At the risk of starting another thread . . .

[glthompson]

This is at best tangential to anything Pynchonian, but I managed to see
_Time Code_ last night, and have to recommend it to the list if it's
around in your area. Unfortunately, since I'm in east-central Michigan
and anything not mass-market disappears quickly, it's gone from here,
and it may already have closed in larger cities. And it's _not_ a film
to wait to see on video.

Tour de force: the screen is split in four and (once it gets started)
there are four separate stories featuring interconnected characters,
more or less in an Altman mode. Mike Figgis, the director and writer,
takes things further, however, by having the camera in each quadrant run
nonstop, uncut! At times there's a transition and you see the same
character from two views, but mostly there are separate portions of the
narrative going on. (At several points in the narrative there's an
earthquake and all four cameras shake simultaneously.) Volume tends to
come up in one portion at a time, and action tends to be slow or routine
much of the time, so that following or constructing the narrative isn't
as difficult as it sounds.

I suppose there's a Pynchon connection somewhere. It reminds me a bit of
the late von Goll part where he's filming reality nonstop and thereby
dismissing any distinction between fiction and reality (at least in his
mind). The quartered screen and plot structure seem to me to shift away
from a narrative centered on one character in a linear fashion, more or
less as happens in book 4 of _GR_ with Slothrop torn into fragments,
supplanted by divergent threads.

Gary Thompson