I personally identify with Michael Cera. As the skinny awkward guy in my group of friends in high school (and now), I saw a lot of myself in his portrayal of a graduating senior struggling with the transition from high school to college in Superbad. Especially because I was a graduating senior struggling with the transition from high school to college at the time. Like Cera in the film, I was leaving behind a close friend to go to a better school, unable to pick up on obvious signs that a cute girl might be interested, and prone to break out in doo-wop melodies in uncomfortable party situations.
I really enjoyed watching him in films because it made projecting myself into the role of the protagonist that much simpler. However it really hurt me when Michael Cera became completely and utterly typecast. He couldn’t escape the George-Michael- Scott-Pilgrim motif. Girls say they like him, but nobody wants Michael Cera more than they want a rugged tough Ryan Gosling. I wanted to see him grow. I wanted to see him turn into the slightly cooler but still not completely socially adept man-boy that I’ve evolved into 5 years later. Luckily for me, the transition has begun. Three roles in particular stick out to me as big moves for someone trying to escape a Hollywood label.
Cera’s coming out party for his new “not always the same character” self had to be his brief but memorable appearance in This Is The End. Appearing amongst a smattering of other celebrities that Seth Rogen was able to lure to a Dallas warehouse for a one night shoot/party (or maybe it was a party/shoot), Cera expresses his affections for cocaine, slapping Rihanna’s ass, and sharing a Capri Sun with the women fellating him before being impaled by a lamp post. This role was so far away from how Cera has been portrayed that Rogen was worried he would reject the opportunity to portray the Bizzaro version of himself. Cera accepted on the condition that he be allowed to choose his own wardrobe, namely a neon jacket that removed all doubt that he likes to ski in more ways than one.
Another outside-the-box role for Cera comes from from the movie Magic Magic. You wouldn’t think that playing the part of a rapey Chilean weirdo would be a step in the right direction, but as long as he isn’t forcing laughter at a bad Ellen Page joke, Cera can do no wrong in my eyes. In the film, a beautiful young American tourist is travelling to an isolated South American island to visit some family friends. Except replace “traveling to” with “imprisoned on” and “visit” with “be forced into marriage by”. In my favorite part of the trailer, Cera and his possible bride-to-be are asked how much they like each other on a scale of 1 to 10. “I only just met him” she replies. We’s likes her 10 my precious, We’s likes her 10.
The third film is less of a departure from a typical Cera role. He’s still awkward, but this time instead of crew cut and Goody-two-shoes’d, Cera has scraggly long hair and does drugs! In Crystal Fairy, Cera and a group of compadres decide to take mescaline on a Chilean beach together. The movie attempts to stereotype Cera by adding a weird pseudo-girlfriend who doesn’t shave her armpits, but as long as Cera takes hallucinogens, the movie will be a success in my eyes.
Just as I’m not sure why the latter two films I’m mentioning both happen to take place in Chile, I’m not sure how long this break from being typecast will last. In many ways Cera will never escape the role of the awkward lanky guy, because he has has been so central in defining what it means to be one. In the end, I’m just glad that he usually gets the girl at the end of the movie, so society will dictate that I should too.
This is funny. Jay-Z dropped the hyphen in his name yesterday, and will now go by Jay Z. I do not know the cause for this sudden change and can only speculate as to which expensive designer influenced Jay’s change of heart. I’m not sure how many people really knew or thought about that lingering hyphen. Before yesterday, did casual S. Carter fans even know which iteration was correct?
I have written somewhat extensively on the romance of the iTunes library, but this story can’t help but remind me of the great lengths I went to in order to properly (or at least uniformly) spell every artist in my iTunes library so they would file under the same name on my iPod.
Napster, to its revolutionary credit, was the wild west. It’s cavalier (read: user generated) listings had no rules when properly naming and listing files. Thus, half the songs you downloaded were listed either incorrectly, or with annoying tags or underscores. To this day we’re still feeling the effects of Napster’s lawless naming system.
So yes, I was one of the few who knew about the meaning of that hyphen as I had to add it to every improperly spelled track. And now, of course, I’m going to go back and remove those hyphens because this is America where OCD is mistakenly seen as a sign that you have your shit together.
In honor of HOVA’s mid-life identity crisis I’ve made a list of other Hip-Hop/R&B (never RnB) artists whose names are commonly misspelled in iTunes libraries across the world.
OutKast (lol at Outcast)
Lil Wayne (no apostrophe)
Lil’ Kim (apostrophe)
2Pac (sorry phonetics)
Three 6 Mafia (In the rap world, if it’s below ten, don’t spell it out)
Santigold (This is confusing because she used to go by Santogold and released an album named Santogold)
Notorious B.I.G. (It’s an acronym, have a little respect)
R. Kelly (Robert likes punctuation)
Boyz II Men (The 90’s were actually the worst)
Dear lol,
It’s been a tumultuous decade. At the height of the AIM era (AOL Instant Messenger—but of course you already know that, you crafty bastard), we were best friends. Something in one of the many conversations with my 13-year-old friends was funny? Lol. Stupid? Lol. Heartbreaking? Lol.
Then came along the hahas and hehes of the world. I experimented with different forms of internet laughter and you didn’t appreciate it. Not one bit. I remember one time around Christmas when my friend typed a poorly-framed fat Santa joke and I responded with hoho. You nearly lost it right then and there. The look on your face was a mixture of pain, shock, and hostility.
We decided to take some time apart, and quite frankly, that was best for both parties. I know I sound like a martyr, but you didn’t need to be around me at that point in my life. I was young. I was crude. I had a terribly unformed sense of humor. I was using you. Hell, I was overusing you. Then I realized I didn’t know what I wanted. It wasn’t fair.
High school started. I embarked on a fairly long-standing relationship with haha and things felt right. You opted for an even younger scene, and that was fine. I understood. You got older but naïve pre-teens stayed the same age. After a while I stopped thinking about you, and I assume you stopped thinking about me.
I went to college and decided to become an English major. I started learning a lot about language and how people mold it over time. I took creative writing classes and wrote a lot of stories with strong characters but no plot. I took lit history classes and did poorly on every pop quiz. Turns out the English we spoke 500 years ago is classified as Modern English—same as today. Not Middle English, not Old English. Oops.
Meanwhile, my relationship with haha was getting a little stale. We still hung out all the time, we still laughed together online. But something about it felt empty. Abbreviations were popping up relentlessly. F-bomb and sexting got added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. I found myself thinking about you again. Were you the advent of a revolution? Were you—nay, are you…Postmodern English?
I thought a lot about attention spans—my own included—and how they weren’t bound to get longer anytime soon. Unfortunately, lol, I realized they were going to get even shorter. Soon, we’d all deem it unreasonable to have to read full sentences like this one; sentences with semi-colons, commas—even long hyphens. Around this time I graduated from college with a degree I’d never be able to use.
Then something truly amazing happened. One day a friend texted me a great joke. Phenomenal joke it was, too, but I can’t remember it because I have a perpetually shrinking attention span. I responded with three simple letters: lol. There you were again—only this was a new and improved you.
I’d been noticing my peers using you frivolously on all sorts of social media: Facebooks, Twitters, hell even Pinterests. I found it incredibly obnoxious at first. Weren’t we all past this stage of our lives? Lol was for the idiotic youth, not legitimate adults. I decided to rebel against this inappropriate conduct—so I said lol. I said lol ironically. And thus, a meaningful relationship renewed.
I wanted to say this to you, lol: I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I was too young to understand you when we first started off. Part of me thinks you were too. I hope you don’t take my ironic use of you now with offense. On the contrary, I’ve rekindled our connection because I genuinely want you again. I hope you want me too. Soon, when the world gets too impatient to finish reading a letter as long as this one, you and I will be destined to embark on something great.
Always yours (lol),
Victor
A lot of work goes into making a quality film. Writing a script, production, casting, shooting, editing, etc. A lot of moving parts have to spin just right in order to get a result that’s commercially and critically praised. So it’s a damn shame when all the effort that gets put into a great movie is wiped away by gluttony, greed, lust, and whatever other deadly sins push filmmakers to make a half-assed sequel.
Here are seven of the worst sequels to great films ever made, accompanied by their Tomatometer scores. Do they completely ruin the original? Not quite, but they’ve definitely left viewers with a sour taste in their mouth that can’t be undone:
The Hangover Part II and III – 34%, 19%
We can all agree that The Hangover was a delightful surprise when it came out in summer 2009. Zach Galifianakis emerged back into the public view, and Ed Helms and Bradley Cooper were the perfect straight characters to accompany him through a crazy plot of twists, turns, and surprises. Then, most unfortunately, the gang decided to get back together and clone the exact same story onto a different wedding and setting in Bangkok. The result was painful. Hangover 3 was supposed to make up for this mistake by revisiting Vegas with a fresh storyline, but it ended up being far too serious and strange. Thus the charm and fun of the original is gone. No one wants to hear about The Hangover anymore.
Son of the Mask – 6%
The Mask was Jim Carrey at his hilarious, disturbingly odd self. It had laughs, it had an interesting plot, it even had a young Cameron Diaz—elements that composed a pretty memorable movie. Do you remember when Son of the Mask came out though? No. Of course you don’t. The 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes can explain why: “Overly frantic, painfully unfunny, and sorely missing the presence of Jim Carrey.” Probably the biggest insult your COMEDY film can get is “painfully unfunny.” Let’s agree to never speak of it again.
Speed 2: Cruise Control – 3%
Here’s the thing. Keanu Reeves can’t act, so having him play an emotionless alien is really the only safe bet when it comes to casting. Despite that fact, he’s not all that bad in the original Speed, where he turned in several powerful lines like, “There’s a bomb on the bus” and “Yeah.” A shockingly compelling “can’t slow down the bus or it’ll blow up” premise and young Sandra Bullock masked Keanu’s trademark blank stares, and the movie ended up being a hit. Enter Speed 2: Cruise Control, sans Keanu. This time we’re on, you guessed it, a boat. I’ll save you from wasting your time: it works out.
The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions – 73%, 36%
MORE KEANU. The original Matrix is undoubtedly one of the most defining films ever made—the story, the technology, the style. So everyone was pretty excited when it was abundantly clear that the film would get not one, but two sequels. Although the respective films expanded the Matrix universe and gave us a lot more of the slow-motion fight sequences we thought we wanted, ultimately they were a disappointment. You could have just left us on the ground while you flew off into the clouds, Neo, and we would have been just fine.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – 78%
The original Indiana Jones trilogy is an absolute classic. There’s no denying it. So everyone got pretty excited when it was announced that Indy was coming back 20 years after the end of The Last Crusade. Despite favorable reviews, turns out bringing in noted weirdo Shia LeBeouf and an extra-terrestrial plotline weren’t the best ideas. If it couldn’t hold up to the standard of the original films, it really shouldn’t have been made. Plus Harrison Ford hasn’t really aged well over the years—I think we’d all prefer to visualize Indiana Jones as the younger Harrison. Less wrinkles.
Jurassic Park III – 49%
Honestly just horrible characters. And why is everyone still screaming on the island? There are dinosaurs. They’ll fucking tear you apart. Shut up. The original Jurassic Park is a classic. The Lost World: Jurassic Park was a big step down. Jurassic Park III another. Classic Hollywood excess.
The Godfather Part III – 68%
In the words of Fat Tony, “I haven’t cried this much since I paid to see Godfather Part III.” Although 68% is still fresh on the Tomatometer, compare that score to The Godfather (100%) and The Godfather Part II (98%) and you immediately understand why this was a disappointment. Great series, great characters, but Part III is largely agreed upon as a mistake.
So there you have it. A short list of sequels that really never should have been made. Granted, there are rare examples where the sequel is better than the original (Toy Story 2 and The Dark Knight come to mind), but it’s a hard feat to pull off. God willing, Anchorman 2 won’t be deserving of horrible sequel status when it comes out later this fall. And if the Coen brothers somehow go insane and decide to make The Big Lebowski Returns one day, then I’ll just give up.
Let’s play it safe and let great movies just be what they are. Please.
Everyone pretends that Reddit is some secret group that no one else is a part of. When you realize someone you know in real life is on Reddit as well you can share your own special fist bump or idiotic comment about a narwhal baconing at midnight with giddy excitement. The site garnered over 2 billion page views in December 2011 and traffic has drastically increased since then. It’s not the cool, hipster internet club that it (never quite really) used to be.
Considering Reddit’s popularity, a lot of people don’t understand much about how it works. Most Redditors read over a stream of posts without taking in all the information being presented due to a lack of background knowledge. According to r/todayilearned, you have to practice something for 10,000 hours before you can truly be considered an expert in that field. This collection of acronyms won’t put in the hard worked hours of upvoting, commenting on and reposting content on Reddit, but it will make you feel cool when you know what they mean and your friends don’t.
IAMA/AMA: I Am A, Ask Me Anything. The best content on Reddit often comes from AMAs. In these text based posts, a user declares their identity (IAMA Cat Herder/Pro Athlete/Snoop Dawg) and then answers whatever questions are posed by the masses of the web. Woody Harrelson ignores statutory rape allegations, blind people explain what they imagine the sensation of sight to be like, and Bryan Cranston tells you about being the star of Breaking Bad. Anyone can post a silly video or cat meme, but AMAs offer unique insights into peoples lives that simply did not exist before Reddit.
ITT: In This Thread. An hour or two into a given AskReddit post, ITT comments will start popping up in an attempt to summarize the majority of the content. For a thread about bad experiences Chefs have had, ITT: People burn themselves. For the AskReddit thread “What was losing your virginity like?”, ITT: Premature ejaculation. For this Article, ITT: Explanations of reddit acronyms.
FTFY: Fixed That For You. When someone makes a simple error misses an obvious opportunity for a joke, someone will reply to their comment with a correction the obvious joke followed by FTFY.
DAE: Does anyone else. DAE wonder what DAE stands for? Not anymore I hope. Should be pretty straightforward at this point.
OP: Original Poster. The person who originally shared the content being discussed. When OP puts up a picture of a safe and doesn’t put a follow up with the contents, OP didn’t deliver.
TL;DR: Too Long; Didn’t Read. This acronym is a favorite of lazy redditors. That’s because it is used to summarize a large amount of text and compact it into a smaller, easier to comprehend statement. Redditors tend to go on and on in their storytelling. Sometimes this results in a beautiful comment with rich detail that make the story sing. Sometimes people drift off into irrelevant details while over-enjoying the smell of their own farts. Some choose to read the whole comment, some prefer the shortened version. TL; DR: “TL;DR:” is a summary of a long comment.
Obviously these are not all of the acronyms to grace the land of Reddit. Some are simple enough to ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5) and others are NSFW (Not Safe For Work [Sexual]), although IANAL actually means I Am Not A Lawyer. These are just a few of the ones YSK (You Should Know). Hopefully this PSA (Not even Reddit exclusive, just Google it) will have you better informed as you continue your quest to become a Reddit expert.