"Care to see a flick Friday night?" a pretty pixie asked me this week.
Always liking it when the lady makes the first move, I happily agreed. "What are we going to see?"
"There will be Blood," she told me.
"Gee, sweety," I said. "I don't like vampire movies."
"Don't worry," she said, "it's not a vampire movie. You'll like it, I promise."
"Oh, ho!" I thought. "It must be a pirate movie!" (Wrong, but I'm getting ahead of myself.)
Dinner at the Buffet Moni Mahal
The Buffet Moni Mahal has the best Indian buffet in downtown Ottawa or the Glebe. (I've tried them all unless a new Indian restaurant has opened in the last month.) The price is lower than most and it has a wider variety of items. In fact, at least double the number of dishes you'll find at Haveli or the East India Company.
There is always butter chicken. There is always egg plant. There is always spinach.
We both enjoyed our meals. The staff said nothing about the number of plates I used.
Moni Mahal Buffet
164 Laurier Avenue West, Ottawa, ON K1P 5J4
Tel: 613-234-8882
[Many online references have the Moni Mahal on Laurier Ave East. This is wrong. And may embarrass you if you take a taxi from Slater Street.]
There will be Blood
It's not a vampire movie and it's not a pirate movie. It's a mining movie! To be specific, it's about the early days of oil drilling, but it starts in a gold pit. It brought me back to my youth, I tell you.
I was fascinated because I've had little experience with oil. Sticking mostly with salt, coal and of course, the precious gems and minerals. But I can tell you, the scenes in the pits were realistic.
The movie also had lovely music from the London Philharmonic except that a lot of the time you could tell that something horrible was going to happen just because the music was so loud and screechy. Can't they hear those violins? Don't they know that she's about to blow?
Favourite quote: "I'd like you better if you didn't treat me like I was stupid."
Noteworthy credits:
- Standby Greens - Ryan Bust [He has an entry on IMdb; And this article says "The greensman is a specialist who decides how and where to place plants and greenery in the film scenes."]
- Albert Chi as himself [How can a movie set between 1899 and 1929 have someone playing themself? But on IMdb, I see that he is listed as "assistant: Mr. Anderson" and Paul Thomas Anderson was the Director.
- "This motion picture was carbon neutral" [Which is quite an accomplishment given that they had an oil well fire and some cool explosions. On the other hand, Industrial Light and Magic had lots of credits, so maybe that was all animation. Still, I had to wonder, if ILM was involved, why couldn't they make it look like the wheels on the old cars were rolling forward instead of backward?
