Ninjabait

I watched this for the first time a week or two ago (I don't pay a lot of attention to music videos and I'm horribly behind on trends, being the farthest thing from some Young Radical Trendy Hip Cat ), and can't say that I found myself liking the Kendrick Lamar remix a whole lot. The original wasn't really one of my favorites, but I think I prefer T-Swizzle's original verses to Kendrick Lamar's. I liked the addition of "You forgive, you forget but you never let it go" to the Bridge quite a bit, though. Gives it a bit more impact if you ask me. Taytay Swishswish definitely handled the guest rapper trend a bit better than most popstars and it definitely felt more natural and less like "A wild RAPPER appears! What will the listener do?" before fleeing like a Suicune who left its oven on. Maybe Tayragon Souffle used Mean Look? I dunno.

 

I REALLY liked the video though, I thought it was cool. I heard the intro and thought Commander Taylord, Star Warrior was going to go with a more orchestral/cinematic sound like Pharrell Williams did at the Grammys with "Happy" (or "Haunted", for a Tayleaf Swirler (yes, I'm having fun with this) example) and was disappointed when they didn't. imo it would've fit the video a lot better, given the spy organization showdown narrative. The intro also kind of built up a lot of tension and then just...whittled away. There wasn't a satisfying release to it and it felt anti-climactic. Eh.

 

And welcome, Little_Napoleon! Glad to see another new Taylor fan here.

Unless it's a September surprise single release and then release the album in October? Not a clue, shes an enigma :(

 

Eh, it doesn't seem like that's the case. Both the articles mentioned those dates as a possible release period for the album and haven't mentioned anything about singles so far. If anything, I'd wager that a single would either come out sometime in the next three months, depending on which month the album is planned to be released. Unless everything I've read so far is a lie and it's coming out right now as I'm typing this oh my gosh I need a basin of hot water and some towels STAT. Someone find a doctor! We're delivering this thing. Oh wait, no, sorry, that was just gas. False alarm, everyone, carry on.

 

And I think being enigmatic is helping her quite a bit, considering that 25 has been the most requested album on Amazon in the past 20 years.

I was absolutely obsessed with that Selfie show that was on ABC and then Hulu towards the end of last year. I'm hoping Hulu decides to pick it up for an additional season at least, it was one of the better sit/romcoms that I've seen and actually managed to be both successfully serious and funny in a way that I haven't seen since Scrubs.

 

Also, I totally watched Las Vegas all the time back when I was a young warthog before it got cancelled on a cliffhanger because NBC is a big poopie-head.

I'm both incredibly excited and incredibly wary about this. On the one hand, it's frickin' Adele, so there's a good chance it'll turn out incredibly awesome. On the other hand, what we've heard of the production has kinda been all over the place and that worries me a bit. Oh well, wait and see.

 

And, on the subject of Pharrell, he may not be producing on this album per se, but could be co-writing or working as a guest vocalist. That's a theory I've seen being tossed around a bit, so thought I'd mention it. As far as release dates go, some places (last I saw was HITS Daily Double on June 12th) have said it'll be released after the Grammy deadline (so October at the earliest), while others (last was the mirror on April 30th) have said it might be out in September. I tried lurking the Facebook page for more info, but the last thing it posted was in March (also, I saw some random guy trying to sell pot on a wall post there (???)). The official Twitter also produced nothing interesting. So, basically just rumors and theories and conflicting information. Sigh.

 

And honestly, at this point, an announcement that she's joining Tool wouldn't be too far fetched to me.

Just listened through the album on Spotify. On first impression, it's a pretty great album and probably one of the better things I've heard this year so far. I quite enjoyed "Ship to Wreck", the title track, "Queen of Peace", "Various Storms & Saints", "Delilah", and "Mother". Right now I'm leaning towards "Queen of Peace" being my favorite song.

 

I may check out the three bonus tracks since everyone is talking about how good they are.

I wouldn't really label myself a fan of Panic! At the Disco and I didn't care for Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die! or Pretty. Odd at all, but I'm actually enjoying this song quite a bit. It feels a bit repetitive at times, but I'm liking the brass and some of the gospel-esque elements here quite a bit, the vocal melodies are good, and the chorus is pretty strong. Not expecting it to be anything groundbreaking, but this album may be worth checking out when it actually does come out.

The last four movies I watched were "Mortdecai", "Catch Me If You Can", "Birdman", and "Into the Woods" (which I just watched an hour ago), most of which I got with Redbox "hey you get to rent a movie for free for a day!" promo codes and I can certainly say I got my money's worth.

 

Mortdecai was, to put it delicately, terrible. It wasn't funny most (if not all) of the time, it relied too heavily on raunchy humor, the plot was completely incoherent and when it was coherent it was completely stupid, the characters were insufferable and seemed a bit cliche, and it felt like a kid's movie despite being rated R (and not in a good way). Speaking of its rating, the two f-bombs inserted into the movie seemed like they were shoehorned into the movie to get the R rating and make it seem edgier. Also, thanks to the magic of Hollywood and my mental typecasting, Obi-Wan Kenobi kept trying to sleep with Jack Sparrow's wife throughout this movie and that's something that should never happen outside the realm of fanfiction.

 

Catch Me If You Can was the best of the bunch and also happened to the be the only I didn't get from Redbox. The performances were phenomenal (not surprising, considering it has both Tom Hanks and Leonardo "Why don't I have an Oscar yet?" DiCaprio), had very interesting characters, and it managed to keep me interested and on the edge of my seat some times. And it actually managed to be funny sometimes, unlike a certain comedy movie I just mentioned. I definitely enjoyed it very much and would probably recommend it.

 

Birdman was a very...interesting movie. And not really in a good way. It was more the "pretentious arthouse schlock" kind of interesting. The characters were all insufferable douchewads to an extreme degree. Like, I didn't end up liking a single character except Emma Stone's (who I don't even really remember the name of), and actually ended up hating most of them. The plot was coherent, but that didn't really help since it was uninteresting (see: unlikable douchebag characters). The ending, however, managed to be both completely stupid and nonsensical ('ending' here meaning everything from the last theater scene to the end credits) to the point that it actually made me say "What? That's both completely stupid and nonsensical." out loud. Half the time I wasn't sure if I should take this movie seriously or not. It's claimed to be a black comedy, but it feels like that was something tacked on the end like what happened with The Room. The only scenes I actually enjoyed were Emma Stone's epic verbal beatdown and the incredibly bizarre hallucination sequence, and that was only because it went so far over the top it became stupidly hilarious. The soundtrack was basically an extended jazz drum improv, which managed to be completely distracting most of the time and not musically interesting enough to not annoy me. The movie also had a weird fetish for closeups. It seems like the movie was solely designed to please critics and win awards, and it seems like both took the bait. This movie is so ridiculously pretentious that I just felt like punching it in its stupid nonexistent face, and I'm not really much of a fan of face-punching things.

 

Into the Woods was a merely mediocre movie (alliteration!). I felt like it had potential, and I think that's probably all in the original play it was adapted from (which I have not heard or seen yet), but it wasn't well made. It had some severe pacing issues, the musical numbers felt shoehorned in, the characters weren't really that well developed so I didn't end up caring for them that much, and it felt like they reused the same melody a lot for Cinderella's singing parts. The plot was a little weird and a bit hard to follow at times, and it felt like they just kind of assumed you would've seen the original play. They didn't really explain much throughout the movie (probably because of dem dere pacing issues) and the movie moved so fast it didn't really give you time to process it. As a result, a lot of the scenes felt like gigantic Big Lipped Alligator Moments. It also felt like it left a lot of plot threads hanging. The acting was pretty good sometimes, and the singing was pretty nice. Also, the movie was pretty pretty sometimes. Quite unlike that sentence.

It's a tough pick between Ant-Man and Inside Out for me, I'm SO hyped for both of those movies. But I think I'll go with Inside Out since I've repeatedly heard that it's an absolutely incredible movie even by Pixar standards and I've been wanting to see it forever while I only found out yesterday that Ant-Man was coming out soon.

Elvis Presley - Hound Dog (originally written for Big Mama Thornton)

Frank Sinatra - New York, New York (originally written for Liza Minnelli)

Blue Swede - Hooked on a Feeling (I'm pretty sure this is a cover of a cover of a cover of a cover or something, but it was originally by B. J. Thomas)

Baha Men - Who Let the Dogs Out? (originally "Doggie" by Anslem Douglas, which was actually about sex)

Metallica - Turn the Page (originally by Bob Seger)

 

Also, not sure if these count, but I was surprised to find that the lyrics to Carmina Burana and the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth were taken from poems.