Things have been tense in Boston lately. Back in June, the subject of a “terror investigation” was shot and killed by police after he was said to have waved a knife at officers who confronted him. A couple weeks later, another man, with another knife, was also shot and killed by police. And earlier this month, the son of a Boston Police captain was arrested after his father tipped off the FBI that he’d been threatening to join ISIS. All of which, of course, comes in the continued psychological aftermath of the Tsarnaev trial, in which the Boston Marathon bomber was sentenced to death, and the larger national conversation about the horrific shootings in South Carolina. So, perhaps, you might possibly forgive riders on the city’s buses for being a little on edge, like they were last weekend, when a man wearing what appeared to be an arsenal of ammunition walked onto the bus. On the other hand, you might call them a pack of simpering, terror-addled babies who called the police over a guy in a punk rock costume.
That’s what happened to Kevin Young, a 26 year old resident of nearby Watertown on Friday, July 10 when he was trying to take the bus from Harvard Square to Allston—a bus route, as anyone who’s taken it before can tell you, that regularly ferries its fair share of punks, metalheads, and assorted members of the general Boston hipster diaspora.
Around 4:20 (nice) on Friday, according to the police report, officers responded to a call for a “person with a gun” at the intersection of Cambridge and Harvard Streets.
The bus driver, the report goes on, had “pulled the bus over and stopped due to the suspect [Young] who was inside of the bus walking towards the front of the bus wearing a gun tactical belt on his waist with what appeared to be military grade ammunition rounds wrapped around his waist area and ankles.” The driver informed officers that he had “caused a panic” in the bus, and immediately called 911.
Young, having sensed something was amiss, got off the bus stop, like so many punks before him have at this particular location just outside the rock club O’Briens and Stingray Tattoo, at which point a search for the potential shooter ensued.
Witnesses informed police that in addition to the ammunition, the suspect “was wearing all black clothing, black boots, black spiked fighter gloves, and black spiked bracelets,” which sounds like a shitty Rancid cover.
Once apprehended, although the police admittedly determined that the bullets were, in fact, replicas, and not dangerous, they arrested him anyway. The charges included “unlawful possession of ammunition,” “carrying a dangerous weapon unlawfully (spiked/studded gloves and arm bands),” and, for good measure, “disorderly conduct.”
At arraignment, Jake Wark, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office spokesmen told me “prosecutors moved to dismiss the charges primarily on the grounds that the ammunition could not be fired and wasn’t intended to be fired.”
Under Ch. 140, Sect. 121, of the Massachusetts General Laws, he clarified, “a person may be prosecuted for possessing ‘cartridges or cartridge cases… designed for use in any firearm, rifle, or shotgun,’ but we determined that our resources were best directed elsewhere.”
I tracked down Young, who was in the midst of completing 20 hours of community service that he agreed to on the conditions of the charges being dropped, to ask him what happened. Young, an engineer who works in computer networks, is a Boston native, who runs the punk record label Serfs Up, and plays in a couple of bands, including the act Hexxus. The label is getting set to release a compilation cassette of punk acts from around the world to benefit the Baltimore Uprising.
Joined by New York punk band The Casualtiesand Los Angeles backyard favoritesAge of FearandSouth Central Riot Squad, for the ultimate celebration of punkAngela Boatwright introduces her film,Los Punks: We Are All We Have. House of Vans will host DIY workshops where guests can stud, patch, bleach and dye just about everything under the sun. Each screening will also offer a Q&A with the attending musicians and directors so guests can interact with the creatives behind the film.
Angela Boatwright’s profound 2016 Slamdance feature Los Punks: We Are All We Have tells the story of the backyard punk community in South Central and East Los Angeles. Punk rock is thriving in these communities, and the film documents a group of predominantly Latino teens and young adults who cobble together a tight-knit family interwoven into a subculture of thrash, noise and pits."I lived in New York City for half of my life and after four years in Los Angeles it’s an honor for me to present Los Punks to all of my East Coast friends,” expressed Boatwright. “Juxtapoz Magazine called Los Punks my “love letter to So-Cal punk” and it’s absolutely true. I can’t wait for New York to find out what’s happening here in L.A.!"
Rock on the Range is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and what better way to celebrate the anniversary ?
Rock on the Range is considered one of America's leading rock music festivals and takes place in Columbus, Ohio, in May. ROTR attracts big name bands and solo artists for a full three days of rock in the Columbus Crew Stadium.
AC/DC performed the first European concert with Axl Rose as
lead singer Saturday night in Lisbon, Portugal. The band rolled through
a career-spanning set that included old favorites ("Back in Black,"
"Shoot to Thrill") and new ones ("Rock 'n' Roll Train"). The band also
played "Riff Raff" for the first time live since 1996 and "Rock 'n' Roll
Damnation" for the first time since 2003.
Green Room, which premieres in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight on
May 17, Saulnier has instead decided “to bob and weave.” The result is a
bloody siege movie in which a punk band, trapped in a green room at a
club, has to fight o ff a gang of white power skinheads.
. “This film goes back to my roots — the crazy genre films of the ’80s see this as a batshit crazy punkrock horror thriller.”
There are few situations more hellish than being trapped for 16 hours in
a music venue by a gang of murderous neo-Nazis in the Oregon backwoods.
The story follows the members of the hardcore band The Ain’t
Rights—Pat, Tiger, Reece, and Sam, whose lean names befit their means.
Low on gas, money, and energy, the band reluctantly agrees to one final
gig, the catch being it’s at a white-supremacist club just outside of
Portland. The musicians aren’t thrilled, but at least Pat (Anton
Yelchin) recognizes what may be the only upside to their situation: How
often does a band get the chance to cover the Dead Kennedys song “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” in front of a crowd of actual Nazi punks?
But the fun doesn’t last: Minutes after their set ends, the band
witness a brutal crime and realize their odds of getting home have just
dropped dramatically. The venue’s owner, Darcy (played by Sir Patrick
Stewart), mobilizes his most devoted foot-soldiers to take care of the
outsiders. What follows is a tense gore-fest, one that’s as grimy and
claustrophobic as the titular room. But scrape off the scum, and you’ll
find Green Room full of visual artistry, dark humor, smart
writing, and glints of humanity. The film’s bleakness and B-movie
trappings won’t appeal to everyone: The violence reaches demented
heights, and having the antagonists be neo-Nazis may come off as lazy
storytelling. But there’s a cool, macabre charm to the whole effort. In
short, Green Room has all the makings of a cult classic—one likely to find enthusiastic fans sooner rather than later.
Saulnier’s third feature film, Green Room bears many of the same sensibilities and characteristics as the director’s first two works, 2007’s slasher comedy Murder Party and the infinitely improved, Kickstarter-funded drama Blue Ruin,
which was the indie success story of 2013. The latter—a Coen
Brothers-esque tale about a man seeking vengeance for his parents’
murders—revealed Saulnier’s deftness at both writing dialogue and
cultivating silence, at knowing the exact moments to hold back or to let
the action spill forth. On the surface, Green Room has more in common with Saulnier’s messier debut, but it retains the cinematic flair and self-assuredness of Blue Ruin.
Neo-Nazi falls in love with a woman who has a black son and finds himself fighting with conflicting feelings.
If nothing else, the Finnish film Heart of a Lion (Leijonasydan) deserves a pat on the head for daring to set up one hell of a wacky premise: neo-Nazi Teppo (Peter Franzen) falls for a beautiful blonde Sari (Laura Birn) but then – surprise! – finds out she has a mixed-race son (Yusufa Sidibeh) from an earlier relationship. It sounds on paper like the makings for an insane, blackly-comic update on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) but maybe with an Oi!-punk soundtrack. Alas,Heart is, in fact, a painfully earnest drama, albeit one with thudding comic moments, that still manages to be offensive – but not in a fun way – as well as credibility stretching and tacky. Franzen’s fully committed lead performance represents one of the few redeeming features (young Sidibeh is another) which might partly explain why this ludicrous work from director Dome Karukoskihas secured program slots at both Toronto and Santa Barbara’s film festivals, as well as closer-to-home Goteborg.
When Sony dropped the trailer for Paul Feig’s reboot of Ghostbusters,
the reaction wasn’t even mixed — it was universally hated. Now, the
preview’s underwhelming status has been solidified in the annals of
YouTube history, as it’s officially the site’s most disliked movie
trailer of all time.
For one thing, the Internet is a hive of mob mentality, and that often manifests as hatred. Many of the other videos on the most disliked list are
things that have largely been appreciated by the general public, but
that detractors abhor with passion. Justin Bieber’s “Baby” video sits at
No. 1 with a hearty 6,042,981 dislikes. While there are objectively
some terrible things about that clip, the song also helped launch an
international superstar and has gone 12 times platinum. It’s also
simultaneously the 10th most viewed YouTube video of all time, so people
are certainly going back for more. Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda”, Adele’s
“Hello”, three Taylor Swift songs, and even the classic “Charlie Bit My Finger — Again!” clip also all sit on the most disliked list.
The Ghostbusters trailer currently has 507,610 dislikes on YouTube. To put that in perspective, the Fantastic Four trailer from last year has only 20,175 dislikes. The Ridiculous Six trailer, which has an impressive 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, has only 5,803 dislikes. Could Ghostbusters be that much worse than either of those two movies? It’s seems unlikely knowing what we know about both Fantastic Four and Ridiculous Six. What is actually happening is that a certain subset of people on the internet have an unhealthy fixation with hating on the Ghostbusters remake and are teaming up to downvote it into oblivion.
Consider some of the rest of the videos on this playlist, which ranks the Top 100 most “disliked” videos on YouTube (current as of April 16, 2016). With 507,610 thumbs down votes, the Ghostbusters trailer
is the most disliked movie trailer in the history of YouTube and
currently the only movie trailer that even cracks the Top 100. The only
other movie-related videos on the list include two versions of “Let It
Go” from Frozen.
Justin Bieber’s “Baby” (#1 on the
list) has a whopping 6 million thumbs down votes, but that’s on 1.36
billion views for a 226:1 ratio of views to dislikes. Psy’s “Gangnam
Style” video (#4 overall) has almost 1.5 million thumbs down on 2.5
billion views for a relatively high ratio of 1,666:1. The Ghostbusters
trailer is remarkable in that it has 507,610 dislikes on just 28.7
million views. That’s a staggering 56:1, almost exactly four times the
amount of dislikes per view of Bieber’s aforementioned most disliked
video on all of YouTube. (By contrast, a trailer for a movie like Captain America: Civil War
has a 5,237:1 ratio.) It’s not just that people dislike it, it’s that
they’re disliking it at a highly disproportionate rate to other YouTube
videos.
As the inclusion of “Let It Go” might indicate, the
majority of the list is filled with songs that were popular but quickly
became annoying. Justin Bieber, for example, has 11 of the most disliked
videos. But a more telling statistic is that the majority of the videos
on the list (59%) star or feature women or female characters. In
addition to the Ghostbusters trailer, there’s Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, and even Adele. Who hates Adele?!
There
is a lot of hatred directed towards the new trailer, primarily because
it stars four women (though the haters would have you believe misogyny
is not the real driving force behind their invective) and seemingly not
at all connected to its quality. Quickly the misogyny began to overwhelm
the comments under the Ghostbusters trailer and Sony Pictures
was forced to delete many offensive remarks, though it doesn’t take long
even now to find comments like, “When are people going to learn that
women aren’t funny?“ and “GhostBusters - Fat Dyke Edition”. The dislikes
eventually got to a point where it became a game among those who hate
the movie and frequently return to watch the numbers grow. When one fan
commented, “We made it to 500000 dislikes,” another followed up with an
enthusiastic, “Lets [sic] get it to a million!”
And that’s really the bigger problem here. It’s not that people disliked the movie on an organic level. As shown above with Fantastic Four and Ridiculous Six,
even when people don’t like a movie they don’t “dislike” it this much.
The thumbs down votes aren’t organic, they’re part of a coordinated
attack on the film by people who are opposed to its very existence.
There have even been reports across the web that angry fans are using
bots to artificially drive up the “dislikes” on the trailer. What’s
worse, there’s a culture of misogyny and toxicity to YouTube comments
that fosters this type of attitude. Just a quick look at the same
trailer posted by Sony Pictures to Facebook shows only 12,000 “angry”
votes (the Facebook version of the thumbs down “dislike”) on 22 million
views.
The good news is that while there are over a half-million “dislikes” on the Ghostbusters
trailer, there are still over 27 million people who watched the trailer
who either officially liked it or had nothing negative to say about it.
So while there may be a vocal minority trying to game the YouTube
voting system to bring down a movie with a female cast, they are still
the minority.
Sadly, at the rate they are going, it’s not crazy to think the video could reach 1 million dislikes by the time Ghostbusters
opens in July. At that point, who knows how much this campaign will
have hurt the movie and all this before we have any real idea whether
this movie itself is any good.
The Ghostbusters trailer currently has 507,610 dislikes on YouTube. To put that in perspective, the Fantastic Four trailer from last year has only 20,175 dislikes. The Ridiculous Six trailer, which has an impressive 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, has only 5,803 dislikes. Could Ghostbusters be that much worse than either of those two movies? It’s seems unlikely knowing what we know about both Fantastic Four and Ridiculous Six. What is actually happening is that a certain subset of people on the internet have an unhealthy fixation with hating on the Ghostbusters remake and are teaming up to downvote it into oblivion.
Consider some of the rest of the videos on this playlist, which ranks the Top 100 most “disliked” videos on YouTube (current as of April 16, 2016). With 507,610 thumbs down votes, the Ghostbusters trailer
is the most disliked movie trailer in the history of YouTube and
currently the only movie trailer that even cracks the Top 100. The only
other movie-related videos on the list include two versions of “Let It
Go” from Frozen.
Justin Bieber’s “Baby” (#1 on the
list) has a whopping 6 million thumbs down votes, but that’s on 1.36
billion views for a 226:1 ratio of views to dislikes. Psy’s “Gangnam
Style” video (#4 overall) has almost 1.5 million thumbs down on 2.5
billion views for a relatively high ratio of 1,666:1. The Ghostbusters
trailer is remarkable in that it has 507,610 dislikes on just 28.7
million views. That’s a staggering 56:1, almost exactly four times the
amount of dislikes per view of Bieber’s aforementioned most disliked
video on all of YouTube. (By contrast, a trailer for a movie like Captain America: Civil War
has a 5,237:1 ratio.) It’s not just that people dislike it, it’s that
they’re disliking it at a highly disproportionate rate to other YouTube
videos.
As the inclusion of “Let It Go” might indicate, the
majority of the list is filled with songs that were popular but quickly
became annoying. Justin Bieber, for example, has 11 of the most disliked
videos. But a more telling statistic is that the majority of the videos
on the list (59%) star or feature women or female characters. In
addition to the Ghostbusters trailer, there’s Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, and even Adele. Who hates Adele?!
There
is a lot of hatred directed towards the new trailer, primarily because
it stars four women (though the haters would have you believe misogyny
is not the real driving force behind their invective) and seemingly not
at all connected to its quality. Quickly the misogyny began to overwhelm
the comments under the Ghostbusters trailer and Sony Pictures
was forced to delete many offensive remarks, though it doesn’t take long
even now to find comments like, “When are people going to learn that
women aren’t funny?“ and “GhostBusters - Fat Dyke Edition”. The dislikes
eventually got to a point where it became a game among those who hate
the movie and frequently return to watch the numbers grow. When one fan
commented, “We made it to 500000 dislikes,” another followed up with an
enthusiastic, “Lets [sic] get it to a million!”
And that’s really the bigger problem here. It’s not that people disliked the movie on an organic level. As shown above with Fantastic Four and Ridiculous Six,
even when people don’t like a movie they don’t “dislike” it this much.
The thumbs down votes aren’t organic, they’re part of a coordinated
attack on the film by people who are opposed to its very existence.
There have even been reports across the web that angry fans are using
bots to artificially drive up the “dislikes” on the trailer. What’s
worse, there’s a culture of misogyny and toxicity to YouTube comments
that fosters this type of attitude. Just a quick look at the same
trailer posted by Sony Pictures to Facebook shows only 12,000 “angry”
votes (the Facebook version of the thumbs down “dislike”) on 22 million
views.
The good news is that while there are over a half-million “dislikes” on the Ghostbusters
trailer, there are still over 27 million people who watched the trailer
who either officially liked it or had nothing negative to say about it.
So while there may be a vocal minority trying to game the YouTube
voting system to bring down a movie with a female cast, they are still
the minority.
Sadly, at the rate they are going, it’s not crazy to think the video could reach 1 million dislikes by the time Ghostbusters
opens in July. At that point, who knows how much this campaign will
have hurt the movie and all this before we have any real idea whether
this movie itself is any good.
The Ghostbusters trailer currently has 507,610 dislikes on YouTube. To put that in perspective, the Fantastic Four trailer from last year has only 20,175 dislikes. The Ridiculous Six trailer, which has an impressive 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, has only 5,803 dislikes. Could Ghostbusters be that much worse than either of those two movies? It’s seems unlikely knowing what we know about both Fantastic Four and Ridiculous Six. What is actually happening is that a certain subset of people on the internet have an unhealthy fixation with hating on the Ghostbusters remake and are teaming up to downvote it into oblivion.
Consider some of the rest of the videos on this playlist, which ranks the Top 100 most “disliked” videos on YouTube (current as of April 16, 2016). With 507,610 thumbs down votes, the Ghostbusters trailer
is the most disliked movie trailer in the history of YouTube and
currently the only movie trailer that even cracks the Top 100. The only
other movie-related videos on the list include two versions of “Let It
Go” from Frozen.
Justin Bieber’s “Baby” (#1 on the
list) has a whopping 6 million thumbs down votes, but that’s on 1.36
billion views for a 226:1 ratio of views to dislikes. Psy’s “Gangnam
Style” video (#4 overall) has almost 1.5 million thumbs down on 2.5
billion views for a relatively high ratio of 1,666:1. The Ghostbusters
trailer is remarkable in that it has 507,610 dislikes on just 28.7
million views. That’s a staggering 56:1, almost exactly four times the
amount of dislikes per view of Bieber’s aforementioned most disliked
video on all of YouTube. (By contrast, a trailer for a movie like Captain America: Civil War
has a 5,237:1 ratio.) It’s not just that people dislike it, it’s that
they’re disliking it at a highly disproportionate rate to other YouTube
videos.
As the inclusion of “Let It Go” might indicate, the
majority of the list is filled with songs that were popular but quickly
became annoying. Justin Bieber, for example, has 11 of the most disliked
videos. But a more telling statistic is that the majority of the videos
on the list (59%) star or feature women or female characters. In
addition to the Ghostbusters trailer, there’s Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, and even Adele. Who hates Adele?!
There
is a lot of hatred directed towards the new trailer, primarily because
it stars four women (though the haters would have you believe misogyny
is not the real driving force behind their invective) and seemingly not
at all connected to its quality. Quickly the misogyny began to overwhelm
the comments under the Ghostbusters trailer and Sony Pictures
was forced to delete many offensive remarks, though it doesn’t take long
even now to find comments like, “When are people going to learn that
women aren’t funny?“ and “GhostBusters - Fat Dyke Edition”. The dislikes
eventually got to a point where it became a game among those who hate
the movie and frequently return to watch the numbers grow. When one fan
commented, “We made it to 500000 dislikes,” another followed up with an
enthusiastic, “Lets [sic] get it to a million!”
And that’s really the bigger problem here. It’s not that people disliked the movie on an organic level. As shown above with Fantastic Four and Ridiculous Six,
even when people don’t like a movie they don’t “dislike” it this much.
The thumbs down votes aren’t organic, they’re part of a coordinated
attack on the film by people who are opposed to its very existence.
There have even been reports across the web that angry fans are using
bots to artificially drive up the “dislikes” on the trailer. What’s
worse, there’s a culture of misogyny and toxicity to YouTube comments
that fosters this type of attitude. Just a quick look at the same
trailer posted by Sony Pictures to Facebook shows only 12,000 “angry”
votes (the Facebook version of the thumbs down “dislike”) on 22 million
views.
The good news is that while there are over a half-million “dislikes” on the Ghostbusters
trailer, there are still over 27 million people who watched the trailer
who either officially liked it or had nothing negative to say about it.
So while there may be a vocal minority trying to game the YouTube
voting system to bring down a movie with a female cast, they are still
the minority.
Sadly, at the rate they are going, it’s not crazy to think the video could reach 1 million dislikes by the time Ghostbusters
opens in July. At that point, who knows how much this campaign will
have hurt the movie and all this before we have any real idea whether
this movie itself is any good.
