BEETLEMANIA

 This is Billy the Beetle:

And this is how I came to meet Billy and some of his exoskeletoned pals last week:

One Sunday afternoon last November I was driving through Phoenix with my cell phone in my hand. I doubt I'll get much sympathy when I tell you that I suddenly noticed a police officer on a motorcycle with his lights flashing in my rearview mirrors. I spit out an expletive and pulled over.

"Important call?" the cop asked drily, when he walked up to the car.

"Not important enough, I'm guessing," I said with a sigh.

He explained to me that it's now illegal to have a cell phone in your hand, on or off, while you're driving, unless you're calling 9-1-1. There was no such urgency to my call; embarrassingly, I was taking the opportunity of a boring drive home to catch up with a friend back east. I was sufficiently chastened that I hoped the cop might let me go with a warning, but it was not to be; he wrote me a ticket and encouraged me to get a hands-free device.

What can I say? As the Brits put it, "It's a fair cop." I was totally guilty. If my kid was doing it, I'd be furious, so I could hardly make excuses for doing it myself. I resolved then and there to put my cell phone down while I'm driving, and to pull over if I had to make a call, and I've stuck to it. So I guess it's a just and effective law.

This didn't mean, of course, that I wanted to pay the fine of over two hundred bucks, so I looked into taking an online traffic class. Trying to enroll in the CHEAP EASY FAST Arizona Defensive Driving video course, I soon found that all three of the titular adjectives were questionable. Between the tuition and various other fees, the course came to an amount remarkably close to the amount of the fine. Not so cheap, then. But I didn't want a conviction, even a no-points conviction, on my record, so I signed up anyway.

Turns out that by law, the course has to be at least four hours long. So the claim that it's "fast" is based on the fact that it's as fast as is legally allowed. And easy? Well, the multiple-choice quiz questions are easy enough as long as you listen carefully to the video segments, but if you fail to catch a tidbit of information that's asked and guess wrong, you have to watch the whole segment over again from the beginning, and some of the segments are more than ten minutes long. So for me, the class, which after weeks of procrastination I finally took a week or so ago, lasted well over four hours, alas.

What I didn't expect in all this, is that the course would be hosted by bugs.

Not Bugs Bunny; bugs. As in insects. Billy, who appears to be a purple stag beetle with mandibles rising over his head like Viking horns, is the courteous, slightly stuffy host. His cohosts are Larry the Locust, a sensualist who thinks mainly of his stomach...

...and Beatrice, or possibly Bee-Atrice, the Honeybee...

As they explain, who better to teach us about driving safety then the hapless creatures who regularly splat into our windshields? And teach they do, in comprehensive, sometimes repetitive detail and at a leisurely pace; it led me to the suspicion at times that they were vamping to fill up the four hours. There's a surprisingly philosophical deep dive into the psychology of driving, as when they note that road rage can result when our "belief system is challenged," as well as of the physical impacts of poor driving, as when they note that anger management reduces the chance of a heart attack by 44%.

This unhurried atmosphere also allows for rich character development and interpersonal dynamics between the bugs. For instance, when Billy reproves Larry for his tardiness and self-indulgence, Beatrice challenges him for unfair self-pity. Maybe it's just me, but I thought I detected a hint of sexual tension between Billy and Beatrice.

Even with all of this, however, Billy, Larry and Beatrice are not sufficient to fill the time requirement all by themselves. Much of their role is introducing video segments on safe driving sourced from all over the place, especially YouTube. At least one came from England; a likable young Brit calculates the kinetic energy of two vehicles at different speeds.

There's candor, too, as when Scottsdale-based lawyer Robert Gruler of the R&R law firm discusses how commonly Arizona police officers hand out the charge of Criminal Speeding: "It's ridiculous, but they do it." The effect of this jumble of information offered in a jumble of formats and presided over by arthropods was deeply weird. It was also, I must sheepishly admit, informative and thought-provoking.

At one point Billy and his pals note that as we age, our senses and reaction times lose their sharpness. When I looked up the life spans of the stag beetle (1-2 years) the locust and the honeybee (both under a year) it gave this lesson an extra poignancy, especially considering that you have to have your learner's permit for at least six months.

DINO EXIT

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend:

Jurassic World Dominion--Before discussing this supposed finale to the Jurassic Park series, I should offer my usual disclaimer: I'm a lifelong dinosaur geek. A movie with dinosaurs starts at as much of an advantage with me as, say, a movie about fighter jets does with a military aviation buff.

So take this into account this when I tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed Jurassic World Dominion. Which I did.

The premise here is that dinosaurs have become a regular fact of contemporary life, usually as a danger or a pest. The movie begins with an enormous Mosasaur ruining the day of a commercial fishing boat, and from there director Colin Trevorrow, working from a script he co-wrote with Emily Carmichael, serves up one sequence after another of Mesozoic mayhem, as the revived reptiles cause traffic accidents, harass children, intrude on industrial sites and so forth. The beasts are also, of course, poached, illegally bred and otherwise exploited by humans.

The plot mixes the characters from the recent chapters, like Chris Pratt's raptor whisperer and Bryce Dallas Howard's Jurassic Park administrator turned dinosaur-liberation activist, with the heroes from the first film, Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum. Pratt and Howard are attempting to recover their adoptive daughter, the cloned child of a deceased JP scientist, as well as a young velociraptor, the offspring of Pratt's beloved Blue. Both have been kidnapped by a bio-engineering firm headed by creepy CEO Campbell Scott, and spirited off to an isolated research facility and dinosaur preserve in the Italian Alps.

Meanwhile Dern, startled by an invasion of locusts the size of baguettes that are decimating crops across the U.S., also suspects that the bio-firm is scheming, in the words of Simon Bar Sinister and Tears for Fears, to rule the world. She recruits her old pal Neill to help her infiltrate the facility, where Goldblum is gadfly-in-residence, and get proof. Eventually both sets of characters, along with an extremely glamorous pilot (DeWanda Wise) and a handful of other sympathetic parties, converge.

Along they way they are menaced by dinosaurs and other genetically-engineered perils. Raptors stalk our heroes through the streets and over the rooftops of Malta like assassins in a Bourne thriller. Dimetrodons chase them through amber mines. A giant flying Quetzalcoatlus attacks a plane in midair. Monstrous Giganotosaurus and sentimental favorite Tyrannosaurus Rex brawl like Japanese kaiju.  And that's aside from the worst outbreak of giant grasshoppers since 1957's The Beginning of the End.

Best of all, maybe, is an eerie, dreamlike sequence in which Therizinosaurus, a beast that resembles an enormous downy pheasant with claws like giant salad forks, towers over Howard as she lowers her pin-up-beauty face into a swampy green pool. This scene is a good example of a strength that has benefitted the whole series but is particularly pronounced in Dominion: the superb sound effects. For all of the movie's visual effects splendors, it's the sounds of the creatures, from the enveloping yet somehow muted bellow of the T-rex to all of the distinctive squawking and hissing and clucking and chittering of the others, that really make them scary.

On the downside, with as much objectivity as I can muster as a sucker for dinosaurs, I must note that the dialogue in Dominion seems bland and inexpressive; even Goldblum has to push his comically diffident delivery harder than usual to wring laughs out his lines. And the story is so unnecessarily scattered that the movie loses momentum at times.

Trevorrow is an admirably free-wheeling talent; he made 2015's Jurassic World a wild ride. With a tighter, more streamlined rescue-mission plot, this one could have been similarly edge-of-the-seat. On the other hand, if it was a tighter movie, it might have lost some of its eccentricity, and therefore some of its magic.

CITY OF THE BIG SHOULDERS (& GRASSHOPPERS)

Congratulations to the Chicago Cubs on winning their first World Series since 1908, as well as the best World Series in many years (at least since 2001!), over the equally excellent Cleveland Indians. Hope the celebrations in the Windy City are less destructive than the havoc wreaked by...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week's honoree...

...one of the gargantuan grasshoppers that invaded That Toddlin' Town in Beginning of the End, Bert I. Gordon's 1957 epic, as depicted here in a Chicago TV ad from April 29, 1961.