Pairing a DVD and a Drink Takes Care

From the NY Times:
I COULD blame Don Draper, but if it was anyone’s fault, it was ROBERT MITCHUM’s.

There he was early in one of my all-time favorite films, “Out of the Past,” sipping bourbon in a little bar in Acapulco (or a Hollywood version thereof), waiting for the girl, thinking about how the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked. But, baby, I didn’t care. I was thinking, man, that bourbon looks good.

So I paused Mitchum midsentence, went over to the liquor cabinet and then the freezer, and poured myself a Knob Creek on the rocks. And then another.

By the end of the film, whose labyrinthine, double-upon-triple-cross plot had baffled me with each previous viewing, I was even more hopelessly lost than usual. But so what?

So, no, Don, your great-looking old-fashioneds in great-looking bars in “Mad Men” didn’t get me started on this funny habit of mine. I’ve been matching my drinks to my movies for at least 15 years. I’ve done it with my wife, in groups, or (and I’m not ashamed to say this) alone. It adds a new dimension — Alc-O-Vision? — to the plot, the photography and, especially, the sense of immersion if the film takes place in the same country from which the drink in my hand originated.

Different spirits cause different results. “Out of the Past” paired with Knob Creek is mellow yet ominous. But try it with smoky Monte Alban mezcal backed by Negra Modelo beer, and it is vibrant and energetic. The opening Mexican scenes seem to stretch the whole way to the end, to the final quadruple-cross. And it all makes sense.

Read the rest of the article at the NY Times.

You must read (and watch) Eddie Coyle

The first thing to know about George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle is that it directly entered the crime-fiction canon upon its 1970 publication. The second thing to know is that it holds up as both a writer's-writer thriller and as popular pulp, with Dennis Lehane introducing Picador's new 40th-anniversary reissue of the novel by heralding it as "the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years"—a moderate claim compared with that of Elmore Leonard, who hails it as the best crime novel, period. The third thing to know about The Friends of Eddie Coyle is that, as Lehane beat me to quipping, Eddie Coyle doesn't actually have any friends. When "my friend" is said in these pages, it is used with far less affection than in the case of a guy at a bodega or a coffee cart man addressing a patron

Read the rest of the article at Slate.com

The Star Who Didn't Care

From Commentary Magazine:

Of all the movie stars created by the Hollywood studio system whose films continue to be viewed, Robert Mitchum is the one whose artistic legacy is most problematic. Throughout much of his career, he was generally regarded less as an actor than as a personality, one whose hell-raising private life (among other once-scandalous things, he was arrested in 1948 for possession of marijuana) contributed to his reputation as one of the baddest of Hollywood’s bad boys. Many of his best-known films were trivial entertainments in which he played cartoonish heroes.

Read the whole article.