Secret Yearning

One of the recurring dream locations since my teen years has been my grandma’s house. Situations differ, but the house is always the same. I loved my grandma’s house. Not for the structure or anything, but for the standard ‘those were the best times of my childhood” reasons.
I can close my eyes and remember the smallest details of her house. It smelled like Puffs and cedar. The high school was across the street. The town was so small you could walk everywhere. There was a small park and a strip mall with a coffee shop, a drug store and a grocery store. My grandma had friends all over town and we would go to their houses so she could show us off.
We rode bikes and played with Lincoln Logs. Her fridge was the only one I knew of that had the freezer on the bottom and the toilet had a button flush. They lived in the Iron Range and everything in their house was metal: the doors, the windowsills, the ‘woodwork’.
The details are so strong and my urge to go back is great so I dream about the house and the town all the time. When my grandfather died, my grandma sold everything and sold the house. So now the only way I can go back is if I buy the house. Buying the house, while a dream of mine, is too impractical to work. The area is depressed, there are no good jobs so I couldn’t live there. And while the area is depressed and the houses are cheap, it seems like an expensive summer home or vacation spot.
I am reluctant to drive by there again (we drove by a few years ago) as I think it would only serve to make me sadder. I did look it up on Terraserver and I wanted to cry. The town is so small, I could see all the details, the churches, the park, the neighbors.

Recent movies

The Others
Good movie with some bad features.
Bad feature 1: Nicole Kidman, she can’t act.
Bad feature 2: Bad dialogue, it came across as choppy and forced and sometimes unrealistic. Part of it could be blamed on BF1.
Bad feature 3: Too much obvious exposition, you spent the whole time waiting for certain elements to come into play. And they did like clockwork.
On the other hand, it was beautifully suspenseful. Tension built, you saw things happen, you waited for things to jump out. But (and this is important) you almost never saw anything scary. It was a menacing film and it had a nice little twist at the end.
Was it an intelligent film? Not really, but it was a film you could get lost in for a couple hours.
Manhunter
This was based on the book “Red Dragon” and is the first in the series of Hannibal Lechter stories. The movie was interesting and the actor who played Hannibal in this one was very good.
Pretty ambivalent on this one, some parts were good, the end was confusing. Perhaps if I was paying more attention the ending would make more sense.
Hannibal
What a sucktacular piece of crap. Storyline sucked. Situations were too contrived. Characters became cheap versions of themselves. The turd flavored icing on all of this was the screenplay written by David Mamet. My hatred for David Mamet cannot be expressed sufficiently here. His dialogue sits in your mind like a Tylenol dissolving on your tongue. Rent Oleanna or The Spanish Prisoner to get a true taste of how bad his dialogue is. This movie was just a parade of gore and guts…
Oh, look, there are some intestines…there are some brains…ooh, a man with an icky face who talks like Jimmy Stewart.
Hannibal is only slightly better than finding a turd on your floor too big to be blamed on the cats.
Memento
Good, intriguing, forces you to think. I like movies that make me think. I definitely need to see it again to put everything together. By now we all know the premise of the movie and that it is shown in reverse sequence. The reverse sequence thing is nice because as the viewer you are just as confused about why he is in the situation as he is because he has no memory.
A fascinating movie that needs to be seen twice.
That’s pretty much it for now. I have ‘Waiting for Guffman’ waiting to be watched. Perhaps tonight?

Sleepy Thoughts

When I slice myself up for distribution, am I supposed to include my head, cuz I could die.
That is what I woke up to this morning. I pictured myself looking like a basket of breadsticks, but I couldn’t figure out if my head should be in there too.