Edit: I wrote this like a month ago and thought I posted it. But there is was in my drafts. Somebody give me some Ginko extract.
The Avengers
The Avengers is Marvel’s latest installment of the films in the Avenger world—Iron Man (2008), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor (2011), and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011).
Iron Man is, by far, the BEST of all of them. I thought Captain America might be just as good, but the movie lost its way about half way through. The others are okay, not anything to jump up and down on the couch about. So while I was looking forward to seeing The Avengers, I wasn’t expecting anything special. I’m happy to tell you that The Avengers is good. Not as good as Iron Man, but much better than all the others. And certainly well-worth the price of admission.
The earth is in possession of an artifact of immense power called the Tesseract, which isn’t a made-up name. In geometry a tesseract is a cubic prism—some four-dimensional thing which boggles the mind. But in this movie and Captain America, the tesseract is a blue cube that can open portals to different parts of the universe or run Nazi war machines. The problem is that there are other beings in the universe. Some of these would like to be able to run their own Nazi machines and subjugate all species on every planet. So they get Loki, Thor’s adopted brother, to lead an army to raze the earth and retrieve the artifact.
Of course, earth’s forces aren’t strong enough to repel this alien force. That is, unless you call upon the Avengers—Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Captain America. As well as Avengers who haven’t had their own movies yet like Black Widow, Hawk, and Nick Fury.
It all sounds a bit much, and in the hands of a lesser writer it might have been. But Joss Whedon (Serenity, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) wrote the script and directed the movie. And he did a fantastic job. Instead of thinking we came for a barrage of special effects, he takes time to build the characters and relationships so we care about the action when it arrives. He does use the idiot chaos cinema technique for some of the action, but not nearly as much as was in Hunger Games. More importantly, he makes up for the error of his ways with a number of laugh-out-loud moments. Hilarious moments. In fact, the humor is one of the main reasons why this movie was so good.
If you like super hero movies, you’ll love The Avengers. Maybe not as much as you like Iron Man or Spider Man 2 or the Nolan Batman series. But close enough to have a great night out.
The Paris Grill
The Paris (Idaho) Grill has opened another restaurant in what used to be the Bear Lake Motor Lodge Cafe. The cafe was okay. Nothing to write home about. So I didn’t know what to expect with the new grill. However, I took two of my daughters out last night for dinner.
The Paris Grill has four menus. I don’t know why they keep them separate, but they do. One for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and another for their pizzas. We opted for the “Burgers n Pastas n Salads” menu which I guess is the lunch menu, but was what we ordered our dinner off of.
Confused yet?
Luckily, the food’s good enough that the menu business doesn’t matter. The lunch menu features a number of regular sandwiches—BLT, chicken cordon bleu, French dip. But it also offers some signature sandwiches like a kielbasa and pepper sandwich, something called the Hobo Deli (which is tasty sounding combo of sour dough bread with pepper cheese, roasted turkey, bacon, grilled tomatoes, and cilantro dressing), as well as the Monster Grill—roast beef topped with caramelized onions and peppers, mushrooms, and provolone cheese. I opted for the Monster Grill. My girls skipped the salads and ordered a hamburger and the chicken cordon bleu with mashed potatoes.
The first words out of my daughters’ mouth when eating the mashed potatoes were “ooh” and “yum.” That was followed by another “ooh” and “yum.” The potatoes were good. And they were made from scratch. The sandwiches were tasty as well. Good enough that I’m going to go back to the grill to try their dinner menu with my wife.
We topped the dinner off by splitting one of the grill’s big, hot cinnamon rolls. The prices for the lunch items were reasonable—around seven or eight bucks—and they were big enough that the girls took half their meal home.
If you’re in Garden City, Utah and looking for something besides burgers and shakes, try the grill. I think you’ll be quite satisfied when you walk out the door.
