→ July 21, 2012
→ By

Pelotero.

The stellar new documentary Pelotero shines a light on the way Major League Baseball has used the Dominican Republic as a pipeline for talent over the past forty years by following a pair of up-and-coming prospects leading up to Signing Day in 2009. The 75-minute film is screening in select cities, and is also available as a rental for $6.99 via both amazon and iTunesicon.

Pelotero started out as a simple documentary about the way MLB mines talent in the Dominican Republic, focusing on two young players, Miguel Angel Sano and Jean Carlos Batista, as they approached their 16th birthdays and the July 2nd date after which they’d be allowed to sign pro contracts. The directors appear to have gained almost unfettered access to both players, their families, and their trainers, as well as a surprising number of on-camera quotes from scouts with major league teams operating in the Dominican. That alone would have made the film worth seeing, but it probably wouldn’t have had much narrative greed to keep the attention of a larger audience.

As some of you probably remember, Sano ended up at the center of a controversy over his actual age and identity, one the directors were able to follow in real time and to expose in a way that has to have MLB and the Pittsburgh Pirates deeply unhappy. The film makes it quite clear that the family blames Pittsburgh’s top scout in the Dominican Republic, Rene Gayo, for starting the rumors about Sano’s age and then colluding with the MLB investigator (who, off camera, tells Sano to sign with the Pirates for $2 million to make the investigation go away) so he can acquire the player at a discount. The most damning evidence, obtained via a hidden camera, has Gayo strongly implying to the family that he is the reason Sano was partially cleared – and that they should sign with Pittsburgh as a result. The unfolding of this drama, as well as a similar if smaller-scale issue affecting Batista, and the associated effects on the players’ families, turns an ordinary documentary focusing on the exploitation of young Dominican players into a scathing indictment of corruption in MLB’s operations on the island. (The film concludes with a note that MLB declined an opportunity to respond on camera, and that MLB now claims that the depictions in the film are “inaccurate” and no longer reflect the league’s operations and conduct on the island. Gayo is still employed by the Pittsburgh Pirates and says, in another statement displayed before the credits, that he simply did his job. You can read some of MLB’s comments here and here, and it is fair for them to argue that their regulation in the Dominican Republic is stronger today than it was in 2009.)

Setting aside the specific questions of culpability in the Sano case, which may have cost him $1-2 million off his ultimate signing bonus, the film’s greatest contribution is its exposure of how Dominican prospects are treated like chattel in a factory system where independent trainers will develop players on contingency, taking up to 35% of their eventual signing bonuses, while MLB teams pay lower bonuses there than they do to comparable American- or Canadian-born prospects. The new CBA, which caps each team’s total international expenditures on all players in this signing season at a figure less than what the seventh overall pick in this June’s draft received by himself, only makes the varying treatment of players by their places of birth even more stark. Pelotero shows how much Dominican players’ families come to count on a large signing bonus as their lottery ticket out of poverty, with some players (including Sano) living in heartbreaking conditions before they sign – and relative opulence afterwards. The promise of a life-changing bonus leads to a clear sense of entitlement on the sides of some players, to Batista’s mother apparently viewing her son as a cash cow, and to incentives for players to try to cheat the system by lying about their ages or identities. MLB and Gayo come off as the villians of Sano’s story, but that doesn’t mean the players or their camps are heroes.

The directors of Pelotero deserve much credit for staying out of the story, with minimal narration from John Leguizamo that offers some slightly pro-player commentary early in the film but that largely drops off as the Sano controversy takes over. The flip side of their hands-off style is that once that storyline becomes the film’s center, the balance begins to shift, unavoidably, to Sano’s side – we are watching it from his house, and hearing most of the commentary from him, his family, and his agent, but other than Gayo, who comes off horribly, we don’t get MLB’s side because they declined to comment on film. There was little the directors could have done to restore the balance without participation from the Commissioner’s Office, but the film does suffer slightly in the end from their absence. It is an outstanding film even with that caveat, a must-watch for any baseball fan. After you hear a trainer casually toss out “planting seeds” and “harvesting” as a metaphor for how he develops teenaged prospects before they turn 16, you will find it hard to look at any Dominican prospect the same way.

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→ July 5, 2012
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Priceless.

Recent ESPN stuff:
* Notes on Trevor Bauer, Andrew Cashner, and Pat Corbin from Tuesday night
* notes on six top July 2nd signings
* Today’s Klawchat transcript
* Today’s Baseball Today podcast
* And my guest appearance on today’s Fantasy Focus Baseball podcast.

I apologize for how little I’ve been posting here; the draft, followed by a 16-day east coast trip with family, put a serious dent in my blogging time. I’ve still been reading as usual, with the best book I read in June a bit out of my normal interests – Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures, Robert Wittman’s memoir of his time at the FBI, where he founded the bureau’s Art Crime Team.

Wittman wisely spends most of the book talking about major cases he helped solve for the FBI, including recoveries of objects as diverse as Goya’s The Swing, North Carolina’s original copy of the Bill of Rights, and a flag used by an African-American army unit during the Civil War. He bookends all of those stories with the attempt to recover several paintings, including a Vermeer and a Rembrandt, stolen from the Isabella Gardner Stuart Museum in Boston in 1990, an attempt that (mild spoiler) was unsuccessful, something Wittman blames largely on bureacracy, infighting, and one particularly obstinate and territorial bureau chief within the FBI. He also includes a little of his own backstory, explaining how he ended up the bureau’s art crime expert, how he learned enough about art and artifacts to go undercover as a crooked art dealer/broker, and how his life was nearly ruined by a car accident that resulted in the death of one of his colleagues.

I’d be stretching to call this a collection of spy stories, but there’s a surprising amount of intrigue involved in stories that you know (other than the final one) are going to more or less work out OK, and are usually very successful. Wittman and co-author John Shiffman, a former investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, manage to work in enough of the personalities of the various thieves and shady dealers with whom Wittman had to negotiate – and was usually also trying to set up, with a SWAT team hanging out in the hotel lobby or in the room next door – to keep the vignettes from feeling paint-by-numbers: Wittman gets the tip, negotiates the deal, and then the bad guys get arrested. The details on how he managed to operate for so long in fairly small underworld circles without being compromised until right before he was due to retire also made for interesting reading, enough so that I wish they’d spent more time discussing backstopping or how he’d cover his tracks after a bust.

My only other criticism is that it’s way too short – even as someone who doesn’t know art, I was interested in the histories of the pieces he was trying to recover, and would gladly have read another dozen such stories between that and the unintentional comedy of the crooks who had the stolen goods. (Really, stealing a Vermeer … I get that the piece is valuable, but you can’t exactly put the thing on eBay and get 90 cents on the dollar here. Whatever happened to knocking over a nice jewelry store?) I also thought the back half of the Gardner Stuart story treated the FBI’s internal squabbling a little superficially – it reminded me of the way The Wire often used the FBI to throw an obstacle in the main police characters’ paths – even though in both cases the Bureau probably was a legitimate part of the problem. The idea that the most significant unsolved art theft in U.S. history remains unsolved in large part because one doofus in the Bureau’s Boston office wanted to cut the FBI’s main art crime expert out of the loop should make your blood boil, but at the same time, the allegation could use more substance.

Next up: Anita Loos’ two comic novellas, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes & But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.

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→ June 22, 2012
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Le Havre boardgame & app.

The board game Le Havre is one of the best complex strategy games I’ve tried, although the emphasis is on complex, involving a lengthy setup, more pieces than I can remember in any other game (mostly tiles representing resources that need to be sorted into piles), and a lot of long-range planning with great potential for other players to inadvertently trip you up. It’s very balanced, nearly luck-free, and rewards patience and attention. But the time to set it up and the time to play it are both major obstacles unless you’re quite hardcore about your boardgaming – and you don’t have to get up early the next morning.

All of that makes it a perfect game for adaptation into electronic form, and Le Havre, released on Wednesday night by Codito, is excellent, playing easily with plenty of instructions and offering sufficient challenges from the AI opponents to allow for many repeat plays.

In Le Havre, a game by the designer of Agricola and heavily inspired by Caylus, players compete to acquire the most total value in buildings and ships while filling growing requirements to feed workers each turn, a balancing act that is far more difficult than it sounds because of the competition for scarce resources and the limited number of ways to obtain food, a problem exacerbated in games of more than two players. On each turn, a player may choose to take resources from any of the seven available stocks; to take the available supply of money (francs); to build one of three buildings visible on the stacks of building cards; or to use a building that is already built, even if it was built by another player. A player may also buy certain buildings outright in addition to that main action.

Each player has to have enough food or francs on hand at the end of every round to feed his workers, and the rounds are short – seven moves in total, so in each round of a four-player game, one player will get only a single move. Yet to acquire points from resources, players have to first acquire the right mix of resources, sometimes converting them to other kinds of resources, sometimes acquiring energy sources as well, and then build the building or the ship in question. It takes patience, and requires a lot of quick decisions about when to move for the short term (food) and when to move for the long (points).

There are multiple ways to win Le Havre, one of the key features in a game that is this complex (and my main criticism of Puerto Rico). Shipbuilding is the best way to beat the AI players in my experience with the app, but there are several different paths to high point totals through buildings, including several buildings that stack up point bonuses depending on what else you’ve already built. There are also several different paths to ensuring a regular food supply, and ships can provide a fixed quantity of food on each turn once they’re built. When a player can’t feed his workers, he can take out a loan – annoying, but sometimes the right strategic move, and sometimes the path to digging a hole you can’t quite escape.

Game play within the app is very straightforward, and one of the benefits of an app version is the fact that you are protected from rules mistakes, which, given the complexity of Le Havre, is a significant advantage. Each card replicates the graphics from the physical game, including symbols that indicate the card’s price in resources, fee to use if it’s not yours, value in points, and resources or gains from usage. Clicking on the question mark in the upper right once the card is expanded gets the full text explaining the card and all of its costs and benefits. Learning the lay of the board took me two or three games, but all of the critical information is either visible or is a click away. The game also gives players the ability to undo a move while the turn is in progress, and confirms the ‘end turn’ request as well (an option that can be turned off). There’s a solid tutorial, although it is no substitute for playing the game a few times against easy AI opponents.

Those AIs are good enough to continue to challenge me, a relative rookie in Le Havre, because they offer multiple levels of difficulty. I do find them a little predictable, and they often race out to early points leads because they plan more for the short term than the long; the first two settings are like training wheels, but in a 4- or 5-player game against all AI opponents, the hardest AI setting is a good enough challenge to allow for repeated gameplay. The app now offers turn-based online multiplayer through GameCenter, which I haven’t tried yet.

My criticisms of the app are minor – the graphics could be brighter, and the font isn’t as clear as it could be, so some of the text is tough to read without expanding it from the background. The hint feature, suggesting the next move to make, can be a little too focused on the short term, although the point of the hints is to help you learn the game, not help you beat the AI players that are running on the same software. I ran into some very minor graphics glitches that should be addressed in the first update. Also, the music made my wife want to strangle me after about two minutes, so I muted it for my own safety.

If you like Agricola and/or Caylus, I strongly recommend Le Havre. It is as elegant an adaptation as I can imagine for a game with this many elements. I’m also impressed by how Codito’s boardgame apps improve each time out – the leap from Puerto Rico, another complex game with a lot of elements, to Le Havre is outstanding – showing an internal commitment to improving the player experience (and, I presume, increasing revenues). That said, if you aren’t a fan of boardgames with a lot of rules or a relatively steep learning curve, you might find this game frustrating, particularly the physical game given all its pieces. (It took me the better part of an hour to break apart and sort all of the little cardboard resource tiles.) It’s very fair to jump off the boardgame bandwagon before Le Havre or Agricola – but at least the app lets you try it out for $5 first.

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Recent ESPN content, if you made it this far: My quick reaction to this year’s Futures Game rosters; an early look at Mike Trout’s MVP case; this week’s Klawchat; and some fun podcasts from Thursday with Dave Schoenfield and from Wednesday with Chris Sprow.

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→ May 23, 2012
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Sherlock, season two.

Season two of Sherlock, which just aired here in the U.S. for the first time, turned out to be even stronger than season one, in part because the characters are so well developed, and in part because the bromance between Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman) seems so natural at this point, as if the two actors have been doing this for years. The only real negative of the season is that it will be so long before we see a third set of episodes, especially on this side of the Atlantic. (My writeup on season one went up in February.)

As in the first season, the middle episode was somewhat weaker than the two surrounding it, with the first episode the strongest of the troika. Irene Adler’s dominatrix character is fascinating – with her clothes on or off, it’s all good, really – and the tense flirtations between her and Holmes were absolutely electric, even though it’s clear he has (or will simply admit to) no interest in sex with her. The crime he’s solving is almost secondary, and she seemed a more convincing adversary than Moriarty because her methods of social engineering are so foreign to Holmes. An American police procedural would have played up her professional life, whereas this episode focuses instead on layers of intrigue and the aforementioned dialogue between the two main characters.

The second episode, derived from the one full-length Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, takes the setting and some core elements of the original story and adds a host of modern twists, including a play on our worst fears about our governments and their research into weapons of mass destruction. The solution hinged on Holmes guessing a password rather impossibly quickly, which I’d peg as a copout; it’s a neat trick, but not that likely on the first try, and any decent network security setup would lock an account after an attempt or two. (Wouldn’t the modern Holmes carry a cracking program on a USB drive? Or is that too easy?)

The final episode, “The Reichenbach Fall,” brings an unexpectedly early confrontation between Holmes and his nemesis, Jim Moriarty, played diabolically by whats-his-face, clearly having the time of his life. Based on the story “The Final Problem,” in which Holmes originally dies, only to have it later revealed that he merely faked his death after public outcry forced Conan Doyle to hit control-Z, “Reichenbach” turns the tables and puts Moriarty on the offensive, destroying Holmes’ life from the inside-out with a cleverly plotted, intricate trap, from which Holmes can extricate himself only through his own death – or so it appears. The whole detective-as-suspect plot device is quite hackneyed at this point, but I’ll give the writers points for the Richard Brook twist, and for crafting the scheme so tightly that Holmes does indeed appear to be trapped when we reach the final clash between the two antagonists. I’ll get to the end of this episode, the subject of much speculation online (which won’t be answered until next year as the show becomes victim of its own success), later on, to avoid spoiling anything for those of you who haven’t seen it.

This season felt faster and tighter than the first one, which I think is in large part because the three episodes in season one had to spend time introducing us to the main characters and developing their relationships with each other. Cumberbatch and Freeman have a very easy chemistry and superb timing, enhanced by British series’ willingness to keep the pace up rather than slow it down to accommodate an audience looking for large print and short chapters. It feels like smart television because it is smart television, rapid-fire, witty, and demanding. It should have you talking long after each episode is done. To wit…

–

Spoiler alert: I’m discussing the end of season two, episode three below. Just stop reading if you haven’t seen it.

Seriously, go away.

For those of you who have seen it, it seems like some suspected elements of Sherlock’s faked suicide are, if not obvious, quite likely to be true. We have Sherlock’s conversation with Molly, where he says he expects he’s going to die and needs her help, a plea that remains unresolved at the end of the episode but that we know would be fulfilled because Molly is inexplicably smitten with the great detective. We have the flatbed truck that starts up the moment Sherlock’s body is about to hit the pavement. And we have the cyclist who hits Dr. Watson at the moment he’s about to cross the street to see to his friend, leaving Watson on the ground and quite groggy when he stands up. I submit that the grogginess is the fourth clue.

Here’s my theory, although it is a bit tinfoilhatty: Sherlock landed in the truck and threw a cadaver, supplied by Molly and rigged to bleed from the head on impact, to the sidewalk, obscured from witnesses by the truck. The cyclist clocked Dr. Watson and somehow drugged him – perhaps a gas like that from the previous episode – so that he wouldn’t be able to properly examine or even identify Sherlock. (That gas would make him suggestible, meaning one member of the crowd could also have been a plant from Sherlock, there simply to tell Dr. Watson it was Sherlock’s body and that he was dead.) This would explain Sherlock’s confession to Dr. Watson, which was wildly out of character for him – it was an act, yet one that, oddly, didn’t set off any alarms in his only friend’s mind.

This leaves a few unanswered questions: Why was Molly, who was on Moriarty’s radar after they had a few lunch dates (seriously, Molly, are there no other fish in the English sea?), omitted from the final hit list, while Holmes’ landlady and Lestrade were included? Who notified the other two shooters (we can assume the hitman assigned to Dr. Watson witnessed the suicide) that Sherlock was presumed dead? Why did the kidnap victim scream upon seeing Sherlock’s face? And, really, why did Moriarty kill himself? I believe he is actually dead, as Moriarty dies in the original story, “The Final Problem,” that inspired this episode. I can’t imagine the writers deviating that far from the source material, and the Moriarty character, who only appeared in two of the original stories anyway, is pretty well played out from here. But why would he die of his own hand, leaving himself unable to witness Holmes’ final humiliation?

Feel free to discuss any of these spoilers or questions in the comments; I assume anyone who’s made it this far has already seen the full season.

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→ May 1, 2012
→ By

Las Vegas eats, 2012.

I was in Vegas with the family for a good friend’s 40th birthday weekend (or, as we chose to put it, her 39.99999….th birthday), and managed to sneak in two meals at places I can recommend.

Border Grill, located in Mandalay Bay near the hotel’s aquarium, first came to my attention via Top Chef Masters, where Mary Sue Milliken, one of the restaurant’s two founding chefs, won one of season three’s least ridiculous challenges (the fast-food challenge) with a recipe for quinoa fritters that I’ve made probably a dozen times at home since the show first aired. As it turns out, the Border Grill added quinoa fritters to the menu, which was enough to get us to try the restaurant since it’s the rare food item all three of us love.

Those fritters were excellent, larger than I expected and much softer inside without losing any of the crisp exterior – clearly I need to cook my quinoa a little longer, or with more liquid, before cooling it to make the fritters. They’re served with a mildly spicy aji amarillo aioli (although I find they work even better with a homemade chipotle mayonnaise, since the fritters themselves are so mild in flavor). We ended up ordering only smaller plates because the fritters can be so filling – two plates of fritters, one of green corn tamales, and a ceviche duo. The tamales were very sweet with a soft, rustic texture, rather than the mealy masa texture of most of the tamales I’ve ever had. The ceviche duo was half successful; the Peruvian style ceviche, with garlic and ginger, served on a tortilla chip, was phenomenal, but the baja ceviche was overwhelmed by one ingredient – I think it was mustard – and the fish just disappeared under the sauce. I like raw fish preparations that highlight the freshness of the fish itself, but between that heavy sauce and the fine dice of the fish, I couldn’t even tell what the fish was, while the Peruvian version was much more balanced (aside from perhaps a little too much red onion). My daughter also had a quesadilla that was clearly made with a fresh homemade tortilla; I’d offer her opinion, but I don’t think she’s ever met a quesadilla she didn’t like.

The dessert special of the day was mango upside-down cake, served with a quenelle of mango sorbet, and I don’t see why that isn’t a regular menu item printed in large bold letters; the cake was a little sticky-sweet on its own, but if you could get the sorbet and cake all together in one bite, the tanginess of the sorbet (from orange juice, I think) balanced out that sweetness so that the predominant flavor was mango rather than sugar and butter. I happen to love mangos for their complexity – they’re sweet, but with a savory component that reminds me of carrots, so you don’t find yourself beaten over the head with sweetness – and this cake highlighted the fruit perfectly.

–

I also took the family to Cafe Bouchon, located in the Venetian, for Sunday brunch and ordered something I hadn’t tried before, Bouchon’s take on chicken and waffles, not exactly authentic but one of the most memorable breakfast items I’ve ever had. The chicken is roasted rather than fried, a half bird, the breast still moist, the skin a rich brown and well seasoned, with a hunter’s sauce (a brown sauce made from red wine and mushrooms) on the side. The waffles contained bacon and chives and were airy and crispy and probably contained about a pound of butter, but really, waffles are supposed to have too much fat for any reasonable diet, because that’s what makes them awesome. Bouchon also had a special beignet of the day, filled with raspberry filling that tasted not of sugar but of fresh raspberries, the type of detail I’d expect from a restaurant founded by a chef known for his meticulous approach to cooking. We overordered a little bit, in part because my daughter came down with a cold and we just wanted to ensure there would be something on the table she’d like, but there was nothing on the table – not even the apricot jam or the fresh epi-shaped country bread – that was less than perfect. One caution: It ain’t cheap, but it is decadent.

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→ April 9, 2012
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Imagine: How Creativity Works.

Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works is a fantastic read that covers the subject of human creativity from two different but equally critical angles: The neurology of creativity, or how we can maximize our own individual creativity; and the sociology of creativity, or how managers can increase creativity in their groups or companies. The small miracle of the book is that Lehrer conveys all of this information – I wouldn’t call them answers, but there are enough ideas here to help you create a plan of action – in a way that’s largely entertaining by building almost the entire book around a series of real-world anecdotes, covering topics as wide-ranging as Shakespeare, Pixar, Innocentive, W.H. Auden, a programmer-turned-bartender named Don Lee, and Bob Dylan.

What Lehrer means by “creativity” is less about artistic creativity (although, as you can see, he uses many examples from the arts) and more about out-of-the-box thinking: Ideas that veer away from conventional wisdom and allow people (or groups) to solve previously unsolvable problems or to create works or products of enduring value. The book opens with the development of a new cleaning tool by Proctor and Gamble, created when that company decided to try to develop an improvement to the household mop. It took an outside agency to be willing to step out of the forest long enough to realize that improving the mop was an inferior solution to replacing the mop entirely – and P&G rejected that agency’s idea for a new product for a full year before finally relenting. (I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by revealing that the product, as you have likely guessed by now, was the Swiffer.) Creativity is stifled by groupthink, territorial behavior, and focus on short-term results, but it is also stifled by our own prefrontal cortices and by bad advice about the value of brainstorming. Lehrer tears each one of these obstacles down in turn and discusses in open-ended terms how we might surmount them.

Each of the book’s eight full chapters revolves around multiple real-world examples, often not obviously connected, that state the case before Lehrer states it himself, after which he’ll refer to studies by psychologists or neuroscientists on things like what happens to creativity when the prefrontal cortex is shut off. (Nothing in the book was more interesting to me than Lehrer’s explanation of the “fourth-grade slump,” referring to the age around which kids suddenly lose much of their creativity, no longer creating wild and abstract or unusual art because their prefrontal cortices have developed to the point where they feel more self-conscious about the quality of the work they produce.) He also explains why Phoenix lags behind much smaller cities in producing patents, a proxy he uses often as a measure of creativity, and why discussions with open and frank criticism produce substantially more ideas than traditional brainstorming sessions where criticism of others’ ideas, no matter how profoundly stupid they are, is forbidden.

The chapter that mentions Pixar discusses, among other factors, the benefit of proximity in idea generation. Pixar’s headquarters apparently includes just one set of restrooms, so employees from all areas of the company are effectively forced to run into each other en route (as well as in a large open area in the center of the building). I doubt I could prove this theory, but perhaps baseball front offices have, over their history, been less creative because so many critical employees don’t work out of the main office? The scouting director and player development director are just as likely to live elsewhere, so while the GM talks to those two executives regularly, even daily, the calls will be event- or agenda-driven, not the kind of casual conversation that occurs in an office setting (preferably an open one) that can spur unexpected ideas because no one is rushing to get off the phone.

One quibble is that Lehrer quotes Yo-Yo Ma referring to Julia Child dropping a roast chicken on the floor during a television show and brushing it off as if nothing had happened, yet doesn’t correct him; this incident, often-cited, never happened. Child did once flip a potato pancake out of a skillet on to the counter, joking about lacking “the courage of my convictions,” but the chicken/floor story is a myth. You don’t mess with Julia.

I’ve already recommended this book to a number of people who run departments because I think it can, or should, dramatically change how people manage their reports or companies. Lehrer argues that it’s not an accident that Pixar and 3M have had such extended runs of creative success, just as it’s not an accident that Shakespeare should rise from humble beginnings to become the greatest playwright in history. We can make ourselves more creative, and we can make our groups more creative, if we understand the science and the psychology behind creativity. Imagine is the first step.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, it appears that Lehrer fabricated many of the quotes attributed to Bob Dylan in this book. While that doesn’t make the book any less valuable in my eyes, I could certainly understand readers choosing not to read it for the hit its credibility has taken.

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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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→ March 30, 2012
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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 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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→ February 29, 2012
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The Wire, season four.

Daniels: What’s this kid to you?
Prez: I don’t know. He’s one of my students.

There appears to be a very strong consensus among critics and serious fans of The Wire that season four is its pinnacle, perhaps the greatest single season of any American TV series from any network. I won’t say that I disagree with that assessment, but that I find it very hard to view season four outside of the context of the three seasons that led up to it – season four stands strongly on the foundation laid by 37 prior episodes that established storylines, developed characters, built tension, and began a form of social criticism that draws on traditions that predate the medium, a kind of angry exposure of societal injustice and hypocrisy that called to mind the angry righteousness of Native Son. The Wire always had a point to make; season four is where that point got made.

The end of season three saw the demise of the Barksdale gang and the rise of a new, more ruthless drug kingpin on the west side of Baltimore, Marlo Stanfield, who lacks the charisma of Avon Barksdale or the intelligence of Stringer Bell, ruling his territory and crew like an authoritarian dictator, disappearing enemies and buying allegiances when he needs them. The investigation into him sputters due to the lack of bodies – a void undetstood by the viewers, but not by the investigating unit – and city politics, allowing a new storyline built around four new characters and one familiar one to take center stage.

Prez turned in his badge during season three, but resurfaces here as a math teacher in one of Baltimore’s failing public schools; four of his students, Namond (son of Barksdale enforcer Wee-Bey), Randy, Michael, and Duquan (“Dukie”), each of whom earns his own subplot. I would challenge any viewer to watch this season without becoming emotionally attached to these at-risk kids, each of whom started life with a negative balance and only one of whom ends the season with any real hope for improvement, thanks largely to the intervention of an adult who goes well beyond his duties to save a kid from jail or death on the corners. I always found Prez a little hapless as a detective; when he showed aptitude for the problem-solving aspects of the job, the camera always seemed to look on him as an object of pity, as if we should be proud that the slow kid finally found something he was good at. Even watching him slug his father-in-law (who had it coming) had that underdog feeling to it. In season four, Prez becomes a fully-realized character, a man who may have finally found his calling after leaving a job that never fit him, justifying (on some level) his presence as more than simply awkward comic relief. But Prez also becomes our conduit to not just another aspect of urban decay but to the missing piece to fill in the puzzle of the plight of the American urban underclass that this series documents. As it turns out, the problems with the streets and corners start inside the broken homes that line them.

–

No spin on a knuckleball. You still can’t tell how it’s gonna break.

Whether David Simon started The Wire to tell great stories, to criticize the actions and policies that were (or are) destroying inner cities in the northeast and the rust belt, or both is immaterial, because the result is clear: the series tells phenomenal stories, longer, deeper, and more intertwined than on any other American TV series I can remember, but always with a clear (if occasionally preachy) message about why. When I was younger, if a network series wanted to cover a major social topic, they would do a Very Special Episode; The Wire was, in that parlance, a Very Special Series.

The macro story here is the decline of the city, at least since the start of season two, since you might argue season one was primarily about the folly of the war on drugs. Adding the failing education system and the way city politics and bureaucracy perpetuate that failure (although the teachers’ unions come in for little to no criticism here) in season four only makes the overall picture more dismal. The police are corrupt. The schools are hopeless. City Hall is only concerned with numbers and elections. The FBI is too busy chasing terrorists to look at homegrown crime. The war on drugs only increases misery, but no one wants to consider decriminalizing them for fear of a backlash. Any attempt to start a small business to help the community and maybe create a job or two will be met with unreasonable regulations – or a need for bribes. And so on. You couldn’t paint a much bleaker picture unless you wanted to turn it into a series about zombies roaming across a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The trick of The Wire is its ability appeal to your emotions without manipulating them, especially hard because we’re now talking about a season that revolves around kids who are swimming upstream against a current that is trying to drown them. The writing veered as close as it’s come to preaching with the storyline in the schools, with scenes that can’t help but leave the viewer angry – but could they have been written any differently? Stories of failing inner-city schools no longer make the front page because they’re too commonplace, and because (I presume) readers are resigned to these situations as unfixable. Pouring more money into the system hasn’t helped. Testing creates massive incentive problems, which becomes a subplot this season. But more than any other cause, lack of structure and support at home shows up in reality and in season four as a major cause, if not the major cause, of the failing schools.

(I did find the academic project, removing ten disruptive kids from classrooms and educating them holistically while avoiding the standard curriculum, a little contrived, but because it got us another season of Bunny Colvin – and the bittersweet restaurant scene – I won’t complain.)

Even watching the drug dealers of Baltimore recognize the benefits of cartel behavior – the “New Day Co-Op,” meeting in a local hotel conference room – keeps the show grounded in the drug-war theme that was established in season one and continued, often below the surface, in seasons two and three. It also had the benefit of giving me more of my favorite character, Proposition Joe, whose prank phone call to gather intelligence on Herc rivals his “nephews and cousins” line from season two for the biggest laugh I’ve gotten from the series.

–

A good churchman is always up in everybody’s shit. It’s how we do.

Where season four did set itself apart from the previous three seasons was in the depth of writing on individual characters. Earlier years weren’t superficial, but didn’t get as far into motivations as season four did, and there was too much emphasis on current actions relative to character history. Putting the four kids at the center of the show for a full season allowed the writers to focus on past and present because for junior high school kids those two things have little separation between them, and in the case of these kids, the issues from their pasts are still active during the show. Nowhere did this have the same impact (no pun intended) as it did in the storyline involving Michael and eventually Stanfield enforcer Chris Paltrow toward the end of the season. (Spoilers ahead.)

Michael’s visceral, negative reactions to any attempt by adult males to establish clear bonds with him were always odd, but about halfway through the year it became obvious that his reactions were some kind of latent response to prior abuse, likely sexual abuse, by a male authority figure earlier in his life. (It later becomes apparent who the culprit was, and why Michael makes the choices and sacrifices he makes as a result.) When Michael reverses course and asks Chris, who, for all of his coldness during murder after murder, shows peculiar flashes of empathy, even for victims (assuring them it will be quick), Chris’ emotions come to the surface with a fury that reveals a profound, unhealed emotional wound that explains not just the violence of his fulfillment of Michael’s request but the dichotomy in his own character, a murderer with a sensitive side that actually fits him, not one that was grafted on by writers to make him less repellent.

The camera has always liked Cutty Wise, as actor Chad Coleman has this mournful expression along with a deep, deliberate style of speaking that draws your attention even when he’s not in the middle of the action. Yet season three used him more as a prop in plotlines about the difficulties of reintegrating into society after incarceration and the hurdles city government puts in front of small businesses than as an individual character involved in micro stories. Here, his gym is thriving as a center of community activity, with all four boys spending time at the gym, two forging uncertain relationships with Cutty that lead, of course, to violence, but also to one of the season’s few slightly hopeful outcomes.

The one individual story that didn’t grab me was the mayoral campaign of Tommy Carcetti, who, despite getting a little more depth this season (as opposed to the raw ambition of season three), can’t command a scene like a credible fast-rising politician character should. I also never really doubted the outcome of the election – why would we be spending so much time with him, and seeing a resolution in the middle of the season, if he wasn’t going to win? What happens after he takes office is less a function of him and more of the moral hazards rampant in democratically-elected governments. Even the identical character played by an actor with stronger oratory skills would have been more effective.

–

Carver: You know what this is? This is one of those enabling relationships.
Herc: Enable me, Carv.

I think we all recommend The Wire, you to me and now me to everyone who’ll listen, because it is smart, compelling television, infused with bright and dark humor, a show that deserved a wider audience when it was alive and will get that audience , come hell or high water, now that it’s gone. But people should watch The Wire not just for its entertainment value, but because it is a social document, one that treats serious issues seriously, that handles characters like people rather than like tools of the writers, and that shows an essential understanding of the economics of behavior that drive all aspects of our lives. You do not need an econ degree to watch or enjoy this show, just as you do not need one to respond to incentives in your daily life. But you will get an education watching the show, if only in the way that a real education forces you to think critically about issues and search for answers, to ignore easy solutions and to question the pat responses you get from authority figures. It’s showing up on college syllabi, as this two-year-old Slate article attests, and not just in film studies classes. It is an American landmark, a work of protest disguised as a police procedural that, like its best characters, ignores the boundaries set out for both genres in the name of the greater good. There may be, or have been, better American series out there; I’m not well-watched enough to say more than that I haven’t seen one. But rather than elevate season four above the three that preceded it, I’d prefer to simply elevate the series, and hold that season four’s greatness is merely a testament to the vision of its creators, and to the strength of all of the material which laid the groundwork for it.

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