Music Videos I've Recently Decided to Hate

I was obsessively watching music video after music video yesterday. (In case you couldn't tell from all the music videos I'm posting.) And I ran into these two videos. They're terrifyingly awful.


Justin Bieber's "Pray"
As far as cotton candy pop goes, Justin Bieber kind of owns the market. And that's all cool and everything. We all enjoy a little guilty pleasure music every once in awhile- Miley Cyrus, JoBros, and Justin Bieber are pretty much the entire genre. And then there's this song, which seems nice. Until you see the music video, in which JB takes all the attention that should be given to Haiti and cancer children, and makes it all about him and how apparently nice he is. Which is just kind of disgusting. It also features Bieber playing guitar in a giant lighted heart to his audience of screaming girls, just in case they forgot what place he should occupy in their lives.



Jesse McCartney's "Shake"
First of all, why is Jesse McCartney still making music? Second of all, why is he wearing that suit in a music video that's all about ghetto ass-shaking? Also, what is the point of this video? I'm genuinely not sure what McCartney is trying to get across. Because he looks like a babyfaced pimp in a tailored suit who just stepped out of the 1950s. He seems thoroughly unimpressed by all of the girls in their underwear shaking it in his face. Maybe Justin Timberlake could look nonchalant in a moment like that, but McCartney looks like he's twelve, why is he so not excited about being a womanizer? Also he looks like this, which weirds me out:

Music Videos

Great celebrity appearances in music videos:


Enrique Iglesias- "Push"

In all honesty, the creepiness of Enrique Iglesias filming a porno for these two actors, who recently played teenagers in the Step Up 2 movie almost ruins it, but whatever.



Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi"
Oh Alexander Skarsgard, you're so dreamy. Aaand then he pushes her off the balcony. Moving on...



Aerosmith's "Cryin'"
Stephen Dorff and Alicia Silverstone. Also, was that Josh Holloway- Sawyer from Lost??



Vampire Weekend's "Giving Up the Gun"
Jake Gylenhaal is the best thing about this video, it's just too funny. Also there's a JoBro in it, always a plus.



Elton John's "I Want Love"
It's rather heartbreaking to see Robert Downey, Jr. walk around in an empty palace singing Elton John, isn't it?



Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers- "Into the Great Wide Open"
Who knew Johnny Depp had a starring role in a music video? It's kind of an awesome music video though.

It's Just Always Bothered Me

 Can we talk about this picture for a second? I think it's a wonderful marketing campaign that tells no lies. Here is Bella. Here are her two boy toys. They're all airbrushed and awesome looking. Look how shiny and smooth and slightly dead they all look! The fans don't care about the plot, or action, or whatever, they care about these three. So. Good poster design.

But wait. I mentioned something about the airbrushing and the looking dead. The problem is that Kristen Stewart's face seems to have been mysteriously pasted into this picture. Her hair doesn't even attach to her head, it's so bad. Also it makes her head look oddly tall. Like a conehead. Also her facial expression makes me think that A) she's really tired from doing her homework all night, B) she's suuuper high, or C) she's dead. I'm not sure how else you could get that facial expression that creepily expresses absolutely nothing. Seriously, look at her face. There's nothing there but dead...deadness. Strange...Also she has no ears, which is worrisome, particularly because it makes me think she does have ears, but they're just covered with her hair, which means her sideburns have grown out waaay too long.

Oo! Look check this out!

Ed Westwick's face fits here too!

Trailers

Worst Trailer of the Day:


Just Wright. First of all, the title kind of sucks. Second of all this entire trailer plays like an example of what not to do. Mostly it represents of the big mistakes trailer-makers fall prey to: they put the entire film into the trailer. This trailer is long, drawn out, and features every conflict that will be in the film, AND the predictable ending. Truly unfortunate.

Best Trailer of the Day:


Cowboys & Aliens. First of all, who wouldn't go to see a movie titled "Cowboys & Aliens"? Second of all, it's freaking James Bond and Indiana Jones fighting freaking aliens in the freaking Wild Wild West. This trailer is the opposite of what we saw in the previous clip. We're given a taste of the idea of the film, and we see its three stars, some explosions, and that's just about it. You're left wanting to know more, despite the fact that almost nothing of importance has been revealed to you. Beautifully done.

Waiting For Superman

If you ever had any doubts about the public school system's ability to teach children effectively, prepare to have them all confirmed. This film exposes the shameful, terrifying, awful (how many other adjectives for "disturbingly bad" can I use?) state of the public school system. If you're not quite sure why it's a big deal if the public school system you grew up in isn't the best, then you should see this film. In the education system Waiting for Superman depicts, our children's future is placed as a secondary priority next to teachers' job security. In this education system we spend more on feeding and supporting a convicted felon for a year than we do supporting a child's education for a year. In this system, schools are forced to retain poor teachers because of tenure, and year after year that teacher hinders the education of hundreds of kids. In this system, bad schools create drop-outs, a bad economy, and are a blight to not just their neighborhood, but the entire nation.


Waiting follows five young children: Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily, and their families as they  attempt to forge a better future for themselves through the public school system, a journey  few kids ever successfully navigate or complete.


We need to wake up, smell the decaying stench of our public education system, and cut out the dying, infected flesh that's ruining the futures of our children, and the future of our country.


Directed by Davis Guggenheim
MPAA rating: PG for some thematic material, mild language and incidental smoking.
See the trailer here

Terminator Salvation

The woman blows on her fingers to warm them. "I'm a little cold." The man sitting a few feet away eyes her, trying to discern the connotation of her comment. She rolls her eyes and moves next to him. "Relax," she says, pulling his arm around her "I just want some body heat." She puts her head on his chest, nestling closer to ward off the cold. Closing her eyes she listens to his heart beating. "You have a strong heart...god I love that sound."

Machines have annihilated most of the human race; a beating heart is a rare sound in 2018. Little does she know that the man whose heart she's listening to may be less man, and more Skynet's latest plan to slaughter what's left of the human race.

Skynet is an artificially intelligent defense system created for the US military. When Skynet became self-aware its creators attempted to shut it down. Skynet then viewed mankind as a threat to its existence and initiated "Judgment Day". In a nuclear holocaust most of the human race was decimated. It is now 2018 and John Connor, the prophesied leader of the Resistance, is on his way to fulfilling his destiny and destroying Skynet. But something is amiss.

Skynet has been trying to kill John Connor (Christian Bale) for years by sending Terminators, killing machines, into the past to murder the future leader of the Resistance. John Connor has been prepared for the future, because of all his mother had told him, but somewhere something changed. And the future is no longer the one she predicted. And this time, mankind might not make it out alive.

Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) is a death row inmate who donates his body to science before Skynet is brought online. Wright awakes years into the future after Judgement Day. Wright knows nothing of Skynet or the Machines and he must reconcile his drive for self-preservation with the desire to make up for his past wrongs by aiding a young Resistance fighter named Kyle Reese.

The new "Terminator Salvation" was probably the most well-conceived Terminator plot yet. The early Terminator films can be called Arnold Schwarzenegger action flicks, with some mind-bending time travel thrown in. As the series went on the films began to take on something that could be called quality. The combination of a Schwarzenegger action style and an ever-more-complicated plot pulled in viewers who couldn't believe the writers could still experiment creatively with essentially the same storyline.

"Terminator Salvation" is a whole new animal compared to its predecessors. It features two male leads, neither of which is Schwarzenegger, and offers a story that's full of great action, that preserves the time-line of the earlier films, and that asks if being human is only a physical quality, or entails something even transcendent of flesh and blood. There are enough machines in the film to ensure that the actual "body count" isn't too high and you won't be traumatized by gushing blood. On the other hand "Salvation" doesn't try to sugar coat the future it portrays. The humans who are alive are dirty, starving, selfish, and embody the spectrum of human nature, often displaying more bad qualities than good. The film takes the classic tale of "Good versus Evil" and turns it around on the audience asking, "What is good?" and "What is bad?"

But don't hold your breath, it really isn't as cerebral as I'm making it sound. John Connor is wonderfully portrayed by one of the most talented actors in Hollywood today, Christian Bale. As much as I love Bale's work, and "Salvation" is no exception, his John Connor spends a lot of time unnecessarily yelling the majority of his lines. Further character annoyances can be found in Moon Bloodgood's character Blair, who is a far cry from the strong, but female, Sarah Connor from the previous films.

The best character in the film is done by newcomer Sam Worthington. His Marcus Wright is the raw and wriggling example of a human being on the hook. He is not an angelic, noble man necessarily. Neither is he all evil villain. He lands somewhere in the middle, as all of us do, struggling between right and wrong, good and evil. On some level don't we all? I can't put my finger on the exact quality that makes his performance so noteworthy. All I know is that Worthington took a Christian Bale movie about John Conner and turned it into a Sam Worthington movie about Marcus Wright. Any actor who can overshadow Bale is one talented SOB in my book.

One of "Salvation's" strongest aspects is the way the writers have worked the story into the original storyline. Skynet's latest scheme in killing John Connor is to murder his father Kyle Reese before he's sent back in time. Die-hard Terminator fans will be tickled to see Anton Yelchin ("Star Trek's Chekov) as a young Kyle Reese, and various other references to the previous films. A version of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator even makes an appearance.

Conclusion: Any fan of the original series, of action flicks, will by default love this film. It's a quality action flick and one of my new favorite films. That means don't waste your time watching anything til you've seen this new installment of the Terminator series.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and language.; Rated R for some violence and brief nudity. (director's cut)

See the Trailer here


Trivia:

• All four 'Terminator' films have had their climactic battle scenes take place in industrial settings.
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• The third Terminator film to have the line, "Come with me if you want to live." In The Terminator (1984), Kyle Reese says it to Sarah Connor at the Tech-Noir club
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• In several scenes, Kyle can be seen wearing Nike shoes. They are strikingly similar to the Nike Vandals he wore in The Terminator (1984).
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• In the original The Terminator (1984) Kyle Reese asks the police "What day is it? What year?" And the first thing Marcus Wright says to Kyle Reese is "What day is it? What year?".

Twilight Sparks But Doesn't Ignite

The human bares her tempting throat to the vampire, who lowers his mouth to her neck, his teeth moving ever closer to her pulsing jugular. As he approaches her soft flesh the tension mounts, but the fanged vamp just kisses her throat and pulls back. He won’t turn her tonight.

This is Twilight, a piece of tantalizing fiction from author Stephenie Meyer, brought to the big screen at the request of millions of desperate fans. The hero of this film literally sparkles, has ‘smoldering” eyes that change color, and says things like, “I hate you for making me want you so much.” Edward Cullen, Meyer’s vampire hero hasn’t necessarily captured the imaginations so much as he has invaded the fantasies of every preteen girl on the planet, who, at the mere mention of his name, sigh and whisper “Oh Edward.”

Twilight stars the lovely Kristen Stewart as Bella Swann, who has just moved to constantly overcast Forks, Washington. When Bella starts school she immediately takes notice of the impossibly beautiful, very mysterious Edward Cullen (played by Robert Pattinson), and soon discovers that Ed isn’t your average high school teen. He’s an immortal vampire. Of course she falls for the vamp, and they decide they can’t fight their love. Unfortunately, their love is punctuated by constant reminders that Edward is a guy who is constantly fighting the urge to sink his fangs into his girlfriend’s neck and suck her blood. When a vampire who hunts humans for sport starts hunting Bella, Edward fears he may not be able to protect her.

Although Twilight the book was an interesting read, the movie is what you’d call boring. Most of the film consists of Bella and Edward staring deep into one another’s eyes, frolicking in the forest, and playing vampire baseball with the Cullen clan while the audience waits for some kind of plot development. In addition to the glacially-slow-moving plot, I should mention the poor casting and poor direction of the four unfortunate actors playing Ed Cullen’s siblings, Jasper in particular. Either Jackson Rathbone (the actor playing Jasper) is a terrible actor, or he was appallingly directed, because throughout the film he appears on the verge of vomiting a small animal at any moment.

Despite its flaws the film isn’t half bad. In fact, the chemistry between Pattinson and Stewart as star-crossed lovers is so raw it’s dripping with the blood and guts of great acting. The couple may be the next Fred and Ginger, the next Depp and Burton, the next long-term cinematic partnership that could have great results.

Pattinson, who portrayed Hogwart’s golden boy, Cedric Diggory, in the last two Harry Potter films, is a rising star in Hollywood. With acting ability far exceeding that of his peers, the Twilight series may be able to catapult Pattinson to the fame and acclaim he deserves. As for Stewart, she starred with Meg Ryan and Adam Brody in In the Land of Women, and worked with Emile Hirsch in Into the Wild, films most people have never heard of, but were critically acclaimed for the actors’ performances. These two kids are packed with charm and charisma, good looks, and serious talent.

Twilight is going to provide both Steward and Pattinson the change to cement their status as gifted actors. Twilight itself may not be a particularly fantastic movie, but its stars are. Even though the story might be a bit dull at times the two lovers make it interesting. It’s the moments between the two main characters that make up for the otherwise egregious casting and the slow plot. Let’s hope that with Stewart and Pattinson at the helm, Bella and Edward turn out to be the next powerhouse couple of cinema.