i spent the latter half of the day thinking that today was Friday, rather than Thursday, and now it's nearly two in the morning and time to sleep soon, especially if i'm back to needing so much more sleep than normal. more science tomorrow, and maybe my data and my chip will behave properly.
but, since i want to give my brain some brief respite before sleeping so i can finish my cocoa and perhaps not have nightmares about animated meat, a brief movie review:
Lunacy, Jan Svankmajer's new film.
Svankmajer introduces it himself with a blasé speech about how it's a horror movie and not art, because art doesn't exist anymore, except as a "sort of trailer for the reflection of Narcissus". and it is a horror movie, and as D. pointed out after the movie, it's got that classic horror-movie trepidation where you
know what's going to happen, and that it's going to be bad, and you watch the characters blunder through it anyway. there's a good bit of speechifying that makes a summary of the extremes of philosophy from the past two centuries or so, roughly coming out to "absolute free will/indulgence" vs. "control and punishment" vs. a sort of naive and shallow religious moralism. with, ya know, the Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allen Poe, the French Revolution, a blasphemous orgy, a therapeutic funeral, and stop-motion animated meat. (yes, stop-motion animated meat. go watch the
trailer. or don't, if that's not something you want to see, obviously.)
yeah. i think i'm glad i watched it, and i am glad that i saw it in the theater rather than telling myself that i'd rent it later, because i probably wouldn't, and i'd've had a hard time sitting through the whole thing if it was easier to get up and walk out. it was thoroughly disturbing in a number of ways, and there's some interesting bits for thinking-about, and Svankmajer is (as always) really, profoundly strange. i've often had a hard time watching his films, though with
Conspirators of Pleasure and perhaps also
Faust, it was more because i kept falling asleep.
Alice is the only one of his full-length films i've watched all the way through. it's worth, at the very least, watching some of the trailers or movie-clips to see his stop-motion animation, because his talent and skill with that is impressive. (edit: a-ha! YouTube wins again. here's a copy of Svankmajer's short
Darkness/Light/Darkness. probably not worksafe, and also involving small bits of animated meat, but mostly just clay, and generally just really neat.)
another and rather more thorough review here:
"Lunacy: Svankmajer's political allegory".
mmm, 2am writing. so crunchy. time for sleep.