Muzzy With Insomnia

Having one of those wake-up-at-3:00-am-for-no-reason days. Ended up wandering out to the living to watch horror movies - yes, in the middle of the night, because I'm weird, and somehow when I can't sleep, horror movies are soothing. Dario Argento's Inferno and now, Eyes of Laura Mars, a movie that really made an impression on me when I first saw it as a teenager. Still a very powerful film, with lots going on in the way of '70s movies - characters you can't predict, mysterious happenings that the filmmakers don't feel a desperate need to fully explain (and thus they maintain their mystery in a satisfying way), a haunting Babs Streisand opening song, and great performances by Faye Dunaway, young Tommy Lee Jones (OMG, the unibrow!), Brad Dourif, Raul Julia, and Rene Auberjonois (yes! Odo with no makeup!) But it's the photography-plus-psychic-powers combo that still gets me - god, talk about a metaphor that really works. The fact that I studied photography myself has... well, okay, it has something to do with it. This is perhaps the only film on record I can think of that actually gets the darkroom stuff right. And if you're curious, Laura Mars's photographs are rather loosely based on the work of Helmut Newton (edited to add: actually, from the credits, Newton actually took the pictures in the film), and although it seems pretty distant now, used to be there was a sort of flap about whether or not that sort of thing constituted "art."

I'm also picking away at the next chapter of my WIP. Toys, on reading through the latest bit, had a reaction to the tune of "wow, you really love to torture Spike, huh." Then looks at me funny, like I'm gonna look at him next and say something like, "well, you only hurt the ones you love, right?" Cue Pyscho music.

Not true. Not true. I mean, Spike is just so... hurtable. Like, there's symbolism and stuff there, about time and injury and forgiveness, and...

Okay, that really didn't come out right. Shit. Maybe I'll just get back to trying to say it through the story. If I start to come off like a big sicko, tell me then.

On a sweeter note, Toys woke up at 7:00 am and wandered out to find me because I wasn't there. Aw. And this is 11:00 am wakeup call boy. Double aw.

OMG, Brad Dourif with a poodle perm and a beard. He's actually kind of cute like that. Wow.

Stop Me Before I Shock Again

Note to self: do not watch a series of Italian horror films while working on a fic set in Rome, because then you start hearing those weird soundtracks in your head and writing stuff that looks like an outtake from Deep Red. And oh, holy shit, Argento's Tenebre probably win the "most people killed with an axe" award. Dude, this movie is gruesome.

Retreating back to the comforting arms of British horror now. Ah, Hammer. The Reptile. Now that was fun. Even more fun was the trailer for Rasputin, "the maaaaaad monk!," as the voiceover informs us. Played by Christopher Lee, no less. And if I'd been lucky enough to have seen that in its original run, I'd have gotten a free Rasputin beard in the theater. Hey, those were the days.