and the insane clown
Fred and I went to see the new Batman movie on Sunday.
Two thumbs up. Dark, scary, freaky, explodey. Everything we wanted from a Summer movie.
Damn, but Heath Ledger did a crazy good job as the Joker. Batshit insane good. And Aaron Eckhart did just as good a job as Harvey Dent, especially in the last third of the movie.
Super awesome fun time happy Summer movie. I LOVE popcorn movies.
Prepare to evacuate.
I made Red Beans and Rice today. Rather good job, if I say so myself. And seeing that there’s no one else posting here, it’s pretty much only me that CAN say so. So there.
The basic gist of Red Beans and Rice is this: boil kidney beans all day with chopped up onion, bell pepper, celery, a ham hock, and a bunch of spices. Serve over rice with liberal dashes of hot sauce. Wait for the explosive aftereffects to hit sometime in the night.
It’s rather an all-day job making it, but as all-day jobs go it’s pretty painless. Most of it involves wandering into the kitchen periodically, stirring the big bubbling mess, and thinking, “hey, this is still pretty soupy.” Patience will be rewarded with a thick red gravy made primarily of bean mash and dissolved onion.
I hate onion. But I really like this.
If you want to try it yourself, use this recipe. Note that it’s a vegan recipe. If you’re a vegan/vegetarian, this is probably right up your alley. If you’re not, feel free to toss in a ham hock or two like I did. Hopefully the blog owner won’t be too horrified that I chucked pork bones into her recipe. I also toned down the heat so that Fred’s head wouldn’t asplode. Hence the bottle of Crystal Hot Sauce next to my plate during dinner.
Those of you of southern extraction will probably complain that I used kidney beans instead of small red beans, or that I used inferior brands of kidney beans. Tough hop. I works with what I can gets at the local store. I’m not going to find Camellia Brand Beans in Minnesota, so I used Market Pantry (Target store brand) dried kidney beans. Quelle horreur.
Other southerners will instead complain that I’m a yankee and have no business cooking something distinctly southern, and know about as much about good food as I do about catfish noodling. To which I invite them to come up here and show me what I’m missing. In January. When we’re grilling beer brats outside.
Candy asses.
The big flickery thing with the ushers and the popcorn.
Today’s movie was Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. Big crunchy visual feast with a slightly convoluted plot, some poorly thought-out plot points, and lots of fighty-explody stuff.
I loved it.
It’s a Guillermo Del Toro movie, which means freakish creatures and lots of grimy texture. I love that. I am a big fan of Pan’s Labyrinth, despite the rather depressing story. I’m not a fan of emotional pain and suffering in movies, so I’m not current with quite a number of the more serious films of the past decade or so. (Haven’t seen Schindler’s List, or Saving Private Ryan, for instance.) But the visuals and the freak factor are so high in Pan’s Labyrinth that I fell in love with it.
Hellboy 2 is heavy on the visuals and the freak factor, without all the agony of his previous film. I appreciate that a lot. This had lots of oddball characters, big clockwork machinery, messy organic stuff, and some nice fight scenes. The opening is in the form of a story told to the young Hellboy, and is performed by animated wooden dolls. Absolutely beautiful work.
The rest of the film is a bit of a chaotic mess, and I don’t care. It’s so much fun to watch that I didn’t really give a damn about the story or the character interactions. Hellboy (usually called “Red”) is a great character, and is played perfectly by Ron Perlman.
Don’t see this for grand acting or comprehensible plot. See it for great fights and awesome spectacle.
Actual personality.
Fred and I discovered a couple of things on the 4th of July.
1) The 4th of July is a great time to go to the movies, because there’s no-one there. Everyone else is out having picnics.
2) WALL-E is a wonderful movie.
I am a genuine sucker for Pixar films. I love all of them, even the ones that are generally considered as the weakest efforts. (Cars and A Bug’s Life are usually singled out for this.)
WALL-E is a marvelous piece of work, even against the rest of their films. It is breathtaking how much personality can be displayed by a rusty little trash compactor. Or a cockroach, for that matter.
The first half of the movie has little dialog. It’s almost entirely driven by visuals, punctuated with appropriate sounds and the occasional pronunciation of the characters’ names. It’s beautiful, and silly, and terrifying, and genuine. So genuine that I rapidly forgot that I was watching an animated movie. The characters seem filmed rather than animated. As much as I love Toy Story, it’s pretty hard to forget that it’s an animated movie. Everything is glossy and plastic, and simple. Here, the world is complex, rusted, dirty, and very lived-in. It leaves a taste in your mouth. You can almost smell the dust and steel.
It’s a glorious film, and another reason why Pixar is my favorite film company.
Holy Hannah.
I made this Chocolate Eclair dessert this weekend. Super easy, super trashy, super delicious. The original recipe calls for french vanilla instant pudding, so of course I screwed around and used chocolate instead.
The simplicity of the recipe belies its awesome power to overwhelm one’s sense of restraint. I won’t be making it often, out of sheer self-defense. This is NOT the kind of dessert you want lingering in the house.
Here’s the recipe. Try not to die from the incredibly difficult instructions. Oh, and it’s at its best after about 12 hours in the fridge. If you can wait that long. Fat chance.
Trapped in a Wikipedia Singularity
