Bridge to Bridge gone awry (and ending with a rye)

(The following article will appear in the 27 June issue of the Piedmont Post.)

You’d have a hard time finding a dusty trail in San Francisco anywhere outside of Golden Gate Park, but the city across the Bay is a fertile and diverse concrete jungle. It even has the title of “most walkable city” in the United States according to Walkscore.com.

This week, the Dusty Trail crew took the BART into San Francisco with good intentions to walk from the Bay Bridge to and across the Golden Gate Bridge along the San Francisco Bay Trail. The urban hike began with a slow saunter down Spear Street from the Embarcadero BART station to Pier 26 at Harrison and Embarcadero. One can’t truly appreciate the monolithic qualities and even the brutalistic beauty of the Bay Bridge by driving on it. A view from below, looking up at the belly of the bridge, is not to be missed, and the lines of the bridge form an intriguing and photogenic linear perspective converging on Yerba Buena Island.

Walking along the Embarcadero, past “Cupid’s Span” (symbolizing where Tony Bennett “left his heart), past the imposing Embarcadero Center buildings and the idiosyncratic Hyatt Regency, with clanging, cacophonous and tourist-crowded street cars jangling by, and past the standard SF-tourist attractions, it takes a great deal of perseverance - more than we could muster - to continue on the Bay Trail much farther than Pier 35. Bay Street offers a utilitarian alternative to the tourist crowds along Jefferson Street, but consider turning right on Van Ness to stroll along the periphery of Port Mason and through the languid park beside it.

With the Golden Gate Bridge now visible, we had to admit defeat at the unwitting hands of the tourist throngs and began walking inland along Laguna Street and then one block east onto Octavia, which soon begins a calf-straining climb up to Lafayette Park. Back on Laguna, we tramped through Japantown and Central North, and then up Haight Street into Hayes Valley. Ali Baba’s Cave (531 Haight) serves possibly the best, biggest (long as your arm), and most reasonably priced falafel wrap you’re likely to find this side of Beirut. Refreshing adult beverages can be had three doors farther down Haight at Toronado, which has a great selection of local brews.

Turning left at the junction of Steiner and Haight, you can traipse through Duboce Park and probably find a cute pup to pet before turning onto Noe Street (across from the Muni stop). Cross Market Street in front of Café Flore to head down 16th Street and into the heart of the Mission district. You could just board BART the 16th Street and Mission station, but the perfect ending to this 8.5 mile urban peripatetic peregrination is a cocktail at Elixir, one of the oldest continually running saloons in San Fran and one of Food and Wine magazine’s Top 100 bars. Elixir’s talented and knowledgeable bartenders are true cocktail artisans, and the Sazerac rye cocktail comes with an especially high recommendation.

Bay Bridge to Golden Gate Phenomenal Cocktails

Distance: 8.5 miles

Elevation gain: approximately 300 feet

Difficulty: 2 out of 5

Time commitment: Five to six hours, including stops for food and drinks along the way.

Kid friendly?: No

Dog friendly?: No

"Waltz with Bashir" review

(This review was published in the 11 February edition of the Piedmont Post)

Waltz with Bashir is one of the best films of 2008. Plain and simple. It is also a landmark in the history of documentary film and one of the most emotionally arresting movies in recent memory. But as this film goes to great lengths to illustrate, memory can be more malleable and/or unreliable than we’d like to think.

Based on a true story, Waltz follows writer/director Ari Folman’s quest to recover missing memories from his service in Israel’s war with Lebanon in the 1980’s. An intense amount of psychological and emotional pressure is built up as the film progresses towards a confrontation with Israel’s role in the three day massacre of nearly 3,500 Palestinian civilians and refugees - men, women, children and the elderly – by Lebanese Phalangist militiamen in the camps of Sabra and Shatila in West Beirut in 1982.

In the film’s opening scene, Boaz Rein-Buskila, Folman’s friend and a fellow veteran, relates a recurring nightmare wherein he is hunted down by a pack of feral dogs, the dogs of war. This story jogs in Folman a half-formed memory of the Sabra-Shatila massacre in which he and two friends are bathing in the sea at night in bombed-out Beirut under the yellow glow of flares. The three men rise slowly from the water, walk slowly to shore, slowly get dressed, and then enter the city, where they are overtaken by a crowd of wailing, disconsolate women. That’s when the memory ends.

Folman resolves to recover his missing memories, horrifying as they might be, by interviewing fellow veterans. In the process, he interrogates the nature of dreams and memories and their interface. Waltz explores how easily we create false events to fill gaps in our memories, especially violent ones and how in order to cope with violence we must shut it out, view it at a remove, through a lens, because if we are forced to confront it we must also confront its motives and, especially, our roles in it.

The haunting stories Folman uncovers are truly heart wrenching. They are viscerally recreated and often conjure startling levels of empathy and bring us closer to the traumatic effects of conflict than we are typically comfortable with.

As you may know by now, Waltz is an animated documentary. The unique visual aesthetic of the film, handled by Yoni Goodman, is at once gritty and resplendent. It portrays the horror of systematic genocide as confidently as it does the peace and beauty of a sun-drenched Lebanese orchard moments before an RPG attack.

Animation allows Folman to vividly recreate the dreams and memories that he collects. It also assures the viewer a certain amount of emotional protection: the film’s violence is translated into art, making it slightly more approachable. However, in a truly unforgettable and masterful turn, Folman removes that shield at the most critical moment.

Waltz is particularly important given Israel’s recent war with Gaza, because its message is one we never appear to be able to heed: the horror of history, if not clearly and frequently remembered, is doomed to be repeated.

NYT's Election Day "Word-o-Matic"

Well, that's not exactly what they call it. The New York Times has a much more verbose title for one of the more creative methods of capturing the sentiments of Americans at this historic juncture. It being 4 November 2008, Americans are turning out in droves to cast ballots for the president who will inherit the morass of troubles that have accumulated in the past eight years.
So the Times has come up with this thing. They call it " What One Word Describes Your Current State of Mind?" which seems a bit clunky and long winded, but I guess it gets the point across. (I'm just going to continue referring to it as the Word-o-Matic, because everybody loves something that's o-Matic!)
Essentially, the Word-o-Matic is a data collection engine. You type provide a word as per the article's title's instructions, punch a button describing yourself as either a McCain or Obama supporter and submit your data. The engine aggregates the ways other people are feeling and presents the data on the screen as the actual words people input. The more frequently submitted a word is, the larger and more opaque it appears in the stream of words, which have a kind of waterfall quality to them, i.e. the less popular a word, the smaller and further down on the screen it appears. So words like "anxious" and "hopeful" appear near on the first line in like a size 48 font, while "thrilled," "bored," "eager," and "pensive" appear on the bottom row in a faint size 18 font. The words are continually updated, so they're always shifting, left to right, like a flowing stream (the water analogies here are very apt and useful).
I'm assuming that NYT has some tech-nerds and/or editors massaging the submitted data so that words like "slutty," "trigger happy," and "full or murderous rage" (which I guess is actually a phrase and not simply a predicate) don't slip through the digital cracks and wind up on the computer screens of emotionally tender Americans.
In many ways, the Word-o-Matic is similar to another data collection engine that has been up and running on the internet for a while now. We feel fine has been "harvesting human emotions" (eww) from "a large number of blogs" for more than three years. Its software identifies the phrases "I am feeling" and "I feel" in blog posts,grabs the full sentence from the blog, up to the first period, and then sends that info to a database where it is compiled and then displayed on an interactive Flash site as lots of little flourescent dots floating around in black space. Check it out.
The most intriguing thing about the Word-o-Matic is its insight into the emotions of the supporters of both candidates. The words chosen by McCain supporters are almost unanimously negative: "battered," "betrayed," "angry," "disgusted," "resigned," etc. "Resigned" and "worried" are some of the most popular sentiments among those people.
Obama supporters’ words are a mix of positives and collective breath-holding: "patriotic," "energized," "antsy," "jittery," "inspired," etc. "Hopfeul," "excited," and "optimistic" rank at the top of the charts for Obama supporters.
The two sides share one big feeling in common: anxiety. I know I can relate.

Trains, Lemon Trees and Baseballs

The train pulls through a hilly pass. There’s a cabin in the nearby woods, and you can see Steve’s Farm in the distance. A bear stalks an unwitting camper, a farmhand tends his sheep behind the barn. Coming out of the hills, the train shuttles along an elevated track through town. It passes by a church where a wedding has just let out, rolls behind the synagogue and Doc’s Greasy Spoon Diner. The Royal Hudson locomotive steadily puffs steam as it rolls past Mary Jane’s Frosty Bar, past the No-Tell Motel, where a young woman peers through a window, and a dude lounges in the heart-shaped pool. It continues around a bend, bound for the ski mountain. The horn blows, and its strained organ cry can be heard in every corner of Daley Mae Land.

“I love that sound,” Mike Humphries says wistfully. He is wearing river sandals with socks, a ringer t-shirt tucked into khaki shorts, a Boston Red Sox hat and his trademark No. 2 pencil tucked behind his right ear. He stands at the boom-box-shaped model train controls, hands resting on both throttles. He has a simple tattoo of a sea turtle on his left calf. His blue eyes follow the two trains as they wend through the miniature town he built and populated. The display occupies most of the floor space in the two-car garage beside his house, which in turn lies only one block from the Piedmont High School athletic fields—a place Humphries oversees with the same compassion with which he presides over Daley Mae Land.

Since 1969, Humphries has been a central figure in Piedmont schools and sports. He has taught physical education in Piedmont and coached freshman and junior varsity football for nearly 40 years. He has been the high school athletic director for 20 years. Last spring he quietly retired from his role as varsity baseball coach, a position he held for 33 years. In all that time Humphries has displayed a passion for teaching youth that, as he is proud of saying, has shaped young boys and girls into capable men and women.

On the career track

Humphries, 64, was born an only child in Vancouver, British Columbia. When he was four-years-old, his family boarded a train and moved to his uncle’s lemon ranch in Goleta, a town just north of Santa Barbara. Friends and family visited the ranch, but without any brothers or sisters to play with, he developed an “incredible imagination.” The same imagination that inspired him to set up tableaux in Daley Mae Land in his 60’s entertained him as a kid in Goleta.

“I would play whole nine-inning baseball games by myself,” Humphries recalled, with his hands in his pockets, jingling his keys. “I used a wooden slat, and would pick up rocks and hit them to determine how many bases a batter would reach. If you hit a rock over the electricity wire it was a home run. That was my early training for baseball.”

Baseball has always been a part of Humphries’ life, but he never considered himself much of an athlete. Early on, he decided that coaching and teaching physical education would be the next best thing to playing sports professionally. He majored in PE and minored in history at UC Santa Barbara. After graduating, Humphries attended Santa Barbara City College to play baseball and avoid the Vietnam War draft. When his student deferment was revoked in 1964, he joined the Marine Corps and served in a construction battalion until he moved to Piedmont in 1969, where he took a job as a student teacher.

Humphries was soon hired as a full-time PE teacher at Piedmont’s elementary schools and coached the middle school football teams. In the early 1970’s he coached varsity baseball for a few years, went on hiatus, and returned to the position in 1979 at the request of his friend, Mike Roof.

The conductor

It’s a Thursday afternoon, and Humphries is out in the garage, watching his trains go around the track.

“There’s one rule,” he tells me, “and that’s that nothing bad ever happens in Daley Mae Land.”

Daley Mae Land is full of family. The Diner is named for his father, Godfrey Ogden “Doc” Humphries. Steve’s Farm is named for his son, an assistant football coach at Piedmont High and director of football operations. Mary Jane’s Frosty Bar is named for his daughter, who lives in Dublin. The Cobbie Burgers served at Mary Jane’s are named for Humphries’ best friend, Cob Berger, a Piedmont High grad who emigrated to Fort Bragg.

Daley Mae Land is named for Dale, Humphries’s wife of 20 years. Years ago she conceded the garage to his passion for model trains. She echoes the sentiments of Humphries’s friends, students and colleagues when she lists his kindness and congeniality as some of his best traits. She does suspect that dubbing his train-town Daley Mae Land is an attempt to placate her, but if it is, it’s surely in keeping with Humphries’s contagious good humor.

It’s the kids, not the wins

As a coach, Humphries has high expectations for what his teams should do and how they should do it.

Mark Delventhall, who coached varsity baseball alongside Humphries for most of the 1990’s, said that Humphries was committed to coaching as an extension of teaching.

“It wasn't always about winning or losing to him,” said Delventhall. “Mike was passionate about doing things the right way. To him, the game was a matter of integrity. There are certain things you do, and certain things you don't, and that's not only mechanics or strategy or execution, it’s the way one carries oneself, how you enter and exit the field, how you put your uniform on, your appearance. There’s a right way to it and that's how the Piedmont Highlander’s do it, period. I coached with him for nine years, and never, not one time, did I hear him say anything bad to an umpire. He didn’t let kids get away with that either.

“Mike also believed in a practice plan, not unlike a lesson plan in science or history class. He always had a lesson plan, written on a 3x5 card, tucked into his pocket and a No.2 pencil behind his ear.”

Humphries says that he is a disciplined coach, and that he can be demanding, but humor has always been one of his most useful and natural coaching tools.

According to Drew Olson, a Piedmont High School Hall-of-Famer who played catcher for Humphries for four years, his former coach allowed guys to play the game without micromanaging, and he also created a fun but competitive atmosphere.

“He cared, and he was truly passionate and knowledgeable about the game,” said Olson. “He had a lot of funny expressions. He gave out a lot of nicknames to people, and would say some hilarious things.”

Humphries recalls two brothers, the Morgans, whom he coached in PE. On this day, the Morgan brothers’ proper names eluded him, but he had little difficulty remembering their nicknames.

“The older one was called ‘Moondog,’ and when the younger brother ascended into my PE class his name was ready for him: we called him ‘Suncat.’”

Humphries’ friend, Berger, a retired Fort Bragg baseball coach and teacher, recalls a game when his Timberwolves simply had the Highlanders’ number. Looking out from the dilapidated guest dugout in Piedmont, Berger was diligently focused on the game, until he happened to glance over at the home dugout, where he saw Humphries waving a bat with a white t-shirt dangling from it, admitting defeat.

Humphries says though he enjoys sports, his interest is more anthropological than most coaches—he likes kids because he thinks they’re fun and interesting.

“I'm more of a people person,” he says. “I'm not the type to sit around and watch football or baseball all weekend. A lot of coaches are more interested in the sport: I was always more interested in the people than the sport, which helps me be more patient with kids. I have more empathy for kids who aren’t terribly skilled. I wasn’t that skilled.”

As a teenager, Humphries only played when his team was trouncing the competition or being trounced, so he learned to think more about the elements, tactics and systems of the games.

The talents he developed on the bench have served him and his athletes well during a career spanning more than three decades. In recounting his teams’ accomplishments, Humphries eyes wander into the nostalgic space between then and now as he stares at the mesmerizing motion of the trains wending around the track.

In 1985, Humphries coached a highly talented baseball team that included his son, Steve. That year they persevered through a triple-round-robin tournament to reach the Alameda County Athletic League Tournament for the first time. In the late 90’s, with a consistency for which he has become famous, Humphries coached the freshman football team to 36-straight victories, four years of undefeated football.

In 2000, Piedmont’s varsity baseball team made its deepest run to date in the North Coast Section championships. With a talented team including Brett Webster, Matt Shartsis, and Piedmont Sports Hall of Famers Pete Schneider and Olson, the Highlanders reached the NCS semifinals.

But Humphries says his greatest accomplishments as a coach are less tangible than championships. He takes the greatest joy in the number of kids who return to Piedmont and tell him what a positive experience athletics were for them.

His wife Dale says that Humphries receives letters from parents whose children played freshman football for him. “The parents say, ‘You saved my kid’s life.’ And I’m not talking about one or two letters. He has gotten at least a hundred of those during his career,” she said.

Made to roll

But eventually, the demands of coaching a varsity sport began to wear on Humphries. He still takes great joy and pride in coaching freshman football and teaching PE, but in the past few years he found himself less and less excited as the varsity baseball season rolled around.

“I got to the point where I didn’t have the enthusiasm required for the kids or the position any more,” he said. “Varsity sports require more energy, and baseball is real hands-on. Fungo-ing balls all the time starts to wear you down.”

Humphries is still a regular fixture at Piedmont baseball games. He recently followed the Highlanders to Albany to watch them face No. 2-ranked St. Mary’s. He mingled with the team, coaches and umpires, and joked with visiting-team fans. At home games he sets up a folding chair adjacent to the home dugout and grabs hold of the infield fence. He peers intently at every play from behind reflective sunglasses and talks strategy with his old assistant coaches in the dugout.

“I enjoy going to games now and not having to worry about the lineup – when to pull a pitcher, stuff like that,” he admitted.

So, last year, Humphries quietly walked away from coaching baseball. He’s a gregarious guy with a cheerful personality that feeds off of the youth that surrounds him; he’s not loud, and a quiet exit is just his style.

According to his son Steve, Humphries will be honored for his 40 years of service to the school and the community during halftime at a varsity football game next fall.

As a gesture of the town’s gratitude for his decades of service, this evening the school board will approve the naming of the Piedmont High School baseball field after Humphries. In the near future, a sign will hang over the concrete stairway leading down to Coach Humphries Diamond.

For his part, Humphries says he wants to coach and teach in Piedmont for as long as he’s able, or as long as they’ll let him. When he retires, he says he’ll go into construction, both on the house up the hill from the Piedmont athletic fields (his wife says there will be a lengthy “Honey-Do List”), and, of course, on his beloved model train set. But his son doesn’t see that happening any time soon.

“He’s been a teacher for 40 years,” said Steve. “He could retire with full benefits, but why would he? He loves what he does. There’s no better way to put it.”

No More Broken Hearts

NO MORE BROKEN HEARTS
(HINT: Click on the above emboldened link)
This is a performance piece I did a little over two years ago on the corner of 5th South and Third East in Salt Lake City. The protest itself was inspired by Miranda July's art-assignment website learningtoloveyoumore.com. I recited a 15 minute long poem-ish monologue twice one day at the corner of 5th South and State Street and again the following day in front of the Salt Lake Public Library.
The piece itself was essentially a nonsecular prayer inspired by a terribly traumatic event. It was an attempt to cope with intense pain and loneliness.
On the latter occasion, a rotund woman who appeared to be mentally disabled stood on the corner and listened to me. When I finished my the piece, she asked me, "What organization are you with?" To which I replied, "I'm not an organization." Other than that, nobody approached me. Enjoi!

Sewing the Seeds of Religulous Disbelief

Very few sacred cows remain untipped in contemporary western culture. Music, television, video games, books, cartoons and the internet have made just about every formerly sacrosanct topic fair game for criticism and even ridicule. Religion, however, remains a dangerous no-fly zone. Sure, some people have had a go at religion, most notably the recently deceased George Carlin, who made a habit of exposing our observance of taboos as childish and unnecessary, but those salvos have typically been delivered by individuals of a certain faith against that same faith, and if they weren't (e.g. the Dutch Allah cartoon debacle), they have been frequently disastrous.

In the fine tradition of Carlin's acerbic humor comes Religulous, a new documentary starring comedian and political commentator Bill Maher. Religulous (which is apparently a faux-Bushism, and a very good one at that) is Maher's box-office attempt to inspire greater skepticism of organized religion and even faith itself. The film's incendiary concept is that we'll follow a provocative atheist–i.e. Mr. Maher–as he travels the western world to try to understand, by way of direct confrontation, why rational, intelligent people believe what he perceives as irrational, childish and downright dangerous stuff.

Whether you will find Religulous entertaining and amusing depends largely on your religious/spiritual affiliation as well as the intensity of your belief. If you're an atheist or agnostic, you'll probably have a very good time: if you're an avowed Christian, Muslim, Mormon, Scientologist or Jew, or if a "higher power" is the gravitational center of your life, smart bets are on your getting significantly warm under the collar.

Maher makes his agenda and his opinions clear from the get-go, which is probably a good idea for such a confrontational movie. In a nutshell, he was raised Catholic, never bought the party line, finds the idea of an omnipotent being absurd, and is convinced that organized religion is detrimental to society and the planet and basically exploits people and gives them false hope. So he heads to a trucker's chapel, a Biblical amusement park, a creationism museum, speaks with an ex-Jew for Jesus, a goofy Vatican high priest, the self-proclaimed second-coming of Jesus Christ, a Holocaust-denying Jew, an evangelical senator from Arkansas, and many others.

Aside from the truckers and some visitors at the Holy Land Experience, he doesn't talk with very many "regular" people about their beliefs. Instead he has assembled a cast of sectarians on the religious fringe whose beliefs serve, for the film's purposes, as a decoction of the beliefs of their representative religions. The idea seems to be to find ladies and gentlemen whose zealotry and faith can be exploited as ignorance.

Maher, standing at the pulpit inside the tiny trucker's chapel, states that he preaches "the gospel of uncertainty," and his mission in the film is to sew some doubt in people's minds about their beliefs. How, he wonders, can someone adamantly believe that Lot lived in the belly of a giant fish for three days? Why isn't Moses, who thought he heard the voice of God from a burning bush, considered a prophet instead of a crazy guy, which he most certainly would be today? Why is the Christian God both loving and vengeful, and isn't the capriciousness of his emotions kind of childish for an omnipotent being? Basically, he thinks religion doesn't have the answers, and the fact that it makes people think it does says scary things about how easily we can be manipulated. If we can be convinced to believe in a man in the clouds who hears all of us murmur to him at the same time, is it really that hard to believe that G. W. Bush was able to convince us to invade Iraq with similarly fictitious information?

Much of Religulous's humor comes from Maher's exasperation as he tries to wrap his mind around people's beliefs, which is a sophisticated way of actually getting people to laugh at the beliefs themselves. Christianity receives the most sustained roasting, if only because it's the one Maher's most familiar with, and while he does address a number of other western religions–he ignores all the eastern ones–he steers away from any direct condemnation of other religions' gods, most notably Allah, perhaps at the earnest behest of the pack of lawyers that must have been consulted in making the film.

Religulous was directed by Larry Charles, the same guy who did Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The format, content and humor of Maher's movie is similar to though not as grotesque as Sasha Baron Cohen's ground-breaking film, and it borders just as precipitously on the cliff of being cynical and offensive as does Borat. However, if you're willing and able to approach religion and belief with a healthy dose of skepticism, or if you once lived in the countryside and reveled in cow-tipping, Religulous will preach to you, a member of the choir.

Passion at Play in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"

(Note: This article appeared in the 27 August edition of the Piedmont Post.)

You don't have to be overly familiar with Woody Allen's extensive oeuvre to enjoy his newest film, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," a sensual, finely tuned exploration of love's confusion staring some of the most gorgeous people on the planet. It is an engrossing investigation of the difficulties of knowing what one wants in and from love, difficulties compounded when you know what you want, but can't attain it.

Billed as a romantic comedy, Vicky Cristina Barcelona's main characters are so desperately lovelorn and lost that most moviegoers will be too wrapped up in their juicy love quadrangle to think twice about laughing. And that's not a bad thing.

Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is a level-headed graduate student spending a summer in Barcelona studying the buildings of the Spanish architect and artist Gaudi. She is joined by Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), an impetuous, wandering soul regarded by her friend as a "mental adolescent." While Vicky's stated goals for the summer are academic, Cristina is eager to fully immerse herself in the indulgent side of Catalan culture—art, wine, leisure, sex and passion—and her prayers are at least partially answered soon enough.

It's not long before the ladies encounter Juan Antonio, a talented abstract painter, artistic celebrity, and dyed-in-the-wool romantic played to perfection by Javier Bardem. Throughout the film Bardem has the sultry, punch-drunk look of a wolf on the prowl. He approaches Vicky and Cristina in a restaurant and with only the briefest of introductions proposes that the two friends fly to Oviedo in the north of Spain with him for a weekend of food, wine and sex. Cristina is instantly charmed, Vicky less so, but Juan Antonio's magnetic sex appeal is undeniable, and the ensuing tryst is unadulterated voyeuristic candy.

While Cristina is the first to be seduced by Juan Antonio, she falls ill at the worst possible moment. With Cristina incapacitated, Juan Antonio focuses his sight on the reluctant Vicky, and he captures his willing prey after filling her full of wine, tapas and Spanish guitar. Vicky would love to give herself over to Juan Antonio. She yearns for him endlessly, as does Cristina. But inevitably some entertaining wrenches are thrown into the works.

For one, Vicky is engaged to Doug, a preppy young go-getter back in the States who keeps interrupting her Spanish dream with lovelorn phone calls. Cristina and Juan Antonio, both hopeless romantics with insatiable appetites for life's rich treats, seem perfect for one another and move in together. Problem is that Juan Antonio is recently divorced from and clearly pines for Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), a frenetic apparently bipolar sex bomb.

When Maria Elena tries to commit suicide, Juan Antonio rescues her and brings her back to live with him and Cristina, which is initially an inconvenience. Soon though, Juan Antonio, Cristina and Maria Elena establish a healthy ménage a trois of a relationship. Meanwhile, Vicky still lusts for Juan Antonio, she and Doug elope in Barcelona, and everything goes awry when Cristina makes one of her idiosyncratic impetuous decisions.

If all of this sounds like a month's worth of soap opera episodes crammed into 90 minutes, you've got pretty good ears. There's even an attempted double murder and a disenchanted matchmaker to help Vicky Cristina Barcelona fit
the daytime soap bill.

To his great credit, Woody Allen manages to keep Vicky Cristina Barcelona above the level of crass melodrama. Much of the film's success is due to the sexy, talented cast, especially Bardem and Cruz, whose gazes might have you sweating in the air conditioned movie theatre.

In the end, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a delightful, indulgent way to pass a late-summer afternoon or evening, and may have you asking yourself some of the same questions facing the main characters. That, or make you want to move to Spain.