h&k2

because i’m also an asian minority that loves marijuana, i feel like i should post this.

what’s up with the guy with the weird eyes? he handicapped or something?

cinemawesome 2

here’s a brand new list of movies to keep an eye on

movies to watch

this is england

the wendell baker story

vantage point

gone baby gone

movies to watch under the influence

1-18-08

30 days of night

into the wild

10,000 bc

and just to give figgy a good ol’ grunt of frustration

becoming jane

isn’t that anne hathaway amazing!!!

higher thinking

lately, a question has been making appearances in my head every time i blaze up. it’s a strange question that i can’t ever get an answer to, but a question that interests me with its profound implications. is there someone out there who thinks the way i do when i’m high, but when they’re sober? allow me to clarify. clearly, when a person is high, their minds function slightly differently. i personally notice more things on a social level. i tend to empathize more quickly and more extensively with other people, even if it’s just my personal interpretation of their behaviors. i will envision histories, personalities, backgrounds to people i’ve never met and know nothing about, solely based on my first impressions of their appearances and behaviors. i am quicker to believe things, more willing to lose myself in a movie or tv show. i analyze situations and pick up on little details. for example, in the new j. j. abrams movie 1-18-08, i realized that apparently everyone in manhattan is beautiful and they all go to parties where other beautiful people congregate. now, my question is, aside from the lack of focus and slow reaction time, is there a person who thinks like that normally? is it too difficult to believe that the psychotropic effects of thc include a kind of personality shift? i think not. it’s an interesting idea to juggle around. it opens one up to the possibility that the experience of life is limited only by our psychological schema and that there are ways of thinking that we simply aren’t capable of when our minds are normally adjusted. i’ve often wondered about the deficiencies of human experience and this question touches on the same nerve. a monkey could never understand the full and complete mental processes of a human. so is it too difficult to believe that human thinking is just a step away from another, more comprehensive, more enlightening, and currently incomprehensible form of consciousness? like monkeys to men, are men just apes to another higher form of thought?

transformers transformed (in my head)

so i saw transformers the other day, and i was stoned like a cheating afghan woman. i was really pumped because the special effects were sure to put me in a state of orgiastic visual ecstasy. when the new untitled j. j. abrams trailer came on, which i’d already seen leaked on youtube, i was buggin’ because that movie just looks really fucking crazy. there’s something about the end of the world that works really well with being stoned. fantastic four 2, transformers, nancy drew; each offers a grim possibility for an apocalyptic future and each best served with a slice of hash brownies. so then the movie starts, and once again, like fantastic four, there was crazy shit in space, and if there’s one thing i love more than watching awesome sfx while high as a kite, it’s watching awesome sfx about crazy space shit while high as a kite. so i listened to the soothing voice of peter cullen, as he explicated the epic story of the allspark and its seemingly godlike qualities. sadly, this is where the movie and i parted ways, for in my frenzied fervor to be told something fantastic, i constructed my own misinterpreted storyline for the allspark, and sat for an hour overwhelmed by the immensity of the story i was being told, but which i had really just imagined myself. now, in the movie, the allspark is an ancient relic from cybertron which imbued all machines on the planet with life. it was an artifact which megatron treacherously used to wage war on cybertron, hoping to enslave the planet. on the other hand, my interpretation had been that the allspark was a mystical relic of the universe, which imbued life on all barren planets, initiating an evolutionary process beginning with the most basic elements and components of the host planet.  i affectionately dubbed it the ‘god cube’.  i believed that the allspark had given life to the barren planet of cybertron, life which eventually evolved into the transformers. i also believed that the transformer race had unlocked the secrets of the allspark and begun to worship it.  later, megatron would use the allspark to dominate the entire planet and subjugate them into mindless drones (i.e. beast machines). also, i believed that megatron was a fanatic worshiper of the allspark, driven to tyranny by madness, and striving to ‘enslave and punish’ all life spawned from the allspark in some fanatic idealist rampage, like the dark and disturbingly morbid zeal of the catholic church during the inquisition. in the real movie, optimus prime and his rag tag rogue team of freedom fighters on cybertron manage to jettison the allspark deep into space where it drifted freely for millions of years before reaching earth 10,000 years in the past.  in my version, the ‘god cube’ drifted the cosmos for millions of years before landing on a primordial earth, where it then acted as the catalyst of a new evolutionary branch of life, leading up to the creation of the human race, thereby tying humans and transformers to the same unknown force that bonds all living entities in the universe. now, after millions of years of hunting for the allspark, the transformers finally track it to earth, coincidentally during the modern human age. megatron thus plans to enslave and punish all life on earth, which i believed to be part of his fanatic ‘to punish and enslave’ philosophy, but optimus and his team arrive to oppose the would be tyrant before another planet falls to his fanaticism. this was the plot as i perceived it in my drug induced haze. personally, i think it’s much better, and much more epic, as well as much darker in thematic content. so you can imagine my disappointment, halfway through the movie when i realized i had constructed a false plot that was actually more engrossing then the actual plot. megatron was not fanatical, nor were his decepticon followers, though i did appreciate the few ‘hail megatron’ lines which ironically came from starscream, traditionally known to be megatron’s brutus. however, in any case, i was saddened by my realization and found certain scenes hard to believe as simple human relations were hindering the transformers’ infinitely important mission to find the allspark. i would have believed that such a relic of massive importance would have overridden parental squabbles. in any case, the movie was still badass, as the special effects made my eyes pop and all the ‘wah wah wah wah wah’ transforming moments nearly drew me to my feet in a standing ovation. however, i still preferred by darker vision of the transformers universe more. the beast machines portrayal of megatron is probably my favorite incarnation of the malevolent villain as it imbues him with something much more than your run of the mill power hungry baddy; it gave him a belief that what he was doing was right, and that is what makes a truly terrifying villain (see george w. bush). maybe one day someone will make a movie or write a book or design a video game that mimics my imagined vision of the transformer universe. until then, i will just say that i cannot wait to get fucked up again and watch that movie in hd on blu-ray disc. also, i’d like to see megan fox in hd, with her clothes torn off and getting plowed on bumblebee’s hood. only time will tell if bay decides to add that to the special features.

solopipe

fuck the iphone, i just found the coolest gadget to come around since the refrigerator. introducing, the solopipe. it’s all you need! (also features a cute blonde who sounds like she’s been smoking longer than she’s been alive). anyways, my birthday is august 19th. hint hint.

the solopipe. it’s all you need.

the golden compass

when i went to see the fantastic four 2, i’d made it into the theater just in time to catch the new trailer for the golden compass. now, i’m not one who usually finds interest in high fantasy, not that i don’t find those kind of movies entertaining. it’s just very rare that a high fantasy movie is anything but uninspired one-liners and poorly developed thematic content meant for grade-school students. i’ve seen enough about the war between good and evil. aesop’s fables were more than sufficient in teaching me oversimplified lessons in morality, i don’t need a snoddy old bitch in london rehashing those lessons so she can vacation in the four corners of the world whenever she pleases, or millions of disconnected teens telling me about how expansive middle-earth is. when return of the king won best picture, i had to saturate my blood with barbiturates just to keep from spasming off my bed that night. however, from the moment that compass hit the snow, it was nothing but excitement and awe flooding through my thc riddled frontal lobe. maybe it was the psychotropics, but something about the golden compass makes me feel like it’s going to delve into topics less frequented by the horde of unintelligent fantasy movies invading the silver screen in recent years. insightful social commentary just might make a relevant cameo in this film and i welcome it with open arms. i haven’t been this excited to see a movie in a long time, and to have it be a fantasy movie is just ridonkeylips. however, in defense of the movie, philip pullman’s novel, from which it is adapted, has been selected as one of the 10 most important children’s novels in the past 70 years by carnegie medal judges, hopefully for good reason. if there’s anything flawed about this movie, it will undoubtedly be its uninspired hollywood treatment handled by chris weitz. now, i like to give some leeway to artists because frankly, sometimes they have to sacrifice a little in order to put bread on the table, i understand. however, mr. weitz, who will be tackling this huge $150 million movie, has never written or directed a single project worth watching. nutty professor 2, about a boy, antz…it’s a wonder new line even considered him to man the helm. but then again, they are competing against the harry potter franchise, not exactly a task requiring visionary direction. there is an all-star cast, but if i’ve learned one thing from the sopranos, it’s that the actor is nothing without a strong script and inspired directing. considering that both the screenplay and directing responsibilities have fallen on a light-weight like weitz (although he does get some help from academy-award winning writer, tom stoppard), i am nervously awaiting the release to see how well he does with this potential harry potter slaying, and more importantly, genre revitalizing epic. be sure that on december 7, 2007, i will be in the theater of my local cineplex, with a mr. pib and red vines, probably after having just blazed up in the parking lot, waiting to have my mind ferried away to a dream world of magic. cross those fingers!

i might even read the book beforehand, just in case the movie does suck.

ggthoughts

thoughts so good, they’re game ending!

while discussing the intrinsic comedic value of an austrian-german accent, a friend and i concocted a humourous hypothetical. an american team builds a needle shaped landing vehicle for an international space mission. they call it a ‘needle lander’. the german word for the netherlands is die niederlande, pronounced needalanda. hilarity ensues as the germans ponder the prudence of returning to holland on the cusp of a manned mars landing. hardy har har guys, ahnold’s not too bright! (just imagine confused exasperated ranting in ahnold’s voice about the incomprehensible decision to return to the netherlands. it’s funny if you want it to be).

“da crazy americans will never make it there!”

nature, in its evolutionary methodology, has provided us with two dialectical urges for survival, one to cooperate and one to compete. as all life must compete for mate selection and resource allocations, we are all competing with one another at some level. however, nature has also selected for us to feel the need to cooperate and to work together in order to forge a better probability of survival for each contributing individual. so we are both competing and cooperating, sometimes alternating between the two, sometimes amalgamating them completely. such is the yin and yang of taoist philosophy, the good and the evil, the right and the wrong, the black and the white. how convenient that evolutionary social theory should pop-up in ancient philosophy. sounds too good to be a coincidence to me, or am i just really high? can’t it be both?

“loser has to worship somewhere else, deal?”

fantastic four 2 delivers the epic feeling that a comic book based movie about intergalactic world devourers should, weaving just enough interpersonal dialogue with unoriginal themes and wild special effects to get audiences really feeling the dread of an impending planet-killing cosmic being. once again, jessica alba just can’t hit the spot, though she still makes us wanna hit hers. julian mcmahon brings too much christian troy to a latverian mad-scientist (i don’t think vic von doom is the kind of man that talks to silver coated aliens like he’s trying to bed them). ioan gruffudd gets my imaginary oscar for this one, followed by chris evans, and then michael chiklis. maybe it was the script these guys had to follow, but these are their rankings in believability. special mention to beau garrett for keeping me interested w/o ever breaking out a single ounce of acting talent. keep up the great body, beau; you’re career depends on it. also, props to the character design team for keeping things discreet. nothing ruins the intimidation of a world devourer like a giant purple helmet with tongs.

you remind me of the word ‘easy’, and i find that appealing.

thomas edison & l. ron hubbard

do the amish think about thomas edison like we think about l. ron hubbard? stick that in your pipe and clog it.