June 17, 1994
Dear Everyone:
“Jeannie” and I went to see
Speed
last weekend. This is your
typical summer action film, based on some impending disaster.
Frankly, Hollywood is running out
of disasters. You can drop only
so many planes out of the sky and then people start to get bored.
Sinking ocean liners and burning
buildings are old hat. Earthquakes,
storms, floods and sundry other
Acts of God have
been done to death.
That leaves terrorists and assorted crazies out to kill as many innocent
people as possible in just under two hours.
Not only that, but these
overworked nuts have to keep coming up with new and unusual ways to
knock people off. This time, it's
a bus.
(I'm not giving anything away here. You
know from the ads that it's a bus.) Dennis
Hopper plays the (rather pedestrian) crazy-of-the-week who rigs and
Inter-city bus to explode if it slows down enough to let its hapless
passengers off. Never mind why;
who cares why? Personally, I
loved the idea.
You see, I hate buses. I've
always hated buses. Especially
big Inter-city buses. Big, dirty,
smelly, unreliable, inconvenient, make-you-sick-to-your-stomach buses.
I used to take the bus into
Portland
every day to attend classes at the
University. I hated that bus.
I hated getting to the stop just
in time, only to learn that the bus was early.
(You can blow that one up,
Dennis! Minus the driver and
passengers, of course.) I hated
standing in the rain for hours, waiting for The Bus That Wasn't Coming.
(You can blow that one up, too.
The bus company won't even know
it's missing.)
I hated taking two hours to get home when you could drive it in 30
minutes. And I hated watching the
bus sail past my stop because the driver was late and was trying to make
up his time. It is written that
buses are never on time.
They are early, or they are late;
but they are never on time.
If a bus
appears to be on schedule,
it's an accident.
We used to sit around the Student Union at Portland State and swap bus
horror stories. There were a lot
of them. (Blow ‘em all up,
Dennis. I'll hold the fuses for
you.)
Actually, buses weren't the only aspect of public transportation that
Speed took potshots at.
It has the usual "unorthodox"
hero and the
usual spunky
heroine. And you know going
in that, ultimately, the villain will be outdone by the usual
combination of courage, resilience, determination, blind luck and at
least one temporarily-forgotten law of physics.
The hero takes his shirt off more than once; but, much to “Jeannie's”
chagrin, he always seemed to have another one on underneath.
I guess the layered look is
coming back.
And I'm told that we missed the boat by going to our favorite "cheap"
theater instead of the big one with the digital sound system, where you
could better enjoy being surrounded by the sound of screeching metal as
it rips and bangs up. I guess
we'll have to go back and see it again.
Speaking of mass transit, can you believe that the Supervisors in the
Bay Area
are actually considering a proposal to double or triple the bridge tolls
during commute hours? The idea is
to "force" people who could drive at other times to avoid crossing the
bridges during the morning and evening commute times.
What I want to know is: Who are
these Stupidvisors and how do
they get to and from work? Can
you think of anyone in their right mind who would driving commute
traffic if they didn't have
to?
Me neither. Maybe we should make
the Supervisors take the bus.
Love, as always,
Pete
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