We had a long discussion about the word "pimp" beforehand, because that is how Andrew initially described Pretty Tony. Closer to the day of the taping, he clarified that Tony didn't want to be called a pimp because he wasn't one. He doesn't sell women. He wears the fancy clothes that you see pimps in the movies wear, so I thought of it more as a pimp "style," like when Andrew wears gangsta-style clothes. After meeting Tony, I think of the style more like a modern-day dandy.

Golden Touch is his business where he uses his persona to draw people to clubs and events. Sort of like the grown-up version of hiring a magician for a kids’ party. Or booth babes for a convention display.

My friend Stacie has been distraught ever since she learned a month ago that her beloved cousin, Tami, has an early form of blood cancer. She has been frantically working in the last month to find a bone marrow donor for Tami, which is much more difficult because she is Asian-American. Another reason she is distressed is that the testing process to find a match takes such a long time and Tami is doing so poorly. She may die before she finds a match.

She brought two other people with her, the Executive Director of the Asian American Donor Program, and James Nguyen, who is seeking a match for his best friend. Finding a bone marrow match is peculiarly racist. A Japanese patient will largely find a donor match only from other Japanese people. However, there’s only a 30% chance of finding the donor in your family. The odds start getting slim for ethnic minorities because not as big a proportion have registered their type. Hopefully this episode can improve that number somewhat.

Andrew’s been on this child advocate thing for a while. It’s natural, because he’s a teacher. He went to a conference where they had a dynamic representative of child advocacy speak, which fired him up. We are also fortunate that Children NOW is headquartered near here. We were able to get a man in the know. We also had a representative from the Santa Clara Unified school district, who is a colleague of Andrew’s.

One of the difficulties in having a subject that Andrew is passionate about is his tendency to talk over the guests. That was the case for this episode. His colleague, Joy, had to work to be heard, since Andrew would often steal the words from her mouth. There was a lot of information, and it reminds me how complex both society and the economy are. Spending money on children’s education and health now means they cost society less as productive adults.

This movie was not what I expected it to be at all. I suppose I was expecting a lovely thriller full of every cliché known to thriller movies anywhere with some new twist on something. That’s what Cinequest is for! But not a movie that wasn’t sure what it was either, that was randomly taken over by the characters being written or that seemed to be full of homo erotic angst.

Was this a comedy? Certainly there were some funny parts. I especially like the half-naked fan service in the background. Was this a movie about self discovery? The leading character did seem to try to learn about himself. Was this a thriller? Not really. There wasn’t enough suspense or body count to be a thriller.

I think this was really a movie about writing. That sometimes a writer tries to force a story or a set of characters into the plot he creates, and then finds out that just isn’t where it wants to go. Writing oneself into a proverbial corner.

The audience would’ve been better served if the writer had stayed true to his real passion. He obviously wanted to write a gay porn flick and seemed better suited to doing so because this movie was just confusing.