why doesn't this happen to people all the time?

I was driving into the sun. I couldn't see the signals without nearly blocking them out with my hand. There were dark streaks on the pavement--those must've been people. Those driving towards me, I realized, would never guess that those of us driving the other way were nearly blinded. To them, we just looked exceptionally well-lit. I slowed down, afraid I would run into one of them. I wished for sunglasses, and wondered why is the light like this in winter?

I'm becoming convinced that "it's always darkest before the light" is a convenient distortion. Isn't it always lightest when it's darkest? Fall kills all the leaves, and they glow warmly in the cold before dropping off entirely, removing all obscurity but the bare limbs. Whenever I go outside it's pure glare--the cars are white flares, even the nearest mountains are nearly the color of the sky. If it snows, the ground becomes painful to look at.

I couldn't see the speedometer because it was all green. When I finally turned off from that street perfectly aligned with the sun and arrived at my brother's house, everything was still green, as it is, as if the leaves are haunting us (it's all about the trees, clearly). But it would sound strange to mention after-images. What can one say but hello?

Thor: The Jumpy World

The main thing about Thor is: he jumps. Like a yellow lab tethered to a stick, he's flung as much as he flings his hammer--an object of which he "will try to be worthy." I have a sketchy feeling there's something reversed about that, but I'm certain that villains stop thrown objects. Hence the hero's motivating envy, because his life is all topsy-turvy. Thor hops between planets more impulsively than we hop between countries. He appears behind a woman with a magical umbrella to shelter her from the storm that follows him around (a bit troubling, I know). He, ahem, crosses stars to save the damsel he sneaks up on. His brother, the ur-trickster, is no help. It's not even clear the writers know what he wants.

Meanwhile, what kind of story is Thor in? At first I thought (with glee) he was in a princess plot. His stern, battle-scarred father (so stern he has to speak in tedious implicatives to say anything kind) wants him to have a practical marriage to the warrior princess (an obvious choice, as she appears to be the only female warrior in the nine realms, and indeed, one of two non-mortal females). But he doesn't love her, daddy. Sadly that is not the story. There is a kind of metaphorical rape-revenge plot, which seems totally thoughtless. Jane gets unwillingly invaded by a malevolent liquid called "the ether," which makes her faint, turns her eyes black, and violently dispatches anyone who tries to touch her other than Thor. For half the movie she's just wandering around asking "how do I get it out of me?" Once the evil elf man sucks it out of her, somehow it becomes power to wield instead of burden to bear. Hm.

Is that the story? There's also a caper. The gang of vaguely recognizable warrior-buddies rescue Jane, free Loki, and dash off through Loki's secret passage. On the way there, one of the gang turns it into a pirate movie for five seconds, swinging by rope from one ship to another. There's also a few minutes of Star Wars, all pwee-pwee dogfight and destructive sperm trying to enter a well-protected sphere. And some grave Peter Jacksonesque mythological backstory, complete with CGI battles with elves. By the way, about the ether, Thor tells power-hungry Loki "you cannot wield it."

Fittingly, the overarching plot becomes in the end about the colliding of worlds. Things fly wily-nilly in and out of portals. Thor is in his element, jumping around blind trying to stop bad things. In this case, he must stop the elf from bringing about that venerable standby of diabolic plots: the destruction of the universe. This vampirically pale man has plunged his dagger-like ship smack in the middle of Greenwich, like a burning cross, or a to-scale Google Earth pin. Because with a flourish lifted from Ancient Aliens wingnuttery, all the great wonders of the world point to Greenwich. All the portals float overhead there, variously inbibing and disgorging villain, henchmen, hero, sidekicks. It does seem the logical aesthetic climax of such a mishmash of tones and genres. It felt much like a firework: a bunch of sparkles and pops, accompanied by a concussive bang and a dispersal of glowy bits.

To be honest, I would prefer the barriers between worlds didn't collapse. Thor and Jane are more bearable when they can't reach each other. The pining shakes them up a bit, and for that short moment they have pathos, even if it can only be signified by a black cloak or a half-hearted date. When they meet, the instant affection runs an iron over them. I think this long distance thing is working just fine for them.

Enough Said

The title gives the impression of a movie fed up with speech. And its dialogue feels driven by pity for speaking. There are few lines whose comedy is seperable from the empathetic cringe they induce. But are words really the issue?

The warp of the movie is awkwardness, the weft, aggression. When Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) blurts something blunt, she gives a shot of color to a surprisingly drab California cloth of mildly painful fake warmth. The pain is nothing more fantastical than everyday interpersonal drain--that seemingly impossible rule that, contrary to Paul McCartney's maxim, the love you take is just a little bit less than the love you make. As a messuse, Eva gives the strength of her hands and in return she puts up with her clients' unwelcome intimacy. They babble, they groan, they have bad breath, they don't offer to help her with her massage table up two flights of stairs. The debt is repaid in money, as it tends to be. The math may not work, but it has to.

(One needs a hand massage to give a hand massage.)

More than a decade later, I still remember Ben Bova's Mars for the dust. It got into everything. Well-marinated in their own granular atmosphere, these are not characters that connect. The closeness of Eva and Albert's (James Gandolfini) dates is just close mutual scrutiny, with a bit of irony to make the lines they're drawing around each other bearably sketchy. Their flirting is somehow composed of anti-play, that substance that can be found in children's assessments of their peers.

Throw a few of these miserable couples together, and we get an exchange of cheery bile (a dinner party). Every pet peeve is aired; everyone lives up to their cariacature.

But Enough Said performs a jaw-dropping feat of instrumental delusion. I have too strong a desire for truth-telling, so I was revolted, but I have to congratulate the movie's one act of imagination. It might live, after all. Relationships are only hard because they can be "poisoned" by too much critical talk. It's true that once criticism gets rolling, it's hard to stop, but here there's a convenient scapegoat: Albert's ex wife, who has aired everything she couldn't stand about him. It's perfect for Eva. She gets an actual person on whom to offload all her negativity. She doesn't have to partition herself.