straight to you from...well, ME

ok, so i just saw return of the king. again. this is quite likely only one of many upcomming "bestial love-making sessions" which mr. mortensen and i will share. him and miranda otto. and me.
anyway, when i've figured out WHY this is such a great movie, i'll let you in on the secret. but until i discover said secret, i'll just tell you that it is FUCKING GREAT, and if you have not seen it, you own it to yourself as a human being to imediately rectify this startling and disturbing error in judgement. in fact, i invite you to join my return of the king marathon, where i will watch all four showings of the film at our local regal cinema. this will happen, naturally, after i get rehired, as i can't really afford to do it otherwise.
basically, i just wanted to tell you all that rotk is deffinitely giving teenage catgirls in heat a run for its money as best movie EVER. this trilogy has earned its place amoung the greats: star wars and good old indy. so hail to the chief, baby.

oh, one last thing. in discussing this great filmmaking achivement with pike, we happened upon a brilliant idea: combine two of the greatest films ever made - teenage catgirls in heat, and return of the king - to make one UBER-FILM. this magnum opus is tentatively titled "the king in heat." further updates as events warrant.

edit: check this shit out.

well i'll be

i knew it.

ripping off each other's clothes for an afternoon of steamy rumpy-pumpy

so anyway, i was looking up movies, and i've been reminded of a few that look simply BADASS. for starters, fucking sky captain which, as greg of yahoo movies's "greg's movie previews" says, has a veritable "veneer of movie fan boy coolness." those of you who think it looks, well, stupid, i supose i can see where you're comming from. that is, i can understand what i might be like to be so bland, closed-minded and generally unintelligent. but then, maybe this sort of thing is just right up my alley, because it includes not just ONE, but SEVERAL or the following:
1. giant robots
2. airplanes, and some sort of airplane-ish THING, which likely fires LASERS or some sort
3. lasers on the giants robots
4. likely lasers in general
5. angelina jolie
6. a villian named "dr. totenkopf" (for those of you who don't spreche german, roughly translated "totenkopf" means "dead head")
7. giant robots
honestly, with a list like that, how could you NOT love it?

second on our list for tonight is, of course, the cream-worthy van helsing, staring the deffinite badass of our time (discounting, possibly, vin), mr. hugh (or, as i like to call him "huge") jackman. unless you're a fucking idiot, you know that he was wolverine in x-men and, uh, x2. he also makes me feel...powerful. and, possibly, like having sex with men. it is also worth nothing that this film will also feature kate beckinsdale, whom i am kind of assuming is hot, and richard roxburgh, whom you also all know as the delightfully rat-ish duke in moulin rouge. a deffinite bevy of, uh, cool...stuff.

also, the Fresh Prince is in a upcomming adaptation of isaac asimov's "i, robot." i am excited about this becuase, well, it has ROBOTS, as well as will smith, who is, succinctly, THE MAN, but will and isaac...not a pairing i would have predicted. anyway, this fancy little project is being directed by alex proyas, of dark city and the crow fame. continueing his inexplicable connection to actors who were in a knight's tale, (rufus sewell was the protagonist in dark city), alan tudyk, who played wot in tale, and was just the cutest little thing EVER, has been confirmed as the primary robotic suspect. this movie will also feature shia lebeouf.

lastly, antoine fuqua is bringing to the screen a film called "king arthur." not suprisingly, it is about the british monarch or the same name. the difference between this film and arther films which have gone before is that here fuqua aims to show a somewhat more "realistic" version of events: instead of focusing on the mythology of the famous ruler, the movie will focus on who an actual king arthur might have been like. it starts the transcendant (i just felt like calling him that, no real reason) clive owen ad the once and future king, kiera knightly as, duh, guinevere, and this guy as lanelot. also, i just discovered that keira, who will have my babies, was, at some point in her career, in a film called "thunderpants." sadly, the title acutally means what you think it means, as the film carries this plot outline: "an 11-year-old boy's amazing ability to break wind leads him first to fame and then to death row, before it helps him to fulfill his ambition of becoming an astronaut." wow. right there, you have the casablanca of the twenty-first century. thuderpants also stars poor, poor rupert grint. it is the only film on his resume that is not somehow related to harry potter.

OK, i think that is enough for one night. i am going to go pack now. have a good weekend kids. happy day after christmas, eighth day of chanukah, and boxing day. any other winter holiday doesn't merit mention, to paraphrase jon stewart talking about the mtarix revolutions, "because it blooooows."

MERRY CHRISTMAS
(or seventh day of chanukah, i think)

the last oscar

having just finished a TASTY burrito i shall now regale you all with my tales of...the LAST SAMURAI. staring tom cruise, future oscar contender.
for one, i should point out at the onset that i have...well, i wouldn't exactly call it a FETISH, as it's not particularly sexual - which, in itself, is somewhat impressive, considering this is ME we are talking about - but certianly a fascination, if not an obsession, with samurai. thusly, my opinions of this film are undoubtedly colored by my attraction to the samurai. nonetheless:

we more or less all agreed that this film was, to be mild, a little cheesy, as well as hammy. if fact, as kyle so insightfully put, should it aquire some eggs, it would make a truely excellent omlette. it was this cheese, and ham, which kept me from enjoying it to the full extent of its - or my - enjoyability. this is not to say that i did NOT like it. indeed, there were portions where i almost CRIED, not at something pathetic or laughable, but at moments which were intended to be, for lack of a better word, MOVING. and clearly, i was thusly moved.
perhaps one of the things i enjoyed most about this film is that i learned japan is more or less like the pacific northwest, only with more hills. in other words, it is green, forresty, and damp. it also seems to be somewhere i might like to live, as in addition to the aspects detailed above, it also has samurai, and REALLY HOT WOMEN. unfortunatly, i would apparently have to kill their husbands in order to get in their pants (kimonos?), and killing people, husbands included, has always been something i am somewhat averse to. back to the movie itself: there were, indeed good performances here. sadly, i did not think mr. cruise, in his bid for oscar glory, was one of them. although he did a good job, most of this job consisted of not anwsering questions for not apparent reason (the script's fault, not his), looking "hard", and staring at things profoundly. this includes staring at hot japanese women, something i, personally, have trouble doing with much profudity, and therefore perhaps he deserves "props" for this alone. tom aside, i particularly enjoyed ken watanabe's performance as the heroic general katsumoto, leader of the rebels. he seemed to bring a slightly more realisitc persona to a role that was equally, if not moreso, as serious as cruise's. he did remarkably little profound staring (perhaps because he did not have a love interest), and also managed to be a somewhat more human character - he clearly had a sense of humor, as well as flaws and doubts that were expressed more subtlely; you might say i found more meaning in the things he did NOT do than i found in the things that tom cruise's character did. i appologize if this seems as if it is turning into a bit of a cruise bash-fest. i assure you that is not my intention. i enjoyed his performance, and cared about his character: he was simply eclipsed by katsumoto, who also had a cool gay son.
all in all: if you like epic battles, don't mind lots of death (at least TWO people get shot in the eye), and can deal with a little cheese, i suggest you see this movie. especially if, like me, you think tom cruise looks hot with a beard. as opposed to brad pitt, who looks like a fucking wild man, and not in that good, "take me you wild manimal" sort of way.

obligatory post

well, i couldn't really count myself a man if i DIDN'T make some mention of that movie we saw last night, so here we go.
although i can't say i was acutally as sensitive as kyle, and acutally made with the crying, i can say that i DID get pretty damn misty a couple times. and of course i just about wet myself over aragon's little "there may come a day when the courage of men fails...but today is not that day!" speech. i guess i'd really have to say that this movie is what great movies aspire to be. although i don't want to just reiterate what kyle pointed out, i, too, noticed the excellent use of color. he used alot of excellent adjectives that described this use quite well, so i won't try and top them, but i will say that there were a few instances where i especially noticed how excellent the colors were. specifically, when smeagol takes the ring from deagol, and when the riders of rohan show up at minas tirith (i'm sorry if i spelt any of that incorrectly). when smeagol decides he wants the ring, the ambient light slowly, and almost imperceptably, changes from a natural sort of golden, the a forboding and frightening green. the use of sound here was also pretty cool, even though it was more of less just a standard heartbeat sort of thing, it still worked very well. as for when the riders of rohan show up to help turn the tide of battle, i may have just been me, but i noticed that the light of the faces of the defenders of minas tirith was the same golden light that broke over the mountians on the dawn of the third day in two towers, when eomer returned with those loyal to him to push back the uruk-hai and save helm's deep. i just thought that was pretty cool. speaking of things that were cool, minis fucking tirith. i haven't read the books in forever, or perhaps i would have been slightly less surprised by its, for lack of a better word, majesty. the massive slab of rock, with the courtyard on it...simply fantastic. anyway, i'm running out of things to say now, and i don't want to ruin any (more) of the movie, so i'll just sign off for now. final words: go see return of the king. it rocks everything that is capable of being rocked.

so anyway

i figure it's time i addressed a few issues, specifically, the recent capture of sadam hussien and, perhaps more important, the fact that i am now HOME, in corvallis. we'll start with sadam, to get that out of the way.

(i fixed it)

so yeah, i heard about this delightful little developement at about 5:30 in the morning, right before i was about to leave for john wayne airport to head back home. my friend eric told me, otherwise i probably wouldn't have found out for a while, and he also told me he had called his mother at 3 in the morning to tell HER. while this may seem like little more than a humorous anecdote, it's really a little more: when he told me he'd called his mom in the wee hours, and just the fact that he seemed fit to burst with excitement at this latest triumph of our spectacular military forces (today's headline: US captures man in hole in the gound) my reaction kind of made me think about...my...uh, reaction. i mean, maybe it's cause i was tired and all, but it was just kind of like "huh...well, they got him. was this really important enough for my friend to wake up his mom at three?" the thing here is that yes, i supose that it's good sadam's out of the picture, since all the propaganda i've been fed for the past several years, some of it likely true, has told me he's a horrible man who tourtures his own people, experiments on them with chemical weapons, and probably eats their children, but to just leave it at that seems awfully machiavelian. yes, perhaps the casualties were THAT high (honestly, i don't know WHAT they were), but the damage to...well, i can't think of a better phrase than "moral fiber of the nation," has been very high. what do you think bush and his cabinet are telling kids: if you don't like what someone's doing, then you go kcik the shit out of them and take their stuff? yeah, that's GREAT message. and how do you think this has made the rest of the world see us? probably not in a very good light. sure, we may be the most powerful country on earth, but we can't survive on our own. supose a bunch of other nations decided to blockade our borders. pretty soon, we'd run out of oil, and the out cars would stop running, and OH, then there would be HELL to pay. honestly, that would probably be GOOD. we might acutally have to figure out how to survive without our cars. but that's a tanget there, so let's get back on track.
in andrew's comment about the previous post, he mentioned that war was illegal, and was quickly corrected, but it got me thinking. although andrew is right, in that war in and of itself condones what is essentially murder, and is, in most countries i have been in (four) illegal, it does, apparently have rules. ben, i aksed myself, what ARE those rules? so i looked it up here, and learned a great many things. for instance, the geneva convention and the hauge laws are more or less the "rules" that govern how war is played out. there was alot of hulalbalo about the geneva convetion back when we had all those taliban guys in guantanamo bay, or whatever the shit it was, becaue it deals primarily with the issue of "victims" of war; prisoners, wounded, civilans, etc. the geneva convetnion we know and love today was ratified, or some other cool word meaning "it happened", in 1949, following the few years of FUN known as world war II, but the first geneva convetion happened in 1864, and chiefly had to do with sick and wounded soldiers. in fact, it was created, more or less, by the international comittee for relief to the wounded, known these days as the international comittee of the red cross (or the red sickle in non-christians countries; ie, islamic ones), and was based on the idea that wounded soldiers should be helped, reguardless of which army they had fought for. the convention was expanded in 1949 to cover various other related issues, such as civilians, and soldiers of the sea (also known as "sailors"). the hauge laws are somewhat more expansive, and cover such things as the destruction of cultural property (this is a no-no), what weapons you can use, property rights, issues of territory and occupation, etc. i won't go into what exactly they mean, because that would take forever, but if you're curious, you can go to the web site, and read for yourself. it's really pretty well done.
anyway, the reason i bring this up, is that in reading these, i realized that the US has been a bad little child, and has violated many of these rules, most obviously those relating to the geneva convention, but also the section of the hauge laws that specifically forbids creation and/or stockpiling of chemical or biological weapons. although we all know this already, it still makes a bit of point with me. namely that if we want to be part of the global community, as i believe we would do well to, we should start playing by the rules. the fact that we can afford NOT to, being the most powerful nation on earth, really has nothing to do with it. i don't really want to single out bush for ruining our nation, although he has worked a good deal in that direction, but he's really not the problem, he's just a symptom of it. if we don't want more bushes, and more idiotic "wars on terror", then we ought to start looking at what causes them HERE, at home. we all know that we went to war in iraq not because our administration thinks sadam hussien is a bad person, but because they need a popularity booster, and because they needed the vast oil reserves in the middle east to fuel our american obsession with cars. so maybe we should think a little more about who we elect for president, and maybe we should devote more research into alternate fuel sources. hydrogen cars, for instance; they run on the most plentiful element in the universe, and their byproduct is water. WATER. or bioeletricity; something like the matrix may be far off, the there are scientists makeing great strides in the field of bilogical batteries. or maybe we should just look at the fact that our culture has become obessesed with pain and destruction: nobody watches reality shows because they're sweet, they watch them because they want to see bad things happen to people. same reason jackass was so popular: few people get a warm fuzzy feeling from watching some idiot staple his balls to his leg - they watch it to see an idiot in pain. ok, admitedly i'm at a bit of a loss to relate this to war in iraq, but damnit, it's still a problem.
so to conclude this, war is stupid, capitalism is the root of all, or at least most, of our problems, america is obsessed with pain, suffering and fear, and "WMD" sounds like a contraceptive device.

as for the second thing i brought up way back in the begining, i'm home now; home in corvallis. so you should all come visit me.

aaaaaaaa

ok, i'm sorrying to be opening up a new post so soon, but i just had to show you this. now honestly, i feel kinda bad about making fun of this poor kid, but shit, some of that stuff is pretty damn funny... so, sorry little fat asian boy, but your humiliation can bring smiles to hundreds of kids, so just go with it. it's for the greater good.

yes, i totally meant to say "sorrying." seriously.

and i thought hair rock was dead

you have andrew to thank, or hate, for the following:
this band, a bunch of apparently british guys with confusing sexual orientation who call themselves "the darkness," have proved to me that even in the day of people like brittany spears, justin timberlake, and jay-z, the beautiful art from of hair rock is still alive and well. i suggest you check out the movie section of the web site. so far, the only one's i've watched are "i believe in a thing called love" and "christmas time (don't let the bells end)." "i believe in a thing called love" features such genius ideas as: a giat crab, which apparently throws styrofoam rocks, a monster which could be an octopus, squid, or bizzare sex organ, guitars that shoot lightening and, for reasons i could not fathom, a spaceship. admitedly, the spaceship looked pretty cool. "christmas time (don't let the bells end)" had me wishing that the bells would, in fact, just fucking end. although with the life, or at least the hideous crooning, of lead justin hawkins:

this delightful film featured, i think, laser blasts from an undiclosed location. they didn't really seem to affect anything, except to cause to of the other band members to huddle over what i took to be a massive orange gun. they never fired it, so i'm not entierly sure it WAS a gun, i'm just guessing, based on the shape. guitars were strangely absent in this piece, with the noteable except of one of those delightful double-necked ones, so popular in the late 70s and 80s. this guitar, however, was the centerpiece of what - and i say this will the utmost respect for the homesexual community - was, undeiably, the gayest moment in the film. and i mean gay not in the sense of "stupid," "lame," or some other derogatory way, but in the sense of having sex with men. given the general sort of "feel" of this film, and the previous one, you can understand my confusion when our friend justin gazes adoringly into a christmas tree bangle which contains an image of a GIRL, who, in fact, looked startlingly like bjork, who - although a little strange - is undoubtedly of the female persuasion. this woman is not a momentary mirage, either: at the conclusion of this sexualy confusing movie, justin climbs into a sports car to discover this mystery woman. when are lead to believe that the two of them the proceed to do that nasty, while the camera pans up to show the spaceship soar across the heavens.
i guess watching this movies was a little like touching some else's penis...it felt wrong, but deep down, i was afraid that maybe, just maybe, i kind of liked it.

not that i HAVE touched any penises (penisi?) other than my own.

really. topher pike is a lying son of a bitch.

oh, i also got my copy of pirates of the caribbean yesterday.

update: since i didn't want to make another whole post, i thought i'd just at to this one. so, here we go.
first, since there were so many people on the waiting list, they opened up another screenwriting class, and i'm now registered for it, which makes me happy. unfortunatly, that means i now have ten o'clock classes every day except friday, so i can't sleep in as much as i've become acustomed to doing. boo hoo.

second, after i showed my friend tiffany that above videos, she introduced me to this.

sad santa

gabe claims this is his new favorite penny arcade strip, and i see no reason to disagree.

...

if anyone was trying to think of what they should get me for christmas, i think that this is probably an appropriate gift.

breaking news on the OFFICIAL BEN'S PANTS LOTR party

my mother, being the parental angel that she is, has offered to supply pizza and soda for the party we've been pimping for the last week or so. so if seeing great film wasn't enough of an impetus for you, food damn well should be. please. come. i want to see all of you. NAKED.

well, except for pike. *shudder*
never was enough.

new images

kyle, i'm sorry the one of you looks kinda funny. i couldn't find a better one.

got some stuff to talk about

for one, dr. suess is a fucking genius. actually, i take that back. the adjective "fucking", much as i may enjoy it, doesn't sound right when applied to the amazing ted geisel. but that fact remains, whatever adjectives i may use to describe him, that he is amazing. his books are so well put-together; they're funny, well-drawn, imaginative, unique, and of course, they've all got some sort of moral...i mean, the lorax probably helped define alot of my idea about the enviroment, and how it's so easy to ruin something beautiful in the name of progress.
anyway, i thought of this because cartoon network is showing the old-skool "how the grinch stole christmas", with good old boris karloff. anyway, i have a feeling i had something else to talk about, but i've forgotten. maybe i'll add it when i remember. but for the rest of, go read a dr. suess book. i'd do it, but there aren't any here. :(

edit: woah...ok, i just watched the cartoon network original special "the night b4 christmas", which is the first rap-themed christmas special i've ever seen. it was...interesting.