waking into a dream journal 01.22.08

this morning's this morning's lack of this morning's lack of this morning's judgment
salvage
director: jeff and josh crook // 2006
cinema 4 rating: 3

this morning, i woke up in the middle of a dream where a constant stream of my friends from anchorage were coming by our manse in anaheim just to tell us what a mess our place was -- at the point that dion asked to use the facilities and was attacked by the massive pile of entertainment weeklies, travel & leisures, rolling stones and time magazines (apparently, we have become an unknowing slave to time warner, inc.), while i struggled to move dinosaur toy after dinosaur toy off the dining room table, and jen jumped to shampoo the rugs, my "real" self awoke in the middle of the oscar nominations -- and then i got up, post-noms, and plunged into a movie where a girl takes a ride she really shouldn't even consider for a second, gets killed and then somehow keeps reliving the moments leading up to her death -- or is it really her experiencing her death over and over and over? myyyaahh-ha-haaaa! -- i'll give the crook bros. credit for one thing: they sure got their fourth movie made and distributed -- this one followed ghetto dawg 2 -- if they had any true eye for staging a scene or for building suspense, even the slightest bit beyond what is displayed here, i might have given in to its obvious conceit and accepted it as a decent, low-budget hidden wonder -- but they don't, and thus, i can't -- people might give them some credit for ambition here, but there is no moment here that rings true even on human terms, and no ghostly move that wasn't swiped (lovingly, i'm sure) from j-horror of the recent past -- plus, i grew tired of looking at liz phair's country cousin and her crazy eyebrows after about twenty minutes -- and then, there's that sheriff character, who seems to have finished working part-time at a comic book store to come over and hunt down criminals -- play around with timelines and perspective ineffectively all you want to, but at least make your cops seem like they can do the job when the moment comes to pull the trigger -- this guy looks like he wants to run and get a 64-oz. slushie -- and then, at the moment that the oh-so-hidden twist is revealed in the film, i was hit by the actual truth: my breathless realization that i could have been cleaning my house instead... and having a better time of it...

[note: you may notice that, however hackneyed and overused these days, the dvd cover betrays some form of visual sense and design -- you will not find this quality in the actual film -- i saw it on cable, so i was not fooled by the cover -- i was merely fooled by its description in the cable guide...]