wakefresh

OMG, I JUST HAD AN IDEA! What if Stratham plays the same character he does in The Expendables, so that you have those two movies cross pollinate!!! I think I just came in my pants...

I wish, I WISH, that in the next FF movie they will do a true crossover of two totally disparate movies. So, bring in Jason Stratham, but he's playing the Transporter role. Or have him actually be Chev Chellios and bring in all of the craziness from the Crank franchise. This could be the action movie equivalent to Patton Oswald crazy ass speech about the next Star Wars movie.

You had it right when you said this is a superhero movie sans cape or magical hammers. I watched the first Iron Man over the holiday weekend and there is a part where Tony Stark is right next to a bomb -- so close in fact that he can read the Stark Industries logo on it -- before it explodes. Why is he still alive after that? They try to make sense of it by revealing he had some sort of body armor on, but if you are that close to an explosive, your head, legs, and arm are going to be ripped off by the impact. These movies are setting a hyper reality where people can make top-notch technology while being held prisoner in a cave in Afghanistan. For superhero and these FF movies, you just gotta roll with it sometimes.

Ha! Yeah, they did do that. I forgive him though because Justin Lin spends most of his time planning amazing action sequences.

The only part that was not satisfying was how the relationship with the Brazilian cop was handled. That was bullshit. Yeah, she's gonna be jealous and angry that you pushed her to the side for this other woman, no matter the circumstances. If they wanted to make this a great movie, they would have had her cussing his ass out in Portuguese and bring her back in FF7 as a bad guy because Dom spurned her.

That was the most boring part of the movie when they were all sitting out the table doing physics equations to make the cars take turns better.

Damn, everyone in that family is huge. His grandaddy was huge. His daddy was huge. They must have been the biggest bullies on the block growing up. Cause what could anyone do? If you're a kid and go get your dad to talk to young Dwayne Johnson, then Dwayne Johnson's daddy -- a pro wrestler -- will just suplex the shit the out of your dad and you.

The fight between the Asian guy on Shaw's team and Han and Tyrese was real good also because it broke that stereotype of all Asian dudes knowing martial arts. Han was just throwing regular punches and getting his ass handed to him. I saw this with a friend and later we both commented on this fact. We were both thinking, "Damn, when is Han gonna break out his karate?" during the scene.

I love in this movie that they reference The Rock being all glossy in the last movie. Hide your baby oil, everyone!

When Chev Chelios showed up in the post credit sequence, people were screaming "What the fuck?!" in the theater. It was amazing.

C'mon, man. You're being a little pedantic right now. These movies aren't that bad and are a lot of fun to watch. I feel like you want someone to say you have refined taste because you didn't like FF6, so I'll go ahead and say it and bring a smile to your face. You have the most exquisite taste in the arts that is why your refined sensibilities could not take this movie. Are you good, now?

So because black kids didn't listen to the type of music you liked, you experienced racism at the hands of black people? Gotcha!

You're holding Kanye up to a standard that you aren't holding other MCs to. As good as Killer Mike is, if you're holding one of his songs up to a Dr. Cornell West op-ed, then Killer Mike is gonna lose every single time. How in-depth of a solution would Kanye have to put in his song for you to be satisfied? This standard seems very weird and arbitrary to me. Awhile ago Nas had this song "Get Down" that was on "Stillmatic", I think. He just went through the shady ways people treat each other. What solution did he offer in the song? Does that mean that song has no merit? I don't think so, because it put a spotlight on what is going on right now. And in that sense, that's the artist's only duty -- to highlight the wrong; to bring it to people's attention and humanize it. They're not responsible for solutions. That's left up to activists and crusaders. If you applied this standard to all music that you listen to, you wouldn't be messing with any music whatsoever and would just devour the New York Times editorial section. He's not a preacher or a politician. He's an artist and his authority comes from speaking truth. If every artist had to live up to the high moral standard that a man of God does, then why do people still like Bob Marley who cheated on his wife all time while talking about love? Why do people still like John Lennon who beat the shit out of his wives, while talking about peace? Why did people like 50 Cent when he was more about chilling at home and drinking Muscle Milk than being out in the clubs?

LOL, yeah, because there is absolutely no history of racial bias in the anthropology department. Absolutely none. By the way, Hyde, can I measure your skull?

The stories themselves are very old and were first written down in the middle ages. That's not a big turning point at all, Hyde. And does not negate any questions about its veracity at all. Political intrigue and legends were very popular during the middle ages.

You couldn't have learned this from your daily talks to Boston racists, Hyde. Wouldn't they be much more vocal about how Ireland saved European knowledge?

Do we have Pythogras' diary on how he came up with geometry? No. we don't. We have alot of his writing talking about the mystical importance of number, blah, blah, blah. So there is a gap there, right? None of these ancient alien nutjobs say that he was given the knowledge by aliens. That's because Europeans can possess ingenuity, but not anyone else. But here's the bullshit of the situation. They actually DO have records of the ancient Egyptians and their astronomical calculations and -- more importantly -- can decipher them. There is no "gap" there. Yet this idea that the Pyramids are created by the hand of the aliens still persist. Its the same shit that has been going on for a long time now. Early Europeans explorers couldn't believe that these dark people created something so grand so they explained it away by saying that wandering tribes of Europeans, people from Atlantis (not a real place, but Europeans believe it was populated by white people), or some lost white civilization did it. All they did was replace "alien" with Atlantean(sp?).

This was never what we were talking about in the first place.

The things that ancient wrote down are usually disregarded as myth or legend because it is hard to trace the veracity of their statements. Was this inclusion a political move by supporters to make X seem grand and magnificent? Was it religious in nature? But if old stories are the basis off of which academic research is done, then there are plenty of old stories about the black men from the southwest that traded gold with the Native Americans in Haiti. Some of these stories were written down by Columbus himself. If an old story can be used to start research into one area, why not the other?

I really liked this movie. After the post-credit scene, I was like

Atlantis is not a real place. And no, its totally fair to say that crazy shit is influenced by racism. Because these nutjobs take some European achievements at face value. They never say every great European civilization owes it technology to aliens, but they do say that about all of the pre-Columbian America and pre-colonized African civilizations.

No, they are not a part of the conspiracies, Joshie. Not on the same level as brown/black people in Americas and Africa. Because at the heart of this alien conspiracy is that every thing that is substanstive coming from this black and brown civilizations is due to alien influence. There are things that the conspiracists don't touch in regards to European achievements. They never say that Pythorgras' ideas came from communion with aliens. They never state that Roman acqaduects are because of alien engineers. No, there are some things that are off limits because the conspiracits recognize that white people can be ingenious; something that they total discount in black and brown people. If you're discounting of a link between Mesoamerica and Africa based on genetics, then you are also discounting the theory of Viking explorers coming in contact with North America. But that little bit of historical fancy is being taught in classrooms as fact based on a lumps of sod found in Northern Canada. Nowhere did it speak of genetics as an establishment of the link. So, are both theories incorrect? Or does a link hinge on more than the assumption that the explorers were fucking the indigenous people? And if the establishment of a link does require more than this, then why should we not research it? So, lots of historians are racist but no one is racist because its not 1935? WTF?! Your one experience doesn't mean jack shit, when you consider the state of public education in red states. Ok, I fucked up on this point. Alien conspiracy nuts don't claim that Newton's laws of motions were given to him by aliens. They allow that human thought and imagination to come into play when dealing with Europeans. But since you're the guy who mentioned retired and dead non-white senators when I was talking about the racial imbalance of the current Congress, we'll call this draw. Oh goodness, one of the great wonders of the world, proclaimed not to be a big deal by message board participant.

No, there actually is not. I did not learn about pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas until I was a sophmore in college. And the only reason I learned about that is because professor I took the class from had an interest in the subject and made it a good chunk of the curriculum. I later found out that other professors that taught the same class had a totally different emphasis. And one of the things she always mentioned in class was how hard it was to get funding to study. Hell, most universities didn't even have graduate programs dedicated to that field of study until the late 1960s. So, no, buddy its not anywhere near on the same level as research done in Eurasia.

I think the thing with Kanye is that he's a complicated human being and embraces that. On his first two albums he's always talking about his love of God and the next song talking about getting head in the jeep. I love that about him because it makes him real. Now, someone like Talib Kweli sets himself up for failure when he's positioning himself as this social justice crusader but then shows his ass and reveals that he doesn't really take women too seriously. Kanye recognizes his blind spots and contradictory behavior and doesn't shy away from it. The news about his charity is depressing. I can only suspect that whoever he had running the day-to-day operations fucked up big time. But the article did say that the foundation was being dissolved, not by a court order, but by the founder's hand. So give him some credit.

I think it's because you're being uncharitable. A lot of people are throwing shade Kanye's way because of his relationship with Kim K. so that may be coloring your view of him. If you look at Kanye's music he hasn't changed his much in his message. There's always a struggle between doing the right thing and feeding his ego and calling white folks on their shit. That whole song "N*!@ in Paris" is basically a big fuck you to white folks.