Thursday, February 23, 2006

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.

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