Danny Franks

You want to see unrealistic financial depictions? Watch Ballers. I just watched the whole of it and, unsurprisingly it was terrible, but the financial means of the characters was just... baffling. The Rock's character, Spencer Strasmore, starts the show by loaning his last $300,000 to an NFL player as an inducement to financially represent him. Five seasons later, he's buying the Kansas City Chiefs and I have never once understood how he got so rich. The show completely glosses over any big wins he might have, usually because he has a burst of integrity and turns down money that he feels is coming on the back of screwing someone else over.

Well Rivers just retired, and he was one of the few other pure, pocket-passing QBs left in the league. Maybe Matt Stafford would count? I don't watch enough of the Detroit Lions (because who would?) to really know how mobile he is. Probably more mobile than Brady, who has always been stiff and slow. The future of the position definitely lies with athletic guys who can also throw the ball really well - Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Russell Wilson, Josh Allen, DeShaun Watson, Kyler Murray etc. It's a natural evolution of the professional game, because the vast majority of college QBs are athletic and mobile, running option offenses. The NFL could keep fighting the tide and trying to turn those guys into pocket-passers, but it seems far more sensible to build your offensive game around their abilities instead.

I'm not sure what Donovan Mitchell on his own is supposed to do about that. Other than Mitchell and the original Covidiot, Gobert, that team just isn't as talented as other teams in the West. They're never going to win a series against the Lakers, Clippers or Blazers, and probably not the Nuggets either. Ex-superstars like Shaq, who like to claim all the credit for the achievements of their teams, seem to have very unrealistic demands of individuals in what is a team sport. There have been barely a handful of players in league history who could take a team on their back for an entire season and lead them to a Championship. In the modern era I can really only think of Jordan and LeBron.

Well, I guess I'm all in on the Chiefs again. Can't stand the thought of the infinite Brady polishing that's going to happen if the Bucs win. As though Brady has transformed the team rather than stepped into a team that was built to win - really good O-line, talented receiving corps and a defence that was solid even before it heated up in the playoffs. Yes, he's a great QB but the hyperbole is absurd. Put him on the Jets or the Jags and they'd still be struggling to get four wins. Fair play to the Bucs for going all in and building this team that had one shot to win, with the likes of Brady, Suh, JPP and Fournette, but I hope they blow it. As for Aaron Rodgers, he should get the hell out of Green Bay and try to do the same as Brady - find a team that's built for him to win now.

I wonder how much of it is studio mandated and how much is due to the vanity of the actors. Damon, for instance, would have felt a certain amount of pressure to look good for the last Bourne film (which should never have been made, by the way) but I can't imagine any studio execs ever went to him and said "you need to put on X lbs of muscle for this role, Matt.' Which is another disparity, because I can't imagine that many actresses have the star power to choose to look a certain way in movies. Unless you're Charlize Theron in Monster you're probably not going to win a role unless you weigh less than 120lbs. and in the cases of both men trying to gain muscle and women trying to lose weight, it's really not good for their long term health. So we're going to see the very odd juxtaposition of Chris Hemsworth's gargantuan arms justifying his superhuman strength in Thor 4 (More Thor) and Natalie Portman having the same superhuman strength while being whippet-thin. If the strength is superhuman, why does he need the muscles? And if he needs the muscles, why won't Portman? I've always thought that the superhero body type should be the same for men and women, at least when it comes to how they're drawn in comic books - they should look like heptathletes and decathletes. Multi-discipline athletes with excellent functional muscles but not ridiculously huge (except for the likes of the Hulk, of course). I'm not an advocate of plastic surgery, and often can't really tell who's had it and who hasn't, but I do know of one case where it has to have been transformative. Stana Katic had a nose job and went from pretty-but-normal to stunning. She never would have been the co-lead on Castle without it. I'm sure that was her choice, and it paid off. Other women will surely have been told 'change this, work on that' if they want success. Similar to the code that wrestling promoters used to use - "work on your upper body" pretty much meant "get bigger, even if you have to use steroids." The anorexic look is one I just never got at all. It did not look good. Calista Flockhart and Portia de Rossi both looked like they were sick, as did many other women.

I'm reminded of something that was observed on a documentary I watched recently - in the 60s and 70s (and earlier) people might not really have much of a picture of what the leading stars looked like without their shirts on. The male physique wasn't ever a selling point for movies. Sure, they needed to be in decent shape and handsome, but bulging muscles just weren't a thing. Paul Newman didn't have them, Steve McQueen didn't, Humphrey Bogart, Sean Connery, Cary Grant etc. It was only in the 1980s that a muscled, macho physique became an important prerequisite for a movie star. Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger really built the template for it and, while it isn't always necessary, and you get action stars who look like 'normal' guys - Bruce Willis for example - the actors playing superheroes need to be huge, to fit the expectations of the audience. Someone like Dwayne Johnson, or even Chris Hemsworth, would have looked almost alien to movie audiences in the 70s. Realistically, you'd expect Peter Quill to look more like Newman in Cool Hand Luke than like Arnie in Commando.

If they don't have Peter slipping down walls because they're frozen, or having his webs fail to attach, then they're missing a trick. As for Henry Cavill as Captain Britain? No thanks. I'm still not even convinced that guy can act. His Superman was lousy and his Geralt is basically just doing an impression of the game version of the character

I'm English (though I do have an Irish passport) and I've never seen it before. I obviously know the song - and I can't stand it - but I've never seen anyone do that dance.

I just happened to catch TOW The Sonogram at the End today, and the scene with Ross, Carol and Susan in the hospital still bugs me. The gall of Susan and Carol to suggest that the kid should have the surname Willick-Bunch infuriates me. They've acknowledged that Ross is the father, Susan has no claim to this child other than as the partner of its mother, yet she expects it to have her surname? Then she gets snotty about Ross expecting his child to have his surname. I get that the show was doing work to show a lesbian couple as a viable family unit, but they treat Ross as though he's the interloper when he's the wronged party. It was totally the wrong way to approach the storyline. It should have been written as Susan tentatively putting out the suggestion she'd like to be involved in the naming of the baby, and Ross initially being resistant but then coming around to it because he has to accept Susan will be a parent to his child too. But Susan was never tentative about anything, as I've said before. The character was utterly unsympathetic and if she'd been a man, her actions would have made the entirety of the audience hate her.

I don't think that twelve years (the gap between Zendaya and Washington) is unrealistic at all, in real life or in movies. Especially not when it's addressed in the movie. It is funny though, because Washington is considered a young, up and coming actor at 36, while a woman at the same age would already be starting to see feedback from casting directors like "too old for the part." It's also funny because Washington's love interest in BlacKkKlansman was played by Laura Harrier, who also played Peter Parker's love interest in Spider-Man: Homecoming... a movie that Zendaya is also in and she plays the love interest in the sequel. There's the idea that people always stay the same age they were when they became famous, which might be why Zendaya is still seen as a teen, and why no one blinked at Zac Efron playing her love interest - both became stars in their teens and so there's a reluctance to see them age into adult roles. I guess you could say that age in Hollywood is kind of nebulous up to a certain point - for women it's about forty but for men it's closer to sixty. This is changing a little bit now, with actors like Jessica Chastain and Charlize Theron proving that playing a leading woman doesn't end at forty (and there's another weird little quirk - Theron has been around for what seems like forever while Chastain is still seen as a relative newcomer. There's only two years between them).

I don't think Steph or Klay were ever the ones rumoured to be resentful, though. But KD is a very needy, sensitive player and I don't see how he and Harden are going to co-exist. This is not the same Harden who was an up-and-comer in OKC when Durant was there. Oh well, the implosion will be fun to watch.

Don't worry, he'll only be doing it for a couple of years then it'll be back to college for him. Just like so many college coaches who find the NFL an entirely different proposition (especially when it becomes clear that they can't just offer illegal incentives to recruit whoever they want).

Daniel Craig addressed that when he was asked about Monica Bellucci playing a love interest in one of the Bond movies - the interviewer said something about Bond and older women, and Craig pointed out that Bellucci was only four years older than him, and thus not an "older woman" at all. It's always been common in Hollywood. For example, Tom Cruise was 52 to Emily Blunt's 31 in Edge of Tomorrow and I doubt anyone ever noticed the gap. Partly because Cruise is so uncanny valley preserved and partly because it's just the norm.

I imagine the extent of this will be a couple of flashback scenes, showing how Steve influenced other characters. The credits of Spider-Man: Homecoming will say that Chris Evans was in that movie, but it was nothing more than a cameo. I don't think Chris Evans has any plans to reprise the character in any significant way. He's on record time and again about how difficult it was to get into Cap shape and over a decade of playing the same role isn't going to appeal to many movie actors. Perhaps the one thing that might sway him would be a project that allows him to directly address the toxic political voices that he's so willing to challenge through social media.

The show actually did that in season 2 (I think) with Susan - They built up a storyline over a number of episodes that showed her struggling to stand up to alpha male types - Benton, Kayson, some other dickish surgeon - and it was discussed by Mark and Morgenstern when evaluating her work. It didn't come out of nowhere, and it didn't result in Susan instantly changing who she was, because the writers back then realised that it's not easy to change your personality and overcome flaws that might impact on your professional life.