Crank - 70% Pure

It's been a busy couple of weeks, fraught with late night panic-driven phone calls from Tokyo, and threatening e-mails from some guy named Genya, but more on that in a bit.

I won free movie passes to Jason Statham's new film called Crank. A few months back, some friends from the ad agency came back from lunch all giddy because Statham came into the restaurant where they had eaten. He was filming in my city and I reckoned Crank was the one he was doing here, but imdb says that Crank was filmed entirely in L.A. Anyway, I wanted the passes because of the local connection, but I had to fork them over to Ali because I had to study for a brutal final exam the next day. It was rough, and I'll probably have to retake the course - at least it's not statistics. I see that Statham is reprising his role of Handsome Rob in a sequel to the remake of The Italian Job, called The Brazilian Job. That might sound like a film about a really fun salon, but it's more likely about a bank heist.

So Ali and her friend Mariko went to the cinema and got to enjoy a film I'll probably never see. Her review is as follows:

Me: So, how was it?
Ali: I nearly barfed, man...
Me: It was that bad, huh?
Ali: No, I just felt sick the whole time, and Mariko was ill too.
Me: Did you sit in the front row again?
Ali: No.
Me: Okay, gimme the qualitative analysis.
Ali: Uhhh, it was so-so. It had a fair bit of action, and the car chases you'd like.
Me: Any romance?
Ali: More comedy.
Me: Like 2LDK?
Ali: Different.
Me: Out of 5 stars?
Ali: Three point half.

So that's it - Statham gets 70% for Crank, which is what I could only hope for on my final. Who knows? Let the nail biting begin. All that studying and it might end up being for nothing.

One of Ali's classmates told her about this "really cute actor" named Wentworth Miller. Ever since, Miss "I don't like violence" Ali has been itching to watch Prison Break. I took a break from studying and hooked up the aerial so she could watch the premiere of Season 2. Of course, I've been watching since Episode 1, but I could tell she wasn't enjoying it. She said that she needed to get the background of the story, so last Saturday I got her Season 1 on DVD. All of a sudden, the telly is more interesting than I. For the past week, she's been calling me Snowflake or Fish and even splashed a bucket of cold water in my face as I slept Tuesday morning. That stopped as soon as she realized that the bed doesn't dry right away. Now, she just wakes me up by yelling "You're late Snowflake!" in my ear.

And so that brings me to Genya. For a while now, Ali has been looking for a place to live, and it would seem obvious that she should move in with me, but we both like a lot of space. I wasn't sure she'd go for it, but it's official. Ali has moved in as of last night. In the last couple days of August, Ali had to deal with annoying calls from her mother -- annoying in the sense that the calls came at about 3:00 a.m. All of a sudden, I was a thing from erstwhile planet Pluto with tentacles growing out of its back or something and no longer the guy who only weeks before had Ali's mother laughing her ass off and wiping away the tears because me so funny. It's quite an accomplishment to use the only two words one knows of a foreign language and mispronounce them at the very exact time that the two completely different words could be their most hilarious -- by accident. But I did it, and I'll probably never do it again. Now, her mum was freaking about all the things that could happen when a decent Japanese girl moves in with a hakujin. Ali got the calls, and I got the e-mails. The title line of the first one was 'We are friends of Ayako' I nearly deleted them until I remembered that I did in fact know someone named Ayako. Ayako is Ali's real name, so I opened the e-mail which came from someone calling himself Genya. I asked Ali about this guy, and it turns out this guy is real. She seemed concerned that Genya should e-mail me personally. She said it was serious for him to do that because he's really supposed to work for Ali's dad as like a driver/caddy/bodyguard/general bad ass and that if he e-mailed me, it's because her dad told him to. The mails weren't too specific, but I do recall that Genya offered to break my arms in such a way that "If they are reset, it will be very painful that you can hope that the doctors to slice them down". I asked Ali to clarify the message, but I basically already understood it to mean that my arms would be broken so that they will never heal properly and the pain would be so great that I would regret that the surgeon just didn't amputate my limbs. Ali got on the phone and called her mum and said that this was going too far. There were more, better written e-mails after that, but they were relatively pleasant.


I may be late to the party on this one, and there's no big Youtube critique about it, but as a tribute to Fuckstress, a former blogger whose writing I really enjoyed reading, and to Fireangel who, if I'm right, started the whole thing in the first place - Here's a snap of me enjoying a very large Hoegaarden (billed at 22 ounces, but more like 20 ounces with 2 ounces of foam in a fuck-off size glass). There would have been more photos, but Ali doesn't want people to see her drinking, and really who needs more than one photo to get the idea? As you can see, I've been hanging out at the beach trying to get a great tan, but nobody told my melanocytes and I've ended up getting a gentle burn.