Know how Barnes & Nobles and Borders always have miniature coffee shops inside? Last night I dreamt there was a tiny Barnes & Noble inside a Borders.

The story's now at 2,165 words. I wrote the best part so far yesterday, and when I woke up this morning, I kind of already knew three things I want to write over the course of the story. I think it basically finished itself, by itself, in my head. Hopefully my typing fingers can do as well.

One of the nice things about Veronica Mars was that it was filmed in San Diego and often locations were used that I could visit myself. Several episodes featured a diner with metal walls, porthole-like windows, and a sign that read "24 hours". I'm always looking for 24 hour places, so I was keen on checking this place out, and last night I finally did. My sister and I ate at Studio Diner--I had scrambled eggs, hash browns, and sourdough toast. The hash browns, in particular, were much better than Denny's, though I guess that's not so hard.

My sister and I also stopped at Mitsuwa, which wasn't far away, and I bought a big bottle of sake that came with a tokkuri (bottle) and two choko (little cups). I heated the tokkuri after washing the things and enjoyed some hot sake last night. Delicious.

Still working on the short story. It stands at 1,410 now, and the scope of the thing feels like it'll probably end up being between 6,000 and 7,000 words. Back when I was writing prose fiction regularly, I don't think I ever went as slowly as I seem to be going on this thing. An effect of time, I guess, though I don't know if it's because I'm out of practice or because I've gotten more thoughtful. I guess it wouldn't make any difference to the aliens from the Andromeda galaxy . . .

Had some trouble sleeping last night. My brain got locked up again in a circular train of thought. I tried a lot of different things, even counting sheep, which actually worked pretty well for me when I was a kid. It didn't seem to help last night--I tried to picture the sheep as clearly as possible, from the slight aura of brown dirt on their wool to their leathery eyelids over black eyes. But I couldn't stop giving them simple cartoon legs.

I swear Victoria the cat helped me eventually get to sleep at around 8am. She was sleeping in my closet, and all of a sudden I had this extremely clear vision of a number of mice scrabbling about one another; I saw tiny pink legs struggling for purchase on the small white fur backs of other mice, pink tails whipping about. And the whole vision was upside down, like a reflection on a camera lens. I honestly think Victoria lent me her dream when she saw my brain couldn't come up with one. I slept until noon.

No maids to-day. It's a different sort of Thursday--the new maids only come once a fortnight. It was weird firing Margo, the old maid, who'd been the maid here and at my parents' house when I lived there. She'd been cleaning my room for maybe a decade, and she never did a very good job. No amount of years could teach her to put things back where she found them, or to treat delicate items carefully. I had to hide things from her. But I guess when you've known someone for so long, firing them is bound to be awkward. Which is probably why the duty was foisted on me.

I wrote another six hundred words on that short story yesterday. I'm still not exactly sure how I'm doing, but I'll keep at it.

This is just silly. What's Bill Murray going to damage driving a flimsy vehicle at fifteen miles an hour? Sounds like bored cops.

I watched a lot of Hope Sandoval videos last night;

Another wonderful day. Why does my coffee get cold so fast?

Well, I started writing a short story yesterday. Remember I said I was going to try prose fiction a week ago? I only wrote 499 words yesterday. Well, that's the score now but actually I snipped a couple of paragraphs and changed it from first person to third person. Maybe fiddling so much with five hundred some words is a bad sign.

I've had no confidence in my ability to write prose since I decided I hated the novel I spent four years writing. And I also hated the novel I wrote before it, the six novellas, and however many short stories I've written. But I really enjoyed doing the impromptu Lord of the Rings fanfic with Caitlin and people seemed to like it. I'm not sure how much that had to do with me or with Caitlin and the novelty of the thing. But I remember how nice it felt to be able to tell a story without having to draw anything. I figured another crack at prose was reasonable. I'll post it on my web site when I'm done.

Keith Olbermann did another one of his Special Comments yesterday;



These are always amazing. Presented with passion, the best thing about them is that they are actually quite well written. It's startling to hear them in the otherwise mostly grey soup of television. And in the increasingly grey soup of the attitudes people have about politics. As this administration goes from bad to worse and worse and worse, people who were angry before just get tired and don't want to hear about it. Olbermann seems to be one of the few embers of the bonfire the world needs and probably won't get. But he rouses you. And he actually made me feel better about an unrelated thing I was feeling hopeless and shitty about. I think emotional honesty and good communication universally elevate things.

No, yesterday wasn't productive. Okay, I pencilled a page and got halfway through inking it before the all the silly black lines started seeming meaningless and I had to get out of the house. I woke up in a rotten mood, the kind I can normally only dispel by working really hard on something. Didn't work this time. Maybe it's just the whiplash of coming out of a really happy and exciting chapter of life. I don't know.

I drove around a few hours. At night, I watched half of Notorious, because watching Ingrid Bergman helps and there's no movie where she looks better. To-day, I don't think I'll draw, I think I'll try something different.

Oh, by the way, here's a helpful reminder about life;

Last night I dreamt that I was borrowing my parents' black SUV and I was travelling north on a strange freeway to meet them for dinner. All the cars stopped at one point so I stopped, too. People were getting out of their cars, putting down blankets and tying rags around their heads as though they were trying to have impromptu picnics while they were being forced to wait. I got out of the SUV and walked for a little ways before I came to a massive pile of personal belongings, like something out of a Holocaust movie. I found my leather jacket and my bag, two items I'd left in the SUV. My cell phone and iPod were missing. I rushed back to where I'd left the SUV to find that it was gone.

There were several cops roaming the aisles between the piles of personal items and I approached one with dyed black hair and orange-tan skin.

"What happened to my car?" I asked, not pleasantly.

He didn't seem enthusiastic about helping me; "Sir, what would you like me to do?"

"I want you to do your job, that's what!"

Then a female police officer in shorts walked past saying, "Oh, help the guy out. You really ought to be more useful."

"Can you help me find my car?" I asked her.

"Er, no, sorry, I have to go." And she disappeared through a magic door in a concrete wall.

Before sleep, I watched some of the deleted scenes from INLAND EMPIRE, the segment called "MORE THINGS THAT HAPPENED," which seemed an apt title. The idea of deleted scenes on a David Lynch DVD was strange enough, so I probably ought to have expected that they'd be edited together like a whole other film. There were at least two scenes that were as good as anything in the finished film. I was able to appreciate even better what an incredible, thoroughly natural actress Laura Dern is. There were more extended, uncut takes of her delivering dialogue, and it seemed like she could take any amount of strange words from Lynch and make them into credible expressions from a full character. Also nice was a very long conversation between the "Lost Girl" and the Polish phantom about magic watches.

A long scene of Laura Dern writhing on the floor while she talked on the phone to a cold, disinterested rabbit she was obviously in love with was kind of painful and made me wonder again about David Lynch's love life. There's a scene near the end of "MORE THINGS THAT HAPPENED" of the prostitutes hanging out on the street while Lynch is singing, "Strange what love does . . . when you're all alone . . ." More than the film itself, "MORE THINGS THAT HAPPENED" seems to be about being in love with someone you can't reach.

And I've still more special features to watch. This is easily the most worthwhile DVD I've purchased this year.

Here's all I managed to get done on Sunday. I'm pretty sure the third one's a self portrait. Here's hoping Monday's more productive . . .

Looking to-day at the Wikipedia entry for Jack Kerouac, I see there's supposed to be a newly uncensored version of On the Road published this year. I think I'm definitely going to have to read that, though I think my favourite Kerouac book would probably either be Visions of Cody or The Subterraneans. I miss reading Kerouac.

I was going to draw all day yesterday or something, but then I remembered I'd talked to Tim about going to Horton plaza with him that day so he could buy a nice vinyl statue of Noriko from Top o Nerae. We ate at Pokez and later he was nice enough to give me one of his old computer monitors. It's a big flat screen LCD--I don't know exactly how big, but this wallpaper looks great on it;



I've decided to-day shall be a day of strange contemplation . . .

It's been hot and cloudless around here lately and yesterday we had a sudden, hot thunderstorm. I went out for coffee and saw lightning in the distance, even as the sun was shining directly in my eyes. There was just an egg yolk of dirty grey cloud in the middle of the sky and it rained hot bullets of water on me when I got of my car and walked to the Starbucks. I was made glad again for my waterproof hat. At least my car got clean--it looked less like a dusty vampire bat and more like a seal, except for the big grey splotch on the roof where the paint seems to have retreated. I needed William H. Macy to try to sell me some TrueCoat or something . . .

I watched the new episode of Bill Maher last night and John Mellencamp was on. I'm seriously starting to think that guy's mentally impaired. For some reason he's decided to visit all these political shows and every time I see him he says something completely bone-headed. Last night, when Maher asked him why people in the heartland bought into the right wing facade, like Fred Thompson's red pickup truck, Mellencamp said, well, these people believe what you tell them. And he added, "There's nothing wrong with being naïve."

Maher was appropriately aghast; "Naïve is what got us into this mess!" But why is this even a discussion? It was perhaps the biggest waste of airtime I've seen on either of Bill Maher's shows. I think it's well past time we admit that a bunch of Americans are as dumb as dirt.

A lot of things irritating me to-day. I'm just going to concentrate on drawing now and try to keep them out of my mind . . .

INLAND EMPIRE
2006 Directed by David Lynch

"Sometimes as we watched them, she'd clutch my arm or my hand, forgetting she was my employer, just becoming a fan, excited about that actress up there on the screen. I guess I don't have to tell you who the star was. They were always her pictures . . ."
-Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard

There's a very useful quote in the INLAND EMPIRE Wikipedia entry from David Lynch about his movie; "We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe."

This movie is about the nature of dreams and stories, how they're an integral force in the mind's framework, and how they can free us and ensnare us.



Yesterday I read "SCENE IN THE MUSEUM (1896)", a new vignette by Caitlin R. Kiernan featured in the latest Sirenia Digest. It's a story very obviously based on Caitlin's experiences in Second Life, an online role-playing alternate universe simulator that Caitlin does not like to refer to as a game. She takes her alter ego seriously enough that she keeps a blog for the character. The vignette prominently features a character named Mary, a prostitute, and based on, I suspect, a real person--someone I've myself cast as a prostitute in Boschen and Nesuko (why do we keep portraying our friends as whores, Caitlin?).

The prostitute wears a red taffeta dress, and I was intrigued to find a prostitute with a red taffeta dress at the beginning of INLAND EMPIRE.



She's watching a television show called Rabbits, a sort of deconstructionist sitcom originally featured as a stand alone film on David Lynch's web site. But now the rabbits have become the barest versions of the dream characters that haunt INLAND EMPIRE in various incarnations.

From the unfinished Polish film 47 to its remake, On High in Blue To-morrows starring Laura Dern's character, Nikki Grace, there is a story haunted by itself, and in turn haunts those involved. It resulted in the murder of the two leads in 47.



Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Nikki Grace is an aging actress living in an enormous house decorated in a decadent, Victorian style. And also like Norma Desmond, Nikki's trying to break back into the business, and she seems to have succeeded when prominent director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) casts her in On High in Blue To-morrows.

The story is of jealousy, murder, lust and desperation. There is a woman who works as a prostitute, unbeknownst to her jealous husband. She becomes pregnant and she tells the husband about it without knowing that her husband is sterile.



Sue is having an affair with Billy. A talk show host, played by Dern's mother, Diane Ladd (seen playing Dern's mother in Lynch's Wild at Heart--a movie that plays an integral role in Caitlin's The Five of Cups), attempts to cause a stir by suggesting a possible affair between Nikki and the actor playing Billy, Devon Berk (Justin Theroux).



Sue's friends are the prostitutes she works alongside in the streets. These girls act as a fey Greek chorus, existing in 1920s Poland and on the streets of Hollywood, exhibiting lust, vanity, and occasionally a tantalisingly odd concern for their ill-fated friend. They perform a dance routine at one point in the film to "The Loco-Motion" after one of the prostitutes proudly displays her breasts to the others. Like many of David Lynch's exercises in comedy, the humour on the surface is funny, but one senses it's a thin veneer for a deeply disturbing truth.



The actress who originally played the character Nikki's inhabiting was noticeably younger than Nikki, and when Sue has a moment of foreboding at the sight of her husband's white shirt covered with ketchup, she has a vision directly out of Sunset Boulevard;







Julia Ormond plays Billy's jealous wife, destined to murder Sue with a screwdriver because she's been cursed by the Phantom, the assassin from the original Polish film.



The bloody journey of Nikki through these dreams is seen eventually to gain freedom for certain dreamers. It's a good movie.

To-day I received a big black box from David Lynch. Gee, I love saying that. Inside was a copy of Inland Empire and sixteen ounces of pure, true, David Lynch coffee. It really is great coffee--I'd buy it even if it didn't bear the David Lynch name. That it does makes it all the sweeter.

For this Thursday, I took the trolley downtown to go to a sushi place my sister had recommended. On the way, I sat across from a guy maybe five years older than me who was talking to himself in English and Spanish. I couldn't hear most of what he said, but the first thing I caught was, "Ricardo thinks he has the world brain. He does, but something's gotta hit him." After a while, I discerned that he was developing in his narrative two characters, one named George and one named Billy. It was a little while before I understood he was referring to George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Apparently the two of them were trying to move the population of the U.S. to Africa.

Anyway, the sushi place was nice. I had the vegetarian dish, which primarily consisted of tofu cubes wrapped in rice and avocado. I also had a small bottle of nihonshu (sake), the first I've ever had, and I loved it. Hot and sweet, it was like the best mug of hot cocoa I've ever had, with an appreciable alcohol quotient. It's a shame it was such a hot day out to-day.

Yesterday, I noticed Boschen and Nesuko received about two hundred extra hits, thanks, apparently, to Rincewind plugging it on the Something Awful forum. I love coming across comments about my comic by people who don't think I'll be reading them. And as is often the case with such unvarnished comments about Boschen and Nesuko, my writing gets props while the artwork gets a failing grade. And, you know, I honestly find that to be a little vindicating. All my life, teachers and friends and adults in my family have told me I was a good artist and were rather unenthusiastic when I decided at some point in high school that I was more of a writer than an artist. Well, take that. It's almost enough to make me want to try writing prose fiction again.

I was reading again recently about a possible third Ghostbusters movie and about the idea that the new one would probably feature a new cast of younger actors. I don't think this is necessarily a bad idea. It certainly fits in with Dan Aykroyd's original concept of the ghostbusters being a national institution, like the fire department. So I started thinking about who I would cast.

My Ghostbusters: The Next Generation movie would take place in L.A. I figure a typical ghostbuster department would consist of scientists at the bottom rungs of their fields of study while also being people who have a tolerance for stressful and life threatening situations. There would be a couple specialised ghostbuster departments housing more established experts, but my Ghostbusters movie would concentrate on some of the more average shlubs.

My team would consist of Steve Carell, Jim Carrey, Wanda Sykes, Thora Birch, and Daryl Hannah.

Carell would play a former high school science teacher who was fired after having an affair with one of students--the case was nationally infamous and he spent a few years in prison for statutory rape. Now he's a ghostbuster and an alcoholic, spending a lot of his time at a nearby bar drinking martinis.

Carrey would be a guy who was a completely anti-social physics buff in high school, but only just barely got through college. He's one of those guys with almost no capacity for human emotion until he becomes ecstatic over a complicated equation or something. But he has almost no control over his own attention, which is why he did so poorly in college.

Wanda Sykes would play a marine biologist who spent a decade studying wildlife in the Pacific Ocean. All of her friends were also marine biologists, but unlike every single one of them, Sykes never made any groundbreaking discoveries or published anything noteworthy. This, combined with extremely bad luck with men, has caused her to become extremely bitter and she sees becoming a ghostbuster as accepting the fact that she's a McDonald's cashier after having tried to be a chef all her life.

Thora Birch would be the tech girl. She has no particular aspirations or ambitions and would easily be the most laid back of the five. She's supposed to take care of the crew's equipment, but she tends to slack off and play MMORPGs all day. She enjoys teasing Steve Carell's character.

Daryl Hannah would be the most accomplished scientist of the group, a former botanist but now a paranormal botanist. She was part of an academic movement that began studying "ghost plants", though she was not a key figure. She's also a Wiccan priestess.

I'm not sure what the movie would be about, but I think I'd prefer a plot that's not about saving the whole world, but just saving people from ghosts.

Farewell My Concubine (Bàwáng Bié Jī)
1993 Directed by Chen Kaige

A film with gorgeous visuals, spanning the central years of the twentieth century from the early 1920s to the 1970s, it follows the life of a Beijing Opera star named Cheng Dieyi like a big Victorian novel. Like most fifth generation Chinese films, the social and political landscape of China figures prominently in the tale, but the meat of the story is undeniably Dieyi. His story is one of a person caught always between fantasy and reality, male and female, and love and isolation.



This is an old favourite of mine, though I haven't watched it in more than four years. Four years ago was when I bought the DVD after I'd owned a VHS copy for several years. There was a period in the late nineties and early oughts when I was strongly interested in Chinese films, partly because I stayed up late several nights watching a lot of fifth generation films like Ju Dou and Huozhe on Bravo, back when that channel still showed movies unedited and commercial free. I've long been a lover of long movies and books, especially those that follow a character's entire life, as these movies often did. Also, the fact that my living situation at the time was in a near constant state of flux probably contributed to my enjoyment of them, as they often feature characters constantly flung from one attempt to settle into life to another.

I started seeking these movies out at video stores, and Farewell My Concubine emerged as my favourite. I hadn't watched it in a while when I picked up the DVD in 2003, and I found to my surprise I wasn't able to watch much of the movie which suddenly seemed to me overly melodramatic. It wasn't until a few days ago, when I saw it on a list of great non-English language films, that I decided to give it another shot. I'm happy to say I was able to enjoy it again, though I find it to be a movie with several significant flaws.



Cheng Dieyi and his partner in opera, Duan Xiaolou, are introduced at the beginning of the movie as old men, though it's difficult to guess their age, not only because of the overwhelming makeup and costumes of the Bejieng opera they wear, but also because this is a movie that makes no attempt to age their actors, something that usually bothers me, though substantially less so here than in a movie like Walk the Line, perhaps because Farewell My Concubine has virtues.

The scene promptly flashes back to Dieyi's and Xiaolou's childhood, before they'd taken their stage names and they were known as Douzi and Shitou. This movie sets out to employ one of those movie conventions I find deeply annoying, which is to show early twentieth century scenes in black and white or sepia (in this case sepia). Since the entire movie is told from this flashback onwards, Kaige is forced to fade colours into existence in the very next scene. So much for that old-timey feel, huh?



Douzi's a kid with six fingers on one hand, but his prostitute mother hacks off the extra finger so that she might give him to an opera troupe, who otherwise would not take him in. Douzi's mother is the first of two prostitutes in the movie to figure prominently and catastrophically in Douzi's life, the second being Juxian, played by Gong Li, who's introduced much later to become Xiaolou's wife. I like Gong Li a lot, and she turned up frequently in fifth generation Chinese films, but I feel she may have been the cause of many of this film's problems as I suspect the role was padded significantly in consideration of the actress's stature.



These prostitutes influence and are at odds with Dieyi's signature role of Concubine Yu in the opera Farewell My Concubine opposite Xiaolou's Xiang Yu, a powerful warlord who faces insurmountable odds. In a display of loyalty, the concubine commits suicide with the lord's own sword before she can be taken by the enemy.



The film is quite good at portraying the brutality of training for Beijing Opera, as from a very early age the actors are moulded for their roles through rigorous recitations and physical beatings. In one of the movie's more curious scenes, Dieyi and Xiaolou return to their old troupe master after they've become famous stars. The two of them, particularly Xiaolou, seem to quickly dissolve psychologically back into terrified children as they kneel again before the master, who whips Xiaolou with a wooden scimitar as punishment for the personal strife between the two. Juxian coolly attempts to stay the master's hand at one point by smiling and saying she's in charge of Xiaolou these days, and permission from her is required for any beating the man receives. The master simply bids Juxian to sit down and enjoy the show, though, and continues the beating. When Juxian suggests Dieyi be beaten instead of Xiaolou, Xiaolou becomes fiercely defensive, refers to this as a man's business, and strikes Juxian across the face, something he'd not done to her before.



The subtext here is that the physical punishment is an intensely integral aspect of the two actors' personalities, and it also relates to the bond between them forged from childhood. Xiaolou regards it as a brotherhood of actors, but Dieyi's lifelong problem is that he sees it as a relationship between lovers.

Dieyi's obviously attracted to men, though I'm not sure if it's because he's gay or if it's because he's a woman in a man's body. Dieyi seems himself not to know the tangled secrets of his own mind.

He's trained from early age not only to perform female roles, but also to behave as a girl at all times, onstage and off. Early on, he had trouble with a line from a play called The Record of an Evil Sea; "I am by nature a girl, not a boy." Despite several beatings, Douzi invariably says, "I am by nature a boy, not a girl." He doesn't deliver the line correctly until a eunuch visits the troupe on the behalf of a prospective patron, and even then Douzi's not able to deliver the line until Shitou physically punishes him.



But even before this, Douzi's feminine behaviour seems entirely natural and he certainly seems inclined to female roles in life offstage forever afterwards.



One thing that's undeniably certain is that Dieyi's in love with Xiaolou, and Dieyi's love persists for his entire life, despite the fact that Xiaolou remains utterly incapable of reciprocating it, having for Dieyi only the love of a brother. The mismatch of their affections manifests in varying but always damaging ways as they live through Japanese occupation, the Communist revolution, and the Cultural Revolution, where the opera troupe is forced by armed forces to parade in the streets in full makeup and wardrobe until they're brought to their knees around a bonfire. Officers force them to make confessions, but signifying the political confusion of that notorious national upheaval, Dieyi and Xiaolou have no idea what they're supposed to confess, and instead begin screaming the ills of their personal relationship.



I could have done without a lot of the political aspects of the movie, as it's more often a distraction from the far more interesting personal drama than a vehicle for it. But I love Dieyi, so I call it a good movie.

Here's a track from the soundtrack.

Behold! I give unto ye all a brand new eight page comic; Zai'Pi Mystery Epic!!!

Time to read it!

Okay, obviously I'm not getting any sleep to-night. And I'm tired of staring at the blue wall, so I'm going to seriously start looking for distractions now . . .

Tim managed to download all fifty-two episodes of Super Gals, the very funny shojo anime series I discovered at Comic-Con. I've since watched the first six episodes and have found the quality to be consistent and good, though by no means perfect.

The show's about a high school girl named Kotobuki Ran and her friends Miyu and Aya, all three of whom are "gals", which is to say their manner of dress and behaviour reflects an actual subculture in Japan referred to as "Gal" or "Kogal". As the Wikipedia entry puts it, "They are characterized by conspicuously displaying their disposable income through distinctive tastes in fashion, music, and social activity. In general, the kogal 'look' roughly approximates a sun-tanned California Valley girl, and indeed, there are even some linguistic similarities between these Western groups and Kogal."

But Kotobuki Ran is also the daughter of two police officers and seems to have inherited a perpetual desire to fight for justice which is manifested in actual street brawls between herself and rival gals. This is a great source of comedy as there is something funny about watching Ran face down a trio of "unseasonably tan" gals among other regular foes.

But Ran's sense of justice is also used as a vehicle for socially conscious messages in the series, about which I have mixed feelings. Ran talks her friend Aya out of having sex with a guy for money, which is a real problem in the kogal culture as the lifestyle is expensive. Ran convinces Aya that a gal can have fun while being poor, which may be an admirable message, but it's slightly sabotaged by the fact that Ran doesn't truly seem to lack for money. It's nice to see an anime series confronting these uniquely Japanese social problems as anime series so rarely do this. I only wish it wasn't as superficial as it is.

An episode where Aya is forced to shun her gal friends due to her falling grades at school focuses on the girl's attendance of cram schools in order to please her parents, apparently depriving herself of the happy innocence of youthful days. Problems most people are generally aware of as existing in Japan but are so often glossed over in anime. And yet, the same morning as I watched that particular episode, I also watched an episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion that dealt with the young protagonist's desire to gain a kind word from his taciturn father by doing work that makes him unhappy. That the work in question is piloting a large biomechanical monster doesn't stop the character story from being effective. More effective, in fact, than the Super Gals plot, which may have taken a page from Evangelion by actually detailing the relationship between Aya and her parents. Instead, Aya comes off in the episode as a vague illustration of a statistic. The odd paradox in art is that the more peculiarities there are in a relationship between characters, the more they tend to resonate with viewers.

Well, it's almost 8:30am. Maybe I can choke down a couple hours of sleep . . .

I caught a bit of Lou Dobbs at lunch to-day. The guest host was talking about the contaminated toys from China--she kept referring to the country as "Communist China", as did all the correspondents. Isn't that great? By the gods, what a pathetic attempt to draw attention from the purely capitalist cause of the problem. I feel like the Lou Dobbs crew really misses the 80s.

I was surprised last night by how many good movies are public domain and available for download at archive.org. I got a really nice copy of the brilliant film noir Detour, the terrific His Girl Friday, and a bunch of Charlie Chaplin films. And they all work on my iPod.

While colouring comic pages yesterday, I watched the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode featuring a movie called The Final Sacrifice on YouTube. For something besides music to listen to while drawing, I'm finding MST3k to be ideal, as one often does not need to be looking at the screen at all to appreciate what's happening, and it's not as though I need to respect any artist's specifications for format and atmosphere when it comes to MST3k--I just have the video playing in a small window while I work with Paint Shop Pro in another.

The Final Sacrifice, a Canadian film from 1990, is a little unusual for MST3k fare. It appears to be an attempt at moulding a Spelbergian adventure on a budget that may not have exceeded a thousand dollars. What struck me is that there appears to have been a great deal of pride in its spectacularly mundane characters and setting. It almost seems as though its writer/director, Tjardus Greidanus, wanted to show how one of the Steven Spielberg/George Lucas style movies that proliferated in the 80s could be done right in your own back yard--all you need is attitude.

The film's hero is a prepubescent fifteen year-old named Troy.



His father was an archaeologist or something who was researching an ancient Canadian empire that predated the Mayans when he was killed by a mysterious cult of pale, beefy men in black tank tops and ski masks (the movie's stand-in for stormtroopers).



It isn't long before Troy's researches--captured in early scenes of long, unbroken shots of Troy reading and grimacing slightly--provoke the attentions of the mysterious cult. Here's the cult's resident Darth Vader leading troops into Troy's home in a shot feebly imitating Vader's appearance at the Rebel Base in Empire Strikes Back;



Soon Troy is pursued across the Canadian wilderness, a land rendered dull and nebulous by the film's casual cinematography. Troy joins forces with the film's Han Solo, one Zap Rowsdower, when Troy hitches a ride on Rowsdower's Millennium Falcon, a truck.



Rowsdower's my favourite part of the movie. Clearly meant to be the rough and dashing hero with a dark past for the adoring boy, Rowsdower's a discreetly podgy gentleman dressed in denim over sensible layers. He sports a fluffy mullet and manly moustache.



It's hard to find decent screenshots as the movie's filled with dialogue scenes with ill-considered blocking, actors' faces turned from the camera, and action scenes devoid of energy, comprised of derivative compositions and overlong static shots of nothing (when the camera inexplicably settled on a bush during a chase scene at one point, Servo adopted the voice of the bush and said, "Hi, I'm just a bush. You'll probably want to pan away from me.").

And yet the movie has a kind of enthusiasm, as though Greidanus wanted to weave magic for us, as though he wanted to fill us with wonder that such an extraordinary adventure could take place on such a banal stage with such plain players. After The Final Sacrifice, I see Greidanus became a career "making of" director for other people's movies. Somehow I don't think that's quite what he wanted for himself. I'm reminded of all the cute girls at Comic-Con dressed as their favourite anime characters, and the thousands of comic book artists and writers who probably won't go anywhere. The odds are against us, and yet we dream. I guess there's always Mystery Science Theatre 3000 . . .

I have terrible posture, myself. Maybe they ought to've hit me with this video when I was a kid. Or maybe I did see it; I don't know how old this episode is. I'm honestly amazed at how many people have good posture at the mall--I just can't imagine putting serious effort into it as a kid.