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.