The Saddest Bugs in the World

I love finding movies that remind me of why I liked movies to begin with. It's pretty rare these days. In fact, I almost don't like movies anymore. I've recently rediscovered David Lynch, and I got a Pedro Almodovar collection not too long ago. I should look for more Guy Maddin. I need to love movies again. From Thursday, May 10, 2007

Been sleeping in the guest room all week. No, there's been no Bumsteadian lover's spat to rend the wedded sheets, we're both in there. Lisa's been too traumatized to return to the bedroom. It's her bug-phobia at work.

If you don't live in Texas, you don't know what Spring truly is. Granted, our weather isn't always lovely at this time of year -- lots of rain, the beginnings of the mosquito invasion, sometimes quite muggy (although today is beyond perfect, mid-70s, sunny, windows open). But there is one thing you can always count on come May -- roaches. And not some puny little crawlers you stomp on and they're dead, no, no. Roaches here are the stuff of novelty postcards with saddles and cowboys and "They Grow 'Em Bigger in Texas!" curved across them. Without exaggeration, the roaches can be as big as or bigger than my thumb. And I have big thumbs.

We saw a few around the kitchen and utility room. We have dogs, and so we have dog doors. It seems unlikely that a roach could push its way through, but the bugs make it in somehow, other beasties tend to. On one ocassion, I looked up in the middle of the night, set to turn off my bedside lamp, only to see a cat in the door. It is fortunate that our dogs did not see it, there'd have been carnage.

So we put down some poison traps, and I went out and bought some stuff to spray around doorways. It's pretty effective. But one thing I've discovered over the years is that the poisons almost always seem to make things worse before they are better. Maybe the stuff makes them crazy before they croak? We had one flying around the family room and kitchen, me stalking it with a shoe, finally smashing it over a window.

(Oh, yes, they fly. Big, brawny, beetly wings you can hear from another room, it's creepy. My mother, a genteel woman not given to coarse expression, says that everyone says the same thing in that moment when they discover that these hefty suckers can take flight, more often than not right at your face -- "Holy Shit!" She is not wrong.)

So there were a few of these instances, roaches gone wild, before the poisons kicked in and we were scooping up carcasses all over the house. And in one of those instances... I shudder even to repeat it... the bastard crawled over my foot. In bed. Lisa freaked and ran. (Good to know I can't count on her when the vampires finally come, I'll have to handle them myself.) We never did find it.

So, yeah, we've been in the guest bedroom since. I'm finally going to re-linen the bed tonight (it's been stripped, sheets long burned, since Saturday) and see if I can push her back in tonight. But I have a feeling neither of us will sleep well.

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Been reading "Rebels on the Backlot," a fawning report of how the Hollywood "studio system" was taken over by daring young filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher in the 90s. (Never mind that the "studio system" was dismantled in the 1950s.) I was actually finding it kind of inspiring, reading about how Stephen Soderbergh rediscovered his muse by taking a rather pedestrian thriller script and turning it into "Out of Sight," one of my favorite Hollywood movies of the last few decades. David O. Russell doing something similar with "Three Kings." I was beginning to feel better about my own genre sensibilities, maybe I could get back to work on specs that could both sell and stretch my abilities. I just finished a paid gig that was satisfying, but not creative. I want to create again.

And then I watched Guy Maddin's "The Saddest Music in the World." And now all that "daring" material about smart-talking gangsters and loving porn-film families and vacationing in John Malkovich's head feels hollow and dirty.

Maddin's feature is the best thing I've seen in years. A pitch-perfect 1930s period piece about Canadian beer and glass legs and music. You feel real proud of yourself, making an "indie" with Brad Pitt or George Clooney? My, what a risk. Try doing it with a Kid in the Hall (and not one of the cute ones, either) and Isabella Rosselini and a bunch of indigenous musicians and about one-tenth of your budget.

"The Saddest Music in the World" is one of the funniest and smartest movies I've ever seen. Find it.