→ December 21, 2012
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Top Chef, S10E7.

Time to review another product placement-packed edition of Top Chef!

* Quickfire: Season four winner Stephanie Izard of Chicago’s Girl and the Goat is here as a guest judge. Every ingredient in the pantry is covered in Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil. I hope they recycled all of that metal, because otherwise this whole challenge is just a big environmental disaster. Once you unwrap an item, you must use it. There are also no cooking vessels available – you must cook in the foil itself, and that stuff can’t be recycled. Immunity’s at stake. Ecological concerns aside, is this challenge really that different from giving each chef a sealed box of ingredients and telling them they must use everything in it?

* Kristen decides to make a sponge cake and we see her whisking eggs in a bowl she made of foil. Danyele says making a cake in this challenge is “the ballsiest shit” she’s ever heard of. That’s also a pretty good indication that Kristen will win the challenge, isn’t it? Ballsy tends to win on this show.

* Bart shapes a bowl on his head, which seems a bit unsanitary, and also made a strainer, which makes him MacGyver in this crowd.

* Chefs can’t sear anything because foil doesn’t conduct heat well enough, and we get a shot of one foil “pot” leaking off the edge of the flat-top. This can’t be the advert that Reynolds was hoping it would be. As an aside, I don’t go through that much foil in the kitchen, but I do use a lot of another Reynolds product – parchment paper, especially to keep pizza dough from sticking to my wooden pizza peel.

* Sheldon smokes scallops. I can’t even think of a time I saw smoked scallops on a menu, and I’ve certainly never eaten them. Wouldn’t a protein that lean fare somewhat poorly in a smoker?

* The bottom three: Brooke, whose dish was under seasoned and who got a nasty reaction from Padma during tasting for her use of raw onions; Micah, whose lamb was still wandering around looking for Mary; and Josh, whose dish was “uninspired.” Is it just me, or is Josh looking pretty overmatched the last 3-4 episodes? You can’t talk that tough and not bring the goods.

* We get a top six first, with Sheldon, Kristen, Josie, Stefan, Danyele, and Bart, of which the actual top three are Danyele, Kristen, and Sheldon. Winner is Kristen, of course, since she took the biggest risks, had a number of different elements, and seems to cook with tremendous precision. She needs to stop acting so surprised when she wins – she’s practically the Paul Qui of this group. And I can’t imagine that Bravo would be upset to have a former model win the season.

* Elimination challenge: Stephanie’s sticking around as guest judge, which seems like a great idea the show should use more often. The challenge involves cooking with fresh berries in head-to-head battles, other than Kristen, who cooks alone because she has immunity. The other top chefs from the quickfire pick their opponents. Sheldon picks Micah, Danyele picks Josh, Stefan picks John T, Josie picks Lizzie, and Bart gets Brooke. No one seems to really be picking for competitive reasons except maybe Josie, and even then, neither Lizzie nor Brooks seems like a pushover.

* Of the berries, the one I’d least want would be gooseberries, which Stefan and John draw. Gooseberries are powerfully tart and a real pain in the ass to clean and trim. Kristen gets tayberries, the one berry here I haven’t tried; it’s a sweet cross between a raspberry and a blackberry, but, per Wikipedia, can’t be machine harvested so it’s rarely grown commercially. I bet it makes an unbelievable pie, though. The whole episode reminds me of the time my wife and I went to Alaska and spotted salmonberries growing wild on the side of a road – but we didn’t touch them because I didn’t know what they were or if they were safe to eat. (They are.)

* Stefan buys flash-frozen tuna, saying it’s the “highest-quality fish in the store.” That might be true at some markets, but Whole Foods typically sells high-end sushi-grade tuna at the fish counter. Also, fish really suffers in the defrosting process, losing texture as the ice crystals melt. I almost never use frozen fish at home; if I can’t get it fresh, I don’t get it at all. John razzes Stefan for it, but then tattles to Tom about Stefan using frozen fish, which is just bush-league. There’s no un-hearing that – Tom had to taste that food with the notion that the fish was previously frozen already in his brain. John’s lame excuse is that he was mad that the tuna wasn’t sustainable. Hey, I’m all about sustainable product, but just admit you threw the guy under the bus already.

* The “kitchen” is an outdoor setup on the farm where the party (with 150 guests) will be held, and it’s chaos, with too little room for eleven chefs to set up. Danyele, not the most assertive chef in the group, has to get loud and pushy just to get counter space. Of course, I don’t know if there wasn’t enough space or if one or two chefs were taking up too much room, but I’d rather not see chefs suffer because they couldn’t find flour or get enough room to work. Bart is struggling to find a blender, and ends up cursing out John, who’s hanging on to a blender but might not have used it yet … again, why not have 11 blenders available?

* Up pulls a tractor with freshly picked berries. How do I get one of those to stop by my house?

* Kristen tells her backstory – she was born in Seoul but abandoned by her mom, and at four months moved to Michigan to be adopted by an American family. That means three chefs of these eleven were adopted. I can’t imagine growing up and dealing with that feeling of abandonment, rightly or wrongly. Kristen talks about taking the $10K prize for this challenge, should she win it, and going to Korea for the first time to see where she’s from.

* Micah’s daughters are named Sage and Saffron. I want to mock this but those names really aren’t that odd.

* Tasting time. Danyele: chicken ping nut terrine with blueberry mostarda on a crostada. No bueno. The bread slices are too thick and crunchy, the terrine is rubbery, and it’s all underseasoned. She looks totally lost in her own head at this point. Josh: savory goat cheese mousse with blueberry compote, plus a little Serrano ham and cracker crust. Judges say this one doesn’t have enough crunch, but that’s the only real comment, so it seems like Josh will win this one by default.

* Josie: A “rock’n raspberry roll” that she’s rolling to order while she babbles like a leaky faucet to distract guests from the fact that she’s woefully unprepared. The roll has sockeye salmon, Dungeness crab, and a raspberry aioli. Gail says there’s not enough raspberry. Tom says there’s too much style, not enough substance. If he’d added “too much blather” he would have nailed it. Lizzie: steamed cabbage roll with heritage pig and bacon stuffing, fresh raspberry, and raspberry liqueur. Padma loves it right off the bat. Tom says it’s just a little under seasoned. We’re not getting much of Stephanie’s commentary, unfortunately. I’d value her contributions over Gail’s, certainly.

* Sheldon: ahi poke, strawberries, sweet chili sauce, and strawberry purée, all in a summer roll. There’s also a radish in there that sells Stephanie. Micah: strawberry-marinated fried chicken with a strawberry and pepper bacon buttermilk biscuit. The fried chicken seems fine, but everyone hates the biscuit, which looks dry on camera and apparently was also dense and mealy.

* John: white gazpacho with chorizo and gooseberry jelly. The whole dish is overpowered by the chorizo, and one guest says it reminds him of “cheeseburger soup.” That’s probably not a compliment. Stefan: tuna crudo with Asian vinaigrette with gooseberries and more gooseberries on the dish itself. Gail doesn’t taste the berries enough, but as with Josh, this looks like a win for Stefan by default.

* Brooke: spicy smoked chocolate pudding with blackberry tapioca and salty graham cracker crumble and earl grey marshmallows. At this point in the show it seems like this is the top-rated dish, with everyone loving the concept, the execution, the use of the berries, and the nod to s’mores. Bart: blackberry soup with salmon and rhubarb yogurt. Tom loves soup, hates the salmon. Stephanie says the salmon is superfluous.

* Kristen: Matcha goat milk custard with tayberry jam, cornmeal sable, and olive-oil macerated tayberries. There are a ton of flavors going on in this dish. She just seems to be conceptually way ahead of anyone else in the competition, and she executes more consistently than anyone else.

* Stefan telling John to “suck it hard” in the stew room. All class, that guy.

* Judges table: John, Josie, Bart, Micah, Danyele lost their matchups in the eyes of the guests and the judges. Micah acknowledged that Sheldon’s food “popped.” His biscuit was dense and chewy, and for a guy with evident skills he is failing to execute at an alarming rate here. Josie gets ripped for “doing a demo” and makes more excuses, which seems to be her core competence. Gail says her flavors were muddled. Tom says it was too heavy with aioli. It didn’t look or sound appealing, and she made guests wait way too long for it. Bart’s salmon had terrible texture. Danyele said she heard people eating the crostada. Tom says she gets her halfway through a great concept but can’t finish it. John saw gooseberries, thought grapes, went gazpacho, then makes excuses about crazy kitchen and says he’s not making excuses. I’ve defended John to this point but he came off horribly in this episode. Perhaps he behaves when things are going well, but when adversity strikes he reverts to juvenile responses.

* Tom says the winners all worked better with the product than the losers. The winner is girl-on-fire Kristen, who can now go to Korea and perhaps eliminate “Gangnam Style” at the source. Stefan plants one on her cheek. Subtle.

* The judges joke about Josie’s dish looking like Pepto Bismol, but end up sending Danyele packing. She’s been on the bottom most of the competition, but Josie’s act is way more tired to me as a viewer, and I’ll miss Danyele’s hair.

* Then we get some drama as Josie goes all over Stefan in the stew room with what appears to be no provocation other than him starting a separation conversation that was too loud for her liking (but wasn’t about her). That’s pressure getting to someone, and that someone handling it poorly. Stefan isn’t the reason Josie’s been on the bottom. Own your mistakes.

* LCK: Make a sandwich in twenty minutes. Danyele goes way too simple, CJ goes over the top, and CJ wins. People do not learn: Simple almost never wins on Top Chef, because the judges nearly always favor a great concept done reasonably well over a fair concept done perfectly. And that’s how they should judge the dishes. That said, I’d rather eat Danyele’s sandwich – and she even takes one of the sandwiches she made to go. I agree with her that avocado just makes any sandwich better; I put guacamole on burgers all the time, and I like her method of making it into a simple spread by mashing it with a little acid and salt. But again, that doesn’t win on TC.

* Revised top three: Kristen, then a big gap, then John and Brooke, with Lizzie and Sheldon rounding out the top five. Micah’s falling fast. Josie seems like she’s clearly the worst competitor left, followed by Josh.

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→ December 19, 2012
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Silver Linings Playbook.

David O. Russell’s Oscar-nominated 2010 film The Fighter underwhelmed me relative to its critical acclaim because the story felt so generic, salvaged by great performances in the lead and supporting roles. With his follow-up, Silver Linings Playbook, based on a 2008 novel by Matthew Quick, Russell is mining more serious territory – most of the central characters are grappling with various forms of mentall illness – but with the general tone of an indie comedy, resulting in a film that takes its serious issues seriously, but not so seriously that the movie drags or becomes something less than enjoyable.

Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper, showing unexpected range) is just getting out of an eight-month stint in a mental institution where he’s been receiving treatment for bipolar disorder after “the explosion,” an incident (later hashed out in full) that resulted in a plea agreement that kept him out of jail but left him with a restraining order against him and some fear and prejudice among neighbors and former co-workers. His parents, played by Oscar winner Robert Deniro and Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver (for 2010’s Animal Kingdom), form an unstable support system for Pat, unable to fully understand his disorder or, in the case of Pat’s father, to separate his own needs from those of his son.

Pat’s one constant friend, Ronnie, himself dealing with a pretty serious anxiety problem but receiving no help for it, ends up introducing Pat to his sister-in-law Tiffani (Jennifer Lawrence), a recently widowed young woman with serious issues of her own beyond her grieving, and the two form an immediate connection over dinner when discussing the side effects of their various medications. (I particularly laughed at the discussion of Klonopin, an anti-depressant I was once prescribed as a sleep aid but never took because I was concerned about … well, exactly what Pat and Tiffani described.) Their partnership in healing is uneasy between Pat’s lack of any filter between his brain and his mouth and Tiffani’s wildly varying emotional states, but it’s also evident from the start that the two will end up together – and, to the credit of Cooper and the always-impressive Lawrence, it feels surprisingly natural. Tiffani extorts Pat into being her partner in a couples dance competition, which feels a little implausible, and that ends up a family-wide event due to a rather improbable two-event parlay that was the movie’s one real false note for me. The Pat-Tiffani storyline works independently of the bet, which is played for laughs rather than plot and only provides a reason for Pat’s father to be there at the end to give his son some advice that Pat didn’t actually need after all.

The film is absolutely carried by the performances of its four principals, led by Lawrence, who I argued was worthy of the 2010 Best Actress Oscar over the landslide favorite, Natalie Portman, for Lawrence’s performance in Winter’s Bone. Lawrence has a stronger groundswell of support now, as one of Hollywood’s It Girls, thanks in part to her lead role in The Hunger Games, but she does the most in this film with the hardest role because her character lacks emotional boundaries – she varies from desperate to angry to crushed to sultry from sentence to sentence, and conveys her grief over her husband’s death and her own previous emotional problems as much through body language and tone as through her dialogue. (She’s also stunning as a brunette.) Deniro turns in what is probably his best work in a decade, playing Pat’s highly superstitious father, himself likely dealing with an undiagnosed mental illness, loving his son and yet obviously fearing him at the same time because he can’t understand why his son acts and speaks the way he does. Weaver, an Australian actress who dominated Animal Kingdom as the amoral head of a ruthless crime family, nails the Philadelphia accent and the role of the subservient wife to a husband who’s probably been something between difficult and impossible for their entire marriage. I could see all three earning Oscar nods, while Brad Cooper, who lacks the others’ history of work in serious roles and would be up in the most competitive category, gets Jim Carrey’d and ends up on the outside looking in. We even get a few great scenes from Chris Tucker, talking faster than ever, and Julia Stiles, somewhat surprising as a domineering wife to Pat’s friend Ronnie.

I was also very happy with how the film dealt with mental illness, taking it seriously but infusing what could have been a very depressing subject with humor, both dark and silly. (Anupam Kher has a couple of scene-stealing lines as Pat’s therapist.) Pat has several episodes of manic or depressive behavior, as well as the “explosion” shown in flashbacks, and some of them are, appropriate, quite painful to watch. I’ve seen several reviews, including the A/V Club’s top 20 films of 2012, that denigrated the film as a “rom-com” that implies that the cure for bipolarity is finding the right, quirky girl. I think those critics miss the point entirely: Pat gets better over the course of the film once he starts taking his medication, investing himself in therapy, and following his therapist’s advice to develop coping strategies and expose himself to potential triggers. That’s how treatment works for any mental illness, including the anxiety disorder for which I’ve belatedly getting treatment this year. Silver Linings absolutely makes it clear that the medication and treatment are working because Pat’s character doesn’t evolve until he gets serious about them. His moods change, his filter reappears, and his word choices start to reflect things he’d likely be hearing or discussing in therapy. Russell doesn’t shove this down our throats, elevating the romantic element (even though Pat and Tiffani don’t actually kiss until the penultimate scene) over the mental-illness storyline, but he lays it all out for anyone who’s paying attention, and respects the subject even while often deriving humor from it. I don’t see how anyone could walk away from this film getting any other message about mental illness beyond “get professional help.”

Silver Linings Playbook is a comedy, and there is a romance, but calling it a rom-com doesn’t do it justice because it omits what sets this film apart from even indie romantic comedies. It tackles a serious subject with intelligence and wit while enveloping the viewer in a compelling romance that builds organically through mostly natural plot elements. The character development is far stronger than in even a good “rom-com,” and the performances are all Oscar-worthy, especially in what seems to be a weak year for serious films. And it’s pretty damn funny too. All rom-coms should be so good.

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→ December 18, 2012
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Homeland, season two.

If you missed it, my analysis of the R.A. Dickey trade is up for Insiders. There will be a podcast on Thursday and I’ll chat that afternoon at 3 pm Eastern.

Season two of Homeland turned out to be very different from season one in plot, tone, and pacing, to the point where it felt for much of the middle of the year like a different show featuring the same characters. (Perhaps not quite to this extent, but you get the idea.) I tend to agree with Alan Sepinwall’s* take that Homeland redeemed itself with a strong finale that got at least most of the way back to the domestic-terrorism angle of the first season, but I think it didn’t move far enough away from the doomed-romance storyline that threatened to take over so much of the season and even occupied too much of the first half of the finale.

* I should mention that Alan’s got a new book out, The Revolution Was Televised, on twelve TV dramas that changed the genre. I haven’t read it, because I’ve only watched one complete series (The Wire) he discussed, but I love Alan’s work and will recommend the book on that basis alone.

I’ve never really bought the Carrie/Brody romance as a deep emotional connection. I get how two very broken people might find solace in each other, and I suppose we’re supposed to infer there’s physical chemistry between these two (I don’t see it – Jess and Mike look like they want to jump each others’ bones when they’re in the same room, but Carrie and Brody’s intimacy seems forced). What I don’t get is how these two broken people are really in love, unless they’re pretending they are, including deluding themselves right down to their comments at the end of the show that they were “so close.” They really should never be that close again, not if the show wants to regain the realism that characterized the first season but was all too absent from the second. And if, as Sepinwall suggests, Brody is largely absent from season three while the focus shifts to the rebuilding of the CIA with Carrie working on the side to clear Brody’s name, I don’t think that’s a bad thing for the show at all.

The loss of realism in season two was coupled with a massive uptick in its pacing. Where season one was slow and methodical, with the CIA team often a step behind the terrorists and making (by TV standards) painstaking progress in their investigations, season two absolutely flew by, with Bigger Moments and faster plot twists. We’re not in network procedural territory here, but the tension from the first season’s lack of story churning was a great part of its appeal to me, reminiscent of British series that aren’t afraid to make the viewer wait for a big payoff. I think season two was far less realistic right up to the finale’s biggest twist, where no one seems to notice that an SUV is parked in the middle of the Langley campus, something that would have likely spurred an evacuation of adjacent buildings and an immediate assumption that the vehicle was rigged. (As for who moved the car, assuming it’s a character we’ve already seen, my money remains on Galvez, whom the writers seem to have been setting up since the middle of the first season as the mole, including his presence at and survival of the Gettysburg assault.)

You can also count me among the fans who didn’t care for the Dana/Finn hit-and-run storyline, which became largely an excuse for Morgan Saylor to do that thing with her sleeves more often than before. Sepinwall’s post mortem with the show’s producers indicates that this subplot was going somewhere else but never got there, which showed in the finished product. It played out like an afterthought, with its only value a modest addition to the venality we’d already seen from Walden.

Aside from three very strong season-long performances from Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, and Mandy Patinkin – the latter probably getting better material for Emmy submission time this year – season two’s other main strength was in exploring the complicated entanglement between Brody and Abu Nazir, from the former’s inability to fully sever his ties to the terrorist mastermind to the latter’s presumed willingness to die to set up the cataclysmic attack of the season finale. I also credit the producers for turning the page on Nazir after two seasons, yet doing so in a way that doesn’t leave the viewers with much closure. He’s dead, but his organization seems to be living on, and his spectre will inhabit the grounds of the decimated CIA for years. Simply catching the bad guy can’t end the threat, because that’s not how the world works, and setting off the emotional catharsis of watching Abu Nazir die against the reality that the threat against us survives the death of one man was one of the best-plotted elements of the season.

What I’d like to see from season three is a devolution from the romantic elements, including the Carrie/Brody relationship and the Brody/Jess/Mike triangle, back towards the tense spy-story themes of season one. That first season was constantly infused with doubt about Brody’s actual intentions and how far he’d get with the plans handed to him, along side his difficulty in readjusting to civilian life. His character has been poisoned by the events of the finale for the time being, to the point where, if he appears anywhere on the show again, he’ll have to be arrested and thrown in that same prison where Eileen Morgan was held. I can’t see him becoming a central character again unless his name is cleared, and that process should take a full season or more. If the show turned away from him entirely, I’d certainly miss Lewis’ outstanding performances, but it might be better for the show in the long run, much as The Wire turned away from Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell to introduce new antagonists for the investigators to chase. If the star-crossed lovers story takes over more of the next season, however, there’s a good chance I’ll tune out of the show entirely, because that’s so far removed from the reasons Homeland hooked me in the first place.

If you haven’t gotten into Homeland at all, I strongly recommend season one, even if my review here sort of turned you off on season two. That first twelve-episode arc ranks among the best single seasons I’ve seen of any show, in large part because it eschews the rapid-fire pacing of most American dramas and builds tension through more organic means.

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→ December 17, 2012
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Stone Age iOS app.

Stone Age is one of our favorite boardgames (which I reviewed in 2009) for its mix of moderate strategy, simple mechanics, a small amount of randomness, a strong theme, and appealing graphics; I ranked it 4th overall on my new boardgames ranking, and third when looking at games strictly in two-player mode. The new iPhone/iPod app version of Stone Age is an excellent implementation of the game’s mechanics with an innovative UI that is easy to learn (although not entirely intuitive) and excellent graphics, although the AI could be stronger and the lack of an iPad-friendly option is disappointing.

If you haven’t played the boardgame, it’s a simple game of worker placement and civilization building where players compete to accumulate points through three methods: obtaining technologies, building buildings, or earning multiplier bonuses on core civilization points like number of workers or number of tools. On each turn, players alternate placing workers on various game board spaces that do things like add a worker (you place two at one hut, known colloquially as the “love shack”), add farmland to give you an extra food token per turn, acquire any of the four main resources, or claim cards or buildings that must be purchased with those resources. The quantity of those resources – wood, clay, stone, and gold – you obtain on a turn is a function of the number of workers you placed in that area and on the roll of dice, one per worker placed, giving the game its main random element. Buildings and cards are also shuffled in each game and you can only purchase ones that are visible on the board.

Gameplay in the app is very straightforward. On each turn, you simply drag from the large worker icon on the left side of the screen to the area where you want to place one or more of your workers, and if it’s to one of the resource sections where you may place multiple workers, you get a fresh screen where you tap the spaces you want to fill. When collecting your workers, you simply tap the workers one by one, in the order you want, and resolve each worker’s situation (rolling dice, paying for buildings, etc.) before moving on to the next one. The app has some small time-saving features such as automatically choosing your free resource in wild-card situations when you’re the last player to choose, although there is inevitably some downtime between your turns while AI players resolve their own workers.

Implementing a game with a fairly sizable board like Stone Age’s for the smaller screens of the iPhone and iPod is a significant challenge because of the difficulty of making all of the relevant information easy for players to access. Stone Age’s designers rethought the entire layout of the game, using familiar graphics but relocating virtually everything to make it easier for players to make their moves and obtain the information they might need before making moves. The three special spaces – the farmer hut, the toolmaker hut, and the “love shack” – are now in the center of the screen, since they’ll usually be filled first. To the right is a column with the four available community cards, with the least expensive one on the bottom of the stack; above that column is a dial showing how much of the deck remains. Along the bottom are five circles showing the five possible resources for worker placement, and in the center of each circle the player can see how much of that resource he already has on hand. Along the top are the four building piles, with a clever if not immediately obvious way of showing how many building tiles remain in each pile (there are stones lined up along the side of each building) and, for buildings with variable resource requirements, barrels in front of the building showing how many different resource types are required by that building. The upper left shows how many tools, buildings, and people you have as well as how much food you produce automatically each turn. The one non-obvious bit of information comes from tapping on the icon in the upper right that shows the community card deck – doing so reveals what technologies you’ve already acquired and what game-end bonuses you hold for tools, food, people, or buildings. I understand that sounds like a lot for one screen, but most of it is clear once you know where to look, and the game uses large screen-covering dialog boxes for most in-game events, like paying for buildings or feeding your workers.

The AI players are not that strong; there are three levels available and the toughest level is fairly easy to beat if you stick to a simple strategy of attacking two or three bonus types while ignoring the others. These toughest AI players tend to pursue one such bonus strategy doggedly, producing respectable results but never racking up a ton of points without substantial luck in the dice-rolling. I’ve also noticed that AI players tend to end the game with lots of unused resources, often 12 or more, which is insane when there are still buildings available for purchase. I’m also disappointed that this app didn’t debut in a universal edition that was also optimized for the iPad, even if the screen layout was identical, because pass-and-play works much better on the iPad – especially when the app allows players to sit around the device without having to hand it off. You can double the screen size for this app on the iPad but it’s not as clear as graphics optimized for the device would be.

The actual implementation at the heart of the app is very strong, though, another in a trend of boardgame adaptations with clean, bright graphics and relatively easy-to-learn mechanics. I’d love a stronger AI presence and I assume an iPad-friendly version isn’t far down the road. If you tend to play live (pass-and-play or online/synchronous) against friends, it’s definitely worth buying, and even just playing against the AIs has been fun for a half-dozen or so games so far.

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→ December 14, 2012
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Top Chef, S10E6.

I should be back on a regular Top Chef recap and chat schedule next week, and sticking to Thursdays for Top Chef recaps after that.

* Quickfire: The judge is Marilyn Hagerty, author of that awful Olive Garden review in the Grand Forks Herald last year that went viral (with, I think, some early help from me after a reader sent it my way). Now she has a book deal with Tony Bourdain. What on earth is someone who knows little to nothing about food – for God’s sake, people, she praised a restaurant that is the chain equivalent to Chef Boy-ar-dee – doing on Top Chef? Our one male cat knows more about fine food and he eats plastic wrappers off the floor.

* The challenge is to make a sweet and savory holiday dish based on your ethnic heritage, and you have to use Truvia to satisfy the marketing department. The stuff, which uses the natural sweetener stevia, is twice as sweet as sugar and has a bizarre aftertaste, not as bad as artificial sweeteners but not pleasant and definitely not an acceptable substitute for sugar. You want to cut calories? Eat less. Unless you have a blood-sugar issue, or are cooking for someone who has one, I wouldn’t recommend stevia – and even then I believe Truvia contains some sucrose.

* The twist: There’s one knife for everyone. Lizzie draws it, but leaves it on her cutting board while she heads for the pantry, so Josh grabs it – fair play as I see it, and he didn’t hog it for long. Why should the knife sit idle? And if she wanted to use it straight off she should have taken it with her. Meanwhile other chefs are cutting with scissors, graters, and so on. No one has a mandoline slicer? Or a pastry cutter?

* Danyele and John both reveal that they’re adopted; Danyele ends up making her mom’s post-Christmas bread pudding with leftover ham.

* Lizzie is from South Africa, so Christmas there is warm. She’s making bobotie, pronounced “buh-BOO-tee” apparently, which I’ve only had at the Boma restaurant at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge. Lizzie’s looks a little different, though.

* Micah is half black and half Mexican and refers to himself as “Mexigro or Blaxican.” I’m just going to stop this point right here before I get myself into trouble.

* Eliza says her mother called her “pleasantly chunky” when she was a kid. In a related story, Eliza’s mother was a fucking moron.

* I don’t know how much range Sheldon has, but even staying within food traditions from Hawai’i he gets to draw on a lot of Asian cultures, and his banana lumpia looked pretty amazing. So did Josie’s tamale with habanero masa and a papaya and mango salsa on the side. Neither made the top three, though.

* Hagerty, meanwhile, is very sweet, but is overmatched by the food here. The bottom two are Bart’s chicken and waffles dish, which she said had “too many things going on,” and Micah’s “taco” (actually a tamale, but that’s okay Marilyn because you’re old), which was dry.

* Top three: Josh’s jonnycakes, Stefan’s latkes with smoked salmon tartare, and Brooke’s apple crostada with cheddar cheese, which Padma called “homey.” Brooke wins, much to her surprise, since she felt she was playing it safe. Personally, I think cheddar cheese is unpleasant to begin with and would never in a million years pair it with apples, but most people think this is a good idea.

* Elimination challenge: Anna Faris and Burt Macklin, who apparently are married. I’d like to see Faris on a Parks and Rec episode where April spends 22 minutes mumbling threats of unspeakable violence against her. Also, Danyele is a Parks and Rec fan, so major props to her. The challenge is to cater their giant homecoming party and the winner gets a Prius. On a slightly related note, I just rented a Kia hybrid when I went to LA this week and was shocked at how smooth the ride was, and how quiet the engine was – quiet enough that I didn’t realize I’d started the car, pressed the button again, and of course turned it off in the process. I expected a much choppier ride but couldn’t tell when the engine was switching energy sources unless I checked the dashboard.

* Faris and Andy … er, Chris want Seattle-oriented food – wild salmon, Dungeness crab, wild game – and food that brings in their German and Norwegian heritage, meaning meat and potatoes dishes. Pratt says “lots of calories” is the way to go.

* I hate Anna’s hair, the color, the cut, all of it. And the dark brown eyebrows with platinum blonde hair just look odd to me.

* We interrupt this episode of Top Chef to bring you a not-totally-obvious Prius commercial.

* Josh says Stefan was “douchey” and “kind of an asshole” on his season. Cough cough, Josh.

* Kristen says she loves making fresh pasta. She’s my pick to win this whole thing. Meanwhile she and der Hundchefkoch are flirting again.

* To the food: Bart does a loin of elk with cherry and beer sauce and mushroom couscous. Padma likes the way he cooked the elk (a meat I’ve never tried). Brooke’s lamb-stuffed squid on black rice with coconut milk gets some odd looks but immediate raves. Chris loves it, Tom loves it, and guest judge Rick Moonen praises her for going for it with immunity. Sheldon does a braised Okinawan pork belly and seared scallop on rice congee, which also gets high marks. Stefan makes a German gulasch with fried marjoram dumplings and sour cream. I couldn’t tell if Chris was joking around about not really knowing what gulasch was – he was kind of making the Andy face but he might have been serious about never having a proper gulasch before.

* Kristen does a delice de bourgogne tortellini, with dried apricots and triple cream cheese. Rick says it’s a perfect single bite, and the dish looks like it’s delicately made with powerful flavors. Micah does briased pork ribs with celery root puree, grilled apples, and a celery leaf salad. He clearly screwed up the puree, adding cream to make it smoother and ending up with a gloppy mess. I like celeriac but it’s pretty fibrous and I would have cut it with potato to improve the finished product’s texture. Lizzie does a crusted wild salmon with roasted radish and beet salad, but the salmon isn’t seared or seasoned enough. Eliza’s elk ribeye with elk sausage polenta and spiced carrots is a dud. The judges say the meat’s not bad, but the rest of dish isn’t good and the carrots are nearly raw. The meat looked way undercooked to me – more blue than rare and not sliced consistently.

* Final group: Danyele’s pan-roasted boar chop and tomato bacon marmalade gave her trouble from the top. Chris, who says he always orders boar when it’s on the menu (how I feel about duck), doesn’t like the meat, although he says the marmalade is awesome. Tom says the meat is sliced too thin and I can already hear the judges’ table conversation coming. Josh does a roasted pork shoulder with grilled corn puree, succotash, and a fennel and apple salad. The pork isn’t seasoned and there’s a huge piece of meat on every plate. Chris says, “it might not be great, but there’s a lot of it,” reminding me of the old (20+ years old) saying about IBM: “It may be slow, but it’s hard to use.” Josie does a creamy polenta with Malbec-braised short ribs, crispy pork belly, sous vide cipollini, and figs. There’s not enough contrast for Rick. I just see a jumbled mess. John does a seafood chowder with cockles, Manila clams, mussels, sockeye salmon, and Dungeness crab, using a chowder base he learned when working for Rick (which he chose before knowing Rick was one of the judges, apparently). This gets enormous praise, including from Rick, who calls it a “hug from the ocean.” The salmon looked almost raw on TV, but he cooked it at 140 degrees (per the lengthy recipe) and that low temp plus the natural color of the sockeye is probably what gave it that appearance.

* The bottom dishes during the judges’ discussion (with Anna and Chris) were pretty clear: Micah, Eliza, Josie, Josh, and Danyele. Josie ends up escaping the actual judges table, though.

* Top dishes: Kristen, John, Brooke, and Sheldon. Brooke says she took a risk because she had immunity. Tom says to keep cooking this way. It is amazing how every season we see chefs play it safe even though safe never wins and often leads to midseason eliminations (if not sooner). Rick says John’s chowder was like soul food. Kristen says she loves to play cheese and dried fruit off each other, something I haven’t tried myself. Sheldon’s dish gets praise for being very autobiographical, and again, he’s showing off his range within his heritage, which could be why I’m underestimating him. The winner is Brooke, who seemed to have the most inventive dish other than perhaps Sheldon’s. John might have won if he hadn’t done something so traditional here.

* On to the bottom dishes: Micah’s celery root puree was too grainy and his ingredients all out of balance. He says the celeriac was fibrous, but isn’t it usually? Josh’s pork shoulder chunks were too and not seasoned enough. Eliza’s elk was unevenly cooked, the carrots weren’t cooked through, and they were dry in parts. Danyele’s hoppin john and relish were fantastic but the boar wasn’t good. She panicked when she saw it overcooking and curling on the flat-top and never recovered – Tom admonishes her not to second-guess herself.

* Eliminated: Eliza is eliminated, which makes sense given what we saw and were told. She also says she was fighting a cold, which might have affected how well she could taste her own food.

* LCK: Eliza vs CJ vs Tyler in a battle of pickles and carrots, the two ingredients that got these chefs eliminated. I thought Eliza would win for her paprika-seared scallops on carrot puree, but CJ wins instead, in part (I think) because he charred and roasted the pickles, which seemed to surprise Tom, along with his smoked trout.

* Top three: Still Kristen and John clearly ahead of the pack, but it’s hard for me to keep arguing in Micah’s favor when he’s ending up on the bottom more than he’s on the top. Sheldon and Brooke were both really impressive this week, and I could see Stefan hanging around until the final five or so. I’d probably put Sheldon third at this point, since his success spans more than just this most recent episode.

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→ December 10, 2012
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Top 40 songs of 2012.

I was so disappointed in the 2011 new music crop that I didn’t do any ranking of the year’s best songs at all, but 2012 was so fertile that I planned to do a top 20 that became a top 40. One way in which my list differs from many others you’ll find, besides the fact that it’s one person’s opinion rather than a staff’s collective thoughts, is that I’ve got several artists represented more than once. If an artist was good enough to produce one of the five or ten best songs of the year, there’s a decent chance the same artist produced another pretty good track along the way too, right?

Each song title is followed by links to purchase the song from amazon and from iTunes as well as a link to a video on Youtube, using the official video wherever possible. And I’ll apologize in advance for overlooking “Gangnam Style.”

UPDATE, 12/2013: I’ve created a Spotify playlist with most of these songs plus a few I should have included but didn’t hear in time for the original rankings.

40. Stars – “Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It.” (amazon• iTunes• video) This is New Order all over again – if I played it for you and told you the song was a late cut from Substance, you’d be hard-pressed to dispute it, although the lead singer sounds more like a cross between Bernard Sumner and Paul Heaton of the Housemartins.

39. Atlas Genius – “Trojans.” (amazon• iTunes• video) This song almost out-indie-rocks itself both in lyrics and in sound, especially bringing indie darlings the Strokes to mind with its persistent guitar riff (but without hiding behind distortion). It’s one of the few songs on the list I didn’t like when I first heard it but grew to appreciate after hearing it several times.

38. Of Monsters and Men – “Lakehouse.” (amazon• iTunes• video) My second-favorite album of the year had a number of songs I could have considered for the list, but I ended up with three, including this one, probably the best song of the concert I saw them play in Tempe back in May.

37. Two Door Cinema Club – “Sleep Alone.” (amazon• iTunes•video) Reviews of this band’s second album were mixed, but I preferred the stronger guitar influence here to the heavier electronic sound of their debut. I was originally convinced after first hearing their debut single, “I Can Talk,” that this was just another Ben Gibbard side project.

36. Arctic Monkeys – “R U Mine?” (amazon• iTunes• video) I admit to missing the younger, snarkier Monkeys, but this single is at least closer to the sound they had on their second disc.

35. alt-J – “Dissolve Me.” (amazon• iTunes• video) Easily my favorite album of the year, and maybe the best I’ve heard since Radiohead’s OK Computer, alt-J cross genres and blend sounds within three- to four-minute songs that boast intelligent lyrics that often tell complex stories. This song’s closing line, “She makes the sound the sea makes, knee-deep in the North Sea,” is one of the album’s more poignant images, behind a track that opens like twee-pop until the heavy bass line storms in to dispel that notion.

34. Soundgarden – “Been Away Too Long.” (amazon• iTunesicon• video) And it is damn good to have you back, boys.

33. Divine Fits – “Like Ice Cream.” (amazon• iTunes• video) I’ll credit Nick Piecoro for introducing me to this supergroup, starring the lead singer of Spoon. I saw the final show of their tour in LA in November and the best track from their set was a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sway,” which was tighter than the original. “Like Ice Cream” wasn’t released as a single but is my favorite track from the Fits’ debut album.

32. Grouplove – “Tongue Tied.” (amazon• iTunes• video) Fun and poppy despite the worst female rap interlude since Prince’s “Alphabet St.” Also, did you know tongue-tied is actually a thing? It’s called ankyloglossia and refers to a condition where the frenulum below the tongue is longer than normal, reducing the tongue’s mobility, sometimes as far as its tip. I only learned this because a friend of mine had a baby this summer who was born with the condition, which they promptly fixed through surgery.

31. Bat for Lashes – “Laura.” (amazon• iTunes• video) Bat for Lashes is Natasha Khan, who is nuts, in a good way. This goth-tinged piano ballad involves a plea to a friend who fails to recognize her own self-worth to see herself in a new light, not as someone who’s only good as the life of the party.

30. Ben Howard – “Only Love.” (amazon• iTunes• video). Howard’s album Every Kingdom was nominated for the Mercury Prize, losing out to alt-J’s debut, but was my second favorite disc of the nominees, sounding like a smarter, more honest David Gray.

29. Jack White – “Love Interruption.” (amazon• iTunes• video) White continues to mine old genres of popular music and find new ways to express himself without making the style he’s borrowing unrecognizable. This folk-rock duet has that typical Jack White unforgettable melody as well as the perfect line “I won’t let love disrupt corrupt or interrupt me” in its chorus.

28. Best Coast – “The Only Place.” (amazon• iTunes• video) You know, I think I’m detecting some west coast bias here.

27. Hot Chip – “Don’t Deny Your Heart.” (amazon• iTunes• video) Not quite as good as their magnum opus, “Over and Over,” but even more upbeat overall. I want to compare these guys to Erasure, but Hot Chip’s music is more layered and less overtly poppy.

26. Imagine Dragons – “It’s Time.” (amazon• iTunes• video) This might be the most overplayed song on the list – I think it ended up on an episode of “Glee,” which is the kiss of death for any song – but I’m trying to remain at least somewhat objective here, and I liked the song quite a bit before it crossed over, as did my daughter, who heard it just once and asked me to put it on her iPod.

25. alt-J – “Taro.” (amazon• iTunes• video) A song about the photojournalist Gerda Taro and her ill-fated love affair with Robert Capa – Taro was the first photojournalist to be killed in action, dying while covering the Spanish Civil War – over a two-part suite, one half sounding almost like a Belle & Sebastian track while the other draws on Indian rhythrms, like the score from a Bollywood film.

24. Ben Gibbard – “Oh, Woe.” (amazon• iTunes• video) My favorite track from the solo debut by Baseball Today listener and Death Cab for Cutie frontman Gibbard. The album version is great, but the live version I linked in that video, just Gibbard and his guitar, is really superb.

23. M83 – “Midnight City.” (amazon• iTunes• video) There’s something abstract about “Midnight City” with the deemphasis on its vocals and the repetition of a short hook that sounds like someone stepping on a clown’s horn, but I had to concede to my own brain on this one after I couldn’t get that hook out of my head for several weeks.

22. Tanlines – “All of Me.” (amazon• iTunes• video) I tend to put these lists together pairwise – would I rather listen to track A or track B? – and had to put “All of Me” over all other electronic/dance tracks save one because it’s a cleaner listen with more resemblance to a traditionally-recorded song. I have no objection to synthesizers, drum machines, and other tools of the trade; progress is wonderful, but I will likely always favor songs that at least structurally resemble the music I grew up listening to. Tanlines definitely draws on that early Depeche Mode sound and even some of the edgier New Wave stuff that defined my musical tastes in the early to mid-80s.

21. Ben Howard – “Old Pine.” (amazon• iTunes• video). The first track from Howard’s Every Kingdom album has three fairly distinct parts, with the middle one, where the lyrics begin, the one that drew me not just to the song but to the disc as a whole, one of only about a half-dozen albums I’ve purchased in full this year. The production here absolutely makes the track, as it sounds like Howard is in the room with you playing the acoustic guitar.

20. Black Keys – “Lonely Boy.” (amazon• iTunes• video) Actually released in late 2011, but it’s my list and I’m including it because I want to talk about Black Keys. Other than the National, I doubt readers have recommended any artist to me as much as they have the Black Keys, and I get it – I probably should like them more, as they draw so heavily on classic rock and hard-rock traditions that characterized most of my music collection from high school through my freshman year of college. But I find Black Keys’ music so derivative of its influences that I find myself separated from their music by a wall of disdain – if other artists on this list, like Jack White, Tame Impala, and Richard Hawley, can draw on the same influences but add new insights or flourishes to create something new, why are Black Keys so satisfied to imitate rather than innovate? “Little Submarines” is just “Can’t Find My Way Home” revisited. “Gold on the Ceiling” sounds like a T-Rex B-side. If anything, Black Keys became less creative on El Camino, since at least the two main singles from Brothers, “Tighten Up” and “Howlin’ for You,” brought something new to the blues-rock table. Black Keys are more Whitesnake than Led Zeppelin in the end.

19. Django Django – “Hail Bop.” (amazon• iTunes• video) Another track from a Mercury Prize-nominated album in a very strong year for candidates after a disappointing crop in 2011. I know “Default” is the hit single and the critically lauded track, but I prefer “Hail Bop” for its better balance between its psychedelic-rock roots and the electronic elements Django brings to all of its tracks. I wonder if I’d like “Default” better if it were exactly the same track but without the muddled sample of the lead singer saying “default” all over the song.

18. Gotye – “Eyes Wide Open.” (amazon• iTunes• video) I hate Gotye’s Big Hit, enough that I’m not even going to say its name. This is a way better song, mostly because it’s not annoying, but also because it shows the multi-instrumentalist can rock out a little bit.

17. Mumford and Sons – “I Will Wait.” (amazon• iTunes• video) I liked Babel, Mumford’s new album (reviewed here), but didn’t think it was as novel as their debut – they cover a lot of the same ground with better production values and some improved quality in the lyrics. I can’t blame them for following a successful formula, but they’re going to have to try something new on disc three. Anyway, “I Will Wait” has been a huge hit single and earned them some Grammy notice, although it’s my second-favorite track on the album.

16. Capital Cities – “Safe and Sound.” (amazon• iTunes• video) This is an unabashed retro New Wave track, something Men Without Hats might be proud of, but again, there are tiny details (like the horn sample) that make a familiar sound seem fresh.

15. Tame Impala – “Elephant.” (amazon• iTunes• video) Really liked this Australian group’s psychedelic-rock debut, featuring Solitude is Bliss, but haven’t spent enough time with their follow-up aside from this bass-heavy track – like driving behind a steamroller on a desolate highway – and the spacier track “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards.”

14. Richard Hawley – “Leave Your Body Behind You.” (amazon• iTunes• video) The former Longpigs guitarist was nominated for the Mercury Prize for the second time this year for his uneven but occasionally brilliant album Standing at the Sky’s Edge, featuring this song, reminiscent of some of the Stone Roses’ early material.

13. Jack White – “Sixteen Saltines.” (amazon• iTunes• video) When Jack White wants to rock, he rocks. He crafts heavy guitar lines that seem so familiar yet are indisputably his, and he doesn’t hide them behind other instruments, nearly always including a section where he’s playing with no vocals or instruments alongside him.

12. Bat for Lashes – “All Your Gold.” (amazon• iTunes• video) A faster-paced, more layered track from Khan’s Haunted Man album, “All Your Gold” would fit as well on adult contemporary radio as it would on alternative radio – and I do mean that as a compliment.

11. alt-J – “Breezeblocks.” (amazon• iTunes• video) The nasal vocals aside, this is a brilliant track that describes a lost love affair, possibly with a violent ending, and then goes on to quote Where the Wild Things Are (something most reviews I’ve seen of the song seemed to miss entirely). It also utilizes some of the recurring lyrical motifs on alt-J’s album, including the image of two adversaries “toe to toe,” and fugal vocal lines that also appear on “Dissolve Me.”

10. Cloud Nothings – “Stay Useless.” (amazon• iTunes• video) Dylan Baldi’s one-man project is now a full-fledged band but he retains his lo-fi garage-rock stylings, just opting for a harder sound on their second full-length album Attack on Memory, led by this standout track and potential slacker anthem.

9. Of Monsters and Men – “Mountain Sound.”(amazon• iTunes• video) I loved Of Monsters and Men’s debut album pretty much start to finish, but I’ll concede the lyrics here might fit in a greeting card. It’s incredibly catchy, though, and my daughter and I have been singing the call-and-response chorus together in the car for months.

8. School of Seven Bells – “The Night.” (amazon• iTunes• video) The lyrics, both in content and in sound, are absolutely haunting: “Our ending/lit a fuse in my heart/Devoured me.” The video is nuts, by the way – they held a contest and the linked entry, starring a girl of maybe eight who is far too good at her role, was the winner.

7. Passion Pit – “Take a Walk.” (amazon• iTunes• video) Loved their single “Little Secrets” from their previous album, but this looks like it’s going to be the far bigger hit and I’m just glad to see this inventive synth-pop group getting more mainstream attention. No truth to the rumor that this is the theme song to the forthcoming film Moneyball 2.

6. Mumford and Sons – “Lover of the Light.” (amazon• iTunes• video) My favorite track from the new album, in part because there’s a little more going on here musically than anywhere else on the disc. And the video has Stringer Bell.

5. Civil Twilight – “Fire Escape.” (amazon• iTunes• video) I thought this song had disappeared without a trace until hearing it last week at Fido in Nashville; I immediately found its pulsing guitar lines, with a syncopated beat that gives the song a slightly funky groove, unforgettable, even to the point of forgiving the hackneyed reference to pharmaceuticals in the bridge.

4. The Vaccines – “Teenage Icon.” (amazon• iTunes• video) Post-punk and snarky, The Vaccines’ best song is either self-mocking or a vicious attack on the couldn’t-care-less ethic of many current rock heroes.

3. Bombay Bicycle Club – “Shuffle.” (amazon• iTunes• video) Released in the UK in June of 2011, although it debuted on the US Alternative charts on February 20th of 2012 and I didn’t hear it at all on the radio (specifically XMU) until March. The slight transposition of the recurring piano riff to keep it a quarter-beat off from the percussion gives the entire song the kinetic energy of a trip down a long flight of stairs…

2. Of Monsters and Men – “Little Talks.” (amazon• iTunes• video) The exclusion of these guys and of alt-J from the Granny nominations was an absolute embarrassment; I thought we’d turned a corner when Arcade Fire won in February of 2011, but that was the Felix Hernandez blip on the radar. OM&M love call-and-response tricks and they employed it most effectively here in a sunny song that masks the sad conversation between two lovers, one of whom is losing her memory or her mind.

1. alt-J – “Tessellate.” (amazon• iTunes• video) The best track on the best album of 2012, “Tessellate” takes a trip-hop beat with vivid imagery and nods to geometry and computer-aided design within a story of the end of a love affair. Any best-of-2012 album list that doesn’t include alt-J’s An Awesome Wave is invalid. It’s a groundbreaking record, a deserving winner of the Mercury Prize, and produced what was easily my favorite song of 2012.

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→ December 8, 2012
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Top Chef, S10E5.

The show starts with an obscene 3:45 am wakeup call for the chefs; speaking as one of the least morning-ish people ever, that offended me to the core. It’s Stefan’s 40th birthday, and true to form, he calls it “sentimental bullshit.” He’s just a bald barrel of sunshine, that Stefan.

* Quickfire: The chefs are all in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, which is awesome, especially in late summer when there’s this unbelievable array of fruits like Rainier cherries and various mountain berries available. Chef Daisley Gordon, who is probably another one of Tom’s kids, is the guest judge. The chefs divide into teams of two and oh-hey-what-a-shocker Josh ends up with John. Meanwhile, Josie Congeniality is already anticipating a clash in styles with Eliza before they’ve even said “good morning.” The challenge is to make breakfast to go for the vendors – but it has to be served on a stick. Daisley brought the pantry, Sur la Table is providing the equipment with the chefs given a $500 budget to purchase what they need, and they get one hour to do it all. Immunity for both winners is at stake.

* Eliza followed Widespread Panic around the country one summer and paid her way by selling “vegan sushi” out of the van. Following a band across the country strikes me as a little odd, but mostly because it’s not my thing. I’m having a harder time with believing that vegan sushi is actually a thing.

* John says he’s acceding to Josh’s plans so that their personal differences don’t get in the way. Once again, he’s not living up to his reputation at all, and Josh comes off far worse in their interactions through the whole episode. Maybe the editors aren’t being fair to Rollie Fingers here but I do not believe they’re letting John off the hook.

* Eliza points out Josie doesn’t play well with others because Josie is the queen of logical fallacies, arguing that her way is right because it’s her way. Then we see Eliza trying to convince Josie to do it another way, which means that Eliza is insane.

* Sheldon and Bart’s panini press dies on them, but apparently the warranty expired after 20 minutes. Lizzie and Danyele got to the open pantry a little late and ended up with neither dairy nor eggs, which tells us nothing about how good they are as chefs. I get that the supplies can’t be infinite, but maybe making sure a few of the essentials are properly stocked – or that other chefs aren’t hoarding for competitive reasons – could be a part of the show, so chefs can be judged on their cooking skills.

* The dishes: Josh and John turn out chilaquiles as tacos, which I think would have been my favorite, especially since the Hillside Spot has hooked me on their chilaquiles. Eliza and Josie make ricotta pancakes with raspberry and linguica sausage, like a layer cake on a stick, but are killed because it’s too hard to eat. Micah and Kristen do a bacon and cinnamon waffle with cantaloupe marinated in pecan maple syrup and boysenberry and strawberry jam, probably the best presentation of any dish. CJ and Tyler do salmon in a crepe with arugula and cream cheese. Bart and Sheldon serve a breakfast sandwich with eggs, cheese, pancetta, and spinach purée; although no one mentioned nutritional value, this seemed like the highest protein dish along with the vitamin punch of the spinach, good for someone who’s going to be on his/her feet for hours before lunch. Danyele and Lizzie do summer berries with crispy pancetta, blackberry honey, and black pepper, but are criticized for its simplicity and lack of substance. Stefan and Brooke do a croque-monsieur with toasted fig.

* The top teams are Sheldon and Bart for their breakfast sandwich and Josh and John for their tacos. Sheldon and Bart win and grab immunity, which turns out to matter more than ever this time around.

* Elimination challenge: Remaining in teams, one per pair randomly draws an artisanal ingredient sold at the market. They then have two hours to prep and cook, with $10K on the line. The central ingredient must be highlighted, and the seven artisans will be guests at the dinner table along with Chef Daisley and the judges (including Hugh!).

* CJ and Tyler get spicy dill pickles. CJ wants to do a burger, fearing that Tom would criticize a more complex dish by saying “why not do a simple burger?” Tyler’s afraid it’s too simple but wants to be polite, which is a great life strategy but generally sucks on Top Chef. You have to be a little bit of a bastard to win reality shows. Just don’t be too much of one or the editors will make you look like a serial killer.

* Josh is merely yessing John to death and barely contributing to the concept of their dish, which isn’t any better than what Tyler’s doing. Lizzie and Danyele, given coconut curry chocolate, disagree on their dish – Lizzie wanted to do snapper or other fish, while Danyele insists on dessert. I can’t fathom Lizzie’s concept here; dessert may seem a little obvious, but chocolate and curry are such dominant flavors that I think they’d blow fish completely off the plate.

* Sheldon says he and Bart will go “balls to the wall” since they have immunity; Chef Udo Dirkschneider approves. Their dish is salmon candy, which Sheldon says is like salmon bacon (I’ve never had it) and says he’s never seen anything like it in Hawaii. Bart says it’s so sweet they must go in the opposite direction, so maybe it’s more comparable to bacon coated in the maple syrup that slid off your pancakes?

* Stefan and Brooke get rose petal jelly, which Stefan hates from the start because it smells like perfume from a prior century.

* Josh pan-sears medallions of pork tenderloin but crowds the pan so they won’t brown correctly. Their artisanal item, truffled popcorn, shows up in their very thick grits and in a truffled sauce. They’re not communicating at all – John sees that Josh is cooking the pork badly, but won’t say anything for fear of a blowup. What a prick, that guy.

* To judging … Josh and John’s pork, truffled popcorn grits, and balsamic truffle vinaigrette are not good. Hugh says “those grits suck.” Tell us how you really feel, brother. The sauce is a gloppy mess, the meat is poorly cooked per Tom, and the popcorn is not cleverly integrated. Well then.

* Micah and Kristen used their core ingredient, cheese curds, three ways – in a bechamel, raw, and fried. All the criticism is aimed at the fried curds, which are so small and so overpowered by the romesco sauce that everyone says the curds disappeared.

* Stefan and Brooke used their rose petal jelly to glaze duck and in the braised cabbage, producing an overly sweet dish without balance in the cabbage, while they also seem to have overcooked the duck.

* Sheldon and Bart served their candied salmon (which is made by the market’s fish throwers) with sweet and sour salad and a salmon mousse underneath. This might have been the best-reviewed dish of all, but the complaint was that they didn’t use enough of the salmon candy.

* Danyele and Lizzie’s coconut curry chocolate mousse tart with orange tea syrup falls apart when the diners cut into it. The artisan was mad that they used other chocolates in the dish, but I could understand wanting to mute the curry a little bit. They may have just done it really poorly.

* CJ and Tyler’s pork crumpet burger with fried spicy dill pickles is a hot mess because the crumpet collapses like wet toilet paper. Tom kills them for their lack of originality here. Has a burger ever fared well on Top Chef?

* Josie and Eliza had cardamom bitters, which I imagine is also powerfully fragrant. I like cardamom but it’s definitely one of the bossiest spices in the drawer. They do a white king salmon with cardamom bitters pistou and white clams. Josie complains about the flavor of Eliza’s pistou, which apparently is salty and has a little sand in it. Hugh says it’s not singing for him, which on this episode is like calling it an All-Star.

* Overall, everyone at the table was disappointed, and Padma even apologizes to the guests. Tom heads to the waiting room to go all Lee Elia on the chefs, calling it “actually a pretty poor showing” between lack of imagination and lack of technique. He changes course and says they’re sending an entire team home instead of just one chef (and, it turns out, not appointing a winner). He also tells them that Last Chance Kitchen is on again, although apparently some of the chefs never watched last season’s version of LCK and don’t understand how it works. Tom’s final comment was probably the most important one as he told them to step it up and take some risks. Chef Udo nods.

* Back in the condo, CJ says he would feel like an “absolute failure bitch” if he were eliminated on this challenge. We should really retire that last word. Meanwhile, Josh lights into Tyler for nothing, letting his own frustrations explode on someone who was just trying to make small talk. Josh later says he and Stefan are both on “the arrogant asshole side … but likable.” He’s half right.

* The bottom three teams are John/Josh, CJ/Tyler, and Brooke/Stefan. Tom hammers them all for a lack of creativity, while Gail says the food just wasn’t well made. Padma says the sugar in Stefan’s duck glaze needed more heat. Hugh accuses Stefan of sending out food (the cabbage) he knew was too sweet. Josh and John cut pork into medallions, and Josh immediately blames John for that, as if he were John’s employee in the kitchen. Tom says the food looked like someone who hated cooking made it, which has to be about as bad an insult as you can offer in this environment. Hugh says CJ’s burger was overcooked and the bun was soggy.

* CJ tries to throw the dessert under the bus as they’re walking out to await the final decision, which, while obviously reflecting his own frustrations, is pretty bush league.

* Hugh compares the rose-petal jelly dish to eating someone’s grandmother with its archaic perfume.

* Gail ends up the deciding vote on who goes home. CJ and Tyler go. CJ says he wasn’t judged fairly which is a joke – it was his dish from the start, and if anyone should feel slighted, it should be Tyler, but even he has to take some blame for failing to stand up for himself.

* LCK: Make a dessert in 30 minutes, with Tyler and CJ working together as a team against Kuniko. Kuniko doesn’t like to eat dessert, but says she has an advantage because she’s working alone. CJ wants to make hay-flavored ice cream, but don’t you need to age egg-based ice creams to improve their flavors?

* Kuniko makes a frozen banana with lemon curd, fruit compote, crushed cashews, shredded coconut, brown sugar syrup, tea, pink peppercorns, and olive oil! Tyler and CJ make hay ice cream with a cherry fritter, cooked cherries, arugula, and a chocolate sauce. Tom praises Kuniko’s flavors and the way she compressed the fruits, but dings her for using a bowl instead of a plate; she defends it off camera because that way you get every element in every bite. Tom says CJ/Tyler’s dish had too much arugula, but had a good fritter. CJ and Tyler end up winning, which I find really bizarre if the only criticism of Kuniko was the bowl. Her flavors were apparently strong and her technique was clearly better, especially with the trouble CJ had forming quenelles of his ice cream.

* Final three prediction: John, Kristen, and Micah.

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→ December 7, 2012
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Nashville eats, 2012 edition.

I ate really, really well in Nashville this week, which is what happens when you get the hell out of the Opryland Hotel, itself a testament to what happens when capitalism’s DNA mutates and reproduces out of control. Over the last five years it seems that Nashville has had a culinary boom, and I had more places I wanted to visit than I could have gotten to in a week.

Our first big group dinner was Monday night at City House, one of the most-recommended restaurants in Nashville by those of you who live there, and one of the most enjoyable meals I have ever had when you combine the food and the company at the table. Because of the size of our party, we were served family-style, which had the benefit of allowing us to all try more items. I thought two items really stood out above everything else: the belly ham pizza and the bread gnocchi. We tried all four pizzas on the menu, with the anchovy pizza the only disappointment, but the belly ham pizza with fresh mozzarella, oregano, and a pretty healthy dose of red chili flakes was incredible, from the light, almost cracker-like crust to the bacon-like pork to the bright, creamy cheese. The gnocchi, without potato as traditional gnocchi would have, were the best I’ve ever eaten (caveat: potato gnocchi don’t thrill me) and are served with a scant tomato sauce, braised pork butt, and grana padano (essentially Parmiggiano-Reggiano from cows near but not in that specific region). That’s the dish everyone was talking about the next morning. The octopus starter everyone’s joked about was just fair, cooked correctly (that is, not till it was a spare tire) but still not that pleasant a texture and without the powerful flavors to stand up to the fish. I loved the rigatoni with rabbit sugo and fennel, kind of like a duck ragout with big flavors from the aromatics and tomato. That night’s special dessert was a chocolate-peanut butter pie that would put Reese’s out of business.

Tuesday night’s dinner included at least 16 of us from the media side at the Pharmacy Burger Bar and Bier Garden, one of the best burger places I have ever visited. Their burgers are made with Tennessee-grown beef and served on stark white rolls that are as soft as potato bread and are custom-baked for the Pharmacy. They hand-cut their fries, including skin-on sweet potato fries served without that annoying sugar topping so many places use or any tricks to make them crispier, and they serve their own tater tots, which might have been an even bigger hit than the burgers. They also had a strong selection of regional beers, including the Nashville-brewed Yazoo Gerst Amber beer, so smooth it went down almost like soda and might be too mild for folks who are more serious about their beer than I am. As for the burgers, most of us went for their signature item, the Farm Burger, with bacon, country ham, and a fried egg on top, which is a top five burger for me at this point.

We ventured out to two new lunch places, Fido and Marché. Fido is related to the Bongo Java coffee shop and retains that coffee-shop vibe even when serving sandwiches or fish entrees like the trout special I ordered, along with a cinnamon cheesecake that Jonah Keri said was to die for and a chocolate-chocolate chip cookie that also really strong. Marche offers a duck confit sandwich about which one probably needs to say little more, because really, it’s some damn good duck confit. Molly Knight ordered a latte which was large enough to drown an orangutan. Both places were worth hitting again, especially because they gave us a chance to eat somewhat more healthful items in expectation of big dinners.

On the way to the airport I made a detour to revisit Arnold’s Country Kitchen, a meat-and-three place that seems to rate as Nashville’s best and where I had a great meal back in 2007. The meats change every day as do about half of the sides available; Thursday’s options included roast beef, while mashed potatoes and turnip greens (with ham hock) appear to always be options. One of the special sides that day was fried green tomatoes, about four-inch discs breaded with seasoned bread crumbs and quickly deep-fried. They’re not good for you – none of this is – but the salty-sour combo was surprisingly satisfying. For dessert, they offered four different kinds of pies plus a few other options. The hot pepper chocolate pie wasn’t very popular but I’d gladly eat that again – the filling had the texture of a dense mousse and the flavor of half-cooked brownies, and once you finished a bite, a warm heat took over from what I assume was cayenne pepper. A meat, three sides, bread (which I skipped), dessert, and a drink ran about $13 and I was full for the whole flight back to Arizona.

Finally, the headline meal of the trip was at The Catbird Seat, named one of the ten best new restaurants in the U.S. this year by Bon Appetit. This was the most expensive meal I have ever eaten, and one of the longest at over four hours and nine-plus courses. It’s a set tasting menu, and the food tends toward the experimental – not quite Alinea territory but along the same philosophical lines. All of the courses hit the mark save one, and I was challenged by a number of the dishes to rethink ingredients or flavors. If you’re not interested in a $150+ meal that goes on for days, feel free to stop reading here – that’s why I’m covering this last. Also, each dish comes with a wine pairing, which the sommelier introduces and explains in some depth, but as the group’s driver I skipped this part.

* The meal began with quarter-sized ‘oreos’ made of a parmiggiano cream or mousse sandwiched between two slices of porcini mushrooms, producing a gustatory dissonance as my palate kept expecting sweet. The point of this starter, other than just being playful, became evident later on.

* The first actual course was a trio of one-bite items, including a raw Island Creek oyster with kimchi and a lime foam, a “cracker jack” using shiitake mushrooms roasted until crunchy, and a rectangle of chicken skin baked until crunchy and topped with ground red pepper for a twist on Nashville hot chicken. That’s the first raw oyster I’ve ever eaten, incidentally – growing up on Long Island during a time when raw oysters were quite dangerous to eat, I had no exposure to them and had (have?) a long-standing bias against raw shellfish of any sort. The faux cracker jack was the best item here, combining the earthiness of the mushroom with the hint of sweetness and crunch you’d expect from something that looks like caramel corn.

* Second course was a diver scallop crudo, sliced thinly, served with their own dashi, smoked roe of Arctic char, crumbled chicken skin, lime juice, finely minced serrano chiles, soy sauce, and shiso leaves. As complex as that sounded, and even looked, the end result was perfectly balanced and nothing overshadowed the scallop itself. This was also one of the largest portions of the night.

* Third course was a soup of roasted sunchoke and caramelized yogurt, poured tableside over a quarter of an artichoke heart, shaved roasted fennel, black olive, black garlic, and a tiny bit of black truffle. Cooked yogurt is very much not my friend, but the texture of the soup was unreal, like double cream, and the roasted sunchokes gave it the appearance of a rich light-brown roux with hints of sweetness and a nutmeg-like spice.

* Fourth course was Arctic char with cream cheese gnudi, dill-infused oil, pureed Meyer lemon (rind and all, apparently), capers, and sorrel leaves. I love Arctic char, a fish nearly indistinguishable from salmon, but prefer it cooked a little past medium rare; this was practically swimming upstream. The gnudi, marble-sized spheres of (I presume) cream cheese with just enough flour to give them structure, had the texture of potato gnocchi and just a hint of the tang from the cheese so that they could soak up some of the dill flavor below them. (Gnudi means “nude” in Italian and refers to a filling cooked without its pasta wrapper.)

* Fifth course was probably the restaurant’s signature dish, roasted pigeon leg, served with the claw still on it, along with a celeriac ribbon, smoked butter, cured egg yolk, chestnut purée, and huckleberry reduction, with the last two items perhaps a play on peanut butter and jelly. Pigeon (usually marketed here as “squab,” for obvious reasons) was another first for me, here cooked rare with a flavor like that of a duck breast with a texture a little closer to a rare lamb rib chop. The chesnut purée stole a fair bit of the show, though, with the crisped skin of the pigeon also standing out.

* Sixth course was a large medallion of rare “Wagyu” beef ribeye with roasted Belgian endive, little spheres of Asian pear, roasted maitake mushroom, and walnut butter. This was by far the most generous portion of the night, but a little tricky to eat with all the components in one bite, in part because the beef, while tender, wasn’t quite that “like butter” consistency I’d expect from that particular cut. (There’s also a lack of labelling standards for “Wagyu” beef, but I’ll trust that the Catbird Seat is at least buying very high-quality inputs.) Getting a sphere of anything the size of a large marble on to the fork with four other elements is nearly impossible, even though the fruit’s mild sweetness was a perfect complement to the various savory elements. Great ideas here, but perhaps not fully executed.

* Seventh course was the one whiff for me, Rush Creek Reserve cheese with a curried granola, rose-water honey, and apricot jam. The cheese looks like mayonnaise and had a heavy, cheddar-y flavor that I simply don’t like. It’s supposed to be one of the best domestic cheese around, so I’m chalking this up to my specific palate and not the dish itself, although Jonah expressed his dislike of the curried granola, which I probably could eat by the bowl.

* From there we move to desserts, three plates although they’re listed on the menu as just two courses. Course 8A was a play on coffee and tea, with coffee ice cream, molasses cake, rooibos (red tea) foam, and a hazelnut and coffee crumb, just insanely good across the board, a dessert where everything was sweet but nothing was too sweet, and a great way to show off the complexity of rooibos’ flavor. (I happen to love the stuff, and especially like to drink it when I’m sick because it has no caffeine.) Course 8B was a maple-thyme flan-like custard cooked in an egg shell with a maple glaze on top and a single stick of bacon protruding from the top – an egg-and-bacon dish that implied there were pancakes on the plate that required the use of maple syrup.

* The ninth course was the most impressive dessert from an execution perspective: charred oak ice cream, vanilla cake, pineapple gelée, and bourbon balls – bourbon encapsulated in a very soft gel so they’d explode in your mouth almost on contact. The ice cream here was smoky but also had subtle flavors that reminded me of caramel, coffee, and of course whiskey, and its texture was as smooth as that of good gelato.

* Finally, another small plate of three Oreo-like items appeared, but this time, they’re sweet, with chocolate wafers and a vanilla cream. They don’t taste anything like the real thing, but speaking as a devout chocoholic, I appreciated the hit of bitter cocoa at the end of the meal.

Someone in Nashville asked me if I preferred the meal at City House or the one at the Catbird Seat but I struggled to compare them. City House is pretty straightforward upscale cuisine – recognizable dishes, done well from start to finish, using fresh, local ingredients with outstanding execution. You will also leave there stuffed. Catbird Seat is experimental and challenging; it isn’t food to be consumed so much as it’s food to be considered. Your preference would likely depend on what you prefer. Catbird Seat is doing things very few restaurants outside of New York, LA, and Chicago are doing, and that makes it the “better” restaurant, the place I’d absolutely take my wife for a special occasion or a client I wanted to blow out of the water. On the other hand, if my goal was to go have a boisterous meal with nine friends, which was what we did on Monday night, I’d take City House. You can’t lose either way.

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→ December 4, 2012
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The History of Love.

I’ve been a little busy down here in Nashville, with Insider posts on the Dan Haren signing, the Joakim Soria signing, and the Mike Napoli signing. My latest video with Boog and Jerry covers Shane Victorino and Giancarlo Stanton.

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Nicole Krauss’ novel, The History of Love, is ambitious for its subject matter – three intertwining plot lines around a Holocaust survivor, a mysterious author, and a young girl named for the main character in the author’s lone novel – and for how much it crams into a book of scarcely over 200 pages. The survivor, Leo Gorsky, and the girl, Alma, receive substantial time on the book’s pages, as Gorsky walks us through his past and through his mundane days as he nears and fears the end of his life, while the precocious Alma, still missing her dead father, seeks salve in the mystery behind the book, also called “The History of Love,” that gave her her name, powered her father’s love for her mother, and somehow ties all three storylines together.

Gorsky’s story is the sad one that gets the entire novel moving; he lost his family to Nazi invaders in his Polish village, and lost the love of his life when they were separated during his flight across Europe during the War, eventually landing in America and finding work as a locksmith alongside his cousin. Gorsky lives a lonely existence with no apparent purpose beyond living another day, bantering with his longtime friend, Bruno, who lives upstairs and with whom he has a pact to check on each other every day so that neither should die alone in his apartment and remain undiscovered for days. Alma, living in the same city, records her thoughts in a diary with a style that reminded me of Flavia de Luce, both her matter-of-fact delivery and her insatiable curiosity in areas that grab her interest. Her father, depicted as a wonderful, caring father and husband, died of pancreatic cancer, leaving Alma’s mother in a deep depression and setting her brother, Bird, on a path 180 degrees from Alma’s, exploring spirituality and mysticism where Alma believes only in science and art.

By focusing solely on these three characters, with a small allowance later for the author of the titular novel, Krauss infuses them all with tremendous depth without skimping on story. Leo could have been a joke of a character whose story is so awful that the reader wants to disown him rather than accept that one man could be so spited by the universe, but Krauss gives him enough will to live and cleverness that he inspires real empathy and support, even though we know his ultimate pain is just a permanent feature. Alma’s a little harder to love because Krauss has implanted some disjointed adult sentiments in her, but the girl’s obsessions with things like how to survive in the wild are both adorable and poignant because they represent gossamer connections to the father she barely recalls. The novel’s end dances on the precipice of bathos – but never quite falls over it into the crevasse of claptrap. Krauss doesn’t go for the big, shocking revelation at the end, but gradually reveals the connections between the three stories (some foreseeable, one very much not) as the book progresses, which helps eliminate any shock value around the ending and allows the moment of the final connection to evoke more genuine emotions on the reader’s end.

I’ve generally been disappointed by Jewish-American literature because of how foreign the Jewish-American cultural experience is to me, not so much in secular aspects but in philosophical ones; I’ve connected more with African-American literature because of its tendency to try to identify cause for hope even in the worst tragedies, whereas many great works of Jewish-American fiction find reasons for despair or at least fatalism in the slightest signs of misfortune. (There are, of course, exceptions in both camps.) Krauss breaks the paradigm by finding hope in hopelessness, giving us solace even where atonement is impossible and the time is too late for real hope, and finding meaning in seemingly meaningless acts. Leo gets a bit of unexpected closure at the end of his life, a point where anything of that kind is welcome because his expectations have long since died, while Alma grows emotionally during the quest for the author’s true story and why it is so important to her mother and to the mysterious man who’s been asking her mother to translate the book from Polish at a substantial cost. It’s a remarkable novel that’s funny, touching, sweet, and sorrowful, without being too much of any of those things.

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→ December 3, 2012
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Argo.

Ben Affleck’s Argo earned substantial praise right out of the chute when Roger Ebert tabbed it as the likely Best Picture winner based on, I presume, a strong story, well-acted, with Hollywood at its heart. (You just have to look at last year’s Best Picture winner to see how much that last point matters.) That aside, I knew the true story behind Argo was in itself interesting enough to make me want to see the film, as did the trailer that strongly evoked the look and feel of an era that exists largely at the periphery of my memories – I remember the hostage crisis and clearly remember seeing the bulk of the American hostages deplaining when they were finally released in 1981 – even if the film played a little loose with history. As it turns out, Affleck and company did a masterful job of infusing drama into a story where the conclusion is known to all at the film’s beginning, and the work they did in recreating 1979 provides a massive injection to your suspension of disbelief, to the point where even the bits that seem obviously false, like coincidental timing of two events, don’t break the spell the movie has over the viewer. The result is a heist movie without the pervasive unreality of most heist movies, yet one that retains the dry humor that sets the best heist movies apart from the rest.

The story, well-known by now but classified until 1997, involves the escape of six employees at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on the day that demonstrators breached the gates and stormed the building, taking another 60-odd employees hostage for what turned out to be 444 days. The six employees who escaped spent a night at the British embassy but had to leave and eventually found sanctuary at the Canadian embassy thanks to the courage of the Canadian ambassador to Iran, Ken Taylor, and his wife, Pat, who could have faced execution had they been caught by the Revolutionary Guard. (Taylor discussed the story with BBC Witness earlier this week, stating that the biggest problem for his six houseguests wasn’t fear of discovery but boredom.) The U.S. government was aware early on that these six employees had escaped, but couldn’t come up with a viable plan to rescue them until extraction expert Tony Mendez (played by Affleck) came up with the idea to create a fake movie, with Mendes himself playing the film’s Canadian producer and the six escapees playing members of the film crew. The film in question was called Argo, and was a fairly blatant Star Wars ripoff that happened to be set in a place that made Iran a plausible location for the crew to be scouting. The group of seven ended up leaving Iran without as much trouble as Affleck’s film would indicate, although the truth would have been fairly dull on the screen, and Affleck also boosts the tension with a substantial amount of gallows humor from all angles, including John Goodman and Alan Arkin hamming it up beautifully as the fake film’s makeup guy and executive producer. (Goodman also appeared in last year’s Best Picture winner, The Artist, and if there were a way to quantify the most underrated actors in Hollywood, he’d have to be on it.)

Argo, the real movie, shifts around the timing of certain events to heighten the drama, making the group’s escape from Tehran more thrilling by keeping them a half-step ahead of the Iranians at every point, including a race on the tarmac in the film’s climax that apparently never happened. If you knew none of the real story, however, every bit of this movie would seem plausible except for the coincidences of timing – Arkin and Goodman returning to their sham office in Hollywood just as the Iranian authorities are calling to confirm Mendez’ phony credentials, or the CIA finally authorizing the group’s tickets on SwissAir as the seven are waiting at the ticket counter at Tehran’s airport. The pacing, however, is so crisp that most viewers won’t have enough time to think about these improbabilities; the script never dwells too long on any one character, scene, or plot point, taking a story that, in reality, probably played out quite slowly and instead turning it up to fourth gear almost from the moment Affleck first appears on screen.

His appearance, and those of the six refugees, also help cement Argo‘s power to suck you into its story even with the occasional artistic license. Images during the final credits show how carefully the actors were chosen and made up to resemble the largely-unknown people they’re portraying, with hairstyles and fashions that are instantly recognizable for their era. The film is shot with the slightly muted tones you see when watching movies filmed in that era, while the settings, mostly in Tehran but also in D.C. and in Hollywood, are just as carefully constructed to take you back to that time period. The shots of Tehran are especially stunning, including reenactments of violent street demonstrations that will certainly evoke memories in any viewer my age or older.

Affleck will likely get a Best Director nod for Argo and perhaps one for Best Actor as well, but beyond his central role, it’s an ensemble effort, with the actors playing the refugees working with limited material to carve out unique identities for their characters, and only Bryan Cranston, playing Mendez’ supervisor at Langley, getting enough screen time to earn award consideration. I haven’t seen enough contenders to consider whether Argo deserves to win Best Picture, or even be nominated, but it would be ironic and perhaps a bit awkward if a film that paints the Iranians as dimwits were to earn that honor when the unbelievable Iranian film A Separation was consigned to the foreign-language category just a year earlier.

If you want more of the true story behind the film: the Wired story from 2007 that Affleck optioned for the film version; The Houseguests: A Memoir of Canadian Courage and CIA Sorcery, a self-published memoir from Mark Lijek, one of the six embassy employees rescued by the CIA; and Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History, co-authored by Tony Mendez himself.

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