→ February 8, 2013
→ By

Lincoln.

One more plug for the top 100 prospects package, which starts with the top 25 players with scouting reports. Thanks to all of you who’ve read, offered feedback, caught typos, or signed up for the first time this week.

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Lincoln is a fine film about the man we would all like to believe was our 16th President, a hagiography so thorough in its depiction of Lincoln as a latter-day saint that it reminded me of the likely apocryphal story of George M. Cohan’s reaction to the film about his own life, Yankee Doodle Dandy: “It was a good movie. Who was it about?”

I find it hard to imagine that Abraham Lincoln was anywhere near as perfect a man as Steven Spielberg’s movie would have us believe he was. In the film, which largely covers the month of January, 1865, and Lincoln’s efforts to get the wartime House of Representatives to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery in the United States. It’s not the ideal subject matter for a lengthy drama, one that involves a whole lot of talking (in language that feels stilted today and may have even been so for the time) and not much else, nor does such a short period of time and such a binary issue of right and wrong lend itself to a thorough character study. Titling the film The Thirteenth Amendment rather than Lincoln would have been more accurate, although I imagine it would have hurt ticket sales and perhaps even awards buzz.

Daniel Day-Lewis is superb as Lincoln in a performance that has been largely sweeping the major acting awards so far this season, although he may be receiving too much credit for the consistency and power of his portrayal of the man’s bearing and accent, as the character on the screen lacks much depth. The worst thing you can say about this version of Lincoln is that he’s willing to trade a handful of patronage jobs to secure passage of an amendment that would free millions of people from bondage. He is otherwise unflawed, a devoted husband, a pillar of strength in his family and for his country, a tireless leader fully committed to his principles of freedom and some form of equality. Day-Lewis looks the part, and sounds the part, but was the part really as complex as his mantle full of trophies might indicate?

The somewhat two-dimensional nature of Lincoln’s character opens the door for Tommy Lee Jones to steal a few scenes as the cantankerous Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a radical Republican (back when that party stood for something very different) and staunch abolitionist whose speeches in favor of the Amendment are shown as pivotal to its passage. Lincoln may have the best monologues, but Stevens gets the one-liners, and Jones gets to stretch a little more, especially in the range of emotions required for his role. Beyond Jones, the film is packed with white character actors you’ll recognize and spend a few minutes trying to place, including a few veterans of The Wire, as well as a brief appearance by David Oyelowo, who played Danny on the first few seasons of the British series MI-5. These roles seem to be more focused on historical accuracy than depth of character, with the same applying to Sally Field’s nuance-less portrayal of the neurotic Mary Todd Lincoln, a role in which she practically wrings her hands off their wrists.

The story opens in early January of 1865, as Lincoln has just won re-election but, as was true until the passage of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933, must deal with a lame-duck Congress until March 4th, at which point the numbers will shift more strongly in Lincoln’s favor. Lincoln chooses, over the counsel of his tiny Cabinet, to push for passage of the Amendment even though the House had been stalling since the Senate’s passage of it the previous April. Lincoln indicates that he wants to use the threat of passage as a way to force the South’s hand and encourage their surrender, beginning a series of horse-trades and slight deceptions that gradually line up the required votes in the House. The most interesting of these scenes, however, don’t involve Day-Lewis, who is so thoroughly embedded in his depiction of Lincoln that he precludes the potential for balanced dialogue (which may simply be the fault of Tony Kushner’s script) when he’s on the screen.

This shouldn’t really spoil anything in the film, but the amendment does, in fact, pass the House with about fifteen minutes left in the movie, meaning we get the great climax and then a bunch of housecleaning scenes, including the South’s capitulation at Appamattox and, of course, Lincoln’s assassination, shown off-screen and handled in the most perfunctory manner. The film could just as easily ended with Lincoln’s reaction after the climactic vote, but finishing his personal story at the movie’s conclusion felt forced given how little of his personal story appeared elsewhere in the film. It’s not really a biopic, but the story of a specific political endeavor, and tacking on the war’s end and Lincoln’s death was, at best, unnecessary.

Although the script was written and the film completed before the 2012 Presidential election, I thought there might be some faint parallels intentionally built into the movie. We now have a liberal President, entering a second term, pushing issues of freedom – with lower stakes than slavery, but, whether we’re talking about the War on Women or marriage equality, still matters of liberty and equal rights – while trying to wind down not one but two unpopular wars. Lincoln used the political capital of his second term to try to push through a morally justified but not overwhelmingly popular amendment to the constitution. Is Kushner encouraging President Obama to cash in some of his political capital to fight for specific causes, like marriage equality? I concede I may be reading far too much into the film, but the parallels seemed too strong to ignore.

I’ve now seen seven of the nine Best Picture nominees, all but Les Miserables and Amour, and while Lincoln may very well win the award, I couldn’t give you a competent argument that it should. I wouldn’t rate it higher than fourth, behind Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchained, and Argo, and if you want to tell me it should be behind Life of Pi I won’t fight you on it. Day-Lewis is a lock to win the Best Actor award, but since I’ve only seen one of the other nominees’ performances – Brad Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook – I can’t offer an opinion on that one. Jones shouldn’t beat out Christoph Walz (Django) for Best Supporting Actor, while Field is probably going to be trounced by Anne Hathaway for Best Supporting Actress and would be behind Jacki Weaver (SLP) on my ballot anyway. (All links in this paragraph go to my reviews of those films.)

Lincoln was based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s hefty, critically-acclaimed book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. I’ve got a few long reads on my to-do list already, so I’ll save this for another time.

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→ February 7, 2013
→ By

Top Chef, S10E14.

First, the links to the organizational top tens, with comments, 2013 impact guys, and sleepers.

I also did another Klawchat today, and the Baseball Today podcast finale is up as well. Thanks for listening for the last two years.

—

So Sheldon thinks Stefan was the front-runner until he was eliminated, but I have a hard time thinking Sheldon or anyone really believed that. Brooke has been cleaning up, especially with Kristen gone, and there’s no way the other chefs in the house haven’t noticed that. As the group arrives in Juneau – the only US state capital with no roads leading in/out of town, and the only one to border another country – Sheldon says he should put extra underwear on to “keep the package nice and warm.” Somehow this is less creepy coming from Sheldon than it did from Stefan. Still creepy, just less creepy. Slightly.

* Quickfire: Sean Brock of Husk is in the house! The chefs must cook at Tracy’s King Crab Shack, “Juneau’s #1 culinary destination” according to Padma, who doesn’t strike me as standard crab-shack clientele. The challenge is to create a dish highlighting Alaskan crab. Brock loves it with a little bit of lemon and dipped in butter. He says that’s too boring for Top Chef, but he’s right – good crab needs very little help to taste great. It’s the candy of the animal protein world.

* Lizzie makes a crab frittata with cherry tomato, garlic oil, and fried capers (drained, not soaked, so it came out very briny). I also feel like that’s a little 1970s brunchy for Top Chef. Brooke does a crab toast, trying to be as delicate as possible with the flavor of the meat, and serves it with a compound butter made from dungeness crab and the Alaskan king crab shells. She tops it with a sweet corn and leek salad for what was easily the best-looking of the four dishes. Josh butter-poaches his crab and serves it with bacon and succotash, saying his food is similar to Sean Brock’s. Along those lines, I think my writing is similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. Sheldon makes “miso” with crab innards and two kinds of crab, then uses pine needles to smoke his asparagus. I didn’t realize this was possible, since you can’t smoke using pine wood (or any other softwood) because of resins that can turn toxic when burned.

* Lizzie’s frittata was overcooked and the capers overpowered the crab. Josh served succotash to “a succotash snob,” his bacon overpowered the crab, and the butter sauce broke, after Josh said he thought he had this “in the bag.” Sheldon’s was simple and interesting, per Sean, between the faux-miso and the pine needle-smoking. Brooke’s looked too easy, and Sean says he didn’t want to like it, but it was flat-out delicious. Sheldon wins thanks to his ingenuity and use of the whole crab, grabbing a $5K prize but no immunity.

* Elimination challenge: Cook a dish with salmon and sourdough for guests at the Gold Creek Salmon Bake. Why wasn’t I told about this tradition sooner? /moves to Juneau

* The chefs each get a large tub of a 31-year-old sourdough starter. This reminds me of Gus toting around his ten-year-old sourdough biscuit starter in Lonesome Dove and hating when he has to leave it behind. The chefs make their bread doughs the night before, working them by hand, which is probably bizarre for them since they would all have large Hobart stand mixers in their restaurant kitchens for making large batches. The real problem here, though, is that if you screw this up, there’s no recovery the next morning.

* Looks like they’re doing a warm rise in the kitchen rather than a cold rise overnight in the fridge, which produces more flavor. Or they’re doing two rises and the editing faked me out. It’s not that hard to do that to me.

* Sheldon’s self-description “I’m just a kid that plays the ukulele, came from a small town in Hawaii, started out as a dishwasher.” Also, Scott Brown drives a truck.

* The chefs get their salmon straight off the boat, packed in ice, still intact, with king, sockeye, and chum, at the very least, all available. Given the chefs’ tendency to cook salmon medium-rare if not rare, I’m a little concerned about the anisakis simplex parasite, which loves salmon and can cause some pretty nasty GI reactions as well as triggering anaphylaxis in some people. Other than that, it’s great.

* Sheldon decides to make pea soup for the first time ever even though it’s not his style – why do that? Why take this risk on a dish that, if executed perfectly, will still just be pea soup?

* Josh’s wife is already dilated while he’s working in the kitchen. My wife would have castrated me if I’d tried to travel when she was 8 months pregnant, let alone 9, which she never reached anyway since my daughter came five weeks early. Seriously, though, go home.

* The color of this salmon is absolutely insane – if you like fish, especially cooking it, you’ve got to be going insane with jealousy as you watch this. Lizzie, meanwhile, is doing a beet glaze, which is all about color, not flavor, so she’s going to take this gorgeous red fish and dye it magenta.

* Tom questions Brooke’s decision to poach the fish to order. Searing and holding really risks overcooking it though, and poaching can be quick if you can hold the liquid’s temp. I get this, plus Brooke executes almost every time out. Mostly Tom just likes to freak the front-runners out, I think.

* And we’re at the Gold Creek Salmon Bake. There are bears in the trees. Bears. In the trees. Why is no one concerned about this? Have they never heard of Timothy Treadwell?

* Hugh is back! And Sean sticks around for the elimination challenge, so why is Gail here with four serious chefs (those two, Tom, and Emeril) in the house? (That’s rhetorical, people. I know the answer – both answers, really.)

* To the dishes, starting with Brooke, who does a lightly poached sockeye in seafood broth with mustard-seed caviar and grilled dill sourdough. The broth is really nice with a good amount of acid, although Hugh says the mustard seeds looked weird when they broke down. She nailed the bread, with the dill tying in to the salmon. This reminds me of a place that used to be in central Arlington, Massachusetts, called Blue Plate Express, that did an unbelievable rosemary flatbread, grilled to order. I’ve never had anything quite like it – thicker than a fresh pita, but still clearly a flatbread.

* Sheldon makes a green tea and chive sourdough, then uses both chum and sockeye in his pea soup, which has a king crab, shrimp, and salmon bone base. Padma doesn’t like the green tea and chive together, and Emeril says the bread didn’t have any salt. Everyone says the salmon is too smoky. Sean is offended to see Sheldon mishandle (or manhandle?) the fish with his tongs. He likes the soup, but Hugh thought it was too thick, saying it reminded him of baby food: “Good baby, healthy baby, well-flavored baby.” Hugh, baby food doesn’t actually have babies in it. Some locals are acting like chum is an inferior fish and can’t believe Sheldon used it. Isn’t that the trend now, though – using less-glorified species that are more plentiful or sustainable, just like using the whole animal instead of just certain portions? That’s very much Sheldon’s ethic too.

* Emeril says when Katrina was coming, his chef brought the sourdough home, took it when he evacuated, fed it, and had it ready when they reopened three months later. That’s dedication.

* Josh does a roasted garlic and sourdough soup, sockeye salmon, and black olive croutons. The salmon is well cooked, the soup has a ton of flavor, but the two don’t go together very well, with the garlic overpowering the salmon. I’m just shocked that he didn’t serve it in a bowl made of bacon.

* Lizzie figures that with everyone else doing some kind of soup, she should do something not-soup, instead making sliders on sourdough rolls, with citrus- and beet-glazed salmon sliders with poppy seed butter and red onion and cucumber pickles. The bread is a clear winner, with huge marks from all judges and the locals, but the fish was bland.

* As the judges walk off, apparently into the forest to go foraging, a woman shouts, “Bye Emeril! I love you!” I can just assume they edited out what was hollered at Padma.

* The judging – Lizzie gets big praise for the roll’s crust and for hand-rolling them, and even for nicely cooked salmon, but it just wasn’t seasoned. She writes her own death warrant when she says she didn’t taste it all together, just tasting the components by themselves. I also thought she might have had too much roll vs filling, although if the filling wasn’t seasoned it wouldn’t have mattered. I love fish, but it needs salt just like every other protein does. Sheldon’s bread was just so-so, and the salmon was too smoky, but the fact that he used an ingredient (chum) that the locals typically feed to their dogs may have been his saving grace, even with too much smokiness in the fish itself. They rave about Brooke’s broth more than anything else in her dish. Sean was “crazy about that bread.” Yeast-raised flatbreads are awesome, really. Josh gets big praise from Emeril for bread soup and his use of garlic (shocker); Hugh says the salmon was awesome, but it got lost under the garlic. So Josh executed but the concept wasn’t there. This all seems pretty straightforward so far – Brooke is clearly going to win, and Lizzie or Sheldon will go home.

* Winner, both with judges and “nearly all the locals” the judges spoke with, is Brooke. Green Mountain Coffee is sending her and a guest to Costa Rica. This is her fourth elimination win and sixth win overall. She and Kristen have combined to win (or, in one case, share the crown) eight of the 13 elimination challenges. Besides those two, only Sheldon has multiple elimination wins (2).

* Now the interesting part, the debate over who goes home. Josh had “a balance issue” (per Tom), Lizzie’s was too bland (Tom) and too simple (Sean), while Sheldon didn’t do a great job with either of the key ingredients (Padma). In this discussion, Sheldon comes out the worst, with talk of bitterness in the fish.

* Lizzie ends up eliminated after all. Padma sounds upset as she tells Lizzie to hit the road. Lizzie cooked the least ambitious dish, and then she didn’t taste it, which had to offend the sensibilities of the chefs on the panel. We had a chance for an all-female final with her, Brooke, Kristen, but it wasn’t meant to be.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Both chefs make fish stews. Lizzie’s dish was so good Tom said she would have won the elimination challenge with it, but Kristen wins anyway, of course. Tom took just one bite of Kristen’s and seemed to be laughing to himself over how complex it was. Maybe Lizzie ran into a buzzsaw. I wonder if she’ll win the Save-a-chef contest against CJ now; she’s certainly more likeable and fared better in the main competition.

* New ranking: Kristen, Brooke, Sheldon, Josh. The only elimination that would surprise me next week would be Brooke. Josh seems weaker than Sheldon, but Sheldon’s had execution issues in the last two elimination challenges. Anything other than Kristen vs. Brooke in the finale would be a disappointment, though.

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→ February 5, 2013
→ By

Parker (a.k.a. Flashfire).

The top 100 prospects ranking is out now – you can view the entire list of names or jump right into the top 25 capsules, as well as the ten prospects who just missed the cut. My ranking of all 30 farm systems went up on Monday. I also did a Klawchat today. Wednesday will bring the AL top tens, with the NL on Thursday along with a fresh chat and the finale of the Baseball Today podcast.

—

I’ve mentioned Donald Westlake’s Parker series, written under the pseudonym Richard Stark, twice before, thanks to the series of reissues by the University of Chicago Press and the fact that they keep sending me copies of these books. The latest one to show up in my mailbox was Flashfire, which has been reissued under the title Parker because it’s the loose basis for the movie currently in theaters, starring Jason Statham as the title character and Jennifer Lopez as his romantic foil of sorts.

Based on the Wikipedia description of the film’s plot, it seems like the screenwriters made a number of changes for the worse, attempting to ratchet up both the drama and the romantic tension in ways that violate the spirit of the novel and of the Parker series in general. Westlake’s writing here is sparse, as stark as his pen name implies, a stripped-down version of the more literary noir novels of the Chandler/Hammett cohort, and the plot is straightforward although not exactly simple. The novel begins with a bank heist where Parker is betrayed by his three partners, who keep his share as an “investment” in their next job, a massive jewelry theft planned for Palm Beach. Parker has no choice but to let them leave with his money, instead plotting a slow, thorough revenge on his former mates. The plan ends up intertwining him with a local realtor, Leslie, who starts to figure out that he’s up to something other than just shopping for real estate, which turns out to be critical when Parker is shot by hit men sent after him for reasons not entirely Parker’s fault.

The novel’s main separator for me was the interaction between Parker and Leslie, where Leslie’s interest in him goes from purely opportunistic – he’s her ticket to a better life – to something resembling romantic, while Parker remains all business at all times, and views Leslie as a useful asset but nothing more, even contemplating killing her if she becomes too problematic. The imbalance replaces the generic romantic tension of mass-market detective/mystery novels with a different kind of tension, as two people who need each other try to use each other within the parameters they’ve each set for themselves, one trying not to get too close, the other trying to get just close enough. I’m disappointed to see that the film alters this formula a little bit to try to appeal to a broader audience, which doesn’t seem to have worked anyway; sticking to the book more faithfully might have garnered stronger reviews, bringing in a different but at least more substantial crowd.

The one flaw in the book is Parker surviving the attempt on his life by the hit men due to a highly amusing deus ex machina, a white supremacist militia that might as well have been organized by Joe Arpaio and that happens to be patrolling the area of the Everglades where Parker is shot. For a character who survives and succeeds on his wits in most of the books to live to see another day thanks to a band of idiots happening to be in the right place at the right time is a copout unworthy of the character or of Westlake. Even his decision to get into the car, under duress, with two people likely to try to kill him was questionable; I expected him to make some kind of move rather than submit to near-certain death. I won’t pretend that the Parker novels are great literature, but the plots are always interesting and tightly crafted, so this one plot point was all the more irritating for its relative cheapness. Outside of that, Parker fits the bill for me for plane reading – quick, engrossing, serpentine, yet never pandering or insulting.

Next up: Joe Posnanski’s book on the 1975 Reds, The Machine.

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→ February 2, 2013
→ By

Saturday five, 2/2/13.

As most of you know by now, the ESPN Baseball Today podcast is ending. This Thursday’s episode, February 7th, marks the series finale, and I’ll be on with Eric to talk about my top 100 prospects and to personally strangle every remaining kitten in the studio.

  • The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist. Need I say more?
  • From mental_floss, 50 Collective Nouns to Bolster Your Vocabulary. Most of these have fallen into disuse, but I do have some favorites, like a business of ferrets, an exaltation of larks, a murder of crows, and a chass of Luddites.
  • Guys, sticking your finger in that immersion blender blade’s path while it’s still plugged in is a bad idea, and the New York Times is on it.
  • An amazing and sad story about the late-1970s encounter between Russian geologists and the Siberian family that had had no contact with outsiders for 40 years.
  • Another NYT post, this one on food myths. I include this link not because I agree with it, but because it’s a good example of how the mainstream media often gives you only half the story on food-science questions. She mentions organic farming without discussing its environmental benefits, while hand-waving away the issue of pollutants in farmed salmon.
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→ February 1, 2013
→ By

Top Chef, S10E13.

* So the five remaining chefs are going on a Celebrity Cruise ship bound for Alaska, after which Brooke reveals that she’s afraid of boats. Her four-year-old son recently said he was afraid of boats, so she’s determined to get past it so she doesn’t transfer the fear to her son. I can empathize, even though my issue is more general anxiety and less about specific phobias; our kids learn behaviors from us, and if we behave as if we’re tense, anxious, or afraid, they notice.

* Quickfire: The guest judge Curtis Stone … is not really cute. I don’t get it. Granted, I don’t play for that team, but still, if this is what women think of as good-looking, I really have no clue. Also, the man wears makeup like it’s fondant. Lay off the trowel, Dundee.

* Anyway, it’s a long quickfire, with two hours to cook one-bite dishes highlighting iceberg lettuce for a crowd of 200 guests. Curtis talks about “the texture, the flavor” of iceberg lettuce. What flavor? It tastes like crunchy water. Josh says it’s flavorless and for once I agree with Rollie Fingers.

* Brooke points out that the equipment is all electric, not gas-powered, which never occurred to me. I wonder if any cruise ships have gone to induction burners. Speaking of Heidi:

High on some hill there’s a lonely goatherd waiting for her.

* Stefan actually loves the iceberg lettuce, the only one to say so. He braises it like cabbage and serves with brined pork. Of the judges, he says, “They’re freezing upstairs, probably should have something warm in their mouth.” Can’t wait till next week, when Chef Subtle tells the camera he thinks Padma would really love a giant bite of his engorged sausage.

* Sheldon pickles the lettuce’s core, saying he doesn’t want to waste any part of it. He’s also, you know, doing something clever, which tends to win on this show, especially when no one else does so.

* Everyone’s using bacon or another form of pork. This is how the chefs tell you that iceberg lettuce has no flavor, or just that bacon is awesome. That said, I’d love to see an entire episode of Top Chef where the chefs were prohibited from using bacon – even better, no bacon, no foie gras, and no yuzu.

* The dishes … Stefan: braised iceberg with bacon and pastrami, fingerling potatoes, and a bleu cheese sauce. Bit of a wedge salad reconstructed. Big thumbs up. Sheldon: Vietnamese wrap with pork, shrimp, pickled iceberg hearts, and green mango, wrapped in the lettuce. He did the only really clever thing anyone did with the core ingredient. Lizzie: Iceberg salad with crispy bacon, shallots, and anchovy vinaigrette, like an umami bomb on top of green crunchy-water. It doesn’t get great marks, though, because it’s hard to eat. Josh: Iceberg roll, blanched outer leaves, raw inner leaves, with an apple cider vinaigrette, bacon jam, bleu cheese. Brooke: Bacon with scallop, lettuce, caramelized onion, and crunchy quinoa. This one is also too unwieldy for one bite. If the challenge is one bite, and you can’t eat the item in one bite, shouldn’t you be disqualified?

* Curtis said he absolutely loved all five dishes. Blah, blah, blah, Sheldon wins and gets an advantage in the next challenge. This all could have been more interesting with a better main ingredient, or just a no-bacon rule.

* Sheldon is getting a manicure at the ship’s spa. Josh, tactful as ever, says, “Where I come from, men don’t get manicures,” and then winks at the camera. O AN HE SEXY. Seriously, I don’t care about whether a manicure is masculine or not; I just don’t see the point of wasting that time and money. Sheldon says chefs need to take care of their hands. So buy a nail file, boss.

* Stefan talking about how the first time he “got laid” was on a cruise. He even remembers her name and where they were going, because he’s such a romantic devil. Can’t believe that lucky gal let him slip through her fingers.

* Josh’s wife’s due date is the day of the quickfire and he hasn’t been able to talk to her. Josh, your priorities suck. Go. Home.

* The chefs participate in an extended advert for Qzine, the ship’s on-board restaurant, with menus on tablets and all kinds of wacky plating ideas. No one mentions whether they like the food, though.

* Elimination challenge: Run the next night’s dinner service at Qzine, with an inventive twist on surf and turf. Curtis says the dish (really a concept, two proteins that don’t normally go together) has a bad rap, but that it should work together and be innovative, rather than just steak with shrimp on top. Stefan says the idea seems old, like wedding food from the ’70s; I would have said barmitzvahs and sweet sixteens from the ’80s, but you get the idea. Sheldon gets the first pick of proteins and his choices are off limits for the other four – he can really screw them all up.

* Josh says doing “whimsical, creative, fun food like that is not what I do.” Then maybe you should have gone on Middling Chef, Handleboy.

* At the apartment Stefan is playing mind games with Sheldon, saying he’d pick beef first. Sure enough, it works – Sheldon takes beef tenderloin and lobster tail, both safe as hell and already too hidebound by the traditional definition of the dish.

* Lizzie takes a whole suckling pig and butchers it as easily as you’d slice a loaf of bread. It’s pretty impressive to watch, actually.

* The chefs are in heaven “shopping” in the ship’s enormous below-deck warehouse of ingredients, which is quite impressive, although perhaps not the quality that some of these chefs are used to using. They also have to use the funky dishware that Qzine uses, and have just 2.5 hours to cook.

* Josh wants to make pasta out of the scallops, pureeing them with gelatin and egg whites, but it looks like no flour or other binder. It doesn’t set up, which is the least surprising development since the sun rose this morning, and he still doesn’t think to add a starch, something to soak up the excess liquid. Instead, he scrambles them like eggs, and intends to use … wait for it … bacon. In Oklahoma, even fish are made out of bacon.

* Stefan is doing ravioli with eel in the filling, then pork belly braised in beer. He then roasts it till the skin and edges are crunchy, with Josh trying to steal some of the burnt ends – finally, something I agree with. I’m pretty sure Stefan is the missing third Festrunk brother.

* Padma’s right breast is pratcialy waving to the camera from out of the front of her dress. Or maybe there was a cantaloupe on the table – I’m not really sure.

* The food … Brooke serves a bed of celery root and fennel puree, topped with clarified butter-poached mussels, frog legs in beet glaze, papadums, and a shallot chutney. It’s a big home run, with good flavors and a creative take on the challenge. I swear, some of these chefs must have forgotten to watch the show before coming on it – you win by being inventive. The only flaw here is a very greasy papadum, which probably didn’t even need to be there.

* Tom doesn’t appear to be a fan of the open sea. Come to think of it, neither am I.

* Stefan serves a braised pork belly with beer sauce along side eel and parsnip puree ravioli. The sauce has separated in its flask, so there’s a nice layer of grease right on top of it. And then Tom tries to eat the pork belly. I don’t know if the microphone was attached to his shirt or his uvula, but this was loud, like he was eating a bowl of Quarry. Curtis then tries to argue in favor of crispy pork skin that registers at least 8 on Moh’s scale, but Tom and Hugh aren’t having it.

* Josh serves his scrambled scallops, along with braised pork belly and some bacon for sprinkling. Flavor-wise Tom likes it; Padma says the turf overpowers the surf. Hugh says it’s a leap of faith on Josh’s part to jump to scrambling the scallops, and there’s general praise for inventiveness, even though it looks like the least appetizing cup of cream of wheat imaginable. (Note: Under the best of circumstances, cream of wheat is not appetizing.)

* Sheldon serves a Korean BBQ filet, tempura lobster, “dynamite” sauce, sesame cabbage, kimchi, and teriyaki sauce. This is a big failure; Hugh asks “why do people continually think tempura is a good idea?” The dynamite sauce isn’t explosive. Hugh says the proteins aren’t married; Tom says they’re not even dating. The tempura was soft and no longer hot. At this point, I thought it was no worse than 60/40 that Sheldon would go home – his concept sucked, he didn’t execute, and he had the advantage of choosing his proteins first.

* Lizzie has some trouble with her dish because she tried to steam her cabbage rolls to wilt them, but the steamer wasn’t on or wasn’t operating correctly. She does serve cabbage rolls, stuffed with suckling pig, seared bay scallops, bacon, cracklins, mustard sour cream, and shallot and apple pickles. The cabbage’s undercooking causes the rolls to fall apart and it’s hard for the judges to get everything in one bite.

* The judges’ chatter at the table after service makes it seem like Brooke was the clear leader for doing something new, followed by Josh and Lizzie, with Sheldon and Stefan on the bottom. Hugh also argues for Lizzie as one of the bottom dishes, with Padma asking him point blank if that’s who should go home. She should do this more often, on camera. You say a dish sucked; okay, was it the worst? In that context – one winner, one loser, everyone else just ‘safe’ – then your judgment may differ.

* Judges’ table: Brooke gets mostly praise. Sheldon blames the ingredients, Josie-style, after which Tom asks why he chose them if they weren’t speaking to him. Sheldon can’t answer that to anyone’s satisfaction. He served cold tempura that was soggy and had a spiceless sauce. Hugh says Sheldon imagined surf and turf, but didn’t reimagine it. Curtis says he was scared by Josh’s description but the scramble really worked; Hugh said it was strange, while Tom said Josh was maybe the first person ever to scramble scallops. (He thinks, but doesn’t say, that he hopes Josh is the last as well.) Stefan’s eel disappeared under the parsnips, and the beer sauce separated with a lot of fat on top. Stefan blames time, so Hugh says conceptualize dishes that you can do in the time limit. Curtis calls him out on the overcooked skin, Tom does the face again…

…although Padma doesn’t call him a bullshitter this time. Lizzie’s flavors were good, just didn’t hold together, although Curtis liked the presentation.

* Winning dish: Brooke, of course. She wins a cruise and a week of exposure therapy. Lizzie and Josh are also safe.

* Tom says to the bottom two chefs that “I hate to see either one of you go.” At this point, it’s probably true.

* Stefan is eliminated; I’m surprised given Sheldon’s performance, and I wonder if there was a slight element of career consideration here, as Sheldon’s been in the top three six times, with two wins, versus Stefan’s two times and zero wins. Stefan goes with some very wise comments, about how Top Chef reminds him of the importance of cooking in his life, showing no bitterness or anger. It’s amusing to see someone be such a pig in one area and then quite graceful and mature in another.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Stefan faces “wifey” Kristen in a challenge about cooking offal outdoors in Alaska, although it looks like it wasn’t as cold as it could have been. Kristen’s seared chicken-liver salad beats Stefan’s mixed-offal beuschel, I think primarily on execution. I’m still fully expecting Kristen to run this table, and to see any tie in LCK go to her. Speaking of Kristen, you might enjoy her photo shoot and Q&A with the Improper Bostonian.

* Was it any surprise that Josie earned just 6% against CJ’s 94% in Save a Chef voting? I can’t believe Don King’s support didn’t sway the vote her way; maybe she needed Al Sharpton’s endorsement too.

* The ranking: Kristen still on top; of the four now in Juneau, Brooke is the clear leader for me, followed by Sheldon, Lizzie, and Josh.

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→ January 29, 2013
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Safety Not Guaranteed.

The 2012 indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed takes a famous ad from someone looking for a companion on a time-travel expedition – claiming he’s “only” done it once before – and builds it into a cute, clever story about quirky characters in search of something more than what they’ve gotten out of life, all for different yet interconnected reasons. At about 80 minutes of actual content, it’s briskly paced with smart and witty dialogue, and sets up so well that the ultimate question of whether the time travelers actually travel in time becomes irrelevant. Call it a movie rule: If the story is crafted properly, and the characters are well developed, then the film’s ending doesn’t matter.

(UPDATE: It’s the iTunes $0.99 Movie of the Week as an HD rental. So you really have no excuse.)

Safety stars Aubrey Plaza, better known as April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation, as Darius, a recent college graduate in an unglamorous, unpaid internship for an alternative weekly paper in Seattle. Bored with basically everything life has thrown her and in a persistent depression since her mom died eight years earlier, Darius volunteers to go with the cocky staff writer Jeff to investigate the man behind the time-travel ad (which, in reality, appeared in Backwoods Home magazine in 1997 as a joke by a staff member), with Jeff figuring he’ll get a portrait of a harmless crazy person … except that Jeff really just wants to go hook up with an old girlfriend, with Darius and fellow intern Arnau, the film’s one stock character, doing all of the work.

The man who placed the ad, Kenneth, played by Mark Duplass, turns out to be completely earnest about the endeavor, definitely harmless, mostly a goofball, but also quite real – at home with his weirdness, with one exception I won’t spoil, totally focussed on this time-travel project so he can go back and prevent one thing from happening. He’s living in the present so that he can relive the past, with an intensity that resonates with the aimless Darius, who poses as a potential partner for Kenneth, going through “training” with him while Jeff hooks up with his ex and Arnau … does nothing all day, apparently, because they never finished writing his character.

Duplass’ character should be the centerpiece as the amiable dork whose passion for his project just sucks you into the story, but Plaza owns every scene she’s in, especially the ones she shares with Duplass, where she plays a character within a character, trying to manipulate Kenneth just to the point where he’ll accept her as a potential partner, but never with the contempt Jeff shows in his own abortive attempts to get the gig. Plaza’s character on Parks has morphed from the satiricial I-hate-everything girl to a more nuanced, more conflicted I-hate-that-I-like-things woman (and wife!) who appears to be hiding her inner Darius – a woman looking to just enjoy the present instead of feeling like the time is out of joint. April pretends she’s not sweet; Darius is sweet (but not saccharine) and wants someone, the right someone, to notice it. Kenneth is a little slow on the uptake there, since he is pretty locked in to the whole time-travel thing, but their relationship feels far more organic for how slowly it develops.

Duplass delivers a strong showing as Kenneth, playing the goofball as a serious goofball, not a wacko or a mentally ill or unstable person, just someone who’s looking backwards because what he sees forwards doesn’t give him much hope. Jake Johnson is appropriately annoying as the man-child Jeff, himself still unable to let go of a failed, long-dead relationship, yet aware enough of it that he can counsel Darius and especially Arnau to enjoy their early-20s primes. Both men are having midlife crises that don’t involve buying Porsches (which they can’t afford) or leaving wives (which they don’t have), instead doing, well, other somewhat stupid things, or doing smart things and screwing them up because they haven’t grown up enough yet. Arnau’s subplot is the one thread that comes through as an afterthought, and his best part in the film is his reaction in the final scene.

The conclusion is ambiguous, because Derek Connolly’s script handles the the Kenneth and Darius storyline so well that it doesn’t actually matter whether they get to travel back in time. Connolly even manages to sidestep the myriad reasons why time travel is impossible, simply having Kenneth treat it as real and moving forward from there, with its feasibility tangential to the main plot. He also granted Darius most of the film’s great lines, largely in response to Kenneth’s sincere nuttiness, with their dialogues, unusually thoughtful and long for a contemporary film, making up most of Safety Not Guaranteed‘s best moments. The movie only showed on a few hundred screens last year – I’m not even sure where it played near me, or exactly when – and made just over $4 million at the box office, which is a shame given how sweet and funny it is, without ever talking down to us (except with Arnau, a little). Perhaps it’s Aubrey Plaza’s curse to star in great vehicles that mainstream audiences just don’t watch.

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→ January 28, 2013
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Gravity’s Rainbow.

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is #23 on Daniel Burt’s Novel 100 and is part of the TIME 100, as well as holding the distinction of being the only book recommended by the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction committeee yet rejected by the Pulitzer Board. It is a transgressive novel, drenched in paranoia, replete with esoteric knowledge of fields from engineering to calculus to military history, with detours into magical realism and Beckett-esque absurdity.

Also, it sucks.

I don’t mean sucks in the sense that mass-market paperback pablum like James Patterson or Janet Evanovich might suck. Gravity’s Rainbow isn’t cookie-cutter or cliched, it doesn’t lack imagination, it is in no way predictable, and it is incredibly ambitious. It is also one of the least enjoyable reading experiences I have ever had. It is difficult to the point of obtuseness, it is repulsive without meaning, it is largely unfunny despite a clear intent to be humorous, and parts of it are painfully misogynistic.

To the extent that Gravity’s Rainbow has a plot, here it is: It’s World War II and the Allies are trying to predict where the German V-2 rockets aimed at London are likely to land. They discover that American Tyrone Slothrop, conditioned from birth in a Pavlovian process similar to the Little Albert experiment, can predict the landing spot of the next rocket due to a peculiar case of hysteron proteron paraphilia: The rockets hit in places where he’s recently had sex. If it’s hard to fathom how that thread can turn into a 776-page opus, fear not, as Pynchon shows great capacity to craft new characters (and discard them just as quickly) and sent Slothrop and the other semi-central actors in the book on various wild goose chases across Europe, frequently involving explicit descriptions of sex, often on the deviant side of the ledger. What Pynchon really needed here was an editor, but in all likelihood, the editor knowledgeable enough to tackle this book didn’t exist.

If you’ve read, or are at least familiar with, Joyce’s Ulysses, imagine a book of that scope and with a similar multitude of allusions, but designed to express modern paranoia in all its forms, from fear of military (and soon nuclear) annihilation to fear of government intrusion to fear of mortality to fear that we lack free will for reasons metaphysical or genetic. It’s all in here, somewhere, if you can find it; I’d be shocked if Pynchon wasn’t a major inspiration for later paranoiac writers like Gibson (Neuromancer), Dick (Ubik) or Stephenson (Snow Crash), and perhaps even Jasper Fforde, who mines dystopian alternate realities for laughs in the Thursday Next series and in Shades of Grey. But unlike those books, accessible for all their erudition, Gravity’s Rainbow is work, work to follow his prose, work to follow the nonlinear plot, and work to follow the references. It’s no wonder most reviews I’ve found of the book, including Burt’s, refer to it as a book with a very high owned-to-finished ratio.

One of the Pulitzer committee’s main objections to Gravity’s Rainbow was its vulgarity, and the book is, in relative terms, pretty filthy, with unstinting descriptions of sado-masochism, incest, rape, coprophilia, and … well, there doesn’t really need to be anything beyond that. Pynchon’s obsession with the functions bodily accentuates the male-ness of the book and narrative but highlights the fact that women in this book are largely there to have sex with the men. There are only two female characters of any depth beyond a few lines. One is Katje, a triple-agent who’s there to seduce Slothrop. The other, Jessica Swanlake (Pynchon loves funny names, but usually just violates Ebert’s First Rule of Funny Names), is there to have sex with Roger Mexico even though he knows she will betray him in the end and return to her fiancee, making her faithless in two relationships. Even the prepubescent Bianca/Ilse character, who might be two different girls, is a temptress, sexually mature beyond her physical development, and available to the adult men in the book, without any indication of approbation from other characters or the omniscient narrator. The term misogyny is frequently used now simply to mean bias against women, or imbalanced treatment, but the word’s original sense, hatred of women, applies as strongly here as in any book I can remember.

If there’s something to praise in Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s in Pynchon’s subversion of the novel’s form. Circular or other nonlinear plots can be entertaining even before we consider their literary purpose. Confusing the reader a little is fine, often part of the pleasure of reading a complex book, as long as there’s some kind of payoff in the end. Pynchon’s ambition here seems unbounded, but boundaries can be as helpful as deadlines, because sometimes you just have to pull back a little to get the thing done. The book is ‘finished,’ in that Pynchon actually completed the manuscript and filed it, giving the book an actual Ending, but it feels incomplete, not least because so many plot strands wither and die without any kind of resolution.

One coincidence that made my reading of Gravity’s Rainbow a little better: I had never heard of the genocide of the Herero people in what is now Namibia by the Germans in 1904-06 before reading about it in the book I read right before this, King Leopold’s Ghost. The Hereros figure prominently here as well, as some Hereros who fought with the Germans against their own people ended up fighting again for the Germans in World War II, with one character, Oberst Enzian (his name a slight pun on gentian), earning a fair amount of screen time. Pynchon alludes to the irony of the members of a tribe nearly wiped out by the Germans fighting for that country in its attempt to wipe out another people in a much broader, more efficient attempt at genocide.

If you’d like a similar take on the book, but with more f-bombs, the Uncyclopedia entry on Gravity’s Rainbow echoes many of my thoughts on the book, including the three-bullet summary at the top. If hating it brings me in for criticism from “pretentious, elitist snobs,” so be it.

Next up: The University of Chicago Press was kind enough to send me a copy of Richard Stark’s Parker, originally published as Flashfire and the basis for the Jason Statham/Jennifer Lopez film in theaters now.

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→ January 27, 2013
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Life of Pi.

Yann Martel’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi was 97th on the last ranking I did of my top 100 novels, a brilliant book that employs multiple literary techniques to tell a story that may or not be a powerful fable, or a commentary on the enduring nature of faith, or a testament to our capacity to handle tragedy and face unimaginable adversity. Or maybe none of the above. It also seemed like the story itself was written to be adapted into a movie, yet its details would make it almost impossible to film.

Computer graphics software has advanced so quickly in the ten years since the book was released that Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) managed not just to film the book, but to do so without making any major modifications to or sacrifices from the original text. The film is wonderful because the book is wonderful; the film is gorgeous because of Lee, and because of technology, but it’s a great film because of the strength of the underlying story and the performance of Suraj Sharma, who plays the teenaged Pi.

The story of Pi, born Piscine Molitor Patel, begins in Pondicherry, India, where his father runs the local zoo, as a business rather than for any affection for the animals. Pi’s given name causes him obvious problems at school, after which he adopts the nickname “Pi” while also developing an affinity for the number itself. The same exploratory spirit leads Pi, raised in the Hindu tradition by his mother, to also follow Christianity and Islam, something given longer treatment in the book, with more humor involved as well; in the film, it’s primarily a source of strife between Pi and his secular father. Pi and his father also clash over the zoo’s recent acquisition, a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, which Pi views as a fellow creature with a soul but Pi’s father sees as a soulless carnivore that would eat Pi as soon as look at him.

When economic and political circumstances in India change, Pi’s father decides to sell the zoo’s animals to North American zoos and move the family to Canada, booking passage for all of them on a Japanese freighter across the Pacific. In a massive thunderstorm, the freighter sinks, leaving Pi alone on a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and Richard Parker, beginning a 227-day odyssey of survival on the ocean where Richard Parker, having dispatched the other three non-human passengers on their modest vessel, and Pi eventually come to a detente, albeit one where Pi does all the work in exchange for what may be a tacit agreement that Richard Parker will not eat him. They eventually encounter a mysterious floating island before eventually hitting the shore of Mexico, after which Pi tells his story to the Japanese insurance company investigators who want to know why the ship sank.

The film’s biggest change from the book is a narrative device that has the adult Pi telling his life story to an unnamed writer who was sent to Pi by Pi’s uncle, who said that the writer would hear a story that would make him believe in God. Pi is lightly dismissive of the promise, but tells his story just the same, with quite limited narration overall, as Lee lets the bulk of the story on the lifeboat unfold on its own.

That decision means that Sharma must carry a large portion of the film by himself, with no interaction with another human (and, to be fair, not even with another creature, as nearly all of the tiger’s scenes involve a CG version, not a real feline). His performance is remarkable as he must convince us he’s resourceful, terrified, grieving, and devious, without the benefit of real dialogue, although Pi does attempt to engage Richard Parker in conversation on a few occasions. The only real help Sharma receives is from the stunning visuals in the film, mostly wide shots of the open ocean, as well as two significant storms and the aforementioned island that stands as one of the most incredible aspects of Pi’s story. I saw Life of Pi in 3-D, which usually seems to me as more gimmicky than useful, but Lee made excellent use of it to convey Pi’s isolation on the open water or the sheer size of the sinking freighter, only engaging in a little special effects-turbation as he does when a whale flips over Pi’s boat (which was actually pretty cool, just not entirely necessary).

The film ends with a twist as the adult Pi concludes his story, one taken directly from the book as well that casts some doubt on what Pi’s tale actually means, and what Martel may have been trying to tell us, if anything at all. I thought the novel was a touch more ambiguous, but the film’s conclusion has the same effect of opening up a panoply of questions not just about what’s in the film, but about the nature of faith, of human psychology, of evil, and the nature of truth. Pi is a classic, if flawed, hero, whose emotional maturation over the 227 days sits in inverse proportion to his physical deterioration due to exposure and malnutrition. He speaks to the Writer, and the audience, with the wisdom of a teacher, but a teacher who is wise from experience, not just because he has a foreign accent. Lee’s use of this device to replace the first-person narration of the book might be the best decision he made on the film, one of many good choices from casting to effects to angles that bring us into the lifeboat between man and tiger that make his work here as good as any director’s in 2012 except Kathryn Bigelow’s for Zero Dark Thirty.

If you haven’t read Life of Pi, I’d recommend doing that before or after seeing the film, as it’s a quick and totally engrossing read that gives a little more depth to portion of the story that comes before the lifeboat, and also spends more time following Pi’s survival planning in his first few weeks alone. The film may have dragged for me in the middle just because I knew almost everything that was to come, but I still enjoyed the craftsmanship in it, including Sharma’s performance.

This is the sixth Best Picture nominee I’ve seen, and I’d place it clearly behind Zero Dark Thirty but comfortably above Silver Linings Playbook (fifth) and Beasts of the Southern Wild (last). I’d also favor Lee over the directors of those latter two films for Best Director, but haven’t seen Lincoln (yet) or Amour (might skip that one entirely). Life of Pi will probably crush a few of the technical awards, but the absence of Sharma from the Best Actor category is disappointing, given how strong his work was and how much the film depended on him to perform at that level. I’ve only seen one of the five films represented in the Best Actor category, though, so I can’t say whether he was jobbed or just squeezed out in a strong year.

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→ January 24, 2013
→ By

Top Chef, S10E12.

I broke down the Justin Upton trade today for Insiders, and I did a Klawchat as well.

Top Chef: The Aftermath. We begin in the house where Brooke says that she would have said something if she thought there was any chance Kristen would be sent home … which I ain’t buying. She was in the room for the judging and never said anything, not even after they sent Kristen home (which would have been a good time to say something, too). Maybe Brooke figured seeing the strongest competitor sent home wasn’t a bad thing. Maybe she didn’t want to talk back to the judges. But she couldn’t have stood there and thought Kristen was completely safe.

Then Josie is tearfully defending herself to Lizzie, who has “STFU” tattooed on her forehead for the entire conversation. Or whatever they say instead of “STFU” in South Africa.

* Quickfire: Create a sushi dish to impress Katsuya Uechi, master sushi chef. He says, mystically, “Don’t touch too much, don’t mix up too much ingredients … make people happy.” It sounds like an empty plate that with positive qi would be a better dish than some raw fish and rice. Immunity is off the table, but the winner gets $5K.

* Josh says he doesn’t crave sushi like bacon, and he’s making some weird sushi breakfast sandwich thing that Stefan calls “so fucking dumb.” I love sushi, but bacon really checks all the boxes.

* Stefan is the only chef we see smelling the fish on the table, which is smart, especially after Lizzie nearly got sent home for serving scallops that were off.

* Josie has done parties where they served sushi on naked women, saying “it’s kind of fun.” If by fun you mean horribly degrading, then yes, I agree.

* Lizzie says sushi is “an art, it’s not my art,” except it sounds a million times better when she says it.

* Sheldon says he doesn’t “do sushi that much,” going sashimi, lemon charcoal – grilled, blended, turned into powder.

* The dishes … Stefan: Yellowtail with grilled shiitake and mustard, and raw lobster with seaweed and unagi. Josie: halibut with yuzu and bacon aioli. Not enough punch for Katsuya. Lizzie: Lobster soup, micro greens, pickle ginger, yuzu sake broth, fresh ginger. Could have had rice underneath. Brooke: Octopus, yuzu, fresh wasabi, sliced shiso, EVOO. Josh: Tempura bacon, omelette, salmon belly, yuzu-koshu aioli, sandwiched between two bricks of rice. Sheldon: hamachi sashimi, fresh ponzu, mitsuba, lemon charcoal – grilled the lemons then ground the charred peel into a powder. Katsuya approves: “Burning lemon? That’s interesting.”

* Lizzie and Josh are on the bottom, neither of which is a surprise. Brooke and Stefan are on top, with Stefan the winner, his first win of any kind this season. Wikipedia says Stefan served as a judge on the Finnish version of Top Chef. Am I the only one who’d watch international versions of the show if they were subtitled in English? They’ve done two seasons of an “Arab World” edition, which would probably be fascinating, and I’d love to see the Portuguese version (bacalao ice cream!) too.

* Elimination challenge: Make fried chicken for an all-star collection of chefs, including Tom, Emeril, Wolfgang, Michelle Bernstein, David Chang, and the guys from LA’s Animal and Son of a Gun, who love fried chicken. Dinner is that night, so there’s not much time to prep or marinate the chicken.

* Stefan, discussing what I thought was chicken: “I like breasts a lot … you can hold on to the thighs much better.” Subtle.

* Josh says “danger zone” for no apparent reason, so I’ll assume that’s an Archer reference.

* Josie is talking all kinds of smack, saying she’s “got this one in the bag” because she’s from the south. Josh points out, correctly, that south Florida isn’t actually the South. Burn.

* Tom makes a crack about Wolfgang opening a chain of fried-chicken restaurants called “Wolfgang Cluck.” I’m not sure how the General will like the competition. Any last words, Clucky?

* Brooke’s plan is to remove the skins, fry them, and use them (ground, I assume) in the breading. Then she doesn’t have time to fry the skins, which I don’t get, since they should cook in a flash in the hot oil.

* Lizzie talks about wanting her mom to buy “one of those tubs” of fried chicken when she was a kid. If she had, she might never have come to the U.S. in the first place for fear she’d starve to death.

* So … I actually like fried chicken a lot, but rarely make it at home because it’s a big mess to do it right, usually in shortening in a big cast-iron skillet, frying at a relatively low temperature for about 45 minutes in total, with oil spattering everywhere. But I’ll order it when I’m out at any place that seems to do it right: Crispy exterior, so much so that it cracks or shatters as you bite into it, but that won’t slide off the meat itself. And dark meat, please.

* Service. Josie, who was sent home last time around by Michelle Bernstein, does a “southern style” chicken with black garlic, cayenne, and rice flour, along with a daikon salad. The judges then mock her for fake-south nonsense by serving on a banana leaf, with the chicken too oily and greasy and the breading underseasoned. Michelle says “I had to put it down … I just, I can’t.” We might all finally get our wish here, people.

* Sheldon does it two ways, umami-style legs (brined with bacon, shiitakes, and bonito, then dipped in a buttermilk-konbu mixture before it’s breaded) and Momofuku-style wings, although he has to toss the first batch of wings because they cooked too quickly on the outside. Everyone loves what he served and his out of the box thinking, but they complain that he didn’t serve enough. Pretty ballsy to serve “Momofuku-style wings” to the chef from Momofuku.

* Lizzie does a fried chicken breast with coriander, black pepper, and brown sugar rub, with a side of cabbage and pickled peach slaw. Judges like the flavor, but call it “shake and bake” (which it does, unfortunately, resemble), and Tom says it’s just not fried chicken.

* Stefan does chicken cordon bleu with garlic aioli. It sucks. I hate chicken cordon bleu anyway.

* Josh smokes his chicken first, then fries it and serves it with hot sauce and blue cheese. Tom loves the concept, so even though it’s not that crispy – was it breaded at all? – it gets the highest marks.

* Brooke does a dukkah-crusted chicken breasts on a bed of wilted escarole and tomato salad. She cooked the chicken too early, then refries it to serve, which is a terrible idea that produces terrible results. Wolfgang says it’s not Top Chef, and he “wouldn’t even call it the apprentice.” The Animal guys also reveal that Brooke interviewed them years earlier for a job at one of her restaurants but turned them down. Isn’t that a bit unfair to tell her now? Great for the cameras, but why not just kick her in the stomach while you’re at it?

* The chefs from LA only served breasts. Wolfgang says “it’s LA, plastic surgery everywhere.” Someone needs to point out that chicken breasts are, in a rather significant reversal, the least interesting part of the bird.

* Top three: Josh, Sheldon, Lizzie. Lizzie fried hers really well, producing a crispy crust that wasn’t greasy; it wasn’t truly fried chicken, but when says she’s not so familiar with it Padma jumps in with a “That’s fair.” That’s significant when we get to the bottom three. David Chang says Josh’s was a clever take on a traditional recipe. Sheldon’s two types, one savory one sweet, also get high marks, with the only criticism that there wasn’t enough of it. Josh wins over Sheldon in what I think was a mild upset, and I’m not sure what we didn’t hear that would back that up.

* My wife, on Josh: “Can I cut his mustache off in his sleep?” Not sure why she’d be sleeping with him, but maybe I can give Padma a call now.

* Bottom: Brooke, yeah, whatever, no way she’s going home. Then we get The Josie Show: She blames the fryer, she blames the clock, but never blames herself. Tom closes his eyes, puts two fingers on his forehead, and makes the “You have got to be shitting me” face. (We need a GIF of this.) Then he starts mocking her for running out of time and nails her for “wasting time.” She argues with him and says everyone (that is, her competitors) who tasted it said it was “delicious,” after which Tom says that clearly the judges were the idiots here. He looks at Josie like she’s the bad penny of Top Chef. Hey, you could have sent her home last week, pal. This one is your own fault.

* Stefan then says fried chicken isn’t “European,” so Wolfgang, who is European, says fried chicken is a classic Austrian dish. Tom calls cordon bleu a “bad banquets” dish and Emeril says it wasn’t even good chicken cordon bleu. He has the best line later, when Padma asks when anyone had seen the dish on a menu, saying “I had it two flights ago.”

* So the three chefs leave the room and Padma says, “such a bullshitter, such a bullshitter!” except that I wasn’t sure if she meant Stefan or Josie. Turns out she meant Stefan, who she says was lying about not knowing about fried chicken. My wife’s response: “If they’re gonna start sending people home for lyin’, there ain’t gonna be nobody left.”

* Josie is eliminated. Josh speaks for all of us when he says, “Thank God the Josie Show has been cancelled.” The fact that she even reached the top 6 is insulting; she won one Quickfire, never won an elimination challenge, and finished in the bottom seven times in eleven episodes, avoiding elimination in week 3 because she had immunity. I watch Top Chef for one reason more than any other – to see the food. I like watching the process, and I like getting ideas from their innovations. Every week Josie was on instead of someone more imaginative made the show worse. Don’t let the kitchen door hit you on the way out.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Kristen wins the grudge match, which was very satisfying to watch. Leave it to Josie to screw up and start making more excuses.

* Rankings: Again, Kristen remains the favorite. Of the five still in the big house, from top to bottom: Brooke, Sheldon, Lizzie, Stefan, Josh. I’d be happy with a final three of Kristen, Brooke, and Sheldon, although Kristen has to run the table to make that possible.

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→ January 23, 2013
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Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

This year’s top 100 prospects package will be posted the week of February 4th. It’ll begin Tuesday the 5th with the org rankings, followed by the top 100 itself on the 6th, and then org top tens on the 7th and 8th.

The sweet if lightweight romantic comedy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was nominated for three Golden Globes, one for best comedy/musical film, and one each for its stars, Ewan Macgregor and Emily Blunt, all worthy choices given how bad most comedies, especially romantic ones, tend to be. Salmon Fishing takes a fantastical story as a way to bring its two characters together in a way that might not be entirely believable but at least doesn’t talk down to its audience and delivers a few moments of brilliantly funny dialogue along the way.

The entire premise of the film is a bit absurd – as the title indicates, a wealthy Yemeni sheik (Amr Waked) with a passion for fly-fishing has decided to embark on a project to build a river in his desert country, stock it with salmon, and popularize the sport while also providing a foundation for agriculture in the inhospitable hinterlands. (There’s a lot more to this idea than the film describes: Yemen needs new economic drivers due to imminent depletion of its oil reserves, but at the same time, groundwater supplies are also disappearing, making this project infeasible in reality.) For political reasons, the British government is keen to help the sheik by providing its expertise, which connects the sheik’s investment adviser Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Blunt) with the peevish fisheries expert Dr. Fred Jones (Ewan Macgregor). The two fail to hit it off right away, but rather than providing a cliched story about differing personalities clashing, the script makes their initial disconnect strictly topical: He can’t get past the ridiculousness of the idea, while she, realizing the same, has to move ahead with it anyway because it’s her job to do so and the Crown is making it clear that she has no choice in the matter. The romance that develops seems less forced as a result, even if there’s a bit of a leap from the development of their working relationship to actual love – although if you put me in the same room with Emily Blunt for a few minutes, I’d probably fall in love with her too.

The complication – and, of course, there must be one – is that neither character is exactly unattached. Dr. Jones (the simple man with the simple name) is married, not exactly unhappily but far from happily, while Ms. Chetwode-Talbot (the more nuanced character) has a new boyfriend who’s just been deployed to Afghanistan and, early on in the film, is declared missing in action. Nothing that develops on either side is terribly surprising; it’s a romantic comedy and those roads tend to all lead to the same destination. Salmon Fishing surmounts the obstacles of its genre primarily through the subtle changes in its two main characters, and the excellent performances behind them.

Everyone else in the film is just a prop, however. Sheiks, sultans, and other wealthy Arab characters in films are nearly always dissolute wastrels, burning their oil fortunes on material goods and women, or Westernized sages who appear to have come down from the mountaintops with the wisdom of centuries. Our sheik here comes from the latter group, but has virtually no story of his own, and the opposition of local Islamists is a plot device rather than a serious subject to at least be discussed a little more seriously by the central characters behind the fishing scheme. Kristin-Scott Thomas has some great lines, including by far the funniest bit in the film (involving her son’s hooded sweatshirt), as the Crown’s head PR person, a no-nonsense power-broker always looking for an angle to sell and showing no indication of any kind of consience or even emotion underneath her shrill exterior. Aside from her few good one-liners, the film drags when neither Macgregor nor Blunt is on-screen.

Salmon Fishing does hint at some of the environmental and ethical concerns around overfishing, salmon farming, and water usage, never seriously but enough that the script can’t be accused of ignoring the subjects, although I was more shocked to see the fish-loving Dr. Jones feeding bread to the koi in his backyard pond. (Not only is it nutritionally useless, but koi aren’t exactly big bread-bakers and have no ability to properly digest gluten.) I wouldn’t ask too much more of a light-hearted romance – it’s nice to see these subjects mentioned, but the goal is to bring these two characters together without insulting our intelligence along the way, which Salmon Fishing does reasonably well. And if you disagree, well, looking at Emily Blunt isn’t the worst use I’ll find for two hours this week.

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