Mongo Nation

Just another half-baked attempt to cash in

By Jeremy Azevedo

A friend and I were talking the other day about the state of the music industry and the proliferation of “hip” bands rising meteorically from Silverlake and Echo park like bottle rockets on the 4th of July, exciting at first, but ultimately fizzling out in a disappointing spectacle of epic fail.

The industry seems to take as fact the opinions of Silverlake/Echo Park hipsters, blindly firing record deals at every single band in the area and shotgunning them over the radio in a noisy hustle of sameness with really cool vintage outfits and ironic haircuts. After all, they were right about Beck and Silversun Pickups right? So why not The Airborne Toxic Event?

The problem with basing your business ventures on the whims of hipsters is that this is a sub culture of people that has no purpose or agenda, and no singular defining characteristic other than the OCD like quality to constantly be on the hunt for something “new” so they can pretend not to like the thing that was “new” last week. Not the best environment in which to try and cultivate a band that lasts for more than one or two albums.

C’mon, really?

The Airborne Toxic Event is just another run-of-the-mill Spaceland resident band, full of potential but still a bit undercooked. I am generally cautious about bands that have been together for less than two years, weren’t even in a real band prior to, and are being called one of the best bands on MySpace by Rolling Stone despite the fact that they have less than 10,000 friends on there, which by MySpace standards is pretty amateurish. Whose dick did they have to suck to get that name-drop, lol? Ooh, and guess what? The lead singer is a real writer, apparently! Somebody better call McSweeny’s, we gotta live one!

Don’t get me wrong, The Airborne Toxic Event has great potential, and that song they have on the radio, “Sometime Around Midnight”, almost sounds as over-produced as a real band that’s actually paid it’s dues for at least a couple of albums before selling out. It’s too bad that they’ll probably be abandoned by their notoriously fickle audience before they ever have a chance to record a second album, because that one might have actually been really great.

Rating: 10 out of 10 fake reviews on Amazon.com by people that work for the label or friends of theirs that have haven’t even heard the album yet.

No suckage, our guarantee.

By Jeremy Azevedo

Endless hype for stupid entertainment products surround us at all times. Hype that blinds us with enormous glossy turds, making it hard to see the little gems that maybe don’t have millions of advertising dollars helping to shove them right in our faces.

That’s why the C4 Anti Suck algorithim was invented, to scientifically sift through all the junk and find four things that absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, will not suck in any way.

I’ve seen so many negative things written about “Funny Games”, that I feel something must be said in its defense. Funny Games is neither torture-porn nor art-house smut, as most of the critics would have you believe. Actually, it more closely resembles a classic thriller like “Cape Fear” or maybe the disturbing “Last House on the Left” than it does shitty slapstick shock horror like “Saw” or “Hostel.

In this film, the victims are fully developed and relateable adult characters rather than the usual 22-year-old models running around screaming and crying. The villains, on the other hand, are so disturbingly psychopathic that any explanation for their behavior would seem contrived, and so, no explanation is given. Seriously, when Michael Pitt breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly, your skin will crawl. This is where the film really excels, by the way, when it reaches out to the viewer and forces you to react. This is something that most films these days have forgotten how to do.

I’ll never see preppy dorks in quite the same way ever again.

Like the 1994 Oliver Stone picture that tackled the same basic subject matter “Natural Born Killers”, Funny Games gives bloodthirsty audiences all the horror they can stomach and more. Although no actual gore is ever really shown, the terror is tangible, and the shots are painfully long and awkward, at first exciting you with promises of bat-shit crazy murder before making you feel like a sick freak for being entertained by such a thing in the first place.

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