You Kill Me

Saw "You Kill Me" last night and enjoyed it. A couple of meal scenes but no focus on food, except for a close-up of a turtle eating a piece of cheese!! Lots of drinking scenes because the story is about a Polish alcoholic hit man, played by Ben Kingsley. To shovel the snow he begins by taking a huge slug out of a bottle of vodka. He throws the bottle a few feet, then starts shoveling. When he gets to the bottle, he takes another big slug, then throws the bottle out a few more feet. Good plan. As the film progresses, between slugs from the vodka bottle, he drinks beer. The film is full of scenes of people drinking, bottles being opened, liquor poured, in bars, at home and at an Irish wake. It actually started to nauseate me, as the sister of an alcholic, thinking about all that booze being consumed and how it would make the people feel the next day. Kingsley does a wonderful job of being almost emotionless at the opening of the film when he just joins AA and he's totally unaffected by the people around him, like an automaton. When he drinks in the film, he drinks almost as if he's taking medication - joyless and mechanical. In one scene, he drinks in a bar sitting perfectly upright with that Kingsley ram-rod posture, picking up the glass, sliding it toward him, raising it to his lips at almost right angles and then throwing it back. Scene by scene, seemingly "one day at a time", he starts to show emotion and become connected to people - Tea Leoni, playing someone he meets in the mortuary in San Francisco where he works (she's relieved he isn't gay - alcoholic and a hit man, she can handle) ; his AA sponsor; the black woman at the mortuary; his Polish mafioso "family". Pretty good film with lots of laughs and particularly funny if you know AA or if you know an alcoholic.

Speaking of alcohol, we had a rather poor beer last night with our Indian food after the film. It was watery and thin, like Coors. Our meal consisted of Chicken Tikka, Spinach Saag with homemade cheese, #60 which is potatoes and cauliflower in a kind of curry, rice and garlic/cilantro nan. Taste of India in Temecula is almost always empty which astounds us because the food is quite good - not great, but perfectly serviceable Indian food. The service is excellent because of the low level of patronage. We eat there on Saturday nights if we're going out because almost all the other restaurants in Temecula and Murrietta are crowded and there are long, noisy waits. Pam mentioned last night that they're all the same too! Isn't that the sad fact.

A new amusing routine: we're throwing out left over bread onto the branches of our Norfolk Pine. The branches are widely spaced and almost flat. Bread chunks nestle nicely into the cleft down the center of the branches. Big crows swoop down to the deck, sit on the railing and assess the situation. Then they make their move, fluttering over to a branch to establish a footing and get a beak around a chunk of bread. They carry off pieces about 1/3 of their size, fly a long distance from the house, drop the bread and then eat it. Once one crow comes, the others follow and the tree/birdfeeder can be stripped of a loaf of bread in a few minutes.