Every Reason in the World to Stay in Bed

Indecision almost wrecked my evening last night. I was in the mood to watch a medieval fantasy epic with a female protagonist when I remembered there aren't any*, which is probably part of the reason I'm writing one. Instead I ended up playing a little World of Warcraft and considered watching one of the many BBC Shakespeare productions I'd downloaded recently, except they're all around three hours long and I didn't want to start something I didn't have time to finish.

So I started watching A Nightmare on Elm Street. I only got about halfway through before I shut it off due to an imposing boredom. I think this is one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies I saw as a kid, and it vaguely brought back pleasant memories of sleepovers and pizza. But it is a damned empty experience to watch alone. Even the mild buzz I still had from the sake I drank while playing World of Warcraft wasn't helping.

I will say, though, that Heather Langenkamp delivers one of the most anesthetised performances I've ever seen. She always seems like she's had a gallon of novocaine injected into her skull a few seconds earlier, and when she speaks her head subtly sways like a wind sock, her eyes seem to be aimless blue jelly beans. There's a guy in Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale who was totally blind playing someone who had sight, and watching him, I was more convinced of his ability to focus on objects than I was of Langenkamp's.



The only really appealing character in the movie is Freddy Krueger, which is kind of remarkable for the small amount of screen time he had in the amount of movie I watched.

Of course, the film also has a baby Johnny Depp. He has what looks like a perm pompadour which invited me to contemplate a vertically oriented aesthetic for his head I hadn't considered before;



I guess the only entertainment that really delivered for me last night was the new Sirenia Digest. The story, "Fish Wife" was a nice, bittersweet lovestory wrapped in the good fishy texture of a lovecraftian package. And there was a new Sonya Taaffe poem, apparently written for Caitlin's birthday, and it's a very sweet poem.

Actually, I also enjoyed the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode I watched last night, "I Only Have Eyes for You", which seemed even better after the previous couple particularly bad episodes--the Valentine's Day episode about Xander was just gigantically bad, from no-one even questioning Xander after apparently the whole town remembered all the women chasing him, to Buffy patting him on the head for being honourable just because he didn't essentially date rape her. "I Only Have Eyes for You" was good because it nicely went back to the second season's ongoing theme of people imperfectly fitting into their roles as heroes or villains.

My tweets from last night;

Peace is static as a struck tuning fork.
Always humming for a sharp chance for change.
At his home King Kong knew a cartoon stork.
Who also saw Charlie Kane at short range.

I was referring the jungle footage from King Kong that was reused for a background in Citizen Kane. It feature an animated silhouette of a flying creature, possibly meant to be a pterodactyl, but it reminded me of the stork in Monty Python's Meaning of Life.


*I mean, there aren't any good ones, that I know of. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I don't count Red Sonja, since the character's not developed well enough. I'd almost qualify Xena: Warrior Princess, since, although it technically isn't, it might as well be medieval, but it's far campier than what I had in mind.