Nothing Personal, But I Hate That Guy

NOT JUST in con-sideration of the fact that eggs have officially been put on the Clean List again-- they don't cause heart disease! DOCTORS do!-- but also the fact that they are now being made to contain a surfeit of omega 3 fatty acids, today's lunch was an omelet. A glorious, glorious omelet, with Mexican blend shredded cheese and a slice of American and a thumbful of chopped shallot and diced cracked black pepper turkey and, of course, two strips of thick sliced bacon slung in right before the fold. Hear me out, folks: strike while the iron's hot. Quick like, before they switch up the voodoo on us again. And God bless the people at Saranac. Just God bless 'em.

The movie of the day is something that is, simply put, far better than it had any right to be. I have not read, and will not ever read, the novel it's based on, for the same reason I don't read Cormac McCarthy or David Foster Wallace anymore. (I have had many, many people tell me they find the novel Infinite Jest to be a work of unspeakably funny genius. I found the first fourteen pages (estimated, whatever I got through the coupla times I tried reading it) to be fourteen pages of world class chain yanking.) (And, as I have said of Spielberg, at least he puts on a velvet glove before yanking your chain.) This one, I remember when it came out, was acclaimed as genius, based on the premise, which is a man suffering from Alzheimer's writes his memoirs, which is then corrected by the son who feels betrayed by him, and thus you have dueling unreliable narrators. Two! Two of 'em! Huh!? HUH!?! CLEVAHHHHH!!!

Which, my initial response to the use of the unreliable narrator is: quit screwing around and tell the @#$%ing story. My response to the use of two of them is: screw you, Jack. Who said you got to talk anyways?

So I have no idea how much of the little twists of humor, sweet chunks of dialogue, cruel twists of fate, or extremely well earned bouts of bathos belong to the source work, and never will, so I am probably being a bit mean and disingenuous in claiming the film has no right being as good as it was, but I am maintaining that viewpoint, if for no other reason than to justify my continued insistence that I just don't ever want to have to read the book. But what comes out is a work of lovely genius, the story of a man's life which, told by others, would easily make him out to be an unbelievable bastard, a selfish lout and cad who had every advantage and squandered them at every turn. But if you were to see it from Barney's point of view, you'd see that he really did mean well, and that it wasn't all his fault.

So do I recommend it? Yes, and pronto, folks. Next thing you know, they'll be telling us we ATE our way into that unfortunate case of leprosy. (Although, if you'd asked US . . . )