I, Frankenstein

Whenever I watch these awards shows and they have the presenters come out, the host or PA announcer always mentions their upcoming projects as they walk up to the podium. And every now and then you hear cool things like” Here’s Keanu Reeves in the upcoming Matrix” but for the most part you hear “And here’s Kevin Hart who will be starring in the upcoming Black Hammer Detective : Who Dey Who Dey Who Let’s Ride” or “Here is Aaron Eckhart of I, Frankenstein”. I always wonder what their peers are thinking when they hear these things. Are they happy for the simple fact that their friends are still collecting checks or are they secretly giggling inside? It’s like the year Eddie Murphy was up for best supporting actor in Dreamgirls and they announced “Here’s Eddie Murphy star of the just released Norbit!”. You know Leo Dicaprio was somewhere shaking his head as his supermodel girlfriend was informing him that it was his turn to go in champagne pong. Yes, that exists; I just saw a pic of Daft Punk doing it!

Anyway, I went into I, Frankenstein with the lowest of expectations when I saw that Rotten Tomatoes gave it a rating of 4% . With that awful rating and a late January release, there was no way I was paying the 3D price for it and I felt the need to rope a buddy of mine into this experience with me. They start the movie off by giving you a 50 second recap of what the book was about and how Frankenstein’s monster came into being. Coincidentally that was about a third of the time it took me to read the Cliff notes version of the very same book, so needless to say, the screenwriter and I had about the same level of insight as to what that story was really about.

I literally almost walked out of the theater when the Gargoyles flew in to save Frankenstein’s monster (Eckhart) and gave the lamest version of “it’s alive, it’s alive” ever! Looking back however, that scene was actually quite money! The Gargoyles in this movie act as God’s earthly protectors of the human race from Satan’s demons, and apparently he has a demon prince named Naberius who is played by the underrated Bill Nighy. I say he’s underrated because Nighy is not picky about what he’s in and whether the movie is crap or not, he always steps up his game and brings unquestionable awesomeness to the set. But Naberius is on a mission to find and capture Adam (the name given to Eckhart by the head Gargoyle) with the hopes that he can learn the method Frankenstein used to create him. He has designs on creating an evil army to take over the world.

Adam has always been a loner and has a hard time accepting who he is because of what he is. So he has a lot of hate in his heart and basically wants to beat up everything that’s in his path. This all changes when he discovers that Frankenstein logged a journal of his work and that somehow this journal lands in the hands of a beautiful scientist that happens to be working for Naberius.

As you can see, the plot isn’t completely ridiculous but they did miss out on the opportunity for some pretty cool jokes. For instance, when Naberius goes up to his lab, the elevator stops on the 5^th floor; um clearly he should’ve gotten off on floor 666. And throughout the entire movie, they called their creation of man the reanimation process, a process in which they took dead bodies and tried to bring their soulless shells back to life. There was a scene where the doctor and Eckhart were alone in his apartment (not sure how he was able to afford one) and there was clearly an opportunity for her to ask “So…when you were brought to life, was uh, everything reanimated?” And that’s when you cue Soul to Soul’s Back to Life, Back to Reality! while he takes her and proves that he's all man! 

Ok that’s enough, but with the exception of a missed opps, this movie was unbelievably entertaining. Outside of how lame the makeup looked for the demons at times, there were quite a few fight scenes that were pretty cool and some decent cgi that accompanied them. Adam’s weapons of choice led to a pseudo gun kata fighting style which was pretty fresh and the score playing in the background made him seem cooler than he actually was as he stalked up and down the dark streets of this modern day city.

Is this movie poetry? No, but if you want mindless entertainment that will make you openly cheer at times, I suggest that you pop in. I can’t believe critics gave the worst comedy I’ve seen in years in Anchorman a rating of 89% and this got a 4. I rate this movie as FRESH! 

Oh and for those who dont know what gun kata is, check out the movie Equilibrium.

Nebraska

Damn you Golden Globes and Oscars! Damn you to hell!!! I had totally planned on skipping both Nebraska and Philomena in the theater because they both looked so boring that you’d rather spend 2 hours watching David Blaine masturbate while he’s sitting in a box and calling it magic. A black and white movie about a senile old man who wants to walk to Nebraska so he can collect his prize money? So just so I’m clear on this; it’s in black and white, it’s about old people who are basically waiting to die, and it takes place in Nebraska??? Why not just have them speak in French, add subtitles, and incorporate random fog in every other scene!

Alexander Payne is known for making painful movies (pun intended) that never seem to end. He has become quite the master of taking a moderately interesting story and dragging it out for so long that the viewer ends up begging him to either finally end the movie or simply end their life; but just in some way please show some mercy! "Please have a party! Feed us drinks! Get us laid!! Aaaarrggh!" Sideways was funny in parts but I can only watch middle aged people talk over wine for so long before  I am reminded of my awful days in country Texas where we drank in the middle of fields to pass the time. And The Descendants and About Schmidt were quite possibly the worst movies ever made! But here I go again, being slowly tortured by film simply because I can’t watch the Oscars without having adequate ammunition to make fun of everything nominated.

Well I’d give you a quick summary of what this movie is all about but honestly I already did.  Bruce Dern plays Woody Grant, an aging alcoholic who gets one of those You’re A Millionaire notices in the mail but for some reason he can’t seem to get it in his head that it’s a scam. His headstrong wife refuses to drive him from Montana to Nebraska to collect it, so he spends day after day walking the highway trying to get there; that is until a state trooper sees him and ends his daily attempt at it. It gets so frustrating for the family that they start talk of putting him into a home but the younger son David (Will Forte) finally caves in and decides to give him a lift. Along the way he hopes that they can finally bond since Dern was never much of a talker and didn’t spend too much time with them when they were kids.

But as they are on their way, an accident occurs and they decide to spend some time with their old family and friends in Hawthorne Nebraska, the town where Dern and his wife grew up and met one another. As word spreads of Dern's new found fortune, he becomes the talk of the town and naturally vultures start to come out of the woodwork.

I will say this, this movie was the funniest movie Payne has made since Election. It’s still just a bit too long but Dern is amazing as the old alcoholic whose sole purpose in life is to collect his prize money so he can buy a new truck and a new compressor. Oh and along the way grabbing a beer whenever he damn well pleases. He honestly doesn’t say much but when he does it’s usually confusion followed by something golden! And where he leaves off, that’s where his wife picks up. She is annoying at first but she starts to grow on you as the movie rolls along and you see that she truly does care for her husband and her sons and that she’s not simply an old nagging hag. The trip to the graveyard is probably the highlight of the move.

Payne does an excellent job of summing up life in the country, a place where all you have to do to pass the time is watch television, eat, drink, and engage in mundane conversation. Everyone knows everyone else and their business and you find yourself settling for certain people or situations simply because there really is no other option.

I rate this movie as FRESH mainly because of the attempted robbery scene involving the two fat Jed Clampett twins. You have to see it to believe it. 

Jack Ryan : Shadow Recruit

Whenever you see those cheap looking widescreen trailers on television with the black borders, you know you are in for a movie that barely made the cut for a theatrical release. I call these trailers the anti Hype Williams videos; you guys remember Jay Z’s Big Pimpin video and every subsequent Williams video that followed, they were all shot widescreen and came complete with those revolutionary white borders. I don’t remember much of the movie Belly but for the purposes of this post I’m going to go ahead and say that entire film was shot this way as well. Well Jack Ryan was featured in one of these cheesy trailers and typically when you see an old Kevin Costner starring in a forgotten Tom Clancy influenced story, you’re either in for absolute freshness or in for a Mr. Brooks part deaux; sadly this fell somewhere in between.

This movie takes you to Jack Ryan’s initial start in the CIA, the days before he was Alec Baldwin or Harrison Ford; which doesn’t make any sense since he was already deep in the CIA when Hunt for Red October took place in 1984. I guess in the year 2014 we finally develop a time traveling machine so that Van Damme can go back in time and save Paul Walker with the hopes that he will be cast as the villain in Fast and Furious 10. Just a bit too soon? Oh well, the writers claim that Ryan was inspired to quit business school and join the army to serve his country when he saw the Towers fall on 9/11. After his chopper was shot down in combat, he is recruited by a CIA head (Costner) to join them so that he can help in preventing another attach on US soil. His job is to be a financial analyst for a global bank and to report any suspicious activity that takes place. One day he notices a number of large accounts that are based out of Russia that have anonymous owners.  And since tensions are high between the U.S. and Russia, he decides to fly over and get more information on these accounts. Next thing he knows he’s in a fight for his life as he unravels their plot to attack and crumble the U.S. economy through a terrorist attack.

It’s a decent enough storyline as director and main villain Kenneth Branagh holds true to the tone and pace of the original three Ryan movies. These were the Bourne movies before Matt Damon popped on the scene but the difference is, Jack Ryan is a desk jockey who is forced into live action. So it’s basically every middle aged white guy’s wet dream; being forced into covert operations while still trying to balance a normal home life with your hot wife (Keira Knightley). Branagh is great as the villain and he nails the Russian accent. He has everything you want in a villain, an accent, and a penchant for vodka, vanity, and women. It was like listening to Yakov Smirnoff yell “In Mother Russia you no have women, women have you!!!! Oooooh” When I made this awful joke mid movie my buddy pointed out to me that women actually do have human beings, it’s called child birth. Whatever, Yakov doesn’t care about semantics.

The point is, there’s enough espionage, action, and Keira Knightley in this movie to keep you entertained. And even though Costner doesn’t do a pirouette like he does in Mr. Brooks I will still give this movie a rating of barely FRESH. I cant believe I made it through this entire review without cracking a lame joke about Costner recruiting men in shadows. 

Ride Along

“I’ll never have dinner with the President! I’ll never have dinner with the President! And if I see your ass again, I’ll be hesitant.” Um…I’m not sure what’s up with rappers and rhyming about both male and female asses but I’m fairly certain that Ice Cube never envisioned a Black president in the White House when he wrote those lyrics. I’m also certain that he never saw himself cutting his jeri curl and starring in pg movies with screaming kids. But good for him, it’s better than him being 50 years old and still making songs about Fuck the Police. Actually that would be kind of fresh, it would be like the black sequel to Falling Down; Ice Cube could walk around and yell at white people for being in the local chicken shacks while also shooting at the people that voted for Mitt Romney. But no, he choose the safe route and has a squeaky clean agent that books him buddy cop movies and commercials where he talks trash to an ice cold beer can.

Well his latest safe move has him sinking just a little bit deeper into the quicksand that has become his career as we are forced to sit through 90 minutes of him pretending to be a tough cop in Ride Along. For the most part the odd couple cop movie has become a dead genre but every now and then you get lucky with movies like Rush Hour or any comedy that features Arnold. What the studios rely on to carry these movies is a funny comedian who is at the top of his game. And this worked in All About the Benjamins simply because every scene basically had Mike Epps doing his stand up in it and you were able to laugh your way past any major plot holes that popped up. So being smart, the writers of Ride Along tried the same formula here with Kevin Hart and for the most part it worked. The only problem is that you saw the majority of the really funny scenes in the previews and this consequently forces you to focus on what is supposed to be a plot of this failure.

They give a weak attempt at one as you see Kevin Hart trying desperately to gain the respect and trust of his fiance’s brother Ice Cube. He has a desire to become a cop himself but since he’s 5’2” and a scrub, Ice Cube just doesn’t see it. But naturally, showing that he’s tough enough to survive a full day in the passenger seat of a cop car will change his mind. Basically every scene is just a random setting they have in place to have Kevin Hart say or do something funny and they somehow try and mix in a crime lord subplot in the middle of it. It’s flimsy at best but since it’s a comedy who cares; all you have to do is fill it with cool action scenes and the occasional boob shot.

Well sadly, there is none of that in this movie. The one real action scene takes place at the beginning but Ice Cube basically ruins it by reciting old school hip hop lines while he's chasing down the bad guys in his SUV; trust me, I know it sounds fresh in theory but in actual practice it just comes off lame. It might have worked if he did the West Side Connection yell after every explosion but once again they didn’t confer with me. There is one cute girl in the movie but all you get is her in a tight t shirt every now and then. But before I go off on a boob tangent, I want to make sure that the main point doesn’t get glossed over; whats really wrong with this movie is the advertising. Don’t show us every funny scene that exists in the movie with your multiple trailers. Sure it will get you a great opening weekend (which is all that really matters in Hollywood these days) but once word of mouth takes over, you're done for long term. You have to look towards the future and the possibility of sequels.

Oh well, I rate this movie as WEAK and suggest you wait for Redbox; hopefully by then you will have forgotten all of the trailers.

Her

 I think a law should be passed in the state of Texas that prohibits people from seeing movies in public during the height of allergy season. And yes, I truly believe that this is a far more important issue than women’s rights, hate crimes, or even gun racks! There is nothing that can ruin a date night at the movies faster than some scrub sitting next to you sneezing repeatedly and building a collection of snot rags while you’re trying to put the moves on your woman .Was I the guy putting the moves on his woman? No! I was the scrub that was sneezing repeatedly, and I felt awful for everyone that happened to be around me; especially the poor guy who sat on the other side of me. At one point during the movie one of my snot rags fell on his seat and I spent the entire time trying to slyly pick it up without him noticing or thinking that I was trying to pick his pocket.  

I realize I should’ve done the right thing and stayed at home but I had been looking forward to Spike Jonze’s weird take on love for a while and if that meant I could no longer play the role of Bubble Boy, so be it! Plus when you have weirdos teaming up with other weirdos, something fun is always bound to happen. Jonze was able to convince Joaquin Phoenix to continue his Hollywood comeback since his sabbatical on Mars or whatever planet he went to that made him think he could rap is apparently over. Say what you want about this introverted recluse, he can certainly act, and I believe he was perfect for this role. I cant think of many actors that could play the role of Theodore Twombly and not have their natural personality get in the way. I love Denzel but we have been exposed to so much of him off screen that you start to easily see his personality bleed into his characters and ultimately all you end up seeing is just  Denzel reciting lines and being cool. I’d say the say about Tom Cruise but you can never really trust aliens so who knows what his real personality is like.

The point I’m trying to make is that for this story to work, you truly had to believe that Phoenix would really feel more comfortable being in a relationship with an operating system versus that of an actual person. And yes, you read that correctly; in continuing with what has become the norm for Jonze, he has found yet another way to bring his unique and odd view of the world to the masses.  I will never forget his awesome choreographed dance for the otherwise forgettable Fatboy Slim song Praise You.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ8vOspxnT0

In his latest effort, you are introduced to Theodore(Phoenix), a greeting card writer who is wandering through life basically alone ever since his breakup with his wife Rooney Mara. He goes to work, barely talks to anyone, and his only true interaction is with his computer that allows him to access everything he could possibly want. He has a few interactions here and there with his neighbor Amy Adams and her husband but for the most part, he’s stuck in a rut and left to video games and random online gossip stories to help him pass the time. This is until the day he decides to buy the latest operating system that has just been made available to the public. It is an artificial intelligence OS that is designed to fit around your personality and cater to your specific needs. It has its own personality and you can also select the gender you want. Since it is a new OS, it is also new to the world and reacts to things that we consider normal with the newness and excitement that Theodore is hopelessly attracted to.

Think about it, it’s a disease free woman of age that has no baggage from previous relationships and her only care in the world is to connect with you and make your life better. I’d be all over her (no pun intended) too; especially since she sounds like Scarlett Johansson. The voice is Scarjo’s by the way and she turns in an awesome vocal performance as Samantha, his OS. She brings her natural energy and sexiness to the character and that helps make the love scene between them more believable than awkward. But believe me, it is awkward! The good thing is, Jonze sets the stage for this with another odd sex scene that takes place between Jonze and Kristin Wiig, in what is easily the funniest scene in the movie.

Without Phoenix’s naturally weird disposition, Jonze’s unique eye, Scarjo’s presence, and the great score provided by Owen Pallet and Arcade Fire; you were probably going to be stuck watching one the worst unintentionally funny romantic comedies of all time. But instead what you ended up with was one of the most unique love stories you’ll ever see; and this is coming from someone who thought that Ryan Gosling’s Lars and the Real Girl could never be beaten in that category.

I rate this movie as FRESH and suggest that you see it; if for nothing else than to see the futuristic high waisted pants everyone wears. I have a buddy who has a girlfriend that’s already rocking these, I guess she’s ahead of her time.

Lone Survivor

With Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, EBooks, YouTube, and whatever else you can think of that’s available to our generation, everyone thinks that they have a story to tell and that the entire world needs to hear it. So we’re stuck reading senseless long posts about how their milk shakes used to be made with half and half but now it’s made with 2 percent. Or you forced to see 8 million pictures of their babies and how they look just like their grandparents did when they spit up their first Gerber porridge! Do you honestly think that people care about this crap? Don’t get me wrong, I am more self aware than you realize; I know that most of my posts are about drunken encounters with random hipsters and that within itself isn’t that impressive, but at least I sandwich these stories in between discussions about movies and music. If you’re going to tell me stories about 2 percent milk shakes at least tell me it was used to wash out the sour taste of Ryan Gosling’s spunk! That would at least give you the same level of respect from me that I gave the little monkey I saw riding a dog on YouTube the other day.

But it seems like our society rewards this type of inane behavior. Somehow someone at HBO gave a green light to season 3 of Girls and we were forced to watch Lena Dunham go on an exciting road trip that included wonderful events like stops at a diner that didn’t serve turkey bacon, adults playing a lame game of truth or dare, and spontaneous hikes in the woods. Clearly stimulating stuff, but the sad thing is, I will be front and center for next week’s show. Maybe I should be shot like everyone else! Well thankfully this past weekend treated us to a movie that featured a group of soldiers whose story really should have been told.

Lone Survivor is the story of 4 Navy Seals who are given the task to take out a deadly Taliban leader who has killed multiple Marines and who terrorizes local villages with random be headings. While on their mission, they camp out outside of the village waiting for the proper time to strike when they are discovered by a local goat herder and his two sons. They face the dilemma of letting them go and giving away their position which would surely get them killed or killing the man and his two sons so they can complete the mission but have the murder of two children on their conscience for the rest of their lives. Well they make what most would agree (myself included) to be the right call and from that point on, they are in a fight for their lives.

Peter Berg directs this film and it’s good to see the dorky white kid from The Great White Hype actually learning how to make good action movies. Most of his earlier films have quite a few hammy moments in them but with the exception of Battleship, he’s toned it down quite a bit since then; especially when he’s dealing with events that happen in the Middle East like his 2007 effort The Kingdom. Even though I have never actually been in one, his gun fights seem to be as close to the real thing as possible. There’s no ridiculous over the top stunts, no cheesy one liners (although I actually love those), and in every instance it looks like shooting someone or being shot at is one of the worst possible things that could ever happen to a human being. This movie is no different in that the second the Taliban discovers the Seals’ position, one of the most graphic, bloody, and painful fighting scenes takes place. And everything you see is based off of the account of the lone survivor Marcus Luttrell.

He starts off the movie by showing you the intense and borderline sadistic training the Seals are put through; and the point of all this training is to teach them how to mentally push their bodies to a point further than they could ever imagine. This helps explain how they were able to get shot and endure the intense pain of throwing themselves off of steep and rugged cliffs as they were in a fight for their lives. With each shot, cut, or fall the soldiers experienced, you could hear everyone in the audience openly groan as Berg does an incredible job of making you feel like you are actually taking the fall with them. While the number of head shots and the amount of blood you see is plentiful, its not exactly Hostel part 3. So the faint of heart should be able to make it through this movie. If for nothing else, see it to cheer towards the end when Luttrell is near death and tells a little Afghani kid that he’s from Texas. I am not as big on the Texas pride as some are but even I must admit that that moment made me proud.

The courage, strength, and sacrifice these men displayed is definitely a story worth telling and its something worth you devoting your time to. Now just because it’s a great story doesn’t necessarily mean that it will also make a great movie but in this case Marky Mark, Taylor Kitsch, and my favorite Ben Foster do an awesome job of portraying these men and presenting them as real life heroes and not (as my friend would say) Arnolds and Stallones running around like cartoon characters. I’m not one to get caught up in hyperbole, so I will wait a few years before ranking it among other war movies but as of now I give it a rating of FRESH! 

Mandela : Long Walk to Freedom

There was a time back in the day when if you had an important story or biography to tell about a black person, the only way that it was getting any kind of run was on a made for tv movie. If you were lucky, something as important as Roots or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. actually got a mini series but these movies  were always filled with melodrama and overacting. It’s like that skit they used to run on SNL with Chris Rock and Sinbad, The Overacting Black Family; where every event was treated like it was setting Black people back 20 years. “What do you mean, we don’t have any milk for my cereal? We don’t ever have two things that match Mattie! Cereal no milk? Peanut no Jelly! Ham no burger!” Now I know I just compared Dr. King to Smokey from Friday and for that I am probably going to hell but that was the reality. Thankfully times have changed a bit and we have movies like Malcolm X, The Hurricane, and Invictus. And while Invictus was a solid movie, it really was just about Mandela forming a rugby team. I don’t mean to trivialize this action, ok maybe just a bit, but his life meant so much more than this. Thankfully Hollywood gave the green light to release a proper biography for one of the world’s most prominent civil rights leaders in Mandela : Long Walk to Freedom.

The movie starts out showing you a young Mandela who spends the majority of his time acting as the public defendant for the native Africans who are being treated unfairly or who are being falsely accused by the outsiders who are ruling their land. And right from the start you see the general disregard the “master race” has for them, even in the courtroom. But the movie makes it a point to not present Mandela as a perfect saint either. He was quite the womanizer early on in his life and this naturally caused a few issues for him. But after his friend is beaten to death by the cops for no apparent reason he decides to help start the ACN (African National Congress) to help bring equal rights and treatment to the natives. It shows how they started off as a peaceful organization but due to the lack of progress they were seeing especially after a slaughter that took place at a local plant, they then resorted to acts of terrorism to get their point across.

The movie takes you through his arrest and the awful conditions of his cell. It also shows you the plight that his wife Winnie had to go through as she was also harassed, tortured, and imprisoned for unjust reasons. This is what led to her deep hatred for the “master race” and is what ultimately led to hers and Nelson’s divorce. The entire time he was imprisoned, Mandela never lost his zeal for helping his people and he dedicated his entire life to their advancement.

What drives this movie and keeps it from being a tv movie of the week are the performances by Idris Elba and Naomi Harris. Idris’ natural cool instantly makes you want to forgive anything negative he does and also makes you want to follow him no matter where he is leading you. He nails the South African accent which is a testament to the hard work he did with his dialect and speech coach. And most importantly he stays away from the melodrama; he relies mainly on his facial expressions to convey the pain he goes through as he has to deal with the death of his mother and first son while he is still in prison. Harris is unbelievably convincing as the radical Winnie with her strong screen presence. I just wish they had thrown in a zombie or two for her to kill so she could yell “Jim! He’s infected!!!” (that’s a 28 Days Later reference in case you didn’t catch it).

It’s really hard to fit how important they were to the civil rights movement in South Africa in 2 ½ hours but the director did an awesome job at it. There are very few lulls in the movie and they don’t go light on any of the racism or violent acts that took place. I think this is an important movie that everyone needs to see and I give it a rating of FRESH! 

Denzel Curry and August Alsina

I haven’t listened to the radio in years; and that includes XM, Sirius, or the ahead of its time Sesame Street Martian Radio. But the one time I was forced to happened a few weeks ago when I was stuck with a rental car from the early 90’s that only had a tape deck and a stereo in it. I looked for hours for my Bell Biv Devoe cassette but couldn’t find it for the life of me; so there I was, forced to listen to what is considered today’s version of  hip hop. I knew it was in a bad state but I thought that the recent infusion of former indie artists such as Kendrick Lamar, A$ap Rocky, and even Rocky Fresh and Danny Brown would have at least brought it up from the gutter. That was until I heard Welcome to My House Party, Woke up in Bugati??? and something about When I Go Out, You Know I Got to Show Out back to back to back. All of these songs were interchangeable in that they had the same 808 beat and they basically had the same material. The only thing going on now is partying and popping Mali? No one is broke anymore? Whatever happened to broken glass everywhere; people pissing on the corner, man they just don’t care. There aren’t crazy ladies living in a bag anymore? It’s sad that we are already killing our brain cells with alcohol, drugs, and television, but now we also need music to turn our minds to mush??? Someone needs to piss off Ice Cube or force DMX to live in the projects again so he can rap about murdering people. We have to have some balance in hip hop and that includes angry Black men yelling about something other than a damn menage.

Well hopefully Denzel Curry can help bring this art form back to some level of respectability with his Nostalgic 64 album. Right now I believe he is simply riding the high that came from Trayvon Martin’s death since he is from the same high school and had a song about the walkout they had in protest of his murder. But don’t let that deter you from checking him out as he definitely has skills. He raps above his age which is key since he hasn’t even graduated from high school yet. Now if he were a scrub like me, he’d be rapping about parties and how he wishes he was a baller but he doesn’t ; he raps about life's forks in the road and how he has the seen the negative consequences of making the wrong choices. He has a good flow and speaks the language that you would expect to hear from someone in the country ghetto that is Florida. And he does this over dark gully beats that definitely represent the south. Check him out as I give him a rating of FRESH.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L8BJVCMUDI

August Alsina is up next and he reminds me of a young R. Kelly, the one that existed before he started peeing on underage girls. While he doesn’t quite have the vocal range Kelly has, his songs lyrically are simple and to the point. You’ll hear songs like Let Me Hit That or I Luv This where he’ll  sing “I’m way too drunk to be talking like this, I’m way too high to be trippin like this, I’m way too young to be living like this”. It's not exactly poetry and he's not much in the way of a role model but if you’re looking to party and/or hook up this will definitely get you what you are looking for. He already has done collaborations with Currency, Trinidad James, Yo Gotti, Trey Songz, and Chris Brown just to name a few. He will definitely blow up in the near future. Ghetto will definitely get you out of whatever friend zone you’re stuck in and will lead to an uncomfortable morning after talk. I give him a rating of FRESH! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ViSMGCqsvE

The Wolf of Wall Street

Being that I am a douchebag who works in sales, and this is an accurate description of every sales person that has ever existed by the way; I like to consider myself an expert on what qualifies as a great salesman’s movie. I swear part of the prerequisite training is that you watch movies like Glen Gary Glen Ross, Wall Street, and for some reason Boiler Room. Boiler Room??? Ben Affleck, Giovanni Ribisi, and Vin Diesel are supposed to teach me how to be a better salesman? Affleck couldn’t even sell big booty Jen Lopez on allowing him a bachelor party for their wedding. I guess she had a flashback to her days as a Fly Girl on In Living Color when she actually had the smallest ass on set; she was afraid he’d leave her for one of those Montreal strippers. As it turns out, he left her for a primate look alike in Jen Garner. Go figure. And the only thing the Diesel can sell me on is paying $10 to see him make a cameo in a street car racing movie that involves a hick in Japan.

The point is, every salesman swears by these movies and will sneer at you in disgust if you talk bad about them. Well, I have a feeling that The Wolf of Wall Street is about to surpass them all. The initial preview they released months ago made it look awful with the totally taken out of context scene between McConaughey and Leo where he is doing this weird tribal rap/dance thing. In the context of the movie, that scene is actually pretty money as McConaughey is showing Leo the ropes and teaching him how to stay on top in Wall Street. This is when you get your first taste of drugs and alcohol.

The entire movie is literally nothing but sex, drugs, and alcohol; and while Scorsese tried his best to make it look like a cautionary tale, the fact that you laughed the entire way through, saw the unbelievably hot women they had, and the ridiculous amount of money they made in the process; you couldn’t help but leave the theater thinking that Jordan Belfort (Leo) was kind of the man. No wonder why this super old actress almost slapped him after seeing a special screening. Look, everyone has crazy tales of doing drugs, drinking alcohol, or even having weird sexual escapades but the trick is to make them stand out from everyone else’s. And this is where Terrance Winter and Marty Scorsese shine. It’s as if Winter wrote everything that he couldn’t get away with in The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire, which is saying a lot if you watch either of those shows. And even though I had my doubts, Scorsese was a master at turning every cloud of cocaine or every pursuit of the ultimate Quaalude into the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.

I don’t want to give any jokes away but the scene that literally almost had me and the entire theater peeing in our pants was when a nearly catatonic Leo used a Popeye cartoon that was on in the background as his inspiration to do an entire vial of cocaine to give him the energy he needed to help save his friend. Trust me when I say it was epic. And so it went, with every sexual encounter that involved a prostitute, with every midget that was thrown at a large bulls eye, and with every disgusting act that followed a large amount of drugs being taken, you found yourself laughing harder and sadly enough cheering for the corrupt people that were on screen.

The plot is simple as you basically follow the creation on this monster better known as Jordan Belfort. You see him start on the worst day of the stock market since 1929; it was so bad that it caused his major firm to fail and he was left selling nothing but worthless penny stocks. He however somehow finds a creative way to turn this into a multi million dollar business but along the way, greed as well as the alcohol, drug, and sex dependencies he picks up with it, slowly sends his life into a tailspin; one that he somewhat embraces. You can't help but see the inevitable ending that is to come but you along with Belfort could care less as you are simply enjoying the ride. Leo owns this role as does Jonah Hill as his super Jewish right hand man. Hill’s crowning moment comes during yet another epic party as he comes up with the idea to sell Steve Madden stock which is later followed by him masturbating in the middle of said party. Again, trust me when I say you have to see it.

If you can’t tell by now, I absolutely loved this movie even though it was 3 hours long. This is easily the funniest movie I have seen in years as I laughed the entire way through it. And my buddy added that it even surpasses Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as the best drug movie ever. I rate this movie as TIGHT and strongly suggest you see it.