→ 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
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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
→ By

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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→ January 20, 2013
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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
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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
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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
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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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