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.

Movie & Lunch, Bifurcated Edition

I KNOW that this blog tends to be photo-heavy, and especially so about things you couldn't possibly care about. This is largely because I insist on taking pictures of food, and, while they are not bad pictures of food, they are pictures nonetheless. And, in the words of Our Hero, William H. Joel Jr., you can't get the sound from a story in a magazine.

But this really is kind of special. I had to take this picture in res, in order to show that this sausage sandwich contains two different mustards, a gag that frequent readers will find not uncommon at all. But better than that:

Due to the recent purchase of a 12 pack of Saranac Trail Mix, I consumed said sandwich with a Black Forest followed by a Pale Ale, which combination proved to be downright magical. Especially in combination with the sandwich, which has so far given me waves of nostalgia, in a very odd way.

The sausage in this sandwich was the result of some vaguely ill-advised bargain shopping. An off-brand of kielbasa which we did not recognize, on sale for basically a dollar, the first application-- baked with sauerkraut and served alongside mashed potatoes with a little mustard for dipping-- proved distinctly odd, in a way I could not quite pinpoint.

After a courtesy nibble, the Wifey managed to approximate the oddness: "It tastes like bologna."

Which it does. It tastes distinctly like bologna. Not baloney, but bologna. In fact, a species of ring bologna that registers a tad low on the garlic scale, which is not necessarily a bad thing, so long as there is garlic present. And that approximation led to the supposition-- again, the Wifey's, all crediot where credit is due-- that the best application for this might be fried, in sandwich form, which is what we have here. On the lower laye* of the Kaiser roll is Grey Poupon, on top of which the sausage, on top of which a slice of white cheese, mainly as a binder, on top of which warmed kraut, and on top of that, my beloved Plochman's mustard. The nostalgia factor is that it reminded me, as I was eating it, of the supposedly kosher hot dog I used to get from the Cambodian guy who ran the lunch stand in the half-defunct mall where I used to work. Minus the beer and the cheese and half the mustard. It was uncanny in a way that I am loathe to even attempt to describe.

Anyways.

The movies of the day were not quite October Sky and The Hi-Lo Country, neither of which I can actually, creditably watch. October Sky because the sourcework is veritable, but the execution is specious. Homer Hickam, the subject of the flick, says that his Dad supported him alot more than the film suggests, and that the film plays up the union-anti-union folderol a fair amount, and on and on, but the film has a definite atmosphere which caputures post-war Appalachia is a very faithful and loving way, and all the performances are solid, especially from Chris Cooper, on of my favorite actors, and Jake Gyllenhall, who, for all I care, can rot in hell.

(Because he is a fine actor, but he tends to take fish-in-a-barrel roles. Donnie Darko? Fuggedaboudit. Who can't play an emotionally tortured adolescent? Besides Christopher Walken, I mean.)

The Hi-Lo Country I keep trying to watch, but it's just so mean spirited. The whole film seems predicated on the notion that betrayal is not only inevitable, but somehow honorable. I mean, I have respect for films that have a gray moral tone, but when Woody Harrelson is your choice to play your moral chorus, well, I think it's clear that you have serious issues with your choice of ethos.

(On the other hand, it has one of the few truly authentic Harrelson performances, so for that reason, it's nearly hypnotic, Harrelson being one of those actors whose performances I equally enjoy whether authentic or in. Alongside Christopher Walken.)

*Laye is a term I recently coined to mean "the slices of bread in the sandwich," so your standard sandwich would have a lower laye and an upper laye, where your club sandwich would have a lower, middle, and upper laye. Big whoop.