Slumdog Millionaire
Oct 19 2010

I was originally going to do a post about all the various issues I’ve had lately with my car, my garage door, and other stuff, but then I rented and watched Slumdog Millionaire last night.  My car stopped working last Friday but they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it.  Fortunately I happened to be near the dealer and was able to drive it into the lot before it died again.  They give free rental cars so I just had to pay about $50 for the diagnostic even though I had a nice new rental car for 4 days.  My garage door stopped working Monday night even though I had just replaced the motor just a month ago and spent more money than I’d like to say to get it fixed.  I was about to lose it when they told me they would charge me for the service trip, but when he came out he discovered it was a warranty issue so I didn’t get charged.   So compared to the life of many street kids in India, I have a pretty sweet set of periodic challenges (knock on wood).

Slumdog Millionaire was a great movie and apparently the Academy thought the same because it won 8 awards in 2009.  It’s about the life of orphan street kids in India.  I’ve been to India and Sri Lanka and the poverty and abysmal living conditions of many kids is real.  Maybe I’m a little cynical these days but the happy ending seemed a bit surreal given the horrible hardships they endured.  Spoiler Alert: The main character wins 20 million rupees, he is finally reunited with the girl he fell in love with as a boy, his brother who betrayed him shoots the bad guy and gets killed in the process, etc.  However, I’m sure the visuals were even more dramatic on the big screen.  If those poor street kids in India can have a positive, entrepreneurial attitude when everything and everyone around them can’t be trusted, then who am I to complain.

One day I hope to take my kids to a true 3rd world country so they will fully appreciate the United States of America and what a nice life we have here.  I feel so blessed to be living in America.  And hopefully they will finally appreciate it when I tell them “there are poor kids in India who would love to have your food” when they say don’t like something on their plates!

Beating The Odds
Oct 10 2010

We love stories and movies about people beating the odds.  We love the high, the risk, the adrenaline, the rush, the underdog making it.  We all want to be that person who beats the odds and we cheer those people on.  I saw the movie Secretariat this weekend and what a story.  Secretariat was a famous, record breaking race horse.  I love horses.  I used to ride horses and one day when the stars align, I’d love to be around horses again.  What a sweet relationship between Secretariat and his owner.

I think this is why I am drawn to entrepreneurship and people who like to create something out of nothing.  People who believe against all odds that what they are doing will change the world and take on the risk of not making it.  It’s that passion that you wish you could bottle and release upon the many people in the world who are afraid to try something because they are afraid of failing or looking bad.  It’s really scary to do things that go against the grain.  To risk being alone.  The anxiety in the pit of your stomach is there when you do something that might result in people judging you but you know in your heart of hearts that it’s the right thing to do even if you can’t fully explain why.  You only know it’s right when you get to the other side and you win, or you get your freedom, feel the calmness, or you see/feel the fruits of your labor pains.  And sometimes you lose, but when you follow your heart there really is no losing because you are true to yourself.

The following quote hit my in box today: 10/10/10 (this must be an auspicious day :-)) from Jeffrey Fry’s Potent Quotables and I took a risk I would never have thought myself capable of doing that might be a mistake or it might just end up being an expensive bit of fun, but time will tell.  It felt right to try it out, and I look forward to the adventure.  If it’s a mistake, I’ll learn from it, move on, and hopefully help others avoid the same mistake.

“If I could do it all over again, I’d make more mistakes.” –Mark Twain

Time Heals All Wounds – But We End Up Older Too
Sep 3 2010

Time heals all wounds or so they say.  Time certainly does makes the wound look different and allows it to close up a bit, but the wound is still there to remind us of something.  In the world of high-tech entrepreneurship, people sometimes refer to those wounds as ‘scar tissue’ or ‘battle wounds.’  It means you’ve been through a lot, learned a lot, and in some cases they are looked upon as honored badges of experience here in the US.  In other parts of the world, that ‘scar tissue’ is socially a black mark which is why you have fewer risk takers and people trying new things.  The results of failure in some cultures/families are not just some scratches you can put Neosporin or Mederma on, learn from and move on, they come to define you as a person.

The trick is to learn from those wounds but also be open enough to recognize that although a situation might remind you of circumstances before you got stabbed previously, you should be aware of the subtle differences so you can move to avoid the hurtling knife or not react in a way that causes history to repeat itself.

Another thing that helps heal wounds is keeping up a strong network of friends, mentors, advisers and to watch a bunch of movies, musicals and TV shows. Talking with people about what they have experienced in life & business, really helps put perspective to what you have experienced.  We have all faced challenges and talking about things out loud with others helps heal your hurt ego and heart.

The endless debate on whether life imitates art or art imitates life might never be solved, but it’s sure great to watch them and feel better about your situation.  It’s usually never as bad, crazy, funny as what happens in the movies or TV.   I recently saw Inception in the theater, watched The Holy Grail (I didn’t have time to re-watch Life of Brian before I had to return it – Ugh!), and saw Mean Girls on TV.  I started watching a TV series called Mad Men (set in an advertising firm in the 1960’s) but missed the first several seasons I think.  Inception was incredible.  It’s about dreams within dreams and I’ve always been eerily effected by movies like The Matrix and this one Twilight zone show about spiders that bite you with this venom that makes the characters think they are fine, but they are really dreaming that everything is fine with occasional glimpses that they are caught in a space shuttle with alien spiders wrapping them in their webs (Scary!).

Last night I saw Jersey Boys: The Story of Franki Valli and The Four Seasons.  What a fabulous show.  All the drama of their families, debt, drinking, taxes.  It makes me wonder if with such talent, misery also follows.  You can point to so many great singers/actors whose lives were tragic (e.g., Elvis, Michael Jackson, Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, etc.).  The actor that played the role of Franki Valli had a wonderful voice and I had forgotten all the songs they sang.  Some of my favorite songs were My Eyes Adored You, December 1963 (Oh, What A Night), and Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.  But behind those lovely lyrics & melodies was a lot of pain and heartache as well as good times.

The sad thing is that we get older while time is passing by and healing all those wounds, so we have less energy to do more things with those learnings.  So we have to learn fast!  Self doubt diminishes but so does the stamina.  “Youth is wasted on the young.” – George Bernard Shaw. But then there’s always the saying that apparently an internet search can’t even reveal the source “Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill.” – unknown

The Drowsy Chaperone and Despicable Me
Aug 30 2010

I saw a play/musical called The Drowsy Chaperone this past Friday with some friends at a local Austin theater called Zach (if you click that link you can even see a short video) and it was very good.  The narrator was hilarious.  He is an obviously gay guy who was married once but now is alone in his apartment listening to old vinyl records, one of which is of the musical The Drowsy Chaperone.  He intervenes during the performance with his opinions of each scene with great commentary from his life experience.  He is so excited about the musical, where most of the cast end up marrying each other (i.e., 4 weddings take place at the end), but also sad and lonely about his situation about not finding the right person to be with.  Actors to me seem to be entrepreneurs, selling themselves for each show in the hopes of getting cast.  I’m guessing that unless you are on Broadway in New York, acting is a tough life financially.

I also discovered a new restaurant called Paggi House.  The food was great (except the mussels were too small) and they had half price drinks and appetizers until 7pm so we shared a bunch of interesting things including one of my favorite things: soft shell crab!  Well, my friend isn’t a big fan of soft shell crab so she let me eat 95% of it (yummy) with a really interesting sweet/sour/vinegar house made sauce.  She had a really interesting salad that I took a few bites of that had vanilla in the dressing!

Saturday and Sunday consisted of meals at home and Chuy’s as well as seeing the movie Despicable Me with the kids.  They had already seen it, but since I hadn’t. I used my strong persuasion skills (not hard) to get them to see it again.  It had some pretty funny, but predictable scenes.  The main character strives to be the best villain in the world and gets caught by surprise when he adopts 3 little girls as part of one of his schemes to be the best villain.  His mother is never pleased with his attempts at villainy as a child and later in life which motivates him but also makes him sad.  In the end his mother pays him probably the best and only compliment he’s received from her when she tells him that he is a great parent to the 3 little orphan girls he adopted…”probably even better than me.”  You can tell he was pleased that she finally gave him credit for something and it wasn’t for any of his attempts to be a bad guy.   Us mothers can cause so much joy and sadness in our kids lives…well according to movies anyway…oh and a few psychologists. 🙂  I wonder where the dads are in these animated movies?!

I had planned to post this earlier, but my Internet has been down for the last couple of days because some squirrels chewed through some of the cabling…those darn squirrels!

Salt and The Brew – An Interesting Combination
Jul 25 2010

I saw the movie Salt yesterday with a friend and it was intense.  A good action/thriller with Angelina Jolie as the main character.  She plays a CIA agent who is set up by Russian agents to infiltrate American intelligence, but she doesn’t know this about herself until she’s much older.  Of course the bad guys always underestimate the power of true love to destroy even the most evil plots and plans.  The stunts and effects were really good.  However, as skinny as Angelina is, some of those stunts and fights with men twice her size are even harder to believe…but hey, it’s just a movie.  My friend and I left the theater pumped with adrenaline, and we both concluded that the way the movie ended there was probably going to be a Salt II.

We decided to grab some dinner and headed over to Baby Acapulco’s which is just across the street from the theater.  We were pleasantly surprised with the band who was playing that night – The Brew.   They play Latin Jazz music and they were really good.  She had heard of them before and I wasn’t sure if I had.  We both enjoyed a margarita and the show!  They even had a free group salsa lesson that I participated in despite the fact I was wearing flip flops.  I’d love to take salsa or almost any kind of dance lessons some day so it was a fun experience.  A bunch of us lined up in front of the stage and my practice partner ended up being another woman who was there supporting the band so she already knew how to dance salsa.  She was older than me and really sweet.  She just got back from Hawaii and was wearing a pretty flower in her hair.  We took turns being the man in the practice sessions as did others because it was mostly women who came up to participate in the free lesson.

The Brew has a sound similar to the Gipsy Kings so beautiful and romantic.  Musicians are entrepreneurs and I’m always impressed when I see a band who is able to seemingly make a living sharing their talent.  To me, hearing them after watching Salt was a nice way to calm the nerves after watching an intense movie!  I look forward to hearing them again sometime soon.

The Book of Eli, Knight And Day, And Other Movies
Jul 17 2010

It’s time for another movie post. I rented The Book of Eli, Hot Tub Time Machine, Cold Souls, and saw Knight and Day in the theater.  A friend of mine made fun of me the other day because I still actually have a Blockbuster card and rent movies the ‘old fashioned’ way.  I know I can probably get them On Demand via Time Warner or some other high tech way, but it’s easier for me to get them from Blockbuster.  Plus I can pick up some sushi take out from a store nearby.  As long as I get them back in 5 days time, it works out well.  Anyway, here are some quick overviews:

The Book of Eli

Set in post apocalyptic earth, the main character, Eli, is played by Denzel Washington.  He is responsible for taking a book – The Book – across the devastated American continent to the west coast where it can be reproduced.  It was an interesting plot and of course Eli is virtually indestructible.  He relies on faith and keen insight to guide him to his destination.  Near the end of his journey a young woman helps him fulfill his destination.  I happened to meet the guy, Armando Kirwin, who led the special effects team for this movie at a monthly event called Nerd Nite.  He was presenting that night, and I chatted with him for a bit before he gave his entertaining talk.  Turns out that Armando might be able to help one of our companies at the Austin Technology Incubator (one of our interns came to the event too) so it was a good random coincidence that we met.  I thought the Book of Eli was a good movie.  Even though the plot was somewhat predictable, it had a surprise ending and of course the special effects were cool.

Hot Tube Time Machine

Your life will be just fine if you never see this movie.  A bunch of older dudes and a teenager travel back to the 80’s when some weird Russian beverage short circuits a hot tub at a hotel the older guys used to stay when they partied.  The 80’s hair styles, clothes, and music was interesting but otherwise this was a very cheesy movie with way too many weird things happening, putting down of women, and unnecessary cursing.

Cold Souls

This movie was a little bit depressing as it’s based on a premise that you can harvest and store your soul.  The main character, who is an actor, is tired of his soul.  It’s weighing him down so he gets it extracted and feels better but empty.  He rents another soul of a Russian poet who happens to be female and his performance as an actor improves.  His soul gets stolen and taken to Russia and is placed inside a woman who wants to be a better actor.  They try to insert some comedic moments (e.g., the way the souls look in the jars after extraction varies from chick peas to prunes, etc.) but it all seemed very serious.  I have often wondered about our souls and how it is that our souls come to be in our bodies or really what unique interaction of neurons in our brains/minds display our unique souls.  Anyway, that’s too existential a topic to go into here…

Knight and Day

This was an entertaining movie with neat special effects.  I heard that Tom Cruise did all of his own stunts in this movie.  The main characters were Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz.  The film’s plot was fairly predictable with Tom being the good/bad guy and Cameron being the sometimes scared out of her mind, dim witted gal.  In the end, she’s the pro and saves him but in the beginning I sometimes wanted to wonder out loud why she just didn’t get her stuff together and act like a reasonable person.  Anyway, it was fun to watch.  Whenever I see a Tom Cruise movie, I wonder how they shoot the film to make him look as tall as the actresses he usually plays across.

I was reminded of a few other movies I had seen a while back when I saw the previews in in the beginning of the rentals.  My memory of them has mostly faded but a couple of really good ones were:

A Single Man – An intense movie about a man trying to cope with the loss of his longtime partner.  It seemed to be set in the 50’s or 60’s when being gay was not as accepted as it is now.  He tries to find the courage to live and comes close to killing himself several times until a student of his connects with him and gives him hope.  It has a tragic twist ending.  The movie has several flashbacks to the main actor’s time with his partner and does a good job of illustrating the pain/feelings he is struggling with.

Cheri (with Michelle Pfeiffer) – a French courtesan and a young man, who is the son of another courtesan, have an affair and subsequently realize they are in love.  The character played by Michelle has the advantage of age and experience on her side to help her mask her true pain and feelings when the young man gets married because that was what men his age were supposed to do.  He being less experienced in the tumultuous, often painful experience of forbidden, unrealistic love cannot cope and is miserable until he finally kills himself.  A powerful movie.

The Runaways – This movie is based on Joan Jett, famous female rock star, and her first band.  This was also an intense, bizarre movie with more than enough footage about her sexual preferences and drug use.  It’s a deep look inside the life of a rock star and how extra hard it was to make it as a female rock star in that day and age.  It’s impressive that she and her other band members lived, but then again it’s impressive that most members of rock bands live given their stereotypical hard running lifestyles.  I have to say this movie made me cringe a few times but at the same time I was proud of her and her female band members for having the guts to go all the way to fame-dom!

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo And Other Movies
Jun 28 2010

I saw the movie The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo this past weekend with a friend and it was way more intense than I thought it would be.  It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen a dramatic, serial killer type movie. It got me so angry at the evil, sadistic criminals and what they did to those poor innocent girls.  The movie was really well done and the plot was strong.  It had such an interesting mix of characters in different phases of their lives (e.g., an 80 year old, a middle aged divorced guy, a 24 year old girl) with vastly different experiences.  They intertwined with each other nicely.  Although we are taught that it’s wrong to take justice into our own hands, you can’t help but be proud of the 24 year old girl/woman (Lisbeth) who didn’t sit back and let herself be the victim unlike the woman they were looking for who they thought was murdered but actually ran away 40 years ago from the people hurting her.  Lisbeth didn’t run away from the people who hurt her, she paid them back in spades with a dose of their own medicine and made sure they wouldn’t hurt anyone else.  It got her in trouble when she was little, but it made her hard and street smart as she got older.  This movie is apparently the first in a set of three based on books written by Swedish author and journalist, Stieg Larsson, and the series was published after his death in 2004.  I look forward to seeing the next one.

I’m reading a book right now that I plan on writing about soon.  It’s a bit of a touchy/feel-y book but very powerful if you can absorb the concepts.  Maybe I’ll add in brief movie reviews to my future blog posts.  I’ve been renting movies and seen some in the theater over the last several months.  I finally saw Avatar, but on DVD.  I could tell I missed a lot of the stunning visual experience not watching it on the big screen.  The plot was predictable in a Romeo & Juliet (i.e., different families, tribes, cultures, species, whatever) sort of way except for both Human & Blue Alien lovers live, don’t accidentally die, and the humans were defeated.  I rented Valentine’s Day, kind of cute because of Ashton Kutcher but otherwise not a very strong plot and The Men Who Stare at Goats starring George Clooney (handsome!) which was good but apparently not as funny or good as the book.  It was interesting to see Clooney play a character that is psychic.

I took the kids to see Toy Story 3 a couple of weekends ago and of that’s a great one.  I started crying way more than I probably should have when the Lots ‘O Huggin’ Bear didn’t pay back the favor of Woody (the main toy character) saving his life and let all the toys go towards their death when he could have saved them.  My daughter kept saying (because she was sitting on my lap) “Are you crying mommy?”  I just said “yes, because I was sad that Lotso the bear was so mean.”  I couldn’t tell her that mommy is still working through a lot of unresolved issues and the reason for the overly abundant tears was far more complicated? 🙂  I cried when I saw the Disney movie Up.  My son even said he felt sad when he watched it.  I didn’t used to cry that much but those damn Disney movie writers/animators sure know how to push those buttons in me.  I think I need to rent more of them…