Smashbomb

"The first song I heard of theirs was called 'Funky' and the B-side of this was a song called 'Mentally Mad'. I was just listening to a mix show of theirs one night and they played all this new shit. I was like: 'Who the fuck is this?' I needed to know everything about this group from there; I knew this shit was ill. I discovered that they were from the Bronx and the more I listened, the more I realised that their beats were hard as fuck. I started reaching around and I found the 12"" single before the album came out and a few other songs. When the album eventually came out I was just mesmerised, especially with Kool Keith and his high-pitched rhymes talking about all this space-age, futuristic shit. It influenced me massively in that it was just this mad, unorthodox music and when I started making music, mine was very unorthodox as well. They were talking spaceship shit, like it was from another planet and they were 'Hardcore Bronx' fools too. The beats were banging with a big old bass and it just felt like some next level shit. It was hard as fuck, street shit set against these incredible lyrics – you just did not hear people talking like that. Kool Keith would rhyme but he'd also do this shit where nothing at all rhymed (like 'Mentally Mad') and that was very different at the time. They came just before Doctor Octagon and I never got into them or none of that as it felt watered down. Ultramagnetic MC's were just pure hood shit and they stood out because of it. Critical Beatdown was just incredible with the music and the beats they used. There's something too about having the contrast of the deep voice and the high pitched voice that's kind of like B-Real or Chuck D and Flava Flav. When one goes away, the other comes in and they switch again: when they come back, it's always more powerful too. They created a really dynamic sound."

Source

Kudos

LoganCrews (2861 KP) rated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) in Movies

Sep 20, 2020 (Updated Nov 29, 2020)

Every so often I think something along the lines of: "There's no way this literal-as-possible, mostly one-note, kind of cringe, and honestly really derivative Oscar bait should work". And that's true, I do have my reservations about this - mainly, the choice to make the titular character this, like Bagger Vance-esque sage wanderer who only speaks in 'wise narrator' tropes (starts every other sentence with "we", seemingly omniscient even though there's no reason for him to be, etc.) and emotes on only one or two levels restricts a lot of the emotional palpability here imo. But Fincher and Pitt sell the absolute *hell* out of it - this looks and sounds all kinds of incredible, and thankfully never goes overboard with the period elements (they're used just right, a rarity with these types of films). Pitt is flat-out exceptional, and so is Blanchett - and oddly enough the makeup effects look less convincing when Pitt's supposed to be a 50-something year old man as opposed to an elderly child lmao, but they still look superb. I can't even act like I'm being objective to a point anymore, the cry porn just inexplicably works hardcore for me here - had a lump in my throat practically the entire runtime (which, by the way, flows together each vignette flawlessly and doesn't sag for a second). For the (minor) gripes listed above I think it works best when you look at it as a classical epic fairy tail as opposed to the human drama it could have perhaps succeeded even more in; and if there's any nuance at all I would say it's the way this works as a treatise towards appreciating 'the good times' while you're actually still in them ("I wanna remember us just as we are now") and the way it shows how we slowly become more and more desensitized towards death, even as we come closer to our own. As full of magnetic imagery and waterworks moments as this is I honestly can't act like I didn't adore it, but I fully understand why so many people are averse to it.