→ October 22, 2012
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A Thousand Acres.

I’ve got a new post up today on the Young-Bell-Pennington trade.

Jane Smiley won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel with A Thousand Acres, her adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, hewing fairly close to the original storyline aside from the typical Shakespeare tragic ending where everyone dies, often in a single pile on a battlefield or in a great hall. A Thousand Acres takes us to an Iowa farm near the end of the boom in land values in the 1970s, where a domineering, impetuous farmer named Larry Cook decides to divide his thousand-acre farm among his three daughters, a process that also begins to divide the family and presages his mental breakdown, much as Lear himself went mad after dividing his kingdom among his daughters.

Following Big Willie’s original plot, Smiley has Cook’s youngest daughter, Caroline (Cordelia in King Lear) lose her inheritance, here for the most innocuous of comments, spurring a severe estrangement between her and her father as well as between her and her two sisters, the narrator Ginny (Goneril) and the more devious middle child Rose (Regan). Ginny points to the tiff between Larry and Caroline as the beginning of the end of their family, perhaps ignoring larger environmental factors like the impending bust in land values and changes in American agriculture, as well as the lack of any male heirs to Larry’s estate who would run and work the farm. Those factors along with Larry’s decline into madness – at first merely bouts of anger and irrational behavior, but later near-complete dementia – increase the strain on Ginny, her husband Ty, Rose, and her wayward husband Pete, with Rose and Pete’s two daughters mostly inured from the family strife until Pete’s demons resurface closer to the story’s end.

Smiley’s characterizations are by far the greatest strength of the novel, since the plot is not original nor was she likely to improve on our language’s greatest storyteller. Ginny and Rose are richly described and presented with great complexity, enough that the mid-story revelation that both were sexually abused by their father doesn’t add as much to their characters as such a background detail might ordinarily contribute. Jess Clark, paralleling Edmund, is recast as the sensitve, brooding stranger whose sexual magnetism draws in both women (and, one presumes, others unseen) despite his clear emotional unavailability. Caroline even earns her share of depth despite spending so much of the novel off-screen; Smiley even hints that she might be Rose’s daughter by Larry, a fascinating (if replusive) plot detail that could explain some of Caroline’s and Rose’s actions towards their father. Only Larry comes up short in Smiley’s character development; he’s an ass from the start, a cranky, misogynistic old fool who is later revealed to be depraved, manipulative, and evil, and from whom none of his daughters can completely break free, even after his death.

Smiley’s adherence to Shakespeare’s plot led her severely astray, however, when she mimicked Goneril’s attempt to poison her sister Regan; Goneril was successul, but Ginny, as she is presented to us, seems totally incapable of such a bold act of violence or jealousy. She is broken, emotionally, and bears some anger toward her sister, but her ultimate target is her father, by that point unreachable by vengeance. An attempt to kill her father, even as a means of closure for herself without the element of revenge, would have fit her character more completely. The idea that she hates Rose enough to kill her for stealing Jess is not adequately supported by her thoughts or actions, and the very sudden shift in her character to someone capable of premeditated murder is not dramatic, but sloppy.

That selective paralleling of King Lear pushes Smiley into a corner where the book, readable and compelling for about two-thirds of its length, starts to come apart, because she’s rewriting someone else’s story with her own characters and has to force them (when she wants) to act in ways not entirely in keeping with their given natures. By the time Ginny wants to kill her sister, she has been presented to us as someone incapable of such an act. When we learn that Larry raped his daughters (an original element not in Shakespeare), he becomes so odious that we are unable to muster sympathy for him in later scenes where his broken mental and physical conditions might otherwise make him sympathetic, or even pathetic, instead of vile and sickening. The lack of balance pushes the reader to Ginny’s side (and Rose’s, to a lesser degree), only to have Ginny revealed as a sociopath who’d murder her own sister. Had the binding come apart in my hands, the book wouldn’t have fallen apart any more completely than it did in its content.

Next up: I read Allison Hoover Bartlett’s quirky non-fiction story The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession (on sale for $6 through that link) and have begin Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011.

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→ October 13, 2012
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Saturday links, 10/13/12.

Fall League coverage has tied me up all week, but I’m stuck around the house today waiting for a mechanic to finish $1500 in repairs to my car’s A/C, radiator, and catalytic converter assembly (the latter rather important with an emissions test looming), so here’s a mess of links I’ve collected over the last three weeks. Enjoy.

  • Monsanto and other major manufacturers of synthetic pesticides are spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat California’s Prop 37, which would require that genetically modified foods be labeled as such. Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Nestle are also listed on the Yes on Prop 37 site among companies that have spent at least $1 million to defeat this basic pro-consumer law, which doesn’t ban genetically modified foods, but merely enables consumers to make informed choices.
  • With the Orioles’ unlikely season ending yesterday, it’s a good time to revisit Wire creator David Simon’s podcast with Sports Illustrated‘s Richard Deitsch. Speaking of Simon, he also did an interview with Salon a few days before that podcast in which he revealed that HBO turned down a Wire spinoff that would have followed Tommy Carcetti’s career in a new series.
  • Yahoo!’s Jeff Passan wrote a great piece on former A’s prospect Grant Desme, who retired from baseball to join a seminary after a breakout Arizona Fall League performance in 2009. I didn’t see Desme as a potential star or even a solid regular, but that doesn’t make his story any less interesting.
  • What your beer says about your politics. More fun than meaningful, although I think in my specific case it’s pretty spot on.
  • Via mental_floss: Why does sex make men sleepy? Amazing how you can explain things with science.
  • Bill Shaikin of the LA Times did a wide-ranging Q&A with Bud Selig. I’m having a hard time seeing the distinction between the Dodgers’ and Padres’ situations that Selig tries to make.
  • I haven’t tried this recipe yet, but I did bookmark it because it sounds and looks so good: crackly banana bread, using whole wheat flour and whole-grain millet to add a crunchy texture.
  • Michael Ruhlman on the fallacy of “follow your passion” advice. He meanders a bit before getting to the crux of the post, but I enjoyed following his train of thought, and I certainly agree that passion and $2 will get you a cup of coffee.
  • I usually avoid straight politics here, but I’m linking to this David Leonhardt piece on ”Obamanomics” because I like the underlying story of how a poor evaluation at the start of a rebuild can negatively affect policies for several years afterwards and lead to further incorrect evaluations that support the first erroneous conclusion. It could just as easily apply to teams like Houston and Colorado at the beginning of long rebuilding processes, to teams like Pittsburgh and Baltimore that had unexpected successes this year based partly on individual performances that aren’t likely to recur.
  • Maybe self-esteem is the wrong buzzword for improving happiness – experimental social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson argues that self-compassion is the real key. I first came across her writing in this July piece on success that argues (I admit without much evidence in the article) that believing in your own ability to learn and improve is a key to increasing job performance and finding happiness in your work.
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→ October 9, 2012
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Culinary Intelligence.

Peter Kaminsky is a longtime food writer, as a journalist, food critic, and cookbook co-author, who found that his career was threatening to shorten his lifespan – after a few decades in the business, he found himself overweight, prediabetic, and rejected when he applied for life insurance. His newest book, Culinary Intelligence: The Art of Eating Healthy (and Really Well), promises an approach to food that keeps calories in check without sacrificing too much pleasure while weighing the ethical concerns about some types of foods. I thought it fell a little short of those goals, but for someone looking to transition from a diet heavy on processed foods and chain restaurant meals, it’s an excellent starting point to get you to elevate your eating habits, one that never lapses into preaching or the monotony of calorie-counting.

This short (209 pages in deckle-edged hardcover) volume covers quite a bit of ground without much wasted verbiage. Kaminsky briefly recounts his history as a food writer whose waistline expanded with his fame, and discusses how he dropped forty-odd pounds without feeling like he was depriving himself. Some of the advice is obvious – cut out sugars and white flours, load up on whole foods, fill your stomach with vegetables rather than with meat (although he never argues for abstaining from meat entirely) – but much of it will be useful to readers who grasp that stuff but feel like their meals have become boring or even painful. There’s a lot of advice on cooking, including lists of key ingredients to keep on hand as well as using the powers of science, notably caramelization and the Maillard reaction (the flavors created when foods high in protein are browned). Kaminsky abbreviates this concept as FPC, or Flavor per Calorie, a variable that should be maximized at every opportunity – sound advice, easily followed with some basic kitchen skills and ingredient knowledge, some of which is contained within this book.

He also discusses sensible approaches to restaurants, including a discussion of why most chain restaurants are evil – and, along the way, why it’s not elitist or snobbish to try to avoid them. (He singles out Chipotle as an exception, mentioning their commitment to local, sustainable agriculture.) Any experienced home cook knows you can often salvage a mediocre cut of meat by drowning it in butter, cream, salt, or even sugar – think of Guy Fieri’s favorite “sweet soy sauce,” which can’t actually be a thing, right? – so when you see a restaurant dish that seems to promise those things, what are they telling you about the quality of the underlying ingredients? I also appreciated his thoughts on ordering less at restaurants, where portion sizes have grown to absurd levels, something you don’t find when traveling abroad. I tend to eat pretty small portions and rarely finish full entrees at restaurants, but I still feel a bit guilty knowing that what I didn’t eat will simply be trashed (or, rarely, composted). Sometimes I’ll order a few smaller plates rather than a main course, to try more items and to avoid wasting food, but Kaminsky validates that practice, arguing it should be more of the norm, and that a party of four would often do better (and consume fewer calories) to order two to three starters and two entrees, sharing everything as they go.

For me, the value in Culinary Intelligence is twofold: Kaminsky’s writing, which is elegant and spare yet highly descriptive; and the expostulation of a food philosophy very similar to mine. The book’s main point, about eating well without getting fat, will seem a little obvious to anyone who’s been cooking avidly for a number of years, and while Kaminsky’s book will help me keep my awareness of what I’m eating high, I don’t think I learned any new tips or tricks from it. It’s absolutely something I’ll buy for friends who want to start getting into cooking or to try to lose weight without using complicated programs or filling up with “diet” processed foods, and its readability should help it reach that target audience without making them feel like the author was talking down to them.

Next up: I’m currently reading Alan Bradley’s A Red Herring Without Mustard, the third book in the Flavia de Luce mystery series; I reviewed the first book in the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, in September of 2011. After that, I’ll start Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres.

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→ October 8, 2012
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Looper.

I loved Rian Johnson’s debut film, the neo-noir detective story Brick, which starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a precocious student trying to solve a murder in his cliquey, drug-addled high school, a film driven by punctuated, subtle dialogue, riding instead on the film’s core mystery and the tremendous charisma Gordon-Levitt brought to the lead role. Johnson’s newest film, the time-travel action flick Looper, also stars Gordon-Levitt, and once again leans heavily on how much he can bring to a role in which his lines are limited and his character’s personality is understated. But where Brick aimed fairly small, an indie film paying homage to a genre by nearly parodying it, Looper aimes huge, tackling standard time-travel conundrums while also getting after some of the general moral questions that a time-travel storyline will inevitably pose.

Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a “looper” who, in the year 2044, serves as a hit man for a crime syndicate that sends targets back from the year 2074 – in which year time travel has been invented and made illegal, so it’s only used by organized crime groups. A looper stands at an isolated place, blunderbuss in hand, and the moment a bound and gagged victim winks into their present time, blows him away. Eventually, the future employers will end the contract by sending the looper’s future self back, with gold bars strapped to his back (in lieu of the standard silver), “closing the loop.” As it turns out, the head of that crime syndicate in the future, known only as the Rainmaker, is closing all of the loops, so we know fairly early on that Joe will be confronted by his thirty-year-older self, played by Bruce Willis, and will, in one reality, let him live (since otherwise the movie would be more of a short film). As it turns out, Future Joe has reasons for wanting to come back, with eliminating the Rainmaker before he rises to power at the top of the list. Present Joe ends up in the middle of this battle, primarily opposed to his future self but conflicted by what remains of his conscience and by the fact that he’s pursued by the 2044 arm of the syndicate that employs him.

Time-travel stories in general are difficult to plot because of, no pun intended, the loops the writer must close: The connections between cause and effect are much more clearly laid out on screen, and loops left open or closed improperly are fodder for criticism and mockery from sharper viewers. Johnson’s script here limits the number of such loops he opens, and he’s extremely meticulous about maintaining the film’s internal logic, even at the risk of potentially clueing viewers in to the film’s eventual resolution. (Once it was over, I realized I’d missed one fairly strong clue.) This tight writing bears many other gifts for the viewer, such as the scene where Joe and his future self sit down for coffee and breakfast – left uneaten, which I have to say always annoys me when I see it on screen – in which Future Joe explains how he can remember Present Joe’s actions as they happen.

Emily Blunt is extremely compelling – not to mention incredibly gorgeous – in her supporting role as Sarah, the mother of one of the candidates on Future Joe’s hit list, and the woman who takes Present Joe in while he’s on the run from the syndicate. Five-year-old Pierce Gagnon is incredible in his role as Cid, Sarah’s son, articulate beyond most kids his age and able to manipulate his emotions as an adult actor would. Jeff Daniels is brilliant, by turns hilarious and menacing, as the syndicate’s main representative and local kingpin in 2044 – but one of his gunsels, played by Noah Segan (who played Dode in Brick), was mostly a waste of time, not developed enough to have an intriguing storyline, and scarcely necessary to the main plot. Piper Perabo plays a stripper because we just couldn’t have an action film unless there’s at least one woman walking around topless, and she’s maybe the fourth-best looking woman in the movie anyway. (Her character is about as irrelevant as Segan’s.) And there’s a fair amount of over-the-top violence across the film, which may seem like an odd complaint with a hit man and, well, the same hit man as the main characters, but when you see the movie you’ll probably know which parts I mean.

Looper has also spawned a fair amount of analysis online of its internal time-travel logic, with Johnson himself going on record (here and here) to discuss some of its mysteries, including the possible infinite loop created by the film’s ending. That kind of intensive commentary can be a function of poor writing, of course, but in this case I think it’s largely to Johnson’s credit that he can answer most of these questions and yet managed to leave so much extraneous material out of the film, helping maintain some of the mystery until the final fifteen minutes. What starts out as a psychological thriller branches out into both an action film and a morality story on the importance, of all things, of strong parenting, with enough suspense to keep you hooked even if you figure out some or all of where the film is going. It’s far more clever than your typical mainstream action or sci-fi movie, skipping the naked sentimentality of the similarly ambitious Inception without aiming any lower in its plot.

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→ October 7, 2012
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The Odd Life of Timothy Green.

The Odd Life of Timothy Green works best as an all-ages movie, one that had to be simplified to appeal to a younger audience as well as the adult crowd taking the kids to see it, but that process of simplification went too far to make the film interesting or compelling on an entirely-adult level. Granted, there’s a market for movies that are strictly for kids, but the best films for kids are those that still resonate for older audiences, something that Odd Life fails to do.

A childless couple, Cynthia (Jennifer Garner, also known as Sydney Bristow) and Jim (Joel Edgerton, who was superb in a supporting role in Animal Kingdom), are telling the story to two adoption officials to explain why they would be suitable candidates to adopt a child. (The lead official is played by Iranian-American actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who might have one of the five best voices in Hollywood.) After learning that, for reasons unstated to us, they will be unable to have children of their own. In a wine-fueled attempt at closure, they write the list of traits their ideal child would have had on sheets torn off a tiny notepad, place those sheets in a small jewelry or cigarbox, and bury it in their garden. That night, with the help of a highly localized thunderstorm, a ten-year-old boy named Timothy appears in their house, calling them Mom and Dad … and bearing leaves on his lower legs. No one seems to ask too many questions about how this couple suddenly are parents to a fully-formed child, nor is anyone all that concerned with the slightly odd things that seem to happen when he’s around. Best not to ask too many questions if you realize you’re participating in someone else’s fable.

The movie spends most of its 100 minutes dancing on the line between sweet and maudlin, and it tends a little much toward the latter. Its best moments involve Timothy acting with almost Zen-like calm when faced with others, mostly adults but occasionally children, who attempt to take out their misery on him, only to find his demeanor immutable. The one who won’t change, the blatantly sleazy and absurdly named Franklin Crudstaff, scion of the family that own’s the pencil factory that provides the bulk of employment in the town, gets his compeuppance in the end in an overly pat, sentimental scene where his own mother sells him down the river. Even when you want to like what’s going on on-screen, there’s an element of empty calories to the story that, for me, spoiled my ability to suspend my disbelief even for a few minutes.

The main problem I had with Timothy Green, in the film’s own terms, is that he had one leaf too many. The various anecdotes that add up to Timothy’s odd life are all so abbreviated that even the best-explained one, involving Timothy’s artsy sort-of-girlfriend Joni, remains fairly shallow – again, easier for the single-digit portion of the audience to follow, but very unsatisfying for their parents. Cynthia’s sister, played to annoying shrillness by Rosemarie Dewitt, is the caricature of an overbearing soccer mom, making frequent digs at her sister and at Timothy’s oddness, apparently masking some inner sadness or emptiness that is never explained. Dianne Wiest is wasted as a one-note character, Franklin’s humorless mother; she’s great, but this is sort of like asking Linus Torvalds to help you change your computer’s wallpaper. The script only gave the meaty roles to Garner and Edgerton, who do their best with somewhat stock characters, and I called every plot twist before it happened, not just because the setups were obvious but because the film couldn’t progress in any other direction.

Foremost among those obvious points was the fact that Timothy Green had to die. Without that – and his death is portrayed as a disappearance on screen, which should be minimally traumatic for younger viewers – the film would devolve from fable to pure fantasy: A childless couple gets the perfect child and they live happily ever after. With Timothy working against the clock, it’s easier to interpret the film on an adult level as a classic if slightly hoary fable – our time is finite, whether we’re referring to our lives or to specific relationships, and we don’t know how long we have, so we need to make the most of it by making other people happier.

Odeya Rush, playing Joni, stood out as an actress to watch both for her performance and because she’s going to grow up to be a stunner. Lin-Manuel Miranda (was completely wasted as the nerdy (and perhaps gay?) gardening expert who makes just two brief appearances in the film, although even a brief cameo from the man who wrote and sang “Silent E is a Ninja” makes any film better. Both are exactly what The Odd Life of Timothy Green needed more of – charismatic actors whose characters didn’t get enough screen time because the script called for Timothy to get involved in one or two stories too many for the movie’s run time. It’s appropriate for kids but I’m afraid there isn’t enough here to engage their parents.

Next up: I saw Looper last night and really enjoyed it. I’ll shoot to get that review up in 24 hours, before Arizona Fall League insanity starts on Tuesday.

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→ October 5, 2012
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White Noise.

I wrote a column on Thursday ranking the top ten starters on this year’s playoff rosters, and also did my usual weekly Klawchat, although the next one may not be for two or three weeks.

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Don DeLillo’s White Noise – part of the TIME 100 and #82 on the Radcliffe Course’s top 100 – blends the science fiction-tinged paranoia of Philip K. Dick and the bleak views of postwar suburban families from novels like Revolutionary Road while foreshadowing the hysterical realism of Zadie Smith and the more recent A Naked Singularity, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. It’s a very dark, often morbidly depressing look at runaway consumerism, overreliance on pharmaceuticals, fear of death in a world of declining religiosity, and the vacuous, sterile nature of life in the American exurbs. It’s also often very funny, with a distinctive narrative voice that often jumps off the page, although DeLillo couldn’t quite maintain that macabre exuberance for the novel’s full length.

Jack Gladney is a professor of Hitler studies at a fictional midwestern University and lives with his fourth wife, Babette, and their gaggle of kids from previous marriages, all of whom but one are beyond precocious, developed (by pharmaceuticals? by environmental toxins?) into odd stages of emotional maturity even before reaching their teens. Jack and Babette both live comfortable but morally and emotionally aimless lives, talking at length about their terror of death, which becomes much more tangible to them when a nearby chemical spill spawns an “airborne toxic event” that gives Jack a slightly grim medical prognosis while setting him and Babette at odds over her own use of an experimental mood-altering medication.

While every description I’ve found of White Noise dwells on the central characters’ shared fear of death, that’s just one of several themes in the novel and, for me at least, it’s almost a cover story for the more pressing anti-consumerist sentiment that pulsates just below the novel’s surface from start to finish. Repeated scenes of characters all lost in the supermarket lead to casual descriptions of emotional satisfaction from large purchases, from a car full of consumer goods, from recognition of familiar mass-market brands, from the mere participation in the economy of commodities. DeLillo indicts American consumer culture by depicting real-but-too-real postnuclear American family whose members can’t relate to each other without the bond of household goods. I thought the occasional interpolations of three major brands, one after another – “Tegrin, Denorex, Selsen Blue” – almost pedantic, as if DeLillo didn’t realize his focus on the Gladneys was sufficient for a guilty verdict.

The fear of death theme covered familiar ground as well, something explored in many novels over the past century as the role of religion has diminished in many developed nations, whether through a decline in general religiosity or an increase in nonbelievers. White Noise particularly reminded me of a novel I hated, Tom Robbins’ fantasy Jitterbug Perfume, which eventually makes no argument stronger than that we can’t be sure what follows death, so we might as well enjoy and extend life as much as we can. I didn’t really need Robbins to tell me that, and I don’t need DeLillo too, either.

That theme actually works better when it underpins the novel’s second, slower-burning subject, our reliance on pharmaceuticals to solve our problems and/or improve our lives – better living through biochemistry, in a way. Earlier in the novel, characters casually mention use of prescription drugs, but the chase for one drug in particular (minor spoiler) that is designed to suppress our natural horror of our own mortality comes to occupy the third of three sections of the book, as Jack realizes Babette is taking it but for reasons unknown won’t discuss it with him. (Of course, it’s one of their precocious kids, Denise, aged nine going on twenty, who finds the bottle and figures out something’s amiss.)

From the point of discovery and confrontation, however, DeLillo goes off the rails in both plot and theme, as if he knew he’d hit on something powerful but couldn’t figure out how to wrap up the story in a manner consistent with his character development and greater intentions for the novel. Jack is somewhere between a desperate man and an enraged husband but not really enough of either to be credible, and by this point in the book, the lack of depth to all of the side characters, including their kids, and to previously significant details like Jack’s choice of academic subjects becomes glaring. What might have built up into a great crescendo sputters into an unsatisfying conclusion. It’s a rare case of a book being too short, where most other books in the hysterical realism realm, both before and after White Noise, came in much longer so that their twisted, layered versions of reality have more time to vest. If the first section stood alone as a novella, it would feel a little incomplete, but could stand on its own for its creativity and manic vision, a lot like Philip K. Dick’s more serious works. Unfortunately, DeLillo stopped in the no-man’s land between that and the more ambitious works I referenced earlier.

Anyway, that leaves me with just four more books on the TIME 100, but none under 600 pages.

Next up: A brief detour into non-fiction with food writer Peter Kaminsky’s book on eating more healthfully without giving up the pleasure of great cooking, Culinary Intelligence.

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→ October 2, 2012
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Midnight in Paris.

Before this weekend I had actually seen just one Woody Allen film, Annie Hall, which I couldn’t stand, mostly because I couldn’t stand Allen’s character, which I guess means I couldn’t stand Allen himself since they seem impossible to distinguish. Since that’s regarded as one of his best films, perhaps his greatest film period, I always assumed that I wouldn’t like much of his oeuvre and used my movie-watching time on other directors. The reviews on last year’s Midnight in Paris were positive enough, especially in saying that the film was different from much of Allen’s work, that I figured I’d give it a shot, especially since I’m working through most of last year’s Best Picture nominees. I absolutely loved this movie, so my own – dare I say it? – bias against Allen nearly kept me away from a great, fun, romantic film.

Midnight‘s main setting couldn’t be much more in my wheelhouse, as it contains an homage to the 1920s within its meditation on nostalgia and our modern happiness paradox, along with a touch of magical realism that, to Allen’s great credit, is never actually explained. Owen Wilson, as likeable as I have ever seen him, plays the Allen stand-in character Gil, unhappily engaged to a narcissistic, shallow woman (played unlikeably by Rachel McAdams) who seems like she might be one of the Bluths’ first cousins, and whose mother might be Lucille Bluth’s long-lost twin sister. Gil is on a vacation to Paris with his fiancee and future in-laws, yet he wants to settle in Paris and try to become a serious novelist rather than continue as a hack screenplay writer, while his intended wants to live to Malibu and spend a lot of money on material things.

The engagement/family plot is almost worthless except as a setup for Gil’s desire to escape to another life, or, as chance would have it, another era. I was close to giving up on the movie after ten minutes before the real story emerges. (Spoilers ahead.) While wandering around Paris alone late one night, Gil is picked up by an old car full of drunken French revelers who insist that he join them and who take him to a party where he meets an American couple named Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, only to discover after his initial skepticism that he’s been sent back in time to the 1920s. Over the course of several such nights, he encounters a number of famous writers, artists, and critics of that time, develops a crush on a French model, and, of course, reevaluates his engagement and the serious choices he’s about to make with his life and career.

These scenes in the 1920s feature a number of well-known actors and other recognizable faces having a blast playing those famous figures from the Parisian salons of that decade, a pleasure that becomes immediately infectious as Adrien Brody gets into character as Salvador Dali or Kathy Bates steals scenes as Gertrude Stein. Gil getting career advice from Ernest Hemingway or trying to mediate between Zelda and F. Scott could seem precious or sentimental in the wrong hands, but Allen makes the dialogue fit these larger-than-life characters in ways that blend our modern perceptions of them with enough realism to maintain the illusion that Gil’s trips back in time are, within the confines of the film, true to life.

Aside from Allen just having fun with famous figures from one of the west’s most fruitful artistic eras since the Renaissance, he also gradually takes the viewers into a serious meditation on the different lenses through which we view our present and the past, especially a past we only know through historical accounts. The past into which Gil travels is inevitably better than the present; perhaps they were all a figment of his imagination, but regardless, they appear as that time period does in its contemporary literature, while shielding Gil from the personal suffering that might come in his own time where he has established, meaningful relationships. Allen nearly writes himself into a corner with this gilt-edged look at the past, but his resolution, while a little quick, is also clever and uncontrived, a spoiler worth preserving at the same time.

Rachel McAdams is shrill and two-dimensional as Gil’s fiancee, and Kurt Fuller, goofily funny as the socially awkward coroner on Psych, is wasted as her snobby father. I’m not even sure who played the mother but she’s such an awful caricature it’s not even worth looking it up. The joy in this movie is in the nocturnal sequences, where Wilson shines – never quite developing the Zuckerman-esque level of annoying that Allen himself achieved for me in Annie Hall. It’s good enough that I feel like I have erred in failing to give the director a second chance sooner, so I’ll end with a question: If I didn’t like Annie Hall but loved Midnight in Paris, which Woody Allen movie should I watch next?

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→ October 1, 2012
→ By

Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

The documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi has quietly been getting rave reviews from chefs and food writers but relatively less attention from mainstream film critics, probably because of its genre and language (it’s entirely in Japanese, with English subtitles) rather than its content. Following one of the most famous sushi chefs in the world and exploring his obsessive attention to detail and the demands he places on his employees and vendors, the film also features some of the most beautiful shots of food I have ever seen, the kind of cinematography that will have you pouring soy sauce on the floor in anticipation. (It’s available on Netflix Instant, which is how I watched it.)

Jiro Ono operates one of the world’s best-known and most exclusive sushi restaurants, a ten-seat establishment in Tokyo called Sukiyabashi Jiro that only serves sushi – no appetizers, no soba dishes, just the fish. He was 85 at the time the documentary was filmed, yet still works at the restaurant every day, usually serving the fish but at this point preparing relatively little of it himself, instead overseeing the rigid structure of the kitchen, where his eldest son, who will one day take over the business, is the de facto headmaster. Jiro’s obsession with quality and long track record have given him an inside track with key vendors, including a rice vendor who won’t sell Jiro’s favorite strain of rice to a large hotel that asks for it, while also making internships at his restaurant into ten-year apprenticehoods where anything less than perfection is unacceptable.

The film documents some of the more unusual kitchen practices at Sukiyabashi Jiro, although many of these are made possible by the restaurant’s small menu. They age their tuna for up to ten days, and they massage the octopus for as long as 50 minutes, nearly twice as long as other restaurants, to tenderize the meat. (I’ve had octopus sushi once or twice and hated it because it was rubbery. Now at least I know it doesn’t have to be that way.) Jiro and his son have exacting standards for flavor, texture, and preparation that I don’t want to spoil for viewers, as seeing some of these practices in action was among the highlights of the film.

Jiro’s two sons also play significant roles in the film as Japanese custom has placed them in very different roles of succession. His eldest son, Yoshikazu, runs Jiro’s restaurant now, while Jiro’s younger son, Takashi, apprenticed there but had to leave and start his own restaurant, a mirror image of Jiro’s, because the eldest son is the traditional successor in Japanese culture. Yet this subplot of sorts isn’t that dramatic because Yoshikazu doesn’t express any of the regret or frustration you’d expect a son in that situation to express – waiting for his father to retire or, more morbidly, to die, so he can take over the business. Yoshikazu didn’t seem terribly unhappy with his lot, and as it is, he handles much of the responsibility, something his father acknowledges.

One of those key responsibilities is acquiring the fish each day from Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji fish market, forming by far the most informative part of the film for me. I’d read about this market before, including a chapter in Trevor Corson’s indispensable book The Story of Sushi, but had never seen an inside look at the institution or how buyers choose their fish. Watching Jiro’s primary tuna vendor walk around a giant warehouse space, poking at giant whole tuna, taking bits of flesh and examining them with a flashlight, wasn’t gripping – really nothing in this film is – but it was enlightening.

There’s a brief discussion at the end of the film about the future of sushi and of fish as a food source in general, mostly led by Yoshikazu, who blames the spread of what I would call cheap sushi – the crap you get at the grocery store, at non-sushi restaurants, or even at awful chain sushi places like Ra that specialize in bland, lower-quality fish dressed up with toppings like a damn ice cream sundae. Sushi shouldn’t be available in packages of eight maki for $7 at the supermarket. Yoshikazu doesn’t get too far into solutions, although he mentions his own vested interest in maintaining a supply of high-quality fish; given Japan’s refusal to cut down on or eliminate its harvesting and purchasing of bluefin tuna, I’m not surprised that he held back, but I imagine he and his father would carry significant weight if they came out in favor of broad bans on environmentally damaging fishing practices.

What Jiro Dreams of Sushi might lack for some viewers is drama; most good documentaries document something more than a man and his restaurant, running into some sort of conflict along the way or covering a past event that was inherently dramatic. This is an homage to a man’s lifelong obsession with his work, with approaching perfection asymptotically, with preserving an ancient cuisine while elevating it to its highest level. It is also pornography for sushi-lovers, with mindblowing images of nigiri made by Jiro, his son, and the three other men (only men – women don’t make sushi in Japan, another issue they neglected to address) who work there. I’ve never seen fish that looked like that. It’ll make you want to, say, find the next Yu Darvish to go scout over in Tokyo – as long as you have a month’s notice to make a reservation at Jiro’s place.

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→ September 28, 2012
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Lush Life.

I discovered Richard Price’s 2009 novel Lush Life on Lev Grossman’s list of the ten best novels of the 2000s, where it was one of only two novels I hadn’t read (the other is Neil Gaiman’s American Gods). Price’s novel was, and still is, just $6 new on amazon, and after picking it up I found out Price wrote the story and/or teleplay for five episodes of The Wire, which would have been enough to sell me on the book in the first place. (He even appeared as the leader of the prison book group where D’Angelo Barksdale gives his thoughts on The Great Gatsby, one of the best episodes in the entire series.) Lush Life does have a lot in common with that TV series, in its realistic depictions of the police and the criminal underclass, in outstanding dialogue that’s almost a little too sharp to be real, and in the deft weaving of multiple storylines revolving around a large ensemble of characters. It’s the best novel I’ve read this year.

Lush Life begins, after a brief prologue, with a murder, a mugging gone wrong in the small hours on a street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where three drunk white men are accosted by two teenagers in an encounter that leaves one of the men dead, another passed-out drunk on the sidewalk, and the third unable to tell a straight enough story for the police. From that starting point, Price branches the story further and further out, tracking the two surviving victims, the two assailants, the murder victim’s father and stepmother, and the various detectives investigating the case (and the higher-ups who either want the case closed quickly or forgotten entirely).

By setting the book in the broad tableau of Manhattan urban life, Price can touch on a vast range of themes without ever making one central or lapsing into preachy or pedantic prose. Race sits at the heart of the novel because the victims were white while the assailants weren’t, and because the white-dominated media loves a privileged white victim of urban crime. Yet Price avoids most explicit discussions of race or racism, allowing the story to unfold through dialogue and changes of perspective that also show scenes of the economically disadvantaged project kids, two of whom are responsible for the crime, most of whom are shown without much hope of upward mobility outside of theft or the drug trade. The media are largely shown as leeches. The higher-ups at 1 Police Plaza are more interested in results that keep them employed than, in this case, closing a difficult-to-solve case. Even the detectives who caught the body here – led by Matty Clark, a McNulty-esque character with less of a drinking problem – are far from saints, motivated to close the case and move on to the next one so no one breathes down their necks, even if they don’t get the right perp, while Clark becomes entangled with the victim’s family with unintended consequences.

The most remarkable aspect of the novel is just how much Price manages to pack into a book of about 450 pages, between the richly developed characters and the myriad plot threads that spread from the initial murder and in many cases come back together at the novel’s close. I finished Lush Life feeling like I’d just watched a six-episode season of a TV drama, something as intelligent as The Wire yet surprisingly fresh and compact. The dialogue sparkles and the characters never seem to sit too far to either side of the wide expanse of grey between the two stock extremes. It’s also darkly funny in places, sometimes with gallows humor, sometimes with the stupidity of the kids getting caught with cars full of marijuana smoke or the venality of the cops, lawyers, reporters, and business owners whose lives are indirectly affected by the murder. It’s not groundbreaking literature, but it is highly intelligent fiction that never talks down to its reader and possesses the narrative greed of a good detective story even though the reader knows who committed the crime and is less concerned with their capture than with the evolution of the story in between those two points.

Next up: Don DeLillo’s very strange novel White Noise, part of the TIME and Radcliffe 100 lists.

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→ September 27, 2012
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Top Chef Masters, S4E10 (the finale).

Today’s chat transcript is up. I apologize to anyone looking for Wednesday’s Sportscenter segment, but I don’t think it’s going to appear online. I’ll tweet the link if that changes.

* So for the finale, each chef had to make a four-course dinner, with an odd theme – each dish had to be the equivalent of a letter, starting with a love letter, then an apology, then a thank-you, then a letter to himself. I never really get these whole “translate an emotion into food” things. Make four awesome dishes, then cook up a story afterwards to fit. The chefs do each get an assistant, a surprise appearance by someone from Chris’ restaurant and a longtime cooking buddy of Kerry’s.

* The judges will be joined by ten diners. Obvious conclusion, made by Chris, Kerry, and me, is that it’s the ten eliminated TCM contestants.

* Chris says the only way to beat Kerry, a classically trained chef, is to put his heart on the plates, which was his hint that one of his dishes would in fact contain heart.

* Kerry does all his shopping at Whole Foods; Chris goes to three places, losing some cooking time but getting more adventurous ingredients. Letting him loose in a butcher shop with a fistful of dollars might make for an hourlong reality show of its own.

* Chris says he hated the smell of tripe as a kid and would run screaming from his grandmother’s house when she cooked it. Now he’s known for offal. Maybe it served as some sort of exposure therapy. Then he makes blood sausage and it looks like a horror movie. I’ve had black pudding, but have never cooked with blood, which apparently is a pretty labor-intensive and, um, messy process.

* Curtis does a side commentary where he talks a lot and says nothing, mostly just saying how either chef could win and whoever doesn’t execute will lose. He’s the Tim McCarver of Top Chef.

* But then Curtis cooks dinner for the final two, which is a great idea, since Curtis was originally a chef but is better known in the U.S. as a TV personality. I’d love to know if this was the producers’ idea or Curtis’; people who love to cook love to cook for others, and I could see Curtis wanting to do something for the two finalists but also to show off his own skills. He made two dishes but the foie gras with figs and Sauternes jelly seemed really clever and interesting. I also enjoyed the snippets of the three chefs’ discussion on critics who don’t have kitchen experience or a culinary education, pointing out that knowledge can be acquired in multiple ways, and (from Kerry) a thought on the challenge of deconstructing a dish in your mind when all you see is the finished product. Obviously, I side with the critics in a sense, since I evaluate baseball players, teams, and even front-office personnel, but never played the game (and couldn’t, in fact). It probably took me longer to learn how to evaluate than it might have taken someone with field experience, but I think I’ve at least figured it out enough to do my job.

* The ten extra diners are all food critics, not chefs, so it’s the toughest set of judges the chefs have faced all season, or perhaps just the biggest bunch of complainers they’ve faced all season.

* This could be entirely editing, but while both chefs look extremely intense in the kitchen, Chris seems like he’s enjoying the chaos, while Kerry just seems stressed. Maybe it’s just their processes. I’m a lot more like Chris personality-wise, at least in the kitchen. If things are going too smoothly, I’m more likely to get distracted by something else.

* Serving time. First course, the love letter: Kerry serves a jjigae (not to be confused with a jugga jigga wugga) with scallops, spot prawns, and gnocchi, earning praise for “smoothness and finesse,” which sounds boring. Chris serves beef heart tartare with foie gras and puffed beef tendon, which is not boring. One critic calls it a “steampunk version of steak tartare.” I don’t even know how to visualize that.

* Second course, the “apology:” Kerry serves a flan of sugar snap peas, prosciutto, morels, and chervil, earning raves all around. The color of the flan was amazing, although I have to admit my first thought was “Shamrock shake.” Chris serves scallops, pancetta piana (pancetta that is cured flat rather than rolled), and sea urchin. Lesley Kama Sutra or whatever her name is calls it the makeup sex. Ruth says it’s sexy. Jane Goldman hates it because she’s celibate.

* Third course, the thank-you: Kerry serves branzino with clam ragout and mustard greens and a little bacon, an homage to his family’s New England roots. The theme so far with Kerry is technical excellence but not a ton of wow factor. Chris serves tripa napolitana with a dark brown streak on the dish to represent him running out of grandmothers house. This earns some of the biggest raves so far around the table.

* Fourth course, the narcissist’s plate: Kerry serves dry aged côte de boeuf (a thick bone-in rib steak), short ribs, swiss chard, and a fennel and potato gratin. Lesley says the frying to crisp the short rib dried it out, which would be criminal, but otherwise gets high marks. Chris makes his “last supper,” a blood sausage with pork-jus poached oysters, and a sunnyside up egg. Francis makes a horribly awkward analogy about swimming in the ocean and getting a back rub from a pig. I believe it’s illegal to even fantasize about that in 13 states. John Curtas calls this embarrassingly awful. No one agrees with him, apparently.

* Critics table: Kerry says the letter to himself was about enjoying something special and rich. Chris says he won’t cook for the critics, but cooks for himself. “When you cook to receive accolades you lose direction and focus.” Isn’t that true when you’re at the top of just about any profession? If you’re cooking for the masses, you need to listen to the customer. When you’re so good that people will pay twice as much for your food, it’s because they’re paying for your vision, or to experience your passion.

* Ruth says she’d never had beef heart tartare before and loved it. Krista loved the poached oysters. Francis liked the reduced jus’ unctuous texture. After the larger group seemed to favor Kerry, the five judges seem to favor Chris. Ruth asks if you want to be comforted or thrilled, while Jimmy Sunshine comments about not wanting to be TOO thrilled, then heads off for his Wednesday-night bingo game.

* The new Top Chef Master is … Chris. I’m a little surprised given the editing of the dinner comments, and Chris seemed to genuinely think Kerry would win. He ends up raising $141,000 for the Michael J. Fox Foundation on the show, and mentions (I think for the first time) that he lost his uncle to Parkinson’s last year after a 34-year battle. The Foundation posted a brief story on Chris’ win, which says that Fox himself called Chris to congratulate him.

I’m skipping Life After Top Chef because October is always so crazy between scouting the Arizona Fall League and watching playoff games, but I’ll resume blogging for Top Chef: Seattle when it starts up on November 7th.

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