Key lime
Lemon meringue
Blueberry
Custard. I actually like custard a lot and it’s sad you don’t see it as much as you should.
Strawberry
Shepherd’s pie
Apple pie
To the best of my knowledge, these are the types of pie that I like. I cannot think of any other kinds of pie that I like at this time, though this is not an exclusive list. What kind of pie do you like?
Believe it or not, this is the first time I’ve ever reviewed a music video on this exceptional blog. Perhaps it could be the start of a trend.
Actor/comedian Donald Glover was the funniest part of NBC’s “Community,” but for years, he’s rapped under the moniker, “Childish Gambino.” As rappers go, I thought he was ok, he had some skills but never really blew any wind up my proverbial skirt until now.
Although it isn’t for the squeamish, his new video “This is America” is worth a watch, and maybe even a couple watches just to pick up all the hidden and/or double meanings. He’s definitely lit up the Internet, getting people talking and there are all sorts of theories about what he’s trying to say.
I’ll give my two cents though I admit up front I could be entirely wrong in my interpretation:
#1 – On a surface level, it’s a psyche out. It begins as though he’s going to sing a happy song, something lively and fun in the wheelhouse of Pharell’s “Happy.” But then it turns dark. Ever so nonchalantly, Gambino blows away a man seated in a chair with a bag over his head.
The tone of the song goes from happy tune to hardcore rap…and yet, ironically, Gambino and a gaggle of young students in school uniforms proceed to dance happily, as though the happy music was still playing.
This happens a second time, when the happy music starts up again, then Gambino machine guns a church choir, then the hardcore rap plays yet he and company dance happily to the hardcore beat.
The casual, non-introspective viewer will think this is just a bait and switch, get you to look left while you get walloped with a right hook you weren’t suspecting. But there’s much more.
#2 – Obviously, gun violence is a major theme. One thought I had is that the first shooting was a street crime style shooting. As the dancing goes on in the foreground, a small amount of people freak out and run around in the background.
Meanwhile, the second shooting was an act of terrorism, and tons of people freak out and run around in the background. I could be stretching here but it dawned on me that people freak out when a lot of people are shot at once in a mass shooting and they demand that something be done to stop mass shootings. Yet, individuals are shot in criminal i.e. (you crossed me or you got something I want) style shootings and the public doesn’t respond with equal alarm, even though if you add those individual shootings up, the numbers get high.
Both types of shootings need to be solved, stopped, prevented.
#3 – The choir scene is clearly a reference to the Charlestown church shooting where 9 black worshippers were gunned down by a white supremacist. And I think Gambino was trying to make a point in how quickly and casually he was able to wipe out a whole choir, cutting a large group of people down as easily as how a hot knife would go through butter, perhaps trying to make us rethink the idea of letting the average person wield a device that carries so much power.
#4 – Dancing happily amidst tragedy = the general public seeks constant entertainment and distraction. We sort of know that these shootings are going on, maybe we heard about them on the noise or something, we care for a little bit and then…ooohh, hey! What’s that new song? Time to dance to this new beat! We’re easily distracted and should be taking the time we put into entertaining ourselves with pop culture and putting it into solving society’s ill, gun violence in particular.
#5 – We celebrate black pop culture and black entertainers in particular…the music, the dancing and so on…and yet, are we doing enough to help inner city African Americans who suffer all day? Do we only care about African Americans who can sing and dance but not about those who live in downtrodden neighborhoods who just want to get through their day without becoming the next victim?
I don’t know. Those are some of my observations. Could be wrong. I don’t know if he has done it yet, but would love it if Glover would come out and spoon feed us what he was trying to say.
What do you think?
Talk amongst yourselves.
Cheese
Sour cream
Salsa
Queso
Tomatoes
Lettuce
Onions
Jalapeños
Worcestershire sauce
Honey mustard
Ranch dressing
Olives
Pick de Gallo
Salt
Chocolate chips
Honey
Pancake syrup
Pancakes
Pizza
Other tacos that go inside the taco to make a taco full of tacos #mindblown
Spaghettios
Nougat
Krispy Kremes
Marzipan figurines carved into the likeness of Jenny McCarthy
Riboflavin
Mint lifesavers
Caramel
Ketchup
Rutabagas
You have a choice, 3.5 readers. You can take the blue pill and wake up, forget that you ever read this pitiful blog, or you can take the red pill and see how far down the rabbit hole this terrible blog goes.
What? You took the red pill? What the hell is wrong with you?
I first saw this movie in the theater when it came out in the summer of 1999. At the time, everyone I knew who saw it thought it was the dumbest movie they’d ever seen. I, on the other hand, thought it was special, unique, different – a science fiction film that didn’t involve space, or clichés, or wasn’t derivative, something that was brand spanking new. The Wachowski (then brothers, now sisters) had invented a whole new world that built off itself and it was intriguing.
Plus, the special effects alone made it worth watching. The slowed down, 360 kicks, spins, the “bullet time” slow motion where characters dodge bullets, all set the standard for other flicks to follow. It holds up today, and looks like something that Hollywood’s best FX gurus could have made yesterday.
The plot for the uninitiated – Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) lives a lonely, forlorn life as an office drone for a tech company, hopelessly searching for meaning and finding none, even while he stays up all night exercising his hacking skills and surfing the Internet. It was 1999, so people still thought they might find meaning on the Internet, rather than just the giant reserve of pornography and cat videos it is today (and to be honest, was kind of back then too, just a lot grainier and slower…still if you were willing to wait 12 hours, you might get ten seconds of exceptionally slow, grainy, not worth watching cat footage.)
Impressed with his hacking skills, Thomas, who takes the name “Neo,” is recruited by Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne in perhaps the most memorable role of his career) and his band of rebels, including Trinity (Carrie Ann Moss), Cipher (Joe Pantagliano) and some others who weren’t that famous so, you know, moving on…
Neo is let in on a big secret. The world as we know it is not a world at all. It is a computer program, dubbed “The Matrix.” The machines have won, they have enslaved humanity by putting them to sleep and hooking up to an array of cords that turn them into living batteries that give the machines energy. To keep the humans docile, their minds are hooked up to an alternate reality program that makes them believe they are living actual lives in an artificial world.
Those, like Morpheus et. al., who realize the world is fake, know that the world’s rules can be broken. They can load their brains up with all kinds of survival training, i.e. kung fu, weapons training, etc. They can run up walls, fire guns with great precision and do incredible kicks where they launch into the air and time stops as they connect their foot to an opponent’s face.
The villain of the film is Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving), a cold, calculating computer program who takes the appearance of a stern Federal agent. I think Agent Smith is one of the more underrated baddies of sci fi film history. Darth Vader might come at you like a honey badger on crack, but Agent Smith will, with his monotone, almost school marmish style, lecture you into believing that all hope is lost and that the best option is to give in, and frankly, he is very convincing. He’s every mean adult you met when you were growing up who told you the rules matter and you better drop your pie in the sky dreams this instant.
It’s funny how you learn as you get older and can watch movies and understand them more. At 20, I thought this was a fun movie. At almost 40, I realize it’s double meaning. Life is “the Matrix” and we often find ourselves weighed down by all these rules that keep us from doing what we want. “You can’t do this because of XYZ.”
“The Matrix” can mean a lot of different things to different people. “Taking the red pill” has become part of the cultural language now. I’ve heard people use that phrase in a variety of contexts, including people on both sides of the political aisle trying to convert others to their way of thinking.
Basically, there’s who you are and who you would like to be and if you stick with the life that makes you unhappy, you’re like Cipher, who decides “ignorance is bliss” and wants to stay in the Matrix because living under the imposed rules is better than going it alone. And in truth, to break the rules will lead to a period of suffering. Morpheus and company, by freeing their minds from the Matrix, do enjoy special powers when they return to the Matrix, but when they are out of it, they live in a harsh reality, one where the few surviving humans live in underground tunnels, eat gruel, and are constantly hunted by the machines.
Thus, if you stop following the rules, your life will be hard for awhile. People will make fun of you, not want to talk to you, you might suffer in a variety of ways, but eventually (hopefully) you’ll master your new life and become the sunglass wearing, black coat wearing kung fu master you were meant to be.
Again, “The Matrix” could be an allegory for whatever it is in your life that is standing between you and what you want. And it’s entirely possible that you might try to break out of the Matrix and fail. In the film, the rule is that if you die in the Matrix, you die in real life, because the body can’t live without the mind….and thus, if we think about real life, it is entirely possible that we might break the rules, suffer, and then succumb to suffering. Maybe Morpheus is right and it is better to live free and suffer than to live a lie. Maybe Cipher is right and it is better to live as a dupe and follow the rules rather than live in a cave and eat gruel.
Ironically, I assume that the Wachowskis broke out of their own personal Matrix by becoming sisters instead of brothers. But again, the Matrix can be adapted to whatever beliefs you have and whatever you think is standing between you and becoming who you want to be.
The film holds up. Although there are some late 1990s things that aren’t around today (the rebels in the Matrix talk to their friends in reality via big cell phones and must seek out a hard line or a telephone booth to get back to reality), the key is that the machines made the Matrix so that the world perpetually remains 1999 forever, even though in reality, it is 2199.
So technically, Hollywood could remake this and set it in 1999 and it would hold up with the film’s rules, though I hope they don’t. To be honest, this film was unique unto itself. The sequels that came out almost back to back in 2003 felt like cash grabs and to me, aren’t that memorable. The second is better than the third though.
STATUS: Worth a rental, or sometimes I even see it playing on cable so you might find it for free.
I can’t believe it took me a week to see this flick. Maybe my reputation as the Internet’s greatest nerd is ill-deserved.
BQB here with a review of “Avengers: Infinity War.”
Where did the past 10 years go, 3.5 readers? I remember watching “Iron Man” in 2008, thinking Marvel was really onto something here and, well, if only I could time travel back 10 years, take the seat next to me and give myself some advice on how to negotiate the next decade.
Oh well. No use crying over spilt milk.
Speaking of not crying, we have a seasoned cast of superheroes now, and damn, there are a lot of them. You’ve got the Avengers…the various hangers-on who help the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, the assorted interlopers who mingle in these worlds…you’ve got a lot of characters. Is it too many? Maybe not.
After all, this film is our reward for sticking with the franchise for so long. Once you watch the individual films, as well as the group get-together films, you spend a lot of time with these characters, getting to know what makes them tick, and thus films like this are possible, i.e. where the individuals come and go, make their entrances and exits and you understand their motivations by now.
There was a brief moment in the beginning where I wondered if this whole spectacle hadn’t jumped the shark. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older but when you really think about it, I mean, seriously…you’ve got a man in an iron suit, a Norse God, a green monster, a patriot, a computer man, a witch, wizards, a spiderman, a cat man, a flying guy, another guy in an iron suit, a lady assassin, a band of space pirates and their talking raccoon…WTF? How do these all fit together?
At one point, I was like, “Wow. There are way too many Avengers. Like seriously, I can’t keep up with all these Avengers. There is a ridiculous amount of superheroes on screen right now.”
Somehow, Disney/Marvel makes it all work. In past movies, we’ve been teased with an impending Thanos (Josh Brolin) attack and it pays off big time here, as he’s the villain to end all villains, the big bad that the Avengers et. al. will have to throw everything at, including the kitchen sink, the toilet, the toilet paper, the plunger and so on.
It’s an intergalactic battle royale featuring different planets, different locations on Earth, different bands of heroes duking it out with different bands of Thanos’ cronies, all in the name of gathering the infinity stones, which the infamous ne’er-do-well hopes to use to engage in acts of evil-doery across the cosmos.
There are touching moments, hilarious moments, humor, laughter, suspense and I don’t want to give it away but Disney/Marvel does go in quite an unexpected direction, one that defies the typical ending of these films and perhaps when all 3.5 of you have had a chance to see it, we can discuss it further.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Kudos to Disney/Marvel for keeping this franchise alive, still going strong, still being as magical as ever. Thank you to all the actors who didn’t let fame go to their heads and bail on their recurring characters. It’s been quite a ride and I can’t wait to see what happens next.
How much of this is people who legitimately can’t get anyone to touch them with a ten foot pole and how much of it is people who look like cave trolls who believe they are too good to date other people who look like cave trolls and believe there is something special about them that means they should date people who look like movie stars and there is a great unfairness in the world that the people who look like movie stars don’t recognize that?
Discuss.
Watching coverage of the Kentucky Derby, with all these ladies wearing incredibly fancy hats.
On the one hand, it’s very annoying. On the other hand, it’s incredibly arousing and I wish ladies would wear fancy hats every day.
I don’t know. Like every five minutes there’s a lady with a new, even more incredibly ridiculous fancy hat and at first, I’m like, “That’s absurd!” but then after a minute I’m like, “Huh…but she pulls it off.”
Discuss.
…it would be cultural appropriation, for I am cis gendered, white, male privileged scum.
It’s too bad I can’t wish you a happy Cinco de Mayo, because up until I realized it was going to be cultural appropriation, I was going to invite you all over to BQB for chips, salsa, guacamole, nachos, burritos and margaritas.
But I’m not Mexican, so I can’t offer you any such delicious treats.
As discussed in a previous post, I am part-Scandanavian, so I can enjoy a plate of hot, salted codfish balls, the same kind that were enjoyed by my Viking ancestors.
You can’t have any though unless you are of Viking descent.
So, tell you what. Let’s just throw a party called, “The Fifth of May” and everyone bring food that is appropriate for their own personal culture and please do not share it with anyone outside of your culture.
Thank you.
Bookshelf Battle 