OxyMORON

Sometimes, I have the urge not to complain about anything or state my opinions, but the urge to simply talk about life and ask questions, which is fine because I have a blog on which I can spam my brains out onto. So if you're expecting a thrill-ride of comedy and clever analogies as my previous blogs have been, then you may as well stop reading here.
As I think I've redundantly stated in this blog numerous times, I'm someone whose feelings and opinions have changed throughout the course of his life a great amount. It's not that I can't make up my mind, rather... well, actually, that's kinda it.
I've always been somewhat of a living contradiction. If you read the title of this blog you will see the words "Eddie Wants Fame" (it just occurred to me how hilarious "EWF" sounds) and while that statement is not a lie, it is, at times, very...flexible.
In case you haven't owned a TV within the last 100 or so years, celebrities are people who can't afford to have the hope of living a simple, happy life. Celebrities are people who (the majority, anyhow) cannot stay in a relationship and cannot go to Wendy's without it being on the cover of People magazine. For most of my life, I've been okay with those ideas. The thought of being known and worshiped by all while living an exciting life doing something I love to do has just been a driving force for nearly everything I do. Even if it's not that extreme, it'd be great to walk down the street and have people say, "Oh my God, is that really who I think it is?". Or maybe just go on TV for an interview with Ellen DeGeneres or Good Morning America. I've always only thought about my own future in that one respect, and focused entirely on that one dream.
But since childhood, I've had two ideas that made me happier than anything to think about. These two ideas have been with me forever, and while the first one (my wanting to be famous) has always been my driving force and the one that occupied most of my time, the other one is an extreme contradiction to it. The one thing in my life that's competed with my dream for fame has been the dream of having a normal life.
Now, I'm completely aware that the reasons why this is really stupid are immediately apparent to anyone reading this. It's an oxymoron to say that you want to be famous and still lead a normal life. It's like saying you want to be a pilot who never flies.
Maybe it's just my basic human instinct that makes me want such a thing as to live "normally". Perhaps it's just in my DNA that I want to have a simple career that pays well yet I still enjoy, and settle down with a beautiful woman in a nice house with kids and live the rest of my days in simplicity, only ever worrying about the same things that any other American has to deal with. The thought of waking up in the morning to see a woman I'm married to and maybe spending the day doing nothing extremely significant to anything other than my enjoyment makes me happy beyond belief.
So... what is a guy to do when he wants to be known by all but also wants to live a life where the only people who know him are the people that he knows?
Obviously such a thing is, to some degree, achievable. There are stars and well-known people who live relatively normal lives and just go day to day spending their time with their loved ones. But that's one of those gambles that would be very unwise to bet on. I know that perhaps if I found some sort of job that brought a degree of well-known...ness, that I could maybe do from home or not have to go very far, then that would work just fine. But once more, that doesn't leave me with much. Being the ignorant teenager I am, I know of no such careers unless you live in a place like New York or California. Not to mention, having such an open-ended goal doesn't quite give me the motivation that "I want to be a movie star" does. It doesn't give me a place to start, it doesn't give me any ideas for something to major in when I'm off to college, and it doesn't give me anything to prepare for while I still have time.
Thank goodness I'm still young and I DO still have time. But when the clock is ticking and college approaches nearer and nearer, that soon brings very little comfort.

Part II

Every human being goes through phases of likes and dislikes. At one point in life, you may like broccoli, while later you may find that you're in love with Lincoln Logs. Something that's always held a very, very special place in my heart is film.
I'm not a film snob. I haven't seen over a billion movies that you've never heard of. But I have seen a lot of movies in my time, and loved them, and hated them. So, they tend to be something I'm very passionate about. When I critique a film, I try to take into consideration its good and its bad. Having said all that, let's move on:
I'm a ginormous fan of the Alien series, or at least, I used to be. I was introduced to it late in my life, but that's fine because a movie series like that opens up your eyes and makes you look at the world from a whole new perspective. I'd like to say that the movie series opened up my eyes to how the world is a beautiful, wonderful place full of great ideas and originality, and that WAS my view up to Aliens (the lazily-named part 2 in the series). Watching this series up to that point was a magnificent roller coaster of excitement and grandeur that was nice enough to give me free ice cream and high-fives every now and then. But when Alien 3 came around the ice cream had started going bad, as if taken from a very pissed off cow and processed by an ice cream factory staffed entirely by Republicans, and the high-fives were great until my hands started turning red and blistering and by that point I was begging to get off. High-fives are meant to signify momentous occasions and a high-five every three seconds just becomes a nuisance, which is exactly what Alien 3 was.
There were great movies like Aliens or The Matrix that left me waiting with baited breath to watch the sequel. Being the ignorant fool I was, I thought to myself, "It is physically impossible that a movie this amazing could ever have a bad sequ-" before I could finish that sentence I was five minutes into the next movie and I had the overpowering urge to go shove my head in a bucket of ice cubes and needles.
I don't hate ALL sequels, because there are plenty of good ones that I like, but Alien 3 was a perfect example of Hollywood’s greatest flaw when it comes to these: trying to turn a movie into something it’s just not meant to be. Why do SO many people think that in order for a movie to be as good as Braveheart or Gladiator they HAVE to kill off the main character in the end? (SPOILER,by the way) Sure it works sometimes and can add to the drama, but a lot of times that’s just not the turn the movie is supposed to take, especially when you’ve killed everything likeable about the character in that very same movie. It’s like an American actor trying to speak with a British accent. *cough* ROBERT DOWNEY JR. *cough*
This also applies to the Indiana Jones series, because as fantastic as those movies were in my childhood, part 4 was just not very good, since it crossed off nearly EVERYTHING on the “how to be as unoriginal as possible” Hollywood movie checklist. I heard they’re making an Indiana Jones 5, and the very idea just gives me the urge to go to Hollywood and throw a camera at someone, kick Uwe Boll in the face, then forget what I was doing there in the first place and hang out with Johnny Depp at the nearest coffee shop. It is typical by this point of popular franchise-Gods like George Lucas to give us further proof they forgot what it’s like to have an original idea, which I guess would make sense seeing as they don’t need originality to rule their vast armies of acne-ridden, anime-loving losers who probably outnumber our actual government officials at least 8 to 1, but as I’ve already stated I’m tired of seeing something good try to be something it’s not, ruined just for the sake of more money. It’s like a British actor trying to speak with an American accent. *cough*EverysingleactorintheUSmovieindustry*cough*

This rant is pretty useless when it gets down to it not only because I’m pretty much beating a dead horse with another dead horse but because this trend in movies will never end. People have ideas that they just shouldn’t have, and the call of a couple trillion dollars more is too enticing to pass up for them despite that a sequel will most likely just kill off everything like-able about the original. But they know people with watch their crap and they decide it’s worth the sacrifice and viola: we have a Ghostbusters 3. It’s thanks to geniuses like Quentin Tarantino and Peter Jackson that movies are still even worth watching. Without them we’d have no choice but to deal with garbage like Titanic 5 and The Godfather 6. Even worse, we'd probably have to deal with George Lucas shoving tons of useless Star Wars garbage down our throa-
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