My thoughts on Julie and Julia

Now that Julie and Julia is out on DVD, lately I've been seeing a lot of posts by food bloggers about giving in and finally seeing this puff. This is exactly the kind of movie that we all sorta secretly wanted to see a little, but not nearly enough to pay a ticket for. So it makes sense that it will be haunting cold snowed in Saturday nights for months to come. After all, Amy Adams is the cutest little dickens ever. And we all like multitudes of cast iron pans and French full skirt dresses with pockets.

I'm not likely to say much about the movie you haven't already read. The whole Julie storyline sucked, and I wish the movie had just been about Julia Childs and her husband, and nothing more.

But here are what I consider some fairly unique takeaways, worth mentioning:

Aspic shots. Yes. Jello shots made with meat jelly. We need to make these. Buddy is insisting we have to make aspic, and I'm insisting it involve copious amounts of alcohol, and this seems like the best solution for all parties. We're thinking Beefeaters, for character development.

This is the last movie I will allow to have a scene where one character shows another how to use the internet. It is time to make some fairly reasonable assumptions. You know how hard it is to make a blog? About as hard as wiping your ass. Wait, stay here for thirty seconds. Okay, I'm back and I just made a blog. About your mom being a communist whore. It will be more popular in 3 hours than Salon.com. What kind of 30 yr old needs her husband to set up a blog for her?

The idea of not being able to look up stuff on Google scares the holey moses living crap out of me. Mail? You're going to collaborate on a book by writing letters? On paper? And mailing them? WTF.

I will never be able to kill a lobster. Not only do I think I would be too much of a pussy, I also think I would develop an immediate fear that it's fellow lobsters were going to come after me, like I know spiders do. In my sleep.

I hate when girls commiserate over being bitches. "I'm a bitch." "Yes, I know, we're both bitches." Well why don't you just stop being bitchy then? It's not really a virtue. It is in fact a known character flaw. It's not endearing when you're fifteen, thirty, or fifty.

Apparently my life goal now should be to get an article in the New York Times, because it will make me an instant success at something. I'm not entirely sure what, but that's the movie lesson and I'm sticking to it.

Also, it is, according to Julie, immensely deridable to write a blog only about yourself, with no other higher purpose or goal. So I will never get that NYT article, because I have already cast myself as a failure. My new life plan? To write a blog all about myself, but with a theme. And the theme cannot be having sex in airplanes. Which is a shame.

Avatar: The Rise of the Blue People who conveniently bear a resemblance to your cat

*Note, there may be spoilers in here. If you're the kind of person who is going to this movie for the stellar plot, you should probably go elsewhere. Or get a clue.*

First of all, here is my prediction, or rather a weak hope. Avatar will be the last movie to get away with a really crappy script, but get critical acclaim anyway because of the CGI effects.

When I saw Coraline, I thought to myself that 3D had finally come into its own as a special effect. The way that Tim Burton used it, it became part of the picture, not the point of the picture. It was, for lack of a less banal word, artistic.

Then James Cameron came along and bludgeoned it to death.

I don't think I really expected anything else. After all, Titanic took awesome scale ship shit and beat it up until it was lying bloody on the basement floor gasping for life. And don't get me wrong, I am a sucker for visual awesomeness. The first half of Avatar was well worth the price of admission. It was beautiful and grandiose and cute. I loved the drops of water when he woke up from Cryo, and the fluorescent gay club vibe of Pandora after dark is like walking into your favorite segment of Fantasia. There were dragons, who doesn't love dragons? Also, and this is key, there was not much talking. There was random crap dialogue, but you could safely ignore it and get involved in the movie.

The exact line where the dialogue became unbearable is, as my viewing companion put it, where the alien sex happens. Alien sex ruins everything. Always. That's when the Blue Braveheart Revolution really gets going, and if I was writing this movie, everyone would have died and the Corporation would have gotten its "unobtainium" (what the fuck?), and a real moral lesson would have been taught.

Instead, the movie quickly goes the route of every indigenous versus civilization movie ever made, and blah blah blah heart is everything and if you're good you win and Mother Earth and all that crap. You know, they didn't really win children. They just beat off one part of a giant army that now is going to come to that planet and nuke them all. Or give them small pox. Or syphilis from all the alien sex.

Also, I am sick of the word Pandora. Can we just officially enter the modern usage as "decent internet radio station" and be done with it?

The best part of my movie going experience was finally going to the Capitol Theater on W. 65th, which apparently I'm supposed to call Gordon Square now. Theater 1 is huge. We were the first ones in there, and we spent twenty minutes discussing how the hell they change the lights on the chandelier. It wasn't a movie theater, it was a bonafide auditorium, and easily my favorite theater now, closely beating out the Shaker Square one that looks like you could rollerskate in front of the screen.

Since I'm in the recommending mood...

I have 2 things to recommend:

1. The movie "An Education" is playing at Cedar Lee right now. It's really fucking good. Based off a book by Nick Hornby (you know, that guy who also wrote High Fidelity and About A Boy), it follows the strange affair of a 16 yr old girl in a school uniform and a "worldly" man. In my head, the ending is completely different, but Peter Saarsgard will make you wish you were 16 yourself, and Carey Mulligan as Jenny is completely charming and engaging. It's also surprisingly funny, with Alfred Molina carrying the best lines as Jenny's dad. Nick Hornby writes the only kind of romantic comedies I can watch. The kind of comedies that are actually sad stories, but are funny because you know they are, and actually you're a mean girl. After the movie I said, this is how I would have ended this. And my companion said, that is of course the way any cynic would end it. But it would have been more true. It's still fucking good.



2. Michael Symon's new restaurant, B Spot. I will admit, I was a little underwhelmed when I went to that other one, Bar Symon, in Avon Lake. Probably cause it was in Avon Lake, which is the middle of nowhere. But B Spot, despite it's location in the middle of Christmas Village central, is wonderful and casual. I mean, it's a mall restaurant. If you want to, you can sit in the patio, which is in the mall, and look at the fancy chandeliers and awful post modern rococo disaster which is any shopping strip on Chagrin. But sit inside, and sit at the bar proper, so you can meet Krissy the Wonderful Bartender. Krissy played the "guess which beer I'm serving you" game with flair. The Kentucky Bourbon beer was sweet and warm and perfect for after dinner, by the way. There are all sorts of older women in various animal prints, and young couples that aren't pretty but have money, and therefore found each other. I also found my new favorite burger in the world there, the Red Hot, which has pulled pork, pickled tomatoes, jalapenos, pepperjack, and siracha mayo. The Parmesan fondue chips are amazing. There's a whole array of sauces on the counter, from Coffee BBQ to Balsamic. And there is a PICKLE BAR in the middle of the room. Pickle Bar, where have you been my whole life? Be sure to get a milkshake to go when you leave. The Vanilla Apple Pie Bacon one was fantastic, but I preferred the Chocolate Espresso with broken up beans to suck through the straw. On the little Symon Says....cards in the middle of sauce trays, he describes the types of doneness you can get, with "well done" described as "no pink, sad, hot in the center." That's the kind of burger restaurant this is.

Oh, and I saw them serve an actual wedge salad, which I thought was only for steakhouses in NYC. Cool.

Oh movies...no seriously, you, movies.

So this past week has been one wonderful jaunt through the marvels of modern socio-economically created super viruses. I've been dehydrated, delirious, congested, barely in control, and bored as shit. I know. I've been pretty vocal about it. What the hell else am I supposed to talk about? All these deep uninterrupted thoughts I've been having? I think the deepest my thought processes went this week was planning out where I would move to when my neighbors convinced the local authorities I was a noise nuisance, because of my awesome Typhoid Mary impression.

But, so, you know, I had time. I played with the cats a lot. They liked that. I read some old 60s pulp novels I had lying around. One is about the secret shame a rich wife wreaks on her developer husband, when he discovers she's been sleeping with the same woman he's been cheating on her with! And conspiring with his evil land manager against him! But it's okay, cause after he saves his misguided and possessed wife from the fire, and she gets carted away as criminally insane, he goes home with the Joan Holloway character, a nice "uncomplicated" girl with heaving bosoms and red hair and a good heart despite her taste for Scotch. The two women illustrated on the cover, I discovered through a good hour of staring at it on the bathroom tile while in the bathtub, have the exact same face. Very symmetrical and doll-like. They actually kind of have the same hair style too, only he changed the colors. Which is the weird part, because why wouldn't you draw the brunette as pert and cute, and the blond as dramatic and sculptural? Isn't that how it's normally done? The artist who created this book cover, which was printed, not drawn by fucking hand like a album poster in Xanadu, couldn't be bothered to take the time to draw individual faces on these Sapphic witches. It makes me feel bad for him, since he probably wanted to be a real artist. But it also makes me kinda hate him.

I actually think that book is Nate's, I should give that back to him. I wonder if he even remembers that he had that.

So I read some stuff. But as I started to get better, I got antsy. The first few days, when you're really feverish and out of it, its awesome to lay in bed, read, pass out, read some more. You don't even notice time, just judge its passage by the liters of juice and gingerale you force down your throat and how tall the mountain of tissues by your bed grows. But then you wake up some, and the coughing and congestion and sinuses really hit you, and you need something way more in your face, to distract you from the nastiness that is your entire aura and physical being on this world. You watch some cable, but the same problem you had in middle school still exists, mid day television sucks. They don't even always show Bonanza anymore. Which is when it's movie time.

First surprisingly good movie I watched was The Brothers Bloom. This was actually before I got sick, but it was really good, and it had a trailer that totally did not do it justice, so I have to mention it. The trailer made me think it was going to be like In Bruges, which was also a good film. Very slick and con. And Brothers was slick as well, but it was also very very sweet and charming and well drawn. It's the story of two brothers who run grand epic cons, written like Russian novels by the older brother Stephen(Mark Ruffalo!), and all starring his young brother Bloom (Adrian Brody!)as the dark, melancholy hero. Stephen says a good con is one in which everyone gets what they want, and loves to have his criminal endings tie up perfectly, with flare and finesse. When Bloom starts to get heartsick, Stephen tries to write the perfect con for him, involving a weird adorable highly intelligent orphan heiress (Rachel Weisz!) and a Belgian, and a heist, and Russian mobsters. It was seriously wonderful. It was like, Pushing Daisies wonderful. There was this great running idea of how to tell stories through the movie, and all these quirks that sometimes you think maybe Wes Anderson has ruined for everybody else, but are awfully redeemed here. It made you feel stoned when you weren't, or drunk on good wine. It reminded me of the first time I watched Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.



Second, I finally watched Hannah Takes the Stairs. I remember when this first came out at SXSW and everyone was like "oh you stupid hipsters with your stupid mumblecore crap, what is that crap, make real movies." Well, at least that was the general vibe from the NYTimes. I mean, the mere description was enough to drive me away. Low budget film made with a video camera, with no scripts, and people just make stuff up and nothing really happens. Sounds fucking perfect, sign me up. But since I was already half-conked, and there weren't any Amy Adams films on On Demand that I hadn't watched, I decided it couldn't be so bad as to not deserve a mere hour and twenty minutes of my time.

I liked it. At first I wasn't sure, because it starts off with a naked Hannah (there's a lot of Hannah skin in the movie), and I was like, shit, some guy just made this so he could get this girl naked. But by the middle of it, you realize that this is kind of like hanging out with some people you know, and then you kinda think maybe this reminds you of your younger sister now, or yourself that one time, and that chair is pretty fucking cute but you could totally afford it, and maybe those hipster snobs who made fun of this crap outta be nicer to the hipster snobs that made this crap cause actually its pretty cute. So there you go. That last sentence is my review of this movie.



Finally, today, I watched Away We Go, which was that baby film that came out with Jim from the Office and Maya Rudolph. I remember I did want to see this when it was in theaters, but there's not a lot of reason to go watch a baby film at the actual theater is there? I mean, you don't go there with a date. You don't say "Hey, random friend, lets go watch a sentimental movie about parenthood, that's a good way to spend Saturday afternoon." I didn't know about this film's pedigree until the credits, which is good cause I went in expecting something trite and cute, but not super indie trite and cute. So when Good Ol' Mr. Eggers was weaving his magically disarming dialogue, I was caught without my McSweeneys armour on. Plus who doesn't like Sam Mendes? Doesn't he always get a free pass, like always? I never liked Maya Rudolph on SNL, in fact I hated her on SNL, but she's a good straight foil to Krasinki's goofiness. And by the way, she could still be on SNL, I have no idea, that show sucks so bad now. John's basically playing Jim from the Office, which is totally fine, that's Cusack worthy crack to me. Melanie Lynskey and Maggie Gyllenhaal are both great, and I usually won't say that about somebody who spells their name unnecessarily tricky like. The story is less about having the baby, and more about a couple building themselves an identity separate from the rest of the world. You're watching them achieve solidarity with every new dysfunctional situation they meet. It makes you happy they fell in love, which is something that happened way before the movie started, and is never in question the whole film. So the fact that it makes you a cheerleader for them is impressive, because there's no dramatic arc to root for.




Having said all this nice stuff though, I would like to now point out that it is the STUPIDEST MARKETING MOVE EVER to disable your movie's trailer from embedding on YouTube. Here, watch this trailer, but don't you dare go SHARING IT or SHOWING OTHER PEOPLE ON YOUR BLOG. What the hell? Look at all the nice things I'm writing about you, why would you make me search for a fucking viable link?

Other movies I watched this week: Dirty Dancing, I Love You Beth Cooper, Fargo, Anna Karenina, The Girl Next Door, Another Cinderella Story, a bunch of old westerns. I really need to go back to work.

Lucky's Cafe - Dinner

When I saw on Cleveland Foodie that Lucky's, the Tremont bastion of brunch, was trying out a dinner, I jumped on it. I'm not entirely sure why. I've only been to Lucky's brunch a couple times, it's not like I'm the most rabid fan of the place. I mean, the brunches are great, but they're usually so busy. I think in my head I was just like "oh, new place! But new place I feel comfortable in!" Like, I know where to park, and I know I can wear jeans without getting weird looks.

Tapenade, grits, ratatouille, and house cured lardon

The call I got on Friday to confirm my reservation said 7pm. Which was weird, cause I thought I made it for 8:30pm. I rushed out of work, picked up S., and we scrammed to Tremont without stopping to buy wine. Which is fine, because it gave me an excuse to drag S. into Lilly Handmade Chocolates next door, which created wine and beer pairings for the dinner. I then proceeded to attain a state of jealousy reserved only for really awesome lighting, directed to the amazing Icarus lamp hanging in the middle of the showroom. If I don't start making my own lights now, before my income catches up with my intentions, I foresee a future of debt.

We picked up a malbec, and one sake aged beer, then headed over. Where I found out that in fact, the reservation was for 8:30pm.

But the staff was really nice, and seated us early. And then let me sit at the table I requested in the back.

S. promptly left as soon as he opened his beer, to buy more beer. Which left me sitting, looking at the amuse bouche above, for ten minutes. Ten long minutes. During which I drank a lot of wine.

Herbed crepes with pulled pork and carmelized onion, served with bacon, brussel sprouts, pecans, and thyme jus

Next we got a basket of hearty baguette, with good salted butter. 1st course was soup or salad. We ended up being one of THOSE couples, that switch their plates around. Is that obnoxious? I don't know. It's more efficient. When I had looked at the menu earlier in the day, I already knew I would get the salad with beets, red onion, and pecans. But it turned out the cauliflower soup with mushroom pate was great. The salad was okay too, but it was really just a good salad. The soup had this wonderful texture when the pate got all mixed in, and it was just smooth and warm and totally yummy. I'm not a cauliflower person, but I might become one.

In fact, the theme of the night was get Bridget to eat vegetables she normally wouldn't. Which means their vegetarian option for the entree, a fricassee of potatoes, zucchini, and peas, was probably incredible. Being meat-eaters, we of course went for the proteins. Because meat eaters don't eat vegetarian stuff, duh. It would be, like, weird.

So we shared the herbed crepes with pulled pork and onion above, and the beef ravioli. The crepes, as you can see, had bacon and brussel sprouts. Brussel sprouts are not my thing. I mean, I hate cooked cabbage, and brussel sprouts are really just miniature cabbages. But these were good, crunchy. S.'s eyes just lit up when he saw brussel sprouts. The things you learn about people during eating. I personally loved the carrot puree with cardamom that came with the very nicely done raviolis.

Then for desert, there was rhubarb crumble and hazelnut torte.

40 layers cashew crepe torte

The torte was beautiful, but I really didn't want to pass him the crumble. It was spicy and not too sweet, and the honey mace ice cream was great. Imagine my thrill, my exultation, when S. tasted it, proclaimed it too nutmeggy (from the mace) and gave it right back. So then I could proceed to eat it, in a slow, tortured manner, until I literally could not swallow another bite or it would be a scene from Monty Python.

The staff, for not being practiced at serving dinner, was wonderful. Our server Eric even tolerated our drunken questioning about 90's weed movies, and solved the problem plaguing S. about the movie with Jon Bon Jovi and Laura Dern. Chef Heather Haviland, besides being awesome in the kitchen, turned out to be the MacGyver of the dining room with her creative lighting solutions. So all in all, it was a pleasant, comfortable, tasty experience.

Heather and Chef Ky-Wai Wong will be doing dinner once a month at Lucky's, the second Saturday of every month. So just remember it's the Saturday after Art Walk (though I wonder if maybe doing it during Art Walk might be better for business?).

And make sure you buy yourself a Chomp Monster from Lilly's for the next morning, when you wake up and seriously regret not buying more candy. And don't let your neighbor talk you into watching Transporter 3 when you get home, because even drunk, it's the worst movie ever.

Dark chocolate, black mission figs, and walnuts

Now, in the background, S. is watching Big Game Fishing The World. Which is basically a show where this old guy takes "international models" on fishing trips. Where he shows them how to hold the rod. Mariah from the Netherlands is trying to pull in a Marlin. "Crank it, crank it Mariah." "Get into a rhythm". "Never use your hands." I personally am very sad right now thinking about that poor beautiful Marlin that got sacrificed for a thinly disguised wank fest on ESPN. And I've got to figure out my poor person menu for the week. Making pie tonight, and baking lots of banana bread tomorrow cause I have, like, eight black bananas in my freezer. Probably pea soup too. If you have any good recipes for the last two, send them my way please.