Sunday, January 23, 2005

The five-shot grande Americano, Earl Gray tea, and smoothie with energy boost did not prevent me from falling asleep dreadfully early on Friday, thereby fucking up my sleeping schedule for days to come.

I'm having some Earl Gray tea right now and I have to say there's something decidedly rockin' about Earl Gray. In some inexplicable but unmistakable way it definitely rocks.

I've watched three of the four movies on the film noir collection I bought a while back. One movie was decent, one was quite wonderful, and one was wonderfully bad.

Strange Illusion, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer in 1945, was wonderfully bad. Some good visuals from a director more than competent with the camera couldn't save the picture from a laughably written story about a young man named Paul (Jimmy Lydon) who interacts stiffly and inexpressively with his world, occasionally wearing a stupid grin, while trying to convince everyone the man who's wooing his mother and every girl in the neighbourhood is in fact a dangerous serial killer.

My favourite scene was Paul discussing his worries with his girlfriend next to the pool one evening. He complains about how all the girls seem to like the evil man, but Paul's girlfriend casually says she's not as crazy about him as she was earlier. When Paul asks why, she explains that when she and the man were swimming earlier that day, he "swam underwater, got a stranglehold on me and started kissing me. I know it doesn't sound like very much but . . ."

No, no, not much at all. Why're you wasting our time, girl? We all know it's Man's god-given right. Sheesh.

However, the same director was in charge of the astonishing Detour. I learned from Roger Ebert's review that it was filmed in only six days, very, very cheap. It looks it. But there's never a moment not to like. And I don't even mean it was "fun bad". It was plain good. Real good. The story uncoils like a flaming rope from the ceiling. Or like ambrosia Pez from a dispenser. Events occur, each one fascinating, not merely for the fact that they're credible and inventive, but also because the underlying threads of the characters' have that pulse of genuine human souls.

Ugh, I want to feel wakeful. I have so much to do . . . I went to visit Marty on Friday, walked all the way to my old high school, but he wasn't there. I waited in his classroom long enough to write the whole script for the new Boschen and Nesuko chapter, which I really ought to've written two days earlier. And because I dropped off so early on Friday, and Saturday, I was plenty behind by the time I woke at 4am to-day. Yet before I was truly awake, I somehow drew one page and inked two (I drew page 89 on Saturday). I glanced at the clock and saw it'd only taken me three hours. I drew page 91, then broke for lunch to celebrate before coming back to ink it. I got back here at around 11 and not only inked the page but got a good start at colouring the three pages. So I'm just about caught up, meaning I can give languorous attention to page 92 to-morrow. Which is good. It'll be that much more perverted, I think.

No comments:

Post a Comment