Took the terrible 8pm-midnight nap tonight. Dreamt that I was part of what I would call a vigilante HVAC squad; you see we go in and secretly fix up the systems when the building management doesn't want it done the easy way. We were planning to go into the Pentagon, which was controlled or at least guarded by John Edwards, and implement some badly needed enhancements to the ventilation system. I think it ended with me running into a startled Edwards' office with some kind of crossbow in hand, and shooting it in a perfect path through the entire building.
5am or so, gave up on my initial attempts at more sleep and finished off the box wine--excuse me, "cask" wine. According to the blurb from the maker, rectangular prisms made of corrugated cardboard are now called casks.
A day and a half or so later, continued writing this entry. Yesterday H. and I caught "Donnie Darko: Director's Cut." Before the feature they showed a trailer for "Open Water" which was somewhat different and improved from the one we saw before "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" (the most frustrating movie ever), which was the worst trailer ever [was that confusing enough?]. It was like the worst of both worlds, with lo-fi footage of people treading water and saying "OH MY GOD!" and then the hi-fi deep voiceover saying "THE MOST TERRIFYING MOVIE OF THE YEAR", coming off completely like a parody. Just picture how bad this could be and that's exactly how it was. That pattern was repeated about 6 times, along with some footage of fish and sharks swimming. Evidently the filmmakers realized how bad it was and got a new, shorter one made. Back to "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead": this movie was extreme subtlety, and in some ways that was very satisfying, although part of me is sad that I've become enough of a grownup to be able to appreciate that. But good god Mr. Hodges, you can only take it so far, before you're spending an hour and a half building up to something and then only half finishing it. Back to Donnie Darko. This was certainly an education in director's cuts; you go in with high hopes because it's like a movie you already know is good has been made and released anew by the person most likely to understand what made it good in the first place, and therefore able to improve on it. But knowing that it's the director's cut, one can't help but notice when a scene could easily have been left out without affecting the plot. Some of the additions were pretty nice for explanation and making the foreshadowing clearer, another common DC effect, but some of them were just not necessary. These DC's are sometimes accompanied by stories of battles with the studio over what would originally get released, but if there was such a fight with this one, I can't see why. Enjoyable nonetheless.
