Tonight was pitcher perfect

Have to thank Petey for that one. He does more with a line than most people do with a blog present company included.

But must admit it summed up the night!

At South Side Louie's. Steamwhistle in a pitcher. Wings for appetizers. Fajitas with sizzlers for dinner after. Wood paneled walls. Soft music in the background. Lights mellow enough to make a candle smile. Cushioned booths. Sofas to lounge in. Waitresses who shimmy up like they read your thoughts. Imported drafts and an aged cider on tap. Along with Microbrews. This is the kind of place that become favorite watering holes. Actually I'd have to work really hard to find a fault in here.

We stopped by at a local comic store. Collector's editions along with Old ads from the twenties jostled pulp fiction from the 19'th century for our attention. They have a pretty comprehensive collection in here. If we weren't both so darn grown up we'd have been drooling all over the place. Spidey, Sin City, Fallen Angels, Phantom every darn comic series ever published seemed to be in there. If any of you are interested drop me a line and I'll go back and check. Actually please please give me an excuse to go in there once again :)

At Ammo we picked up March of the Penguins a used copy for 10 bucks, a boxed set containing a UMD (PSP version) and the DVD of Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex Episodes 1 through 5 for 29 bucks, and we rented Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters and a french movie called Crazy.

We walked down to Queen Video. Over there I was showing Peter a DVD that had a bunch of skeletons rattling around outside their cupboard. The title read "Sex among the living dead'. Peter completely dead pan replied "No problem finding a boner in there eh?"

Man can you imagine living with the guy?

Kalendar

Midweek's focus is shifting to the midweek event itself. Movie reviews will continue but at movieline.pbwiki.com.

For the non-cognoscenti ... midweek is a personal exploration of restaurants, videostores, soundbars, and other assorted interests. All this happens once a week on Wednesday, and is centered around the stretch of College Street bounded on the West by Bathurst and on the East by ... I don't know we haven't really gone east far enough to set a boundary as yet. It all started with the discovery of a video store Ammo that carries all of the important movies ever made or at least it feels like it. Entire walls covered with Criterion collection sets, well stocked asian, italian and latin sections, hard to find cult movies from the 30s and up, documentaries, out of print selections such as Guilliano Gemma's One Silver Dollar and others such ... So it became a regular fixture and initially our midweek was focused around this store. But along the way we ran into some amazing restaurants, some very interesting shops and some very very good looking women. So far our involvement has been eyes only with regard to the women and shops, but with coupons for bitch slaps being handed out, who knows when that will change ...

This past week we visited the Kalendar.

Wild mushroom risotto, seven vegetable scroll and a creamy garlic potato soup. We washed it all down with Amsterdam blonde, and topped it off with biscotti and french vanilla ice cream. The coffee was interesting. I managed to recreate some of this ...

Made coffee as usual but instead of the usual half and half, added half cream and half coconut cream. Came out almost the same. So one mystery solved.

The ice cream was creamy creamy creamy. And the accompanying wafers were crisp, sinfully good when crunched with the ice cream.

The risotto was a revelation. The mushrooms had a velvety texture to them that was hard to define, but it flavored the arborio so well that the whole dish had an almost chocolatey kind of texture to it. Sticky without being cloying. And the underlying stock seemed to carry traces of a dry white wine, along with vegetable stock and maybe some parmesan and reggiano. Anyways the dish is worthy of an encore.

The vegetable seven scroll was spicy. Had an indian bite to it. Couldn't place quite all the flavors but there was cumin, some coriander, some chillies and a couple of other notes we couldn't quite place. Very very biteworthy.

The soup was good, but no not memorable. I think if they'd added some leeks to the mix, and roasted the garlic first and stirred in some shallots and parsley, mmm it could have worked out real well. But that being said, as an opening course it was apt, cleansed our palate and set the expectations for the rest of the evening. So no complaints.

All of it came to seventy bucks with the tips included.

The only thing I would change next time would be the beer. Hoegaarden would have been a lot more appropriate given the wild mushroom risotto to follow.

A long walk was needed, so we headed west to Queen Video first. Very interesting music section. Carried DVDs of jazz, rock, pop and many other genres. Also included documentaries etc.

Also carried a lot of interesting movies. While not quite so esoteric as Morris' Ammo, this place had enough interesting titles to make it a worthwhile visit every now and then.

At Ammo we browsed our usual sections and finally settled on Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes. There was a Korean movie that looked very interesting "Memories of murder" about a serial killer that had come in, but we passed it up for later.

Le Samourai

Jef Costello, the quiet unsmiling stranger who ever so slowly seeps into our awareness in the opening scene is an assasin for hire. We see him first smoking in bed.

Alain Delon as Jef Costello is an iconic portrayal. From the way he wears his trenchcoat to the intensity of his engagement with the caged bird in his apartment, he paints his character in stroke by indelible stroke. Yet throughout the movie he never reveals a single emotion. You're left compulsively obsessed as to what makes him tick.

About the movie. Paris is not at it's most interesing here. The lighting and composition were elegant throughout. The script was complicated enough to be interesting but not complex enough to keep it from dragging in parts. Melville's direction however has a touch of surety about the way he builds this movie to it's inevitable denouement.

Save the planet

Save the green planet. Is it a movie? Or is it a deleriously close encounter of the third kind. An experience, a strangely compelling one in my opinion. Detectives that would have had Holmes choking on his elementaries. Bee keepers that carry a sting themselves. And a boss that gets crucified, electrocuted, hamstrung ... Okay that's just the cast.

Death and trauma served up with extra terrestrials ... usually the stuff of b-grade movies. But when it ends up feeling intensely wierd you're not so sure anymore.

The movie's plot is driven, nay rollercoasted into our awareness both by it's hell for leather script both by as well as by brilliantly edited sequences. Is it parody? Is it travesty? Or is it good old fashioned creativity gone wild? The jury rests. Take the mind shuddering violence of Silence of the Lambs, the alternative take a la History of the world Part I. Add the indestructibility of the Terminator. Nah, none of them begin to describe the experience. Lace the mix with the pathos of a true Marxian proletariat ground under by filthy capitalists and then pump in enough amphetamines to go into orbit ... Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war ... Forget saving the planet, look out for your sanity first.

And the list grows

Missed one midweek ...

But more than made up for it with the next two ...

The first one we hung out at a bar where they were playing a kind of different techno. Anyways the waiter obliged by writing us out the name. We walk into soundscapes and two minutes later walk out with the album. That made the night for us :) Oh, and the food was tres excellente. So far the restaurants on our strip of College strip has been just getting better and better.

The last trip we went in vowing to rent only two movies but after another sumptous dinner at Bar Italia (highly recommended by the way) we ended up with about 22 :)

Anyways the list of movies has grown and grown ... and it will take a while to work our way through all of it.

Oh and in between we caught the opening night of the LOTR musical. Oh!my!god! what an experience. The lighting, the sets, the score everything was amazing. And at 3 and a half hours the two intermissions were most certainly the highlights of the evening :)

On to the movies

Scarlet Pimpernel. A period piece that deviates a bit from the Orczy novel but remains true to intent does a decent job. Worth seeing definitely.

The Warrior. A Korean/chinese period piece. Good battle scenes, and well shot. And it's got Zhiyi Zhang as the princess

The Zu Warrior. Tsui Hark outdoes himself on this one. Lotsa mystical stuff, flying folks and a villain that breakfasts on souls ...