wherefore art thou, insomnia?

wherefore art thou, insomnia?
pulling them lids up on my peepers
to catch the first crusty rays
of hateful sunlight
blaring on the back of the drawn curtains
like a fist of glorious light
streaming
over a radio crackling
and cheerfully droning
through its seventh hour
of reassurance that
there is surely no hope for humanity

for one second i get a dream
here or there
and then you pull me up again
like a shoe off hot gum
the sun melting my beautiful repose
till it hangs down off my heel face
in long gooey strands

Making sense of the Predator series.

Making sense of the predator series isn’t that easy because there are a lot of contradictions and problems related to the temporal continuity of the films.  A lot of these problems come from the fact that, at a certain point, the Predator films were merged (kind of) with the Alien films.  Since the first point of contact between humans and "aliens" takes place in the distant future and the first contact between humans and predators takes place in the present (well the 1980s), any attempt to understand how exactly the timeline works is going to be a waste of time. 

I'm sure that there was some attempt to explain these matters in Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predators, but I don't remember what the explanation was exactly.  Still, it's worth saying something about Predator (and Alien) because beneath the sprawling parasol of these two series are some of the best and worst movies ever made.

Timeline:

1979 – Alien.  Pauline Kael wrote a beautiful review about this film and explained that what makes it so scare is the amount of time spent by the director simply letting the audience get to know the dimensions of the space ship that the lead characters are on.  The advantage of this is that it gets the audience into the claustrophobic gloom of the ship and allows us to begin to see the psychological cracks between the characters before the real horror begins.  This way, then it all does begin, we truly have a sense of how trapped these people are. 

The other good thing is that the horror builds up very slowly and because the species is so incredibly unfamiliar (yet really cool in its conception) we have no idea as viewers exactly what it is that is going on.  The alien just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

As a side note, this is the first movie I ever watched on video…but that's a story for another time (although it's a great story).