What I’ve learned (so far)

Before I start, let me say that I realize that that title’s a bit condescending. Saying I’ve learned anything implies that I know something you don’t. That’s not true. I don’t know anything for certain. There’s this quote I’ll paraphrase because I can’t remember who said it right now, and it says ‘to know that you know what you know, and to know that you do not know what you do not know, that is knowledge’.

That’s also my defense for anything I might say here that you want to argue with. And anything that anyone unwilling to accept any insights yet can use as an excuse to disagree, with me and themselves. I don’t know anything, and this whole post is going to be a stream of consciousness thing about what I do know: which is nothing.

Recently, I’ve gone through a breakup (again). Deep, rich emotions to play with now. Like fertile soil, loaded with nutrients and potential. Always a good time for self expression. Pretentious, self-involved bullshit, you might say, but when is writing not ever that? I’m a slacker and I like writing. Combine those and you end up with a lot of free time for introspection. I like searching for metaphors in everything I see, or anything that happens to me. This means that even the seemingly insignificant crap that goes on in my life gets to mean something. You see me standing at the urinal, taking a piss, and I see the lost potential of the coffee I had slipping into the abyss. But that’s only when I’m feeling particularly moody.

Most hours, I’m actually finding a lot of joy and happiness in things. Even urinals.

Of course, once everything is a metaphor, it can be both the best and worst thing you’ve ever seen or thought about. Events, items and people have no value except whatever you imagine they do. How devastating, if you’re always looking for things to let you down. How refreshing, if you’re hoping there’s more to everything than first meets the eye.

So, love. I’ve been thinking about it’s value in terms of myself and “what I know”. So far as I can imagine, the only thing we’ve got that’s of any real value is our time. This is cos we have no idea how much of it we have. I could die in 80 years, tomorrow or even right now, mid-sentence (and then you’d never see this), and no one can tell me with any absolute certainty how much I have left. Imagine a bank account where you’re never told how much cash you’ve got inside. Every purchase becomes that much more valuable, but also has the same value as every other one, because it might be your last. So when you declare your love for someone – and when it’s not some creepy charade fueled by your insecurities about being alone – you’re really doing something much more significant. You’re saying “Here’s my time. I don’t know how much I’ve got left, but in it there’s all my potential, my dreams, my hopes for a future I may never see. But you can have it. Please just share yours with me.”

I don’t know about you, but that is a scary fucking thought. The folks who hand that over have got to either be brave or crazy (take your pick, depending on your lover or your perspective), or both.

When I was younger, these sorts of theories and metaphors used to mean a lot to me. I liked being reassured that I could figure anything out if I thought hard enough about it. Obviously realizing things like what’s above only reminds me that my perspective is always evolving, that the horizon is always getting further away, that nothing is exact or certain. That everything is made up. We’re all just each others’ perceptions colliding to form something that’s like a solid but isn’t. Holograms turning in the dark. Nothing means anything unless you want it to. No person is greater than any other unless you believe they are.

And that last part made me realize that the sad part about a breakup isn’t that you lost someone. It’s that you lost faith in someone’s value in your life.

Bummer, I know.

Despite all this morose crap, though, I have a shit ton of faith and hope. I know I have no assurances about how much time we have, but I’m inclined to roll my eyes at mortality in a way I never could before. I like to plan for a future I might never see. If nothing else, it keeps things from being boring and gives every little action a little more meaning and a little more joy. Even typing this out from my head to the digital page after 1am seems to have some purpose. At least from my perspective.

So that’s what I “know”, guys. What do you think?

Green Lantern [Review]

You’ve no doubt already noticed that we’re in the grip of a comic book-inspired movie onslaught. We’ve just sat through Thor and have Captain America coming up and The Avengers in 2012. That’s over at Marvel Studios, where they’re mining their lesser known comic book stable for films while laughing all the way to the bank. Over at Warner Bros, though, they’ve only just started trying to make anything that isn’t Batman.

Green Lantern stars Ryan Reynolds as fast talking, arrogant but charming test pilot Hal Jordan, who shirks responsibility at every turn. When a purple alien space cop crash lands on Earth, Hal is recruited into the intergalactic peacekeeping police force called the Green Lantern Corps. Each Lantern gets a ring that can turn their thoughts into reality, although this is barely made clear in the movie’s 5-minute-long training sequence Hal goes through to master his abilities.

There’s a lot that isn’t clear in this movie, actually. Hal is trained by the alien warriors Kilowog (voiced completely unnecessarily by Michael Clarke Duncan), fish-like Tomar-Re (Geoffrey Rush in a more inspired bit of voice casting) and the great & powerful Sinestro (Mark Strong, doing his level best to carry this picture). After they show our hero the ropes, though, all of them just kind of disappear from the movie. Same goes for Jordan’s earthbound extended family, who are introduced early on, but never appear again. Not even when ‘Uncle Hal’ is flying around their hometown as a superhero, or when that very same city is attacked by a giant evil cloud. It’s a pity, because Reynolds does his best to charm the audience into liking Hal. There’s just not a lot for him to do after that.

Between the minimal action, there are a lot of hollow speeches about destiny and overcoming fear. They’re all delivered with surprising aplomb by Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, but the movie never really establishes the relevance of these themes to the plot. They’re only there because that’s the sort of thing the Green Lantern comic books have recently been about.

Peter Sarsgaard's in this movie, you guys!

The villains, by the way, are a mix of mutated biologist Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard being creepy) and a giant CG cloud, voiced by the legendary Clancy Brown. Not awful, but whereas the movie spends all its time building up Hammond, the supposedly epic Parallax never feels like the threat the dialog makes it out to be. A scene where the alien Lanterns go off to fight it is cut short without any explanation of how the heroes that made it out alive escaped what seemed like a losing battle.

The question then becomes, where is the movie that director Martin Campbell shot? All the elements are there, but the important exposition and action seems to get briefer and briefer as the movies progresses, leaving instead several long scenes of Lively and Reynolds moping and almost none of Green Lantern saving anybody or fighting anything. In this era of hyper-successful superhero and sci-fi movies, why was Warner afraid to commit to the 3-hour opus that they no doubt shot? Why replace it with this vague mess of out-of-left-field plot devices and pretty CGI instead?

Seems ironic that they made a movie about a hero who has to overcome great fear when they couldn’t muster the courage to release it in its entirety.

_________________________________________________________

The One-Liner: Ryan Reynolds plays a space cop who doesn’t go into space much or serve & protect anyone in a movie Warner Bros seems to have cut up from something entertaining into something messy.

The Best: The thing people were most worried about before the movie came out was the Green Lantern suit. Don’t worry. The studio sank its budget into the CGI and so the suit looks fantastic. It is probably the coolest thing about the whole movie.

The Worst: Every plot point that comes out of nowhere, but I think by the third time you’ve watched the romantic leads sit down to talk it out and not reach a conclusion, it stops being romantic and starts to feel like stalling.

Rating: Half Mast

P.S. There’s an after-credits scene that, like everything else in this movie, comes out of nowhere and tries to set up a sequel. Poor Mark Strong.

FastFive! [bitches!]

N.B. The word “bitches” was not actually in this movie’s title, but God, it should’ve been.

N.N.B. Joining me for this review is my good friend Jordan Koen. Go follow him on twitter and, more importantly, jam to his music.

Jordan: Hi there, I’m Jordan.

Nas: On Sunday night me, you and [y]our mates undertook the titanically manly task of going to watch the latest in a long line of sequels to The Fast & The Furious (seriously, click that link; that trailer is so 2001). You’ll recall that there was 2 Fast 2 Furious, Tokyo Drift (with its ridiculously ausome titular anthem), Fast&Furious and that brings us up to speed for the fifth installment: Fast Five (or Fast & Furious 5: Rio Heist in places that aren’t the USA). There are a lot of movies I’ve been waiting a long time to see this year, like Thor, Green Lantern, Captain America and other cool obvious franchise flicks. I’ve only been excited about Fast Five, though, for about two weeks. This was ever since you told me, Jordan, that it didn’t just star Vin Diesel and Paul Walker (who will probably never make another kind of movie ever), but also Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson!! This man sweats Awesome. Soon as I knew he was in it, I knew that the people behind this franchise about fast cars, burly men, hot chicks and overly simplistic cop/heist plots knew what they were doing. Isn’t The Rock just the bestest? Let’s get into this thing. Take it away, Jordan!

Jordan: First off lets not believe that Fast Five is anything more than it sets out to be. Pure unadulterated Action. The plot is so paper thin a five-year-old probably wrote it but little plot is needed when you have action scenes this amazing.

Nas: Ask yourself how many action sequences you can come up with involving cars. If the answer is more than 9, congratulations, cos you obviously already worked on FastFive! Everything that makes this kind of movie fun to watch can be summed up in the first 30 minutes, where [SPOILERS!] a truck is hanging out the side of a train, about to hit a bridge and explode, with Paul Walker hanging from it. Vin Diesel has to steal a car off the moving train and save his buddy. It. Is. Ridiculous.

Jordan: Director Justin Lin delivers in spades, this isn’t just one car race/crash after another. No, my friends, this film has one of the best fight scenes of all time. Not that the fight is amazing. It’s just the fact that you get to witness The Rock and Diesel go at it. Woo. And they go at it. This, friends, is worth the price of a 3D movie alone.

Nas: You tell no lies. I think the director even summed this whole movie up as being about The Rock jumping through a window and hitting Vin Diesel in the head.

You better run, Vin!

Jordan: Not to mention the fact that Rock has some of the best one-liners in an action flick to date. The plot involves Diesel & Co. heading over to Rio after the FBI starts a manhunt for them and eventually ends with them heisting the richest mobster in town.

Nas: The Rock, meanwhile, is the special forces guy sent in to hunt them down. How can you not want to watch this movie now?!

Jordan: So the Fast & Furious crew have to battle the locals and the Special Forces at the same time, which obviously just means double the action for us.

Nas: This movie strings together its action sequences and cool moments by just having other characters ask Vin Diesel rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions he then answers, because he is that sort of tough guy with a watertight plan!

Jordan: I won’t lie and say I didn’t get as giddy as a schoolgirl when he first appears on screen, with the overly blatant hero shot on the back of a truck alongside a moving train.

Nas: Normally I’m not a big Vin Diesel fan, but you gotta respect the dude for owning up to his career screw-ups. He didn’t sign on for 2 Fast 2 Furious and he knew it was a mistake. This meant that we had to sit through an entire movie where Paul Walker tried to act. And worse: The Dawn of Tyrese.

Jordan: Oh wait! I had almost forgotten about old Paul Walker. Shame. Poor Paul is pushed to the sidelines in action terms, as the other two leads just own the action in this film. Walker does a job (neither good nor bad) of being the emotional anchor for the team.

Nas: Paul Walker has this weird schoolboy likability that means no matter how many awkward examples of Ebonics he mutters at the other characters, you never quite hate him. You just sort of don’t care about him either. What about the rest of the cast? This movie brings almost all the other major Fast & Furious characters together. Along with Diesel, Walker and Jordana Brewster from the original, we’ve got - sigh - Tyrese and Ludacris from the first sequel, and Sung Kang, fromTokyo Drift (which is now, apparently, set after all the Walker movies), who even played his character Han in a non-Fast & Furious movie. We all know how much I love characters named Han. And then there’s some other people to round things out, including another hot chick. For posterity.

Jordan: The rest of the cast, ummmmm, yeah I dont really care about them. The girls are hot as hell, the rappers are comic relief and if they can’t do it, there are two Mexicans for you.

Nas: Special billing for Jordana Brewster though. There’s a reason her pregnant character doesn’t ever look even 3 months into baby-rearing for this whole movie.

_________________________________________________________

The One-Liner: This is a movie where The Rock leaps through a window to catch Vin Diesel, guys.

The Best: Action! Action! Vin Diesel! The Rock! Jordana Brewster! Action! Also, the intro lives up to the original movie’s title in every way.

The Worst: It’s all completely implausible rubbish, but let’s be fair here, this movie wasn’t trying to be anything other than the most blatantly action-y action movie of the year. We haven’t been to the future, but we think it may’ve succeeded.

Rating: Full Bone.

P.S. Stay for an after-the-credits scene if you like sexy Latinas, ugly Latinas and wanna be on the up and up for Fast Six (they should honestly just call it Six). I think Winter 2013 is gonna be a good time for us all, folks.

Last Week’s News 16-05-2011

Intelligence sucks – Cracked has an article showing us the 5 Unexpected Downsides of High Intelligence. God, it’s sad.

_________________________________________________________

South African Politics for the lulz – I wanted to do a political roundup guide for South Africa before this week’s municipal elections, but I’m not sure I can do a better job than this.

_________________________________________________________

Here’s a shit-ton of unnecessary Batman-related news.

Rise of the Batmen – How many idiots can dress up like Batman in one week? Apparently at least two: this guy who got into a fight on the Vegas strip and this weirdo.

Batman in Africa – More Batman news. This DC Comics introduced Bat-Wing, the Batman of (Northern) Africa in the best comic they produce: Batman Incorporated.

Bat…dinosaurs? – Bat-Wing’s creator, Grant Morrison, is set to script comic and film versions of Men In Black director Barry Sonnenfeld’s Dominion: Dinosaurs vs Aliens (not making that up).

_________________________________________________________

Walt Disney, Capitalist Creative – Oh, Disney.

_________________________________________________________

Rise of the Machines – Check out this awesome archive gallery on the history/rise of personal computers on PopSci.

_________________________________________________________

Bolton’s Back – Michael Bolton attempts pop cultural relevance by teaming up with Lonely Island to do a song called Jack Sparrow. It’s funny. I swear.

_________________________________________________________

Lady Gaga by Jim Lee

Lady Gaga redesigns – I love Comics Alliance way too much. But still, these Lady Gaga costume redesigns by comic artists are great.

_________________________________________________________

Twitter helping Doctors – Picture the little twitterbird helping out doctors in earthquake-ravaged Japan. Now read this article.

_________________________________________________________

Twitter to Follow – She lives in New York and she live-tweets from Cannes. I hate her, but Goddammit do I respect her: @NadiaNeophytou

_________________________________________________________

Song to Listen – Gang Gang Dance – First Communion [via @Lovejadeheart]

More Bad Art 10/05/2011

Last night I had a raging buzz that could not be stopped. I went to bed at around 1AM, but couldn’t get my mind to shut off till 5AM. In the time between, I wrote an entry that’ll show up on this blog sometime soon, and then I did some random drawings.

This is a rough of a character I created for a web comic I’ve been meaning to do for the last 3 years. I’ve pitched it to many artists, but no one ever wants to jump on board or they get too busy to keep up (to be fair, they have the harder job). Part of the reason I keep considering learning to draw, and learning to draw sequentially, is that I want to execute that web comic some day.

I don’t know who this fellow is, or where he cropped up from in my subconscious. I think every now and then I just tend to scribble out these sorts of generic “cool” people with atypical haircuts, sunglasses and gear. The real experiment here was that I wanted to mess with perspective a bit to learn something. I’m not sure it quite worked, but at least I’m trying to branch out. Soon you might even get some characters in motion.

Top left is another character from the web comic. That’s a really simple drawing that conveys zero personality, although he is supposed to be the ‘zen’ character. The next two at the top right are just rough experiments with making the face of the character from the first drawing emote a bit. You tell me how successful I am in the comments below. Bottom left is another guy from the web comic, although he looks more androgynous than usual here. In actual fact, I think that sketch started out as a drawing of a girl’s face, but morphed into his much more familiar pouting mug. The last one on the bottom right is the last of the leads from this never-did-happen web comic and he’s just doing something a little different than the others. I like to think there’s some of his personality in that, but really the character was meant to be reserved and a little dopey.

Well, there you go, kids. This is what I do at 4am when I should be catching up on my sheep count. Hope you like. Or even hate. I just want you to feel something!! Please leave your comments below.