You know what the chain of command is? It’s the chain I beat you with until you follow my ruttin’ commands!

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.

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.

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

“How many hot dogs a day? Well, gosh, I don’t know. Some days it’s just two. Other days…it could be up to, and I’m just ball parking here you understand, it could be…up to seven?”

“So…seven hot dogs a day.”

“Yeah, probably safe.”

In OP’s defense, I checked out both movies’ Letterboxd ratings, and Blade 1 is rated at 3.5 out of 5, and Blade 2 is sitting at 3.3, so maybe it is just an echo chamber thing. That being said, I really believe this was not the case 10, 15 years ago.

Having sat with it for awhile now, I’m kind of coming around on the notion. I’d have to do a back to back viewing to confirm, but my current hypothesis is that Blade 1 is an excellent urban action-horror picture. It does everything you’d expect it to do pretty well. Blade 2, being a product of Guillermo’s interests, has this weird, quasi-Shakespearian family drama between Nomac, lady vampire, and the patriarch serving as the emotional spine of the picture. It’s fine, but I remember a lot more about their dynamics than I remember about Blade’s arc, which is maybe not what you want from a Blade movie. Plus, all the extra vampire lore and whatnot makes the picture feel less like urban action-horror and more like a fantasy film, which just so happens to have guns and the occasional unwitting human. Not bad, but it does feel like a dry run for ideas Guillermo would do better in other movies.

I was gonna say, how is this entire thread skipping over the take that Blade 2 is a step down from the first? It’s not the craziest movie take I’ve read on here, but it definitely flies in the face of what I understood to be popular opinion.

isn’t a shower curtain a sort of thin veil, too?

Whoa dude

All you anti-AI luddites can bite my shiny metal Cybertruck bumper. I am saving SO MUCH TIME by having my vehicle hit schoolchildren on my behalf, I can finally work on engineering the perfect prompt to generate images of the kids all black Antifa uniforms, so people can tell that they were asking for it by how they were dressed… Modern problems, modern solutions! Now, if only I could get Grok to stop making the kids’ outfits so sexy…

(Cosmically massive amounts of sarcasm, which feels unnecessary to point out, but I’ve been wrong before)

Multiple decades on this earth, decent schooling, undergraduate degree in history, and yet today is the day I discover why the cotton gin is called that. Wild. Thank you for sharing.

Does it smell like a steak and seat 35?

You might like Burn Notice, depending on your tolerance for network television tropes of the mid-aughts. It’s a “monster of the week” format, rather than the serialized approach of Reacher, but it typically includes a scene or two referencing the season arc in any given episode, so you still feel like the narrative is advancing, even if the majority of the episode was a side quest.

The gist is that a US government spy gets “burned” and turned loose in Miami. He, and the few contacts he has who will still speak with him (which include his mother, an ex-gf with a bombastic personality, and Bruce Campbell at the height of his smarmy powers), attempt to figure out who burned him, while also getting wrapped up in “favors” for various folks about town that inevitably wind up more complicated than was initially let on. Antagonists run the gamut from international terrorists to con artists who target the geriatric (it is, after all, set in Florida).

It’s not high art, but it’s got a winning cast, decent action (for network television), and, on occasion, I think some pretty clever solutions for problems which leverage the “spycraft” gimmick. Worth a shot.

Full disclosure, the last time I studied chemistry was 20 years ago, and I was not a particularly good student, so take this with a heaping helping of NaCl.

It isn’t the direct reaction of Drano + PVC that causes the issue. Rather, it’s the heat given off from the reaction of the clog and the lye. Apparently it’s significant enough to be an issue. I tried looking up how much heat might be released by the reaction, but I went crosseyed reading the formula, so someone else will have to do the math on that one.

Also, I know you said caustic material doesn’t react with metal, but Google doubts you on that front, for whatever that’s worth. In fact, zinc is specifically called out as a metal with which sodium hydroxide reacts pretty strongly, which is important because many water lines are steel galvanized with, you guessed it, zinc.

Wandering through to mention that your local library almost certainly has a collection of cookbooks spanning decades, and, depending on your area, might even have stuff tied specifically to your region. Take the book, photocopy the recipes you’re interested in, return it, get to cooking!

I was told it was never about the size, it was about how you used it!

Lol you’re correct. Idk what happened there, meant to say fun!

Tremors is up there for me. Every couple of years I revisit it and have just as much time as the last.

Brb, updating my grindr profile…