You Can't Lose If You Don't Play

I LOVE NEW YORK. Last night I had the oppor-tunity to take the matter up with someone who professed the opposite, and with every turn, he seemed to have to admit that any grounds for NOT loving New York-- the crowds, the noise, the smells-- and OH, are there smells-- can be caveatted. This, for instance, is a pastrami on rye from the Stage Deli at 47th and Broadway, ingredients for which the Wifey brought back for me at the conclusion of her trip yesterday. They packed it all as componentry-- bread, meat, mustard, pickles-- and there was enough meat that I was able to have one for a late lunch yesterday afternoon, and then cobble one together with Arnold rye and some Ploughman's Polish mustard. I love New York. A pastrami on rye from the Stage Deli is a pure, bold truth. You cannot convince me otherwise.

This is not the film of the day, although it could have been. I watched this over a week ago, and thought almost instantly I could review it in two words: good enough. Which describes everything: the script, the direction, the acting, the characters, the dialogue. It's all good enough. Especially the characters. With one single exception, this film is populated with people who mean well in the Carlinian sense. (And the one who didn't mean well was so sharply drawn that I winced just about every time she came on screen, before even a single line of dialogue was spoken.) It had the unmistakable feel of a faked up real world, one that has been fiddled and jiggered with so that everyone comes out just all right, having made sacrifices to do so, sure, but all right nonetheless. But see, that's not really a criticism. It's a summation. And all it really tells you about the movie is that it's easy to watch. The only other thing I have to add requires a quick explanation. We are fond of saying, in our household, of various actors, "I'd watch So-And-So (insert mundane task here)." I would never thought to have said it, but I have now watched Paul Giamatti plunge a toilet, and it's the only piece of acting I have ever seen him do that struck me as gimmicky.

This is the film of the day. It popped into rotation a coupla weeks ago, and I knew sooner or later I'd get around to it. And, as predicted-- as I predicted, back when this came out in theaters and was an instant Oscar buzz-- it couldn't help but be compelling, given the subject matter. Here's something that doesn't get said enough: the royalties of Europe, all of them, gave Germany every opportunity not to wage war, but Hitler was bound and determined to do so, and utterly convinced that the inevitable outcome would be the conquest of the globe by the German armies. That bastard was crazy.

Anyways. The major knock against this when it hit theaters was that there were parts that were probably not completely accurate, which is kind of a bum rap, because those bits would have happened behind closed doors and would not have been recorded for posterity. And also that the speech therapist in question may have been more charlatan than scientist, but I never got hold of anything that substantiated that-- or, frankly, disproved it either, which is odd. But this was a good enough entertainment for a lunchtime. Which is an odd thing, too. Given the source material. Towards the end, I found myself thinking "You know what would go down nicely after this? A Fish Called Wanda." (You know, because of Michael Palin's beautiful stutter job.) Yeah. That kind of sums it up.
So while I am sure that no one reading this could have any doubts as to my recommendation regarding the sandwich-- oh, and by the way, starting with the boho black and finishing with the IPA worked splendidly as well-- I am equally sure that you can figure out my recommendations regarding the films. Which is: meh. You could get it at the grocery store and do as well.

We Named The Dog Indiana

TODAY's lunch is brought to you by a general sense of desper-ation. Of the several options I was faced with, none of which were gaining any kind of moral traction, what I ended up with is what I am electing to call the Doggie Club: grilled cheese and turkey, with both white and yellow American cheese-- the real stuff this time, not the plastic-wrapped cheeze variety-- and two different kinds of mustard, both my beloved yellow Plochman's and the ubiquitous Grey Poupon. The only thing about the sandwich that is at all strange, though, really, is that the turkey I used is the stuff we buy for our dog as a nightly treat. Not that there's anything wrong with the turkey-- it's Oscar Mayer Organic, which we get for the dog on the grounds that it has a lower volume of sodium than other varieties-- it's just kind of strange to know that I am eating food we bought for the dog.

The beer is not just a mistake, it's a cruel joke, and insult, a big, flacid slap in the face of a fake beer. I sampled the stuff about a year ago at a beer and wine emporium we never go to, and it didn't seem that bad. On pouring a whole bottle, and specifically on the third or fourth gulp, it was clear that mischief was afoot. A cursory examination of the neck band revealed that Blowing Rock Ale is made for the Boone Brewing Company (both places in the North Carolina mountians) in Wilkes Barre, PA.

That was yesterday. Today's revelation? This stuff is McSoreleys. Plain and simple. Boom, like dat. I got two more of the things to cringe through before I am done, and at least they're not horribly, horribly bad if you more or less bolt them, gulp by gulp. At least they were on sale.

Today's film ended up being The Eiger Sanction. I caught this more or less by accident when I was in college, and today it just happened to turn up about the time I was starting to consider lunch options. The first time I saw it, I thought it was a pretty good movie about mountaineering sandwiched around a pretty bad spy flick. The truth is, I learned subsequently, that the novel was meant as a satire of the whole spy book genre, and the movie plays it right down the middle: if you are a fan of spy movies and buy into all the cold war bullshit, it's a pretty good spy movie. If you hate spy movies and understand that all the cold war, spy vs. spy bullshit is bullshit, it's a pretty good satire. Problem is, I love spy movies because I know all the cold war stuff is bullshit, so to me, it is still a pretty good mountaineering movie sandwiched in a pretty bad spy movie. This isn't near so satirical as some of the mid-age Bond movies.

Scratch that. Great mountaineering movie. And really, how many of them are there? Besides that, see where it says GEORGE KENNEDY in great big letters at the bottom? This is really a great George Kennedy movie. Really, he takes a while to come in, but he really takes the thing over. It's a beautiful thing, so long as you like George Kennedy. Which I clearly do.

So do I recommend it? Eh. Fly by your own lights. I like it well enough to watch it when it comes around, which so far proves to be every five years or so. Don't eat your dog's food, unless your dog is so spoiled that it demands to be fed people food. And the beer I wouldn't wish on my dog.