for those of you who wasted your time and money seeing the cut-down, dubbed version of zhang yimou’s hero, miramax got just what they wanted. it’s hard enough to get people to watch foreign films, but to deliberately edit and market this film as something that it’s not… well, it isn’t going to help the problem. it only further reinforces the mass perception that asian cinema is made up of nothing more than martial arts and action films, while at the same time alienating the existing fans – who only want to see the original films in their entirety, not what the studio thinks people want to see.

‘hero’ was released nearly 2 years ago (and on dvd for over a year now), but had been sitting on miramax’s shelf while much better, older films continue to wait for a release that may never come. this has been their standard operating procedure for quite some time; buying the rights to asian films, and sitting on their releases before chopping them up.

on top of that, the film itself amounts to little less than funded propaganda for the chinese government, though it’s billed as a ‘crouching tiger’ clone from the advertisements. the first emperor was known to be a total bastard pretty much equivalent to stalin in military dictatorship, only he stuck with regular ol’ murder rather than mass genocide. thanks to cool commies like chairman mao™, most of the books in china chronicling those times have been burnt; what remains is the PG-13 version of events.

that’s not to say that the film doesn’t lack style. it’s definitely got a lot in that department; the cinematography is astonishing – the fights and choreography make good use of donnie yen and jet li (see: once upon a time in china 2) . zhang ziyi is looking cute, as usual. it’s just that the film has no substance to back it up.

unfortunately, due to miramax’s policy of denying distribution of the original, uncut and unedited versions of the film, you’re out of luck trying to see the film in its entirety to begin with. but if you’re smart enough to figure it out, there might just be ways around it.

so, uh… does this make her a terrorist?

I’m not sure if it was supposed to be a ‘joke’ as cape air insinuated, or she’s just fucking nuts.

• poverty? what? how can this happen when they’ve told us the economy is better every year for the past 4 years?
• so if skipping out on a drug test and having sore losers boo the other competitors is your method of vindication, you’re a tool. if he needed to be ‘vindicated’, why wouldn’t he just take the test? or be a man like hulk hogan and ‘fess up.
• woohoo, problem solved! jet express, here I come.
• it’d be funnier if they left out some cards for the “few cards short of the deck” joke. unfortunately, not everyone is as scheming as I.

oh. my. god. and check out that photo spread. whooo, that’s hot! I wonder if those cheerleaders are their sisters.

if you were wondering what type of person would actually be willing to get a ukrainian internet bride… well, now you know.

it’s strange that video games don’t have quite the same stigma that they used to. obviously, this is thanks to sports games like madden and nba street. by my own estimates, 93.5783% of the nfl plays madden, since pretty much all of them have a video intro in the game that you have to skip.

me, I typically only like a game if it has either a. ninjas, b. samurai, or c. a combination of the two. I’m also quite fond of virtual spoon whittlin’ 3.

with the dramatic increase in traffic to his site in recent weeks, it was hard to keep this wartime soldier’s blog a secret. unfortunately for him, his first amendment rights most likely don’t apply under military law. which really sucks, since his blog was one of the few sources that was unbiased. his criticism attacked both sides equally; and his combat entries filled in the gaps of what the media here won’t tell us.

all this from a guy who neither did well in school nor took an interest in politics. viva la information superhighway interweb!

oh well, there’s always fox news.

so about that al-Sadr guy disappearing… here’s my question: was he ever there at all?

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

disappeared during the night? or is he kaiser soze?