Word: ben
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...late-night stoned discussion of Seattle's annual HUMP! - a film festival for amateur pornographers - Andrew makes his "you, me and a camera" proposal. The film will be "beyond gay," and a likely festival winner, he thinks. But primarily, it's an insult to Ben, a gauntlet thrown down in the battle of the lifestyles, with the subtext, You're too square for this. (Andrew's main defense in life is that he's resolutely not square...
...Ben and Andrew have been friends since college, but now that they're in their 30s, that friendship has become mostly a fond memory, now close to dormancy. Ben (Mark Duplass) has been busy making a life for himself in Seattle, acquiring a steady job, a house and a wife - doe-eyed Anna (Alycia Delmore), who is warm and kind and really gets him. Andrew (Joshua Leonard) is one of those carefree, just-back-from-Machu Picchu types, reliable mostly for being unreliable. Both men are at that stage of life where the costumes they've been trying...
...Andrew, a wife, even a nice one like Anna, is by definition a ball and chain. Arriving uninvited and unannounced in the middle of the night, he is wildly enthusiastic, proclaiming his love for Ben with ferocious bear hugs and many "I love you, man"s. Anna he waggles his finger at, telling her, "And you. I don't love you yet, but I will." (This might be a threat.) Her eyebrows arch delicately, conveying not just mild horror but consternation over her own reaction. She knows she's too cool to be ruffled and jealous...
...only takes Andrew an afternoon to befriend a like-minded, co-op-dwelling bisexual (played by the multitasking Shelton), who invites him over for an evening of drugs, dancing and experimental thinking, if not actions. Andrew persuades Ben to drop by to meet his new friend. "It's a little weird," Ben tells Anna on the phone, promising he'll be home in time for dinner. "The place is called Dionysus, and they aren't kidding." Wanting to please both friend and wife, he's torn. In the end, the desire to be as hip as he believed himself...
...Have Ben Bernanke's green shoots magically turned into tropical forests overnight? Hardly. There may be some justification for how stock-market indexes in the U.S. and Hong Kong have soared from their lows in March, when it seemed the global economy was sliding off a cliff. But this incipient IPO mania is a different story. Investors are bidding up the stocks of Chinese companies not because their shares had been unfairly pummeled, but because of expectations for future growth that...