Wednesday, July 23, 2003

I just got invited by my mate Debs to join Friendster, a 4-degrees of separation networking web site. So, I thought, why not? So far, I have to say, it's been an amusing experience – within a few moments of joining I discovered that I'm linked via only two friends to 41 people (at least one of whom is cute as hell, single and in the UK…).

Friendster is free during beta (like so many of these networking sites appear to be) and works fairly well on a technical level. My only criticism is that it's a bit short on information as to how stuff works, e.g. what exactly does one get if one suggests a match or requests an introduction? I dislike clicking on things if I'm not certain what's going to happen when I release the mouse button.

Another networking site that I've recently joined, after an invitation from Ken, is LinkedIn. That has more of a business bent to it. It's not so much fun as Friendster, but could be more useful in the long term. I've already made one contact through it, so we'll see how that pans out.

For those of you who actually know me, online or off, if you want an invite from me to either Friendster or LinkedIn, just email me and I'll sort you out.

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I don’t want to write a review about Donnie Darko. It wouldn’t do it justice. It would be just too linear. Too done before.

Instead I want to just enthuse. Jake Gyllenhaal, despite a dyslexic's nightmare, is amazing as the eponymous Donnie. There are times, as he gazes up through his eyelashes, half grin on his face, intense and brooding, when he looks just like Malcolm McDowell from A Clockwork Orange. That sense of foreboding, that something really, really bad is going to happen very, very soon.

Then suddenly, an interruption and the moment has evaporated. Donnie is again, just a teenager, albeit a troubled and schizophrenic one. Gyllenhaal’s performance is eerie, almost as much as Gary Jules? version of Tears for Fears? Mad World. The film, Gyllenhaal’s performance, Jules? cover, they’re all haunting, disturbing, beautiful. They’re going to get under your skin and stay there for a long while.

It’s a slow film to start, I’ll admit, but the way that director Richard Kelly rifles through the subjects physics, philosophy, teenage emotional trauma, religion and mental illness without ever skipping a beat, and without talking down to his audience, makes for a captivating watch. The explanation of the possibility of time travel is tossed into the mix without so much as pause, the philosophy of fate vs. self-determination, the question of whether we truly do die alone. There’s no exposition in this film at all, which makes it all the more fascinating.

It’s not often that I see a film where I reach the end and realise that in order to understand it fully, I have to go back to the beginning again. The film is not only circular in plot, but emotionally circular too. As it brings you round to the conclusion that’s the beginning, you find you want to follow the path you know now is set out for you again. You want to stay there, in that loop, forever.

Even if it does mean endlessly dealing with a six foot rabbit called Frank.

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