerlifter Greg Nuckols adapted the daily maxing and frequent training sessions for his own purposes, and published a manual detailing the program. I believe he published it seven years ago; I haven't heard much since about it. The lifting world is powered by Youtube bro-influencers shitting out information that's about as useful to a veteran lifter as whatever a hobo on the street will tell you about... well, anything. Anyway, in the past, I have done very well with high-intensity, high-frequency training. My most successful training block the past couple of years featured constant rep maxes and training frequencies of at least five days a week. Unfortunately, the deadlift maxing basically killed me, and I had to step away from that sort of thing for a couple of years, during which I've just been churning my gears, doing bodybuilding work. It's not satisfying training; I've always lifted for strength rather than appearance, and now, as a nearly 41 year old man, I've noticed the onset of middle age. My recovery is prolonged; I can no longer drink alcohol hardly; I'm getting lines around my eyes. I would like one final challenge, however, before I ride off into the sunset as a broken old man, and so, I'm trying Nuckols' Bulgarian strategy. Two weeks in, it's surprisingly do-able. As for how sustainable it will be, and how much success I'll have, we'll have to see. Here's what I'm doing.

Daily Maxes, all the time. In Nuckols' program, you squat and bench at least four times a week, working up to a daily max. A daily max is a heavy weight that you can hit any day of the week without psychological stress--it should be 80 to 90 percent of your true one rep max. For the squat, I've started out with 275 lbs, which I've blown past every single day so far. Yesterday, which was my third day squatting in a row, I hit 325 lbs for a smooth single. These daily maxes should increase, but every training session will not be as smooth as butter. If you hit your daily max and it feels like shit, you're supposed to take some weight off the bar and do some doubles or triples. That's the program in a nutshell. Heavy weights every session, but low daily volume. For the deadlift, you're supposed to do five to ten reps between 60 and 70 percent of your max once or twice a week. Assistance work is optional. I've been doing curls, rows, and pullups, but nothing else.

The demands of my job are brutal right now. The heat is constant, the humidity thick, and my traps are often riddled with muscle knots. I'll often do my training while washing apples. It's quick, it's low-rep, and I'm excited to do it. I woke up this morning feeling pretty good, despite squatting 325 lbs yesterday. My pecs, which were really sore early in the week, have already recovered. Perhaps I'm uniquely suited for this type of training, or maybe it's just the placebo effect of trying something new. In any case, I think I'll start posting a training log at the end of the week detailing my accomplishments. I'd like to squat 400 lbs and bench press 300 lbs again. We'll see if I can do it.  

 

The Esteemed Critic Reviews: Poor Things; High-Fidelity; The Death of Stalin

 

Poor Things: Poor Things is a feminist Frankenstein tale directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Emma Stone as a woman reanimated with the brain of her unborn child inside her skull. Described by one Redditor as "If Tim Burton made a Wes Anderson film," Poor Things is animated by Stone's brilliant performance, which successfully straddles the line between daft and sophisticated. "Never go full retard," intoned Tony Stark in blackface, and while that's true most of the time, I think Poor Things makes its own logic. Mark Ruffalo also deserves praise for his foppish dandy who tries and fails to tame Stone's Bella. There's a lot of "vigorous jumping" as Bella refers to sex, and a lot of it is more grotesque than titillating, so be warned. Just an altogether brilliant movie that's like little else out there. Ten fucking stars.

High-Fidelity: I dunno about that John Cusack guy. His character in High-Fidelity is a hipster record store owner interviewing past girl friends about where it all went wrong. He reminds me greatly of Ted Mosby, the star of How I Met Your Mother, and I fucking hate Ted Mosby. The record store hipster was not a beloved creature in the nineties, and I wonder if he's gone the way of the Yeti or his North American cousin, the Sasquatch. If so, good riddance. Gate-keeping music "fans" suck. Anyways, Cusack's character is always pining for what he might have instead of appreciating what he has, and his realization of this fact is supposed to be the climax of our film. Like, why is this guy landing girls anyway? He's running a shitty record store, he has no sense of humor, and he's a perennial cheater. You know how Woody Allen was always writing himself into his films as a sex-obsessed nerd who nevertheless gets the good-looking woman despite being an obvious pervert and looking like Woody Allen? Yeah, that shit sucks. Five and a half stars out of a hypothetical ten, and Jack Black is worth most of those stars.

The Death of Stalin: Funny and terrifying at the same time, The Death of Stalin shows how a totalitarian system devoted to one man quickly crumbles into in-fighting and violent chaos when that leader bites the dust. I wonder if anybody in Trump-world has seen this film? Steve Buscemi is great as Khrushchev. Eight out of ten mangos.

Microsoft and Sony Are Trying to Kill the Console Business

 

Microsoft and Sony don't want your business. Playstation is ending the production of disks for new games starting in 2028. Microsoft is laying off 20 percent of X Box, including half of id Software, the guys behind Doom. Sony is no longer porting their popular single player games to PC. Due to the incredibly slow pace of development for most Sony Studios, that's not as big a flex as they think it is. The AI bubble has inflated hardware costs so that a PS5 and an X Box Series X cost 600 dollars, up one-hundred bucks since their launch five years ago, with more increases likely as data centers gobble up RAM and SSDs. The next gen machines, which are rumored to be delayed, will likely cost one-thousand dollars if the AI bubble doesn't pop.

Let's add it all up. 1000 dollars consoles with no new games, less studios, and no physical media. Considering the dearth of disposable income and the worsening economic outlook, who is going to buy this shit? If a console is going to cost over 1000 bucks, why not just switch to PC, where you have more options, from the hardware in your machine to what store you buy your games from. Unlike Playstation and X Box, a PC is a continuous platform. You don't have to depend on Sony or Microsoft to port your old games over or worry about them deciding that you don't own them anymore at a whim.

I've always been primarily a PC gamer, but I understand the value of consoles. In my basement, we have an N64. My kids play it all the time, and I just recently bought Mario Kart 64 on ebay for 20 bucks. Decades on, it's a useful machine, simply designed and easy to use. It would be great if the geniuses at Sony and Microsoft realized that there are customers out there that they should appeal to rather than their shareholders. What happened to good ol' fashioned capitalism where you deliver a quality product at a decent price? All I know is that at this point, I see no reason to purchase whatever overpriced machine either company delivers in the future. 

Is Mitch McConnell Fucking Dead Yet?

 

Mitch McConnell, former Senate Majority Leader and chief architect of the current hellscape that is our politics, is apparently lingering in between a state of death and life. No one has seen the son of a bitch for over three weeks since his hospitalization, and despite the words of his aides, crazy-ass Laura Loomer claims Mitch is "brain-dead" and on his death bed. If the grim reaper has finally come to take the turtle to the underworld, why lie about his status? Do his aides think they can pull a Weekend At Bernie's with McConnell's corpse? Even in death the motherfucker is blocking seats.

Mitch McConnell has been in the Senate since I was born in 1985. During his tenure, Kentucky has remained near the bottom of states in every major indicator of quality of life. His chief legacy is stealing a Supreme Court Seat from Obama, one that Neil Gorsuch, who doesn't believe in birthright citizenship, filled. Oh yeah, and he didn't vote to impeach Trump after January 6th, even though he was quoted saying that Trump was responsible for that day. Very interesting to note also that since Mitch has been in the hospital, his wife Elaine Chao fucked off to China, declining to abandon her trip even though her husband is likely dead or dying.

Politicians lingering in office far past the date when they should have retired is unfortunately too common in America. Biden was obviously in bad shape during the end of his term, and whatever passes for Trump's brain is currently turning completely into mush. McConnell's evil deeds will outlive his physical form, with the consequences spanning generations. I must ask the voters of Kentucky what the fuck they were thinking by continuing to elect Mitch McConnell for forty years, but then again, I've long ago lost faith in the voters. We can only hope that this traitor to democracy can finally descend into hell where he belongs. Stuff that shit down the drain, is what I'm saying. Let's not let McConnell's corpse clog anything any further.