Clown Ear, Bikes, and Movies

I've got a case of Clown Ear. Some kind of tiny bug-like creature bit me yesterday and this morning when I looked in the mirror, I noticed I had Clown Ear. Big and red. Oh how I laughed.

This is just the kind of thing what happens in the summertime...when the Clown Flies are abundant.

Lesa and I have begun a weekly tradition. We've decided that during this summer we would bike to the movies every weekend. The route to the Cinemark is about four or five miles I think. It is almost all entirely on the Northampton and Norwottuck Bike Paths. We'll ride along with the ghost trains through the backyards, over the river, and through the asparagus and corn farms of Western Massachusetts.

Is there a more summery thing to do than to ride your bikes to the movies? To come out of the movie, feeling hollow from popcorn and wincing in the bright stark day light and heat? Not really.

So far we've done it for two weekends. But we'll try to do it ever single week, if possible (rain, trips out-of-town, locusts etc.), and see a movie no matter what kind of junk they are showing.

This Saturday we saw You Don't Mess With The Zohan. We weren't expecting much.

Let me just say, I like Adam Sandler. I know some people can't stand him, others think he is all jock humor or whatever. I like him. I like his movies. But, I'm pretty easy to please - especially when it comes to dumb comedies. So I try not to recommend them to people unless I know their sense of humor pretty well. Then after I recommend the movie I get nervous that they will hate it.

I know someone who recommended Club Dread to her fellow office workers and was greeted later with jeers. Comedy is a very varied thing. So I am not going to recommend Zohan but I am going to say that the first 45 minutes or so were freakin' hilarious. You know....to me and Lesa anyway.

If you are curious about this movie despite being totally turned off by the previews for it. I recommend this interview with one of the writers Robert Smigel. You know Smigel. His credits include Saturday TV Funhouse and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. He wrote this movie along Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow. - It's actually a good interview even if you don't care about the movie. It gives some nice background on Steves Carell and Colbert.

My secret to enjoying most all movies? I try to go into every movie with a desire to love it. I don't want to be won over by the film, I want to already be on the side of the film-makers. Some movies I enjoy purely because I can sense how much fun it must have been to make the movie. Besides, I just love sitting in a cool darkened theatre. I enjoy the acoustics even before the movie starts - I revel in the way the carpeted walls suck the echoes out of my ears. I take great pleasure in seeing lights dimmed. For the most part, the only movies that I really can't stand are ones that seem to have an ulterior motive.

Take, for example, that atrocity of a mess Armeggedon a few years ago. A summer block buster about huge asteroids smashing into the Earth?! Sign me up, I love that stuff. However, it was just a huge product placement for the oil industry, starting with Bruce Willis driving golf balls off his oil rig at a Greenpeace boat and ending with a team of oil drillers sent into space to demolish the approaching asteroids. That kind of stuff drives me nuts...but the explosions were cool.

Anyway, what's my point?

1.) A movie and a bike ride once a week. Maybe I'll write reviews weekly here.
2.) If you go into a movie cynically or with a desire to be let down, you will be. And hopefully vice-versa.
3.) Clown Ear.