Day: July 11, 2004

July 11, 2004 /

On Friday I left work early and went to the lab where Maria is working for the summer, in order to get my brain mapped. Brain mapping means they put a lot of very wet sponges all over your head with rubber bands, so they can go in the room behind you (with a one-way mirror window) and laugh at you until they pee themselves.

It’s a pretty neat process, if not very comfortable. They do some really interesting work there, although Maria apparently disagrees with me on that. I got to be one of the first participants in a new experiment one of Maria’s coworkers has designed. I can’t tell you what it was about, but I might be able to get a printout of my session; apparently my data was “very clean.” That’s nice to know. I should be out of Re-Education And Happiness Camp any day now!

Short things are better than long things

July 11, 2004 /

Okay, saying “it’s one big movie! It’s just cut in half!” is stupid whether applied to Kill Bill or Matrix or, I don’t know, American Pie, whatever. It’s a bad idea to make a six-hour movie. Have you ever seen a six-hour movie? There’s a reason for that. It’s a worse idea to cut it in half. It’s bad enough mentally breaking out of the film long enough to take a five-minute bathroom break; I don’t see why a six-month bathroom break would be better.

If you want to make a long movie, make a three-hour movie and end it. If you want to make several movies, make them short. It’s not hard. Just don’t let any action sequence last longer than five minutes, and kill the freaking monologues.