Last night, I saw a promo for the new crappy children's movie, Zathura. The promo was using music from Requiem for a Dream. Some incongruities just tickle me. True, Requiem for a Dream music was used for Two Towers promos, but this is much better.

I see from the imdb entry that Zathura is distinguished by having yet another shitty David Koepp screenplay.

So, Trisa and I are leaving in an hour and a half. I'm a little worried about Boschen and Nesuko, as this'll be the first time I've had to work on an update at another location. Hopefully no unexpected calamity shall arise.

I was captivated last night by this Off to War show. It seems to be a reality series about American soldiers in Iraq. I say reality series instead of documentary because it seems somewhat aimed at the Real World crowd, with its interview style and unfortunate John Mellencamp theme. Probably an admirable attempt to reach out to the young people, but it's already doomed in that regard by being on a Discovery Channel.

Anyway, it was fascinating to watch soldiers on a daily routine dealing with traffic jams, wandering Iraqi merchants trying to sell them porn, and the hospital situation. Gods, the hospital situation--American soldiers standing around in a small cluster, handing things out to aggressive and desperate Iraqi women. And I was quite struck by the fact that the American soldiers were trying to speak English to them. In fact, I didn't once hear an American soldier say anything in the native tongue. That seems to me a lapse in training and I wonder if the culture clash would be as severe otherwise.

It was interesting that each of the soldiers interviewed seemed to feel that they were sent to Iraq for no good reason. One sergeant said that, after what he'd seen, he couldn't imagine democracy as we know it emerging in Iraq. Just a little of Off to War makes that clear to the viewer, too.

Damn. 4:40am. I guess you can't teach a dog new tricks. He has to have chains nailed into his limbs so's he can be a living marionette.

I'm trying to adapt my sleeping schedule to something closer to Trisa's, who I'll be staying with in San Jose for some time starting to-morrow. Yesterday, I managed to wake up at 11am after having gone to bed at around 2am or so. I was quite proud of myself. Guess I got too comfortable--now I can't sleep.

So I ate some oatmeal and watched some 100 Scariest Moments show on Bravo featuring various celebrities and critics talking about said moments. I was intrigued by the presence of Peter Jackson, Rob Zombie, John Carpenter, Clive Barker, a couple Buffy cast members (Tara and Drusilla), and Jennifer Tilly, among others. I was a bit thrown by the presence of the Coors Light Twins, but, still.

They were talking about The Exorcist, which, if I remember, was at number four (entire movies seemed to count for "moments" somehow), and they were all talking about how that movie absolutely gets you. That it's so unpredictable, that it crosses boundaries that you would've never expected it to. It was when John Landis was saying how you completely bought into the girl floating off the bed that I recalled seeing the movie in the theatre a few years ago and noticing how the entire audience seemed completely unaffected, half-bored even. There was frank laughter whenever the little girl cussed and, yeah, that sort of thing is played for laughs in modern movies.

More and more, I think people are going to see movies for self-contained realities that have no intimate relationship to their lives--at best, they can jive with the opinions in the movie.

I went to see A History of Violence again on Thursday and my love for it increased greatly. Because this time, the only people in the theatre were me and a perfectly quiet old man sitting in the back. The first time was on a Sunday night with a young El Cajon crowd that sounded as though they clearly belonged in the Deuce Bigalow theatre. You know homophobia's bad when guys in the crowd are referring to a sex scene between a man and a woman as "gay."

Without those chattering voices around me, I was able to settle into the movie and approach it on its own terms a lot more easily. The wall with multicoloured light cast on it was now a clear window to a reality, playing in my senses.

When I was telling my friend Marty about my experience first viewing the movie, and the assholes in the crowd, he said, "Where's the bomb when you need it?" It was such a perfectly Morrissey thing to say, and he was right. You know, I spent a good part of my adolescence wondering about how Stormtroopers might be real, complex souls, only to find out now, when I'm older, that they may have been soulless clones all along.

It always feels like a misfortune on so many levels when I notice that a large group of humanity living nearby is hopelessly stupid. Bill Maher mentioned on his show last night that only 15% of Americans believe in evolution.

And every day is like Sunday . . .

I love David Lynch.

Discussing his newfound love for digital video, the man says, "Some would say it looks bad. But it reminds me of early 35mm, that didn't have that tight grain. When you have a poor image, there's lots more room to dream."

That's what I call an exquisite attitude (you can read more here).

But I've been neglecting another of my favourite Davids, namely Cronenberg, as I've not here discussed my feelings about

A History of Violence

Not Cronenberg's best, far from his most ambitious, but probably the best movie in theatres right now (I feel I can safely say that without having seen Capote, partly because I'm a smug bastard).

Viggo Mortensen is well cast as a man who, when we first meet him, seems an ordinary denizen of a small American town, but who is eventually revealed as having a sinister, bloodied past. It's the same qualities that made him ideal for Aragorn, actually--he can be the dangerous, wild-faced Strider, but also the good and noble Aragorn.

His Tom Stall at the beginning of A History of Violence seems basically an affable, decent, if quiet, man, but there is a subtle, buried fierceness you can see in his eyes. I'm sort of reminded of the opening shot of Blue Velvet, where David Lynch showed that even under an idyllic, suburban setting, there're vicious insects scrabbling under the grass. In Cronenberg's new film, even in the ostensibly normal, peaceful atmosphere of the beginning, there are harbingers of a violent reality kept at bay; the strange anecdote from the cook in Tom's diner, the juxtaposition of Tom's daughter screaming about imaginary monsters at night with the film's opening scene, and, well, Mortensen.

The very first scene is two thugs lazily committing horrific crimes. A subtle, somehow perfectly Cronenbergian touch I noticed was that one of these thugs bore a resemblance to Mortensen. Cronenberg relies on people knowing Viggo Mortensen's the star of the movie, so that one or two people in the audience might be saying to themselves, "Looking for Viggo . . . Looking for Viggo . . . Looking . . . Wait, is that him? I know he looks different without the Aragorn makeup so maybe . . . I don't know--no, no I don't think it's him." So already there's a little shadow of Tom's duel life.

Maria Bello's good as well. She has the task of conveying the horrified disorientation at learning her husband of fifteen years may not be who she thought he was, an idea audiences are largely too jaded for. And she's good in the movie's two sex scenes, which are both very different in tone and are both instrumental in conveying the nature of hers and Tom's relationship. The second scene in particular was terrific for conveying her internal conflict.

Daily life, sex, violence . . . The film does a wonderful job of showing that these are all, in fact, part of the same fabric, and that one of the biggest tasks we may face as human beings is holding all three in the same perception of the universe. This is almost the opposite of what most films seem to do these days, which is to perceptibly switch modes between violence, dialogue, sex.

The violence in the movie is sudden and terrible, and lingers as something you're still trying to understand moments after the action has passed. In that way, it was somehow Kurosawaian. And unlike many directors of late, like Chris Nolan in Batman Begins, Cronenberg does not use quick cuts and manipulative editing as a crutch to make up for the actors' inability to perform the stunts. Instead, Cronenberg uses quick cuts and expert editing as an enhancement for the violence. Godard said, "the cinema is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie." So, like everything in the medium that the audience is hip to the artifice of, the presence of these cuts has to be justified by artistic brilliance. Cronenberg succeeds. Baz Luhrmann ought to be taking notes.

A new Boschen and Nesuko is now online. And I'm long overdue for another cup of coffee . . .

Oh, Thursday, you are a harsh female thug. It's like you crept up behind me and hit me with a blackjack. But otherwise, the day hasn't been so bad, really.

I almost didn't wake up in time to leave for the maid, but a nightmare about 8 1/2, which I'd watched last night, woke me just in time.

Here are some signs I didn't get nearly enough sleep;

1) I settled for a muffin at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf for breakfast.

2) I almost banged up my car pretty good in the Hillcrest Landmark parking garage.

3) After purchasing my ticket, it took me a couple of minutes to figure out which of the five, clearly marked theatres was screening Mirrormask.

4) As I was leaving the parking garage, the lady I gave my parking validation to asked with a thick accent, "Where did you go?" ME: What? HER: Where did you go? ME: Who? HER: You! ME: Oh. The movies.

5) I found my way back on surface streets. On one street, it was clear that I was going to need to U-turn at the next intersection, and I couldn't remember whether or not one was allowed. I made a mental note to check when I was in the left turn lane. About fifteen minutes later, I reminded myself. ME: To do what? OTHER PART OF ME: To check to see if you can U-turn! ME: Why? Where? OTHER PART OF ME: Why, over . . . wait, why're we moving in the other direction already? ME: We're going home. This is the way. OTHER PART OF ME: Yes, but we needed to U-turn. We must have U-turned to have been moving in this direction. Why can't we remember--oh, never mind . . .

Anyway, here's some more on movies I've seen lately;

Mirrormask

First of all, Roger Ebert's review is retarded. Ebert himself admitted on Ebert and Roeper that he was biased against Fantasy movies, which was pretty clear to me from his Lord of the Rings reviews. You could tell he really hated to admit that those were good movies.

But, fortunately, albeit quite against my will, his review lowered my expectations, so I was partially pleasantly surprised--and partially I got exactly the good movie I was expecting.

I went to Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's panel on Mirrormask at the Comic-Con a couple of years ago, which would have made anyone excited to see the movie. Even Tim, who was with me at the time and has little interest in that sort of movie these days, seemed somewhat engaged by the presentation.

Anyway, as the movie started, I sort of regretted having watched 8 1/2 the night before, as it was suddenly clear to me that Mirrormask was, in some ways, a similar animal, only not nearly as good. And I became a little frustrated with the beginning of the movie, which was awkward and laden with some too obviously expository dialogue. I began to wish actually that the movie was more like what some of the negative criticisms about it said it was; a confusing and nonsensical ride.

I didn't really get into the proper mindset for the movie until the character Valentine started talking about his tower. His tower, his tower--kept mentioning it until finally the pervert in my brain woke up and said to the rest of me, "Oh, I get it."

Valentine is for this movie what David Bowie's crotch was in Labyrinth. Or, really, where Jareth's relationship with Sarah was meant to deal with a teenage girl's emerging sexuality in Labyrinth, so was Valentine's relationship with Helena in Mirrormask.

Mirrormask, in the early stages where Jim Henson Co. was just approaching McKean and Gaiman about it, was meant to be a sequel to Labyrinth. So I can very easily picture the two sitting at a table and tossing about what they liked about Labyrinth. And, personally, the sexual undertones would have been pretty high on my list, so I just about fell in love with Mirrormask at that point.

McKean's imagery is wonderful, and his stylistic use of cuts at times made me wish it were more of a Dionysian film. Gaiman, though, is the most Apollonian of writers. And perhaps that's why Ebert didn't get it.

Gaiman carefully crafted in little fun and interested ideas in bits of dialogue that contribute to a whole that generally mirrors those little bits. And the detours are nice and welcome--like the floating giants, which was a sweet, sad moment.

I think the only thing I'd really change is that I'd remove the very last, one-word line in the movie.

Stephanie Leonidas, who plays Helena, looks like a young female Cary Grant.

8 1/2

Now this was brilliant. And no, can you believe it, I'd never seen it before!

It starts with an easily interpretable dream sequence; Guido, a film director, is stuck in oppressive traffic. He struggles out of his car to then float away . . . only to be pulled down from the clouds by his producer.

What follows is Guido's wanderings through a life cluttered with a wife, mistress, producers, a cardinal, a difficult writer, anxious financiers, and an assortment of more difficult to label others.

The movie's about truth, and the usefulness of truth or the truth in lies . . . among other things. Mainly the movie is itself. That's one of the marks of a great movie--it doesn't need to be reduced to what its themes and plot are. It is it's beautiful self, and that's enough.

Okay, now I'm gonna talk about movies I've seen recently . . .

Corpse Bride

Eh. A decent way to spend a couple hours. A pretty movie, with a couple of palatable songs. I recognised the voice of Danny Elfman himself as "Bonejangles." Not as good a tribute as Fred Astaire in Swing Time, but they don't make Fred Astaires any more. Or Bojangleses, for that matter.

I was surprised we didn't get to hear Johnny Depp sing, since all this time he's been talking about how his first love is music. I wonder if he has a really bad singing voice and everyone's afraid to tell him? It's funny, but in a so-called musical, the only of the principal characters who gets to sing is Emily, the corpse bride herself, and even she has to share her song with two of the more cartoonish supporting characters who otherwise dominate the musical numbers.

A lot of the visuals recall earlier Tim Burton movies--the opening shot of the bleached 19th century city was reminiscent of the one in Sleepy Hollow, where we see Depp's similarly dressed character peering out the window in a similar fashion. Also, the corpse bride's entrance is shot almost exactly like Beetlejuice's.

SPOILER WARNING:

The film's about as good as Donnie Darko and ends on the same note. What's with all the noble sacrificing, anyway? Not that I mind, really. I mean, it is admirable and all. Though mainly what it reminds me of is the scene in Amelie where Amelie's watching television and imagining herself as some sort of tragic saviour. But I like Amelie Poulain, and if you're like her, then I like you too.

Serenity

AH. This was a very satisfying movie. I was saying to Trisa afterwards, "I feel very satisfied right now." It felt good. There was a huge amount of non-bullshit in the movie that more than made up for the two milligrams or so of bullshit I detected.

I've never seen Firefly, but now I very much want to. Serenity was good, uncompromising movie-matter from beginning to end. I mean, yes, compromises were made, but never with the result of damaged goodness. Most everyone talked like grownups, too! In the tracking shot where we meet the crew, two unruly children sitting in front of me decided to leave the theatre when they realised they couldn't follow the dialogue. That is plain great. And it felt great.

Man, I don't think I'm very articulate right now. I feel like a jazz DJ. Isn't it weird how all DJs on jazz stations seem to have inordinate difficulty expressing themselves with words?

Er, that's a digression (obviously). Anyway . . .

Robyn's been complaining that the movie isn't as much of a Western as the television series is. Not having seen the series, I'd say overtly Western qualities (i.e. those not normally shared by space operas anyway) were limited to superficial details; dialects, sets, weapons (Captain Mal's cool quick-draw pistol), references to pioneering, and heists. The personalities of the characters are, for the most part, in wide-open violation of typical Western personalities, and anyway, Whedon's trademark catty dialogue is about as far away from John Wayne as you can get. Which makes me wonder how Western the series can really be.

Actually, the only thing that really bugged me about the movie was all the Galadriel shots of River's feet. I mean, sure, I like her feet, but I got bored by what was being said with them. Again and again, "Oh, poor vulnerable little River nonetheless steps boldly into dangerous/dirty situations/places!" Oh, that River! Where will she get to next? Of course, mainly I liked River. One shot of her holding a bloody sword and hatchet reminded me somewhat uncomfortably of Nesuko. But, hey, Nesuko has a kukri, so she's completely different, right? Right.

Oh, and a lot of people are upset by a certain character's abrupt death. Maybe I'd feel differently if I'd seen the series, but personally, I loved Whedon for it. One of the things about death that's always struck me as particularly bad is the fact that it's a barrier placed between yourself and the deceased that you can't be prepared for. So it seems something of an insult, to me, that characters are constantly given really long, drawn out death dialogues that last comfortably as long as it suits the audience. Sometimes, that does work. But it is overdone. I love Farscape, but one of the most irritating few minutes in my television-viewing life was watching Zhaan bid her personalised farewells to each member of the crew. I was left feeling not so much that Zhaan had died as Virginia Hey was leaving the show.

Er, anyway, I deeply loved Serenity. Sorry Robyn and Moira. I cannot share in your disappointment.

And now it's 6am and I think this is getting long anyway (it's kind of hard to tell since I write my first draft in notepad with the word-wrap off. Weird, huh? Yeah, I've only been doing it the past couple months . . . Don't know why but I like it.). I guess I'll talk about the rest of the movies in my next post . . .

Hurray, I made a banner! See;



There's a whole new focus on banners on my links page now. It's like I'm trying to work my brain on the whole linking-structure-web-philosophy thing. Rather far from my forte, or so the dim feeling in my skull informs me. I intend to make more, big, sweeping changes on my site this week, but I probably won't, because I'm like that.

See, I'm not even feeling up to talking about Serenity and History of Violence yet, both of which I've now--finally!--seen.

*. . . yawn . . . * maybe I'll post about them to-morrow . . .

The new Boschen and Nesuko chapter is up. And it's only 7pm (here)! That's the soonest I've gotten a chapter up in a long time . . . Now maybe I'll go see one of those movies I've been wanting to see all week.

I've decided to go cold turkey on sweets. That's right folks; I don't like sugar. It sucks. Sugar can suck my ass until it's retrieved all it's foisted on me.

A chocolate pudding and whipped cream pie at my mother's house last night pushed me over the edge. I couldn't even finish it for how gross I felt.

Meanwhile, one grandmother gives me banana cream pudding and a huge bag of caramel brownies, while another wants me to eat a huge bag of chocolate muffins, bearclaws, and scones. And it's like this every gods-damned month. I know they mean well, at least I think they did the first couple months I was telling people I want to lay off sweets. But I'm through being polite. I'm upset that the very thought of sugar makes my stomach turn. I have a feeling it didn't need to be this way. I fondly remember being able to enjoy mocha or flavour syrup in my coffee. Now I can't. Not even vanilla.

I think I'm gonna eat a lot of plain oatmeal from now on. Gods, that actually sounds incredibly appealing. Yeah. As Wilfred Brimley says, when he thinks he's alone, "It's the right god-damned thing to do, and the right fucking way to do it."

In other news, I felt all lazy and sleepy yesterday, in a somewhat entrancing way that never happens to me anymore, so I didn't feel very guilty about not starting the Boschen and Nesuko page until 11:30pm or so. What surprised me was that I pretty much finished it by 7am, except for the last panel which I decided to leave for to-day since it uses the same colour palette as to-day's page. A complicated page--not page 228 complicated, but very complicated--yet it charmed me in an unexpected way, which I think helped a lot. Now for page 236 . . .

What happens when a repressed Westerner's sexual fantasy about Geishas is purchased by Steven Spielberg, who loses interest, and gives the project to the almost-competent but celebrated Rob Marshall(Chicago)? Why, an American movie in English starring Chinese actresses--who speak that English with Chinese accents--about Japanese culture in the early twentieth century. With very silly looking blue contact lenses. And I shall likely be the only person who's bugged by it all.

But I bet Japanese audiences will be amused.

After last week, gods, I cannot even begin to say how good it feels not to have to do anything this weekend. I feel like my whole structure is sagging down into melted Hutt, though. I almost went to bed at 1am--I couldn't believe it, but I actually felt rather sleepy! I think all the nights of only three or four hours sleep were stacking up again. The main trouble with that is, unlike many of you, my online friends, I'm not an insomniac. I'm a good sleeper. I love sleeping, and I'm brilliant at it.

You know, a significant part of me wishes I was a gorilla, living in some secluded forest unknown to man. That would be the way to go. Because it's much harder to be a hermit human, what with all the ridiculous particulars humans need to survive. As a gorilla in a good location, I'd likely only have to worry about food, shelter, and occasional territorial disputes, but I imagine, in my imaginary locale, that there'd be plenty of space for all the gorillas--oh! I'd want some fine female gorillas around as well, jiggity-jiggity.

Anyway, that line of thought sort of begs the question; why the hell do I seem to be revelling in my capacity for abstract thought, so to speak? Why all the words and representative images, like this one you're looking at now? I guess my fervent belief that there's more to life than living comfortably has sustained my utter disbelief, lately, in the spiritual and supernatural. Don't know why. Maybe I feel that a spiritual achievement counts more if you don't believe in spirituality, or some fool thing.

Sunday, I watched Final Fantasy: Advent Children. Released just a couple months ago in Japan, this is a cgi direct to video movie sequel to Final Fantasy VII that is, among other things, a better movie than Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Most reviews insist that Advent Children requires you to have played Final Fantasy VII all the way through in order to have any idea what was going on. However, even though I have beaten Final Fantasy VII, I even still found Advent Children to be rather muddled and perplexing at times, in a variety of ways. The action sequences, while consisting of beautiful characters in beautiful surroundings using amazing uber-martial arts, were nonetheless difficult to follow at times as the director frequently seemed unable to find a focus and displayed a bad sense of timing with his cuts between close-ups and wide shots. And then the dialogue was bizarre and, at times, laughable. As when the villain says something to the hero like, "I'm going to find out what you care about most and make you suffer!" and the hero replies with something like, "You're pathetic! I care about everything!" before launching into his ultimate attack. The movie’s filled with exchanges that seem like, at some level, they do have meaning, but that meaning is rendering insubstantial by lines that seem more like isolated statements floating on the surface of the same pool rather than exchanges of words.

But, there are some definitely good things--the characters look really good. The Japanese voice acting is nice, and the movie has a number of amusing Japanese gangster types, going so far as to promote thugs Reno and Rude--minor characters in the game--to two of the foremost stars of the movie.

The environments look wonderful, and the internal conflicts of the characters were even emotionally resonant, when you can get past the dialogue. Final Fantasy VI's darker, somewhat more melodramatic story was partly inspired by the death of the directors' mother and so, to a lesser degree, was Final Fantasy VII's story. Final Fantasy: Advent Children took that little seed and ran with it until it was a full blown main theme and it's clear throughout the movie that both the heroes and the villains are looking for their mothers without ever finding them.

So, it's a decent couple hours of cgi.

Ah, good, I've made it to a healthy 4:30am. Now I'll sleep.

I've finished the somewhat over the top new Boschen and Nesuko and it's online. There's blood and nudity on every page, and that's a guarantee. How many people can promise you that? Why, anyone who's read the new Boschen and Nesuko of course!

I just heard someone on BBC News refer to the bombings in London a couple months back as "7/7". Am I the only one who thinks our current era's inability to properly name days, ships, and military campaigns is to do with homophobia?

I've started using FireFox after having used Internet Explorer for many years. There's some new spyware infecting my Internet Explorer that seems to be undetectable to Adaware and Spybot. It's extremely frustrating. I hate the helpless feeling it gives me. And even though it doesn't effect FireFox, I'll always have the knowledge that the spyware is somewhere on the computer, lying dormant . . . It's not something I'm accustomed to tolerating.

To put it simply, "ugh." I will be very happy when this week is over. It's a thought I had on Sunday, and it only continues to resound in my thinky bits.

I was on schedule with this particularly complicated and gratuitous Boschen and Nesuko chapter until this very evening--or, until last night for all you human day-measuremently aligned people. I got so dispirited and mudded trying to draw something perfectly simple that I realised I had to stop. It's that weird, crushing, amorphously hopeless feeling that's like the psychological equivalent of a mild cold.

It has partly to do with this bloody week. For various reasons, I won't go into details, although I sort of wish I could. I already unburdened on Trisa over the phone, but I didn't quite hit on the real atmosphere in my brain. I keep thinking about the Werner Herzog movie I saw a couple weeks ago, about Timothy Treadwell. The real life former human being who met his doom for the folly of believing in a universe that is based on harmony. Herzog says it's based on chaos, and I think he has a point.

To-night, I concluded the only really good thing in life is art. Everything else can be put down to confusion or randomness. Which is not to say that things other than art can't be enjoyable. But enjoyable things that aren't art shall always be a little suspicious in my eyes.

So let's see. I have to get up early to-morrow to clean up my room for the maid to vacuum 30% of the floor, dust three small surfaces, and change the sheets. Then I need to come back here, do two, hopefully three pages of Boschen and Nesuko, so's I can upload the chapter Friday or Saturday, feel pleased if people enjoy it, feel somewhat dismayed that things I feel most passionate about may turn out to be my doom, start it all over again, and then, sooner or later, I'll die. Yay.

And so, another Thursday comes to an end. Like every Thursday, the day was a unique blend of bad and good elements, colliding with one another in an obnoxiously gooey alchemical reaction. What is left, in the end, is a dubious entry in the saga of my week, with mysterious consequences.

The previous Thursday was preceded by four hours of sleep, but this new Thursday was underway after a mere three. How solemnly I promised myself I'd finish the new Boschen and Nesuko script by Wednesday night, finish the storyboards on Thursday!

Alas, an epileptic asteroid field of pop rocks was my vista of story ideas, so that only three pages were written by Wednesday night. And so dizzyingly zombified did I feel on this Thursday that I despaired of getting anything done.

But, as if they've a stupid mind of their own, my fingers began typing away at a script that pulled from me intermittent and confusing giggles. It's not really a funny chapter, nor do I think it shall feel it was meant to be, but it filled me with an unaccountable mirth. Which is one reason I think I'm going to need to proofread it carefully after I've gotten a decent amount of sleep.

Let's see . . . My grandmother's gotten some new, 40-inch flat, widescreen television, and so far I've been watching only perfect movies on it. That is, two--Vertigo and Fargo.

It got me thinking about what I consider to be a perfect movie.

Roger Ebert frequently quotes Howard Hawks' belief that a good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes.

A perfect movie, I feel, should be all good scenes, and several great ones. And all scenes must tie together in a variety of ways without you realising immediately that they're tied together, thereby subverting your awareness of the natural artifice of movie.

Now, a perfect movie need not be technically perfect--I'm not speaking to perfect continuity between actors positions at different camera angles, or that sort of thing. Although outright sloppiness in that regard is a disqualifier. Which would disqualify Return of the King, for example--but, before anyone rolls their eyes at Setsuled needlessly ragging on Return of the King again, let me state that I watched the movie a short while ago and remembered that I absolutely adore it.

But this reminds me of another requisite for a perfect movie--the greatness of the film should not be subject to your personal taste. It's a movie where you can watch it and, even if you absolutely hate that sort of movie, you admit at the end of it, if you're employing your objective mind, that it is brilliant.

No. Greatness of art is not subjective. You may enjoy a movie most other people don't, just as you might enjoy the sight of specific tree other people don't. Someone might enjoy the sight of a tree more than any sort of art, in fact, which in itself demonstrates that fondness is not the determination of artistic quality.

Now, take an obvious example of a perfect movie--Citizen Kane. You have a billion things working in tandem all throughout the movie to establish beautiful things about specific components at the same time they're contributing to a whole. Bernard Herrmann's score is always perfect for what's going on and is collectively a magnificent, monolithic thing. Orson Welles as an actor conveys each situation well while adding up to a single story of a man.

But these are obvious examples and maybe not so illustrative. I've implied already that I consider Fargo to be a perfect movie. A while ago, I think it was Robyn who mentioned that a lot of people consider the Mike Yanagita character to be a pointless detour from the plot. To which Robyn pointed out that he was a contributor to Marge's decision to check in again with Jerry Lundegaard--but more than that, there is a perfect strangeness about the interlude that to me is a contributor.

One of the most distinctive good aspects of Fargo is its use of a setting a corresponding group of characters that are unusual for a movie about murder. But at the same time, those elements make sense with a story of murder--from the perspective of real life where we know, yes, a murder could happen somewhere other than New York or Los Angeles--and help to communicate it, by forcing us to make observations of the movie based on our conceptions of reality, and not of movie reality. And so Mike contributes in that he is a slight detour from things, because things often happen in life that don't seem to have any relation to anything else. But the brilliance is that, while capitalising on that, his scene still is a contributor to the fabric of the movie as a whole, simply by being an interesting and believable scene. And by making sense in mysterious ways that may not be explainable to ourselves.

Anyway. I ought to sleep now.

Last night, I watched the 1918 version of Stella Maris. It's a good movie--an engaging melodrama, which pleased me after having watched Vincente Minnelli's disappointing The Clock, which was such a drab, predictable and commonplace waste of Minnelli and Judy Garland, that it had me wondering if I've simply seen too many Hollywood melodramas, and I was quickly seeing patterns fresher eyes might not.

But Stella Maris, having been made in 1918, and having been a very popular movie when it was released, handily defied the notion that it might not have anything of interest. I'm not entirely sure what it was--maybe it was simply Mary Pickford's astonishing duel performance as both the orphan Unity Blake and the titular Stella Maris. The studio boss was apparently unhappy with Pickford as Unity Blake, since she played the role with unattractive makeup and wardrobe. But aside from making Unity look like an entirely different person from Stella, I must say she comes off as a far more attractive creature, a fact that I can't think escaped the notice of the filmmakers.

Stella starts the film off as a cripple who's shielded from all unpleasantness in the world by her parents. So she's pretty and sweet and innocent . . . Meanwhile, Unity is taken from a harsh orphanage by a savage alcoholic woman who, in one rather brutal scene, severely beats Unity with a metal rod of some kind.

Anyway . . . I'm not feeling particularly talkative right now. I slept twelve hours yesterday--from 6am to 6pm. I would've done the same to-day if not for an effort of will. I think it must have to do with all the days of only four hours of sleep last week. It's for that reason that I'm hoping this week I can get a head start on Boschen and Nesuko. But I'm having difficulty deciding how the next chapter ought to go. I have a feeling it's something that'll come to me if I just sit and do nothing for a while, like a mollusc. I was watching a documentary on Greta Garbo last night, and one of the people who knew her said she once, in her years after retiring, compared herself to a mollusc. "You know what a mollusc does? They do nothing." I may be getting the quote slightly wrong . . .

The new Boschen and Nesuko's up. I had to do the last three pages to-day--I can't believe I finished by 10pm.

Someone Bush'll probably want to see arrested.

In a post last week, I said, about Katrina, "It's very easy to feel angry at people, but there is no convenient idol for this."

Well, turns out I was wrong. As rather eloquently pointed out, there're lots of people deserving lots of ire over what happened in Louisiana. Not that you or I or anyone with a brain fragment had to be informed at this point. Although some of us need to be told . . .

I don't know. I'm not good at being seriously angry. I think it goes back to my Donald Duck complex--I really identified with Donald Duck as a kid, but I was always afraid of being like him, finding myself impotent in my anger. In those cartoons, you can sense how the universe respects Donald's anger--it's always met with the humiliation of Donald.

A part of me, I guess, feels that that's how the real world does work. That all the anger in this country at Bush's, to be sure, horrible crimes is dismissed by the opposing ideologues as a form of extremism.

Which, I know, is stupid. Tens of thousands of people dead, and it's rude to get angry at the killers.

I am angry. And it has little to do with whether or not I want to be. I'd feel inhuman if I wasn't. But at the same time, there's a proportionate sadness--a helpless feeling that rational, good, human anger will be met with us being in the stocks with pie on our face. The last election does much to fortify that feeling.

When I saw the video of Aaron Broussard, and heard the story of his colleague's mother drowning five days after the hurricane, it touched the central feeling of horror I felt about the catastrophe. It's the perfect snapshot, the perfect single story to suggest the thousands of others wrapped up in this thing. I wanted to tell people about it, only to find other people were telling me about it before I could open my mouth.

But what does that community mean? "We are the dead," as Winston said in 1984? That we'll be the building blocks of an eventual definite structure of humanity, centuries down the line? Or is that too much to hope for? Nixon taught us nothing about George W. Bush, for example.

Well, I've had a hard time concentrating on Boschen and Nesuko this week, and I've only managed to make progress by concentrating on laying very small stones.

So therefore, I say to you, George W. Bush . . . I hope someone feeds you your own cock. Maybe then you'll stop killing innocent people just so's you can cum.

A dismaying dispute at Wikipedia.

And to think, Wikipedia had been giving me hope that it might be a truly impartial compendium of information . . .