Daysleeper

Hello readers. It feels like an age has past since my last entry. I can put that feeling down to the familiar effects of sleep deprivation (having not had a good nights sleep since last Thursday). The late nights over the weekend were through socialising, which is a slightly better reason for not sleeping than the usual pointless acts of procrastination I am apparently addicted to.

I seem to be handling it relatively well; although I do occasionally come to the realisation that I have just been swept away on a daydream. Afterwards I always become paranoid that I may have been talking to myself, but as nobody has started to avoid me at work I’m assuming I haven’t gotten that bad just yet!

That said; my short-term memory and concentration are beginning to deteriorate rather quickly. So tonight I will be going to bed early, and if sleep doesn’t come naturally my housemate has a mallet!

The weekend was a fun filled few days of vodka, geekery and a pretty awesome Australian Grand Prix. It’s good to see Jensen Button land a victory, and hopefully we will get a few more this season. He has made a few mistakes in his career, but he is a quality driver and deserves more (in my opinion). Yesterday evening I went to see Knowing, starring Nicholas Cage and directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City and I, Robot).

In 1959 a group of school children load a time capsule with drawings of what they think the world will look like 50 years later. In 2009 the capsule is opened and the contents distributed amongst the current class of children. Caleb Koestler, the son of MIT Professor and Astrophysicist John Koestler (Nicholas Cage) is handed a sheet of paper containing line after line of numbers. The numbers appear random, but John soon uncovers a pattern, realising that the numbers show the time and place of every major disaster since 1959, three of which have yet to occur.

What then follows is the journey John undertakes in attempting to save lives and come to terms with his almost existentialist beliefs (that there is no grand meaning to life; it is all merely the result of millions of random occurrences), could be wrong and that every event is predetermined by a higher power.

Overall the film was pretty good, in fact I though the first half was fantastic. I expected it to be visually pleasing, having seen most of Alex Proyas previous films; and I wasn’t disappointed on in that aspect. The disaster sequences really made an impact, especially the first one. But I began to lose interest rapidly when the truth surrounding the “whispering men” began to unravel.

I don’t want to spoil it for anybody that hasn’t gotten around to seeing it yet, so I’ll not go into any further detail. Suffice to say my personal views don’t agree with the ending. I’d have found it better if the film ended when the event foretold at the end of the sequence of numbers played out.

It is definitely worth watching, and I think I’ll probably buy it n DVD to watch again; because despite not agreeing with the side of the argument the film takes, it is well made and entertaining.