fine whine

There's something worse than having an extraordinarily deep pile of work. It's knowing that there's an extraordinarily deep pile of work that's not quite ready to drop on you yet, and there's nothing you can do about it either way*.

* So there.

So today is the eleventh of September, a date to which has been given great significance here in America. If not for the recent destruction of New Orleans I'm sure there would have been more attention given to the annual rending and gnashing and whatnot.

Well, I'm not interested in gnashing nor rending. I'm aware of what happened in 2001, and it was indeed a tragedy, and I'm aware of what happened two weeks ago, and that too is a tragedy, but having an opinion of the events is about the extent to which I am involved with either, and that's about it.

So let's talk about escapist cinema. Tonight I finally saw Highwaymen*. The movie is as bleak and sparse as the highway that sometimes sets its stage. All of the dialogue is treated as though capital "I" Important, with some of the more obvious foreshadowing clichés.

Readers not interested in plot spoilers should skip a ways down, to the part after I mention how there's this guy killing people in an old El Dorado and there's this other guy who chases him in a Barracuda, but somebody else shoots the murderer at the end.

So there's this guy killing people with Cadillacs. The opening of the movie is an artfully shot (by which I mean "gratuitous use of slow motion and fast cuts mixed with over/undersaturation") and introduces us to Rennie Cray, yet another version of the unshaven, sullen-but-determined character that Jim Caviezel seems to play most of the time. He watches his wife (and a bag of citrus fruit) run down by a speeding, swerving maniac in a Cadillac. Fast forward five years and suddenly we're beset by angelic voices. Is this the score? Are we hearing the chorus because something significant or action-packed is happening? Alas, we are merely hearing some random choir practicing.

They practice on the stage in "Orchestra Hall". The city is never named, nor the highway, and so forth. It's obvious that the movie was shot in Canada well before the credits confirm that fact. The camera follows Molly (Rhona Mitra) out to the front of the Hall, where after a brief conversation with "Boone" (sorry, but the name just sounded silly when she said it) she hops in an old Mazda with her friend Alex (Andrea Roth). As the plucky little hatchback pulls away and eventually into a tunnel the Ontario license plates are visible. Oops. They'd been chased by a speeding and oddly menacing El Dorado and, already spooked, aren't ready for what scares await them ahead.

This town has a tunnel, and our ladies find it to be a scene of confusion and carnage before long, with upturned trucks and a spooked horse inside. One driver is obviously very hurt, and Alex runs out to get some help. Which, we all know, is a major movie mistake: never leave the main character alone and go for help (fittingly she's wearing a red shirt). She is hit by that menacingly "winking" Caddy (one set of headlights is not lit, though later the bulbs are in fact missing. I guess the continuity guy wasn't watching the car that closely) and dies a bloody death, but not before getting her friend Molly close enough to the car for the door to swing open and her snapshot taken with a bright flash. Somebody shows up, she escapes, and the next morning the cops come.

We meet Will Macklin (a familiar Freddie Faison), a state traffic investigator (for a state never named) who, surprisingly enough, isn't nearing retirement. He of course lives through the whole picture.

Actually, come to think of it, there aren't many deaths in the film. The opening titles use accident photos as a background and many are quite graphic and gory, but only six people, by my count, died during the proceedings; one off-screen (presumably) and another two or three times over in various flashbacks.

At its core it's a chase movie, a revenge thriller that puts the pedal to the metal and leaves it there the whole time. More or less, that's it. Back to the movie. Will finds Molly at the scene, Rennie finds her sleeping in the hospital, and Molly meets Will at his office, where it is revealed by some convoluted exposition that her family was killed in another accident. Well, that just sucks.

Will makes sure to mention that he doesn't carry a gun nor has he shot anybody. Idle chitchat, or foreshadowing? Only time will tell.

Molly is next shown as the only person wearing a brightly colored outfit amongst accident survivors in a sort of therapy session. The leader begins with "Here in America..." and I missed the rest as I laughed, having already seen the Ontario plates and guessed where "here" really was. Next we find Rennie and Molly engaged in some harmless banter in the hallway, and then some stronger words and intimidation that bring Molly to the point of agreeing to meet Rennie for a ride after choir practice, but as he waits for her then she is helped into an aging Saab by the aforementioned Boone, and the two drive off. Rennie is left to have a brief Adam-69 (two cars, facing opposite directions so the drivers can talk... it's fake cop lingo) with Will who is inexplicably also at Molly's practice, despite being a pretty sorry baritone. Rennie speeds off in his 1968 Plymouth Barracuda and Will can hardly keep up with his X-files surplus Ford Crown Victoria. Rennie gets away, and we cut back to Boone and Molly just before they are catapulted sky-high by a feat of leverage few square-fendered road yachts could hope to match in the real world. The sorry Saab soars and once it comes to rest Molly is shocked to find not only that Boone is likely beyond help, but that the madman has attached a tow chain, and she is soon being dragged at great speed in the upside-down Swedish coupe.

This sequence is quite cool looking, especially when Rennie appears, the knight in shining steel. He bashes off his door, and after some jockeying for position grabs her from the (now flaming) car. Immediate danger averted, he spirits her off to a convenient junkyard, where he will reveal to her his dark past (and thus his drive for vengeance), patch up her wounds, convince her to help him catch the guy, and find a new door for his car. Before that, though, we are treated to a ("Roger"-free, oddly) CB conversation, with closeups of an LED bar grafted onto an old CB radio to give some sort of visual effect to the scene.

Why they replaced the needle gauge that usually is there is beyond me, other than to punch up the visuals. Over ninety percent of the viewers wouldn't notice, and those who did probably wouldn't care. I'm not entirely certain that I care.

So some more stuff happens. In the sensitive moments in the junkyard office we learn that Molly "can't drive" because of the accident that killed her family.

Any time you hear an "I can't" or "I've never" or "I won't" or "I don't" in these movies it seems that the speaker "can" or "will" do what needs to be done, and this one is no different. It's a cliché, but apparently it works because this was the second movie in as many years to use that idea (the other was the dreadful remake of Taxi with Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon).

In that sequence we also learn that Rennie didn't just watch his wife get hit. He hopped into his Mercedes and chased down the killer Caddy in another artfully action-packed and effects-laden chase culminating in him t-boning the killer, totaling both cars and our antagonist. Rennie spent three years in prison and Fargo (somewhere along the line we learned his name) got 18 months in the hospital and re-hab being built into the near-cyborg that now roams the roads.

All of this of course builds to the tense final confrontation, but not until after Rennie sways officer Will to join him on his vigilante quest. Near the end he (and the camera) looks up to reveal an engine hoist or something else cross-shaped, and one can but wonder if he has any Christ-figure parallels in this movie as well.

Jesus always struck me as a Mopar fan, you know.

I really enjoyed watching Highwaymen. It's silly, and high-concept, and implausible, but it takes everything at face value and runs with it full throttle. Sure, director Harmon and his cast probably are capable of much, much more, but for what it is, it does well enough. Car chase fans and cheesy thriller buffs alike should give this a watch, if for no other reason to see something of a new take on age-old conventions.

* When first I saw the trailer for this, I thought it was a joke. I can't now recall the DVD that had the trailer for this, but it was a spoof or at least a comedy, and it didn't seem out of place on the disc to have absurd trailers for a fake film or two. This one just seemed so unreal, so contrived that it couldn't be real: In a world gone mad, two men speed around in 70s muscle cars, linked by killings and one woman who might just be the key to bringing the murderous streak to an end.

Well, it turned out that the film did in fact exist, and moreover to be available from my library. I reserved it, and, well, you can figure out the rest. Seeing as it was, in fact, really a movie, it has an AMG synopsis fraught with, well, one error. Matthew Tobey writes:

The culprit, it seems, had his heart broken by a woman long ago and now copes with his grief by hunting down and killing random women, using his green 1972 Cadillac El Dorado as his weapon.

As Caviezel's character explains, the homicidal maniac was the son of an insurance claims investigator who had been exposed at early age to gruesome accident photos. Growing up he transitioned from collecting the gory sights to staging them himself. The reason he only kills women is never explained. Likewise the reason he apparently always drives Cadillacs, as seen near the end in one or two shots of the dead cars in front of his motel. Some things, I guess, we were just not meant to know**.

** And some things aren't known by other people too. The subtitle authors for the DVD apparently weren't aware of what a Hemi was, nor did they have the script to work from, as Rennie's 'Cuda is described as "heavy" and not "Hemi" for the exceptionally large and powerful hemispherical-headed engine. "Heavy" indeed.

So much for my company's supposed security. Despite keeping us from our personal email* and desktop wallpaper our network and computers were compromised today. Apparently a hole in the plug-n-play service built into Windows 2000 was published recently, and, despite a fix appearing not long thereafter from Microsoft, our workstations were not prepared for the onslaught. Apparently in the last day or two some fourteen variants of the same exploit have been worming their way around, and it hit my computer at about noon. As far as I can discern all it did was to shut down my computer, but others didn't fare so well (one had all of her emails erased. Lucky her).

I, of course, assumed that the NT ADMINISTRATOR mentioned in the shutdown notice (which admittedly didn't look familiar) was someone in the I.T. end of things, and they were going to come after me for my custom wallpaper and unapproved software. When I began hearing cubicle mumblings about viruses and shutting down I paid attention, and slowly the rumors spread about a virus outbreak.

Of course Zotob and RBot and the others are technically worms, but who am I to argue? Some of my coworkers don't quite comprehend computers the way I do.

You see, I sought out a fix, and found the aforementioned Microsoft hotfix. I put it on a floppy and set out to find as-yet-uninfected computers to vaccinate. I gave the disk to somebody and she put it in the drive, and then asked me, "Now what do I do?". Immediately I realized that my instruction of "Run the one file on this disk" might've been insufficient so I walked her through the three click process.

Of course, less than half an hour later someone official wandered around telling us that we don't in fact need to turn off and unplug our computers (from the "blue cord" only, they'd said) but instead just reboot around 3:45.

Naturally the rumors had begun around 1pm, and there were many, many empty cubes for an hour or two while rumor and reality clashed. In the end we're all back up and running. What is really amusing is that there were whole departments of people unwilling to heed the hearsay and stubbornly kept working. Here they had an opportunity to socialize for an hour, and they turned it down. I don't know who's crazier, them, or the people supposedly securing our computers.

* Even Gmail (via https) is now blocked. Somehow they've even managed to plug that hole, much to my chagrin. I still have some tricks up my sleeve--and my own wallpaper, not theirs--but dammit, I shouldn't need to try and beat them. We should all be on the same side here, and naturally it should be my side. Stupid policies.

So I've been thinking. I may have been overly critical of Herbie rides again before when I wrote that it was "so ridiculous it’s not even funny". Bearing in mind that it was created to appeal to children (and grownups with a sense of whimsy and fondness for VW bugs), I managed to find a couple noteworthy points here and there.

It does, in fact, have some subtle touches that can go unnoticed unless you're paying attention. Early on, when we first meet Willoughby Whitfield (Ken Berry), we see clues to his zen-like aloofness whereby he is not flummoxed at all by Herbie rolling onto his foot. His utter nonchalance at his foot pinned under the car's tire betrays a total inner calm, an otherworldliness that allows him to be neither concerned about his toes being squashed or anything like that; nor does he think too long to determine that somebody must've left the parking brake on, leaving the little car to roll just far enough to stop him in his tracks. For him to take something like a car rolling itself around, over a foot, on what looks to be level ground, without questioning too much, must be a sign of his true enlightenment.

But Herbie rides again isn't just about enlightenment. It's about redemption, too. When sort-of-sentient streetcar #22, laden with Mrs. Steinmetz's (Helen Hayes) possessions, hurtles down San Francisco's famous hilled streets, a drunken rancher, in a ten-gallon hat, who looks to be passed out from a couple gallons of booze, hops on for a ride. Sobering slowly but amiably, Mr. Judson (John McIntire) strikes up a conversation with the knitting widow, and before long they are fast friends. They are also fast heading into the bay, which provides more of the tension than anything between them, sparks-wise. It isn't until he appears later at her firehouse, heroically wielding a firehose in her defense and otherwise protecting her and her ersatz fortress, that he truly shines. He's actually a rough and tumble guy, ready to fight for his woman and his rights, no longer the washed-up drunk we saw when first we met him. Willoughby goes through a similar arc, from being pushed around (he calls himself a rabbit) to pushing back, and in like fashion Nicole (Stefanie Powers) transforms from judgmental hothead to sentimental sweetie, but neither in so quick a timeframe as their cowboy pal, and more predictably so.

Also, I think that cinema in general needs more scenes of groups of suited lawyers being chased, whether by Beetles or otherwise.

So it has more than I had, at first, thought going for it, but when I weigh everything I like about it against everything I don't, the latter wins out. The bad stuff is just too bad to outweigh the good. Take the DVD cover, for example. Disney must've thought that the car, with Ken Berry perched in a silly pose atop it and Stefanie smug inside, flying in front of the Golden Gate must not have conveyed well enough the sense of whimsey, so an artist added big blue doe eyes to Herbie. Girly looking doe eyes, I might add. This is entirely unnecessary! A VW Bug is already rather anthropomorphic, Herbie doubly so, and for this sequel to apparently need to stress that is a sign of desperation or something worse. It's another extraneous addition that only compounds the rest of the extra (bigger, better, more) junk that outweighs what really made the first film so fun: its heart. Not gags. Not more sentient machines, just heart.

And footage of fast cars*.

* This may be the reason they found fit to include, as a dream sequence for Herbie, several minutes lifted directly from the first film.

This dream sequence was much better executed than Alonzo Hawk's (Keenan Wynn), wherein he is first chased by (obviously model) Bugs with chomping toothed hoods and then encircled by feathered-headdress-wearing, tomahawk-chopping mini Herbies apparently readying to burn him. Other cheesy model sequences in the film proved less silly but just as distracting, as though they couldn't afford a convincing enough scale model and instead opted for what looks like a dime store toy. Even as a kid I think I knew it was faked.

I'm not sure I can ever trust somebody capable of making "Hi" a polysyllabic word. Why is that?

Instead of my usual exciting start of the workday, this morning I was up bright and earlier, and just sitting around. In fact, I sat around from about eight thirty until just before noon. I was waiting around because Jessica was having foot surgery.

I miss out on all the excitement.

She got through it fine, by the way. With the anesthesia she didn't even know it was happening until it was over.

I, on the other hand, was forced to endure those three hours more or less awake, in the waiting room with nice-looking (i.e. expensive) chairs that weren't all that comfortable for long term occupancy and a television blaring the Fox News channel.

The channel gets a bad rap, I guess, but by not having cable and not watching television in general, I don't run into it very much and haven't formed much of an opinion. From what I've heard their programs are rather abrasive and biased or worse.

Today was a special day, though, and instead of their regularly scheduled programming the channel seemed to be in live crisis mode.

To be honest, the last time I even saw more than a channel flip's worth of Fox News they were in crisis mode, back in September of 2001. They haven't gotten any better at it.

This morning's crisis was across the pond, seemingly a re-hash of the mass transit bombings a fortnight ago. From what I heard, that was quite the tragedy and many lives were lost. All in all, a bad thing. And that's about the extent of my feelings about it. Call me callous or self-centered or whatever but what I feel won't change one bit of those people's lives for the better (or the worse).

But that's last week. Today's crisis was seemingly a series of diversions, detonators detonated without explosives exploded. Of course, at the beginning, we didn't even know that much.

When we first arrived in the waiting room the screen was showing street-level footage of cars, buses and people, interspersed with a map of downtown London with one or two tube stations marked.

Two hours later, that map hadn't changed except that the arrows now pointed to little blue red and white Underground icons, not just points on the map. Woo hoo.

Of course they weren't just showing the map; they also had rivetingly boring footage of the same streets over and over. Occasionally they framed a British station, complete with its own ticker, clock and other eye candy, inside their own ticker and so on. The footage was the same, just an extra border or two.

The real action was in the voiceover. The 'host' was talking to anybody he could find, apparently, some on the scene and others just watching the show. He was asking the people such hard hitting questions as "What do you hear?" and "Do you smell anything?"

This focus on the senses struck me. Obviously there was nothing they could show us, so was this an effort by the news folks to get us to somehow experience some of the chaos and confusion? Difficult to say.

An oft-repeated litany was "We don't know". Nobody seemed to know anything for the hours of the broadcast while I was there. Some people had smelled and heard odd things, and some reported seeing a suspicious tall African American or Asian wearing a hoodie with wires hanging out the back. He eluded the bobbies, but the news people, despite knowing nothing about him other than that "tall African American or Asian wearing a hoodie with wires hanging out the back" so they just repeated that over and over, like some kind of moronic chant, an invocation to call this suspect out of hiding.

That was the main thing that bothered me: they had nothing to tell. Live coverage is only significant if something is happening, and largely, during the hours I heard the show, most everything was unknown or under control. It is a testament to London's emergency response teams that most everything was buttoned down and everyone largely safe.

Anyway, I didn't stick around long enough to get any real facts, so I don't know what actually happened. And you know what? It doesn't matter. Very little that happens in the subways of London is affected by me and what I know, and very little that happens there affects me. I know that terrorism cannot be tolerated anywhere, and it is important to know that something has happened, but I don't need a play by play, especially when nothing's happening.