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roastgum
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Always thought the least-discussed thing about the Wire was how funny a lot of it is. There are so many scenes of people just chilling and making jokes! When you think of plot points throughout the show, they are all pretty depressing; however, there are lols aplenty along the way.
I think the reason Treme has been much less successful is that Treme is not nearly as funny (and isn’t trying to be). Joking around humanized a lot of the characters in The Wire, but in Treme most people are just mad.
If you look at a few rappers/songs in particular you see a lot of it, though. “Hey Ma” is surely among the most Freudian of rap songs, with Juelz Santana referred to as a “baby,” the girls he and Cam’ron pick up as “ma” and “momma,” etc. Also most of the songs on 50 Cent’s atrocious album The Massacre seem like a child’s ideas of what it means to be a cool adult — “Piggy Bank” about how fitty made more money than his rivals, “Candy Shop” with those oh-so-original sex-as-candy metaphors, “Gatman and Robbin” about fitty and eminem killing people who talk shit, and “My Toy Soldier.”
Also Stanley Crouch is basically trolling when it comes to rap…he has a lot of theories about how rap postures are bad for America or something, but he isn’t really interested in debating the merits of particular songs/artists. He’s pretty much an old media dude hating on new media because it’s new (although rap isn’t that new anymore), kind of like Ebert hating video games. He never manages a close read on any rap songs, just disses the (purely theoretical) social implications of those songs.
Too many of the lyrics on snacks and shit are ingenious faux-retarded lines that the writers of that blog fail to understand. Even the “snacks and shit” line itself is sort of an interesting detail, which the komedy professionals on that blog think is stupid because it sounds unusual within a standard rap narrative.
Well Maggie Grace was like a decade too old for the role, so I was more ready to believe she liked U2 than that she was a teenager.
More Spike Lee fans than expected, I guess? I haven’t seen Crooklyn, I admit. Or When The Levees Broke, which some people said was good. I think Do The Right Thing is sort of a sacred cow among film critics because it was so inflammatory at the time, but when you watch it now the racial politics are really clumsy and most of the characters are gross stereotypes. The scene in the pizza parlor where bad racist John Turturro’s hypocrisy is revealed (because he likes michael jordan but doesn’t know that he’s black?) is probably the most grade-school, straw-man presentation of racism I’ve ever seen. And it’s all presented in this smug fucking manner as if Lee was teaching you a Very Special Lesson about racism, when really all of his ideas are trite to the core.
Also Spike Lee is a terrible actor and he should be banned from casting himself in his own movies, just like Tarantino. In interviews he’s as insufferable as Tarantino, except he usually plays the race card instead of referring to a random Hong Kong movie every 5 seconds.
If any Spike Lee movie is awkward enough to be WMOAT-worthy it’s probably the painful She’s Gotta Have It (which got a weird amount of love from Pauline Kael) or one of the random godawful ones like She Hate Me.
That Land of the Lost guy must be a hot property in Hollywood these days. (Although 30 people probably worked on that script so it might not be his fault.)
I guess Gabe doesn’t have a “no Uwe Boll Rule” but he probably should. Maybe it would fall under the umbrella of “intentionally terrible,” because I think almost nobody goes to see an Uwe Boll movie without knowing what they’re getting into.
I knew a guy in a creative writing course who would often write these really elaborate mystery plots set in New York. There would always a bunch of suspects in the crime of the century, or a group of amnesiacs trying to figure out what happened on a fateful day in the past, or even a bunch of criminals in a madcap adventure trying to find a stolen diamond. However, the stories would always end with all the suspects/participants in a big chase through the World Trade Center, and a plane would crash into the building just before they resolved the mystery, because it was 9/11. I still think that twist has feature film potential.
Yeah Taken was fucking awful. Although I do always crack up at the overwrought “race to save my daughter’s virginity from cabal of shadowy rapists” plot. I think the major lessons of the movie were 1) preserve your chastity, girls (because then you will get special treatment from white-slavery rings that will give hero dad time to save you) and 2) don’t travel abroad until you’re 40 years old and have black ops training, because shit is crazy out there.
Basically the whole thing seemed like it was made by some xenophobic Purity Ball dads, but it was actually directed by Pierre Morel and produced by Luc Besson. So I guess they are either self-hating Frenchmen or they just targeted what they perceived as the American male lowest common denominator.
I can’t remember the details, but doesn’t Neeson shoot a French policeman’s wife in the arm? And then have no trouble leaving France by plane at the end of the movie (after also killing like 100 other people)? There is really a lot of material in that movie.
I think I hated it, but not as much as Jungle Fever. Every Spike Lee movie is pretty awful, really, but genre movie fans like to pretend he did good work with Inside Man and 25th Hour.
BREAKING NEWS: Comedy offends the easily offended! Critics of terrible actress labeled “hateful!” IN LOCAL NEWS: Why you should get the fuck out!
I really enjoy the repulsive amphibian squelching noise when Wiseau wakes up and opens his eyes.
I’m pretty sure he said they were “studied,” and have simply received more education about how fe touch de spot.
I haven’t had this much trouble understanding what a Jamaican is saying since I played GTAIV.
Did you teach sex ed at my school? They always traumatized us whenever we asked how anything fun worked.
http://www.theroot.com/views/lets-make-deal-n-word?page=0,0
I kind of agree with this guy, who argues that people should be allowed to at least quote “nigger” if referring to an incident where someone else said it. People who insist nobody can say it in any context are trying to kill discussion of the word entirely. (Somebody said it, but let’s pretend it didn’t happen.) I always think of that Louis C.K. routine about how he hates people saying the phrase “the n-word,” because they’re just tricking him into saying “nigger” in his mind and feeling like a racist.
I get your reasoning, and sorry for being rude, but I don’t really believe in using euphemisms in this sort of situation.
Must I live in a world where Black Frasier doesn’t really exist, and this does?
It’s like the Lionel Richie thing; he sold away the high point of his entire life.
He seems more out of it when he’s sober.
@Lew: I kind of disagree, because it is easy to start an argument about anything under the sun, and if you apply the label of art to anything that starts debate then the word “art” means nothing but “controversial.” And I am really not hip enough to believe that things possess only the values assigned to them via “discursive formations,” i.e. everything’s relative.
A good day?
You’re right!
I think I agree with you if you’re saying that genre movies are often great movies, but I disagree with you that Rodriguez makes genre movies along the lines of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like you I think he does not exactly make bad movies on purpose, but I think he makes them with a combination of ironic distance and bad taste that just isn’t good filmmaking.
In his recent films Rodriguez winkingly incorporates too much material too blatantly from other filmmakers (Planet Terror borrowing large parts of the plot of Bio-Zombie, f’r ex.), and casts actors primarily because he knows the audience will remember them from certain movies he wants to reference. I think that he structures his films around shock effects and funny moments, but doesn’t really do any work on his characters. You could say that a great film like Alien steals a lot from the plots of The Thing From Outer Space and Planet of the Vampires, but it also transforms that material in such a way that it seems wholly a part of the world of Alien. Rodriguez doesn’t transform anything, and wants only to create a big mess of references and a cynical atmosphere.
This is a very subjective argument about Rodriguez’s “attitude” so maybe I’m not persuading anyone.
I can sort of forgive Japan’s love of blackface when they produce videos like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_a4M9clpQE. One of the best Japanese variety show videos for sure, mostly thanks to Japanese Bruuuce and Japanese Cyndi Lauper, who are killing it.