One of my all-time favorite movies is the Nicholas Cage classic “Gone in 60 Seconds”.

Nicholas Cage in “Gone in 60 Seconds”

This is not just because Nicholas Cage and my brother Adam could be identical twins, either.

In the movie, Cage plays car thief Randall “Memphis” Raines. His nemesis, Detective Castlebeck (played by Delroy Lindo) and Castlebeck’s sidekick (played by none other than a younger Timothy Olyphant, aka Justified’s Raylan Givens) spend what seems to be every waking minute trying to bust his chops.

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Me with my brother Adam (aka “The Young Nick Cage”)

Continually throughout the film, you hear Castlebeck muttering, “The easy way or the hard way, Raines….the easy way or the hard way.”

I must have watched the movie a dozen times before I realized that that was my favorite line. It felt like something I’d been asking myself for most of my (now) 41 years.

When I was in college I wanted to be in the FBI.

Yup, that is right. The Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The gal my parents nicknamed “our little flower” wanted to be a pistol packing, trained and dangerous government official.

Looking back now, I think I was just confused….because clearly what I really wanted was to simply marvel at others (real or fictitious) who have those skills from the comfort and safety of my own home.

To date I have plowed my way through the entire five seasons of “Burn Notice”, and I am right smack dab in the middle of season three of “Justified”. I already have season one of “White Collar” loaded into my Netflix queue, and right behind that I plan to watch “Luther”.

I just like folks who don’t waste time that could be spent getting it done.

I like folks, characters or flesh and blood, who aren’t afraid to make a decision, even if it requires pitting doing what’s easy against doing what’s right. In fact, I especially like those kind….the kind who choose option b on a regular basis.

I guess I spent too many years of my own life waffling, and now I’m ready to get a little of my own back, even if it is vicariously.

My landlady and I have had our differences over the years, so when she loaned me the first book in the Dragon Tattoo series, I accepted it more as a mutually desired peace offering than with any real literary enthusiasm.

Truth be told, I was scared of the books. I have a phobia about serial killers (unfortunately realized a good 100 “Medium” episodes too late) and I knew full good and well the book was named “The Man Who Hates Women” in the Swedish edition.

But I was determined to read it anyway – for the aforementioned reason.

I started reading, and promptly started having nightmares. Of course. I have a phobia, the book was addressing the phobia, and certainly there were many other rather awful events that befell the heroine along the way to the end of page 650-I-lost-count.

But, as I am sure the writer intended, by the end of the first book I was also hooked.

It is no secret that I am a huge cinema fan.

There are many movies and movie characters that inspire me, but in particular I have noticed that Clint Eastwood is a great mentor if you have self-confidence issues.

Some of Clint’s most famous roles, like police inspector Harry Callahan in “Dirty Harry”, war veteran Walt Kowalski in “Gran Torino”, and Secret Service agent Frank Horrigan in “In the Line of Fire”, teach us all what it means to have a sense of yourself, your talents, your capabilities, your personal “line in the sand” and your self-integrity.

Admittedly, Clint has as many great “bad guy” roles to his credit as his “good guy” star-making roles, but this too is just a metaphor for the many sides of “us”, as his movie “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” succinctly reminds us.

One of my favorite scenes is from “Dirty Harry” where the bad guys – four total – are trying to rob the diner where Harry gets his coffee each morning. To warn him, the waitress pours lots of sugar in his black coffee. Harry, reading the morning paper, fails to notice until he gets outside, tastes his brew, and spits it back out.

And promptly heads back to the coffee shop.

I don’t talk about birds as much on this blog as I do in other places where I write. But all that is about to change, because recently, I saw the movie “Rio”.

About a dozen times.

Featuring a tame blue macaw named Blu, the movie is less about its overt plot to mate the last male and female blue macaws together to save the species, and more about the transformative power of relationships to make the unimaginable possible.

In Blu’s case, his issue is flying. He can’t. Or so he thinks. Then Blu gets captured, chained to Jewel, a blue macaw who can fly, and, well, you know what comes next.

Or maybe you don’t.

One of my favorite quotes comes from an anonymous author.

The piece is entitled “Rules for Being Human”, and it contains 10 short “rules” that are so dead-on accurate that it is little wonder the author chose to keep their identity from us.

This is because, as history clearly shows us, anyone who figures all this out and is still breathing is a clear candidate for either deification or death, depending on society’s general mood at the time.

In my book about mentoring and eating disorders, Beating Ana, I end the book with one of my favorite of the “rules”, #9:

Your answers lie inside you. The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen and trust.

If you’ve ever seen “Finding Nemo”, you know that not being able to remember is not always a bad thing. Sometimes, it can help you remember in a deeper way why life is so precious and worth living.

The 10th and final “rule”, by the way, simply states: You will forget all this.

And I do. Everyday.

Recently I saw the film “Bill Cunningham New York”.

Twice.

Never in my dreams (or my nightmares for that matter) did I ever expect to meet a mentor from deep inside the maw of the fashion industry.

Yet from his first days as a humble young milliner to his current post as the New York Times’ celebrated street fashion photographer, 82 year-old Bill Cunningham has never lost his childish enthusiasm for fashion-as-art, fashion-as-self-expression, fashion-as- (in his own paraphrased words) a panacea against the pain of life itself.

Recently a friend gave me a copy of one of her old magazines. It is not a magazine I usually read.

Well, if I’m being honest, I usually don’t read magazines, so that is nothing new.

But there was one article in the magazine that I liked, and so she offered me the option of taking it with me.

Once I got home, the novelty of having an actual magazine in the house got the better of me, and I sat down to thumb through it and stumbled upon some insightful advice about how we talk to ourselves.

In particular, the writer mentioned how, when we reject a compliment, make a self-deprecating comment, or refuse to own up to our own expertise or insight in a certain area, we both lead ourselves to water and we make ourselves drink.

Whether we want to or not.

Last week a friend convinced me to go check out the new X-Men movie.

Despite my assertions that I am not an X-Men afficionado and probably wouldn’t understand a thing about what was going on, she insisted I would do just fine since the new movie is a “pre-quel” that explains how all the stuff I don’t know about came to be.

So of course I went.

It is not that the concept was so revolutionary – people can be different, and people who are different can be scary, and we are programmed to be scared of scary things, and so on and so on.

But what struck me was the oh-so-clear portrait the movie painted of how powerful group support can be.

Recently I watched the movie “Amelia”, starring Hilary Swank in the title role of the legendary female pilot Amelia Earhart.

As I watched, I was struck again and again by Amelia’s courage. And stamina. And vision.

Amelia knew where she was going. She knew what she wanted. She knew what she was capable of.

Long before anyone else did.

Sound like anyone you know?