[CinemaRatty] tag: crust

A Dream Deferred - Revolutionary Road

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 13:29:33 +0000

“What happens to a dream deferred,” Langston Hughes once wondered. “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore — and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over — like a syrupy sweet?”

“Maybe it just sags,” Hughes wrote, “like a heavy load. Or does it explode?”

Hughes wasn’t talking about bored and perhaps boring white suburbanites trapped in the perfect storybook of a life, though. Surely that must make the minor dreams of April Wheeler less so, perhaps even ridiculous by comparison. But the question must be asked anyway, what happens to a dream deferred?

Revolutionary Road is about two people who have to believe that there is more to life than what they’ve signed up for - the perfect house, the two kids, good looks, a decent job. What is it they want that they don’t have? If you ask author Richard Yates it might be that innate, unshakable desire to live out the American dream because so many that came before us died earning their freedom to do just that. It isn’t enough to be good. One has to be great.
But the thing many of us learn as we stumble through life is that there are no guarantees. We are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The key word is pursuit. We are predetermined to always be chasing after that elusive conclusion to our lives: we will one day “be happy.” At a certain point almost everyone realizes that happiness is not wholly attainable; happiness comes and goes like the seasons, only not as predictably and without the pretty pictures. We learn to live with and without everything that goes along with it.

Mostly, though, we are all destined to decades of longing for those things we don’t have, the wives we never married, the trip we never took, the car that so and so just bought, the attention that so and so is getting, when is it MY turn, why can’t I have THAT. Longing is so much a part of us that when we finally do get what we’ve always dreamed of most of the time we don’t want it anyway. After all, we were able to acquire it so it must not be worth much.

Richard Yates has said that the title comes from this idea that at the end of the long road after the American Revolution this is where we end up; the American Dream is nothing more than a bubble of hope, a collection of dreams deferred. That theme threads neatly through the Mendes film but because of the explosive relationship between Frank and April as interpreted by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio you have a film that is more about two people, a marriage, a toxic relationship.

In Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf you have two characters, George and Martha - the mother and father of our country, if you choose that interpretation. And much the way that film became a filter of irony as to life here in America, so does Revolutionary Road expose a flaw in the perfect American life.

The Wheelers symbolize the ideal couple in the ideal home with the perfect kids. The horrendous fights between them is never witnessed by neighbors. What happens inside stays inside. When the lights are flicked on everything seems almost normal. Then comes the beer, the wine, the whisky, the light dims and the monsters come.

You probably won’t find two better performances this year than those of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road, and with the likes of Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt’s extraordinary turn this year as Benjamin Button, that is saying quite a lot - but the reason for this is that the two together are like fire and gasoline. Old friends who trust each other seem to have no barriers. Sam Mendes, with a background in theater, gave them room for exploration. Funnily enough, Blanchett and Pitt worked well for similar reasons — good friends, not lovers in real life.

That doesn’t mean they’ll win Oscars. Kate should win, though, for this performance and for all the others she didn’t win. She is well practiced at playing exuberant just this side of crazy. But here, she has peeled herself off layer by layer with precision; this isn’t sloppy work. She aims, she shoots. The first time we see her, walking into the makeup room and looking not at herself in the mirror but at her husband to see his reaction that to the horror that just took place on stage.

She looks at him with so many things going on in her face at once - disappointment mixed with approval-seeking mixed with shame mixed with anger. It is just a look but it says so much. The next scene is her hard heels on the high school hallway, clack clack clack clack - so loud and out of place. There’s nothing to say until they are alone in the car, in the darkness and no one can see them for what they really are. No longer the glamorous and perfectly held together Wheelers but a collection of mistakes, inbred fury and regret.

In the film April has only one hope of escaping her own life. She believes that she and Frank can opt out of the American dream and move the family to Paris so Frank can find out who he really is. She really believes this to be the thing that will rescue them. For a while they are “happy” again. But things don’t quite turn out that way. Real life rears its ugly head and the moment April feels like there is no way out that is when she implodes.

DiCaprio as Frank Wheeler doesn’t have to delve as deeply as Winslet but he is there to react to her. His world is pieced together, illusion by illusion, and he’d be content living the typical, hypocritical life of the American male in the pre-feminist 60s - the office, the mistress, the booze, the suits. His wife is hurting, though, because in many ways she is the one living out the illusion all alone in her pretty house with her perfect kids. In that way it’s a lot like Mad Men but the characters in the TV series aren’t shattering illusions, not yet anyway.

Michael Shannon plays the film’s only literally “crazy” person. He’s received shock therapy numerous times and can’t control his anger or his verbal attacks on anyone he meets. He is the only person who speaks the truth about what he sees in the lives of the Wheelers. Does that make him happy? Nope. Does that make him sane? Nope.

He douses the atmosphere with enough crazy that soon the Wheelers find they can’t pretend anymore, especially April who begins to crumple.

Kathy Bates is perfect as the kindly lady who so admires the perfect Wheelers and their perfect little house. She has some of the film’s best lines and it’s funny to see her with DiCaprio and Winslet all over again.

One of the odd things about the film is the absence of the children in almost every scene. It is clear that they don’t exist except as set pieces. Who are they, anyway? What will become of them? Again, this echoes Virginia Woolf, where children loom large because George and Martha couldn’t have any.

That makes Revolutionary Road a tough film to connect with; we’re not to admire these people so much as to pity them. And maybe pity those weak aspects of our character. What we throw away every day is exactly what matters most in the end.

It’s rough going, to be sure, but it is as beautiful as it is hard to watch. It has the techs nailed down - Roger Deakins’ breathtaking cinematography, the costumes, the art direction, the score, none of which upstage the story or the acting.

Paul Newman's Tasty Legacy

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:30:22 +0000

With his inevitable self-deprecation, Paul Newman once said that the downside of his successes with his Newman's Own line of foods was that "my salad dressing is out-grossing my films."

In reality, his box-office draw showed an enviable growth curve, from Silver Chalice, the first of his 65 movies (which probably didn't make back the $4.5 million it cost to make in 1954), to Cars, which earned roughly double its $120 million budget in 2006.

But the record of his foods business is hard to put in the shade. It has churned up over $250 million in profit since he and a neighbor started it in 1982; all of it has gone to charity. And the companies will live on, as a commercial, charitable legacy of the actor.

If the heirs to his commercial and charitable legacy have their way, the salad dressing and the empire it spawned will continue its steady growth. Notification came via a note posted on the company's site this past Saturday:

"For 25 years, we at Newman's Own have had a front row seat to watch Paul's entrepreneurial brilliance, humor, and compassion at work helping those in need. We will miss Paul, but we will honor his vision for the Common Good through dedicated stewardship of his company that will perpetuate his philanthropic legacy. Paul wouldn't have it any other way."

To see the power of that legacy, it helps to know some history.

It seems clear that Newman's exemplary charitable record was a sort of abashed outgrowth of his mistrust of the fame and fortune brought to him by his good looks (and superb acting skill). He liked to joke that if his famously blue eyes turned brown he would have quickly become a failure.

"I was always a character actor; I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood," he said, later noting, "I started my career giving a clinic in bad acting in the film, Silver Chalice and now I'm playing a crusty old man who's an animated automobile [in Cars]. That's a creative arc for you, isn't it?"

(As reported in his New York Times obiturary, Newman "once gave out pots, wooden spoons and whistles to a roomful of guests and forced them to sit through Silver Chalice.")

With due respect to the salad dressing grosses, the actor's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made $102 million in 1969 and The Sting made $160 million in 1973; back then, that was real money.

And there were other consolations -- an Oscar in 1986 for The Color of Money, along with nine other nominations.

Most of us have our own favorite Newman performances. I'll take the potty-mouthed coach in Slap Shot, the "I can eat 50 eggs" antihero of Cool Hand Luke, and the the ice-cold half breed of Hombre.

Another favorite is the washed-up lawyer in 1982's The Verdict. In her eloquent appreciation of Newman, New York Times critic Manhola Dargis epitomizes that character as "a defining Newman type: the guy on the hustle who seems to have nothing much left but keeps his motor running, just in case."

It was around the time of two back-to-back searing performance -- first in 1981's Absence of Malice and then The Verdict a year later --that Newman was goofing around on his estate in Westport, Connecticut, and composed a dressing from his own mix of oil, vinegar, and mustard.

Normally dispensed to neighbors in wine bottles at Christmas, the tasty stuff inspired friend and neighbor A.E. Hotchner to persuade Newman to bottle more -- lots more -- and stick his mug on the front. It would come to account for 23 percent of the U.S. market for pourable dressings, about the 10th-best seller among nearly 500 choices.

He had a philosophy that his he'd been unduly lucky in life compared to those he sought to help, according to his longtime friend David Horvitz. "He felt a need and an obligation to try to give back," said Horvitz, who oversees the 11 Hole in the Wall Camps that Newman founded to give terminally ill children the chance for a free summer-camp experience.

Newman said as much before he passed away last week, age 83, of cancer. "I wanted to acknowledge luck," he said; "the chance and benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others, who might not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it."

As recently as June 24 of this year, Newman's Own was rolling out yet another new product, a sparkling pomegranate juice drink. Newman-branded juice sales grew 38 percent last year, "well ahead of the growth in 'new age' beverages," according to the distributor, Drinks America.

More recently came their Sweet Enough Breakfast Cereals (the determinedly hands-on Newman crafted the little homilies on the packaging) and Thin and Crispy Crust Frozen Pizza.

As the product names suggest, Newman wasn't precious as he set out. "When the face came on the bottle, I knew that the profits would have to go to charity," he once recalled. "To make money off that would be so tacky.

"From this came the concept of circular exploitation," he added. "I allow my celebrity status to be exploited in order to sell stuff from which I then in turn channel the proceeds into good causes. Hence the slogan of our company: 'Shameless exploitation for the common good.' "

Once that original decision had been made, the salad dressing was sent out with store displays proclaiming, "Butch Cassidy is also a gourmet cook." More than 10,000 bottles vanished form the shelves in the first two weeks.

The privately held company turned a profit in its first year, and the profits and royalties were funneled through Newman himself to his chosen beneficiaries. He launched his Hole in the Wall Camps charity in 1988.

Newman's daughters remain active in the good works. One, Clea, sits on the Newman's Own Foundation board to help oversee grants. Another, Nell, runs the separate Newman's Own Organics line, launched in 1993.

Last year's profit of $28 million -- the product line now includes pasta sauce, cookies, popcorn, pet food, coffee, and a number of other goods as well as salad dressings -- was parceled out to a range of causes, notably the Safe Water Network with its work in India and Africa.

In January of this year, the company announced a premium wines Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, both '06 vintage, at $16 a bottle.

The labels feature Newman's signature face: on the Chardonnay label he wears a cowboy hat; on the Cabernet label he sports a Butch Cassidy-style bowler.

Newman -- whose diagnosis of cancer was only announced by Hotchner on June 12 of this year -- may already have known he was issuing a pair of collectors' items.

"We have come full circle," he said at the time the wines were introduced. "We're back to wine bottles, but this time we are filling them with a wine that will complement my salad dressing and pasta sauce. Wine was the only thing missing at dinnertime. Now the meal is complete."

We'll drink to that.

Moving on: After a year and a month of posting to this blog, this is my last scheduled contribution to Portfolio.com. I'll be helping some smart folks launch a website, and soon thereafter commence a book. Details on that will come in another forum. Thanks for reading these posts. See you in cyberspace.

Insurance Against Failure in Art

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:07:00 +0000

I love Dabney Coleman as much as everyone, but it seems a little strange that there was a brief period where he actually had the starring role in a few movies. Strangest of these titles was probably John Boorman’s WHERE THE HEART IS, released in February 1990. What sort of relationship did these two guys have? Did they ever bond over steaks at Dan Tana’s? WHERE THE HEART IS has to be considered a comedy and while the idea of a John Boorman comedy makes about as much sense as a Don Siegel musical, enough of his personality still manages to come through. That, of course, turns out to be part of the problem.

As New York demolition mogul Stewart McBain (Dabney Coleman) is prevented from taking down a rundown Brooklyn building known as the Dutch House, he decides that he’s reached the end of his rope with taking care of his three children (Uma Thurman, Suzy Amis, David Hewlett), each aspiring creative types. After musing about the ‘won’t-leave-home syndrome with a friend, he decides to teach them a lesson. So in spite of the protests by his wife Jean (Joanna Cassidy) he drops the three of them off at the Dutch House in the dead of night essentially telling them that they’re on their own. As the kids try to figure out a way to make the decrepit building hospitable they begin work on their own projects as well as bringing it friends and boarders into the house. Meanwhile, Stewart, still trying to deal with financial problems stemming from the Dutch House situation, finds himself confronted by a money situation he never could have anticipated.

Watching WHERE THE HEART IS for the first time in years, I was struck by how it is clearly very much an attempt by Boorman (along with daughter Telsche, with whom he wrote the script) to create a sort of light Shakespeare piece, a sort of MIDSUMMER’S NIGHT IN NEW YORK sort of thing with a touch of light magical realism. In addition to Coleman’s Lear-like lead are a number of supporting players who seem to drift through the movie as if part of a giant rep company, as well as a full-blown Fool in the form of Christopher Plummer, playing a homeless magician only ever referred to as “The Shit”. Of course, he offers life lessons to a few of the characters, lending his expertise where it is needed. To complain that the film doesn’t present a serious look at the homeless in New York is probably missing the point, since Boorman doesn’t care about that any more than he cared about THE EXORCIST while making EXORCIST II or the basic concepts of reality in most of his other films, for that matter. He doesn’t even seem to be all that interested in New York (more on that in a minute). What he is trying to create is an extended mood piece more than a comedy which thrusts its characters into this new world that they create for themselves in the form of the Dutch House. The cinematography by Peter Suschitzky is at times breathtaking particularly in its use of color and perfectly captures the mood they’re striving for. Most striking is the series of paintings created by Suzy Amis’s character incorporating people into paintings (she’s creating a calendar for an insurance company as part of the “art versus commerce” theme that runs throughout), credited to an artist named Timna Woollard. I would actually be willing to recommend the movie to somebody who might be interested solely on the basis of the cinematography and those paintings.

The intent and subtext is perfectly valid. The execution, as well as the actual text, is another story. Possibly because it’s a release from a Hollywood studio (Touchstone) the idea of a mood piece quickly takes a back seat to making the film a full blown comedy with people acting like they’re in a sitcom and far too much wackiness to the point where some sections feel a little unwatchable. The film was at one stage to be set in London with Sean Connery starring. Whether this would have been better is a moot point—it certainly would have been different--but it does feel like there has been some basic tampering with the idea to make it more palatable, at times feeling like someone has gone through the script adding bits to amp up the comedy. Characters can’t just turn on a film projector; they have to flail about frantically for five seconds first. A potential renter trying to enter the house falls into mud in an embarrassing bit of slapstick. When Dabney Coleman accidentally turns a stereo volume up instead of down he does a wildly exaggerated comic take. Maury Chakin, the Harvey Weinstein figure on ENTOURAGE, does some of the worst mugging imaginable. Annoying little supposed comic bits persist throughout the bulk of the running time. What results is not a funnier film but something which is neither here nor there, a feathered fish that is neither the traditional comedy Touchstone probably would have wanted, nor the light family piece Boorman presumably had in mind. It’s so insistent on this giddiness that even the background extras are annoying (it should be a rule saying that whenever you notice this sort of thing it’s a problem) and there’s a persistence to the tone which feels like the movie is aiming for an audience of pre-teen girls—all due respect to pre-teen girls, of course—but too much of the story wouldn’t interest that demographic at all.

How different this would have been in a London setting is tough to say, but its uninteresting use of New York is compounded by much of it being shot in Toronto, so it doesn’t really feel like Manhattan or Brooklyn even when it’s clearly shot there (Actually, the changes to Brooklyn over the past few years would probably moot the basic setup today). Unfortunately, what results is not a film that achieves its own unreal tone but simply a Touchstone comedy from that era which feels like it was made on a budget. The story makes an attempt to tie in how one reconciles the need for both commerce and art in this world, working in some financial disasters in the stock market. The plotting of this element isn’t particularly credible or at all coherent but it does make the film surprisingly timely these days. I swear, I pretty much just put it on at random. Every now and then there’s a moment or a scene which feels like it was allowed to slip through unencumbered but a moment like Dabney Coleman declaring, “Nobody destroys what I built up,” as he presses the button to demolish a building which we witness in a wide shot deserves a better movie around it.

Trapped among all this chaos is a bunch of very good actors who you could almost believe look troubled by the fact that they signed up for the chance to work with somebody on the level of Boorman and then realized they had to play this material as a sitcom. They’re all capable and certainly deliver during the more serious moments but there’s no way the two tones can exist together without the movie feeling like a huge jumble. Part of the problem is how much of the film seems to be dubbed which gives a feeling of unfortunate disconnect with many of the performances. Dabney Coleman plays things amped way up with lots of exaggerated behavior. Even in a comedy, he doesn’t really have the weight for playing a Shakespearean king in a modern-day context (I guess that's where Connery would have helped). Joanna Cassidy, usually a terrific actress, seems miscast in her role (it makes for a nice BUFFALO BILL reunion with Coleman, though) and seems to compensate by playing things so frantic much of the time that the behavior actually seems beneath her. She even plays one scene with more of an upper-crust accent than the rest of the film, the sort of tiny inconsistency that seems to pop up throughout. Uma Thurman shows that she clearly had huge talent this early on though even she seems unsure at times of the tone she should be going for (but seriously, what a vision she was back then). Suzy Amis looks way too old to be a ‘kid’ being kicked out of the house, but she’s not bad—she also looks weirdly like Judy Davis in some shots. Surprisingly, the actor who works best here is actually Crispin Glover playing the gay clothing designer friend with a secret--you’d expect the actor to be off in his own world but more than anyone his performance feels modulated at the tone the whole film should be going for. Sheila Kelley, who became a regular on L.A. LAW around this time, also hits the right vibe as a student reserarching speaking in tongues for her Master's ("The karma here is...major"), floating through her scenes seemingly commenting on the events without even saying anything (now married to Richard Schiff, she was last seen onscreen saying “Join the club,” to Tony Soprano/Kevin Finnerty, which for some reason makes me think of this role). Christopher Plummer is unrecognizable both in face and voice (another dubbing issue?) as The Shit (“At least I’m THE Shit, you’re just A Shit,” is one of his better lines) and NIP/TUCK’s Dylan Walsh has a really bad late 80s/early 90s haircut as the stockbroker friend who moves in. He plays things at an annoying sitcom level too.

Because of its insistence at being more of a wacky comedy than it really should be, it’s not even as lightly enjoyable as it would like. The worst scenes of supposed comedy are annoying enough that they actually make the whole experience less likable than it would be otherwise. The film is a mess, but at least it’s an interesting mess. Every now and then there’s a moment, a shot, a flash of color, where everything briefly seems to come together. Sadly, these moments a far too brief and soon enough we get a character doing something overly frantic, killing the mood. Boorman’s been all over the map in his long career (I’m one of those people who openly worships POINT BLANK) and his most recent film, shot in 2006, hasn’t even gotten a release in the U.S. But an interesting failure is more preferable than a piece of hackery any day of the week and if that’s going to be how WHERE THE HEART IS gets considered, at least it’s something.

Classic Film Smackdown!: MCGINTY vs GODFREY

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:47:00 +0000

The Great McGinty, Preston Sturges' directorial debut and one of my personal favorites from his all-too-brief filmography, was on TCM the other night and I caught it from about the middle on. This is one of the great rags to riches to rags stories -- a domestic/political farce with real heart, and great performances, especially from lead Brian Donlevy and "antagonist" Akim Tamiroff (character actors afraid of "overacting" in comedies today, and there may not be any that are, would do well to study Sturges' well-tempered casts). The ending is a real dagger in the chest, too; I don't think Sturges ever maxed out his credit card of the pathetic to that extent again, although he came close in Christmas in July, which -- like McGinty, is soaked in depression-era pain.

I was reminded of another depression-era bum while re-viewing McGinty -- perhaps el rey de depression-era bums, if you will, William Powell in My Man Godfrey, from 4 years earlier. Granted, the two films are very different -- one a dramedy of sorts and the other a screwball exemplar, one a political satire and the other a skewer aimed at the UHBs whose cushy lifestyles were threatened, but not quite demolished, by the soaring unemployment rates and plummeting stock market of the 1930’s. And, the two bums in question -- McGinty and Godfrey -- are practically polar opposites. Godfrey is an entrepreneurial bum who takes command of his own destiny, where McGinty is plucked from the gutter and thrust into greatness. Godfrey's character is static throughout his journey (and the film really is in the end about Carole Lombard's efforts to daffily woo him) whereas McGinty is a social psychology portrait slowly gathering definition as the movie progresses. Godfrey is a linear film, McGinty shows us the ending first and flashes backward (preparing us, mercifully, for the fate that will befall our titular friend).

And yet...is there not, hidden in there somewhere, delicate traces of a mirror image in either film when juxtaposed? Both concern transients who in some way wish to better themselves, and who prove themselves great men. Both fight tooth and nail the possibility of love. It's superficial, but look at even the titles. Both are brief, three-word collections that qualify each bum in some way ("My Man..." is both a reference to Godfrey's vocation and Carol Lombard's "ownership" of the plot's third act; "The Great" is tragic/ironic, even more so when you consider Sturges' original title Down Went McGinty). Both titles even alliterate the same consonant sounds -- M & G -- and end on a long "e" sound.

So how do the two stack up? Personally, I think McGinty would whoop Godfrey's ass in a roughhouse, but we're not talking physical strength here.

Call me crazy, but on closer inspection I think that McGinty emerges from the fray the stronger film. I think part of this is the dated quality of Godfrey. I remarked to my wife the last time that we watched it, "They just don't make bums like that any more" (I should point out that we were living in Berkeley, CA at the time, where homelessness is viewed a disease, like schizophrenia). Granted, Akim Tamiroff's ethnic racketeer is nothing if not an outdated stereotype (though not exaggerated by the actor), but this pales in comparison with characters like Carlo, the Bullock mother's protégé. While I don't doubt that upper-crust families like this still exist, mocking them now would be like hunting lox in a barrel to spread on one's bagel.

Sturges’ films, on the other hand, are steeped in the vernacular and vague bigotry of their time (McGinty even has the obligatory African-American maids and butlers…but then, didn’t the family in Hannah and her Sisters?), yet they always feel curiously modern -- I think simply because of the man's daring. Consider the conjugal configuration in McGinty which has the protagonist marry his secretary as a ploy to win the women's vote, then sleep in a separate room for six months before realizing that he's loved her all along. It’s a plot gimmick, maybe, but this pulling back of the curtains on the dynamics of even quotidian sexual discourse (aberrant or not) – such as what marriage really means to some people, who sleeps where, etc – still seems considerably juicier than it really is (I felt a similar sensation watching My Favorite Wife for the first time). In contrast, when Carole Lombard invades Godfrey’s servant quarters against his wishes, we may feel Hayes grumbling a little bit and Aunt Mabel gasping “Scandal!”, but we don't feel like we've learned anything about how "real people" behave.

And yet…I ADORE Godfrey. I adore Carole Lombard's dippy head-over-heels puppy love and the tender tremors of Eugene Pallette's swollen jowls. The premise would today be a ghastly anachronism (then again, look at the Princess Diaries franchise), but it’s a real testament to the writing and the acting that the film is still hilarious and heartwarming after so much time. But for me McGinty wins the celluloid melee because it refuses to condescend to any of its characters, rich, poor, straight, or crooked (or woman -- Muriel Angelus "concocts" her marriage as either a method of freedom or a method of seduction and sees which one pans out) and because I think that the well-depicted moral trajectory of a single man, satirical or not, may be more rewarding than the tale of the refined businessman who learns to love a nut. And, though it surprises me to say it, I might prefer erudite schmaltz to erudite screwball.

Bloggers Make Pizza at California Pizza Kitchen

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:08:00 +0000

If I were Michelangelo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I was going "Cowabunga!" the other night.

The California Pizza Kitchen invited several bloggers last September 10 to make pizzas based on CPK's signature California-style pizzas in their Glorietta 3 branch. Each was asked to draw recipes from several pizza boxes and we were to create a pizza based on our drawn list of ingredients. I drew the Mango Tandoori pizza, and it was a curry-based pizza inspired by Indian cuisine. Yeah, my recipe doesn't sound enticing, but it tasted pretty nice after it was done. :)

I never knew creating pizza was easy-- you had some ingredients like cheese, the sauce, onions, and you sprinkle them liberally over the crust. The art, as I was told by my chef mentor, was to put the toppings radially inward, since pizzas tend to "center," or be distorted towards the center point as it is being cooked in the oven.

The evening was lively as it was hosted by fellow blogger/TV personality RJ Ledesma and he was as witty as ever. Even the CPK Philippines head honcho was there to give a demo of how put the toppings on a pizza. There were lots of bloggers in attendance and some of them were:

Markku
Jayvee
Fritz
Rico
Juned
Poyt
Mica
Marcelle
Karla and Sha (My girlfriend & I shared a table with them. :P)
Arpee
AJ
Eric
LA
Allan
Gail
Benj

Please do chime in if you were there. :)

There was also a pick-up line competition where we were asked to write pizza inspired pick-up lines and write them on pizza boxes. I submitted "I have a CRUST on you" and it drew guffaws from the crowd. The winner was "Please stop topping me" (figure that out :P) and she won a nice Samsung media player.

The event was a nice but the venue was obviously too small for the crowd. it didn't help that the room was designed in such a way that everyone was funneled near the exit, which was also near the bar where bloggers made the pizzas. But all in all, it was nice experiencng different types of pizzas from the California Pizza Kitchen.

Tags: California Pizza Kitchen

Bloggers Make Pizza at California Pizza Kitchen

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:08:00 +0000

Markku
Jayvee
Fritz
Rico
Juned
Poyt
Mica
Marcelle
Karla and Sha (My girlfriend & I shared a table with them. :P)
Arpee
AJ
Eric
LA
Allan
Gail
Benj

TV REVIEW: Fringe (pilot)

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 06:06:00 +0000

The pilot for J.J. Abrams' series Lost (2004 - ) is -- without any exaggeration -- the finest I've ever seen. That's not a comment on the direction the series has ultimately taken (don't get me started, please...). Just my honest assessment of the involving, intense first episode. It was...amazing.

By direct contrast, the pilot for J.J. Abrams' new genre series, Fringe is one of the absolute worst that I've seen in a good long while. With Fringe's disappointing initial outing, we very much have a modern case of the Emperor's New Clothes: the pilot is alarmingly naked in terms of real human interest, and shockingly devoid of originality in terms of conception, look and execution.

There's been a lot written in the press lately (hype) about how Fringe is not a rip-off of The X-Files. Don't believe a word of it. This show is such a flat-out rip-off of Chris Carter's work it's actually an embarrassment. Allow me to enumerate (briefly) some of the many similarities between the two productions:

1. Fringe, like the X-Files is set in the milieu of the FBI. With agents, search warrants, stake-outs, car-chases and "investigations."

2. Fringe, like the X-Files, finds solutions to unusual problems (like a nasty new airborne disease/terrorist WMD) in the notion of "extreme possibilities" (the paranormal/fringe science) On The X-Files, this description meant any number of things (NDEs, Astral Projection, psychokinesis, etc.). First up in Fringe: "a synaptic transfer" that allows two minds to meet in the dream world. You may have seen this idea played out already in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) with Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher. Lower. Lower...

3. Fringe, like The X-Files, focuses on an untrustworthy authority figure. In fact, this character-type was a regular staple of The X-Files. Specifically, I'm referring to the incredibly sympathetic notion that someone derided, dismissed or de-valued by society at large (perhaps a criminal, perhaps a madman, perhaps just an unconventional thinker...) could be the best source for understanding "the truth" about the featured mysteries. Even "Spooky" Mulder fits this type to some degree. As do the conspiracy theorists, The Lone Gunmen. As late as this summer's X-Files: I Want to Believe, we saw this character type at his most raw and troubling, in the form of the psychic pedophile priest. On Fringe, we get quirky, inappropriate Dr. Bishop, both a madman and a criminal, one who possesses many secrets.

4. Fringe, like The X-Files, focuses on the "The Mytharc" or "Pattern." The X-Files was famous for an exploration of a larger conspiracy, one including the FBI, heads of state, and various departments in the United States Government. The conspiracy had a secret, malicious agenda. In Fringe's pilot, we're introduced not only to a specific episodic mystery (an airborne, self-eradicating germ) but the conspiracy operating behind it. There's not a Cigarette Smoking Man hanging around yet, but we have Blair Brown (replete with a cheesy robotic arm...), a representative of the company Massive Dynamic. She and her corporation are working behind the scenes on the by-now rote malicious and secret agenda.

5. Fringe, like The X-Files, centers on a male/female pair-up. It's Duchovny and Anderson on The X-Files, and Joshua Jackson and Anna Tory on Fringe. I should point out an important difference here. On the X-Files, Scully and Mulder actually boasted fields of expertise. Mulder was a behavioral psychologist (and one of the best profilers in the FBI). And Scully was an M.D. The characters on Fringe seem to have no specialties at all. Peter Bishop (Jackson) is simply tagged a "genius" (that way, a writer has to do no research whatsoever - the character is just SMART!) and Olivia Dunholm (Tory) is merely your average gun-toting, ambitious FBI agent. Each character is about as interesting as wonder bread. Without the crust.

6. Both shows have the same home: The Fox Network. Wonder how that happened?

So yes, pretty clearly, Fringe is a dedicated rip-off of The X-Files. iI's also a rip-off of a short-lived, obscure series from 1998 called Strange World, which concerned "medical mysteries" like the one featured in this pilot. My problem: it's not a good rip-off of either show.

The X-Files is such a classic not merely because the subject matter (the paranormal) is fascinating; not merely because the conspiracy is intriguing. But rather because it boasted the good sense and artistry to create two characters (Mulder and Scully) who viewed their world in vastly different ways. As viewers, we saw the world interpreted through each lens. The writing and acting were so utterly brilliant that moments of heavy exposition played not like boring recitation of fact...but foreplay. We fell in love with Scully and Mulder because they were both smart and passionate. And I don't mean passionate about sex, necessarily, but in the manner they interpreted "the facts" of any given case. Ideas represented the currency of the show. Bold ideas; boldly interpreted.

Whereas on Fringe, there's only the veneer of intelligence, not intelligence itself. In other words, all the concepts and ideas in the pilot are pulled from smart sources (like The X-Files and Altered States), but don't feel organic to this enterprise. You can't import intelligence, and you can't import wit. This was the same problem I had with Orci and Kurtzman's brain-dead Transformers (2007) movie. There was no authentic human element to grasp. Similarly, Fringe already seems anti-science, railing against "science" and "technology." In The X-Files, the villain was the misuse of science and technology, not science and technology itself. There's a distinction there. One asks us to examine human nature (how do we apply our knowledge wisely and morally?) and the other is blatantly anti-intellectual.

So what we're left with in this pilot is a dull police procedural with a conspiracy underneath, and a touch (and I mean a touch...) of the paranormal. Oh, there's a car chase, well-staged. There's a creepy prologue (also an element of The X-Files' formula), here set on a plane in flight. There are some nice special effects involving a man with translucent skin, but the X-Files has already done that too (in Fight the Future and the Season Six premiere.) Worst of all, in Fringe's pilot there's no joy, no fun, no sense of curiosity at all. It's a mechanical, heartless product...a machine grinding out sausage for the masses.

I'm going to keep watching, and I hope the series gets better. I would always rather write a positive review than a negative one. And I have been wrong before, that's for dang sure. But for the time being, I'm going to call a spade a spade: Fringe is a charmless, brazen rip-off of The X-Files. One that copies all the specific elements of that TV classic, but has zero understanding of why it worked in the first place. Fringe is positively soulless. In fact, that's the creepiest thing about it.

Films I Love #3: Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 06:45:00 +0000

Bonjour Tristesse is, like many of Otto Preminger's films, an extended exercise in toying with the problems of audience identification and tone. The film shifts, in its first ten minutes, from a somber black and white prologue in which Cecile (Jean Seberg) and her father Raymond (David Niven) seem subtly discontented in their upper-crust lifestyle, to a gorgeous Technicolor flashback in which everything is breezy, carefree, and fun for the pair and Raymond's latest fling Elsa (Mylène Demongeot). Preminger injects the color into the film slowly, fading in some blue ocean waves over Cecile's shoulder as she dances, then irising out from the center of the image with a burst of color. The shift to Technicolor highlights the contrast between the two Ceciles we see, one numb and disconnected, the other vibrant and almost relentlessly sunny. The film tracks Cecile's downfall as her father abandons his carefree ways to marry the matriarchal Anne (Deborah Kerr), who immediately assumes a domineering, motherly attitude towards the defiantly flighty Cecile. Preminger's brilliance lies in the way he gets the audience irrevocably on Cecile's side — it's hard not to love Seberg's smiley, unrestrained performance and to sympathize with her desire for freedom — only to pull the rug out as he delves more and more into the selfish, willful, and vengeful aspects of this charming girl's personality. The film remains ambiguous, right up to its final black and white closeup of Seberg's agonized face, as to whether Anne or Cecile is the real victim in this battle of wills.

As always, Preminger's direction is fascinating, his distinctive roving camera framing and reframing the characters in various couplings and trios, emphasizing Anne's intrusion on Cecile's carefree life by placing her in dominant positions within the frame, always looming over the younger girl. And yet Preminger hardly makes her an unredeemed "evil stepmother" character, infusing her with unexpected pathos while Kerr plays her as a complex, well-meaning woman who is simply ill-suited to the morally loose, privileged existence enjoyed by Cecile and Raymond. The film also provides a dazzling showcase for Seberg in her second role, which Preminger conceived as a comeback attempt after she was roundly mocked for her debut in his Saint Joan the year before. The American critics mostly didn't bite this time either, but Seberg's wide-eyed naivete and cheerful bombast made her a curiously effective Joan of Arc, and an even better Cecile. Of course, at least some French critics caught on to what Preminger and Seberg are up to here, and her performance in Bonjour Tristesse directly brought the young actress to the attention of Jean-Luc Godard, who immediately cast her in his own debut feature. Godard picked up on the film's purposeful tonal ambivalence and Seberg's deftness in conveying a character who is at once charming and ruthless. He famously said that Seberg's Patricia in Breathless was a continuation of Cecile's arc: "I could have taken the last shot of Preminger's film and started after dissolving to a title, 'Three Years Later.'"

9/4: A Girl Cut In Two

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:04:00 +0000

Claude Chabrol's latest film, A Girl Cut In Two, is two hours spent with some of the most smug, obnoxious, hypocritical people you'd never want to meet — and who, despite the time spent with them in their upper-class milieu, you never really do get to meet in any meaningful way. Chabrol, always a detached director, seems here less interested than ever in character psychology or the exploration of motivations, and more interested in surfaces, appearances, and language. One of the main characters, Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand), is a writer who is obsessed with quotation, who likes to end conversations by using someone else's words; an odd tic for someone who produces his own original words for a living, but a very appropriate indication of the kind of distance that Chabrol is striving for here. The film continually raises questions about its characters and then refuses to answer them, discreetly looking away at pivotal moments, either directly (a cut to black prematurely cuts off the film's shocking climax) or indirectly (key conversations drift along on the soundtrack while Chabrol's camera wanders off elsewhere to shoot walls or flowers).

The girl of the title is the TV weather girl Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), a charming, naïve young woman who soon attracts the attention of two rival men who already have a somewhat mysterious antipathy towards each other: the writer Saint-Denis, a local celebrity of sorts, and the spoiled, arrogant Paul Gaudens (Benoît Magimel), the heir to a fortune earned by his father and squandered in idleness ever since. The story is somewhat typical, as Gaudens becomes infatuated with Gabrielle, who leads him on but always stops short of returning his affections, instead throwing herself wholeheartedly at the much older Saint-Denis, a compulsive womanizer who seems mainly to be using her, enjoying her youth and her capacity for sexual molding. "I'll teach you," he says, and teach her he does, indoctrinating her into a sexually subservient role in which she'll do anything for him, from dressing up with a tail of peacock feathers to spending a night at a shady swingers' club where he passes her around amongst his friends. The material is sordid, but Chabrol's camera is discreet almost to a fault, suggesting a great deal without ever showing a thing. The film is inscribed with a curiously bourgeois outlook, in which whispers and rumors convey the plot more so than what is actually seen. In this upper-class country town, the sordidness of the inhabitants' lifestyle is papered over with a tastefulness that doesn't stop some of the more juicy rumors from being circulated in private: the incident involving Gaudens, some friends, and the kidnapping of a group of underage girls; the goings-on at a private little club where the upstairs room, never shown, seems to hide all kinds of debauchery; the suggestions of homosexual encounters in the pasts of both Gaudens and Saint-Denis. The connection between these two men, the source of their mutual hatred for one another, could lie in any of these distasteful little stories, which provide so little outrage from anyone. When Saint-Denis tells his puppy-dog-faithful wife Dona (Valeria Cavalli) about the rumors regarding Gaudens and the young girls, and the way his family connections got the whole incident covered up, all she can muster to say is, "I never judge anyone." This lack of judgment, this utter black hole of morality, sucks all of these people into its orbit; they won't judge, because they're all just as guilty.

Chabrol's bourgeois satire may be slightly passé to the extent that he's satirizing this amoral outlook — so the rich are despicable, you say? — but the film is more interesting and complicated in its consideration of chauvinism and the role of women. Chabrol has often been indicted for the misogyny of his male characters, and it's easy to imagine the same mistaken interpretations cropping up here. In fact, the film is a somewhat devastating critique of the limited options open to women in a society that continues to view them first and foremost as sex objects. The lovely Gabrielle experiences this subtle restriction firsthand, as no man she meets can fail to tell her how beautiful she is. Underpinning her every interaction with her boss or her male coworkers at the TV station is an unspoken sexual bargaining, communicated in looks and too-long touches, a sense that these men are constantly feeling her out, trying to leverage their influence on her career into sexual favors. As is characteristic of these people, they're too discreet to come right out and say it, but it's obvious anyway, apparent in everything they do and say. Gabrielle is surrounded by men who want her, which makes it hard to see why she might see something different in Saint-Denis, who she falls for almost on sight. Chabrol never explains this relationship, but he does convey its intensity: the only sexy moment in this nearly passionless film is a tight closeup of the couple sharing a playful, teasing series of kisses.

Despite this passion, what Gabrielle never seems to realize is that Saint-Denis is just another version of her slightly grabby boss, admittedly somewhat more suave and self-possessed but no less sexually manipulative or exploitative. And yet she runs to this man with giddy love, cheerfully lets him demean her, collapses into a zombie-like isolation and depression when he leaves her. Gabrielle is a bit of a naif, but she's also the only character in the film who lets a genuine sense of her feelings shine through, while everyone else is hiding in plain sight. At one point, when Gabrielle and Saint-Denis are at the height of their very public affair, she somewhat regretfully says that this is all having a great effect on Saint-Denis' wife Dona, who mopes around and cries all the time now. But when Dona appears in the next scene, she's in good cheer, teasing her husband and bantering with him and the couple's good friend Capucine (Mathilda May), a sexually voracious older woman who's frequently at the same sex club as Saint-Denis. Only Gabrielle seems to be really affected by things, although Paul, who's forthrightly childish in his spoiled insistence on getting his own way, seems to have the same capacity for emotional expression. The difference is that he's continually being pulled up short by an ambiguous friend, valet, or bodyguard who's always hanging around nearby, ready to stop Paul from going too far — which he accomplishes with a simple gesture, placing a hand gently on his shoulder, that is strangely imbued with a homoerotic subtext and emphasized by the way that Chabrol films these moments, the hand always emerging from offscreen with a jarring detachment from whatever's going on in the scene.

This detachment extends, in various ways, throughout the film, which is alternately intriguing and infuriating in its refusal to delve very far into these mostly unlikeable characters. The flat tone occasionally gives way to touches of wry, dark comedy — especially from the fey, needy Paul and his precisely caricatured upper-crust family — but for the most part Chabrol keeps the proceedings dry, even arid. One gets the sense that he directed the entire picture with one eyebrow strenuously raised, and no other expression on his face. Which is why the final sequence, in contrast, is so deeply moving, and so puzzling in relation to the rest of the film. As Chabrol unexpectedly literalizes and visualizes his title — that perfect metaphor for a girl not only torn between two men but torn apart by a societal framework with no respect for her — he lingers on a gorgeous, affecting, poignant closeup of Gabrielle, struggling to appear as detached and unconcerned as everyone else in the film, but still unable to keep a single tear from running down her face. It's an extraordinary moment, one that drives home just what a good choice Sagnier was for this part: capable of girlish glee and darker, more subtly shaded emotions alike, she possesses the film's only real beating heart, and she keeps it alive pretty much singlehandedly.