Sometimes, You Just Want Pizza

THIS IS Freshetta's Pizza Amore 10 topping deluxe pizza, something I never would have tried had it not been on sale one time last month when I was in a bit of a funk and didn't have any idea what I wanted for dinner. I think in part I was looking for something that would pretty much be guaranteed to dissapoint, and while most Freshetta products I have so far found satisfactory, this is touted as coming with it's own heating tray, and my experience has been that nine out of ten emerging frozen food technologies do what they claim and are wholly unimpressive. But this was good. The first one I burned a little, but the subsequent ones have been rather nice, garlicy and spicy and slightly sweet in the sauce and buttery in the crust. Also, half the pizza-- what you see here-- makes a fine meal, and the leftover reheats admirably, so that comes out to a pair of decent meals for two to two and a half bucks apiece, beer not included.

I don't recall whether I have followed the Sara B&T with the Black Forest, but they went along fine, both with the pizza and each other. The slight sweetness of the pizza brought out an earthiness in both beers that was pleasing.

This was all after spending a productive morning driving myself completely insane.

Apocalypse Now has long been one of my favorite movies, despite having watched Apocalypse Now Redux. Apocalypse Now Stupid, Stupid Gaddammed Redux. The version wherein they added scenes that just made it seem more like they were just wasting a bunch of time and money screwing around in the Philippines rather than going about the serious business of making a movie about a very serious and rather tragic war. Still, I have managed to go back to the original version with some satisfaction from time to time, and what I see is a tightly coiled, nicely paced meditation on duty and madness and the toll war can take on the souls of men. I knew pretty solidly that I would eventually come around to this, but given that no review I have ever read gave it a complete rave, I held off for quite a while, But this morning I gave in, and there were many facets of it. Long periods of Coppola meditating on how to be a film maker without being pretentious followed by footage of Coppola being a pretentious film maker. Huge swaths explaining how hard they tried to stay authentic followed by complaints that the Philippine government helicopters they had been loaned were suddenly called away to help quell an uprising in the South. ("Hey!? Where are our helicopters goin!?!") One big reveal in which we discover that, had they stuck to the original ending in the script, this thing would have sunk without a trace.

But also it revealed that all those scenes in the French Villa were scrapped before they were even done filming it. They didn't reference the stupid surfboard stealing scene, but I get the feeling the same thing happened there. The things didn't belong in the Goddamned film, which is why they were Goddamned cut to begin with. Redux, my pasty white ass.


And, again, something I was going to do sooner or later, no doubt about it. And I think I was probably in about as good a mood as I could have been. Still, an extraordinarily mixed bag. There were alot of amusing bits, but alot of them were repeated, not quite ad nauseum, but not far from it. The narration and the rules gimmick were overused, to the point that the former became tedious and the latter, when it's big moment came to be used as a punchline, had completely worn out its welcome. And while Woody Harrelson was defintely the man for the job, it seemed really, really, insultingly clear that the director really wanted Jessie Eisenburg to be Michael Cerna, and he's just not. (And shouldn't have been. Cerna's mush-mouthed sincerity isn't really what the film needed; it needed a bitter, self-loathing misanthrope who is completely aware that the only reason he's survived is because of his life-long practice of deliberately separating himself from the rest of humanity.) The girls were fine, although little Abby Breslin being a steely eyed con artist wasn't nearly as shocking as I imagine the people behind the product imagined she would be. ("But it's Little Miss Sunshine!?!") Oh, and when you select a media that completely allows you to make up the rules as you go along, you have to draw your own lines. If you don't, eventually, you just end up looking like an ass.

So: Freschetta. They do good work. It ain't Ray's on West Houston, but it'll work. Saranac is good for the soul, I'm convinced of it. You probably know everything you want to know about Francis Ford Coppola and his partners in crime as you'd ever want to, and if you don't, yyyyyyyyyou probably don't want to. There are better zombie movies to watch, so unless you are the kind of person who likes to sit around snickering about how much smarter you are than other people (and trust me, you're really not) . . . well, there are other zombie movies to watch.