Sleeping, THE 400 BLOWS (5), and FISHING WITH JOHN (5).

My life is actually, surprisingly, fairly busy these days. I've got two jobs, write for a variety of unpaid blogs, and try, to some degree, to have a healthy social life (i.e. drinking and carousing with ladies). To try and get all of this done, I've been attempting over the last two or three weeks to cut my need for sleep to a drastic level. I'm hoping that I can some pull it off so that I sleep somewhere between 4-5 hours a night and still, in the hours that I'm awake, be an uber-functioning work/drink/carousing machine. Thus, my ideal time schedule would be every day to wake up at 7 in the morning, thus giving me three and a half hours before I have to be at my coffee shop job and go to bed anytime between 12 and 2.

Oh the glorious amount of work/movie watching I could accomplish in this perfect schedule ... unfortunately I'm fucking terrible at it. I set a certain amount of things I want to accomplish each night, and end up zoned out in front of the television each night watching America's Most Haunted Homes on the Travel Channel or something equally retarded. I end up half-awake in my squeaky leather chair trying to remember what I was supposed to be working on ... inevitably I throw on a movie of some sort, pass out in my chair and wake up at four in morning with a painful neck crick. Then comes the awesome part, trying to wake up at 7. I have three alarms set (and seriously I don't know how I found it by I have the most annoying alarm ever, somewhere between a bird chirp and broken car alarm) one at 7 (this is what I refer to as the fantasy alarm - the one I set so I know I can sleep a little bit longer), one at 7:30 (this is the actual alarm, the time I'd like to wake up at, eat some breakfast), and one at 8:15 (this is the damn, I overslept, but I still have time to do shit alarm). Almost always, I wake up at 9:15 in a storm of cursing and pillow punching, completely annoyed that I slept through three alarms and accomplished nothing.

I'll get better though ... I hope.

The 400 Blows is a pretty amazing movie that I've sat through a few times in my journey of Criterion discovery. It's the first movie in Francois Truffaut's (a name you'll be seeing a lot around here) in his Antonie Doinel quintology. The series tells the tale of Doinel, a troublesome kid who sort of stumbles through life, talking to girls, smoking cigs, and generally causing mild strife. It's a beautiful black and white New Wave piece, Truffaut being one of the masters, and if you've ever been a sort of rambunctious troublemaker of a kid, you'll a lot of yourself in Doinel. This has one of my favorite tracking shots of all time, as the camera follows a confused Doinel as he escapes school runs down a path and then on to a beach. I'm describing this poorly, because it's hard to describe, but I highly, HIGHLY recommend the film. I couldn't be more excited to dig in to the next four films ... if I ever get to the high 100s ...

Fishing With John (42) is a series of sorts, so I'm clamoring through one or so a day. It's really brilliant though a sort of artsy take-off of cheesy fishing shows featuring John Laurie, a hilarious sort of broken-nosed basketball player looking lounge singer, and a variety of his often confused guests. My favorite so far has been the first episode with hipster-god Jim Jarmusch, but seeing Laurie interact with Tom Waits and Matt Dillon in Jamaica and Costa Rica is pretty hilarious. Especially when Laurie and Dillon, decked out in like Goodfellas style Hawaiian gear try to ride horses through the jungle. It's like if my douche bag friends and I somehow got a hold of a camera from the 1980s and decided we were going to put together a weekly hunting documentary. Sure, one of us would probably die from a misplaced shotgun blasts, but we'd probably shoot some hilarious idiocy in the process. So, if that sounds funny (which I can't imagine it could) you'll enjoy this film.

Tomorrow: Beauty and The Beast (6) and Fishing With John (42)