wildcat

I think, ultimately, the centre of each character's arc in Little Miss Sunshine isn't the painful emotional hammering that they're each exposed to, but the moment of freefall and then the landing, and then the getting up after the landing, and the moving on. It isn't always on camera or part of the immediate action - Frank's moment comes before the movie even begins - but they've all got them and they're all simultaneously quite horrifying and quite beautiful. The particular moment I liked the most was Dwayne's, which had some really solid camera work attached to it and it was all about that pivoting one hundred eighty degrees - we start out with one status quo for the character and then that all comes crashing down and he has to make himself a new status quo so that the movie can actually continue. They all fall, they land, they stand up, they turn around and keep going. Frank's freefall is related after the fact, his suicide attempt, and is delivered with a deadpan expression over the dinner table when little Olive asks what happened to his arms. He lists off the events leading up to the attempt and after each one Olive asks if that was what made him do it and he simply responds with "Well, no, but then..." And he just gets up and walks on, emotionally. We never actually see him attempt suicide again, because he's made a new status quo for himself even when old reminders crop up and bite him on the ass.

The cinematography is beautiful, flat, desolate, and grainy. It perfectly reflects the tropes of the genre that the movie falls into: the road movie. At times, the genre is its own pitfall, as the Hoover family on their way to the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant in California (where little Olive is supposed to perform) undergo the requisite road movie obstacles and cliches. There's a dead body in the trunk because there's always a dead body in the trunk in road movies. There's the apparently horrible car trouble that threatens to bench them until at least Thursday, when a car part can be ordered. They get pulled over by the cop and something compromising must happen for them to continue. This is what struck me the most false, the Standard Road Movie Plot Points, and it's possible that those were all intentional - it's hard to work with a genre without depending on its tropes - but the script fails to integrate them properly and they stand out like a hitchhiker's thumb.

Most of the characters are quite compelled, and brilliantly acted - Olive, the youngest character was portrayed competently and with the peculiar sincerity of a small child that doesn't always come through from adult actors. Toni Colette proved herself to be a great actress yet again in spite of the lack of depth that the script gave her character, Sheryl, the mother of the family. You almost don't notice that she fails to undergo any real emotional freefall and mostly serves as a sounding board character - she's the shrill wife who doesn't react to her husband's misfortune correctly, she's the peacemaker between warring family members, she's the driving force behind getting Olive to the competition, but we never really find out who she is outside of that and don't get into her head as much as we do the other characters. Virtually everything we know about Colette's character is in that first twenty minutes of the movie - she cares about her brother but is infinitely uncomfortable trying to take care of him after his suicide attempt, she works a presumably unfulfilling job and never has time to cook for the family but can't extricate herself from the role - instead of someone else making dinner, she gets takeout chicken and a box of popsicles. She wants them all to be truthful about what they're going through while at the same time denying that she still smokes compulsively. Her character is never foregrounded as much as her character's role is, but Colette does a wonderful job with what she has.

And then there's the beauty pageant itself, which shuffles the movie out of the Road Trip Genre and into Horror Flick. The ending ultimately takes the horror and changes it into something completely new and the family in a strange moment of solidarity after fighting for the entire movie redeems it and themselves for a moment before burning off into the night. They bring innocence with them.

I walked in being worried that the movie was going to turn out to be terrible; I had this sinking feeling that all the good bits were in the trailer and the rest of the movie was going to be this long, empty void. I was surprised and genuinely delighted by the product, which had its flaws but made the most of itself and its genre. Top notch performances by people like Alan Arkin as the Grandfather, and Toni Colette, and Greg Kinear carried on through the weak moments in the script and it took us into the really strong, brilliant, bright moments. The cinematography was striking - the best shot in the film was of Frank, Dwayne, and Sheryl shot through the back window of the VW minibus, pushing it along to get it rolling again, that weird feeling of being stationary in the bus but moving, a natural tracking shot with the hot sun and desert behind them. There are stark, understated transitions and the use of music was both relentless and appropriate. Despite it's weaknesses, I still really enjoyed Little Miss Sunshine a lot. Worth seeing.

1. Trying to figure out where to submit a story told in three sentences. It probably needs some smoothing over of the prose and maybe a spell-check, but I like the thing and it only took five minutes to write, yesterday morning. I'm not sure what the status of Grain's postcard stories contest is, when they do them and such like.

2. Steph introduced me to a Vietnamese place open until Midnight, down on Fort Street - I might start going there for late-evening writing binges with hot soup.

3. Sunday was Fun Day: Getting Michael out of bed, showering, motoring over to pick up Jenny and Daniel, roaming through Thrifty's, jetting up-island to Parksville for two games of minigolf and a round of "bumper boats" which is about as ridiculous as it sounds and twice as soaking. I won little plastic army guy for Michael and then we headed back to Victoria, stopping to take the Mill Bay Ferry over to Brentwood Bay and going from there. Exhausting.

Now, don't quote me on this or anything, but having spoken to Ana on the phone last night, the payphone down the bottom of the street ("bottom," yes, in the sexual fashion), I can firmly say that the water's been turned back on again and that means showers. For everyone, actually, golliping showers that are not in the least bit brown, grey, or opaque. Utter transparency! It's like rinsing with glass, actually, only there are no bits to get caught in your cheeks when you press them with your hands, there's no chance of blood being drawn.

Ana knows these things, she's in the know, she hangs around with the Mad Typewriter Gang that scoots along Gladys Row, you know, the street with all the hedges. Why are they called "mad?" Well, wouldn't you call someone stupid enough to strap a typewriter to the handlebars of a half-broken red scooter - well - possibly - mad? They can't balance for shit and they're usually piloting one-handed while they type madly with t'other, yes, and then they go full-bore hands-on-home-row when the light's red. Yes! They respect traffic lights! They must be mad. Sure, they can't be bothered with most of the laws of the road, but traffic lights. Well. They like traffic lights (but only, like the song says, when they're green).

Dottie Perpetual's the one that actually, as they say, told Ana about the status of the hot water tank's availability. Trailblazer, honey, Dottie Perpetual took the first shower in the altogether with one hand to the wall, still wearing her riding gloves because she's never been a proper girl and there's nothing more improper than wearing gloves in the shower! They say Dottie subsists on a diet of bugs caught between her teeth while on the road, they say she'll join the Algonquin Road Table when they make it a drive-thru. She favours her strict sestinas, and Ana calls her "Auntie."

The Deplorably Dogged Dapper is the one with three or four cigarettes betwixt his lips, yes, all the time, ongoing, neverending - they never run out! He's been accused of not inhaling but possibly he switches them out whenever his scooter crashes on account of the paper roll from his typewriter getting caught under the tire because he's convinced that somewhere in his non-euclidean typings lies the lost epilogue to "Kaddish," mostly because nobody can be bothered to remind him that Allen Ginsberg's been dead since the Nineties, that he's not Jewish, and that he's not even Allen Ginsberg. He's the one with the bare feet, of course, he likes to feel the concrete against his callouses. The Dapper has an irresistable impulse to mouth the words as he types, which has been known to distract other drivers, especially because he's never quite conceived of the words VOLUME. CONTROL. in relation to himself.

Saintly Sara Seagull, she's the one who habitually ties a bird to her head and SCREECHES AT YOU when you're having an argument, has decided that Ana is her secretly her soul sister, on account of the missing letters thing. She's what happens when you give an accountant a gun and a condom, whatever that means, and she sold her virginity to the Devil for a preternatural capacity for lists. Saintly Sara has always wanted to perform an entire opera using semaphore, but makes do with postcard stories typed directly onto the back of photographs of war criminals and then tosses them out in her wake, hoping to cause car accidents and street theatre and Nuremberg Trials. She wants to drag an antique bathtub along behind her scooter for the occasional mid-afternoon siesta in the harbour...

The journalist, Boddy Esss Bigg, they say he doesn't have eyes, no, just empty voids and a desperate hunger for News. Reporter for a Great Metropolitan Newspaper, he files reports from the road, dumping pages into mailboxes as he skims on by - to Bigg, the streets are sentences to be edited. He asks the big questions, the fiction versus non fiction or non versus fiction or fiction question mark non question mark. He has perfected the Styrofoam Riding Suits and has made himself hundreds of falsified passports and identity files; he's run for mayor, for president, for prime minister and pope. They say a woman in Ireland once witnessed a photograph of Bigg weep openly for hours when in the presence of horseradish; to pronounce his name properly the Esss must sound as air expended by a deflating tire in heat, a mating call for tires to come, to come and burn in an everlasting sexualized tire fire!

And Ana? How do I know Ana? We went to school together, maybe, and I knew her on weekends at garage sales and certainly there were parties, and everybody heard about her and the Russian count, the unpleasantness, and why she doesn't play cards anymore. Tarot cards make her violently ill. She favours poems with anaphora, the incantatory repetition, the calling of spirits, and the purr of a scooter engine. She found hers leaned up beside a little red garage with the seat falling off and negligible ignition and it claimed her, right there, she touched that magic gas cap and then they found her, oh, the Mad Typewriter Gang you can't quite say no to the gang when the Dapper kisses the back of your hand in that way that he does and Dottie Perpetual thrusts a mixer towards you and demands that you make her a dirty, dirty martini with an onion rather than an olive because she can't abide the dirty, pigeony things.

(c) 2006, Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved.

Damn it all to Hell. I'm going to have "Dancing Queen" in my head all day, aren't I? And I'm going to have to learn the damn lyrics, aren't I, so that the hummy bits where I'm unsure of the words don't drive me insane...

I've been infested with nanotechnological bugs that are sweeping through my system and liquifying most of my internal organs, hollowing me out to rebuild me as a second Sixty-Four Million Dollar Man. I'll have hydrochloric acid for saliva and be able to walk up walls thanks to magnetism.

Actually, probably not, because I'm not sure CSIS is known for its stealth cyborg-fu.

Instead, I have a bad case of food poisoning or possibly a stomach flu which had me up all night with the Ring of Water (worse than the Ring of Fire) and crescendoed particularly violently at about six this morning when I threw up for half an hour straight into a pot. A sickpot. I'm dizzy and exhausted and incapable of prolonged standing, prone to collapsing on my bed in a chaotic fit of half-shamanistic fever spirit trips while more of my internal organs melt. I'm nauseous no matter what position I'm in.

I think this was caused by a particularly flavourless tuna melt and fries I had at Rosie's Diner yesterday, and won't be patronizing them again. I had to call in sick to work. I try to avoid calling in sick to work. I have this problem where I feel like I'm actually faking it even if I'm completely and utterly at death's door. Guilt. But by this point my breath has been classified as one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and my entire stomach is a dirty bomb waiting to happen. One day Christian and I were driving somewhere and CBC was blaring about cluster-bombs and dirty bombs and they wouldn't stop talking about them. I should not be at work. I'm going to have another lie down shortly and I'm drinking tea and I'm trying not to think about the cyberpunk mosquitos burrowing through my insides, set to "Convert Appendix into Gelatin" and "Invalidate Warranty on Liver" modes.

Doom Patrol volume 4 - Musclebound - is out on the shelves tomorrow, reprinting DP #42-50. I'm excited! It's got the origin of Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery; the horror of the Beard Hunter; and the "terrifying secret beneath the Pentagon." There's some old art in it by Jamie Hewlett, who co-created Tank Girl and is the artistic half of Gorillaz. I'm not sure why they keep using these Brian Bolland covers for the collections; Bolland's work is too straight-laced, simple-lined and straightforward for the Doom Patrol, super-heroes far past the verge of a nervous breakdown and onto the surrealistic planes of bodies in the middle of horror. The Doom Patrol should be a horror comic disguised as super-heroes.

Who was in this particular era of the Patrol? Cliff Steele, a former race car daredevil killed in a brutal, body-burning car accident right up until his brain was transplanted into a robot body, incapable of standard sensations, with controllable brain chemistry, suffering from full-bodied castration. Crazy Jane, a woman broken into sixty-four seperate personalities, each one possessing its own super-power. Rebis (my favourite), a white man and a black woman merged together into a hermaphroditic being possessed by a negative radiation creature and wrapped mummy-like in bandages because of hir dangerous radioactivity. Rebis had wonderful fashion sense.

And! The Beard Hunter! Finally, I'll get to read the Beard Hunter story! Arr! He hunts your beards, yes he does.

I need to go shave before he gets here.

Also: the three-year anniversary tomorrow.

1. The Anniversary was good, and understated in a spastic way. Michael's developed a cold and isn't doing too well - I went over to his place after work and he was napping, then he played video games while I read comic books which suggests something about two extroverted introverts being in a relationship together. At around eight we went over to Christie's and met up with a fair brigade of people; there weren't enough chairs and consequently some confusion and then most people were tired or sick or prone to moderate agoraphobia. I got to sit beside Steph and we had a good time, Ian showed up so I got to know him a bit better, and Christian was wiped out from his first couple days as an Uni/College professor pulling two different campuses. I gave Michael a copy of Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and he gave me a book detailing the histories, mythologies, and philosophies connected with the Hindu creator-god Shiva (Ganesha's father), which goes nicely with the Dancing Shiva figure he gave me as a housewarming. Shiva contains the universe, and is both positive and negative. He spent too much money, though, because he also gave a beautiful glass necklace from Galiano Island, which looks like a ribbed phallus run through with yellow. I've decided it's an orgone collector.

2. Cory Doctorow's other book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town was my solitary friend in the wee hours of Monday morning, while I was locked in Solitary Confinement in the Ambiguous Water Closet of the Margaret Atwood Boarding House, experiencing peculiar fever dreams. It was an odd choice.

3. After work yesterday I made it to the comic book shop before closing and picked up a copy of Doom Patrol Volume Four, wherein, amongst other things, Crazy Jane designs a logo for the Doom Patrol, a capital Phi. In her words: "It's a 'D' and a 'P' put together. It's also a masculine '1' and a feminine '0' and when you combine them in binary notation, you can generate all the numbers of creation." In order to break the horrible tyranny of the People Beneath the Pentagon (led, of course, by Major Honey), heroic Flex Mentallo flexes his muscles until the Pentagon becomes a circle. And, some dialogue:

CLIFF: Larry, where did you come from? Last we saw, you'd turned into a big, glowing ring of light.
REBIS: Yes, I was having sex with myself. I'll tell you all about it later.
JANE: Best kind of sex, I heard.
REBIS: Indeed. The Earth moved. Then again, it usually does...with a rotational speed around one thousand kilometers per hour, as far as I remember.
CLIFF: I pray to God that wasn't supposed to be a joke.

4. I am highly impressed by the recent flourishes Joy's been taking over on Shots for Breakfast, live from Japan. Her prose is all alive and crackling with new vitality and she puts me to shame. As usual.

5. Sylvia Plath says, "Miracles occur./ If you care to call those spasmodic/ Tricks of radiance/ Miracles."

"Hi, my name's Margaret Atwood and in the time I've taken to say my name, three books have been published by me and I've been scheduled for a book tour."

Goddamn Atwood with her three books in two goddamn years goddamn goddamn.

Underworld Evolution is notable for having one of the most detailed sex scenes I've ever seen in a piece of mainstream "cinema." There is not much else to report other than (a) Kate Beckinsdale is still hot, (b) Scott Speedman is still hot and (c) the plot makes even less sense than the first Underworld movie. It's not really worth having a drinking game about, either, because there was no questionable dialogue grammar and nobody at any point threw open a set of double doors while walking dramatically into the room. The overwhelming leitmotif of the movie was beheading. There was a sequence where Kate Beckinsdale in her PVC ultrasuit lets Scott Speedman suckle blood from her exposed wrist which probably produced a unanimous geekgasm from the bloodplay fetishist circles, but there was very little that was otherwise notable.

Meanwhile, I'm nearly finished with Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, a book about literary detective Thursday Next, which includes the capture and hostage-taking of Jane Eyre. It started out a bit twee, but it improved on the whole; I like the alternative history angle, and the story takes place in a world where Wales is its own Republic and the Crimean War is still going on. The book still suffers from being too precious with its many puns but I like Thursday as a character. Not sure if I'll bother reading the next one, though, which promises to be more of the same.

After severe criticisms by various countries were levelled against the United States for their foreign policy, the United Nations unanimously agreed to abolish the concept of the "dual citizen" and replace it instead with "duel citizenship," wherein the individual trying to gain access to a country their parents may have had citizenship in must first challenge one of the standard citizens to a duel, the winner being allowed to remain in the country.

It is currently customary that the challenger is allowed to select the date and time for the duel, preferably keeping it relatively soon after the challenge is issued; the native-born citizen is given the responsibility of selecting the weapons for the duel, either pistols or fencing foils. Generally, these duels are fought to the death.

Leaving aside the issue of meat (the stink, the stink),
yes, certainly, there is a great deal of violence in the cooking.
Potatoes must be boiled,
scalded until the skin dangles and the flesh collapses to the touch.
Then you mash:
pulverize, puncture, press
until the flesh gives in
and yields,
breaks down,
particulates.
The beheading of carrots,
the flaying of onions (oh, there are layers),
eggs beaten like stepchildren and then exposed
to the Church of Heat's frying pan glare,
their inky yellows hardening into the repose of agony.
Salt the wound, throw pepper in their eyes
(ground pepper, put through a grinder).
Carve away until you reach the artichoke's heart.
Never forget the blood orange.
Never forget that the grater is mechanical
leprosy for the cheese.
To melt is to become flaccid, uncontrolled, and spineless.

(c) 2006 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved

Lola owes me fifty bucks and a bottle of gin, you know how she is, I can't imagine depending on her to pay bills!

Lola the Showgirl makes a mean peach cobbler, and often does so after show nights. All the girls come over and they have coffee and peach cobbler and Irene always complains that Lola's coffee is too weak and then Daisy does a Goldilocks-and-the-three-bears impression.

(Art from Zatanna #2 by Ryan Sook)

It was an early morning, my neck hurts, Johnny Cash is crooning in the earphones, I bought groceries and breakfast is sorted for the morning. I go now to write, and I have nothing up my sleeves. It's all magic, from here on out. Zatanna says so.

Well, the good news is that "My Father is an Invisible Voter" is right there in the middle of the acceptable word count for the CBC's literary contest, so I don't need to go through and prune it to get the length right; all editing will be done purely for the art of the thing. I'm a little uncomfortable with the delineation between "fiction" and "creative non-fiction" with this one, though, which is the bad news, because I need to put that anxiety to bed before I can submit the thing. And: the use of racist terminology, while important to the text, makes me a little uncomfortable with it. Which is a good thing - there's got to be a discomfort attached to that - and a frustrating one. The story takes place during a specific time period where attitudes were different and it's setting. But maybe I'm just being lily-livered about submitting something to the CBC with the cussing and the words.

I should get some iron inserted into my spine and just do it already. This is about the story, and not about the politics, although there's always politics, and the story has politics in it, and the story has politics around it, and I have politics, and that guy over there has politics, and Joy has politics, and Samara has politics and possibly this wall, which has never spoken out for anything, really, has politics. Well, the wall may be an oppressed mass, I really can't be sure because this wall has been silenced by its oppression.

I'm more concerned about whether or not I should keep the epigraph in at the beginning. It's the opening to a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem. Are epigaphs still cool? Are they done? Again, it's supposed to add a layer of meaning to the story in terms of structure but I can not be sure that it is successful. But whether or not I win some prize should reveal that. I believe one of the judges this year is Eden Robinson. In fact, I should win this award just so that Christian has a mild heart attack about Eden Robinson reading one of my stories. Well, I'll be having a heart attack because Eden Robinson read one of my stories

You know, if anyone was to have a problem with my use of racist terminology in the story it might very well be Eden Robinson, but of course there's a context and she's a very intelligent woman. I think my existential crisis over this has a few miles to go before it rests.

Meanwhile, outside the Margaret Atwood Boarding House, two men are screaming at each other somewhere nearby, probably the front yard next door, somewhere else, about money. Actually, it sounds like a deleted scene from The Big Leibowski, it sounds like it belongs in a scene with "Where the fucking money, Leibowski?" And a gun held tilted. It's peculiar to be sitting there, doing one's business in the water closet with hollering and screaming going on outside, drifting in through the open window. It's a peculiar day, or week, and people I care about are unhappy and other people I need to phone because I haven't spoken to them lately and I wish I had some ice cream but I don't.

I've now seen the first full season of J.J. Abrams's Lost. It's got its ups and its downs, as most first seasons do, and I'm torn about whether or not I care enough to investigate Season 2.

1. Say it with me now: simultaneous, intercut sequences of someone dying and someone else giving birth? Done to death. Honestly, honestly - it felt like one was killed off because they couldn't figure out what to do with him/her, and I only applauded the birth because it gave a set of characters who had shifted needlessly into the background something to do.

2. Lost should actually be called: "People on an Island whose only means of solving problems is beating the Shit out of Each Other. Shirtless." Not that there's anything wrong with that, certainly, they're people under stress who often have difficulty communicating with each other because of language barrier, age gaps, and stupidity.

3. I enjoy the interaction between Jack and Locke, especially when they're calling each other on withholding information. It highlights the fact that there's no rational power structure between the island exiles, they've been cut loose from the imposed societal ones. Locke complicates Jack, I find, and helps prevent me from losing interest in Jack. Jack spends most of his time railing against the assertion people keep making that he's the leader, or alternatively wailing because he's clearly supposed to be the hero/leader and why won't people listen to him? And I'm still surprised that Locke never actually mentions the biggest bit of information he has, although I think it's because he's afraid it's going to spontaneously stop.

4. It's sad that it's not until the season finale that anyone actually intimates that anyone besides S. and S. are having the illicit sex. And it's someone outside the main group! In case you forget that there are other people with them.

5. Kate, Sawyer, and Jack need to have a big, bisexual threesome already because the sexual tension is starting to drive me crazy. Either that or one of them needs to kill and cannibalize the other two to assert their authority over the other castaways.

Slowly but surely, the lights in my apartment are going out. The overhead's been dead for a couple days, I have to wait for the landlord to get back from his vacation so he can show me how to remove the weird retro-lighting fixture with no visible screws. And my beside lamp has just gone out. The bigger lamp is still working, so I'm not entirely shrouded in darkness, but this situation is becoming disheartening. I'll have to go to the hardware store soon and pick up some bulbs.

YouTube seems to be failing me this evening. Possibly this is a sign that I need to go edit that story and get it all ready to go out the door. I'm not expecting to do much to it now, but I should make some attempt to fix the broken bits.

Ran into Jason today, talked about his cat, had dinner with Samara at Fifth Street, came home, the light burnt out, and dogs are barking in the night. I feel like I should have a cigarette only I don't smoke and I should be blowing smoke rings out while I type away on the typewriter, preparing two-fisted action to send off to Astonishing Stories. Maybe work on something like that tonight. As well, I have this idea to do a poem a day for the next little while, like Joy was doing and probably is doing.

I'm in the mood to watch the Alien movies again. Maybe it's the Sigourney Weaver (a name which just screams nasty alien arachnid sex), and her portrayal of Ripley, or the HR Giger designs, or. There's something dirty and sick and xenophobic about the whole thing, obviously, the slick and oily body overtaking one from the inside. Weaver did an excellent job of holding her character together through the four movies without descending - I think - into self-caricature.

For some reason, Ripley running around in her panties for a decent portion of Alien never struck me as exploitative or objectifying, but maybe they were. There was this sexless but oversexed vibe she gave off while the alien chased her, while she tried to destroy the alien, it was more about her human vulnerability right up against the alien exoskeleton and the insectoid horror show - you almost have to show the skin to balance it out, because the space suits were dehumanizing and alien enough on their own.

The films kind of lose it midway through - Aliens was, from what I remember, terrible; Alien 3 is really just Alien but on a prison planet instead of a spaceship, with potentially psychotic criminals instead of corporate cosmonauts; but the first one's really very good and the fourth, Alien Resurrection was intriguing until almost the end. Ripley being resurrected as human/alien hybrid was an interesting twist, especially given how much the movies depend on bodily horror of penetration by the Other, and here Ripley is, not just penetrated but corrupted and rewritten on the cellular level...there's that awful scene halfway through where she stumbles on a graveyard, glass tubes everywhere filled with amniotic fluid and aborted Ripley clones, some of them more Alien than human, petrified monstrosities. The scene itself has been done before in other genetic engineering films and comics, but it's still powerful and dirty and sloppy. It makes sick to my stomach to watch that scene.

The ending, with the ridiculous pasty-yellow offspring, the gigantic Alien baby that Ripley gives birth to as the ship descends into the Earth's atmosphere for the first time in the tetrad (we're always in space until this point; Earth is always "out there," other, removed from the situation, we've been transplanted and become alien), well, it sort of fails but has some redeeming qualities, mainly the brilliant shift in lighting from what has gone before throughout the movies...