See Also: Duane Hopwood

THE MAIN REASON for posting today's lunch is not so much for the content as the form, as I managed a near perfect slice job on the perfectly grilled item. Is that pretty, or what?

The sandwich itself is close to something I was going to start calling The Item, after a discussion with Lauren the Hippie Chippie on how it was both like and dissimilar to a classic Monte Cristo. The item in question there was on white bread, where this is in rye, and didn't include sandwich sliced dill pickles (not visible in this shot), and while the chief difference between that concoction and an actual Monte Cristo would have been that the bread had not been French toasted, the big similarity, there as here, is that the sandwich contains both ham and turkey, with the result that, in the final analysis, I don't know that even I actually give a final rat's ass, even if it were a spiral sliced rat's ass.

The movie of the day is this. I'm not sure how to feel about it. This is probably the third time I have tried to watch it, with the key being that this was the first time I had managed to catch it at the beginning. I knew I was going to see it eventually-- Patton Oswalt, after all-- but I also knew I wasn't going to like it entirely-- Robert Seigel, after all, who I am convinced is basically a hack, despite his great success and the fact that I have it on pretty good authority that he's a hell of a nice guy and a good friend. For the record, I have not yet seen The Wrestler, but the five to seven minutes I have seen so far seemed authentic yet cobbled together, or perhaps authentically cobbled together, not altogether believable despite having the taste of gritty reality. But perhaps that's just me.

Big Fan is unrelentingly ugly. It reminds me of the kind of terrible granola bars my mother would foist off on us during her health food phase, large chunks of sawdust held together by soy gluten which we would eat on the grounds that sooner or later we would encounter a fragment of rasin or carob chip.

Let the spoilers begin.

I think Seigel really does thing this is something we should eat because it's good for us. I think he wants us to realize that modern life is poor and full of cheap thrills we only appreciate because our mothers don't love us and all success is plastic and based on who can be most easily ripped off for the most money. Patton's character is the epitome of Hunter Thompson's worst nightmare: all he has left is TV and relentless masturbation, despite the fact that he has not ostensibly been convinced that rain is poison and sex is death. The premise is that hate is really joy, and only sports matter. (Even for the players, for whom a casual and unintentional professional slight is enough to distract one from the halcyon joys of hookers and blow and drive one into a homocidal rage.) If you can manage to laugh three times in the course of any given ninety minutes of your grim existence, Siegle seems to be saying, then your life is rich and full, and you, my friend, are a worthwhile human being.

There are, frankly, worse messages being sent these days. Most of them being sent by the kind of people who think all Americans are sports obsessed whackos who will believe anything so long as they think you're rooting for their team.

Anyways.

By the time it turns out that Michael Rapaport is the rival sports nut who is really responsible for all of Our Hero's woes (not his terrible moron of a mother, not his worthless shyster and corporate shill brothers, not the cop who won't stop pressing him for the details on the beating he got from his favoritest football player ever, whom he won't testify against because there is no way his team can manage a winning record until the guy's suspension is revoked), well, that's satisfying enough. Rapaport plays a very convincing jerk, to the point that, were they to happen upon him in a gentlman's club, his own fans would likely turn away from their own strippers and blow long enough to beat the living shit out of him. And I was going to accuse Speigel of stealing the paint-ball gag from Boston Legal-- which I am not convinced he didn't-- until he played the team colors gag, which I found laugh-out-loud hysterical despite the fact that I saw it coming a half a mile away.* But still, in the final analysis, I am not entirely sure three evenly spaced laughs was worth an hour and a half of fairly sheer ugliness.

*Hey! I think I managed to be esoteric and opaque enough that nothing I revealed there can really be considered a spoiler! Which means that I am a either good person or an obtuse moron. It's a theme.