#89 - sweet romance.

last night, i was doing the internet chat with a certain friend in germany & she was looking for a romantic comedy to watch. eventually, she settled on marley & me, starring jennifer aniston, owen wilson & a naughty dog. personally, the closest i get to watching romantic comedies are films with michael cera or seth rogen. today, to avoid the rain falling outside, i checked out nick & norah's infinite playlist, starring cera & the sometimes hot kat dennings & an infinite playlist. ellen page was nowhere to be found.

as a supporter of all things indie rock & skewly arrested development-related, going in, the film could've had michael cera sitting around in his apartment with any cute girl listening to british sea power for ninety minutes & it would have been fine with me. over the past few years, i've been a big believer in indie rock as a great catalyst for bringing people together, so i'm a fan of the film's "dorky love through indie rock" approach. the indie rockness starts right up in the opening shot, which features a merge records (happy 20th anniversary!) sticker & a poster for a show at nyc's bowery ballroom. during the night, they visit all the indie joints--bowery, arlene's grocery, union pool (or "brooklyn pool" in the film). the opening credits play over a devendra banhart song...& then later devendra has one line as a customer in a deli, where he assures norah that she'd know if she'd had an orgasm. creepy.

the film weaves two plots together. the first revolves around a group of high school seniors, including nick (cera) & norah (dennings), trying to find the locale of a secret show by the fictional band where's fluffy?  this plot provides the backdrop for the main plot--nick & norah shedding their exes & falling in love over the course of a single evening. they argue a bit & say nerdy things to each other & get excited about bands & he has a handiwipe handy for her & she calls him "her musical soul mate except for all the cure" and they fall in love. that's the best kind of love! anyway, i enjoyed the film. you should too.

a few items of note...

near the beginning of the film, nick's band, "the jerk offs" are playing a show in the l.e.s. opening for bishop allen. since this gig is at arlene's grocery, we can assume that nobody got paid.

there are a few random cameos--seth meyers (as half of a horny couple who mistakes nick's yugo for a cab), andy samberg (as a scary homeless dude) & kevin corrigan (as a guy at port authority with a turkey sandwich).

favorite line i can identify with #1: "...nicky is definitely worth the underwire. he just needs a little push is all."

favorite line i can identify with #2: "look, other bands, they want to make it about sex or pain, but you know, the beatles, they had it all figured out, okay? "i want to hold your hand." the first single. it's effing brilliant, right?... that's what everybody wants, nicky. they don't want a twenty-four-hour hump sesh, they don't want to be married to you for a hundred years. they just want to hold your hand."

#89 - sweet romance.
snack: ike & sam's kickin' cayenne kettlecorn
drink: grown up soda dry cola


since nothing goes better with a movie than popcorn & a soda, i cracked open a bag of ike & sam's kickin' cayenne kettlecorn to munch on. it is hands down the best popcorn i've had this millennium. the individual pieces are fully popped & fluffy at times and at other times crunchy & sweet & salty all at once. the cayenne flavor's not too crazy, but it's there enough to give the popcorn a slight peppery taste, which goes well with the other prevailing taste, which is like a subtle, sweet caramel...not unlike every single character michael cera has ever played.

the popcorn's made by a company located down by avenue i here in brooklyn, which means i'm a selective locavore, right? it's trans fat & cholesterol free and made with only five ingredients--popcorn, corn oil, sugar, salt & cayenne pepper--which is an amazing feat given the wonderful taste. it's a good thing that it tastes as godlike as it does & that, as a result, i finished off the bag today, because it apparently expires on cinco de mayo.

tonight's beverage of choice is a grown up soda dry cola, made by a company based here in the city. even though i assume they don't have a bottling plant on 57th st, we'll call them local as well, especially since they've donated to both 826NYC & the madison square park conservancy. their cola's made with cola nut extract & like all their beverages is 100% natural, kosher & no-caffeine. no high fructose corn syrup in this bad boy...cane sugar all the way. i prefer the cane sugar sodas over the HFCS ones. it gives them a feel similar to that of fountain soda, even though it's bottled.

...so it turned out that my snack & drink choices tied in nicely with the film & just like with the film, they were both subtly sweet & not too "in my face."  when i was done with them, i felt satisfied & hopeful and the best part?  it was all done in a way that felt neither icky nor manufactured...how sickly perfect is that?

#85 - a night in at the movies.

since i've been obsessed with obsessing over tv series recently & was staying in this saturday night, i decided to take a different path & watch a few flicks & since my last entry was entitled "arrr," i decided to keep going that route by watching two flicks with "r" names--rachel getting married & religulous...after catching up on the last five episodes of the office, of course.

i've been meaning to see rachel getting married for quite some time now, pretty much since it came out. for starters, when i first saw previews for the film & realized that it had that "indie" feel that i go for & that tv on the radio's tunde adebimpe was playing rachel's groom, i wanted to see it. i loved him in jump tomorrow & as it is, he's only acted in a handful of films thus far. plus, anne hathaway's in it & she's totally hot & from brooklyn. going in, i could've cared less about the fact that it's directed by jonathan demme. other than silence of the lambs & swimming to cambodia, nothing he's done interests me. anyway, til now, i slacked on seeing it.

i'm a sucker for character-driven stories & rachel getting married is full of characters. anne hathaway is amazing as rachel's recovering addict sister, kym, and all the many many other actors in the film each have numerous chances to shine. for me, one of the other special parts was the use of music. everyone's staying at rachel's family's house for the wedding & since 90% of them seem to have some sort of musical talent & most of the action takes place at the house, there's almost always somebody playing music in the background. one of my pet peeves is when a film tries to make you feel a certain way by laying the sounds of omnipresent, sappy music over the action. in this case, since there's only natural music, it adds to the "realism" of the film. anyway, i didn't cry or anything, but i definitely felt the emotion of the film & i definitely recommend it.

religulous takes an interesting (if not self-indulgent) approach to storytelling, as the film revolves around bill maher doing his shtick & examining the craziness of religion through the filter of his own experience/struggles with the existence of god. one of the guys i share an office with & who, by default, listens to npr with me, leading to multiple, daily, political discussions, passed it on to me last week after watching it. now we can have all sorts of discussions tomorrow!

it was an interesting enough film, but i have the same problem with bill maher that i have with michael moore. although maher's not as annoying as moore, both of them go at people with a smug attitude that subtly mocks their subjects & adds an unspoken "i'm right, but i'll ask you regardless to prove that i'm right" to every one of their questions. i get that it was larry charles' follow up film to borat, so there's some of that "talk to people & they'll expose their own ignorance" thing, but for some reason, i've never viewed that as the best approach to revealing truths.

throughout the film, he shows the craziness of most organized religions, speaking with a rabbi who denies the holocaust, a man who claims to be the second coming of jesus, mormons & scientologists and a number of folks hopeful for the end of the world. he does a solid job of exposing how much of what is written in religious texts is written by men & often overlaps with texts from other religions. all of them are so sure that they're right & their god & text are the one true ones & as such, do crazy things to those who don't believe in what they do & start wars & whatnot...oh humans. you'll believe anything.

#85 - a night in at the movies.
snack: broiled spicy octopus salad
drink: radeberger pilsner


tonight, i'm snacking on a broiled spicy octopus salad, made up of octopus that was totally broiled in the oven, tomatoes, onions, feta & lettuce, all topped with balsamic vinaigrette. it was more of a meal, but i sort of picked at it for a few hours instead of inhaling it all at once, so i'm calling it "snacking." as a rule, i rather enjoy picking at my food, so it worked out just splendidly toward confirming that quirk.

i guess i have to consider myself an octopus lover. that doesn't mean i'm a red wings fan or have ever had sex with an octopus (SFW?), but i very often get it as sushi & occasionally consume calamari, which is squid & like the octopus also a cephalopod. there's just something about the pseudo-chewiness of it that appeals to me. it also goes well with the 2000 horror classic, octopus.

i'm glad i chose to broil it rather than just tossing it cold in with some veggies. it gave it more of a spicy, off-the-grill, bbq flavor. recently, i've been making a lot of salads for dinner, partially due to the aforementioned co-worker above, who has been eating salads every day for lunch, partially due to the positive influence of his girlfriend. as a result, it gave him reason to question my lack of greens in my weekday lunches & i realized he had a point & remembered that i actually like veggies, so i recently began stocking the fridge with the essentials--lettuce, onions, tomatoes--& started picking up avocados & peppers & portobello mushrooms & whatnot on my way home from work so i could have me a salad every once in a while...luckily, that led to leftover veggies for tonight's salad making.

i had a radeberger pilsner along with the salad. i can't say that there's anything special about the radeberger. it's your basic european pilsner, all light & easy to drink, with a subtle bitterness. it's made by a german company out of dresden, the city that we completely leveled with firebombing at the end of world war II, destroying 13 square miles & killing tens of thousands of civilians with repeated incendiary bombings that raised the ground temperature to 2700° F. at least that war had nothing to do with relig...oh, wait. never mind.

#55 - limey.

full shocking disclosure: other than gray's anatomy, which is pretty much all spalding gray anyhow, i've never seen a steven soderbergh film...not erin brokovich, not traffic, not oceans eleven, twelve, or thirteen...not even sex, lies and videotape, three things that, individually, i'm a huge fan of. people talk about him as experimental & ground-breaking & whatnot & maybe i'll believe that when i watch sex, lies & videotape or schizopolis, but until that day comes, i'm comfortable with the opinion i've formed of his body of work...i mean, oceans thirteen? c'mon. the rat pack must be just sitting in the afterlife puffing on cigars & rolling their eyes over that one. i will say i'm slightly intrigued about the che movies though.

nonetheless, in a half-assed attempt to create a blog theme, i sat down & watched his film the limey tonight...even turned the lights down & lit a lime-scented candle i had lying around to set the mood, a mood that can only be described as "solo sexy." the film was actually pretty good. it's about a british ex-con whose daughter is murdered, so he flies to l.a. to find out what happened & enact his revenge. there's this one scene with nicky katt (who you may know as the dude who wins the "fight" near the end of dazed & confused), where he is standing on the edge of a film set viciously mocking various members of a film crew as they walk by. i can only assume this helped him fulfill some fantasy as an actor...loved that. as to the tone of the film, i've been watching & loving damages recently & from what i can tell from the limey, the disjointed narrative & time switches denoted by different color tones that the creators of damages employ all the time would not have existed without the limey before it.

nobody actually refers to the main character as a limey & he's not a sailor or anything, but i guess we're just supposed to assume that he deserves to be called one. the term "limey" is american slang for british & specifically sailors, slang that apparently developed because of the practice of giving british sailors lime juice to combat the vitamin c deficiencies that often occurred whilst at sea & often eventually led to the disease scurvy. though scurvy is no doubt one of our funnier-named diseases, it goes hand-in-hand with malnourishment & in the areas of the world where it actually does occur it's actually no laughing matter, especially the excessive bleeding & non-stop diarrhea parts.

#55 - limey.
snack: choxie dark chocolate key lime truffle bar
drink: blue moon rising moon seasonal ale

since i hate excessive bleeding & non-stop diarrhea, i've taken the necessary precautions to ensure that i don't get scurvy any time soon. tonight, i finished off a choxie dark chocolate key lime truffle bar. choxie is another one of target's hip grocery brands, cleverly named to evoke thoughts of similarly-named japanese candies & treats. in addition to the tastiness of the dark chocolate & the key lime, the truffle bar has graham biscotti pieces, a splendid bonus for a texture lover like myself. the packaging urges me to "keep it hidden from mere amateurs, and keep your choxie for yourself" & that's just what i did. i'm glad target finally wised up & realized they're dealing with a professional here. believe me, nobody even had a chance to lay eyes on that poor chocolate bar.

i had a blue moon rising moon seasonal ale to go along with it. it's a light spring ale brewed with kieffer lime leaves & lime peel, which basically saves me the step of cutting up a lime & putting it in there myself, which is very convenient. who said preventing scurvy takes effort? i bet the british sailors wish they had scurvy-preventing chocolates & beers like i do. they probably have to mix the limes in with their fish heads & gruel. i don't want to sound prejudiced towards british culinary delights, but i'll take my lime chocolates & beers over their lime-tinged fish heads & gruel any day of the week.

#54 - biggie x3.

this past saturday night, i headed into union square with some peeps to catch the 7:30 showing of notorious, which had just opened on friday night. i was never this huge notorious b.i.g. fan. when he was around, from 94-97, i was in college & putting behind my high school love of rap, which had been largely dominated by n.w.a. (& a host of gangsta rap, both crappy & not), public enemy & a laundry list of d nices & redhead kingpins & das efxes. i had become unhappy with rap's direction, was starting to come in contact with grunge/phish & was reading a lot of feminist texts. as a result, i ignored rap for the most part & didn't really know much about biggie or non-digital underground tupac or for that matter, who nas or jay-z or a lot of other dudes were for until at least few years after i should have.

that aside, after recently running through seven seasons of the shield, i'm definitely intrigued by the fact that the l.a.p.d.'s now-defunct rampart division (which the shield draws inspiration from) is allegedly tied to both gang activity & beyond that, the tupac & notorious b.i.g killings...& there's the fact that biggie was from brooklyn, which has been my home for the last 6+ years...so i decided weeks back that i needed to see this movie in the theaters when it came out.

it was pretty aight. three out of five stars or thumbs or something. those who i went with who had more knowledge of biggie than i reviewed it as, "i'd pretty much heard & seen all that stuff before, but it was still pretty good."...so there's that. jamal woolard, who plays biggie, is pretty good...& there's one running joke about diddy always dancing, which was somewhat comical...

#54 - biggie x3.

snack: regal cinema small popcorn with butter
drink: regal cinema small cherry coca-cola

...before the film, i'd grabbed a small popcorn & a small cherry coca-cola, an indulgence which ran me $10.25. the ticket was $14, so all told, i paid $24.25 for the film experience. i like to tell this story about one of my college film professors, who once briefly theorized that if the price of going to see a film in the theater was closer pricewise to seeing a broadway show or the opera, people would be pickier & choose wiser & think of going to the movie as more of a cultural experience. so much for that theory.

after purchasing my popcorn, i couldn't help but bring it on over to the butter pump, conveniently placed on the other side of the lobby behind a line of people queuing up to enter the theater next to it. i gave my small popcorn two pumps & headed into the theater. what can you say about movie theater popcorn really? it's usually pretty standard & the difference comes in how much butter there is on there. on this occasion, i didn't really give it a hearty enough shakeup after the butter pumping, so at one point, when i was a few inches down into the bag, i reached in to grab a handful & ended up with hands slimier than patrick swayze in ghost. thank god for tiny scratchy movie theater napkins. in the end, i only finished half the bag...i get sick of popcorn pretty quickly, i suppose.

as for the cherry coca-cola, i sucked that thing down. i've loved cherry coca-cola ever since they resurrected it years back. it always makes me think of fifties soda parlors for some reason & i like fifties soda parlors...they're the kinds of places where jerks are preferred!...so i sucked that cherry coke down & of course, had to pee for the last forty-five minutes of the movie. i was ok though. every time i'm in a position like that, i think back to elementary school, when my class went on a whale watch & we had an hour bus ride to the boat. i had to pee even before we left but didn't go for some reason & by the time i finally reached the bathroom on the boat, i had devolved into some sort of pre-teen over-expanded bladder haze. i figure if i made it then, i can make it now.

...today i followed up & watched the biggie & tupac movie from 2002, so i could get a bigger picture of the east coast/west coast craziness & the murders & fill in the stuff that wasn't covered in notorious, which was more the story of biggie's life than his death. biggie & tupac is from nick broomfield, who also did monster in a box & kurt and courtney. all i can say is that he interviews suge knight a few times & that guy does not seem like the smartest & most rational guy. to be honest, i'm surprised he hasn't had nick broomfield killed yet, but that's only because from what you see in the film, he seems to be pretty good at getting away with it. in conclusion, suge knight...please do not have me killed. if you do so, i will agree to not mock the fact that your record label is now owned by canadians. thanks.

#7 - having it my way.

holy storms, batman! this weekend, there were a series of storms here in the city that brought me back to the summer storms of fort lauderdale, where one second it'd be all sunny & happy & a'birds tweetin' and the next, the sky would turn black & sheets of rain would come crashing down on your face.

as an example, on saturday, i left my house & jumped on the subway up to union square. when i left my apartment, the skies were grey, but there was complete skyness dryness in action when i descended into the subway station to catch the train. when i came out of the union square station 45 minutes later, the GAME HAD TOTALLY FLIPPED & there were masses of tourists & nyu students & citizens & trader joes/whole foods bags & baby strollers & a viola taking cover at the top of the stairs exiting the subway...taking cover from the torrential downpour that could have had irreversible effects on us all...if we were mogwai...which i'm pretty sure we aren't. five minutes later, the rain had stopped & the evil scientist with a weather machine hidden deep in the bowels of columbia's pupin hall cackled with glee.

i didn't want to take the chance that i might be even part mogwai, so with the sporadic violent half-hour storms this weekend, i stayed indoors a bunch overall, assembling quite a lazy dog-dangling agenda.

on saturday night in particular, i decided to have some indoor netflix time with two films...3:10 to yuma & the bridge...a western & a documentary about suicide at the golden gate bridge. to prep for a four hour plus span of couch-sitting, i stopped by the rite aid & picked up the awesomest bag of snack i could find & went down to bierkraft to get a few beers that made me feel snooty...

#7 - having it my way.
snack: burger king ketchup & fries flavored potato snacks
drinks: abita purple haze, victory hop wallop, porkslap pale ale

at around 10:10, i started off with 3:10 to yuma, probably the first western i have watched since i watched dead man for the 7,000th time earlier in the year. anyhow...very entertaining film. i didn't want to kill russell crowe half as much as i expected that i'd want to.

a little bit into the film, i broke open the bag of bk potato snacks. the verdict: they don't really have the bk french fry taste to them, but they definitely taste like ketchup. basically, if you've ever paired a can of potato sticks with a bottle of heinz, you're feeling bk with these snacks. by this time, i had finished the abita purple haze & with the fruity beer out of the way, i moved on to the victory hop wallop. it was hoppy.

just after midnight, i started watching the bridge & cracked open the porkslap pale ale (click on the barn doors if you visit the site!). the porkslap comes from butternuts beer, a brewery located in a town midway between syracuse & albany, both places that are cold in different senses of the word. i'm a sucker for beers like theirs--the kind that come in cans but don't taste like piss. under fear of ketchup overdose, i could not eat another bk potato snack at this point & hid the bag safely in the kitchen cupboard.

the bridge...in 2004, filmmaker eric steel, inspired by a new yorker article about suicides on the golden gate bridge, moved to san francisco & got permits to film the bridge. in that year, a pretty typical one, 24 people died by jumping off the bridge, again making it the top location in the world for suicides. he captured 23 of them amongst his footage & then combined this with interviews with friends & family of ome of the victims.

jumping off the bridge is pretty easy to do, in fact. there's no fence stopping you from doing it. the golden gate bridge district has made sure of that by taking forever to put up some sort of barrier. sure, if there were a barrier up, people would probably just rule that method out & find another (one person in the film likens choosing the method of suicide to picking out a college), but a deterrent is a deterrent in my book.

anyhow, if you are ok with watching a movie about suicide & how people get to that point & what effect it has on friends & family, check this movie out. burger king ketchup & fries flavored potato snacks are optional.