→ January 20, 2013
→ By

Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Beasts Of The Southern Wild was one of two surprises among the nine Best Picture nominees – Amour was the other, since foreign-language films rarely show up outside of their Best Foreign-Language Film ghetto – and the only one that was already gone from theaters and available for home viewing when the nominees were announced. It’s a low-budget film set in the Louisiana Bayou and relied on locals in both the crew and the cast, giving the performances an authenticity that carries a ho-hum storyline to the level where it might be mentioned among the year’s best films.

Beasts follows the adorable five-year-old Hushpuppy (played by nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, now the youngest-ever Best Actress nominee, and the actress whose dress I am most interested in seeing), resident of an impoverished Bayou settlement called the Bathtub, along with her ailing, ill-tempered father Wink (Dwight Henry, a baker with no prior acting experience) and a handful of local eccentrics. The town is cut off from the rest of the region by a levee, although the residents seem to share the laissez les bon temps rouler philosophy of greater New Orleans. Climate change threatens the Bathtub’s very existence, which the local and unconventional schoolteacher Bathsheba (Gina Montana, also an amateur) explains to the children in terms of Aurochs, giant boar-like creatures who have been trapped in the Earth’s icecaps for centuries but who will be freed as the ice melts. When Wink’s situation and that of the Bathtub both take turns for the worse, Hushpuppy and her friends take off on a raft to try to find her long-absent mother.

The casting decisions, including giving three of the biggest roles to amateurs, absolutely made this film, as the plot, which relies on some magical realism but probably could have gone farther in that regard, is actually pretty slight. Wallis’ performance is pretty mind-blowing given her age, although her tiny stature also gives you the impression that you’re watching an actual five-year-old deliver these lines and scream and burp on command. I was even more shocked by Henry’s performance once I read that he wasn’t a professional actor – his role demands a broad range of emotions and the ability to switch between them with very little transition, and his determination to keep Hushpuppy away from the obvious consequences of his illness for as long as possible conveys such a deep affection that it seems hard to believe it’s not real. (Then again, I’m imagining the whole cast and crew fell in love with Wallis after a few days.) Even Montana shines as the one discordant note in the community, talking in apocalyptic (and prescient) terms while she shares a giant beer-and-shellfish feast with her neighbors.

Unfortunately, the story seemed a little half-baked, or maybe three-quarters-baked, and while some people (like my wife) like their chocolate chip cookies pulled from the oven when the center is still a little on the gooey side, I prefer mine fully cooked. We don’t get a lot of character development beyond Hushpuppy, and the main internal conflicts aren’t resolved. The (mostly white) authorities who forcibly evacuate the Bathtub at one point are stock villains, more than a little unfair to people who were probably largely volunteers or just underpaid in reality. Beasts‘ plot doesn’t make enough use of the Aurochs or any of the magical realism potential unlocked by Bathsheba’s preaching, but it doesn’t dwell quite enough on the serious aspects of anything that goes on in the film, even Wink’s illness. If this was intended to make a broad statement about the impact of climate change, I don’t think it went far enough. The kids’ quest for Hushpuppy’s mama is a beautiful sequence, a short story that could almost stand on its own, but the rest of the plot tended to drift rather than find itself propelled by its own energy.

The film’s nomination for Best Picture seems like a stretch to me, although the only films I’ve seen other than this one that might have been worthy, Looper and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, weren’t obviously better, and either one could have dropped into the unused tenth nomination slot. (Looper absolutely deserved a Best Original Screenplay nod, though.) The absurd nomination among the four that Beasts earned was the Best Director nod for Benh Zeitlin over, among others, Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow, which I can only assume was politically motivated. Zero Dark Thirty was far more ambitious and more difficult to craft, including the intense final scene in the Abbottabad house, thus far the single best segment of any 2012 movie I’ve seen. For Bigelow to end up on the outside while Zeitlin got a nod is … peculiar, to say the least.

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→ January 19, 2013
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King Leopold’s Ghost.

A quick baseball note: Earl Weaver passed away last night at the age of 82. Weaver hadn’t been active in the game in over two decades, but his work as the Orioles’ manager made him a legend not just for his colorful language but for his thinking about in-game strategy, which presaged a lot of what is now called “Moneyball” thinking in an era before computers, spreadsheets, and mothers’ basements. His book Weaver on Strategy is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to learn about a more rational approach to managing; the book discusses the use of statistics, the uselessness of the bunt, the benefits of platooning, and more such topics strictly through logical arguments rather than with heavy math.

—

Adam Hochschild’s 1998 non-fiction work King Leopold’s Ghost tells the unsavory story of the rape of the Congo by the monarch of the book’s title, a megalomaniacal autocrat who manipulated and schemed his way into one-man rule of a giant and resource-rich plot of land in the heart of a continent he never visited. The book itself focuses on the time from Leopold’s first attempts to gain a colony for himself to the eventual handoff of the territory to the Belgian state, but the effects of his misrule and the marginally better rule of the Belgians continue to plague what is in effect a fake-country today.

Leopold was obsessed with finding a colony to rule, partly out of ego, partly out of fear that tiny Belgium would be left at an economic disadvantage (as their equally small neighbors the Netherlands established colonies across Asia), and partly out of greed. His impact on the land he ended up ruling was awful, but he was a master diplomat in his era, buying influence, wheedling concessions, and financing large expeditions, some led by Lord Stanley, up the Congo River to explore and claim territory for himself. That territory was first titled, Soviet-style, as “The Free State of Congo,” even though it was about as free as a man in concrete shoes, and later became the Belgian Congo and then Zaire, the title by which I’ll probably always think of it. (It was so easy to remember the geography of that part of Africa, as the world’s only three countries that start with Z were located there, adjacent north to south in alphabetical order: Zaire, Zambia, Zimbabwe.) Leopold established a brutal system of colonial rule that relied very heavy on forced labor – outright slavery as well as punitive labor systems that created virtual slavery through enormous production quotas, hostage-taking, and cutting off hands – and made the territory the world’s main producer of natural rubber at a time when demand for the resource was growing due to the invention of motor vehicles.

The extent of slavery and its inherent violence ended up a cause celebre around the world, even though similar systems existed on smaller scales in French and English territories in Africa, with the movement to end the oppression of the Congo’s native tribes led by an English journalist-activist named E.D. Morel and two black Americans who visited the Congo, the historian George Washington Williams and the preacher William Sheppard, and saw the the brutality up close. After setting the scene by detailing Leopold’s takeover of the Congo, Hochschild spends the heart of his book explaining the rise and modest successes of one of the world’s first truly international protest movements, aimed at embarrassing Leopold into instituting reforms. Leopold fought back, often playing quite dirty in the process, but did eventually sell the colony at an exorbitant cost to Belgium, which didn’t do a whole lot better as colonial rulers.

The biggest problem with the country known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, something Hochschild doesn’t spend enough time exploring, is that it remains a fabrication of the Belgian king who created it: The territories aren’t based on tribes, languages, or even historical entities, but on the treaties Leopold signed to craft his territory. Much as the Versailled-created nation of Yugoslavia (originally and comically known as “The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes,” as if they were all citrus fruits you could stash in the same crisper) collapsed once autocracy there failed, the DR Congo has been torn apart by civil wars, coups, famines, and genocides since the Belgians left – not that it was any better while they were in charge – and the United States helped assassinate the country’s first ruler, the democratically-elected Patrice Lumumba. Wikipedia – which is never wrong – says that there are an estimated 242 different languages spoken within the DR Congo’s borders, now, including four “national” languages, all of the Bantu family, the distribution of which gives you some idea of how fraudulent the country’s borders seem today. Yet breaking the country apart poses enormous problems of resource management, with the eastern province of Kivu providing over 10% of the world’s supply of the ore coltan, the central provice of Kasai-Oriental providing 10% of the world’s diamonds by weight, and the southern province of Katanga has the world’s second-largest reserve of copper and might have a third of the world’s supply of cobalt. (All data also from Wikipedia.) The country has just one direct outlet to the sea, at the Congo River delta into the south Atlantic Ocean, so dismembering the country would create economic discrepancies across the new nations while just one of these subcountries would control the only international trade route that didn’t involve crossing a border. It is no wonder that the country has been racked by conflicts for a half-century, with the only respite coming during the reign of the dictator-thief Mobute Sese Seko. (No, not this guy.)

Hochschild does a fair job of sourcing his material, although the lack of inline citations is a slight negative, and he points out several times that most of what we know of Leopold’s rule actually comes from white/European sources, since the conquered African tribes either didn’t have effective writing systems or just didn’t have the way to put that writing in a form that would survive. Slaves or forced laborers seldom had avenues to describe their experiences unless they escaped from servitude. Hochschild paints a bleak picture to begin with, but it’s likely that the brutality was more widespread than he states and the death toll, estimated at around 10 million, could easily be higher. It’s a shocking and largely forgotten story of white exploitation of Africa, but given the constant instability in the region – including further genocides and the use of rape as a weapon of terror – it’s important that we understand our own contributions to the area’s problems. In a week where Lance Armstrong and Manti Te’o each garnered about a hundred times the ink of the conflict in Mali, however, I suppose that’s wishful thinking.

Next up: I am making extremely slow progress through Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow; through 200 pages, I can say that the book makes almost no sense to me.

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→ January 17, 2013
→ By

Top Chef, S10E11.

My breakdown of yesterday’s three-team deal involving Michael Morse and John Jaso is up for Insiders.

Usually I don’t discuss a Top Chef episode’s elimination until the end of the post, sticking to the chronological order of the notes I took while watching the show in real-time (well, DVR real-time). This time, however, a few reader tweets spoiled the ending for me before I’d even started watching, and so I had a pretty skeptical eye going from the start. Nothing happened in the episode to change my mind, not even Tom’s after-the-fact post explaining how they had “no choice” but to send Kristen home. Not only do I disagree with him, which I’ll discuss below when I get to judges’ table, but, for the first time, I think viewers who are questioning whether the judges’ decision was truly independent of the producers’ input have valid reasons for their doubts, not just the kind of tin-foil-hat thinking that I may joke about but haven’t really taken seriously.

* Stefan says Restaurant Wars is always a shitshow. He’s not wrong, although it turns out that this year’s edition was a shitshow for entirely different reasons than previous years’ versions. He ends up handling front of house duties for Team Sheldon, which seems like a good fit since he’s kind of a schmoozer by nature.

* The biggest twist: there are no kitchens. The chefs must build them from scratch, outside in the open courtyard area between the two dining rooms.

* Josie really not getting along with anyone. I may have just copied and pasted this from every previous recap.

* Stefan is shopping for flowers. Who cares? I don’t think it’s “gay” as Stefan said; I just think it’s a waste of time, especially when you’re a man down compared to the other team. Also, a lot of idiots would say cooking for a living or for pleasure is “gay” too, so, you know, maybe not using that word would be good.

* Stefan and Josh are at least saying the right things about working with a cuisine they are completely unfamiliar with, even though Josie would already be preparing her excuses for why her version of someone else’s menu didn’t work.

* Kristen says her menu is “ambitious,” and is inspired by when she watched French cooking shows when she was five and would try to mimic whatever the chefs were doing on screen. When I was five I was still watching Write On and Read All About It!. Then again, I’m a writer, so maybe this all makes sense now.

* Josie talks about roasting her bones on the day before, then never does it, even though Kristen asks her to do so more than once. This is known in the business as “foreshadowing.” Roasting bones isn’t exactly hard, you know; you oil them and stick them in the oven for an hour, more or less. Failing to do that is just laziness.

* Josie wants to preplate at least some of the items, including the fish for her bouillabaisse. Kristen wants to prepare everything to order. Josie thinks that can’t work for so many people. Josh predicts cooking fish to order will sink them, but I think cooking fish before the fact is pretty much the worst idea ever. Some things can be prepared the day before. Fish ain’t one of them, unless you like chewing on old tires.

* Other than Josie being Josie, Kristen’s team looks quite organized, and the other three chefs are getting along fairly well. Kristen might be micromanaging a little bit, saying she wants to “touch” every plate that goes out, but she views this as taking responsibility – and the judges wouldn’t hesitate to slam a team leader if a restaurant is sending out sloppy or unfinished plates.

* Are you sick of reading about Josie yet? Because I’m sick of writing about her, and I’m far from finished.

* Sheldon’s team is doing six dishes, two per chef, which seems incredibly ambitious given their disadvantage. That said, Sheldon’s laid-back temperament – I would call it a Hawai’ian stereotype, but we were just there in November and just about everyone we met acted pretty much like that – is a perfect fit under what could be a soul-crushing degree of stress. He even recruits the dishwashers to help with prep.

* This is really the all-Josie episode; if the producers wanted to craft a new villain with John gone, they got their material here, as Josie is all excuses, all the time, when she’s not flat-out lying to Kristen about what’s been done. She did the broth the day of service, not the day before, so it’s so late that she can’t use the gelatin Kristen wanted to add before charging the broth in the iSi canisters. When Kristen hears this, she says virtually nothing but drops a serious WTF face before telling Josie to switch to cream and soy (milk, I think?) and forget the gelatin.

* During the first seating, Stefan seems to be ideal in front of house, all schmoozing, keeping guests liquored up, saying the right stuff … which makes it so much more surprising when his service falls apart in the second seating.

* Here come the judges. Good grief is Padma’s skirt short. And her heels high. There are interstate highways that don’t go on as long as her legs.

* The judges start at Kristen’s restaurant. The first dish is Lizzie’s twist on charcuterie: rabbit rillette, pickled turnips, and beets, in a roasted chicken and rabbit broth. Total acclaim here.

* Then we get what turns out to be the pivotal moment in the show: No one even tested the mounted bouillabaisse broth in the iSi canisters, so the foam doesn’t work; Brooke, who was handling front of house duties, is standing there working the broth with an immersion blender while in a dress and heels. Kristen says she’d prefer a dishwasher to Josie, which is a clear insult to the dishwashers on Sheldon’s side who are doing actual work without making excuses.

* The result of all of this is that it takes way too long to plate and serve Josie’s course, a bouillabaisse with halibut, Dungeness crab, and scallops. The dishes don’t have anywhere near enough broth, and the fish is unevenly cooked. It’s a disaster dish, with Tom saying later (but before judges’ table) that Josie should go home for it.

* The other result is that we see service breaking down in Kristen’s kitchen, with tables getting the wrong dishes and tickets coming in incorrectly. Given the editing, it’s hard to see this as unrelated to the stinkbomb Josie dropped in the kitchen by being in it.

* Kristen’s main dish is a take on beef bourguignon, a Burgundy-braised short rib with garlic purée, glazed carrots, pearl onions, and mushrooms. The dish has nowhere near enough sauce or acidity; what’s on the plate is good, but the consensus is that she didn’t reinterpret the dish far enough, so it feels like an incomplete version of the original.

* Brooke’s cheese course has fresh baked gougeres (made from choux paste and usually deep fried), cheese, roasted radish, and an espresso truffle … plus something else that isn’t included in the online recipe but that the judges said was impossible to chew.

* Kristen’s dessert is her take on the two types of macarons, the French version with almonds and the American version with coconuts (called macaroons). She does an almond cake macaroon with coconut custard and salted buttercream, and no one particularly likes it, saying it’s not reminiscent of either of the original pastries and was too heavy to recall the French version (although to be fair, French macarons are light, but are usually filled with buttercream or ganache, which isn’t). Overall, Kristen’s restaurant was generally disappointing, but not a flop other than Josie’s dish; Lizzie is the one team member who’s very clearly going to be safe.

* Back to Sheldon’s restaurant, we see Stefan dropping the hammer to get the first seating out and clear the big backup at the entrance, which continues to grow regardless.

* The first dish is Stefan’s kilawen, yellowtail crudo with three sauces: cilantro, spicy chili, white soy. He seems to have a knack for raw fish, and the judges love it.

* Josh’s take on balut has a poached egg, duck confit, and a foie gras mousse. Stefan didn’t explain the dish enough, although if he’d said what balut really is – a fertilized duck egg, poached and eaten in the shell, looking a bit like a grey chicken fetus – that might not have helped. Padma says it was executed beautifully, while Tom says it doesn’t read filipino at all.

* Sheldon’s miki has prawns with tapioca roll/pasta and achiote. Stefan wasn’t there to explain it and then comes and “scolds” the judges after it – a bizarre misstep for a guy who usually is willing to suck up to the judges for his own benefit. It’s like no one told him he’d have to work a doubleheader today.

* Sheldon’s adobo pork belly with mung bean purée and pea shoots salad gets praise from Tom as the best dish all day, with Danny Meyer largely agreeing. I don’t think this was mentioned on the show, but that braised pork belly was deep-fried first. That might have helped its flavor a little.

* Josh’s dessert, a take on halu-halu, has coconut sorbet, avocado mousse, bananas, and shredded coconut. It’s another hit, and it’s clear by this point that Team Sheldon is going to win.

* Stefan’s dessert has ginger tea and a dark chocolate confection with macadamia nuts, ginger, and peppermint oil. Those are some seriously strong flavors fighting each other, and I’ve never liked the chocolate/ginger combination even though I’m a big fan of both.

* Now we see Padma saying Stefan should go home for service, while Tom says Josie should go home for bouillabaisse. If only.

* Judges’ table: Brooke gets praise for her front-of-house performance, while Lizzie gets praise for starter. Josie gets killed for her bouillabaisse and immediately begins blaming Kristen for her dish. Kristen has the chance to explain the gelatin being scrapped because of Josie’s screwup, but declines, which was a fatal mistake.

* Stefan gets crushed for service but owns up to it quickly, largely because that’s what he does with the judges. Tom says Sheldon’s adobo pork was the best dish all night; Team Sheldon wins and he gets a new Toyota Avalon. Padma tells Stefan he’s very lucky, since he would have been sent home had Kristen’s team won.

* Lizzie and Brooke are told they’re safe, while we hear Kristen saying “bite my tongue” under her breath as Josie makes excuse after excuse. Kristen falls on her sword and takes all of the responsibility, which I suppose I should respect greatly, but I don’t think it’s abdicating responsibility if you stick to the truth about an employee (figuratively) who didn’t do her job.

* Josie: “I’m an easy target.” Yes, because your food sucks.

* So Kristen is sent home over Josie, in what Gail revealed afterwards was a split decision. This entire discussion felt extremely contrived, with Padma’s sudden anti-Kristen sentiment looking horribly forced. The judges missed two extremely obvious points when conducting this fake debate over who to send home. First of all, Josie’s dish was the only one on either side that was served late, and with Josie doing that twice previously this season, some basic deductive reasoning would tell you that she was the cause, not Kristen. Second, their behavior and body language at judges’ table spoke volumes: Josie was all excuses and emotions, while Kristen was calm and took responsibility while deflecting attempts by the judges to get her to pin the blame on Josie. I’m not buying Tom’s claims afterwards that they had no choice or didn’t have all of the available information; their own expressions on the show implied that they knew just what was going on, and were trying to get Kristen on the record. I also don’t think the judges needed to send Josie home on the basis of her season-long incompetence. The only excuse I can make for the judges is that neither Brooke nor Lizzie chimed in to support Kristen, perhaps for competitive reasons. Overall, this was a new low for the show, an embarrassing episode that has, unfortunately, given the show a lot of the wrong kind of attention. It is very hard for me to accept that the show is all about the food when the chef who dominated the entire season is sent home for someone else’s cooking failure, and while Kristen comes off way, way better on TV, it undermines the entire show to see this. I’m usually just acting fake-angry about stuff on the show – it’s a reality show with no impact on my life other than entertainment – but now I feel like I’ve been had. We get more drama, but the best chef is gone. That’s like trading Rafael Soriano for Horacio Ramirez.

* Having Josie in the final six is like having Willie Bloomquist on the WBC Team USA roster. She’s far and away the worst chef left, and with Kristen winning Last Chance Kitchen (I can’t even be bothered with an LCK recap), she’s still the best chef sort-of standing. Of the six in the main competition, Brooke is the new #1, followed by Sheldon, Stefan, Lizzie, Josh, the Mariana Trench, and then Josie.

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→ January 16, 2013
→ By

Zero Dark Thirty.

The wildly overblown controversy over torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty has, unfortunately, taken over much of the discussion about the film itself, which is a remarkable piece of craftsmanship that takes a script (by Mark Boal) with a barebones plot and an ending that everyone in the audience already knows and turns it into a gripping account of a manhunt and for a government’s willingness to let one end justify many sordid means.

The film itself unfolds like a series rather than a single movie, almost like the kind of multi-episode story arc you’d find on British television over a full season of 240 minutes. Zero Dark Thirty compresses its story into about 135 minutes, the last third dedicated to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, with the first third melding the needle-in-a-haystack search for information with various Islamic terrorist attacks on the west and some unstinting depictions of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” generally known by people with functioning brains as “torture,” by the CIA of terrorist detainees. It boasts the tension of a thriller despite having the plot no more complex than that of a detective story: Maya, a CIA analyst played skilfully by Jessica Chastain as a sort of Carrie Mathiesen without the crazy, latches on to a new bit of information from one of those detainees and refuses to let it go, even though years of false starts and dead ends, because she believes that what detainees aren’t saying is often as telling as what they are.

Maya’s obsession with this detail, the name of a man whom she believes has substantial direct access to the big foozle himself, leads to some slightly predictable clashes with bosses and colleagues, one played by a surprisingly lifeless Kyle Chandler, but also emphasizes her isolation from nearly everyone she works with except for those who share her particular ardor for this clue. She eventually puts together just enough convincing evidence and just enough of a threat to her boss to put a surveillance team on the finally-located target, which leads to one of the film’s best scenes, where four operatives drive around a hostile city tracking the target’s cell phone to try to identify him in person – something that could be as dull as a butter knife but is filmed and paced to layer tension on top of it.

Bigelow’s other method of infusing tension into a story that, at its core, is a slow chase down a paper trail, is to use reality to punctuate the fits and starts of Maya’s search efforts. The film opens with a black screen and recordings of 911 calls from victims of the September 11th attacks, and the story eventually weaves in the London and Madrid attacks, the Islamabad Marriott bombing, and the suicide attack on the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. Such detours provide context for the increased emphasis within the CIA’s unit looking for bin Laden/al-Qaeda on finding targets to kill, as well as creating some of the moral ambiguity that might be upsetting the film’s critics – if al-Qaeda continues to launch attacks, does that justify using unethical or unconscionable means to try to stop them?

The final third of the film, in which two choppers full of Navy SEALs (including Chris “Bert Macklin” Pratt and Joel Edgerton) raid bin Laden’s compound in the middle of the night, should have been more than enough to earn Bigelow a Best Director nod. Filmed with minimal light, often through the perspective of the SEALs’ night-vision goggles, and almost entirely from a ground-level view that further obscures the audience’s vision, it still refuses to take sides – even though the audience knows the target is worthy of this effort to execute him – and makes superb use of silence to put the audience into the house with the SEALs, while playing the actual killing of bin Laden in a deliberate, understated manner that seems so un-Hollywood it’s hard to believe this was an American film.

The claims around Zero Dark Thirty‘s depiction of CIA-direct torture seem to contradict themselves: The film advocates torture, it fails to condemn torture, and it shows torture as useless. Certainly the last point has value – the critical revelation from a tortured detainee comes not as he’s being waterboarded or stuffed in a box that would cramp a small child’s body, but as he’s being fed a normal Middle Eastern meal while Maya and her “I-vuz-just-following-orders” colleague Dan trick him into thinking he’s already told them key details but has forgotten about it. I see no argument that the film supports the use of torture, since it shows such techniques quite brutally and has examples of information derived from torture as unreliable. Adding condemnation is largely unnecessary; if you can watch the torture scenes without flinching or averting your eyes, you might be a sociopath. Watching a grown man beg for mercy, or the deterioration in his face over multiple scenes, is repulsive enough. Bigelow doesn’t need to turn this into a finger-wagging morality play because the truth itself mocks us for our own indifference.

Boal’s script runs the story like a documentary without interviews, as if we’re watching action in real time, with so much emphasis on the central storyline that we are spared subplots or any real investment in characters beyond Maya. That means that some talented actors appear in very limited roles, such as the CIA station chief, Jessica, played by Jennifer Ehle, looking more like a bewigged Meryl Streep than Elizabeth Bennet; or Edgerton and Pratt, who get a few moments of seriousness and a few of clowning before setting off on the climactic raid. I’m usually a strong advocate of character development in films, especially ones of this length, but there is so much to the underlying story and its unfurling is so masterful that any digressions to give us more on the characters would have like punching pinholes in a garden hose. Perhaps the script’s worst moment comes when Jessica tries to grill Maya over her personal life, including lack of friends (really? not a single one?) or disinterest in office hookups (“I don’t want to be the girl that fucks,” a throwaway phrase ironic given Maya’s later deployment of profanity that marks one of the film’s best lines).

I don’t understand how Bigelow ended up on the outside of the Best Director Oscar nominations, and I’m not enough of an expert on film direction to offer more than an amateur’s “I don’t get it” on the subject. Zero Dark Thirty is superb almost start to finish, definitely the strongest of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, with Chastain a worthy Best Actress nominee, although I’d still lean toward Jennifer Lawrence for her work with a more complex role in Silver Linings Playbook. To the credit of Boal, Bigelow, and Chastain, however, they turned a marvelous trick with her character: They’ve built a strong, smart, desexualized female protagonist who ends up pretty damn sexy just by being awesome.

On the same subject, two books earn a number of mentions in articles about the Zero Dark Thirty non-troversy: Mark Bowden’s The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden and the pseudonymous SEAL team member Mark Owen’s No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden. I’ve never read either book.

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→ January 16, 2013
→ By

Le Havre.

I’ve got a short post on ESPN.com today for Insiders, covering the top age-25 players in MLB.

I only found Le Havre, a 2011 French-language film from Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, because it appeared on Roger Ebert’s list of his top 20 films of that year, of which I’ve now seen nine and will eventually see at least one more. Ebert noted the film’s major flaw, an absurd ending that bears no connection to the remainder of the film, as if it were a trifle (calling it “certainly satisfying”), but that plot twist took a film that danced on the edge of cute right over into fairy-tale twee.

Le Havre, no relation to the board game and app of the same name, tells the story of an aging French shoe-shiner, Marcel Marx, who discovers an 11-year-old African refugee, Idrissa, hiding in the waters of the city’s harbor. The police are engaged in a comical manhunt for this harmless child, and Marcel, now alone in his house as his wife is in the hospital with a serious illness, decides to take Idrissa in and protect him from the authorities, out of what I presume is pity or empathy for the boy’s plight. Marcel’s neighbors just barely tolerate him at the film’s beginning, but between his wife’s poor health and his caper with Idrissa, the neighbors conspire with Marcel to hide the boy and eventually to smuggle him out of the country to his ultimate destination, London. Meanwhile, Marcel’s wife, Arletty, won’t allow anyone to tell him how serious her condition is, with the doctor originally saying there’s no hope but a miracle, because Marcel is just a child in a man’s body.

Kaurismäki’s directorial style provokes discomfort through lingering shots of expressionless faces, often staring at or just past the camera, as well as closeups that get a little too close. The plot couldn’t be any simpler, and no characters beyond Marcel get any kind of deeper development; even Idrissa is shown to be a perfectly polite and articulate Gabonese boy who speaks French fluently and whose only real flaw is that he doesn’t like to stay shut up in Marcel’s house all day, risking detection and capture. The one neighbor who doesn’t play along, reporting Idrissa’s whereabouts three times to the police, never gets a name, much less a motivation – racism? xenophobia? general douchebaggery? – for his betrayal of Marcel’s secret. Arletty, played quite obviously by a non-native speaker of French (the Finnish actress Kati Outinene, whose French is proper but toneless with an unnatural rhythm), seems to have no purpose in life other than to play housewife to Marcel, and gives no appearance of being happy or in love with him, beyond being terrified that he’ll be unable to cope without her.

The film does boast some dry humor, as well as an absurd subplot involving the musician “Little Bob” (played by Italian blues-rock singer Roberto Piazza), while Jean-Pierre Darroussin offers subtle homages to Inspector Clouseau in his performance as Inspector Monet, hot (or tepid) on the trail of Idrissa. But the film, while cute for its amusing parts, isn’t funny enough to be a straight comedy, and isn’t serious enough to have a point beyond, well, be kind to the less fortunate, there but for the grace of God, and so on. Had the film ended on a less incongruous note, it might have felt like a fable, cute and funny but with a greater theme that forgives its cuteness. Instead, it ends with nonsense, an ending that would feel tacked-on if it wasn’t dominated by a greater feeling of falseness, kind of like opening door #2 to find that you just traded a new car for a pair of goats.

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→ January 14, 2013
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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

I’ve long had an interest, bording on the obsessive, with learning foreign languages, dating back to early childhood. I find the way they work fascinating, since we’re all expressing the same concepts and images and yet do so in sometimes inscrutably different ways. One such way is through idioms, like my favorite Spanish expression, “canta otro gallo,” which is the equivalent of the English expression “that’s another story” but literally translates to “another rooster crows.” It’s far more colorful and brings a concrete image to mind that even made it hard for me as a non-native speaker to remember.

The Spanish language also has a wonderful phrase for what we call old age or might euphemistically refer to as one’s “golden years” – la tercera edad, meaning “the third age,” after childhood and one’s working adult life. The idiom seems better to reflect the expectation today that people in developed countries will outlive their working years by a decade or more, and must, therefore, plan accordingly lest they outlive their money as well. The idea of a third age confers hope and promise on a period that automatically conjures fears of mortality, indigence, ill health, and loneliness. They are years to be lived, actively, not to be dreaded or avoided.

For the seven characters who populate the film and the building The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, this third age begins with subtle hopes for a fresh start in India, away from varying disasters they’ve left behind in England. The retirees find, of course, that the hotel is nowhere near what it promised to be, but once there, ostensibly without funds to return home, most of the guests choose to make what they can of the situation, developing new relationships while adapting to their shared fates.

The setup is brief, as it should be, as the magic only truly begins when the performers are thrown together in non-air-conditioned methods of transportation on the subcontinent. The various characters are retirees who have moved to India to stretch their retirement funds further, or get a hip replacement faster than would be possible in England, or to avoid an ignominious decline into grandma/babysitter territory. Once there, they encounter a comedy of errors in the titular hotel, in which the phones don’t work and most guest rooms have doors. The hotel is run by the perpetually optimistic and fast-talking young Sonny, who is desperate to make his plan to “outsource” old age work both as a vocation (so he can marry his very pretty girlfriend Sonaina) and as a purpose in life, but who has the business acumen of a sea cucumber. (As opposed to anemones, who are surprisingly good at identifying core competencies.) Most of the Indian characters involved here are thinly drawn and exist primarily for the Englishmen and -women to play off, although given who’s playing those roles, I find it hard to argue with this approach.

The movie boasts the greatest cast of any movie released in 2012, with two Oscar winners in Judi Dench and Maggie Smith (twice); a Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee in Tom Wilkinson; another Golden Globe winner in Bill Nighy (who excelled as the editor-in-chief in State of Play); and Penelope Wilton, winner of several major awards for British theatre and now better known here as the do-gooder Isobel Crawley, with all four performers honored as Officers of the British Empire or higher. Unsurprisingly, Smith and Dench steal most of their scenes, with Smith dropping a few Lady Violet looks on the locals and Dench often sounding like the Queen of England (and occasionally like the voice from Spaceship Earth). Celia Imrie is a bit one-note as the cougar of the group, although she gets in her share of one-liners, while Ronald Pickup is the amiable past-prime Casanova who gets the best introduction to the audience and plays it to the hilt. It’s a loaded group, given a witty and clever script, yet there’s an underlying seriousness to the performances (rooted in their characters) that elevates the film to the status of award consideration.

You can’t make a film about seven old people without something going awry, and a few things do, perhaps fewer than expected – but the film is a hopeful comedy at heart, so we can give the writers a bit more leeway. It’s the interactions between the characters that make the film sing, and within those it’s the interactions between the actors themselves – Nighy and Dench, Nighy and Wilton, Dench and Wilkinson, Smith and pretty much anybody – that are so striking. You want to see Justin Verlander face Mike Trout, but you hope it doesn’t end with an intentional walk or a hit batsman; you want to see a ten-pitch at bat where each player is at his best, regardless of the final outcome. Best Exotic Marigold Hotel boasts a dozen or more such at bats and some of them are epic. Dench earned a Golden Globe nomination, with Smith nominated in the same category for her role in Quartet; the film was shut out at the Oscars, but I could have seen a case for either actress or for Nighy, whose role is central to the film and who must play the exasperated husband clutching at a straw of happiness while his raincloud of a shrewish wife stews in the next room. He and Dench share two of the film’s most memorable scenes, and while their relationship on-screen grows almost glacially (he is, after all, a married man), there’s a remarkable chemistry between them that derives almost entirely from outside of the film – that these are two performers so effortlessly comfortable in their roles and with each other that they can convey the interest in each other on screen with barely any words or action to depict it.

The film doesn’t pander to the viewers with a giant, rousing finish, rewarding us and some of its characters with small victories rather than large ones, all under the general theme that the third age is one to be enjoyed and appreciated. The one character most determined to throw these years away will undoubtedly succeed in doing so, while those who choose to maximize their experiences – even just exploring their new hometown of Jaipur and seeing its tourist attractions or shopping in its central market – will be all the happier for doing so. You could really extend the same lesson to the first and second ages as well.

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→ January 11, 2013
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Django Unchained.

I was busy yesterday, with a Klawchat and the Baseball Today podcast, the latter featuring my interview with Nate Silver, who denies being a witch. Those followed my ranking of the top 25 players under 25, which went up yesterday morning and requires an Insider membership.

—

I went into Django Unchained with somewhat limited expectations: I’m not a Tarantino fanboy by any stretch, and the two most frequent comments I’d heard about this film were that it was too long and too violent. It is violent, although nearly all of it is of the cartoonish variety, with just one scene that I would have cropped or eliminated. It’s long at 165 minutes, but aside from that one scene there’s virtually no fat to trim. It’s also clever, funny, sentimental almost to sappiness, righteously angry, and borderline absurd – a glorious alternate-history revenge fantasy that lacks the broad scope of Inglorious Basterds‘ vengeance but gives us the titular character as a stronger protagonist to exact retribtution on behalf of his race.

Django (a perpetually seething Jamie Foxx) begins the movie in chains, one of a group of recently-purchased slaves who are being led through a dark, dare-I-say mysterious forest by two white brothers, when they are miraculously intercepted by Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, who scored a Best Supporting Actor nod for the role), a dentist-turned-bounty-hunter who, as it happens, is looking specifically for Django. His incredible fortune in finding this caravan without a GPS is never quite explained, nor is the fact that Django, who ends up joining Schultz in the bounty-hunting business, is a preternaturally accurate shot with virtually any sort of firearm.

The two hunt down a few targets before turning to the task of rescuing Django’s wife Brunhilda (Kerry Washington, who has two jobs, to look pretty and act scared, and does fairly well at both) from the unctuous plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, chewing scenery like it’s a cud). Candie likes to buy and train slaves for “Mandingo fighting,” a human equivalent to cockfighting with no historical basis in fact but which is named as an allusion to the 1975 blaxploitation film Mandingo, which Tarantino has cited as a favorite of his. (He also honors another blaxploitation film with Brunhilda’s white surname, Von Schaft.) Django and Schultz claim to be slavers interested in buying a slave for use in Mandingo fighting, all as a pretense for seeing and buying Brunhilda on the cheap. Only the head house-slave, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson, playing this traitor to his race to the hilt), has any inkling that something is amiss.

Tarantino has figured out the way to tell a good slavery joke: Make the white people involved the joke’s targets. The various slaveowners and white lackeys are all odious in various ways, but Tarantino infuses them with comic weaknesses that he proceeds to exploit, most successfully in the absurd scene where a Klan raid breaks down because the white bags they are using as masks have eyeholes that don’t allow the riders to see properly. Quick yet florid dialogue that is obviously absurd yet can sound real enough to work for the audience is a difficult trick to pull off, yet Django‘s dialogue never broke that suspension of disbelief for me, and Tarantino’s script concludes with a flurry of self-referential lines that build on the humor of the first times the lines were delivered.

That same suspension of disbelief didn’t quite hold as well for the violence, largely because Tarantino appears to believe that human bodies are 98% blood, with perhaps some sort of light exoskeleton that keeps us from turning into landlocked jellyfish. Aside from one murder near the film’s end that evoked raucous laughter in the theater – I’m including myself in that – the extent of the splattering was a distraction, and appeared to be Tarantino just exuding in the fact that, yeah, he can take a tense shootout and make it so gross that it breaks the tension because the splashes are louder than the gunshots. The non-gun violence in the film was more disturbing and generally more effective at ratcheting up our hatred for the white folk Django will eventually target, because of the degree to which this violence, from torture to murder, shows the extent to which these whites view blacks as something less than human.

Tarantino’s last film made Nazis its targets, because, of course, who doesn’t love watching a Nazi get what’s coming to him? With slavery and racism at the heart of Django, however, Tarantino wanders into more dangerous emotional territory with the film’s heavy use of the n-word and with the depiction of some blacks as complicit in their own subjugation. The use of what is today a nasty racial epithet but was, in 1858-59, a common term for African-Americans, didn’t bother me because it is grounded in historical accuracy; I don’t want to see the term removed from Huckleberry Finn or the wandering Jew scrubbed from The Scarlet Pimpernel either, because they are monuments to the racial or ethnic attitudes of their times. But I imagine the role of Stephen as a black slave who, in return for privileges he’s been granted by a serious of owners, takes on the role of overseer of the house slaves, betraying his race and contributing to institutionalized racism, will make many viewers uncomfortable, even as it becomes clear that Stephen is doing so not from ignorance but from a clear strategy of self-preservation. Candie even delivers a speech in the film that argues that blacks didn’t fight back because of neurological inferiority, but we can dismiss that as the outdated racialist thinking of one of the film’s most hateful characters. Stephen is much harder to hand-wave away.

Waltz’ performance as Dr. Schultz could very easily win him his second Oscar as Best Supporting Actor, and his character has the most difficult development in the film, with subtle changes in his attitudes toward slavery from academic detachment to emotional involvement that lead to the film’s slam-bang finish. Foxx’s barely-contained rage gains articulacy through the film, but as strong as his performance was, it had a hint of one-note to it that might explain why he was overlooked in the Best Actor category. DiCaprio, normally such a strong actor in any sort of role, brings a bizarre flamboyancy to the role, starting with the overplayed deep-south accent and continuing with the vaguely incestuous flirting with his widowed sister, herself a cipher of a character despite a fair amount of screen time. Jackson worked with the most difficult material as Stephen, the Uncle Tom of the Candie estate (unironically referred to as “Candieland”), and he dominates most of his scenes between his stentorian delivery, impossible to hide even behind his character’s duplicitous yes-massah stammerings, and a glare so searing that it at one point reduces Brunhilda to tears. His appearance in the film’s second half transforms the movie from straight revenge fantasy to a somewhat more complex study of slavery through a conflict between African-American characters, one that doesn’t delivery any answers but provides a thought-provoking component to the film that would have been absent had we just been following Django around on a justified killing spree.

Revenge fantasies themselves, given the proper targets, can be superficially satisfying but will lack any kind of staying power beyond the closing credits and can leave the viewer feeling slightly empty the way he might after, say, wiping out a package of Oreos. I have little interest in a straight exploitation film, which I feared Django might be based on some early word-of-mouth, especially regarding the copious quantities of blood involved, but the film was both far funnier and more incisive than I anticipated. Tarantino could have stuck with cartoon violence and avoided any hints at the barbarism of slavery, but he took the hard way, with various scenes of brutal treatment, all presented without the sensationalism of the shootouts and made more effective through that contrast. The camera lingers on bodies spurting a quart of blood for every bullet, but when a slave is branded, the scene is truncated, and when a slave is torn apart by dogs, it’s shown so obliquely that the violence is largely implied – and those latter scenes are the ones that matter. Only the fight scene between the two “Mandingos” broke this rule, and deserved a major edit, but otherwise Django makes excellent use of its running length to entertain its audience in a thoughtful way.

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→ January 10, 2013
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Top Chef, S10E10.

My ranking of the top 25 big leaguers under the age of 25 is posted for Insiders, and I’m chatting today at 1 pm ET. We’ll also have a new Baseball Today show later today, with an interview with special guest Nate Silver as well.

—

No one’s really broken up by John leaving, partly because his personality had become a problem, but I think also because there’s some recognition that he had the ability to keep advancing – he was one of the few chefs here with any kind of vision, although I think in recent weeks he’d started to run out of inspiration and his dishes started to look more derivative. I’m really shocked the whole glasses-on-the-forehead thing hasn’t become a national fashion craze, though.

* Quickfire: Cook a dish emphasizing ginger in 15 minutes, judged by Wolfgang Puck. This morphs into an ad for Canada Dry … which I admit is my preferred ginger ale for mixing, actually. (I also like ginger beer, but they’re two different drinks.) Puck mentions a popular ginger creme brûlée dessert at his restaurant, which is right up my alley. My wife loathes ginger in all its forms, which I think is some sort of genetic defect on her end, but needless to say this was pretty close to the Quickfire of her nightmares.

* Kristen infuses ginger into ingredients using a pressurized CO2 canister, which most of us would recognize as a whipped cream dispenser. I have one very similar to this iSi model and love it, mostly because it avoids the mess of whipping cream with a hand mixer. Anyway, this kind of thing is why I think Kristen is a huge favorite to win – she’s operating on another plane from the rest of them, conceptually and technically. I was surprised she didn’t make the top three here, as Padma and Wolfgang liked her dish and praised her creativity.

* The bottom two were Sheldon for a stir-fried skirt steak with ginger and oranges that Wolfgang called “pedestrian Chinese food,” and Josh for a white chocolate ginger soup with peaches and tarragon that Wolfgang said was “underwhelming.” I like how Wolfgang asks for vocabulary help as if he hasn’t been here for 30 years. His English is good – I just think he likes messing with people.

* Top three are Brooke for a ginger caramel squid with fresh lime and chili powder; Lizzie for a cold watermelon-ginger soup with fresh mint, using ginger ale with pureed watermelon for the base; and Stefan for an ahi tartare with lemongrass ginger vinaigrette. Stefan butters up Wolfgang by switching to German, so apparently he’ll flirt with anyone. Brooke wins for her dish, something I’d expect to see on the menu of a fine-dining Vietnamese restaurant, assuming Americans would actually be willing to pay $10 for a Vietnamese entree.

* Elimination challenge: Restaurateur Danny Meyer is in the house for the setup to Restaurant Wars. Each chef must come up with a restaurant concept and make one dish that encapsulates it. There will be two winners, each getting $10K, and one chef sent home, so we’ll have 4 vs 3 in the actual Restaurant Wars episode next week.

* Meyer’s advice to the chefs: “Do it from your heart because you can’t fake soul.” How is that remotely useful advice? “Do it from your heart, not your spleen.” And is faking soul at all like faking the funk?

* Micah’s concept: raw foods. This is an obviously terrible idea – you’re going to build an entire menu around food that isn’t cooked on a competition that’s about cooking? Raw food quality is entirely about ingredients; if the fish isn’t incredibly fresh, you’re toast. He hits the market and finds no meat he can serve raw, which should have immediately led to a change in concept, but he’s determined to fail.

* Kristen’s comment “I need to show them I deserve to be here” was some serious unintentional comedy. I don’t think anyone’s questioning whether she’s still here on merit.

* Four of the eliminated chefs return to work as sous-chefs for the remaining eight, and Stefan picks Carla because “she is super fast and her butt is always cute.” Unless he’s going to slow-braise her butt with some red wine and figs, I don’t really see how that helps him.

* He then tells Tom that in “every Quickfire I’ve been sloppy seconds.” The man is incapable of discussing anything without resorting to at least one reference to sex. He then spills liquid all over a guest with yet another blender explosion.

* Brooke’s concept is “Unkosher” – traditional Jewish items expanded without the limitations of kosher requirements. Tom says “it’s like my mother-in-law’s Seder every year.”

* Josie says her croquettes aren’t done and that she wants to shoot herself in the head, although I think most of us would settle for her duct-taping herself on the mouth.

* Why is Gail judging this competition instead of Wolfgang? Gail doesn’t bother me like she does some viewers – although horizontal stripes are really not her friend – but is there any question whether Wolfgang would provide better insight into the food?

* To the dishes: Josh serves a seared ribeye on cauliflower purée with a red wine mushroom sauce and barley. Aside from the steak being slightly underseasoned, this goes over well with praise for its “earthy” flavors. It doesn’t seem particularly innovative to me, though. Is there anything here you couldn’t whip up at home?

* Lizzie does a mustard green canaderli (a central European dumpling also known as knödel, often made from leftover side starches) with fonduta and crispy speck. She’s going for northeastern Italian, a regional cuisine that draws heavily from Austrian, Hungarian, and Slovenian traditions because the area has changed hands so many times over the last few centuries. The flavor is great but the judges all agree it’s too heavy.

* Hat Guy Thierry is in the house as a guest.

* Sheldon serves a Filipino dish, sour tamarind soup with pork belly, shrimp, and snapper. This gets raves, I think because it’s got huge, bold flavors, and because (per Padma) he took a dish that’s usually ugly and made it elegant without losing its authenticity. This is one of those dishes I think future competitors should sit up and notice – there are successful formulas for winning challenges on this show, and they don’t change much over the years. But hey, go ahead and make yet another sloppy risotto. That’ll work too.

* Stefan does a “German-Thai” fusion thing with a lobster bisque with shrimp dumplings along with a dessert lollipop of Bavarian cream. I know this is shocking but the two don’t really play well together.

* Micah’s plate of raw fail has thick slices of four (I think) types of raw fish along with mizuna and raw vegetables, along with not enough of the vinaigrette over the top. This is a cold mess. There’s no cooking involved, no risk, and, per Danny Meyer, it offers no improvement over our palates’ raw-fish standard of good sushi.

* Kristen does an onsen egg (poached in the shell so the yolk just barely sets) with a Camembert mustard sauce and buttered radishes. Everyone says she nailed the eggs. She’s the only chef here who went really upscale, which is also something that tends to succeed here. She’s a lot like Michael Voltaggio without the tattoos and antisocial behavior.

* Josie is busy talking and not serving, again, which is really painful to watch. She serves a puerco asado with a black bean sauce and chorizo croquette. Judges are visibly annoyed at her act, and even more so when the pork proves to be flavorless and dry.

* Brooke does a matzo ball soup with duck confit and black rye bread. The duck broth is good but Gail says the matzo ball is “offensive to my people,” after which Tom suggests that she should have used the rye bread in the matzo. As someone who grew up outside of New York and loves rye bread in almost any application (I suppose bread pudding would be an exception, although I’m open-minded), I’d definitely eat this dish if she made that switch.

* Judges’ table: Kristen, Sheldon, and Josh are the top three, at which point it seems obvious that Kristen and Sheldon will win because they were way more creative than Josh, who’s here for execution. Sheldon gets the win on his 30th birthday, while Kristen is now up to $45K in winnings.

* The challenge now is to move right into Restaurant Wars, with less than 48 hours until judging. Their spaces are completely empty and they must pick their staffs now in stew room before they learn who’s been eliminated.

* Kristen takes Brooke, Lizzie, and Josie, in that order, while Sheldon takes Josh, Stefan, and Micah – that is, boys versus girls. I thought Kristen made one mistake here, taking Josie over Micah, because Josie seemed at least as likely to go home, if not more so, and because if Josie doesn’t get eliminated, then you have to work with her, which is probably worse than working with no one at all.

* The bottom three are, unsurprisingly, Micah, Josie, Lizzie. Micah tries to shift blame to the store for lacking the kind of meat he needed, which is a great way to dig your own hole a little deeper. Lizzie’s dumpling should have been cooked more, and was pretty heavy without any relief in it. Josie’s pork was bland, greasy, overcooked. Tom refers to the “Josie show” and I think he’d like to see it put on hiatus.

* Micah is eliminated, which I understand, since he had such a terrible concept, but I would have sent Josie home – her concept was no better, and she didn’t execute it either. I’m disappointed in Micah, though, because I thought he showed more upside in his concepts, but he ends up leaving primarily because his concept this week was so poor. This leaves Sheldon’s team one chef short for Restaurant Wars, which means they’ll probably have just two guys in the kitchen and one out front – although I assume they’re responsible for one fewer dish as a result.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Micah and CJ have to do a raw meat preparation. Micah’s dish looked really unappealing with a large triangular blob of duck breast tartare, placed on top of a bison carpaccio in part to hide the fact that he didn’t slice the latter item cleanly. CJ’s looked more appealing and he did something novel by pickling the duck skin and subcutaneous fat, which made it fairly obvious he’d win his sixth challenge in a row.

* Top three: I’ve still got Kristen, a big gap, and then Brooke, with a pretty big gap to everyone else at this point. Brooke’s concepts aren’t as out there as Kristen’s, but they’re fairly evenly matched on execution. Sheldon would be my pick for the third spot over Stefan, only because Sheldon’s shown more upside (albeit more downside too). Josie is the clear bottom once again and yet survives for another week, with Josh and Lizzie in spots 5 and 6.

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→ January 9, 2013
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Catching up on recent reads.

For a variety of reasons, I fell behind on book reviews in December, so I’m cheating a little with an omnibus post on everything I read between Thanksgiving and New Year’s that I haven’t written up yet, aside from the usual Wodehouse/Christie/Stout stuff I generally don’t cover here. I had pretty mixed feelings on all of these works except the one non-fiction title, which is probably part of why I procrastinated on the reviews – it’s easier to write something quickly when you know which way you’re leaning from the start, but these books had enough positives and negatives to keep me from coming down on either side.

* The longest book I read in that span, and the one most deserving of a longer writeup, is Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, part of the TIME 100 and #81 on the Modern Library 100. Tabbed “the great American novel” by Martin Amis, praised by authors from Amis to his father Kingsley to Salman Rushdie to Christopher Hitchens, Augie March is an ambitious, expansive story of its title character’s growth from an impoverished Chicago childhood through one money-chasing scheme after another, including various brushes with the law and materialistic women. It starts slowly, hits a promising note for several hundred pages, and then ends with a gigantic whimper that ruined an otherwise enjoyable serious yet comical read for me.

Augie’s odyssey of self-discovery while he’s trying to make a buck – or a pile of bucks – draws him into various webs of fascinating side characters, a panoply identified by Hitchens as Dickensian, but one I think comes from the broader tradition of picaresque novels (to which Dickens contributed in The Pickwick Papers) and that continues through postmodern works like Ulysses and The Recognitions and later writers like Dawn Powell, Haruki Murakami, and Richard Russo. Augie March even has the peripatetic thread that defines the picaresque novel, even though Augie’s adventures, like his brief but disastrous time in the Navy, rarely encompass the high ambitions of classic picaresque characters.

Augie himself straddles the line between hero and antihero – he’s the protagonist and quite likeable despite his highly fungible morality, in part because he’s got the rags-to-riches vibe about him and in part because he entertains us through one peculiar situation after another – creating a curious ambiguity about Bellow’s point. If this is to be the great American novel, what exactly is Bellow telling us about the American experience? Is the key to the American Dream a refusal to commit oneself to anything – an education, a career, a marriage? Or is he saying the American Dream is an illusion that we can pursue but never catch? I think Bellow was posing the questions without attempting to provide any answers, which works from a thematic perspective but left the conclusion of the plot so open that I felt like I was reading an unfinished work, like The Good Soldier Svejk or Dead Souls.

* I wanted to like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, since I think Lolita is one of the best novels I’ve ever read, and while I didn’t enjoy Pale Fire I do recognize how clever it is and that I might not fully appreciate its humor. But Pnin, the story of a fish-out-of-water Russian professor at a fictional university in upstate New York, suffers from Pale Fire‘s problem even more deeply: The target of its parodic efforts is too obscure for the average reader to appreciate. Where Pale Fire satirized technical and literary analysis of poetry, Pnin takes aim at the ivory towers of academic life at private universities, which is probably hilarious if you’re a professor or a grad student but largely went right by me as someone who sleepwalked through college by doing the minimum amount of work required for most of my classes.

* Abbe Provost’s 1731 novel Manon Lescaut seemed to be stalking me over the last two months, so I had to read it – it appears on Daniel Burt’s revised version of the The Novel 100, then was the subject of allusions in at least two other books I read that time, including Augie March and I think Nicole Krauss’ History of Love as well. Manon Lescaut follows the Chevalier des Grieux as he ruins himself over his obsession with the title character, a young, beautiful, and entirely materialistic woman who throws the Chevalier overboard every time he runs out of money. The two engage in multiple schemes to defraud wealthier men who fall in love (or lust, really) with Manon at first sight, and eventually end up sent to the French colony at New Orleans, where the pattern repeats itself with a less fortunate conclusion. Its controversial status at the time would be lost on any reader today over the age of 12, but its depiction of sexual obsession mixed with several early examples of suspense writing (before either genre really existed in its own right) made it a quick and intense read. Plus now I get the references.

* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is another short novel of obsession, also appearing on the Novel 100, this one telling the tale of a man who is so in love with a woman who is betrothed to someone else that he eventually takes his own life. Told through the letters Werther writes to his friend, I found the deterioration of Werther’s mind as his depression deepens to be far more interesting than the pseudo-romantic aspect of a man so in love with another woman that he’d rather die than live without her. He just needed a good therapist. It was by far the shortest novel I had left on the Novel 100 and brought my total read on that list to 80, so it was worth the two hours or less I spent on it.

* Zadie Smith’s On Beauty reimagines E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (which I read and didn’t care for that much) in a serious comic novel around a conflict of race rather than class, set in a New England college town in the early 2000s. Smith also sends up the conflict between conservative and liberal academic ideologies (or theologies, more accurately) in one of the subplots that, much like that of Pnin, ended up missing the mark for me, although I could at least recognize glimpses of my alma mater in some of the satire. The novel’s greatest strength is the way Smith defines so many individual characters, especially those of the Belsey family, headed by a white father and an African-American mother and whose children are searching for racial, religious, and cultural identities while their parents try to recover from their father’s inability to keep it in his pants. I couldn’t help but compare On Beauty, which has some brilliant dialogue along with the deep characterizations and is often quite funny, to Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, which produced very mixed feelings in me when I first read it and didn’t fully appreciate (as I think I do now) how Smith was trying to stretch the boundaries of realistic fiction to tell a broad and expansive story. On Beauty, paying homage to a classic work of British literature, feels restrained by the confines of its inspiration when Smith’s imagination is a huge part of why her writing is so appealing, leaving it a good novel, a funny yet smart one that reads quickly, but a slightly unsatisfying one because I know she can do more than this.

* Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World tells the history of that somewhat mundane, unrespected fish, which had a substantial impact on the growth of civilization in Europe and in North America, and which was one of humanity’s first warnings (duly ignored) that we could exhaust a seemingly endless natural resource. Kurlansky’s book Salt turned a similar trick, taking a topic that seemed inherently uninteresting and finding interesting facts and anecdotes to allow him to make the story readable. Cod actually has a stronger narrative thread because Kurlansky can trace the fish’s rise in popularity and commercial value as well as its role in international relations, climaxing in the sudden collapse of cod stocks and the uncertain ending around the fish’s future as a species and a food source. We’re really good at overfishing, because technology has allowed us to catch more fish (as well as species we didn’t intend to catch) which has in turn made fish too cheap to consume. Kurlansky didn’t focus enough on this issue for my tastes, although Cod was published in 1997 when overfishing was seen as more of a fringe environmentalist concern, before celebrity chefs embraced sustainability and began preaching it to the masses.

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Farro with braised duck legs.

My favorite protein of all isn’t bacon, or short ribs, or smoked pork shoulder – it’s duck, duck legs specifically, which are best cooked slowly until the meat falls off the bone, after which the skin is cooked over direct heat until crispy and slightly sweet, while the fat rendered out during the slow cooking process is saved for another dish, like potatoes or bitter greens or even fried eggs. The one issue with duck legs is, once cooked, figuring out how to serve them, since they tend to fall apart before they even get out of the pot. I’ve tossed duck leg meat into risotto, which is fabulous but also a lot of work, and more of a special-occasion meal than a weekday-night dish. I’ve also had them served in crepes (at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill) or in tacos, but again, that’s a lot more work, and not a complete meal in and of itself.

Enter farro, a whole grain that can be prepared similarly to brown rice or barley but with a starch that is released during cooking to produce a slightly creamy texture similar to that of risotto. Farro is an “ancient grain,” an unhybridized plant found in Egyptian tombs and still popular in northern Italian cuisine, part of the wheat family but very low in gluten. It’s related to spelt and einkorn but is easier to cook than the berries of those two members of the wheat (Triticum) family), and, in my opinion, it tastes better too. You can prepare farro using the liquid/farro ratios below and treat it like a risotto, starting with onion and garlic, finishing with grated Parmiggiano-Reggiano and a little butter, or you can treat it like a pilaf and stir or fold in greens or peas after the cooking is finished. Here I use it as the platter for the duck, finished with some peppery leaves for color and to make it a one-dish meal.

As for the duck meat itself, I use the braised legs recipe from Ruhlman’s Twenty, which is foolproof and can be made a day or two in advance – it’s a great thing to throw in the oven on a cold weekend day, since it makes the house smell amazing, and braised meats always taste better a day later anyway. Just store it in the braising liquid and skim the congealed fat off the top the next day. You can even strain the defatted liquid and use it in place of some of the stock in this recipe. If your local Whole Foods or similar high-end market sells prepared duck confit, that will work as well.

Farro with duck legs and arugula

4 duck legs, braised or confit
1 tbsp rendered duck fat or olive oil
1 shallot, minced
1 cup farro
¼ cup white wine or 2 Tbsp brandy
3 cups chicken stock or low-sodium chicken broth
½ tsp salt
1 handful of arugula, radish leaves, or other peppery greens

1. Shred the duck meat by hand. To prepare the skin, remove it from the legs, keeping it as intact as possible, and scrape any remaining fat off the inside of the skin using a paring knife. Crisp the skin in a dry, non-stick skillet until brown on both sides, and set aside until serving. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Heat the fat/oil in a large (3-quart) saucepan until hot and add the shallot, sweating for 1-2 minutes until translucent but not brown. Add the farro and toast in the oil 2-3 minutes until the grains smell slightly nutty.

3. Add the wine/brandy and stir until the alcohol has mostly cooked away and the pan is dry when you separate the grains. (Lean over the pot and inhale. If you get dizzy, it’s not ready for step four yet.)

4. Add the stock/broth and salt, stir once to combine thoroughly, and bring to a boil. Cover and place in the oven for 35 minutes, at which point the farro should have absorbed all of the liquid.

5. Once the pot is out of the oven, add the duck meat and green leaves, stir, and cover for ten minutes to heat the duck and wilt the leaves. Serve in bowls topped with sliced crispy duck skin and freshly ground black pepper.

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