The most unlikely thing every to be applicable from my college education.

My film-school education came to bear the other day as I came across an Entertainment Weekly article that mentioned "vagina dentata." It brought back a rush of unwelcome memories.

"Vagina dentata" appears in the myths of several cultures, notably several North American Indian tribes, and means, literally "toothed vagina" in Latin. Those with a linguistic background among us might have gathered that by now. Actually, pretty much anyone with a vague understanding of how Latin works might have figured it out, too. It speaks of the fear in men of sex, because... well, let's not get into that.

Anyway, I'm not all that comfortable writing about this because the whole subject scares the tar out of me, but here's the story: when we discussed the theory in class, we discussed in terms of movies that are not apparently sexual to the casual observer, but metaphorically, they positively reek of sex. A lot of horror movies are made this way. The movie we chose to use for our discussion this was Ridley Scott's Alien, the movie that essentially moved him up from a promising newcomer into the ranks of one of Hollywood's top directors.

Now, I love Ridley, but Alien has not withstood the test of time well. It came out in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, and hasn't had the advantage of having George Lucas go back in 300 times to redo all the special effects. It's a little hokey. But it does still have the general horrifying aspect of an alien attaching itself to your face and laying eggs inside of your stomach that grow up to be a huge alien and explode out of your stomach while you're having dinner with your fellow astronauts. That aspect has certainly not lost its terror - for me, at least. Maybe you're immune to that sort of thing. Sicko.

Anyway, the article in question was not talking about a film like that. The article was talking about this film.

So, I guess, this whole post ended up being an argument against going to film school, huh?

I'm surprisingly good with fortune cookies.

Have I ever mentioned how good I am at getting excellent fortunes every time I eat Chinese food?

I know that's a strange talent to be proud of, but I'm stunningly lucky at them for someone so generally misbegotten. Most people get things like "life is a hard road, but those who persevere are stronger for it," or "think happier thoughts." I generally get things like "the people around you will come to see your ideas are superior," and "it will be hard for people to not fall in love with you."

Those are both real fortunes I've gotten.

I once bragged about this to a group of my friends, and they laughed and scoffed (I have great friends, you see). "No one's good at getting fortunes," they pointed out. "It's just all chance."

"I really am," I replied. "I know it sounds weird, but I'm lucky at it."

I had the poor judgment to be holding an unopened fortune cookie in my hands while I said this.

"Prove it," they said.

"I'm going to," I said, cracking open the fortune cookie with a bravado that, to this day, I have no idea where it came from. "I'm just very lucky this. I'll show you."

"No way. Nobody's lucky at this."

"I am. I'm just very lucky."

I pulled out the slip of paper and read my fortune aloud: "You are very lucky."

They stared at me open-mouthed. "There's no way that actually happened," one of them whispered.

I bring this story up because a few days ago, I cracked open a fortune cookie and read: "Your ability to find the silly in the serious will take you far." I don't know what that means, exactly, but I am so pumped for this.

In a related note, I'm starting the writing process for my musical adaptation of Hotel Rwanda this week.

Please, before I go.

Three fun things:

1. I've developed a new film-geek game. It's like playing 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon by yourself.

Let's say that you just watched a film... say, Smokin' Aces. If you're like me - obviously, you're not, or you would've come up with this geeky game yourself - you want to go to IMDB and look up to see who's in the film, what other films they've been in, who wrote the film and what else they've written. "Why do I want to know that?" you ask. You just do. It's fun.

You arrive on the IMDB homepage. You could go up to the search field at the top to type in the name of the movie, but that would be cheating. Instead, you have to click a link somewhere on the main page to get started. You look around and there's no link to Smokin' Aces (there actually is, of course, since the movie just opened, but stick with me). So you're going to have to start clicking somewhere else.

What's this over here? There's a link to a story about Peter Jackson not getting to direct The Hobbit? You click on that, and then on Peter Jackson's profile. There it lists all the movies he's directed. You click on The Return of the King, which starred Dominic Monaghan as Merry. You click on Dom's profile. Monaghan is also on "Lost," starring Matthew Fox, who is in, you guessed, Smokin' Aces. There you are.

But you also watched Letters From Iwo Jima this week, did you? Well, you're going to need to click over to there, too. So you click on Jason Bateman's profile. Bateman's starring with Jamie Foxx in the upcoming The Kingdom, and Foxx was once co-starring with Tom Cruise in Collateral, who co-starred with Ken Watanabe in The Last Samurai, and Watanabe is the star of Letters From Iwo Jima. You are now free to poke around this page until you decide you want to go to another movie.

I've wasted a full two or three hours of work on this game this weekend, and I just made it up yesterday. Who knows what the coming week will hold?

And yes, I'm prepared to take commental abuse about this game.

2. I bought a Nerf basketball set, and I've created a game in which you have to hit two walls and roll the ball off top of the cabinet before sinking the basket. I've almost killed myself, the 13-year old son of my boss, and come close to destroying my G5 and an $8,000 camera. But I'm getting great at the shot.

3. gomusic.ru

Because of some loophole in the Russian copyright system, you can legally download any music you want here for fifteen cents a song. You can buy any album for about $1.50. I'm swearing off iTunes for life.

I'm getting good at this.

I got a call at lunch yesterday saying, "hey, we're doing a video interview in half an hour. I need you back here right now."

I got back to the church and my boss told me, "I need you to set up a camera, find chairs and build a set, set up lighting for the subject, set up a backscreen, set up a lighting pattern for the backscreen, set up microphones and a mixer, and get the studio soundproofed. We're interviewing Billy Graham's daughter in fifteen minutes."

Fifteen minutes later, when Mrs. Graham arrived, not only was everything done, but I was waiting casually by the door to welcome her in.

For the record, and I think it's safe to say that this comes as no surprise, Ruth Graham is a very sweet, friendly, and intelligent person who was a lot of fun to work with. I kind of feel bad for her, because she's a successful woman in, I would say, her mid-fifties, who leads an extensive Ruth Graham And Friends ministry, and yet our pastor continued to refer to her as "Billy Graham's daughter" for the entire length of his sermon both services, the entirety of which she was seated in the front row. I'm going to assume that's not a one-time thing, too.

I found this quite charming, as well, and I really hope nobody reads into this as me making fun of her, because I honestly find this a nice humanizing quirk from someone in a family that's lauded in the Christian community above all others: the motto of Ruth Graham And Friends is "real answers, for real issues, with real hope, from a real God." Mrs. Graham wrote this motto, placed it in bold typeface on her website, has used it in every intro video that she's recorded (she makes one for each individual church that she visits), and says it aloud every time she's called upon to explain what her conference does. She's also quite incapable of remembering exactly what the motto is, each time she does it.

She starts rolling into it, but she often gets the first one wrong, and pauses for a split second as she tries to figure out whether she's going to back up and start over or not. She usually ends up charging through the rest, and it ends up coming out something like this: "Real questions... for real answers... for real issues... from a real God." And then she just keeps on trucking as if nothing happened, so no one ever ends up noticing. She did it a different way in each of this morning's service, and half a dozen different ways on the video intro she recorded.

I thought it was kind of a neat idiosyncrasy. It's like if Steve Jobs announced at a keynote "once you go Mac you... usually, uh... stick with it."

Flags Vs. Letters

I want to throw this out there... I think it's worth debating:

Clint Eastwood released two films about Iwo Jima this year, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. Both received positive reviews across the board, and while both are no-shows at the box office (Flags - $33 million domestic, Letters - $5 million domestic), Letters has received a lot of acclaim from award shows and critics' lists and the Academy, and it's currently up for both Best Picture and Best Directing, while Flags is up for... Best Sound Recording and Best Sound Mixing (Letters is also up for Best Sound Recording but not for Mixing. Somewhere in LA there's a film mixer who is pissed), and nothing else.

Now Flags is an English-language film about the Americans who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, and how the U. S. government shamelessly used them to promote good relations press for the rest of the war. Letters is in Japanese, and is about... well, basically, it's one of "those darn Japanese! They're so crazy!" movies. A lot of soldiers commit suicide rather than retreat to higher ground to keep fighting, except for the Japanese officers who have traveled to America and learned the much more logical American system of only dying when it actually helps that particular war that you're fighting in. These soldiers, lead by a quietly charismatic Ken Watanabe (who I would actually follow into a war with pretty much anyone), hold out against the Americans as long as they can, even though they learn during this battle that Americans are not crazy savages like they've been told, but instead thoughtful, average people with a fondness for Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Except for one American soldier who turns out to be a douche. And in the end, pretty much everyone dies. But you knew that.

My argument is this: I think the reason that Letters is receiving so much more adulation is that it's much more a pro-America type movie, which makes its tricky subject matter easier to swallow. Americans don't like movies where the dirty secrets about a much-lauded war effort are revealed. They like movies about honor and glory that make them feel good about sacrifice and being an American.

I don't think that's surprising to anyone. But I think if that's the reason we're all praising a movie, we should say it. Let's not hide our true affections under a rug.*

* And just to clarify, for people who read this post and miss the point completely - I thought Letters From Iwo Jima was an excellent movie, I really did. I'm not into war flicks, but this had beauty and pizazz and glory and explosions and that little "bullets whipping by the camera" zipping noise that makes you tense up in your seat and all those movie tricks that make you feel like you're right there on the battlefront. I don't want to hear people complain about how I bashed on a movie that they like. I didn't bash on any movie in this post. Just shut up.