johnnyhongkong says…

Last night Mary Milan and I saw An Inconvenient Truth. It’s a fascinating, sad, enraging, and yet hopeful film that everybody should see.

If I could do one thing, it would be to mail every member of Congress a copy of the movie and make them watch it because there is only one take home message: “Climate change will fuck us up if we continue to let it.”

The producers of the film had a similar idea. They wanted to give 50,000 copies of the DVD to schools around the nation to show kids in science class, maybe in hopes that our nation’s youth will pester their parents about why they’re not living a carbon neutral life and why they want to leave behind a hot, barren, uninhabitable earth for their kids to die in.

What a great idea – it’s Miller Time, right?

Uh, no.

As if the movie weren’t enough to get you mad, Blue Mandy’s new mentor and internet superstar Cory Doctorow boinged The Conscious Earth blog which has news about how The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), which is the nation’s leading coalition of science teachers, rejected the offer because it would risk the financial support of “certain targeted supporters.”

Hmm…who might be a large corporation that would take umbrage to our nation’s kids seeing An Inconvenient Truth?

I’ll give you three guesses but you’re only gonna need one.

Exxon Mobil, bitches!

AAYIEEEEE!!!

Do something.

We got one of those Brooklyn Style Thin Crust pizzas with pepperoni from Dominos for the USC decimation of Notre Dame. While I still don’t know what exactly Brooklyn Style thin crust actually means, it does approximate a decent New York style pizza and furthermore, it is defiantly not shitty.

The New York Times doesn’t think so. But seriously, can you believe them? They’re biased. It’s sort of like asking the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to write objectively about Budweiser and Coors. And besides, the Grey Lady wants to charge you money to read their takedown of Domino’s, money that you could use to buy one of their defiantly not shitty pizzas and judge for yourself. Eat and order with confidence.

1. People whom you would never expect it from, try to make Thanksgiving nice for themselves and their friends and family.

• About a decade ago, I didn’t know how to cook. When my friends and I wanted to eat a Thanksgiving dinner on the 3rd Thursday of November in Poughkeepsie that year, I figured out how to roast a chicken, make stuffing, gravy, and mash potatoes. I credit that night as the night I learned how to cook. It’s that or the other explaination which is I just woke up one day and knew how to.

• That punk rock guy. He stood behind me one line at Ralph’s on Thursday and he had pink, spikey hair, torn shorts, and a chain connected to his wallet. He bought a roast chicken, two steak knives, a pumpkin pie, and a can of whipped cream.

2. It’s a holiday that’s all about hospitality. It’s sort of like the Olive Garden: it doesn’t matter who you are, when you’re at someone’s for Thanksgiving, you’re family.

3. The movies. This year we saw Deja Vu. Along with The Hunger and Crimson Tide, it’s one of Tony Scott’s (and Jerry Bruckheimer’s) most restrained works. But for what it lacks in the Expressionist visual stylings a la Domino (a film where narrative is deconstructed to color, swish pans, and edits and that I believe is the first ever mainstream art installation), Deja Vu makes up for in ka-razy. It’s definitely worth checking out. If you plan to, I suggest not reading anything about the movie.

Robert Altman (1925-2006) was 81.

He was one of my first great inspirations. As a young Asian kid trying to figure out why I wasn’t like the other Asian kids who liked math and the violin while I liked this theatre and movie thing, seeing The Player was a revelation.

I was hooked.

Altman was such an original inspiration that in the director’s notes for Torn, my fully improvised drama, I forgot to mention Altman as an inspiration.

Now that I think about it, with our huge cast, multiple storylines, improvisation, overlapping dialogue, and music playing – sometimes too loudly – underneath all of the action, it was basically a stage translation of an Altman film.

“No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have,” Altman said while accepting [the lifetime achievement Oscar this year]. “I’m very fortunate in my career. I’ve never had to direct a film I didn’t choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition.”

And we are thankful for his love of filmmaking which has inspired and informed the work of so many others and the cinematic treasures he is survived by.

RIP

I guess Tom Cruise and his folks didn’t get the memo that Deacon Johnny Hong Kong was available to be at the Odescalchi Castle on Lake Bracciano in Italy to officiate his and Katie’s wedding. Hell, if you ask Joey Jerusalem and Jessie Napoli and the gathered attendees at their wedding, they would tell you that my ceremony was the best they had ever seen.

According to Reuters, in a traditional Scientology wedding:

[Scientology Spokeswoman Karin] Pouw said what makes a Scientology wedding unique is the advice offered in the ceremony for couples to maintain and improve their relationship.

Please. I did that too.

“They make a vow to each other that they won’t go to sleep at night without having repaired any upset they may have had during the day,” Pouw said.

Come on. Stay up all night? What if they get tired and they can’t think straight and start saying hurtful things?

According to the JHK ceremony:

…the journey of their marriage will be a hot, messy, unending, and beautiful work that most times will be easy and at others will be difficult and trying. The hard times are not to be feared though because getting through them simply takes the teamwork, understanding, compassion, patience, and love that they have already forged together. And the good times? Hell, they’re just good times.

Testify!

Scientology ceremony:

…the groom is reminded that “girls” need “clothes and food and tender happiness and frills, a pan, a comb, perhaps a cat” — and is asked to provide them all.

The bride, in turn, is told that “young men are free and may forget” their promises.

In the Double Ring ceremony, the ring is a symbol of permanency and reaffirms the Scientology principles of affinity, reality and communication.

The JHK ceremony has nothing to say about anyone being promised “a pan, a comb, and perhaps a cat,” so I guess that’s my bad but it does have a bit about rings:

The rings that Joey and Jessie are about to put on represent the acknowledgement of having made this magical and beautiful thing between them, and more importantly, their commitment to the continuing process of keeping it beautiful.

The rings are thus the physical representation of a bride and groom’s commitment. The vows they share give their own voice to this promise.

So what if only the brightest Hollywood luminaries are in Italy attending the wedding (even Bruckheimer was searching the internet to see if he had scored an invite)?

We’re damn sure that the royalty present at JoeJes’ wedding did not grace the TomKat wedding.

Royalty, you ask?

Damn straight. The King, pictured here, looking out over his vast empire…

Which king?

Wait for it…

The Burger King, bitches!

As Joey Jerusalem’s best man, the Burger King toasted them and gave them part of his burger kingdom as a wedding present.

Here’s some internet oddness: I was just going through the referrers to my little stop on this big series of tubes and found that someone from Jerry Bruckheimer Films found this site by Googling “Jerry Bruckheimer + Cruise Wedding” (which I am happy to report that as of today, Google says that I am the authority on this subject as I am the first search result that Google found in only 0.11 seconds!).

It was likely just one of Bruck’s assistants doing due dilligence to see how the Google and Internets prioritized his/her master’s press coverage in relation to TomKat’s wedding bash but there’s part of me that wishes it was the Bruckaneer himself scouring the internet to see what folks like me are saying about him.

Whichever the case, now that you’ve found me, Jerry (or Jerry’s minions) as you may have read: johnny hong kong is all yours for Days of Thunder II. I meant to pitch it to you when we ran into each other at Q’s but it was after one of those celebrity hockey games and I didn’t know what kind of a headspace you were in. I play in an annual Thanksgiving football game, you wanna come out with Denis Leary, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Keifer? You’ll make me the most popular Turkey Day football player in the history of Balboa Park.

Oh, and JB, in the event that you weren’t subscribed to our RSS feed back in April, you may have missed that Mary Milan’s favoritest movie of all time is Top Gun.

that girl – not any one particular one, but the many here in L.A. – who is on an elliptical at the gym and yapping away on her cell phone, while there are a bunch of folks waiting behind her to get their cardio work in. they usually are the ones dressed in juicy couture gym clothes and careful to not break a sweat.

you can read, that’s cool. listen to your ipod or watch tv, that’s cool too. but if you’re able to talk on the phone while doing a cardiovascular workout, you may as well get off the damn machine and get to stepping around the fucking block.

everytime I see one of these girls, I want to saunter over, grab their phone and throw it clear across the cardio room. as far as I’m concerned, the only woman who should be talking on the cell phone while working out at the gym are Oprah and Condolezza Rice.

Mary Milan agrees. She adds that she when she sees them, she wants to slap the shit out of them.