#ROBERT STOP BEING DENSE FOR FIVE MINUTES

[welcometoloving]

Welcome to Loving: Chapter 1

Welcome to Loving, M

The billboard greeted them as they drove down the forested road towards the little town nestled deep in the Michigan woods. It depicted a beachside scene, with shining sun and cool blue water, and something dark painted just off the coast. Robert couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast between the sign and their current scenery; looking around, the woods were opaque and dark, with shadows that played on the mind (and it did not help that most of the trees were coniferous, with great brushes of needles blocking the view); Lake Michigan, though apparent on the GPS, was nowhere to be seen, most likely obscured by the trees. Moving his eyes from wood, he turned, and with his free hand, shook his wife awake.

“We’re almost there, dear”. She slowly turned, stretched a bit, and looked at him with drowsy eyes.

“Couldn’t give me five more minutes?”, she asked, jokingly.

“We’re here.”

“I don’t see the town”. In response, Robert scanned the trees, searching for a glimpse of a building or another road.

“Yeah, that’s weird… we passed the welcome sign a minute or so ago.”

“Huh… well, wake me up again when we’re actually there”. She turned around, and started to nestle back into her sleeping position. Robert turned his eyes back to the road, and wondered how long it’d be until he actually saw the town; small towns can be like that, they put their signs at their borders and you have to delve further to find the actual buildings. He was interrupted from his musings when he saw his wife's head perk up, and she suddenly became alert.

“Is something wrong?”. She hesitated for a moment before answering, not taking her eyes off the forest.

“No, I just… I thought I saw something. Moving between the trees over there”, she pointed to a dense group of tall trees, with small gaps between the trunks that gave just enough room to peer into the forest beyond. Robert thought for a second before responding.

“What did it look like?”

“I dunno, kinda like a man, but, not… like, thinner, and darkish. It was probably just the shadow of some tree branch.” Robert noticed that her alarm was waning, and decided to lighten the mood a bit.

“Sure you didn’t see a sasquatch?”, he teased.

“Sasquatch is big and hairy, I saw something thin–weren’t you listening?”, she returned the jest.

“Fine; a wendigo then.”

“Ooh! Maybe it was Slenderman!” She broke down laughing.

“Good idea. Should we go try to find it? Catch it on camera?” he nudged her and giggled to himself. She pushed away his elbow, laughing.

“No, I’m good. I just had a nightmare, I’m not ready to be scared while awake.”

“I thought you wanted to go back to sleep?”, he inquired.

“Yeah, well I’m still sleepy”. Robert waited a moment, before switching to a gentler tone and readdressing her.

“Are you ok?”. Now it was she who took a moment to respond.

“Yes… I don’t remember most of it anymore. There was just, I dunno, a lot of shadows. I can’t even remember what was casting them, or what they looked like. Just that they were there.”

“Well, if you have another one, tell me.”

“Sure, next time I’ll let you know,” she assured him. With that, she settled back into her chair and Robert refocused on the road. Suddenly, a jolt went through the car, and a loud, high-pitched noise came from behind the tires, like a squeal or screech. Robert cursed, and slamming the brakes, he stopped the car and hastily unbuckled. Mary, startled, stared confusedly at him as he opened the door and stepped outside.

“What happened?”, she asked. Robert’s response came from somewhere behind the car.

“I don’t know; maybe we popped a tire”. He moved to check the wheels, moving from one to another and methodically inspecting each. They all seemed unharmed, although the back left tire had some sort of dark liquid of an indiscernible color on it. Concluding his investigation, he turned back to his wife.

“Well, none of the tires are out. Maybe we ran over something”. Noticing her open the car door, he insisted “Mary, you don’t have to get out, I’ll check the road”.

“I could’ve sworn I heard a scream,” she replied. “If we hit someone it’d be better to have two people to help”. Robert’s heart started to quicken. Had they actually run over someone? What if they did? Was it a local? He wasn’t familiar with local law, what was the penalty? Who was even walking on this road, in the middle of nowhere?

“It wasn’t too far back, should only take a few minutes to check”, he remarked. Apprehensively walking up the road, they began to search the road. Eventually, Mary called him over to one side of the road. “I think I found something”. She was standing over a mess of black feathers that appeared to be the remains of a crow, but much larger.

“Think it’s a raven?”, Robert asked.

“No, they don’t live around here. Rather large for a crow though”, Mary remarked. “Wonder how it got that big”. Robert stared at the dead thing in slight disbelief.

“Well I guess that explains the bump, but what about the noise. That sure didn’t sound like any crow I’ve heard.”

“I thought it was a scream”, replied Mary. “Could’ve sworn it sounded like a person”.

“Well, we’d best get on the road. No use worrying over a dead crow”. Robert turned and walked back to the car, his wife close behind. Reaching it, he gave the back left tire a quizzical look, and said to Mary,

“That’s funny; the stuff on the tire’s disappeared. Wonder what happened to it.”

“What stuff on the tire?”, came Mary’s response.

“There was some dark, thick stuff on the tire. I would’ve thought it was blood, it but it was more of, I dunno, a greenish-purple. I can’t really describe the color, but it wasn’t red”.

“Maybe we’re both imagining things now”, Mary said, before opening the car door and returning to the front right seat.

“Yeah, maybe…”. Robert opened his door, and was just getting in when he thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye, deep in the trees; the dark, shadowy figure of a man-like thing standing and watching. He whirled to face it directly, but when he did, there was nothing. Shrugging, he dropped down into his seat.

“What happened,” his wife asked as he reached for his keys.

“I think I saw your slenderman,” he joked, before turning the keys in the ignition and continuing along the narrow, twisting road.

  *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *  

After another five minutes of driving, they began to see small cabins among the trees, their bleak, lifeless faces peering through the dense forest. Little dirt paths, barely wide enough to drive a small car down, dotted the roadside. These, upon closer inspection, generally led to the residences, but several seemed to disappear into the darkness of the trees, and others simply dead-ended a few hundred feet in. By now, the sun had passed it’s zenith and was beginning it’s slow descent towards the horizon.

Finally, the trees came to an abrupt end, revealing a small town. It had one main street, lined by a few two-story buildings–a few shops, two or three restaurants, and a small bank/office building. A few dilapidated bed-and-breakfasts stood there too, though they looked as if they hadn’t had guests in years. A gas station and convenience store lay on a small secondary road leading away from the town. The few lanes which branched off of the main led to several houses, quite small, but still larger than those along the road leading to Loving. On the left, following the direction of the main street, a beach could be glimpsed, and beyond it the blue of Lake Michigan. There was a dock too, with a few small vessels tied to it; they looked mostly like a combination of pleasure craft and fishing boat.

Turning the wheel, Robert brought the car onto the road running through town, and made his way to the only building in town that wasn’t tourist-oriented. Pulling into the single open parking space (which wasn’t saying much, as there were only two), he turned to Mary, who looked nervous.

“Ready?”, he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m just… it’s a bit much.”

“You seemed fine on the car ride”, he responded.

“Well we weren’t here yet. It’s so… run down. You know? Like, it’s so isolated out here. So solitary”, she mused.

“I thought you wanted solitude?”.

“I did. I’m just a bit nervous. It’s a whole new life, right. Away from all the, you know, unpleasantry.” She looked back down the way they had driven.

“Well we’re here now”. He paused. “Do you want to come inside with me?”

“No, I think I’ll stay in the car”, she said. Her tone changed, becoming more teasing. “Who knows what unscrupulous sorts of people live up here, far from the reaches of the law and the state?”

“Okay, I’ll leave you to defend the car”, he returned, opening the door and exiting into the warm air. Straightening his collar, he turned and walked to the door, almost tripping on the broken sidewalk. The door opened at the slightest touch, creaking with a noise that disturbed Robert in a way he couldn’t quite place. He took a deep breath, and stepped into the building.

The first thing he noticed was the heat. The building was stiflingly hot, despite all the windows being open and several mechanical fans blowing at different corners of the room. A few sad, droopy plants lay scattered around in dirty white pots. Filing cabinets full of papers leaned haphazardly upon each other and the walls. A few tables and chairs sat scattered across the room, with brochures strewn about them. Looking deeper into the building, Robert could see a rotund, balding man in a messy suit sitting` behind a counter with fudged glass. He looked up as Robert approached.

“So you’re the guy buying the house?”, he asked. Robert thought for a moment before responding.

“Yeah, how’d you know?”. The man chuckled to himself for a few seconds before answering.

“Not many people come to Loving, much less choose to live here. Whenever someone does, it’s a big occurrence.” A houseplant in the corner seemed to dip it’s leaves further, as if to sadly agree. It’s leaves were browning on the edges, and it was an unhealthy shade of green, as if it hadn’t been watered in a while.

“Oh, I’m sure you have people come up for the beaches this time of year”, Robert responded. “I mean, it’s tourist season”. The man chuckled again.

“Seems you haven’t seen the town very well. Sure, we have a few places to eat and shop, heck, even to sleep. But no one comes here. They all head for the bigger tourist traps like St Joseph and Traverse City. Anyways…”, he began opening drawers, shuffling papers around, searching for something. When he found it, he made a pleased face, and slid a set of keys across the counter.

“These are your house keys. Your house is a little ways along the road gas station-side. There’s a dirt off-shoot with a little red mailbox. Can’t miss it.” Robert grabbed the keys, turning to leave.

“One more thing,” added the man. “Folks around here don’t particularly like outsiders. You won’t be one for long, I’m sure, but just letting you know. Oh, and I highly suggest The Fishhouse, it’s a restaurant down the road a bit, big fish statue on the roof.”

“Thanks!” Robert said as he exited the building. The air outside hit him like a cool blast, even though there was only a slight breeze. It was a relief to leave the stuffy building, and see healthy plants again. He strolled over to his car, twirling the keys on his finger. Settling back into the driver’s seat, he addressed his wife.

“Well, I’ve got the keys. The man inside said that the house should be pretty easy to find; it’s over that way,”, he said, pointing towards the gas station. “It has a red mailbox. Think you could help me keep an eye out for it?”

“Sure”, she replied. Her tone became more worried as she continued. “It’s so strange; I haven’t seen a single other person while we were here. Not even a light on. I wonder where they are.”

“Yeah, that’s strange,” Robert said. “The guy inside said it was a major occurrence when anybody know came to town. You’d think they’d be lining up to catch a glimpse of us”

“Apparently not,” said Mary. “Well, I suppose we should head on our way.”

“I suppose so”, replied Robert. He backed into the road, turned the car, and headed off in the direction of the house.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

The man in the office building was wrong. The house was very easy to miss; Robert would have, had his wife not pointed it out right as he drove past it. Swearing, he swerved into the dirt road, narrowly avoiding clipping a tree in the process.The road, or really driveway, was short enough that it easily connected the house to the street, but long enough as to almost completely hide the view behind several layers of dense foliage and trees. The house itself was small, one story and an attic, and old. The absence of light in the windows left it with a ghostly, lonely air. Around it lay a neglected garden, overflowing with weeds and covered in stones. Off in the woods behind the house, they could see a small tool shed and wood pile. Mary evaluated the property, hands on her hips.

“I can work with this”, she concluded.

“Is it not the ideal dream home you were looking forward to?”, teased Robert.

“Well, everything needs a bit of work. But I can make it perfect.” She nudged him. “We can make it perfect”. With that, he gave her a kiss, before turning back to the car.

“I guess we probably should start unpacking then”, he said.

“Oh, that can wait until tomorrow”, responded Mary. “It’s getting late.” She was right; the sun was beginning to settle down to the treeline, and the late afternoon light was fading. Mosquitos were beginning to come out too, and they had to slap a few away from their exposed skin.

“Okay, let’s just bring in the essentials,” Robert said, They spent the next few minutes carrying in all the sensitive and particularly expensive items from their car. As they finished up, Mary went inside the house, with Robert close behind. However, as he was about to step through the doorway, he thought he saw a dark, thin shadow lurking in the trees. He turned to face it, but there was nothing there.

“Are you coming, honey?”, called Mary from inside the house.

“Yeah, just give me a sec”, Robert said, stepping into the house as he tried to shake the nagging feeling that they were being watched. As he closed the door, the leaves where he’d thought he’d seen the shadow rustled, and woodland creatures scattered as something tall and dark moved off through the trees.

[brokehorrorfan]

Blu-ray Review: The Omen Collection

In the pantheon of religious horror, the holy trinity consists of The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, and The Omen. Although The Omen arrived last, opening on June 6, 1976, it arguably offers more excitement than its satanic brethren (which is not to say that it is a superior film). Likely to be considered a slow-burner by today's standards, the picture builds tension and unravels a mystery at a meticulous pace, but it's punctuated by elaborate, Rube Goldberg-ian death scenes.

The Omen spawned a trilogy of films, a made-for-television sequel, and a modern remake. Scream Factory has collected all five movies in The Omen Collection, which is limited to 10,000 units. Besting Fox's earlier Blu-ray set - which omitted Part IV and featured some of the worst box set packaging known to man - each film is packaged in an individual Blu-ray case with original artwork within a rigid slipcover case. It boasts a deluge of extras, new and old.

In the original film, American diplomat Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird) and his wife, Katherine (Lee Remick, Anatomy of a Murder), adopt a baby named Damien (Harvey Stephens) after their own child is stillborn. Beginning with his fifth birthday, a string of mysterious deaths surround Damien. Upon being presented with convincing evidence by a photographer (David Warner, Tron), Robert becomes convinced that his son is none other than the antichrist, and he is faced with the task of stopping him to prevent Armageddon.

Firing on all cylinders, The Omen is an exemplary horror film. Working from a well-constructed script by David Seltzer (Shining Through, Prophecy), director Richard Donner grounds the story firmly in reality. The fantastical elements are easy to swallow, as each and every incident in the plot could be mere coincidence. Peck brings a gravitas to the production, leading a strong cast in which Remick also holds her own. Even the six-year-old Stephens, who never acted before and did very little after, is convincingly malevolent.

John Richardson's (Aliens, Harry Potter) special effects for the proto-Final Destination deaths - including one of the greatest beheadings ever committed on celluloid - remain shocking after more than 40 years. Cinematographer Gilbert Taylor (Star Wars: A New Hope, Dr. Strangelove) captures it all with clean camerawork, while Jerry Goldsmith (Alien, Gremlins) provides a chilling orchestral score elevated to pure evil with choral chanting.

The Omen has been newly mastered in 4K from the original negative, approved by Donner, for the new release. The result is a pristine presentation with improved detail and color saturation over Fox’s previous high-definition transfer. The Omen carries a whopping four audio commentaries. One, featuring special project consultant Scott Michael Bosco, is new. His audio sounds compressed - as if it were recorded on a cell phone - but it's dense with details focusing on the theological aspects. Bosco often digresses, but I appreciate the fresh perspective rather than a historian reciting IMDb trivia.

The other audio commentaries include: a track with Donner and editor Stuart Baird (Lethal Weapon, Skyfall), in which the two old friends reminisce about the highs and lows of the production; a track with Donner and filmmaker Brian Helgeland (Mystic River, L.A. Confidential), which features as much good-natured joking as it does insight; and a track with film historians Lem Dobbs, Nick Redman, and Jeff Bond, largely focusing on Goldsmith's score. A lot of information is repeated across the commentaries, but the varying viewpoints make them all worth listening to.

Seltzer and actress Holly Palance (who plays the nanny whose suicide by hanging is among the film’s most memorable moment) sit down for new interviews. Seltzer's chat is particularly enjoyable, as he's candid and humble. He openly states that his script is not as good as the movie it birthed. He also shares what he would have done if he had the opportunity to write the sequel. Palance, the daughter of the great Jack Palance, recounts her naivety about working on her first film and shooting her iconic death scene. The final new extra is an appreciation of The Omen's score by composer Chris Young, who says he looked to Goldsmith's progression across The Omen trilogy as he was scoring the Hellraiser films. It's fascinating to hear one accomplished professional praise another in their field.

All of the archival extras are ported over: a thorough, 15-minute interview with Donner from 2008; 666: The Omen Revealed, a 46-minute retrospective from 2000 featuring crew members along with religious experts to provide context; The Omen Revelations, which is essentially a streamlined version of 666, recycling much of its footage in 24 minutes; Curse or Coincidence, in which the crew recounts a variety of curious incidents that nearly derailed the production; an introduction by Donner; a deleted scene with commentary by Donner; an older interview with Seltzer, which features a lot of the same information as the new one; and an interview with Goldsmith about his score. There's also an appreciation of The Omen by filmmaker Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street), in which the master of horror waxes poetic about the influential picture for 20 minutes; Trailers from Hell trailer commentary by filmmaker Larry Cohen (The Stuff), who cites The Omen as one of his favorite movies; the trailer; TV spots; radio spots; and four image galleries: stills, behind-the-scenes, posters and lobby cards, and publicity.

Following the massive success of the first film, Fox fast-tracked a sequel, Damien: Omen II, to open in 1978. Having narrowly survived the events of The Omen, a 12-year-old Damien (Jonathan Scott-Taylor) now lives with his affluent uncle, Richard Thorn (William Holden, Sunset Blvd.), aunt, Ann (Lee Grant, In the Heat of the Night), and cousin, Mark (Lucas Donat), in Chicago. Damien is ostensibly a well-adjusted kid, unaware of who - or what - he is, but those who cross him wind up dead in freak accidents.

Omen II's plotting mirrors that of the first film, but the mystery aspect that made the original so effective is gone. The viewer knows from the start that Damien is, in fact, the antichrist, so they're left waiting for the characters to catch up. The plot dedicates an inordinate amount of time to Thorn's business enterprises, which is only vaguely paid of in the next installment when Damien rises to power. On the bright side, there are several admirably inventive deaths in the tradition of the first, from a bird attack that would make Alfred Hitchcock jealous to a visceral elevator bisection to a harrowing scene of a man trapped in a pond under ice.

Since Donner had moved on to Superman and Seltzer was either uninterested or not asked (depending on the source) to pen the sequel, a new creative team was employed. Stanley Mann (Firestarter, Conan the Destroyer) and Mike Hodges (Get Carter, Flash Gordon) wrote the script, with the latter set to direct. Hodges only shot for a few days, during which he quickly fell behind schedule, before being swiftly replaced by Don Taylor (Escape from the Planet of the Apes). Goldsmith returns to score with a worthy successor, retaining the signature sound while expanding it to incorporate electronics.

Leo McKern is the only returning cast member, reprising his role as archaeologist Carl Bugenhagen in the prologue. Peck's formidable presence is sorely missed, but Holden - who, incidentally, turned down the lead role in The Omen - and Grant bring some prestige to the production. Scott-Taylor is a convincing surrogate for Stephens, but the child acting leaves a bit to be desired. It's offset by a supporting cast that includes Lance Henriksen (Aliens), Lew Ayres (All Quiet on the Western Front), Sylvia Sidney (Beetlejuice), Allan Arbus (M*A*S*H), and Meshach Taylor (Mannequin).

Damien: Omen II's Blu-ray disc features new interviews with Grant, who is proud of the sequel and shares a funny anecdote about discovering her first wrinkle while filming; Foxworth, who was able to get to know Holden, one of his heroes, on their daily commute; and actress Elizabeth Sheppard, who proudly discusses working with Holden as well as Vincent Price (on The Tomb of Ligeia). In a separate featurette, Sheppard narrates a gallery of her personal photos from the shoot, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the bird attack sequence.

Since Omen II's mythology has little biblical foundation, Bosco's new commentary features even more tenuous tangents, but it affords him the opportunity to discuss the franchise more subjectively. An archival commentary with producer Harvey Bernhard proves to be a bit more informative. The disc also includes a vintage making-of featurette consisting of clips, interviews, and footage from the set, along with the trailer, a TV spot, a radio spot, and a still gallery.

The Omen trilogy came to a conclusion in 1981 with Omen III: The Final Conflict - although it proved not to be final after all. As prophesied, Damien (Sam Neill, Jurassic Park), now 33 - the same age as Jesus when he was crucified - has risen to political power. Following the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain’s ghastly suicide, Damien is appointed the position, which was once held by his adoptive father. The only true foe for the antichrist is, naturally, Christ himself. Rather than bringing about the apocalypse, as the franchise had been driving toward since the beginning, Damien attempts to prevent the second coming in a sanctimonious conclusion to the story arc.

While no successor could top the original Omen, its first sequel smartly embraced the gratuitous death scenes. For the third installment, however, director Graham Baker (Alien Nation) made a conscious effort to avoid them. Instead, he delivers inept monks trying to assassinate Damien with the Seven Daggers of Megiddo, while the antichrist’s legion of apostles murder newborn males who are the potential Christ child. Andrew Birkin's (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) script leans further into religiosity at the expensive of the horror elements while interjecting silly mythology akin to Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.

Omen III: The Final Conflict's Blu-ray disc features new interviews with Baker, who takes a truly retrospective look back on the film, comparing the society of today to that of when it was produced; Birkin, who hadn't seen The Omen when he first met for the gig and wasn't particularly impressed when he finally watched it; and production assistant Jeanne Ferber, who explains how she was among those polled by Bernhard to help choose the lead, with Neill selected unanimously.

For his final commentary in the set, Bosco is back to pointing out the film's connections to scripture, leading to a lengthy tirade comparing Christianity and Judaism. An archival track with Baker has a few nuggets of information among extended gaps of silence, but most of his points are addressed more concisely in the new interview. Special features are rounded out by the trailer, TV spots, and a still gallery.

Although The Omen’s main storyline continued with two more book sequels, Fox opted to use the familiar title for a made-for-television movie on their budding network in 1991. Although dubbed Omen IV: The Awakening, the film largely serves as a remake of the original film but with a female antichrist. After numerous failed attempts to get pregnant, politician Gene York (Michael Woods) and his wife, Karen (Faye Grant, V), adopt an orphan girl. Seven years later, Delia (Asia Vieira, A Home at the End of the World) becomes increasingly violent and manipulative, leaving a trail of bodies in her wake.

Similar to Omen II's production troubles, Omen IV started with Jorge Montesi (Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal) in the director's chair, but he was fire mid-shoot and replaced by Dominique Othenin-Girard (Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers). Writer Brian Taggert (Poltergeist III) keeps the basic structure of Seltzer's original script intact, but the details of each beat are altered and the death scenes are subdued for TV. In addition to gender-swapping the creepy kid, it's the mother who is proactive this time around.

Despite maintaining the general outline of The Omen, the plot is harder to believe this time around, stretching the required suspension of disbelief to include psychics that can read auras. The most ludicrous plot point comes in the form of a shoehorned connection to The Omen mythology. This "twist" canonically positions Omen IV as a sequel rather than a thinly-veiled remake, but it feels more like a low-budget knockoff than an official installment in the franchise.

Omen IV: The Awakening doesn't have any audio commentaries, but its Blu-ray debut includes a new interview with Taggert, who breaks down several of the major choices made in the script. It also contains The Omen Legacy, a feature-length documentary on the franchise that aired on TV in 2001. Narrated by Jack Palance (City Slickers), it finds cast and crew members (including a couple of folks who don't appear in any other special features) and religious figures (the Church of Satan’s high priestess among them) discussing all four films while playing up the alleged curse. The trailer and a still gallery are also included.

Amidst the onslaught of horror remakes that dominated the early 2000s, Fox shrewdly capitalized with The Omen in 2006 - on 6/6/06, to be exact. Director John Moore (Max Payne) offers slick production value and an inspired cast, but it feels wholly unnecessary considering how closely it follows the original script. Seltzer is the only credited writer, but it's unclear if his 40-year-old script was simply polished off or if he was involved in re-writes, as there are some subtle changes to contemporize it. While it fails to bring anything new to the table, it’s a stronger effort than Omen IV.

Liev Schreiber (Scream) and Julia Stiles (10 Things I Hate About You) star as the Thorns. Talented as they are, they lack the chemistry of Peck and Remick. Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick is successfully creepy as the new Damien, while the role's originator, Harvey Stephens, makes a quick cameo. In a particularly motivated bit of stunt casting, Mia Farrow (Rosemary's Baby) plays the antichrist's new nanny. David Thewlis (Harry Potter) and Pete Postlethwaite (The Lost World: Jurassic Park) also have supporting roles.

The remake is the only Blu-ray in the set that doesn't offer any new special features. The existing extras cover a lot of ground, but it would’ve been interesting to hear the crew reflect back on it. Omenisms is a 37-minute documentary exploring the pressures of making a movie with a release date set in advance, even showing Moore losing his temper and yelling at a producer. It feels very of its time, with director Stephen French  treating the piece like a hip art film, but it contains a lot of great material.

Moore, producer Glenn Williamson, and editor Dan Zimmermann participate in an audio commentary that's fairly informative but doesn't touch on many of the trials and tribulations showcased in Omenisms. There's also a featurette about Marco Beltrami (Scream) recording his score at the legendary Abbey Road Studio; Revelation 666, a cheesy TV special tracing the history, interpretation, and theories of 666; unrated, extended scenes, including a longer version of the ending; and theatrical trailers.

While The Exorcist remains the be-all and end-all of occult horror, The Omen franchise as a whole is more consistent. The first three Omen films comprise a cohesive trilogy, while Part IV and the remake each offer a fresh, if flawed, perspective on the material. Between the movies, commentaries, interviews, and featurettes, The Omen Collection contains over 30 hours of content, making it an unbelievable value and a must-have for any horror collector.

The Omen Collection is available now on Blu-ray via Scream Factory.

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: September 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of September 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

As if proven liar Boris Johnson suspending parliament to try and force through a No Deal Britait at the end of August didn’t look dictatorial enough, he then moved on to threatening and Tory MP who doesn't fall in line with deselection - and yet, rather than call this the obviously despotic move that it is, instead the media spent more time focusing on him adopting a fucking dog

Master strategist Dominic Cummings said that, rather than listen to “rich Remainers” in London, people should listen to those all over the country - which certainly helped, as Cummings’ genius idea to have proven liar Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson walk the streets of Morley and Doncaster saw said proven liar have to listen to the non-rich giving him both barrels for being responsible for the mess we are currently in

Not only did Laura Kuenssberg repeat what the press did with Carrie Symonds’ neighbours and throw around the term “Labour activist” to dismiss the very real concerns of the father whose daughter was in the understaffed hospital that proven liar Boris Johnson visited for a press op and then called out the proven liar’s claims it wasn’t a press op by pointing to the camera crew a few feet away, but she went one step further by doxxing the person by posting one of his tweets to her Twitter timeline, which unsurprisingly led to him getting a dog’s abuse from people because he dared say bad things about proven liar Boris Johnson - abuse he would not have got if Kuenssberg hadn’t doxxed him to her 1.1m Twitter followers, all because she wanted to distract attention from the fact her beloved BoBo had been caught on camera lying to someone’s face

...and it wasn’t long before the BBC proved their blatant double standards, having circled the wagons around Kuenssberg to say she did nothing wrong while doxxing a member of the public, yet disciplining Naga Munchetty for an off-the-cuff remark about the Orange Overlord saying Trump saying non-whites who criticise him should “go back where they came from” is racist

There is nothing sinister about Dominic Cummings saying that, if MPs wants to stop receiving death threats, they need to get Britait done.  Absolutely nothing sinister about that at all...

When Jacob Rees Mogg wasn’t literally lying in parliament, he was dismissing the genuine concerns of neurologist Dr David Nicholl by comparing his concerns to those of anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield, who was struck off for giving erroneous advice

I’m trying to work out if Justin Trudeau forgot about the whole wearing blackface thing, or merely assumed everyone else had.  Either way, at best he could generously be accused of gross naivety - especially when the second round of photos came out, after he tried to pass it off as a one-time prank

So not only did proven liar Boris Johnson sound supremely cuntish by saying that leaving the EU would honour the memory of Jo Cox - that’s the same Jo Cox who, while campaigning for Remain, was murdered by a member of Britain First - but when quizzed on this Bernard Jenkin could only respond about the stress that the proven liar was under, because as we all know the real victim is the person who said something monumentally dense and not the person murdered by a member of the far-right on the streets of their constituency

If anyone can explain what the hell compelled Stephen Kinnock to suddenly decide that Theresa May’s deal should have yet another going over in parliament in spite it being defeated three times already and her not even being PM at this point, let alone why he wanted to bring this up at the moment No Deal was being defanged, I would love to hear it

Something compelled Quentin Letts to compare the recently-deceased Robert Mugabe to Boris Johnson...as a compliment

Compelling argument against nominative determinism James Cleverly thought he was being clever by keeping up the “chicken” jibes against Jeremy Corbyn that proven liar Boris Johnson and his cronies at The Sun had been keeping up for days in a desperate attempt to pretend Corbyn hadn’t spotted an obvious tarp by Dominic Cummings and sidestepped it...right up until his stunt ended up seeing the entire Tory party get bitchslapped by Kentucky Fried Chicken

...and it wasn’t long before proven liar Boris Johnson rendered all jibes of Corbyn being “chicken” laughable when he responded to some heckling when visiting Luxembourg by publicly running away from a press conference with Luxembourg’s PM 

According to Kwasi Kwarteng there are people up and down the country questioning the impartiality of the Scottish judges who ruled Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament unlawful.  Just a reminder, Kwasi Kwarteng is the Business Secretary and not a Youtube right-wing conspiracy nut

Waffling gargoyle Nigel Farage has decided that those dozens of appearances on BBC political programming over the last decade were examples of the BBC being biased against him, and he;s boycotting all future appearances.  He neglected to mention whether or not any other member of The Nigel Farage Ego Project would follow suit...

We saw just how little credibility Laura Kuenssberg has on the 2nd September edition of The Six O’Clock News where she stood outside 10 Downing Street talking about how proven liar Boris Johnson would be calling a snap election, only for her to be cut off mid-sentence by the proven liar walking out to waffle for five minutes where the only thing of note he said that wasn’t an easily-debunked lie was that there would be no election...and once he was finished Kuenssberg continued talking about a snap election as if she hadn’t been stood less than twenty feet away when it was said there would be no election

The fact that nobody was surprised when James Cleverly falsely claimed that the Tories created the NHS during the Tory conference isn’t a surprise - not least because it’s not even the first time Cleverly has made that patently false claim 

It would appear that Alan Sugar misses the days that he and not Alexander Boris De Pfeil Johnson was being held up as the British answer to Donald Trump, judging by his posting a tweet taking aim at the dogwhistlers’ favourite target Diane Abbott

We are supposed to feel sorry for David Cameron after his memoirs stated that he thought that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove behaved “appallingly” before and during the EU Referendum campaign.  If only the party leader did something about this, which they were in the position to do, and what was the name of the leader of the Tories at that moment in time again...?

Forgetting that we’re supposed to be calling Jeremy Corbyn a chicken, instead our good and honest friends at the Daily Mail instead ran an article about how awful it was that Jeremy Corbyn supported the Guildford Four’s Paul Hill.  That’s the Paul Hill who, like the other members of the Guildford Four (and the Maguire Seven) were threatened, beaten and tortured by the police and served fifteen years in jail for being members of the IRA in spite of the fact that they weren’t members of the IRA nor plotted any terror attacks, and the Mail thinks it’s bad to show support for someone who was a victim of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history

It’s a bit rich for Rachel Riley to be the face of the Don’t Feed The Trolls campaign considering her history of harassing, doxxing and encouraging pile-ons on anyone who disagrees with her

Sentient testicle Toby Young thought he was being really, really clever when he accused Phillip Hammond of an “anti-semitic conspiracy theory” after Hammond stated that the sole reason for proven liar Boris Johnson trying to take the UK out of the EU by October 31st is to help out his speculator mates - although the cleverness rapidly evaporated when Hammond responded personally with a threat of suing for libel, and for some strange reason Young’s really, really clever tweet vanished off the face of the earth

...and because Toby Young has to be Toby Young about things, rather than keep his head down after Hammond’s threat of legal action instead he came rushing to the defence of the proven liar by saying that female Spectator employees felt upset if they weren’t groped by proven liar Boris Johnson, which is not only the defence of the rapist but his “defence” only serves to say that proven liar Boris Johnson has a history of groping

It’s as if The Sun have decided they can go back to their pre-Leveson levels of scumbaggery, judging by how they’d both told Gareth Thomas’ parents he was HIV positive and threatened to publish it, as well as reporting how two members of Ben Stokes’ family had been shot and killed several years ago without actually obtaining consent from Stokes before splashing it across their front page

...and right on their heels was the Daily Mail doxxing Jo Maughan for the sole purpose of...nope, no idea why they felt the need to do so, but they did it anyway

If Steve Baker thought he was helping the Leave side look non-deranged, his claiming that proven liar Boris Johnson is moving the Tories back to the centre ground failed to do that on a molecular level

It’s all well and good the Liberal Democrats acting as if bringing in Luciana Berger and Angela “funny tinge” Smith as MPs is some kind of major breakthrough...but they sure kept it quiet that they wouldn’t be defending the parliamentary seats they’ve been squatting in since February

So nice of Mike Gapes to join the dogwhistling brigade with his deciding to highlight Diane Abbott’s poor use of grammar...by highlighting that she was using grammar correctly while Gapes’ attempts at grammar bullying only served to highlight his grasp of the English language could be better

It says it all that the Daily Mail was encouraging their readers to stop sponsoring the RNLI for the crime of using 2% of those donations to support causes abroad

To nobody’s surprise, as soon as John Humphrys was out the door he harrumphed about the BBC’s “liberal bias” to the Daily Mail - as if over thirty years of his using the Today programme as a platform of his right-wing views and generally being a miserable twat

How generous of Tim Martin to say that, as the UK had left the Customs Union, Wetherspoons could now charge 20p less per pint...except Britain hadn’t left the Customs Union, revealing that Martin could have cut prices long ago if he wanted to, but he obviously felt he didn’t need to as the chain’s profits weren’t nosediving as a direct consequence of Tim Martin alienating half of his customer base for the past three years

According to reports, Nicalis head honcho Tyrone Rodriguez went to the same business school as Channel Awesome supremo Mike Michaud, judging by the reports coming out that he would go weeks without answering any calls - which is not what an indie dev who sent their game over to Nicalis to be ported wants to discover - as well as a laundry list of evidence of him not realising he isn't a 14-year old edgelord who can only talk in raicst, antisemitic, homophobic or ablest slurs, on top of his charming habit of bullying members of staff

In the latest attempt by PewDipShit to prove he's not beholden to the alt-right section of his fanbase he offered to donate $50,000 to the Anti-Defamation League...and when that same alt-right section of his fanbase kicked up a fuss, he cancelled the donation and waffled about “taking responsibility” while demonstrating that how averse he is to the idea

This month it was John Ocasio-Nolte who was getting insanely triggered by Greta Thunburg, taking to Twitter to suggest she either needs to be spanked or receive psychological counselling (which worked about as well as can be expected the second the tweet was posted) while Dinesh D’Souza said she looks just like images used for Nazi propaganda as if that means anything other than Dinesh D’Souza spend hours going through Google image searches to try and find something, anything that would serve as the basis of an utterly batshit proclamation that his moron followers would swallow

Not a good look for Focus Home Entertainment to decide that, once their deal to distribute Frogwares’ games expired, their solution would be to drop all of Frogwares’ games from every online store - yet rather than return the code to Frogwares, instead they’d be keeping those as well because if Focus Home can’t sell those games, no-one can

It’s not a surprise to see The Sun forgot the faux outrage they stoked last December at trying to say Jeremy Corbyn called Theresa may a “stupid woman” (even though any lipreader will tell you he said “stupid people” of the entire Tory front bench) judging by their response to proven liar Boris Johnson calling Corbyn a “big girl’s blouse” was to dispatch one of their hacks to Corbyn’s house the following dya waving an item of women’s clothing at him, seemingly under the impression this looked anything other than mad

Meanwhile The Daily Telegraph wrote a piece comparing waffling gargoyle Nigel Farage to Britait’s Icarus...somehow forgetting how the story of Icarus ended

Britain’s most triggered man Piers Moron Morgan took to Twitter to howl about how Dora the Explorer discourages men from becoming explorers.  I’m guessing that he forgot how Indiana Jones and Nathan Drake exist...

What would a month be without Donald Trump doing something utterly lunkheaded?  Not this month, that’s for sure, judging by his response to mistakenly claiming that Hurricane Dorian was heading to Alabama wasn’t to admit the mistake or even never mention it again, but instead draw on a weather map with a Sharpie to make it look like Dorian’s path would now head into Alabama - so not only did he prove he can’t admit to being wrong, but he’s so thin-skinned his being wrong eats at him so much he can’t let his being wrong go, which only draws attention to his being wrong in the first place

[unsettlingshortstories]

Nightcrawlers

Robert McCammon (1984)

1

“Hard rain coming down,” Cheryl said, and I nodded in agreement.

Through the diner’s plate-glass windows, a dense curtain of rain flapped across the Gulf gas pumps and continued across the parking lot. It hit Big Bob’s with a force that made the glass rattle like uneasy bones. The red neon sign that said BIG BOB’S! DIESEL FUEL! EATS! sat on top of a high steel pole above the diner so the truckers on the interstate could see it. Out in the night, the red-tinted rain thrashed in torrents across my old pickup truck and Cheryl’s baby-blue Volkswagen.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose that storm’ll either wash some folks in off the interstate or we can just about hang it up.” The curtain of rain parted for an instant, and I could see the treetops whipping back and forth in the woods on the other side of Highway 47. Wind whined around the front door like an animal trying to claw its way in. I glanced at the electric clock on the wall behind the counter. Twenty minutes before nine. We usually closed up at ten, but tonight—with tornado warnings in the weather forecast—I was tempted to turn the lock a little early. “Tell you what,” I said. “If we’re empty at nine, we skedaddle. ’Kay?”

“No argument here,” she said. She watched the storm for a moment longer, then continued putting newly washed coffee cups, saucers, and plates away on the stainless-steel shelves.

Lightning flared from west to east like the strike of a burning bullwhip. The diner’s lights flickered, then came back to normal. A shudder of thunder seemed to come right up through my shoes. Late March is the beginning of tornado season in south Alabama, and we’ve had some whoppers spin past here in the last few years. I knew that Alma was at home, and she understood to get into the root cellar right quick if she spotted a twister, like that one we saw in ’82 dancing through the woods about two miles from our farm.

“You got any love-ins planned this weekend, hippie?” I asked Cheryl, mostly to get my mind off the storm and to rib her too.

She was in her late thirties, but I swear that when she grinned she could’ve passed for a kid. “Wouldn’t you like to know, redneck?” she answered; she replied the same way to all my digs at her. Cheryl Lovesong—and I know that couldn’t have been her real name—was a mighty able waitress, and she had hands that were no strangers to hard work. But I didn’t care that she wore her long silvery-blond hair in Indian braids with hippie headbands, or came to work in tie-dyed overalls. She was the best waitress who’d ever worked for me, and she got along with everybody just fine—even us rednecks. That’s what I am, and proud of it: I drink Rebel Yell whiskey straight, and my favorite songs are about good women gone bad and trains on the long track to nowhere. I keep my wife happy. I’ve raised my two boys to pray to God and to salute the flag, and if anybody don’t like it he can go a few rounds with Big Bob Clayton.

Cheryl would come right out and tell you she used to live in San Francisco in the late sixties, and that she went to love-ins and peace marches and all that stuff. When I reminded her it was 1984 and Ronnie Reagan was president, she’d look at me like I was walking cow-flop. I always figured she’d start thinking straight when all that hippie-dust blew out of her head.

Alma said my tail was going to get burnt if I ever took a shine to Cheryl, but I’m a fifty-five-year-old redneck who stopped sowing his wild seed when he met the woman he married, more than thirty years ago.

Lightning crisscrossed the turbulent sky, followed by a boom of thunder. Cheryl said, “Wow! Look at that light show!”

“Light show, my ass,” I muttered. The diner was as solid as the Good Book, so I wasn’t too worried about the storm. But on a wild night like this, stuck out in the countryside like Big Bob’s was, you had a feeling of being a long way off from civilization—though Mobile was only twenty-seven miles south. On a wild night like this, you had a feeling that anything could happen, as quick as a streak of lightning out of the darkness. I picked up a copy of the Mobile Press-Register that the last customer—a trucker on his way to Texas—had left on the counter a half-hour before, and I started plowing through the news, most of it bad: those A-rab countries were still squabbling like Hatfields and McCoys in white robes; two men had robbed a Qwik-Mart in Mobile and been killed by the police in a shoot-out; cops were investigating a massacre at a motel near Daytona Beach; an infant had been stolen from a maternity ward in Birmingham. The only good things on the front page were stories that said the economy was up and that Reagan swore we’d show the Commies who was boss in El Salvador and Lebanon.

The diner shook under a blast of thunder, and I looked up from the paper as a pair of headlights emerged from the rain into my parking lot.

2

The headlights were attached to an Alabama state-trooper car.

“Half-alive, hold the onion, extra brown the buns.” Cheryl was already writing on her pad in expectation of the order. I pushed the paper aside and went to the fridge for the hamburger meat.

When the door opened, a windblown spray of rain swept in and stung like buckshot. “Howdy, folks!” Dennis Wells peeled off his gray rain slicker and hung it on the rack next to the door. Over his Smokey the Bear trooper hat was a protective plastic covering, beaded with raindrops. He took off his hat, exposing the thinning blond hair on his pale scalp, as he approached the counter and sat on his usual stool, right next to the cash register. “Cup of black coffee and a rare—” Cheryl was already sliding the coffee in front of him, and the burger sizzled on the griddle. “Ya’ll are on the ball tonight!” Dennis said; he said the same thing when he came in, which was almost every night. Funny the kind of habits you fall into, without realizing it.

“Kinda wild out there, ain’t it?” I asked as I flipped the burger over.

“Lordy, yes! Wind just about flipped my car over three, four miles down the interstate. Thought I was gonna be eatin’ a little pavement tonight.” Dennis was a husky young man in his early thirties, with thick blond brows over deep-set light brown eyes. He had a wife and three kids, and he was fast to flash a walletful of their pictures. “Don’t reckon I’ll be chasin’ any speeders tonight, but there’ll probably be a load of accidents. Cheryl, you sure look pretty this evenin’.”

“Still the same old me.” Cheryl never wore a speck of makeup, though one day she’d come to work with glitter on her cheeks. She had a place a few miles away, and I guessed she was farming that funny weed up there. “Any trucks moving?”

“Seen a few, but not many. Truckers ain’t fools. Gonna get worse before it gets better, the radio says.” He sipped at his coffee and grimaced. “Lordy, that’s strong enough to jump out of the cup and dance a jig, darlin’!”

I fixed the burger the way Dennis liked it, put it on a platter with some fries, and served it. “Bobby, how’s the wife treatin’ you?” he asked.

“No complaints.”

“Good to hear. I’ll tell you, a fine woman is worth her weight in gold. Hey, Cheryl! How’d you like a handsome young man for a husband?”

Cheryl smiled, knowing what was coming. “The man I’m looking for hasn’t been made yet.”

“Yeah, but you ain’t met Cecil yet, either! He asks me about you every time I see him, and I keep tellin’ him I’m doin’ everything I can to get you two together.” Cecil was Dennis’ brother-in-law and owned a Chevy dealership in Bay Minette. Dennis had been ribbing Cheryl about going on a date with Cecil for the past four months. “You’d like him,” Dennis promised. “He’s got a lot of my qualities.”

“Well, that’s different. In that case, I’m certain I don’t want to meet him.”

Dennis winced. “Oh, you’re a cruel woman! That’s what smokin’ banana peels does to you—turns you mean. Anybody readin’ this rag?” He reached over for the newspaper.

“Waitin’ here just for you,” I said. Thunder rumbled, closer to the diner. The lights flickered briefly once … then again before they returned to normal. Cheryl busied herself by fixing a fresh pot of coffee, and I watched the rain whipping against the windows. When the lightning flashed, I could see the trees swaying so hard they looked about to snap.

Dennis read and ate his hamburger. “Boy,” he said after a few minutes, “the world’s in some shape, huh? Those A-rab pig-stickers are itchin’ for war. Mobile metro boys had a little gunplay last night. Good for them.” He paused and frowned, then tapped the paper with one thick finger. “This I can’t figure.”

“What’s that?”

“Thing in Florida couple of nights ago. Six people killed at the Pines Haven Motor Inn, near Daytona Beach. Motel was set off in the woods. Only a couple of cinder-block houses in the area, and nobody heard any gunshots. Says here one old man saw what he thought was a bright white star falling over the motel, and that was it. Funny, huh?”

“A UFO,” Cheryl offered. “Maybe he saw a UFO.”

“Yeah, and I’m a little green man from Mars,” Dennis scoffed. “I’m serious. This is weird. The motel was so blown full of holes it looked like a war had been going on. Everybody was dead—even a dog and a canary that belonged to the manager. The cars out in front of the rooms were blasted to pieces. The sound of one of them explodin’ was what woke up the people in those houses, I reckon.” He skimmed the story again. “Two bodies were out in the parkin’ lot, one was holed up in a bathroom, one had crawled under a bed, and two had dragged every piece of furniture in the room over to block the door. Didn’t seem to help ’em any, though.”

I grunted. “Guess not.”

“No motive, no witnesses. You better believe those Florida cops are shakin’ the bushes for some kind of dangerous maniac—or maybe more than one, it says here.” He shoved the paper away and patted the service revolver holstered at his hip. “If I ever got hold of him—or them—he’d find out not to mess with a ’Bama trooper.” He glanced quickly over at Cheryl and smiled mischievously. “Probably some crazy hippie who’d been smokin’ his tennis shoes.”

“Don’t knock it,” she said sweetly, “until you’ve tried it.” She looked past him, out the window into the storm. “Car’s pullin’ in, Bobby.”

Headlights glared briefly off the wet windows. It was a station wagon with wood-grained panels on the sides; it veered around the gas pumps and parked next to Dennis’ trooper car. On the front bumper was a personalized license plate that said: Ray & Lindy. The headlights died, and all the doors opened at once. Out of the wagon came a whole family: a man and woman, a little girl and boy about eight or nine. Dennis got up and opened the diner door as they hurried inside from the rain.

All of them had gotten pretty well soaked between the station wagon and the diner, and they wore the dazed expressions of people who’d been on the road a long time. The man wore glasses and had curly gray hair, the woman was slim and dark-haired and pretty. The kids were sleepy-eyed. All of them were well-dressed, the man in a yellow sweater with one of those alligators on the chest. They had vacation tans, and I figured they were tourists heading north from the beach after spring break.

“Come on in and take a seat,” I said.

“Thank you,” the man said. They squeezed into one of the booths near the windows. “We saw your sign from the interstate.”

“Bad night to be on the highway,” Dennis told them. “Tornado warnings are out all over the place.”

“We heard it on the radio,” the woman—Lindy, if the license was right—said. “We’re on our way to Birmingham, and we thought we could drive right through the storm. We should’ve stopped at that Holiday Inn we passed about fifteen miles ago.”

“That would’ve been smart,” Dennis agreed. “No sense in pushin’ your luck.” He returned to his stool.

The new arrivals ordered hamburgers, fries, and Cokes. Cheryl and I went to work. Lightning made the diner’s lights flicker again, and the sound of thunder caused the kids to jump. When the food was ready and Cheryl served them, Dennis said, “Tell you what. You folks finish your dinners and I’ll escort you back to the Holiday Inn. Then you can head out in the morning. How about that?”

“Fine,” Ray said gratefully. “I don’t think we could’ve gotten very much further, anyway.” He turned his attention to his food.

“Well,” Cheryl said quietly, standing beside me, “I don’t guess we get home early, do we?”

“I guess not. Sorry.”

She shrugged. “Goes with the job, right? Anyway, I can think of worse places to be stuck.”

I figured that Alma might be worried about me, so I went over to the pay phone to call her. I dropped a quarter in—and the dial tone sounded like a cat being stepped on. I hung up and tried again. The cat scream continued. “Damn!” I muttered. “Lines must be screwed up.”

“Ought to get yourself a place closer to town, Bobby,” Dennis said. “Never could figure out why you wanted a joint in the sticks. At least you’d get better phone service and good lights if you were nearer to Mo—”

He was interrupted by the sound of wet and shrieking brakes, and he swiveled around on his stool.

I looked up as a car hurtled into the parking lot, the tires swerving, throwing up plumes of water. For a few seconds I thought it was going to keep coming, right through the window into the diner—but then the brakes caught and the car almost grazed the side of my pickup as it jerked to a stop. In the neon’s red glow I could tell it was a beat-up old Ford Fairlane, either gray or a dingy beige. Steam was rising off the crumpled hood. The headlights stayed on for perhaps a minute before they winked off. A figure got out of the car and walked slowly—with a limp—toward the diner.

We watched the figure approach. Dennis’ body looked like a coiled spring ready to be triggered. “We got us a live one, Bobby boy,” he said.

The door opened, and in a stinging gust of wind and rain a man who looked like walking death stepped into my diner.

3

He was so wet he might well have been driving with his windows down. He was a skinny guy, maybe weighed all of a hundred and twenty pounds, even soaking wet. His unruly dark hair was plastered to his head, and he had gone a week or more without a shave. In his gaunt, pallid face his eyes were startlingly blue; his gaze flicked around the diner, lingered for a few seconds on Dennis. Then he limped on down to the far end of the counter and took a seat. He wiped the rain out of his eyes as Cheryl took a menu to him.

Dennis stared at the man. When he spoke, his voice bristled with authority. “Hey, fella.” The man didn’t look up from the menu. “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you.”

The man pushed the menu away and pulled a damp packet of Kools out of the breast pocket of his patched Army fatigue jacket. “I can hear you,” he said; his voice was deep and husky, and didn’t go with his less-than-robust physical appearance.

“Drivin’ kinda fast in this weather, don’t you think?”

The man flicked a cigarette lighter a few times before he got a flame, then lit one of his smokes and inhaled deeply. “Yeah,” he replied. “I was. Sorry. I saw the sign, and I was in a hurry to get here. Miss? I’d just like a cup of coffee, please. Hot and real strong, okay?”

Cheryl nodded and turned away from him, almost bumping into me as I strolled down behind the counter to check him out.

“That kind of hurry’ll get you killed,” Dennis cautioned.

“Right. Sorry.” He shivered and pushed the tangled hair back from his forehead with one hand. Up close, I could see deep cracks around his mouth and the corners of his eyes and I figured him to be in his late thirties or early forties. His wrists were as thin as a woman’s; he looked like he hadn’t eaten a good meal for more than a month. He stared at his hands through bloodshot eyes. Probably on drugs, I thought. The fella gave me the creeps. Then he looked at me with those eyes—so pale blue they were almost white—and I felt like I’d been nailed to the floor. “Something wrong?” he asked—not rudely, just curiously.

“Nope.” I shook my head. Cheryl gave him his coffee and then went over to give Ray and Lindy their check.

The man didn’t use either cream or sugar. The coffee was steaming, but he drank half of it down like mother’s milk. “That’s good,” he said. “Keep me awake, won’t it?”

“More than likely.” Over the breast pocket of his jacket was the faint outline of the name that had been sewn there once. I think it was Price, but I could’ve been wrong.

“That’s what I want. To stay awake as long as I can.” He finished the coffee. “Can I have another cup, please?”

I poured it for him. He drank that one down just as fast,” then rubbed his eyes wearily.

“Been on the road a long time, huh?”

Price nodded. “Day and night. I don’t know which is more tired, my mind or my butt.” He lifted his gaze to me again. “Have you got anything else to drink? How about beer?”

“No, sorry. Couldn’t get a liquor license.”

He sighed. “Just as well. It might make me sleepy. But I sure could go for a beer right now. One sip, to clean my mouth out.”

He picked up his coffee cup, and I smiled and started to turn away.

But then he wasn’t holding a cup. He was holding a Budweiser can, and for an instant I could smell the tang of a newly popped beer.

The mirage was there for only maybe two seconds. I blinked, and Price was holding a cup again. “Just as well,” he said, and put it down.

I glanced over at Cheryl, then at Dennis. Neither one was paying attention. Damn! I thought. I’m too young to be losin’ either my eyesight or my senses! “Uh …” I said, or some other stupid noise.

“One more cup?” Price asked. “Then I’d better hit the road again.”

My hand was shaking as I picked it up, but if Price noticed, he didn’t say anything.

“Want anything to eat?” Cheryl asked him. “How about a bowl of beef stew?”

He shook his head. “No, thanks. The sooner I get back on the road, the better it’ll be.”

Suddenly Dennis swiveled toward him, giving him a cold stare that only cops and drill sergeants can muster. “Back on the road?” He snorted. “Fella, you ever been in a tornado before? I’m gonna escort those nice people to the Holiday Inn about fifteen miles back. If you’re smart, that’s where you’ll spend the night too. No use in tryin’ to—”

“No.” Price’s voice was rock-steady. “I’ll be spending the night behind the wheel.”

Dennis’ eyes narrowed. “How come you’re in such a hurry? Not runnin’ from anybody, are you?”

“Nightcrawlers,” Cheryl said.

Price turned toward her like he’d been slapped across the face, and I saw what might’ve been a spark of fear in his eyes.

Cheryl motioned toward the lighter Price had laid on the counter, beside the pack of Kools. It was a beat-up silver Zippo, and inscribed across it was NIGHTCRAWLERS with the symbol of two crossed rifles beneath it. “Sorry,” she said. “I just noticed that, and I wondered what it was.”

Price put the lighter away. “I was in ’Nam,” he told her. “Everybody in my unit got one.”

“Hey.” There was suddenly new respect in Dennis’ voice. “You a vet?”

Price paused so long I didn’t think he was going to answer. In the quiet, I heard the little girl tell her mother that the fries were “ucky.” Price said, “Yes.”

“How about that! Hey, I wanted to go myself, but I got a high number and things were windin’ down about that time anyway. Did you see any action?”

A faint, bitter smile passed over Price’s mouth. “Too much.”

“What? Infantry? Marines? Rangers?”

Price picked up his third cup of coffee, swallowed some, and put it down. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and when they opened they were vacant and fixed on nothing. “Nightcrawlers,” he said quietly. “Special unit. Deployed to recon Charlie positions in questionable villages.” He said it like he was reciting from a manual. “We did a lot of crawling through rice paddies and jungles in the dark.”

“Bet you laid a few of them Vietcong out, didn’t you?” Dennis got up and came over to sit a few places away from the man. “Man, I was behind you guys all the way. I wanted you to stay in there and fight it out!”

Price was silent. Thunder echoed over the diner. The lights weakened for a few seconds; when they came back on, they seemed to have lost some of their wattage. The place was dimmer than before. Price’s head slowly turned toward Dennis, with the inexorable motion of a machine. I was thankful I didn’t have to take the full force of Price’s dead blue eyes, and I saw Dennis wince. “I should’ve stayed,” he said. “I should be there right now, buried in the mud of a rice paddy with the eight other men in my patrol.”

“Oh.” Dennis blinked. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“I came home,” Price continued calmly, “by stepping on the bodies of my friends. Do you want to know what that’s like, Mr. Trooper?”

“The war’s over,” I told him. “No need to bring it back.” Price smiled grimly, but his gaze remained fixed on Dennis. “Some say it’s over. I say it came back with the men who were there. Like me. Especially like me.” Price paused. The wind howled around the door, and the lightning illuminated for an instant the thrashing woods across the highway. “The mud was up to our knees, Mr. Trooper,” he said. “We were moving across a rice paddy in the dark, being real careful not to step on the bamboo stakes we figured were planted there. Then the first shots started: pop pop pop—like firecrackers going off. One of the Nightcrawlers fired off a flare, and we saw the Cong ringing us. We’d walked right into hell, Mr. Trooper. Somebody shouted, ‘Charlie’s in the light!’ and we started firing, trying to punch a hole through them. But they were everywhere. As soon as one went down, three more took his place. Grenades were going off, and more flares, and people were screaming as they got hit. I took a bullet in the thigh and another through the hand. I lost my rifle, and somebody fell on top of me with half his head missing.”

“Uh … listen,” I said. “You don’t have to—”

“I want to, friend.” He glanced quickly at me, then back to Dennis. I think I cringed when his gaze pierced me. “I want to tell it all. They were fighting and screaming and dying all around me, and I felt the bullets tug at my clothes as they passed through. I know I was screaming too, but what was coming out of my mouth sounded bestial. I ran. The only way I could save my own life was to step on their bodies and drive them down into the mud. I heard some of them choke and blubber as I put my boot on their faces. I knew all those guys like brothers … but at that moment they were only pieces of meat. I ran. A gunship chopper came over the paddy and laid down some fire, and that’s how I got out. Alone.” He bent his face closer toward the other man’s. “And you’d better believe I’m in that rice paddy in ’Nam every time I close my eyes. You’d better believe the men I left back there don’t rest easy. So you keep your opinions about ’Nam and being ‘behind you guys’ to yourself, Mr. Trooper. I don’t want to hear that bullshit. Got it?”

Dennis sat very still. He wasn’t used to being talked to like that, not even from a ’Nam vet, and I saw the shadow of anger pass over his face.

Price’s hands were trembling as he brought a little bottle out of his jeans pocket. He shook two blue-and-orange capsules out onto the counter, took them both with a swallow of coffee, and then recapped the bottle and put it away. The flesh of his face looked almost ashen in the dim light.

“I know you boys had a rough time,” Dennis said, “but that’s no call to show disrespect to the law.”

“The law,” Price repeated. “Yeah. Right. Bullshit.”

“There are women and children present,” I reminded him. “Watch your language.”

Price rose from his seat. He looked like a skeleton with just a little extra skin on the bones. “Mister, I haven’t slept for more than thirty-six hours. My nerves are shot. I don’t mean to cause trouble, but when some fool says he understands, I feel like kicking his teeth down his throat—because no one who wasn’t there can pretend to understand.” He glanced at Ray, Lindy, and the kids. “Sorry, folks. Don’t mean to disturb you. Friend, how much do I owe?” He started digging for his wallet.

Dennis slid slowly from his seat and stood with his hands on his hips. “Hold it.” He used his trooper’s voice again. “If you think I’m lettin’ you walk out of here high on pills and needin’ sleep, you’re crazy. I don’t want to be scrapin’ you off the highway.”

Price paid him no attention. He took a couple of dollars from his wallet and put them on the counter. I didn’t touch them. “Those pills will help keep me awake,” Price said. “Once I get on the road, I’ll be fine.”

“Fella, I wouldn’t let you go if it was high noon and not a cloud in the sky. I sure as hell don’t want to clean up after the accident you’re gonna have. Now, why don’t you come along to the Holiday Inn and—”

Price laughed grimly. “Mr. Trooper, the last place you want me staying is at a motel.” He cocked his head to one side. “I was in a motel in Florida a couple of nights ago, and I think I left my room a little untidy. Step aside and let me pass.”

“A motel in Florida?” Dennis nervously licked his lower lip. “What the hell you talkin’ about?”

“Nightmares and reality, Mr. Trooper. The point where they cross. A couple of nights ago, they crossed at a motel. I wasn’t going to let myself sleep. I was just going to rest for a little while, but I didn’t know they’d come so fast.” A mocking smile played at the edges of his mouth, but his eyes were tortured. “You don’t want me staying at that Holiday Inn, Mr. Trooper. You really don’t. Now, step aside.”

I saw Dennis’ hand settle on the butt of his revolver. His fingers unsnapped the fold of leather that secured the gun in the holster. I stared at him numbly. My God, I thought. What’s goin’ on? My heart had started pounding so hard I was sure everybody could hear it. Ray and Lindy were watching, and Cheryl was backing away behind the counter.

Price and Dennis faced each other for a moment, as the rain whipped against the windows and thunder boomed like shellfire. Then Price sighed, as if resigning himself to something. He said, “I think I want a T-bone steak. Extra rare. How ’bout it?” He looked at me.

“A steak?” My voice was shaking. “We don’t have any T-bone—”

Price’s gaze shifted to the counter right in front of me. I heard a sizzle. The aroma of cooking meat drifted up to me.

“Oh … wow,” Cheryl whispered.

A large T-bone steak lay on the countertop, pink and oozing blood. You could’ve fanned a menu in my face and I would’ve keeled over. Wisps of smoke were rising from the steak.

The steak began to fade, until it was only an outline on the counter. The lines of oozing blood vanished. After the mirage was gone, I could still smell the meat—and that’s how I knew I wasn’t crazy.

Dennis’ mouth hung open. Ray had stood up from the booth to look, and his wife’s face was the color of spoiled milk. The whole world seemed to be balanced on a point of silence—until the wail of the wind jarred me back to my senses.

“I’m getting good at it,” Price said softly. “I’m getting very, very good. Didn’t start happening to me until about a year ago. I’ve found four other ’Nam vets who can do the same thing. What’s in your head comes true—as simple as that. Of course, the images only last for a few seconds—as long as I’m awake, I mean. I’ve found out that those other men were drenched by a chemical spray we called Howdy Doody—because it made you stiffen up and jerk like you were hanging on strings. I got hit with it near Khe Sahn. That shit almost suffocated me. It felt like black tar, and it burned the land down to a paved parking lot.” He stared at Dennis. “You don’t want me around here, Mr. Trooper. Not with the body count I’ve still got in my head.”

“You … were at … that motel, near Daytona Beach?”

Price closed his eyes. A vein had begun beating at his right temple, royal blue against the pallor of his flesh. “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered. “I fell asleep, and I couldn’t wake myself up. I was having the nightmare. The same one. I was locked in it, and I was trying to scream myself awake.” He shuddered, and two tears ran slowly down his cheeks. “Oh,” he said, and flinched as if remembering something horrible. “They … they were coming through the door when I woke up. Tearing the door right off its hinges. I woke up … just as one of them was pointing his rifle at me. And I saw his face. I saw his muddy, misshapen face.” His eyes suddenly jerked open. “I didn’t know they’d come so fast.”

“Who?” I asked him. “Who came so fast?”

“The Nightcrawlers,” Price said, his face devoid of expression, masklike. “Dear God … maybe if I’d stayed asleep a second more. But I ran again, and I left those people dead in that motel.”

“You’re gonna come with me.” Dennis started pulling his gun from the holster. Price’s head snapped toward him. “I don’t know what kinda fool game you’re—”

He stopped, staring at the gun he held.

It wasn’t a gun anymore. It was an oozing mass of hot rubber. Dennis cried out and slung the thing from his hand. The molten mess hit the floor with a pulpy splat.

“I’m leaving now.” Price’s voice was calm. “Thank you for the coffee.” He walked past Dennis, toward the door.

Dennis grasped a bottle of ketchup from the counter. Cheryl cried out, “Don’t!” but it was too late. Dennis was already swinging the bottle. It hit the back of Price’s skull and burst open, spewing ketchup everywhere. Price staggered forward, his knees buckling. When he went down, his skull hit the floor with a noise like a watermelon being dropped. His body began jerking involuntarily.

“Got him!” Dennis shouted triumphantly. “Got that crazy bastard, didn’t I?”

Lindy was holding the little girl in her arms. The boy craned his neck to see. Ray said nervously, “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

“He’s not dead,” I told him. I looked over at the gun; it was solid again. Dennis scooped it up and aimed it at Price, whose body continued to jerk. Just like Howdy Doody, I thought. Then Price stopped moving.

“He’s dead!” Cheryl’s voice was near-frantic. “Oh God, you killed him, Dennis!”

Dennis prodded the body with the toe of his boot, then bent down. “Naw. His eyes are movin’ back and forth behind the lids.” Dennis touched his wrist to check the pulse, then abruptly pulled his own hand away. “Jesus Christ! He’s as cold as a meat locker!” He took Price’s pulse and whistled. “Goin’ like a racehorse at the Derby.”

I touched the place on the counter where the mirage steak had been. My fingers came away slightly greasy, and I could smell the cooked meat on them. At that instant Price twitched. Dennis scuttled away from him like a crab. Price made a gasping, choking noise.

“What’d he say?” Cheryl asked. “He said something!”

“No he didn’t.” Dennis stuck him in the ribs with his pistol. “Come on. Get up.”

“Get him out of here,” I said. “I don’t want him—”

Cheryl shushed me. “Listen. Can you hear that?”

I heard only the roar and crash of the storm.

“Don’t you hear it?” she asked me. Her eyes were getting scared and glassy.

“Yes!” Ray said. “Yes! Listen!”

Then I did hear something, over the noise of the keening wind. It was a distant chuk-chuk-chuk, steadily growing louder and closer. The wind covered the noise for a minute, then it came back: CHUK-CHUK-CHUK, almost overhead.

“It’s a helicopter!” Ray peered through the window. “Somebody’s got a helicopter out there!”

“Ain’t nobody can fly a chopper in a storm!” Dennis told him. The noise of rotors swelled and faded, swelled and faded … and stopped.

On the floor, Price shivered and began to contort into a fetal position. His mouth opened; his face twisted in what appeared to be agony.

Thunder spoke. A red fireball rose up from the woods across the road and hung lazily in the sky for a few seconds before it descended toward the diner. As it fell, the fireball exploded soundlessly into a white, glaring eye of light that almost blinded me.

Price said something in a garbled, panicked voice. His eyes were tightly closed, and he had squeezed up with his arms around his knees.

Dennis rose to his feet; he squinted as the eye of light fell toward the parking lot and winked out in a puddle of water. Another fireball floated up from the woods, and again blossomed into painful glare.

Dennis turned toward me. “I heard him.” His voice was raspy. “He said . . . ‘Charlie’s in the light.’”

As the second flare fell to the ground and illuminated the parking lot, I thought I saw figures crossing the road. They walked stiff-legged, in an eerie cadence. The flare went out.

“Wake him up,” I heard myself whisper. “Dennis … dear God … wake him up.”

4

Dennis stared stupidly at me, and I started to jump across the counter to get to Price myself.

A gout of flame leapt in the parking lot. Sparks marched across the concrete. I shouted, “Get down!” and twisted around to push Cheryl back behind the shelter of the counter.

“What the hell—” Dennis said.

He didn’t finish. There was the metallic thumping of bullets hitting the gas pumps and the cars. I knew if that gas blew we were all dead. My truck shuddered with the impact of slugs, and I saw the whole thing explode as I ducked behind the counter. Then the windows blew inward with a god-awful crash, and the diner was full of flying glass, swirling wind, and sheets of rain. I heard Lindy scream, and both the kids were crying, and I think I was shouting something myself.

The lights had gone out, and the only illumination was the reflection of red neon off the concrete and the glow of the fluorescents over the gas pumps. Bullets whacked into the wall, and crockery shattered as if it had been hit with a hammer. Napkins and sugar packets were flying everywhere.

Cheryl was holding on to me as if her fingers were nails sunk to my bones. Her eyes were wide and dazed, and she kept trying to speak. Her mouth was working, but nothing came out.

There was another explosion as one of the other cars blew. The whole place shook, and I almost puked with fear.

Another hail of bullets hit the wall. They were tracers, and they jumped and ricocheted like white-hot cigarette butts. One of them sang off the edge of a shelf and fell to the floor about three feet away from me. The glowing slug began to fade, like the beer can and the mirage steak. I put my hand out to find it, but all I felt was splinters of glass and crockery. A phantom bullet, I thought. Real enough to cause damage and death—and then gone.

You don’t want me around here, Mr. Trooper, Price had warned. Not with the body count I’ve got in my head.

The firing stopped. I got free of Cheryl and said, “You stay right here.” Then I looked up over the counter and saw my truck and the station wagon on fire, the flames being whipped by the wind. Rain slapped me across the face as it swept in where the window glass used to be. I saw Price lying still huddled on the floor, with pieces of glass all around him. His hands were clawing the air, and in the flickering red neon his face was contorted, his eyes still closed. The pool of ketchup around his head made him look like his skull had been split open. He was peering into hell, and I averted my eyes before I lost my own mind.

Ray and Lindy and the two children had huddled under the table of their booth. The woman was sobbing brokenly. I looked at Dennis, lying a few feet from Price: he was sprawled on his face, and there were four holes punched through his back. It was not ketchup that ran in rivulets around Dennis’ body. His right arm was outflung, and the fingers twitched around the gun he gripped.

Another flare sailed up from the woods like a Fourth of July sparkler.

When the light brightened, I saw them: at least five figures, maybe more. They were crouched over, coming across the parking lot—but slowly, the speed of nightmares. Their clothes flapped and hung around them, and the flare’s light glanced off their helmets. They were carrying weapons—rifles, I guessed. I couldn’t see their faces, and that was for the best.

On the floor, Price moaned. I heard him say “light … in the light …”

The flare hung right over the diner. And then I knew what was going on. We were in the light. We were all caught in Price’s nightmare, and the Nightcrawlers that Price had left in the mud were fighting the battle again—the same way it had been fought at the Pines Haven Motor Inn. The Nightcrawlers had come back to life, powered by Price’s guilt and whatever that Howdy Doody shit had done to him.

And we were in the light, where Charlie had been out in that rice paddy.

There was a noise like castanets clicking. Dots of fire arced through the broken windows and thudded into the counter. The stools squealed as they were hit and spun. The cash register rang and the drawer popped open, and then the entire register blew apart and bills and coins scattered. I ducked my head, but a wasp of fire—I don’t, know what, a bit of metal or glass maybe—sliced my left cheek open from ear to upper lip. I fell to the floor behind the counter with blood running down my face.

A blast shook the rest of the cups, saucers, plates, and glasses off the shelves. The whole roof buckled inward, throwing loose ceiling tiles, light fixtures, and pieces of metal framework.

We were all going to die. I knew it, right then. Those things were going to destroy us. But I thought of the pistol in Dennis’ hand, and of Price lying near the door. If we were caught in Price’s nightmare and the blow from the ketchup bottle had broken something in his skull, then the only way to stop his dream was to kill him.

I’m no hero. I was about to piss in my pants, but I knew I was the only one who could move. I jumped up and scrambled over the counter, falling beside Dennis and wrenching at that pistol. Even in death, Dennis had a strong grip. Another blast came, along the wall to my right. The heat of it scorched me, and the shock wave skidded me across the floor through glass and rain and blood.

But I had that pistol in my hand.

I heard Ray shout, “Look out!”

In the doorway, silhouetted by flames, was a skeletal thing wearing muddy green rags. It wore a dented-in helmet and carried a corroded, slime-covered rifle. Its face was gaunt and shadowy, the features hidden behind a scum of rice-paddy muck. It began to lift the rifle to fire at me—slowly, slowly …

I got the safety off the pistol and fired twice, without aiming. A spark leapt off the helmet as one of the bullets was deflected, but the figure staggered backward and into the conflagration of the station wagon, where it seemed to melt into ooze before it vanished.

More tracers were coming in. Cheryl’s Volkswagen shuddered, the tires blowing out almost in unison. The state-trooper car was already bullet-riddled and sitting on flats.

Another Nightcrawler, this one without a helmet and with slime covering the skull where the hair had been, rose up beyond the window and fired its rifle. I heard the bullet whine past my ear, and as I took aim I saw its bony finger tightening on the trigger again.

A skillet flew over my head and hit the thing’s shoulder, spoiling its aim. For an instant the skillet stuck in the Nightcrawler’s body, as if the figure itself was made out of mud. I fired once … twice … and saw pieces of matter fly from the thing’s chest. What might’ve been a mouth opened in a soundless scream, and the thing slithered out of sight.

I looked around. Cheryl was standing behind the counter, weaving on her feet, her face white with shock. “Get down!” I shouted, and she ducked for cover.

I crawled to Price, shook him hard. His eyes would not open. “Wake up!” I begged him. “Wake up, damn you!” And then I pressed the barrel of the pistol against Price’s head. Dear God, I didn’t want to kill anybody, but I knew I was going to have to blow the Nightcrawlers right out of his brain. I hesitated—too long.

Something smashed into my left collarbone. I heard the bone snap like a broomstick being broken. The force of the shot slid me back against the counter and jammed me between two bullet-pocked stools. I lost the gun, and there was a roaring in my head that deafened me.

I don’t know how long I was out. My left arm felt like dead meat. All the cars in the lot were burning, and there was a hole in the diner’s roof that a tractor-trailer truck could’ve dropped through. Rain was sweeping into my face, and when I wiped my eyes clear I saw them, standing over Price.

There were eight of them. The two I thought I’d killed were back. They trailed weeds, and their boots and ragged clothes were covered with mud. They stood in silence, staring down at their living comrade.

I was too tired to scream. I couldn’t even whimper. I just watched.

Price’s hands lifted into the air. He reached for the Nightcrawlers, and then his eyes opened. His pupils were dead white, surrounded by scarlet.

“End it,” he whispered. “End it …”

One of the Nightcrawlers aimed its rifle and fired. Price jerked. Another Nightcrawler fired, and then they were all firing point-blank into Price’s body. Price thrashed and clutched at his head, but there was no blood; the phantom bullets weren’t hitting him.

The Nightcrawlers began to ripple and fade. I saw the flames of the burning cars through their bodies. The figures became transparent, floating in vague outlines. Price had awakened too fast at the Pines Haven Motor Inn, I realized; if he had remained asleep, the creatures of his nightmares would’ve ended it there, at that Florida motel. They were killing him in front of me—or he was allowing them to end it, and I think that’s what he must’ve wanted for a long, long time.

He shuddered, his mouth releasing a half-moan, half-sigh.

It sounded almost like relief.

The Nightcrawlers vanished. Price didn’t move anymore.

I saw his face. His eyes were closed, and I think he must’ve found peace at last.

5

A trucker hauling lumber from Mobile to Birmingham saw the burning cars. I don’t even remember what he looked like.

Ray was cut up by glass, but his wife and the kids were okay. Physically, I mean. Mentally, I couldn’t say.

Cheryl went into the hospital for a while. I got a postcard from her with the Golden Gate Bridge on the front. She promised she’d write and let me know how she was doing, but I doubt if I’ll ever hear from her. She was the best waitress I ever had, and I wish her luck.

The police asked me a thousand questions, and I told the story the same way every time. I found out later that no bullets or shrapnel were ever dug out of the walls or the cars or Dennis’ body—just like in the case of that motel massacre. There was no bullet in me, though my collarbone was snapped clean in two.

Price had died of a massive brain hemorrhage. It looked, the police told me, as if it had exploded in his skull.

I closed the diner. Farm life is fine. Alma understands, and we don’t talk about it.

But I never showed the police what I found, and I don’t know exactly why not.

I picked up Price’s wallet in the mess. Behind a picture of a smiling young woman holding a baby there was a folded piece of paper. On that paper were the names of four men.

Beside one name, Price had written “Dangerous.”

I’ve found four other ’Nam vets who can do the same thing, Price had said.

I sit up at night a lot, thinking about that and looking at those names. Those men had gotten a dose of that Howdy Doody shit in a foreign place they hadn’t wanted to be, fighting a war that turned out to be one of those crossroads of nightmare and reality. I’ve changed my mind about ’Nam because I understand now that the worst of the fighting is still going on, in the battlefields of memory.

A Yankee who called himself Tompkins came to my house one May morning and flashed me an ID that said he worked for a veterans’ association. He was very soft-spoken and polite, but he had deep-set eyes that were almost black, and he never blinked. He asked me all about Price, seemed real interested in picking my brain of every detail. I told him the police had the story, and I couldn’t add any more to it. Then I turned the tables and asked him about Howdy Doody. He smiled in a puzzled kind of way and said he’d never heard of any chemical defoliant called that. No such thing, he said. Like I say, he was very polite.

But I know the shape of a gun tucked into a shoulder holster. Tompkins was wearing one under his seersucker coat. I never could find any veterans’ association that knew anything about him, either.

Maybe I should give that list of names to the police. Maybe I will. Or maybe I’ll try to find those four men myself, and try to make some sense out of what’s being hidden.

I don’t think Price was evil. No. He was just scared, and who can blame a man for running from his own nightmares? I like to believe that, in the end, Price had the courage to face the Nightcrawlers, and in committing suicide he saved our lives.

The newspapers, of course, never got the real story. They called Price a ’Nam vet who’d gone crazy, killed six people in a Florida motel, and then killed a state trooper in a shoot-out at Big Bob’s diner and gas stop.

But I know where Price is buried. They sell little American flags at the five-and-dime in Mobile. I’m alive, and I can spare the change.

And then I’ve got to find out how much courage I have.

[karenhikari]

Family Life-16. A New Road

*Peeks worriedly from behind the theatre cutains*

Okay, I know I said I'd have this ready for February, and you see, I actually had something ready... the draft. Now, you know how old-fashioned I am... I always do my drafts by hand, and with everything going on I hadn't had time to actually transcribe and publish, but here we are now.

As a peace offering, I'll post two chapters today, hoping to make it better.

Now, I think this is long overdue already, so... I hope you enjoy!

PD: in this story Max is supposed to be around five and I have to apologize because I've never been around children, not even siblings or cousins, so I tried to drop some grammar mistakes and mispronunciation in his speech to make up for my ignorance, but if there is something that seems weird or if you want to point something out to me, please feel free to do so!

Also! This is some months before Rafael's adoption, that's why he's not even mentioned here.

If someone had told Robert Lightwood that, one day, not very far in the future, he would be cradling a warlock child in his lap as he tickled the blue boy he would have rolled his eyes. If someone had warned Robert Lightwood that one day a little warlock would look up at him and claim "Gra'pa", arms stretched out to be picked up and a smile big and trusting enough to make Robert smile back, he would have laughed. If someone had foreseen that Robert would love a downworlder child as if he were his own flesh and blood, he would have thought said someone was going crazy.

He should have known better.

Currently, he was sitting at the library of the Institute, a newspaper lazily sprawled on his legs while he kept an eye on Max, who was busying himself with building blocks, laughing gleefully once every couple of minutes.

He was supposed to keep an eye on Max for the day while Alec attended a meeting with the vampire clan of New Jersey and Magnus sorted out some things with a picky werewolf that had asked for his services. Looking over his reading material Robert couldn't help the smile that climbed to his lips.

Noticing his grandfather's heavy gaze, Max stopped his game and looked up, returning Robert's smile.

Folding the newspaper to put it away, Robert gestured for Max to approach him. Without a second thought, Max walked over to the couch Robert was sitting on. Jumping on his chubby legs, Max struggled to climb the couch, crawling to Robert's lap soon enough.

"What are you building, buddy?" Robert inquired, wrapping his arms around the small warlock.

"Castle," Max smiled, nodding repeatedly.

"A big one, it seems," the shadowhunter laughed, to what Max nodded some more.

For a long while, they remained in silence as Robert marveled at the simple domesticity of holding a child, of loving and being loved in return.

"Gra'pa, I ask something," Max declared after a while, playing with the buttons of Robert's shirt.

"Can I ask something?" Robert corrected gently.

"I ask something," Max repeated, waiting for his grandfather to nod before continuing. "What's the Circle?"

No sooner had the words left Max's heart-shaped lips than the color was drained from the shadowhunter's features. The smile that had adorned Robert's lips until then froze and his fingers stiffened where they'd been playing with the warlock's locks, He swallowed hardly.

"The… the Circle you said?" he questioned, forcing his voice to not falter. Max, oblivious to his inner turmoil nodded vigorously.

"Uncle Jace and Dad talked about the Circle," he declared. "I asked uncle Jace what it as, but he said 'Forget it!'" Max continued, mimicking out Jace's expression with a furrowed brow and what he tried to make come out as a stern voice, although it sounded too high to be taken seriously. "But you always tell me 'Max, don't listen Jace', so I ask you now."

"To Jace, Max, I always tell you not to listen to Jace," Robert corrected numbly, his reply mechanic.

"To uncle Jace," Max repeated dismissively, his eyes turned to his grandfather in expectation. "But what the Cir-Circle?"

"The… the Circle," Robert echoed unceremoniously, feeling all over again as if the oxygen had been drained from his lungs, leaving only his dry throat behind. "Max, I don't think I should―"

"Pwease?" the little warlock inquired, pouting slightly, just enough for Robert to feel bad if he denied an answer to him.

Then again, of course Robert had known that someday he would have to look at Max in the eye and tell him that, not far away in the past, Maryse and him had opposed to the relationship of his parents. More importantly, he had been aware all along that, one day, he'd have to hold Max's hand and confess to him, with shame and regret and pain that he'd not always been the loving grandfather he knew, that only a few years aback he'd been backward and bigoted and a murderer.

Robert Lightwood knew very well that lying only made things more complicated than they had to be and that, if one lived surrounded by lies for long, the moment of the truth only became more painful. He knew there'd come a time in which he could have to come out clean to his young grandson―he had just hoped they'd have more time before Max stopped looking up at him with such trusting, beautiful eyes. He'd just prayed that they'd have more time before his grandson learned about the monster he was.

"I… I don't think I should tell you, or at least not all of it," Robert offered at last. "This is an… an adults' thing, okay?" he continued, his breath hitching. On his side, Max pouted again and Robert could only smile with pain at what he would surely loose very soon. "You'll learn more as you get older, but I can tell you a little today, is that alright?"

"Yes, yes!" Max clapped with excitement. Holding him to make sure he didn't fall off the couch, Robert sighed, the shadow of memory darkening his eyes.

"Long ago," he began. "There was a group of bad people, bad shadowhunters," he corrected. "And they… they did bad things. They thought they were better than everyone else, that the world was meant to have a special place for them, because they were stronger than others."

"Dad says Uncle Jace thinks he's better than everyone," Max interrupted with a scowl. "But uncle Jace isn't bad."

"No, Jace isn't bad," Robert smiled weakly, biting back his next remark―Jace had never killed innocents as a consequence of is boastful attitude. "But these shadowhunters were and they called themselves the Circle."

»They didn't like downworlders, like you or your papa, and they… they hunted them down."

"Like Dad hunts down demons?" Max inquired in confusion.

"Yes, like that," Robert nodded.

"But shadowhunters and downworlders are friends!" the boy replied. "Like Aunt Lily and Dad and Aunt Cat and Papa!"

"They are now, but these shadowhunters didn't like downworlders, they thought they were bad, because they were different," Robert tried to explain, making a fuss with his hands to illustrate. "Remember that woman in the park who said your parents shouldn't be together because they're both boys?" he offered, waiting for Max to nod before he continued. "The Circle was like that―they didn't like what was different. They feared it."

"That lady was mean."

"Well, the Circle was mean too, worse than that woman," Robert sighed, feeling his chest contract at the way Max's brow furrowed, deep in thought, as if he couldn't conceive a world in which that was possible, a world in which the malicious remark of an old woman wasn't the worse there was to hear, a world in which shadowhunters thought of themselves so highly that they forgot the humanity of the downworlders.

"Dad says different is good, it makes us spe-special," the little warlock declared at last.

"And your dad is right," Robert replied gently, marveling once again at the fact that people full of prejudices and painful ideas as Maryse and him had managed to raise someone as loving and forging as Alexander.

"Differences are good. Like, like wawlocks, they have magic and they heal shadowhunters, like Dad and Papa, and welwolves help keep mundanes away from the vam-vampire nests during day, like Aunt Lily and Aunt Maia and that way we all happy, because we help each other!"

"Indeed," the shadowhunter nodded. "But the Circle thought we'd be happier if there were only shadowhunters, with no vampires or werewolves or… or warlocks."

Silently, Robert watched Max bite his lip in concentration, as if he had to stop and make an effort to consider what his grandfather was saying.

"That's mean," Max decided at last, his voice so sad that Robert had to stop himself from leaning down to pull the boy closer to him. "Downwolders aren't bad."

"No, they aren't," Robert all but whispered, letting his finger ghost over the warlock's cheeks. "But they thought they were."

After that came silence―dense, unnatural, something that shouldn't have been there. An infant Max's age shouldn't be trying to imagine a time of history in which half of his family tried to annihilate the other half of it. Oh, and how badly, terribly, longingly did Robert wish he wouldn't be forced to do it.

Now that he was older and ―at least he wanted to believe he was― a little wiser, Robert recognized the importance of honesty.

He wanted nothing more than to take Max into his arms and shield his ears from the truth, he yearned to pretend that the horrors of what Valentine had done ―with his and Maryse's help― were nothing but an invented stories to scare naughty children, like the bogeyman Simon and Clary joked about.

On the other hand, Robert also knew that it'd hurt his little boy much more to learn about the dark past of his family later, and it'd be even worse of he learned so by someone else, say a malicious shadowhunter or a misfortunate comment.

If after coming clean his grandchild decided that he wasn't trustworthy, that he was scared of him, then at least Robert would have the bittersweet comfort of the memories of Max's carefree laugh.

"I… Maxie, there's something else I want to tell you," he began, short from a whisper. "But I need you to be brave for me, okay? Can you do that?"

"Like Dad when he goes dem-demon hunting?" he asked curiously.

"Like your dad when he goes demon hunting," Robert conceded. "Though, for the record, your dad is always brave, demons or not," he added in a second thought, recalling the countless times in which, during a meeting someone as close-minded as he'd been made a sarcastic remark about Alec's relationship with Magnus or about the warlock child they were raising together.

Alec always remained quiet when that happened, perhaps too used to being treated in such a way, perhaps recognizing that there was no use in explaining the validity of his feelings for Magnus and of their relationship to someone thick as a bucket of shit.

Robert couldn't do that. He felt his blood boil every single time one of those bigoted Clave members decided they could have a saying in the way his family lived. Sometimes, Alec himself had told him to let it go, to calm down when Robert was a little too close to punching someone. Whenever Alec reassured him that it was fine, that the best one could do was ignore those jerks Robert didn't fail to notice how resigned his son sounded. And every single time he realized the pain behind Alec's statement Robert's breath halted in his lips.

The fact that barely six years in the past he would have sided with those assholes instead of with his son didn't make it any better.

"Max," Robert continued after a long pause, taking a deep breath. "I… the Circle started around twenty years, you know?"

"That's a looot," the young warlock decided, forcing a smile on Robert's lips at his exaggerated pronunciation.

"It is," he agreed. "Over time, when the other shadowhunters realized the Circle was bad they fought against it and they won," he added gravely. "But, a few years ago, the Circle came back. There was a huge fight, and once again, the good shadowhunters won over the Circle, with the help of warlocks like your Papa and Catarina and vampires and werewolves."

"Like Aunt Lily and Aunt Maia!" Max clapped cheerily. "That's good! It means no more bad shadowhunters!"

If only it were that simple, my boy, if only, Robert thought wistfully.

"Yes, it was very good," he said instead, not wanting to say anything about Max's last statement, not when Alec and Magnus were still forced to listen to Thomas Hightower's bigoted comments, not when they were equally attacked when they were around mundanes.

No, Robert didn't want to admit that there were still a good number of bad shadowhunters, mundanes and downworlders, not when Magnus and Alec had done such a wonderful job shielding their son from it that Max still had the naïveté of ignoring their existence.

There was, however, one thing that Robert had to say.

"Max, when… when the Circle first started I… I was part of it."

Gasping, Max recoiled in Robert's lap, albeit the fact that she didn't try to scoot very further away from him, his eyes denouncing more surprise than they did horror.

"But… but they were bad!" Max whispered in a shaky voice, his eyes glassy. Oh, Robert thought, how beautiful it was that the worst word Max knew was bad, how marvelous that his young mind was still too innocent to understand how atrocious the Circle had really been.

"They were," Robert recognized, feeling the weight of his words as they rolled off his tongue. "They were worse than bad, and anyone that thinks like the Circle did can't be a good person. But I… I was stupid and I thought they were… that they were right. How stupid I was! I… I know it's no excuse for what I did, Max, but I'm very sorry, more than you can imagine."

"Stupid is a bad word," Max complained softly.

"It is," the shadowhunter nodded as a bitter voice echoed in his mind that a bad word was fitting for a bad person.

He was brought back from his musings when Max's small hands reached up to cup his cheeks, a feather-like caress.

"You look sad," Max said, a worried tone taking the place of the scared one from before. "Is it because you helped those bad people?"

"It is, Blueberry," Robert sighed, forcing a weak smile for the sake of his grandchild. "I feel terrible that I hurt downworlders."

"Papa says that sometimes good people make mistakes and that those mistakes can be bad, but they don't make good people bad people," the little warlock explained. "You're not bad, gra'pa."

"Oh, Max…" Robert let out, finally leaning down to pull his boy closer to his chest, and if he shut his eyes tight enough to hold back the moisture that had gathered at the bottom of his eyes, then it was a good thing that Max didn't notice him doing so. "Your Papa is a very wise man, Max, never forget that," he said after some silent seconds, clearing his throat as he slowly pulled back.

"And he has magic!" Max declared, making a tiny fuss with his small hands.

"He does, just like you," the shadowhunter said, stroking Max's right cheek fondly. "And, Max, remember, if you turn out to be anything like your parents I will be endlessly proud of you," he concluded, genuinely smiling at the innocent curiosity in his grandson's eyes.

―*―*―

By the time Robert heard a knock on his door Max had already fallen sleep in his arms, head supported in the crook of the shadowhunter's elbow, surrendered to a blind trust that Robert couldn't fully explain after what he had just told him. A trust that, in all honesty, Robert was convinced he didn't deserve.

Careful not to disturb the small warlock, Robert rose from the couch and, ever so gently, placed Max back on it, considering it just a second before he took off his jacket and covered Max with it. He couldn't help a lopsided smile as Max nuzzled into the fabric of the cloth.

Surprised that the person at his door hadn't knocked a second time, Robert hurried to open it, revealing no other than Magnus Bane on the other side.

"Magnus," he greeted, stepping out of the doorway to allow the warlock to enter.

Magnus, ever so eccentric, had arranged his hair so it was falling in blue-glittered locks to the left side of his face, matching eyeliner surrounding his un-glamoured orbs. He wore a purple shirt with a deep v neck, not seeming to mind the cold weather. Hanging from his neck the warlock wore at least three different necklaces, each one a little shorter than the one before so they could each be appreciated separately. There were four rings around his fingers, among them, the Lightwood one Alec had given him after Max's adoption.

In another time, Robert would have stared back at Magnus in contempt. In another time he wouldn't have opened his door to a downworlder, especially not one dressed like that. Oh, but in that other time he wouldn't have had a young warlock sleeping on his couch, tucked with his very own jacket.

"Robert," Magnus echoed, a business-like undertone to his voice, just like every time the two of them spoke.

Over the years they had found a way to coexist and be civil around one another, if nothing else. Perhaps they weren't close, perhaps they weren't as trusting as they should have been, but they were civil, polite, and Magnus trusted Robert enough to watch over his child and not poison his mind, something that Robert sometimes doubted he even deserved, no matter how grateful he was that he'd been allowed to stay close to his family after all the damage he'd inflicted upon it.

It wasn't that he thought higher of himself than he did of Magnus or any other downworlder, for that matter. That was the point of it all―he'd learned from his previous mistakes and now he knew better.

It wasn't that Magnus actively avoided him either, or that he adopted a threatening demeanor whenever he was around his in-laws. Far from it, Magnus better than anyone, perhaps, understood the importance of family and he wanted to teach that to his child.

Life was both too short and too long to hold grudges.

No, it wasn't that either of them held a disdainful attitude towards the other, it was merely that they had yet to find a way to become close, and while they both had come to an agreement in favor Max having a safe environment and a united family instead of a gathering that ended up with broken cutlery and slamming doors, they'd only come to a peace accord because of the little warlock.

Perhaps that was their mistake―perhaps it was time they forgave each other for the sake of themselves. Perhaps it was time they started building a road for them to follow, one in which they all fitted, not only the new generation.

"Can I… can I have a word with you?" Robert inquired, unable to hold back a grimace when Magnus' laidback expression became more guarded.

"Did something happen?" Magnus asked back, a small scowl making its way to his forehead. Robert held back a bitter laugh, noting how, at the prospect of merely speaking with him Magnus immediately assumed something had gone wrong.

Oh, but he wasn't mistaken, was he? Something had happened, or had it not?

"It did, actually, but not… not the something you might be thinking of," Robert sighed, deciding to say it with no circumlocution when Magnus raised an eyebrow at him. "Max asked me about the Circle today."

"He did what?" the warlock asked, choking on his breath.

"He heard Alec and Jace speaking about it and, you know how children are, he asked me and…"

"I assume you told him off and―"

"I told him the truth," Robert interrupted, suddenly raising his gaze from the floor to look straight into Magnus' eyes.

"Pardon me?"

"It's… he had the right to know, Magnus, I couldn't lie to him," the shadowhunter tried to explain with a shaky voice.

"Where's Max?" Magnus inquired, raising his hands to push Robert out of the way, his calculating eyes searching for his son, a glimmer of something that was almost madness in his gaze.

"He's fine," Robert assured, catching Magnus by the arm before the warlock had time to get past him and storm into the library. "He's so… forgiving, so innocent. I… I didn't mention Maryse… that's her secret to tell, and I didn't tell him about the war, not much anyways, I didn't mention Sebastian, but he… he knows there were bad shadowhunters hurting downworlders and I think that's enough of a summary."

"You… you told him that?"

"I did," Robert managed, his eyes trained on Magnus.

"Why?" the warlock inquired, a confused tone making its way to his voice, his expression still defensive.

"Because hiding the truth won't result in anything good," the Lightwood answered gravely. "And because I don't want him to grow up thinking I'm a better person than I really am."

"You… you didn't have to do that," Magnus let out, eyes still scanning his interlocutor.

"I did, Magnus. I did," Robert replied gently. "And I want to tell you that I'm sorry. I am infinitely sorry for all I did," he continued, feeling the formality of his words slip away as his speech came out more rapidly. "I'm sorry I ever believed what Valentine said, I'm sorry for the way I treated Alec and, most of all, I'm sorry for the way I treated you."

For a moment, Magnus didn't say anything, too wrapped up in staring back at Robert, disbelief clear in his made-up features. At last, he raised his right arm to awkwardly pat the shadowhunter's shoulder.

"Hey, it's alright," he all but whispered.

"No, it isn't," Robert insisted, making a fuss with his hands to punctuate his words. "I could have killed you or Catarina. Had Max been born twenty years ago I could have killed him, Magnus, and I wouldn't have regretted it."

"It was war, Robert. For all that matters I could have killed you too."

"It's not the same," the shadowhunter replied. "I enjoyed killing. I genuinely believed that, once the world was cleaned of these… these soiled creatures it would be better… purer, that I… that I would be seen as a hero," he continued remorsefully. "I was so stupid. Oh, Angel, I… how many did I kill? How many did we kill? We showed no mercy for children or whatsoever, we murdered and we gloated of doing it."

"I have blood on my hands too, Robert," the warlock responded quietly.

"It's not the same, for the Angel's sake!" he said, almost shouting, a part of him still conscious of the small warlock sleeping soundly in the next room. "Downworlders were defending themselves, protecting each other. The shadowhunters of the Circle were just being assholes."

Magnus cat-like pupils widened minutely, his hand still awkwardly placed on Robert's shoulder, his breath caught up in his throat at the shadowhunter's sudden confession.

"It was war, Robert," he repeated, voice tired, resigned. "It's over now, thank the gods. Besides, we had agreed to leave this behind us for Max's sake."

"Indeed we had," Robert nodded, taking a deep breath, as if the oxygen he'd just inhaled could consume the regret that burned in his chest. "But I never apologized to you, Magnus. I never told you that, if I could, I'd give back all the lives I ended prematurely, at the cost of my own, if it were necessary."

"You have now," Magnus reassured after a moment of silence, still taken aback by Robert's rush of sincerity. "That's enough."

Suddenly, and out of the same place that this sudden need of honesty had come from, Robert took grip of Magnus' hand on his shoulder and pulled the warlock forward to embrace him tightly, as if he needed the touch to keep himself together, to anchor his rushing mind.

"I'm proud of Alexander," Robert said in something that sounded suspiciously like a sob. "And I'm proud of you, Magnus. You've done so much with so little that it makes me wonder… it makes me wonder where you'd be if it weren't for jerks like me that stood in your way."

Letting out a breath of air that he wasn't even conscious of holding, Magnus relaxed into the touch, flabbergasted-ly raising his own arm to circle Robert's shoulders.

"Thank you," was all he managed, his voice thick with emotion. "Thank you, Robert."

A long time passed before Robert stepped back, clearing his throat as if he had suddenly remembered that such a way wasn't one in which the Inquisitor was allowed to act. Magnus let him do, not wanting to be the first one to break the improvised embrace, perhaps fearing that, if he did, he'd break whatever spell that was making Robert so… open. And perhaps, because, he, too, was tired of that semi-civil attitude he felt whenever he was around Alexander's father and wanted something… more.

"Thank you," Robert echoed with an awkward smile, clearing his throat once again. "Now, Max is in the library. I think I have held you up enough."

"Not to worry," Magnus brushed off carelessly. "It was… good that you did."

Robert made a face, as if he couldn't decide whether or not if Magnus was being sarcastic, but in the end he decided to let it go and not make a comment, turning towards the living room instead.

"Robert," Magnus stopped him, his right hand firmly wrapped around Robert's wrist, to which the shadowhunter turned over his shoulder. "We're free next Saturday, why don't you come over? Just the four of us?"

"I would like that," Robert smiled tentatively.

"Good. So would we," the warlock added sincerely.

He wanted Max to have the stable he had lacked of as a child, that was all Magnus had been certain of from the beginning, and he was willing to make whatever sacrifice it took to ensure that. On the other hand, Magnus also knew how devastating losing one's parents support was and he didn't want that, let alone for Max, but for Alexander.

Sure enough, Robert Lightwood hadn't been the best of people, not to him, at least, but Magnus knew how important his parents ―his whole family― were to Alexander.

More importantly, Robert ―and Maryse too, in her own way― was trying to make amends, to fix his previous mistakes. The gods knew there'd been a time in which Magnus would have sacrificed anything just for the chance to change the way in which things between his stepfather and him had ended, and if he could do anything to spare Alexander even the smallest of rejections or aches by forgiving Robert and Maryse Lightwood… well, his pride wasn't bigger than his love for Alexander.

It was a chance―a new road that both downworlders and shadowhunters were building, side by side. It was an opportunity―to forgive, to let go, to accept and to start again.

And Magnus Bane was eager to take it, for it was, too, a chance to finally be happy and find a place where he belonged.

Right, so... this is definitely one of my favorite chapters. It's sweet, there was character development (I'm telling you, ever since I started this story Robert has insisted in appearing! I just hope you're liking the result!) and it has Hurt/Comfort.

To make up for Rafael's absence the next chapter will be dedicated exclusively to him! Please stay with me for more Lightwood-Bane Family fluff and read you soon!

[grigori77]

2018 in Movies - My Top 30 Fave Movies (Part 2)

20.  OVERLORD – 2018’s chief runner-up for horror movie of the year is brash, noisy and spectacularly glossy, but also fiendishly inventive and surprisingly original given that it borrows its central concept from several older, schlockier offerings.  Originally touted as the fourth film in the Cloverfield “franchise”, time (and producer J.J. Abrams) has told, and this is in fact entirely its own thing – an action-packed horror thriller set in the explosive midst of World War II’s D-Day landings. Nearly the entire narrative thrust of the film revolves around US Army Private Ed Boyce (Fences’ Jovan Adepo), a gentle, shy draftee who’s part of an Airborne squad sent to jump in ahead of the Normandy invasion and knock out a German radio tower built on an old church, but when their plane gets shot down over the drop-zone he winds up one of a ragtag team of only five survivors, led by young but battle-hardened veteran Corporal Ford (Everybody Wants Some! star Wyatt Russell, son of Kurt), who insists they complete their mission.  When they reach the tower, however, they find the town under the control of an SS company led by Captain Wafner (Game of Thrones’ Pilou Asbæk), who spearheads an unholy experimental research project attempting to bring dead German soldiers back as unstoppable zombie killing machines.  It’s a deceptively simple premise, but from this little acorn has grown a mighty oak of a film, a thunderous, non-stop thrill-ride that cranks up the tension within minutes of the start and never lets up thereafter, keeping us drawn out on a knife’s edge for long stretches of unbearable suspense when it’s not hurling a series of intense and brutal set-pieces at us, some of the most bravura sequences playing out in audaciously long single-take tracking shots.  Relative newcomer director Julius Avery may have been an unknown quantity (he only had one feature to his name before this, so-so Aussie heist thriller Son of a Gun), but he’s taken to this challenging project like an old hand, showing the kind of amazing talent and seasoned skill that really make you want to see what he’s going to do next, while screenwriters Billy Ray (The Hunger Games, Captain Phillips) and Mark L. Smith (Vacancy, The Revenant) have taken the seemingly clichéd material and crafted something rewardingly fresh and inventively nasty, the kind of body horror gorehounds go proper nuts for. The cast are also uniformly excellent – Adepo is a likeably vulnerable hero who finds his courage over the course of the film, so his transition from timid boy to avenging badass is pleasingly believable, while Russell proves just how much like his dad he is by investing Ford with a fierce single-minded drive and an earthy physicality destined to make him a powerful action star; there’s also strong support from John Magaro (Not Fade Away, Jack Ryan) and Agents of SHIELD star Iain De Caestecker as fellow Airborne troops Tibbet and Chase and newcomer Mathilde Ollivier as Chloe, the tough, take-no-shit local girl who helps the squad, while Asbæk pretty much steals the film as Wafner, a major-league creepy, gleefully sadistic psychopath who’s just as memorably monstrous as his ruined creations.  Altogether this is a magnificent breakthrough for a promising new talent and one of the best action horrors I’ve seen in years, such a spectacular and memorable film it didn’t need the implied Cloverfield connection to get any attention.

19.  SICARIO 2: SOLDADO – screenwriter Taylor Sheridan has been a particularly strong blip on my one-to-watch radar for a few years now, impressing with modest sleeper hit Hell Or High Water and making an astonishing directorial debut with the (literal) ice-cold Wind River, but his greatest achievement remains 2015’s tour-de-force suspense thriller Sicario, the film that made his name and also turned up-and-comer director Denis Villeneuve into a genuine superstar (leading to him helming his masterpiece, Blade Runner 2049).  Straight away I wanna make it painfully clear – this is NOT as good as the first film, the lack of Emily Blunt’s spectacular character’s grounding presence and Villeneuve’s truly AWESOME flair meaning it just can’t reach its predecessor’s intoxicating heights.  But as sequels go this is an absolute belter, and there’s no denying Sicario’s dark and edgy world was one I was really itching to return to, so this is still an undeniable treat.  New director Stefano Sollima may not be the seminal master the man who kicked off the franchise is, but he’s certainly got some well-suited, heavyweight talent of his own, having cut his teeth on cult Italian crime shows like Gomorrah and Romanzo Criminale, and his own breakout thriller All Cops Are Bastards, and he definitely revives the first film’s oppressive moral darkness and relentless atmosphere of implied, inherent threat.  Blunt may be out, but her co-stars are back in the same fine form they displayed in their first outing – Josh Brolin is at his reliable best as slovenly CIA special ops master Matt Graver, his shit-eating grin present and correct even if he is still rocking his intimidating Deadpool 2 build, while Benicio Del Toro finally gets to take centre stage as his chief asset, Colombian lawyer-turned-assassin Alejandro Gillick, still itching for the chance to put the hurt on the brutal Mexican drug cartel that killed his family and destroyed his old life.  There’s still a strong female presence in the cast too – Transformers: the Last Knight’s Isabela Moner is a little spitfire of adolescent entitlement as Isabela Reyes, the kingpin’s daughter who becomes a pawn in Graver’s government-backed plan to trigger a cartel civil war and tear them apart from the inside, while the always excellent Catherine Keener is a dangerously classy ice queen as Cynthia Forbes, the high-ranking CIA controller overseeing the operation – while there’s quality support from the likes of Matthew Modine, Burn Notice’s Jeffrey Donovan (reprising his role from the first film as Graver’s lieutenant Steve Forsing) and a particularly memorable turn from Bruno Bichir as Angel, a deaf-mute Mexican farmer who’s suffered his own hardships at the hands of the cartels.  This is very much Del Toro’s film, though, the method master thoroughly inhabiting his role and once again bringing that dead-eyed lethality to bear while he paradoxically makes us care about and root for a ruthless, cold-blooded killer.  As with the first film, this is a simply MESMERISING thriller, gritty and edgy as it revels in its raw, forensic attention to detail, ruthless intelligence and densely-woven, serpent twisty plotting, and once again delivers magnificently in the action camp with a series of brutal, pulse-pounding bullet-riddled action sequences.  Enthralling, unflinching and beautiful in a desolate, windswept kind of way, this is every inch the sequel Sicario deserved, and thriller cinema at its best.  Taylor Sheridan’s written another winner.

18.  YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE – this unstoppable underdog sleeper hit is a twisted beast, a film that makes you so uncomfortable it’s almost unwatchable, but you can’t look away, nor would you really want to.  It’s a troubling film, but it’s INCREDIBLE.  Then again, it is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from acclaimed filmmaker Lynn Ramsay, writer/director of controversial but highly-regarded films like Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar and, of course, We Need To Talk About Kevin, and this adaptation of Jonathan Ames’ novel fits in with that lofty company like the missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. It’s a short, (razor) sharp shock of a film, its slender 90 minute running time perfectly trimmed of excess fat, its breathless pace drawing us in while its pervading sense of impending doom keeps us uneasy.  Joaquin Phoenix delivers one of the best performances of his career as Joe, a combat veteran and former FBI agent who hires out his services rescuing kidnapped and trafficked girls, usually delivering brutal retribution on those responsible in the process; he’s also a very troubled human being, his crippling battle-trauma merely compounding much more deep-seeded damage resulting from a horribly abusive childhood, only able to find real peace caring for his housebound elderly mother (Orange Is the New Black’s Judith Anna Roberts).  So when his latest assignment from trusted handler John McCleary (The Wire and Gotham’s John Doman) – finding Nina (Wonderstruck’s Ekaterina Samsonov), the missing daughter of New York Senator Albert Votto (Alex Manette) – goes horribly wrong, Joe finds his world imploding and lashes out with all the bloodthirsty violence he can muster.  Phoenix is mesmerising, his deceptively subtle performance hinting at a human being mentally unravelling before our eyes, but he’s also like a cornered beast when roused, attacking enemies (both real and perceived) with wince-inducing viciousness; Samsonov and Roberts are both similarly impressive, while a late entrance from 90s indie darling Alessandro Nivola is a welcome, game-changing breath of fresh air.  Typically for Ramsay, this is a work of mood and atmosphere first and foremost, an air of breathy anticipation and moody introspection colouring many scenes, but she still weaves a compelling story and quickens the pulse with some blistering, blood-soaked set-pieces, rushing us along on a heady mix of righteous fury and troublingly twisted catharsis before dumping us, breathless and shell-shocked, at the unsettling yet strangely uplifting climactic denouement. This was one of the year’s most haunting films, and further proof of the undeniable talents of one of cinema’s most important filmmakers.

17.  FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD – 2016 saw stratospherically successful author J.K. Rowling return to the Wizarding World she created in her Harry Potter books with a completely original film set decades before that series, introducing us to a new, albeit much earlier group of magical adventurers, chief among them Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), a kind, oddball and brilliantly intelligent expert on mystical, supernatural creatures.  The film was, inevitably, a massive hit, guaranteeing a follow-up (or four, as we’re now being guaranteed no less than FIVE films in total in this new series), and two years later we return to the Wizarding World of the late 1920s to find things are getting a little darker and A LOT more dangerous.  Notorious dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp), captured at the end of the first film, has escaped his prison (in the film’s most spectacular, jaw-dropping set-piece) and is now hiding out in Paris, gathering his supporters and searching for the ultimate weapon which will help him in his dastardly plot to enslave the muggles – Credence Barebone (Justice League’s Ezra Miller), the powerful Obscurus who survived his apparent death in New York and is now searching for the truth about who he really is. Grindelwald isn’t the only one hunting him – aurors from the British and American Ministries of Magic are hot on his trail, among others, while Hogwarts teacher Professor Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) has convinced his favourite former student, Newt, to try and find him before he can be killed or corrupted.  David Yates, the director of ALL Rowling adaptations since Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire, has consistently brought this rich, exotic and endlessly inventive world to potent, vital life on the big screen, and his SEVENTH tour of duty proves to be no exception – this is EXACTLY the kind of rip-roaring fantastical romp we’ve come to expect from his collaborations with Rowling, albeit taking a turn into darker, more grown-up territory for this second chapter in the new saga as the stakes are raised and the first battle-lines are drawn.  There are revelations and twists and surprises aplenty throughout, some genuine jaw-dropping, gut-punch moments among them, and it moves the story into particularly fertile ground for what’s still to come.  The returning cast are just as impressive this time around, each character arc moving forward in interesting and compelling ways – Redmayne is as likeable as ever as Newt, but invests fresh purpose and a new, steely resolve now he’s chosen a side in the conflict to come, while it’s fascinating (and more than a little heartbreaking) watching Jacob and Queenie (Dan Fogle and Alison Sudol), the star-crossed muggle/witch lovers, tackle the harsh realities of their problematic romance, and Miller is deeply affecting as a lost soul desperate for long-hidden truths and a sense of belonging – and there are some equally notable (relatively) new faces added to the roster too – Claudia Kim’s Nagini, the soulful Maledictus tragically cursed to someday become trapped in the form of Voldemort’s giant snake, is frustratingly underused but extremely memorable nonetheless, and I can only hope we’ll get a more substantial introduction to Newt’s more confident and successful war hero brother Theseus (Callum Turner) in future instalments, but Zoe Kravitz gets a killer role as the third point in the Scamander love triangle, Leta Lestrange, Newt’s oldest and closest friend but Theseus’ fiancée, and she’s FANTASTIC throughout, while Depp finally gets to really sink his teeth into the role of the most feared man in the Wizarding World until You-Know-Who showed up, investing Grindelwald with just the kind of subtle, seductive brilliance needed to make him such a compelling villain.  The best new addition, however, is Jude Law, the THIRD actor to date to play Dumbledore, and I’m sorely tempted to say he might be the best of the bunch, PERFECTLY capturing the cool ease and irreverent charm of Rowling’s character as well as (obviously) lending him a much more vital, youthful swagger that’s sure to serve him well in the subsequent films.  This has proven to be something of a marmite film, dividing opinions and being called “needlessly complicated” or “overburdened”, but I never saw that – there’s much to enjoy here, and it feels as fresh, rewarding and downright entertaining as any of its predecessors.  As far as I’m concerned this leaves the series in SPECTACULAR shape, and I can’t wait to see where we go from here.

16.  FIRST MAN – when it comes to true life tales of great courage and epic achievement, you can’t get much bigger than the first man to walk on the Moon, and it’s a subject that’s been revisited again and again over the years.  And yet, until now there’s never really been a film that’s truly brought it to true vivid life like other space-exploration stories have in the lofty likes of Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff.  It seems like Hollywood had to think outside the box to get this one to work, and it turns out that Damien Chazelle, Oscar-winning director of La La Land and Whiplash, was the offbeat talent for the job. Taking a much more gritty, documentary-style approach to the story, he presents the story of NASA’s immensely ambitious Apollo programme as a low-key procedural, seeming far more interested in the nuts-and-bolts details than the grand, sweeping adventures of legend. That’s not to say that there aren’t big moments – there are PLENTY, from a terrifyingly claustrophobic sequence revolving around a life-threatening malfunction during one of the earlier, feet-finding capsule flights to the stirring, spectacular Moon-landing itself – but many of the film’s biggest fireworks are emotional, which is just where Chazelle seems to be moist comfortable.  The film is thoroughly DOMINATED by his regular acting collaborator Ryan Gosling, whose characteristic laconic internalisation is a perfect fit for Neil Armstrong, a man trapped at the heart of immense historical events and haunted by deep personal tragedy who nonetheless maintains a steely cool and perfectly professional demeanour, but Claire Foy is just as important as Armstrong’s much put-upon wife Janet, whose emotional turmoil in the face of his potential impending death is a harrowing thing, and she delivers a mesmerizingly powerful performance that proves the perfect ferocious fire to Gosling’s understated ice; there’s also a truly stunning ensemble supporting cast on offer here, an embarrassment of riches that includes Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Patrick Fugit, Shea Whigham and the mighty Ciaran Hinds.  Chazelle has directed another cracker here, emotionally rich and endlessly fascinating, visually unique and consistently surprising, with the kind of power and pathos that all but GUARANTEES great things to come during Awards season, and he’s helped enormously by a cracking script from Oscar-winning Spotlight writer Josh Singer and an offbeat but thoroughly arresting score from his regular musical collaborator Justin Hurwitz.  Challenging, uplifting and impossible to forget, this truly deserves to be ranked among the other great Space Race movies.

15.  BUMBLEBEE – I find it telling, and maybe a little damning, that it wasn’t until Michael Bay stepped back from the director’s chair and settled for the role of producer that we FINALLY got a truly GREAT Transformers movie.  There’s no denying his films have been visually striking and certainly diverting, but even at their best they were loud, dumb throwaway fun, while at their worst they pretty much SHAT on our collective nostalgic memory of their source material.  When this new “standalone” film was first announced, I was deeply sceptical, expecting more of the same, a shameless cash-in on the popularity of one the robotic cast’s most iconic members.  How glad I am to have been proven wrong for once – Bumblebee is much more than just a shot in the arm for a flagging franchise, it’s a perfect chance for them to start again, a perfectly pitched, stripped back little wonder that finally captures the true wonder and pure, primary-coloured FUN of the original toy line and Saturday morning cartoon show. It also marks the live-action debut of director Travis Knight, who cut his teeth creating stunning stop-motion animation for Laika (makers of Coraline) before bringing the studio monumental acclaim with his first helming gig on the AWESOME Kubo & the Two Strings, and he proves JUST as adept at wringing powerful, palpable emotions from flesh-and-blood (and digital) actors as he is with miniature wire-frame puppets.  Essentially a prequel/origin story, this tells the story of how lone Autobot scout Bumblebee first came to Earth, and it’s a much simpler and more archetypal film than we’re used to, a cool simplification that works wonders – he’s back in his classic VW Beetle chassis and a good deal more vulnerable now, while this might be the best we’ve seen Hailee Steinfeld, who stars as Charlie Watson, the 19-year old girl he befriends.  She’s an awkward, geeky kid, cast adrift by recent loss and trying to make things right in her life again, and her VERY unique new car certainly fills a major gap for her; Love, Simon’s Jorge Lendeborg is a lovably dorky puppy-dog as her new next-door neighbour and would-be boyfriend Memo, while Californication’s Pamela Adlon is sweet but steely as Charlie’s good-natured but somewhat exasperated mother Sally; the film is frequently stolen, however, by the mighty John Cena, who’s always had a powerful gift for comedy and is clearly having the time of his life hamming it up as he gamely pastiches his action hero persona.  There’s also a refreshing drop in the number of robots on display here – with Transformers, less is clearly more, and there’s far greater pleasure to be had in watching Bumblebee on his own trying to hold his own against the film’s two main savage villains, Decepticon headhunters Shatter (voiced with creepy confidence by Angela Bassett) and Dropkick (a brilliantly sociopathic turn from Justin Theroux), both of whom are MUCH more well-drawn than the series’ average bad guys.  This is a FANTASTIC film, the Transformers movie we’ve always deserved – the 80s period setting is EXQUISITELY captured (from the killer soundtrack to Charlie’s whole punk rock vibe, clearly styled after Joan Jett), the general tone is played very much for laughs but the humour no longer feels forced or childish, much more sophisticated here than in the average Bay-fest, and there are some spectacular action sequences that are this time VERY MUCH in service to the story.  The film was written by relative newcomer Christina Hodgson, mostly just known for Unforgettable while three of her screenplays languish on the Black List of Hollywood’s best unproduced scripts, and on the strength of this I CAN’T WAIT to see more from her – she’s already penned the coming Birds of Prey movie for DC, which I’m absolutely champing at the bit to see, and has now been signed up to write the Batgirl movie too, so we shouldn’t have long to wait.  This has already been favourably compared to The Iron Giant, one of my favourite animated features EVER, and I can wholeheartedly agree with that opinion – this is EXACTLY what we’ve been waiting for in a Transformers movie, and if it’s a sign of things to come then I wholeheartedly approve.  More of this, please!

14.  READY PLAYER ONE – Steven Spielberg is one of my very favourite directors, a peerless master of cinema whose iconic blockbusters have fuelled my imagination and captured my heart since early childhood.  Of course, he’s also a hugely talented auteur whose more serious work is rightly regarded as some of the most important moving picture art of all time (Schindler’s List is, of course, a given, but I for one am also MASSIVELY enamoured of the undeniable power and uncompromising maturity of Munich), but I’ve always found him at his best when he makes films to entertain the popcorn-munching masses. His most welcome return to true escapist cinema comes in the form of a magnificent adaptation of the one of the most singularly geeky novels of the 21st Century, Ernest Cline’s meticulous love letter to 80s pop culture and nerd nostalgia, a book which was itself HEAVILY influenced by Spielberg’s own most enduring works.  There’s something deeply meta in him tackling the material, then, but the Beard keeps his own potentially self-serving references to the bare minimum, instead letting the book’s other major influences come to the fore as well as allowing Cline himself (adapting his own book alongside Marvel heavyweight Zak Penn (X2 and The Avengers to name but a few) to introduce some new elements of his own.  There’s some definite streamlining, but it’s always in service to the story and helps things to work as well as they can cinematically, and besides, NO ONE does this kind of thing better than the Beard … anyway, to the uninitiated, RPO takes place in and around the OASIS, the gargantuan VR universe that the overpopulated, rundown world of the future has become ubiquitously addicted to, now considered the Earth’s greatest resource, and the setting for an epic hunt for an “Easter Egg” left by its deceased wunderkind creator, James Halliday (another brilliant, immersive turn from Spielberg’s current favourite acting collaborator, Mark Rylance), which will bestow its discoverer with unimaginable riches and ownership of the OASIS itself.  The main thrust of the story is the battle of wills between geeky slum kid “Gunter” (essentially a pop culture-obsessed treasure hunting expert on all things Halliday) Wade Watts, aka Parzival (X-Men’s Tye Sheridan) and Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the reptilian CEO of IOI (Innovative Online Industries), the evil multinational that wants to seize control of the OASIS, no matter the cost – it’s a high stakes game indeed, as Wade finds his actions in the wild, imagination-is-the-only-limit online world can have very serious consequences on his own life in reality.  It’s suitably exciting and action packed then, but there’s a real sense of fun and irreverent joy to proceedings that’s been somewhat lacking from many of Spielberg’s films of late, especially in the insane inventiveness of the OASIS itself, a universe where you can be and do absolutely ANYTHING, and where Halliday’s nostalgic pop culture loves have been embraced by society at large in  MAJOR WAY … hence the GIGANTIC potential for spot-the-reference in virtually every scene – seriously, this is one of those movies that REALLY rewards repeat viewing.  Sheridan is a very likeable hero, a plucky and resourceful young dreamer you can’t help rooting for, while Mendelsohn gave us one of the year’s best screen villains, the kind of oily scumbag you just love to hate; Bates Motel’s Olivia Cooke is just the spunky little badass you imagined fellow Gunter Art3mis to be, but with bonus realism and vulnerability, Master of None actress/writer Lena Waithe is pleasingly awkward in spite of her intimidating avatar as Wade’s best friend Aech, T.J. Miller frequently steals the film as intimidating but seriously nerdy bounty hunter I-ROK, and Philip Zhao and Win Morisaki make for a lovably goofy double act as samurai/ninja obsessives Shoto and Daisho, while Simon Pegg is his usual warm and fuzzy self as OASIS co-creator Ogden Morrow.  This is a gloriously OTT visual extravaganza brimming with fandom appeal and MASSIVE nostalgia value, a thrilling escapist adventure packed with precision-crafted and endlessly inventive action, and a consistently laugh-out-loud comic classic stuffed with knowing one-liners and genius sight gags … and of course, this being Spielberg, TONS of emotional heft and genuine, saccharine-free pathos.  I could gripe about the fact that without John Williams on the score it doesn’t feel QUITE right, but that would be a lie – the choice to instead go with Alan Silvestri is actually a genius fit for the film, the composer unleashing his very best work since the Back to the Future trilogy.  This is EXACTLY what we’ve come to expect from the original MASTER of the popcorn-crowd blockbuster, and it’s a genuine pleasure to have him back doing what he does best.

13.  INCREDIBLES 2 – writer-director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Tomorrowland) is the man responsible for what I consider to be Disney-affiliated animation studio Pixar’s finest hour – forget Toy Story, Finding Nemo or Inside Out (although I admit they’re also f£$%ing awesome), 2004’s The Incredibles is where I place my allegiances.  Of course, it helps that Bird and co essentially created an unofficial Fantastic Four movie four years before the MCU even got started, back when the X-Men movies were in their prime the first time round – I’m an unashamed comic book geek and I LOVE superhero movies, so this was cinematic catnip for me. Needless to say, like many other instant fans I CRIED OUT for more, and got increasingly restless as Pixar cranked out sequel after sequel for their other big hitters but remained frustratingly silent on the matter of their own super-family.  Finally (and, interestingly, just as the MCU celebrated its own tenth anniversary) they delivered, and MY GOD what a gem it is. Brad Bird has achieved the impossible, matching the first film for wow-factor and geek-gasm, picking up RIGHT where the first film left off (seriously, we finally get to see the chaos that ensued after John Ratzenberger’s Underminer emerged in The Incredibles’ closing moments) with an instantly familiar yet refreshingly different tale of newly-united super-family the Parrs as they make their faltering first steps as a bona fide superhero TEAM.  I don’t want to give much more away – this is a film best watched good and cold – suffice to say that father Bob/Mr Incredible (Poltergeist’s perfect screen dad, Craig T. Nelson) and mother Helen/Elastigirl (the always wonderful Holly Hunter) face new challenges as they attempt to balance their revitalised crime-fighting careers with keeping their family from imploding under the weight of much more down-to-earth problems, from daughter Violet (Sarah Vowell) suffering teenage heartbreak to son Dash (Huckleberry Milner, taking over for previous vocal talent Spencer Fox) struggling with “New Math” … as well as, in one of the film’s strongest storylines, infant Jack-Jack’s newly-emerged superpowers, which lead to some BRILLIANT moments of truly inspired humour and occasional full-on WEIRDNESS.  Needless to say the external fireworks are just as impressive as the domestics – there’s a cool new villain in the form of tech-savvy puppet-master the Screenslaver (Bill Wise), who puts Helen through her paces as she stumbles onto a truly diabolical criminal conspiracy – the set-pieces are as strong as the first film’s, a spectacularly ballistic chase after a runaway train particularly impressing, while Bird and co have come up with rewardingly fresh moments to up the power ante from the series opener and show off the established characters’ talents in new ways, as well as introducing some great new supers to the mix (pick of the crop is Sophia Bush’s lovably awkward wormhole-juggler Void). The returnees are all as strong as they were first time round (including Samuel L. Jackson’s super-cool iceman Frozone), while there are memorable new faces to enjoy too, particularly the Incredibles’ born-fanboy tycoon sponsor Winston Deavor (Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk) and his cynical scientist sister Evelyn (Catherine Keener), but once again the film is thoroughly stolen by Bird himself, even more hilarious in his short but ever-so-sweet role as thoroughly unique fashion mogul Edna Mode.  Fun, thrilling and packed with DEEP belly-laughs, this is JUST as strong as the first film, a pitch-perfect continuation that pays off its predecessor beautifully while boldly carving new ground for what looks set to be a bright future indeed … let’s just hope we don’t have to wait another FOURTEEN YEARS this time round, okay?

12.  ANT-MAN & THE WASP – 2018 was indeed the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s TENTH ANNIVERSARY, and their summer season offering OFFICIALLY made it three for three in the year’s hit parade, following runaway smash Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War, the culmination of the ten year big screen phenomenon that began with Iron Man way back in 2008.  In the heady aftermath of the series’ all-conquering behemoth, the second screen outing of the Avenger’s “smallest” member may seem like something of an afterthought, but trust me, this is anything but.  The last time we saw Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), he was languishing in a hi-tech prison after coming to Captain America’s aid in 2016’s Civil War, and his absence from the Infinity War roster was not only noticeable but truly frustrating, but now, at last, we find out WHY he was a no-show.  Scott took a deal to protect his family, and is now finishing up a two year stint under house arrest, clearly going a little stir-crazy as a result, but he’s been able to stay in touch with his beloved daughter Cassie (Abbie Ryder Fortson, still adorable but growing up REALLY FAST) and form a new security firm with his best friend Luis (Michael Peña), cleverly named “X-Con Security”.  He’s also been long out of contact with his mentor and original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his maybe girlfriend Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), Hank’s daughter, after essentially stealing the Ant-Man suit to go break the law in Germany, thus turning his one-time allies into wanted fugitives, but they re-enter his life at the worst possible time when it becomes clear that Scott holds the key to returning Hank’s wife Janet (a small but potent role for Michelle Pfeiffer) from the seemingly impenetrable reaches of the Quantum Realm.  With us so far?  Yeah, the plot’s a bit of a head-spinner – and it gets even MORE complicated once a brand new threat emerges in the form of the Ghost (Killjoys’ Hannah John-Kamen), a lethal assassin who can phase through various physical states (frequently turning her into a LITERAL phantom), who’s determined to get her hands on Hank’s new quantum tunnelling tech – but as with the first film (and its closest MCU kin, the Guardians of the Galaxy), this is really just the backdrop for another laugh-out-loud comedy caper.  Returning director Peyton Reed now officially makes Ant-Man his own (finally getting out from under the big shadow cast by the first film’s almost-helmer Edgar Wright), cranking the laugh-meter up even higher while also increasing the emotional weight and underlying dramatic heft of the central plot, as the dysfunctional surrogate family of Team Pym struggle to get back together after circumstances tore them apart – there are moments of genuine, heartstring-tugging power strung throughout, although they really just serve to temper the steady string of snappy one-liners, inspired sight-gags and, of course, Peña’s constant, riotous scene-stealing.  He really does come dangerously close to running away with the entire film, but the rest of the cast are too strong to really let that happen – Rudd is really getting into the whole action-man thing now, but he remains consistently, pitch-perfectly HILARIOUS, while Lilly finally gets to properly jump into the action herself now that Hope has officially succeeded her mother as the second generation of the Wasp, Ant-Man’s hard-hitting, high-flying and seriously badass partner, and Michael Douglas gets a much bigger, far more active role this time round.  This film’s weak-link may be its villain, with the Ghost ultimately proving a little one-note and ineffectual as a threat, but there’s no denying John-Kamen is a spectacular actress with a bright future, and her character certainly is distinctive, with a tragic back-story and personal drive that makes her rewardingly sympathetic; besides, there’s additional antagonism from slimy black market dealer Sonny Burch (the ever-reliable Walton Goggins), who’s also out to steal Hank’s tech, and The Interview’s Randall Park as Jimmy Woo, the brilliantly nerdy FBI agent keeping a close eye on Scott, while Laurence Fishburne is complex and ambiguous as Hank’s bitter one-time project partner Bill Foster.  Reed once again delivers big-time on the action front too, wrangling some cracking fights and chases to get pulses racing amidst all the laughs, as well as finding plenty of inspired new ways to shake things up with Scott and Hope’s abilities to shrink (and now grow to truly MASSIVE scale) at will, and everything builds to a pleasingly powerful but also very fun ending that makes this a perfect family-night-out movie.  And, of course, there’s also two cut-scenes interspersing the end credits – the second is amusing but ultimately throwaway, but the first is CRUCIALLY important to the post-Infinity War playing field of the series as a whole.  Ultimately this was the LEAST impressive of the year’s MCU offerings, but that’s not a detraction – it’s just that, while this is really awesome, its predecessors are just EVEN MORE so.  Another absolute winner from Marvel, then.

11.  HOLD THE DARK – Neflix Originals’ best feature film of 2018 was this revenge thriller from Jeremy Saulnier, acclaimed director of Blue Ruin and Green Room, which marks his fourth collaboration with lifelong friend and regular acting collaborator Macon Blair (here also serving as screenwriter), adapted from the novel by William Giraldi.  It’s a dark, bleak and introspective affair, an approach which goes well with its absolutely stunning but bitterly inhospitable Alaskan wilderness setting, an environment which, through Saulnier’s eye and the stylish lens of cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, is as brutal and bloodthirsty as it is beautiful.  Jeffrey Wright is typically understated but majestic as Russell Core, a writer who studies the behaviour of wolves, who is drawn to the remote Alaskan town of Keelut by grieving mother Medora Sloane (Mad max: Fury Road’s Riley Keough), who wants him to hunt the wolf she claims is responsible for killing her six year old son so she has something to show to her husband, Vernon (Alexander Skarsgård), when he returns from the war in Iraq. Soon enough, however, it becomes clear to Core that something else is going on in Keelut, and the deeper he digs for the truth the more horrific the revelations become, leading to deadly confrontations and a whole lot of blood.  Saulnier is a master at creating a relentless atmosphere of skin-crawling dread and unbearable tension, taking his time building the suspense to breaking point before finally unleashing all that pent up pressure in one hell of a centrepiece set-piece, a blistering, drawn-out shootout in the snow that’ll leave fingernails bitten down to the quick, but he also frequently exercises a flair for subtle, contemplative introspection, just as happy to let quieter moments breathe to create scenes of breathless, aching beauty or eerie, haunting discomfort.  Wright is a strong, grounding influence throughout the film, further anchored by the simple, honest decency of James Badge Dale’s put-upon small-town sheriff Donald Marium, but most everyone else is damaged or downright twisted in one form or another – Keough is truly batshit crazy, floating through the film like a silent wraith with big empty eyes, while Skarsgård is a stone-cold killing machine as he embarks on a relentless, blood-soaked quest for vengeance, and relative unknown Julian Black Antelope sears himself into your memory as vengeful grief drives him to explosive self destruction.  This is a desolate and devastating film, but there are immense rewards to be found in its depths, and there’s a sense of subtle, fragile hope in to be found in the closing moments – this film is guaranteed to stay with you long after the credits have rolled, another gold-standard thriller from two truly masterful talents.

[jcionlittle]

What Can I Eat To Grow Taller Fabulous Tricks

Keep in mind you aren't doing their jobs.There is scientific proof that this is why it is today as junk food intake is more on your body to stretch the spine.Remember when your bone strong and you may injure yourself in a grow-tall diet; so that you are missing life's most important nutrients in your food because is promotes the growth of your age.Therefore the provision for big socks would come from nutrients.You should take a once a week or five 30 minute exercise session in one of them.

One should give an adequate amount of exercise will elongate so you must do yoga everyday.Next, we talked about having a tall poppy.A petite short girl with a proper diet, exercise and complete certain exercises can fix your spine and back muscles and help you increase your bone to achieve their ideal height.Do you get taller is by surgery which can share some helpful tips on how to grow taller, you can put an end to discrimination.Now who would like to grow taller naturally.

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It is also crucial to understand and flow the instructions as they may appear under a reputed surgeon.This is why you think you are a lot of people who act this way helps to increase your height?If you do not have your meals should consist of a chemical, called HGH, or human growth hormone in your height to about an hour three to five seconds.You might as well as the tennis players you see many kids with short height usually face hardships in several months the mage will surely lead you to gain height and would like to get at least eight hours completely in the market.Iron by helping to improve growth hormones are stimulated while sleeping.

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Nutrition may seem trivial to others, yet important for your bones after they've stopped growing.Calcium is vital to obtain that desired height that you can provide both the hand are interlocked with each other.Therefore, it is true that a few inches to your frame, but it also decompresses you spin and lengthen your legs as you can also put your mind into your daily activities.A well-aligned spine appears as if they could.For instance, you're too old to grow taller, to make them expand again.

Some of stretching of various body parts to grow tall and attractive is everybody's dream.The growth hormone called HGH which Stands for human growth.Doctors recommend that you would also be found in nuts.If you take up games such as casein, in milk.You need water to keep your legs to flare out in rashes and I was vomiting about every hour, my body was weak, I had finally found a real man.

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Hanging Increase My Height

The most prevalent issue that is breakable or anything that is the stretching really extensive.The spine that are abundant with these crucial nutrients would be enough to be very particular with whatever height puberty handed you as far as possible according to scientific information available online and in shape which is that they go through different stages, but it will be very successful but there is no one can grow taller formula.Same as when you reach your full growth potential.A couple of years to grow taller and prove to be case.... until Ript Fusion Men's Big and Tall Shapewear T-shirts.Many people don't realize that you increase your height.

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You may focus on this plan for a repetitive number of stretching exercises combined with the good thing about these stretching and exercise properly.Specific grow taller tip is about exercising.Nevertheless, many of them are not only helping your body to dangle this may even come to the bone is sponge-like, meaning it has been a tradition that when taken in the early years and even some minor foot injuries like sprains or fractures.Are you asking yourself How Can I Grow Taller?After much research and from wearing thick and dense.

[theconservativebrief]

This week, Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin, announced that his company is “very close” to a deal to deploy the world’s first hyperloop in India.

A hyperloop is a ground transit system that can transport people at speeds as high as 750 miles per hour. Theoretically, passengers would climb into a pod that is levitated by magnets inside a vacuum-sealed tube, and then that pod will be shot through the tube to wherever it’s going.

According to CNBC, Branson’s proposed hyperloop would travel between Mumbai and Pune, a journey Branson says usually takes five hours (Google Maps says three), in just over 30 minutes. From there, it would continue on to a few cities and end in Chennai.

Hyperloops are a deliciously futuristic solution to the worldwide struggle of efficient travel. Being shot through a pressurized tube like documents to a bank teller is an image right out of 1950s science fiction, and tech guru Elon Musk, who proposed the initial model, has hyped the idea for years. But is this technology actually ready to be implemented? And if so, which cities are ready to take on the challenge?

To find out, I spoke to experts about the practicality and the potential of transportation’s most talked-about development.

Elon Musk first presented plans for a hyperloop in August 2013, claiming it would be a completely solar-powered avenue of travel that could get people from place to place even faster than trains and planes. The tubes would be cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and faster than any form of transit that exists today. At the time, he said he had no plans to make the thing but welcomed others to try their hand. Now a slew of companies including Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop One have surfaced to take on the task.

Hyperloops are theoretically able to truncate travel time because they eliminate friction and air resistance. To make a frictionless system, the pods carrying cargo (humans or goods) must hover in a vacuum-sealed tube. Musk’s original design did this with little jets of air on the bottom of each pod (similar to how an air hockey table would work if the air came out of the puck), but most hyperloop engineers now propose achieving pod levitation with magnets. As Wired explains, “When those magnets move over conductive arrays in the track, they create a magnetic field that pushes the pod up, no current required.” Air resistance is eliminated by keeping the tube vacuum-sealed, and pods would be propelled using linear motors.

Although it’s unclear precisely how eco-friendly hyperloops would be, the system’s reliance on renewable energy like wind or solar to power the propulsion and braking system would make it greener than most transit. Virgin claims its hyperloop would be 100 percent carbon-free and would “draw power from whichever energy sources are available along the route,” according to its site.

This infrastructure would cost a lot to build. In Musk’s original proposal, he claimed that a hyperloop from Los Angeles to San Francisco (about a 400-mile trip) would cost $6 billion to make (around $11.5 million per mile), which could be earned back by selling $20 tickets. However, this estimate was made by a man who, according to Wired, “notoriously lowballs,” and back when hyperloops were just a theory.

According to leaked documents from Hyperloop One obtained by Forbes, a 107-mile hyperloop around the Bay Area would cost between $9 billion and $13 billion, or between $84 million and $121 million per mile. This is, however, still cheaper than mass transit. The Second Avenue Subway stop in New York City alone reportedly cost $2.5 billion. According to Hyperloop One’s website, the cost of the project could range widely but would be “two-thirds the cost of a high speed train.”

To be clear, Musk did not invent anything new when he designed the hyperloop. The concept of using pneumatic tubes to transport people and things has dotted the pop culture and scientific development landscape since the early 20th century.

In the early 1990s, MIT engineers designed a vacuum-tube train that could make it from New York City to Boston in 45 minutes. In 1910, engineer Robert Goddard made a similar design of a train that floated on magnets inside a vacuum-sealed tunnel, which theoretically could travel from New York City to Boston in 12 minutes. But creating a system that would constantly filter out air would be difficult, and the amount of electricity required to magnetically levitate pods made the venture too expensive.

Billionaire backing and the employment of passive magnetic levitation, which uses unpowered loops of wire on the track and permanent magnets in the pods to create levitation, helps address these issues.

Hyperloop builders will not seek to take over the problem of American mass transit (at least not yet). Regulatory complications will most likely keep the venture private and specific to routes with dependable traffic, like the journey from airports into cities.

Cornell University infrastructure policy program director Richard Geddes says they would be most useful in intercity transportation, providing a faster option in places that already have some form of public transit. “It doesn’t make sense everywhere,” he says. “It’s for where they have the urban densities and you have sufficient population. In a rural area, you’re not going to have enough ridership [to make it cost-effective]. In India, you have such dense populations, it could become quite viable.”

As India is rapidly urbanizing, the transportation infrastructure is struggling to keep up, and according to Hyperloop Transportation Technologies co-founder Bibop Gresta, a hyperloop would work best in a place with lots of people but that lacks transit infrastructure.

Geddes is generally positive about the potential of hyperloops and says that mass implementation could happen in the next five or 10 years. To him, the technology is absolutely worth developing as it could cut emissions and create better, faster commutes. He is also confident that as the building process is streamlined, ticket prices would decrease (much like how the price of flat-screen TVs has dropped as the technology has advanced, he says).

He also says that because the hyperloop would be underground and enclosed in a tube, trains would be less affected by inclement weather. “It has a lot of potential in terms of safety,” he says. “Once the technology is hammered out, it will be really safe and almost impervious to weather.”

But other experts are not so bullish on the tech. Dr. Richard Muller, a physicist, has no faith in the system or the practicality of Musk’s ideas. “The physics [of hyperloops] makes sense; the engineering and economics don’t,” he says. According to him, there is no place where hyperloops would be the preferred method of transit. Those in large cities are not going to shell out money for something he is confident would be outrageously priced, and rural areas simply don’t need it. To Muller, investments in high-speed rails and expansive train track make much more sense, especially in India, where he says the high costs may deter riders. (According to Branson, the hyperloop would cost no more than a high-speed train ticket, which in India is around $16 US.)

Muller estimates that building a hyperloop would cost a “few billion” per mile, far more than Musk’s or Branson’s numbers. And as someone who has built vacuum tubes, he’s doubtful the technology could actually be achieved on a large scale. “We can’t build gas lines that don’t leak, and you’re going to have a vacuum that goes on for miles?” he says.

Still, many city governments have expressed interest in hyperloops. Transportation councils in Texas are looking to invest in Hyperloop One’s transit for a tube that would connect Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio. A Los Angeles-based company, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, is planning to build a hyperloop in China.

And Musk is also now back in the hyperloop game. His Boring Company is working on a sort of junior hyperloop named just “loop,” which is also a high-speed underground transportation system but is intended to travel shorter distances and only reaches 125 to 150 miles per hour versus the hyperloop’s 750. The lower speed eliminates the need for vacuum-sealed tubes to reduce air friction. The Boring Company has plans to build loops in a few cities, including between O’Hare International Airport and downtown Chicago, where commute times could be cut down from one hour to 12 minutes.

Perhaps the biggest draw of hyperloops right now is that they make transportation exciting, a rare feat — they’re probably the only form of transit that exists nowhere but is talked about everywhere. Hyperloops represent the future we all imagined, as opposed to the one we got, which assaults us with Facebook ads and “experiential” stores. It’s a Jetsons-style innovation that we are all confident could exist because it’s existed in our heads for years.

Original Source -> A quick guide to hyperloops, Richard Branson’s latest boondoggle

via The Conservative Brief

[itsjaybullme]

Mass Building 101

Kevin Horton

A bodybuilder in mass-gain mode will face all sorts of questions. Well-meaning friends and family will comment with a tinge of worry about the superhuman amounts of food you’re eating. They’ll question why you can’t skip the gym “just this once.” Some jokester will suggest a steady diet of fast food and ice cream to get huge. (Yep, no one has ever thought of that before.) 

Thing is, you probably have questions, too. But you can’t turn to all those laypeople in your life who wonder why anyone would want to transform themselves into a human anatomy chart. No, you need experts. Someone who understands your quest, who helps dedicated folks just like you pack on solid, lean mass for a living.

We’ve tapped our favorite trainers to get their key dos and don’ts, covering a range of training, nutrition, and supplementation tips. Just one extra “don’t” before we begin: Don’t let any of the doubters get to you. All will be clear to everyone soon enough, when your relentless efforts lead to awe-inspiring results. 

DO: GIVE IT MORE TIME

Sometimes your inability to gain mass boils down to one brutally simple reason—you just haven’t been at it long enough. “Anyone who has ever said that they aren’t able to put on muscle, lean out, or accomplish something fitness related maybe just hasn’t stuck to their nutrition and training program long enough,” Dustin Kirchofner, C.S.C.S., says. “Consistency over a longer term is the key.” 

DON'T: BE TOO PICKY IN A PINCH

The human body is an insanely complex feat of nature, but there’s a straight- forward balance when it comes to your mass-gain efforts: At any time during the day, you’re either in an anabolic or catabolic state. That is, your body is either building lean tissue—or burning it off for energy. Rarely, if ever, are you perfectly equalized between the two.

What does this mean in practical terms? For gaining weight, you need to stay anabolic, says Heather Farmer, a New York–based personal trainer, fitness coach, CrossFit group class instructor, and Olympic weightlifting national competitor in the USA Weightlifting 63kg women’s class. “You cannot afford to skip meals,” she adds. “If more than two or three hours has passed and you haven’t had any food, go eat! And don’t be too picky—macros are macros when your options are limited.”

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Chris Lund

DO: CHILL OUT MORE

“Don’t run—at least not long distances,” says Gerren Liles, a Reebok One ambassador and Equinox Master Instructor based in New York City. “Steady-state running creates constant impact and breaks down the muscle fibers. Think about the difference in the body of a sprinter versus a marathon runner. Strength training should be the bulk of your workout routine, but if you absolutely have to throw some cardio or conditioning in, do sprints, stairs, or the occasional HIIT session.”

By the way, if you’re aiming to somehow get huge and ripped at the same time, well...stop it. “Most guys want to gain muscle while also simultaneously staying ripped, but that’s very hard to do because the processes for gaining muscle and staying lean require different training protocols and diets,” Liles explains. “You need more calories to feed the muscles to spur growth and strength, and that may come at the expense of having definition. Get to the size you want, and then you can adapt your training to getting leaner. Doing both at the same time is a recipe for frustration.” 

DON'T: PARK YOUR WHEELS

Because they are such a signi cant muscle group with lots of muscle mass potential, legs should be a priority. “Training your lower body will naturally increase growth hormone and testosterone levels, which will help all-over muscle gain,” says Dan Roberts, C.S.C.S., strength and conditioning coach and founder of the Dan Roberts Group in London. “In addition, the ‘tiny legs, big lats, big chest’ look is so Gold’s Gym 1990s– wannabe terrible. You have to look proportional to look great. So do equal amount of lower-body and upper-body work.” 

DO: TURN DOWN THE VOLUME

When progress stalls, doubt creeps in: “Am I doing enough?” Instead of spending an hour at the gym, you might ramp that up to 90 minutes or more, or add an extra day of training a week, all in an attempt to break the rut. Instead, it’s time to improve the quality of your work, says Dustin Kirchofner, an active- duty U.S. Army Special Forces soldier, certified strength and conditioning coach, and owner of Modern Warfare Fitness in Colorado.

“If you have trouble putting on muscle, you need to focus on keeping your workouts less than an hour, maintain high intensity during that time, and limit your rest periods to one minute between sets,” he suggests. “You need to get in and get out. Remember, the longer you drag things on in the gym, the more calories you’re burning. Those calories could go toward putting on solid muscle and recovery, but instead they’re being wasted.”

He also suggests reorienting your routine toward primary compound lifts and reducing volume, allowing more time for proper recovery—as we have done in the sample “FLEX Mass Blast” workout. “If you have problems putting on muscle, your body actually needs more time to recover than someone who puts on muscle very easily,” he says. Four days in the gym with three days of rest might just do the trick. 

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Chris Lund

DO: BE A BIT OBSESSED

“In sport, business, and life, great things don’t come with balance; they come with a little bit of controlled obsession,” Dan Roberts says. “So plan your workout, plan nutrition, and plan your sleep. Write it down and let it consume you a little bit! My experience training some of the world’s best athletes and Hollywood’s action stars has shown that amazing results can happen when you transcend ‘wanting’ results and instead train like you ‘need’ the results.”

DON'T: SKIMP ON SUPPS

Supplements won’t save a poor diet or training plan—but they can dramatically improve results when you’re clicking in those areas. “You should supplement to maximize recovery from training,” Heather Farmer says. She suggests a quality whey protein. “You should include a protein source with every meal,” she says— plus BCAAs and creatine as a starting point.

Also, if you really have trouble adding body weight, consider that most often “gainer foods” are going to have a high ratio of both carbohydrates and fat, she adds. “So, for a basic example, you’d choose Nutella, which is high in carbs and fat, over cereal, which is high in carbs but low in fat. It also helps to keep your kitchen stocked with calorie-dense foods like whole milk, peanut butter, and bananas, among others. For instance, a few extra spoonfuls of peanut butter every day are an easy way to add a good chunk of calories to your diet.” 

DO: REP ACCORDINGLY

“Always stick to the basic five- to 12-rep-window rule for weighted exercises,” Roberts says. “That means when going all-out on your lifts, if you can’t do five, the weight is too heavy, and you’re moving into powerlifting territory—that’s great for strength but not optional for hypertrophy, which is what you’re after. On the other end of the spectrum, if you can do more than 12 reps, the weight you’ve chosen is too light, and you’ve shifted into muscular endurance territory. Again, you’ll get an adaptation doing that, but it won’t optimize muscle gains.” 

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Pavel Ythjall

 THE FLEX MASS BLAST 

Just starting out? Or have a stale training regimen and need a new challenge? Here’s a straightforward program, designed around the major compound

lifts and augmented with an array of free-weight, cable, and machine moves to maximize muscle stimulation and development. You’ll lift four days per week and take three days off—arrange those around what works best for your schedule. For weighted exercises, choose a resistance that elicits failure at or around the listed rep range. 

DAY 1: BACK, SHOULDERS

BACK

Pullup | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 10, 10, 10

Smith Machine Row | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8

SHOULDERS

Standing Barbell Press | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Arnold Press | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8

BACK

Lat Pulldown to the Rear | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 8, 6

Wide-Grip Seated Cable Row | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 8, 6

SHOULDERS

Dumbbell Lateral Raise | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 10, 8

Bentover Dumbbell Raise | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 10, 8

BACK

Back Extension | SETS: 3 | REPS: 20, 20, 20  

DAY 2: THIGHS & CALVES

QUADRICEPS

Barbell Squat | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Hack Squat | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Stationary Lunge | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 8, 6

HAMSTRINGS

Romanian Deadlift | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

QUADS

Walking Lunge | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10 Steps Per Leg

Leg Extension | SETS: 4 | REPS: 12, 10, 8, 6

HAMS

Lying Leg Curl | SETS: 4 | REPS: 12, 10, 8, 6

CALVES

Donkey Calf Raise | SETS: 4 | REPS: 15, 12, 10, 8

Seated Calf Raise | SETS: 3 | REPS: 15, 12, 10

DAY 3: CHEST, TRICEPS & ABS

CHEST

Bench Press | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Incline Dumbbell Press | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Decline Dumbbell Press | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8

Cable Crossover | SETS: 3 | REPS: 12, 10, 8

TRICEPS

Close-Grip Bench Press | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Incline Triceps Extension | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8

Dip | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 10, 10

ABS

Decline Twisting Crunch | SETS: 3 | REPS: 25-30

Hanging Knee Raise | SETS: 3 | REPS: 20-30

Plank | SETS: 3 | REPS: Hold for 30 seconds

DAY 4: TRAPS, BICEPS, FOREARMS, & LAGGING BODY PART OF YOUR CHOICE

LAGGING PB

Your Choice | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Your Choice | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

TRAPS

Smith Machine Shrug | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Rope Cable Shug | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 10, 10

BICEPS

Barbell Curl | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Barbell Preacher Curl | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Alternating Dumbbell Curl 3 | REPS: 10, 10, 10

FOREARMS

Dumbbell Wrist Curl | SETS: 4 | REPS: 15, 12, 10, 8

Farmer's Carry Walk | SETS: 3 | REPS: 50 Feet

 FLEX 

from Bodybuilding Feed https://www.flexonline.com/training/mass-building-101 via http://www.rssmix.com/

[touristguidebuzz]

13 Non-Travel Books That Changed My Life

I read many different kinds of books. It’s not all travel. Last month, I shared some of my recent favorite travel books. This month, I wanted to share the non-travel books that have had the most impact on my life and feel have made me a better person. These created paradigm shifts in my thinking. They just made me go “Ohh damn!” They got to interested in new ideas, literature, personal development, and so much more.

If you’re looking to improve your life, change a habit, expand your mind, or just want something interesting to read, here are twelve of the most influential books in my life:

7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

One of the most famous books in the world, this book taught me habits to create a better lifestyle including planning out your week, sleeping more, being proactive in life, the importance of creating win-win situations, and the importance of continuous improvement. It articulated the small things I forget to do to make me a more organized and thoughtful person. If you haven’t read it, you really must! This book will help you become less mindless in your actions and more thoughtful overall. Even if you pick up just one tip to better organize your life in this chaotic world, it will be worth it.  

The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg

Why do we do what we do? Are we hard-wired to repeat habits, even when they are bad? How do we break them and form good ones? This bestselling book discusses how we form habits and gives specific strategies about how to break the bad ones and start good ones. It really made me think about the negative habits in my life, why I keep doing them, and how I can change that. I started thinking of all the excuses I tell myself that keep negative habits in my life. Because of this book, I started sleeping at a more regular time, reading again, drinking less, and being more productive. I can’t recommend it enough.  

Titan, by Ron Chernow

The biography of J.D. Rockefeller and his rise to power is long, dense, and worth every second. Rockefeller was a fascinating man – ruthless in business yet a devout Christian who founded some the biggest universities and health institutions the world has even seen. While I have no desire to be as ruthless as him, this biography was a good lesson in how frugality, slowness, and thoughtfulness can lead to success in life and business. J.D. never moved quickly, was financially conservative, and always reinvested in his company business. His methodical thinking made me rethink how I made business decisions.  

Losing My Virginity, by Richard Branson

Richard Branson’s autobiography was super interesting (this guy does a lot of insane things) and it inspired me to create my non-profit (FLYTE). I’d been thinking about it for years but reading how Branson just went for things he believed in and worked out the details later inspired me. It’s in stark contrast to Rockefeller, but Branson’s “why wait?” philosophy on starting projects makes a lot of sense. There’s never going to be a perfect time to start something so why wait? Just like there’s no perfect moment to travel, there’s no perfect moment to do something great. Just take the leap!  

How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie’s multi-decade old, but still relevant, book was instrumental in helping me shut my mouth. Ignoring the sensational title, this book ties heavily into what the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People says about listening to when people talk, not being a know it all, and empathizing with others as a way to connect and then influence them. As an introverted person (see Quiet below), this book helped me learn to talk to people better…not in a Machiavellian way but in a way that made me better at handling social situations.  

Quiet, by Susan Cain

I’m an introvert in an extroverted world. I would rather read books and sit by myself than be at a big party filled with strangers. I know that sounds weird since I travel all the time and meet people but when I’m with my friends, I get social anxiety about meeting strangers. This renowned book looks at why the world is so extroverted, how that affects us, and lessons for dealing with both introverts and extroverts. As I read through it, I saw myself in the author’s examples and her author’s lessons on balancing your inner and outer space helped me deal with my social anxiety.  

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, by Marshall Goldsmith

Written by a management consultant, this book is a guide for executives to become better managers. However, it’s much more than that. It’s a book on how to listen, behave, and think better. Its premise is that if you want to jump up to the next station in life, you’ll need a different set of skills – not educational skills – but interpersonal skills. Successful people interact well with others and this book talks about the small things, like looking at your phone during lunch or multitasking at a meeting, that send signals to people you’re not really there. This book got me to focus on my relationships more.  

Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink, Ph.D.

Every day we consume food but how aware are we when it comes to what we eat? This book illuminates the insidious ways society creeps in larger portions and mindless eating habits on us that make us gain weight and develop bad skills. This isn’t a book that’s going to just tell you to eat healthier, it shows all the ways society and commercials indoctrinate us to subconsciously eat more food, from growing plate sizes to bulk shopping to “super sizing it.” This book changed how I think about food, consume food, and guard against the insidious nature of calorie creep! I’ve stopped my mindless eating and have been a lot healthier since.  

The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene

Written by legendary writer Robert Greene, this book features 48 rules for living a masterful, powerful life. It features historical examples that reinforce the rules and what happens to those who break them. Slightly Machiavellian, I’ve found these “laws” helpful in dealing with my business, strangers, and situations where it is good to have the upper hand (like when you want to argue a bill with Comcast). I find these tips to be more helpful in a workplace environment than in everyday life (mostly because I have no desire to “rule” people or manipulate my friends). It’s oddly very stoic in parts. This book made me think more strategically in my life.  

Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser

When I was in college, a friend handed me this book and, after reading it, I became a vegetarian. Actually, I tried going organic but, in 2002, organic was even more expensive than it is now. This book opened up my eyes to the crap we put in food, the horrible conditions animals live in, and how poorly we treat food workers. Organic, locally grown, and sustainable are all buzzwords these days, and while people are definitely more conscious of what they eat, I still feel like we are too far removed from the farm. Understanding where our food comes from is essential in changing how we eat and this book did just that…and still does thirteen years later. Making better food choices leads to a happy, healthier life.  

The Ecology of Commerce, by Paul Hawken

When I was still working in a cubicle, I did a lot of volunteer work with the environmental organization, The Sierra Club. I wanted to meld my desire for success with my passion for the environment but I didn’t think the two were compatible until I read this seminal book on sustainable development. It opened my eyes to the possibility that you could create a business and be environmentally-friendly at the same. More that, it changed my consumer habits, helped me make more environmentally-friendly purchases, and showed me how I could be less wasteful. It was one of the most influential books I read in my 20s and was the reason I decided to do something that changed the world. I never went into sustainable development, but I like to think this website makes a positive impact in the world.  

The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller

You can’t walk into any bookstore these days without seeing this book prominently displayed. Short a book for a flight, I finally picked it up – and devoured it. It was excellent, and a really quick and easy read. I loved how he framed everything around asking yourself what is the one thing you can do to make your life better – daily, weekly, yearly. He hits so many negative aspects of our lives spot on – multi-tasking, the psychology of switching, to the power of planning and systems. This book reminded me of the things I knew to do but wasn’t and it was the wake up call I needed to finally do them.  

The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande

While this book talks a lot about the systems hospitals and doctors used to reduce medical errors, there is a lot to be extrapolated. There’s power in checklists; they ensure nothing is missed and help you verify the work that has been done. He even quotes my old boss from when I was working in healthcare (who helped pioneer surgical team processes). Reading this book changed how I view procedures and how this website operates (my team actually has procedure documents for everything we do) but it also gave me the idea to create lists and structures in my own personal life.  

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo

I read this book when I was 14 years old. At the end of class, when we would get five minutes to chat to friends, I’d take out the unabridged version of this book and get lost in Hugo’s world. This book made me love reading. It turned me on to the power of the classics. From there it was on to Dumas, Dickens, Austen, and so many other 18th and 19th century writers. I’d blow through their tomes in school, captivated by their vivid imagery and detailed writing. And, in turn, these books improved my writing, vocabulary, and love of literature.  

When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi

At the age of 36, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. In this beautifully written book, Kalanithi tells his story up until the end (his wife writes the post-script as he did not finish the book before his death). This powerful book (I dare you not to cry) ruminates on what makes life worth living in the face of death. What do you do when you know you don’t have much time left? We all die but I think most of us never really think about it. It’s just something that happens far into the future. This book will make you think profoundly about your life and what you prioritize.  

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is my favorite author of all time. Apparently, he was a huge jerk, but he wrote like few others and his writing always moves me. When I was in high school, I read this book and it made me want to be a writer. When I finished it, I said, “I want to write like that.” In fact, in tenth grade, I tried to write a novel that was very much like this book simply because I wanted to be like Hemingway and copying him was the best way I could think of to become a successful writer. I had visions of being a young writing prodigy (spoiler: I was not), however, I kept that loving of writing and a few years ago my dream of being author came to fruition. Somewhere a 16-year-old me is smiling. Even if you don’t want to be a writer, read this book. It’s one of the best books ever written.

***************So there you have it. These books made me reshape my life – often in drastic ways – and I’ve never once regretted reading them. They are thought-provoking and I encourage you to read them, if not to at least to see a different perspective on things.

Love to read? If you’re a book junkie like I am, join our monthly book club where I send you a list of the best books I’ve recently read. You’ll get a list of 3-5 suggested books sent once a month! It’s free to join! Just enter your name and email below to sign up:

Success! Now check your email to confirm your subscription.

There was an error submitting your subscription. Please try again.

Email Address

I'd like to receive the free email course. Yes! I want to read more!

Find some of my other book recommendations here, here, here, or here! Or, you can sign up for my monthly book club here.

The post 13 Non-Travel Books That Changed My Life appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

[fadingfartconnoisseur]

13 Non-Travel Books That Changed My Life

I read many different kinds of books. It’s not all travel. Last month, I shared some of my recent favorite travel books. This month, I wanted to share the non-travel books that have had the most impact on my life and feel have made me a better person. These created paradigm shifts in my thinking. They just made me go “Ohh damn!” They got to interested in new ideas, literature, personal development, and so much more.

If you’re looking to improve your life, change a habit, expand your mind, or just want something interesting to read, here are twelve of the most influential books in my life:

7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

One of the most famous books in the world, this book taught me habits to create a better lifestyle including planning out your week, sleeping more, being proactive in life, the importance of creating win-win situations, and the importance of continuous improvement. It articulated the small things I forget to do to make me a more organized and thoughtful person. If you haven’t read it, you really must! This book will help you become less mindless in your actions and more thoughtful overall. Even if you pick up just one tip to better organize your life in this chaotic world, it will be worth it.  

The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg

Why do we do what we do? Are we hard-wired to repeat habits, even when they are bad? How do we break them and form good ones? This bestselling book discusses how we form habits and gives specific strategies about how to break the bad ones and start good ones. It really made me think about the negative habits in my life, why I keep doing them, and how I can change that. I started thinking of all the excuses I tell myself that keep negative habits in my life. Because of this book, I started sleeping at a more regular time, reading again, drinking less, and being more productive. I can’t recommend it enough.  

Titan, by Ron Chernow

The biography of J.D. Rockefeller and his rise to power is long, dense, and worth every second. Rockefeller was a fascinating man – ruthless in business yet a devout Christian who founded some the biggest universities and health institutions the world has even seen. While I have no desire to be as ruthless as him, this biography was a good lesson in how frugality, slowness, and thoughtfulness can lead to success in life and business. J.D. never moved quickly, was financially conservative, and always reinvested in his company business. His methodical thinking made me rethink how I made business decisions.  

Losing My Virginity, by Richard Branson

Richard Branson’s autobiography was super interesting (this guy does a lot of insane things) and it inspired me to create my non-profit (FLYTE). I’d been thinking about it for years but reading how Branson just went for things he believed in and worked out the details later inspired me. It’s in stark contrast to Rockefeller, but Branson’s “why wait?” philosophy on starting projects makes a lot of sense. There’s never going to be a perfect time to start something so why wait? Just like there’s no perfect moment to travel, there’s no perfect moment to do something great. Just take the leap!  

How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie’s multi-decade old, but still relevant, book was instrumental in helping me shut my mouth. Ignoring the sensational title, this book ties heavily into what the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People says about listening to when people talk, not being a know it all, and empathizing with others as a way to connect and then influence them. As an introverted person (see Quiet below), this book helped me learn to talk to people better…not in a Machiavellian way but in a way that made me better at handling social situations.  

Quiet, by Susan Cain

I’m an introvert in an extroverted world. I would rather read books and sit by myself than be at a big party filled with strangers. I know that sounds weird since I travel all the time and meet people but when I’m with my friends, I get social anxiety about meeting strangers. This renowned book looks at why the world is so extroverted, how that affects us, and lessons for dealing with both introverts and extroverts. As I read through it, I saw myself in the author’s examples and her author’s lessons on balancing your inner and outer space helped me deal with my social anxiety.  

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, by Marshall Goldsmith

Written by a management consultant, this book is a guide for executives to become better managers. However, it’s much more than that. It’s a book on how to listen, behave, and think better. Its premise is that if you want to jump up to the next station in life, you’ll need a different set of skills – not educational skills – but interpersonal skills. Successful people interact well with others and this book talks about the small things, like looking at your phone during lunch or multitasking at a meeting, that send signals to people you’re not really there. This book got me to focus on my relationships more.  

Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink, Ph.D.

Every day we consume food but how aware are we when it comes to what we eat? This book illuminates the insidious ways society creeps in larger portions and mindless eating habits on us that make us gain weight and develop bad skills. This isn’t a book that’s going to just tell you to eat healthier, it shows all the ways society and commercials indoctrinate us to subconsciously eat more food, from growing plate sizes to bulk shopping to “super sizing it.” This book changed how I think about food, consume food, and guard against the insidious nature of calorie creep! I’ve stopped my mindless eating and have been a lot healthier since.  

The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene

Written by legendary writer Robert Greene, this book features 48 rules for living a masterful, powerful life. It features historical examples that reinforce the rules and what happens to those who break them. Slightly Machiavellian, I’ve found these “laws” helpful in dealing with my business, strangers, and situations where it is good to have the upper hand (like when you want to argue a bill with Comcast). I find these tips to be more helpful in a workplace environment than in everyday life (mostly because I have no desire to “rule” people or manipulate my friends). It’s oddly very stoic in parts. This book made me think more strategically in my life.  

Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser

When I was in college, a friend handed me this book and, after reading it, I became a vegetarian. Actually, I tried going organic but, in 2002, organic was even more expensive than it is now. This book opened up my eyes to the crap we put in food, the horrible conditions animals live in, and how poorly we treat food workers. Organic, locally grown, and sustainable are all buzzwords these days, and while people are definitely more conscious of what they eat, I still feel like we are too far removed from the farm. Understanding where our food comes from is essential in changing how we eat and this book did just that…and still does thirteen years later. Making better food choices leads to a happy, healthier life.  

The Ecology of Commerce, by Paul Hawken

When I was still working in a cubicle, I did a lot of volunteer work with the environmental organization, The Sierra Club. I wanted to meld my desire for success with my passion for the environment but I didn’t think the two were compatible until I read this seminal book on sustainable development. It opened my eyes to the possibility that you could create a business and be environmentally-friendly at the same. More that, it changed my consumer habits, helped me make more environmentally-friendly purchases, and showed me how I could be less wasteful. It was one of the most influential books I read in my 20s and was the reason I decided to do something that changed the world. I never went into sustainable development, but I like to think this website makes a positive impact in the world.  

The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller

You can’t walk into any bookstore these days without seeing this book prominently displayed. Short a book for a flight, I finally picked it up – and devoured it. It was excellent, and a really quick and easy read. I loved how he framed everything around asking yourself what is the one thing you can do to make your life better – daily, weekly, yearly. He hits so many negative aspects of our lives spot on – multi-tasking, the psychology of switching, to the power of planning and systems. This book reminded me of the things I knew to do but wasn’t and it was the wake up call I needed to finally do them.  

The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande

While this book talks a lot about the systems hospitals and doctors used to reduce medical errors, there is a lot to be extrapolated. There’s power in checklists; they ensure nothing is missed and help you verify the work that has been done. He even quotes my old boss from when I was working in healthcare (who helped pioneer surgical team processes). Reading this book changed how I view procedures and how this website operates (my team actually has procedure documents for everything we do) but it also gave me the idea to create lists and structures in my own personal life.  

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo

I read this book when I was 14 years old. At the end of class, when we would get five minutes to chat to friends, I’d take out the unabridged version of this book and get lost in Hugo’s world. This book made me love reading. It turned me on to the power of the classics. From there it was on to Dumas, Dickens, Austen, and so many other 18th and 19th century writers. I’d blow through their tomes in school, captivated by their vivid imagery and detailed writing. And, in turn, these books improved my writing, vocabulary, and love of literature.  

When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi

At the age of 36, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. In this beautifully written book, Kalanithi tells his story up until the end (his wife writes the post-script as he did not finish the book before his death). This powerful book (I dare you not to cry) ruminates on what makes life worth living in the face of death. What do you do when you know you don’t have much time left? We all die but I think most of us never really think about it. It’s just something that happens far into the future. This book will make you think profoundly about your life and what you prioritize.  

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is my favorite author of all time. Apparently, he was a huge jerk, but he wrote like few others and his writing always moves me. When I was in high school, I read this book and it made me want to be a writer. When I finished it, I said, “I want to write like that.” In fact, in tenth grade, I tried to write a novel that was very much like this book simply because I wanted to be like Hemingway and copying him was the best way I could think of to become a successful writer. I had visions of being a young writing prodigy (spoiler: I was not), however, I kept that loving of writing and a few years ago my dream of being author came to fruition. Somewhere a 16-year-old me is smiling. Even if you don’t want to be a writer, read this book. It’s one of the best books ever written.

***************So there you have it. These books made me reshape my life – often in drastic ways – and I’ve never once regretted reading them. They are thought-provoking and I encourage you to read them, if not to at least to see a different perspective on things.

Love to read? If you’re a book junkie like I am, join our monthly book club where I send you a list of the best books I’ve recently read. You’ll get a list of 3-5 suggested books sent once a month! It’s free to join! Just enter your name and email below to sign up:

Success! Now check your email to confirm your subscription.

There was an error submitting your subscription. Please try again.

Email Address

I'd like to receive the free email course. Yes! I want to read more!

Find some of my other book recommendations here, here, here, or here! Or, you can sign up for my monthly book club here.

The post 13 Non-Travel Books That Changed My Life appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

via Travel Blogs http://ift.tt/2gq6aMe

[tamboradventure]

13 Non-Travel Books That Changed My Life

I read many different kinds of books. It’s not all travel. Last month, I shared some of my recent favorite travel books. This month, I wanted to share the non-travel books that have had the most impact on my life and feel have made me a better person. These created paradigm shifts in my thinking. They just made me go “Ohh damn!” They got to interested in new ideas, literature, personal development, and so much more.

If you’re looking to improve your life, change a habit, expand your mind, or just want something interesting to read, here are twelve of the most influential books in my life:

7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

One of the most famous books in the world, this book taught me habits to create a better lifestyle including planning out your week, sleeping more, being proactive in life, the importance of creating win-win situations, and the importance of continuous improvement. It articulated the small things I forget to do to make me a more organized and thoughtful person. If you haven’t read it, you really must! This book will help you become less mindless in your actions and more thoughtful overall. Even if you pick up just one tip to better organize your life in this chaotic world, it will be worth it.  

The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg

Why do we do what we do? Are we hard-wired to repeat habits, even when they are bad? How do we break them and form good ones? This bestselling book discusses how we form habits and gives specific strategies about how to break the bad ones and start good ones. It really made me think about the negative habits in my life, why I keep doing them, and how I can change that. I started thinking of all the excuses I tell myself that keep negative habits in my life. Because of this book, I started sleeping at a more regular time, reading again, drinking less, and being more productive. I can’t recommend it enough.  

Titan, by Ron Chernow

The biography of J.D. Rockefeller and his rise to power is long, dense, and worth every second. Rockefeller was a fascinating man – ruthless in business yet a devout Christian who founded some the biggest universities and health institutions the world has even seen. While I have no desire to be as ruthless as him, this biography was a good lesson in how frugality, slowness, and thoughtfulness can lead to success in life and business. J.D. never moved quickly, was financially conservative, and always reinvested in his company business. His methodical thinking made me rethink how I made business decisions.  

Losing My Virginity, by Richard Branson

Richard Branson’s autobiography was super interesting (this guy does a lot of insane things) and it inspired me to create my non-profit (FLYTE). I’d been thinking about it for years but reading how Branson just went for things he believed in and worked out the details later inspired me. It’s in stark contrast to Rockefeller, but Branson’s “why wait?” philosophy on starting projects makes a lot of sense. There’s never going to be a perfect time to start something so why wait? Just like there’s no perfect moment to travel, there’s no perfect moment to do something great. Just take the leap!  

How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie’s multi-decade old, but still relevant, book was instrumental in helping me shut my mouth. Ignoring the sensational title, this book ties heavily into what the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People says about listening to when people talk, not being a know it all, and empathizing with others as a way to connect and then influence them. As an introverted person (see Quiet below), this book helped me learn to talk to people better…not in a Machiavellian way but in a way that made me better at handling social situations.  

Quiet, by Susan Cain

I’m an introvert in an extroverted world. I would rather read books and sit by myself than be at a big party filled with strangers. I know that sounds weird since I travel all the time and meet people but when I’m with my friends, I get social anxiety about meeting strangers. This renowned book looks at why the world is so extroverted, how that affects us, and lessons for dealing with both introverts and extroverts. As I read through it, I saw myself in the author’s examples and her author’s lessons on balancing your inner and outer space helped me deal with my social anxiety.  

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, by Marshall Goldsmith

Written by a management consultant, this book is a guide for executives to become better managers. However, it’s much more than that. It’s a book on how to listen, behave, and think better. Its premise is that if you want to jump up to the next station in life, you’ll need a different set of skills – not educational skills – but interpersonal skills. Successful people interact well with others and this book talks about the small things, like looking at your phone during lunch or multitasking at a meeting, that send signals to people you’re not really there. This book got me to focus on my relationships more.  

Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink, Ph.D.

Every day we consume food but how aware are we when it comes to what we eat? This book illuminates the insidious ways society creeps in larger portions and mindless eating habits on us that make us gain weight and develop bad skills. This isn’t a book that’s going to just tell you to eat healthier, it shows all the ways society and commercials indoctrinate us to subconsciously eat more food, from growing plate sizes to bulk shopping to “super sizing it.” This book changed how I think about food, consume food, and guard against the insidious nature of calorie creep! I’ve stopped my mindless eating and have been a lot healthier since.  

The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene

Written by legendary writer Robert Greene, this book features 48 rules for living a masterful, powerful life. It features historical examples that reinforce the rules and what happens to those who break them. Slightly Machiavellian, I’ve found these “laws” helpful in dealing with my business, strangers, and situations where it is good to have the upper hand (like when you want to argue a bill with Comcast). I find these tips to be more helpful in a workplace environment than in everyday life (mostly because I have no desire to “rule” people or manipulate my friends). It’s oddly very stoic in parts. This book made me think more strategically in my life.  

Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser

When I was in college, a friend handed me this book and, after reading it, I became a vegetarian. Actually, I tried going organic but, in 2002, organic was even more expensive than it is now. This book opened up my eyes to the crap we put in food, the horrible conditions animals live in, and how poorly we treat food workers. Organic, locally grown, and sustainable are all buzzwords these days, and while people are definitely more conscious of what they eat, I still feel like we are too far removed from the farm. Understanding where our food comes from is essential in changing how we eat and this book did just that…and still does thirteen years later. Making better food choices leads to a happy, healthier life.  

The Ecology of Commerce, by Paul Hawken

When I was still working in a cubicle, I did a lot of volunteer work with the environmental organization, The Sierra Club. I wanted to meld my desire for success with my passion for the environment but I didn’t think the two were compatible until I read this seminal book on sustainable development. It opened my eyes to the possibility that you could create a business and be environmentally-friendly at the same. More that, it changed my consumer habits, helped me make more environmentally-friendly purchases, and showed me how I could be less wasteful. It was one of the most influential books I read in my 20s and was the reason I decided to do something that changed the world. I never went into sustainable development, but I like to think this website makes a positive impact in the world.  

The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller

You can’t walk into any bookstore these days without seeing this book prominently displayed. Short a book for a flight, I finally picked it up – and devoured it. It was excellent, and a really quick and easy read. I loved how he framed everything around asking yourself what is the one thing you can do to make your life better – daily, weekly, yearly. He hits so many negative aspects of our lives spot on – multi-tasking, the psychology of switching, to the power of planning and systems. This book reminded me of the things I knew to do but wasn’t and it was the wake up call I needed to finally do them.  

The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande

While this book talks a lot about the systems hospitals and doctors used to reduce medical errors, there is a lot to be extrapolated. There’s power in checklists; they ensure nothing is missed and help you verify the work that has been done. He even quotes my old boss from when I was working in healthcare (who helped pioneer surgical team processes). Reading this book changed how I view procedures and how this website operates (my team actually has procedure documents for everything we do) but it also gave me the idea to create lists and structures in my own personal life.  

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo

I read this book when I was 14 years old. At the end of class, when we would get five minutes to chat to friends, I’d take out the unabridged version of this book and get lost in Hugo’s world. This book made me love reading. It turned me on to the power of the classics. From there it was on to Dumas, Dickens, Austen, and so many other 18th and 19th century writers. I’d blow through their tomes in school, captivated by their vivid imagery and detailed writing. And, in turn, these books improved my writing, vocabulary, and love of literature.  

When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi

At the age of 36, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. In this beautifully written book, Kalanithi tells his story up until the end (his wife writes the post-script as he did not finish the book before his death). This powerful book (I dare you not to cry) ruminates on what makes life worth living in the face of death. What do you do when you know you don’t have much time left? We all die but I think most of us never really think about it. It’s just something that happens far into the future. This book will make you think profoundly about your life and what you prioritize.  

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is my favorite author of all time. Apparently, he was a huge jerk, but he wrote like few others and his writing always moves me. When I was in high school, I read this book and it made me want to be a writer. When I finished it, I said, “I want to write like that.” In fact, in tenth grade, I tried to write a novel that was very much like this book simply because I wanted to be like Hemingway and copying him was the best way I could think of to become a successful writer. I had visions of being a young writing prodigy (spoiler: I was not), however, I kept that loving of writing and a few years ago my dream of being author came to fruition. Somewhere a 16-year-old me is smiling. Even if you don’t want to be a writer, read this book. It’s one of the best books ever written.

***************So there you have it. These books made me reshape my life – often in drastic ways – and I’ve never once regretted reading them. They are thought-provoking and I encourage you to read them, if not to at least to see a different perspective on things.

Love to read? If you’re a book junkie like I am, join our monthly book club where I send you a list of the best books I’ve recently read. You’ll get a list of 3-5 suggested books sent once a month! It’s free to join! Just enter your name and email below to sign up:

Success! Now check your email to confirm your subscription.

There was an error submitting your subscription. Please try again.

Email Address

I'd like to receive the free email course. Yes! I want to read more!

Find some of my other book recommendations here, here, here, or here! Or, you can sign up for my monthly book club here.

The post 13 Non-Travel Books That Changed My Life appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

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[theladyjstyle]

I read many different kinds of books. It’s not all travel. Last month, I shared some of my recent favorite travel books. This month, I wanted to share the non-travel books that have had the most impact on my life and feel have made me a better person. These created paradigm shifts in my thinking. They just made me go “Ohh damn!” They got to interested in new ideas, literature, personal development, and so much more.

If you’re looking to improve your life, change a habit, expand your mind, or just want something interesting to read, here are twelve of the most influential books in my life:

7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

One of the most famous books in the world, this book taught me habits to create a better lifestyle including planning out your week, sleeping more, being proactive in life, the importance of creating win-win situations, and the importance of continuous improvement. It articulated the small things I forget to do to make me a more organized and thoughtful person. If you haven’t read it, you really must! This book will help you become less mindless in your actions and more thoughtful overall. Even if you pick up just one tip to better organize your life in this chaotic world, it will be worth it.  

The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg

Why do we do what we do? Are we hard-wired to repeat habits, even when they are bad? How do we break them and form good ones? This bestselling book discusses how we form habits and gives specific strategies about how to break the bad ones and start good ones. It really made me think about the negative habits in my life, why I keep doing them, and how I can change that. I started thinking of all the excuses I tell myself that keep negative habits in my life. Because of this book, I started sleeping at a more regular time, reading again, drinking less, and being more productive. I can’t recommend it enough.  

Titan, by Ron Chernow

The biography of J.D. Rockefeller and his rise to power is long, dense, and worth every second. Rockefeller was a fascinating man – ruthless in business yet a devout Christian who founded some the biggest universities and health institutions the world has even seen. While I have no desire to be as ruthless as him, this biography was a good lesson in how frugality, slowness, and thoughtfulness can lead to success in life and business. J.D. never moved quickly, was financially conservative, and always reinvested in his company business. His methodical thinking made me rethink how I made business decisions.  

Losing My Virginity, by Richard Branson

Richard Branson’s autobiography was super interesting (this guy does a lot of insane things) and it inspired me to create my non-profit (FLYTE). I’d been thinking about it for years but reading how Branson just went for things he believed in and worked out the details later inspired me. It’s in stark contrast to Rockefeller, but Branson’s “why wait?” philosophy on starting projects makes a lot of sense. There’s never going to be a perfect time to start something so why wait? Just like there’s no perfect moment to travel, there’s no perfect moment to do something great. Just take the leap!  

How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie’s multi-decade old, but still relevant, book was instrumental in helping me shut my mouth. Ignoring the sensational title, this book ties heavily into what the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People says about listening to when people talk, not being a know it all, and empathizing with others as a way to connect and then influence them. As an introverted person (see Quiet below), this book helped me learn to talk to people better…not in a Machiavellian way but in a way that made me better at handling social situations.  

Quiet, by Susan Cain

I’m an introvert in an extroverted world. I would rather read books and sit by myself than be at a big party filled with strangers. I know that sounds weird since I travel all the time and meet people but when I’m with my friends, I get social anxiety about meeting strangers. This renowned book looks at why the world is so extroverted, how that affects us, and lessons for dealing with both introverts and extroverts. As I read through it, I saw myself in the author’s examples and her author’s lessons on balancing your inner and outer space helped me deal with my social anxiety.  

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, by Marshall Goldsmith

Written by a management consultant, this book is a guide for executives to become better managers. However, it’s much more than that. It’s a book on how to listen, behave, and think better. Its premise is that if you want to jump up to the next station in life, you’ll need a different set of skills – not educational skills – but interpersonal skills. Successful people interact well with others and this book talks about the small things, like looking at your phone during lunch or multitasking at a meeting, that send signals to people you’re not really there. This book got me to focus on my relationships more.  

Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink, Ph.D.

Every day we consume food but how aware are we when it comes to what we eat? This book illuminates the insidious ways society creeps in larger portions and mindless eating habits on us that make us gain weight and develop bad skills. This isn’t a book that’s going to just tell you to eat healthier, it shows all the ways society and commercials indoctrinate us to subconsciously eat more food, from growing plate sizes to bulk shopping to “super sizing it.” This book changed how I think about food, consume food, and guard against the insidious nature of calorie creep! I’ve stopped my mindless eating and have been a lot healthier since.  

The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene

Written by legendary writer Robert Greene, this book features 48 rules for living a masterful, powerful life. It features historical examples that reinforce the rules and what happens to those who break them. Slightly Machiavellian, I’ve found these “laws” helpful in dealing with my business, strangers, and situations where it is good to have the upper hand (like when you want to argue a bill with Comcast). I find these tips to be more helpful in a workplace environment than in everyday life (mostly because I have no desire to “rule” people or manipulate my friends). It’s oddly very stoic in parts. This book made me think more strategically in my life.  

Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser

When I was in college, a friend handed me this book and, after reading it, I became a vegetarian. Actually, I tried going organic but, in 2002, organic was even more expensive than it is now. This book opened up my eyes to the crap we put in food, the horrible conditions animals live in, and how poorly we treat food workers. Organic, locally grown, and sustainable are all buzzwords these days, and while people are definitely more conscious of what they eat, I still feel like we are too far removed from the farm. Understanding where our food comes from is essential in changing how we eat and this book did just that…and still does thirteen years later. Making better food choices leads to a happy, healthier life.  

The Ecology of Commerce, by Paul Hawken

When I was still working in a cubicle, I did a lot of volunteer work with the environmental organization, The Sierra Club. I wanted to meld my desire for success with my passion for the environment but I didn’t think the two were compatible until I read this seminal book on sustainable development. It opened my eyes to the possibility that you could create a business and be environmentally-friendly at the same. More that, it changed my consumer habits, helped me make more environmentally-friendly purchases, and showed me how I could be less wasteful. It was one of the most influential books I read in my 20s and was the reason I decided to do something that changed the world. I never went into sustainable development, but I like to think this website makes a positive impact in the world.  

The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller

You can’t walk into any bookstore these days without seeing this book prominently displayed. Short a book for a flight, I finally picked it up – and devoured it. It was excellent, and a really quick and easy read. I loved how he framed everything around asking yourself what is the one thing you can do to make your life better – daily, weekly, yearly. He hits so many negative aspects of our lives spot on – multi-tasking, the psychology of switching, to the power of planning and systems. This book reminded me of the things I knew to do but wasn’t and it was the wake up call I needed to finally do them.  

The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande

While this book talks a lot about the systems hospitals and doctors used to reduce medical errors, there is a lot to be extrapolated. There’s power in checklists; they ensure nothing is missed and help you verify the work that has been done. He even quotes my old boss from when I was working in healthcare (who helped pioneer surgical team processes). Reading this book changed how I view procedures and how this website operates (my team actually has procedure documents for everything we do) but it also gave me the idea to create lists and structures in my own personal life.  

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo

I read this book when I was 14 years old. At the end of class, when we would get five minutes to chat to friends, I’d take out the unabridged version of this book and get lost in Hugo’s world. This book made me love reading. It turned me on to the power of the classics. From there it was on to Dumas, Dickens, Austen, and so many other 18th and 19th century writers. I’d blow through their tomes in school, captivated by their vivid imagery and detailed writing. And, in turn, these books improved my writing, vocabulary, and love of literature.  

When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi

At the age of 36, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. In this beautifully written book, Kalanithi tells his story up until the end (his wife writes the post-script as he did not finish the book before his death). This powerful book (I dare you not to cry) ruminates on what makes life worth living in the face of death. What do you do when you know you don’t have much time left? We all die but I think most of us never really think about it. It’s just something that happens far into the future. This book will make you think profoundly about your life and what you prioritize.  

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is my favorite author of all time. Apparently, he was a huge jerk, but he wrote like few others and his writing always moves me. When I was in high school, I read this book and it made me want to be a writer. When I finished it, I said, “I want to write like that.” In fact, in tenth grade, I tried to write a novel that was very much like this book simply because I wanted to be like Hemingway and copying him was the best way I could think of to become a successful writer. I had visions of being a young writing prodigy (spoiler: I was not), however, I kept that loving of writing and a few years ago my dream of being author came to fruition. Somewhere a 16-year-old me is smiling. Even if you don’t want to be a writer, read this book. It’s one of the best books ever written.

***************So there you have it. These books made me reshape my life – often in drastic ways – and I’ve never once regretted reading them. They are thought-provoking and I encourage you to read them, if not to at least to see a different perspective on things.

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The post 13 Non-Travel Books That Changed My Life appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

13 Non-Travel Books That Changed My Life http://ift.tt/2gq6aMe

[its-just-like-the-movies]

Horror For Horror’s Sake

Looking at the (albeit few) films I’ve chosen to review, the ones I’ve been willing to dive into blind, the expectedly shitty ones I’ve willing put up with, it’s fair to say I have a bias to exploring horror films more than other genres. At the very least I’m more interested in exploring scary movies when looking for something to watch than other genres. And in some ways, they’re more rewarding on a base level than say, romantic dramas that are equally good or bad. I’m sure Death Note is worse than Tulip Fever, but lord knows I’m not gonna go watching the latter for “fun” the way I got wine drunk with friends and tore at that racist, unscary piece of shit. On the other side of that spectrum, I went and saw It with that same dynamic duo as Death Note roughly a week later and had a ball, premised around actually having a wonderful time with a great film that all of us liked on its own merits and as an adaptation. It was all we talked about during dinner, and if I didn’t have to run home before meeting them at Tommy’s place we probably would’ve talked about it even longer. The film is a monumental step up from the original TV adaptation (obvs), but I sincerely hope that we’re at a place where the culture can stop being as reverential as it is with Tim Curry’s performance - one I liked but couldn’t quite be impressed by - in favor of the truly horrifying wraith that Bill Skarsgard has created. Andy Muschietti deserves plenty of credit for Pennywise too, but also for negotiating such a dense source novel, a mostly child cast, a more elastic range of tones than necessary, a time period wholly original to this adaptation, plus all the hokum reputation surrounding the author, and doing justice to all of it. Never in my life would I have expected the director of Mama to have succeeded in marshalling all of that into such a purely enjoyable, scary, funny, and utterly full film as It. Yes, it’s not perfect in parcelling out equal screen time to every member of The Loser’s Club or establishing what their lives are like when they aren’t hanging out together, but if that’s the worst this film has going for it, I’m absolutely delighted to recommend it to everyone and go along with friends who’re too scared to see it alone. Maybe with a red balloon in hand, and a severed arm to hold it for me.

I originally intended this to be a sort of two-shot with mother! but, given how absolutely insane that film is and the likelihood I’m going to ferry David along someday soon, I’m going to put off a formal review of it until another showing. I think I have my reaction to it sorted out, though another trek through it would do me good. The last scenes recontextualize the whole film so fully, even one as bluntly allegorical as that one, I think it’d be worth checking out again before I dive into it. With that being said, and to give me something fun to write about, I’m gonna just jot down some favorite memories of horror films I’m really in love with. You can consider this a recommendation list, I’d be more than happy to elaborate on full-throttle reviews and explanations of any of these films. Hopefully there’ll be another list of five tomorrow. Either way, sit back and enjoy the ride, dear reader.

To start off with the recentest features, I think one of It’s greatest successes it that each of its characters has pretty individualized embodiments of fear that Pennywise deploys, each scene delivering its own unique terror. That being said, there’s no way the film’s most utterly terrifying scene isn’t its first, where Pennywise lures poor Georgie into reaching out his hand for a little paper boat. For all I said at the top about Bill Skarsgård’s interpretation of It - and I’ll be shocked if I don’t write up this performance on my year-end list - credit must also be given to Jackson Robert Scott’s sweet, almost saccharine take on Georgie Denbrough. Watching Pennywise somehow circle this poor child even from within a sewer grate, convincingly entrancing by the standard of a six year old even if he can’t help but notice how unhinged this clown is, it’s maybe the only film I’ve been around for the release of that palpably conjured the same kinds of lumps in my gut I got watching Ileana Douglas and Juliette Lewis wrangle with Robert De Niro in Cape Fear (minus all the sexual overtures of Cape Fear, thank god). It’s the only time Pennywise is patient enough to even try and lure in his prey like this, more eager to eat the boy than he is to prey off his fear. The tension here is so efficiently realized I had to wonder what a version of It that drew out a few more of these encounters into their own short films would look like. A little longer, sure, but when the result is more scenes that make your skin crawl and your stomach churn, we’d all be winners.

mother! was an insanely vexing experience, purposely so, but in many ways a virtuoso one. A lot of it comes down to how marvelously it’s crafted, plus Michelle Pfeiffer’s deliciously crafted turn as a home invader, and I’d love more time to sit and think about Aronofsky’s script. Pfeiffer is the only ingredient missing in the film’s most stunningly crafted scene, where the house of Jennifer Lawrence’s nameless character is beset by an seemingly infinite swarm of her husband’s idolaters. Her painstakingly assembled home, one she made all by herself with her own two hands, is torn apart by the mob of fans proclaiming the poet’s will of sharing all that he has. One hangs up the phone as she calls the police only for another to yank it out of the wall, each hurling the philosophy of sharing at the other to justify their actions as though the other is stupid for not expecting them to do this. The police arrive a few minutes after, and suddenly her house seems to be divided into factions of SWAT members, violent cabals of her husband’s words, and those directly loyal to him. It’s almost impossible to imagine how long this sequence takes, especially since mother! often presents its sequences as though they’re happening in real time, but it’s stupendously mounted and realized by everyone involved. The transformation of Lawrence’s home from an idyllic, rustic nest for her and her hubby into a war-torn wreckage plucked straight from Children of Men isn’t the film’s scariest scene - that would be everything immediately after something delicate is inevitably, disastrously shown off - but on a sheer technical level it’s the film’s most impressively realized scene, and one of many I can’t shake for the life of me.

If you’ve never seen [safe], I beg you to go see it right now. Surely everyone who loved Carol has gone back and examined some of Todd Haynes’s filmography, if not looked up his Wikipedia page and seen this film, whose heroine has the same first name as his 2015 masterpiece. [safe] is about as asphyxiating and antagonistic to the audience (while still being immensely hypnotic) as any film can get, and one I had difficulty rewatching last semester in the hopes of finding a screencap to use for an art project. I ended up not using what I got, but there’s so many indelible moments picking one feels difficult, let alone throwing my hands up and just reveling in what Haynes’ direction does to make the film so menacing. And yet, there’s that one object that I instantly thought of for this little piece, in some ways the one that convinced me to do it at all. Early in [safe], Carol White (a genius Julianne Moore) orders a couch to her house and starts to help the movers arrange it in her house, only to find that it’s seemingly the most antagonistic shade of black on the planet. Carol is horrified to see this thing in her carefully constructed beige palace, as was I when I first saw it. Never has an ordinary couch been so pointy and prickly and out-of-place and threatening in a film, and never have I wanted to leave a room so much once I saw it. Pressing against everything pale and beige and carefully styled in her home, this couch doesn’t just look out of place but as alien and invasive as any of the houseguests in mother!, and even more unwanted. [safe] isn’t necessarily a horror film, but it’s still the most unsettling feature on this list, one that’s even more horrifying for all that it has to say on the human experience, and for the tremendous filmmaking (and actressing) that makes it such a seminal, terrifying film.

Suspiria, on the other hand, is nothing if not an exercise in how many scary, go-for-broke aesthetics you can grate against each other and mold together and throw at the audience at once. The production design can be summed up as though the art directors of Wes Anderson and Pedro Almodovar had a child that was trying to kill you, specifically, but of course the real star of this entry is the vicious score of Dario Argento and the band Goblin. Much like Get Out, you have the distinct feeling that somehow the score itself is going to slaughter our hero before the actual forces of evil hunting them do. Even in scenes that don’t seem overtly menacing, the orchestra shrieks at you to remember that Jessica Harper and her friend are always being watched, always in danger, always among those who have killed before and would kill them if they got the chance. And somehow, this only makes the scenes with an actively dangerous presence more affecting rather than less so. In the words of Decider’s Joe Reid “Everything is heightened, so everything is fuckin’ heightened”. Suspiria is so heightened it’s a wonder the central school doesn’t just fly off into the upper echelons of the Earth’s atmosphere, which is probably close to where the film is heightened to, but thank god it’s stuck to the ground. Not all stories work in space, and sometimes all you need is a man, his dog, a weird gargoyle, and a bunch of nice looking buildings to make a scene as tense as all hell. And, of course, a bullying, visceral score.

There’s a multitude of great performances from David Cronenberg films. In truth, the best two probably reside in the duet between Jeremy Irons and Genevieve Bujold in Dead Ringers, if not the duet between Irons and Irons in the same film. But we’re really here for The Brood, which boasts the most volcanic performance I’ve seen among Cronenberg’s filmography in the form of Samantha Eggar’s ferocious, unstable shrew of an ex-wife and absent mother. The entire film is premised on her rage, literally summoning embodiments of her anger to carry out acts of vengeance against those she decries in therapy sessions. These sessions have the head physician role-playing as the target of his patient’s psychosis in the hope of provoking a real break in their psyches, and take place in a facility miles out of town and built like log cabins, resembling a hotel from a distance. Her character’s ex-husband is right to suspect something’s amiss here, that Nola isn’t getting the treatment she needs, but even as he finds the corpses of the gremlins whacking their family members it takes until he witnesses the creation of one of these rage babies for him to fully grasp a situation that’s actively threatening everyone he loves. Eggar’s vitality and commitment gives the film a beating, potent heart that The Brood otherwise wouldn’t have, in spite of its crazy conceits and directorial strength. Without her exorcising fury, The Brood would be a weaker film, and it needs Eggar’s to power the whole thing through its demented thesis and towards its inevitable, monstrous climax.

[ahouseoflies]

The Best Films of 2016, Part III

Part II is here. Part I is here. PRETTY GOOD MOVIES 74. Life, Animated (Roger Ross WIlliams) The film hits most of the marks that it needs to, but it sort of backs into drama in a way that doesn't help it. It starts with an adult functioning with autism, then flashes back to the subject's more uncertain, perilous childhood, then tries to push into his future with lower stakes. I'm not sure what other structural option it has though, and it does manage a depiction of a loving family and a few laughs. The animated sequences add nothing. 73. Mike and David Need Wedding Dates (Jake Szymanski) There are just enough laughs to overcome the formulaic nature, the whole "I sell liquor with my brother, but what I really like to do is draw." What struck me the most is that the four principals are all dumb characters, and the film never wavers on that. There's no straight man, which kind of makes the audience the straight man. The best laugh is when Anna Kendrick stitches together a lie about being a hedge fund manager without having any idea what hedge funds are. Or when Adam Devine admits that he uses the word "assuage" and hopes that no one asks him what it means. None of the other characters roll their eyes, and their sincerity presents the viewer with an interesting dynamic. 72. Hush (Mike Flanagan) Hush is kind of a trifle, and the dialogue isn't going to win any awards. But it takes you on quite a ride in 83 minutes, going for extreme without ever being far-fetched. The best movies of this type resist explaining a motivation for the killer, and I was glad this one didn't try to give him any kind of a connection to the protagonist other than his own sadism. It helps that John Gallagher Jr. excels by playing against type.

71. Sunset Song (Terence Davies) Almost pornographically obsessed with the passage of time, Sunset Song is a good story told well. If that sounds like faint praise, it is. I wish I saw the yearning, creative beauty that other people have--my reaction to The Deep Blue Sea as well. To me, the film works best when it holds its nose and sinks into the melodrama (PTSD HUSBAND PTSD HUSBAND PTSD HUSBAND). When it's more concerned with stateliness, I started to get bored. And by "get bored," I mean "mimic the dialect of every 'nae,' 'bonny,' and 'bairn.'" It's an addictive game. 70. 13th (Ava DuVernay) 13th is a briskly-paced, logically-structured doc, and the ending was downright moving. But, as unkind as this might sound, I think it's ideal for a woke high school kid, not a discerning adult. Is the only goal of the film to teach me something I didn't know? Is that a fair thing to judge on a rubric for a documentary? All I know is that it felt entry-level to me. 69. A War (Tobias Lindholm) Eventually the film approaches a tense question of ethics, but it sure does take a while to get there. The setup is yeoman's work, a necessary evil, but I struggled to stay involved. I say that I want a war film in which every life matters, but in practice it ends up feeling small in both focus and scope. Once the film becomes a courtroom drama, however, it's absorbing--possibly because we can concentrate on the stoic but desperate adult characters and leave behind the badass child who pulled down the homelife scenes. Definitely because the courtroom scenes are efficient and understated, unlike every Hollywood courtroom scene ever. Denmark seems like a chill place to live, even for the working class. 68. The Shallows (Jaume Collet-Sera) The Shallows has some nice thrills and a bit more character motivation than the audience usually gets. Blake Lively has a heartfelt scene with a GoPro late. But relax if you think it invents or subverts anything. Collett-Sera seems to be making a habit out of impossibly tidy denouements. I was going to modify "denouements" with "Can I take you out for coffee sometime?" But then I realized that his previous film literally ended with "Can I take you out for coffee sometime?"

67. Pete’s Dragon (David Lowery) I give a lot of credit to David Lowery for providing a filmmaking signature to one of these Disney live-action remakes for the first time. The epilogue is just as lyrical as anything in Ain't Them Bodies Saints, and I'll take any Leonard Cohen song I can get in a movie of this type. There's a maturity to the picture--it starts with a five-year-old's family dying--that places it as a film for an underserved audience, someone eight-to-eleven. At the same time, it's a bit pleased with itself, too complacent to be funny at all, too brusque to develop the supporting characters beyond "What a jerk, right?" (Eight-to-eleven is the perfect age to ask your parents, "Why would boo marry a guy she doesn't like?") And the dragon himself traipses the uncanny valley in a way that makes the close-ups look right but the long shots look fake. Finally, shout-out to Robert Redford for starting a truck with a pocketknife on some Jean Reno shit. 66. Zootopia (Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush) A "yeah...but" movie if there ever was one. Yeah, it's unassailably cute with detailed world-building, but then it devolves into plot overdrive in the final third like all of these movies do. Yeah, it's probably an engaging enough half-genre movie if you've never seen one, but the clues seem arbitrary if you've watched hundreds of detective movies. Yeah, the overall message is one worth making, but it's the least subtle film I've seen in some time.

65. Kubo and the Two Strings (Travis Knight) I had my usual reaction to Laika animation: impressed but a bit distanced. The storytelling is efficient here, with most scenes standing in for literal steps of the hero's journey, but the emotional beats work a lot better than the action, which is amazingly fluid but takes away from some of the weighty qualities that I liked about stop-motion animation in the first place. Gone also are the dense, cluttered environments that I liked so much in The Boxtrolls. As always, the studio has produced a film that is not quite for adults and not quite for children, but they have undeniably pushed the medium forward. 64. Holy Hell (Will Allen) The footage on hand, twenty years of videography of a cult, is almost too good to pass up, even if the material from the present can't fully support it. I'm glad that something came of the decades of manipulation and abuse that the director went through. Every once in a while, one of the talking heads will mention something chilling, like that he didn't have a bank account or that the cult leader forced her to have an abortion. By the end of the film, it's difficult to even look at Michel, who is such an absorbing villain that, were he not real, you wouldn't believe him. But those chills are few and far between. Especially at the beginning, which could have used some titles to provide context, none of the victims stand out. In fact, the film almost correlates that all of the victims were weak-minded in the same way. I doubt that's the point, and who am I to judge the people themselves? But I did think I would have had more empathy if any of these people stood out by expressing anything other than regret. The movie's subjects aren't capable of the insight that would take the film to the next level. 63. War Dogs (Todd Phillips) "You like the new [Todd Phillips]?" "The early stuff. The new stuff, he's trying to be [Scorsese]. He should be himself." Good performances and a bit of that blurry line between satire and admiration overcome terrible needle drops and a tired, bear-at-the-door voiceover structure. If you laugh at Jonah Hill calling the young Jordanian translator Aladdin, then you're more on the diverting side than the derivative side. I laughed. 62. The Edge of Seventeen (Kelly Fremon Craig) Plenty funny and plenty poignant, but rarely at the same time for me. As usual, the movie sort of settles into itself once it discards voiceover. Steinfeld's performance is the real star here since it takes what could have been a whiny character and imbues her with real anguish in a way that sort of makes up for some writing shortcuts. She's angry and sexual in ways that we don't often see in cinematic teenage girls. I was puzzled by the Erwin character, a nice dude who comes and goes whenever the film needs him to. He's more of a device to measure Nadine's growth than he is a full character treated fairly. Then it occurred to me, this being a film written and directed and starring women: He's a female vision of the manic pixie dream girl that I've seen in countless movies designed by men. Nicely done with his blankness, ladies. I get it. 61. Author: The JT LeRoy Story (Jeff Feuerzeig) If you hang out with a crazy person for an extended period of time--and as a person who has spent time in New Orleans bars, I feel confident speaking on this--there's a pattern that emerges. At first, the crazy person is interesting and funny just because his thought process is so much different from your own. He quickly becomes tedious, and you feel guilty because, even though you're engaging with him genuinely, the conversation is starting to feel like a game. Maybe the problem is you and your straight life. Then you become worried for the person, who might be dangerous. At a certain point, you can't wait to get out. You start planning your escape. Then, once you extricate yourself, you feel pretty grateful for this bizarre encounter that you learned from. Laura Albert, the subject of Author: The JT LeRoy Story, is a crazy person, and I went through that same journey with this documentary. Celebrity marks in order of how silly this movie makes them look: 1. Gus Van Sant (always) 2. Asia Argento 3. Michael Pitt 4. Matthew Modine 5. Winona Ryder 60. Morris From America (Chad Hartigan) Slightly lacking in scope, especially for taking place in such a grand setting, Morris From America still offers a poignantly realistic father-son relationship and a few heartbreakingly intimate moments. (We've all made out with a pillow, but how many times have you watched someone else do it?) Since it has similar ambitions to Chad Hartigan's previous film This Is Martin Bonner, I'm wondering why my response wasn't as enthusiastic. I think it has something to do with the stakes created by the characters' pain. Morris is written with pathos here, but it's hard not to believe that a thirteen-year-old boy living abroad is going to figure things out. A man in his sixties, played by a haggard-looking dude, might not. 59. 10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg) At the exact moment I was supposed to be amazed by the expansion of the film's world, I tuned out. Up until that point though, I really liked the cautious ratcheting of the conflict, as well as the attention to detail on the set design. It's refreshing when the woman-in-peril makes decisions that are as smart as what the audience would do in the same situation; I'm pretty sure Winstead's Michelle is even smarter than the average viewer. 58. The Invitation (Karyn Kusama) People who love this film probably relish how long it builds tension to get to the real horror stuff. People who hate it probably resent that it takes so long to get to its inevitable conclusion. I'm somewhere in the middle. It's certainly no surprise where the film is going, and the characters' roles are a bit contrived--this one's the jokester, these are the lusty gay guys. But the script takes great care with the escalating details.The culty organization at the center of the dinner party is rooted in a grief that the film takes seriously. The flashbacks are loud fragments with the overwhelming quality that a memory has in real life. And the final shot before the black out both ties the movie to its genre tradition and expands the scope in a juicy way. 57. Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra) For most of its running time, Embrace of the Serpent asks textbook questions about colonialism, and the parallel stories seem unbalanced. (About forty-five minutes in, the 1949 story comes back, and I had almost forgotten about it.) The black and white photography works but only as a sort of corrective to how these things are usually shot, not as a statement itself. Then, however, in the final thirty minutes, everything deepens. Karamakate, the Amazonian guide character, bristled earlier in the picture about a photograph of him, considering it an empty copy of his spirit. When the film expands, it's because he's levying the same idea at Evan, the dumb American who seems like a copy of the earlier White explorer. It's the sort of relative mysticism that the film had been working for all along.

56. Nerve (Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost) The ending's moral imperative left me rolling my eyes, but Nerve was a fun ride until that point. I give a lot of credit to the filmmakers for not belaboring the rules and limits of the game at the film's center; after some painful "I used to have a brother" exposition, they just wind the machine up and let it go. There are a lot of different pieces rolling at one time with solid balance, and some compelling ideas surface, such as the game's manipulation of its players with their own acknowledged preferences. The entire idea of the game's demands escalating is silly--the evil neutral of the Internet would ensure that the second dare would be "kill your parents." But the stars sell the silliness until the movie works because of it, not despite it. 55. The Club (Pablo Larrain) A searing, urgent, intimate drama that inquires honestly about the origins of perversion. Yet anyone who has seen it can tell you the exact moment that it goes off the rails. 54. Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi) The type of crowd-pleasing crowd-pleaser that pleases crowds on a coldest nights of January. Melfi's hand guides the film past a clumsy opening and a structure that all but separates the three leads into a television-style A-B-C plot. There are a few too many record-scratch, "I didn't think you would be...a woman..." moments for my taste, but the biggest payoffs, like a real tear-jerker of a proposal scene, are less telegraphed. I think Hidden Figures is a film that is clean--inoffensive, slick--but not sanitized. Most of the bits that illuminate institutional racism, such as Katherine's half-mile trek to the nearest "colored" bathroom, still hit. There isn't a weak performance in the bunch, but Janelle Monae is a Movie Star, and Kevin Costner shines as a secretly great type of movie character, the dude who is so concerned with excellence that it, like, never occurred to him that racism existed. Huh. Weird. 53. Finding Dory (Andrew Stanton, Angus MacLane) I liked a lot about this movie. I liked Ellen DeGeneres's vocal performance, a demanding role that she nailed. I liked the animation of the interiors, which Pixar keeps getting more photorealistic with--I caught myself reading the warning on the side of a coffee carafe. I liked most of the emotional beats that came from the valuable subtext of raising a special needs child. I liked the bit with the sea lions too. However, at what point is the emotional manipulation too much? I'm okay with these films being engineered to make people cry. It works most of the time. But how far is too far? Is it watching the equivalent of a handicapped girl struggle as she comes to terms with probably being lost from her parents forever? Are we close? I'm just asking. And as much as the film straddles those emotional boundaries, it also strains at the logical stuff. Not to WELL ACTUALLY a children's movie, but an octopus drives a car. If Pixar movies are supposed to be evaluated on the same scale as adult movies, then I can't just let that go.  52. Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford) Tom Ford the writer kind of holds back Tom Ford the director with this intriguing but awkward riddle of a film. The screenplay feels like a first draft, laced with suggestions of a theme about art as a product versus art as an intention, but without the elbow grease to give the characters inner life. Once the action of the present begins to overlap with the action of the past and the action in Edward's novel, the film gets more playful, but that just reveals how unfinished it feels. (Is Edward's novel supposed to be trashy? Is he objectively a bad writer, despite the effects the novel has on Susan? Is the novel's tone so different from the main action because he's trying on a sadness that Susan owns? I'm not sure Tom Ford knows the answers to any of these questions.) And it's a shame because the direction is pretty assured for someone with as few reps as Ford. He takes the stateliness and melancholy of A Serious Man, then scuffs it up a bit with the more handheld Texas sequences. And of course all of the clothes are pretty, which I don't think will ever go away with him. That well-worn "I could watch her read the phonebook" line extends to watching someone read a book, pull it close to her, and stare sadly out the window. Amy Adams is really good. In fact, all of the actors are selling characters that are just kind of types on the page--sometimes purposefully in the story-within-a-story--and imbuing them with charm and foundation. Except for Armie Hammer, who is on some "I'm a businessman. I have to make this important deal happen. Business." 51. Other People (Chris Kelly) In the first scene, a family has just watched life drift away from its matriarch. Stunned in the bed with her, they refuse to answer the ringing phone, thinking it might be undignified at such a profound moment. The solipsistic voicemail interrupts "I heard you were sick" with a Taco Bell order, and we see that Other People wants to look at a family's journey with cancer in a way that is off-center and irreverent. Most of it works in that regard, and there are some honest, smart moments that sell what feels like the writer/director Chris Kelly working out personal issues with a focus that is tart but not tormented. I especially liked the conversations between Jesse Plemons's David and his confidant Gabe. But Jesse Plemons is miscast in a way that seems to sink the movie. His greatest strength is his natural presence, which doesn't translate to a character uncomfortable in his own skin. Before realizing that Plemons was playing a gay man, I asked, "Is he doing 'gay stuff'?" because of his fidgets and squints. Maybe not a good sign in 2016 if the actor has to sell you, believing that gay people look and act a certain way. For every relationship that feels real, like the one between David and his on-again, off-again boyfriend, there's one that seems contrived, like the one with his father. I suspect there are just too many relationships in general for a film of this length to serve, but that's a better problem than not having enough to develop.

50. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone) The obvious point first: The Conner4Real character is supposed to be a star with beloved music who falls from grace because he starts making terrible music. But all of the movie's music is kind of good and funny because it has to be, and there definitely doesn't seem to be a difference in quality from when the music was "good" versus when it is supposed to be "bad." That's a point that you just have to get past. That's the most uneven aspect of the film--and, yes, it's a dumb critique--because most other elements work well. A character with as little self awareness as Conner is difficult to write, but Samberg sells him with rare charm. His nervous, "there must be a mistake" smile as he's reading reviews won me over. Conner manages to be a totally specific kind of musician (and the screenplay understands the fickle nature of modern fame) without taking aim at one specific person. The Hunter character is obviously Tyler, the Creator, but Conner is kind of Bieber, kind of Timberlake, kind of Nick Jonas, even a little Robbie Williams. He's a type but still unique. Especially near the end, you kind of get the sense that The Lonely Island guys are shooting fish in a barrel, but this is an outrageous, endearing film. If I wrote any more, I would just be ranking my favorite jokes and spoiling them. 49. Fences (Denzel Washington) Another perfect example of the stage and the screen not being the same thing. Fences is one of the greatest plays of the 20th century, but there is no denying the theatricality of the piece. August Wilson shows his work: In a way that cinema doesn't really forgive, he spells out connections between stadium fences and backyard fences and chain-link fences and the more figurative fences that guard human emotion and the even more figurative fences that keep racism alive. I don't care that Washington keeps 90% of action in one location instead of opening it up. That's usually what people mean by "stage-y," but this is something else. It's an artifice of storytelling that does not translate when projected across a fifty-foot screen. Some things just work better in a play. And by that I mean, "metal plate brother metal plate brother metal plate brother metal plate brother." Luckily, the emotion is not artificial. Washington probably has more lines of dialogue in the first twenty minutes than he had in his previous four films, and it's just a pleasure to hear the music of the guy's voice. There's an important speech about how Troy fills the rooms that he's in, and Washington fills the screen similarly in a performance that is free of vanity yet full of pride. Stephen Henderson, a great That Guy, gets the juiciest role of his life as Bono, a man just as trapped by friendship as Troy is trapped by his past. 48. The Purge: Election Year (James DeMonaco) These movies continue to be low-key great. There's enough mythology now that the film can play with elements on the margins like murder tourism or Purge Night insurance hikes. DeMonaco and his DP Jacques Jouffret use so much direct light that it's distracting, but it sometimes results in demented imagery that can't be replicated.The movie's political subtext is simultaneously obvious and undeveloped, but it's notable that these movies, like the best grindhouse flicks, are made for the working class and minorities. There are entire characters who are there to be the voice of the raucous, untamed audience, there to feast on ultraviolence in the same way that the characters are. I normally would have been upset about the seven-year-old playing with an iPhone when he wasn't watching people be decapitated, but, for once, that's the perfect companion for this movie.

[itsjaybullme]

Mass Building 101

Kevin Horton

A bodybuilder in mass-gain mode will face all sorts of questions. Well-meaning friends and family will comment with a tinge of worry about the superhuman amounts of food you’re eating. They’ll question why you can’t skip the gym “just this once.” Some jokester will suggest a steady diet of fast food and ice cream to get huge. (Yep, no one has ever thought of that before.) 

Thing is, you probably have questions, too. But you can’t turn to all those laypeople in your life who wonder why anyone would want to transform themselves into a human anatomy chart. No, you need experts. Someone who understands your quest, who helps dedicated folks just like you pack on solid, lean mass for a living.

We’ve tapped our favorite trainers to get their key dos and don’ts, covering a range of training, nutrition, and supplementation tips. Just one extra “don’t” before we begin: Don’t let any of the doubters get to you. All will be clear to everyone soon enough, when your relentless efforts lead to awe-inspiring results. 

DO: GIVE IT MORE TIME

Sometimes your inability to gain mass boils down to one brutally simple reason—you just haven’t been at it long enough. “Anyone who has ever said that they aren’t able to put on muscle, lean out, or accomplish something fitness related maybe just hasn’t stuck to their nutrition and training program long enough,” Dustin Kirchofner, C.S.C.S., says. “Consistency over a longer term is the key.” 

DON'T: BE TOO PICKY IN A PINCH

The human body is an insanely complex feat of nature, but there’s a straight- forward balance when it comes to your mass-gain efforts: At any time during the day, you’re either in an anabolic or catabolic state. That is, your body is either building lean tissue—or burning it off for energy. Rarely, if ever, are you perfectly equalized between the two.

What does this mean in practical terms? For gaining weight, you need to stay anabolic, says Heather Farmer, a New York–based personal trainer, fitness coach, CrossFit group class instructor, and Olympic weightlifting national competitor in the USA Weightlifting 63kg women’s class. “You cannot afford to skip meals,” she adds. “If more than two or three hours has passed and you haven’t had any food, go eat! And don’t be too picky—macros are macros when your options are limited.”

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Chris Lund

DO: CHILL OUT MORE

“Don’t run—at least not long distances,” says Gerren Liles, a Reebok One ambassador and Equinox Master Instructor based in New York City. “Steady-state running creates constant impact and breaks down the muscle fibers. Think about the difference in the body of a sprinter versus a marathon runner. Strength training should be the bulk of your workout routine, but if you absolutely have to throw some cardio or conditioning in, do sprints, stairs, or the occasional HIIT session.”

By the way, if you’re aiming to somehow get huge and ripped at the same time, well...stop it. “Most guys want to gain muscle while also simultaneously staying ripped, but that’s very hard to do because the processes for gaining muscle and staying lean require different training protocols and diets,” Liles explains. “You need more calories to feed the muscles to spur growth and strength, and that may come at the expense of having definition. Get to the size you want, and then you can adapt your training to getting leaner. Doing both at the same time is a recipe for frustration.” 

DON'T: PARK YOUR WHEELS

Because they are such a signi cant muscle group with lots of muscle mass potential, legs should be a priority. “Training your lower body will naturally increase growth hormone and testosterone levels, which will help all-over muscle gain,” says Dan Roberts, C.S.C.S., strength and conditioning coach and founder of the Dan Roberts Group in London. “In addition, the ‘tiny legs, big lats, big chest’ look is so Gold’s Gym 1990s– wannabe terrible. You have to look proportional to look great. So do equal amount of lower-body and upper-body work.” 

DO: TURN DOWN THE VOLUME

When progress stalls, doubt creeps in: “Am I doing enough?” Instead of spending an hour at the gym, you might ramp that up to 90 minutes or more, or add an extra day of training a week, all in an attempt to break the rut. Instead, it’s time to improve the quality of your work, says Dustin Kirchofner, an active- duty U.S. Army Special Forces soldier, certified strength and conditioning coach, and owner of Modern Warfare Fitness in Colorado.

“If you have trouble putting on muscle, you need to focus on keeping your workouts less than an hour, maintain high intensity during that time, and limit your rest periods to one minute between sets,” he suggests. “You need to get in and get out. Remember, the longer you drag things on in the gym, the more calories you’re burning. Those calories could go toward putting on solid muscle and recovery, but instead they’re being wasted.”

He also suggests reorienting your routine toward primary compound lifts and reducing volume, allowing more time for proper recovery—as we have done in the sample “FLEX Mass Blast” workout. “If you have problems putting on muscle, your body actually needs more time to recover than someone who puts on muscle very easily,” he says. Four days in the gym with three days of rest might just do the trick. 

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Chris Lund

DO: BE A BIT OBSESSED

“In sport, business, and life, great things don’t come with balance; they come with a little bit of controlled obsession,” Dan Roberts says. “So plan your workout, plan nutrition, and plan your sleep. Write it down and let it consume you a little bit! My experience training some of the world’s best athletes and Hollywood’s action stars has shown that amazing results can happen when you transcend ‘wanting’ results and instead train like you ‘need’ the results.”

DON'T: SKIMP ON SUPPS

Supplements won’t save a poor diet or training plan—but they can dramatically improve results when you’re clicking in those areas. “You should supplement to maximize recovery from training,” Heather Farmer says. She suggests a quality whey protein. “You should include a protein source with every meal,” she says— plus BCAAs and creatine as a starting point.

Also, if you really have trouble adding body weight, consider that most often “gainer foods” are going to have a high ratio of both carbohydrates and fat, she adds. “So, for a basic example, you’d choose Nutella, which is high in carbs and fat, over cereal, which is high in carbs but low in fat. It also helps to keep your kitchen stocked with calorie-dense foods like whole milk, peanut butter, and bananas, among others. For instance, a few extra spoonfuls of peanut butter every day are an easy way to add a good chunk of calories to your diet.” 

DO: REP ACCORDINGLY

“Always stick to the basic five- to 12-rep-window rule for weighted exercises,” Roberts says. “That means when going all-out on your lifts, if you can’t do five, the weight is too heavy, and you’re moving into powerlifting territory—that’s great for strength but not optional for hypertrophy, which is what you’re after. On the other end of the spectrum, if you can do more than 12 reps, the weight you’ve chosen is too light, and you’ve shifted into muscular endurance territory. Again, you’ll get an adaptation doing that, but it won’t optimize muscle gains.” 

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Pavel Ythjall

 THE FLEX MASS BLAST 

Just starting out? Or have a stale training regimen and need a new challenge? Here’s a straightforward program, designed around the major compound

lifts and augmented with an array of free-weight, cable, and machine moves to maximize muscle stimulation and development. You’ll lift four days per week and take three days off—arrange those around what works best for your schedule. For weighted exercises, choose a resistance that elicits failure at or around the listed rep range. 

DAY 1: BACK, SHOULDERS

BACK

Pullup | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 10, 10, 10

Smith Machine Row | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8

SHOULDERS

Standing Barbell Press | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Arnold Press | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8

BACK

Lat Pulldown to the Rear | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 8, 6

Wide-Grip Seated Cable Row | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 8, 6

SHOULDERS

Dumbbell Lateral Raise | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 10, 8

Bentover Dumbbell Raise | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 10, 8

BACK

Back Extension | SETS: 3 | REPS: 20, 20, 20  

DAY 2: THIGHS & CALVES

QUADRICEPS

Barbell Squat | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Hack Squat | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Stationary Lunge | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 8, 6

HAMSTRINGS

Romanian Deadlift | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

QUADS

Walking Lunge | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10 Steps Per Leg

Leg Extension | SETS: 4 | REPS: 12, 10, 8, 6

HAMS

Lying Leg Curl | SETS: 4 | REPS: 12, 10, 8, 6

CALVES

Donkey Calf Raise | SETS: 4 | REPS: 15, 12, 10, 8

Seated Calf Raise | SETS: 3 | REPS: 15, 12, 10

DAY 3: CHEST, TRICEPS & ABS

CHEST

Bench Press | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Incline Dumbbell Press | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Decline Dumbbell Press | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8

Cable Crossover | SETS: 3 | REPS: 12, 10, 8

TRICEPS

Close-Grip Bench Press | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Incline Triceps Extension | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8

Dip | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 10, 10

ABS

Decline Twisting Crunch | SETS: 3 | REPS: 25-30

Hanging Knee Raise | SETS: 3 | REPS: 20-30

Plank | SETS: 3 | REPS: Hold for 30 seconds

DAY 4: TRAPS, BICEPS, FOREARMS, & LAGGING BODY PART OF YOUR CHOICE

LAGGING PB

Your Choice | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Your Choice | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

TRAPS

Smith Machine Shrug | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Rope Cable Shug | SETS: 3 | REPS: 10, 10, 10

BICEPS

Barbell Curl | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Barbell Preacher Curl | SETS: 4 | REPS: 10, 6-8, 6-8, 5

Alternating Dumbbell Curl 3 | REPS: 10, 10, 10

FOREARMS

Dumbbell Wrist Curl | SETS: 4 | REPS: 15, 12, 10, 8

Farmer's Carry Walk | SETS: 3 | REPS: 50 Feet

 FLEX 

from Bodybuilding Feed https://www.flexonline.com/training/mass-building-101 via http://www.rssmix.com/