MovieMonday: Girls Trip

There wasn't much new to watch at the movie theater this weekend, unless you wanted to see "The Emoji Movie."  I didn't want to see the that movie, and so I saw "Girls Trip" instead.

Ever since 2009, we've had bro-friend and girlfriend group movies.  Personally, I've see "The Hangover,"  "Last Vegas," "Bridesmaids" and, now, this one.  

To its credit, "Girls Trip" does more to establish the loyalty of friends to each other than its predecessors ever did. 

The plot is this:  One of four college friends, very successful, is seen as the next Oprah and has written a book called "You Can Have It All."  When she is asked to give the keynote speech at the annual Essence Festival in New Orleans, she invites the other three to join her.  They quickly learn that she does not, in fact, have it all, and they form ranks to protect and help her.  

It's a vulgar comedy -- zipline pee jokes, grapefruit oral sex jokes, male nudity and absinthe-induced hallucinations.  Scenes like these now are expected in this this type of film;  The audience in my theater understood this and enjoyed the film enormously.  

After I got home, I went back and re-read the plot synopsis from the first of these, "The Hangover."  It's much, much more crude than "Girls Trip," and it has more than a whiff of misogyny to it.  

On the upside, serious actresses including Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett Smith are in the ensemble, and there are snippets of musical performances (Ne Yo, Diddy) from last year's Essence Festival.  A new-to-me actress, Tiffany Haddish, stole scene after scene playing Dina, a fiercely loyal friend with no dimmer switch and seems to destined for fame as Melissa McCarthy was after her star turn in "Bridesmaids." 

Note

Movies like "Girls Trip" are not just formulaic -- they are shaping the culture.  For the second year, I am some months in Nashville, which has acquired a regional reputation as the go-to spot for bachelorette weekends, prenuptial bonding events for brides and their bridesmaids.

Recently, the local paper described how a 20-year-old company, NashTrash Tours, has stopped accepting bachelorette groups for its smutty, alcoholic entertainments.  Turns out bachelorette groups misbehave too much for the NashTrash people.

FWIW, bachelor groups are not banned.   They seem to behave themselves better.  Also, I never have seen an African American bachelorette party in downtown Nashville.


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The Cold Shoulder and Other Fun Terms

The old cold shoulder

Yesterday we spoke of the new "cold shoulders" in fashion.  Now let's discuss the term in its historical context.

I'm not sure I ever have used the phrase "cold shoulder" in speech or, before yesterday, in writing, but my previous understanding always accorded with its definition in the American Heritage Dictionary.

To “give someone the cold shoulder” is to ignore someone deliberately: 

“At the party, Carl tried to talk to Suzanne, but she gave him the cold shoulder.” 

This term has a long history.  Before the 19th century, English scholars speculated that its origin suggested that hosts would greet favored guests with a hot meal but that less welcome visitors would be served "the cold shoulder," presumably of mutton.  Admittedly, such a cold shoulder does sound unappetizing.

But etymologists -- experts in word derivations -- have for many generations rejected this as unsubstantiated folklore.

Extensive research has concluded that Sir Walter Scott was the first writer to use the term, and in fact used it twice, in two of his lesser novels. 

Here is the first reference, from "The Antiquary," published in 1816:

"The Countess’s dislike didna gang farther at first than just showing o’ the cauld shouther".

Anyone who has read any Shakespeare can deduce the meaning here.  (And, yes, it has been established that, for Scott, "shouther" meant shoulder.)

Eight years later, in "St. Ronan's Well," Scott affirmed the meaning of the term with this:

"I must tip him the cold shoulder, or he will be pestering me eternally."

Ergo, the word experts say, Scott invented the phrase.  Personally, I wonder; obviously it is possible to track down printed expressions in surviving texts, but previous common usage in speech cannot be deduced because there are no records to examine.  

Anyway, the phrase went viral, at least in nineteenth century terms, appearing several times in Charles Dickens' writings and jumping the pond to appear in a letter to the editor in The Bangor (Maine) Daily Whig and Courier in 1839:

'... eminent individuals and his cabinet advisers turned "the cold shoulder" 

to their ambassador, for his independent act upon this occasion.'   

So there.  

But the whole meaning of the term flipped nearly 200 years later, probably when one or several fashion editors applied it more literally, to describe garments with bared shoulders, as in, if you wear a such a shirt outdoors in November, your shoulders will be cold.   

From there it was off to the races (an idiomatic expression meaning, sometimes, a trend gaining in popularity) and now everybody, or at least every fashion follower knows the meaning.  This description has replaced the 200-year-old one, at least for the moment. 

Sic transit gloria grammatica.

(Note:  I am beholden to the phrases.org.uk website for its discussion of the evolution of the phrase "cold shoulder.")

Words of the Moment

English is an unusually elastic language, particularly American vernacular.  In the last century we have learned that "Twenty-three skidoo" means to leave an event hastily, that "Jumping the shark" means going too far with an idea or theme and that IMHO, AFAIK and other acronyms are shorteners for generally understood text messages.  New words seem to be coined on a daily basis, and perhaps more often than that.

Just yesterday I learned this new one: "stan," which seems to be a mashup, as in, STalker+fAN=STAN.  A stan is someone obsessed with a particular celebrity, and by celebrity I use the term loosely to indicate someone who is famous but not necessarily for any particular reason.

I also learned that the word can function as a verb.  In this usage, a stan may decide to "unstan" a previously favored celebrity.  

This happened when a major Kendall Jenner stan decided to unstan the model/whatever on Twitter at the first of this month.  You can follow the very, very long thread of support for the unstanning if you wish.  I haven't spent much time thinking about Kendall Jenner myself, but this event has rocketed around the world, gathering news coverage from here to South Africa and many places in between.  

It appears that all the cool kids are giving poor Kendall Jenner the cold shoulders, and I don't mean sweaters with holes in them.

Cold Shoulders in Fashion

Here is a new piece from the Donna Karan New York fashion line.  It is a knit top with what are called "cold shoulders."  The name describes the skin exposed by cutouts between the tops of the sleeves and the body of the shirt.  

This look is now very popular, as you can see from a few of the many cold-shouldered offerings in this year's Nordstrom Sale catalog, which previews fall and winter trends. 

Other fashion retailers are trying catch the cold-shoulder wave by attaching the term to somewhat different looks, including the ones below.

The distinction to be made here is that these are not so new.  Single-shoulder and off-shoulder women's clothes have been around forever.  

For my purposes, cold shoulders are knit shirts and dresses with two cut-out shoulders.

And Donna Karan started the whole thing 25 years ago.

Donna Karan and Cold-Shoulder History

Karan broke out as the designer of the moment in the late 1980s with an urbane New York aesthetic -- low-key, cool and sophisticated -- that offered a stylish look to career women who were sick of boxy suits and who also wanted clean-lined evening clothes without silly frills and furbelows.  Karan has remained true to that view ever since.  As a fashion figure, she remains a big influencer. 

Here, from 1992, is possibly the first cold-shoulder look, a Karan number worn by super model Christy Turlington.

HIllary Clinton wore a similar Karan dress for a White House gala in the early 1990s. 

Then the cold-shoulder thing seemed to disappear.

Twenty years later, Karan took it up again, as seen in this photo promoting her fall winter 2013-2014 collection.  (The picture is from a series shot by Mikael Jansson. It features a model visiting a hunky sculptor's studio at night.  Very Karan, that.)

Also in 2013, Karan released this gown.

This time around, the cold shoulder look captured the public imagination and provoked imitations.  

Here, for instance, is Lena Dunham wearing a cold-shoulder dress at a 2015 event to kick off the fourth season of her popular HBO television show, "Girls."

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this dress was not designed by Donna Karan. (My guess is that some stylist told Dunham that vertical stripes would look good on her and that Dunham perhaps took the advice too much to heart.)

So cold shoulders are popular now.  One retailer ventured a reason why that may be so:

"The shoulder is the only part of a woman's body that doesn't age."

That may be true, but I'm not buying it in this case.  I've been seeing more and more cold shoulders lately, particularly in the three airports I visited (twice) on a recent weekend.  The women wearing those shirts and dresses were mostly young and won't be worrying about aging body parts for at least 20 years.

At the moment, cold shoulders are new and a little different but not in a wacky way.  They're a way to update a wardrobe of plain-vanilla shirts, sweaters and basic dresses.

My personal advice:  Go ahead, and invest in this trend.  Choose something knit and in a normal color, and wear it often for the next year or so.  

Then we'll be on to something else.  

Next: Cold Shoulder Etymology

MovieMonday: Dunkirk

"Dunkirk" starts at a seminal moment early in World War II -- when 400,000 British and French soldiers have been driven by German forces onto the last scrap of land before the English Channel.  

Traditional Dunkirk stories focus on how the English rescued most of those men, how the Allies rallied from there to fight another day and how the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, pledged his country to persevere until the war was won. 

This movie takes a different view, that of the trapped soldiers who understand they are vulnerable to infantry and armored tanks behind them, to naval bombardment in front of them and to bombs and bullets dropped and shot from airplanes above them.  

The movie is not a war story but a story of survival.  

The soldiers are virtually indistinguishable as they dive into the sand, hands covering their heads, when bombers and fighter planes appear overhead.  They wait in endless lines for rescue ships that take too long to arrive.  After the soldiers have boarded the ships, they try to block leaks created by bullets that have pierced the ships' hulls.  As ships sink, they jump to escape and then dive underwater as fuel slicks on the surface catch fire.

These struggles are the meat of the movie, which was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the talented Englishman best known for the blockbuster Dark Knight Batman trilogy.

Interestingly, this film is light on computer-generated imagery but generates more in the way of suspense and dread than the usual horror or superhero movie because it feels so real.  

Several recognizable actors play low-key parts around the edges.  Mark Rylance ("Bridge of Spies," "Wolf Hall") is a civilian who pilots his personal boat across the channel to assist in the rescue.  Kenneth Branagh (Shakespeare, etc., etc.) has less to do as an admiral who stamps up and down a long dock and scans the horizon with his binoculars, a concerned look on his face.  

More movingly, Tom Hardy ("Dark Knight," Revenant") is a fighter pilot who chases down German aircraft as his Spitfire runs low on fuel.

The context of the 10-day Dunkirk evacuation is shared at the film's end and without huge emphasis.  Again, it's a survival story, and moviegoers arrive knowing how it ended.

It took the English 10 days to rescue almost 340,000 of the trapped soldiers on that beach in 1940, a great triumph but one that still left 40,000 behind to be taken prisoner and as many as 20,000 dead. 



Notes

--Finlay Greig of the inews.uk website filed a thoughtful interview with historian James Holland, author of "Duty Calls: Dunkirk," who analyzed the film for historical accuracy. Interesting points. 

--It's worth noting, as "Dunkirk" does only very briefly, that many French soldiers also were stranded on that beach.  In fact, French heroism at Lille is believed to have prevented the German Wehrmacht from reaching Dunkirk and slaughtering all the Allied soldiers there. 

--Citizens in the U.K. remain divided about Brexit, which was approved narrowly in a vote last year.  There appears to be some concern that noise about Dunkirk and Winston Churchill is playing into pro-Brexit jingoism.  

My Love-Hate Relationship with Uber

In recent years I have been using the Uber ride-hailing app more frequently.  As time goes by, however, I'm having second thoughts.

Let me count the pluses and minuses.

On the Plus Side

-- During the afternoon rush hour in New York, you can get an Uber to take you somewhere. Theoretically, you could take a taxi, but between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. the taxis are all on their way to Queens to end their 12-hour shifts.

      As I understand it, this is more convenient for the taxi drivers, who like picking up drunks after bars close starting around 2 a.m., which is more lucrative work than helping commuters get home. 

      In the bad old days before Uber, I used to take pedicabs to Penn Station or from the station to dinner appointments, sort of like in Calcutta.  I am not making this up.

Transit innovation, circa 2005, in New York

-- Using Uber is often easier than driving, especially in traffic-choked cities, and also where parking can be difficult to find and expensive.  On one occasion we spent $62 to stable the car during a two-hour museum visit in Manhattan.

-- Uber networks are more extensive than taxi networks in every place where we spend time, including the suburbs and New York's outer boroughs.  

-- Uber drivers are nice.  They are independent operators, and the Uber system of riders and drivers rating each other provides a mutual incentive to be pleasant.  In the last year I have talked with several interesting Uber drivers -- a military veteran, a young drummer trying to break into the Nashville music scene and, yesterday, a green-haired immigrant who grew up speaking Gaelic on a farm in Ireland. You don't meet folks like these every day.

       Taxi drivers, by contrast, are employees and, perhaps with reason, they seem to be employees who hate their jobs.  They expect to be tipped 20 percent on top of the higher taxi rates, even if they spend the whole ride talking on their cell phones and even if they do not help you wrassle your suitcases out of the trunk.

-- Uber is less expensive.  Usually when we have flown from the West Coast to our home in the East, we have taken a cab to the house, 15 minutes away; the cost with tip is about $60.

       One unrelated problem is that these flights typically arrive in the late evening, around the time the sidewalks are being rolled up in our town.  We arrive home to an empty refrigerator and no place to get a meal, which makes me cranky.

       The last time we tried something different:  We took a shuttle to an airport hotel whose restaurant was open until 1 a.m.  After eating dinner, we spent less than half the taxi charge taking an Uber home.  The net cost -- dinner and ride -- was about the same as the taxi ride would have been.

        (Besides the old no-tip policy, the Uber ride cost less because it did not involve airport fees for the local taxi bureaucracy and for two attendants stationed 24 hours a day at every terminal's taxi rank to distribute little pieces of paper telling riders how much their rides would cost.)

On the Minus Side

-- Even after the departure of Uber's lauded and loathsome CEO, the company culture is a problem needing solutions.  You've read about this in the papers, and so I won't say more.

-- Uber does not treat drivers well. Some examples from New York:

      1) The company has cut its rates to compete against Lyft and other competitors.  This may help build Uber's market share, but it's bad for individual drivers.  One told me recently that his income had dropped by half in recent years. 

      2) The company has raised rates for trips to some fancy neighborhoods, but has not increased drivers' pay for those high-revenue rides. This violates the fundamental business premise -- that Uber connects drivers and riders, collects a small fee for the service and then credits the remainder to drivers.  Uber's new we-decide-how-much-to-pay-you policy makes drivers more like Uber employees and less like owner-operators.

     3) The two previous points have led some Uber drivers to act like taxi drivers. Manhattan riders have begun to report that Uber drivers now expect cash tips and down-rate passengers who do not provide those tips.  

--  Uber now allows passengers to tip Uber drivers through the Uber app. I'm not exactly sure why this bugs me so much, but it does.  Fundamentally, I don't like tipping service providers just for not being mean to me.  Also, I like to think of Uber drivers as independent business owners and not low-wage workers whose incomes require gratuities from kind strangers.  Seems more dignified the old way.

      Personally, I'd prefer to pay more for the rides and to skip the tips.  

      And let's face it:  If the opportunity to make tip income were a genuine incentive for better service, surly cab drivers would have cleaned up their act (and their cars) two or three  generations ago.

-- Uber economics favors the omnivorous growth of the company.  It is now one of those firms that comprise what I call Big Algo -- businesses based on algorithms and with enormous valuations.  The premise of these valuations is that the companies can expand far into the non-algorithmic world, counting on ready investor funding all the way.

     With Uber,  the plan was to get out in front of the self-driving car thing.  The company hired an Alphabet (Google) engineer working on the same technology and may have infringed patents to aid in its progress toward the goal.  The long-term plan was for Uber to get rid of its pesky drivers (and, ultimately, the nation's pesky truck drivers) and to manage more and more, and ideally even all, of the traffic on the nation's roads.

     This is grandiosity on steroids, and I don't like it.

     Since Uber began that initiative and got busted for its tactics, our understanding of self-driving technology has been refined.  It appears that there will not be rollouts of fleets of self-driving cars in the next few years but, instead, the gradual incorporation of self-driving technology in new cars.

     

Long story short, there may be hope for Uber.  As for me, I'm running out of patience.

MovieMonday: The Big Sick

Here's a romantic comedy with a good story to tell, appropriate for our day and stocked with often-wacky characters whose behavior flows naturally from their own situations.

You know the plot line:  A Pakistan-born standup comedian meets a cute American graduate student and they fall in love; his traditional parents expect to select his wife for him; the young man tells his love that he cannot break with his family and ends the relationship;  later, the young woman falls ill and then is in a coma;  while she is asleep in the hospital, the young man bonds with her worried parents and they hope for her recovery; yada yada yada.  

Because it's a comedy, I don't think it is revealing too much to say that everything works out in the end. 

Along the way there is excellent dialog, fine humor, nice pacing and much heart.

In fact, the lead actor and his wife went through something similar.  This led the two of them, good writers both, to adapt their story and turn out a charming film about love, loss and culture clash.

This movie's producer is Judd Apatow, whose own breakout movie, "Knocked Up," was much admired as the rom-com of its day, 2007.

I saw that older movie, which I enjoyed, but my recollection is that it was more of a yuck-fest about arrested development.  "The Big Sick" is better, I think, because it taps into richer material -- the deep ties between parents and children.  

All parents approach their children's potential mates with suspicion and a little fear.  They worry whether the chosen one is good enough for the loved child and whether that newcomer will fit in with the established family.  There are concerns about personality, religion, class, geography, ethnicity and race.   Parents understand that marrying the right person is the best guarantor of a child's future happiness.  They take the matter seriously, even when children don't want to grant mom and dad any say in the all-important decision.  

"The Big Sick" navigates these minefields with understandable characters and a story that treats them with generosity.  To do this well and with humor is not an easy needle to thread, but it is done well here. 

If you want to see a movie and are not in a superhero mood, this is a good one to choose. 

A Shark Story

I've spent a lot of time near the beach in several parts of California.  I'm not a surfer, but I've met a few surfers and I've admired others from the shore.

I've also read news reports.  Surfing culture is big in Australia, and there is at least one beach outside Sydney that is described as "sharky."  This doesn't stop local surfers, and I'm not sure that it should.

My aunt is a dedicated scuba diver who encouraged me to get my own certification.  After I had done so, she sent me an internet link to a dive magazine.  One of the stories in the publication was about "shark diving."  I told my aunt that I probably wouldn't be signing up for shark dives.


The Why

Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I swam laps at the pool at my university's aquatic center.  The pool was magnificent, 50 meters long and set on a hill overlooking greater Los Angeles.

A few times that first autumn, as I waited in line for the pool to open on Saturday mornings, I talked with another graduate student named Tammy.  She was in some sort of public health program.  Her plan was to complete her degree and work for a non-profit in Africa.

"She wanted to help people," her mother was reported to have said in a newspaper report after Tammy died.

What happened to Tammy was this:  She and her boyfriend went out in two kayaks one November morning and never came back.

Pieces of their kayaks washed ashore and, later, body parts were recovered as well. 

Tammy and her boyfriend had done nothing wrong, but they were unlucky.  

As they paddled, their course coincided with that of a shark that may have been very hungry or just unusually aggressive.  

The shark's bites broke up each of the kayaks, which washed ashore.  Investigators later retrieved some body parts from one kayaker but none from the other -- I forget which, not that it matters. Both were killed.

This happens, but only very rarely.  Tammy and her boyfriend were not reckless.  There had been no reports of shark attacks in the area in the year before their incident.  Like winning the lottery, the shark encounter was an extremely improbable event that came up without warning.  


Conclusion

To my regret, I never made the effort to find Tammy's mother.  I should have let her know that, even in my few conversations with her daughter, I had come to respect and admire her.  To say that Tammy's death was a loss to us all.

It wouldn't have been difficult.  I could have traced the woman's name, or I could have hounded the newspaper reporter who filed the very brief story about Tammy's death.

I was busy at the time -- taking difficult courses and working part-time to cover the rent.  I may have used this rationalization to justify my inaction.  Or maybe I dreaded facing the extent of Tammy's mother's pain.  

Many years have gone by, and I have taken a single lesson from this incident.

The lesson is not to avoid, or even worry about, sharks in the ocean.

It is to offer solace to the grieving. To tell the families of the dead that their loved ones will be remembered.  That their lives mattered.

There are sharks everywhere -- in the water, on the streets, lurking in our bodies.  The most basic fact of human existence is that eventually every one of us will meet a hungry shark.  

All we can do is comfort each other.

MovieMonday: The Hero

Here's a nice piece of filmmaking, distinguished particularly by its star, Sam Elliott, for whom the script was written.

The story involves someone a bit like Elliott, an actor of the same age who lives in Malibu. But the film character, actor Lee Hayden, has regrets -- a career whose high point is 40 years back in the rear-view mirror, a busted relationship with his only child and, suddenly, a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.  

Hayden keeps the latest news to himself, researching his dismal prospects on his cellphone and putting off treatment.  He reaches out, sort of, to his ex-wife and daughter, but does not tell them why.  He smokes dope with his only friend and, through him, meets an unusual younger woman, who calls him "a sad old pothead" but who likes him and stays by him through some difficult moments. 

The movie proceeds through Hayden's ups and downs -- a recognition ceremony by old fans, a disappointment that he doses with bourbon and mushrooms, an audition for a role in a promising part in a new film, a painful confrontation with his daughter and fantasy moments when modern-day Hayden relives scenes from his single iconic movie.  

All of the action allows us to see Hayden, or perhaps Sam Elliott, as he is:  a tall, lanky, Western hero who wears his age as naturally as his signature mustache.  Watching him listen as other people talk is more illuminating than watching another actor carry his end of a film dialog.  Hayden/Elliott's presence is that compelling.

Many, perhaps most, movies are about young people coming to understand who they are, but people face the same challenge, sometimes many times, in their adult lives.  This film shows us an adult moving through that process in fits and starts, but ultimately with grace. It's worth seeing.


Sam Elliott

For someone who has preferred to work mostly as a character actor, Sam Elliott is pretty well known.  People remember his work as The Stranger in "The Big Lebowski," as Cher's motorcycle boyfriend in "Mask" and as Lily Tomlin's irate ex-husband in 2015's "Grandma" -- among dozens of roles he's played over the years.  

Elliott's gravelly voice is at least as famous as his image, instantly recognizable to anyone who has heard a commercial for Ram Trucks or Coors beer in the last umpteen years.  

In addition to movie work, Elliott has played the paterfamilias in the Netflix series, "The Ranch," which is now moving into its fourth season.  

Stop-and-Stop on the Freeway

Automotive chaos has been on my mind lately.

Last week, I saw "Baby Driver," a movie punctuated by many car chases and collisions. The wreckage incurred in the making of the film must have kept several Atlanta body-and-fender shops busy for months.

 A few days earlier, we had driven from New Jersey to Nashville, a journey that included an unanticipated dead stop of three hours while several cars from two accidents were cleared off a stretch of highway five miles ahead.

This was the first such experience for me, and so I shared it in discussions with friends. Turns out these events are almost commonplace.  

Everybody has a good sit-still-on-the-freeway story.  Perhaps the best one I heard came from a man who with a friend sat 13 hours waiting for snow to be cleared after a big storm on the other side of a mountain pass.

Then I noticed a few press reports, maybe one per day, about highway backups that usually followed truck accidents and that left traffic stacked up for miles and people waiting for hours, sometimes many hours, while the injured and damaged vehicle were moved.

I think the news reports I saw only covered a few such events. These matters have become so common that they aren't all that newsy anymore. The only photos circulated are ones taken with cellphones by bored people waiting for roads to clear. 

Here are a few reports of incidents on freeways known to me in a very short period.

July 7 

In New Jersey, a dump truck overturned at around 5:30 a.m. on I-287 North at Exit 57 near Oakland.  Eventually other vehicles, including a tractor-trailer, a box truck and uncounted automobiles, joined the tangle.

(I-287 is the New Jersey piece of a heavily trafficked New York regional ring road.)

All three northbound lanes were closed for more than 1.5 hours, and then the far right lane was opened.  The press lost interest at that point, but two hours later, toward the end of the amusingly misnamed morning "rush hour," one person reported on Twitter that traffic was inching along very, very slowly at every road near the the exit just before the accident.



July 5
  

A flatbed tractor trailer crashed in the northbound lanes of the New Jersey Turnpike near Exit 13A, which leads to New Jersey port terminals. 

The tractor trailer hit a box truck in the center lane at about 8 a.m., and then both trucks plowed into a Honda Civic in the left lane. 

The box truck and the tractor trailer then hit the left guardrail, and all three vehicles came to a stop.  The big truck's driver was taken to the hospital, where his condition was listed as serious.

        

This also happened during the morning "rush hour." The left two lanes of the roadway were closed for five hours after the crash. 

July 3 

Around 2:50 a.m., a Honda SUV traded paint with a tractor-trailer in the westbound lanes of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  Both men got out of their vehicles, and the Honda driver was struck and killed almost immediately by another passing vehicle.

       

The accident shut down all westbound lanes of the highway between two exits for nearly seven hours Saturday morning.

       

June 30

A Cessna 310 crash landed on the northbound lanes of I-405 just after 9:30 a.m. and burst into flames.  For a time, all 405 lanes in both directions were closed at the MacArthur exit to allow debris to be removed

The plane had just taken off from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, and its right engine had failed.  The pilot tried to return to the airport and, unable to go that far, landed on the nearest stretch of straight road, one of the most clogged freeways in Southern California.  

The plane crashed into the center divider of the freeway, then caught fire before striking the wall on the southbound side. Three vehicles going south on the freeway struck the plane or a part of it, while a vehicle going north struck the plane’s landing gear.  Pilot and passenger managed to get out with minor injuries.

The freeway reopened fully in both directions shortly  a little before 5 p.m., almost eight hours after the crash.

The 405 functions something like a parking lot in the best of times.  This was much, much worse, and it came on the day before the beginning of the four-day Fourth of July weekend.

Perspective

Bear in mind, these events happened over eight days in just three states.  Who knows how many situations like these occur nationwide every week of the year?

What to Do

Reading these reports has been an eye-opener for me.  They have taught me that a little three-hour stop in freeway traffic, like mine, is now so common that it is rarely reported.  Dog bites man, and all that.  I will not complain the next time I am involved in such an incident.

What I will do is pack a meal and beverages before I undertake a drive of any length.  I will fill the car's gas tank early and often.  I also will keep a pillow and afghan in the back seat should the opportunity for a nice nap arise unexpectedly.

MovieMonday: Baby Driver

What you see in this preview is what you get in the movie.  A young guy named Baby is the getaway driver for a gang of gun-toting robbers. He wants to step away, but he can't.  It's complicated.

This is not an unusual plot concept, but its execution here sets it apart from many action films, which by definition are shoot-em-ups, typically with car chases and high body counts.  

"Baby Driver" is different in that it is hip and stylish.  

In the opening scene, Baby drives a bright red Subaru occupied by three fleeing thugs.  He dodges police cruisers, executes U-turns on freeways and eludes at least one helicopter on his way to dropping the car in a quiet parking structure.     

Baby, an unemotional but talented driver with excellent reflexes, manages the escape to the accompaniment of "Bellbottoms," a grinding 2010 song by The John Spencer Blues Explosion.  The scene's choreography would make an automotive Bob Fosse proud.

Next we see another side of Baby.  He picks up coffee and moves rhythmically down a city street as his ever-present iPod plays Bob & Earl's smooth "Harlem Shuffle" in a long, lovely single-camera take. It's great cinematography if you like that sort of thing, which I do.

Yes, Baby lives to a sound track.  This relates to his back story, a sad one, and is the first point on which he connects with the sweet waitress whom he comes to admire.  

The screenwriter/director, Edgar Wright, has done a nice job introducing a distinctive vibe in what ultimately becomes a traditional action film.  My suspicion is that he liked the energetic 1970 Simon & Garfunkel song and wrote a story to use the same title.  

As a viewer, I preferred the earlier parts of the film, but the action genre and its fans require a certain amount of gunplay and a certain body count to be credible.  The film's plot inevitably degenerates into the kind of extended interpersonal conflict necessary to satisfy these needs.  

To be fair, the violent deterioration of the gang is managed well in the plot, particularly with the introduction of Bats, played by Jamie Foxx, who upsets the harmony in the bad-guy team for whom Baby is the passive sidekick. 

The film's script must have been well-received because, in addition to Foxx and Jon Hamm of "Mad Men" fame, it attracted two other prominent actors to anchor its story. These are:

--Ansel Elgort as Baby, whose previous fame relies on playing a noble, innocent, dying-of-cancer teenager in "The Fault in Our Stars," based on a young adult novel of the same title.

--Kevin Spacey as Doc, who runs the gang and organizes its heists.  Spacey is famous now as amoral, power-hungry Francis Underwood in the interminable "House of Cards" Netflix television series.  He will have right of first refusal in any future film involving an evil CEO or Wall Streeter.

Yes, it's typecasting.  But it works.


Note

"Baby Driver" comes with an important playlist.  Here it is:

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – ‘Bellbottoms’
Bob & Earl – ‘Harlem Shuffle’
Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers – ‘Egyptian Reggae’
Googie Rene – ‘Smokey Joe’s La La’
The Beach Boys – ‘Let’s Go Away For Awhile’
Carla Thomas – ‘B-A-B-Y’
Kashmere Stage Band – ‘Kashmere’
Dave Brubeck – ‘Unsquare Dance’
The Damned – ‘Neat Neat Neat’
The Commodores – ‘Easy (Single Version)’
T. Rex – ‘Debora’
Beck – ‘Debra’
Incredible Bongo Band – ‘Bongolia’
The Detroit Emeralds – ‘Baby Let Me Take You (in My Arms)’
Alexis Korner – ‘Early In The Morning’
David McCallum – ‘The Edge’
Martha and the Vandellas – ‘Nowhere To Run’
The Button Down Brass – ‘Tequila’
Sam & Dave – ‘When Something Is Wrong With My Baby’
Brenda Holloway – ‘Every Little Bit Hurts’
Blur – ‘Intermission’
Focus – ‘Hocus Pocus (Original Single Version)’
Golden Earring – ‘Radar Love (1973 Single Edit)’
Barry White – ‘Never, Never Gone Give Ya Up’
Young MC – ‘Know How’
Queen – ‘Brighton Rock’
Sky Ferreira – ‘Easy’
Simon & Garfunkel – ‘Baby Driver’
Kid Koala – ‘Was He Slow (Credit Roll Version)’
Danger Mouse (featuring Run The Jewels and Big Boi) – ‘Chase Me’