#thingfromanotherworld

Okay, this is bad. I have the typing fingers of a grandmother clunking away at a keyboard that may as well be from Planet Zork. It has been too long. I am very, very behind on work. I have excuses! Good excuses. You have never heard such good excuses for becoming an unproductive, sloth-like creature who fails to do so much work that she forgets how to touch-type.

See, the thing is, in the last couple weeks I’ve found myself with double the free time as I did in the first three weeks of Uni, so obviously I did half the amount of work. That may not sound like logic in the strictest of sense, but hear me out. For a while, my boss/mother was away so I was working double shifts, doing extra management and bookkeeping duties that I am entirely unqualified for, cramming my homework in between every spare minute I had before coming home late, exhausted and never wanting to cook/have responsibilities ever again, to a hearty dinner of vegemite toast and beer. I may have scurvy, but that is neither here nor there. Point is: I was busy. I was running around like a jacked-up rabbit, twitchy and fuelled by sheer anxiety. And coffee. I was practically snorting ground coffee beans and injecting espresso into my eyeballs.

Dramatic? I know not of what you speak.

Oh boy. Anyway. Turns out, I am a person of extremes. If not sufficiently panicked, my heart beats in time with that of an ageing turtle. And no work gets done. After quitting my job, I lolled around the house like a floppy cat, delighting at all the time I had to do all the work and do it well! Ha.

This is me issuing a wake-up call to myself. Wake up, Jeff! Snap out of it, girl. This sort of thing can happen, it is true, but it’s been long enough. Go for a swim, crack your knuckles and thank those lucky stars of yours that you get to do what you’re doing.

So: Week 4! The Thing From Another World was Hawks! I had no idea. I perked up as soon as...um...The Introduction Man...said Howard Hawks. This man is responsible for two of my favourite movies of all time: Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday. These films are brilliant screwball comedies. Bringing Up Baby has two leopards. Because apparently one leopard does not a screw-ball comedy make. There’s nothing quite so delightful as watching Katherine Hepburn blithely scold a yowling, snapping leopard in her high-socialite drawl. And The Thing From Another World stuck to Hawksian tradition with its treatment of the female lead: She was a cool cat. She was witty, she actively flirted and pursued her boy, she even tied him up, teasing our hero mercilessly as she drank him under the table. She didn’t faint or scream in mindless terror. She didn’t exist simply to be rescued - she played an active role in destroying the monster.

The monster was okay too. Maybe it’s because my experience with Hawks is mostly with screwball comedies, but I reckon I laughed more than I jumped. I think the movie was at its scariest when the monster was a dark blur in a block of ice, a shadow tearing dogs apart. Basically before its 50′s special effects made me giggle. The moments I most enjoyed were really the ‘tension-relieving’ interactions between Nikki and the Captain, but not because they relieved tension - they just created tension of a different type. Wink.

I also really enjoyed this movie because I started picking up on how much it acts as an origin story for later horror and sic-fi movies that I love. Particularly Alien. The scientist determined that the monster was a superior life form? Pure Ash, the demented robot scientist. The way the monster breeds and survives at all costs, not inhibited by pesky human morality? Alien Alien Alien.

I’m going to stop now, because poor Luke has to read all of this mumbo-jumbo and then everybody else’s blogs, too. I really should start cutting down.