Spider Season

There's a William Shatner movie from the seventies in which a town is overrun with spiders. In typically bleak seventies style, the heroes lose: the haunting last shot of the movie is an overhead of the small town completely blanketed by the snow-white webs of the freakish arachnids.

Portland at this time of year is like the first reel of that movie. Spiders and their horrible webs are everywhere.

Yep, we're experiencing Spider Weather.

Set a glass of water down on the picnic table, and next time you pick it up for a sip there's a strand of webbing across the mouth of the glass. Set your bike against the fence and two minutes later it's a vital structural support for a bug-catching web.

Every single day I blunder through at least two webs, often ending up with a recently evicted and none too happy eight legged freak in my hair, or rampaging across the lenses of my glasses. Yesterday, my flailing reaction to this ocular horror sent spectacles and spider sailing from my head. Luckily, both found a soft landing on the welcome mat and the glasses didn't break.

As summer transitions to fall, nature will resolve the issue as it always does, sending the spiders back to wherever they go when it's too rainy to spin a nine foot web across my back yard.

I hope.

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A little, tiny movie

We've been known to make movies, but since baby Elizabeth joined us it hasn't been easy to do. Last weekend we busted out a very quick commercial parody involving Elizabeth, Barb, Aaron, his daughter Lily, and myself.

It was inspired by my purchase of a gaming headset from Turtle Beach. I got it so I could actually hear the video games I play Saturday nights right outside Elizabeth's room. Prior to the headset I'd keep the TV audio so low I could barely hear anything.

The packaging said "Trash talk your friends! For when it's too late to be loud." That makes no sense, of course, as the video illustrates.

However, the headphones are awesome for hearing the game. I really am glad I purchased them. Tomorrow I'll play an online game with friends for the first time with the headset and that should prove interesting.

It was incredibly fun to make the movie, and equally fun to get two positive reviews on YouTube -- including one from Turtle Beach itself which said "LOL 5/5!"

Dang. That's cool.

Movie Review: Speed Racer

The Wachowskis come back with a vengeance after the hideous, moneygrubbing disappointments that are The Matrix 2 and 3. I blame it on Joel Silver, their moneygrubbing producer, who convinced them that artistic bankruptcy was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Anyways, Bound is a great movie, The Matrix is a great movie, and guess what? Speed Racer is a great movie.

Speed Racer is a guy. That's his name. Speed Racer. He lives in a world kind of like ours, but much more colorful, where a popular sport is a type of auto racing wherein the cars are like gymnasts, springing about the track like living things. Somehow the laws of physics are different in this world, so as the 3000 pound cars are flung about, the necks of the drivers do not snap like so many toothpicks. Accept it. The movie is true to its fantasy in that it sets rules and lives by them. The cars are acrobatic, but they have limits, and their moves aren't invented on the fly for the convenience of the script.

You've never seen a movie like this. It is gorgeous. There are clear nods to videogames (e.g. Rex failed to hit the "quicksave") and anime, but the Wachowskis succeed in crafting their own style that's absolutely like nothing you've ever seen before. It's pop art, or I'm Roy Lichtenstein.

I've basically given up on action movies, but I was actually interested in the races in Speed Racer. They're exciting, despite the unreality. Somehow the movie creates a reality that has enough weight to keep you interested while being incredibly fluffy and neon.

Plus, there's fatkid- and chimpanzee-humor, which works, again, better than it should. I was amused by Chim-Chim in a way that I'm not normally by movie monkeys (cf. Cutthroat Island).

And: real actors! Susan Sarandon and Emile Hirsch and Matthew Fox are all fantastic. John Goodman is typical John Goodman, which isn't bad. Chim-chim should get a friggin' Oscar. There are ninjas.

Don't get me wrong. This movie is not for every one. Speed Racer is a strange movie made by strange filmmakers who are real artists taking something idiotic (or so I assume -- I've never seen the cartoon) and making of it something real, something beautiful, something that has a few strong things to say about art and family, and a lot to say about cinema.

Review: Things Change

I used to think it was cool to say, "David Mamet is one of my favorite filmmakers."

Best known as a playwright, Mamet is sorely underappreciated as the director of such awesomeness as Spartan, State and Main, The Winslow Boy, and House of Games. But maybe moviegoers got off to a rocky start with this boring twaddle, Mamet's first movie. Things Change is so dull and disappointing it makes me use grandpaw terms like "boring twaddle."

Don Ameche is, admittedly, kinda charming as an Italian shoeshine guy who gets chosen to take the fall for a murdering mobster whom he resembles (the mobster really resembles James Joyce, but that's neither here nor there). Joe Mantegna (never a favorite, despite House of Games), is the eff-up low level goombah charged with keeping track of Don over the weekend before he "confesses". Joe gets all Last Detail and decides to take the 'shine to Tahoe for a last weekend of fun (i.e. boring hookers and boring gambling). Lack of hilarity ensues. Avoid Things Change so you don't get gun-shy about Mamet, who is definitely great.

Review: Rescue Dawn

This is a surprising movie in a lot of ways. A Hollywood-type movie directed by German weirdo/genius Werner Herzog, for one. A great, nuanced performance by Christian Bale playing not an action hero but a regular guy who probably believes that he is an action hero. Another great performance by Steve Zahn, one of my favorite character actors, playing counter to his normal comic sidekick role. An incredible, based-on-a-true story tale of survival and hardship. This movie is only marred by a coda that is, if representative of what really happened, staged in such a way that it comes off as supremely cheesy, betraying a lot of the feelings the viewer had developed for the main character.

Worth a watch if you like: POW movies, survival against the wilderness movies, Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, or Werner Herzog.