Weekend of Flaming Heads

For a weekend in which we had nothing pressing to do, it somehow completely exhausted me by the end. Don’t know what it was, but it might have been trying to negotiate with a daughter who was ready to scream at the drop of a hat. Is eight too early an age to worry about her hormones running amok?

Went with Number One Son to see the Ghost Rider movie at the Davis Saturday night. It wasn’t a good movie–not by a long shot–but parts of it were quite superb, and it was a very enjoyable time. Not least because we could walk to the movie and back and talk about it. It’s almost as good as being in a 70s Woody Allen movie, except we don’t have to live in Manhattan and worry about rats scurrying around our feet in the theater. And also, we can talk about Stan Lee and not Leni Reifenstahl.

Parts of the movie certainly were corny and lame. Well, when you juggle such dog-eared elements as a deal with the devil, and mystical cowboys, and demons connected with air and land and water, it’s going to take a pretty deft hand to not make the awful. But somehow, the image of a flaming skull still packs enough power to make it all watchable. The flaming bicycle was worth it too. And Johnny Blaze, the human host of the Ghost Rider, always stops his channel surfing when a video of a monkey shows up. This made me identify with him as a hero, more than the stuntriding and the loving Eva Mendes and the whole head-on-fire thing. Monkeys are the great leveler.