My Brain Hurts… November 8, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : General , trackbackEver had one of those days? I mean, one of those days when your brain just simply lets you down.
Oh, I can walk and talk, so the motor functions are a-okay; I know my name, address and telephone number (on reflection, that last one’s a toughie though; after all, I’ve only had it 17 years), so another day without dementia, but, well, the little things just go butter side down.
First up; I read DVD Savant’s nicely rendered review of The Fallen Idol. I hop on over to the Criterion website and read: “The Fallen Idol was the first of three masterpieces to result from the legendary meeting of director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene, who together would also create The Third Man and Our Man in Havana.”
Okay. So I do two things - I fire off an email to Glenn Erickson to congratulate him on his review (it was a good review, deserved a pat on the back, it’s the least us watchers from the sidelines can do), then I tell him of my fervent wish that Criterion would release Reed and Greene’s Brighton Rock. I then go back to Criterion and snippily tell John Mulvaney, with the greatest hauteur I can manage, that they musn’t think much of Brighton Rock in view of their comments in the notes on The Fallen Idol and would they pul-lease consider it for release. Y’know. John Boulting’s Brighton Rock. And not the one by Carol Reed. Which he didn’t do (as you well know). Ouch.
With deepening horror I realise my schoolboy error. Which Glenn points out me as gently as he can in a return email, because I am either (a) a mental defective and must be kept at arms length or (b) …well, to be honest, there is no other possible explanation, so we scrap (b). Criterion don’t answer. I assume that even now the mythic Mulvaney is applying for a restraining order.
I knew that, honestly, I bloody well knew that. I can flap my arms and repeat that a zillion times, but it still doesn’t stop teenage film students (the lowest form of life) from pointing at me, guffawing and slapping me with rolled up copies of Sight & Sound. Look guys, I bleat, it’s just that I’m on one of those days when my brain is on a work to rule; it’s a ‘lower brain functions’ only day. One of those, ‘let’s just keep this sucker alive and no more’ days.
Mid-way through the afternoon, I post at the DVD Forums about the 2-disc Network version of the R2 Black Narcissus. A gorgeous, gorgeous disc, as in singular, because there is no second disc. It hits me like a bolt of lightening several hours later, and I have a track down a similar post I’d made on a different forum a few days ago. In fact, I can’t remember which bloody forum, only that I’d made one. Phew, made it, edited both posts, and no-one pulled me up. My secret is safe.
I have the damned Network Black Narcissus, I know it’s a single disc. I can count (all the way up to two on this evidence). Only my brain doesn’t. Not today.
I have form for this kind of thing. There are loads of crass errors I could point to, but for some reason, I recall two particularly clearly. I once mixed up which scenes were in colour and which were monochrome in Lindsay Anderson’s If…, even though I was pontificating about it as if I was some sort college lecturer (it’s not so bad; I’m pushed now to recall. But, hey, I was nurturing a reputation here…), and I remember typing some rubbish in some film forums thread (about silent films), about Fritz Lang’s M. Easy mistake to mix up silent movies with subtitled ones isn’t it? Especially when your brain goes on an away day to Inverness without you.
It’s hard work trying to cultivate an on-line persona as some sort of bleedin’ cinematic know all, when you, it is apparent, can’t tell your Boultings from your Reeds. Years of hard work trying to convince people you’ve never met (and who could care less) that you actually know something, to establish a cyberspatial rapport, undone in a few key strokes.
Not my fault. My brain wasn’t plugged in today…but shush! Let’s just keep it between ourselves.
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