Passed (and Charlie Kaufman)
That was suitably mild.
Life is OK again.
Had dinner with Helen at Roti Chennai last night. Pretty good - no complaints from me, anyway. I had a stuffed parotha with chicken curry. An acquaintance of hers appeared halfway through, and in-between catching up with the gossip and so on, asked Helen if I was "the man of her dreams". Her reply, "well, he's a man". Which is fair enough. A horrible question to ask someone, at the best of times.
We followed that up by playing pool again (I won 5-3, she got upset because she thought I was patronising her when I thanked her for a good game, but not too upset). She decided to go home (it was only 8.30) - alone. Made me feel slightly paranoid, although I realised it was just because she gets up so early for work she was tired out.
I strolled over to
Rialto, but couldn't find anything I wanted to see, so headed on up to Reading. I was in luck, they were showing
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which I'd been wanting to see. Interesting film, possibly even weirder than
Adaptation, and very enjoyable, although the ending felt a bit rushed, and wasn't totally satisfying. I feel like there's there's a place for a "writer's cut" to be released - it didn't feel like it ended properly.
Idle speculation: Charlie Kaufman is the auteur working today whose style is closest to that of Philip K. Dick's. All the way through,
Spotless Mind felt like something that PKD could have produced. Even the quote that gives the film its title reminded me of Dick - Mary misattributing the Pope quote is similar to J.R. Isidore's misattributed Donne quote in
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?... and the central motif of the film (character with memory erased, at the mercy of powerful and incomprehensible forces, experiencing dreams into which reality intrudes) is pure PKD. Daydream: Kaufman writing the screenplay for a Dick novel. How cool would that be? (Even cooler than Linklater directing
A Scanner Darkly, I'm betting).
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