A death of note this morning...and it's not Terri Schiavo's.

According to HowardStern.com, Mitch Hedberg has passed on. One of my favorite comedians of the last 5 years, Mitch had the uncanny ability of finding the right humor in all the high places. Through his two CD's, multiple TV appearances, and club dates, it was easy to find someone laughing hysterically at his jokes. It was probably me.

The cause of death is unknown, but rumors point to a heroin overdose (Update: According to this St. Paul obituary, his family was told it was a heart attack). He used to do drugs. He still did use them, but he used to, too. He was 37.

Have I ever told you the story about some water at a pho place? Well, it was at one of those pho restaurants on Capitol and Silver Creek (don't worry, not in business anymore) and we asked for water and tea. Disgustingly, one of the cups of water had keys in it, so when we showed it to the server, he just laughed and replaced it with a new water (or he could've just fished them out, I don't know...I stuck with the tea).

Now comes word of a different sort of object in food, this time a bowl of chili at Wendy's on Monterey near downtown where a couple seems to have found a human finger. When it was brought to the attention of the workers, they thought it was just a vegetable, but it has been confirmed otherwise. The last sentence in the Mercury News article really had me laughing though.

Asked whether they were still selling chili, Irving said they had run out of it that evening but planned to continue selling it today.

Hostage
After a failed hostage negotiation, Jeff Talley (Bruce Willis) chose to leave the job of negotiator and take the position of police chief in a small Los Angeles suburb. But everything he left would soon come back to him in the form of three teenagers with an eye toward an Escalade who hold a rich family hostage at their hilltop house. While he passes the case onto other authorities, he's forced upon the situation by an unknown hooded mob, which needs a disc inside the house, who holding his own family hostage. So Talley needs to use his wits to solve two separate hostage situations before everyone potentially loses their lives.

The situation is very interesting and it would have made for a great movie if not for the stupidity of all involved. The teenagers, who apparently have a history of carjacking (if so, why are they driving such a beat-up truck?), instead break into the guy's house and force him to give up the keys? They do realize they could be tracked with GPS right? (I'm sure the car has it, this rich guy seemed to have everything.) Plus, they're up on a hill. Probably one access road that could easily be blocked. Then they give up Kevin Pollak as good faith? Man, they need to watch some of those hostage movies that are part of the rich guy's collection. Then Talley comes up with a plan that involves all three teenagers to come out to the front. Gee, they're dumb, but they're not that dumb. Then this mob comes up to invade the house parading as the FBI. Why didn't they do this in the first place? Haven't they seen Die Hard? They could have just taken over and not needed Talley's help whatsoever. It's also a letdown that we never see who holds Talley's family hostage, seeing as how they knew so much about him. I must admit the whole ordeal is kinda thrilling, but if you're looking for a smart thriller, look elsewhere. 2 stars

Sources inform me of a new place serving pho and it's somewhere where you'd least expect.

Fresh Choice is introducing an Asian flavor to its dishes with the introduction of pho as a soup to serve in its soup and salad buffet. The picture on the web site doesn't make it look too appetizing. There are carrots on top and the noodles look way too big. (or do those look like bean sprouts?)

The important question is how does it taste? I don't know, but I'm game if you are.

Gee, and I thought Berkeley's administration was messed up. It seems SJSU is 10 times worse. Ever since my sister began there, from a records standpoint, it has been awful. Lost transcripts, lost financial info., re-send transcripts, scheduling difficulties, etc. But this one takes the cake.

My dad was worried that he hasn't received the 1098 tax form yet from SJSU. It gives tax credit for tuition. So my dad called up the cashier's office and gave them my sister's info. First question they ask?

Is she a U.S. citizen?

It was at this point my dad went off. "Of course she is! How else could she be in school?" could be heard from the semi-yelling. He goes on to recite SSNs and birth location and date. But to no avail. All they said is to use a printout of what you paid to use for the tax form.

As for the U.S. citizen question, they apparently didn't have her SSN on file. How can this be fixed?

Leave a message and we'll get back to you...

On the heels of Hai's B-day yesterday is Steves' birthday today. Happy 23rd.

Happy birthday wishes go out to Hai on his 23rd birthday today.

Oscar predictions. It's a funny thing.

2002: 14/24
2003: 15/24
2004: 16/24

So you would think I'd get 17 this year, right? Nope, I did one better.

My Oscar Predictions (Winners in Bold):

Picture: Million Dollar Baby

Director: Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby

Actor: Jamie Foxx, Ray

Actress: Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby

Supporting Actor: Morgan Freeman, Million Dollar Baby

Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, The Aviator

Adapted Screenplay: Sideways

Original Screenplay: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Foreign Film: The Sea Inside

Live Action Short Film: Little Terrorist Wasp

Animated Feature: The Incredibles

Animated Short Film: Ryan

Documentary: Born Into Brothels

Documentary Short Subject: Autism is a World Mighty Times: The Children's March

Editing: The Aviator

Art Direction: The Aviator

Cinematography: A Very Long Engagement The Aviator

Visual Effects: Spider-Man 2

Make-up: The Passion of the Christ Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Costume Design: The Aviator

Original Song: "Accidentally in Love" from Shrek 2 "Al Otro Lado Del Rio" from The Motorcycle Diaries

Original Score: Finding Neverland

Sound Mixing: Ray

Sound Editing: Spider-Man 2 The Incredibles

While there's still 2004 movies to watch through Netflix, it's time to move on. So here's the big list of movies seen in 2004.

Top Ten Movies of the Year
1. The Incredibles
2. Hero
3. Kill Bill: Volume 2
4. Sideways
5. Million Dollar Baby
6. Hotel Rwanda
7. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
8. Collateral
9. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
10. Maria Full of Grace

Bottom Ten Movies of the Year
1. White Chicks
2. Surviving Christmas
3. Thunderbirds
4. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
5. Tremors 4: The Legend Begins
6. Walking Tall
7. King Arthur
8. Alfie
9. The Village
10. Alexander

The Rest
3½ stars

The Bourne Supremacy
The Manchurian Candidate
Miracle

3 stars

13 Going on 30
The Aviator
Before Sunset
Closer
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
The Girl Next Door
Goodbye, Lenin!
Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
In Good Company
Mean Girls
Meet the Fockers
Ray
Shrek 2
Spider-Man 2
Starsky & Hutch
Super Size Me

2½ stars

50 First Dates
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera
Dawn of the Dead
Fahrenheit 9/11
Friday Night Lights
House of Flying Daggers
I, Robot
Jersey Girl
Ladykillers
Man on Fire
Ocean’s Twelve
The Passion of the Christ
Shaun of the Dead
Spartan
The Stepford Wives
Troy

2 stars

The Alamo
Blade: Trinity
The Day After Tomorrow
The Dreamers
Eurotrip
The Grudge
Hellboy
Laws of Attraction
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Napoleon Dynamite
National Treasure
The Notebook
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Team America: World Police
The Terminal
Welcome to Mooseport

1½ stars

A Cinderella Story
Raise Your Voice
Raising Helen
Wimbledon

Million Dollar Baby
Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) is headed toward the last legs of a career as a boxing trainer. His last boxer just left with a new manager. All he has left is the gym he runs with his friend Scrap (Morgan Freeman). A female boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) is eager to be trained by Frankie, but he refuses. So in the corner, she trained and trained until finally, Frankie saw some promise in her. With his help, she becomes the best female boxer in the country. But when tragedy occurs during an international match, Maggie and Frankie together make the most important decision of their lives.

While advertised as a boxing film, the movie is so much more. It takes a lot of character development to build the complexity Million Dollar Baby is able to do, and Eastwood, Freeman, and Swank pass with flying colors, breathing life to a not-so-showy script. Coming in, all three lives were incomplete, needing that final piece to be happy, and together, they manage to complete it in their own way. Eastwood's direction in the film is excellent, showing off the continued high quality of his work. It may not be the best picture of the year (Oscar voters may say differently) but it is certainly one of the best and most emotionally fulfilling. 3.5 stars

Hotel Rwanda
Early in its history, the people of Rwanda were divided into two groups, Tutsis and Hutu. Today, it looked as though peace would be achieved between these two factions, but violence kept them divided. The Hutu threatened to kill every Tutsis in sight, even with the eyes of the world upon them and U.N. peacekeepers doing nothing about it. In the middle of it all, Paul (Don Cheadle) is the manager of a hotel that caters to American and European tourists. Paul, a Hutu, is married to Tatiana, a Tutsis. Once the violence erupts, Paul houses hundreds of Tutsis refugees in the hotel, as U.N. forces withdraw to safer territory. It takes a lot to protect these refugees, constantly paying off his police friends while he pleads with the commander of the U.N. forces and the president of the hotel for help. It's a temporary fix, but time is running out and everything around him crumbles in the mean time.

The film does a really good job showing the inhumane conditions the Rwandans faced during this time of civil war. You can't help but feel for Paul as he himself feels helpless through many junctures of the film until a quick idea leads to a few more days of survival. Cheadle does a great job of conveying this, showing a good face to the crowds but showing how it can take its toll privately. It's also a quick history lesson for those who do not remember the casualties in Rwanda during the crisis in 1994. 3.5 stars

Assault on Precinct 13
Detroit's Precinct 13 is destined to be closed on January 1, to be replaced by a high-tech facility nearby. As a result, it's a bitter goodbye from those who are manning it for the last time, headed by Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) and accompanied by old timer Jasper O'Shea (Brian Dennehy) and secretary Iris (Drea de Matteo). Meanwhile, the police have scored a coup with the arrest of criminal mastermind Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne). Along with a group of other prisoners, they are about to be transported to a different facility until bad weather forces them to nearby Precinct 13. Due to Bishop's involvement with some dirty cops, these cops, led by Gabriel Byrne, want Bishop dead and soon try to storm the police station, but Roenick rounds up what little men and ammunition he has to make a stand.

I don't understand why Byrne's team couldn't take the station by force. Obviously outmanned and outgunned, they could've just blown up the place right? They didn't care that cops were going to be killed and the building was about to be torn down anyway, so why not? So other than their implausible stand, Assault on Precinct 13 makes for some good entertainment, even knowing the fact that it could've been over sooner than the 2 hour running time indicates. 2 stars

Hide and Seek
It's a traumatizing time for the Callaway family. Wife Alison has committed suicide leaving husband David (Robert DeNiro) and daughter Emily (Dakota Fanning) to pick up the pieces. David, himself a psychiatrist, is convinced a move to upstate New York will help his daughter cope with the loss. But after the move, Emily begins to change due to a new imaginary friend of hers named Charlie. While it seems innocent at first, Emily is moving away from the good girl that she was. It's up to David to figure out whether or not Charlie is real or not and how he can get rid of her.

When you figure out the true identity of Charlie (How can you not? It's quite obvious if you follow the clues), the movie goes downhill into a slasher-type flick. Even if you can't figure out the clues, they give him up fairly early into the ending, with about 30 minutes to go. It would have been better to find out more about Charlie (origins, etc.) instead of him terrorizing everybody, but that's the direction they went, which is disappointing because it had more going for it than that. 1.5 stars

Friday Night Lights / Raise Your Voice
These movies are out on DVD but since they came out in October, they still make the list to the left. However, there isn't much to say about them.

Friday Night Lights chronicles the events of a high school football team in Permian Basin, Texas. High school football in Texas is a religion for most folks down there and at this high school, it's no exception. With pressure running high for a state championship, Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) has his hands full. While the talent is there, having them work as a team is another problem. It is this dedication to building bridges in order to achieve one goal brings the team together all the way to the state championship game, even as their star running back gets injured.

While events in the film were changed a little bit to suit Hollywood, it still comes up short in telling a compelling story. However, it is one of the most nicely shot football films I've seen in a while so credit goes to those who made it look so real.

Raise Your Voice concerns a young girl (Hilary Duff) who has dreams of becoming a great singer and helped along by her brother (Jason Ritter), applies to an exclusive summer music program in Los Angeles. But when the two sneak out for a concert, her brother dies in a car accident. Still recovering from his death, nothing can break Terri from her depression, even the news that she was accepted to the program. Her mom (Rita Wilson) and aunt (Rebecca DeMornay) convince her to go and manage to sneak her there under the nose of her father, who highly opposes Terri going. Once there, the competition is fierce but everything Terri puts into her singing is for her brother, giving her the chance to win a coveted scholarship.

This movie shifts back and forth so many times, it never knows when to stop until the movie is over. Duff tries to do here best with the bad material but mainly, she's either smiling or crying. Soon, it eventually becomes a cycle as you await how Terri will become teary and want to leave or when the angry dad appears or when everyone gathers in the quad to jam. Might as well let Duff sing in the movie instead of surrounding it with all that dialogue.

Friday Night Lights: 2.5 stars
Raise Your Voice: 1.5 stars

I was talking with my cousins the other day at the New Year's party and I realized something about the li xi, money, we get every year. For most Asians I know, the older you are, the more you get. For my family though, it seems to be a bell curve. You start out young and you get a few bucks from everyone. Once you hit around junior high or so, earnings multiply quickly. Around high school, you've reached the limit. After that, while money per person remains high, the number of people giving money to you dwindles until finally you're too old. Suddenly, I'm feeling deprived.

With New Year's mostly done (more parties this weekend), Valentine's Day approaches and one of the weirdest commercials I've seen involves buying pajamas for your significant other. While it looks professional, obviously someone just wanted to film ladies in pajamas in bed while spewing out such lines as "also buy some of that spa stuff women love."

Hockey seems more or less doomed as evidenced by the latest proposal and rejection by the owners and players respectively. Those owners are very shrewd. You see, the owners and the players each have their own proposal. The owners said, okay, we'll follow the players' proposal but if it gets too expensive, things will automatically revert to the owners' proposal. But the owners are the ones paying the checks! They can make it expensive whenever they want. Idiots, just get a deal done.

Oscar predictions start Saturday. I did see Million Dollar Baby and Hotel Rwanda, both excellent films. It almost offsets watching Hide and Seek and Assault on Precinct 13. Almost.

Let me be the first, second, or hundredth person to wish you and yours a happy lunar new year.

The State of the Union was tonite and President Bush spoke in surprisingly coherent terms for a very long time for him. All eyes were focused on his proposal for private accounts in Social Security. Democrats argue the system is in no real danger until 2042. Bush argues the system will pay out more in benefits than it will take in through taxes in 2018 meaning steps must be taken now in order to prevent insolvency. I do believe the system must be fixed but not in the drastic terms Bush wants to take it. Raise the cap on payroll taxes, change the way benefits are paid out, or even raise the retirement age before even considering private accounts, something too complicated and expensive to do right now.

Funniest moment of the night? Senator Joe Biden of Delaware started to applaud after President Bush's request for more money toward Palestine, but when no one applauded with him, he stopped and let out a silent "damn."

So the Orioles realized, hey, we gotta field a team this year, eh? Let's see who we can get.

Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado are out there. Nope, we gotta re-sign B.J. Surhoff.

How about Carl Pavano or Pedro or even Derek Lowe and Matt Clement? We need an ace for the rotation. Oh wait, we need aging middle relief. Let's get Steve Kline and Steve Reed. And don't forget that Asian pitcher that pitched a few games for us last year Bruce Chen.

I know, we're suckers for comeback stories. Go out and sign Tony Saunders and James Baldwin.

As you can see, the team hasn't come close to the success we had in free agency last year when the Orioles obtained Tejada, Javy Lopez, and Palmeiro. This year, they've taken stabs at Pavano and Delgado with no success and you can't blame the money. The Orioles basically threw as much money as they wanted to and still couldn't get them. Does Angelos still have that negative effect on the team? Maybe, maybe not.

So tonite, word comes that Sammy Sosa will be traded here. How fun. This could be the biggest acquisition for the team (save for Miggy) since Albert Belle. Hmm, that name should send shivers. He basically was the greatest cause for the team's demise for the last 5 years as his contract ate up most of the money the Orioles had. While successful prior to his arrival, Belle only played 2 years while the team paid for 5. Now Sosa arrives, obviously on the back end of his career. Hopefully, he experiences a revival with a change of scenery. If his production stays constant from what he's done for the last couple of years, I'd say he'd be worth it given what we're giving up (Hairston, a couple of minor leaguers from our weak system, and probably Julio too, expendable since Ryan takes the closer role this year). But if he turns out to be another Belle, say hello to the cellar.

Tragedy struck in Glendale in the form of an accident involving 3 trains and a SUV. And if it weren't for the 11 deaths and the 200 people injured, the circumstances surrounding this incident borders on comedic.

A man decided to commit suicide so he drove his car onto some railroad tracks and waited. And waited. And waited. Soon, the train was coming. Suddenly, he had a change of heart. He wanted to live. So he got out of the car and walked away. Ehh, forgot one thing. He positioned the car so that it was stuck in the tracks and couldn't move it. As a result, the train hit the car, derailed, hit another train coming from the opposite direction and then hit another train, idling on the side.

Good one, guy. Might as well have gone through with it instead of going through the pain and suffering now.

Oscar nominations were announced this morning and while there were some surprises, it's a wide-open race. Where's Paul Giamatti? The Aviator got how many?

The nominations can be found here. My predictions will start in February. I was correct on 15 and 16 of them the last two years but I don't think I'll match that this year. The only true lock among the majors this year is Jamie Foxx for Ray.

With all the celebrities in the news, I figured out that if you're a stalker, you can get steady employment in the news business. How else to explain the blow-by-blow account on what happened on the island where Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston broke up including video of their boat ride and the home they were staying in. Or the news that, "at this theatre, Johnny Carson went to see The Aviator one week prior to his death." People don't want to know these things, right?

My run-in with celebrity last weekend was at my cousin's wedding where one of the invited guests was the female announcer from those Paris by Night videos. Honestly, they're up to a million of those by now, aren't they?