Friday Night Heat: Invasion

Old School.  Primo at his best.

My Mixed Feelings On Action

Although I'm Hip-Hop 2 Tha Heart, as I prosper in my older age, I do what naturally comes with it & find myself shitting on anybody new coming up, naturally assuming that any music they make is a complete and utter mockery of this thing of ours.  So when I truthfully say that I've been knowing the name Action Bronson because it keeps popping up on every post on 2DopeBoyz.com, but I've never heard any of his music, you can believe me.  This used to be the exact situation I had with Kendrick.

So when I DLed the Funk Flex Tape & forgot what I had read the sequence was in when I was listening to it, I got a nice surprise. Like, this dude is GUTTA.  He got that real raw NY flow that's hard to fake.  Like, I may really need to go back & check homeboy out on his previous shit.  For real.

But....the visuals.  And I ain't just talking the video above either ....

Y'know, Bubba Sparxxx was an aight rapper; Action, off of a couple of listens, is WAAAAAAY nicer than he could ever be; but that whole Cracker thing really put me off & I doubt that I was the only one.  It's just not Hip-Hop.

I understand doing something different than everybody else.  REALLY, I DO.  And more than that, I get trying to "do you".  I get it.

But I think I'ma just stick to the records for the time being.....

Sunday Service: Where Ya At?

If you can groove to this, well then smoke
If you can move to this, well then loc
Cause ain't no party like a Eastside party
Cause a Eastside party ain't no joke

So I Just Watched The Office Finale...

...so once a upon a time, I actually had some *real* feelings for somebody & I'm pretty sure they felt pretty highly of me, too.  Lord knows that the chemistry that we had was, shall we say, unique & not the kind you find with just ole' anybody off the street.

It was the kinda the thing that can keep a person, who gets knocked down at almost at every turn in life, believing that yeah, there could be a point to all this.  Maybe there could a day...a way...maybe there could be a happy ending.

There were tentative plans to go somewhere...else.  Somewhere called Austin.  Because Austin was/is/will always be awesome.  It's the kind of place that gives you that breath of air you need; the place that closes you off to the bad madness & helps you embrace the good madness; it's a place that you could never imagining getting old.

Those dreams didn't happen.  Like most things, the truth got in the way of the fantasy.  It's been a while so all those things aren't as important as they once seemed to be.

Pam wasn't real, but she helped me see what it is that I would want.  What I will never settle for less than.  It has been quite a aid in avoiding things that I knew just wouldn't be worth the trouble when I was at my most human and imperfectness.

Nothing makes me happier than to see Jim & Pam find their ever after.  In Austin.

Even though they weren't real.

Some thoughts about The Great Gatsby

Ideally, I guess, I'm the target audience for The Great Gatsby.  I know it was required reading in school, & that was no exception for me, but for some reason, I know for a fact that I didn't read it.  To be honest, that time is all a ~little~ blurry to me.  I'd like to say "it was all the drugs", but that would be a lie and that is something I would never do on the internet.  The point is, I was going into this movie with only the vaguest of notions of what it was about & what was going to happen in it, which is exactly whoever the asshole who put together those trailers wanted people to have before it came out.

I made a comment about this movie having way more special effects in it than you would expect from some narrative about rich people in the 1920's, but I was only half kidding.  What you need to know is this movie is BEAUTIFUL and that it wasn't an accident.  It's pretty apparent that if there was some kind of message somewhere in this movie about the price of extravagance & excess being too steep of someone's soul to pay, the creators wanted it to be an extreme afterthought 3 days after viewing this.  I mean, I saw Iron Man 3 in 3D last weekend and was more impressed with the way that was done HERE than in that movie.

Since the story is considered a bit of a classic, then I guess I can't really blame the material for the headache I developed while watching this (actually, truth be told, maybe it was all the Heinekens I was throwing back with 3D glasses on #badcombo).  I just suppose as Nick being the eyes in which we see all these events happening, I would find myself having a little more connection;  more relativity to his character, but by the end of the movie, I find myself not giving one damn about the motherfucker.  I have no idea if his role is played much differently in the book & other interpretations, but here, he's not much more than an extreme voyeur (a role that, as I type this, IS given some semblance to in a scene early in the film).

And while this may be the craziest statement in the world coming from me, but the use and inclusion of Hip-Hop music in the narrative seemed just so wrong to me on so many levels that, in describing it here, I'm forced to use a term that I hate when used by other people:  "it took me out of it".  And yet, it did.  By playing Jay-Z instead of jazz music in certain areas, I assume that the film makers were attempting to superimpose this as the black music that transcended race lines at the time because they assume that younger viewers couldn't properly fathom it without a modern day parallel, but that's just some shitty & outright wrong way of thinking, so I guess I won't assume that's why.

Speaking of music:  the film is 142 minutes and I think I should dare somebody to find one minute that doesn't have some kind of music playing in it.   I sincerely hope you enjoy this song because you're treated to an instrumental reprise of it about a million times throughout (and I say this as someone who preaches at The Church Of Lana).  #overkill  Maybe I'm just being too negative about the music due to the movie forcing my ears to once again experience  B's cover of one of Amy's classic, which is the worst torture imposed on mankind since another ill-conceived cover , but I kinda gotta go with my gut (cough, I mean my hearing) on this one.

I do have to say as an insecure male in his mid-30's, I am kinda feeling a little joy in Leonardo Dicaprio getting a few wrinkles around the face mask.  I mean, don't get it twisted, I enjoy homey as an actor and this is as a fine as a performance that someone as talented as himself could give, but when he's standing next to Tobey Maguire (which is most of the movie);who, like Leo, is a grown child actor who was given their career because he had facial features that would make him look like a kid for the rest of his life; it gives him just a little more ammo to play someone convincingly that has seen more than a little mileage in his lifetime.

All in all, not a bad movie, but not a GREAT one (Ha!  Me make Great puns!  Me so funny!).  So watch illegally online at your own risk of disappointment for what you paid for. The only REALLY important thing I took away from the movie is yeah, Elizabeth Debicki #cangetit