More summer photos

 

Summer Movie Rentals

The Devil’s Rejects is about a psychotic family – the dad is a skuzzy, creepy clown – who inhabit an isolated country home from which they run a thriving torture/killing enterprise. The film is indefensibly violent and bloody, but I think Rob Zombie intended it to be viewed as satire. In a review of the horror film The Hills Have Eyes, Roger Ebert wrote that he admired two things about The Devil’s Rejects: (1) that it desired to entertain and not just sicken, and (2) the depraved killers had personalities, histories and motives. In comparison, he explains, the mutants in Hills are simply “engines of destruction.” 

Locking Horns

 

How foot-friendly is your neighorhood?

Here’s another interesting link I got from Bob Congdon’s blog: Walk Score, a site that uses street addresses to calculate the most pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods. What a terrific idea for house hunters looking to cut the cost of commuting by car, or, if I may, curb the cost of curb appeal, by relocating to a home that’s closer to commerce and other conveniences. Of course, you probably have some idea of your neighborhood’s walk score. If the blocks are really long, or nearest grocery store is 20 klicks away, then you live in a vehicle-oriented neighborhood. In downtown Redmond, I can run most errands – from returning a dvd or library book to grocery shopping – within the compass of five blocks. We wouldn’t consider getting rid of our car, but it’s so nice to be able to forgo driving in bad weather, or if we just have to pick up a prescription from the phramacy. What’s more, our neighoborhood is "walkable" and "bikable": it’s flat, and the network of bike trails is impressive.

The first time I tried to calculate our neighborhood walk score, I got an error message that the Google Maps limit had been exceed and that I should try again in an hour. I’m not sure what’s up but I tried again a few hours later and our neighborhood scored in the 90s.

Face Recognition

When was the last time a friend compared you to an acquaintance or well-known person you thought only remotely resembled you? Bob Congdon posted the link to the MyHeritage.com site, which makes available a face recognition product that matches your uploaded image to celebrity “lookalikes.” I laughed out loud looking at the famous faces matched against his portrait, especially considering the significantly different palettes proposed for the two, nearly identical photos he uploaded.

I tried it with Tiggy and Gabby. Tiggy’s first mix of celebrity lookalikes included Anna Nicole Smith and Dakota Fanning.

http://www.myheritagefiles.com/acollage/H/8_2/lq3k30_341892eb686a642nkli330

http://www.myheritage.com

Tour de France Fever Invades Redmond

Wait, aren’t they…cheating? I guess that’s cycling for you.

Summer Picnic in North Bend

This weekend, we went to a summer picnic at Mountain Meadows Farm in North Bend, a bucolic, poetic city with Mount Si as its backdrop.

While the focus of the picnic was clearly on kids and families – inflatable moonwalks and slides, sandboxes, rides and games  abounded – there were also a slew of activities for adults, including a wine and beer garden, a climbing wall and volleyball. The long lines to try out some activities were off-putting, especially considering all the natural beauty to take in as we chased our toddler around. Tiggy, by the way, enjoyed the bouncy house, sand pit and all the Radio Flyer bikes in the giant play area. He also ate salmon and enjoyed his first popsicle.

There was no live music this weekend, which was just as well, our friend Adda thought. In the afternoon, I heard some tinny noise coming from speakers on the other side of the farm, confirming that we were better off without the acoustic confection served up by sound stages competing for an audience. 

The weather was warm, but there was lots of natural, comfortable air conditioning, powered by the canopy of tall evergreens surrounding the farm. It’s so nice to live in Western Washington.

Your Movie Sucks

Your Movie Sucks is a collection of negative reviews written by one of the most objective movie critics. The films on the list that I have seen all merit Roger Ebert’s "thumbs down" rating: a lot of them made the Rotten Tomatoes Worst of the Worst list or some other ranking of notably bad films. They include films inspired by popular video games (Resident Evil, Doom), some nihilistic "wrong gas station" horrors (Hills, High Tension, Wolf Creek) and a slew of action films telling implausible tales. He compares Wolf Creek to Three…Extremes: "Wolf Creek is more like the guy at the carnival sideshow who bites off chicken heads. No fun for us, no fun for the guy, no fun for the chicken."

Roger Ebert isn’t settling scores or being mean on purpose to showcase his creative writing: some of these films either intentionally tasteless or bad on purpose and would probably attract their target audience regardless of the review. Instead, he explains what goes wrong – like a remotely plausible plot or character – often referencing similar but far more successful films to make his point. Reading his reviews was a lot more fun than sitting through most of the films he wrote about.

Happy Feet

Warner Bros released an animated film inspired Tiggy’s favorite toy, Gloria. I was weary of renting Happy Feet because so many animated movies are just so full of themselves, and because Luc Jacquet’s documentary La Marche de l’empereur; The March of the Penguins, about the Emperor penguins in Antarctica, struck me in such an intensely personal way. Given how few films we see that are truly moving, I didn’t want to have that powerful feeling watered down by a feel-good animated film with a hero. But I had to give in. Every time we went to the video store, we’d inevitably walk by a wall of Happy Feet DVDs and Tiggy would start shouting “Wah-Wah, Wah-Wah!”* I sat through Happy Feet twice – or at least parts of it – and discovered two things: Gloria played only a supporting role and the film has an environmental message.

 

* translator’s note: "Gloria, Gloria!"

The Other Notebook

Against my better judgment, I took out another romantic melodrama from Hollywood Video last weekend. The Notebook recounts the love story between a working-class local boy (Noah) and a rich girl on vacation (Allie) in a seaside town in the 1940s. An old man in a nursing home reads the love story aloud from a notebook to another resident, whose name is also Allie, and who is suffering from dementia. The story weaves back and forth between the codgers in the present-day nursing home and the storybook romance that sparked some 60 years earlier, and as the narrative progresses, we make the connection between them.

The Notebook plays out like a Tour de Gorge Competitive Eating contest that serves up cheese as the main ingredient.  I really got into it at the beginning but halfway through, I needed to surface for air. Some of the sequences are so cheesy, it’s as if they had been taken from a checklist of scenarios that are supposed to get audiences all choked up. A guy stops a ferris wheel to get a girl to go out with him. A girl in love laughs uncontrollably while savoring ice cream. And every story has its villain. In this one, it’s Allie’s controlling, high-society mom who schemes to split up the young couple. Noah overhears the mom explaining to her daughter that a lowly local lad has no place in an illustrious future. The couple reunite some seven years later and embrace tearfully and fervently under a torrential downpour. The water drops hit the ground with a force of their unbridled passion. Allie attacks Noah for not writing to her after her departure. Noah retorts that he wrote her every day for 365 days and that for him their romance never ended.

I wanted to know why Allie didn’t write, being so literate, romantic and strong-willed. And why did Noah, drenched from the rain, carried able-bodied Allie up the wooden stairs of the plantation house that looked like it had a 12-foot ceiling. How romantic would that have been if he lost his footing?

Despite all the sappiness, I was moved by the film’s message that love brings hope and that it can work miracles. That made the film worthwhile.