I love movie trailers. There's an art to balancing the desire to showcase the film's good stuff with the need to hold something in reserve.
My favorite trailer of all time is the extended cut for Cloud Atlas. It sets up an extremely complex story and takes a six-minute emotional ride that gets me more than most two-hour feature films. Though after watching not only this trailer, but The Fault in Our Stars, I'm realizing that I might just have a neurological condition that turns me into a sobbing mess whenever I hear M83 in a movie.
Anyway, I might be the only person in the English-speaking world who really liked Cloud Atlas. It wasn't perfect, and there's not really any way to include all six storylines without either whitewashing the Sonmi storyline, which would be Problematic, but not nearly as problematic as what they wound up doing, which is put Jim Sturgess, James D'Arcy, Halle Berry, Keith David, Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant in yellowface makeup. I do not deny that it is deeply flawed.
But it's ambitious and weird and beautiful to look at, and I'd so much rather encourage movies like that than another origin story that brings us one step closer to every single piece of film and television being integrated into either the Marvel or DC universe.
"Cosmic Love"--and indeed, most of Flo-Mo's first two albums--is like the Cloud Atlas trailer, so I'd like it anyway even if it weren't responsible for the best photos ever taken of my brothers and me.
That's from my wedding reception. We didn't have a DJ, so after arriving in town on Thursday night, I sat down with my fiancee, my then-16-year-old brother and my best man to hammer out playlists for various parts of the reception. (It worked perfectly until my sister-in-law hijacked the iPod to play Macklemore, so if you're looking to save money somewhere on your own wedding, ditching the DJ is a good place to start.)
"Cosmic Love" came up as a possibility, and my brother started doing a fist-pumping routine to the drum hits in the chorus, so we put it on the playlist and jokingly told him that he had to do the dance at the reception. Which, of course, he did, and suckered me into joining in. Nobody but the four of us had any idea what was going on, including our other brother (pictured laughing in the first photo), who joined in the routine toward the end.
It was my favorite part of the reception, because it was stupid and spontaneous and fun, and just weird enough to make everyone slightly uncomfortable. In the battle between "music is objectively good" and "music is good because it brings back good memories," this song is a point in favor of the latter.
