What the Hell Happened To Me?

I don't understand what happened. One day, I was twenty-two years old. I showed a lot of promise, both as a musician and as a writer. I was well-liked; I was sociable.

Then I woke up the next day and took stock of my life. I'm thirty-four. I'm s fat. I've stopped socializing, and keep mostly to myself. I've become cranky. Surly. My back hurts all the time, no doubt owing itself to my excessive weight. I have a job where I was miserable and not making much money, but I don't know what to do. I need the little bit of money I make, even though I'm living hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck. I'm trying to save up enough money to take a trip home to Ohio so my girlfriend can meet my mother, and I'm finding it difficult. Life keeps getting in the way of saving money.

I look around at my peers and I don't understand how they do it. Many of them seem happy. They have children. Families. They own cars - I don't own a car. Some of them own houses, which I'm pretty sure I'll never own. They have adult jobs doing adult things and they take their adult vacations to adult destinations.

They go to wine tastings.

They hang out with their friends.

They look amazing. Seriously, they all look fucking amazing!

I wonder if, on the surface, my life looks really glamorous to them. After all, I work at a talent agency in Hollywood. I'm involved in the entertainment industry. Growing up in Ohio, I never would have imagined I'd end up here. To them, perhaps I've arrived. To me, I have a shitty job and don't even really take the steps necessary to get to where I want to be.

I mean, I'm a screenwriter who hasn't written a word in a month. Instead, I play MLB 2K11.

But I do take day trips to cool places. I hike along the coast. I discover hidden gems in the Santa Monica Mountains. To them, it's quite possible that my life looks pretty amazing.

But I'm fucking miserable. I have a tooth coming out. Did I mention that? It's disgusting, but not surprising. I'm thirty-four years old and I've never been to a dentist. Not as a child, not as an adult. I don't have insurance. I can't afford to go to the dentist, but I'm going to go on Monday morning. My first trip ever to the dentist.

What the fuck is wrong with me.

Karma Chameleon

There was an old woman sitting maybe ten feet from me. A kindly old woman with a blue button-up cardigan over her maroon turtleneck. Black slacks, because this is the kind of old woman who would never dream of wearing denim.

It had been raining earlier in the day, so her umbrella wasn't entirely out of place, though the large yellow smiley faces didn't quite mesh with the rest of her ensemble. It looked old; rarely-used. Perhaps it belonged to one of her children. After they had moved out of the house, she was cleaning their rooms and came across it. Being the pragmatic woman that she no doubt was, she set it aside for - literally - a rainy day. On her way out of the house this morning, it was the first umbrella she'd seen, and she'd grabbed it.

Anything to keep out of the rain.

I wasn't eavesdropping. I hear things. I don't try to; I just do. What caught my ear was her proclamation:

"God must be on his side, then. But He's on the wrong side. I don't know why God would be on the wrong side, but He is, because he's wrong about this. I know it in my heart."

The rant wasn't odd in and of itself. It wouldn't ordinarily have caught my attention if it weren't for the umbrella. The old, rusty umbrella. The unreliable umbrella.

Punctuating her heretical dialogue was this umbrella. It was a collapsible umbrella, and it popped open midway through the first sentence. She closed it and held it to her chest, presumably to keep it closed. But it popped open, the handle smacking her in the jaw. She closed it once more and laid it across her lap, where it popped out once again, hitting the woman at whom she was monologuing.

This continued, and it struck me that if I was the type of person who believed in a God, this would have profound significance. All of her expounding on the wrong merits of this particular decision by God aside, she struck me as someone who believed in Him. And the fact that she was doubting him -- and getting pelted by an inanimate object in the process -- didn't seem to alarm her at all.

Which makes one think about all the miracles we miss. All the signs we miss. All the warning signals that happen around us but go unnoticed; unheralded.

Or maybe it was just a faulty umbrella, after all.

On The Slate

I've never been a big fan of Slate magazine. They tend to write lazy, sexist commentary that makes no contribution of any value. "Ten Ways To Please A Man." This only works if the list goes something like this:

1. Show up.

That's it.

But today, I read a wonderful treatise by Marisa Meltzer on the state of the slacker movie.

But that's also a problem with the genre: Slackers are always childlike men, and the objects of their affection always women with their acts together, as if slacking is a uniquely male vocation. Women in these movies are never equals; they may be able to parse the finer points of Josie and the Pussycats, but the issues that really occupy them aren't pop culture ephemera, but marriage, money, and babies. If male slackers are stuck in a permanent state of adolescence, all deep thoughts and long talks and sleeping in, then women are agents of growing up and getting a grip, two things that could harsh any slacker's mellow.

This point particularly hit home with me.

I've always walked a fine line with the role women play in modern American cinema. The romantic comedy genre is littered with women whose role is to change the protagonist - to mold him to their own idea of perfection. They are, on the whole, underwritten and two-dimensional characters with very little going on in their own lives beyond getting their male counterparts to jump through proverbial hoops in an effort to "prove" themselves. To match some image of perfection.

On the rare occasion that an empowering movie with strong female characters comes along, it's an oddity. It's slapped with a label - "chick flick" or "feminist film" - in a subconscious effort to highlight how out of the norm it is. If something shows women to be capable creatures with lives outside of the men that populate their worlds, it must have some sort of an agenda.

I can't say that I've done a great job in my own writing of breaking this paradigm. Regarding my first full-length play, a prominent New York critic said this:

"He writes women with breathtaking ease, treating them not as a gender either greater or lesser, but as human beings - in entertainment, a distinction generally afforded only to males."

But since that piece, my female characters have gotten exponentially weaker.

I have two current projects in the works - one is in pre-production, and while it features three very strong female characters, each is introduced only as a means of "testing" the male lead. The second is still in the script stage. It's an historical drama - a true story about a female explorer who broke barriers in the early twentieth century. But her primary motivation, in real life at least, was to avenge her deceased husband.

Not that my character in the film has to match this motivation. Because of the nature of her journey, her husband's death is vital. But does that have to be the only motivation, or even the primary motivation? It's a difficult model to break - the female who is only special because she is female. Who relies on her gender to separate herself from her peers. Who lacks any sort of distinction in character or achievement beyond that.

So the problem goes beyond the slacker genre, or even beyond romantic comedies. Even beyond romance. It permeates the film industry, and I can't help but think that breaking out of this mold is a vital step in reshaping the way Americans think about gender.

It's something to think about, at any rate. Portraying women as human beings. There just might be something to it, after all.

Marty

Martin Scorsese has finally won his Oscar, sparing him from the dubious distinction shared by directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick of standing as a paramount figure in his field, virtually unparalleled by his peers, but unable to win a contested Oscar.

Hitchcock, unlike the others, at least helmed one Best Picture winner with Rebecca, his American debut (and some might argue one of the least "Hitchcockian" movies he ever worked on). Scorsese's pictures kept running against bad luck.

In 1976, Taxi Driver got knocked out by Rocky. Scorsese announced a rematch four years later with his own boxing movie, Raging Bull, which was muted by Ordinary People. The next Best Picture nomination wouldn't come until ten years later, 1990, when Goodfellas was whacked by Dances With Wolves. In 2002, Gangs of New York was mobbed by Chicago. Two years later, he would lose to yet another boxing movie when The Aviator went the distance with Million Dollar Baby, only to lose once more.

Not a Forrest Gump or a Titanic in the bunch. All of them legitimately great movies, all of which have aged extremely well (though looking back, many of the Academy voters might feel differently about Goodfellas against Dances With Wolves.)

Five director nominations. To whom has he lost? Robert Redford (Ordinary People), Barry Levinson (Rain Man), Kevin Costner (Dances With Wolves), Roman Polanski (The Pianist), and Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby). Not bad company to be in, all things considered.

But it's all moot now. He's broken through. How perfect that among his presenters were Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola -- it felt like an old Hollywood moment. Like now we've taken care of this small piece of business and we can move on into our glory years.

And make no mistake - this was very much a Lifetime Achievement Award for Scorsese. He assembled a top-notch acting corps and handed them a terrific script. He didn't have to be nearly as masterful a director with this genre film as he had to with The Aviator or even as far back as Mean Streets. From a directorial standpoint, it was nothing earth-shattering - certainly not as impressive as Alejandro González Iñárritu's work on Babel. But the Oscars are not wholly about the best man at the best time. Sometimes they are about not repeating mistakes.

When you watched the audience applaud Scorsese, you could feel the love and the respect. Here's a man who has toiled long and hard for his craft; someone who has given so much to so many. And while he was being snubbed by the awards presenters, he kept a smile on his face. He kept plugging away, and you could always tell he maintained his love for cinema.

So congratulations to the Academy Awards for getting this one right. The Best Picture announcement was almost an afterthought; denouement after the evening's climax. Forest Whitaker's and Helen Mirren's awards were merely preludes to the fireworks. Because it was clearly Martin Scorsese's night. And a better night is not often had.

Oscar Grouch

Until very recently, I never really got into the Oscars. When asked about it, I was the first to point out that Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Ridley Scott, David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, Stanley Kramer, Norman Jewison, James Ivory, and Peter Weir have combined for a grand total of zero Best Director awards - proof enough for me that the award is a sham.

But last year, I got excited because I was desperate to see Crash overcome Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, despite all the buzz building in the opposite direction. This year, I've got a similar mission: I want to see Martin Scorsese win Best Director.

It's my opinion that Scorsese's problem hasn't been the quality of his work. No one can deny that. It's that his films always seem to butt up against other great films. Lately, he and Eastwood have gotten into the same cycle, with Eastwood coming out the victor so far. This year, Eastwood has been building a lot of great buzz once again.

And for a good reason. Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese may be the two best directors in American cinema today. They simply never seem to miss. Even on Scorsese's bad projects (I'm looking at you, Gangs of New York,) the direction is nearly flawless. The technical filmmaking is brilliant. Actors give the best performances of their careers (Cameron Diaz was wretched in GONY, but still better than I've ever seen her be in anything else).

And I think - and hope - that The Departed puts him over the top.

In other news, I think it's a shame that Children of Men didn't get a Best Picture nomination. Really terrific film - check it out post haste.

So without further ado, my Oscars picks:

Actor -- Leading

• Leonardo DiCaprio -- Blood Diamond


• Ryan Gosling -- Half Nelson


• Peter O'Toole -- Venus


• Will Smith -- The Pursuit of Happyness


• Forest Whitaker -- The Last King of Scotland

Actress -- Leading

• Penelope Cruz -- Volver


• Judi Dench -- Notes on a Scandal


• Helen Mirren -- The Queen


• Meryl Streep -- The Devil Wears Prada


• Kate Winslet -- Little Children

Actor -- Supporting

• Alan Arkin -- Little Miss Sunshine


• Jackie Earle Haley -- Little Children


• Djimon Hounsou -- Blood Diamond


• Eddie Murphy -- Dreamgirls


• Mark Wahlberg -- The Departed

Actress -- Supporting

• Adriana Barraza -- Babel


• Cate Blanchett -- Notes on a Scandal


• Abigail Breslin -- Little Miss Sunshine


• Jennifer Hudson -- Dreamgirls


• Rinko Kikuchi -- Babel

Directing

• Alejandro González Iñárritu -- Babel


• Martin Scorsese -- The Departed


• Clint Eastwood -- Letters from Iwo Jima


• Stephen Frears -- The Queen


• Paul Greengrass -- United 93

Best Picture

• Babel


• The Departed


• Letters From Iwo Jima


• Little Miss Sunshine


• The Queen

Animated Feature

• Cars


• Happy Feet


• Monster House

Art Direction

• Dreamgirls


• The Good Shepherd


• Pan's Labyrinth


• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest


• The Prestige

Cinematography

• The Black Dahlia


• Children of Men


• The Illusionist


• Pan's Labyrinth


• The Prestige

Costume Design

• Curse of the Golden Flower


• The Devil Wears Prada


• Dreamgirls


• Marie Antoinette


• The Queen

Original Song

• "I Need to Wake Up" -- An Inconvenient Truth


• "Listen" -- Dreamgirls


• "Love You I Do" -- Dreamgirls


• "Our Town" -- Cars


• "Patience" -- Dreamgirls

Original Score

• Babel


• The Good German


• Notes on a Scandal


• Pan's Labyrinth


• The Queen

Makeup

• Apocalypto


• Click


• Pan's Labyrinth

Foreign Language Film

• After the Wedding


• Days of Glory


• The Lives of Others


• Pan's Labyrinth


• Water

Film Editing

• Babel


• Children of Men


• Blood Diamond


• The Departed


• United 93

Documentary Short

• The Blood of Yingzhou District


• Recycled Life


• Rehearsing a Dream


• Two Hands

Documentary Feature

• Deliver Us From Evil


• An Inconvenient Truth


• Iraq in Fragments


• Jesus Camp


• My Country, My Country

Short Film -- Animated

• The Danish Poet


• Lifted


• The Little Matchgirl


• Maestro


• No Time For Nuts

Short Film -- Live Action

• Binta and the Great Idea


• One Too Many


• Helmer & Son


• The Saviour


• West Bank Story

Sound Editing

• Apocalypto


• Blood Diamond


• Flags of Our Fathers


• Letters From Iwo Jima


• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Sound Mixing

• Apocalypto


• Blood Diamond


• Dreamgirls


• Flags of Our Fathers


• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Visual Effects

• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest


• Poseidon


• Superman Returns

Screenplay -- Adapted

• Borat: Cultural Learnings From America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan


• Children of Men


• The Departed


• Little Children


• Notes on a Scandal

Screenplay -- Original

• Babel


• Letters From Iwo Jima


• Little Miss Sunshine


• Pan's Labyrinth


• The Queen

Have You Seen This Drive?

Identity theft is a serious growing concern in this digital age. As access to information becomes easier and easier, sorting the good from the bad becomes more and more difficult. Experts guess that there are at least 500,000 victims a year. It seems everyone is trying to limit the average American's risk - software companies, banks, credit card companies, law enforcement. And then there's the FBI.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations - or the "FBI," as the kids call it - is a proud organization with a storied past. They pride themselves on their ability to do their jobs better than anyone in the world.

But what they can't quite seem to grasp is holding onto things. Things with sensitive information on them. The Bureau reportedly loses an average of 11 laptops a year. Laptops with people's personal information splashed all over them. And then there's this Iomega external hard drive that they lost in Birmingham.

The FBI and the Department of Veterans Affairs is seeking information and/or the return of the hard drive that contained personal information on at least a half-million people.

Half a million, or 500,000. Say, that number sounds familiar.

Venue

I'm considering a change to a new address. I've had a domain name for a while, sitting around collecting dust. I've been slow to move because the last time (from Blog-City to Blogger), I lost most of my readers.

Since now I don't have any readers, it seems like an okay time to move. So I guess the question is... how do I do it? How do I turn my own domain name into a blog? Typepad? Movable Type? I don't know. I really don't know.

Things are going to be a little funky for a while as I sort things out... content will leap around or disappear. I know no one will read this, so I'm not too too worried, but still.

Clientele

This morning at work, I processed a new client which we will call People For Better Schools.

I sent an instant message to our Sales Director, and this is what ensued:

EcamirG: I guess I'm confused. Does this mean that there are People Against Better Schools?
Sales Director: Yes. There are seven.
EG: But they can't actually count to seven, so you're really just accepting their best guess.
SD: Plus they've got that really screechy woman, so that's helpful when you have to speak over crowds.
EG: Which I imagine they have to do a lot, considering the crowd is X-7, where X=the entire population of the planet Earth.
SD: Technically, it's X-Y-7, where X=the populations of the Earth and Y equals the population of the Earth not in attendance at the PTA meeting in question.
EG: Oh. I don't think a "crowd" can technically consist of a negative integer.
SD: That's only a worry if Y is equal to or greater than X-7+1.
EG: Which, I think it's safe to assume, it usually is. Have you ever been to a PTA meeting?
SD: Of course I have. I'm part of the Citizens Against Better Schools.

Why am I so exhilerated to have such a nerdy conversation?