You Can't Lose If You Don't Play

I LOVE NEW YORK. Last night I had the oppor-tunity to take the matter up with someone who professed the opposite, and with every turn, he seemed to have to admit that any grounds for NOT loving New York-- the crowds, the noise, the smells-- and OH, are there smells-- can be caveatted. This, for instance, is a pastrami on rye from the Stage Deli at 47th and Broadway, ingredients for which the Wifey brought back for me at the conclusion of her trip yesterday. They packed it all as componentry-- bread, meat, mustard, pickles-- and there was enough meat that I was able to have one for a late lunch yesterday afternoon, and then cobble one together with Arnold rye and some Ploughman's Polish mustard. I love New York. A pastrami on rye from the Stage Deli is a pure, bold truth. You cannot convince me otherwise.

This is not the film of the day, although it could have been. I watched this over a week ago, and thought almost instantly I could review it in two words: good enough. Which describes everything: the script, the direction, the acting, the characters, the dialogue. It's all good enough. Especially the characters. With one single exception, this film is populated with people who mean well in the Carlinian sense. (And the one who didn't mean well was so sharply drawn that I winced just about every time she came on screen, before even a single line of dialogue was spoken.) It had the unmistakable feel of a faked up real world, one that has been fiddled and jiggered with so that everyone comes out just all right, having made sacrifices to do so, sure, but all right nonetheless. But see, that's not really a criticism. It's a summation. And all it really tells you about the movie is that it's easy to watch. The only other thing I have to add requires a quick explanation. We are fond of saying, in our household, of various actors, "I'd watch So-And-So (insert mundane task here)." I would never thought to have said it, but I have now watched Paul Giamatti plunge a toilet, and it's the only piece of acting I have ever seen him do that struck me as gimmicky.

This is the film of the day. It popped into rotation a coupla weeks ago, and I knew sooner or later I'd get around to it. And, as predicted-- as I predicted, back when this came out in theaters and was an instant Oscar buzz-- it couldn't help but be compelling, given the subject matter. Here's something that doesn't get said enough: the royalties of Europe, all of them, gave Germany every opportunity not to wage war, but Hitler was bound and determined to do so, and utterly convinced that the inevitable outcome would be the conquest of the globe by the German armies. That bastard was crazy.

Anyways. The major knock against this when it hit theaters was that there were parts that were probably not completely accurate, which is kind of a bum rap, because those bits would have happened behind closed doors and would not have been recorded for posterity. And also that the speech therapist in question may have been more charlatan than scientist, but I never got hold of anything that substantiated that-- or, frankly, disproved it either, which is odd. But this was a good enough entertainment for a lunchtime. Which is an odd thing, too. Given the source material. Towards the end, I found myself thinking "You know what would go down nicely after this? A Fish Called Wanda." (You know, because of Michael Palin's beautiful stutter job.) Yeah. That kind of sums it up.
So while I am sure that no one reading this could have any doubts as to my recommendation regarding the sandwich-- oh, and by the way, starting with the boho black and finishing with the IPA worked splendidly as well-- I am equally sure that you can figure out my recommendations regarding the films. Which is: meh. You could get it at the grocery store and do as well.

Strange Guy, But I Like Him

THIS IS IN NO WAY the lunch of the day. This is my take on KFC's Failure Pile in Sadness Bowl, which, as I predicted, years ago when they first brought the product out to market, is really pretty good if you make it yourself. It's a layer of mashed potatoes coated with sweet kernel corn and then adorned with chicken nuggets and drizzled with brown gravy, so kind of like a variation on shepherd's pie, and frankly not far from a version of bangers & mash. Which still makes it basic knuckle-head food. I mean, boeuf bourganion it ain't. But it's brown, it's hot, it's tasty, and it'll fill the void, as we're fond of saying. (Not that I really sought it out; it more or less came together. About half the ingredients were acquired on the grounds that they were on sale last week. Like I say, I first thought about doing this some years ago. Not something anyone ought to go out of their way for.
Which Patton Oswalt did. In one of his stand-up bits, again, years back, he referred to this as a sadness pile in a failure bowl-- or the other way around, it doesn't seem to make alot of difference to me-- where the actual KCF product name is the Flavor Bowl or something else equally fictitious/fatuous, and, really, who gives a dry gray fuck. Later on down the line, after he struck up a friendship with some of the folks over at the Onion AV Club, they challenged him to actually eat one of these things and write about the experience for them. He did, and the results were predictably amusing, but in the process he made the ultimate rookie mistake. He bought the failure bowl and-- get this-- got it TO GO. He took it away, took it to his house and ate it. Any fool knows that, with this type of product, you have to eat it right then and there, while it's hot, for it to have any chance at being palatable in any way at all.
(Which, as the Wifey is fond of pointing out, is bullshit. It's still KFC. It'd always suck, hot or cold.)
(Today's lunch was an omelet. See picture heading previous entry. Same thing. Same glorious, lovely thing.)

This is not the movie of the day. I got this via Netflix last week, firstly on the strength of it's being written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson, and secondarily on the strength of Martha Plimpton playing the lead-- secondarily because, God bless ya, Martha, you don't always pick material I like-- and watched it over lunch. And I am still sussing out my reaction. It's an extraordinarily well written version of an often told tale, with bits and pieces twisted about for effect, and absolutely studded with sublime performances, and aside from one bit of stunt plotting involving an unexpected glass eye-- I ask you, a glass eye?-- pretty much everything rings true. Especially since I am usually a stickler for the proper use of Southern stereotypes, and Tim gets just about everything about the Oklahoma setting reasonably right. But I think what it boils down to is I appreciated it more than I liked it. Maybe. I dunno.

In other news, Jerry Lee has seen Paul. Which, well . . . I caught this fifteen minutes in, watched most of the middle of it, ended up missing the ending, and caught it during a later showing (after watching the re-run of the F1 racing at the Hungaroring from last July, which was a helluva great race). And it seems like what everyone else said about it after it first came out was pretty much correct. It's cute, it's inventive, it's about what you would expect from a movie that casts Seth Rogan as the alien. But on the other hand, there were more than a couple of the plot culture gags that made me laugh out loud. (So tempted to soil a couple of 'em. Won't.) So I will watch it again, at some point, I am sure. It just entered the rotation, and even though it came in deeper in the HBO roster and on at an odd time interval, assuredly it will be on again, and I will sit it out, just so I can say I have seen it. Jerry Lee needs to take the ferry.

So no, I wouldn't recommend it. It's way better at home, and if you happen to have a mega-bag of chicken bits laying about the house, it kind of makes sense, But I can't recommend it. I'll eat it, but there's no compelling reason you ought to. Tim Blake put a ton of work into this, and the love of his labor shows, and Martha et al requite themselves magnificently, but when you get right down to it's it's kind of like mining for dirt. What I saw of Paul was fun and funny, but it's really meant for pop culture geeks with an obscenely wide base of knowledge. So I can't really recommend it. Hell, I don't even KNOW you! (Then again, if you're actually reading this stupid blog, it's probably right down yer damn geek alley. Ya damned geek.)

PS: The title of this blog refers to a Kids in the Hall sketch, but whether that makes any of this any funnier, I dunno. Also, Paul is on Cinemax, not HBO right now, and although it was on MaxWest this morning, it will be on Cinemax proper tonight. At 8:15. Really, Cinemax, WTF?

Nothing Personal, But I Hate That Guy

NOT JUST in con-sideration of the fact that eggs have officially been put on the Clean List again-- they don't cause heart disease! DOCTORS do!-- but also the fact that they are now being made to contain a surfeit of omega 3 fatty acids, today's lunch was an omelet. A glorious, glorious omelet, with Mexican blend shredded cheese and a slice of American and a thumbful of chopped shallot and diced cracked black pepper turkey and, of course, two strips of thick sliced bacon slung in right before the fold. Hear me out, folks: strike while the iron's hot. Quick like, before they switch up the voodoo on us again. And God bless the people at Saranac. Just God bless 'em.

The movie of the day is something that is, simply put, far better than it had any right to be. I have not read, and will not ever read, the novel it's based on, for the same reason I don't read Cormac McCarthy or David Foster Wallace anymore. (I have had many, many people tell me they find the novel Infinite Jest to be a work of unspeakably funny genius. I found the first fourteen pages (estimated, whatever I got through the coupla times I tried reading it) to be fourteen pages of world class chain yanking.) (And, as I have said of Spielberg, at least he puts on a velvet glove before yanking your chain.) This one, I remember when it came out, was acclaimed as genius, based on the premise, which is a man suffering from Alzheimer's writes his memoirs, which is then corrected by the son who feels betrayed by him, and thus you have dueling unreliable narrators. Two! Two of 'em! Huh!? HUH!?! CLEVAHHHHH!!!

Which, my initial response to the use of the unreliable narrator is: quit screwing around and tell the @#$%ing story. My response to the use of two of them is: screw you, Jack. Who said you got to talk anyways?

So I have no idea how much of the little twists of humor, sweet chunks of dialogue, cruel twists of fate, or extremely well earned bouts of bathos belong to the source work, and never will, so I am probably being a bit mean and disingenuous in claiming the film has no right being as good as it was, but I am maintaining that viewpoint, if for no other reason than to justify my continued insistence that I just don't ever want to have to read the book. But what comes out is a work of lovely genius, the story of a man's life which, told by others, would easily make him out to be an unbelievable bastard, a selfish lout and cad who had every advantage and squandered them at every turn. But if you were to see it from Barney's point of view, you'd see that he really did mean well, and that it wasn't all his fault.

So do I recommend it? Yes, and pronto, folks. Next thing you know, they'll be telling us we ATE our way into that unfortunate case of leprosy. (Although, if you'd asked US . . . )

If You Get Caught, Lie

THIS WAS the default lunch, as today Speed TV re-ran the 2011 Grand Prix Espagna, from Catalunya, which is my second favorite course. Yeah. I think so. Spa, Catalunya, Monza. Then probably Singapore, because it's ridiculous. Imagine F1 racing in Pittsburgh. Or maybe in Jersey.*
But the traditional pastrami dish, which this time was going to be an omelet with pastrami inside, sort of like an omelet with hash filling, was out because the pastrami in the fridge had gone over, very likely because that's what happens when Christmastime comes around and everybody else in the known universe insists on feeding you. So at the last minute, I bolted out to the store and grabbed some bacon. So I had a turkey, bacon and cheese with both cheddar and American cheese and two kinds of mustard. (Oh, and the Ketchupo!(R) is made with a new Heinz product, ketchup with balsamic vinegar, which WOO-HOO!)
This is not the movie of the day, even if you hold a non-metaphoric gun to my head. It happened to be on when nothing else was, and SHEESH! What a dog. There are small flashes of what they meant to do, Russell Brand is intermittently amusing, Helen Mirren is appropriately icy and quirky by turns, but it has a heart as black and cold as Jennifer Garner's. It seems like they meant to do a fairly pure update to the original-- eventually Our Hero gives in, goes to AA, and accepts his small part in the charity wing of the soulless corporation whose teat he formerly gorged upon, and thus honorably wins the penniless girl who turned out to be a genius kiddie lit author, which is all bullshit, but at least bullshit authentic to our times-- but, as always happens with addicts, too many things must have seemed like good ideas. In a way, it was like going to a flea circus and finding ticks. You either get that metaphor or you don't. I'm not going to elaborate.

Not that the original was actually any better.

What was very clearly designed as a vehicle for Dudley Moore to show off his classic British stage sketch comedy sensibilities, not to mention Liza Minelli to pull the original J-Lo, trying to convince us that Liza with a Z was really just Linda from the Bronx, degenerated into a writer's group monstrosity. The sky was the limit. If they wanted to get Sir John Gielgud to act in their farce, so be it. If they wanted to kill his character off, so be that as well. They even included a speech in which one character justified a killing and then asserted that his being justified in protecting his family's house and food gave him reign and justification in killing for any reason he saw fit. (Oh, and that damned theme song? It took, like, six people to write that thing. Okay, four, but two of them were Burt Bacharach and Carol Bayer Sager, and if that didn't foreshadow the coming cocaine epidemic, I don't know what else would have.)

But the re-do? The final scene was a shot of Arthur driving his one true love down Fifth Avenue in the Batmobile with flames coming out of the turbine. And Fifth Avenue was so clearly glass painted (or whatever the computer photo-shop equivalent is) that when they disolved from that into a cartooned Fifth Avenue backdrop, it was actually, disappointingly, anti climactic.

So do I recommend it? The sandwich was good. But other than that, man, I just don't care.

*Never mind. That's only funny if you follow F1 way too closely. But this is. "Moon. New York City. What do I have to do, draw you a map!?"

Ain't That A Hole In The Boat?

ONCE IN A LONG WHILE something comes together that makes perfect sense while making no sense at all. This time it's topping a beef stew with slices of brie. The stew comes about because it's freakin 3 degrees outside-- alright, as of now, it's 48, but it was 28 for the low, and 33 when I took the dog out to walk about ten this morning-- and the brie was just hanging around after being part of a ploughman's lunch a few weeks back. The result, after the brie was allowed to rest atop the steaming stew for a few minutes while the bread roll finished baking, was just tremendous, a subtle, under-the-chin punch that rings the bells like a hay maker, just a shadow of the brie's pungency co mingled with the spice of the stew. It's so crazy, it just might work!

This is not quite the movie of the day. Almost. Kinda sorta maybe. Mostly in that I am watching it on Comedy Central, so it's chock full of commercials and bleeped to h***, but also that I am only watching it for a sense of completion. I have seen the second half of it, in bits and pieces, probably one and a half times all told, just during stints of time when there wasn't anything else much on or while something else I was watching was in commercials. But I felt I needed to give it the full shot, at least once, since it has a real rotten rep as what the critics like to call "lazy comedy," despite having shown me some flashes of, if not brilliance, at least competence.

Allow me to backpedal here, just briefly, and suggest that I also feel guilty for not giving the flick a shout out for containing yet another brilliant Michael Shannon performance-- and whatever else goes on here, Shannon really does manage that stride between drama and comedy, playing a genuinely scary guy for laughs. Nah. That doesn't justify it either. And it doesn't really say much for Shannon, although I don't think it says anything against him either, to lump this in with the Shannon oeveur.

Because it's not that it's a bad movie. It's just not a better one. Its full of yank-out-the-rug humor that doesn't quite surprise. It's like that friend you had in junior high school who learned that if he popped his friends in the right spot in the back of the knee, they'd almost, but not quite, fall down. It's like watching a student pilot do a run-through for the instructor before doing a solo: they punch all the buttons and toggle all the switches, but it never gets off the ground.

This is the movie of the day. Lemme take a moment and try to figure out why.

Nah. I got nothin. It's a beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, gritty, overseas inter-war drama, full of conflicts and injustice and cruelty, and love and redemption, and, most of all, pathos for flawed but worthwhile characters. It's also based on a pretty badly written book about a bunch of stuff that never happened while the Chinese people were trying to decide which kind of fascism they wanted. Oh, and did I mention the stereotypes? Not just of the Chinese mind you. McKenna-- that's the author of the book, Richard McKenna-- thought it was important to show that peoples of all races are capable of being completely nasty, and that unless you fall in love with Candace Bergen, your soul is as redeemable as a tin can in Nevada.

I have no idea what I mean by that.

So do I recommend it? Not really. In the final analysis, you're as likely to combine brie and stew as, well, you're not likely to, I don't think. Let's Go To Prison really isn't bad, it's just misunderstood. No, wait, it's too well understood, and it takes the patience of a saint to sit through it for all the little good bits to add up, despite the fact that Will Arnett and Dax Shepard are adorable together. And even though The Sand Pebbles is a really good movie about really rotten things (and people! Don't forget the people!), the fact remains that it's about five hours long-- alright, three-- and given that it plays hell with a bunch of really very interesting history, mainly for the satisfaction and edification of it's author, it's really hard to argue for.

And The Horse You Rode In On

Merry Christmas, y'all.

Entertainment--It's Contaigious!

TODAY's lunch is in part inspired by the Wifey's compul-sive viewing of food related shows on the Travel Channel, specifically Adam Richman's show Man Vs. Food. On one of his bizzaro jaunts through some town's eateries lead him to a joint where they made grilled cheese sandwiches with basically whatever cheeses they could find-- or so it seemed to me-- and every once in awhile the memory of watching those sandwiches being made will inspire me to do something like this. This amounts to a seven cheese grilled cheese sandwich, American, two different levels of cheddar, and the four cheese Mexi blend, which, yeah, I know: that's cheating. But then it's on rye bread. With two kinds of mustard. And bacon and slices onion. He he he he he.

This is not particularly the movie of the day, but it was on while I was waiting to make, making, and then having lunch. I can watch this dumb tub of crap anytime. The science is not precisely junk, but it sure as hell ain't far from it. The whiteboard scene in particular, where they're trying to hone down a pool of victims to try and find Patient Zero, well, um, no, that's not precisely how that works. Besides which, having read the book from which they derive their source material . . . Ah, forget it. The list of bitchings is just too long. But if I am in precisely the right mood, then I can watch the performances and dig to the dialogue and only every once ion a while break out laughing out loud at the fact that I am watching fuckin' Outbreak.

This is also not the movie of the day, insofar as I did watch it, but more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. I heard, when it came out, that it was both brilliant and damned near impossible to watch, and figured that vsooner or later I would end up giving it a run. But then, having enjoyed Michael Shannon's wonderful, dark, increasingly unhinged performance on the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, the final tumbler fell and I stuck it in the Netflix queue. With the result that, dear God, what a superbly well acted, amazingly well written, meticulously constructed chunk of the willies! The best way I can sum this up is to say that, several times, I had to remind myself that yes, there are people out there that believe about 80% of the conspiracy theories being spewed throughout the film as justification for the characters' increasing mania, and to just calm down, all that blood is fake. (And no, that wasn't a bug on my leg just now.)

So do I recommend it? Hell, yeah. Have a grilled cheese on rye. Add bacon. Turn off the part of your brain that knows how the CDC and the Army actually function, along with whatever knowledge you have of virology or weaponizing bugs, and watch Cuba Gooding Jr. pretend to fly a chopper. And you'll probably never want to watch it ever again-- and make sure it's daytime, or else keep the lights on, and plan on getting up and walking around from time to time-- but Bug will keep you crawling. Hate them willies. They oughta call 'em the sams.