And Jerry Mathers, As The Silent Prophet

EVENT-UALLY, I COME to the con-clusion that I need a comfort food, and for me, this is one of the comfort-iest. I don't care if that's not a word; it describes how I feel about this beast, which is cracked black pepper turkey, thick sliced bacon, and American cheese, on white bread, with Gulden's spicy brown mustard and Plochman's Kosciusko. Now, in this day and age, where "If you do that, you'll go to hell" has been replaced by "If you eat that, you're killing the earth" (or, conversely, "If you eat that, your body will disintegrate"), there are at least five or six reasons this ought to make me feel guilty, but I don't care. It makes me happy. I was just going to say something along the lines of "I don't mean to speak for others," but, in fact, I don't speak for others. I think I should eat whatever makes me happy. If, one day, I find my viscera leaking through my shoes, then I'll apologize. To whoever.
The beers, on the other hand. The Sara I actually bought to replace the White Hawk, which I bought gleefully when I found it on sale for eight bucks a carrier. I've long been a fan of the Medocino Brewing Co., but this one . . . It's good, but it seems a little slipshod. I guess. Maybe I was expecting too much.
In other news, I hated loving this.
This is one of those movies that I have had on the to-do list forever. But, firstly, it's not something the Wifey would want to watch, and secondly, I often have a problem with historical interpretations. I mean, I know this stuff; don't screw with it for the sake of morality or entertainment or just to be evil and create enemies we can all agree on. But this was one fictional creation built on strong bones, and cut pretty close to them as well. And my favorite moment in the film had very little to do with the historical material. I found myself looking at the screen and thinking "Who the HELL is that? I KNOW that face." It was Cate Blanchett. Take it as a compliment, Cate. You really do know how to disappear into a role.
But, more to the point, all of the performances were top notch, and only one of the characters rang false (there was one character amongst the woman prisoners who was set up to represent all of the minor failings someone in this situation might face, which wasn't done badly per se, but just got old after awhile). (And although I know all the other women in the camp had to come of ass Ordinary Saints, but come on! There wasn't just one person being petty, personal, judgemental, lazy, manipulative, oh, Fudgesicles! Never mind. I'm bored again.)

On the other hand, I loved being mildly entertained by this!
The Wifey put this in the Netflix queue some time back, just on impulse, and I think based on the novelty of having both Jet Li and Jackie Chan, and we popped it in the other night on the grounds that neither of us was really in the mood to pick something to watch on TV. And in that context, it worked like gangbusters! This is one of those things where you don't have to follow the plot, because it'll follow you. It makes no sense outside itself, but it'll tell you what its up to every fifteen minutes or so. They start out with an underdog white kid in Southie, set Jackie up in a nifty little run-down pawnshop, set up villans to take down, and then BOOM! We're in Plotz Dynasty China watching the Monkey King face down the Jaded Warrior. (Sorry! JADE Warrior. Or General, or something.) And then journey, fight, bait, journey, fight, bait, until the word MAUDLIN is completely obscured. And although it suffered from the same problem as almost every Kung Fu movie ever made-- eventually, no matter how impressive the choreography is, the staged fighting gets old; one of these people should be DEAD by now-- it still moved right along. It'd be wrong to say that two hours streamed by seamlessly, but it did, in fact, fill the time. But it also made me feel bad. I knew that Chan and Li had multiple roles in it, but it also had a whole slew of famous Fu actors in it, which lead to me doing alot of this: "Hey hey! It's Jackie again! Ooop-- wait! That's not him, that's someone else." Which was just freakin' embarrassing.
But I don't recommend it. I can eat this sandwich. But if YOU eat this sandwich, you'll go to hell. And if you drink Menocino beer, the world will cease to turn and one side will burn while the other side freezes. Paradise Road contains strong scenes of brutality and atrocities that ACTUALLY OCCURRED DURING THE WAR. And I know some folk would rather not think about those sorts of things. And the kung foo stuff is very fun and very pretty, but, Jesus, people! One of you ought to be in TRACTION by now! Whoever you are.

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 . . . )

Shapes Of Things To Come

SO I HAD burgers. I had cheese. I had bacon. Even-tually, this was going to happen. I think it probably happened as a result of having Chinese take-out last night. For some reason, having a bacon double cheeseburger strikes me as the polar opposite of having fried dumplings and mixed lo mein, and the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is the spark in the firmament that connects them. Very Zen, very yen-yang.

Tomorrow will be the cheeseburger at the local, which doesn't necessarily follow as a consequent at all. It'll be Tuesday. Tuesday is the day I go to the local for the cheeseburger. This, too, is more or less inevitable.


I also thought this was inevitable, but I was wrong. We got through maybe ten minutes of it before the Wifey had had it. She had decided, after the fourth sequel came out, that maybe we needed to catch up with the series. Which meant watching this, 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Fast And The Furious: Toyko Drift, and Fast And Furious, the ingeniously titled fourth installment of this seemingly deathless series. I didn't make mention of the fact that I gave up watching the third installment after five minutes of hammy, cliche-ridden, shallow exigesis that went down worse than old crackers from a packet of C rations without water, an analogy almost as cryptic and stupid as the movie itself. Of course, it didn't help that I knew a little about the "sport" of drifting, which is a nasty, filthy, wasteful, awful activity, perpetrated by idiots who hate their cars.

But, after all, crisis averted. When Vin Diesel is the most convincing actor in the flick, time's come to give it the fuck up.


AND then we watched this. I forget precisely what fomented it, although it clearly had something to do with the derbying, but she decided awhile back that she wanted to give it a shot, in advance of seeing the 2002 remake. Whilst this was waiting in the queue, we watched about two minutes of the newer one, about 15 minutes in, before Rachelle decided that it was a stack of shit not worth measuring. Which was fine by me. Say what you will about the man, but when Jean Reno is your seasoned veteran brought in to give the youngsters some gravitas, well, you're fucked.

But the original played nicely. Rachelle's classic quote, after the elucidation that the world in 2018 will be run by corporations, was, "Well, they got a couple of things wrong." (Which is funny, see, 'cause we taxpayers supposedly own several large banks, General Motors, etc., although it has been argued by yours truly that the political parties in most countries in this day and age are basically corporations.) Her classic after-action report is even better: "Also, I would totally watch a game of Roller Ball live. Without the killing." Yeah, the homicide would kind of put a damper on the thing for me.

The larger part of the reason I like the film has to do with how awfully ironic it is. We're supposed to be enjoying it because of all the terrible things it says about humanity, because all us smart folk are misanthropes who abhor violence. But we're NASCAR fans at heart, most of us. We're going to see people get smacked in the head with spikey gloves and shiny metal balls.

And when I say we, I mean you. 'cause I'm that kind of schmuck.


After that, this. Just happened to be on the TCM channel, a tad over half the way through, which is a fine enough way to watch it. This is another example of how much it is possible to get wrong. The International Space Station is a glorified high school science lab, there is no base on the moon, you can't fly manned spacecraft any further than the moon, and even then it costs a fortune and wastes resources, and so far as we know, freezing kills. No such thing as suspended animation.

The rest, howeverm is all true. The bone that famous ape-man threw into space turned into a spaceship, and then that monolith caused that one guy wo spend etenity in a ninteenth century drawing room before hurtling across the high deserts of California wearing neon filter glasses. Don't you read the papers?

So: to the recommendations. Anything you add bacon to in your own home is your own business. Wow. Think about THAT for a minute. The possibilities! On the other hand, what went wrong with the Fast & Furious movies is essentially what went wrong with the remake of the Rollerball movie, which is, basically, they added bacon to it. I could be wrong about that. But I do think that it's part of why no one ever thought to remake Kubrik's movies. They already had bacon added to them. Little known fact: Kubrik added bacon to everything.