True Stories/Stop Making Sense/Demons.

We have cocktails and appetizers at Bar Mingo until 6:40, and I don't want to run the twenty blocks so we take a cab to the theater. Someone with us knows the cab driver. We make it just in time: the girl walks toward the camera down the two-lane road hugged on all sides by fields, great open Texas fields. Byrne begins his narration, introducing the town. His voice is mostly relaxed, with undulations of terrific joy and puzzlement.

John Goodman works in a microchip plant. He wants to find a wife. Sad music causes him to lie down on the floor. He can remember kids' names if they sit in alphabetical order. He dances (there're musical pieces, frequent but spontaneous, for example a great moment has Byrne in a field, reflecting with a real estate agent on the curious nature of housing developments, and as the camera tracks with Byrne a group of kids appear screen right; they carry instruments and burst into song). Goodman is Byrne's traveling companion through this mostly relaxed narrative tapestry (it also has undulations of terrific joy and puzzlement). Byrne's car is not leased, it's privately owned. He's a crazy driver.

It's an easy to like movie. It's critical but affectionate, and it's more curious than critical. It's more perceptive than curious. It's more funny than perceptive.

Ten minute intermission. We avoid security cameras. The movie has started when we re-enter, so we crouch as we cross the front of the theater to our seats. We're front row. I want to dance but I'm too self-conscious about it. There's seriously a dance floor in front of the screen. I notice the guy next to me keeps shaking his leg, and then I notice that I keep shaking my leg. I think that in our heads me and this guy are the purest dancers here, the real dancers. I stop shaking my leg, my theory being that the energy will grow and I will explode into a dance frenzy on the stage. Sometimes in bursts I hear the audience singing along. Sometimes they clap after the songs. I stare at the screen, mesmerized.

On the way back I call a lamp pole a lamp post, but no one says anything to me about my mistake.

We arrive twenty minutes early. The previous movie hasn't let out. We wait on the sidewalk.

It's more gory than I remembered. I try to keep a list of the types of brutality: eye gouging, face tearing, throat slashing, bulging sores erupting with green puss. I think next time I'll bring paper if I want to keep a list of types of brutality featured. Terribly creepy and visceral fang sequences. My favorite moment used to be the helicopter breaking through the roof, but now it's the girl pushing the theater screen with her hands, an effect reminiscent of Videodrome.

I keep yawning during the movie. Am I tired (later, I'll come home and watch thirty-forty minutes of Man of Aran, waiting to fall asleep), or am I bored? Maybe you can't follow Stop Making Sense with Demons. I blank out for about twenty minutes, after the pimp dies.