Saturday, May 29, 2004
This afternoon, I'm vaguely embarrassed at yesterday's outburst regarding The Day After Tomorrow. Oh, the film's every bit as awful as I said it is, make no mistake, but I might have pointed this out a little less shrilly. I'm not one of those geeks who seems to enjoy disliking things. When I watch a film (or read a book, for that matter), I give it every possible benefit of the doubt. I try as hard as I can to love a film. I figure that's a big part of my half of the filmmaker/audience bargain. I think the thing that happened with The Day After Tomorrow is that I've become much, much choosier the last few years about which films I see at the theatre, even at matinees. I used to see frelling everything, even the things I knew would suck, just because I love movies that much. But then I got better. Now I pick and choose. And I don't think I've been this unhappy with a film I've seen in the theatre since, oh, frell, I don't know...the last Star Wars film. I think the very worst part of the whole experience, even more disheartening than the film itself, was that the audience applauded at the end. I'd like to think the applause was simply because the film was over, but no, it was quite obvious that the applause was appreciative. The film had found its target audience.
Last night, we watched the extended cut of Underworld, and, honestly, it's a much better film with all this missing footage restored (forty-five minutes). It's not so much that missing scenes are put back, as scenes in the original are made longer, and, in the end, the effect is that the whole film has a bit more depth and clarity. If you liked Underworld even a little, you should give this version a shot. After that, we drifted away from our usual Kid Night fare, because FMC was showing Miller's Crossing. Were I to ever be forced to try to compile a list of the 100 Best Movies Ever, Miller's Crossing would definitely be in there somewhere, so, I figured, it should be potent enough to drive the taste of the afternoon's matinee from my mind. And, thankfully, it was.
Anyway.
The galleys for Murder of Angels are sitting here staring at me, wondering when I'm going to pick them up and get started. But I think I've come to see the futility of what I'm expected to do here. There's no point in my pouring over this thing again, wasting my time and fraying my nerves even further, in an attempt to find the comma corrections I want to keep, or the ones I find the most critical. They are all, all 510 of them, exactly equally important and trying to pick and choose would only be arbitrary, and, generally, I loathe that which is arbitrary. A little earlier, I calculated that it would take me, at most, 2.12 hrs. to make these changes on an electronic copy of the ms. (which is what the pm/ce will be doing; the days of movable type are long past). Now I'm trying to figure out why "the budget" would need $1 per change to get this done. Do glorified typists really make $255 an hour? Can it be? I'm beginning to believe that I'm just going to make one more change -- which they can bill me for -- and add to the acknowledgements a note of thanks, recognizing the production manager's invaluable attention to punctuation in Murder of Angels. Then I'll stuff the damned thing back in the envelope and return it to NYC and move on.
I got the page proofs for the "Mercury" chapbook today (Deacon Silvey in 1985, long before even "Anamorphosis"), and will need to read over those early next week.
I've had a headache since last night. But it's really nothing a grapefruit spoon to my right eye wouldn't fix.
4:31 PM
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