Saturday night's alright for dogsitting

I spent my dogsitting time watching movies. I watched Eyes Without A Face, which I had seen in high school, but that I didn't remember the story so much as visualize certain scenes, so it was good to put those scenes in order again. It was recently re-release by Criterion, so I rented it from Netflix. It really is a wonderfully strange film: it's identified as a horror film, which it definitely is, but in a subtle way. The fact that it was originally released in the U.S. with the voices dubbed, and titled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus (on a double bill with The Manster -- "HALF MAN, HALF MONSTER!!") is a bit surreal. If you get the chance, rent it.

I also watched The Terminal, because my it was at the house when I got there. I liked it better than I expected, which still wasn't much, but Stanley Tucci's character really bugged me. He was given no motivation for being such an asshole: his superiors disagreed with his monomania, his inferiors disagreed with him, he was like the Grinch, only without the benefit of Boris Karloff. By turning Tucci into such a stock character, it just deflates the whole film. I know a lot of people are cruel assholes, but I like to believe that there's always something behind that. Call me an optimist.

I finally got around to rereading my story, as well. I had been putting it off, partly because a sense of dread permeates the whole endeavor. To my surprise I really like it. The ending still seems too abrupt to me, as if there ought to be a better place for it to conclude. But it's not the type of story that depends a lot on how it ends: it's had several different endings through the years, and has survived all the changes. Julie also wanted me to stop with the semi-colons -- because, as you may have noticed, I am crazy about the punctuation. But the story really didn't have a lot of that in it, and I was reticent to remove what semi-colonage there was, since the narrator in the story is the type of guy who would talk that way. I made some (largely cosmetic) changes, but I really am happy with how it's turned out. (I did change the name of the narrator's best friend back to "Julie", as it had been originally: Julie told me that, since the character was clearly her, there was no need to alter the name. She was in fact disappointed that I had changed the name in the first place. [Originally, the narrator's name was "Bill", and the boyfriend of the best friend was "Mike", but I thought that was a bit too clever/ironic. Plus when I let Mike read it, I think a brief passage meditating upon the size of "Mike"'s package sort of freaked him out. Go figure.])

I'm completely petrified of re-submitting it to Strange Horizons, lest I completely blow this opportunity by my impatience.

When my cousin showed up last night to take over the care of the dogs, she told me that her mother had come in 6th out of 10 in an amateur dogsled race. I didn't even know that that's where she went! Congratulations, Katie!