What Did You Want For A Nickle?

TODAY's lunch is only partly a nostalgia trip. Mainly I wanted a little change of pace after a week's worth of Sierra Nevada Pale Ales for lunch. I stopped short of picking up a half pound of pastrami for lunch on the earlier errands. Still, I will gladly admit to having a wave of sweet memories rush over me after I got the sandwich back here, even though I live in a single story house, sit facing the woods, and the sandwich is (was) full of ham instead of pastrami.

A note on that: the ham is Black Forest ham. I don't see why anyone buys anything else, at least as far as the Oscar Meyer deli varieties go. The rest of them just taste like generic ham to me. This stuff atstes like HAM. I know I pick on people who claim that gras fed beef or organic free-range chicken are what beef/chicken OUGHT to taste like, but, to me . . . Also, you'll note that this has sliced onion and black olives within-- escapees at nine o'clock and twelve o'clock, respectively. Yes, my friends. Play with your food.


The film of the day is something I had been meaning to get to for a coupla months now. With one thing or another, I only just got around to moving it to the top of the queue last week. Today, on preparing to watch it, I came to a decision: this is an experiment to see if this is something I want to own.

The first time I caught it was totally by mistake. It was on HBO, back in the wild and wooly days of pay TV, and I think I basically went "Burt Reynolds? Ryan O'Neal? How can it lose?" Aaaaaaaaand then spent the next eight minutes wondering how/if I was going to make it out of this. Really. It was boring me to tears. Oh, and Bryan Keith was utterly unrecognizeable under his character, totally, brilliantly immersed, and I was ready to plunge a stalk of celery through my chest. (Meaning: I'da killed myself to get out of it, if only I had so much as a stalk of celery.)

That was largely because Bogdanovich had a helluva lot of establishing to do, and he was doing it all at once. As the tapestry began to take shape, things got better, and better, but it actually wasn't until about a half hour in that it started to really make sense-- and get funny. Very, very funny. And pick up momentum and reeeeally move. And from there on out, it was a pure joy. The the last half hour it just kind of died-- which, also forgiveable, was a function of the plot. It picks up again right at the end, and so boom, overall, satisfying movie experience.

So I will get to the recommendation bit before getting to the real reason I'm writing all this. I am sure you all know how I feel about ham sandwiches. But remember: Mama Cass. Hendrix. Jayne-Ann Phillips-Sousa. The ham can be your friend, or the ham can be your worst enemy. Proceed with caution. Nickelodeon is a fine romp, but you have some doldrums to contend with, so you kind of have to either be prepared to tread water or convince yourself, as Bogdanovich did, that the task at hand, the aping and celebration of a long gone time in the making of movies, is not just important, but sacred.

So I popped in the disc and clicked the menu to play and go two options: original theatrical release or directors' cut. And, of course, I thought to myself "I like herring sandwiches!"* So I watched approximately four minutes of the directors' cut. As I did I seemed to recall reading that the chief difference between the two is that the director's cut is in black & white and about four minutes longer. Indeed, a quick check with Wikipedia yeilded the existence of this entry on alternate versions of Nickelodeon:

"The 2009 DVD release includes a 125 minute 'Director's Cut' in black and white."

The Director's Cut is proof positive that not every auteur always knows what's best. Black and white was a horrible idea. This reeeeeeeeeally needs to be in color. It just does.

So am I buying a copy? Dunno. Maybe I will watch it again tomorrow. With a herring sandwich . . .

*From one of Douglas Adams' books; there was created a contraption whose function depended on getting a robot convinced that it liked herring sandwiches; this, the narrator notes, turned out to be the real trick.