2008-04-13

Mick and I had a most pleasant Sunday despite chilly mists and light rain most of the day and a high temperature in the forties F. After wheeling me to church for pre-service choir practice Mick came home and cleaned house, retrieving me after the service for lunch and our first of three films at our home theater.

Our first adventure was There Will Be Blood. The movie lasts two and a half hours, but we only lasted through about half of the running time. Daniel Day Lewis plays a thoroughly ungrateful character who puts his son on the train and abandons him after the son tries to burn down their house and shoots a man in the head when he finds that the man has lied to him. We could not find it in ourselves to care what happened next. And for me, the music track was the absolute worst I have ever heard. A small child making tone clusters on a piano would have been more musical than this score. And this film won two Academy Awards! Pfui!

We tried again for fun with a film titled When a Man Falls. A lot of good people worked on this film and supported its making, and Sharon Stone and Timothy Hutton were competent in the roles of the leading characters, a couple whose marriage and lives are a wreck. We watched this one all the way through, but were not the better for it. Dylan Baker was very good playing a nearly dysfunctional janitor living next door to an abusive couple. It was an earnest film, and the points made were clear enough, succinctly stated in the film’s title, which was originally When a Man Falls in the Forest. No, no one hears! No one cares. At least, not in this film; not with these characters.

We had been disappointed twice, so when we put Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street in the DVD player, we expected little better, since Mick almost never enjoys musicals. But Johnny Depp seems to give life to anything! And to give the film credit, Tim Burton’s London was convincingly Dickensian, gray, dirty and dark. Stephen Sondheim’s music was absorbing, quirky and likeable and Helena Bonham Carter gave a wonderfully grimy performance as Depp’s sometime wife. It was very bloody, as the title indicates, and the motto under the title, “Never Forgive; Never Forget”, summed up the mood of the film. In fact, There Will Be Blood ran along the same emotional lines. However the genius of Sondheim, Burton and the players lifted this film into the realm of true art. We surprised ourselves by enjoying it thoroughly.

We took a break in late afternoon and I worked with nine of Gary’s e-mails on various subjects, generated by his first day home from vacation. One of our discussions revolved around L/L Research’s on-line store at www.bring4th.org. We do not have our tee shirts and cups offered for sale, nor do we have other things on site yet. Webmaster Steve E is handling other things right now and cannot work on the site.

About the cups: we ordered 16-ounce and 20-ounce cups made with our logo and they came out well. But how to ship them? It is a moot question if we cannot get them listed in our store, but given that this eventually happens, how do we ship them! They do not fit in our existing boxes. Gary is exploring this.

Gary also sent me a new transcript to edit, from our last channeling Saturday. That’s fast! I will edit that tomorrow, after I work with Steve M’s comments on Chapter 8 of 101, which arrived in the e-mail today.

We finished the evening with another episode of Star Wars on television. I offered the closing prayer at the Gaia Meditation tonight.