Book Club: The Martian, No Country for Black Men

The Martian by Andy Weir
The teaser or not-quite-theatrical trailer or whatever two minute clip Fox released for the upcoming movie The Martian some months back did absolutely nothing for me. Even with Ridley Scott's name attached — you saw Prometheus — I found it strange that a huge budget studio film set in space was coming out so close to the release of Interstellar, another big space movie, let alone one that also starred Matt Damon (spoiler..). Now that I think about it, if you include Gravity, space movies have had quite the run these last few years. Anyway this trailer did nothing for me. He gets stuck. They save him. So what? Also, Donald Glover? I like Matt Damon, but he's had some misses recently. I disregarded it until someone at work mentioned reading the book and I read about the unbelievable response to the book online. This book is absolutely thrilling. While I do read a lot, I admittedly don't read much modern fiction. Astronaut Watney is accidentally left behind on Mars when his crew thinks he's dead. He has to survive. It's hard to survive in space. Things go wrong. When things start to go right, they go wrong again. And then they go wrong again. Even when you know things are going to go wrong, they go right and then go wrong in a way you could not have imagined. The science of it was fun for me (and apparently accurate at least to an extent). I do recommend this very much.
I just re-watched the trailer and am a lot more excited at least until I realized Venkat Kapoor, the head of NASA in the book, turned into fucking Jeff Daniels on the screen. Jeff fucking Daniels are you kidding me? An Indian dude was finally going to major part in a movie and it went to this clown.

No Country for Black Men by Byron Crawford
I've read all Byron Crawford's books. His blog is in my RSS reader. I subscribe to his weekly newsletter. If you're familiar with his writing, you can guess how this book reads. The books' titles would suggest that they have themes, but they're all anthologies of sorts, with chapters that document different current (and not so current) events that may or may not have to do with their titles, not unlike some of his long form blog posts. There were maybe three chapters about how Nas had in fact lost in Nas Lost if I remember correctly, but that could be total BS. No Country for Black Men follows suit of the other four (wow), but I really enjoyed certain parts of this book. It would be weird to say he has improved while writing these books because he's been writing for so long, but he definitely hit a stride writing certain chapters of this one.

Film School: Spy

The stigma around Melissa McCarthy for people who have only seen Bridesmaids and are maybe slightly aware of Mike & Molly seems to be that she only plays women versions of Paul Blart. That she knows she's big and sort of plays dumb and is only capable of being funny physically. It's amazing how unfair that is. McCarthy is so funny and such a gifted actress. Emotions, facial expressions, sarcasm, physical movements, comedy, drama, she's really good at all of it. Even that last sentence is patronizing. When people were excited at the possibility of women-driven comedies after the success of Bridesmaids and nothing like that really happened, McCarthy happened. This is her second big comedy in two years, and while she's joined by some big names, Spy is essentially her movie. That's the star she has become.

I'll be honest, when I saw the trailer for this movie, with all the big names in it — Jude Law, Statham, Rose Byrne and even McCarthy — and with it being a secret agent parody, I thought it was a kids movie. I had no idea until literally the other day that it was an R-rated comedy. I don't know if that says more about me or how they marketed the movie.

It almost doesn't seem like an R-rated movie. Statham is the only one that uses any bad language and with the exception of a great dick pic joke, it's not until the second half of the movie that the jokes pick up their raunch factor. They clearly spent money on this movie. They film literally all over Europe. I love that a movie that isn't a Fast and Furious sequel or comic book movie got a huge budget like this. I like that an R-rated comedy that doesn't have Rogen or Apatow's name on it received such a push. And this isn't a lead up to some qualifying statement. This is a great movie that's very funny. I enjoyed it very much.

The cast meshes together very well. McCarthy and Miranda Hart, who plays her sidekick and fellow fish out of water, are especially great. The spy parody is almost a genre of its own at this point, but Spy establishes its tone uniquely. It successfully mixes a goofiness with comedy today's need for quick, savvy Veep-style insults. And that we owe to director Paul Fieg. I've enjoyed Feig's past work, but now I'm fully on the bandwagon. He brings the best out of his actors and lets all sorts of minor characters get in on the fun.

By the way, 50 Cent is in this movie. If you've listened to any interview he's done in the last two years, he has mentioned it. He literally only has a two minute concert cameo in which he doesn't even perform a real song. Well, it might have been off Animal Ambition, but those are the same thing to me.

A$AP Rocky - At.Long.Last.A$AP

It's not unfair to say that much of what makes A$AP Rocky's music enjoyable is the aesthetic. There are people that for whatever reason still link him to a Houston sound, and while that's not the case, there's definitely a palpable style to his music. The Houston, Memphis and whatever else influences are there, yes, but it is Rocky's charisma that made it worth feeling excited over. Anybody can pitch down vocals over fake Mike Jones leftovers, and that sounds cool until it doesn't. What was fun about Rocky shone through on bright like "Peso" and "Goldie". There wasn't really a formula to follow. The energy was just there.

At.Long.Last.A$AP noticeably lacks any of these moments. Rocky is not a bad rapper, but he hasn't shown much technical improvement at all. So it's really not a good thing that one of his two main qualities - charisma - is blatantly absent and the other - aesthetic - is muddled up garbage. The production on this album is the remnants of a half-eaten scoop of ice cream after being left in the sun. Shit is bland and wholly uninteresting. And when it does hit, Rocky coasts lazily. The LPFJ2 beat sounds like the soundtrack to hell raising. Rocky doesn't seem to get the memo. L$D is wtf?

Why is this album so long? And why is Mos Def on it? After four listens, you can trick yourself into thinking this album is kiiiiind of alright if it's on strictly in the background and you're not really paying attention to it. It's hard for me to believe Yams approved of this. Future's part is fire though.

Sci-Fi Today: Ex Machina & Other Space

In an interview with NPR Fresh Air, Paul Feig (Freaks and Geeks, Bridesmaids, the Ghostbusters reboot) claimed that comedy has never really done sci-fi right. The obvious examples, Space Balls and to an extent Tim Allen's Galaxy Quest, were less works of science fiction that were funny as much as they were blatant parodies of stuff that already existed. This inspired him to create the show Other Space out now on Yahoo Screen. To Feig the show could overturn typical sci-fi tropes and in some sense explore the limits of the genre, at least in the form of a single cam comedy. 

His goals seem lofty, but the man's track record sort of allows for this. And this statement probably makes more sense in the wake of the news that he will direct the new Ghostbusters reboot. It's a story about random people fighting ghosts. Let's be honest. There's a lot of creative shit you can do with that. But Feig wrote the initial script for Other Space over 10 years ago (I'm pretty sure he said this anyway), and the only example of doing something different that he brought up in the NPR interview was that aliens didn't have to look like green monsters but that they could resemble humans. 

The show is not some Star Trek parody, but it's basically The Office (Parks & Rec might be a more appropriate comparison) in space and I mean this as the highest compliment. Other Space is very enjoyable and funny, but it's essentially a workplace comedy on a spaceship. Yes, there's a robot and an A.I., but the robot looks like it came from an 80s movie with no CGI budget. There's nothing modern at all about the sci-fi element of the show. 

This brings us to Ex Machina. The wonder in most of our favorite Sci-Fi films stems from an element of impossibility. Star Wars is set in a faraway galaxy, with different species, crazy weapons and magical powers. Terminator, Blade Runner and Back to the Future take place on Earth but in some twisted version of society. They were written during a time when personal computers were barely plausible. Ex Machina is the first film of its kind in the iPhone age that could very well take place in the present day. 

In the movie, Oscar Isaac plays Nathan, a billionaire computer scientist who has developed the most advanced artificial intelligence system known to man. Domhnall Gleeson's Caleb is invited to the research facility to test the A.I. — a robot that looks like a human woman — and decide if its behavior is indistinguishable from that of a human. If the A.I. is as advanced as possible, this means it could feel and emulate human emotion. The movie brings up all sorts of issues regarding morality, trust, deceit, sexuality and manipulation. 

While technology today is still pretty far from what's shown in the movie, it's not hard to imagine a situation like this. Machine learning and artificial intelligence today is already so impressive. Once your imagination starts to run wild, literally anything in this realm is possible. This is what sci-fi today is capable of. You can take today's technology, today's societal worries and today's political problems and flesh all that into a very real story. Not that there isn't room for Star Wars and the like, but this allows for a whole batch of ideas rooted in something modern yet familiar. Other Space is a fine show, and I hope more and more people watch it. It probably works better as it is than it would have been as some as sitcom version of Her, but at the same time, hey maybe there should be a comedy version of Black Mirror. Feig had the right idea to do sci-fi differently because the possibilities now are truly endless.

Straight Outta Compton (Trailer)

No one has really cared for any (theatrical) music biopics released in the last few years. It's not so much that they've been garbage. It's moreso that they're been mediocre, boring even. This happens for two main reasons. One, the artist's estate won't clear the rights for any of the music until they approve of the final cut. That's how we ended up with a PG-13 James Brown movie. Two, these movies don't usually involve top notch talent be it actors, directors or screenwriters.

Which is why I'm still hesitant about Straight Outta Compton even after seeing this trailer. Cube and Dre are the movie's executive producers, and they both have public images they sort of need to uphold. The N.W.A story is obviously an incredible one and an important one, but it does not end well. The entire group splits up and Eazy-E dies of AIDS. And there's so much to cover - the censorship issues, their dominance without radio play, the branding of gangsta rap, invasion of hip-hop into white suburbia, police brutality, LA gang culture, the LA riots, Eazy-E the mastermind, Jerry Heller the thief and eventually the number of careers it spawned. I'd like for the movie to be gritty, to be dark. This trailer is a little too shiny for me. It almost seems like a rags to riches story that cuts off before anything bad happens. And while getting Paul Giamatti to play Heller was a huge win, he's depicted as this mentor and confidante when he's clearly the villain. The still for the YouTube video alone looks so corny. They look like the Backstreet Boys in Raiders gear.

The cast is pretty much all new faces, which could be a really great thing. Of course, Ice Cube casting his own son in the movie is some Jayden Smith shit. The movie is produced by Cube and I get that they're friends, but you really couldn't do better than F. Gary Gray? And the writers haven't been a part of anything noteworthy.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a total loss for this movie if it ends being on the level of Notorious. Hundred bucks says they throw in a beats/headphones joke in there somewhere.

TV Recap: Betas

Not until Transparent won the Golden Globe for Best Television Comedy did Amazon ever warrant any attention for the original series it distributed through its Prime service. After a couple iterations of that pilot experiment they do, Betas was one of the first shows put to series along with Alpha House, which — and this may sound so stupid — was weird because Alpha and Beta.

Betas follows a five-person social networking startup in San Francisco. The app, itself, sets out to bring people that are glued to their phones and screens face to face, which okay, sure. The cofounders make a splash at a party at a VC's house and get a chance to work in his incubator. It's not as groundbreaking as Transparent, but it does what shows are supposed to do (and what few actually accomplish) — establish a world and offer characters viewers can feel invested in.

I can't remember the last time a show was set in San Francisco (never got into HBO's Looking), let alone filmed there. As much as there are easy stereotypes about how liberal the Bay Area is and that there are probably organic dog cafés or whatever (see recent episodes of The Mindy Project), the city is much more than that. San Francisco is incredibly diverse with different cultures, arts scenes, levels of income and sights to see. I can't say Betas focuses on the city but these elements are definitely present. It could have been interesting to see how the show dealt with the tech encroachment on those aspects of the city.

As far as the characters go, it's an accurate portrayal of the tech world, at least based on my experience. The employees of BRB are actual people and not just weirdos typing away on laptops. Hobbes (Jon Daly) is a slightly paranoid, divorceé in his late thirties in need for this latest startup to not end unfavorably. Mikki regularly pokes at her coworker's masculinities and deals with her irresponsible mother's antics. Mitchell takes Adderall and listens to rap music. Though they probably could have established that better because I'd rather never hear "cop the new Freddie Gibbs tape" again. They experience romance and anxiety and total confusion regarding the world they're in. Tech is what they do and while they are invested in this business, there's more to them than just that. As a software engineer at a startup, I must say I enjoyed that being depicted.

Ultimately there's only so many ways the main BRB storyline could have gone, and it might have been hard to stay invested in that plotline. The show's main character is also pretty annoying. A couple other issues: It seemed strange to establish a strong character like Lisa's (Tawny from Even Stevens) to have her then sleep with the main character by the second episode. I didn't really get all the stuff with the tech blogger — between this and Top Five, Hollywood clearly doesn't understand the journalism industry at all. Overall though, the show is funny. They jokes are dry and sarcastic, but there are plenty of them.

Oh, and Tyson Ritter, the lead singer of The All-American Rejects, is in the show. The fact that I recognized him is literally the most shameful moment I've had all year. But he does a nice job.

You can't discuss this show without bringing up HBO's Silicon Valley. Betas came first by about a year. Both shows showcase the different engineer stereotypes pretty well. Both include companies with absolutely awful names — BRB and Pied Piper. Silicon Valley is very much a comedy. The ridiculousness comes first in the same way it does for a show like Veep. What I appreciated about Betas was its more diverse and ethnically accurate cast. You don't see nearly any Indian and Asian representation on television. Sometimes you get one or the other but definitely not both at the same time. To have an openly gay character in Karan Soni's Nash was a very progressive moment for South Asians in TV and film.

Amazon didn't pick it up for a second season which is sort of unfortunate. I liked seeing these actors on screen together even if the show was ultimately a few notches above one you'd watch on USA. It probably wouldn't have lasted alongside Silicon Valley anyway.

Film School: The Interview, The Hobbit, Top Five

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies
I really enjoyed Desolation of Smaug when I saw it in theaters. Then when I caught it randomly on cable earlier this year, it was hard for me to sit through. I wasn't exactly rushing to see this one. I get why they did three Hobbit movies, all at three hours long, to sort of parallel the LOTR trilogy, but this was just too much. It was clearly a stretch to make this movie as long as it was. The movie starts in the middle of the action, and the actual battle starts very quickly, but I just felt so detached from all the characters and I forgot who was who that it was hard to root for anyone. And considering it was a Hobbit movie, very little of it had to do with Bilbo. But you don't get a final Peter Jackson movie with an ending, another ending and then ten more minutes of nonsense.

The Interview
You know what? This wasn't that bad. I really didn't like Neighbors. I thought it was such a stupid movie and poorly directed and a waste of great talent. You'd think that would be the case for The Interview. The premise is something literally only Rogen and James Franco could get greenlit. But the first half of this movie is so great. The way Randall Park, who's awesome on Veep, portrays Kim Jong Un is kind of unbelievable. This is important for two reasons. One being Park is a tremendous actor, and I look forward to his new show Fresh Off The Boat. The other being that this is the highest profile casting of an Asian American actor in Hollywood this year, and there are people that probably assumed the part would be played as if it were a South Park character or Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany's. There's something so human about the character, and I hope that doesn't go under appreciated. Of course, the second half of the movie rushes to finish, and even I can't believe I'm complaining about the logic of a James Franco movie, but there are some good laughs here.

Top Five
I wanted to really like this movie. If it wasn't for how the movie ended, I'm not sure I would admit to liking it at all. Chris Rock is a wonderful comic. He just isn't the greatest actor. While there are other things wrong with this movie, that stuck out the most to me. I like how the movie was directed. It was clearly influenced by Woody Allen with some Richard Linklater sprinkled in. The gag with Anders Holm was a little strange, and the middle third of the movie got a little too predictable. You've got to love all the cameos though. Seinfeld in the strip club was great.

Rounders
This has been sitting in my Netflix queue for some time now, solely for its cast. I had no idea what it was about, but when the idea of a sequel came up in some podcast I was listening to, I finally got around to watching it. I had some friends get really into poker my senior year of college. I thought they just liked the possibility of winning money, but they were scheduling weekly games, reading up on strategies, studying old world series of poker games — they were really into it. After watching this movie, I realize how stupid it was for me to ever play with people that take the game this seriously. This is a fantastic movie. I think being close to serious poker players (albeit total amateurs) made it that much more interesting. Great performances by not only Damon and Norton but John Malkovich and John Turturro. Not sure that Damon does a sequel at this point in his career, but I'm all for it.

Blue Ruin
Here's a movie I saw on a bunch of year end lists last year. It is a well done movie. I feel like I've seen different variations of the guy gets revenge story or at least the guy who shoots up a storm, but this had a pretty interesting take on the trope with a lead character that didn't know anything about guns or killing people. I'm honestly most proud of myself realizing that the old high school friend with the guns is played by the dude that played Buzz McCallister in the Home Alone movies.

A Trip To Italy
I watched The Trip completely on a whim. I had recently been put on to Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge projects and I didn't know anything about Rob Brydon. It was really great, like the Before Sunrise movies with two close friends that like to do Michael Caine impressions. A Trip To Italy is even better. They play fictional versions of themselves in a way that I wish could be done with American actors we love. More impressions, too.

In A World
I will always appreciate movies that depict odd little occupations and social scenes like this one did. There's a whole crowd of people that I'm sure totally relate to it, but for others it's fun just to discover what it's like. First time director Lake Bell does a fine job. I now officially don't connect her with that awful show How To Make It In America a.k.a Entourage for people that read rap blogs in 2009.