Weekend Adventures

It was a good weekend to be a delivery driver. Friday was wonderfully busy, I think I did 20 runs which is about as good as one can do at my store, and I crossed the $70 plateau which is always a cause for celebration. Even the no- and low-tippers were giving that night.

Saturday was slower but still steady, and I did well again. The most interesting thing that happened wasn't on a delivery but was inside the store. I took a run around 8 to this trailer in a notorious no-tip zone. They had a big complex order with all kinds of shit on the side, they had two or three pizzas, cheesestix, wings, salads, you name it they got one of it. Well somehow in the bustle I forgot the dozen wings. That hadn't happened with me in a while but sometimes you just miss something...well anyway by the time I got there it was too late to go back and they didn't want a refund, so someone was going to have to bring the wings out to them. I knew it would probably be me, b/c no one likes doing the redelivery shit b/c it is a guaran-damn-teed no tip. I've only seen someone tip on that once in 4 years - not that you should have to, when we fuck up it's not like you should be obligated to be more generous. But anyway that's why no one wants to take it.

Well I call the store and talk to Charley and ask if there's anyone coming back out this way with another run, and if so could they please bring along my wings. Abdul was apparently the only one in the store, and I hear Charlie yell out something to him in Arabic (there is only one way to speak Arabic, and that's by yelling - you start from there and then gradually escalate until you're screaming your fucking brains out at each other) about the street I was on. "No," I hear Abdul say, and the Charley repeated it and I said "alright, I guess I'll come back and get it."

When I got back to the store Abdul was still inside working the oven, which was a little odd b/c I thought he'd be off on his run by now. I go over to where the wings are reposing on the top of the oven and as I do I take a sideways glance at his slips hanging on the wall. Sure enough, the one on top was a different direction and so if he was taking that he wouldn't be obligated to do the redelivery. But something seemed a little off so on my way back out of the store I glance over at the order list by the phone, and I see that the only two orders to come in are the one that I saw he was taking and another, earlier order which would have belonged to him, which was going the opposite direction, and which would have gone along well with the redelivery.

I knew then that he was violating the unwritten rules of our store's delivery system: he was taking two orders simultaneously that went in opposite directions, and he was doing this to make it seem as if he couldn't be bothered by driving out of his way on a redelivery.

I was pissed, but I didn't say anything right away. No one wants to have to fix someone else's mistake, and so I couldn't be angry at him for trying to avoid the redelivery, in fact I'd consciously avoided them before, as well. But I never went so far as to blatantly flaunt the rules. Of course all of this sounds silly and petty, and it is, but I only now realize this in hindsight...at the time I was steaming mad.

So I take the wings back and return to the store and Abdul comes in shortly after. He starts talking to me but I'm giving him terse answers that would communicate to anyone with a basic grasp of English that I was pissed off, but of course Abdul don't speaka tha English that well, so he completely missed it. Then he starts joking around with me, ok, this is going to require me to back up-

Have you ever seen that commercial from a year or two ago that was selling car insurance, I believe, or something like that, and which was a takeoff of an 80s metal song? There was this band that bizarrely followed this guy around and would start into this song: "Roy! Roy Roy Roy! Roy Roy Roy! He's the man, going to work, got a job got a mission...he knows one day he just may become...a supervisor!" Well anyway a few months ago when it was popular there was this guy working at my store named Danny. He was a really hyper but cool pothead, I liked him, and we talked about music and movies and stuff and got along well. He had been singing the first few words of that song while we would clean up the store late at night, b/c people got a kick out of it and laughed. One day outta the blue he substitutes my name for Roy's, and sings "Wayne! Wayne Wayne Wayne! Wayne Wayne Wayne!" It was funny and everyone liked it and it sort of became Danny's way of greeting me. Everytime I saw him he'd break into that. Anyway it didn't really bother me and people thought it was funny, so who cares?

Well Danny was subsequently fired, which is a real rarity at my store, believe me you have to be a real fuck up to get fired by James. But anyway after he'd been gone a few weeks Abdul and I were working together cleaning up the store one night and out of nowhere he breaks into: "Wayne! Wayne Wayne Wayne!..." Now if it was funny when this longhaired hippy born too late did it, it was trebly funny when this imposing six foot something irascible deep voiced Syrian with a perpetual scowl. So it sort of became a running joke, Abdul would do it occasionally and everyone would get a kick out of it.

But by Saturday night, for me at least, it was getting a little old. For one thing Abdul is a loud talker among a race of loud talkers - anyone who knows me knows I respect Arabic people a lot, but let's face it, they like to scream - and whenever he would start singing it would be like a shot went off. He would wait for the quietest possible moment and then lob that verbal volley out there. I jumped b/c it startled me at least a half-dozen times, and that can get old fast.

So on Saturday night, after he'd broken the rules and pissed me off royally, while we were together in the store cleaning up he launches into the song. He surprised me again, and I jumped a little like you do when you see a scary movie, and I said "Hallas" which means something like "enough" or "that's it." He seemed a little stunned, and I walked away to do something else. When I returned and he saw me come into view, he said prominently to Charley "Hallas Charley." He was picking on me, trying to be friendly probably, but my thought then was "it's on now bitch."

So we're going about doing our chores and he strikes up another conversation. "Why you say 'hallas' man?" he asked. "Because that song thing is getting annoying," I answered. Charley had to interpret. "Oh, ok man," he said, meticulously washing his hands - a lot of Arabs probably spend half their life cleaning themselves. "Thank you, Wayne," he says, sarcastic. I didn't respond. After a few tense moments: "Why you no say 'you're welcome?" "Because you're being sarcastic," I said. Charley again translated. He moves away, still rambling about how grateful he is for my clarity and how wonderful it is to hear the truth from me, and finally I turn and say "Abdul, why don't you just shutup, and when you need more advice you can come to me." He said something sarcastic and I said "look, just be quiet or else I'm going to say something you don't want to hear" and then I turned and said more quietly "like how you're a fucking asshole." Charley, who was working beside me, told me to be quiet b/c he could still hear me and I indicated that I didn't care, and called him a "fucking asshole" again for good measure. By now Abdul knew I wasn't joking and he shut up.

Of course things were tense for the rest of the night while he was still there. Charley, Mo, and I stayed late and shared a six pack and we talked about it, and I could tell that in his private conferences with them post-confrontation he had been really pissed at me, and rightfully so. I had let my temper get out of hand and though he had dong something wrong it wasn't that big of a deal, and when we had been talking he was just playing around until I took it to another level.

So all day Sunday I felt like a jerk. When I got there Sunday night Abdul was in the store but we didn't exchange our usual greetings and I could tell he was still angry. I pretended to be, too, but after a while I just couldn't take it anymore. After an hour or so of standoffishness and frowns I went up to him and said "Abdul, I'm sorry about yesterday, I was having a bad day (not true, but that's the sort of justification people insert into apologies) and I didn't mean what I said." He accepted my apology and said something about us being 'brothers' b/c we've worked together for four years, and that even though we may have been briefly angry at each other we would get over it. He then extended his hand and I shook it, and I said "Anna meniac yesterday" which means "I was an asshole" and he laughed as the Arabs always do when I speak their language and things were back to normal.

I was glad I apologized (it was hard, believe me, b/c part of me still thinks he bore a lot of the blame) and I'm glad things are back to normal. But if he starts into that "Wayne!..." shit again I might just have to punch him in the mouth...

Ann Coulter Eats Babies

She also jokes about poisoning justices according to this article.
That doesn't really bother me, and I don't think Ann's a malicious or evil person, I just think she's a hideous self-absorbed bony moronic nutjob who as poster-girl for the Right embodies all that is wrong with most of the people on that side of the spectrum.

But, at least she's interesting...so keep writing, Ann.

Adventures, continued

Last night was deadly slow, and considering it was a Thursday that's pretty troubling. But maybe the weekend will redeem us. I did 8 runs the whole night, and that was only because I closed, which is ridiculous.

Meth-boy had called again, during the day shift, Abdul told me. He said that when he went to 'his' house he was there dutifully standing by the mailbox, shivering in the cold. Abdul laughed at this, and I'd feel sorry for him if he wasn't such a prick and a persistent no-tipper.

News to the customers of the world: if you don't tip, we hate you. And if you're a regular customer, and never ever tip, our hatred is limitless. It's irrational and silly, we know, but we don't care, we despise you with every fiber of our being. We will do whatever it takes to frustrate you, screw up your order, ensure it's cold when it arrives, make you stand in the freezing cold to get it, whatever. We may smile to your face but you can rest assured that when we turn our backs we're cursing you and yours.

Now it doesn't take much to avoid this sort of enmity. Just give us a couple of bucks. That's all it takes. The average tip for a pizza delivery is 2$ and if you give that every time I can assure you that your delivery guy will do his best to get your stuff to you hot and on time. If you want to give more, great, 3, 4 even 5 bucks are all of course appreciated and will only increase your standing in our eyes.

Of course there are the weirdos who tip more than that. I'm not talking about big tips on large orders, that's understandable and expected. If you have 100$ worth of pizza coming give 10 or 15 when it arrives. But we have a couple of regulars who order a standard amount of pizza, 20-30 bucks worth, and then will tip 7-10 dollars. Of course everyone wants to take their runs, but I can't help feeling that there's something wrong with these guys...like they expect a little more for their generosity. I'll let my dear readers look between the lines for their answers, but let's just say that in the summer these guys always answer the door shirtless.

But to sum up: just tip people. What you give will be returned to you ten-fold, or something like that.

Two Days, Two Great Movies

In the past coupla days I've seen two great films, both of them Oscar 'contenders,' to use the parlance of our times. Both of these were officially released in 2005 but since I don't live in New York, I have to wait a few weeks for them to trickle down to my local googa-plex. Fortunately it was worth the wait.

Match Point was easily the better of the two, and was probably the best 05 movie I've seen, with the possible exception of Sin City. My only complaint, and it is a very minor one, is that it felt like Woody had gone over some of this ground before...in fact Match Point in some ways was a sort of Crimes & Misdemeanors 2: Younger and Hotter. Just as in that earlier Allen film there's a philandering hero who gets more than he bargains for and gets himself out of a tough situation by making some serious moral compromises, and yet, he's able to get away with it and move on. In Crimes & Misdemeanors the moral compromiser, played by Martin Landau in what I believe was an Oscar-winning role, sits down in the end and makes it manifestly clear that he doesn't care that he's murdered his lover and that he's happy to get on with his life with the knowledge that his success and wealth is secure. The ending of Match Point is more ambiguous, and I like that, the final shot is of Chris gazing out on the Thames from his gazillion pound flat looking serene but contemplative, surrounded by his family and all that he's 'earned.' We know that he's escaped, and that evil will go unpunished again, but we're less sure of whether or not the hero will be able to live with that.

I suppose that takes away some of the bleakness from what is an otherwise morally bankrupt picture. I don't use that phrase negatively, because that is part of the point of the film, morality is an illusion, 'faith is the path of least resistance' as the hero says and those of us who believe that in the end good will win out and evil will be punished are just deluding ourselves and are making ourselves sheep to be led to the slaughter by the supermen in society who see beyond all of the illusions. Of course that's complete nonsense...I think, but at the very least it's damn interesting and that's part of what makes Woody's films so exciting and memorable.

Of course it's well shot, but that goes without saying. It's written even better, but again that's no surprise. All of the little tricks and symbols worked for me, especially the match on action from the opening shot with the shot of Chris throwing the ring into the river. All of the Dostoyevsky allusions were great, especially the inspector scenes at the end. The middle of the film drags a bit, but is redeemed by its ending. The actors all worked for me, too, but honestly the strength of the performances has never mattered in great films, in my opinion, a talented director and storyteller overpowers poor acting...and Woody is certainly talented.

Syriana was also good, if not great. I think part of my problem with the film is that the revelations weren't really all that revleatory. Oh, you mean the American government engages in all kinds of shady dealings and illegal military operations to protect its interests in the Middle East? That protection of the powerful costs innocent lives, destroys the would be reformers, contributes to terrorism and extremism, and corrupts our own values? No way!

I also kept reading about how complicated and confusing the film was, but I think those reviewers were just reflecting how so much of American film has gone to shit, and how short the average attention span is. Syriana is not tough to follow if you are, to paraphrase my dad, smarter than the chair you're sitting in.

But is it really worth paying attention? Yes and no. As I said it didn't really cover any new ground for me. I didn't care that much about any of the characters, in fact in the end when one of the 'heroes' returns to the wife and child he'd abandoned for his cause I just asked myself: 'who cares?' When another ends his life in one of the final shots of the film by blowing up an oil tanker I didn't really give a damn. I did, however, care about the pretender to the throne played by my old friend Siddig el Fadil (you won't get away with a name change here, buddy) and I didn't like the way his story ended. Of course a lot of that affection was just carried over from DS9, I'm sure...

So if the characters don't work, and there really isn't anything to learn, what makes it good? Well, it's hard to say...there's a certain grittiness to the film that feels honest. We aren't manipulated by soaring overtures, the characters feel real and so does the situation, and it's shot in a Soderbergh sort of way that reminded me a lot of Traffic. Like Traffic, this film is trying to look at an issue from a lot of different viewpoints, and we do get some greater sense of the whole as a result of it. Syriana worked for me, even if it was not a complete success.

Adventures in Pizza

After an AP story directed me to this blog I had an idea, why not do something similar? For the past ~4 1/2 years while I've been in and out of college one of the constants in my life has been my part time job delivering pizzas, and like the cab lady I've seen a lot of weird shit that strangers might find interesting. So why not?

Let's start with tonight. Well, for starters it was slow for some reason. January usually is, but James had sent out some advertising last week and the weekend had been reasonable, so there was cause for hope, but for whatever reason that didn't pan out. In 4 hours I took six runs, but they were fairly good ones.

The best tip of the night was from a pregnant woman who ordered two calzones. I pull up and walk to the door and at first her two little toddlers come and press their faces against the glass, and then she appears in all of her knocked up glory. I'm smiling at her from outside in my usual faux-oh-i'm so happy to see you-pose, and she starts talking to me. This totally threw me off for a second because she hadn't opened the door, but then I realize that the upper half of the screen door is missing and that she can communicate with the outside world through the opening while at the same time feel safe that her children won't scamper off. Anyway I hand her the credit card slip and she quickly signs it without glancing at the tip part, and I'm already thinking my usual hateful thoughts about ungrateful bitches and so on, but then she hands it back to me with a fiver and all is forgiven, naturally.

The other interesting delivery was to this blacklisted cat who lives out on this country road where we're the only ones who deliver there. I instituted the black list about a year ago after becoming fed up with people like him who are constantly pulling crazy shit and trying to get free pizzas, falling asleep right before we pull up with their stuff, calling the store and complaining when we don't give them the last 20 cents of their change, that sort of stuff, and I'm quite proud of it. There was some hesitation at first, in part because James absolutely hates to not give business to anyone, I swear he would serve the Devil himself after he'd cheated him 20 times, and also I think something may have been lost in translation to James and Charlie b/c they'd never heard of a 'blacklist' before and maybe thought there was some sort of racial connotation involved (of course the majority of the blacklisted folks are of that persuasion, but I digress). Anyway in the end I prevailed, and this guy was one of the first to appear.

He always took hours to come to the door, several times he wasn't there, a few times he claimed he didn't have the money, and to top it all off he was just scary. He lives in this old ramshackle place with a bunch of mean looking dogs, there are never any lights on in his house, and let's just say he has the face of a meth addict. But after several months of not calling, today he calls, not once but twice. He had called during the day shift and had asked to have something delivered to 4905, which was right next to where he lived and which was the address of an abandoned trailer. Abdul took the call over the phone and knew what was going on but because of James he decided to take down the order. He knew the guy was actually calling from 4891 but when he delivered it he feigned naivete and pulled up to 4905, knocked on the door, and when no one answered he left. Of course, he told me, as he was pulling away he sees the guy bust out of his house and start running down the street chasing him, but Abdul said he just laughed and kept on truckin'. Well the guy called the store before Abdul could return and James called Abdul and made him go back.

Right after Abdul tells me all of this the guy calls, and I have to take the run. Charlie, who took the order, had heard everything about what transpired during the day and as such asks him if he's going to be there. The guy assures him that he'll wait by the mailbox. So I take off with the run, get there in under 30 minutes probably (which was fortunate for meth-boy) and sure enough he's dutifully standing by the mailbox at 8:30 at night in the dark waiting for his two lasagnas to arrive. Now after hearing the story of his daytime humiliation I was a little bit concerned that this might be a revenge call and that he might be plotting something, but if anything I robbed him coz his order was 15.30 and I gave him 4 back from his 20 then hopped in the car like the thought of pocket change never occured to me. Fuck him, anyway, he never tips and yet he is relentless in his calling and now that he's found a way back into the system I know he'll be a daily fixture on the sheets. Whatever, I'll just do what I always do with the no-tippers: whenever possible I'll get there as late as I possibly can, I'll let their shit slide all over the place in my car without concern for the structural integrity of their pizza or whatever, and I'll try to find some way to get them blacklisted, or, in his case, re-blacklisted.

The 'Why the Hell Not?' Approach to History

I just finished Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln's seminal work in the history of fringe conspiratorial pseudo-history, 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail,' which I had received ironically enough as a Christmas present. First let me say that I was really eager to get into this. I reread Foucault's Pendulum right before Christmas and really enjoyed it all over again, and again had my interest piqued by historical conspiracies, the Templars, the Cathars, Jaques de Molay, Rene D'Anjou, the Comte de Saint-Germaine, etc etc. And though I haven't read The Da Vinci Code [a)it's way too popular now for me to deign to pick it up and b)I can wait for the summer movie, anyway] like many Americans these days I too have been swept up in the swirling rip-tide of secret societies and ancient conspiracies.

In some ways, HBHG doesn't disappoint. It doesn't lack in ambition, and it certainly is grand enough to be interesting. I think that if the authors had constrained themselves a bit, or if they had had someone playing devil's advocate, they might have come up with something a bit more reasonable and concrete albeit a bit less grandiose. But like Belbo in Foucault's Pendulum, one gets the impression that the authors here started off as skeptics who wanted to believe but couldn't, and ended as believers-at-all-costs who ignored evidence to the contrary and who stopped asking the hard questions. Of course they were at a deficit from the beginning because they weren't historians, they were trained as writers and/or journalists, and HBHG never really feels like a serious work because of it. Certainly the authors explored a lot of primary sources and had a good understanding of their topic, but it feels like they were more interested in their story than in the truth.

But what a story. Honestly, I'm pretty forgiving because 1)the authors seem to have looked at a lot of sources and 2)regardless of whether it's true or not, it sure is fun. Here's the best summary I can give:

-~100 or so years ago a poor unspectacular priest in southern France named Sauniere, in a very small town called Rennes-le-Chateau, seems to have uncovered something underneath/inside of his church which gave him a lot of power.

-In the course of his life he spent more money than could have been possible for a small town priest, and he was also visited by a number of very powerful people (including the heir to the Hapsburg dynasty). Why?

-Well, maybe because what he discovered there was evidence that:

a)Jesus was not celibate, but in fact was a father (via Mary Magdalen)
b)The Holy Grail, which is often viewed as a receptacle for Jesus' blood and thus often is depicted as a chalice or cup of some kind, was actually his bloodline, or his heirs, who were secreted away to southern France soon after the Crucifixion was staged.
b1)That's right, with the complicity possibly of Pilate and others, the Crucifixion was staged and Jesus did not die, but rather someone died in his place, possibly Simon.
b2)This explains how the Resurrection was later staged.
c)Jesus and his heirs went on to spread the 'family' cause, which was basically the argument that the 'Second Coming' of Christ would be the return of his heir to the crown of Jerusalem. They weren't popular with the proponents of the 'message,' those who believed Jesus literally died and was reborn, was truly holy and not symbolically so, and who would definitely return some day from Heaven to reclaim his throne in Jerusalem.
d)Because the 'family' was threatened they had to go into hiding, which they did under the protection of a bewildering sequence of royal families in France in the early Middle Ages...what's important is that they eventually were united with the Merovingian dynasty, which ruled France for a few hundred years around 1000 AD.
e)The Merovingians seem to have been connected to a group of warrior monks called the Knights Templar who led a series of Crusades to recapture the Holy Land from the infidels, presumably so that when they did so they could put Jesus' heir back on the throne.
f)Eventually the Templars fell out of favor with both the Roman Catholic Church (those old proponents of the message and adversaries to the family) and with the clandestine group that had been functioning behind the scenes and secretly controlling them all along - the Priory of Sion. When they lost the protection of the Priory of Sion they were vulnerable to the Church and its pretender to the French throne, Phillipe IV, who had Jaques de Molay (23rd and final Grandmaster of the Knights Templar) and his cohorts brought up on charges and executed in 1314.
g)What then had seemed to be the end of the family cause was just a diversion, the Knights Templar had been a red herring of sorts meant to distract the family's enemies from the true conspirators, who continued to operate in secrecy for the next 700 years through a series of sometimes obscure but sometimes ridiculously famous Grandmasters (among them da Vinci, Victor Hugo, Newton) and whose aim was to restore the Jesus/Merovingian line to the French throne and to reconquer Jerusalem. Along the way the Priory of Sion was in some ways connected to practically every well-known conspiracy theorist group/secret knowledge advocates, among them the Freemasons, their counterparts in France whose name I can't recall, the Rosicrucians, the publishers of the Secret Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc etc. But these were probably all still more distractions meant to conceal the real truth.

-Sauniere died still claiming he had a secret, and his companion made the same claim after his death, even though she died in poverty. No one really knows what he knew.

Which is a big part of the problem with HBHG. The authors never really provide an answer to the mystery that began their entire investigation! Sauniere is the starting point, but then he's discarded and forgotten while they traipse around European history in search of clues for the secret society they believe he uncovered. I would be a lot more satisfied now if they could have simply answered where Sauniere got his money, what he uncovered in Rennes-le-Chateau, and why he was so popular with so many powerful people. Of course they imply it was because he knew the truth about the conspiracy theory I've laid out above, but they can never demonstrate that connection existed; they have no proof, only conjecture.

And as for their conjecture, well, there are a lot of holes in the theory. For starters, the list of the supposed Grandmasters of the Priory is obviously a ridiculous farce. Don't you think that in the volumes of research done about great men like da Vinci and Hugo and Newton, in the countless hours spent researching their lives, that legitimate scholars would have found some connection among these men and a secret cult? And yet the authors of HBHG offer no such reference, the best they can muster is the association these men had with well known occult figures and imply that they probably had deeper ties. And I don't even want to get started on their Biblical theories. Of course the Gospels have holes in them, contradict one another, seem to imply things that aren't explicitly said, were arbitrarily chosen by members of the early Church at the exclusion of others, yadda yadda. But asserting that the Gospels are unreliable evidence doesn't then give you the power to cherry pick stuff from other, equally unreliable Gospels (like the Gospel of Thomas and of Mary) and from the four canonical Gospels to buttress your own theory. And the connections are strained, at best, for example there is apparently a scene in I believe Matthew in which Jesus attends a wedding, and the authors suggest that because his mother just happened to be there and because Jesus seems to be in command that it must have been his own wedding, not one of a stranger. Even if you agree that the incident is a curious one, that doesn't mean that your own theory about what happened is true. Just because Magdalen was associated with Southern France, with carrying a child, and with a sort of intimacy with Jesus does not mean that she bore him a family that gave rise to the greatest conspiracy the world has ever known.

But with all that said...I enjoyed it. Conspiracy theories are the new religion, I think, they give the faithless something to cling to, some sense of design and order that is just beyond our ken but which isn't necessarily divine, it's just mysterious enough to seem that way.

Munich, or, Spielberg: Still Good, Not Great

I liked Munich, liked it a lot actually, and I like most Spielberg movies. Of his later efforts (with the exception of The Terminal, which I never saw) I've liked everything: War of the Worlds was competent and exciting despite being plagued by an anti-climactic ending (the aliens get sick? c'mon...) and the presence of yet another bug-eyed child actor in distress for which he seems to have a penchant for inserting into his films, I thought Minority Report was near-brilliant and one of the best films of its year, I had fun with Catch Me If You Can, and I even liked the mostly-panned A.I. even though I believe if it had ended a half-hour sooner it would've been a masterpiece. I think Spielberg's responsible for two perfect films: Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark. And he gets a lot of credit for trying to tackle the big issues in films like Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, and Amistad, even if he doesn't always completely succeed.

He's back trying to tackle the big questions again in Munich, and certainly that's to his credit, but his reach exceeds his grasp here, again, I believe. Munich tries to be two movies simultaneously and yet it's never really fully one or the other. Is this an action/chase movie about a band of assassins chasing down bad guys, or is this an introspective drama about the nature of nebulous concepts like revenge, honor, justice, etc?

As an action movie it is a partial success, even though it succumbs to the old cliches and plot contrivances - try and guess what's going to happen after the aloof veteran finally opens up to Bana's character and they share a moment, and then separate...do you think maybe that might be his last night on earth? And if you think the sensitive toy/bomb-maker who doesn't really want to be killing people in the first place is going to survive to confront some sort of moral quandary akin to the one Bana experiences, well, welcome to your first movie.

And as a thoughtful drama the movie is even less of a success because, well, for starters the acting isn't that great. Bana's been on my shit list ever since I suffered through The Hulk, and as I watched him trying to emote and struggling to contort his face into some representation of the inner struggle it felt like I was watching a Jewish Ben Affleck trying his best to cry his way through the climax of Armageddon. There's one especially dreadful scene near the end of the film when Bana's home with his wife in Brooklyn and they're making love, and as he's going through the motions he keeps having these images flash in his mind of how the Munich athletes suffered and how they died and his face looks like he could be watching a baseball game, or horses fucking, or a plane crash, or...anything but what he's supposedly imagining. The introspection also fails because Spielberg thinks the best way to get us thinking is to hit us over the head with these thoughtful images. I liked the pan to the World Trade towers in the final shot, but Golda Meir's soliloquies, the scenes with his mother, the comment that 'your mother is Israel,' shit like that just had me rolling my eyes. "Every civilization finds it has to negotiate compromises with itself," Meir says early on in the movie. "Oh really," I thought, "do you think that's what the film is supposed to be about?" I don't know that subtlety is something that lends itself naturally to film, it's a demonstrative art form and subtext isn't always as important, I recognize that, but Stephen, at least try, mmkay?

But with all that said, Munich is a good film. In my last semester at UNC I took an English course that was popular with all majors, Southern Lit, and I was one of the handful of English majors in a class of 30 or so. I always felt the prof was being a bit harder on me b/c of that, and it feels like I'm being harder on ol' SS, here, too, because I expect more from him. Munich is not bad, it is by no means a failure, and it is worth your time. But I don't know if Spielberg can adequately tackle the serious stuff. His best films have just been fun popcorn flicks, and it is this viewer's hope that he returns to that genre.

No, I have not seen Brokeback Mountain

So I played tennis with Lee today, in Cary, and after I'd beat him (surprise! 6-0, 6-1) we hit up the nearby Dairy Queen for some Asian-made patties and syrupy treats. That's how we roll. We walk in and are greeted by this snaggle-toothed black guy who's running the register. He was missing like the right half of his upper set of teeth and as if in compensation his remaining teeth on the other side were all oversized and jagged and pointing in odd directions. He reminded me simultaneously of two things from the Simpsons (again, surprise): the projections of how Lisa would look if she never had braces and Gummy Joe. Anyway, I order my #1 combo with a Mello Yello (no ice) and he processes it and instead of announcing the total he points to where it is displayed on the register. Maybe he was sensitive about talking because he'd have to show off that mouth straight outta the Big Book of British Smiles, I dunno, but I was a little put off by the gesture and gave Lee a look that said something like "what a prick." I think he sensed this, and as he was waiting for me to get my cash out he tries to strike up a conversation to make amends.

Register Dude: "So, have you seen Brokeback Mountain?"

Me: "Um, no, can't say that I have..."

Internal Dialogue: "Are you hitting on me?"

RD: "Yeah, it was nominated for like 4 Golden Globes I think and it was directed by Ang Lee, the guy who directed Crouching Tiger"

-me getting cash-

RD: "and it's supposed to be really good, and..."

-him taking cash-

Me: "Yeah, that's cool man, but I can't say that I've seen it."

Where the fuck does this guy get off asking me a question like that? Do I look like someone who would go see Brokeback Mountain? If anything Lee's the Brokeback Mountain watcher, with his operas and his Guys and his Dolls and his knowledge of cheeses. I was really disturbed by the whole encounter.

At least for a moment...turns out the guy was full of non sequiturs, coz after Lee orders he just starts babbling about some girl who used to work at the DQ and who knew all this shit about medicine and herbs and shit, and believe me, Lee had said nothing to prompt this. So I didn't feel quite as emasculated after I realized he was just some crazy toothed loon.

Gummy Joe: