Waking up early

This weekend has been an attempt to get myself on an early-bird schedule, since I have to show up for jury duty at 8am tomorrow.

Happily, for no reason I can understand, I woke up at 6:30 in the morning yesterday. Tired, but pleased to be up in a timely manner.

Today, for reasons I can understand quite well (alarm clock, natch), I woke up at 6:30 in the morning as well.

Am reading another Journal submission. I'm having trouble reading past all the little things (missing citations, some odd capitalizations) and not-so-little things (footnotes that read "cite so and so here", or "review stats on X") in this one, and keeping my eye on the larger point. It's more of an interdisciplinary work, too.

*Yawn*.

There is a moment

There are several moments, in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs (I have The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs on DVD, but haven't seen The Village, or the new one that's out now), that are just amazing. Night does a lot with silences, and I like that b/c life is full of silences, and they're just as important as everything else. Just as filled with portent. Large swathes of life happens in the interstices of things, you know.

It helps if you have actors like Phoenix. There's this moment, when Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) turns (this is a non-spoiler description) after something Graham (Mel Gibson, in a major, major, non-lazy performance -- hey, he put it that way in an interview, that Night didn't let him get away with being lazy) says, right before -- well, I'll stop there. And there's this almost trembling in him, this near fear of completing the movement and facing or realizing what it is that Graham is telling him.

There's a lot of stiff bodies and arms-at-sides throughout Signs, which may just be an artifact of Night's emphasis on stillness, and then this explosive power matched by an explosive emotion as the climax of the film.

How, as a director, Night manages to ratchet up the tension higher and higher and higher throughout that film, is simply incredible. I mean, its the third, fourth? time I've seen this film, and it still gets me completely.