→ April 6, 2012
→ By

A Very Private Gentleman.

The never-named narrator of A Very Private Gentleman – known to his neighbors as “Signor Farfalla” because they believe him to be a painter of butterflies – is in fact a high-end gunsmith, forging custom weapons for assassins whose targets have included world leaders and wealthy businessmen. He’s chatty, prone to long digressions on his craft, his philosophy of life, his politics, and why we shouldn’t view him as a mere accessory to murder, but when he realizes he’s been spotted and is being followed by a man with unknown intentions he’s forced to reconsider his plans to retire in this Italian village with his call girl/lover Clara.

That part of the book, covering the final quarter, is as gripping as any passage I’ve come across in fiction, very tightly written, but also accelerating the pace of the narrator’s revelations about his own character, constantly shifting the reader’s impressions of his morality and his motivations. He begins pursuing his pursuer, and employing many of the tricks of his trade he discussed earlier in the novel, and the way Booth has set up the big finish there’s no expectation of any specific outcome – any of the central characters could die, and it’s not even clear who’s pursuing the narrator or why until the very end of the book.

The suspenseful payoff made up for a pretty slow first half of the book, where the narrator is so busy trying to tell us about his philosophy – or, perhaps, to impress us with his intelligence while rationalizing his choice of professions – that we get little more than stage-setting. There’s no suspense other than the suspense you get from reading a novel that you know has some suspense in it but that you have yet to encounter within the book itself. It was slow enough that I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish the book, even though it pains me to put down a book I’ve already started; obviously now I’m glad I stuck it out, but I don’t remember another book with that much lead-up to the Big Finish.

You could, however, read the book as a character study, although that’s a genre I seem to prefer in films over books. The narrator is complex, and fully capable of deluding himself, which could make him, in turn, somewhat unreliable (although we never receive hard evidence that he is). His lengthy tangents on the nature of his job, specifically whether it’s immoral or amoral, expose all kinds of rationalizations designed, I imagine, to help him sleep at night. He’s a man without faith but strikes up a friendship with the priest in the Italian village where he’s working on his One Last Job before retiring, and that priest is the one person who learns something of the narrator’s personality and reasons for secrecy, leading to more probing questions about the narrator’s state of mind. I found the narrator’s thoughts on speaking about religion particularly interesting, since I have avoided discussing religion (and, for that matter, most political subjects) in any forum because it’s like licking the third rail:

I have respect for the religions of others; after all, I have worked for the cause of several – Islam, Christianity, Communism. I have no intention of insulting or demeaning the beliefs of my fellow man. Nothing can be gained thereby save controversy and the dubious satisfaction of insult.

I suppose the Internet would lose about half its volume if everyone followed that dictum.

The problem I had with the novel as a character study is that it’s plodding. You want something to move the story along, but looking backward from the end of the book it’s clear that nothing happened until the Big Finish; the most interesting passages were flashbacks to previous jobs, including two that went awry. But that finish was a heart-pounder, and once the hunt begins in earnest, it’s impossible to put down: Now you know something is about to happen, and therein lies the fear.

The novel was adapted for the big screen and titled The American, starring George Clooney as the narrator (whose nationality is never identified in the book), but with substantial changes to the plot. I understand the reviews were solid, but I have a strong aversion to films that drastically alter their source works without good reason (“the book sucked” being one such reason).

Next up: James Joyce’s Dubliners. Agenbite of inwit, indeed.

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→ April 5, 2012
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Drive.

It didn’t take me long to find a 2011 film that I thought was better than The Artist. I admit to a strong partiality toward noir in all its forms, but even adjusting for that, I thought Drive was tighter, more interesting, better performed, and a lot less cliched than the actual Best Picture winner. (Drive wasn’t nominated.)

Based on a novel by James Sallis (just $5.18 on amazon), Drive follows its nameless stunt-driver/mechanic protagonist, played by Ryan Gosling with the bare minimum of emotion, as he moonlights as a getaway driver for hire, a role that gives the film’s car-chase scenes some actual justification. The Driver develops an attachment to a new neighbor Irene, (Carey Mulligan), and to her young son, Benicio, whose father, Standard, is in prison when the movie begins but comes home to find himself pursued by thugs to whom he owes money for protecting him while he was in prison. When the Driver sees Standard take a beating at the hands of the thugs and learns that they’ve threatened Irene and Benicio, he offers to help Standard fulfill the gangsters’ demand that he rob a pawn shop holding a substantial amount of cash, which, inevitably, leads the Driver into a conflict with the gangsters themselves that he resolves (in part) through his skills at the wheel. It’s a pretty simple plot with a small number of characters, but they’re all looped together very tightly, if a little improbably, unless we believe Los Angeles is so small that it only has two gangsters in it.

One of the hallmarks of the noir genre is understated dialogue, which is one of Drive‘s two greatest strengths. The Driver couldn’t say less if he was made of stone, and even his expressions are so slight that it’s often unclear whether he’s motivated by anger, self-preservation, or the desire to protect Irene and Benicio. He barely smiles or frowns, and is almost inhuman in his calmness under pressure. I wish that understatement had extended to the film’s depictions of violence, which are unsparing (fine) and gory (pandering?), and which added little to the film itself. I expected bodies, but the director seems to take a perverse delight in the destruction of the human head.

With scant dialogue, a movie like this lives or dies on the quality of its performances, which turns out to be the other strength of the film. Gosling is excellent as the Driver, playing him as emotionless without turning him into a hackneyed “tightly-wound hero about to explode” character. Albert Brooks is even better playing against type as a high-ranking gangster who hides an inner ruthlessness behind a somewhat erudite facade. (I’d also give points to Carey Mulligan for being cute, which the role requires since the Driver is supposed to develop feelings for her fairly quickly.)

Gosling’s character is so calm and insular that it requires a precise performance that keeps emotions you’d expect to see in scenes involving fear or rage below the surface, yet Gosling doesn’t come off as a charmless robot or a monotonous antihero. Brooks steals every scene he’s in, even those with Gosling, again by keeping his sinister nature underneath the sarcastic but not humorless exterior; when he’s not taking care of business, he has his charms, yet when he flips the switch and needs to commit some horrible act of violence, there’s no overplaying – this is just business, from a man who knows when something needs to be done. The failure of the Academy to give Brooks a nomination for Best Supporting Actor earned them much criticism in a year when they seemed to screw a lot of things up (Dujardin over Oldman for Best Actor would be one such mistake in my mind), and based just on Brooks’ performance here I can see why, although I still would have given the award to Christopher Plummer for Beginners. Gosling makes the movie, but Brooks elevates it every time he’s on screen.

The story itself doesn’t have much depth behind it, but imbuing a noir film with too much subtext would rob it of its essential noir-ness. Noir is entertaining without targeting the least common denominator: Phrasing is clipped, dialogue is sparse, explanations are few. The viewer is drawn into the film because he has to work a little harder to understand motivations or connections between characters. Drive only veers from typical noir through its depictions of violence, but not the intensity attached – there should be a coldness pervading all conflicts between protagonist and antagonists, which Drive achieves; the gore only served as a distraction to me.

(I should probably mention the plaudits given to the film’s soundtrack, but I can’t say I noticed it at all. Soundtracks and scores almost never make any impression on me unless they’re intrusive.)

The limitation of Drive is that you have to like this style of movies – it’s an action movie without a tremendous amount of action (which led to one of the more frivolous lawsuits I’ve ever heard of), and it’s a sharp movie without a ton of dialogue. I like hard-boiled detective novels for the same reasons I liked Drive, because I like seeing a plot stripped down to its essentials, with tension that’s derived from the story itself. Your mileage may vary.

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→ April 2, 2012
→ By

The Wire, season five.

If you’re new to these recaps, you should start with my notes on previous seasons – on season one; season two; season three; and the longest post, on season four.

I’ve held off a bit on writing about season five of The Wire for two reasons. The obvious one was work – the end of spring training is always a sprint between daily games, keeping up with draft stuff, and, you know, actual assignments, like columns and podcasts. But I also wanted to create some distance between myself and the material (I finished the series on the 23rd, watching the last two episodes back-to-back on a flight home from Charlotte) to see if my impressions of the season would vary in time.

They really haven’t, however: Season five just wasn’t that good. It’s a sad ending to what was otherwise such a phenomenal achievement in television.

There’s a laundry list of problems with season five, but I’ll limit myself to three. One is that the entire season feels rushed. The show adds another setting, the Baltimore Sun newsroom, and cast of characters, including old Homicide favorite Clark Johnson. Yet without shedding many characters from previous seasons, we’re left with the same sixty minutes per episode spread out over an ever-increasing number of subplots and characters, so the newsroom folks don’t get the development they need, and every one of them remains two-dimensional after the series finale – particularly the setting’s villain, Scott Templeton, whose motivations are never sufficiently explored. The increased character density means we also get less time with series stalwarts like Omar, McNulty, Marlo, and Carcetti, all of whom receive plot treatments far more superficial than what we’ve seen before. The explanations, if you could call them that, for McNulty falling off the wagon and into a ditch fell far short of the standards set as recently as season four for character development and background. Add to all of those issues the shorter season length, ten episodes instead of twelve or thirteen, and the need to tie up as many storylines as possible before signoff and you have a season that feels like a compliation rather than a coherent set of stories.

The second is co-creator David Simon’s proximity to the material. The Templeton storyline is Simon’s vengeance on a real-life coworker at the Sun, Jim Haner, whom Simon accused of fabricating quotes and events while also accusing the Sun‘s editors and management of protecting their star reporter. Templeton is a flawed character, but is more fleshed-out than the simpering managing editor Thomas Klebanow (who talks like a damned grief counselor) and executive editor James Whiting, both of whom are depicted as willfully blind to Templeton’s malfeasance because they only see the potential for awards and a Hail Mary play to save the newsroom. I have no problem with Simon wanting to use his platform to decry plagiarism and fabrications by reporters, but it watched as if no one edited him down from his pulpit.

And finally, the serial killer storyline, the one thing that ties just about everything together other than the Omar plot, was so implausible and so far out of left field that I found myself wishing I could skip through those scenes (I couldn’t, because the series is otherwise so tightly plotted that you can’t skip anything, ever, or risk becoming hopelessly lost) and get back to the routine street violence. The idea that straightlaced Lester would be so consumed with his desire to nab Marlo that he would engage in an illegal endeavor that would jeopardize not just his and McNulty’s careers but would jeopardize the case against Marlo and the careers of people like Cedric Daniels is too far gone for my suspension of disbelief to encompass it. Yeah, I caught the parallels between Templeton’s fabrications and McNulty’s, but that literary flourish doesn’t justify the departure from four seasons of severe realism.

There were literary flourishes within the season that did pay off for me as a viewer, however, especially the underlying conceit that the players may change, but the streets will remain the same until the structures that govern (or fail to govern) them fall. Avon Barksdale fell, to be replaced by Marlo, who will be replaced by someone, perhaps Slim Charles. Omar’s gone, but Michael has stepped right into the void. One addict, Bubbles, escapes the streets, only to be replaced by Dukwon, with their closure scenes airing back-to-back in the final episode just to hammer that point home. The government’s continued cycle of rewarding superficial stats over honest results, and politics over performance, was actually the funniest part of that final montage, one bit I won’t spoil in case any of you haven’t seen it; I’ll just say it took me a while to figure out who was going to fill that void because the choice was so unlikely (and, yet, so ultimately predictable). That self-referential aspect, the way loops always close and minor characters (like Lester’s girlfriend) resurface, remains one of the series’ most enduring qualities for me. Those closures also give the series as a whole that novelesque quality absent in most series – these massive story arcs and entrances and departures of characters mirror those of great Russian novels and require degrees of attention and skill absent in so much modern fiction in all media. I just wish the final season had played out differently.

* Because I know someone will ask, I’d rank season five as the worst, and four as the best – but you can’t really call season four the best without attaching it to the groundwork laid in season three, can you? Season three didn’t stand well on its own for me, but the 25 episodes in those two seasons combined, slightly longer in episodes than a standard network season (and about a season and a half in show minutes), beat any season of any other TV show I’ve ever seen, and it’s not that close. I still maintain that season two is unfairly maligned, however; it was different, but in a good way, and even seeds planted on the docks bloomed in the series’ final few episodes.

* One thing I’ve puzzled over far too much is which Wire actor was most deserving of some recognition from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which completely whiffed on the series while wasting Outstanding Drama Series nominations on the likes of Joan of Arcadia, CSI, Boston Legal, and Heroes. (The Wire received just two Emmy nominations that I can find, both writing nods, one for S3E11, “Middle Ground,” and one for the series finale, “-30-.” It appears the Golden Globes can’t even say that much.) My answer was far from certain after four seasons, but season five clinched it: Andre Royo, for his portrayal of Bubbles. It probably didn’t help his cause with award committees that his subplot was always in the background, or that the character’s required range only became evident over multiple seasons, but his performance was the most compelling in a series full of compelling performances. Only Seth Gilliam as Carver saw his character develop that much over the full five years – but we all know the award shows love a good addiction storyline.

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→ March 31, 2012
→ By

Saturday five, #2.

Five books, five links to my own stuff, and five links to others’ articles.

I’ve read eight books since my last post on any of them, so I’m going to take a shortcut and catch up by highlighting the five most interesting. Now that spring training is ending, I hope to get back to regular dishblogging soon.

* Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea is the one non-fiction book in this bunch, a history-of-math tome that incorporates a fair amount of philosophy, physics, and religion all in a book that’s under 200 pages and incredibly readable for anyone who’s at least taken high school math. The subject is the number zero, long scorned by philosophers, theologians, and even some mathematicians who resisted the idea of nothing or the void, yet which turned out to be critical in a long list of major scientific advances, including calculus and quantum mechanics. I generally prefer narrative non-fiction, but Zero moves as easily as a math-oriented book can get without that central thread.

* Dashiell Hammett’s Nightmare Town is one of three major Hammett short-story collections in print (along with The Continental Op and the uneven The Big Knockover), and my favorite for its range of subjects and characters without feeling as pulpy as some of his most commercial stories. The twenty stories are all detective stories of one sort or another starring several different Hammett detectives, including early iterations of Sam Spade and the character who eventually became the Thin Man, as well as a western crime story that might be my favorite short piece by Hammett, “The Man Who Killed Dan Odams.”

* Readers have recommended Tim O’Brien’s short story cycle The Things They Carried for several years, usually any time I mention reading another book that deals with the Vietnam War and/or its aftermath. The book, a set of interconnected stories that feels like an novel despite the lack of a central plot, is based heavily on O’Brien’s own experiences in that conflict, especially around death – of platoon mates, of Viet Cong soldiers, of Vietnamese civilians, and of a childhood crush of O’Brien’s who died at age 9 of a brain tumor. The writing is remarkable, more than the stories themselves, which seemed to cover familiar ground in the genre, as well as O’Brien’s ability to weave all of these disconnected stories into one tapestry around that central theme of death and the pointlessness of war. The final story, where he ties much of it together by revisiting one of the first deaths he discussed in the book, is incredibly affecting on two levels as a result of everything that’s come before.

* I’m a big Haruki Murakami fan – and no, I haven’t read 1Q84 yet and won’t until it’s in paperback – but Dance, Dance, Dance was mostly a disappointment despite some superficial entertainment value, enough to at least make it a quick read if not an especially deep one. A sequel of sorts to A Wild Sheep Chase, it attempts to be more expansive than that earlier novel but still feels like unformed Murakami, another look at him as he built up to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a top-ten novel for me that hit on every level. Dance is just too introspective, without enough of Murakami’s sort of magical realism (and little foundation for what magical realism it does contain) and no connection between the reader and the main character.

* I loved Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, a funny, biting satire on upper-class life in the United States just after World War I, so I looked forward to House of Mirth, present on the Modern Library and Bloomsbury 100 lists, expecting more of that sharp wit but receiving, instead, a dry, depressing look at the limitations of life for women in those same social circles prior to the war. It’s a tragedy with an ironic title that follows Lily Bart through her fall from social grace, thanks mostly to the spiteful actions of other women in their closed New York society; it’s a protest novel, and one of the earliest feminist novels I’ve read (preceded, and perhaps inspired, by Kate Chopin’s The Awakening), but I found myself feeling more pity than empathy for Lily as a victim of circumstances, not of her own missteps.

Next up: I’m reading Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman (filmed as The American) and listening to Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works. The Booth book is on sale through that link for $5.60.

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Five things I wrote or said this week:

On Jeff Samardzija’s revival.

This week’s chat.

One batch of spring training minor league notes, including the Angels, A’s, Rangers, and Royals.

Tuesday’s “top 10 players for 2017” column, which I emphasized was just for fun and still got people far too riled up. There’s no rational way to predict who the top ten players will be in five years and I won’t pretend I got them right. But it was fun to do.

I interviewed Top Chef winner and sports nut Richard Blais on the Tuesday Baseball Today podcast, in which he talked about what it was like to “choke” (his word) in the finals on his first season and then face the same situation in his second go-round. We also talked about why I should break my ten-year boycott of hot dogs.

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And the links…

* The best patent rejection ever, featuring Borat’s, er, swimsuit.

* A spotlight on Massachusetts’ outdated liquor laws. For a state that likes to pretend it’s all progressive, Massachusetts is about thirty years behind the times when it comes to alcohol, to say nothing of how the state’s wholesalers control the trade as tightly as the state liquor board does in Pennsylvania. The bill this editorial discusses would be a small start in breaking apart their oligopoly, but perhaps enough to start to crumble that wall.

* I admit it, I’m linking to Bleacher Report, but Dan Levy’s commentary on how Twitter has affected what a “scoop” means, especially to those of us in the business, is a must read. And there’s no slidshow involved.

* The Glendale mayor who drove the city into a nine-figure debt hole by spending government money to build facilities for private businesses – including the soon-to-be-ex-Phoenix Coyotes – won’t run for a sixth term, yet she’s receiving more accolades than criticism on the way out. Put it this way: Given its schools, safety, and public finances, we never considered Glendale for a second when looking to move out here.

* The “pink slime” controversy has led the manufacturer to suspend production at three of its four plants. That makes for a good headline, but are job losses really relevant to what should be a discussion of whether this is something people, especially schoolchildren, should be consuming? And now the controversy is moving on to carmine dye, derived from an acid extracted from cochineal beetles and used in Starbucks frappuccinos. If nothing else, I applaud the new emphasis on knowing exactly what we’re eating.

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→ March 30, 2012
→ By

Citizen Public House + more Scottsdale eats.

Citizen Public House in Scottsdale was on Phoenix magazine’s list of the 23 best new restaurants of 2011; this was my seventh so far, although two of the ones I’d visited previously have since closed. This dinner was the best meal I’ve had at any Arizona restaurant other than Pizzeria Bianco, a fine dining-meets-gastropub menu that’s heavy on bacon fat and other comfort-food staples.

We started with the pork belly pastrami ($12), probably their best-known dish, a small portion of melt-in-your-mouth pork belly with an exterior bark served over browned rye spaetzle with a Brussels sprout slaw and a whole-grain mustard vinaigrette. The meat is tender, the fat smooth and warm, and the zing of the mustard helped balance the richness of the meat. It was difficult to get all of the ingredients in one bite, but the hint of sweetness in the spice rub married well with the acidity of the vinaigrette and the faint bitterness of the cabbage. The bacon-fat popcorn ($5) is as you’d imagine – freshly-popped popcorn tossed in bacon fat with crispy pieces of bacon mixed in; there was a lot of fat at the bottom of the bowl but the popcorn itself wasn’t greasy.

The seared sea scallops ($24) over creamy grits were probably a bit past medium-rare but the sear was perfect and brought out the scallops’ inherent sweetness; they’re not my favorite kind of shellfish (that would be crab), but since this is another signature dish I felt compelled to try it, and actually liked the grits – more like the softest polenta imaginable, but made with white corn grits and whole corn rather than yellow cornmeal, creamy but not overly cheesy to the point where they might overshadow the scallops. The dish was topped with more crispy bacon bits, which are always welcome, and there was a superfluous Coca-Cola gastrique around the edges of the plate. My friend got the fair-trade short rib ($28), cut flanken-style, braised and browned (my preferred style) with a dried cherry sauce (barely necessary) and served over mashed parsnips

The chocolate pecan bars were a little sweet for me, with the texture of fudge and a salted caramel sauce on top, but if you like fudgy brownies this would likely be right up your alley, and the chicory ice cream that comes with it does give an earthy component to balance out the sticky-sweet flavor and texture of the bars. The beer selection only includes one local beer on draft (Four Peaks’ hefeweizen, which isn’t even one of their top two brews); the cocktail menu is heavy on old-school ingredients like gin and rye but in more contemporary concotions.

* Scratch Pastries on Indian School supposedly has the best macarons in town, but after one look at them – wide and flat, as if they’d spread badly in the oven – I decided to stick with a sandwich, which was on some of the best bread I’ve had out here. The smoked duck breast sandwich comes with walnuts, mixed greens, and olive oil, which sounded like it might be too simple but instead keeps the duck – smoky and tender but not fatty – at center stage. The sandwich came with a side salad for $8, an absolute steal given the quality of the ingredients, making it all the more horrifying that someone might choose one of the million fast-food options in that area to save a buck or two (if that).

* Echo Coffee is between Old Town and Papago Park (where the A’s minor league complex is, as well as the Phoenix Zoo) and rivals Cartel Coffee Lab for the best drip coffee in town. Echo grinds the beans to order, sitting them in a cone filter and pouring just-boiled water over the top, so it brews as you watch. Yes, it’s a $2 cup of coffee, but this is what real coffee tastes like, full of subtle notes that are lost when the coffee is overroasted (I’m looking at you, Peet’s) or blended to eliminate any kind of character (the very definition of Starbucks’ Pike Place blend). It’s too far from the house for me to go there just for a cup of coffee, but it’s good enough that I would reroute myself to go by there if I was otherwise headed into Phoenix or Scottsdale.

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→ March 24, 2012
→ By

Saturday five.

Sorry I’ve been somewhat absent from here – spring training is among my worst times of the year for getting time for non-work writing.

I don’t know if this will become a regular blog feature, but I’ve been saving up a bunch of random links and recommendations and finally had an hour (thanks to an early wakeup call from the child today) to sit and work them up: five mostly-new alternative songs I’ve got in heavy rotation on the iPod and five links to articles/posts I enjoyed.

Civil Twilight – “Fire Escape.” (amazon/iTunesicon) After Of Monsters and Men’s “Little Talks,” this is my favorite new song of the year – I hear a little early U2 in the song, especially the vocals, but the slightly offbeat guitar riff is the part that drew me back after the first listen.

Bombay Bicycle Club – “Shuffle.” (amazon/iTunesicon) Second choice for second-favorite new song. That off-kilter piano sample and the spacey production of the vocals both reminded me of Beta Band, but this song is much bouncier than any Beta Band track I’ve heard.

School of Seven Bells – “The Night.” (amazon/iTunes) Sleigh Bells gets all the love right now – I thought the industrial thing was kind of played out twenty years ago – but I prefer these Bells, or at least this song, an ethereal electronic track that sounded like an updated Flock of Seagulls with a female vocalist lamenting a broken heart.

Lonely Forest – “Turn Off This Song and Go Outside.” (amazon/iTunesicon) Immediate reaction was negative – it’s just too emo for me – but then I found myself singing it the next day and caved in and bought it. Think of a slowed-down Jimmy Eat World that still just wants you to know they’re singing their hearts out. The chorus is still gimmicky, though. Originally released in 2010 on an EP.

Grouplove – “Tongue Tied.” (amazon/iTunesicon) Prediction: I’m going to hate this song in about six weeks. I’d call this LCD Soundsystem meets Erasure as sung by your obnoxious friends who sound like they’re never going to grow up.

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And a few links:
Penny Arcade interview with Days of Wonder’s CEO, talking about how the iPad Ticket to Ride app boosted sales of the physical game. Recommended by reader Patrick T.

Jonah Lehrer on how anyone can be creative, from his just-released book Imagine: How Creativity Works.

NY Times article on hyperpolyglots, including how they use the Internet to find and help each other learn more and learn faster. The main subject is extremely impressive, but I’m not sure from the article whether he’s getting to fluency or just learning basic conversation.

Otters who look like Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as Hedgehogs who look like Martin Freeman.

Will Leitch’s piece on Bryce Harper, in which he points out that baseball needs some stars with personality, which Harper has in spades – and I agree. The “bad makeup” tag on him was always nonsense, and besides, it ain’t braggin’ if you can back it up.

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→ March 23, 2012
→ By

The Artist.

Here’s my basic problem with The Artist, which I saw two weeks ago: The more I try to think about it, the more I end up thinking about something else.

Don’t mistake my tone there – it’s a very good movie, at different points entertaining, funny, and poignant; beautifully shot and staged; and simply written with little that doesn’t belong. But it didn’t stick with me at all; a great movie will come back to me often, days or even weeks after I see it, with the best scenes replaying in my head regardless of whether I called them to mind. I end up considering and reconsidering themes or questions or ambiguities, often until I see a different film. But The Artist brought none of that. It was a fun way to spend two hours, but I couldn’t call it more than that.

The Artist is, at heart, a tragic romance, the story of a man, George Valentin, who is madly in love with himself – so much so that he can’t seem to recognize it when someone else actually cares about him. The title might even be ironic, and given how he treats most of the people in his life, especially after his career begins to unravel, it might have more accurately been called The Asshole.

Valentin (Best Actor winner Jean Dujardin) is a silent-film star whose life is altered by two major events near the start of the film. One is the advent of talkies, which he dismisses as might anyone who finds his livelihood threatened by new technology or innovation. (I imagine buggy drivers had some choice words for the first automobile as well.) The other is a chance encounter with an adoring fan, the fresh-faced and aptly-named Peppy Miller (Best Supporting Actress nominee Berenice Bejo), to whom George gives a role as an extra in his next film. Her star rises with the rise of sound in pictures while he is cast aside, eventually blowing his fortune to produce a silent film that, for a variety of reasons, tanks at the box office, after which his wife leaves him and his life spirals down to the bottom of a series of bottles. He hits bottom twice, and Peppy ends up in position to repay him for his part in starting her career – if only he wasn’t too buried in self-pity to notice.

The strongest aspects of the movie lie in its subtleties, as the plot itself is pretty straightforward and there aren’t any real subplots. Peppy criticizes silent movies once she’s a star by referring to actors “mugging” for the camera, but Bejo and Dujardin mug a lot less than I expected without sacrificing the expression a silent film requires from its stars. I was far more impressed by the mass of activity underneath the film’s surface, some of which holds clues to the small twist at the end of the film that casts Valentin in a better light (but only slightly), some of which just made the film a greater pleasure to watch – such as the scene in the studio’s offices where the camera shows three floors simultaneously, with a flurry of activity around Peppy and George as she tries to reconnect with him, unaware that he’s just been sacked by the studio.

But the production values and strong performances couldn’t quite get me past how sparse the actual story was. Valentin starts at the top, falls to the bottom, nearly dies, considers suicide, but never seems to learn a damn thing – not the need to change, not the value of treating people well, not how to live within his means, nothing. Only at the very end do we see a small sign that he may have learned some humility, but even that is tainted by its circumstances. He waited around for life to come back around and save him. We spend more time laughing at misfortunes of his own making than we do empathizing with him because we never seen the insecurity that lurks behind the pride.

The dog is awesome, though.

—

I was familiar enough with the film going in to try to guard against the reflex reaction that the film only won the Academy Award for Best Picture because it seemed designed to win the award – a black-and-white love letter to nascent Hollywood shot in 4:3 with only two lines of spoken dialogue, coming at the very end of the film. And, to the film’s credit, it wasn’t hard to get lost in the story, even with the twists I kind of knew were coming. But it seemed rather insubstantial for a Best Picture winner, according to the arbitrary standard in my head for that award. I expect more depth from a film deemed the best of the year by that body.

I’ve only seen one other Best Picture nominee from last year, and The Artist was better, but I’m not sure what made this film, stripped of gimmickry, better than, say, Martha Marcy May Marlene. It’s prettier, and more mainstream, and not half as disturbing, but none of those things really makes it better. I’ll work my way through the nominees as I did last year, as well as a few movies that film-critic friends of mine have pushed me to see (coughA Separationcough), but I’ll predict now that I’ll find something else I thought was more deserving. Next up is Drive.

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→ March 11, 2012
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Fresno eats.

Hunan, located in the courtyard of a strip mall at Cedar and Herndon, boasts a chef, Zhongli Liu, who served as executive chef at a major Beijing hotel for over a decade before emigrating to the U.S.,  once representing China at the Bocuse d’Or competition. The restaurant looks like the typical Chinese restaurant you might find in any decent-sized city, but the food was something else entirely. 

I haggled with the waiter to try to get him to recommend something he really liked, but I didn’t get fair until I dropped the word ”authentic,” after which he didn’t hesitate to recommend the house special lamb. Lamb is my least favorite protein, but the man did not lie – the dish was outstanding. The lamb is sliced thinly and stir-fried with green peppers, onions, and a cumin sauce with lots of depth, including a little heat (not as much as you’d expect from all the dried Thai chilies on the plate), a little sweetness, and the right amount of salt. The hot and sour soup included in the meal was also phenomenal in texture and flavor, although I got one piece of bamboo that was too tough to chew. Apparently there’s a second menu you can request with more authentic dishes like the one I ate, although I still would have asked for a recommendation.

Cracked Pepper Bistro appears to be the clear leader for the ”best restaurant in Fresno” title, although that may not be the stiffest competition going. The food was very strong, maybe one grade below what you’d get at a good fine-dining establishment in a larger city, with larger portions and comparable service.

The server emphatically recommended the ”mala-insana” Napoleon, fried slices of eggplant with layers of goat cheese, roasted tomatoes, and pesto, covered with a drizzle of balsamic reduction (according to the server – the menu says it’s aged balsamic). I don’t really love eggplant because it tends to take on a weird, meaty-but-not-quite texture no matter how it’s cooked, but this was the best eggplant dish I’ve ever had. The slices, crusted in panko and crushed pumpkin seeds, held their shape, weren’t soggy or fibrous, and were as crunchy as a piece of fried chicken. I would have eaten them plain.

For the entree, I couldn’t pass up the short rib with German potato salad, and the ribs were tender enough to pull apart with your fingers. (I used a fork, as this appeared to be a respectable restaurant.) The potato salad wasn’t a salad at all – it’s new red potatoes, parcooked, then quickly fried to brown and crisp the exteriors, served with a dressing of minced bacon, sugar, cider vinegar, and Dijon mustard. The texture and sweetness of the caramelized sugars in the potatoes were great, but the sweet/sour dressing was too assertive and even bled into the sauce over the short ribs.

The restaurant’s main problem, at least in the two dishes I tried, was a lack of editing. The eggplant stacks were overpowered by the tartness of the goat cheese and the sweetness of the balsamic reduction. The potatoes that came with the short rib were similarly undone by the inclusion of sugar in the dressing, which, on top of the sugars created by quickly frying the potatoes and browning their exteriors, made the whole thing too sweet. I’m holding Cracked Pepper to a higher standard than I would most restaurants because they are aspiring to that higher standard (and are priced at that higher standard too); this is very good food done with a great deal of skill, but pulling back one step on each dish would have earned them the top grade.

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→ March 6, 2012
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Delux, Bliss on 4th, Irish Wolfhound (Phoenix eats).

I tried three new spots in the last week, but unfortunately none of them was all that great; clearly I need to keep branching out.

Phoenix has a surprisingly strong contingent of high-end burger joints, including three of the best-reviewed ones all within one long block of each other on Camelback just east of route 51. I’ve been to Zinburger and raved about it, but haven’t tried The Grind yet and just got to Delux yesterday for the first time (even though I first heard about it three or four years ago). They’re known more for their fries and for the general vibe of the place than for the burgers themselves, which I’d say also summarizes my experience there.

The fries are clearly a focus, and it’s the sweet potato fries that really stand out. Sweet potato fries rarely live up to the potential of the root vegetable involved, as they’re often soggy or mealy inside and rarely crispy on the outside, but these were among the best I’ve had. They’re cut thin, the exterior is crunchy, while the interior is light and fluffy like a regular French fry would be; the dipping sauce, a mixture of mayo, sour cream, cayenne pepper, and a few other spices, is kind of a poor man’s remoulade but complemented the sweetness of the sweet potato fries well. The regular fries were fine, not greasy at all but also not that crispy, and of course next to the sweet potatoes the regular fries seemed mild.

The burger, while huge (10 ounces), was a disappointment, primarily because the meat itself was underseasoned. They use Niman Ranch beef in both burger options (there are just two, and a limited number of toppings you can add/subtract), but even good-quality meat needs seasoning, especially salt, and this didn’t have enough. The burger was crying out for sauce – ketchup, mustard, anything – to give some depth to the flavor of the meat, but to me, that’s an error in the burger itself. (The burger might be better with condiments, but it shouldn’t require condiments to taste good.) Delux has a pretty wide selection of beer and wines, including a number of beer-tasting “flights;” the menu has interesting sandwiches and salads; but at the end of the day, if I go to a great burger place, I want a great burger, and Delux’s would be behind Zinburger and Blu Burger among Arizona burger joints.

Bliss on Fourth was named one of Phoenix magazine’s 21 best new restaurants of 2011, although that’s a dubious honor since two others have already closed. The concept is “urban hangout” with high-end comfort food, and while the menu hits that mark, the execution the other night wasn’t great.

Their two signature dishes are the pot roast with mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese (available with or without bacon); I went with the pot roast, which had clearly been out of the braise too long and had started to dry out, while the potatoes underneath were somewhere between lukewarm and cold. We ordered an appetizer of pretzel bread with three dipping sauces, but had to remind the server to actually serve it to us, and even when it came it was a little disappointing, since the bread was served in very thin slices – isn’t the point of pretzel bread to get the salty crust contrasting with the thick, spongy center? I wish the execution had been better, as it’s a cool concept in a great indoor/outdoor space, but watching the food come out of the kitchen from where we sat, I could see dishes sitting half-plated, waiting for the final ingredient and getting cooler by the second. Maybe they just need a better expediter, since the food itself tasted fine, but I can’t say I’m jazzed to go get cold potatoes again.

And speaking of mashed potatoes, I tried a reader suggestion (actually a reader’s friend’s suggestion) in Surprise, an Irish pub right near the ballpark called Irish Wolfhound. The interior is caught somewhere between a pub and a sports bar, but more concerning was the mash in the bangers-and-mash, which had a weird texture that I can only assume either came from a box or a freezer bag. If you can’t get that dish right, you’re not an Irish restaurant.

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→ March 1, 2012
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Top Chef S9 finale.

Last night’s Top Chef season finale answered the question: is Paul the ’27 Yankees or the ’07 Patriots?

* Sarah begins by talking about momentum; is there really a “hot hand” in the kitchen? Maybe if you grab a pan preheated to 500 degrees without using an oven mitt. Not that I’ve ever done that.

* Meanwhile, Paul is clearly full of nervous energy once he learns he’s in the finale. Either that or he was mainlining Red Bull in between takes.

* Challenge: Hey, we’re cooking! Create a four-course menu in the restaurant of your dreams. No gimmicks beyond the selection of sous-chefs, which is done by having a selection of eliminated chefs plus two renowned chefs, Barbara Lynch and Marco Canora, each prepare a single dish for Paul and Sarah to taste; those two then select the dishes they liked and get the chefs who made them. I have no problem with this except that having the two expert chefs compete seemed a little silly.

* The group even includes a few of the chefs who were eliminated before reaching the final 16, among them the infamous butcher Tyler Stone, who has to be here just for the comedy potential; and Ashley Villaluz, who I remember because she’s really cute, even in those thick-framed eyeglasses. (Or, especially in those thick-framed eyeglasses.)

* Paul chooses first … and gets Barbara Lynch with the first pick. Hugh says this “is like getting Albert Pujols for a tee ball game.” I need Hugh to be a permanent addition to the Judges’ Table. Paul also gets Malibu Chris, who did an Asian-inspired dish to try to get Paul to choose him (bromance alert!), Ty-Lor, and Keith.

* Sarah gets Nyesha and immediately pigeonholes her (or says she will) as her saucier. Nyesha’s fierce, a shoo-in if they do another All-Stars show in a few years, and this feels like taking your best hitter and asking him to drop a bunt in the two-hole. Sarah tries to pick Heather by taking a dish that’s on Heather’s restaurant’s menu (good logic) but instead gets Tyler and then insults him in front of everyone. She ends up with Heather anyway as well as Grayson, so the team is pretty strong outside of Butcherboy.

* Marco doesn’t get picked. That’s got to hurt. Some head-hanging as he, Ashley, and the other guy whose name I can’t remember slink off.

* Meanwhile, I can’t decide if the editors just tried to make Tyler look bad, or if he did it all by himself. Asking your chef a ton of questions to make sure you’re not screwing something up doesn’t bother me – remember Restaurant Wars, Sarah? – but pushing the sous vide technique when Sarah said she’s not comfortable doing something for the first time in the finale or just flat-out disobeying her instructions is really out of line, and I don’t think you can edit that stuff in.

* But I do think the editors tweaked some of the footage of Barbara Lynch to make her look a little pushy in the early going. Later footage shows her very team-focused in the kitchen, and by the end, she was all praise for Paul, even saying “working with Paul is amazing” and she’s very “proud to have this opportunity.” How does Paul hear this stuff and still have no ego?

* The chefs shop at Granville Market, which is awesome. Every city should have something like that.

* Sarah, on managing Tyler: “(I’m) ‘trying to make Tyler feel like I actually give a shit.” Again, the red light means THE CAMERA IS ON.

* Contrast Tyler’s style to one clip we see of Ty-Lor asking Paul for a quick demo on preparing the radishes. Professional and fast. Could be editing, but in this case, I doubt it.

* They spelled Keith wrong (“Kieth”) on the assignment board. It’s a five-letter, one-syllable name people. And it’s not that uncommon: Keith Hernandez. Keith Sweat. Keith Richards. Keith Moon. Keith Urban. Maybe I was supposed to be a musician.

* First big hiccup for either chef comes when the crab for Paul’s first dish develops an off flavor overnight. Keith says the “crab sat overnight,” but where? On the counter? In the fridge but unwrapped? There’s a mistake in there that we never hear about. Paul was prepared with a backup plan, having bought spot prawns he wasn’t otherwise using, which is impressive. (Also good: Canadian wild-caught spot prawns are an environmentally-friendly shellfish option, as populations are abundant and traps do minimal damage to the habitats.)

* To the food: Paul leads with a chawanmushi with those spot prawns; the first group raves, but the second batch is all overcooked and is easily the worst dish either chef served. Second dish is grilled sea bass (loup de mer, which I think is really branzino) with clam dashi and pickled radishes, earning raves for aesthetics and depth of flavor; Tom says it’s “hard to fault this,” so I guess he’s in a good mood here. Third dish is a congee with eggs, uni, fried kale, and smoked albacore; Tom says not as interesting as other courses, Cat loves fish says it doesn’t fit, but it seems to have worked on a more subtle level, with Bill Terlato apparently saying it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten. (I can’t take Cat Cora seriously as a judge. Is she really on par with the other chefs who appear on this show? She’s just here to promote her new Bravo program, right?) Dessert is coconut ice cream (frozen with liquid nitrogen!) with puffed rice, candied kumquats, mangosteen, Thai chili foam, and jasmine gelee; it’s a beautiful dish, and the judges were pleasantly surprised by the heat in the foam, with Tom saying Paul “really knocked it out of the park” but Hugh quibbling with the texture (too hard) of the puffed rice. Outside of the custard fiasco for group two, it sounds like Paul nailed it the rest of the way.

* Sarah starts very strongly with a squid-ink tagliatelle with dashi, coconut, and raw spot prawn dish that may have been the best-reviewed dish of the night. She follows with a rye-crusted steelhead with caramelized fennel sauce and pickled beets; judges love the fish, but she didn’t cook the beets at all (rookie error? Don’t you at least heat the acid and blanch the beets?) and there was probably too much fennel; there’s some irony here, as Butcher Boy was pushing her to sous vide the beets. That dish caused some legitimate drama when her fiance found a pinbone in his fish, but Sarah went into crisis mode and checked all dishes still in the kitchen to remove any stray bones. (I’ve still never found a great way to remove them without damaging the flesh – needlenose pliers are the best option, but I usually end up tearing some of the surrounding fish.) The fish was well-cooked and even Bev said she liked the crust.

* Her third course was veal cheeks and sweetbreads with polenta and persimmon sauce that looked, um, “rustic” on the plate, and was probably her worst dish, with every component but the cheeks getting criticism somewhere, particularly the texture of the polenta, which she then blended to smooth out for the second seating. Hugh also thought the sweetbreads were overcooked. I love persimmons, and could see a persimmon sauce with a rich meat like veal cheek or sweetbread being outstanding, but pairing that with polenta (which I’ve never seen without some kind of cheese as a binder) sounds like an off-note in my head. But the hazelut cake with roasted white chocolate ganache was a home run, particularly the ganache. Padma – I knew I liked this woman for some reason, aside from her stunning good looks that is – looks at Sarah and says with distaste dripping from the corners of her mouth, “I hate white chocolate.” (I do too. It’s not even actually chocolate.) But Sarah roasts it in a low oven for a half-hour to start to caramelize all that sugar, prompting one judge to say that she “turned it into caramel.” The dish was really striking on the plate as well. I confess that I’d rather have this precise dish with an almond cake instead of hazelnuts, but hazelnuts have always been my least favorite nut – there’s a specific chemical in there that, as often as I’ve had them, I just can’t get used to, and it triggers a mildly unpleasant aftertaste. This sucks, as it ruins Nutella for me.

* Before I get to the results, two interesting notes. Paul refuses to blame Keith for the problems with the chawanmushi: He won’t blame Keith in the kitchen, in the confessional, or at Judges’ Table. This is how you lead.

* Also, I think the producers, for once, undersold a dramatic element – Paul’s father breaking down when he sees his son in the finals. We hear from a lot of chefs on this show that their parents questioned their career choices and often weren’t proud of their chef sons/daughters, so winning this show would be some sort of redemption. (I’ll leave the question of whether pride earned in this way is really that valuable to a therapist.) It came up with Paul and Bev this year, at least, but we didn’t get much follow-up here in the one instance where the chef and the formerly disapproving parent were reunited on camera.

* Judges’ Table: Judging appears to be close to a dead heat, with Tom saying it was the best food ever in a finale, something he reiterated in his by-the-numbers blog entry. But he said what I thought they were trying to say on the show, something that was edited down to maintain suspense: Paul’s menu was more ambitious and showed greater dexterity in managing and manipulating flavors and textures, right down to the less beautiful but more thrilling dessert. And Paul, the Chef of Destiny from pretty much the first episode, is Top Chef. I am pleased. But I’d still gladly eat at Spiaggia, Sarah’s restaurant. (And, for what it’s worth, I think Emeril would have picked Sarah.)

* And that wraps a very up-and-down season of Top Chef, but one that finished with two really strong challenges that returned the focus of the show to the food. The best chef won, and the gimmicks gave us lots to snark about. I can’t complain too much.

* I started these recaps as a lark because the one blogger whose recaps I was reading just missed the mark for me, and I had too many stray thoughts I wanted to write down as I watched. It turned into a pretty popular feature here – I’ve had scouts, agents, and even a player’s father comment on them when I’ve been out at games – and led to a great personal thrill, writing for the official Top Chef site on Bravotv.com. Thank you all for reading and commenting. I’ll pick it up again whenever Top Chef returns.

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