fine whine

In the last two days I have watched as many movies. This in itself is unremarkable. What is vaguely worthy of note is that both movies had protagonists who suffered from amnesia.

Neither movie was all that memorable, suitably enough.

In reverse order (shades of Memento) they were The Bourne supremacy and The man without a past (or as they call it in Finland, Mies vailla menneisyyttä).

They shared neither language nor genre, and both of them failed to be all that memorable, if you'll pardon the pun.

One stars Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, the man who spent another entire movie not knowing much about himself, and though this time they ratcheted up the intrigue a couple notches (and didn't bring back Franka Potente and Clive Owen) it still didn't grip me quite the way they probably think Bourne's story should. Many a critic has lambasted the cinematography of the car chase near the end, so I'll weigh in merely to say that it was dull beyond the potential of tight angles and quick cuts.

I've read bits of Ludlum (though not the Bourne saga) and I'm betting that I could probably, given the chance, imagine a better chase while reading the book, if even one is in there. After all, the filmmakers have taken their share of liberties in updating the decade(s?) old books to the post Cold War era.

Aki Kaurismäki takes the other path in his film about a man who has misplaced his past. Though it too is apparently the middle piece of a trilogy, it also stands alone as a slow, sad essay on the nature of what counts and those things that bring us joy and sorrow. Many a critic has championed this film as well, but as for me I say skip it unless you've got some major insites into Finnish humor and culture that I don't. Or at least a lot of patience.

As I look back over a year's worth of posts (over three hundred of them, even) I find that a great many aren't really, well, all that great. They'll fill their function for me and my meory, but for readability and entertainment value quite a few are rather lacking.

So I've selected what are probably what I'd point out as the best of 2004, except that some of them are only on the list for novelty value. A casual glance at my notes reveals that I felt far better about what I was writing in the latter half of the year, but beyond that I have few conclusions to draw.

• 11 January: an early stab at observational humor.
• 15 January: a strange dream that gets only stranger as it goes on. Cameo appearance by Ernie Hudson.
• 23 January: another dream, but celebrity-free.
• as for February, well, I found nothing of note.
• 4 March: a little ditty about work that figures into what happens later, in some form.
• 29 April: a rant about PowerPoint that was but one of many, and the most revealing.
• May, too, was without much merit. As an excuse I might point out that I became a new homeowner that month.
• 26 June: a farily well-written wrapup of some movies I'd watched, and a catchphrase I forgot to try to use since then.
• 16 July: to include it is cheating, since the novel's from 2003, but here is my love letter to my 2003 NaNo 'novel', or at least some tasty excerpts.
• 17 July: Jessica and I hit the road and I had some brief, but notable, insights about death and stuff.
• 21 July: midly forgettable movies sometimes make for less forgettable posts about them.
• 12 August: an extensively researched piece about the real story of The Straight Story.
• 28 August: a public service announcement: how to dance.
• 3 September: last year saw a lot of haiku from me, but the bat poems go above and beyond, as it were.
• 8 September: an attempt to combine humor and whining about the BMV, among other things.
• 29 September: an uproariously funny IRC log that's really funny to me and Heep, and probably nobody else.
• 12 October: trouble at work, typed from the trenches.
• 3 November: a long-winded but cathartic rant about voting.
• 6 November: musings about shared knowledge, the capabilities of the internets, and Jesse Ventura.
• 23 November: a long winded acount, post-bad-stuff, about team building at work.
• 25 November: turkey day special, remininscing about music.
• 30 November: six hundred words about failing to write fifty thousand.
• December doesn't seem long enough ago to fondly look upon any particular chunk of it.

And those are all you really need to have read last year. Thanks for wading through the rest!

Here comes some melodrama, but I'm acknowledging it and just trying to get it all out of my head.

So 2004 (last year, you could say) saw Jessica and I with our own house for our very first Christmas--and we ended up spending it at somebody else's place. I hadn't finished putting together Jessica's gifts (i.e. getting the final bits and wrapping them all) and more little things like that, and to have the storm throw everything out of whack, well, threw everything out of whack.

We drove up to my Aunt's place on New Year's Day to get together with my extended relatives and whilst there we did a brief trunk-to-trunk exchange of gifts with my parents. Drive-by gift giving.

The whole getting-together-with-family thing worked out fine, but the gift-exchanging didn't. The next night I mentioned on the phone that we were not so fond of some of the gifts we had received, and it wrecked everything not yet wrecked.

I know now that there is no tactful way to decline a gift. There's no tact at all in gift reception other than a polite "thank you". I know this now and probably should've thought that then, too, as I ended up saying (in a way I thought nice) that the intents behind some of our presents was, well, mis-intended.

I should've learned back in the late 80s, the first time I ruined Christmas gift-giving. That time around I received a cassette recorder that was considerably smaller than the ones given to my sisters the year before.

What's worse is that it's all on video somewhere. I whined and whined and whined that my radio was too small, that it didn't have input jacks, and so on and so forth.

The lessons I'd learned accepting ugly shirts from grandparents were obviously lost on me, and apparently still are. But is this the way things really should be?

Should the superficial part of Christmas, the requisite gift exchange, be completely shrouded in politeness and manufactured sentimentality? If it's all about family and the strengthening of bonds why should we all be tip-toeing around each other? Of all the people we should be able to be honest and ourselves with, why can't it be with our closest relatives and friends?

Not that I can talk. I strongly dislike the gift-giving process since I don't want to give gifts that won't be liked. To say that I agonize over Christmas shopping is to use the wrong word but to nail the right feelings. I want all the gifts that I give to be perfect and right-on, even though I know that such a thing rarely happens . It's the aggravation when it doesn't happen that far overshadows for me the happiness when it does. That's just how I am, I guess.

To be fair, I don't really like getting gifts either. I tend to agonize about them too, not wanting people to pay too much for things nor to give me nice things to duplicate things I already have (the too many pairs of boxer shorts or socks problem). When pressed I often cannot write a list of things that I want people to buy me.

I think that I'll start pushing for people to make donations in my name. That way everybody wins, right?

There's this tradition going around, of making lists of things that people want to change at the beginnings of new years. I usually throw a couple out here or there to maintain polite conversation, and these are probably no better.

• I want to eliminate the "have"s and "got"s out of my conversations when I mean things like ownership and necessity. This means no more "gotta", too.
• I want to maintain a list of things that I'd like to receive, instead of just thinking and acting like I already own everything that I could possibly want.
• I want to burn over one hundred fifty thousand calories in activities above and beyond my ordinary sitting and walking around.
• I want to finish constructing my shelves, and make at least a design for some sort of desk-based solution for my computer room. I want to begin construction on a model railroad in my basement.
• I want to keep better track of the books I read and the movies I watch. I keep score on the movies but not the books, and darn it, I'd like to know. I also would like to make a better stab at qualitative lists of the best and worst ten or so.

I'm tempted to come up with some CGI tracking for some of these, and could probably call that a resolution or goal or whatever too, except that it takes me an average of three years, start to finish, for any CGI application more complicated than rock-paper-scissors. I'm trying to stick to listing ones that I might actually be able to keep (you may have noticed also the conspicuous lack of "I want to update this in a more timely fashion").

But, whatever. They're just made up goals anyway.

Today we finished watching the third season of 24 on DVD. Jessica had been excited to watch this one in particular with its theme of a virus threat and her epidemiological background and whatnot, but I hadn't been holding my breath. The previous seasons were, I must admit, interesting but even to the beginning a lot of it seemed too contrived and the characters all seemed a bit too capable (Jack Bauer is basically superhuman, even without a good night's sleep) for too many hours.

Also, nobody ever uses a restroom except for conversations, chloroforming or other activities unrelated to, er, personal relief. For something that was trying to be purportedly accurate to the minute, that's a pretty big omission. It's certainly possible that everybody runs off and pees when the focus (split screen style) shifts to another place, but still that's a lot of coordination and inconvenience to organize around.

But enough about bathroom matters. I don't want to say the whole show is crap, though it's not nearly as interesting as other shows I've seen. The suspense is at times obviously exaggerated (in the manner of the brain-destoying pauses after Regis asked "Is that your final answer?") and the show's expectations are far too high for the suspension of disbelief. Then again, given the superhuman capabilities of the agents and villains to resist torture and sleep deprivation and the laws of physics, perhaps the show's creators expect a similar elevation of suspension of disbelief from the audience. They didn't get it from me.

I managed to get myself back on the treadmill, but only for the first thirty or forty minutes of Something's gotta give. That movie was all right but not outstanding, though I would say that Diane Keaton does turn in quite a good performance. Amanda Peet, on the other hand, does not. Keanu Reeves has a role that's no bigger than hers but he plays his far better, and what can you say about somebody who is outshone by Keanu Reeves?