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Quasar Sniffer

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Posts posted by Quasar Sniffer

  1. Posted

     

    This brings up a good (separate) point, too. For me, one of the major flaws of the movie was that "Chad" was constantly treated like he was Elvis. I guess I just didn't get it. For instance, before Elvis was "Elvis," he looked the same and possessed the same talent, but he wasn't, like, mobbed when he tried to walk down the street or anything. That didn't come until after he became a superstar. So why is everyone swooning all over him?

     

    It's just weird to me that all these people respond to "Chad" like he's a rock star and not a shiftless, "tourist guide."

    Yeah, the movie could never decide if Elvis was playing a character named Chad or basically just playing Elvis. I know Elvis' handlers were obviously trying to cash in on his persona and popularity, but if they were going to go that route, they might as well have cast him as a famous rock star returning to Hawaii from the army (maybe with parents wanting to cash in on his celebrity in order to benefit their company, which would lead to the resentment we see from him in the film), rather than trying to have it both ways. He could still be named Chad, but it could at least explain why the whole island is obsessed with him.

    • Like 4

  2. Posted

    When Queen of the Damned came out, I was definitely a Teen Who Thought Korn Was a Good Band, therefore my self-hatred is strong when it comes to this movie. I would wholeheartedly welcome the chance to make fun of it for all its terribleness, as it would placate my desire for emotional self-flagellation, at least when it comes to my own past opinions.

    • Like 2

  3. Posted

     

    Honestly, when the teenage girls came into the picture, I was pretty concerned. So, imagine my (pleasant) surprise, when Elvis is not only adamant about them being too young, but actually gets in a fight with an older man for trying to take advantage. He even refers to it as "robbing the cradle."

     

    That being said...

     

    What's REALLY weird is that when Elvis met Priscilla Presley in 1959, he was 24...and she was 14! Which means, that in 1961 when this was filmed and released, she would have only been 16 - a year younger than Jenny Maxwell's character was supposed to be! Like, did the script writer add this in as a jab at Elvis? How did Elvis feel about having to deliver those lines?

    Exact. Same. Thought. Process. What really disturbed me is that we saw the girl partake in a suicide attempt (or at the very least, some sort of panic or anxiety attack), and the film basically dismisses this as a cry for attention, the we witness Chad commit sexual assault on a teenage girl and her mental illness is CURED! The girl, at several points, expresses frustration with her own alienation, she lashes out because she is desperate to feel anything else. This is at the root of why she has to open herself up sexually to men (i.e. to get their attention). It's a very disturbed pathology, but it's dismissed here with rolled eyes and played for laughs. And this is all after a whole herd of teenage girls broke into Chad's room desperate to fuck him, a guy who thought a good idea for a joke would be to make out with a stewardess he just met in full view of his girlfriend of, presumably, several years. Blue Hawaii needs a god damn psychoanalyst.

     

    Me at the end of every scene in this movie:

    giphy.gif

    • Like 6

  6. Posted

    It seemed like he just literally had a flood of OG Om's original memories and so he couldn't not be accepting of it. I thought at first he was just gonna dump New Om's family at one point for his old family and I felt really bad for them until his dad turned up again lol.

    Per New Om's family, I think one of my favorite moments was when New Om was talking to his dad at the afterparty for the awards show and just took his dad aside and said, "I'm sorry for coasting on celebrity and privilege. From now on I will try to be a better actor and, more importantly, a better son." Or something to that effect. Plus, I'm a sucker for Somber Father-Son stuff. Do you know how many times I've seen Field of Dreams? Because I don't. I lost count by, like, age 10.

     

    And my favorite Indiana Jones movie is Last Crusade. I WONDER WHY?!?!

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    • Like 4

  7. Posted

    It depends on what you enjoy in a "bad" movie. The first half of the movie is about these two people falling in love and the dialogue is laughable but it just moves so slow. In addition you have bad acting and lots of bad technical things like audio issues, recycled footage, non-matching cuts, etc. It's basically bad community theater for the first half. If that stuff makes you chuckle go ahead and watch it straight if you like. For me personally, I found it a little too slow to enjoy fully the first time through especially when you know what's coming.

    I'm the same. With a lot of bad movies, I do get a kick out of them, but for maybe five to ten minutes. After that, I keep thinking, "isn't there an Akira Kurosawa movie I haven't seen that I could be watching? Or just, I dunno, Indiana Jones?" So I usually watch these HDTGM movies in discrete bits. With RIfftrax though, especially with something like Birdemic, I can withstand the full frontal badness assault much better.

    • Like 2

  8. Posted

    Nice, I've been eyeballing this one on Netflix.. I've wanted to watch some more Bollywood.

     

    I didn't mean to be MIA for the last few, I was laid off from my job end of January. And the job hunt took a bit longer than I was expecting. BUT all is good now and start my new job tomorrow :)

    I'll definitely be hopping back in these convos.

     

    And did anyone watch the Jesus Christ Superstar Live thing? I'm like 20 mins in (it's available on Hulu).

    Congrats on the new job! I know I've been MIA on the musical boards, but I have been lurking and liking!

     

    I do need to catch that new JCS though...

    • Like 5

  9. Posted

    I guess I don’t get your position then. You say the movie is about “assholes” but it doesn’t push you to feel “one way or another about them.” It has, though, hasn’t it? They’re assholes. I don’t think anyone here has argued otherwise. So the movie *has* pushed you to feel something.

     

    It seems to me that your issue isn’t so much that that they’re assholes, but since they don’t feel any remorse, the repercussions they face don’t adequately “punish” them. But, again, this is a movie about narcissists and sociopaths. They don’t care about anyone but themselves. It simply wouldn’t make sense for Ian to suddenly put on sackcloth and ashes because his wife (that he didn’t want) took away the child (that he didn’t want). Even before anything happens, Director Krennic complains about how he feels pushed to the side. These aren’t people who give a fuck about anyone else’s feelings. They are - in the literary sense - Romantic Heroes. The only true punishment they could face is to be separated from one another. They want to be isolated from the rest of the world so they can spend the rest of their lives in the resplendent glow of one another’s company. And, in the end, they achieve that. They win - whether we like it or not.

     

    That being said, I still don’t think the movie is trying to judge them for their actions. It’s more, “These people are objectively assholes, but I still like them. Let’s watch...” It’s all about their journeys to earn that final sunbath on the sin raft.

     

    But I guess this is all why it lacks the ability to engage the viewer, at least to me. The stakes are so low, the relationships so underdevloped and uninteresting, that I'm constantly thinking, "why should I care about these people?" At least with a Byronic Romantic hero, or even a more nihilistic one like in Lermontov's 'A Hero of Our Time' and some bits of other Russian novels that followed, those protagonists are wild in their actions, proposing deep philosophical questions in the other characters and the readers. Their actions may be reprehensible, and their responses to them are those of sociopaths, but at least we can filter and interpret and contextualize those actions through other characters. Here, everyone is universally superfluous emotionally, except maybe the wives of the boys, but they are given less character development that the salads eaten by Robin Wright and Naomi Watts. Hell, if they were willing to marry these emotionally stunted Australian Tourism Board commercial background actors, they're probably pretty naive themselves. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the film fails to engage with them on any meaningful level, so we can barely sympathize with these women who had the misfortune of loving these boys who have been under the sexual spell of their Godmothers since they were 18.

    • Like 4

  11. Posted

    I have definitely noticed, as your site points out, the large grouping of 90s movies that HDTGM has covered. Do you think this is a generational thing? That people between the ages of 20ish and 40ish, the demographic for listeners to this podcast and the people creating it, just remember those movies from their childhood more easily? Is there something about the 90s that makes the movies produced in that decade more conducive to mockery now? I have NERD QUESTIONS!

     

    Great work, all around!

    • Like 1

  12. Posted

    What's always puzzled me about the Alice story is how we're managed to graft our own cultural perspective on to the events and the symbolism for the story. Looking at it now, and especially since the 1960s at least, the growing larger/shrinking because of pills or potions Alice take seems like a drug reference, but it's obviously not something 18th Century British writers were interested in. It's all about consuming and things going through "doors" in Alice the way she is traveling through other portals.

     

    Or the fact that the painting the White Roses red bit, or even the existence of the Red court and the White, are references to the War of the Roses between the Houses of York (symbolized by the white rose) and Lancaster (symbolized by the red rose). So these symbols are so far beyond our horizon of perspective now, they seem so scattershot and random and meaningless, no wonder they are disturbing. This is even more disturbing because Carroll was also obsessed with math, so part of the story is motivated by cold logic, so the cognitive dissonance created by juxtaposing semantic or mathematical philosophy (ex. "you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'") against stuff that makes no sense to us anymore is all the more severe. Like, this is a book for... children?

    • Like 5

  14. Posted

    I think the easiest change would be to the ending. It's the exact same set-up, with Rodney and Mr. Mullen on the bus with an athletic team... but instead it's the same girls from the soccer team. However, they are STILL traveling to play baseball, only it's to compete in the boy's baseball league. The final shot is the girls running off the bus with their hair tucked up in their hats to look like boys, EXCITED to play and beat the boys at their own game. So you still get the gag of Rodney perpetually breaking the rules, but you show how much faith he has in the Ladybugs by sticking with them, no matter what the situation might be, no matter the sport, no matter the gender politics. MORE BONDING!

    • Like 3

  15. Posted

    As uncomfortable and just plain bad as this movie is, I think the script is just another draft from being a passable kids movie. Obviously replace the fucking pedophilia jokes because, holy shit, that's disgusting and not something you should portray as HILARIOUS to CHILDREN. You could just, for example, replace that business in the clothing store changing room by having Matthew having to do quick changes from Martha to Matthew while Rodney changes into that weird, unconvincing woman costume to try and convince the fainting old lady that they are actually two pairs of different people, each entering the changing room separately. They change into each other's cloths by accident, Matthew walks up to the cashier wearing Rodney's dress but no wig. Rodney has both wigs on but his wallet is missing. Matthew has his wallet. HI-JINKS! Maybe buys some actual nice flowers that he intends to give to Kimberly, but instead, in a fit of pity, gives those flowers to Rodney so Rodney can give those flowers to his (Matthew's) mom to get out of hot water. BOOM! Bonding moment.

    • Like 5

  17. Posted

     

    The thing is, a lot of famous rappers did exactly what DJay did. Jay-Z was a crack dealer. Ice-T was a pimp. And so on and so on. They never got their comeuppance. I think the movie is a commentary on this. I don't think DJay is ever REALLY supposed to be sympathetic. I think the movie tries to go a bit deeper than "is he a good guy or a bad guy?" Rappers who do songs about dealing drugs, pimping, and gunfights are held up as heroes, but this is the disgusting, desperate, and pathetic reality behind all of that. In the end the movie the movie is asking, "You think these guys are cool? Well, this is what all this all actually means. You still cool with that?" In other words, the movie is less about learning abut who DJay is and more about learning who you are.

    Maybe that's part of why I like Metal so much? When you ask Metal musicians what they did when they were younger, it's always stuff like, "I dunno... I stayed in because I was depressed and played guitar between sessions of smoking weed while listening to Black Sabbath."

     

    But really though, that's also why I prefer hip-hop artists that don't buy into or participate into that narrative (see Beastie Boys, P.O.S., Astronautalis, Common)* or who confront it and comment in it rather than glorify it.

     

    *I AM SUCH A FUCKING WHITE PERSON.

    • Like 3

  18. Posted

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    Cameron H., on 26 February 2018 - 09:08 PM, said:

     

    Maybe I'm misreading, but are you saying that the filmmakers intended for DJay to be, I don't know, cool or aspirational? Because I didn't get that at all. I felt like they were intentionally portraying him to be a pathetic ass from T to B. I mean, the fact that he thinks handing a cassette as a demo is in anyway acceptable in 2005 and wearing a gold chain with his name on it (no matter how well-intentioned) is cool, just kind of shows how much of an out of touch loser he actually is.

     

    Even in the end, the message of the movie isn't so much "work hard and achieve your dreams" so much as "infamy equals instant notoriety." When they announce his song at the end it isn't "this song is great" it's "the guy who wrote it beat up a celebrity and got in a gunfight with his entourage."

     

    Talent has nothing to do with his success.

     

    Hmm... I definitely don't think the film is trying to portray Djay as aspirational, but definitely sympathetic and maybe even someone the audience is supposed to be rooting for. Like Cam Bert said, the ending seems to vindicate him in the filmmakers' eyes, especially considering how all the other characters seem to be stronger for having known him. As if his flow was so magical, he passion for music so uplifting, it was ok for him to be a pimp and exploit these women. I feel like the movie would have functioned better if he was a villain and Key, Nola, and Shug were able to profit from his song while Djay rots in jail (or dies). He wasn't even able to keep it together in the club, lost control, and assaulted Skinny Black that got him arrested.... but also got him street cred I guess? Is that a win for this character? Is that supposed to be inspiring?

     

    I still don't get how it's hard out here for him; he's the character who is making the easiest choices. He's not a prostitute, he's not pregnant destined to raise that child alone, hell, even DJ Qualls made the choice to have a bullshit vending machine job that doesn't pay well and leavings him stinking of junk food rather than become a pimp (or some other such criminal path). It's hard out here for THEM.

    • Like 2

  19. Posted

     

    Small correction: Keisha (Shug's baby) isn't Djay's daughter. During the prison visitation scene, Djay tells Key that Keisha "got a ho for a mama and a trick for a daddy that nobody even know where he at."

    Ah, ok. When I first saw that scene, I thought he was referring to himself in the third person, as in, "nobody even know where he at" because he, Djay, is in prison. But I was wrong because he would not have referred to himself as a "trick." Thanks for your alert ears!

    • Like 6

  20. Posted

    Despite my unnecessary griping in the Picking Thread, I did end up watching this, but it sort of confirmed my worst fears. I find Terrence Howard totally unappealing and uncharismatic as a performer. DJay is, to me, an utterly detestable character, someone who, like many abusers, takes his own frustrations of his own broken life and broken dreams out on the vulnerable people around him. He's just been able to turn this emotional and physical abuse (as well as financial manipulation) into a way to make a profit, i.e. Pimping. I can sympathize with a character who has done terrible things, especially someone striving to be better or seeking redemption, but I don't really get any of that from Djay. He's not running away from pimping, he's just using that as fodder for his music, music in which he whines about how hard his life is when he's constantly terrorizing the woman pregnant with his child and forcing a woman to have sex in cars on a daily basis because, hey, those cars might have air conditioning.

     

    I don't feel that this was intentional by the filmmakers, either. Maybe partly, but it felt like the movie expected me to sympathize with this dirtbag and I was just not having it. There were some things interesting about his character, yes, but definitely not enough to keep me from rolling my eyes in disdain every time he talked. I mean, this movie has the balls to have Taraji P. Henson break down in tears and thank Djay for "letting" her sing on his song? Motherfucker, he should be on his knees thanking her.

     

    And I find Ludacris equally unappealing as an actor, but Skinny Black was at least only naive about his talents and the people around him, not exploitative of the weakest of them (unless you count the groupies he surrounds himself with, I guess).

    • Like 6

  22. Posted

    And bonus, MORE ZAKK WYLDE!!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URJRf0pUfOo

    I'm pretty agnostic on Zakk Wylde, mostly because I find Black Label Society pretty boring (he's an amazing guitarist, but I am just not a fan of that band). This song, however, is still incredibly badass. It came out right at the time I was taking over programming duties for hard rock/heavy metal at my college radio station, so I will always remember giving it plenty of airplay during that time.

  23. Posted

    On a side note, I went and saw The Greatest Showman again. During "This is Me", there's one shot where the cast is in slow motion and Keala Settle keeps moving. Then they land and dance in perfect step with her. On the big screen it's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. All I could find before was a cam video but now there are official lyric videos. It starts just after 2:50.

     

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    Happy Belated Birthday to EvRobert. Sorry for not being more timely with my birthday wishes.

     

    And the further I get from Greatest Showman, the more I like it. That movie took my unkillable cynicism and smothered it in sugary-coated doughy musical nonsense. And I love it for doing so.

    • Like 1

  25. Posted

    Just wondering if anyone here is still with their first sweetheart? If not, do you wish you were?

    Me personally, no, but two of my good friends from high school married their respective sweethearts and are still together. One is a teacher and is still married to the girl he went to prom with. She is a lawyer and they have two kids (at least she was a lawyer. I know she passed the bar and was working in a law firm but took some time off to spend with her kids. I'm not sure if she is practicing at this very second). The other guy actually got his high school sweetheart pregnant the summer after senior year and they remain happily married, now with three kids. Both couples are more well-adjusted than I will ever be and their kids are great.

     

    As for me? No time for kids, I gotta make room in my schedule to watch Rock Star so I can listen to a podcast about it!

    • Like 4
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