(no subject)

[kjpepper]

Idlewild was good. It's little slow in bits, but anywhere where either member of Outkast is doing his thing, it's fantastic. I think my favorite is the little bit where Andre3000 is singing a short little song about the fear of time - accompanied by about forty singing cuckoo clocks. Really its main flaw was that it couldn't figure out whether it was a dark comedy or a drama, which would have been fine if the two tones were balanced better. The funny parts were very funny. The dramatic parts? ehhhhh. (Moulin Rouge had the same problem - it was excellent when it was going for completly cracked out over the top silliness, not so much when it was all dark and depressing.) Also, it really didn't seem like the two members of Outkast were doing the same movie... they almost never share a scene, and if so, it was brief. There really isn't anything there to support a great friendship between the two characters after they grow up, though the bit in the beginning where they're both little boys was utterly wonderful.

Still, as an exercise in visual style, it's gorgeous. There were so many little touches that added to the atmosphere, like the opening montage in black and white where the perspective is contantly being messed with, the way the swing/breakdancing was shot, and even the animated characters inhabiting Percival's scores and talking rooster on the back of Rooster's flask (that sounds disturbingly like Saddam Hussein from South Park) were wonderfully done. And I want the soundtrack. Currently abusing "The Rooster" on iTunes as we speak.

I seem to have lit a firestorm in one of the comms with my popcorn rant from yesterday. I'm somewhat annoyed that people latched onto a minor detail and dismissed the whole - I really didn't want to start a whole "But I like/have to drink/worship/prefer Diet Coke" debate. At some point though, simply because the whole topic has pissed me off yet again, I'm going to have to write a definitive rant about it and then give up soda entirely in a fit of pique. And this is completely aside from the whole "aspartame is (questionably) evil" thing, BTW, that's been done into the ground, and it can be said that HFCS is about on par with it in evil. I've got greater issues with the stuff other than how much better apparently Diet Coke actually tastes, that pretty much lead to an objection as to why the stuff is even sold, and if it has to be, why it's marketed as "Diet" Coke.

No, please don't start the shit up again in comments to this entry. I realize I've got a f-list of diet coke drinkers, and please let it be known that you all have heard me bitch about it at various points. Answer my rant when I actually write it.

I had this weird existential thought process this morning that there is precious little one can put 100% solid faith in. Not other people, cause that whole free will thing makes them inherently unstable. Not things, cause they can be taken away from you or destroyed. Not even your physical self, cause you never know, you might have an aneurysm and keel over at the end of this sentence.

Everyone still with me? good.

So what's left? It kind of leaves you with murky abstractions, like faith, love, truth, justice and the American way, ha ha. But all of them are highly subjective. So what really is there?

I'm not depressed. I'm just thinking too much.

Seems like funeral homes are the theme of the week, seeing as I just saw Idlewild and am in the middle of Fun Home, which is wonderful so far and makes me want to trek up to vermont simply so I can give Alison Bechdel a big fat kiss. (Not that I and pretty much any comic-ally inclined person that at any point in their lives identified as a lesbian between 1983 and now didn't want to before.) It makes me want to draw again... amidst the 6000 other projects. *rueful grin* Seems like memoir graphic novels are everywhere now, and they're just so much... I guess more relatable than normal (auto)biographies. *shakes head* Anyway, read it if you have a chance. Even if you can't relate to DTWOF. (BTW, Q, you did indeed give me Carbon Based. So I'm only missing one.)

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Comments

[austingoddess.livejournal.com]

So what really is there?

Let me know if you find out. Seriously. Since my life was pretty well thrown to the 4 winds a few years ago (sounds dramatic, but I lost 95% of all relationships that were important to me, my job, my temper for the first and only time, and then damn near my mind...all unexpectedly, somewhere between mostly and totallycompletely out of the blue, and all for reasons that didn't allow any solid blame that would give me the luxury of explaining or externalizing it), I've been wanting to know that very thing. It was a terrible lesson, for me anyway, to learn that life is inherently not fair, that karma only covers so much, that the real honest-to-Rudy underlying principle of the universe is that shit happens. To quote the preacher in From Dusk Til Dawn: "I'm not going through a lapse. What I've experienced is closer to awakening."
Except I'm not so bitter about it now as he was. Mostly just looking for a clue as to what to do next. Nothing works the way it did for the 35 years before that. Where do you start when you can't count on anything that's come before?

[retsuko.livejournal.com]

I, for one, enjoyed your rant, and have no inclinations towards or against particular kinds of soda. ^-^

I'm glad to hear a good Idlewild review. The previews looked like so much fun, and I was hoping that it would be good. I would love to see/hear the cuckoo clock performance! Methinks I must check it out.

And isn't Fun Home the best? :-D

[morlock.livejournal.com]

the subjective stuff is all you can count on because thats the only thing that you can bed to your will. or ignore parts of. i mean, look at scientists that believe in non-evolution. faith is what they grasp onto, and they can ignore what they don't like.

by the by - outkast always does that. andre3000 and big boi are going in two completly different directions (if you noticed their scores are kind of seperate) musically and in their lives, but they are still really good friends. whenever they do stuff together, theres always a gulf between them... one of their recent records was the love below, and it was a double disk...one for each.

[birkwelch.livejournal.com]

I know what you can count on! Gravity. Everything in the entire universe is always sucking, jerking or pulling on you, and the closer they are, the harder they suck. Believe it!