WTF, Katy Perry?
Can we all just take a moment to appreciate how inane the video for "California Gurls" is? Seriously, people, the song has some pretty freaking clear imagery about bikinis and booze and beaches, basically giving you everything you need for a cute, campy, happy little summer movie. No no, said Katy Perry. The video is set in a super-sketchy, sexed-up version of Candyland in which Katy Perry wanders around in this bizarre, infantile little outfit acting like an overgrown version of Alice in Wonderland. Oh wait, Alice was actually capable of stringing together rational thoughts and acting like she had a higher IQ than a 5 week old puppy. And her story made more sense. That's right, Katy Perry, Alice in Wonderland made more sense than your video. The only thing - and I mean the only thing - saving this from total fail is the fact that the other (equally stupid, apparently) girls aren't white. Still, I could have made a better video in my dorm room.
"California Gays" is infinitely better.
(More after the jump)
California Gays
California Gurls
Cthulhu changes the future. Or Paul the octopus is one lucky fish
As some of you are aware, Paul is a German octopus who has correctly predicted the outcomes of all of Germany's World Cup games as well as Spain's victory over the Netherlands today.
I've decided that Paul is actually Cthulhu in disguise. Slightly terrifying, yes, but I'm much more comfortable with the idea of a terrifying god-demon changing the future than with a mollusk arbitrarily picking the outcome of 8 games. I just can't handle that much chaos, okay? (Insert witty classical mechanics joke here: I've got nothing)
Borges is a freaking space cadet
(Image from http://www.bookbyte.com/1/1/54142-stories-stone-writing-the-ancestral-pueblo-homeland-by-ellis.html)
I've been working my way through this little volume for the last month or so, and let me tell you, I've decided that Borges may not have been from this planet. Some of the concepts are rather interesting, but he doesn't develop all of them into comprehensible narratives, which makes it hard for me to get emotionally invested and involved in the short stories. I've got a couple novels waiting for me to read them, so I'm just trying to finish this up so that I can move on to a more recognizable form of literature.
I'll post my favorite stories when I'm done. Right now, I forget what it's called (the book is at home, and I'm at the library), but the one about the Chinese spy in WWI was kinda cool.
Depicable Meh
(Image credit: http://www.impawards.com/2010/despicable_me.html)
I saw Depsicable Me in 3D on Thursday night, so I wasn't exactly chillin' with the children, i.e. the target audience.
Short answer: it was fine. I mean, my world wasn't rocked but it wasn't Prince of Persia-level fail. Based on the trailers, I knew how it would end before it even started, so I was just waiting for my heart to be warmed.
Not that this is appropriate for a kids' film, really, but if you're going to have a super villain, I want him to be evil-er. Popping kids' balloons and cutting in line at Starbucks is douche-y, for sure, and stealing the moon is a pretty nasty thing to do. Still, I never got the sense of malice, you know? I mean, any idiot can attempt something ambitious, but why was it so important that Gru did something evil? What drove him to hurt other people in a push towards validation? We learn in the film that he has Mommy issues, although I refuse to believe that that's enough to cause someone to try to shrink the moon. I guess it's good we're showing kids the softer side of villians and learning about how people can be both good and evil simultaneously blah blah blah, but still, this film would have worked perfectly fine if you'd subbed in his evil plot with literally any other ambitious project: capping the oil spill, starting a webcomic (actually, that'd be really cool), getting a BS in EE, whatever.
My favorite line: Gru's competition, Vector, the villian in the orange track suit (*shudder*), has this enormous mansion with a shark tank. The top of the shark tank is all glass and serves as the tv room floor. Gru is sneaking around in Vector's house, and the shark sees him while Vector is too focused on watching the tube. The shark - this is an enormous shark, guys, like Jaws - starts pounding his head on the glass, and Vector, all annoyed by the shark who's apparently freaking out over nothing, goes "Down, fish." Incidentally, I was the only person laughing at that line. That is only the 800th time that's happened to me in a movie theater, so I wasn't really perturbed.
So, really, it was meh.
Ke$ha is a $hit$how, but Rihanna was good
(Image Credit: http://www.last.fm/event/1491288+Last+Girl+On+Earth+Tour)
I scored tickets to this little event for $10, so two friends of mine and I went last night, none of us particularly huge fans of either "artist."
We missed the beginning of Ke$ha's set, but since it started at 1930, it was still light and not much of a spectacle anyway, especially not from the nosebleed section
Rihanna's set, though, was a legit, professional concert. There were three screens on stage which looked liked LEDs, I think, based on the fact it's hard to get tv screens that huge. She had some spiffy costume changes and some talented dancers, etc. etc. The highlight of the actual staging was the giant, pink cannon she straddled during the chorus of "Rude Boy" - you know, the part about getting it up or something. Phallic-tastic. I preferred Rihanna's older, fluffier stuff to her new more rocky-y and angrier stuff, but that's just me. She did sing "Unfaithful," which is my favorite song of hers, and although a lot of people left after she thanked us at the end of "Take a Bow," she performed an encore of a couple of songs, finishing up with "Umbrella," which my 800 nearest and dearest friends and I enjoyed.
The breakdown of the ticket, as far as I'm concerned:
$2 "Unfaithful"
$5 "Umbrella"
$1 "Tik Tok"
$2 The screens on stage and the videos on them
It took forever to get out of the parking lot, so we blasted oldies and rocked out. That was probably about 20% of the overall fun had that evening.
Favorite webcomic this week: "Mind in the gutter"
QC won the unofficial contest of funniest webcomic of the week for the "episode" in which Angus confronts Hanners and Marigold about their all night WoW playing.
Why yes, I do have a juvenile sense of humor, thank you. These are exactly the kind of jokes my equally mature friends and I make, though, so gold star for verisimilitude.
Next week, on unsolicited opinions:
- A food review from the Mission
- Inception, I hope, as well as maybe Winter's Bone and The Kids Are All Right
- The end of Borges and beginning of a new book
- The new Black Keys album. I already own it - I just haven't listened to it too much yet.
- Frozen yogurt flavors enjoyed in Cupertino
- I'm hoping to make it to a play some friends of mine are in. It's in one of those tiny black box theaters I love so well.
W
No comments:
Post a Comment