p e n g u i n d e v i l

So we watched another great documentary, it is called I Like Killing Flies and it is about this fellow Kenny Shopsin and his restaurant in the village, Shopsins’. The restaurant is one of those places that is just an extension of the man who has run it and cooked the food for 32 years. And what a fellow! A great example of what is best about New Yorkers… Honest, straightforward, confident, with no BS and no capacity to put up with BS. He turned his teeny little storefront into what looks like a wondrous restaurant with, literally, hundreds of menu items (including some of the most exciting pancakes I’ve seen since the Globe in Seattle) and an incredibly loyal clientèle of regulars. Sadly, this movie was made at a point where it had become obvious that the restaurant had to move to a new spot so this film is kind of a homage to Kenny and his restaurant and it’s trusty and homey old space.

Kenny is a lot of fun and full of opinions and the wisdom of common sense, his family also all work in the restaurant and appear in the film, along with interviews of many of the regulars, all of which adds a good deal to the subject. Though at the end of the movie, they moved to a much different much larger space…

This week we took a little break and we went off to the beach for a few days. It was a nice spot, somewhere I’d never been before… Pacific City, with a side trip up to Cape Mears. Of course, I took some pictures (mainly of the baby) that are up at my Flickr page, but more to the point, we watched three movies while we were down there!

First off, we watched Funny Farm. It wasn’t particularly funny, but it was alright and pretty much typical Chevy Chase fare. So I do find that to be fairly entertaining and charming, at least. We primarily watched it because it took place in Vermont. The story of a couple from the city who buy a house in Vermont to get back to nature, write and raise a family. Of course, everything goes wrong. Wrong in a totally overboard Chevy Chase fashion! He gets into conflict with his publisher, his wife, the locals, makes multitudes of dumb mistakes, and just wreaks general havoc.

We also watched one of my old favorites, True Romance. I do forgive the fact that it is one of Tarantino’s early writing credits because it’s soo damned good and because his writing was still entertaining when it was just writing and not a boring “Tarantino-thing” like they have now. It’s a tale of a true love, in a crazy love fashion. When Clarence meets a cutie at a Sonny Chiba triple-feature, they decide to flee from her “business associate” (Gary Oldman) and run off with some of his drugs. Of course, they are chased cross country by James Gandolfini (who is working for Christopher Walken!), and they cross paths with Brad Pitt (in his best role), Dennis Hopper, and more (including Val Kilmer as the Elvis of the mind)… It has a great cast and the movie is non-stop action: guns, fights, drugs, the mafia, the police, pimps, drug dealers… It just goes on and on as the movie gets more overboard and more violent. Strongly recommended for anyone who wants a great fun action movie with fun dialogue and fun characters.

We also watched Dreamcatcher. Easily one of the best Stephen King films I’ve seen yet. Admittedly, it is probably also the most commercial and Hollywood one too, but I’ve never really appreciated the cheapness of most of his movies, so it was nice to see one that was done up big. It is a fun and interesting alien invasion story, the aliens are cool and different from what we’re used to, with some rather unusual alien tricks and great special effects. The movie is filled with the standard interesting and fun Stephen King characters, but better played than normally. The story of 4 friends who long ago each got a “special power” from Dudditz (a surprising appearance of Donnie Walburg), a strange boy they met and came to the rescue of when they were kids. Now, 20 years later and at their hunting lodge, they fall into the line of a violent alien invasion and the violent military reprisal. Trying to avoid the aliens, escape and also save the world, becomes a big task. Are our heroes up for it?