3 AND 1/2 BROTHERS CAFE - TUCSON, AZ

A new restaurant at 2530 N. 1st Avenue. It serves breakfast all day and starting on 10/1 will be open till 9pm for dinner. Their menu is very basic and small but oh, the food is cheap and delicious. So delicious in fact, that Chris approved and heartily indulged in her biscuits and gravy which is a breakfast she always orders and is always dissatisfied with.

The building itself is pretty plain with no decorations inside but its clean and the service was good. I ordered 3 pc's of French toast (great crispiness on the outside, lots of butter and warm maple syrup), 2 scrambled eggs, a small bowl of fruit which was a substitute for a bread choice (watermelon, canteloupe and strawberries), hashed browns (not done enough for me plus by this time i was approaching glutton belly time), and a sausage patty (greasy so i had to pat it down with my napkin but oh, so good).

And all this food was $7.62 with tax!!!!!!!

I'll be back with Bill for dinner. The waitress said they will probably be adding some new items; pasta dishes for instance.

DRIVE

I was expecting a 10 movie and it wasn't -  so part of my acute disappointment  is reflected in my rating of 7. Bill agrees.

The acting was superb and the photography was great and the action scenes were fantastic and exciting; it was all the other stuff. Like the music which was jarring and too loud and didn't seem to fit with what was going on in the movie. One especially intrusive moment was an operatic song (loud) done at a ho-hum part of the movie; i was expecting that with a melody so strong and germanic opera powerful that something significant was about to happen. Nada.

Ryan Gosling who plays the lead role as the driver is so very good-looking (in a way; better even than Johnny Depp who is soon to appear in another kaleidoscopic disaster film adaptation of a Hunter Thompson short story.) and is a master at the enigmatic look, the half-smile, the pregnant pause, the ability to mirror his emotions through his eyes but it was way way way overdone.

And Carey Mulligan (the gal with the dimple) also communicates that way; slowly and with long looks and dimpling before she answers a simple question like "what's your name?"; everything is fraught with glacial boredom instead of tension.

and that was the worst thing about the movie especially the first half; whenever the film switched to building a relationship or attempting to show a character's motivations or just plain talk, it bogged down into Soma-land.

The opening scene was dynamite; Gosling driving a get-away car for 2 robbers and hearing on the police radio that his car had been identified. He kept his cool throughout all his maneuvers to escape being caught and it was a great sequence. During the second half of the movie when violence of a high magnitude occurs (Albert Brooks providing some particularly gruesome rage.) and the story develops, it got more exciting but not enough to make up for the first part plus the ending was disappointing.

I should briefly mention the plot; Carey Mulligan's husband gets out of jail and his and his wife's life is threatened by some thugs cuz of money he owes; before the husband got released, Gosling and Mulligan began seeing each other and he didn't want anything to happen to her or her son so he volunteers to do a robbery to pay back the money and the debt. and things go terribly awry.  just like this film.

THE WAY BACK

This movie was released in theaters earlier this year and promptly disappeared. After watching the video, I can see why. Its quite long - over 2 hours - and the acting is just so-so and the story is not very exciting.

Prisoners from a Siberian labor camp escape and make their way through forests, deserts, snowy mountains, villages with hostile inhabitants and endless arid featureless land. They eventually find their way to India.

Colin Farrell plays a criminal who was locked up for a murder ( i think) and another escapee is Ed Harris. and then there were several Eastern European actors. All the escapees had thick accents and since they always seemed to be whispering - I missed a lot of dialogue; not that it made a difference.
 
we certainly enjoyed it enough to keep watching their endless walk but a major problem was the lack of anything interesting; a few of them died, they went hungry, they lacked water, there were some hallucinations and a lot of temporary collapses but no tension was ever built up. And none of them ever looked like they went hungry. Ed Harris achieved the best cachectic look but the others stayed fleshed out with bright alert eyes. In fact, at one point as they were crossing into Tibet they came upon a river and just laid in it to cool off and several of them had pudgy bellies and you couldn't see their ribs.

Bill gave it an 8; my rating was a 6.

August 2011 trip

Click here for the pop-up link to see our South Lake Tahoe, CA hiking pictures.

Click here for the pop-up link to see our Crescent City, CA hiking pictures.

TONY'S NEW YORK STYLE ITALIAN DELI - TUCSON, AZ

Unbeknownst to us and jean and tim, they were having a dinner show with buffet on the night we ate there. So we got the only remaining table (and there's not many tables to begin with since its a very small eating area). because they needed the space to set up the buffet.

The table was right by the front door with a monster air blower creating a din of ventilation. and because people were arriving in a steady stream for the show (all Eisenhower generation plus  a few New Jersey gangster types and their molls ) the bell on the front door was constantly ringing and it wasn't a tinkle of celestial sound; it was a damn cow bell. The show featured the music of who else? Frank Sinatra, Patsy Kline and Billie Holiday. and this cost $10 which included this fantastic spread of food.

And i love Tony's food and our left-overs for lunch. I had cheese ravioli with a salad with Italian dressing and Bill had spaghetti with italian sausage. Its the only restaurant where i order Italian dressing. The salad was large and really fresh with lots of goodies on it. And with each entree you get a mini-loaf of garlic bread. Lots of sauce on the pasta and the ravioli has more ricotta filling than dough - wonderfully flavored.

So in spite of the cacophony and constant movement and activity; we had a good dinner accompanied by our usual sprightly level of conversation.

THE DEBT

we were headed to see Contagion. i had read enough reviews which gave me confidence that we were NOT going to be subjected to another "outbreak". remember that horror of a movie with dustin hoffman and rene russo? it was about the ebola virus.

however, when we got to the theater we discovered that Contagion was showing in 3D and we had missed the 2D showing. The paper doesn't separate the 2 from 3 D's; it just lists all the hours. So this is how we ended up watching The Debt (which we had wanted to see anyway.)

I did not get lost or confused so that was a relief since with spy, espionage, CIA and undercover films i tend to become lost early on and i never quite catch up.

Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson were 2 of the very fine actors. They were part of a mission in the '60's to capture a Nazi doctor from East Berlin and bring him to the West to stand trial. However, things did not go as planned. The film went back and forth (especially in the beginning where the actual planning of the nazi's kidnapping was happening; and this was probably one of the most suspenseful parts) in time and also showed what happened 30 years later to these agents.

Naturally, secrets had been created and lies promulgated and it started to unravel in the late 90's. It gets twisty with unexpected plot turns though there were a  few loose unexplainable actions that i wasn't aware of till bill and i were discussing the movie afterwards.

Bill and i both rated it an 8.

REDNECK'S SOUTHERN PIT BARBEQUE - KINGMAN, AZ

no picture will be posted with this review cuz i'm doing it from the road and i don't have my notes about how to download an image and transfer it to my blog and fb. soooooooo

we are on our way back to tucson from a fabulous 2 week hiking trip in South Lake Tahoe and then Crescent City. I am at the end of my delight in eating out and now get nauseated when i look at french fries, burgers and blt's. so it was a great adventure which re-awakened my usual constant and persistent interest in food to come across this bbq place.

it was a huge room with lots of long picnic tables in addition to booths. very clean - in contrast to a lot of bbq places i've been to which are sticky with bbq sauce and rib debris and mayo- laced coleslaw shards. The staff was extremely friendly and we were served by a gal who came out of Central Casting as Becky Sue, in Western movies and pioneer flicks; the good hearted golden haired blue eyed naive waif who is married to the town drunk and whore-master and sheriff.

I had a pulled chicken sandwich with baked beans. Absolutely mind-boggling and the house sauce was spicy and sweet at the same time. Bill had 3 ribs which were fall off the bone tender. After he was through eating, his face reminded me of a Dave Chappell skit (whatever happened to him?) about the technique that black people use when they have trouble falling asleep. They don't drink warm milk like the white folks; they eat drippingly greasingly downhome ribs and go to sleep with their mouth smeared with sauce and bits of meat on their chest.

I highly recommend this restaurant if you are traveling through Kingman, Arizona. it's on Beale street in the Historic District.