THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

Now complete with more brooding and teen angst. Exactly what I was worried about.

Also, another origin story just in case you didn't get it the first time.

(It takes a while to load, because God forbid Sony put it up on a site that can handle all the traffic. They don't want just anyone to be able to see the trailer for a movie they've spent tons of money on and is their flagship cash cow.)

*EDIT* There we go. Good old Yahoo!.

ANOTHER LIFE

Half cold, truck stop coffee. Parking lot calisthenics. 5 am sunrise over desolate cornfields. 9 hour night drives to avoid over-heating the A/C. Midnight pool parties. Every mall in every city. Stealing from Whole Foods. Sneaking in to movie theaters to kill time. Getting lost in Compton. Ditching the band for baseball games with a girl you only knew from the Internet. Feeding ducks. Hitting the beach no matter how cold. Wandering strange streets looking for coffee shops.

Those were the days.

ATLANTIS

I've always been fascinated by space travel. It probably dates back to when I was younger and STAR WARS dominated every aspect of my imagination. As I got older, I was still interested in it, but kind of stopped following what was going on in the world of space exploration. I'd still read up on every NASA mission a little bit, but it didn't dominate my thoughts the way it did when I was 8 and running around my basement with a CHALLENGER toy.

Then, in February of 2009, when I read this article by Chris Jones, I started becoming a little bit obsessed with shuttles, rocket ships and space exploration all over again.

Since then, I've been toying with all sorts of stories and ideas revolving around the subject and when Atlantis launched the other day, I started thinking about it even more and started looking around the Internet and finding all kinds of stuff about it. It's been a little bit depressing to read about, since this generation doesn't really care about it the way I did when I was little.

I wonder if public schools took a break in whatever they were teaching that day to turn on the launch. I never missed one when I was in school. But that was a different time.

This is from an astrophysicist in New York as he vented about the end of NASA's shuttle program.

I know there's only so many times we can send people up to space only to come back either empty handed or with barely a sliver of new information, but it's still a little sad. It's hard to put something like this in perspective because space shuttles and NASA launches have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

Of course there's been rough times, specifically in 1986 when the original CHALLENGER exploded a little over a minute after it launched and in 2003 when COLUMBIA disintegrated upon re-entry. I remember sitting on the floor of my Grandma's living room watching the news report, even though at 6 years old, I was still too young to completely understand what happened. It was probably worse for my parents who were in Florida at Disney World and saw the debris falling from the sky as they got off the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

But still, even with those accidents, and the inherent danger that came with launching a crewed flight to space, the space program has been huge part of this generation. Unfortunately, now that's over.

One of my favorite writers, Warren Ellis, a man who probably spends way more time than he should reading about space, technology and the future chimed in about it on his blog the other day.

And unfortunately, he's 100% right about everything he said.

Still, sad to see it go.

BAT FOR LASHES

Way, way late to the party on this one, but I quit watching music videos years ago. So, I have to thank my man J. Colby Smith for showing this to me. Really dig it.

THE HANGOVER: PART II

THE HANGOVER is on HBO and is playing quietly in the background while I'm writing this. When I saw it for the first time, I had no idea what to expect. The trailer made it seem pretty funny and worthy of my eight bucks. I got exactly what I wanted out of it and now it's one of those movies that I'll click on for background noise while I'm on the computer. It's not a great movie, but it does what it was intended to do. You just can't think about it too much.

That said, I wasn't excited to see the sequel at all. What worked best about the original is that it came out of nowhere—no hype and no expectations to live up to. That wouldn't be the case this time around.

After it was released and critics were bashing it left and right, I was kind of set to defend it a little bit. The director, Todd Phillips, only knows how to make one movie. If you look at his oeuvre—actually, I take that back. Let's say 'body of work' instead. Oeuvre should be saved for people with talent.

If you look at his body of work, every film he's directed has basically had the same premise, the same set of characters and the same beats. ROAD TRIP, STARSKY AND HUTCH, OLD SCHOOL, SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS, DUE DATE are essentially the same. They've got funny moments, but those funny moments are largely due to the talent he's able to assemble. So I was all set to go with that and use that as a basis for an argument about how people were being a little too hard on the sequel.

Then I actually saw THE HANGOVER: PART II.

Now I take it all back.

It is honestly one of the laziest, most uninspired movies I've ever seen. And I've seen some shit.

Phillips and his writers didn't even try. I know that's the biggest complaint, but really, they didn't. At all. If you played part one and part two at the same time on two different screens, I can almost guarantee it would look 90% the same the entire time, beat for beat. They told the same type of joke but just a little worse, they did the same pseudo-action bits but just a little lazier.

It was really kind of depressing.

I wouldn't have minded watching a movie where I got to hang out with Stu, Alan and Phil for another couple of hours but this wasn't it.

And unfortunately, since THE HANGOVER: PART II has already pulled in almost a quarter of a billion dollars, a part III is all but assured.

That also means that the people who loved both installments will surely love the third and we'll have to listen to these idiots talk about how THE HANGOVER TRILOGY ranks up there with the best of them.

Those people are why America is doomed.

WUGAZI

A lot of times I don't really care about mashups. There are a lot of them out there and a lot of them are absolutely terrible. Every once in a while you'll find a good one (like the Katy Perry/Disembodied one that I'm still ashamed to admit I like).

The Jay-Z/Beatles Gray Album is probably the most popular and the one that shot amateur mashups to another level. Now they're everywhere. About once a week there will be a link to a new one and most of the time I could care less, but I saw the title of this one and couldn't pass it up.

Wugazi.

Yes, that's Wu-Tang Clan and Fugazi thrown together. The Rza, the Gza and the Old Dirty Bastard would probably be all about it if they were to ever come across it. Ian MacKaye, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about.

Either way, it's out there. The first 'single' is "Sleep Rules Everything Around Me" and a full album, 13 Chambers, is set to hit the Internet next week (7/13/11). They have a Tumblr (who doesn't?) so keep an eye on that for more.

Not going to lie. I'm pretty excited about this. And that doesn't happen very often with these things.

 Sleep Rules Everything Around Me by WUGAZI