Tag Archives: films

Princess Leia is a Racist Bitch

So some guy found a bunch of old Starlogs and comes across this piece of information:

April 1979: As for why Chewbacca doesn’t receive a medal at the end of “Star Wars,” this is as good of an explanation as any other.

I think the reason the wook [sic] didn’t get a medal was because Princess Leia simply isn’t that tall. He could have received his after the ceremony.

Chewbacca doesn’t get a medal because Princess Leia isn’t tall enough?

Bull. Shit.

Chewbacca gets screwed over publicly because Princess Leia is a racist / speciesist bitch.

  1. She uses a slur describe Chewbacca.
  2. When trying to think of the most disgusting thing she can think of, she picks wookies. A woman that has been in a trash compactor with a tentacle monster, thinks a person that saved helped save her from execution is grosser.

Who gets medals? The two white guys. The brown guy that convinces Han to go back, the guy that’s shooting the guns on the Millennium Falcon to save that farm boy’s ass, is the one that gets bupkis.

Fuck her.

Ahh Hipsters

Vinyl

“For many of us, and certainly for many of our artists, the vinyl is the true version of the release,” said Matador’s Patrick Amory. “The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it the format of choice for people who really care about music.”

Cassettes

Children of the 80s, too, are affectionately revisiting the format on which they first discovered music. “What you grew up with just sounds right,” says 22-year-old Brad Barry, a student at the University of Texas who hosts a weekly cassette-only radio show called C60 Radio. Meanwhile, people who sport cassette-themed Urban Outfitters’ T-shirts or iPhone cases are just using it as a retro prop in the never-ending 80s revival.

VHS

“I enjoy the aesthetics of VHS,” said Josh Schafer, the founder of the horror magazine Lunchmeat. “I like putting it in the VCR and rewinding and pausing and fast-forwarding. It’s an experience nobody gets to do anymore because they consider VHS dead.”

“I was not around during the main VHS boom, but I’ve never liked DVDs,” said [Louis Justin, the 21-year-old owner of the one-man company Massacre Video, in Michigan], who has a VHS tape tattooed on his arm. “When I was younger and I went to the record store, my parents would push me to get the CD, but I wanted the cassette. I’m an analog nerd.”

Real musicians release on 8-track.

Big Man Japan

I recently watched “Big Man Japan“, the Japanese mockumentary about a Japanese superhero that grows to immense proportions when shocked with electricity. He’s the sixth generation Japanese Apache Chief. The film follows the the big man in his normal life. We see his crappy house. (He can’t hold a normal job, he’s always on call for a monster attack.) We see him deal with his estranged wife and his disinterested daughter. We watch him negotiate with his agent on corporate sponsorship deals; and catch reactions to his battles from person on the street interviews.

Throughout the entire film is the undercurrent of lost glory. The big man’s grandfather, “Number Four,” protected Japan during the 40s. There were shinto ceremonies prior embiggening, and much more pomp and circumstance, but now – like the current big man himself – they are in considerably less glorious.

The film starts out very slow, but once it picks up after the first fight, it starts to move at a nice pace, and gets progressively funnier. It’s netflix streamable, so there’s no reason why shouldn’t watch it now. DO IT NOW!

The Bridge

I finally watched Eric Steel’s film The Bridge on Hulu. After reading this 2003 New Yorker article about Golden Gate Bridge suicide jumpers, Eric Steel set up cameras around the GGB to film the jumpers. He managed to film 23 of the 24 suicides in 2004, and in the process, annoy CalTrans for showing a part of the bridge experience that tourists shouldn’t see.

The film is fascinating, and thankfully doesn’t take the easy melodramatic or Helen Lovejoy approach. Steel treats the the subject, and everyone, involved with a distance that makes the film come off as more descriptive than anything. Other film makers may have turned the second half into a call for foxconn-esque nets.

When I first mentioned bridge jumpers, I said:

I [had become] enamored with the moment that the jumper’s center of gravity moves over the water, and the inevitable plunge begins. That moment, when your heart skips a beat, and your stomach tenses, and you think “Here we go!” It’s not the moment of total commitment. No, it’s the moment just after that. Did they intend to go just then, or were they just trying to get up the nerve when they slipped? More disturbingly, do they change their mind on the way down?

In the film, jump survivor Kevin Hines, recounts his experience. “[I] hurdled over the railing with my hands, and I was falling head first. And the second my hands left the bar – the railing – I said, ‘I don’t want to die. What am I going to do? This is it. I’m dead.'” Watching person, after person, simply turn, climb over the railing and immediately jump, I wonder how many of them were like him.

One that probably didn’t think twice was featured jumper Eugene Sprague. The interviews with Sprague’s friends, reveal a man that for years had decided to kill himself. He simply was waiting for the time to do it. He reminded me of my great aunt Doris. Aunt Doris, talked about suicide for years. She even tried a multiple times, while simultaneously teaching me lessons about suicide. Lessons like, cutting your wrists doesn’t work. You have to cut your elbows, or as they say, “Down the road, not across the street.” She taught me, that if you want to get hit by a train, you should check the train schedule first. Perhaps her best advice was when she told a 9 year old me, “Jonathan, if you ever want kill yourself, don’t try to electrocute yourself. It hurts like hell.” My response: “Oh, okay.” My mom and my great Uncle Lee, would take her to psychiatrists for years, but none of that helped. My mom says that eventually one of them simply said, that Aunt Doris would keep trying until eventually she succeeded.

On my birthday, (I think my 10th birthday), she came over and brought me a lava lamp, almost identical to the one that she had sitting in her living room. I thought her lava lamp was one of the coolest things around. When I opened the box, I was amazed. I couldn’t imagine ever getting something so grown up like a lamp. It was awesome. She said, sitting in the recliner of my parents’ living room. “I got you that so you’d have something to remember your crazy Aunt Doris by.” I was confused by the statement, but mostly just in awe of owning a lava lamp. I remember that my mom got up and left the room rather angrily, and I had no idea why. The next day, Aunt Doris shot herself in the heart with a pistol and died.

I still have the lamp.

Japanese Bug Fights

Japanese Bug Fights is a website dedicated to invertebrate cock fighting. It’s videos of two bugs fighting to the death. I watched some of them. The video above is Round 15: Japanese Hornet vs Scorpion. I have to say, I felt a bit uneasy watching it. Kind of like watching something off of rotten.com . Although, if i learned anything out of reading the ethics standards for high school science fairs, you can do ANYTHING to a invertebrate, and it’s all good.

Mark, pointed out that “the Japanese love bugs.” He says that Pokémon’s success can can be traced to cultural phenomenon. He pointed to the documentary The Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo (trailer), which chronicles Japan’s pet bugs. Beetle Queen is on the festival circuit, but there isn’t a Bay Area screening scheduled yet.