While Keypressed = False

It’s Saint Patrick’s Day! This is the first time that I will be noting this holiday here, as this is also the first time that I got reminders on the net before the event instead of after.

@@ I finally got to watch Day Breakers last night, after hearing a lot of good reviews about it online, and these from local people whose opinion I admire at that.

I guess that is one of the advantages of living in a provincial area, that there is a slight delay for non major blockbusters from their time in the theaters in the metro and the theaters here.

And to think I was planning to watch this while my best friend from college was still here in the first weeks of January.

Anyway, here is another vampire concept turned on its ear, but in a good way not like – never mind.

Vampires are the dominant species in this setting, and humans are like cattle (a term that, I think, they did use in the first Blade movie) but endangered threatening a famine with their extinction.

Except that one of them, Lionel Cormac, played by the awesome Willem Dafoe (who also played a vampire in Nosferatu and in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, showing his range in portraying different kinds of bloodsuckers), found a way to revert back to human.

Add to that Sam Neill probably best remembered for his role in Jurassic Park, and Ethan Hawke.

The first reel of the film establishes this premise well with their empty streets in the daytime and a city come alive at night, vampire children hanging out in the streets smoking, coffee shops claiming 20% blood content, the existence of a sub-walk connecting all houses underground for daytime travel and warnings given as to the immediacy of sunrise.

It was great to finally see the undead showing fear at a shaft of sunlight through a bullet hole again.

And the movie even tries to answer some of its own questions it poses, such as what happens to a vampire that deprives itself of human blood, and what happens to a vampire who, in desperation, drinks his own or another vampire’s blood with visually arresting answers.

That is, instead of chucking established vampire mythos out the window in the service of a damsel in distress scenario.

* I realize this late that I have to write the date here given the inconsistency of automatic time stamps when posting to thoughts dot com. Well, it is not so much inconsistency as not being able to take into consideration the possibly different local time zone of point of origin from the time zone of the host site, or that feature is not working properly.

** I also tried to finish writing this last night. I started, but given I woke up at 2am yesterday, last night I finally gave in to the threat of gradual drowsiness at moments of inactivity throughout the day.