→ December 13, 2011
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Dallas eats.

From a culinary perspective, this had to be my most successful winter meetings since Las Vegas in 2008, which isn’t exactly a fair fight since Vegas is something of a food mecca. But Dallas had quite a bit to offer even with my restriction that no meal take place more than 15 minutes’ drive from the Hilton Anatole.

I’ll start with the one place I hit twice, Zaguan Bakery on Oak Lawn Drive, just under a mile and a half from our hotel and on my way back to Love Field to fly home. Zaguan is a South American bakery, featuring pastries, sandwiches, and other dishes from all over that continent, including one of my favorite foods on the planet, the arepa – a thin cornmeal pancake, here sliced lengthwise and stuffed with the fillings of of your choice for a deliciously sloppy sandwich. The slow-cooked beef was whole (I believe brisket) rather than ground, producing a much better texture, and while it comes with a mildly spicy red sauce it’s elevated by fresh guacamole. As good as the arepa was, it was topped by the cachapa, a thick pancake of cornmeal with fresh corn kernels mixed in for a crunchier, sweeter wrap around the same choice of fillings (like an omelet); I had the cachapa with chicken, white meat cooked in a similar sauce but without the depth of flavor from the beef. Both sandwiches are served with plantain chips that you can upgrade to maduros for $0.99 (do this). There’s also a big display case full of sweet pastries that merits a return trip – I only tried one, the alfajor de chocolate, a linzer tarte-like cookie with chocolate frosting between two shortbread cookies with a chocolate glaze on top, not too sweet with a perfect crumbly texture.

My editor Chris Sprow and I went for high-end Mexican on the first night of the meetings at La Duni, a very well-reviewed restaurant over on McKinney. The fresh guacamole appetizer was big and more chunky than smooth (I prefer this style, although I think it’s a matter of taste), with diced onions, cucumbers, and serrano peppers. For the meal, I went with the slow-roasted lomo sandwich, primarily because the restaurant has its own bakery and I can’t turn down fresh bread – in this case, Pan de Yema, a sort of South American brioche that, unfortunately, came out very dry, saved only by the avocado and Manchego in the middle along with the roasted pork. It came with yucca fries dusted in paprika and spritzed with lemon juice, perfectly fried (good thing, as undercooked yucca can kill you); but we also grabbed a side of maduros which were just as perfectly cooked, almost candied while maintaining some firmness inside. Sprow ordered enchiladas con pollo and cleaned his plate so fast I thought he’d eat the napkin too. I don’t care that much about ambience or décor but we both noticed how cool the place looked. One weird thing: They have valet parking … and the valet just pulled the car into the space right next to the front door. I’m pretty sure I could have done that myself.

Il Cane Rosso was the site of the first of our misfit-writers outings – I can’t tell you how much fun these dinners were, even beyond the food – over on the east side of Dallas, serving pizzas cooked in their wood-fired oven at 900 degrees. The house salad was fresh but overdressed; the Caesar, on the other hand, was one of the best I’ve had outside of the garlicky heaven you’ll find at Strip-T’s in Watertown, Massachusetts, although Il Cane Rosso does use anchovies in their Caesar dressing (which isn’t traditional). The pizzas had a great crust (they use imported 00 flour) with the correct amount of char on the outside and high-quality meats among the toppings, although their fresh mozzarella melted more like the low-moisture find you’d get in a grocery store. Of the pizzas we ordered, the prosciutto e rucola, with prosciutto crudo, arugula, and mozzarella, was my favorite. I only tried one of the three desserts we ordered, the zeppole, smaller than the kind I’m used to getting on Long Island but with the right crisp exterior and soft, yeasty interior. They had a solid selection of local beers, and the server (who also gets points for being an Arcade Fire fan) was knowledgeable about the beers and the pizzas. We ordered a substantial amount of food and everyone had at least one drink; with tip, the total ran just $35 a person.

The second group dinner was to Lockhart Smokehouse, in the Bishop Arts District. Lockhart brags “no forks needed,” although I’d call that a slight exaggeration; the brisket was insanely tender with the best outer bark I have ever had on any kind of smoked beef. The smoked sausage, from Kreuz Market in Lockhart (near San Antonio), was fair but didn’t have the same great smoke flavor as the brisket. They smoke food over local post oak, which is apparently common in Texas but isn’t a wood I’ve encountered anywhere else. My fellow writers gave positive reviews to the ribs, the jalapeno sausage, and the smoked chicken. I did try the baked beans but tasted all heat and very little smoke. Sprow’s contribution to the blog follows:


Beware of meat.

Back to solo dining: Tei-An is a Japanese soba house in the Arts District with a slightly peculiar menu mixing traditional Japanese dishes with plates more tailored to the American palate. I went with a soba dish, figuring I should go with something I couldn’t get just anywhere, short green soba noodles served hot with chicken in a mild curry-like sauce (too mild to really be curry, I think). The dish was solid, very filling thanks to the noodles but touching on bland, and the dish came with four mayo-heavy California rolls as a free side dish. The soba noodles were very well made, but just lacked flavor; maybe I ordered the wrong thing, but at a soba house, shouldn’t the soba dishes blow you away?

I ventured out for one breakfast, at Craft Dallas, another outpost in Tom Colicchio’s growing empire. The short rib hash with two eggs any style was a small disappointment, given Craft’s legendary 24-hour short rib dish; the short ribs themselves were fine, but the hash was sitting in a fancy bowl with a very salty sauce on the bottom, and the (perfectly) poached eggs ended up running into that sauce.

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→ December 12, 2011
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The Master and Margarita.

I don’t often re-read books, primarily for the reason that there are too many books out there I have never read and would like to, but also because a second read never quite stimulates the mind the way the first read does. The narrative greed isn’t the same when you remember every major plot twist, no matter how skilled the writer. The fun in encountering some clever turn of phrase, or pun, or imaginative element is lost the second time around as well. For those reasons, I’d avoided a re-read of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita for years, fearing I remembered too much to enjoy reading it again, even though it sits atop my personal ranking of the top 101 novels I’ve read. It’s almost exactly twenty years since I first read Bulgakov’s masterpiece, and I’m relieved to report it held up well against the expectations of my memories of the book, perhaps aided by the fact that I read a different translation this time around.

Bulgakov was a state playwright under the Soviets, but was himself an anti-communist who suffered under the repressive regime that refused to publish many of his works and denied his request to emigrate to a country where he could practice his craft freely. This novel, completed over the last decade of his life and published more than 20 years after his death during a brief thaw under Nikita Khrushchev, destroys the communist regime while also mocking the oligarchs who flourished through their obeisance and outright cowardice. It’s wickedly subversive, and yet often so subtle that I’m surprised the Soviets saw it for what it was – or were willing to publish it after they understood its true intent.

Bulgakov’s masterpiece is a sly satire of communism and Russian life under that political and economic system in Russia between the world wars, told via multiple narratives that all collide across time as the book concludes, with the one common thread among them coming in the person of Satan himself. The devil, calling himself Dr. Woland, appears in Moscow with his retinue – comprising Behemoth, an anthropomorphic cat; Azazello, an ugly stout man with flaming red hair; and Koroviev, also known as Fagot, a sort of chief-of-staff character who always wears a checked jacket and pince-nez (apparently an allusion to The Brothers Karamazov) – to reveal the baseness of the privileged classes under communism. Bulgakov’s Satan is not quite the Satan of the Bible – in some ways, he’s a forerunner of Tyler Durden, causing mayhem to provide meaning to a deadened life in a repressive society – just as Bulgakov’s Yeshua ha-Nozri, betrayed by Judas and crucified under Pontius Pilate, is not quite the Biblical Jesus.

The titular characters, while central to the novel’s themes of freedom, cowardice, and redemption, don’t appear until roughly a quarter of the novel has passed. Bulgakov opens the scene with a discussion between the poet Ivan Homeless and the avowed atheist Berlioz, only to have their talk interrupted by the appearance of a strange foreigner, Woland, who endeavors to show Berlioz that the devil does, in fact, exist, with a gruesome demonstration. This begins a chain of events where Woland and his retinue take over Berlioz’ apartment and hold a “seance” at a local theater where they dazzle the people with magic tricks that have hilarious consequences for the greedy audience members. The master, meanwhile, first appears in a sanitarium in conversation with Ivan Homeless, telling the story of his arrest by the secret police for his authorship of an anti-communist novel about Pontius Pilate, and how that arrest separated him from the love of his life, Margarita, for whom Woland has a special plan in the greatest scene among many in this complex novel.

Cowardice is the most explicit theme of The Master and Margarita, even though I think Bulgakov’s ultimate intent was to expose the emptiness of the Soviet state. Pontius Pilate, in a story that Woland begins telling but that the master completes in his novel-within-the-novel*, knows that the decision to pardon a common criminal over the peaceful philosopher Yeshua ha-Nozri is the wrong one, but given more than one opportunity to try to change that decision, he does nothing more than make a perfunctory request that his superior reconsider it. The master, while implicitly condemning Pilate’s own cowardice, exhibits some of his own, giving up on his life and his art when confronted by a seemingly invincible State that threatens to “disappear” any who threaten its sovereignty or integrity.

*That bit of meta-fiction gives rise to the most famous line from the novel, Woland’s response to the master’s lament that he burned the manuscript for the work that landed him in an asylum for its seditious nature: “Manuscripts never burn.”

Those disappearances are the subject of frequent allusions in the novel, in oblique references to the secret police and in Woland’s habit of moving people around the country or in transmogrifying them into other forms, such as the vaguely porcine man who becomes a flying pig. These fantastical elements were a major part of why I fell in love with the novel when I first read it at age nineteen – I hadn’t seen a classical novel deviate so far from the typical constraints of realistic literature; the most fantastical elements I’d come across were the coincidences that populated great works written before the last half of the 19th century. I didn’t know it as magical realism at the time, or even understand it as a literary technique – I think I just associated it with science fiction or fantasy novels – but Bulgakov’s use of it has to be one of the earliest such examples in literature, along with the works of Franz Kafka, much of whose work was published during the time Bulgakov spent writing The Master and Margarita. What better way to satirize a totalitarian state than through Satan exercising a similar disregard for human life, property, and individuality, alluding to a religion that the state sought to extinguish?

This is a remarkably rich, inventive novel, decades ahead of its time, socially important, funny, outrageous, and a tremendous pleasure to read.

Some stray thoughts:

* I first encountered the book in a class taught by Professor Donald Fanger (now emeritus) at Harvard called “Comedy and the Novel.” How good was that class? Six of the eight novels we read are on the Klaw 101, as is the book he told me a few years later was the unofficial ninth title he couldn’t squeeze into the semester, At Swim-Two-Birds. It was, by far, the best class I took in college, and the one that has had the greatest influence on me after the fact.

* I just discovered that there’s a graphic novel version of The Master and Margarita available, as well as one for Kafka’s The Trial. I’m curious how the illustrator handled Woland’s retinue – Bulgakov’s descriptions are quite vivid, but while Woland and his crew are somewhat anthropomorphic, they could easily turn into monsters without straying far from the original text, which I don’t think was Bulgakov’s intent.

* I’ve become slightly obsessed with spotting possible influences on J.K. Rowling, including A Dance to the Music of Time and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I might add The Master and Margarita to the list for the magical realism elements involved in Apartment #50, especially those elements that appear in the chapter “The Great Ball at Satan’s,” which seemed to show up all over Hogwart’s.

Next up: I’m way behind on writeups, having already finished Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica and moved on to Haruki Murakami’s After Dark.

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→ December 10, 2011
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Saturday linkcopia.

My wife has been designing jewelry for a few years, just making gifts for friends and family, but she’s decided to branch out and sell some of her work online. You can see her earrings and necklaces on Etsy under Candyluminous Designs. They make great Christmas gifts for the ladies in your life.

—

It was a busy week in Dallas – I have a food post coming, because I really ate well – so here’s all the content I generated, linked in one place. First, reaction pieces:

This week’s chat, including my thoughts on the Ian Stewart/Tyler Colvin trade.

Podcasts:

Other stuff:

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→ December 9, 2011
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Top Chef, S9E6.

I would say this was a weird episode, but this whole season is playing out strangely, isn’t it? The challenges seem stranger, Tom Colicchio seems crankier, the contestant pool feels as weak as the last non-All Stars crop, and whether it’s editing or reality we have some grade-A wackos among the remaining chefs.

* Quickfire: This I liked – emphasis on fundamentals of French cooking, which, like it or not, is the underpinning of most haute cuisine. And sauces are critical. Learning that, say, Whitney didn’t know how to make a sauce tomate or that Chris C. could see the sauce velouté as a foundation for building flavors (like you’d find in Ruhlman’s Ratio) was enlightening – one of the few chances we’ve had to learn a lot about several of these chefs in a short period of time. But again with all the scallops?

* So Paul didn’t use a roux in his sauce espagnole, but the recipe says he used demi-glace, which is a highly reduced sauce espagnole combined with veal stock. So there was some roux in the demi-glace, as well as the concentrated flavors of an earlier sauce espagnole, and the thickening power of the demi-glace boosted the finished product as well. Demi-glace is a major ingredient in high-end kitchens, but using it here feels a little off – like he used someone else’s work to boost his own dish.

* I’ve written about béchamel before – isn’t it kind of simple for a show like this? I think it’s the easiest of the five mother sauces to make, and I don’t think converting it into a sauce mornay (as I do in my baked macaroni and cheese) was permissible.

* Elimination challenge: Four-course meal, at least two including steak. Was I the only one surprised that they decided to cook 200 individual steaks? Not only is that boring, it’s time-consuming, and gives you no room for error; dishes of sliced steak mean you can always toss any pieces that are over- or under-cooked (within reason – they didn’t shop for 250 plates). And a ten-ounce ribeye per person after another steak course, followed by dessert, is an obscene amount of food for an average person.

* So, is Heather a horrible person, or is she just edited that way? There were a few clips of her being bossy – although you know the same behavior from a male chef would just make him a “bad-boy” type – but the rant she gave the camera about Beverly was over the top. And then she won, which felt a lot like a narrative to me. It did sound like the cake was awesome; I can’t see giving Nyesha the win for a sauce and a compound butter (the latter is pretty straightforward), but didn’t Chris J. perfectly cook the steak in a dinner that required two steak courses? That doesn’t win?

* Tom … man, I like Tom because he’s so incisive, but there’s a vicious turn to his comments in the last few elimination challenges. I’d like to think this is because he’s disappointed in the quality of the cooking so far; from my couch, it looks like we’re not getting the transcendent cooking of the Voltaggios’ season, so that might be making Tom grumpier. But he just lit into the three chefs on the bottom to their faces and tore apart the eliminated chef right after it. He’s so much friendlier on Last Chance Kitchen, so I’m thinking Angry Elimination Tom is about the quality of the chefs.

* Not enough Hugh. It does sound like he’s cool with the roux-less mother sauces, though. Also, “Heather can’t remember who shot J.R., but she’s pretty sure it’s Beverly” is gold.

* Ty-Lor wants Jamie Lauren to know she is a capital-w Wuss.

* I don’t think I’ve ever actually had gazpacho, so I couldn’t interpret the Tom/Hugh divide on that dish. I feel like I need to rectify this in my next meal.

* I feel badly for Whitney after she revealed last week that she grew up quite poor, at times living in cheap hotels with her family when she was a kid. But a basic gratin is a pretty easy dish to make; even if she’d executed it well, she wouldn’t have won, and it seems like other chefs didn’t like her decision to cook it all on day two. She wasn’t winning this thing anyhow, so on that level I’m not as disappointed.

* LCK: Love the peanut gallery of eliminated chefs, especially Keith, and they seemed to really enjoy offering the commentary. Whitney’s burger sounded better overall, considering the toppings and the use of the pork sausage, and it sounds like she won because she had better flavor but also may have cooked hers better. Was Chuy at a disadvantage with ostrich, which reminds me of the leanest steak you could imagine? Again, Tom is so much more human in these videoclips that I wonder what has him so curmudgeonly in the elimination challenges.

* Final three: Paul and Chris C. remain the top two in the competition in my eyes. Heather’s blustering and her win this week don’t elevate her in my eyes; I think she’s just as limited as Beverly and Sara but doesn’t realize it. I’m leaning Nyesha, who started to come on strong in this episode, for the third spot, followed by Edward.

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→ December 2, 2011
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Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a tense story of a woman who, after fleeing a cult-like commune, shows increasing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder as she attempts to reestablish her normal life and a relationship with her selfish sister and difficult brother-in-law. Based on the true story of a friend of writer/director Sean Durkin, the film is driven by two very strong performances and the use of both silence and background noise to allow the audience to feel the tension grow with the main character’s own mental troubles.

The film begins when Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of Mary Kate and Ashley) flees the commune where she has lived for two years and calls her sister to ask for help; the call is awkward and Martha nearly gives up, showing how far she had fallen into the clutches of the commune’s charismatic, depraved leader Patrick (John Hawkes). From there, we see parallel narratives, one tracking Martha’s first few days of freedom with her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and brother-in-law ted (Hugh Dancy) who want to help her as long as it’s no real inconvenience to them, the other following her two years in the cult from her first day to the incident that triggered her decision to escape. Both narratives follow similar curves with an initial ascent followed by a long, gradual decline, a dichotomy where each storyline intensifies the other.

The commune’s true nature only becomes apparent through gradual glimpses through Martha’s memory – and it’s possible that Martha isn’t a reliable narrator, given what happens to her in the other narrative – that reveal the commune to us more or less as it was revealed to her. She’s taken in as a bit of a lost soul, charmed by Patrick, eventually drugged and raped by him (which is explained to her as a “special” event that begins the “cleansing”) as part of her initiation. Patrick exercises control over the commune’s members through very subtle psychological manipulation, although that turns darker as the story develops. Martha – whom Patrick has rechristened “Marcy May,” as he renames all of the members – drifts into the lifestyle of the commune, never questioning any of its practices because she’s pleased, or at least satisfied, to have something resembling a family.

That need for family is explained in part by Martha’s time with her sister and brother-in-law, both flawed themselves and particularly ill-equipped to deal with a woman who has just fled a cult but claims she simply left a boyfriend. Her problems in this timeline start out as mere distance, moodiness, and ignorance of some social customs, but degenerate into delusions and paranoia, and Lucy and Ted show very little compassion or even the ability to generate it – we go through more than 80% of the movie before Lucy finally confronts Martha directly with the question of what happened to her during her two years out of contact. Their parents gone, Lucy is Martha’s only family, but there’s little warmth between them and more obligation than outright love, which stands in the way of Martha’s recovery almost as much as her own unwillingness to discuss what happened does.

Olsen is superb in the film, her first screen role, particularly in the second half of the film when she’s required to show a broader range of emotions; in the first half, she’s emotionally vacant in both narratives, but gets to stretch out into two different faces of the same character as the narrative unfolds. But Hawkes dominates his half of the story by almost trying not to dominate it: There’s no showiness, no bravura, just small gestures, eye contact, a faint change in the tone of his voice to convey the power he has over his charges. Olsen’s growing fear is the primary driver of the tension in the commune storyline, but Hawkes’ magnetism manages to elevate it even when all we have is the threat of his entrance. He’s a monster despite never acting like one; she’s the victim but never acts victim-like, only showing it through a slow crescendo of confusion and fear.

Both leads will at least be in the running for Best Actor/Actress nominations, although those categories are incredibly competitive, and if nothing else I think Martha Marcy May Marlene – the reason for the fourth name is too good to spoil – will end up with a Best Original Screenplay nod. If you can find it and like a tense, psychological drama with the tension of a British thriller, it’s well worth seeing.

I’d like to discuss the meaning of the end of the film, but for those of you who haven’t seen it, you may want to skip ahead. This paragraph has no value other than providing a warning and a buffer.

–

And this is another buffer, in case you didn’t listen the first time. Spoilers ahead.

There are three ways to interpret the end of the film, two literal, one other metaphorical. Perhaps the man is from the cult and has come to capture, harm, or kill Martha, which is certainly what she’s fearing. Perhaps the man’s appearance is just a coincidence; he could even be a random stalker, but not from the cult. But I favor a third interpretation – that the man’s status is irrelevant; the point of the scene is that Martha isn’t free of the effects of her two years in the cult, and might never be free. She will assume any incident like this is about the cult, or she’ll even experience more delusions like the two she had at the house and will see someone from the cult where there’s no one. The idea that her ordeal isn’t over is paramount, which is why it’s unnecessary to show the viewer the outcome of the incident in the street.

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→ December 1, 2011
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Top Chef S9E5.

* The quickfire itself was a great idea – finding out what can the chefs do with a limited set of ingredients, especially ones where they need to bring flavor or overcome a bad texture, is the perfect construct for a fast challenge. But making them struggle to open cans? What’s the point of that? Just give them can openers so they can spend more time cooking and less fighting to get to the ingredients.

* It does make me wonder whether the chefs would be allowed to carry emergency kits on them of, say, essential seasonings or even packets of things like soy sauce. Would using those be considered cheating on a quickfire?

* As always, take my comments in the appropriate context, since I never tasted any of this food. That aside, Lindsay’s dish looked awful – was the taste gap between hers and Edward’s (which the judges also liked, and which looked like real food) that big to overcome his enormous advantage in presentation? Not to mention the idea that using Vienna sausages successfully was some sort of inherent advantage for Lindsay – she couldn’t be penalized for it, but I can’t see giving her bonus points for it. Edward took subpar ingredients and made something almost upscale. How does that not win?

* Chris J. running for the cornfield should be played every week for sheer comedy value. It would have been funnier if the producers had hidden, say, a cooler full of sushi-grade tuna in there.

* Nouveau riche gets a bad name in the elimination challenge, especially with the wife of the first couple, who hates all food that tastes like anything. I’ll give her a pass on the cilantro, but bell peppers? Or food that might give people bad breath – so no onions or garlic? Some smart-ass chef should have just made her a plate of boiled chicken. If I had that kind of money, I’m not sure I’d be in a rush to show it off on TV anyway, but these people made it worse by showing the self-awareness of a sea cucumber. When you’re rich, people want to hate you. Don’t encourage this.

* And by the way, I might be out on a limb here, but do you think Gummi Bear Husband’s wife might have married him for his money?

* Excellent point by Edward that pleasing the specific couple at whose house they were cooking was by no means sufficient – the chefs needed to please all of the guests, and as it turned out, really only needed to please the judges.

* Speaking of which, Tom’s laugh and facial expression after an inane comment by one of the bottle-blonde wives might have been the funniest moment I’ve ever seen on the show. He could have said, “Wow, what a dim bulb that one is” and it wouldn’t have been as derisive. All the money in the world can’t buy you taste, I suppose.

* To the woman who thought Edward’s dish was “jiggly looking” … maybe because it’s set with gelatin, sweetheart.

* There were no entrees among the winners group – two appetizers, two desserts. Paul’s fried/roasted Brussels sprouts with grilled prosciutto (and, I believe, sliced peaches) isn’t up on the site (yet?), but did sound excellent, if a bit safe – cabbages and cured pork products are a pretty natural and obvious pairing. Dakota’s banana bread pudding with peanut butter cups sounds and looks amazing, and I really thought she’d win for succeeding where so many chefs fail – on dessert. I’m concerned that Sarah is going to get Fabio’d – if she can’t answer a challenge with something from her Italian repertoire, she’s hosed.

* Elimination: I think Chris C. may have had the worst plate – he certainly seemed to be on the bottom of Tom’s list – but I’m really uncomfortable when a chef on this show is sent home because s/he failed at a dessert that s/he was forced to make (as opposed to a chef choosing to do dessert). Chris J. got killed for making a “cigar” with “ash” … I thought it looked cool, but was surprised he used collard greens (which are tough and fibrous and require long, slow cooking) instead of seaweed on the outside. The judges talked so much about Ty-Lor’s messy plate that I wasn’t clear on whether the food itself tasted good – although having the judges question your knife skills augurs poorly for your future on the show. Chuy overcooked salmon, then tried to justify it; overcooked meat generally gets you sent home on this show, and overcooked fish is even worse than overcooked meat. Plus salmon and goat cheese doesn’t sound like an appealing combination to me – although I admit that I never pair fish and cheese at home anyway. I thought he was one of the half-dozen most talented chefs on the show, but that’s a pretty big mistake to make.

* LCK: I was torn here, since it seems like both guys are talented and I would have liked to have seen both stick around on the main show. Chuy referred to Tom as “the Puff Daddy of steak.” I don’t think that’s the compliment he intended for it to be.

* Final three: Paul seems to me like the runaway leader right now. Despite his appearance in the bottom four, I still think Chris C. is a contender – he’s got a different vision than most of the other chefs and, other than dessert (which he said up front was a huge weakness for him), he executes a lot in a short period of time. Edward would be the third choice if he doesn’t go all Chris Snelling and end up in traction. Am I wrong to think Dakota is too fragile to win this thing? The judges pretty consistently like her food, and the improvisation with the milkshake cup was huge, but I feel like she’d burst into tears if she stepped on an ant. I think she and Nyesha are in the next group.

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→ November 30, 2011
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Beginners.

Mike Mills’ 2011 film Beginners takes an event from his own life and turns it into the central plot point in a romantic drama about love, death, and depression. But it’s a much better and sweeter movie than that makes it sound.

As the film opens, we see the 38-year-old Oliver cleaning out a house, going through mementos and old papers, after which he explains (as narrator) that his father, Hal, has just died of cancer, four years after his mother died, which led Hal to reveal that he was gay and to embark on almost a second adolescence, finding new friends, a new love, and a happiness he’d never had during his four decades of marriage. That story, shown in retrospect, is cut in between shots of emotionally-stunted Oliver struggling to forge a new, and for him unusually happy, relationship with, Anna, a beautiful French actress who stumbles improbably into his life but is far from emotionally perfect herself. Oliver’s inability to be happy in love is only partially explained by what we learn about his family, but it’s too facile to say that he learns how to overcome that by watching his father – he learns how to start overcoming it, and to Mills’ credit, the film doesn’t make anything too easy on him or on us.

Nearly all of the dialogue – I’d be hard-pressed to call it action – in Beginners comes from the three central characters, with a few added lines from Hal’s younger boyfriend Andy (Goran Visnjic) and from the dog Arthur (via subtitles, if you were confused). Christopher Plummer is earning some justified Oscar buzz for his performance as the moribund Hal, whose mood is anything but as he finds himself liberated after 40-plus closeted years in an unfulfilled marriage that was, for him, more of a business arrangement; while I’d love to see him win Best Supporting Actor for sentimental reasons, it may also be that he wins for sentimental reasons, as he turns 82 in two weeks and has received just one nomination, in 2009 for The Last Station. It could be the Academy’s last chance to so honor Captain Von Trapp in a sort of lifetime achievement award.

But Plummer is truly the supporting actor to the two leads, Ewan Macgregor as Oliver and Mélanie Laurent as Anna, whose relationship we watch in tiny movements from inception to breakup (if you can call it that) to resolution, a path that seems painfully real in how precise some of those movements are. They meet at a costume party – one of those costume parties you only see on TV or in films, because all of the costumes are impeccable – where Anna has laryngitis and communicates via a tiny notepad, which still makes her louder than the grieving Oliver, just two months past the death of his father. From there, the film jumps around in time between their romance, often sweet but tinged with melancholy reflected in dim apartments and fall weather, and Hal’s last few years of personal freedom, exploring (his word) another side of himself while Oliver attempts to hold together a foundational element of his past. Discovering that his parents’ marriage was a sham – to him, fully, but to his father, only partly so – only cements his belief that relationships won’t work out, so why give them a chance to do so when you know you’ll fail?

We also see scenes from Hal’s marriage to Oliver’s mother Georgia (Mary Page Keller) in flashbacks in which Hal never appears: It’s always Oliver and his mother, and it becomes clear that while Hal viewed their marriage as an arrangement, she didn’t, and her growing alienation from her husband only compounded whatever issues she brought into the marriage in the first place. (This receives some explanation toward the end of the film, a mild spoiler I won’t reveal.) Witnessing his own parents’ loveless marriage, understanding that it was loveless with no understanding of why, warps Oliver’s own view of love and plants the seeds of an inability to build a lasting relationships that, with Anna, is exacerbated by his suffocating grief.

Laurent, meanwhile, could say virtually nothing and steal scenes just by virtue of being adorable, but Anna is battling a depression of her own, living an itinerant and ultimately lonesome lifestyle that may also reflect a reaction to a broken relationship between her still-living parents. It’s a hard trick to look sad without becoming pathetic when an actress and her character are both cute; while it took some time for Laurent to make Anna’s underlying sadness come through (the film is, after all, more focused on Oliver’s grief), the script turns enough to allow Laurent to stretch out beyond the façade of Anna’s playfulness. Her reunion with Oliver at the film’s end would have felt forced if he was the only one struggling emotionally, one of several small twists in the film that made it more effective and less sentimental than a standard girl-fixes-guy romantic drama.

Mills’ script succeeds when it’s subtle but veers off course when he veers outside the relationships at the film’s core. The conversations between Oliver and Anna are soft, short, understated – sometimes too much so, as in the breakup conversation that neither my wife nor I fully understood – contributing to a tentative feeling that conveys Oliver’s own uncertainty at entering a relationship that might not fail (and perhaps Anna’s uncertainty over the same). What I could have done without was Oliver’s inexplicable job – he’s some sort of artist or sketcher who ignores a rock band client’s request for an album cover, instead producing a series of badly-drawn sketches about the history of sadness that is far more about him (and emphasizing just how sad he is) than about the client, whose needs we never actually hear about anyway. Mills wants us to know just how Sad everyone is, but the dialogue and the tiny interactions between Oliver and Anna already provide that, leaving his sketches (e.g., “First couple too in love to be sad”) feeling extraneous. It was a heavy-handed flourish in a film that didn’t need it; Beginners wins you over with the delicate scenes between Oliver and Anna the contrast with the unfettered last few years for Hal.

* I don’t understand how this moved ended up with a rating of “R.” There’s no violence at all, and very little foul language. There’s no on-screen sex or even nudity – just a few shots of Melanie Laurent’s bare back, and if that merits an “R” rating, I must be one of the New Libertines or something. It seems to me that the ratings board members must have been watching the movie and saying, “Wow, what a nice film, we should make it PG or PG-13 since it’s so inoffe…oh my God there are two men kissing! Rate it R! RATE! IT! R!”

* Ewan Macgregor was just as charming as a shy phone-company tech in Little Voice, a 1998 vehicle for singer Jane Horrocks, who plays a painfully shy woman with a hidden talent for impersonating great singers. (Those of you with young daughters know her as the voice of Fairy Mary in the Tinker Bell movies. Yes, you do, stop lying.) Horrocks owns the movie when she sings, but it’s a virtuoso performance from Michael Caine, who won a Golden Globe for the film, as the unscrupulous talent agent who sees one last chance to make a killing.

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→ November 28, 2011
→ By

The Fighter.

I finally got around to watching The Fighter (on sale for $9.49 through that link) on Friday night – an odd experience seeing Amy Adams as a New England townie a few hours after I saw her in The Muppets – which makes it the ninth and final 2010 Best Picture nominee for me to watch. (I’m not watching 127 Hours, because I can’t stand James Franco, and that movie is basically him.) A few of you loved it, and a few of you said it was a decent movie with great performances; I’d put myself squarely in the latter camp.

Based very loosely on the story of Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a boxer from Lowell who made a somewhat improbable comeback in his 30s after a hiatus from the sport, becoming the WBU light welterweight champion, at which point the film ends. (I know zilch about boxing, as you probably guessed.) Ward’s brother and part-time trainer, Dick Eklund (Christian Bale), was also a professional boxer whose career ended due to cocaine addiction and ended up in jail for armed robbery. The film melodramatizes their relationship, moving around several events in the timeline to heighten the tension, while also folding in their crazy mother, played by Melissa Leo, and Ward’s girlfriend Charlene (Adams), who provides him with some stability and common sense. In an inspired move by the directors, Ward’s other trainer, Mickey O’Keefe, is played by … Mickey O’Keefe himself, well enough that it never occurred to me that he wasn’t a professional actor.

The film itself is a tight but rather generic underdog sports film, where Ward gets beaten down in the ring and out of it, quitting boxing and eventually having his hand broken in a fight with police where he’s defending his idiot brother (which I don’t think ever actually happened). With Dick in jail, Micky throws off the deadweight of him and his mother, rededicates himself to training, and ends up winning several fights, one of which comes after some advice from a still-imprisoned Dick. The curve of the narrative is so smooth that I felt like I was being played.

But the performances are really out of sight. Bale and Leo won Oscars for Best Supporting Actor and Actress; Bale’s was a pretty easy call, but I thought Leo largely won because of her accent and look, with Adams delivering an equally strong but more nuanced performance. There’s a great scene where she and Micky are about to have a little afternoon delight – with a shot of her in black lingerie that is absolutely there because, hey, Amy Adams in black lingerie sounds great – that culminates with Adams beating the crap out of one of Micky’s twenty-nine sisters on the porch of the house where she lives; Charlene is tough, independent (which grates on Micky’s family), but guarded, and doesn’t have the same over-the-top I’m-so-wicked-local veneer as Leo’s portrayal of Alice as a scheming, white-trashy woman who sees Micky as a paycheck and Dick as a misunderstood kid, not as an addict, thief, and anchor on his brother. Wahlberg plays the title role but is so understated next to the manic Bale that he’s overshadowed, but a similarly ebullient character would have made the film unwatchable (never mind whether it would have been realistic).

Again, I don’t follow boxing or even remotely like the sport, but one thing I noticed was that the boxing scenes looked somewhat realistic – the punches looked like they were landing, as opposed to the standard “wow, he really made contact with that pocket of air” technique. I’m sure some of the boxing scenes were glamorized, and real fans of the sweet science could probably pick them apart (please do – I’m curious), but at least the makers of the film made an effort to make the fight scenes watchable to the non-fan.

And, because everyone loves a ranking, here are the Best Picture nominees from 2011, in one non-critic’s opinion, with links to my reviews of seven of them.

1. Winter’s Bone
2. The King’s Speech
3. The Social Network
4. Toy Story 3
5. True Grit
6. Inception
7. The Fighter
8. Black Swan
9. The Kids Are All Right
10. Sorry, I’m just not watching it.

Of course, those aren’t the best films of 2010, but it seemed like a good enough place to start. I have heard raves about Animal Kingdom, so that’s in the queue.

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→ November 26, 2011
→ By

The Muppets.

When I originally heard that Jason Segel was writing a script for a brand-new Muppet movie that would attempt to reboot the franchise, I was excited, and nervous. It’s been almost 20 years since the last decent Muppet film (The Muppet Christmas Carol, among our favorite holiday movies), and after a long hiatus since the last one, it was going to take a big hit to overcome any skepticism after the mediocre Muppets from Space and the disastrous Muppet Treasure Island to revive the brand. Segel’s endeavor could easily have been the death of the Muppets, too. I’m beyond thrilled to report that it’s a rebirth instead, and one of the most enjoyable nostalgia projects I could imagine.

Segel has created a two-layered script that accomplishes the most important thing in any Muppet film: He has them put on a show, which, naturally, is needed in the story to save the theater from destruction at the hands of evil oil baron Tex Richman (played by Chris Cooper, clearly having the time of his life). The basic story has Segel’s character, Gary, and his little brother, Walter (who is a Muppet, but no one seems to realize this, which is a great conceit that just sits in the background like an inside joke), headed to Los Angeles with Gary’s girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams), where they go to tour the Muppet Studios only to learn of Richman’s evil plot. They track down Kermit the Frog, living in semi-retirement in the home that he should have shared with Miss Piggy, and persuade him to put the gang back together for “one more show.” And Walter, who has never been able to fit in as the lone felt creature in a town full of actual humans, lives the ultimate fan’s fantasy, working alongside his idols and finding, for the first time in his life, a community where he really fits in.

The macro story here, and the real theme of the The Muppets, is that there are, and have always been, millions of Muppet fans out there just waiting … and waiting … for someone (one of us, as it turned out) to bring them back into the spotlight in a movie that cuts right to the heart of what we love about the characters individually and as an ensemble. Segel is such a fan that he inserts himself and his fuzzy alter-ego brother into the movie, only to wisely work Gary and Mary back out of the story in the second half of the film so that the Muppets can take over. And take over they do, with Walter on board, and a great turn by Jack Black playing the, um, reluctant guest host of the show-within-the-film. Amy Adams also deserves mention for an incredibly game performance that includes a very silly dance number in the middle of a diner and a slew of wide-eyed, deadpan lines that kept emphasizing how very absurd all of this is. Having seen her in The Fighter a few hours later, I feel like she’s the Nicole Kidman of this generation of actresses, up for absolutely anything and able to nail whatever role she’s given; let’s hope she doesn’t botox herself into zombiedom in her 40s like Kidman has.

That’s not to say the celebrity cameos, such a critical element in the best Muppet movies, are absent – they’re there, and many of them make an impact in just a few seconds of screen time. Neil Patrick Harris has one line and it’s one of the funniest jokes in the film. Mickey Rooney’s cameo is a funny nod to past cameos. Jim Parsons’ cameo would be ruined if I tried to explain it, but he’s nails. I kept waiting for someone to point at Rashida Jones with both hands and say, “Ann Perkins,” and she was one of the best at interacting with the Muppets, grabbing Kermit by the lapels and shaking him like half the guest stars on the original The Muppet Show used to do. Dave Grohl hams it up as “Animool,” maybe his best performance since the “Big Me” video. And Zach Galfinakis has to be a lock to appear as Hobo Joe in every Muppet movie going forward.

Segel also shows off his knowledge of the characters with some Muppet cameos as well. The Beautiful Day Monster is taking pledge calls in the balcony, and Wayne and Wanda appear for a moment when the lights come back on after Chris Cooper briefly cuts the power to the theater. The Newsman (one of the few voices that didn’t work for me) appears briefly in the balcony as well. Marvin Suggs and the Muppaphone appear in the “Life’s a Happy Song” reprise. Behemoth is in Jack Black’s dressing room – and how did he not eat anything? – with a few other monsters I couldn’t name. If Segel had a checklist of Muppets to include, he couldn’t have been more complete.

The music, which really set the two good Muppet movies (the original and the Christmas Carol) apart, is outstanding here, making Bret McKenzie the somewhat unlikely heir to the legacy of Paul Williams, who wrote most of the music in those two earlier flicks. “Life’s a Happy Song” is the breakout hit, stuck in my head for the rest of the day (which is fine by me) and so good they included it twice, while “Man or Muppet” inserts some much-needed humor at a point where the film threatened to get all serious-like on us. But the gem on the soundtrack was actually written by a songwriting team largely responsible for writing bubblegum pop songs for Disney artists: “Pictures In My Head” has Kermit walking down the hall in his House of Usher, looking at old photographs of his castmates and wondering “Would anyone watch or even care, or did something break we can’t repair?” It’s the first of a surprising number of highly emotional moments in the film.

One of those other emotional moments comes when Segel, constantly paying homage to history, has Kermit and Miss Piggy perform a duet of “Rainbow Connection,” which is a high point of the film but had particular resonance for me. In 1994, PBS aired an episode of “Great Performances” on the life of Jim Henson; when they reach the end of his life in the documentary, the producers used “Rainbow Connection,” apparently at Jerry Juhl’s suggestion, to close the discussion of Henson’s life and death and lead into the closing credits. I’ve only seen the show once, when it first aired, but that song, already a favorite of mine, has always brought me back to that point in the documentary, where the full impact of our loss seems to hit all at once. (If whoever holds the copyright on that show has any sense of marketing, they’ll put it out on DVD now while the Muppets are hot again.)

If you don’t love these characters already, however, the film is going to feel a little thin. The story is good by Muppet movie standards, but the contortions required to get the Muppets back together and on the stage don’t leave much time for plot. The film is actually not that funny – it’s sweet, sentimental, almost romantic, but has only a handful of real laugh-out-loud moments, more from the humans than the Muppets. (I’m pleased to report that the much-maligned “fart shoes” joke turned out to be funnier, and more clever, than the trailer indicated.) Chris Cooper rapping is something I never need to see again – and really, can we just put a moratorium on older white male actors rapping badly in film and on TV? It’s not funny now, because it was never funny. I mentioned the Newsman’s voice being off, and Fozzie Bear’s voice was only intermittently right, like two people were behind it, or like the one person behind it couldn’t hold the right pitch and kept slipping out of character, although the vast majority of Muppet voices were more than good enough. I could also pick nits at the absence of a ballroom scene or Veterinarian’s Hospital, but now I’m just being (in my wife’s words) a “Muppet sap.”

I was a little surprised that they tweaked some of the Muppet characters’ personalities, although that may just emphasize just how much I have invested in the characters at this point. Kermit remains the flawed hero, frequently frustrated but less stalwart than in the past, and I missed his old habit of freaking out and flailing his flippers all over the place. (They had a chance, too, in the kidnapping discussion.) Gonzo seemed a little less, well, gonzo, and I don’t remember any lines from his pal Rizzo. Even Miss Piggy seemed a little older and wiser, with just one real “Hiiiii-YAH” in the film, although she made it count. But again, if you lack history with them, you’re not even noticing this stuff, let alone nitpicking like I am. You’ll find it a sweet film with fun music, corny humor, and very high production values compared to any previous Muppet film, but you won’t get all choked up when Kermit walks out of the theater doors for what might be the last time.

If you do love the characters, and I assume by this point you know where I stand on that subject, you couldn’t ask for a better film than this. It’s a tribute, a love letter, a nostalgia trip, a shot in the arm, and probably the impetus for a slew of sequels – and perhaps a revival of the TV show? Please? – written and performed by people who feel the same way we do. But the highest praise I can offer is that after we walked out of the theater, my five-year-old daughter, who knows the characters but obviously doesn’t have the same history with them, said to us, “I want to buy that movie.” I’m hoping her generation takes to these characters the way mine did.

Oh, and next spring, when I need to go see high school players scattered across the country, I am absolutely going to travel by map.

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→ November 25, 2011
→ By

Top Chef S9E4.

Kind of an uneventful episode, especially since, of the five teams in the elimination challenge, four of them made extremely similar variations on chili – similar cuts of beef, similar flavor profiles, the chili even looked the same. One team took a gamble on a non-traditional approach and they failed. I respect the gamble, but making chili that tastes like mole is out there enough that the chefs couldn’t miss on execution, which they did.

The quickfire challenged the chefs to build dishes around the chile pepper of their choice, from poblanos to ghost chiles (although the latter is no longer the world’s hottest pepper, surpassed earlier this year by the Naga Viper cultivar). Still, the ghost chile is damn hot, and carries with it the biggest cash prize if the winning chef uses it in his/her dish … so why does only one of the chefs, Paul, choose it? They’re practically commanding you to pick that pepper, and we get wimpy chefs going for Anaheims and poblanos that toddlers in India use as palate cleansers. On the other end of the spectrum, Beverly – who might be insane, although I’m still refining that judgment – serves her peppers raw, which would be great if this was something other than a cooking show. Anyway, the result here was fairly obvious: If you use the most difficult ingredient effectively – and putting chiles with dairy or a similar rich fat like coconut is a great way to carry the heat while protecting diners’ mouths from gustatory Ragnarok – you win. And so it goes.

(Also: Chuy uses canned tomatoes. I can not imagine that there was any lack of fresh tomatoes in the Top Chef Kitchen, and he went for canned. Never mind the judgment call of that moment when he bypassed the genuine article – what chef ever looks for canned over fresh in any situation?)

Then the chefs head have to prepare giant pots of chili (now we’re talking about the stew) for the Tejas Rodeo. Split into five teams of three, we get the ridiculous battle for equipment and cooking space at the house – really, you built a beautiful kitchen for the chefs to use, but won’t let them use it? I’m not seeing the point here except to stir up a little drama – followed by an all-nighter that has the chefs dragging like an Atlanta reliever at the end of September. We get meat shortages at Whole Foods, which makes no sense, because you know the producers are calling the store ahead of time to say, “Incoming!” and perhaps give a heads-up on what items they might want to have on hand. As much as I love short ribs, though, I’m having a hard time picturing that in a chili – the fibers would get very stringy after they fall apart during all that time in the heat, right?

The shots of the chefs getting slaphappy overnight … whatever. I’m just here for the food. Although they are setting Chuy up to be a villain character down the road by giving him every chance to show off his ego on national television.

Judging: Not enough comments from patrons, in my opinion. The actual judges’ comments were helpful, but if the winners weren’t their call, then let’s hear more from the customers who voted. As for elimination, asking three sleep-deprived chefs to cook again is probably a bit much, but I thought Richie and Beverly were potentially the two weakest chefs there, and as long as Nyesha stuck around, I was fine with either of the other two leaving.

Random thoughts:

* I wonder if Paul’s dish will make the next Top Chef Quickfire Cookbook, perhaps modified for an easier-to-find hot pepper.

* Speaking of which, I think Chuy was the only chef to pronounce “habanero” correctly. There’s no tilde on the n, so it’s ha-bah-NAIR-oh, not ha-bah-NYEH-ro. The latter pronunciation reminds me of New York Italians who dropped the final vowels from words like mozzarella and locatelli. Maybe there’s some dialect of Italian where that’s correct, but in New York, it’s just affect.

* Really, the emphasis on all the waterworks seemed very overblown, given how little sleep the chefs had had by the time the elimination rolled around. I don’t care how stoic you are with seven hours of sleep, you’re going to struggle with your emotions after 30 hours or more without any rest.

* Did you know Texas chili has no beans in it? Man, I’m glad they reminded us of that fact … about fifteen times.

* No Hugh Acheson? Nothing against the ladies of the Border Grill, but this show definitely missed Hugh’s dark humor. His recap was typically hilarious: “Chuy wants to die under the table. This can be arranged but is not good TV.”

* Chris C. is going to end up with multiple restraining orders against him at this rate. Dude, we know Padma’s hot. Dial it down a notch. And really, you compare one of the most beautiful women in the world to Fabio?

* Last Chance Kitchen: I thought Tom’s “looks inventive, isn’t really” critique of Richie’s food spoke volumes about Richie’s style: In effect, he said Richie’s cooking was superficial, and I don’t think that would play on Top Chef anyway. It seems like Richie has the techniques down (aside from salt), but not the deeper understanding to deploy them in ways that can make an old dish feel new. It must really suck to lose, get ready to leave, and then lose again. Glad to see Keith moving forward – it seemed like Tom’s only real criticism was the weird pumpkin pie smear on the plate, as if Keith was trying to seem a little more avant garde than he is. I’m guessing whatever success he has on LCK going forward will come from sticking to his style of smart comfort food, rather than trying to be something he’s not.

* I was going to pick a final three, but I feel like we’re not seeing enough discussion of winning dishes for me to make anything more than a random guess, skewed by how much screen time they’re giving chefs who say weird things. Next week, I’ll take that plunge.

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