Sadly, such a thing does in fact exist.  Courtesy (or perhaps cursedly?) PostBourgie’s G.D.:

Bill Cosby Presents The Cosnarati performs “Safe of Your Heart” from Bill Cosby on Vimeo.

A few thoughts.  1) The articulation that makes for good flow means it’s generally a poor idea to have a bunch of folks rapping a chorus together.  2)  In that vein, it would be good to make sure your sound system and mics are set up to deliver clear audio.  Doesn’t matter how clear and tight you are if no one can hear you.  3) Your production should not manage to be simultaneously boring and distracting, as this combination of drumming and synthesizer beats invariably is.  4)  If you’re going to wear a vest, collared shirt and tie, it might be wise to make sure your shirt is actually tucked in.  And 5) as a special notice to the gentleman on the left (from the perspective of the viewer), those long beads and feathers on either side of your head make you look like a rabbit with undergrown ears who compensated by raiding a textbook on Native American ornamentation traditions.

So, I watched the first five episodes of the motion comic adaptation of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men run.  And as much as the plot’s a lot of fun, I have to say, it looks terrible:

When I first saw previews for this, I assumed the animation looked so choppy because it was an early cut or something.  Not so.  It’s rare that I’d express doubts about an entire form, but motion comics seem to me like a dubious product for a couple of reasons.  First, there’s no reason to translate something from the page to an animated screen unless you think you can add something to it or valuably reinterpret it.  The voice work is nothing particularly extraordinary, so the visuals need to justify the project, and they don’t.  The motion comics are only barely different from reading a page, and they’re so awkward it’s a detrimental viewing experience.  X-Men: Evolution may not be a masterpiece, but it’s a fluid viewing experience, and putting the mutants in the context of a relatively normal high school is a pretty cute idea:

And right now the third through fourth seasons (the first two are in syndication to Disney HD at the moment) are on Hulu, so unlike the Astonishing X-Men motion comic, you don’t even have to wait for your fix!

Every so often, I find myself feeling guilty for seeing something as art.  It’s not so much that I think there are events that art can’t be derived from: while there may be an overabundance of movies and novels about the Holocaust, that tragedy is certainly evidence that astonishing horror can be mined for astonishing art.

But there’s something very different about producing redeeming art from the ruins of tragedy, and from seeing something lovely in the actual instruments of such tragedy.  So it was that I found myself feeling guilty during a vist to Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge’s interrogation facility in Phnom Penh.  The museum on the site of the prison captures the site’s intense contradictions: it’s a lovely, whitewashed site with sunny courtyards, a plausible former schoolyard, which it is.  And yet, when invading Vietnamese troops seized the prison in 1979, they found rooms where corpses were chained to the beds where they’d been executed, flesh literally stuck to the metal.  The Khmer Rouge took people–often their former comrades–and turned them into meat:

But in the tiled rooms where the Vietnamese found the remains of those people destroyed by a regime eating itself alive, the thing I found myself noticing first, and most, were the delicate and distinctive designs in the head and footboards of the beds.  They’re lovely:

I don’t know if it’s inappropriate that the designs struck me so strongly.  But the only people who survived Tuol Sleng were the ones who used art to keep themselves alive.  They took the photographs of their fellow prisoners, or they painted at the requests of the people running the prison–one of whom, Duch, is on trial in Phnom Penh right now, an event that only fleetingly makes the news here, the story made a relic by time and by geographical distance.  If art can be a tool of survival, perhaps it’s also a useful tool of remembrance.

That John Cusack is involved in this:

It seems fitting, in the context of this slightly odd Wesley Morris piece in the Boston Globe about the lack of movie stars who are also Real Men, to discuss the first trailer for Iron Man 2.  Morris’s piece doesn’t quite work because he doesn’t have an articulated definition of real manhood.  He sees elements of it in everyone from Clark Gable to Clint Eastwood, and complains that it, whatever it is, is lacking in younger men of today.  If he had a firm definition to work from, it might be possible to make that exclusion definitively.  But Gable and Eastwood are really only two points on a continuum, and not even definitive end points of it.  I agree with Morris on certain points: I do think that a certain lassitude has crept into portrayals of male characters in major movies, a lack of certainty and decisiveness.  But I’m not entirely sure I think that’s a dreadful thing.  Portrayals of men are different today because of evolving gender roles.  But just because we’ve moved beyond once kind of dominant performance for men doesn’t mean a total loss: if you lose one kind of role, but gain many others, I think that’s probably a net benefit for male actors across the board.

But all of that aside, since Morris mentioned him, I actually think there are remarkable commonalities between Clark Gable’s performance as Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind and Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies.  Both characters are extremely competent in their performance of somewhat socially inhospitable occupations: Butler is a smuggler and speculator, Stark is an arms manufacturer.  Both characters delight in flaunting societal expectations of their relationships with women: Butler sets Belle Watling up in business and carries on an affair with her.  Stark, in an age where women like Belle Watling neither exist nor are particularly shocking in the form they take, merely consorts with pretty much anyone cute who comes along.  And both end up masking their feelings for women they love in flippancy.  The fabulously tossed off “You complete me” Tony gives to Pepper as he jumps out of a plane is the equivalent of Rhett’s declaration to Scarlett that “You should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how.”  Both are meant to be evidence of how little the men in question care, and they convey just the opposite.

I tend to think that those kinds of conflicts, that flippancy and anger and commitment, are frequently what characterize not just self-aware and fully recognized men, but self-aware and fully-recognized people.  I’m glad Downey Jr. is continuing in the tradition.  And I’m glad Gable was such an illustrious part of it.  Male actors will carry it on, and redefine it.  And female actors have work of their own to do, too.