Strange Guy, But I Like Him

THIS IS IN NO WAY the lunch of the day. This is my take on KFC's Failure Pile in Sadness Bowl, which, as I predicted, years ago when they first brought the product out to market, is really pretty good if you make it yourself. It's a layer of mashed potatoes coated with sweet kernel corn and then adorned with chicken nuggets and drizzled with brown gravy, so kind of like a variation on shepherd's pie, and frankly not far from a version of bangers & mash. Which still makes it basic knuckle-head food. I mean, boeuf bourganion it ain't. But it's brown, it's hot, it's tasty, and it'll fill the void, as we're fond of saying. (Not that I really sought it out; it more or less came together. About half the ingredients were acquired on the grounds that they were on sale last week. Like I say, I first thought about doing this some years ago. Not something anyone ought to go out of their way for.
Which Patton Oswalt did. In one of his stand-up bits, again, years back, he referred to this as a sadness pile in a failure bowl-- or the other way around, it doesn't seem to make alot of difference to me-- where the actual KCF product name is the Flavor Bowl or something else equally fictitious/fatuous, and, really, who gives a dry gray fuck. Later on down the line, after he struck up a friendship with some of the folks over at the Onion AV Club, they challenged him to actually eat one of these things and write about the experience for them. He did, and the results were predictably amusing, but in the process he made the ultimate rookie mistake. He bought the failure bowl and-- get this-- got it TO GO. He took it away, took it to his house and ate it. Any fool knows that, with this type of product, you have to eat it right then and there, while it's hot, for it to have any chance at being palatable in any way at all.
(Which, as the Wifey is fond of pointing out, is bullshit. It's still KFC. It'd always suck, hot or cold.)
(Today's lunch was an omelet. See picture heading previous entry. Same thing. Same glorious, lovely thing.)

This is not the movie of the day. I got this via Netflix last week, firstly on the strength of it's being written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson, and secondarily on the strength of Martha Plimpton playing the lead-- secondarily because, God bless ya, Martha, you don't always pick material I like-- and watched it over lunch. And I am still sussing out my reaction. It's an extraordinarily well written version of an often told tale, with bits and pieces twisted about for effect, and absolutely studded with sublime performances, and aside from one bit of stunt plotting involving an unexpected glass eye-- I ask you, a glass eye?-- pretty much everything rings true. Especially since I am usually a stickler for the proper use of Southern stereotypes, and Tim gets just about everything about the Oklahoma setting reasonably right. But I think what it boils down to is I appreciated it more than I liked it. Maybe. I dunno.

In other news, Jerry Lee has seen Paul. Which, well . . . I caught this fifteen minutes in, watched most of the middle of it, ended up missing the ending, and caught it during a later showing (after watching the re-run of the F1 racing at the Hungaroring from last July, which was a helluva great race). And it seems like what everyone else said about it after it first came out was pretty much correct. It's cute, it's inventive, it's about what you would expect from a movie that casts Seth Rogan as the alien. But on the other hand, there were more than a couple of the plot culture gags that made me laugh out loud. (So tempted to soil a couple of 'em. Won't.) So I will watch it again, at some point, I am sure. It just entered the rotation, and even though it came in deeper in the HBO roster and on at an odd time interval, assuredly it will be on again, and I will sit it out, just so I can say I have seen it. Jerry Lee needs to take the ferry.

So no, I wouldn't recommend it. It's way better at home, and if you happen to have a mega-bag of chicken bits laying about the house, it kind of makes sense, But I can't recommend it. I'll eat it, but there's no compelling reason you ought to. Tim Blake put a ton of work into this, and the love of his labor shows, and Martha et al requite themselves magnificently, but when you get right down to it's it's kind of like mining for dirt. What I saw of Paul was fun and funny, but it's really meant for pop culture geeks with an obscenely wide base of knowledge. So I can't really recommend it. Hell, I don't even KNOW you! (Then again, if you're actually reading this stupid blog, it's probably right down yer damn geek alley. Ya damned geek.)

PS: The title of this blog refers to a Kids in the Hall sketch, but whether that makes any of this any funnier, I dunno. Also, Paul is on Cinemax, not HBO right now, and although it was on MaxWest this morning, it will be on Cinemax proper tonight. At 8:15. Really, Cinemax, WTF?

Cold Comforts

TODAY THE WEATHER turned on us, yet again, and the two days of glorious sunshine turned into a grim, gray, dour, rainy winter day. The ground is swollen shut, still cold from the deep freeze of the last two months, so the rain is coursing off it in streams. The kind of slow, soaking rain that always seems on the verge of ending, yet seems as if it will never end. So the lunch of the day is soup and sandwich. The soup is Campbell's Soups Natural Selections Tuscan Chicken, and the sandwich is ham on rye, grilled. The face on the television screen is Thandie Newton in the fine film Run, Fat Boy, Run, which is not a bad film because David Schwimmer directed it, but rather because of the huge holes in the plot at the 1, 3 and 5 marks. Which is to say it's a fine enough thing to watch, so long as you are distracted by the bad weather, the good food, and the lovely Red Hook Winter Ale. (Which I also had with Ghiardelli's Christmas special peppermint bark, which was both a one-hundred-and-eighty degree skid around and dead solid perfect.)


The film of the day is not Requiem. One of the crew at the Onion AV club recently added it to their thier new cult canon series, which I can appreciate on several levels, but, I, just . . . Nope. No can do. The barrel is way too full of fish. And one of the plot threads is yanked straight out of a Rolling Stones song. It's that school of film that's supposed to reward us all for appreciating how rotten the human spirit is, malfunctioning aspiration machines strapped to dying animals. Oh, and by the way, fuck yer mom, too. (Love the soundtrack, though.)



The film of the day is the fifth season of News Radio. Actually, it started earlier in the week. No, it started last week. Or was it the week before? Whatever. I grabbed a link to Hulu, which I had never bothered with before, and ended up watching the entirety of Season 4, which was the season before Phil Hartman's wife went insane and killed him before turning the gun on herself. It was also the season wherein the writing went from very good sitcom to straight out, up-and-up abstract comedy, culminating in an episode wherein they reinacted the movie Titanic, to great and magnificent effect. In point of fact, I started with the Titanic episode, and then went back to the beginning of the season, the first episode of which featured Jon Lovitz as a man perched on a ledge, preparing to commit suicide.

There's what you know, and then there's what you can prove. For instance, it's well documented that the fifth season was pulled together in spite of the fact of Hartman's absence, in fact because it was felt that Hartman would have wanted the show to go on. Lovitz joined up in his friend's absence, but knew he wasn't taking his place, because no one could take Phil Hartman's place. The fifth season has a kind of rhythm to it, one, two, one, two, with a fairly conventional plot followed by a more surreal and absurd episode. (More or less; this is a matter of appreciating intentions as much as anything else.) It's also indisputable that every single member of the cast found themselves channelling Lovits at one time or another. But I know . . .

Lemme back this up a step. I am on record as having a very vague and thoroughly unexplainable understanding of some kind of afterlife. No idea why, not attached to any kind of belief system or religious upbringing, just some vague notion that there is something left over, some other kind of existence out there somewhere. And somehow I know, I just know, that from somewhere, out there, Hartman was looking out at the show as they filmed it, thinking that there's no way the season would have played out that way if he had still been in it.

And he smiled.