NP: Live -- Beauty of Grey (Album version)
Although I'm fighting a serious cold/flu-like thing, I have just finished the first draft of Chapter 7. That means that, after a dinner break and some serious FIFA 2006 playing, I will start editing it and should make my Tuesday deadline. That's really cool. As I end, though, I have some random thoughts that need to be addressed.
1. Why do some bands make it to levels well beyond their talent, and others crap out before their time? Someone should really do a study on the listening habits of American teenagers as they get older, because some of the bands that we listened to growing up should still be around, especially compared to the trash that is coming out now. Why did Live peter out after their fifth album (yes, they produced another one but it was a junky effort to sound like today's bands) but Scott Stapp continues to have a record contract? Collective Soul's music is better than anything Creed ever dreamed about doing....yet the Creed guys still produce garbage as Alterbridge while Collective Soul is reduced to putting out concert albums on the new "Instant Live" label. Live and CS opened Woodstock II and now they are three steps away from bagging groceries at the Kroger. Hell, CS already played Funfest, if that tells you anything. This is a travesty I tell you. There is just no accountig for taste.
2. Why are Americans so opposed to soccer? The fourth round of the FA cup was this weekend. That is the tourney where the little clubs and the big teams play against each other on the road to the finals at Wembley. This is so much drama, yet Americans just don't care, nor will they ever emulate anything like it in our sporting world. Such a travesty.
3. What happened to Hollywood? The list of movies out right now absolutely suck. Underworld 2 was an utter waste of time. The director of the Hulk now has a movie about gay cowboys. Hollywood is now more about causes than providing good entertainment. I miss the days when celebrities would only talk about political causes that they had a direct hand in, such as censorship or entertainment issues, and not just issue these blanket statements about the political situation.
Well, my rambling isn't going anywhere fast, so I'll stop and spare you.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Thoughts at the End of the Task
3 comments:
The music thing, well, it's hit or miss in terms of bands going on and on. At times its good that some bands move on and don't risk ruining their good name with crap. Like Soundgarden, which in a perfect world would have made fifteen more albums and they would have all rocked the planets out of alignment. But in this world at least half of those albums would be total shit that would risk making the rest of their catalog look bad in retrospect. The last Beastie Boys album was six years in the making and it was boring. The new Bloodhound Gang album took as long and it awful. U2 hasn't made a good album since who knows when. Of all the bands from my youth that are still working, I think Pearl Jam and the Chili Peppers are about the only ones that aren't either recycling old crap or shitting upon the albums they made that once ruled the world.
Soccer sucks. It's a simple explanation. But you trust your government to do whatever it takes to protect you from swarthy brown people yet not to tax you fairly, so whatever.
Did you say that someone was trying to make gays look like actual human beings and caracaturized monsters? Why would they do that? Next thing you know some filthy Jew will make a movie that shows terr-ists in a sympathetic light and we can't have people thinking that maybe the world isn't black and white. Otherwise how will the religious hucksters get the money to pay for those gold plated temples to con-artistry the rubes call "churches" and the political theives get the tax money to build the war machine? Someone oughta pass a law, by gawd.
I haven't seen Brokeback and most likely I won't, but who gives a fuck about it? If social conservatives weren't so goddamned terrified of gays and their sweaty mansex that movie wouldn't have been a fart in a duststorm. But "oh god no they're having the buttsex so sweet Jeebus lets act like cretinous neanderthals and whine about it" and give it all sorts of free publicity and then a bunch of people go see it to find out what the fuss is all about so it makes a shitload of money and hey! That's what Hollywood has always been about, making money off of idiots. Or you could do what I do and just ignore it.
I remember a time when the social commentaries in movies were about Negroes stealing our white women and the Klan being an honorable organization and smoking marijuana would make you kill people. Well, I don't actually remember that time because it was over 70 years ago and I'm only 26, but if you're looking for mindless entertainment MTV will be happy to serve you. Or you can watch soccer. Me, I'll fire up NCAA Football 2006 on the Gamecube and take solace in the fact that the most offensive thing I might see in a movie is gay mansex and not a propaganda film for the Klan.
"Brokebak Mountain" is just as big an exploitation film as "Reefer Madness," "Shaft" and "I Spit On Your Grave" ever were.
I'm not arguing with the idea that Brokeback is an exploitation flick, because as I said, I'd imagine that the fact that it contains a hot button issue giving it plenty of water cooler talk potential and thus free publicity had a lot to do with it getting the green light. That said, I don't think this is so much a political statement as a cash grab, but most of the attacks on it enter the sociopolitical realm so there's a lot of room to defend it from that perspective.
You could also make the argument that every year Hollywood makes countless love stories for heterosexual people, so what's the big deal with throwing a bone (PUN!) to gay guys? And I have a hard time imagining a lesbian love story (PUN!) getting this much shit, but that's a whole other discussion.
If it's a bad story with bad acting and is generally a bad movie then sure, it's all hot button issue. But there are a lot of people saying that as far as movies go, it's not bad. I don't know because I'll never watch the motherfucker.
And I'm not really interested in a pretentious "are movies art/what is art" discussion to defend the idea that art usually contains a message of sort and all that bullshit, but the movie is based on a short story or series of short stories and I'll give literature the benefit of the doubt.
On that point, complaining about the sociopolitical message of artwork is the right of the viewer but there's not a lot of substance to the original complaint because saying "Hollywood is now more about causes than providing good entertainment" is a blanket statement that most likely has no basis in fact and the entire point was basically that gays make Ron feel icky and that they shouldn't make movies about them. Yeah, I read between the lines there because the other example of Hollywood's politcal activism was Underworld 2 and somehow I don't think a Kate Beckinsale vehicle about supernatural something or other involves much political activism unless the vampires were voting Republican. In which case it's a documentary and all bets are off.
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