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Ugh. Once again, here I am on a Monday morning, struggling to stay awake. Why has my bedtime window shrunk so much? If I fall asleep before about 9 p.m., then I'm awake for hours at 2 a.m. and groggy in the morning. But if I go to bed after about midnight, then--regardless whether I sleep in in the morning or not--I'm groggy the next day and the day after that. This is only going to get worse as I grow older, isn't it?
And it all could've been so easily avoided, too. For once I didn't have a late-night event on Saturday. There was a gathering at the Glenwood I would've liked to have been at, but I made it contingent on finishing up my taxes. That didn't happen, so instead I ended up on the couch watching t.v. with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu. That was my doom: I decided to look for a movie and settled on Mystic River, failing to consider that its 137-minute running time means three hours once it's stuffed full of advertisements.
And it wasn't even worth it. For all the talk about how the movie explores the effects of a devastating crime on a tight community, it really felt like a glorified police procedural, right down to the gimmicky twist ending. The final fifteen minutes were particularly awful, with a couple of lines that seem to trivialise the trauma of molestation followed by the least-convincing Lady Macbeth turn I've seen since The Walking Dead ended its second season. I kept bracing myself for a gut punch that never came, something on the level of the park bench scene in The Woodsman. (Comparisons being inevitable, what with the subject matter and the presence of Bacon.)
I was much more affected by watching Love Is the Devil on Friday night with Mazeppa, even if it was a familiar story he summed up as "Francis Bacon is kind of a butthole." Whereas Eastwood's direction is all but invisible, Maybury's is palpable in every scene. I could see that being intrusive (my companion thought it was), but given the tale he was trying to tell, I felt it worked. I jokingly offered it to a neighbour who didn't recognise the title, but a friend of his did and called it "like a nightmare". That's definitely the impression it gave, and though I'm not dying to see it again, I would in order to examine more closely the organisation of elements which convey that.
And it all could've been so easily avoided, too. For once I didn't have a late-night event on Saturday. There was a gathering at the Glenwood I would've liked to have been at, but I made it contingent on finishing up my taxes. That didn't happen, so instead I ended up on the couch watching t.v. with
monshu. That was my doom: I decided to look for a movie and settled on Mystic River, failing to consider that its 137-minute running time means three hours once it's stuffed full of advertisements.And it wasn't even worth it. For all the talk about how the movie explores the effects of a devastating crime on a tight community, it really felt like a glorified police procedural, right down to the gimmicky twist ending. The final fifteen minutes were particularly awful, with a couple of lines that seem to trivialise the trauma of molestation followed by the least-convincing Lady Macbeth turn I've seen since The Walking Dead ended its second season. I kept bracing myself for a gut punch that never came, something on the level of the park bench scene in The Woodsman. (Comparisons being inevitable, what with the subject matter and the presence of Bacon.)
I was much more affected by watching Love Is the Devil on Friday night with Mazeppa, even if it was a familiar story he summed up as "Francis Bacon is kind of a butthole." Whereas Eastwood's direction is all but invisible, Maybury's is palpable in every scene. I could see that being intrusive (my companion thought it was), but given the tale he was trying to tell, I felt it worked. I jokingly offered it to a neighbour who didn't recognise the title, but a friend of his did and called it "like a nightmare". That's definitely the impression it gave, and though I'm not dying to see it again, I would in order to examine more closely the organisation of elements which convey that.