Sticky Things

I like the long Memorial Day weekend. It doesn’t promise too much. It delivers what it does promise. It’s slow and relaxing and the days are longer than your typical long weekend, languorous sunrises giving way to an endless midday, before the drip-drop sunset appears to (but doesn’t really) send the sun into the Pacific.

Speaking of the world’s finest ocean, the weekend was a little too cool for swimming and body surfing. So Laurel and I drove to the high desert, passing the windmills of Palm Springs and the biker bars of Highway 62, before settling in Joshua Tree National Park, where we climbed the sticky rocks, pulled sticky things out of our clothes, and soaked in the clean quiet air of the far away.

Elmore Leonard, a writer who writes books that turn into entertaining movies, once said that the first rule of writing is to never open with the weather. Blogging isn’t literature. It isn’t even literature-with-adapted-screenplay-in-mind. Still, I apologize for not only breaking Elmore’s rule today but crushing it with the four fingers I type with.

Besides the weather, there was a birthday party for one of this blog’s four readers. Today’s the day, Jason, isn’t it? Happy birthday. There was also a visit to the Inland Empire family compound (the Fahmpound), where my mother and assorted relatives live comfortably in a (needlessly) gated community of earth tones and neutral waves from minivans. At least they have a pool. And a dog who strangely doesn’t like the pool. Lucy recoils from its edges, refusing to set paw nor tail in the blue water.

Finally, an-unasked-for recap of my weekend wouldn’t be complete without a mention of one of the more amazing film experiences I can remember: Crash. It’s hard to make a great movie. It’s easy to make a bad one. But nothing is more difficult than setting out to make a well-thought-out, perfectly cast, beautifully shot film about the ever-interesting topic of race relations in an American city, amid a backdrop of Christmas, crime, and family turmoil, and ending up with the worst movie ever made. There have been other well-intentioned bad movies created by talented hands. Just in the past ten years or so there’s been Secrets and Lies, A Simple Plan, Fight Club, Pushing Tin, the first Crash, The Way of the Gun, and Return of the King. But to make a film that rings false in everything it has to say about Los Angeles, features absurdly wooden dialogue that makes even Matt Dillon wince as he forces himself to spit it out, wastes good performances by Don Cheadle, Thandie Newton, and the ever-evolving Brendan Fraser, and telegraphs its surprise moments more clumsily than that writer who doesn’t like talking about the weather, well that takes some kind of talent. And an awkward wrongheaded vision. It takes a Canadian. Anyway, Crash is so bad that I recommend you see it.

To end on a positive note, I think everyone should see Team America: World Police, now on DVD. And everyone should drink Passion Fruit-Mango Juice Squeeze.