The Plotz Thickens

SO I HAVE had lunch out (approx-imately) for the better part of the last week. Starting with a latish lunch of tuna salad croissant with Utz salt & pepper potato chips from the local grocery store deli and culminating with a visit to the nearby Asian bistro last Tuesday, I had not had lunch in at home for almost a week, and then I decided to go out to the local for a Reuben yesterday, given that the Terminix guy had just been over to poison the perimeter of the house, and, well, I just have a hard time making lunch in the kitchen on those days. It isn't that I am scared the pesticides will end up in my food, it's more that I am aware of the vague, subtlety evil aura of it surrounding the house. Just kinda unnerving, really, is all.

So today's lunch is a hot ham and cheese, and, as always, the things that make it special are the tings you cannot see. Garlic and peppercorn infused mayo on the bottom, two kinds of mustard, Plochman's yellow and the deli brown, on top. And you can't see it. Because I'm mean like that.


The movie of the day is not The Losers. Where normally I would have stuck up a copy of a movie poster, here I chose to tack up a still I stole from the Onion AV Club review,, partially because it better captures the essence of the film, and partly because I just hate all the goddamned posters they made for thing. Hate 'em. Every single one.

Or so it seems, anyways. As I began ramping up to this entry, I scanned all along the interwebs for info, things I could use to punch up my understanding of this irredeemably flat, unaccountably flabby post-cold-war-paranoid-schizophrenic hallucination, every poster I cam across looked like something based on what a thirteen year old had spent seven hours of study period etching in the back of his Trapper Keeper.

So I went with this. It should give you a pretty good sense of how the titular group is composed-- big guy up front, second in command at his left shoulder, wacky side-kicks in back, and the woman out to the side-- it could also give you a pretty good idea of what the plotz is. Er, sorry-- the member of the team who will plotz. Um. No, I mean the big plot twist, which is not-- SPOILER ALERT!!!-- that the chick is an Angelina Jolie clone from the planet Reptar in the Hulu nebula (I mean, facts are facts)-- but that the second in command will have dastardly turned on Our Hero about 95% of the way in, resulting in a set-piece shoot-out that would have happened either way, because that's how these things are plotted. Frankly, with this kind of flick, the only way to have anything resembling a twist is if it didn't result in an eleventh hour betrayal and resulting shoot-out. (But, again frankly, who the hell wants to see that.) (Besides Jim Jarmusch.) And while I don't precisely agree with the Onion AV's Scott Tobias' assessment of them as "a collection of black-ops douchebags" (and, he allows, "our ostensible heroes"), the tableau also helps establish another key aspect of the film: no one in it matters as much as . . .

Nah. let's leave it at that. Really. The shoot-outs seem to be clinging to the vegan motto "nothing with a face." Our heroes blast it out with an army of evil minions working for . . nah, I'm stumped there too. Anyways, the whole way along, nothing that went down seemed to have any human features aside from head, neck, torso and limbs. So this tableau shows that our ostensible heroes are ostensible characters who have ostensible personalities establishing an ostensible hierarchy in their ostensible group. Ostensibly. And then they fight a rich guy who has decided he wants the whole world to pick a fight with each other so that they can finally level out their differences. Or something. Jason "Butch" Patric, God bless 'im, plays it like a splice of Al Pachino's characters from The Devil's Advocate and Scent of a Woman. (I was gonna say Dog Day Afternoon, which would have been funnier, but false. Much like the way Patric plays his character!)

Anyways. We watched the whole damned thing, for no readily apparent reason, aside, perhaps, base laziness. Neither of us was willing to put forth the effort to get up and pluck the thing out of the DVD player. This is one ham sandwich I cannot recommend.