Caution: this post contains a spoiler! If you can't predict how the movie would end, watch out!
Oh my gawd, you guys. I just got back from watching Clash of the Titans with my friend Joe. I cannot remember the last time I laughed so hard, and it was only five bucks!
This movie did not have an original thought in its head. It was a hamhanded pastiche of classic and not-so-classic sci-fi, adventure, and fantasy movies. I only wish I had a broader crap-film background so I could name more quotes.
Let's see, first we see a coffin bob up in the Aegean Sea (Call me Ishmael!) bearing a baby... of mysterious parentage! Then the plot limps along on twin crutches: Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.
The film then lurches from the video-game monster violence of Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf past the Dark Crystal-meets-Pan's Labyrinth Gray Sisters and an Anaconda-esque Medusa, to a truly Godzillian ending with an impossibly giant kraken corpse making a tsunami-sized death splash—never quite managing to carry off Andromeda, though she is strung up like Naomi Watts on offer to Peter Jackson's King Kong. Along the way we even manage to quote The Mummy (blood falls on the sand and giant monsters pop out!) and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead (a severed hand gets up and scurries off to do mischief!) I'm pretty sure they threw in some Pirates of the Caribbean, too (creaky skeleton ship ride!).
Meanwhile a black-cloaked Ralph Fiennes as Hades swoops and skulks through the movie, vaporizing and rematerializing around every corner like Sauron-cum-Dracula-cum-Voldemort-cum-Nightcrawler from X2. All the while he's simpering, sulking and glaring like the runner-up in an emo beauty pagent, coldly quipping on the movie's premised economies of human existence like Stalin to Zeus's Lenin: "No. YOU need their love. I learned to live on their FEAR." (Thanks to friend Joe for the apt comparison.)
In other words, it was a hokey, derivative-as-hell retread—but big and fun and made me laugh! And it only cost FIVE BUCKS!
Just like this week's recipe! These burgers do not teach anyone anything, but they are big, cheap, pretty tasty, and they make us happy.
Burgers of the Titans!
In a world where grilling seasons are all too short, one burger recipe hides a secret: savory ingredients lurking inside...
2 lb ground beef
1 piece of bread, rubbed between your palms until it is crumbs
2 eggs
2 T fines herbes
1/4 c grated Parmesan cheese
1 T freshly ground black pepper
1 T minced garlic or onion (optional)
Mix it all up! Pat it into 8 burgers. Grill over hot coals.
