I Call The Big One "Bitey"

SO NEW TECH-nologies and advance-ments in frozen pizza manufacturing techniques have finally lead us to a brave new world, one in which a person of discriminating tastes such as myself would contemplate having frozen pizza and beer for lunch as an actual treat. To be completely fair, this is the Palermo thin crust, which is a vastly superior bird in the field. I am not comparing it to true pizza. Tony's it ain't. Nor Villa Francesca, where they offer both New York style thin crust and Sicilians, and also the Grandma, a delightfull little cheese and garlic bomb I try to make room for even if I am full. But also, Totino's in ain't. Nor Red Baron, which, ew. Just ew. Anyways, this offers a nice, spicey sausage, which I don't even feel compelled to say is "good for frozen pizza," a bright, sharp pepperoni, and a nice undercurant of garlic. All of which is plenty to stand up next to the Harpoon offerings. If I did call one of them Bitey, it would be the Bohemian Pils, which like the IPA is hopped to the gills, but being very slightly lighter bodied, the hops are, in a word, bitey.

The movie of the day very nearly wasn't. The description we get of this on our TWC Guide makes it sound like a kind of pat exmination of the Holocaust through fictional characters, but it's way more than that, and very painful to watch. The basic premise is that a writer is conscipted by the Nazis to write a treatise justifying euthanasia-- what it says in the giude-- but at root it's really about a man whose circumstances keep him distracted enough to allow him to make what turn out to be terribly, tragically bad decisions during what turned out to be a terrible, tragic time. The worst part about it was that the character isn't blind to what's going on; it simply, by turns of the screw, becomes more and more impossible for him to resist, until finally he has become part of the most evil enterprise in history.

I don't want to say anymore, for fear of spoiling it. I'm not waiting to the end to say I recomend it. It's very, very hard to watch, but immensely well done, and imminently worth seeing.

This is also hard to watch, but for different reasons. This is not the film of the day, it's the film that was not the film of the day yesterday. I got it via Netflix, and popped it in at the end of what had turned out to be a fairly hard day while I snacked, blissfully and ravenously, on cheese and sausage and flatbread crisps and an IPA, but I hafta say I missed a fair amount of it. The basic plot was, I'm guessing, so thin that the first two thirds of it consists mainly of a shell game in which we are not supposed to be sure if the one guy is ripping everybody off, the other two guys are either blind or stupid, or they really are going to make a functioning jet pack. (Or rocket belt, in the chinois of the film.) The acting is commedable, especially from Paul Giamatti, who plays an arrogant, angry, genius schmuck like nobody's business. And David Hornsby, who's character may or may not have been gay (one of the parts I missed, if in fact there was a reveal there). But it moves like an unhurled brick, so when I happened to be away from the screen when the big plot twist came, and wasn't sure if the genius had hired mobsters to shake down the pitch meister, or just had gotten in some dirty money to finance the project, or had simply gone batshit with paranoia, I really didn't feel compelled to rewind and see what I had missed.

Sorry, Paul. I blame the editing room.

But I could recommend it. Like I said, not bad, as frozen pizza goes. Not Totino's, anyways.