Kendrick Lamar's Black Panther Masterpiece

KENDRICK LAMAR IS HIP HOP'S LEONARD COHEN

 

If you weren't excited about Black Panther, this album, dropping a week early will get you in the mood. If you were already excited, this thing will get you PUMPED!

The first time I listened to it, my first thought was, how did they get Disney to agree to this? I imagine most conversations between directors and their studios go something like this:

Director: Can I please just do what I want and maintain creative control over the whole product?
Studio: NO!!!!

Studios haven't trusted directors since the '70's. Every once in a while, you get an auteur who sticks to his guns, but attached to a tent pole franchise? I don't think I've seen that since Lucas was still in charge of Star Wars. And it it all reminds me of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, where the director tapped Leonard Cohen for all the songs of the film and reinvented westerns. Tim Burton did it with Batman too, when he somehow got Prince to do all the songs and invented the modern comic book movie. It's seldom that directors squeak that much control out of a project, and when they do, it's awesome.

Ryan Coogler is an Oakland guy who made Fruitvale Station and Creed, both of which were fantastic. That's how he landed the gig, but how the hell did he get Disney to sign off on this soundtrack? I want to meet him just see what a smooth-talker he is. Shit. I want to be his best friend. I love this guy.

The stand out track for me is the second track: All the Stars.

• SZA is on the track with her sad but optimistic voice perfectly suited for the lyrics.
• The intro beat sounds like an old African animal skin number. It sounds like a live drum, and it anchors the song in warm tradition while voice filters kick in and distortion knobs get turned. And there's something that sounds like a steel drum/keyboard in there sparingly so as not to become a Jamaican tune. That sound comes back on other songs on the album, and it really is a concept album; you don't see that much these days.
• Kendrick's verse is reminiscent of other tracks he's done about the aspiration and letdown of love and trust, and it's great.

I love a song that can be soulful and sad and happy and inspirational at the same time. They're rarer than diamonds.

I'm over the MCU, but I think this album might have won me back for now. I was a passing fan of the character, and I bought a bunch of the comics in the 90's. I hope it lives up to my memories of this cool icon.

Catch up with Black Panther:

What's a Mangina?

IN DEFENSE OF JAMES BOND

Guest blog by Kevin Kunundrum

I'm tired of dreadlocked Millennial Manginas making videos to meet Social Justice Warrior women under the guise of declaring how terrible men are. And I love when they speak for all men and apologize on our behalf. Do they think by condemning men en masse, they’ll appear all sensitive and sanctified to Feminists?

I see through you, Manginas! Babbling whiningly at length about men's oppression, blah-blah-blah, and chanting the new catch-phrase: 'Toxic Masculinity' 

O, to be an evil Man, the wellspring of all that is bad, the oppressor of all that is good.

I try to ignore them, but now they're Bond bashing!

Behold the usual Bond-bashing boilerplate. "James Bond is a misogynist Neanderthal alcoholic murderer who flees from his own feelings and uses women as disposable playthings for his own amusement, etcetera..." Sure, James Bond's an easy target, from a superficial point of view. So let us for a moment, examine James Bond in depth, the real Double-O-Seven... 

James Bond was conceived in a World War, with bombs raining down on Britain. According to Ian Fleming, he had a traumatic childhood. Orphaned at eleven, he went to live with his aunt in the small English village of Pett Bottom. If you don't find that hilarious, you'll be among the first to go in the coming Apocalypse. Learn to laugh, dear friends...  

So Bond is an only-child-orphan-introvert, which means he can become one of three things: a serial killer, a poet, or a secret agent. And he chooses secret agent. And what does this mean? He decides to live his life for the greater good, the greater good being England. And this used to be part and parcel of coming of age, the notion that you go into the service to give something back. That's why they call it the service!

This is how Britain withstood the Nazis when the firebombs set London ablaze. When the blackest of evils was right across the Channel, the people gave their all, out of sacrifice and selfless obligation. But James Bond takes it a step further. He doesn't just sign up for a stint, two years and out. He's in it for the long haul. And it's not as some desk-bound bureaucrat, home by 5 for G&Ts... No, Mr. Bond does the heavy lifting. He ventures where no one wants to go, where the shit is always headed for the fan.

And he doesn't just save a few people or even England, but more times than not, the world!

How 'bout you, dreadlocked Mangina? How many times have you saved anything?

When 400,000 men are stranded at Dunkirk, you don't whine. You get in your boat, whatever it is, and you sail out. And you fight the freaking Nazis for six long years and you see things and do things that scar you forever. But it's for England, the world, and the children unborn. Talk about sacrifice! And you silently endure because those that don't know will never know, and those that do, know it all too well. We can't tailor-make our life to be rid of rough edges. The rough edges are there precisely so that we can become our best or our worst. It's not easy to heed the call. It's when we find what we're made of. And some of us, sadly, come up short.

And what does James Bond do? His courage and mettle are constantly tested. His loyalty, his steadfastness, his ingenuity, his humanity. He's given the worst tasks where he must do things most never imagine. And because of this, his life is measured not in decades or years but in days. Sometimes, hours and minutes. Imagine if you knew that you could be dead tomorrow. You might enjoy that drink tonight. You might savor that woman. But you know there's no future in it because you have no future. That's a given. You've accepted it. 

And what do these women see when James Bond appears? A man with the confidence that stems from confronting humanity's darkness. Someone who faces death and defeat and who somehow surmounts it. And as things crash around them with death racing forward, James Bond calmly, collectedly figures it out and saves the day. Who wouldn't find this attractive?

He's someone who will always have your back. Who will never give up. But unlike Mr. Mangina who uses exalted rhetoric as a ploy to get laid, James Bond says very little.  And when he has a brief respite he enjoys it fully because he knows more than most the measure of life. As Bond says to 'M' in Casino Royale, 'So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman'... But he's more than just a blunt instrument. He's a 'sin-eater' who takes in the darkness for the benefit of all.

Courage, fortitude, loyalty, authenticity. These are Bond's currency. And he is nothing if not authentic. He's always himself, never anyone else, and you can depend on this. It's one of the rarest things in a world in which you can depend on practically nothing.

Bad Romance

This is where I ruin that Lady Gaga song everyone likes

Bad Romance is a grossly underrated song.

The two halves of the song mirror each other wonderfully. Ugly is echoed by horror, and disease rhymes with design as the first lines of both halves so that all the stuff in the middle is sandwiched together perfectly.

Plus, all the movie references in both halves strengthen that bond. Leather studded kiss in the sand is a reference to Sandy getting her leather kiss in Grease. And psycho, vertigo, and rear window are all references to Alfred Hitchcock movies.

What do all the movies have in common? The horror of romance? The dangers of love? The acceptance of our worst attributes? Who knows? Who really cares? Thematically, it works with the mechanics of the song in such a tight way that all the weird French stuff and the Fashion/Real Bitch bridge thing that happen in the original version are there just for fluff that work because the rest of the song is so damned strong.

My favorite part of the song is "I don't want to be friends." In the original version I swear I hear "I don't want to be French" the first time she says it after the French part of the song. But that could just be my lying ears.

Who can't relate to the sentiment of wanting more than friendship from someone? The complete letdown and heartbreak contained in the last few lines of the song, the idea that even a bad romance is better than friendship, is something I think everybody can relive at the close of the song. For a pop song to leave you lamenting one-sided love is impossible, so Lady Gaga belts out the chorus a few more times in the original.

It's a tricky little song in a lot of ways. Bad Romance has plenty for your brain to suss out and it happens to come in a fun package. I hope you like my stripped down version of it.

Starkiller Base Is the DUMBEST Thing in Star Wars History

You already know about Starkiller base, the First Order's planet-sized space station/weapon/Macguffin. It's by far the dumbest thing in Star Wars canon, and one of the dumbest things in Sci-Fi history.

It destroys Coruscant and all of the planets in its system. There's some debate to that statement, but it doesn't matter here for my purposes. They definitely destroyed five planets.

There are only a few ways for this to occur:

They didn't build it from scratch.

Maybe they weaponized an existing planet.
How do you weaponize a planet without the neighboring planets not noticing. It has a breathable atmosphere and trees growing on it. No one wants to live there? Did they just kill everyone already living there and drill into its core to create a superweapon that converts star energy into ammunition? How do you test that without destroying a star? The worst part of that plan is that it's a one-time-use weapon. You just get to destroy one solar system and then have to abandon the planet or try to use it as a base of operations until the debris from all the exploding planets destroys it. Planets don't travel from one system to another.

They built it far away.

How do they get it close enough to target and destroy the solar system? There are several projectiles travelling slowly enough for lens flares and for Kylo Ren to behold the impending destruction from a window. Consider it takes months to get to Mars, and that's only possible every other year. Even if these missiles "blast through hyperspace" (which is not what we see in the film) the movies have established nothing can be tracked/targeted through hyperspace. So, unless they want to fire these interstellar missiles and wait around for potentially years to see if they land properly, they're not going to shoot from too far. But that means they need to move this space station unfathomable distances to get into range.

Now, range matters. Star Wars weapons have ranges, and vehicles have fuel ranges, too. How much fuel would it take Starkiller base to travel from one star system to another? All the other ships that are jumping in space have visible blue exhausts. Not Starkiller. It's simply not built for travel.

It has to be super-long range weapon. Its size makes it able to launch plasma ridiculously long distances and it houses boundless computer capacity to target very faraway places. And the First Order is incredibly patient. That would be like the USA launching missiles at china and waiting 20 years for them to hit their marks. That's a long time to hold a grudge. 

Distance in space is usually overcome in Sci-fi by faster-than-light drives, subspace mumbo jumbo, wormholes, warp-speed, teleportation, etc. It's a necessity that some universes ignore (Firefly) to their detriment. Sci-fi has to do some work your brain won't in the suspension of disbelief. Star Wars used to not give a shit about what you thought about anything. But they've since talked about midichlorians and kyber crystals. And they always had the Force (which is just magic) and hyperspace (which is just sci-fi magic) to dismiss the impossible.

Anyway, the Starkiller base is idiotic, and anyone saying this movie was superior to episode VIII or any other Star Wars movie should start thinking about why they like these movies in the first place. They're stupid, bad movies we like despite all that. They're Fast & Furious in space. It's OK to like garbage. Garbage is fun sometimes.

Let's say they built a planet-sized weapon in the same solar system they were bent on destroying even though Hux says they're attacking planets in a system far away. How did its construction go unnoticed? The whole solar system thought it was normal somebody was building a whole new planet? Cloak?  That would still throw off the tidal patterns of nearby planets. It's simply impossible for the thing to have been built anywhere near their intended target. Meanwhile, the natural resources involved in building your planet would mean basically dismantling an entire world, to create a new weaponized one. So we have to take Hux at his word here.

Abrams can't function without an explanation-free MacGuffin. That's his power over his audiences, and he wields it with frustratingly successful results. 

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I always imagined that the Death Star could move faster than light. You don't see any blue engine burns on the Death Star either, but maybe you just never get to see them in the movies. How would Alderaan not see it coming? It'd have to jump in and destroy and then refuel or recharge and jump to its next destination. Maybe that's why it just sat around waiting for the rebels to attack it; it wasn't able to escape the scene of the crime back to its secret location in time.

Kyle Hill has a fun article about Starkiller base here »

This Isn't a Dream

Every time I say "this isn't a dream; this is really happening!" I expect everyone to get the reference and at least smile. But I guess no one has ever seen Rosemary's Baby.

She's adorable in that movie, Mia Farrow.

Those eyes of hers.

There's a whole subplot spoofing the film in the Seth Rogen movie, This Is The End, and I don't think most people get what he was doing there.

Cultural touchstones aren't what they used to be. . . I don't think they even really exist anymore. Or if they do, it's for such fleeting moments that they're forgotten before they accumulate any weight. Maybe that's why we're still talking about Hamlet and other stuff made by men long dead.

Maybe we can just appreciate how pretty Mia Farrow was back when people still cared about the future.

If you haven't seen it, watch it.

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Tomorrowland at Disneyland used to be about what the future might look like if we all just work our hardest and try our best. I was employed there when they announced that all plant life in Tomorrowland was going to be edible. Innoventions was the newest attraction.

Now it's all about Star Wars.

Star Wars is not about the future; it's a fairy tale set in space so it doesn't have to obey the laws of our physics. It's not a shining beacon toward which we might strive; it's a romp in the stars set to orchestral swells.

I don't feel like ranting about Star Wars today.
But does the future matter anymore?
Are we treating reality like a dream?
Maybe the future doesn't matter, but shouldn't it?

I still care about the future.

Wasn't she so pretty?

Have you seen Girls Trip?

What I like about this film overall is that it's not a "black movie." And I mean to say that this is the GET OUT of comedy. It's not a film about racial stereotypes, but it's a film that doesn't ignore them either. It's a good movie if you like raunchy comedies that deign to attempt to transcend their genre.

Think Farrelly brothers at their best meets Ice Cube at his best.

Every time it panders to the lowest common denominator with piss or penis jokes, it buys you back with a lesson about loyalty and sisterhood that comes off as genuine because it's not acknowledged until the films denouement, which is predictable, but worth it.

There's even a stupid trope about the dangers of absinthe sold in a Michael Epps cameo that's derivative, but everything in comedy is just another cue telling us when to laugh, so it's excusable or at least as excusable as when they did it in EURO TRIP. It's a hallmark of the genre of buddy trip comedies, and they do it well enough.

I think it's the only decent comedy I've seen this year, and that's sad since this country needs it so much right now. Maybe this country always needs it.

DEAR HOLLYWOOD, MORE GOOD COMEDY, PLEASE!

Have You Seen DUNKIRK? BTW, the Batman Movies Sucked

Dunkirk. a magnum opus, was an incredible use of Christopher Nolan’s bag of tricks. If you like those tricks, you’ll love Dunkirk. Fun with time relativity, action set pieces that pose as works of art, heavy themes that tug at the edges of the narrative, and a refusal to show a handsome man’s face. Dunkirk shines a light on something most Americans are woefully ignorant about, so it’ll probably be history teachers’ new lazy-day film pick. Verisimilitude in motion, it makes everything seem so real it reminds me of idiots telling me how realistic his Batman movies were.

It’s the director’s finest film with hardly any missteps. It reminds me how much I dislike his Batman movies.

His turn at Batman was obviously a genius held captive by a cadre of fools demanding he finish a trilogy for trilogy’s sake.

“Can I please shoot a film on 35mm about a space crew stuck in black hole time warps?”
“Not until you give us another Batman movie!”
“Can I please make sweeping epic about the evacuation of Dunkirk shot on 70mm?”
“We’re going to need another Batman movie!”
“Bloody hell!”

So what did we get? A military Batman who blows things up with military weaponry and unilaterally extradites foreign nationals. Anyone who says they’re set in a more realistic world is delusional. It’s a militaristic world, and after 2001, that’s what film execs thought we wanted and would accept as “real.” One can see his obvious talent, but we already knew he was special with his previous films.

To me, Batman is either the smartest man alive and the world’s greatest detective, or campy and cool. Campy and cool is hard to pull off, but it’s worked before. The greatest detective, smart-guy stuff is harder, but there're tons of comic material ripe for adaptation. Anyway, he was never a super soldier, and only a shitty studio exec would ask him to be.

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Anyway, fuck those Batman movies despite their fleeting moments of brilliance. Yes, there are plenty of moments evidencing Nolan's genius; that doesn't make the movies great. Even an iconoclastic, career-defining performance by Heath Ledger does not a great film make.

I love Dunkirk, by the way. I think it's one of the best things I've seen in a theme I'm actually so bored with I almost didn't go. Do we need another movie about the second world war? Maybe not. But Christopher Nolan's voice is certainly worth listening to, and I think it'll go down as one of the better examples of the genre. 

The Big Sleep (1946) - Like Marcel Proust

This has always been one of my favorite scenes in a movie. I want my life to be this. Is it too much to want a Lauren Bacall? Also, I do not care how you say Marcel Proust--neither does Marcel Proust--but I say it the way she does because there's nothing sexier than a woman who knows who Marcel Proust is and compares you to him.

And do you know who wrote this screenplay? William Fucking Faulkner. There were co-writers, but who cares about them? I mean, William Faulkner!

I read the book in college. I chose the coolest Junior seminar: Post-war Detective Fiction. I took that class so seriously that when the professor cut books for time (this was actually not post-war), I still read and wrote about them. I even went to a tiny video rental spot on College Ave in Berkeley and asked them to create a noir section. I watched every single film they had, and there were far too many to be reasonable about it.

And if you're interested, there's this gem which was recorded in post, after they were married and the war had ended:

Have You Seen Interstellar?

I kind of think that Christopher Nolan did the Batman movies so he can con top-rate actors and studios into letting him make movies like Interstellar, and that makes me feel better about his Batman movies. Interstellar is pretty stellar.

I saw it on 35mm Wednesday night at the Galaxy at the Cannery in Las Vegas. It's the most luxurious cinema I've been to. Electric lounge seats with little tables attached and craft beer on tap makes it my new favorite. Plus, they announce in the beginning of the show that they will literally remove you without refund if you so much as look at your cell phone. And seats are assigned.

The grainy 35mm lends something to this project, I think. It's a dying medium, and the scratches and cigarette burns made me a little nostalgic. It also reminded me of 2001:Space Odyssey in a theater. The film deals a lot with the struggles against decay, reciting Dylan Thomas over and over again, so there's an elegant reach with the degradation of celluloid mirroring the dying of cellulose on planet Earth. And, the Dylan Thomas reading was welcome because it assumes you know a poem--gasp! Smart people who know a few poems by heart will save the world if it ever is saved.

Heavy themes aplenty in this one, but in particular I liked the notion of being stuck between wanting to be a pioneer/adventurer on the cutting edge, doing what you know you're best at and wanting to fulfill your duty to the greater whole of humanity. Being born a generation "too early or too late," Cooper (McConaughey) wishes he could do it all. If that's not a theme for Gen-X-ers I don't know what is.

The sci-fi premise touches some familiar bases that make it a tiny bit predictable, worm holes, time-bending, relativity, black holes, interdiminsional shifting about. But Christopher Nolan navigates them so adroitly, and the acting is so good, and the look and feel of the film is such that you don't mind you might have seen some of this before. And sci-fi suffers from that so frequently at this point, I kind of like that it reminded me of Warren Beatty's Reds in parts.

It's a little talky, but I like cerebral science fiction and wish J.J. Abrams never turned Star Trek into Buck Rogers. It's a little heavy-handed on philosophical themes like love, but that's refreshing too after the genre has been riddled by laser pistols and giant explosions, zip-zap.

Jonathan Nolan wrote this one, but that kind of goes without saying with Christopher Nolan movies. Why we aren't calling these films "Nolan brothers movies" is weird to me. He wrote Memento. If you liked Memento, and since you have eyeballs and are human, I'm assuming you did, you will like Interstellar.

And one more thing: can Jessica Chastain ever be bad in anything? It's as if she single-handedly saves some films. I think she's the most alluring woman in Hollywood, and I hope every filmmaker save Michael Bay starts begging her for even a cameo. Actually, she could probably even make a Michael Bay movie watchable.

Gone Girl

Gone Girl is a scary movie, and that's perfect for an October release. It keeps you on edge throughout, and it proves once again that David Fincher is a genius. He's probably the best director of our time, and there are far too many people out there who don't know his name or his body of work. That should change.

My reaction to the big reveal was infuriating. It's weird how people who say they love you can turn into horrible monsters, pragmatic destructors, who are willing to destroy themselves to hurt you. In the film, they give this villain a motive, but it isn't necessary. I knew a guy whose ex-wife broke into his house, stole his dog and everything he owned, and then emptied his bank account out of nowhere. No cheating, big fight, nothing.

Gone Girl is kind of an extreme reflection. It's the fun-house mirror of Hollywood so aptly angled by the prestidigital Fincher that makes it worthwhile. The Trent Reznor contribution shouldn't go unnoticed either. This director/scorer team-up is the best we've seen/heard since Tim Burton met Danny Elfman.

If you wait until it's out on DVD (a mistake) make sure you play it loud.