This Week, Grab Life by the:

• underdog story
• fond remembrance
• indecipherable diction
• spreadsheet!

And check out the brass demonstrated by nikmarov contributing this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!

At Paste Magazine, familiar face C. M. Crockford looks at where the underdogs of Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story would stand today:

Maybe it’s the punk rocker in me, but I still prefer a story about a team of broken misfits trying and nearly failing to save their hangout spot, Average Joe’s gym, to the current day mainstream cultural parade of superheroes, grifters, billionaires, athletes, and wildly successful “owners” whose main attitude is, in essence, “I, a high-powered individual, will conquer the world.” What does it say about the 2020s that one of the richest men on the planet is a version of Dodgeball villain White Goodman (Ben Stiller), a desperately overcompensating, misogynist loser? And how much modern movies have changed that Dodgeball writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber is now one of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s guys, making bland Netflix action slop like Red Notice with a star who seems increasingly humorless about his superhuman frame? (Shades of how the diminutive Goodman surrounds himself with giant bodybuilders.)

Keith Phipps of The Reveal writes a tribute to his recently-departed mother and their different relationships to the movies:

That doesn’t mean she ever really understood, or approved of, my attempts to turn my movie appreciation into a career, even when presented with evidence the attempt was finding traction. When I told her, during a trip to a mall while visiting over Christmas, that the bookstore had copies of The Tenacity of the Cockroach, The A.V. Club’s then-new interview collection, she wondered aloud who would buy it and never went to see it for herself. I think after a while she accepted my choices, particularly after it became clear I wasn’t going to end up on the street. Toward the end of her life, much of that had fallen away. As her dementia deepened, she’d ask me what I was doing for work whenever I visited her at her apartment in the memory care unit of a nearby assisted-living facility. When I said I was writing, mostly about movies, she asked if I liked it. When I said I did, she smiled.

RIP legendary actor Donald Sutherland. The Hollywood Reporter assembles some amusing anecdotes:

“Well, I hadn’t achieved something that I felt my mother and my father, you know,” he said, before breaking off and recalling a scene in M.A.S.H. where he and Elliot Gould were in a jeep in Tokyo and a female officer with the U.S. Army yelled out to ask whether they wanted to say hello on camera to their mothers. “And I said, well, my mother’s passed, but I would like to say hello to my dad if that’s OK. And she said OK. So I waved at the camera and said, ‘Hi, Dad,’” Sutherland recalled of his onscreen lines. It turned out Sutherland’s parents, then alive, watched M*A*S*H in a Las Vegas movie theater. ”And when I said ‘Hi Dad,’ my father stood up in the Las Vegas cinema and said, ‘Hi Donny.’ And my mother tried to drag him down into the seat and his suspenders were elasticized. I mean, she nearly slingshotted him through the air,” Sutherland recounted proudly.

Miles Surrey categorizes the many strange accents of Tom Hardy in The Ringer:

In the grand tradition of British actors doing American accents, Hardy has many such voices on his résumé. He’s particularly fond of throwing out his own, uh, unique spins on the classic New Yorker accent. Hardy’s most conventional voice within this category was in The Drop, the 2014 crime drama best known for being James Gandolfini’s final film role. Playing the Brooklyn bartender Bob Saginowski, Hardy occasionally stammers through his words, but otherwise the accent doesn’t call too much attention to itself. On the opposite end of the spectrum, for better or worse, is Hardy’s work in Capone. As the titular Italian American gangster at the end of his life, Hardy is straight-up croaking his way through every syllable. Since no audio recordings of Al Capone exist, Hardy basically had free rein to sound like an inebriated frog with peanut butter stuck to the roof of its mouth.

The Verge‘s David Pierce shines a light on the world of competitive Excel spreadsheet making: