Be Careful of Whom You Invite for Dinner

Yes, that's right. Be careful about whom you invite to dinner. And for those of you who have the patience to read the entire entry, I have a cocktail recipe you can serve your next dinner guests. You could, I suppose, just scroll down to the recipe but that's the easy way, isn't it? Please also mind that the special recipe is for adults only. Dax Watches Movies in no way condones the delinquency of minors (though I am thankful to those adults who contributed to my delinquency as a minor), and any minors reading this entry would kindly stop reading at the point indicated and do some chores or something. I don't know why it is, perhaps I'm really trying to avoid studying which is weird because I really want to pass this exam once and for all, but I watched two movies on Saturday.

Ali and I watched the first one because I really want to encourage her to watch more English language films without having to read subtitles, and because we didn't really have anything on that day. It was gorgeous on Saturday, so my first thought was to sit in a dark vault for 2 hours watching what I expected to be predictable comedy. We had to do it before 17:00 so that we could take advantage of the matinée price. To my surprise, Ali was up for it.

I would like to be clear about this up front - I am not a NASCAR fan, but I will refrain from making jokes about NASCAR and its fans, because I know some very genuine kind-hearted people who are fans of NASCAR. I am, however a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen whom, I first believed a complete fool, but thanks to youtube.com I have grown to appreciate his craft. Will Ferrell, meh. A talented man surely, but he always relies on comedic crutches - at least in (not m)any film(s) I've seen him in.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby was the vehicle, and a supporting role by John C. Reilly, famously of Boogie Nights helped bring home the underlying message of the film - friends and family are important. Various other underlying messages such as 'same-sex marriage may not be so popular but its here to stay', or 'it really is possible to brand every frame of a film', or 'maybe Highlander wasn't such a great movie' are repeated throughout this movie. Let's face it, people either love or hate Will Ferrell. If you hate him, take the time to consider his upcoming movie alongside Dustin Hoffman and Queen Latifah called Stranger than Fiction. The trailer makes it look like a semi-dramatic role, and maybe worth the dosh.

Ferrell plays a race driver who gains instant success in NASCAR because he's spent his entire childhood and youth living, eating and breathing the stuff. Reilly plays his best friend who earns a spot as Ricky Bobby's co-driver, always the bridesmaid. Ricky Bobby becomes the Michael Schumacher of NASCAR and wins, at any cost, pretty much every race until his boss' son hires a former F1 driver to win for the team with less carnage. Cohen plays a gay Frenchman with a ridiculous accent who, upon meeting Bobby, breaks his arm because he won't say he likes crèpes. Driving with a broken arm in the next race, Bobby causes a large accident and basically ruins any credibility he has left. His Felipe Massa, excuse me, his co-driver becomes bitter because Bobby never gifted him a win and with Bobby gone, becomes the star driver. Three drivers now work for this team, Bobby has been replaced by a new driver and takes to delivering pizza after losing his wife and home to his best friend. Bobby goes through a transformation to win back the respect of his deadbeat father played by Gary Cole and a sweet black and gold Chevelle. He reassembles his team and enters the Daytona 500. Due to his reckless driving, Bobby manages to decimate the field on the final lap, and ends up in a roll down the finish straight with the Perrier car of Cohen's character Jean Girard. The commentator calls it the worst accident he's ever seen, which makes him a liar because in real life he would surely remember Ricky Rudd's accident from about 20 years ago. That was the worst NASCAR accident I'd seen up to that point and one of the few I still remember. Ricky got his car up in the air at 90 degrees, nose down, and the car did two or three pirouettes before putting a massive divot into the infield. In any event, the cinematic collision was nothing like the wrecks these guys wind up in nowadays. Maybe it's got something to do with 33 big cars and even bigger egos all trying to be #1. Bobby and Girard climb out of their wrecks and begin sprinting toward the finish line. I leaned over to Ali and said, "This doesn't count" as explained by the on screen announcer about 45 seconds later. The win goes to Cal Naughton, Jr., Bobby's erstwhile teammate and former best friend. Finally defeated and free to be himself, Girard slinks off into the sunset and Bobby and Naughton talk things over. Bobby explains that he cannot be best friends with Naughton anymore, but they are still civil to one another. Bobby and his two kids, his girlfriend, his mum and his deadbeat dad all pile into the black and gold Chevelle and drive off to Applebee's for a fine dinner. Bonus points to the creative department for managing to wedge a song by Monster Magnet into a NASCAR film.

The second film we watched was recommended by a guy at the video shop. One that I'd seen on the shelf, but never bothered to watch because it was an award winner at some festival somewhere and because I wasn't interested in Takashi Miike at the time. Truthfully, Ali watched only the first half before falling asleep. The Miike stuff really doesn't really start until the second half anyway, so I don't blame her. All the guy at the shop could tell me about Bizita Q or Visitor Q was, "It's really fucked up dude" and that might be the best, most succinct way to describe this movie. The movie is a little like Pulp Fiction in that it doesn't have a central story line. Instead, it takes various chapters of a family's daily life and combines them. After watching the first few scenes, which would have been enough for most people to walk out of the theatre, I was trying to imagine the pitch that got this movie sold, and then I was trying to imagine what kind of fucked up producer would spend the money to make the film. Perhaps I was being too judgmental at that point. I dropped Ali at home and for some unknown reason decided to watch the rest of the film. It just got more messed up from there.

The film is about a television reporter and his messed up family, and a strange visitor who sees an opportunity to change the family, in his way, for the better. The first scene opens and there is no secret - the audience is told that it's a father and daughter. The daughter is a prostitute and gets the father to pay her for sex. The second scene sees the visitor pick up a rock and crack the skull of the father, now sitting in a train station. The third scene sees the son beating his mother with a switch. The mother goes off and shoots heroin as the father and the visitor come home for dinner.

The son is bullied at school and the father decides to turn it into a series. He pitches it to his ex-girlfriend whom he wants to report on the issue. He's a loose cannon and has already lost too much credibility in the industry and she tries to walk away from the whole idea. The father attacks her and ends up killing her in a bout of sex-filled rage - all on film. Most directors would leave it there, and the story would follow some sort of murder suspect as he flees/goes on trial, but not Miike. Instead, Miike takes the story a little further. The reporter and the visitor who doesn't really exist - I'm sure there's some really long word in German for this type of imaginary personification, but part of the reason I flunked out of third year med school was because I never took psychology - take the body home and attempt to cut it up. Still on film, the father explains to the camera that when he sees his son being beaten, he wants to have sex (or something like that), and starts to fuck the corpse of his ex-girlfriend in the greenhouse. Okay, now Miike is doing his thing - totally unbelievable stuff set in a totally possible situation. So the father is determined to make this one last and ends up getting his junk stuck inside the corpse which seems to have begun to rigor. If that isn't fucked up enough for you, here is the most fucked up part of the film, for me at least. The husband asks the wife to help him get his dick out of the corpse. After trying in vain, the wife, who has a new lease on life due to some breast feeding deal that I don't even want to try and understand, gets the idea to shoot her husband with heroin. Tada! He relaxes and his body separates from the corpse. The husband and wife take the girlfriend back to the greenhouse and commence cutting. This must have made them hungry because they decide that this is the time to eat dinner. As a trio of bullies beset the house with fireworks on film, the father grows a pair and goes apeshit on the three kids. A swift spanner to the head dispatches the first, and a portable hacksaw meets the second between the eyes. The audience is treated to the father playing Lumberjack on the kid's skull. The third kid is standing amid the action, but by the time he finally tries to run, the wife has cut him off at the gate and throws a knife at him.

So now the family has four corpses to contend with, and they couldn't be more tightly knit. The son has decided to stop hitting his mum and make a decent go at studying and thanks the visitor for destroying his family. The wife seems to finally be getting respect from the husband and the husband has finally become the father he's always wanted to be. But what about the daughter? We haven't seen her since the opening scene. Well, the visitor is next seen strolling down the sidewalk and gets propositioned by the daughter. She offers him a discount because he's good looking or something, at which point she gets nailed in the head by a big rock. Injured, the daughter returns home only to find her mum naked in the greenhouse under a blue tarp breastfeeding the husband. Apparently, the daughter misses bonding because she goes out to the garden to join them. Pan out - roll credits - cue Real Time. My new favourite Japanese band, five years too late.

I watched the film a second time to see if the shock was any less but it wasn't. I knew what was coming up, but it didn't really change the way I felt about the characters and the film in general - except for one point. When the father is playing Lumberjack I now found it humourous I guess because it was so ridiculous.

Okay, now that the minors reading this blog have read several cuss words and various descriptions of illegal sex acts, violence and drugs, I would ask them to stop reading now. Go! Shoo!

*********************************

Dax' Amazing Drinky-poo Recipe

Okay, I admit it. I stole this recipe from a Japanese fusion restaurant and it breaks pretty much every rule I have about cocktails. But love makes one do strange things. I promised Ali that I would learn to make this drink, and attempts 4, 5 and 6 were all pretty close. I stopped measuring empirically after #5, but you can play around with it as you like:

The Umetini

What? The you-me-tini? No, Silly. Just read along.

Rule #1: Cocktails must contain gin. Broken.

Rule #2: Cocktails must contain a maximum of three ingredients. Not including garnish which cannot be more than one ingredient. Broken.

Rule #3: Blah-blah-fuckin-tinis must contain vermouth, either sweet or dry. Broken.

Rule #4: No cranberry - None. Broken.

Ingredients:

1 and 1/2 oz. ume (plum) wine
1 oz. vodka
1/8 oz. mandarin vodka
Splash of lime cordial (NOT lime juice, Silly!)
Stir.
Top with cranberry juice to maintain the deep ruddy colour of ume wine.
Garnish with small pickled ume.

Serve in a chilled cocktail glass if you wanna be like Ali, OR if you wanna be like me - on the rocks in a highball.

There you go - 5 ingredients not including garnish, no gin, no vermouth and topped with cranberry. Play around with it. Make sure that the lime is no more than a splash.