You know what? To heck with beating myself up about how this blog is very unstructured and random and whatnot. I am just not the sort of person to have a neatly organized blog, with everything in categories and neatly tagged and all properly formatted and so on.

You know what kind of people are good at that sort of thing? Very boring people.

The best I can reasonably hope for is the occasional furtive sortie into the general area of neatness and order and competence between long periods of lapsing back into my natural protean chaos.

And beating myself up over what I will never be is hardly productive. So screw it.

These are just my thoughts for today. Make of them what you will.

Met Joe Black

My most recent Netflix watch has been on my mental “movies I plan on watching” for a long time, namely the rather epic movie Meet Joe Black.

And by “epic”, what I really mean is “long”. The damn thing clocks in at three hours long, which means it starts out asking a fair bit from its audience right out of the gate. Sure, it has both Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, but still. Three hours? It’s not so big a deal to me as a home viewer because I can just however much of it I feel like, when I feel like it, but three hours in a movie theater in this era where intermissions are a thing of the past? Oy.

And the movie is very, very slow. I wouldn’t say that the movie is padded, mind you. Everything that happens does serve the plot. So you are not sitting there going “Get on with it!”, exactly.

But everything that does happen, happens at a slow, stately speed to allow the actors and actresses all the room they want for long, significant pauses and subtly turned readings of a line, as well as lots of
this kind of thing :

“I am going to say….. ”
“Yes? What are you going to say?”
“… this sentence. I am going to say this sentence. ”
“So you said that sentence?”
“Yes…. I….. said it. ”

You get the idea.

So it’s long, and it’s slow, and those are two big fat strikes.

As for the premise…. that Brat Pitt plays Death, come to collect Anthony Hopkins, but decides to hang around to check out life for a while…. barely has anything to do with the movie. The movie, indeed, seems to work hard to make sure that we don’t think it has any speculative fiction content at all. No special effects to speak of, no probing of interesting questions about Death, just a quick bit of dialogue to establish that Death is not, in fact, taking a holiday (everyone is dying just the same as always, because otherwise, it might have become interesting) and then for the middle two hours of the movie it barely even comes up.

So, so much for the main reason I was interested in the movie. I love things that have to do with Heaven and Hell, Life and Death, Right and Wrong, and so forth and so on.

Add in the fact that we are expected to really feel for Anthony Hopkins, a fabulously rich, powerful, and successful man, and it’s no wonder that the box office for the movie was poor and even the critics seemed somewhat bewildered by the movie.

Still, I did get some enjoyment from it. It is visually rich, and the acting, while perhaps slightly overindulgent, is otherwise superb. Anthony Hopkins is, in fact, quite likable, and Brad Pitt is interesting as a socially awkward and clueless Death. Sort of a stealth “special education” role for Brat Pitt. He’s like a handsome and very confident Aspie, and that is fascinating to watch.

So overall, I don’t think the movie was a waste of my time or anything. It asked a hell of a lot, but it delivered enough so that I didn’t feel like I had been ripped off.

If I had seen it in the theater, I might not be so forgiving.

A Recurring Problem

It occurred to me today that a lot of ideas have to occur to me many times before I actually do something about them.

It is like the idea is formed, but it’s not really ready to be born yet, and so I send it back down into my subconscious mind to be mulled over, considered, maybe modified a little, examined from all angles, and then it pops back up via recurrence for another audition.

That would explain why it seems like I am in a fast car with no reverse gear sometimes. I can’t just keep going with an idea once it has occurred to me. I have to think of it, then let it go while I think about other things, then come back to it again, like I am going around and around on a merry-go-round and can only make a grab for the brass ring once per rotation.

And the real problem is, the world outside my head doesn’t see the merry-go-round at all, and they can’t understand why I can’t just walk over and grab the damn thing, and hold on to it.

And I can’t really explain it. It’s just how I work. I am a strange breed of machine.

And seeing as my latest project in the never ending renovation of my soul is to try to eliminate nearly all regret from myself (without becoming a sociopath) and to learn to view life as an adventure, where there are no wrong moves, just different chapters….I am going to stop thinking of myself as a broken machine, and start thinking of myself as just a nonstandard model.

One with its own strengths and weakness. Not broken, just different.

There is a serious Robot Pathos animation script in there somewhere.

Well, those are my thoughts for today. There was a lot more, but my webhost screwed up and I lost like 500 words that ain’t coming back.

And just when they want me to renew. Hmmm.