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Two videos that I didn't make but love as if they were my own

My friend Gabe made a supercut of people in movies saying the title of the movie and it is as least twice as genius as my description makes it sound:

Gabe's been talking about this for a while (supercuts, like Mariah Carey's vision of love, take time), so it's pretty momentous that this is finally seeing the light of day. I also must pat myself on the back for contributing to it. I won't outright spoil the clip I suggested, but click here if you're curious.

Also, I missed this when it was posted a few months ago, but here's a video mashup of Ponyo (which I love like a half-human-half-fish loves ham) and the Lonely Island's "I'm on a Boat" (which I love like a vegetarian loves ham, which is to say: ugh). But whatever, this is extremely clever (if very literal) and it's all worth it to see Ponyo exclaim, "Aw shit!" She's such a card, that Ponyo. What will she have someone think up for her next?

[via ONTD]

If he's black, he must rap

R. Kelly. Bobby Brown. Ray J. Estelle. Sisqo. Russell Simmons. Shaggy. Damon Dash. M.I.A. Santigold. Kelis. T-Pain. Akon. All of these people have two things in common: 1) At one point, they were referred to by the New York Post as "rappers," and 2) None of them are. You see how some of these might confuse people: how the sing-songy styles of M.I.A. and Akon could be mistaken as rapping for the uninitiated and hard-of-hearing, old white people who write the Post. T-Pain is a "rappa ternt sanga," so that explains that. Bobby Brown has rapped (I mean, has a couplet finer than "Too hot to handle, too cold to hold / They called the Ghostbusters in they're in control" since been spat?), Kelis, R. Kelly and Santigold have kind of, as well, I guess. Russell and Damon have worked around rap, so I guess they're rappers by association?

The fact of the matter is that even if the case can be made that a few of these people could possibly write "rapper" on their resume, a more accurate title could be applied to any of them. (Someone like Kid Rock apparently is one of the few of the multi-hyphenate elite. Guess why!) I do not know for sure why they are called "rappers," but I can make a few guesses. The Post still fetishizes rappers as the bad boys of the entertainment industry. The vast majority of its hip-hop coverage -- I'd say just from the informal survey that I took to find the above examples of faulty labeling, 80 percent of it involves the rappers involved in some sort of crime. As silly as it is, the word "rapper," still has sensationalistic value at the Post that "R&B star" or "dancehall artist" or "mogul," just doesn't. (Shit, they called Barbie a rapper, even though she was actually, Rappin' and Rockin'.)  Also, these people who have no idea what they're talking about regarding pop culture, may hear about a (usually male) black recording artist and just assume that he is a rapper. I'm not saying that these people are racist (although, if they work for the Post, I'm not saying they're not racist, either), but I am saying they're lazy, ignorant and prone to stereotyping. That's all!

The reason that I bring this up is that in Tuesday's paper there was an item labeling Ne-Yo a rapper, which is the most egregious error of this sort yet. I think I've rapped more than Ne-Yo has. He's a fucking crooner, you know? A singing, songwriting crooner. (I discovered through my research that this isn't even the first time the Post has done that.) Seriously, Post, who's next? Stevie Wonder? Miles Davis? Lenny Kravitz is part-black, so he must be part-rapper, too, right? And look, I understand factual errors. I make them often. I understand meaning one thing and typing another. But I don't understand working at a national media outlet and just assuming in the place of fact-checking. That's nonsense.

It's not just the Post that does this, of course. Come, let's laugh at the mistakes of what we can presume are stupid white people:

Human differential

I love that Brittany was called out for looking too catalog. I wonder what catalog this could be for? The Curried Feather Company, specializing in all things red: from skin to dots?

Oh ma gawd, y'all!

Ah just peed myself and am unable to post an ANTM recap today. I have to spend my day air-drying. Sahrray!

(Just kidding. It was Halloween. Gimme a break.)

Recap tomorrow. In the meantime, if you need to be entertained, I highly suggest watching Keyshia Cole's mom Frankie on the BET Hip Hop Awards red carpet (embedded below the jump because I can't figure out how to take it off autoplay). She is a fearless interviewer who'll physically drag a celebrity over to her camera and ask questions no one else would (Anaconda, anyone?). This is the best use of a drug-addled past that I've ever witnessed. This is really a phenomenal moment.

Happy Halloween '09!

It's that time of year again! The time when eating 3,000 calories worth of candy in one night is OK as long as you're doing it in fun-size portions, and most importantly, the time when Winston gets dressed up. It comes but once a year (sometimes twice, depending on how festive we're feeling at Christmas -- and just replaying that video was enough for Winston to get up from sleeping next to me and leave the room, as though hearing "Welcome Christmas" brings back painful memories).

Anyway, the point is that Winston is in costume below. Yay!

This Is It, and that's that

Michael Jackson dies at the beginning of This Is It.

That is not a spoiler; it's why we're there. The film opens with a rolling slate informing us the circumstances surrounding this two hours of rough (at times, extremely so) rehearsal footage for a stage show that never was. It tells us what we already know: on June 25, Michael Jackson made the biggest comeback in pop music history under the most tragic terms possible. The film is a great encapsulation of MJ's relevance resurgence: his death is what sparked our attention and got our asses in the theaters, but his music is what keeps us there in both cases. It's wonderful to hear vividly arranged renditions of a dozen or so of his hits on a booming movie theater sound system. That's worth the price of admission, and the entire ordeal is mesmerizing as a result. Despite Michael's grandeur, This Is It feels not cinematic, but alive. I can think of no greater praise for this organized series of clips than to say that watching it made me forget that Michael Jackson is dead.

Beyond how his death informs the movie (it got it put together, yeah -- but you can hardly condemn anyone for commodifying a commodity), there is little to intellectualize here: It is what it is. The music, which takes up about 85 percent of the movie, aside, It's a shrinking portrait of an odd man prone to Willy Wonka-wardrobe decisions, a fussy and entirely hands-on approach to his stage show and a love of the dramatic pause. He was a man who had a taste for, or at least could recognize, beauty in men -- his eight or so backup dancers are jaw-droppingly gorgeous (their thrusts and sways are rewarding, if you're into that: this movie could have been called This Is It, And By "It," I Mean Dick In Sweatpants). He was the kind of man who thought audiences would be "nourished" by the reinsertion of eight bars of "The Way You Make Me Feel" into its live arrangement, the kind of man who considered "love is important," to be an "important" message to convey in his show, the kind of man who would wear a blazer with cartoonishly pointed shoulders over a T-shirt depicting an iced-out Popeye. It was a man so mired in weirdness, he had no idea how weird he was (I'll never forget the astonished way he asked Martin Bashir, "You don't climb trees?!?"). Except now, instead of rolling our eyes at that weirdness, we gaze up at it and sigh. It took a lot for us to come around, but I'm glad we did.

The Dog Stopper

More VHS-ripping fun. This is scary enough to be appropriate for Halloween week, I think. Also, it's almost magic.

Comedy album of the year!

Shakira strikes me as the kind of person who likes to pee on people. It doesn't feel like a sexual hypothetical pee -- just a matter-of-fact one. Maybe she doesn't even enjoy it; it is just something she does the way other people crack their knuckles or chew on their own hair. I have a few reasons for believing this: the way that she moves suggests someone so invested in the art of public urination that she has many different techniques. Her gestures in the "She-Wolf" video alone make me believe that this is a skill honed through lots of practice. Here are three of them:

 

I just imagine the urine streaming out in all of these shots, particularly in the gif, as she lifts her leg (so wolf-like!) and pivots a la a sprinkler. All of this makes me want to start referring to her as "Shapeera." Perhaps I will from now on.

I remember when I first decided that Shakira was a dedicated pisser. It was many years ago...

Eraesed

Hey look, Halloween came early!

(Tyra seriously makes the best faces at these girls before she lets them go. If only they'd learn by example, we'd have not just a tank full of hamsters, but a coven of them.)

Believe the hype

I'll just get right to it: I fucking loved Paranormal Activity. I expected to hate it and avoided it for weeks, but I finally relented. If you are on the fence as I was, I implore you to get over yourself and see it. I thought it was effective, a fantastic use of resources, and a brilliant marriage of an old standard (the haunted house) and newly active subgenre (POV horror, which I wish I could call a new subgenre for the sake of conciseness, but Cannibal Holocaust disallows that). And like the best marriages, each party strengthens the other - the ghost story gets reinvigorated with rawness and POV horror gets a new vitality to the story it's telling. While the story lines of most entries in the POV horror subgenre could be conveyed in a more traditional, detached filming style (making the first-person hand-held thing is ultimately a gimmick, to whatever degree), Paranormal Activity simply could not. Central characters Katie and Micah record themselves as they sleep to get a grasp on what's going on at night in their suspected haunted house, so their camera just as vital to their understanding as it is ours. The medium is the message to themselves.

Paranormal Activity's cleverness is astounding. From very early on, Katie worries that the camera will agitate the demon that lives among them. Whether the camera's presence does this directly isn't fully explained (this demon is fond of grunts, door slams, guttural name reciting and other forms of vague communication), but it is central to the couple's inevitable downfall. (If it hasn't struck you yet, if you care about spoilers, now would be a good time to stop reading, although I'm not going to be too specific.) The more Micah finds out about their haunting by reviewing footage taped at night, the more he wants to know. This leads him to engage with the demon verbally and via a Ouija board, despite being warned not to do so by a psychic who visits the couple's home early in the film. Micah is not characterized by stupidity or irrational decisions to move along the plot -- he's a rational person in a situation that defies logic. He's alternately curious, amazed, frightened and angry. His struck me as a wholly human response, maybe because it's much like how I regarded the film. I didn't jump or cry a la Katie (even though the movie is full of potential jump scares, depending on how scary you think small movements, flickering lights and thuds are). Instead, I was more nervously intrigued like Micah. I can't say for sure, but I wonder if predicting two potential and very different audience reactions via his two characters was a goal of director Oren Peli.

I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case. There's an awareness here that goes beyond typical horror fare to cover major plot holes. This movie seems to have an answer for everything. If you wonder how this found footage can escalate in tension to work as a conventional story arc (complete with climax!), well, the answer is that the demon feeds on negativity. It grows stronger and scarier and so it keeps pushing things forward. (Also, Micah's probing causes strife with the perpetually terrified Katie, which in turn causes more negativity, which means more probing, and because it's all bound together, the film is just as much about a crumbling relationship as a haunting.) If you wonder why they don't just pick up and move, the answer is that the problem is not with the house, but Katie, who's been experiencing some sort of paranormal activity since age 8. If you wonder why they don't just shut up in an effort to reduce this haunting to the creeking level it once existed at, the answer is that once you open Pandora's box, it matters little if you close it.

For the way that it sets (and keeps) the story in motion, the camera is that box. (I should point out that, as with most POV horror, the camera is a frequent object of discussion and open disdain.) Because of this, I detect a critique on our perpetually deepening obsession with recording and examining ourselves. It feels particularly pointed here, not just because Katie and Micah's actions lead to their demise, but because this collection of supposedly found footage has been unmistakably edited to include just the good parts. (For once, this POV horror doesn't purport to be raw footage, but that which has been manipulated via selective inclusion and fast-forwarding, as, we can assume, a way to explain the heinous, human crime that eventually takes place. After all, it couldn't be any other way, since these characters were filming themselves for hours each night, and we only have so much time as moviegoers.) As something that has been picked over to exploit the most sensational elements of these people's lives, Paranormal Activity feels like the answer to or heir of reality TV or YouTube-worthy material. Paranormal Activity is a critique of our compulsive documentation, but it's also a celebration of its entertainment value when assembled properly. That kind of irony and ambivalence nicely sums our ever-strengthening love of the guilty pleasure as pop-culture consumers. Even if we aren't amongst demons that go bump in the night, this is how we live.

That Alf house track you always wanted

Alf - Stuck On Earth (Ben Liebrand Housemix)

There are no words, except you're welcome, I guess. [Found at No Guts No Glory No 80's]

All my banners

Do you know how many damn banners I've made for this site? Probably about a million. Here they are in one post (at least, I think this is all of them). Some are such crap (like the one above, which was my first ever and way too literal in its identity struggle) and some I love so much that it disappointed me to take them down for the sake of keeping things moving. But now, like the horror villains they frequently depict, they live again and in an even cheesier context. I'll add to this as each banner goes up and I'll link to it on the side since I know you're just dying to keep up with all this.

My favorite, incidentally, is the Requiem for a Dream one. I'd forgotten about it and how wrong it is. After all these years, I can still make myself laugh. Aw, me and me are perfect together. Best couple ever. [HT to Steele for suggested I throw all this shit together in one post.]

Halloween: Something to do/wear

I'm spinning on Halloween. If you're in New York, come. I haven't played records publicly in years (this doesn't exactly count since teens'll dance to anything). I might forget how to beat match. This should be appropriately horrific, given the occasion.

If anyone needs a costume, I have one for you:

I think this picture (taken a few months ago a few doors down from where I live) summarizes New York really well. If there are lice living in that mask (and I have no reason to believe there aren't, though I didn't check because I'm afraid of lice): even better.

India: Not so far from Jersey?

Last night, I watched Mahakaal: The Monster, the Bollywood take on A Nightmare on Elm Street. It is long, silly, completely tame, needlessly musical (sadly, Mahakaal, the Indian Freddy, does not share in the singing and dancing) and features a Michael Jackson impersonator. There are some scenes uploaded on YouTube to give you an idea of how closely this apes specific Elm Street plot points, as well as how bootleg the Bollywood Freddy knock-off looks. The scene embedded below is the one I love the most, for the sheer physicality of it. This woman would unsettle the evil dead.

I can't figure out if this is better with or without sound. Anyway, most of the movie is as hilariously shoddy as this scene. It's little more than a fun novelty.

What can't be dismissed so easily, though, is the fashion throughout the film. It is entirely stellar. Between the globby eyeliner, fluffy hair, day-glo colors, moose-knuckling jeans and high-waisted denim skirts, watching this felt like going home. Literally -- India in 1988 (when this film began shooting, though it wouldn't be released till five years later) looked a lot like Jersey at that time, if Mahakaal: The Monster is to be believed (and, duh, of course you can trust Mahakaal: The Monster. The name and entire production just screams authority). Seriously, this is some straight-up Dance Party USA shit.

A sampling of the gorgeous styling is presented below. Enjoy.

Eye bye

To quote Tyra directly: whoa, look at that face.