A surprise Bay Area visit from Lauren meant that Monday night she and I got spectacularly drunk and proceeded to terrorize any male that came within a hundred yards of us. And then there was the dancing...

Wednesday night Aimee and I went to the Parkway to see Insomnia, but we had severely underestimated how many people would be there on the evening before a holiday. Fortunately Amélie was playing upstairs. Aimee hadn't seen it, and I didn't mind seeing it again. Everything you've heard about Amélie is true: it's a charming, delightful confection that makes your heart swell with warmth and good feeling. It also depresses the hell out of me, mostly because love in this movie is either complete fantasy or doomed to failure. Neither option gives me much hope. Right now I much prefer the world of The City of Lost Children.

The Fourth of July was a marvelously relaxed, unpatriotic affair at Aimee's house where a group of us sat around and charred some meat. Later that evening Patrick and I watched Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis, pausing the film only briefly to watch the fireworks from his balcony. Metropolis itself is pretty damn amazing, easily one of the most visually staggering films I've ever seen animated. The themes in the story are familiar to anyone who knows Otomo, or Lang, or Gibson. In a strictly regimented society, one man attempts to use technology to overcome the ghosts in his past and take over the planet at the same time while a brave soul or two struggle to stop him. The joy of Metropolis is watching this tale play out against the rich backdrop the animators weave.

Saturday evening I talked Aimee into accompanying me to the Brainwash Drive-In/Bike-In Movies Festival, an annual short film and video festival that occurs in unique locations around the Bay Area. This year they set up a screen in the parking lot of the Alliance for West Oakland Development, a delightfully urban setting right between a freeway onramp and BART. We were the first ones there, so we set up our camp chairs right behind the projector and read trashy magazines until it was dark enough to show the films. I loved Giorgio Rossovich's "Beethoven's Fifth" and Jim Granato's video for "Carbon Copies" by indie pop band Brando. In "Thought Bubble" Billy Greene artfully turns the story of a homeless man into pure art with his stop-motion animation. Greene's inclusion in the festival is especially poignant as he was recently shot and killed in front of his home in nearby Emeryville. Unfortunately, the Brainwash projection equipment was plagued by technical difficulties this particular night, and Aimee and I finally succumbed to impatience and the cold a little over halfway through the festival. As we sped up the onramp on our way home we saw that they'd finally gotten the next film to play. It looked really cool, but we weren't turning around.

Cloud Factory Design Collective
Amélie
Metropolis
Brainwash Movies Festival
Billy Greene