I haven't blogged in days, maybe you've noticed. I feel really bad about it. And I haven't checked my stats either, because when I see you visit me and nothing new is up I feel like such a tease. I don't mean to be, it's just that I haven't had anything to say. Do you ever feel that way? Like your brain is a white room with nothing - not even you - in it?
When I speak, I feel this way all the time - like I've got nothing. I'll be talking to you and suddenly I go blank, zero, empty of everything except a low emotional chord, plucked and buzzing where my thoughts used to be. I panic then. I'm in the middle of a conversation. I have to come up with something. But I can't. Because my brain has flipped into this lower, animal mode and I'm back in a room so white it doesn't have walls or a ceiling or even a floor, just a smothering emptiness in one dimension and a guitarstrum background, one-note emoting, the long buzz of how I feel.
Am I sounding crazy? I feel like I'm sounding crazy. You'd tell me if I sounded crazy, right?
But let's move on, because we've got some ground to cover.
Dog the Bounty Hunter is a racist. I'm sure you've heard, it's been big in the news. I'm disappointed, downright embarrassed really, because I gave him such a rousing endorsement not too long ago. I never would've guessed that hiding behind all those Dreamcatchers and Aloha's and Indian warrior beading was a niggersayer. Though maybe I should have. Just like how the loudest homophobe in the locker room tends to slap the most ass, Dog's gaudy cloak of Brown Spirituality should've tipped me off.
In better brown news, American Gangster is just so awesome I can't stand it. Denzel Washington in a suit with a gun, Harlem gritty in seventies glamor, Russell Crowe rumpled and righteous - I can't think of a better way to spend two hours and forty minutes.
If you haven't seen it or the previews, American Gangster is a biopic about Frank Lucas, the badass Harlem gangster who cornered New York's heroin market during the Vietnam War by importing the stuff direct from the war zone in American soldiers' coffins. He was able to get away with everything because he was black - no one believed a nigger (as Dog would say) had the competency or balls to take on the Italians and the cops.
Reviews have been mixed, but I couldn't be a bigger fan. Biopics so easily become such a worshipful mash of details you can just feel the writer sweating as he tries to jam into a two hundred-page script the dozens of interesting themes and subplots he clipped from the six-hundred page biography that gave him the idea. American Gangster avoids this pitfall beautifully, sacrificing Lucas' fascinating young adulthood and later cop collaboration in order to give the heart of the story the room it needs.
Besides, it's a gangster flick. And, like Martin Scorsese and Sergio Leone well know, there's nothing better than a genre that explores power, loyalty, violence, and the coolest parts of wardrobe.
GTD from SILENTKILLER7@vtext.com:
Sorry guy time is actually 6:30am leaving to go if thats too early then you can meet up at chevychase at 8am with Renu
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Movies Make It Better
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4 comments:
Ooooohhh, sounds like the NYC version of "The Departed" which was partly based on Boston Irish mob boss Whitey Bulger. It's loaded with cliches - Matt Damon and Mark Wallburg dropping their "r's", obviously more than pleased to speak in their native tounge. Scenes of Vietnam and rioting set to the Stone's "Gimme Shelter." It's still a wicked awesome Boston based flick! :)
great call, Alicia. i loved that one too. wicked awesome for sure. i think your uncle ted saw it 7 times. . . and Miranda, you are right about films. you become unconscious to some extent of your world and your brain gets busy absorbing another. based on my own experience, i always recommend movies to squabbling couples as a way to clear the air. only problem in recommending this is that many of them can't agree on a movie to go to. (gimme something to work with here, i often think). sounds like this one could work for both genders.
i'm quite bummed about Dog.
...yes, we noticed...no, you are not crazy....well, at least not any more than the rest of us....and, yes, you were very much missed....so, big hugs... : )
.....sorry about Dog....i think he made BBC news...hhmmm....but maybe if people thought about it for a moment, they might realize he was using a term he perhaps hears a whole lot from the folks with whom he works...and is it like, Ok, for anyone of the many young African American folk to use it, but not the young WASPS....this is an ongoing discussion i have heard of late....not that we approve the term around here....but maybe context has something to do with it....a good blog for you....racist terms/origins/use/misuse....
....and SO glad to see GTD....i just love those.... : )
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