After the incredible rendition of the National Anthem at this past Super Bowl, I was curious to see/listen to Lady Gaga’s tribute to David Bowie at yesterday’s Grammys.
The current music scene, to me anyway, is akin to watching a foreign movie without subtitles…For the most part I don’t understand it at all. (Get off my lawn!!)
After the show was nearly over I headed to YouTube and found the Lady Gaga tribute in its entirety (this morning, however, I’m seeing the tribute has been washed from YouTube and, instead, we get plenty of reviews of it).
My thoughts on what I saw?
I didn’t like it much. In fact, I shut it off after a couple of minutes.
Don’t get me wrong, I know Lady Gaga put a great deal of effort into the production and she certainly tried hard to get as many of Mr. Bowie’s “hits” presented in bit sized fashion as quickly as she could. It is also obvious she has a great deal of admiration for Mr. Bowie. I’ve always felt that she, and Madonna for that matter, are among the artists who most directly copied/adapted David Bowie’s evolution of style into their acts. Though they may have copied Mr. Bowie in that respect, they also brought powerful songwriting/singing skills to the mix which allowed them to not just copy Mr. Bowie’s style but also find their own and soar in their own directions.
Having said that, the Lady Gaga tribute was…it was cheesy.
That word screamed to my mind as I watched all I could handle before turning it off after a minute or two. Despite the great makeup and clothing and computer graphics what you had was basically a “best of” version of David Bowie’s hits/styles and it felt too curt and rather…depressing.
By giving us small samples of his songs while changing clothing every few seconds to mimic some Bowie style, it felt like we were getting some Vegas version of Mr. Bowie’s career. It was not unlike seeing Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees do The Beatles in the dreadful Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band movie.
Please understand, I’m not a Lady Gaga “hater”. I’ve heard some of her popular songs on the radio and, frankly, like them for the most part even though I’m hardly into today’s music “scene”. I also recall hearing her on Howard Stern a while back, singing a couple of her songs with only her piano to accompany her and was blown away by how good she sounded. Hell, as I mentioned above, I absolutely loved her National Anthem rendition.
As anyone who’s read this blog should know, I’m absolutely fascinated with the concept of self-driving vehicles. I firmly believe that they are coming and while people may express some skepticism or hesitancy toward them, in the end this will be the future of cars/trucks.
In fact, I further believe people will no longer actually own a car, that we will travel to work or on vacation by “renting” a car via an app on our cellphone (or whatever equivalent service we use). This self-driving vehicle will pick us up and take us to our destination and when we need to return home we call up another such vehicle and it takes us back.
All the while, we’ll be in the car reading our paper or playing on our tablet/smartphone.
Anyway, Elon Musk, head of Tesla, offers a great interview for Fortune magazine regarding the future of self-driving cars. He offers his predictions regarding when Tesla cars will be self-driving…
The NBA is currently on its mid-season All-Star Break and one of the events it features is a “Celebrity” Basketball match. In the match, Arcade Fire’s singer Win Butler’s team won and in the interview following the win, Mr. Butler, who is Canadian, tried to talk about Canada’s Heath Care system and how in this election year -I can only imagine he was heading in this direction- people should educate themselves on the many positives of this system considering many of the Republican candidates have already promised to dismantle the Obamacare system.
I say I can only imagine that’s where he was going because Sage Steele, the lady interviewing Mr. Butler, cut him off as if he were in the middle of yelling out a string of obscenities…
It’s been pointed out that Ms. Steel is a registered Republican and has in the past tweeted/talked negatively about Obamacare, which certainly explains her so sudden cutting off of Mr. Butler all the more.
Others might argue why, in an event meant to entertain, should Mr. Butler be given time to talk about something political and which doesn’t have all that much to do with Basketball.
To which I would say: How many times have you seen “entertainment” events and had the athletes interviewed after the fact mention God or Jesus or some charity they’re working for? These things, too, often have little or nothing to do with the game.
Even if Mr. Butler had said something I might find offensive -say, “Elect Donald Trump…he isn’t as batshit crazy as he appears!”- I would have shaken my head and probably thought a little less of Mr. Butler as a person but it wouldn’t have changed my opinion of his music or made me bemoan the fact that he won this All-Star Basketball game. Further, had the interviewer cut him off just as he started as Ms. Steel did, I’m thinking I would have been just as offended as I was with Ms. Steel’s actions here.
To Mr. Butler’s credit, he acted like your stereotypical Canadian and didn’t call out Ms. Steel for her boorish behavior.
Jeeze, give the guy a few seconds to say what he wants and don’t inject yourself into things so quickly and wag your finger at the man you’re interviewing (“But we’re talking about celebrity basketball and not politics”), Ms. Steel.
If he isn’t cursing or acting like a complete jerk, there is no reason to make yourself look like one.
I have to say, as I was reading the article I kept thinking this was simply some kind of ruse, that the man who had amnesia about his past just couldn’t have had it, that he was fleeing some kind of familiar relationship he no longer wanted any part of and/or had a second “life” with someone else he preferred.
It reminded me of one of the segments of a Zucker/Abrahams’ forgotten comedy creation, Our Planet Tonight (1987), which itself was a parody of the 20/20, 60 Minutes, etc. news shows. In it we have a report on how these two twin brothers were separated at birth and yet live such extraordinarily similar lives while -supposedly unknowingly- also lived in the very same town and in very close proximity to each other.
The upshot of the skit/pseudo-news report (if you haven’t clicked above to see it, you should!) was that there were no twin brothers and the man they were following was in actuality a bigamist with two different wives/lives who, now that he was being investigated for this show, had to pretend mightily he and his “other” were twins. The hosts of the news show hilariously miss all the evidence right in front of their face that points to the fact that these men are one and the same, including how they use the “same type of car” or “work in the same place” yet how, in the reporter’s words, hadn’t once crossed each other’s path!
Toward the end of the episode, the reporter wanted to bring the “twins” together to meet and it was hilarious how “each” twin stated that they didn’t want to meet just yet that they had to digest this information and didn’t want to traumatize the other.
Hilarious stuff and, yes, I was thinking of exactly that when I started reading the above article. I suppose that’s the cynic in me.
Anyway, my cynicism was quickly banished when I found out the man who had this extended amnesia is mentally disabled and has an intellectual development of a 12 year old. While I would be suspicious if a perfectly “normal” man made such a wild claim, it makes more sense in this case that this developmentally disabled individual wouldn’t have the capacity or desire to make such a thing up.
Which makes the story, and the fact that this man and his family will finally be getting together, nothing less than heartwarming.
Stop me if you heard this before: I found out about Sicario shortly before its release and was eager to see it in theaters but couldn’t find the time until–
What’s that?
Oh. Ok, moving right along…
So I finally got to see Sicario via the magic of home video. I was very eager to do so and heard plenty of good things about the film. In fact, as of this writing it has an astonishing 93% positive among critics and an equally impressive 86% positive among audiences according to Rotten Tomatoes.
While watching the film, I was impressed with many things, from Emily Blunt’s Kate Macer (the film’s protagonist), Benecio Del Toro’s mysterious -and deadly- Alejandro, and Josh Brolin’s Matt Graver, a good ol’ boy spook.
I was engaged with the film but as it played out and, especially when it reached the end, I found myself curiously unimpressed with the totality of the venture despite so many reasons to recommend it.
To begin there are at least four action/suspense set pieces within Sicario that are nothing short of terrific. One occurs at the beginning of the movie (and quite a bit of it can be seen in the trailer below), a second at a border crossing, a third involving a tunnel chase eventually leading to a high level drug lord, and the fourth at the movie’s end.
Really great stuff. And yet…
As good as those elements were and as I said above, when all was said and done I felt the movie could have been so much better.
So I wondered what was it that made the film not quite work for me.
I think a part of the problem was the use of such familiar and well-established actors in so many roles. In some ways their appearances (and I’m not even mentioning the likes of Jeffrey Donovan, Victor Garber, and Jon Bernthal) proved somewhat distracting and took me away from viewing this film as “real”. The established actors in the lead roles, too, had me anticipating the film would never get too terribly “dark”. Sometimes established actors are loathe to go too far out of a certain comfort zone.
Perhaps I’m not explaining myself very clearly so I’ll use the following example:
A number of years ago I saw the Swedish film Insomnia (originally released in 1997). At the time I didn’t recognize any of the actors, though since the movie’s release Stellan Skarsgard has made inroads in American films and is now a more familiar face.
The film, which involved a corrupt police officer that either accidentally or very much on purpose killed his partner while lost in a fog and on the hunt for a serial killer. Our protagonist’s partner’s death was not insignificant: The partner, it was revealed, was about to turn our protagonist in to the Police Internal Review Board because of the many shady and illegal things he had done. After his partner’s killing, the film follows our could be/might be evil cop as he continues his hunt for the serial killer. He does this while facing the inevitable Internal Review Board hammer that’s about to come down, the serial killer whose victims keep popping up, and the Northern town they’re in. In that town and during this time of the year a day lasts weeks and the sun shines near constantly and our increasingly fragile lead cannot get any sleep.
As I watched Insomnia, I didn’t know where it was going or whether our protagonist was truly evil or regretted his action(s) or some wild combination of the two. This great unknowing added to the movie’s tension and made us wonder just where we were going.
Five years later and in 2002 director Christopher Nolan remade Insomnia. In the remake, he cast Al Pacino as the protagonist and Robin Williams as the serial killer. Though all the elements of the originally movie were used and the American film version was an almost scene for scene remake, lost in the translation was all that delightful tension of not knowing what our protagonist was up to.
Because we had Al Pacino in the lead, I somehow knew he would eventually be shown as rising above and, if not excusing, at least making amends for his many sins. I knew this almost instinctually from the very moment we first saw Al Pacino on the screen and therefore much of the original film’s tension was effectively gone.
With Sicario’s use of familiar, established actors, I kinda/sorta knew the film would not get too dark and, sure enough, it never did. Had the film used less well known/established actors, I suspect we would have a different dynamic and audiences would wonder what would happen when Alejandro and Kate finally confronted each other…instead of knowing there was simply no chance the director and actors involved would stray too far down a very dark hole.
I know it sounds like I’m blaming the actors for the film’s failing to totally turn me on and, further, it comes across as a disservice considering they played their roles quite well. Emily Blunt was very good in the role of an innocent who faces ultimate evil. Benecio Del Toro was equally great as a wolf in sheep’s clothing (loved the fact that he was in a white suit at the very start of the film, then in a later scene is shown removing it and revealing the black clothing below).
But facts are facts and, as I said, I simply could not see these well established actors veering wildly off the path and into a potentially pitch black conclusion.
So in the end, despite some very good scenes and overall good work by all involved, I can only give Sicaro a mild recommendation. You most certainly will not walk away hating the film, but you might, like me, wish it could have been more.
Gotta admit: I found the posting hilarious and when he linked to so many people/critics who have done just that, I couldn’t help but scratch my head.
Steven Spielberg has made many films, yet I never see people offering a “ranking” of his best films. Similarly, so too has Alfred Hitchcock and Ridley Scott and (the Gods help us) Michael Bay.
Yet with these directors we often simply get a quick listing of the “best” films they’ve made yet never an attempt to list them all as is the case with the Coen Brothers.
I tend to agree with Mr. Roth as to the why: The Coen Brothers have made just enough films to offer a listing but no so many that such a list is pondersome. Further, their films tend to follow the same general storylines (the Coens write their own scripts) and use roughly the same budget with each film. Thus, they do not have a “small” film followed by a huge “blockbuster” film.
I think there’s another factor: They make so many really great films that touch people in unique ways. Mr. Roth notes that many people have “favorite” Coen Brothers films but they may be different for each person. You may like Fargo best while your friend may find Miller’s Crossing the Brothers’ cinematic peak.
As for me? (Come on, you don’t talk about ranking Coen Brothers films without offering your own ranking, right?!)
While I haven’t seen all their films, of those I have seen my favorite is probably Fargo. Truly there has never been anything like it, an absolutely hilarious comedy whose subject matter/plot would have in any other reality been made into a terrifying, bloody crime drama!
I also enjoyed No Country For Old Men but found the ending really bizarre (to be fair, they followed the novel it was based on). I really liked Miller’s Crossing but was uncomfortable with the fact the Coen Brothers were essentially lifting without attribution the plot of Dashiell Hammet’s The Glass Key. I had great fun with Burn After Reading, Raising Arizona, and Blood Simple.
After that…
Well, I liked The Big Lebowski until it got to that bizarre dream sequence and I felt the film kinda fell apart (though I will admit it finished very strong). O Brother Where Art Thou was ok but not my particular cup of tea. Same with True Grit. While I saw both Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy, I remember very little of either and therefore they obviously didn’t make much of an impression on me. The only other film of theirs I saw that’s left is The Man Who Wasn’t There. I left that film for last because to me this was easily the worst Coen Brothers film I’ve seen. It was, IMHO, a stupid, pointless reworking/mash up of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Lolita (I guess!). Boring, to boot.
Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
(For the completist out there, the Coen Brother Films I have not seen are:
Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, A Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Lewis, and the just released Hail, Ceasar!)
My thoughts on Super Bowl 50, if you’re interested:
Lady Gaga’s rendition of the National Anthem was quite spectacular. Couldn’t tell you about the halftime show as I was busy doing a few things and missed it completely (I could have rewound and watched it but as I don’t care for either Coldplay, Beyonce, or Bruno Mars all that much there seemed little need to).
As for the final score, I was very surprised by it. Going into the game I thought this would be a blowout with the Carolina Panthers winning.
While I knew the Denver Bronco’s defense was damn good (it was rated #1 this year), I felt Peyton Manning’s QB play was so very weak that it would ultimately prove a liability the Broncos could not overcome. The fact is Mr. Manning’s body is broken down and he is, at best, an average to below average QB at this point.
Add to that the fact the Carolina Panthers looked to be an far better rounded team and you’ll understand my reasoning. Carolina’s defense, while obviously not ranked #1, was nonetheless still a damn good unit and in combination with an overall better offense had me feeling this would be an easy win for Carolina.
Boy was I was wrong.
Denver’s defense essentially won the game while Manning, though he committed a few errors (and potentially more…there were times his passes were up there for grabs but Carolina didn’t get them), nonetheless didn’t sink their ship.
After the game, one of the announcers repeated my exact thoughts by noting he never thought a defensive performance alone would be sufficient to win a Super Bowl but that this game proved it could indeed be the case…provided your defense is as good as this one.
In the end, the better team won and in this case it was because of their incredibly good defense.
So much for the game. How about…The commercials?
Ho boy.
What was always a side tradition of watching the Super Bowl was seeing a parade of clever and sometimes outrageous commercials. This year, it was nothing more than a bust.
Of the commercials I could remember:
The Prius commercial. This was the worst. I mean, who thought it was a good idea to present a group of “lovable” bank robbers as protagonists in these commercials? For those who didn’t see the commercial, it starts with the bank robbers’ car being towed and they are forced to steal a car to make their getaway. They find a Prius and take it but, hey, it’s all good: They leave behind a bag of stolen money to pay the owner for the stolen car. The commercial then has them getting away…and away…and away as the Prius is not only fast, but so fuel economical that it keeps the police from capturing them.
Of course in real life the police would blast the living shit out of that Prius and take the bank robbers down hard. Further, other than the people behind the making of the commercial, who in their right mind would look upon bank robbers as being “lovable”?!
The Snickers commercial. Last year Snickers presented one of the all time best versions of their “You’re not yourself when you’re hungry” commercials by having Danny Trejo (Machete) and, at the end of the commercial, Steve Buscemi (Broadwalk Empire, among many others) appear as the “hungry” versions of Marcia and Jan of The Brady Bunch.
This year we had Willem Dafoe playing a cranky Marilyn Monroe as s/he’s filming her famous “white dress being blown up by the subway air” scene from The Seven Year Itch.
On paper the idea of seeing Willem Dafoe in Marilyn’s dress and doing that scene must have felt like a home run but in watching it I couldn’t help but cringe. Didn’t work at all.
The superhero commercials: Unless I’m missing one, I believe there were five in total. The Deadpool one was ok. They’ve done better.
The Captain America: Civil War trailer was…only OK as well, IMHO. I’m curious why they didn’t just call it Avengers 3: Civil War, considering the fact all the main superheroes (plus a few new ones) are there.
The Hulk/Ant-Man Coke commercial…Cute concept but ultimately played out too long. And a part of me was thinking: All that destruction and potential human life lost/injured because of one stinking can of Coke?
TheBatman v Superman/Turkish Airways commercial. Though many have dumped on the film before its release, I’ve felt that up to this point the clips/trailers I’ve seen have me optimistic the film will be good. But this whole Turkish Airways cross-promotion has me scratching my head big time. I mean, what’s the point of this commercial? Use Turkish Airlines whenever you want to go to fictional cities like Metropolis and Gotham?! Very weird.
The X-Men Age of Apocalypse trailer…Again, I thought it was only OK. It was so average, in fact, that I forgot entirely about it until I did a search for the superhero ads placed in the Super Bowl. Not a good sign.
Other commercials:
The Bud Light Seth Rogan/Amy Schumer commercial. Too long and not as funny as it could have been. But I did like the Paul Rudd appearance/joke.
Weirdest commercial by far: The Puppy Monkey Baby commercial for Mountain Dew. How do I even explain it? I can’t so I’ll conclude this blog entry by showing it. Gaze in wild wonder at one of the most bizarre commercials I’ve seen in quite some time…
Back in November I wrote an update on my work with Book #6 in the Corrosive Knights series (you can read the update here). Re-reading it today, I urge anyone who has read some/all the books in the series thus far look at what I wrote there as I get into the series’ wonky chronology.
One thing I also said back in that November update was that I was hoping Book #6 would be ready by February. Well, we’re in early February and I can say without any doubt and with not an inconsiderable amount of frustration that I won’t have it ready this month.
This, however, is not an entirely new thing. In January I provided another update (you can read that here) and noted my hope was to have the book ready by May. While I still hope to get it done in and around that date, I will further note I was hoping to finish the current draft I was working on by January but it looks like I’ll be finishing it by next week, ie the middle of February.
Having said all this, despite the frustrations and time spent on the revision process, I’m optimistic I’m very near the point where I switch from rewriting/reworking the book to having all the story elements in place and focusing on grammatical/spelling issues.
This is significant because once I get to that stage, things move very quickly and we’re rapidly approaching the end. Will it be May? I really hope so! I just have to make sure I get all the parts together into a very coherent whole.
Speaking of which…
I hope what I write doesn’t sound like a boast, but my stories/novels tend to be not unlike the pieces of a machine. If you want a more poetic description, my novels and the stories I tell are not unlike the components of a watch. When looked at individually, the parts may not seem to come together (at first!) but when all is said and done, they do. If I’m on top of my game, it is my hope there isn’t a wasted page or event presented and every word and paragraph is necessary to tell the story I’m giving you.
I probably mentioned this before so forgive me if I’m repeating myself:
Back when I was in College I took a Literature course and while I don’t remember much about it, there was one particular lesson regarding author Henry James’ view of a novel that really, really stuck with me. I’ll let Mr. James’ words speak for themselves:
A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.
Mr. James’ ideas, often referred to as the view that a good/great novel presents an “organic whole”, urges authors to not waste a single word or create any scene(s) within their work that is superfluous and doesn’t contribute to the entirety of the work/story you are telling.
Thus in the “perfect” novel a reader is given a work wherein not even one single word is wasted. Each and every one of the words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters, etc. move the story forward until it reaches its end.
I took this lesson very much to heart.
So whether you like, hate, or are indifferent to any/all of my works, it is my intention to never waste your time as a reader. I try my best to make sure every element I insert into a novel has a reason for being there and ties into the larger story I’m telling.
And it is indeed a large story and one I couldn’t be prouder of.
News organization Al Jazeera created a mini-scandal when they reported on HGH (human growth hormone) deliveries to the home of professional quarterback for the Super Bowl bound Denver Broncos Peyton Manning. This report was furiously denied by the Manning camp.
Now some more unsavory details regarding this case, and Mr. Manning and his people’s actions following becoming aware of the investigation are coming to light, as well as the revelation that, yes indeed, the HGH was sent to his house after all:
First thing’s first: The revelation the HGH was sent to the Manning household after all was explained as it being for Ashley Manning, Peyton Manning’s wife, and not for her athlete husband. No further details were provided as the Manning’s cited Ashley Manning’s medical privacy.
While Mrs. Manning certainly has every right to her privacy, the HGH medication being sent to the Peyton household, even if it was sent under her name, raises all kinds of questions.
Let’s face it, many athletes use whatever means they can to gain that “extra edge”. It is the difference between making it and being banished to the sidelines…or never being part of the game itself. Further, this story cannot be viewed as a stand-alone instance as it inevitably becomes part of the sports doping continuum. For years now there have been stories regarding star athletes who were reported to have doped. These stories were inevitably followed by stern, finger-wagging denials by the athletes before the weight of the evidence against them was too much to deny and the athletes finally admitted what they did.
We’ve effectively gone through these very same steps with Mr. Manning, the only difference being that his camp is admitting the drugs were sent to his house but were for his wife rather than for Peyton. Sadly, this explanation sounds like a variation of the old “the dog ate my homework” excuse.
But putting that aside, we get to something even sleazier: It is very troubling to hear that Manning’s people sent these two bruisers to the home of the parents of the man who was taped making the accusations against Peyton Manning. What, other than intimidation, was the reason for sending these people there? Even if we are to assume Peyton Manning is totally innocent and these charges are totally outrageous, what was the purpose of sending these people to that man’s parent’s home? This cowardly, bullying action reflects very poorly on Mr. Manning and the people he employs.
For years Peyton Manning has had a sterling reputation among NFL athletes. To many, he’s a star athlete, a family man, and an all around good guy. As of this day, he’s two days away from playing in the Super Bowl and, if other reports are to be believed, this will be his very last professional football game. Should his team win this Super Bowl, it would make for a truly legendary exit for one of the league’s superstars.
And yet this story lingers just behind the scenes and, thanks to these new revelations, soils what could be a crowning ending to a magnificent career.
I’ll grant you the timing of the release of this report is also suspicious and feels like it was timed for maximum exposure. Having said that, it is difficult to excuse or ignore the alarming accusations within it.
Incredibly fascinating article by Kristen Bobst for Mother Nature Network explores the new theory that our very own Earth may actually be the result of a fusion of two celestial bodies, Earth (as it was 4.5 billion years ago) and the head on collision and subsequent fusion of it with a Mars-like proto-planet called Theia…
This idea is not new. In fact, most scientists feel that evidence of that collision lies in our Moon, which appears to be a residue from that very collision. But the theories were that Earth was “sideswiped” by this planet and the resulting debris caused by the impact caused the Moon to be created over time.
Now, based on close examination of the composition of material from the Earth and Moon, scientists now think the collision was more direct. The debris from the collision still caused the creation of the Moon but now it is thought our planet is actually the direct merging of what was the Earth and Theia.
Which makes one wonder: What was the Earth like before the collision? What was Theia like?
