Damn You, Montezuma

So I'm back from Mexico. Call off the posse, bring the horses back to the leasing office.

As the title might indicate, I did get sick. No, I didn't drink the water. Well, I did, but it was bottled water. But something got me very sick, in that uniquely Mexican way.

Still, I managed to wrestle it into submission for long stretches (thanks to a lot of medication, though I'm still fighting it, even back in L.A.) and managed to enjoy most of the trip. It wasn't a resort vacation; we were visiting relatives of my wife, and so the places we saw were more off the beaten track. More ordinary Mexico.

The highlight was probably a small town in the mountains called Tapalpa, where my wife's cousin grew up. A tad touristy here and there (though there was some good local art, there was also refrigerator magnets with the town's name on them), but overall very old and very cool, with the kind of restaurants I wished existed in Woodland Hills, where I could just spend a lazy day reading and looking out over the plaza.

Movie titles translate interestingly in Mexico. The title of Ocean's Thirteen is "Now There Are Thirteen". Live Free or Die Hard is "Hard To Kill 4.0". And a saw a DVD for Planes, Trains and Automobiles in which the Spanish title translates as "Better Alone Than With Accompaniment". Which makes sense.

On the flight on the way back, they showed "Blades of Glory", but then stopped it with 30 minutes to go because the plane was landing. Bastards.

Back to work. Sigh.

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So for reasons I'm still not sure of, I submitted a script to the Bluecat competition a few months ago. Last Friday I got an e-mail asking for a .pdf copy of my script. I figured I must have made the first cut.

Two days later, they announce the top 10%. My script was nowhere to be found. I still haven't figured that one out.

Oh well. I need to be writing some new stuff anyway. I did do a little brainstorming during the trip, and hopefully I'll start turning out some pages and finishing some of the things that I'm halfway done with (which is both the blessing and the curse of my screenwriting group).