The Food and the Ale
Standing in BevMo in front of the Belgians, I pick up a Westmalle and say to my husband, “Have you tried this before?” He shakes his head no, and suddenly I realize that I am a terrible wife.
Quickly I buy a Westmalle Dubbel and Tripel and a couple of pounds of chuck and embark upon a night of Belgian tastiness. The meal of choice: Belgian Beef Stew (aka Stoovflees).
Ingredients:
A big onion
Cubed beef
Butter
Dark Belgian ale
Dark Rye bread
Mustard
Black pepper, thyme and whatevs other spices you dig
First brown the meat in a SEARINGLY hot pan in some buttah (I prefer Kerrygold, myself).
Slice up your onion, turn the heat down, and slowly fry up the onions in the butter remains.
Throw the meat chunks, onion, and a bottle of Belgian (I chose some Chimay Grand Reserve) into a stew pot.
Coat your dark rye bread in mustard. Regular yellow mustard is fine if you don’t have fancy-ass mustard like I do.
Put the bread mustard-side down on top of the beef and onions, cover and cook on low for 2-3 hours or as long as you can wait. YOUR HOUSE WILL SMELL AMAZING.
Show off the badass Night of the Living Dead shirt that you bought yourself for Halloween.
Pour yourself some Westmalle Trappist Ale.
When the time (finally) comes, serve with mashed potatoes, or mashed “faux-tatoes” as we did–that’s mashed up cauliflower with cream cheese and garlic. I used faux rather than po because one of the guys in the tasting room next to the one where I work had about five buckets of cauliflower at work with him, and gave me one. What’s a girl to do with a 5 gallon bucket of cauliflower? Why, incorporate it into Belgian night of course.
The Film: Man Bites Dog
Benoit Poelvoorde as serial killer Ben in “Man Bites Dog”
The direct translation of the French (from Belgium) title of this film is “It Happened in Your Neighborhood”. The English language title Man Bites Dog has a similar journalistic quality, as the point of the film is to examine the relationship between violence and the media. I had heard as much about this film’s satirical theme, but I was unprepared for how dirty I would feel watching it.
The film, directed by Remy Belvaux, opens with Ben, an ego-maniacal serial killer, standing in the hallway of a train, looking out a window as a woman passes behind him. As soon as she passes, he rounds and wraps a wire around her throat, hauling her into a train cabin with the documentary cameraman rushing into the cabin to film her silent and painstaking struggle and strangulation. The next scene features Ben describing in detail how to dispose of a body into a rock quarry or river. He compares the weight of the stones you have to put inside the corpse as related to bone density, comparing and contrasting the elderly, adults, children, and midgets.
It is clear Ben has killed a hell of a lot of people, and has little time for anything else.
Our camera crew doesn’t take nearly as long as I thought to become Ben’s accomplices. I assumed, when I heard about the film, that it would take at least until the final act for them to be drawn in, that their taking part in a murder would be a part of the climax. In fact, they start right away. First they help dispose of one of the bodies. Then they use a zoom lens to help Ben find and shoot a victim he is chasing around an abandoned warehouse. Then they challenge Ben to murder a suburban family, a multiple murder of which they take part in as well.
There is a montage of shootings and strangulation, with a very vivid image of an elderly woman spitting out her dentures as she dies. Then comes one of the most horrific gang rape scenes I’ve ever seen on film. Then comes some really unexpected retribution which is absolutely unsatisfying after such a nihilistic tone has been set in the rest of the film. All the violence feels so random that any “justice” against the killer just feels random as well.
Don’t get me wrong. The film isn’t bad. It won some Palm D’Ors if I’m not mistaken. It sends a very clear message about the media’s symbiotic relationship with violence in a way that isn’t too heavy-handed or insulting (I’m looking at you, Michael Haneke). The journalistic reference in the title itself–about how horrific and unusual things are what is truly newsworthy–makes journalism the main target of satire in this film. The acting is not bad, the dialogue is clever, and it’s most certainly not boring. It’s just not really fun to watch. And I don’t think movies always need to be fun, much like I don’t think any art needs to be fun to exist.
It did it’s job by provoking thought. I don’t need to see it ever again, though.
