Guess who is....

[Daiquiri Van-Derveld]

...going to be the big 20?!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Jonathan!! :D

[CMJ]

Wow, Bowen at 20...who'd a thunk it. ;)

Congrats big guy. :D

[JMK]

Wow, seems like just yesterday when a 17 year old critic came here and shook up the forum! :lol

Have a good one!

[CMJ]

Nah, I remember when he was 16. ;)

[Diego Van Derveld]

Congratulations, you're 20. Now you can do....well....NOTHING!

I hated 20, but congrats nonetheless.

[CMJ]

Twenty seemed like a big deal to me. I couldn't get over the fact I was 2 decades old.

I ended up depressed mostly. ;)

[Mu Satach]

Hippy Day Dood!

[Diego Van Derveld]

Yeah...I was terribly depressed at 20.

Terribly depressed at 21 too, since it fell on a sunday, and all bars were closed, so I got to STUDY.

Twenty-two, however, was fun :) I made up for 2 crappy birthdays.

[CMJ]

Being that I don't drink...every birthday after 19 has made me depressed to some degree.

Though people being nice to me and giving me stuff is always awesome. ;)

[Diego Van Derveld]

Well if you drink, they give you free drinks, so HEY!

Though you'll usually tag along with sadists to all the local bars, who insist on ordering you Prarie Fires, Cement Mixers, or Four Horsemen...none of which I'd recommend very highly.

[Jedi Master Carr]

Happy Birthday Jon. And CMJ if you thought 20 was bad wait till you get to 25 its worse :p you realize about a 1/4 of your life is over.

[BUFFJEDI]

Well, happy Birthday Wild man. DANG 20 years old!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's all down hill from here big guy:D

[darth_mcbain]

Yeah - happy birthday... Hope it's a good one... :)

[CMJ]

Carr, believe me I'm dreading the quarter century mark already. :(

[Diego Van Derveld]

I don't want to think about 25. I'm already at the point where getting older isn't cool anymore.

[CMJ]

Getting older being cool stopped for me around 19 or 20. :p

I'm about 7 months from the dreaded 2-5. :( Hard for me NOT to think about it.

[Admiral Lebron]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!


hehehe. Hope its good.

And here I am feeling all old and stuff at ... 15.. :(

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Happy Birthday! I've got three years on you, and believe me, it just gets better...until you hit 22. >_< Sucks at 23. ;)

[JonathanLB]

Hey, cool, thanks! I guarantee more people here will have wished me happy birthday than in real life -- pretty sad, but that's the way it goes, lol.

Everyone is really busy with finals and all of that. I have a Geo final tonight from 6-8, so I have to drive back after that for a really late "Birthday dinner" or whatever.

I read in my Psych book that at 20, your brain officially stops growing or something, so dang, this is going to make it harder to learn more! :) haha, j/k

Diego, that is pretty funny. Yeah I've had a few lousy birthdays here and there.

I think probably the stupidest birthday I ever had was when I was about 14 and the infamous "Wind Storm" hit Portland and the water levels rose past flood levels, then the trees falling all over the place knocked out power in many places, including at our old house for three days and our generator wasn't working. Well, my birthday was the first day of the power outage and everything I had asked for was, of course, electronic! I had all of these video games... and they were just about as useful as oddly shaped paperweights. There was not one thing I could use. I was just so bummed, I mean to get stuff you really want at the time, but you can't use at all, that's just kind of lame.

The only good part was that I got school off that day, but to be honest I was bored out of my mind. You know on a snow day, you have snow outside, you can go mess around with that... but this wasn't a snow day! There was no snow, there was no power. It was difficult even to read because it's a pain in the butt to hold a flashlight to the book. I cannot even remember what I did all day.

Last year was a good birthday actually, it'll end up being a lot better than today because I got home about 4:30 from Los Angeles and had a full dinner with relatives and all that stuff, plus it was nice to be done with LMU's first semester after such a horrible time down there. Very relieving. Ironic that I should finish two years in a row on my birthday, but oh well. Then after I got back from LMU, I took 10 months off basically! :)

Unfortunately I think today is just going to be a work day for me mostly, I have a lot of stuff to do. I just finished updating JLB Movies last night but I have 7 reviews I've not written yet for movies I've seen and as I keep trying to catch up I keep falling behind. I finished the term with 130 reviews roughly from 10 weeks.

I must have forgotten this is only 2-0 and not 2-1 because I had a couple alcoholic drinks last night ;) lol. I just finished my film comedy final in English 125 and it was honestly the most grueling test I've ever done. It took 2 hours and I wrote more than 10 notebook pages on these 9 film clips that the professor showed and let us comment on. I basically didn't take the pen off the page for two hours straight. I would assume I did really well though because I knew this stuff inside and out and I noticed other students were putting their pens down after like 5 minutes on each clip and couldn't think of more to say, lol! I never finished saying what I knew after the full time was up, but he has to cut us some slack because 2 hours isn't enough to write everything i know about film comedy...

1 more year until 21! CMJ, wow, yeah 25 will be pretty weird. That's the point which every day after you are kind of going towards your "late 20's" and that's just weird. I always thought the 20's were the time you really build the start of your career, then in the 30's you solidify your position and move upwards further, and by the 40's I always thought you should be enjoying the fruits of your labor from then on out, haha. :)

[ReaperFett]

According to IMDB, noone is 20 today. Jennifer Connelly is 32 though :)





Happy Birthday Jon :)

[Diego Van Derveld]

Nothing wrong with underage drinking :)

Just don't get sick or become a crazy alcoholic.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

I'm dying to go out drinking in mixed company. I need a slight excuse to be ....ignorant. :mischief

Hope your day is better than your 14th, Jonathan. :)

[BUFFJEDI]

Originally posted by Lilaena De'Ville
I'm dying to go out drinking in mixed company. I need a slight excuse to be ....ignorant. :mischief

How You Doing !!??!!!;)

[Diego Van Derveld]

You know, I tried partying with you, but NOOO...you weren't in the mood to :lol

[CMJ]

:lol :lol ROTFLMAO Buff!!!!!!! :lol :lol

[Dae Jinn]

:lol

But what will Bea think Buff??!?!?!?! ;) :lol

Happy birthday Jon :)

[JonathanLB]

Check out what else I got on my birthday!

From my agent, Richard Curtis (he practically never sends me, lol):

Dear Jonathan:

As you know, we represent Leonard Maltin, and because I'm so impressed by your skills and interests, I wrote Leonard asking if he had an opening on the research staff he uses to screen and write up films for his annual TV MOVIES guide. Unfortunately he doesn't, but invited you to send a resume and some samples of your work to me to forward to him to keep on file for possible future use. If this interests you, put a package together and send it to me and mark it for my attention to be send to Leonard Maltin.

That would be pretty sweet!

I am fairly sure that when I write this book on film comedy, I will be able to get an endorsement from Leonard Maltin and from my professor here at OSU, Jon Lewis, who is a five-time author and film expert himself. So that would already be two huge experts giving credibility to that book, when I get around to it. (That's the book after next, likely more like next summer, late in the summer).

[Master Yoghurt]

Happy Birthday, Jon :)

[JediBoricua]

Happy Birthday Man!


20 years, i'll catch you on september.

[BUFFJEDI]

Originally posted by Dae Jinn
:lol

But what will Bea think Buff??!?!?!?! ;) :lol


:lol

I will not tell If you don't ;)

[Dae Jinn]

;) Sure thing...:lol

[BUFFJEDI]

Thanks, your a Pal;)

[Dae Jinn]

Ummmm, yeah.

*scurries off to voodoo curse people*

[Admiral Lebron]

What about mosquito bites?!

[BUFFJEDI]

OUCH!!! Is that a needle?, or are you happy to see me;)




No worries Admiral, there's enough to go round:lol J/K

[JonathanLB]

Thanks all for your kind wishes.

I'm driving back to Portland now for winter break, whoo hoo!

25 days off for me, I think. Lots and lots of movies, but I won't be updating JLB Movies until after the break (the computer at home is too pathetic to allow me to use my FTP and DreamWeaver Ultra Dev and I don't want to have to download all of the files and edit them; I'll just update later with this computer).

I just took my geo final, lol. Man that was so lame. Ok, half the questions were incredibly easy, and then like 20% of them were just ridiculous, I had no idea what the hell they were talking about and didn't remember any of it. Nobody will get those right except through guessing, I guarantee that. But I don't care, I needed only a 50% to get my A in the class and I'm sure I broke into the C range. I'm guessing I got like an 80%, but I'd say between 70 and 85 is most likely, there is just like no way I got an A, not unless my guessing was incredibly awesome. Not important, as I said, though, so whatever.

My friend Bryan gave me Blood Simple (the Coen brothers film) for my birthday, hehe. That's cool, I've never seen it. Looks good.

[CMJ]

Oh man Jonathan...I LOVE "Blood Simple"!!!!!

[Jedi Master Carr]

Thats cool Jon. It would be cool to work for Maltin be careful what you say about AOTC though ;) And CMJ, I didn't realize you were approaching 25, well there is one good thing about it your insurance rate would go down.

[JonathanLB]

I like that Carr, looking on the bright side :)

My drive back to Portland was terrible! It was actually challenging and that's pretty odd because driving is, well, usually easy. Turn your brain off, watch where you're going and think about whatever and you get there. I mean I-5 is straight. Well I was going about 65-70 almost the entire time, not even over the speed limit, at one point I slowed to 60 as it got particularly hard to see. The rain was intense and the darkness didn't help, I just couldn't see that well.

Hey ok so here is what I got for my birthday when I got back (CMJ you'll probably be interested in a few of these that I am sure you've seen and I have not yet):

I got the Criterion Collection 4-DVD set of some of Akira Kurosawa's greatest films, Yojimbo, The Hidden Fortress, Seven Samurai, and Sanjuro (I know almost nothing about this fourth one...). Then I got this awesome limited edition DVD set with 3 more Kurosawa films, there are only 5,000 of these sets, mine was #0999 (kinda cool). It has "Kurosawa," "Ran," and "Madadayo," along with a really nice collectors edition box with a poster and a booklet and some other board like thing. It's a great presentation.

On the low-brow side, I got South Park Season One (I wanted this) and the South Park movie, which I thought was hilarious -- I'm not alone, considering that Time, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal gave it great reviews on the cover and back of the DVD case, hehe. Our film comedy teacher played it as part of his class too. Great social satire, actually. Not as low-brow as one might initially think, IMO, hehe.

I never actually owned my own copies of Gattaca or The Truman Show, two of my top 50 favorite movies or so, maybe top 100 in the case of Gattaca, top 10 w/ Truman Show. So I got those two. Andrew Niccol directed Gattaca and wrote The Truman Show and he also directed Simone, which was, I think, only his 2nd major directorial effort. I absolutely love his work. So far, in my book, he has done no wrong. I just love Gattaca, I think it's a really powerful movie. As many critics said, a thinking man's sci-fi film. The way it is paced is one of my favorite parts of it, the cinematography, the almost ponderous nature of it, which doesn't work with some films but worked for me on Gattaca.

Among a few other not-so-important films, Mr. Deeds, Reign of Fire, and Collateral Damage (I'm an Arnold completist and it was enjoyable, just nothing special). Oh and Bicentennial Man but I happen to love that movie. I think it's a masterpiece... the critics hated it mostly.

I also got One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I've seen it twice, love it, had to own it.

X-Files Season Six too, so I have all of the first 6 seasons, which is what is available.

Plus aside from the DVDs, I got a new pair of Oakleys, bringing my total to 7 (and at $200-350 each, that's not bad! LOL). These are the Emerald kind. I have Plasma Ice, Fire Iridium, plain black (I never wear these... hmm...), Gold (most expensive, most sophisticated, hehe), and two plastic-framed fire iridium pairs that are each different slightly. The last two are the kind that run "only" a few hundred instead of $300-350.

I got a new Sensa pen too, I have a rather large Sensa collection going along with my Oakley collection. The Sensa one is kind of dotted, it's really neat, far different from the others I have. I think I have 13 Sensa pens now. Most are like $50, but this one and two others are $100. They're the higher end kinds. I really want the $220 24k gold one sometime :)

I'm anxious to watch these Kurosawa films. No idea if I'll really make an effort to get to any of them during break because I'm in a mad dash to finish the AFI Top 100 before break is over if at all possible (or come to 90/100 at least), but we'll see. Soon.

Bryan was joking that it's hard to find a movie I've not seen, which may seem true to some people, but I'm very humble in that respect -- I can think of at least 1,000 significant, classic films I've never seen. I mean I couldn't name them all, but I would just say AFI Top 100 comedy, top 400 nominees for the greatest list (I've not seen at least half of these I bet), 100 greatest sci-fi/horror movies according to cinescape (I've seen maybe 40 or 50 at most), etc. I guarantee there are 1,000 major movies I have never seen and furthermore there are about 2,000 I'm trying to get through before I get out of college. The number of great movies available is rather daunting...