Well, I'm seven minutes into 7/7/07 here and now I'm going to bed. I wish I had a fancy schmancy camera so I could take some pictures of the night sky, all I have is a fuzzy dot that I know is Jupiter, but you'd think it was an insect passing in front of the lens if you didn't know better. I do have a picture of Venus from the other evening that's not too bad, except that it isn't very good.
So, unable to photograph the heavens, I have some pictures of my clock reading midnight instead. I think I'll get another one at 11:59pm tonight, just to bookend my set. Whether or not I'll actually include them in the upload to the group, I dunno yet.
We're maybe going to an air show tomorrow. The fireworks aren't a go because they shot 'em off last night instead. I still don't know what tomorrow will bring.
I watched Closer tonight. I discovered I have an uncanny ability to discern whether a movie was made from a play or not. This is one of them. We got about a quarter of the way through and I knew it had to be a play. Had to be. I was right.
The only thing about the movie that doesn't work is Natalie Portman. I don't buy her as her character simply because I know there is no way in hell Natalie Portman is a stripper. I would buy Julia Roberts long before Portman. Natalie Portman is the good little girl who speaks six languages and gets top marks and doesn't take her clothes off for anybody. She exudes this from every pore of her face, every look in her eye, everything. The girl is not a stripper. I do not understand the Academy Award, unless there is supposed to more behind the character than is revealed in the film. I suppose I'll have to get hold a copy of the script and see if there was supposed to be more there, or not.
Other than that, though, it's a very good movie, and Natalie Portman does try very hard to be something she hasn't been in any other movie she'd ever done. I suppose that's commendable. I know you couldn't get me to do that and manage as well, and she's only four years older than me (so she's a year older than me when she made the movie).
The strangest thing about the movie was that for some reason, The Boy said it made him really sad. Of course, he almost cried through the end of Ladder 49 the other night, which I refused to watch with him because I won't watch action movies (I saw Armageddon and couldn't wait for Bruce Willis to die already so the movie would be over. As far as I'm concerned, I never need to be subjected to anything in the genre ever again). So, I can't say I know the movie, but, honestly, crying when a character dies in an action movie. There's a reason we call him the girl in the relationship.
He won't go into why Closer made him feel bad, though. Probably because I gave him too hard a time over 49. I, on the other hand, thought it was funny, in a schadenfreudic kinda way. Not, like, laugh out loud funny, but more, "Wow. None of this would've happened if Natalie Portman had been paying attention when she crossed the street." And the end of the movie clearly shows that this is how she lives her life, because if you can get past all the dudes rubbernecking at her, she was totally crossing the street when it said "Don't Walk". I'm glad she enjoyed it, for all that none of the rest of them really did.
There we go. That's my problem. Natalie Portman's character is the "agent of action", the protagonist, it's HER play, and she doesn't act like she thinks that it is. She lets the other three do it all, especially Dan. But who does the show close with? Her. She was running the entire thing, because she was the one who never told the truth, she was the one who could've backed out at any time and stopped everything. And she did, just like she said she would in the first scene.
But that's why I think it's so funny, it's so tragic, and it'd be easy enough to stop, like all tragedy, and it doesn't, because no one can stop it. That's why it works. And even as an audience member, you can't really see it coming, like in Oedipus, where you want to stand up and say, "No! She's your mother! Can't you see it!?" We aren't two steps ahead of the characters, we're all right with them, but we're not involved, therefore: schadenfreude.
Well, for anyone who hasn't seen the movie, pardon my stream of conscious analysis. I've been up far too long as it's almost one.
Good night folks.