Owwwwwww ow ow - my arm hurts from Wiimote use. Which I guess goes to show you how few punches I throw in real life.

Yeah, Chris and Demetre and I took the boxing for a few rounds last night. I managed to not play the Wii for the entire time I was working at home yesterday - and then 3:30 rolled around, I turned off the laptop, turned on the Wii, fired up RESIDENT! EVIL! ...FOUR. and the next time I looked up, it was dark. In the plus column though, I cut down zombies like a thresher cuts corn. Zombies have become the perfect metaphor for my life, my pain, and the entirety of confusing human existence.

So September's here. Did you know I only saw the Harry Potter movie once this summer? I've sort of been kicking myself about that lately. The book just sort of overwhelmed everything and now I've got some serious Order cravings I can't satisfy till the DVD comes out. (Actually, till a month after the DVD comes out, on account of DVD Bankruptcy not expiring until December 4.) Plus the first screening of a Potter flick is basically useless; it all just gets burned settling up the expectations vs. reality account and creating the List of Things They Changed From the Book. I never saw the IMAX 3-D, either, and I never will. So dumb. Sorry Harry. I really do adore you.

Speaking of movies, did you know that there's actually a serious ongoing debate on the Interwebs right now about the shakycam cut style of The Bourne Ultimatum? I thought it worked brilliantly, and I saw the flick in about the sixth row of the Varsity 8, over on the left side of the theatre, so I don't think screen proximity helped me out at all. Apparently a lot of other people had serious problems interpreting the visual data, however... or even keeping themselves from being sick. David Bordwell has some pretty interesting comments on the matter over on his blog, but on issues like this I start to wonder if matters more physiological and less psychological might be at work. (And again, I rail against the concept of an objective understanding of "how film works.") We don't really know a lot about the actual physical components of how a human body interacts with a filmed image; it's possible that the ability to sift through "run and gun" filmmaking is as genetic as hair colour. I can't smoke 2 Cuban cigars back to back to save my life, but I can sit through the entire Bourne trilogy and not even develop a headache. I drilled through the complex web of visual and aural information, found the thread I needed to hang onto, and hung onto it; the rest of the frenzy merely informed that relationship, rather than negatively interfering with it. I really do believe that Greengrass was doing something significantly more intelligent with the "run and gun" approach than, say, Tony Scott does with it; that he was working on a more coherent and intelligent schematic in order to make it all work. But maybe chaos is chaos, and finding order in it is as accidental as seeing faces in wet sand. Just like, you know, life.