Monday, May 8, 2006

We begin anew tonight, or at least as anew as I can muster on a Monday evening, so you’d best attend and attend well. When I go ghost, I’ve decided, I’m going to go in for a penny, in for a pound, such is my mastery of exchange rates. Why disappear for a day when three will do?

Dreary weather is a relief for me, because with the rain comes a temporary reprieve from enjoying the outdoors and collecting pollen with my eyes. You’d think allergies would be a powerful deterrent, but that’s not the case. Nature is compelling, congestion be damned, and in my mind there is an immunity to flowers lying just out of reach. When the skies darken, however, I turn to the bottle all too easily.

My bottle happens to be media. A recent draught was Final Fantasy: Advent Children, a visual spectacle whose prettiness is matched only by its unintelligible flow. Good cloth and hair are hallmarks of masterful CGI, they say, and in these capacities the movie impresses. But coherency? Forget it. I’ve never gone to film school, so my vocabulary is limited to the jump cut, yet I believe Advent Children makes strident use of the “what the fuck” cut.

You’ll be cruising along, flush with the delusion that you understand the basic plot, when suddenly you’re warped forward or backward in time, nobody really knows, new characters sashay onto the screen as if they were old friends, and the situation turns into a genuine mystery. I’m talking Da Vinci Code type mystery, where only the Knights Templar could be responsible. I was bewildered.

Fortunately I’m familiar with the source material, so I was able to cobble together the following spoilers. If you wish to preserve the magic, stop reading right now, but if you’re curious: Brood, brood, brood, swordfight, bike, brood, flashback, brood, swordfight, brood on a bike, swordfight on a bike while brooding, flashback, brood, credits, brood. Possibly not in this order, I can’t really say.