Sweeter Lemon

Tuesday nights are kind of a TV wasteland for me. I don’t watch American Idol, I don’t watch Dancing with the Stars, I don’t watch Work Out, so I usually spend Tuesday nights catching up on the TiFaux or watching a movie.

During my channel surfing a few weeks ago, I noticed Hell’s Kitchen on the program grid. I figured that since I like Top Chef I’d probably like Hell’s Kitchen, too, since it’s another cooking competition show.

These two shows couldn’t be more different. In a nutshell, Top Chef is about creating new recipes and dishes and serving them under fairly strict (and usually non-restaurant) conditions. Where as Hell’s Kitchen is about… cooking someone else’s recipes in a restaurant setting, under the watchful eyes of a f-bomb dropping executive chef.

I have to admit something. I knew nothing, NOTHING, about what an actual restaurant kitchen was truly like. I’m not sure if Hell’s Kitchen is a typical example, but according to Mr. Martini it’s a fairly good approximation. Lots of yelling, lots of running around, lots of food flying and burns and barely controlled chaos.

Here’s the thing about Hell’s Kitchen I can’t quite wrap my brain around. It’s a reality competition show. The cooks on the show are competing, and eventually there will be one winner. During the competition, they are yelled at, belittled, put down, badgered and verbally abused by celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. It’s seriously disturbing to watch him yell and scream when dishes are not up to his standards. But what gets me is that the winner of this competition? Gets to work at one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants.

Basically, you’re competing to work for this somewhat insane, f-bomb dropping control freak. I… I just don’t get it. Then again, it’s not like the winners of “The Apprentice” actually get to work directly with Donald Trump, so maybe it’s not as bad as I would imagine. But still…

At this point, I’ve now watched enough Hell’s Kitchen episodes to actually wonder which person is going to win. Unlike most other reality competition shows I’ve seen (like Top Chef and Project Runway) where you can pick out “the one to beat,” this show has me stumped. I honestly cannot tell who has the brass cajones to put up with the hijinx and outlast the rest of the competition to be the winner. I really don’t know.

I just know I couldn’t do it. And I know I wouldn’t want to, that’s for sure.

I’m going to say this right at the start:

This movie isn’t for everyone.

A few years ago, a friend introduced me and Mr. Martini to the Canadian TV show, “Trailer Park Boys.” It is, in a word, hilarious. However, it’s hard to describe in a way that makes it sound as hilarious as it actually is:

“OK, so, like, it’s about these guys who live at a trailer park in Canada. They’re both petty criminals. Julian constantly has a glass of rum and coke in his hand – I mean, like, constantly. Ricky is always trying to find new and better ways to grow and sell weed. They also have this friend, Bubbles – yes, Bubbles – who has an underbite and wears coke-bottle glasses and loves kittycats, but can be a badass when he needs to be. The three of them are constantly trying to pull-off heists and robberies, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t – OK, mostly they don’t, and sometimes they end up in prison. There’s also a bunch of other characters at the park that are always messing with them, and stuff. Plus, it’s shot documentary style, kind of like The Office. Also, they swear a lot.”

See? It doesn’t sound all that funny. But it really, really is.

As an end to the series, they produced a movie to kind of tie everything up, like a series finale. We hadn’t watched any of the shows for awhile, so I was hesitant – I mean, I have Juno just waiting to be watched. So I wasn’t expecting to enjoy myself as much as I did.

It could probably be watched as a stand-alone movie, without having seen any of the TV shows. But for me it was more fun to see it with a little bit of background about each of the characters, especially Julian since he took a more of a backseat in the movie’s plot.

In brief – a fun movie for a Saturday night, especially after a couple of rum & cokes.

Last weekend, I watched not one, but two scary movies. This may not seem that strange for someone who likes scary movies.

I, however, do not like scary movies. But I did enjoy these. For the most part. I kind of ducked out of one of them for awhile.

The first – “The Mist,” based on the Stephen King novel (short story? novella? whatever). Basic plot outline – a strange mist envelopes a small town in Maine, cutting off a group of people in a grocery store. Complicating matters, “There’s something in the mist!” Yes, my friends, things are popping in and out of the mist, killing the grocery store folks one at a time in various and sundry ways. Add to the mix a religious fanatic, suggesting ritual sacrifices to appease an angry G-d, and you’ve got human drama to add to the other scary monsters.

I have to admit, I didn’t watch all of this movie. I have a low threshold for scary monsters jumping out of nowhere, and an even lower tolerance for suspense, so I had to walk awhile for a while in the middle. I did catch the ending, which I won’t spoil, except to say: “Whoa.” But from what I did see – great performances all around, especially by Thomas Jane and Marcia Gay Harden.

The other scary movie we watched was Cloverfield, and I LOVED it. I loved the conceit of just a random schmoe documenting the monster invasion with his digicam because “people will want to know.” It had a lot of truly unbelievable moments (the roof cross comes to mind), sure, but it also had a lot of moments that seemed freakily realistic (one character’s almost catatonic freakout after seeing a monster attack). While I really wished that the girls, dressed in their finery since the monster crashed (ha!) a party, would grab a pair of sneakers or even slippers from one of the many abandoned stores so they didn’t have to run all over Manhattan in their HEELS, for the most part I could understand each character’s motivation throughout the movie.

Also, the special effects, in my opinion, were fabulous. The destruction of the city was freakily realistic, and the Statue of Liberty head rolling down the street didn’t lose any effectiveness despite being shown in every trailer. It was really more of an action movie than a scary movie, but it had my heart beating pretty fast. A great Saturday night movie.

Speaking of which – I don’t feel we missed anything by waiting to see these movies at home. I know there are a lot of movie purists out there who must see movies on the big screen, but… I’m OK with DVD at home. It’s so rare for us to have good movie-going experiences, plus bad seats and noisy audiences make the high prices that much harder to swallow.

So there you have it – two scary movies as seen by a girl who doesn’t like scary movies. Next in the Netflix queue – Juno. Which I suspect is a scary movie antidote.