This piece is on Prometheus. Spoilers abound so beware.

There's a 1985 Tobe Hooper movie called Lifeforce, starring a very young and yet still oddly old-looking Patrick Stewart and a constantly topless Mathilda May, that's remained stuck in my mind throughout the years. The reason for this has nothing to do with it being any good -- on the contrary, it's an unmitigated piece of crap -- but more for the fact that for years after seeing it for the first time, I would find myself returning to it at regular intervals. The reason I'd continue to subject myself to something I obviously disliked intensely? Because I very much wanted to like it, and I always held onto hope that maybe at some point I'd hit on something I hadn't noticed before and the movie would click for me and fall into place. It was a great idea and I wanted it to be a great movie -- unfortunately, no matter how many times I saw it, it never became one. It just kept being the same piece of shit I remembered from the last time I saw the thing.

Ironically, the script for Lifeforce was written by Dan O'Bannon, the writer of my favorite movie of all-time, Alien, and that adds an interesting layer of synchronicity to my feelings about the nominal Alien prequel, Prometheus -- a film I've been waiting for in one form or another for 33 years.

I saw Prometheus on Thursday night -- and I desperately wanted to like it; almost no other movie imaginable would receive the automatic benefit of the doubt from me as one that saw Ridley Scott returning to the Alien universe. And with that in mind, I gave the movie that benefit -- over and over again as I turned it over in my mind in the few hours after leaving the theater -- only to finally realize that if the movie hadn't been Ridley Scott's return to a beloved canon, I wouldn't even have bothered trying to rationalize my feelings about it and to assign deeper meaning where I simply wasn't finding any. I just would've come right out and admitted that the film wasn't all that great.

Make no mistake: Prometheus is a visual feast; it's worth seeing strictly for how lovely it is to look at and for how masterfully the 3D optics are used. I would recommend the movie to anyone based solely on that. Prometheus also has a couple of truly spectacular set pieces and one or two very nice nods to the original Alien beyond simply the revelation of who and what the "Space Jockey" is and where it might have come from. Beyond that, though, it's a mess. A beautiful mess -- but a mess nonetheless.

I'm just going to throw out the issues in a stream of consciousness fashion and let anyone who's seen the movie and who feels like it discuss whether they were bugged by the same things.

1. Okay, a trillion-dollar expedition into space with the aim of discovering the origin of man, the most important mission mankind has ever undertaken, and the 17 people hand-picked for it are the dumbest and most unlikable people planet Earth has to offer. Scientists don't behave like scientists. The captain of the ship seems strangely disinterested in his crew's peril. Characters do unbelievably stupid things seemingly without reason and thoroughly against what we know of their personalities through the meager amount of set-up we're given. (The two terrified crew-members who suddenly decide to play with the pretty alien worm; the two jokey co-pilots who instantly and complacently volunteer to martyr themselves at the ass end of space because a woman they don't even know says somebody's going to have to.) Jesus, I cared more about the kids getting picked off by Jason in Friday the 13th VII than I did about anybody -- anybody -- aboard the Prometheus. And what's worse, I really get the impression that the writers and director didn't care about the characters either.

2. Maybe Noomi Rapace can carry an American movie -- but she didn't carry this one. Again, I didn't give a damn about her.

3. While the C-section scene is admittedly excellent, the fact that Shaw then immediately -- after pulling an alien squid the size of a football out of her -- runs, jumps, gets the shit knocked out of her and isn't doubled over in excruciating pain the entire time required a suspension of disbelief I kind of couldn't muster. Also, why did no one seem to notice that she'd just hacked herself open and why didn't she bother to tell anyone, "Oh, by the way, there's an alien squid in the med-pod bay -- might wanna go check on that," instead of pretending it never happened?

4. While David was absolutely the most interesting character in the movie -- and Fassbender's performance was a lot of fun -- can anybody explain to me the motivation for 80% of the crap he does? Why poison Charlie? Why revel in the fact that Shaw is pregnant with an alien? Why then reach out to her at the end? My boy Omar has a good theory, which is that David isn't actually taking orders from Weyland and has instead been programmed by someone else and that his mission is actually, keeping with Alien tradition, to bring back a specimen for bio-weapons. This is the only possibility that makes any sense.

5. If Captain Janek is supposed to be the audience surrogate -- or the closest thing there is to one among the characters -- and if he's indeed right that the planet they discover is nothing more than a weapons facility, then why the hell did the Engineers tell humans about it? Why try to entice them to come for a visit? On that note, if what the crew of Prometheus finds is indeed the remnants of an accident in which the Engineers' bio-weapon got loose and killed a bunch of them, that means this is the second time at least that this has happened, since the Space Jockey in Alien was obviously the victim of his own cargo. That makes the Engineers the most incompetent alien race to seed our planet imaginable. Although admittedly I appreciate it if that's the point -- that we're a bunch of assholes who aren't the product of God or an enlightened species of space men but were instead created by beings that are as angry, petty and stupid as we are.

6. In reference to all of these questions, I blame and kind of hate Damon Lindelof. Despite its popularity, Lost was annoying metaphysical tripe that masqueraded as intellectualism -- and Lindelof seems to have brought the same ethos to Prometheus. No, churning out a script in which you can almost hear your own voice saying to the audience, "Ah? See? Interesting, isn't it? That's a big question, right? Bet that'll give you something to discuss!" while smirking smugly doesn't make you a genius or your work high-minded. It's cheap and easy to ask questions you don't even try to answer and create chaos just for the hell of it.

7. There are vast stretches of the movie that are just boring as hell.

Again, it took me about an hour or so after seeing Prometheus to admit to myself that the only reason I was trying to give it a pass on the issues I had with it was that it was ostensibly an Alien movie. Upon any kind of close inspection -- really any inspection at all -- the whole damn thing falls apart, and that obviously disappoints me greatly.

I should say, by the way, that I'm going to see it again -- mostly to see it in IMAX and truly immerse myself in its visual splendor, but also because, as with Lifeforce all those years ago, I really want to like it. I want to find something I didn't catch the first time that will make it all come together for me. I'm not sure that's going to happen, though.

Just had a converstaion at Starbucks with some local hip hop heads. Creative in their fashion, but let me hear their demo in the hopes I would help produce them. Hellz no! Very very wack lyrics and the worst freestlye I've heard in forever. This industry has been my life since I was 15 and I've done hundreds of projects in hip hop alone, hell, I grew up in the inner city jungles of Jersey & Brooklyn (add Miami), but the time has come to blog about the current state of this lost art.

It’s hard for me to critique the monstrosity that has become commercialized hip-hop culture. I love hip hop and didn’t even start listening to music until old school hip-hop hit the scene. I am a serious fan of quite a few artists, both young and old. However, hip-hop (at least the stuff we hear on the radio) calls for an intervention, like the relative you love who has been hitting the crack pipe for way too long. The intervention is necessary to protect our kids from receiving poisonous messages that are wired to ruin their lives.
One of the things that drives me crazy about commercialized hip-hop is that the art form has lost the bulk of its creativity. When I listen to white guys on the radio, they sing about all kinds of stuff: the birds in the sky, the iPod they just bought, the girl they are trying to go out on a date with, their days in high school, etc. Apparently brothers don’t have that kind of range: They are only allowed to rap about the same tired stuff that the other dude rapped about in the last song. “Imma spend it on ya shawty, bottles of Patron fo ya shawty, got my gun for the haters, diamonds on my neck, I’m a playa”…blah, blah, blah, whatever man.
So, to make my point, I thought I would lay out the 10 things that any person needs in order to be a rapper, at least the kind of rapper who gets on the radio. Call it the Z Instant Rapper Fun Kit. I’m sure that every white boy in Iowa already has one:

1) A really large and overpriced piece of jewelry that you borrowed money to buy: It can have diamonds, gold, platinum, or whatever and has to be really heavy, as if it might crush your testicles if you move too fast. Oh, why is your favorite jeweler snickering at you and calling you in the middle of the night to tell you about another piece he just made? Because he knows you’re gonna be broke after your next album drops and wants to milk your dumb a** before it’s too late.
2) Your body must be tattooed so much that even your mama doesn’t recognize you: I’m just waiting for a rapper to tattoo his own eyeballs, now that would be gangsta. You better keep making hit records, because it’s hard to get a job with tattoos all over your neck, just ask Thugnificent from the Boondocks.
3) You have to be drinking out of a bottle of something that is eventually going to kill you: If you are going to be a real rapper, liquor must become a food group. You know Uncle Joe, the alcoholic who lives in yo grandma’s basement? He used to act just like you 20 years ago.
4) A gun so you can blast all haters on sight (The Haterologist Extermination Program ): You’re only keeping it real if you shoot another black man, white boys don’t count. You can even sell more records if you rap about it, especially if you went to prison. According to the NAACP, black men, can officially say, that they've killed more black people than the KKK (Oh snap, did that rhyme? Now dats wussup!)...oh latinos, not far behind.
5) A whole lot of gold, diamonds and other random jewelry in your mouth: You should be setting off metal detectors, even when you’re butt-naked.
6) A pack of random women around you, preferably strippers, all of whom you slept with last night: Don’t worry about the fact that they’ve had sex with hundreds of dudes before you. AIDS only happens to other people, Eazy-E was a fluke.
7) A pound of weed, an ounce of coke, or a bottle of ‘Sizzurp’ somewhere in the vicinity: There’s nothing more productive than a man who is so high that he can’t even get out of bed in the morning. That was Dr. King’s dream, Malcolm’s too.
8) A gang of dudes who follow you everywhere you go for no particular reason: You’re not a real rapper without a bunch of straight-up thugs from your childhood who are there to “protect” you, but end up shooting somebody at a club who then sues you for everything you’ve got.
9) A pocket full of cash so you can make it rain at the club: Don’t save or invest your money, that’s actin white. Just go to the club and throw money in the air and take pictures on Twitter with hundred dollar bills hanging out of your hat, that’s what Bill Gates and Oprah do with their money too.
10) A full-fledge plan of weaponized, mass-marketed self-destruction: By being determined to reflect only the worst and most ruinous parts of your humanity, you have become a virus to your community and an exaggerated caricature, thus creating a modern day minstrel show. Your over-the-top behavior is a reflection of the crabs-in-a-barrel mindset of impoverished, uneducated samoan/black/latino/whatever.. men competing for attention by showing that their urban experience is more authentic than the next dude. You are exporting a false version of the “hood experience” to those who believe that the trauma of urban America is exciting, fun and intriguing, like watching elephants mate in the middle of the jungle.

Every little boy who looks up to you and emulates your distorted perception of manhood and thugness is walking right off a cliff that lands him in a casket, the poorhouse or a prison cell. You, and the multi-billion dollar plantation owner who keeps you high, ignorant and unfocused, are destroying the futures of millions of kids who ignore their parents and pay attention to you. When you consider the death toll of the aformentioned men in America, one can easily argue that you’re part of an extermination plan no less deadly than what Hitler did during World War II.
It’s time to wake up and smell the exploitation.

Now pour me an extra espresso shot and don't "F" it up, save yourself a punch in the mouth...oh wait.

For those about to rock...go 'F&^$" yourselves

Chances are no matter where you live you're used to being inundated with ads for really crappy-looking upcoming movies you have no desire to see. If you happen to live in Los Angeles, though, that pummeling is positively inescapable, since this place is ground zero for the unholy work of the film business's promotional machine. The last several weeks saw every billboard, bus bench and ten-story building in sight turned into the equivalent of an odious carnival barker, screaming his lungs out in an effort to get somebody, anybody to see Battleship.

And now that that movie has, well, sunk -- it's time to move onto the next high-profile piece of shit that Hollywood knows it's going to have to ram down the throat of the public if it wants to turn a bad greenlight decision into some kind of a profit.

That movie would be Rock of Ages.

The promotion for it around town right now is simply impossible to avoid. Everywhere you look, there's Tom Cruise shirtless in a fucking cowboy hat, fur coat and sunglasses; an uncharacteristically prudish-looking Catherine Zeta-Jones brandishing a handmade, PMRC-style anti-rock sign; Russell Brand looking like Russell Brand, and the rest of the large and otherwise indistinguishable cast of this Broadway-to-Hollywood nightmare. I've already mentioned here how I'd rather have a screwdriver rammed through my head than see Rock of Ages, but I have to throw the question out there: Who is this movie for?

No, really.

Millennials don't care about Poison, Def Leppard and -- oh dear God -- Foreigner (it's one of the few admirable attributes you can ascribe to that particular generation). There isn't a latter-day metalhead in the world who honestly wants to see a silly Broadway musical, let alone one that features Tom Cruise doing Glee-ified versions of 80s metal songs in leather pants (once again nicely putting to rest all those gay rumors). Anyone with a hint of dignity who's still somewhat enamored of what's possibly the single goofiest period in rock history isn't going to be caught dead anywhere near this thing. Hell, most people who remember that era are still embarrassed they ever kind of liked Poison in the first place (I raise my hand); it took two full decades of listening to Opeth and Miles just to constitute an appropriate penance for our transgressions against decent music and make us feel whole again. So, again, who's it for?

The best I can come up with is 40-something suburbanite women; the ones you never wanted to get anywhere near when they were girls listening to this shit unless it held the promise of easy sex; the ones who've gone on to cling desperately to their youth through the dreck their daughters like (see: Twilight) and soulless, cloyingly nostalgic faux-celebratory horseshit they can see with their equally tragic girlfriends, like Rock of Ages. In other words, the women who still keep Bon Jovi inexplicably and unforgivably away from the state fair circuit after all these years.

I just can't see that crowd being enough to make this movie a success -- but what the hell do I know? As H.L. Mencken famously said, nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. And nobody understands that better than Hollywood.

Did you hear that Coachella brought Tupac back to life via hologram over the weekend? No?! Where the f*ck have you been?! It's EVERYWHERE. Seriously. I hear Marilyn Hagerty is writing up an op ed as I type.

OK, maybe not. But the rest of the internet has certainly chimed in, in only the way the internet can. By not really making fun of it. Not really applauding it. Just sort of ambiguously deriving laughs from how GD weird it was despite the pretty amazing advancement in technology.

I suggest taking in all the hologram fun you can right this second, because soon enough Hologram Tupac is going to be touring and prompting the rights holders to other dead artists to do the same, and the awesomeness that is hologram technology in theory will only inspire "ughs" and fart noises and the inclination to punch strangers in the face

Hipster Living Social deal:
Equal opportunity in my love and hate. That said the hipster epidemic has reached critical mass for me. Note a living social deal I received today from my old family neighborhood in Brooklyn. An Easter Egg Hunt Pub crawl?

Can you believe that 1164 people paid $30 (which is 50% off!) for permission to walk around a NYC neighborhood tomorrow looking for Easter Eggs like a 5 year old would and have a few drinks included at smug bars along the way? The 1164 people doesn’t include the hundreds who bought in at $60 for this “only in NYC experience”. So basically, tomorrow in the E. Village you’ll see a couple thousand artists, musicians, creative assistants, and a bunch of other funemployed, parentally subsidized transplanted pussies stumbling around drunk while “solving riddles, answering trivia questions, and deciphering picture challenges to clues as to where the eggs and Easter bunny are hidden” while simultaneously staring at non-participating normal NY’ers with a smug and pretentious look; saying in their heads “like yah, get with the program and be kewl like us, yah, yah.” Think about it – how many places in the E. Village can you hide 1000 eggs without one touching piss, blood or vomit?

I can see it now – Hayden and Megan are looking for eggs along gritty Avenue A when they are stopped by Noah the bearded 6 year NYC veteran who magically pays for his $2800 studio by doing performance art in the park. He says: OK guys, answer these two questions correctly and you get this mystery golden egg. 1. She’s green, stands in the harbor holding a torch – who is she? 2. Directly over the WIlliamsburg Bridge is what ‘real’ Brooklyn ‘nabe’ that is home to some of the most creative types in the world? Correct! You win two medium fairtrades from Stumptown coffee – roasted in Brooklyn of course!

Are you keeping in mind that everybody involved in this extravaganza is an adult. Yeah, hard to believe, I know. Finally, when the day’s festivities are over everybody is invited to a ‘secret party’. What has happened to this great city? Why have so many 20 – 40 year old began acting like 10 – 18 year olds? Why are these hipsters allowed to roam our streets and subways pulling these “LOOK AT ME” acts such as public pillow fights and condiment wars. Having art parties, dinner parties and riding in their underwear on our trains? Not that I approve of smoking on a train platform but, if you do, you get a fine – no question about it. Even if it’s outdoors and you are all the way at the end not bothering anybody. However, if 50 flyover state, talentless, obnoxious hipster fucks decide to jam into one subway car in their underwear and other costumes while drunk, screaming and climbing poles, they’ve done nothing wrong? FUCKING SCUM! GO BACK TO OSH KOSH AND TEACH YOUR OLD ‘NABE’ CULTURE AND ART YOU IRRITATING CUNTRAGS!

There, its over.
Back to the beautiful things in life.

There is no such thing as "couples porn", not the homemade kind, the high end production kind.
The adult film industry tries really hard to put forth the absurd notion that women account for up to 40% of porn viewers (users?) That may be the silliest notion since some jokers tried to convince the world that men landed on the moom in 1969. ;p

The increased mainstreaming of pornography and porn like things has no doubt led couples to pop a DVD in and attempt to create a spark. This is a terrible idea. Your girl has zero interest in watching your copy of "Weapons of Ass Destruction #37." In fact, it goes far beyond that. She may feel many different things watching porn with you, but be assured that none of those feelings are of arrousal.

Women will judge you for your choice in spank material. Either the girls are too good looking and she'll feel insecure that you're wanking to chicks that are hotter than her or she'll find their looks to be less glamourous than expected and she'll think poorly of you for spanking it to low rent chicks.

The reason she is watching is for more than just judgment; she's attempting to be cool and seem badass and wild for you, but she'll be shocked and mortified at the Discovery Health Network level of camera intrusion. She'll also likely be intimidated by the Fear Factor-esque acts that dominate modern porn. A chick you dig: cannot, will not and should not be doing the things on screen--that's why they have professionals. One's that you can pay.

The worst form of couple's porn for your relationship is your own DIY home video. There is no way to make a chick feel worse about herself than to see her in the act with bad lighting and camera angles. Couple that with the fear that the video will be viewed by someone other than the two in the relationship and understand that it's a terrible idea. I know, I know, we all have made awesome art before, but always?

If you must go through with shared porn viewing: find the mildest girl on girl video possible (the kind that would bore you to tears on your own) and if she shows any interest: it's a good segue into the "would you be into another chick" condo. ;p