Reviews

Got a couple of reviews to hand out for things I've tried or watched this week.

First is a movie review. I watched "Marie Antoinette" last night. Yeah, I know - I'm on the front line, watching only the latest releases. Let's just accept I don't watch everything first-run at the theater and move on to my review, kay?

This movie was released in 2006 with Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman and some other recognizable names. I wanted to like it. I liked the cast and I like the Marie Antoinette story. She reminds me of Princess Di - an innocent lamb led to the slaughter of a sophisticated royal system she didn't really understand and didn't navigate that well, ending in an untimely death. Obviously there are differences, but certainly there are similarities.

Anyway, I wanted to like it. I tried to like it. But sheeeeeeeeesh. They really drug the hell out of a lot of scenes. They spent 2-3 times longer than needed on just about every point, showing you that she was vulnerable, showing you she liked the gardens - HOW much time did we spend watching her climb stairs??? The one really hot scene, with her having a tryst with her Swedish soldier lover - that lasted about 2 seconds. But let's spend endless minutes showing people at a picnic engaged in banal chatter. Yeah, let's take the audience through that - repeatedly.

So, I gotta say, I can't really recommend it. It only lasted 2 hours but felt much longer. And that's usually not what you're after in a movie.

The second thing I have to review is pizza. Someone brought our office some free pizza today. It was from Gatti's, and it was some new flavor called Kicken Chicken. They should've called it Bacon Kicken Chicken's Ass, because all you could really taste was the bacon that was also on there. Oh, and onions - it had a lot of red onions. It had a lot of flavor, and I liked it at first, but it was really salty, and after two pretty small pieces, I had to eat some cherry yogurt to get the taste of something sweet. The salty and savory of the pizza was pretty overpowering.

I didn't hate it, but I wouldn't order it. Maybe if it were on their buffet, I'd get a small slice. Of course, if I'm ordering pizza, I'm not ordering Gatti's anyway. If I'm ordering it's Papa John's or Domino's. Papa John's is definitely my first choice for pizza, but Domino's is also good AND has the super-spectacular Cinnastix, so order either of those and you're a champ.