Strange Clouds and the Cats Beneath

An odd cloud formation yesterday;



I tried to take some video, but Snow the Cat decided the movie should be about him;



The music is from the Japanese version of Kiki's Delivery Service. It wasn't used in the dubbed version because that's when Disney felt it was important to Americanise their imports as much as possible.

Here are the strange clouds from the mall parking garage;



Here they are after sunset, lit by the lights of the city;



My tweets last night;

A cross-eyed cat is the End Times saviour.
When clouds become behemoth clay pigeons.
And the pope's a Stuart Gordon voyeur.
Quick rogue rabbits steal off with dark engines.

There's been a rabbit on the lawn the past couple nights when I've gotten back from Tim's. The rabbits normally congregate in front of the house, but this one seems to wait a lot longer on the lawn before running away from me. I assume it's the same rabbit just because.

I drank a martini while watching part of Stuart Gordon's The Pit and the Pendulum last night, a 1990 film that resembles Edgar Allan Poe's short story about as much as Gordon's Re-Animator resembled its source material. I remember watching The Pit and the Pendulum when I was a kid and thinking it was one of the most serious, scariest movies I'd seen. I remember being so shocked by the nudity and the guys poking around in that young woman's anus. Now the movie looks so cheesy it seems more like a slightly prudish porno with high production values, except for Lance Henrikson's dead serious performance. His character seems to be existing in an entirely different reality from the other characters, one with psychological subtext and genuinely threatening torture and weapons. Everyone else seems to be in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.

I got kind of sad thinking this was the movie I was spending my Saturday night watching, so I switched to watching Yojimbo again. More than any of Kurosawa's movies, Yojimbo seems to me to be about suspense, more than its given credit for. Sanjuro's one man, putting himself between two dangerous groups. Although he seems preternaturally confident and skilled, Kurosawa makes the threat from the other characters believable enough. Unosuke having a gun helps a lot. The scene where Unosuke confronts Sanjuro while the note that would incriminate Sanjuro goes unnoticed on the table never fails to make me tense. It's a perfect example of Hitchcock's "bomb under the table" theory--that a bomb suddenly going off under a table is nowhere near as effective as characters sitting at a table while at least one of them is aware during the conversation that a bomb could go off at any moment.