The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio

Set in the '50s, 'The Prize Winner of Defiance' is the true story of one woman's effort to keep her family of 10 afloat under difficult circumstances with winnings from jingle contests. Applying her remarkable resourcefulness and an uncommon wit, she finds her own way in the profitable jingle contests popular in the 1950s and '60s. The result is a bittersweet comedy-drama.

One of the perks that comes with working at the SF Film festival is a free membership of the SF Film Society. This enabled me to see a prescreening of the movie in San Francisco. Following the 'contest' theme of the movie, there was a free raffle before the screening.

I couldn't believe my luck. Not because I won anything in the raffle because I didn’t. I felt lucky because my date for the movie is turning out to be a winner in every way imaginable.

Update: my beautiful date read my palm this weekend and concluded that we would have 6 kids. Guess I should get into the contest business as well.

Lost in Translation - II

Sunday morning I picked up a free magazine called ‘Possibilities’. It contained a section called 'Translating Girl Speak':

You’re sweet = You’re boring
Sweet is a bland term about as exciting as a plain white T-shirt. It’s a filler adjective, like nice. It’s a pleasant word to use when she’s trying to spare your ego a little pain and can’t think of something better to say. She enjoys you as a friend, but there’s no special magic there to propel you to boy-friend material.

What are you thinking right now? = I’m interested in you, and I hope you’re thinking about me
This is the classic. Where you’re thinking of something mundane or work-related, while she’s looking at you and thinking of you in a special way. Now you have three seconds to come up with something profound. As a standby try “I was just thinking of how pretty your hair looks when we’re outside in the sun”.

I had a really time with you = Please ask me out again
Commonly women don’t pursue; they drop hints, and the rest is up to you. Women give signals of encouragement: laughing at your lame jokes, twisting hair around their fingers, or dangling a shoe off the end of their feet. So go ahead, and make the next move.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I had a date Saturday night. And I like her. At the wine bar, she asked me a couple of times what I was thinking. When we left the bar, she almost lost her shoe while standing up. And she called me while I was still on my way home to tell me that she really had a great time. At last, I’m not clueless anymore.

About Schmidt

About Schmidt is a funny and dark comedy in which Warren Schmidt retires from his 20+ year career at an insurance company. This event is causing him to reflect on his life and along the road of self-discovery, he finds something new and meaningful in his thoroughly unimpressive life: preventing his daughter from getting married to a underachieving waterbed salesman.

The days before the wedding, Warren is staying with the free-spirited family of his soon-to-be in-laws. While he is sitting in the Jacuzzi by himself, his son-in-Law’s mother comes out of the house naked and joins him in the tub, making Warren feel very uncomfortable.

This scene in the movie reminded me of a third date I had late last year. After getting back from dinner, me and my date were sitting on the couch and sipping some wine. All of a sudden my date got up and said ‘Hey, let’s get in the hot tub!’ As it was supposed to be a dinner date, a bathing suit was not on my list of 'items to bring' for this particular date but soon it became clear that wearing bathing suits was not required.

Needless to say that on that night I got to know my date much better than I could have hoped for.. :)