Dinner tonight: Stiles Switch BBQ, which is conveniently half a mile from our house. The place just opened; the pit master used to be the pit boss at Louie Mueller’s up in Taylor. I am no barbecue expert but I hear Louie Mueller’s is very good, and Stiles Switch made me very happy. And it’s just a few minutes away.
Briefly: Fincher’s directing and Rooney Mara’s acting make it painfully clear that Lisbeth Salander doesn’t make any sense next to Mikael Blomkvist. There are two potentially awesome thrillers in both the book and the movies: one stars Blomkvist, and it’s a story about an awesome journalist who’s pretty much an auctorial stand in. The other is a somewhat more interesting story about Swedish traditional culture and the horrible things it does to women, as personified by both Harriet Vanger and Lisbeth Salander. When you mash them together, however, you get a wish-fulfillment piece in which the awesome journalist is just another man using a woman. Blomkvist and Salander should never have met. ...
Quick note, because I know some of you like Squirrel Nut Zippers a whole bunch: if you liked Squirrel Nut Zippers a whole bunch, you ought to check out White Ghost Shivers. immlass turned me onto these guys, and we took some time to see ’em playing this last weekend, and they were awesome: seven piece band doing 20s jazz, with a fairly punky modern attitude. The sound is way rooted in the 20s, but they aren’t afraid to sing about mullets and white trash. They’ve been playing together for more or less a decade, and are as sharp as you’d hope given that much experience together. Also the piano player played with Squirrel Nut Zippers some. ...
There I go giving away my conclusion. Ah well. Anyways: American: The Bill Hicks Story is on Netflix streaming, and if you don’t know Bill Hicks you oughta watch it. If you do know who he is, you can watch it to get all pissed off all over again, or you could watch it because there’s some really cool footage of his teenage comedy act. The problem I had is that the movie shows Hicks as a saint. Even when he’s going through his alcoholism, it’s not really his fault. He hung around with a dangerous crowd, right? And he got off alcohol soon enough, after which it’s smooth sailing until he dies of cancer in the most polite, family-oriented, sane way possible. The movie was authorized and supported by his family, who come across as really decent people. His parents didn’t object to his comedy, which is saying something. But I still suspect the seal of approval might have gotten in the way of any real examination of the man. ...
The Adjustment Bureau is carried a long way by Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, with an assist from Terence Stamp, but the directing was indifferent and the script wussed out in the end. And at a crucial point in the middle; watch for the library scene, where we find out that much of the central philosophical dilemma is completely irrelevant. It’s a Philip K. Dick movie, so you kind of have to know the odds aren’t that good going in; you expect to get an interesting mindtwist of a premise executed without total commitment on the part of the director/screenwriter. Check on all counts. I put this one a bit higher than most, just because Damon and Blunt were so good. Awesome chemistry, great acting. But this is George Nolfi’s first movie, and man, even the experienced directors tend to hit the reefs on Dick adapatations. He also wrote the screenplay, so I can confidently blame him for everything I disliked. ...
I got two books on making ice cream. I’m very pleased with one; I am not so pleased with the other. Perfect Scoop is really good. David Lebovitz was a pastry chef at Chez Panisse and he cares a lot about good ice cream; his cookbook gives a nice solid grounding in ice cream theory and then rolls into a ton of recipes. There are also sections on granitas, toppings, and things to serve ice cream in. It’s a very foodie cookbook but it’s also very practical – there are not a lot of super-weird ingredients and he’s not snotty about using just the right thing. ...
I took advantage of a Christmas Amazon gift certificate to fill a few holes in my old Hong Kong movie collection plus make a gesture towards catching up on more recent Hong Kong flicks. I know the Hong Kong movie scene is never going to be quite what it was back in the day, but it’s not like the last decade was a wasteland or anything (original). I’m behind! Thus Susan and I watched Sha Po Lang last night. (You’d find it on US video shelves as Kill Zone; despite Miramax’s reputation and the horrendous new title, it’s an unclipped unmangled version.) Simon Yam was the big draw for me, cause I’ve always thought he’s a great Hong Kong character actor, plus it’s got a great rep, plus of course Sammo Hung and Donnie Yen. ...
We started a new year of glorious movie-going with Sherlock Holmes. It was better than I expected, but it did not rise to brilliance. The raw material is pretty raw. Checking – yeah, fairly inexperienced screenwriters who haven’t written anything great; I don’t imagine the script gave anyone a lot to work with. I give the writers credit for knowing their Alan Moore, though. (Blackwood is Gull. Ritualistic killing of women in order to bring about a future in his own image? Been there, read that.) Despite stealing from the best, though, the story was simple and uninspired. ...
I just read the debut novel from Harry Connolly, Child of Fire. It’s urban fantasy/horror with a crime fiction feel: if you’ve ever read a book where a couple of investigators roll into a small town and clean up some corruption for their own reasons, you know the approach. There’s an excerpt available. I’ll give it a solid B. The plot gets a bit complex in the middle; I think I counted at least four distinct factions in the town, which is sort of a lot. The writing’s good, the protagonists are reasonably interesting, and the world’s good. You can tell it’s designed as a series, with lots of back references to origin stories. There are rules about how magic works. ...
Susan and I caught the So You Think You Can Dance tour last Thursday. I’m not sure I’d shell out for the season 6 tour, but I had more fun than I expected at this one. As expected, it was relentlessly full of tweens and parents, with a scattering of oddballs like us. The overall vibe, as Susan noted, was a high end Disney show. I imagine they’ve learned from High School Musical and so forth. The dances, of which there was not enough, were situated in a rather bland pudding of dancer banter. These kids are not in fact trained in the ancient art of standing on a stage and sounding conversational, excepting of course Evan. It showed. ...