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The Usual Suspects and The Cell. The costumes were cool in The Cell but mostly I thought it was retarded. Aaron told me to get it. So somehow his taste in film has depreciated. Usual Suspects was kind of good except for Benicio Del Torro's character died early and Gabriel Byrne really sucks I think. I mean he can't deliver a line authentically. Gabe and Aaron are really in love with him somehow. Maybe it's just that he's Irish that annoys me. But Peter O'Toole is Irish. But he's a classier Irish. Kevin Spacey is pretty cool.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the standard dysfunctional family story with a father who is dying who has a disappointment son (Death of a Salesman) with the husband/wife exorcism (Virginia Woolf). I don't know what's so great about this Tennesse Williams fellow. All the things I've seen by him were good only because of the acting. And also I really hate movies where people, from out of nowhere, say, "I'm like a cat on a hot tin roof!" and then that's the title. Like To Kill a Mockingbird. I think it's more subtle in Catcher, at least. It's good how Hemingway titles things. Little quotes from Donne first or Gertrude Stein. But when it's just like that, just someone saying something very supposedly-clever, then it annoys me.

Picking Up the Pieces. Woody Allen is in it but otherwise had nothing to do with it. It's pretty stupid. He's always cool, of course. But generally it wasn't good. And it looked like it was made for tv, which it may have been, I don't know. Directed by some doofus I hadn't heard of and it looked bad. It really didn't have the Woody Allen look. None of the shots were very nice looking. He always has such a great photographer.

Ended the same way as The Front, which he's in but also didn't direct or write, with the same line: "Go fuck yourselves." It was a little different from that exactly in this one though. The Front is a lot better.

Giant was kind of long, but it was good. It wasn't really about anything and it didn't really have a plot. It was just Elizabeth Taylor marrying Rock Hudson and then hating him and then loving him and fighting with him and James Dean being poor and then getting rich and then getting very drunk and pissing off Dennis Hopper and being in love with Elizabeth Taylor, only she was married and everything and didn't really love him. It was all these great actos playing stupid people wondering around Texas aimlessly and drinking and beating each other up. And it lasted four hours. And why ever make movies about Texas? And why is this Dmitri Potemkin guy so good?

Love and Death (Woody Allen). They must have just got it at West Coast because I was pretty sure I'd seen all of the Woody Allen they had. It was pretty funny, about a Russian boy during the Napoleonic Wars. I think there were probably a lot of Russian classics I should have read first that were being parodied though.

Saw a movie on television about Charlie Chaplin with Anthony Hopkins and Robert Downey Jr. as Chaplin. I don't really know why Hopkins was in it: he was a fictitious biographer. And those kinds of narrative aids are crap. It wasn't spectacular or anything. It was very anti-climactic, which is Chaplin's fault for not having a dramatic end more than it is the writer's. But the Chaplin character was just complaining to his Jewish half-brother about Hitler, and he made a psuedo-eloquent speech and then he got an Academy Award and cried into the credits.

Keil's movies premiered at the BTE. Son of Man wasn't very good. Mimi and John were really awesome in it. But every single scene was just people sitting on steps or at tables or on beds or on lawn chairs or stages. People just kept sitting. It was entirely actionless, so that got tedious to watch. It was paced kind of slowly. And it was insanely didactic. Like even people who weren't supposed to be Jesus Chist were preaching. People who were just characters didn't tell their stories --- they gave them like a sermon. Every line wasn't a line, it was a huge piece of script - just a guy sitting and talking and talking, looking into the camera and talking. So it was like characters lecturing to you.

Aaron gave his lines like he was doing his Charleton Heston impression, with the same wrinkled brow. But he didn't really do anything. All the people in it didn't do anything. They just sat around and wrinkled their brows and talked a little. So they weren't characters so much as robots who mouthed boring words.

Little Dream of Me was a lot shorter than I expected. And one of the killer's lines was, "I am the Lizard King." So I don't know what that's about. So he was Jim Morrison murdering small children is disguise or something? But I thought it was good if it was longer, like a full movie --- then it could really be perfect. But as it was I thought it was cool. All the shorts were pretty dull, too. Like jerk-off arty stuff.

One short was kind of good, about a guy whose job was a getaway driver for bankrobbers. But I'm pretty sure all the dialogue was stolen from the ending to Take the Money and Run.

Watched Pulp Fiction with Chuck and Tim. The first time I saw it I think Aaron skipped all the Bruce Willis stuff, so it's a lot better that way. It's just too long as it is. But I love it anyway; I'm just saying.

A copy of Stigmata was in my basement for some reason so I watched it. Billy Corgan did the score. Which wasn't actually too spectacular. I guess I didn't really notice it. The acting got pretty unnatural in places and the whole concept was hokey. But it was good. Not like Kundun or anything like that. But it was good as far as being mediocre goes.

After Hours (Martin Scorsese). It's Keil's favorite movie ever. There were one or two things I'd have done differently, but it was really great. There's a really wonderful shot of a taxi, and then an out-of-focus hand comes into the frame and then the street goes out of focus and the hand comes in. It's kind of funny.

Deadringer, I think it was called. By The Fly/Naked Lunch/Existenz/Madame Butterfly director. I can't remember how to spell it. I think it's David Cronenberg. With Jeremy Irons, the guy from M. Butterfly. He was playing identical twins. But he did it well. It was really boring but still good. Near the end it was great, but then it got really boring again. But I liked it.

Strangers On a Train. The best part is when he pops a little kid's balloon with his burning cigarette. The ending was so good, with the carousel. It was hilarious. Like the little, toothless old guy saving the day, and the guy getting shot in the head like that. He died like a slap-stick character. It was so corny.

But really I loved it a lot. The whole set-up is very clever, and as corny as it was the ending looked great. So really you had to have some sort of cheesy way for that to happen so it'd look so good. I don't know how else you'd make a merry-go-round go crazy.

Dali really had the most perfect wife, the kind that I'd want. Like a Yoko Ono sort of girl. Except for maybe this transvestite thing explains why Salvador never cared about all the affairs Gala Dali was always having, I'm not sure.

I read about sixty pages of The Shadow-Line. And I was originally thinking that I'd read Heart of Darkness for the paper, but then I thought I might not have enough time so I wouldn't. But then I looked over the stuff they gave me, and it looks like I need a third source. Maybe I can just use Apocalypse Now or that Hitchcock movie that's based on a Conrad story, but I'm not sure if it's Sabotage or Saboteur or The Man Who Knew Too Much.

They really are bastards for making me do all that chapter summary nonsense over my vacation. Mostly, I think I'm insulted that it implies that my own choice in books to read isn't as good as theirs. But also I just would really like to watch films when I'm not busy with always rehearsing and sawing apart boards and beating tiles with hammers, and work on my own things. Because I've got this screenplay and this stageplay and this novel to work on, and also I wanted to visit Boston and go hiking. It seems pretty outrageous to me that the Science department and the Math department and everyone: they don't make me do anything. But the English people who should really be wanting me to watch good movies and to write and be in a play don't trust me enough to read whatever I feel like reading on my own.

I guess I could do the Philip thing and just find some notes, but I really would rather not. Because I do want to read it, and I probably would sometime anyway. It's just that right now I'm in the middle of Notes from Underground and also Warhol and Freud and Swann's Way, and I want to read them first. I want to read the stuff I left at Aaron's house, namely. I got "The American Dream" and also I need to reread "Zoo Story". And I bought some more Kafka stories --- those are the things I left there. Except he doesn't think they're there.

Philip and Tim and Kevin were all talking about not doing it - just dropping out of honors. I'd really like to be in it, though. Because most of the people can barely read, I mean., but they still all read better than the people in the only altervative. It really sucks, of course. But it doesn't suck as much.

I was thinking, though: Ashley watches all that tv that I can't stand because that kind of garbage is moving to her. Like The Crucible made her cry. Gatsby made her cry. She's so hyper-senstive to everything, that of course stories that aren't any good could still move her. I guess that implies that Gatsby's no good, which isn't what I meant to say. But it's nothing to cry about. Maybe you cry because it's so beautifully written or something like that. But you don't cry because he gets shot.

Anyway, I don't see how anyone could tell me that I'm an idiot if I don't read whatever they want me to. I really do read. Maybe not as much as Jefferson and Adams, you know. But I read more than the average person, absolutely. I probably haven't read nearly as much as I planned to over the summer. But on the average I read about 100 pages and see 3 films a week, so I don't think I've done too badly. I mean, because I'm also decently busy. And two books by Joe Conrad wouldn't make much difference as far as enlightening me goes.

Sometimes I really think that I should just burn all of my books and never read again. That's really the Zen thing to do. And then if I wrote I wouldn't be able to subconsciously steal anymore. But I really doubt I'll ever do that.

My play is going nicely, and I thought of a never-before-done thing to incorporate into it. But then I realized a few hours later I'd heard it from Gabe's screenplay, which depressed me, but I think he's handling it differently, so no one will really know. And, anyway, it's not my fault.

I'm sort of hoping that Aaron might suggest to me that we merge our projects together. Because really I haven't got the stamina to go for a whole play. And of course he hasn't, either. Because last time I was at his desk I looked through his computer and he'd only listed some characters and given some details of a set for the thing he'd told me he was going to do, about a mute girl and a priest and an atheist. Wouldn't that be a fun part to play on stage? A mute girl?

Whenever I want to do anything, Heather starts loudly playing her music. It's weird, because it's just a constant thud thud thud thuda thud thud thud thuda vibrating through my walls. It makes me insane like a heartbeat under my floorboards or a cat in my wall. My teeth clench and I really start to feel homicidal. So of course I can't write.

She only buys albums of I guess just a really bad drummer. Just a solo drummer going thud thud thud thuda on every track. It's R&B kind of garbage, like you'd hear coming from a Cadillac if you were watching Boyz In The Hood or something. She's got such bad taste in everything. It's so disappointing.

Aaron kept saying once how the Oscars were rascist because Spike Lee is never nominated. Really I think that's not the problem. The Oscars are just dumb. Like not giving it to Ellen Burnstyn. Giving it to Juliet Roberts, ugliest woman in the world. I don't know how you'd respect them after that. Because she can't act. Helen Hunt can't act. How could you take it seriously after they forgot all about Raging Bull? I don't see how you could.

I've been reading Warhol until I get the books from Aaron's. It's really insane. Capote keepts telling Andy about how he was sleeping in the same hotel or something as Bogart one night, and that he wanted to give him a blow job but Bogart told him he couldn't, that he could only give him a hand-job, I guess, and then another time Bogart "jumped into [Capote's] bed with a hard-on." It's funny to imagine this big chain-smoking man's man or whatever, who has always got Ingrid Bergman or Audrey or Katharine Hepburn on his arm wanting to screw around with Truman Capote. It's such a surreal book.

Anyway, Capote told him it was 'too early in the morning.' So that'd really be funny. This big chain-smoking man's man who's infamous for screwing beautiful women suddenly hops into bad with a notorious homosexual, throwing off all his pride and reputation or whatever, and then Capote just says, "Eh you know what? Nevermind because I'm awfully tired." That'd be very embarrassing.

I watched Pecker and The Crossing Guard today. I like Sean Penn very much, except for all the really silly shots of trees and rocks and water in The Pledge. There was one really gross far-away shot of three people walking towards each other on the crest of a hill. You could only make out their silhouettes. It was so bad. Nicholson was really good and I like that woman from Crimes and Misdemeanors very much. Pecker was okay. Not as good as everyone kept telling me, because it was that kind of cheesy Hollywood story everyone's always doing about the kid who gets famous and then realizes it's better not being famous. Charles Dickens alone used that one about fifty times. But I liked it.

The previews for The Crossing Guard made it like it was very suspenseful, and all the shots were of outside late at night in the rain with Jack Nicholson racing through alleyways with guns. But really that was just about ten minutes, and the other two hours were inside in the day with lots of light. Nicholson just kept crying like a girl more than he was killing people, and it was really a lot better that way. Those kinds of very domestic movies are always my favorite. And he's such an amazing actor. He looks so silly.

Aaron and I were going to watch it together, since he'd not seen it yet, either. But I thought that since he's a dork and didn't call me I'd just watch it without him because I didn't have much to do. Mighty Aphrodite (written and directed by Woody Allen). Helena Bonham Carter is so wonderful. F. Murray Abraham was hilarious, too. The whole Greek tragedy theme was great - genius, but it's generally not too funny except for a few really nice lines. And I love the shot at the end with OEdipus making out with his mother.

Also, I watched Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Diane Keaton was in it, and she's one revvy cat. Basically just the whole movie she kept getting fucked. She kept moaning all the time too and so I had to turn the television down. My parents were still awake, and if they'd seen it, if anyone had seen it, they'd immediately assume it was porno. Which is good if you are watching porno. But it seemed weird for a movie.

One kind of cheesy part was when she was in a bar reading The Godfather, and this guy came up to her and said, "I saw the movie. Al Pacino is cool." And she just said, "Yeah" and smiled. It was a dumb thing to do. If they hadn't written it with her in mind I guess it'd be fine. But with her doing it, it just was corny.

Also, Richard Gere was in it, and that retracted a little. But he himself was actually decent. It was just sort of the preconceptions I have of him that retracted.

As soon as this goddamn play is over I'm gonna pack up my rucksack and camp someplace. Maybe with other people, but most likely alone. Some Zen Master once said, "Fearing death, I take to the hills" and I'm gonna take to the hills where I don't have to listen to my mother complain to me all the time about folding her laundry and be around my sister with all her ozone-destroying hairsprays which give me a headache. And lots of jerks who bore the hell out of me with their pettiness and bourgeoisie and spineless attitudes and anyone who says poo instead of shit and gives a fuck about the dolphins they could be eating in their tuna. And also anyone who isn't honest. Well, hell: people who say poo aren't honest. I loathe dishonesty.

I feel so happy though. I really do. And as soon as this play is over I'm gonna camp with my Bodhisattvas someplace. OM MA NE PAD ME HUM. OM MA NE PAD ME HUM. O my sweet Buddha Christ Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare. Sangham saranam gocchami. O ever youthful, O ever weeping. O sweet bhikkus. Our Buddha-natures shall be nutured.

I really don't know what's so great about it. It's worth watching once, but I have no idea why anyone would own it or see it several times or say it was especially superlative. It drags on absolutely forever and the dialogue is cheesy. Everyone is always, whenever anything happens to them, saying, "What the?" Maybe it's just the translation.

I guess you could like it just on the principle that it's a break-through anime, but that's a really weak principle, I think. And if you're going to make a break-through anime, then it should at least be coherent and entertaining. But it has so many characters with so few real emotions or motivations or plot lines worth mentioning.

We watched part of Akira again at Gabe's house, which we thankfully didn't have to sit through entirely. It's good, but it's too long and not worth watching again so soon after the first viewing (about eight months ago).

Everyone always says, "If you don't want to watch this Allen, we don't have to." And then they do anyway, which is funny. Or else they put things in they know I hate when I'm in the bathroom. And I overhear and try to hurry, hoping I can show my disapproval in time. But I never make it.

I hate the idea of remaking movies, really. But if I ever did one, I think it'd want it to be Rope. Only I think I'd maybe make the two murderers lovers. As long as it wasn't silly and insanely retracting.

I think that the problem with it and movies like A.I. and Minority Report is that you keep begging the film to be over. When you start to do that it means that the movie is rot. And it's not that I've got a short attention span, because I sat through 2001: and Lawrence of Arabia without sighing and throwing things at the screen.

Also, I think that any acting which gives you a general reaction of gee, I really don't care that you're crying and in love with someone who doesn't like you isn't good crying (or acting).

In order to act well, you've got to make everyone feel sympathetic. Instead, Vivien Leigh makes me want to crush my skull. I mean, Clark Gable was pretty cool, but his character was just so two-dimensional and underwritten, really, that you couldn't care about him. And maybe that's the same problem with Scarlet, that she was just written poorly. But she was so revoltingly melodramatic in everything that she said that I think Leigh was simply a terrible actress. Or maybe they were just meant to be characters you were supposed to loathe. But I didn't really loathe them enough for anyone to use that as an excuse; I was bored out of my mind by them until I wanted to die, that's all.

The setting is pretty alien, of course. But the emotions are the very basic love story kinds, so I think that if someone really great had played Scarlet, I might have felt enough about her to think the movie was good. But really the problem was just with the entire plot and film as a whole and the fact that, in four hours, no one developed into more than a piece of cardboard.

I also watched Psycho, which is about fifteen times cooler. Hitchcock's theory is basically mine: the characters are what's important, not the knifing. And if you don't make people seem like people, then no one gives a damn anyway if they lose their plantation.

Philadelphia Story had some really great people in it and a lot of it was really clever, but some of the lines were dumb. The real problem was that it played more like an audio tape than a film.

He's written exactly as many films as Shakespeare wrote plays. He looks a little aged and everything, balder even than he was so long ago, but he's going to live much, much longer and beat out the old Bard. I really do think he's the Shakespeare of our time, even if he looks more like the Shylock.

Watched Trainspotting, which seems like the contemporary (rather than futuristic) A Clockwork Orange, minus the interesting morality stuff but with the revving sort of "I was cured allright" ending. That kind of lonely teenage (20-year old) angst is my favorite kind of story lately.

Also, I watched The African Queen, which I liked a lot but think should have ended immediately after Katharine Hepburn had prayed, thinking that Bogart was going to die and that they'd never make it, and then the camera pulled up to show that they were only like five feet away from the lake. It even faded to black. I was really hoping it might end on a sad note like that with them starving or getting malaria, yards from their dreams. But, oh, well.

I started reading M*A*S*H and got about halfway through and threw it away. It's rotten. The jokes aren't funny after seeing them. Same thing with watching Catch 22 after reading it. Seeing the film was horrifying. Art Garfunkle was in it, and that was funny.

But, anyway, acting: I try to be a little humbled about doing it, because first of all you could never possibly tell if you were good or not, and also because I don't want to come off as an asshole anymore than I already do. Yet, you know, those last few moments today when I was screaming some corny lines into Gabriel's face, I really felt some true emotion.

Even if you were as famous as Anthony Hopkins, you'd still have to wonder if you could act well. You'd always think, Am I really that cool, or am I just British(etc.)? Also, if you were Marlon Brando, you'd never get over the fact that lots of dorkfaces like Nicholas Cage were so much more popular than you.

Watched The Seven Year Itch, which was massively over-rated. I saw everything very famous and great by Billy Wilder straight away and now all I've got left to see are the less entertaining ones.

Tennesse Williams I do not like. And the Italian people running through streets super-imposed with Taylor's face was pretty annoying. It's too bad the three of them didn't get together for something by a real genius.

Read another of the shorts very early in the morning when I awoke. Pardon, 1pm. But I usu. end up falling asleep round five, you see, so it's not as if I'm terrifically lazy.

He's always been a character I could sort of relate to. He's a horrible bastard and everything, and I'd protest his politics even if he hadn't done nasty things like impeding justice and breaking into hotel rooms. His whole career was one big, heaping pile of Fascist nonsense, but he was very clever. Really cunning.

But Nixon the Man is such a convoluted story. He's what Alvy Singer (Annie Hall) would be like if you gave him the Presidency. I mean, he's got no sense of decency and everything, and he's an egotistical hoodlum. But he's as screwed up emotionally as I am. He's a complete neurotic, and all because he wasn't loved properly as a child. I can definitely feel for him, and I think we should really have some sympathy for the poor guy, jerkface Conservative or not.

Does anyone else think that Oliver Stone should really knock off all the montages of like cells and everything, constant shots of surreal images mixed together at inappropriate times? I can see doing it in one movie, because it's cool in Natural Born Killers. But I don't know how you'd do it several times and not really wonder if you weren't being stupid.

I truly love what Kahlil Gibran writes on happiness - that joy is sorrow unmasked, that that which causes us joy, too, causes us suffering, that sorrow carves out the soul so that it may contain more joy.

The Cocktail Party by T. S. Eliot. Kind of goofy at the end, but really great otherwise. I feel kind of bad for Eliot, because he's obviously a big stinking prude and everything, but he writes very, very nicely. So I wonder, you know, was the guy possibly happy? I doubt it, because that whole moving to England and becoming a member of the Anglican Church, I think he must have been the same kind of Dorkface that I was in the eighth grade. Though I wasn't quite writing J. Alfred Prufrock around then.

Songs of the Doomed by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Collection of his articles and stories and accounts of things he did during the 60's, 70's, 80's and his arrest in the 1990's. He says lots of funny things about President Nixon, like that he's a pig fucker and that he personifies evil in ways that the English language can't describe.

Sabrina. good. I love how in all movies there's the ugly guy or whatever who finally gets the girl, only it's played by Bogart or someone very handsome and chic.

Stalag 17: didn't realize it was Billy Wilder; was thus impressed by my clairvoyant movie-renting skills during the credits. It wasn't as snappy (dialogue-wise) as I'd expected him to be. Bits are hilarious, bits are corny. Overall: worth my two hours.

Lost Horizon: a little sentimental in parts, which is how those kinds of films go. But I really loved it. Might prefer his Arsenic and Old Lace (which was him, I'm pretty sure), but that's only because of the mood I'm in. I love the shot of the "10" on the door back in England, and then it's inside with the Prime Minister. Someday I want to make a movie like that with a corny shot of Downing Street and then go inside to see everyone meeting.

Reflections in a Golden Eye: E. Taylor sometimes knocks the wind out of me. Not quite Virginia Woolf, but she was pretty stunning in this, too. It goes without saying that Mister Brando is the most wonderful actor ever.

He's like number four according to them. But the guys above him (like Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart) --- they would never do that. They would never be really man enough to play a repressed homosexual like that, and start sobbing. De Niro would. He's great. And Dustin Hoffman. But, I mean, could you see Bogart in Tootsie? He's great, but he wouldn't have the balls for it.

Read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, whom I always accidently confuse in conversation with Christopher Walken (same sounds), which makes me sound like an idiot.

Insomnia. Everyone sucks but Al Pacino, who wears a silly leather jacket the whole time. But he sounds so great from fifty years of chain smoking that he makes the whole thing pretty good.