These are three reasons I stick up for Noel Gallagher. He may be too provincial at times or cocky or anything else. But he always has an honest answer. Here he discloses 10 things he likes/dislikes:
Here’s worth listening to maybe 0:52 of it. He dismantles any appeal to Blur as a power greater than a band as rubbish. I always preferred Oasis to them anyway. Blur is an overrated band, liked by some but loved only by dogmatic indie fans.
Finally, Noel is more interested in the truth than appearing to the media to be kissing another star’s hole. Here it’s Jay-Z. The conflict was this: Noel was asked what he thought of the Glastonbury Festival in the U.K., and said he thought the music it was showcasing today was inappropriate and bad for the festival. Jay-Z was one of those at Glastonbury. Therefore, the media said he didn’t like Jay-Z. Even though Jay-Z took it seriously and mocked Oasis, Noel just made it clear here how he was being honest about a question that the media skewed publicly. It’s amazing:
There are times when the strains and stress of life can be allayed through a movie that you know will be mindless. Otherwise you ignore such movies when your poison is that which the best movies offer: those interims, those waking naps, in which you broaden moral and aesthetic capacities. But for blind entertainment no better waste has use than the Hollywood film. The sentimentalist, who is inside some, hates how these movies are so costly to make; but the hedonist, who is inside all, does not. Indeed, the hedonist is thankful for it.
This was my situation recently when I decided to let Rock of Ages do the job of numbing these senses through pleasure. But Rock of Ages didn’t. And that’s because Rock of Ages is about as appealing as a shit taco.
Oh hey, my movie sucks.
I read someone call Rock of Ages a ‘metalhead’s Mamma Mia!’. But if the tunnel-dweller’s Papa Roach is a nicer example of metal music, then the foregoing description is misleading. A more sober opinion would call it soft rock. Soft rock and solos. Yet I thought the 80s anthems in this musical would be like microcosms for the film’s delivery — blind, and maybe for some, guilty pleasures, which songs like ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ are — and they weren’t. The songs come in medleys that fit the characters and circumstances at certain moments in the film. Sometimes this works, like when Russell Brand’s character, representing the hedonic life of rock, leads a pack of people who sing ‘We Built This City On Rock and Roll’ at a crowd of protestors headed by Catherine Zeta Jones, which replies, ‘We’re Not Gonna’ Take It’. But other times it doesn’t, or is simply ambiguous: when the male lead (Diego Boneta, an actor who cannot act) breaks up with the female lead (Julianne Hough, an actress who can’t act either), she immediately finds shelter with the first woman she passes on the street (Mary J. Blige), who offers her a job as an exotic dancer/waitress. In Blige’s club they sing ‘Anyway You Want It (That’s The Way You Need It)’, because that’s either the ideology of women who work strip joints, or summarizes the didactic life-advice Blige is selling. It’s not clear, but, more importantly, it’s not interesting.
Just don’t.
This raises an important point about musicals. No, you probably shouldn’t see one if plot and plausibility are your reasons. I know that. But a good musical, at least on screen, can even appease those who do. Manipulating the plot to the degree that it will not distract the attention of some viewers is very possible. So is making the characters attractive and interesting, worthy of our two hour concern. Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge comes to my mind: the singing there was better than what’s in Rock of Ages, yes, but what worked was really the way you could fall for the characters and the backdrop of it all, and even sing with them. I felt no urge to even mime the words of Rock of Ages. The only person who said he did was the man who took my ticket — the same middle-age chump who answered my question of which movie to see with, ‘Doesn’t matter, they’re all just so amazing’. Go figure.
I also know this musical was supposed to mock the music it performs in a way, and mock the lifestyle of rock and its reactionaries. But it does itself no favor with some places in the plot: when Hough is embraced off the street by Blige, for example, we see a homeless man on the street, shaking his cup desperately to both of them; he’s no prop, he’s definitely meant to be visible here; yet Blige very clearly extends her charity not towards the homeless person rotting outside her strip joint, but to this unknown, pretty ditz walking by. Is that supposed to be satirical, to point out how blind vice-ridden californians are or were to human welfare? It’s not clear because that scene, like so many in this picture, is done poorly.
What do I mean by all this? That Rock of Ages lacks the necessary condition of any musical: charm.
Ridley Scott’s Prometheus portends a foundation for us to understand the Alien films. Now, that can be one way of appreciating a movie, knowing its origins and motivations, sometimes unearthing great stories that were in the original movie’s idea, albeit in embryo. Such is the appeal of creation. Scott had, however, more and more often towards the film’s launch, insisted on downplaying the effect of Prometheus as prequel, and rightly so: he knows that, under that pretense, the value of the film would then have to come from finding a way to complement, or even do it one better (if really ambitious), the masterpiece that is 1979′s Alien. In fact, I’m sure he knew it would almost be unavailable to him to create the means to construct a film that would be significantly connected to the Alien saga and on a par entertainment-wise. Not that a film as prequel must entertain in the same way as its sequel, but almost always its the case that the audience will expect ‘something’ like it. That much seems sound to me.
At the same time, the web is filled with deep believers that this movie will dig the appropriate space to make the Alien movies make sense, and it’s just out of my scope here to discuss that.
So forget Alien prequel: Let’s take Prometheus for what it is at the moment. And — to be very blunt — I found it’s not that much.
In terms of plot, the gigantic bust in the image above, with lights shining on it from the minute humans, should be revealing enough: it’s an anthropology about human origins. It maybe worth noting that, connected to Prometheus, though unconnected to Scott, is the 2004 film Alien Vs. Predator, which I spontaneously watched one lazy afternoon last month. There we learn that predators led humans to their own self-awareness and civility, and that we worshiped them as semi-deities. Aliens, meanwhile, were understood literally: beings totally other, other than our Gods and other than us, with origins unknown.
Large humanoid, an ‘Engineer’
And that’s more or less the stance of Prometheus, but without predators: the film begins ambivalently, with a large humanoid ingesting a black substance that we all know will prove corrosive; its body is instantly demolished from the inside-out, its limbs crack, and it falls over a waterfall, down to the water’s ground, with its DNA rupturing and contaminating the water. And that’s it, that’s what it says about origins: there were, before us, something like humans and something like black, hostile liquid. There’s a spaceship above him, but it’s not clear what that says at all about human origins and the origin of the aliens. I really don’t subscribe to the naïve interpretation of those who think the opening scene explains the birth of humanity and that of the aliens (for creating humanity they get label ’Engineers’). It really doesn’t. All Prometheus tells is the story of how events between those two things, the large humanoids and the black goo, conspire to create the banana-head aliens (they’re called ‘Xenomorphs’). That is really how the film begins and ends.
Everything in between, however, could make for a good film, I think, but doesn’t. The dialogue, especially around the two main female characters, is fairly glib: Theron’s character represents the same corporate sneer that was present with Ian Holm and Paul Reiser in Alien and Aliens. She says little, cares only about inheriting her dying father’s corporation and getting laid; and when she does talk, looking serious, we’re not interested. Perhaps it was expected, and always is if we’re trying to get reality right in films, to include the corporate impediment that has always stood in the way of human inquiry. But the ads for the film sold Theron off as some main voice for and reason to see the film, yet she is neither.
The only interesting thing with Theron’s character is that she has many tells of being an android. I’m not sure that hypothesis holds up; but I do know it’s pretty inconsequential to the film overall, and doesn’t make it great by any means.
The voice of the main female lead, Noomi Rapace, isn’t much better. She represents what Prometheus looks to get across as the philosophical note of the film, the pursuit of truth and the human sacrifice therein, in the name of something bigger than us. But they played it the wrong way by making Rapace come across as this blind Christian (she bore a crucifix at all times) who believes what she wants to believe because ‘she chooses to believe it’ — a precarious choice of tenet if your pursuit is of that which commonly passes as truth. Still, intellectual stuff aside, it’s just an unexciting, somewhat clichéd presentation on the film’s part.
Fassbender as android David
What’s worse, however, is made evident in this main character’s relationship to the film’s other lead, the android Michael Fassbender plays. Rapace — most of the cast, really — only makes predictable conversation with Fassbender, emphasizing how he can’t feel the conviction of belief and so on because, holy smokes, he has no soul. There’s really nothing strained between the human/non-human divide, nothing that makes us think more about it, or at least be scared of it (like with Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey). Not that they did that in the other Alien movies; there they relied upon the suspense of revelation, with Ash in the first film, and the promise of forgiveness and the hope of a harmonious coexistence between humans and androids, as was with Bishop in the second film. But with Fassbender, it’s all revealed at the outset: he’s an android, doing shit without the crew knowing it, which leaves us with nothing to interpret in his character besides being some means to quickly facilitate the plot. We know even at the outset he is probably going to jeopardize the whole odyssey, since he’s gaining presupposed plot time while they’re all asleep at the beginning of the film, studying up on their histories and dreams, learning their weaknesses — his knowledge of which, predictably, will all be used to some end, and is.
The closest they come to sounding a promising note for viewer’s reflection happens, I think, with only one conversation. Rapace’s heroin character, representing the interminable human search for cause and meaning, is warned by the android, David, that the answer to her ‘why’ question about human origin may be just as banal as the answer to the question of ‘why’ humans created him, namely: Because they could. But it never goes deeper than that conversation. Perhaps this is a high expectation of mine; after all, it’s Ridley Scott’s film, not Terrence Malick’s.
As far as characters go in this movie, Fassbender’s, I think, will be remembered as best, even if just for his appearance. He’s gorgeous in Prometheus, modeled after Lawrence of Arabia‘s Peter O’Toole, whom he even quotes occasionally. Though while I suspect much praise will be thrust at his portrayal of a wayward and insouciant android, I don’t think it is terribly well earned, since he has the countenance of unwanted vacancy anyway. It’s not that profound.
Since none of the aforementioned — the pretense of prequel, the plot, the dialogue, the characters — really stood out for me, I can only in passing recommend Prometheus as general viewing, nothing special.
With the exception of a barely-recognizable Guy Pearce and one scene that tries to match the classic chest-busting scene of John Hurt in the first movie, and almost does, the best thing about this film is the outstanding, though deceiving, trailer.
Just watch and listen. It says: Oh?! What is this? What is going on? Something wrong?! Run!
21 Jump Street isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not as good as I thought it would be.
One problem is the hype behind Jonah Hill.Christ, why do people laugh at the sight of this person? He’s not that funny looking. He’s less funny looking now than when he had excess weight. My cinematic experience in particular was ruined by lots of — mainly trashy — girls laughing at him in scenes where he is merely in stasis. They just cannot take him seriously, which ominously speaks to his inevitable type-cast.
I still enjoyed the movie, however. It had occasional moments where I laughed hard. Yet they were not as frequent as they were with, say, Super Bad, Get Him To The Greek,Knocked Up, or Forgetting Sarah Marshall; they’re all better than this movie. Too much of Jump Street is built around the revisitation to high school, a theme that gets more lame with age. Movies that occur in high school, not through memory, but through the present tense fare better (like Superbad). The only neat thing about this return to high school is that it shows the dialectical life of popularity: the popular kids are vegans, environmentally friendly, not bad at school — all, basically, unlike the crowd Channing Tatum’s preppy character identified with years ago. But that’s all.
There were some sad sights in the film too. Its first two minutes are exactly what you saw by way of trailer, which for some reason seems a very cheap moment to witness. Johnny Depp makes a useless cameo in homage to his affiliation with the Jump Street sitcom as a man who complains about having to wield a big nose for five years undercover. That’s not funny. Yeah, the humour just isn’t that pronounced; do I miss something when everyone in the theatre erupts at Hill’s character having a knife in his back and saying ‘that’s awesome’?
Still, besides the cheap humour and bad promotional tactics (one scene, with Hill smashing a car windshield in jest, isn’t even in the movie), 21Jump Street is fun. It’s better than most comedies, just not those associated with Hill (don’t buy any hype about him in this one).
My previous post concerned, in part, skepticism over global warming. Here’s what I think of it within eighty words.
Like Pascal’s wager, we risk something very great in not believing it. I think it is more important to believe in global degradation, act accordingly, and risk being wrong than it is to refute it, act accordingly, and risk dying. Just rig up a chart that records the amount of money lost in pro-global warming initiatives versus that lost in initiatives that are anti-global warming.
The positive side wins, but for a reason that requires not an unquestioned reverence to monetary gains, but a heart. You require a heart for this belief because it holds that the future of humanity is more important than you are. This lesson is difficult to swallow, but I think it is true. Quit thinking of deliverance in an afterlife, or in the present tense of this one, and focus upon posterity. (Interestingly, though the political Left is the one to usually first embrace this ideal, this has been the core message of political Conservatism since Burke, though that brand has not seen a day since, and has, after what’s happened to it hitherto, recessed in utero.) That’s what will carry people forward, not only in our pollution politics but in our intellectual politics. Too often I hear people trying to totalize the world, trying to solve it — that won’t happen or work. Do what you can and know that more persons after you will do more. One needn’t cognize this each morning but keep it in one’s vestry of secrets, for personal expression. Bring it out when need be, and use it to make oneself feel better (as it almost always does).
These are weak comments, needing further probing I’m sure. But I had a joke in my mind to publish about certain folks:
Tommy Douglas seemed a great founder and leader. Let’s hope they keep up the honesty of his message, whether or not the content survives.
Harper makes a few bad mistakes each moment he appears; the man’s party, therefore, should end, or at least reform. Illogical mistakes are what get me…
Rex Murphy — fellow Newf — is a smart man, who loves his political privies, and loves to be open and virulent about things he dislikes. But not all these things are great. I wish he would stop being some icon of envy for Newfoundlanders. My reasoning? He questions global warming: not that question’s a bad thing to do, but question something for which a wager for positivity is best makes me bored or worried, not sure which. Rex, in other words, can be more interested in rhetoric than truth.
