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As I trudge towards the dreary days of mid-winter (which this year in Portland is marked by a rainy season more so than a snowy or cold one), it seems as a good a time as any to blow out several Chapter Twos from the last half-decade in one column. Armed with rentals from the Multnomah County Library System and the Redbox in front of the 7-11 a half-mile down the road - my two most frequent weapons of choice in attempts to hold down this column’s auxiliary costs as low as possible - I have been keeping myself up late these past few months (“late” for me qualifies as sloughing off to bed somewhere between midnight and 1 am.)

Alas, my 35th birthday a few weeks ago brought me to fully accept a crushing realization I had been loath to admit to myself: I can’t continue such viewing habits on the near-nightly basis I have sustained since my childhood. Close scientific observation by myself of myself suggests that two consecutive nights and/or no more than four in any weeklong period is the most my psyche will allow at this juncture.

The rest of the time, I will be plopped under the covers at a respectable hour, chortling my way through the latest installments in the five-volume annotated collection of every single Bloom County comic strip from 1980-1989 (all time favorite line: “This is like a bad made-for-TV movie starring Bert Convy and Mr. T”). The droll irony in this is that my girlfriend actually doesn’t mind me staying up late. The O. Henry twist ending is that the later I stay up and more tired I get, the worse my snoring gets. And then, she’s kept up, I am exiled to the far left eighth of the bed and nobody wins. But enough of my nocturnal woes and on to more filmic matters.

Not to pigeonhole their appeal to me, but Kristen Stewart is the once and future face of Hollywood androgyny and Jon Favreau has carved out a niche of unironic, defiantly uncynical fantasy-based projects as a director. In the last three years, Favreau has helmed two films that have grossed in excess of $300 million each (Iron Man and Iron Man 2) and Kristen Stewart has starred in one film that came within spitting distance of $300 million and another that hocked a loogie right into $300 million’s money-bagged puss (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, with $296.5 and $300.5 million respectively).

Back at the start of the last decade, if you had asked the then 35-year-old Favreau (just stretching out into feature directing with the buddy-mobster comedy Made) and 11-year-old Stewart (making her credited acting debut in The Safety of Objects) if they could fathom being involved with two of the biggest film franchises of the next ten years, they probably would have rolled their eyes. And since one of those projects was still four years away from existing as a book series, it would have elicited a dumbstruck reaction nonetheless. (For good measure, you could have added that the two of them would collaborate on a sci-fi themed family adventure film that would be well received and yet flame out spectacularly at the box office.)

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