My man Patton Oswalt, just spazzes out here and drops an eight minute long nerd freestyle about the new Star Wars movie on Parks and Rec. This should immediately be remixed with a series of Funkmaster Flex bomb drops and explosions. Shit is pure hot fire, if you’re really about that ComicCon life. For dudes that fuck around on that DragonCon wave, this rant is the equivalent of J.R Writer’s epic 9 minute freestyle from the early 2000s. Dude goes in real deep on the nerd references and fantastical theories, pitching a movie that ties together Star Wars, Avengers, and Clash of the Titans. I’d watch it. Honestly, if you had sex in high school, don’t even fuck around and watch this shit. I know everyone thinks they’re nerds these days, but your boy Oswalt is on some Rom, The Space Knight level arcana here. Strictly for live men, not for freshman.
You can look at the people in the crowd’s faces and see all of them glaze over. Lady with the red hair, in the front row really bringing that bored girlfriend realness. Try and explain the plot of Primer to your girl, know that face all too well.
* Not for nothing, but homeboy talks about the X-Men’s Quinjet, but, the X-Men have a blackbird. -1 points. But my man drops a Moon KNight reference, so that evens shit out.
Yooooo! Christopher Nolan you crazy for this one my dude. The new trailer for Man of Steel aka Superman 6, looks fucking insane. Previous trailers for the movie focused on Superman with the ill beard looking really pensive, strong Terrence Malick Tree of Life vibes. It looked like a “real” movie, but not like a Superman movie. We barely saw dude fly. This trailer however mixes the pathos with Superman blowing shit up. I’m totally in. Opening day. Wild nerd shit.
A lot of movie heads were worried about a Zack Snyder directed, Christopher Nolan produced Superman. What the hell would that look like.? Nolan is known for the gravitas of his blockbuster movies, while to the movie while Snyder is known for having a “15 year old who’s really good at CGI” aesthetic. Could’ve easily been a clusterfuck. Judging by this trailer though, these two dudes are two tastes that taste great together. Cinematically.
There’s a moment in Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion where I realized I was in for some shit. A fully clothed Tom Cruise (Cocktail) is pulled into a swimming pool by a naked woman. They slowly circle each other, staring into each other’s eyes like horny sharks. Then Cruise takes off his clingy wet t-shirt and just as the shirt gets over his head the BRAAAAAAHM sound from Inception cues in like a hammer striking an anvil. You know the sound, the one that’s been criminally overused in trailers since 2010, which is supposed to drum up intensity. This time it’s to signify that Tom Cruise is about to get his fuck on.
The rest of the film is just as shallow and silly, as well as brazenly derivative of much better sci-fi films, including Moon, Wall-E, and Total Recall. Even echoes of the Bruce Dern eco-power film Silent Running are present. But while those films have strong story lines, Oblivion streamlines the hell out of its own, resulting in a pretentious homage that lacks any identity of its own. The film fails to transcend the sci-fi genre in any way, making for one disappointing experience.
Cruise plays Jack Harper (like Jack Reacher, but different), a working-class schlub who fixes drones that protect machinery extracting vital resources from a devastated Earth. During a lazily delivered opening narration, Jack explains how aliens have knocked our moon out of orbit, triggering tsunamis and earthquakes. While earthlings were dealing with these disasters, the aliens launched a full-scale invasion. We beat them off with nuclear weapons, scorching the planet in the process.
Jack lives with his navigator/lover Victoria (Andre Riseborough) in a slick-looking “skytower.” The house resembles a giant Apple product and rests above the clouds. Victoria is all business and just wants to get their mission the hell over with so they can retire to a lunar colony. But Jack likes going to Earth, where he’s secretly set up a getaway cabin complete with a record collection and basketball hoop. A nice, subtle touch is his found pair of aviator sunglasses – harkening back to Maverick. The mission is running smoothly until a mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko) starts haunting his dreams. Then when she shows up in reality, everything Jack believed about his “mission” is shot down.
The rest of the film is a lot of explosions, drone fights, and Tom Cruise running. Fact: it’s in his contract that he gets to run at least five miles over the course of a film. Morgan Freeman (Dolphin Tale) plays the leader of an underground gang of rebels on Earth, but his character is terribly underwritten. After his grand appearance, he barely shows up again until the finale. That’s a big problem with this film: it presents all these weighty ideas and characters, then abandons them for more action. Even when the big “twist” is revealed, it seems like Kosinski got tired of that direction while writing the script and moved onto something else.
When there isn’t action going on, characters deliver lengthy bits of exposition. As straightforward and predictable as the plot is, the characters spell out every single plot element and emotion that’s going on. The script shows a real lack of confidence in the audience and in Kosinski as a writer. What the writer/director does do well are the visuals. Oblivion is as dazzling as a sci-fi film can get. He seamlessly mixes the gorgeous vistas of Iceland with well-constructed CGI to create a genuinely organic looking world. The man knows how to stage an action scene too and has a good sense of control during chaotic set pieces.
Besides Cruise, all of the characters are filler. Freeman is pushed aside and the women blandly deliver their lines so Cruise can kick more ass. Stuntwoman extraordinaire Zoe Bell (Death Proof) makes an appearance as part of the rebels and I was like “Oh hey, it’s Zoe Bell.” They don’t do anything with her though. Cruise feels totally empty throughout the film. I’ve always liked him as an actor, but this has got to be one of his laziest performances ever. His narration is reminiscent of Harrison Ford’s infamous voiceover in the original cut of Blade Runner. Yes, it’s that drab. These kind of sluggish performances give the audience nothing to invest in and painfully drags the movie down.
It would’ve been cool if it turned out that Jack was an actual clone of Maverick from Top Gun. There’s the nod to the film with the aviator glasses and Jack is a skilled pilot, so all of the ingredients are there for a mind-melting Top Gun sci-fi crossover! I would’ve liked that movie better.
Oblivion isn’t a bad movie, just highly disappointing. The visuals and action bits are spectacular and Kosinski shows tremendous talent in those realms. There’s no emotion behind the spectacle though and watching it just reminds you of superior films you’d rather be sitting through. Abort this mission until home video release!
Damn, this documentary Sirius really got me out here thinking that maybe aliens are real. Lil dudes that came from outer space in crazy ships, to make wild shadowy deals with the Illuminati. Right about now, I’m real heavy on my Fox Mulder shit.
Normally when we think about alien conspiracies, we think lil dudes came and the government just didn’t tell us. If you wanna get real far out, you assume they’re from the future. If you want to get real sexy, you argue they’re here to probe heads in the butt and jerk dudes off in their spaceships, because aliens use cum as currency. Obviously. Sirius presents the idea that aliens have visited Earth, but, the government covered it up so they could exploit alien technology. Dudes in this video are hard at work to figure out shit like antigravity, zero point energy, and room temperature superconductors; because aliens already did it, but now the Illuminati is keeping it from us. Fascinating. Basically, dudes are trying to tell us that if they’re successful we’ll have flying cars, the Illuminati will be defeated, and infinite energy will be a reality. If that’s not reason enough to give money to these goofy, crazy bastards I don’t know what is.
Neill Blomkamp, director of District 9 and extraterrestrial enthusiast, has a new flick coming out called Elysium. It’s about a future world where wild rich people live on a space station in idyllic conditions, while everyone else slowly dies on shitty, polluted Earth. Matt Damon stars as an everyman with a terminal condition, that could be cured, if only he could get to Elysium. Drama ensues. Robots get decapitated, spaceships crash. Matt Damon get’s some sort of Iron Man suit and blows everything up. Jodie Foster looks mad worried, one dude has a laser whip. I’m sold.
Blomkamp continues the grand tradition of science fiction movies injecting social commentary into tales of aliens, robots, and video game physics; because sometimes you need knowledge jewels wrapped in Halo plotlines. Hints of Total Recall and H.G Wells’ The Time Machine in this one. Shoutout to Alien Nation.
If you ever wondered what WorldstarHipHop would look like in the Star Wars universe, this video is your new favorite thing. Watch as a baby gets ahold of a lightsaber and proceeds to menace his entire family. Limbs are removed, baby cries, and domestic havoc slowly unfolds before your eyes. It’s like the best of Baby’s Day Out and Empire Strikes Back, but with a lil bit of child negligence sprinkled on top. I wonder, if Child Protective Services falls under the prevue of The Empire, or if that’s more of a local government issue? Surely, a messageboard somewhere, holds the answer to this and other asinine Star Wars questions.
Videos like this make a strong argument for lightsaber control laws. Everybody says they need a lightsaber in the house in case robbers attack, or some Sith roll up and try to start shit. In most cases you end up merking yourself with the shit, or worse yet, your kids get into it. It’s really time that motherfuckers let go of these wild west attitudes and pass laws regulating the ownership of lethal, fictitious weapons. “Lightsabers don’t kill people, people kill people” is, and always has been, a bullshit argument.
Here to answer a question your lil brother is bound to ask you after his third grade science class take a trip to the planetarium, here’s science. In this video, we get the extended answer to the question “what would happen if the sun disappeared?” The short answer is, we’d have an ill party for about a week and then shit would get real fucked up real fast and everyone would die, cold, pointless deaths. Don’t tell your kid brother that though, that’s the type of shit that ruins kids’ entire lives and turns them into doomsday preppers.
Check out the above video to see ole science bro with the glasses explain how shit will get increasingly shitty without a sun. At the end some small microbes and shit will survive and allow life to begin again on Earth when we eventually run into another life sustaining star. Good news if you can hold out in an underground bunker for a billion years or so…
Chalk this one up to crazy ideas only twelve year olds and psychotics have, but some dude has finally made a “taser sword”. A taser sword—as demonstrated by dude in this clip—is two Klingon looking swords bolted together with a wild electrical charge running through it, for the simultaneous stabbing and electrocuting. A sadist’s wettest dream come true.
Really feeling like this has to come from a dude that’s either really worried about the zombie apocalypse or a doomsday prepper. One of those cats that’s real upset about 2nd Amendment rights and figured he could juke the system by making some sci fi, post apocalyptic weaponry the government hasn’t had a chance to legislate yet. I’m glad guys like this are around, sometimes it takes insane motherfuckers in their basement welding together swords to really push the arts forward.
So apparently alternate universes do, in fact, exist. In a story that sounds straight out of a Philip K. Dick novel, quantum physicists at the University of California have managed to make a small metal paddle both vibrate and stand still, at the same time, somehow. Basically, by observing and measuring any object you are giving it a fixed location in time and space, when in fact everything is constantly vibrating, which means your measurement is inherently arbitrary, and what you’re seeing is actually just one dimension of ‘reality’. So much for believing in things!
What are the ramifications of this? Can we time travel? Have we already? How does Future factor into this? This article also reinforces my belief that, much like weather channels have ‘feels like’ temperature, we need a way to calculate ‘feels like’ time to account for all this relativistic bullshit. Lots of questions, very few answers, and my liberal arts education leaves me qualified to provide exactly zero of them. Maybe in another dimension I’m a quantum physicist. Until then, I, for one, welcome our new time-travelling overlords. Please don’t make it so I was never born. Thanks.
To me this Ep just makes sense. Ethelwulf is one of the hottest names in the underground right now and Eric Dingus has been on fire lately with collaboration tapes with an array of dope rappers. On this one Eric stays in his lane with ethereal, spaced out bangers and Ethel dropping straight fire on every track. This Ep had to be inspired by anime, lsd, and tons of weed smoke because that is all I wanna do when I listen to this.
We were in Miami last weekend and this was basically the soundtrack for the trip. The whole tape is solid and is the perfect music to gaze out the window and just zone out. All I am going to say about the individual tracks is, wait til you listen to the hook on “Dengen” and on “Tamashi” when he says “I got to hit the sto’ fo’ another swisher HO” and tell me you don’t vibe to that, FOREAAAAL. Also check out Eric’s solo instrumental tapes you can find on his bandcamp and be on the lookout to see Ethelwulf everywhere in the blogosphere this year!. 2013 is definitely the year of BRK.
