Friday night three power surges hit my apartment while Amy and I were getting ready to watch a DVD. Each time the power snapped off and back on. After the third time half the outlets in the apartment and everything upstairs was dead (including the air conditioning, fridge outlet, and my entire bathroom). There were people from the Power Company and cable companies everywhere in the neighborhood. The next morning we got a personal visit from LADWP who informed us that someone had had a birthday party Friday night with metallic balloons. Ordinarily this would have been a pretty understandable thing. When you live under a main power line and decide to have the party outside that is when it goes into “what were you thinking?!” territory.

Evidently these people weren’t, and decided to release some balloons into the electric wires. Explosions and a blackout of north Hollywood followed.

Aaron wasn’t affected of course because he is in Hawaii at the moment. Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention that? Aaron is in the middle of a two-week Hawaiian adventure with his family. I’m not jealous or anything, oh no of course not.

By the way, the movie we watched was Million-Dollar Baby, which Roger Ebert called “the best film of the year.” It was a terrible film. Heavy on cliché and weak on plot. As I watched Clint and Morgan argue about why one would have holes in their socks I couldn’t help but think of a Saturday Night Live skit from years back in which Norm Macdonald hosted a game show called “Who’s More Grizzled.” Contestants Garth Brooks and Robert Duval (in redneck garb) exchanged painful scratchy voiced answers to questions like: “”The category is Dead Wives”. The question is: “Life’s hard, isn’t it?” “ Clint Eastwood has always had a scruffy voice, but listening to Morgan Freeman pretend to have lost his smooth narrator’s deep tone was hilarious at certain spots and (unintentionally) sad in others. Watching the movie was like “scriptwriting 101.” How to introduce an emotional character. How to give that character a sad back-story (he has lost contact with his daughter). How to connect the characters (Frankie believes he is responsible for Scrap losing his eye). In that sense it IS the “perfect” film because Eastwood follows all these film conventions to a tee, making obvious characters, obvious foreshadowing, and dividing the film into three distinct acts. However, it is this perfection that also leads to major flaws. To achieve perfection you have to cheat… just ask any major league baseball player. In order to make Eastwood and Swank’s characters so close by the end of the film we must believe that Swank has great respect for “Frankie” and he feels the same. The reasons for him to feel that way are obvious – she is a replacement daughter for him. The reasons for her are few and far between. In a teeming metropolis like Los Angeles, surely she could have gone to another gym to find a trainer after Frankie berates and turns her down three times. But wait, maybe she knows Frankie was a great boxer – nope…he was just a good cut man. So wait, maybe she knows he is a good manager- nope…in the first act he screws up his managing duties with his star boxer that eventually goes on to win the heavyweight title after leaving him. We can make up excuses for this in our own heads as we watch the film, but the departure from reality in the third act is just too much for me. Without spoiling it for anyone I’ll just say this, according to Eastwood and the writer of this film
#1 Hospitals turn off all the hallway lights after dark
#2 Hospitals neither post guards after visiting hours nor lock the doors
#3 life support machines can be A) turned off and/or B) shown to have a patient flat lining and nobody will know about it for a good long time. There are several explanations for this here but I can’t believe that a machine that is responsible for monitoring wether a patient is alive or not can be turned off as easy as my computer monitor. Mom (masters degree in nursing, nurse practitioner, and has decades of hospital experience), make your first comment ever on this blog and help me out (or correct me)!
#4 when a patient in a hospital dies there is A) no autopsy (regardless of the age of the patient) and B) no criminal investigation if foul play is suspected (like say if a person paralyzed from the chin down has their breathing tube disconnected).
#5 a 70 something year old owner of a boxing gym has easy access to liters of pure adrenalin
#6 a priest wouldn’t tell the police about a “certain” conversation with someone about killing people after said person is suspected of actually carrying it out…oh wait…according to #4b nobody would investigate the death …damn! I guess I shouldn’t mention the fact that the “killer” didn’t bother wear gloves or a mask either.

We also watched Sideways and Hostage this past weekend. Both were measurably better than Million Dollar Baby.

Unbeknownst I think to everyone in my life but Amy, Aaron and I began a scriptwriting adventure about a month ago. At this point we’ve got about 80% of the film written. The plan is to finish the script and meet with a screenwriter Aaron has connections with through a coworker. This screenwriter has written a few movies and has written for a few sitcoms including My Wife and Kids and is apparently a personal friend of the Wayans brothers. For those who don’t understand my motivation here let me explain something…. Do/did you watch Reno 911 or The State (when it was on)? Did you know two of the comedians from those shows wrote The Pacifier and Herbie Fully Loaded? No, you didn’t. Even Aaron – a self admitted film freak didn’t even notice this fact. While both of those movies were terrible – they made money. Lots of money. The film industry is just that- an industry. While Star Wars III might make 450 million dollars by the time it comes out on DVD and (for all I know) The Pacifier will be lucky to break $60 million; one percent of 60 million is $600,000. How much does it cost to write a script – nothing (assuming somebody already has a copy of Final Draft).

The band isn’t working (yet) and I haven’t started painting or anything of that nature again (yet). Aaron and I agreed this was the perfect time to work on a few of these film projects we’d been tossing around since we were living in the Towers.