Joe Son, a man best known for his role as Random Task in the first Austin Powers and a brief career as a fighter that saw him go 0-4 as an MMA fighter and 0-1 as a kickboxer (though he did famously get punched in the dick a lot and showed up to one fight in a thong and white eyeliner), was convicted today for his part in a 1990 gang rape in Orange County. 

Joseph Hyungmin Son was found guilty of one felony count of torture Thursday. A statute of limitations had expired on other counts. Prosecutors say Son and an accomplice pulled the victim into a car on Christmas Eve in 1990 and drove her toward Huntington Beach as they beat her with a gun and raped her.
The investigation had gone cold until Son was required to provide a DNA sample in 2008 in connection with a vandalism sentence.
He faces a maximum sentence of 15 years to life in state prison. [SFGate via CagePotato]

I posted a slightly more detailed account of the crime back when he was first arrested:

Son, along with a second suspect, is accused of dragging the victim into the back of a car, pistol whipping her, threatening her life at gun point while he counted the bullets in his gun, and raping, sodomizing, and forcing her to orally copulate him repeatedly, according to a release from the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. Son is also accused of sexually penetrating the victim with his firearm before she was released naked with her pants tied around her eyes.

Aw, he sounds like a real neat guy. And speaking of forced oral copulation at gun point, Mike Myers is writing Austin Powers 4.

The other day after posting my most recent rape van submission (as the internet’s number one destination for vannin’ and rape-van related van pictures, it happens all the time), a friend asked, “Wait, is every van a rape van?”

I believe this to be one of the most important questions we face today.  Is simply being a van enough?  Everyone understands vans to be the rapiest of vehicles (except for the owner of the above van, who still disputes this conclusion), like non-commercial incarnations of semi tractor trailer cabs. But are they all rapey?  The easy answer is that some are more rapey than others.  A Mazda MPV, for instance, is not very rapey, due in no small part to the abundance of windows.  However, there exists no one perfect equation that can accurately determine the rapeyness of a particular van.  Like the Supreme Court justice famously said of obscenity, “I can’t tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it.”  The same is true of Rape Vans.  So come with me, as we explore just what makes a van rapey or righteous.

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It didn’t seem to bode well for the movie, when in the first trailer for Your Highness, the centerpiece joke was a guy falling down.  The red-band trailer was a huge improvement, but even in that, Natalie Portman’s butt sort of stole the show.  You can hardly blame them, she’s an Oscar winner.  If I made a movie with Meryl Streep’s bush in it, it wouldn’t matter what it was about, Meryl Streep’s bush would be the selling point.  Maybe even the name of my first born.  In any case, early word is that Your Highness does indeed have stuff besides Natalie Portman’s butt in it, and 85% of that stuff is cow boners.   As Danny McBride recently told Opie and Anthony:

“We have a minotaur hard-on in the film.  …And it’s full hard.  There is a rape scene with a minotaur and a man.  You see the minotaur… get his sh*t going.  You apparently can’t show a male hard-on, but since this was a minotaur, we said it was the bull which was getting turned on.  Because the bull is the bottom half.  You can get away with that if it’s creature hard-ons.”

I’ve admitted this before, but one of my ultimate guilty pleasure movies is Freddy Got Fingered, which probably has a lot to do with seeing it when I was really high.  And of course the signature scene in that film is Tom Green holding up an erect horse penis shouting, “Daddy, I’m a farmer!”  I guess what I’m trying to say is that if your film has big erect farm animal penises, my only question is where to buy popcorn.  Wow, you can practically hear my graduate school professors beaming with pride right now.

[thanks to Robopanda for the tip]

"Hmm, I don't know, I think it might look nicer if he raped her over there."

Last month brought the news that Angelina Jolie’s permit to shoot her directorial debut in Bosnia had been revoked over concerns that it was about a rape victim falling in love with her rapist.  To prove that the rumors weren’t true, Jolie provided a script to Bosnia’s culture minister and her permit was reinstated, but even that hasn’t stopped rape victim groups from calling her “ignorant” in a fresh round of protests.  That’s good, refuse to read that script. It’ll probably just be full of more ignorance, but I guess we’ll never know for sure.

“Angelina Jolie’s ignorant attitude towards victims says enough about the scenario and gives us the right to continue having doubts about it,” the Women Victims of War (WVW) association said in a letter published Monday.

“She didn’t come to our dinner party so now we’re justified in hating a script we haven’t read.”

According to the synopsis, the movie is a wartime love story between a Serb guard in a prison camp and a Muslim detainee, his former girlfriend.
Jolie said at the time she wanted to meet the associations that had complained about her film to clear up any misunderstandings, but the meeting never took place.

“We have insisted to meet Angelina Jolie since we don’t want to be wrongly presented in the world … Our voices are worthwhile and we should have got much more respect,” the WVW letter said. “Angelina made a big mistake. We feel that she did not act like a real UNHCR ambassador and we believe that she has no more credibility to remain the ambassador,” it concluded.

WVW head Bakira Hasecic said Jolie invited the victims to meet her in the Hungarian capital but they refused the invitation.

“Crimes were committed here, in Bosnia, and we want to meet her here,” Hasecic told AFP. “We wanted to talk woman to woman. She should have asked after the victims before the shooting to hear our voice.”

“As far as we are concerned a love story could not have existed in a camp. Such an interpretation is causing us mental suffering,” she stressed. [AFP]

Silly Bakira, it’s not the filmmaker’s job to ask “what is,” but rather “what if?”  They’re a lot like rapists in that way.

[Related viewing: The Rape of Richard Beck]

I’ve got lots of stories from this weekend to cover, but I’ll be damned if I spend all week playing catch up. So here are some of the headlines:

The Scream Awards happened. (Dammit, Aronofsky, not again! Quick, get the hose!) Last night, Blake Lively presented her Green Lantern co-star Ryan Reynolds the award for “Most Anticipated Movie,” Hollywood’s most coveted award, as decided by the president of show business.  I guess those Oscars are looking pretty stupid now, eh, Streep?  They also revealed the first photo of the power battery from Green Lantern, about which I know nothing, but gather may be of interest to huge dorks.  Also, they showed a trailer for Scream 4 which you can watch below.  It’s at least as fascinating as that sounds.  Oh, and it may still be titled “Scre4m.”  Airing Tuesday, the show promises to be Spike’s most important work since Blue Mountain State. [ComingSoon]

Mel Gibson has a cameo in The Hangover 2.  Gibson will play a tattoo artist in the film, which is set in Thailand.  By now, it’s a tired cliché that every broad comedy has to have a cameo from a big star in the middle, but give Todd Philips credit for at least having the balls to have his be Mel Gibson. Ten bucks says the studio was pushing for Betty White as Galifianakis’ wacky grandma. |WWTDD|

Angelina Jolie’s rape movie got its permit back.  Bosnia originally denied Jolie a permit to film there after it was rumored that the film was about a Bosnian woman who falls in love with her rapist, a Serbian soldier.  Jolie has since been given permission to shoot there, which presumably means the culture minister read the script and the rumors were wrong, although it is suspicious that he’s recently been seen gallivanting around town with a new blade on his plow.   [Yahoo]

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