I've been having connection problems lately, so I'll hope this posts. The other day I finished reading Gratitude. Yesterday I emailed Joe some thoughts I had on the book, and he emailed me back promptly thanking me and offering some encouragement. He also said that earlier in the day, Tim O'Brien had emailed him some praise. I had just finished reading O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" yesterday, so it was a neat coincidence. I also re-read Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", which is a phenomenal piece of unsettling work.

I've been keeping a low profile at home, hanging out mostly with the folks, which my mother seems to appreciate. We watched The Bucket List last night. I've been thinking for quite some time that I'd like to launch some sort of review website where I do quick and dirty reviews of films, records, books and such. Just a hundred words or so each, more for my own personal benefit than anything else.

Radiohead's show at the Molson Ampitheatre might be a great starting point. I've been looking forward to this for awhile. It'll be my second time seeing my favorite band.

The Dark Knight was the third film I've seen in an IMAX theatre (outside of documentaries), the first two being The Matrix Revolutions and then 300 last year. From the opening aerial shot of Gotham that pans down lower into the buildings and streets, I lost my breath and didn't get it back for the rest of the movie. "Action-packed" doesn't come close to describing it - the film relentlessly navigates from one harrowing section to the next in an effort to turn your brain inside out over questions of morality, ethics, social propriety and the stability of the forces in the world that people trust. As for Heath Ledger, he gives an unearthly performance as the Joker; a more sadistic, disturbed character has never surfaced in a comic book film. His real-life death casts an incredibly haunting gravity over the entire film as it juts back and forth between poetry and tragedy. And although Ledger's performance is getting the greater focus, Aaron Eckhart's character arc is the best in the film - he is the textbook definition of a tragic character starting out successful and losing everything. The way they set up the Two-Face character is GENIUS and makes the comparison between Tommy Lee Jones' portrayal a complete waste of time. The movie is two and a half hours long but you don't want the characters to go away. It ends on the perfect note to introduce the next film, which can't come too soon.

It's a movie I've been looking forward to seeing for a very long time. I've kept up with the viral campaigns and trailers, greedy to see that next shot of the Joker. To see him brought to life on the screen the way Ledger did is to experience one of the great performances in movie history. Everything came together beautifully and unfortunately.

Yesterday I picked up some books I'd ordered from Amazon, but I'm returning one because I ordered the Spanish version of it by mistake. Also in the package: a couple of books on writing and reading, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. I started reading Joe's book, Gratitude, and got a bit of writing done. Right now I'm at Andrea's drinking coffee. We grabbed dinner at the Royal Oak last night and crashed at her place.