With SFIAAF 2008 in full swing, I’ve managed to munch popcorn with yeast for dinner more times than I care to admit during the past few days. And with another week of films ahead, it looks like I’m going to need to restock my supply of dental floss.

Fortunately, it’s been worth it. Over the weekend, two titles that food and film lovers should add to their list were screened to sold-out crowds.

THE KILLING OF A CHINESE COOKIE

Who among us can resist opening a fortune cookie? No matter how jaded or snobby, no matter how much you may hate that dry, tasteless joke of a dessert that sits on your bill after a meal at the Golden Imperial Jade Wok Garden, I dare you to leave behind, unopened and unread, that little strip of paper and its peek into your future.

Like many things we touch in daily life, the beginnings of the humble fortune cookie are murky, but in his documentary, The Killing of a Chinese Cookie, director Derek Shimoda doggedly follows the complex maze of historic claims and counterclaims. Best of all, he collects the amazing stories of thoroughly lovable individuals. Third-generation confectioners and visual artists, judges and lawyers, historians and entrepreneurs, master chefs and hack writers–everyone has an opinion about the fortune cookie. Among the highlights are recollections of the mock trial held in 1983 at the San Francisco Court of Historical Review. Instead of settling the dispute, though, the arguments seemed to have only stirred up the controversy even more.

More recently, The New York Times covered the long-standing debate in a feature about the origins of the ubiquitous cookie. Among the many representing Northern California’s interests are the descendants of Suyeichi Okamura, who in 1906 opened the Benkyodo Company, a confectionary in San Francisco Japantown where you can still buy handmade moochi, sembei and other traditional sweets.

One of the Suyeichi Okamura’s grandsons shows how hot cookies were once slipped into this wooden rack to cool slightly before a fortune was hidden within its crisp folds.

I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much during a documentary while learning about the secrets of the past. With great affection, Shimoda tracks the cookie’s influence from Japan’s sembei treats to Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Garden, though World War II and the rise of Chinatown restaurants, to erotic art and lucky lottery numbers. I won’t reveal any more about the film or the cookie’s history, since I highly recommend this film. The fun of it will be in watching the story unfold for yourself.

A manager at a Los Angeles factory showing an old tin of fortune cookies that he’s resisted opening for posterity’s sake.

The Killing of a Chinese Cookie
Directed by Derek Shimoda
Sunday, March 23
12:00 Noon
Camera Cinemas 12 Downtown
201 South Second Street
San Jose, CA 95113
(408) 998-3300

You can still buy tickets for this weekend’s screening of the film at San Jose’s Camera Cinemas 12. Until then, you can read the memorable fortunes submitted by NTY readers.

I’M A CYBORG, BUT THAT’S OKAY

Many of us have been waiting to see Park Chan-Wook’s latest film on the big screen. If you’ve survived his infamous films, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, then you’ll already know that Park’s work is not for everyone. But those who love his intense, over-the-top vision or who can’t get enough of Korea’s boundary-breaking films, his latest should not be missed.

I’m a Cyborg, But That’s Okay reveals a new tack in his filmmaking: romantic comedy. In Park’s world, though, this means telling the story of how two psychotics in an insane asylum find love across the distance of alternative realities, group therapy and padded rooms.

Im Su-jeong plays Young-goon, a pale and skittish young woman who refuses to swallow even a single grain of rice, since cyborgs like her cannot digest food. She licks batteries to help recharge her energy, talks to vending machines and flickering lights, and mourns the loss of her daikon-nibbling grandmother. Superstar singer Rain plays a scruffy kleptomaniac, Il-sun, who invents and (in one of my favorite scenes in the film) installs a tiny machine called the Rice Megatron–with lifetime service guaranteed–inside Young-goon to help her survive the rigors of reality.

Any further attempt to explain the plot or introduce the cast of characters will fail miserably.

Viewers who nearly died from cuteness overdose during Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain or Michel Gondry’s La Science des Rêves might think twice about seeing this film. You’ll find a bit of relief from romantic sweetness during a few crazed killer-bot scenes, but don’t expect the endless blood or deep anger of Park’s earlier films.

I’m a Cyborg is the ultimate film, however, for fans of surrealism on the screen, well-intentioned massacres, hope flickering in a chaotic world, and uncertain non-endings.

The documentary film, Chez Schwartz, enjoyed a quiet if savory U.S. premier at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center earlier this week. It has yet to be picked up for wider distribution, but keep an eye out for it. Or, if you can’t wait, order a DVD and see for yourself why this little “Charcuterie Hebraique” is the place to eat in Montréal.

Garry Beitel, a Montréal-based documentary filmmaker, recorded the day-to-day rhythms of Schwartz’s Deli over the course of an entire year. He managed to whittle his footage down to a poetic study of its workers. As one season melts into another, Beitel teases out the stories of the diverse men — from the dishwasher in the back of the house to the waiters in the front, from the general manager down to the gentlemanly panhandlers. They each describe their unique role in the extended family anchored by this tiny, 75-year-old restaurant. Through their stories, we see how years slip into decades and how one long-lived business adapts to a changing world.

Unusual in a film about ethnic food, there’s an “overcast” feel throughout the documentary. In the end we wonder what happens to individuals such as newly promoted Alex or sweet, ailing Ryan. (Anyone interested in degrees of separation and ground-breaking animation should watch this award-winning short about Ryan.) The power of Chez Schwartz lies in Beitel’s understated directing, Marc Gadoury’s intimate camera, André Boisvert’s amazingly natural sound, Robert Marcel Lepage’s music and — ultimately — the simple, direct oral history of the workers themselves.

At the head of the line, hungry pilgrims can catch glimpses of smoked meat, freshly sliced by hand and ready to go at the sandwich counter. Joao (Johnny) Gonçalves, meat cutter, prepares some without the usual bright yellow mustard.

I remember the first time I bit into smoked meat at Schwartz’s. Everyone does. In the film, two women gasp in rapture while sharing their first sandwich right there at the counter, and another diner is struck speechless while remembering his own first taste as a teenager. It may seem strange, perhaps even laughable to the uninitiated. But like any religion, only the converted truly understand.

During my year of exile in Vermont, I drove across the border every month to eat in Montréal. While dinner restaurants varied — rilettes at l’Express with my own jar of cornichons or maybe noodles in Chinatown — I always started with an early lunch at Schwartz’s.

The neighborhood surrounding the deli draws immigrants from around the world. Historically the heart of Montréal’s Jewish community, the road on which the deli sits has also been the symbolic division between the city’s east and west streets, its French and English languages.

After five years as the busboy, Alexandre “007″ Lebel gets promoted to waiter. To help with the stress of a fast-paced deli, he composes poems on clean paper place mats during precious down time.

If you arrive at 3895 Boulevard St. Laurent anywhere near the middle of the day, you’ll stand in line on the sidewalk with a couple of dozen other meat lovers, separated by mere glass from stacks and stacks of brisket still warm from the massive steamer. You’ll be able to smell the smoky, salt-tinged meat and listen to the same order over and over again in two different languages: a “medium” with fries, cole slaw, fresh pickle and black cherry soda. Around 400 to 500 other diners a day will order a steak from Peter at the grill; it arrives accompanied by a slice of calf liver and two diminutive sausages. The grill is a relic of the past: open flame right in the dining room, arm’s length from innocent diners.

Grill man Peter Christianis (left) has been searing steaks and calf livers at the same station for 40 years, while waiter Mike Nelli has been a member of the Chez Schwartz family going on 7 years now.

Upstairs in the marinating bins and inside the smoker in the back are where the magic happens. The very secret recipe results in über-meat that’s juicy and tender, savory and smoky, fatty and flavorful. It’s not quite pastrami (there’s a dry rather than wet cure) and it’s way beyond corned beef (behold that spice-flocked, smoke-lacquered exterior). So everyone just calls it for what it is: smoked meat.

Frank Silva, general manager, knows the business inside and out. He’s hefted and sliced so many briskets during his twenty years at the deli that his arm is starting to give out.

Schwartz’s sandwiches have no need to rise to Carnegie heights nor does the owner, Hy Diamond, feel pressure to expand the menu beyond one type of meat sandwich, a steak and a few sides. As Peter Levitt and Karen Adelman, co-owners of Saul’s Deli in Berkeley know well, this is a rare and precious thing.

After the film’s screening on Thursday night, the two moderated an enlightening discussion about the future of Jewish delicatessens in the U.S. How does a meat-centered restaurant survive in a health-conscious, politically aware, option-filled world? How does Saul’s modest amount of Niman Ranch beef compete with super-stacked, industrially raised pastrami from tourist-driven, New York delis? And how does a younger generation begin transforming a cuisine frozen in time into a meaningful, relevant, profitable business?

It’s not about the size: Saul’s uses “clean meat” from Niman Ranch in its pastrami sandwiches.

Anyone who hangs around chefs knows that, generally, they survive on the razor’s edge of profit margins and see the cloud behind every silver lining. Peter and Karen were refreshingly honest about the challenges of running the deli, from the need to cater to the economics of not smoking your own meat to the impossibility of guaranteeing a kosher establishment. (People want milk with their coffee, after all, and don’t even think about getting rid of the Reuben!)

They named their own favorite delis: Langer’s in LA, Katz’s in NYC, and Manny’s in Chicago all made the short list. Most intriguing, though, were hints of a possible “Jewish bistro” in their future. The two hope to reinterpret and reinvent the vernacular of Jewish food with dishes from around the world using local, seasonal, organic ingredients.

For the time being, I’ll continue enjoying my favorites at Saul’s. From personal experience, I can vouch for the chopped liver (on both rye and matzo with plenty of mustard), the chicken soup and the pastrami sandwich. I also enjoyed more than my fair share of half-sour pickles and, of course, a bottle of Cel-Ray to wash everything down.

SAUL’S RESTAURANT & DELICATESSEN
1475 Shattuck Ave
Berkeley, CA 94709
(510) 848-3354

“King Corn“ is a new film that premiered in the Bay Area this past weekend. In it, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis –best friends from college — plant an acre of corn in Iowa and attempt to track its path into the food chain. I caught up with director Aaron Woolf, whom I knew of from our undergraduate years at a small college in Vermont.

Meghan Laslocky: Can you give us a “before starting the film/after starting the film” picture of your dietary habits?

Aaron Woolf: Before I started working on “King Corn”, I don’t think I really understood that there was a connection between the way we grow things and the fact that we aren’t eating well in this country, which seems pretty obvious now. I came from a family that always ate well, but the way people eat now, like Curt, my cousin [producer and on-screen talent in “King Corn”] who is a generation younger, versus how people ate when I was a kid, is so different. When I was a kid, we went to the wholesale seafood market, mussels were 17 cents a pound because Americans didn’t eat them, and we got our meat at a butcher, Mr. Olishefsky, who wore a white gown covered in blood. Behind him in the walk-in cooler were sides of beef. It wasn’t a mystery to me as a child where meat came from — I knew it was a cut-up animal. But I think if you grew up in Curt’s generation, the disconnect is pretty major. I think that’s one of the lessons of the film: that Curt and Ian are of the cornfed generation, and I am less so, and it took so little time — the sixteen years that separate us in age — for that major shift to happen.

Initially, when I started this film, when people asked me about how making the film has changed my eating habits, I’d say, “It’s changed the way I wish I ate.” But now that the film is done, it’s definitely changed the way I eat, and I don’t eat fast food. It’s instinctive now. What we choose to eat is such a combination of knowledge and religion and training. It’s hard to change your diet simply because it’s better to do x rather than y, but after seeing feedlots with 100,000 head of cattle — that’s something that’s hard to get out of your mind when you look at a hamburger.

Now I try to eat food that lived a life. I’m not a vegetarian, and I don’t make much of a distinction between an animal and a vegetable. We derive our life force from eating living things. It’s more the way that they lived. For example, I think that eating something that lived in an undignified setting, like pork in confinement that never saw the light of day, is spiritually unhealthy. But the same is true for an asparagus spear that was raised industrially. I wish I could just eat things that were raised in a dignified way that that we would want to incorporate into our own bodies.

ML: Knowing what you know now, what’s your take on the rising consciousness of where our food comes from?

AW: I see the benefits of having convenient things to eat, and I still think that’s true on some level. And there’s a lot of snobbery in the upscale movements, people make a lot of assumptions about other people’s ability to choose good and fresh food, even about if they have access to it.

ML: What came as a surprise to you as you did research for the film?

AW: It was a surprise to me how much we have almost consciously created a fast food society, in terms of the Farm Bill and the shift in policy in the 70s. I don’t think there is much true evil in the world. I don’t blame Earl [Earl Butz, President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, whose policies supported large-scale agribusiness and who is interviewed in the film]. I don’t blame corporations, but we have gotten to a place where the idea of having more isn’t always the best thing.

ML: In the film, you use these great vintage Fisher Price farm toys and kernels of corn to illustrate how the Farm Bill works. What’s the back story there?

AW: We were looking for a way to describe obtuse concepts like agricultural subsidies. People are paying to see this film, so we had to come up with something that was at least palatable. We bought one of the Fisher Price barns at Chuck’s farm during the auction [see the film for a touching farm auction scene], and the other barn is one that Curtis played with as a child, and probably me as well. Part of the point was that children still play with those toys, but now they’re part of a perpetuation of a myth about farming that just doesn’t exist. Plus the Fisher Price toys look like food labels on processed foods — the idealized barn, the livestock — for a product that contains hog meat from an industrial farm. There was something poignant about that, toys perpetuating a notion about the American heartland that is less and less real.

ML: Has making this film changed your life?

AW: I’ve made a lot of films, but never before has a film that changed the course of my life as this one has. I’m opening a grocery store in, called Urban Rustic, that incorporates documentary into it, so buyers know where their food comes from. I’m doing this with my partners, Dan Cipriani and Luis Illadeas. On the shelves, there’s an LCD or a viewmaster, and you can see where everything comes from. Much in the same way in “King Corn” we’ve explored where our food comes from, in Urban Rustic, we want people to know where the food comes from. In the store, people even know where the wood flooring comes from — it’s from trees we cut down ourselves on my family’s land in the Adirondacks. It’s an attempt to take back what the industrial food system has obscured from us.

“King Corn” is currently playing at the Shattuck in Berkeley and at the Red Vic, and it will air on PBS’s Independent Lens in the Spring. It was produced with support from San Francisco-based Independent Television Service [ITVS].

Read a review of King Corn in KQED Arts & Culture

In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is a small, silver sugar bowl from the late 1700s, complete with a tiny latch for a tiny lock. The mistress of the house would have kept the key herself, as sugar was far too precious to leave unprotected.

Today, sugar flows freely at every table. No longer spice or medicine, no more exotic or expensive than salt or pepper or clear tap water, sugar is now a basic and powerful commodity. It rarely concerns anyone who’s not worried about calories, insulin or childrens’ attention spans. With corn syrup currently wearing the black hat and ethanol a favorite of politicians, cane sugar has suddenly been rehabilitated. What sugar blues?

But Bill Haney and his documentary, The Price of Sugar (opening this weekend at the Opera Plaza Cinema) are here to show us exactly what it takes to bring us that stuff of sweetness.

I know, you’re already rolling your eyes or reaching for your mouse. Who wants to add sugar to the growing list of politicized food? Chocolate, coffee, corn, every fish and fowl and four-legged creature under the sun, and now this? Is nothing safe for the conscientious eater to enjoy?

If it makes you feel any better, know that centuries ago, cooks and diners were wrestling with these very same issues.

“EAST INDIA SUGAR not made by SLAVES”

In 1791, abolitionists in the United Kingdom declared a boycott on sugar from the West Indies, where sugar plantations flourished with the help of the burgeoning slave economy. Diaries from the period mention how troublesome it was to entertain guests who were boycotting sugar, while Punch cartoonists poked fun at “anti-saccharrite” families that refused to offer sugar at teatime. There were valiant attempts to hold awareness-raising bake sales with cakes and cookies prepared without sugar or else only with sugar from India. (Thanksgiving cooks everywhere can empathize–how to fit the tofu next to the turkey?)

An ambitious little pamphlet, “Address to the People of Great Britain on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West Indian Sugar and Rum,” written by Thomas Clarkson, set a publishing record for the time: 50,000 copies were distributed in the UK in only four months.

On the back of this anti-slave sugar bowl: “East India Sugar not made By Slaves. By Six families using East India, instead of West India Sugar, one Slave less is required.”

The slave-free sugar movement faced much greater opposition in the US, where rum was filling the new nation’s coffers. While Clarkson and his followers helped turn the tide against slave labor in the UK (an estimated 300,000 British families boycotted West Indies sugar) American abolitionists had another century of fighting before slavery was outlawed in the US.

But here’s the problem: Slave labor is not a thing of the past.

Ships no longer ply the Middle Passage, but we still have human trafficking in containers and vans. If trapping entire families on plantation land to work their whole lives, guarding them with rifles day and night, stringing barbed wire over their ceilings so they can’t escape, paying with vouchers for the company store or not bothering to pay at all, and enjoying the full support of governments do not all add up to institutional bondage — or slavery — then someone needs to rewrite the dictionaries.

In the US, the major sugar-cane states are Florida, Louisiana and Texas. A long-growing crop with intensive irrigation requirements, heavy chemical inputs and back-breaking, hand-maiming occupational risks, sugar cane is not an easy crop to grow. Increasingly, American growers depend on a mechanized harvest (especially after a lawsuit was filed in the mid-1990s demanding that companies pay their guest workers the contracted $5.70 a ton rather than merely $3.70 a ton.)

However, environmental devastation is still a serious issue. As sugar cane is re-framed by politicians and growers as an eco-friendly source of energy here in California, we need to keep a closer watch on the discussion. Close ties to Washington help big sugar companies maintain generous subsidies, while import restrictions keep domestic sugar cane prices artificially high.

So yes, there’s still a long way to go. Luckily for us, courageous and determined individuals continue to lead the way. Person by person, family by family, nation by nation…changes will happen.

THE PRICE OF SUGAR
Directed by Bill Haney
Landmark’s Opera Plaza
601 Van Ness Avenue
(415) 267-4893

The documentary really should be titled “The Life and Work of Father Christopher Hartley” since this Catholic priest, who compares himself to Mother Theresa, stars in the film. Father Hartley fought for years to improve the horrendous living and working conditions of undocumented Haitians on the sugar plantations of the Vincini family, powerful players in the Dominican Republic. The family has tried blocking the release of the film, and both the crusading priest and the director have received death threats. The film depends more on slow motion and plaintive music than data or historical context to make its points. In the end, though, I came away with an understanding of the human side — both the good and the bad — of this complex issue.

SMALL STEPS TO GOOD SUGAR

There are no easy answers. The US produces 80% of the sugar it consumes, so international free-trade sugar, already a small fraction of the industry, is just one part of the solution. Domestic sugar’s impact on ecosystems, energy production, public health and political power are other important considerations.

• Awareness and education are the first steps. Seeing the above documentary is one way to begin. There are many resources on the internet for anyone curious and committed. I’ve included a few links at the end of this post for those who’d like to read more. Taking on all the issues is overwhelming. Instead, choose subjects already close to you and learn how they relate specifically to sugar production and consumption.

• Spend your money wisely to express your desire for a better world. Do what you can when you can. Buying fair-trade sugar supports companies and cooperatives that meet international standards for worker rights and environmental sustainability. Go for little but consistent changes for the long haul. Our small individual acts really do add up.

• Spread the word. While you might not have a sugar bowl that speaks for you, there are many opportunities to influence others, whether it’s the office manager who stocks your company’s break room or the grocery store in your neighborhood or the bakery that’s going to craft your wedding cake. Ask if fair-trade sugar is an option, and if it’s not, ask why not.

• Finally, one of the most important things we can do is to fax or call our elected representatives to remind them that we want an agricultural industry in California that is environmentally sustainable and fair to its workers. The California Coalition for Food and Justice offers several different sample letters as well as a detailed tip sheet on how to meet your respresentatives in person. Join the coalition or sign up for their newsletter to keep in touch with food policy issues in California. You can adapt their language to your own specific concerns. Encourage your friends and family to write letters, too.

Look for these marks of fair trade certification on sugar that you buy.

SUGAR LINKS

If you’re interested in learning about the sugar cane industry, especially a little closer to home, here are some online resources:

• Sugar Knowledge International offers a basic description of how cane sugar is processed.

• Fair Trade Certified provides a fact sheet on fair-trade sugar.

• Read about the call for growing sugar cane in California’s Imperial Valley to provide energy and ethanol.

• Environmental Entrepreneurs estimates

how many megawatt-hours of electricity might be converted from cane sugar fiber in California.

• The Center for Responsible Politics describes the electoral politics of sweeteners in “Iron Triangle of Beet Sugar, Cane Sugar and Corn Syrup.”

• For a historical view of Big Sugar from, of all places, The American Conservative, this critique of guest worker programs for the US sugar industry describes how growers take advantage of their workers.

• In its National Wetlands Newsletter, the Environmental Law Institute discusses how growing sugar cane in the Florida Everglades affects the ecosystem and taxpayers.

• Alter Eco, based in San Francisco’s Mission Bay, distributes fair-trade sugar. Their controversial financial model, melding the business structure of a corporation with the social mission of a nonprofit, helps them pursue their goal of mainstreaming free-trade products into supermarket chains.

I love food. I think the fact that I maintain a food blog might hint at that. I also happen to love film. If we suspend our disbelief for a moment and pretend that food and film were women and that I were somehow straight, my relationship with the two of them would go something like this…

Film was my first love. She was wild, emotional, larger-than-life. We dated through high school and most of our university years, but we’d grown apart by our senior year. We loved each other but just couldn’t commit ourselves to a serious, exclusive relationship.

Along comes Food, who’d been there all along, to console me. Stable and nurturing with both feet planted firmly in the earth, I thought “Oh, how blind have I been not to have seen her all my life?” She moved in with me and we started planning our future meals together.

Several years later, Food and I are still together, but part of me misses Film and always will. I confess sneaking off to see her every once in a while. Food pretends not to mind too much when she finds the theater stubs in my coat pocket. We’ve talked about my problem in couples therapy and, to my surprise, she confessed that she’s always wondered what it felt like to be on Film.

Food, Film and Me. That’s my idea of a three-way.

Are you nauseated? No? Then continue…

Food on Film. That’s the topic for today. Yes, we’ve all seen Babette’s Feast (30 times), Like Water for Chocolate, and Eat Drink Man Woman. All of these films appeal to us (or, at least me) for one reason or another. Food is center stage. Appetite as metaphor for human desire, etc. Another thing these films have in common is a central character for whom food is his or her primary outlet of expression. Cooking is action. They are, all of them, cuisine-driven cinematic heroes.

What has interested me lately are films in which cooking is not the central theme. I like to watch people who are not supposed to be food professionals preparing meals. For me, watching characters not known for their cooking abilities attempt to bake or boil is far more fascinating and often more telling. Think of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. If you own it, watch the scene in which Holly Golightly attempts to make dinner for Paul Varjak. Perhaps I read too much into things, but notice the way she tosses the salad. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s in over her head, which is entirely appropriate, considering the character. It’s actually rather heart-breaking. The tension of the scene finds release when the contents of her pressure cooker (”Chicken and saffron rice with chocolate sauce, an East Indian favorite.”) explode all over her kitchen. So the foreshadowing and symbolism are a little heavy-handed. Food-focused people get the sense of what’s about to happen.

This week’s pick comes from the rather odd little 1970 Jacques Demy musical, Donkey Skin. Based on the the fairly tale of the same name (well, the french Peau d’âne) by Charles Perrault. I saw this film with my friend Dan a couple of years ago. Sadly for him, I associated the name of the film with his own. Po’ Dan. I don’t’ remember who dragged who to see it, but I’m grateful to either one of us. It is marvelously bizarre and wildly anachronistic (the resident Fairy Godmother descends in a helicopter, naturally). And then of course there’s not one, but two Catherine Deneuves in a musical baking number.

A film could not be more up my particular alley.

In the scene below, Deneuve (the Princess/Donkey Skin) prepares a “love cake” for the object of her affection, a lovesick prince. The importance of this cake is illustrated by the fact that she feels the need to don her dress “the color of the sun” to prepare it. It matters little if you understand French. I just want you to take note of her baking skills. And, possibly, the movement of her full, lace-trimmed sleeves as she works. Whether Demy intended it or not, Deneuve’s unconvincing technique speaks volumes. Remember, this is a fairly tale and a French fairy tale musical at that. The suspension of one’s belief is critical. How else can Catherine Deneuve baking in that gown be explained? Of course, my belief has been suspended for so long that I am convinced that she can do just about anything, like turn Susan Sarandon into a vampire by merely rolling around half naked with her and exchanging fluids.

Enjoy the clip.