The Ned and Daron Report:
We are Good at the Bulletproof Monk

Last night I had a dream about the very essence of evil. There was this very evil and magical man with a cape on who was similar to LOTR’s Sauron because he lived in a mystical dark land all his own with a huge black tower at the evil center of it. This guy’s tower was actually more like a sinister lighthouse than Sauron’s tower was though, and there was a very evil red light that was emanating like a laser from a large rock or crystal set into the top of it. That light seemed to be forceful, with its own kind of intelligence. It seemed like the kind of light that some of you may have seen before, that if you were to stand directly in its path, it might melt out your eyeballs and then melt off your skin and leave you standing there as skeleton. Some of you may have seen ghosts eat out somebody’s flesh in the fashion that I’ve described, but in this case it would not be ghosts, but the power of the guiding beacon that invites all evil to come to its safe harbor that would eat out the flesh of your body. You see, all evil was drawn toward the light, and all good (such as your bodily flesh) was scattered and wasted desolate by it. Now, you need to understand that of course I was at the top of the tower because it was there that I had to fight the evil man and try my hardest to kill or slay him.

We were fighting and fighting for quite a while, and it was a pretty big deal -- swinging around, chopping our swords at each other, I think you would have been pretty impressed with both my fight moves and also with the way I was dressed. I had on a cape and some shoes that were pretty good. Every now and then one of us would, like, teeter at the edge of a precipice, and then you’d see a shot looking down from the precipice at how high we were, and our feet would be half on and half off the ledge, you know, so we’d dislodge some rocks that would fall down and down and down and never really seem to ever even hit the ground. Then we’d fight around some more for a while, etc.

Then at some point during our fight I accidentally looked directly into the evil light coming out of the crystal, and I was terrified. I saw that the beam was emitting from a single area deep within, and that that point was actually a glowing red heart, as bright and intense as the sun, but eerie and gross in a way that the sun can only imagine being. Because of the stress of the battle, my own heart, both in the dream and I believe in real life as well, had been beating pretty hard, and when I saw that the evil lighthouse was powered by an actual heart, a human heart, the exact size of my fist, and sort of pulsating in synch with my own, it scared me so bad that it woke me up instantly. I was completely terrified. And at that moment, when I was now awake, I realized that I couldn’t actually feel my own heart beating the way I had felt it in the dream, so I assumed it had actually stopped, or maybe I had kind of somehow left it behind in the dream land, and I literally thought I was about to die. I was totally freaked out and didn’t know what to do so I was flopping around in my bed in order to hopefully jump start my heart, or to at least kind of squish my blood around and make it circulate a bit so I could stay alive for just a few seconds longer - I literally thought I was going to die, and the whole time I couldn’t get that horrible sight of the burning red heart in the rock out of my head. It was so scary, it seemed like the most evil satanic thing I’d ever seen or heard of, but multiplied by about a five. I wish you could have seen it.

My brain had to wake up a little bit more, and then I had to think about it for a few minutes before I could start to calm down and feel safe again. I kind of told myself that maybe since light is the opposite of evil, the heart trapped in the rock might not actually be evil itself, but maybe it had probably belonged to some really important human or elf who had almost nearly killed the Sauron like (how about let’s say “Sauryn”) character at some point in the distant unremembered past. Probably Sauryn ended up killing that elf, but, like, for example, he still couldn’t quench the unstoppable fire of the elf’s powerful heart, so he had to encase it in a rock where it couldn’t hurt him and it could symbolize his victory over good. In fact, maybe the key to defeating him might be to find a way to release the power of that heart so that IT could kill him, you know, because no mere mortal, etc, etc. That made me feel better, and I calmed down to the point where I was able to go back to sleep.

For the rest of the night I had pleasant dreams of my distant homeland village where I spent most of my time sipping steamy rich herbal tea and watching TV with this very beautiful lady played by this girl named Stephanie who’s a popular new waver that I see around town sometimes but who I would never dare even talk to in real life because she’s so popular and all. The world was magickally radiant and glowing, more so than I thought it probably was even before I had left home to go on adventures.

The lady I was talking about earlier told me that after Sauryn died there was a giant earthquake and the evil tower sank into the center of the world taking the glowing red heart with it, and that the heart’s power had melted the cold stony center of the earth and would ever after provide the world with a new source of inner warmth and energy which explained why the world looked so sparkly and new. This seemed really great to me, and I felt proud to have helped, you know, help with that stuff, but then my pride turned out to be my downfall because she also said the inner power would occasionally burst forth destructively from like volcanoes and magma cracks and stuff, and it would bust some of the villages up sometimes. That reminded us that the powers of good and evil are forever very closely linked, essentially indiscernible from one another.

Oh Ned, that reminds me, on Saturday I went and totally checked out Paul Hunter’s Bulletproof Monk, and it was some serious high-kicking, good time shit. But, much like our dream, there were also some life lessons that were there for all to learn from. If you haven’t seen it, you totally should. Basically Chow Yun-Fat plays a totally awesome martial arts monk whose last 60 years have been used to protect an ancient and powerful scroll which gives whomever possess it all the power in the universe. Faced with finding the scroll’s next guardian, Chow goes to Hawaii where, to his disbelief, it appears his successor is a smart-mouthed local surfer named Kar (Seann William Scott). Kar is a chiseled and glistening, beachcombing wildcard who seems to enjoys life 2DAXTREME, with no responsibility.

For example, in one scene, Kar is totally cresting goofy footed on a rickt 10pt a-frame, when some slog of hodad haoles drop on him by doing a totally bent backslide right across his path. Do you wanna know what Kar did? He freaking just totally acid-droped that wave like they weren’t even there. In another scene, Kar finds a pocket full of change with his metal detector! So anyway, later on, Chow starts to instruct Kar in the ways of fighting, and this might seem pretty shocking, but they become unlikely partners in protecting the scroll from a power-hungry nazi who is hell-bent on using the scroll’s power to win a local surfing competition.

Actually, I didn’t see the whole movie. I thought that scroll was so retarded that I left about 20 minutes into it to go see What a Girl Wants instead. That was a pretty good one, by the way. Obviously the funniest kind of comedy in the world is based on white people acting like black people, but it’s almost as funny when dumb British try to act like cool Americans. But as long as we’re talking about Bullet Proof Monk let’s go ahead and talk about it. There was one thing in the movie that I did really enjoy and that was the gang of crazed thieves led by the intensely shirtless Mr. Funktastic. I loved the way Mr. Funktastic drew at will from the world’s powerful super forces (martial arts, ska and pickpocketry) to create an under-subway post apocalyptic super fortress where his friends could hang out and he could go up and down on the elevator to his heart’s content all day long. He was strong, and he was sassy, and he was loaded with money and power, you could see that, and his friends were loyal to him almost to the extent that you had to wonder whether he was truly the bad guy that he appeared to be, or if maybe he might be more complex and multi-motivated. He had certain loyalties, you know? And though he was bad, he wasn’t a coward, he was strong and seemed to be guided by something. I wonder…how did Kar end up defeating him? It must have been tough, I’m sure. Did Mr. Funktastic go down hard or did he take the easy way out? Did he end up in jail, or dead, or was there some suspense at the end? Maybe Funktastic was down, but not defeated, leaving the possibility of him coming back in a sequel? Do you think there will be a prequel where we’ll be able to find out how Funktastic got his start as a super villain? He’s an interesting and complex enough character that I think he probably could carry a movie of his own, even if he isn’t a “good guy”. You know, it could be kind of like The Godfather or that little ass hole Skywalker.

At first I was pretty pissed off that La Femme Musketeer wasn’t going to be directed by Paul Hunter, because quite frankly I thought he did a spectacular job with not only Bulletproof Monk, but especially with that Mariah Carey video he did with the jet skis and that funny comedian from that funny movie, Double Take. He is really funny. When I found out that Paul directed him in the Honey video, I was totally pissed off that he didn’t even do a cameo in Bulletproof Monk. What the F! He would have made a really funny surfer buddy that could say “Whazzzzzzup?!?” a lot or make funny jokes while skimboarding or doing a head dip on a totally geeked mushy. I can almost totally guarantee that if Paul Hunter had been put in charge of La Femme Musketeer instead of this asshole Steve Boyum (whoever the hell he thinks he is), that that comedian guy would have totally been in it, making it way the hell funnier than it’s going to be without him. That I know for sure.

But I don’t mean to sound like I am totally down on Funktastic and La Femme Musketeer, I am sure they will be great, and I really didn’t mean to get all pissed off at Steve Boyum. I don’t even know who he is, and I am sure it probably isn’t only his fault that that comedian and Paul Hunter haven’t worked together recently. I think that even though they aren’t working on it, it is still gonna turn out great. Gérard Depardieu is really good in that movie My Dad the Hero with Isobell from that TV show Roswell, so it should be fine. Have you seen that? It is a really awesome movie. She plays a 15-year old girl that is pretending that she and her dad are actually lovers to try and make another guy on the beach that they’re vacationing at fall in love with her. It totally works, but then everyone on the beach thinks that he is a totally old perv.

Anyway, me and Policeman Rick were driving to the Panda Express today in my car, and he was feeling really uncomfortable about being involved in something as illegal as my car is. I told him he was too uptight and he needs to learn to relax a little bit. Actually, the way I was driving all laid back and easygoing, and the way he was being a passenger, all high strung and tense, and the fact that we were driving in an SUV (my car is a racing style Jeep Cherokee) all conspired to remind me of that movie Anger Management. I told Rick about it, and tried to explain to him that I was being like Jack Nicholson and he was being like Adam Sandler, which I think he probably thought was a wry and delightful observation, but nevertheless it seemed to only make him more angry. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that once we got to the restaurant and Rick calmed down we started talking about who was going to be the new Jack Nicholson of our era. He said that he thought for a long time that it would be Christian Slater, but neither of really thought that was likely anymore. I started thinking about it, and I kind of remembered seeing something on HBO where that guy who directed Animal House and Ghostbusters II said that he thought the new Jack Nicholson might be, you guessed it, Seann William Scott. I’m not kidding. Remember what I said earlier about how I tell the truth? He really did say that, and he didn’t really seem to be trying to make a joke at the time.

Now, Seann William Scott being the new Jack Nicholson is not a theory I could have come up with on my own, but I don’t want to imply that I know more about acting than a successful, possibly Oscar nominated director. Anyway, I like Seann, Dude, Where’s My Car is an all time favorite, and Road Trip was not bad either. So I’m just going to go ahead and accept the possibility that even if fate doesn’t turn SWS into the new JN, at least the two of them are a lot alike.

So, if Seann William Scott is a lot like Jack Nicholson, and I’m a lot like Jack Nicholson, then that means by the power of mathematics that I’m also a lot like Seann William Scott, as you can see. And as a person who’s a lot like Seann William Scott, who can understand him, and be sensitive to his needs, I have the right and even the responsibility to say this: if I were Sean William Scott, I would not make any more movies like Bulletproof Monk.

Daron, your prediction was correct. Today I went to the theater to finish watching the last 2/3 of Bulletproof Monk, and frankly I thought it sucked, royal. No surfing, no swashbuckling, no Gerard Depardieu, no final battle with Mr. Funktastic.

Anyway, the good news is I can tell you why Paul Hunter didn’t get to direct La Femme Musketeer: he sucks. Bulletproof Monk 7/12, What a Girl Wants 11/12, Anger Management 6/12, La Femme Musketeer */12.