The week that was #14

A daily dose of gross vegetable juice

Vegetables and I don't get along. We really don't. And I've given up buying them because, short of one or two ways - all including the addition of other substances that disguise their awful, awful vegetable taste - I can't eat them.

And I'm also a lazy, lazy person - so cutting/shelling/skinning or whatever the heck else you need to do to vegetables to prepare them is also an annoyance, particularly these days when I'm frequently pressed for time and have to get myself fed before heading out to rehearsal or to whatever other event I may be attending.

In the past I've tried to be good and buy vegetables, but the aforementioned barriers have meant that, despite having them lying around, I still haven't made myself eat them. Which means I'm not only not eating them but throwing them out - and I really hate wasting food - though not, apparently, as much as I hate eating vegetables. So I've turned to V8 Juice - the all-vegetable kind, not the mostly-fruit-with-a-bit-of-carrot-thrown-in-so-it-can-be-called-vegetable-juice kind - to ensure that I am getting at least something approaching the RDI of plant matter.

What I'm doing now is taking a 1L carton of V8 Juice to work each Monday and drinking it over the course of the week - this is also because it says on the box that it's supposed to be drunk within 5 days of opening, and that strikes me as reasonable given that vitamins and such do leech out of vegetables over time; juiced-up vegetables are probably no exception.

Yes, it's vile - truly vile; I wince with every mouthful and have to wash my mouth out with water afterwards and follow that with a strong mint. But it's still better (and faster) than eating the damn vegetables and - more importantly - it means I don't have the ghastly things getting in the way of me enjoying my evening meat¹.

I've been doing this for nearly two weeks, and I'm reasonably content. I suspect that not getting enough of whatever vegetables are supposed to contain was leading to diminished energy; now that I've upped my intake I think I am less lethargic later in the day. I was going to say that it's also helped boost my colossally useless immune system but it felt the urge to let through something over the weekend and I had Monday off work with low energy and an unceasing headache.

But, as much as my taste buds resent me for it, I'm going to keep at it. I hate the constant minor illnesses - sniffles, coughs and so forth - I'm plagued with, and if doing this cuts that down by even a tiny fraction it's going to be worth it.

Now where did I put those mints?

¹That's not a typo.

Influence

ATG review

I don’t have a lot to say that isn’t in the review – though it is a reminder of how much of a challenge casting a show can be, particularly when – as was the case with Influence - the script gives specific references to how old the character is.

Many of the roles I’ve played either haven’t been especially age-specific (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Me & My Girl plus anything I’ve been chorus in) or have been described as close enough to the age I was at the time (Emma, The Matchmaker, Lords & Ladies), but in a few I’ve played characters I was probably too young for: Popcorn, The Crucible, and Arsenic & Old Lace.

Obviously it’s a concern for me with Tempest – otherwise I wouldn’t have gone the grow-and-dye-the-beard option mentioned in last week’s entry. But there’s not really a lot I can do about it so it’s going to be down to trusting the audience are capable of the requisite suspension of disbelief.

Iron Man 2

I went to see Iron Man 2 this week. I quite enjoyed the first one – as comic-book adaptations go it was very good – and I trusted the people involved (mostly director Jon Favreau) to not go down the Michael Bay path, i.e. where you just throw a whole bunch of money at the CGI and effects people but get your script written by people who (it seems) he found standing by the side of the road holding up signs reading ‘Will hack for food’.

I really should have found the time to rewatch the first one just so I could make a more informed comparison; perhaps I’ll get hold of it and watch it during my two week Tempest break.

While it wasn’t – as far as I can remember - as good as the first, it wasn’t that far off. They were very good at not making the oh-so-common sequel mistake of deciding to just up the humour level to the point where the sequel seems more like a parody of the original (Michael Bay again - [cough] Bad Boys 2 [cough]) and although they did throw more money at the CGI and effects people, they made sure they had a solid plot and good writing as a framework to build upon.

So there was some excellent, funny dialogue - helps distract from the brain-hurtingly-bad subversions of reality mostly to do with how quickly Stark and co. are able to build all the stuff they build, plus his creation of a 'new element' that's a stable metal – something that I possess enough science-fu to know isn’t actually possible.

Incidentally, the screenplay was written by Justin Theroux, who’s also an actor: he played Evil DJ in Zoolander and Sean O’Grady in Charlies Angels 2, amongst other things. Oh, and he also co-wrote Tropic Thunder – another script I though very highly of.

Robert Downey Jr was excellent, but it wasn’t until I saw an advertisement for the dvd release of Sherlock Holmes that it dawned on me exactly how different he made those two characters – and that only improved my opinion of him.

Scarlett Johansson is hot, especially in a black catsuit. Samuel L Jackson is awesome, even though he didn’t say ‘motherfucker’ (or one of its variants) even once. Lousy US PG-13 rating. Roger Sterling from Mad Men (John Slattery looking disturbingly like Walt Disney) is Tony Stark’s father.

It was full of references to other characters in the Marvel universe - Tony Stark has Captain America's unfinished shield (apparently it was in Iron Man, but I didn't notice it) and uses it to prop up a particle accelerator; in a post-credits sequence (technical name: the stinger) the agent goes to New Mexico and in a crater we see Mjolnir - Thor's hammer.

Thor is the next Marvel film we’ll see – it’s due next year and directed, hilariously enough, by Kenneth Branagh – but the one I’m now really looking forward to is The Avengers, which’ll be directed by (wait for it) Joss Whedon. It’s about damn time someone trusted him with a big project like this. Let’s just hope there isn’t any executive meddling to screw things up.