Movies and Things That Dangle Under Trucks

File this under things you don't see you every day:

So the other day I was driving home on the interstate. I was in the left lane and just in front and to my right was a white pickup truck. Traffic was pretty heavy (for around here). I happened to notice something dangling from underneath the truck's front axle. It looked rather like a snake to me and my imagination began to picture it as such a creature clinging to the underside of the truck, having just awoken, and wondering "This is going to be a bad day." But I soon reasoned that it was springing up and down too stiffly to be a snake and had to be a wire or cable of some sort. However, as the truck and I moved along down the road I noticed the cable started to dangle further and further - and bounce more and more with the turbulence of the road. I thought to myself that the cable was likely important and it would be bad if it fell off completely. A few seconds later, it did fall off. As it came out from under the truck I was stunned to see that it had indeed been a snake all along! It appeared that the semi immediately behind us took care of the snake, but the lasting impression of a snake hanging out on the underside of one's vehicle has stuck with me ever since. As I passed the truck I looked over at the guy and thought "Dude, you have no idea..."

I saw the Russell Crowe movie Robin Hood last week. It was pretty good...not on the level of Gladiator by any means, but worth seeing. It was definitely better than Iron Man 2, which halfway through I realized that nothing interesting had really occurred yet. And then nothing interesting really occurred in the second half. I can't even think of any other big movies coming out this summer. Or at least "big" in terms of movies that I would actually go see. So, whatever Twilight and Harry Potter sequels they're on now do not fall into that category. I've found that it really takes a lot these days for a movie to impress me. Either I'm getting older and it takes more to amuse me, or the quality of movies in general continues to decline. I'm thinking it's likely a combination of the two factors.

Of course, Hollywood ran out of ideas long ago. Now we unfortunately live in an age dominated by phony computer-generated special effects and formulaic corporate-Hollywood plots. Give me scale models and guys in latex masks any day over effects that obviously look computer generated. I don't care how "real" the CGI looks -- it still is obviously CGI and thus fake.

I've heard that there is a movie version of Stephen King's the Dark Tower in the works. Somehow I'm sure it will be a total Hollywood disaster. Now if they were to give the project to Christopher Nolan (one of the very few people in Hollywood I'd trust with any project), then we could have something special...