Someone asked me recently who I would want to portray my family in a movie about my life. It’s an intriguing idea of course, but it’s the kind of thing one really has to think about. What are the various qualities my family members have, and which actors also have them while looking vaguely like my family? I spent not a little time mulling it over, and here are some of the results.

My Mother
I know she’s dead, but Bette Davis in her late 30s – early 50s could be a dead ringer for my mother. It’s not just her wide, intelligent and fierce blue eyes, or her high cheekbones, but her attitude. There really was no one like her, just as there is no one like my mother. However, I think for the purposes of this question, I’m supposed to pick someone alive, and frankly, I’m at a loss—maybe Kathleen Turner?

My Father
This was easy. Ciaran Hinds LOOKS like my father, and he’s got a certain presence that my father doesn’t seem to realize he has. He can play a mean, selfish guy who just wants to be loved…and that’s my father in a nutshell.

My Dad
I always thought my Dad looked a lot like Burton Cummings from The Guess Who, but I’m not sure they still look that much alike nowadays. Plus, my Dad’s pretty low key, all things considered. I guess he’s sort of a cross between Adam Sandler, Robert Downey, Jr. and Michael Gambon, but really, only Michael is old enough to play my Dad.

My Sisters
For my little sister, C, I’d cast Reese Witherspoon–provided she dyed her hair a dark brown colour. That was an easy decision.

For our middle sister, P, that’s a much tougher task, because she is such a strange combination of qualities. On the one hand, she’s kind of Drew Barrymore-ish, but she’s also a lot like Nurse Ratchett in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, not to mention Diane Keaton in Annie Hall and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. I’m not sure there is only one actress who could play her, maybe she could be played like the facets of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There?

Esso could be played by Liev Schreiber, I think.

As for me, well, there is only one actress I have been compared to ad nauseum, and that is Ricki Lake. She even inflects her vowels in a similar way. It’s kind of eerie. Thing is, I think I’d rather be played by a very overweight Winona Ryder.

Who would you cast as your family in the movie of your life??

In many ways, I’m far advanced beyond my classmates. I have the benefit of life experience, a good 15 years more than most of them, with lessons learned and more time management skills under my belt which help me out in crunch time. Having said that, though, I am far behind in the self-confidence areas.

I spent a long time afraid of pursuing my dreams and following up on the talents I have always believed I possess. I was afraid, and had no one to propel me forward, because I was busy trying to propel someone else forward in their life’s goals, and to fill a role that I had been taken as a given. One day, I broke. When I found myself planning how I was going to get to a highway overpass to jump down into oncoming traffic, I realized something was seriously wrong, and I was undeniably unhappy.

I have been scrabbling my way into confidence ever since. Sometimes, I make great strides; I wrote the script for my last short film, and I was so happy with the dialogue, I got a real boost from seeing my creativity in black and white and not just in my head—to hear the actors speak those words was an even greater feeling. Other times, and unfortunately, these are far more common, it seems like I am taking two steps forward and one step back. Eventually, I’ll get there, but I’m tracing and retracing a pattern instead of striding forward. It’s a little frustrating sometimes.

Because the film studies program I am in focuses on the theoretical nature of film—why certain aesthetics, themes and images mean something to us as viewers—its production stream tends to be more avant garde or experimental in nature. I’m not so good with the avant garde. I appreciate it, sometimes I understand it, and there are a handful of avant garde films that I love, however, *I* cannot make avant garde films/videos. That takes a certain kind of attitude and imagination. The best experimental/avant garde films are the ones where the artist injects their life, their feelings and their thoughts into the piece.

As I indicated above, I have spent so much of my life in fear, I simply do not have the guts to dive into my past and come out with the juice and essence of the tortured girl hiding inside me and show bits of it to the world. This is partly because the forces which have helped shape that scared child still have sway over me.

But I’m working on it.

Anyway, the point is, when I see the creativity that comes from some of my classmates, I can’t help but be a little envious, and feel a little inferior.

But I’m working on that, too.

Somewhere in Broward County, Florida, there is a woman with the exact same name as me. I have learned a LOT about this other Jennifer, because her e-mail address is almost exactly the same as mine, and I have been getting e-mails from all over the state of Florida and other places.

At first, I found it a little amusing–I was being reminded of meetings for the writing staff of a publication called “Metropolis.” After three of these, I fired off a quick e-mail to the editor and told him he had the wrong Jennifer.

A few weeks later, I received an e-mail from someone called Paul, who is apparently my father. Perhaps I should have written to let him know I wasn’t his daughter, but in his message, he wrote (and I’m paraphrasing), “it’s been so long since I heard from you, I thought I should drop you a line to tell you I was thinking about you…” I figured, if this woman didn’t care enough to keep in touch with her own father, maybe she didn’t want to hear from him—and in telling him he’d reached the wrong Jennifer, I might be opening up a bigger can of worms than I wanted to.

For a few months, there was nothing, and then I suddenly started getting whole categories of e-mails. The first volley were from employment opportunities in health research places–all in Florida. I politely responded to about three of them, letting them know I was a completely different Jennifer who lived in a completely different country. Finally, some place offered Jennifer a job, and that particular variety of e-mail stopped.

Only to be replaced by (no word of a lie) SEVEN separate messages from Ritz-Carlton hotels all over the state of Florida (plus one in Las Vegas and one on Boston Common—that one looked good), congratulating me on my engagement, and giving me information about their facilities. I sent politely worded messages back to a handful of them before I got bored. Again, it stopped for a month or so.

Today, I got a receipt from a university in Florida for tuition, which this Jennifer has made a payment on. It came from a non-reply e-mail address for the university, so I can’t respond. But I’m a bit worried—the e-mail includes the name of her bank, the branch, and her account number, i.e. VERY sensitive and personal information. I don’t know what to do about this.

I don’t know how to get in touch with this other Jennifer. I thought about sending an e-mail to all the e-mail addresses I could think of that would be close to mine, and discarded that thought because I became convinced I would only be annoying the shit out of all the other Jennifers out there.

I can only really hope that, when this Jennifer ties the knot, she will take her husband or wife’s last name (or hyphenates) and then gets a new e-mail address.

I have been recently (i.e. today) linked to a blogroll for the first time in probably a year or two, and it’s at a great blog I found through IMDb of all places: Wonders in the Dark.

WitD has some really interesting takes on international film, and I have really enjoyed the past few quick trips I’ve made there. They love Jacques Tati’s Playtime, too! And their Top 50 films of each decade aren’t simply a rehashing of Hollywood films from the period in question, but a cross-section of films from around the world, which makes them aces in my book.

Nevertheless, my blog has been a record of my concerns personal and otherwise over the course of the past while, largely because I’ve been busy pouring my heart out into my schoolwork. I think that might have to change if I’m going to start getting traffic from a blog with more…shall we say, interesting subject matter?

I’m keen to see what Sam Juilano, Allan Fish and others have to say about Ozu, Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Satyajit Ray…

I was reading Somewhere on the Masthead when it hit me: if everything had happened as it was supposed to, I would have a toddler on my hands right now. I would be running after a little 23-month old brown-haired, green-eyed person (unless by some strange miracle he/she had blonde or red hair and blue eyes), collecting toys and potty training.

And suddenly, in the midst of all my exam prep for tomorrow, I felt a wave of real sorrow. I don’t have a little brown-haired, green-eyed person to chase, or teach, or hold and cuddle.

I may never.

As time goes along, I am sure my condition is getting worse.

Yesterday, my favourite professor dropped a bombshell on my Iranian/Taiwanese cinema class: after four years of teaching here, he has resigned his position, and will be moving his family to the U.S. His wife will be teaching there, also.

Since going back to school, I have learned to really appreciate the films from other countries, and this professor was the go-to guy in our department for “foreign” films, so naturally, I ended up taking a whole bunch of classes with him. Four in two years, to be exact.

He was the kind of prof you wanted to take a class with, because he always had an interesting approach to the material, and he was good about helping you find a direction with a paper or an idea. Without becoming everyone’s best friend (I hate profs like that), he nonetheless was incredibly supportive of student’s efforts. More than one student in the past told me he recommended polishing one of their essays for publication, and suggested certain journals and avenues for them to do so.

He was our main advisor for the Film Society, and no matter what happened, he was on our side, fighting for us to continue with what it is we do, and being a constructive critic when we botched things up.

And yet, with all of this, he has retained a certain humility which is a little disconcerting. After the news, when I told him the department will be different without him there, he replied, “No it won’t, it will be exactly the same.”

I respectfully disagree. When we held student events, he always came, and the same cannot be said of most of his colleagues. He is leaving a very big hole in our small department.

I am without words to express my sorrow for his departure.