"Intolerable Cruelty" -- The Criminally Ignored Coen Brothers Movie: A Tribute, I guess...

Last night Miss Edith was in a good mood. It was just one of those unprecedented things.

I made a surprisingly decent kind of variant on tamale pie, using up the last of some excellent chili I had in the fridge – it wasn’t enough to stand on its own for dinner, but spread over a base of polenta with corn and cheddar and then baked, it was outstanding – and Notarius and I ate, literally, the entire casserole while watching, for the umpteenth time, a Coen brothers movie that no one seems to love but us. In fact, I don’t think I’m acquainted with a single person who’s even seen it. This is wrong. In a moral universe, this movie would be required viewing for anyone contemplating marriage or law school. (Not that there are any lessons to be learned, but, frankly, anyone planning a wedding or going to law school probably needs a good laugh. And god help you if you’re doing both at the same time.)

The Coen brothers have, of course, quite the following. Miss Edith remembers when she was a slip of a girl, many of her friends memorized “Raising Arizona,” a movie that Miss Edith never glommed onto. (Holly Hunter, a fine actress, makes me a little crazy for some reason. Though I ought to give the movie another shot, to be fair.) Miss Edith saw “Blood Simple” when it played at the York Square Cinema, here in New Haven, back in the day; she remembers being grossed out and not particularly amused. So while I am well aware of the Cult of Coen, I can’t say I’ve been a member of it, though I certainly was interested in the Coen brothers’ movies. They’re a category unto themselves, no question.

A few years back I saw “O Brother Where Art Thou” and the first time I saw it I was bored to tears. Then, watching it again on TV one lazy afternoon, it suddenly struck me as funny. And George Clooney, it dawned on me, was possibly the closest thing to Cary Grant going today. With that in mind, I rented “Intolerable Cruelty,” another Coen brothers movie starring Clooney. And you know what? It was fucking awesome. I could not fathom why people weren’t crying hosannas for this thing. It was, and is, a classic screwball screenplay, snappily directed, with absolutely marvelous turns by literally every single person on screen. And yet it was, I understand, a flop. This is, if you won’t mind the hyperbole, tragic.

I realize that much of the plot is improbable, to put it lightly. It doesn’t matter; in la vie Screwball, plot is just… a detail. The point of the plot is just to give the characters an excuse, however flimsy, for snapping verbal wet towels at each other’s asses. What you’re after is attractive leads, nimble and comic supporting actors, and fast funny dialogue. “Intolerable Cruelty” has all this in spades. What the hell is wrong with people? Why has everyone glommed onto “Fargo,” “O Brother Where Art Thou,” and “The Big Lebowski,” and forgotten this jewel?

I would add that I saw “The Ladykillers” not long ago and while that was not as fine a product as one might have hoped, it did provide perfectly solid entertainment. Notarius and I in fact watched it three times. He particularly liked it for the early music humor. Notarius is funny like that.

If you don’t like screwball comedy, then fine, don’t watch “Intolerable Cruelty,” but I have to say, if you skipped this one first or second time around because people said it sucked, please give it a chance. Jonathan Hadary, as Heinz, the Baron Krauss von Espy, needs to be seen to be believed…

Miss Edith Is Disappointed: The New Yorker Let Me Down

People who know Miss Edith, or are familiar with her writings, won’t be surprised to find that she’s the sort of person who’s easily pissed off by improperly used punctuation and words. Miss Edith makes mistakes, too; readers have pointed out to her flaws even in this site, and she’s done her utmost to fix them posthaste (though if you notice a problem, please let me know!). Edith is genuinely mortified when something wrong gets past her. She likes to think of herself as being a one-woman New Yorker editorial staff in this regard – The New Yorker, of course, known for being a magazine that is, among other things, nit-picky about form.

So imagine Miss Edith’s horror when last night, perusing The New Yorker issue of 25 June, she sat down to enjoy a Calvin Trillin piece about vigilantism on a small Canadian island and read the following:

“That evening, Ross piled some wooden palettes in his front yard, right next to the street, put a couple of propane tanks on top of the pile, started a fire, and, according to Foster, said that he was going to blow up the entire neighborhood.”

Miss Edith does not paint and has little first-hand experience with palettes, but she has spent a good amount of time in art supply shops (she has fetishes for nice paper, colored ink cartridges, and cheap pens that write in funky colors) and it’s always seemed that palettes are just expensive enough that they’re not likely to be candidates for material to build a bonfire. A quick perusal online of the price of wooden paint palettes confirms this.

It seems much more likely to me that the unpleasant, pyromaniac Mr. Ross was using wooden pallets to build his firebomb. Pallets: the cheap wooden structures one uses to load and unload shipments of this, that and the other. Pallets can be taken from all kinds of places. You can steal them from construction sites, for example, quite easily, if you have a truck you can load them into. Not that I recommend this; I’m just saying. You could. If you wanted to.

If Mr. Ross did actually use palettes to build his fire, I’m impressed. If he didn’t, then shame on The New Yorker for letting this slip.

I suppose we should be grateful that the article didn’t say that Mr. Ross built his bonfire out of palates; that would just be gross.

Why can’t people get a grip on this stuff? When even the people who are supposed to know their ass from their elbow lose track of communicating accurately and effectively, what hope can we have for the people who seem to think these things genuinely don’t fucking matter? It makes Miss Edith’s blood boil.

Though I enjoyed Mr. Trillin’s piece otherwise.

Miss Edith's Adventure in New York: How I Watched Television And Ate Food God Never Intended Me To Eat

Yesterday Miss Edith and Notarius had an adventure: we went, accompanied by our darling neighbor A., the devoted vegan, and a friend of his, R., to Central Park’s Summerstage to hear Television play.

This was good, clean, fun. We were sorry sorry sorry that Richard Lloyd wasn’t able to perform with the band – he apparently is quite ill, and of course this is sad news and we hope he gets better soon – but the man who filled in for him did a fine job of stepping into large shoes. When we arrived in the city, a thunderstorm rumbled over us, and we all thought, “Shit.” But we trudged, determined, through the rain, convinced that it would pass and we’d be able to enjoy the concert. We were correct, and were walking or standing in the rain for a really finite amount of time – maybe a half hour or so. By the time Television took the stage, the sky was bright blue and everyone, soaked to the skin one and all, cheerfully stood in the park and dried off under the late afternoon sun.

I won’t compose a review of the show; I’ll just say that parts of it were divine and other parts were very disappointing. Television fans who read this blog are, I imagine, extremely few in number, and I don’t want to bore my general readership (such as it is). When the show ended, we all took a deep breath and said, “Well, ok. It was what it was. Now: on to dinner.”

A., being vegan, apparently goes through life carrying paperwork with lists of restaurants where he can eat comfortably, and suggested we all trek down to the Village to go to a particularly awesome place he knows. It’s a favorite among vegan and vegetarians, we were told, and known for its “buffalo wings” that, of course, aren’t buffalo wings at all. If you do a search online for this place, which is called Red Bamboo, you find a zillion people raving about it, how it’s just the best vegetarian food, the best vegan food, the best restaurant they’ve ever been to. I was more open-minded than you’d expect, reader, honestly, and I gamely read the menu and thought, “Gee, this stuff really does sound pretty awesome.”

Notarius and I both decided that since we were in a place that obviously specialized in trying to make non-meat taste like meat, we ought to dive in wholeheartedly and not chicken out (so to speak) by ordering vegetarian/vegan items we would eat normally anyway. So we forsook the delicious sounding Portobello mushroom sandwich and the pesto sandwich and ordered appetizers of “buffalo wings”; and then Notarius requested a “ginger chicken” stir fry and I got “Dante’s Cuisine,” which was meant to resemble braised beef.

[Before I go further, I want to let A. know -- if he's reading this -- that the following diatribe is not intended to offend or distress him, and that I am in fact completely grateful for having had this dining experience, and that I'm so pleased I had it with him. There is no sarcasm intended in this paragraph, either. Now: read on, and watch it get ugly...]

The buffalo chicken wings tasted all right – they were drowned in a sticky red sauce. The texture was, as Notarius said, akin to that of wet paper towels. The restaurant did a remarkable job of taking soy product and working it so that you ended up with a vaguely chicken-fiber-seeming mass surrounded by something that tore in your teeth much the way chicken skin does. However, Miss Edith is one of those cranks who genuinely doesn’t much like eating chicken skin, so this was merely off-putting; and the texture of the “meat” was entirely unpleasing. The accompanying celery stalks were a relief… but then again, Miss Edith always did like celery, so that’s not much of a statement.

It was when our entrees arrived that our hosts, A. and R., looked at us expectantly. I was unable to cut my medallions of “beef” with a fork – something you should surely be able to do with actual braised beef – and put an entire piece in my mouth. Apparently my face registered total horror. “Look at her face!” R said, laughing. I don’t blame him for laughing; I’m sure I looked as appalled as I felt. But this stuff was really ridiculous. It tasted nothing like beef. It had, like the chicken, been worked and processed and worked so that it looked sort of like chunks of beef – it sort of looked stringy, the way braised beef can – but it also looked like little ovoid medallions of sponge. And that is how it tasted. Medallions of sponge in a highly spiced savory brown sauce with mushrooms. It was, I repeat, ridiculous. There were nicely steamed vegetables and mashed potatoes on the side, and these were fine if unremarkable. Notarius felt his meal was nearly inedible, the poor boy, and told me later that the rice tasted like plastic.

We tried to be sporting about this culinary experiment, and pressed on to dessert. Informed that there was a stunning peanut butter cake, we ordered that, and it was perfectly nice – sweet, with layers of chocolate cake and peanut butter cake that made it, basically, a baked version of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup – but in the end it couldn’t make up for the disappointment of our entrees. Very sad.

Our waitress, Elaine, was a total sweetie, and naturally a very thin attractive woman – we were treated quite well, I think, as a party of four dominated by straight men, who all admired her – so as far as the nuts and bolts of service at the restaurant goes, I have no complaints. But god help me if I ever eat there again.

I’ve learned my lesson. From now on, confronted with a menu like that at Red Bamboo, Miss Edith will stick to the Portobello sandwich and call it a day.

This afternoon, we are going to Cape Cod, where we often find the food equally indigestible but from the opposite end of the spectrum. I expect that when we come home, we will be very happy to cook for ourselves. God knows our stomachs will need some TLC after the day before us and the days ahead…