Quote of the Week IV

I normally don't like reading books - I don't have the patience, I just find it boring as batshit. But The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is a corker. Interspersed throughout the story are little pieces of wisdom, and this is the one which most intrigues me (I'm reciting it from memory, so it may not be 100% accurate):

"If lightning strikes once, it may never happen again. But if it strikes twice, it will probably happen a third time."

This little maxim is gold for people who like to learn from their past experiences and mistakes, or even just for people who like to analyse. The message is extremely simple, and is based on the old saying "lightning never strikes twice". Crazy coincidences might occur every now and then, but if the same coincidence happens twice, then we can start looking for a pattern.

This lesson is significant to me at the moment because lightning has recently struck me twice. Several months ago, I went out and had drinks with a female. No flirting, but there were a few phone calls and text messages that ensued. All of a sudden, then, I stopped getting replies. One part of me knew that it wasn't beneficial for myself or the other party to continue trying to initiate contact, another part of me could not work out what could have caused such a turnaround. I tried a couple more times, spreading the missed calls out so as not to seem like a crazy stalker. As expected, no reply, no returned call. Later on down the track, I find out that she was under the impression that I fancied her, and this threw her off as the feelings weren't mutual.

Ok, no worries, it's just a one-off thing, don't take it personally - right? Well, right now I'm in almost the exact same situation, at the moment right in the middle of the "stopped getting replies" stage. What caused the sudden 180 this time? I'll probably never know (it was by fluke that I found out what happened last time). What I do know is that lightning has now struck twice, and I've got to come up with ways of preventing it from striking again.

Quote of the Week III

"Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans".

This is a line from the John Lennon song "Beautiful Boy", which was written about his son Sean. A lot of people seem to interpret it as emphasising the importance of planning. To me, this is the boring way of interpreting it. In fact, it is the complete opposite of how I read it.

What I get out of the line is that life is a by-product of our actions, thoughts, our experiences, etc. If you sit down and try to plan life, it won't come, like a watched pot that doesn't boil. But if you're busy doing things such as meeting people, experiencing things, attempting challenges, then life is what comes from that. Another way of putting it is that life only happens when you're caught up in it, when you're a part of the process of it as opposed to sitting outside of it.

But what exactly is meant by "life happens"? I think people who have never experienced life not happening can not fully understand the concept of life happening, because it's all they have ever known. Most depressed people have experienced happiness at some time or other, but there's probably only a percentage of happy people who have experienced depression (that is, the experience of being isolated from life, I'm not just talking about a temporary change in mood).

Right now, life for me is not happening.

Movie Review: Closer

I saw this movie a while back, maybe a few months ago, and I found it extremely good.

This movie, as well as other things in life I've experienced and observed in life, fuels my idea that "lust brings people together, love keeps them together". Dan (Jude Law) seems to be prone to giving in to his lust, he becomes infatuated with both Alice and Anna after having known them for only a short period of time. It was physical attraction alone which attracted Dan to Alice, and it was probably Alice's neediness, and perhaps her promsicuity, that attracted her to Dan. I did get the impression that their relationship was being set up (by the writer, director, whoever) as a flawed one, one which was based on a weak foundation .

Dan then goes through the process of infatuation all over again when he meets Anna, a photographer, and sets her up with a prank, which backfires because it introduces her to Larry (Clive Owen), who would eventually become her fiance (or groom?). Clive Owen is phenomenal in this movie, I think he either won an Oscar or got nominated for one. Anyway, Dan is still infatuated with Anna and despite her engagement with Larry, and his with Alice, he continues to chase after her.

The next part is just fantastic, I love what happens here - basically, everything falls apart. Although we don't see it happen, we are told through Anna's break-up speech with Larry that she's been having a affair with Dan for a number of months. Needless to say, he's pissed off, and Clive Owen just comese into his own. "Did he make you come?" he asks her. "How many times?" And Anna's just in tears. It's a great scene.

Larry, depressed and dejected, visits a strip bar and by chance comes across Alice (who by this stage has been dumped by Dan for Anna), who he recognises from Anna's art exhibition. He asks for a private show, and while getting it confounds her with questions, which she doesn't seem to be responding to very well, a number of which are for her "real name". She insists her name is "Jane Jones" which drives him nuts, because he's 100% sure that this is Dan's ex-girlfriend, Alice. At some point he asks her to sleep with him as well, and we get the impression that she is rejecting his advances. It's a cool scene, Natalie Portman looks damn hot in that pink wig.

We then get a confronntation between Dan and Larry at Larry's surgery, which has been a long time coming, I think it might even be the first time and only time they meet in the movie (not sure on that though, as I said, I saw this movie a while ago). Larry, at this stage, I think has gotten back with Anna, and Dan's not happy. It's another scene where Clive Owen just rips it apart, Larry tells Dan that he's an idiot for leaving Alice, who not only was extremely beautiful and all the rest, but most of all, she loved him. Larry tells Dan that he fucked Alice (presumably on that night at the strip bar, which is odd, because it seemed like she was rejecting him). Dan has obviously finished worse off than Larry, who it seems has come off pretty well - back with Anna, as well as having fucked Alice, although revenge was a big part in him doing that.

Dan tries to get back with Alice, and it seems like all's well again, they're about to make love in the hotel room, but she pulls out after he asks her whether she really did sleep with Larry. She says yes, she did, and when he asks her why, she replies "because he asked me nicely"(haha, if only it were so easy!). In tears, she tells him that she used to love him, but he's ruined it, there was nothing left. Dan's already lost Anna after dumping Alice, now he's going to find out how she felt.

The final scene is a great one, Dan walks past the hospital which marked the first encounter between him and Alice, and most significantly, where he first got her name. He finds out that she was bullshitting all along - her name is not Alice, she ripped it off from a plaque next to the hospital. We then see "Alice" heading overseas, and shows the customs guy her passport. Her name? Jane Jones.

Reading other reviews on the net, it seems a lot of people were put off by the explicitness of the language - the characters are extremely open about sex, especially when they lose their cool. Larry's internet liasion with "Anna", that was pretty explicit as well. But that's one of the things I loved about the movie - it's realness. It doesn't sugercoat anything by skipping over the gory bits. At the same time, though, it's not showing gratuitous sex, the purpose of the heated dialogues and explicit language is to add to the movie's emotional intensity, not to arouse the viewer.


I really loved this movie. It's not only superbly dramatic, but it makes you think. What is love? What is it's relationship to sexual attraction? Why is Natalie Portman so hot? Hard questions to answer. My rating for the movie: ****1/2 stars.