For someone who says they are unconcerned about “cool”, and how obvious the situational framing of Xeni’s involvement may be, you certainly don’t mind wasting a lot of verbiage on it!
So it was a formal, coldly calculated - yet inexplicably unprofessional and fannish - interview by this woman who thinks she is more familiar with them than you think she is?
Thank you for having taken the time to explain it to us.
Sorry, I stopped reading after “helpless schoolgirl”. Your boorish analogies are a bore.
Anyway, it’s Friday night here in Denver and I got shit to do.
Have a good weekend complaining about something.
‘So it was a formal, coldly calculated - yet inexplicably unprofessional and fannish - interview by this woman who thinks she is more familiar with them than you think she is?’ Who said it was coldly calculated on HER fawning, uncritical part? You think the band got to where they are BY ACCIDENT? She giggled like a schoolgirl (there it is again!) through the WHOLE THING, asked ZERO hardball questions, gazed longingly at the man, did not disagree with a word he said or try to direct the conversation at all, and, oddly, responded to him more as an interviewer would a real person, instead of a person PLAYING somebody.
He’s a middle class man playing a working class man playing a part-American rapper who has drowned his worldview and verbiage in tiresome, sometimes-outdated American teenage popular culture slang. But still manages to make fucking amazing songs. There has to be interesting conversational fodder in there, if you know how to dig for it, and not just play along with what can seem like a deeply offensive and patronizing and condescending sick (not as in ‘cool’ sick, though that word has been around since the 1950s anyway) artistic worldview sometimes. It’s not meta, or knowing. It’s just crap.
Wonder if she had to sign an agreement she would talk to Jones in character about nothing but the film and got her ‘questions’ (she asked hardly any anyway, preferring just to giggle stupidly and make occasional comments about how awesome everything was, with ZERO criticism leveled at the film - not the mark of a professional journo who has fought a few on mahogany ridge). Entirely possible. Kudos to her for not losing her embarrassing teenage soundswarm fantasy boyfriend enthusiasms and crushsloppery. It just mortifies outsiders to see it, is all.
And I think you all defending the lady fair is quite noble, and honorable, if sexist. She’s probably not a bad person, and she might well do better in other venues or interviews. I just said what I personally saw as an outsider (no doubt others will see it as I do too would they but comment, or even care about commenting) with no real agenda except saying what I saw. Pissing any of you defenders of the faith off was never my intention, but I can clearly see this is a tight-knit load of snotty hipster dolts, and pissing you off, or even making you yawn, DOES make me smile. Stepping in a snakepit of impotent keyboard sneerers is fun to me. That’s how I trolley. Cos this is now just driving trollies, really. Originally it was not.
Oh, RandomObserver… you’re so provocative!
I would describe the film as hilariously inept. Many of the climactic scenes don’t work because the antagonists remain untransformed, unlikable, and unsympathetic, yet the film asks you to care about their suffering. Chappie, the character, is pregnant with an arc, but one never materializes; He’s supposed to be super-intelligent, and shows some signs of learning quickly, but we quickly realize that this is a plot device. Disappointingly, this device is in service of “having a naive robot who can move around and talk in the plot.”
This was a bad, bad film that proves that District 9 was a flash in the pan and that the Alien reboot will be awful.
District 9 was also over rated. It was a fun film that got a huge amount of hype and was great for it was a glorified visual FX reel. At this point we can see that Blomkamp, has a nice visual style that is not maturing and he can’t handle writing anything beyond a rudimentary action plot.
Hopefully this bombing will get his Alien film canceled. His not the man to make that film.
interesting to listen to ninja carry on positively about the movie and working with neill in this interview in light of this story that came out last year: http://www.citypress.co.za/entertainment/die-antwoords-ninja-pure-evil/
wished xeni would have asked him about that.
(fwiw, i am a big fan of die antwoord)
I don’t quite understand the appeal of Die Antwoord. I don’t hate them, or like them. I’m a big fan of Ugly Boy, just because of the contrast and the collaboration (Aphex FTW).
Generally it confuses me how they try to simultaneously keep “upper lower middle class” cred when they are obviously rich. Not particularly profound, and really have an obnoxious sound (at least Yo-landi. I’m irritated by her voice, but also the Afrikaans loses me. But the Afrikaans is just a cultual thing and isn’t bad or good)
OK, so they make a really big deal about that little USB dongle security key thingamabob, right? Like it’s the only way to update the firmware, Chappie can’t be himself without it, blahblahblah… And then when it’s yanked out of the droid, it makes no difference at all to Chappie or the story. Lazy! This is a McGuffin that should actually carry some sort of function, like the restraining bolt in Star Wars, removing it should have some sort of consequence. And if it doesn’t, you should at least have a character as, “What about the dongle?”,and have someone explain it away with some kind of rubber science. There were a lot of lazt scriptwriting bummers, but that one annoyed me the worst.
And yes, Chappie the character is adorable, and yes, I enjoyed it, but it didn’t fascinate me like District 9 did. It was better than Elysium, though.
Also, DJ Hi-Tek is just whoever makes a phat beat for them, lots of different people. So probably their greatest strength is finding people who can make good music, then using them to support their rap.
stupid Japan is not releasing this till the end of May! …
They keep removing all comments that mention this.
You’ll notice that the Ninja character slips on and off throughout the interview. That’s because it is a character! The man’s whole life is an art project and you have fallen right into his fantasy. 
LOL
I agree! And all of these kids need to turn their damned music down!
But seriously, how old are you? “Fuck” is barely an expletive anymore. It’s not harsh, it’s not offensive, it has lost its meaning. It’s a conversational space-bar at this point. Do you spend time with anyone under the age of 45 in a nonprofessional setting? It’s not “tr[ying] too hard.” It’s just common vernacular.
“Wannabe hipsters?” Hipsters don’t actually exist. They’re the monsters under your bed. If people like something, even if they enjoy it just to exude a certain style, they’re still being genuine to themselves. What exactly do DA fans “wannabe?” The music exists to be enjoyed by people, and it’s being enjoyed by people. Are you actually offended that people like something that you don’t like?
Indeed, that’s also how Jeff Foxworthy and the Duck Dynasty roll; there’s always money in fleecing the yahoos you’re impersonating. The Jo-burg Juggalo schtick is all about being paid.
For more on this cultural theory, see: The Manual from our friends over at The KLF.
No, that part actually made sense. The idea was that the firmware of the droids was read-only, and the little dongle thing was the only way to unlock it for updates. Plugging it on or removing it shouldn’t change the behavior any more than moving the write protect slider changed the contents of a floppy. Which was exactly how it was used - once to write the experimental firmware, once to write the destructive firmware, and once to move consciousnesses around.
How reductionist! So, what then is “being paid” about?
yeah, this makes me not want to see it, vehemently.
Bamboozling ~50 million to rip-off Short Circuit 2 starring this generation’s Vanilla Ice. Res ipsa loquitur.
