Bizarre and Vivid Dream

This is actually from over a year ago, but I just found an old post I wrote about it on a forum, and thought I'd copy it here.

I had the most bizarre and vivid dream last night.

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It started with me being hanged for a crime I didn't commit! The perp was a random guy I went to high school with and haven't given a thought since. Where did that come from? But I didn't actually find out what the crime was and why I was the accused/convicted one until very late in the dream in a weird flashback moment.

The dream actually started with the hanging. It took place in a weird schoolroom, but the odd thing was, the hanging was bungled and I survived, I was only knocked out. But apparently everyone thought it worked. I had something over my face and couldn't see, but I was dragged away on the floor, taken for dead. Finally whoever was dragging me stopped for a minute and I looked out from whatever was covering my head, saw that he wasn't looking and bolted. I found a door to this little building and ran out on the street. It was in downtown Manhattan somewhere, but I didn't recognize the neighborhood. I could tell the guy who had left the body must be running after me, so I went into the first store I saw, a little Chinese pottery and art store, and looked around for a while.

The store walls were all windows, so I could see the guy who had followed me run by. Eventually I went out and ran a bit more till I found a group of churches to duck between. I finally went in one where there was some choral music coming from no where and just a few people sporadically sitting around in the pews. One of them gave me a blanket to wrap around myself--people had been starting to stare at me. I must have looked the worse for the whole hanging thing.

After what must have been hours of sitting huddled under the blanket in this dark almost empy church, I finally left...

I can't quite remember what happened next, but somehow I met up with a group of friends one of whom resembled, but was not exactly, Diana, and another was my roommate Claudia. But there was a whole gang of them, and they had a big loft apartment over a store they ran, but some of them were not cool with pretending I was dead, which is what they had to do. And the police showed up at the store! Fortunately it was really crowded, so we were able to slip out without me being seen. Finally, they decided it would be a good thing to keep me away from the store for a while, so they took me to a late night showing of Ran!

The dream sort of skipped the movie, and the last part of the dream involved us sitting around on and under some scaffolding at night, next to the Villiage Voice building, having a picnic. It was during this part of the dream that I "saw" the crime for which I'd been accused--it was as though I was just watching it from across the street--it involved that guy from high school getting into a fight with a construction worker, and I was there, and tried to step into stop the fight, and the construction worker guy ended up being killed by the high school guy, who fled, and there I was with the body.

After "seeing" this, then the scaffolding we were all sitting around and under started to break and one other guy and I had to save the people who were sitting on it from falling ...

And then I woke up.

28?

My 28th birthday is just about a week away and that sounds like a very adult number. Of course, several of my close friends are over thirty--some are fifteen or more years older than thirty, so in perspective, it still seems pretty young.

Still, it's interesting to hit a time in my life where I realize I'm no longer just in the first stage out of college. I'm apparently in the beginning of a career, a life. Choices have been made, relationships have been forged.

Of course, it could all change tomorrow and I wouldn't be that far behind if I started all over now. But I don't have any big starting over plans at the moment.

I don't really feel like a "real" adult yet. I feel a lot like a kid playing house but with a bank account. But that's cool with me. I'm not ready to "find myself" I guess, so in the mean time, playing house is just fine.

Remembering

So, I guess it's time to revist what 9/11 was like.

It happened two months before I moved to New York, having just graduated the previous spring, so like most of the world, I mainly watched it on the news.

I was living with my folks for a few months between school and moving to the city, waiting tables at the local Olive Garden. I had had a late shift the morning before and was working lunch that day and I woke up at quarter to nine when my father rang from the office to tell me to turn on the TV. My mother was out running errands. I watched the news of the second plane hitting. I was listening to the radio while driving to work as the first tower fell.

When I got to work, the radio was on in the kitchen and we listened in between serving guests (who mostly seemed totally oblivious to what was going on). About half way through the shift, the manager got a TV hooked up in the back so we could watch the news coverage. There weren't many people coming in, so I got to go home early.

When I got home later that afternoon, I made some calls and sent some e-mails. I was moving to New York from DC and I had friends in both places I was worried about. I heard back, surprisingly, from everyone I knew within a few hours. My mother and I baked some frozen pizzas and sat in front of the news and my dad joined when he got back from the office. I think we pretty much stayed there all night. It was just too unbelievable.

I'm back.

I haven't been here in a long time. A year has gone by.

What has happened?

Not a whole lot. I've seen a LOT of movies and a lot of theatre too.

I've also moved from being just the admin at my job to taking some more responsibility managing the accounts for three sales territories. I basically get to babysit orders, make sure they get entered, manufactured, and shipped on time and in good quality. It sounds a lot easier than it is. Trust me.

I've also had my first print articles appear this year, in the pages of The Sondheim Review which is a small step but maybe someday might lead to some bigger and better writing gigs.

Today I spent most of the day copying CDs and DVDs for various people which I will be mailing and trading in the next week. I'm actually leaving the apartment now to go spend the evening trading discs and having dinner with a friend.

Yes, I am a nerd.

Yesterday, I went to see Hollywoodland. Eh. It was ok. I got tired of it pretty fast; the murder mystery side of the story seems very convulted, and, as my friend said, it was a total Chinatown-wannabe. Except here, there's no crime! Eh. Not great. But not bad either.

Movies Watched in the Last Week

Heights

I didn't know till I read in the credits after the movie that it's based on a play, but I looked it up and the basis was just a 25-minute one-act done by Ensemble Studio Theatre five years ago. Written by someone named Amy Fox. Basic idea: five or so New Yorkers going about their separate lives but they all eventually intertwine. But it's really about the main girl, Elizabeth Banks, and her impending marriage to the hottie James Marsden who has some ... questionable things in his past. Glenn Close plays Elizabeth's mother, a Broadway actress about to open in a new production of Macbeth. It's interesting, but most of the movie is spent setting up interesting characters and situations that don't go anywhere. Only the central relationship ends up getting some resolution, which itself is a little easy and pat. That said though, despite some hand-held camera stuff I don't like and some bad music, a lot of the movie is surprisingly life-like.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the original and the new)

My peanut M&Ms were better than the new movie. It had some laughs, but it was another example of movies today. Dumb made-up psychologizing to explain enigmatic characters (that's not in the book) which takes away any time we might have to actually get to know the characters for real, so it's just plot point, plot point, plot point. All Tim Burton movies look and sound alike and now he's been seduced by CGI and even the faces look computer-generated. I will say for him that he has a pretty good sense of humor and Johnny Depp has some fun.

I was surprised that the original movie, even though it's in some ways less faithful to the book and has time taken up with songs, still manages to crack the characters a lot more successfully. There, we get a lot of Charlie at school, Charlie with his mom, his family, Grandpa Joe's infirmity, etc., all things we just glide right by in this movie in order to have this made-up flashback stuff about Wonka. The thing is, the Dahl book sees Wonka as mysterious and somewhat inexplicable--the way all adults appear to children. It's Charlie's world we understand most, and this movie spends all its time trying to explain Wonka and it doesn't work with the material.

The Return of Martin Guerre

Pretty great movie. Beautiful, for one thing. The production design is both gorgeous and authentic. The clothes and sets looked lived in.The performances, especially Depardieu and Nathalie Baye as his wife, are great.It's a very interesting and true story, though the film does apparently have its fictional elements. I've never seen Somersby, the American remake that takes place during the American Civil War, but that doesn't sound like a good idea to me.One interesting thing: in the movie, the young Martin can't consummate his marriage because he is thought bewitched, which is apparently true. But it does turn out he was married when he was ELEVEN years old. Maybe he just had to ... hit puberty! LOL.

The Piano

It's interesting. Not going to become my favorite movie and I HATED what Sam Neil does to her at the end, but it's an evocative movie and the performances are very good--including the little girl who got the Oscar. That was SOME sex scene! My goodness. Elements of the movie reminded me of Julie Taymor and Titus. All that shadow-puppetry stuff with the axe is foreshadowing I guess, but there are a lot of other striking unique images. I think it's a cooler looking and seeming film than it ends up being.A lot of the story is left loose-ended. But still interesting. I would have preferred real music though, instead of that nouveau contemporary piano stuff. It just doesn't sound right for the period.Also, there's a vaguely contemporary attitude about Victorian mores, I think. Hunter's character is non-conformist and rebellious against her oppression. Even her muteness may be a choice, but it also feels like a comment on the silencing of women's voices in a male-dominated society. I just don't think the real story and idea is as deep as the movie makes you think it is.

Double Indemnity

Well, it's pretty arch and calculated, but pretty good flick. Barbara Stanwyck is SO the person to play that role. And Fred MacMurray is well-used too. The dialogue sometimes gets going so fast and sharp that it took me out of it, but overall I can see why it's seen as such an important movie. And what an interesting choice to have him confess right at the beginning.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

I liked it. I haven't seen a lot of Allen, but it's less funny and more morally overt than other ones of his I've seen. Nevertheless, good performances all around, and life-like. I guess the toughest thing about the movie is it's hard to like anyone in it. The only real problem I see with the movie is that it isn't telling me anything I don't already know moralistically and it seems to be trying to reveal something ideological about morality and religion. But in so far as it's about the characters' own personal struggles with their morality, I liked it a lot.

Chinatown

I can't help comparing it to The Aviator, since I saw them both recently and they're both pastiche films basically covering the same era, though of course the similiarities stop there, pretty much.

Nicholson is great. In recent movies (didn't see About Schmidt) I've found him to be a little self-parodying, which I don't find as engrossing as the rather simple performance he gives here. Faye Dunaway is stately and beautiful. She's another performer who later moved into a self-parody, but here has a naturalism to go with the movie-star appearance. John Huston, who directed the arresting, recently-viewed Red Badge of Courage, gives an excellent, creepy performance as the bad guy.

The romance between the two of them feels a little forced, as though they just had to put in a sex scene between the leading male and female despite it not really making sense.

It's a pretty interesting story, with plenty of surprises and it generally held my interest, though it's not short. It's MUCH more satisfying than The Aviator. Unlike that film, this one was able to use the period setting without a contemporary comment on it (i.e., "weren't people quaint and silly then"). I'm not sure if I'd put it up on the Greatest Films of All Time list, but it works in almost every way.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera

You Can't Make a Silk Purse Out of a Sow's Ear.

Given that the 1986 stage original POTO was mainly exceptional for producing such spectacles as falling chandeliers and locales that can literally change in a film-like manner before the eyes in the live theatre, a movie adaptation will be at an immediate disadvantage. That Lord Lloyd Webber's wall-to-wall songs don't so much propel the plot or reveal the characters as much as they bring the proceedings to a crashing halt doesn't help matters.

So, despite some exciting visual feats and a hilarious but brief turn by Minnie Driver as Carlotta, the opera's reining diva (singing dubbed by English Opera singer and former London-stage Carlotta Margaret Preece), the film, unsurprisingly is endless and bad.

Other than Preece's vocals and some satisfactory snippets from Patrick Wilson's Raoul, the singing is all sub-par. Emmy Rossum, in the central role of Christine, is likeable, pretty, and completely wrong. Her singing sounds about like the average soloist of the average American High School choir. Not bad, but when her opening night song ("Think of Me," a bland pop tune serving in the place of an actual operatic aria) gets a stunning ovation from the opening night audience who expected vocals on the level of Preece's, the film loses any credibility it may have had up to that point. Rossum is a starlet to watch, though. She's genuine and attractive, trying her darndest to make us buy things like dialogue that inexplicably rhymes (these are "recitatives" in the stage show which are spoken in the film, presumably to add to the movie's believability, if you can imagine). Sarah Brightman, who created the role in the stage production brought a gothic weirdness to the proceedings which helped the show's unbelivability. Rossum is American and contemporary, and like the rest of the movie, fails to make the outrageous believeable. Gerard Butler's Phantom is super hot despite the mild skin affliction under the mask, and his singing, though not very good, is passable and has something akin to a rock style.

Is it a terrible film? Well, the art direction is probably too good to call it terrible. But for all its loudness and the occasional effective cinematic moment, it's really just long, loud, and boring.