i am destroying this title

For the last two nights, another guy has been working with me on the overnight shifts. I am training him, I guess. I am training him to enjoy movies on my laptop. There is not much work for one person, let alone two. Tonight might be my last night with him. I hope so. He is an alright guy, but I miss being alone. I like being alone. The other guy being there would probably make my mother very happy. It will make her feel safer. She will think that if the store gets robbed, I can use him to stop the bullet.

The other guy's name is Jesse. He has the same name as a friend of mine in Salt Lake City. This friend is letting me sleep on his couch for a week so I can go to the World Horror Convention and meet Carlton Mellick and others. I am now working with Carlton Mellick on my novella. He is my mentor, I guess. There is a very good chance that we will use a different plot and the two chapters that I have written will have to be deleted. I am ok with this. I suck at plotting. It is my weakness. This is why Carlton Mellick is my mentor. Carlton Mellick is awesome at plotting. He helped me with the last novella that I wrote, which appears in the Bizarro Starter Kit (Blue). I really liked how it came out. Carlton Mellick is awesome. It is weird to have a mentor. I do not know how I feel about it.

My friend Jesse in Salt Lake once tried to set my favorite chair on fire by dousing it in beer and lighting a match. Frustrated by his inability to set the thing on fire, he destroyed it by smashing it on the ground. Now I am getting my revenge by forcing him to put up with me for a week. I am laughing maniacally.

I have been renting movies from a movie rental vending machine that they have at the supermarket. I have been bringing in movies that could be described as being "very guy." The first night I brought in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. That movie was awesome! I was surprised how awesome it was. I had heard that it was slow. I had heard that some people thought it was boring. It was neither of these things. It was awesome! It is also very long, so the other guy didn't get to see all of it. I watched the last hour at home.

I did not understand why Casey Affleck received a Best Supporting Actor nomination rather than a Best Lead Performance nomination (or whatever it's called). He played the lead. Brad Pitt was the supporting actor. But I guess since he is Brad Pitt and Jesse James, he got first billed. I don't think he was nominated for best actor though, probably because he didn't play the lead and the Academy Award people didn't want to admit this fact to the public.

The second movie that I rented was 3:10 to Yuma. It was another western. It was also a mistake on my part. I might have liked it if I hadn't seen Jesse James the night before. But I did, so 3:10 seemed like garbage. It seemed pretty mediocre, but when viewed as a whole rather than focusing on all the little details that the movie consists of, it was a pretty good movie. It was a pretty good movie because it was sentimental, but in a very unconventional way. Sentimentality usually makes a movie suck, but unconventional sentimentality is good. It is difficult to come up with a plot with sentimentality that unconventional rather than cheesy fuck crap.

The movie made me a little sleepy. Wes (of Wes' mom fame) called on my cell phone. I did not bother to press pause. I did not care. I talked to Wes for like thirty minutes. Then I went back to the movie. I did not really know what was going on. I lost interest. The movie ended. I asked the guy what the ending was all about. He explained it to me and said that the movie got really good at the end. It made the movie sound really good. I watched the last hour when I got home. It was pretty ok.

There were no more westerns left in the movie rental vending machine. I do not think I'm a big western guy, but I love the movies that Clint Eastwood did with Sergio Leone. I do not like that they are disorienting though. They are disorienting because the American actors (Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef) speak in English, while the Spanish actors speak in dubbed in English. It took my a while to figure out that the movies were dubbed. A Spanish actor would speak and I would think, "Hey, this is dubbed! Too bad. And then Eastwood would speak and I would think, "This is not dubbed. I was wrong." Eventually I would figure it out. I did not like it that way. I think I would have preferred everybody speaking in Spanish originally and being dubbed into English over halfway. I hate dubbing. I like subtitles. Of course, I am not crazy about subtitles either, but what are you going to do to watch a decent movie that isn't made in the U.S.?

The worst dubbing atrocity was this Dario Argento movie that I tried to watch. I think it was Deep Red. Sometimes it had subtitles and sometimes it had English dubbing. The same character would speak in both English and Italian. It often switched mid-scene. Sometimes even mid-sentence. It was very surreal. It was very bad. There was no rhyme or reason to it. The actors are not actually speaking in Italian at one point and English at another. Originally, it was all Italian. I could not finish the movie. I heard that the print's sound got all fucked up, so they had to mix dubbing with subtitles.

Argento wrote Once Upon a Time in Mexico with Sergio Leone. Once Upon a Time in Mexico doesn't have Eastwood, but it has the Death Wish guy. I was a little bored by it. It was very long. The settings were very beautiful though. I think they shot it in the desert in Utah rather than in Mexico. I miss the mountains of Utah. I could see them from anywhere in the city. I would go into my backyard after I woke up and look at them. Massachusetts has mountains, but they are wimpy, covered in foliage, and I cannot see them from my window. I think that foliage on a mountain makes them look less majestic.

I do think Leone's Once Upon a Time in America may be the greatest movie ever. It is a four hour long Jewish gangster movie. It stars Robert De Niro and James Woods. James Woods gets eaten by a garbage truck.

For tonight, I rented Blood Diamond. Leonardo Dicaprio can sometimes be a really good actor. I guess he got a bad rap by being a teen-ish sensation and completely sucking in a few movies. Tonight, I will revel in the manliness of Blood Diamond.