Anything, but Toast approaches midnight

It's too late for new lines, so here are some old ones.

Feelings are too strange, they grab with claws and dig deep into the pit of you, twisting until there is nothing but a hot burn climbing up a throat. She suspects this is where tears really come from, not the corners of eyes, but at the very base of her larynx. Pressure throbs there, before pushing its way past her mouth, nose, ears, watering her eyes, sending moments of blindness to her mind. These feelings are like dragons that rage inside her and they have been there for the longest time. She remembers.

But then I can hardly help myself. I've finally got the laptop dialing up, with software like Netscape Navigator 4.0 and hardware like a 14.4 Megahertz XJ1144 PCMCIA, remember 14.4? And I agree that the whole mailing list thing is overrated, I just couldn't keep away you see.

I had this great idea while sitting through the trailers before 6th Sense the other day, which by the way, is a fairly well-made quality piece of cinema. The trailers were (as I recall): Blair Witch Project (like, what-ever), Fight Club, Sleepy Hollow. My idea was to buy out themovie.com and lease sub-domains to movie studios so they could get such cool urls as happiness.themovie.com, which would be less of a mouthful than the (albeit clever-hip) happinessthemovie.com, or even whatisthematrix.com. I think sub-domains should be the next URL fad. themovie.com is taken, of course. As is every other word and probable word combination.

It took me a little time to work out that beingjohnmalkovich was not johnmalkovich's homepage, rather regrettably actually. It would've been nice to know that johnmalkovich was possessed of such charm, self-assurance and media-savvy wit. Instead, I couldn't actually figure what beingjohnmalkovich.com was about, I think it has something to do with a movie, for which I can't be bothered downloading the trailers.

Back to the Sixth Sense, where I was very impressed with the young boy-actor (Haley Joel Osment), if we could all be so sensible at such an early age. Critics (the rumour is, but then don't those good-looking guys on pay-tv that present movie trailers every week consider themselves critics?) had been complimenting Bruce Willis' performance, perhaps because he'd never really ventured into drama before. For that at least he should be congratulated, as not all action stars survive the leap. His acting was competent, not terribly bad, as the cynics would have you believe, but taken in comparison to even the boy, it was lack-lustre. Toni Collete was marvelous, I have to say that because she has a better Australian accent than I do and she still watches football or something.

I had problems with the major plot twists and character motivations, namely when the film turns from saving a small boy to if you help the poor souls, they'll go away. There wasn't a natural progression and it felt as if the second half of the film was devised with a completely different purpose in mind. The problem with the first half of course, was that unless the writers (M. Night Shyamlan gets directing, writing and cameo credits) were wonderfully talented they weren't really going to get anywhere ground-breaking with that premise. I mean, there was scope there to explore a whole heap of emotional trauma and psychological damage, in addition to scarin' the bejesus out of me. Insead they opted for the easy road of smart Usual Suspect-esque endings (but not nearly as neat, not nearly) and sob-filled partings. Blah.

When I said quality, I meant that in comparison to the other shoddy pieces of crap major Hollywood studios (that's a pretty generalised statement, I should point out that Hollywood Pictures was responsible for things like Grosse Point Blank and Joy Luck Club, so their track-record is mostly clean) churn out in a year, this was pretty well constructed. It had some witty jokes, seriously chilling moments helped by wonderful make-up. The cinematography was quite pretty, even though some of the hand-held shots made me carsick. I am satisfied with the overall result of the film to call it something I liked.