09.10.04

Another day of gathering and selling books. I'm telling myself that books sitting on shelves are like corpses in a bowling alley; they're dead, heavy, and useless.

Made some more scratch for my fund. That's good.

I did the Beaverton-Burnside Powell's two-step. I left with a bone-cracking full box, and came back with three books.

While I was downtown, I ran into a classmate from last winter's acting class. He's trying to move to Miami. He's running into the same troubles I am in the job quest.

It doesn't help that this morning the Boregonian's headline claimed that the Oregon unemployment rate spiked (yes, that's the word they used) last month to 7.4%. There's an over-abundance of talent out there, and few positions available.

I send out queries and resumes every day. I've told all and sundry that I'm looking for work--as long as it's honest, I'm there. True, I've only been actively looking for about a month. The horror stories of people looking for up to a year...shudder.

Still, it's character-building.

Last Monday, I saw Donnie Darko at the cinema with a friend. Lured by the twin enticements of the director's cut, and a full-size movie screen, we had high expectations.

I'd recently seen the movie for the first time on cable. It fascinated me; time travel, parallel universes, love, and tragedy. What's not to like? The denoument, as everything came together in a big "Aha!" moment, why is this the exception rather than the rule? It satisfied. I watched the movie every time it was on for about a week. Not to understand it, but to enjoy how the pieces work towards a unified ending.

Seeing the movie in the communal darkness of the cinema made a good film more enjoyable. However, I thought that the film was better in the more concise, theatre-release, version. There were a couple of small scenes that gave more information about the characters, but I didn't miss that information in the shorter version.

The theatrical release of Donnie Darko was, for me, a tighter, more intriguing, and more interesting story. It respected my ability to figure things out.

We've grown accustomed to the idea that director's cuts are inherently better than theatrical release versions. Are we mistaking quantity for quality? More is not always better.

More is sometimes too much.

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