Area 52 - Southland Tales Reviews: 10 of 52... Cold Medicine and the Cannes Cut...

When I last left you I was all hopped up on cold medicine and my viewing of the Cannes cut of Southland Tales had me in a very reflective mood.

I spent the rest of the week unsure if I was actually sick, or just depressed. Deep down I knew it was a little of column A and a little of column B. The true question was which one was the main course.

Either way… I got a lot of much-needed sleep after an insomnia-induced spell of hyper-productivity. I crash hard from these phases, usually alternating between getting three to four hours of sleep a night to ten to twelve hours, depending on my mood.

A combination of a couple of events that took place in my personal life, mixed with the news of last week’s Boston Marathon Bombing sent me into extra sleepy mode. I just wanted a sleep vacation from the world and being that work’s been slow lately I had the time.

 On Thursday the 18th I woke up from a six-hour nap sometime around 9 o’clock in the pm to play on the computer for a couple of hours before going back to bed.

I posted some dumb joke on one of the social networks before reading what everyone else was up to. I quickly saw that there was something going on at MIT. I searched the local over the air TV stations and saw nothing but Two and a Half Men, and Everyone Loves Raymond reruns. Thankfully someone on Twitter posted a link to a local Boston station that was live-streaming their coverage.

I spent the rest of the night glued to Twitter to follow the events.

On the day of the actual bombing… I felt a little comforted that the world seemed to be coping with this tragedy without turning into a circus.

Not Thursday. Thursday was a juggler and a bear on a unicycle away from being, “The Greatest Show on Earth!”

As I watched everyone cheering on the transformation of Boston into a police state while the US House of Representatives passed CISPA, I couldn't help but think of the world created in the movie Southland Tales.

Everything was there even:

• Cheri Oteri running over her partner as she ran from the cops.

• The news coming from everywhere, and being very confusing.

• Even the people who were posting and taking their roles as reporters seriously… couldn’t miss an opportunity to throw in a joke from time to time.

• There were some comedians joking the entire time.

• There was even a porn star or two just posting as if nothing were going on at all.

It reminded me a lot of the blend of frivolousness and fear that’s portrayed in Southland Tales.

I stayed up all night following everything.

Just as I dozed off for a second I received this message from someone who follows me on Twitter.

It’s fun to live in a world where you can get instant confirmation that you’re not alone in your thinking and from a stranger none the less.

I went back to sleep feeling that I was going to watch the comedy version of Southland Tales this week.

The rest of the week was pretty uneventful. Things in my life have seemed to even out a little, and by Monday I felt completely normal and was back to a normal sleep pattern.

I had a couple of things to do during the day so I waited until 1:30 in the am to fire up this week’s viewing of the comedy version of Southland Tales.

As I pointed out last we, I’m now referring to the theatrical release of Southland Tales as the comedy version, being that I feel the shortening of the scenes and the way the scenes have been reordered from the director’s cut leads the movie to be more confusing and comical.

To my surprise… I watched an entirely different movie this week.

I’m sure part of it is from just having seen the movie so many times, but a bigger part is from now having seen the real movie. This time even the comedy version didn’t seem as over the top. It just felt like an abridged version of the director’s cut.  

I don’t expect anyone else to invest the same amount of time and effort to build this type of relationship with any movie, but it’s been amazing how every week since I’ve started I’ve managed to watch a different movie.

I wonder what’s going to happen next week?