I see the war on women continues apace.

And speaking of things which aren't exactly celebratory of women, Crash(2004) won Best Picture at the Oscars last night.

I sincerely thought Brokeback Mountain would win. My favourite of the lot was Munich, but I knew that it didn't stand a chance in hell, as directors talented to the point of legendary status are seldom awarded properly, a fact which Jon Stewart alluded to after 3-6 Mafia won for Best Song--"Martin Scorsese: zero Oscars. 3-6 Mafia: one Oscar."

Jon Stewart was a good host. At times it felt like watching a three hour episode of The Daily Show, especially during the hilarious faux-attack ads for Best Actress, narrated by Stephen Colbert.

Anyway, my initial fury over Crash(2004)'s win has kind of diminished to a dull disgust now. For those of you who haven't seen the movie, here's my take on it;

The film begins with soft, colourful rain and sanitised, boring light jazz--a musical sensibility which continues throughout the film to make sure we, as an audience, don't ever get too excited. It proceeds then to employ a lot of actors to give us brief, prematurely birthed stories populated mostly by weak archetypes with weak, tiresome twists.

There's an Iranian couple who own a small store which is robbed because their door won't lock. The Iranian man hired an Hispanic man to fix the door, but the Iranian man was too impatient and irritable, and didn't know English well enough, too understand when the Hispanic fellow told him the whole door needed to be replaced. So the Iranian guy blames the Hispanic guy for the robbery and he goes to shoot the Hispanic guy. Only the Hispanic guy has a little girl who can leap four feet in the air and has a magical, invisible, bullet-proof cape, rendering the Iranian's gun useless. The Iranian guy seems to ponder this, but we never learn how any individual involved processed the episode.

Then, in a hyper-retelling of Driving Miss Daisy, there's a white woman played by Sandra Bullock. She's sort of a bitch, but then one day she hurts herself and realises her Hispanic maid is her best friend.

A cop played by Matt Dillon pulls over a black couple played by Thandie Newton and Terrance Howard. Newton and Howard were having a good time, and she's a little drunk. Dillon's a racist, decides to molest Newton, and later, in a scene I actually thought wasn't so bad, Newton grills Howard about not sticking up for her, in exactly the way I might imagine a slightly drunk person might act after having just been molested by a guy with a gun and authority.

But later, Dillon rescues her from a car wreck. We never find out how the characters feel about the episode. But it was re-enacted on Oscar night by, apparently, the cast of George Romero's Land of the Dead.

Then there's another cop who's not a racist, until, I guess, the end of the movie when he shoots a black man for no apparent reason.

By the time the credits are rolling, you feel like you've seen a slightly above average episode of the latest crappy CSI knockoff, though you sense its logic, in several places, wouldn't hold up under scrutiny. And you also realise that there were episodes of Star Trek that handled these issues better. Perhaps people are racist in ways I don't understand, but which may be exorcised by this movie. I dunno. All I can say for sure is that, forty years from now, this movie will be even more boring than, though maybe not as cloying as, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is to-day.

I guess I've put the amount of effort I'm willing to put into My MySpace. Now that I've really sniffed around under its skirts, I can more authoritatively say that it is rather third rate. I guess it's a decent little place for advertising yourself, but the deemphasis on the blog aspect is sort of unappealing for me. I guess I feel the content of a person's character is better reflected in blog entries than it is in their photo and list of interests.

I'm not sure that's as trite as it sounds.

I'm using a background graphic I originally made for my blog. Blogger allows for much easier, broader customisation than does MySpace. Blogger actually let's you load the page template and let's you change any piece of HTML you want. With MySpace, you have to do a kind of circumventous hoodoo--which, oddly enough, seems to meet with the administrators' approval, even while they won't provide the most basic of tools with which to do it. So all coding has to go into the "About Me" field, which made me feel like a slave whose master's given him his very own woodshed.

I took a cue from Avarwaen and used mine to advertise Boschen and Nesuko a little. It was very nice of her to include the banner on her own site. I'm always rather pleased and flattered when people use it.

I noticed earlier that, for the time being, Boschen and Nesuko's gotten 200 fans on Online Comics. Which isn't bad, considering that it isn't a studiously homogenous teen romance manga, which is what seems to be the big craze there.

The number may drift in and out for a few days. I notice I tend to lose fans now and then. I can only presume they're people who think, "It's been much too long since there's been any violence! Too much talking!" or "It's been much too long since there's been any talking! Too much violence!" or "Where's the gratuitous nudity these days? I'm gone." or "What's with all the gratuitous nudity? I'm gone." Or just possibly, "This guy can't draw."

I always remember Oscar Wilde saying, "When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself."

But all in all, I'm extremely pleased with the volume I'm getting. It's a rare day now when I get under a hundred hits, so I don't feel I'm sinking or swimming based on what I get from Online Comics. Which seems to have a very strange popularity system. Boschen and Nesuko moves to and from the popular section with no real particular rhyme or reason. It doesn't seem to correspond with the number of fans it has, though occasionally it goes to the popular section when I receive one positive feedback. Just one seems to do it, which seems very silly to me, as anyone could put a friend up to it and cheat their way in.

It doesn't matter a great deal to me, though, as I don't get any particular increase in hits from being in the popular section. The whole thing's rather useless, if you ask me. Not to disparage Online Comics, which has been by far the single biggest source of hits for me. But its automated and fan bureaucracies are kind of amusing.

I had some perverted dreams last night. First I dreamt that C3PO was using Star Trek transporter beams to molest children, all while Oingo Boingo's "What You See is What You Get" was playing in the background. I know; a Star Wars character using Star Trek technology? I am twisted.

I also dreamt I was reading a comic written by Caitlin and illustrated by Jhonen Vasquez. It was about a skinny blonde Japanese girl having sex with an oversized caterpillar that looked like a hedgehog cactus while being photographed on a polished black square, like the one General Zod was trapped in in Superman 2. When the caterpillar came out of her, it didn't have spikes any more.

No less than three of my friends were talking about MySpace this morning. "Those suckers," I thought, "I'm not getting into that MySpace racket until I'm 90 and chasing teenage tail."

Then the voice in my head asked, "You're going to let someone else take the 'Setsuled' login?"

So here's my dumb mug.

I hope you're all very happy for getting a man of my sophisticated tastes to partake in such a thing.

Now, if you don't mind, I've got scantily clad dames to draw in me sketchbook.

Thursday was rather aggressive. Knowing that I was getting up at 11am naturally these days, it arranged to rouse me at 7am.

I had an appointment to take my car into the dealership to get its brakes fixed. The woman there said it would take until the end of the day and asked if I needed a ride anywhere. "No, thanks," I said. I thought, "I don't need no steekin' automobile anyway. I got two legs, as Terry Gilliam said."

I brought my black bag, which slings over my shoulder and which was a, oh, for these purposes, let's call a purse. I also had the brilliant idea to bring my leather jacket, even though the morning chill shortly thereafter disintegrated like a polar bear in lava. And guess what? I'd run out of deodorant the day before. I only mention it because the exact same thing happened to me last time. The last time I had to take my car into the dealership and then walk for long periods under the blood engorged breasts of our affectionate sun. Both times I said to myself, "I'll just buy some in the morning before I go to the dealership." And of course, both times I didn't have time.

So I walked to a Starbucks a few blocks away, purse flopping on my hip under my heavy black leather jacket. And yet, somehow, by the time I reached the coffee place, I had managed to not sweat even one drop. Mind over matter, I suppose.

I sat there for about two hours reading Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Five of Cups. It's a good book. I read about Gin the Vampire's shenanigans with an interesting priest, an angel, and a bird.

I finally decided to move on to elsewhere in La Mesa. I walked down a fairly steep overpass to the very busy intersection of Baltimore and Fletcher Parkway. As I was standing there, waiting for the light to change, I looked down and noticed a small brown bird, standing in the street, about a foot from the curb. She just stood there, tranquilly watching the car wheels passing inches from her face.

When the light changed, I put my hand under her. She slowly put one foot on my fingers and then the other. I looked closely at her as I walked quickly across the street. She didn't seem to be injured in any way--no blood, no oddly angled body parts. She didn't look sick. She fluttered her wings a couple times but didn't try to fly away. Her beak opened and closed as she looked at me.

On the other side of the street were a couple of middle-aged hippies. "Is it okay?" asked the woman.

"I don't know," I said. "It doesn't look like there's anything wrong with her."

"Maybe it's a baby," said the woman. At that moment, the bird flew away.

"It's a good omen, man," said the male hippie.

"I hope so," I replied.

"It's beautiful . . . God bless you!"

I kind of awkwardly waved to him as I walked away. Of course I thought about the bird all the way to Grossmont Centre mall. I went from wondering if I'd given her the wrong impression of humans, if she was going to fly into some redneck's backyard and get shot. I wondered if she had bird flu, and if I had bird flu all over my hand. Maybe she'd been someone's pet, but she wasn't the sort of bird one normally sees kept as a pet. She looked exactly like all the other little brown birds one sees in the area.

Anyway, I reached the mall, bought a small coffee, put my jacket and bag on a chair, sat tiredly down in another, laid my phone and book on the table, opened the book--and immediately received a call from the woman at the dealership, telling me my car was ready. It was 11am. Apparently "the end of the day" means different things to different people.

So to-day I do the first page of the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter. I'm happy I managed to completely finish the script on Wednesday, and I managed to have enough energy to work on the storyboards last night.

I shall now have at it . . .

Virginia Heffernan reads too much into Brokeback Mountain parodies.

I had what can certainly be described as a good day yesterday. Or evening, really; the day was so insubstantial as to be almost non-existent, like very thin tissue. But the evening just got progressively better, so that by the end of it, I was jittery with happy excitement, far happier than circumstances probably really warranted.

On Tuesdays, I normally eat at my mother's house. There I watch Gilmore Girls with my family, which is an occasionally decently written show, though less so these days. However, my mother and sister were having some sort of "girl's night" with friends at Olive Garden (a restaurant), leaving me alone at my mother's house. I watched my DVD of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' Shall We Dance. I noticed it's not as well written in the first half as it is in the second half, and I wondered why. But already the pattern of mounting happiness was presenting itself in my evening.

Then my sister came in briefly to give me some cheese ravioli from Olive Garden. One of the keenest pleasures of my life is cheese ravioli, and I was very hungry at this point for lunch having been several hours before.

So happier I became, and upon returning here, I discovered Robyn had recommended Anthony Mann's Westerns with Jimmy Stewart, and I got irrationally happy when I found I had one already on tape.

But irrational happiness proved most prudent and wise, as The Naked Spur, the movie on my tape, proved very good indeed.

A movie many times better than Mann's later Man of the West, The Naked Spur is cunningly written. The screenplay was nominated for an Oscar it very much deserved--it succeeds in vividly crafting characters and stringing them through conflicts that are both fascinatingly unpredictable, yet consistently true to the characters and human nature.

James Stewart plays Howard Kemp, who's been provoked into the life of a bounty hunter by a very raw deal. Robert Ryan is his quarry, and Janet Leigh is Ryan's girl . . . You know, as with Match Point, I find myself not wanting to discuss many details of the plot, as one of the movie's joys for me were its surprises.

I'd seen Ryan in only two other movies, Clash By Night, and The Woman on the Beach, the former being a decent, dark domestic drama featuring Barbara Stanwyck with bad hair, and the latter being an American film by Jean Renoir, who seemed with it to be about as far from The Rules of the Game as Marcel Dalio was in Casablanca. In both movies, Ryan was a nearly adequate male lead, but in The Naked Spur, he's quite good at being plain hateable.

All of the supporting players were good and appropriately cast, but the great performance of the movie was definitely Stewart's. Where Gary Cooper was staunchly Nice, James Stewart was capable of injecting a disturbing, dark edge into his performance that contributed enormously to the movie's core beauty. In the midst of the plot's clever workings is a very compelling story of a decent man trying so hard to retrieve his decent life that he's almost ready to commit murder. The soundtrack of the film was quite good--the rough percussion and strings of the opening theme reminded me of Yojimbo, while Stewart's desperate, uncertain justifications and forbiddingly manic pleading for Lina(Janet Leigh)'s affections are accompanied by a slightly soured rendition of "Home, Sweet Home."

The delicious trickiness of the character relationships is perhaps best evoked in the scene of Stewart pleading for a wife who won't abandon him only a few feet from the man he's willing to kill in the desperate hope to ensure that future.

Now, although I didn't think Man of the West was a great film, it nonetheless didn't seem unlikely from it that Mann, with his eye for dusty, American wilderness, was capable of filming a great Western. And his contribution to The Naked Spur isn't insubstantial. Filmed in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, scenery is constantly used to great effect, and the movie seems to have been filmed almost entirely outdoors, with the exception of one scene on a cave set. It gives the movie an air of realism unusual for movies of the period, yet there were times I almost wish he had used a set, as the several very obvious day-for-night shots were a little jarring.

But, all in all, it's a brilliant movie that I only wish was available on DVD.

It seems like every two days or so Caitlin is posting about movies I haven't seen. I'm staggered by the constant reminders these days of large quantities of interesting movies I've not seen, particularly movies made in the past three decades. So, realising that there're still over three hundred movies on them that I haven't seen, I've gone back to my TCM tapes.

On Saturday, I watched Anthony Mann's Man of the West. A film with some beautiful, very widescreen colour photography of Western vistas, and with one decent action sequence. But it was a movie I had a lot of problems with.

Gary Cooper stars as Link Jones, a former outlaw who now lives peacefully settled down with wife and kids in a small community. As the movie begins, he's taking a train to the big city in the hopes of hiring a teacher and bringing her back to his remote town.

But the train is robbed by young hooligans, and Link is left stranded on the tracks without his gun and without the money the town had entrusted to him. Also stranded is a small-time hustler and a woman who was possibly a prostitute or possibly merely a waitress at a bawdy saloon. Sometimes it's hard to tell what filmmakers are trying to hint at through the censors.

Anyway, Link leads the trio to his former hideout where he finds his former mentor and former partner in crime, Doc Tobin, in charge of the gang that had accosted the train. Link's ostensibly brought back into the fold, though he isn't given a gun. They don't trust him, and for good reason, as Link is merely playing along so that he and his new companions aren't killed. Things lead then to wagon travel and plans of a heist in a town called Lasso.

Now, the first problem I had with the movie was Link himself. Gary Cooper was simply wrong for the role, and not just because he looked too old--and was too old--to be Doc Tobin's protégé. Never at any moment did I even slightly believe that he used to be a ruthless bandit. Gary Cooper exudes far too much unmitigated honour and decency from his little finger. And he essentially plays the same guy in all of his movies. Now, if it'd been John Wayne in the role, that might have worked. Wayne showed in The Searchers that he was as capable of injecting a bit of loathsomeness into his performance as he was at being a plain straight arrow.

Another problem is that the movie's an experiment in portraying slightly harsher circumstances than movies had previously allowed--this being during the era of the old studio system, but after the defeat of the Hayes production code, when filmmakers were flailing about slightly, trying to decide how far they could go. Unfortunately, movies that push the envelope purely for the sake of pushing the envelope don't age well after said envelope becomes irrelevant. So a scene where an unruly gang member forces the lady to start undressing doesn't make you feel, "Oh, that's so incredibly indecent!" so much as it makes you think, "You know, in real life, the whole gang would've raped her already."

Then the movie has some formulaic fight scenes, and the small-time hustler is rather mechanically gotten rid of at one point. But the end of the movie does have a decent gunfight in Lasso, a rundown little town that appeared to have been completely constructed for the movie.

For the most part, though, the movie was a series of weak, insubstantial notes.

This sure felt like a quick day.

I haven't done very much with it. I watched a Discovery Times report on Jihadists on the internet while Victoria the cat slept on my lap. I worked a bit on a new project, finding it's hard to draw human ears now.

I'm starting to get the impression that Robyn would like people to plug her Live Journal community, Cinemaeater. She and her friend post reviews there for bad movies they've watched. It's a pretty entertaining site.

It's actually been pretty gloomy outside to-day--cool air, grey sky, and light drizzle. The cats walk to the door eagerly, stop, look at me as if wondering if I was the one who authorised the weather, and then walk away.

I think maybe I'll go out into it now . . .

Perhaps you will buy Spooky's doll?

Rereading Mike Nelson's latest blog post this morning, I clicked on his link to an article on H.R. Pufnstuf. I think this is my first exposure to the . . . phenomenon? I don't know why, but for some reason the screenshots of the titular dragon make me nauseous. Maybe it's the faded colours, or the fact that he looks like a bloated, jaundiced corpse with mould tears.

Or perhaps it's that I just returned from a long walk in the hot sun, during which I ate a Subway sandwich and drank a hot caffe latte. Swiss cheese, mayo, and avocado followed by steamed milk, all under the hot San Diego sun. Yum.

I've been too busy with Boschen and Nesuko to get the brakes fixed on my car, so I've been walking to lunch on those days where I absolutely had to get out. Last week, it caused me to make two completely unplanned DVD purchases, one insanely cheap, the other a bit more than I probably ought to have spent.

On the first occasion, I'd been wandering over some considerable distance trying to make up my mind on where to have lunch. I finally settled on Tacos Mi Pueblo, for their wondrously hazardous hot sauce. When I got there, the place was very crowded, so I was forced to eat outside, alone on a cement bench in the cold wind. Combined with the hot sauce, my nose soon became very runny, though I was proud of the fact that no napkin or tortilla chip had been snatched by the air currents threatening to take my hat.

So I afterwards quickly darted into the nearby Big!Lots in order to blow my nose. I marvelled again at the store's perpetually ravaged shelves--I used to work there, you know, and my job consisted entirely of straightening merchandise on the shelves. That's it, that's all I did--but it was disgracefully time-consuming. I mean, when I worked at Rite Aid, straightening shelves, or "recovery," was something cashiers did at the end of the day. But something about Big!Lots makes customers feel entitled to tear and molest things that don't belong to them.

Anyway, in the paper and plastic carnage, I spotted a bin of two-dollar DVDs, one of which, incredibly, featured both Charlie Chaplin's The Kid and Buster Keaton's The General. I think I mostly bought it on principle, because both movies really are worth more than two dollars.

The DVD had this on the cover;



I'm not sure what that's meant to convey. But as much as I like the Keaton and Chaplin movies, it wouldn't surprise me if some kid somewhere is rather angry at his parent for bringing this home in lieu of Pokemon or Harry Potter.

The other DVD I got was Tori Amos' new video collection, Fade to Red. Twenty bucks, which is really much more than I'm usually willing to spend on a non-Criterion DVD, but standing there in the Wal-Mart and reading on the back that it has commentary from Amos, my knees melted, and I knew it was written that I should purchase the thing. Every time I wonder at the helpless devotion Oprah Winfrey fans display for their goddess, I ought to look back to that moment, and know that I am hardly above such things.

Of course I was dismayed upon putting the DVD in my computer to find that audio wasn't working. I tried other DVDs, and found that it was only the Amos DVD not giving sound. Apparently it was recorded in some funky format, but fortunately, earlier in the week Tim had given me a link to this site, which provides a video player with some very handy codecs, which I'd needed to watch the bootleg Top o Nerae 2 files he'd given me. That I should need such a thing for a store-bought DVD seems rather silly, but whatever; it works now and I'm happy.

I guess I mainly bought the thing for the commentary, as all the best videos were already on a VHS collection I have. They're not in chronological order, so the inferiority of the newer videos seems particularly sad. It's reflected in the commentary, as Tori discusses meaning and song writing motivation for her older videos, while for her newer ones, she discusses technical details and the credentials of her collaborators. As I was saying to Trisa on the phone a couple days ago, Tori has become the George Lucas of the music industry.

I've been testing that analogy in my mind, finding all sorts of parallels--they both dig Joseph Campbell, both weave classic mythology into their works, and both seem to have become generally more interested in the technical and superficial aesthetic aspects of their productions.

But I truly loved seeing those old videos again. The video for God was particularly refreshing, in its unabashed, mischievous poke at religion. They don't make videos like that anymore, do they? Can you imagine such a thing in our current climate? Oh, Tori, I miss you.

Wow. I just now finally had time to watch the fourth episode of Top o Nerae 2. Absolutely amazing. It was the first time in a long time I felt what you might call "anime awe."

Anime is chalk full of super strength and big, big, bigger-than-you-can-even-imagine type explosions. So almost never do I feel as I think I'm meant to feel. All the ultra-mega blasts and urban supernovas get to be pretty underwhelming after a while--even, I suspect, to the people making them. It gets to be so rote--even the average romantic comedy can't go five minutes without a soufflé or a lawn ornament going critical and endangering the neighbourhood.

But every once in a while, you get the big thing and it actually comes across. Such was the case with Top o Nerae 2 episode 4. Within the space of about thirty minutes, it did better than most big budget epic sci-fi movies. There's an exhilaration, undeniable even for the ultra-cute main character, Nono, and the show's theme song, which doesn't seem so much standard J-Pop, as an attempt to actually up the ante on J-Pop sugary sweetness. It makes you feel like you're masturbating in public.

Perhaps it was an ironic juxtaposition, because not since Evangelion have I been so emotionally involved with the pretty kids in their bipedal machines fighting huge alien menaces. Amazing video, audio, and art design are all on the ball here and moments touch the Lovecraft nerve with their feeling of unimaginable, alien malevolence.

You know the cats are damn good when you're gamely cheering for the pink-haired heroine to resurrect the legendary "buster machine." Wow, that was neat.

The Winter Olympics is in sore need of nude figure skating.

A new Boschen and Nesuko is up. You could learn a lot from this chapter. I may quiz you later.

Thursday and I've been awake since 7:30am. I feel like I've just jumped off the high dive, done eight summersaults, landed splashlessly in the pool, and changed the water to strawberry Kool-Aid. I'll damn well be in Scotland before ye to-day, Thursday.

I've gotten behind on Boschen and Nesuko. In insidious little ways that I don't quite notice, but that keep me from taking pleasure in anything else. However, I caught up big time yesterday, working on the thing from 9:30am to 9:30pm. I stopped only for lunch and to buy the Sin City soundtrack, which, as I'd suspected, was even better than the movie itself led me to believe.

One of the reasons I was behind on my comic was that I went with family on Tuesday to see Good Night and Good Luck. Now I have only to see Capote before I've collected ticket stubs of all Best Picture nominees. As the astutette Robyn says Capote is disappointing, I may skip it.

So far I still feel that Munich is most deserving of the Best Picture title, though I'll be quite happy to see Brokeback Mountain win (as it most certainly shall).

Good Night and Good Luck wasn't bad. David Strathairn was good as Edward R. Murrow, and the speeches taken verbatim from Murrow were good. At times the movie felt like a feature length version of the newsreel screening room scene from Citizen Kane, and there was a nice atmosphere, accompanied by Rosemary Clooney's band. However, there was a distracting tendency for the camera never to get very far from the actors--everyone was always seen from at least the waist up. It also suffers from the current irritating trend of having slightly too-shaky handheld camera work. The influence, I suppose, comes from Dogme 95, but the novelty's worn off big time for me. Look, guys, we know it's not a documentary. You're not fooling anybody, and you're giving me a headache. Knock it off.

Those two devices, combined with the fact that there were no exterior shots, gave the movie a close, almost claustrophobic feel that was probably intentional, but that I felt was distracting and inappropriate for a movie about McCarthyism. Also, Robert Downey Junior's character was completely superfluous.

Anyway, it's about time for me to go. So goes me.

I can't seem to draw a straight line with a ruler to-day. And boy, without a ruler, my pencil almost invariably takes the scenic route between points. I did pencil and ink for the first Boschen and Nesukopage to-day. It took five hours. A little more complicated than I expected. And then there's this weird funk. Well, perhaps it's not so weird for someone who's just had his sleeping pattern inverted against his will.

I caught the new Bill Maher last night. The man seems off his game. I remember when I used to consider Politically Incorrect the pinnacle of political comedy television, with The Daily Show a good but sometimes misguided second. Now things seem to have reversed.

Real Time did help me stay up until 9pm, though. So I made the astonishingly normal slumber run of 9pm to 5am.

I did get a good long walk in yesterday. I made a big circuit through several commercial areas, ending up at Target. Which reminds me--a few days ago, when I was looking through video games at Target, I heard a guttural voice behind me say, ". . . then they cut off your head and piss and crap and shit in it." I turned around and there was a hairless dwarf dressed in black, watching me. He beat a hasty retreat down another aisle.

I have to go back to sleeping during the day.

And now it's 7am and I slept for about twelve hours. It's wrong to feel this tired after twelve hours of sleep. It's indecent.

I did break at midnight and stayed up until after The Daily Show at 1:30am. I suppose I'm lucky The Colbert Report is reruns this week.

Honestly, I'm worried I'll be in no state to get anything done. And that angers me.

I meant to go to Taco Bell yesterday and never did. However, I had two or three dreams involving Taco Bell last night. I think I'm meant to confront Taco Bell to-day and I've a feeling, if I don't, I shall never become a Jedi.

But on the bright side, this will be the first Thursday in a very long time that won't be a horrible inconvenience.

Bleugh. Well, I guess I had an interesting Valentine's Day. I got shanghaied into a family function--ostensibly a party for my great great aunts (yes, two greats for both of them). But they both looked almost as bored as I was. Two or three people there gabbed furiously while the rest of us were smothered by the atmosphere. Or maybe I was the only one who'd call it smothering.

The location was some kind of sea food restaurant I hadn't been to since I was a kid. The tables were very low, making it difficult for people to move their hands from their laps to the table top--it was something like the harness on a rollercoaster. I had slept from around noon until 3pm, so I was ravenously tired, and drank innumerable refills of black coffee. But circumstances didn't permit me to sleep until 9pm, and I slept sporadically throughout the night. I woke for periods to eat, watch The Daily Show, play Baldur's Gate--but those activities only fitfully, as I could barely concentrate.

By 8am, I wasn't sure if what I'd experienced counted as a night's sleep or not. I decided it had, so I toasted a bagel. Lucky the Cat seemed to disagree with my assessment, as he jumped off my bed and walked into the hall to observe me eating. You ever look at a cat and swear he's about to say something in English? It wasn't a cat look. It was a, "Are you going to bed, or what? You look a bit ragged, Old Boy," look.

But I decided to take the opportunity and do some of those daytime things I'm never able to do. I went to the banks and deposited money into my checking account. Fortunately I wasn't as low as I thought I was, and I received Sirenia Digest #3 in the e-mail last night. I suppose I'd just be overdrawn, but I had this irrationally dreadful fantasy of receiving an e-mail from Spooky saying, "You dishonour us with your lack of funds, and you dishonour yourself."

After that I wandered aimlessly a bit, intending to write the new Boschen and Nesuko script at a Starbucks or something, not expecting much difficulty as I have the whole thing practically written in my head by now. Or at least I've got the exe file. But I started feeling out of sorts, and now I'm back, it's 3:40pm, and I feel like it's bedtime. I really hope this doesn't get in my way too much.

Think you can shoot better than Dick Cheney? Step up!

A CNN poll finds 8% of those polled feel the government is doing "too much" for victims of Katrina. Those can't all be bored junior high students and ASL gorillas. How do you get to be that brand of asshole? My guess is it takes a lot of money.

It seems Paris Hilton's impeccable moral character has finally paid off.

I picked up the final volume of Maison Ikkoku yesterday. An ending of a Rumiko Takahashi series! A real ending, too, not just a last episode where nothing changes. Which I guess is the advantage of reading the manga--although the Ranma 1/2, Urusai Yatsura and Inu-Yasha television series have no proper endings, supposedly their manga counterparts do. And so, from what I hear, does the Maison Ikkoku television series, which adheres closer to the manga than any other. But I have to say I was somewhat disappointed by the one episode I saw.

Tim copied a bunch of anime for me on Saturday. This time he gave me the movie Jin-Roh, two episodes of Top o Nerae 2, and all twenty seven episodes of Noir.

I watched the first episode of Noir and was pretty heavily disappointed. There seems to be a frightening thirst for the homogenous in anime these days, and Noir is a good example of the trend. I think it's meant to be film noir-ish, but it's not easy to tell with its very standard and dull J-Pop theme, hazy story, and hazier characters. Animation is very, very slow--which I might forgive for a presumably low budget if the compositions weren't utterly bland and coloured with boring pastels worthy of a Hallmark shop before Easter. The main characters apparently are a blond assassin and a girl who wants her help because she has amnesia. "But," the assassin says, "I don't help people. I kill people," and tells the kid that, once they find out the secret of the kid's identity, the assassin's therefore going to have to kill her. Er, yeah. This after they've been in a gunfight with your standard mysterious thugs in black suits and sunglasses. A fight that had all the excitment of blank postcards falling through a mailslot.

But I'm excited about the Top o Nerae 2 episodes. These are episodes three and four of an OVA series probably destined never to be released in the U.S. If it is, it'll probably be under the title of Gunbuster 2, as Gunbuster was the English title of the first series, a classic from the 80s. Directed by Hideaki Anno who, apparently, has recently done a tongue-in-cheek live action adaptation of Cutie Honey, which I'm afraid to see.

Top o Nerae 2 is produced by Gainax, the same company as produced the original series. The director's different, and the show has a different sensibility, but it's especially after viewing Plain Jane Noir that I appreciate it very much. It's a lot of fun, and interesting. Why are people so afraid of Interesting?

Anyway, I didn't do very much else yesterday. I'm making grand plans, mainly. I want to get started on the next Boschen and Nesuko chapter early as there will be a lot of things I need to work out. Plus I'm working on another project which needs a whole lot of groundwork laid, but I like the daydreams I'm having about it.

But for now, perhaps, I'll sleep . . .

I just now finally read Caitlin R. Kiernan's most recent Sirenia Digest--number two. It came in the e-mail weeks ago, I think. I think it's almost time for Sirenia Digest three, in fact. Where does my time go?

But the #2 pair of tales was a very lovely time in my chair this evening. First was a vignette called "Orpheus at Mount Pangaeum", which was like the minds of three creatures laid out in a laboratory, utterly dwarfing the room's clean orderly nature with their awesome strangeness and beauty. It's with a vignette like that that it becomes very clear how much Caitlin loves monsters. And why not? It's like Michelangelo walked into a room filled with alien and demoniac cadavers and was told to make a sculpture--and the results expressed things simple marble could not. Claws, teeth, and blood seem to sprout from the vignette to suit the unspoken emotional rhythms writer and reader are keyed to.

The second story, "Pony", is more human, perhaps. But in a good way. It's a pair of lovers and a strange friction they feel due to one of Kiernan's favourite concepts--people attempting to cope with an apparently supernatural experience. It's also got some very pleasing sex.

It's nice to cap the evening with good art. I'd been playing Baldur's Gate for a while beforehand, which feels more and more like a joyless addiction. What's worse, it's a joyless nostalgic addiction--I get a certain thrill from using Fireball and Stinking Cloud again, just like I did in the Golden Box D&D games I played when I was younger. But it leaves me feeling really empty, and I miss just watching movies in the evening.

The latest Boschen and Nesuko chapter ate up so much of my time last week, that I only managed to watch Revenge of the Sith--and that in parcels, over several nights. Part of the reason I had so little time was because I had to get ahead in order to be free on Friday night to baby-sit my cousins. For which, it turned out, I was in fact not needed.

And gods, was Thursday ever a particularly nasty clog in the works. I got three hours of sleep that morning, then of course had to be out at 11am. I went to Fry's and bought a copy of Lawrence of Arabia and Elvis Costello's Armed Forces. Can you believe I didn't have that album, Costello fan that I am? It occurred to me to get it finally when I saw this entry in Spooky's journal. I took it as a sign--despite the fact that I have no real faith, I am paradoxically rather superstitious. Call me Ichabod Crane.

Well, anyway--I still don't have that album. I got to my car, eagerly tore off the cellophane . . . and found part of the jewel case was missing, and along with it the bonus CD. Fry's notoriously dodgy merchandise strikes me at last. There's a reason their returns section always has a huge line.

I almost went right back in, but glanced at the clock and saw that it was already 1:45pm and I wanted to visit Marty at around 2pm. Which I did, and it was a nice visit.

So I got back home at around 3:30 or so. I fed the cats and went back to sleep--waking up at 9pm. The good news was that I finished both of the last two Boschen and Nesuko pages--and the bad news was that I couldn't get to sleep until noon. And I had to get up at 4pm.

Ever since then, I've been dogged by a phantasmal shroud of sleepiness I can't shake for the life of me. But I did enjoy watching Lawrence of Arabia on the 42 inch screen. I sit real close, too--and I sit through the Overture. That's how it's meant to be, folks. Take it that way and I guarantee you'll feel better in the morning.

The new Boschen and Nesuko's up early. I finished the last two pages last night because I think I might be busy to-night.

It's another anti-Valentine's Day chapter. I just can't kick that holiday enough times in its stomach.

Also, if you're out there wondering if there's anything you can count on in this world, well, I can guarantee you you'll see Nesuko naked yet again. I live to serve.

Addendum;

I forgot to mention that I don't think the Danish cartoons are very good. Which seems important, somehow. Although I hesitate to positively critique something that was created in a culteral context to which I am alien. But I also find myself hesitant to condemn them as obviously, intentionally bigoted.

A while ago, a friend of mine told me that he felt religion was the bane of mankind, that we'll never see peace in the world so long as there is religion. I responded by saying that I didn't feel religion was the problem, but a symptom of the problem.

I don't like the idea that my consciousness will cease with my death. And yet, if I had to choose, I'd say that's what I believe occurs, since there is a lot of evidence to support it, and no evidence to the contrary. But because the idea makes me unhappy, I can certainly understand why people would choose to believe in an afterlife. And so I can therefore understand why people hold faith in certain belief structures instead of accepting a frightening alternative.

So the problem isn't religion. The problem is that people prefer to be ruled by their passions instead of their reason, and religion provides an excuse to do so.

I've been thinking about this as I read and hear about the international crisis arisen in the wake of Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Twelve little cartoons and people respond not only with riots, but embargoes and official diplomatic atrophy. It's bad enough when it's teenagers burning embassies because they're hot-blooded and ignorant, but when prominent public officials and diplomats, even those who decry terrorism in the name of Islam, are deliberately damaging trade and calling for punishment of the cartoonists, it's a larger, more serious problem. A more fundamental problem, you might say.

The cartoons are viewable at the Wikipedia entry on the matter. Some of them criticise the treatment of women in popular Muslim culture, while another is of a cartoonist nervously drawing Muhammad. That these should provoke physically violent outrage is terrible, but the most controversial cartoon is one depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. That this should provoke violent reprisals is terrible in a different way. For one thing, it shows the distressingly poor conception of irony; "Call us a violent people, will you?! That makes us so mad that we're gonna burn your embassies!"

Personally, I don't think the cartoon is necessarily insulting to Islam. If the artist was interested in making a statement with it, it could well be that the juxtaposition of Muhammad with a bomb is a discordant one, an ugly one. One might say that if the artist felt violence was fundamental to Islam, such a drawing would be pointless. But, then, maybe the artist wasn't that clever. Perhaps it's a genuinely bigoted caricature.

In any case, I disagree with the people who are calling the article and the cartoons the obvious products of irresponsible provocateurs. The general point of the article seems to have been to do with free speech and understanding the nature of Islam in a positive light; the cartoons were commissioned as response to an author's difficulty in finding illustrators for a children's book on the life of Muhammad. That those who've reacted hatefully to the article are unable to comprehend that, to the point of feeling very extreme reprisals are warranted, evinces a deep rooted and widespread cultural malady. A malady that cannot be solved with military action, as current U.S. leaders might think, but, if anything, with better cultural thought, and the instillation of respect for secular reason.

The fact that that's probably never going to happen should not restrict artists from working for or under finer principles. And part of living in a society where people are free to express ideas is learning not to freak out when someone expresses what seems like a bad idea. Perhaps people simply need to realise that considerations of life and limb ought to take more serious priority than those of ink and paint.

And for gods' sake, people; lighten up.

"As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster. Or an evil wizard."

I succeeded to-day in waking up at 8pm. Thank you, thank you.

Yes, I'm only too happy as another Thursday draws to a close. Although I tried to go to sleep earlier, I only managed to drop off at around 8am--and then I of course needed to awaken again at 10am. So out into the world I went, an ambassador of bad coordination and sticky eyes. I had a meal at Einstein bagels, and had serious trouble counting the seven dollars from my wallet to pay for it. My poor math abilities are grossly multiplied by sleep deprivation.

Not thinking about it a whole lot ahead of time, I decided to see Brokeback Mountain again in order to kill the time. I think one of the fun things about seeing Brokeback Mountain alone as a young man is that it makes you Obviously Gay and Possibly Tragic.

"One for Brokeback Mountain," I said to the 20-something male cashier, who, in response gave me an earnest look and said, "Hey, that's no problem." The guy who took my ticket even blessed me.

The first time I saw the movie was in La Jolla, at the Landmark, which exclusively shows foreign and indie films. The audience consisted of a lot of women, and one old man who I overheard talking about seeing Snow White when it was first released.

To-day, I was in Rancho San Diego at the big Edwards Meta-plex, or whatever they're calling them now. The audience, it being the middle of the day, was small; only about fifteen or so people. It consisted of older, gossipy women, who thankfully talked little during the movie, although several of them left and returned to the theatre throughout the movie like it was a football game. And they would always walk all the way across the theatre, in front of the screen, so that Ang Lee's beautiful mountain vistas were frequently accented by fluffy round-haired bespectacled silhouettes. A people impressively out of touch with their feelings, I noticed, as one woman even strolled past during Ennis's story about the old man he saw mutilated and murdered.

I stayed until the credits stopped. At the end of the row to my left, two old women also stayed in order to chatter for the duration. When I finally got up to leave, and I walked by in front of them, one of them said, "Oh, my god!" and they both stopped talking.

...

I was made extraordinarily, maddeningly happy on Monday. I went to see Match Point--and it was a great, unpredictable, thoroughly wonderful movie. I can't remember the last time a new movie has made me feel so happy. I can't remember ever being happier, actually.

Driving home afterwards, I couldn't stop smiling. Not because it was a happy movie, but because it was so damn perfect. And it was even better because I knew hardly anything about it going in. It's directed by Woody Allen, who says it's his best film. And although I've only seen four other Woody Allen movies, I think he could be right.

I could tell the audience behind me weren't terribly happy about it. A woman behind me said, "I guess it was entertaining, but there was no point." I can assure you people that there was as much a point to the movie as there was to Casablanca, Taxi Driver, or Ghostbusters. It was the uncomfortable grumbling of an audience who was undeniably at the edge of their seats for the whole movie--not a peep or rustle did I hear--even though the movie couldn't be neatly categorised or--worse--couldn't be categorised as a typical Woody Allen film.

First of all, the beginning of the movie almost brought me to tears by the fact that it had intelligent, complicated, and engaging dialogue. And then about halfway through the movie I was having the beginnings of a darkly strange cinema orgasm. My thoughts might have read something like, "Oh, Allen, what--what are you doing . . . I'm . . . not sure I like this . . . no, Allen, stop--stop! Oh, gods, stop . . . stop, stop, stop---aAHAHUh! No, no, no--yes, yes, yes, yes, YES! Yes . . . ah . . . ahhh . . . Ah, oh, Allen, mmm, I--I love you. I love yoooooou . . . "

Trust me. You want what I was having.

I just learned, somewhat appropriately, I suppose, from Moira that Moira Shearer died yesterday.

I've only seen her in The Red Shoes, and a long time ago I saw Peeping Tom. Which shows how deficient I am in Powell/Pressburger movies I've seen. Especially considering The Red Shoes is a movie that I constantly have to prevent myself from re-watching. It's a great movie in so many ways; editing, its use of colour, pacing, story, acting, characters, costumes. Each aspect can definitely be described as both striking and beautiful.

And Shearer was great in it. A beautiful and talented ballerina, who also proved to be a very good actress. Whenever I imagine a Boschen and Nesuko movie, actually, a young Moira Shearer is who I usually picture playing Nesuko. Sometimes I imagine Katharine Hepburn, particularly if I'm imagining a cgi movie, but I know Shearer would've been able to handle a lot of the physical stuff. I loved her in The Red Shoes that much.

I just noticed there's an 1894 film for download of Annie Oakley in her Wikipedia entry.

I feel like this was an unproductive night. I spent a lot of time playing Baldur's Gate. Yes, the writing irritates me, but it is still Dungeons and Dragons. If only I lived near Stephen Colbert, who, as I've learned from this recent Onion interview, played it as a lad. He was lucky. I wish I knew people nearby who played Dungeons and Dragons.

Well, then, maybe I don't. After all that Baldur's Gate, I feel really dirty. The best way I could justify it to myself was by saying, "It's Sunday. Sundays are made for slacking off."

I was playing it a few nights ago as well, when I looked to my left and noticed that my Citizen Kane DVD happened to be sitting at the top of a DVD pile. And I asked myself, "What would I really rather be doing? Playing this insipid game, or watching Citizen Kane yet again?" And I'm happy to say Kane won that particular vote.

Afterward, I was looking at the movie's IMDB entry and noticed one of the user comments, though ostensibly a positive review, described the movie as "slow" and, though obviously important and influential, also "not pure entertainment."

Bullocks. Someone needs strangling. I'm not even putting this one down to a short attention span. This is abject stupidity. Slow? There's not a merest fraction of an atom of fat in that movie. Though I guess I can see how a teenager might not like the subject matter, and even get greater thrill, as the quoted reviewer does, from The Matrix. But it sure does make me hate young people.

Anyway. I better put myself to bed now before I start dragging white trash out of their homes and into cold asphalt hell, as I lecture them in the early morning chill about the difference between squares and rectangles. Gods, all my crotchetiness seems to come out at 7am . . .

The original Harry Potter?

It's the jolliest Boschen and Nesuko yet! I think it's also an early anti-Valentine's Day chapter.

Boschen and Nesuko's now past 300 pages, so . . . mazel tov to me, I guess.

Yesterday was a strange eating day. I went to Starbucks thinking I wasn't going to have much time for breakfast, wanting to get a zucchini walnut muffin. When they didn't have any, I settled for a cheese danish, which had a strange, insubstantial weight in my stomach. I couldn't tell if it'd filled me up or not. So when it turned out I'd have more time yesterday than earlier thought, I went back to Starbucks and used up a gift-card on an egg salad sandwich and a five-shot grande latte. I was unmistakably full after that. So I went home and got to work on Boschen and Nesuko, and after an hour of decent headway, I got a call from my mother asking if I'd like to drop by for some tofu salad.

My operating system, by default, will not refuse free food. Then there're several programmes running that add qualifiers like, "Does it have meat?", "Am I even really hungry?", and "Is it sweet (if yes, then no)?" But the operating system's running the "accept any food" algorithm the whole time, and sometimes I run out of virtual memory, and then that directive is all I've got to go on.

Anyway, I figured, the tofu salad might simply spackle the couple empty spots.

However, I'd probably misheard my mother, because the meal ended up being the salad, two kinds of paddy looking things, soup, and chips with guacamole. The bitch of it all was that it was good stuff, but I could barely choke down half of it.

I was sorrier at 3am, though, when this stupid body reminded me that us organisms have to eat at intervals No Matter What. And I had to settle for two miniature microwave burritos.

I was playing Baldur's Gate at the time. I've been itching for a game with an interesting plot with well written characters and dialogue since Fallout 2. So I borrowed Baldur's Gate from Tim, figuring since both it and Fallout 2 were from Black Isle, they'd share some writing quality. No such luck.

Either the writers are different, or the Fallout 2 writers' skills were neutralised by the Forgotten Realms environment. The dialogue is so awful as to be awesome. It deserves an award for "Most Gratuitous Misuse of a Thesaurus" with lines like, "There are a plethora of people going through the woods," and, "It's a mistake to think I'd trust your benevolence!"

And I think the Lord of the Rings movies have ruined at least one thing for the AD&D worlds--it doesn't wash to hear American voices speaking in faux Middle English. No longer may Ed from the corner drugstore play Sir Gawain.

There's a free episode of South Park online (it's Quicktime). I guess it's kind of a "fuck you" to Tom Cruise, who's prevented broadcasting of the episode in Britain. The episode makes fun of Scientology and makes an oblique, but lengthy crack at the man's supposed closeted homosexuality.

Personally, I've never really found the idea that Tom Cruise might be secretly gay to be particularly funny. Mostly it just reminds me of the guys passing him on the street in Eyes Wide Shut calling him a faggot--it just seems kind of immature, and provoked by the fact that he's handsome, but not as particularly macho as other pretty leading men of his generation.

But I do think it's stupid how angry he gets over the jokes, which may also be the real point of the South Park episode. And I do agree with Stan's assessment of his acting ability--I don't think Cruise is a bad actor, but John Heder probably is a little better.

As for the Scientology stuff, Matt and Trey really seemed to be just phoning it in. It's not as funny as the Hubologists from Fallout 2--the South Park episode basically relies on actual facts of Scientology to be funny by themselves. Matt and Trey used to be more inventive. I wish they'd retire, before the show shares The Simpsons' fate.

I love Firefly.

A little over a year ago, long before I'd seen any Firefly, I talked to a guy at school who I knew was a fan.

I said to him, "From what I've heard, it sounds a bit like . . . Cowboy Bebop?"

And his face subtly fell. I could tell he was used to telling people how innovative this series was, and suddenly he realised he couldn't think of significant differences between it and Cowboy Bebop. But what he said to me was, "No . . . Firefly's pretty much a drama."

I let it go at that, even though I knew Cowboy Bebop was not a comedy series. But I thought about it as I finally got around to watching Firefly a few weeks ago. And yes, it's a lot like Cowboy Bebop. As I continued to watch the series, I couldn't help but check off similarities, and places where one was better than the other;

They're both combinations of Space Operas and Westerns. In both, characters usually speak one language, but can slip into another on occasion (in Firefly, it's English and Chinese, and in Cowboy Bebop, it's Japanese and English). The respective central space ships, Bebop and Serenity, even look a little alike.

A Firefly episode is roughly twice the length of a Cowboy Bebop episode, so you get a more intimate feel for the characters. The characters are also a lot more affectionate with each other, which is kind of sweet, and there're more of them.

But Cowboy Bebop easily defeats Firefly in terms of visuals. Mars on Bebop, which combines jumbled Tokyo-like modern city with familiar empty red Mars landscape, monorails, and very vital, complicated crowds, easily overshadows Firefly's big cities, such as the one seen in "Ariel", which are neat, but grey, and seem populated by twelve to twenty television extras. But partly to blame for that must be the budget limitations of a live-action television series.

I also have to admit I got tired of how similar most of the planets on Firefly looked. I know it's in keeping with the western theme, and maybe it makes sense if all the planets are terraformed by the same technology, but it all looks a lot like empty fields a few miles from here. I guess the fact that I live in southern California biases me on that score.

It highlights an advantage Farscape had in being produced in Australia, with its wider variety of locations in a small area.

I loved the characters and writing on Firefly. Inara felt kind of stiff most of the time, but in instances where she didn't have to play formal, unconvincing Lady of Elegance, and just be a girl, she was good. I was able to remember why I liked Morena Baccarin as Black Canary on Justice League.

Kaylee was adorable, and the actress playing her continually found interesting ways of making her lines effective. Nathan Fillian as Mal was good, except his jaw line always seemed a little too soft to me. But that really didn't bother me a whole lot. I never did really warm to Simon, as I thought I might, but the actor doesn't do a bad job. It's not his fault if I think his face is weirdly lumpy.

Summer Glau was good as River, and is probably a big part of why her character worked, which is the sort of character I think is a lot more difficult to make credible than a person planning a series might assume. It's hard to make crazy talk without sounding very contrived, and actually, they didn't always succeed with River. Especially when she was under the pen of writers who Joss Whedon probably purposefully left in the dark regarding River's true nature.

But she was really good in the last episode, versus the bounty hunter who was apparently an homage to Boba Fett, complete with his own Slave 1. I knew he was a bounty hunter from the moment I saw the shape of his ship. However, his character was obviously more complex than Boba Fett, and genuinely threatening when it came to Kaylee. Which was why it was a shame he lost a bit of his gravity in his dialogue with Simon.

Overall, it's a lovely series.

I wish I had some gloves. Mittens, even. Or thick gloves with the fingers cut off--I'd feel very Blade Runner, then.

Now, I know that compared to where most of you lot are now, this temperature around me is practically the surface of the sun. But I think it's rather cold, and I seem to be one of the only ones around here who seriously thinks so.

I've got layers of clothes piled on me, but my bare hands have become floppy frozen hamburger paddies.

I ate breakfast at Einstein bagels again this morning. No one knows how to act in there anymore--the counter spreads pretty symmetrically across a corner of the shop, and they've removed the "Order Here" sign. So I might be blissfully daydreaming in the queue, free to ignore the corporeal world, when I notice a fierce redheaded businesswoman giving me bristly indignant glances as she shuffles from the opposite direction.

But I have the old knowledge. I know where the order sign used to be. And I see that ordering and paying still goes generally in the same order. But do the employees correct anyone? No, they just take 'em as they come, from whatever direction they come, and my somnolent routine is disrupted.

The queue is strange as a social venue. There's an unspoken protocol, and a narrow avenue for unspoken confrontation.

At the bank, I usually read a book while waiting, and to-day I had Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Five of Cups. Next to me, an athletic girl in a short, bright blue nylon skirt and an oversized white t-shirt seemed unsatisfied that I could monitor the progress of the queue and read at the same time. Subtle body language conveyed this--from the rhythm with which she edged closer to me, to her rigid trajectory.

But do not get me started on they who can't actually stay in queue, but think they are when they're standing well off to your right, left, two people ahead of where they're supposed to be, and leaning on the counter. An old woman dressed in black behind me, upon noticing such antics displayed by someone in front of me, remarked that such a thing never happened in New York.

I think the secret to San Diego's social malaise is its artificial easy attitude. People like to think they're laid back, but they're really just trying to cut in line. That's what I says, and I'm an anti-social recluse. So there, yeah.

I learned of the draw Batgirl meme through Robyn's journal.

Here's my version;



She'll fuck you up, man.

I looked at a bunch of pictures of bats, thinking about how I was going to do this thing. It terms of colours, I think I based it on a lot of the more harmless bats. So it's the girl half that's dangerous, naturally.

Truthiness to power.

See how you feel about the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter.

I'm dedicating this chapter to Jessica Rabbit, for reasons less obvious than you might think.

Ai, ai, ai. Just watched Dead Ringers for the first time in a long time. Gods, I love Cronenberg. Sure, the idea of twin gynaecologists going mad and one of them creating some evil looking "instruments for mutant women" is a bit disturbing in itself. But there's something subtler about Cronenberg's style that gets under my skin so nicely. Something that has purely to with angles and editing--the bare bones, to which the subject matter is almost secondary.

I got the Criterion edition of Dead Ringers, which has been out of print for a while, so I had to order it used from Amazon. But it's worth it, knowing I have the Cronenberg commentary that's not on the newer edition.

Cronenberg does a good commentary. He's articulate, intelligent, and doesn't merely point out obvious things. Some commentaries are critics who seem to assume I've decided my first ever viewing of the film would be with their commentary, so they give me the play by play; "Here's Jimmy Stewart . . . He's playing the lead in the movie . . . Now watch what happens here . . . Neat, huh?"

Then there's the other end of the spectrum, like Marian Keane's commentary for Notorious, which really tells you more about Marian Keane than it does Notorious. I'm sorry, Marian, but a transitional shot that happens to feature a grandfather clock is probably not meant to be a penis.

But, then, it could be anyway. I saw an interview with Hitchcock's daughter where she talked about taking a film class where her father's movies were being similarly overanalysed. She went home asking her father if he really meant to put all that in his movies. He told her, of course not, but people are allowed to see whatever they like in the movies, and it pleases him.

Anyway, Cronenberg's commentaries are generally good. I liked an anecdote he related on the Videodrome commentary about an exchange he overheard between Deborah Harry and James Woods--Woods had to wear an uncomfortable, large prosthetic over his stomach of a vertical lesion in his pseudo-flesh. It was so uncomfortable that he griped to Harry one day, "I've ceased to be an actor and have become the bearer of the slit." To which Harry replied, "Now you know how it feels."

It's been a good Christmas for movies, a lot of which, actually, have commentaries I'm looking forward to listening to; Brazil, Star Trek II, The Circus, the Star Wars trilogy, the 1950 King Solomon's Mines, Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, and Akira Kurosawa's Ran. I haven't had time to watch any yet except Beauty and the Beast, which I intend to watch again, both because the movie wants to be watched again, and because I've been borrowing Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast production diary from Marty for over a year now, and it strikes me that this would be an excellent time to read it, especially as I've just finished the previous book I was reading.

I also reread King Lear in preparation for Ran (which is based on the play). This is the Criterion edition I've just gotten, and I'm looking forward to seeing it on the 42 inch screen. I have an older DVD edition of the film that isn't formatted for widescreen televisions, and since it's a movie in which Kurosawa consciously avoided close-ups, I think as large a viewing as possible would improve the film substantially.

I also went on a small CD binge, getting Charlie Parker's With Strings album, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, and two Oingo Boingo CDs. I'd been wanting more of the Boingo since Trisa played a collection of theirs on our trip back from San José, but, unfortunately, I'd only been able to find collections for the longest time. I don't like collections--they lack the structure of proper albums, and buying them usually means you end up buying most of the songs multiple times. But I found Only a Lad and Nothing to Fear for rather good prices, and I am pleased with them.

Damn. I forgot about Broken Flowers and Howl's Moving Castle. Years are too damn long.

Okay, the revised list;

1. Munich
2. A History of Violence
3. Broken Flowers
4. Serenity
5. Sin City
6. Brokeback Mountain
7. Grizzly Man
8. Revenge of the Sith
9. Howl's Moving Castle
10. Batman Begins

So now it's an even ten. Okay.

At last, a day stretching before me with almost nothing I need to do. I've been itching to post about movies I've seen lately, but Christmas put me quite behind on Boschen and Nesuko, so I've been drawing like mad all week. I'm nonetheless basically happy with the chapter as it stands, even though I changed it significantly as the week progressed. Sometimes I wonder if I oughta settle down on Boschen and Nesuko and simply write it as one of the sorts of stories it seems to be in certain chapters, but I get a certain glee from watching it hop genres.

Anyway, Caitlin posted a list of her favourite movies of 2005. Here's mine, of what I've seen--though it ought to be noted that I still have not seen King Kong;

1. Munich
2. A History of Violence
3. Serenity
4. Sin City
5. Brokeback Mountain
6. Grizzly Man
7. Revenge of the Sith
8. Batman Begins

Munich

Rarely have I left a movie theatre feeling more pleased. This is the most unsentimental Spielberg movie I've seen and I love it.

It's also the second best spy movie I've ever seen (Notorious is still #1). Mainly because it never falls into the two big spy movie traps--it never gets the dry bird's eye view of the political world and it's games (like a Tom Clancy movie), and it never treats itself like it's fake (like a James Bond movie).

Spielberg shows that the biggest influence on him as a filmmaker is probably Alfred Hitchcock, whether he likes it or not, because the main reason this movie works so well is that we see everything from Avner(Eric Bana)'s point of view. The stuff about Israelis and Palestinians is interesting, and always played intelligently without Spielberg giving a heavy hand to either argument, but instead allowing things to sit out in the light; cold, bloody, and tragic. But the presence of those details is important mostly because they enhance Avner's story;

Munich is about rationally deciding to kill for something you love, and then continuing to kill because it continues to seem like the most rational course action, and then waking up one day and realising you're a creature whose entire life is wrapped around killing others and avoiding getting killed yourself. The movie shows the strange deletion of beautiful, seemingly integral parts of the human perception. There are some critics saying this movie has a lot of fat to be trimmed, but I wouldn't remove a single thing. The reviewer at CHUD claims there's too much of the business of killing in the middle, but what I saw was a movie seamlessly moving through amazing action sequences to create the feeling of Avner's mind realigning to the new conception of life. Not just becoming good at killing but learning how vulnerable everyone is to a bomb under the bed, or in the telephone.

Here's a movie that says we've lost innocence and goodness, we're probably never gonna get 'em back, and no-one knows any solutions.

A History of Violence

I thought of this movie a couple times while watching Munich. They're both brilliant movies about the function of violence on our world, the effects it has on our lives, and whether or not it's worth those effects.

I talked about the movie in this post.

Serenity

I talked about it here.

I've since watched the first five episodes of Firefly and, while I love the Joss Whedon written episodes, the others are only good. There was a ballroom scene in the episode called Shindig where Inara really didn't come off but Kaylee was adorable and it was somehow fun seeing everyone playing with what was essentially a standard ball from a 1930s or 40s Western.

Sin City

I talked about it here.

I've since gotten the extended edition, which is really nice, since it isolates the stories as their own short films. Now I can skip That Yellow Bastard with a clear conscience. I'm finding The Big Fat Kill has grown on me quite a bit, especially since I've read A Dame to Kill For. Really looking forward to the next movie.

Brokeback Mountain

Gorgeously shot, with Crouching Tiger-ish views of vast, mist shrouded mountains. Well acted with an endearingly subtle, grumpy performance from Ledger, and a charmingly Marlboro-ish Jake Gyllenhaal.

The premise of a love that everyone in the world forbids, yet persists anyway, is obviously the makings of a great tragic romance. Or a cheesy one. It's to Ang Lee's credit more than anyone else's that it is definitely the former.

The characters are real and complex and the movie, though it looks beautiful, never goes for the decadent and operatic, choosing instead to seemingly allow the real feelings speak for themselves.

Of his motivation to make movies of wildly different subject matter, Lee often says that he's mainly attracted to stories of people trying to adjust to a world changing around them while not accepting them. And that was one of two things about Brokeback Mountain that reminded me of John Huston's The Misfits. The other thing being that The Misfits took place in relatively the same period in relatively the same society. It's not hard at all to imagine Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist competing with Montgomery Clift's Perce Howland at the rodeo.

And while The Misfits is about free spirited cowboys being broken by capitalism, and a divorcee being broken by the impermanence of love, Brokeback Mountain is about two men being gay in the middle of what could be one of the worst possible cultures to be gay in. And that's made clear by a flashback Ledger's character has of an old man being beaten to death for just maybe being gay.

It's a good, beautiful film. And yes, damnit, it's a little sad. Why is it I feel like I'm the only person I know who likes sad movies? Anyway . . .

Grizzly Man

Talked about it here. I gots to see more Herzog movies . . .

Revenge of the Sith

I still like it, bitches. I talked about it in this post.

Batman Begins

I said things about it in this post. For some reason I don't feel much like getting the DVD. I'm not sure why. You know, I don't get a hankering to re-watch Memento very often, either.

Don't eat lasagne before, while, or after reading the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter.

Ah, and, again, I recommend signing up for Caitlin R Kiernan's Sirenia Digest. It'll knock your socks off.

"That is how we say goodbye in Austria."

Just a reminder . . .

I feel like someone's scrubbed behind my eyes with a dirty little mop. Because Christmas day is all about frantic, tight schedules wherein many are angered if I fall out of step, I've taken the sleep upset Thursday and used it to quickly alter my sleeping schedule--I went to bed at 8am or so on Thursday, as usual, and then got up three hours later for the maids, as usual. Only this time I didn't go back to sleep when the maids were gone. Thus enabling me to go to sleep at around 8:30pm Thursday, and awaken to-day at around . . . 3:30am. Well, it was the best I could do. It just feels so strange sleeping at night; however sleep deprived I was, every time I woke up, I felt like I ought to leap out of bed and do something.

So I wasn't good for much that was very complicated yesterday. The two pages of Boschen and Nesuko script I wrote only demonstrated to me how boring I am when I'm sleepy. So I have a lot to do to-day, particularly since I wanna get ahead a bit.

Anyway, Merry Cephalopodmas.

The latest reason why it's legally irrefutable that Bush belongs in prison.

Wouldn't it be nice if something came of it for once?

I've seen The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And there's a very simple way to tell you why this movie doesn't work:

To-day's audiences are too jaded and emotionally atrophied for the real The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It's my belief that everything that's wrong with the movie--say, 81.7% of it--can be traced back to that problem. This was not the time for The Chronicles of Narnia to be made major motion pictures.

It's really too bad, too, because, at one time, Disney would've been the perfect studio to make The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Imagine if the folks that made Snow White had done this? That might have been beautiful.

I will say I liked this movie a lot more than I thought I was going to. I mostly liked the actors, and I was particularly surprised by how much I liked Lucy, who is very good, except when she cries, but I won't moan about that as it's probably hard to get convincing crying out of child actors, even generally good ones. I liked Edmund and his perpetual frown that reminded me of Melanie Lynskey in Heavenly Creatures. I liked the beavers--they were fun and engaging, almost exactly like they were in the book. I adored Tilda Swinton as the witch--she was threatening, beautiful, and cunning. I bet a lot of people left the theatre wishing she'd won (I know I did). I loved the design of the armour and costumes. Richard Taylor's team prove once again that they are brilliant at crafting these things. The colour schemes are very different from the Lord of the Rings costumes, with silvery armour and bright red, blue, and green tunics. It reminded me a lot of the Technicolor Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn, which, to my mind, is the absolutely perfect note to strike with this material.

But my absolute favourite part of the movie was when Lucy came across the lamp post and met Tumnus. It was the only time in the movie where I actually sort of felt like I was looking at Narnia.

And the interaction between Tumnus and Lucy is, I suspect, one of the few pieces of the story that Andrew Adamson was able to connect with enough to actually put some heart into. It's also why the beavers worked--these were both Shrek-like bits; animals and mythical creatures talking absurdly like familiar humans, to humorous effect.

As for what I didn't like, I'll start at the beginning;

I'd heard a long time ago about Adamson deciding to make the opening scene be the bombing of London by Nazi Germany during World War II, even though this is not in the book, nor does the book begin on even remotely the same foot. When I first heard about it, I thought perhaps Adamson was trying to suggest that Narnia was in fact a means through which the children are coping with their experience of real war, with real death. I don't know if I'd necessarily mind such a story, but such a story is not The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The book's a fantasy, yes, but such a manoeuvre with the movie would be to make a fantasy within a fantasy--essentially, it would be assuming the audience is too jaded and emotionally atrophied to take fantasy at face value. They'd need it justified with a reality check, a VH1's behind the scenes this-is-what-we're-literally-saying device, nothing so eloquent as actual art, thank you.

Now, having seen the movie, I'm not sure Adamson's intent was anything so complicated. What the opening scene actually felt like was a sucker punch. Like Adamson felt the movie needed a big opening, and he needed to throw in the trauma of the childrens' separation from their mother, which we get in the following scene where they part at the train station. It felt like a cheap trick to get us emotionally involved, but it didn't work at all because we don't know the characters yet, and the shots of the bombing are terrifically dull. For one thing, it begins in the air with the German planes, then cuts to the interior of one of their cockpits. Since the shots aren't particularly interesting, and look fake, and the pilot is pretty anonymous in his mask, we don't really have a point of view yet, so the effect is somewhat inferior to what stock footage of actual WWII planes might have been.

And beginning the movie with emotional trauma is just a bad idea, as I think Lewis could have pointed out. He didn't begin the book that way, and with good reason--kids are resilient and not usually accustomed to grief and horrific stress. You really have to take them through it; you can't just drop them right in, particularly when your uncommunicative filmmaking style isn't helping.

The professor's house is introduced decently enough, and at this point in the movie, I was making a concerted effort to not be bothered, since I wasn't sure yet whether my chafing from the opening wasn't due to preconceptions. I was really watching Lucy because I remembered not much liking the look of her in the trailer. What's interesting is I don't feel like I actually got a look at her until after she went through the wardrobe. The scenes of the children in the mansion involve some sub-par dialogue and some very quick cuts, which reminded me of a quote I'd heard of Sergio Leone saying about the movies he saw in his youth never giving you time to actually look at the stars' faces. Leone, of course, was known for his long close up shots, so maybe his perspective was peculiar, but it's movies like this that give me an idea of how he must have felt.

The introduction of the White Witch was good--as I said, Swinton was a goddess on screen. But her dwarf henchman, described as hideous in the book, was far too cute, and made the audience giggle far too much.

It was nice seeing the kids deliver Lewis dialogue at Tumnus's house, where Edmund argues that Tumnus was a criminal, and we know why he would say that, and it's subtle character stuff. But those spots dissolve far too quickly into dumbed-down one liners.

One of the movie's biggest problems is that Aslan aggressively doesn't work. He looks very cartoonish, is introduced rather off-handedly, and we never sense the grandeur of Aslan as we do in the book, mostly because I don't think Adamson even began to know how to pull it off. I feel bad for the lion during the stone table scene, but only because I wouldn't want to see that happen to anyone, and absent is the shock of seeing the mighty Aslan so dressed-down. It made me a little uncomfortable, as though I was sitting through the funeral of a complete stranger.

The battle sequence at the end fails miserably, as Adamson attempts weakly to find a middle ground between modern, action war epics, and the unabashedly fairy tale quality of the story. It could have worked, but what it needed was a new vision, one that could interpret the fairy tale battle to moving pictures, instead of imitating Braveheart and The Lord of the Rings. There are several shots that are almost replicas of ones from Lord of the Rings, such as a minotaur standing on a rock, waving his hordes forward. Or the first clash of the armies, which looks identical to the warg battle in The Two Towers.

Again and again, I was impressed by the fact that Adamson wasn't up to this. There were too many obvious day-for-night shots, which Peter Jackson doggedly avoided, going so far as to do a month of night shoots for Helm's Deep. It's particularly bad in the stone table scene, where the table is obviously on a sound stage, with complete darkness outside the ring of torches, while Susan and Lucy are clearly looking on from a completely different, outdoor location, which glows blue with the lens filter. When the girls are finally at Aslan's side, on the table set, green screen is used to put the location shot in the background.

I was astonished by how many obviously artificial backgrounds there were in this movie, where there very clearly didn't need to be. One shot had Peter artificially placed in front of his tent. I mean, just a canvas wall, for gods' sakes! Adamson, if you can't plan ahead properly, then at least have the mivonks to do proper pick-ups once in a while.

Anyway, it was, after all, Adamson's first live-action movie, and only his third movie of any kind. All he'd done before were the Shrek movies, the success of which, of course, brought him this project.

I've only seen the first Shrek, and I liked it. But what made that movie good? Sly, post modernist humour. The sort that connects with--yes--a jaded and emotionally atrophied audience. I'm not suggesting it's bad. Not at all. Merely that it's almost the polar opposite of the unabashed, earnest fantasy of the Narnia books. Which also makes Narnia the polar opposite of what audiences these days are open to.

So. Maybe we can try again in twenty or thirty years . . .

Oh, yeah, and now guys can see if they measure up to Heath, penis-wise. This'll be the last genitalia related post for a while, I promise.

So, the other day I was craving vagina and a visit to Innsmouth. A few minutes ago, reading issue # 1 of Caitlin R. Kiernan's Sirienia Digest, I just about got all I wanted. Beautiful words conjuring sex, surgery, and strange sea things. That's what I call an evening well spent. If you're looking to have good evenings, I recommend subscribing.

Actually, I suppose it's morning for most people, now isn't it? I suppose I ought to make some attempt at sleeping earlier since I have about four Christmas presents left to buy.

In the real evening of . . . what day was it?--Sunday! On Sunday night I read this interview with Richard Taylor of Weta workshop--those of you who've watched the special features on the Lord of the Rings disks may remember him as the New Zealander with the peculiarly monotonous voice and Harry Potter glasses. Sounds like he's really eager to make an Evangelion movie, and he's eager to get the right director *cough*Peter Jackson*cough*.

I do believe it's possible for the Evangelion story to be made into a great live-action movie. But I think it'd be extremely easy to screw up, too, so I hope Taylor's earnestness has sufficient influence over ADV. Yes, I advocate influence, hahahahaha!

You may've noticed that Adult Swim's been showing Evangelion lately. Part of me's happy that the show might be getting a bigger audience, but another part of me resents that so many people'll be seeing the show for the first time in its English dubbed format. Like all anime series I've ever seen, Evangelion is horribly dubbed. I don't know what the hell the problem is, except every show seems to be dubbed by the same four or five reekingly incompetent actors. My guess is some translation studio executive is pocketing money that could be spent on a better dubbing budget.

On another subject; what do Mulholland Drive, King Kong(2005), and Ellie Parker all have in common? They all star Naomi Watts as a struggling actress. Think about it, won't you?

Don't be influenced, bitch!

Some people are so fucking stupid, they do shit like putting their fists into their mouths and letting their friends dress them in different outfits. How fucking dumb, man!

How about you? Are you a brainless fucking idiot? Well, are ya? Are you fucking high right now? You spineless little shit!

Why can't you be Above the Influence! Right now, there's a league of strong, clean, magnificent boys and girls. Their hair is shiny and blows freely and gracefully in the winds of the strong Utopia. For they are strong men, and strong women.

Do you wash your genitals in marijuana soap? Now, I know that ain't how your mommy and daddy showed you to wash.

At Above the Influence, our mission is not to pressure you, merely to teach you how to be clean and strong, like a Super person.

A new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up. I coloured the last five pages to-day. That was a lot of hours. I really need to stick to colouring every day . . .

Damnit, my hopes just shot way up.

At the very least, Studio Ghibli will treat Earthsea better than Sci-Fi channel. And, you know, if Goro's style is anything like his father's, this could be a perfect marriage. Earthsea could do with the slower, more contemplatively beautiful style.

The true meaning of Superman.

Ah, back on the old schedule. I didn't manage to get to sleep until 7:30am or so.

Instead of counting sheep, I like to play a variation of Degrees of Separation in my head--I pick two seemingly wildly disparate names from the movies and connect them. I went through several this morning, but I was proudest somehow of connecting William H. Macy with John Gilbert.

William H. Macy was in Fargo with Steve Buscemi, who was in Big Fish directed by Tim Burton, who directed Jack Nicholson in Batman. Jack Nicholson was in Terms of Endearment with Shirley MacLaine, who was also in The Children's Hour with Miriam Hopkins. Hopkins was in Trouble in Paradise, directed by Ernst Lubitsh, who also directed Ninotchka starring Greta Garbo. Greta Garbo starred in Queen Christina with John Gilbert.

There're probably closer connexions than that, but I like to think of interesting ones. I did think of some nicer ones, like connecting Selma Blair with D.W. Griffith (Selma Blair-John Hurt-Anthony Hopkins-Katharine Hepburn-John Huston-Marilyn Monroe-Billy Wilder-Charles Laughton-Lillian Gish-D.W. Griffith).

I've been listening to a lot of audio commentaries while drawing lately. A couple days ago, I listened to Brian Singer and Newton Thomas Sigel's (cinemtographer) commentary for X-Men 2. It's a sad thing to listen to as they discuss quite enthusiastically some of the things they hope to do with X-Men 3. Oh, why did Superman have to come along? And why did the people at Fox have to be such dicks?

So when I finished drawing last night, I watched X-Men on the big 42-inch television. I'm pleased by how rewatchable those movies are--the actors and sets all work together so well, it feels like returning to a favourite television series.

I've mainly just been rewatching movies lately, mostly because VHS tapes don't seem to work on the flat screen television. I finally got around to buying the Indiana Jones collection on DVD. It'd been a long time since I'd watched any of them in any format, especially Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I don't believe I'd watched since I was age 15 or 16. There's such a natural flow of action and fun and danger in that movie that it is, when you step back from it, awe-inspiring. When you're in the middle of enjoying it, of course, you just feel happy and absorbed.

I think I enjoyed the second movie almost as much, although in different ways. But I was surprised and dismayed by how disappointed I was by the third movie. It's as though invention ended with the poor reception of Temple of Doom, replaced by a desire to produce a Well Made Indiana Jones movie. And to be sure, The Last Crusade is well made in a lot of ways. There's definite evidence of a more technically adept Steven Spielberg than the one who directed Raiders of the Lost Ark. I sense the earlier Spielberg probably couldn't have handled the Venice boat chase. And yet I never felt as engaged by any of the action sequences as I did by the ones of the previous films--though, make no mistake, I did enjoy them. In fact, the boat chase and the motorcycle chase were two of the highlights of the movie for me, in no small part due to John Williams' score. I love the theme he composed for "Chasing after the Joneses." And I admit I didn't like the overuse of the Raiders’ march at the beginning of Temple of Doom.

And yet, it really didn't bother me because the beginning of Temple of Doom is so damn wonderful. One spectacular surprise after another is pulled out of a hat. And then, it gets better because the movie gets grim. I mean, it's Temple of Doom that most gives the feeling of Indy-as-unlikely-hero. You're talking about one little archaeologist up against a big, really menacing Kali cult, and he's not just trying to get away from them. No, he's going to steal diamonds and try to save a bunch of brutalised kids. It could easily have felt sappy and fake, yet you really get the feeling of a big damned Temple of Doom casting a shadow.

Now, again, there are elements of Last Crusade I like. In spite of the fact that I think bringing in Indy's father was a bad idea, and that Indy essentially becomes a different, less interesting character around his father, I do like the dialogue they have on the airship; "We never talked." "Well, I'm here now . . . what do you want to talk about?" "heh . . . I can't think of anything . . ." "Than what are you complaining about?" Much better than just a few minutes later when Indy, after revealing his limited knowledge of flying, is startled to find that his father thinks he's talking about time when he yells, "Eleven O'clock!" Oh, that old chestnut. Did we have multiple, un-credited writers for this movie? Yes, we did.

But what really bothers me about the third movie is the last act. Suddenly it's about whether Indy believes in Santa Claus and Angels and love and it just soggily sucks. I mean, the Ark in the first film worked on God juice and I didn't care. It was great--melting faces, physical peril, and MacGuffin. It's a good show, because what's interesting is whether Indy and Marian escape and get the MacGuffin and what and how. Not whether or not Indy can bring himself to believe in God.

Even invoking Siiva in the second movie, it was fine because it was bloody cool.

Anyway, all this has made me lot less eager to see the fourth movie, if they ever do get their act together on it. And my belief that Schindler's List and Jurrassic Park ought to've actually been back-to-back Indiana Jones movies has sort of been reaffirmed.

I was looking at the top 100 lists of the highest grossing films of all time, adjusted and unadjusted for inflation, and I noticed that in the unadjusted section, Return of the Jedi beats The Empire Strikes Back, while in the adjusted section, it's the other way around. There are some other, even more severe examples than that. Number three seems to be the weird one on both lists; Shrek 2 and The Sound of Music? And where the hell's Casablanca? And what the hell's Sergeant York doing on that list?

A new Boschen and Nesuko chapter's up. "Read" it slowly.