vital functions

[kaberett]

Watching. Leverage: Redemption S01E07 & E08. Even the fucking ethics in this one didn't make any sense, emotional or otherwise. UGH.

Magic Mike (2012) and Magic Mike XXL (2015). We watched the former by accident -- I'd heard lots of good things about the latter and we were aiming to watch that, but instead found the first film from 2012 on Netflix and started watching it by mistake and then... kept watching it! I am so here for Channing Tatum living his best life, by which I obviously mean "stripping to get start-up funds for his independent furniture design company". I really loved all of the character portrayals and development in it, which... meant I found XXL a let-down in comparison. The best articulation I've managed so far is that it... feels like Mike's emotional arc in XXL mostly involves going backwards? In basically every respect? Which I am happy to expound on in comments, but, yes. The mirror dance set piece was amazing, and there were lots of Bits of the film I enjoyed, but as a whole it didn't quite work for me.

(I note also that the sizeism-for-lols in the first film made me reaaaaaally wary about the treatment of all of the fat women in the second film, even though I think it was actually genuinely better? So that's a thing.)

Cooking. I was particularly pleased with the Dundee cake and the blackberry-and-almond buttermilk clafoutis.

Eating. An enormous pile of takeaway curry that did us three meals, which I enjoyed greatly (accompanied by the Magic Mike films, post-viva).

Today we had two meals in Cambridge -- lunch was sweetcorn-from-the-neighbour's-allotment plus tomato and basil (from my mother's garden) and mozzarella; dinner was bruschetta, and potatoes and beans from gardens various, and crumbed mushroom/aubergine/courgette, and salady bits, and also a plum cake.

Exploring. Shepreth Wildlife Park!

Growing. The allotment has been much neglected this week, for some reason...

Comments

[rmc28]

Shepreth Wildlife Park is a lot of fun - we took the children there a few weeks ago. The otters are very vocal!

[madgastronomer]

XXL was totally going backward, but as far as I'm concerned, all flaws in the second movie are totally made up for by the Andie McDowell Southern mansion stuff with the daughters who invited the guys to a party and then the moms were like, "So what do you boys do?" all the way up through when the guys leave there. Because, as a (US) Southerner, that whole thing was brilliant and hilarious and the best thing about that movie, and after I saw it a few years back, I recommended it highly to my mom and aunt.

[madgastronomer]

But also a lot of the reason I like the first movie was the very Florida, and very Tampa, feel of it (I'm from a Southern family, but I grew up in Florida).

[kaberett]

That is definitely one of the sequences that I genuinely really liked in isolation! Part of what I was attempting to work out was why I had liked so many segments but found it overall unsatisfying :)

[madgastronomer]

Yeah, the first one was a character-driven movie with dancing, the second one was a road trip movie about dancing, and was very different in tone, in addition to the going backward thing.

[vass]

That's the second recommendation I've seen for Magic Mike/XXL in the past 7 days.

Watching two Magic Mike films and eating an enormous pile of takeaway curry sounds like excellent post-viva recovery.

[kaberett]

That was very much the idea. :D