Pun Salad

A movie from a few years back that a co-worker lent me. Not bad!

It's the based-on-true-story of Bob Kearns, a would-be inventor. It starts one day in the early 60s; while driving in the rain, Bob gets frustrated with his windshield wipers, which had two speeds: "Too Darn Fast" and "Off". Hence he was driven to invent the intermittent wiper. He took this good idea to Ford, who promptly ripped him off. This sent Bob into financial and psychological peril, culminating in the nervous breakdown that landed him in a Maryland funny farm for awhile.

Can he bounce back to get some satisfaction out of Ford and the other auto manufacturers that promptly came out with their own intermittent wipers? Well sure. It wouldn't be a little-guy-fights-the-soulless-corporation movie otherwise, would it?

Greg Kinnear does a good job playing Bob as a driven, principled, schlub. Lauren Graham plays his wife Phyllis, who is both perky and long-suffering. It's an interesting topic, given the current controversies involving intellectual property and patents. It would be easy just to dink things around a bit to turn Bob into a bad (or at least delusionally destructive) guy, attempting to milk millions out of corporations via the broken legal system.

The movie was interesting enough for me to scan through the New Yorker article it's based on. Almost needless to say, the actual history is less black-and-white than the movie portrays.