The Grant Catton Blog

I've heard about Basil Hayden's for years, but somehow just never managed to buy myself a bottle. I was too busy to try the BEST, that's why.

Okay, okay sure...I'm an admitted bon vivant and I love my whiskey. Therefore, every bottle that's right in front of me is the "best I've ever had!!" Last week it was Bulleit. Two weeks ago it was Woodford Reserve.This week it's Basil Hayden's BUT...let that not invalidate the seriousness of what I'm about to impart to you.

If you're an enthusiast of the whiskey-type beverages, you must try Basil Hayden's Small Batch, Eight-year old Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey. This shit is so smooth you'll wish it came out of your tap instead of water. You'll be tempted to drink a shot of it at breakfast, with your bacon & eggs. You'll wish your only job in life was to sit on the porch and sip glasses of this shiz. You could do that, of course, but then you really would have no job an…

I try as hard as I can to eschew bullshit...so let's get right to the point: you can't make an exciting movie out of a boring book. Period. There it is. It's hard for me to say that, considering George V. Higgins (author of the book Cogan's Trade that became this essentially snooze-worthy film) wrote one of my all time favorite books and perhaps the greatest crime novel in history: The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

It's not that it's a patently bad film, it's just that hardly anything happens. In a crime/action movie...that's bad. But there's a corollary to that rule: if nothing's going to happen, at least there has to be fast, snappy, funny dialogue. Tarantino is a master of this...see Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction for dialogue 101...but incidentally there's also a lot of action in those films so maybe that's a bad example.

In this film there are, quite simply, just too many scenes of people sitting around talking. And the dialogue isn'…