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Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Boston Globe
Sometimes you just have to throw your sandwich
Get Winter Soup Club A six-week series featuring soup recipes and cozy vibes, plus side dishes and toppings, to get us all through the winter. Enter Email Sign Up Perhaps things would have ended there if he hadn't been armed. With a sandwich. A footlong sandwich from Subway. Not all heroes wear capes. Some come on freshly baked Italian bread. Maybe toasted? We'll never know. Advertisement The entire time the man in the pink shirt was yelling, he held in his left hand a floppy parcel wrapped in paper. Call it Chekhov's bun. Suddenly, with the control and speed of a Pedro Martinez in the rough, he pivoted, transferred that sandwich to his right hand, and pitched it directly into the well-padded chest of the agent before him. Then he ran, officers in hot pursuit. They eventually caught up to him: 'FBI and Border Patrol officers arrest a man along the U Street corridor during a federal law enforcement deployment to the nation's capital,' reads the caption on a Getty Images photo that shows the baguette bandit surrounded by eight armed individuals and one threatening blue recycling bin. Federal dollars well spent. D.C. was safe again. Safe from sandwiches. Advertisement But not from the spirit that throws them. Because here was a man hungry enough to eat a Subway footlong, yet so moved by moral indignation he would throw it away. 'This machine kills fascists,' as the memers memed when footage hit the Internet Monday, referencing Woody Guthrie's guitar. Was it a steak bomb? A meatball sub? For sure not an Elite Chicken & Bacon Ranch. A revolutionary would never order something so upper-crust. Whatever it was, it was just dinner, until it became something more. FBI and Border Patrol arrest a man on U Street corridor last night. Federal police are patrolling this area after — Andrew Leyden (@PenguinSix) As a symbol of protest, food is potent. From tomatoes to rotten eggs to pies, it has been hurled at politicians and public figures as an expression of anger and discontent. Climate activists throw soup on Van Goghs and mashed potatoes on Monets. In 2019, there was an outbreak of 'milkshaking' in the UK, with frosty frappes tossed at far-right leaders and Brexiteers. Beverages count, too. Just ask Boston, where we invented spilling the tea. (Taxes! Trade! China! Glad to see so much has changed.) It can also be withheld, whether by a bakery refusing to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple or a restaurant owner asking a member of a political administration to leave. Last week, a Advertisement As symbols go, a sandwich is solid. If the deli dissenter's actions were as spontaneous as they appeared, he could hardly have chosen better. It is the ultimate everyperson's meal, accessible, ubiquitous, quickly consumed so that workers might get back to working. And this was no bougie sandwich on artisanal sourdough with heirloom tomatoes. It was from Subway, where a value meal gets you a sandwich, drink, and chips for under $10. When the man in the pink shirt went ham on those agents, he did so relatably. Social media, where no one can agree on anything, united on this: Protect sandwich bro at all costs. Fleet of foot, perhaps slightly inebriated, prepared to bend the arc of the moral universe by hurling hoagies: This week, he was the hero the Internet needed. Devra First can be reached at
Telegraph
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The End: A satirical post-apocalyptic musical? It's almost as insufferable as it sounds
Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary documentary The Act of Killing may have been released almost a decade and a half ago, but if you saw it back then, chances are its aftertaste still lingers. By turns brutally clear-sighted and queasily surreal, it had perpetrators of the Indonesian anti-communist pogroms of the 1960s not only crowing about their crimes on camera, but also staging gloating reenactments, often with bizarre theatrical flourishes. The point, at its heart, was that the only way the human soul could bear the horror of such facts was by dressing them up as fictions, thereby giving the truth an absolving gloss of falseness. Why the recap? Because 13 years on, Oppenheimer has returned to this theme for his debut narrative feature – albeit far less convincingly, and at bafflingly extended length. The End is a satirical post-apocalyptic musical set in a billionaire's bunker buried deep in a salt mine, whose residents live in luxury, sealed off from civilisation's burning remains. Michael Shannon, Tilda Swinton and George MacKay star as its main occupants: a former oil baron with a prowling, Daniel Plainview-ish air, a brittle former ballerina with the Bolshoi, and their wide-eyed 25-year-old son, whose entire life has played out in this luxurious sanctuary-slash-tomb. The walls throng with Renoirs and Monets; the wardrobes are stocked with enviable knitwear; a butler (Tim McInnerny) and private doctor (Lennie James) are both on hand to ensure everyone's needs and wants are adequately met. The cuisine prepared by Swinton's professional chef friend (Bronagh Gallagher) couldn't be hauter. Even the gouged sides of the mine itself look acoustically optimised, like the flanks of some grand modernist konzerthalle. Perhaps that's why everyone's singing all the time. Big, buttery golden-age showtunes, too – mostly about how lucky and lonely everyone is down here, and how hard it is to blame anyone for the planet's current hellish state. MacKay – the best thing here, though the whole cast admirably commit to the eccentric task – also helps Shannon write his presumably never-to-be-read memoirs, in which his company's role in climate change is downplayed. ('It's sheer arrogance to think we control the fate of our planet,' one line runs.) As the survivors serenade their audience of nobody, their pitch and choreography occasionally wobbles, just to remind us that what we're watching is ultimately all for show. These poor players have all hand-picked their roles, and are resolved to strut and fret as convincingly as they can, right up until the curtain plummets. For the first half hour or so, it's intriguing stuff – not least when Moses Ingram's mysterious outsider somehow burrows her way in, and successfully ensconces herself within the family group. But nothing resembling a plot ever gets underway, and the characters don't really change or develop: the tedium of their routine soon spills over into the viewing experience itself. Perhaps that's the idea: we should feel trapped with these self-deluding ghouls, who cloak themselves in melodious clichés and ignore the sourness of the vintage plonk uncorked at lunch. It's all meaty stuff for a think piece, but rather less swallowable as a film. 12A cert, 149 min; in cinemas from Friday March 28
