Predators

After the horror that was Damios’s post, I feel that we need something to repair our brains. You can start by listening to this.

Now to continue the therapy, by talking about something very unlike Ms. Glitter Demon. That is, “Predators”, by Robert Rodriguez. The film, released last month (Yes, I’m a bit behind the times. Shut up.) was made as a sequel/spiritual successor to the original “Predator” film, with the intention of taking it back to its roots.

I should warn you now, I have never seen the original Predator. A horrible crime, I know, especially when I’ve seen most of Ahnold’s other famous movies. I am familiar with most of the memes that spawned from the film, but apart from that, this review will be from the eyes of someone new to the franchise.

The premise of the film is simple. Six of the world’s best killers (and a doctor), ranging from Spetsnaz to Yakuza (why does spellcheck hate Spetsnaz, but not Yakuza?), are dropped onto an alien planet, where they are hunted as game by three aliens. No time is wasted in establishing this premise either; film starts, people are dropped out of the sky onto the planet, everyone gets together, and we get into the action.

“Predators” does exactly what it tells you it’s going to do, and no more: Provide 1 hour 47 minutes of human versus Predator action in an alien jungle, filled to the brim with action and testosterone. There’s nothing else going for it; the plot is simple, the characters are flat, and there’s no message the director is trying to give us. But that type of manly awesomeness is what the Predator franchise does best, and “Predators” is very, very good at it. There’s no mystery for the audience when we walk into the theater. We know exactly what’s going on when all the characters find themselves on the planet, even if they themselves don’t know. Even people like me, who haven’t seen the original films, are so familiar with the concept that we don’t need anything to be told to us. The film knows this, and works with it amazingly. It’s as though Transformers had just compressed everything with the human characters and their silly human stories into 10 minutes, and then had spent the rest of the film in a huge battle between the Autobots and Decepticons. It’s nothing but cheap action and suspense, but it’s good cheap action and suspense.

And here I need mention Hanzo. Hanzo, played by Louis Ozawa Changchien, is a Yakuza enforcer. He singlehandedly outbadasses every other character in the group. I now feel that Damios’s talks about how amazing the Yakuza are how now been justified, as from the moment he steps down onto the planet, in his clean, white suit, every action he does is filled with awesome. This is despite the fact that he has among the fewest speaking lines out of every other character (which really only adds to his badassness). And towards the end of the film, he succeeds in outdoing every other character from the Predator franchise by (spoilers ahead) fighting and defeating a Predator in single combat WITH A KATANA. Yes. A katana. No traps, no tricks, no camouflage, he stands out in a field, waits for the Predator to come, and then fights it. With a katana. I feel that has to be reemphasized.


“Predators” is nothing but action oriented fun; that’s all it succeeds at being, and that’s all it tries to be. There is absolutely no reason at all to go and see it unless you want over an hour and a half of violence and testosterone, but if that’s what you want to see, hell yeah go and watch it. And then bask in the manliness that flows outward from the screen, as you chop down a tree and eat a shattered glass and rusty nails sandwich.

And I never thought I would describe a movie with Adrien Brody in the lead role as manly….

The Death and Post-Mortum Rape of Music

I consider myself a fairly decent music reviewer. Yes, I have very particular musical tastes, and I make them well known. But even with genres I don't like, I can appreciate music for what it is. For example, I greatly dislike pop, but I can respect Lady Gaga for writing her own music rather than having it written by the Matrix like everyone else in mainstream music does nowadays. And I don't even mind all that much if someone else writes your music as long as everyone accepts the real intent behind it. I don't hold it against performers like Miranda Cosgrove, or even the dreaded Miley Ray Cyrus, because it's a big marketing tie-in by the television networks. This is fine. It's to be expected, it's a way to make money, and it's a way to have little kids get more involved in their programming. I don't take it seriously and I move on, like most people eventually do. I like to remind those who think real music is dying that fads come and go like they have since the music industry became huge. Let's face it folks, if you don't think that the 70's and 80's had shitty music, you're blinded by nostalgia. And that, too, is fine! I've embraced it! Look, my favorite incredibly shitty 80's synth pop song of all time is a living drug PSA! I can't recommend that song enough, for the record. So I always said what I've always said about mainstream music, that contrary to popular belief it's not getting any worse.

Today, I just ate my fucking words. I watched Ke$ha's latest music video.

To preface this as a form of self defense, I got to the video in a cracked.com article. I read it not knowing at all who Ke$ha was prior to reading the article. Never even heard the name. Read through it all in a manner of minutes. The complaints in the article about the lyrics and autotune were so par-for-the-course that it just kind of left me unimpressed. "WOW, you mean a pop star used gratuitous AUTOTUNE?! I NEVER THOUGHT I'D SEE THE DAY!" At the bottom of the article was a link to a music video of hers, so I figured I'd click it and give it a whirl. I expected it to sound exactly like Britney Spears, or Miranda Cosgrove, or Miley Cyrus, or Victoria Justice, or whoever else is big nowadays.

Please don't watch this. If you must watch, wait until the end of the article. I feel I am legally obligated to provide a link to the video I watched. But I can't stress this enough, don't click the video.

If you watched it against my warnings, then you might as well stop reading now because you know. You understand. You realize what's so...just...wrong about this...soundscape and you don't need another couple of paragraphs reminding you of the trauma you just witnessed. In fact, I'm begging you to turn away from this post and just go ahead and enter the shower to wash away the shame. Reading a whole blog post about what you just had to endure is comparable to forcing a rape victim to watch the video of her experience. And to those of you who wisely chose not to watch the video and read this paragraph, YES IT REALLY IS THAT BAD!

I really wanna single out the autotune for starters. I know earlier I said every pop star and their little brother uses it, but I never thought I'd see the day when someone's singing would be so bad that even fucking autotune couldn't mutilate it into something passable and not offensive to the human ear. I liken autotune to a miraculous device that can squeeze clean, drinkable water out of animal droppings. And yet somehow this would-be-diva's bullshit is so toxic and foul that no matter how hard you try and wring something worth enjoying out of it, you can't. I'm serious. I really can't even put into words what her voice sounds like, because no one on earth has ever failed this spectacularly at making music with a full multi-million dollar production team behind them, so I have no point of comparison. If robots could have sex, Ke$ha's voice on autotune would sound like one crying rape. In fact, that's almost a perfect way to describe her voice. Imagine an entire song being sung by the female version of Robocop. No, seriously! If you make the mistake of going back to listen, please tell me how "Female Robocop" is not the best way to describe her autotune. And I don't mean the first 10 seconds of the video that is distorted, I mean her actual...ick, I'm hesitant to call it singing...

Oh, and then there's the music itself. Remember that song little kids used to sing on the playground, the "There's a place in France" tune? Yep, she basically turned the beat from that into a fully-fledged song. That's not just lazy, that's spectacular. That's not simply "not trying," that's trying extra hard core at "not trying." It's like she thought to herself "Hey, how can I show the musical world that I couldn't give less of a fuck about it's integrity? Oh, I know! I'll do dirty children's tunes!" Is it seriously that fucking hard to have someone write a few new original riffs?

And don't even get me started on the fucking lyrics. "Dirty version of kids tunes" doesn't just cover sound. The Chorus? "There's a place downtown where the freaks all come around. It's a hole in the wall, it's a dirty free for all." And then, "There's a place I know if you're lookin' for a show...where they go hard core, and there's glitter on the floor!" Yep. Let that sink in. She must mean "hard core" in the porno sense of the term, because when I think of hard core shows, my mind goes back to the shows I went to that I considered "hard core." There wasn't glitter on the floor, there was blood, and lots of it. There weren't strobe lights, there were torches. And afterwards I didn't smell like sex, I smelled like cigarettes, vomit, and dead animals. Then again, I imagine the outcome of a Ke$ha concert would smell very similar to that if you're standing in the front row.

It will take three days of scrubbing to remove the smell of dead fish from your clothes.

Then there's the actual video. It starts off with a really boring clip of her running around, hopping over cars with her friends for no apparent reason...in fact, that part was kind of funny. I'm not sure why her friends walk to the car, jump ontop of it, walk across the hood, and then jump off and continue walking. It's the only car in the fucking parking lot, and yet they singled it out as their own personal area rug. Is it even theirs? If that bitch got anywhere near my car, much less stand on top of it for kicks, her sorry ass would be chained to the back getting dragged at 120 miles her hour while I'm blaring real fucking music through the speakers. But I digress. Stupid as that bit is, it's not really noteworthy. Nor is the gigantic free-for-all tag game that takes place in the entire upper lot of the hotel. Again, I'm forced to wonder what the point is. Aren't there other places to play tag, where you're less likely to piss off someone who is likely just trying to get some sleep? I'd write something about what I'd do to her if she woke me up in the middle of the night at a hotel with a game of tag, but I've already included a car dragging murder scene. I feel if I wrote a violent threat every time she did something stupid then this whole piece would just devolve into a gory murder fantasy.

Regardless, if you get past that and the part where they throw trashcans around (those horny rebels), you get to the pool scene. This is where everyone starts ripping off eachother's clothes in a haphazard fashion. Then, all of the sudden, tension! A young man and a young woman eye eachother from across the pool...no sorry, same side of the pool...with intense animal passion! Unable to restrain their physical urges, they run towards each other to meet, and as they leap into the air to embrace, they explode in a gigantic poof of pink and blue sand!...yes, you read correctly. They explode upon contact into tons of gender-color-coded sand. Yes, to YOU it may seem non-sensical, but to the mind of a lyrical genius like Ke$ha, whose entire song amounts to a naughty little kids version of a naughty little kid's song, the multi-colored explosion has deep symbological meaning! In this case...yeah. Sex. I get it, two people of opposite gender bump into eachother and you get sex. There have been stupider metaphors for orgasm before. I get that. So we'll just pan to the next scene, where for some unexplained reason Ke$ha is covered in pink and blue sand...wait. Wait. Didn't we just establish that the sand explosion was a metaphor for sexual climax? So if your face is covered in it then...what the Hell? Is that something to be proud of? Fuck, I'm starting to think I've put too much thought into this. Ok, maybe I was wrong. Maybe it's not a metaphor. Maybe she never figured out what a metaphor is. But if that's the case, we are only left with a literal interpretation of the previous scene,which would indicate that the sand is just what used to be that one guy and that one chick. So which is it Ke$ha? Is your face and hair caked with sexual fluids, or the crushed remains of your now dead friends?

And then it gets better! The sand is EVERYWHERE! It coats the walls of the pool, the floor, other people...Not only am I not sure why everyone is dancing in it and slathering themselves in it (a disturbing thought given I still don't know what the fuck that stuff is), but I don't know where the Hell it's coming from. From what I've seen, the only place it comes from is head on collisions between members of the opposite sex. Are people dying off screen to provide you with sex juice/decomposed bodies for your own amusement? Camera pans to Ke$ha, who know has less colored sand on her face for no explainable reason, and then to a disturbing scene where out of a pile of sand on the ground merges and reforms the two lovers from the first scene. Holy fuck! Is this necromancy or did the giant mixture of toxic splooge create some type of primordial ooze from which these invertebrate life-forms spawned? I don't know whether I'm watching the end of the world or the origin of life according to Ke$ha. Either way this shit is more fucked up than anything I've read in the Bible, and God ordered the Isrealites to smash the heads of Babylonian babies in with rocks. Which, according to the Transitive property, means watching Ke$ha is more fucked up than cracking open a baby's skull.

Course, I seem to be the only person disturbed by this Caligula-esque display of hotel pool orgy fun. Everyone is throwing the sand at everyone else, sprinkling it around themselves, at some point the sand becomes glitter which I don't even question...she dons on some random fur coat while everyone else is gorging themselves in the pool, only to immediately take it off. I'd make a snarky comment, but my head is still wrapped around the mystery sand. But then, suddenly, we are given an answer! A young man standing outside the pool reaches in and grabs a young girl who desperately wants to escape this Hellish carnal nightmare, when all of the sudden she rips his arm from him and blue sand pours out of the stump where his hand used to be! YES! YES, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE HAVE THE ANSWER! Ke$ha MYSTERY SAND IS PEOPLE! Rest easy that Ke$ha doesn't party in vats of semen, but in tubs filled with dead bodies! This discovery almost made me miss the part where a young man dancing gradually has his limbs randomly turn into sand...which is kind of disturbing. I guess he tore his own hands off in some drug-fueled revelry, but whatever!

Though, this does leave the question of what the glitter was. If dead bodies made the sand, what made the glitter? Well, Ke$ha is never one to leave her...audience...unsatisfied, so she did indeed decide to bare all and show us just what the source of her special glitter is. She reaches into her chest to a zipper...a zipper attached to her flesh, which she begins to unzip down. And as she does, glitter pours out of her chest wound, and her arms gradually dissolve away into even more glitter. But...but...I thought dead human bodies made sand? Or...wait...are you trying to tell me that Ke$ha isn't HUMAN? Yes! That must be it! It all makes sense now! So the glitter is the remains of Ke$ha's rapidly deteriorating non-human body! The same glitter that she insisted covered the floor of all her hard core shows...holy fuck, she was describing her own decaying body!

But why, why bathe in the dead bodies of humans? It's a very rare practice that wasn't often done even as far back as history. The only time I can specifically think of is the great Countess Elizabeth Bathory who would bathe in the blood of virgins to stop her body from aging. And that doesn't make sense within the context of that legend. For one thing, the people in that pool definitely weren't virgins, as they were kind of in a gigantic orgy, and for another Ke$ha still dissipated away...wait. No. No. It all makes sense. She dissipated because they all lost their virgin status in the pool! Ke$ha is Elizabeth Bathory! Then...at the beginning...that wasn't a game of tag they were playing at all! THEY WERE KNOCKING ON THE DOORS OF THE ABANDONED HOTEL IN A DESPERATE SEARCH FOR HELP AGAINST ELIZABETH BATHORY! And so they must have resigned themselves to their fate at the end and decided to deny her her feast and destroy her once and for all by engaging in a massive orgy to deny her sustenance! IT ALL MAKES SENSE! Ke$ha IS COUNTESS BATHORY, AND SHE IS NO MORE! Countess Bathory is dead! Long live Countess Bathory!

Or maybe I'm giving her too much credit. Maybe, just maybe, she's a shitty and talentless pop star who has an unhealthy and rather childish obsession with glitter and bright colors.

Yeah. I'll go with that.

Anywho, I realize a lot of this sounded like a bad attempt at humor, and my description of the actual music segued into a ridiculous story about Ke$ha being a many times over dead Hungarian Countess. But I wasn't trying to sound funny. It's really just awful. It was mostly my bitterness pouring out over how little I like her, because it's like no one even tried to make this sound good, and yet it's selling like fucking hot cakes. I truly do not understand anything about her fame and how she came to be who and what she is. If you don't believe me and you're fine with the distinct possibility of never being able to enjoy music ever again, by all means go back up to the top and try out the video. You'll totally regret it.

China Beats Japanese Economy, and Thoughts On New York Mosque

So, for starters there's this bit of important news. A lot of their economic strength, according to the article, comes from how much debt the U.S. owes to them. The nice thing is that they've come into all of this purchasing power now while they still have a lot of room to develop. That money can go towards infrastructure, urban development, building schools, so on and so forth. Not bad for a country with "a fifth of the world’s population and insufficient resources." Glad to see China is progressing well.

And then there's this week's non-issue, the Mosque at Ground Zero. I call it a non-issue because in my mind there doesn't seem to be a decent reason for this to be legally questionable. Government can't just opt not to allow a Mosque to be built there for purely religious reasons. You see, the First Amendment's "Freedom of Religion" aspects come with two distinct clauses, the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause.

Establishment Clause: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"
Free Exercise Clause: "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"

If the government steps in and prohibits the building of this Mosque, then it is in violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by definition. Congress would make a law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. As a member of the smallest and most hated religious minority in America (and perhaps even the world), I'm pretty sensitive about this sort of thing. I'm definitely not pleased.

That being said, I'm confused as to how someone thought building a Mosque next to Ground Zero would be a good idea. Not that I believe such a bigoted opinion is right, as I feel that it isn't fair to stereotype Muslims as terrorists and suicide bombers. I may be harsh about the Middle East and Islam given the sheer volume of terrorist organizations they've got listed (see for yourself), but that in no way speaks for the majority. Yes, I've vocally stated that I'm very upset the moderate elements of Islam don't do more to combat the violent extremist image. That's still no excuse for typecasting Muslims.

Now that that's out of the way, I do feel it's only fair to point out that when grieving, people aren't exactly the most "rational." People are upset about the ordeal. So I really have to wonder about the mindset of the group that wanted to erect an Islamic building in that location. Maybe they had a permit to build there prior to 9/11, and in that case then I'd be very sorry that the terrorist hijackers have made things much more difficult on them than need be. Defending the building of that Mosque would be a matter of protecting finances as well as being right, which is twice the reason to do so. But if not, then I'd figure someone in the community had to think "Gee, there might be some backlash for this decision. Maybe some left over anger and resentment." Which makes it almost seem like trolling. Not that they wouldn't be in the right, mind you. They would still completely deserve the place like everyone else. I'm just jaded and cynical, so this comes off as suspicious in my mind. Then again, I've not really met the leaders of the Islamic community that want the Mosque built, so I can't speak for their character. At the end of the day, it's all speculation, and irrelevant speculation at that. Point is, whether you're talking about rightness in the legal sense or in the not-being-a-bigot sense, there doesn't stand much of a reason not to let the Mosque be built.

Twitter Experiment Pt. II

So, after fidgeting about and realizing I'm not very tech savy, or social, I realized that I might not be getting the full Twitter experience. So I was thinking that maybe I could invite some of you, my readers, to join this little Twitter experiment with me. To that end, I invite anyone and everyone who may be interested to create a Twitter account and try it out for a month or so with me. At the end of the month (or whenever everyone involved agrees we've figured out pretty well how Twitter works individually), everyone writes a review write up which will get posted as part of a super mega collaborative effort on the Extremists.

Feel free to join in and leave your Twitter URL here in the comments section and I'll add. Have fun, all!

Twitter Experiment

So I've decided to give Twitter a shot. You might have caught one of my previous rants about how much I dislike Twitter's interface and how hostile it is to users, but in all fairness I haven't used it since like 2006. I figure one more attempt won't hurt any.

Part of the reason I'm doing this is because of how I use my FB anyways. I'm not much into pictures, picture comments, and the likes. For the most part I just post interesting and random shit I find throughout the day. If there's anything I feel like exploring, I go into a bit more detail with the Well Intentioned Extremists. So I was basically using my FB for what Twitter is supposed to be designed for. Who knows, if this works out my Facebook might fall to the wayside. I was never a big fan anyways. I tried to delete it twice, but others insisted I keep it. Omega whined about how difficult it would be to keep track of me. Though I'm flattered, for the record. I feel so loved!

The plan for right now is to try it out for a month or something and then write a bit about the experience. Maybe this time I'll figure out how Twitter works better. Maybe I'll release it was as unpleasant, confusing, and unnecessary as I first thought. But hey, exploration is always a good thing. You'll never know until you try.

So anywho, if you have a Twitter, feel free to "follow" me or whatever. I'll do the same.

http://twitter.com/FraterOphionoi

(I have way too many aliases)

Another Hero

Some of you may have heard of Steven Slater, a Jet Blue flight attendant who did what everyone who has worked in the service industry has always wanted to do. If you haven't, I'll let Colbert explain.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/343699/august-10-2010/alpha-dog-of-the-week---steven-slater

Steven Slater, for your service to employed Americans everywhere, I salute you!

Super Villains! But Of Course!

Yes, that's right, someone decided that now that there's a whole bunch of super heroes out there, we need some SUPER VILLAINS! That's right, a super villain page built as a response to the World Superhero Registry. With super villains.

Kill me now, please.